Book Nanoreviews: Matryoshka; Boy, With Accidental Dinosaur; The Rainseekers

These are three novellas from quite different corners of science fiction that I read over January. One, Matryoshka, is a backlist title that's been on my shelf for some time, while the other two are new releases.

The odd thing is you will see I've given all 3 the same score (give or take a few decimal points; I do think Matryoshka is probably by a small margin the strongest), but that flattens just how diverse in their strengths (and their flaws) these three works are. Suffice to say that I think if any of these is in a niche that is to your taste, you will find it enjoyable and engaging.

Matryoshka by Ricardo Pinto

This is, as far as I can tell, Pinto's only longer-form work outside his very good and underappreciated Stone Dance of the Chameleon series of early 2000s grimdark doorstoppers, and it is a very different beast to those. A slim novella clocking in at under 90 generously spaced pages, it opens with our point of view character, Cherenkov, hooking up with a complete stranger in post-World War 2 Venice and then following her through a portal to another world, called Eboreus. So far, so portal fantasy. What follows, though, is something considerably more abstract and more surreal.

Cherenkov and the woman he followed to Eboreus, Septima, are quickly set on a mission across a trackless sea and towards an increasingly fierce white light to find an old man who is probably a Neanderthal. It turns out that the closer one gets to that white light, the slower time moves. By the time the two return (with a third person, who had been lost in time), years have passed in Eboreus and decades in the real world. The plot, such as it is, plays out the consequences of this time dilation.

Matryoshka is probably best described as science fantasy. The story is played out like a fairy tale, but the time dilation at the plot's core seems pretty clearly to be a matter of physics (if not understood as such by most of the characters) rather than magic. The plot is sketched lightly and its logic deliberately surreal and disorientating. Through this choice of narrative voice, the themes Pinto seeks to explore—dislocation in the face of the Holocaust and in the face of modernity more generally—are also sheeted onto the reader trying to make sense of the action. This is in general very effective and quite clearly deliberate, but in a few places the generally elegant prose clunks or is missing just one more plot breadcrumb to pull the reader along. Those quibbles aside, this is a bold and creative work by an author whose work deserves more attention. Recommended if you enjoy surrealist approaches to speculative fiction.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10, a mostly enjoyable experience.

Boy, With Accidental Dinosaur by Ian McDonald

McDonald is a science fiction luminary, with works across a wide range of subgenres to great effect, from the sweep of centuries on Mars in Desolation Road to near-future brilliance in The Dervish House and River of Gods to cartel wars on the moon in the Luna trilogy. Boy, with Accidental Dinosaur explores yet another corner of the genre in a near-future post-political-collapse America. The point of departure from our timeline to the one of the book is the existence of the B2T2: "A place where two times lay up against each other, close as kittens, separated only by the finest layer of space-time fur, that could be stroked, and parted." This hole in time caused religious and political upheaval and, related to the anomaly or not, significant civil war within the former United States. It also allows for the rise of a truly idiosyncratic new form of entertaiment across these shattered states: dinosaur rodeo.

McDonald's masterstroke is to tell the story of this world from the perspective of someone deeply shaped by its differences from ours but with no understand of, or agency over, it. Tif is an orphan in his (late, as I read it) teens, his parents killed in early exchanges in the early battles which shaped the geopolitical present of the book. From a young age he is obsessed with dinosaur rodeo and aroused by the buckaroos; he's gay with little drama about that fact (and Arabic with a fair bit more drama in the Christian theocracy of the future USA). He runs away from the orphanage he ended up at after his parents' death and begs, borrows, and blowjobs his way across the American southwest to get a job mucking out stalls at a dinosaur rodeo. The book opens with him being fired from that job for letting a dinosaur escape. Shortly after, he acquires the titular accidental dinosaur, and the rest of the book is a road trip where Tif attempts to find a home and send his dinosaur back to the past (mandatory under time travel rules to minimise the risk of paradox).

There is a lot to like about this book. McDonald has frequently brilliant turns of phrase, tuned precisely to the register of the under-educated, dinosaur-obsessed, working class teenager who is our point of view character ("Tif folds himself into the big chair and all the sleep that hid in the night creeps up and settles in his lap"). The character work, if briefly sketched (appropriate for a novella), is well done and convincing. As an idiosyncratic, working class view of trying to make a life in a pretty grim future, it is generally successful. The thing that holds a good book back from being great is that it seems to have precisely the wrong amount of plot for a novella. There's too much plot and too wide a sweep for a short story, but it includes so much that it feels overcooked for a novella. The plot races at breakneck pace when it feels like it should proceed more sedately, and some scenes are over almost before they begin. The overall impression is that the story could have done with another 10 or 15,000 words of breathing room. As it stands, Boy, with Accidental Dinosaur feels just a little bit more like a genuinely excellent penultimate draft than a fully realised finished article.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10, a mostly enjoyable experience.

The Rainseekers by Matthew Kressel

The Rainseekers is The Canterbury Tales on Mars, or (perhaps a more genre-appropriate comparison) a condensed Hyperion in mundane SF mode. Terraforming on Mars has proceeded far enough that there has been snow for some years, and the book focuses on a group of 40-odd people trekking out from the safety of Martian dome cities in an attempt to be the first to experience rain. Our narrator, Sakunja Salazar, is a former future!Tiktok star who since making more money than she knows what to do with in that career has turned to photography and journalism and is along for the ride. The book is about equally split between her frame narrative and the stories told to her by several of her fellow pilgrims (it's barely expressed as such; the trek is definitely a pilgrimmage) about their lives and what brought them to be out here, seeking Martian rain.

These pilgrims come from a wide range of backgrounds, from the descendant of the genius scientist who designed the orbital mirrors which have over decades warmed Mars and melted ice to the talented engineer brought low by trauma and addiction. Kressel has a deft touch with these nested stories, bringing depth to their subjects in a short word count. We get Sakunja's story as well, both through the narration of the frame story and her own background as narrated to one of the other pilgrims, and the emotional beats are equally well done.

I have two quibbles with the novella, one structural and one genre-related. Structurally, the balance of frame narrative to nested stories seems off. There is more to the frame narrative than an excuse for the stories, but there isn't quite enough to it to stand alone either. And for a party of 40-odd pilgrims, it feels weird that the story only gives us the stories of a handful of them. The balance is just slightly off in a way that means you finish the book feeling like you've missed something. In terms of genre complaints, there is a fair bit of "as you know, we realised [x thing happening in the 2020s] was bad" backfilling of the timeline between now and the novel's setting, and some of this is quite clumsy. The pilgrims and the Mars they inhabit are believably and authentically sketched; the history of the Earth they left behind to come there, not so much. It detracts only slightly from the narrative, but I do think it's worth noting when some of the SFnal elements of a SF narrative are one of the story's weaknesses.

Overall these are quibbles, though, and this is a nuanced, emotionally resonant set of stories that I think a lot of readers will enjoy.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10, a mostly enjoyable experience.

Book Review: The Astral Library by Kate Quinn

A magical realism novel about the power and importance of libraries. 

Libraries. What are they good for? Many things as it turns out. Libraries are collections of books, yes, but they are havens, safe spaces, sanctuaries for people, especially readers. Libraries are inherently magical spaces. Historical fiction writer Kate Quinn turns to fantasy and magical realism in her paean to libraries and books, The Astral Library.

The novel centers around our protagonist, Alix, and holds it in a first person point of view throughout the book. Alix has a rather hardscrabble life, living on a couch, less than $40 in her checking account, and working three jobs to not make ends meet. To say that she is living on the edge would be an understatement to be sure. A series of unfortunate events (including a bout of identity theft) puts Alix over the edge. But our bibliophilic reader finds a portal in the Boston Public Library into the titular Astral Library. Every book ever written (and some that are still in progress) are available here. Even better, she can go into a book to live in. Into the world of the book, to be clear. Like Gumby, or perhaps more contemporary, like an Isekai LitRPG, people who come to the library can choose a book to enter into its world. 

No, you don’t get to become Jane Eyre, but you get to be in her world. You can fight alongside D’Artagnan, but not as Athos. You can experience the world of a book, quite literally. It’s the ultimate playground of the imagination. You can even choose to live inside of a book of your choosing. Do you want to live in a mansion in West Egg not far away from the Gatsby’s. The Astral Library can let you do this!

The Astral Library chooses its readers to be allowed to do this, and Alix is the latest choice. But as our protagonist gets set to live in a book, her world and the world of the library come under threat. For, you see, the librarian of the Library is not in complete control of the Astral Library. Instead, a Board seeks to modernize and change and update the Astral Library... and not, as Alix learns for the better. This board seeks to bring the Library into a modern mold, complete with side helpings of “improvements” like curating the library for texts that are “inappropriate for children”, for starters. Alix finds herself on the front lines of a conflict to protect the Astral Library she has just discovered.

This is the central plot conflict of The Astral Library.

The central character conflict and development, the romance, is between Alix and her best friend Beau. Beau is in a hardscrabble existence of his own, resonantly, as he is trying his best to make it as a fashion designer. He’s gotten some breaks, but he is on the edge of success, or of utter failure. But thanks to an IOU that Alix has, he has promised her a dress for a single occasion. And when she enters the library, she has such an occasion to cash in that IOU. But beyond that, the arcs of a slow burn romance slowly come to the fore between them.

But really, this novel is about the magic of books and what the power of the magic of books and libraries have to offer, especially in times when the sources of that magic is under threat. For all of its whimsicalness, the novel does go rather topical and sometimes rather dark, both with Alix’s life and with the threat that libraries face in general. This novel is all about what libraries face. Does it have a bulletproof solution to what is to be done in a world where libraries are being squeezed and squeezed? No. The novel is a fantasy about, among other things, being able to stop and fight back against some of these forces. It’s a novel about believing in libraries and their mission. This is a novel about believing in books.

So why was I dissatisfied with this novel as much as I was? All the elements of a magical library are there, all the elements of why books are magical things and celebrating the magic nature of books. And not just books, but other art as well Alix finds out there are sections of the library devoted to art that one can enter. There is even a tie in to one of Quinn’s historical fiction novels in the process. The book loves books and is unapologetic about that love.

While I’ve seen references to Jemisin’s work before, I was delighted to find references to The Queendom novels of Greer. It’s unapologetic for the mission and nature of libraries as they have been. The novel is also queer friendly, both Alix and Beau are unapologetically bisexual and happy and proud of it. It’s not a queer-friendly world, but the world of the Astral Library is a little less queer-hostile than our own.

But for me the worldbuilding of the book just did not hold up to any sort of scrutiny or reflection. I am going to leave the details of this to an end note, if you do not want to be spoiled. And yes, while this is a magical realism novel, the consequences of the worldbuilding were more than a bit ungainly, once they became obvious to me, they harmed my enjoyment of the story. And even for a novel that is at its end an allegory about the dangers that libraries are under and the wonder and power of libraries and books, the worldbuilding flaws (which also lead to a downbeat in the character arc between Alix and Beau) marred my enjoyment.

I wanted to like, love and immerse myself in this book far more than I did. The book is very uncomfortable in spots, Alix really is in a tough situation at the beginning and at points, the author does press onto sore spots in Alix with strong pressure. This novel may be a comfort read at points but at other points, it hits rather hard. But overall. the heart of the themes and ideas of The Astral Library are in the right place, But for me, the execution just doesn’t quite match up.

End Note

Alright. A couple of things bothered me about the worldbuilding. Spoilery and again, read this only if you want to. 

The major one is how time works here. It is established in the novel that no time passes within the library itself. You can walk in and as long as you stay within the library itself and do not go into the world of a book, time relative to the outside world does not pass at all. If you go into the world of a book, then time runs at a rate equal to that of the real world. So a number of the patrons are spending chunks of their lives doing this, one of them is basically cycling through The Tale of Genji over and over again. There is mention that you can continue to live in a book “after it’s over” but that the results are unpredictable. So patrons renew the books and start over and over again. Come out of the book, a year has passed, renew and go back in.

The problem, you will see immediately, is how can things in the outside world impinge upon the library at all if it is timeless? The Library Board sends messages and threats into the library but how can that possibly work if time inside of the library itself stands still? It is explicitly explained by the librarian that if you enter the library at 5pm on a Friday, and if you don’t go into a book, you leave the library at the exact moment that you entered. So how can the library receive threats at all? The chase scenes through the books we get are fine, its established that book time is equal to ours. The author forgets this again when Alix tries to read the forthcoming Song of Ice and Fire book... which is changing as the author changes his mind. Again, those changes can’t happen because the library is a fixed point in time that when you leave, it is the time that you entered. 

And then there is the other worldbuilding quibble. This is a realpolitik problem of how the novel dances around copyright issues. The novel does an excellent job with the love and lore of books. Alix is a Reader, capitalized. She name drops a host of books and authors throughout the work, and the author’s own enthusiasm for these books is unmistakable. So, naturally, once Alix is first explained that she can live in a book, she immediately starts naming off books that are in copyright. Narnia. Middle Earth. She is shut down completely and firmly by this and told that she can only live in books that are in the public domain. She cannot visit and live in books that are in copyright, as a way of respecting the authors and their work. While I understand the problems and copyright issues, the sheer awkward nature of this restriction glared out at me. Narnia and Middle Earth have authors who are dead. Their estates own the copyrights. While I get how the author has a problem here, Alix is shut off in an unsatisfying way. And what of things that are in the public domain in some places, and not others. The early stories of Ian Fleming (James Bond) are in copyright in the United States but entered into the public domain in Canada, there was even a Canadian published anthology that used this fact. Are the Ian Fleming Bond stories available to be "lived in" or not? 

What I think annoys me is not that the author is trying to escape lawsuits and problems, but that the solution just doesn’t fit with the rest of the library’s ethos and nature. For example, it is pointed out that multiple readers can live in the same book, but they are in their own worlds and versions of that world and thus won’t meet, living parallel lives in versions of the same book. That argument goes to copyrighted books, too, after all. The version of Middle Earth I have in my head is my own and is idiosyncratic. Maybe if it was mentioned that there was a special archive where people could enter books in copyright (but phrased in a more smooth manner), the weird restriction would not have irked me, so. Slow down Alix’s charge to get to Cair Paravel by having plot happen first, and the problem solves itself by the end of the book and it doesn’t seem like there is a very weird tiered version of access in the Library based on copyright. This in itself goes against the entire theme of the book, which is perhaps why it irks me so thoroughly. 

The counterargument to this entire end note is that the worldbuilding is not, to use the phrase I got from Liz Bourke meant to be "load-bearing". Which means that the worldbuilding elements are not what matter and to focus on the inconsistencies does a disservice to the book and what it is for.

-- 

Highlights:

• The wonder and love of libraries and books.
• Immersive scenes and locations
• Queer friendly.

Reference: Quinn, Kate, The Astral Library, William Morrow, 2026

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

Looking Back at War Front: Turning Point

What if World War II happened ... this way?

There is a lot to be said about War Front: Turning Point, as I have discovered it after marching through its twenty-two missions. It is a real-time strategy game from 2007, made by the Hungarian studio Digital Reality. Its premise is a knockoff of Command and Conquer: Red Alert and its gameplay is ultimately a knockoff of Command and Conquer: Generals; I kept thinking about the latter during those missions as Generals was my first RTS and as such it has a place in my heart, for all its silliness.

I fear that that beginning paragraph sounds rather harsh. I enjoyed the game, mostly because I enjoy the primal experience of building an army of tanks and artillery and using it to just wreck shit, which this game provides in spades. I will say I really enjoyed the Eurogamer review of the game, from the year of the latter’s release, and it makes a lot of good points.

As I said, this game draws a lot from Generals, gameplay wise; there’s a version of the battle plans available at the American strategy center from the former game in all three factions of the latter. The resource gathering feels like the halfway point between Red Alert 3 and StarCraft. Base defenses feel closer to CNC than StarCraft, being formidable on their own and not so easily mobbed with basic units. The building is a clone of Generals, down to one faction having the builder be an infantry unit rather than a vehicle. That same faction has a black market, like the GLA, but it is involved with stealing units rather than generating cash (buildings can be built to do such a thing). You have CNC-style oil derricks.

What makes the game frustrating, at first, is the realization that most units are glass cannons, especially tanks. This makes any given mission prone to devolving into a war of attrition, based around economy and sheer patience, veering on resilience, on the part of the player. At least, it did for me until I remembered that upgrades exist, which then breaks the stalemate and turns the gameplay into the sort of tank mob I am fond of (I know it is monotonous, sometimes, but it scratches my animal urge to just wreck shit, when I’m in the right mood). Large formations of tier-two tanks and tier-one artillery, with some anti-air thrown in, will win you campaigns. That tendency towards glass cannons also makes artillery far more important than in comparable games in my experience.

All the glass cannon issues are tripled when concerning aircraft. When playing CNC games, I would often make flying units (comanches, helices, hammerheads, venoms, chopper-VXs, twinblades, harbingers, battle angels) and rip apart enemy bases, but was always careful enough to veer away from anti-air guns whenever possible. StarCraft games on the other hand never really had this issue as the base defenses were comparatively weaker; Terran battleships or Protoss carriers never had the issue. This game takes the CNC balancing and tilts it comically in favor of the anti-air guns; this renders plane-based support powers (another thing lifted from Generals) absolutely useless most of the time as one or two emplacements can cut them into paper. Like, I wanted to drop an atomic bomb, but it was cut down so quickly! Imagine if the Japanese had these guns in 1945! If I had to fix this, I would double if not triple the speed of the aircraft, as they are very slow: the EA CNC games did this well and added real uncertainty to air strikes, which this game should have had.

The tier-two tanks and tier-one artillery I mentioned previously tends to be weapons that historically existed in World War II, and it is telling that most missions can be won with only historical units and not the crazy science fictional units available later on. The most useful of these is an Allied tank that projects a large shield for aforementioned tank mobs. The Germans get a sonic tank and a small mecha of sorts (called an exo-skeleton, reminiscent of the human walkers in the Avatar movies, although this game predates them - and is prominently displayed on the cover art), as well as jetpack troopers (who likewise get mauled by anti-air to a comical degree). The Soviets have even bigger tanks than historically, a giant artillery gun that calls to mind the Schwerer Gustav more than anything else, and lots of cold-based weaponry (a bit stereotypical, but can be really annoying in the field).

In all these fancy doohickeys being easily beaten by historical weaponry, the game ends up reproducing a real dynamic of the actual Second World War in a way that cannot have been deliberate. Rather, the wonky balancing serves historical accuracy; what are ice tanks and exoskeletons and sonic tanks more than wunderwaffen, the overengineered monstrosities made by the Germans in our world in a desperate attempt to win the war when it was obviously lost to anyone actually paying attention. Most didn’t work; the war was won by the dependable Sherman in the West and by the equally dependable T-34 in the East. The Americans, in particular, were a massive economic engine that kept out-producing the Germans. Likewise, the zeppelins you can make as the Germans are sitting ducks for anti-air, which is why zeppelins were phased out as weapons of war in reality. In the game, focusing on the economy to mass produce Shermans (as an Allied player) will win you the battle. It’s not to the level of The Campaign for North Africa by any means, and it wasn’t even intentional, but it was a fun thing to notice.

The more interesting and clever things come in terms of the story, subverting a lot of expected plot beats of World War II alternate history, as well as RTS game stories. When looking at the campaigns, there are only two available: the Allies and the Germans. Starting the game, I thought that the Allied campaign would include both the Western Allies and the Soviets, but I turned out to be wrong; the Soviets are the ultimate villains. The two campaigns are ultimately two sides of a coalition defending Europe from a Soviet invasion after a peace agreement, which itself came after German rebels overthrew the Nazis.

In the menu you will see the Allied campaign first, and then the German campaign. This appears to encourage the player to go the Allied route, and then the German route, as I did. The Allied route is the more generic of the two, obligatorily fighting Nazis, and then fighting Soviets with German allies. The German campaign, on the other hand, only has you a loyal servant of the Nazi regime for at most two missions, when your commanding officer reveals to you he is trying to overthrow the Chancellor and ropes you in. In an eleven mission campaign, the German player only fights the Western Allies twice. Three of the remaining missions are fighting other Germans (one with Allied support), and the rest are fighting the Soviets. In other words, you are fighting a civil war as much as a world war, to the point of backing a military coup, something I’ve only seen in Tiberian Twilight with the New Adana insurrection. In my opinion more games should have military coups. There is storytelling potential there.

If you play the Allied campaign first, and then the German campaign second, you see the former colored by the latter in interesting ways. There are three missions that are played from different perspectives in each campaign, the other army being represented by an AI that is not particularly smart (there is a mission set in Poland where you, the Germans, have to defend an Allied base from the Soviets, and you practically have to babysit them). Unlike Red Alert 3 a year later, which did a multiplayer version of this, each mission told from different perspectives is subtly different in terms of the respective objectives, particularly the penultimate level, which feels like a proper massive battle with different flanks with different objectives. Unfortunately, the final battle, a gruelling siege of Moscow, plays almost identically for each army.

I find the lack of a Soviet campaign both narratively disappointing and somewhat problematic. The Soviets are the most ‘Eastern’ of the nations at play, as Russia and its empire have so often been considered, not entirely unreasonably, as more Asian than points west. This is often racialized unpleasantly; the Nazis considered Slavs to be subhuman and subsequently treated Eastern Europe far more brutally than Western Europe; in the latter, razing a village was a unique atrocity (see Oradour-sur-Glane or Lidice), while in the former it was de rigueur. Perhaps more chillingly, one recalls that Hitler originally wanted to ally with the British and the Americans to destroy the Soviets; in a game and a world where Hitler is killed early on, he ironically gets his wish.

I have complicated thoughts on that last bit. I think it is very telling that the studio that created this game is Hungarian, a country whose government (led by an Admiral without a Navy) allied with the Nazis, engaged in its own territorial irredentism, helped the Germans invade the Soviet Union, and then was invaded in turn by the Soviets who turned it into a puppet state that lasted until 1991. I cannot help but think that 1956, year the Soviet Army violently crushed a reform movement in that country (and grippingly retold in James Michener’s book The Bridge at Andau), hangs heavily over this game’s story. Having been released in 2007, the developers would likely have been born under Communist rule, known people who lived through 1956, and may well have seen the Soviets as the century’s great enemy more so than the Nazis (a not uncommon sentiment among certain segments of Eastern Europe; see the memorials to Nazi collaborators in Canada, put up by Eastern Europeans who hated the Soviets, or see also the neofascist groups in these countries that often feel similar, such as the Ukrainian Azov Battalion).

On the one hand, there’s a part of me that feels like this is whitewashing the Nazis a bit. On the other hand, I don’t want to minimize the very real suffering that the Soviets unleashed in much of Eastern Europe. But more concretely I think the story told, minus the fantastic weapons, is scarily plausible inasmuch I can imagine a world where this particular alignment of forces happened; indeed, after World War II the British had drawn up plans to invade the Soviet Union as a contingency. In this regard, I think the story succeeds the most, by doing what all great alternate history does: making it very obvious to you that the world we live in exists due to a great multiplicity of contingencies, any one of which going differently leading to a totally different result. But on a more visceral level, you are seeing recognizably Nazi tanks and troops and planes participate in what is cast as a somewhat heroic effort - but that dissonance is what makes that sense of contingency really work. It is a truly different world, not beholden to our aesthetic sensibilities, and where a stahlhelm may not conjure images of genocide.

As expected for games of this period set in World War II, the Holocaust and the other Nazi atrocities are not really dwelt upon (one of the only games I can think of in this ecosystem that does is Company of Heroes 2, which puts the player in charge of the liberation of Majdanek). These may be butterflied away by the assassination of Hitler, but the absence does give the plot an eerie quality (using ‘eerie’ as Mark Fisher did, as the absence of something that you feel should be there).

The game’s cutscenes are really, really good. Each campaign focuses on a few commandos and officers, so there is a good degree of character development. They bicker and complain and wish for things they get to do on leave or after the war, and you can get some affection for them. These cutscenes are obviously done in the game’s engine, but they are done with a certain cinematic verve that really escalates it (the crowning glory being the ending cutscene for a certain mission in France). Some of the personal drama, though, is a bit hackneyed, with each side getting a female commando who inevitably falls for a respective male commando. A detail, but a jarring one; the male commandos keep talking about their desire for ‘babes,’ a word that I don’t think had its modern slang meaning back then, and I can’t remember it being used in any period media, or even works from the sixties. I admit to being pulled out of the story by that a bit.

War Front: Turning Point is ultimately a curiosity, never really becoming a classic of its genres. But it is an enjoyable experience that does some interesting things narratively and gives your monkey brain plenty of opportunities to just break things in the way only RTS games can. There was potential, though, for something deeper, something more epic, and part of me is sad we won’t really get that. But, all in all, I enjoyed the experience.

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

Realm of the Elderlings Project: Fitz and the Fool Book 1: Fool's Assassin

In which Robin Hobb, believe it or not, is merciful

Cover illustration (c) Alejandro Colucci

And so, my friends, we come to the beginning of the end: the first book of the last trilogy of this magnificent saga. Do you feel a bit of melancholy? A twinge of guilt at joining with Hobb to inflict her narrative malice upon poor Fitz? Remember the end of Tawny Man? He was done! He was reunited with his beloved Molly, installed in Withywoods, settled with an estate, a family, released from Farseer demands upon him. It was all over!

Hah, not so fast, I thought, cackling in anticipation as I settled down to read this. Except there is a hint of mellowing in Hobb's approach here. More than a bit. We actually saw the start of this process in the Rain Wild Chronicles, where familiar torments of misery and despair are not quite so tormented as they have been in the past. For all that there was cannibalistic torture and the disintegration of self and identity in the memory-drowning addictions of dead civilizations, nevertheless the Rain Wild Chronicles lacked something of the keen edge of the previous trilogies. And that — not blunting, but let's say softening — of edge continues here.

We open with Fitz happily ensconced in Withywoods. Nettle is established as skillmaster at Buckkeep, the other stepchildren are grown and on the verge of departure. Fitz and Molly are the beloved and established Lord and Lady of Withywoods. They host Winterfest celebrations, they welcome guests; Fitz administers the estate, Molly runs the house. It is delightful. It is peaceful. It is . . . doomed?

Well, so I thought, foolishly imagining I knew what Robin Hobb had in mind. But there are many, many hundreds of pages of peace and plenty and prosperity that elapse before doom befalls. And although there are worries included in those pages, they are decidedly mundane and expected. Some mysterious visitors. A bit of light murder. A baffling, uninterpretable message. Molly is slightly unwell and needs to go to bed. And that’s it.

And between each of these events, YEARS pass! YEARS! Years more of Fitz's domestic tranquility pass domestically tranquilly elapse between plot points. He ponders the passage of time, the process of ageing. He has late night text message Skill conversations with Chade. Molly starts showing signs of dementia, claiming that she is pregnant. Fitz doesn't believe her: she is well past menopause, and the claimed pregnancy continues past nine months, twelve months, twenty-four months. Fitz and Nettle have hard conversations about how to handle Molly's mental state. And, yes, it's distressing that Molly's losing her marbles a bit, but this particular type of hardship is not the unique misery that Hobb tends to inflict. These unhappinesses are real things that happens to real people all the time. Ageing and eldercare and dementia is hardly comparable to getting tortured to death in a dungeon by your uncle-usurper-of-the-throne!

Eventually, a bit of magic separates these real-world cares from our world, but in so doing they render Fitz's life better, not worse. Molly was pregnant, it turns out, with a real child. An odd child, to be sure — slow in developing in utero, and freakishly small after birth, to the point that other people don't believe that the little girl, named Bee, will live. But Bee does live, and although she continues slow to grow and slow to talk, and hesitant around Fitz because his wild Skilling distresses her, she is the joy of his life. And so more years pass of domestic tranquility. A far cry from being forcibly separated from your loved ones, watching from afar as your father-figure marries your beloved and raises your daughter as his own. WHAT IS GOING ON?

And then! And then! Molly dies! Oh no, disaster! She dies — peacefully, painlessly, in her garden, with her little girl next to her, of some entirely natural heart-attack type of thing. Not great for little Bee to see her mother die, but as far as deaths in a Hobb book go, this is nowhere near being flayed alive. Even Fitz's misery is lessened, because he has around him his daughter Nettle, his devoted staff of household retainers, and little Bee. Again, the worst thing Hobb can inflect on Fitz and Bee — widowhood, single parenting an orphan — is nothing worse than people in our world must endure all the time. It's not even in the same ballpark as getting your leg chomped by a sea serpent, leaving a rotting gangrenous stump behind.

And Bee! She is small, and has a speech impediment for the first part of her life, and her peers bully her, and the tutor that Fitz arranges for her is snotty to her when he discovers she is not as stupid as people say she is. And what does he do to punish her? He makes her write lines! Which Fitz immediately puts a stop to the instant he hears about her treatment. Bee never even has to work on her penmanship, let alone get beaten to unconsciousness, almost thrown off a tower, and suffer permanent damage to her ability to Skill.

Even the basic PASSAGE OF TIME is softened. We've already seen Molly having a much-wanted and beloved baby well past menopause. But Fitz gets even more. He doesn't even show his age! Due to an over-enthusiastic Skill healing he enjoyed back in Golden Fool, which keeps him looking young and virile, his appearance tops out at 35 at most. Just look at the cover art! Alejandro Colucci's brief almost certainly included the instructions, 'More DILF than GILF.'

Ok, so, sure, at the end the Fool reappears and in a tragic misunderstand Fitz stabs him, and must leave Bee so he can rush the Fool to Buckkeep for Skill-healing. And then the Fool's people, who it turns out have been torturing him for years, murdering his friends, and chasing him to recapture him for more torture, invade Withywoods, kill people, fog their minds, and abduct Bee in Fitz's absence. Like, yes, that's all bad. That's the kind of thing I expect in a Robin Hobb book. 

But here’s the thing: I expect it to happen well before page 600 in a sub-700 page novel. Hobb is entirely capable of squeezing a lot of unhappiness into 80 pages. She makes a good showing of it here! But even she can’t make them rough enough to bring the average for this book back up to expected Hobbian mean. The mathematics of misery simply don’t allow it.

Is it a relief? A disappointment? I’m not sure. It’s not what I expected when I first read this book. I think a lot of the misery might have been self-inflected, as I perpetually braced for the never-dropping other shoe throughout the first half thousand pages. Come back next month to see whether book 2, Fool’s Quest, regresses to the mean.

——

References: 

Hobb, Robin. Fool's Assassin [Del Ray, 2014]. 

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: Hyo the Hellmaker by Mina Ikemoto Ghosh

 Hellmaker? More like anxiety ridden puzzle solving geek. And that's ok.

cover art:Mina Ikemoto Ghosh

Hyo the Hellmaker.

I’m late to this book. In fact I only picked it up because at World Fantasy at the end of 2025 I was browsing the dealer tables and saw this gorgeous physical copy with gold lettering and absolutely filled with illustrations (all done by the author).

For me it’s a classic case of a Young Adult fantasy that embarrasses us all because it highlights just how artificial that genre distinction is. Published in 2024 with a sequel out in April this year (2026) it’s a high fantasy set in an analogue of this world but one which is very definitely secondary and full of magic and ideas and ways of being that aren’t faux medieval European. 

 

Hyo is a Hellmaker. Part detective, part judge and part executioner. Hyo is someone who can make hells for other people in retribution for what they’ve done to others. To do this though, someone has to pay the price and that price is normally right up there.

 

Thing is the ‘world’ as it were brings people willing to pay that price to her door, normally the relatives of the murdered, who want satisfaction for the injustice they have suffered and for which there is no one else to help. 

 

Hyo is, kinda, a one-woman A-team. 

 

In that sense this has all the sensibilities of a great manga and the setting is a reworked version of Shinto turned into a living breathing set of Kami together with their shrines and strong links to their places, elements and lives of origin (because kami can come from places like rivers or mountains but can also be rooted in extraordinary people).

 

What Ikemoto Ghosh does to elevate this is create a world in which Shinto is not just a practiced and living faith but one in which the gods walk the land as physical beings who enjoy Takoyaki as much as the mortal next to them – that extension into a fantastical world is refreshing, innovative and, most importantly, delightfully fun. It allows Ikemoto Ghosh to build an enthralling setting in which Hyo’s story sits like a little pearl to be plucked.

 

There are strong themes of justice and futility in the book, the sense of fighting against the inevitable, that fate is always lurking behind the scenes but that your fate is unknown to you. Your choices are your own even if they serve to deliver the world as it’s meant to be.

 

I like this tension a lot. We often get simplistic ideas about fate (bad) versus free will (good) and that toddler level philosophising irritates the hell out of me. So to see Hyo wrestle with a world in which so much is beyond her control – including her endings – and see her choices remain meaningful and entirely hers is deeply satisfying. 

 

Without wanting to talk as an old man about what ‘young people’ are reading, I am often very conscious that I have two teenagers in my house who read and that I am therefore aware of the stories they’re engaging with and the ones they don’t get through. Hyo is the kind of story they approve of – because it doesn’t treat them as morally simplistic, in need of someone who’s got it together from the beginning or regard adults as a category of idiots to be manipulated, avoided or resisted. 

 

There’s grief too, although it’s in the rearview mirror. Hyo, shaped through it and the anger and metaphor of being manipulated by the hollowness of sorrow and the futility of wishing the past were otherwise, is focused more on the present. There’s a sense of found family alongside actual family here – some of that pretty conventional (young person having to mature, coming of age etc.) but Ikemoto Ghosh handles these tropes with gentle aplomb, serving up a young person who’s basically getting on with life even when that life is far from ideal.

 

More to the point Hyo knows what and who she is – she’s not entirely happy with this sense of self-awareness but she doesn’t let ignorance or self-discovery get in the way of being a normal person. 

 

The cast of secondary characters is brilliantly fleshed out with the many characters quickly establishing themselves on the page and providing motivations, quirks and experiences that help them feel distinctive, which in a large cast feels essential. 

 

I sometimes get frustrated with the idea of YA as a genre purely because I miss books I would otherwise have found earlier and loved wholeheartedly. Hyo the Hellmaker is a great example of that – an ostensibly Young Adult novel (I think by dint of having a young person as the main character) that transcends those fake marketing requirements to be something I suspect will be of interest to readers of any age. 

 

--

Highlights:

• Gods and spirits and demons rubbing shoulders at the noodle bar
• Detective shenanigans
• Fantastic world building leaving me wanting more

Nerd Rating: 7/10, A brilliantly executed secondary world with fun and mysteries with characters who feel distinctive, entertaining and dealing with nuanced themes of justice and retribution.

References: Ikemoto Ghosh, Mina, Hyo the Hellmaker. [Scholastic 2024].

STEWART HOTSTON is an author of all kinds of science fiction and fantasy. He's also a keen Larper (he owns the UK Fest system, Curious Pastimes). He's a sometime physicist and currently a banker in the City of London. A Subjective Chaos and BFA finalist he's also Chair of the British Science Fiction Association and Treasurer for the British Fantasy Society. He is on bluesky at: @stewarthotston.com.

TV Microreview: Wonder Man

‘To thine own self be true’ is a superpower

Much like the 2005 movie Bewitched, the MCU series Wonder Man tells the story of the remake of an old production about a superpowered character, with the twist that the lead actor chosen for the role happens to actually have superpowers. Now, before you get too excited: just because Marvel decided to make a superhero story about the making of a superhero story doesn’t mean that it’s finally casting a critical gaze on itself. The show’s acknowledgment of the problematic cultural footprint of the superhero business doesn’t go beyond the briefest lip service. Don’t expect the level of awareness you find in The Boys, for example. Far be it from Marvel to bite its own hand. But what you do get in Wonder Man is a sweet character treatment of a talented, hopeful artist learning to get out of his own way, joined by a more mature artist who has used his talents in disgraceful ways and gets a chance to put them in the service of a nobler purpose.

First we meet Simon, a son of Haitian immigrants who first learned as a child the usefulness of putting on a performance when life got too cruel. After watching the old Wonder Man movie, he became enamoured with the art of fiction. Now he’s a struggling D-list actor who overthinks his roles and stresses out his agent because he can get annoying to film with. When he hears that there’s a Wonder Man remake being produced, he drops everything in pursuit of the lead role. But his complicated acting style is the least of his troubles: he also has superpowers, and they’re very hard to control, which would ban him from the acting profession if it became known. His arc is about deciding which side of him it’s wise to let people see.

Then we have Trevor, whom we met in Iron Man 3 and then in Shang-Chi. He’s trying to rebuild an acting career that he can be proud of, but his past misdeeds keep catching up with him. Under threat of sending him back to prison, the Department of Damage Control recruits him to gather information on Simon, who is considered extremely dangerous, but as the two become friends, Trevor ends up reevaluating his priorities and risking his own future to save Simon’s. His arc is about recognizing the one moral thing he can finally do, and daring to do it.

Together, Simon and Trevor are a lovely duo, the aspiring artist pushing the older one to rediscover his goodness, the veteran artist nudging the younger one to be more authentically himself in his craft. These two form the beating heart of the story, and the scenes where they nerd out about their love of acting are a pure delight. Fittingly, the theme of acting resonates with their respective problems: on Simon’s part, with the constant pretense that it takes to keep his superpowers hidden; and on Trevor’s part, with his secret mission to infiltrate Simon’s life. Their mutual game of masks is resolved when each realizes that there’s a time for vulnerable self-disclosure, and there’s a time to put on an elaborate act for the right reason.

It’s refreshing that, for once, a Marvel superhero doesn’t have to save the world from an all-devouring cataclysm. There’s also value in finding that there’s something worth saving in yourself.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Book Review: City of Others by Jared Poon

Magic and bureaucracy in a supernatural Singapore

It seems like I enjoy a subgenre of urban fantasy that I am starting to think of as “books that involve the bureaucratization of magic,” where main characters working for government agencies try to tame the magical world with procedures, paperwork, and protocols. Examples might include Charlie Stross’s The Laundry Files, parts of Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series, and now, it seems, Jared Poon’s new DEUS series beginning with City of Others.

Our narrator is Ben, who works in middle management at DEUS, the Division for Engagement of Unusual Stakeholders, part of the Ministry of Community, that oversees the “Others”: people with magic or connections to the supernatural.

The book is set in a Singapore where magic is everywhere, but most people don’t notice it due to what the ministry refers to as “Deviant Occurrences Blind Eye Syndrome” (DOBES). But most of the Others just all it the “DKP effect,” for “Don’t kaypoh” (kaypoh is Singaporean slang for ‘busybody’).

Ben’s team of government bureaucrats works to help Others fit into the overall fabric of Singaporean society. The team features a psychic, a spell-slinging bomoh (Malay shaman), a half-jinn intern, and Ben, who is a “Gardener” with access to a large well of internal magic. The team is eventually joined by a ghost cat who can rescue objects from the immediate past, as well as by Ben’s boyfriend, Adam.

Ben and his team face a dual threat: first, a world-ending attack from an endlessly ravenous shoal of creatures swimming in from a parallel but connected dimension; second, the possibility that their boss, Rebecca, may catch them performing an exorcism without a risk management plan and filing for official clearances.

There's just something I find charming about the juxtaposition of civil servants and bureaucracy with snake gods and other supernatural magic. For example, at one point, when Ben is trying to figure out what's going wrong in a residential neighbourhood, he tells himself, "OAR—Observe. Analyze. Respond. That was the DEUS framework for field observations around deviant phenomena. There was even a very nice set of slides, featuring clip-art people rowing a kayak together, that showed how the OAR framework could help us navigate complex situations.” As he considers what he can remember from the slides, he ends up submerged and frozen in a parallel universe for a few moments.

The OAR framework helps Ben navigate the situation, but his reference to it (and other government protocols) makes the magic seem possible to tame, which perhaps helps the reader feel like it could be real. Rather than forcing the reader into a magical realm, it brings the magic into our mundane realm with its informational PowerPoints and mnemonics to remember protocols.

Further, just as even mundane employees sometimes face top-down policies that make their lives difficult, Ben must deal with the DEUS’s past policies, which focused more on controlling and policing the Others rather than helping them. In the past, DEUS even violently shut down locations where Others gathered, calling them “unhygienic” and “lawless." Due to this legacy, many powerful Others do not trust DEUS, and Ben must work to prove that the agency has changed.

The book is peppered with pop culture references, with a light and humorous tone.  For example, Ben quotes both Aladdin and Star Wars at his boyfriend and, at one point, in the midst of the battle against the shoal, his team needs to stop everything to participate in the Ministry of Community Sports Day to demonstrate their team spirit for their boss. But the book also has a deeper core, where characters cope with past grief and mistakes while learning to grow and work together. Ben begins the book unable to ask for help and feeling emotionally estranged from his father. By the end, he comes to better understand how his father shows care, and also learns to ask for help when he needs it.

I enjoyed that this book was set in Singapore. We get to hear about different forms of magical beings based in Asian folklore, such as the manananggal, a mythical creature from Filipino folklore, and Semar, a Javanese demigod. Poon also integrates aspects of Singaporean history into the book, such as in the fact that the category of “Other” for magical creatures comes from a post-colonial era racial classification that the Singaporean government used as an administrative tool. People were asked to self-identify as “Chinese, Malay, Indian, or Other.” This puts all the magic users together with racialized others: “We, of course, were in the last category, which included jiangshi [undead corpse creatures from Chinese folklore], diviners, and elves right alongside Eurasians, Filipinos, Arabs—all the ones who had to tick a special box and fill something in when they entered the National Service.”

City of Others is clearly the first in a series where we spend a lot of the book meeting new characters and being introduced to the larger context of magical Singapore. The city has several powerful factions of Others that vie for influence, and there’s even a shadowy private organization trying to build technology with magic taken from Others. Because we’re being introduced to so many new characters and settings, the narrative can feel a bit like it’s dragging at times. But it was an amusing first book, and I’ll be curious about how Poon continues to build out this world.

Highlights:

• Fun, magical Singapore
• Bureaucratization of magic
• Queer characters
• Ghost cat

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10. Definitely enjoyable, but you’ll notice that it’s setting up for a longer series.

Reference: Poon, Jared. City of Others [Orbit, 2026].

POSTED BY: Christine D. Baker, historian and lover of SFF and mysteries. You can find her also writing reviews at Ancillary Review of Books or podcasting about classic scifi/fantasy at Hugo History. Come chat books with her on Bluesky @klaxoncomms.com.