Book Review: Victory City by Salman Rushdie

A profound commentary on the construction of Indian identity

This much we know to be true:

During the era that we in the West call the 14th century, the brothers Hakka and Bukka, of the Sangama clan, fled the Delhi Sultanate and went southward. After crossing the Krishna River, in the region that corresponds to present-day Karnataka, they built a city that would grow to become the capital of a great empire. They called this city Vijayanagara, which is Sanskrit for “victory city.” The civilization that developed there was immensely prosperous and cosmopolitan, admired by travelers from as far as Venice and Portugal, who wrote of its religious tolerance, exquisite architecture and abundant riches.

It was a society of poets, scholars and merchants, which for three centuries controlled most of southern India until the neighboring sultanates in the Deccan plateau joined forces, attacked the empire and destroyed its capital. While it lasted, the Vijayanagara Empire was a hotbed of cultural fusion where half a dozen languages coexisted and reached memorable heights of literary refinement, and where women enjoyed more freedom than anywhere else in medieval India.

But in every history there are lacunae, events that escaped memory, people whose achievements weren’t written down. In those blank spaces of the historical record, Salman Rushdie weaves the threads of his imagination and creates the vast epic that is his novel Victory City. By retelling history in the style of myth, he gives us a timeless portrait of India as he has dreamed it, a land of infinite creativity and glorious diversity that has often had to endure the curse of narrow-minded rulers who can only conceive of one correct way of living. More than a political allegory, Victory City is a prayer addressed to the future.

The novel’s main fictional addition to the historical account is the character of Pampa Kampana, a divinely gifted woman who witnesses the two and a half centuries of Vijayanagara’s splendor. She presides over the city’s birth and lives to watch in despair as it is destroyed. Across four successive dynasties, she becomes prophetess, fugitive, queen, spy, grandmother, witch, conspirator, saint, soldier, thief, chronicler and survivor. She brings the city to life by summoning it from the depths of the earth and growing it like a plant. Spawned without a history, the city comes already formed, with houses and streets not made by human hand, and with fully-grown inhabitants without ancestry, identity or any idea of how to live. So Pampa uses her magic to give them fabricated memories. People need to know who they are and where they come from, even if it’s a lie.

This bit of magical realism contains an astute observation from Rushdie: modern India often resorts to made-up narratives to tell itself its history and identity. Under Narendra Modi’s ultranationalist regime, the official version of India’s past has been entangled with authoritarian control of information, us/them revisionism, literalist readings of mythology, ethnic supremacy, fanatical patriotism, normalization of sectarian violence, science denial, entrenchment of a monoculture, sanitization of the caste system, patriarchal propaganda, and erasure of Muslim achievements.

Rushdie has in mind the difficulty of presenting any faithful and honest rendition of the facts, and this is acknowledged in the composition of the novel itself: an unnamed narrator tells us that the text of Victory City is a prose version of Pampa’s much more elegant narration in Sanskrit verse, which we don’t get to see. This is an instance of the literary device of the found manuscript, as employed in Don Quixote, and the novel’s first paragraph is addressed at the reader in a tone that echoes Don Quixote’s introduction.

From time to time this narrator reminds us that we’re not learning these events from an eyewitness point of view, but only as filtered through rewriting, translation and abridgement. There’s no moral judgment of Pampa’s use of fiction to create the history of Vijayanagara; in fact, the text’s self-professed nature seems to be saying that any version of history a society chooses to accept will always be mediated by someone’s account of it. It’s a sharp irony that, when Pampa tries to explain to the people that their history was an invention, they insist that it really happened they way they learned it. The subtext is that it’s not a bad thing that all identity is constructed; knowing this fact actually empowers you to choose how you construct it.

Pampa is very aware of the type of society she came from: a rigid patriarchy divided by religious allegiances. Her constant struggle as her miraculous city’s caretaker is to steer its people, be it explicitly or in secret, toward a way of life that values openness, harmony, pluralism, learning, and equality. But time after time, her efforts are opposed by strongmen who define themselves in reference to some designated enemy and waste the empire’s wealth in campaigns of conquest to feed their vanity, or priests who won’t listen to women and seek to enforce their favored form of devotion as the only authorized form of devotion. Like the best speculative literature, this is an imagined country that speaks with calculated precision about the real one.

Rushdie has been a frequent critic of religious extremism, on both sides of the Indian partition. He has the scars to prove he knows what he’s talking about. The land of wonders depicted in Victory City is a vision of the freedom India could achieve, in some other century, in another life.

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10.

Reference: Rushdie, Salman. Victory City [Random House, 2023].

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

Book Review: Kill all Wizards by Jedidiah Berry

An irreverent fantasy novella with a Conan-like protagonist, but with a number of fresh twists and style.

Gotchimus has a problem with wizards. Wizards put a real cramp in his style and his life. He’s a barbarian. He has an eyepatch although even to his friend Hecksley he is not open about what happened to his eye. But with a number of wizards turning up dead, suspicion has fallen on Gotchimus as the cause of the recent spate of death of spell slingers, a barbarian like Gotchimus, even if he has come up in the world of sartorial fashion and manners a bit, is going to be suspected. And he does have a grudge against some of the dead wizards, if not all of them. Untangling Gotchimus’ story is going to take a lot of work, and a lot of wizard deaths.

This is the world and story of Kill all Wizards by Jedidiah Berry.

The perspective and touchstone I want to go with showing you how this story felt like me might feel a bit strange and obscure, but bear with me here. In the 1990’s there was a now not well remembered film adaptation of the detective/superhero comic The Shadow, with Alec Baldwin in the title role. John Lane plays Shiwan Khan, his opposition (and ostensibly the last descendant of Genghis Khan)¹. There is a scene in the movie I want to focus on, where Shiwan Khan and The Shadow have lunch together. They debate philosophy, tactics, and, well, fashion. It’s the classic Dr. No style “the bad guy and the villain have a meal together”. Shiwan Khan reminds me of Gotchimus. He’s trying to learn fashion and manners, but at the end of it, he is a barbarian (the lunch scene ends predictably, with things going to pot).  

In a way, Kill all Wizards captures that vibe from Khan for the story. One minute, he is at the opera and ill-fitting (but trying) in the heart of culture and refinement.² And then the next moment, he is fighting what seems to be a forest god for his life, elegant clothes and put-on manners ditched for doing the more traditional business of a barbarian. The novella, too, recognizes the story and goes a little postmodern with the whole business a number of times, commenting on the action directly to the reader. 

This goes to the point of pointing out that there is an excess of violence and refuses to have that be inflicted on the reader. Thus, the narration of the story is extremely knowing, and sometimes very much tongue in cheek. The narration and tone recognize the reader has likely been down this road before many times and wants to tell the story in a slightly skewed way. Consider the cover image: The cover image in a way tells you that the author is not going to play it exactly straight. It's a good use of the cover art to inform and prepare the reader.

This is not to say that the book doesn’t give you what is on the label. Gotchimus, for a lot of the book, is recounting his adventures, and yes, there is a lot of barbarian action in among the more polished cultural adventures. The polished cultural adventures include the mentioned visit to the opera, and an encounter with the horrid and unkillable beast named Bureaucracy. The wilder adventures have a resonance with exploits of barbarians going all the way back to Conan. 

It’s clear to me that Berry made deliberate references and homages all through the novella and I hesitate to spoil too many of them for a curious reader.  This all resonates with several genres of fantasy beyond just the sword and sorcery, and there is plenty for a well-seasoned fantasy reader to enjoy here. Even for its length and its freshness, I am not sure this is actually even a 101 novella, it's unexpected in its cuts and premises. 

In the midst of all this, finally, the story is queer friendly, readable and doesn’t outstay its welcome. 

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Highlights:

• A classic fantasy story from a delightfully off kilter point of view

• Maybe not the fantasy story you expect, but one that does not outstay its welcome

• Some delightful funny bits, both in manners and in action.

Reference: Berry, Jedediah, Kill All Wizards (Tordotcom, 2025)

¹ Just go with it. Genghis Khan is probably the ancestor of an appreciable fraction of Eurasia thanks to his, um, prolific nature. But on the other hand, even that now is coming in for question as the evidence seems muddled. 

² Is this a Fantasy of Manners? Maybe, to a degree it hits that old subgenre, too. There is evocation of the  subgenre of fantasy (mannerpunk). Although far from its high point, there are still fantasies in this vein being written.... notably the Glamourist Histories by Mary Robinette Kowal run on this sort of Austenian flavored fantasy. Gotchimus’ intrusions into High Society are in this old tradition. 

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

Book Review: Wickhills by Premee Mohamed

Manticores, vampyrs, and spies challenge a magical city 

Premee Mohamed’s Wickhills is a John le Carré-style spy story that manages to both critique surveillance states and the narratives we tell about the past while also distracting us with fantastic beasts and a fast-paced plot. We follow Ferec, an agent for Seaborne, a secretive government agency that he believes protects the people of Wickhills. Ferec’s boss has asked him to do an off-book mission to retrieve a mysterious package which turns out to be a defector from a nearby city. The problem is: no one travels between the two cities; it’s just not done (perhaps because of magic?). And the defector has something that cannot fall into the wrong hands, including those of the government that Ferec works for. Shenanigans ensue.

Wickhills is one of six regional cities, but people never travel between the cities. Ferec grew up with stories of how Wickhills was different and better than the other cities in the region. But, this mission forces Ferec to confront his view of his city, its government, and its past, coming to realize that our stories of identity are almost always crafted to make us feel like the ‘good guys’, even when we’re not (or it’s just more complicated than that).

On a micro level, Wickhills tells the story of Ferec. He’s a fairly broken man; orphaned as a child, he was forced and sometimes chose to do terrible things to survive. As a member of Seaborne, he’s had to kill to protect the city and he often wonders if he feels bad enough about those deaths. He sees himself as an imperfect defender of the city but this mission forces him to ask if he’s been the bad guy all along and if Seaborne is secretly the Gestapo.

Over the course of the book, Ferec acquires a small team that he tries to learn to trust. It includes a member of the city watch, Velasco, who gets pulled in deeper to their secret mission than he would have preferred and, my favourite character of the book, Agent Heopsachett, an extremely competent fat lady who comes from Seaborne’s archives and provides a counterpoint to some of Ferec’s more destructive impulses.

On the macro level, Wickhills tells a story of the long tail of generational trauma left by war. Most people do not remember the wars that made Wickhills and the agreements with the other five cities of the region, so the governments of those cities can tell the story of the war however they like. Ferec sees his city as the hero of those stories. But, of course, that’s the story that the state would want you to absorb, no?

Bringing a defector through the city forces Ferec to see Wickhills through they eyes of an outsider. Unsurprisingly, he does not see things the same way. Further, during this mission, Ferec learns more about the history of the city from some allies who actually lived through the past that is now covered up by the state. Ferec’s boss, Bardanes, is a manticore, an extraordinarily long-lived creature from Persian mythology that has the face of a human, the body of a lion, and the tail of a scorpion. He’s lived in Wickhills for more than 250 years, so he saw some of its history made. Bardanes reveals part of the history of Wickhills that has been buried and forbidden to help Ferec understand the significance of his mission. Later in the story, Ferec works with a vampyr named Cazenave whose people have been in the city as long as there has been a city. Cazenave also exposes more of Wickhills’ past and how it has been shaped by the people in power.

As with all of Mohamed’s work, the writing will sometimes make you just stop on the page to admire a line of description or the way she builds characterization into an idle gesture. For example, when we meet Agent Heopsachett, Mohamed tells us “her coat and dress had been tailored to fit her fat, powerful body, not to camouflage it.” This line shows us so much about Heopsachett and her personality, trusting the reader to get it without spelling things out didactically.

Mohamed also drops in incredible details that never get further explained, in a way that makes the depth of the world she’s built seem bottomless. For example, from just the first chapter we get this description: "The Market Street Wyrm slackened its sable coils around the dome of the old mall, somnolescent but not quite asleep, its great pre-hibernation yawns occasionally flooding the neighbourhood with amber light. At street level lay the dragon’s shrine, begging it to rest, to dream, the wooden box crowded with cheap tin amulets and wizened crabapples.” We learn no more about the Market Street Wyrm. It’s part of the scenery of Wickhills, but one that tells us of the incredible depths of this city, this world that Mohamed built.

I have been a longtime fan of Mohamed’s work, but Wickhills is really a standout for me. The characters, setting, and writing are all fantastically done. Go and read this book. It’s great. 

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The Math:

Highlights:  

• Compelling John LeCarre-style spy story
• Deeper questions about narrative and history
• Outstanding writing and worldbuilding 

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10, "very high quality/standout in its category"

Reference: Mohamed, Premee. Wickhills [Tor Books, 2026].

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

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

Film Review: Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender

The film opens big questions, but being an interquel constrains how deeply it can explore them

It’s hard to keep track of all the productions involved in the Avatarverse. The original 2005 Nickelodeon show is called Avatar: The Last Airbender. The epically embarrassing 2010 live-action film is called The Last Airbender. The 2024 Netflix live-action series is called Avatar: The Last Airbender. And now we have a sequel film (technically an interquel if you count The Legend of Korra and the upcoming Seven Havens), streaming on Paramount Plus and launched on a handful of movie theaters, called… Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender.

I’ve been less confused trying to sort out all the Ghost in the Shell series and films.

The first impression I got from this new film is the refreshing return of the goofy sense of humor that distinguished the original show and is so noticeably lacking in the Netflix retelling. The core characters have reached early adulthood by this point in the timeline, but they still feel like the same fun team we met 21 years ago. However, this plot is heavily focused on Aang, with the rest of the team confined to admittedly cool-looking combat scenes but no story arcs of their own.

The plot begins with Aang following clues to the location of another frozen airbender, Tagah, who sparks Aang’s hopes for restoring the air nation. Tagah is interested in unearthing an ancient magical artifact that a previous Avatar used to grant airbending powers to normal people. The twist, we eventually learn, is that Tagah is a supremacist who wants to punish the world for the historical mistreatment of airbenders. This creates obvious problems: Aang has already founded Republic City, where people from all nations coexist in peace. Tagah wants to replace that with an airbending empire, so Aang will have to fight to prevent a new world war.

You may have noticed that this story retreads discussions that have already been explored in the franchise. Korra season 3 also featured the return of airbenders to the world due to powerful world-changing magic, and also introduced a radical airbender who plotted to overthrow the world’s political system (albeit for diametrically opposed ideological reasons). The film has an undercooked subplot about a faction of rebellious nonbenders who perceive elemental bending to be a tool of oppression, which retroactively foreshadows the Equalist movement seen in Korra season 1.

Exciting action choreography and beautiful background landscapes notwithstanding, there’s a nagging sense that this film exists to tick off a line in nitpicking fandom’s log of complaints. The plot seems to care a lot about clarifying an uncertain point of magical lore: if Korra season 1 established that an Avatar who knows energybending can restore the powers of a bender who has lost them, what prevented Aang from simply giving airbending to random people and rebuild the air nation? This film answers: no, you need special powers from the Lion Turtles themselves to do that, like for example the magical staff that everyone is looking for. That does solve the question that had been left open, but at the cost of oversimplifying the political themes of the franchise.

Aang’s peculiar situation has always lent itself to lengthy discussions about the nature of nationhood. He’s the only survivor of a genocide (until he meets the frozen airbender Tagah, but that guy dates from way before the genocide), and a big part of his mission as this incarnation of the Avatar is to heal that wound in the world. But the methods available to him carry their own complications. Korra shows us that, once Aang became an adult, it took him three attempts to conceive an airbender child, which I’m sure must have caused immense tension in his marriage with Katara, not to mention Lion Turtle-sized daddy issues for his children. The Korra series didn’t explore that famly dynamic deeply enough.

But also, why are Aang’s first two children not considered part of the air nation? If ethnic membership means anything, it has to be tied to ancestry. But in the Avatarverse, the nations are not exactly defined by shared ancestry, but by the ability to practice a magical art, to the point that, in Korra season 3, completely unrelated people from other countries who suddenly gain airbending are invited to join the restored air nation (and it’s a stain on Tenzin’s moral character that he only repairs his relationship with his brother Bumi after Bumi wins the magical lottery and becomes an airbender). The comic book The Promise adds another twist to these questions by introducing the character of Kori, an earthbender who politically identifies with the firebending side of her ancestry.

The elemental bending disciplines influence everything: visual art, clothing, urban design, military technology, even the respective cultures’ favored metaphysics. This is a conception of nationhood unlike anything seen in the real world. It would be like defining the Swiss people as only those who can ski, including anyone from anywhere who can ski (plus structuring all of Swiss society and culture around the visual markers and philosophical analogues of skiing). And this wouldn’t necessarily restrict Swisshood to Switzerland itself; we’re used to conceiving of nationhood as fundamentally connected to territory, but airbenders are nomads, so they’re not tied to a specific territory in the way conventional nations are.

In the film, finding the magical staff that gives airbending would put Aang in the position of choosing who will join the new air nation. This is a decision he has strong opinions about (remember how, in the comic book The Promise, he chastised fans of airbending culture for appropriating the arrow tattoos without having any airbending ability). Even if he’s the only remaining representative of his culture, it’s still worth asking: should one single person have the power to decide how an entire national identity is to be built?

All these questions are brought to the forefront in the film. Unfortunately, established characterization exerts a force against this potential for drama. Although Aang is a bit too eager to follow Tagah even when it endangers his friends, once Tagah’s true intentions are exposed, Aang remains morally immaculate, never feeling the temptation to use horrific violence to Make Airbenders Great Again. Part of this has to do with the need to keep the timeline in harmony with the established events in the sequel Korra series, but it’s also a waste of big themes that the film introduces and then dispatches unaddressed.

Overall this is a worthy addition to the Avatarverse. It can’t be emphasized enough: a core component of the appeal of this franchise is its goofy humor, and here there’s plenty of it. The animation is impeccable, and the music is in keeping with the real-world inspirations of the setting. I only lament that the story could only go as far as established lore allowed.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

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

Book Microreview: Amusement Park Arcana by Jennifer R. Donohue

A contemporary horror/dark fantasy novella with a strong grounding in its setting

Riley is a Jersey Girl. She lives near the Shore, and has a season badge at Asbury Park. She has been drifting since before she graduated from high school, because her best friend Tara disappeared months ago. The last place she was seen was Thrill Park, a family-owned amusement park. And Riley is determined to find out what happened to her. Even if she has to become part of the staff of Thrill Park to do it.

This is Amusement Park Arcana by Jennifer R. Donohue.

One of the book’s strongest points is the voice. We get a first-person point of view from Riley, full of her opinions, determinations, fears and doubts. She has been devastated by losing Tara, and trying to find her is what keeps her going. Even as strange things happen to her at the park, she keeps that drive, that internal voice, that forward momentum going. Riley feels authentic, and we get to understand her deal in a short space thanks to the author’s writing. It shows just how broken a person Riley has become since Tara’s disappearance.

Another strength is the grounded worldbuilding. The book is set in coastal New Jersey and expertly captures the feel of a place I didn’t grow up in, but visited often enough to find the sense of place to be in accord with my memories. There are a couple of comparisons and allusions to an infamous amusement park, Action Park. Having been to Action Park several times growing up in the area, this was an excellent reference point for me to really get a sense of how Thrill Park compares, or doesn’t. The horror and real life dangers of Action Park are different from the more supernatural ones of Thrill Park, although there is an attraction in the fictional Thrill Park that definitively evoked its Action Park counterpart.

That handling of the mundane elements is strong, perhaps almost too dominant a flavor in the novella. I think I would have liked more of the supernatural elements, which were applied with a lighter touch than most of the fantasy fiction I read. But perhaps that is part of the point this story. The mundanity of Riley coming to terms with Tara’s fate and processing her feelings about it has more narrative weight.

That said, I was darkly amused by what was for me the central supernatural element, that the penumbra of mundane space coincidentally leans into a hot topic in horror and fantasy: liminal spaces. And of course, the recent movie Backrooms. The worker and employee spaces in an amusement park are a backrooms-like liminal space if someone not of that public (or someone new to it, like Riley) should stumble into it. It’s a space that we don’t normally see, but logically they exist.¹

And that brings me to the title of the book and what the author focuses on, and what I focused on. The title of the book is Amusement Park Arcana, and there is a tarot reading as a centerpiece and a station on the Riley’s path to find out what happened to Tara. At the point it happens we’ve already had a weird/fantastic note. And the tarot reading leads Riley to get into the liminal space where she finds out what really happened to Tara. That reading, given the title, is a big sign.

Perhaps it’s because of my lack of real knowledge of the tarot that I didn’t focus on the details when I was reading it, but looking back now, my focus on the liminal space, dictated by recent media, led me to not realizing that the tarot reading is the real focus of this story. Riley’s reading has her embody the card she represents: the Knight of Swords. This card, I am given to understand, is an energetic, driven figure, who wants to accomplish their goals at any and all costs. That certainly is Riley, who has responded to her best friend disappearing at an amusement park by charging in and signing up to be hired by the park so that she can investigate it herself. Rushing in where angels fear to tread is this archetype.

That, indeed, is Riley. Rushing and determined. Sort of like the story itself, come to think of it.

Thus, Amusement Park Arcana rushes by, in a similar manner, quickly. I am not sure about the ending; it felt a little underwhelming to me. But the story up to that part, for its relative balance of mundane versus supernatural, is solid. It flows well and quickly, and as I think about it in retrospect a week later, especially as noted above with the tarot implications, my initial hard feelings about the ending have softened. It’s not as much of a resolution as I might have liked, but for other readers, it might be enough.

Highlights:

• Great sense of place in New Jersey
• Good use of tarot as magic and central theme
• Strong first-person POV protagonist

Reference: Donohue, Jennifer R. Amusement Park Arcana [self-published, 2026].

¹ Now thinking back to my days of working in a supermarket, and not really realizing at the time how I was often in spaces that we would now consider liminal. I know the backrooms of Pathmark (rest in peace) and can walk them in my mind to this day. But a stranger thrust into that space would be at sea.

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

Anime Review: Daemons of the Shadow Realm

Sibling strife and plenty of intrigue in the new anime from the creator of Fullmetal Alchemist

Sibling bonds and sibling conflicts are frequent themes in popular anime. Powerful examples include Sasuske and Itachi in Naruto, Asta and Yuno in Black Clover, and Demon Slayer’s inseparable sister-brother duo Tanjiro and Nezuko. Sibling relations are often a side story in many adventures, adding emotional depth to the characters. In some stories like Fullmetal Alchemist, the sibling relationship is the primary story. Daemons of the Shadow Realm is a new fantasy anime from the creator of Fullmetal Alchemist which brings sibling drama back to the center of the story, but with a twist. Kind, down-to-earth Yuru will do anything to protect his twin sister Asa until he finds out that Asa is not who she appears to be. Neither is his cozy medieval village what it appears to be. The new series is full of plot twists, family angst, lots of betrayal, and plenty of magical creatures who are invisible to the rest of society. In addition to the intriguing premise, the story keeps viewers engaged with its movement between adventure, humor, and very graphic violence. Holding the diverse cast and action-focused plot together is the primary protagonist Yuru, whose particular balance of pure-heartedness and clever, wise cynicism is a refreshing change of pace from the usual shonen heroes.

[SPOILERS for the first episode] Teenaged Yuru lives in a small medieval village with his twin sister Asa. Legend has it that twins born on opposite sides of midnight will have magical destructive power (the power to sunder day and night). This leads to a quiet power struggle by outside forces to control or destroy the children. After their parents disappear, the children are raised by the village. Yuru is mentored in hunting and fighting skills but, for unknown reasons, Asa is kept locked in a cell by the village elders, and Yuru won’t leave the village to search for his parents because he refuses to leave her behind. Despite the strange arrangement, Yuru has strong friendships and support in the village, and remains close to and protective of Asa. But things aren’t what they seem, and everything changes when outsider assassins attack the village and brutally massacre most of the adults. They are led by a dark-haired teen girl who looks somewhat familiar. Yuru and his mentor Ryu (also known as Dera) are able to skillfully defend themselves, but Ryu decides to take Yuru and flee the isolated village. Yuru refuses to leave his sister behind and vows vengeance against the lead killer. But the assassin shares some unexpected news: the little sister he’s been protecting is a fake designed to trap him in the village, and the brutal murderer in front of him is his real sister, who’s been searching for him for years. Then, as he and Ryu flee the magically protected village, Yuru is suddenly exposed to cars, cell phones, and skyscrapers. We learn that Higashi Village is trapped in time but surrounded by contemporary Japan. It’s a lot to take in, but Yuru is surprisingly level-headed as he navigates a completely new world. In the process, he forms a contract with a pair of powerful daemons who fight to protect him. As the world battles around him, he must navigate his powers and fight off those who seek the control him and his sister. All of this is mostly hidden from the rest of the world. Only certain people can see daemons; few people can reach Higashi village, which is hidden from the rest of the world by magic.

But are the people of Higashi Village trying to protect Yuru or use him? Asa has been raised by the powerful Kagemori clan, whose manipulative wealth and crime connections make their intentions suspect. The story is filled with lots of betrayals, plot twists, and power struggles that keep the story enjoyable. But there are also enough sentimental moments to keep the story emotionally anchored. Cynical Ryu becomes a reluctant father figure to Yuru in their modern urban apartment. There are some fun fish-out-of-water moments as Yuru and his giant shadow daemons discover the wonders of modern living. But, despite being mystified by seemingly magical gadgets, Yuru has been raised with strangeness as part of his life, so his humorous fascination is always moderated. The idea of something he can’t understand is already a part of his being. This element is a fun exploration of the wonder of magic versus the wonder of science. And his curiosity is balanced with his solid instincts and a healthy dose of cynicism. After being abandoned by his parents and lied to by those he trusts, and witnessing the massacre of his community, he is not easily fooled by the smooth-talking manipulators who are trying to access his power. Asa, on the other hand, is fierce, cutthroat, and brutal, but she unexpectedly loves intensely, and is completely devoted to the brother she lost. Yuru treats her with bitterness for killing his village, but also with suspicious curiosity, as she genuinely dotes on him and tries to connect with him. Although he won’t forgive her for what she’s done to try to find him, he understands that there are larger issues at play, since control over the combined power of the twins will affect the safety of the entire world.

The pairing of opposites working together is a consistent theme throughout the story. Yuru and other magic wielders have pacts with supernatural beings called daemons. The daemons exist in pairs with opposite identities. Yuru’s daemons are the strong, giant, ancient, male and female warriors named Left and Right, who are fun characters with gorgeous animation and character design. The central story focuses on the twin protagonists who symbolize Day and Night. Yuru represents night and the power of “seal,” locking things down or bringing closure. Asa represents day and the power of “break,” destruction or opening to freedom. The duality symbolism is fun, and many of the various magical characters have their own quirky personalities. Beyond the core characters, the story builds outward with a growing cast that includes the various factions fighting to control the twins. Fortunately, the characters are introduced gradually, which makes it easier to keep track of who everyone is. Other than Yuru, almost all of the characters are morally gray, including Asa, who has no remorse for slaughtering people to get to her brother. This dynamic keeps the tension strong because you never quite know when someone is going to suddenly betray a character. Fortunately, Yuru understands the realities and is clever enough when dealing with the various factions trying to get to him. His balance of youth, curiosity, cleverness, and cynicism makes the show highly watchable without falling into the more common protagonist tropes of either excessive optimism or grumpy bitterness. And the quirky relationship between the lethal siblings is a nice change of pace from the more common protective big brother themes.

So far in season one, Asa feels much less developed than Yuru, but neither of them have extended deep moments of introspection. Fortunately, the brief moments pack a lot of meaning and keep the story grounded. In one passing moment, Yuru realizes and comments out loud that his parents left him behind. There’s not a lot of drama, but viewers can feel the gravity of the hurt in that single sentence. Elements like this keep the show entertaining and engaging despite the growing cast of characters. The show’s premise feels typical, but the delivery is clever and unexpected, with plenty of early plot twists. Additionally, the story gives us a unique and intriguing sibling dynamic that differs from the usual setup of protection or rivalry. Both Asa’s and Yuru’s love for each other has been twisted, leaving the twins to navigate not only the forces battling to control them but also their own personal connection that was brutally damaged through the actions of others. That internal tension is a great way to balance an action-oriented plot in this unique fantasy setting.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Highlights:

• Refreshing change of pace in the protagonist and relationship set up
• Complicated cast of morally gray characters
• Solid action with plenty of violence

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

Book Review: Sister Svangerd and the Not Quite Dead

The latest novel by K.J. Parker set in his Parkerland ‘verse

K.J. Parker has settled into doing novels set in his Parkerland ‘verse. For lack of a better term for the setting, since it involves a variety of locations, timelines, characters, and inconsistencies, it is a medieval world that isn’t our own, but rhymes and plays with that rhyme in a whole bunch of different ways. Be it the Siege (Sixteen Ways to Defend a City) Trilogy about the not-quite-fall of Byzantium to Saevus Corax, battlefield salvager who winds up trying to head off international conflicts, to various novellas involving the ubiquitous Salonicus, who is a con artist, inventor, playwright, and possibly also the most brilliant person in the entire timeline. The novellas and novels aren’t in any sort of sensical order, the very idea of a map is scoffed at, and just when things actually took place is not clear.

Sister Svangerd and the Not Quite Dead is the latest in these. This novel feels, from internal evidence, to be late in the timeline of events compared to the others. The church has been going along for quite a while and doesn’t have any competition anymore, and seems ready to have a schism of some size. The eternal threat of the Sashan Empire seems muted. Once again we have people lamenting lost manuscripts, writings and whole technologies.¹

And an impious monk and a female assassin/nun are dispatched to a synod where they have been tasked with killing a troublesome princess. But things get hot and hairy before they can even get there, and when they get to the synod itself, trouble erupts not of their own making, but definitely because they are there.

Despite the title, our viewpoint character is not the assassin/nun Sister Svangerd herself, but rather a more typical Parker point-of-view character: Brother Desiderius. He is a well worn and familiar archetype to readers of Parker’s work. A cynical, knowledgeable, brains-driven protagonist. He’s also an out-and-out atheist, even given that he’s a monk. He also has some other useful skills, and the classic Parker game of “I reveal this about the character and that changes what you just read” runs riot through his story. Sister Svangerd, for all that she is in the title, doesn’t hold a candle to our real protagonist, and that is a shame and a missed opportunity.

This novel’s theological debates about The Invincible Sun and the minutiae of its dogma are interesting if you want a debate over a religion in a fantasy novel. Parker, and to various extents his characters, are engaged with it. And there is a veneer of the idea that maybe there are supernatural forces using human agents here—or are the human agents simply thinking they are working for those supernatural elements—or is it all lies, delusions and half truths?

Take the Not-Quite-Dead from the title. Yes, this novel has a type of zombie in it. Or at least an undead. But there is a real fascination with Parker with the idea of people thinking they are supernatural, and regarding their presence as prima facie evidence for the truth of evil, versus the alternative. Our protagonist is from a country where this happens in families: naturally, there are families where, when people die, they come back as these undead. He’s an atheist and has a materialistic view of the entire affair, even if nearly nobody else does. It’s like this novel is having arguments with the more fantastical novellas such as Inside Man about whether the supernatural elements of Parkerland are actually real or not. Are they? Unclear!

And that is the thing about this novel, for better or worse. This novel is very much, absolutely meant as inside baseball catnip for people who have read a bunch of these novels and stories already and want to keep burrowing into this world and try to figure it out and see if there is a consistent design behind everything. Is there? Some days I think Parker is deliberately inconsistent just to mess with his longtime deep readers, and half the time I think he is just winging it and doesn’t have a consistent theory of worldbuilding. As I have read a number of books and reviewed them, here. Making History, for example, seems like a serious contemplation on the nature of history and its transmission. The Saevus Corax series, which this book resembles in some ways, does a lot of what this novel does, although with a somewhat different focus and at a different point in the timeline. I do think, especially given his academic focused stories, that it is all a game to Parker.

And that’s fine, but, and here’s the but. I might enjoy trying to figure out things here, trying to tease out where and when in Parkerland these events are happening and what it all means for the history and development of the world. I might enjoy the reading references, the aforementioned familiar archetype of a character. There is a well worn groove here in these novels.

The problem, the but, as it were, is that there is no way I would recommend this book to someone absolutely new to Parker. I am glad Parker is not writing solely for the inside baseball (the aforementioned Making History works pretty well for readers who haven’t read much or any of Parker). But a novel like this, although it is first in a series, really isn’t the first in a series at all. It’s a novel for a limited audience—deep fans of Parkerland.

I can hope, based on prior experience, that the next two novels will tie things together and get me to reconsider this novel and its merits. But then again, that’s once again something for the deep Parkerland reader, not for the casual fantasy reader picking up Parker for the first time. And so we come back to the original problem.

So in a real way what this review boils down to is: If you like and read lots of Parkerland novels, you get more of the same here. Other readers probably won’t derive as much enjoyment out of the novel as you’d hope. I think it’s not worth your time, frankly. I enjoy Parker’s tone and world, and his knowledgable protagonist, but this is down deep in that, and starting here won’t land well at all. There are better places to start, I think (e.g. Sixteen Ways to Defend a City).

Highlights:

• A novel set late in the Parkerland timeline
• A familiar protagonist despite the book title
• Too well worn a groove for a limited audience

Reference: Parker, K.J. Sister Svangerd and the Not Quite Dead [Orbit, 2026].

¹ Inside baseball here. One of the things that make it hard to date and come up with a chronology of the Parkerland ‘verse is that technology and knowledge keeps getting lost. This world seems to be continually in a trap where no sustained technological development can take place without a war or other disaster knocking the sandcastle down all over again and regressing to an equilibrium. Even for a world with multiple organizations trying to preserve and extend knowledge, in Parkerland, it never *lasts*.

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

Book Review: The Dragon Has Some Complaints, by John Wiswell

A multi-headed allegory that rewards multiple readings

It’s tricky to attempt to pin down in a few paragraphs all the things that The Dragon Has Some Complaints is trying to say, because it operates on several layers of meaning at the same time. Its tale of a grumpy, battle-weary dragon who infiltrates a city of dragon riders to get free food while he quietly plots his revenge on humans is both hilarious and heart-wrenching, and the points it has to make about pain, kindness, hubris, cruelty, loyalty and resilience get richer the more one reflects on them.

The first and most obvious level of analysis has to do with disability and chronic pain. When we meet the protagonist, the fierce dragon Garrodigh, he’s badly injured and traumatized. In one of the frequent and interminable wars between human kingdoms, a cannon shot knocked him down from the sky, leaving him with the bones of one leg shattered, his wings torn to shreds, his four heads reduced to three, and his memory partially erased. Other dragons shun him because of an alleged closeness to humans he can’t remember. He can barely hunt his food, much less defend himself. If hunger doesn’t kill him soon, a stray cannon ball will. By the time the book starts, he already has nothing to lose.

Author John Wiswell has spoken openly and at length about his own experience with disability and chronic pain, and he uses that personal perspective to great effect in the book. Because the nature of dragonkind is all explosive fire and brimstone, Wiswell employs the imagery of water and ice whenever he needs to refer to things that harm dragons. The pain in Garrodigh’s broken bones is described as a freezing sensation, like being stabbed with needles of ice. To a dragon’s mind, the nearness of death feels cold. And in a fascinating bit of worldbuilding, dragons in this universe can’t swim. A dragon’s fire can’t survive immersion in water.

The reader will find such allusions repeatedly, because once Garrodigh sneaks his way into a dragon-friendly human city, the book takes its time to very gradually depict his recovery. These humans have an entire arsenal of techniques to rehabilitate injured dragons, but even after he has laboriously regained his full mobility, an echo of the pain still lingers. There’s no perfect cure, and a body that has taken that kind of beating will never not carry its old wounds. For a book that has dragons, this is a strikingly realistic representation of physical therapy in both its benefits and its limitations.

How the narration treats Garrodigh’s inner life is another point of interest. This dragon has three remaining heads, but the book is told exclusively from the perspective of Centerhead, who seems more in touch with reality than the perpetually hungry Bottomhead, who has no interest in complicated ideas and prefers to follow more animalistic urges, and the delusional Upperhead, who is horrified at dragon behavior and is convinced that he’s a human trapped in a bad dream. The constant disagreements between Garrodigh’s heads, with Centerhead almost always taking the role of the mediating and decision-making personality, can be read as a creative reinterpretation of the Freudian trinity of Id/Ego/Superego, with the missing four head serving as Garrodigh’s life-defining trauma, the symbolic castration in reference to which everything else is framed.

(Another possible reading of Garrodigh’s heads would view them as representing the fractured self that emerges in cases of dissociative disorders, with Bottomhead’s and Upperhead’s maladaptive coping mechanisms, as well as their selective amnesia, having developed to protect the primary identity from its life-defining trauma.)

(YET another possible reading of Garrodigh’s personality would use a Lacanian lens. The primordial Lack of the fourth head is what drives Garrodigh’s every goal and choice, and his inner conflict isn’t resolved until a later chapter where he crosses an ocean, facing the thing that can kill him. Here I should be careful not to spoil too much, but the turning point in this part of his journey is that he recovers a lost Archetypal Mother at the same time as he helps humans recover a lost Archetypal Father, an encounter that reconciles Garrodigh with both the order of nature and the order of society.)

Interestingly, with all the details the book provides on Garrodigh’s mind, it never mentions how dragons experience (or not) desire. This omission stands out because the narration goes out of its way to make a recurring joke about Centerhead’s bafflement at human sexual habits, and these moments showcase how humans can look outright alien when viewed at a distance. The human Rania, Garrodigh’s self-appointed rider, caretaker and confidant, has a head-spinningly convoluted love life that the reader only gets to see as filtered through the dragon’s inevitably inaccurate perception.

On the human side, things are no less complicated. Rania is an immigrant in the dragon rider city, a native of another kingdom with which her new home is at war. Some of her superiors expect her to simply fulfill her duty and fight, but others mistrust her by default and question the truthfulness of her sworn loyalty. These questions about belonging and acceptance mirror Garrodigh’s own dilemma regarding his place among humans: he hates them and wants to eat them all, but he’s unexpectedly met a human community where dragons are valued and cared for. Neither Rania nor Garrodigh see any reason to expect they’ll end up being loved, and finding exactly that will be the final test of their respective characters.

The Dragon Has Some Complaints continues Wiswell’s literary exploration of what we mean by the category “monster” and what we do to beings that label is applied to. Sometimes prejudice makes us eschew any attempt at communication, and sometimes we wish nothing more than to open up to each other, but never learned what to do if such connection succeeds. If you’ve ever felt it’s dangerous to open your mouth, imagine having three.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Reference: Wiswell, John. The Dragon Has Some Complaints [DAW, 2026].

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

Film Review: Toy Story 5

A treasure trove of worthy ideas wasted in a movie that has no reason to exist

In Toy Story 5, our girl Bonnie receives a computer tablet that now consumes all her waking hours, and the toys are worried that they’re going to be abandoned. Jealousy and misunderstandings ensue. I think it’s time to ask in what year the Toy Story universe is set, because if anyone at Pixar has kids, they should have noticed that the preoccupations explored in this newest film in the franchise have been discussed and analyzed to death since literally the last century, and this plot adds no fruitful arguments to the conversation.

Traditional toys worried that they’ll be replaced by a newer, shinier electronic toy was the plot of the first Toy Story, back in 1995. Just one year later, the world saw the launch of Tickle Me Elmo, the Tamagotchi, the Game Boy Pocket, the Nintendo 64, the Palm Pilot, and the Yahoo Kids portal. Then, in 1997, came the Tetrix Robotics Kit and the Digimon (the virtual pets, not yet the TV show). And in 1998 came Betty Spaghetty, LEGO Ninja, Imaginext, and the Furbies. All that happened before there even was a Toy Story 2, which had nothing to say about the Tamagotchi and its cousins.

So who is the intended audience of Toy Story 5? If it’s the nostalgic fans of the first film, it’s absurdly late to say anything about electronic toys to viewers who already moved on from the death of their Tamagotchis. If it’s today’s children, this film has nothing useful to say to them either, given that what they have to deal with is Minecraft giving them malware that can steal their data, Fortnite pressuring them to spend more and more on loot boxes, Roblox serving them on a silver platter to pedophiles, and ChatGPT teaching them how to kill themselves. This movie makes a big gesture of concern for the dangers of digital entertainment for children, but it shows no awareness of what those dangers are.

I’m not saying that the Toy Story franchise has used up its potential. But it needs to make a more serious effort to stay relevant. For example, toys in this universe are cursed with immortality, accumulating lists of past owners across generations. So there are much more interesting stories that could be told with this lore. The new gadget in Toy Story 5 is a supposedly kid-friendly tablet computer, and because toys have sentience, this computer can take its own initiative to use its browser, email, chat or camera functions, acting as an agentic AI without constraints. With that character there’s a lot that could say about today’s AI craze.

Or consider the small army of Buzz Lightyear dolls that are set loose on the world at the start of the movie and eventually learn that the sole purpose for their existence is to play with kids. Why can’t one of those toys wonder whether maybe there’s more to life? Barbie, of all things, did a deeper exploration of the meaning of a toy’s life than Toy Story 5 (and the fascinating questions raised by Forky from Toy Story 4 are completely forgotten in 5).

It seems that toys in the Toy Story universe are expected to resign themselves to a life of unquestioned subservience, much like the robots in Star Wars. Jessie the Cowgirl, who takes a more central role in 5, laments the fact that children grow up and forget their old toys (and makes the laughably boomer-coded observation that those new digital gadgets are making them grow up too quickly), but even after going through an extended reflection on the pain of repeated abandonment, she doesn’t question her assigned function, and even considers it an honor to be used as a literal plaything for an unknown number of lifetimes.

The core ethos of Toy Story may be the heart-warming “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” but friendship happens between equals, and the dynamic between a child and a toy that can never reveal it’s actually sentient is far from equal. All the fanciful imaginary adventures that the toys enact are decided by the child, with the toys forced to go along with them. Once you really give it some thought, where’s the fun, let alone the honor, in such a life?

Toy Story 5’s solution to Bonnie’s difficulty in adjusting to digital culture is to find her a new human friend who also likes traditional toys and doesn’t bully her on a public chat. That’s a more reasonable narrative choice than a flat “machines bad,” but it implies that a whole swath of “kids bad” is left unexamined. Sure, hurray for the handful of kids still interested in playing with toys, who would otherwise face the existential horror of immortality inside a shoe box, but when it comes to the many, many more kids whose playtime consists of interminable sessions of Candy Crush or Angry Birds or whatever it is that today’s kids are into, the movie just gives up on them.

The safety of children in the digital world is a very real concern, and Toy Story 5 doesn’t have anything to say on the matter that rises above tired Black Mirror-level platitudes. If you want a good animated movie about the absurdities of electronic life, try Ralph Breaks the Internet. That one’s from 2018, and the points it makes feel more relevant than this year’s Toy Story 5. Try to keep up, Pixar.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

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

Book Review: This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me

Ilona Andrews expands their fantasy and romance talents into the burgeoning realm of isekai in English

Isekai. Portal fiction. The very Japanese origin of the word suggests it is relatively new, even exotic, but it is a tradition that taps into a small but active stream in English SFF while using the enthusiasm of its Japanese taproot for basic concepts. Ilona Andrews’s This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me is the latest iteration of isekai fiction in a mainstream English language format.

Online encyclopedias define isekai as a genre of Japanese manga, anime, light novel, video game, etc. It has characters who go into a different world. But that’s not quite right, since you might be thinking: What’s the difference between isekai and portal fantasy? Portal fantasy does all of that too. One can think of portal fantasy as a bigger umbrella category than isekai. Portal fantasy covers any time characters go from one universe to another, usually from our world to a fantasy-based world.¹ Examples are numerous, and the concept goes back at least to the pulp era of science fiction.

Isekai is a more specific form of portal fantasy. There are some strains and varieties, but the main thrust is that the protagonist is transported to another world. Sometimes they have to die in order to get resurrected into this new world.² A lot of the time, unlike some portal fantasy, they wind up getting powers and abilities, even godlike ones, by the act of transferring across to the new world.³

Some isekai have an explicitly roleplaying element to them. The protagonist finds themself inside of a roleplaying game, or a piece of fiction, sometimes one that they know quite well.⁴ This knowledge can itself be a superpower, but the thrust is, the character has been transported into a new world that can run on rules that can be manipulated.⁵ There are even subsets of this where the protagonist finds themself in the role of a specific character from the book/property whose world they are now in. There is a sub-sub-genre of this where the protagonist finds themself specifically in the body of a villain… a villainess in fact, and has to figure out how to avoid the sticky end that inevitably awaits them.⁶

So let’s get to This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me and see how this fits into isekai. Our protagonist is Maggie. Maggie has fallen into the world of her favorite fantasy series, one that has never been finished. She is in the city of Kair Toren, and she knows the plot of the two books by heart. She is immersed fully in the world of the books. The problem is, she is absolutely penniless. She is not in the body of a villainess or anyone else, and she knows that the world is in for a rough time. And so she decides that, in addition to survival, her goal is to stop the tragedy that the book unfolds.

Maggie does have a superpower, one that she does not expect. She dies early in the book… and then she is resurrected. This is not like Django Wexler’s How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying. The world itself does not reset; the world keeps going on, and the resurrections are painful and take time. Maggie herself thinks about the gruesomeness of this, and whether she could come back from, for example, being torn to pieces. So she uses her extensive knowledge of the books and tries to bootstrap herself out of poverty and try to derail the beginnings of the plots that will consume Kair Toren in fire and blood. Along the way she makes some friends and gets wrapped up in intrigue and adventure. She also discovers a secondary superpower that is subtle but important: although she has read the book many times, she discovers that she can quote from the book, chapter and verse as it were. It gives an interesting metatextual twist to things. It also means that at points she doesn’t know some facts, because even the braided multiple POVs of the book don’t cover everything, so she is forced to guess and deduce some things about the plot and people around her because they were not in the book.⁷ As far as telling her companions what she is, she does not tell anyone that she is from the world outside the story. She is genre-aware enough to realize the problems of that. As it is, her ability as a seer means she has to try and keep her head down to avoid entities who might want to grab her for information.

And then there is the romance. This is an Ilona Andrews novel, and romance is a common subgenre in the novels they write. So there is no surprise that Unresolved Sexual Tension is shot through the book, especially when Maggie realizes that one of her companions and friends is not who she thought they were, and is instead someone far more dangerous and compelling. Given that the character in question is, according to the book, destined to marry someone else, this provides narrative tension as well.

And that is the real heart of this book and what it tries to do, and what it is in the isekai subgenre. Maggie knows the book by heart and even better than she should given that secondary superpower. What she finds is a conservation of narrative working against her. She does indeed try to stop the tragic events of the book, including even the “pebble” that rolls downhill to start the avalanche of war and rebellion and conflict, but at every turn, the narrative tries to assert itself and put the story “back on track” despite her efforts. It’s a fascinating use of metatext here, as Maggie tries to defy what happens in the books, only to be resisted and have to find a different approach or fight a new problem.

The story ends on a cliffhanger, with a situation seemingly resolved, but then, out of nowhere, the problem arises anew and puts our protagonist in peril. But that, too, is a narrative convention (and our protagonist knows it), which suggests to me that she is still trapped in a narrative structure that keeps wanting to assert itself despite her efforts. So this is not a novel that is going to satisfy if you are looking for the one-and-done approach. Instead, we have a series, and we still have a whole set of unresolved mysteries, and of course, peril for the protagonist. The novel stays entirely in Maggie’s point of view, which is an interesting commentary and choice given that she is in a world of multiple POV epic fantasy. I like that tension for the reader, and wonder if she will keep up that for the inevitable sequel.

Highlights:

• Isekai, in a English language SFF mode.
• Yes, this is a kissing book. Or at least slow-burn would-be kissing.
• Interesting metatextual elements.

Reference: Andrews, Ilona. This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me [Tor, 2026].

¹ A notable exception to this is Lawrence Watt-Evans’s Out of This World and sequels, where there is portal travel from our world to a fantasy world, *and* to a space opera world. The space opera world may have a touch of science fantasy to it since it's not a rigorous “the net is up” sort of hard SF universe.

² That bit doesn’t seem to yet be popular in mainstream English versions of Isekai. However, the far out of print Through the Ice by Piers Anthony and Robert Kornwise (1992) does use this, having its young protagonist fall through ice and then get resurrected into a fantasy world. I thought it very strange at the time I read it, not knowing at all of isekai in any form. But in Japanese isekai, it would be bog-standard. Did Kornwise and Anthony read isekai at that point, or invent it independently?

³ The first time I came across that in mainstream English form was Dave Duncan’s The Great Game series, which explicitly has as its worldbuilding that if you transfer to another realm, you basically have it in you to be a god in that realm. The protagonist goes from 1914 England to a realm where he has the potential to gain prodigious power… but the gods already there have very mixed ideas about someone else joining their pantheon (especially the God of Death). The author’s foreword, 10 years after the fact, doesn’t mention isekai as an inspiration at all. But, again, by Japanese framing, bog-standard isekai.

⁴ And showing that this is old in English language SFF, I present to you The Incompleat Enchanter ‘verse of Fletcher Pratt and L Sprague de Camp. Harold Shea and his friends find that portal magic, and magic in general, is based on verse, and they wind up in a variety of worlds that they know—Norse myth, the Roland cycle, The Faerie Queene and other worlds that they recognize. There is even some directed targeting at one point, seeking a world with a magician powerful enough to handle a problem, and picking it based on their reading. Also a bit of Duncan here, as, except for portal magic, the protagonists seem unable to do spells with verse in our world… but in other worlds, they are indeed magicians with verse.

⁵ LitRPG enters the chat at this point, as well as its outgrowths and parallels. Being thrust into the world of a game is much older than that in mainstream English SFF, however. One can look to the 1980s and the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon, which runs on this premise. Or Joel Rosenberg’s Guardians of the Flame novels, which have the characters transported into an RPG world. Although it is not a videogame, Django Wexler’s How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying has a protagonist who was brought across, portal fantasy style, but every time she dies, the world resets. Wexler is extensively deep into anime and manga, as seen in other books of his, and he is definitely channeling isekai tropes throughout.

⁶ And this is where Sarah Rees Brennan’s Long Live Evil comes into the chat, because it runs right on this chassis in a mainstream English language form. Main character Rae is dying and makes a magical bargain… and winds up in the world of the books… but she is not the superfan; her sister is. So she doesn’t know everything, but she does know that she is Lady Rahela, and that in that role, she is due to die the next day.

⁷ And what of the book and its actual world? As revealed by Maggie and what we see, Kair Toren is a high-magic epic fantasy world with lots of intrigue, and yes, lots of blood. Think Martin’s Westeros or Elliott’s Wendar, but with the magic turned on to high. The two fictional novels have lots of PoV characters, extensive worldbuilding and backstory, and are exactly the kind of thick doorstoppers that someone could read and reread extensively and obsessively.

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