Anne Claude Philippe de Tubières-Grimoard de Pastels de Lévis, comte de Caylus, marquis d’Esternay, baron de Branscac (1692-1765), generally known by the considerably shorter name of Comte de Caylus, not only had the enviable honor of having about the longest name yet of anyone discussed in this series, but also of being the grandson of a first cousin of Madame de Maintenon, known to history as the second, secret wife of Louis XIV. This in turn ensured that he and his mother had access to the very cream of French society—and the French salons, where fairy tales still remained a prime source of amusement.

Caylus flourished in this atmosphere. After fighting in the War of the Spanish Succession from 1709 to 1714, an experience that caused him to avoid the military and further wars for the rest of his life, he chose to travel through Europe, eventually making his way to Italy, Greece, and the Ottoman Empire. Here, he fell in love with antiquities and archaeology, even joining in the dig at Herculaneum, where the wealthy Emmanuel Maurice de Lorraine, Duke of Elbeuf, was busily hunting for more statues to adorn his villas. An extensive tour of what is now Turkey cemented his passion.

For most scholars, his most important work was probably the seven volume Recuiel d’Antiquities, which appeared at regular intervals from 1752-1767. But Caylus did not spend all of his time cataloguing coins (especially gold coins) and other ancient wonders. He also attended the various salons of Paris, still in operation, wrote a number of popular erotic tales, and dabbled in fairy tales and “oriental” tales—that is, tales of magic set in the Middle East, which Caylus, unlike other French writers doing the same, at least had the benefit of having seen in person.

Caylus wrote decades after Madame d’Aulnoy had pioneered the use fairy tales as subversive critiques of the court of Louis XIV, and after Charles Perrault had used those same fairy tales to uphold the court of Louis XIV—while cautioning children, and in particular girls, of the dangers there. Caylus, familiar with both, drove his own path: mocking aspects of the court of Louis XIV, but also adding in a trace of misogyny that both d’Aulnoy and Perrault had largely avoided, and just barely managing to avoid expressing some decidedly negative thoughts about the organization of the French army.

His “Princess Minute and King Floridor,” originally published in 1741, provides an excellent example of this. As the story opens, a large empire has been left to the rule of the tiny, thirteen year old Princess Minute, who has a passion for collecting knickknacks, and her fairy protector, Mirdandenne. Shortly after this, Minute dismisses a distinguished general from her court because he wore a hat laced with silver and a coat laced with gold, a negligence that she believes may be a sign of future negligence in battle. These sorts of decisions, Caylus explains, are enough to make anyone—and a kingdom—unstable.

It’s not particularly hard to connect all of this to Versailles, with its obsession with manners, fashion, and, well, delicate knickknacks—though it’s only fair to note that Caylus himself spent much of his life obsessed with and writing about delicate knickknacks, which may also account for their mention here. But Caylus here is less concerned about expenditures—a decided problem at Versailles, and one that other French salon fairy tale authors did obliquely or directly address in their tales—and more on the absurdity of basing important military matters on trivial things—and also, it seems, the problems with allowing civilians with no military experience or training to make military and personnel decisions.

Though in this particular case, the princess might have a point: given the court’s intense focus on knickknacks and trivia, it would have been prudent for the general to take extra care and—at least for this one appearance—focus on knickknacks and trivia. It sorta reminds me of the time and attention actors take over red carpet appearances: sure, it’s ludicrous, but it’s also part of their job. Negligence in one aspect might be linked to negligence elsewhere.

Or, civilian me could be completely wrong, and the former soldier scribing this might be right, and what really matters is skill in the battlefield, not what people are wearing on it, or before they reach it.

The story then shifts to the other main character, King Floridor, ruler of a tiny kingdom, whose chief advisor is a charming ant. For those with insect issues who are about to protest that no ant can ever be charming, I hear you, but this particular ant happens to be a fairy in disguise. When she hears that Minute’s kingdom is falling apart thanks to questionable leadership and about to be invaded by another king interested in marrying Minute, the fairy ant sends Floridor off to rescue Minute, without an army, but with a walnut shell, a little carving knife and a sparrow.

Minute, meanwhile, is trying to figure out if her troops should wear blue or white cockades. Ok, ok, yes, maybe the earlier criticisms do have a point. She also has failed to build fortifications or stockpile ammunition—something Caylus speaks of with enough exasperation that it seems possible he was thinking of a real life incident. With no defenses, Floridor believes the only way to save her is to take her back to his own tiny country. Once she’s safe, he can return to her country and save it from the invading king.

This part of the tale may have been inspired by any number of historical cases where a queen or an heir fled to another country, leaving others to fight on their behalf. Caylus had met people who had known the exiled Queen Henrietta Maria, for instance, while she lived in France, and he may have met Prince Charles Edward Stuart while in Rome. That is, it’s realistic—but I also couldn’t help remembering other French salon fairy tales where women led armies. Ah well.

Anyway, Minute and Floridor flee, pursued by rebels. Just as the rebel scouts come near them, Florida accidentally breaks the walnut—revealing a rather convenient army of thirty thousand men. This allows them to escape—but not for long. They soon find themselves threatened by yet another army. At this point, Minute decides to use the knife for “some trivial purpose.” We’re never told exactly what, leading me to believe that perhaps said purpose was not as trivial as Caylus wants me to believe it was), but when the knife proves to be useless as a regular knife, Minute throws it away—discovering that if it’s not particularly good at cutting ordinary things, it is good at immediately digging large holes in the ground.

Thanks to the ability to immediately create defensive fortifications with the knife, an army that can be carried in a walnut, and a sparrow which turns out to have the ability to lift mountains, Floridor is able to imprison the rebel army inside a mountain and take Minute back to the safety of his own kingdom and the approval of the magic ant. The ant does, however, take the walnut and the knife back—maybe they can only be used a certain number of times?—sending Floridor back out to war with only a letter from Minute and the sparrow. Fortunately, the sparrow is still up to moving mountains around, which allows Floridor to free the rebel army, gain its support, train its soldiers, and attack the invading king—and win.

It’s a fairy tale ending, of sorts, but not an entirely satisfying one. For one thing, it’s rather hard to tell exactly why Floridor is in love with Minute, apart from the fact that they are both in the same story. For another, most of the end of the story is focused on the importance of maintaining order and discipline in military ranks—an important point, and one that clearly nagged at Caylus, but not exactly a traditional part of the fairy tale ending. Come to think of it, for all that fairy tales often seem obsessed with soldiers and wars, I can’t remember another fairy tale quite as determined to stress the importance of military discipline versus military uniforms.

More importantly, the story ends not with the lovers rejoicing that their troubles are over, and ruling their kingdoms happily ever after, but with Minute feeling ashamed that she has done only little things with great help, while her new husband has done great things with little things. This seems more than a bit unfair: a walnut capable of concealing and carrying an entire army of thirty thousand men is small only in size, but not in consequence, and Minute, not Floridor, was the one to discover how the knife could be used, however accidentally. Of course Floridor accomplished more: he had magical items, and a mother who served as his regent until he was old enough to take the throne. She ascended her throne at thirteen—an age where a boy might well have been as obsessed with the minutiae of uniforms and gold and silver trim as she was.

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And not just unfair, but her sense of shame also seems to be a rather alarming beginning for a marriage. It’s hard not to join scholar Jack Zipes in wondering if this tale is not just mocking courtly manners and the frequent shallowness of French courts, but also mocking the very idea of a happy ending—and to a certain degree, even the concept of a fairy tale.

Indeed, for all its criticisms of courtly triviality and its insistence on a professional army, and various trappings borrowed from earlier tales, “Princess Minute and King Floridor” is more of a counter attack on the subversive fairy tales of the French salons. The aristocratic Caylus does not precisely follow the example of Charles Perrault, whose fairy tales tended to support the court of Versailles, or at least present it as an opportunity for some social climbing. And even in this tale, Caylus offers two examples of women who were able to rule tiny kingdoms, if not large ones. It’s not entirely as misogynistic as I’ve made it sound.

Still, in the context of the frequently subversive French salon fairy tales, it’s a bit jarring, coming across almost as a statement of “look, I just don’t believe you,” along with suggesting that really, all a foolish women needs is a man to organize her life and train and discipline her army. It’s notable that the two competent women of the story remain in minor roles and never leave their tiny country, while the two incompetent women play a much larger role in the story, which focuses on their deficiencies. In its attempt to counter the salon fairy tale stories, it becomes the sort of story that reminds us just why many exasperated women turned to writing subversive fairy tales in the first place.

But it also serves as an example of the richness of the fairy tale format: not just in its ability to stretch and accommodate multiple viewpoints, but in the way it almost demands responses from readers. Caylus had no shortage of material to write about, and no need to earn a living through writing. But he did feel he needed to respond to the fairy tale writers who preceded him—which says quite a bit about their power.

Mari Ness lives in central Florida.

This was a surprisingly talky episode of The Expanse! “Dandelion Sky” touched on free will, determinism, the nature of consciousness, the nature of fear…there was a lot going on as our intrepid space people drew ever closer to The Ring. There are spoilers below, obviously, but also a content warning as I’ll be talking about suicide, specifically how it was depicted in this episode, so if you need to tread carefully or simply not read that part I’ll drop another warning in when we get there. (And if you haven’t seen the episode yet, note that it shows a suicide, in a blunt, graphic scene, so if that’s something you don’t want in your head, just read a recap for this one.)

First of all… HOLY SHIT HE LEFT A NOTE. Holden actually left Amos and Alex a note. I’m proud of him. I’m going to go ahead and come back to Holden at the end, but I just needed to get that out of my system.

Meanwhile… Anna, What Have You Done?

Of all the things I anticipated in this episode, I did not expect Anna to go on an unintentional killing spree. First, she ignored Nemeroff in his time of need, and he suicides, and then she tells Tilly to reach out to Melba/Clarissa, and naturally Clarissa feels cornered, bites one of her HAM pills, and launches herself at the woman.

ANNA. Either help more, or way less. I’m not even sure which.

So about Nemeroff. Just as the UN Thomas Prince is about to make the transit into The Ring, a man approaches Anna. (I don’t remember seeing him as anything other than a background character before—did I miss him?) He says he’s a Methodist, like her: First Methodist of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. With that out of the way, he lets his mask drop, and looks openly terrified. He asks her directly: “Do you think God wants us to be here?”

Anna has a choice. She could lie and just say yes, to calm him down, or be a bit more open and say she doesn’t know but she believes so. There are many things that she could do that would be appropriate. But my girl is EXCITED. She doesn’t want to comfort someone, or deal with fear right now, so instead she says, “Scripture is quiet on this one.” And then she says “Excuse me,” and walks away.

Reader, I said “oh, no!” out loud.

This man, an avowed member of her literal flock just reached out to her and she rejected him. As became clear last week, Anna wants to see The Ring because she finds it exhilarating. She wanted a private moment, personal, to experience history on her own terms without being interrupted or distracted. It makes sense—I’d want the same thing.

But.

As a pastor, Anna made an agreement with the humans of her church (and, you know, God) that she’d put others first. She would care for others’ emotional well-being before her own. She agreed not to be selfish. And technically this selflessness holds for anyone—if an atheist Buddhist who has a grudge against Methodists walks up to her, she’s supposed to listen to them. But this is a fully-fledged flock member, who announces himself as a Methodist, which probably makes it even worse for him when she refuses to engage with his fear.

She has her moment, the pure exhilaration of the transit, and then she spends some time theorizing with her Kolvoord, guessing that maybe the objects floating in The Ring function like cysts would in the human body. The scientist says the ship is “where angels fear to tread if they had any goddamn sense” and then apologizes for cursing, calling her pastor. Only then does she check on Nemeroff, who is vibrating with fear. She asks if he’s OK, but she does this in public, perfunctorily, rather than asking if he wants to go somewhere private to talk, or reassuring him, or trying to set a time for them to talk in the future. (Any of the things that might have calmed him, basically.) And he says he’s fine and walks back to his quarters and kills himself.

I’m going to come back to this.

A few scenes later, Anna’s walking with Kolvoord, telling him that her father used to say, “God gave us two texts: scripture and Creation. If they seem to contradict it’s because we haven’t understood one of them yet.” When Kolvoord remarks that that’s enlightened, she laughs and says it pre-dates the Enlightenment, because she later learned her dad was quoting Augustine. (Pedantic note: Anna says “Ogg-gus-steen” rather than “O-gustin”—this doesn’t really matter, I’m just always intrigued by which pronunciation people use, since the second one seems more common in academic circles.) This is fun and cute and once again reminds us that Anna is the major voice of wisdom on this show, which is a perfect way to break all of our hearts when another crewman informs her of Nemeroff’s death. Of course, he says it was an accident, but Anna immediately knows better. And what’s more, as she says to Tilly: “I should have been more focused on why I’m here. I’m not a scientist, I’m a pastor. I’m here to offer comfort. To sit with people when they’re scared. That’s what a minister is supposed to do.”

She delivers the eulogy at his funeral, admitting that she didn’t know him well, and then saying: “He asked me if I thought God wanted us to be here. I didn’t know answer, and I don’t know it now. What I do believe is that God wants us to be together. To care for each other.” She urges the rest of the crew to be gentle with each other, and to keep track of each others’ emotions. This is good, but again, I have a few thoughts. I’ll be talking about the suicide scene in more detail now, so hop down to the next heading if you need to.

The arc of Nemeroff’s fear, suicide, and funeral seemed much too rushed to me. I like how all the actors played it, but I couldn’t help but think of how much better it would be if we’d met Nemeroff more explicitly last week, if he’d tried to approach Anna but changed his mind, or even if they’d had an initial conversation before. Unless I missed him, this seemed to be our introduction to Nemeroff, and he went from scared to suicidally depressed to actually killing himself all over the course of what looked like a single day? And then the funeral was immediate, but people didn’t really seem grieved or shocked enough. Plus, Anna is giving a eulogy for someone whose death is being publicly called an accident, but her repeated requests for the crew to take care of each other is a huge hint about what actually happened. I don’t know, it just didn’t quite work for me, and Anna actually seemed too much in control given her guilt over his death—which, obviously, it is not her fault. I think this episode shows his death as too much of a cause-and-effect situation, which is another reason I wish they’d seeded this in earlier. I think it’s fairly obvious that he’s reacting in panic to contact with an alien intelligence, which is different from someone who lives with suicidal depression, but it’s still unsettling that the show kind of codes this as “Anna ignored his pain, and that’s what killed him.” I don’t know, I’m still working through this one, so I’m interested in hearing what other people think.

The other thing though is that they made the choice to show Nemeroff shooting himself, with the camera essentially plunked at the perfect angle so we saw everything. And I don’t think there was any value in that. Showing Maneo liquifying as his ship hit The Ring was one thing—that showed us exactly what happens when a ship comes in too fast, which set the stakes for all the other ships that were approaching. Now we know that if Holden or Naomi or Drummer or anyone else speeds up, they might get squished. Maneo’s death showed a narrative purpose, and showing it served arguably even more of a purpose. This, though? We already know that blood beads and floats in zero G. We know what happens to a human head when a bullet goes through it. We know people are terrified about going through The Ring, and yes, showing someone killing himself to avoid first contact is extremely effective, but we could have gotten the entire emotional arc just from seeing him look at the screen, and then hearing the shot. Anna still would have realized the truth, and felt guilty.

In conclusion, I’m not sure what to do with all of these emotions. The other part of Anna’s storyline is simpler. Tilly bumps into Melba, and realizes that she’s Clarissa Mao. When she tells Anna, the pastor, reeling from her own lapse in judgment, recommends that she reach out to try to help Clarissa. Obviously none of them know that she’s plotting against Holden; they simply assume she’s in hiding because of her father. Of course, when Tilly tries, Clarissa goes on the attack.

Meanwhile… Naomi? What Are You Even Doing, Naomi?

Naomi’s still trying to get in touch with the Roci. The MCRN threatens to arrest her, she argues with Martian, the Martian tells her she has to stand down. That’s it for her plotline so far.

Roci Time!

Mostly the action on the Roci this week is Amos and Alex bouncing off each other while they deal with Holden’s note. We do get two great Amos moments, though. First he claims not to have felt fear since he was five years old.

That’s…oddly specific.

Then when Alex confesses that he’s afraid they’re all going to die—humanity, not just the people in The Ring—Amos replies with the most comforting story he can think of.

Amos: Back in Baltimore, I had this friend, she said if the end ever came she’d go on the roof with a bottle and her two cats, have a toast, and jump.

Alex: With the cats?

Amos: Like a freakin’ pharaoh.

Then he cups his hand on Alex’s cheek, kind of under his ear. “Don’t worry. I’ll take you with me, too.” This moment becomes even funnier if you think about the fact that most cats love it when you scritch them under their ears, so Amos is, essentially scritching Alex to comfort him. 

Behemoth!

Oooof this was tiresome to me. Ashford puffs his chest, Drummer tells him to quit it, the jerk kid from two seasons ago tells Ashford he should be captain, more chest-puffing ensues. Just coup if you’re gonna!

And Finally: Holden

Holden’s note did in fact say: “I have to do this on my own” and “Do not follow me—that’s an order,” and he does in fact spend the entire trip to the nucleus bitching about how he NEVER ASKED FOR THIS and “I’m starting to feel like I’m cursed” (which, seriously? Just now?) until Miller tries to shut him down by telling him he’s just following the program. Holden replies with, “I have this crazy notion of free will” (ha! I happen to be #teamfreewill, so I followed my own programming by applauding that moment) and Miller snipes, “You’re the patron saint of lost causes, kid. Quit runnin’ from it.”

This encapsulates what works on this show. This is a tense, action-based scene. Holden is floating through space into unknowable danger. But rather than cranking up the soundtrack we just get two characters (one of whom might be an alien, or dead, or both) debating free will vs. determinism. It’s great. Holden wants to know whether Miller is truly Miller, and the reply is, surprise, unsettling. Basically a human (or maybe all matter?) is “a fancy hand terminal with a trillion buttons”—the proto-molecule is running the Miller program so Holden will understand what it needs, which is to get the system back online.

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The Martians are en route to intercept, and Bobbie tries talking to him, but Holden is so busy arguing with Miller (whom of course no one else can hear) that Bobbie has to agree with her commander that he’s “cracked.” But at least they all seem to agree that he’s probably not a terrorist? Holden speeds up to try to get away from them, even as Miller warns him that The Ring will squish him if he keeps it up. “Just exercising some free will,” Holden says. “Bein’ an asshole,” Miller responds. They make it to the nucleus, which Miller explains used to be a civilization, but is now a bunch of closed doors. He wants Holden to pick the locks. Once inside the nucleus it basically looks like a cave made out of the Matrix. The matter here can rearrange itself at will, just as the proto-molecule did on Eros. Holden needs to act like a good hand terminal, and complete a circuit for the alien. But Holden, being a human, still wants to know whether there’s any Miller left in Miller. He blips out of sight for a moment, and then the Miller who reappears seems much more like the one we used to know. He goes into a poignant story that Julie told him, about angels leading children halfway into death so they wouldn’t be afraid. He tried to be that angel for Julie, but was so scared that she held his hand. So this is seemingly a bit of Miller’s true consciousness, pushed up to the surface of the proto-molecule to reassure Holden.

I don’t know. This whole thing seems pretty horrific to me.

Of course the Martians show up to intercept him, Bobbie tries to talk to him, they shoot, the bullets freeze in time because they’re going too fast for The Ring’s physics, and then Bobbie’s commander does a Truly Dumb Thing and throws a grenade. When I watched this I thought that the sequence was thus: The Ring perceived the grenade as a threat and dismembered the commander in self-defense, Holden used the chaos to stick his hand in the circuit, then time slowed with a jolt and possibly killed everyone on all the other ships. Molly pointed out though that The Ring perceived the threat and immediately slowed all the ships so they would move slower than the grenade, then Holden completed the circuit. Either way, a lot of people just got squashed.

Holden kwizatz haderachs all over the place, sticking his hand in the pain box and turning into a living, breathing Galaxy Brain meme. He seems to experience everything the proto-molecule has done, in a series of rapid visions, before being flung back onto the floor. He, um, he looks pretty dead.

Random Thoughts Floating in the Void of Space

• So what’s happened to all the people who were just forcibly slowed down? Has everyone flattened?
• At least it looks like Clarissa and Tilly’s fight was interrupted?
• Amos’ love for Alex makes me so happy I’m glad the show doesn’t spend too much time on it, because it would render me incapable of thinking about anything else.
• Bobbie being part of the Holden Interception Plan seemed super forced to me.
• Ditto Naomi just…flying around.
• A Martian, on the Nucleus: “Maybe little green men will come out?”
• Holden, on being pursued: “Ugh. Martians.”
• Holden, trying to understand the Miller Program: “Even the hat?”
  Miller Program: “I like the hat.”

Book Notes for Book Nerds

I watched this so late at night, and was so anxious about the Great Slow(er)down, that I almost forgot: THE PORTALS! WE SAW THE PORTALS!

I don’t know why I’m so excited about this when I am not looking forward to toxic lizards and the villain of book four, but… it was appropriately epic for what was going on this episode. And a lot of other bits … didn’t feel epic enough. The show’s been struggling a lot with scale: the massiveness of the Behemoth never feels massive; the occasional establishing shot of the Ring does make the ships look mighty tiny, but then we spend so much time up close and green-glowingly personal with Holden and Miller that the scale of all of this fades away again. I want to feel dwarfed. I want humanity to look so small.

Not having shown us the center, and the inner scale, of the Behemoth is part of this, and I don’t know that we’re ever going to see that, which means we’re going to lose some of the effect of everything being slowed even further. But it’s ok! I think. I understand that this was just a tease, that we’re really going to get into the aftermath next week, but it didn’t exactly work. The impact was so diffuse as to almost be unclear. Putting Bobbie on the station with Holden does, as Leah notes, seem forced; the balance between the characters’ stories felt off this week. The Ashford/Drummer conflict feels like an afterthought with no way forward; Tilly’s underdeveloped, and so her gentle approach to Clarissa seems almost out of character; Holden’s relationship with his destiny/free will argument kind of feels like going through the motions. For now.

Maybe this is just me wanting more, more, more, though. Did the slowing work for you? Was the station alien enough? Is Anna still going to do that thing she does? Two more episodes!

Leah Schnelbach wants to make it clear that her love for Pastor Anna will still be strong, no matter how many times she screws up. Come talk about guilt on Twitter!

Molly Templeton might have to go home and watch this one again. You can find her spilling her Expanse and other feels on Twitter.

Since Carmen Maria Machado’s short fiction collection Her Body and Other Parties was published last October, individual stories have emerged as their own conversation pieces: the stark, sexist horror of “The Husband Stitch,” a retelling of that eerie favorite urban legend about the woman with the green ribbon around her neck; the brutally clever “Especially Heinous,” told through micro-recaps of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit; and so forth. It’s fitting, then, that the television adaptation of Machado’s collection is being pitched as an anthology series described as a feminist Black Mirror.

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Vulture broke the news (as part of an in-depth profile of Machado) of the adaptation of the National Book Award finalist in development: After speaking with “dozens of interested parties,” she selected Imagine Television (whose series include Empire and Genius) to helm the anthology series. Gina Welch (The Terror, Castle Rock) is attached as writer. Imagine Television president Samie Kim Falvey told Vulture that Machado’s stories “capture the intense, unspoken psychology of inhabiting a woman’s body today” and predicted that the series will “undoubtedly be a force in the conversation about gender.”

If you haven’t yet read Her Body and Other Parties, check out our Genre in the Mainstream column on the collection.

On Sunday May 27^th Gardner Dozois passed away. On Friday June 1^st, essentially through happenstance, I ended up buying several boxes containing hundreds of used copies of Analog and Asimov’s, most of the latter from Dozois’s incredible editorial reign. Unpacking these and perusing their contents accentuated the sense of loss I’d been experiencing since Dozois died, but the experience also hit me in another way. The sheer volume of his editorial contributions was staggering. (And I wasn’t even thinking of his thirty-five years of annual reprint Year’s Best collections, or his many other anthologies, or his consistently interesting short fiction reviews in Locus). How many writers had Dozois discovered and encouraged and promoted over the years? How many voices had he amplified?

In a 2013 interview, Dozois said, “Even after all these years, finding a really first-rate story is still a thrill, one I want to share with others.” I know I’m not alone in feeling a deep sense of gratitude that Dozois did indeed share so many first-rate stories with us through the decades.

I’m not an editor, but as a reader I likewise find it thrilling to discover a new story that speaks to me. And as a writer I also like to shine a spotlight on what I consider strong work, particularly in the field of short fiction. I don’t do this as much as I’d like to, and that thought has been on my mind for some time. I do make a conscious effort to cover short story collections and anthologies in my review column at IGMS, I love taking the opportunity to promote short story writers on the Locus roundtable blog, interview them for the ’zine Words, and so on—but it doesn’t feel like quite enough.

To this end, a few years ago I started a Facebook group dedicated to discussing science fiction/fantasy/horror short stories. Posts have been sporadic and the group hasn’t taken off in the way I know it has the potential to. It’s easy, after all, for us to get sidetracked away from short fiction. Many conversations on social media, even in writers’ circles, tend to focus almost exclusively on novels—when not talking about movies, TV series, comic books, video games, politics, and so on.

Dozois’s passing, and holding all those issues of Asimov’s in my hands five days later, got me thinking about short stories again.

Which brings us to June 5^th. Catching up on various reviews feeds and websites, I discovered a series of wonderful short fiction round-up posts by Maria Haskins at the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy blog. I was particularly impressed by Haskins’ breadth of coverage, both in terms of markets and aesthetic sensibilities.

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My hunger for short stories recently re-awakened, I noted down, in a casual way, the names of a few writers recommended by Haskins—and promptly added Haskins herself to my working list. Most of these authors were “new” in a double sense: they hadn’t been publishing for a long time, and I personally hadn’t encountered their work before.

Initially, you have to understand, I was simply writing them down so I wouldn’t forget them. But looking up their names led to several more names, which in turn led to bibliographies with markets I was woefully behind on, which in turn led to finding more new writers, and so on.

The list grew and grew.

As it did, I realized it might be fun to share it with others. After all, it can be challenging for writers in the fantastic genres who work primarily at short lengths to get the attention they deserve. As my compilation of names expanded, I also found myself codifying certain principles for inclusion/exclusion on the list, to keep things somewhat sane.

In short:

• My primary reference tool to look up writers quickly became ISFDB. I know it has limitations, but that’s what I used.
• I decided to place an arbitrary cut-off at 2012. Intuitively, a writer who had been at it for more than six years didn’t really feel “new” to me. As I said, I know this is arbitrary. I could have just as easily chosen 2015 or 2010. And I’m sure I could look for psychological reasons to explain why I placed the cut-off at 2012, but ultimately it doesn’t matter; that’s what I went with. Any writer with an ISFDB credit prior to 2012 was ineligible.
• To be included on the list, a writer had to have a writing credit in 2018. I wanted to find “new” writers still actively publishing.
• I looked at a variety of markets, but I didn’t try to be comprehensive, I didn’t follow formal criteria for what markets to include or exclude, and I was often guided by whimsy. Wheee!
• I do tend to read short fiction regularly, and so I left many writers off because they simply weren’t new to me. But even here I wasn’t always consistent.
• I started to get tired around 130 names in and decided to stop at 150. Again, no specific reason. I could have brought the list to an end at 50 or 100 or pushed on until 200 or beyond. But I did notice the cumulative total of stories at 150 names was approaching 1,000, which seemed like more than enough…

Here’s the list, arranged in chronological order by year of the first story credit according to ISFDB, and alphabetically by first name within each year:

Please keep in mind, this list is in no way meant to be all-encompassing or intensely rigorous or canon-suggesting or awards-consideration-related or anything like that. It’s a personal, provisional snapshot, subject to the constraints I mentioned above. I made it for fun!

That said, I’d be pleased if it inspired the reading of short stories and got folks talking about writers who may otherwise pass under the radar. “Fighting the good fight,” as the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy blog tweeted at me. In that sense, this list is in the spirit of Dozois’s editorial work, a tiny tribute to his vast enterprise.

Most of all, I’m hoping you’ll look at it and say things like, “What?! This writer is obviously missing!” or “Yes, we all know about that writer, did they really need to be on yet another list?” and so forth. Add your own names, using whatever criteria you decide—and if you’d be so kind, do so in the comments, so we can all benefit.

Alvaro Zinos-Amaro is the author of the Hugo- and Locus-finalist Traveler of Worlds: Conversations With Robert Silverberg (2016). Alvaro has published many stories, essays, reviews, and interviews, as well as Rhysling-nominated poetry.

Hilketa is a sport, first played in the United States, in which two teams of eleven players attempt to score points, primarily by tearing off the head of one of the opposing players and either throwing or carrying the head through goal posts. Other points may be accrued through defensive or offensive action. Because of the violent nature of the sport, no human bodies are on the field during play; all play is performed with personal transports (“threeps”). Because of this, and due to the fact that until very recently all threeps were operated by people with Haden’s Syndrome, to this day all professional Hilketa athletes are “Hadens.”

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Despite being a relatively new sport, the kinetic nature of the game and its scoring has caused the game to become exceptionally popular in a very short time, although the highly-specialized and expensive nature of the threeps involved in the game means that live exhibitions of the sport are largely confined to the professional, major league level. The top league of the sport is the North American Hilketa League (NAHL), which currently fields twenty-four teams in the United States, Canada and Mexico, across two conferences, each with two divisions. There are plans to add four new teams to the league within two years, and another four within ten.

The name of the sport comes from the Basque word for “murder.”

Rules and Play

Art by Tim Paul

Hilketa is played by two teams of eleven players each, with five additional players on each side held in reserve. No more than eleven players per team may be on the field at any one time.

The shape and size of the Hilketa field is highly variable depending on the venue but must have two features: Roughly symmetrical and connected field “sides” of between 3200 and 4600 yards square, and identical goal posts at the end of each side. These dimensions are initially derived on the shape and format of an American football field, on which the first games of Hilketa were played, and which serves as the “default” field for the game. The flexibility on field size allows the game to be played in many existing sports venues and allows for some variability in game strategy, based on field dimensions and conditions. In addition to field size, the game allows for the addition of certain field “features” including small hills and other topographical challenges.

Additionally, at ten points on each side of the field are placed weapons: Two bats, two hammers, two axes, two swords, one crossbow and one grenade, one randomly placed at each station. The crossbow bolt features a soft head with sensors attached to calculate “damages” which are then assessed to the target threep’s functionality; the grenade is likewise designed. Melee weapons are additionally designed to mimic damage without actually destroying the threeps they are used on. Players may, but are not required to, select a weapon during play.

There are no set positions in Hilketa; each team appoints a team captain to preside over ceremonial moments, such as the beginning coin toss. However, there are four different approved threep models for Hilketa play which offer various offensive and defensive advantages over four core attributes: Strength, speed, agility and damage tolerance. These are:

• General: The basic, “all purpose” threep model which offers a balanced approach to speed, strength, agility and damage tolerance;
• Tank: The strongest threep, and the one best able to withstand attack, but slow and limited in terms of agility;
• Scout: The fastest of the threeps and also the easiest to damage, with agility between those of a Tank and General;
• Warrior: The most agile of the threep models, relatively strong but relatively slow and somewhat more susceptible to damage. Warriors are the only players allowed to carry more than one weapon at a time, effectively allowing for two weapon attacks where other players can manage one.

Each of these threep models has the performative range of attributes defined by the NAHL. Beyond this range, a team manager has the option of increasing any one of these attributes by up 20% in any one player for the length of either a game or of a play campaign, at the cost of commensurately reducing those abilities by the same amount across all the rest of the players on the team; i.e., if the manager makes one player 10% faster than the usual range of their threep model, every other player on the team becomes 10% slower, regardless of model. This creates an interesting risk/reward strategy challenge in many situations.

The team manager assigns threep models for both the active and reserve players prior to the start of any game; once the models have been assigned for a game, they may not be swapped out, although active players may be swapped out for reserve players at the beginning of any new play campaign. However, once swapped, the previously active players may not return to the game unless their replacement is unable to continue play for some reason accepted by the game officials. Likewise, the threeps the players use may not themselves be swapped out during the game unless a malfunction occurs that is not related to the game, as judged by the game officials. In this way, “injuries” and wear and tear play a factor in game management.

The game consists of two 45-minute halves; the captains of both teams meet midfield for a coin toss; the winner of the toss may choose to defend or attack. After the first half the teams switch field sides.

Each half begins with the first “campaign” of the game. Campaigns are the period of time in which an attacking team first attempts to rip the head off the body of the designated opposing player, and then deliver that head to their goal. These campaigns have two formal parts: The “capo,” the four-minute period of time during which the attacking team must acquire the head; and the “coda,” the four-minute period of time in which the team must deliver the head to the goal.

The goal consists of two large poles, spaced eight yards apart, with an additional two poles on either side, eight yards apart from their respective poles. Additionally, between the two central poles, twenty feet up, is strung a one-yard-wide hoop, in the center of a net a yard wide at the top and bottom and spanning the length of the central poles. To score, the head must be thrown or carried past the goals or through the hoop. A goal through the central posts is an “inside goal”; through the outer posts is an “outside goal,” and through the hoop is an “upper goal.” If the head is thrown it must not touch the ground prior to entering the goal. To throw a head into the goal, the player must be within ten yards of the goal.

At the start of each campaign the attacking team begins inside a ten-yard wide “starting circle” directly in front of their center goal posts; the defending team may place themselves anywhere they like on their half of the field, which usually means near the weapon stations. No weapons may be touched prior to the start of a campaign; no player may take weapons from the opposing team side until the attacking team breaches the defending team side.

Play begins when the starting whistle is blown and the “goat,” the defending team player whose head is to be the target, is chosen. The goat is chosen randomly by computer and is visually signaled to opponents and to spectators by a ring of lights, set in the threep head or neck, becoming illuminated; they will remain illuminated for the remainder of the campaign. The goat, alone among the defending players, is not allowed to use a weapon; they must evade capture by running or by fighting using their own bodies. A goat may disarm an opponent by taking a weapon from them and discarding it (or giving it to a team member to use) but may not use it offensively themselves.

When a goat is selected and the campaign whistle blows, the attacking team has thirty seconds for at least one of their members to breach the opposing side of the field. Once the breach has occurred, all players may engage on either side of the field, and pick up any remaining available weapons. If the attacking team does not breach within thirty seconds, a penalty is assessed, points deducted from scoring, and a new campaign begins with the attacking team now on defense. Likewise, until the defensive side is breached, defensive players may not enter the attacker’s side of the field.

The goat’s head may be removed by either an opposing player striking it off with a weapon (headshots with a crossbow bolt will trigger the head to fall off) or by removing it physically with their own threep. Once the head is removed, the opposing player with the head is now the “carrier” and must transport it to their own goal. While a player is a carrier, they may not carry a weapon; they are vulnerable to attack without the help of their teammates.

A carrier may choose to hand or pass the head to a teammate. The new carrier must then drop any weapons.

Defensive players must attempt to retrieve the head by wresting the head from the carrier, disabling the carrier and taking the head, or intercepting the head while it is being passed. Once the defensive players have possession of the head, they have the option of either running out the clock for the coda portion of campaign, which offer no points, or returning the head to the goat’s body, which does. The head must be physically returned and in possession of another defensive player when it touches the body. Once the goat’s head touches any part of the goat’s body in this manner, it is considered returned and the coda portion of the campaign is over.

Attacking players may attempt to retake the head; defensive players to again retrieve it and so on until the end of the coda portion of the campaign. As long as the head is in bounds and neither through a goal nor returned, it is in play.

If a carrier goes out of bounds, or the head otherwise leaves the field, the play clock is stopped while the head is retrieved and thrown back into play by a game official at the place it went out of bounds. The official will throw the head back in while facing away from the field and the teams will fight to retrieve the head. If the head was out of play because a carrier left the field, the carrier will not come onto the field again until the head is again in play. Additionally, any player other than a carrier who steps out of bounds during a campaign is removed from play for the duration of the campaign; play will continue with the player’s team minus that player.

If the attacking team cannot take the goat’s head in the four minutes of the capo portion of the campaign, the campaign is over and a new campaign begins with the attacking team becoming the defending team. If the attacking team cannot score a goal during the four minutes of the coda portion of the campaign, the campaign is over and a new campaign begins with the attacking team becoming the defending team.

There is a brief pause between campaigns while the ground crews reset the field and the team technicians reattach any threep limbs severed during play.

If time in a half runs out during the capo portion of a campaign, play stops. If it runs out during the coda portion, play continues only until current carrier scores, loses possession of the head or is unable to move the head on the field for three seconds, due to tackling or being physically blocked from movement by opposing team members. In this situation, the carrier may not give or pass the head to another team member.

Damage zones on player threeps require a special mention. As noted above, the melee, crossbow and grenade weapons are designed to simulate damage to threeps rather than offer real, substantive damage to the machines themselves; although in the case of the melee weapons some actual damage can occur simply as wear and tear. Both the weapons and the threep bodies carry an array of sensors that allow the threep bodies to know what weapons are attacking them and how much “damage” the threep is taking and where. As a result, threep bodies will commensurately adjust their abilities to the amount of damage taken for the remainder of the campaign. If the overall damage to the threep passes a certain threshold, the threep will deactivate and be out of play for the remainder of the campaign.

Likewise, when appropriate to the nature and force of the “damage,” a threep can lose limbs or a head during play. If a threep loses a limb, it may continue play without the limb to the extent that it is able to with its remaining limbs. If a threep loses its head, it will be out of play for the remainder of the campaign.

Another player may not use a severed limb or head from a threep as a weapon without penalty, but a player whose threep’s limb was severed may retrieve that limb and use it as a weapon.

Damage may also be incurred through physical melee without weapons, although usually a lesser amount per each attack (excepting attacks from a Tank threep).

Note that when a player is the “goat,” the force required to remove their head is roughly half of what is required otherwise; therefore it is possible for a goat’s head to be removed by hand.

NAHL rules require player threeps not to have their pain sensory apparatus entirely muted, in order to assist with threep care and maintenance; pain sensation is usually transmitted at 5% to 10% of “normal” pain settings.

Scoring

Art by Tim Paul

Scoring is as thus:

• Removal of the head during the capo portion of the campaign: 1 to 4 points, depending on the time. If the head is removed during the first minute of play, four points are awarded; if during the second minute of play, three points; in the third minute, two points; in the final minute, one point.

• Time of completion of goal during the coda portion of the campaign: 1 to 4 points, as above.

• Outside goal, thrown: one point.

• Outside goal, run in: two points.

• Inside goal, thrown: three points.

• Inside goal, run in: five points.

• Upper goal: ten points.
  NOTE: If an upper goal is attempted and failed, player shall receive NO goal points. An attempt will be defined as the head touching or going over the net the upper goal is contained in, without entering the upper goal. If an upper goal is attempted but the head hits the goal net and does not go through, the player attempting the upper goal may try to retrieve the head before it touches the ground and convert it to an inside or outside goal instead. No other player may attempt a goal after an upper goal has been attempted. Likewise, no opposing team player may try to intercept the head after an upper goal attempt. A failed upper goal attempt ends the coda portion of that campaign. An attempt at the upper goal that passes under the net without touching it will be judged an inside goal.

• Returning the goat head: 1 to 4 points, depending on time remaining in the coda portion, as specified above.

With the exception of points for returning the goat head, all points will be awarded only after the head has passed through the goal. At that time, all points accrued during a campaign will be added to the team’s tally. No goal, no points.

Thus the maximum number of points accruable during a successful attacking campaign is eighteen; the minimum is three. The maximum number of points accruable for a successful defensive campaign is four; the minimum is zero.

Penalties assessed during play may result in the docking of points from a final score. Penalties include not breaching the defensive field in the required time, intentionally stepping out of bounds, and using unauthorized weapons.

League, Rankings and Scoring

Art by Tim Paul

The North American Hilketa League currently features twenty-four teams, in two conferences, with two divisions each. They are:

EASTERN CONFERENCE

• Northeast Division
  • Boston Bays
  • Columbus Navigators
  • New York Knights
  • Pittsburgh Pitbulls
  • Toronto Snowbirds
  • Michigan Destroyers

• Southeast Division
  • Atlanta Dragons
  • Charlotte Webslingers
  • Orlando Mad Mice
  • Houston Hurricanes
  • Dallas-Ft. Worth Stampede
  • Tulsa Tornados

WESTERN CONFERENCE

• Northwest Division
  • Chicago Blues
  • Portland Pioneers
  • Rocky Mountain High
  • Seattle Malamutes
  • Twin City Princes
  • Vancouver Lights

• Southwest Division
  • Arizona Howlers
  • Las Vegas Aces
  • Los Angeles Devils
  • Mexico City Aztecs
  • Oakland Fire
  • San Diego Surf

Within the next two years franchises will be awarded in four pre-selected cities, one in each division: Philadelphia in the Northeast, Washington DC in the Southeast, Kansas City in the Northwest and Austin in the Southwest.

The game season is similar to American football with fourteen regular season games, from April to July, and a three-game post-season completing in August. Each team plays the five other teams from their division, five from the conference’s other division, and two from each division in the alternate conference. Playoffs include the division championships, the conference championships, and the league championship, known as the Haden Cup.

Rankings are determined on a point system similar to hockey, with three points awarded for a win, one for a tie, and none for a loss. The team with the best regular season record in terms of points is awarded the Sebring-Warner Shield.

The current holder of the Haden Cup is the Boston Bays; the current holder of the S-W Shield is the Vancouver Lights.

Art by Tim Paul

Special Challenges and Controversies

• Because Hilketa requires the use of threeps, all current professional players are athletes with Hadens. This has caused complaints from non-Haden Hilketa players in the amateur and development virtual leagues (in which no physical threeps are used), who have alleged discrimination and claim to be as good as, if not better than, current professional Hilketa players and have threatened to creating competing leagues. Because Hilketa is copyrighted and trademarked by the NAHL, and the use of threeps until recently regulated by the United States and other governments, these protests have gained little traction as yet.

• Because Haden athletes’ physical bodies require constant medical attention and sometimes cannot be physically moved without significant cost/effort, a number of Hilketa players pilot their threeps remotely rather than from the staffed and medically state-of-the-art game rooms at the stadiums themselves. This has given rise to accusations of “pirate subs,” in which underperforming players are illegally swapped out before or even during games by more accomplished players. It also makes it more difficult to monitor players for performance-enhancing drugs.

• Despite relying heavily on Haden athletes, the franchise owners the NAHL are largely comprised of non-Hadens, with only one owner (Gabrielle Garcia, Arizona Howlers) related to a Haden. This fact combined with a league-wide salary cap and ceiling on wages has led some Hadens to protest or boycott the league. The NAHL has responded by saying that it is seeking out Haden and Haden-related owners for its upcoming expansion franchises; most notable among potential new franchise owners is billionaire real-estate developer and former NBA star Marcus Shane.

• Some Basque speakers have complained about the name of the sport, arguing that it places their culture in a negative light.

Originally published in April 2018

Dubbed “the world’s greatest comic magazine,” Fantastic Four changed comics when it was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1961. At the time, DC (or National Periodical Publications) was having huge success rebooting their superhero comics, with new versions of the Flash and Green Lantern and renewed interest in Batman and Superman and Wonder Woman—and they also had a huge team book in Justice League of America.

Over at Marvel (or Timely Publications), whose bread and butter was mostly monster comics at this point, they decided to cash in on the trend with their own superhero team, though this one was less like the Justice League and more of a family of adventurers, more akin to Challengers of the Unknown. They were the first of many new superheroes to debut from the company, quickly followed by the Hulk, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Thor, Daredevil, and more, including another couple of team books, X-Men and Avengers.

Even though the Fantastic Four were eclipsed in straight-up popularity by Spider-Man in the 1960s and 1970s, the X-Men in the 1980s and the 1990s, and the Avengers in the 2000s and 2010s, the FF always remained the rock-solid foundation of the Marvel age of heroes.

In comics, anyhow. In movies, not so much.

The history of the FF in comics has always been steady and stalwart. It was the book that Lee and Kirby stayed on together the longest, with more than a hundred issues done together. So many of Marvel’s most iconic heroes and villains came out of the FF comic, from Dr. Doom to the revival of the 1940s character Sub-Mariner to the Black Panther to Galactus and the Silver Surfer.

But it’s the main foursome themselves who remain the main part of the team’s appeal: Reed Richards, the brilliant scientist. Susan Storm Richards, his wife and support, who went from being the “girl hostage” in the 1960s to becoming the most capable and powerful member of the team. Johnny Storm, the hot-headed Human Torch. And Ben Grimm, the tragic strongman who remains trapped in a hideous, rocky form. (The team would have lots of other substitute members over the decades, from Giant-Man to Luke Cage to She-Hulk to Crystal to Ant-Man to Storm to the Black Panther and more.)

Two aspects of the FF stood out in 1961 that set the tone for future Marvel characters. The first was the team eschewing the whole concept of the secret identity, the first major heroes to do that. They all have codenames—Mr. Fantastic, the Invisible Woman (previously the Invisible Girl), the Human Torch, the Thing—but everyone knows who they really are. They’re completely public in a way that superheroes never were at the time, and which you only see more commonly in the last twenty years or so.

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The other is embodied in the Thing (and also in Cyclops of the X-Men): the notion of powers as tragedy. The Thing doesn’t transform into the Thing, he’s always the Thing. (Unlike one animated spinoff, anyhow…)

Many of the finest names in comics have worked on the FF over the years. John Byrne’s brilliant run from 1981-1986 was as definitive a run as Lee and Kirby’s (and as seminal in its own right as Walt Simonson’s contemporary run on Thor), and folks like Roy Thomas, Len Wein, Marv Wolfman, Steve Englehart, Karl Kesel, Jonathan Hickman, Chris Claremont, Simonson, Jeph Loeb, and especially Mark Waid did some of their best work on the flagship title.

After the disastrous 1994 movie produced by Roger Corman, Marvel paid through the nose to get the negatives back and sell the rights to 20th Century Fox, who then took ten years to finally get an FF movie made. (The executive producer of the 1994 film, Bernd Eichinger, still has a producer credit on this one.) The film went through screenwriters and directors like stoners through potato chips: Chris Columbus, Michael France (who co-wrote the Ang Lee Hulk and the Thomas Jane Punisher), Sam Hamm (who co-wrote the Tim Burton Batman), Sam Weisman, Raja Gosnell, Peyton Reed (who would go on to direct Ant-Man and Ant-Man & the Wasp), Mark Frost, Tim Story, and Simon Kinberg (one of the writers and producers on Fox’s X-Men films). The final writing credit went to France and Frost, though Kinberg did uncredited work on it, and Story finally settled in as director.

The cast included Jessica Alba, a controversial bit of casting as Sue, as well as Chris Evans (who would go on to play the definitive Captain America from 2011 to the present day) as Johnny, Ioan Gruffudd as Reed, longtime comics fan Michael Chiklis as the perfect Ben, and Julian McMahon as Victor von Doom.

“It’s clobberin’ time!”

Fantastic Four
Written by Michael France and Mark Frost
Directed by Tim Story
Produced by Avi Arad and Bernd Eichinger and Ralph Winter
Original release date: July 8, 2005

Reed Richards and his best friend Ben Grimm go to Von Doom Enterprises in New York to meet with Victor von Doom, their old college buddy, who has a thirty-foot statue of himself in the lobby of the building. Reed’s theory is that a storm of cosmic rays passed by Earth billions of years ago and was the catalyzing event for life on the planet. (Hilariously, this is also the plot of the classic Doctor Who episode “City of Death,” only there it was a Jagaroth space ship exploding.) Another such storm will pass by Earth soon, and Reed wants to study it using the Von Doom orbital platform. Reed can’t do it himself because he’s bankrupt, and NASA has already turned him down.

However, von Doom agrees, for 75% of the profits. He puts genetic scientist Susan Storm in charge on his end—Sue is Reed’s ex, and Victor has the hots for her also. Reed wants former astronaut Ben to pilot the shuttle, but von Doom already has a pilot: Sue’s brother Johnny Storm, who washed out of NASA under Ben’s watch when he crashed a flight simulator. Johnny is willing to let Ben be copilot, though.

Victor joins the expedition, and the five of them arrive on the platform. (Is there nobody up there normally? Who maintains it?) Victor tries to propose to Sue, but before he can, the cloud accelerates while Ben is EVA placing Reed’s sensors. Ben is hit hardest by the cosmic storm, but they’re all affected—except for Victor, who lowers the shield to protect himself while the others are on the outer edge of the platform trying to rescue Ben.

They are brought back to Earth, with the four who were outside the shield left in quarantine at a private hospital in upstate New York near a mountain. Ben tries to get Reed to rekindle his romance with Sue, while Johnny decides to break quarantine and go snowboarding with a nurse. Meanwhile, Von Doom Enterprises took a huge stock hit after the fiasco on the platform, and the board of directors gives Victor a week to right the ship.

Reed, Sue, Ben, and Johnny start displaying odd symptoms. Johnny catches fire, Sue turns invisible temporarily, Reed is able to stretch his arms like taffy, and Ben transforms into a giant rocky creature. Ben breaks out through a wall and heads back into New York City to talk to his fiancée Debbie. However, one look at Ben’s new form and she runs screaming.

Ben goes to the Brooklyn Bridge to brood. He stops a jumper from committing suicide, but the chaos caused by his rescue results in a massive pileup—including an oxygen canister exploding, causing a major fire. A fire truck attempts a rescue, but also crashes. Reed, Sue, and Johnny’s cab happens to be on the Brooklyn Bridge by a startling coincidence (even if they were definitely going to Brooklyn from von Doom’s private hospital, there’s a dozen other routes they could take that wouldn’t involve that iconic bridge). They’re able to rescue the firefighters and bystanders, Johnny by absorbing the flames, Sue by generating an invisible forcefield to contain the fire, Ben by pulling the fire truck from the edge of the bridge, and Reed by stretching far enough to catch a falling firefighter before he crashes into the East River.

While the cops are all set to arrest the four of them, the crowd and the firefighters cheer them, leading the cops to put their guns down. The media dubs them the Fantastic Four, and they become instant celebrities.

Unfortunately, they don’t know what the cosmic storm actually did to them. Reed takes them to his combination home/lab in the Baxter Building, where they’re warmly greeted by Jimmy the Doorman, as well as mailman Willie Lumpkin, who looks just like Stan Lee, and who hands Reed a whole mess of bills labelled “FINAL NOTICE.”

While Reed does multiple tests on all four of them, Victor notices that he, too, has been affected, as his skin is turning into metal, and he also has some control over electricity. He also has lost his company, as the board of directors has ousted him thanks to the failure of Von Doom Enterprises’ IPO. Victor takes revenge on the board by killing the chair in the parking lot.

Reed has come up with a possible way to reverse their mutations, but he’s not sure it’ll work, and is worried that it will kill them. Sue is frustrated with how indecisive he is, and she’s not just talking about science. Johnny is chafing under being forced to stay inside, and has started using their fame for marketing purposes.

Johnny goes to a motorcross event and gives an impromptu press conference, giving himself and the other three nicknames. Reed, Sue, and Ben go to the arena to remonstrate with him, and they argue publicly and loudly.

Victor has bugged the Baxter Building, and he uses the fact that Reed and Sue are taking steps to get back together to sow doubt in Ben, convincing him that Reed is too busy mooning over Sue to work on his cure. Reed, still not sure the cure will work, tests it on himself—and it doesn’t work because he didn’t use enough power.

Ben goes to his favorite bar in Brooklyn (in the comics, he’s from the lower east side, which makes him the first of two Jack Kirby creations to be moved from the LES to Brooklyn for no compellingly good reason, the other being Steve Rogers in Captain America: The First Avenger six years hence). He meets a blind woman named Alicia, who is fascinated by him, and the feeling is mutual.

While Reed is recovering and Sue is caring for him, Victor convinces Ben to return to the Baxter Building. Victor increases the power as Reed theorized, but also exposes himself to more cosmic rays. Ben is cured, and Victor is now more powerful. Too late, Ben realizes his mistake, and Victor—whose skin is now almost entirely metal—rewards him by throwing him into a wall, and says, “One down, three to go.”

Victor then defeats Reed and kidnaps him to his own nearby office and, after putting a metal mask on to cover his increasingly disfigured face, fires a heat-seeking missile at the Baxter Building. Johnny is able to divert it by flying through the air while flamed on, eventually diverting it to a garbage scow.

Thinking Johnny to be dead, Victor says, “Two down,” even though he’s actually defeated three of them. Sue arrives at his office and frees Reed while invisible, but Victor interrupts her and they fight. Then Ben arrives, all rocky again, as he put himself back in the chamber to get his strength back in order to take Victor down. Now the four of them face off against Victor on the streets of New York. At Reed’s direction, Johnny superheats Victor, with Sue’s force field keeping the fire contained to just Victor. Then he has Ben kick open a fire hydrant, and Reed uses his own body as a hose to douse the white-hot Victor, freezing his metal form in place.

The Fantastic Four hold a celebration on a boat. Alicia is there, Ben’s arms around her, the latter more philosophical about his transformation. Reed proposes to Sue, and she accepts. Meanwhile, Victor is placed in a cargo crate on a ship bound for his home country of Latveria.

“Flame on!”

This movie and its sequel have come under tremendous amount of fire, and while some of it is deserved, the movie has two very big things going for it: their names are Chris Evans and Michael Chiklis.

Honestly, I remember my first thought after seeing this movie thirteen years ago was that I wanted the next movie to be called Strange Tales (a title that featured the Human Torch and the Thing at various points in the 1960s and 1970s) and only feature Chiklis and Evans, with Reed and Sue off on their honeymoon.

Chiklis apparently lobbied to play Ben Grimm, and he’s letter perfect in the role, from his easy friendship with Ioan Gruffudd’s Reed to his equally easy friendship with Jessica Alba’s Sue to his war of words and deeds with Evans’s Johnny to his frustration with being the Thing. The moment when he can’t pick Debbie’s discarded engagement ring up off the pavement because his fingers are too big is just heartbreaking, and Chiklis does an amazing job of selling Ben’s anguish through the metric shit-ton of latex he’s covered in.

Anybody who’s followed the Marvel Cinematic Universe knows the greatness of Evans. If Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark is the heart of the MCU, Evans’s Captain America is the soul. So it’s even more impressive to see him in this role that’s 180 degrees from Cap, an adrenaline junkie who jumps into being a superhero and a celebrity with both feet. Evans is a pure delight, and he and Chiklis make a superlative combination.

It’s really too bad they’re stuck in this movie.

So many of Marvel’s heroes have origins that are very much tied to the time in which they were created, whether it’s the basic notion of radiation = magic to writers and readers who didn’t know that much about radiation, or the specific things like the Hulk’s origin being tied to bomb testing (and the Cold War, as the test is sabotaged by a Soviet agent), Iron Man’s being tied to the fighting in Southeast Asia, and the Fantastic Four’s being tied to the space race of the 1960s.

As a result, the team’s origin needs updating when retold for a time that isn’t pre-1969, and the attempt here is—okay? Like the 1994 film, they make it a specific cosmic event that they investigate and that gives them powers. And unlike the comics and the 1994 film (but like the 2015 film that we’ll cover down the line) they give Sue and Johnny actual reasons for being on the mission, since it never made any kind of sense that the mission commander’s girlfriend and kid brother would go on a spaceflight just to tag along.

But while the basic notion of them going to an orbital platform to study a cosmic ray cloud and Things Go Horribly Wrong is a good one, the execution is botched in a number of ways.

The first is in the casting of the other two heroic leads, as Gruffudd never once convinced me that he was playing Reed Richards. I instantly bought Chiklis and Evans as their characters, but Gruffudd mostly just stared wide-eyed at things and muttered his lines and stumbled through the entire production. (At least his stretching looks more or less convincing, unlike what had been done ten years previously in both the 1994 FF film and the 1996 Generation X TV movie.)

Alba is better as Sue, as she at least sometimes gets things right (particularly when she berates Johnny for being an ass, as she sounds just like an older sister). Having said that, there are way too many situations that are contrived for the express purpose of getting Alba to wear as little clothing as possible, and it’s tiresome. (Especially since—except for a brief, awful period in the 1990s when Tom DeFalco and Paul Ryan were on the book—Sue has never been a sex symbol type of character.)

Julian McMahon does an excellent job of playing an iconic comic book villain, but the one he’s playing is Lex Luthor, which is a problem insofar as he’s been cast to play Victor von Doom. It’s frustrating, because this version of von Doom makes a much better Luthor than Gene Hackman, Kevin Spacey, or Jesse Eisenberg.

But turning Victor into an evil industrialist just never feels right. Worse, the rivalry between him and Reed never feels real. The one thing the 1994 movie got right was the resentment between Reed and Victor that went back to their days in college together and the accident that scarred Victor for life. We don’t get any of that here, changing it instead to a rivalry between a successful scientist and an unsuccessful one, with Sue reduced to the prize for one of them to win.

I don’t object to changing Victor from a despot ruling a small eastern European nation to an industrialist on principle, but the change doesn’t always fit right. Worse, though, is changing Victor’s armor from something he built with his scientific genius to super powers he got the same way the FF got theirs. But Dr. Doom was never a dangerous foe because he was armored and fired blasts from his gauntlets, but rather because he is as smart as Reed.

This basic storyline could have produced a good FF film, but it’s done in by the wholesale rewriting of Victor von Doom, by disastrous casting of three of the five leads, and by a plot that is mostly just putting the pieces in place for future films.

While this movie was not a critical success, it was a commercial one, and a sequel was greenlit. We’ll look at Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer next week.

Keith R.A. DeCandido will be reviewing the second season of Luke Cage for this site next week, and is also working on a piece on Cloak and Dagger. If you support his Patreon, you can read his takes on Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War, Deadpool 2, and the two most recent Star Wars films.

We all know that there is really only one reason we have kids. I mean, yeah, there’s the whole “walking bag of donateable organs and blood” part. But the real reason one has children, the true reason, is so that you can fill up their bizarre little brains with your own pet affections, vigilantly programming them to love the things you love, and also to love you, I guess. It’s like having a parrot, but instead of teaching them to say the things you want, it’s to have the emotional bonds to the pop culture that you want.

Friends, I am going to straight up say this right here—I have miserably failed in my efforts to indoctrinate my children with the appropriate pop culture references. Well, I say that I have failed, but I feel like at least 70% of the burden of failure rests on my two very bad garbage sons, who have both proven to be just dogshit at liking the right things.

At least I’ll always have access to their organs.

Here I will recount some of the ways that my efforts have not succeeded, so that all the parents out there who are making tiny copies of themselves in the hope of forcing their genre loves on their children can learn from my mistakes.

To begin with, I had assumed that the Large Son would take to genre like a duck to water.

The main reason for this is that genre is everywhere now. It’s about as common and unremarkable as paving asphalt. Whereas in the ’80s you were considered a big ole nerd for buying a Han Solo poseable action figure, in the bright, beautiful era of the 21^st century, you can buy a bag of Star Wars-themed oranges and nobody even blinks an eye.

This is way different than when I grew up, when we kept renting a wobbly VHS of A New Hope from the library, and then my dad brought home The Empire Strikes Back and suddenly we realized that they had made more of these movies, oh my God.

So the Large Son is absolutely drowning in genre exposure. He lives in an age of abundance that I was utterly denied. But does he take advantage of it? Does he religiously memorize all of the various planets, as well as the types of ships?

No. He does not. For a whole damned year he called Darth Vader “Star Vader,” and he still calls Boba Fett “Bobo Fett,” and he calls every kind of land transport an “AT-AT,” which is just abysmally fucking wrong in every kind of way. I created a spreadsheet for him but I am fairly sure he only gave it a cursory glance. Perhaps the most galling thing about it all is that, incredibly, despite having never actually watched a Star Wars movie in the six years of his life (he says they are “too loud,” which, okay, sure), he somehow already knows that Vader is Luke’s father, and he’s just utterly fucking blasé about it, too.

No, wait, that’s not true. The worst thing is that his Star Wars is all prequels, which I see now were completely engineered for children, where Jedis just casually whomp battle droids and the battle droids make humorous, honking sounds as they die, and absolutely nothing matters. This, too, is Doing Star Wars Wrong. Like, even though the Ewoks were ridiculous, I still remembered when one of them attempted to wake up the mangled corpse of its friend, and then moaned in despair as he (she? Am I not Ewok woke?) realized his friend was dead.

Even when shit got saccharine, there were still some goddamn stakes. Teddy bears got their brains blown out. It was hardcore. The way they’re doing Star Wars today is just all wrong.

One of the places I can find common ground with Large Son, though, is in the Star Wars Lego Wii game where he plays as Artoo and just makes him fall off cliffs over and over again, laughing as Artoo makes that chirrupy scream as he dies.

That’s good. That’s pretty good.

VERDICT: BAD

While this was going on, I tried to teach Smaller, Louder Son about the Biblical parables hidden within Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Son. He responded by somehow ejecting feces out of every seam of his diaper except those around his buttocks, as if his lower torso were covered in hidden anuses.

VERDICT: VERY BAD

It seems as if Legos have somehow become the conduit for all things pop culture in our lives, and inevitably Large Son was gifted with some Lego Batman sets. These I approached with great interest. I remembered watching Batman: The Animated Series as a six-year-old, and wondering how I could possibly jimmy together a grappling hook in our shed, unaware that such a feat might be far easier for a genius, athletic, scientifically gifted billionaire than a STEM-challenged six-year-old in the South Carolina sticks.

Yet this, also, turned out to be a failure, because Large Son insisted on making Batman fight Steve from Minecraft. This is not canon. Worse, Large Son insisted that Batman would lose the fight because Batman was not—and here I quote directly—“immune to lava,” namely because Batman was incapable of carrying cobblestone.

First of all—again—this is not canon. Second of all, just because my son has not witnessed Batman carrying or utilizing cobblestone in the Minecraft universe, the idea that he is inherently incapable of doing so is preposterous bullshit. If Batman wanted to carry cobblestone, he would devote weeks of his time learning the best and most established methods of carrying cobblestone, and he’d map out dozens of plans and scenarios for carrying the cobblestone, carefully researching the mineral composition of the cobblestone, and he’d develop backup plans for the backup plans not only for carrying the cobblestone, but also implementing the cobblestone, delivering the cobblestone with surgical precision.

However, before I could finish making this argument, my son simply left.

VERDICT: WORST

After this, I approached Smaller, Louder Son and tried to strike up a conversation about how Batman: The Long Halloween, Batman: Dark Victory, and also the Hush storyline were all basically driven by the same narrative gimmick—murder mystery whodunit that lazily cycles through all available characters just to pad time—and also, man, isn’t that also basically the plot of the show Heroes, another work Jeph Loeb masterminded? However, instead of engaging with the argument, Smaller, Louder Son proceeded to yell incredibly loud, which made Wife come, and then she also yelled just incredibly loud, holy shit.

VERDICT: HOLY SHIT

I was pretty much at the end of my rope after this. As a white, middle class, male American nerd, I am only capable of expressing my anemic inner self through vapid genre references. Pop culture is my sole language of emotion! If my child does not appropriately love the intellectual properties I am attached to, will I be capable of loving either child? Especially Smaller, Louder Son, who smells like death yogurt??

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But then, I realized I was perhaps going too fast. Perhaps it’s like my music teacher always said about practicing pieces slowly, and then speeding up: it’s like putting a frog in a pot, and if you slowly increase the heat, the frog won’t jump out, and the water will boil, and you’ll successfully kill the frog. (On an unrelated note: this is the worst metaphor of all time.)

So, one day while playing Legos with Large Son, I had an idea—what if we grouped the Lego dudes into two teams, with two bases, and we took turns: each turn we’d get to move one Lego person, and attack once. Each Lego person got two hit points. Whoever ran out of Lego guys first won.

He agreed. And we played a good game—and, though he was unaware that I was basically training him for countless board games, he enjoyed himself a lot.

Part of the reason he enjoyed himself, I’m sure, is that his guys outnumbered my guys three to one, and also they got all the guns, and my guys were armed with one (1) stick, and one (1) fish. This doesn’t necessarily indicate that he might not eventually love nerdy stuff. It might indicate that he’s an asshole, though.

VERDICT: POSSIBLY?

Encouraged by this, afterwards I went to Smaller, Louder Son and talked to him about how interesting it was that Emily Blunt somehow managed to star in not one but two of the most innovative sci-fi movies of the recent era, Looper (2012), and Edge of Tomorrow (2014), and also she played somewhat similar characters—a tough, independent love interest who reforms the wayward main character—and I was expanding on what’s interesting about this curious cultural symmetry when I noticed he had fallen asleep.

VERDICT: HOPELESS

This article was originally published in May 2017.

Robert Jackson Bennett was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but grew up in Katy, Texas. He attended the University of Texas at Austin and, like a lot of its alumni, was unable to leave the charms of the city. He resides there currently with his wife and children. He is the author of the Divine Cities series, and hs novel Foundryside is the start of a new trilogy, forthcoming this August from Crown Publishing.

The moment that I knew we were in for something special with Hereditary was the scene where miniaturist Annie Graham (Toni Collette) thinks she sees her mother’s spirit in her workroom. It’s a typical horror-movie shot of a shadowy figure ominously lurking in a darkened corner, distinct enough to elicit gasps but indistinct enough that it could just be a trick of the light. A scene later, there’s no wringing of hands from Annie, no self-denying rationalizations: Instead, she’s googling hauntings, because she saw something, dammit.

I loved that the heroine of a horror movie didn’t second-guess her instinct, that we got to skip the requisite scene where someone tells her “there is a dark presence in this house” and she doesn’t believe it. Annie knows that her life is saturated in darkness, because she survived a dysfunctional family. Even before the death of her estranged mother—an event which kicks off the film’s brutal series of events—Annie already had ghosts in her home. And that’s what makes Hereditary so successful—it’s frightening, and funny, and fuuuucked up, in ways that only humans can be to one another.

If you’ve gotten this far and have not yet seen Hereditary, kindly leave this post open in a tab and take yourself to the nearest movie theater. All of my favorite horror movies are the ones I’ve entered into knowing next to nothing about what is about to proceed. How different would my impression have been of Signs if I knew about Joaquin Phoenix yelling at the kids in the nightmarish alien sighting video? Saw already knowing that Cary Elwes would completely commit to sawing off his foot? The Babadook if I had already heard that distinctive baBAbaDOOK.DOOK.DOOK? As a kid I had The Sixth Sense spoiled for me, which made my first watch everyone else’s requisite second watch, brimming with dramatic irony and on the lookout for any and all foreshadowing. It was a fun viewing, but it wasn’t an experience. With this in mind, I must recommend that you go into Hereditary knowing as little as possible. You can watch the first trailer, which excellently sets up the atmosphere of the film without delving too deeply into the plot beyond a family, a death, and perhaps a curse or some other misfortune following in their wake. But if that’s enough to intrigue you, skip the “Charlie” trailer and go see the movie as soon as you can.

For everyone else… HOO BOY. Let’s open up this dollhouse of horrors.

Photo: A24

SPOILERS AHEAD for Hereditary

Obviously, supernatural forces are afoot in this movie, and it’s debatable just how long Annie’s mother Ellen has been playing this long game. Did it start when she pressured Annie to have a child (Peter) she didn’t even want? Or earlier, when Annie’s brother commits suicide after accusing his mother of “trying to put people inside him”(!!)? His death seems to trigger gibberish words writing themselves across the wallpaper like Dolores Umbridge punishments; alongside a pretty but sinister sigil showing up on Ellen and Annie’s matching necklaces, on the cover of one of Ellen’s books, and even on that damn telephone pole. Writer/director Ari Aster has described the film as “a story about a long-lived possession ritual told from the perspective of the sacrificial lamb.” He goes on to say that the Grahams are a modern Greek tragedy, that all of the action is inevitable and they have absolutely no agency in the narrative.

And yet, those actions, and especially how they respond to them, seem so brutal, so horribly random yet also so awfully specific. These lambs could have been sacrificed peacefully, but instead they destroy themselves long before the ritual is completed.

Photo: A24

We have to start, of course, with the accident, the turning point where you begin to realize that you have no idea what you’re in for with this movie. I spent the first half hour convinced that Annie’s daughter Charlie, with her mournful face and penchant for tongue-clicking, would be our odd little protagonist. Other reviews had her pegged as a demon child à la Damien from The Omen, but I never got that vibe. To be sure, she is way too creepy for her own good—I felt like Peter, frantically whispering to her, “Don’t be weird, don’t be weird” when she fiddles with handmade toys or cuts the head off the dead bird. (Though let’s not ignore the fact that both play into Charlie’s final state by the end of the film—the head, obviously, but also creating a new body!—so again, there’s a dark hand nudging things in the intended direction.)

Photo: A24

Charlie’s family has patterns in place to accommodate her oddness, but they also clearly don’t entirely know how to handle her. There are sympathetic stares slid over her oblivious head, attempts to engage that fall flat, feelings worked out (in Annie’s case) in miniature. As mother, as awkward caretaker grappling with the loss of her own mother, Annie tries to share stories with her children, only to be met with resistance (in Charlie’s case) or blankness (in Peter’s). The only way that she can fully get the story out, then, is by recreating these memories through creepily detailed dioramas while Charlie camps out in the treehouse, Peter smokes weed, and her husband Steve watches from the doorway of her workroom with a small smile or leaves encouraging Post-It notes.

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Because this is a family that doesn’t know how to talk to each other. It likely started with the sleepwalking/paint thinner incident (ohh Annie), the trauma of which made everyone retreat to their respective corners rather than address what the fuck that was. In some way, it indirectly leads to Charlie’s death; Annie mentions how it sort of short-circuited the way she and Peter talk to each other, where they snipe and sneer instead of speaking directly. So when Peter wants to go to a party being thrown by his high school friends, she challenges him in a roundabout way rather than directly confronting him; challenging him to bring Charlie to the party despite how inappropriate they both know that would be. It’s a weird game of chicken, but Charlie is the one who loses.

Photo: A24

Even though the movie goes on to become gory, the most disturbing moment for me is Peter’s reaction to the accident that results in Charlie’s death. The way he won’t let himself look in the backseat. The resolute shock as he drives home; the numb way he climbs into bed and the camera stays on his staring face through the long, sweat-soaked night. The fact that he can’t bring himself to tell his parents and instead just leaves her body for them to find. I wanted to be angry with Peter for setting Annie up for such an awful shock, but can I say that I would react any differently? His decision comes out of a place of shock and disbelief, but it’s the most authentic reaction. I can’t even imagine what it would have looked like for him to come through the door, wake his parents up, and tell them.

Interestingly, the movie also withholds any scene discussing Peter’s role in the accident. At first I wondered if somehow his parents didn’t connect the outcome to his actions, or if they knew about the pole but not the nuts in the cake. Their refusal to address the elephant in the room made me think that Peter was forgiven, even incrementally, for what happened. Instead, each member carries the full weight of despair and guilt and anger inside, letting the poisonous combination fester until Peter begins the old dance with Annie, the sneering and prodding that sparks an explosive confrontation. Of course this is how this family grieves. It’s not until the séance that they’re actually able to speak freely.

Photo: A24

At some points, Hereditary is funny as hell, which is startling every time. Like, how can we laugh at anything related to the horrors this family has endured? But when Annie drags Peter and Steve downstairs in the middle of the night, and she’s swinging between desperation and exasperation and saying “I’m a medium” with such conviction, it is absurd. Or even before that, when grief group buddy Joan sees Annie at the store and trills with such delight you’d think her prayers have been answered (which you find out later they very much have); when Annie is standing in Joan’s playing the seance skeptic and clearly thinking oh no, why did I follow the crazy lady to a second location. Hell, even the part where Annie makes a diorama of the accident and agonizes over the perfect detail on her daughter’s severed head—it is so horrifying yet unexpected that all of us in the audience were shocked into laughter because we didn’t know how else to react.

A lot of it is the sheer range of expression in Toni Collette’s face. (And Ann Dowd, doing equally delightful-slash-disturbing work on The Handmaid’s Tale as Aunt Lydia, here making so much of an innocuous gesture.) After Hereditary, I would follow Toni Collette into any horror story. Which is ironic, seeing as I didn’t even remember that she was the mom in The Sixth Sense. Though, rewatching the scene in which Haley Joel Osment proves his supernatural gift by passing along messages from his grandmother, you see Collette shift from exasperation to fear to reluctant belief.

Photo: A24

Poor Annie does not get the same catharsis: Her expressions are all different levels of horror, mouth wrenched open almost unnaturally wide, or anger, her mouth slack with disgust or lips pressed together in fury. By the time you get to her agonized wailing from the trailer, it’s like Annie doesn’t even know why she’s still screaming, just that she always has been and always will.

I will admit that the movie lost me a bit in the final sixth; basically when we get our first of two exposition dumps about King Paimon and the cult, led by Ellen, that sought to give him a body in exchange for boundless riches. To be fair, I usually bounce off horror movies whose villains are linked to demons and/or the occult; I much prefer serial killers or cultists tapping into their own inner darknesses. I don’t know Paimon from Lucifer, but I do want to know more about how Ellen discovered this bargain in the first place; if it meant earthly riches that were consolation for being estranged from her family, or if it were a matter of fortune in the afterlife. Despite Annie glimpsing her mother’s spirit, Ellen only really communicates to her through notes like the one in the book, that said something to the effect of Know that I sacrificed what I did for the reward. Having seen the movie only once (and a lot happens after that note), I can’t remember if she ever claims that this bargain is for the good of everyone. That’s the story I wanted to know more of: why Ellen entrusted Joan in her confidence as a surrogate daughter over Annie; if Ellen offered up her blood children and grandchildren as sacrificial lambs or thought that she was actually ensuring the greatest of all family legacies.

Photo: A24

But to reveal all that would have taken away from the horror of the final sequences: poor stalwart Steve going up in flames; a possessed Annie sawing off her own head; Peter jumping out the window to his death, only for his body to be reanimated by Charlie’s spirit. Or is that Paimon’s spirit, and Charlie was never really Charlie? Hereditary leaves its audience with so many more questions than at the beginning, but that’s the point: This story, about the family whose tragic flaw is an inability to communicate, gets people talking.

Natalie Zutter has trouble listening to Janelle Monáe’s “Make Me Feel” without thinking very differently about those clicks. Talk horror with her in the comments and/or on Twitter!

Destined from birth to serve as protector of the princess Zariya, Khai is trained in the arts of killing and stealth by a warrior sect in the deep desert; yet there is one profound truth that has been withheld from him…

Jacqueline Carey’s lush and sensual standalone fantasy Starless brings listeners to an epic world where exiled gods live among humans, and a hero whose journey will resonate long after the last chapter concludes. Listen to an excerpt from the audiobook below, read by Caitlin Davies.

In the court of the Sun-Blessed, Khai must learn to navigate deadly intrigue and his own conflicted identity… but in the far reaches of the western seas, the dark god Miasmus is rising, intent on nothing less than wholesale destruction. If Khai is to keep his soul’s twin Zariya alive, their only hope lies with an unlikely crew of prophecy-seekers on a journey that will take them farther beneath the starless skies than anyone can imagine.

Starless is available from Tor Books. You can find the audio edition from Macmillan Audio or get the print and ebook editions at the links below!

L.E. Modesitt, Jr., is one of science fiction and fantasy’s bestselling and most prolific authors. Since signing his first contract with Tor in 1983, he has written over 60 novels, moving between science fiction and fantasy, 18-book epics and standalones. The fantasy worlds he dreams up tackle issues of balance between order and chaos, harmony with nature, and the sociopolitical ramifications of magic-users on society and culture. What’s more, each series features a different, detailed magical system and painstakingly constructed millennia-long timeline of its history. Modesitt also likes to jump back and forth by generations or even centuries within his series, strengthening the fibers of those fictional histories with new stories.

His latest novel, Outcasts of Order, is the 20th book in the long-running Saga of Recluce series—if you’re itching to learn more about the world of Recluce, or Modesitt’s other fantasy universes, read on!

The Saga of Recluce

The Magic of Recluce | The Towers of the Sunset | The Magic Engineer | The Order War | The Death of Chaos | Fall of Angels | The Chaos Balance | The White Order | Colors of Chaos | Magi’i of Cyador | Scion of Cyador | Wellspring of Chaos | Ordermaster | Natural Ordermage | Mage-Guard of Hamor | Arms-Commander | Cyador’s Heirs | Heritage of Cyador | Recluce Tales | The Mongrel Mage | Outcasts of Order

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The most important thing you need to know about Recluce—both the saga and the island—is that there is a neverending battle between chaos and order. In their natural state (a.k.a. Balance), these qualities make up all matter; but as white wizards unleash the entropy of chaos and black mages harness the structure of order, these forces become imbalanced. Modesitt’s intention was to subvert fantasy tropes by having the “good guys” wear black, though, as he points out, there is a lot more gray area to it—and not just the “grays” who can manipulate both chaos and order. Even as the first book, The Magic of Recluce, establishes Recluce’s tenets of uniformity and repetition in order to keep chaos at bay, such monotony—even with the safety it provides—bores protagonist Lerris. His lack of engagement with order gets Lerris sent away from home on the dangergeld, or ritualistic journey to learn more about the world before deciding if he will follow Recluce’s rules. But ennui aside, what we’ve learned from all of the dystopian fiction that has been released in the 25 years since the first Recluce book is that order can be just as dangerous as chaos.

While Lerris’ dangergeld is the focus of the first book, he is by no means the series’ protagonist; in fact, each of the characters in the 18 books to date get only one or two novels. In a recent piece for Tor’s Fantasy Firsts series, Modesitt challenged the notion that The Saga of Recluce is a series, considering that they neither follow one protagonist nor take place in “a single place or time”—instead spanning 2,000 years, and the rise and fall of empires worldwide in 20 countries on five continents. And even then, he adds, “the Recluce books aren’t really a ‘saga,’ either, because sagas are supposed to be tales of heroism following one individual or family. And that’s why I tend to think of the Recluce books as the history of a fantasy world.”

The internal chronological order is also vastly different from the publication order—if you’re going by timeline, the series starts with 2001’s Magi’i of Cyador and concludes with 1995’s The Death of Chaos. Modesitt says it’s the reader’s choice to read the books in either order, or neither, the only caveat being that one should read the first book of a certain character before going on to the second.

Spellsong Cycle

The Soprano Sorceress | The Spellsong War | Darksong Rising | The Shadow Sorcereress | Shadowsinger

In Ames, Iowa, Anna Meadows is fairly ordinary: middle-aged wife and mother, small-time opera singer and professor of music. But in the mystical land of Erde, song is the key to mastering ancient sorcery. As volatile as any other magic, a wrong note could mean disaster; but no one in the kingdom of Defalk is as skilled as Anna, who can sing the perfect note under even the most dire conditions. Not only must Anna learn her way around this unfamiliar world to which she has been transported, but she must also learn this magic while contending with the patriarchal society that wants to wipe out this fledgling sorceress.

In a 2012 interview with Far Beyond Reality, Modesitt described what is unique about his work, pointing to the Spellsong Cycle for a particular example:

In a phrase—the unobviousness of the obvious. My work almost always points out or shows by example something that underlies society or culture or science—something basic that has seldom, if ever, been noticed for what it is—that is so obvious that, once it is pointed out, critics and others way, “Oh… that’s so obvious.” […] The Spellsong Cycle explores the issue of power by making vocal music the heart of magic—and shows why something that is universal [singing] and should theoretically be a widespread source of power cannot be, because true singing is not what people think it is (nor is it as easy as anyone thinks, except for trained singers).

Hailed as a feminist fantasy series, the Spellsong Cycle presents an independent heroine unwilling to give up her freedom for marriage, who rises through Erde’s patriarchal society as first a head of state and eventually the most powerful sorceress on the continent. Even as The Shadow Sorcereress trades Anna’s perspective for that of Secca, her adopted daughter, Anna’s influence is keenly felt: Secca inherits her mother’s position as Sorceress Protector of Defalk and must grapple with many of the same personal and ethical dilemmas that Anna did, from marriage to misogynist sorcerers.

The Corean Chronicles

Legacies | Darknesses | Scepters | Alector’s Choice | Cadmian’s Choice | Soarer’s Choice | The Lord-Protector’s Daughter | Lady-Protector

Like The Saga of Recluce, The Corean Chronicles depicts the ongoing conflict between two different cultures and the fallout it has on their world. But instead of chaos and order, both Alectors and (some) humans possess Talent, a magic derived from life force. However, the series shares with the Recluce books the themes of finding harmony with nature and balance between different groups. The first trilogy takes place millennia after a devastating magical event that ended a golden age of prosperity and progress in the world of Corus. Instead, humans fight among other countries as well as with the Alectors (their human-like caretakers) to eke out survival. The second trilogy jumps back in time to provide a new perspective on the Alectors and a greater context for Corus’ history and fate.

In a 2010 interview, Modesitt summed up the magic system of The Corean Chronicles:

That’s a take-off on what one might call Earth magic. Basically it’s the Aegean concept of the world has a planetary life force and those who have talent can draw on it. But life force varies, obviously by the amount of life in a given area, etc., etc., etc. And you can draw on it too much. And basically you’ve got two races on this planet, one of whom has this tendency to exhaust all the life force on a planet by building great things and imbuing them with life force and literally leaving planets dry and hopping to another planet. […] And then there are the locals who are stuck there and who may be left with a dead planet on which it’s rather difficult to survive. And you’ve basically got the conflict between two cultures, and the locals don’t even know that that conflict exists for the most part.

Corus was the first of Modesitt’s fantasy worlds to include supernatural creatures: the strange animals created by the world’s magic, as well as the fairy-like Ancients, or Soarers. Both are dependent on Corus’ life-force-generated magic for energy. Though they are small in number and appear infrequently, the Ancients—Corus’ original inhabitants—interject themselves into the Alectors and humans’ matters when it is necessary to their survival. One of the humans to which they appear is Alucius, the protagonist of the first trilogy: Taken off his family’s Nightsheep farm and conscripted into the Militia, he is sold into the slave army of the immortal Matrial, who seeks to conquer Corus. But even as he is magically bound to the army, Alucius possesses a secret he was warned never to reveal: a strong Talent, and a compelling reason to use it.

The Imager Portfolio

Imager | Imager’s Challenge | Imager’s Intrigue | Scholar | Princeps | Imager’s Battalion | Antiagon Fire | Rex Regis | Madness in Solidar | Treachery’s Tools | Assassin’s Price

With The Imager Portfolio, Modesitt went “looking for a different kind of magic”: Drawing upon his attempts to be an artist in his youth, he came up with the idea of visualization magic, in which imagers pluck visuals from their imaginations and make them real. Merchant-turned-journeyman artist Rhennthyl’s training is derailed when his master patron is killed and he discovers that his true talent is as an imager—in fact, he’s one of only a few in the world of Terahnar who possesses the power. However, this realization is bittersweet, as Rhenn is forced to leave his family behind for the solitude of imager training: He is both feared and vulnerable, as imagers can accidentally conjure objects from even their dreams, and because he has enemies he doesn’t even know about who would keep him from attaining full proficiency. Not to mention that half of all imagers die before they reach adulthood.

The Imager Portfolio examines what kind of society would be supported and constrained by such powerful magic-users (Modesitt described it as “literally emerging into what I would call early Industrialism from something like a Renaissance culture”). The series examines economics and politics, and the philosophy behind them, a recurring theme in Modesitt’s work; in a 2011 interview, he said, “The use of economic and/or sociopolitical themes in fantasy and science fiction, to me, is one of the best reasons for reading the genre.” While Modesitt has considered writing a follow-up to the first Imager trilogy—potentially focusing on Rhenn’s daughter—he explained that that would have to wait until after he wraps up his current writing projects.

This article was originally published in December 2016 and has been updated several times since.

Are cinematic universes inherently bad?

Star Wars was sold to Disney in 2012, and the result brought that galaxy far, far away into the 21st century—specifically, it guaranteed that Star Wars would expand beyond Episodes I-IX in the Skywalker Saga and continue on and on into the future. No longer a singular modern myth, we will now be watching Star Wars at the cinemas seemingly until the end of time.

Not everyone is into that idea. But Star Wars is actually better outfitted for this future than most.

In a recent article in The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman bemoaned the how empty the Star Wars universe was becoming, citing William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition with its coolhunter central character Cayce Pollard, and her physical aversion to disingenuous, diluted branding. The article goes on to cite how the latest Star Wars offering—Solo—was a perfect example of the very thing that makes Cayce physically ill to observe: A film that feels like Star Wars, but isn’t truly. “When the universalization of ‘Star Wars’ is complete,” Rothman says, “it will no longer be a story, but an aesthetic.”

And this is funny to me. Because Star Wars has always been at least 90% aesthetic.

LOOK IT STAR WAR

This is part of the reason why Rogue One was such an affecting film, even if its characters were too faintly drawn to make for deep cinema—director Gareth Edwards knew one thing better than most, that Star Wars is primarily a visual vernacular, perhaps even more than it is a story. You can look at Star Wars and know what it is without ever hearing a word spoken by a character. This is part of the reason why George Lucas’s scripts for the prequels were always so painful to hear out loud, and why those films fare better silently overall. Star Wars is a look, is a color palette, is a layer of dirt and grime. And if that’s not the entirety of it, that is certainly the core of it.

Now, to be fair, I also don’t think that Rothman (or the plethora of writers, fans, and enthusiasts who worry about the same issues where Star Wars is concerned) is wrong to be worried. He isn’t. Star Wars is in danger of becoming stale because the franchise is now owned by a big conglomerate corporation, and corporations don’t like risk or change or anything that will effect their ever-expanding profits. The truth of our near-cyberpunk future is that some stories are brands now. And brands shouldn’t be stories, even if there are weird examples where that has worked out in a company’s favor. Star Wars should not endeavor to be He-Man, or G.I. Joe, or My Little Pony, even if the majority of its money also comes from making toys that kids and adults want to play with, because it didn’t start as a toy. It started as an epic myth.

But there is a way to save Star Wars. And that way is down to something that its oft-maligned creator, George Lucas, frankly excelled at: kitbashing reality.

This blue elephant is playing a space organ in the criminal den of a giant slug

I have called Star Wars a behemoth of super-culture before, and it still applies. George Lucas didn’t create his funky little space myth from a few beloved tales and knick-knacks. Star Wars is a kitchen-sink, multi-media, ever-evolving sticky vortex of global elements. It’s far-reaching and always renewing when it’s done right. Star Wars should never empty out because you should always be topping it up with new ideas and new references and new culture. Star Wars isn’t really a single myth: It’s a scramble of art and existence and story.

That scramble doesn’t always work, and it can be horrifically damaging when done poorly, as is born out in several racist caricatures in the first Star Wars prequel alone: the faux-Caribbean shtick of Jar Jar Binks, the anti-Semitism of Watto, and the thinly-veiled Japanese corporatism of the Trade Federation in The Phantom Menace all serve as proof enough that these converging sensibilities can make for some very ugly storytelling choices without care and attention paid. But when it works? It makes Star Wars very different from all the other sprawling fictional universes that we have to choose from. Unlike Marvel and DC, who are determined to shove very specific character arcs from 75-plus-years worth of comic book history on screen, Star Wars doesn’t have to keep dipping into the same well, or even keep working from the history it has built. It can dig a brand new well. It can forego any references or familiarity because the galaxy is a gigantic place.

While the films may always be in danger of diluting Star Wars with style-over-substance in an effort to capture the largest audience possible, other areas of the universe have had no issue cultivating the ever-growing referential encyclopedia that makes the franchise enjoyable. The cartoons Clone Wars and Rebels, and the novels being produced by an endless array of delightful authors have never stopped doing what Star Wars does best—adding to the scramble. The references and influences continue to stack in these bright corners, a place where nothing seems off-limits. The Nightsisters are like the Bene Gesserit of Dune; queer characters exist and fall in love and get married; there is a Hutt crime lord who sounds like Truman Capote; the Toydarians (Watto’s people) are treated with respect; we find thriving guerrilla art touting the Rebellion’s cause; Alderaanians speak Spanglish—and all of this fits perfectly.

Because it’s Star Wars. Everything belongs in Star Wars.

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If the films want to avoid irrelevance, especially when held up to the rest of the ever-expanding Star Wars universe, they need to embrace that philosophy. Rian Johnson did this in The Last Jedi: Luke’s strange hermitage on Ahch-To and the pockets of culture we observe all over Canto Bight are a part of that scramble. The layers make the universe come alive in ways that it can’t if it gets bogged down in old-school sensibilities and old-school rules. Occasionally the other cinematic universes out there understand this and create their own scrambles—Thor: Ragnarok is a beautiful mash of Jack Kirby’s visuals, 80s film aesthetics, and director Taika Waititi’s heritage and sense of humor. Black Panther, of course, is another stunning example of using the previously tried and true formulas, and merging them with different histories, different aesthetics, different artistic frameworks to create something completely new.

Sy Snoodles is holding up her boyfriend at the gravesight of his dad because why are you even asking that question, this is totally normal

And if it sounds like I’m advocating for diversifying the voices that create Star Wars stories by bringing that up, that’s because I absolutely am. What the Star Wars universe has achieved well in recent memory it has done by centering voices that understand the funkiness of the original narrative (in film and TV directors Rian Johnson and Dave Filoni) and new perspectives that bring exciting material we haven’t seen before (in novels from Daniel José Older, Claudia Gray, Chuck Wendig, and Delilah S. Dawson). If Star Wars is to maintain its scramble, it needs to nurture those voices and keep giving them the flexibility to futz with the dials, the tones and colors and sound balance that make up the series.

Solo has moments of this kind of inspiration: the plight of Elthree, the grotesqueness of Lady Proxima, the audacity of Lando’s gorgeous wardrobe. When it clings to those moments, the movie is delightful, but too much of the story veers from what’s unique in order to bring us the beats that will keep everyone comfortable. The Kessel Run is boring (and basically borrows a bad deus ex machina from 2009’s Star Trek in order to work), Tobias Beckett is an everyday rogue as stock as they come, Qi’ra and Han’s relationship has nothing to glue it together aside from a shared history that we don’t really witness. But the Star Wars cinematic universe is perfectly poised to avoid these pitfalls, so long as it trusts in what it already did well.

Mass appeal is a subsection of death, and we all know it. The best pieces of Star Wars have always been the strange bits; the often-imitated cantina scene, blue and green milk, two-headed aliens, spaceships that looks like criss-crosses and doughnuts. One of the greatest pieces of Star Wars fiction is a set of Clone Wars episodes that focus on Hutt politics! Let Star Wars be what it is. The mythological arcs may be comfortable, but we’re outside the core mythos once Episode IX is done. Go nuts.

When you trust the scramble, you don’t have to worry about Star Wars being empty. And then you can enjoy your cinematic universes well into the future. The only real question is whether or not one of the biggest companies in the world is willing to let Star Wars be what it is in the years to come.

Emily Asher-Perrin demands more Hutt politics. You can bug her on Twitter and Tumblr, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.

In this foray into the past, I cover women fantasy and science fiction authors who debuted between 1970 and 1979. In stark contrast to the previous instalment, this essay covers a sparsely populated range of the alphabet. Accordingly, it will include authors whose surnames begin with N, those whose surname begins with O, and those who begin with P. Even so, it’s not as long as the M entry.

Previous instalments in this series cover women writers with last names beginning with A through F, those beginning with G, those beginning with H, those beginning with I & J, those beginning with K,  those beginning with L, and those beginning with M.

Mary C. Pangborn

Mary C. Pangborn’s published works were all short pieces published in respected venues like Terry Carr’s Universe anthologies, Silverberg and Randall’s New Dimensions series, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Lamentably, her body of work was both small and is very much out of print (and too recent for Project Gutenberg to be of any help.). My tendency is to recommend an author’s novel(s) if possible, but the sole Mary C. Pangborn novel of which I am aware, Friar Bacon’s Head, has never been published. Pangborn died in 2003; one hopes that despite recent distractions executor Peter Beagle finds time to see her novel through to publication.

Anne Spencer Parry

Author photo courtesy of Pinchgut Press

Australian author Anne Spencer Parry died in her mid-fifties some thirty-three years ago, which no doubt contributes to her comparative obscurity. She wrote juvenile fiction, of which perhaps the best example is 1975’s The Land Behind the World, in which an idealistic young girl finds a world she can truly belong to on the far side of a magical portal. Unlike a lot of the books mentioned in passing in this series, The Land Behind the World is back in print.

Katherine Paterson

Author photo courtesy of Dial Books

Katherine Paterson’s list of awards includes the Newbery, the National Book Award, the Hans Christian Andersen Award, and the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, among others. Her well-known novel Bridge to Terabithia, which helped inspire the Death by Newbery trope, is if not genre, then at least genre-adjacent. Bridge is strongly recommended to parents of children unduly burdened with excessive levels of joie de vivre.

Barbara Paul

Barbara Paul is a prolific mystery author, but before she wrote mysteries, she wrote science fiction (a common pattern; authors who notice how much larger the mystery genre/market is when compared to SF often migrate over.).

One of the great pleasures of doing this series is rediscovering someone I read almost half a century only a short time ago and somehow inexplicably forgot. As soon as I saw the covers of Pillars of Salt, An Exercise for Madmen, and Under the Canopy, I had the most delicious memory of having read them. Alas, not to the point that I remember what any of them were about, aside from the anthropologically-focused Under the Canopy. Well, print runs were huge back then—I bet I can find and review at least one of her SF novels.

Ian Sales is more diligent than I. His review of Paul’s interstellar diplomacy adventure Bibblings can be found here.

Susan C. Petrey

Susan C. Petrey might have been one of science fiction’s grand old figures if only she had not died at age 35 back in 1980. Her focus on short fiction, in particular a series of stories featuring the somewhat vampire protagonist Spareen, means there are no novels I can recommend. Happily, there is a collection, 1990’s Gifts of Blood. Less happily, it appears to have been out of print since Brian Mulroney was Prime Minister.

Rachel Pollack

Rachel Pollack is both prolific and justifiably well regarded: she has won the Clarke and the World Fantasy Award, and has been nominated for the Tiptree, the Lambda, and the Nebula. Often one is at a loss to recommend authors in this series because their body of work is so small. Pollack presents exactly the opposite problem. Does one focus on her comics work, like her run of Doom Patrol and the Brother Power the Geek one-shot (which, unlike the two-issue Joe Simon original, is actually readable)? Perhaps the best place to start is her Clarke-winning novel Unquenchable Fire, set in a world transformed by a global spiritual revolution, whose reluctant protagonist is drafted to play a role in which she has very little interest.

Susan Price

Susan Price is also prolific, with works in genres as diverse as historicals to science fiction, from fantasy to alternate history. Genre fans may find her 1987 The Ghost Drum of particular interest. Drawing on Russian sources, it tells the tale of a brave young witch determined to use her mastery of magic to rescue a young prince from the tower in which he has been imprisoned by his father, the Czar.

 * * *

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The upside of having such a short list of authors is that my List of Shame, those authors of whom I know little, is proportionately short. Still, if any of you have read and can recommend books by the following authors, please do:

• Winona Morris Nation
• Pamela Oldfield
• It is not that I have not heard of prolific author Francine Pascal but having not read her books, I don’t know which are of genre interest.
• Diana L. Paxson is another prolific fantasy author, but I leave it to others to decide which, if any, of her books to recommend.
• Daniela Piegai

In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviewsand Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is surprisingly flammable.

I don’t know if Disney•Pixar’s Incredibles 2 is the best superhero movie this year (I mean, Black Panther) but it is the first time this year that as I walked through the theater to leave, I seriously considered ducking into the 10pm showing and watching it all over again immediately. It also has the greatest action I’ve ever seen in a super hero movie—the only thing that even comes close is the opening of X2, with Nightcrawler bamfing through the White House. The action sequences are breathtaking in the sense that I literally held my breath during a couple of them. And again, as a hardbitten, cynical movie critic I tend to spend my movie time watching myself watch the movie, gauging audience reactions, analyzing themes. Here I was just…happy.

And yet! There were also enough messy, contradictory ideas built into the film that I was able to think about it, too.

Before we go below the cut: The first few paragraphs of this review are non-spoiler, but I do go into a bit more depth later on. I’ll warn you before we get into spoiler territory. Also, and more important: there are flashing lights and hypnotic screens in the film that might be triggering if you have epilepsy, so please be cautious if you need to.
So to begin with the basics! Incredibles 2 is preceded by “Bao,” an adorable short that plays on the same family reconciliation themes that infuse the adventures of the Parrs. This might be one of the weirdest Pixar shorts, and it’s also their best ode to food since Ratatouille.

The plot of Incredibles 2 is something of a retread of the last film: superhero-ing is still considered an illegal activity, so much of the action has to be illicit. There are a few groups that want to make supers socially acceptable again, and they bet on Helen Parr’s competence as Elastigirl to convince people that the government is mistaken. The main plot arc features one super-true-believer trying to create a grassroots movement to change the anti-super laws, and their confidence in Elastigirl is more than rewarded, as she proves to be a genuinely great hero, acting out of a genuine concern for people, and the belief that it’s her responsibility to make the world a better place. This is far more than just Mr. Incredible’s mid-life crisis from the first movie. My one quibble with The Incredibles was that because it was satirizing ’50s culture and sitcom tropes, it occasionally played up rigid gender norms—like when a superheroine uses her super strength to punch a civilian she thinks is the Other Woman. Here though, Helen gets most of those truly great action set pieces. We get to see that she’s resourceful, quick-thinking, absolutely determined. It’s a fun irony that someone whose power is stretching is absolutely inflexible when it comes to her moral core. She also works with multiple other women, providing not just support to her own super-daughter, but being revealed as an inspiration to women in many fields, and becoming a mentor to a younger female hero.

Meanwhile Mr. Incredible’s weaknesses are fully exploited. The caper in this film isn’t going to be solved by a bunch of punching, it needs Helen’s finesse and subtlety. Instead he has to live up to the awesome line from the last film, and embrace the fact that his family is his greatest adventure. Learning how to be there for Dash and apologize to Violet might not seem like flashy hero stuff, but it’s actually more important for his kids to know their dad will be there for them. The film does an excellent job of balancing more sitcom humor with the real exhaustion and elation that comes with caring for children full time. And finally, in another excellent continuation of the last film, Frozone gets to be much more than the BFF/sidekick he was last time. Here he’s a leading member of a new super team, he has his own fans clamoring for his autograph, he gets one of the best hero moments, and he also gets some of the funniest lines in the film—one of which can be read as a riff on Infinity War.

When the film begins the kids are three months into being told that they can be heroes, so they’re still pretty shaky. Violet gets to show a bit more initiative, and Dash still mostly just runs fast, but he also gets some good comic bits. The two best parts of the movie, predictably, are Jack-Jack and Edna Mode. Jack-Jack is used beautifully, each newly revealed power more terrifying and fun than the last. This is also truly an innovation on the last film. If The Incredibles was about superheroes in the suburbs, I2 builds on that to show us how difficult it is to parent a super-child who not only can’t control his abilities, but has no interest in doing so. When he gets mad, he bursts into flame. When he gets scared, he goes into another dimension. The logic is inarguable, and you can’t exactly make him stop. So how do you parent that? How do you work with his abilities rather than against them?

And then there’s Edna. I don’t want to say too much, because if you haven’t seen it yet I would never spoil it for you, darling. She was perfect in the last movie, and she’s even better here. My only problem is that she isn’t in the movie enough, but she’s like caviar–you really should only have a little. I should also mention that at the screening I saw, people not only applauded as the film began (which I don’t think I’ve ever seen in New York?) but there was an explosion of applause and whistling for Edna. As there should be.

OK. We’ve covered the bases, but now I want to dig into what the film is about, and to do that I gotta talk about villains, and to that I gotta spoil everything. So duck on out of here if you haven’t seen the film.

I know some people think The Incredibles is an ode to Objectivism. (True genius is punished by mediocrity, participation trophies are mocked, and while in hiding, the family is even saddled with the name Parr—i.e. at par, average, mediocre, etc.) Much like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and A Wrinkle in Time could be read as either anti-communist, or anti-anti-communist hysteria, I tend to read it as pro-creativity and anti-conformity. What I also saw in The Incredibles, which was shockingly prescient for 2004, was a critique of the laserlike nerd rage that is currently slicing through fandoms large and small. Mr. Incredible didn’t do exactly what super fan Buddy wanted, so Buddy poured a ton of money and energy into becoming Syndrome, a hateful whiny manbaby, and made it his mission to ruin supers for everybody…you know, instead of just accepting Mr. Incredible’s “No,” making his own path, and becoming a science hero, as he clearly had the skill to do. He was also willing to murder a woman and pair of children (whom, as far as he knew, were all ordinary civilians) and fridge his own girlfriend to turn Mr. Incredible into a gritty reboot of himself. I have no doubt that a few years later he would have simply doxxed and SWATted all the supers instead of luring them to Nomanisan Island. (Which, um, by the way? There’s another strike against Objectivism.)

I think Incredibles 2 continues both of these themes. There is plenty of stuff about how the government just doesn’t work in general, and doesn’t understand heroism specifically, which leads to the idea that the common man has to be sold superheroes, and given a palatable image of friendly neighborhood demigods, which leads us into the film’s true theme.

When The Incredibles premiered in 2004, it launched itself into a world where James Gunn’s first dark superhero deconstruction, The Specials, had come out to very little attention in 2000, and M. Night Shyamalan’s superhero deconstruction, Unbreakable, came out to too much attention, only becoming a cult film later. Bryan Singer had directed two X-Men movies, and Brett Ratner hadn’t yet kicked the franchise in the stomach. Sam Raimi had directed the first two Spider-Man films—Spiderman 2 had only come out a few months earlier, and Emo Peter Parker had not yet kicked the franchise in the stomach. From Hell, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Hellboy, and the Blade films were all marketed more as gothy horror-adjacent movies rather than “superhero” movies. Ang Lee’s take on The Hulk was… not embraced. But it got off easy compared to Ben Affleck’s attempt at Daredevil.

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And that was pretty much it?

Constantine hit theaters the following year, with comics fans rejecting the film for casting Keanu Reeves, and the rest of America just being confused because Urban Fantasy wasn’t really a thing yet. Four months later, Batman Begins launched Christopher Nolan’s gritty reboot of Batman. And it was only a month after that that Fantastic Four came out—The Incredibles, with their Fantastic Four-esque powers, were released into a world where only the crappy Roger Corman quartet had hit screens. And people had never met either the Chris Evans’ Johnny Storm nor the Michael B. Jordan Johnny Storm. Iron Man was still four years away from saving Robert Downey Jr.’s career. Samuel L. Jackson was still four years away from walking into Tony Stark’s living room and announcing the Avengers Initiative. The MCU didn’t exist yet, and the concept of watching (at least) two superhero movies a year was unimaginable. And speaking of Mr. Jackson…

Nick Fury? Falcon? War Machine? Black Panther? Shuri? Nakia? General Okoye?

Nope. If you wanted a Black superhero—but you didn’t want a Goth Dampiel—you had Frozone.

I still remember explaining to friends of mine that, no, The Incredibles’ deconstruction of the superhero mythos, while awesome, wasn’t that revolutionary—a book called Watchmen did it in 1986. Our innocent eyes were still five years out from witnessing Zack Snyder’s violent Randian blimp sex.

No Heath Ledger Joker, no X-Men retcon, no Logan, no Deadpool, no Super, no Kick Ass, no Henry Cavill CGI upper lip, no Batffleck, no Wonder Woman, no Netflix/Marvel hybrid shows, no Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., no Agent Carter, no Runaways, no Cloak & Dagger, no whomever I’m missing here. (I know I’m missing people/shows here.) No ongoing battle between Marvel and Star Wars for box office supremacy—which has since been rendered moot by Disney buying both of them.

Now just look through that list of stuff that didn’t exist yet. Comics fans knew a lot of these characters, but they weren’t yet the mainstream cultural juggernaut that they’ve become. So I think it’s extremely interesting that this film bundles two ideas together to create a villain: the charge that we’ve all become too dependent on screens and passive forms of entertainment, and that we’ve entrusted our safety to superheroes. (Which, I have to say, I admire the eggs on Brad Bird to blast superhero films in the middle of his own superhero film.) The real conflict in this film is between Win Deavor and his sister Evelyn.

Win, who’s expanded the family holdings through his tech company, wants to fund the campaign to bring superheroes back, thus outsourcing human safety. His sister, the company designer, seems to want to promote Elastigirl as a form of feminist solidarity. As we learn early on, she’s actually using an evil persona called “Screenslaver” to scare people away from both their dependence on screens and passive entertainment, and heroes. And, as in Black Panther, the villain here is not exactly, um, wrong? But like Killmonger, Evelyn Deavor is only too willing to allow innocents to take the fall for her revolution. While Win’s shiny happy reliance on heroes isn’t healthy, her utter callousness toward the people she’s claiming to want to “help” shows us that she doesn’t really have the moral core to create a better future. And while tying these two ideas together may seem like a stretch worthy of Elastigirl herself, the more I’ve thought about it, the more it worked for me.

Obviously on the surface, the whole “let’s not depend on superheroes” thing only seems to work in the high tech alt-’60s wonderland of The Incredibles, or as a commentary on the DCU and MCU. But once we dig even slightly into our own world, we can see that we have largely outsourced our morality and eloquence and sense of outrage at injustice—we express our horror at atrocity via memes, jokes, mis-attributed quotes passed along from email forwards to Facebook shares. We’ve outsourced our research to Snopes. We like and retweet other people’s reports on injustice as though we’re actually doing something.

We rely on the vague hope that eventually the information will get passed along to the right hero or conscientious government official, or, I don’t know, Buddha, and that that person will act on the tip. And please understand that when I say “we” I’m goddamn including “me” in that—I’ve done more than my share of sharing.

What the Incredibles pointed out, both in their first screen outing and their latest one, is that we can’t rely on that. If Win and Evelyn’s parents had taken care of themselves and dashed for the saferoom, they would have lived. If Helen hadn’t taken it upon herself to go rescue her husband, Syndrome probably would have killed him. (I know, her initial call is what got him caught in the lair, but I don’t think he was making it off that island regardless.) If the kids hadn’t taken the initiative to step up and rescue their parents, everyone on the boat, plus all of the New Urbem citizens in the vicinity of the harbor, would have died in the boat crash.

And I know I’m maybe muddling the message here by taking moral advice from a cartoon, but I think this is the biggest argument against Randian thinking here: it’s on us to be the heroes. It’s on us to recognize when the government is enacting unfair laws, and to work to change those laws—maybe not through creating portals through spacetime or running at lightspeed, but Win Deavor’s path of grassroots organizing and education seemed to work pretty well. By the end of the film people have been poked enough to realize that they are allowing themselves to be too passive, and they’ve recognized that they’ve been unfair to the supers. A whole new team of powered people have come out of hiding, and will hopefully be able to live better, more fulfilling lives in a society that values their gifts. The Incredibles have once again bonded through hero-ing as a family. Brad Bird has expanded his original story into a universe that could tell a lot more stories, and inspire a lot more heroism.

Leah Schnelbach thinks we can all be heroes, even i just for today. Come monologue with her on Twitter!

My first children’s novel, Candy, is out now from Scholastic UK, and forthcoming soon in several European countries. This is as surprising to me as it must be for anyone who realises my last book in the UK was about Adolf Hitler, but there you go! Candy is about a 12 year old girl detective, Nelle Faulkner, in a world where chocolate has been made illegal and children now run the candy gangs…

Which got me thinking of some of the classic heroines in children’s books that continue to have such a resonance to this day, and who must have been in the back of my mind as I was writing! No doubt I’ve missed many—Meg from A Wrinkle in Time? George from the Famous Five? Anna from Mister God, This is Anna? Dorothy? Hermione? You tell me!—but these five in particular stood out for me as I was writing.

Momo, from Momo by Michael Ende

Last year I went to Bavaria, and I got to visit Ende’s home town. There’s not much there now—a small plaque on a building marks where he was born—but there is a lovely little public park filled with his creations, including the very amphitheatre from Momo, and the giant turtle, Cassiopeia.

Most English-language readers probably know Ende from The Neverending Story, but his books, which are rich, surrealist fantasies, are much more than that. Of all of them it is Momo I keep going back to, about the little girl who has to fight the Men in Grey who steal people’s time…

Like the very best children’s novels, Momo packs philosophical and moral questions into a fantastical framework of danger and excitement. And as the adult world is slowly corrupted by the Men in Grey, it is Momo alone who stands for what’s right, a moral compass in an unjust world. I think I definitely drew on that idea for Nelle, and that same sense of the adult world as a place of moral compromise for Candy. Like Momo, Nelle in is determined to do the right thing, whatever the cost.

Ende himself, of course, knew better than most how fragile childhoods are. Growing up as the Nazis rose to power, he joined the resistance movement as a teenager, fighting the SS. His subsequent books, I think are, even at their lightest, informed by the knowledge that the “Nothing” (as the plague threatening the land of Fantastica in The Neverending Story is called) is never far away, and that it takes courage and imagination to fight it.

Pippi Longstocking, from Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren

A beloved childhood classic, Pippi lives alone in a big old house, eats messy spaghetti whenever she wants, has a pet monkey, superhuman strength, and treasure from her father, a sea captain lost at sea. Together with Lindgren’s Master Detective Kalle Blomkvist, the two have definitely shaped my ideas on how stories work, and combining them seemed like a perfect opportunity.

Scout, from To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Scout, as everyone probably knows, is Harper Lee, and Dill is Truman Capote. What inspired me here was not just the book, which I love, but the actual life of (Nelle) Harper Lee. Nelle in Candy is named after her, of course. I first came across the idea of Lee as a detective of sort in the films Infamous and Capote, which weirdly came out around the same time, and both concern the writing of Capote’s In Cold Blood. Lee, his childhood friend (and before publication of her seminal novel), joined him on his investigation into the murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. Lee is wonderfully played in the two movies by Sandra Bullock and Catherine Keener, respectively. So “my” Nelle is very much intended as a homage for the young Scout/Harper Lee herself.

It’s probably worth saying Mockingbird is, of course, very much not a fantasy novel, though I don’t know! Boo Radley’s as gothic a character as anything out of Shirley Jackson, and—hold on, can we make this list six characters? Because Merricat, in Jackson’s incredible We Have Always Lived in the Castle is just such a wonderful—if wonderfully disturbing!—character in her own right…

(Incidentally, it once occurred to me to wonder what would have happened had Capote and Lee took a wrong turn and ended up investigating a murder in Innsmouth instead of Holcomb. It’s in a story called—you guessed it—“Cold Blood,” in an anthology called Innsmouth Nightmares… But I digress! Needless to say, though, the manuscript of To Kill a Mockingbird Lee is writing turns out quite a bit different than in our own reality.)

Little My, from the Moomin books by Tove Jansson

I love all the Moomin books, but I have a special love for Moominland Midwinter, the one where Moomintroll wakes up from hibernation in the middle of winter and finds the whole world transformed. The Moomin books can get quite dark, and this one does read a little on the noir side, perhaps, with the appearance of the Groke, the endless night, and the mystery of the Dweller Under the Sink… So this one definitely fed into Candy, too, I think.

My favourite of the Moomin characters is Little My, the irrepressible, fearless—and nosy!—Mymble, who of course stays awake for the long winter. I’d like to think there’s a little of My in Nelle, though Nelle is more serious—and far less mischievous.

Veruca Salt, from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

As much as I’d like to talk about the book, I can’t help but think Veruca will always be defined by her portrayal—by Julie Dawn Cole—in the classic 1971 movie Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. I actually read Cole’s memoir—I Want It Now!—a few years ago (it’s a lovely memoir), and I adore Veruca’s single-minded determination to, well, have it all and have it now. For some reason she’s supposed to be a terrible person! But I’d like to argue for a rethink of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory where Veruca is the real hero, for being ambitious and going for what she wants. Charlie, let’s be honest, is a bit of a wet blanket… So I’m Team Veruca Salt all the way. Nelle in Candy isn’t really like her at all, but I think maybe she’d secretly like to. Go Veruca!

Lavie Tidhar is the author of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize winning and Premio Roma nominee A Man Lies Dreaming (2014), the World Fantasy Award winning Osama (2011) and of the Campbell Award winning and Locus and Clarke Award nominated Central Station (2016). His latest novels are the forthcoming Unholy Land (2018) and first children’s novel Candy (2018). He is the author of many other novels, novellas and short stories.

Welp. Nothing gold can stay.

That goes double for Westworld, which followed up last week’s excellence with another slog through Manly Man-Pains and clunky exposition. And maybe some needlessly cruel fridging of an awesome female character.

Bummer.

I get that the Man in Black is definitely an alpha male kinda badass, especially as he is living out his Clint Eastwood-style killer fantasies. And he’s played by Ed freaking Harris. But he’s sooooo damn serious that it’s just a bit… much. We get it dude, you’re D-A-R-K. Like, your soul is blacker than Dale Cooper’s coffee. Colder than a well-digger’s ass.

Yet, I don’t get why his long-suffering wife, Juliet—who seems to know nothing of the hosts’ sentience—doesn’t see him as anything more harmless than a Grand Theft Auto addict. She catches his Twitch stream highlights reel and flips her shit so bad that she ends her life, and it’s just not quite believable. He’s not a badass cowboy; he’s an emotionally stunted gamer. I mean, obviously, addiction of any kind isn’t good for marriage, but Westworld places so much emphasis on the Man in Black being DARK, man. SO DARK. DARK MONOLOGUES GALORE. It’s not that he games to the literal rejection of reality, it’s that he plays a bad dude that seems to be the issue.

It’s just a bit old, at this point. And now that he very foolishly got so lost in his playtime and forgot what was real, he’s murdered his own daughter. Fuck. Now, that is dark, but it also sucks. Emily was an awesome character, or could have been—we barely got to know her. And now she’s just gone?! What a huge waste! And all we have to look forward to from it is the Man in Black being even more broody and DARK?! Not a fair trade by a long shot, show. She could’ve been an interesting ally to the hosts! And a great foil to her father.

What I thought was handled well was the terrible aftermath of a suicide on a family. It’s a sensitive subject and particularly uncomfortable to think about last weekend, when I first watched this episode, the day after Anthony Bourdain’s death. The blame game, the guilt, the anger, the distance—that felt real. I wanted William and Emily, who was kind of positive about wanting to work through her shit with her dad, to have that journey together.

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But, nope. Stupid me.

Maybe I’m not the right person to be writing these reviews, since I so sincerely dislike what Dolores has become. I’m just not that into her Wyatt side. I miss the woman who was coming into her own independence. Now she’s just a slave to the story gods. So, the humans’ backup data is in the Valley Beyond and Dolores wants to use it as a weapon against her human masters; meanwhile Akecheta and the Ghost Nation—and Maeve, presumably—want to use this data as a tool to open a door to a new world. I’m… not really clear on the implications of either. Last week’s gorgeous character piece was so strong because it didn’t go into the details of the larger seasonal structure, but we’re one episode away from the finale and I feel like I don’t know what these folks are fighting for or against anymore.

Ford talking about humanity’s “own broken code” was so Nine Inch Nails. While he tries to save his “children,” the Man in Black and Delos have been fighting to preserve their human immortality project. Only…it doesn’t seem like the Man in Black cared that much about it until right now before the season ender. My guess? He will go to the Valley Beyond to get the backup data for Emily, to bring her back. Now he’s got a horse in the race.

Can Dolores really even feel remorse for Teddy? Is she too far gone? How will he get to the Valley Beyond now, where we saw him floating in that sea of other “dead” hosts?

Did you really feel like this was the penultimate episode?

Final reveries:

• Ford really is everywhere these days. Good on Anthony Hopkins. So, Maeve is his favorite host, eh? He kept quite a distance from her physically last season, but when you’re the ghost in the machine, you can be everywhere. I’m sure looking forward to Maeve getting up off that damn slab!
• Elsie must be the luckiest person in the park, to keep having so many near-misses with a homicidal Bernard. And her hair still looks fresh.
• Oh, my darling Clementine, you are truly lost and gone forever. Her mesh network “upgrade” worked way too well, but raises the question—why is Maeve dispensable to Delos now? The park is neither densely populated or small, so wouldn’t they want numerous hosts “infecting” the others across a wider field?
• HBO placed an embargo on spoiling the casting of older Juliet, played by a woman I thought was Mariska Hargitay the whole time, but was actually Sela Ward. So, uh, no worries there, HBO!
• Next week: “The Passenger.” Who will be shown the door in the season finale?

Westworld airs Sunday nights at 9PM E/PT on HBO.

Theresa DeLucci is a regular contributor to Tor.com covering TV, book reviews and sometimes games. She’s also gotten enthusiastic about television for Boing Boing, Wired.com’s Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast and Den of Geek. Reach her via pony express or on Twitter.

Sometimes a narrative begins in a familiar place: with someone embarking on a journey, for instance. Nikhil Singh’s novel Taty Went West is like that—the first sentence of the second chapter seems to usher the reader into familiar territory. “The piggy bank bought her a bus ticket to nowhere fast,” Singh writes, tapping into a longstanding tradition of young people venturing out into parts unknown. (As if to make this more explicit, Singh includes a nod to the Beat Generation later in the novel.) Taty is a young woman frustrated by suburban life, tuned in to her favorite songs on her Walkman. She’s in search of something bigger, a larger and more compelling world. This is a familiar story, right?

It’s not a familiar story. That bus ticket’s bought in the second chapter. The one before that sets up an altogether stranger milieu, and one that hints at the bizarre scenarios to come.

“There had always been stories of lost cities in the jungle. Descriptions of vast structures hidden behind impenetrable veils of steaming foliage, their once-great plazas and floating pyramids now the haunt of monkeys, shades, and folkloric spiders.”

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What happens when you take someone familiar and place them in an utterly alien setting? Taty Went West is, in its own way, a series of variations on that theme of contrasts: the known world meeting the impossible world; the transcendental colliding with the sordid; the speculative meeting the delirious. In Taty Went West, a robot can evoke the divine, and a monstrous presence can be the agent of liberation. This is a novel that abounds with contradictions, taking them to absurd ends.

Although the milieu of Singh’s novel could roughly be described as psychedelic science fiction (complete with nods in the direction of William Burroughs and the Grateful Dead), that doesn’t quite get at its fundamental strangeness. Much of the novel finds Taty attempting to deal with some sort of perilous situation, at times facing horrific danger, and grappling with betrayals, violence, and horror around her. After leaving home, she is kidnapped by a mysterious group led by Alphonse Guava, “the imp pimp,” who tells her that she has considerable psychic abilities, able to transmit certain feelings, emotions, and sensations to the people around her.

What transpires from there, more or less, is Taty’s quest for her own freedom. Complicating matters is the presence of bizarre alien symbiotes, whose presence slowly transforms their hosts into something inhuman, a process that can only be staved off by the consumption of an absurdly large number of carrots. If this seems like Cronenbergian body horror by way of Eugene Ionesco, you’re not wrong. It’s par for the course here: that adorable creature you encounter on a given page might be what it seems to be; it also might be something immensely powerful and twice as malicious. That’s the kind of book this is.

The contrasts continue. Most of the characters have names that come off as overly stylized, the stuff of fables or children’s stories: Dr. Dali, Number Nun, Miss Muppet, and Bronski Glass all come to mind. But this is also a novel in which the threat of violence (particularly sexual violence) is present for many of the characters. (In a 2016 conversation with Geoff Ryman, Singh discussed this aspect of the novel.) The cumulative result is jarring—cartoonish one moment, harrowingly visceral the next. But that juxtaposition has been in place from the outset: this may be a novel with ancient cities, mysterious beings, and adventure—but escapism it is not.

Outside of writing, Singh’s body of work includes forays into film, music, and illustration—specifically, a comics adaptation of a novel by the similarly hard-to-define Kojo Laing. That same multifaceted approach can be seen in a distilled form within this novel, both literally (through both illustrations and cues for music in the prose) and metaphorically. Singh has endeavored to combine theoretically incompatible strands of literature: the picaresque blended with New Wave science fiction blended with absurdist comedy blended with realistic looks at trauma and its aftereffects. Does it all neatly flow together? No, but the risks that Singh takes here succeed more often than not, and the result is a deeply singular and highly compelling literary debut.

Taty Went West is available from Rosarium Publishing.

Tobias Carroll is the managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn. He is the author of the short story collection Transitory (Civil Coping Mechanisms) and the novel Reel (Rare Bird Books).

If you ask a Lipizzan enthusiast in the US how they first became enamored of the breed, there’s a very short list of books and films that comes up immediately. Prominent on that list is the Disney film, “The Miracle of the White Stallions,” and Mary Stewart’s 1965 suspense novel, Airs Above the Ground.

Stewart was not, as far as I know, a horse person, and the book is not a horse book. It’s about a young woman searching for her husband in the Austrian countryside, and international drug smuggling, and, incidentally, one of Austria’s greatest treasures, the Lipizzan horses of the Spanish Riding School of Vienna. In the mid-Sixties, between the film and the Spanish Riding School’s 1964 tour of the US, the Dancing White Horses of Vienna were very much in the news, and Stewart seems to have caught the bug along with many others. Being Mary Stewart, superb writer of romantic suspense, she did her homework thoroughly, and built a thriller plot around the magical white horses.

Veterinary surgeon Vanessa has been married for two years to international businessman Lewis, and since it’s 1965, that means she’s pulled back from her career and plans to drop it completely once they start a family. Meanwhile she’s still poking at it now and then, just keep her hand in, and being bored and frustrated because Lewis was supposed to take her on holiday to Italy and has been called back to work.

A family friend begs her to chaperone the friend’s teenaged son to Austria where he’ll be meeting his estranged father; the friend expects that Vanessa is going to meet Lewis there. Vanessa has been led to believe that Lewis is in Sweden, but the friend has seen him on a newsreel in Austria, involved in a fire at a circus—and when Vanessa investigates, she immediately notices the luscious young blonde he’s comforting.

So off Vanessa goes with sullen and resentful young Timothy, to find out exactly what Lewis is up to. Tim is a lover of horses and specifically the Lipizzans, and he’s a fount of information about them. His life’s dream is to get “a job” at the Spanish Riding School, though he’s never quite clear as to what that job would be.

Once they’re in Vienna, Tim’s family situation turns out to be much more complicated than he admitted. His father isn’t expecting him—and Vanessa reveals that Lewis isn’t expecting her, either. By then they’re fast friends and allies, and they decide to rent a car and head toward Graz, Tim because it’s near the Lipizzaner stud at Piber, and Vanessa because the circus is in the area.

Amid the lushly described details of Austrian landscape, Tim and Vanessa find themselves in the middle of several international incidents, including the circus fire that killed an elderly horsemaster and one of Lewis’ colleagues, a gang of drug runners, and a Lipizzan stallion stolen from the Spanish Riding School.

The thriller plot is thrilling, I suppose, but that’s not what I came to the book for. Rereading it made me think of the framing story of The Princess Bride. There’s a whole book full of plot and wordage, but I’m reading it for the good parts. Which are, naturally, the horses.

As with The Princess Bride, there’s not all that much to the good-parts version. A full third of the book is a long night’s chase over castle battlements and through moonlit Alpine scenery, with death-defying feats of driving, shooting, and Tim getting his foot caught in a cog railway and needing a desperate, last-ditch run to save him before the train runs him over. Wow. Thrilling. See my excited face.

There’s a saying among readers of teen books. “Too much boyfriend, not enough roller derby.” Here it’s “Too much drug chase, not enough Lipizzaner.”

Even so, the good parts are so very good. When I read the book as a teen, I knew a little about Lipizzans, but I learned quite a bit more from the threads Stewart wove into her story. Tim sums up the breed and its history concisely and clearly, and that leads us into the circus, where the young woman, Annalisa (who is not having an affair with Lewis at all, much to Vanessa’s relief), does exhibition rides on her stallion, Maestoso Leda. They’re a dim approximation of the performances in Vienna, with flashy glass jewels on the saddle and the rider in a hussar’s uniform, but they have their charm.

For me, having seen the traveling shows in the US—the Herrmann family show and the “World-Famous Lipizzaner Stallions” out of Florida—these scenes are rather evocative and strikingly prescient. To this day there are young women in hussar-like uniforms riding performances at Tempel Lipizzans outside of Chicago, just like Annalisa.

At the time I first read the book, I didn’t even dream of owning my own Lipizzan. These horses were as magical as McCaffrey’s dragons or Tolkien’s elf-horses, and as unattainable.

And magic is what Stewart gives us. The plot that captivates me, the story that brings me back again and again, is by word count quite a small part of the story, but it shines brilliantly in memory.

The story that comes out through Vanessa and Tim’s investigations is that a young man joined the School at Wels and became a rider-candidate, but he had a serious drinking problem and was fired. He was said to have committed suicide, but in fact he disappeared, as did one of the stallions, Neapolitano Petra, who was an Airs horse; his Air was the levade.

Vanessa unravels the mystery after meeting Annalisa and being invited to attend a performance. When she goes backstage after, she comes across an old piebald horse who belonged to the deceased horsemaster, who was injured in the fire and who is in danger of being put down. Vanessa operates on the horse’s leg and talks the circus owner into letting him live.

The truth comes out when Vanessa takes the old stallion out to graze during the afternoon performance. When the music for Annalisa’s ride comes on, the horse starts to dance. He’s stiff, he’s rusty, but he knows all the movements. And at the end, he performs the levade.

This isn’t any old cart horse. Vanessa urges Tim to join her during the evening performance, to get his horseman’s eye on the proceedings. And there in the moonlight, old Piebald performs the steps and movements of the high school, and finishes with the levade. In that light, it’s clear the black patches are dyed, and the horse is a Lipizzan.

Tim knows what to look for, to prove it. They find the brands under the black patches: the L on the cheek for Lipizzan, the crowned P on the haunch for Piber, and the two symbols in the saddle area for the horse’s lineage: Neapolitano for the sire, and the male line of his dam, Petra.

The old horsemaster was the runaway rider, and the horse nobody paid attention to is the lost Lipizzan. His training was kept up in private over the years, but never in public for fear of betrayal.

Vanessa and Tim convince the circus to release the horse to them, and promise to return him to Vienna. Hence the castle, where the old horse is given stable room, though he’s turned out on pasture and forgotten while the chase goes on.

What’s wonderful about these scenes is how deeply true they are. Even dumping him in the pasture—for his particular injury, moving around is what he needs, and shutting him up in a stall will make him worse. But the one we all remember, the one that’s burned into our horse-fanatical brains, is the old horse dancing by himself, first in the sunlight, and then under the moon:

As the stallion rose in the last magnificent rear of the levade, the moonlight poured over him, bleaching his hide, so that for perhaps five or six long seconds he reared against the black background, a white horse dappled with shadows, no longer an old broken-down gypsy’s piebald, but a haute école stallion, of the oldest line in Europe.

It’s not just that he’s so thoroughly trained. It’s that this is what he is. He hears the music, he has to dance.

It’s also true that standing by themselves, just being horses, Lipizzans can be fairly unimpressive. As Vanessa notices when she meets Maestoso Leda backstage, they’re short, stocky, and their profiles tend toward the convex, which has gone out of fashion. It’s not hard for one to be mistaken for a cart horse, especially if he’s depressed from the loss of his rider and has been hurt.

The story is that the rider stole him out of spite, to get back at the School for firing him, but there’s an undertone of deeper truth, and that’s where my head canon goes. The bond between the rider and his (and in recent years her) horse is deep and strong. Anne McCaffrey based the bond between dragon and dragonrider on it. I think Franz stole Neapolitano Petra not only because he was drunk and furious, but because he couldn’t bear to be parted from him.

In the book, once the horse leaves the circus and Tim leads him up to the castle, that’s it for him until the very short epilogue in which Vanessa, Tim, and Lewis sit in the royal box for Neapolitano Petra’s return to the Spanish Riding School. There’s one more truth here, one more thing that shows how well Stewart understood. When the horse performs, he doesn’t whicker to Vanessa, or even seem to see her, though he’s clearly fond of her and grateful for what she did for him. He’s gone into his own space.

The eyes, like the stallion’s whole bearing, were absorbed, concentrated, inward, his entire being caught up again and contained in the old disciplines that fitted him as inevitably as his own skin.

Yes. So very yes. That’s it exactly.

We never do find out whether Tim gets a job and if so, what it is; we never see how the School reacts to the news that its missing stallion has been found. But one thing we do know. We’re told this several times, and that’s the note we end on:

The lights dimmed, and the white horse dwindled down the corridor beyond the arch, to where his name was still above his stall, and fresh straw waiting.

The wonderful thing about all this, the thing that gave me bad blurry-page syndrome when I reread the book, is that it speaks to so much of what I live every day. Even the story of the rider who died—that has happened, and not terribly long ago, though I don’t know of any stallion who was ever stolen; they’re given as gifts to world leaders, and sold once in a great while to a long waiting list. But stallions who retire still receive visits from their riders, and the love between them is a strong and perceptible thing.

The magic is real. Stewart saw it, and wrote it beautifully. Even if she did allow herself to get terminally distracted by that endless chase scene.

As for Tim, I suspect she would have assumed he’d be taken on as a groom. But these days, at least until Brexit plays itself out, a seventeen-year-old (male or female) with an EU passport and fluent German is welcome to apply to the School as a rider-candidate. In fact one of the first two women admitted had dual US and UK citizenship. She didn’t stay; but the other did, and is now a full Bereiter.

So in my head canon, Tim becomes an Eleve, and eventually a rider, and maybe Neapolitano Petra will be one of his four-legged teachers. As for the horse himself, he lives out his life in the School, retires at a great age, and lives on for a while at Piber like his spiritual descendant, Neapolitano Nima, also a levade horse, who is now the oldest living Lipizzan, having just celebrated his 39th birthday.

This book is true on so many levels, from so many directions. And that’s a magic of its own.

Next time in my summer reading adventure, I’m moving on to another book I loved immoderately when I first read it: Joy Chant’s Red Moon and Black Mountain. It’s…problematical. But still, parts of it are too gorgeous almost to be borne.

Judith Tarr is a lifelong horse person. She supports her habit by writing works of fantasy and science fiction as well as historical novels, many of which have been published as ebooks by Book View Cafe. She’s even written a primer for writers who want to write about horses: Writing Horses: The Fine Art of Getting It Right. Her most recent short novel, Dragons in the Earth, features a herd of magical horses, and her space opera, Forgotten Suns, features both terrestrial horses and an alien horselike species (and space whales!). She lives near Tucson, Arizona with a herd of Lipizzans, a clowder of cats, and a blue-eyed dog.

Barrayaran culture is made up of many parts. On the one hand, they have a feudal political system that glorifies the military. On the other hand, they have absolutely gorgeous weddings. (Although these have moderated in recent years, the planet’s rabid anti-mutant biases mean that most Barrayarans refuse to acknowledge the existence of individuals who deviate from the standard “two hands” configuration.)

Anyway, GORGEOUS weddings. Very meaningful. Lots of groats. In the run-up to the wedding, we learn that Miles can effectively deploy his reputation as a murderer against people who believe, well, that he’s a murderer. He didn’t like those people anyway, so this is very convenient. The rest of Gregor’s wedding is also very educational.

Per prior arrangement, Gregor’s wedding does not involve public nudity. Appropriate parties have appropriately witnessed proofs of Gregor and Laisa’s genetic health, supposedly on the morning of the wedding ceremony. Miles is our viewpoint character here, and he’s not involved in that part of the proceedings to the extent that he doesn’t note when it took place. Possibly before breakfast? Gregor and Laisa could have had fasting blood work drawn at the same time! This is not the possibility Miles raised when the arrangement was discussed in planning meetings, but both of them are of an age where it makes sense to monitor one’s cholesterol.

The parts of the wedding that Miles DOES comment on are the parts that involve horses. That childhood programming really stuck, didn’t it? Gregor is on a glossy black beast. I imagine that Laisa’s mare is the same one Gregor had flown in for their lunch date in the Palace gardens in Memory. Laisa’s father has been taught how to lead a horse. Once again, Miles suspects horsey tranquilizers. And honestly, I would hope so. The wedding involves a lot of noise and fuss and skirts. These are all things that horses can be trained for, and I’m sure these horses have been. The addition of people almost entirely unfamiliar with horses in key roles, in combination with a need to ensure that the entire event runs smoothly, suggests to me that a little Ace would be a reasonable backup plan. Laisa’s wedding outfit strikes me as heavy for Midsummer but appropriate for riding. I hope she goes all-in on Barrayar’s equestrian sports as part of her embrace of her new planet.

Mark is scrupulously honest in matters of business. I know, he helped Enrique skip bail on Escobar (I can’t imagine that the Duronas would have put him on to Enrique’s case if Mark was going to insist that Enrique had to stand trial), but his proposed plan for selling Imperial wedding groats actually involves wedding groats. The plan also involves several kilos of filler groats. Buyers would be getting an essentially homeopathic quantity of wedding groats. In related news, Barrayaran women’s formalwear, while sometimes useful for first aid, does not have pockets. Kareen has to get Mark to hold on to her wedding groats for her.

Dono and Olivia are getting married. I’m so happy for them! Large weddings are very fashionable right now because Gregor and Laisa are literally in the process of having one. This puts Commodore Koudelka in a tough spot. He’s suddenly grateful that Mark and Kareen aren’t rushing towards matrimony as well. He apologizes for his earlier over-reaction to Mark’s relationship with Kareen. This is a lovely conversation, where Mark says that he’s not good at family yet, but he means to try. The Commodore had expected to control the General Staff in his old age and has been a little surprised that his daughters have not all paired off with military officers. Delia picked Duv, who is climbing the ranks in ImpSec. Olivia, however, went for Dono, who seems positioned to be an influential politician, and whose matrimonial agenda suggests that he intends to dedicate himself to all aspects of that project—he will not be dying without a designated heir. I imagine that he and Olivia are planning to use a uterine replicator. Commodore Koudelka doesn’t know who Martya might choose yet, but Mark is quite certain she’s thinking seriously about Enrique. At the very least, Enrique has been the topic of serious discussion; Martya has previously said that she thinks Enrique is the sort who needs a managing type of wife, and Kareen has told Mark that awkward academic types are supposed to age well.

Contemplating the differences between what the Commodore expected from his daughters and what he is likely to get, Mark considers sending Kou and Drou on a trip to the Betan Orb.  I don’t know what kind of gifts people get their in-laws in the Galactic Nexus, so maybe an all-expenses-paid trip to a sex resort is just like sending them on a cruise. Or possibly it’s well-intentioned but just a little awkward. Mark is still learning about family, and he means to try.

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Ma Kosti is on hand to hand out samples of maple ambrosia, a product that combines bug butter with maple mead. Ivan doesn’t think much of either bug butter OR maple mead, but he gives high marks to the combination. Ma Kosti denies being responsible for the innovation involved here; she says it was Miles’s idea, part of his effort to funnel money back to the people of his District. Miles isn’t Count yet, but he is his father’s voting representative, and while the Viceroy is on Sergyar, he is the ranking Vorkosigan on the planet. He’s obviously quite busy with his duties as Auditor, but I see he means to try at local politics just like Harra told him to.

Ivan discovers that Byerly and his mother are both on the Imperial payroll. Ivan is having a very educational year. Miles appears to have figured out Byerly’s role in ImpSec before the wedding and offered constructive criticism. That sounds like it was fun. I’m sorry we missed that. Ivan’s reaction is also fun, as is his pulling rank on an ensign trying to make time with a woman in an alcove that Ivan has decided to appropriate. It’s like literally everyone else on the planet is pairing off, but not Ivan. Or Byerly. For some reason. Poor things.

Like Delia and Olivia, Miles would love to plan a fashionably large wedding, but Cordelia has coached Ekaterin on preventing it—she says it wouldn’t feel right during her mourning year, but perhaps if Miles wanted to wait? They plan for a smaller outdoor wedding in Ekaterin’s Barrayaran garden in Autumn. Join me next week as we explore that—shifted slightly off the planned schedule—in “Winterfair Gifts.”

Ellen Cheeseman-Meyer teaches history and reads a lot.

When I first finished Tochi Onyebuchi’s Riot Baby, I wanted to burn the world down. The story of two gifted siblings with extraordinary power whose childhoods are destroyed by structural racism and brutality and whose futures might alter the world, it’s a pulls-no-stops, nitrous-fueled novella that reads like The Fifth Season meets Attack the Block. I’m proud to announce that Tor.com Publishing has acquired World English rights, in a deal negotiated by Noah Ballard at Curtis Brown, Ltd.

Riot Baby is rooted in foundational loss and the hope that can live in anger: both a global dystopian narrative that calls on Afrofuturism and resistance ideology and an intimate family story with quietly devastating things to say about love, fury, and the black American experience. I’m thrilled to be editing Tochi in his adult debut and cannot wait for readers to discover these characters.

It’s no accident we’ve chosen to announce this acquisition on Juneteenth. Here’s Tochi on why:

This story, of Ella and her brother, Kev, has been inside me for years in one form or another. Sometimes, it was a voice, hurt and angry, and, sometimes, it was a single scene: a young man emerging from prison to serve his parole in an unrecognizable world. Each time this germ of a story stirred in me, I felt their fear and their fury and knew that they, too, were watching what gang violence had done to their communities, what terroristic policing had done to their families, what the experience of being black in America was doing to them.

I began to see them everywhere. In Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, in Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira, in N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth and Inheritance trilogies. Every place where words were molded around injustice, around unfreedom, was a place that Ella and her brother occupied. This is a story about the rage that starts riots, but it is also a story of the love that binds a family together in the face of tragedy, a story of the fierceness with which we try to protect each other from harm. Juneteenth is an American holiday that commemorates the announcement of the abolition of slavery in the state of Texas on June 19, 1865. Even though it’s recognized as a state holiday or accorded special status as a day of observance in forty-five states, most celebrations are local. Ultimately, I wanted to see what freedom looked like. For this family. For everyone else who looks like them. I am thrilled and honored to be working with Ruoxi on bringing this story—with its too-large questions and too-small answers—out into the world.

Born and raised a New Englander, Tochi holds a B.A. from Yale University, a M.F.A. from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, a J.D. from Columbia Law School, and a Masters degree in droit économique from L’institut d’études politiques, colloquially known as Sciences Po. He has worked to help student immigrants secure relief through the DACA program prior to its rescission, researched smuggling routes in the Balkans, and worked in the West Bank for a prisoners’ rights organization that advocates on behalf of Palestinian Arab detainees. While at Columbia, he was part of a team that helped to secure habeas corpus relief for a man unjustly imprisoned for nearly two decades in Connecticut. In addition, he has written on carceral philosophies developed in the United States and applied in international case studies.

Tochi’s fiction has appeared in Panverse Three, Asimov’s, Obsidian, and Omenana. His non-fiction has appeared in Nowhere, the Oxford University Press blog, Tor.com, and the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, among other places. When not writing or trying to read his way into his best postcolonial self, he can be found indulging in his love for narrative-heavy open-world video games or adding to his already near-encyclopedic knowledge of rap beef. His debut young adult novel, Beasts Made of Night, was published by Razorbill in Oct. 2017. Its sequel, Crown of Thunder, will hits shelves in Oct. 2018.

Riot Baby will be available from Tor.com Publishing in 2019.

Welcome, welcome to Week 18! This week Reading The Wheel of Time covers Chapters 48 and 49. We ride with Lan into the Blight and we will see monsters and green men and trees that would put the ones in Oz to shame. At the edge of the climactic battle, our heroes are drawn together, to thoughts of how the future could be happier, and who they want near them. And the Green Man gives us hope in a decaying land.

A note about comments: Before we get started just a little info (in case anyone missed it last week) about what we’re doing vis-à-vis spoilers and comments for the Read. Comments pointing out things I may have missed in chapters are very welcome as long as your comment doesn’t give away future events that Jordan later explains clearly to the reader. I’d love to chat about important information and juicy tidbits I may not have noticed, or realized the significance of. Those discussions are one of my favorite parts of doing the Read, actually!

Folks here have all been doing a great job with this already, but just another reminder that if your comments do contain spoilers for things Jordan later reveals, those discussions are welcome too! Just make sure to hide anything that would give too much away to me or any other first time readers that may be following along. Make whatever portion of the text that might contain spoiler white, and put the little // secret secret, look how wrong Sylas was in that guess, haha // around it so other commenters know where to highlight over to read your thoughts. Thanks!

As we start Chapter 48, Moiraine and company are given an escort to the border of Shienar and the Blight by Ingtar and 100 lances, under Agelmar’s orders. They ride together to the Shienaran towers that line the border, heavily fortified stone walls designed to hold back Trolloc raids, with signal mirrors on top to notify other towers of an attack. Normally they would be minimally fortified, but now Rand can see that there are only a few men on the walls, as even here forces have been drawn away to go fight in Tarwin’s Gap. If the men fail there, it won’t matter if the towers are manned or not.

They ride past the towers and up to a plain stone post, which used to mark the border between Shienar and Malkier, and now marks where Shienar ends and the lands under the Blight begin. Ingtar halts his men there, as instructed, but he is irked by Agelmar’s orders; having spent time escorting Moiraine means that he and his men will not have time to reach the others fighting in the Gap, and he is irked not to know the reason he would be denied the ability to fight the Trollocs in the Gap, as well as why they’re similarly not allowed to pass into the Blight and fight there on behalf of the Aes Sedai. His irritation is clear, and Nynaeve asks him if he is truly so eager to fight Trollocs. Ingtar replies “That is what I do, Lady… That is why I am.”

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He leaves them then, bidding Lan a traditional-sounding “Peace favor your sword.” as farewell. Rand watches the men go, thinking back to the morning when he had watched the soldiers of Fal Dara prepare to head off to join with other Shienarian forces headed to fight in the Gap. Meanwhile the civilians were also preparing to evacuate Fal Dara, leaving only a token few to defend the fortress. And out of the Malkier Gate went Moiraine and her tiny column, the most desperate and important of all.

For the first hour or so of riding Rand doesn’t notice anything different about the landscape, but it does start to get much warmer. Egwene notes that it’s the best weather they have seen all year, but Nynaeve says that it feels wrong, and Rand agrees, although he can’t quite say how it feels different. He just knows that it’s more than noticing that it should not be so warm this far north; he knows it must be the Blight.

It continues to get warmer and muggier until everyone is sweating, especially Loial. Only Lan and Perrin don’t appear, in Rand’s eyes, to be suffering. Rand is warned off touching a spray of leaves on a branch by Lan, who tells them that they are in the fringes of the Blight now, a place where flowers can kill and leaves maim, and mentions a creature called a Stick that looks just like its namesake, but will bite if touched and release digestive saliva into the wound. And he warns that there is much worse to come, so they’d better keep quiet and keep up.

As they travel on, they encounter the true corruption of the Blight.

Leaves covered the trees in ever greater profusion, but stained and spotted with yellow and black, with livid red streaks like blood poisoning. Every leaf and creeper seemed bloated, ready to burst at a touch. Flowers hung on trees and weeds in a parody of spring, sickly pale and pulpy, waxen things that appeared to be rotting while Rand watched. When he breathed through his nose, the sweet stench of decay, heavy and thick, sickened him; when he tried breathing through his mouth, he almost gagged. The air tasted like a mouthful of spoiled meat. The horses’ hooves made a soft squishing as rotten-ripe things broke open under them.

Mat actually throws up, and Rand notices Egwene and Nynaeve struggling not to even as he himself does. Even Moiraine looks pale, and Loial wraps a scarf over his face. Lan is his usual outwardly unperturbed self, but Rand is surprised to see that Perrin is also not showing much of a reaction to the horror and scent of decay, looking around him as if for an enemy, muttering and half growling to himself, his eyes golden.

Eventually they have to make camp for the night, and Moiraine suggests “a place” to which Lan somewhat reluctantly agrees. They ride westward, and Rand catches a glimpse of what he thinks are hills but then realizes are the remains of towers; seven towers. No one else seems to catch the significance, though, and Lan’s face doesn’t show anything revealing. They do catch sight of a monster in a lake, though, huge and with a tail spouting long terrifying tentacles that may or may not have hands on them. Moiraine sets a ward around their camp to protect them; she can’t use the Power to physically keep things out because that would draw attention, so she hides the camp instead. Everyone hears her announce that she will do this, but Rand and Perrin are helping Lan with the horses and gear and are both startled when the women and Loial seem to have disappeared. Lan rolls his eyes at them and crosses over to where the camp had been a moment before, then vanishes as well, and Rand and Perrin hasten to join everyone.

Moiraine, seeing the boys’ surprise, smiles and explains that what she did was a “bending” so that any eye looking at the camp sees around it instead. Egwene is eager to try her hand at the technique, though Moiraine quickly reminds her that even the most simple use of the Power is dangerous to the untrained. Nynaeve, carefully neutral in her expression, tells Egwene that she is considering going with her to Tar Valon, and Egwene is delighted. Egwene suggests that the boys could come too, and tells Rand that when she is an Aes Sedai, she will make him her Warder. Egwene asks Rand if he would like that, and he, seeing how much the question appears to mean to her, says that he would like to be her Warder, even as he remembers what Min said, that he and Egwene are not for each other.

Rand finds it impossible to fall asleep in the sweltering heat of the Blight, even though Moiraine put something in the lamps to disperse the smell of the place. Most everyone else has fallen asleep, however, except for Lan and Nynaeve. She brings Lan a cup of tea, and Rand cannot help but overhear their conversation. Nynaeve tells Lan that she should have known that he was a king, but he disagrees, calling himself just a man without even a farmer’s croft to his name. Nynaeve insists that some women wouldn’t care about having land or a title, just the man; but Lan replies that a man who would ask her to accept so little would not be worthy of her.

“… You are a remarkable woman, as beautiful as the sunrise, as fierce as a warrior. You are a lioness, Wisdom.”

“A Wisdom seldom weds.” She paused to take a deep breath, as if steeling herself. “But if I go to Tar Valon, it may be that I will be something other than a Wisdom.”

“Aes Sedai marry as seldom as Wisdoms. Few men can live with so much power in a wife, dimming them by her radiance whether she wishes to or not.”

“Some men are strong enough. I know one such.” If there could have been any doubt, her look left none as to whom she meant.

“All I have is a sword, and a war I cannot win, but can never stop fighting.”

“I’ve told you I care nothing for that. Light, you’ve made me say more than is proper already. Will you shame me to the point of asking you?”

“I will never shame you.” The gentle tone, like a caress, sounded odd to Rand’s ears in the Warder’s voice, but it made Nynaeve’s eyes brighten. “I will hate the man you choose because he is not me, and love him if he makes you smile. No woman deserves the sure knowledge of widow’s black as her brideprice, you least of all.” He set the untouched cup on the ground and rose. “I must check the horses.”

Nynaeve remained there, kneeling, after he had gone.

Sleep or no, Rand closed his eyes. He did not think the Wisdom would like it if he watched her cry.

The next morning Rand wakes to heat and sunlight, and he notices that even in the Blight, the sky is still blue. Untouched, he thinks. He notices Egwene and Nynaeve talking, and Egwene sending hard looks in Lan’s direction as Lan ignores them both. As he gets ready for the day, Rand wonders if women have some way of reading men’s minds. All women are Aes Sedai, he thinks, then pushes the thought away, blaming it on the atmosphere of the Blight.

As Moiraine erases the evidence of the Power she used on the campsite, Egwene and Nynaeve both shiver, and Egwene catches Nynaeve’s reaction. They smile and nod at each other (although Nynaeve is visibly reluctant), clearly recognizing each other’s shared abilities, but Rand, not knowing that Nynaeve also has the gift, doesn’t understand the exchange, although he feels that he somehow should. Then they set off, riding North towards the Mountains of Dhoom, as Egwene asks if they will find the Eye of the World that day.

Moiraine answers that she hopes so, but the party is reminded that the Eye is never in the same place. The last time Moiraine found it it was on the other side of the mountains, but in any case they must continue to hunt until it appears. “The Green Man senses need,” she reminds them. “And there can be no need greater than ours. Our need is the hope of the world.”

If the Blight had seemed vile and disgusting before, it is worse now. The foliage of the trees is rotting off of it, and the trees themselves are small, twisted and oozing sap like puss from their split bark. Mat observes that the trees look like they want to grab the travelers, and although Nynaeve gives him a scornful look, Moiraine confirms that some of them do, only her presence protects everyone. Mat looks like he thinks she’s joking, but Rand isn’t sure. He can’t think of a reason a tree would want to grab a man even if it could, and thinks perhaps she’s just trying to keep them alert.

But just at that moment Rand sees a tree in the distance move, bending and reaching down and snatching something from the ground, a dark shape that shrieks as it’s grabbed. Everyone edges their horses away from the forest around them, closer to Moriane as Lan pulls out his sword and disappears in the opposite direction from the terrifying tree. They ride on, hearing terrifying roars from the direction Lan has gone, but a moment later he rejoins them, his sword dripping with black blood that steams. He wipes the blade very carefully and the cloth he uses dissolves as if eaten away.

Then something jumps at them from the trees, and Mat puts an arrow through it before it can reach Lan’s blade. As they ride past Rand can see that it’s covered in bristly fur and has too many legs, some even springing out of its back. Moriaine says that such a creature should not have been willing to come so close to someone who touches the True Source, and Lan suggests that perhaps the Blight also knows that a Web is forming in the Pattern. They try to hurry on, but then more trees move, reaching out to grab them despite Moiraine’s presence.

They all turn to fight, Rand with his sword and Mat with his arrows as he cries aloud in the old tongue again, Perrin hewing through his enemies with his axe in that new stoic way he has. Lan takes Mondarb into the trees again and again, returning with weapons stained in black blood and gashes in his armor stained with his own. Moraine heals them each time, though she bemones the signal that she puts out by using the Power. Rand realises that the only reason they haven’t yet been overwhelmed is because the creatures and the trees are fighting each other as much as trying to attack the company, and fears that even that fact won’t save them, when suddenly they hear a weird, piping cry in the distance. In an instant the trees still and the creatures rush away, and as the cry comes again and is answered by others, Lan tells them that they are Worms, and that they must ride.

As they race the through now dead-seeming trees, Lan explains that nothing in the Blight wants to face a Worm if it can help it, that a Worm can take out a Fade, and that they have a whole pack of them on their tail. Their only hope is to reach the Mountains, where the Worms don’t go because they are afraid of what dwells in the high passes.

The land starts sloping upwards as they ride, but the mountains still remain too far away as the trees are taken down by what sounds like huge bodies slithering over them. Realizing that they won’t make the mountains in time, Lan turns ready to fight the Worms, urging Moiraine to ride on to safety. Nynaeve cries out to him, Moiraine insists that even he cannot stop a Wormpack and that she will need him when they reach the Eye. Rand, looking up through the foothills and towards the pass beyond struggles with his own fear and panic, wondering what could be so bad ahead that it frightens the things chasing them, struggling to find rally his courage by finding the flame and the void.

The void eluded him, forming, then shivering into a thousand points of light, re-forming and shattering again, each point burning into his bones until he quivered with the pain and thought he must burst open. Light help me, I can’t go on. Light help me!

He turns his horse to face the oncoming Worms when the landscape abruptly changes. The Blight is gone, the trees are green and leafy, the ground carpeted in wildflowers, the air filled with butterflies and bees and birdsong. Moiraine tells them that they are safe, that this is the Green Man’s place, and when Rand mutters in confused astonishment that she said it was on the other side of the passes, a deep voice answers him, saying “This place… is always where it is. All that changes is where those who need it are.”

A figure stepped out of the foliage, a man-shape as much bigger than Loial as the Ogier was bigger than Rand. A man-shape of woven vines and leaves, green and growing. His hair was grass, flowing to his shoulders; his eyes, huge hazelnuts; his fingernails, acorns. Green leaves made his tunic and trousers; seamless bark, his boots. Butterflies swirled around him, lighting on his fingers, his shoulders, his face. Only one thing spoiled the verdant perfection. A deep fissure ran up his cheek and temple across the top of his head, and in that the vines were brown and withered.

The Green Man greets them, calling Loial “little brother” and Perrin “wolfbrother,” an address which Perrin studiously avoids acknowledging. When he greets Rand, however, his words are strange and Rand doesn’t understand them.

“Strange clothes you wear, Child of the Dragon. Has the Wheel turned so far? Do the People of the Dragon return to the First Covenant? But you wear a sword. That is neither now nor then.”

When Rand says he doesn’t know what the Green Man is talking about, the Green Man touches his scar and only admits that he is often confused nowadays, that his memories are torn and often fleeting.

The Green Man greets Moiraine next, asking how he could be seeing her again, since the place was made so that none could find it twice. She replies that her need, and the world’s need, has made it possible, and that they have come to see the Eye of the World. The Green Man sighs, saying that he has feared that the Dark One is stirring, as the fight to keep the Blight out of his place has been harder than ever. He tells them that he will take them to the Eye.

Well, Moiraine kept saying that need was the key to finding the Green Man, so I guess it makes sense that they would only get to the place when they were one step away from death. Given that she also said to Agelmar that one’s motivations in searching for the Green Man must be completely pure, I suppose a moment when you are desperate for help but not necessarily calling directly to the Green Man would be the purest of all. Perhaps it was even Rand calling on the Light to help him that did it.

In any case, these are a packed couple of chapters! As I was writing the recap I found myself struggling with what to focus on; a lot happens in a short time-frame and it all seems like it will be important. I also used a lot of quoted sections in the recap this week because I found the narration so beautifully seamless in these chapters, especially at the important thematic points. There was no way I could recap Lan and Nynaeve’s conversation, for example, in a way that felt like it captured the essence of what was happening as simply as Jordan’s words do themselves. It’s a lovely section of dialogue, and a lot more is being said behind and between the words. I felt the same about the description of the Green Man; it’s such a perfect image, I could see it like I was watching a film. And I kind of want the Green Man to give me a big, forest-y hug.

I always read each chapter twice, first for fun and overall impression, then again for detail before I do the recap section, and my initial impressions and image of the Blight were vastly different on the second read. On the first pass I focused more on the imagery of decay and dying, imagining trees that were once healthy and tall that have slowly withered away and will eventually be gone entirely as they succumb to the poison of the Blight. But on the second read I realized that the point is that the flora is actually growing in that decayed state, and I imagined the Blight more like how a post-apocalyptic movie might show a nuclear wasteland; the trees aren’t slowly dying, they just exist and grow in a twisted, putrefied state brought on by inner corruption, like the animals with extra limbs growing out of their backs and the Stick with its saliva that isn’t so much poison as it is an agent of decay. Even the oppressive heat, very evocative of the standard idea of hell or a hellmouth, could also remind one of heat from a radioactive source. Poison right down into the molecules.

Living as I do in an era of instant connection with the internet, satellite phones, and the ability for a passenger plane to circle the world in just a few days, I find it jarring to realize just how isolated the lands of Rand’s world are. When I started reading The Eye of the Word, and people in the Two Rivers treated the idea of Trollocs and the Green Man and Aielman as things of history and legend, I assumed that the same would be true of the rest of the lands; that Trollocs would not have been seen for generations and were only now returning to the world. Through the course of the story I’ve learned differently, but this is the first time we have seen the real life of people constantly under siege by the Dark One’s forces, for whom Trollocs never stopped being a reality, and that makes it sink in for me a lot more. The way characters throughout The Eye of the World have talked about the Breaking of the World, the way humanity was scattered, how the Ogier lost their steddings and had to go searching for them, has shown the reader just how separated humanity really is, and it is not peacetime that has made them forget the horrors of Trollocs and Fades but isolation. Seeing the forces of Fal Dara really brought that feeling home for me.

I also feel like the narration is setting us up to receive the idea of Rand’s new fate and responsibilities when he is revealed/discovered as the Dragon Reborn. From Ingtar’s declaration that fighting Trollocs is literally what he is, to Lan’s decision that he and Nynaeve can not be together because he is bound to a war he can never win, to the constant reminder of the nature of ta’veren and the Web forming in the Pattern, the idea of duty and the power of fate are ever present even in two chapters that largely focus on description and action. And Min’s words echoing in Rand’s head during Egwene’s little moment of happy naiveté, when she decides they can all go live in Tar Valon together and that Rand can be her Warder, remind us of how fate and duty may very well keep these two apart despite their feelings for each other. And then right after, Nynaeve and Lan go and have a very similar conversation.

An oh, that was quite painful to read. The way neither of Lan nor Nynaeve could be direct in their speech just made the whole exchange sadder, and I have to admit I was frustrated with Lan’s response. I can certainly understand why he wouldn’t wish to commit himself to someone else, even if he did have feelings for her, while his duty had to always be paramount and there was a high chance that he would die young, but if you’re going to reject someone, you should have the grace to admit your own emotions and needs and not make the other person feel like the responsibility is all theirs. Nynaeve is clear about what she wants and it feels disrespectful for Lan to insists that she deserves better, as though he knows what she should want better than she does. I was also surprised that his duty to Moiraine didn’t come into it; but probably the last thing Lan wants to do is give Nynaeve another reason to resent Moiraine. However, as she is someone who is also very focused on duty, I feel like a rejection on that basis might have stung a little less for Nynaeve than a rejection based on Lan’s unilateral determination that she deserves something better than what she herself wants.

I’m still holding out some hope for the relationship, though. Nynaeve is a determined woman, and no one can truly know what the Pattern holds for them. The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills, right?

There’s actually a lot of interesting things going on with Rand in Chapter 49, although they are subtle and you have to watch for them. When he notices Egwene and Nynaeve exchanging that look as they rub their arms, he thinks that he is missing something. Perhaps it is only that he can read the significance in their glance but doesn’t know what it means, but it’s also possible that Rand partially or almost sensed Moiraine’s use of the Power, as the two women clearly did. (That feeling of cold that always seems to accompany channeling is in evidence again, as well.)

Then when Rand is panicking about the Worms and the danger of the mountains, there’s a particular description that accompanies his trying to summon the flame and the void that struck me as perhaps another moment of Rand unconsciously attempting to channel, although he doesn’t succeed this time.

The void eluded him, forming, then shivering into a thousand points of light, re-forming and shattering again, each point burning into his bones until he quivered with the pain and thought he must burst open.

It’s an awfully evocative description that speaks, I think, to more than just a feeling of panic or desperation. Moiraine has said before about how dangerous channeling can be to one who has no knowledge of the technique, and it sounds like Rand just experienced a mild consequence of such inexperience. He’s probably lucky it wasn’t worse.

I am confused by the way that the Green Man greets Rand, however. He called him “Child of the Dragon” which for a moment I thought meant that the Green Man was able to recognize Rand as the reincarnated Dragon, but the confusion about Rand’s clothing and appearance made me think that this was another moment of someone believing that Rand was an Aielman. I don’t know why an Aielman would be called “Child of the Dragon” and I also don’t know why it would be strange for an Aielman to carry a sword since we know from Raen’s story that they are a fierce warrior people. But I am sure there is much more to learn about the Aiel culture and history, so speculation on that front is premature. One thing I do know is that whatever the Green Man thought before he lost his concentration was important, even if neither he nor Rand is aware of it yet.

I think a chapter where the heroes are saved from certain death by a magical device that responds to need has a poignant and bittersweet feeling to it, especially this late in the book. The idea of a desperate fight against almost impossible odds is common in epic fantasy, but the heroes in this case are not saved by luck or by the arrogance of an overconfident evil (like Aragorn leading the armies to distract Sauron to distract him from what’s going on in Mordor at the crucial moment) but by something that seems almost preordained. I don’t know if the Eye is naturally occurring or manmade, but once again this device that is almost a dues-ex-machina again becomes something that is thematically so much more. Moiraine believes that she and her group are meant to be somewhere, are being given guidance and direction to this final conflict, and events so far really do support her belief. Ba’alzamon told Rand in his dream that the Eye will never serve him, but it seems to be that its inclination certainly tends that way.

We will find out who is right week in Chapters 50 and 51, in which we finally see the Eye of the World and have some very climactic battles. So hold onto your seats, dear readers, because this is going to be one heck of a ride! In the meantime, what do you think of the vivid descriptions in these chapters? Are you on team Lan and Nynaeve? And how cute are the Green Man and Loial, calling each other brother and wanting to sing to the trees together?

The name Sylas comes from Sylvanus, Roman god of trees and fields, so Sylas K Barrett thinks he ought to get to go visit the Green Man someday. They would probably get along great.