Book Review: Lessons in Magic and Disaster

A Russian nested doll of stories, characters and relationships, and yes, magic

Jamie is a grad student in Massachusetts, working as best she can to teach classes and make her way in the world. She’s also a witch, has been for years, and has gotten more and more interested in the uses of magic. But it is her relationship with her mother, and the story of two women in the 18th century, and a book, and the story within that book, that truly drive and reinforce the narrative.

This is the story of Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders.

On the level of basic plot description, the novel is a relatively straightforward affair about Jamie’s relationship with her mother, and about uncovering what happened to her other mother, Mae. This proceeds as Jamie struggles with her relationship with her mother, with her spouse, Ro, and with the nature and uses of magic. Oh, and there is also drama and issues with her graduate studies and classes in the modern day.

Anyone with a parental relationship as an adult will find a lot here to think on and absorb. There is a real dividing line from when you stop being a child and start being an adult with an adult parent; and what life is like on that other side can be uncomfortable, especially if relations have had a break for a time. This novel explores the implications of that sort of relationship intimately and with feeling.

The narrative is far more than the sum of its parts. It is a rich dive deep down in levels and layers that wind up influencing and talking to each other, and to the reader. The novel works on those interlocking layers. At the very top, this is a story about a mother and a daughter and how they try to reconnect, with the daughter teaching magic to her mother, and the use of that magic having all sorts of spinning consequences. This impacts severely the relationship. And since this is a Charlie Jane Anders book, nearly all of the sympathetic characters are queer.

Jamie’s graduate studies center on the author Sarah Fielding, a real-life author, and sister of the more famous author Henry Fielding. The story of 18th-century women like Sarah is part of this novel. Anders devises a fictional novel of hers called Emily, making the text (and Jamie) focus on that book and speculate on the relationship between Emily and one Charlotte Clarke. Charlotte is a fascinating real-life character who transgressed gender roles in complicated ways, was often known as Charles Brown, and dressed in men’s clothes. In real life we don’t know how much Charlotte and Sarah knew each other. In this novel, bits of a speculated relationship between the two is a “level” of the story underneath the main ones.

The novel is like that: levels upon levels, echoing and reflecting on each other, like a layer cake. From the top:

• Main day story of Jamie, Ro (her partner) and Serena (her mother). Plus magic.
• The story of Serena and her partner Mae (Jamie’s parents). It’s a tragedy in many ways. I was moved to tears at points.
• The story of Sarah Fielding and Charlotte Clarke. Anders takes what we know and, thanks to it being part of Jamie’s thesis, has her speculate on the relationship.
• The fictional novel Emily by Fielding (which we get excerpts and commentary on, since this is Jamie’s thesis).
• Finally, inside Emily there is a layer further down: a fantasy story, the Tale of the Princess and the Strolling Player, that definitely has connections at least up to Fielding and Clarke’s story, and, I think, all the way to Jamie and Ro’s as well.

Although there is no actual time travel involved in this book, what comes to mind when reading it is Tim Powers’s The Anubis Gates, which focuses on the early 19th century, and the work of an imaginary Romantic poet’s work and its importance to the narrative. With all these layers influencing each other, I am also reminded of the Dialogues of Achilles and the Tortoise in Hofstadter’s Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.

So the novel is extremely geeky in a literary sense. It’s a fascinating high wire act from Anders. It’s also a very science-fictional geeky book. For all of the focus on an 18th-century author, the novel lives in a modern context and has plenty of references and genre awareness—not to the degree of, say, a Jo Walton novel, but enough for someone new to genre works or movies to find it just very slightly off-putting. That said, this IS the novel to give your queer or queer-friendly friend who has never read science fiction or fantasy before but wants to try it out.

That subject has been in the water in recent months. Here, in Lessons in Magic and Disaster, there are no spell-slinging wizards; the magic is subtle. While people might reach for Kelly Link here, what this novel made me think of (besides earlier works by Anders and the aforementioned Tim Powers), is Megan Lindholm (a.k.a. Robin Hobb)’s Wizard of the Pigeons, where magic is also very subtle and hard to notice.¹ The threat in that novel is mystical, whereas the challenges Jamie and her family and friends face are all too real and present.

The theory of magic, such as it is for Jamie and her family and friends, is one of discovery and of liminal places. There is a numinous, mysterious and only-vaguely-understood nature of magic that is very much against codified rules. Jamie, who has been practicing this magic for some time before the book, has theories about it that don’t always seem to align with the actual results. Serena, to whom she teaches magic, has her own ideas on what it’s good for. When Serena and Jamie find other practitioners, the bounds and sphere of actual theory, craft and knowledge expand further. At no point is there a Sandersonian ruleset defined. Magic is, in the end, mysterious. And it’s not the entire focus of the book, as witness the book’s Kelly-Link-like title.

The voice in the writing of Lessons in Magic and Disaster is contemporary and open. In this year of 2026, Jamie’s voice resonates as someone you might know, or at least be neighbors with. Her concerns and problems, aside from the issues of magic, and of the 18th-century material mentioned before, are of this moment too: the rising intolerance against queer people, and the difficulties of relationships with a spouse and a mother. It’s not a comfortable read, given what Jamie and those around her go through, but Anders makes the experience easy for us to immerse in, and find sympathy in both Jamie and her mother despite their differences. There are no easy answers at the end. That in itself is a form of magic.

There is a point in the novel where Jamie finds a thesis statement (or thinks she has) for her study of Fielding. It’s really an echo for the thesis statement for Anders’ s novel as well, and so, atypically, I am going to quote it verbatim:

So now Jamie is thinking of Emily as a story about nature, change, and chasing your own heart’s desire in spite of everyone else’s expectations. Emily is a book about the games we play along the cliff edge. About nature encroaching in the places that people have left behind to move to towns at the very start of industrial capitalism, and the changes that people can make in those places. It’s about the trade-offs between security and self-determination, and Emily’s struggle to have both.

Lessons in Magic and Disaster is a queer, immersive character study that sometimes uncomfortably (in a good way) speaks to fractured relationships, both familial and otherwise, and the costs of both action and inaction in dealing with challenges. Plus magic.

Highlights:

• Character-focused, immersive story
• Russian-doll narrative, layered story reinforcing and exploring theme
• Possibly a very good fit for a first SFF novel for queer-friendly readers

Reference: Anders, Charlie Jane. Lessons in Magic and Disaster [Tor Books, 2025].

¹ I’ve thrown a number of books and references at you, the reader, in this review, but the book is like that, too. There are both a Historical Note and a strongly felt Afterword where Anders reveals her thought process, ideas, and a reading list. And a music list, because she’s like that.

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

Festival View: Fireflies in the Dusk

Comedy science fiction takes many forms. Thoughtful (if strange) scifi like Buckaroo Bonzai Across the 8th Dimension sits right there alongside the more intellectually down-market (but no less enjoyable) Teenagers from Outer Space. That comedy can exist across that spectrum isn’t shocking, but it’s surprising when something lives on both those lines at the same time.

And Fireflies in the Dusk has entered the chat.

The story is actually fairly simple: a 19th-century woman, Charlotte, has discovered that her desk has a temporal connection to a credenza in an ad agency office in 2025. Through letters exchanged via this unusual method, she has met her man Zack, technically a DudeBro, and she’s in love from the letters he’s been sending through the cabinet to her. When she is about to be forced to marry Cecil, a right-proper English gentleman, she chooses to go through the desk and be with her true love in 2025.

And, of course, Cecil follows.

The situation arises where Charlotte and Zack become a 21st-century couple. Cecil and Zach’s boss, Martin, also come together in a lovely sort of twist where Cecil discovers everything from GRINDR to Showgirls.

Of course, things go about in a strange and weird way, and the ending is a wonderful, twisted, utterly appropriate comedic finish.

The first thing is that everyone simply accepts the idea of a credenza that is a time portal, and that passing between the time periods. It’s an absolutely bizarre possibility, but everyone’s basically just “yeah, whatever” about it. That is what I love about science fiction comedy, when the unexpected becomes the completely blasé. That’s a key to genre acting, to be able to play off the strange and interact with a new reality in a natural way. Everyone in Fireflies in the Dusk manages that, with special note going to Emily Goss, whose work I’ve admired since I first saw her in the lovely horror film The House on Pine Street. She’s hilarious presenting a Charlotte that is utterly of her time and finds herself settling into her new one slightly uneasily. Her role at the end is a delightful twist in tone. She provides the backbone of the story.

But it’s Hale Appleman (probably best known for his role in The Magicians) as Cecil who absolutely kills every second on screen. He’s deadpan, but he delivers even lines like “Have you heard of poppers?” with nothing more than a late Victornian Gentleman’s droll. He’s great, and his boyfriend played with absolute dead-on comedic energy by Drew Droege (of Drunk History and Chloë Sevigny imitation YouTube videos) gives the flip side to the Zack-Charlotte relationship.

It’s a perfect little seventeen-minute experience that could be chock-full of fascinating ideas. If time travel is possible through household goods, exactly how many people take the journey? Is it a manufacturing glitch, or a planned feature?  Are there repercussions? What exactly is the mechanic that makes it possible?

Now, these questions exist, but that’s where the trick happens: we’re not here to have meaningful thoughts about time travel; we’re here to see what these two fish out of timestream’s water do when tossed into the present. It’s a relationship comedy, mixed with an office comedy, all set inside a time travel story. That takes doing, and in such a short timeframe, it’s a near miracle.

It’s a short with such good acting (including a lovely couple of pop-ups by the wonderful Amy Yasbeck) and smart writing, which makes for the fact that the biggest laughs at points are not exactly higher-than-middlebrow. The best of these, and they are pointedly funny, are delivered by the excellent Jade Catta-Pretta. She doesn’t have a huge role, but it’s remarkable.

So this is one of those wonderful shorts that don’t only live in one world, both within and without the story of the story, which is the story itself. It’s not as meta as that makes it sound, but it’s so much fun getting there, you wouldn’t mind even if it was. There are smart references to classics like Somewhere in Time (and the poster is a direct reference to it) and The Lake House, but it still feels fresh because, well, it's not super serious about things. Can't argue with that direction if you've got a cast with the comedic chops to pull it off.

You can find Fireflies in the Dusk on the festival circuit, and it’ll be playing Cinequest in March. You can view a trailer here.

Book Review: These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart by Izzy Wasserstein

Breaking binaries in a future that feels terrifyingly near

We often talk of the collapse of governments as the collapse of order. We fear anarchy, conflating it with the brutalities of war and genocide and cannibalism and of many other atrocities that the state nominally exists to prevent. When the state recedes, order as defined by the state recedes, and the territory concerned gradually becomes less “legible” to the state. In his book The Art of Not Being Governed, anthropologist James C. Scott talks about how people in these “illegible” areas deliberately acted to prevent the state from encroaching upon them; he argues that they rejected writing itself, or even history itself (conversely, markers of “legibility,” as discussed in his book Seeing Like a State, include surnames, gridded streets, government record-keeping, standardized agriculture, and the like—these were critical parts of the creation of the modern nation-state). Scott talks specifically of the peoples of upland Southeast Asia, but it is a phenomenon that has existed in much broader contexts. One potential form of this phenomenon may be seen in Izzy Wasserstein’s 2024 novella These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart, published by Tachyon Publications.

It is a future that feels terrifyingly near. The ever-weakening functions of the American state are ever receding and ceding power to outright corporate rule. In a blighted, impoverished Kansas City, there is crime, and misery, and utter, utter poverty. Yet there is one little oasis of hope: an anarchist commune that has refurbished a part of the city, whose people live according to mutual aid and consensus decision-making. Seen from today’s neoliberal late-state capitalist hell, it can look almost idyllic.

Then a member of the commune is found dead in her room. The only person willing to go all the way with an investigation is her ex-girlfriend, a former member of the commune who was exiled when a tension between her and the rest of the communards came to a head. Distrusted by her former friends, disowned by her family, and thrown into deep emotional turmoil, Dora, your protagonist, has to solve the murder.

Looking at this story through what Scott called an “anarchist squint,” we see another manifestation of the theme of “legibility” to other people, a theme that serves the narrative’s larger thrust. Dora is a trans woman, expelled by her rich magnate father, who blames her for “killing” his “son.” There’s a very particular contrast between the way the broader world interprets her gender, as opposed to this commune. Much of transphobia is an objection to how trans people blur the boundary between “masculine” and “feminine,” and transphobes hold on for dear life to a “legible” binary to preserve what they feel is epistemic stability. The communards, on the other hand, have no such issues; their conception of gender is a multitude, something diverse, and so they find Dora perfectly legible. She’s not breaking the basic building blocks of social reality to them; she’s just a person, completely comprehensible for that.

Basically every antagonist in this story is someone with money trying to violently contort the world into making sense to them; I am reminded of the American police who have tried to find the leaders of local Food Not Bombs collectives, but cannot comprehend the idea of a leaderless group that is nevertheless organized. Such is the nature of the primary antagonist: to avoid spoiling it, this character is involved in all sorts of underhanded skullduggery in an attempt to make a world that is too clean, too orderly, too “respectable,” too tidy, because that force cannot bear a world that diverts from its preconceived notions. A trans person is thus anathema to this character’s worldview, even to their sense of self and to the bigotry at the core of that worldview.

Another critical part of this novella’s thematic infrastructure is nigh-impossible to discuss without spoiling, but I will try. A crux of the plot is a particular science fiction trope that assumes a certain nature of the self, an assumption commonly made by cis people in most areas of life, and gives it a profoundly trans twist that really uproots your assumptions about this trope. In her afterword, Wasserstein talks about how the science fiction genre has traditionally used speculative elements as metaphors for aspects of the real world. In her own book, she is doing it differently, being more flexible with it, and the end result is phenomenally clever in a way that only a trans writer could do. It’s the sort of new perspective that the “rainbow age” of science fiction (as Elizabeth Bear has been calling it for over a decade) has given us in spades, and it is something the genre needs. What follows is a very discerning, very original take on an old trope.

The world of the commune, in particular, feels something out of the great novels of Ursula K. Le Guin, combining the exploration of gender in The Left Hand of Darkness with the exploration of anarchistic living in The Dispossessed. Wasserstein makes a very similar point to Le Guin regarding the latter: even without formal hierarchy backed by guns, there can still very much be informal hierarchies of popularity. Dora is exiled because she thinks in a different way about a crucial aspect of life on the commune, but the others have come to a consensus that her way of thinking renders her anathema. It’s a wrench thrown into the soaring ideals of utopian science fiction, dealing with this more than Everything for Everyone did. In some sense, the world of Wasserstein’s novella is one still transitioning to the anarchist world of the sort that Emma Goldman feared it would take humanity centuries to create; there is still a lurking tribalism that is combatted internally but I fear can never entirely be excised from the human species. It is ultimately a nuanced portrayal that makes the whole thing more believable.

These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart is a deeply radical book, when you get down to it; it is about rejecting the hegemonic legibility that patriarchal capitalist society demands of us. Why do we need only two genders? Why do we need one ruler? The book shows, not merely tells, of how a newer, better, more tolerant world could actually function, at least in microcosm. It is a story that feels plausible, with a pearl of collective living in the sea of neoliberal misery. It gives me hope, as hard as that is to have these days.

Reference: Wasserstein, Izzy. These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart [Tachyon Publications, 2024].

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

Film Microreview: Cold Storage

If exploding zombies are your thing…

Cold Storage is the latest iteration of the fad for fungus zombies, which seem to be still in vogue. This time, they’re the result of a medical experiment that was once aboard Skylab and everyone forgot about until it escaped an oxygen tank that fell on Australia. In an extended prologue, we witness the disaster that happened two decades ago when a comically understaffed team of experts went to contain the mutated organism and lost one member in the most gruesome way. This is the type of fungus that takes over the nervous system and compels the victim to seek a location for optimal dissemination. That’s scary enough, but on top of that, the infection ends up blowing up your guts all around you. The movie delights in showing the many ways this can deform a cadaver.

Another member of that ill-fated team, played by Liam Neeson, suffers an unspecified back injury that conveniently keeps him out of the main action in the present, when the military building that kept the last sample of the zombie fungus (now decommissioned and repainted as a self-storage facility) has a minor electrical mishap with catastrophic cascading effects: a freezer malfunctions, the fungus starts growing again, it breaks containment, and it climbs up the food chain until it becomes a problem for humans. Liam Neeson is dragged back from retirement to save the day again, but he spends most of the movie traveling to the site of the crisis, and most of the rest of the movie lying on the floor because his broken back can’t handle gunfire recoil. Why do you even hire Liam Neeson to not let him do Liam Neeson stuff escapes me.

Instead, our heroes are Joe Keery, fresh from saving the world in Stranger Things, and horror veteran Georgina Campbell, whose character is very tired of running from monsters and just wants to hide and wait. These two stumble into the whole world-ending menace because they’re bored and decide to investigate a weird noise in the self-storage facility where they work the night shift, and discover the alarm that was triggered by the broken freezing system. Meanwhile, the fungus has already spread to the local fauna, and when the shambling victims cross paths with our heroes, it’s time for them to run for their lives.

It helps that they have more plot armor than Bugs Bunny. The fungus zombies repeatedly ooze, spittle, burst open and projectile-vomit their gooey innards right next to our heroes, and somehow not one drop of infected material splashes onto them. When you consider that this fungus has been shown to be able to penetrate cement and metal, the protagonists’ eventual survival can only be explained because their names are on the poster and aren’t allowed to die. So the gore quota is met by an array of secondary characters established as unpleasant enough for it to be OK to enjoy watching them suffer the most spectacularly messy deaths. This movie has a lot of fun with zombie makeup, and even more fun with throwing zombie guts at every surface.

Cold Storage is the kind of supremely silly flick that demands out loud that you switch off your brain. There’s no point in pausing to question the multiple instances of military bureaucratic dysfunction that it must have taken for this plot to happen. Don’t expect any implied reflection on the problem of badly maintained public infrastructure or the irresponsibility of storing hazardous materials near civilian areas (one character has a small atom bomb hidden in a house with children, and it’s treated as a nonissue). Just sit and savor the spectacle of a screen smeared with squishy rotten organs. Hey, the world is ending anyway, right?

Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.

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

Book Nanoreviews: Matryoshka; Boy, With Accidental Dinosaur; The Rainseekers

These are three novellas from quite different corners of science fiction that I read over January. One, Matryoshka, is a backlist title that's been on my shelf for some time, while the other two are new releases.

The odd thing is you will see I've given all 3 the same score (give or take a few decimal points; I do think Matryoshka is probably by a small margin the strongest), but that flattens just how diverse in their strengths (and their flaws) these three works are. Suffice to say that I think if any of these is in a niche that is to your taste, you will find it enjoyable and engaging.

Matryoshka by Ricardo Pinto

This is, as far as I can tell, Pinto's only longer-form work outside his very good and underappreciated Stone Dance of the Chameleon series of early 2000s grimdark doorstoppers, and it is a very different beast to those. A slim novella clocking in at under 90 generously spaced pages, it opens with our point of view character, Cherenkov, hooking up with a complete stranger in post-World War 2 Venice and then following her through a portal to another world, called Eboreus. So far, so portal fantasy. What follows, though, is something considerably more abstract and more surreal.

Cherenkov and the woman he followed to Eboreus, Septima, are quickly set on a mission across a trackless sea and towards an increasingly fierce white light to find an old man who is probably a Neanderthal. It turns out that the closer one gets to that white light, the slower time moves. By the time the two return (with a third person, who had been lost in time), years have passed in Eboreus and decades in the real world. The plot, such as it is, plays out the consequences of this time dilation.

Matryoshka is probably best described as science fantasy. The story is played out like a fairy tale, but the time dilation at the plot's core seems pretty clearly to be a matter of physics (if not understood as such by most of the characters) rather than magic. The plot is sketched lightly and its logic deliberately surreal and disorientating. Through this choice of narrative voice, the themes Pinto seeks to explore—dislocation in the face of the Holocaust and in the face of modernity more generally—are also sheeted onto the reader trying to make sense of the action. This is in general very effective and quite clearly deliberate, but in a few places the generally elegant prose clunks or is missing just one more plot breadcrumb to pull the reader along. Those quibbles aside, this is a bold and creative work by an author whose work deserves more attention. Recommended if you enjoy surrealist approaches to speculative fiction.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10, a mostly enjoyable experience.

Boy, With Accidental Dinosaur by Ian McDonald

McDonald is a science fiction luminary, with works across a wide range of subgenres to great effect, from the sweep of centuries on Mars in Desolation Road to near-future brilliance in The Dervish House and River of Gods to cartel wars on the moon in the Luna trilogy. Boy, with Accidental Dinosaur explores yet another corner of the genre in a near-future post-political-collapse America. The point of departure from our timeline to the one of the book is the existence of the B2T2: "A place where two times lay up against each other, close as kittens, separated only by the finest layer of space-time fur, that could be stroked, and parted." This hole in time caused religious and political upheaval and, related to the anomaly or not, significant civil war within the former United States. It also allows for the rise of a truly idiosyncratic new form of entertaiment across these shattered states: dinosaur rodeo.

McDonald's masterstroke is to tell the story of this world from the perspective of someone deeply shaped by its differences from ours but with no understand of, or agency over, it. Tif is an orphan in his (late, as I read it) teens, his parents killed in early exchanges in the early battles which shaped the geopolitical present of the book. From a young age he is obsessed with dinosaur rodeo and aroused by the buckaroos; he's gay with little drama about that fact (and Arabic with a fair bit more drama in the Christian theocracy of the future USA). He runs away from the orphanage he ended up at after his parents' death and begs, borrows, and blowjobs his way across the American southwest to get a job mucking out stalls at a dinosaur rodeo. The book opens with him being fired from that job for letting a dinosaur escape. Shortly after, he acquires the titular accidental dinosaur, and the rest of the book is a road trip where Tif attempts to find a home and send his dinosaur back to the past (mandatory under time travel rules to minimise the risk of paradox).

There is a lot to like about this book. McDonald has frequently brilliant turns of phrase, tuned precisely to the register of the under-educated, dinosaur-obsessed, working class teenager who is our point of view character ("Tif folds himself into the big chair and all the sleep that hid in the night creeps up and settles in his lap"). The character work, if briefly sketched (appropriate for a novella), is well done and convincing. As an idiosyncratic, working class view of trying to make a life in a pretty grim future, it is generally successful. The thing that holds a good book back from being great is that it seems to have precisely the wrong amount of plot for a novella. There's too much plot and too wide a sweep for a short story, but it includes so much that it feels overcooked for a novella. The plot races at breakneck pace when it feels like it should proceed more sedately, and some scenes are over almost before they begin. The overall impression is that the story could have done with another 10 or 15,000 words of breathing room. As it stands, Boy, with Accidental Dinosaur feels just a little bit more like a genuinely excellent penultimate draft than a fully realised finished article.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10, a mostly enjoyable experience.

The Rainseekers by Matthew Kressel

The Rainseekers is The Canterbury Tales on Mars, or (perhaps a more genre-appropriate comparison) a condensed Hyperion in mundane SF mode. Terraforming on Mars has proceeded far enough that there has been snow for some years, and the book focuses on a group of 40-odd people trekking out from the safety of Martian dome cities in an attempt to be the first to experience rain. Our narrator, Sakunja Salazar, is a former future!Tiktok star who since making more money than she knows what to do with in that career has turned to photography and journalism and is along for the ride. The book is about equally split between her frame narrative and the stories told to her by several of her fellow pilgrims (it's barely expressed as such; the trek is definitely a pilgrimmage) about their lives and what brought them to be out here, seeking Martian rain.

These pilgrims come from a wide range of backgrounds, from the descendant of the genius scientist who designed the orbital mirrors which have over decades warmed Mars and melted ice to the talented engineer brought low by trauma and addiction. Kressel has a deft touch with these nested stories, bringing depth to their subjects in a short word count. We get Sakunja's story as well, both through the narration of the frame story and her own background as narrated to one of the other pilgrims, and the emotional beats are equally well done.

I have two quibbles with the novella, one structural and one genre-related. Structurally, the balance of frame narrative to nested stories seems off. There is more to the frame narrative than an excuse for the stories, but there isn't quite enough to it to stand alone either. And for a party of 40-odd pilgrims, it feels weird that the story only gives us the stories of a handful of them. The balance is just slightly off in a way that means you finish the book feeling like you've missed something. In terms of genre complaints, there is a fair bit of "as you know, we realised [x thing happening in the 2020s] was bad" backfilling of the timeline between now and the novel's setting, and some of this is quite clumsy. The pilgrims and the Mars they inhabit are believably and authentically sketched; the history of the Earth they left behind to come there, not so much. It detracts only slightly from the narrative, but I do think it's worth noting when some of the SFnal elements of a SF narrative are one of the story's weaknesses.

Overall these are quibbles, though, and this is a nuanced, emotionally resonant set of stories that I think a lot of readers will enjoy.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10, a mostly enjoyable experience.

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.