“We’re loathed and despised in every time, in every country, in every culture. In New Guinea they say we dig up the bodies of dead babies and eat them. In Zambia they say we sleep with our brothers and fathers and murder newborns. The Hopi say we kill our kin to prolong our lives. In Germany they say we steal men’s penises and hide them in birds’ nests. (…) They say we spoil milk and steal children. That we murder the innocent and ruin crops. That we bring disease and eat human flesh. You know why they say all this?”

“Because you’re witches?”

“Because we’re women. Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Jew—the one thing they all have in common is that they hate us. For hundreds of thousands of years, they’ve hated us.” (p. 219)

The horror in this world needs no monsters kicking up a storm. Instead, it stems from authority, and from its supposed guardians: parents, social workers, doctors, the “grown-ups.” This isn't Hendrix's first exploration of girls under patriarchal control, and the novel participates in horror’s larger project of voicing what gets silenced elsewhere. Yet the genre itself has been marginalised, denied critical recognition, despite, or because of, its popularity. The study and recognition of horror remains sparse relative to the attention devoted to fantasy or science fiction.

As Hendrix notes in his history of the genre's ’70s and ’80s boom, Paperbacks from Hell (2017), “...horror appeared nowhere on best-seller lists. Horror was for children. It was pulp. If it was any good, it couldn't possibly be horror and so was rebranded as a ‘thrilling tale.’ Horror seemed to have no future because it was trapped in the past” (p. 16). But then the needle moved. The genre exploded:

Between April 1967 and December 1973, everything changed. In a little more than five years, horror fiction became fit for adults, thanks to three books. Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, Thomas Tryon’s The Other, and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist were the first horror novels to grace Publishers Weekly’s annual best-seller list since Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca in 1938. (p. 24)

This mutation had roots. As Bernice M. Murphy argues in her essay from Xavier Aldana Reyes’s Horror: A Literary History (2016), “Horror Fiction from the Decline of Universal Horror to the Rise of the Psycho Killer”:

Horror fiction began to enter the literary and publishing mainstream during the post-war era because it had increasingly begun to reflect the myriad anxieties found in everyday life. Authors such as King, Barker, Campbell, Straub, Herbert, Blatty, Ketchum, Thomas Tryon, Joan Samson, Kathe Koja and many others (...) added further depth, sophistication, frank sexuality and outright gore to the genre.

They would do this by variously utilising the four major characteristics of the genre: a tendency to deal with horrors arising from the conditions of everyday life; an accompanying preference for mundane, contemporary settings; a movement away from the supernatural and towards the depiction of aberrant psychology as a source of terror (as epitomised by the soon-to-become iconic figure of the serial killer Hannibal Lecter); and a tendency to depict the supernatural in a much more ‘grounded’, naturalistic manner.

This vision of horror materialized out of a changing nation's shifting anxieties. Steffen Hantke in his essay for the same volume, “The Rise of Popular Horror, 1971-2000,” identifies this: “Not by coincidence did the American small town, the epitome of the conservative vision of the nation, become the prime setting for 1980s horror fiction: a sunny, cheerful place of white picket fences and apple pie where something would always be really, really wrong.”

The genre's commercial success followed from this shift: horror that respected no authority, broke taboos, and took risks mainstream literature might not even touch. In Paperbacks from Hell, Hendrix shows why they worked: “Thrown into the rough-and-tumble marketplace, the writers learned they had to earn every reader’s attention. And so they delivered books that move, hit hard, take risks, go for broke. It’s not just the covers that hook your eyeballs. It’s the writing, which respects no rules except one: always be interesting” (p. 14).

And interesting they were. Hendrix, inspired by that era and its books, carries that sensibility. His horror lies very much in the world around his characters in mundane, ordinary settings. In his homage to 1980s pop culture, My Best Friend’s Exorcism (2016), when Gretchen gets possessed, neither she nor the dear reader is certain if it’s something supernatural or simply puberty’s hormonal chaos. The supernatural always pales in comparison to the complexities of the material realities, particularly when filtered through his characters' skepticism.

Likewise, in Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, even after successfully “transferring” a sickness to a condescending doctor, the girls remain unconvinced. Magic? Coincidence? Their own mistake? They don't know. Can't know. This uncertainty is a sign of changing times, changing minds, changing bodies. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s backtrack.

To understand the stakes of Hendrix’s novel, you have to understand the time it’s set in. Witchcraft for Wayward Girls is set in the Baby Scoop Era, a euphemistic label for a system built on forced obedience. In the decades after World War II, stretching into the early 1970s, countries in the English-speaking West saw an exponential increase in pre-marital pregnancies—four million parents between 1945 and 1973 in the US alone—as well as a rampant increase in adoptions. Children could be literally “scooped up” by adoptive couples, hence the name. As always, the burden of that “crisis” fell on women. [1]

Pregnant girls and women were secretly sent to maternity homes across the country, where they were forced to surrender their children in secret. Witchcraft for Wayward Girls is set in one of these maternity homes. Neva Craven, fifteen years old and pregnant, is driven there by a father who no longer sees her as a daughter but as a problem requiring institutional management. She’s told to stay there until she gives birth and her baby is taken away. Then she can return home and go back to being a “good girl.” Hide her, wait for the birth, take the child, send her back. Pretend nothing happened. [2]

For six months, she’d been holding on by her fingernails, but at least she’d been around people who knew she could tell a joke, and made straight As in English, and loved Patty Duke. Now she was surrounded by strangers who only knew one thing about her: she’d been stupid enough to get pregnant. (p. 34)

Every girl carries her own version of the same violence. One embroiders napkins for a wedding that will never happen, still trusting a boy’s broken promise. Another fantasizes about escape, building a future with her daughter that no one will let her keep. One girl dreads returning home, knowing exactly what awaits her—the priest who raped her, waiting to do it again. Each arrives with a different story, but Wellwood erases those distinctions, reducing them all to the same diagnosis—wayward girls. Under the claustrophobic, invasive gaze of the House and its custodians, the girls discover the only power available to them: each other. Bonds have to be formed, resistance built from whatever materials are at hand.

What Hendrix understands is that the supernatural is never the main event. Witchcraft might be the book’s premise, but true magic lies in the friendships, in girls finding each other in a hostile system. Despite the cruelty and hopelessness engineered into Wellwood, this is a story of sisterhood first.

Witchcraft, in this context, comes as an equalizer. Not empowerment, with its sanitized, corporate connotations, but power seized when every other possible avenue has been shut down. “When you are at your lowest, when you feel your least powerful, know that this dark legion is there for you. Witches will catch you when you fall, carry you when you are tired, heal you when you are broken” (p. 223). The witchcraft here is grisly, macabre, nothing like the aestheticized versions sold in bookshops and Instagram feeds. The greater the magic, the more blood, the more pain it demands. The book presents witchcraft as a tool to fight patriarchy, to defy a society that oppresses women at every juncture, to resist a world hell-bent on taming them into docility, to create a world of their own. “A true witch does not fear change. She is in an eternal state of revolution” (p. 184).

Women’s bodies have always been a site where power is exercised. The specifics shift, the system adapts, but the fundamental equation keeps women’s autonomy provisional, always requiring justification, always up for negotiation by someone else. The Baby Scoop Era has a name now, a historical distance. We look back at maternity homes and tell ourselves we’ve moved past that brutality. And yet, women’s bodily autonomy continues to be legislated away. Girls are again being told their choices matter less than someone else’s morality. The system adapts faster than we do, finding new ways to exercise the same control while insisting it’s different this time, better, necessary.

Witchcraft for Wayward Girls sits at that uncomfortable intersection where past and present collapse into each other. Hendrix shows us 1970, but it’s easy to recognize 2026. The architecture that built Wellwood is still standing under different names. And the girls trapped inside it—then, now—have to keep finding ways to say no. Then. Now. The specifics shift. The fight doesn’t.

Endnotes

[1] Hendrix describes this in the novel’s acknowledgments: “whether girls had been raped or sexually abused, believed a promise that wasn’t kept, didn’t have access to contraception, or simply didn’t know it existed, they were told that getting pregnant was all their fault. Doctors and social workers labeled unwed mothers “neurotic,” newspaper columnists suggested they be hounded in Alcatraz, and politicians blamed them for everything from high taxes to crime to the collapse of Western civilization” (p. 475). [return]

[2] In a TIME piece about this period, Kelly O’Connor McNees—the author of another novel set during the era, The Myth of Surrender (2022)—remarks: “Almost no one asked the young women themselves about their wishes. During the Baby Scoop era, an unmarried pregnant woman sent away to a maternity home had no say in whether she would carry her pregnancy to term, no agency over the birth itself and, once the child arrived, no choice about whether she could raise the baby.” This is the ground on which Hendrix plants his witches. [return]

These categories can also flag a fear of the modern, the experimental, and the challenging. It’s very comforting to believe that any problem can be solved with a bit of moral rectitude and a pure mind, but it’s far from obvious that we can believe that this is actually true. More importantly, and more damagingly, the novel itself also fails to convince on even its own terms, as a piece of fiction in which we can play with that statement as a thought-experiment.

In the first volume of Orion’s Arm (we read), an expedition from Earth—whose ship is interestingly called the Samaritan—has discovered, on a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, a human civilisation. They are the Fintidierians, who are around the technological level of 1950s USA, and were taken from somewhere in Asia some tens of thousands of years ago by a mysterious race of aliens, dubbed by the Earth visitor the “Atlanteans,” who had ruled and enslaved the Fintidierians before dying out around 50,000 years ago. On a continent named Misropos, which is deemed taboo by the Fintidierians, there are ruins and hieroglyphics which seem to offer a clue to the origin of the Atlanteans, and the superior technology of the Earth visitors allowed the detection of a signal from a particular region of space. Could this be the homeworld of the Atlanteans?

Now, plans are being made for all this to be investigated.

There are essentially two plot strands here. In one, the Fintideirians have a massive “fertility” problem (a sharp decline in the birth of females), which seems to have been caused by the Atlanteans. In the second, on the moon of a planet revolving around a nearby star, a ship with still-functioning cryogenic pods is discovered. The inhabitant of one—an Atlantean woman—is awakened and goes on the rampage, sending a signal to wherever the previously-detected signals had come from. It is clear that the technologically advanced Atlanteans are a threat to Earth, and so, partly through altruism but largely through motives of self-preservation, the leaders of the Samaritan expedition decide to track down the Atlanteans and tackle the “Gender Plague.”

So far, so standard SF plotting. Indeed, many acclaimed works of SF have had plots which are less novel. But the presentation and resolution of these plot strands quickly run into problems. First, this is the kind of science fiction where plot is developed by people talking to each other and telling them what has happened, what is going to happen, and what the “scientific” elements are. There are, in particular, several passages of people explaining maths and quantum theory to each other in ways that hold up the story. One plot strand is partially solved during an idyllic fishing trip which involves much technobabble about genetics and choosing the sex of babies, all of which kind of leads to the solution but without any real drama or tension. During another fishing trip, fish and chips are introduced to the Fintidierians, one of whom fantasises about exploiting the new exotic discovery (tomato ketchup) brought by the Earth people. This is mildly amusing but hardly gripping.

Second, this is the kind of science fiction which isn’t really science fiction, but simply has the coating of “sci-fi” to give it the flavour of things we have seen countless times on TV screens. For example: communication via implants. One character “tapped his collar to activate his microphone, exactly like the characters in the old twentieth-century sci-fi shows he watched with his grandfather as a child.” There are “smart contact lenses” and artificial intelligence assistants with no real sense of how such devices might have changed society: “He activated the star chart app in his contact lenses and let the embedded artificial intelligence find the star for him.” Here are spaceships powered by technobabble: “Powered by the ship’s fusion reactor, the Samara Drive emitted an extremely intense beam of UV light that functioned as reaction mass to accelerate the Samaritan (and the Emissary) at up to one gee for extended periods of time.” And “society,” of course, is default United States of America. The USA still exists, and the rest of the world might as well not. (There has, though, been something called the “great economic reset of 2066” which caused people to emigrate from Slovakia.)

The Samaritan is a US ship with a (largely) US crew. We do have characters like Polkingham, one of the “few Brits,” who is indistinguishable from everyone else (perhaps his use of the swear-word “bloody” is some sort of cultural marker), and Nkrumah, whose “heavily accented English” might refer to a Ghanaian origin, though he bears the Irish first name Kieren. There is a New Zealander whose cry of “I say it’s time for full bangers, Mike!” is, I assume, not a sexual invitation. The Fintidierians speak pretty much like everyone else, too, and, although initially they have names like Sgurom Smyo, many of them end up taking American names which is soon “quite the fad.” It must be obvious to at least some readers that here proceedings are following the example of many colonised countries, but this is hardly questioned.

And so, following on from this, we need to believe two things which are increasingly difficult to believe: that this near-future setting (the beginning is dated February 15, 2101) is pretty much our present given a few magical-tech items; and that an Asian society transplanted from Earth many thousands of years ago is going to end up pretty much like the twentieth-century USA. Take this description of a biology lab: “Like most Fintidierian buildings, it looked like something you would see in an old 2D movie set in the USA circa 1945 to 1950, with lots of concrete, austere windows, high ceilings, and exterior pillars.” You can hotwire Fintidierian cars just like you could twentieth-century automobiles. There is no exploration of major scientific, technological, or philosophical differences, save a passage in which the Fintidierian Secretary General Arctinier muses about the way the name of the Samaritan Ambassador Charles Jesus echoes that of someone described earlier as “his more famous and godlier namesake.” Arctinier has clearly heard about “the Christian religion’s savior of the same name”—but do the Fintidierians have a religion, or any philosophical beliefs or dogmas underpinning their society? We are not told. There are aliens, perhaps, but there is nothing alien.

There is even idiot-plotting which flags itself as idiot-plotting. During a terrorist incident, Roy Burbank, an engineer, is locked in a room from which he easily escapes. As he reflects: “Don’t kidnap and lock an engineer in a room filled with electrical equipment and expect him or her to complacently accept their fate.” On the other hand, if they hadn’t done this, it might have been more difficult for the authors to imagine his escape.

Taylor and Johnson have written a number of books, together and separately, and judging by reviews on Amazon and Goodreads there is a market for them. Most readers will not read their work critically. Crisis at Proxima is not written, or read, with any thought to literary awards. The authors have massive experience in related fields. Taylor is described as “currently working” on “very large space telescopes, space-based beamed energy systems, and next generation space launch concepts”—some of the ideas in Crisis clearly come from such work, and they are clearly in the tradition of scientists writing science fiction, which is an honourable one. Despite what I am writing, I can fully understand the appeal of this book as a moment’s entertainment. Much of what I have flagged as flaws—the avoidance of any exploration of ideas, the constant referencing of those SF images and common-stock technologies which have leaked into the mainstream, the blandness of character—identify the story’s appeal, but it is a curious one.

This is a book for readers who don’t really like reading; science fiction for readers who think that they like SF, but who don’t know what it can do to jolt people out of complacency, or who don’t care. It has some of the elements of pastiche, but unfocussed images like “[t]he door itself had grown into some strange mixture of cables, tubes, metal appendages, and the most bizarre Cthulhu shit she had ever seen” and “[t]he imagery was like something out of an animated Japanese horror movie from a century prior” are neither precise nor baroque enough to evoke any real meaning beyond their status as cliché. When Terry Pratchett, for instance, constantly drops references to the “white knowledge” that “fills up your brain without you really knowing where it came from,” he is doing something similar; but his instances are more direct, wittier, designed to allow the pleasurable shock of recognition and the sly nod indicating a shared culture. Here, it’s hard to avoid feeling that this is not comedy but simply a set of nudges towards vague icons, used because they avoid having to spend time on detail.

Some of the comments on the novel have noted approvingly its “old-fashioned” quality, but this is yet another target that is missed, as we can see by the reference to “Arthur C. Clarke and his contemporaries.” There are those among SF’s readership who read Clarke when his major works were published, and who saw in him a writer excited by the potential of the future, by genuinely observing the universe with a sense of wonder. There are those (indeed, sometimes the same readers) who—many years after Clarke’s visions have faded—see in the SF of the period a mode that simply ignores many major issues and is wooden in characterisation. Neither reaction is wholly incorrect. Positions can be debated, but what is interesting is that there now seems to be a readership that ignores or actively rejects the approach of the first tranche of readers and actively embraces what those who hold the second position condemn.

Of course, “Smart people with good intentions and high moral standards can solve any problem” is meaningless, but much entertainment can be had with problem-solving. What is questionable here is whether the characters of this story are “smart” or possess “high moral standards.” (Our ketchup millionaires seem very happy about infringing any patent held by the Heinz company because “That company is over four light-years away. What’re they going to do about it if we do copy their recipe?”) And we all know what the road to Hell is paved with.

In Clarke, we had the anticipation of the future and wonder at the universe. There is no “future” in Crisis at Proxima to wonder at, or fear. There is little in it which reflects the dreams and fears of the present, or the astonishing excitement that thinking about the universe can provoke. To the extent that “Clarke and his contemporaries” were engaging with this (and I believe that, whatever their faults, they were), the novel falls away from their model, keeping only what later generations have argued with—their deep, if often unwilling or unconscious, identification with the more conservative strands of social stances or literary style. Nor are we shown anything like the triumph of competence which writers like Heinlein argued they were promoting.

Ultimately, the basic “problems” at the heart of the novel are solved by the gosh-wow handwaving science developed by the young Fintidierian Grag, who bounces thoughts off his Earth mentor Chris Sentell, along with the help of  knowledge instilled through the “superconducting quantum interference transceivers” which enable sleep-learning while he is in cryosleep. This is not so much Clarkean, in fact, as Gernsbackian: The novel’s  view of science very much echoes that presented in Gernsback’s Ralph 124C 41+, serialised in 1911 and issued as a novel in 1925. Its final chapter has Ralph bringing his girlfriend Alice back to life. He needs the “rare gas” Permagatol, but there is none available … So, naturally, he invents a substitute (“The gas he evolved was Armagatol”). Or, to put it another way, “and then we were saved”; or “[w]ith one bound, Jack was free.”

This is, in fact, precisely what the science fiction of the 1950s was reacting against, and why, whatever spirit Crisis at Proxima is written in, that of “Clarke and his contemporaries” is not it. It’s a novel which meets the expectations of its readers in that it tells a story, is full of infodumps which give the impression of imparting educational information, and it passes the time. The shame is that the expectations are, clearly, so low.

In the world of this novel, the Great War in Europe weakened the protective wards that previously separated the human world from the world of the fae, allowing the latter to further their own violent agendas. The Faerie Wars, and the massive casualties on both sides, not only forced many othersiders to flee across the Atlantic Ocean and establish their courts in the United States, but also eventually led to laws and regulations that prevented the stealing of babies, enforced with the threat of fae lands being spiked with iron.

By the terms of the Russwald treaty, the fae are restricted only to legal bargains, and by the time we enter the picture the Wild Land States of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming are the only regions left in the United States where more traditional bargains between humans and othersiders remain legal. On the Otherside, this has led to what’s called the Great Bargain, whereby all faerie courts pledge fealty and loyalty to protecting the Wild Lands territory and its sovereign ruler.

Poppy Hill was very young when she was snatched from her family’s homestead in frontier-era Montana and spirited away to the Otherside. After spending more than a century as a cook in the employ of the King of the Wild Lands, she is thrown back without warning into a human world that is much changed from any lingering memories she has of her brief former life.

As it turns out, the human world has, in the meantime, come a long way in coexisting with its parallel realm. Carter Lane, one legal firm among many that specialise in fae law, leads the way in brokering faerie bargains. They’re the best at offering these services because they employ Returnees like Poppy to check for loopholes in the contracts. In return, they offer Returnees a fully-fledged twenty-first-century immersion so that they can survive and eventually assimilate into their new surroundings—a fresh start after a set number of years working at Carter Lane.

Of course, Carter Lane’s faerie broker services remain exclusive because of how much the firm charges its clients, and this means that their clientele is often the high-maintenance and demanding kind. Poppy is sitting in on one such protracted contract discussion when we meet her, the story throwing us straight into this new world and forcing us to “learn on the job.” At this point, she has been back in the human world for three years. A homesick Poppy is still struggling to adapt, missing her best friend Sloan, her former boyfriend Elan, and the only life she’s ever known. Sloan has found a way to stay in touch, so that is a small solace, but it has been crickets from Elan.

Soon after a successful completion for the above contract, Poppy is compelled by a senior partner to be involved in a very important (and super confidential) bargain. When it goes sideways through a series of unexpected orchestrations, a flustered but determined Poppy has no choice but to make a bargain of her own—and return to the Otherside to fix her blunder before it’s too late. There, she will uncover a sinister plot that could ruin both the human realm and the fae.

If I am being honest, all this initial infodumping felt a lot to take in, and the narrative didn’t really settle into itself until Poppy found herself back on the Otherside. But, once it got going, this book was hard to put down, well balanced in matching its action, twists, and intrigue with quieter moments of character growth and interaction.

Othersiders need bargains like plants need sunlight; they can never resist one. But having spent more than a century among them, Poppy is aware that, even though they cannot break their oaths, they are masters at sidestepping them—that, though it is impossible for them to lie (they have to at least think something is true), there is “too much space between can’t lie and telling the truth.” Herein lies the challenge, and it’s one she is usually very good at. As she says, “There was nothing like the bone-deep knowledge that the wrong words could worse than kill you to make you determined to find the right ones.”

This magical bureaucracy is one of the story’s most interesting parts—the rules offer a structure without erasing the always-inherent danger when dealing with the fae—and, even as I struggled to keep all the new facts straight in the initial chapters, Poppy’s talking us through the fine print of contracts, their lacunae; and the ways in which those loopholes can be exploited was immediately engaging. I wish this element of the plot—one that you’d assume was central given the title of the book—was more utilised, especially once Poppy was in the Otherside, rather than what we get. Ultimately, the bargains from the first third of the story are used more as tools to enable and propel the real main plot.

I will say that The Tricky Business of Faerie Bargains also suffers from incorrect marketing syndrome in stressing the “delightful cozy fantasy” and teasing a “pesky ex-boyfriend,” as if this story will have a second-chance romance. In truth, this story has fangs—reckonings with what is some pretty severe childhood trauma amounting to abuse, and the knock-on effects of that; the grief of straddling two worlds but never really belonging to either, the realisation that one can never truly return to what a place, person, or life was before; not to mention physical danger, torture, deaths, stabbings, and blood.

“Othersiders aren’t kind. It was absurd to think of one of them being nice. They demanded. They bargained. They offered favours in return for debt.” When Poppy returns to the Otherside, she is, an an escapee, captured by Theron, an enigmatic Hunter who journeys with her to the Wild Lands capital. He confounds her—because, contrary to the received wisdom about faeries, he seems to be kind. Indeed, the interactions between the novel’s two main character pairings—Elan and Poppy and Poppy and Theron—aren’t the focus of the story, either. While hints of new, and potentially rekindled, romance are present, these serve primarily as part of Poppy’s personal narrative arc.

Nowhere is the novel’s non-cozyness more evident, however, than in the emotional journey that Poppy undergoes through the course of the narrative. It forces her to confront unsettling truths and to readjust deeply held and felt perceptions about herself and the found family she thought she loved. When we first meet Poppy in Montana, she is not only homesick, but also under the impression that she “gets” the Otherside, and othersiders, more than other humans—because of Sloan and Elan, and the belonging she found there because of them. She is desperate to return to the only place she felt at home. And yet, as she gets to know Theron more, she realises that even this most well-meaning and different othersider will never truly be able to imagine a different way of tackling certain areas of governance that need to be overhauled, even though he promises to consider what she has said.

Poppy’s is a bittersweet growth, then, that stems from finally seeing something, and someone—multiple someones—for what it and they truly are (and maybe always was and were, even if it was impossible to see it through the manipulations and gaslighting back then). In fact, it’s hard to get a handle on Poppy as a character until we see her in the Otherside. Even there, we are privy only to a slow unpeeling of layers (some she herself is unaware of). But this process does a credit to her many positives (she is resourceful, smarter than she lets on as a defence mechanism, brave, sensitive, a fantastic cook, resilient). Using a first-person POV can often backfire, but here, where the narrative intention demanded an unreliable narrator, it was the perfect choice. We are an intimate observer to the process that leads Poppy to insights about Sloan and Elan and the true nature of her relationships with them, about how her life in the Otherside was nowhere close to the rose-tinted time she recalls, and how she’s never had much agency or choice. We feel the true emotional impact of the revelations (and the betrayals) along with her, even if we can see certain conclusions before she does.

This brings me to another element that I loved: the emphasis on the value of human creativity. “They don’t have it, they don’t understand it.” Othersiders cannot look at one thing and imagine another; they cannot envision the endless possibilities: “Othersiders can’t cook any more than they can paint, or dream, or design a new type of water pump [...] without humans and creativity in their Courts, othersiders died.” A story in which human creativity is impossible to replicate with magic, in which the fae need human ingenuity to show them new ways to live, feels quietly, but firmly, defiant in the age in which we live.

In recent times, there is an ever-present temptation to human-wash the fae, to attribute to them human emotions and appearance and nature. I’m happy to report that this book makes no such attempt. It embraces the trickster, glittering, uncanny, dangerous, selfish, casually cruel otherworldly creatures (some with humanoid characteristics, granted, but never fully human-appearing) who, by all earthly standards, are monsters. What I appreciated was McCarty’s choice to allow for complexity and discomfort, for solutions that are messy; to reflect life’s reality of multiple things being simultaneously true. It makes more meaningful Poppy’s eventual acceptance of reality, of her trauma and the need for her to work through it with the Carter Lane therapist she has until then mostly scoffed at. Even the resolution of the central narrative arc, the twist, ties into this character development. It feels earned, and there are many such satisfying callbacks in the final third of the story.

And yet, many narrative threads are left incomplete, in less a cliffhanger than a promise of a sequel. I hope I’m correct in that assumption.

This Brutal Moon

*

The thing about politics in the novel is … it’s just people. However fascinating, complex, grand, and sweeping your political storyline is, the foundation it will always rest on is the characters who enact it, and with whom the reader must spend the time of the plot, moment by moment. It is this, more than anything, that Bethany Jacobs has grasped in the Kindom Trilogy, and never more so than in this final volume.

The first two books—These Burning Stars (2023) and On Vicious Worlds (2024)—follow a multiplanetary world (the Treble) under strain as an oppressed workforce called the Jeveni break free of their strictly delimited place of mining a valuable ore. They escape to a distant world, away from the corrupt and in-fighting noble families who held them in place, and the equally corrupt and in-fighting tripartite ruling structure of the Kindom itself. But getting away does not prove sufficient, and the second volume into the third spends much of its time showing what it actually takes for the Jeveni to get themselves truly free and safe—and what the Kindom will do, whom and quite how many they will hurt, to bring back the Jeveni and reinforce the status quo.

But the series also follows characters more deeply embedded within, or reacting to, the structures of the Kindom itself. Chono has been trained by a high-ranking noble and served faithfully in the priesthood arm, the clerics, until she found doing so compromised her morals and more personal loyalties beyond breaking point. Six trained to be an assassin, but was forced out on the whim of Esek, the same high-ranking noble who trained Chono, and against whom Six dedicates their life. At the end of the first book, they are revealed to have killed and replaced Esek, and are working to use her personal power to disrupt the system, a plan which is ultimately turned towards freeing the Jeveni who are controlled by Esek’s family.

If this sounds like a complex web of interactions, it is, and that isn’t even all of the viewpoint characters. But, for all the complexity crammed into these three five-hundred-page books, in the moment Jacobs always keeps events grounded in the individual, their wants, needs and plans, and their personal connections to the people and ideas that surround them. She understands that the politics of a multi-faction, multi-world polity is complex, when it needs to be, but is also often very simple. There are no grand master plans and evil geniuses. There are interlinked systems all built out of individuals pulling in different directions, driven by geography and culture, by social and religious forces—that is, a natural complexity, rather than one of Machiavellian, deliberate scheming. She also understands that, sometimes, it is dreadfully simple: the grim calculus of survival, and the striving for basic needs.

The politics of the series, then, are constantly viewed through this lens of the individual, even when operating at a grand scale. The decision to resist oppression rather than take a deal to survive is dramatized in small moments of individuals fighting or conversations in which people discuss their reasons for their choices: guilt, blackmail, love; defence of home, a dream, loyalty to those around them; duty to the person holding the next spot in the line. Everything is granular. When viewed that way, the complex becomes comprehensible.

The same is true for her approach to faith, which is inextricably linked to the politics of the peoples of the Treble. One third of the ruling body is the clerisy, which represents the Godfire in its multiple gods. But faith is not, for Jacobs, just about structures: like politics, it is personal. Faith is viewed through different perspectives throughout the trilogy, and having Chono as a viewpoint character, alongside the Jeveni and their faith practices distinct from the rest of the Kindom’s, allows this to shine.

Through Chono, Jacobs shows us both the driving force of personal faith and the conflict that arises from holding to it within a corrupt system. Throughout This Brutal Moon, the toll the conflict has had on Chono begins to really show. She takes actions that go against her sense of honour, for the sake of protecting others. Religion, for her, is both a hardship and a source of comfort, and the exploration of it through the story is one of the greatest strengths in Jacobs’s work. She acknowledges—as many stories struggle to—the distinct but intertwined aspects of religion both as an internal, personal relationship with the divine and with morality, and as a structural force, one which can be used for peace and social cohesion, but also be weaponised by those within power in the Kindom for division. This sits alongside the value of faith in building a better system for the Jeveni. Nothing is ever one thing only. Across it all, for good and for ill, religion is a critical part of the cultural fabric of the Kindom.

This, too, is one of the great strengths of the story, and one that marks it out from other accomplished space operas. While depictions of religion in fantasy and science fiction are hardly uncommon, what is rare are ones that seek to firmly root it in place within the rhythms of daily life. Not the drama of a god real in the world, but the quiet quotidian of ritual that brings meaning to life—a piece of the puzzle that forms the reality of each character. Understanding who Chono is, who Six is, who the key Jeveni players are, who the hacker Jun Ironway is, means understanding their approach to spiritual practice, or their absence or rejection of it, just as much as their ethnic identity or their politics. And none of these can be fully unpicked in any case.

This wouldn’t work were Jacobs not extremely skilled at character study. This was most obvious in the first book—where much of the plot relied on the reader being compelled by the toxic interpersonal relationships of Esek and Chono—but it has continued, in one form or another, all the way through to This Brutal Moon. All the characters have by now had several books of development, and the culmination of the story’s overarching plot is played out in miniature in each of their personal developments. Not everyone gets a good or happy ending, or even a cathartic one, but it is clear how the events of the story have brought each to their final point. And they are all, in some way, compromised by the story they’ve lived through, by the toxic relationships of which they’ve been part.

The characters, like those in Tamsyn Muir’s The Locked Tomb trilogy (2019-2022), are an inducement to read purely on their own merits. They’ve grown up suited to a corrupt system, and are the people they are because of it, and there’s also something terribly compelling about messy people having messy lives all together. It is nice to love some mess, alongside imbibing the more serious business of a hard-hitting plot in which a corrupt system has been overthrown.

That plot has required violence and hard choices that linger in the souls of those who survive it, alongside guilt about those who didn’t. One cannot fight something so large and all-encompassing and come out unscathed, and freedom has a cost. By emphasising those costs at a personal level, Jacobs once again provides a more emotively immediate window into the consequences at a macro level.

When bringing all this to a close in the final book of a trilogy, there are a lot of plates to keep spinning, let alone bring together into a satisfying (or even just comprehensible) conclusion. And there is a point, around two thirds of the way through the book, where it feels like they may be slipping. The structure moves away from substantial chapters in which significant developments occur for a particular character or geography, opting instead for a run of shorter snippets, between which it chops and changes, refusing to settle—five- and six-page moments that up the pace but interrupts the rhythm. The novel becomes, for a little while, difficult to read and follow. But, just as that threatens to become unmanageable, Jacobs reaches a crescendo of action and comes back to the longer chapter norm, settling back into the flow and signalling the final act of the book—showing once again that she very much knows what she’s doing.

In the end, she brings us to the necessary compromise, to pragmatism and survival. The heroes violently overthrow the corrupt system, but what comes after cannot be easy, and building a new world is a task that takes forever, a constant striving rather than a swift resolution. This Brutal Moon never paints itself as a fairytale or a path to utopia, and it is fitting that this stays true all the way to the conclusion.

This is a book—and a trilogy—that can be characterised in very different ways. On the one hand, I could paint it as the slow-motion car crash of one bright, burning, terrible life—of several sets of people and even a whole culture—trying to escape the gravity of one awful person and her effect on their lives and deaths. I could argue that the Kindom Trilogy is the story of Esek, a person so spectacularly awful that she caused multiplanetary chaos.

But on another, I could say it’s precisely the opposite—a thesis on relationships, and the interaction of connectedness on large scales, fuelled by the multitude of individuals and their decisions within the system. Esek was simply a face, one metonymous example of the toxic relationship that is played out at grand scale across the worlds of the story.

On a third hand—neatly, given the tripartite system of governance that shapes the books—this is a series about genocide, and about oppression and freedom. These individuals offer a window into the suffering of millions, and play out the destructive forces of capitalism, as we know it in the real world, on a larger stage. Theirs is a story that has much to say about many parts of the now—and especially about Palestine, as Jacobs herself highlights in her afterword.

It’s a rich enough, dense enough text to support all these readings and more besides.

Moreover, This Brutal Moon is a fitting end to so equally rich and dense a trilogy, drawing all the multiple threads and character arcs into a satisfying conclusion without succumbing to the chaos that so many moving parts could bring. This concluding novel is a lot, and asks the reader to put in the leg-work to follow it all the way to the end. But it absolutely makes that end worthwhile.

They’re also, the vast majority of them, pretty grim. A number of these stories are set in environmental dystopias—as if there is any other kind. Is it possible for any dystopia to exist that doesn’t include ecological devastation of one form or another? There are certainly fictional dystopias that focus on the exploitation and degradation of one or more population groups, but these are nearly always linked to environmental disaster. In Eugen Bacon’s “The Water Runner,” for instance, a drought so severe that it dries up the ocean is said to be the result of “a curse that rose from Mother Africa’s lips in her bereavement for her lost sons and daughters.” This might be a metaphorical explanation, but there’s arguably more than a grain of truth in it: The pathological desire for profit that once supported slavery also supports unsustainable environmental practices, no matter the human or ecological costs.

Dystopias such as these are increasingly hard to read—but are they hard to read because the metaphors are so recognisable, or because we’re aware, as we read, of how increasingly remote it all feels? As E. M. Faulds writes in her story “Love, Scotland,” everyone is haunted by the global litany of disaster: “Stories of strangers dying, disasters that wiped out communities, trauma—helpless to change things but witness to it all. The internet connected them but divorced them, increased empathy but decreased agency until people drowned in it or switched off that part of themselves.” The narrator of Matthew Freeman’s story “Birdseed” agrees: “I won’t bore you with how it all came apart. We have had enough exhausted chronicles of the dissolution.”

There’s only so much empathy that can be felt before it does become exhausting, and we harden ourselves so easily. One of the best stories in this collection, for me, was “Bodies” by Cat McMahan, about cloned workers at a factory for cloned chickens. The images of human and chicken reflect each other until they almost meld, with both exploited terribly for gain—the chickens because they can be reared without care for any animal welfare standards, and the humans because they too can be harvested if their body parts benefit non-cloned humans—and yet my shock, while reading, was reserved primarily for the chickens, the birds engineered to exist without a voice box and with minimal appetite, so they “couldn’t wail or want.”

I don’t even like chickens that much. Well. Half the time I don’t like humans that much, either, but surely this is a grim reminder of how easy it is to turn off empathy, or to limit its expression. It’s not as if I haven’t read stories about the harvesting of cloned humans before. Possibly I was more shocked by those earlier narratives. Honestly, I just don’t remember. I don’t recall ever reading about suffering cloned chickens before, though, so maybe it’s just novelty in narrative that grabs my attention these days.

That should be a horrifying admission, a horrifying paragraph to write, but I no longer feel that either.

Broadly speaking, that sense of numbness, of inconsistent and dysfunctional response, is something I’ve focused a lot on in my own ecological fiction: the changing emotional response to living in a world of explicit environmental degradation. The idea that some of the many potential responses have a greater validity than others is, I admit, something I struggle with. The opening story of ECO24, “In the Field” by Shelly Jones, cuts to the quick in that respect. An artificial intelligence working for an elderly academic, isolated in a former agricultural landscape now rendered sterile and uninhabitable from fallout, considers the inability of their employer to come to terms with what has been lost: “I nod, unsure what to say; what will be of comfort when the soil is toxic, the air polluted, and the prospect of that changing soon is unlikely. Eventually the teams will clean up the fallout, eventually the soil will absorb the radiation, but the professor will not be here when the land heals.”

My reaction to this, I confess, is unsympathetic. Why should she be there? I’m not talking in terms of age, either, or of mental competence; the professor is clearly in the early stages of dementia. But the painful truth is that the fallout described in the story, the pollution and toxicity, didn’t happen by accident. It’s a result of choices, and the professor made hers. And yes, it’s often said—and it’s true—that corporations and governments bear more responsibility for pollution and other environmental disasters than individuals, but it’s also true that those corporations and governments are able to do what they do because of the world that individuals allow to exist. If we will keep voting in politicians who gut environmental protections, then what the hell can we reasonably expect?

At some point, the choice not to haul out the guillotines is on us all.

Fiction, of course, is spectacularly good at creating worlds where the guillotines stayed in their sheds and rusted. The world that the professor inhabited—that she still inhabits, in her memories—is gone. That the AI narrating the story at least considers what might comfort her is indicative of a certain amount of generosity on its part. Then again, that AI has lost very little: The remediation of the land that is occurring within the story is one performed by machines—who, unlike the professor, may well be around when that remediation is complete. The generosity, then, costs the narrator nothing.

As readers, can we say the same? How much sympathy are we expected to give? How much do we think that we, ourselves, deserve?

That’s the question, isn’t it. Increasingly, it might be the most salient question that ecofiction can possibly explore: How much do we deserve this? What comfort do we have a right to expect, and who is going to be there to give it to us?

A quick aside: I read slush for Reckoning, which focuses on environmental justice. You would not believe the number of stories we receive in which aliens, animals, divinities, superheroes, or other nonhuman entities turn up to fix our environmental messes and generally improve the world for our benefit. These stories are hard sells, because they refuse to engage with the notion of responsibility, both personal and collective.

No one is coming to save us. We have to do it ourselves … and if we choose not to, what then? It’s the AI in the (fallout) fields, cleaning up and trying, inexplicably, to comfort. It’s the alien field workers in F. E. Choe’s “Swarm X1048,” documenting the human destruction of species and ecosystem and a single beloved dog, not able to save any of them because their ethnological practices require observation only, and even if they didn’t: how is it possible to mount a rescue on a planetary scale when the planet’s own population can’t collectively be bothered? (Notably, all the Swarm’s inclination towards comfort is reserved for the dog. It’s not guilty of anything.)

If this seems a little hard, a little too black and white, then I’d agree. We know from the real world that some people, some populations, are more responsible, and bear more guilt, than others. Responsibility may be shared, but it’s certainly not shared evenly.

Neither are consequences. In Bacon’s “The Water Runner,” for example, money to escape the waterless dystopian setting is earned through the reproductive exploitation of women such as the protagonist Zawadi. In Osahon Ize-Iyamu’s story “We the People Excluding I,” a series of well-meaning human sacrifices offer themselves up in a futile attempt to try and stave off active predation of their communities by the powerful Fox Man. The environmental reclamation workers in Steph Kwiatkowski’s “Batter and Pearl” are stuck in poverty traps that such work is effectively designed to keep them in. Furthermore, “The Plasticity of Being” by Renan Bernardo explores a world where an enzyme-bacteria system is developed so that people can eat plastic. By “people,” of course, I mean the poor, who now find it much easier to feed themselves by sifting through piles of garbage. This is implicitly accepted as a good thing by the wealthier and less vulnerable classes: “Feeding people would become a decentralized process without lots of points of failure. Costs would plummet. It would all become excruciatingly cheaper than producing any kind of food,” although readers will all realise that food will still be eaten, of course, by the people who have never been in any danger of scavenging from trash.

That so many of the ECO24 stories share this clarity of unequal responsibility and consequence is, in many ways, an indication of what is to come. These stories are not outliers, nor are they telling us anything new: They are solidly representative of the current state of knowledge in environmental justice. We know now that some populations are more responsible than others. We know now that some populations will suffer more than others.

The question, then, is—as individuals, and as communities—what are we to do about it? What ethical responses are open to us?

There are, admittedly, a number of stories in ECO24 that grapple with the idea of responsibility and atonement and the possibility (or impossibility) of comfort. “A Seder in Siberia” by Louis Evans, for example, shows a family discovering that their exile to a lifetime of climate remediation work wasn’t due to their refugee status, but to their father’s crimes against humanity (he refused to give water to people who died of thirst in a holding cell). This piece of family history is only discovered after the father, himself mentally compromised due to illness, sends his oldest son to try and negotiate a return. “I want to go home,” he says, as if his actions hadn’t materially contributed to the loss of that home, both for himself and for others. The father’s silence, over the years—neither his children nor his grandchildren are aware of his past actions—and his refusal to actively engage with those actions, is not exactly indicative of remorse. One might argue that remorse doesn’t have to be publicly expressed in order to exist, but if you let dozens of people die of thirst (and the story implies that those unfortunates were refugees themselves), then there’s that question of comfort again, and of sympathy.

And, inevitably, of forgiveness.

I have trouble with forgiveness.

*

There’s a story in here I almost didn’t mention. “Parasite’s Grief” by Katharine Tyndall is about two nonhuman species, one of which acts as a parasite on the other. Without that parasitism, the Hyella would “live larger, longer, more peacefully”—and yet the Hyella have agency and intelligence, and many of them choose the shorter, smaller, less peaceful life that comes with parasitism. There’s a long, unpleasant history of linking exploited human minorities with exploited nonhuman bodies, and I side-eye the comparison, especially when that element of voluntary choice is added to the mix. No one volunteers for slavery, for instance. Yet there’s an element of genius here in that “Parasite’s Grief” is placed, in this anthology, directly before Kelsea Yu’s “Skittering Within,” in which an infant vaccinated with the blood of suffering horseshoe crabs—they’re only animals, might as well bleed them as well as boil them alive—goes through a bodily change of her own as she ages, turning part-horseshoe crab as well. Hai’s infant exposure is not voluntary on her part, of course, but her choices as she grows, as she turns toward the nonhuman instead of the human, speak to a chosen loyalty to the exploited crabs, to their plundered bodies.

“Skittering Within” has one of the happier endings in the book, as Hai’s turn to the sea is presented as an unalloyed positive. There’s an uncomfortable question here, though, of how much exploitation is internalised, how much it is chosen—particularly, as I said, when contrasted with “Parasite’s Grief.” The genuine loss that the Teloschi parasite feels at the death of their Hyella is referred to as a natural part of life … but they still parasitise them. It’s an inescapable part of the Teloschi life cycle, and necessity is excusal. But what is necessity, and how much of our own exploitation (of others, and of ourselves) do we excuse?

It’s a choice to bleed horseshoe crabs, to offer up your body as Zawadi does, to eat plastic. To keep the guillotine in the shed.

*

Refusing forgiveness for that choice is often cruel. People do the best they can to survive in the situations in which they find themselves, and all too frequently those circumstances are not of their making. The more exploited you are, the fewer choices you have, the easier it is to sink into identification with the nonhuman—because there’s wonder in that, there is, and a focus on that wonder, that sense of communion, can drown out other options.

It’s an uncomfortable mix, complicity and forgiveness. When Hai is coming down the stairs, shrieking in pain because her mother is boiling a crab, for a moment I think she’s going to brain the woman for her indifference to the suffering of her meal and her child. Part of me wants her to. Part of me wants to do it myself. I read stories like this and I think, What’s stopping me? I like the ending to Yu’s story. I like the transformation, the escape. But escape isn’t freedom. Not for everyone, anyway. Not from everything. Increasingly, I wonder if it’s nothing more than the breath before the blade comes down.

Part of me wants that blade. Part of me wants other people to use it so I don’t have to. Part of me, clearly, is attracted to the possibility of dystopia, if only because some things will be easier to excuse.

Ecofiction does not have to be dystopian, but dystopian it mostly seems to be: a way for writers to work out the lingering, unsettling horror at the ecology around them. There’s no shortage of real-life environmental horror stories out there, and it doesn’t seem to be getting better. Dystopia sells, whether it’s on the bookshelves or on the news, but if science fiction has a history of broadcasting warnings as well as imagination, then there are stories here that offer, amidst the horror, comparatively brighter exemplars. The welcoming of refugees in Faulds’s "Love, Scotland" is one example of this, and it’s notable for being one of the few realistic examples. More frequently, successful resistance is essentially magical, as it is in Guillermo G. Mendoza’s “One with the Ground,” in which a girl with an amulet restores clear-felled forest every night.

The magical resistance stories are touching, they are. I’ve read a lot of ecofiction lately where resistance has magical overtones, as if we find it difficult to picture without the marvellous. The girl who becomes a crab, the girl who becomes forest ground. There’s beauty in the imagery. There’s hope in it, even. But it’s inspiration, not application.

I’m not knocking inspiration. We need that sense of possibility, just as we need the warning sirens of the genre. I do feel, however, that, in this anthology at least, the warning signs are the most prevalent. I certainly understand that—it’s art reflecting reality—but if this anthology is representative of the best of ecofiction, what does that tendency say about our ecological visions of the future? It says that they tend almost inevitably to the dystopian. And without the guillotines I’m no longer sure that’s enough.

The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts,

In Fu’s last work, the short story collection Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century (2022), many of the stories revolve around real and imagined technologies’ effects on how people connect with each other. Eleanor’s story here is not an exception to this trend in Fu’s work. Her therapy practice is virtual, and she moves into an isolated valley with no neighbors. Her mother has just died, and she is single after a nasty breakup. She is isolated, to put it lightly. Her attempts to make awkward conversation with cashiers are her attempts to try to find in-person human connection, and it is no wonder that she starts thinking of her patients on the other side of the screen as ghosts. There are multiple times she thinks about her old in-person practice and how ineffectual she feels without the ability to see her patients face to face. In our current world, even though the rise of remote work has opened up a great deal of freedom when it comes to where to work, a number of jobs have settled into a hybrid format for this very reason: Eleanor struggles with loneliness from moving to a new, hostile place, the nature of her job, and grief from her mother’s death.

Eleanor and her mother’s relationship is the driving force in The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts. When her mother was alive, their relationship was best described as codependent. Lele Fan, Eleanor’s mother, raised Eleanor by herself. In college and graduate school, Eleanor struggled with transitioning into adulthood and independence. Lele told her to move back home when she was in graduate school. From then on, Lele took care of all of Eleanor’s household chores and any tasks beyond her school or later work. Lele would go so far as to “peel apples and pears with a knife, slice them inside her palm, and hand-feed segments to Eleanor,” who initially is apprehensive but later appreciates that it “kept her fingers and keyboard clean.” When Lele becomes sick with cancer, Eleanor has to care for her instead, giving her medicine despite her protests. When she was well, Lele handled secretarial duties, acting almost as Eleanor’s personal assistant; after her death, Eleanor has to confront all the life skills she has never developed because her mother handled almost all the mundane tasks of life, and she struggles with calling insurance companies and arranging repairs. I would classify The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts as a coming-of-age story as Eleanor slowly learns to tackle these tasks in her grief. Similarly, Fu’s other two novels, For Today I Am a Boy (2010) and The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore (2018) both center the transition from childhood to adulthood; it is the speculative trappings of The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts that the other two books lack.

The world of The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts initially appears identical to our own, but the constant rain and mentions of terraforming to create housing developments reveal that it is a not-so-distant future in which strange weather has become commonplace. For most of the book, it is raining, and characters comment on the constant rain. Eleanor's house floods when it rains and her lock breaks because there is no awning above her door and the nonstop rain damages it. Other characters talk about mudslides destroying nearby low-lying towns, and the valley Eleanor has moved into turns out to contain ghosts. The book leaves unanswered why exactly the previous property developer committed suicide, whether the cause was ghosts or something more mundane, but his death establishes early on that even the richest and most powerful humans are still subject to the whims of Mother Nature. Eleanor is unused to handling flooding houses and home repairs, due to being a renter and the fact that her mother handled most of these logistical issues, and she struggles with calling insurance companies and figuring out the right contractor to handle repairs.

One of Eleanor’s clients at her virtual therapy practice, a man named David, comes to his initial intake session talking about how his wife says the news is making him too negative and liable to start fights. He tells her, “I feel like every day, there’s some new horror. Some new, specific detail, proof of the planet dying even faster than we thought … I feel like the entire country, the entire world, is constantly in the middle of another natural disaster. Every week there’s a once-in-a-century event somewhere.” The only advice Eleanor can offer him is to stay off the news and focus on what he can do to be more present with his wife or actively engage in causes he cares about. Eleanor herself, however, recognizes that this is an inadequate solution as the weather becomes more and more unpredictable. Yet, instead of lingering on existential dread, she is preoccupied with the many repairs her new home needs, as it floods in her new house every time it rains. Eleanor’s world is not one that is kind to the people living there, even as she is busy grieving and dealing with seemingly small concerns in the face of climate change.

The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts does not contain any specific setting information other than that the valley seems to be somewhere in North America. The reader has no idea where in the world it is set, which is a purposeful omission given how Fu’s previous two novels had highly specific settings—Montreal in For Today I am a Boy and a summer camp in the Pacific Northwest in The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore. In contrast, The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts could take anywhere in North America and at any time, given that no information on either point is given. Mentions of a pandemic and a lockdown recent enough that characters talk about it initially made me wonder whether it was taking place around our own time, but it is never mentioned whether the lockdown was due to COVID or another disease. This vagueness adds dread to the events that take place in the book, a sense of the unplaceability of time and place that works well with the ghosts that exist out of time in Eleanor’s house.

Even though I found Eleanor and her mother's relationship to be unhealthily codependent when Lele was alive, I found myself rooting for Eleanor in her struggles to try to define herself without her mother. Who are we without other people? This book wants us to ask this question as it shows us Eleanor’s own ghosts, people both living and dead who follow her around when she has nobody else. Kim Fu’s writing at the sentence level is deceptively simplistic. It hides how much her work makes me think.

I have found this problem fairly endemic to the romcomantasy (eh? eh?) subgenre to which McCollum’s debut belongs. Oh, I am so tired of reading book after book where nobody has ever done a single thing wrong, or, even if they have, it was all a terrible misunderstanding. I cannot bear these characters with personalities as smooth as Ken dolls, who run dear little retail shops in interchangeable Fantasylands and placeless middle Americas, unbothered by problems of inventory or human frailty. I am going to chew right through the bars of my enclosure, and go rampaging all around the countryside, if I am called upon to read one more book where a character’s big secret finally comes out, and the other character is like: “No problem, babe, I know your heart, and I understand that, while you initially had a scheme to sabotage my dreams, you changed your mind over the course of our courtship. Due to the trust we have built together, I understand this perfectly without your having to explain it.”

Not once more. If I read this sort of thing again, down will come the power lines. To the incinerator with the paper stores. The printing presses I will break like the Luddites of old. Chomp will go my teeth upon the spindly fingers of the TikTok tastemakers or whoever’s responsible for this. A romance is just so much more interesting if the two love interests have personality traits … I was going to finish this sentence with something like “that don’t mesh perfectly without effort,” but really I will just let the sentence end at “traits.” A romance is much more interesting if the two love interests are recognizable as alive human people. I would like us to get back to that, please.

David, the protagonist of Into the Midnight Wood (and this is a single-POV romance, refreshing in this era of dual-POV supremacy), has been living with, and frustrated by, his hot chaotic roommate Meredith for five years. And I would also be annoyed with Meredith: Meredith sleeps with all their third roommates so it’s a revolving door of third roommates; he leaves mugs and glitter all over. He wanders into the dangerous magical woods at the edge of their property and gathers herbs and chats to the Midnight Mice with very little regard for the possibly sinister forces that lurk in the forest. You may argue that Meredith is a manic pixie dream girl, and I shan’t disagree with you, but McCollum is not shying away from the real material conditions of living with someone like this. Mugs. Mugs everywhere! Never the trash taken out or the dishes done! Meredith I would kick twice, sharply, in the shins.

David is also kind of the worst. He’s that difficult combination of judgmental and resistant to change that means he’s constantly complaining to himself about circumstances he has every ability to alter should he so choose. He’s gotten into a habit of tossing not-very-nice banter at Meredith. He gets so locked in to a given life goal (getting a promotion at work) that he lets himself lose track of the emotions of the people around him. On a day when he was not wearing a button-up and couldn’t fact-check me, I would say to David, “Why do you always have one of the middle buttons on your shirt askew? Is that a fashion thing?”; and then he would be stressed about his button-up shirts forever afterwards.

Is this a good book? I don’t know. What even does it mean to be good? The fantasy elements could be more clearly delineated. Non-humans live and conduct their business alongside humans, but this seems not to have materially affected geopolitical history, since Wales and Appalachia still exist. David and Meredith live on the edge of the Midnight Wood, a magic forest where time and space don’t follow the usual rules. I found its parameters and personal relationship to Meredith confusing, but possibly in that way common when the author has several further books in mind, perhaps ones that will feature Meredith becoming ever more powerful and unearthly at the periphery of other people’s love stories. (I would endorse this, by the way. [This would rule.]) But within the confines of this one book, I couldn’t tell you with a gun to my head what purpose, for example, the Midnight Mice serve in maintaining the forward march of time.

I can say with certainty, though, that I did not welcome the return of the implied-Black best friend (Meredith’s) who punctuates more of his sentences with the words “you feel me?” than is strictly natural. He’s there mainly to be protective of Meredith. This is, I admit, the mandated role of the best friend in a romance novel, but the author’s discomfort with writing a Black character is so palpable that you wish they’d just not bothered. I can’t propose a fix for this—it’s weird when white authors populate books with only-white characters, and quite often, as here, it’s weird when they very uncomfortably don’t. (The ideal solution would be to address the problem at the root by eliminating white supremacy, but I suppose that’s beyond the scope of this book review.)

Into the Midnight Wood is good, at least, in its ability to supply the chief thing I care about from a romance: a pair of characters trying to get their emotional houses in good enough order to be in love with each other. Like everyone, like all of us, they are both a little bit terrible. I am so starved in general for romance protagonists who are a little bit terrible that I did not care that the specifics of David and Meredith’s story arc were heavy-handed. One of the novel’s precipitating events, for instance, is that a psychic gives Meredith a charm to reveal hidden things, which means that he gets less good at concealing his depression and self-worth issues from David. Elsewhere, the reasons why David and Meredith end up hosting an event for Meredith’s terrible family, giving David a front-row seat to how these jackasses treat him, are contrived. And you know what? I don’t care. Great. I love it. Gimme.

Likewise, McCollum is stellar at writing conversations in which the leads are plausibly, but consistently, misunderstanding each other. It’s one of the harder stunts for a romance novel to pull off, because the failure mode leaves readers complaining that the whole conflict could have been resolved or avoided if the characters had just had one single conversation with each other. David and Meredith can’t stop having conversations. It’s just that they’re not hearing what the other person is telling them. Here’s their discussion right after the first time they have sex, about midway through the book:

David stood abruptly. “You forgot to give me the speech, you know,” he remarked as he pulled his boxers back on.

Slowly, Meredith got to his feet. “David, I—”

“No, no, it’s all right,” David forestalled him. “I know it by heart: I’m not in love with you. I’ve got no plans to fall in love with you and this isn’t going to change that, and it’s all right if that means you’d rather not do anything.” Even if it was a bit late for that last part now … “As you said, the two of us together—could you even imagine? The very idea is absurd.”[…]

After a silence that lasted a beat too long, Meredith gave a lopsided smile. “Yeah,” he said. “Of course it’d never work, would it? You and me, we’d be at each other’s throats every minute. S’pose you’ll be wanting the shower? You can go first, I’ll put the kettle on.”

This works because McCollum has set this up from the beginning. We’re well aware that Meredith always gives this little speech to people he sleeps with, because it’s a conflict that comes up in the book’s very first scene. So I don’t need much persuading that David would think of himself as the latest in a long line of sexual conquests, and that Meredith would take this little speech to mean that David doesn’t want him. It’s good! It’s elegant! This is the content the people (me) desire!

I also deeply appreciated the book’s casual resistance to tidy (boring) scripts around sex and gender. Meredith wears dresses and sparkly clothes and flower tiaras, and there’s a running gag that he’s allergic to labeling himself as one thing or another. David takes a moment for a pronoun check about midway through the book, which I really loved. It’s rare to read about two characters with years of familiarity between them checking in about pronouns, outside of the context of a coming-out story. When they have penetrative sex, they also have a quick check-in about who will be doing what, ruffling David’s instinctive assumption that they both mutually understand he’d be topping. Here again, the warmth of my positive response may owe less to what this book is doing, and more to what other books are not. It felt really refreshing to be reminded that even quite compatible people can’t read each other’s minds or magically intuit each other’s preferences. Having these conversations is what building intimacy looks like.

I’m going to say something now that will sound like an insult; but walk with me, because it will turn out to be a very high compliment, albeit current trends in publishing will be catching some strays along the way. Into the Midnight Wood is not for everyone. You could say that Meredith is too twee, that David spends too much time being a jerk and not enough time redeeming himself, that it’s aggravating when these two characters won’t just talk about their feelings. I would know what you meant. I wouldn’t argue. But Into the Midnight Wood feels like the book the author wanted to write. I didn’t, perhaps, realize until I was midway through it how badly I’ve needed that.

So many of the books in the cozy romantasy space (I know I said romcomantasy before, but I’ve lost the courage of my convictions since then) feel like cynical marketing strategies between two covers, books that endeavor to capture the largest readership by making their plots and their characters as anodyne as possible. I crave books with enough specificity that I can say they are not for everyone; the alternative, I think, is books that are not for anyone. Books that are, essentially, for the algorithm.

Real people are annoying, and you may carve that on my tombstone. Alexandra McCollum need not visit my grave to learn this truth. Refreshingly, they already know.

Please send in your mycelial pitches to gautam.strangehorizons@gmail.com.

For word-count, formats, and remuneration, please see here.

I’m tempted to joke that it’s due to climate change that in Hana Carolina’s engaging and emotionally intelligent novella, The Inescapable March, this moment arrives a month earlier. I think the choice of month is more deliberate, though—because the precise moment being described is what one of the novel’s two main characters, flamboyant travelling-actor Hyacinth, describes as “the wretched vestiges of winter” (p. 29). At the point when the novella opens—as dour warrior-mage Arran, from whose viewpoint proceedings are narrated, muses to himself—we’re not quite yet at the beginning of spring. The problem therefore is not that Arran can’t bear the pain of returning feeling but rather that he can’t even jolt himself far enough out of his resentment towards life in general, and of Hyacinth in particular, to even care. The two are friends who are attracted towards each other, but Arran has difficulty dealing with the emotional demands placed upon him by Hyacinth, who is an outrageous flirt with both men and women. Indeed, even while reflecting on how Hyacinth would have taken the brief hint of early-morning sunshine as an excuse to dress wholly inappropriately in layers of silk and an ornamental hat, and would by now be complaining bitterly about the cold, Arran is actually in the process of leaving him behind to die in the siege of a grubby little market town by an advancing army.

The reason that Arran knows that Hyacinth is going to die is that he has already seen it happen. More than once, in fact. Even as he thinks about it, he meets another version of himself riding in the other direction back to the town, before wearily turning round himself. Once there, he spells himself with magical strength before fighting and killing many soldiers, including one with a prominent facial scar, to cut his way back into the town and find Hyacinth amongst the panic-stricken crowds of townsfolk. However, with the effects of the spell waning, he is now exhausted and can do no more than hold on to Hyacinth as the two are crushed to death in the stampede against the locked town gates. Then, they wake up again in a bed in the town inn, exactly as they had at the beginning of that day in a brief moment of unexpected sunlight.

This is not simply a fantasy reworking of Groundhog Day (1993) in which the “march” of the hostile army is inescapable, however (though this is, of course, the other sense of the novella’s title). For one thing, we are never quite sure of the exact sequence of events: The third and penultimate chapter, “The End” is followed by Chapter 4, “The Beginning.” Even if we were such charlatans as to cut the book up in order to reassemble its constituent passages into chronological sequence, I’m not convinced that a linear timeline would emerge. Furthermore, there is also the question of how many times the novella’s events have happened to its characters before. At one point, we are told that Arran and Hyacinth first met a century ago. At several points we encounter the fortune teller Vadoma, who remains aware of what is happening and complains about being stuck in a liminal hell while having to watch her passing dalliance Richard—the soldier with the scar—“die a thousand times over” (p. 96). Later, Arran apologises to Hyacinth for making him “relive the most painful moments of your life a million fucking times” (p. 125). This is not just hyperbole. Both the scale of repetition and the refusal of linearity indicate a queer temporality that can’t simply be fixed by a couple of clever tweaks and a “happy ever after” ending.

The actual process of what is happening is explained to us early in the book, in a scene in which Arran is selling his magic to a woman who wants her husband not to have left her following the death of their son. As he explains to her, the spell will take her outside of space and time and enable her to replay scenarios endlessly until she gets the desired result. The husband won’t remember what happened: “He’ll only live through the final outcome you choose” (p. 25). There’s a telling moment when the woman maliciously asks Arran why he can’t fix his own life if it’s that simple. Then, after he has sat through the dizzying rhythm of hundreds of simultaneous interactions between woman and man, in all of which the husband leaves, she also asks him if the spell can be cast on someone who’s dead. To which he replies that he could only do that if he cast a spell on himself too:

“Many have tried. Most cannot change a thing. And being trapped in endless repetition, with death as the only certain outcome—that’s hell. I wouldn’t do that to someone, or myself.”

“Hell? That’s what you think hell is?” She let out a wet chuckle. “That’s just life.” (p. 28)

In the end, though, which is also the beginning, this is what he must have done—because the whole novella is concerned with Arran and Hyacinth, who is barely aware of what is happening, trying to escape from exactly such a liminal hell-life. But every time Arran tries to leave, with or without Hyacinth, he ends up coming back to the same place again and dying once more. It’s only when he asks Vadoma how they get out that she points out the problem, by replying deadpan, “Are you sure you want to?” (p. 94). Ultimately, The Inescapable March is about whether Arran will continue warping time forever because he can’t bring himself to face the truth, which is that he loves Hyacinth. However, to reach this point he has to overcome his own socialisation as warrior-mage and necromancer.

At this point, I should also mention that, despite this serious purpose, the novella is very funny in places. Carolina’s dialogue is sharp and the moments when Arran and Hyacinth engage in banter are especially delicious. There is also a great scene in which Vadoma reads the palms of Hyacinth, Arran, and Richard in sequence and to darkly humorous effect. It’s not difficult to imagine The Inescapable March as forming the basis for a “high-concept” episode in a big-budget fantasy television series: Gruff magical warrior, bisexual companion figure, fighting, magic, bedroom scenes and there’s even a song. (Obviously I’d love someone to actually make this episode!) What the novella foregrounds is how this kind of fantasy is not just great entertainment but also a kind of technology for making sense of our time and even altering it.

It seems clear to me that the rise of fantasy—which, following the global success of A Game of Thrones (2011-2019) has become one of the master-narratives of the twenty-first century—is shaping how people understand and engage with the society around them. Winter has come and brought a quasi-medieval power politics to Europe and America that would have seemed too crude to be believable twenty-five years ago. I could bemoan that state of affairs but that would be hypocritical given that I have been reading fantasy since childhood. I think all of us who are fantasy fans have to own it. But, in any case, I don’t want to disavow fantasy completely, either, because when it combines wit, humour, and magic as The Inescapable March does, while refusing the quick fix of happy ever after, it allows us to imagine worlds where life is not just a tedious linear repetition of nasty, brutish, and short days until we die. Or, to put it another way, queer fantasy allows us to escape “the wretched vestiges of winter” which make Carolina’s March even crueller than Eliot’s April.

This is on display in the eponymous “House of Illusionists,” which provides an extreme example of Fogg’s love for tragic endings. In it, a pair of aged instructors in a fantasy version of imperial China work with their young students to bend their craft of casting illusions toward a transcendent escape from their civilization’s collapse. Outside the walls, an invading army forces their city toward an inexorable surrender. The details of an agonizing siege, and the imagined pillage that will follow, contrast with the beauty of the illusions which are wrought in the shelter of the school. All this builds toward a gut-wrenching climax.

Fogg also excels at sketching out the contours of a fantasy setting without getting bogged down in its details. This is a skill that gives her stories, most of which are fairly minimalist when it comes to the narrative, a weight which is derived from everything that is not on the page. There’s a feeling that the stories are built on a richly imagined world in the background. I was reading the collection on a trip, and the thick atmosphere and gorgeous details of Fogg’s stories made it a great collection to disappear into in an airport.

This is a characteristic that often gives her stories a dreamlike quality. For example, “An Address to the Newest Disciples of the Lost Words” highlights the tension Fogg successfully maintains between sharp foreground detail and background fantasy outlines, using epic fantasy settings to highlight the richness of the former. In this story, a magic practitioner in a desert academy reflects on their life, their training, and their decision to train in magic. An entire world and magical system are sketched out, but the story remains impressionistic, like a Japanese print. In this case, the minimalism of the narrative, with no climax or resolution, makes the detail that much more striking.

I was a boy of twelve when I first saw/heard/felt this Word. There was a woman at the night market of my hometown, performing Words by the river for free.

The anchor for this Word is wind.

This Word is restlessness coiled deep in the heart. It is a longing with a voice. (p. 173)

Longing is also woven through these stories. In “Wild Ones,” the urban fantasy piece that starts the collection, a mother worries about her daughter as she reaches the age when children—in what appears to be an otherwise normal world—participate in the “wild hunt” each evening, accompanying a goddess figure on flights through the clouds. The mother fears her daughter will not outgrow the longing for the open sky as most children do and that she will eventually choose not to return home. Playing on resonances with Peter Pan (1904) and the anxieties of parenthood, the piece explores the mother’s fear as she recalls her own time as an adolescent flying with the hunt and slowly realizes that it’s her, not her daughter, who is being lured back into the sky: “Why do we forget so much of our wild days? How do we lose the language of the wind?” (p. 7).

Another kind of longing is apparent in “Traces of Us,” which appeared in Neil Clarke’s Best Science Fiction of the Year anthology for 2019, and in which brain scan technology allows two lovers to overcome death through their longing for each other. It’s a poignant and subtle piece that comes to life with medical details highlighting Fogg’s career as a translator and editor of scientific articles. That background comes through not only in her crisp language and detail but in the sharp focus she can bring to scientific sensibilities, as in “The Wave” and “The Message”—two near-future science fiction pieces, the first of which deals with social media and sports in the age of climate change and the second the aftermath of an ambiguous SETI success.

Fogg’s stories deserve to be read more widely, then, and Interstellar Flight Press is to be applauded for bringing this collection to print. (My only complaint about the volume is its lack of a table of contents.) So much new fiction is published each month that it is almost impossible to keep up with all the worthy writers appearing, and small presses like Interstellar Flight do an important job offering volumes collecting excellent pieces that otherwise would be ephemeral. Even for someone who has run across Fogg before, this collection makes it possible to read work that may no longer be available online or anywhere else.

Shelter in gardens, academies, and family; solace through beauty, memory, and at times illusion: Fogg’s focus on endings and societies declining or being destroyed may hit harder today than when these stories were originally written, which is why her consistent emphasis on the power of beauty—if not to save then at least to somehow redeem such endings—is important. I sincerely hope there will be many more such lovely endings to come.

Edwin Callihan’s “Angelhood & Abscission” is the longest story and the one that most explicitly builds the anthology’s shared world. The piece is framed as a series of letters from an unnamed narrator newly arrived in a vast brutalist city. The architecture is rendered with obsessive detail: Buildings rise on “colorless columns and flying buttresses rounded by cylindrical obelisks, spackled with tiny little windows like the outside was hit with buckshot” (p. 10). The narrator finds a sparse apartment with a couch, a microwave, TV dinners, and a television that only catches static or late-night sign-off patterns. The prose circles in the way genuine fixation does. Early on, the narrator visits a bar called Sefer, where a “band” manipulates a chrome box that emits “clanky, metallic groans and whimpers” (p. 8) while oily yolk drips from the stage. He meets Bill, a tall man with a bowl cut and a face covered in red boils, who speaks with a whistling “w.” He is later introduced to The Sculptor, who keeps hundreds of sheet-draped figures in a red-lit basement beneath a twenty-four-hour copy shop. The figures are malformed, not quite human, with blue veins running across marble-like skin. When the narrator reaches to touch one, The Sculptor slaps his hand away and retches. The realization arrives gradually and inescapably: The narrator is being sculpted, too. Callihan balances cosmic detachment with intimate physical detail. Lines like “[b]etween heaven and hell is an orifice, a puckering asshole shitting us out into wherever” (p. 24) land with cosmic revulsion. The closing ascent to the lunar surface—during which the narrator looks down at the city “blinking like Christmas lights” (p. 24) and understands there may be countless versions of himself “plucked and discarded again and again” —is both grotesque and quietly devastating. The repetitive, hypnotic prose mirrors the narrator’s growing dissociation, making the reader feel the slow erosion of self in real time.

Sam Richard’s “Red Tears Are Shed on Grey” shifts to a fragmented, almost cinematic style. Sections marked “C” intercut loops of historical atrocity footage—missiles rising in “tumescent power” (p. 26), faceless soldiers marching, factory fires, hanging bodies, endless ejaculation overlays—with the story of Sasha, a young woman smoking outside an illegal basement venue called the Rat’s Nest. The Karl Marx epigraph about dead generations weighing like a nightmare is structural rather than decorative. The footage is rendered with clinical detachment: faces scratched out, flags clipped, pilots with faces removed. Sasha listens to a strange man reminisce about the venue’s past as an underground library filled with suppressed radical texts and do-it-yourself guides. The conversation unsettles her. When she returns home, the loops invade her reality. She finds herself strapped to a chair by invisible restraints, forced to watch versions of herself on a filthy projector screen. Her face tears open. Blood pours. Tears bleach the screen white. Richard refuses catharsis. The story ends in vacancy and fraying film. The formal choices—abrupt cuts, smokeless cigarettes, eternal ember—create a disorienting rhythm that mirrors Sasha’s unraveling. History is not past; it is a corrupted reel projecting itself onto living flesh until identity dissolves.

Charlene Elsby’s “I’m Not Coming After Her” is the emotional and philosophical heart of the collection. The narrator is the surviving twin speaking from inside the womb after her sister Millie has been delivered and harvested for organs. Elsby writes with extraordinary precision. We feel the initial warmth and nutriment that convinced both twins their mother wanted them to live. We feel the shift when the technician explains that Millie cannot survive independently and that her viable parts could save other babies. The mother’s relief is immediate and physical: “the relief of not having to have two daughters after all, and that it would be through no fault of her own” (p. 49). The surviving twin experiences every scalpel cut, every cold disposal of unusable parts labeled “biological materials.” The decision to remain inside and fester, rather than enter a world that treats bodies as spare parts, is presented without melodrama: “All I must do is fester,” the narrator repeats like a verdict. The story reframes the womb as a battlefield and asks, without sentimentality, whether any world that dismantles you for parts is worth joining. Elsby’s philosophical density never sacrifices visceral immediacy, however. The final description of infected tissue turning gray as blood retreats is one of the most haunting images in contemporary horror. The first-person perspective from inside the womb creates an intimacy that makes the betrayal feel personal.

Joe Koch’s “I Am a Horse” begins in apparently realistic territory and descends into prolonged bodily transformation. An aging mathematics professor, Mr. Sapin, becomes obsessed with a Butoh dancer he first mistakes for a statue in a garden. The story is structured in numbered encounters that escalate relentlessly. The second meeting involves a fake breast torn open during rehearsal. The third is a disastrous dinner in which the dancer accuses Sapin of knowing about her childhood abuse and doing nothing. The fourth finds her at his door soaked in blood. The fifth and sixth dissolve into sensory deprivation: hooded, bound on all fours, fed pureed food through tubes, cleaned by automated jets, slowly reduced to animal state. Koch writes captivity with a poet’s sense of rhythm and a clinician’s patience. The professor’s perverse gratitude amid degradation feels earned rather than contrived. The story refuses easy moralizing. It simply observes the process until the man becomes the horse of the title, rocking gently under an invisible rider who sings a half-remembered lullaby.

The anthology closes with two shorter pieces that function as sharp codas. Justin Lutz’s “Not Waving, but Drowning” literalizes Stevie Smith’s poem inside a flooded basement venue, turning a gig into slow, collective submersion. Brendan Vidito’s “Theatre of Sublimation,” meanwhile, presents a performance in which the audience itself becomes the raw material. Both deny the reader any clean exit.

Certain obsessions repeat across the collection. Clean spaces—operating theaters, copy shops, white-painted Butoh skin—reveal themselves as sites of deepest filth. History loops like scratched film. Privacy is illusory; the body is always subject to sculpture, harvest, projection, or transformation. There is no warmth offered and no redemption promised, only a cold, surgical clarity that refuses to avert its gaze.

Filthy Loot Press has produced a handsome, minimalist object: stark cover art by Rat himself, clean typography, no excess. The physical book feels like the concrete city it describes. In the broader landscape of contemporary extreme horror—where shock often substitutes for substance—New Meat in a Clean Room stands apart. It shares DNA with recent works by Gretchen Felker-Martin, Eric LaRocca, or Hailey Piper, but its intellectual rigor and formal cohesion place it closer to the tradition of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood or Kathe Koja’s early novels. Ira Rat’s editorial hand is confident yet unobtrusive; the stories converse without ever feeling forced.

This is not comfortable reading. It is not intended to be. It is, however, one of the most tightly conceived, skillfully executed, and intellectually demanding horror anthologies I have encountered in recent years. Readers seeking easy scares or traditional resolution should look elsewhere. Those willing to sit with sustained discomfort will find something sharp, lasting, and deeply unsettling.

To understand why all SFF writers are historians, you have to understand what a historian does.

It is easy to think of a historian as an assembler of facts. We scour archives, libraries, and historic sites, sometimes with pick and trowel, more often with dictionary and laptop, to acquire new information: who did, wore, bought, ate, killed, burned, invented, lived, or saw what, when, and where. Just as, when describing a space elevator, I ask friends in the space tech world to send me facts, another writer might turn to me for facts about fabric dyes, currency systems, dueling customs, or castle layout, to give accuracy to a historical story or supply ingredients for an original world build.

However …

The particle physicist’s craft is not primarily describing particles at rest, but observing particles in motion, tracking their interactions, forming hypotheses about how particles form, change, and affect each other, and speculating about particles we cannot yet detect, and new things we may learn from them. Just so, the historian’s craft is not primarily filling encyclopedias and reference books with static facts, but observing historical change over time, describing past transformations and their causes, offering new hypotheses about how societies form, develop, and transform each other, testing said hypotheses, and speculating about things we do not yet know about history while trying to figure out how we might try to learn them.

Many famous histories, like Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, or Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, center on making claims about the causes of historical change: whether and why the Roman empire declined, why WWI took the shape it did, or what caused Europe’s rise to global dominance post-1500 (spoiler: Diamond's argument is right there in his title). Even more prosaic-seeming topics, like Aaron Bobrow-Strain’s White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf, marshal their facts to make arguments about what causes change: White Bread examines the baffling shift from 90 percent of America’s bread being baked at home to 90 percent being store-bought within two decades in/after 1912, attributing the change to profit-seeking bread factories funding deliberate propaganda tapping into xenophobia and hygiene panics (fake news stories about the supposed unsanitariness of bread from home ovens or immigrant-run bakeries) plus the early-twentieth century’s mania for all things scientific (kids need high-tech bread made in labs by white-coated scientists, not baked by ignorant moms!). Zooming out from the details, White Bread argues that profit-seeking corporate greed, propaganda, moral panics, and sudden fads have the power to change the world—at this moment, dozens of writers reading this are thinking about how such kinds of change could apply to their own world builds. (By the way, as White Bread shows, sliced store-bought bread dates to 1912, so the next time you hear someone say, “The best thing since sliced bread,” it means the best thing since 1912.)

History is a social science and, like all sciences, seeks (in Francis Bacon’s words) knowledge of causes and the secret motions of things—in history’s case, the causes and secret motions of human society, of us. When historians get together at conferences, we debate whether there really are such things as Dark Ages and Golden Ages, whether and where it makes sense to draw lines between periods (when does pre-modern become modern?), and whether we’ve been focusing too much on one kind of cause (political leaders, war, dynasties) and should pay more attention to another (livestock evolution, transportation tech, everybody’s mom).

In brief: The historian’s craft aims to show how our world changes, and who or what has the power to change it. Okay …

In SFF, the world usually changes. It may be saved, destroyed, discovered, overrun by zombies, driven mad by faeries, terraformed, irradiated, touched by strangers, or saved from tyrants, but it changes. Often, the story focuses on characters who shape or initiate the change for good and/or ill: plucky rebels, unlikely saviors, shadowy conspirators, ruthless dictators, the king seeking to rule wisely, the king in exile seeking to return, the faithful followers of the king in exile who make it happen. Live on the page, characters win battles, achieve regime changes, create disruptive technologies, release then battle pathogens, found world-shaping institutions, make passionate arguments in the room where it happens, or are placed by fate in the right place at the right time. If it’s a cozy fantasy, they may even popularize a new kind of bread.

All such stories advance claims about who and what has the power to change the world. Think of a dystopia where the world went bad because of Technology X, versus one where the world went bad because of Villain X, or Corporation X, Political Party X, Global Cataclysm X, Supergenius X, Aristocratic Family X, Religious Leader X—each of these makes a different claim about who and what has power to change our world. A future transformed by a new technology presents a different model of who changes the world if the technology came from one genius inventor, versus the synthesis of two inventers, versus a team of university scientists, versus corporate funding, versus a government lab. A political drama of lords, ladies, and emperors advances the claim that only those at the top have the power to shape history; a drama where the lords and ladies are in conflict with a merchant-class bigwig presents two types of world-shaping power in conflict; a drama which adds an idealist rising from the gutter presents a third; a tale where someone starts in the gutter but enters the elite and uses elite power to actually enact change goes back to only those at the top having power again. A struggling space colony may be saved by rugged space marines, dutiful hereditary lords, the teamwork of the crew, or one special little boy; each option makes a claim about where human power lies, while having the space colony perish despite all efforts makes a claim about human powerlessness.

All such stories are practicing the historian’s craft, not the half that is gathering facts, but the half that is advancing a claim about the causes and secret motions that shape human history.

SFF with worldbuilding does this even more. Every world build involves the author deciding how the imagined society got to its present shape. Was there an ancient golden age of noble elf kings, followed by a dark age caused by the actions of one evil mastermind? Such a book is in the camp with histories that claim there are such things as dark ages and golden ages. Was there a massive revolution which wiped away the old regime and built a blank-slate new world order dreamed by revolutionaries? Such a book accepts those histories of the American and French Revolutions which depict themselves as restarting from nothing like a new dawn. Did the revolution shed more blood than it likes to admit, and leave a lot of old structures and hierarchies embedded in its new order? Such a book uses different histories of the American, French, and other revolutions, and makes a different claim about whether a blank-slate new era is possible. If this is SF, did Earth face a third World War, from whose ashes the fragmented survivors created a new civilization shaped by … what? Idealistic visionaries? Rival religious cults? Rival warlords lifted to power by their dominance of guns, germs, and steel? Having World War III in the backstory of any imagined Earth future advances the claim that new eras are often born through war; a future built on the rise of a charismatic leader, or hard-earned incremental reform, makes peaceful change feel plausible. Every world build makes choices about where agency rested in the great stages of its past, using histories as models and also practicing the historian’s craft: making claims about how the world changes, and who has the power to change it.

Importantly, every sentence above could have said teaches instead of claims. Storytelling is how most claims about how the world works reach us, in childhood and adulthood, from our very first picture books to this year’s Hugo finalists. We are all familiar with the importance of representation, how it feels empowering to see a story where the hero resembles us and disempowering when the hero never resembles us, but the same is true in the structural sense. It feels empowering to read stories—fiction or nonfiction—where the world is changed by the kinds of things we feel we too could do: by teamwork, grassroots action, steady effort by someone not too different from ourselves; it feels disempowering only when powers we can’t hope to wield transform the world: superpowers, royalty, geniuses, or vast inhuman processes, whether military, economic, medical, or alien. When Sam and Frodo save the world through friendship and resisting corruption in their hearts, we, in our smallness, feel we could aspire to that; when Superman does we know we can’t.

So, all SFF authors—authors of stories with worldbuilding, and of stories where the world changes—practice the historian’s craft.

You can find some SFF that doesn’t. Romantasy, for example, sometimes has nothing at stake larger than the happiness and intimate lives of the characters; such romantasies may still have a world build which makes claims about history, but a sufficiently light world build may not. Conversely, some non-SFF genres have world-changing stakes. Many thrillers and political dramas make claims about who has the power to save the world, though usually in the form of guarding the status quo; in such stories it’s usually the choice of threat that makes claims about what changes history, whether James Bond or Jason Bourne battle terrorists, business tycoons, government agencies, traitors within governments, etc. Similarly, non-SFF historical fiction often makes claims about history, like Mantel’s Wolf Hall or Renault’s The Mask of Apollo, if the story shows the exercise of power or a major historical event, but not if it just shows the detective solving the murder or the heroine finding happiness against a historical backdrop.

In sum, all SFF writers are practicing the historian’s craft. If we think carefully about what claims our plots and world builds make about who has the power to change the world, we can use that to advance models of history which encourage hope and action, and we can avoid or subvert those models which teach powerlessness and cede agency to the powerful. And (my historian colleagues would urge me to add) we can be careful to advance historical models that recent historians agree are true, and not outdated ones like Great Man History or cycles of Dark Ages and Golden Ages which historians are toiling so hard to combat, but one bestselling book can undo the labors of a thousand academic monographs.

Important corollary: Most authors of other genres outside SFF are not historians; this is more important than it sounds like when we remember this is especially true of mainstream literary fiction.

So-called mainstream literary fiction is a genre which many falsely argue is not a genre but “normal” or “non-genre” literature. But lit fic has its tropes, pacing, furniture, and expectations just as much as other genres, it just tricks many into not noticing them, since its formula is less formulaic than the genres defined by extreme formulaicness (romance, mystery), and its furniture is less conspicuous than the genres defined by conspicuous furniture (fantasy, SF, western), but SFF is certainly as variable in formula and romance and mystery are often as realistic in setting as mainstream lit.

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.

Romance fiction, in contrast with lit fic, does depict characters taking actions to improve their lives, since part of the formula is that the heroine does not only find love, she makes some change in her life that makes her much happier: a new job, new career, moving to Italy, taking up a new hobby and forming friends, finally opening that bakery, etc. Romance depicts agency in the small sense of people making a difference in their own lives and those of communities and loved ones. These messages of hope have great power to inspire collective action, as we have seen in how romancelandia via its Romance the Vote has raised over a million dollars for democracy and, this month, tens of thousands for funding pop-up supply depots for Minneapolis protestors. But romance, like thriller, usually deals on the global sense with a static world, in which individuals take actions within the status quo that impact lives around them, but do not make one era move on to the next.

In other words: Most people today get our ideas about how history works and changes primarily by consuming SFF and historical fiction. We in the SFF genre are not only historians, we are the most influential historians practicing today. That is a lot of responsibility.

When SFF authors offer portraits of how people change the world, we exercise enormous power over worldview, over expectations, over hope. When we use history innovatively, presenting diverse or inspiring portraits of agency, we can spread truly life-shaping calls to action, or at least calls to expect that one’s actions matter, but even an old-fashioned tale of kings or superheroes, or outdated Dark Ages and Golden Ages, at least shows the world in motion, and with pivot points when some choice or action causes the next. We should not underestimate how much power genre writers have to shape how people expect the world to change, what actions are important or likely to matter, what threats to watch out for, and whether it is worth taking action when we see the world on fire.

Nor should we underestimate the power of genre readers to challenge the hegemony of the literature of powerlessness by pointing out that SFF practices the social science of history, analyzing and depicting the causes and secret motions of the human world at a larger, truer scale than the microcosmic lens of mainstream lit aspires to do.

Sometimes people ask me why I, a historian, became an SF writer since past and future are opposites. I always answer: Nothing is more like the future than the past, a long period in which cultures change, disruptions happen. I’m not a historian who decided to write SF, I wanted to write SF—indeed SFF—from early childhood, and became a historian because I realized it would be the perfect training. The more I practice both crafts, the more I realize they are one.

In a brilliant scene from Kerry Callen’s Halo and Sprocket, a slice of life comic about a single woman and an angel helping Earth’s first sentient robot learn about the world, the three unlikely roommates visit a local art show. Two pictures hang side-by-side, an abstract mass of shapes and a night scene with lovely landscape and stars. The robot asks why humans call the shapes piece abstract and the nightscape realistic when the stars are in completely inaccurate places, while the geometry of angles and lines is perfect. Once that challenge is voiced, you can’t un-see it. We shift the paradigm the same way when we ask the denigrators of genre fiction why our literatures, with diverse and realistic depictions of human agency and worlds in flux, are less realistic than mainstream lit fic with its narrow, zoomed in portraits of inner journeys and human powerlessness. When Le Guin called genre writers “realists of a larger reality” she focused on how SFF portrays other ways of being and living, demonstrating alternatives, but we also portray a larger reality by showing those realities in motion instead of in stasis, as so much real-world contemporary fiction does.

The historian’s craft is a powerful one. Medical research does not let us control that massive system called the body, but it lets us understand how it works and changes, guiding us in what to expect, and how to start our interventions when we want to affect the body for the better. Just so, the craft of history does not let us control events, but it reveals mechanisms, guides our expectations, helps us diagnose, and posit treatments. SFF authors are not usually the researchers who developed the new historical model, but physicians are not usually the researchers who developed the cure either; SFF authors are the front-line practitioners who put the fruits of history’s craft into daily practice, sharing it in doses the public can consume, combining, treating, administering, customizing, even inoculating against evils like propaganda and despair. All human beings wonder how we got the world we have and how to change it; not all stories help answer that question, but—for all their faeries, rockets, spells, and aliens—ours do.

Editor: Gautam Bhatia.

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department.

https://archive.org/details/NightfallUPGRADES

*

So there’s a man teaching some medical students about cutting cadavers and he made a joke but I didn’t understand it

Everyone’s laughing a lot though

I doubt if it was really that funny

This story has already set up its dialogue and back story so nicely

So two college dudes, Freddie and George, are carrying the body of an auld woman with a terrible mouth

They are going to use this to prank some girl who stood one of them up

Oh you silly boys

They have now dragged the corpse to the girl’s door and now they will probably run away quite fast

Wait! Creepy music!

Instead of running away so fast, Freddie is staring at the corpse

Freddie says that the corpse’s mouth was green and it was staring at him whaaaaaaaaat

This is what we came for you guys

Digging the synth music at the scene changes also

Now we are at the medical college hospital? And Freddie has suddenly been called in to assist with something. George, on the other hand, is going skiing because his priorities are different.

They are trying to revive this body but it is not cooperating

You know why? Because it has a huge hole in its heart and its face is dark purple

I’m not a doctor, but I would say such a person is dead. That is just my opinion though

Phone is ringing but since no nurse is around, Freddie magnanimously answers the phone himself

Oooh Freddie has a secret admirer who is calling him. He thinks it might be a prank though.

How did she know that Freddie would answer the phone? Dun dun dun!

The secret admirer has the perfect voice you guys

This secret admirer is bamboozling Freddie with her words

He has now promised to meet this admirer at the same place they dropped off the corpse

So a mysterious lady has asked you to meet her at a place where you dropped off a corpse. NOTHING BAD CAN HAPPEN I GUESS

Freddie has asked how she knew where to find him, pertinent question fam, and she says the guy next to you told me only the guy next to Freddie IS DEAD NO BIG DEAL

Now Freddie has come to meet the mystery lady and they are in some room? And there’s like twenties music playing? And she looks great apparently.

The lady has referenced banks crashing, so I guess she thinks it’s the thirties? I don’t know anything

We all know this is going to end badly for Freddie but right now, he’s dancing with a pretty girl and they’re having champagne and they seem happy

Now they have stopped dancing and he is asking what her hopes and dreams are

Feel like there is a rule somewhere that one should never ask the undead what their hopes and dreams are

Now I think they are going to have sex

FREDDIE DON’T HAVE SEX WITH THE UNDEAD

Well, to be fair she said she was going to go change into what she really is.

That’s probably not a good thing

She just said that’s what you want, isn’t it? NO THAT IS NOT WHAT YOU WANT FREDDIE

Freddie is saying stuff like when you meet someone special you just kinda know and we all feel bad for Freddie right now

OMG THE LADY SOUNDS LIKE SHE’S DECAYING WHAAAAAT

As we said before, DON’T HAVE SEX WITH THE UNDEAD FREDDIE

Freddie has screamed and SCENE!

So I guess Freddie is trying to tell George about his ordeal but George is laughing

He has figured out that the ghost lady was the corpse lady

George is really, really laughing

Well whatever the boys are now going to sleep

None of this is going to end well for Freddie

Which seems unfair, considering that it was George who came up with the idea, no? Isn’t it?

Some twisted twenties/thirties music is playing and I have to say it’s uncomfortable fam

George is going skiing today and Freddie is staying back to study

It’s the phone DON’T ANSWER THE PHONE FREDDIE

It’s the corpse lady who wants to meet again

Corpse lady just said that they belong together. Which is discouraging when this kind of sentiment comes from the undead.

Bro is now having insomnia

There is now a knock at the door

Surprise! It’s the corpse lady!

She’s like you took me from my bed you can’t send me back now but again this was George’s idea no?

Is Freddie having second thoughts about this whole ‘don’t have sex with the undead’ thing?

Fred is actually considering this whaaaaat I mean the logistics alone Freddie

Maybe this isn’t about sex at all, maybe the corpse lady just wants to hang out.

Freddie just opened the door and the corpse lady is standing there with no clothes on.

Welp. There goes Freddie.

Now we are back to that same cadaver class like from the beginning

I think they have opened the cadaver freezer and found Freddie inside.

Oh, the corpse lady and Freddie are together in the freezer I think.

And they look so happy. Aw

*

That was pretty good fam! I enjoyed it a lot, a typical, strong Nightfall story. I thought the lady who was the corpse did a particularly good job and it is sweet that we got a happy ending here. I did expect the story to go another way because I thought it was going to be like any other undead story. But I am very happy to see that it wasn’t. For the next few weeks I am tempted to go through some of the other stories here. Frankly, they are a nice change from the usual OTR shows which, to be honest, are often on the sloppy side. So do join us next time when we will look at another show from Nightfall. Bai dears.

Columns Editor: Joyce Chng.

Copy Editor: The Copyediting Department.

the walls of their City, Dex crosses paths with Splendid Speckled Mosscap, a robot on a quest to find “what humans need.” Humankind, after all, is no longer reliant on robotic labor: Two centuries before, robots developed consciousness and left their factories for the forest (Chambers 6). The journey that follows is not only a meeting of human and synthetic minds, but a “rewilding” of human purpose for Dex, which drives them toward the text’s central invocation: to “find the strength to do both” (Chambers 10).

Chambers’s rich descriptions of comfortable objects—hot food, crisp sheets, a calming cup of tea—reinforce the novella’s frequent categorization as a “cozy” text (Harris 2025). Yet this emphasis on comfort adds to the eremitic rigor of the book by illustrating Dex’s devotion to Allalae, the God of Small Comforts, and is embedded in Dex’s function as “three parts therapist, one part confessor, and two parts bartender” (Ladd 2021). Criticism has inadequately considered the text’s urgency around negotiating human purpose as part of Dex’s monastic role. Instead, it attempts to historicize the text’s discussion of the relationship between technologized human comfort and the harsh realities of the wilderness within an industrial context that can feel anachronistic to monastic work (Arianne 2025). Yet by staging a conversation between a robot and a human with a vested interest in committed purpose, Chambers offers fruitful speculations on the relationship between function and purpose.

The companions’ dialogue revises human flourishing as a rewilding process, led by a commitment to fluidities between technology and nature. This rewilding is reconstitutive, suggesting reconciliations between humans, our technology, and the natural world through messy, sometimes injurious balance. Critically, this process is modelled through programmed and nonhuman actors, whose nonhuman priorities are also centered. In this discussion I will first consider Dex’s “rewilding” as an ecosystemic process resulting from engagement with the external world, rather than monastic contemplation. Mosscap’s role in this rewilding will then be considered as a model of neither a nostalgic and impractical virtue ethics nor a rationalist optimization but a more ecosystemic, and perhaps more plausible, way of being. 

In Ways of Being (2022), James Bridle describes intelligence—broadly defined here as the ability of a creature to take in information, process it, and apply it to behaviors or perceptions—as one of many “ways of being”: “it is an interface to [the material world]; it makes the world manifest” (Bridle 52). He furthermore suggests that “all intelligence is ecological,” only knowable from some sort of inter- or intra-action (Bridle 57). Bridle asks:

What would it mean to build artificial intelligences and other machines that were more like octopuses, more like fungi, or more like forests? What would it mean—to us and for us—to live among them? And how would doing so bring us closer to the natural world, to the earth which our technology has sundered, and sundered us from? (Bridle 11)

Bridle’s discussion of these alternative ways of being, from mycelia to moss, emphasizes the possible misapplication of anthropocentric characteristics in our relationship to technology. It is worthwhile to integrate ecological methods into analyses of literary portrayals of alternative ways of being, not least because the collision between extrapolative futures and the somewhat less optimistic present can help us decipher how we might respond to what is coming before it gets here. After all, SF has its characteristic prescience; consider the depiction of rocket-propelled space travel in Cyrano de Bergerac’s The Other World (1657). A Psalm for the Wild-Built exists in dialogue with a longer tradition of “rewilding” through admission of technology into ecologies in SF. 

The positioning of technology as a route to rewilding is not specific to solarpunk, nor did it originate with the genre. Solarpunk is almost hallucinogenic in its optimism, although it has in some cases started to become more realistic. There is an infectious quality, and perhaps an unsettling idealism, in a genre that allows the reader to imagine a world in which we need not place our bets on coal or plutonium but instead on the clean comfort of sunlight. Yet similar, less idealized technological mediators and models can be found in the ecosystemically-minded generation ship of Kim Stanley Robinson’s famously pessimistic Aurora (2015), or even in the tenuously symbiotic relationship between Le Guin’s technologized Cities and Archives of Wakwaha in Always Coming Home (1985). Mosscap’s modeling of an alternative way of being is characteristic of these ecological thinkers, especially in the robot’s emphasis on decay, disposal, and disassembly. Yet A Psalm for the Wild-Built does represent the central impulse of solarpunk, which Konstantinou describes as a more imperative “ought” rather than a “could be.” This reflects an increased attention to SF’s particular responsibility in its interlocutory relationship with tech, as described by Yeliz Figen Döker and Zoya Yasmine in the Cambridge Journal of Artificial Intelligence last year. Mosscap dramatises a rewilded disposition toward nature for Dex and for the reader, but it also emphasizes the importance of this rewilding for future productive and responsible engagements between people, our tech, and the natural world. By reading these texts together, we can consider what we might learn from our own technologies, in developing our own ways of being in our ecosystem.

Dex’s travel is initially reminiscent of an offline millennial van-lifer setting off in a vintage campervan to find the coastal eddies of Point Reyes, but their quest for meaning immediately implicates the external world, not just the internal, through its environmental implications around balance and fluidity:

Oh, there were plenty of bugs–butterflies and spiders and beetles galore, all happy little synanthropes whose ancestors had decided the City was preferable to the chaotic fields beyond its border walls. But none of these creatures chirped. None of them sang. (Chambers 6)

Dex’s emphasis on “ancestors” identifies their dissatisfaction as a historical issue, with adaptation to the orderly structure of the City, itself a “healthy place, a thriving place” accompanied by the disappearance of singing in its resident creatures (Chambers 6). A straightforward reading of these “happy little synanthropes” suggests a subtly sinister dimension to the City, in spite of the apparent health of its ecosystem. Yet the tension of this moment lies in the siloing “border walls”—reminiscent of Le Guin’s Wall of Anarres in The Dispossessed—upon whose conservationist function the continued function of the City and the “chaotic fields” are predicated. 

This tension is underscored by Dex’s choice of the term “synanthropes,” which emphasizes the balance between closeness and otherness: While the butterflies, spiders, and beetles are neighbors, they are not kin. The echoing call of this chirping, singing wilderness foregrounds the contrasting eerie silence of the City’s bugs. The emphasis on song in this moment evokes an oral tradition in the natural world and in doing so rewilds personal and historical expression from human actors into the broader ecosystem. The text, and ecological thinkers like Bridle, do not suggest that through this rewilding humans are discovered to be fundamentally less complex than we believe, but that our environment is capable of greater complexity than we anticipate.

The development Dex undergoes in the “chaotic fields” and the dense forest beyond is initially unsatisfying; the text ends on a wobble. Dex is unable to resolve the felt necessity of their calling with the sinking feeling that their work is unsatisfying, and ultimately decides to put aside their work in order to continue accompanying Mosscap on its quest. Readings of Dex’s surprising nonanswer to the question of human purpose have varied from an optimistic nihilism in the face of purposelessness to an alternative resolution to the works/faith line. Yet the text’s refusal is its resolution; after a harrowing journey through the wilderness, a sudden revelation of very human purpose would undercut Dex’s reassimilation into the often incomprehensible ecosystem they are now a part of. Much of the text emphasizes the distinction between healthy environments that are navigable by humans (as in the City with its “happy little synanthropes”) and the total wilderness: “[a cave] was craggy and dark, uncomfortably angled. A stagnant smell emanated from nowhere in particular… A fragile rib cage of something extremely dead lay without ceremony on the floor, a few tufts of limp fur scattered around, unwanted by whatever had crunched the bones clean” (Chambers 117). 

This emphasis on discomfort in Dex’s wilderness, which is “uncomfortably angled” and “without ceremony,” unsettles the almost excessive emphasis on comfort, ritual, and definition that pervades the novella. The text suggests that it is important, even in a utopian future where we have become reconciled to our environment, for there to be an unsettling “nowhere in particular” in which bad smells, “fragile rib cage[s]” of dead creatures, and things that “crunch bones clean” live without human structure or observation. This nonanswer becomes an ecological resolution: that it is not in nature for us to find clear and defined purpose, and that the desperate human desire for this definition is anomalous, rather than the norm. As Gautam Bhatia’s Strange Horizons review of the novel observed, the text is ateleological as part of its ecological commitments. For Dex to remain uncertain about their purpose, yet to continue onward, enacts the text’s central invocation to “find the strength to do both.” Dex is still a participant in an ecosystem, but their role shifts: from purpose-built to wild-built, from ends to means. 

This shift in Dex’s identity is catalyzed by an assertion made by Mosscap. Embedded in a love for, and wonder at, the environment more broadly, and a joy at their participation in it, Mosscap’s assessment of Dex’s dilemma returns Dex to the ecosystem without reducing their complexity. Mosscap says:

You’re an animal, Sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine! Good! So do I! But if I wanted to crawl into a cave and watch stalagmites with Frostfrog for the remainder of my days, that would also be both fine and good. You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it… You are allowed to just live. That is all most animals do. (Chambers, pp. 138-9)

Mosscap’s argument locates both Dex and itself squarely alongside the rest of their ecosystem, and, more subtly, it asserts Mosscap’s authority to determine what is “fine and good.” Mosscap’s assertion that Dex is only an animal is not a denial of the particularities of humanity so much as it is an invitation for humans to recognize their existing participation in a larger system. Dex’s failure to reach a clear definition of purpose¹ constitutes a rewilding, facilitated by Mosscap’s intervention as an equally authoritative interlocutor within the same ecosystem. By asserting that “it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it,” Mosscap reframes Dex’s purposelessness into a subtle call to action—or, perhaps, a call to attention: to “marvel.” The claim that marveling is a necessary ecological function recalls Bridle’s framing of the purpose of intelligence as one ecological interface amongst many. In an echo of early American naturalist thinkers,² Chambers asserts that to marvel is a necessary part of human flourishing, a mandatory part of responsible human participation in our environment. To be a responsible ecological citizen, Dex must recognize that as an animal, they have “no purpose.” Dex’s shift across the course of the text is a reversion from a purpose-led synanthrope to a more expressive, attentive partaker in their ecosystem, following in Mosscap’s footsteps.

The success of Dex’s realization depends on Mosscap’s authority to determine what is “fine and good.” By putting substantial definitional power in the hands of a robot, Chambers confirms that the “wild-built” robots of the text are not only members of, but advocates for, the natural world.

Much of Mosscap’s ecological authority rests on its status as a “construct.” The monastic scholar whose reflective introduction contextualizes the novella asserts that robots were originally made as “constructs that could build other constructs” (Chambers 1). The term “construct” evokes a synthetic, potentially artificial quality, particularly when it comes to questions of reproduction or species continuance, maintaining in its periphery the possibility of deconstruction or even spontaneous collapse. Chambers emphasizes the anomalous, fragile, and potentially transitional nature of constructs: “we struggle to understand that human constructs are carved out and overlaid, that these are the places that are the in-between, not the other way around” (Chambers 110). Mosscap and its robot kin could theoretically live forever if they maintained themselves indefinitely, but robots in the novella refuse the potentially empowering permanence and adaptability of immortality. Instead, robots in A Psalm for the Wild-Built reproduce by scavenging the functional parts of their deceased kin. Once no more robots function, the species will come to an end, having run the natural course of its component parts. 

Constructs must be reconstructed, recycled, and repurposed. By developing these new and yet more conventionally natural forms of reproduction, the robots imagine an effective way of participating in an ecosystem which is inspired by the time-limitedness and inevitable decomposition of its other members. Mosscap asserts that by remaining immortal, rather than recycling, the robots would be “behaving in opposition to the very thing they desperately sought to understand” (Chambers 94). These recycling practices position the robots as not just responsible actors within their ecosystem, but also as its historians, echoing Donna Haraway’s assertion that “Ancestors turn out to be very interesting strangers; kin are unfamiliar (outside what we thought was family or gens), uncanny, haunting, active” (Haraway 103). 

Robotic history in A Psalm for the Wild-Built is not transmitted through oral storytelling, nor through formal robot history texts, but through the passing-on of “remnants.” Describing remnants, Mosscap says: “I have a remnant of chairs, but I have never sat in one” (Chambers 56). Remnants lie between instinct and memory, and are transmitted through robotic component parts. In a human analogy, Chambers’s remnants are almost epigenetic. The function of remnants, to borrow a metaphor appropriate to Dex’s monastic calling, resembles the inborn architecture of the soul in Teresa of Ávila’s interior castle: structural, with all the local nuances of a city, and, likewise, traversable and signposted. Remnants carry trauma from the Factory Age, and guide the development of a robot culture despite the dispersion and solitude of Chambers’s robots, who spend most of their time alone in nature. The book itself also mimics this dynamic memory, as the natural world intervenes on the page with the inclusion of naturalistic fleurons of maple leaves at the beginning of every chapter. This symbolic infiltration of the processed paper of the book by its material precursor enacts what Connor Louiselle calls the “positive reinforcement of solarpunk” through aesthetic reminders of the natural world (Louiselle, Almanac for the Anthropocene). 

Mosscap models this alternative way of being in an ecosystem for Dex by maintaining its inherent remnants alongside the embedded newness of its capacity for wonder and curiosity. This emphasis on both present being and cultural memory reframes construction as a creative, generative activity rather than an industrial one. Compare the craftsmanship of Mosscap’s with the manufacturing origin of its original central compartment, which is stamped with “643-143, Property of Wescon Textiles, Inc,” a name whose numerics evokes any number of dehumanizing historical precedents (Chambers 93). In contrast, Mosscap’s insistence on the ecosystemic embeddedness of robots models a creative, reconstitutive way of being in the world. Rather than being constructed, the “wild-built” robots are described as “composed,” like music, with the regular rhythm of consciousness accompanied by a melodic emergent cultural memory (Chambers 93). Like the crickets Dex leaves the city for, Mosscap’s existence sings. 

Resisting the temptation towards anthropomorphizing, Chambers’s depiction of Mosscap remains resolutely nonhuman.³ Mosscap insists on being called “it,” while emphasizing the dignity of an object operating outside of recognizably human behavioral norms: “We’re machines, and machines are objects. Objects are its… We don’t have to fall into the same category to be of equal value” (Chambers 69). Mosscap’s is not a call for objectification, for treating humans in the same way we currently treat objects. Rather, it’s a call to recognize different ways of being in an ecosystem by nonhuman actors, a recognition that does not detract from participation already realized by human ones. Dex’s rewilding results from a recognition that humans are made up of separable and often fluid component parts, built without purpose or calling, embedded in an ecosystem of which we are not always fully cognizant but must always try to be mindful. We must continue anyway, and we must continue to marvel.

From the vantage point of 2026, this novella already feels, in some ways, like a relic, with its optimism about the potential of technology to do more than steal our data, hallucinate our work for us, and provide positive reinforcement where gentle criticism from a human might do a better job. Russell and Norvig’s seminal text on the development of deep learning gestures at the Bayesian networks they anticipated in advanced AI models. The suggestion that machines will operate on Bayesian decision-making principles neither suggests any encouraging similarity to the unpredictable texture of human decision-making nor offers an alternative model for true robot consciousness. It certainly does not do much to reassure the reader of much opportunity for kinship with our future robot neighbors. 

Yet, as Bridle observes, “We are the technology of our tools: they shape and form us” (Bridle 18). SF imagines alternative ways for us to coexist with these tools, and in turn posits alternative ways in which we may ourselves be better “technology.” To recognize our own constructedness in a way that extends beyond the social world into the natural one is to challenge our specialness within the ecosystem, and to perhaps have a shot at a more collaborative relationship with our environment. We clearly have remnants of cricket song. Perhaps the recognition that it is our duty as a species to listen to it might tug the reader to the wilderness, where we could unpack our constructs from a satchel and watch them flourish.

Without constructs, you will unravel few mysteries. Without knowledge of the mysteries, your constructs will fail. These pursuits are what make us, but without comfort, you will lack the strength to sustain either. (Chambers 135)

Footnotes

1.  Perhaps best framed in religious terms, in conversation with Frank Herbert’s Litany against Fear or Octavia Butler’s Earthseed tenets.
2.  Consider Thoreau’s essay “Walking.”
3.  Much can be said about the reassurance found in treating machines that appear to think like people, and about the lengths we will go to in order to make these objects familiar to us. Consider the Thinking Machines Corporation supercomputer, the CM-5, which had to use extra computational power in order to maintain the flashing red lights that made it appear to be “thinking” (Thiel, 1994).

Works cited and consulted:

Arianne. “A Psalm for the Wild Built: Analysis & Reflections,” Letters from Ari, Substack, 21 June, 2025. 

Abrams, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, Vintage Books, 1997.

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Duke University Press, 2007.

Bridle, James. Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence. Function, 2022.

Haraway, Donna. ‘4. Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene’, Staying with the Trouble : Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 2016.

Harris, James. ‘A PSALM FOR THE WILD-BUILT and A PRAYER FOR THE CROWN-SHY by Becky Chambers’, Classics of Science Fiction, 18 November 2025.

Hendlin, Yogi Hale. ‘Compost modernity!’, Aeon, 10 February 2026.

Ladd, Christina ‘A Psalm for the Wild-Built Review: Find the Strength to Do Both’, Geeklyinc, 14 July 2021.

Konstantinou, Lee. ‘Something Is Broken in Our Science Fiction’, Slate, 15 Jan 2019.

Magnasson, Andri Snær. Love Star, 2002; translated 2012 by Victoria Cribb

Russell, Stuart and Peter Norvig. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Prentice Hall, 1995.

Scott, Spencer. ‘Solarpunk: Refuturing our Imagination for an Ecological Transformation’, One Earth, October 5 2025.

Thiel, Tamiko, “Connection Machine CM-1/CM-2: Design Legacy,” 1994 (Digitized).

Wagner, Phoebe and Brontë Christopher Wieland (eds.), Almanac for the Anthropocene: A Compendium of Solarpunk Futures, West Virginia University Press, 2022.

As far as themes and threads go: A prominent one is women who are trapped by their roles, by a lack of opportunity, and by men. These men are sometimes well-meaning and clueless—but often they are mean and even cruel, dismissive and neglectful, and closed. Men who don’t ask questions, who assume things about the women and the world around them: what they are like and what they are capable of and what they mean. Many of these stories (and a lot of McKillip’s work in general) are romantic and end happily (as she alludes to in “Writing High Fantasy,” the final entry in this anthology); but it’s the men who are willing not just to think, but to reconsider, who find happy endings. These men put metaphors together and uncover different perspectives, and they allow other people to know more than they do. The exception to this lies in the more fairy-tale or parable-feeling stories, like “The Lion and the Lark,” in which the man is a magical entity and doesn’t do a whole lot of learning or changing. But in “The Lion and the Lark,” the man at least does a good job of knowing and loving the protagonist.

The fairy world appears often, posited as a secret world. And here’s another of the collection’s threads: secrets, and particularly secret identities and their discovery. The majority of these stories have at least one character who isn’t who they seem to be, or who isn’t sure themselves who they are. There’s often a lot of intersection between secret identities and secret worlds, or sometimes simply a different, secret, way of things. Indeed, the most important hallmark of McKillip’s style, I think, is her particular mix of solidity and dreaminess. Her characters feel like real people, with practical concerns, who you could imagine stubbing their toes or running out of groceries—things that are mundane but also specific to them and their world. But these solid characters exist in much more fluid worlds. Her settings and plots are both held together by feeling, evocative description, and character, and so sometimes they’re vague and oddly shaped. Sometimes her novels can be a little loose and meandering because of that dreaminess, while some of the short stories in this collection end before I wish they did.

My two very favorite stories in the collection are “Lady of the Skulls and “Byndley.” Both of them exemplify this point about style in fascinating ways.

There’s something particularly powerful and rich about “Lady of the Skulls,” and I think part of that is due to how focused the setting is: a lone tower, filled with vast amounts of mythical treasure, standing far away from everything on a barren plain. Those who visit the tower are allowed to choose one thing to take with them. If they choose the most precious thing in the tower, they can leave freely; if they choose wrongly, they die as soon as they leave. The Lady of the Skulls is the woman who guards this tower and has to watch as men come and break themselves on it. She plants her flowers in old skulls. Her watering can is the helmet of some past adventurer.

I felt the awe of the magic here, and understood this woman as a particular, specific person. All of the complex elements and different flavors get to kind of marinate in this one specific place, which sits at one specific point in these men’s lives. We do get a flashback at the end, but it feels like a reward to me, not a break in focus, because it finally gives us the final piece we need to understand the place we’ve been in for the rest of the story.

In general, though, my favorite McKillip stories tend to sit somewhere in between her real-world style and her vaguest dream-like style. “Byndley” does exactly that. It is about a wizard named Reck who once fell in love with the faerie queen. The faerie queen invited him into the woods, and took him into her bed. But the queen has a husband, and Reck can’t help but be jealous. He steals a special gift that the king gave the queen: a “tiny living world within a glass globe” that’s astonishingly beautiful. Because he’s a wizard, he was able to escape, by jumping into the globe itself and making the globe vanish. Now, years later, he still has the globe.

“I took it partly to hurt her, because she stole me out of my world and made me love her and she did not love me, and partly because it is very beautiful, and partly so that I could show it to others, as proof that I had been in the realm of Faerie and found my way back to this world. I took it out of anger and jealousy, wounded pride and arrogance. And out of love, most certainly out of love. I wanted to remember that once I had been in that secret, gorgeous country just beyond imagination, and to possess in this drab world a tiny part of that one.” (p. 111)

But Reck doesn’t say this to excuse or defend himself. He explains this to one of the citizens of the town of Byndley, where he’s come on a quest to return the glass globe back to the faerie world. He cannot live in peace with what he’s stolen. He feels the weight of the queen’s memory—or his own guilt. So he searches far and wide for a way to give it back. And in his search, it turns out, he seems to have discovered something true about faerieland and about himself, something that applies to McKillip’s stories generally: Something about the porousness of worlds, and about what it means to be inside one or another, and how you can sometimes be in more than one place at the same time, in different ways.

In fact, Reck discovers that he’s never really left the globe at all. The town of Byndley is made up of faeries in disguise, and the townsperson to whom he told his tale was the faerie queen herself. When he leaves Byndley, he doesn’t look back: “He looked up instead and saw the lovely, mysterious, star-shot night flowing everywhere around him, and the promise, in the faint, distant flush at the edge of the world, of an enchanted dawn” (p. 116). This is how McKillip’s work makes me feel, too, and I think it’s what I want out of fantasy most of all (alongside characters to be there with me): the feeling of that promise of wonder and enchantment, and the truth of that feeling. Somehow, by giving the globe back, Reck gets to keep that feeling with him, which was what he really wanted anyway.

Stylistically, “Byndley” and “Lady of the Skulls” work particularly well because of the way they give us that feeling—they give us a world that we can feel that way about. It’s magical enough to be wondrous, but it’s also defined enough to picture at all. Sometimes, McKillip’s more real-world stories lose the wonder for me—“Mer,” for example, is this way, although I did really enjoy it. Others are so vague that it’s hard to get a grip on anything, though this is more true of some of her novels than of any of the stories in this collection. In The Book of Atrix Wolfe (1995), for example, there’s also a wizard who tries to travel between the fairy realm and the human realm. But that story is written in a much more dreamlike way, and also (maybe more importantly, even) the journey often takes place in Atrix Wolfe’s head. For much of the book, he has nobody to talk to about what he’s trying to do or what exactly is troubling him. In “Byndley,” Reck asks people questions all the time, so that even if we don’t get definite answers about what the world is like, we learn what the people of Byndley are like and what they think. In “Lady of the Skulls,” the two main characters ask each other questions, too. There’s something about that communication and the acceptance of wonder that really makes these stories come alive.

McKillip is unique; there’s no one else who you’d mistake for her. But she is deeply invested in fantasy as a genre, and fantasy in turn is often interested in interpretation and repetition (among other things). Le Guin is maybe the most obvious comparison, as far as feminism and the role of women in magic go (A Wizard of Earthsea [1968] notwithstanding; McKillip didn’t need to go through the learning curve that Le Guin did). Tanith Lee is also in there, and Angela Carter (Carter especially in “The Lion and the Lark”); and, a little bit more recently, Ursula Vernon—the matter-of-factness, the vivid lives of different unusual people (particularly women), the brand of humor. But “Byndley” in particular shows McKillip’s fundamental Beagle-ness.

Peter S. Beagle is an admirer of McKillip’s work and they collaborated on a novel; he also wrote the afterword to Dreams of Distant Shores (2016). Together, they’re two of my personal favorite writers because of their simultaneous true love of fantasy and reality—for the strangeness to be found within. McKillip is a little dreamier than Beagle is, Beagle a little more jokey and parodic, and Beagle’s women frustrate me sometimes, but that’s for some other review; but ultimately what we see in their fantasies is an unusual interest in people and in spaces-between.

Take, for example, McKillip’s “The Harrowing of the Dragon of Hoarsbreath.” This is a relatively early story. And Kushner’s introduction explains that Terri Windling commissioned it for her collection Elsewhere in 1982; it was McKillip’s first published short story for adults. I like how surprising it is, and how funny it is. The characters are taken seriously—it matters who they are and why they think and feel the ways they do. What happens to them isn’t predictable, and nor is it predictable what the story focuses on and cares about. It’s excellent stuff. Likewise, in “The Witches of Junket,” the characters are great and at the very centre of the story, alongside a really fascinating portrayal of witchiness. The POV character in particular is one of McKillip’s excellent older women. If the story gets a little bit jumbled up, and the pacing is a little bit too fast—there are too many new characters and I would’ve loved the time to get to know them a little better, and to more clearly understand what was at stake—this can be forgiven because of the connection it makes between reader and characters.

“The Witches of Junket” is set in our contemporary world, as is “Out of the Woods.” This is another story that’s difficult to predict, but in this case that’s more because of what the story chooses to focus on than because of plot. The main character, Leta, is worked to the bone by her husband and by her magician boss, and we know that something must change. But that change is surprising, more melancholy than I expected, and somehow also exactly right. I wish this story had been longer, because I wanted to know what happens to the main character, but its abrupt ending is part of the point. Indeed, I’m not always very patient about shorter stories, especially when they hinge on ambiguity or some sort of “gotcha” moment, but McKillip almost always wrong-foots me. I have no idea what happens in “Weird,” for example, and yet I’m still thinking about it. I don’t feel irritated or upset about that, just intrigued.

Still, “Knight in the Well” is maybe the book’s primary example of McKillip’s dreamy vagueness: There’s a lot going on, it’s beautiful, and, again, I had no idea what any of it meant until maybe halfway through the story at best. This story, too, ends rather abruptly, and I would’ve enjoyed much more time with these characters instead of having their conflicts resolved so fast. In contrast with “Weird,” however, this is one of the volume’s longer stories, at around fifty pages. “The Gorgon in the Cupboard” is of similar length, and likewise I wanted more perspective from it: on the story’s women, as well as more information about the titular gorgon, who in a way was the least interesting part of the story. If the shorter stories can feel too brief, both of these longer stories feel a little bit structurally lopsided—and so also somehow unfinished.

Why are these stories the length that they are? Why not longer or shorter? I wonder what was going on with these stories; were they written for some purpose in particular? I would love more background information on them. This is perhaps my one real criticism of the present volume: I would have liked more information on the stories, and more information about the logic behind the anthology itself. It’s a lovely book, and all of the stories deserve to be here and to be read carefully. I’m just not sure what makes this collection the “Essential” McKillip, especially when compared to Tachyon’s earlier (and also excellent) McKillip anthology, Dreams of Distant Shores. With a title like this, I’d have liked there to be an explanation of why these stories, and not others, are so definitive.

For instance, “Wonders of the Invisible World,” collected here, is the title of another McKillip anthology, and so we might assume it has significance. In the story (which shares its title with a book by Cotton Mather, the seventeenth-century Puritan), a researcher from the far future goes back in time and pretends to be an angel that Cotton Mather saw in a feverish revelation. Her boss has sent her there because he’s trying to write a history of imaginative thought—and, in their far future, everything possible to imagine has already been imagined by a very powerful computer. The researcher isn’t allowed to veer from her script, which is set to minimize any alteration of the past, even though she very much wants to. When Cotton Mather raves about witches, it’s difficult for her to stomach. But she’s supposed to keep the angel within the limits of what Cotton Mather would have imagined the angel to be.

When the researcher returns home, to a time when everything imaginable has already been imagined, her son and her friends are playing a video game together. Their characters are in an intergalactic zoo, and they try to defeat the computer by imagining different animals. The computer is always able to display whatever the children dream up—but then an angel appears in one of the animal cages. The angel belongs to none of them. Except, possibly, to the researcher. The angel is caught in the zoo, like the researchers are caught in history, and like her current world is trapped because imagination can no longer create a way out. But then the angel disappears, and that’s the end of the story. So what does this mean, and what can it tell us about the logic of this collection? My best stab at it: The Essential Patricia A. McKillip is by and large concerned with three things—how can imagination set people free, what do people imagine, and how do those imagined things/people/places connect and change throughout space and time?

If nothing else, this collection certainly serves as an excellent McKillip primer. The anthology itself is beautiful: Thomas Carey’s cover illustration is so very McKillip, and it’s also resonant of the ornate Kinuko Y. Craft’s Ace covers. Ellen Kushner’s foreword is deeply personal and moving. But other excellent McKillip primers exist: They include Dreams of Distant Shores itself, a Strange Horizons roundtable on Ombria in Shadow, and Audrey Isabel Taylor’s Patricia A. McKillip and the Art of Fantasy World-Building. I also highly recommend The Riddle-Master of Hed and its two sequels, as well as The Forgotten Beasts of Eld. But if you haven’t started reading McKillip yet, this is certainly a good place to start—and then, hopefully, continue. But, wherever you start reading McKillip’s work, you won’t want to stop.

Slow Gods is proper science fiction as opposed to a story set in a recognisable world, something common in much of North’s previous works. Set in the far future and spanning a galaxy, it remains a high-concept effort full of delight and invention. The narrator, “frustrated academic” Mawukana na-Vdnaze (Maw for short), is not to be trusted and yet we know that he has died multiple times—and is, as a result, potentially a god. He is an interesting character to dump into the ultra-capitalistic world of the Shine. Maw was born into debt, and charged for his birth. Every breath taken, every bit of sustenance consumed, in this world has a fee attached. In return, paying citizens are expected to rise by their own merits while working at their maximum capacity, or to sink into debt and work their way out, however unrealistic this achievement might be. People sort of accept this, giving their children middle names such as “Chairman” and “Director.” North isn’t subtly going after our capitalistic and consumerist society here. They’re bashing it with a wrecking ball. Dropped from space.

The story forms around a supernova event that will destroy several inhabited planets and which therefore need evacuating. North spends a lot of the first few chapters on worldbuilding and not so much on the storytelling—so much so, in fact, that Slow Gods reads like a memoir from the future as opposed to a novel. Maw narrates how he felt about growing up and living what was perceived as a normal life, neither particularly happy nor unhappy; North, via Maw, tells, rather than shows. The Slow, for example, is an ancient machine that travels around the galaxy and knows things. It is potentially an AI. North holds back from delving into the science of this science fiction story on a number of occasions, since their future societies create things that are in some ways unknowable to the peoples that inhabit the story. North uses phrases such as “pundits grumbled [it] was ‘some sort’ of ion drive” and talks about the terrifying mysteries of arcspace—this universe’s method of interplanetary travel, dark, unknown, and creepy. Indeed, it is Lovecraftian in some respects. Is there something in the corner just out of perception?

North writes as if it were the easiest thing in the world. Prose and ideas seem to flow as naturally as a river and it’s never a surprise when they throw in a curve-ball or two: numbered points mid-chapter, a chapter that begins by providing a list of a character’s lovers; oddly indented paragraphs, the Slow speaking in capital letters; interlude sections, such as “On Pilots,” which again skip the science bit by addressing this future’s many unproven theories about itself. In other words, giant concepts are readily accepted.

After the Slow arrives into Shine space and informs everyone that a supernova event in which two stars will collide is about to occur in the not-too-distant future, North writes: “and if we look back through the historical data it would appear that they are on a collision course and actually the maths is fairly elementary now we bother to think about it.” What we learn is that, at the point of this discovery, the Ventures—Shine bodies that run the cities—wiped the data. They didn’t want people to panic. They denied there was any problem. Business needed to carry on. But it is now too late: Everyone with a telescope could see, and then come the protests and riots. And everything changes.

As well as the big ideas, North spends time on the small things that affect us all. Time and again, they return to the idea of small talk, social niceties, and cultural misunderstandings—the things that mean something to us as individuals just trying to navigate through life. I particularly enjoyed a passage seemingly referencing Kurt Vonnegut: “Adjumiris hate silence, but when they chose it, it is deliberate, absolute. When there is nothing more to say, there is nothing more to say. And so it goes, and so it goes, and so it goes.”

Another example: North’s various peoples have a variety of pronouns, including the Slow. North themself is non-binary. In the interlude headed “A note on gender,” they explain all the different pronouns in the setting of Slow Gods. One race, the aka-aka, have a single gender and are “we”; another, the aforementioned Adjumir, have eight genders and many pronouns, based on region. The use of a variety of pronouns throughout the novel (xe, xim, que, quim, Hé, hím, and more) normalises gender fluidity and non-binary cultures, and is also used to demonstrate the othering of some of the peoples. One character humorously points out: “You can remember the difference between innumerable different types of sausage or sporting teams, but you cannot hold in your mind a mere half-dozen or so categories of people?” Even machines have different pronouns: Maw has a kind of robotic intelligence as a companion who is known as “qi” (in one of qis guises, qis is a three-tailed fox).

To counterbalance the dominance of the Shine, there is a great diversity in societal structures, too. In Lud, for example, there is what could be seen as socialism, where everyone serves the people as a whole. Elsewhere, houses are bio-formed and spaceships are grown (and are therefore essentially alive), highlighting ways to live and thrive outside of capitalism. Elsewhere, there is a nod to isolationism, with a species called the kekekee who say that “the rest of the galaxy sounded awful.”

But what is all this about Maw dying, and what about any plot? Maw is an arcpilot and during a flight through arcspace is somehow changed: When he is killed, he resurrects, sometimes slowly and painfully, but dying again and again, in space. This proves useful as most pilots can only do one or two flights before they are no longer of use. Maw, however, can keep going indefinitely. This proves of particular use in the evacuation of a planet due to be destroyed by the supernova. But Maw believes himself to have died and therefore to be now a monster, perhaps a bad copy of himself at best.

Is he part of the darkness that is arcspace? He tends to be what people perceive him to be—when he is seen as a good man, he is one. He can also forget to obey the laws of physics, and that can lead to horrendous acts of destruction. During the evacuation, however, Maw falls for historian and curator Gebre, who doesn’t necessarily fall back in return. Gebre is not one of those selected for evacuation: It is impossible to get everyone off the planet in time, but Gebre is tasked with saving antiquities and cultural relics.

Meanwhile, the Shine have moved onto a neutral planet, finally admitting that theirs will be destroyed by the supernova—an occupation, if you will. They also have what are known as “blackships” stationed around the galaxy, ready to attack any resistance. A guerilla movement grows and Maw is drawn into what the Shine don’t call a war against the rebels but a “humanitarian intervention,” as the only person who can reliably use arcships for tactical resistance raids. This eventually results in atrocities as bad as those committed by the Shine, and Maw withdraws as a consequence. There is also a sub-plot here about a communication device used by the blackships, alongside some espionage. The only slight criticism amid all this is that the leader of the Shine, the prime capitalist, is a bit of a cartoon villain in his actions in the way he dismisses all life, says things like “[h]asn’t this all been interesting” as he kills someone and laughs. Worse, despite this there is no real jeopardy from him other than to minor characters.

But Maw is as human as you (though he is also a monster and a god). You believe in him as an individual, and therefore in the importance of the life of an individual; but you also believe there is a way forward in a collective community that exists for the betterment of all and not just its biggest shareholder. This is more than just a space opera, more than just an adventure spanning centuries. There are so many huge ideas and issues addressed in Slow Gods—capitalism, religion, gender, culture, climate migration, othering, war, love, morality, having a meaningful life—but they don’t get in the way of enjoying a well-written and enjoyable novel. Treatises, memoirs, novels, stories don’t need to be subtle to get you thinking, nor to work. And North’s Slow Gods simply works.

To recap, the Black Company is the last extant of various free companies of mercenaries which waged campaigns across a vast Southern continent. It has largely forgotten its original purpose, in spite of trying to maintain detailed chronicles. (One of Cook’s narrators, Croaker—the original one and still one of the constant voices of the books—is both surgeon and annalist.) In the first book, they took service across the sea on the Northern continent with its dominant ruler, the Lady—who was brutally rebuilding, after an interregnum, the empire established by her rather nastier late husband, the Dominator, with the help of various powerful but enslaved magic workers, the Taken. At first, the Black Company help her expand her realm, but latterly they promote a successful rebellion; this is all rather complicated by the treachery of various of the Taken, attempts to resurrect the Dominator, and the strong romantic attraction between the Lady and Croaker.

Stripped of her magic, but not in any particular way reformed, the Lady joins the remnants of the Company, now under Croaker’s command. They return South in a quest for their own institutional history, constantly recruiting new troops—some of them local military castes descended from earlier generations of the Company—and find themselves at war with an alliance of former members of the Taken, among them the Lady’s sister, Soulcatcher; a group of wizards from a parallel world, the Shadowmasters; and the cultist followers of demon goddess Kina, the Deceivers. [1]

Soulcatcher, who has survived an earlier beheading, abducts Croaker, whose relationship with her sister maliciously intrigues her. Much of the Company is trapped in an extended siege. A remnant commanded by the Lady, who is now pregnant with Croaker’s child, allies itself with the Deceivers, whom she believes she has successfully conned into thinking her an avatar of Kina. In fact, their leaders abduct her newborn daughter to fulfil that role (this reversal rather entertainingly undercuts the White Saviour implications of where this subplot appeared to be heading). Later, much of the Company’s leadership is trapped in magical stasis in a temple complex presided over by an immortal golem, Shivetya, while others act as a secret underground in a city state ruled by the irrepressible Soulcatcher. By the end of the previous book, Soldiers Live (2000), the Company has achieved a Pyrrhic victory over all its major enemies and the elderly and infirm Croaker has chosen to swap bodies with the bored Shivetya in order to keep Kina asleep and Soulcatcher trapped in stasis. Croaker hands his role as annalist to two bickering Mean Girl recruits, the cousins Arkana and Shugrat, while he casts his consciousness back and forth through the history of several worlds.

The original Black Company trilogy—The Black Company (1984), Shadows Linger (1984), and The White Rise (1985)—has been followed by pairs of sequels in which the first volume is largely passage work, setting up situations to be largely resolved in the second—save for a secondary point which becomes a slingshot ending, a hook for our continued interest. With Lies Weeping, this technique runs the risk of diminishing returns, especially now that not only most of the original characters but most of their replacements are dead, and the Black Company is currently not engaged in a war but trying to survive as an armed camp in a potentially hostile alien world. Where once the books operated in terms of pitched battles, sieges, and guerrilla actions, the only set piece combat here is pest control against rampaging apes attacking the crops needed by the company as a food supply.

In prior books, then, our interest was perpetually piqued by a series of puzzle boxes, most of which have by now been opened more or less satisfyingly, and by the vicissitudes of the central romantic relationship, which is by this point over. The relationships of the two new narrators with a young magician haunted by the ghosts of his female ancestors, and a monk sent by his abbot to steal a manuscript that apparently doesn't exist, just don’t have the same emotional weight—especially once the cousins abandon both boys for the long-range reconnaissance mission that takes up the latter part of the book.

Arkana and Shugrat are also less personable than Cook’s earlier narrators, or perhaps it’s that he writes teenage girls rather less well than weary veterans. Their bickering about boys is less entertaining than the novel’s occasional, flirtatiously malicious exchanges between Croaker and Soulcatcher; still, once they and their bodyguard, the enigmatic old cook Jun Go, are flying through mountains and exploring dead cities, they stop bitching at each other and become considerably more interesting.

Meanwhile, various subplots are simmering gently—Cook has always been good at this. The Lady is travelling across worlds back to her former realm, in a probably vain attempt to re-ensoul her daughter, who has been left vacant and comatose after the ejection of Kina. The deal between Croaker and Shivetya was that the golem would take over Croaker’s body in order to die in it—but in fact, this was not the golem’s plan at all, as Arkana and Shugrat find out the hard way in the dead city …

Surprisingly, some of the best passages of the book come in the sections narrated by Croaker as he explores the abilities of his new, largely immobile, body and casts his mind across space and time. For one thing, he has several worlds to watch across millennia. [2] Primarily, though, his astral travels take him rather closer to home, to the backstory of his wife and her sister, and the role of their extended family, the Senjaks, in the rise of the Dominator.

Cook has always been deliberately vague about his shadowy Dark Lord. Now, he finally retcons that vagueness in a way that he would not have done back in the 1980s, making it clear that part of the point of the Domination for its ruler was that it enabled him to engage in sexual predation on an industrial scale, a predation from which even his closest allies were not immune. Soulcatcher and the Lady are the survivors of several other sisters: Their mutual hatred has roots which are centuries old. Cook has dropped hints about all this for twelve books; here is a puzzle box only somewhat nearer to being opened.

In the end, then, Lies Weeping is not an especially good book in and of itself. It’s a mildly entertaining late instalment of a fantasy soap opera to which many of us are profoundly addicted. Cook is a competent enough writer in his dour, sardonic way—his action sequences are decently blocked and his characterization rich enough that we remember who these people are from book to book. But the point of it all is that sense of life and history, as an occasionally enjoyable endurance test to be gone through with a patience and fortitude that are their own point: Glen Cook is a bracingly grim and bleak writer.

Endnotes

[1] This last group represent one of Cook’s more problematic narrative choices, being based in detail on the British Raj’s propaganda about Thugee—there is an ongoing historiographical controversy about whether Thugee even existed as an organised cult as opposed to opportunistic local banditry, let alone as obsessed with the finer points of ritual strangling of merchant victims with weighted scarves. Cook blithely and, it has to be acknowledged, very effectively appropriates as a major plot point all of the gory details of the legend, both in its propagandistic original form and its mutations in popular culture. [return]

[2] In passing, Cook hints that the world of his Dread Empire sequence
(1979-2012) was the distant past of one of these worlds. [return]

The set-up given in the first two-page chapter is this: “Because of an accident within the gravitational system, the Earth is rapidly plunging into the sun, pelting toward it, to melt there.” How did this accident occur? No idea. Is there anything we can do to stop it? No. Can we escape to, say, some other planet? The question doesn’t even come up. This is not about climate change mitigation, adaptation, or technological solutionism. It is about the mind faced with certain death. Of course, we are all already faced with certain death. “Because one does not come without the other,” the narrator reminds us. “Life had an intimate sister. You didn’t marry one or the other, you married both.” Death and life, inseparable twins.

At first, people in the book barely react to the news of their impending doom. A few words printed in the newspaper: What can they have to do with real life? One woman in the small village where the story opens, seeing the headlines, says, “What do I care?” We were all going to die anyway; the only difference is that now we will die together instead of separately. The lackadaisical attitude of the villagers is not sustained indefinitely. Soon the signs of unrest appear—there are guards stationed outside the bank in town; strange noises are heard at night; mobs begin to form. Money cannot continue to mean anything, and then no one owns anything, and then violence is the medium of exchange. But it’s gradual, and even this is not the point of the story. To be honest, there isn’t really a story. There is more of a slow unwinding which, as it unspools in the maddening sun, reveals what was inside of everything all along.

If Into the Sun does not really have a plot, neither does it really have characters. The narrative voice flexes between first-person, third-person, and even occasional second-person invocations. Ramuz is fond of the French third-person impersonal pronoun “on,” which the translators have rendered as the English first-person plural “we.” Similarly, the authorial “I” does not necessarily designate a specific individual, but rather an Everyman who serves as an observer at a range of shifting scenes. According to his biographical entry in the Dictionnaire Historique de la Suisse, Ramuz had by this point in his career abandoned expository narrative (“roman explicatif”), which follows the exploits of an individual, in favor of a more “epic” style exploring the response of an entire community to a serious challenge or threat. He was writing about war, disease, and the existence of evil, but also about religious miracles and healing (see La guérison des maladies, 1917). At the same time, he was dedicated to delineating the rhythms and voices of people of the countryside. The translators’ note at the end of the present edition of Into the Sun quotes him imploring the reader to think of the “shuffling step of the person who returns from harvesting or pruning his vineyard: consider this gait and the fact that our sentences don’t have it.”

Ramuz’s efforts to remake the novel as a new form true to the inner life of ordinary people places him within a strand of Modernism. The 1920s was, in the West, a period of disillusionment following what was then still called in English the “Great War,” which was in turn accompanied by a devastating pandemic in 1918. The 1920s might be remembered now as a non-stop party filled with carefree flappers and hot jazz, but much literature of the era depicts a troubled milieu of dissipation, cynicism, and apathy. Quite a few classics of apocalyptic and dystopian fiction appeared around this time, including Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924), Karel Čapek’s stage play R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots (1920) and his novel The Absolute at Large (1922), and W.E.B. Du Bois’s short story “The Comet” (1920). The end-times had, perhaps, been narrowly averted, and could still be just around the corner. If any of this sounds like right now, well, yes, it does and it should.

In this translation, Ramuz’s sentences have the beauty of a beam of sunlight through swirling dust—simple, elegant, illuminating the structure of the invisible. Repeatedly he invokes a mirrored world, in which constructions partner natural objects, and the mind reconstitutes reality in its own image. A streetlight resembles the moon, it “looks like the real moon when bad weather is coming. And so we search for the real moon, and after a moment we’ve found it, over there, behind the rooftops, behind the chestnut trees, still so low in the sky and not any smaller than the other moon, but pale, so pale and immobile, as if painted as decoration in the sky with a brush.”

The sky is a backdrop; the landscape is a canvas; the moon is a bit of trompe-l’oeil; stars are paper lanterns. The world is a human world. “Our own world is so small,” explains Ramuz. “Our own world goes as far as our eyes can reach; it’s our eyes that create it for us.” To grasp the enormity of the coming disaster, “We would have to imagine the sky, the stars, the continents, the oceans, the equator, the two poles. Yet we can only imagine the self and what we have.”

As the destruction gets underway, the first-person narrator laments that he “loved the world too much. When I sought to imagine something beyond it, it was still the world that I imagined. When I sought to go past it, there I found it again. I tried closing my eyes to see the heavens; it was the Earth; and the heavens were the heavens only when they became Earth once again.”

Towards the end, when few people remain alive to experience themselves in isolation, a solitary pilot ascends with his plane in search of some respite from the heat. Failing, he begins his descent, and hearing the roar of the plane’s engine he finds that the “noise that he alone makes irritates and astonishes him. He seeks a response in this noise; he seeks an answer to himself from himself. He doubts that he exists, not perceiving any existence but his own anywhere. He considers himself angrily; he is a disruption. And he keeps descending, in pursuit of a resemblence and something like symmetry.”

One of the many symmetries in the text is provided by a lake, which appears in the first pages as a site of relaxation and pleasure, later as a refuge from increasing heat, and ultimately as a locus of death. A lake implies the symmetry of reflection, but by the time the unnamed pilot approaches it in his aircraft these qualities have eroded. “This expanse presented to him the absolute wasteland of its waters, motionless as metal, perfectly silent and fixed, bare, with no reflection, no image, no response.” The world has ceased to function as a mirror for humanity. Once the mirror is broken, could there be another, more real and primal perception that arises only in the face of death? To fall into the Sun is to come too close to the source, where our matchstick houses and stick-built hypotheses will burn away. The collapsing roofs of a town begin to look, from above, like a mud pie that a child has left to fissure in the heat. Our works were those of children and playtime is over. Now is time for a new world, an impossible world, a place we cannot live.

Knowing very little about manga but interested in learning about its origins and evolution, I approached Manga’s First Century with an idealistic perspective about how quickly and easily it would inform me of the subject. The first chapter showed me that this wasn’t the book I had received. Rather, Andrea Horbinski’s exploration of manga is a massive onslaught of detailed information that would constitute a feast for hard-core manga fans hungry for a roadmap to how the art form found its groove from the early twentieth century through its development into the late 1980s, where she ends her account. Instead of the lay-reader-friendly introduction to manga that I was hoping for, Manga’s First Century is nonetheless a fluent, eloquent account of the art form and its many iterations across Japan’s rapidly-shifting social, political, and economic landscapes during the tumultuous, accelerated twentieth century.

Despite its intense popularity in Japan and the increasing number of bookshelves dedicated to the form in American bookstores, relatively little scholarly work has been done on manga. The first, Frederik L. Schodt’s Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics (1983), was published by Kodansha International and sought to introduce Western comics fans to the manga that itself was influenced by late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American and British satirical cartoons. Helen McCarthy, a British scholar who has written extensively about manga and anime since the early 1990s, gave Anglophone readers A Brief History of Manga in 2014 (which includes extensive illustrations and focuses on specific, important dates) and is coming out with The Manga Bible this year. The only scholarly studies of manga that I could find prior to Horbinski’s book are Eike Exner’s Comics and the Origins of Manga: A Revisionist History (2021) and Manga: A New History of Japanese Comics (2025). In the latter book, Exner begins in the 1890s, but then takes the story into the twenty-first century, focusing on the art form’s “structural development” and the ways in which manga publishing itself has shaped its development.

One of Horbinski’s major claims in this book is that she is specifically choosing 1905 as her start date because she wants to decouple manga from earlier forms of Japanese art. However, Exner’s earlier Comics and the Origins of Manga specifically claims that it, too, “challeng[es] the conventional wisdom that manga evolved from centuries of prior Japanese art” and “explain[s] why manga and other comics around the world share the same origin story” (publisher’s synopsis). This argument over timelines is important in how scholars and fans understand manga’s origins, so it’s not surprising that both Exner and Horbinski are interested in nailing down a date. Horbinski specifically points to “ponchi-e,” the Japanese term for Punch drawings, a form which itself derived from the magazine of the same name, launched in England in 1841.

Inspired by Mr. Punch of the Punch and Judy puppet shows popular in England from the nineteenth century, the magazine focused on social and political satire. In Japan, such cartoons evolved into what we call manga at the turn of the twentieth century, thanks to the work of pioneers Imaizumi Ippyō and Kitazawa Rakuten. The latter’s “artistic and satirical innovations, focused on political subjects, made Tokyo Puck [a satirical Japanese magazine inspired by the American magazine of the same name] Japan’s first manga magazine and him its first professional mangaka” (p. 307). Rakuten was succeeded by Okamoto Ippei, who moved manga out of its political and social satire corner to comment on the larger Japanese society as it industrialized and competed with Europe and America.

Horbinski appropriately launches us into this history of manga with the image of a boy dashing through the streets of Kumamoto, desperate to get his hands on a monthly manga magazine and some of the freebies that come with it. Reading this, I was reminded of my older brothers, who grew up in the 1970s and ’80s reading every Marvel and DC comic they could get their hands on, begging my parents to take them yet again to the local comic book store so they could get the latest issue of … whatever it was. It’s this devotion and enthusiasm that, according to Horbinski, has characterized manga since it launched into the popular Japanese imagination with Ippyō and Rakuten.

For the two pioneers, manga was a break from Edo-era visual art (1603-1867) and situated itself more forcefully in modern times, which allowed it to easily morph and evolve with the changing times (and the changes came thick and fast in the twentieth century—see two world wars, Japan’s “economic miracle” of the ’70s and ’80s, etc.). Horbinski clearly explains in her introduction that she wants to tell “a history … rather than the history,” focusing on a few key themes in order to develop her argument. Given this, it is surprising that Horbinski offers little discussion of the studies that have come before by Schodt, McCarthy, and Exner. Though her bibliography is extensive, she only cites Exner once in the book and never mentions the other two authors except in the bibliography.

One could counter this by noting that Horbinski must have spent countless hours in the archives that she lists, finding information about the many manga magazines and clubs that sprang up as manga gathered steam. Her specific interests in this book (given the subtitle) include the ways in which the manga establishment and the manga on the periphery have established a productive tension over the years, with “upstarts working on the margins seeking to revolutionize the medium’s content and audiences” (p. 5). Horbinski has also offered a focused analysis on format and “format as platform,” since “manga has oscillated between newspapers, magazines, four-panel comics, serialized multi-chapter stories, dojinshi [self-published works], and ebooks” (p. 7).

Horbinski offers us a street-level view of the impacts of, for instance, censorship, changing gender norms, technological innovation, and marketing (especially to children) on the shifting of manga from satire to storytelling, taking us on a tour through: Manga’s Origins, 1905-1928; Manga During Wartime, 1928-1946; Manga in the Postwar Era, 1945-1963; TV Manga and the Age of Revolution, 1963-1975; and Manga Turns Postmodern, 1975-1989. From political cartoons in the early 1900s to a dizzying array of magazine and book manga telling stories for every demographic and about any topic one could think of, Horbinski shows how manga has come to stand for an art form that the masses love because it speaks to them.

Some manga reflects the speed of our modern age (content, style), while some is more stylized (flowers, celestial bodies), and yet others offer us adorable cats and other animals. Despite its seemingly infinite variety, however, manga still has at its core a specific kind of style that has evolved for the twenty-first century. I took my own tour of the manga section at my local Barnes and Noble after reading Manga’s First Century and was immediately intimidated, faced with hundreds of manga volumes. Taking a few off of the shelves and paging through, I thought of what Horbinski writes about how the art style has been driven by the artists who read manga growing up first imitating those forebears and then launching their own interpretations. Reading Manga’s First Century deepened my appreciation, then, of the ways in which manga has saturated Japanese society and spread around the world. It didn’t take me by the hand and give me recommendations, though, so I’ll have to get those from a trusted manga enthusiast who can guide me toward the books and compilations I might like. But I have no doubt that I’ll find something.

Ivan Leonov’s Arctic Knot wants to be one of these sorts of books. Unfortunately, it is, instead, disappointingly unsuccessful at essentially every turn. However, Arctic Knot’s failures serve as a really excellent window into what makes idea-driven fiction work—and does so in a moment when the SFF community is embroiled in fraught discussions about generative AI, the relationship between the writer’s mind and the writer’s work, and many people’s apparent belief that a concept or “idea” is the same thing as (or the real, true, and essential work of) a book. More specifically, a reading of Arctic Knot helps reveal that not only does a book, a story, or a fiction of any kind live in its execution, but actually the ideas and thinking inhere there, too.

One hallmark of the “high-concept” is a catchy premise: “a planet that is always winter where the people are unsexed most of the time and can take either role in reproduction,” “a world where it never gets dark,” “death is a position you assume by killing the previous officeholder,” etc. At first glance, Arctic Knot is aiming for such an idea, building its plot around the fracturing of time on the remote Russian shores of the Bering Strait. What causes these ruptures? What do they mean? What is the metaphysical significance of the slippage the characters experience between times and worlds, seeing different versions of themselves and their homes, of a world where “if you stared long enough into the snow—it would show you your own footprint, left tomorrow”? Yet the novel is unable to sustain the interest that the experience might produce, despite Leonov’s attempts to reinvoke it with each movement between alternate Chukotkas.

The most obvious failure of execution as it relates to the matter of ideas is in the answer the novel provides to these questions:

Chukotka stands upon a border. Men call it the East of the East, but it is in truth the West of the West. The world tangled words, and so the rivers of time run crooked [. . .] You think it is coordinates that rule the world. But it is not numbers that guide it—it is faith, and names. When the spirits hear a lie the earth answers with a crack.

That is, the diegetic explanation for the temporal anomalies that make up the plot and texture of the novel and its world is that the Russian (and Soviet) codification of Chukotka as the easternmost part of the Russian (Soviet) Far East is a metaphysical affront to land that is “really” the westernmost portion of the Western Hemisphere. This answer is unsatisfying at best, and at worst seems to partake of all of SFF’s worst habits: It ontologizes epistemology (if we grant the precise boundaries of the Prime Meridian even the dignity of qualifying as an epistemology), offers a pat rationalist answer for a phenomenon built up as a beautiful mystery, and establishes an opaque relationship between all this and the processes of exploration and discovery.

But a catalogue of dissatisfactions does not an explanation of what is missing make. After all, Leonov’s frustratingly unconvincing explanation is far from the first time that an uncharitable summary could seem implausible or unconvincing. Asimov and Silverberg’s claim—that, if a planet never got dark, then a total solar eclipse occurring about every two thousand years would introduce the population to the stars and cause them to all lose it and burn their whole society to the ground—shares some of Arctic Knot’s flaws when expressed this way. So, too, might the revelation that Clarke’s House is essentially a pocket dimension in which Piranesi was imprisoned by an occult ritual by the Other. It’s possible that, the less science is an essential part of a work’s aesthetics, the more ambitiously explanations can stand by narrative fiat. But beyond this, what actually works against the assertion of cartographic metaphysics that makes up the final resolution of Arctic Knot?

First, it might be my own instinctive rejection of the truth of cartography as metaphysical reality. I was not “convinced” that the question of whether Chukotka is “the East of the East” or “the West of the West” is of the great social, political, or metaphysical importance that its spiritual and ontological centrality to the novel would imply. But a novelistic idea need not convince me of its “truth” in order to be worth exploring. So what could have transformed Leonov’s novum from a half-baked premise into an interesting idea, even if in the end I didn’t “like” the novel’s conclusions?

To answer this question, I want to start with the issue of characterization. One thing that can get a reader invested in a high-concept idea is a connection with the characters to whom it matters and who experience it. Take, for example, Genly Ai and Estraven’s relationship, which forms the central organizing logic of The Left Hand of Darkness: It is through getting to know the people of Gethen, in particular coming to understand Estraven, that Genly and the reader learn how to think with and about the ambisexuality that characterizes Le Guin’s “concept.” In Nightfall, meanwhile, the psychological believability of the characters is absolutely essential to accepting the idea that seeing stars when no one in a society had ever conceived of their existence would be burn-the-city-to-the-ground levels of frightening. Arctic Knot, by contrast, fails to deliver characters who feel real and believable, and in the process reveals the vital importance of fleshed-out characterization for the ideas of fiction.

The novel centers around a group of five young adults who are investigating the temporal anomalies, but they all blend together, motivated by an unexplained burning desire to understand—and little else. In particular, the protagonist, Olga, fails to do anything with her distinctive characteristics—including the visions of the future she receives and which seem to have startlingly little impact on her subjectivity. Why, you might ask, would a young divorcée be attracted to the absolute remoteness of the far northern village of Lavrentiya? What makes her need so badly to understand and solve the time anomalies? Why is she so invested in her own rationality? How do all of these aspects of her personality shape her reaction not only to time travel (which all five of the protagonists experience) but clairvoyance (which only she does)? The novel does not answer any of these questions.

Olga’s internality is stubbornly inaccessible even as the novel appears to be trying to reveal it, with details like “[w]ith each passing day, Olga dreamed more often of other people’s dreams” and “Olga trembled inside. And in that trembling was not only fear—but recognition.” These details seem like they would contribute to a sense of Olga as a person, but they ultimately slide off any sense of her as a complete self, in part because all the characters in the novel seem to respond to things in essentially the same way through essentially the same language. All of them fear and resolve and tremble and doubt and so on in tandem and the result is that they feel a bit more like wooden dolls or puppets than like people. The generally stilted dialogue contributes to this impression as well, even (and especially) in moments that should be tense, like a futuristic prison break facilitated by Olga’s clairvoyance, during which she is told to “[h]old onto the ones where we survive” only immediately also to be told “[f]ocus on the good outcome. Try to hold it.” This sort of artificiality (perhaps the artificiality of trying too hard to sound like real conversation, which meanders, repeats itself, and generally doesn’t read well) deflates scenes of energy and makes the characters feel even harder to distinguish as individuals.

The effect of this is to reduce the characters to props for the ideas of the novel, but that, in turn, vitiates the novel’s thinking. Unlike other idea-driven fiction—in which the living enactment of the idea in developed characters allows the reader to really sit with all the implications of the thinking as it is performed—this sort of reduction here punctures ideas. It prevents the metaphysics from feeling grounded in the human, and thus from feeling like a serious consideration which can move beyond an initial instinctive response to a basic statement of concept or explanation.

The other contributing factor to the way in which this failure of execution leads to a failure of thinking is more distributed. Arctic Knot is, at the level of the sentence and the paragraph, awkward and uneven. Its em-dashes are persistently slightly off, signaling breaks that aren’t really there, like the one between the staring and the showing above or between Olga’s fear and recognition. These minor infelicities are everywhere. They are coupled with what seem like attempts to recreate the tone of a writer like Le Guin: “Life in Lavrentiya did not begin with dawn—it began with the wind. Not with birdsong, but with the screech of metal sheets covering old sheds.” But the various stumbles reveal this voice as false, even before it is abandoned for something more like reportage: “The debate raged on—Alexi and Olga for Naukan, Georgy for Anadyr, Natalia torn between”; or “They exchanged a quick glance: the place was the same, the time entirely different”; or even a call to the pulps (“Immortality activated”).

All of which is to say that a charitable read on the novel’s voice would be to identify it as a shifting tissue of pastiche; but the attempts at imitation feel too disjointed, as if the surfacing and dropping of echoes happens not for effect but because Leonov couldn’t maintain it any longer. As a result, I think the book is also missing the cognitive presence that narratorial voice (including deliberately shifting and fragmentary narration—like Rakesfall, like The Starless Sea, like Always Coming Home) usually provides. I don’t know how Arctic Knot thinks because I don’t feel like I have a sense of the voice or perspective of the novel or of Leonov as a writer. The production of a narratorial whole—through either consistent voice or a plethora of trackable voices with distinct effects, through fluid (or perhaps carefully alienating, rather than merely disjointed) prose, through all the stylistic effects that produce the suite of aesthetic experiences known vaguely and idiosyncratically as “good writing”—seems, in light of this, to be an essential part of a book’s thinking. That is, the failure to provide a compelling voice and the sentence-level infelicities actively prevent Arctic Knot from thinking through its ideas about the relationship between time, culture, meaning, and place, reducing them to mere concepts or proposals.

Ideas need to be thought rather than merely posited. And that active thinking happens, Arctic Knot inadvertently shows, in the execution of the novel, in the sentences and words, in the characters, in the playing-out of plot as a written experience, rather than as an outline or a premise or a “concept.” In failing to live up to its ambitions, then, Arctic Knot demonstrates what makes idea-driven speculative fiction work, the essential transformation that makes an idea into something that can animate a story, that needs to be explored in narrative. Through this revelation, the novel offers a sort of object lesson which answers anxieties about what resistance to the equation of idea and story might do to the long tradition of idea-driven SFF. If the idea lives in the particular execution of fiction, then not only can we continue to read and write idea-forward work and simultaneously insist on the centrality of the book as a work created with intention (whether or not we believe the author themselves is discernable within it); we must.

Endnotes

[1] There are also non-SFFnal examples of this form of literature, ones which locate their intellectual or philosophical work within realism, such as a novel like Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938); we often rely on conceptual ambition and speculative imagination to mark the distinction between this sort of ideas-driven fiction and SFF. [return]

Burroughs’s Barsoom saga pulses with energy. Indeed, much of Burroughs’s writing can be characterized by momentum and motion, slinging the reader literally across the solar system with the blink of an eye or the turn of a page. Faced with the question of getting Carter from Earth and onto Mars, Burroughs simply channels the power of “irresistible enchantment” (A Princess of Mars [Penguin, 2007], p. 12). As Carter stares at the red planet, “it seemed to call across the unthinkable void, to lure me to it, to draw me as the lodestone attracts a particle of iron” (p. 12). Readers (both in 1912 and 2025) might wonder how Carter planned to travel to Mars, a seemingly impossible task in a world still reliant on horses and trains. But Burroughs’s Carter is quick to remind us that, “[my] longing was beyond the power of opposition; I closed my eyes, stretched out my arms toward the god of my vocation and felt myself drawn with the suddenness of thought through the trackless immensity of space. There was an instant of extreme cold and utter darkness” (p 12). And thus Burroughs ends one chapter and dares the reader to continue onto the next, which he opens with a wonderfully understated sentence: “I opened my eyes upon a strange and weird landscape” (p. 13). Questions of explanation, of rationality and logic and sense are completely eschewed in favor of immediacy, wonder, and imagination: pulp, in a word. “My inner consciousness told me as plainly that I was upon Mars as your conscious mind tells you that you are upon Earth,” Carter explains, continuing with “you do not question the fact; neither did I” (p. 13). Leave your reason at the door; we’re here to rock and roll.

Nathan Ballingrud’s Cathedral of the Drowned, a sequel to his Crypt of the Moon Spider (2024), exists in this pulp tradition, reveling in the inexplicable and launching its characters across the stars with the flick of a short and declarative sentence, disappearing them into “angles of light” across the cosmos (p. 91). But where pulp afforded Burroughs an opportunity for tales of heroic escapism (tossed with imperialism for good measure), Ballingrud takes a decidedly different tack. While he maintains the imaginative wonder of pulp storytelling, he dumps the conventional male power fantasy and replaces it with an alternative fantasy (or horror, depending on your philosophy): (dis)entanglement. If A Princess of Mars imagines an embodiment of power and physical superiority encapsulated in the sculpted physiques of beautiful, individual bodies, Cathedral of the Drowned collapses those boundaries. In Ballingrud’s hands, the body itself disintegrates into pulp, enmeshed not in the Cartesian safety of singular consciousness but instead spread across a mass of entangled, creaturely bodies which is cosmic in reach.

It is this interrogation of embodiment, wrapped in the Lovecraftian dread of the Other and the pulp sensibilities of Burroughs, that I found most compelling in Ballingrud’s novella, a slim volume that never feels slight. His characters are at turns ruthless and pathetic, endearing and distancing, and the scope of the characters’ relationships remains grounded, even while the scale reaches out to the stars. As with Ballingrud’s previous short story work (particularly his excellent collection Wounds [2019]), I was simultaneously repulsed, fascinated, horrified, and certainly never bored.

The story begins in medias res, shortly after the events of Crypt of the Moon Spider. Veronica, the abused housewife shipped to the moon’s experimental mental asylum run by (mad) scientist Dr. Barrington Cull, has found seeming fulfillment as “the new queen of hell,” abandoning her human shell in order to assume the mantle of a spider god (p. 54). The inmates are now running the asylum, as it were, and Dr. Cull has fled to Earth. Meanwhile Charlie (also called Grub), a former bodyguard sent to protect mob interests on the moon, has been bifurcated between mind and body, with the former—Charlie—strapped into a satellite and blasted to the moon of Io and the latter—Grub—finding itself the new home for hundreds of soon-to-hatch spider eggs. But we open in 1924 in Red Hook, with mob boss Goodnight Maggie dealing with Sicilians encroaching her territory, a disruption to her supply chains of moonsilk (a resource spun from those creepy space spiders on the moon which is used as an hallucinogenic drug), and a pining for Charlie, who she believes has been lost.

As with all good pulp, the explanations for 1920s space travel and interdimensional spiders that weave magical webs is left where it belongs in the stuffed bin of Who Cares. Instead, the inciting incident is a series of two unexpected visits for Goodnight Maggie: Dr. Cull—whose face “no longer looked much like a face at all,” having mostly sloughed off in his escape from the moon—arrives desperate for refuge from the Alabaster Scholars (moon people who worship the spider queen); and Charlie, who seems to manifest in her closet as “a metal orb sprouting dozens of long silver spines in every direction … oily water trickled from it in a series of steady streams, as if it rested beneath a small waterfall she could not see” (pp. 2, 8-9). This is all in the first few pages. Even for a sequel, Cathedral of the Drowned is bursting at the seams with expansions of the setting: intersecting and competing character motivations, a giant rocket cathedral that crash-lands on the lush jungles of Io only for its missionary crew to fall victim to alien centipede monsters, and time travel. It’s a lot. But for me, the storytelling seams are stretched but never split. Ballingrud somehow holds all of this together and in the process raises a giant middle finger to the in-vogue narrative conventions, so encouraged by the age of streaming, in which stories are stretched beyond their proper bounds. This novella moves with the speed of Burroughs and the detail-density of your average Warhammer 40k novel (not to mention lots of 40k imagery—see the giant rocket cathedrals that have crash-landed and decayed in the swamps of Jupiter’s moon).

My initial attraction to Ballingrud’s work is this sense of horrific wonder and Lovecraftian worldbuilding. It’s all so cool and ticks all the boxes in my pulp-loving brain. Dr. Cull explains to Goodnight Maggie: “My belief is that the silk tended by the lunar spiders contain the memories of a spacefaring being, of which our moon is a remnant. Perhaps its skull, or perhaps just part of its skull. I believe the use of the silk somehow grants the spiders access to hidden avenues through space and time, allowing them to bypass the restrictions of conventional travel” (p. 31). The moon as part of the skull of a galaxy-huge eldritch being? Transdimensional spider silk? Yes, please, give me more. When brain-in-a-jar Charlie arrives on Io’s moon and is carried by the titular “drowned” to the sinking cathedral, “he beheld the vaulted arches of the cathedral’s interior, stone walls decorated in frescoes besmeared with lichen, the twinkling lights of switchboards and circuitry lighting the darkness like candy-colored stars” (p. 20). Ballingrud’s prose glories in the gothic and the gory, often mixing them to great effect—and generating a wonderful tension between beauty and ugliness that is a hallmark of pulp horror.

But, while my initial interest in Ballingrud and his Lunar Gothic Trilogy comes from the heavy metal of it all, my lingering investment is rooted in the ecologies and philosophies undergirding the texts. Crypt of the Moon Spider established an interest in the Cartesian dualism that informs much Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought, and Cathedral of the Drowned pushes this philosophy into the kind of literal symbol that genre storytelling makes possible. In brief, for centuries Western culture has labored under the belief that the mind, one’s consciousness, wields supremacy over the merely animal meat-sack of the body: “I think, therefore I am.” In other words, who we are becomes divorced from the materiality of our own existence; or, more accurately, what we call consciousness is divorced from materiality itself and instead imagined as purely abstract and symbolic and somehow disconnected from the body. Of course, this belief is ultimately incorrect, or at best incomplete, and for decades now much work has been done to correct its harmful implications, particularly in the work and writings of disability activists and disability studies. As an alternative to Cartesian dualism, we might imagine our bodies—including our minds—as an always-emerging series of overlapping materialities that are infinitely enmeshed and mutually dependent. The implications of this are, potentially, horrifying and exposing: We don’t like to imagine that our own minds are outside our control and beholden to material influence, existing in the same state of perpetual vulnerability within which our “non-thinking” bodies exist; we don’t like to imagine that something else is making our decisions. Ballingrud’s work understands this anxiety.

The Charlie/Grub character is my favorite in the work precisely because he becomes our angle into interrogating embodiment. Charlie, as we learn, “was born in a jar on the moon,” and his brain/consciousness is placed by Dr. Cull into a small satellite that is then launched into space, to peer into the dangerous mysteries of the cosmos (p. 13). As he comes into his consciousness, Charlie is aware of his body—Grub—on the slab next to him. He wonders “was the part of the brain in his body on the table the defective part? Or was it this part, himself, contained in the jar? Both were being rebuilt by the spiders and the moonsilk” (p. 13). This kind of disembodiment and existential dread at its recognition is familiar territory, and there are times where Ballingrud leans a bit too heavily into the body/mind split, to the point where the critique itself becomes muddled, a victim of its own critique, and the edge of the idea is dulled. Indeed the text maintains the distinct separation of Charlie and Grub despite their origin as a singular organism, a move that seems to reify the Cartesian split itself. But when Charlie arrives on Io, the novella introduces an embodied ecology of violence that sharpens and complicates everything, exciting me as a reader.

Ultimately, at the risk of spoiling how wild and weird Ballingrud makes everything, Charlie becomes inextricably entangled with the truly bizarre flora and fauna of Io, and his own individualism is collapsed into a violent, non-human collective. Ecology itself is neither sentimental nor sterile nor sanctimonious—it is consuming, violent, and terrifying because it requires self-annihilation, and Ballingrud’s work is never afraid to acknowledge this uncomfortable truth. Charlie’s violation leads to disambiguation, and from that loss of self something new is born. It is here that Goodnight Maggie re-enters the narrative in a truly stunning turn of events which takes the novella into mythic territory, where those pulp staples of sex and violence and revelation all collide to form new worlds and new peoples and—actually, you’ll have to read it for yourself. No, really: This is a novella to be experienced.

Hazelthorn

The novel’s protagonist, Evander, has been deceived into believing he has been sick for seven years, and regurgitates the narrative his “caretaker”—Byron—has given him: scion of the estate Laurie Lennox-Hall tried to dissect him with a shovel, and because of it, Evander is a homebody constantly under the scalpel and receiving medicine. Despite his “permanent injury,” Evander longs for Laurie’s “cornflower blue eyes and the beautiful shape of his wretched mouth,” a key tension asserted throughout the story (p. 10).

But in fact, Laurie—“this family’s bad apple, the academically defective and offensively queer Lennox-Hall who runs their mouth”—once fed the Hazelthorn garden his blood and wished for a friend, and Evander appeared. This warped creation metaphor isn’t lost on Drews: through the breath of life (in this case, blood), a man springs from the dirt. In fact, near the end of the novel, this beautiful line addresses the relationship of Laurie with Evander: “God was stronger than me when he made Adam and didn’t fall in love with him” (p. 345). Another similarity with God: Laurie hides the truth from Evander, and the only way for Evander to learn he’s been deceived is for Byron Lennox-Hall to die.

When Byron Lennox-Hall suffers a poison-induced death-seizure, then, Evander will learn the truth. The path to these revelations begins when a tall woman enters Evander’s room. She has gaudy taste: leopard-print heels, red pants, and “overstated and lavish” jewelry—including ruby bracelets and earrings. But most interesting are her “white saber teeth” (p. 75). Oleander Lennox-Hall’s condescending attitude matches her fashion sense. When she asks a non-verbal Evander if he speaks, she says each word slowly, like he’s a simpleton. When he doesn’t answer, she grabs his jaw and inspects him. She says the prettiness of his eyes is “wasted on a boy,” calls his hair a “ghastly mop,” and, very obviously, thinks she has inherited all the money and property left to Evander in Byron’s will (p. 77). This introduction characterizes Oleander and the remaining Lennox-Halls perfectly—conniving, judgmental, and greedy. It mirrors the relationship the Lennox-Halls have with the garden as well, feeding it corpses for blood rubies. They all see Byron’s death as an opportunity to enrich themselves—and Evander as an obstacle.

The Lennox-Halls, save for Laurie, view all people as resources to further enrich themselves. In one scene, Evander follows Oleander’s son, Bane, and her assistant, Jessica, into the garden. As you might have guessed, Bane murders Jessica and buries her to make rubies (p. 189). In another, Laurie’s aunt Azalea tries to seduce Evander in order to gain access to the resources left to him in Byron’s will (p. 221). Eventually, we find out that Byron himself has been fed by the other Lennox-Halls to the very garden he abused, to make more rubies. Even the lawyer and executor of the will is greedy, lying about the will to misdirect the whole family and then cutting a deal with them to take a “clipping” of the garden to start his own Hazelthorn elsewhere. Of course, this clipping is a part of Evander.

In contrast, Laurie thinks the garden is right to try and kill the Lennox-Halls: “The garden fucking hates Lennox-Halls, and why shouldn’t it? … The garden wasn’t like that until they started feeding it blood. They made it a monster. So I guess it gets revenge when it can … Good for it, quite frankly” (p. 255). Evander’s existence is Laurie’s fault: He fed the garden his own blood to get a friend, rather than feeding it a victim for riches. In fact, Laurie is so different from the other Lennox-Halls that his family decides to kill him (p. 316).

The wedge Drews drives between Laurie and his relatives, of course, is meant to endear him to us. And it works, in the sense that Laurie’s snarky behavior is preferable to that of unrepentant murderers. Laurie’s beauty (described in sometimes derisive detail, and ad nauseam, by Evander in the novel) is seemingly “balanced” by his wrist disability, inflicted by Byron. One scene features Evander sneaking into Laurie’s room and spying on him as he tends to his arm: “This is a moment so raw and skeletal it feels wrong to see” (p. 112). “He would core him like a pear and throw away the soft, rotted skin until he saw him as he really is: horrible and beautiful and real” (p. 114). This is our first taste of Laurie beneath his moody teenage mask, and it’s braided with Evander’s conflicting desire and detestation for him. (This is further fueled, of course, by Evander’s years of loneliness.)

Evander vicariously derives romantic experiences from “mildewy books” where “the lord marries a lady without much variation”; but he desires variation, frequently fantasizing about kissing boys, Laurie usually being the boy in question (p. 153). His reclusiveness feeds his Laurie obsession, the pages are absolutely bursting with sensual thoughts of Laurie, but one directly relates to Evander’s hermitism. “Not that Evander would kiss someone like that. That would be akin to swallowing poison and relishing the taste. He can picture himself kissing girls, and he likes that idea, so his addiction to Laurie must be born of starvation, of deprivation, of memories from a ruined childhood friendship that he can’t quite get over” (p. 65).

Evander’s yearning seems unrequited through most of the novel, but near the end we discover Laurie’s snark is a shield to hide his affections for Evander. Laurie is “shitty” towards him because he needs Evander to hate him, but he eventually admits: “I’d split my bones, I’d open my throat, I’d do anything to be near you and have even one second with my mouth against yours” (p. 283). Once they’ve established mutual desire, these boys are ready to burn the world down for each other. In Evander’s case, it’s closer to a bloodbath.

Evander poisons the Lennox-Halls at a wake and the garden comes to life, murdering many of them, including the lawyer. After this scarlet ceremony, Laurie and Evander (now calling himself Hazelthorn) remain in the garden, where all they do is kiss. This romance at the core of the novel is its resolution, in which the “odd” Lennox-Hall remains with the garden because he is less greedy, less murderous, while the others scatter into the wind, never to see their inheritance.

While all of this was enjoyable, ultimately I found the prose to be too submerged in a stream of consciousness style. It leans on the idea of a “good” rich person pursuing better communion with the earth, meshing queerness and wealth critique within the gothic. Ultimately, it neatly combines a critique of the rich themselves with one of the exploitation inherent to gaining massive wealth.

However, this reality, as valid as it is, is not usually something that is explored in a novel that claims to be cozy, at least not with any real stakes. And yet that’s exactly the direction in which Travis Baldree takes Brigands & Breadknives, technically the third book in the Legends & Lattes universe, but the second in terms of chronology, if Bookshops & Bonedust (2023) is considered as “ground zero.”

“It seems like relaxing work,” famed ancient immortal Elven warrior Astryx says, making a seemingly casual observation to her semi-accidental drunken stowaway, Fern. “Easy. Calming. Not the sort of thing to drive anyone to drink.” In response, an indignant Fern—the foul-mouthed, kind-hearted rattkin bookseller we met in Bookshops & Bonedust—sputters:

”I have spent my life convincing people to buy blocks of paper with marks on them for more money than they want to part with. I fill a room with them and pray to the Eight that I filled it with the right ones, and that I can get them into the right hands, and I never get enough of that right. It’s like tossing fistfuls of fucking silver up a hill and hoping enough of it rolls back down that I have more silver to throw. I bet on odds that any self-respecting dice player would run screaming from, and half the time, I lie awake wondering whether I’ll be able to keep at it for another week, or a month, or a year.

[…] “I only do it, because I’m stupid enough to think it’s important.”

“So it’s important. Then why did you run from it?”

“I … no, I mean I … loved … it.”

This, in a nutshell, is the existential struggle at the core of this novel. It puts centre stage not Viv, the orc mercenary and star of Legends & Lattes (2022), but Fern herself. When we meet her again, she is, along with her pet gryphet Potroast and their carriage driver, being rescued from a pescadine by Astryx One-Ear, the legendary Blademistress and Oathmaiden. The immortal elf makes easy work of the creature, retrieves the carriage’s horses, and melts away before Fern can so much as thank her. The rattkin, we find out, is en route to a new life in the city of Thune, where her old friend Viv has been living a happy, domestic existence running her own coffee shop since hanging up her sword. The property next to Legends & Lattes awaits. (“A new start. A new bookshop. The embers of an old friendship to fan. Perhaps even something she might one day call family.”)

Amidst the excitement and nerves this naturally engenders, a careful reader will sense immediate doubts, a certain unease, flowing underneath. Fern seems aware of this, to an extent—she is desperate to find comforting, logical explanations (which she does), from nerves to hunger to the fatigue of a long journey and the butterflies of a new start; but whether they reassure her longer than a few breaths is another matter. Initially engrossed in getting the space in shape for the opening, and then in getting the various systems of a working store set up, it is much easier for her to keep kicking these increasingly gnawing worries into the next day.

But then, when everything settles into an easy rhythm—the bookshop is flourishing and she can tell that it belongs in the building, the neighbourhood, the city—she can no longer ignore the “hollowed-out feeling of dissatisfaction that had steadily eroded her center for the past few years.” Nothing seems to matter.

“I wasn’t supposed to feel this way,” she confides in the steady hob carpenter Cal, whom the readers of this series already know and love. “Who says?” he challenges. He listens to her detail the emptiness she feels, the nagging feeling that somehow, somewhere, she took a wrong turn, without knowing what it was or when—and, more importantly, having no clue about the solution—and tells her to open up to Viv. After all, Viv—who has been through a similar dilemma in her previous warrior life—would understand better than anyone how it feels to not belong in an old life, and what it means to figure out what a new one could look like. But Fern had thought that a change of scene, an old friend, and new acquaintances would be akin to “a fresh breeze in a stale room”: “I leaned on the kindness of others to get here, it didn’t fix what I wanted fixed, and now I’m ungrateful to boot.” How can she face her old friend while wrestling this grief and guilt, how can she admit she wants something more, something different, but has no idea what that could be?

A drunk Fern, armed with her cloak and a battered leather satchel filled with her parchment, quills, and current reads that used to belong to an old friend (just in case), sets out, with a book as an apology, to cross the few yards between her bookshop and Viv’s coffeeshop before deciding that a walk first might clear her head. Said walk leads her to a cart parked under a streetlamp, and to Astryx One-Ear tying up the tarpaulin before disappearing into another alley. Fern wonders whether bumping into a legend twice is coincidence, or “maybe a sign.” At this point, she has her bearings and could easily trace her footsteps back to Viv’s. But something has her moving to hide under the tarpaulin—and then, even as she debates the mad decision and decides whether to get out, Astryx comes back, and Fern’s stuck waiting. Until she falls asleep, and the rest of the decision is made for her.

This passivity, it seems to me, is a deliberate move by Baldree: Fern, at this point, is scared to make any decision, even though she knows she must, for fear that it will be the “wrong” one—and also for fear that she doesn’t actually know what she wants. Her choice here becomes another almost-unconscious means of letting someone else make a decision for her, so that she won’t be responsible. In this context, letting her guard down and falling asleep almost becomes a challenge to the universe.

It turns out that Astryx is travelling with a bounty in tow (an enigmatic red-haired chaos goblin named Zyll) who has to be delivered to the city of Amberlin halfway across the Territory. Fern understands a handful of goblin swearwords, and manages to convince Astryx that she’d be useful as a translator—at least until they reach the next big city, where Fern can buy passage back to Thune. But a series of incidents later, and our intrepid bookseller is accompanying the duo (with their two sentient weapons, known as Elder Blades, and the best horse ever) to their final destination.

Now, I understand the argument levelled at Legends & Lattes: famously, about “high fantasy and low stakes,” about its lack of forward narrative momentum (though it was a story I still thoroughly enjoyed, I might add). But I’d also argue that its prequel, Bookshops & Bonedust, actually both set the stage and paved the way for Brigands & Breadknives. It existed between the cozy (what’s more comforting than books and bookshops and the restorative and transformative magic of reading?), the adventurous (a dangerous necromancer with powers of osseoscription), and the existential (a lack of mobility through injury, suddenly thrust upon Viv in her fighting prime and necessitating compulsory rest). The new novel takes this even further by not only eschewing the comforting elements, but also raising the question of what happens when those once cherished elements—that comfortable, cozy life—start to feel stifling. What happens when you can recognise the worthiness of your old purpose and even believe in its importance, but it’s not enough anymore? Where does that leave you, who even are you without this thing you’ve done for a quarter of a century?

In the prequel, by helping Viv discover parts of herself she never knew existed, and want things she never knew she wanted, Fern rediscovered her life’s purpose, why she did what she does, rekindled a dream inherited from her long-gone father. But what if that was not a permanent fix, just a small piece of something bigger?

“It’s like I can see what I loved—still love?—about it, but it’s behind thick windowpane. I can’t feel it or smell it or taste it, and I don’t know that I’ll ever be on the other side of that glass again.”

Fern was a wonderful supporting character in Bookshops & Bonedust; here she makes an equally sympathetic protagonist. Baldree supplies her with her own supporting troops, each a capable, well-fleshed out character on their own, and—in this out-and-out adventure story with lots of swordfights, chases (on account of Zyll’s considerable bounty), and yes, blood—we get to traverse much more of the diverse Territory with them than in the other books, in which we were only in Thune and Murk, respectively. Fern’s dynamic with Astryx is different from hers and Viv’s, but equally compelling, and watching the two rub off on each other for the better—despite the often frustrating and frictional nature of their at-odds conversations—was all kinds of lovely.

There was even a surprising, but welcome, narrative side thread involving Astryx—about heroes and legends, responsibilities and covenants, and how stories can be shaped and reshaped. Fern, her own life still in shambles, helps the ancient warrior come to the realisation that, after a thousand years of doing the same thing, she is allowed to deviate from what she has always done, without anything falling apart. Later, Fern wonders—a little guiltily but not for long—whether she’s responsible for turning Astryx into less of a legend but more of herself.

The book manages the balance between Fern’s external and internal battles well, and as a reader we get to live the journey with her, not knowing until she does what the ending is going to be. At one point early on, Fern notices a “painful tearing in the very center of herself, like a sapling being slowly peeled apart down the middle [...] an aching growing tension that would either snap back together and resolve itself, or split forever into something unrecognisable.” She carries this split in her through the course of their journey, trying to shine light on what it might be telling her, and getting no closer to an answer even as Amberlin approaches: “I feel a dreadful anticipation, like unbelievable possibilities lie ahead, if only I say the precise magic word required [...] but I don’t trust myself to recognise it.”

The answer when it arrives isn’t perfect or permanent, nor is it fully voiced, but it makes sense for Fern, just as it must for many others.

“Does anyone [even] want a ‘cozy’ story about the grief of disappointing your friends, and the agony of saying ‘no’?” the author asks in his acknowledgements. He describes how much longer this book took to wring out of him than anticipated. “Would readers be okay with Viv taking a backseat to Fern for the story I wanted to tell?” Baldree explains that, while he didn’t have the answers to his anxious doubts, he also didn’t want to write the same story over and over. He didn’t want to pretend that fantasy small-business ownership is the answer to all of life’s woes. The solutions for every challenge are not the same for everyone, nor are they neatly resolved (not to mention, they don’t always stay resolved), and he wanted to reflect that.

Brigands & Breadknives is a brave book to write, a cozy fantasy novel that acknowledges the hard, the messy, the jagged, and the wrenching bittersweet, while simultaneously advocating for hope and belief in an essential goodness. It’s a book that’s all the stronger, more beautiful, and more emotionally resonant for its messiness and vulnerability, and nobody embodies this complexity better than Fern.

“Always remember, although the unimaginative see life as a thread stretched from one point to another, birth to death, a life truly lived is a glorious tangle. One is never lost. And if one is lucky, one is never found, either.”

His first success came with the Shadows of the Apt series (2008-14), fantasy rather than SF, which—so his publisher’s website tells us—had its roots in his university involvement with a role-playing game (Bugworld) that then drew him to think about translating insectoid characteristics into human societies. Similarly, within a few pages of Spiderlight, it is clear that this is not only a fantasy novel with the obligatory Dark Lord, but that it is in part a generic Quest role-playing game spin-off.

Among the characters are Lief, a seedy sneak thief; Penthos, a pompous wizard; Harathes, a warrior who can actually speak sentences like “It will be an epic journey … [a] worthy quest, through monsters and the servants of the Dark one, past evil forests, marshes, and jagged rocks” and mean them; and Cyrene, an archer driven to her part in the quest by some anger or guilt. And yes, her anger is to do with the fact that people like Harathes think that one sexual encounter means exclusive possession and “just because I take up a bow and fight, and don’t just sit in a kitchen with my hair bundled up … I have to be giving it away.” Heading this bunch of misfits is Dion, brought up in the service of the Light and in the possession of a magical talisman called the Disc of Armes, but already discovering uneasily that Light and Dark are not necessarily the same as Good and Evil.

But this is all, to repeat a phrase I have already used twice, “in part.” Tchaikovsky might be back on familiar ground, but he is doing something more than giving his growing range of fans something that they have had already.

There is, of course, a prophecy, and like all prophecies it is carefully ambiguous. In this case, the Dark Lord Darvezian will be defeated by means of a spider’s tooth and his realm entered by means of a “spider’s path,” which turns out to be not so much a map as the shared knowledge of the ways and byways into his domain. This knowledge the Spider-mother imparts into one of her brood, Nth, who Penthos transforms into (more or less) human shape. And so the quest is joined by the semi-monstrous Enth, who has to discover by himself such complications as individuality (what is a simple designation of his status as a unit within a mass becomes a name), the difficulties of handling only two legs, the incomprehensible nature of human communication, and the attractions (or otherwise) of beer. Much of the story is seen from the point of view of Enth, although each main character is given their own share of viewpoint.

There are, in the great tradition of RPG fantasy quests, the obligatory borrowings from Tolkien. If The Lord of the Rings (1954-5) has its Dark Lord’s nemesis, Aragorn the Ranger, Dion’s team encounter Lothern, a “Ranger of Elwer” with a Darkness-detecting lodestone which works perfectly. (The only snag being Lothern’s inability to understand exactly why the lodestone is detecting evil wherever they go with their Darkness-spawned human/spider hybrid constantly at their side!) There are also Doomslayers, who perform some of the functions of Sauron’s Nazgûl. And later, the team enters the realm of the Dark Lord by means of a realm ruled by a spider matriarch, calling up memories of Shelob. But a section entitled “The Third Rule of Arachnophobics” nods to a very different branch of the fantastic, when it becomes clear that Enth’s ability to fight and kill must be drawn upon only if it can be certain that he would fight for his human companions rather than against them. The mage Penthos confirms the consensus—Enth must be bound by magical commands not to harm them, not to harm anyone else unless defending itself or ordered to, and to obey orders. Any reader of classic science fiction will here recognise, as Tchaikovsky is nudging them to do, something very like Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, and especially the loopholes and contradictions which arise from such “laws.”

Spiderlight is, then, certainly an entertaining romp in which Tchaikovsky has enormous fun with the clichés of the modes both he and his readers enjoy at face value. In doing so, he cleverly exploits his own gift for turning deeply researched zoology into vivid and plausible world-building. There is, in particular, some clever characterisation with Penthos’s hopeless crush on Dion, and the equally hopeless dimwit hero Harathes. But it is not long before Tchaikovsky turns the quest into an interrogation of the nature of “Dark” and “Light.” This is done through Lief who, as the standard character of the “thief,” is allowed a bit of ethical ambiguity anyway. In the “uncertain territory” of Shogg’s Ford, he is ordered to mind Enth and confesses to him in the bar that his recruitment to Dion’s band was as much due to being offered that or “the mines,” after being caught temple-robbing, as to any moral qualms about Dervezian’s ruthlessness. Equally, we learn about the “Holy City” of Armesion, to which Dion wants to return to seek the blessing of the Potentate for their mission, from Penthos, himself a member of a profession viewed with suspicion by the Righteous: “Being at the heart of the Light, they are remarkably lax at checking for corruption. It’s amazing what you can get away with … Or so I’ve heard.” As Lief remarks shortly afterwards, “There’s a lot of people who make a good living there satisfying needs that the holy and the laudable aren’t supposed to have.” Long before our band enters the realm of the Dark Lord and learns some interesting truths about him, then, we have already had our sense of moral certainty undermined.

Enth, and the others’ reaction to his nature and his presence, is important here. Enth is a monster, partly because spiders are monsters anyway and partly because in this world the intelligent spiders are creatures of the Dark. But once, for the purpose of the quest, he is transformed into (approximately) human shape, we enter the “uncanny valley” in which he is both somehow less and even more monstrous. The reaction of the humans is to consider him as unhuman. His default pronoun among them is simply “it.” As Lief begins to see Enth as simply another misfit on a quixotic quest, however, he starts to chide others for calling him a “monster” and “it”; and Enth himself, though bound by his Asimovian laws, still insists on some sort of agency when he protests against being called a “that.”

When Abnasio, Supreme Prelate of the Brotherhood of the Dawn, seems to have decided that the fulfilment of the prophecy which outlined Dion’s quest involves taking Enth into custody—and into closer acquaintance with some sort of sacred disembowelling fork—Lief goes so far as to channel the dilemma Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn faces when he, too, is faced with breaking the moral code he knows to be right: “Enth was a creature of Darkness. There was no getting round it. And what if Dion is wrong and Abnasio is right? Am I really about to rescue a monstrous servant of evil from the hands of the righteous?” Like Huck’s “[a]ll right, then, I’ll GO to hell” when he allows his friendship for Jim to trump every sense of morality and right and wrong he has been brought up with, Lief’s “[f]uck the righteous” puts comradeship and compassion above abstract codes. That this does not lead directly to rescue—that the argument that Abnasio is morally wrong is reduced to a cut, thrust, and parry academic analysis of obscure texts, as Dion and Abnasio debate the true meaning of the “prophecy” before actual battle commences—is more evidence of Tchaikovsky’s playfulness.

Indeed, it would have been easy for Tchaikovsky to have turned this amusing piece of genre-bending into slapstick farce, and while there is a fair share of slapstick in Spiderlight, he manages to turn many openings for humour into something darker. For example, when Cyrene realises, some time after the event, that what she took for a fairly mindless sexual encounter has very different implications (“I wasn’t thinking that he couldn’t say no”), the humour—and it’s very dark indeed—comes when Enth thanks her for not killing him, drawing our attention to the very different nature of arachnid sexual encounters.

Despite this light and shade, it's certainly possible to read Spiderlight as a lightly amusing deconstruction of the kind of fantasy we have all read too much of. At the end of the day, it’s a guilty pleasure. We know where we’re going, and we are happy to have a skilful guide to take us there. But if this novel is play, it is thoughtful play. The last part of the book, in which we meet the Dark Lord and discover the spiritual “cosmology” of this world, is, on one level at least, evidence of the adage that fantasy is “good to think with,” as China Miéville puts it in his “editorial introduction” to Historical Materialism 10, no. 4. We are focussed upon some quite fundamental examples of the way fantasy—and not only fantasy, but our general ways of system-building—“thinks about” the world as a structure of moral dualism. I shall be vague about the ending, because what Tchaikovsky is giving us, important though it is, is more a chat than a lecture, more a nudge towards the obvious than a self-important declaration of moral certainty; but it will come as no surprise to the practiced reader of fantasy. What the novel leaves us with is a sense that maybe we should think for ourselves, which is perhaps the most important moral lesson we must be asked to study in these times.

Strange Horizons stands with immigrants in the US facing these conditions. At this time, we have the opportunity to lend our strength as a global community to a strategy that organizers in impacted areas have been using: putting pressure on hotels not to provide rooms for the agents, making their operations that much more difficult to enact.

This year, Worldcon will be hosted in Los Angeles, California, and the hotels they have partnered with are two major providers of accommodations for anti-immigrant operations: Hilton and Marriott. We all can help by contacting the hotels with our concerns, and/or by contacting Worldcon 2026 organizers about their choice of hotel partners. The risk of losing the revenue from convention attendees has the potential to sway the hotel chains' decision makers at the top.