Book Review: The Palace of Eros, by Caro de Robertis

On making Mount Olympus' foundations shake

I first discovered the work of Caro de Robertis (they/them) with their novel The Gods of Tango, which follows an immigrant from Italy’s new life in Buenos Aires in the early twentieth century, embracing that quintessential Argentinean dance and music, and transitioning gender in the process; I was interested because I am an amateur ballroom dancer and can dance the American bastardization of Tango reasonably well, but know vanishingly little of the original. Since then, I have read some of their other books, including Cantoras, a spellbinding, heartbreaking saga of lesbian life under the dictatorship in Uruguay, and The President and the Frog, an odd little novel that dips into the supernatural. But in their most recent novel they take the speculative plunge: The Palace of Eros could be considered another entry in the recent subgenre of feminist retellings of ancient myth (as my esteemed colleague on this blog Roseanna Pendlebury has deftly discussed the failings of said subgenre).

Unlike Pendlebury, I will admit to you that I am not the ideal audience for this novel, and in all likelihood not the ideal audience for de Robertis’ oeuvre in general. I am heterosexual, cisgender, and male, ethnically mixed between a smorgasbord of western Europe on the one hand and the Philippines on the other. I am autistic, with no romantic relationships in my life thus far. I have no cultural link with Latin America, but I speak Spanish reasonably well if not fluently. Nor am I particularly fluent in classical mythology. A more narrow-minded person may ask why I would read this book to begin with. I would first retort with the well-trod benefits of reading widely, of learning other perspectives, of opening your mind. I would then provide this quote from Jean-Paul Sartre’s introduction to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth:

“Europeans, you must open this book and enter into it. After a few steps in the darkness you will see strangers gathered around a fire; come close, and listen, for they are talking of the destiny they will mete out to your trading-centres and to the hired soldiers who defend them. They will see you, perhaps, but they will go on talking among themselves, without even lowering their voices. This indifference strikes home: their fathers, shadowy creatures, your creatures, were but dead souls; you it was who allowed them glimpses of light, to you only did they dare speak, and you did not bother to reply to such zombies. Their sons ignore you; a fire warms them and sheds light around them, and you have not lit it. Now, at a respectful distance, it is you who will feel furtive, nightbound and perished with cold. Turn and turn about; in these shadows from whence a new dawn will break, it is you who are the zombies.”

The novel is a queer reinterpretation of the story of Psyche and Eros. In this novel, the former is the youngest of three daughters of a farmer. She is said to be the most beautiful, and her father is intent on using that fact to marry her off to a man that could benefit him. She and her sisters are made to sit quietly in their living room as her father socializes with the men of her town. Later, she is displayed as a sculpture would be at an auction, gawked at, leered at, but never actually engaged with in any substantive form. She is objectified in the sense that she is reduced to the status of an object to be traded away, as something to be hopefully received by the suitors, and to be traded away for benefit by her father.

It is at this juncture that Aphrodite, goddess of love, takes note, and is disgusted that men find Psyche more beautiful than her. She sends her child, Eros, to make her fall in love with a monster. Note how I said ‘child,’ and not ‘son,’ as Eros is traditionally male in mythology. Here, Eros presents femme in most contexts but can shapeshift across the gender binary (including sex organs). Though a character whose gender expression is quite fluid, Eros is referred to with she/her pronouns throughout the novel, and that is what I will use here. She is an embodiment of sexual desire, as in classical mythology, but a more expansive, more liberatory, queerer form; she loves both men and women (expressing confusion when contemplating why her mother has only ever had sex with men). More piercingly, she asks why her crossing of the gender binary is so rankling to the other gods, as they change species with regularity. If a man can become a god, and a god can become a swan, surely a man can become a woman, and a woman become a man, so the logic goes, and it is a hard logic to argue with.

Much as in the original myths, Eros arranges to whisk Psyche away to a pleasant valley with an opulent palace filled with luxuries. There are sumptuous meals that are refilled every day, and supplies for art, and baths, and a very big bed. Every night, when Psyche goes to sleep, she is joined in the dark by a person she at first calls, for lack of a better term, her ‘husband,’ who makes her swear to never bring light into the room, leaving ‘him’ anonymous, and to never ask who ‘he’ is. The ‘husband’ is of course Eros, hiding her transgressions against the Olympian patriarchal order by roof and by anonymity. The two will only meet in the marriage bed, in pitch black. This raises two significant themes in the book.

Firstly: if the word ‘Eros’ appearing in the title wasn’t enough to clue you in, there is a lot of sex in this book. The lovemaking sessions between Eros and Psyche are emotionally tense and psychologically deep. Consider that Psyche’s sole exposure to any form of human sexuality beyond rumors of the mechanics involved in heterosexual intercourse is to be leered at as essentially a trophy, to later become the second-class partner in an unequal arrangement as she is ripped away from everything and everyone she loves (her sisters and her mother in particular) to be part of a man’s status game (there is very much a dynamic of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ evident in the way the menfolk of her town behave). It is here that she gets to experience sex as a joyful thing, as something that she can take pleasure in. Eros clearly cares for her needs, and knows how to keep things exciting (the ability to change between male and female forms is used to great effect here). This is a very strongly embodied liberation: liberation not as an abstract concept, but as a thing that exists physically, on the skin and in the nervous system. At first, this appears to be eroticism without the shackles of patriarchy, without the weight of societal expectations, without the status-jockeying and the need to marry a man simply to have basic human needs met. At first.

If all of the above raises some thorny issues of consent in your mind, you have struck on the second theme I was mentioning. Eros has effectively kidnapped Psyche and, without explanation, given her everything she could ever want. Eros resolutely refuses to give any actual identifying information about herself to Psyche, and has made it clear that this cornucopia of gifts will only continue if Psyche agrees to her demands. At first, Psyche is happy to accede due to the novelty of the whole thing, but as time goes on she begins to grow bored with not having any company, and insulted by a lack of explanation. Psyche eventually begins to probe the boundaries of what Eros has allowed and finds answers, to Eros’ great displeasure.

This is the sort of thing that, if left unexamined, would be disturbing, but de Robertis is brave enough to tackle this issue head on. Eros has designed this arrangement to accomplish a number of things: to rescue Psyche from Aphrodite’s wrath, to explore the erotic opportunities of freely transcending the gender binary, and to hide this threat to the Olympian patriarchal order from the eyes of Zeus. Eros is herself deeply traumatized from the way her gender non-conformity has been persecuted, and empathizes deeply with Psyche. But as those with relative privilege so often do to those with less privilege, Eros treats Psyche not as an equal, but as a charity case, to be manipulated and prodded in the service of the former’s sense of self-preservation. In this arrangement, what little agency Psyche has is at Eros’ allowance (and there is some agency; Psyche is thrilled by the ability to engage in artistic expression in the palace, as she takes up painting with gusto). She is not treated as deserving the dignity of a clear answer to what’s going on, the dignity of real consent. What becomes so crushingly clear is that, in her attempt to escape patriarchal norms, she has recreated them in this palace, in this valley, allegedly away from it all. The great tragedy of the bulk of the book is seeing this logic play out; Eros and Psyche both are getting a crash-course education in breaking patriarchal norms, but, as Paulo Freire wrote in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “The oppressed find in the oppressors their model of 'manhood,’” and that in face of education that is not liberatory, the oppressed will only seek to become the oppressor.

It is at this point I am going to spoil the ending because it is too rich in thematic content to leave unremarked upon. Those interested in the story should exercise caution.

Psyche ultimately storms out of the palace and tries to find her way home. Eros, distraught, is found out by the other Olympians and is now in deep trouble with them for breaking their rigid gender norms. More gods get involved, some of whom are on Psyche’s side, and eventually Psyche and Eros come to see each other again, Psyche having reclaimed a sense of dignity and Eros having reckoned fully with the implications of what she had done to Psyche. Eros asks Psyche if she wants to stay in the relationship, and after thinking about it, she says yes. Eros says she will find a way to marry Psyche, and turn her into a demigoddess. One way or another, she says, the Olympians will accept her, and this arrangement. The novel ends not long after.

This is an ending that feels narratively satisfying, but has implications that some may object to. One objection I consider is that this is an abuse victim choosing her abuser, and I was more than a little worried at first. But, thinking about it more thoroughly, I came around to the ending. The novel has made clear the nature of why Eros did what she did, not out of malice, but out of a limited imagination. I can see how Psyche herself could have come to that conclusion in regards to Eros, her mind being opened by her positive experiences within the palace - experiences which would lead her, later, to seeing the issues of the palace arrangement itself. She comes to understand how Eros came from a situation not unlike her own. She understands, then, how Eros came to act the way she did, and she can forgive. That’s what makes the most sense to me, anyway.

This ending, again, is narratively satisfying, but thinking about it more, I find that it has a lot of potentialities that are simply left alone. The idea of the Olympian gods having to recognize a same-sex marriage and a god/dess who jumps across the gender binary at will implies a titanic (no pun intended, but appreciated) shift in the cosmology of this version of Greece, and will doubtlessly resonate in the mortal realm. As an SFF reader and writer, and especially as an alternate history aficionado, I find that this is where de Robertis is most obviously a writer of literary fiction. I quote from a piece in Strange Horizons by Ada Palmer, which is my framework for this particular issue:

 “But one nearly-universal characteristic of contemporary mainstream literary fiction (as nearly-universal as technology is in SF or magic in fantasy) is a focus on a powerless character making an internal journey to come to terms with the world. It may be a journey of finding joy or finding despair, but the world is the challenge, and whether it's static or changing is despite the characters, not because of them. Lit fic thus does not teach any models of how the world changes or how history works, other than the powerlessness model of the individual being ground along by progress, like Charlie Chaplin trapped in the gears of Modern Times. In fact, when literary authors want to talk about characters changing the world, they reach for the tools of SFF or historical fiction, as in Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, Lessing’s Shikasta, Spufford’s Golden Hill, Piercy’s Gone to Soldiers, and Mantel’s Wolf Hall—all of these authors established themselves first as mainstream authors but used genre tools when they wanted to address the genre question of how the world changes.”

The story of Psyche and Eros as presented by de Robertis matches this conception of literary fiction, albeit in a slanted form. Psyche, clearly, has no way of changing the brutal patriarchal order she had the misfortune of being born in. Eros, though, is a bit trickier - she has divine power, but she is presented for most of the novel as being incapable of changing the gendered order of Olympus. This is why this ending was a bit unsatisfying as a work of speculative fiction, whereas for a literary novel it is just fine. The part of me that loves SFF that depicts societies undergoing great change, whether sprawling (like Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 - a book that was pivotal in my political development - or The Ministry for the Future, what Henry Farrell called the ‘apocalyptic systems thriller’) or smaller-scale, localized books like Sim Kern’s The Free People’s Village, found this to be a very abrupt sense of what the narrative’s sense of possibility - we’ve spent almost three hundred pages in a situation where the world must be endured, not changed, but now we have a way to potentially change it! That left me wanting more. Looking at this novel from an SFF perspective, Eros and Psyche are two characters who exemplify very well K. S. Villoso’s point about how worldbuilding and good characterization reinforce each other when writing speculative literature. De Robertis saw fit to let setting mold character, but not character to mold setting. I know literary authors aren’t usually in the habit of writing sequels in the way that SFF writers are, but I really, really wanted a sequel to this book where Eros and Psyche rip the ideological floorboards out from under Olympus and from classical Greece at large, and see what new world emerges.

I finished this book empathizing with Psyche’s desire for dignity, for personhood, as an autistic person of color aware that his government is targeting people like him. I do so, though, with the understanding that as a cisgender heterosexual man I am very much not the target audience, and that there are nuances to this story, and the way it is told, that I have simply missed. My privilege doubtlessly binds me to things here. I wondered for a while if I were the right person to review this book, being so far removed from the people it’s really about. I can say that it is an engaging, intelligent novel that I enjoyed a lot. I came to the conclusion that I, as someone with the privilege of having a platform like Nerds of a Feather, should use it to amplify good books that wouldn’t get coverage elsewhere in the SFF ecosystem. Ultimately, I believe that if this review brings this book to someone who will benefit from it on a level much deeper than I would, it is worth it.

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Reference: de Robertis, Caro. The Palace of Eros [Primero Sueño Press, 2024]

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

Film Review: The Mandalorian and Grogu

Want to watch basically just a no-stakes, super-long episode of The Mandalorian on a huge movie screen this summer while eating popcorn? You can.

A long time ago (3 years), in a galaxy far, far away (Hollywood)...

Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau had just finished writing season 4 of The Mandalorian TV show. But amid all of the hubbub of the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike, LucasFilm decided to hold off filming it and instead prioritized making a Mando movie. And that, my friends, is why The Mandalorian and Grogu exists. 

Once you learn this, everything all starts making a lot of sense. Here are the answers to a few questions I know you'll have right off the bat:

• Yes, it's essentially a two-hour episode of the TV show that's released in time for summer blockbuster season. 
• No, it doesn't reveal any interesting lore or invest in heavy world-building.
• Yes, it has the typical Filoni-esque easter eggs, fun cameos and Clone Wars-style easy, clean, G-rated storytelling.
• No, there's absolutely no reason this had to be a movie.
• Tragically no, (for me), the Armorer isn't in it. 

The plot

Our guy Din Djarin is enjoying life as a single dad and contracting for the New Republic. As per usual, he's tasked with a tit-for-tat mission: If he agrees to rescue Rotta the Hutt, son of Jabba the Hutt, his aunt and uncle will provide intel on the location of post-Imperial Warlord Commander Coin. 

He finds out that Rotta, voiced by an unrecognizable Jeremy Allan White, is a popular gladiator on the cyberpunk planet of Shakari. The whole plot revolves around Djarin rescuing and/or escaping from various monsters, creatures, and aliens and double-double crossing the Hutt aunt and uncles. 

There's not much to it, though it does get a little convoluted. It's the standard fare of any Mandalorian episode, really. Problem --> learn about McGuffin to fix said problem --> encounter difficulty --> Obtain McGuffin --> Watch Grogu eat something.

What makes a Star Wars movie a movie

Lest it sound like I'm one of those fans who pooh-poohs nearly every Star Wars entry into the canon, The Mandalorian and Grogu isn't a "bad" film, and this is coming from someone who used to post weekly Mando recaps here. There's just...not much to think about. And maybe that's okay! If the goal for LucasFilm was to launch a fun Star Wars movie for the summer that's just a popcorn movie, I have absolutely no qualms with that. There are definitely things to like about it (more below). 

But Star Wars movies, in general, are emotional gateways for fans. Watching Luke stare into the binary sunset on Tatooine, witnessing Anakin and Obi-Wan's final duel on Mustafar, and experiencing Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor's final embrace on Scarif— these are the moments that stick in our hearts and have followed us into adulthood. Even the polarizing Last Jedi had moments of awe, shock, and absolute sadness.

For a Star Wars movie to have no stakes goes against everything we love about the franchise. Djarin and Grogu get into some tough scrapes in this movie, but there is never a single second where you worry about them not coming out on top. There's even a scene where Grogu has to take care of Djarin for a few days as he lies unconscious recovering from a venomous dragonsnake bite (in a great parallel to Pedro Pascal as Joel recovering in The Last of Us — he's always a down-on-his-luck single dad, isn't he?). 

The things I liked

I've probably said this before, but I like any glimpse into the Star Wars universe writ large, and seeing gorgeous tableaus on the big screen is always a delight. I particularly enjoyed:

• The murky, swampy Hutt planet of Nal Hutta, including the rusty towers that folks will recognize from Jabba's palace on Tatooine. That little bit of continuity just hits different.
• Visiting the cyberpunk planet of Shakari was an interesting addition to the Star Wars "clime-as-planet" database. Though futuristic in shape and feel, it was actually inspired by 1920s Prohibition-era Chicago. It felt lived in and different from the hyper-modern versions of Coruscant we've seen over the years. 
• Ludwig Göransson, who also does the score for the TV show, really outdid himself with the Shakari theme. He takes the Eastern-style pipe and synth leitmotif we're familiar with and incorporates streaking synths and neon audio bursts that creates a Blade Runner-meets-Star Wars vibe. It's Outrun/vaporwave/synthpop but set in space. It slaps.
• The various monsters and beasts are a blast to watch — but then they better be, as it's the only action/plot device in the film. 
• If you live long enough, you get to watch your heroes become X-wing pilots. Seeing Sigourney Weaver don the iconic helmet and go careening through an alien planet was absolutely Ripley-level badassery.

At the end of the day, I'm glad I went and saw this on the big screen on the Thursday before Memorial Day. It was me and a handful of other hardcore Star Wars fans, and we all laughed and reveled together at certain points. It didn't affect me emotionally at all, but maybe that's not always necessary for a fun movie. Like I mentioned earlier, I appreciate any time spent in a galaxy far, far away.

I just may not be able to convince other folks to go with me. 

--

The Math

Baseline score: 6/10

Bonuses: Martin Scorsese as an alien food stall owner; the killer synth score;

Penalties: No real soul; Grogu is experiencing Flanderization; absolutely zero stakes; I cannot take a Hutt with six-pack abs seriously.

Gonk droid count: 0

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: The Final Chronicle of Yeneh by Jo Miles

A potent anti-colonialist novel that sets its stakes on not just the fate of a planet and a species, but more importantly, the heart and soul of its main character

Ada Quintrall is the heiress to the Dukedom of Corbridge. Her grandfather the Duke has managed the aforementioned dukedom, which is actually on the planet Corbridge, in a future where humans have gone to the stars. The terraforming of the planet has been a harsh affair, and the native life has resisted. But when Ada finds out the long connection between her family and that native life, she is forced to confront what her grandfather and her family have done, and her complicity in it. And what is to be done about it.

This is the story of The Final Chronicle of Yeneh by Jo Miles.

The Final Chronicle of Yeneh plays with a number of genres in order to explore its overall themes, which are, unapologetically, anti-imperial, anti-colonial and anti-authoritarian in nature. Let’s begin with the most unexpected, and that is portal fantasy. In the story of The Final Chronicle of Yeneh, Ada learns that her ancestor wrote a bestselling fantasy series (The Chronicles of Yeneh, hence the book title). As the novel proceeds in its opening phases, Ada realizes that the native inhabitants of the planet are not mindless “plants,” but rather are the fantasy species from her ancestor’s book. Just how and why this is true, and what it means, puts a portal fantasy frame front and center in the book.

As this is a science fiction novel, the nature of the world, combined with the portal fantasy already alluded to, gives the setting and the story a significant layer of science fantasy. It retains this even as the novel progresses; the novel isn’t as interested in hard SF as it is in the sociological, political and personal stories. You don’t get any sense of what the interstellar drive is or how it works, for example. That’s not the kind of novel this is.

And then we get into the worldbuilding and some more genre-bending. In this future, a portion of a diasporic humanity has decided to reinstitute aristocracy as a social system. It is explained that in a world where some people turn away from merciless post-Capitalism, the appeal of personal rule by means of hereditary aristocracy for some planets was strong. It’s not a new idea¹ to have an aristocratic “feudal” future.² Miles, however, does it a bit differently. Aristocratic nobles like Ada’s family are not the only social system out there; it’s made clear that there are still capitalistic systems, and aristocratic ones, and even socialistic ones. There is a plurality of social systems in Miles’ universe, and while we are under an aristocratic one in this book, a main character, Zamora, is from Luna, which is mainly a socialist state, This does set up some cultural distrust at first between Ada (as an aristocratic heiress) and Zamora, and in general between Zamora and the population of Corbridge.

And then there is the straight-up science fiction as a genre. Ada (and Zamora) understand that the natives of the planet are more than just “plants” (as Zamora already argued); moreover, there is an entire civilization in the toxic and dangerous zones beyond what has been colonized and terraformed by the humans. So we switch up into the novel’s anti-colonial, anti-imperial and pro-ecological themes. With the previous layers to this, this makes The Final Chronicle of Yeneh a science fiction novel with interesting and intriguing underpinnings, providing a fresh story in the process.³

But beyond all that genre-mixing and worldbuilding, this is a very personal story, focused on Ada, who as heiress to her grandfather, is confronted with the ecological, sociological and personal costs of imperialism, colonialism and the rapacious nature of her family and her family’s legacy. It’s a painful story for her in some ways, especially as it puts her on the other side of her grandfather and her legacy once she completely learns those costs and takes a stand. The novel is about those costs, and the difficulty of that change. And as importantly as coming to terms with that legacy, the novel is about taking action, making recompense and taking active steps to do better.

Yes, while Ada herself is in a position of privilege (at least at the outset), the novel’s message is that people can and do make a difference—and indeed must do so in order to effect change. Change is hard and is scary, but it is possible, with action. That is a message that the novel hits home, and it is a very necessary message in this day and age.

In sum, what The Final Chronicle of Yeneh does, brilliantly, is to channel Miles’ excellence in character depth and make the very soul of the main character, Ada, to be as important as the fate of the native Yeheneh and of the planet Corbridge. It stirs a swirl of portal fantasy and a hint of science fantasy into a far-future story that examines and criticizes colonialism, imperialism and exploitative social systems. Miles’ focus remains tight and sympathetic, having us join Ada on her own journey to recognizing, confronting and acting on working on systemic problems on Corbridge and beyond.

Highlights:

• Strong character focus and background
• Interesting space future sketched in and intriguing
• Bold anti-colonial, anti-imperial message, told well

Reference: Miles, Jo. The Final Chronicle of Yeneh [Horned Lark Press, 2026].

¹ Melinda Snodgrass’s Imperials Saga has capitalism evolve into a Spanish-focused monarchy and aristocracy, in space. And of course, there is always The Mote In God’s Eye by Niven and Pournelle.

² Obligatory note that feudalism, as you might think of it, really didn’t exist as you might think of it. The huge variety of local political systems in Western Europe really put paid to that notion. Read the works of David Perry and Matthew Gabriele, among others, to learn more. (e.g. The Bright Ages).

³ The worldbuilding about the local inhabitants of the planet has resonances to many previous works of science fiction. You can certainly look at The Word for the World is Forest by Ursula K LeGuin. I also see touchstones to the work of Adrian Tchaikovsky and James Cameron’s Avatar universe.

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

Review: And Side by Side They Wander by Molly Tanzer

 Ctrl C, Ctrl V: The novella

And Side by Side They Wander is a novella absolutely brimming with interesting ideas delivered in accomplished prose, but one of the most interesting things about it is that as a single coherent work it just doesn’t quite, well, work.

The premise for this slim book is that aliens called the Celerians arrive on Earth a few years from now and promise to give us the technology to solve all our problems—social, economic, environmental—with their advanced technology. All we would have to give them in return is all our most important art, but don’t worry: they’ll give us perfect, indistinguishable replicas in return. The art is taken to a perfect, safe, secure museum on the Celerian homeworld, and they promise to give it back when the Earth solves all those problems and the art is no longer at risk of destruction. 300 years later, problems solved, Earth something of a paradise thanks to the (bio)technology given by the Celerians, and it turns out they aren’t so keen to give it back. Enter our narrator and her companions, about to start an interstellar heist to steal the art back.

If this sounds very much like the situation the Greek government has been in at the very least since the completion of the Acropolis Museum in 2009 in relation to the Elgin Marbles still firmly, smugly ensconced at the British Museum, Tanzer’s author’s note makes it clear the reference is deliberate. And so you would expect the novella to be a sort of reverse reclamation heist (à la Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon), and that plot is absolutely there—we get its key details, slightly out of chronological order, from planning to execution—but that really isn’t what the book is about. Tanzer’s jumping off point for And Side by Side They Wander is in fact a proposed techbro “solution” to the Elgin Marbles problem: what if they did a high-res scan of the marbles, then laser-cut precise replicas out of virtually identical marble? Very obviously, this would satisfy neither Greek nor British government, but Tanzer is interested in the why of this: what is it about a copy that makes us instinctively think it is inferior to the original?

So the book is absolutely fixated on the nature and effect of copying, not just art but people. An Elon Musk-esque billionaire ascendant just before the Celerians arrived preserved his legacy by creating a series of clones and androids who looked like him. He was also involved in the development of a fungal nuclear cleanup device, which was released after insufficient testing, and turns out when it ate a bit too much radiation, it became sentient and started producing fungal simulacra of animals, plants, landscapes… and people. These elements are all used to ask questions about what it means to make or to be a copy. These are very interesting ideas to explore from these different angles, and by and large Tanzer does so with real insight and in a lovely written voice. Throw another alien race which has a very different understanding of “self” and “other” into the mix, and these concerns about similarity, difference, self and authenticity become all-consuming.

But this does mean that ultimately the heist plot, too, is largely consumed. It isn’t even really the primary vehicle for all that exploration of copying; that comes in the backstory, explaining how our narrator, Fennel Tycho, ended up part of the gang. Starting with her grief at the death of her brother, and her hiring by Earth’s lone megacorp (run by the descendants and clones of this dead billionaire), this runs through her time as a minder of sorts to one of the billionaire copy androids, Jack Kirby (the androids were all named after artists). That professional relationship evolved into a romantic one—at least on Fennel’s side; we’re never given access to Jack’s feelings on the matter, and are again invited to think about the extent to which a copy of a human has access to the emotions and motivations of the original.

This time spent with them means that the dynamic between Fennel and Jack is nicely done, effectively if briefly sketched. But the rest of the cast and much of the plot is shaded in perhaps too lightly. The sheer overstuffed quantity of ideas and plot points simply do not fit easily into the page count. And there are darlings that really should have been killed in editing. Walter Benjamin is clearly influential; he is discussed reasonably extensively in the author’s note. But that doesn’t mean it entirely works to have Jack quote him verbatim in-story: like the Elgin Marbles nod, it is perhaps just a little too on the nose. The insertion of a twist and brief action plot that begins and ends in under 5 pages at the end is also very odd. Grief, love, copying, heists, colonialism, sentient fungus, clones, androids, interstellar war, a nominal core cast of five needing attention: it’s a lot to cover in a double-digit page count (front and back matter take the printed page count above 100, but the substantive story is less).

This all leads me to the conclusion that a novella just isn’t quite the right venue for the stories Tanzer wants to tell here. The firehose of ideas and multiple, slightly attenuated storylines are asking for either the space of a novel or the discipline of being split into a series of short stories in conversation with each other. Either would work well, and I think could have been a genuine triumph. As it is, the book feels somehow both overstuffed and underdone. It feels an odd conclusion to come to when I like so much of what Tanzer put in here, but this is an occasion where the whole doesn’t quite measure up to the sum of its parts. Others may have a different impression—I can imagine being sufficiently charmed by the ideas and aesthetic exploration such that the tangled wisps of plot and character don’t matter to you—but for me, the fine work Tanzer has done here is undercut by a story fighting against its form.

Nerd coefficient: 6/10.

Highlights:

• Overstuffed with great ideas.
• Exquisitely crafted prose.
• It really is overstuffed, though.

Reference:  Tanzer, Molly. And Side by Side They Wander [tordotcom, 2026].

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

Video Game Review: Hades II

A god-tier roguelike that gives its time generously

Hades II from Supergiant Games is the sequel to the smash hit Hades. The original game saw you play Zagreus, the son of Persephone and Hades who very definitely had daddy issues he (and you) needed to work through.

Hades II, set some time after the first game, sees you take up arms with Melinoë, Zagreus’s younger sister and the only survivor of the house of Hades following an unexpected attack both on the Underworld but also against Olympus.

The attacker? Chronos, the titan who swallowed his children to stop them from killing him—which they did anyway. Chronos, the titan of time itself, has returned and taken over Hades while also attacking Olympus in revenge for being cut into pieces and scattered across Tartarus.

The game is a roguelike that lets you explore the Underworld from Hecate’s crossroads, but also eventually sends you above ground to make your way to Olympus itself. Unlike Zagreus’s deep dislike for his family and what they’re up to, Melinoë has grown up in the aftermath of a lost war, and her view of both her family and her enemy are simple, straightforward and loyal.

This is the first of the changes that Supergiant Games have made to the story and how they tell it. Having Chronos whisk away the characters of the Underworld means we can work with an entirely fresh set, which is a joy because, although those who appeared in the first game were great, classical Greek religion is full of other significant characters like Odysseus, Ariadne, Heracles, Circe and more.

Supergiant gets the balance just right between presenting these characters in a way that makes them relatable and sticking just close enough to how they are found in the original texts and stories where they appear. If that veers sometimes a little too smooth and soft-edged, that’s alright, because this isn’t their story; it’s Melinoë’s.

For example, there is a long running plot involving Odysseus and the women he encountered on his journey home from the Trojan war. The game softplays his loves and his passions and, most likely, how his experience of war impacted his emotional capacity (dare one say trauma?). Nevertheless, that they’re here is fabulous and fun to see them explored, especially as small details are there if you’re looking. Perhaps more importantly, though, is that these stories give a telling from both sides, and although it’s not as emotional as it could be, it’s interesting to hear Circe’s point of view and be able to then go and ask Odysseus.

As with the original game, these stories unfold over time and are revealed as you complete runs to the Underworld or towards Olympus. There’s a major plotline that can only be completed after the credits run, and even then, only with substantial effort from that point on.

This doesn’t feel like stretching a game; that’s basically a roguelike dungeon crawler, past its welcome. It feels like clever design to nudge the player into seeing more of this world without feeling like it’s about completion at all. For the one thing the game does better than almost any other is give you buckets of action as a way of bringing you along for the exploration. Unlike most other roguelikes, Hades II has a story to tell, and it’s told not just in the interstitials between runs but in the runs themselves, in the monsters, in the people you meet, in the boons you secure and in the places you explore.

Melinoë’s loyalty to the gods is curious and understandable. This is a main character who’s grown up with one mission: death to Chronos. To believe in this goal, she’s been taught from the crib that the gods are good and right and natural, and to oppose them is foolishness at best and unforgiveable at worst. The game subtly challenges her assumptions but doesn’t force a change of heart on her, at least not easily.

When she meets Prometheus, the conversations are enlightening for all, because whatever he did in giving mortals fire, he’s also sided with Chronos. It’s a strange juxtaposition that works neatly because it doesn’t let the titan be a worthy martyr but someone with complicated feelings. Not least because he made these decisions knowing their outcomes in advance. Yet nor does it leave Melinoë entirely comfortable with her choice to kill Chronos.

Hades was such a perfect game that it’s difficult to look at Hades II and think about where it’s better than its predecessor. It has all of Hades’s strengths around narrative and looks just as gorgeous at every step.

However, for me, there are some areas where it is an improvement. The first is the sound design. Supergiant Games always does stellar music thanks to the genius that is Danny Korb (I still listen to Bastion’s soundtrack when writing certain types of story). The songs written for Hades II are bangers, and Scylla and the Sirens are a highlight of every run with songs that pop. Alongside the music, the sound effects feel weighty, and even if you can sometimes run into a bullet hell landscape, the sound of what’s going on is clear and crisp.

Additionally, there are a whole load of quality of life changes between the two games that make playing Hades II fun in a way that I sometimes struggled with during the first game. Hades II is smooth, is probably the best way of saying it—everything fits together, everything serves a purpose and it’s lovely to play.

Lastly, I think the balancing in Hades II works better than in the first game. The different types of weapons all lend themselves to multiple different builds and reward experimentation. There are few games where you can do this and find an entirely new and effective set of strategies. For a long while I’d been set on two of the six options and had started to think the others just weren’t as strong, but then my son played the one I really didn’t like and stumbled on a build that rocked hard. This sums Hades II up pretty well: it will subvert your expectations and consistently reward your curiosity while telling a neat little story about change and forgiveness.

Highlights:

• Incredible music
• Exciting gameplay with Greek gods and titans

Nerd coefficient: 8/10, an excllent game that rewards your curiosity.

Reference: Supergiant Games, Hades II.

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

This Is Kind of, Sort of, Mostly, a Review of Crimson Desert

Is bigger better?

I have a weird relationship with video games. I certainly don’t consider myself a “gamer.” I will play for a while, and then sort of forget they exist for a while, before jumping back in. As a certified Old Guy (“unc,” as the youths say), this worked pretty well back in my day, when most everything was single player, or required you to be physically present with another person to play against/with each other. There was no such thing as DLC, season passes, or (so far as I knew) people who play obsessively and obliterate me every single time I log on to Battlefront. I just want to play as a stromtrooper, dear lord.

But I digress.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is, in my opinion, video game perfection. A massive open world that is incredibly detailed, has immense depth, and always feels like there is another thing to discover. It helps that it marries that with one of the best stories in video game history. Plus, if I don’t play it for a while, I can just jump back in without 12-year-olds shooting me immediately*. I could make this entire post about how great RDR2 is—but it’s been out for seven years, so it seems redundant.

I bring RDR2 up so I can talk about Crimson Desert. In the first place, because there are a fair amount of varied opinions about the game—r/CrimsonDesert is populated with people calling it the greatest game ever, and others complaining about anything and everything (r/RDR2, not so much. Maybe that says something). In the second place, because a review *I* do is going to be pretty subjective, and you are likely to strenuously disagree if you’re a speedrunner/hardcore gamer/one of the 12-year-olds who owns (PWNZ) me at Battlefront.

Like this review, it’s hard to know where to start with Crimson Desert. It’s so stinking massive. The most important thing to me is: is it fun? To this, I say a resounding yes. I enjoy it. You can explore for days, do a pretty wide variety of things, and get happily sidetracked for hours.

There are negatives, to be sure, and how much they affect your fun quotient depends a lot on you and what you’re looking for out of a game.

One of the big ones, from where I sit, actually has me conflicted. The game does a pretty good job of teaching you a lot, obviously, about the mechanics and gameplay. But it also just doesn’t. I highly recommend spending a fair amount of time on YouTube watching videos along the lines of “20 things I wish I knew when I started Crimson Desert,” because there are a lot, from combat to companions to the way the world works, to (literally) what icons on your map mean. On one hand, I appreciate the game not holding your hand. On the other… I don't want to google what the doohickey on my map is.

Gary Larson was unintentionally a prophet.

Another big complaint is that the game is pretty light on story. Full disclosure: I haven’t finished it yet, because while I’m breaking tradition by writing about something I’ve actually played, I can’t go all the way and have the whole picture. I have a reputation to uphold. You can have pets in this game, and I have ADHD, so you can guess what I spend a lot of time doing. Like above, the game kind of sort of forgets to tell you the story directly. But (and I absolutely love this kind of thing), it rewards you snooping around and finding out information that gives you context and depth for what does happen in the story. The story itself isn’t terribly original—you’re the chosen one, save the universe, blah blah blah, but the hidden details give it depth, explain why you’re the chosen one, and make it more compelling. It’s a massive open world—using it is rewarded. Plus the story is kind of secondary to the myriad of other things you can do in the world.

My biggest complaint is, for as massive as it is, it is kind of shallow, in spite of the above. NPC dialogue is very limited, and not really connected to the NPC who is speaking. Sure, it would be a massive undertaking, but RDR2 did such an amazing job of this—the NPCs felt like people. They didn’t all say the same things, in the same voice (“My baby’s gone and called me PA at last”—bro, I am about to hunt down your stupid baby if I hear that one more time), and just stand around in the same place for all eternity. They also cower and make the most obnoxious whimper if you push the wrong button and even pull a weapon out. It’s probably a nitpick, but it ruins the immersion in a game that is meant to be immersive.

I do enjoy how currency is managed—mostly. You end up with a ton of different types—you have your basic “coin,” which there are some clever mechanics (that you’re not told about!) to keep you from being a billionaire (looking at you, RDR2) if you use them. You have “contribution,” which is basically your reputation within a region that unlocks specific gear. The camp funds/missions mechanic is fun, and as your camp grows, you basically have an entire passive game generating income for you, all of which becomes important later in the game. It’s sort of a lot to manage, but, like I said, you get sidetracked by it, in a good way (usually) and it pays off.

The game itself is stunningly gorgeous, in the same way as RDR2. Climbing to the top of mountains or towers is rewarded with spectacular views (and you can glide down, which is just fun). However, it struck me as I fast travelled all over the place—I never do that in Red Dead. Riding around is rewarding. Riding slow is rewarded more. There are random encounters in Crimson Desert, but as noted above, the bland NPCs make it neither interesting nor rewarding. So I jump around using the Abyss Nexus littering the landscape and don’t think twice about it, which is a little bit of a letdown. Not that this stops me from wandering around and trying to find new things—which there aren’t too many to find, aside from Abyss Artifacts (more on them in a sec). So while it’s just as pretty, and bigger, than Red Dead, it just lacks depth—Red Dead gives you side quests that last the length of the game, details and oddities to find that are quests unto themselves, or just pieces of another story. If Crimson Desert has these, I haven’t found them, and the totality is that between that and the “people” populating it, it feels very, very shallow.

Crimson Desert does a nice job of being an RPG without going too in depth—it has three basic skill trees, and various skills can be enhanced, but it doesn’t require the level of micromanagement a lot of RPGs fall victim to. I might have preferred skill trees that allowed for slightly more customization—Borderlands isn’t far off from how this operates, but allows for more “specialty,” but I’m pretty fine with the way it is. The area that really could use customization is the character—Kliff is… fine, but he’s such a blank slate, I don’t know why they didn’t just allow you to make a character entirely. A lot of the dialog is fairly generic—and many conversations pass without Kliff actually participating in them—so it doesn’t seem that far off (it’s rumored to be part of an upcoming DLC, which, fine, but why not do it in the first place?). It’s another missed opportunity for an immersive experience.

None of these, for me, are dealbreakers. There is tons of good. As I mentioned, it looks amazing and it’s fun to wander around in, and find new areas and slaughter bandits with reckless abandon. The combat system is great, and ironically given the above, almost too detailed—I keep forgetting about abilities or attacks. The game spoils you for options—you can fight equally well unarmed, with a one-handed weapon and shield, or a two-handed weapon. The Abyss Artifacts you find can be used in a few ways—most straightforwardly, as skill points, but also can be used in upgrading higher quality gear. Like currency, it does a good job of making you choose on how it’s used instead of just grinding and levelling up to God tier early in the game. There are also Sealed Abyss Artifacts, which are unlocked after completing certain challenges, making getting them rewarding in-game and not just to check off a box.

It also runs into the classic open-world problem of being a one playing as a someone possessing immense power, clad in armor worth more than the entire kingdom and wielding enough weaponry to take down God while also having literal superpowers, but half the quests you go on are carrying some old lady’s groceries or whatever. It’s unavoidable, but it’s also comical. There is a decent variety of minigames and puzzles, of varying difficulty and quality, but that gives the game nice texture.

There is honestly so much more to talk about - the variety of mounts (you can literally tame a dragon!), the diligence with which the game is updated and patched (which is great, but can be jarring), the camp dynamics - basically, it's a really big game. The enjoyment is going to be pretty subjective. 

I meant for this to be more of a compare/contrast between Crimson Desert, Red Dead and other open-world games (I had a whole Ghost of Tsushima thing, which I made the mistake of playing immediately on the heels of RDR2. Basically, I want open-world games to be Westworld, and that’s probably not a fair ask. It is fair, I think, to ask Crimson Desert to live up to its full potential while also enjoying the good qualities it has.

Highlights:

• Stunning, massive open world
• Fun, rich combat, both between swarms of baddies and repayable bosses
• Diverse gameplay befitting the size of the world
• Doesn’t hold your hand

Lowlights:

• NPCs are bland and lifeless
• The world is shallow for as big as it is
• Doesn’t hold you hand enough
• Makes you do homework to figure out several key mechanics
• Isn’t quite RDR2 in a fantasy setting

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10. Well worth your time and attention.

*We will not be discussing the miserable failure that is RDO.

—DESR

Dean Smith-Richard is the author of 3204AD, and will definitely publish something again one day, probably. He loves to cook, play baseball, and is way too much of a craft beer nerd. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, and likes the rain, thank you very much.

Book Review: Crosshairs by Catherine Hernandez

Searching for dignity amidst despotism

Had Catherine Hernandez a less deft hand, her novel Crosshairs would simply be generically dystopian. It is set in an authoritarian near-future Canada which has been taken over by fascists and are rounding up ‘others,’ the term they call the indigenous, the immigrant, the poor, the minority, the queer, as is expected from fascists. The novel is told from the point of view of these ‘others’, primarily Kay, a half-Black half-Filipino gay man and drag queen, as the world collapses around him and joins up with those who also want this new regime dead and gone.

Kay is downtrodden, what would once have been called ‘the wretched of the Earth’. He had never met his father, as he was the product of an intense one-night stand that ignited at a karaoke bar. His mother hated his curly hair, inherited from his father. He grew up in a fundamentalist church, abused by his minder, and then expelled from his house for being gay. He finds solace with his friend from school, and from there finds community and belonging (albeit imperfect belonging) in Toronto’s queer community. He really finds himself as a drag queen, and there achieves something approaching self-actualization. And then, of course, the fascists come to power.

The novel jumps back and forth in time, and to a useful effect. This resistance of necessity comes into being and Kay is thrown into it without really asking, and he meets several people who have joined him in the struggle. Starting with Kay himself, you’ll have a bit of the ‘present’ plot, and then a chapter going back in time, explaining the history of any number of characters, such as Bahadur, a trans Iranian immigrant who is riding, laying down to avoid surveillance, in the same van as Kay. This of course is partially to service character development, and also worldbuilding (and is a sterling example of how K. S. Villoso argued that in speculative fiction character and worldbuilding are best when they bolster each other), but I feel there is a deeper, even more salient point: that revolutions are built by people, and people are endlessly complicated and their actions relentlessly contingent. I’m certain that this dictatorship would eventually fall, but it is due to the combined small choices of thousands of people that it fell in this specific way, rather than another way.

In terms of its plot, this novel is a queer novel of self-discovery, a novel of resistance that brings to mind the likes of the maquis, and also the leftist equivalent of a spy novel. Your ‘spies’ here are not government agents, but rather rebels who sometimes have to pretend to work for the fascist government. It’s a mode of writing I haven’t seen much of but is ripe with storytelling; you are left with the potent question of loyalty to an ideology rather than loyalty to a payroll (let us not pretend the likes of James Bond, for example, are supremely ideologically committed, the blunt objects that they are). There’s a particularly potent bit with a pair of pop stars who at first object to the rising tide of fascism, and then are seemingly co-opted. The payoff to that plotline is both deeply hewed and explosively satisfying. On the other hand, there is a former soldier who is putting the skilled he learned as an instrument of oppression to liberatory ends, but in a way that makes the reader wonder how much of that old training has lodged itself in his mind, and how much he thinks like a soldier even now.

Through much of the latter half of the book there is a well-considered depiction of the different types of resistance, and how each is adapted out of necessity or out of privilege. There is a point when Kay and Bahadur are asked to enlist in a violent struggle by a white gay man who had served in the Canadian Army against indigenous land defenders until having a crisis of conscience. He tells them they will have to risk their lives, and their ultimate objection is that their lives are already at risk day in and day out (they had to take a van, lying down so nobody could see them, to get to this place to begin with), and he has to bluntly reckon with his privilege. However, as events go on, and the discussions between them deepen, the two eventually accept the need to learn to use a gun.

You can tell that this whole thing is painful for Kay, and you get a deep dive into his character through the flashbacks into his life. These bits are some of the best in the book, giving an entry into a fully realized Toronto drag culture, with both wonderful moments of joy as well as enough rough edges to still feel real (he has a racist drag name bestowed upon him at one point, and it takes too long to shake it). The loss of his earlier life plays in resonant counterpoint with the joy he finds here. There is pathos here, and it is moving.

One of the things that makes these flashbacks work is that you are treated to the eerily plausible descent into fascism. There’s a small moment, right in the beginning, that really sets the tone of the worldbuilding: a member of the resistance whose duties are clandestine and peaceful, running an underground rail of sorts, is on her phone listening to a regime-produced podcast that is whitewashing what are clearly concentration camps. That tinge of something very current, a podcast, with something all too miserably common, a concentration camp, is just the right sort of juxtaposition that really sets a mood. The rest of the worldbuilding works because of how little extrapolation actually went on; Canada’s history of settler colonialism, of genocide, of anti-immgrant persecution has been exaggerated only a tad, made the most visible elements of the state to white people rather than simply in the background. Fascism, as Aimé Césaire said, is a ‘return shock’ of colonial practices to the metropole, and that is as true here as it is anywhere else.

Crosshairs is about what the Greeks referred to as ‘thymos,’ what could be translated as ‘spiritedness,’ or the desire to be recognized as a human being with dignity and agency and rights worth respecting. The new fascist government is based on denying the thymos of the indigenous, the queer, the immigrant, the woman. The basic demand of these groups, indeed the basic demand behind all civil rights movements, all resistance movements, is that of thymos, the right to stand as a human being worthy of that name. There is a very powerful scene near the end of the book that involves these people declaring before the world their personhood; it is a scene that made me wish I were one of them. It feels odd and somewhat appropriative to say that; I am a straight man, a mixed Filipino-American, and autistic - it’s my sexuality that makes me perhaps not the target audience for this book, but on the other hand, it was Hernandez’s Filipino background, combined with the dystopian angle, that made me check it out from my local library. It is my autism, with all the discrimination I have suffered because of it, that makes my psyche seek thymos, and that seeking is what made the ending have such massive catharsis for me (and of course it bears mentioning that one of the men responsible for Applied Behavior Analysis went on to have a hand in creating conversion therapy). Target audience I may not be, but I found it extremely moving all the same.

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Reference: Hernandez, Catherine. Crosshairs [Atria Books, 2020]

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