6 Books with Jordan Kurella

Jordan Kurella is a trans and disabled author who has lived all over the world (including Moscow and Manhattan). In his past lives, he was a photographer, radio DJ, and social worker. His work has been nominated for the Nebula Award, the Sturgeon Award, and the LA Times Book Prize. He is the author of the fantasy novella, I Never Liked You Anyway, the short story collection, When I Was Lost, and the climate fiction novella, The Death of Mountains. Jordan lives in limbo with his perfect dog and practical cat.

Today he tells us about his six books.

1. What book are you currently reading?

Right now I’m doing a re-read of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones as I am answering these questions a day or two before I’m due at the L.A. Times Book Festival. I’m on a panel with Stephen Graham Jones and Catronia Ward. I have Ward’s book ready to read on the train to Los Angeles. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is one of my favorite horror books I’ve read in a very long time, but then again, I’m an enormous fan of Dracula by Bram Stoker (probably read that four times). The book is paced and constructed similarly (but not samely) to Dracula but with more revenge, more justice, and more skill in voice (in my opinion). Jones does an absolutely incredible job in the narrative voice differences between Etsy, Good Stab, and the Pastor. This is the kind of thing I just gobble up. I’m about a third of the way through my re-read, and picking up on clues I dropped the first time.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

This was originally going to be a very difficult question to answer, as my two big books I was anticipating were Year of the Mer by L.D. Lewis and Ignore All Previous Instructions by Ada Hoffman. But Year of the Mer is already out, so! This makes answering this question far easier (get Year of the Mer at your favorite indie bookstore). As Ignore All Previous Instructions is due out in May, I’ll talk about that one. This book is an incredible rocket-ride of spacefaring adventure and romance with the kind of drama that I don’t usually see in science fiction—by which I mean relationship/romantic drama—and that kinda messy stuff is totally my jam. I love fictional relationships that mimic soap opera levels of mess, and Ignore All Previous Instructions has that with trans characters, neurodivergence, space travel, and a total and scathing takedown of LLMs. Hoffman is an incredible writer, and I’ve been a fan of their work for ages. This book is my favorite of theirs so far.

3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to re-read?

I always want to re-read The Mountain and the Sea by Ray Nayler. This is my answer every time. When I’m in-between books, I see it on my shelf and want to read it again. Had the fortune of talking to Ray about this at the 2025 Seattle Worldcon, and he said that he wrote that in the hopes that folks would find it that way—like their favorite Pixies album—but to me, The Mountain and the Sea is itself about language and communication and the problems and benefits of it. So re-reading it again and again (I’ve read it twice) makes me understand the book on a deeper and deeper level, like listening or replaying a conversation in my head might do. See where I erred, or where maybe someone wasn’t being completely on the up and up. It also makes me a better writer, I think? Re-reading something that I love so completely? Because I can pick it apart and get to the makings of why it works so well.

4. A book that you love and wish you yourself had written?

No. 

I don’t get jealous or envious about other authors’ work, and when someone else writes a book concept that was close to something I was thinking of, my immediate thought is, “Oh thank gosh, now I can put that idea aside.” And then I read their book to see how much better they did it than me, and then sit back and enjoy it. Authors are all unique and bring their own life experiences to the page. Ideas might be chaff, but every idea is built upon the backbone of experience. To get to the question? The closest I got to this was Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera, which thank gosh he wrote that. Chandrasekera wrote Rakesfall as a far better book than I could write, and executed the nascent idea I’d been playing over in my head so much better and more masterfully than I ever could do. Which is cool! How can I be upset, now I get to read it! I just love reading, and I love reading a lot of things. So when I come across something that is similar to something I want to write? I am just super happy go along for the ride.

5. What’s one book, which you read as a child or young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?

This is a complete toss-up between D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths and The Stranger by Chris Van Allsberg. Each of these books I was given by my parents when I was around nine or ten years old, and I wore the copies out so much that the covers fell out and pages fell out. I still have the originals I was given. But I’m going to talk about The Stranger. This book is not one of Allsberg’s more famous works, it’s about Jack Frost, who gets hit by a farmer’s car, and is brought into the farmer’s home to recover from amnesia. Like much of Allsberg’s work, the illustrations are phenomenal, and there’s a mystery to be solved. When the seasons don’t change, and the harvest doesn’t come, Jack Frost suddenly regains his memory, and winter arrives. I’m getting chills just typing this. It made me seek out and have curiosity about more things. Books, nature, and beauty in the world around me.

6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome?

The last book I had published is called The Death of Mountains and it came out last year (March 2025). It features Plundered Mountain, who is a middling hill of the Appalachians who does not want to die. When she is visited by the Death of Mountains who has come to usher her along? Plundered Mountain bargains for her life through the trading of stories back and forth over the course of one night, but it becomes more involved than that, as stories always tend to do. Told in three points of view in novella length, this book was a fun thing to write, an experiment in how weird can I go? There’s a book called Before the Feast by Saša Stanišić translated by Anthea Bell. I read it about six years ago, and in it, there’s a town that speaks in a first person plural. Reading this book changed my entire perspective on how a book could be told. I could not have written The Death of Mountains without Before the Feast. But I’m getting lost in my answer: Death of Mountains, the character, is terrible at his job, while Plundered Mountain is exceedingly good (and stubborn) at being a mountain. The two clash in the kindest and gentlest of ways as they tell stories and ask questions over the nature of permanence, what is life, what is joy, and how there is no life without a little suffering. I had a lot of fun writing this book, and I hope others enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Thank you Jordan!

--

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

Book Review: Inquisitor: Rise of the Red Blade

Come for the lightsabers, stay for the intense analysis of alienation

I knew I was in for an experience with Delilah Dawson’s Star Wars novel Inquisitor: Rise of the Red Blade when I looked at the first page of the book and found that it contained a trigger warning for the fact that, over the course of the novel, a character commits suicide. I was blindsided a bit - I don’t expect Star Wars to handle such delicate material. Whatever hesitation or trepidation I may have had was assuaged as Dawson’s novel ended up the most emotionally intense novel in the franchise that I have ever read. I was frankly astounded.

The novel is, ultimately, a novel about the process of radicalizing terrorists, but the terrorists are the dark side. Such organizations prey on a very particular type of person: the isolated, the disaffected, the angry, the sort of person who is utterly dissatisfied with their lot in life and is prone to lashing out. Your potential terrorist here is Iskat Akaris, a padawan of the Jedi Order of an unknown species from an unknown planet, with no heritage to look back towards and no approval from the Order to be found. Her master is cold, her peers hate her for an attempt of demonstrating ability with the Force having gone dangerously awry, and her duties frustrate her and bore her in every measure.

But the other side of terrorist radicalization is the side that our media and our governments like to pretend does not exist. It is the society around these disaffected people that makes them disaffected in the first place. For white nationalist terrorists today, their recruiting grounds are angry young white men who haven’t got what they feel they’ve earned (or in many cases, entitled - be that status or prestige or women or money). For Islamist terrorists, their recruiting grounds are majority-Muslim areas of Western countries that are neglected by their governments, never allowed to truly be neighbors by societies that hate them. It is then unsurprising that groups like al-Qaeda or ISIS or al-Shabaab fill the void, offering them a righteous cause and a pacific Jannah for the price of committing murder.

That uncaring, miserable environment in this novel is the Jedi Temple. The Jedi Order has always had this mystical component to it, a sort of space opera version of an Eastern monastic order, with added martial arts and laser swords. Here, that religious element is brought forth, and it is not simply a religion; in this novel, the Jedi Order is a cult. The Masters tell Iskat again and again that the Order cannot fail; the Order can only be failed. That is the message the Order gives her again and again; her feelings are invalid, her problems are irrelevant, and her suffering is a sin. For daring to stand up, to be herself, she is punished.

The way Dawson writes the Jedi Order in this novel reminded me of the writing of people who have left toxic religious organizations; the one I’ve read the most is Chrissy Stroop, an exvangelical writer who has gone into great detail about the toxicity of American evangelical culture; similar writers have talked about the miseries inflicted by the Catholic Church, or the Jehovah’s Witnesses, or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), among many others (not all of them Christian). The throughline through all of these groups is that they create a problem and market the solution. A toxic Evangelical church will deny its members the right to consume secular media. The Jehovah’s Witnesses discourage its members to have friends outside the Church. The Catholic Church denies its followers the ability to have a healthy relationship to sexuality (or a sex life at all to queer people). The Mormon Church discourages its followers from reading about Mormon history from outside approved sources. And the Jedi Order denies its younglings any outside attachment, any family, any love. The Jedi Order only offers a laundry list of obligations, a culture of silence, and a demand for utter obedience.

Dawson has created this setting of the Jedi Temple that is just suffocating. The most aggravating thing, for the reader and for Iskat, is that the Order simply does not view a padawan as a being entitled to the dignity of reason. Again and again and again, she is met with thought-terminating cliches that resolve no issues, solve no problems, ease any tensions. Even as she is proven right in the field of battle, they find reasons to demote her and snub her.

She is discontented, but crucially, she is also violent. She feels at her most self-actualized when she is fighting. She is first deployed at the Battle of Geonosis not long after the first shots of the Clone Wars were fired, and she revels in slaughtering Geonosians. She goes against orders on a subsequent mission, creating diplomatic headaches, but even the Order has to admit that she was effective. You would hope that the Order would find a way to channel this aggression in a useful way, if only on the battlefield, but instead they assign her to teach children. Teaching is of course a worthy calling but it is clearly not the best use of her talents.

From there, the plot rolls on with the inevitability of a boulder running down a mountain, crushing everything before it. Iskat is Yoda’s maxim personified: fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering. Yoda was speaking on the individual level, within the confines of a single conscience, but here you see a version that interplays between individual and broader society. The Jedi fear Iskat, and she fears the Order in turn. The Jedi come to rage at Iskat, leading her to rage at the Order in turn. The Jedi, ultimately, inflict much suffering on Iskat, and Iskat takes all the fury that has welled up within her and unleashes it on the galaxy at large.

The tragedy of the whole thing is enhanced by the possibility of another outcome. There is a sequence where Iskat finds her homeworld (discovered, by pure chance, after someone she meets on a mission recognizes her species) and visits it. This is a world that has decided to reject galactic civilization entirely. There are no starports on this planet, as they have only received misery and death from the merchants from the sky. They are the Sentinelese of this universe, or perhaps the Piraha; they have rejected any attempt to be made ‘legible’ by galactic civilization. They are the highland people of Zomia. They are also reminiscent of the residents of Hydros, the planet of seas and of archipelagos from Robert Silverberg’s novel The Face of the Waters (which I had the fortune to read not long before this novel), a planet whose indigenous species rejects space travel, and whose human colonists came with the knowledge they would never leave.

All of that is to say that her homeworld is a place where Iskat could have existed without all the cruelties and, bluntly, bullshit of the Jedi Order. This is a place where Iskat could have chosen to be Iskat, to be her own person among her own kind. You see in the people here someone who Iskat could have been without the cruelty of galactic civilization. The tragedy of it all comes when Iskat decides she has to leave, to be involved in the misery of the universe. She hasn't been corrupted so much as she has been angled into following a logic of decision-making that can lead only to destruction. And that is what is so painful about it - Dawson has persuaded you that this could have ended no other way.

There is something about the way that Dawson has conjured her images that is so striking in this book. There are multiple images in this novel that I can recall very well some time after reading it. The best of these, by far, is the ending, the last shot of the movie in your mind, that has the cinematic, epic, romantic quality of many great works of film, the Star Wars films themselves by no means the only example. It is that last image, that last painful, searing image, that made me wish that Disney would have the chutzpah to adapt this into a visual format.

I remember feeling a very, very slight twinge of offense when I read that Denis Villeneuve described his Dune movies as ‘Star Wars for adults.’ Realistically, of course, I know what he meant, and I know George Lucas made the first film for children in the style of the serials of his own childhood, and I know how it’s marketed, and Villeneuve’s films are astounding. This book, I think, is what Star Wars for adults, if that is a thing that should be brought into existence to begin with, should look like. There are a lot of meaty ideas in here that a child may not be able to digest (but a brainy teenager, on the other hand, I suspect would profit very much from this). I am confident in saying that this is one of the best works the franchise has produced. If Disney is brave they will pay for more like it, and hopefully from Delilah Dawson.

--

Reference: Dawson, Delilah Inquisitor: Rise of the Red Blade [Random House Worlds, 2023]

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

Film Review: The Sheep Detectives

A lovely whodunit that could have gone farther with its material

I’m torn baatween two imperatives. On one hand, the movie adaptation of a novel should baa able to stand on its own, and therefore baa analyzed apart from the source material. If I follow that line of thought, the movie The Sheep Detectives is an adorable cozy comedy with an interesting message about the value of growing from painful memories. On the other hand, the only reason I wanted to watch this movie was baacause I loved the novel Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann and its sharp observations about the dark facets of the human heart. If I follow that line of thought, the movie does the novel a disservice by sanding down all its sharp edges and turning a smart literary experimentation into a more inoffensive family-friendly story.

Such is the conundrum baafore me.

The novel and the movie share a simple central plot: when the shepherd George turns up dead one morning, his sheep decide in their baareavement that they will investigate the truth of what baafell him and who was truly baahind it. As it happens, George used to read crime thrillers aloud to his sheep, so they know a thing or two about detective work. It’s somewhat harder to do when you don’t have opposable thumbs, but they manage to strategically eavesdrop on the right human conversations to uncover what happened. Baawilderingly, the movie manages to change absolutely everything else: the manner of his death, the reasons, the suspects, and the entire flow of the investigation. The version of George in the novel isn’t the impeccably kind caretaker shown in the movie; he took some nasty secrets to the grave. Plus the individual sheeps’ personalities are far more varied, and there is assorted commentary about small town life and organized religion. There’s drug smuggling, adultery, and additional dead people. The movie is baareft of all that.

And yet I know that none of it should matter, baacause the quality of a movie adaptation has nothing to do with its fidelity to the original. A movie’s only duty is to baa a good movie on its own. And on its own, it’s well made: the jokes are effective, the talking animals look realistic, and the new version of the mystery is compelling enough, with the requisite confusions and detours to mislead the sheep, who then have to race against the clock baafore the wrong person is sent to jail. What’s curious is that the script heavily expands on some elements of sheep society that get mere passing mentions in the novel, such as the widespread prejudice against lambs born in winter, the baalief that a sheep’s fate in the afterlife is to baacome a cloud, and most notably, their ability to willingly forget sad memories. Lo and baahold, this is one edge the movie does have over the novel: whereas the novel uses the sheep as a device to look at the baafouled defects of humanity through an unconventional lens, the movie is more interested in developing the sheep themselves as characters.

As much as the movie sanitizes the story for child viewers, it can’t sweep the core plot point of the shepherd’s death baaneath the rug. So it needed to find a way to tell a story about death while staying family-friendly. That’s where the sheep’s forgetting power comes into play. Sheep are traditionally a symbol of innocence, but they only stay innocent baacause they make themselves forget anything too distressing. The movie makes it the measure of a sheep’s personal growth when she chooses to not forget her shepherd—even after seeing his corpse, even after finding ugly facts about the sheep farming industry that challenge her religious ideas about the Great Baayond. And that’s a precious lesson for the child viewers: baaware the temptation to run away from hard truths. Life has some very sad moments, and it does you no good to pretend they’re not real.

The Sheep Detectives executes baafittingly the modest job it sets for itself as a cozy comedy, although I still baagrudge it for not staying closer to the novel’s darker tone, which is especially ironic in view of the movie’s message that you shouldn’t avoid the unpleasant thoughts that from time to time baaset all of us. The novel was certainly not aimed at children, but even in a family-friendly adaptation, they don’t deserve to baa kept in baanightedness about the baadaggled parts of life. I’m not trying to baasmirch the movie’s quality or baalittle its achievements, I baaseech you to please baalieve me, but with such a strong source material, I think that this time it’s appropriate to baamoan the missed opportunity, the wasted potential of what could have baan.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Six Books with Jeremy Szal

Jeremy Szal was born in 1995 and was raised by wild dingoes, which should explain a lot. He writes epic fantasy and dark space opera of a character-driven, morally grey nature. His main series is the Common trilogy from Gollancz/Hachette, which includes Stormblood, Blindspace, and Wolfskin, about a drug harvested from alien DNA that makes users permanently addicted to adrenaline and aggression. He’s the author of over fifty short stories, translated into fifteen languages, many of which appear in his short fiction collection Broken Stars. He was the editor for the Hugo-winning StarShipSofa until 2020 and has a BA in Film Studies and Creative Writing from UNSW. He carves out a living in Sydney, Australia with his family, where he loves watching weird movies, eating Japanese food, exploring cities, learning languages, cold weather and dark humour. Find him at https://jeremyszal.substack.com/ or @JeremySzal

Today he tells us about his Six Books.

1. What book are you currently reading?

I'm currently reading The Strength of the Few by James Islington (a fellow Aussie!). It's engrossing, dark, twisty, and deeply intricate. I know that the puzzle pieces will inevitably fall into place soon, and now I'm just along for the ride, waiting for the penny to drop, while dreading what is coming.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

Red God by Pierce Brown. I first discovered Red Rising when I was still a teenager, back in 2015. I don't want the story to end, but end it must, as all stories do.

3. Is there a book you're currently itching to reread?

Not a book, but the manga series Beastars by Paru Itagaki. I discovered the series just before COVID hit, and so many rainy weekends were spent cooped up on the couch, exploring this world of animal protagonists. The writing is rough around the edges, but the characters and story are so well executed, and the art is truly spectacular. I'd read the whole series again just for the artwork. Maybe I will.

4. How about a book you've changed your mind about—either positively or negatively?

I usually wouldn't do this, because I try to never speak ill of my literary brothers and sisters, or their books, but I've spoken with the author about this, so I'll make an exception: Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio. When I first read it, I thought it long-winded, melodramatic, dull and too stuffy and full of purple prose for its own good. And make no mistake, the book is rough, as all debut novels are, including my own. But I heard that the series got better with each installment, so I gave Empire another read. I learned to appreciate the voice and style, found solace in the flowery language that helped to build this great galactic world brick by brick. The third novel, Demon in White, almost had me light-headed with just how epic and awesome it all was towards the end. If I allowed my hasty first impression to get in the way, I'd have deprived myself of one of the best SF epics in modern publishing.

5. What's one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?

Red Rising by Pierce Brown. The entire series has been a part of my life for a long time, and has shaped me and my writing in a multitude of ways—something about a lonely, broken man, desperately seeking friendship and a home and a place where he belongs, resonated so strongly with me in my late teens, when I was seeing the end of university approaching and knew that I'd soon be ejected out into a new world to fend for myself. Although the world is one of limitless horrors and violence, it is also one of nobility and bravery, interspersed with epic and traumatic moments. I care deeply for Darrow and his cast of feral characters, and I know that I'll always have a home with them, whenever I flip open the pages again.

6. And speaking of that, what's *your* latest book, and why is it awesome?

My latest book is Wolfskin! It's the third book in the Common series, where the DNA of an extinct alien race is turned into a drug, making users permanently addicted to adrenaline and violence. The story is centred on Vakov Fukasawa, the protagonist, and his younger brother Artyom, as they're embroiled on opposite sides of a conflict that starts off as a drug war, and escalates into a grand galactic war, where the Shenoi—the source of the stormtech—prove to be not quite as extinct as everyone believed.

Wolfskin is awesome (although I could be biased) because I've finally been able to explore a bunch of the themes and plotlines that have been gathering speed since the first book. Vakov and Artyom have (mostly) healed their relationship and are now locked in and fighting side by side against the enemies that want to see them both dead. There's no secret as to who they are fighting—the Shenoi are not friendly, and here we get to see them in their full, grotesque, gory glory. And I think Wolfskin is the book where all the characters step up and truly set out on their own path, reach their full potential. It has always been my dream to write a fully-fleshed out space opera, on a scale similar to that of Star Wars, with tons of factions and aliens and ships and superweapons, and in Wolfskin I was given the chance to do just that.

Of course, I've also tried my damnest to keep things centred on character as well, where Vakov and his relationship—both with his friends, family, and his own body, take centre stage, and I think I've achieved that. I had to make some hard decisions in this installment, with how each character would end up, but I do think that I've ended it the way it demanded to be ended. The way it needed to be.

And now, I'm just extremely happy for it to soon be out in the world.

Thank you, Jeremy!

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

The Recluce Reread: The Magic of Recluce

Dear readers, if you thought to yourself that you don't have enough rereads of fantasy series in your life, have I got a treat for you! By treat, of course, I have the pleasure to announce that I'm launching a reread of L.E. Modesitt, Jr's Recluce Saga. The series spans 26 novels and a story collection, and I'll be upfront that a full series reread would require far more ambition than I have in me.

The plan is to for sure push through the first six books of Recluce, with a probable endpoint of The Fall of Angels and a potential to go one more with The Chaos Balance since it is linked to The Fall of Angels. That will almost certainly be it.

If you asked me on the right day, I would tell you that I have many favorite series, because there's so much great stuff out there and I've been reading science fiction and fantasy since the early nineties, and this is a genre built on series. This one is among my favorites, so let's just get right to it.

The Magic of Recluce and the fifth book in the series, The Death of Chaos, are chronologically the last books of the series. I recently (at the time of writing this) finished Sub-Majer’s Challenge, the twenty-fifth Recluce novel and part of a sub-series of the earliest books in the chronology—to the point that The Magic of Recluce is set some 2100 years after what Modesitt is writing now.

I first discovered Recluce sometime in the mid ’90s, but it wasn’t this book that hooked me. I’ll write about this more when I write about the next book, but I discovered the series with The Towers of the Sunset and was swept away and blown away by the story of Creslin leaving Westwind in the snow and everything that followed. That was my introduction to this world, but The Magic of Recluce (originally published in 1991) is the book that actually started it all.

Here’s the introduction: Lerris is a young man on the island of Recluce who seemingly doesn’t know or care much about anything. As a result, because the society on the island is built around a concept of Order as a fundamental force (might as well use capital letters here), anyone who cannot fully commit to Order and who in turn may inadvertently invite Chaos into that society is exiled from the island and sent out into the rest of the world to find their way and ultimately figure out if they can truly belong as part of Recluce. Few return.

A motley group of disaffected not quite youth must undertake a “dangergeld”—a.k.a. the semiformal exile quest with a purpose. Each of the seven have their own reasons (or causes) for not fitting into Recluce society, but since the novel is mostly told from a pretty tight first-person perspective of Lerris, we only get his perspective on the others.

Lerris is, according to the internet, only 15 when we first meet him, which does explain why he is an absolutely annoying git for almost half the book. Lerris is someone who wants to understand, but he wants to be told why in a way that he can understand and without being lectured, which is perfectly reasonable, and it doesn’t appear that Recluce has a modern education system, so he never quite internalizes an understanding of the fundamental nature of Recluce. Since we see everything through the eyes of Lerris, neither do we.

It’s not a bad setup for a novel: boy who doesn’t know shit about shit is exiled until he can figure his shit out, and in the meantime we (the reader) learn how the world and its inherent magic system of Order and Chaos overall works. Things eventually go boom.

I’ll admit that I never loved The Magic of Recluce as much as most of the rest of the series. It’s Lerris, and also because I fell for Creslin and Westwind, and then went back to this first book, and Lerris isn’t Creslin (though I’m prepared to be disappointed by Creslin after all these years). The good news is that even if, on reread, it’s still not going to ever be one of my favorites in the series, it’s a reasonably good introduction that sets up a truly climactic fifth novel that doesn’t actually end the series, because there’s still twenty novels after that, which take place at various points in the overall chronology.

The Magic of Recluce sets the template for just about every novel in the series that follows: regardless of the age of the protagonist, there is a need to develop an understanding of either order or chaos and its underlying principles and to deeply internalize it as they go through the day-to-day mundanity of their lives, and often they will be sent away from their home and end up in conflict with other powers that be, as they are or become deeply competent and moral, and it’s that competence and morality that forms the core conflict. If that works for a reader, it’ll really work.

As someone this deep into the series, the parts of The Magic of Recluce that I most appreciated are when he settled down in a town for about a year and just worked as a woodworker/crafter, and avoided romantic entanglements with the daughter of the crafter who took him in, because he knows he’ll still need to venture out eventually and do magic, all the while gaining the respect of those around him for his young age and skill. We get versions of this in almost every Recluce novel, whether it is competence at a trade or as a military professional, and I am an absolute sucker for it.

I don’t remember how I reacted to the novel when I first read it and what bits I latched onto. It might have been some of the same lore that I’m digging today, but today it’s nostalgia. It’s the melted city of Frvn that used to be Fairhaven that was once the greatest city and power center of the white wizards. There were pictures in the city of Nylan in Recluce of two “magisters” from long ago. Those were Creslin and Megaera from Towers of the Sunset. Nylan itself, the black city, was kind of a counterpoint to Fairhaven, but also was named after another legendary figure. Justen will feature in a couple of books coming up. I don’t even know where to begin with the fairly minor character of Cassius. There’s overall less lore that pulls across the span of novels, but the bits that are here are all stuff that I just really enjoy.

That’s where I land on The Magic of Recluce and Modesitt’s fantasy novels: it’s just compelling stuff that I’ve been reading for thirty years now, and while I’ve kept up on the franchise, I don’t think I’ve revisited anything in possibly twenty years now. I’m going to enjoy this ride.

Related Short Story: “Black Ordermage”

Before Lerris leaves for his dangergeld, he is trained by a number of magisters. One of them is a man named Cassius, a black mage who we are given hints that he might not be from the world of Recluce. I don't mean from the island, I mean literally not from the same world. There are suggestions that he might be from our (the reader's) world.

“Black Ordermage” is the origin of Cassius arriving in the Recluce universe. Like those angels and demons of legend, he is not from that world. He is a Vietnam-era American sailor fighting a fire on the flight deck of his ship and is… somehow… transported to the middle of a battle on a Recluce ship, which ends with him in captivity, accepting that he really isn't in his world anymore, and a gradual understanding that he might be an order mage and what that means.

The story is set around 20 years prior to the start of The Magic of Recluce. It doesn't add all that much to the lore or understanding of the world or even this novel. What it really does is confirm a small bit of speculation that yep, Cassius is from Earth, just like later novels will feature characters also not native to this world.

One thing that I do find interesting is that the various transports to this universe are not all pulled from the same time. Cassius is from the 1970s, but others had more large-scale military spacecraft. I'm curious once again at the mechanism for how some of these transfers occured. 

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

Book Review: Green City Wars

Uplifted raccoon investigator solves mysteries

When you begin Green City Wars, Adrian Tchaikovsky drops you into a world that looks a bit familiar but has enough that’s incomprehensible that you spend at least some time thinking, “Wait, what?” a lot in the first few chapters. You are wandering the very German-inflected European city of Neuwein-Grundstadt with Skotch, a raccoon who freelances as a finder of things and investigator of secrets.

Skotch is a Gehirner (which is the German word for “Brains”), one of many small animals who live in the city and have been genetically hacked and augmented to be able to do routine maintenance and labour. The people of the city all have some kind of Universal Basic Income and do what they want while these Gehirner unclog sewers, fix telecom transmission boxes, and clear plates at fancy restaurants. They are paid in Plangent, a drug that allows them to maintain their level of intelligence; if they cannot get it, they slowly feel themselves losing their ability to speak, reason, and solve problems. The Gehirner are an eco-friendly solution to the question of who will do the work of a city that no one else wants to do: hence, “Green City.”

In this noir-coded tale, the freelancer Skotch is pulled in for “one last job” to find a mouse that everyone wants to get their hands on. Usually no one would care about a single mouse, but this mouse is special. Skotch doesn't know why, but every Gehirner interest-group in the city wants this mouse, dead or alive. And, as Philip Marlowe might say, Skotch doesn't know if he's going to be able to get through this case with his own skin intact.

The world, while confined to one city, feels sprawling. There were times when I felt like I was being introduced to too many characters and gangs. There are literal squirrel armies fighting over turf. A gang of amphibians control the city's waste management, and corvids deal with the dead. There are cultists, anarchists, a sexy but villainous Stoatweasel, and a dangerous cat who might sometimes be an ally if it thinks it would be amusing. There are mystical parrots; a loud, nosy pigeon; and the rats have their own gang called the Rattenkönige (“rat kings”).

Humans are nearly completely absent from this story. In Green City, Rule One is “Don’t bother the humans.” The humans know about the Gehirner; they created them. But all Gehirner work must happen at night to avoid being seen by humans. Tchaikovsky doesn’t clearly explain why, but it’s a central tenet of how Green City works.

If you are already familiar with Tchaikovsky's work in series like Children of Time, Dogs of War, or Shadows of the Apt, you will not be surprised to hear that he does a fantastic job thinking through how a group of uplifted animals might deal with building a society. In this book in particular, he’s considering what traits humans might want to add to animals, and then how those choices might affect the animals in question.

For example, humans tried to modify dogs. But dogs actually evolved around humans, so dogs pretty much did all the things humans really wanted them to do. Trying to make them smarter made them extremely neurotic. And, quoting Tchaikovsky, “being just so smart and no smarter turned out to be the way humans like their dogs. Nobody wants a pooch that can beat them at chess, basically… Dogs were already too smart to be properly engineered any smarter.”

Tchaikovsky is also interested in exploring the question of how human gene-hacking would interface with an animal's natural instincts. How would it change them? I adored this paragraph where Skotch considers religion:

“Do raccoons have a sense of the numinous? That the world might contain more than can be grasped, smelled, bitten? Skotch, despite being one, can’t say. If a lion could speak, the old human saw goes, could we understand it? And yes, it turns out you can understand the lion. But the act of reworking the lion to allow it to talk removes enough of its lion-ness that, when you ask, What’s it like, being a lion, the thing can only shrug with the new shoulders you’ve given it. It’s probably something about the engineering process, though, that makes space in a Gehirner’s head to think about the other and the beyond. Not a huge amount of space, because they’re small heads and full of work stuff most of the time, but still. The big questions squeeze in there somehow.”

So these uplifted animals are still animals, but they have—of course—been changed by having their genes hacked. In addition to considering religious movements, these changes have also led to other very human social developments, like a cutthroat, competitive, under-the-table economy where squirrel armies fight over resources. Skotch frequently stops to consider how the humans do not understand all of the changes they have wrought with their gene modifications; he hopes the Gehirner might someday break out of these very human systems caused by the artificial scarcity of Plangent.

If you've come to Tchaikovsky through Children of Time, The Tyrant Philosophers, or The Final Architecture, this book is going to seem a bit light. Tchaikovsky clearly had a lot of fun writing it, but it's a fairly basic private detective story under the animal skins. However, it does contain hidden depths: much of Tchaikovsky's work centres on how animal intelligences and technologies might develop, and it is interesting to see him explore it in a new world.

In many ways, it felt like reading the first book in a series, although Tchaikovsky has no concrete plans for further books in this world. (When I asked him on Bluesky, he said, “Like a lot of my work it's a standalone until I get an idea for a followup, which would likely be self-contained but build on the first.”) I would definitely like to see more of this world and I would be curious to see where else he might go with the Gehirner society.

Highlights:

• Raccoon solving mysteries
• Squirrel armies
• Deeper questions about personhood and intelligence

Nerd Coefficient: 7.5/10. A mostly enjoyable experience that is worth your time and attention.

Reference: Tchaikovsky, Adrian. Green City Wars [Tor Books, 2026].

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

2026 Hugo Award Voter's Packet

The Voter's Packet for the Hugo Awards will be released shortly and made available to all members of LAcon V. As is traditional, Nerds of a Feather has put together a compilation of what we feel represents the best and the breadth of our collective work published in 2025. While the purpose of the Voter's Packet is to help eligible voters make an informed decision when casting their ballots, we are also making the packet available to all of our readers who may want to take a look back at what we did last year. 

Below, you can find Arturo's introduction to the Voter's Packet followed by the Table of Contents with links to each of the essays, reviews, and features we included.

If you'd like, you can download the entire Voter's Packet and take Nerds of a Feather on the go:

• PDF
• epub

Introduction

Greetings, Earthlings.

If it's a dream come true to be nominated for the Hugos, it's an ecstatic vision of paradise to have been nominated multiple times already, to have won a couple of the rocket statues, and to keep being nominated for yet another year. The only thing more satisfying than the weekly cycle of sharing our obsessions with our readers is to know that our readers share the same enthusiasm for the type of discussion we bring. Thank you for your votes, and for staying with us after all this time.

And what a time! As I write this, reality and imagination seem to have blended: we just watched a new team of astronauts make it safely back from lunar orbit, there are reports of newly developed vaccines that could fight broader varieties of flu and even cancer, and adoption of clean energies is growing eveywhere. At the same time, we’re witnessing a cartoonish revival of the worst authoritarian ideologies from the previous century, we’ve become inundated with digital garbage pretending to have consciousness, and corporate greed is making the planet unlivable for humans. To understand the real world, we need more and more to understand what speculation has to say.

I’m a fan of Elizabeth Bear’s term “Rainbow Age” to describe the current explosion in diversity across the speculative landscape. While much remains to be done to bring audiences in closer contact with the variety of stories out there, there has never been as good a moment as now for authors of every continent, every language and every gender to become known and valued. The online community that has formed around speculative fiction (by which I mean the entire ecosystem of writers, translators, editors, literary agents, scriptwriters, studio producers, reviewers, etc.) is a precious space that needs to be nurtured precisely as the dark forces of reactionary repression set their sights on the few progress that has been achieved.

Yes, I’m bringing up politics, but that’s because politics is already an inherent part of storytelling. Which worlds we imagine, who gets to imagine them, where they can be discussed, how they are perceived and interpreted—there’s a political dimension to any conversation about fiction. At Nerds of a Feather we feel it’s an honor and a heavy responsibility to have the chance to add our voices to the conversation.

Let’s keep imagining other worlds. Let’s keep imagining ways to transform this one. Let’s keep inspiring each other. 

Arturo

Table of Contents

Section I: Literature Reviews

Book Review: Katabasis, by R. F. Kuang
Book Review: The Everlasting, by Alix E. Harrow
Book Review: Colourfields, by Paul Kincaid
Book Review: When the Moon Hits Your Eye, by John Scalzi
Book Review: Nobody's Baby, by Olivia Waite 
Book Review: God’s Junk Drawer, by Peter Clines
Book Review: The Stardust Thief, by Chelsea Abdullah
Book Review: City in Chains, by Harry Turtledove


Section II: Media Reviews

Rebellions Are Built on Hope: Andor S2E8
Movie Review: The King Tide
Video Game Review: Metaphor ReFantazio
Movie Review: The Brutalist
Movie Review: Frankenstein
Video Game Review: Citizen Sleeper 2
TV Review: There’s no “I” in Plur1bus
Movie Review: Wicked: For Good
Graphic Novel Review: The One Hand and Six Fingers
Video Game Review: Hollow Knight Voidheart Edition
Festival View: The Ugly Chickens
Anime Review: Apothecary Diaries Season 2
Movie Review: The Naked Gun
Movie Review: Predator: Killer of Killers

Section III: Conversations & Commentary

The Sand in Our Lungs: The Desertification of Our Imaginations
Hollywood is Dead, Long Live Hollywood
Andor and the Reimagining of Star Wars
The Arthur C. Clarke Award 2025: A Shortlist Discussion
Interview with Emily Tesh
Book Sale Finds: Mental Hygiene
The October Daye Re-read: A Killing Frost
Realm of the Elderlings Project: Intro and Book 1: Assassin’s Apprentice