Book Review: Hell's Heart by Alexis Hall

Horny and intellectual by turns, this sapphic, spacefaring adventure is Moby Dick for the digital age.

I'll freely admit that a lot of things in this book are jokes, because I have a very short attention span and like kid myself that facetiousness is the same as satire.

So says I, the cryptically-monikered narrator of Hell's Heart, a sapphic reimagining of the story of Moby Dick, set on a ship out to hunt leviathans in the roaring storms of Jupiter. And on one level, this is a perfectly accurate summation of the novel. It's absolutely jam-packed with jokes. They range from the subtle, the referential (if you can read Latin, there are a number of sometimes apt, sometimes rather less so quotations that you may recognise, more on this later), through a Muppets gag, all the way to a long-running repeated bit about "sperm" being a funny word. It would be very easy to read this book and read it light, to skim across it with the glib, flippant tone the narrator offers, and be content. The narrator, as characterised, often seems to want you to do exactly that. It would be a perfectly good reading, and a great time. And, yes, conceivably both facetious and satire.

But it would be an incomplete one. Because Alex Hall is doing a heck of a lot more in Hell's Heart, and that is both its strength and its weakness.

To be clear before I dig in too deep, I've never read the whole of Moby Dick, and even my partial encounter with it was a time ago best measured in decades. But I have the cultural awareness of it as a novel that many do, so my perspective on it comes from a place of rough familiarity, but without the detail for a full comparison.

To start with the weakness, it's quite a long book. Not as much as its inspiration, but my copy clocks in at 464 pages, which is still relatively chunky, and more to the point long enough to start feeling long. In that time, while Hall packs in a lot of content, a lot of themes, a lot of angles (and less sex than might be expected, but still plenty), by the end, it starts to feel like there are a small number of major pieces that are being proffered up to the reader on rotation. Around page 370 or so, all of these were feeling just that little bit too familiar, so I was very glad once Hall finally got around to the dramatic end piece. And think to some extent the length is a product of doing all those different things all together and at once - they have to keep circling around and getting their various turns to make sure they're all covered off before the big finale. And just for that little while, for a short span of pages... it did get a tiny bit stale. Everything just became that bit too familiar. They hadn't quuuuite paced it right.

Which is a real shame, because in nearly every other way, that packed in variety was what made the book so enjoyable.

Starting with the religion stuff, of which there was quite a lot. In the space future Hall envisages for the setting of Hell's Heart, there are three major and a number of minor churches, but the ones that figure most into the story are the Churches of Liberty and Prosperity, and a cult referred to as the Church of Starry Wisdom, or just Wisdom. The first two are clearly based on Christian textual traditions (based on quotes, names and various pieces of information dropped across the book) but with radically different intents, both to each other and to my (admittedly weak and very Anglican-focussed) understanding of modern Christianity. Living up to their names, they preach a doctrine of radical personal freedom and profit respectively, and how those tenets interact with life in a solar system of dispersed exocolonies and habitats is deeply threaded through much of the story. The protagonist herself is a semi-lapsed Prosperity disciple, and she keeps coming back to her personal upbringing and relationship to money, profit and belief throughout the story. Which makes sense on a voyage where a captain is going to start prioritising vengeance over bringing in the goods that everyone signed on to hunt to earn their pay.

Meanwhile the Church of Starry Wisdom has a very different theology - they believe we're all going to succumb to the great beast, devourer of worlds, but that some are destined to be devoured before others, and those last-to-be-eaten are the chosen. Great beast, you say? In a monster hunting book? Yes, exactly. You see where that's going.

On the one hand, all of the religions are inherently parodic. Not necessarily of real world faiths, but certainly of strands within modern belief. It is hard to read a section in which the rich man and the camel passing through the eye of the needle story of the Bible is canonically interpreted as a mandate to be rich, and not see that this is poking fun at capitalism as we know it right now. And when that sits alongside pay-to-pray church services... well, it's not subtle. But it's also actually quite effective, and a lot of that is because the main character is really ambivalent about the extent to which she believes it all. There's a fair amount of musing on what it means and how it figures into her life, and that doubt makes it more than just a funny poke at the real world.

Instead, it's part of how Hall is drawing a hypercapitalist space future hellscape, from which space-whale hunting is a legitimate escape for those with few means and debts to pay.

Part of this hellscape is a medical one - several characters throughout the book are shown to have biological amendments, upgrades or replacements in their bodies, and a number of them are in perpetual debt to Aphrodite Corp. because of it - healthcare being extremely proprietary. There's even a throwaway line about someone being punished for inheriting copyrighted genes. And yes, this too is obviously satire, but it sits in that good and fuzzy zone of obviously satirical while also real enough to be effective worldbuilding. Because I is one of those characters with debts - hers being for unspecified body mods that I was interpreting as something gender-related but which is never made wholly clear in text - and the way that that is emphasised by her, and by the world around her in text makes her decision to run off to this incredibly dangerous, gross and difficult career make a lot more sense than it might otherwise do.

Another part, and this is something that only comes up in a few small lines but which nontheless made a deep impression on me, is the way Hall envisages art in this horrible vision of the world. This is a world with a divide between human-produced and procedurally generated art, it seems, and that is such a horrible, biting window into a possible future that I had to pause for a minute when I got to it. I've read a number of stories about and full of AIs in the last couple of years, and yet this little tiny glimpse in a book about space whales somehow grasped it all the better.

I suppose it's because the book is very much about, among all the other things, inequality and desperation. And that is so real, so graspable, that all the SFnal trappings around it work all the more.

That desperation is also part of what makes the narrator work so well, because it undercuts and grounds her sometimes... well, as she says, facetious tone. In some ways, she reads very similarly to another Hall narrator, Puck from Mortal Follies and Confounding Oaths. Both of them are incredibly cagey about real names, for one thing. But where Puck starts and ends with that light, mischievous tone they share, that fey nature, I is just as much defined by her wants, her humanity and her seriousness as by her rejection of it. Over 464 pages, the lightness might have worn thin without something substantial to be glimpsed underneath it. It comes in fits and bursts, but it's there, and it turns the lightness into something darker than just a person with a certain approach to life. The humour becomes coping mechanism, tied up into the darkness to which it offers a contrast. I is simultaneously comedic and tragic.

Outside of I, most of the other characters don't get an awful lot of depth. There are short portraits of key figures, but they take something of a sidebar to her main interests - digressions and sex jokes. Some of them are, themselves, jokes. Many of the ones that aren't are obvious parallels to characters from Moby Dick, especially the mates, and the Ahab figure, genderbent and referred to only as A. Her madness - characterised in part by a wholly different register of speech than the rest of the crew, archaic and formal and itself calling back to the source text - is made compelling. We can see why I loves her, just as we can see why that adoration (possibly infatuation is a better word, given how one-sided it all is) is absolutely toxic to her.

The other part of her madness is another thing that made me do a big "oof" and put the book down for a little while, for that sudden face slap of too close, too real. The captain has in her quarters a "networked machine intelligence", a computer programmed to provide advice, data processing and predictions, but in a chatty, colloquial manner. A machine with which she develops an unhealthily codependent relationship as it gives her the information she wants and the answers that best reinforce her existing priorities and intentions. Horribly familiar, isn't it? It's a damnably good take on that kind of obsession, updated to the modern world, and I sort of hate how effective it is.

The other character who gets genuine page time and development is... less easy to sum up. Her name is Q, and she is obviously a reflex of Queequeg from the original. In this multiplanetary (and more) future, however, her home is old earth, rather than Queequeg's South Pacific Island origin. In this future, Terrans, with their strange tattoos, are seen as backwards and barbaric compared to those in the habitats and expoplanet colonies. They are strange, insular and possibly cannibals, and don't have the same religions or priorities as the "exodites".

Given the obvious racial dynamics of the original, this is an interesting choice of update. And one I'm still not entirely sure how to take. Because on the one hand, Hall has taken a number of the stereotypes included in the original text and just shifted them over wholesale, but on the other, he's given them some aspects and accoutrements that point in opposite directions. My understanding (as above, incomplete) of the original text is that Queequeg is heavily othered and given a strong desire to visit "Christendom" which... brings up a whole bunch of associations. So to pivot that othering into a character who is from the most familiar place in this setting for us as readers seems to me a very deliberate choice to engage with the problems of the original.

Likewise, while Q in Hell's Heart speaks mostly in a language none of the other characters understand... that language is Latin, which comes with a bunch of assumptions about prestige and worth for a lot of readers. And if you either can read Latin or fancy googling it as you go through the book, you discover that Hall has cheekily used this as a way to pull in quotations from a wide, wide pool of sources. Some of them are Biblical, which makes a lot of sense for this retelling and the direction they choose to take most of the story. But some are drawn from Classical authors like Cicero and Catullus. Indeed, there is a phenomenally effective sex scene early on where Q speaks to I only in quotes from Catullus' erotic poetry. So again, Hall is taking a racist portrayal and making some very deliberate choices about how to mess with it, how to hold it in conversation with the original.

Q is also one of the very few seemingly altruistic characters in the book. While all the exodites are busy being out for profit (or worshipping an embodiment of entropy that just so happens to have white supremacy baked into its hierarchy of the universe), Q operates on a moral compass more easily comprehensible to the reader (even as it's opaque to I). Which on the one hand reinforces that she is the familiar one, not the Other. But on the other plays into ideas of the noble savage.

Does it work? I'm honestly still not sure. The Latin does, and there are moments where they deploy it brilliantly, where the quotes are exactly perfect for that piece of dialogue, and where I's uncomprehending response is a humorous dissonance. But as a whole thing? Maybe?

Despite my above complaint about length, I think possibly Q needed more page space in order to fully work through her character and its relationship to Queequeg. It's a big thing to grapple with, and while it's clear Hall is grappling with it, I think it's not quite clear what the actual thesis of it all is. It's just sort of all... there, in a jumble, not quite sorted out. And for something so messy, there does need to be some sorting.

Even aside from the Latin, Hall does like to play with language and quotation quite a lot throughout. And that? That is successful.

I mostly speaks a very modern vernacular - and one that screams "excessively online millennial" to me, an excessively online millennial - which is extremely informal and irreverent. Most of the exodites speak a slightly less sex-joke-laden version of the same. But some characters are marked out by their dialogue, and every time Hall does this, it's interesting. In the Captain, it's a sign of increasing madness, as she slips past modern formal right into "hast thou". In one of the Wisdom followers - who suffers an accident that either is making him hallucinate or given him access to the voice of something numinous, depending who you ask - it is likewise a sign of madness, but of a different kind. He speaks in riddles, taken as prophecies, but I think every single one is a Shakespeare quotation. Certainly I spotted a lot of them in his dialogue. Given I's resonance with Puck in a previous Hall work, this felt like a slightly elaborate, subtle joke. But it also worked really well because he feels immediately distinct from all the other speakers, and from the self we met at the beginning of the book. In a sea (so to speak) of mostly indistinct background characters, it gives the reader an instant cue that this one needs attention and that this one is, now, different.

And indeed, offers a stark contrast to I's dick jokes. Because Hall didn't pick the dick jokes bits of Shakespeare.

It's those contrasts, more than anything, which are the heart of Hell's Heart. Between modes of speech, between humour and tragedy, between the old text and the new. So much of the story feels like a homage to or an argument with Moby Dick, even to someone not familiar with the original text. There are long digressions about whale physiology and the logistics of hunting, of the realities of a long journey spent cooped up together with a limited number of people in a small space, surrounded by an environment that wants to kill you, which is itself full of monsters. It feels, in those, stunningly close to its predecessor. And then up comes the irreverence, the absolute refusal to take some of the core premises seriously, and that contrast brings it to life. Just as in real-world whales, the resource being hunted in the gassy seas of Jupiter is "spermaceti", or "sperm" for short. And I did not count how many times I comes back to this, to teehee about it being a funny word, but if I did I would run out of fingers and probably toes as well. And yet it's also doing some serious thinking about capitalism and religion. Hall keeps you coming and going, never quite settled into one thing, one feeling, throughout the whole of the story. I is by turns a philosopher, a slut, a pilot, a girl, a problem - and those in her own words - and it is her effervescent changeability that sustains the story most. She speaks directly to the reader, always chatty, always lively, often metatextual, and creates a sense of conversation and relationship between herself and us for the duration of the story. She takes us by the hand and leads us through the ups and downs of her life and self.

She - this complex, quixotic, messy, terrible, excellent character - is what makes the story sing. And because she, and it, are so many different things, she makes it a rich text. Where I found myself focused on the capitalism, I'm sure someone else would linger elsewhere. That someone else might be me, on a future reread even. Yes, it's a long book, and yes, it might be overstuffed. Yes, that's even a problem. But it is also a strength, and one that makes this book worth reading, despite and because of its faults.

--

The Math

Highlights:

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Reference: Alexis Hall, Hell's Heart, [Tor Books 2026]

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

TV Review: One Piece Live Action – Season Two

Picking up the pace with more quirky characters, lots of fighting, and some tearjerker moments as Season 2 sails into the Grand Line.

After a long wait, the second season of Netflix’s One Piece live action series has finally arrived. Season One of One Piece was a hit with a range of fans as it explored the adventures of a pirate boy and his ragtag crew. Due to the quirky nature of anime in general, it’s normally a challenge to bring those fantastical stories and characters to life in a live action format. Fortunately, Season One managed to navigate the source material’s wild visuals and storytelling to create a show that appealed to everyone from complete newcomers to superfans. The show has strong diversity in its characters and great character chemistry which draws the audience in. In Season One we met the five original Straw Hat crew members, one at a time, with pacing that allowed for poignant backstories and the development of strong character chemistry in the midst of some big adventures. In Season Two, the slower pace is gone, and the show dives right into a dizzying array of new, outlandish characters along with lots of fight scenes brought on by the busy new antagonist, Baroque Works. While the new adventures lack the wonder of the first season, the characters are still charming and the adventures are still entertaining, particularly for long time fans.

Summary: Luffy (Iñaki Godoy) is an enthusiastic adolescent boy in pursuit of his dream to become a pirate and to ultimately become the “king” of the pirates. To do this he must find a hidden treasure known as the One Piece. Luffy gradually assembles a rag-tag but loyal crew to join him on his hunt for the One Piece which is hidden in a dangerous place known as the Grand Line. Among his crew are Zoro (Mackenyu), a fierce and cynical swordfighter; Nami (Emily Rudd), a cartographer and navigator; Usopp (Jacob Romero), a shipbuilder with a knack for exaggeration; and Sanji (Taz Skylar), a suave chef who is talented at both cooking and fighting. Luffy calls his crew the Straw Hat Pirates in honor of the straw hat he wears. Season 2 begins with Luffy and his crew finally entering the Grand Line and realizing how much they underestimated its wild nature and complicated politics. The primary antagonist for the second season is an assassin agency known as Baroque Works whose oddball killers target Luffy and his crew. But things get more complicated when Luffy comes to the aid of Vivi, an undercover princess, and meets a shapeshifting reindeer named Chopper. 

While the first season did a good job of entertaining a wide range of viewers, Season Two seems more targeted to established fans. Many of the new villains appear with little introduction and the plot moves fast as new obstacles and new adventures arrive. But, as in the first season, we are helped out by explanatory signs that fly onto the screen when a new character is introduced. The design and presentation are different from the first season, but it’s still a helpful tool, especially if it’s been a while since you’ve consumed the anime and don’t immediately catch the characters’ outlandish visual cues. The new adventure brings to life episodes of the anime’s early story arcs including the amusing giants of Little Garden and the tragic oppressed kingdom of Drum Island. As the plot and the pirate ship move along, several of the show-stealing characters from the live action’s first season are left behind, or only have brief moments on screen, including pirate captain Buggy the Clown, the pure-hearted Koby, and the stern marine commander Garp.

Fortunately, Season Two adds appealing new characters with particularly good acting. Among the best are the determined Princess Vivi, played by Bridgerton’s Charithra Chandan, and the stalwart, guilt-ridden Drum Island soldier Dalton (Ty Keough), the ultimate green flag hero who finds his true strength. But the most fun arrivals are the sweet and much awaited, Tony Tony Chopper (Mikaela Hoover) and his gruff mentor Dr. Kureha (perfectly played by Katy Sagal). One Piece stands out in anime for its particularly fantastical characters in very outlandish costumes. The live action show does a good job of adapting the character designs, rather than just directly copying them, so they fit in a real-life setting. This is especially true for the adorable Chopper, an orphaned reindeer who gets turned into a human-reindeer hybrid after eating a magical devil fruit. Chopper is the kind of character who seems impossible to pull off in a live action but the show succeeds in making him believably real and endearing, rather than artificial and creepy. Like Golum in the Lord of the Rings movie, Chopper is presented via motion capture so the facial expressions are heartbreakingly engaging.

Some of the future main characters like Brook and Nico Robin appear briefly as set ups for future story arcs in future seasons. The main plot of Season Two is Baroque Works versus the Straw Hat Pirate. With so many Baroque Works agents the story focuses more on adventure and fights and less on the slow moments of character introspection that we saw in Season One. However, we do get some thoughtful and emotionally impactful intervals with the tragic stories of Chopper and his former mentor Dr. Hiruluk, and also with Dalton finding his voice and strength to deal with the despotic oppression of his people. There is even a rare quiet moment of Sanji recalling cooking for his sick mother when he was a child.

While Season Two doesn’t have the same magic of the first season, it is still a fun adventure that manages to capture some moments of emotional storytelling and manages to showcase some appealing new characters. The pacing is fast and the tale feels like it is over quickly, leaving viewers anticipating the next adventure in the Grand Line. But overall, long time fans will enjoy seeing more of the major characters come to life in this latest wild adventure.

--

The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Highlights:

• Faster pacing, more fighting
• Appealing new characters
• Emotional moments buried in the non-stop action

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

TV Review: The Beauty

Caution: Side effects include painful rolling of eyes and death from boredom

Through The Beauty’s clumsily structured first season, we follow cartoonishly greedy pharma bro Byron, whose only personality trait is a massive black hole where humanity is supposed to reside. In these times of corporate sociopathy elevated to aspirational fame, the problem with a character like Byron isn’t a lack of realism (hell knows the real world has more than its share of narcissistic buffoons), but the fact that his evil is played as a joke. As necessary as it is to counter the ego of the über-rich with relentless ridicule, The Beauty strikes the wrong tone: we should be laughing at this villain, but actor Ashton Kutcher’s contagious charisma invites the viewer to laugh with him.

Byron’s newest business plan is a drug that completely remakes the human body with some genetic technobabble. One injection cures all diseases, fixes the metabolism, stops natural aging, and—here’s the selling point—makes the patient look impossibly sexy. I marvel at the difficulties this show’s casting director must have had in selecting only the hottest of the hottest supermodels for the dozens of extras that showcase the wonders this drug produces. Just a little problem: the miracle beauty drug ends up raising your body temperature until you literally explode. Not that that’s going to deter Byron from his goal of squeezing the world out of a fortune.

(This gruesome detail has a distant basis in reality: in the 1930s, one of the first anti-obesity pills contained 2,4-dinitrophenol, a molecule that interferes with the body’s ability to extract energy from its reserves. As a result, more and more fat needs to be burned in order to maintain basic biological functions, which of course reduces the amount of stored fat, but all that extra burning causes internal overheating that can easily get lethal. The molecule was banned.)

Watching The Beauty, it takes a while to piece together exactly how things started to go wrong for Byron’s company. In the season’s many ineptly misplaced flashbacks, we eventually discover that it was one of his lab technicians who leaked the miracle drug to the world before Byron was ready to start charging for it. It turns out that The Beauty^® is sexually transmissible, which creates a snowballing problem: each formerly normal, newly super-attractive person jumps at the chance to seduce lots of partners, each of which is in turn transformed and then proceeds to similarly propagate the molecule. So now lots of people are becoming beautiful without paying Byron, and also, lots of people are randomly exploding like Tetsuo from Akira all over the world, which threatens to bring a massive PR crisis at Byron’s doorstep.

What does Byron do to contain the epidemic of gorgeousness? Why, he hires a professional assassin, as you do. In fact, this is how we start the story: we follow two FBI agents who have been investigating a series of mysterious deaths of beautiful people across Europe. Things get complicated when one of the FBI agents has a one-night stand and is transformed into another sex bomb. Now she has to get to the bottom of this medical mystery before she blows up too.

It‘s strange that so much of this show happens in secret. We’re not shown how the press reacts to high-profile people exploding, or how the common people feel about the rumors that surely must circulate concerning an STD that makes you hot. It’s especially out of character for someone as egocentric as Byron to never give an interview about his vision for humanity.

The Beauty has the ingredients for a compelling story, but has no idea how to cook them. It has nothing to say about the social harms of lookism and the pharmaceutical exploitation of people’s insecurities that The Substance didn’t say better. Its embarrassingly preachy dialogues sound copy-pasted from incel forums. Each episode rehashes the same yucky sequence of a new victim receiving the molecule and being painfully transformed via convulsive contortionism. When the best character in the show, Byron’s delightfully vitriolic wife, is given the treatment against her will and then attempts suicide, Byron’s change of heart feels hollow because he had never shown any concern for her before. And his hired assassin turns a target into his apprentice for no comprehensible reason.

The Beauty is an uninspired The Substance wannabe with far less bite, a juvenile sense of humor and zero awareness of the times. Yes, we know that obsession with beauty is dangerous. The show doesn’t have any more points to make after that, and it gets tiresome to watch a string of tertiary characters frantically throw themselves at the walls for ten minutes while the drug works its Cronenberg-lite magic. One wishes they could skip the grimacing part and blow up already.

Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.

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

6 Books with Aubrey Sitterson

Aubrey Sitterson is a comic book man. Based in Los Angeles, he is recognized for his ferociously idiosyncratic creator-owned work, blending literary aspirations with genre exploration. His best-known works of fiction include the geopolitical space opera Free Planet, fight comic character study No One Left to Fight, and populist superhero series BEEF BROS. Additionally, he is the writer of the exhaustively researched nonfiction tome The Comic Book Story of Professional Wrestling.

Today he tells us about his Six Books

1. What book are you currently reading?

Recognizing the importance of a balanced diet, in addition to contemporary comics and other periodicals, I try to always keep a nonfiction and a historical comics read going simultaneously. Right now, the former is Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game, a detailed, personality-based exploration of the 19th century military and intelligence sparring undertaken by the British and Russian Empires in Central Asia, particularly Afghanistan. In addition to being the beginning of a dynamic that would continue through the Cold War with significant impacts today, it's also a rollicking, imperialist adventure story.

On the comics front, I'm finally reading Elfquest, which has always been an embarrassing gap in my comics knowledge; it's as wonderful as everyone says it is. Wendy Pini's control of gesture and character design are unparalleled, functioning within a newspaper and European comic strips tradition that, because of its remove from most contemporary US comics, hits like a ton of bricks today; not to mention how outrageously sensual all the character interactions are, without ever feeling salacious. Plus, like The Great Game--I'm discovering a theme--it's also a ripping adventure story.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

The Daniel Freedman anthology Stimulus. Daniel sent me a PDF of it months and months ago and I adored it, despite being keenly aware that--because we share a similar comics philosophy--reading it digitally was a pale imitation of the real thing. Working with a murderer's row of artists, all chosen for their specific talents, Daniel presents a collection of sci-fi stories that reward slow, careful reading and deliberate thought, with interlocking and recursive themes. And, as evidenced by how stoked I am to get the physical edition, it also rewards rereading.

3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to re-read?

Dave Sim's sprawling, experimental, abrasive, and controversial Cerebus isn't just one of my favorite comics of all time, I think it's the best comic of all time and one of the best works of written English in any medium. Sim accomplished what I aspire to: A comic that achieves novelistic depth not despite the medium but through it, utilizing, dusting off and innovating formal approaches that are always tied to his overarching fixations and the work's byzantine thematic layering. I read the full thing in college and it blew the top clean off my skull; over the past few years, I've been going back through the collections and am even more impressed than I was as a younger man. After I finish this volume of Elfquest, I'm planning to tackle the acclaimed Jaka's Story volume.

4. How about a book you’ve changed your mind about – either positively or negatively?

It took me at least three running starts, over the course of half a dozen years, to make it through Dune. Well before the movie, I knew it was something that--on paper--I should love; in addition, I wanted to love it; I wanted to be a Dune guy. Not just because of the high regard in which it was held but because it was this big, sprawling, uncompromising text, so deep and complex as to feel esoteric. But on the first few reads, I found it punishingly dry; I think it was down to two things: 1) Trying to read it like an essay that has to be fully digested as opposed to a work of art meant to wash over you, and 2) Reading it--like a fool--digitally.


Eventually, something clicked for me and I devoured all of the Frank Herbert books. While I'm still torn on my opinion of the individual volumes, I adore them all as part of a whole; it's the platonic ideal of a long-running series, reveling in the freedom to explore different approaches, settings, tones and characters, while remaining in disciplined service to the work's overarching themes, layering in depth and complexity along the way.

5 What’s one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?

My favorite author in high school was Aldous Huxley; he still ranks extremely highly. While I dug Brave New World and Island was probably my favorite, the one that stuck with me the most is Point Counterpoint. It's a stunning piece of work, with a sprawling cast generally freaking out about the convulsions of the early 20th century. The character work is flawless, with Huxley simultaneously constructing and deploying instantly relatable archetypes, such that it feels both prophetic and timeless. But the aspect I've never stopped thinking about is the interplay between the characters' lengthy conversations, the larger issues lurking around the edges, and their relationships with one another, including the romantic.

Point Counterpoint is big, messy soap opera but it's also about big, messy ideas; concepts and challenges so complex and complicated as to defy the simple explanations found in parable and direct metaphor. Instead, Huxley mirrors the complexities of these challenges--political, social, economic, and moral--with the characters' ardently held but often inconsistent worldviews. I've always aspired to create work this challenging, with this type of depth; work brave enough to admit that there aren't any simple answers to questions worth asking, with complexity and ambiguity that inspire rumination in readers.

6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome?

My latest book is Free Planet, an ongoing series from the legendary Image Comics. Free Planet is space opera about what happens after the revolution is won. The Freedom Guard, a group of revolutionary heroes, is tasked with safeguarding the freedom of Lutheria from threats without and within. The problem, however, is that--just like in this great nation of ours--they all have completely different ideas about what complete freedom entails. It's informed by extensive research into real world revolutions and civil wars, with what Robert Kirkman calls "rich, intricate worldbuilding"; think "Cordwainer Smith meets Noam Chomsky" and "Sci-fi G.I. Joe defending space Venezuela" and you're partway there.

Throughout Free Planet's creation, cocreator/artist Jed Dougherty and I have aspired to utilize the comics medium to the utmost, attempting to match Huxley's depth and complexity through the use, not just of prose, but images, design, and their communication with one another on the page. It's a holistic approach to comics; rather than creating a story and breaking it into issues, panels, and pages, the book is ideated and written as an art object, built of overwhelming spreads featuring maps, graphs, charts, and infographics on top of all the sci-fi action and soap opera drama. It's not to be read quickly; it's a world you're meant to slow down and luxuriate within. And best of all? There's a full graphic novel waiting for you, with new issues landing at your local comic shop every single month.

--

Thank you, Aubrey!

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

TV Review: Starfleet Academy

A more than worthy successor to Discovery, somewhat undercut by mixed messaging

Starfleet Academy is proof that a six-decade-old ongoing story can still find ways to feel fresh if it dares try the unusual. Prodigy already showed how the same elevated ideals that sustain the Federation can be adapted for child protagonists, and Lower Decks brought much-needed levity to the franchise’s sometimes suffocating self-importance. The newest iteration, set in the 3000s after the United Federation of Planets has been broken apart and reforged, blends the thrill of space adventure with the angst of teen drama. But the most unusual aspect of Starfleet Academy isn’t even the soap opera side of it; it’s that, extremely rarely for a Star Trek series, it’s driven more by the internal exploration of characters than by clever plot-solving. So I think it may be a worthwhile exercise to analyze the show in the same manner: by focusing on the characters.

Caleb. The show’s protagonist had a childhood traumatized by the Federation, after his mother was sentenced way too harshly for having been at worst an accessory to murder. This defining incident shapes all his relationships: he’s learned to expect to end up alone, so he’s reluctant to bond. This is made evident from the big gestures, like the way he lashes out at his new friends each time they get too close, to the small ones, like his habit of hoarding food (which is a real behavior in children who were abandoned). This issue gives him both a clear direction and a weakness: he has a mission to find his mother, but everything else is secondary to it, so he doesn’t allow himself to experience life. He can’t commit to his girlfriend because he feels too emotionally exposed with her (it doesn’t help that she’s a literal mind-reader), and he can’t participate in a Klingon bonding ritual because he’s still waiting for the family he lost. This is interesting characterization, but it gets resolved too neatly by the end of the season.

Genesis. Our favorite obsessive overachiever has a simpler but harder drama to deal with: as the daughter of a Starfleet admiral, she enters the Academy having already a mountain of second-hand expectations dumped onto her. She’s definitely talented, as well as a quick learner and a natural leader, but she can’t bring herself to believing that her successes are her own, even after she’s proven multiple times that she can improvise resourcefully, notice the details that matter in a moment of urgency and somehow always know the right thing to say to comfort a friend. That’s her tragedy: she treats everyone with much more care and understanding than she’s willing to give to herself.

Darem. This one is fascinating to watch evolve. We first meet him as an arrogant child of aristocrats (we eventually learn he’s literally engaged to a princess), used to being the center of attention and not above hurting others to get his way; over the course of the season, he realizes he doesn’t need to keep putting up an image of flawlessness for parents who don’t even care enough to answer his calls. This frees him to start searching for who he is in reality, and it turns out he’s a loyal friend with a bottomless capacity for empathy—that is, unless you’re dating his crush, in which case he can still be a pain to deal with. His newfound willingness to make fun of himself still needs more practice.

SAM. What can I say about this bubbling avalanche of positivity, our beloved Queen Sam Samallina of Samonita? On one hand, she has an unquenchable thirst for life, an earnest curiosity for a universe she can’t get enough of. On the other hand, she has an entire species’ fate in her hands, being an envoy from sentient holograms with the assignment to study us squishy organic beings and report on whether we’re still a danger to artificial lifeforms. That’s a massive responsibility for someone only four months old, which comes back to bite when she suddenly has to deal with violent trauma without having the emotional resources that come from actually having lived. In a beautiful case of metaphor turned literal, she almost dies because she’s literally too pure for this world. After she quickly-but-not-really (there’s some serious time dilation involved) gains the maturity she needs to maintain a stable personality, she becomes an even more compelling character to watch: now she has enough perspective to critically examine both the person she used to be and the way her friends responded to that version of her.

Jay-Den. Once again there’s only one Klingon in Starfleet, and this time he’s a pacifist studying medicine. This is a refreshing change from the repetitive way this species has been portrayed in Star Trek. Of all the colorful and strange cultures we’ve seen across the decades of this franchise, Klingons have been among the ones that make the least sense. I always wondered how their civilization lasted all the way to the space era without exterminating itself. Now that we’re in the 3000s, the Klingons’ situation is much different: they’ve lost their empire, they’re reduced to a handful of clans, and their collective survival is in question. Jay-Den’s family drama (about being a son of hunters who eschews violence) gets resolved fairly early in the season, and from then on he’s relegated to something of a background role, which is a pity because he’s just the sweetest and his romance subplot is adorable.

Tarima. Ah, Tarima. What shall I do with you, you Manic Pixie Dark Phoenix. This was the character I struggled the most to understand. Her backstory is that, in a species of born telepaths, she’s an exceptionally (even alarmingly) gifted one, and the medical treatments she’s had to live with in order to keep her powers within safe limits have prevented her from fully knowing herself. Frustratingly, this also prevents the audience from getting a sense of what her deal is. She’s reserved, but impulsive, but apprehensive, but uninhibited, but distant, but bold. To be fair, her best scenes are those where her directness cuts through Caleb’s tendency to lie to himself.

Captain Ake. As a centuries-old being who has seen everything, it makes sense that she has little patience for Starfleet’s excessive love of formality and protocol. I love the way she commands respect as a captain without bothering to perform the part. Because the show is mainly focused on the younger characters, we learn about Ake’s personal drama late in the season (she once made a tactical decision that cost her son’s life), but the additional fact that it was her fault that Caleb grew up without his mother gives us enough to chew on in the meantime. The only regrettable moment with her is the finale, where it feels like the Federation comes off as too implausibly clean-handed for the times of hardship that followed the Burn.

With equal parts romance, comedy and technobabble, Starfleet Academy is remarkably well directed, acted and written (I want to single out Kirsten Beyer, who is proving to be by far the best writer in New Trek), although it shares with Discovery a questionable plotting choice: in the 3000s, with the Federation in pieces and the galaxy in dire need of new leaders, why try to remake the same old Federation that already failed, instead of coming up with something different and more suited to the new political reality? Aside from that oversight inherited from its predecessor series, this is a laudable step forward for the franchise, especially after recent disappointments like the nostalgia vomit that was Picard season 3, the inconsistent mess that was Strange New Worlds season 3, and the unforgivable calamity that was the Section 31 film. More of this, please.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Six Books with Alex Shvartsman

Alex Shvartsman (Brooklyn, NY) is the author of The Best of All Possible Planets (2026), Kakistocracy (2023), The Middling Affliction (2022), and Eridani’s Crown (2019). Over 150 of his stories and translations from Russian have appeared in Analog, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, F&SF, Nature, Reactor, Strange Horizons, and several Year’s Best volumes. He won the WSFA Small Press Award for Short Fiction, was a three-time finalist for the Canopus Award for Excellence in Interstellar Fiction, and was a two-time finalist for the BSFA Award. Read his work at alexshvartsman.com.

Today he tells us about his Six Books.

1. What book are you currently reading?

I tend to read or listen to a couple of books at a time: one in English and one in Russian. I’m finishing up Operation Bounce House, a standalone sci-fi adventure by Matt Dinniman (of Dungeon Crawler Carl fame), where a colony is invaded by remotely operated drones and mechs controlled by gamers from Earth. Although set in the far future, it has plenty to say about current gamer culture, politics, and AI.

I’m also reading Tunnel by Yana Vagner, the author whose novel The Epidemic was adapted into the To the Lake series which aired on Netflix. Tunnel is a thriller where hundreds of people are trapped in a tunnel underneath Moscow, the entry points shut due to an unknown catastrophe on the surface.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

Children of Strife by Adrian Tchaikovsky, coming out later this month. Children of Time is one of my favorite SF books of the past decade or so and I’m excited to see where he takes the series next.

3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to reread?

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, which is my favorite Russian-language book. I reread it every decade or so and it always feels fresh, benefiting from added perspective.

4. A book that you love and wish that you yourself had written?

Birthright by Mike Resnick; it’s not one of his better-known books, but it’s fantastic and quite ambitious in its scope. It tells the story of the human species from the moment we reached the stars and until humanity’s demise, spanning tens of thousands of years, and he does it through interconnected short stories that set up the universe he’s written many novels in.

5. What’s one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that holds a special place in your heart?

The Snow Queen and Summer Queen duology by Joan Vinge. I love those books dearly and really enjoy her other novels as well. That’s another set of books I need to reread!

6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome?

The Best of All Possible Planets is a space opera comedy. This book is inspired by Candide and structured as a series of Futurama episodes. It is full-on absurd and funny, and the sort of thing I love writing the most. The audiobook is narrated by Eli Schiff (Succession, The White Lotus) and Lewis Black (The Daily Show, Inside Out)! Plus there are corgis.

This book is presently on Kickstarter, and you can snag unique rewards as well as copies of the book itself in four different formats.



Thank you, Alex!

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

Interview: J.M. Frey

J.M. is an author, screenwriter, and lapsed academic. With an MA in Communications and Culture, she’s appeared in podcasts, documentaries, and on radio and television to discuss all things geeky through the lens of academia. She spent three years as the entertainment contributor on AMI Radio’s Live From Studio 5 morning show, and was an occasional talking head in documentaries and on the SPACE Channel’s premier chat show InnerSPACE, as well as dozens of other radio programmes, documentaries, and podcasts. She has also lectured at conferences and conventions all around the world. She also has an addiction to scarves, Doctor Who and tea, which may or may not all be related. Her life’s ambition is to have stepped foot on every continent (only 3 left!).

Her debut novel Triptych was nominated for two Lambda Literary Awards, won the San Francisco Book Festival award for SF/F, was nominated for a 2011 CBC Bookie, was named one of The Advocate’s Best Overlooked Books of 2011, and garnered both a starred review and a place among the Best Books of 2011 from Publishers Weekly.

Her queer time-travel novel A Woman of the Sea was named a winner of the 2019 WATTY Award for Historical Fiction and was published in Fall 2024 with Penguin Random House Canada and W by Wattpad Books as Time and Tide, and named one of the New York Times’ Best Romances of the year. She followed that up with her first fully self-published novel, Nine-Tenths, which was voted one of the best reads by the reviewers of N.N. Light Book Awards.

NoaF: Tell me about your latest book, and the accolades it’s received so far!

I started Nine-Tenths in 2019, but I was unsure what I wanted to do with it or where I wanted to go with it. I was feeling pretty defeated at the time; I’d just been fired from my day job (no surprise, I’d only been there 6 months and it was a bad fit from day one), my grandmother was dying (she passed within weeks of me starting the book), and my agent and I were no longer sympatico (she’d declined to represent two full books I’d delivered, and wasn’t enthusiastic about others I had pitched. Our relationship had run its natural course).

After my agent and I parted ways, the funeral was over, I decided I wanted to use the lockdown while being unemployed to write the most J.M. Frey book possible.

I made a list of everything my former agent had critiqued in my writing (too long, too Canadian, too queer, too genre-blendy), as well as a list of all my favourite tropes and moments in other books and fanfics I loved (accidental/arranged marriage, coffee shop AU, grumpy/sunshine, etc.). The idea was that if I queried and signed with a new agent with an extremely J.M. Frey book, then there would be no mistaking who I was and what I did as a storyteller, and my agent wouldn’t be asking me to tone it down or change my voice. I finished Nine-Tenths to these specifications in 2020, and began to query it in 2021.

I guess I J.M. Frey’d it too hard, because by late 2023, I’d amassed 348 rejections. It felt like there was nobody left in the industry to query. I’d had a few close calls, a few in-depth rejection letters or conversations with agents about why the book wasn’t working for them, and even an R&R which I declined to pursue because I thought the requested changes would result in the exact same problem I’d had previously—it would strip the book of its Canadianness and genre-blendyness, two things which define me as a writer.

My 2024 New Year’s Resolution was to self-publish Nine-Tenths. The story and characters had really seized my heart, and though I was working on other manuscripts to take back to the query trenches, I wasn’t ready to abandon this one to the dusty depths of the manuscript trunk. I reached out to successful local indie authors for guidance, hired an illustrator for the cover, made a massive 200-line checklist, set the paperback publication day for my birthday (which meant that to have it complete 90 days on KU, the ebook dropped on my friend’s birthday!), and dove in.

I had hoped that the book would resonate with readers, that people would admire the detailed worldbuilding and the fun voice, and I thought I might earn out what I invested in a year or two. Instead I earned enough to pay back what I spent for the book within three-ish months, have been invited to talk about the book at dozens of bookstores, podcasts, and websites, and have the highest star rating of any of my books on GoodReads. I’m so proud that I didn’t trunk this book, and so pleased that people leaving reviews (nearly a hundred!) and naming it to their favourite book of the year lists are really getting the story.

My proudest accolade with the book is every review that mentions how intrigued and engaged they were by politics and worldbuilding I wove into the love story. Awards are marvelous, and I appreciate every one, but I am most happy that readers are outwardly praising the J.M. Frey-ness of the book.

NoaF: As a writer who’s done it all, how have self-pub, small press, and mainstream publishing been different experiences for you?

In many ways, they’re not very different at all. Regardless of the size of the publisher, every book needs to go through substantive editing, revisions, proofreading, page-setting/interior design, cover design, publication, and marketing. The only difference is who does those things, how many people are on the team, and who pays for it! With the bigger publishers, it’s a different person at every stage; in smaller presses, fewer people wear more hats; and of course, in self-pub, I wear all the hats alone.

I’ve always had great editors and engaged designers, so it’s been overall a pleasant experience no matter which publisher I’ve worked with.

All the things that I deem important for a successful marketing campaign—book launches, reading appearances, podcast appearances, merch, signing events, social media drives and reader review pushes—these are largely the realm of the author, no matter what the size of the publishing company. In larger presses, my book was featured in bigger campaigns and some pre-publishing influencer events/ARC distribution, and giveaways, and of course they were able to leverage their relationships to get the book into big chain stores that I’ve only been dreaming about up until now (Hudson in the airports, Walmart, Target!) But that was pretty much the only difference in terms of marketing. Even in a big press, with Big Five distribution channels, the moment the book is published, any and all marketing falls pretty much solely on the shoulders of the author. There’s exceptions of course, but you have to be a big, big name for those exceptions to happen. Which I’m not. Yet!

In other ways, it’s completely different.

I am unbelievably Type-A, so having complete control over the timeline, the budget spend, the interior design, cover design, illustrations, and marketing rollout has been a dream. I’ve re-published all of my backlisted and discontinued books through my self-publishing imprint, and prior to Nine-Tenths, I’d hired interior typesetters and cover design experts. I found communicating my vision took a lot of mental energy. It wasn’t frustrating, but it made for a very drawn-out process and a lot of back-and-forth. So this time, I did a lot of research and found cover (Canva) and interior (Atticus) software that I could learn and use myself. It meant I wasn’t waiting on anyone to complete the work, didn’t have to give notes, etc. I just did exactly what I wanted, when I wanted (usually at 2 am), and could control the deadlines.

For as much work as it was, mostly a lot of fiddly stuff that took a hundred different upload attempts to get approved on the printer’s websites, it was a lot more relaxing because I didn’t have to stress out about what other people were doing, how their vision might not align with mine, and when I would be seeing things given back for review, or even if I would be included in the process at all. I didn’t have to worry I wouldn’t like the cover they made, or whether I would even have a say, or when they planned on dropping it (it’s a common joke that authors see their covers for the first time as the readership, and that authors find out their release dates the same way the audience does—when it’s listed for sale). I had all the time I wanted to prepare, put things in place before any announcements were made, to complete things in their entirety so I wasn’t scrambling against a clock or other people’s deadlines, and to approach the release efficiently and calmly.

However, any irritation I may feel when having to wait on others and compromise my vision is usually wonderfully outweighed by how much better my manuscripts become when there are other cooks in the kitchen. Every editor I’ve worked with has elevated the story in ways that I would never have thought of or been able to achieve on my own. Every marketing team I’ve worked with has found new and interesting hooks that I wouldn’t have considered. And every cover I’ve been given has helped me understand the genre of the book (and the marketing that works better in said genre) than I could have, or taps into marketing trends that I hadn’t been aware of at the perfect moment to hit the zeitgeist. It’s worth stomping down on my Type-A impatience and being a team player, because the end result is always worth it.

The downside to self-pub is, of course, that I had to pay for all of it out of pocket, and up front—software and image licencing, editor, illustrations, marketing materials, marketing campaigns, etc. I took out a small bank loan to fund that, and luckily my perseverance was rewarded, and I was able to pay it off in its entirety within months of the ebook release (thank you to everyone who bought and read it!). One of the nice things about working with a publisher is they sink their own money into all the up front costs. Sure, that means my cut is smaller when it comes to profits, but it also means it didn’t cost me a dime of my own to make the book.

All in all, I’ve enjoyed both processes. I wouldn’t self-pub again, I don’t think, unless it was a another project that I was really, really passionate about, like Nine-Tenths. I really need to love something to be willing to invest all that time and money again.

Oh! I guess the pubday gifts, if there are any, are more elaborate the bigger the publisher, but I still treasure and wear the tiny dragon pendant that my first-ever small-press publisher sent to celebrate my debut novel. The gifts are nice, but also not the point. (I sure did enjoy that bottle of bubbly Wattpad sent me when Time and Tide landed on the NYT Best Of list, though, NGL!)

NoaF: What’s been your biggest career honour to date?

Nobody even knows it happened except for my former agent, because nothing came of it. But I guess it’s been over a decade, so I can talk about it: I took a meeting with one of the executives at The CW to discuss the possibility of a television adaptation of the Accidental Turn series. The series wasn't complete then, I think I was working on final revisions for book two, and had begun drafting book three. While the series was never optioned, that meeting helped me figure out how to structure the series so it didn’t suffer from what the exec called “Mushy Middle Syndrome”—where the second book in a trilogy only exists to pull readers along into the third and final book, where all the payoffs will be. She begged me to provide them with a story that was complete and satisfying in and of itself in the second book, as that would correlate to the second season of the show, and that’s when a lot of adaptations get cancelled.

I also added the epilogue in The Silenced Tale about Pip and her family moving to Newfoundland so she could be the script consultant on a film adaptation of the faux fantasy books in the Accidental Turn series. I thought it would be a funny wink at the audience, if at the end of the TV show, they pulled back to reveal they were filming a TV show. Alas, it never happened.

As we say in this industry, “Everything is nothing until it’s actually something.” It was great to rate the meeting, but I’m not annoyed the show never happened. That’s showbiz.

NoaF: Do you have a pie-in-the-sky publishing dream? Let’s manifest the big dreams for the new year!

I want what C.S. Pacat has! 😄 I want a massive Tumblr following, with people making fanart and fanfic. I want the readers to grab it and love the world and play in its sandbox. More important to me than big marketing campaigns from a large publisher is that the fangirlies like it. I started in fandom, I wrote fanfic for years before my theatre TA encouraged me to try my hand at original fiction, and I still engage in fandom every day. I would love for Nine-Tenths to flourish in fandom spaces, for people to make up their own stories, write songs, put together cosplay, draw art. The deep-running ocean of creativity that is fandom gave me drink when I was parched for creativity during the lockdown, and it is the well from which Nine-Tenths sprung. I would love for this book and its world to water other people’s creative gardens in turn.

I also want a fully produced, multi-actor audiobook dramatization of the novel to happen. I know I can’t afford to make or produce it myself, so I am manifesting a production house reaching out to me to obtain the rights. Does someone have an in with Michael Sheen? I feel like this would be right up his alley—he can play Owain, and I’m sure he can locate a bright young Welsh actor who needs a big break to play Dav. I’ll let my readers fancast the rest of the book ;)

NoaF: What was the strangest (publishing-related) opportunity you were glad you took?

Well, in April of 2008, I was at a SFF Book Convention in Toronto, and a writer-actor buddy of mine scooped up a group of folks from the hotel bar and invited us up to her hotel room to keep the party going. I was tired and it was noisy, but I liked these folks and I wanted their advice about the rejection letters I was receiving for my first novel. A stranger I had never met overheard us talking about my woes, came to sit with us, and asked about my book. Turns out she was the acquiring editor of Dragon Moon Press, and she ended up signing my very first novel and shepherding me not only through the publication of my first book, but to award ceremonies in New York City. She continues to be a good friend, and an invaluable beta reader on whatever novel I'm writing next. (Thanks, Gabrielle!)

The point I’m making is: go to the events, visit the bookstores, attend other people’s book launches, support your local indies, and have fun. You don’t have to be in networking mode the whole time, but participating in the scene and supporting other writers is the reason I even have a career. When you are kind and generous with your time and expertise, decision-makers and opportunity-creators will remember you at the right moment.

NoaF: What do you read for fun? Who else should we put on our TBR piles?

I am really loving all the queer or queer-coded cozy romantasy fabulist/magical-realism-esque books right now, where everyone gets a happy ending, because *gestures at the world*. Recent faves are: When the Tide Held the Moon, The Sweet Sting of Salt, The Nightmare Before Kissmas, One Last Stop, The Almost Wedding of John Barron Grey, Carry On, Howl's Moving Castle. I wish I had more time to read!!