Book Review: China Mountain Zhang

 A stone cold classic of future lives which holds up more than 30 years after it was written. 

We are small, governments are large, we survive in the cracks. Cold comfort.

McHugh is one of the consistently best science fiction writers of my lifetime, and it's a scandal that most of her work is not reliably in print in the 2020s. On this positive side, China Mountain Zhang probably is her best work (though both her short story collections and the very out of print Mission Child are also truly excellent), and it is available to us. China Mountain Zhang is a modern classic of Science Fiction. It was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula and won the Otherwise and Lambda awards in 1993. It is currently in print both in North America (in a Tor Essentials edition) and outside it (in a Gateway SF Masterworks edition). Despite this, it isn’t really part of the conversation on the history of the genre in the way books from the fifties through seventies still do. There is probably a broader conversation to be had about how static and old the canon of SF is and how we could do with looping in some books from the 90s and 2000s which are now 25-35 years old (China Mountain Zhang is as old now as Starship Troopers was when CMZ was released). For the purposes of this review, however, I’ll focus on why this early 90s classic deserves a place in the pantheon.

This is a mosaic novel, a collection of nine vignettes ranging from short story to novelette length which tell the story of a China-dominated 22nd century. Five of these focus on our main character, Zhong Shan/Rafael Luis Zhang, a gay, biracial (Chinese/Latin) construction tech living – at least at the start of the novel – in New York. These are interleaved with four stories of people whose lives intersect with his, to a greater or lesser degree. Zhang is very much the focus, but the vignettes work well in adding depth and breadth to the society in which he lives, giving perspective on people, events, and places he has no access to (or is not in a position to understand). This is a very difficult structure to pull off; too much overlap and it’s just a poorly edited novel, too little and it’s simply a collection of disconnected shorts in a shared setting. But McHugh gets the balance right, and the result is a fascinating collage of a man and his world, vividly drawn.

Unlike much decades-old science fiction, it really is remarkable how much of McHugh’s 22nd seems plausible today. In the first half of the 21st century, the US economy goes down, bringing most of the world with it due to wide exposure to the US bond market. In the wake of this depression, the US government collapses, unable to provide basic services. China, less exposed than some of the other big players, is better placed to bounce back and becomes the leading technological, economic, and political power in the world. This leads to a proletariat revolution supported by China in the US, a civil war, and the eventual establishment of a socialist state. Living standards as between the two countries are inverted from what prevailed in the early 90s when McHugh was writing; a generally prosperous, advanced economy in China while the US in a backwater; not a terrible place to live but definitely a place Chinese citizens in good standing would look down their noses at. When the novel opens, the US has just come out of the ‘Great Cleansing Winds’ cultural revolution-style reactionary purge; things are only completely back to something approaching the pre-campaign normal about a year beforehand. Looking at the changes in geopolitics over the past 30 years, with the notable exception of a genuine proletariat revolution in the US, this medium term future is if anything a more likely path for the next century to follow than it was when the book was published.

In addition to the political speculation, it’s got a number of pieces of scientific speculation pretty nailed down as well (actually reasonably uncommon for books in a genre with “science” in the name). Climate change of ~4 degrees C has ravaged the planet, extreme drought making large swathes of territory –a wide corridor of the US just east of the Rockies, both sides of the Mediterranean, Northern China – close to uninhabitable. Mitigation efforts and decarbonisation are underway in the novel’s present, but after decades of work the climate curve is only just starting to even out, and bending it down further decades away. It also has widespread medical treatment based on RNA (which was just at the start of its development in the late 80s, certainly not in the deployable mRNA vaccine form we saw during Covid). And if the Martian colony two of the vignettes are set in is implausible on current scientific understanding, the fact that it’s marginally viable and exists only for ideological reasons (‘brave socialist workers conquer the frontier on another planet!’) is pretty consistent with the Mars-based fantasies of current tech bro oligarchs.

All of this well-judged speculation, impressive as it is, is not why you should read China Mountain Zhang in the year 2026, though. McHugh is writing a novel here, not prophecy (and she’d be somewhat lacking as a prophet; she missed the fall of the USSR by a year or two & it remains incongruously present in her worldbuilding). And the novel she wrote is a spectacularly good piece of fiction, written in a realist mode, that just happens to be set a couple of hundred years in the future. The epigraph of the book is a quote from Camus’ The Plague: “a simple way to get to know about a town is to see how the people work, how they love and how they die.” This is exactly what McHugh sets out to do in the vignettes which follow.

Zhang loses his job, goes on assignment to the arctic, studies in China, loves and loses, and returns home. Two Martian settlers meet & carve out a precarious life. A ‘kite’ (biomechanical hang glider) pilot races. A young woman finds her dreams aren’t quite what she thought. None of these people have any agency whatsoever to change the world the low-key crappy world they live in. Early in the novel, Zhang bitterly observes “I don’t believe in socialism but I don’t believe in capitalism either. We are small, governments are large, we survive in the cracks. Cold comfort.” To the extent that change is achieved in the novel it is in our characters learning how to take sincere comfort in this observation. Pushing the cracks a little wider, realising that the “we” rather than an “I” can make that a bit easier. Each of the characters we follow succeed and fail at this to varying degrees, but even the most successful remains someone who is unable to meaningfully influencethe world outside the cracks. They just work in it, and not as starship captains or space cops or politicians. They have blue collar and office jobs, and McHugh does great work in showing the lived in reality of their working lives. As Jo Walton has noted, this serious focus on labour is an unusual thing in SFF writing. I would also add that a lot of attention – particularly in the sections focusing on Zhang and his gay friends – is paid to fashion, again in a way that most science fiction doesn’t. Not all of this is completely convincing (apparently the future will have a lot of stylish sweaters with mirrors or capes or various other bits stuck on) but it still serves as another rich source of pointillist world-building, building up a convincing picture of this future society via specks of authentic detail. 

This sort of low stakes storytelling in a speculative fiction space that typically expects power fantasies – or at least agency – is high risk. The failure state of this sort of writing, particularly for the audience it is marketed to, is dull and claustrophobic. And, look, go into this expecting high action or even drastic change you will be disappointed. But taken on its own terms China Mountain Zhang is a spectacular success. That is down to McHugh’s precise and unfussily excellent writing. She is not a flashy prose stylist, but the voices of each point of view character – the whole novel is first person narration – are brilliantly realised. 

To focus on the main character first, Zhang is a remarkably well drawn gay man, again as Walton notes sketched remarkably unromantically. He's been cruising for sex since he was fifteen, he has a wide but shallow circle of friends, for most of the novel having only one person he truly feels comfortable relying on. His ironic sense of humour and self-deprecation are a thread throughout each of his sections (sample internal monologue, drooling over cute blond guys in a bar: “Chinese always think westerners’ eyes are set too deep in their heads, that they look a bit Neanderthal. This is not a prejudice I share.”), but within his relative lack of agency he has there is also growth. He’s an immature 26 at the start and a grown up almost 31 at the end. And McHugh makes it clear to the reader why his life up to the start of the novel made him immature and emotionally unavailable – it really isn’t uncommon amongst gay men in homophobic societies – and what it is about his experiences during it that helped him grow up. Other characters are similarly well-observed. Martine, a divorced retired soldier now homesteading on Mars, wryly observes of herself “I thought I’d start a new life on Jerusalem Ridge, but I hadn’t counted on the fact that wherever I went I’d still be there.” A page’s worth of character conveyed effortlessly in a sentence.

The effect of all of this – the plausible social and scientific speculation, the well-chosen background details, the superb character work, the overlapping vignettes of a world yet to exist – is to me incredibly moving in quite a specific way. The skill and humanity with which McHugh draws a line from her sitting at her desk in the early 90s, through to today to the vividly realised 22nd century of the novel is striking. The superpower of literature has always been to connect people separated by time and distance. Making it clear that while they’re not the same – and the differences do matter – people are people. Their hopes, their failures, their successes. The messy stuff of building a life. Feeling that continued struggle, sitting in the kinda shit present looking at Zhang’s life in his differently kinda shit future, is in many ways a feat of worldbuilding more impressive than the flashiest space opera or most lore-drenched secondary world fantasy could ever hope to be.  

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Highlights:

• A masterwork of mosaic storytelling.
• Compellingly mundane picture of people living their lives in the future.
• A surprisingly good hit rate of speculation for a novel from the 90s.  

Reference: Maureen F. McHugh, China Mountain Zhang, [Tor, 1992]. In print in both Tor Essentials and Gateway SF Masterworks editions. 

POSTED BY: Eddie Clark. Professional nerd by day, amateur nerd by night. @dreddieclark.bsky.social 

Festival View: Anwar by Fawaz Al-Matrouk

Life as a genre-nerd film programmer isn’t always easy, largely due to the number of genre-hating film programmers. One interaction I had, years ago, was a film programmer for a significantly large, and now very significantly larger, festival who said that there hadn’t been an intelligent science fiction fiction film since Blade Runner, and even attempts to bring the idea back, like Gattaca, failed because “science fiction is no longer about ideas other than what effects they can make flash across the screen.”

Needless to say, we haven’t spoken in a while. 

Every year, dozens of intelligent short genre films cross my desk programming for Cinequest, and many of them are beautiful without relying on effects to drive the storytelling. Some of them are call-backs to the kind of films that were being made in the 1960s and 70s by the likes of Kubrick and Godard. Some years, there is something so fresh that it pushes those comparisons out of in. In 2026, the film that made me feel like intelligent and emotionally complex science fiction is alive and well was Anwar by Fawaz Al-Matrouk.

The story is of a mother and her son. In the future, seemingly the near-ish future, people can chose to live forever, longer than the Earth if they can get off-planet. The mother, played with incredibly pointed emotional resonance by Kerry Bishé, has chosen to become an EverPerson. Her husband, stayed human and paid for that choice with death, leaving behind his wife and a son: Anwar. Anwar is a Muslim, his mother is not a woman of faith. Anwar longs for Heaven and his mother has chosen the certainty of eternal EverPerson life.

The story moves from Anwar at ages 8, 18, and 80. Mother remains the same age, but not the same person. The story deals with the path of choice between technology and faith, at the same time as dealing with the idea of a parent’s obligation and limitations. There are, or course, questions of faith, and not simply religious faith. 

How’s that for thinking science fiction? 

The film is not only intricate emotionally, but it is so very beautiful in nearly every aspect of production. The cinematography is absolutely gorgeous, stunningly so. The setting, the redwoods of the Santa Cruz mountains (where I happen to live) are some of the most beautiful vistas in America, and every shooting choice takes great advantage of it. The music, somewhere in the range of minimalism, is used as a salve for the moments of disharmony, a stab for moments of indecision. Silence, though, plays a significant role as well, and when we are left with the silence of emotional situations at their peak, we are forced to fill the air ourselves with thought. That is, without a doubt, the hardest kind of filmmaking; where you establish enough trust with your audience that you can be certain they’ll do the work. If anything can be said of Anwar, it is that Al-Matrouk has faith in his audience to take the effort determine whether a character’s choice is right or wrong, and what that means. We are given a full story, but we have to work through all that means ourselves. 

There is also a significant written science fiction pedigree to the film. Fawaz attended Clarion West, that legendary site for the creation of fine stories since a time called the past. He was mentored by Ted Chiang. You might remember him from such award-winning stories as “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” and “Exhalation.” He also wrote the story “Story of Your Life” which was made into a movie called Arrival. If you’re gonna have a mentor, Ted is the one you wanna get. Fawaz developed the story there, and wrote his own adaptation into the short film. The story will be published in Autumn 2026 in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. You can’t get more deeply tied to the history of science fiction than having a story published in F&SF.

And yet, this is one of the most modern of science fiction tales. The villain, if there is one, well, it could be the very concept of choice. Or maybe time. Or maybe, just maybe, it is technology’s siren call. Or the mind-body problem.  That thinking in the silence of the tensest moment I mentioned, that’s where that decision is made in the mind of each and every viewer. 

I’ve watched Anwar at least five times, and have had at least five different interpretations. It is not that it’s left open-ended, but there's no coda that tells us how to feel as we watch the credits roll. That alone plays so differently from much of the genre work of the last couple of decades. It is a complete story, but just like the stories of our lives, it is not answering any question. That’s a task left for those of us still here after it’s been told.

You can see Anwar as a part of the Unconventional Families program as a part of Cinequest at the Alamo Drafthouse in Mountain View, CA, on March 15th and 17th at the Alamo Drafthouse in Mountain View, CA, or as a part of Cinejoy (https://creatics.org/cinejoy) online from the 24th to the 31st.  

Chris Garcia - Archivist, curator, festival programmer, and professional wrestling enthusiast. @johnnyeponymous

Film Review: In the Blink of an Eye

45,000 years of nothing much happening

Watching Andrew Stanton’s new film In the Blink of an Eye, it’s inevitable to be reminded of Darren Aronofsky’s 2006 film The Fountain, its similarly plotted predecessor in the tradition that Charlie Jane Anders identified as the Cloud Atlas genre: stories composed of parallel segments linked by thematic echoes across centuries. My favorite literary examples of this trend have been, as people must by now be sick of hearing, Anthony Doerr’s 2021 novel Cloud Cuckoo Land and Thomas Wharton’s 2023 novel The Book of Rain, both of which contrast the finitude of human life with the long-term consequences of our ecological crisis. In the Blink of an Eye also addresses that topic, but from a more zoomed-in point of view, following three family dramas marked by the universal human experience of disease and death. In this it closely mirrors the structure and preoccupations of The Fountain, but with less focused and coherent results.

The plot begins in the time of cavepeople, with a small Neanderthal family going through the ordinary experiences of pre-agricultural society: procuring food, raising children, making fire, leaving handprints on rocks as a mourning ritual, crafting small pieces of art, and generally trying to make it through the little time we have on this planet. The events in these segments are simple and generic, so the fact that all the dialogues are in an unknown prehistoric language doesn’t hinder comprehension. The actors’ performances are transparent, effortlessly readable. Across a few decades, a widowed parent lives to see their children grow and have their own children. That is the limit of human aspirations in this era. Life is too harsh and painful for any effort beyond just living.

One of the members of this family ends up under the microscope of our next protagonist, 45,000 years later. In these segments we follow an anthropologist who studies the genetic admixture between Neanderthals and modern humans. Hers are the standard worries of 21st-century white-collar life: juggling major family events with opportunities for career advancement, finding time for romantic fulfillment in between professional duties, and generally trying to find meaning in a world that sometimes feels too complicated. In the early scenes with this character, we watch her adjust to her mother’s worsening health and its impact on her work life; unfortunately, after her mother dies the plot feels aimless for a long while until we reach the adult years of her son, who invents a medical treatment to extend the human lifespan by centuries.

This development makes the third story possible. In the 25th century, humankind has left a dying Earth behind and has placed its hopes on a generation ship carrying embryos and terraforming equipment. Its sole adult occupant has been genetically modified to stop aging so she’ll be able to keep the ship in operation during the entire journey. She has an AI overseer program to talk to, but otherwise she’s on her own. It seems that the mission had to be planned with very limited resources, as the ship has no redundancies in its design. This becomes a problem when a mysterious disease appears in the greenhouse, which threatens to lower oxygen production beyond the dangerously narrow threshold for the viability of the whole mission. After running some cold calculations, the AI decides to sacrifice itself and offer the space of its server room as a backup greenhouse, which fixes the oxygen problem but leaves the human operator without its help for the crucial task of watching over the embryos during incubation and training the children for life on the new planet.

The threat to the oxygen levels aboard the ship is the only plot point that resembles a true conflict with stakes in this film. The other stories we follow in parallel with this one proceed too smoothly along the traditional lifepath of birth, growth, reproduction and death. It’s the circle of life, over and over for millennia. The film’s moral stance is to be found in a brief dialogue from the scenes set in the future: at some point, humankind decided that the treatment to extend life for centuries was not a good thing. Here’s where In the Blink of an Eye breaks away from The Fountain after repeatedly alluding to it: the three parallel segments of The Fountain deal with the human struggle against death through the mythical, and therefore unattainable, quest for the secret of eternal life. The story of In the Blink of an Eye presents us with a society that has conquered that secret through science, but later chooses to eschew it. The idea is that it’s a good thing that people die. Whereas The Fountain presents death as ultimately acceptable, In the Blink of an Eye goes beyond and makes the case that it’s actually desirable.

That’s a grim stance to take for what is otherwise plotted as a rather uneventful slice-of-life story. With its unexamined reliance on reproductive futurism, In the Blink of an Eye seems to position the abstraction of humankind, instead of real humans, as the character to root for. According to this film, the reason why it’s a good thing that people die is that that’s the way it’s always been, and as long as new people keep being born, all will be well. The characters in all three time periods end up accepting the deaths of their parents as a natural part of life, but this theme finds its bluntest expression in the future plot, where it’s framed as OK that the ship AI dies because it frees up resources for more babies. Perhaps it’s worthwhile here to point out one likely basis for the ideological divide between this film and The Fountain: Aronofsky is Jewish, and the questions he brought to The Fountain had to do with the thirst for life in this world, while Stanton is Christian, and it’s evident throughout In the Blink of an Eye that the plot favors the Christian theme that death can help life. Still, the ending of The Fountain presents that cyclical idea in a more elegant way, without ignoring its tragic side. The Fountain admits that death is an unbeatable enemy, but doesn’t fool itself pretending it isn’t still the enemy. In the Blink of an Eye is too busy crafting a sentimental portrayal of day-to-day heteronormative domesticity to notice the gloomy fatalism that hides underneath its embrace of mortality.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

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

Book Review: The Iron Garden Sutra by A. D. Sui

A death-monk in space, musing on what it means to be alive, and to be conscious... with a little bit of murder just to get things going.

If, like me, you read and enjoyed A. D. Sui's last published book - The Dragonfly Gambit, [Neon Hemlock, 2024] - then you'll have been just waiting for this one to drop. Sui has already shown they can handle space opera with flair, so give them not just a whole novel but a whole series in which to do it? Sign me right up.

The Iron Garden Sutra, which begins the Cosmic Wheel Series, follows Vessel Iris, a monk of the Starlit, whose role is to help the dying and deliver the dead to their final rest. The story opens with him in his home monastery, from which he is called to attend a very rare event - the discovery of a generation ship from old earth. One of many dispatched from a struggling planet long ago, it, like its siblings, is expected to be a tomb for its pioneering crew. Iris' job is simply to lay that precious, lost cargo to rest. It's a lonely job, but one he relishes, in the company of the AI assistant embedded into his brainstem. But when he gets there, he finds he isn't alone after all - a group of academics have been granted access to this monumental find, and he'll have to work alongside them to complete his task. Them... and whoever (or whatever) starts killing them off one by one.

A space opera, thriller, murder mystery situation - hurrah!

However - and I'm going to tackle this before I get to the positives because I think it's kind of important - I am not sure how well that "mystery" piece is handled. It really comes down to how much you value surprise, and the slow revelation of plot, piece by piece, over the course of a story. Which I think is an important, but not only critical, factor in this sort of story.

The problem comes from how the information is delivered to the reader, and how much we can reasonably expect of it to be accessible to the characters. For me as a genre reader, as someone who has consumed thriller and mystery content, I unfortunately found the solution to the situation pretty obvious early on, and was never surprised by the mystery (key point, I'll come back later), all the way to the end. I wasn't even in doubt, at any point, once I settled on what was happening. The joy of mysteries, for me, is in the guessing as I read them, even if I'm not amazing at it, so losing out on this strand of the tapestry was a little disappointing, and doubly so because the resolution yielded very easily to narrative logic, rather than being as a result of information presented that the characters themselves had access to. It made sense, within the story, that the engineers didn't come to the solution until close to the end - nothing of the knowledge we know them to have sets them up to come to the right conclusions. Their pool of information is made pretty clear - Sui does a great job setting their context up in that regard - and it makes very intuitive sense that they wouldn't make the jump needed. But that leaves me, the reader, sitting there with a solution nonetheless.

But this story isn't purely a mystery, there's more to what it's doing and where it's drawing its tonal and generic shape from, and so if one were to read it thinking of it in a different light, one where plot revelation pacing is less critical... I can see that this might be less of a concern. But for me, it slotted itself straight into mystery, and I could not but read it with that context in mind.

However, in everything else it was doing? Very few such complaints.

One of the primary other foci here is the character study - of Iris in particular, and of his relationships with both his companion AI (which, in this world, is both a rarity and somewhat of a taboo that his role as a monk is an exception to) and with the strangers he meets on the generation ship Counsel of Nicaea (yes I loved that joke too). Here, for the most part, is where the good work is, and where the obvious connection to Sui's previous book lies. The Dragonfly Gambit, for me, was a triumph of messy characters having messier relationships. While The Iron Garden Sutra is more restrained on that front, the DNA connection is still very clearly there.

Iris is... a mess, to be quite frank. He has spent a lot of his life isolated for a number of reasons, and struggles with having to operate around the new people he finds himself with, while at the same time yearning for their companionship. He is constrained by rules and vows, and also by his own nature that struggles to come to terms with his desires in this context. There are some beautifully described moments, where Sui has a real knack of conveying emotional state and of putting the reader truly inside Iris' head. He dissociates, he panics, he stresses, and all of those feel very embedded in his character and reactions to the (increasingly stressful and horrifying) situation in which he finds himself.

These moments, as well as the early character sketches that introduce us to the others, and the environmental descriptions that persist throughout, are where Sui's prose shines brightest. Right away on boarding the Nicaea, I got a vivid sense of the atmosphere of the place - not just the look, the carpet of moss and the hanging vines, but the feel. There's humidity and warmth, there's the soft floor against bare feet, there's the sweat dripping down the back of a neck. If one is prone to full immersion when reading, this is a book primed to deliver that most generously.

The inter-character relationships too have a good, immediate quality too them - people slot into place amongst themselves quite naturally, and then develop into something more complex from there. By far the best of these is Iris' relationship with his AI construct, referred to as VIFAI. VIFAI is a distinct character in his own right, absolutely a living thing as far as the novel is concerned, and a little bit snarky with Iris when needed. They have the warmth of two people who know each other intimately, and are also occasionally frustrated by one another, having to deal with a stressful situation together, and that stays lovely to read throughout the book.

The relationships with the academics are given less time and less depth, but there's still plenty worth enjoying, especially with the initially-antagonistic Engineer Yan, who clearly has a problem with the Starlit but won't explain why. He, too, gets character development and revelation well worth watching, and makes more and more sense in his responses the more time he gets on the page.

Where the character work falls down a little - only a little! - is in two regards. The first is that contextual information is sometimes delivered in such a way that it... not quite contradicts but definitely gets a little in the way of the natural-feeling progression of character. For example, there's a sequence relatively early that is clearly meant to be there to explain to the reader that this is a world in which AIs are considered living beings, whose autonomy is respected and protected by law. However, this is presented via Iris having a little revelation about how he's been treating VIFAI, that simply doesn't makes sense for the fact that the two have them have been together for more than half Iris' life. It feels as though it comes out of nowhere... except that it's the exact point in the plot where I needed that information, and the protagonist-AI relationship was the best vector to provide it. It doesn't happen enormously often, but there are a few moments like it throughout the story, and each was just a little grit in the eye for an otherwise lovely view.

The second regard is incredibly minor (ha), and yet also one that nagged at me the whole way through the story. There are two students with Engineer Yan as part of his team - and specifically students who have at least and undergraduate degree, possibly more, so they are at the very least in their twenties. These two are universally referred to as children throughout the book, and treated very differently than the "adults", even compared to the non-academics, so it's not even a matter of intellectual snobbery. It's just... a weird quirk. But one I couldn't get away from.

But aside from those? Wonderful. We get some revelations about Iris and VIFAI's early relationship towards the end of the story, and they're the sort of extra contextualising that just clicks everything into place. It's excellent. Likewise, some of the final character interaction scenes are an excellent encapsulation of the journey those characters have undergone, and the changes it must necessarily have performed on them. That growth and change is one of the absolute standout aspects of the book.

Which doesn't mean all the interactions are smooth. I liked The Dragonfly Gambit for its mess, and that mess is here too, though in a different form. Iris, in particular, makes some bad choices in how he responds to and reaches out (or doesn't) to the people around him that are sometimes heartbreaking, but come from a very natural-feeling place for the information we have, increasingly, about his background.

And, coming back to the point, while I may not have been surprised by the mystery, I was sometimes surprised (in a good) way, by some of the character decisions, especially at the climax and aftermath of the story. There is one, in particular, which is devestating in the moment, coming seemingly out of nowhere, but which feels entirely right in contemplation after the fact. And that, more than anything, feels like character work done right - even when they surprise you, it feels entirely unsurprising.

For a book restricted predominantly to the walls of a single (albeit large) ship, we do get enough of a sense of the world to ground it, to make sense of where all the pieces of this puzzle come from. Sui is, unsurprisingly, interested in the history from earth to the generation ship's appearance, and in giving us enough of a sense of the line between the two to make it feel like a part of the wider world.

One of the ways this is done best is in religion, in fact. For all Iris is a member of the Starlit, this is not a single future religion, alone and unchallenged. This is a world that has, at least, muslims, mormons, catholics and a rabbi living alongside the space-death-monks. And for me, religious plurality is an incredibly important marker for a credible space future. Too many stories expect me to believe in monocultures - whether that's a single planet, a single religion, or a single faith - and there is nothing about my experience of the world that has me expecting anything from humans other than plurality in all things. And so, when a story gives that, it's always a pleasant surprise. But moreover, in this space-faring world, where space travel still carries inherent risks and dangers, it makes a lot of sense that something like Iris' Starlit would exist to operate within that niche. The world is shaped in such a way that Iris and his context make instant, intuitive sense to me, and that felt important too. His religion is given shape and depth throughout the story, in his actions, his possessions, his habits and in interstitial texts that tell us more about scripture and beliefs. It is a thing whole, one that forms part of the fabric of human life, and provides something that could conceivably nourish the soul - it is a religion where I can understand why people follow it. Very easily. This is rarer than perhaps it ought to be.

Between the world, the characters, the prose and the very real sense of place, there is a lot to love about The Iron Garden Sutra. I have my quibbles with parts of it, but none of those ever stopped me from wanting to devour it, page after page. I found some of the magic in it that drew me to Sui's previous work, and more than enough to draw me onwards into the rest of the series. I am desperate to know what happens next, but, more importantly, keen to see the characters who go one from the end of this volume, and to see them continue to grow into whatever comes next.

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The Math

Highlights: excellent characters and their relationships, lovely neat turns of phrase, excellent descriptions of place and atmosphere

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Reference: A. D. Sui, The Iron Garden Sutra, [Erewhon Books, 2026]

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

Nanoreviews: Overgrowth, Aunt Tigress

Overgrowth by Mira Grant

It’s been fifteen years since Mira Grant published Feed, the first of the Newsflesh novels. It’s been ten years since Chimera, the conclusion of the Parasitology trilogy, followed by the phenomenal Into the Drowning Deep in 2017. Since then Grant has published a kickass YA Alien novel and a handful of novellas, but even so, it’s been a while since we’ve had what feels like a “proper” Mira Grant novel, for whatever exactly that means.

Overgrowth asks what it would look like if a little girl told anyone who would listen that she was really an alien in the form of a human and the alien armada was coming… and that girl was telling the truth. As told by Mira Grant, the open pseudonym of Seanan McGuire, which is important because there is a sort of personal narrative style that Grant/McGuire works in, where most characters speak in a very specific explanatory descriptive way, and it’s something that I’ve appreciated reading a LOT of McGuire’s work over the last decade.

The Mira Grant name is where McGuire writes her more horror-themed science fiction novels and novellas (rather than as Seanan McGuire, which gets more urban fantasy/fantasy). Overgrowth is absolutely horrifying. That little girl at the heart of the novel’s premise—she walked into the woods one day and didn’t come back. Something else did, and that something else looked like the girl, moved like the girl, and sort of talked like the girl, but not exactly, and when she said that she was an alien, most people thought it was trauma, but the parents also knew that something was wrong.

I’m not going to say that this is a sort of horror that only parents can understand or relate to, because I don’t think that’s actually the case at all—but it is a horror that I feel more viscerally as a parent. It’s the combination fear of something happening to either of my children, but I know my kids. I know who they are as growing people, and I can scarcely imagine the raw horror of my son or daughter being there but being “not right”. It’s terrifying.

That’s also not truly what Overgrowth is about, because it’s about what happens when that kid (and others) are grown, still telling the same story, and the the aliens actually show up. What happens *then*? How does the world respond to those people who said they weren’t human in the face of evidence that something is coming? We can guess how governments would react based on years of evidence of how they treat actual humans they choose to deem a threat or a “security concern.” We can guess how other people will react to someone truly “other” because we’ve seen that in our lifetimes and our parents’ lifetimes. We know the stories.

All that is before the aliens actually show up, which isn’t really a spoiler. It’s kind of the premise behind the setup. If those kids weren’t lying, *something* has to arrive, and more than likely given that this is a Mira Grant novel, they’re not gong to be coming in peace.

If you’re down for this premise and for Mira Grant’s light touch with horror and characterization, Overgrowth is one of my favorite books of the year so far. There’s a lot to like here. Overgrowth is not going to open up your veins and make readers viscerally feel every bit of fear and terror and gore. It’s not that sort of book, and Grant (so far) has not quite been that sort of writer (though it’s been a very long time since I’ve read Newsflesh or Parasitology), but that’s also not what you go to Mira Grant for. You read Mira Grant for one hell of a premise, fast-paced storytelling, and a very specific characterization. Overgrowth hits the mark.

Aunt Tigress by Emily Yu-Xuan Qin

I often think of urban fantasy debuts the way I remember Seanan McGuire’s Rosemary and Rue or Jim Butcher’s Storm Front: there’s enough to interest me, but not quite to hook me into the series, but I absolutely need to read one to two more books because the hook is almost certainly coming, and once it sets, I’ll be fully invested for another twenty books.

Aunt Tigress is an exciting debut urban fantasy from Emily Yu-Xuan Qin set in Calgary and wrapped in Chinese and First Nations mythology. I’m… interested. Tam Lin is part magical tiger, with a human mother and a tiger on her father’s side. Everything starts with the death of Tam’s titular Aunt Tigress, who appears to have been a truly awful person, and it turns out that perhaps Aunt Tigress was murdered, and Tam wants to find out what happened despite her withdrawing from her magical heritage. A university classmate, Janet, latches on to Tam and helps her on her quest. Misadventures ensue.

I bounced off this idea during the novel, but I wonder if there will be more Tam Lin novels, and if so, in what way the mythology of Tam Lin and Janet and faerie might play into that. Having a character named Tam Lin is one thing. Tam having a love interest named Janet is something else. That’s not really germane to Aunt Tigress, but given some distance, it’s something I’m thinking about.

Aunt Tigress is a wild adventure that starts relatively grounded and ends up on a truly magical mystery tour (™) through a mystical cosmos of sorts. I didn’t love this, but I’ll read another from Qin to see how she develops as a storyteller.

PUBLISHED BY: Joe Sherry - Senior Editor of Nerds of a Feather. Hugo and Ignyte Winner. Minnesotan.

Book Review: The Subtle Art of Folding Space

A story of two sisters and their tangled relationship, plus maintenance of the laws of the universe

Ellie lives in Boston. She is on her way to DC, where her elder sister Chris has been taking care of their mother, whose condition has slipped into a coma. Chris is the type of elder sister that never, ever stops telling Ellie how worthless she is, how much she clearly doesn’t love their mother as much as Chris does.

Oh, and did I mention that Chris has sent a number of assassination attempts Ellie’s way?

Oh, and did I also mention that their family is among a secret group of people who maintain this universe, and others?

This is the story of The Subtle Art of Folding Space, short story author John Chu’s jump from shorter forms into a full-length novel.

There is a point in the novel where Ellie, and a few others, are discussing the fact that within their society there is apparently a secret cabal of universe tinkerers, maintainers and builders, and how it’s a problem that there are secret factions amongst them. It’s funny, but Ellie never seems to consider that she herself, and all of her colleagues, are in fact a secret cabal within the wider universe, and universes, that the secrecy goes from the very beginning. So let me explain:

Ellie, Chris, their mother, family members and others, some of which are not from this particular universe, and some of which are most definitely not human, are members of a group of people who build, debug and maintain universes, including our own. They do this by means of an attached “sub-universe” called the “skunkworks.” That’s where the universe can be tweaked. Those who can do this are expected to do it not for their own gain, but as an unheralded public good, and as needed. Ellie may not be her mother (who is and was Chief Builder), but when she finds that there’s new hardware and code in the skunkworks, and that someone is exploiting design flaws, she’s forced into action.

The mechanics, methodology and paradigm of maintaining the universe feel somewhat like computer programming, when you have some very old code that has not been completely debugged and probably can’t be. That means continual work for people like Ellie. Just how this all came to be in the first place, and how someone can get initiated into this, are never made clear, but the programming of the universe is a scaffold for telling a story of heart with these characters and their relationships.

Take Chris and Ellie. Chris, as mentioned above, continually tells Ellie she is not good enough and really doesn’t love their mother. Plus the assassination attempts, and the gaslighting. The novel takes pains to have Ellie slowly really realize just how toxic Chris’s relationship with her is, and how it is not a normal sibling rivalry relationship, but something worse. The untangling and exegesis of the Ellie-Chris relationship is what this novel is all about. The skunkworks, the machinations, the secret societies, changes to the universe, and intrigues, all really in the end boil down to Ellie’s relationship with her older sister.

This means that readers who are hoping for even more crunchy details on how these universe maintainers do their work are going to be a bit disappointed. Just enough detail is there to tantalize the reader (such as mentioning casually that a century ago they had to add quantum mechanics to the universe), but it does not go endlessly deep. The sense that we get, and is explicated directly at points, is that maintaining the universe is a thankless job, if you are playing it straight and not for your own gain. It’s a lot of work, scut work, to keep the machinery of the universe running, especially when it’s filled with exploits and code problems.

But the book really isn’t about the mechanics of all this. This is a book about the characters in that space, and what they do, and why, and how they relate to each other. There are also hints, as mentioned above, of various philosophies within the factions of how to do all this.¹

Besides Ellie and Chris (who is not actually on screen so much but remains a looming antagonist), the other major character we get is their cousin Daniel. He is a prodigy of the skunkworks on axes that Ellie is not, and it is clear that he, for all his affability, is extremely competent—and dangerous. I also liked Ahdi, who is Daniel’s boss in the hierarchy (or is he?), and has some rather startling skills of his own. Through Ahdi we get a window into the greater world of the people who maintain the skunkworks of this and other universes, and it’s a tangled relationship map that Ellie, Chris and Daniel are only just getting themselves into.

In many ways, this feels like a multiverse modern world novel that is in conversation with Max Gladstone’s Craft Wars books. Both authors have a strong sense of humanity and relationships, queer-positive worlds, and characters that are dealing with some often unhinged and mighty powers (magic on one side, multiversal manipulation on the other). But what counts is how people deal with such power, and the philosophies of handing it. A lot of the Craft Wars is about how to maintain societies and what it means to siphon off power for your own ends, even with the best of intentions. Here, Ellie and Chris’s relationship, and the fate of their mother, falls squarely into that conversation.

The novel reaches an inflection point in the sisters’ relationship, a very satisfactory ending to a self-contained story. Anyone who has had strained relations with a sibling, especially revolving around their relationship with their parents, can see and get a lot out of the Ellie-Chris relationship. The skunkworks and the problems, personal and otherwise, revealed in the course of the novel are not resolved, and if Chu wanted to write more in this multiverse (I do think he has a lot more to say about power than what he has said here, again, like the Craft Wars ’verse does), I think there’s room here to really explore these ideas with an aggressively character-centered focus.

In other words, I certainly read more novels set in this multiverse.

Pass the bao, and some more novels, John!

Highlights:

• A very strong focus on character dynamics, the Ellie-Chris relationship in particular
• Universe maintenance as computer programming of an old and somewhat creaky system
• This novel made me hungry for bao

Reference: Chu, John. The Subtle Art of Folding Space [Tor, 2026].

¹ The description of exploits and how the universe can be circumvented reminds me a bit of the description of how magic works in Charles Stross’ Laundry Files ’verse, specifically The Regicide Report.

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

Film Review: Bugonia

A bleak, biting exploration of human shortcomings that undercuts the dark comedy label

Joining Sinners and Frankenstein on the speculative side of the 2026 Best Picture Oscar race is the psychologically twisty thriller Bugonia. While Frankenstein offers addictive melodrama with fantastical sets, and Sinners delivers a stunning historical allegory on racism, creativity, and exploitation, Bugonia, on the other hand, is a quirky, quietly focused exploration of human shortcomings, especially as a response to grief. Bugonia is categorized as a dark comedy, but that label feels misleading. Despite its outlandish premise, the ultimate execution of the story feels for the most part sharp, direct, and bitter rather than sarcastically humorous. This tonal choice is unexpected but effective due to the excellent performances by the lead actors, who discuss outrageous, fantastical, tragic, and banal issues with equally seething intensity in a way that feels more like an intimate stage play than a feature film.

Bugonia is a remake of the 2003 Korean film Save the Green Planet, in which a conspiracy theorist kidnaps and tortures a corporate CEO who he believes is an extraterrestrial alien bent on destroying our planet. [SPOILERS] In Bugonia, Teddy (Jesse Plemons) is an ordinary warehouse worker and amateur beekeeper who has become obsessed with the idea that aliens known as Andromedans have infiltrated human society and are deliberately destroying the planet. He convinces his gentle-natured cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) to help him kidnap drug company CEO Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), believing her to be an evil Andromedan.

In a complex scheme, Teddy and Don are able to overpower and kidnap Michelle and chain her in their basement. They demand that she arrange a meeting with the Andromedans, but when Michelle denies being an alien, Teddy tortures her by repeatedly electrocuting her. Despite the dire nature of the situation, Michelle remains calm and intellectually challenges Teddy’s viewpoint. This causes Teddy to physically attack her. Don becomes uncomfortable with Teddy’s physical abuse of Michelle but is devoted to him.

Meanwhile, a deputy (Stavros Halkias) investigating the missing CEO is revealed to have repeatedly sexually abused Teddy as a child. Additionally, the drugs made by Michelle’s company are responsible for putting Teddy’s mother (Alicia Silverstone) in a coma. Teddy’s fraught backstory is counterbalanced by his obsessive pseudo-intellectualism and violent behavior. Michelle’s wit and calmness match her corporate persona that is briefly shown before the abduction. As Teddy and Michelle match wits, Don gets overwhelmed by the pressure of the competing extremes, and we see how truly unhinged Teddy is and how ultimately manipulative Michelle is.

Bugonia’s strength lies almost entirely in the addictive performances of Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons. Plemons is well cast as the self-important mastermind who uses his ego to justify his disturbing behavior and cover up his profound inner insecurities. The character is reminiscent of Plemons’s portrayal of the cruel Robert Daly in the “USS Callister” episode of Black Mirror. In both stories he portrays a person who feels beleaguered and intellectually superior and feels justified in hurting others to get his way.

Similarly, Emma Stone owns the scenes as the assertive, unbowed corporate CEO. She spouts corporate doublespeak about employee wellness while manipulating people to work late. We see just enough of her in terms of fitness, intellect, strength, and boldness before diving into her cold, calm performance as a smart captive. The performance is taut, sharp, and calculating, the perfect foil to Plemons’s portrayal of an insecure façade of control that falls apart when challenged. Aidan Delbis is also solid as Don, whose loyalty to Teddy is counterbalanced by practical insight and independent ethical awareness. Despite being presented as naïve and compliant, Don is the true moral center of the story.

The film delves into a diverse but related continuum of issues ranging from environmental damage to human poisoning to the toxic nature of corporate life. On the other hand, we see how abuse leads to rage and to more abuse, how loss and grief fuel anger and violence, and how the echo chamber of online algorithms can fuel extremism. Ultimately, the issue becomes a larger question about humanity itself: why do human beings choose to be toxic and violent, repeatedly and on so many different levels, despite the cost to ourselves, other humans, and our world itself?

Unfortunately, the ending doesn’t land as solidly as the initial tense setup deserves. The low-budget visual effects are meant to be humorous, but undercut the story’s initial intensity. Instead of locking in on the sharp biting commentary, the ending is awkwardly campy in a way that fails to be either actually humorous or truly ironic. The only true poignancy comes in the epilogue, but those final moments feel a bit flat after so much intense emotion.

Bees are a primary symbol in the story; the film’s title refers to a strange ancient theory of spawning a beehive from an animal’s carcass. The concept is bleak call to account to address the reality of who we really are versus who we think we are. However, the strength of the film lies in the acting in this psychological thriller, rather than in the awkward questions it asks about the flawed nature of humanity in both our external choices and in our innate being.

Highlights:

• Excellent acting
• Biting social commentary
• Lackluster ending

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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