Book Review: The Shadow Before the Dawn

The Shadow Before the Dawn is a historical fantasy novel by Alma Alexander

Steffan, son of the King of Ras, is, at a young age, taken hundreds of miles away from his home to be fostered in the court of the Qigai out on the steppe. There he will strike up a friendship with a mighty horse no one can ride, and start to learn the skills that he will need when he returns to Ras. But long and twisted is the path to a crown and the leadership of a nation, and Steffan is going to walk that path.

The Shadow Before the Dawn is (mostly) Steffan’s story.

There is a game to play in historical fantasy novels like this¹. It’s a puzzle, or a joy to solve, or a recognition of immersion, especially if you have not been warned or spoiled. Who or what is the location, time and place that is being represented here? Where is it following that history, and where is the author taking liberties? The Shadow Before the Dawn thwarted my ability to do so, and forced me to treat this as a purely novel secondary world fantasy, because the subject matter was unfamiliar to me. Steffan is a cognate of our world’s Stefan Uros III, a king of medieval Serbia and the forerunner and father of a great king, Stefan Dusan.

From there, once you have it, his story in the book follows Stefan Uros III’s life story with relative faithfulness. He winds up getting sent to the Altan Orda, which is our Golden Horde, to live as a hostage for a number of years. He then manages to return home, get into trouble with his father, and goes into exile again, this time to Visant (Constantinople). From there, after years of exile, he finally gets his chance to return home.

There are differences and inventions, though. A notable one is the matter of a horse that Alexander has inserted into the narrative. At the court of the Qigai, Steffan encounters a horse, untameable, unrideable, unapproachable. Steffan forms a bond with this horse, and the horse’s captivity and pride mirror Stefan’s own in the deadly court of the Qigai. He eventually wins the horse, and it is a minor but personal triumph.

Alexander does a lot of interesting things with language here. There is coine, the traditional trade language, and there is a lot of matter about understanding languages and communication between individuals, or the lack of ability to do so. As a sideline to that, there is also a matter of names and what people are called. Alexander likes to give people different names and epithets in different settings and languages. It’s something that the often monolithic Western world doesn’t do a lot with in real life, especially here in America.²

Steffan’s path to the throne, as it was in real history, gets wilder as the narrative progresses. Alexander does a great job in showing the many complicated sides of Stefan Uros III as Steffan. He gets into conflicts with his family, is married against his will (although historically we have no record of who that was, the novel invents an appropriate bride), is sentenced to be blinded and sent to Visant (Constantinople) and slowly waits for yet another opportunity to return to Ras and be the rightful king. In our world, the nature of this would-be blinding is not clear. In the world of the novel, he fakes it for years, telling few people (not even his own son) the truth.

The complicated nature of Steffan means that, while he is the protagonist throughout much of the book, sometimes he is not as sympathetic as one might expect in a central character. Although it was (as I later learned) often a beat-for-beat parallel to the real history, I did wonder about Steffan’s choices and actions time and again. It makes for an interesting character to follow, if not one that is always that easy to root for. The style of the writing and the pacing also goes with that, as there are years dismissed in less than a paragraph and then a deep microscopic look at a particular incident in Steffan’s life. The book demands close reading. I suspect that an audiobook might create difficulty for readers who let words flow over them and don’t study them with full attentiveness. This is a book that wants your attention in order for it to succeed for you.

The themes of the book are ones you might think in a king-in-making plot. Duty is definitely a big one; we see that right from the beginning, and it is a throughline for the novel. Honor, loyalty, family, and doing what one thinks is the right course of action are the guidestars for Steffan throughout the book. He doesn’t always hit his own marks; Steffan, as noted above, often has feet of clay. But he does for the most part try to his own self be true.

The last portion of the book, however, is the weakest. Even as it is taking from real history, and quite vividly, there is a point-of-view switch at the end of the novel that I don’t think works narratively. In the last chapters of the book, we shift from Steffan to his son, Dussin, and the handoff feels awkward to me. Through the entire novel, we’ve followed and gotten to know and understand Steffan. This shift to Dussin feels like abandoning that viewpoint at the end, and we see a diminished and declining man from the outside. I can intuit why the author did it that way—the son is the story she really wants to write in a successor novel³, and this is a way to achieve that passing of the torch. But in so doing, it diminishes the strength of this novel—Steffan’s story. We’ve followed him since he was shipped off to the Atlan Orda, but pulling the narrative away from him and following his son at the end feels like it is a transgression of the promise to the reader that we are going to follow Steffan’s story, not jump into his son’s story before its end.

Aside from this complaint, however, I was well and truly satisfied and sated with The Shadow Before the Dawn. It’s a rich secondary world fantasy with strong historical roots that brings to light a time, place and characters who don’t get a lot of attention in Western European fantasy. I’ve talked about “The Great Wall of Europe” for a decade and a half. That Wall has never included all of Europe; the story of the Balkans in the Middle Ages is a complicated and wild one that historical fantasy has often neglected. The Shadow before the Dawn is a valuable move towards giving the Balkans their due.

Highlights:

• Immersive historical fantasy in an underrepresented time and place
• (Mostly) a deep dive into the life and times of an interesting character
• Strong themes of loyalty, family, duty, and honor

Reference: Alexander, Alma. The Shadow Before the Dawn [Crossroad Press, 2026].

¹ See my review of The Court of Venus about secondary world fantasy that derives from history with names changed. I argued that for me, this is not historical fantasy, but acknowledge the minority position.

² Usernames on the internet, when they were more common, seemed to fill this a bit. As witness myself, “Princejvstin”. But I am more reminded of the phenomenon of East Asian people coming to the Western World and taking a Western name.

³ In the acknowledgements, Alexander admits that going into this project, she intended to write Dussan’s story and really wanted to, but in the process of research, decided that she “should” begin with the father. There is a tension there between what one wants to write and what one feels like they should write. I think this novel doesn’t always navigate that as well as it might. It’s a tricky balance.

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

Video Game Review: Prey by Arkane Studios

An overlooked gem

What would have happened if JFK had never been assassinated? He would have supported a cooperative space station launch with Russia called Talos 1 to help research a mysterious alien threat and discover wild new sciences, of course! The year is 2035 (maybe 2036?) and humans can install neuromods directly into their brains. These mods take the brain patterns of people with immense skill, copy them, then allow almost anyone to install them, instantly learning new skills. Want to learn how to play Beethoven flawlessly without having to practice? Want to become an Olympian? Eat more hotdogs than Joey Chestnut? Well, stick this needle in your eye! But what happens if you need your neuromod removed? What happens when the company that gave them to you as a perk rescinds their offer when you find new employment? An apto-regressive neurotomy will take care of that, and with the removal of your neuromod, so too go all the memories you’ve made since installation.

The question is, what happens when you become stuck in a loop of living the same day repeatedly because someone continues to remove your neuromods day in and day out after some experiments? Is it okay to continue because the old you with all the mods consented, or does the current you have the right to object? Even better, what if a neuromod-installed version of yourself made a backup of your personality to tell you what might happen, to free you from a potential prison if the alien threat breaks free? What if multiple backups show up, and they have contradicting missions? Which older version of yourself do you trust? What if other people around you are making more sense than the older version of you is? What then? Whose plans do you follow? What path do you take? This is the dilemma in Prey.

Let’s cut to the chase here. Prey is Bioshock meets Dead Space. The gameplay has elements of both. The zero-g moments are heavily inspired by Dead Space, and the first-person gameplay with abilities feels exactly like Bioshock. In one hand, a power; in the other, a weapon; with a wheel to select everything from. Though I must admit, the more powers and weapons you unlock, the more unwieldy the weapon wheel becomes. Best to keep it simple and only focus on a few things per playthrough. The game is nine years old now, but it feels like it could have launched when Bioshock did (which is twenty years ago, yikes!). In a year when Overwatch and Uncharted came out with smooth, action-packed gunplay, Prey’s gameplay was dated on release. That’s not to say it does not play well. It just feels a bit clunky. Things feel heavier than they need to, and considering the speed of some enemies, the fights can become frustrating. The mix of different abilities and weapons creates fun combinations, however, and situational combat can become intense; just don’t expect the game to be as smooth as Apex Legends.

The Talos 1 space station is a massive man-made triumph will many different people aboard. Throughout the station, you’ll find many transcribes (voice recordings) of the old crew. From relationships to work orders to competitive machismo, the story of Talos 1 is in huge part brought to life by the people that once lived there (and some still do). With the typhon threat (alien lifeform) roaming free, most crew are dead and only live on through the transcribes. One of my favorite things that Prey does well is environmental storytelling. Bloodstains leading to the rafters, things left behind in a rush, and an old D&D campaign established by the old crew. Nice touches like these make the massive space station feel like a place people were inhabiting before all the insanity went down.

The music accompanies the semi-horror sci-fi vibe of the game, adapting to the moment. The horror level of the typhon sits between Bioshock and Dead Space in fright factor, not feeling like a full-on horror game, but definitely giving a few jump scares throughout its twenty-plus-hour playtime. While I do wish there was more enemy variety (most of the enemies are just different versions of phantoms; even the largest enemy looks like a massive version of a phantom), the mix of mimics and other enemies creates some intense fights. The game created a successful air of making me second-guess myself, as mimics can take on the appearance of other objects. Sometimes I would see something out of the corner of my eye, only to find that a mimic had taken over a coffee cup. It’s a fun, creepy addition that never wears out it welcome.

Exploration on Talos 1 is a good time, except for the loading screens. They are not too much of a problem until the endgame, when you have to do multiple things in multiple areas of the ship in quick succession. Otherwise, the space is massive, and there are a bunch of different things to discover and multiple ways in which to do most of them. Considering I played this game multiple times in a row, I found it fun to unlock rooms I hadn’t in my first playthrough. Having different skills gives you access to different rooms, or ways to get into an area that you couldn’t before. I always love a maxed-out hacking/lock-picking skill. No door is ever safe from me.

The game looks decent still after nine years, though I have to say the character models are hideous. I think that it’s just Arkane’s style, but I don’t think the models are pleasant to look at, especially when it contrasts with the detail of everything else around them. That said, the enemy models that are there look good, as do the guns and the environment. There is a cohesive feel to it all that makes stepping out of the Neuromod Division for the first time a pleasant delight.

Prey gives you choices. Not presented in front of you like the little sisters in Bioshock, but in a more natural way. Do you save every human you discover or do you kill them? Do you kill any of them, even if they harmed you? You are fighting off an alien threat after all, and every living human is an asset. Right? But also, as you progress, you can scan typhon enemy types and learn what they can do. You can then install their abilities into your character. Do you remain fully human? Do you install only a few typhon neuromods? Or do you let the typhon take you over and install everything you can? Making these choices has an effect on the multiple endings you can select from, and it makes for stronger roleplay when going back through the game.

As the credits rolled for the first time, I decided to immediately get back into the game. I wanted to test all the powers I hadn’t before, as well as see the other endings. The game definitely feels like Bioshock meets Dead Space, as I’ve mentioned; it’s not as memorable as either, but that’s always the case with those that come after. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a good time. If you like Bioshock, if you like Dead Space, if you like an interesting sci-fi story wrapped up in a multi-billion-dollar family drama, then taking a chance with Prey can do you no wrong. Don’t expect the heights of its inspirations, and you won’t be let down, but you’ll find yourself wondering why you didn’t check out this underrated gem when it came out nine years ago.

The Math

Objective Assessment: 7.5/10.

Bonuses: +1 for fun exploration/cohesive atmosphere. +1 for player choice. +0.5 for pacing.

Penalties: −1 for dated gunplay. −1 for lack of enemy variety.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Posted by: Joe DelFranco - Fiction writer and lover of most things video games. On most days you can find him writing at his favorite spot in the little state of Rhode Island.

TV Review: Avatar: Seven Havens

To heal the world, you need to heal your soul first

Avatar Korra’s time has passed. The newest reincarnation of the spirit of light is a pair of twin girls, Pavi and Nisha. This is an unprecedented occurrence in the history of the Avatar Cycle, and it has naturally given rise to all sorts of speculations, including the most obvious possibility: that one of the twins may secretly be the next Dark Avatar, which was first created during Korra’s life. As tantalizing as this theory sounds, it raises questions about the nature of the Avatar’s mission and what the weight of such responsibility can do to a child. The new Seven Havens show is about restoring a broken world, but its plot also has an opportunity to restore a broken cosmic system.

First, to bring you up to date: by the start of Seven Havens, it has been a little over two centuries since Korra’s time as the Avatar. In circumstances that have been forgotten over several generations, the world suffered a natural disaster of catastrophic proportions that left humankind confined to just seven city-states, living in terror of the raging weather outside. We spend the first season of the show in the haven of Ellora, where any children found to be benders are forcibly recruited to serve as city guards, and where everyone blames the Avatar for breaking the world. In this climate of isolationism and paranoia, it’s understandable that little Pavi, a homeless orphan with a missing leg who happens to bend the four elements, keeps herself out of sight. But after accidentally revealing herself to one of the city guards, she’s brought under the care of the White Lotus, and soon after meets her lost twin Nisha, who has already been training as the Avatar.

From this point on, the rest of the season has our twin Avatars continue their training while they gather clues about their missing parents and stay hidden from the Elloran government. Their main enemy for the season is a strange spiritual force that appears suddenly, both feeding on fear and intensifying people’s fear. So, in a refreshing change for a franchise heavily focused on martial arts, what the heroes must solve this time isn’t the schemes of a specific villain, but a spiritual wound in their community.

Since the first series, The Last Airbender, the importance of the Avatar’s role has been in tension with the fact that an Avatar is usually identified at a rather young age. In Aang’s case, this was an unbearable revelation that had lasting consequences for the war that had just begun. For Korra, the lurking threat of the Red Lotus meant a secluded childhood and thus almost no experience of the wider world. Now, in a world that hates the Avatar, Pavi and Nisha are under multiple sources of stress: they feel abandoned by their parents, overprotected and underestimated by the White Lotus, and unable to live openly in their own city because of the people’s attitude toward what they represent. They have the vague intuition that one day it will fall upon their shoulders to heal the world from whatever it was that actually happened in Korra’s time, but with no historical records to explain the nature of the crisis, no realistic expectation of support from the general public, and no link with the past Avatars, they don’t know where to start.

The early announcement of the episode titles gave a big clue about what the solution would involve. The season’s last episode is called “The Root Chakra,” which alludes to one of the seven nodes where spiritual energy concentrates in the body and that need to flow unimpeded for an Avatar to access their full power. As was explained many years ago to Avatar Aang, the Root Chakra is the first that needs to be opened. It’s associated with survival (the stated theme of this season) and is blocked by fear, which is the problem faced by both the city of Ellora and the twins. From these clues it’s easy to anticipate that each of the titular Seven Havens represents one negative emotion that the Avatars will need to address, as if the planet itself needed a chakra cleanse. This plot structure has the risk of getting too linear, like a succession of videogame level-ups, but it’s still early to complain. This first season is about freeing Ellora and the twins from fear, and both quests are compelling to watch.

First, the city. Ellora is located in the middle of a vast desert with frequent sandstorms, so it’s a constant duty of the recruited benders to maintain the outer walls and prevent the violent weather from hurting the locals. This is a dangerous job, which has caused resentment in certain sectors of Elloran society. The Elloran government has turned inward, rejecting contact with the world and focusing obsessively on self-sufficiency. It holds survival as its highest value, but this is a distorted view of survival, that views any external presence as an enemy to avoid. The lesson for the city at the end of the season is that you can’t do everything alone, and you shouldn’t fear asking for help.

As for the girls, their fears have to do with their cosmic destiny. The clearer of the two is Pavi, who has grown accustomed to her lonely life in the streets and feels overwhelmed by the prospect of becoming a world-famous spiritual leader. Nisha’s inner jorney is more complicated: she begins the season thrilled to be the Avatar and eager to be of service, but she’s eventually confronted with her unpolished bending skills, her lack of political astuteness, and the devastating discovery of her role in her parents’ deaths and her sister’s injury. Whereas Pavi is scared of society, Nisha is scared of herself. The final episodes play as a tragedy where Nisha’s choice to hide the truth from Pavi inevitably results in Pavi’s choice to leave Nisha behind and complete her Avatar mission alone. This opens up much potential for further drama in future seasons.

However, the (so far highly hypothetical) possibility of one of the girls being the Dark Avatar highlights the problems already inherent to being the regular Avatar. Since the time of Aang we’ve known how fundamentally unfair it is to tell a child that they are the fated savior of the world and they’ll never get to have a normal life. This weight is multiplied after Avatar Korra, who lost the link to the past Avatars and can no longer resort to their centuries of accumulated wisdom. But if the Dark Avatar has reincarnated, we get the much more problematic scenario of accusing a child of evils they haven’t yet committed. In a way, this is already what the twins are going through: Dark or not, the Avatar is already a figure of contempt across the Seven Havens. Dark or not, no child deserves to grow up under such expectations. This is heavy material that the show needs to handle honestly and carefully.

With three more seasons already confirmed, there’s space for the show to continue exploring the ways this system can be fixed. It’s a big task: our heroes will have to stabilize the planet’s chaotic climate, earn back humankind’s trust, help rebuild civilization, and maybe, if they still have the time and the will, repair their relationship as sisters. Will they also rewrite the rules of the Avatar Cycle? It wouldn’t be the first time. Maybe this story will end up changing the underlying dynamic that has put its world through so much trouble: no society should be so unlucky as to have to rely on a cosmic savior, and no child should be so unlucky as to have to become one.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Anime Review: My Happy Marriage — Special Episode Trilogy

The Cinderella-inspired historical fantasy chases its long-awaited happy ending

For fans of romance, the first season of My Happy Marriage offered a satisfying and entertaining historical fantasy with elements of Cinderella. In a magic-based society, abused and magic-less Miyo is forced into an engagement with a cruel military magic wielder. After a strong first season, My Happy Marriage returned with a slower-paced second season of both magical and everyday adventure. This year offered a three-episode special to round out its run. As the title implies, the show is primarily a romantic adventure. It begins in its first season with a classic Cinderella premise that works well and delivers both great romantic elements and genuinely engaging fantasy adventure. But the later offerings struggle to rise to the strong start.

Season 1

The story is set in a fantasy version of the early 20th century where specially trained, magically talented military units fight malevolent supernatural monsters known as grotesqueries. Kind-hearted Miyo is abused by her step-mother and half-sister and ignored by her scheming father. In a world where elite families are blessed with magical powers, Miyo seems to have none. As a result of this, she is reduced to being a servant in her own home after the death of her mother. When her father sells her off to a cruel military leader, she accepts her fate with humility knowing she has no other options. However, she discovers that her betrothed, Kiyoka Kudō, is different from his reputation. And she discovers that she has secretly inherited her mother’s psychic powers. Miyo is supported by Koji, her kind childhood friend and “boy next-door” neighbor, and her sister-in-law to be, Hazuki, a modern, bold divorced woman. Grumpy hero Kiyoka is supported by his cheerful lieutenant Godo and his easy-going, curse-banishing friend Kazushi. Later, Miyo’s complicated cousin Arata appears as an antagonist/ally who tries to control/manipulate Miyo’s newfound powers. The show is filled with adventures, friendship, and lots of heroic romance. Together, Miyo and Kiyoka learn to trust each other and use their powers to protect each other and their loved ones. The setting is a fun mix of modern and historical fantasy, with Kiyoka driving an automobile to work and then using magic to fight supernatural monsters in the retro 20th-century setting. Season 1 is a satisfying complete story that will leave even non-anime traditional romance fans happy.

Season 2

The second season of My Happy Marriage arrived with high expectations. Unfortunately, the storytelling was not as strong, and the character development went from inspiring to repetitive. This season focuses on an insurgent group trying to overthrow the government and wreak havoc by releasing monsters and monstrous powers in the community. The primary villain has a connection to Miyo’s maternal Usuba family, so Miyo is placed in protective custody. In the first season, Miyo is humble and self-effacing as a direct result of her childhood trauma and the relentless abuse she faces. Despite this, she has several moments where she shows genuine strength, determination, and defiance, even in the face of cruelty and danger. However, in this season Miyo’s character flatlines to consistent and tiresome timidity that starts to wear thin. Although she is discovered to be the long-awaited Maiden of Dream Sight, Miyo is unable to fully use her powers despite tutelage from her maternal family. Miyo stays in damsel-in-distress mode for most of the season, and almost all the heroic action is done by men. Fortunately, there are other strong female characters, including Kiyoka’s bold yet kind sister Hazuki, and the talented military soldier Kaoruko.

2026 special episodes/wedding trilogy

Despite the show’s title, the protagonists, Miyo and Kiyoka, are not actually married in the first two seasons. They are engaged and living in the same household, but in separate rooms. The impending marriage always hovers in the background of the monster-fighting drama and the adventures in slice-of-life domesticity and family politics. To move the narrative closer to its namesake, three episodes focused on the long-awaited wedding ceremony were added this year. While it’s fun to finally see Miyo in her wedding attire, there are still lots of obstacles in the way of the couple’s happiness. The most annoying is Miyo’s exhausting shyness and timidity. After so many adventures, it seems unbelievable that Miyo is still intensely timid about things such as speaking Kiyoka’s first name or letting his hand touch hers. Especially since these things have already happened in the past. The regression in their relationship feels artificial and incomprehensible even in their uptight turn-of-the-century setting. In addition, the final villain is an abused housewife who becomes entangled with an evil spirit. She uses the spirit’s magic to disable her abusive mother-in-law (but not her abusive husband) and hurts others with it, including Miyo. This storyline was particularly strange, since the woman is abused by her husband and repeatedly seeks help but is rebuffed by everyone, including Kiyoka. Even Miyo doesn’t really speak up for her despite her own exposure to abuse. It was an odd choice for a villain setup, but it would have been a great opportunity for Miyo to shine in wisdom, heroism, or compassion. However, she retains her wide-eyed damsel-in-distress status for most of the episodes. The only quirky moment is when a curse put on Miyo makes her tell off Kiyoka. But despite the highly out-of-character behavior, neither of the magic experts, Kiyoka or Miyo, notice she is under a spell.

Overall, the wedding trilogy episodes of My Happy Marriage offered a sweet and visually appealing closure to Kiyoka and Miyo’s adventures. It also gave us a nice reunion of many of the appealing side characters. However, while Kiyoka matures over time, Miyo’s flat development was a disappointment after such a promising opening season. Many anime series have an archetypal sweet, demure, pure-hearted heroine, often as a foil to another bold, bossy, powerhouse heroine. Notable examples of this archetype are Hinata in Naruto, Orihime in Bleach, and Tohru in Fruits Basket. Miyo initially seems to be a similar type of character, one who is externally gentle but internally strong. However, the second season and the wedding trilogy regress her character development. Her meekness moves from charming to worrisome. While there are many valid reasons why this might truly happen to a person with her background, the series doesn’t address them. If her personality is an intentional choice, then the show had a missed opportunity to add some authentic context regarding trauma-based responses. If, on the other hand, there was simply a passive narrative choice to keep her as a damsel in distress, then the second season and the final wedding arc did Miyo a disservice after such a promising start.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Highlights:

• Strong first season
• Flat character arc
• Fun magic system and enjoyable supporting characters

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

Book Review: The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances by Glenn Dixon

A cozy dystopia that really misses the mark

The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances by Glenn Dixon has a fairly adorable premise (even if “sadness” in the title makes one wonder if it will turn dark): a young, sentient Roomba tries to save her humans from a dark technological overlord. There have been several recent popular explorations of small sentient appliances or robots, such as Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Service Model (2024), Annalee Newitz’s Automatic Noodle (2025), and Suzanne Palmer’s Ode to the Half-Broken (2026). The Newitz and the Tchaikovsky were even both finalists for the Hugo (and it’s too early to know if Palmer’s will be a finalist, but I’m sure it will be nominated!). But this newest take on small sentient appliances misses the mark: it lacks fairly basic understandings of technology, which means it cannot think through how a machine brain might be different from a human one. Further, and even more damning, the overarching lesson of the book seems to be more about preserving stuff than relationships.

I wanted to like this book. I am absolutely the target audience for this book! It’s by a Canadian author, I found it on a Canada Broadcasting Company (CBC) listicle recommending books, and I am generally down for what is sometimes disparagingly called “cozy dystopia.” But this book left me in the incredibly weird position of wanting to defend big surveillance technology?

Set in a near but undefined future, the story follows the self-named “Scout,” a Roomba-style vacuum that works for an older couple named Edie and Harold. Harold is a retired high school English teacher obsessed with finding and sometimes restoring first editions of classic 20th century novels (such as To Kill a Mockingbird, from which Scout took her name; The Alchemist; and C.S. Lewis’s Narnia chronicles). Edie is a retired pianist and piano teacher dying from cancer. [This part will definitely remind you of the beginning of the movie Up.]

In the house with Scout there are several other appliances with various levels of sentience: we meet Clock, Refrigerator, Thermostat, and Auto. Watch, who lives embodied in a smart watch on Harold’s wrist, connects the team with The Grid, which monitors the house and its inhabitants.

The first half of the book focuses on Scout’s journey of self-discovery, which largely seems to be about Scout learning to appreciate piano music and 20th-century literature. After Edie’s death, we mostly lose track of Scout until she can provide a deus ex machina for the plot. Instead, we’re introduced to Kate, Harold and Edie’s estranged daughter, who returns to the home to help Harold downsize and prepare to move.

With these characters, we are set up for a clear dystopia: an all-controlling, all-watching Grid that takes away human freedom. But, in actuality, The Grid doesn’t seem that all-powerful. It can literally be thwarted by stepping halfway outside the garage so it can’t “hear” you in the house. It can become so “busy” with other things in the house that Scout has more than two minutes of time to hack into something she’s not supposed to be listening to. There are dissidents who live “off the grid” that The Grid cannot seem to thwart despite the fact that they’re often just walking around in neighbourhoods? In the end, the final “hack” to deceive The Grid has at least half a dozen ways that it would be spotted immediately by any even moderately effective AI.

I don’t expect every author who writes about technology to be a programmer (and I am not one!), but I felt like many of the basic misses related to computers and how they work should have been evident to anyone who even sometimes reads science fiction with AI or machine minds. Scout, our vacuum-protagonist, does not read as a machine or computer. All of the appliance characters could have been replaced with human servants without making any difference to the book. (And, for a more charitable analysis, perhaps that’s the point? We are making all powerful AIs and robots because what we fundamentally want is the ability to have slaves.)

I was also disappointed about the overall lesson of the book. All the conflict over The Grid has to do with Harold and his stuff. He only notices that he’s, apparently, living in an AI-controlled dystopia when he may be forced to move into a smaller home. He didn’t notice when his daughter was taken away and not allowed to visit for years. He didn’t notice when a neighbour boy and a former student of Edie’s, Adrian, seemed to be living some kind of precarious existence because they’re not registered citizens and therefore not eligible for The Grid’s UBI. He only notices when The Grid wants to take Edie’s piano so he can be moved into a smaller home.

The Grid’s evil mission appears to be the densification of cities. It wants Harold to move into a smaller house because he’s now an older man living alone. And, to be honest, when Harold falls down the stairs of his large single-family home and breaks his hip, you kind of think The Grid has a point?

I live in the very expensive city of Vancouver, British Columbia, where there is a constant push and pull between some older people who bought single-family homes in the 70s and 80s when they were inexpensive and don’t want to pay taxes on what has become their multimillion dollar assets, don’t want to downsize, and oppose even gentle efforts at neighbourhood densification. Reading this book made me wonder if one of them had written it.

While I, in general, definitely oppose Big Technology and do not want to live in a surveillance state, the goals of The Grid in this book seemed so Left-coded that I felt like I was being trolled: The Grid gives almost everyone UBI; they’re trying to move people into the city centre; they want to preserve human art to understand it!

The neighbour character, Adrian, and his mother offer a small hint of what it might be like to live as someone in this Grid-controlled city who is undocumented in some way. We are told that they have some problems with money and *gasp* are forced to live in a basement suite. But it’s left at that, and we get no resolution to their plot. (Also, as a Vancouverite, almost everyone I know has lived in a basement suite at some point. It’s fine!) The book barely explores these characters. I thought the obvious community-oriented answer to Harold and Kate trying to find a way for him to stay in his home was for him to welcome Adrian and his mom into their house! But no.

In the end (and I am going to totally spoil the book here), Scout is able to hack into The Grid to eliminate Edie’s death date, theoretically making The Grid think that Harold is not living in the house alone. Kate makes contact with dissidents who help her flee to a community living off the grid in the woods. So, in a supposedly happy ending here, Harold is getting to keep living in a Grid-controlled city, alone in a giant house while, presumably, not able to communicate at all with his daughter? Hooray!

While I often enjoy the small scale of cozy dystopias, The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances really didn’t work for me. The robots were just people with robot faces, and the overall lesson focused too much on materialism at the expense of relationships. Skip this one and go read Murderbot. It's less cozy, but a lot better.

Highlights:

• Very weak “all-powerful” Grid bent on world domination
• Sweet old couple characters that will remind you a bit of Up
• The writing about technology will irritate any moderately tech-savvy readers

Nerd Coefficient: 3/10, “very little good I can say about this.”

Reference: Dixon, Glenn. The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances [Atria Books, 2026].

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

Operation Deja Boo: Complete

We came, we revisited, we conquered our childhood fears. 

Deja Boo, we hardly knew ye! Over the past three weeks, intrepid writers here at Nerds of a Feather dug deep and revisited the (mostly) horror movies that scarred us — at least as far as we can remember. 

There are strange souls such as myself that enjoy horror as an adult and regularly consume visual media that frightens. Many others, meanwhile, tend to avoid them. I believe these two paths both stem from the same impetus: being scared as a child. One group wants to recreate that fearful sensation, while the other would be happy to never experience such things again. 

What decides who gets placed in what group, and why? The world may never know, unfortunately. From my experiences this month and the various posts by my brethren, it is very clear that kids are extremely susceptible to being spooked. This isn't anything new, of course. Kids are born into a world with zero context and absolutely wild imaginations. Every day, they're making sense of the world, and extraordinary or horrific things throw a lever into the burgeoning machine-works of their little brains. 

What's clear from our Deja Boo experiment is that our childhood fears tend to be focused on images, and not entire cinematic experiences. This makes sense, as even the scariest films have minutes upon minutes that are in fact not scary. But the images that get burned into young retinas and seared into our memories can remain for decades. What's even scarier is that you probably don't even have to have seen a movie to be scarred by it: commercials, posters, schoolyard chat, and the VHS boxes at the video store can also serve as triggers. 

This is what makes scary movies so, well, scary to kids. The potential for a fright lurks around every corner, and there's not much you can do to avoid it. Such is the vulnerable plight of being a young human in the world. 

As an adult, I pride myself on being unspookable. But here, I believe, is the perfect place to announce my caveat: I do not enjoy A24 horror. Midsommar? Absolutely not. Hereditary? I will never. Modern prestige horror is based on trauma, and the emotional beating these movies deliver upon viewers is intense, and one I do not enjoy. Not because I'm scared, but because it makes me feel...weird and sad. Some would say that counts, but I'm not so sure. 

Give me a haunted doll, a creepy house, or a bloody monster and I won't bat an eye. But the death of a person's entire family after tragic circumstances? I'm utterly destroyed and despondent. 

Perhaps that's what changes as you get older. The usual frights and scares begin to dissipate and are replaced by adult fears: job loss, cancer, and crushing guilt over past actions. The opening to Midsommar still wrecks me when I think about it (if you know you know). And this despite the fact that the film takes places in blazing white sunlight — not a shadow or monster around.

One thing that stuck out to me during my rewatches was just how often comedy and horror are combined, especially in the formative years of my youth. The 1980s horror genre was chock full of gallows humor, but at the time I was too young to grasp it. I'm not beating myself up here, most kids can't parse such opposite emotions. But I think the horror comedy genre is fascinating, and something I may want to explore next year in another series like Deja Boo. 

The concept goes back almost as far as horror itself, considering Abbott and Costello met nearly all of the Universal Monsters. Combining the two genres gives wide room to play with conflicting feelings, all while reveling in the absurdity that's created when they collide. Some are gross, some are hilarious, and some are psychedelic excursions into wackiness( looking at you, House).

Looking back on the films I and my fellow flock members revisited, I can say that it's a worthwhile activity to engage in during spooky season. I mentioned my quest to a few friends recently and everyone had a story about a movie they saw way too young that has stuck with them. It's comforting to know that we all have similar formative experiences as children, no matter where we grew up or how old we are. My generation had Child's Play, my mother's had Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and my grandmother's had The Blob. Kids today have 100+ years of horror cinema to be traumatized by, including brand new releases on streaming channels that are released weekly. 

For anyone curious about digging into their childhood psyche to revisit old fears, I highly recommend it. You're braver than you think. 

--

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

Book Review: Forged for Prophecy by Andrew Knighton

The second “Forged” book by Andrew Knighton.

In Forged for Destiny, Knighton brought us the story of Raul. Raul was seemingly a Chosen One that was manufactured by a former court official, and an officer in the army. By means of keeping him hidden from invaders who had toppled the kingdom, and seeding legend and myth, they hoped to manufacture a Chosen One storyline for him, and ride him to glory into throwing out the invaders and restoring the kingdom. Raul slowly begins to realize his role and his seemingly foreordained fate is a manufactured manipulation. And even as he tries to fulfill the expectations and the role, he finds that a prophecy and destiny cannot be so easily manufactured. The attempt at rebellion is shattered, brutally. The supposed destined sword captured by his enemy. And Raul abandons the woman pretending to be his mother and flees to the hinterlands to begin again--but his way.

Forged for Prophecy, second in the series, details what happens next.

And that of course is the trick, What happens when you find out that your own Chosen One life was a lie and that you weren’t magically destined for anything, really. You’ve been trained, in a sense, to be that hero, that heir, even if you really are not the last scion of the royal family of Estis.  The Dunholmi are still in control of Estis. The local Count is still the one that took the fake chosen sword. The man who raised you still lost a hand in that disastrous final conflict. 

Raul decides to try and do a revolution and revolt on his terms--mostly. He still is pretending to be the last scion of Estis, but without Prisca, the woman who raised him, guiding the rebellion with her prophecies. And it is not going well at all. Revolution is a hard business, and early on, Raul bites off more than he can chew. He has a reconciliation of sorts with Prisca, who urges him to go into the wild to find an ancient artifact that could help him be the hero he needs to be. 

And so the story continues.

The second novel is very much concerned about forging a myth (as opposed to faking a myth as in the first novel) and the burdens of command and power. And the costs of doing all of this. Raul has chosen this leadership position, and now seeing it through is a real test of command and ability. Raul has to learn, quickly, and also learn, to his sorrow, that these lessons have a cost. This starts both, immediately, at a cost in trying to obtain coin from the Dunholmi, and in the long term, with a plot thread involving the somewhat reconciled Prisca. It turns out that trying to do divination does damage to the mind over time¹. 

Knighton does a good job with this, especially once we get to the meat of the novel. In the course of being in the wilds, Raul and his companions are confronted with a god, Varrag. Varrag is worse than Conan’s Crom, he is capricious and even less useful as an object of worship, but he is the master of this twisted and changeable land.  Raul and his companions traverse a tewr

And so does Count Alder.

Because, of course, Alder pursues Raul, because he does have a sense of duty to his Empire and his own interests. Raul is a small threat but he is a threat, and after the events of the first novel, he is willing to spend political and social capital in going after him. So the Dunholmi, too, go forging into these wilds after the Rebels. We only get a few short sections from Alder’s point of view. However, Knighton handles these well, giving a face to the local Dunholmi ruler, and making him a more fleshed out antagonist. He has his own problems, ideals and plans, and like in the first book, I could see and somewhat sympathize with him and his own life.

The Withered Hills, the wilds where the bulk of the action takes place, is an interesting and well written wilderness. Knighton knows his forebears, and has some interesting twists to the chaotic terrain and those who live there, giving the Withered Hills (which is such a good toponym that is worthy of Tolkien) a real life and personality to them. That the Hills are being violated by outsiders but fights back in a losing battle is a somber reflection about how a dangerous way of life, but one unique to the residents and one the residents are used to, is being slowly eroded away. 

The book I was thinking of as I was reading Forged for Prophecy is the recent award finalist novel from Alix Harrow, The Everlasting. There aren’t anything like the time loops that Harrow uses, but other themes from that novel contrast well with this one.  In this book, the myth making is happening in real time by Raul himself, rather than being just the results of the changes to Una’s story. 

But Forged for Prophecy, just like Forged for Destiny, continues the critique from the inside of the whole project of a Chosen One. And it gets at the same thing as The Everlasting does, as the turns and revelations of the novels continue--the good, but also the danger of reaching for these myths and what happens when these myths do not align with the facts on the ground. As Raul pursues a magical item and the aforementioned Varrag, there is temptation, and bargain revolving around power, and the future of Raul and Estis, and the past history of Estis itself. This also goes to the character development.

The secondary characters, in addition to Raul are well done and get arcs of their own. Prisca’s struggles with the costs of doing divination; Valens, having lost a hand in the previous novel, has to reconcile his usefulness and his changed role in Raul’s rebellion. And Yasmin, with her masks that allow her to become various creatures, finds that the lure of “becoming the mask” is extremely tempting, and real. It’s easier to become the wolf whose mask she wears. It simplifies things... but becoming the wolf too often changes Yasmin. Alder, too, gets a small but significant character arc of his own.

But to turn to the style and the reading of the book, this is an extremely readable and page turning epic fantasy series, and a very good middle good in this story as well. After the twist of the Chosen One in Forged for Destiny, Forged for Prophecy keeps exploring the consequences of Raul trying to do better after the disaster of the first novel. In these trilogies, the ones that this novel derives and critiques, the usual pattern is Early Win in Book One, followed by the Empire striking Back in Book Two, and then victory in Book Three. Knighton is already off that pattern and continues to surprise in this book as well. While following more standard epic fantasy patterns can still be rewarding to a reader like myself, this critique and twist on those narratives was very satisfying. Forged for Prophecy is an entirely successful sequel to Forged for Destiny and I look forward to picking up the third book in the series, Forged for Royalty.

--

The Math

Highlights:

• The Chosen One with a twist continues, and continues the surprises.

• Character arcs for all help support and grow the narrative

• Refreshingly written and page turning. 

Reference: Knighton, Andrew, Forged for Destiny, [Orbit, 2025]

¹ One is reminded of Charles Stross’ Laundry Files, a very different genre, but similar potential problems for wizards. 

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