Whose Science Fiction: Recognition and its Absence in a Reading of Colourfields by Paul Kincaid

A deeply thoughtful collection that muses on the nature of SF and its sub-categories, though not one without blind spots

Cover art by Tom Joyes

I am not, by nature, someone uninterested in history; my degree was, after all, somewhat directed into the ancient world, and the study of the past has long captured my attention. And so it is very strange to find myself reading a book that contains reviews (a thing I love) many of which focus on histories (also a thing I like) of science fiction (a genre I greatly enjoy), and feel... disconnected from it, as was my experience with Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction, the new Briardene Books volume from long-time critic of the genre, Paul Kincaid.

Split into three sections, the volume collects his reviews of Histories, Topics and Authors, covering a broad span of work on a wide-ranging set of texts, all in Kincaid's enjoyably acerbic tone. It's not a collection to pull punches either; when Kincaid dislikes a text he is reviewing, or finds it wanting at the fundamental or surface level, he doesn't hold back in offering up his critique (and as someone with a strong ideological support for the negative review, this was extremely welcome reading). Each review digs deep into the substance of the book in question, offering a clear view both of what that text is setting out to achieve and how well it does it, and any blind spots, omissions or unusual choices made in the process, alongside interesting bits of contextual information drawn from a frankly alarmingly broad knowledge of the field.

Before I get into the musing about why I felt that disconnection, I want to emphasise—I did enjoy reading this book, at times, immensely. It came with me on a flight, and I found myself giggling despite my deep discomfort with flying, so it must have been doing some things right. But I found, as I read, increasingly there was one lens through which I was viewing the whole of the book, and so the thing that affected most deeply my reading of it both as a text entire, and in its individual components: namely, that I very often looked at the science fiction(s) being presented to me on the page, and simply did not recognise them.

I don't have a clear answer for why that is, though I have some theories. The first of which is simply one of the passage of time: the SF I grew up into and the one often portrayed on these pages have between them a gulf of years that encompassed a great deal of change. But I don't think it's just that.

Kincaid alludes in various of his essays and reviews herein to the multiplicity of science fiction—the idea that it is not a single, coherent genre (indeed, he talks about disliking that word as well) with a single, coherent history. And so my discomfort in many ways proves him precisely right—whatever my conception of science fiction was, and is, it occupies a different strand of the weft (or a different shade of the colourfield, I suppose) than the ones under discussion here. But even with that acknowledgment that these reviews and essays look only at part of the story, it is still peculiar to see so little of the parts I do recognise—chiefly, the references to the Puppies and their Hugo activities. It's not even necessarily in the specifics of what's on the page, rather sometimes in tone, or in feel. This isn't a place I find myself or my experience within, and that's just downright odd, especially as I generally think of myself as at least reasonably curious and relatively informed, up to a point. Perhaps that self-image needs some adjustment.

However, my suspicion is that alongside the time gap there's a confluence of factors that lead to the genre I grew up into bearing little resemblance to the one Kincaid references, and I rather suspect gender plays a big part in it. The fiction I grew up reading, the fiction that coloured my childhood and my perceptions well into my time at university is what I might call, for want of a better term, girl-coded. It was aimed at children, and it was particularly geared at a market of female children. It was only at university (and sometimes rather later) that I encountered things I now see taken as universals. The SFF magazines of short fiction are a particular example, because I don't think I was more than passingly familiar with the barest concept of them until the mid-2010s. So maybe I wasn't connected to fandom, or only to a more forward-looking (or possibly just gender-segregated) subsection? Except... I don't think I was. Until fairly recently, I'd have called the university SF society I was a member of extremely backwards-looking, at least when I initially joined—they didn't read or discuss, for the most part, contemporary releases in my first couple of years, and if I think back to our society library, the overwhelming sensory memories are the feel and smell of slightly mouldering, very yellowed paperbacks. I was also, when I joined, one of three women in the whole society. Bastions of the futuristic we were not.

I am also, to be blunt, not the fresh face of the youth anymore, being a whole thirty-five. But that is exactly what reading this collection makes me feel—young, and terribly, terribly ignorant. Because, despite his clear awareness of that multiplicity of SF, there feels to be a coherent subsection of it on show here that does lean heavily backwards, not just in the sense of looking at histories (which would entirely make sense, given the topic of a whole third of the book), but in the sense of approaches and conceptions of what the genre is, where it is, and even more nebulously, but perhaps most crucially, how it is discussed. This is not a way of talking about the genre that maps to the vast majority of the conversations I have, many of which with people much smarter and more knowledgeable about both genre and fandom than myself.

If you're unsure from the way I'm talking about the book whether I think this is a good or a bad thing, well... join the club. I vacillate between poles as I consider it. Because on the one hand, I feel like I'm benefiting from this thoughtful, considered and extremely thorough look back at a part of the genre that is alien to me, and that kind of thing is surely always a benefit? But then on the other, the incompleteness rankles, on a more emotional level. The inner voice that goes, "Well, where's the bit I'm in? Why doesn't that get a look in?". I think, if I try to boil it down, my opinion is that what it does is done extremely well—if you like an acerbic turn of wit, an inclination towards sass and a very analytical eye on the specifics of what a particular work is doing, this will absolutely be provided. But, like all these kinds of projects, it has a limitation, and it may come to the fore if, like me, your experience of SF doesn't match up to what is being put under the microscope. And of course, that limitation may come from a number of places; as this is a selection of pre-existing work, it is predicated on what Kincaid has previously reviewed. The selection bias can come from any point on the journey: what was offered, what was accepted, what was actually written about, what was chosen for this project particularly. I don't know, and in many ways it doesn't matter, as all I have and can assess is the text in front of me.

However, to move away from the navel-gazing before it consumes all possibility of interesting thought, we should talk a little more in depth about the content of the book:

The three sections do pretty much as they say on the tin. Histories provides Kincaid's reviews of a selection of histories of the genre, and in general he seems somewhat dubious of them at a project conception level. When talking about Adam Roberts's The History of Science Fiction, he is fairly clear in his rejection of the idea that there can be a single, canonical history of the genre, not least due to the fact that SF as a single entity cannot first be defined. To quote:

"But when your subject is science fiction, famously undefinable, a protean literature that takes on the characteristics of its observer, no history can be anything but partial."

This argument crops up again and again, with variable strengths of expression, throughout the chapter, as he grapples with various attempts by a range of authors to both pin down and explain SF and its past. He takes pains to spell out his position well too, that many of these characterisations of the genre limit themselves in their inclusions and exclusions, often on gender, race or linguistic lines. It's an argument I think is made well, and one I mostly find myself in agreement with (I too have done a big sigh and rolled my eyes at the idea that there was a single progenitor of the genre and that it was Mary Shelley). The one downside, outside of my previous discussion, with this section is something that becomes apparent as you keep reading: he is dissatisfied with approximately every single text he discusses, possibly even exasperated, and it becomes quite wearing to get to another history and... oh yep, this one's bad too. He's right and he should say it, but structuring the book with these collected together and as the first section is a little of a trial by fire; if you can weather the grumbling, you can get to the good stuff.

Which brings us around to Topics, by far my favourite of the sections. Because, by nature, the works under discussion in this section are narrower in their scopes, the tone is much lighter—the fundamental objection to the project of them is much reduced. The reviews here feel much more wide-ranging, and include possibly the most positive section in the volume, a chapter that I had to put down and stare off into space for a little while after reading because it was such a glowing paean to its subject that it felt wildly out of place. It was, of course, the Clute chapter. I should not be surprised.*

As someone without a huge depth of knowledge on what was being discussed, I also found this section the most informative about the genre that I wasn't recognising—the different texts being reviewed start to paint a picture of some key areas of import, from Marxism to utopias to Gnosticism to grammar to the prehistoric and its role in genre works that may (or may not, depending on the light) be counted as SF. Names crop up over and again, and a web starts to form of connected thoughts, schools and ideas. This is the section where I found myself wanting to pick up the books under discussion, although Kincaid is more easily inclined to declare something universally necessary for those interested in SF than I would be, an assertion I am often moved to distrust. There are no universals, not even in criticism, and certainly not in worth or value. But the works held up as vital in this way are not ones I'm familiar with, and so I cannot say for a certainty that I don't agree, only that I distrust the instinct to make such bold declarations.

That being said, the confident tone in which Kincaid feels comfortable making quite broad statements felt more apt here than in Histories, or perhaps I had just acclimatised. Likewise, I felt less sandblasted by my ignorance, more just informed, and I think that is also down to the reduction of scope. It's easy to look at a specific topic and be ignorant, and then to learn about it, whereas trying to behold the genre at large and finding it unrecognisable has something of a humbling effect. If there's a downside to it here, it is that occasionally Kincaid will confidently assert something—that X is author Y's best work, or similar—and it is unclear whether this is relaying the information presented in the book under discussion, or his own opinion thrown in. I don't particularly mind which; I am generally in favour of reviewers not feeling they have to hedge every single opinion as being just an opinion (it's a review; surely that's a given?), but it would be nice, in general, to know.

The final section brings us onto Authors, and this section is... tricky. I'll come onto the content/tone in a moment, but I want to first look at who the authors chosen are, especially in conjunction with Kincaid's assertions back in the Histories section about people looking at the genre with a closed-off scope of who fits (and who isn't included).

Of the 12 authors covered in 11 chapters, only three are female. As far as I can tell from cursory research, every single one of them is white (with a complication in that the Disch chapter talks just as much, if not more, about Delany, who is a queer black man). They hail from three countries in total: the UK (7, of which 2 from Northern Ireland), the USA (4) and Canada (1). Only three of them are living, and I'm unsure if one of those is still actively publishing. Their careers fill a gap between 1895 and the present day, though I would personally suggest most of them had their zenith... I'll say before I was born rather than pinning it to something more specific. If we're going to talk about limited scope, and especially if we're going to talk about genre being a spectrum whose constituent parts stretch back before Aldiss's claim about Mary Shelley and forward up to the present day... well, the selection here somewhat undermines that assertion. And again, I don't know the factors that led to these specific authors being selected. I don't know what biases operate on the books Kincaid has been offered over the years to review. But I have this work in front of me as itself, and as that text, at this time... I have some questions to ask about this selection, when placed alongside those earlier critiques.

So let's see how Kincaid talks about it in his own words:

Preface to the third section of the book, entitled Authors

So yes, he alludes to the editorial selection issue, but then assures us that this selection is a designed one. And to take up the metaphor, if there is a figure emerging from the rock... well, it's a white, British man. That mirror being held up is indeed perhaps to the reader and to the reviewer himself.

But it's not just the demographics. When I said earlier that the way this feels is backwards-looking, this selection of authors only highlights that feeling. If this is the fascinating ecosystem we call science fiction, did it end in 2005 or so but for Margaret Atwood? And where, in Histories and Topics, that backwards glance feels more apt for the subject matter, here... here I struggle. For all the interest in each chapter of this section (plenty, let me stress), when I step back a ways and think of it holistically, I cannot stop myself from thinking about what this, as an indicative selection, says about SF. Because ultimately this book is about SF, what it is, what it isn't, and the blurred boundaries of its edges into other work. If I weren't thinking about the shape of the thing under the blanket, I wouldn't be engaging properly with the work.

To be blunt, the shape of the thing under the blanket looks exactly like the thing Kincaid has critiqued. That he has seen the problem and nonetheless himself gone on to replicate it is frustrating. Hopes dashed and all that.

Tonally, this section lies closer to Topics than Histories, and for me is the better for it. Particularly, not all the chapters are reviews—Peter Ackroyd, for instance, is covered in a short essay for an anthology about supernatural fiction writers, and this gives more leeway for the personal opinions and assertions of objectivity that are the mode in which I find myself enjoying Kincaid the most. Call it an opinionated potted biography, perhaps. Likewise the "impressionistic response" to M. John Harrison's anti-memoir.

It also made the better for many of the authors in question being people Kincaid has met—I enjoyed the brief digressions into personal anecdote a great deal, and again fit into the tone I seem to enjoy most in Kincaid's work, with added connectivity out to these figures who for me are distant and august, if I've heard of them at all.

Of the book's three, this section also generated by far the most online research and interest in discovering more. With each new author under the glass, I found myself tabs deep in discovery, and trying my best to withhold the onslaught of tbr additions. These are often authors familiar to me but now fundamentally more interesting by his discussion of them. Previously my interest in H. G. Wells was... well, not zero but hardly significant. Now? We're trending upwards, for sure. And the previous interest I had definitely had in M. John Harrison's Viriconium works has likewise been given a fair boost. When he's convinced of a work (or an author)'s worth, the value it has, whether aesthically, ideologically or contextually, is very well spelled out, and even when he's not trying, what he loves, he sells. When it's there, the enjoyment in a work is palpable, and because it exists in contrast to pretty honest and blunt critique, it is clearly authentic, making it all the more valuable.

It ended very much on a high—the section on H. G. Wells covers several works, but reiterates a point made earlier in the volume about the depth, range and contradictory nature of his character and body of work. It feels like the best of what the volume does (Clute lauds aside), capturing a person and their relevance to the body of SF, such as it is, in all their variety. This? This was the stuff I loved.

But it cannot erase what came before, nor the context in which it sits in that final section.

And so, somewhat contradictorily, my conclusion is this: In presenting only a subsection of SF, only a few colours of the field, Kincaid proves his own assertions about the nature of the genre entirely correct, and my inability to recognise them shows only how wide and deep the field ranges. But, on an aesthetic and personal level, I found it strange to read, and sometimes alienating, because, even as he acknowledges that there are many science fictions—acknowledges the absence of women, people of colour and non-Anglophone voices in frequent attempts at categorising them—the one presented in the book slowly feels as though it coheres into a single beast, one overwhelmingly white, male and British, and whose focus ranges backwards, a preoccupation I sometimes feel undermines SFF's ability to accurately assess itself, and the issues it faces in the present, except as viewed through the lens of that past. I know there is a value in history, and on the merits of that it delivers a thorough, thoughtful and fascinating insight. I learned much, developed my existing understanding more, and had a great time with the thoughts of someone with a deep feel of his part of the field and a knack of sharing it clearly. But in my inner self, I wished the mirror held up had shown at least a little of a face I recognised. Demographically, but also environmentally and contextually.

Ultimately, I may need to look backwards to understand where SF has come from to reach the point it's at now. But equally, when attempting sweeping discussions of "what it is we write about when we are writing about science fiction," that "fascinating ecosystem" cannot be understood fully if we excise the last ten years either. The present owes its debts to the past, but must also be understood on its own terms—partly shaped by the ideas and people covered in this exploration of the genre, but not wholly defined by them. This is a snapshot of what SF was rather than is, a work I find in some ways limited, but within those limitations—fascinating, thought-provoking, discussion-provoking, occasionally laugh-provoking and more.

*I have yet to grapple with Clute myself but I am beginning to understand that he operates as a sort of saintly figure, or perhaps the icon of a mystery cult, for a lot of British SFF criticism. If I start babbling about him as Dionysus reborn, you must assume that I too have been initiated.

--

The Math

Highlights:

• Acerbic tone of voice, leading to occasional snicker-out-loud moments
• Huge depth and detail of information about SFF history, criticism and its discussion
• Thoughtful discussion about the nature of the genre

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Reference: Kincaid, Paul. Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction [Briardene Books, 2025].

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

Book Review: The Estate by Sarah Jost

A version of the story of a famous sculptor’s relationship with an even more famous one, using an art buyer’s ability to enter the worlds of art as her genre hook

Camille Leray has a special ability, one invaluable to her work as an art historian and seller. Not that many would believe her, even if she told her secret, but she can go into a demiplane of the artwork she studies. She can get a real psychological and social sense of what the artist was thinking and doing and trying to convey, by means of the interiority of their worlds. But when her gift goes badly wrong, and she is forced to take a job at an estate in Brittany, her gift unlocks the secret and mystery of her favorite, underappreciated artist... but at a heavy personal cost.

This is the story of Sarah Jost’s The Estate.

The novel revolves around several interesting, interlocking axes. We have Camille, whose personal history, and her gift and her need for money after a disaster at the auction, leads her to the titular Estate where she spent some time during her childhood. Camille’s time there, as well as her relationship, in various meters with Maxime Foucault, the head of the estate, past and present, drive a lot of the social and psychological heft of the novel. Camille is more than a little in love with Max, and the working out of that relationship, and how it relates to her gift and her interests, is a lot of what you are going to find here. This does move the novel somewhat out of pure genre fiction (although the elements to be discussed below certainly are). A comp mentioned in the publicity materials, and what occurred to me as being a good one as I read this book, is Peng Shepherd’s The Cartographers. This novel does try to do with art history and art appreciation what that novel did with maps.

In keeping with the weight of the novel, and following that parallel, the mimetic elements really are strong here. We get a good third-person close POV look at Camille’s life, as her trip to the titular Estate brings up some good and some very bad memories in the process. There is an uncovering and unearthing process in the novel as we learn more about Camille even as we learn more about Maxime, his family in general, and more importantly their relationship with Constance Sorel, the focus of Camille’s artistic interest. Camille is a conflicted, interesting and engaging protagonist for most of the book (there is a later reversal that doesn’t seem well set up or paid for in advance that annoyed me). Besides Camille, a lot of the effort is put on Max, as well as his girlfriend Lila. The Camille-Lila relationship, as the novel goes on, becomes more and more central and important¹ to the culmination and denouement of the book.

So I should discuss the genre elements here. Camille’s ability to enter demiplanes that represent the interiority of an artwork and the mind of the artist is something that she herself does not quite understand and does not (as Maxime sees it) use to its fullest potential. The book begins with Camille thinking that it is idiosyncratic and singular; the inciting incident above that goes badly wrong is that she brings someone else into the demiplane with her by accident. As the novel proceeds, she finds out inch by inch that her ability is greater than she realizes. The exploration of this power is a secondary concern, and always takes a back seat to the mimetic elements and storyline.

There is a technique to determine whether a novel or story is fantasy or science fiction, and that is simply: if you remove the genre elements completely, does it still work as a story? By that test, The Estate very nearly succeeds. You’d have to make some alterations to make the plot work, get Camille to the Estate, and propel the rest of the narrative and why Maxime is so interested in her. So, without alteration, no, the work doesn’t quite succeed, but with some adaptation, it probably could. So The Estate sits inside the porous barrier between genre and non-genre work² but it is within the line. It’s just not a very *strong* genre-focused work. It was a bit frustrating to me in that regard, in that Camille is not only afraid to extend her ability, but she seems absolutely terrified, without any backing information, to actually explore it deeply.³

There is a lesser and somewhat underutilized genre element here, and that is Arthuriana. What some casual fans of the Arthurian romances may not know is that much of the work of the early versions of the Romances were composed and set in Brittany and not England at all. The forest of Broceliande was inspired if not taken to be Paimont Forest in Brittany, and to this day there are things like monuments and sculptures devoted to the French romance tradition of the Arthurian legends throughout the forest.

This gives a good grounding for Jost to use Arthuriana both in the demiplanes of Constance Sorel and in the works themselves. There is a definite theme of things such as the relationship between Vivaine and Merlin that come up time and again in the novel. A real appreciation for those early French versions of the stories infuses the work that Sorel does, and throughout the novel as Leray engages with that work at the Estate. There are intimations and not-quite-fully-formed ideas about mapping some of that Arthuriana onto Leray’s own life, but I don’t think the novel *quite* gets to where it is pushing for in that regard.

I’ve waited to this point to discuss the focus of Camille’s interest, Constance Sorel, in more detail. Aside from the original focus for her for Arthuriana, Constance’s is not imaginary at all, but is rather an alternate version of a real artist, Camille Claudel (the fact that Camille Leray has the same first name as her is, I think, absolutely no accident). Camille Claudel had an intense and tragic relationship with an artist you most definitely have heard of: Auguste Rodin (yes, the Thinker guy). Claudel was an artist in her own right, but her relationship with Rodin and her eventual confinement in a mental institution consumed the last decades of her life. Much of her work has been destroyed, part of it by herself. Hers is a tragic, heartbreaking story that recontexualized, when I first found out about it, my love of Rodin’s work.

In the world of The Estate, Constance Sorel had a relationship with an artist named “Boisseau” and the lines of that relationship are very clear: Boisseau is the better-known artist, a rockstar of sculpture. This relationship ended badly, and Sorel, like her model, wound up first in exile in Brittany, in the very estate that is the center of the novel, and then finally in an asylum.

The novel missteps with this, I think. We mostly get stories of the Boisseau-Sorel relationship and the power of their art. But the novel doesn’t seem to know whether or not these are an alternate Rodin and Claudel or not, and that hurts the story. We get a mention of Rodin once by name (Leray says she sold a Rodin not long before the start of the book), as well as a mention of The Thinker and jokingly “The Gates of Whatnot” (clearly The Gates of Hell). But I am still not convinced that the Rodin sale line isn’t a typo and that it's supposed to be Boisseau and that Boisseau in this world is Rodin and therefore, Sorel is Claudel.

The reason why this matters is that Rodin and Claudel’s relationship is never mentioned, even if Boisseau and Sorel’s relationship rhymes with it. If Rodin and Claudel existed in this world, for real, they would be a touchstone, a reference point, something for Camille Leray to hang her hat on and use. “Constance Sorel, as denied in her time just as Camille Claudel was, another woman deemed the mistress of a Great Man and whose art was denigrated and denied.” It’d be an obvious thing to mention and to think about. But this never happens, and with just one named reference to Rodin... it remains frustratingly unclear. And I think that is a real misstep.

My theory is that the Rodin line is a typo, and Rodin and Claudel don’t exist in the world of this book, but Sorel and Boisseau do.

The novel does additionally suffer, I think, for trying to fit Camille Claudel a.k.a. Constance Sorel onto the life and final fate of our heroine Camille herself. For all that we go through this journey of discovery of an artist’s true power, on top of all this, the novel seems to want to cast Camille Leray as a latter-day Constance Sorel, and Camille Claudel in the same breath, to the point of echoing Constance’s life and trying to give herself a better ending. Constance has a lifelong friendship that falls apart due to Constance being institutionalized (just as Camille Claudel was), but Camille Leray seems to be reaching for the same sort of friendship with Lila and succeeds. Instead of being pleased by the echoes and resonances, they instead seem to be an ill-suited frame fo Camille Leray’s life and fate that did not, for me, satisfy.⁴

I can hope that the book will bring more attention to Camille Claudel through her fictionalized version as Constance Sorel in the book, since her story is a tragedy (and sadly she destroyed much of her work). The thesis of the book, that Constance Sorel was an unsung genius of sculpture, appears to be the author talking about Camille Claudel’s work and place in history, and one that I can agree with. In the end, this book attempts to recapture and bring Claudel back to prominence through her fictionalized version and Camille Leray’s story.

So, if you are interested especially in art, particularly Rodin and Claudel, and don’t mind some not-always-well-used genre elements in a work that’s really about rehabilitating Claudel more than anything else, this is the book for you.

Side note: The Getty Museum and Art Institute of Chicago did a retrospective of Claudel’s work at the end of 2023. I wish I had known about it; it would have been worth a trip to Chicago to see.

Also side note: I did a Six Books with Sarah Jost in 2023, in connection with her book Five First Chances.

Highlights:

• Strong story about a fictionalized version of an underappreciated artist.

• Passionate and deep mimetic story about an art historian and her gift.

• Not as genre as it might be, and not as effectively as it might be.

Reference: Jost, Sarah. The Estate [Sourcebooks Landmark, 2024].

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

1. I should emphatically note that it is not a queer relationship in any way, although, given my reading habits and expectations lately in reading a lot of queer-friendly genre work, I was *expecting* the slow-build intensification of Lila and Camille to go that way... but it does not. 

2. People like the esteemed Gary K. Wolfe would say that there is no such barrier, having written articles and even a book on the subject. I’d love to know his take on this book in that spirit. 

3. To take an idea from this. Suppose you had a door in your wardrobe to another world, be it C. S. Lewis, Seanan McGuire, or multiverse style. Would you poke your head through it, look at the world of the other side but never go further than a few feet from the portal, and yet still keep coming back and just repeating that same process? That’s how Camille feels like she has a relationship with her power. She doesn’t reject it outright, but seems to really limit any idea of trying other things for a lot of her life and a lot of the book.

4. So the Camille-Lila relationship is clearly meant to be an echo of Constance-Anne. The latter one is clearly platonic, and thus, as per footnote 1, the Camille-Lila remains strictly platonic, even if I read it coding as being potentially queer.

Series Review: Black Mirror Season 7

Strong acting and innovative stories explore our difficult relationship with technology

Humanity’s interaction with technology returns as a timely primary theme in the latest season of Black Mirror. Unlike last season’s obsession with cruelty and extreme violence, season 7 of the mind-bending series explores the ways technology shapes our understanding of reality and relationships. The latest advances lure consumers with affordable pricing and irresistible features, but soon we are caught in a cycle of dependence even as the price rises, ads bury the features, and the never-ending contracts trap us in ways that seem impossible to escape. Video games provide a conflicting combination of immersive connection and distinct unreality which leads to moral decisions in a fictional context that may not match real-life choices. The top casting means the concepts are explored with immersive acting, even if the ultimate conclusion doesn’t quite live up to expectations. And, for most of the episodes, the stories are thoughtful and engaging, while raising questions without providing clear answers.

Common People. School teacher Amanda (Rashida Jones) and her construction worker husband, Mike (Chris O’Dowd), are a loving but financially struggling couple. When Amanda suffers a near-lethal seizure, doctors tell a stunned and grief-stricken Mike that she won’t make it. But then he learns about Rivermind, a high-tech system that gives Amanda a chance at life for a seemingly reasonable monthly fee. However, as time moves on, the couple discovers the real price of keeping her alive. The episode is the strongest of the season and offers commentary on the bait-and-switch techniques of online subscription services that lure us in and change the rules as time progresses. But this time, the service is not just television streaming or a music app; it’s the thing keeping Amanda alive. The episode also deals with disturbing obsessions with suffering and humiliation as a form of entertainment and income. Tracee Ellis Ross is excellent as the slick-talking salesperson for Rivermind whose constant doublespeak keeps Amanda and Mike tangled in a web of frustration. The episode is riveting, poignant, and tragic.

Bête Noire. Maria’s life as a food product development specialist changes when an old high school classmate, Verity, appears. Everyone else finds Verity (Rosy McEwen) appealing, except Maria (Siena Kelly), who finds her strange, suspicious and annoying. As Verity insinuates herself deeper into Maria’s life, Maria notices odd occurrences and inexplicable inconsistencies that no one else seems to notice. The episode starts out as an intriguing psychological thriller, with each new mystery building on escalating tension before the story descends into an unexpectedly wild ending.

Hotel Reverie. Superstar actress Brandy Friday (Issa Rae) is tired of the same old film roles and jumps at the chance to be part of struggling film company’s high-tech remake of an old black-and-white classic film. To save money, the film company’s owner hires tech firm ReDream, led by Kimmy (Awkwafina). The tech firm drops Brandy’s consciousness into an AI version of the old film along with the consciousness of the film’s long-deceased star. Of course, with this weirdly complicated set up, things don’t go exactly as planned when Brandy’s AI co-star (Emma Corrin) becomes self-aware and Brandy herself becomes attached to the person inside the character. To make things worse, Brandy’s own life is at risk since she is (unexpectedly?) neurologically linked to the film. This means she has to finish the film to survive. If you think too hard about the scientific logic of this episode, you will turn it off, so it’s best to employ a willing suspension of disbelief to enjoy the quirky love story that unfolds. The episode has similar vibes to an earlier poignant romantic story, San Junipero, but the appeal of this tale lies mostly in the classic, early-twentieth-century film style that it eerily captures while having a contemporary character immersed in it.

Plaything. Doctor Who fans will be excited to see Peter Capaldi onscreen as the mysterious protagonist in Plaything. Cameron (Capaldi) is an eccentric older man whose obsession with a ’90s video game ties him to an unsolved murder from that time. When he is arrested for an unrelated crime, he tells the police detective and police psychologist the story of a video game whose characters are real creatures. Cameron’s protectiveness of the creatures leads to extreme consequences. The episode has a cameo of Will Poulter from the stand alone interactive episode Bandersnatch.

Eulogy. The quiet life of a bitter and isolated man (Paul Giamatti) is interrupted when he is asked to submit memories for an old acquaintance’s funeral. As part of the process, an computer platform connects to his neural system and takes him on an immersive journey through his damaged old photographs. Along the way, we learn the true nature of his relationship with the deceased as the AI guide (Patsy Ferran) prompts him to face some difficult truths about his past. The episode is an intriguing and artistic discourse on affection, pride, and bitterness, and is definitely another standout episode for the season.

USS Callister: Into Infinity. The original story USS Callister gave us a fascinating vision of Star Trek-style fandom inverted into a disturbing exploration of cruelty and toxic anger. In the original episode, a socially awkward genius, Robert Daly (Jessie Plemons), feels unappreciated at his high-tech company. He takes revenge on his colleagues for a range of perceived slights by creating sentient copies of them and torturing them in a Starfleet-inspired, computer-generated world of his creation. But when his latest captive Nannette (Cristin Milioti) arrives, she inspires the enslaved starship crew to fight back. The sequel, USS Callister: Into Infinity, undoes much of the satisfying wrap-up of the original by creating a new problem for the crew: the Callister now can’t survive without game credits (physical currency) to buy fuel, etc. However, the Callister and crew are unregistered players and so can’t earn the credits needed. So they steal currency from other players (avatars of real people), which leads to further conflict in the game and ultimately a violent showdown with the company owners in both the real world and the virtual world. The premise of the sequel is unexpected since none of these obstacles were mentioned in the original story. However, as we saw in Common People, the rules of technology grow harder and more expensive the longer you play. It’s a full-circle moment of irony to wrap up the season.

Season 7 of Black Mirror is significantly more cerebral than the prior one, with thoughtful and timely discussions of AI, technology, and the problematic ways we often treat each other as human beings. While the premise of AI as useful and relatable exists, many episodes lean into cautionary explorations of the roles of technology in our lives. The strong acting and innovative tales give us, as in real life, deep and important questions without clear answers.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Highlights:

• Relatable messaging on our interactions with technology
• Unspectacular endings for some episodes
• Memorable acting delivered by a strong cast

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

Video Game Review: Assassin's Creed Shadows

A fine addition to the Assassin's Creed world, Shadows lets you explore the fascinating world of Sengoku-era Japan

The long-awaited new Assassin's Creed entry, Shadows, takes players to feudal Japan in the 16th century and introduces two main heroes—the formed enslaved Diogo who takes the name Yasuke and becomes a samurai, and Naoe, a young female shinobi (ninja) hell bent on revenge. They team up to tackle a secret band of bad guys, as per Assassin's Creed style, and along the way you learn about this era of Japan and its history, art, and culture.

I was a bit hesitant at first to get excited about this game because I had loved Ghosts of Tsushima so much, a game also set in medieval Japan (though a few centuries earlier). The games have a lot in common, especially their quiet devotion to aspects of Japanese culture but totally different vibes, so I'm glad I got over my hesitancy. 

I mentioned a while ago how much I love Assassin's Creed Odyssey, and it's the video game I've played the most in my adult life. Roaming around Ancient Greece and playing as the formidable Kassandra is one of the highlights of gaming for me, and no other Assassin's Creed has held my attention quite like it.

Shadows comes in at a close second, I think, now that I've dropped 50+ hours into it.

A convoluted tale of revenge

The first main character you meet, Naoe, is a young shinobi who witnesses her father's death at the hands of a masked group of marauders. With his dying breath, he asks her to retrieve the mysterious box that they stole from him. She sets out on a Kill Bill or Arya Stark-worthy quest of vengeance against the group known as the Shinbakufu, masked evildoers that must be revealed and destroyed.

Along the way, she meets and teams up with Yasuke, a former enslaved man who ended up in Japan via the Portuguese (the first group of Europeans to reach Japan). If this sounds familiar, it's because the recent adaptation of Shogun gave modern audiences an extraordinary look into this era when Japanese people were interacting with Portuguese traders.

I won't get into spoilers about the ending of the game, but those familiar with Assassin's Creed games will understand that it all gets a little confusing. At a certain point, you're just doing assassinations and side quests, and it's easy to lose track of the latest target's backstory and motivation and how it relates to the main storyline. Fortunately, for me most of the fun in these games just comes from roaming across the countryside and happening across people, places, and events.

Two main characters with wildly different playing styles

You begin the game playing as Naoe, and she's lithe, fast, and flips around from roof to roof with incredible grace. She stalks the shadows and gets into places quickly and quietly, and when fighting she jumps, rolls, and dodges like the wind.

After a few hours of story play, you get to unlock Yasuke, and the difference hits you like a ton of bricks. Yasuke is sheer power and force, and can literally run through walls. The shoji doors in interior buildings hate to seem him coming, and he's constantly breaking them down like a bull in a china shop.

What he lacks in grace, however, he makes up for in absolutely wild gameplay. Using him, I can regularly fight and beat enemies with a higher rank than mine, something I definitely can't do with the willowy Naoe.

His strength comes at a slightly funny cost though—he struggles climbing up even small walls, and when it comes to the iconic and gorgeous "leap of faith" that AC characters do into haystacks, he more or less falls, and always follows up with a self-deprecating statement like "It is harder than it looks," "Any landing you can walk away from is good enough," and "Next time will be better."

While playing, both characters get to use an assortment of awesome weapons, from samurai swords and daggers to kusarigama (a blade on a chain) and teppo (early guns). Despite how cool they are, I found myself primarily using the sword.

The world is gorgeous, expansive, and full of nature and nuance

Roaming feudal-era Japan is a pleasure for the senses, and the game delivers visually, sonically, and emotionally. The seasons change every so often, and you get rewarded with flowers, red leaves, and even snow-covered roads as you gallop around Kyoto. Much of the game is spent on horseback, and some of the things you encounter will simply take your breath away. You'll pass by a small village and see a man sweeping his stoop and it's like something out of a Kurosawa movie.

There's vendors, food sellers, rogue ronin, and monks inhabiting this world, and it feels very lived in. One of my favorite parts is all the animals you come across. There's the requisite deer and eagles, of course, but feudal Japan is absolutely chock a block with dogs and cats. As a cat person, I stopped (almost) every time to get in a little scritch. Evidence:

Photo of shinobi stopping to pet a calico bobtail cat

Photo of samurai loving on a tabby bobtail cat

You explore and pillage Sengoku castles, climbing up the multiple levels and gaining entry to the upper floors to access coveted legendary loot. One of my favorite parts was discovering that castles used "nightingale floors"—wooden floorboards that chirp/creaked very loudly to alert that an intruder was near.

You also get to explore Shinto temples and shrines, allowing you to pray and pay respects as needed.

Building your hideout is like getting a free Sim City Zen garden for free

When I played Valhalla for a bit, which is set in the Viking era, I didn't quite understand building the village, so I skipped it. (I also didn't really jibe with that game at all, but that's another story.) But in Shadows, I'm completely hooked. Your hideout is a respite from gameplay where you can upgrade weapons, chat with NPC team members, and landscape and build to your heart's content. At different vendors throughout the world and after certain achievements, you gain access to new things to add to your hideout, from types of bamboo to dogs, cats, and even giant sakura trees.

I found myself concerned with roofing choices, shoji wall materials, and whether a mossy boulder placed just so was the right choice. In other words, I loved it. Sometimes, I'd just head to my hideout at night to walk around the property and bask in the fire light while I pet my chow. (I've basically made it into an animal rescue, too, what with the sheer amount of cats and kittens I've amassed.)

Designed for 9th generation consoles, the tech behind it is stellar

In terms of pure visual spectacle, this may be the very best next-gen game I've played so far. While it has the same mechanics as Odyssey, the difference in graphics, gameplay, and functionality is lightyears apart.

The graphics alone are breathtaking, especially when it's raining. Rendering water can be especially challenging, but it looks so good in Shadows that you can even tell when wood is wet—absolutely wild.

My quibbles

I have two primary quibbles. The first is how much the game pushes you to use the existing roads. I get the point—it introduces you to roadside sidequests. But in other AC games, I literally will choose the shortest distance between two points and muscle my way up mountains, across bodies of water, and through dense forests. AC Shadows doesn't really let you do this.

When you can climb no further, especially on mountains, you start sliding down. It's frustrating. Running at an angle may help, but I've basically just stopped trying. And if you try to run your way through dense forest, the foliage doesn't really clear and everything looks like this:

Fortunately, they added a recent update bringing back Follow Road auto-riding, so I'll just set my destination and go wash the dishes or something until I arrive.

My other quibble is with the Objectives screen. Usually in AC games it's a list, but in Shadows it's this weird overlay map thing, and there's no sense of urgency or hierarchy I find. The Shinbakufu is in the middle, and that's the primary goal, but everything else is hard to figure out what's important. It seems players are mixed on this—folks either love it or hate it. I find myself missing a text list, but I am a writer after all, I suppose.

This format also is related to the non-linear gameplay that results in my losing interest occasionally, as it's always: get a target, track them down, kill, repeat.

Overall, I have loved playing Shadows, and intend to keep spending time in feudal Japan long after the main quest has finished (I accidentally lost 20 hours of gameplay, so I have had to rebuild my world a bit). The sneaking and fighting is incredibly fun, and the glimpses I get into this historical period have been informative and meaningful—and I love being able to say that about a game that's primarily just assassinating people.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Film Review: The Day the Earth Blew Up

An explosion of fun despite WB's efforts to memory-hole it

It's a small miracle that The Day the Earth Blew Up survived Warner Bros. Discovery's ongoing self-destruction in the pursuit of quick profit. A buddy comedy in the classic stooge/straight man format, this movie reignites hope for the continued existence of the Looney Tunes in an increasingly hostile corporate ecosystem. It's a cliché to read every movie as a statement on its own production, but the fact that the plot of this one involves a fearless creative fighting a company's stagnant recycling of the same old flavors under new packaging deserves, in the context of David Zaslav's disastrous tenure at the head of the studio, at least a moment of admiration.

Another of the creative choices that make this movie work so well is that it resists the easy temptation to use the entire Looney Tunes cast. The Roadrunner and Bugs Bunny are arguably more famous, but their presence would have muddled the narrative focus. The versions of Porky and Daffy used here, as adoptive brothers learning to lean on each other's distinctive strengths, is the emotional throughline that sustains the plot from beginning to end, with Porky fulfilling the role of the responsible and reasonable half of the duo and Daffy in the role of, as the kids say these days, a total chaos goblin. These two had appeared together in numerous classic WB shorts, most notably the science fiction parody Duck Dodgers, with the noteworthy reversal that Daffy was the one in charge while Porky was his insecure sidekick. This time, the dynamic between them hinges on the mission to keep their childhood home from being demolished by the city government, a pursuit that gets complicated by Daffy's newfound obsession with alien conspiracy theories and Porky's newfound obsession with the cute and brilliant Petunia, a scientist in search of the perfect bubblegum flavor (and who will taste literally any substance, edible or not, which I'm sure is a subtle joke about the fact that pigs are omnivorous).

Also commendable is the choice to stick to a 2D look that both honors the history of the characters and takes advantage of their expressive flexibility in ways that 3D attempts have failed to. Despite the massive progress made by digital video technology since the days of hand-drawn animation, the fact remains that cartoon faces and bodies can stretch and flatten much more effectively when the eye isn't distracted by the quasi-realism of a 3D shape.

The Day the Earth Blew Up makes extensive use of cartoonish exaggeration to ease the joining of the disparate tones it needs to juggle: it's a delightfully demented comedy full of slapstick zaniness, but also a creepy alien invasion thriller with disturbing body horror, but also a heartfelt personal drama about learning to manage the frictions of a chosen family. That's a huge load of complex emotional content to express via flat images, and the movie excels at the task by drawing from the decades of cinematic artistry that constitute the legacy of WB animation. For a silly story about talking animals who fight a chewing gum invasion with the power of rotten eggs, it can boast some beautiful achievements on the technical side of the moviemaking process.

Despite being produced with the tools and practical advantages of digital animation, the look of the movie maintains the tactile solidity of hand-painted backgrounds. The degree of care on the part of the team of artists is noticeable in both outdoor daylight scenes and indoor dimly lit ones. The deliberate way some shots appeal to the evocative effect of shadows and contours brings to mind better days in WB history, such as the early seasons of Batman: The Animated Series. Whether a plot beat needs to be funny or spooky or sentimental, each decision in the visual style serves to bolster the script's intention.

Not that the writing needed any help. The Day the Earth Blew Up is composed of a cavalcade of great joke after great joke after great joke. The director knows how to sustain an energetic pace without becoming overwhelming or confusing. Even when the screen gets filled with flamethrowers and giant maces and neon-green goo and a small army of wind-up dentures and unadvisable chemical experiments and an infestation of termites and prehensile bubblegum (yes, seriously), following the action feel effortless. It's really tricky to animate nonstop frantic movement while ensuring that the viewer doesn't lose the thread of the action. That's where I can bounce off a production like Star Trek: Lower Decks, and where The Day the Earth Blew Up succeeds while making it look easy.

As a bonus treat, it is thanks to the success of The Day the Earth Blew Up that Coyote vs. Acme has been rescued from oblivion, which in some way turns the act of watching it into a message to Zaslav about how wrong he is to disrespect the Looney Tunes and how necessary these characters still are.

(Also, Daffy is apparently a trans boy, which is not only fully in line with the Looney Tunes' venerable tradition of pushing the boundaries of gender expression, but is also a welcome counterweight to WB's horrendously ill-advised plans concerning a certain wizard school.)

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Book Review: If Stars are Lit, by Sara K. Ellis

 A philosophical meditation on personhood that ends up more enraging than was probably intended

 

It has been a long time since I’ve read a book that engaged me as much as this one, or had me writing so many verbose marginal notes at so many plot elements. This is a book that inspires thoughts. Lots of thinky thoughts – and it’s intended to do that. The thing is, I don’t think it intended to inspire the thinky thoughts that I found myself thinking.

The premise of this book revolves around a creation in artificial intelligence, called a gemel. Gemels are sentient holograms, created off a human prototype, and sharing all memories and personality traits with the prototype up. They are effectively a holographic copy of that prototype as it exists at the moment of their inception. Gemels occupy an odd half-life in the starfaring semi-near future of this book: they are officially recognized as sentient, but they are constrained, legally: their programming forbids them from hurting humans, or through inaction allowing humans to come to harm. It’s all very three-laws-of-robotics­—only don’t say ‘robot’ around a gemel: that’s a sentientist slur. They remain tied to their progenitor’s service, unless explicitly discharged through a complex legal process; and they are switched off when the progenitor dies, unless there is an emancipation clause in the progenitor’s will. (The text describes it as “essentially indentured servitude”, because apparently the word “slavery” was on vacation or something.)

Our main character, Joss, is a hostage negotiator by profession, on her way home from a successful — or so she thought — mission talking down some unhappy asteroid miners from a ledge. Then the ship explodes and everyone dies except for Joss. This gemel was created with Joss as the prototype, but takes the form of Joss's ex-wife Alice -- and, don't worry, we'll get there. Over the course of the book, the two work together to figure out who blew up the ship, and why. I don't think it will surprise anyone if I reveal that the real villain turns out to be capitalism we made along the way.

(NB: In what follows, I'm going to be using both AI, an abbreviation for 'artificial intelligence', and also the visually similar name Al, short for 'Alice'. I cannot expand 'Al' to 'Alice', because I need to maintain a distinction between those, too, so to avoid confusion, I've decided to exploit the wonders of formatting. Artificial Intelligence AI will be bolded, while Not-Alice Al will be italicized. I'm terribly sorry for it, but the website's sans-serif font makes it impossible to distinguish them otherwise.)

The broad plot of the book is reasonably well-constructed, with some nice turns of phrase and thoughtful observations. Unfortunately, it was completely poisoned by the whole gemel component of the plot; and that's a big deal, because this component forms the philosophical heart of the book. In this world, gemels are fantastically expensive, and usually represent some rich jerk's way of externalizing of their id. But Joss acquires her gemel through some hand-wavium related to the explosion of the ship. The reason that this gemel, Al, looks like Joss's ex-wife, Alice, is because at the moment of Al's inception, Joss has been working through some Issues about her failed marriage, and Alice is at the forefront of her psyche. So their partnership serves a dual narrative purpose: First, we the readers learn about the minutiae of gemel-lore; while simultaneously, Joss takes the opportunity to work through her Issues by talking to this AI simulation of her ex-wife that shares all of her—Joss’s—memories. Oh, and also fall in love with her.

And this is where I ran into the first incredibly frustrating element of this book, one that pervades the entire narrative. Gemels are sentient, distinct in kind from humans, but nevertheless beings worthy of respect and autonomy. This is a vitally important theme in this book. Yet Al’s role, especially in the first half of the book, is focused on facilitating Joss’s character development. This section alternates between the present, told in present tense, in which Joss and Al work together to solve the ship-blowing-up mystery; and flashbacks to the past, usually (but not consistently, argh) told in past tense. Time switches are triggered by some resonance between something Al has done in the present and some memory of Alice in the past. Structurally, this device aims at elegance, because of the physical similarity between present-Al and past-Alice; but narratively, it undermines the message that gemels deserve autonomy. If gemels are unique, distinct people from their progenitors, then why does this gemel’s sole narrative purpose revolve around Joss’s own navel-gazing and personal growth?

These flashbacks are also related to a second issue that irritates me. See, Al is built from Joss’s psyche. Al has access to all of Joss’s memories, even the ones that she can’t consciously recall herself, like tasting chocolate for the first time as a toddler. (That was a nice moment, actually. Toddler-Joss really, really liked the chocolate.) But, as Al tells her repeatedly, humans curate their memories. What they choose to let fade is as important as what they choose to remember. So anything that Joss wants to recall which has faded from memory represents a journey she must undertake on her own, because relying on a gemel to retrieve the memory for her would cause mental atrophy.

In principle, I can get behind this particular philosophical statement – although I can’t help but think that Ted Chiang’s short story ‘The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling’, offers a more sophisticated discussion about exactly this idea. But it runs awfully close to another narrative trope that I just despise. You know the one I mean? The deeply inefficient one? It's the one that goes, Oh, yes, I am an all-knowing dragon-wizard-sage, and I could have told you the secret to the magic macguffin, but we are in a coming-of-age novel and so you needed to discover it for yourself. What's more, in this particular instance, the specific memory that Joss was trying to recover involved seeing a guy in a bar whose overheard conversation may well have provided vital information about the bombing that killed everyone on the ship and stranded her in space. She’s not trying to short-circuit self-actualization here; there just aren't enough CCTV cameras in the bar.

Finally, there’s a profoundly troubling and creepy issue that seems to lie at the heart of the whole Al-Alice-gemel situation, an issue which I don’t think Sara K. Ellis fully apprehends. And the issue is this: Al is an AI-generated copy of a real person, Alice, but she has all of Joss’s memories and just plain understands Joss better than Alice ever could. Falling in love with Al is presented as a way of respecting the gemel’s autonomy and personhood, because in so falling Joss is recognizing that Al is distinct from Alice. But in this particular case it still seems like a deeply unhealthy way to have another go at a failed marriage. (It also seems to be veering dangerously close to deepfaking real people for porn, which is illegal in the UK, where this book was published, and for which people have already gone to jail.) It reminds me of nothing so much as Sarah Gailey’s brilliant book The Echo Wife, in which a husband steals his ex-wife’s cloning technology to make better versions of her for a marriage do-over. The wife prototype in question is not thrilled to discover what he’s done; and in this book, Alice herself is likewise displeased (although less murderously so). But I don’t get the sense I’m supposed to be sympathetic to Alice here, because in the same conversation she starts saying sentientist things that challenge the autonomy and personhood of gemels, so she’s definitely being positioned as the antagonist. Still. Apologies in advance for linking to the rabbit hole, but strawman really does have a point here.

And — spoiler alert — I’m going to mention something that happens at the end, but it is relevant and puts the infuriating apple on the entire troubling sundae. At the end of the book, it seems that gemel-Al somehow merges with human-Alice, and in the process preserves/rekindles the love between Joss and Al-Alice.

Gemel-Al, who is a distinct and autonomous person, merges with human-Alice.

Human-Alice, who was already not thrilled to have a gemel made in her image without her consent, is now forced to merge her consciousness with a completely separate sentient creature, again without her consent, after which she is going to rekindle a romantic-and-probably-sexual relationship with her ex-wife.

This is very convenient for Joss, to be sure: she gets to keep her new love Al, but now  upgraded with an organic body that can do fun kissing stuff, plus all that useful Joss-internal knowledge that allows Joss to skip working at things like communication and sharing.  After all, Al-Alice already knows it all.

Alice did not consent to this. This is not a happy ending. This is an appalling violation of personhood, which we are being encouraging to accept and respect in the name of love. The more I write about it the more outraged I find myself.

This is the bit where in my review outline I had notes to talk about all the various other infelicities that reveal a very shallow treatment of various elements of science. Probabilities are misused; timescales of AI communications are simultaneously inhumanly fast and also humanly slow; acoustic and articulatory phonetics is invoked in a way that any linguist knows is nonsense; and I'm pretty sure radar can't distinguish between wave and particle forms of energy. Or maybe it can – but that’s not the point here. The point is that there are sufficient problems with the stuff I do know about that I cannot trust that the author knows what she's doing in areas where I'm less sure.

And that trust is important. When I consider that final, unforgivable violation of Alice, I do wonder whether Sara K Ellis truly unaware of the problems here. I could imagine a book in which this is done purposefully. Maybe my fuming outrage is the intended outcome. If so, well played, Sara K Ellis. You got me.

But for that, I'd need to trust Ellis to know what she was doing. And I just don't.

--

Nerd coefficient: 5: problematic, but has redeeming qualities

Highlights:

• Thought-provoking AI-generated holograph clones
• By-now de rigueur indictment of capitalism
• Lesbians on the rocks
• Flashbacks
  

References: 

Chiang, Ted. 'The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling'. [Subterranean Press Magazine 2013].

Ellis, Sara K. If Stars are Lit. [Luna Press 2025].

Gailey, Sarah. The Echo Wife. [Tor Books 2021].

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

Book Review: Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman

A breathlessly intimate story about the irrationality and grossness of being an embodied person, and how that intersects with transness, love and living through history.

You know how sometimes you put a book down on finishing it and the world looks different, like the flavour of the prose has bled up into your thoughts, your perception, so for a little while you've been translated into its grammar? That is generally my experience of reading the work of Isaac Fellman, and Notes from a Regicide, his newest novel, is no different. But when I try to encapsulate the substance of the story into a blurb, to cup something tangible about it in my hands so I can offer it up to you to share, it slips between my fingers, leaving only fragments. Despite being a book utterly grounded in the flesh and the tangible world, it is itself surprisingly evanescent.

There are two stories, interleaved. The first, of Griffon, who escaped a violent father to live with Etoine and Zaffre, in whose house he felt safe enough to be a boy, finding in them new parents. The second, the story Griffon constructs from Etoine's notes years later, of his and Zaffre's life in distant Stephensport before and during their revolution. Which is ultimately the crux of it, but gives away nothing about why this is either speculative, or so wonderful.

I'll start with the speculative elements first, because they are the easiest to grasp (while being insubstantial). Most of the content and action of the novel is focussed in on relationships and the interactions between characters and each other, or their own self and story. No one in the foreground does anything inherently SFFnal. But as the story progresses, it becomes more and more obvious that all these fairly realist events are taking place in the distant future, in a city that does not currently exist (or if it does, not in any way a recognisable form from Stephensport in the story). We learn more about it, about the buried electors who, revived at intervals, select the city's new leader and namesake. About the gulf of centuries that exist between the story-time and now. About the subtle and less subtle differences between Griffon, Etoine and Zaffre's world and ours. Most of these come in glimpses and references, incongruous moments of a thing where it's not supposed to be. But together they built, quietly, into a picture of a future I am fascinated by and prevented from fully grasping. And its absence is part of its success - the world is the world, for the characters in the story. It is real and normal and graspable, even if Stephensport is a mystery to those outside its boundaries. And so, for those living in a place, the place is not remarkable in its mundane details. Thus, not remarked upon in their notes or diaries. Stephensport is most clearly shown by Griffon, who has never been there, but yearns to understand this understated thing in Etoine's words.

That mystery is never fully resolved. It is not a rich world to be tour-guided around, more a backdrop. But for something that never comes into focus, there are some extremely interesting choices in its construction, especially socially and structurally, nonetheless.

Why it's wonderful is a rather harder matter.

If you like realist writing, or litfic - which I do - there is much to be said for the sort of immersion in a character and a moment of being that Fellman excels at. Griffon and Etoine both write with an obvious, idiosyncratic voice, and become more and more real as their writing continues through the book. But Fellman has a particular knack for catching them in their most human moments, especially Griffon - when he's stuck in a thought or a doubt. There's all the irrationality of the deep interior thoughts that never seep out into the world, the odd comparison, the habits, the weird connections.

But where this really comes to the fore is in the way those fully realised characters interact. Because there are these two interleaved narratives, and we get the narration and interiority of both Etoine and Griffon, we can triangulate around the points of their relationship with each other and Zaffre, and gain a depth of it that could never come from seeing each alone. Etoine in his own words has a different shape when we first meet him through the awestruck gaze of a teenage Griffon. And as the story goes on, the thing we are told at the start - that Griffon loves his found parents - comes closer and closer to the surface, becoming almost painful in its brilliance.

I do not think I have ever read anything that captured the idiosyncracy, the mundanity and the marvel, of love like Notes from a Regicide does. It is a love story, of a child to parents, of a man to his wife, and of a whole family, each for each other and themselves. It captures a love that includes the flaws, the boredom and the habit, the mysteries. And these all make it feel deeper and more richly true by the end.

From the beginning, we know this is a story of grief, written by Griffon after Etoine's death. But the depth of that tragedy only becomes real once we have come round full circle to it again at the end, having experienced life through their own eyes.

That alone would be wonderful enough, but there's far more at play here. I could talk about the way Fellman portrays the revolution, backgrounded and looked at sidelong, until it cannot be ignored, all while Griffon is desperate to know more about it. I could talk about the way both Etoine and Zaffre look at and talk about art. Both could take up whole essays of their own. But the thing I found myself lingering over most, as I was reading, was simply the beauty of Fellman's descriptions, and so it is this I shall focus on instead, having filled five pages of notes with quotes of them.

For example:

I went through his desk when he died and found all of these writings (Zaffre left none behind, or vanishingly few). They are the ingredients for the book I am writing now. He would find that metaphor too homely, but I, unlike my parents, am a cook. They look like ingredients too: notebooks thick with interleaved drawings, wrapped in shiny brown leather like chicken skin; small parcels of old paper tied with string like roasts ready for the oven.

or:

But by the time I met him, he really was cold. The kind of cold that preserves things, like the way you keep your beer in a sealed bottle in the snow or the stream when camping.

I realised, as the story went on, that the descriptions served a purpose beyond themselves - Fellman leaves them long, sprawling, unnecessary, in a way that forces you to slow down. They're a tool to force you to acknowledge certain aspects of the world, often the mundane details that build up a person.

And then of course, it becomes obvious that Fellman is doing this all over the place. The word that most vividly comes to mind when I want to talk about this book is "lingering" - the prose does it everywhere, highlighting and pacing you as you go, like so:

Words have colors and colors have words. At times, when a word has been on my mind too long, they take on shapes and actions. Regicide is a blazing bar of iron whose brassy heat I grip firmly between the teeth, as an obedient dog does a bone. I can't say why, or why I can so clearly imagine the sear of that bar in my mouth, its brief taste of blood - but I do.

And a picture builds up, in all that lingering, of what matters in this world, and to these people.

It's not always beautiful, mind. Some of Fellman's best or most memorable turns of phrase are to the grosser parts of being human.

I was a mass of strong smells tied together in a crude packet of skin.

Some of them feel universal, the sort of thing everyone can relate to, but many are deeply idiosyncratic, tied up in the very specific experiences these characters have, especially with their bodies and change in their bodies. All three of the family are trans, and all three experience and discover it, navigate it, in their own ways, but all wear it in their physicality, and have it read by the other two. Skin and hair, clothing, binders, the way of walking, posture and voices, all are handed out in these lingering moments to the reader, to try to see this family the way each see the others, full of love and the close attention we only give to those closest to us.

One of the things most clearly encapsulated by all of this is the scars they all three live with. Some of this is physical - Etoine walks with a cane and has significant damage to his feet. But much of this is psychological, the ghosts of the lives they've lived and the places and people who have shaped them. Stephensport is most visible in the story not as a place described, but a scar on the person of Etoine and Zaffre, whose experience of the revolution there can never be escaped, only endured.

And that's the crux of what Fellman does well here - a portrait of the fullness of humanity. Which is apt, when a large part of the story webs around a painting made by Etoine, that captured a woman so perfectly it helped him unwittingly kickstart a revolution. With a deliberateness that Etoine lacks, Fellman has done that same act, capturing a perfect slice of a person - or three people - for us to appreciate. Like the portrait, it is necessarily artificial, built of obvious brush strokes and quirks of writing, but they make it all the more impactful. The art of it is the point, the beautiful writing worthy for its own sake, as well as for the whole portrait they leave us with at the end.

--

The Math

Highlights:

- gorgeous descriptive prose
- fascinating backdrop
- some of the most vivid portrayal of love I've read in fiction

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10

Reference: Isaac Fellman, Notes from a Regicide [Tor Books, 2025].

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