TV Review: A.A.R.O.

Come for the Paranormal Mystery of the Week, stay for the animist theodicy

To the Western viewer, likely acquainted with The X Files, Fringe, Supernatural and Evil, a show like A.A.R.O. may at first feel like another iteration of the "whodunit, but make it spooky" genre. And the limited series that's been released on Netflix goes for that vibe in its initial episodes: this is a world where people can vanish into thin air, leaving just their empty clothes and bucketfuls of blood; where breaking the shrine of a fox spirit causes a wave of mass faintings; where pieces of an airplane that's been missing for years suddenly fall to the ground out of nowhere; where a shadowy terrorist faction can't succeed at planting bombs across Tokyo because a clairvoyant keeps frustrating their plans.

So far, so standard. But as we gradually get to meet the protagonists, a jaded misanthrope who can cite the classics of Japanese mythology from memory and a wide-eyed newbie with a keen nose for asking the right questions, we discover that the plot lurking under the surface is far more alarming than the occasional unexplained anomaly. It's not just that the monsters and curses from Japanese folklore happen to be real; it's that someone has declared war on the entire spiritual realm and has been extending tentacles at every level of Japanese society. This is a world where someone has been buying mummified mermaids to harvest their flesh; where someone has been running experiments with a spell that causes unending hunger; where someone has created a sound frequency that induces suicide; where someone is scheming to put heaven and hell under new management. What begins as a series of seemingly unconnected cases for a clandestine government agency to investigate turns out to lead to a potentially world-ending conspiracy whose best chance of succeeding is the fact that humans are the worst.

That's a fortunate thing for the viewer's enjoyment, because on the purely police investigation side of the story, A.A.R.O. just isn't very well written. The quiet pleasures of meticulously following the clues and formulating logical deductions are eschewed for impossibly lucky guesses, unprompted confessions, frequent instances of literal deus ex machina, and a tsunami of melodrama that would make Candy Candy blush. Also, the plot plays an increasingly ludicrous game of "guess who's possessing whom" that abuses the bait-and-switch trick with regard to the true identity of the villain four times, including one time it does reveal the actual villain, but still tries to pretend there's a further bigger villain behind. No, this detective/mystery show doesn't stand out because of its detectives or its mysteries. It stands out because of the ideological conflict it dramatizes on the nature of evil and the redeemability of humankind in an era when we've become almost godlike with technology we're too immature for.

It's worth highlighting once more the non-Western nature of this story, because the dynamic between mortals and the supernatural is very unlike what we're used to seeing in Western fantasy. Over here, we're still under the Miltonian spell, conceiving of spiritual power as flowing in a vertical direction, which makes humans either the helpless playthings of omnipotent overlords or the blasphemous rebels who seek to punish heaven for being too harsh on this world. But in the animist mindset, spiritual power flows horizontally, because humans are no less capable than the gods of influencing events in heaven, and if anyone seeks to punish heaven, it's for being too permissive with this world. With enough discipline and study, a determined human may turn into a worthy adversary for the gods.

A.A.R.O. thus twists the formula of the paranormal procedural: this time Earth isn't a means for spiritual factions to play out their eternal battles in; it's an end in itself, where all the spirits are responsible for protecting humans, even as humans grow more and more self-conceited, cruel and treacherous. Instead of fighting demonic incarnations of evil on behalf of humans, the protagonists of A.A.R.O. fight the demonic extremes that human hubris can reach. Instead of treating the gods the way, say, the Greek epics do, as capricious tyrants to fear or to pacify, in A.A.R.O. the gods are long-suffering, overworked benefactors who can only do so much in the face of human self-destructiveness. Whereas a story like God of War treats the quest to dethrone the gods as heroic liberation, A.A.R.O. treats the quest to dethrone the gods as a sad consequence of ignorance.

A case could be made that treating the Shintō gods as the preferrable status quo gives the show a conservative bent, and it would be hard to argue against that interpretation. The story clearly leans toward blaming human hubris for the problems in the world. However, it knows to avoid the extremes of anti-humanism and binary morality. The two protagonists constantly argue for opposite sides about the worth of humans, and a key reason why the good guys (somewhat) win in the end is because a god chose to trust a human. One villain is so strongly convinced that their cause is just that they can fool another character whose superpower is to cast detect evil. Moreover, a spell that reduces a god to human status isn't treated as a profanation every time. A former god reflects on this turn of events with admirable equanimity: yes, dying as a human is horrible, but living as a human can be full of wonders.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Realm of the Elderlings Project, The Liveship Traders Book 1: Ship of Magic

Chonky epic fantasy at its absolute best

Cover art by Stephen Youll

Ah, at last we come to the Liveship Traders, which in my memory is the finest subseries within the whole Realm of the Elderlings saga. Where the Farseer trilogy excelled largely in depicting characters’ relationships – and, in my view, the tragedy of lost opportunities for connection – its actual character depictions themselves were a little shallow in places. Regal, in particular, was an awfully blandly evil villain. But no more here! In this book, we have a rich, churning cast of characters, each with their own goals, histories, motivations, and perspectives; and we have a much enlarged world, with sophisticated sociology and politics. And we’ve got magic talking ships. And sea serpents. And pirates. And monks. And society balls. And seafaring adventure and hidden beaches with mysterious oracle creatures and slaveship rebellions and lost buried cities and deadly magical artifacts that change your body and shorten your life and make you fabulously wealthy. It’s difficult to know where to start in praising this book.

Arbitrarily, I’ll start with the setting. This book is in the same world as the Farseer trilogy, but where that was focused in the far north, in the Six Duchies, this series is centered around Bingtown. And if the Six Duchies are decidedly medieval, Bingtown gives a lot more of a sense of colonial Philadelphia. It is a semi-independent city, sandwiched awkwardly between Jamaillia, its official sovereign power, and Chalced, that cruel, slaveholding nation mentioned occasionally in Farseer as a rapacious neighbour in the south. Bingtown sits at the mouth of the Rain Wild River, a deadly watercourse whose corrosive waters eat the hulls of ships that try to sail it, and whose proximity causes mutations and plagues and shortened lifespans. But up in the Rain Wilds there are ruins of cities of the Elderlings, full of magical artifacts and wondrous objects that bring fantastic prices in trade.

So the Bingtown Traders, historically, made a deal with the Satrap of Jamaillia: In return for braving the deadly Rain Wilds, they get exclusive access to the wealth that comes from it in trade (after, of course, paying their share to the Satrap). In the time since its founding, Bingtown has flourished, because the first traders discovered a key thing in the Rain Wilds, that makes navigating the Rain Wild River possible: wizardwood. It is the only type of wood that can withstand the corrosive river waters, and so people with ships made of wizardwood are the only people who can trade upriver. What’s more, after three generations of service, these ships, the titular liveships, become sentient: the figureheads become animated, and can move and speak with the memories of all the generations that their ship body has existed. This centrality of the Rain Wilds magic creates a fantastic cultural richness to Bingtown, whose population thus splits into the following subgroups:

1. The Rain Wild traders: those who have accepted the cost to body and life that comes from living far upriver, deep in the Rain Wilds, and are the primary source of the magical goods, including wizardwood, that underlie Bingtown’s wealth.

2. The Old Traders, those who made the original deal with the Satrap of Jamaillia, who live in Bingtown Proper, and serve as go-betweens, connecting the Rain Wild Traders with the rest of the world. Only Old Traders have liveships.

3. The Three Ships Immigrants, a secondary group of inhabitants of Bingtown. We know very little about their story, but occasional mentions suggest that they were refugees from somewhere, arriving in Bingtown poor but willing to work, and were accepted by the Old Traders. They are now integrated as a kind of commoner stock in Bingtown.

4. The New Traders, newer immigrants to Bingtown, who have been granted land grants by the Satrap in contravention of the original charter with the Old Trader families.

These last, the New Traders, are the source of some fantastic sociocultural tension. See, the original deal with the Satrap of Jamaillia was that there would be no new land grants offered to anyone else around the Rain Wild River. That was the exchange: The Rain Wild and Old Traders would take on the risks of making the Rain Wilds a prosperous trading city, and in return get exclusive access. The Trader council chose to welcome the Three Ships Immigrants (although not as equals); but they have not chosen to welcome the New Traders. The New Traders’ land grants violate the original charter that created Bingtown; and the New Traders themselves have not put in the sweat and pain and generations of mutations, early death, disease, and child mortality that the Rain Wild and New Traders have paid for the wealth they now enjoy.

And, worse still, the New Traders do not share Bingtown values. This is an striking source of tension to read with a modern eye. To a 21st-century Western reader, phrases like ‘They don’t share our values’ is code for something rather bigoted and horrible. But in this particular case, the values that are not shared include things like, ‘Bingtown does not allow slavery.’ By contrast, the New Traders are pretty ok with slavery. It’s forbidden in Jamaillia, but common in Chalced, and Bingtown sits rather awkwardly between those two nations. And because Bingtown has to eat, and farming is labour-intensive, and because Chalced is a valuable trading partner, slave labour starts looking like a pretty attractive option. They hide it in Bingtown under terms like ‘indentured servants’, but those indentured servants are all imported from the slave markets in Chalced, and they work for free, which is causing real economic unheaval among the Old Traders who are trying to make a living by the old ways. Some don't even try, and instead adopt these newer, cheaper, crueler methods.

Ahh, such a rich backdrop! So much more sophisticated than the Six Duchies, whose politics were really not much more complex than ‘Me want kingship oh no bad guys killing’. And because this cultural-political setting is so rich, it means that the characters have a thousand different ways to interact with the world.

So let's discuss the characters! They split into two groups. First, we’ve got the Vestrit family and their circle. Althea Vestrit is the  youngest daughter of an Old Trader family, and has always expected to inherit the command of the family liveship, Vivacia, who is on the cusp of sentience. Althea loves Vivacia with all her heart, and has spent her life on the ship since childhood. She understands the business inside and out, and is the logical choice to inherit the ship on her father’s death. But when her father dies, right at the start of the book, it turns out that he has left the ship not to her, but to her elder sister, with the understanding that her elder sister’s husband, Kyle Haven, will command Vivacia.

And that brings us to Kyle Haven. My god, Kyle Haven. What an astonishingly awful person. He is so brilliantly constructed to be just terrible. As I saw on the r/fantasy subreddit not too long ago, it is entirely reasonable to ask something like, ‘Who is the worst villain in all of fantasy, and why is it Kyle Haven?’ Except I don’t really want to call him a villain, because that dignifies him with some degree of scope and power that he doesn’t have. He’s just a small, evil, vicious, cruel, stupid man, who makes life terrible for everyone around him in ways that are pretty trivial on the broad scope of politics – changing the world is not in Kyle Haven’s scope – but catastrophic on the personal level. 

The first example of his vileness is his treatment of Althea. Not only does he insist on captaining Vivacia himself, he refuses to let Althea even sail with him on the ship – effectively banishing her from her home and a newly-sentient creature who is a combination of her child and her best friend. And then there is his son, Wintrow. Wintrow is a sensitive, intelligent, thoughtful boy, who has spent years as a novitiate at a monastery, in training to become a priest of Sa. He is happy there, in this life path which suits him down to the ground. But you can’t sail a liveship without a member of the family on board, and since Althea’s not present, Kyle decides that Wintrow will do the job. So he removes Wintrow from the monastery and forces him to become ship’s boy on Vivacia. Wintrow is too weak, too puny, too girly, thinks Kyle. This will toughen him up, thinks Kyle, and make him a man.

Oh, yes, because Kyle is also a raging sexist. It’s one of those Chalced values, along with condoning slavery, that are gaining traction in Bingtown. Wintrow is too weak and girly (when in fact he’s just gentle and thoughtful); and Althea is too masculine and coarse (when in fact she’s just experienced in sailing and trading).

The worst (as a person) and best (as a character) part of Kyle Haven is that he actually can make an entirely coherent case for his actions. It’s not convincing if you don’t share his values, but if you do, his behaviour makes perfect sense. Of all his faults, he is not a hypocrite. Observe: The Vestrit family’s finances are in dire straits; culture in Bingtown is shifting Chalcedwards, which makes powerful female matriarchs less common; Althea must marry someone wealthy, which will help; and Vivacia must make a lot of money trading. So it makes perfect sense, in his eyes, for Althea to focus on the womanly ways of marrying, and to leave managing the family business to him, a manly man. First order of business: Vivacia must carry the most profitable cargo possible. For Reasons, the Vestrits do not trade up the Rain Wild River, so what’s the next most profitable cargo?

Slaves.

Kyle Haven therefore turns a sentient liveship into a slaver.

He really is vile.

Contrast him, then, with the heart of the second group of characters, Kennit. Kennit is a pirate. If Kyle dreams too small to be a proper villain, Kennit is too --- something I can't articulate --- to be a villain either. He acts as an antagonist, but however much you might be pulling for Althea's success, it's really hard not to root for Kennit at the same time, even when their goals are opposed. He's a deeply charismatic character, not only to other people in the book, but also to readers.

Kennit's one dream is to become King of the Pirate Isles, an awkward series of channels and islands and reefs that stretch between Bingtown and Jamaillia. He is smart; he is charismatic; he is driven, and he is lucky. He is not a good man, but again and again his luck turns out in ways that make him seem virtuous. For example, one of Kennit’s goals is to command a liveship. But because he has not had three generations of family wealth to pour into paying for one legitimately, he must take one piratically. This is a bit of a tall order: liveships do not serve anyone but their family, and they are faster than any conventional ship, and impossible to catch in chase. Kennit’s first mate, Sorcor, thinks that it is not possible for Kennit to take a liveship, and because pirates have a degree of democracy in their hierarchies, Sorcor could make real trouble for Kennit if he does not support this endeavour. So they make a deal: Sorcor is a former slave. Sorcor hates slavery. For every liveship Kennit tries to take, they will also take a slaveship and free the enslaved captives on it. Capturing liveships is hard, but capturing slaveships is easy, and so they are successful at none of the former but quite a lot of the latter.

So now, through no desire of his own, Kennit becomes known as the pirate captain that frees slaves. The people love him. And wait, there's more! At one point, he dumps a load of freed captives in the nearest settlement – because he really does not have any use for these weakened drains on resources, as he sees them, and wants to get rid of them as soon as possible. But it turns out that these settlers were themselves captured and enslaved, and came from the same village as the new load on Kennit's ship. And so now Kennit not only frees slaves, but reunites families in the process.

If this book were just about Kennit, the success after success would become monotonous. But set against the inimitably Hobbian pattern of catastrophe after catastrophe striking the Vestrit family, it’s rather nice to take a break from Wintrow’s mistreatment and Althea’s frustrations and Bingtown’s decline, and see what it’s like for someone to enjoy success in a Robin Hobb book.

Can you see how these plot elements coming together? Kennit, Kyle, liveships, slavery? Anyway, they do. In a predictable turn of events, to be sure, but with a satisfying sense of inevitable doom finally being unleashed upon fucking Kyle Haven who fucking deserves it. (I don't usually love to hate baddies in my books, but something about Kyle is so completely hateful it's almost enjoyable.)

Finally, I can’t end without saying something about Malta Vestrit, Kyle Haven’s daughter. In the same way that Kyle himself is just awful, but brilliantly so, Malta is also just awful, in a 13-year-old way. She is going to have one of the best character arcs in all of fantasy, so take a moment to enjoy what an astonishing brat she is in this book.

There’s so much more here! There are the sea serpents! There’s Etta, there’s Davad, there’s Brashen. There’s AMBER! there’s so much more here that I could rave about! But my wordcount has already grown too high, so I must stop typing. Perhaps in the next book I will get to those folks. Or perhaps not! Because new revelations await there. This is chonky epic fantasy at its absolute best. 

--

References:

Hobb, Robin. Ship of Magic. [Bantam, 1998].

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social

Film Review: Snow White

A mix of promising moments and distracting production choices.

Long before Disney Princesses were a corporate trademark, fans flocked to Disney’s fairy tale adaptations on the big screen. Over the decades viewers enjoyed the musical adventures, often with a strong, girl-power protagonist and likeable allies who triumph over cruelty to find happiness. But, of all of the Disney princess films, the 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarves was the hardest for me to connect to. That adaptation of the classic Grimms’ fairy tale was the oldest in the catalogue and the story was iconic in its simplicity. Later versions of the tale were more intense in their explanation of the desperate princess on the run from a murderous queen. The first season of the television series Once Upon a Time, gave us the fugitive princess Snow White as a fierce, smart-mouthed archer who has an enemies-to-lovers adventure with a rogue prince she sarcastically nicknames “Charming.” Snow White and the Huntsman offered a dramatic and complicated relationship between the two lead characters. But if you have interpretations like Snow White and the Huntsman or Once Upon a Time in mind, the 2025 live action film is nothing like those. The newest version of Snow White takes us all the way back to 1937, complete with the iconic blue and yellow poufy dress and kid-friendly, music-filled storytelling.

In a happy kingdom, a benevolent king and queen have a daughter born during a snowstorm. They name her Snow White in honor of her surviving the storm. The king remarries when his wife dies and Snow White’s cruel stepmother (Gal Gadot) takes control of the kingdom when the king disappears. The evil queen hoards food (unclear why) and orders the kingdom’s farmers to be her soldiers. Surprisingly, they fall in line and become very dedicated to their new jobs as oppression enforcers. Meanwhile, Snow White (Rachel Zegler) is kept inside the palace and forced to work scrubbing floors, etc. This continues for years and she becomes isolated from what’s happening in the kingdom. The queen has a magic talking mirror which she consults to confirm that she is the fairest person of them all. One day Snow White catches a thief, Jonathan (Andrew Burnap), stealing potatoes from the palace, allegedly to feed starving people in the woods. Snow White scolds him for stealing but when he inevitably gets caught, she unsuccessfully appeals to the queen for leniency. Around the same time, the queen gets the bad news that Snow White is now fairer than the queen. The queen sends a guard to kill the princess and Snow White ends up having to run for her life. She is sheltered by seven miners a/k/a “the seven dwarves” from the original film. Snow White decides to team up with her new roommates and with Jonathan and his band of bandits as they all figure out how to win the kingdom back from the queen. 

The 2025 film is not trying to be new or clever and will be more enjoyable if you calibrate your expectations accordingly. However, despite the simplistic set up and the decidedly grade school vibes, the film has several promising moments. Rachel Zegler’s portrayal is appealingly earnest and her singing voice is gorgeous and perfect for the film’s childlike mood. The film has a relatable central theme of oppression versus kindness. The magic mirror uses a double meaning for the word “fair” noting that Snow White is more than pretty, but is just and fair-minded, unlike the queen. It’s a fun element of symbolism and moral commentary. Additionally, Snow White’s interactions with “Dopey” are sweet as she supports him in moving from being a victim of bullying to finding his voice. The idea of finding your voice to stand up to oppression is an overall theme in the story. It’s fun that Snow White’s name refers to overcoming the cold snow rather than aspiring to be like it. If you are in the mood for allegory, the film does a nice job of weaving in uplifting concepts throughout.

Unfortunately, the promising moments are undercut by other story elements. The new film gives us a Snow White who has slightly more self-determination than the original film but who always reins it in before she gets too fierce. Her love interest Jonathan (not a prince) is a quirky combination of Han Solo, Rapunzel’s Flynn Ryder, and a comic version of Robin Hood but with a rom-com vibe that seems a bit too flippant in dire situations. The evil queen is visually striking but is, more or less, two dimensional with no personal backstory or substantive motivation. The opening narration sums her up by simply stating, “She was evil.” And apparently that’s all we need to know. But, most distracting, were the non-stop CGI effects, not only of the forest animals but also of the seven miners who take in Snow White. Despite being a live action film, the seven characters are creepily cartoonish with distorted, giant faces. The fun of a live action adaptation is to see the characters as real people not merely three dimensional cartoons. All of these elements lead to a mix of promising moments and distracting production choices. 

Overall, Snow White will appeal to very young viewers but the film’s reluctance to flesh out the characters, literally and figuratively, may leave more mature viewers wanting something a bit more real.

--

The Math   

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10

Highlights:

• Appealing lead actress
• Distracting CGI
• Simplistic storytelling

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

Book Review: When the Moon Hits Your Eye, by John Scalzi

I have a confession to make: when I first heard of When the Moon Hits Your Eye I was *deeply* skeptical. I’ve been riding with John Scalzi since day one (to be transparent, I didn’t find out about the self published Agent to the Stars until after Old Man’s War) and I’ve truly enjoyed just about everything he’s had published. Scalzi’s science fiction is a lot of fun, I’ve really dug his move to standalone work with The Kaiju Preservation Society and Starter Villain and if I hated the cover for Starter Villain it’s probably not Scalzi’s fault (my wife liked the cover, so maybe I’m in the minority here).

Despite that, finding out that this book was about the moon turning into cheese still gave me a visceral reaction that could best be described as a cringe. The cover didn’t help.

Friends, I’m here to tell you that When the Moon Hits Your Eye is as delightful as you might hope it would be. It’s Scalzi, with everything that entails. Scalzi gives us the big concept and then treats it seriously (well, mostly). The moon has turned to cheese. Okay. What would that actually mean? Well, if the moon keeps its mass then it would be much larger. It’s brighter in the sky. It would be a bit of an existential concern on earth and there would be plenty of doubters and mockery and those trying to take advantage of the situation.

Would there be a moon mission? How would this impact the space program? What about the cheese mongers?

When the Moon Hits Your Eye has John Scalzi’s typical light touch and humor. Are there cheese jokes-a-plenty? There are. The obvious puns, of course, and ones that you need to be a bit more cheese invested to have thought of.

Does it work? Your mileage will vary, but as someone who really likes bad jokes (they’re all good jokes, Brent) and who typically gets on with Scalzi—When the Moon Hits Your Eye is a truly fun time with a ridiculous idea that I’m sort of surprised hasn’t been played with more often and more popularly.

There isn’t a true narrative arc to the novel in the sense of following one or two characters through their story. When the Moon Hits Your Eye follows a wide ranging cast of characters from astronauts to retired scientists to top level government officials to a rich asshole (aren’t they all) to competing cheese mongers to just regular people going about their lives and figuring what/how/or if they need to deal with the moon having been turned to cheese. We all still have to go to work even if the moon is cheese, after all.

The novel is a slice of life, if you will (I’m having a lot of restraint here, people). During a period of time when the moon first turned to cheese, this is how some people and the United States government reacted and responded. That's ultimately what we're working with here. Progressive snapshots that move forward in time and there is an overall arc to the world's and the reader's understanding of what happened and more or less what it means for their lives and the lives of those they love. 

The novel's hook is the concept. If you're down for a not really plotty examination of what happens when the moon turns into cheese that's funny and occasionally emotionally touching—this is the book for you. If you've read Scalzi before and his stuff works for you, this is an absolute winner. If Scalzi isn't your thing and you've tried, I'm not sure this will convince you. From my perspective, it's a delight. 

It’s a cheesy good time. It’s really grate and I truly brielieve that it couldn’t have been cheddar than this.

I’m not sorry. 

It's all gouda. 

--

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

Book Review: A Palace Near the Wind by Ai Jiang

 A vividly stylised tale of a woman pulled from her homeland and all she knows into a baffling and hostile new world.

A Palace Near the Wind, the new novella from Ai Jiang, follows Lufeng as she is required to leave her homeland of Feng to marry the king whose palace encroaches ever closer onto their lands. Her grandmother hopes to use this marriage to limit that encroachment - halting it for a decade - but Lufeng has little hope, as she follows not only her mother but two of her sisters into marriage to the king, whose relentless industry is destroying the land that Lufeng and her people hold dear. The story follows her into the palace, and uncovering what the world outside Feng is truly like, and the extent of the trouble she finds herself in.

The bare bones of the story - girl must marry for political reasons to save her home, and then use her smarts/gutsiness/curiosity/magic/other redeeming quality (delete as appropriate) to find out what's going on and save those she cares about - is not a new one or a particularly exciting one. So go many of the stories I grew up reading. What matters here is how Jiang has presented it, both in the creation of the setting and in the crafting of Lufeng's point of view.

Focussing on the setting first, Jiang eschews obvious tracts of exposition, and so it takes a little while of immersion to grasp quite what's going on in this world. Lufeng's people, the Wind Walkers, seem to be a predominant part plant. They have sap instead of blood, trichomes on their bodies, possibly some sort of pine needles for hair, and bark for skin. Because the narrative is told very firmly from within Lufeng's perspective, these are only revealed through the words she chooses to use for herself and her actions, and so while the difference is obvious from the start, the full extent of it only resolves as she has others against which to compare herself - the difference only resolves via that comparison.

At which point it becomes clear that this is a world of at least three people - the Wind Walkers, humans, and Water Shifters, possibly with a fourth that have some effect on the earth. Lufeng's people can see further, hear more and be carried by the air itself, and as she moves into a world far apart from nature, she feels the absence of her gifts in the stifling confines of a human palace. Again, the extent of her abilities is not explained, and again this is due to the depth of the perspective immersion within her point of view - if one were to hold this up against "show don't tell" as a standard, Jiang could not be found wanting on the show end of the scale. Such limits or rules as there are must be gleaned from witnessing Lufeng in her use of her abilities. In general, this is an approach I prefer in worldbuilding and magic "systems" - magic for me feels more magical when it occupies a more inuitive space than a scientific one, and Jiang absolutely embraces that approach, even in a world that clearly contains scientific elements. 

However, in the extremity of approach and of immersion within Lufeng's worldview, there is a downside, at least when paired with another noticeable feature of Jiang's writing. It is a somewhat hackneyed criticism of fantasy to suggest it will use a high falutin synonym at any possible opportunity - why an eye when one could have a pellucid orb, right? It's been quite a long time since I've read anything that justified that critique (though my teenage and early twenties reading was absolutely rife with it), but it does, at times, feel like A Palace Near the Wind strays in that direction. In some places, it does feel justified - Lufeng isn't human and so it is natural that the way she talks about her body doesn't align with how I might. But there are times, especially early in the narrative, where it just feels like it goes too far. One specific example that stood out was how Lufeng, at the start, never talks about her eyes - it's always lids and sight instead, even when the phrasing heads into awkwardness like "When my lids fell slack". Perhaps the wind walkers don't have eyes then? Except, just the once, later in the story, she does switch to "My eyes refused to shut". So it's a stylistic choice. But I'm afraid it's one that doesn't work for me, because there are just a few too many awkward synonyms, clunkily talking around things that could be handled more simply. I am not one to call something overwritten, but this... this might be, just a little.

And perhaps it wouldn't be a significant issue, except that it dovetails with yet another aspect of the storytelling, and they both exacerbate each other, to the detriment of the whole.

When I say that the narrative perspective is deeply rooted in Lufeng, I should also say that this means the reader's knowledge of the world is severely closed off with it. Lufeng is an intensely naive character, with a very restricted knowledge of the world outside Feng. It is a success of Jiang's writing how thoroughly this infects the narrative - it thoroughly colours everything. However, it also means there are often moments, pieces of information, sights and sounds, where it is evident I as the reader would understand, but Lufeng doesn't, and so my understanding is occluded by hers. When this happens because of a naive protagonist, I find this approach maddening - the feeling of information artificially kept from my grasp is just something I cannot cope with. It is the exact same experience I had when recently rereading Nona the Ninth. Nona herself is so thoroughly limited in what she can see and understand in the world, and the narrative perspective is so successfully wedded to that understanding, that it's like watching the events of the story through misted glass. The feeling of wanting to take an intellectual cloth to wipe off the condensation persists, and taints the narrative for me.

I am not always against this sort of approach - having the narrative infected with the protagonist's worldview in a way that limits the reader's understanding of the world. Indeed, it's present in the other two The Locked Tomb books and I find it very effective in both. But there's something about tying it to a character so naive that their understanding is lower than me, an outsider to the narrative but with plenty of metanarrative understanding of the genre. There's a tension between the protagonist's ignorance my metaknowledge that just doesn't work because I have all the understanding and none of the information through which to fuel it, while the protagonist has the opposite. In Nona, at least on the first reading, this is mitigated by the puzzlebox nature of the narrative - I come into the story armed with information from the preceding two books, and can try to treat it as a riddle to be solved with prior knowledge. It is only on the second go, when all mysteries that can be solved have been solved and I am left with only Nona's internal monologue and processing, that the absence becomes a troublesome one. The lack of understanding, of specifically mature emotional processing and contextual response to the world, is not a fun place to be for me, without mitigation.

And while not to the same extent, I have the same problem with A Palace Near the Wind, and Lufeng's perspective. She is more emotionally mature than Nona, but very sheltered, and without a great deal of contextual information and worldliness that would allow her to process how people act outside of her expectations of behaviour and the world. And so she too is limited, and finds those around her most of the way through the story a black box. And so I too am cut off from them as emotional and realised people, because the information I would need to form those impressions never makes it through the filtering lens of Lufeng.

This is the first book in a series, and while Lufeng only shows a little growth over the course of the book, it is possible that her scope of the world will expand in the subsequent stories. I hope so, in fact. But within the bounds of just A Palace Near the Wind? I think it's a significant problem. I cannot get over how artificially obfuscatory it feels to be limited like this, even as I recognise the skill in how well Jiang has committed to the immersion.

It also gives the story - clearly deliberately - a feeling more of a number of events befalling Lufeng, rather than something she is an active, driving participant in. This, I mind less, but it is noticeable how little impact she has on the story until towards the end. In many ways, it has the feeling of prologue to it, of this being the set up to get Lufeng to a place of action later on, from which she may have the understanding to start having an impact on the story she finds herself in, now she begins to have the context of it all. I would certainly be interested in seeing if that were the case. But purely on the bounds of this story as itself and only itself? I struggled with it.

Which is not to say the whole thing is a wash - there are moments, especially when Lufeng is in her homeland, where Jiang's skill at descriptive prose comes to the fore. In describing the natural world, especially tactile things, the immersion that bothers me so much for its limits comes good and makes something entirely wonderful. I also enjoyed the depth of that immersion when it is focussed inwardly - Lufeng's awareness of herself, her body, her feelings is fascinating and delightful, and I could happily read much more like that. Likewise, the descriptions of using the skills her people are born with captures some of the magic I love to see in the fantastical - unexplained but evocative and described with more feeling than explanation. And the setting is an interesting one - it begins with what feels far more traditionally high fantasy or mythic, before bringing in elements of science and technology that clash with those assumptions, making this something richer and more textured, more unexpected. But it never has the chance to develop into something truly exciting, because of the limitation of Lufeng's worldview.

Ultimately, there were glimpses of something wonderful, enough to tempt me to continue the series, but the problem of that perspective immersion never quite allowed me to settle in and enjoy them. I kept turning the pages, hoping, but finding what I wanted eternally out of reach.

--

The Math

Highlights:

• Evocative, beautiful descriptions of the physical and the natural
• Deep embedding in the mindset of the protagonist

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10

Reference: Ai Jiang, A Palace Near the Wind, [Titan Books, 2025].

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

Book Review: Idolfire by Grace Curtis

An engaging and entertaining novel that does most, but not quite everything, that it says on the tin

In a world of fallen empires, lost gods and the power to channel divinity, Kirby, a young woman from a dying village, sets off on a quest to find the stolen icon of goddess Iona. Kirby is convinced, with some solid evidence, that Iona’s absence is the reason why the community suffers under a curse that is slowly and steadily strangling it. Meantime, Aleya, the overachieving daughter of the current ruler of the powerful city of Ash, is finally given a quest (a Calling) to prove her worth, which sets her off on the road as well, to the same destination as Kirby: to a city that once ruled the vast and now fallen empire of Nivela.

This is the story of Grace Curtis’s Idolfire, a resolutely standalone fantasy novel.

I do want to lead off with that. In a world of trilogies, duologies (which appear to be especially popular these days) and other extended series, this is a story that wraps up everything in one volume. You will get a complete story here of the two (and then a third) main characters, complete and whole. Kudos to the author for managing that feat.

Idolfire is advertised and marketed as “A character-driven science-fantasy road trip book with sword fights and a slow-burn romance. An epic sapphic fantasy roadtrip inspired by the fall of Rome.” We do get most of that in this book.

First up, the characters. Our two main protagonists, Kirby and Aleya, do take their time to meet, and their sapphic romance is definitely a slow burn in the squabbling-squabbling-acceptance-sparks sort of affair. It should be said that this fantasy world is resolutely queernorm; their relationship is just an accepted part of human relations in this ’verse. And while Kirby may have been shy and barely kissed anyone before, Aleya definitely has had prior lovers (and we meet one while on the road). So the bones of all that are good, and a lot of the novel works on the engines of its characters, both when they are apart and then when they unite.

Their relationship and their natures are an excellent engine for drama and events that unfold during the course of the novel. While Kirby can’t fight her way out of a paper bag at the beginning (despite having what might be a magic sword she can barely swing), she has practical skills for living off of the land that Aleya does not. Aleya has trained as a fighter all her life (see the above mention of sword fights),  but also has diplomatic and administrative skills (after all, she does want to rule Ash, or thinks she does). Aleya is also the one that can use the titular Idolfire, using the belief and power of gods stored in relics and other items in which it resides. The power unleashed by this does degrade and use up the relic, and it is tied to the nature of the god/dess herself. If you use a statue consecrated to the God of War, you are going to get war and martial-based effects, not healing.

Let’s continue. It is definitely a road trip book of the first water, as they both are not only traversing the landscape; they are in many cases following the old straight-line implacable roads of the fallen prior civilization, the Nivelans. This is where the “Fall of Rome” inspiration comes in, as the Nivelans have built their roads in what many readers would recognize as a “Roman” mode: straight lines, and damn the geography that is in its way. Roads that most definitely do not harmonize and work with the landscape, but rather seek to dominate it. There are a couple of names and other things that also tag as Roman, but in the main, though, while the author was inspired by the fall of Rome (as she says in the acknowledgements/afterword), I saw a different model and inspiration that she does call out in the aforementioned back matter, but I think is a fairly more dominant influence overall in the book. You might have guessed it already with a city-state named Ur.

Yes, this book and its world very much run on lines inspired by Ancient Mesopotamia. We have a world that is mostly city-states (with a fallen empire for good measure). We have a world where there are a ton of local deities, and those deities and their worship are tied directly to the land, and can be, in fact, stolen. Curtis relays an incident in the back matter where this actually happened in real-life Ancient Mesopotamia, and that incident shapes Kirby’s life and story profoundly as a result. And Mesopotamia, with its palimpsest of prior civilizations, fallen cities, ruins, and more, is very much the model for the landscape of the road trips that Kirby and Aleya go on, separately and together. Even the realm that the city of Ash sits in is called Ur, after a famous Mesopotamian city state.

Mesopotamia, the Land Between the Rivers, is an inspiration and a model for fantasy that gets a lot less play than Greece or Rome or Egypt. The author is not unique here: Harry Turtledove’s Between the Rivers is very much in the mold of this book. That book uses a godly point of view, but the whole idea of this fractured Mesopotamian landscape of rising and falling civilizations, tons of deities, and a city-state-based mentality with the occasional and irresistible eruption (and then decline) of empires resonates between Curtis’s work and Turtledove’s. I can also find resonances in L Sprague De Camp’s Novaria novels and stories, and the Godserfs series by N. S. Dolkart. Also, Kirby’s home village of Wall’s End, at the edge of the huge ruined city of Balt, reminded me strongly of Pavis, a massive ruined city in the RPG world of Glorantha, which itself as a setting takes a lot of its notes from ancient Mesopotamia.

But in the main, Ancient Mesopotamia is a rich (and underused) setting for all this, and one that more authors could definitely take ideas from and claim as their own. Thus, Curtis takes advantage of that and uses it effectively and deeply to give a real richness to the road trip. A road trip across the fallen Roman Empire? Tired. A road trip across Ancient Mesopotamia? Wired.

Where the novel doesn’t do what it says on the tin, then, is the phrase “science fantasy.” For me, and I think, as is commonly accepted in the fields of genre, science fantasy is a fusion of the ideas, concepts, trappings and motifs of fantasy with science fiction. It is the original “peanut butter in my chocolate / chocolate in my peanut butter” subgenre, and discussing it in full detail might be beyond the remit of this review.. But while Idolfire has some excellent fantasy elements, as outlined above, there is no science fiction in this work whatsoever. There is, unusually, a moment of *science* that recalls a real-life remarkable event in ancient history, and it delighted me that Curtis slotted it in there. But that doesn’t make it science fantasy either.

Instead, a different subgenre of SFF fits this novel better. It’s a well-made and cromulent sword-and-sorcery novel, not a science fantasy novel. Sword and Sorcery fits as a much better label for this book. Swordswoman (and her companion), fighting, adventure, road trip, strange gods, weird magic, and the like. Could I see Kirby and Aleya and Nylophon (I’ll get to him in a moment) wandering around Hyperborea, or Lankhmar, or Ranke or, even more recently, and really on the mark, the sword-and-sorcery world of Howard Andrew Jones’s Hanuvar? Absolutely. I think the label “science fantasy” does this book a disservice, and “sword and sorcery” reflects more accurately what this world and its characters are like, and what the reader can expect as they navigate the book. Is Sword and Sorcery a limiting label? Possibly that is a subject beyond the remit of this review.

But enough of that. Let’s dig back into this book and what it does. So, aside from our two protagonists, we are given two additional characters and points of view. The first is a mysterious one, where Curtis uses a second-person point of view to inject mystery into this character, whose identity and nature is only slowly revealed in the course of the novel. That character provides some parallax to the events and backstory of the novel, and to reveal more would be spoilery.

The other character is Nylophon. Nylophon is a mercenary soldier from the mercantile realm of Carthe. It’s not quite Carthage, although that is clearly meant to be a bit of an inspiration; the Carthe hire themselves out as mercenary soldiers and make bank on it. Nylophon has clawed his way to a small command by luck and perseverance and making the right friend (lover, implied; Nylophon is queer as Kirby and Aleya) to basically save his life. After a disastrous encounter with our two main protagonists, he takes on a Javert-like role, and also his is a story of redeeming himself and coming to terms with who he is. Even if he is rather a prat for a lot of the novel, he does in the end get better.

Finally, a word about the writing, and especially the dialogue. The novel crackles when the characters engage with each other, and the descriptions of the world, their adventures and the landscapes come out well written and engaging. Combat and swordfighting, although present and a highlight in the book, isn’t as lingered over in the text as other things; the writing here is economical and to the point, much like Aleya’s own fighting style. Where the novel comes off the best of all is in the whole road trip, from sea voyages to the Nivelan road, to some of the truly strange things our protagonists encounter along the way. There is a great sense of atmosphere here.

Like I said at the start, the story is completed in one volume, with some fillips and twists as our two protagonists (and yes, Nylophon) make their way to the culmination of their quests, and find that the city of Nivela, their destination, is not quite what they expected at all. There are real moments of heroism and completion here, especially for Nylophon, who gets a “payoff scene” in the climax of the book that he clearly has been working toward ever since he was introduced in the narrative. The novel satisfies, in the end. The author promises more fantasy novels in the future, and I am quite reasonably happy to give them a go.

You can also read Roseanna's review of Grace Curtis’s Floating Hotel here at the NOAF blog.

Highlights:

• Interesting pair of primary characters on a road trip adventure

• Strongly imagined Mesopotamian-flavored fantasy setting

• Not a science fantasy after all, but very much worth reading

Reference: Curtis, Grace. Idolfire [DAW, 2025].

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

TV Review: Severance season 2

After you've betrayed yourself, can you trust yourself again?

After its season 1 ended in a thrilling cliffhanger, Severance took its sweet time to return to screens. And it (literally) hit the ground running: now our protagonist, Mark, knows that Gemma, his wife, is still alive, hidden somewhere in the restricted levels of his workplace. Now he'll need to enlist the help of his other self, the separate identity the company created for his job, but he has his own budding romance to worry about. An added problem is that said love interest is Helly, the work self of the company's heiress, whose agenda appears to be not fully in line with her father's or her unwitting coworkers'. Meanwhile, the rest of the Macrodata Refinement team have to deal with the consequences of their escape attempt: Irving struggles to keep a sense of purpose now that Burt has retired (even though their external selves seem to be getting acquainted), and Dylan still hasn't gotten over the revelation that he has a full family—but what he learns from pursuing that route may not be the antidote to loneliness he's seeking.

One of the best things about Severance is the richness of levels of interpretation that it allows for. While Season 1 focused mainly on the corporate dystopia side of the story, season 2 aims inward and explores the personal trauma side. We knew that Mark's reason for undergoing the severance surgery was to avoid experiencing the pain of having lost Gemma, which creates the separate identity that lives during office hours in his stead. An implication that was not immediately obvious in season 1 is that this process resembles the survival mechanism that occurs in people with dissociative identities: to protect itself, the mind creates other selves who will bear the burden of trauma that the core self finds too much to face directly. As we discover Gemma's whereabouts, the reason she's being kept there, and how that relates to the real purpose of severance technology, we find more dots to connect that bring us nearer to the full picture: in fulfillment of the doctrine of its mythologized founder, Lumon plans to permanently subdue the Four Tempers.

A key step in this plan is Macrodata Refinement. In this season we learn what those funny numbers our protagonists spend endless workdays sorting mean, and the answer reveals yet another side to Lumon's unflinching cruelty. In fact, even those most loyal to Lumon can be tossed away without a thought. We saw in season 1 how Harmony Cobel went through a collapse of her entire worldview (and season 2 reveals the extent of how much she actually did for Lumon); this time it's Seth Milchick who gets pushed to the limit of his patience, not so much by the employees' already established rebelliousness but by the totalitarian capriciousness of upper management, whose disciplining methods start to grow increasingly degrading.

Another important shift relates to location. We get more episodes set outside of Lumon, some of which are the highlight of the season, which showcase how far and how deeply Lumon's reach has corrupted the world around it. These episodes help us better understand the motivations of Harmony, Burt, Seth, and even Gemma and Helly, but these are the kind of brilliant revelations that don't close off follow-up questions. Yes, now we know what those characters want, but why would they want that?

This insight into hidden motives and strange choices informs the central relationship of the season: that between Mark and his work self. Each half of his identity knows only part of the puzzle about Gemma, and they're going to need to work together in order to rescue her. But of course, it's hard to join forces if each Mark exists only while the other doesn't. The external Mark's efforts to communicate with his workplace half escalate in desperation until both versions of him realize how little they know each other and how incompatible their goals truly are. And here's where the story's various interpretative possibilities come into play. Rather than a separate character, office Mark can be seen as a part of Mark's mind that he's neglected and refused to acknowledge. It's a substitute self that helps him skip the necessary steps of his grieving process. After so much time spent nurturing such an unhealthy coping strategy, it shouldn't be surprising that the original act of self-betrayal becomes multiplied. Mark, who has been suffering intensely without the love of his life, should know better than to try to inflict the same pain on someone else. And yet, in his moment of need, that's exactly what he offers to his other half. The latter's response is shocking, but understandable.

After a stellar first season, Severance found a way to raise the bar even higher. Somehow managing to juggle the interpersonal tension of the panoptical workplace, the dark dead-ends of unprocessed grief, and the ever-worsening difficulty of staying true to oneself under a system of coerced devil's bargains, Severance continues to be a masterpiece of psychological intrigue and imaginative storytelling.

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10.

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