Book Review: Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky

A first contact novel on an unusually hostile alien planet. 

An Adrian Tchaikovsky science fiction novel has a big overarching pattern with endless variation. A strange setting in space or on a planet. Alien intelligences that don’t work like human ones at all, but slowly there is understanding between the alien and the human. The alien intelligences can and often are strikingly different than our own, and are not humans with headridges. 

His 2025 Hugo finalist effort in this regard is Shroud. 

The future depicted in Shroud is a rather bleak one--Corporatocracy goes to the stars, and like a capitalist von Neumann machine, is spreading in sub-light ships and cryosleep. Reach a new system, set up extraction facilities, get the minerals and materials to expand and move on. You are woken out of cryosleep if you are useful and the ROI on your food, water and air is there. It’s next stage Capitalism in a terrifying iteration. Capitalism ruined Earth... but also got us to the stars and allowing us to swarm, slowly, across the galaxy. 

Enter our main character and point of view: Juna Ceelander. Unlike the other members of her team, she doesn’t have a technical speciality in their Special Projects division. She instead is the interface between the specialists and their boss, Bartokh. Her teammates assume that being the interface means she is just sleeping with the Director and isn’t good at anything. The politics and conflicts aboard ship are reminiscent of a number of toxic workplaces in SFF (like, say The Mercy of Gods by James S A Corey).

In any event, the team is soon confronted that the titular planet of Shroud is even stranger than they thought..A planet totally in the dark, and with aliens who live on broadcasting, essentially, radio frequencies. A cold and strange world. But there is life here, definitely, and perhaps even more. There is enough here that Juna and the Special Projects division gets a bunch of resources to investigate the surface. Life of this complexity (and maybe even out right intelligent) has never been encountered before. 

And. then, in short order, disaster happens. Juna and Mai and Bartokh get into the modules that Mai and special projects have made and manage to get down to the planet, leaving their destroyed portion of the spaceship behind. They land on a planet where everything uses radio, where they are the only creatures that can see. Oh and they are in pods they cannot leave, or they will die, quickly and messily.

And then the plot really gets going. 

The backbone of this is a classic “cross the planet” quest as our survivors, inside of their modules, try to get to the one location where they might be rescued--the beanstalk that they have set up at the “pole”. The novel turns into a road trip--but a road trip where Juna’s point of view is broken up by the point of view of the intelligent alien species. It’s a fascinating balancing act as we see Juna and the others’ actions interpreted and misinterpreted by the aliens, and vice versa by means of their interspersed points of view. We also get, in Tchaikovsky fashion, an omniscient drop in here and there. This omniscient bit gives us the backbone of how life evolved on Shroud and how it rose to intelligence and its current position. I don’t know that these sections are strictly necessary--one can enjoy the plot and worldbuilding without them, but it feels like a tip of the hat to Tchaikovsky’s The Doors of Eden where all the alternate worlds’ divergences are explained in interstitial chapters. I do feel that at the bottom, that the appeal of Tchaikovsky’s novels are rooted strongly in their worldbuilding and that superstructure is *fun* for the author to show off for us.

Going back into the mainline of the novel, we see this at work. While we get bits and pieces until the crash-landing onto the planet, it is on the planet that the nature of the aliens and the interrogation of alien biology that Tchaikovsky is making her, becomes clear. We’ve had in prior novels aliens based on almost Lamarckian recombination (Alien Clay). The spiders which mark many novels and novellas in his oeuvre. Aliens who rearrange planets into art pieces. And much more. Here, Tchaikovsky builds a world and creates aliens who work and adapt on the principles of mechanics and mechanical engineering. 

Tchaikovsky also has a lot of fun with puncturing some of the assumptions that have accreted over first contact. This is a first contact novel, to be sure, but that contact is a long process that really doesn’t even work well until the denouement. The humans’ attempt to use the Fibonacci sequence to communicate (the whole math as the universal language) comes in with contemptuous humor in the novel. Getting the point of view of the aliens to these communication attempts helps illustrate for the reader just how off the map this is for the denizens of Shroud. They are mechanical engineers working by iterative trial and error rather than anything like theory. That’s how they evolved to be what they are. So yes, that trial and error does finally pay off, but it is a long pay-off for the humans and aliens to finally be able to talk to each other.

As much as it is the aliens’ story, the novel really is Juna’s story, much more than the other humans, especially since we don’t have another human point of view. Juna is not sleeping with Bartokh, and in fact as an understudy for everyone, has a small amount of knowledge in everything. More importantly, she has flexibility of thought that allows her to work with the more technically minded Mai to manage the journey. At several points, Tchaikovsky makes the subtext text: the flexibility and adaptability of Juna is why Mai and Juna can make a go of this wild idea at all.¹ But that goes to the aliens’ nature and the “whatever works” realpolitik of trying to make a go of it in extremely harsh conditions. 

Shroud is a paean to engineering, from the nature of the aliens, to the ways that the humans try to understand Shroud as a planet, and, eventually, work to leave it after being stranded there. It occasionally goes into the highbrow in thinking about how we could come up with aliens that exist in its lightless, high radio environment, but at it’s core, its a journey of survival across a wild world rendered expertly. 

It’s a science fiction novel that is unapologetically and in the central core of what we understand science fiction to be, and to do. To put it in the context of the other 2026 Finalists for Best Novel for the Hugo Awards, it’s the most mainstream Science Fiction of the lot by far. Death of the Author is metafictional, immersed in the idea of stories, who tells them, why they are told, and how they are told. A Drop of Corruption, The Incandescent, The Raven Scholar and The Everlasting are all fantasy novels. Fantasy has had a real surge in the 2020’s; Shroud feels like it is not in step with the other novels at all (Death of the Author feels different, too, in a different way, much of a literary chassis). However, with two Best Novel nominees last year, and Shroud this year, Tchaikovsky, even given that he writes fantasy as well (The Tyrant Philosophers novels and novellas, most particularly lately) seems to be the science fiction author of award prominence and in the mind of Hugo voters. Shroud cements that reputation and place.

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Highlights:

• Unapologetic Space Opera. 
• Strange and well done Tchaikovsky aliens, high engineering style
• Shows the versatility of the author. 

Reference: Tchaikovsky, Adrian, Shroud, (Orbit, 2025)

¹ Tchaikovsky seems to riffing off of Heinlein’s “Specialization is for insects” idea. Juna is the anti-specialist, but she is adaptable enough to be the essential member of the survivors.

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

Film Review: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a meta narrative on slasher films, queerness, the media that shapes us, and desire. 

Lots of movies about specific interests are often referred to as "love letters to [blank]" — so much so that it's a bit of a cliché, at this point. But Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, directed by Jane Schoenbrun of I Saw The TV Glow, truly is a love letter to slasher films. In telling the story of young director Kris (Hannah Einbender of Hacks), who gets the extraordinary opportunity to revive the classic horror franchise that she grew up with, Schoenbrun creates their own new slasher world, complete with  lived-in world building and mythology.

The film itself is full of painted vistas, dreamy sets, movies-within-movies, and absolutely insane needle drops. But despite all this, it's the cinematic equivalent to inside baseball. There is a lot going on in the film, and fans of Schoenbrun's work will most likely revel in the weird, glorious, and twisted world they created. For folks who are into horror but in a more casual way, they may walk out confused. To be fair, it's confusing. A24 passed on it, if that tells you anything. There's an entirely different analysis that could be done from the trans perspective, but I'll leave that reading to others who can speak to it more meaningfully.

The heart of the film revolves around two main relationships: Kris and Billy Presley (played by Gillian Anderson in her best Southern Gothic Norma Desmond) as they spend a wild weekend exploring the possibility of a reboot, and Kris & Billy and Little Death, the recurring villain the series. 

First, Gillian Anderson's final girl-all-grown-up performance is absolutely the stuff of dreams, and maybe one of the strongest parts. Presley inhabits the abandoned summer camp where the first movie was shot, having become the classic ex-Hollywood recluse archetype. When Kris arrives, she's greeted with classic Southern hospitality: two buckets worth of Kentucky Fried Chicken (complete with dipping sauces) and copious amounts of weed. 

Kris and Billy are attracted to each other, and shortly after meeting hook up. Kris grows frustrated, declaring herself "bad at sex." Billy is empathetic and doesn't pressure her to continue. She admits that she too has had trouble with coitus, and has relied on imagining Little Death watching her have sex. Kris, we learn, that despite her status as a queer feminist filmmaker, frequently fantasizes about being a sexualized final girl. She admits that as a young child (perhaps too young to be exposed, in fact) she obsessively watched the Little Death franchise, and this fantasy became embedded in her psyche. 

For many people, media shapes us in ways that go beyond just taste — including the ones kept secret from everyone else. Horror and sex have always been intertwined, for a multitude of reasons: teenagers are drawn to it. The line between fear and desire is razor thin — titillation goes both ways. Horror films have often been also used as morality plays, where the "horny" teens get their comeuppance by way of brutal stabbing. Then there's the homosexual subtext in Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge, a movie so gay that Freddy Krueger himself becomes the metaphor of being gay for a young teen, an intense self-loathing that permeates the film. Movies like Sleepaway Camp added to the gender dialogue, though that film has been hotly debated in recent years by queer scholars as to what it's really trying to say.

Much of the film revolves around these two characters simply talking and eating, and Schoenbrun in an interview with The New York Times described it as being influenced by My Dinner With Andre, the 1981 character study where the leads dine at Cafe Des Artistes and simply chat about life. The fried chicken, and then the candy that's every where — these all speak to the joy and comfort we get from pleasures of the flesh.

It reminds me of the novel Cranford, where the strict Victorian women must retreat to the solitude of their own room to enjoy oranges. When my English professor back in 2003 mentioned that this was absolutely a metaphor for sexual desire, I was floored. And yet, here we are, 175 years later, and we're able to witness the exact opposite of such prudishness. We get not only the metaphor — there are literally gummy bear and Sour Patch Kid chandeliers — but also later, two women having sex on screen. In another era, the simple fact of the main characters being gay would have doomed them to certain death by the villain. The very opposite happens, however.

They are thus connected together in their respective sexual proclivities that revolve around the fictional monster. Naming him "Little Death" is a little too on the nose for me, but one can see where it could be clever. The movie's end then gets meta as they insert themselves into the world of the film, and that's where I stopped understanding what exactly was happening. But that's okay! I admittedly came for the vibes, and I stayed for the vibes.

When it comes to meta-textual films, I think there's a very thin line you have to tow: Staying part of the "new" plot while not crossing streams too often. Self-aware media has existed for a long time (Hamlet, anyone?) but recent films have had varying degrees of success. Adaptation, for one, but also Scream, Being John Malkovitch...the list is surprisingly longer than you'd expect. Personally, I'm not the hugest fan, as I mentioned before I think there's such a thing as being too clever. It can quickly obfuscate nearly everything else about the film, especially the acting and the story. 

For Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, I didn't worry about the meta-ness of it all. Sometimes, you don't have to understand every single beat of a movie to enjoy it. When the characters didn't die at the end of the run time, I just shrugged and said, "Great!" It was enough for me to live in this odd world for a little while. The mythology of Little Death is so well choreographed that it felt like home. The opening sequence uses that classic exposition trick of overlaying the titles with a 30-year history of the franchise via newspaper articles. This old trick is up there with the Indiana Jones airplane-travel-red-line-on-a-map trick, and I'm a huge fan. By the time the movie starts, you have a really good grasp of this lived-in franchise and its ups and downs over the years. As someone who wishes there were more classic slasher villains in the world, getting this fake one is actually really fun.

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Highlights:

• Gillian Anderson eating fried chicken.
• Classic homages to Sleepaway Camp, Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, Friday the 13th, and countless other horror films.
• The Counting Crows needle drop being used in a scene Adam Duritz could never have imagined when writing this sad ballad.
• Great supporting cast in Eva Victor and Zach Cherry
• Like many good horror films, it has hilarious moments to break the tension

Rating: 7/10

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

Film Review: The End of Oak Street

Come for a bite of big lizard action, stay for the biting social commentary

You’d think that dinos going nom nom on people is a sure winning formula that should be impossible to flunk, but then you look at the lamentable state of the Jurassic franchise and notice how easily it’s put to shame by The End of Oak Street. Its simple premise of an entire neighborhood mysteriously snatched in time and transported to prehistoric Earth allows for plenty of cool monster action in assorted combinations that maintain a heightened level of tension throughout. The ending, however, feels abrupt and incongruously happy after all the terror that precedes it. If you can excuse a less than elegant resolution, this movie rewards with abundant people-munching gore. And if you take a look beneath the surface narrative, you’ll realize this is a far smarter movie than its primeval beasts would suggest.

The story is set in a suburb of Detroit in 1982, a very difficult time that writer/director David Robert Mitchell experienced personally in his childhood. The deterioration of the American carmaker sector resulted in waves of closed factories and thousands of newly unemployed. This crisis coincided with the start of Reaganomics and its devastating effect on the income gap, and with the cultural shift toward a conservative moral agenda anchored in the past. In the film, Ewan McGregor’s character is shown to be struggling to provide for his family after being fired, while his wife, played by Anne Hathaway, is stuck in the position of desperate housewife with unfulfilled professional aspirations. When they’re thrown into prehistoric Earth, her husband reacts with the same naïve optimism that characterized the average 1980s American patriarch, complete with purely performative religiosity. Even before they’re faced with the task of surviving a horde of ravenous dinosaurs, this family is already in the middle of the epic quest to survive Reaganism.

And if the historic parallels aren’t enough by this point, please look up General Motors Poletown and the depressing tale of how, in a desperate attempt to revive the past glories of the car industry, an entire neighborhood of Detroit was demolished in the 1980s to clear up space for a new car factory, displacing hundreds of families in the process. This is a movie about what happens when the past comes uninvited to tear your house down and wreck your everyday life. At the symbolic level, surviving a horde of ravenous dinosaurs is surviving Reaganism.

Put yourself in the shoes of a kid growing up in 1980s Detroit. There’s a spiraling crime wave, a crack epidemic, deadly gang wars, a dwindling job market, and a perverse new hobby of setting houses on fire. That’s the city in utter chaos that inspired The Crow and Robocop. That’s the Detroit where Mitchell grew up, and the anxiety that he expresses in this movie is not a fantasy scenario. The movie translates that feeling into thrilling action with dinosaurs, but the numerous scenes of abandoned houses crumbling to pieces, of background characters being randomly killed all over the neighborhood in broad daylight, and the protagonists’ dread that the same violence could target their family at any moment, is precisely what it felt like to grow up in 1980s Detroit.

And Mitchell has very specific points to make about society’s response to those changes. The 1980s provided mass culture with a limited repertoire of role models. The protagonists’ son likes to play with a bow and arrow, à la John Rambo, but once the dinosaurs show up, that weapon proves useless. Pay close attention to a couple of scenes in the first act: first, during a family meal, the daughter remarks on her brother’s annoying boys-will-be-boys attitude, and a joke is made about a massive load of poop that he once made as a baby; the morning after, the next-door neighbor, a guy previously established as a gun-happy jerk, shows up to complain that he’s found a man-sized pile of poop on his backyard, and blames the protagonists. To defuse the situation, the father decides that it will be the son’s responsibility to clean it up. The audience knows that it’s actually dinosaur poop, in a clear allusion to Jurassic Park, but hidden there is also a clever commentary on the role that gun violence plays in constructing the 1980s macho archetype (which Mitchell evidently judges to amount to a big load of poop) and the responsibility that falls onto young men to help dismantle it.

Am I stretching my interpretation too far? Consider a later scene, which I think makes the point even more obviously: a Titanoboa enters undetected through the parents’ bedroom window and sneaks past each kid’s bedroom, even though the doors are open and its presence should be obvious if only they bothered to look. It finds the mother and prepares for the fatal bite, but the son injures it with one of his arrows, giving his mother a snap-instant opening to fight back. Note that (a) this is the only time in the movie that the protagonists are attacked inside their house, and (b) this is the only time in the movie that the son’s weapon is good for something. This scene is a metaphor for sexual violence. The real Titanoboa was a snake, but in the movie it’s portrayed with a smooth, off-white skin that makes it look like a gigantic penis. When it’s about to attack the mother and opens its mouth, its tongue looks nothing like a snake’s tongue; it looks unmistakably like female genitalia. The point here is that sexual violence can go on undetected inside your own house (starting in the parents’ bedroom and spreading from there), even when it should be obvious, and women shouldn’t have to fight it alone without the help of male power.

It would be irresponsible and pointless to try to speculate on which of these horrific social scourges were specifically part of Mitchell’s lfe, and in the movie itself he takes pains to let us know as much: the mother has been writing a novel in her free time, in which she describes an unhappy housewife who plans to abandon her family, but she makes it clear that her urge to explore those feelings through her art doesn’t mean she’s describing herself. The End of Oak Street is 1980s Detroit as Mitchell saw it, and it’s there to make us feel like it felt for him. The fact that our heroes escape the prehistoric Earth through a shiny spherical bubble, like in the Terminator movies, gives us the last key for interpretation: whatever his personal hell, science fiction presented him with a way out. Just like it was for so many of us who grew up in the tumultuous 1980s, science fiction was how he escaped.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

The Recluce Reread: The Order War

Welcome back dear readers to the fourth installment of the Recluce Reread! Today we’re going to discuss The Order War, in which we learn a lot more about the nature of order and chaos, have more political Recluce drama, and end with a world changing finale - though if we’re being fair, a number of these early books have world changing finales.

If you’re keeping up with the series chronology, and I certainly wouldn’t blame anyone for just going with the flow, The Order War is set 400 years or so after the previous book, The Magic Engineer, which means it is around 700 years after the founding of Recluce in The Towers of the Sunset. The Order War is still some 200 years before we meet Lerris in The Magic of Recluce, though if you’ve read *that* book you’ll note very quickly that this is the same Justen that Lerris meets and Gunnar is Lerris’s father.

Modesitt changes up the Recluce formula a bit in The Order War. This time our protagonist Justen is not exiled from the island of Recluce (or functionally driven from Westwind as Creslin was) but as a magic engineer joins a small military detachment traveling to Sarronnyn to help defend it against the White Wizards of Fairhaven. Oh, those chaos mages. They just want to take over the whole world and there’s always some order mage getting in their way. 

To simplify a good amount of plot, In the battles against the Fairhaven wizards and troops, Justen is separated from the rest of the Recluce and while hunted by the white wizards eventually travels a decent way across Candar to the forest of Naclos (after being rescued by a druid who has been talking to him in his dreams)

In various novels we’ve encountered mentions of the druids, Naclos, the Great Forest, The Accursed Forest - but here we are introduced to the actual community that lives in the forest and in balance (always the balance) with nature and order and chaos. I may have to push the re-read farther than I was planning to see how deep into the Naclos lore we actually get. 

When we first met Justen in The Magic of Recluce we meet him as a Grey Wizard, one who embodies (sort of) both Order and Chaos. The rest of our protagonists and heroes have been fairly pure black (order) mages thus far - but what the novels have been hinting at to various degrees is that excessive order concentrated in one place or machines will only breed more chaos across the world, which is how the white wizards of Fairhaven have grown so powerful even as Recluce itself has become a world power. 

To the druids that accumulation of excessive order and chaos in the world is, well, unbalanced for how the world should be and is a harbinger of great conflicts to come. In Justen they see a potential druid who is at the cusp of understanding his own balance but who can also be a tool for stepping back into the world to “do something” about Fairhaven and respect the balance at the same time. Recluce has since learned that building a stronger fleet of order based ships or doing mighty deeds with massive amounts of order magic may achieve their short term strategic aim but will long term increase concentrations of chaos across Candar. Also - I kind of wonder how the island nations of Hamor and Nordla feel about all of that. Like, they are just minding their business and all of sudden, bam, there’s more powerful magicians in their land?

The thrust of all of this is a big climactic battle and mighty deeds and Justen (and his brother Gunnar, a weather mage like Creslin, along with a guard from Recluce) takes his newly built “land engine” and floats a giant magnifying glass in the sky and melts Fairhaven like an ant. It’s much more traumatic than that, both in the experience of it as well as the Frvn we first discovered in The Magic of Recluce.

The Order War is a significantly more satisfying book than The Magic Engineer was and Justen is a more enjoyable (less dangergeld whiny) protagonist to follow than Dorrin could ever hope to be, though there is still a pattern of not explaining things in this book as has been in the previous three. I suspect it’s because there is a greater maturity to Justen and he generally accepts Recluce and Order as they are, though we are not without conflicts with Recluce as the three person ruling council includes an incredibly corrupt trader and two other councilors who seem to not want to go against said councilor. It’s never smooth sailing. Conflict from within. Conflict from without. 

There is an ancient druid in Naclos. I don’t know when we learn who she is, but internet sleuthing tells me that she is Ayrlyn, one of the original “angels” who ended up in this world in the events we read about in The Fall of Angels and The Chaos Balance - which is approximately 1200 years in the past, if we’re wondering how long lived some of those druids can be. We also revisit Werlynn, a singer and druid, who mentions his long dead children, which we know are Creslin and Llyse from Westwind (if you remember The Towers of the Sunset).

Well - that’s it for The Order War. When we meet again we’ll talk about The Death of Chaos, in which everything ends even though Modesitt will write 20 more Recluce novels, but none set after that book.


Related Short Story: The Price of Perfect Order. 

Set 8 years after The Order War, the story doesn’t so much deal with the fallout of the climactic melting of Fairhaven and reduction of chaos and order as show some consequence of what it means to be truly ordered and how Recluce deals with those who don’t live up to that ideal.

What is interesting and not successful reading this right after The Order War is there is a trader named Ryltar, which unless I am getting twisted up character names, which is the same name as one of the antagonists of The Order War and in the same profession but is a 20ish year old trader who still seems wrong. Maybe I have the name wrong, but I read this right after finishing the novel and that aspect read incredibly discordant.

This is also probably my least favorite of the short stories I’ve read while pushing along the re-read.

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PUBLISHED BY: Joe Sherry - Senior Editor of Nerds of a Feather. Hugo and Ignyte Winner. Minnesotan.

Festival View: Em & Selma Go Griffin Hunting

There is a look to genre short films. You expect a DIYness, and a high contrast shooting. I see hundreds of them a year, so when something bucks the trend, I know I am watching something special. 

Em & Selma Go Griffin Hunting is one of the most beautiful short films I have ever seen, with effects that are on-par with Hollywood’s best, and a story that is equal parts heartbreaking and breathtaking. 

The story is this; in an alternate Depression era, a mother, Selma, and her daughter, Em, are griffin hunters, the most significant ritual of their ancestors. The two have a different point of view on the griffins. Selma is of the tradition, while Em is far less staunch in her desire to continue it, but if it’s gonna happen, she wants a big score. 

If you’re thinking this is a lot like the 1930s in many ways, you’re absolutely right. The Depression was an era of massive cultural and societal change. The young, those who would be fighting in or dealing with the impact of, World War II in a decade, were coming to grips with the idea that their future was likely to be worse than their parent’s past. The way mother and daughter interact with one another shows the difference between those upon whom the Depression landed fully, and those that came up through it. Selma is simply happy to have something, Em wants different, if not necessarily better. 

Something that is interesting is in the writing process; they viewed the griffins as co-stars. That is demonstrated not only through the way that the characters interact with them, but how they interact with each other about them. Selma sees their role as important, and they must do right by the beasts as well as themselves. Em doesn’t think the ritual is doing right by the griffins at all, but seems to want to do ti right.  

There is an interaction with wood nymphs that shows Em’s still a child, even if she’s saying things that indicate her maturity, at least unto herself. The inclusion of the wood nymphs does a lot of work in establishing the world as more than simply the humans and the griffins, which in the weeks since I watched it for the last time, has made me wonder what else is out there. 

I can talk about the mythological connections between the griffins and Christian iconography, about how that plays with the new religious movements of the 1930s, about the nymph as a signifier for youth, beauty, nature, all of which are embodied by Em. It’s all there, and I chewed on this for days and days, watching it a half-dozen times during programming, and then in the weeks after the festival where it was incredibly well-received. 

But the thing that hit me was the look. 

Let’s start with the griffins. 

I was 18 when Jurassic Park was released. I remember sitting in the theatre, it was the morning of my high school graduation, and seeing the first dinosaurs appear and just being incredibly stunned by the realism. Even back then, I knew computer graphics, had seen SIGGRAPH video compilations, and this was better than anything I’d ever seen. 

The griffins were at that same level, only now, with decades of advancement, improvement, this was easily the best fantastical animal I’ve ever seen on screen. They are realistic in a way that not only brings them to life, but also makes everything around them seem more realistic, adding an almost Dorothea Lang sense to the action, and that adds a sense of pathos. It is incredible what effects can do when they are integrated into the story instead of being illustrative. 

The black and white cinematography is utterly clean, perfected graded, and insanely precise. It may seem as if it was chosen because of the timeframe, and the director has said as much, but it also did something that no one may have seen in the process. It draws out sorrow. There is a natural bleakness to black and white in this age of the hyper-colored cinema experience. What filmmakers are starting to realize is that is it not merely the setting that is portrayed through the color palette, but the emotional signifier. This, actually, is a concept that dates back to German Expressionism, but it has often been buried under decades of most contemporary film criticism. 

This entire story deserves to be played by fine actors, and this is where Semla & Em Go Griffin Hunting gets it so right that it hurts. Selma is played by Pollyanna McIntosh. You may recognise her from The Walking Dead or Vikings. She also directed the exceptional short Quicksand. There are few genre actors today who naturally inhabit their characters as McIntosh, and I can not express how she manages to play the fantastical and the Depression era equally well. Em, played by Milly Shapiro of Broadway's Matilda and the horror flick Heredity, hits every note hard. The little softness to her performance allows the breaking of the tension, and it makes the hard hit harder, smarter. 

I can’t recommend this film enough. It’s won more awards that I can count and has played dozens of festivals. I hope it’ll get a general release of some-sort, but who knows. Shorts are still hard to find after they’ve run through their festival life.  

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POSTED BY: Chris Garcia - Archivist, curator, festival programmer, and professional wrestling enthusiast. @johnnyeponymous

Book Nanoreviews: Heaven's Graveyard, The Infinite State, and The Demon Star

Heaven's Graveyard by Grace Curtis

Heaven's Graveyard does a couple of unusual things for secondary world fantasy. First, it is set in a modern, industrialised world. It closely resembles the late 1920s/early 1930s in our world in both technology and geopolitics, with creaky automobiles, well-developed industrialisation, and simmering tensions between major powers suggesting a war might break out at any point. Second, it is set in the same world as Grace Curtis's previous book, Idolfire, but is not a sequel: it is in fact set 2,000 years later. Familiarity with Idolfire might add some marginal accents you'd miss if you haven't read it—the key initial motivating factor for our main character is trying to find evidence that the main character of Idolfire is real—but it really is marginal. And the accent could just as easily work the other way; a bit of context is added to Idolfire if you've read Heaven's Graveyard beforehand. Both of these things work very well for me; the worldbuilding is tight and compelling. The glint of largely absent magic in the background and some fine reflections on the nature of religion and belief add to the picture.

So the book initially looks like it will be an archaeological mystery: what happened in the past and can our main character, Cod, prove it? It quite quickly morphs into a murder mystery and then, about halfway through, takes a quite hard left turn into quite tense geopolitical drama: the whole thing feels a bit like lesbian nerd Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Typically for Curtis, however, the focus is not on the broader political ructions or big action sequences. Instead, the personal stakes and motivations of the core cast take centre stage.

In her previous work, I found that the personal, almost-cozy tone pulled in a different direction to the nuanced characterisation and often quite spiky, borderline cynical thematic and plot elements. Happily, four books in, Curtis has the tonal register working in harmony with all the other elements of this excellent book. This is in large part down to Cod's own spiky persona: unapologetically neurodiverse, relatable, and a bit of a mess at the same time as being extremely accomplished. A secondary plot focused on her family works fantastically to add depth and history to Cod's character. All of this is delivered—as I've come to expect from Curtis—in fabulous, evocative prose. Ultimately a hugely impressive novel from an author really hitting her stride.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

The Infinite State by Richard Swan

The Infinite State is an unfortunately topical book. Unfortunate, because it's about life under a fascist space empire and the compromises and sacrifices necessary to even imperfectly rebel against it, and those seem like vital themes right now. The book opens with the death of the head of a government-linked megacorporation, and the possibilities and vulnerabilities that that death opens up for his wife, Katherine. In particular, the key plot driver is her plan to buy a planet for colonisation from the galactic UN-equivalent and set up a less repressive state. Hers is one of three points of view, the others being Julian, a naïve foreign driver working in the fascist state without asking too many questions, and Cyprian, a cynical, burned-out cop both complicit in and deeply contemptuous of the state's repression. Right from the start, the atmosphere is impeccably crafted. Pretty much every single character is just waiting for the Sword of Damocles to fall; every action courts suspicion, and even the most paranoid worries have some risk of coming true. It's also a deeply patriarchal and misogynistic setting, with open homophobia and heavy coercion for women to have as many children as possible.

Unsurprisingly, given the pretty grim setup, the characters are all generally contemptible in a quite compelling way. Katherine and Julian start the book as privileged idiots who are shocked when the fash come for them too, while Cyprian and a number of other supporting characters are smart, broken functionaries within the system who commit evil in its name all the while seething—with varying degrees of impotence—to do something about it. So far, so promising, but there really is something quite lacking in its execution as a complete story.

The plot is thin and frayed almost to breaking point in places, unable to support the events and character development that hang off it. Swan jumps from (nicely done) set piece to set piece without much explanation. Some key plot events happen in an incredibly (in both senses of the word) easy manner, given the fascist state's otherwise tight control. Similarly, the worldbuilding elements outside the state—some of which are plot-critical—really don't quite make sense. The Infinite State is the first in a series, and I'm sure some of these elements will be developed later, but as a standalone proposition the book suffers from these deficiencies. A bit more thought and 50 or 100 additional pages adding character depth and connective tissue between major events really would have helped. As it is, the book leaves us in a place where I'm interested enough in the characters and in what comes next that I'm keen to read the next book, but with just a bit more attention (much of it editorial, rather than authorial, I think) we could have had something more impressive than the perfectly adequate baseline the published book presents us with.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

The Demon Star by Jesse Aragon

The Demon Star is an entertainingly gonzo dark science fantasy romp. We open on a shattered, hostile world with a few outposts of civilization doing only very slightly better than bare survival. These outposts have competing religious beliefs about gods and demons who must be appeased and/or fought as the case may be. Every so often there is a "harvest" where the gods descend and take people away who are never seen again, particularly those psychically talented. We expand from this setup to a slightly cosmic-horror-tinged plot of revenge, revolution, and pretty large helpings of violence. Although it isn't on the cover copy and isn't, from what I've been able to tell, what the author has said are her influences, I get strong impressions of R. Scott Bakker as written by C. S. Friedman: a dark science fantasy that isn't quite grimdark in the specific early 2000s mode.

I'm a fan of science fantasy done well, and the atmosphere and tone Aragon serves up are both great. Our two main point of view characters—a woman who was supposed to be harvested living on the fringes of the biggest city on the planet and an alcoholic, tortured priest of the city's religion—are compromised in a lot of ways, but interesting enough to maintain one's attention. There are several twists throughout that aren't quite unexpected (there are appropriate hints of what's coming) but do a good job escalating the stakes and the scope of the world.

The prose is largely straightforward, but with an appealing gothic tint to it that really works for the subject matter. The problem, though, is that it really, really doesn't feel like a complete work. Crucial character dynamics we're expected to pretty quickly care about are doled out largely in "as you know" asides or brief flashbacks. This means that key character developments feel occasionally unearned or incoherent. Similarly, several crucial bits of the political setup that undergirds both the societies in the setting and the conflict that erupts partway through are sketched so briefly as to be inadequate. Even moreso than was the case for The Infinite State, the skeleton of plot we're given just isn't sufficient to bear the weight of the characterisation and worldbuilding hung off it. There's so much that feels missing that one gets the impression of a duology cut down to a single volume in the editorial process. Again, this may well be more an editorial than an authorial issue. Either way, The Demon Star has enough glimmers of real interest and talent that I'm interested in what Aragon writes next, but for me at least does not come close to fully realising that potential.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

References:

Curtis, Grace. Heaven's Graveyard [DAW Books, 2026].

Swan, Richard. The Infinite State [Tor, 2026].

Aragon, Jesse. The Demon Star [DAW Books, 2026].

POSTED BY: Eddie Clark. Professional nerd by day, amateur nerd by night. @dreddieclark.bsky.social

Film Microreview: The Last House

Coronavirus allegories are needed in film, but this is the wrong allegory

At the start of this decade, when mass quarantine briefly reduced the footprint of human activity on the world, the meme “Nature is healing” achieved viral popularity. In the new Netflix movie The Last House, the premise seems to be: “Nature is healing… BUT AT WHAT COST?”

It all starts when the creatures of the sea revolt against humanity’s predation (there are a lot of references to dead fish in this movie) and weaponize the water cycle to produce a special type of water that seals houses hermetically. Their revenge comes in the form of a continuous rain that coats houses in a self-reparing layer, keeping people locked inside. The plot of the movie follows a suburban family (whose hobbies and interests are a bit too obviously gender-coded) as they find themselves forced to work together, contributing their respective talents, so they can survive with the food they have until they figure out how to force their front door open.

The movie is sharply divided in two parts: at the beginning, this family deals with their situation with a light-hearted attitude—at times too light-hearted, as if it wanted to be a comedy. The second part abruptly becomes survival horror when the neighbors start dying of starvation and it’s revealed that there are big, scary creatures lurking in the rain, and they can unlock the doors whenever they want.

Movies about the collective trauma of the coronavirus pandemic were to be expected, but it’s strange that they have been so few. In The Last House, an even bigger strangeness is that, while it’s unafraid to explore directly the psychological toil of a worldwide crisis that forced us to stay apart from each other, the movie’s attention is aimed at the isolation, not at the underlying crisis. Translating the allegory back into real life, it seems to be saying that the real disaster wasn’t so much the widespread infection as the quarantine, that the generation-defining scar we’ll carry forever isn’t the count of possibly tens of millions of deaths, but rather, having had to stay indoors for some months. This is a movie that wants to say something about a tragedy but prefers to focus on a related inconvenience.

This attitude is noticeable in the way the parents try to keep the kids occupied during the first weeks of isolation. Helpfully for the scope of the plot, phone and internet service is lost immediately, but somehow electricity, water and gas keep functioning for far longer. This family happens to own just two DVDs that they rewatch a sickening number of times: Annie and Air Force One, a melodrama about finding a home for a child and a hyper-patriotic thriller structured like a home invasion movie. Such choice of allusions reveals The Last House’s conservative stance: the priority is to safeguard a home for the kids, and prolonged separation denies them a proper childhood. This echoes the real-life argument that mandatory quarantine was an invasion of personal freedom. Nevermind that, in the world of The Last House, the weird rain has also conjured tentacled horrors that kill anyone who makes it outside. The movie heavily implies that Homo sapiens is to blame for the suffering of sea creatures, but our heroes’ response in the end is to wield those big brains and opposable thumbs to hunt and kill sea creatures.

So the elements for a story that comments on the early 2020s are there: people can’t leave their houses, the outside world has a mysterious deadly enemy, and the feeling of powerlessness is stressful for everyone. But it has its commentary backwards: in real life, being confined indoors was a solution, not the problem. The problem was that the virus made physical socialization dangerous, and isolation was what we decided to do to protect each other. In the movie, isolation is treated as the problem, an excessive punishment on humankind imposed by monsters, and protecting each other means finding a way to break the forced isolation.

The Last House works better when it feels small, when it cares about the value of mutual care and the cumulative weight of uncertainty. But it mutates into a power fantasy for doomsday preppers, with confusing editing and quick flashing lights during action scenes that detract from the emotional content. And again, it mistakes the nature of the crisis it’s trying to talk about. This is not the right way to contribute to collective catharsis. This is a reassuring pat on the back for those who whined that quarantine was an unacceptable affront that needed to be opposed with violence.

Nerd Coefficient: 3/10.

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