Book Review: Of the Emperor's Kindness by Chaz Brenchley

A new and modern approach to fantasy of manners. 

Malance, as I like to say in these reviews, has a problem. One year into the job, she’s the ambassador of Verantha to the court of the Emperor of Feremandas, the older, larger and more stately of the two competing empires in this part of the world. Her problem is that Verantha does not physically exist in territory any longer and has not for years, it has been absorbed by the rising, burgeoning and grasping Empire of Clath. Clath is dead certain that Verantha is just now a province of their realm and Malance’s existence and role is a joke or worse an insult to Clath. It is fortunate, perhaps, that Malance has a balance of the Feremandas Emperor’s favor, and is in a relationship with his niece. But when refugees from her vanished homeland arrive, Clath’s response may put her at odds with their plans, a rather dangerous position to be.

This is the story of Of the Emperor’s Kindness by Chaz Brenchley, projected to be first in a series.

I am going to look at this book through the lens of a subgenre of fantasy that had risen, peaked and in these days where seemingly the majority of fantasy books published are either grimdark or romantasy¹. That subgenre is the fantasy of manners, or even mannerpunk. It was first recognized in the early 1990’s as a category by Donald G Keller, describing a spectrum of books from the 1980’s by authors like Steven Brust, Emma Bull, Kate Elliott, Ellen Kushner, Caroline Stevermer, and others.

Fantasy of manners is fantasy by way of, to use contemporary references, works like Downton Abbey, although at the time authors such as Dorothy Dunnett, Alexandre Dumas, Jane Austen, and Georgette Heyer were seen as inspiration and progenitors for this type of fiction. It’s fantasy where (generally) the supernatural elements are a light touch or even entirely non-existent, just taking place in a secondary world. The focus of these works is intensively social. While there can be action and adventure in these works and often are, that is not the propelling power of these novels.

Instead, fantasy of manners are social novels, focusing on social constraints, social relationships and conflicts, the growth and development of social contacts, and in general are relentlessly about the people, first and foremost. Fantasy of manners novels are, in my experience, either urban, or take place in tight social spaces (c.f. Downton Abbey or Bridgerton).The conflicts that erupt are not orcs coming over the barricade, it is the cut and thrust of words at a party, the scheming to bring peers on side for a petition or power play. To maneuver socially even as the threat of violence within the peers might erupt. But that violence and action is subordinate to the social conflicts and interactions.

All this is what fantasy of manners does. Fantasy of manners is a subgenre then that can be subtle, with the reader having to do legwork in picking up clues from context and deciphering what precisely is going on in the machinations and social maneuvers. It is a subgenre that you immerse yourself in a party, and try and figure out as you are reading the description of the party just who is aligned with whom, and what is happening even as it slowly unfolds.²

With all that in mind, let’s take a look at Of the Emperor’s Kindness. Our protagonist Malance is the ambassador of Verantha, and we see her go about her duties, such as they are. She’s the ambassador of a nation that no longer exists and so she has no official duties at the beginning save to attend court like the other ambassadors do. This is complicated by her relationship with the emperor’s niece, a force of nature of her own.

We remain steadfast within Malance’s point of view as events unfurl but the plot and subsequent series of events are relentlessly social in nature. There are clashes with Clath, of course, but it is the titular kindness of the Emperor that really kicks the ball rolling on the plot, as well as the arrival of the refugees. Malance, a young woman who never expected to be anything other than a dusty young ornament at court, is plunged into social conflicts, and perhaps, a rising conflict between the two great empires of Feremandas and Clath. There is plenty of backstory here and revealed worldbuilding. Clath is an up and coming empire, just about ready, or so they think, to start to possibly take on the older, established Feremandas. And Malance, as you guess, is right in the center of that.

Like fantasy of manners of prior years and authors, the plot is very much more of a skeleton for the social immersion that the novel provides the reader. We are put entirely into Malance’s life and circumstance. Like the novel’s progenitors, there is a lot of sensory detail that the reader is introduced to, from the foods of Verantha, to the look and feel of Malance’s house, to the opulence of the Emperor’s palace, and the feel of the city. This is, in fact, one of those books where you can get immersed into the world and worldbuilding and the characters, and that is what and who the book is for.

 
The book is not in line with the main contemporary strands in fantasy, which may be a hindrance for readers who have grown up on relentless grimdark action, or the widescreen of epic fantasy, or coming from the heights of urban fantasy, or have crossed the porous border of romance into fantasy by way of the growing field of romantasy. There is a relationship between Malance and Vivi, a queer loving one that goes through challenge and change as things unfold, but it’s not a romance or romantasy--the relationship is there at the beginning. It’s not epic fantasy either, with a widescreen canvas, we never really leave Feremandas City, really, at all.

A key to novels like these, as you might imagine, is a sympathetic protagonist. I am pretty sure that a unsympathetic fantasy of manners protagonist could be written, but they would have to be so magnetically interesting as to overcome their repellent nature. Malance is much more in the traditional vein. We feel for her and her plight, seemingly the “last Veranthan” right away, and as the complications of the Emperor’s attentions, and the plotting and maneuvers around her rise, we feel for her and her situation. The author does a great job, using tight point of view, of keeping us in her head, and keeping her someone relatable for the reader. Malance grows into her strength and role as challenges mount, and while characters like Vivi threaten to overwhelm the narrative at points (to say nothing of the emperor), Malance rises to the challenge, on the strength of the writing.

While the subgenre of fantasy of manners may have peaked in the 1990s and the field has largely moved on to the aforementioned other subgenres, there has been and is relatively recent fantasy written that if not labeled as fantasy of manners, is certainly in the tradition--authors like Freya Marske (A Marvellous Light), the fantasy novellas of Aliette de Bodard, too, and the works of Stephanie Burgis. Also, too, the Glamourist Histories of Mary Robinette Kowal align with this book. Readers who enjoy those works are likely to enjoy Of The Emperor’s Kindness as well.

Does the novel innovate the fantasy of manners sub-genre? Like some of the more recent of the works listed above, it is more openly and boldly inclusive than what was readily publishable in the late 1980’s and into the 1990’s. Not just the Malance-Vivi relationship in specific, but in general the novel and the world it presents to the reader is queernorm through and through.

 
Readers who are looking for more action, more and more complicated plot (although to be fair, it is deceptively simple since we stay in Malance’s point of view) and more magic are not going to find favor with this book. This is a book for readers who do want to read paragraphs discussing the social implications of livery and colors worn, for readers who will be fascinated to see how Malance’s household has to adapt, change and grow after a series of gifts from the Emperor, and readers who will enthuse to see the social machinations at court and within Malance’s own household.

As for myself, having read and am still reading a swath of fantasy of manners, Of the Emperor’s Kindness brings a breath of new air to the subgenre, showing that it can still have a strong and major place in the empire of fantasy. While the ending of the novel does feel like a closing point and a place to exit this world if one should wish, I am curious enough about Malance and her world to want more.

--

Highlights:

• Unapologetic Fantasy of Manners
• Strong attention to immersive detail
• Engaging and well written protagonist

Reference: Brenchley, Chaz, Of the Emperor’s Kindness (Wizard Tower Press, 2025)

¹The thought of a romantasy grimdark book has just occurred to me. I am not sure such a book would quite be for me.
²Sculdun's Investiture party in Season 2 Episode 6 of Andor (What a Festive Evening) is where Andor approaches Fantasy of Manners, but in a Science fiction setting. In keeping with science fiction, A Civil Campaign by Lois M Bujold is entirely and completely SF fantasy of manners.

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

Film Review: Tron: Ares

A story about the ephemerality of life shouldn't be as instantly forgettable as this

The threequel Tron: Ares looks and sounds more expensive than it has any right to be. While the idea of transplanting the franchise’s iconic motorcycles and frisbee fights from cyberspace into the material world is undeniably interesting, the movie wastes its special effects extravaganza in telling the most generic tale of AI independence. To namedrop Frankenstein without any of the pathos is hubristic enough; to lift the plot of Blade Runner for mere nostalgic fanservice is sacrilege.

The plot is a simple case of corporate espionage between two software megacorporations racing to be the first to crack the secret of energy/matter conversion. Both have succeeded at 3D-printing physical objects from pure light, but for some contrived technobabble reason, these creations can’t sustain their existence for longer than half an hour. When the Designated Ethical CEO finds a piece of code that fixes the problem, the Designated Evil CEO deploys his AI assassins to steal it.

The ensuing chase sequence is executed with admirable technical virtuosity, but it feels redundant to go to so much trouble to retrieve a physical flash drive right after the villain demonstrates his ability to remotely copy data from his competitor’s servers. Instead of drawing so much unwanted attention trashing half a city, he could have simply waited for his target to add the code to her systems and then stolen it. But we need to bring the AI assassins to the real world so the next piece of drama can happen.

The titular Ares is a self-aware security program that our villain is trying to market as the ideal soldier: an obedient killing machine that doesn't eat or sleep, and can be reprinted infinite times if it’s killed. Somehow we’re expected to buy that this genius inventor didn’t anticipate that something that is self-aware could eventually form its own goals that don’t involve dying and dying again. During its brief presence in our realm, it quickly notices the sensory delights of corporeality and starts scheming to seize the permanence code for itself.

Unfortunately, this Blade Runner-derivative tale of an artificial person hoping for a longer lifespan calls for more acting skills than Jared Leto can be bothered to bring to the role of Ares. Even as his character learns about ineffable feelings, such as developing a personal aesthetic taste, or improvising a horrendously insensitive psychoanalysis of the woman he just kidnapped, Leto maintains a resting bored face that proves contagious to the viewer.

After an overcomplicated romp through cyberspace, the real world and then another cyberspace to obtain the permanence code, he ends up in a one-to-one fight with his fellow AI assassin who is still loyal to the villain. This climax is utterly unsatisfying because (a) the actual victory is won by secondary characters who spent the entire third act typing code in an office, and (b) it never occurs to our hero Ares that he could copy his own permanence code to save his former friend.

Anyway, with the Designated Evil CEO’s plans thwarted by his own absurd recklessness, Ares is free to experience humanity and… die of destitution, I guess. Meanwhile, the Designated Ethical CEO proceeds to take advantage of finally stable 3D printing to singlehandedly solve world hunger, the energy crisis and all diseases, which I suspect is a bigger story we’d rather have watched than this one. At no point does Tron: Ares make us care for the inner life of sentient digital minds. But hey, the motorcycles look cool.

Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.

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

Contributors Wanted

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What do we want? We're looking for volunteers who can offer at least 1 review or feature per month to our schedule, as part of our regular Monday-Friday blog content. We're particularly looking for contributors able to cover comic books and graphic novels, or those with interests that range broadly - though all contributors are free to write about SF/F novels or anything else relevant to geek culture. 

What do you get? Nerds of a Feather is a fanzine, which means we means we do not seek or generate revenue. Rather, it is a fanspace run by fans, who work as volunteers. However, joining us does mean opportunities for free e-books and the potential for other free stuff, as well as the fun and support from joining a dynamic and flexible team of enthusiastic nerd bloggers at this here little Hugo Award winning fanzine.

We're looking for people who: 

(a) write well in long form (900-1500 words) and don't need extensive copy-editing
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We are not, however, looking for automata who agree with the rest of us on anything and everything.

One of our goals is to feature a diverse range of voices on the topics that matter to us. As such, we encourage writers of all backgrounds to apply.

Caveat: we know lots of you have other awesome projects you want everyone to know about, but since these are regular contributor positions, we would like to emphasize that this would not be an appropriate forum to use for that self-promo.

Process: send an email to NoaFeditors at gmail dot com telling us what you are interested in doing and why you'd like to join our team. Please also send a writing sample, which can be either embedded into the body of the email or links to published work. We will try to respond to everyone as quickly as possible.

We look forward to hearing from you!

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Graphic Novel Review: The Power Fantasy vol. 2 by Kieron Gillen, Caspar Wijngaard, Clayton Cowles and Rian Hughes

The tensions increase in a stalemate between superpowers, as does the backstory and the drama of all kinds. 

The second trade volume of The Power Fantasy series of comics, Mutually Reassuring Destruction continues to follow a group of super-powered individuals from the twentieth century in their stand-off and power jockeying, against the backdrop of a world already gravely marked by their exercise of power.

Where vol. 1 (reviewed here) gave us the premise and initial setup, however, chucking out the ideas and the groundwork to lure us in, vol. 2 goes back to consolidate those ideas into something with further depth and texture. The key part of which is taking the "Second Summer of Love" - a catastrophic event which wiped out all of Europe - and giving us the backstory that led to the destruction, extremely well-placed as well as much-needed for the emotional depth it provides.

This backstory section is critical in a lot of ways, but I want to first highlight the thing that most makes it stand out against the rest of the story at first glance - the art. Caspar Wijngaard was a strong part of why volume 1 captured me, and that continues throughout volume 2, but never more so than in the Second Summer of Love and the character at the heart of it, the Queen. This section is awash in trippy rainbows, swirling colours and abstract motifs, and has, at the centre of it all, the distinctly non-human Queen. Thus far, the superpowers we have met have been at least human-base, if modified (Eliza) or obscured (Magus). The Queen is... not that. What she is is not fully explained either, but her visuals are a point of complexity and mystery that underscores how little this group of people - and the world - understand about their superpowered nature and origin. This is not "mutant gene" territory. At least one of them is theoretically from heaven. But that fact isn't taken as true whole cloth - quite frequently characters say that she "claims" that as backstory. Taking us visually that extra step away from human baseline - along with some other turns of the narrative - just adds greater depth here to the sense that none of this is cleanly explicable. I love mess, and The Power Fantasy is rolling in it like a delighted pig in muck.

The majority of the volume is given over to this and other vignettes which dot through time, and for a significant part of the story, the pacing has a sense of circling - lingering on certain ideas from different angles yes, but also the nervous hostility of two predators pacing around one another, assessing, waiting for the moment to strike. Big Cold War vibes continue apace, then. Had that been the whole of the thing, I might have been less satisfied, and wondered if volume 2 was being wholly given over to this consolidation and scene-setting, in service to reveals and action in story to come. Many a comic series has done likewise - one of the hardest things, in my opinion, about a long running series of graphic novels is to manage the pacing so no volume feels insubstantial on its own, subordinated to the needs of the greater plot. I would not have held it deeply against The Power Fantasy to do likewise. But no. The end section delivers a rush of drama and narrative crescendo that makes this volume feel like a complete emotional arc, as well as all the work being done to pick up threads from before and lay foundations for later. There is one particular page of beautiful work in which that dramatic arc reaches its destructive peak that I just had to sit with, enjoying just how well it combined its focus on the significance of the moment and the aesthetics of it, how the two really do pull together to serve the story.

Thematically, the focus remains firmly on the morality of power. It had already been put front and centre, and that isn't going away, but a new thought has entered the chat. In my review of volume 1, I said that that no one here is free from sin and boy howdy has that come to call in volume 2 with Eliza. We met her briefly before, but now she gets far more time in the spotlight, with her deeply held christian faith and her powers that come straight from hell, and her morality that burns bright because of/despite/throughout this. The Second Summer of Love was her crisis point and origin story, and its legacy continues to haunt her. As we learn about her, about her choices and her actions, she stands vividly for the fact that everyone in this story has fucked up and is fucked up. No one here is unalloyed good. She is haunted by her mistakes, and has taken herself off to a place outside the world, constructing an edifice of her own remorse and regret in which to do penance, and demanding an accounting of sin from those who try to visit her. Which makes her sound deeply unfun to read along, but nothing could be further from the truth. Her existence at a crossroads of faith and identity is extremely compelling, and casts a light which causes shadows to spring from those around her - her faith, her bringing her faith into all these questions that have been the centre of the story already, causes us to re-evaluate the premises we've already been given.

Alongside and in contrast to her, the character of Magus also continues to develop. I picked up previously his parallels with Wōden  in WicDiv and those haven't gone away, but the longer we spend with him the messier that comparison (productively) becomes. They draw on similar motifs and ideas, the fusing of technology into irrational systems of magic, the direct exploitation of others for power, but go in very different directions ideologically, especially in the partial resolution of the some of hints from the first volume that his journey from anarchist to dickhead techbro was... not what I was expecting.

And I think that's the thing that makes this stand out so much. Magus is one of the two closest characters to anything that resembles a potential "villain" in a usual narrative sense, and we are given so much information about both of their positions, their backstories and their moral philosophies, that even when we can't sympathise with their choices, we always understand how they resulted from the premises and processes that went into them. I'm not saying anyone in this story is a morally good actor - indeed, I think the whole point is that none of them completely are - but all of them are shown to be relatively rational and well-intentioned characters. Their differences come from their ideas of what good is, and the scope of their framework, what they consider the stakes to be. And it's this that Eliza's presence complexifies - her unshakeable faith, and her bringing both god and hell into the equation. As named specifically on the page, the idea of eternity is now on the table and that changes things. What does justice, punishment and good look like when you have to consider that suffering can be unending? What is a reasonable sacrifice when that's what it costs? And this, at least to me (with my relatively limited superhero comics background) feels fresh and thoughtful, because it takes the premise and the terms of the problems on the page genuinely seriously. All these factors would be a headfuck if you had this kind of power and were determined to be a force for good.

It did also, at several points, make me wonder if Kieron Gillen has just been having a little obsession with utilitarianism and its relationship with problems. And I'm cool with that.

There is a risk that anything this philosophical will get wanky, but for me at least, The Power Fantasy, is still staying plenty on the right side of the line. If anything, I put the book down realising that most other superhero media should be doing the same sort of grappling with power and isn't. Obviously plenty of this kind of media can be taken as clear analogies for all sorts of real world problems of varying scope, that isn't new, but the thing I'm taking from this is how much benefit there is to doing that my taking every single part of the equation dead seriously, and thus giving it time and the characters space to develop it to some kind of conclusion. The fights and the explosions and the romantic entanglements - because there are all of those - aren't vying for ground with the philosophical and moral musing, but forming the groundwork and fuel for it to be productive. The morality matters not just because the stakes are high, but because the people thinking it through are really people, and the space is given to ensure that comes through clearly on the page too.

The closure we get marries all of these up, too - it represents the culmination of arcs that matter both morally and personally - from which comes its success. But this is only vol 2, so any closure it has is going to be small scale, and indeed, the ending leaves a hint at the reduced scope of its conclusion. For all that we've had consolidation, we're still setting up some of the ideas that feel like they'll come more into play later on, and I'm still excited about all of them, but glad to see that vol 2 still gets to be a complete thread of its own, rather than entirely subservient to the larger plot. I said in my review of vol 1 "This is, quite clearly, not going to be a series for easy answers or simple debates." and that has only got more true.

I am interested, though, in how we'll reach any kind of conclusion on the broader scope of the problems in a later volume. I struggle to envisage where this goes to have narrative closure that truly encompasses it all. But I have faith. Everything I've seen so far here indicates that The Power Fantasy is being taken seriously as a thematic and a narrative project, and that any conclusions will ensure both parts are being served and supported. Which makes my inability to envisage where it's going pretty exciting. I have no idea where this is going, and I can't wait to find out.

--

The Math

Highlights: 

• a few stunning full-page spreads and gorgeous moments that really sell the atmosphere of the story
• hell turns up to make things all the more complicated
• some proper sexy character arcs

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: Kieron Gillen, Caspar Wijngaard, Clayton Cowles and Rian Hughes, The Power Fantasy Volume 2: Mutually Reassuring Destruction, [Image, 2025].

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

Film Review: One Battle After Another

Paul Thomas Anderson has made an absolute masterpiece about rebellion, standing up to power, and hope.

I went into One Battle After Another cold, which is an experience I highly recommend. Even seeing the trailer doesn't truly prepare you for this 2-hour and 42-minute magnum opus. It revolves around a modern-day revolutionary sect called the French 75 as they carry out immigration liberation and general anti-capitalist insurgency tactics. Ghetto Pat (Leo DiCaprio) and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) are active leaders in their movement. I don't want to get into a detailed plot summary because a lot happens, but I do want to talk about three things that One Battle After Another does really, really well – and what I can't stop thinking about. 

It powerfully depicts the de-centering of white men in leftist organizations

From the trailer, you'd think Leo DiCaprio would be the brains behind everything in the radical French 75. That couldn't be further from the truth, as he's essentially a bumbling, stoned Big Lebowski-type dude, although he is well-meaning. When compared to his partner and lover, Perfidia, he's all soft and scared, a forever second fiddle to her powerful presence, mastermind planning, and pure passion for the cause. Seeing a woman of color in charge of a paramilitary organization doesn't happen very often, and it's extremely moving. It's very much a "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" viewpoint. Of course, the movie is directed by a white man and features white male main characters, but they're not the emotional or competent core of the film. Those roles belong to Perfidia, Willa, and Deandra.

16 years after he's gone underground into hiding with his daughter, Willa, Bob's forgotten nearly everything he trained for, including much-needed passwords in the case everything goes to hell. There's a brilliant scene in which he spends 10 minutes arguing on the phone with another agent about a codeword, while behind him, the Sensei (Benicio Del Toro) is silently and quickly organizing migrants into a safe shelter to avoid a raid. It's a powerful moment that contrasts chest-beating bravado with the actual everyday work of committing to a cause. In today's political climate, Paul Thomas Anderson is sounding the alarm on performative activism, and it's invigorating to see. 

It forcefully shows the banality — and stupidity — of evil

The central conflict in the film revolves around Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn) and his quest to join the Christmas Adventurers, a white supremacist secret society. However, Lockjaw and Perfidia have a child together, Willa. If it were to come out that he has a mixed-race child, his acceptance into the CA would be in jeopardy. 

First, we have to talk about Sean Penn in this movie. His performance is absolutely stellar as a pent-up, military-chafing, chauvinistic pig. He's going to win an Oscar for his performance in this, as he's almost unrecognizable. The way he casually throws around racial epithets in his quest to arrest undocumented immigrants is stomach-churning and absolutely classic villain coding. When he meets up with the secret society of white supremacists, they're bumbling buffoons who are obsessed with racial purity, and he desperately craves acceptance into their secret club. These people, of course, are horrible humans, but the way PTA portrays them is to cast a spotlight on their absolute absurdity, down to greeting each other with "Hail St. Nick." Despite all their power and evil machinations, they're deeply uncool, incompetent, and can't even live up to their own self-made, racist expectations (as in the case of Lockjaw).

It brings back a classic cloak-and-dagger feel to film

I love old movies about the secret tactics of the French resistance like Army of Shadows, and One Battle After Another brings that same energy and feel to the modern era. From the complicated cell structure of insurgents to actual secret tunnels under houses and between buildings, the day-to-day work of secret organizations is painted with a masterly brush. I suppose I never really thought about modern organizations doing such cloak-and-dagger stuff, but it makes sense and also really brings it to life. 

Bob (Leo DiCaprio) and his daughter Willa go into hiding for 16 years, but he never forgets (most of) what they're running from. They, too, have secret tunnels, MacGuffin-type transmitters that glow green when someone trusted is nearby, and rendezvous points for when shit goes down. Bob instills all of this into his teenage daughter, who sort of believes him but also thinks he's just a paranoid, stoner old crank. When the time comes and she's faced with a do-or-die type situation, she calmly accepts the protocol and trusts the other person with her life. It reminds me of Sarah Connor training John Connor all of his life for the day SkyNet goes operational. 

My favorite tiny but poignant moment is when the Sensei is closing up the hatch of a secret tunnel. It's a brief scene, but when he pulls the hatch down on top of him on the floor, a small rug effortlessly and magically unrolls down on it, completely covering their tracks. I don't know why this little flourish is so amazing, but it really captures how detail-oriented a resistance must be if they're to succeed. And in turn, how Anderson really mastered the feel of it via film.

Overall, this movie is incredibly moving, at times laugh-out-loud funny, and occasionally scary in how prescient it is to our current political climate. The run time is definitely long as it inches toward 3 hours, but I didn't even get up to go to the bathroom once. That's how much it enthralls you. I look forward to seeing it again to relive some of the blink-or-you-miss-them, adrenaline-fueled scenes and car chase sequences. 

--

The Math

Nerd Rating: 9/10

Highlights: How much Bob and the Sensei drunk-drive with Modelos; Perfidia's one immaculate eyelash, and Lockjaw's mouth gymnastics in any given scene.

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.

Book Review: The Stardust Grail, by Yume Kitasei

A perfectly reasonable space adventure

Some books do exactly what they say they will do, and nothing more. The Stardust Grail is one of those. Its hook has all the right trimmings to beguile the willing reader: a graduate student protagonist, a reformed thief, multiple heists, androids who want to be human, wormholes, ex-soldiers with fancy armour-tech, squid-tentacle aliens, hive minds, shady organizations, plagues, and ray guns. All these components are woven together into a quest narrative for a MacGuffin whose recovery spells the difference between survival and extinction, and indeed the fate of galactic civilization. It’s practically a paint-by-numbers example of a sci-fi space adventure. This is not to say that it’s bad. It’s just not particularly surprising.

Our main character, Maya Hoshimoto, used to be a thief for hire, travelling around the galaxy with her partner Auncle, a member of the dwindling alien species known as the Frenro. Together they made a reasonably satisfactory living stealing cultural artifactes for clients, until Maya decides that she wants to build a different life for herself, and returns to graduate school in… cultural xeno-anthropology? Something like that. The specific field of study is never named, but it’s one that involves examining alien cultural artifacts, which her practical stealing experience has equipped her to understand very well. (Readers with experience in academic publishing are encouraged to skim past the bit where Maya’s academic advisor tells her to write an entire article for submission to a prestigious journal in the space of two days, and her research consists of getting a librarian who is entirely unconnected to the project to select some books on the right general topic for her.)

One day, the special collections library where Maya works receives a bequest containing a lost volume of the journal of Dr. Huang, a wildly famous human space explorer from the previous century. The same day, a visiting researcher, Dr. Garcia, approaches Maya and reveals that the entire transportation web of wormhole-flavoured nodes that ties the galaxy together is breaking down. He further reveals that he knows about her criminal past, and threatens her with exposure unless she helps him and the fascist-leaning organization he works for track down a MacGuffin referenced in Dr. Huang’s journal, which for Reasons is the only hope of restoring the transportation web. And, to complete the trifecta of inciting incidents, Auncle returns, and begs for Maya’s help recovering the same missing MacGuffin, which can not only create new nodes, but also an object that is essential for the Frenro’s ability to reproduce. Behold, an ethical dilemma: save the entire galactic civilization from utter collapse, or save the Frenro species from extinction?

As ethical dilemmas go, this is a pretty good one, in part because it avoids the more common plot-driving dilemma structure, which pits smaller, personal obligations against much larger societal stakes. Typically, we get protagonists agonizing over questions like Do I stay home with my family or answer my country’s call and do one last spy mission for the good of AMERICA? Or Do I obey commands and do my duty or do I give up everything, abandon the mission, and rescue my best friend/beloved? These personal-vs-big-stakes dilemmas are common in fiction, because they make the protagonist’s dithering believable while still making it possible to enforce a narratively correct decision. But precisely because the narratively correct answer is obvious, the dithering gets awfully tiresome to the reader. Of course you’re going to abandon your family for one last job, otherwise there won’t be a plot! Or: Of course you’re going to abandon the mission and rescue your friend, otherwise we’ve wasted chapters and chapters of backstory about why your friendship is so important! Quit Hamleting about, unholster your raygun, and go kick some betentacled tushes!

[pant pant pant] Sorry, got worked up there. Anyway, the point is: Maya’s dithering is not frustrating, because both sides of her dilemma are personal and also carry genuinely huge stakes. On the one hand, recovering the MacGuffin to restore the Frenro’s ability to reproduce is personal because Auncle, Maya’s dearest friend in the world, is Frenro, and desperately wants to raise children. If she recovers the MacGuffin and turns it over to Dr. Garcia, she is destroying her best friend’s chances for reproducing, which is a terrible betrayal. She’s also causing an entire species to go extinct. That’s a heckuva bad outcome on both levels.

On the other hand, rebuilding the galactic transportation network is personal to Maya, because she is living on Earth and her family are living on a different planet. The breakdown of interstellar travel means she will never see her family again. It’s also huge stakes because, remember, the entire galaxy depends on this network. If it continues to break down, all worlds will end up isolated, and not all worlds are self-sufficient. Entire planetfuls of people may die. The urgency of this all is rather nicely backed up by a resonance with Maya’s own personal history. Her childhood was marked by scarcity that is an inherent part of trying to subsist on a colony planet where humans did not evolve. Everything was made even more difficult by a horrific disease that swept through the galactic civilization, killed many, and left others—including Maya—struggling with permanent consequences. (This is a 2024 publication. The covid-coding is not a coincidence, I'm sure.) Quarantines were instituted; people starved. Maya therefore knows firsthand the devastation wrought by a much smaller version of this looming total isolation. That is another heckuva bad outcome associated with losing interstellar travel.

So: on the whole, the character motivations, interstellar politics, and betentacled aliens are all very competently accomplished. Maya’s dithering is not frustrating, precisely because there is no good outcome. There is no choice she can make that satisfies either personal or societal constraints. But precisely because there is no good outcome, in a book that is not intended to be any kind of grimdark, it also became clear before the halfway mark that there was only one way the dilemma could be resolved without betraying the entire value system the book presented to us.

This book delivers on everything it says on the tin. But it doesn’t deliver anything more. And at the end, when I arrived exactly where I had predicted hundreds of pages earlier, I found myself wondering whether all those museum heists were really necessary to get there.

Nerd coefficient: 7/10. An enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws.

Highlights:

• Believable dilemmas
• Tentacled aliens
• Overpowered MacGuffins
• Lore

Reference: Kitasei, Yume. The Stardust Grail [Flatiron Books 2024].

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 

Cult Film Review: In The Mouth of Madness (1994)

Cosmic horror without the Lovecraft

 

This month, just in time for Halloween, the Criterion Channel launched a John Carpenter retrospective. I took the opportunity to revisit 1994's In the Mouth of Madness, one of the strangest John Carpenter films... and I feel like that's saying something.

Fresh off of Jurassic Park in 1993, Sam Neill went to work for John Carpenter, playing insurance investigator John Trent. We meet Trent ranting and raving as orderlies at an insane asylum drag him into a padded room. The next morning, when asylum psychiatrist Dr. Wrenn visits Trent to get his story, he opens the door to find Trent has drawn symbols all over his room, clothes, and face, and he begins to unfold his tale of madness.

John Trent was not always the raving maniac Dr. Wrenn sees before him. No, indeed. Trent was once a successful, can't-bullshit-a-bullshitter insurance investigator. The popular horror author Sutter Cane, Arcane Publishing's biggest literary star, has disappeared, and Arcane wants Trent to find him. Trent reluctantly accepts the assistance of Cane's editor, Linda Styles, but believes from the start that this whole thing is a fakeout—an elaborate publicity stunt designed to generate headlines for Cane's new novel, In the Mouth of Madness. Trent tries to do his research, grabbing copies of all of Cane's novels, but they're too scary. They wind up getting inside his dreams, and maybe even into his waking reality. Maybe everybody's waking realities. A spike in violent crime seems to be tied to people who read Cane's books. And it comes home for Trent while he sits at a restaurant and a man wielding an axe smashes through a plate glass window, coming for Trent before the police shoot the attacker. It turns out this madman was Cane's agent, and right before he raised the axe over Trent's head, he asked a question everyone seems to be asking:

"Do you read Sutter Cane?"

In the same way that Stephen King sets much of his work in the fictional town of Derry, Maine, in the film Sutter Cane sets his work in the idyllic New England town of Hobb's End. Trent realizes that design elements consistent across Cane's various novel covers fit together and form a map to the fictional town. So he and Styles set off to follow the map and see where it takes them. After trading off behind the wheel, Trent falls asleep in the passenger seat, and while Styles drives, things get weird. A figure looms up out of the darkness, the road seems to vanish, the figure returns, but different, then again, then there's a crash, or is there? The radio distorts, goes out, the night seems to bend around Styles, and then... poof. It's daytime and they're in Hobb's End.

That's all the plot summary you get, because after that, the film begins playing with reality in very interesting and increasingly labyrinthine ways. If you haven't seen the film, I don't want to take any of the fun out of it. But extremely telling is the exchange about Cane's books that Trent and Styles have on the road right before he hands over the wheel:

Trent: What's to get scared about? It's not like it's real or anything.

Styles: Well, it's not real from your point of view, and right now reality shares your point of view. What scares me about Cane's work is what might happen if reality shared his point of view.

Trent: Whoa, we're not talking about reality here. We're talking about fiction. It's different, you know?

Styles: But reality is just what we tell each other it is. Sane and insane could easily switch places if the insane were to become the majority.

I have to be honest: that line hit a little closer to home these days than it probably did in 1994. I do remember renting this movie (on VHS!) when it came out, and when it ended, I felt so perplexed, so surprised by the final moments of the film, thinking that I must have missed something, that I rewound it back to their arrival in Hobb's End and watched it again. Watching it this time, having vaguely remembered that experience from 30 years ago, I was a little more prepared to simply go on the journey that Carpenter and writer Michael De Luca wanted to take me on.

If you are a fan of Carpenter and/or Stephen King, this movie is a ton of fun. Carpenter throws in a number of signature visuals that are reminiscent of The Thing, and the movie really nails the Stephen King vibe, not only with the setting but down to the author font on the paperbacks. But one of the most enjoyable aspects of the film is the way it manages to give the viewer a full-on cosmic horror experience without H.P. Lovecraft. Sure, there are a ton of homages to Lovecraft, but it's not his mythos, not his settings, and not his baggage.

Like many people, I can no longer enjoy the work of Lovecraft—certainly not the way I could at maybe 13 years old, reading paperbacks with evocative titles full of odd, elliptical stories that hinted at a hostile cosmos and latent dangers outside of the realms of our perception. But Lovecraft's racism and eugenicist views, which revealed themselves in tropes I wasn't equipped to fully understand at that age, make the experience of reading him one I can no longer find much joy in. And while there are a couple of good ones, Lovecraft film adaptations tend toward the schlocky and cheap, as name-recognizable IP in the public domain might lead you to believe.

So I'm grateful to John Carpenter for In the Mouth of Madness. It scratches the cosmic horror itch in a satisfying way, and wraps it in something of a puzzle box narrative that's akin to a film like Mulholland Dr. but very much in the horror genre. I'm happy to recommend this without having to caveat it.

In the Mouth of Madness is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel (October 2025), and Tubi with commercials.