Essay: Language and Anti-Language in The Republic of Memory

cover art by Raja Nandepu

Republic of Memory, by Mahmud El-Sayed, previously reviewed on NOAF, is a deliciously rich text, full of chewy, intertwined meditations on memory, legacy, family, society, duty, revolution, collaboration, and identity. Since you all raced out to buy it and read it back when Stew's review came out in May, the details may be a bit fuzzy, so I'll remind you of the key bits here. (If you didn't race out and buy it and read it DO THAT NOW, jeez, how many times do we have to tell you a book is fantastic?)

The story is set on the generation ship Safina, two hundred years and halfway through its journey to its intended colony planet Hurriya, governed by an administration set up during a ship-board revolution shortly after launch. But the democratic, anti-fascist, anti-AI (w00t!) Compact that was put in place is breaking down. Time and and complacency have led to corruption, and disaffected crew have been dipping their toes back in the waters of revolt. In fact, the creeping collapse of the Administration resembles the Safina herself: ageing, suffering worsening technological malfunctions that range from transient inconveniences to deadly shipwide catastrophes. Complicating matters further are the cryogenically sleeping passengers, selected at ship's launch by the now-defunct Network Empire that funded the expedition. These sleepers are intended to be revived at Hurriya to from the first generation of colonists, and although the new Administration has broken from the Network Empire in most ways, this element of their mission is preserved.  Socially, the passengers are revered as Ancestors by the crew. But their preservation is eating up resources on a ship that is feeling the ever-increasing strain; and not everyone reveres them. They are, remember, perpetuators of the old order of the Network Empire that everyone now reviles, a symbol of everything both right and wrong about the ship's origin and purpose. Every time I try to pull on a single thematic thread to examine in isolation, the rest of the book comes with it; no one idea can be analysed independently of the others.

Nevertheless, I'm going to try. And because I'm a linguist, I want to discuss how brilliantly language — and, as we shall see, anti-language — is used to support all the other thematic components of this text, from culture to change to rebellion to rebirth.

1. Language and culture on the Safina

We can see this centrality of language from the start, in mind of Iskander Ezz, a Translator by profession. The first thing we learn about Iskander is that he feels like a different person depending on which language he speaks. This idea — that language affects thought — has been studied scientifically by Earth linguists from a number of angles, of which I will discuss two. The first angle, perhaps the more familiar to readers of SF, derives from the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This idea, also known as linguistic relativity, was invoked brilliantly in Ted Chiang's novella Story of your Life and later dramatized brilliantly in Denis Villeneuve' magnificent film adaptation Arrival. (It was also invoked less brilliantly in Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.) This hypothesis proposes that the different structural features of the languages people speak direct their attention to different elements of existence, and so modulate their perception of the world. 

In its strongest form, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis often seems to invoke the concept of time, specifically. Benjamin Lee Whorf himself famously claimed that because the Hopi language lacks any capacity to express the concept of time, the Hopi people are incapable of understanding the concept of time as Europeans do. (Whorf 1941/1956). (He was wrong on both counts.) More recently, Chen (2013) proposed that, if a language doesn’t explicitly encode for future tense, the grammatical unity between present and future might prevent speakers from discounting future gains or disregarding future harms. The future is now, Chen argues, and so the potential gains and harms are more immediate. As a result, speakers of tenseless languages they smoke less, watch their weight, use condoms, and invest their money more responsibly.¹ In the limit, for the Chiangs and Heinleins among us, it's a short step from this sort of claim to add the SF-sparkle, and write stories wherein learning a language like Martian or Heptapod B, with sufficiently temporally transcendent grammar, grants its speakers the ability to see the future. 

Although no one has demonstrated tense-based clairvoyance in the laboratory, there is some reasonably persuasive evidence that language can affect perception in limited ways. For example, the range of basic colour terms in a speaker's language does seem to shape colour perception in small but measurable ways (Thierry et al 2009). If a language encodes agency, its speakers might better remember intentional actors than unintentional actors (Fausey & Boroditsky 2008).  Although most linguists agree that strong Whorfianism is not terribly well supported, weak Whorfianism may not be complete bunkum.

An alternative approach to this idea — i.e., that different ways of thinking depend on different languages — relates not to the linguistic structures of the languages themselves, but instead to the distinction between thinking in a native language and a second (or third, or fourth) language. If you have ever learned another language, think of how you might relapse into your first language in moments of high stress. Native languages tend to be more tied to emotional processing than second (or third or fourth) languages, and this difference can affect cognitive processing. Keysar et al. (2012), for example, asked people to choose between two options in both their first and second languages — e.g., selecting one of two treatment options for a deadly disease. Mathematically, the treatment options were equivalent in their outcomes, but they were framed differently across experimental conditions. In one condition a treatment option was presented such that it had a certain percentage probability of saving lives, while in the other the same option was described in terms of its failure rate. Even though the two options in each condition were numerically equivalent, participants were more likely to select the option framed as saving 33% of lives, rather than the option framed as letting 67% of people die — but, crucially, only when they were considering the options in their first language. When they did the same task in their second language, they instead recognized that the outcomes were equivalent, regardless of framing. These experiments were replicated across a variety of languages and scenarios, and the outcome was reliably similar: people were less susceptible to emotional framing in their second language. The authors propose that the mechanism relates to cognitive load: when you're thinking about a language you know less well, you don't have the brainspace to spare for emotional reasoning.

Iskander's split personality could be understood from either of these two perspectives. Arabek, his native language, is rich with different expressions of emotion — especially cursing (oh, especially cursing!). Why shouldn't using a language which encourages emotional expression result in a personality that is is quick to smile and laugh, effusive and expressive? By contrast, in Inglez, the language of ship administration, Iskander's second language, he is formal and proper, as would be expected in a language whose sole purpose is directed towards formal pursuits. 

Alternatively, you could imagine that the cognitive load of operating in a foreign language like Inglez would tax Iskander enough that he must tamp down on cognitive indulgences like emotion. (However, since he falls in love with a woman to whom he communicates in Inglez, this seems less persuasive).

But I think the personality-language match here is doing a third thing. Forget linguistic research. Instead, consider Iskander's personalities through a narrative lens. The Safina houses its thousands of inhabitants in different berths, and although its original crew members came from different nations and ethnic groups, the Compact’s First Crew after the revolution decided to group people not by ethnicity or religion, but by language. By grouping people based on voluntarily mutable characteristics — anyone can learn a new language — the crew can guarantee equality and unity, with translators to ease linguistic barriers to cooperative group action. Thus, the different berths speak Arabek, Manda, Canto, Malay, Russ, Nihon, Torkdil² and others. And to communicate across berths, all are united by Inglez, the language of official administration. 

Inglez is no one's native language, but anyone who wishes to work in Administration, or indeed climb above the lowest ranks in other divisions, must learn it.³  But Iskander's role as a Translator also serves a second purpose: in addition to simply conveying meaning, he also serves as a kind of lawyer. He ensures that all the paperwork — for criminal defenses, marriages, births, deaths — is prepared and filed properly. His use of Inglez, then, is fundamentally administrative. No wonder he develops a stodgy, no-fun, stuffed shirt persona in Inglez: not necessarily because Inglez's grammatical structure encourages stodginess, and not because he is less emotional in a second language; but because that particular second language is tied primarily to the culture of paperwork.

And what goes for Inglez goes for all the other language on the Safina. The linguistic variety might have been intended to serve as a mutable grouping characteristic, but the different berths have preserved — or developed, or strengthened — their differences since launch day in more dimensions than just language. Religion, fashion, culture, and values vary enormously across berths, defying the original goals of preserving social mobility.

The fact that the ship's original crew contained so many speakers of so many languages, and yet not English, feels like a pleasing thumb in the eye of English linguistic imperialism. Whatever this future Network Empire was that had the power to dominate the world and build generation colony ships, it did not require English to do it. However, the fact that English — and thus Inglez — was consciously adopted to become the language of status and privilege on the Safina is harder to interpret. Is it a straightforward world-building consequence of what happens when one language is made the language of power? An authorial commentary on the inescapable dominance of English in our current world? A thematic invocation of the tensions inherent in any society where English-speakers specifically control all decisions, and vernacular speakers must learn English to have any power? 

The last option is certainly consistent with the unfolding events in the book. By 200 years into the journey, organized crime groups — or covens — are everywhere, spreading violence in their internecine disputes; and even law-abiding crew have started to develop linguistic bigotries, or 'berthisms' betraying the philosophy of social mobility that underpinned the berth-grouping structure. Administrators throw complications in front of crew who want to marry across berths, linguistic and religious fundamentalists are developing with berths. The Compact is breaking down (like the ship), or perhaps was imperfect from the start (like all societies). Chaos threatens; agitators whisper of revolution, and the crew, divided as they are across berths and languages, are losing touch with the shared purpose that is supposed to unify them in their mission. Iskander is different people in different languages. He's not sure which of them is the real him. It's not clear which version of the Safina will survive to see Hurriya. 

2. Language and change on the Safina 

Languages change over time. As we can see in the spellings of the Safina's languages, Arabek is not the same as its ancestor Arabic; Russ is not Russian; Torkdil is not Turkish; Inglez is not English. This shift is made all the more evident when one of the sleeping Ancestors, Heba Hilal, is woken from hibernation and finds herself confronted with 200 years of linguistic drift. From her perspective, she talks like a hard-boiled detective — appropriate enough, given her previous employment back on Earth as a military investigator. But when we see her from the Safina's crew's eyes, her speech is archaic.  'Grant you mercy,' she says. 'Wouldst thou like to come in?'

And yet not all speech changes at the same rate. Hilal observes that Inglez has changed much less from English than Arabek has changed from Arabic. This is linguistically believable: standardized languages that are formally taught (like Inglez) will remain far more stable across the centuries than  casual, vernacular languages (like Arabek). In fact, Arabek itself is diglossic, with different versions used in different contexts. Formal, scholarly, religious Arabek is much the same as Hilal remembers. Only the vernacular Arabek requires her to rely on her still-intact AI-implant to help her with automatic translations. 

This split in Arabek on the Safina echoes the status of Arabic in modern-day earth: Modern Standard Arabic is the language of news, politics, and education. It is no one's native language but everyone's second language (does that sound familiar?). Meanwhile, the vernacular Arabic dialects — Mahgrebi, Levantine, Gulf, Egyption, and others — have diverged from their common ancestor to the point that speakers of some varieties verge on mutually unintelligible. Speakers of Gulf dialects, spoken around the Arabian Gulf (e.g., Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar) can understand each other easily, but have difficulty understanding Mahgrebi dialects, spoken in Algeria and Morocco.⁴ On the Safina, the Modern Standard Arabic from Earth, like English/Inglez, have retained much of their 200-year-old character. Only the vernacular Arabic varieties have continued to grow and change until they are nearly unintelligible to Hilal's ear.

The shifting rates of language development mirror the Safina’s social tensions between conservatism and change. This parallelism is beautifully apparent in the role of the Ancestors. Is it respect for culture and heritage that leads the crew to maintain the Ancestors in cryogenic stasis, celebrating them on the anniversary of the launch, visiting them and honoring them on ship holidays? Or is it mindless subservience to the last remnants of the brutal Network Empire, whose voracious violence eventually destroyed Earth itself? Is there anything to be gained by preserving the Ancestors? They were selected, after all, for their expertise in geology, meteorology, agriculture, and all the other skills that will eventually be necessary for colonizing a new world. But they also are the last representatives of that same Network Empire, with the technological augments still in place, ideologically devoted to a regime which the ship's crew rejected centuries before. And it should not be ignored that they consume enormous quantities of Safina’s resources, at exactly the time when the ship is itself strained and breaking down. How can the ancestors' potential future contributions be balanced against the equally undeniable dangers they represent — both now, asleep, and in the future, awake? When they wake on Hurriya, they will speak old languages that none of the crew understand. In their mouths, a world that is 400 years dead and gone will return. 

3. Anti-language and anti-society

The fracture lines between embracing change and conserving the past fuel both crime and revolutionary fervor among the crew, who coalesce into multiple activist groups, also called covens. These covens both follow the language-based divisions and also cross-cut them. Along linguistic lines, for example, we have the Karls, or Kommunists among the Russ-speaking births, and the more violently-minded Vory; the Haraka in the Arabek-speaking births; the Gokudo in the Nihon-speaking berths; the Zendistas among the Portuguese-descendents. Although these covens have their own primary linguistic affiliations, they must also communicate with each other, both for purposes of illicit trade, but also for coordinating larger criminal or political actions. Crucially, though, they do not communicate in the existing lingua franca of Inglez. They use a different mode of communication: Nupol.

Nupol is described as an argot, a polyglot blend of words from every language on the ship — and some that didn't make it into space — slotted into an Inglez grammatical frame. Russ contributes numbers and a lot of body parts; German or Yiddish's descendant seems to have provided negatives and some obscenities; Portuguese or Spanish or some other Romance language provided some abstract ideas about work and thought  and freedom, along with some personal and relative pronouns, and temporal adverbs. Still, each word can be more or less directly with an intended English counterpart. The reason it's possible to learn Nupol is because it is not an entirely novel language. The syntax of the sentences remains familiar. Even the morphology is unremarkable: To cog — to think or feel — inflects like any other verb: Today I cog, right now I am cogging, yesterday I cogged, tomorrow I will cog. Gulliver — head — pluralizes into gullivers. Nupol is Inglez relexicalized, but not regrammaticalized. 

Nupol is almost a textbook example of what Halliday (1976) called an 'anti-language'. Anti-languages are the communicative practices of anti-societies. In Halliday's words, "An anti-society is a society that is set up within another society as a alternative to it. It is a mode of resistance, resistance which may take the form passive symbiosis or of active hostility and even destruction" (pg 570). The covens on the Safina are all of these things. Some — the Zendistas, the Gokudo — seem to be content simply to to exist in their own carved out domains, existing in mostly passive symbiosis with the ship’s administration. Other covens take more active forms of hostility, but differ in the degree to which they advocate for active destruction. The Vory want to overthrow the administration and replace it with their own head, but otherwise preserve the social order. The Kommunistas want to go further, and set up  a new social order, build a new Compact.

These revolutionary goals make literal another feature of anti-languages. As Halliday argues, every language reinforces the agreed-upon social order that structures its speakers' consensus reality. Every time someone speaks, they must decide what to say, and what to leave unsaid; and every one of those decisions conveys something about the interlocutors' shared reality: This thing is new, and require explicit remark, and so we say it. All of those other things are normal, background parts of daily life, and not worth saying. So we say, 'Hey, your fly is undone' to identify the bit of the world that departs from the norm, without bothering to remark on all the shared knowledge about the convention of going about clothed rather than naked, the standard modes and mechanisms of standard garments, or the particular tabooness of crotch-associated wardrobe malfunctions. In this way, language helps to construct and maintain our shared reality. 

By speaking Nupol, the members of the covens, the coves, are not simply communicating across berths that speak different languages, or signalling in-group membership to other coves, or avoiding being overheard by out-group members — although they are doing that too. But more than that, they are also building the new social reality they want to spread: one without the Administration in charge; one run by the covens, structured by coven social hierarchies, governed by coven values. 

Because this new social reality is defined in opposition to the existing standard, it is not, in itself, fixed. There are many ways to oppose the dominant order, and as the covens shift their goals and membership and internal power relations, so too does Nupol shift. The Nupol spoken by Badreddine, the leader of the Haraka, sounds old-fashioned to the younger members, and indeed one of them reflects that Badreddine himself is the oldest person speaking Nupol that she has ever seen. To her, Nupol is the language of youth, of change, of agitation. 

An early scene in the book illustrates Nupol's quicksilver changeability in action. Iskander’s sister Damietta is aligned with Badreddine and the Haraka, and in this scene she is approached by a former friend called Britva to convey a message to Badreddine. This is the first time they've met in years. In her youth, Britva had been arrested for smuggling and spent time in prison; and following her release she joined the Russ-speaking Kommunistas. Although both women know Arabek, they converse in Nupol, because the substance of their interaction is aligned with coven activity: Britva's message is a proposed alliance between her coven, the Kommunistas, and Damietta's, the Haraka. During this conversation, Britva uses words Damietta doesn’t know, and so needs to explain their meaning to Damietta: strax — itself derived from a Russ(ian) root — means to fear something. In other words, as Britva’s Kommunist-aligned influence spreads through these proposed alliances, she also influences the Nupol of the people she contacts. New words enter the anti-language and spread, reflecting changes in the structures of the anti-society that uses it.

4. The Inglez substrate

I mentioned earlier that Nupol is constructed by relexicalizing Inglez: new words are introduced to replace standard vocabulary, without altering the grammatical frame. But why must the grammatical frame, the substrate language, be Inglez specifically? As I see it, there are two reasons: one trivial, the other metaphorical and delicious.

Trivially, the coves needs to be able to understand each other.  The crew don't necessarily know Arabek and Russ and Manda and Torkdil and Canto. (Even Translators like Iskander don't know all the languages themselves. Iskander is actively working on learning Nihon.) What the crew do all know is Inglez, to one degree or another. So if Nupol is built upon Inglez, everyone has access to a recognizable scaffold from which the unfamiliar bits can be puzzled out. (The reader must do quite a lot of this. It helps to know a certain amount of Russian.)

Metaphorically, recall that Halliday describes anti-languages as the language of an anti-society, and describes anti-societies as organizations defined in opposition to the dominant social order. A completely new language would be a thing in itself, able to exist independently of any other social order beyond the one belonging to its speakers. An anti-language, on the other hand, must be built upon the substrate that it exists in opposition to. You need to start with Inglez before you can build a language defined in opposition to Inglez. 

The delicious consequence of this metaphor extends further. Inglez is the language of privilege and power, but by providing the substrate of Nupol, it is also the means of unifying the coves who might otherwise struggle to unite their forces to greater action. If the brewing revolution is to be successful, then the new consensus reality, constructed and reinforced by the use of Nupol, will sprout from seeds planted in the earth of Inglez. And what could be more appropriate? On the Safina, the dead are composted to create food for the new generations that replace them. The old consensus reality is dying. The new struggles to be born. Now is the time of anti-language.

 ——

1 This particular proposal got a lot of attention at the time, although I don’t believe it was ever accepted as more than a cool idea that lacked proper scientific support. Just last year my department — and I'm sure other linguistics departments in universities around the UK — was approached by a banking firm, because they were considering developing a marketing campaign about savings and investments based on this idea. They wanted to get some real linguists to approve it as valid science. I do not believe campaign ever launched. 

2 The languages that Arabic, Mandarin, Cantonese, Malay, Russian, Japanese, Turkish, and English become after hundreds of years.

 3 Given that one component of the growing corruption in the ship relates to the way plum Admin posts are passed down within families; and given that people who fall in love across berths often end up speaking to each other in Inglez — as Iskander and his girlfriend Taki do — I have my doubts about how long Inglez can remain 'no one's native language'. It's not explicitly discussed, but I suspect a lot of those hereditary admin families and cross-berth couplings probably do end up speak Inglez at the breakfast table with their children. 

4 This information comes from my PhD student, who is currently studying the use of intonation to interpret syntactic ambiguities in Kuwaiti Arabic, and the extent to which Kuwait Arabic-English bilinguals can use the same perceptual strategies to interpret prosodic cues in the two language.

References

Berreby, D. 2012. Obese? Smoker? No Retirement Savings? Perhaps It's Because of the Language You Speak. The Big Think. http://bigthink.com/Mind-Matters/obese-smoker-no-retirement-savings-perhaps-its-because-of-the-language-you-speak 

Chiang, T. Story of Your Life, in Stories of Your Life, and others. [Tor, 2002].

El Sayed, Mahmud. The Republic of Memory. [Gollancz, 2026].

Thierry, G, Athanasopoulos, P., Wiggett, A., Dering, B., and J. Kuipers. 2009. Unconscious effects of language-specific terminology on preattentive color perception. PNAS 106:4567–4570. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0811155106 

Fausey, C. M., and L. Boroditsky. 2008. English and Spanish Speakers Remember Causal Agents Differently. In Proceedings of the 30th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Washington, D.C. https://escholarship.org/content/qt4425600t/qt4425600t.pdf 

Halliday, M. A. K. 1976. Anti-languages. American Anthropologist, 78(3): 570-584. https://www.jstor.org/stable/674418 

Heinlein, R. Stranger in a Strange Land. [G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1961].

Keysar, B., Sayuri, L. H., and S. G. An. (2012). The Foreign-Language Effect: Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases Psychological Science 23(6): 661 – 668. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41489753 

Liberman, M. 2012. Cultural diffusion and the Whorfian hypothesis. Language Log. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3764 

Pullum, G. K. 2012. Keith Chen, Whorfian economist. Language Log. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3756 

Sedivy, J. 2012. Thought Experiments on language and thought. Language Log. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3797 

​Whorf, B. L. (1940/1956). An American Indian Model of the Universe. In Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. John B. Caroll. Cambridge, USA: MIT Press. Pg. 57​.

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative or on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social

Book Review: Cello's Gate by Maurice Africh

A science fantasy novel that is perhaps not quite greater than the sum of its parts. 

Captain Grey has a problem. He’s a pirate, and a good one, but the local gendarmes are always dangerous and trying to keep his airship, The Trench, flying in the air, costs a lot of money and effort. That’s why when he is offered an extremely lucrative commission to go to an island no one can get to, in order to get a MacGuffin (the first in a series) that he doesn’t think really exists--he is willing to do it. Adventure is afoot on a journey to the island and surviving its dangers, from traps, to wildlife, to an immortal being that might have created all of magic itself.

This is the story of Cello’s Gate, by Maurice Africh. 

For all of the crunchy worldbuilding in the novel, Cello’s Gate is a novel that runs very strongly on vibes. It borrows and slightly modifies a lot of those vibes and those parts and puts them all together, not always in an optimum configuration, leaving some of the interesting parts of the worldbuilding feeling like they don’t quite seem to comfortably work together or sometimes even at all. The book is a patchwork of these elements, sometimes going at cross purposes. 

Let’s go for the high concepts and beats. Our main character, Captain Grey Shimada owns the airship the Trench as the ostensible pirate, although, like nearly all protagonist pirates I find in SFF, he’s not truly a pirate, or not very much so. He has a found family of fighters and rogues and outcasts of various types, including the pilot being married to another crew member.¹ His father, who he is somewhat rebelling against, is an important admiral.² He is hired by a client, Dalia Auber, who insists on coming along with her muscle, to find the seven Stones of Indigo. These seven are the basis of all magic in this science fantasy world, but someone who gets all seven would have unlimited cosmic power³. Once on the island, the group has to deal with a variety of tests, challenges, and traps. Also, there is a rival group after the stones and a confrontation with their superior numbers and firepower is the real enemy.⁴

There’s plenty to this complicated world and the characters and their backstories. Aside from Grey we get a few situations where the backstory of one or other of the characters unspools and the world builds from that. The thing is, it doesn’t all seem to fit together. I can’t make real sense of Grey’s story to begging with, he starts off as a bit of a failson hanging out with childhood friends. An especially harsh punishment for their antics sends him off to military school and away from his friends. We then go to 17 years later, and surprise, not only is Grey now a pirate, his two childhood friends are suddenly on the pirate ship he has, and part of the crew. We don’t see his father on screen except in the prologue, but just how this relationship and world is supposed to work, especially since his father backed him getting a ship, is a little murky. And the book almost feels like it was originally written that there were no holdovers from the prologue to the actual narrative, but suddenly there was a chance and we get two of them. 

Then there is the tech and the magic. The setting might have too much going on here--it’s a steampunk world with firearms, and airships, but also a complicated magic system, and also there are classes of people in that magic system. There are people who are Immortal, and people who are preternatural fights, Knights, and others. A revelation comes that there are even forbidden(?) hybrids of these as well. The author’s favorite must be the Crest Knight, since we have Dot, part of Grey’s crew, Rook, who is the bodyguard to the Immortal client, Dalia, and it turns out one of the antagonists on the island is a Crest Knight as well. Crest Knights fight so fast and so furious, that their fights are described in bullet time terms.⁵ The physical combats, and there are a number of such set pieces of various kinds, are well written and are a highlight of the book. But then there are people like the Immortals, who straight up come back from the dead when killed. It’s a painful and unpleasant process, but that is their magic. Minn, Grey’s childhood friend,and something that is not quite a crush, not quite a relationship (even after knowing her for two decades) is an Oracle and can get precognitive flashes of the future. There are other kinds of magic that we hear about but for the most part do not actually see in this narrative. 

Speaking of science fantasy again, though, a more general thought. Science fantasy is a hard trick to pull off, to make both the science fiction and the fantastic sides of the equation equally interesting, useful, powerful and important. As noted above, there is a lot of magic in this verse, of a wide variety of kinds that seems tied to the stones. As far as science, there are airships, and jamming fields and a variety of technology. Magic, though, with one noticeable and big exception, seems to win any straight up conflicts with science and technology that we see in the book. I suspect maybe the author was doing a bit with this. It does seem that magic is by far the more dominant half of the paradigm. 

Given that the novel is 600 pages, all of this worldbuilding and all of this wide variety of elements to the narrative does help fill up the pages. But for all of the invention in some places, the novels reaches for reference and allusion again and again and again, and the serial numbers aren’t always filed off well enough. 

However, it should be said that novel doesn’t drag, and it does know how to breathe, although the timing of the changes in point of view were sometimes off, and the withholding of information at some points only annoyed me rather than amplified my interest. On the other hand, the novel does well with a queernorm verse, something that is becoming much more the default, and less something I need to highlight except for contra examples. And, of course, this is the first in a planned series, since Grey and his crew only reach the first stone in this novel, and there are six more to go afterwards. 

Will I go on with the series? I am frankly not sure. With a lot of the heavy lifting of stuffing this world with its ideas in the first volume, it's possible that subsequent books will have a lot less of a gear shift issue than in this one. I hope so. Worldbuilding, as much as I love it, needs to flow from and to the plot and characters. The author here seems to have wanted to put in All the Cool Things into their worldbuilding, and many of them are cool, but not all of them, to me, feel like they should be in the same universe as each other. 

--

The Math

Highlights:

• Thick and chonky science fantasy

• Not quite the sum of its parts

• Good action and adventure beats.

Nerd coefficient: 6/10 

Reference: Africh, Maurice, Cello’s Gate, [Saga 2026]

¹ So, in essence, channeling Firefly, even if the Pilot is the wife here. There is also some Guardians of the Galaxy as well. 

² A Number of Anime have this father-son dynamic. It does make Grey more than a Mal Reynolds clone, at least, although I am not sure how it fits all that well. 

³ Despite my Aladdin joke, it’s the Infinity Stones, naturally

⁴ Given all the traps and puzzles, there is an Indiana Jones feel to it all. 

⁵ So the Matrix, with hand weapons. 

⁶ Here is a bonus secret endnote instead of a footnote, since I couldn’t work this into the narrative of the review. I didn’t like the title at all. We don’t find out who or what Cello is until late in the novel, and it doesn’t tie in with the theme or plot of the novel at all. In my view, a book title is important to attracting readers--even today, Netgalley, when requesting a book, has “Book Title” as one of the reasons you are attracted to a book.  And frankly, for me, Cello’s Gate doesn’t do that. The cover is very good, and does tell you what you are getting, right up to Dot’s not-quite light sabers.  But the title? No. It fails for me.  POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin. 

Deja Boo: Poltergeist 2

The second entry in the Poltergeist trilogy is classic kid nightmare fuel, no matter how cheesy it may seem in retrospect

The very first Poltergeist came out in 1982 and had some serious chops: It was directed by Tobe Hooper (of Texas Chainsaw Massacre fame) and produced by Steven Spielberg himself. It was a major success, and is universally beloved as a modern take on the haunted house trope.

Needless to say, neither of these two powerhouses returned for the sequel, Poltergeist 2. Does that make it any less enjoyable? No, I proudly say, as someone who loved this movie as a kid and who continues to enjoy it today as an adult.

It does, however, lose a bit of its gravitas. It turns from a quaint, supernatural movie about the horrors of suburban capitalism into a wild, twisty, culturally appropriating spookfest. Once again, I found myself not remembering key plot points in this sequel. Instead, I honed in on specific imagery that sticks with you long after the screen goes black.

The plot

The Freelings, having escaped from their former haunted house (now conveniently disappeared into another dimension), are living at the wife's mother's house. They're far from safe, however, as the main spirit they battled, a 19th-century apocalypse cult leader, continues to target young Carol Ann's life force. A Native American shaman named Taylor comes to their rescue, teaming up with everyone's favorite medium, Tangina Barron (of "This house is clean" fame from the original) to help the Freelings fight off the bad juju. There's not much more to it than that, and the movie consists mainly of scary scenes/monsters/otherworldly forces. They triumph in the end (seemingly). There's a third movie, but only Carol Ann and Tangina return—not even Craig T. Nelson could be bothered to show up.

What scared me then

Look, kids don't always know what's hokey. Sometimes, frightening imagery is enough, as we've learned over the course of this month. The most strikingly scary image in Poltergeist 2 is the main baddie: Reverend Henry Kane, played by Julian Bond. He is truly frightening, in a scary-Flannery O'Connor-preacher sort of way. He's ragged and scary, all rotten teeth and sallow skin.

When he starts singing "God Is In His Holy Temple," you can't help but feel like he's going to crawl out of the screen and kidnap you. He's a worthy villain, and Julian Bond is perfectly cast in this role. He's like biologically created to scare young kids about the terrors of elderly people.

The next scene that scared the living daylights out of me was the son/bathroom scene. The Freelings' teenage son is upstairs alone (yes, in the haunted house that his parents know about), attempting to shave when the dark spirit starts messing with him. The son's spindly orthodontic brace wires start spouting out of his mouth out of control, threatening to consume him as they expand and hold up near the ceiling. His folks come running upstairs to help him, battling the rogue braces wires before they reach the electrical outlet. This scene left a profound impact on me as a young child, and even more so once I reached middle school and got braces myself.

Once again, as I reexamine the past via horror memories, I realize that I was almost continually microdosing body horror. Maybe that's part of growing up: Realizing the gross and almost comical limitations of our corporeal forms.

Finally, I've remembered my entire life the absurdity of tequila worms. In the film, the father (played by Craig T. Nelson), very obviously is fighting alcoholism. At one point, as he's downing a bottle of the hard stuff to battle his demons, he imbibes the dreaded worm—only this time, it's possessed by the evil Reverend Kane, and the father thus becomes possesssed himself. He acts rudely, threatens his wife, and eventually throws up the tainted worm, which then becomes a horrific, tentacled monster.

This monster is a triumph of disfigured, circus sideshow proportions, and thus extremely memorable for children. Or rather, I remembered the worm growing into something monstrous and obscene even if I couldn't recall specific details about it now. But to this day, I've harbored a bit of a fear about mezcal, too.

What scares me now

Watching this as a 43-year-old, I can't say there's very much that scares me. The magical Native American trope bothers me more than any ghostly fright. The special effects are fine, in practicality, but don't particularly evoke much fear. As a fan of haunted house films, the Poltergeist movies are interesting. There's something inherently less scary for me when said spooky domicile is a California ranch. It's just less atmospheric than a broody, sprawling, black-and-white Victorian manse.

The only thing that I can still sort of defend is the depiction of the Reverend Kane. It's unsettling and creepy, no matter one's age. Cult leaders with an interest in little girls transcend time and space, and are always monsters. 

There's one other aspect that was a bit ahead of its time: the idea of a person being haunted and not just a locale. This would be echoed later in movies like Paranormal Activity, but it hardly pioneered the idea. Not being able to escape a haunting is at once harrowing and claustrophobic. Not being able to escape to the safety of a hotel or a family member's is insane. My father, a former Army Ranger and lifelong cop—and who I once thought invincible—once mentioned his greatest fear was a being he couldn't stop. That still holds true for me, I think, as the idea of an escapable spirit remains frightening.

Adults can scoff at the cheesiness of Poltergeist 2, as it's just good fun, but it's very easy to see why many scenes remain with kids who watch it.

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

Deja Boo: SCP-1733

Going through Groundhog Day with twenty thousand strangers, forever and ever and ever...

I confess that this essay may not fully accord with the guidelines set forth by the Déjà Boo project; in any case, my editor approved it, so here I go. It’s not a film, but an article on a horror wiki. It scared me deeply at one point in my life, but that was my adolescence, not my childhood. I came upon the SCP Foundation when I was in high school from the off-topic section of alternatehistory.com, and I found this one early on in my reading of that site, in what I believe was the first half of 2013, which was my sophomore year of high school (year 10 for non-Americans). It was the first work of web horror that really got under my skin.

For those not familiar with the SCP Foundation: it is a community-written horror wiki focusing on the titular non-governmental covert organization dedicated to protecting humanity from a wide variety of anomalous entities, objects, and phenomena. Its name reflects its mission: Secure, Contain, Protect. Every mainline article (tales excluded) takes the form of a case file in this organization’s labyrinthine database, detailing the nature of the anomalous phenomenon and how the Foundation is working to protect humanity from it. This format has gone into some deeply strange, deeply scary places. I have something of an up-and-down relationship with the SCP wiki (I’ve never had the bravery to try my hand writing one myself); for one reason or another I find myself on the wiki, browsing articles until the sense of dread endemic to reading this type of horror leaks into the rest of my life, and then I put it down to recover.

For the reader: here is the article in question, written by the pseudonymous user bbaztek. It is a brief read. Be sure to click the red heading “Partial Timeline Document 001” at the end so you can see the testing logs, which are a major part of the story. After this paragraph, I will assume that you have read it.

Clearly, I’m not the only person this article left an impression on. It is one of the highest-voted pieces on the entire wiki. It has been made into a YouTube video several times by various creators piggy-backing on the brand the Foundation has built. The comments on the article are laudatory, saying it is one of the scariest articles on the wiki.

Why did this scaled-up horror take on the premise of Groundhog Day worm its way under my skin as much as I did? In the months after I first read it, my mind would wander to the sheer terror of the people trapped inside that stadium, as civilization falls around them, leaving utter barbarism in its wake.

Part of it, I think, was my particular experience of high school, by virtue of my social class, background, and area. I grew up striving middle-class in an affluent Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. Like many kids from that background, there is a lot of pressure thrust upon you to make something of yourself. High school, in particular, for this type of kid from this type of background, is suffocating. This is when your grades really start to matter in the endless rat race to get into a good college, which will hopefully get you scholarship money to boot. This is the season of massive amounts of homework, extracurriculars chosen for their value on a college application, endless fretting about your grades, an unhealthy lack of sleep, and a deep, existential fear of what the future holds. As if that weren’t enough, I had a white father who worried endlessly about everything, and a Filipina mother who embodied every stereotype about the Asian tiger mother (I have explained my youth to my younger cousins as “surviving your auntie’s academic death march.” I later went to a university with a notorious stress culture over academics, to the point that it was nicknamed “suicide central” for a wave of suicides in the years before I was there, but I found the whole thing quite restful, as I could control the rhythm of the panic, rather than having it imposed on me based on my mother’s erratic mood swings).

It is very easy for a kid that thinks too much, works too much, and experiences too little to feel deeply trapped by that particular cycle. That, I think, glommed onto this SCP. This story is a repeating loop of miserable experiences that wears you down, leaving hope a distant dream. I was teetering on the edge of a mental breakdown (which finally came true my sophomore year of college), and the whole experience felt like pointless suffering. On some level I saw my experience in that story.

I had another reason, I believe. I am autistic, and as such I have a very hard time discerning what other people think of me, and what other people intended. I had very little idea if the people I spent time around actually liked me or simply tolerated. I was afraid that my peers found me stupid or annoying or downright repulsive (and, statistically speaking, I was probably right). This is an emotion that can easily spiral into worse; you begin to worry about which of your friends are actually bad people, with ill intentions. That, intertwined with the themes of the story, where just the wrong situation can throw otherwise normal people literally at each other’s throats, tapped into my paranoia. Who, given a bad day and a horrific situation, would kill me for no reason?

I have returned to this article periodically, and thinking about it, there is a lot going on here on a thematic level that makes the horror really work. What is striking is that the supernatural conceit is only scary in an abstract sense. It is, from the perspective of the unfortunate souls trapped in the recording, doors that will not open, ever. This is a scary idea primarily because the entire point of a door is to go through it. The very premise demands the consideration of the thoughts of the people who are denied passage through the doors. The horror, then, comes ultimately through the human psyche.

Human beings, obviously, live in linear time. Our very existence is mediated through the fact that we are born, we grow up, we age, and then we die. We have rites of passage for different milestones along that path that ends, for everybody, at the same destination. We become ourselves, day by day, by accumulating experiences, and through that accumulation we grow as people. Buddhism, contrary to popular belief, doesn’t necessarily deny the existence of the self. Rather, it says that the self is endlessly changing based on the experiences it has and the conditions through which it is put. We come to understand, intimately, that a man cannot walk through the same river twice.

SCP-1733 arrests the flow of time in a fundamental way. With every rewind of that recording, the lives of some twenty thousand people are reset to the same moment. But, cursedly, they remember what happened in every previous playback. They are eventually struck by the fact that none of this hell ends. It has to keep going on, and on, and on, and the sense of self deteriorates. There is now nothing to look forward to, other than macabre suffering. They are furthermore ripped from the human networks that define them—job, school, neighborhood, family—and give their lives meaning. Not only lacking a future, they could also be said to lack a history, and from there they might lack a self, and lack a meaning. They are forced into a situation where existentialism—the choice to make your own meaning in an utterly meaningless universe—is impossible. There will be no graduations, no weddings, no promotions, no births. There will simply be senseless, random deaths, right in front of their eyes, over and over and over again.

With that lack of meaning made painfully apparent, you glimpse at the different ways people try to cope with a loss of meaning. Some of them eventually kill themselves, finding a life with no meaning to be not worth living. Some of them take solace in defending others, in choosing to protect a semblance of decency as the people around them find no point in morality. Some of them simply choose to accept hedonism, and put up banners to conceal an orgy. All meaning has collapsed, so why not fuck every attractive person you can find in the arena? There are no churches in the TD Garden.

But there is another response. To illuminate it, I will turn to an oft-misquoted book that has been in some ways terrifyingly prescient: The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama. No, he did not argue that the fall of the Soviet Union would lead to world peace. He did argue, though, that the rising standards of living throughout the world would lead to a sort of existential boredom that would lead many people to rage against the order that gave them such standards of living to begin with, because they want to be recognized. To quote him:

“Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle.”

The experience of these twenty thousand people is, without question, existentially terrifying, and at first the comparison does not feel apt, even to me. But consider Ursula Le Guin’s words from The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas:

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”

The people in the TD Garden in that recording are certainly in great pain, emotionally and existentially first, and then all too physically. And if the monotony of this awful experience can be considered boredom, you can then see how some people would find reasons to rage against whatever is available. Whatever has trapped them there is not vulnerable to them in any way they can see, so they rage against the only people who could help them.

The Faithkeepers, the zealots who escalate the situation, have created meaning through the shared experience of their confinement. This is how many groups, cultures even, have come into existence in reality. African-Americans became a group through the shared experience of slavery. Filipinos became a group through the shared experience of the brutalities of Spanish colonialism. The Faithkeepers have bonded over their confinement, and an initially vague idea as to why they are confined, namely the belief that they are being punished in some way for the excesses of life in the First World in the 21st century. They engage in violence to feel something, to give themselves a purpose, to gain recognition as people in a situation where they are mere playthings.

Note, in particular, the rituals of sacrifice they develop after several replays of that recording. The notion of sacrifice requires an initial belief that two different things are valuable, but that one is more valuable than another. This valuation demonstrates that the person conducting the sacrifice has values to begin with, and from there the beginning seeds of an identity. By sacrificing their phones, they demonstrate their belief that freedom is more important than the ability to call people. By dragging LeBron James and Paul Pierce from their locker rooms and disemboweling them publicly, they state that they value freedom more than the lives of the notables of their society. By calling for the sacrifice of children, they are saying that they value freedom more than the most vulnerable. Some sacrifices are done out of commitment to a belief. These sacrifices, on the other hand, are to create and enforce the belief, and from there to create and enforce a self in opposition to forces around oneself.

The scariest thing about this is how it echoes into this decade. Existential boredom among people, particularly rich people, has led to a massive growth in the popularity of far-right movements whose ultimate creed is utter nihilism. You have people who are bored fall into worlds of conspiracy and hate ultimately just to feel something. These people have been driven to kill, to massacre even, just to have a sense of identity in a world that is constantly changing. People will kill for a self.

And then there is the meta aspect of it: these people are suffering at the hands of a force they cannot see. We, however, can see that force: the SCP Foundation researchers rewinding the recording over and over and over again, just to see what happens. It is not a major leap of logic, then, to see that force as the reader. The horrors are happening because we want to see the horrors. This is reality television, and social media mobs, and large-scale harassment campaigns, and so many other realms in the social realm. SCP-1733 forces us to confront what we are complicit in. What horrors occur because we want to see what they bring forth into the world?

The horror of this story comes from its unmooring of one of the fundamental aspects of the human condition: time. All purpose fades away, all connection fades away, all identity fades away. As the African philosophy of Ubuntu argues, a person is a person through other people, or put another way, I am because you are. What happens, then, when people are severed from the other people who made them people themselves, and confined with strangers over and over and over again? Given the limitations posed by Dunbar’s number, most people you come across will not have any meaning to you. In confinement, you are ripped from your old meaning and forced into a process of meaning-making, and that is terrifying.

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

Deja Boo: The Birds

Still creepy after all these years

When I was a college freshman, my roommate had a blue parakeet. On occasion, the bird would escape the cage and fly around our tiny dorm room and I would hide under the covers until the bird was safely back in the cage. I realized back then that my fear of free flying animals was likely based on my childhood viewing of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. I didn’t consume a lot of horror as a young child and I actively avoided graphic slasher films. The idea of scaring myself intentionally was limited to intense amusement park rides, not scary movies. As a result, much of what I saw in the horror genre were reruns of old black-and-white film classics that felt more like melodramatic gothic stage theater rather than being actually terrifying. However, one day, while flipping through the channels, I came across an old movie called The Birds, and I couldn’t look away. There are movies that will stay with you for various reasons, and not always because they are particularly well made or well acted. I was riveted by scenes of little children, my age, being attacked and wounded. And I was particularly creeped out by the attacking “monster” being something I walked by, or beneath, every day on my way to school. Without my realizing it, The Birds changed my brain chemistry when it came to the chirps and birdsong of sweet flying creatures with claws and beaks.

The story follows Melanie (Tippi Hedren), an impeccably dressed, pampered socialite whose minor hijinks periodically land her in trouble, but without lasting consequences. At a bird shop in San Francisco, Melanie and a charming young lawyer named Mitch (Rod Taylor) mutually prank each other. Determined to get back at Mitch, Melanie buys a pair of lovebirds and drives up to the seaside town of Bodega Bay to sneak them into the house which Mitch shares with his uptight, widowed mother (Jessica Tandy) and his cheerful, school-aged younger sister, Cathy (Veronica Cartwright). Melanie is helped and reluctantly befriended by Annie (Suzanne Pleshette), a cynical young woman who is Cathy’s teacher and Mitch’s ex-girlfriend. However, a series of isolated, strange bird encounters gradually escalates into swarms of massive, coordinated attacks and lethal carnage in the little town.

The Birds did a great job of creating a fear of the ordinary which, at least for me, can be far more scary than fantastical monsters or creatures. The birds in the story aren’t radioactive, alien, or super-enhanced in any way. They are just ordinary birds, en masse, and very angry at people. This is one of the early films I had seen that used the idea that any small thing, in sufficient numbers and fury, can kill you. This concept has been played out with ants, spiders, piranha, and young children, in other horror stories I saw later in life. I didn’t really worry about sharks or piranha in my home town, but birds were a regular presence in my life. I would see them massed on telephone lines or flying in formation in the sky. After the gory scene where Jessica Tandy finds a friend dead with his eyes gone, I had a new respect for birds.

The Rewatch

As part of our Déjà Boo series, I recently did a rewatch of The Birds to see how it compared to my childhood memories. Despite some dated acting and special effects (that make it sometimes drift a little towards campiness), it’s still creepy after all these years. There were things I noticed on my grownup watch that I didn’t catch or think about when I was a child. First of all, there is no music. Most films, especially from the 1960s, have jaunty background tunes or suspenseful music to set the emotional tone of the scene. In The Birds, music is absent, so there is only the natural sounds of the birds. Even in the most terrifying and violent scenes, there is only the flapping of wings and screeching of the birds and the cries of the victims.

Another thing I noticed is how slow and ordinary the start of the film is. There is no dramatic opening, chase scenes, jump scares or other intensity. Almost the first third of the movie is Melanie figuring out how to prank Mitch with the lovebirds. Even after she gets to Bodega Bay, she is still chatting with and manipulating the locals to complete her prank. I love how polished she is with lying for this small, petty thing, and I was intrigued by the way the small conversations gradually reveal the various characters’ inner demons long before they are hacked at by birds. The slow creep of the story prior to the pivotal action scenes and the lack of dramatic music created a feeling of vague, impending dread while still making the intense physical attacks sneak up on you.

The third thing I noticed on my rewatch was, well, the birds themselves. This may seem obvious, but as a child I was just freaked out by the massive amounts of birds attacking children my age. Watching this as a grownup, my brain was thinking about logistics. How did they get so many birds? How did they get them to swarm? I went down some unverified internet rabbit holes and read that most of the birds were real, but some were mechanical (which on second viewing you can sort of see when a child is pinned to the ground by a persistent bird). I also read that Tippi Hedren was surprised on set by the unexpected use of real, rather than mechanical, birds attacking her in a pivotal scene.

The final element I noticed during my rewatch were the philosophical conversations between the various characters, including several of the side characters. There are multiple times where a victim reports an attack and is disbelieved, not because they are untrustworthy, but because the listener doesn’t want to believe it could be true. There is a great scene in the town’s diner where Melanie reports that there was a bird attack on the school children, and an elderly woman who is a bird expert explains that a coordinated bird attack couldn’t happen, even though it clearly has. Another customer at the diner doesn’t want to hear the information because it will scare her two children. When the birds swarm the area around the diner, the customers stare at Melanie in the aftermath and one says that Melanie must be to blame. It’s an interesting reminder of toxic group conversation dynamics that continue to exist in our current day.

The Birds may seem tame by contemporary standards, but as a child I was riveted by the bird attacks, especially since children were often the targets and they were being attacked by real-life creatures that I regularly encountered. While the gore was mostly kept to a minimum, there were several jump scare scenes with an eyeless corpse or a man engulfed in flames or a child with a bird pecking at her neck. These scenes were enough to leave an indelible imprint on my young thoughts. As a result, The Birds remains a memorable experience as one of my first horror films.

Highlights:

• No music, so many birds
• Jump scares
• Kids always in peril

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

Anime Review: Kaiju Girl Caramelise

A cynical, thoughtful, funny twist on the usual coming-of-age rom-com anime

As the world around us feels more stressful, the proliferation of anime rom-coms offer a sweet retreat, and an alternative to the (often equally cathartic) intense or violent adventure stories. With charming characters, poignant moments, the overcoming of insecurities or childhood traumas, and slice-of-life coziness, all of these tropes can be a perfect balm to a stressful day. When you’re in the mood for that kind of vibe, I highly recommend a few of my favorites: The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity, You and I are Polar Opposites, the very underrated and funny Tamon’s B-Side, and the ultimate evening chill show Smoking Behind the Supermarket With You. However, my latest guilty pleasure is a bit of a departure from the general sweetness of the romance anime genre. Kaiju Girl Caramelise offers a different kind of rom-com, in the form of a gender-swapped, building-crushing, monster love story that’s wild, funny, and unexpectedly meaningful about external appearances and the pressure to fit in.

Kuroe Akaishi is a high school loner who dresses in dark clothing and avoids socializing due to her unusual “skin condition.” But this is more than an inconvenient allergic reaction. When she gets overstimulated, her hands turn into thick claws, she grows a monstrous tail, and eventually she begins to turn into a giant (skyscraper-sized) Godzilla-like monster. As the new school year begins, a popular and beautiful boy, Arata Minami, becomes attracted to her, despite her outcast status and her intentionally goth appearance. This newfound and very genuine attention leads to dangerous overstimulation in the worst way as Akaishi finds herself reluctantly attracted to the boy despite her grumpy, self-conscious attempts to avoid him. But as their relationship grows, she loses control of herself more frequently and begins to fully transform into her enormous fearful kaiju form, which the locals nickname “Harugon.” Although afraid of the creature, Minami feels an unexpected connection to it and treats it with empathy. Minami struggles to manage the constant social pressure he feels at school, but he soon finds himself at the center of national media attention when the rampaging Harugon publicly shows kindness and restraint with him. Meanwhile, Akaishi is both horrified by her nightly transformation and property damage and stressed out about figuring out what kind of creature she really is, while also angsting about her unintentionally toxic affection for Minami. Fortunately, Akaishi is supported by several women in her life, including her single mother, a scientist, who has a major secret related to Akaishi’s transformations. Akaishi is also supported at school by unexpected new friendships from Manata, a wealthy, kaiju-obsessed classmate, and Reiru, a cosmetics expert and fashionista who has her own unexpected physical appearance secret.

For a show with such a funny and light premise, Kaiju Girl Caramelise has surprisingly solid commentary on society’s focus on physical appearances versus true emotional connections. All of the lead characters have an unexpected side that fits this theme. Akaishi is a shapeshifting teen girl and destructive Godzilla monster. Despite this secret, her new friends support her, and her dreamy boyfriend loves her even though something seems off. On the other hand, Minami is popular because of his good looks, but his childhood was one where he was overweight and bullied, making him now overcompensate by starving himself to stay “beautiful” and by being automatically social and warm with everyone. The cycle of hyper-popularity due to his physical appearance is exhausting and toxic for him, and it gets even worse for him when he becomes the focus of national attention. Rich and pretty Manata is obsessed only with the monstrous Harugon creature, to the point of jealousy of Minami’s public connection to it. And Reiru channels her physical insecurities into a thriving social media presence about creating your own beauty, since beauty is essentially superficial. Later in the series, a boy, Daichi Yoneyama, appears to be a rival to Minami, but he is also not what he appears to be.

Interestingly, when Akaishi transforms into Harugon, she is not only physically monstrous, but she also changes emotionally, becoming more volatile, impatient, and frustrated. Akaishi will often acknowledge her escalating temper during her transformation. This is a change from shows like Kaiju No. 8, in which the transformed protagonist (Kafka Hibino) remains sweet-natured and tries to moderate his monster form while retaining his sense of humor. On the contrary, although Akaishi usually tries to calm herself down to stop her initial transformation, once it is complete, she relishes her monstrous side and finds it exhilaratingly cathartic. In one very funny scene, she thinks (incorrectly) that Minami wants to make out with her, and she knows that will trigger her potentially deadly kaiju transformation. Instead of leaving him or trying to calm down, she instead says, “Sorry, Tokyo, you’re all doing to die tonight.”

While Minami is the ultimate green flag, cinnamon roll character, the show has fun with gender-swapping the traditional monster and damsel-in-distress roles. In Kaiju Girl Caramelise, the giant, bridge-stomping monster is a girl, while the beautiful, kind-hearted, person in peril is a boy. When Minami first encounters a rampaging Harugon, he feels a familiarity with it after looking into the eyes of the monster, and he, at least subconsciously, realizes he has a connection to the creature. We soon have several moments of the kaiju catching or saving Minami, while the news cameras are rolling, which in turn causes Minami to become a national sensation, nicknamed the “Kaiju Prince.” But it is always clear that the real strength of the show is Akaishi. She remains a realistic combination of boldness, insecurity, humor, strength, cynicism, and thoughtfulness.

In its short run of episodes, Kaiju Girl Caramelise succeeds in being sharp, cynical, funny, and surprisingly thoughtful about the societal pressure for a “beautiful” appearance and the value of struggling to push past the superficial expectations. It also has a great deal of feminism and positive girl power energy as Akaishi, Reiru, and Manata all support each other and even find unexpected support among their female classmates. The show will periodically venture towards traditional mean-girl territory and then subvert the usual tropes with something that is actually and surprisingly positive. Despite the funny rom-com set up and completely enjoyable story arc, Kaiju Girl Caramelise has enough heart to be more than the deliciously guilty pleasure that it seems to be.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Highlights:

• Gender-swapped monster romance
• Surprisingly positive messaging
• Funny, enjoyable guilty pleasure adventure

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

Deja Boo: Child's Play

Child's Play still holds up after 40 years, and is a film that is most likely still scaring children into avoiding their dolls

This movie was the one. The one that caused me to forever fear dolls. Now, is it happenstance that I was also a tomboy in the late 1980s and didn't really like them anyway? We'll never know. But I can say that this movie personally traumatized me, and it's perhaps the scariest Deja Boo I'll personally revisit this month.

Since its release in 1988, Child's Play—or less formally known as "Chucky"—has spawned a franchise of six sequels, a TV show, and a reboot. I think it's easy to forget how chilling the first movie was back when it was just a standalone film. The intervening years have sort of Flanderized the demonic doll into a evil, sardonic toy version of Deadpool. That's okay, there's clearly an audience for this sort of thing.

But when you rewatch this first film that launched everything, it's an incredibly frightening supernatural slasher that sticks with you. Like with Killer Klowns from Outer Space, I don't recall ever sitting down and watching Child's Play from beginning to end when I was a kid. It was whispered about in playgrounds, featured in the lineup in the papery-thin HBO viewing guide that came in the mail, and stacked three deep in the horror section of my local video stores. That was plenty exposure for a young Haley to say absolutely not and bid adieu to even the innocuous Teddy Ruxpin that had previously been living in my room.

There's an easy explanation to why the idea of a haunted doll terrorizes children. They're things of comfort, given to you by a loving adult. They possess an emotional safety that binds you to them. If they suddenly turn on you and at the very least cause trouble—and at the very worst threaten you—you're liable to not be believed. It's only a doll, they'd say. Stop playing, Mom would counter.

Therein lies their fear.

The plot

Chucky is a possessed doll that comes to life in Child's Play, and finds his way via happenstance to the home of young Andy and his single Mom in Chicago. Chucky is the cartoon star of a popular kid's cartoon, and Andy is obsessed—he even has Chucky's trademark blue overalls in the form of pajamas (another terrifying thing to watch given the ubiquity of Chucky in pop culture now). His mom is struggling to stay afloat, but manages to buy a stolen Chucky doll for a song from a back-alley peddler.

Chucky eventually comes to life, and begins tormenting Andy and his family. We find out that Chucky is actually possessed by the soul of a local serial killer who, upon being shot up by a cop played by Christopher Sarandon, utters a magical voodoo incantation and sends his essence into a 2-foot doll.

As a possessed doll, he's not just there for a good time. He has Andy take him via the L train to a sketchy part of town where he can take vengeance on his former accomplice. He then goes and visits his voodoo master, who tells him that he can only come back to corporeal form if he says the incantation again in front of the first human to whom he revealed he was alive. In other words, he now has to kill Andy.

Andy, his mom, and Chris Sarandon eventually figure this all out, and manage to take him out—but not until after he's been kicked, stabbed, shot, and burnt (very Rasputin of him).

What scared me then

Honestly, it was more the idea and image of Chucky that got me more than any specific scene. Seeing a red-headed doll—even if only in brief swatches—was terrifying. I'm sure I'm not alone in this. There's a reason Chucky is up there in the mononym club like Michael, Jason, and Freddie. He's mean-spirited, vulgar, and has zero problem killing men, women, and children.

I think more than the idea of him, though, was his visage. All dolls to me are unsettling, really, but Chucky is beyond the pale. He's creepy when he's the happy, harmless, smiling version of the real-life doll. But when the serial killer's soul wakes up, he contorts the doll's face into an angry, twisted sneer, and the eyes glisten with hate.

It was scary then, and it's scary now.

What scares me now

First, I want to explore what's more disturbing: If Chucky's deranged-supernatural-serial-killer-possession origin was never discussed, or the fact that it is. I think the not knowing would be more disturbing actually, because it would be more like a random act of terror. Him having the backstory somehow makes him more human, I think, so for me it's a little less scary. Now, I still wouldn't want to confront either one, of course, don't get me wrong. But random acts of violence are inherently less upsetting than a situation (no matter how far-fetched) that can be explained at least a little.

The scene where Andy's mom realizes that this stolen doll she bought for her son is truly, evilly alive, is so stark and horrifying. She's looking over the box he came in, and then—the included batteries fall out. This thing has been talking and moving by itself. All of a sudden, all the things Andy's said Chucky's been saying and doing make a lot more sense. It's alive.

Seeing Chucky amble out in the wild, even at a distance, is discomfiting. There's a scene where Andy is watching Chucky run up some outdoor stairs towards him, knowing that Chucky will try to kill him. It's a brief scene, and some may call it a throwaway, but I found it oddly scary. You see this little bright red and blue doll scurrying up steps, moving on its own volition. It's scarier, to me, than any close-up special effect, because it just seems… real. There's an urgency to it that can't be shaken.

Towards the end of the movie, after they've tried repeatedly to kill Chucky, he gets burnt to crisp, all blackened wax and sooty skin. He's alive still, and at this point, at his most physically disgusting. I think this part is especially scary because not only is he a haunted doll, which is frightening because he resembles a real child, but he's also burnt beyond recognition. No one wants to imagine a badly burnt child, but that's exactly what he resembles. It's horrific, and it compounds the fear you've been facing all movie-long to this point.

Child's Play is an upsetting movie, and I feel a little justified in being such a scaredy cat about it in my youth. I dare any parent to let their child even know this movie exists—you'd have the same situation.

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