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.

Reading the Ignyte: Outstanding Novella 2026

 A roundup of this year's novella finalists.

The Ignyte Award is always a delight when it rolls around - they are shortlists I love to pore over, to find great recommendations, and to see the things I wanted to have a chance at the spotlight get the recognition they deserve. The structure - where the shortlist is pulled together by a panel but the winner voted on by the public - is a good one especially for highlighting things that are excellent but might not have got quite the widespread appreciation that is recognised in awards that popular vote right from the off, while still retaining the popular vote for the joy of getting to be involved in an award.

I unfortunately don't have time this year to cover all of their shortlists (though bangers there are to be found in every single category), but I did want to take a moment to look at one that is pretty close to my heart: the novella.

The six novellas up for the award this year are:

• The Iron Below Remembers, Sharang Biswas (Neon Hemlock)
• Audition for the Fox, Martin Cahill (Tachyon)
• The River Has Roots, Amal El-Mohtar (Tordotcom)
• Psychopomp & Circumstance, Eden Royce (Tordotcom)
• Descent, Wole Talabi (Clarkesworld)

So I thought I'd talk a little about my thoughts on each in turn, and maybe help get a couple of them onto your tbr, if the shortlist hadn't already done so.

The Iron Below Remembers, Sharang Biswas (Neon Hemlock)

I typically get on really well with Neon Hemlock novellas, and The Iron Below Remembers is no exception; in fact, it was one of my top novella reads of 2025. I am extremely happy to see it recognised here.

The story is set in an alternate present, where world history (and colonialism) have gone veeeerrrryy differently, as South Asia colonised the world using their giant mechs. And also where superheroes are real. Why have one difference when you can have two?

Already, cool, interesting, a lot going on. But the thing, is the great thing about this book isn't even the obvious stuff from the blurb and summary: it's the people. Because the narrative is deeply embedded in the perspective of an academic who is dating one of the major superheroes while also working on an archaeological site that might be one of the most important of their time, and which links into the giant mechs and the world's understanding of the superheroes. And he's also just enormously in love with (and anxious about) his hot superhero boyfriend. This is a man at the crux of a lot of different stressors, and someone clearly dealing with a lot of emotions and pressure and uncertainty, and he is intensely compelling as a viewpoint character. It's his skillful characterisation that renders so much of the outlandish content of the plot comprehensible and real to the reader, and which takes all the enormous quantity of Stuff and, without trivialising any of it or taking away from the weight it has in the sense of a wider world, making it feel like a single, coherent story that fits within this single, novella-sized package.

It's incredibly well done, and the sort of thing that seems impossible until you read it. An absolute joy of a book, and one I'd wholeheartedly recommend and be glad to see win.

Audition for the Fox, Martin Cahill (Tachyon)

Another entry from a smaller publisher, Audition for the Fox is a delightful read that I found very hard to put down. It tackles a pretty weighty subject matter, but manages to romp through it at speed without ever undermining the seriousness of the topic, and to hand-wave and imply a depth of worldbuilding, without letting the story get bogged down in details.

The novella follows Nesi, an acolyte hoping to serve one of the 99 gods of the world, but who has failed in her previous 96 petitions. Faced with the remaining gods of war, assassination or mischief, she picks the one that seems least intimidating and prays to the fox god to let her take their trial. They agree, and send her back in time to revisit a turning point in her people's history, under the occupation of an imperial force that Nesi knows will, later, be thrown off, but has to face in reality herself now.

Interspersed through this story are folk tales of the gods, told in a war that feels very true to mythical narratives, and to how people tell stories, and about what.

Between the two halves, it's a book very much about culture, about what survives, and why, and especially religion, myth and the stories about the gods. Religion in fantasy isn't always done well, but I think this is one that manages to grasp the pieces that matter, without getting too into the weeds on the cosmology and distracting from having a pacy, direct narrative that satisfies with the sort of closure it feels like the story sets up with its opening.

Another one I enjoyed a great deal, and would be glad to see as a winner.

The River Has Roots, Amal El-Mohtar (Tordotcom)

This is the only overlap between the Ignyte shortlist and the Hugo, and several other awards besides, as El-Mohtar has been receiving praise in plenty for The River Has Roots. It's also one of the two Tordotcom novellas on this list, a publisher that often does well, and even dominates, the awards for the form.

What can I say that others haven't already? That I haven't already? It's a good book. I had a really good time reading it, way back away when it originally came out. It's based on a traditional folk song (a murder ballad called The Bonny Swans... spoilers it's not a happy fun nobody-gets-hurt type of song or book), and El-Mohtar does a great job carrying through the tone of the song into the prose and the atmosphere of the book. It's a bit of cliché to call someone's prose "lyrical", but sometimes it really is just the most apt term - here is such a time. It's not that it's rhyming or going full iambic or anything, but there feels something of the weight and melody of a song in there in the way she handles her language.

Language is also at the forefront when it comes to the magic of the world too, based as it is on (and called) Grammar. Don't go in expecting something fully systematised; it ain't that kind of story, and to my mind all the better for it (the wiki-isation of everything, and especially things that ought to be magical and mysterious, is where fun goes to die). It's slippery about its specifics, but that's fine, because the sort of story its evoking, the sort of folk-tale, isn't one that has ever been there for clarity of system. You just have to roll with it. What El-Mohtar creates feels sufficiently intuitively valid to facilitate such rotations.

My one quibble with this one is, having read it a good 18 months ago, is that it has drifted somewhat out of my memory in the interim. It has left a vague - and good - impression, but not a clear or lasting one, and it doesn't feel like a story with a long legacy beyond its initial impact. I still like it, I still had a great time reading it, and I would still support it for the win, but it means it's not my top pick from this (very good) selection.

Psychopomp & Circumstance, Eden Royce (Tordotcom)

This is the first of the shortlist I hadn't read beforehand, and what a delight it was to encounter. 

This is a Southern Gothic historical story, following a young woman named Phee St. Margaret in the town of New Charleston as she chafes under the expectations her mother and her society places on her, especially because of her gender. She is unwillingly resigned to the idea of marriage, though not to the likely suitor she sees on the horizon... until word comes that her mother's estranged sister has passed away, and someone needs to accept the role of "pomp" for her. Phee seizes this opportunity for an escape, however brief, and the chance to prove to her family that she can do things herself, be independent, take responsibility, and be something more than a prospective wife.

While I don't always love coming of age stories, this one is just as much about duty and about the tangles of imperfect families, uncovering the history of the conflict between Phee's mother and aunt, as well as the feelings Phee has about her own limited contact with an aunt she wishes she could have loved closer. And those are things I do enjoy deeply. It has the sort of mess that feels like it really would cause a family rift, and the reasons too why it would have stayed covered up, as well as the warmth of family feeling that makes it so hard to unpack the hurts that go back years.

It also has a beautifully immediate voice, settling into the character of Phee right from the go, and charming the reader with her mixture of naivety and independence, her charm and her caution and her determination.

In a year when many Tordotcom novellas have found their way onto shortlists, I found myself wishing this one had been on far more of them: it does a lot of what Tor can be really good at, and with an individuality and presence that makes its own argument for its place in the honours. It's a book I'm extremely glad to have picked up, and one I'd gladly see win.

Descent, Wole Talabi (Clarkesworld)

And now for something rather different. Where everything else is a print novella, Descent is from an online magazine. Where everything else is, more or less, fantasy, Descent is SF. Where everything else is standalone, Descent is part of a wider series called the Sauútiverse. And, unfortunately, where I really liked everything else, Descent did not entirely work for me.

As a caveat, I have read no other entries into the Sauútiverse, and I don't know if knowing more about it would have affected my reading of the work, though it felt very much a standalone, and one I never felt confused by or lacking key information. Indeed, the existence of a wider series I think made the reading experience better: there's a clear depth (ha) to the worldbuilding here, that implies a wider scale and sense of understanding than can be conveyed in a single novella, but gives what is in the novella a richness.

And I enjoyed a lot of the broader aims of what it was doing, especially around how it presented a paradigm of knowledge and scientific method other than "write papers", one that relies on the oral and the verbal. I was, as I read, deeply interested in the world, especially culturally, as Talabi presented a set of interacting cultures with their interrelated tensions, snobberies and resentments. The problem I had was with the nature of the story itself, which follows a pioneering scientist on a mission to find tangible evidence for his theory on the nature of the planet he lives on, and to disprove his mother's theories. As such, this is a story that does spend a lot of time on the specifics of theory and state of the world, in a way that feels somewhat akin to (though sometimes different from) more traditional hard SF, which alas is just not my jam. The science is interesting, though for me it struggled both on a point that didn't make sense to me (though that might be because I don't know enough about the mechanics of gas giant planets), and because the science as the focus meant that the more emotional angles of the story - the ones upon which a lot of the drama of the ending rests - felt a little neglected. The emotional crescendo of the final sequence just didn't hit for me.

There are moments when it comes close, and when Talabi deploys some banger lines like "the boundary condition of all knowledge is faith". But it just doesn't quite pull together, in the end. Interesting enough that I would pick up another story in the series, but not I think the one I want to win from this otherwise stacked shortlist.

* * *

And so, there we have it. My broad conclusion is: this is a really strong shortlist, one that covers a variety of angles and styles within the genre, and which delivers strongly especially on distinctive voice: these are stories you could read and know them by their words in a moment. Whether that's lyrical, poetic prose evoking a murder ballad, scientific specificity tinged by the wonder of faith, or a world that diverged wildly from the one we know, each of them has a clear sense not just of the story it wants to tell, but the way it wants to tell it, and the determination that each part is just as important as the other. And I love it.

The great thing about the Ignyte has, so far, been its ability to provide such a consistently high standard and variety in its shortlists. I see no evidence that that has changed, and indeed, it seems like the award continues to go from strength to strength if the novella slate for 2026 is anything to go by.

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

Book Review: Victory City by Salman Rushdie

A profound commentary on the construction of Indian identity

This much we know to be true:

During the era that we in the West call the 14th century, the brothers Hakka and Bukka, of the Sangama clan, fled the Delhi Sultanate and went southward. After crossing the Krishna River, in the region that corresponds to present-day Karnataka, they built a city that would grow to become the capital of a great empire. They called this city Vijayanagara, which is Sanskrit for “victory city.” The civilization that developed there was immensely prosperous and cosmopolitan, admired by travelers from as far as Venice and Portugal, who wrote of its religious tolerance, exquisite architecture and abundant riches.

It was a society of poets, scholars and merchants, which for three centuries controlled most of southern India until the neighboring sultanates in the Deccan plateau joined forces, attacked the empire and destroyed its capital. While it lasted, the Vijayanagara Empire was a hotbed of cultural fusion where half a dozen languages coexisted and reached memorable heights of literary refinement, and where women enjoyed more freedom than anywhere else in medieval India.

But in every history there are lacunae, events that escaped memory, people whose achievements weren’t written down. In those blank spaces of the historical record, Salman Rushdie weaves the threads of his imagination and creates the vast epic that is his novel Victory City. By retelling history in the style of myth, he gives us a timeless portrait of India as he has dreamed it, a land of infinite creativity and glorious diversity that has often had to endure the curse of narrow-minded rulers who can only conceive of one correct way of living. More than a political allegory, Victory City is a prayer addressed to the future.

The novel’s main fictional addition to the historical account is the character of Pampa Kampana, a divinely gifted woman who witnesses the two and a half centuries of Vijayanagara’s splendor. She presides over the city’s birth and lives to watch in despair as it is destroyed. Across four successive dynasties, she becomes prophetess, fugitive, queen, spy, grandmother, witch, conspirator, saint, soldier, thief, chronicler and survivor. She brings the city to life by summoning it from the depths of the earth and growing it like a plant. Spawned without a history, the city comes already formed, with houses and streets not made by human hand, and with fully-grown inhabitants without ancestry, identity or any idea of how to live. So Pampa uses her magic to give them fabricated memories. People need to know who they are and where they come from, even if it’s a lie.

This bit of magical realism contains an astute observation from Rushdie: modern India often resorts to made-up narratives to tell itself its history and identity. Under Narendra Modi’s ultranationalist regime, the official version of India’s past has been entangled with authoritarian control of information, us/them revisionism, literalist readings of mythology, ethnic supremacy, fanatical patriotism, normalization of sectarian violence, science denial, entrenchment of a monoculture, sanitization of the caste system, patriarchal propaganda, and erasure of Muslim achievements.

Rushdie has in mind the difficulty of presenting any faithful and honest rendition of the facts, and this is acknowledged in the composition of the novel itself: an unnamed narrator tells us that the text of Victory City is a prose version of Pampa’s much more elegant narration in Sanskrit verse, which we don’t get to see. This is an instance of the literary device of the found manuscript, as employed in Don Quixote, and the novel’s first paragraph is addressed at the reader in a tone that echoes Don Quixote’s introduction.

From time to time this narrator reminds us that we’re not learning these events from an eyewitness point of view, but only as filtered through rewriting, translation and abridgement. There’s no moral judgment of Pampa’s use of fiction to create the history of Vijayanagara; in fact, the text’s self-professed nature seems to be saying that any version of history a society chooses to accept will always be mediated by someone’s account of it. It’s a sharp irony that, when Pampa tries to explain to the people that their history was an invention, they insist that it really happened they way they learned it. The subtext is that it’s not a bad thing that all identity is constructed; knowing this fact actually empowers you to choose how you construct it.

Pampa is very aware of the type of society she came from: a rigid patriarchy divided by religious allegiances. Her constant struggle as her miraculous city’s caretaker is to steer its people, be it explicitly or in secret, toward a way of life that values openness, harmony, pluralism, learning, and equality. But time after time, her efforts are opposed by strongmen who define themselves in reference to some designated enemy and waste the empire’s wealth in campaigns of conquest to feed their vanity, or priests who won’t listen to women and seek to enforce their favored form of devotion as the only authorized form of devotion. Like the best speculative literature, this is an imagined country that speaks with calculated precision about the real one.

Rushdie has been a frequent critic of religious extremism, on both sides of the Indian partition. He has the scars to prove he knows what he’s talking about. The land of wonders depicted in Victory City is a vision of the freedom India could achieve, in some other century, in another life.

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10.

Reference: Rushdie, Salman. Victory City [Random House, 2023].

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