Friday, August 22, 2025

Film Review: Americana

In which much blood is shed over a shirt



There’s an old joke that after anything bad happens in America, some wisecrack will remark that it’s almost as if the country were built on an ancient Indian burial ground. Americans, like settlers everywhere, like to pretend that the genocide that birthed their country either didn’t happen or was a side note in the heroic tale of manifest destiny, which made possible either a white nationalist ethnostate (for conservatives) or a multicultural land of tolerance (for liberals). The Western genre is in one way or another a reckoning with this, a glorification or a condemnation but always an attempt to make sense of it. Such a formula has been once again modernized by Tony Tost in his 2023 film, released in cinemas in 2025, Americana.

Like many classic westerns this is a crime movie, with desperate people all needing something, for reasons good or ill, all hunting down a single object. The plot could be viewed as a chained heist film, with people chasing other people whilst being chased by still other people. The object in question is a ghost shirt of the Lakota people from the age of the Ghost Dance in the late 19th century, a spiritual rebellion against American rule. It is deeply sacred to the Lakota, a group of whom are prominent in this film, and also worth a lot of money to white people.

This film boasts an impressive cast. Sydney Sweeney is completely unrecognizable as Penny Jo Poplin, a waitress who learns of the heist, and has dreams of being a musician in Nashville. Halsey plays Mandy Starr, the ex-girlfriend of one of the men who ends up starting this whole shebang, and the mother of a son, Cal Starr (Gavin Maddox Bergman) who is witness to an act of great violence and is convinced that he is the reincarnation of Sitting Bull. Zahn McClarnon plays the leader of a Lakota radical group seeking to reclaim the ghost shirt for their people. He has the right combination of intensity and chill to him for such a role, capable of being empathetic to a small child and quoting Karl Marx in his tirades against what white America has done to his nation. Of particular note that McClarnon is himself Hunkpapa Lakota; you can tell he knows the pain his character feels deeply and personally.

There is a character I am deeply conflicted about: Lefty Ledbetter, as played by Paul Walter Hauser (an actor who is having a good summer, between this film, his role as Ed Hocken Jr. in the new Naked Gun, and Mole Man in the new Fantastic Four). He is introduced asking Penny Jo Poplin for her opinion on the speech he will use to propose marriage to the woman he has been seeing for only a few dates. Cards on the table: I am autistic, and I despise cringe comedy. My life is filled with awkward moments that end with people disliking me; I find humor based on such situations to be viscerally unpleasant. Maybe he’s just socially awkward, but I can’t help but read his character as something of a caricature, and to be particularly caustic, a caricature of autistic people. I cannot know if Tony Tost meant him that way, but several jokes involving him rankled me. To Tost’s credit, he improves markedly as the film goes on and you get a better sense of his humanity, and a scene near the end is legitimately heart-rending.

White people have often treated the American West, comparatively less dense than the East and also the cities on the West Coast, as sort of a blank slate, an opportunity to build whatever they want. Such is the Christian cult featured in the film’s third act, where Mandy is revealed to have grown up. The women are silent in the presence of men, and all wear long dresses. They cannot wear makeup, and they cannot have phones. They are ruled with an iron fist by Hiram Starr, Mandy’s father, played with appropriate menace by Christopher Kriesa. But even so, you get the feeling that he and the other men in this bigoted little hovel in Wyoming are not strong, not virile, not the masters of their fate. This whole microcosm of Christian Nationalist patriarchy ends up looking like a way for emotionally stunted men to avoid ceasing to be emotionally stunted, and they are willing to make the lives of women living hell so they can continue to play god. When the whole thing falls apart spectacularly, you will cheer.

I also appreciated the way that the film portrayed this Lakota radical group. They are neither simple savages of the classic Western film, nor are they blinkered radicals along the lines of the namesake group in The Baader Meinhof Complex (a stunning film from 2008 about leftist radicals in 1970s West Germany). And neither are they cuddly caricatures, positive representations of nonwhite peoples with no flaws, no rough edges - and no personalities. These are rugged, rough men who deeply love their people, and are willing to kill for it (and they are quite good at killing for it). They came off to me as very realistic, very believable revolutionaries, if only on a small scale. They know that revolution is not a dinner party, to quote Mao Zedong. And, when confronted with the white world with all its maddening misunderstandings of their culture, they can be both very kind and very cold (such as one piercing scene at the end - you both feel that what McClarnon’s character does is wrong, but you also understand deeply why he did what he did).

The Lakota characters, McClarnon’s in particular, are also great foils for Cal Starr, the white child who thinks he’s the reincarnation of Sitting Bull. Sitting Bull, for those unaware, was the nineteenth century war leader of the Lakota people who led his nation’s war of survival against the United States. He is a perfect personification of how settler colonies try to indigenize themselves, to claim a historic connection with the land they occupy that they simply do not have, not unlike the white men in faux indigenous garb who threw British tea into Boston Harbor at the eve of the Revolution. This child, submerged in the currents of history that he cannot comprehend due to his youth, has the fortune of coming across actual Lakota, and the film milks this peculiar juxtaposition for all it is worth. But he is not merely a comic character; he goes through a lot of pain in this violence, and by the end you just want to hug him.

Americana is a panoramic view of the contemporary American West, with all the cruelties that simmer beneath its bucolic, utopian presentation. This is a film about how the past is never past, and how it can come shooting into the present with all the force of a speeding bullet. There is a violence here that erupts into the lives of the characters very suddenly and without remorse - which is not at all unlike the violence that created the American West as we know it. The end result is a thrilling, somewhat pulpy crime drama that is both great fun and deeply thought-provoking.

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POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Thursday, August 21, 2025

TV Review: Wednesday Season 2, Part 1

Clever, funny, horror mayhem and lots of family drama 


After a bold and successful first season, Wednesday has returned to Netflix with a suitably creepy new adventure. For those unfamiliar with the series, Wednesday is the latest iteration of The Addams Family, the creepy, wealthy, cynical, and humorously ghoulish family that evolved from classic New Yorker cartoons to a 1960s sitcom, to numerous feature films, and now to a daughter-focused, light-horror, Netflix series. In season one, teen daughter Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) is sent to Nevermore Academy after her defiantly macabre behavior gets her in trouble elsewhere. Nevermore is an isolated academy for “outcasts” who, in this setting, are teens with supernatural identities such as werewolves, sirens, gorgons, vampires, witches, etc. Cynical, dour Wednesday must adjust to life on the Edgar Allen Poe-inspired campus while reluctantly accepting the friendship of her sunshiny roommate Enid (Emma Myers), and solving the mystery of a serial killer who is deceptively hiding in plain sight in the town. She approaches the challenge with her signature combination of intelligence, clairvoyance, and fearlessness.

In season two (part one), Wednesday overuses her clairvoyance and begins to suffer physical consequences including crying or bleeding black tears and becoming exhausted and passing out. Meanwhile, as she returns to school at Nevermore, she is irritated to discover that she is now a beloved celebrity on campus. But, there is a new mysterious killer in town, assassinating people via a swarm (murder) of crows and also overtly stalking Wednesday. When Wednesday has a vision of Enid’s death, she becomes determined to use her clairvoyance find the killer and to save Enid. This puts her at odds with her mother Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) who is openly worried about Wednesday succumbing to the same obsession, psychosis, and physical harm that Morticia’s sister Ophelia suffered. As a side story, Wednesday’s younger brother Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez) enrolls at the school and accidently creates a murderous zombie from a long dead Nevermore student. With multiple killers, stalkers, and high stakes crises, Wednesday quickly moves towards a mid-season climax in which yet another killer joins the chaos. 

Season one was a funny, clever, horror mystery with lots of red herrings and lots of adventure. However, season two intensifies the emotional investment of the characters. Instead of directly rehashing the same type of plot, season two builds on certain elements of the first season but takes the storytelling in a more character focused direction. A major driving force of the current season is Wednesday’s friendship with Enid. Instead of Enid being a comedic foil or general annoyance to her, Wednesday’s determination to protect Enid emphasizes Wednesday’s emotional evolution in the midst of the mayhem and cynicism. Conversely, in season two, Wednesday has a degenerating antagonistic relationship with her mother, even as Morticia struggles with anger at her own mother. The multi-level mother-daughter conflicts, and the mutual insecurities that fuel them, is a secondary driving force of the story. Despite these meaningful emotional overtones, the show still has plenty of action as Wednesday deals with a primary murderous stalker, as well as a creepy fangirl stalker (a show-stealing Evie Templeton), and the fallout of her little brother’s accidental zombie creation.
 
While the core adventure and emotional overtones are solid, the show sometimes suffers from an overabundance of side plots which can, at times, be distracting and does periodically slow the pacing of the primary story. In addition to the main storyline, we also have Pugsley’s rampaging zombie, Enid’s love triangle with Ajax (Georgie Farmer) and Bruno (Noah B. Taylor), a newly arrived music teacher (Billie Piper), and a mysterious psychiatrist (Thandie Newton) at the town’s high security psychiatric hospital. There is also a bit of social commentary regarding the way Bianca (Joy Sunday) is manipulated by the new Nevermore headmaster (Steve Buscemi) who uses her status as a scholarship recipient to exploit her for financial gain. And we have Bianca’s issues with protecting and hiding her mother. Most of the stories are entertaining, albeit voluminous, with the possible exception of Pugsley’s zombie, which is often a bit campy despite being a poignant representation of Pugsley’s relatable feelings of awkwardness and isolation as he begins the new school.

Despite being a teen adventure, Wednesday is also a horror comedy series, which means several characters meet their demise onscreen in horror film ways. Fortunately, the actual gore is kept to a PG safe minimum. This balance of intensity makes the show a satisfying and entertaining gothic adventure without becoming overly graphic. Overall, the first half of Wednesday Season 2 is off to a promising, albeit overstuffed, start with solid acting and entertaining plotting as things move from bad to worse for Wednesday.

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Highlights:

  • Escalating emotions
  • Lots of subplots
  • Clever, funny, horror adventure

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

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

Wednesday, August 20, 2025

Second Look Review: A Palace Near the Wind by AI Jiang

The first half of a duology of one woman’s struggle to preserve her world’s culture, and find her mother, through an arranged marriage.



Liu Lufeng has a problem. She is the eldest daughter of the Feng family. They are wind walkers, they can talk to and harness the wind. They are literally made of wood. But she must negotiate the safety and continued survival of her people, and so Lufeng will marry the human King. But she soon learns that not is all that it appears and the people, especially her younger sister, are in more danger than they know. And the revelations will surprise the reader even more than Liufeng herself.

This is the story of A Palace Near the Wind, first in a duology.

Jiang slides us quickly into a fantastic fantasy world where we don’t know the rules, where we are immediately in a world that feels a bit like Faerie. People with bark skin, branches for limbs, the magic of wind. The proposal of marriage feels like something out of a faerie story that you may have read many times before, too. A human noble marries a faerie princess and she goes back with him to his human world. This does not all go to plan. Simple, right? Not so simple as all that Jiang keeps us off balance throughout, and slowly and surely starts revealing more and more facets about what is going on.

For you see, Lufeng has a plan to save her world. She’s the eldest daughter, the princess who has let her sisters be married one by one...and now to defend her younger sister, she will not only marry the king, instead...but will seek to end him and his reign entirely, to ensure peace and safety for the wind walkers. And so she spins a plot and plan to kill the King in order to stop the endless marriages and the danger to her people. Complicating this are threats against her, her mother (a prisoner), and the looming potential threat against her younger sister. But as soon as Lufeng arrives at the palace, revelations of who the King really is, what the palace they go to really is, and the nature of the world throw her plan off course.

And most importantly, revelations of what Lufeng and her people actually are and where they came from.

The novella is entirely from a tight point of view set on Lufeng, and it often takes others to jostle loose key information that the protagonist already knows, and has not told us. That, plus the information control that Lufeng herself has to fight through, to find her siblings, her mother and protect her people mean that the entire novella is one of slow revelation. That revelation is sometimes punctuated by violence, or outright dark fantasy or horror (such as a rather disturbing banquet scene). Lufeng and us get a real sense of the world, perhaps even more than Lufeng herself really understands. We get words, names, concepts and worldbuilding blocks that she can’t quite fit together, but I as a reader could see what Jiang was and is doing. It’s another classic case of the reader having more information than the main character.

With that said, I don’t want to get into too much detail on that front, because this novella is one of discovery, revelation, of pulling that veil aside, for the reader somewhat faster than what Lufeng manages to do. It does leave the locations (including the titular palace) and world we see as an amazing and inventive world that I truly liked immersing within, even if I kept having a Bluebeard like feeling that Lufeng’s plot and plan was doomed to disaster from the get-go. And indeed, the longer Lufeng is in the palace, the more complicated things get for her, and for the reader as those veils are pulled back. And again, it is a case of the reader knowing and understanding and putting pieces together that Lufeng is slower to come to. I think Jiang does a good job in having the reader in a tense state of “will she “get it” in time to save herself and the Wind Walkers?”

Overall, the tone and style of the fantasy reminds me heavily of Neon Yang’s Tensorate series of novellas. A wild, unusual fantasy world where elements of science fiction creep in, almost unexpectedly here and there to provide a fantasy landscape that is original, immersive and creative. This is most definitely not your typical fantasy within the Great Walls of Europe by any means. Also, as mentioned above, the revelation of information as to what this world is really like and what is going on, both to our main character and to us, is a masterful use of information control and plotting that I had previously read in Jiang’s “I am AI” .

Also, too the theme of characters who are not what they appear, even to themselves, is something very much in common in a very different subgenre, setting and main character. The revelations I mentioned above are not just about the nature of the world, but the nature of Lufeng’s family, people, the King and the rest of the society around them. While the motif and metaphor of an outlander princess getting a rapid education in court politics and history is not a new one, in this setting with the additional worldbuilding that is going on, it takes on a whole new dimension and layer of meaning.

And finally the writing. The writing and descriptions are sharp and sometimes brutal. Given the subject matter and what Lufeng goes through,there are parts of this novella, and revelations, that are not at all easy for the reader, much less the character. And there is a real wonder, too, for the reader as we are introduced, again and again, to the strange elements of the world.

This is, to be clear, really the first half of a longer text and there is no good jumping off point. The narrative stops, not very cleanly. If you like what you’ve read here, you will want to read it, knowing that, like I, I am very curious as to what “happens next”. The revelations, reveals and the slowly clarifying situation are intriguing, but it is clear Jiang has more surprises in store. And I am quite invested in seeing what those are.

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Highlights:
  • Inventive fantasy world, worldbuilding and revelations
  • Interesting use of information control vis a vis the main character and the reader
  • Sharp, sometimes brutal writing--but too, wonder.
  • Gorgeous cover art
Reference: Jiang, Ai, A Palace Near the Wind, [Titan Books, 2025]


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

Tuesday, August 19, 2025

Book Review: Blood of the Old Kings by Sung-il Kim (tr. Anton Hur)

Taking Down the Corpse-Empire


The fall of empires is dramatic, especially when it is fast and violent. Such is what happened to the Japanese Empire and the Third Reich, and long before them, the Khwarezmians who were foolish enough to kill a messenger from Genghis Khan. They are times of newness, of rebirth, although not always of indubitably good things. There is certainly a schadenfreude from those victimised by the empire when everything comes tumbling down - after, of course, several had made the decision to topple it. One such story of empire collapsing spectacularly is Blood of the Old Kings, a Korean fantasy novel published in Korean in 2016 and in English translation by Anton Hur in 2024 (the second volume of the trilogy is due in English translation in October of this year).

You start off the bat with three main characters who become your viewpoint characters: Loran, a woman who makes a deal with a dragon to fight the Empire ruling her home country and vows to become king, Arianne, a student at the imperial sorcerer’s academy who had made a deal with a voice that began manifesting in her head, and Cain, a petty thief who has made deals with many in his quarter of the imperial capital who gets tangled up in broader politics when he learns that a friend of his was killed. All of these characters have made deals with somebody, and more and more somebodys as the narrative goes on. All of this is juxtaposed with the profound lack of deals - of consensus, rather - of imperial rule that has been imposed on large swathes of the known world.

The Empire that is the larger antagonist of this narrative goes unnamed. Partially this reminds me of Jean d’Ormesson’s The Glory of the Empire, where the idea is to make the namesake state feel archetypical, foundational to the conception of its world that no other referent is necessary. Another part of me is reminded of the Race in Harry Turtledove’s WorldWar series, where the Race needs no modifiers in its culture as there is no other polity worth speaking of (until their armed forces happen to land on Earth smack dab in the middle of World War II). This is a world, or perhaps more accurately a corner of a world, where one polity’s tyrannical rule is so omnipresent that it needs no adjective to make clear who is being referred to. Like what d’Ormesson and Turtledove have done, Kim is forcefully using a generic term to overawe your interpretation of the world. There is the Empire, and that is all.

The Empire here feels archetypical and frankly many other things in this book feel archetypical. Reading this book felt like reading many other heroic fantasy novels of its type. Interestingly, the names of the characters (Arianne, Loran, Cain) and of regions (‘Arland’ in particular, a name mentioned a lot as it is the home region of all three main characters) sound very European. The sorcerer’s academy that features prominently at the beginning of the book takes its children from families and isolates them entirely in a way that I could not help but compare to the Jedi Order as depicted in the Star Wars prequels. I don’t know what Kim was thinking when he wrote this or Hur when he translated it, but the whole setup feels very familiar to someone experienced with the genre. It will not feel ‘exotic’ (a deeply problematic term, doubtlessly) to the Western reader, and those looking for ‘exoticism’ (a problematic urge) will be disappointed - but one must remember that those outside of the West, however you want to define that, can and do read and respond to Western texts, and more importantly are not obligated to write what we want them to.

None of the above is to say that the yarn Kim spins is a bad one; far from it. There’s a lot of very good character work here, and a lot of good displays of tensions between factions of a rebellion. The plot is one of resistance against tyranny, and this interacts in clever ways with the idea of a ‘chosen one,’ in our case Loran. She knows that she can conquer a kingdom from horseback but cannot rule from there, to quote what a Chinese advisor told Kublai Khan; parts of this are almost reminiscent of Andor, but never hugely so. Arianne fights to escape her situation, and Cain fights because he has fallen into it not unlike Han Solo.

There is one bit here that is strikingly original, and it is how this Empire sustains its power. Every sorcerer in imperial service (and, according to its laws, should be every sorcerer, but this is not easy to enforce in practice) is turned into a magical battery when they die, and these batteries are the lynchpin of their entire civilization. The implications of this system are especially stark on Arianne, who is rankled by what will eventually happen to her were she to complete her studies. There are a lot of interesting hints as to where this idea could go, and one particular character is intimately tied to it, but parts of it are clearly left for later in the series.

Kim, rendered through Hur, is very good at depicting action. Never at any point in this novel did the detailed descriptions of violence did I zone out. The whole thing is very clear, very visceral, and it keeps the plot moving forward. This pays off at the end when almost all of Chekhov’s guns you see on the wall in the first half are fired and you get a spectacular ending scene that works both as raw spectacle and as a culmination of the theme of making deals (in particular there is a small bit that feels like a commentary on the tendency of resistance movements to splinter into a variety of teeny tiny factions but that goes by quickly). Kim via Hur reminded me of Robert E. Howard at his absolute best, and fortunately without all the racism (it’s there in the Conan stories and incredibly obvious in the Solomon Kane stories).

As of now I am waiting eagerly for the next book in this series. I absolutely see why this story became a big thing in South Korea. It is perhaps not the most original heroic fantasy novel (although I give Kim major props for letting a woman be a king, which has all sorts of interesting undertones) but it does what it does very well. Those who want that sort of thing will be well served here and will likewise look forward to the next volume.

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Reference: Sung-il Kim, Blood of the Old Kings, [Little Brown Book Group, 2024], translated by Anton Hur

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Monday, August 18, 2025

Book Review: No Sympathy by Eóin Dooley

On using magic to slip away


Theo is a man who is almost invisible. He is couch-surfing with people he vaguely considers his friends in Berlin after leaving secondary school in disgrace in England. He does everything in his power to avoid calling himself ‘homeless,’ although after a certain point there is no other way to put it. He is rambling through the streets of Berlin in the middle of the night, looking for a place to sleep, when he stumbles through a hole in reality and winds up in Shenzhen, in China’s Guangdong province not far from Hong Kong. Deeply confused, he meets a man named Gabriel who tells him that he is attuned to magic, and he is attuned because he is invisible to the world, someone who is so easily forgettable. Such is the opening volley of Eóin Dooley’s novella No Sympathy, published in 2024 by Android Press.

So much of the reason why this book works is because of Theo, its main character. This is a man who is aimless, with no ties to anything, no roots anywhere. He is a man who was not able to ‘make it’ in that striving middle class sense due to an inability to truly fit in a late-stage-capitalist education system, and as such becomes invisible to ‘polite’ society. Dooley never states this, but I suspect that Theo might be best read as being neurodivergent, autistic perhaps, as he always holds the rest of the world at arm’s length. I wonder if something more traumatic is lurking in his background. It is his rootlessness that makes him really able to find a use for magic; those of us in steady jobs and with families, given the opportunity to use magic, may hesitate as it may disrupt the delicate balance that stability requires under late stage capitalism. Theo, a man with nothing that is truly his and as such has nothing left to lose, can go all the way with it.

Magic here is heavily associative; the main thing you can do in this particular universe is to teleport between two locations that are similar on some level. It is remarked by Gabriel that, unlike most depictions of magic in contemporary settings, modernity has actually been a boon for magic. The easiest way to use this power of teleportation is to jump between restrooms, or between different outlets of the same fast food joints, which happen to be in different countries. I’ve never seen magic used in a modern setting like this before and I approve.

But this comes at a cost to the user, specifically in the requirement that the wielder be unmemorable. It means you cannot really have friends. It means that you can’t have community. It condemns you to nomadism. It prevents you from ever being able to make a truly systemic change in the world. It means you cannot indulge in local cuisine, as that makes a place less interchangeable with other places, so you cannot teleport nearly as well between that place and elsewhere. Theo ends up, for a time, in a group of magicians who teleport around the world doing small acts of charity and mercy, and eventually snaps at how much this particular way of living alienates him from anything that makes life really worth living at all.

No Sympathy is a book that poses a powerful question but never really answers it - but I’m not convinced that an answer was necessary for the book to work. Indeed, the book works best as a character study of Theo, the consummate drifter. He knows he has no roots, but being in that position makes him all too cognizant of what it means to have none at all. Beyond that, there isn’t an obvious thematic throughline, an obvious stance on alienation that the book is taking, where this nomadic existence is shown with both great benefits and great costs to the nomad. Indeed, this group Theo falls in with makes it almost a monastic enterprise.

Theo asks them if they could use their powers to throw wrenches into the gears of capitalism, to do what they can to bring evil men to justice and thereby prying loose the injustice of the world. The response they give him is something Theo finds to be sanctimonious and without any commitment to the broader well-being of humanity, the magical equivalent of white American church groups that go to Africa and build poorly-constructed houses or water pumps or what have you and do it primarily for the vacation and for the Instagram photos with smiling African children in their arms. His charge is that they have used their powers to become dilettantes, which really is not all that different from those who use magic for selfish reasons.

When not reading I am a swing dancer in my spare time, and as such I have familiarity with a good deal of midcentury American popular music. This book reminds me a good deal of one particular song from the fifties that is occasionally played at swing dances: The Wanderer, written by Ernie Maresca and sung by Dion DiMucci in 1961. It’s a song that, at first, appears to be an ode to an adolescent heterosexual male fantasy of arriving in a town, bedding the local women, and going off to the next town to repeat. But, as Dion has said and Bruce Springsteen has pointed out, the key to the song is in these lines:


Well, I roam from town to town,

I got a life without a care.

And I`m as happy as a clown,

I`m with my two fists of iron but I`m going nowhere.


This is a song about loneliness, about listlessness, about rootlessness. Theo is Dion’s wanderer, but so poor that he doesn’t even have the benefit of mindless hedonism. Both Theo and the Wanderer have discovered the truth of Ubuntu, the philosophy from Southern Africa, of how a person is a person through other people. We are social animals, and as much as we may fantasize of throwing it all away, it can never truly be done without wrecking us. We may try to fill that gap with pleasure or mindless distraction or, in our world, reactionary politics, but it never works. We are all bound together.

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Reference: Dooley, Eóin. No Sympathy [Android Press, 2024]

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Friday, August 15, 2025

Book Review: The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson

An epic fantasy that provides new twists and avenues for familiar genre conventions

Class and social distinctions. Longstanding grudges and plans within plans. Unusual use of point of view, including an effective omniscient and at first unexplained points of view. Strong grounding in personal relationships. Unexpected revelations.

These are the themes and tropes of Antonia Hodgson's The Raven Scholar.

The bare bones of the story, laid out, would not seem out of place in a lot of fantasy novels. The whole idea of a "country mouse" going to the city and trying to thrive there against all odds is one that goes back at least to the Roman Empire, and probably a lot earlier, too. Our titular Raven Scholar, Neema Kraa, is just that.

But the novel keeps us off balance right from the beginning. Neema is a side character for the opening of the book, and in fact does not appear in that opening or seems to have any importance, at first. The opening revolves around a mother and her two children under the equivalent of house arrest since the father led a bloody insurrection. The Emperor gives the male child a choice, and sets off a chain of events that runs through the center of the book. The female child undergoes a slow and painful death, the male child trains to try and succeed the Emperor, and our titular Raven Scholar is summoned to give a historic flourish to the decision.

Jump forward in time, and our Raven Scholar is a member of the court, although she is far more interested in her studies than courtly intrigue. Intrigue finds her, however, and by twist and turns, and unwilling response, she finds herself in a deadly competition to succeed the Emperor. The fact that her friend (and perhaps more than a friend) is also in this competition only heightens matters. And Neema is keeping secrets… as is everyone else in this competition and this court.

All this, with Neema trying just to do House Raven credit in the competition and not discredit it with a bad performance, would make for an effective and interesting novel. There are plenty of interesting and often tangled secrets, lies, betrayals, alliances and conflicts among the participants to succeed the Emperor (the Emperor is a selected, term-limited position). Even the backstory and secret intrigues that Neema and the reader are only slowly made aware of are part and parcel of what would normally be a fine and upstanding fantasy novel, one worth recommending if one likes the intrigue and schemes of a "deadly decadent court".

In addition, we get a novel that nearly bursts at the seams with rich worldbuilding detail. We learn a tremendous amount, fed to us in a steady stream, of the scheming Houses, long-standing social tensions, history, philosophy, literature and more of this world. While the action really is restricted to mainly one island where the Emperor lives, the world beyond that island feels visible, tangible and real.

And then there are the characters. We start with Neema, our titular Raven Scholar, our country mouse turned city mouse and dumped into the deep end, but her history and background turn out to be more complex than first indicated. This is also true (and sometimes surprising even to themselves) of all the contestants, the Emperor, and several secondary characters. Many of them have full-fledged character arcs, or the appearance of same: they hew and defy their Houses, and they are remarkably three-dimensional and human, uniformly. These are the kind of people you can imagine meeting for dinner and really having a sense of how they'd act. (looking at you, Cain! (but not JUST the scion of the Fox)).

The best way the novel handles this is in the trials and competition. The competition to become the next Emperor proceeds by a series of bouts and trials, one for each of the Houses. We get a sense of the characters from how they do in the trials… but also in the design of their own trials for the others. (One does not participate in their own trial, of course.) How Cain and the Foxes see the world and really are is seen in the Fox Trial, and Neema's Raven Trial is also illuminating, but even something like the Ox Trial shows that the steady and patient Oxen (including our Ox trial participant) are NOT the simpletons and fools that the rest of the Empire makes them out to be.

But where this novel really shines is in the extra it brings. The novel feels like it is in the tradition of a stratum of fantasy novels and stories in a mode that Jenn Lyons's A Chorus of Dragons series did not invent, but certainly is a strong and striking example of. The novel uses unusual points of view (including omniscient ones and ones whose provenance and nature are not explained at first) to give a wide kaleidoscope of what is going on. The novel sometimes feels like a slowly emerging picture from a jigsaw puzzle. Certainly, with a murder mystery on tap, that was going to be baked in, regardless. With all the moving pieces of the various factions, plots and plans, that was going to be the case. But the unusual and extra point of view lets the reader have more of a sense of what is going on than even the biggest characters, and with the social and literary commentary on the proceedings from within the world, The Raven Scholar really comes together as a stunning example of the form. It's on the low end of true doorstoppers (650 pages or so), but with all that is in here on offer, it feels longer still.

R. R. Virdi's Tales of Tremaine also sits in the same space as the Lyons series and what Hodgson is doing here in The Raven Scholar, as well. The slightly metafictional commentary on the nature of the story, as well as the stories within stories that all three series employ, seem to be part of a genre conversation on the nature of story that has always been there,¹ but has been getting more of it lately. Writers like Hodgson, Virdi, and Lyons are interrogating fantasy stories on multiple levels by using these sorts of devices.

I say, then, though, that The Raven Scholar is not a "101 book" for genre readers. If you have never read a fantasy novel in your life, starting your fantasy reading here is probably going to be an exercise in frustration and confusion.² Or at the very least, you won't get as much mileage out of the book as if you had already read some fantasy novels and were ready for the usual tropes and devices to be deployed and subverted.³ But if you are ready for that gear shift, The Raven Scholar is here as an excellent new book to explore this region of genre space.

Highlights:

  • Complex, complicated and intriguing epic fantasy
  • Excellent set of characters
  • Doorstopper: feature, not bug

Reference: Hodgson, Antonia. The Raven Scholar [Orbit, 2025].

¹ Take Scheherazade as an example. Or even The Odyssey, which has a lot more of Odysseus recounting things than you'd think. In fact, the whole bit about the Trojan horse is from the Odyssey, NOT the Iliad.

² The older science fiction model that comes to mind here is Dune (and whether or not Dune is really SF or just fantasy in SF garb is a whole other essay). But the points of view, the deep dives into character, the literary history, the framing of the Dune story, the subversion of tropes (sometimes so subtly that too many people don't even realize they are being subverted) are things that readers who have not read much SF can entirely miss.

³ In a different way, the metafictional books Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan and How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying by Django Wexler are doing that subversion, but from a much punchier populist angle rather than a literary one.

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

Thursday, August 14, 2025

On the cop movie spoof in the age of ACAB

When Frank Drebin Jr. saves the day, what is actually being saved?

Back when I was an impressionable elementary schooler, I saw the first Michael Bay Transformers film with my dad, and I remember being struck that this time around, the robot that turned into a police car is evil. The men and women in blue uniforms and caps who drive cars with sirens have fallen from the heroic status they held in the 20th century, and we now focus not on the uniforms or the cars, but on the guns they have on their belts, and the wide variety of ways they know how to kill people. As such, the very idea of the original Naked Gun trilogy, and the Police Squad show before it, feels like something out of an allegedly more innocent time (although the likes of Bull Connor would probably disagree), a quainter, more naive time.

When the decision was made to make The Naked Gun for release in 2025, it was to be made and released in a country that has had massive unrest over police violence. More and more Americans do not look up to cops, but fear them. As such, to portray the police as the heroes in a spoof movie will read differently than when Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker made the original Police Squad show.

To get the most pressing question out of the way: this movie is hysterically funny. It’s very much a modernized version of those old spoof movies where, if you don’t like one joke, the writers are banking on the prospect you may like one of the four other jokes occurring within the next minute. It’s that density of comedy that really saves the original trilogy for a modern viewer, as perhaps one in five jokes (and frankly that is being charitable) are hideously offensive by modern standards (one particular reveal in the third movie taking the crown for single most offensive joke in the franchise). There is a series of gags involving an infrared camera that, while not particularly offensive to anyone, are possibly raunchier than anything in the original trilogy. That density is preserved here, as the film is crammed with funny background events and a conga line’s worth of one-liners.

Liam Neeson is doing a Leslie Nielsen impersonation through all of this, and he is very good at it. What made Nielsen so good in his role as Frank Drebin Sr. was that he was capable of saying, and responding to, completely absurd horseshit with a completely straight face. Neeson is very similar, capable of making absurd Sex and the City references or questioning the use of a certain slur in an old song in a manner that sounds very earnest. Neeson sells Frank Drebin Jr. as a man who has no idea that what he’s saying is complete nonsense. In the younger Drebin’s mind, his responses are perfectly rational, and he is the rational man in an irrational world.

The basics of the plot are ripped from 2014’s Kingsman: the Secret Service, involving a sonic frequency that makes people kill each other. The villains here are what Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor described as ‘end times fascists,’ wishing to see an end to human civilization so that they can make a new world atop its ashes. They feel like Musk- or Thiel-style technofascists, a clear departure from the villains in the original trilogy, whose aims were far more down-to-earth, relatively speaking. Since we live in a world that feels like it’s careening ever quicker into a dystopian future, this movie is the first time that the series gets openly science fictional.

That swerve into science fiction is one way that this film shows its origins in this century; a subtle shift in the characterization of Frank Drebin, and by extension Police Squad as a whole, is another. In addition to thinking that the completely ridiculous is completely normal, Neeson’s Drebin is portrayed as a violent asshole, going by several of the jokes. When he urgently needs to use the restroom, he fires a gun at the ceiling to get a crowd out of the way between him and a toilet in a coffee shop. Before doing that, he let a speeding driver get away with a warning. This Drebin is actively destructive to human life and property in a way that Nielsen's Drebin never was. He is, if not racist in his heart of hearts, happy to admit that his violence disproportionately affects people of color. One particularly memorable background gag in Police Squad headquarters has an officer escorting away some crying children while he holds their confiscated lemonade stand around his arm. The question eventually has to be asked: does Police Squad do anything other than terrorize innocent people?

It’s subtle, and easy to miss given the rapid-fire comedy, but this film portrays Police Squad as at best completely useless, and is very aware of the myriad problems of contemporary policing. Police Squad is filled with cowboy cops—the sort of cowboys that massacred Natives. I’m reminded of Peter Moskos’s book Cop in the Hood, his memoir of taking a job with the Baltimore police department to do anthropological work on policing. He says that most cops that he knew were not committed racists; the violence they meted out affected Black people disproportionately because of the broader structural inequalities of American society rather than any particular animus as individuals. But it’s not intent, but impact, that matters, and these cops, Frank Drebin Jr. foremost among them, are terrorizing the streets of Los Angeles like the imperial enforcers from which American police have drawn so much. They rampage around the city with impunity (for them, punishment for police misconduct warrants a pool party) and have brought the war home. In another world, Frank Drebin Jr. could be a particularly dim-witted officer of the Philippine Constabulary, brutalizing a people white Americans called the n-word. It was a service that attracted brutes, and this version of Police Squad acts that way.

[An aside—if you want to read more about imperial influence on policing, I recommend Julian Go's Policing Empire, Matthew Guariglia's Police and the Empire City, Alfred McCoy's Policing America's Empire, and Radley Balko's Rise of the Warrior Cop.]

Frank Drebin Jr. ultimately saves the day, as he was bound to do, fighting the villain outside of Ponzischeme.com Arena. It is telling that the only dangerous crime anyone actually stops in this movie is one that threatens the interests of the rich and powerful. He does so with the cooperation of his love interest, who makes up fictional stories and sells them as true crime, thereby saving Police Squad’s funding, after the Spirit Halloween banner had already been hung up on its building. Earlier in the film, it is shown that Police Squad is rank with nepotism, where the son of Nordberg heavily implies that his father (portrayed in the original trilogy by O. J. Simpson) committed crimes similar to that of his actor. The whole enterprise, the whole concept of policing, and indeed contemporary American society are all immersed in a slimy morass of corruption and theft.

Police abolitionists argue that policing, as an institution, does not solve crime, nor prevent crime, but rather punishes crime, to the detriment of the aforementioned. They often insist on referring to the American legal system, rather than the American justice system, as it is designed to execute laws rather than to pursue any real form of justice. Looking at the movie from this lens, the ultimate joke of The Naked Gun is justice in America, and the punchline is: “Justice? What justice?”

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.