Book Review: The Astral Library by Kate Quinn

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

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

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

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

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

This is the central plot conflict of The Astral Library.

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

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

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

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

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

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

End Note

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Highlights:

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

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

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

Looking Back at War Front: Turning Point

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cover illustration (c) Alejandro Colucci

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

——

References: 

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

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

Book Review: Hyo the Hellmaker by Mina Ikemoto Ghosh

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

cover art:Mina Ikemoto Ghosh

Hyo the Hellmaker.

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

Hyo is, kinda, a one-woman A-team. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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Highlights:

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

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

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

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

TV Microreview: Wonder Man

‘To thine own self be true’ is a superpower

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

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

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

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

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

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Book Review: City of Others by Jared Poon

Magic and bureaucracy in a supernatural Singapore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Highlights:

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

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

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

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

TV Review: Star Trek: Starfleet Academy (opening episodes)

Gen Z’s Star Trek hits the sweet spot for youthful adventure mixed with Gen X cynicism

Star Trek has grown significantly from the original 1960s adventures of Captain Kirk and the crew of the starship Enterprise. Over the decades, new versions of Star Trek ranged from the bleakness of Enterprise, Picard, and Discovery to the optimism of the original series and Strange New Worlds, to the timely philosophical insights of The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, to the very funny humor of Lower Decks.

In the background of the adventures, many of our favorite heroes gave passing references to where it all began, Starfleet Academy. But we seldom got a deep dive into life at the academy. Now, just in time for its sixtieth anniversary, Star Trek is going back to the beginning by showing us the start of the hero’s journey for the next generation of explorers in its latest offering, Starfleet Academy. On the Trek continuum from bleak to hilarious, Starfleet Academy is definitely on the optimistic and humorous end of the spectrum. Those who prefer their Star Trek rather serious will be disappointed, because Starfleet Academy feels much more like a live action version of the always humorous Lower Decks. If you haven’t seen Lower Decks, you should, because Lower Decks is funny, clever, and sharply witty in its references to core Star Trek themes and tropes. Starfleet Academy has a bit more seriousness than Lower Decks, but mostly retains a fun, playful tone that is still in touch with the traditional Trek values of diversity, loyalty, heroic empathy, and scientific curiosity.

[Mild spoilers for the first episode] Set centuries into the Star Trek future, Starfleet Academy begins as the story of a single child. Caleb Mir is six years old, living with his mother Anisha (Tatiana Maslany). In her struggle to find food, Anisha accepts aid from a man (Paul Giamatti), not realizing he is a pirate who ultimately killed a Federation officer. Although she cooperates with the Federation, the commander Nahla Ake (Holly Hunter) gives her a cruel punishment, sentencing her to fifteen years in a hard labor camp and putting Caleb in state custody. Feeling betrayed as her son is torn away from her, she warns Caleb not to trust the Federation. As a result, the child tricks Ake and escapes, and grows up as a distrustful street urchin who tries in vain over the years to locate his mother. Meanwhile, Ake is devastated by losing the child she promised to care for, and to whom she promised to bring for visits to the betrayed Anisha. She resigns from Starfleet for fifteen years, but is eventually lured back to lead the newly reopened Starfleet Academy when the long lost Caleb (Sandro Rosta) is caught and incarcerated for stealing. Regretting what happened years ago, she urges Caleb to join the academy instead of being sentenced to prison. Caleb, who is a technology expert, reluctantly accepts enrollment in exchange for Ake’s promise to help locate his mother, who has disappeared from the Federation’s prison system.

Starfleet Academy is being reopened for the first time after a cataclysm known as the Burn. The new cadets will be the first class at the revived academy. Over the past years, officer training had been taken over by the War College, a conflict-focused institution that becomes a rival to the exploration-focused Starfleet Academy. At the academy, Caleb quickly falls in with an eclectic group of new cadets with their own interesting backstories, including Jay-Den (Karim Diané), a gentle-hearted Klingon; SAM (Kerrice Brooks), an earnest and nerdy photonic (hologram); Darem (George Hawkins), an egotistical shapeshifting Khionian; Genesis (Bella Shepard), a clever, success driven Dar-Sha strategist who is Darem’s rival; and later, Betazoid siblings Tarima (Zoë Steiner) and Ocam (Romeo Carere). The young people are supervised by academy instructors, including the eccentric Captain Ake. Ake is a half-Lanthanite who has been alive for centuries and has an attachment to quirky, ancient objects such as old-fashioned eyeglasses and hardback books. She often walks barefoot and helps the kids revenge-prank the neighboring school. Her cranky second in command is the part Klingon, part Jem-Hadar, Lura Thok (Gina Yashere). There is also the returned holographic Doctor (Robert Picardo) from Voyager, and the wise and cynical instructor Jett Reno (Tig Notaro) from the time-traveling Discovery. As the young people settle into the structure and adventure of life at the academy, an old villain returns to wreak havoc, and Caleb has to learn a quick lesson about working with his new allies.

Starfleet Academy does a good job of starting with only two perspectives: the young, rebellious Caleb and the ancient, quirky Ake. The story initially focuses on those points of view and then gradually adds new characters. This technique allows viewers to enjoy the dynamics of this new setting before adding too many new perspectives. If viewers don’t remember the Burn, its story starts in season 3 of Discovery [Editor’s Note: If you haven’t seen Discovery, the short version is that all the dilithium in the galaxy exploded and warp travel became impossible for a whole century]. Fortunately, knowledge of the event is not essential to enjoy Starfleet Academy. The series is set in the distant future, which allows lots of creative freedom regarding technical aspects of the traditional Trek lore. Therefore, a willing suspension of disbelief is helpful for enjoying the story. After the destruction from the Burn, the Federation largely fell apart, with many members abandoning the alliance. The reopening of Starfleet Academy offers opportunities to rebuild those connections with the help of the young cadets.

Starfleet Academy is character-focused and youthfully Gen Z, with a healthy counterbalance of Gen X cynicism from the instructors. Ake refers to the cadets as “kids” despite the fact that many of them are adults by our contemporary standards. This is Star Trek for the Fourth Wing, TikTok, Instagram generation. It’s Trek’s addition to academia-based speculative fiction. Starfleet Academy leans into character tropes with a modern take on traditional group dynamics that have been showcased in pop culture since The Breakfast Club. At times, the clichés feel heavy-handed and a bit predictable, and if you’re not in the mood for hijinks, this may not be the best Trek experience. Even for those of us who are older, we probably still remember college days of cramped cozy dorm life, late night conversations, building lifelong relationships, and struggling with both schoolwork and family expectations. Starfleet Academy leans into those awkward dynamics while maintaining the steady leadership from the older generation. Some YA stories paint the adults as clueless or as adversaries, but here they are treated as smart, fully fleshed-out characters whose wisdom and cynicism are amusingly relatable.

Over the years, many Star Trek series have initially struggled to find their footing, including the ultimately beloved The Next Generation. The franchise suffers from the burden of expectations, and each new series feels the pressure of comparison while trying to do something new. Despite some predictable moments, abrupt character arcs, and outright silliness, the show delivers upbeat adventure and likeable characters who each have enough backstory and angst to let viewers know a reckoning is coming for each one as the series progresses. Additionally, the casting is superb with, Oscar Award powerhouses like Holly Hunter and Paul Giamatti, as well as the amazing Tatiana Maslany, the nostalgic return of Robert Picardo as the holographic doctor, and Stephen Colbert as the deadpan funny dean heard over the academy’s public address system. But the most memorable character is Gina Yashere’s Lura Thok, who steals every scene she is in with her hilariously perpetually irritated attitude.

Despite the new generation vibe, Starfleet Academy is full of easter eggs and nods to both major and minor Trek elements. Long-time fans will catch the signage for Boothsby Park named for the former academy groundskeeper (seen in The Next Generation), the presence of a background character who appears to be a descendant of a species whose racism drove themselves into near-extinction in The Original Series episode “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” and the quietly funny presence of an exocomp during a conversation between Lura and Ake.

Starfleet Academy is clearly targeted to a new generation, but it has enough Gen X energy to provide a much needed counterbalance. Besides, the show is filled with many classic Trek references that will appeal to a range of viewers looking for something fun. The pilot episode is called “Kids These Days” and the following episode is called “Beta Test” (also a reference to the arriving Betazoids). Both of these signal that the Starfleet Academy story is a new concept that is just beginning a journey for both a new and older generation.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Highlights:

• A Gen Z adventure with nods to classic Trek
• Predictable tropes and clichés
• Enjoyably quirky characters and Oscar-caliber actors in a humorous context

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