Book Nanoreviews: Heaven's Graveyard, The Infinite State, and The Demon Star

Heaven's Graveyard by Grace Curtis

Heaven's Graveyard does a couple of unusual things for secondary world fantasy. First, it is set in a modern, industrialised world. It closely resembles the late 1920s/early 1930s in our world in both technology and geopolitics, with creaky automobiles, well-developed industrialisation, and simmering tensions between major powers suggesting a war might break out at any point. Second, it is set in the same world as Grace Curtis's previous book, Idolfire, but is not a sequel: it is in fact set 2,000 years later. Familiarity with Idolfire might add some marginal accents you'd miss if you haven't read it—the key initial motivating factor for our main character is trying to find evidence that the main character of Idolfire is real—but it really is marginal. And the accent could just as easily work the other way; a bit of context is added to Idolfire if you've read Heaven's Graveyard beforehand. Both of these things work very well for me; the worldbuilding is tight and compelling. The glint of largely absent magic in the background and some fine reflections on the nature of religion and belief add to the picture.

So the book initially looks like it will be an archaeological mystery: what happened in the past and can our main character, Cod, prove it? It quite quickly morphs into a murder mystery and then, about halfway through, takes a quite hard left turn into quite tense geopolitical drama: the whole thing feels a bit like lesbian nerd Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Typically for Curtis, however, the focus is not on the broader political ructions or big action sequences. Instead, the personal stakes and motivations of the core cast take centre stage.

In her previous work, I found that the personal, almost-cozy tone pulled in a different direction to the nuanced characterisation and often quite spiky, borderline cynical thematic and plot elements. Happily, four books in, Curtis has the tonal register working in harmony with all the other elements of this excellent book. This is in large part down to Cod's own spiky persona: unapologetically neurodiverse, relatable, and a bit of a mess at the same time as being extremely accomplished. A secondary plot focused on her family works fantastically to add depth and history to Cod's character. All of this is delivered—as I've come to expect from Curtis—in fabulous, evocative prose. Ultimately a hugely impressive novel from an author really hitting her stride.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

The Infinite State by Richard Swan

The Infinite State is an unfortunately topical book. Unfortunate, because it's about life under a fascist space empire and the compromises and sacrifices necessary to even imperfectly rebel against it, and those seem like vital themes right now. The book opens with the death of the head of a government-linked megacorporation, and the possibilities and vulnerabilities that that death opens up for his wife, Katherine. In particular, the key plot driver is her plan to buy a planet for colonisation from the galactic UN-equivalent and set up a less repressive state. Hers is one of three points of view, the others being Julian, a naïve foreign driver working in the fascist state without asking too many questions, and Cyprian, a cynical, burned-out cop both complicit in and deeply contemptuous of the state's repression. Right from the start, the atmosphere is impeccably crafted. Pretty much every single character is just waiting for the Sword of Damocles to fall; every action courts suspicion, and even the most paranoid worries have some risk of coming true. It's also a deeply patriarchal and misogynistic setting, with open homophobia and heavy coercion for women to have as many children as possible.

Unsurprisingly, given the pretty grim setup, the characters are all generally contemptible in a quite compelling way. Katherine and Julian start the book as privileged idiots who are shocked when the fash come for them too, while Cyprian and a number of other supporting characters are smart, broken functionaries within the system who commit evil in its name all the while seething—with varying degrees of impotence—to do something about it. So far, so promising, but there really is something quite lacking in its execution as a complete story.

The plot is thin and frayed almost to breaking point in places, unable to support the events and character development that hang off it. Swan jumps from (nicely done) set piece to set piece without much explanation. Some key plot events happen in an incredibly (in both senses of the word) easy manner, given the fascist state's otherwise tight control. Similarly, the worldbuilding elements outside the state—some of which are plot-critical—really don't quite make sense. The Infinite State is the first in a series, and I'm sure some of these elements will be developed later, but as a standalone proposition the book suffers from these deficiencies. A bit more thought and 50 or 100 additional pages adding character depth and connective tissue between major events really would have helped. As it is, the book leaves us in a place where I'm interested enough in the characters and in what comes next that I'm keen to read the next book, but with just a bit more attention (much of it editorial, rather than authorial, I think) we could have had something more impressive than the perfectly adequate baseline the published book presents us with.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

The Demon Star by Jesse Aragon

The Demon Star is an entertainingly gonzo dark science fantasy romp. We open on a shattered, hostile world with a few outposts of civilization doing only very slightly better than bare survival. These outposts have competing religious beliefs about gods and demons who must be appeased and/or fought as the case may be. Every so often there is a "harvest" where the gods descend and take people away who are never seen again, particularly those psychically talented. We expand from this setup to a slightly cosmic-horror-tinged plot of revenge, revolution, and pretty large helpings of violence. Although it isn't on the cover copy and isn't, from what I've been able to tell, what the author has said are her influences, I get strong impressions of R. Scott Bakker as written by C. S. Friedman: a dark science fantasy that isn't quite grimdark in the specific early 2000s mode.

I'm a fan of science fantasy done well, and the atmosphere and tone Aragon serves up are both great. Our two main point of view characters—a woman who was supposed to be harvested living on the fringes of the biggest city on the planet and an alcoholic, tortured priest of the city's religion—are compromised in a lot of ways, but interesting enough to maintain one's attention. There are several twists throughout that aren't quite unexpected (there are appropriate hints of what's coming) but do a good job escalating the stakes and the scope of the world.

The prose is largely straightforward, but with an appealing gothic tint to it that really works for the subject matter. The problem, though, is that it really, really doesn't feel like a complete work. Crucial character dynamics we're expected to pretty quickly care about are doled out largely in "as you know" asides or brief flashbacks. This means that key character developments feel occasionally unearned or incoherent. Similarly, several crucial bits of the political setup that undergirds both the societies in the setting and the conflict that erupts partway through are sketched so briefly as to be inadequate. Even moreso than was the case for The Infinite State, the skeleton of plot we're given just isn't sufficient to bear the weight of the characterisation and worldbuilding hung off it. There's so much that feels missing that one gets the impression of a duology cut down to a single volume in the editorial process. Again, this may well be more an editorial than an authorial issue. Either way, The Demon Star has enough glimmers of real interest and talent that I'm interested in what Aragon writes next, but for me at least does not come close to fully realising that potential.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

References:

Curtis, Grace. Heaven's Graveyard [DAW Books, 2026].

Swan, Richard. The Infinite State [Tor, 2026].

Aragon, Jesse. The Demon Star [DAW Books, 2026].

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

Book Review: A Trade of Blood by Robert Jackson Bennett

Meat is murder

This is a book about murder and forced labour as well as the cost of beef. And the last is quite probably the most important.

A Trade of Blood is the third book in Robert Jackson’s Bennett’s Shadow of the Leviathan series of fantasy mysteries. The books follow the duo of Ana Dolabra and Dinios Kol as they investigate politically sensitive crimes across a biohacked secondary world empire which is constantly threatened by attacks from massive, amphibious Titans from the sea (think Pacific Rim-esque kaiju). Both Ana and Din have had significant biological enhancements. Ana struggles greatly with external stimuli but is able to stitch together astonishing chains of logic when provided with appropriate information. Din, meanwhile, has been altered to have perfect, photographic memory. He investigates, observes, and reports back to Ana, who reaches conclusions with alarming rapidity.

In A Trade of Blood, Ana and Din travel away from the sharp end of the Titan threat for the first time in the series (the first two books having been set right near the sea where the Titans come ashore). They travel to the agricultural heartland of the empire to investigate the killing of the daughter of one of two key families in the beef industry by the son of the other key family. Any disruption of food supplies would seriously upset the stability of the Empire, and thus Ana and Din, specialist Imperial Iudex (the judicial/police/investigative branch of government), are sent to try to resolve the matter with a minimum of fuss. The facts of the killing seem largely indisputable, but the victim doesn’t remain the only dead body for long, and things get a little bit more complicated than they first appear, leading into a well-crafted, engaging mystery. I picked the culprit a bit earlier in this book than in the earlier ones, but it all still, in my view, worked very well.

As with previous books in the series, Ana and Din are very much our core cast, and their dynamic is fantastic. Ana is salty and waspish, and has absolutely no filter. Din, in contrast, is the straight man, sighing along, but also giving his own deadpan ripostes. This is established from the very start of the book, which opens thus:

“IT IS AN INARGUABLE TRUTH, you know,” said Ana, “that most people are absolutely enthralled by dead girls.”
I cracked my eyes and gazed at the carriage ceiling, certain I’d misheard this comment. I waited, listening to the rumble of the wheels and the crackling of the horses’ hooves on the gravel road.
Perhaps she would stop now, I thought. Perhaps there would be no more of it.
I shut my eyes and sought my way back to sleep.
“In fact, did you know, Din …” said Ana.
I opened them again.

It’s a genuinely funny dynamic, but it’s also great character work; the general banter and occasional seriousness and sincerity make it clear that these two, three books and a year or so into their working relationship, like and respect each other. Both also have ongoing, though low-key, plot threads that carry through from earlier books, Ana relating to what exactly her modifications are and Din to a quite difficult family history (these do mean that the book doesn’t entirely stand alone—though you can certainly enjoy a significant majority of what’s going on in the book without having read the first two, you would be missing enjoyable context if you did so).

The interchanging support cast is also (as it was in the first two books) very well done. This ranges from various family members of the victim and the accused to local law enforcement and, most prominently, the leader of the local Orbiis corps—essentially agricultural bioengineering specialists. Din also has a family connection pop up in a quite unexpected fashion. I also enjoyed very much that Bennett continues to present Din as that exceptionally rare beast in SFF, the bisexual man who generally prefers men, and the use of that aspect of his character (and his eidetic memory) to play with the “love interest of the week” dynamic one often gets in noir fiction is well judged.

This is the point at which mystery reviewing gets a touch difficult, at least for me. I find it quite difficult reviewing in this genre—at least before release—because you can't go into that many plot- or character-specific specifics without spoiling the whole thing. In most cases spoilers aren’t something I care about, but they really do matter for most mysteries, and that that is indeed the case here. However, the fact that it is a fantasy mystery means that isn’t all there is to talk about—the worldbuilding and thematic concerns hanging off the mystery plot also reward attention. RJB is very clear that what he's doing with this series (aside from writing deeply entertaining Nero Wolfe pastiches) is examining the different institutions of a society designed and tuned to address an ongoing, existential environmental threat. In Ana & Din's world this is the annual march of the Titans inland from the sea (as noted above, these are major presences in the first two books, absent in all but the use of their body parts and excretions as essential elements of Imperial biohacking here). But the story is also very clearly holding a mirror up to our world and the ongoing, existential threat of environmental degradation, particularly climate change.

As I've written elsewhere, there is a distinct genius to the nature of the role Bennett gives Ana and Din as specialist Imperial Iudex. They're not private detectives. They're not CSI technicians. They're not even really cops. They are Ombudsmen (in the European sense of the term of an organisation to investigate and ensure integrity in government). It's not a perfect analogy—there's rather more violence and crime scenes than Ombuds in the real world typically deal with—but at heart the crimes and puzzles Ana and Din investigate go to the proper functioning of the Empire's government. That proper functioning, it is made very clear, is maintaining social stability and directing that stable society at the eternal problem of staying alive with a decent standard of living in the face of centuries of rampaging kaiju. This setup allows our main characters—and Bennett—to poke around in all of the key institutions that make society tick. The Tainted Cup was engineering/civil works. A Drop of Corruption was basic forms of government and international relations. And A Trade of Blood is agriculture and food production.

It might seem weird to say this is part of government, but there's an Imperial bureaucracy responsible for agriculture too, complete with genetic enhancements: the aforementioned Orbiis. And food production is of course critically important to social stability; there’s a reason Juvenal sneered about “bread and circuses” as a mechanism for keeping the plebs happy almost 2,000 years ago. That sneer is particularly true of raising beef, which ultimately is an unnecessary luxury in land use and nutritional terms. But it's delicious, people want it, it keeps them happy, and happy people are easier to direct at the existential problem. But raising beef in this world is also wildly, weirdly artificial: biohacked giant tottering cattle with tonnes of meat on each limb, pre-sapient cat-monkey things pressed into service as field hands, and perfectly tuned magic fertilizer. We also see the waste: enormous piles of bones and hides. In reality that would very likely be used for something, but Bennett is clearly going for a 'slaughter of the buffalo' style image here, and it's an effective one. If he isn't going full militant vegan (and I think the book's take on the role of food as a social stabiliser is too pragmatic for it to go that far), he's clearly interested in showing the desensitisation to death that the factory beef farming methods cause.

The point Bennett is making, of course, is that this is all pretty much all true of how agriculture works in our world too, at least on a mass scale as it is practiced in most developed countries to a greater or lesser extent. Exploring these ideas in a secondary world gets the familiar context out of the way so we can see the strangeness in what we accept as quite normal in our own society. As Bennett states in his author's note, despite agriculture being framed in much of our current political discourse as a “natural” sphere set against the unnatural cities, there is little we do that is more profoundly “unnatural” than industrial farming. In this shock of recognition amidst the alienating oddity of Ana and Din's biohacked world, Bennett asks us how far we will have to hack ourselves and our society to survive what's coming from our planet and what the costs might be. Having these questions consistently in the background throughout a well crafted, taut mystery, excellent character work, and engaging worldbuilding really is impressive. It's rare that a novel this much sheer fun is also so thought-provoking. Another excellent entry in a series of remarkably consistent and remarkably high quality.

Highlights:

• Engaging fantasy mystery
• A hugely compelling core duo
• Asks compelling questions while entertaining

Nerd coefficient: 8/10.

Reference: Bennett, Robert Jackson. A Trade of Blood [Del Rey, 2026].

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

Book Review: The Feywild Job by C. L. Polk

 A solid piece of D&D tie-in fiction; a missed chance for more

After the heights of 2nd- through 4th-edition Forgotten Realms tie-in fiction, where we got dozens of books across a quarter century, Wizards of the Coast seems to have gone into a bit of a lull in the setting over the decade since 5e bedded in (at least as far as characters not named Drizzt are concerned). That ‘90s TSR fiction is what I cut my fantasy nerd teeth on as a pre-teen and younger teenager; I have very fond memories of it. So I was pleased to see Wizards of the Coast return to tie-in fiction and return to a book set (at least partially) in the Realms. I was equally pleased to see they’ve tapped C. L. Polk, a writer with a great backlist, to write The Feywild Job.

The premise is that two pairs of adventurers are essentially blackmailed by a “client” into a reverse heist: steal a MacGuffin back from someone and return it to its proper place before anyone notices it’s gone. Each pair is led by half of an old duo of thieves—the warlock Saeldian and the bard Kell. That partnership fell apart a decade before the book started, when feelings started to develop between them. This was a problem for Saeldian’s warlock pact (the deal with an Archfey which gives him his powers), which requires him to never fall in love, so he walks out, and the next time he sees Kell is at the start of this heist. The two tagalongs are Kell’s orc druic companion Lorzok and Saeldian’s rogue companion Jubilee. This leads into a heist plot, a potential second-chance romance, and some very of-the-moment cozy-adjacent vibes.

A shift to cozy-adjacent romantasy might seem an odd choice for D&D tie-in fiction, but in a lot of ways I think it actually honours the tradition of the field. The heist-quest plot thread is absolutely classic TSR tie-in stuff. The point of tie-in fiction is at least in part to attract new audiences to the TTRPG product, and romantasy—and its audience—is a potential untapped market for WotC. And to dive into some deep lore, in fact one of the earliest examples of D&D tie-in was what we’d now call romantasy. A spinoff of the early ‘80s Endless Quest Choose Your Own Adventure books was 6 HeartQuest books. Before Drizzt, before the Dragonlance Chronicles, we had CYOA romantasy aimed at teenagers. So the choice of genre seems both perfectly judged for the current moment and a well judged nod to tradition.

And it all works quite well without being a total triumph. If I’d read this as a 13-year-old just realising he was queer at the height of TSR Forgotten Realms fiction, I’d have loved it. And it is a solid, largely well executed example of both a cozy romantasy and a piece of RPG tie-in fiction, but it isn’t more than that, either. I’d certainly put it in the top quartile of D&D fiction ever released, but with the greatest of respect, that isn’t the world’s most searching standard, and I don’t think it quite matches the absolute best of the old 2nd- to 4th-edition tie-ins (notably the best work of Erin Evans and Elaine Cunningham, for example). For the rest of the review I want to talk about why it reaches that upper quartile and why it also doesn’t, in my eyes, extend beyond solidly pretty good.

Polk is a technically excellent writer, and the prose in the book is very well done. A nice eye for imagery, a bit of personality to the narrative voice. One of the risks of D&D fiction is you can sometimes hear the dice rattling in the background, but the integration of spells, combat, and shared world elements is done seamlessly here—this may seem like damning with faint praise, but it really isn’t. It’s a key element of RPG tie-ins, and it is not often done as smoothly as Polk does it here. A number of the action set pieces are done very well, and the lick of horror imagery in the back half of the narrative is well judged and effective. Our non-binary lead in Saeldian is also written sympathetically and subtly. In a lot of ways The Feywild Job is a really good piece of writing in this genre.

But some of the bigger picture elements are not quite at the level of the sentence-by-sentence work. The major forward plot drive for the book is the heist element, and I really just wanted more of it: the planning, the traps, the complications. The first quarter of the book provides a bit of that, but for a book whose title creates an expectation for heist-heavy narrative, it was a little underdone. If you create the expectation, the reader (or I, at least), wants it to be fulfilled. What fills the narrative space not taken up by the heist is the second-chance romance plot between Saeldian and Kell, and unfortunately it doesn’t really compensate. For a romance of this type, understanding the nature of the first breakup, getting a good grasp on motivations and pining and missed opportunity is in my view essential to the whole thing working. And given the nature of that romance plot, the backstory is a little too thinly sketched to get the full effect. There are also a few misplaced details that just leave the break, and the level of bitterness being carried by both parties, feels a little contrived. Finally, for a book with four main cast members, the two leads’ companions are done a little dirty; both Lorzok and Jubilee have glimmers of real interest and very obvious possibility for more in Polk’s capable hands, but just don’t get the time or page space to be fully developed. The unrealised potential really does frustrate.

There is a place for 3-star fiction that doesn’t push—particularly when I was younger, I read a lot of it, I enjoyed a lot of it, and to a lesser degree I still do now. And The Feywild Job is firmly in that bracket. Perhaps because of the nature of tie-in fiction, perhaps because of the reasonably tropey cozy and romance elements, perhaps because of the combination between all of those and a moderately undercooked heist, it just doesn’t rise above it. It’s not a page count issue—it’s a reasonably typical length for this sort of book—but somehow it does seem to be trying to do a bit too much a bit too briefly.

Ultimately, if this is the quality of D&D tie-in we're going to get in the future, we should all be happy: it sets an enjoyable, highly competent standard. The Feywild Job is exactly what it needs to be. I just found myself the slightest bit disappointed it wasn’t more.

Highlights:

• Well crafted prose and engaging imagery
• Tie-in fiction which speaks to both tradition and the current moment
• Just a whiff of missed opportunity

Nerd coefficient: 6/10.

Reference:  Polk, C. L. The Feywild Job [Random House Worlds, 2026].

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

Review: And Side by Side They Wander by Molly Tanzer

 Ctrl C, Ctrl V: The novella

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nerd coefficient: 6/10.

Highlights:

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

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

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

Book Review: Mortedant's Peril by R. J. Barker

 Grimy murder mystery in gaslamp Minas Tirith

R J Barker has established a fine career writing consistently very good to excellent fantasy that is just a little bit weird. Not so much the particular frame of the New Weird(TM), more that it reads like it was shot predominantly from a Dutch angle: you’re reading what appears at first glance to be (top quality) but reasonably down the middle fantasy and then you realise everything is just a little quirky, unsettling, or both. In Mortedant’s Peril, Barker deploys that lens to great effect to not one but two of my favourite fantasy building blocks: the book is a murder mystery set in a well-drawn secondary world city.

After a brief prologue from the perspective of the murderer, the book opens with our protagonist, Irody Hasp, arriving at the scene of a death in a down-at-heel neighbourhood. Hasp is a Mortedant, a quasi-religious order which reads and passes on the last thoughts of the dead (This is one of the three great orders of the city of Elbay, the others being the magic engineers the Spurriers and the more familiarly clerical Worshipful, who revere the Howling God allegedly trapped beneath the city). Although he reads nothing unusual in the deceased’s thoughts, someone obviously thinks he might have, and shortly afterwards Hasp is caught up in a murder. In the rather brutal criminal law of the setting, absent any other evidence the last person seen with the deceased will be fingered as their murderer, and so Hasp has only a few days to find said evidence before his scheduled execution. The mystery plot which unfolds from this is well-crafted and surprising: the end result makes sense in a way that doesn't betray the reader or the setting, but neither is it quickly obvious what the details of the (in the end quite convoluted) plot surrounding the murder are.

Perhaps the obvious comparison (and, indeed, it is one of the comps the publisher user in the blurb) with “death priest secondary world city murder mystery” is Katherine Addision’s Witness for the Dead. And at one level, sure, the similarities are obvious. Both Addision’s Celehar and Barker’s Hasp are ultimately gentle men who have been ill-used by people who are not, both are death priests investigating murders. But the sensibility of Elbay is very different from that of Amalo, and Irody Hasp is a very, very different character to Celehar. Celehar is a quiet, lonely man with little understanding of his own worth & endless empathy for his clients. Hasp, meanwhile, is a quiet, lonely man (though he'd not realise the latter) who is, at the start of the novel, a prim snob with a significant collection of prejudices about pretty much anyone and anything and a perhaps inflated sense of his own worth. He has a general contempt for pretty much all other people and institutions he comes across. He finds fault with the behaviour of both people higher and lower in social status to him, is dismissive of religious belief and, when we see him encounter the Sea People – another species of sapient which exists in the setting – somewhat racist as well.

What Barker does and does well is, over time and with exposure, show us that Hasp’s bigotry is more due to ignorance than deep character law and is not particularly closely held; he slowly realises that perhaps his prejudices are not universally justified. This is achieved in large part by making Hasp do something he has not been able to do for quite some: rely on other people. The key supporting cast who achieve this are Whisper – a Sea Person mercenary forced upon him as a guard after the murder – and Mirial, the sister of the murder victim who essentially swindles Hasp into taking her on as an apprentice. These characters are well-drawn, with enough detail coming through to get a sense of personality while also making it clear that Hasp very much does not have a complete picture of his (initially unwanted) companions. 

The setting itself, the city of Elbay, is a remarkably evocative thing. It resembles M John Harrison’s Viriconium superimposed on Minas Tirith with a side of Dickensian London (Given that Harrison’s city is in part a response to what he saw as the fussy nerdism of Tolkien and his successors, this is a provocative choice of setting). I do not think the Minas Tirith reference can be accidental. Like Tolkien’s city, Elbay has seven tiers, with the top being a castle within which a possibly absent ruler allegedly resides. Like Minas Tirith, Elbay was designed from the ground up to resist invasion, and with that imminent threat now centuries in the past, the city’s defensive orientation makes little sense and is in some ways a net negative to its residents, as I imagine is the case in Minas Tirith after the fall of Sauron. The Viriconium aspect comes from the gothic skewering of the more romantic side of fantasy, the grime and the steam and the old technology which the residents still use but do not wholly understand (and is no longer wholly reliable). This obviously overlaps with the Dickensian aspect of the worldbuilding, but the Dickens influence goes wider than just the cityscape. The wonderfully evocative names, the well-judged aspects of caricature in some of the characterisation, and the ongoing touch of genuinely funny humour throughout all point in that direction as well, and the labyrinthine bureaucracy and legal system are certainly reminiscent of Bleak House.

The worldbuilding is widescreen in its approach, which works for the book's pace. By this I mean it flits from set piece to set piece of the murder investigation with an impressionistic view of the city in between rather than a detailed one. Points of detail and specificity (I particularly like the communal plumbing whereby the further down the city you go the more second and third and fifth hand the water is) do contribute to the worldbuilding, but a lot is left in soft focus. This doesn't bother me,  but if you're a worldbuilding nerd this may frustrate. 

As with the slow evolution of Hasp’s character, this approach is reflective of the fact that is both Book One of a series and that it has its own distinct (and complete) plot and character arcs and the reader is expected to have patience with both. As noted above, aside from the prologue, the narration is in the first person and thus tightly. At one point a fair way through the novel, Mirial takes Hasp off the main streets to avoid attention. As he goes through these back alleys and byways, he sees “quiet neighbourhoods... [he] had never seen before, places where the houses rose up in great steps and grew on top of each other in teetering piles that almost met just above our heads”. Until the events of the novel, his small life – and his bigotry – have constrained his experience of his city and its people and it is the later opening up of his character which opens up some of the world as well. Hooks for the sequels and further character dives (Hasp and Whisper both have very interesting pasts which are very much not fully explored in this book) similarly remain, and we can expect further unspooling across the rest of the series. This is entirely deliberate and brilliantly done, to my reading, but I can see it irritating readers who expect things to be more clearly and fully laid out from the get-go and want an immediately likeable narrator. 

Like the characters, Mortedant's Peril's thematic concerns resist simplistic analysis. In the opening chapters of the book, reading Hasp’s repeated sneers about religion, I thought I was seeing the voice of the author. And there is some of that in here, sure, fanaticism for religious or personal reasons is clearly not something the book has much time for. But the stuff at the start I nodded along with sympathetically as Hasp sneered about the Worshipful is shown later on to be just another emanation of the Little England bigotry (Little Elbay?) he'd built for himself; a wider exposure to a wider range of believers showed that view impoverished. It could be read as a condemnation of the way class and capital eat up and spit out those at the bottom of the heap (here, in the towering hill-city of Elbay, literally the bottom). And yet even that understanding is at least complicated by the raw utilitarian views of one of the supporting characters one might be tempted to class as 'good'.

Ultimately, this is a riotous, seething romp of a book with a city and a cast that are both weird and fantastical and also viscerally, plausibly human. Another very impressive series starter from an author who has an unblemished record of producing them.

--

The Math

Highlights:

• Well crafted fantasy mystery in a wonderfully realised setting
• Both demands and rewards patience from the reader
• Asshole protagonist (complimentary)

Nerd coefficient: 8/10 

Reference:  R. J. Barker, Mortedant's Peril [Tor, 2026].

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

Game Review: Opus: Prism Peak

 Ever wanted to play your own personal Makoto Shinkai movie?

After a brief scene-setting introduction, Opus: Prism Peak opens with a middle-aged guy, Eugene, in a car on his way home to his grandfather's funeral. He rather quickly crashes into a statute, then mysteriously finding his way to a land filled with animal spirits which in a lot of ways echoes the real world. Shortly afterwards, he meets a young girl who can remember nothing about herself other than that she needs to travel to the top of the mountain looming over the landscape. A lot of this world is ephemeral, and the core gameplay mechanic revolves around Eugene taking photos of people, places, and scenery to both tether it all to reality and help build the picture of what is going on. The photography-based gameplay gently increases in complexity and the game goes on, with different lenses being provided, different exposure settings being unlocked, and other tools for helping you judge the perfect photograph.

Prism Peak is the fourth in the Opus series of games from Sigono, a Taiwanese developer. These are all technically, I believe, set in the same universe, but spanning millennia and different worlds. All have different gameplay; The Day We Found Earth (initially a phone game) had a robot hunting for star. Rocket of Whispers had time management and scavenging. Echoes of Starsong light resource management and exploration puzzles. All also have significantly different visual styles (down at least in part, I think, to increasing budgets over time). I find it really interesting that despite these disparate approaches to gameplay, all are identifiably part of a series. What unites them (other than the very loose shared world) is a particular, and quite unusual, wistful thematic thread. They are also all scored, very impressively, by the same Taiwanese  electronic/solo piano artist Triodust. 

The previous game in the series, Echoes of Starsong, occasioned almost universal praise; I'm pleased to say that in my view Prism Peak continues that fine tradition. If some of the emotional beats might not hit quite so hard, the gameplay is more robust and the visuals are stunning. And, if there were hints previously, Prism Peak makes it clear that Sigono owes a distinct visual and thematic debt to Makoto Shinkai and an atmospheric one to the work of Kyoto Animation (especially Violet Evergarden); the latter takes the form of an if not melodramatic then certainly open and not entirely subtle approach to emotion and interpersonal tension.

The Shinkai comparison is right there in the marketing copy, but it's not just puffery; the vibe and visuals really do echo his work (while, I think, significantly going beyond pastiche). Thematically, there are nods to the games with gender and time in Your Name, the romantic self-absorption in Weathering with You, the rural decline of Suzume, and the concern with natural disaster and environmental degradation that pervade all three. Visually, the resemblance is even stronger; if Shinkai's work has a single signature, it's towering, majestic skies, and the skies in Prism Peak are things of beauty. 

The rest of the visual design is also hugely impressive. The cast - our human core duo and a collection of animal spirits - is expressively rendered, and the ground level scenery (mostly abandoned or decaying urban and suburban environments and misty forests) works well both as a passive source of storytelling and as a collection of objects and vistas to take photos of, which drives the gameplay. I'd also be remiss not to mention the score, again from Triodust, this time with a number of collaborators. It's emotionally evocative where it needs to be, added depth and texture when it should mostly stay out of the way, and is complemented by two or three really good insert songs. The voice acting is also generally good. I played in English (Japanese and Mandarin are also available), and by and large it's all fluent and matches well with the characters the actors are voicing. The one noticeable weakness is, unfortunately, in the main character. Eddy Yeung generally does a great job portraying Eugene as the slightly careworn 40 year old he is, but there's the occasional line, particularly in the first half of the game, that just lands slightly off, taking you out of what are sometimes intended as quite emotional scenes. This is a quibble rather than major complaint, but just those few lines being re-recorded would add another level of polish.

So this is how it looks and sounds; is it any fun? The short answer is it depends on what you're looking for, and if you vibe with what Sigono is putting down in this game, absolutely yes. The gameplay is based on taking photographs and, by interacting with those photos, the characters, and various sacred firebowls scattered around the world (these also serve as save points), filling in a journal you acquire early in the game. There is some light puzzling involved in this (finding what photographs people want to see; understanding the motivations and desires of the various characters), but it's all reasonably simple. It wouldn't be involved enough to carry a long game, but a full playthrough of the game takes about 10 hours (with the ability to dive back in in post-game and fill out any parts of the journal you might have missed with some ease of replay tools), and it's perfectly fine for that purpose. 

The arc of the game is ultimately Eugene learning about himself while learning about others, and the interesting combination of widescreen emotion and wistful tone I mentioned above works for me (though it may come across as mawkish to some). My eyes were left damp a number of times which is really what this sort of game is trying to achieve. This is accented with just a tiny hint of cosmic horror, judiciously deployed, that provide a nice point of tonal contrast to the prevailing mode. It is also, not to repeat myself, absolutely gorgeous, appropriately enough for a game that revolves around photography. Moving and beautifully presented, Opus: Prism Peak is well worth a couple of days of your time.

-- 

Highlights:

• Gorgeous visuals and a brilliant soundtrack.
• Gently compelling photography-based gameplay.
• Emotionally resonant storytelling (if you're in the mood for what the game offers) .

Nerd coefficient: 8/10 

Reference: Opus: Prism Peak [Sigono, 2026]. Available on Steam, Switch, & Switch 2.

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

Book Review: The Lighthouse at the End of the World by Philip A. Suggars

 An impressive multiversal picaresque that has maybe a few too many meanders

I’m not typically one to start a review with comps, but I think that might be the best way to situate the very interesting, quite deliberate mashup of influences that is The Lighthouse at the End of the World. 

Our main character, Oyster, is a smalltime gang member running cons in London who discovers an undercurrent of magic in London and stumbles into a tangle of alternate worlds, including an alternate London. With that setup, there are very definite nods to the British portal fantasy tradition here; you can see the dialogue to Narnia, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan. But those nods, while affectionate, are also critical. Forgive a wretched colonial for perhaps not quite getting the class nuance, but the protagonists of those classics are all, to a greater or lesser extent, posh. Oyster and his associates are very much not that, and neither are essentially any of the people he meets during his adventures. And none of these books really feature cities, indeed, some are visibly hostile to them. Perhaps the layered Londons of V E Schwab’s Shades of Magic series are closer cousins, but even there the vibe is different, the crime more gentleperson thief than street kid tough. The Lighthouse at the End of the World is grimily, borderline threateningly, defiantly urban, and it is also, in an engaging, accessible way, really quite weird.

At heart this is a picaresque novel, with a likeable, flawed rogue (Oyster) falling into scrapes, travelling to strange places, and having adventures which poke obliquely at issues of contemporary relevance (climate change; ecofascism; capitalist excess). But it’s a multiversal, biohacked version thereof. The worlds oyster travels to range from unfamilar to bizarre – a beach packed with the lost detritus of urban development (dead tube trains, bicycles, office chairs) was particularly striking. And the creatures and people he meet are similarly so, from slightly insectoid fairies (?) to semi-biological flying machines to adorable beetle pets which nest against your rib cage (this last being an example of a light but effective thread of body horror throughout).

The nature of this sort of novel is the plot tumbles along and to some extent just happens to the protagonist. There is still enough action, contrasted with points of calm, to keep things interesting, but I could have wished a little bit more focus. I saw when looking up some details online for this review that the book is listed as “Book 1 of the Cities of the Drift,” and its status as Book 1 of a series (not something clearly advertised in the ARC copy I read) might explain the slightly unsatisfying conclusion, and even somewhat excuse it; it is a good setup for more books set in this world. But in my view the book isn’t quite, in its own terms, a wholly satisfactory conclusion to a wholly satisfying plot arc in and of itself.

Suggars’ character work is effective but thinly sketched, with the exception of a compelling, complete central character in Oyster. Fantasy fronted by firmly working class characters is rarer than it should be, and he is an excellent portrayal of such. Flawed, prickly, a bit lost, but with a basic decency at his core. He’s also never patronised by the narrative, again something that is rarer than ideal in this space. The rest of the cast, though, is closer to Dickensian caricature than realist portrait, though I do think this is deliberate, and effective in creating the appropriate atmosphere if not quite the depth I might ideally prefer. On the other hand, I’d give bonus points to Suggars for the lively and well-realised sometimes very odd non-human characters that populate the novel.  

One particular narrative choice which grated was the attempts to render dialect and accent in the text. It’s clearly deliberate and part of the project – working class, street-level urban fantasy – but doesn’t quite work for me. Not, as far as I can tell, an inaccurate representation of vocabulary and accent (Suggars is from South London), but it’s just hard to do that in a way that reads well and I don’t think it quite succeeds. And this isn’t only true of Oyster’s South London cant, the (hugely entertaining) Marya Petrovna who doesn’t speak English as her first language also comes across just a little unnaturally. This may not bother others, but for me pulled me – significantly, at times – out of the otherwise really well crafted, slightly hallucinatory fever dream setting of the novel.

Ultimately, The Lighthouse at the End of the World reads very much like a first novel (Suggars already has a number of very good short stories in print), but a good first novel. Not everything entirely lands. There’s the occasional (metaphorical) missed dot on an i or cross on a t. But the creativity and eye for imagery lingers more than the flaws for me. A good read in its own right, and an even better signal for what might come next.

--

The Math

Highlights:

• Unapologetically working class, street level fantasy
• A well-developed taste for the bizarre
• Flashes of brilliant prose

Nerd coefficient: 7/10 

Reference:  Philip A. Suggars, The Lighthouse at the End of the World [Titan, 2025].

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

Book Review: China Mountain Zhang

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

Highlights:

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

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

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

Book Nanoreviews: Matryoshka; Boy, With Accidental Dinosaur; The Rainseekers

These are three novellas from quite different corners of science fiction that I read over January. One, Matryoshka, is a backlist title that's been on my shelf for some time, while the other two are new releases.

The odd thing is you will see I've given all 3 the same score (give or take a few decimal points; I do think Matryoshka is probably by a small margin the strongest), but that flattens just how diverse in their strengths (and their flaws) these three works are. Suffice to say that I think if any of these is in a niche that is to your taste, you will find it enjoyable and engaging.

Matryoshka by Ricardo Pinto

This is, as far as I can tell, Pinto's only longer-form work outside his very good and underappreciated Stone Dance of the Chameleon series of early 2000s grimdark doorstoppers, and it is a very different beast to those. A slim novella clocking in at under 90 generously spaced pages, it opens with our point of view character, Cherenkov, hooking up with a complete stranger in post-World War 2 Venice and then following her through a portal to another world, called Eboreus. So far, so portal fantasy. What follows, though, is something considerably more abstract and more surreal.

Cherenkov and the woman he followed to Eboreus, Septima, are quickly set on a mission across a trackless sea and towards an increasingly fierce white light to find an old man who is probably a Neanderthal. It turns out that the closer one gets to that white light, the slower time moves. By the time the two return (with a third person, who had been lost in time), years have passed in Eboreus and decades in the real world. The plot, such as it is, plays out the consequences of this time dilation.

Matryoshka is probably best described as science fantasy. The story is played out like a fairy tale, but the time dilation at the plot's core seems pretty clearly to be a matter of physics (if not understood as such by most of the characters) rather than magic. The plot is sketched lightly and its logic deliberately surreal and disorientating. Through this choice of narrative voice, the themes Pinto seeks to explore—dislocation in the face of the Holocaust and in the face of modernity more generally—are also sheeted onto the reader trying to make sense of the action. This is in general very effective and quite clearly deliberate, but in a few places the generally elegant prose clunks or is missing just one more plot breadcrumb to pull the reader along. Those quibbles aside, this is a bold and creative work by an author whose work deserves more attention. Recommended if you enjoy surrealist approaches to speculative fiction.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10, a mostly enjoyable experience.

Boy, With Accidental Dinosaur by Ian McDonald

McDonald is a science fiction luminary, with works across a wide range of subgenres to great effect, from the sweep of centuries on Mars in Desolation Road to near-future brilliance in The Dervish House and River of Gods to cartel wars on the moon in the Luna trilogy. Boy, with Accidental Dinosaur explores yet another corner of the genre in a near-future post-political-collapse America. The point of departure from our timeline to the one of the book is the existence of the B2T2: "A place where two times lay up against each other, close as kittens, separated only by the finest layer of space-time fur, that could be stroked, and parted." This hole in time caused religious and political upheaval and, related to the anomaly or not, significant civil war within the former United States. It also allows for the rise of a truly idiosyncratic new form of entertaiment across these shattered states: dinosaur rodeo.

McDonald's masterstroke is to tell the story of this world from the perspective of someone deeply shaped by its differences from ours but with no understand of, or agency over, it. Tif is an orphan in his (late, as I read it) teens, his parents killed in early exchanges in the early battles which shaped the geopolitical present of the book. From a young age he is obsessed with dinosaur rodeo and aroused by the buckaroos; he's gay with little drama about that fact (and Arabic with a fair bit more drama in the Christian theocracy of the future USA). He runs away from the orphanage he ended up at after his parents' death and begs, borrows, and blowjobs his way across the American southwest to get a job mucking out stalls at a dinosaur rodeo. The book opens with him being fired from that job for letting a dinosaur escape. Shortly after, he acquires the titular accidental dinosaur, and the rest of the book is a road trip where Tif attempts to find a home and send his dinosaur back to the past (mandatory under time travel rules to minimise the risk of paradox).

There is a lot to like about this book. McDonald has frequently brilliant turns of phrase, tuned precisely to the register of the under-educated, dinosaur-obsessed, working class teenager who is our point of view character ("Tif folds himself into the big chair and all the sleep that hid in the night creeps up and settles in his lap"). The character work, if briefly sketched (appropriate for a novella), is well done and convincing. As an idiosyncratic, working class view of trying to make a life in a pretty grim future, it is generally successful. The thing that holds a good book back from being great is that it seems to have precisely the wrong amount of plot for a novella. There's too much plot and too wide a sweep for a short story, but it includes so much that it feels overcooked for a novella. The plot races at breakneck pace when it feels like it should proceed more sedately, and some scenes are over almost before they begin. The overall impression is that the story could have done with another 10 or 15,000 words of breathing room. As it stands, Boy, with Accidental Dinosaur feels just a little bit more like a genuinely excellent penultimate draft than a fully realised finished article.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10, a mostly enjoyable experience.

The Rainseekers by Matthew Kressel

The Rainseekers is The Canterbury Tales on Mars, or (perhaps a more genre-appropriate comparison) a condensed Hyperion in mundane SF mode. Terraforming on Mars has proceeded far enough that there has been snow for some years, and the book focuses on a group of 40-odd people trekking out from the safety of Martian dome cities in an attempt to be the first to experience rain. Our narrator, Sakunja Salazar, is a former future!Tiktok star who since making more money than she knows what to do with in that career has turned to photography and journalism and is along for the ride. The book is about equally split between her frame narrative and the stories told to her by several of her fellow pilgrims (it's barely expressed as such; the trek is definitely a pilgrimmage) about their lives and what brought them to be out here, seeking Martian rain.

These pilgrims come from a wide range of backgrounds, from the descendant of the genius scientist who designed the orbital mirrors which have over decades warmed Mars and melted ice to the talented engineer brought low by trauma and addiction. Kressel has a deft touch with these nested stories, bringing depth to their subjects in a short word count. We get Sakunja's story as well, both through the narration of the frame story and her own background as narrated to one of the other pilgrims, and the emotional beats are equally well done.

I have two quibbles with the novella, one structural and one genre-related. Structurally, the balance of frame narrative to nested stories seems off. There is more to the frame narrative than an excuse for the stories, but there isn't quite enough to it to stand alone either. And for a party of 40-odd pilgrims, it feels weird that the story only gives us the stories of a handful of them. The balance is just slightly off in a way that means you finish the book feeling like you've missed something. In terms of genre complaints, there is a fair bit of "as you know, we realised [x thing happening in the 2020s] was bad" backfilling of the timeline between now and the novel's setting, and some of this is quite clumsy. The pilgrims and the Mars they inhabit are believably and authentically sketched; the history of the Earth they left behind to come there, not so much. It detracts only slightly from the narrative, but I do think it's worth noting when some of the SFnal elements of a SF narrative are one of the story's weaknesses.

Overall these are quibbles, though, and this is a nuanced, emotionally resonant set of stories that I think a lot of readers will enjoy.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10, a mostly enjoyable experience.

Contributor Profile: Eddie Clark

NAME: Eddie Clark.

SECRET UNDISCLOSED LOCATION: The bottom right corner of the map, if we have in fact been included on it.
 
NERD SPECIALIZATION(S): SFF books. Video Games. Anime. The intersection of gay shit with all 3.
 
MY PET PEEVES IN NERD-DOM ARE: The Hugo Award for Best Novella from Tor. Books which don’t trust the reader to do the slightest bit of work. Mistaking aesthetic preference for for moral valence.
 
VAMPIRES, WEREWOLVES, ZOMBIES, ALIENS OR ROBOTS: Alien Vampires.
 
RIGHT NOW I'M READING: The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh.

…AND A COUPLE BOOKS I RECENTLY FINISHED ARE: A Tangle of Time, by Josiah Bancroft. The Door on the Sea, by Caskey Russell. The Effaced, by Tobias Begley.

NEXT TWO ON QUEUE ARE: Notes from a Regicide, by Isaac Fellman. Seventhblade, by Tonya Laird.

WHEN THE WEATHER SUCKS OUTSIDE I'M MOST LIKELY TO BE… on the couch. Either book or controller in hand.

MY FAVORITE SUPERHERO AND SUPER-VILLAIN ARE: My answer to this will vary over time. This month: Kid Juggernaut and Mysteriant respectively (Anthony Oliveira’s run on Avengers Academy is a thing of queer beauty; do check it out).

IF I WERE A SUPERHERO/VILLAIN, MY POWER WOULD BE: Sending anyone to sleep instantly. I’d mostly use it on myself.

THE BEST COMIC FILM OF THE PAST 5 YEARS IS: Probably haven’t seen an western comic adaptation in the past five years! But the Netflix limited series adaptation of Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto in 2023 was spectacularly good.

THE WORST COMIC FILM OF THE PAST 5 YEARS IS: Happily for the genre, I really don’t have one to offer!

I JUST WATCHED XXXX AND IT WAS AWESOME: Kowloon Generic Romance—pitch perfect vibes, well produced, casually queer, and didn’t take any easy exits. 

I JUST WATCHED XXXX AND IT WAS TERRIBLE. Star Trek: Section 31. Did not understand what Star Trek is. Didn’t understand character. Bleh.

EVERYONE SHOULD SEE XXXX BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE, Run, don’t walk, to whatever distribution is available in your country and watch the superb SF black comedy Creamerie. Funny, sharp, and bleak.

BEST SCIENCE/SPECULATIVE FICTION SHOW OF THE PAST 10 YEARS: The Expanse.

NAME A BOOK YOU *NEED* A MOVIE OF (OR VICE VERSA): A Merchant Ivory adaptation of A Mourning Coat by Alex Jeffers would be amazing.

Welcome, Eddie!