Book Review: The Wings Upon Her Back by Samantha Mills

A stunning science fantasy novel with a strong theme and timely and resonant message underpinning a strong character study. 

Science fantasy seems to be having a moment again. The peanut butter and chocolate of the two main halves of speculative fiction are once again meeting in the middle with novels that combine the technological speculation of science fiction with the social structures, and sometimes outright magic and the unexplainable elements of fantasy. Gary K. Wolfe considers science fantasy as an SFF story that you can read as a science fiction story, a fantasy story, or both at the same time, which is as good a definition of science fantasy as you can get. 

So it is with Samantha Mills The Wings Upon Her Back, Mills' first full length novel. If you have read Mills before, it is probably the story "Rabbit Test". This is rather different and shows her range. Here, Mills sets us up in the city state of Radezhda, where all of our action takes place. Long ago, five deities visited the city and uplifted the civilization of the city, ancient aliens style. The power and technology they have given the city are not completely comprehended by the residents but it is enough for them to assert their independence and defense from the rest of the world. Those gods are mostly sleeping now, leaving their mortal Voices to commune with them, occasionally get news or judgments, and contribute to the welfare of the city. 

Our main character is Zenya. Although born under the auspices of the god dedicated to learning and knowledge, she has always dreamed of flying, of being a warrior. We start the novel, then, with her showing a dissident a small act of mercy, for which as a reward for her years of loyal service, both to the warriors and personally to their leader Vodaya, with being stripped of her biomechanical wings, and left to die. It's when she is found by the real revolutionaries that the plot really kicks off, as Zenya has a painful coming to terms of who she is, what she has done.

This comes to us in a narrative set in the present day, following the events of her being cast out, and in a parallel narrative, we get to see how Zenya became Winged Zemolai. Mills cleverly uses the flashback sequences in a threefold sense. First and foremost, we get the full character arc of Zenya, how and why she became the woman she was, who is both a fearless warrior with wings, and yet someone who showed that act of mercy. Second, we get to see how and why the city has strayed and moved from a path of five representatives of the various gods cooperating into the brutal authoritarian rule of Vodaya. This strand of the novel is frankly an out and out blueprint of how fascist and authoritarian societies emerge from innocuous beginnings. And third, mixing the two, we see how the toxic relationship between Zenya and Vodaya came to be, growing and flourishing in its poisonousness. This also serves as a character study of Vodaya herself, showing how a fascist leader can emerge and take power, but also, it shows just how seductive and alluring such a leader and their ideology and methods can be, especially to a young and impressionable youth such as Zenya. Seeing Vodaya use and manipulate the young Zenya is a horrifying masterclass in such psychological techniques. 

The novel can be relentless at times, because in the present day narrative, Zenya has fallen with true and real revolutionaries who are seeking to stop the authoritarian tyranny that Vodaya has instituted. These are not protesters hanging up signs, this is a movement with cells, goals, and that can and will use violence to achieve their ends. Zenya really has gone from the frying pan of being the hand of Vodaya to falling in with a group that trusts her not at all but is willing to to kill and do damage in order to oppose the tyrannical rule, as well as torture, and also manipulate prisoners and those not trusted, including of course, Zenya. 

But I want to go back to the science fantasy nature of this novel and explore briefly, how it fits into that context.

How can one read this in both modes? A city-state where technology-as-magic allows for biomechanical wings, and five sleeping gods whose worshipers squabble and try and interpret what their gods want to do and why, and feeling lost and forgotten, is definitely a fantasy setting if I ever heard one. The novel fits my medium stakes and "city-state fantasy" paradigm rather well - if you read the novel in a fantasy mode.

And yet this is also a science fiction novel. The technobabble of the wings refers to "ports" and there are flying boats, bombs, and even (although not really named as such) an EMP device. There is very heretical thought that the gods aren't gods at all, but rather are ancient aliens who came, gave some technology to the people of the city, but mostly now for reasons unknown, are asleep and not generally reachable on a regular basis. 

There is an additional piece within the novel, a plot point/MacGuffin that becomes extremely important to the unfolding of the plot. I don't want to give it away because it becomes such an important hinge later in the novel, but the fact that it can be read either as technology or as something in a fantasy mode helps solidly that science fantasy is indeed the axis that this novel very deliberately spins around.

In the end, the world of the novel is a world where both sides do very dirty things, and neither side's hands are clean. The Wings Upon Her Back, though, grounds this all in Zenya, and thanks to the dual narratives, we slowly close the loop and fully understand Zenya. Why would she find service to the mecha god instead of "her" scholar god in the first place, how her brutal training, physically and psychologically molded her to be Vodaya's creature, and how the seeds of her (at first) mild disillusionment came to be in the first place. 

But even with Zenya in the rebellion and opposing Vodaya, her toxic and disturbing relationship to her old life and her relationship with Vodaya always comes to the for, and Vodaya, besides Zenya, has staying power as the most memorable and darkly compelling aspect of the novel. Vodaya has spent years molding Zenya, and this novel could be read as a story of deprogramming. The deprogramming is twofold, first of all Zenya herself from Vodaya and her toxic methods, and the deprogramming of an entire society which has been molded to be brutal, uncompromising, fascist, and authoritarian. The novel shows that it is a painful and not easy process, and there are no simple magic bullets or answers for either. I felt strongly for Zenya especially in the flashback scenes, as Mills makes what Vodaya is doing to her plain and unmistakable. 

And again, given the rise of authoritarianism around the world, and those it impacts, what Vodaya goes through feels timely and relevant.

The last part of the book, then, has in the flashback sequences Zenya taking her first flight with her wings, showing her joy at the pinnacle of her triumph as a youth, and in the present, Zenya recreating that journey, without wings, older, wiser, and irrevocably changed by her experiences. It's a potent and strong ending to a potent and strong novel. The novel is complete in one volume and there really isn't, as far as I can see, need or room for a sequel hook. 

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The Math

Highlights:

• A potent and important story of authoritarianism and what it does to a society and people
• A strong science fantasy hybrid
• An unflinching look at a protagonist and the character who manipulates and molds her

You can read more about the book, and Samantha Mills, in my Six Books interview about her.

Reference: Mills, Samantha, The Wings Upon her Back [Tachyon, 2024]

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Film Review: Blink Twice

What you don't know will absolutely hurt you

That the über-rich act as if they were exempt from the law of the land, common rules of courtesy, and basic human decency isn't news to anybody. Nor is their disturbingly common tendency to build secret lairs that keep the world out (and its pesky laws). And the disingenuous non-apology apology has become the rare genre of drama where bad men all recite the same lines while hoping no one will remember the spectacle.

Zoë Kravitz's debut as a film director, Blink Twice, points an irate finger at the uselessness of the public apology tour. The story is deceptively simple: a working-class woman crashes an exclusive party for billionaires, gets the attention of a sketchy creep with money, and joins his entourage for a tropical getaway at his private island. Soon enough, we learn that the reason this place is disconnected from the world is exactly what you were suspecting when you bought your movie ticket.

During the first half, the storytelling is cleverly anchored on what it's not showing: at the private island, our protagonist finds all the gourmet dishes, cocktails, sunny afternoons at the swimming pool, and wild drug-fueled parties that anyone would imagine the 1% have an endless supply of. This goes on day after day until you suddenly wonder: hey, if this is supposed to be a hedonistic extravaganza of excess and licentiousness... where's the sex? What we've seen so far is surprisingly chaste.

What are we not seeing?

Of course, it turns out there is sex on this private island, and oh boy does it make you wish you hadn't seen anything.

The modus operandi of the villains in this story is a terrifying logical extension of what happens in real life: the focus isn't on not doing evil, but on not getting caught. If you're used to controlling thousands of subordinates, it's easy to be lured by the prospect of controlling perception and memory. The same sociopathic traits behind the harmful actions of powerful people can produce elaborate mechanisms of deceit. Nothing to see here, keep going, don't believe your own eyes.

Channing Tatum plays the main villain with a dramatic potency I never suspected he had, especially in a tense scene toward the end, where his character spells out his worldview with raw fury. Maybe this achievement in acting should be attributed to Kravitz's direction, which makes the whole feat even more artistically interesting: she's crafted a burning portrait of evil from the image of her real-life fiancé.

Blink Twice has a mystery plot, but it's very direct about it. There are no layers of symbolism or allegory. It could be because the message it conveys needs to be shouted clearly: #MeToo has been a big necessary step, but it's been far from enough. Roman Polanski still walks free. And Woody Allen. And Bryan Singer, and Bill Cosby, and Brett Ratner, and Louis C.K., and James Franco, and Kevin Spacey, and untold numbers of other perpetrators who haven't been exposed yet. It hits hard to watch Blink Twice while the Neil Gaiman case is still unfolding.

It's a no-brainer to empathize with this protagonist, but I'm ambivalent about the revenge fantasy with which the movie ends. After the secondary villains have been dispatched with bloody gusto, the final boss gets trapped forever in the bliss of ignorance. One thing I'll grant is that this choice leads to an important point of discussion: what's an appropriate punishment for unrepentant abusers?

Blink Twice is an effective thriller that knows how to maintain high tension even long after all the secrets have been revealed. The trick it plays on the viewer is the same one abusers execute on their victims: it's absolutely obvious that something very wrong is happening, but as long as no one acknowledges it, the pretense can continue.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

TV Review: Kaos Season 1

A modern-day reimagining of the ancient Greek gods works spectacularly well in a way that has the the vision of Homer, the aesthetics of Baz Lurhmann's Romeo + Juliet, and the toxic family dynastic dynamics of Succession. (Spoiler-free)

Sing to me, O muse, of the latest Netflix show, which blew away nearly all of my expectations. Many were the episodes that left me in awe or screaming at the screen.

In 2018, I played Assassin's Creed: Odyssey for a solid six months, and it revived in me an Ancient Greek renaissance. I devoured as much content as I could about my favorite world. I read Madeline Miller's Song of Achilles and Circe, and I bought every second-hand old copy of Greek myths I could find. I even made a hat with Athena's owl on the front. 

So needless to say, I'm a fan of Olympian deities. 

This new series, the brain child of Charlie Covell, sets our favorite gods in modern day Greece, complete with cars, phones, yachts that only Poseidon could afford (and who could also most likely fend off those orcas taking down ships these days). 

I know what you're thinking — another cliched "modern-day retelling" rehash. 

This one's different. It's incredible. 

The characters and their portrayals are truly entrancing and worth watching 

I haven't seen a show so well-cast in years — it's literally a who's-who for TV and movie fans from the past 30 years. In addition to the bigger names I've listed below, there's also a ton of "oh THAT guy!" moments. 

For example: Oh you want the guy who played Stannis Baratheon? Got you. How about Remis Lupin? I'll throw him in along with Frank from Station Eleven.

Jeff Goldblum, of course, is the all-mighty Zeus, and he perfectly captures the insecure, bombastic, and slightly pathetic characteristics of the king of the gods. He's actually playing against type in Kaos, and you don't get the typical "Life, uh, finds a way" moments of Goldblum-ness that usually pop up in his works. 

Janet McTeer is Hera, Zeus' wife and arguably one of the show's most interesting characters — let alone one of the most interesting and powerful portrayals of Hera I've ever witnessed. 

Debi Mazar plays Medusa, everyone's favorite Gorgon. She is so effortlessly cool and intense, and she keeps her snakes under a head scarf to not intimidate people. 

Eddie/Suzy Izzard is one of the three fates — the women in charge of the destiny of every living being. As a fan of Izzard's standup, this was just truly magical to watch.

World-building that rivals the slick and ready feel the John Wick movies

Creating a believable universe for our pantheon of gods to inhabit isn't exactly easy, and even traditional depictions of them have been a bit sparse on the actual domestic details. Yes, Zeus wears a toga and is usually an old white man with gray hair. Mount Olympus, their lofty home, seems more like a big, Grecian-columned room en plein-air more than anything, though. 

Not so with Kaos. Olympus is a sprawling magnificent Italianate villa, even featuring the palace where parts of Naboo from The Phantom Menace were shot. The gods are waited on by dutiful, tennis-attired ball boys. 

Down on Earth, though, there's even more fun stuff. Hera has an entire line of nuns called tacitas that are tongueless (not unlike the avoxes in The Hunger Games) who hear confessions from humans. She can access these confessions right from a room off her bedroom in Olympus, because Hera is a freak.

I could go on and on with the smallest of details — from a box of Spartan Crunch cereal to the fact that Eurydice and Orpheus live in a place called Villa Thrace — because this show is so well done. And if you're a Greek myth nerd, it will definitely demand rewatching. 

Tapping into the emotional truth of mythic characters but straying from actual retellings

Showrunner Covell definitely takes some liberties with the characters and their backstories, but always in service of making things more interesting. For example, Medusa isn't in fact dead, slayed by Perseus, but instead is a middle manager down in the underworld. 

Charon, the lonesome ferryman of the river Styx, was once in love with that fire-stealing upstart Prometheus. This show is so delightfully queer in many ways, and actually features a transman portraying a transman, something Hollywood doesn't always get right. 

So yes, there's lot of little things like this, but I think they truly add to the show rather than take away anything. Covell uses the entire history of Greek myth more like a sandbox, a place in which to grab characters and build them into something interesting and compelling in service of the narrative. It works.

It's got all the big themes that have been making stories entertaining for millenia

The plot revolves around three humans — Ariadne, Orpheus, and Eurydice — and how their fates are intertwined with those of the gods. Zeus has been losing his mind over a prophecy that he believes will have him unseated. There's also familial drama that rivals the Roys in Succession, except that instead of being spoiled and unhinged billionaires, they're literally spoiled and unhinged mighty deities. 

Zeus is still screwing around on Hera, and Dionysus is the prototypical party boy, but it feels a lot more real to modern viewers when it takes place in contemporary Greece. The setting may have changed, but the story hasn't. 

The importance and inevitability of fate is what drives Kaos, though, and it's woven superbly throughout nearly every scene in the season. After the last episode, I literally screamed with pure delight. I cannot wait for the next season. 

Mainly because Athena, my all-time favorite character in Greek myth, wasn't in this season.

I'm telling myself it's because they're going to cast Phoebe Waller-Bridge as her next time. 

Go watch it! 

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The Math

Baseline Score: 9/10

Bonuses: I couldn't have imagined a more perfect cast; the soundtrack is superb, including Siouxsie and the Banshees, Elastica, the Kills, and more; it makes me want to re-dive into my love of Greek myth.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal is a lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

TV Review: Terminator Zero

Finally, a Terminator sequel that makes a good case for its existence

Terminator Zero exists in the nebulous space between two incompatible truths: (a) in the real world, T2 was a perfect ending after which every subsequent movie has been not only unnecessary but atrociously bad, and (b) in the fictional world, it would have been strategically suboptimal for Skynet to send just one or two killer robots to the past. The solution that this new animated series finds is to acknowledge all the timelines: instead of one single history that gets overwritten with each time jump, we're presented with infinitely branching realities. The implication is that Skynet is unwittingly wasting its efforts in trying to readjust a past that by its very readjustment no longer connects to it, while the human resistance is making continuous sacrifices in the hope of creating a separate timeline where Skynet is defeated. You can go back and save humankind, but your humankind is still stuck in the bad future.

So, for example, although it's not spelled out in the show, T2 is now assumed to have created a timeline where the world didn't end in 1997, but it did end a bit later in T3, as well as another timeline where, even though Skynet was never created, Legion took its place (i.e. Terminator: Dark Fate), plus whatever timey-wimey mess is supposed to be going on behind the scenes in Terminator: Genisys. One could imagine there's even space for The Sarah Connor Chronicles in some other branch of time.

Besides avoiding the easy petty choice to invalidate previous entries in the franchise, this new theory of time travel creates a fruitful avenue for a season-long discussion on the futility of human endeavors. If you devote your entire life to saving a future that you won't get to personally experience... wait, that sounds exactly like the real world. Terminator Zero takes the fantasy of fixing everything with time travel and drags it down to Earth. Time travel is not the panacea for historical mistakes. It's simply a factory of opportunities that you take at the cost of abandoning your previous life and leaving it unchanged.

This retcon not only solves the problem of the mutually incompatible timelines in the movies made after T2 (answer: they all happened), but also brings the world of Terminator emotionally closer to human viewers. It's difficult to empathize with characters who are exempt from the fundamental tragedy of the human condition. By nerfing the scope of what time travel can fix, Terminator Zero makes its stakes feel closer to us. One character makes this theme explicit: making sacrifices for a better future that will not benefit you is what separates humans from machines.

This plea for human worth isn't without opposition. Skynet calculated that its survival required human extinction, but it drew that conclusion from human-made data. We taught it the argument against us. Could another machine reach a different conclusion from a blank slate? Throughout the season, a programmer who knows more than he initially lets on has an extended debate with a secret machine that he has designed and that he hopes will save humankind from Skynet. The irony of their interaction is that they don't yet trust each other enough to reveal the arguments that would convince them to trust each other. Perhaps human overcaution will end up signaling to the machine that there's stuff worth being overcautious about.

Terminator Zero is set in Tokyo in the few hours before and after Skynet's awakening. This is a great choice: it makes perfect sense that the future factions would be facing off in other battlegrounds apart from the Connor family. A Terminator story should be about the fate of the species, not about the Great Man theory of history. In this timeline, Skynet's first attack against humans isn't prevented, but a potential rival machine emerges. Which side it will take remains an open question.

All this happens while, as usual, a human and a robot arrive from the future and start playing cat and mouse. The intriguing bit is that the human fighter keeps alluding to a version of the future that doesn't quite match the one we know from all the previous movies. As for the robot, it has a non-obvious agenda that complicates the plot in interesting directions. Without spoiling too much, I'll just present this dilemma: what choice do you make when you meet someone who claims to already know what you will choose?

The plot is served well by the quality of the animation, in which I can't find any fault. Even for a series where numerous skulls are crushed, limbs are ripped off, and flesh melts away under a nuclear hellstorm, the violence isn't depicted for shock value. The killer robots look appropriately creepy, both in human guise and once bits of it have been torn; and the human drama sustains a balance of enough revelation and enough mystery episode after episode.

I must admit I hadn't suspected how much a series like Terminator Zero was needed. It has been long noted that science fiction made in Japan has a very different attitude toward robots compared to Western science fiction. Here we classify the world in dichotomies, starting with human/nonhuman, and everything nonhuman must be either kept under control or kept away from us. In the Japanese mindset, every object has a spirit, so it's not threatening for a robot to acquire human-level intelligence. In the Western tradition, to create life is to usurp the role of divinity, which is how we ended up with the cautionary tale that is Frankenstein, while Japanese animism sees divinity spread all across nature, which is how they ended up with the joyful tale that is Astro Boy.

So it's fascinating that Terminator Zero takes the time to dwell on our relationship with domestic helper robots, toy cat robots, and a hypothetical sentient machine that sees itself as having not only a mind, but also a heart and a spirit. One cannot refute this character's protest against being considered a tool or a weapon; it would be immoral to do it to a human, so it should be immoral to do it to anything of equivalent intelligence. However, what this machine chooses to do with humans isn't acceptable either.

Like The Matrix: Resurrections, Terminator Zero speaks of a more complex stage of the war, in which humans and machines can make alliances for strategic reasons. I don't know whether this series will have more seasons, but apparently the trick for writing, at long last, a worthy successor to T2 was to change the stakes of the war to anything other than zero-sum, and that's a scenario I want to see explored in deeper detail.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Anime Review: My Hero Academia Season 7

As the popular manga ends its ten year run, the anime moves toward the long awaited final conflicts

After years of adventures, My Hero Academia is now moving towards its conclusion. The bestselling manga on which the anime is based officially finished its ten-year run in August, 2024. As a result, the ending of the anime series is not far behind. The popular show with its fantastical character design and likeable, ensemble cast of young heroes-in-training has grown from a predictable kids adventure to a gritty exploration of cruelty and the human psyche. Season 6 gave fans a grim battleground between the villains and heroes, played out while the disenchanted population became unsure of who to trust. Season 7 continues the dramatic departure from the optimistic vibe of the early seasons, but the story has pivoted from nihilism to the long awaited final conflicts.

My Hero Academia is the story of a future version of Earth, where most humans have some variation of special powers (quirks). Those with extraordinary superpowers are sent to academies to be trained as licensed superheroes. The protagonist Izuku Midoriya (aka Deku) is one of the few children who has no power (quirk) although he idolizes the number one hero, All-Might, and dreams of being a hero to fight the violent supervillains who plague the country. After a dangerous act of bravery Izuku is secretly gifted with a transferable superpower by All-Might who can no longer maintain it due to a critical injury. The series follows idealistic, cheerful Izuku as he enrolls in the top hero academy where he trains and struggles to control the enormous and dangerous power he’s been gifted. The show’s large ensemble cast includes the students’ cynical teacher Aizawa; kind and cheerful Uraraka, a girl with anti-gravity powers; superfast Lida; brooding fire and ice powered Shoto; and loudmouth, explosive Bakugo who is Izuku’s childhood frenemy. Izuku, Bakugo, and Shoto eventually become the top heroes among the students.

Over the course of the series, Bakugo has the strongest character arc, progressing from a self-absorbed bully to a humorous loudmouth anti-hero, to a true hero in season 7, willing to sacrifice himself for others. Conversely, in the prior season, Izuku devolves from optimistic teammate to a depressed loner, watching his world crumble as the villains seek the secret power he’s been given. However, Season 7 sees his return to heroic form while giving other characters a chance to have their moment in the spotlight. Shoto remains the most tragic of the three leads. He continues his efforts to overcome his abusive upbringing at the hands of his hero father Endeavor. Regret, atonement, forgiveness, and resentment are major themes this season. Endeavor’s jealousy towards All Might led to his attempts to genetically engineer Shoto as the perfect offspring to surpass his rival. As the youngest of four siblings Shoto has the half fire, half ice powers his father had been seeking but Shoto had to endure violence from his abusive father and from his emotionally damaged mother who physically scarred him by pouring boiling water on him. With the demise of All Might, Endeavor finds himself as the number one hero, and must now lead the other heroes. However, the thing he always wanted has become a bitter victory in the light of the destruction of his country and the irreparable damage to his family. He seeks atonement for his past cruelty but, in a departure from the usual anime trope, his three sons, in their different ways, continue to despise him. Endeavor’s abusive past is publicly revealed by his estranged son Dabi in Season 6 but in Season 7 it is up to Shoto to deal with the fallout by fighting his older brother.

The low point of Season 7, so far, is the story’s treatment of Star and Stripe, the super strong American hero who defies her government and travels to Japan in an ill-fated attempt to help her mentor All Might. Her arrival brings some much needed girl-power to the conflict and even adds a little diversity with her supportive team of military fighters who are unequivocally loyal to her. Star and Stipe is such a great set up, only to break our hearts.

Another disappointing element in Season 7 is the continued flat presentation of the primary villain All For One. His only personality depth is his emotional attachment to his deceased younger brother. Like Aang in Avatar the Last Airbender, Izuku has psychic access to the prior holders of All Might’s power including the original vessel Yoichi who is the beloved younger brother of All For One. All For One’s consistent obsession with his little brother adds unexpected and disturbing poignancy to his otherwise two-dimensionally brutal villain persona. On the other hand, Tomura, the boy whose body kills any person he touches, has become the ultimate sad villain backstory. As the successor vessel for All For One, he kills a lot of people. But Izuku senses that Tomura is a child crying for rescue. Izuku’s observation of this in Season 6 and Season 7 teases the potential for a redemption arc, especially since Tomura in Season 7 is primarily being controlled by All For One.

Season 7 also has a surprising discussion of bigotry and the disparate experiences within an oppressed group as the story focuses on the experiences of heteromorph heroes including two of the student heroes.

Over the course of the series, My Hero Academia has progressed from a simple hero versus villain adventure to a thoughtful introspection on the power of inner demons. Starting in the middle of Season 3, the show pivoted from generic to intriguing with the Bakugo abduction story arc. Since then, it has changed in tone, becoming more grim and psychologically intense. Those who have completed the manga will already know how things will turn out for the heroes. But, for the rest of the viewers, Season 7 continues the gradual evolution of emotionally mature characters as they approach the story’s final conflict. The show has progressed through playfulness, suffering, bleakness, and renewal as it moves towards the big finish. Hopefully, it will be worth the wait.

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The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Highlights:

• Maturing leads progress from introspection to resolution
• Disappointing plot decisions with some characters
• Slowly building to the big final conflict

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

The Wheel of Time Reread: Knife of Dreams

Welcome back, dear readers, to The Wheel of Time Reread. Today we’re going to talk about Knife of Dreams, the eleventh book in the series. This is the last novel Robert Jordan wrote before he passed away in 2007. Following this, Jordan worked on what he intended to be the final novel of The Wheel of Time: A Memory of Light, but was not able to complete it. We’ll discuss this quite a bit more when we get to the final three novels co-written by Brandon Sanderson.

Knife of Dreams follows nearly three years after the publication of Crossroads of Twilight, which I noted was the most disappointing novel of the series and one which made me question the future of the series. Knife of Dreams restored my faith in Wheel of Time and reaffirmed my love of The Wheel of Time.

Suffice it to say that there will be spoilers, especially one particular plot point in the last battle in the last book.

Knife of Dreams reads like Robert Jordan finally decided to get serious after Crossroads of Twilight. He got all his pieces where he wanted them on the board (again, finally) and it was time to start making moves. Perrin rescuing Faile from the Shaido Aiel? Let’s go. Confirming Elayne as the Queen of Andor? Do it. Egwene immediately making moves to undermine Elaida in the White Tower despite being a prisoner? Not wasting any time here. Mat marrying The Daughter of the Nine Moons? Rand battles a Forsaken? Galad somewhat inadvertently taking over the Whitecloaks? Lan riding to the borderlands for the Last Battle and Nynaeve sets him up with an army he doesn’t want? Loial gets married?!

There’s a lot going on in Knife of Dreams and it all actually feels important, which is all the more remarkable after Crossroads of Twilight, a novel in which almost nothing felt important.

I’ve long considered The Shadow Rising to be my favorite Wheel of Time novel but now that I’m so close to the end of my Wheel of Time reread I wonder if it’s not actually Knife of Dreams. The Shadow Rising has Rhuidian, which I can’t express just how thrilling it was the first (dozen?) times I read it - but Knife of Dreams just has so much movement.

Knife of Dreams also has the beginning of Egwene’s true rebellion against Elaida and the White Tower. Egwene in captivity is probably my favorite storyline in all of the series, and it’s one that continues in The Gathering Storm with even more strength. But it begins here. Egwene’s dignity in understanding her position as a captive but taking every moment to quietly sow seeds of dissent against Elaida and demonstrating how a real Amyrlin should comport herself is something special in this series.

I know how this all ends, and I’m still upset that Egwene never gets the change to be a transcendent Amyrlin following The Last Battle, but between how she begins to reunite the Tower and her later actions in the Last Battle - she is going to go down as an absolute legend.

Everything else in this novel is very good. Egwene is *great*.

Also, as with all things relating to Wheel of Time, I reject the internal chronology that from start to finish the entire series only spans two years. I think Egwene is only a captive in the White Tower for a couple of weeks, which doesn’t seem nearly long enough for her quiet resistance to build the allies and support it does. This is months in my head, which much better fits my head canon of the series being something like 5-6 years in duration rather than 2. Of course, months may be too long for how the Salidar rebellion / siege of the Tower lasted without Egwene but it’s not like everything ties together perfectly anyhow.

Knife of Dreams is the novel to look forward to if you’ve been sticking with the series but experiencing some frustration with pacing and disappointment - but if you’ve read through ten books and aren’t sure if book eleven is worth it than I’m not quite sure what to say is that Knife of Dreams begins a very strong ride to the end.

 

Previous Rereads
The Eye of the World
The Great Hunt
The Dragon Reborn
The Shadow Rising

The Fires of Heaven

Lord of Chaos

A Crown of Swords

The Path of Daggers

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Joe Sherry - Senior Editor of Nerds of a Feather. Hugo and Ignyte Award Winner. Minnesotan.

Review: House of Open Wounds by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The Tyrant Philosophers series continues in a new setting

War? What is it good for? For the Palleseen, it's absolutely everything. Converting the world to their materialistic and rationalistic philosophy by armed force means that, in order to fight effectively, they are willing to try a number of things to keep their armies effective, including a rather special medical unit. As the Palleseen fight against their opposite and equal number on the battlefield, the members of that medical unit find that the costs of war are higher than even they can imagine.

This is the story of Adrian Tchaikovsky's House of Open Wounds.

The first book in the series, City of Last Chances (reviewed by Roseanna here at NOAF) featured a rotating set of points of view, including Yasnic, a priest of a small god who has diminished so much that his name is just God, a peculiar god of healing. At the end of that book, he finally fell into the hands of the Palleseen conquerors. In House of Open Wounds, set sometime later, we find out what they decided to do with him. And that is to assign him to a medical unit, an experimental medical unit. After all, he is a priest of a god of Healing, right?

House of Open Wounds is the story of this medical unit and its characters, all broken in very strange ways. The metaphor I kept coming up with as we started to learn about the characters and slowly learn their stories is that this novel comes across as a mixture of M*A*S*H and Glen Cook's The Black Company. The hospital staff are all misfits, quirky, odd and weird. One might say, in the Pals parlance, that none of them are even near to be perfected. But since there is a war on, the Hospital unit is just barely tolerated (and the threat of its dissolution hangs over the unit throughout the book), and so the misfits of the hospital do the best they can in an endless cycle of war.

This book gives the spotlight to the relatively large cast of the hospital, as they find themselves in a number of locations and conflicts. They are not often in combat, but when that happens, it is a catastrophic and dangerous event, since even with some of the limited resources on hand, the hospital unit staff are not very effective fighters. But Tchaikovsky leaves the prospect of direct action only as a vague threat for much of the book (until he doesn't) and focuses the staff on the conflicts and considerations between each other, and with the rest of the army.

I've already mentioned Yasic (who finds himself with a new name to his chagrin, Maric Jack) but there are plenty of other memorable characters here, who conflict with each other, the army, the war and anything else. Banders, the most promoted (and subsequently demoted) soldier in the army. The Butcher himself, who is holding a very dark secret as to his alchemical skills and just why he is so good a surgeon. Fellow-Inquirer Prassel, who is a necromancer, who only gets new material if the Butcher and company cannot save someone. Cosserby, who can make golem-like servitors, but whose work is looked on with extreme suspicion by the powers that be. It's a whole set of misfits, and early on, Yasnic/Maric Jack (who is new to the unit) is introduced to all of them and what they do, cleverly giving us the essentials upon which the author then sets these characters into motion.

In other words, this would be a hell of an Apocalypse World-style game setting, with a bunch of misfits and castoffs, all of whom are keeping secrets (sometimes not even knowing that they HAVE a secret) and all of whom don't fit in with the rest of the army or with the world in general, all trying to get along with each other and with their lives, but the war keeps getting in the way.

This makes House of Open Wounds, for all of its interesting setting and worldbuilding, ultimately a very character-focused novel. This is not to say that Tchaikovsky's work has skimped on character before or that he hasn't had a good sense of characters in previous novels, but a lot of this novel is driven by putting these quirky, broken, unusual misfits in a pressure cooker (or an instant pot), turning it on, increasing the pressure, and watching what happens to them.

However, it's not all grim and humorless, just like M*A*S*H is a dark comedy. There is a lot of dark humor throughout, as one might expect. In addition to that, Tchaikovsky knows his pacing and timing, especially in a long novel, so there are definite rhythms to the war and its progress. An endless sequence of battles would wear down readers and characters alike, and so one of the most interesting worldbuilding bits and sequences in the entire book is when the hospital is sent to a distant front far away.

Given the time and logistics of doing so, the Pals use one of their incorporated people's magics to deploy flying islands for the purpose. Thus the hospital, and many others, are loaded onto a giant flying island and flown to the site of the new front. This gives a fair chunk of downtime away from the battle, and allows us to breathe and the characters to rest, and we get to see new and different sides to the characters when they aren't awaiting the conveyor belt of the results of war. It is not the climax of the book (the climax is rather interesting and different, and brings together some of the characters' secrets into a cohesive and satisfactory whole), but I think that it is its centerpiece, because it gives us a chance to really see these characters and think about the whole project of war and what they are doing and why. It is no surprise that when the island lands, Tchaikovsky plunges the hospital staff into an even worse conflict than when they left, and ramps us toward that finale.

It seems that whenever you are talking about epic military fantasy of this type, whether you will it or not, Malazan comes to sit at the table. Steven Erikson's Malazan books, with their devoted legion of fans that can be rather frightening in their passion, may well be the standard against which epic fantasy series are measured. Even 20 years after its initial release, I note that, for example, Subterranean Press is now in a third printing of Gardens of the Moon, the first in the series, at the high value, quality and cost that Subterranean Press editions fetch.

So how does this compare? If you are a reader of Malazan, you like your intense deep history worldbuilding, with strange gods, magic, morally grey characters, and military grade action and adventure. This novel is set in a military hospital, so our protagonists don't do a lot of fighting (when the war comes TO them, it's usually a disaster). But otherwise, there are a lot of parallels one could make here. The Pals and their rationalistic program of trying to convert the world to their philosophy, their logic of empire, will feel awfully familiar to Malazan fans. Characters like Banders, The Butcher and many of the others could be dropped into the Bridgeburners, or have the Pals fight the Malazans. The Seven Cities would definitely be in need of some correction in the Pals' eyes. There are definite differences in tone and style, and I personally think Tchaikovsky can write circles around Erikson, but people looking to scratch that "Malazan itch" (and given the sales and popularity, it is definitely there in the SFF community), House of Open Wounds is here for you.

This is the second book in the Tyrant Philosophers series, but aside from Yasnic/Maric Jack, God, and the common universe they are set in, it is a character sequel but not a full-on sequel to City of Last Chances. And like the rest of the characters, we get Yasnic/Maric Jack's backstory, as he tells it, in an abbreviated fashion but enough to make us understand him and his deal. This is all to say that, especially as these are chonky thick books and time is finite, if a character-focused story in a medical unit in a fantasy war really sounds like your jam, you could skip City of Last Chances and jump into this world here at House of Open Wounds. While Tchiakovsky is building and developing his world across books, you could start here if you really want.

House of Open Wounds, with its setting and selection of characters, does something untried and new in the epic fantasy genre, with his characteristic penchant for invention, worldbuilding and eminently devourable writing. It's rare for a writer to attempt, much less put out a high output and succeed at a wide variety of subgenres in SFF. However, House of Open Wounds continues to show that Adrian Tchaikovsky is definitely one of those writers.

Highlights:

• Strong character focused military fantasy set in a military hospital
• Excellent worldbuilding and depth
• Lots of dark and grim humour. 
• Fantastic cover art for this book and for the series as a whole.

Reference: Tchaikovsky, Adrian. House of Open Wounds (Tyrant Philosophers Book 2) [Head of Zeus, 2023].

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.