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Science fiction is everywhere in our lives. Whether it’s the latest blockbuster movie in theaters or streaming, hit novel, technological advancement, or space launch, the world around us could easily come out of the pages of a classic novel. Transfer Orbit helps make sense of science fiction and how it helps us understand the future.

This newsletter is a regular look at the latest news within the science fiction community, featuring analysis and commentary and updates about fiction, writing, and the future of reading.

P. Djèlí Clark’s Ring Shout reimagines Lovecraftian horror

I recently blew through P. Djèlí Clark’s short novel Ring Shout. It’s a topical book for 2020, especially as the country deals with the issue of race inequality and racism. As the cover suggests, it’s a story that deals with the racism of the Ku Klux Klan, the terror group that arose in the aftermath of the Civil War, and again around the 1920s.

It follows a woman named Maryse Boudreaux and her companions as they contend with a rising tide of racism in the country in the aftermath of the First World War. Clark puts a supernatural spin on the movement, revealing that our reality is under attack from another dimension, with otherworldly creatures feeding off of the hatred and anger that drove that movement. They’re slowly infiltrating the ranks of the KKK, and are close to breaking through and taking over. Boudreaux can see these creatures, called Ku Kluxes, and she and her friends have been taking the fight to them, little by little, trying to stem the tide.

The book is a fast-paced, gripping thriller: I could hardly put it down, and Clark masterfully ups the tension, dropping the reader into the midst of a pitched battle, and quickly upping the stakes to really put pressure on the characters as the goals of the Ku Kluxes becomes more apparent.

The novel makes for a nice accompaniment for another recent novel, N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became, in which she explores the modern state of racism through gentrification and white exceptionalism and fragility in New York City. In both books, we see otherworldly terror used as a metaphor for systemic racism, and Clark’s work taps into that systematic horror that groups like the KKK brought with to the people it sought to oppress.

This is a topic that’s been top of mind for me in recent years, and it’s something that I touched on earlier this year with my interview with Lovecraft Country author Matt Ruff, and my thoughts on The City We Became shortly after it was released. Along with books like Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom and Ruthanna Emrys’ Winter Tide, there’s a growing movement to take the racist legacy that is H.P. Lovecraft, and subvert his cosmic horror and use the tropes as a way to point to the very real horrors that racism and bigotry holds for the people it targets. Jemisin, LaValle, Clark, and Emrys all center their stories on the marginalized: people who would were seen by Lovecraft (and even his modern fans) as undesirable, and putting the traditional systems of power that might have otherwise been heroic for Lovecraft on the other end of the equation.

This, I think is why Lovecraft’s cosmic horror still works, and are stronger when you incorporate the real world history. As Ruff said in our interview, Lovecraft isn’t going anywhere — he’s too deeply embedded in the DNA of the genre. But Lovecraft’s fear and anxiety about the state of the world isn’t limited just to him, and if you change up details of ‘Shadow Over Innsmouth’, you “could easily be a story of a black traveler getting stranded in a sundown town.”

People fighting against an incursion of evil was absolutely a story Lovecraft has written. But Ring Shout has the backing of aa better understanding of history behind it, something the wider public is finally getting an idea about as we see statues of racists being toppled around the country. It’s a powerful little book, and one of a struggle I hope that we’ll see more of in the future.

(Originally published on Transfer Orbit)

Love Letter to New York City: N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became

The last couple of years have been a whirlwind for the science fiction and fantasy community, with a whole host of scandals like Sad/Rabid Puppies, Gamergate, and the Lovecraft / World Fantasy Award highlighting the need for the community to grapple with both the changing demographics of Fandom, but also the realization that the genre has deep-seated issues that it needs to work out if it’s going to remain around as a community.

We’re now starting to see those events trickle over into the content that the community is consuming. Books like Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (inspired by Okorafor’s anger at racism in District 9), Chris Kluwe’s Otaku (a book that feels like it’s been inspired by the fallout of Gamergate), and now N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became, a powerful punch of a book that pushes back against the systemic racism in the United States, and one that provides a counterpoint to the works and worldview of H.P. Lovecraft.

Jemisin has been a rising star within the world of fantasy literature, and in many ways, that’s made her a target for racist fans who dislike her stature, her views, and the fact that she won the Hugo Award for three years running for her Broken Earth trilogy. In her acceptance speech for The Stone Sky back in 2018, she addressed the struggle:

I have smiled and nodded while well-meaning magazine editors advised me to tone down my allegories and anger. (I didn’t.) I have gritted my teeth while an established professional writer went on a ten-minute tirade at me—as a proxy for basically all black people—for mentioning underrepresentation in the sciences. I have kept writing even though my first novel, The Killing Moon, was initially rejected on the assumption that only black people would ever possibly want to read the work of a black writer. I have raised my voice to talk back over fellow panelists who tried to talk over me about my own damn life. I have fought myself, and the little voice inside me that constantly, still, whispers that I should just keep my head down and shut up and let the real writers talk.

But this is the year in which I get to smile at all of those naysayers—every single mediocre insecure wannabe who fixes their mouth to suggest that I do not belong on this stage, that people like me cannot possibly have earned such an honor, that when they win it it’s meritocracy but when we win it it’s “identity politics” — I get to smile at those people, and lift a massive, shining, rocket-shaped middle finger in their direction.

The City We Became feels like a natural evolution of her career, a shift from second-world fantasy to an alternate version of our own world, one that’s all-too-painfully recognizable. in 2016, Jemisin published “The City Born Great”, a fantastic short story about the birth of an avatar for New York City — a manifestation of the city in human form, and the otherworldly horror that they face.

Jemisin has now expanded upon that shorter story, unfolding it like a piece of origami to show that a much greater story is at play. Now in novel form, that initial birth of New York City has gone wrong: the avatar has been hurt, and it’s hibernating, as the forces that worked so hard to take down the city regroup and prepare to strike again. New York, however, is a special place: it’s inhabited by not just one avatar, but one for each of its boroughs. Matty (Manhattan) arrives in the city only to forget his past and who he is; Brooklyn is a former rap star turned city councilwoman. Bronca (Bronx) is a tough Lenape woman who directs an arts center, Padmini Prakash (Queens) is an Indian student, and Aislyn Houlihan (Staten Island) is a young white woman who’s terrified of the others.

The enemy they’re facing off against is the Woman in White, who’s bent on destroying the city and all that it represents. She’s begun to infect the city with tendrils that seem to enhance people’s divisive urges, nudging them gently towards intolerance and bigotry. It seems as though she’s been at it a long time, setting up foundations that work to gentrify neighborhoods, backs racist artists trying to make high-profile viral “statements,” and so forth.

Unlike The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and The Fifth Season, Jemisin sets up a story that’s far more straight forward: the five avatars have to figure out how to find one another and work together to save their home as the city is slowly taken over by the Woman in White and the otherworldly horrors that she brings with her. The novel is a fast read, but it’s no less weighty. Where Jemisin’s commentary on the world was wrapped up in second-world fantastic allegory, she brings out the message carved onto a two-by-four. It makes for a powerful read, one that puts forward not only the overt moments of racism against black people, but some of the more subtle ones as well.

In a lot of ways, the novel serves as a counterpoint to Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook” — it even directly references it. Lovecraft was famously xenophobic, and that story in particular focused his racist eye on the impoverished slums that were the Red Hook neighborhood. While it’s tempting to push Lovecraft to the side, refitting his brand of cosmic horror to work counter to his views is a delicious thing to read.

(Jemisin isn’t the first to address Lovecraft’s work: Victor Lavalle did that as well in his own novella The Ballad of Black Tom.)

If the five avatars represent New York City, the Woman in White is one for all of white America. The implications are readily apparent: a malevolent entity that seeks to subjugate and oppress others to maintain power. It’s imagery that Jemisin’s used before — (although I’m not sure if it’s expressly connected): the White Lady in her short story “Red Dirt Witch” — and it’s an extremely effective tool, particularly when she follows Staten Island, a young woman who’s surrounded by subtle and overt forms of white supremacy in a part of the city that’s a far cry from the diverse and liberal streets of its neighbors. Jemisin shows off how effectively insidious fear is as a means of division, something that plays out in a critical way by the end of the novel.

Reading this book over the last couple of weeks has been an interesting experience: I finished it right after a Minneapolis police officer killer George Floyd and after a racist woman called the cops when Christian Cooper asked her to leash her dog in New York City, and it’s been on my mind as protests have swept across the nation. There are so many points in the book that are drawn from the fabric of our world: angry white people who call the cops on “suspicious looking” neighbors, police officers who are connected to white supremacists, the weight of white America pushing down on the black and brown citizens of this country. It might be cosmic horror, but isn’t that pretty much what we’re living through now?

(Originally published on Transfer Orbit.)

Ready Player No

Let’s get this right out of the way: Ernie Cline’s Ready Player Two is not a good book.

But that’s not really something that matters for a book like this, is it? I’ve always been somewhat of an apologist for Cline’s debut novel, Ready Player One. When it hit stores back in 2011, it came at at time when “geek culture” was in its mainstream ascendancy. Game of Thrones had just hit HBO earlier that spring, but the larger Avengers/Marvel Cinematic Universe hadn’t quite hit the fervor that surrounded it. Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm was still a year away. Nerd culture was already here — it had been for decades — but it was a moment where folks were beginning to realize that those things that they might have loved as a kid, be it video games, action figures, Dungeons & Dragons, 1980s science fiction movies, and so forth, was something that they could still love.

Ready Player One perfectly encapsulated that moment. It’s not a good book either — it’s just Cline listing off the things that he loved, but it was a book that someone could crack open and go “hey, I love those things too!” It was a referential book about references and easter eggs, the hidden codes that fellow nerds could use to find their own kind. It’s a fun, earnest story about being a nerd and loving certain things.

But while the book captures that scene or mindset, it’s not the complete picture of what “geek culture” really is. It’s just a fragment, the easiest, espousing the lowest-hanging fruit for what people think about when they think about what geeky things they enjoy.

But in the eight years since it came out, the various, collective communities that make up the SF/F world have faced a sort of reckoning, one that puts issues of diversity and inclusion right in the front and center of fan’s attention. We’ve seen people from various, marginalized backgrounds speak up and make space for themselves, forcing fandom to realize how unequal, problematic, and exclusionary the scene could be. Movements like GamerGate and Sad / Rabid Puppies showed that people will go to great and extreme lengths to protect their remembered history of the SF/F world.

Looking back, Ready Player One hasn’t held up well. It might be a celebration of nerdy pursuits, but it also reads as a set of requirements that might as well say “if you don’t like these things, you aren’t a real nerd.”

A bullshit opinion.

Morever Cline hasn’t really shown a lot of depth with his novel Armada. (Related: Ernie Cline’s Armada Fucking Sucks) It showed that his tendency to just list off the things he love, following an obsessive nerdy character as he goes through adventures isn’t a trick that really works more than once. With Ready Player One, he could get away with it because of the premise of the book. With Armada, that formula didn’t work.

This year, Cline decided it was time to revisit the world of the OSASIS with Ready Player Two, and from all appearances, it’s done well — it debuted at the top of The New York Times’ bestseller list mid-December, where it’s currently still sitting.

It hasn’t been well received — my friend Laura Hudson’s review is probably my favorite, in which she describes the book as “instead of an underdog orphan trying desperately to escape his poverty, our protagonist is now a bored, vindictive tech billionaire who has learned nothing from his previous adventure.”

Reading Twitter the day the book was released was fun, as reviewers pulled out a seemingly endless stream of cringe-worthy quotes. Wade Watts and his fellow owners of the OASIS end up facing off against the technologically resurrected consciousness of the world’s creator, who hijacks the world to try and get them to resurrect (through another easter egg hunt) another artificial consciousness, a woman who he tried to woo.

And along the way, we’re treated to other endless lists of references to everything from Prince’s musical back catalog, the films of John Hughes, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion. Rather than feeling like a “hey, I know that reference!” it’s an exhausting slog. The first book was one that was a fun one to read, so long as you didn’t slow down to think about the implications. Ready Player Two never captures that feeling.

What struck me the most about the book was at how Wade — really, Cline — doesn’t seem to have evolved his thinking about the value of pop culture. There are a couple of distinct passages in the book that caught my eye that seemed to highlight Cline’s thinking in some troubling ways:

“If someone talked shit about me, I found them and killed their avatar. If someone posted something hateful about Art3mis or her foundation, I found them and killed their avatar. If someone posted a racist meme about Aech or a video attacking Shoto’s work, I found them and killed their avatar.”

Attacking racists and bigots aside, Cline highlights the power that a single tech billionaire holds, and the complete and utter lack of accountability for his actions. While the story ostensibly is about the power of technology and how that can be abused, Wade and his companions don’t really learn anything from their adventures this time around. Cline gleefully talks about how they’re able to set up police bots to “help reestablish the rule of law in the rural areas where local infrastructure had collapsed along with the power grid” and shows distain for people sexually experimenting with a new OSASIS technology in safe and consenting ways.

The internet has changed drastically in the years since Ready Player One first came out. VR is actually a thing now, and we do spend an awful lot of time on a global internet platform. I would have hoped that any sequel to the book would ingest some of those ideas and experiences that we’ve collectively gone through, especially with how these platforms can be mismanaged, taken advantage of, or simply used for ill. Judging from what we ended up getting, Cline’s vision unfortunately hasn’t evolved with the times, and we’re stuck with a story that’s not nearly as interesting as the first one was — and certainly not as much fun.

(Originally published on Transfer Orbit)

Survivor Song by Paul Tremblay

Reading Paul Tremblay’s latest in the middle of a global pandemic was an interesting experience. I had to put this down more than once, because at times, it just felt too real. An aggressive form of rabies has begun to spread, infecting its victims within a matter of hours, pushing them to violently attack and bite those around them, spreading the illness even faster through the community.

As the book opens, we meet Natalie and Paul, who are attacked in their home by a neighbor. Paul is killed and Natalie is bitten. She calls her friend, Rams — Dr. Ramola Sherman — a doctor at a local hospital that’s been dealing with the influx of patients. There’s a complication: Natalie is pregnant and nearly due, and it’s a race against time and across the city to get a vaccine and bring her to safety before she gives birth.

I’ve admired Trembley’s recent novels (A Head Full of Ghosts, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, and Cabin at the End of the World) for his take on the horrific: he has a light touch, letting the reader wonder if what the characters are experiencing is really supernatural, or just in their heads. With each book, he’s placed his own spin on established genre tropes — exorcisms, ghosts, or home invasions — and with Survivor Song, he turns his attention to zombies.

There’s been a glut of zombie stories out there in the last decade, from straight-up horror like The Walking Dead and ZNation, to the more inventive, like Santa Clarita Diet or iZombie. It’s a trope that’s been done to death (sorry), but Tremblay’s managed to put a new perspective on it, examining the crisis as a public health issue. The violent residents of Massachusetts that Rams and Natalie have to contend with aren’t the goulish undead, but are people who are desperately, fatally ill. Tremblay sprinkles in plenty of pop culture references, from The Cranberries’ ‘Zombie’ to references to the various films and shows out there, pushing back on them with a sense of realism.

The horror in Survivor Song comes with its relentless pace: the book takes place over the span of a couple of hours as Natalie begins to deteriorate, leaving messages for her as-of-yet-unborn daughter as she and Rams try and get help from one hospital after another.

The other facet of the horror comes from the obvious, mirroring the last six months that we’ve endured this pandemic. Toward the end of the novel, one particular passage jumped out at me:

“In the coming days, conditions will continue to deteriorate. Emergency services and other public safety nets will be stretched to their breaking points, exacerbated by the wily antagonists of fear, panic, misinformation; a myopic, sluggish federal bureaucracy further hamstrung by a president unwilling and woefully unequipped to make the rational, science-based decisions necessary; and exacerbated, of course, by plain old individual everyday evil.

While the book arrived in bookstores in the midst of the pandemic, Tremblay tells me that he wrote the book long before it took place. But while it makes for a hard read because of how closely elements of it have tracked with real life — lockdowns, the panic buying in stores, the sense of dread and uncertainty — the book shows that the ingredients needed for such an event were systematically laid by evil and corrupt men who peddle in misinformation, anti-science rhetoric and who are unable to confront the challenges before them. That’s the real horror, and it’s one that doesn’t require a reader to suspend their disbelief.

(Originally published on Transfer Orbit)

Zero 7's Shadow EP Live Sessions

Zero 7’s one of those bands that I’ll drop everything to listen to when they release something new. They haven’t released too much in the last decade: their last album, Yeah Ghost, hit in 2009, but they released a handful of EPs in the years since — EP 3 in 2015, and Shadows in 2020.

Shadows is a sublime quartet of songs that felt like they went a bit back to their roots. This one features singer Lou Stone, and it has a sort of chill, playful vibe that reminds me of driving across a rain drenched city late at night.

In the last couple of weeks, the group has been releasing a series of live sessions from the EP, and they’re really fantastic and laid back. I don’t think I’ve actually seen them perform live like this before.

José González's Head On

I’ve been a fan of José González's music for a long time — Sony used his song Heartbeats for a commercial and his minimal, acoustic sound was something that really caught my ears at the time. Artists like Nick Drake, Bon Iver, Alexi Murdoch, and Iron & Wine featured heavily in my own personal playlists at the time, and González's album Veneer proved to be a good fit.

I’ve followed him ever since — I even caught him live when he swung through Vermont on a tour — and I’ve generally enjoyed listening to his followup efforts, like his more forceful In Our Nature and Vestiges & Claws, which built upon that minimalist sound, but expanded and enriched it without departing too far from what made it really enticing.

González has a new album coming out later this fall, Local Valley, and he’s released a handful of songs ahead of that release: ‘El Invento’ (his first song entirely in Spanish), ‘Visions’, and ‘Head On’. He released the first video for that last one earlier today, and it’s a sublime listen: there’s some beautiful guitar work and minimal lyrics that grows into a solid, catchy beat. This one’s going to be on my new songs playlist for a while, I can tell.

The Real Robotic Revolution: P.W. Singer and August Cole's Burn-In

In 1920, Czech playwright Karel Čapek published an unusual work: a play called Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti, or Rossum's Universal Robots. Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction cites the play as the first use of the word “robot,” and ever since, robots have been a fixture of science fiction drama, used by countless authors throughout science fiction’s long history, who have imagined all of the ways that they could break, help, murder, or otherwise exist alongside humanity.

One of the latest books to look at the world of robotics is Burn-In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution by P.W. Singer and August Cole. The two collaborated on 2015’s Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War, a near-future thriller that blended the then-present-day advances in military hardware with geopolitical friction between the United States, Russia, and China. The result is a book that’s eerily been coming true, piece by piece. Now, the pair replicate their approach to look at what the near future might hold for robotics.

Set in the 2030s, the pair depict a future that feels like it could come true tomorrow. FBI Special Agent Lara Keegan goes about her work trying to capture a suspect amidst a wide-scale Veteran protest and series of domestic terror attacks, aided by facial recognition that’s beamed into her glasses, self-driving cars, origami drones, and more. She’s soon tasked with a new partner: a police robot called TAMS (Tactical Autonomous Mobility System). Her job is to give it a shakedown — a burn-in field test to see if it’ll be useful to officers in the field, and to help it better understand human interactions. TAMS proves to be a useful partner as she and her fellow agents work to track down an extremist bent on a major attack in Washington DC.

TAMS is certainly the highlight of the book — it’s simultaneously inhuman, but is fleshed out nicely: you can’t help but imagine that it’s sentient. It’s something I (and soldiers who have worked closely with robots on the battlefield) can relate to a bit: I’m very attached to my home’s Roomba, Rosie (and “her” newer sibling, Robbie.) The same is true with TAMS.

This is the key to the success of Cole and Singer’s brand of science fiction (the aforementioned FicInt, of which this is an example): it has a foot firmly planted in reality, while stepping forward in time a bit by extrapolating forward from 2020. This worked for Ghost Fleet, in which we see a range of then-theoretical or novel military technologies like drone swarms, automated ships / vehicles, hijacked tech because of poor supply-chain security, and so forth. While Cole and Singer still have their eyes on the future of the military, the building blocks that they’re playing with here show how porous the barrier between military and civilian technologies. Their characters stock up on food with apps and algorithms, appear in bystander videos that go viral, and contend with hacks and cyberattacks against insecure public infrastructure.

If some of those items sound familiar, it’s because they’re all things that have taken place. Novels usually carry a disclaimer in the front that says that the story and characters are fictional. In this novel, it reads: “The following is a work of fiction. However, all the place, trends, technologies, and incidents in it are drawn from the real world.” The end of the book has a thick section of footnotes of links to technology news from the last couple of years, everything from data security to robotics.

But what makes Burn-In a bit more of an effective read is that Cole and Singer don’t just focus on the technological gains that we can expect in the coming decade: they look at the effects of automation. What happens when you have a huge number of white men thrown out of work because their jobs have been automated out of existence? Keegan’s ex-husband is a good example here: he’s getting by as a gig worker helping elderly clients navigate their lives virtually, and is getting more radicalized by politicians and internet commentary that’s designed to steer people towards a more right-wing worldview (in this case, it’s also presented as very anti-technology).

This is an idea that’s central to robotic stories, because it’s fundamentally about how they change how we live. Cole and Singer aren’t arguing that robotics are bad in Burn-In: we plainly see how useful these things can be. But they’re warning that robotic, computer, and autonomous systems as we’re currently designing them are fragile — as are the cultural, political, and social systems that we live with today.

Apps that summon autonomous delivery robots aren’t the problem: it’s that they’re implemented without thought for the larger context in which they fit into the world. Uber, for example, has decimated the traditional Taxi market. On-demand delivery services and platforms are having a terrible effect on local restaurants and eateries. In doing so, Cole and Singer demonstrate the value of this type of fiction: it helps identify potential breaking points by framing them in a dramatic way, and Burn-In serves a bit as a warning sign for how things could go. It’s a scary future that they present, and in all likelihood, much of it is going to become very, very real.

(Originally published on Transfer Orbit)

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

I loved Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s debut novel Signal To Noise when I read it back in 2015: it’s a rich, modern fantasy that blended its rich characters together music, magic, consequences, and family. I’ve been anticipating her latest, Mexican Gothic, initially because of the really phenomenal cover, but also because it’s a straight-up gothic horror about a decaying family and one young woman’s efforts to free her cousin from their grasp.

Set in the 1950s in Mexico, a young socialite named Noemí Taboada gets a letter from her cousin Catalina, who had recently married into a prominent English family, the Doyles, who presided over the silver mines of El Triunfo. The letter is disturbing: Catalina says that her new husband, Virgil, is trying to poison her, that the house is “sick with rot, stinks of decay, brims with every single evil and cruel sentiment,” but most worrisome: the house whispers to her and refuses to let her go.

Noemí’s father thinks that Catalina’s had a mental breakdown, and wanting to avoid a public scandal, dispatches her to the Doyle’s home, High Place, to figure out the situation and bring her home if necessary.

What Noemí finds when she arrives is a cold, gothic house. The Doyles are emotionally distant and strict, and High Place is a structure in decline.

But Catalina says that she wants to stay with her new husband, and Noemí works to figure out the family and what their story is. She’s disturbed by their casual racism and the family’s ancient patriarch, Howard Doyle, and soon begins to experience hallucinations and strange dreams herself.

Moreno-Garcia’s novel is a carefully tuned gothic tale, with elements of Dracula, The Yellow Wallpaper, Rebecca, and Jayne Eyre peaking out from behind the corners. It includes all of the necessary ingredients: a family in decline, a decrepit, gothic mansion, supernatural phenomena, and characters that have to contend with their reality unraveling around them, coupled with a slow burning sense of dread that drives the novel forward.

I also have to call out the house itself: it’s a glorious representation of the family’s decline, and Moreno-Garcia really nails its presence.

“Then, all of a sudden, they were there, emerging into a clearing, and the house seemed to leap out of the mist to greet them with eager arms. It was so odd! It looked absolutely Victorian in construction, with its broken shingles, elaborate ornamentation, and dirty bay windows…

The house loomed over them like a great, quiet gargoyle. It might have been foreboding, evoking images of ghosts and haunted places, if it had not seemed so tired, slats missing from a couple of shutters, the ebony porch groaning as they made their way up the steps to the door, which came complete with a silver knocker shaped like a fist dangling from a circle.

And like all good gothic horror, it’s a book that holds a stark social commentary at its core, examining the colonial attitudes of High Place. The Doyles, Noemí discovers, came to Mexico strip the country of its wealth, much like the Europeans who came before them. But at some point, there was an illness that spread like wildfire throughout the mining town, and the family has fallen further and further with each year. I don’t want to spoil the reveal, but Noemí and Catalina’s arrival are integral to the family’s plans — a desperate hope to resurrect their bloodline and family fortunes, using deeply racist logic to justify their actions.

It’s a deeply gripping story that cuts to the root causes of the racial divide in the Americas, the result of the encounter between two alien cultures, one that sociopathically exploits and dehumanizes the other. Noemí is an exceptionally vivid, powerful character that Moreno-Garcia transplants into dull, decaying surroundings, showing that the real horror is everything she loses through assimilation.

(Originally published on Transfer Orbit)

A tale of two worlds: Hao Jingfang’s Vagabonds

Science fiction is a genre that’s fascinated with the implications of colonization: take a seedpod of people (in the form of a generation or colonial ship), and transplant them in a new place, allowing a new society to grow in new, fertile ground. Sometimes, authors use the opportunity to look at how to build a better world that sheds the problems that they’ve left behind. In other stories, we see two societies juxtaposed against one another, to see how fiction presents itself between the two mindsets and ideologies.

That’s the case with Hao Jingfang’s novel Vagabonds, which Ken Liu translated into English earlier this year. Set centuries in the future, humanity began to colonize Mars, only to launch a revolution that severed ties from Earth. In the decades that followed, the two worlds established vastly different civilizations: Earth continued on a trajectory of hyper-capitalism based on the market for intellectual properties, while the new Martians build out a society built on collectivism and equality. As the embers of war cooled on each side, the two began to reach out to reestablish ties and to get trade up and running once again.

To that end, Mars dispatched a group of young Martian students in 2196 — known as the Mercury Group —  to live on Earth for a period of five years. They integrated into life on Earth, and then returned home. What they found when they returned was disillusionment: their homeworld was not as idyllic or equal as they’d remembered, and as they question their surroundings, they find that they really don’t fit in anywhere.

Along the way, one of the Mercury Group members, Luoying, (the granddaughter of a prominent Martian leader), begins to question her participation in the expedition, and as she does so, begins to learn more about her family’s history, and how it’s rooted in the war that separated the two planets in the first place.

Chinese science fiction is a field that’s growing here in the US, based in part on the success of Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem and the work of places like Clarkesworld Magazine. Given the economic and technological rise that China’s experienced in the last decade or so, it’s not a surprise that the genre has grown, bringing with it a number of new voices that have joined the ongoing global conversation that is science fiction. Other authors out there include authors like Chen Quifan (Waste Tide) and Xia Jia (A Summer Beyond Your Reach), but as Liu has told me, trying to distill Chinese SF into a couple of common tropes or themes is difficult: every author brings something different to the genre.

Despite that, the stories that I’ve read from China are commenting on the state of the world to some extent — as any science fiction story does. Jingfang has been acclaimed for commenting on the inequality in her home country with stories like “Folding Beijing”, and Vagabonds takes some of these ideas onto a greater stage.

The central idea here is the conflict between the two, diametrically opposed worldviews, and it’s hard to read this story as anything other than a look at the differences between the US and China: one where the ideals of the free market are prized, and another where a sort of collectivism is championed.

However, Jingfang talks a fine line between both. Her Martian students had to work to adapt to life on Earth as they tried to come to terms with how people went about their lives, trying to profit off of their skills and talents. But back on Earth, they find issues with how Martian society is set up: people have guaranteed income and housing, as well as placement in professional guilds known as “ateliers”, but they can’t choose where they go or do, and efforts to change the system are met with resistance and punishment.

Vagabonds is a slow but rewarding read, and it’s one that examines an issue that I see everywhere these days: how do groups of people, systems, or organizations pass along information, history, and habits from one person to another? It’s a novel that examines the systems (in all their forms) around us, and presents an argument that meaningful change is possible, but difficult. Jingfang puts forth an argument that in order to understand the present, we have to understand the complicated route that the past took to get to this point, something that’s appealing to me as a historian.

What Jingfang (and Liu) has written is an engrossing philosophical musing that stands up to some of the best that the genre has to offer: a sprawling novel that explores the state of the world as it stands to day, with some pointed thoughts on how today could turn into tomorrow.

(Originally published on my newsletter. )

Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Relentless Moon

The history of space is inherently one of exclusion. Mary Robinette Kowal has been writing about this recently for places like The New York Times, pointing out that the snafu with space suits that sidelined the planned all-female spacewalk isn’t just a budgetary thing with NASA, it’s that space is inherently designed for male astronauts, and that because women weren’t included in the US space program until Sally Ride went up in the 1980s, it’s had an impact that ripples out to the present day.

Read my interview with Kowal here.

That focus on inclusivity is something that runs under the hood with her Lady Astronaut series, an alternate history where humanity must figure out how to get into space before the Earth overheats after a massive asteroid impact in the 1950s. In the first two installments (and assorted short stories), we watch as a handful of women and astronauts of color fight to join the program, because what good is a space program designed to lead to permanent habitation if you only send up a select group of people?

In The Relentless Moon, Kowal shifts focus a bit. We follow Nicole Wargin, one of Elma York’s fellow “Lady Astronauts”, who’s dealing both with her standing in the space program and her husband’s impending presidential election. While the International Aeronautics Coalition is working to further build its foothold in space, attitudes toward the space program have begun to sour: some people have begun to question the validity of the science underlining the IAC and need to move off-planet, others are rightfully protesting the resources that are being taken away from people in desperate need, and yet others are motivated by religious concerns. Riots have begun across the United States, and a terrorist cell appears to be working to infiltrate the IAC, with the intention of destroying its efforts, or at the very least, sowing doubt into the future of the program.

Wargin is sent back into space to the growing lunar colony, where she’s tasked with working to help flush out the plot against the IAC. Immediately, a whole new set of problems arise. The rocket that brings her up to the Moon experiences a rough landing, breaking her arm and causing a serious fuel spill that causes numerous problems for the base. A BusyBee (think the lunar craft from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but for one or two people), goes missing, there are power outages, and signs of deliberate sabotage.

If there’s any one thing that’s underpinning Kowal’s work with this series, it’s her spotlight on the systematic issues that exclude people from various parts of the world. But what I appreciate the most about this series is her approach to this particular observation. The Lady Astronaut novels are hard science fiction that don’t ignore the systemic problems running under the hood. It’s a particularly clear-eyed and principled view of the world, recognizing both the things that excite and delight about science fiction, while also pointing out that there are major issues thrown in the way of people.

The Relentless Moon picks up that mission from the prior two books and keeps running it forward. Kowal weaves together a solid thriller as Wargin works to figure out the identity of the saboteur, as well as an empathetic character story as she deals with being apart from her husband, a debilitating eating disorder, and your run-of-the-mill sexism that leeches into every part of the space program. Neither plays a backseat role to the other: both are important to the world that we see, and Kowal’s portrayal here feels raw and honest, a portrait of a complicated character that is driven, principled, and utterly human.

That’s an important thing, I think. 2019 marked the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, and in the years since the space race was in full swing, NASA consciously placed those astronauts on a pedestal. They were heroes (rightfully so) who became more than just men (and later women). But they were also deeply human, and looking at the history of spaceflight, you can see those moments when they bucked NASA’s direction and image: John Young brought a corned-beef sandwich with him on Gemini 3; members of the Apollo 15 crew brought along some stamps to the Moon to sell when they got home; and the crew of Skylab 4 turned off their radio and refused to work for a day after they were overscheduled. Couple that history with science fiction’s propensity for supermen, and you have a recipe for characters that aren’t quite believable or realistic, despite the widely-held intention of hard SF to rigorously depict realistic science and characters.

Kowal doesn’t sacrifice realism for human drama, and vice versa: The Relentless Moon is a raw, honest depiction of the challenges of spaceflight and solar system habitation. It’s simultaneously aspirational and optimistic for what the space race might have been, and steeped with a keen understanding of human nature and the problems that we bring with us.

(Originally published on Transfer Orbit)

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians opens with a horrific scene. A young Blackfeet man, Ricky, had left home and joined a mining crew in North Dakota, and makes his way through a bar — one of two in the joint — and encounters a terrifying, spectral presence in the parking lot. It’s an elk, and as it sets off car alarms in the parking lot, the angry, drunk miners in the bar target Ricky and brutally murder him.

The murder sets the tone for what’s to come as Jones jumps from character to character — Lewis, Ricky, Gabe, and Cassidy — four childhood friends who grew up on a reservation, and who are each visited by this spectral presence. A decade before, they embarked on a hunting expedition in a forbidden part of the reservation, one reserved only for their tribe’s elders, trying to make the best of a slow hunting season. It’s there that they hit the jackpot: a herd of elk that have huddled together in the middle of a snow storm, easy targets for the four young men. Shen the shooting stops, eight of the creatures are dead, but one refuses to die — it keeps trying to escape, despite its mortal wounds, and it isn’t until they finish her off that they realize that she was pregnant.

The four are caught by tribal authorities and forced to leave their kills behind, and a decade later, the past begins to catch up with them. Lewis has moved on, working as a mailman, and living with his girlfriend, Petra in a house they share. He too is soon haunted by the specter of that elk that refused to die, injecting him with paranoia, and he hatches a plan to try and kill it before it kills him, a plan that backfires spectacularly. The elk soon turns its attention on Gabe and Cassidy, stalking and torturing each of them in turn before striking.

There’s plenty of gruesome scenes here: Lewis slowly loses the people around him in some cringeworthy ways — from his girlfriend’s nasty fall onto the edge of a brick fireplace to a murder of a coworker he believes is really the ghost of an elk — but where Jones really shows off his mastery is the slow burning tension that permeates the pages. As Lewis descends into paranoid insanity, we can see what he can’t: that he’s being manipulated by the creature into committing some horrible acts. Even once the characters begin to realize what’s happening, it’s hard to break away from the game before it’s too late.

The novel is more than just a revenge fantasy from a wildlife creature — Jones points to a flaw at the heart of each of the characters: a sort of corrupted masculinity that drove their initial slaughter, and which drives their actions as they try desperately to survive. Ricky joined a mining crew, enduring the racism and intense, dangerous labor to be a man. Lewis is tempted by a coworker, while Cass and Gabe contend with alcoholism and poverty that has ruined their relationships with family or brought them into conflict with the law. The spectral elk doesn’t really need to do much in order to extract her revenge from each of the four men: she just has to push them in the right direction, and leave them to marvel at the horrors that they have perpetuated. It makes for a tense, frightening, and gripping read.

(Originally published on Transfer Orbit)

Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower

There are some books that you dig into because they’re ubiquitous: it’s hard to escape the influence of books bearing the name Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, or Robert Heinlein. They’re the welcome mat for the genre, books that are easy to get into and understand as a teenager.

There are others that are influential, but I haven’t picked up until now — ones that I’m glad that I’ve waited, because I feel like I wouldn’t have really understood what the author was getting at with it. I had this thought as I was reading Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower in my backyard the other day, and while listening to it while helping my brother strip a porch of its paint.

Butler’s novel follows the journey of a young woman named Lauren Olamina, who grows up in a gated community that shields her and her family from a slowly collapsing US. They have little money, there’s horrific crime out beyond the front gates, and a major corporation is experimenting with its own closed communities: a new version of a company town where you work and live for the company.

Lauren is afflicted with a particular condition: hyperempathy, in that she can feel the pain of others around her. The gates to her home are eventually breached, and she’s forced to trek north to possible safety, gathering people to her side as she begins to create her own philosophy of existence, Earthseed. This is a book that’s chillingly real, from a California that’s burning up, to the occasional mention of a crewed Mars mission to the proliferation of guns.

I’m glad that I waited until this particular moment in 2020 to pick up the novel, because I’m not sure that I would have fully comprehended it: how she viewed race through the lens of an apocalyptic collapse and the rise of corporate influence.

Some of that is a failure of imagination on my part: had I read this in high school or a decade ago, I would have likely just seen it as book about a girl going on a hike in the midst of an apocalypse. But given the last decade — where society at large (or at least those who haven’t had to endure these problems already) has begun to better learn or understand the complexities of race, power, privilege, white supremacy, and corporate greed and malice. Reading this book for the first time this summer was enriching and enlightening.

But the biggest thing that I drew from the novel comes down to Lauren’s abilities and the importance of empathy. She muses at one point what the world might look like if everyone had her condition, and after enduring the last couple of years of social media, online harassment campaigns, or even the comment sections on Facebook pages, I’m understanding what Butler was really getting at: the world is destroying itself because people lack this ability, because they can’t understand one another, or realize that the only way out of disaster is with people by your side.

Then again, if I’d read it earlier, maybe I would have better understood the world long before we reached today.

(Originally published on Transfer Orbit)

Robert Jackson Bennett’s Shorefall

Two years ago, I picked up Robert Jackson Bennett’s Foundryside, and was blown away by his depiction of magic. In my review, I wrote about the book as a cyberpunk-like novel, about a young thief who picks up a magical key and gets pulled into a conspiracy on the part of some shady people to reprogram reality.

Bennett approaches magic like it’s a technology: it’s a force that permeates the world, and with the right arguments, you can convince an object to do something that it might not do. Say for example, you want to secure a door. Here in the real world, you might put a lock on it, with a key that allows you (or anyone with it) access. In Bennett’s world, you enchant — scrive — the door, and it knows that it can only open the door under certain circumstances: someone puts the right key in the lock, or it’s enchanted to recognize a specific person or heartbeat, or something like that. To get in, you need the right person or key, or in Sancia Grado’s case, you have the ability to talk directly to the enchanted door, and convince it that it’s not breaking its programming if it would only open in the other direction.

Her particular set of abilities here made her an ideal thief, and we learned in Foundryside that she was a former slave who had been augmented with a scrived plate that gives her this ability. After discovering a key named Clef, she stumbles upon a plot from some a very shady person that want to use Clef to rewrite reality to suit their needs by transforming themselves into a god.

Shorefall takes place a couple of years later, and Sancia and her friends have been working to remake the world in their own ways: they’ve been trying to dismantle the established merchant houses that have an iron-clad grip on her world’s economy, which leads to slums, slavery, and oppression. This work comes to a screeching halt when a character named Valeria reaches out to Sancia with a message: her creator, an ancient hierophant named Crasedes Magnus — a godlike character that had destroyed entire civilizations over his reign — has somehow returned to life, and he’s aiming to remake humanity.

There’s a lot going on in these two books, but one thing really jumped out at me: power corrupts, even when someone has the best of intentions. Much of the novel covers Sancia and her allies working to figure out the threat to the world, working out how to address it, and then trying to prevent the worst case scenario.

There’s plenty of fantastic horror here: Sancia and company trying to stop Crasedes Magnus from entering the city of Tavanne, only to discover that he’s figured out how to not only return to life as a living god (there are some real Lovecraftian elements to him here), but he’s pretty much put together a bullet-proof plan to enact his plan: essentially reprogram humanity, stripping people of free will. Over his millennias-long life, he’s seen humanity rise and fall a couple of times, and he’s realized that our inherent ability to improvise and innovate are traits that are inevitably weaponized, leading to war, concentrations of wealth, and slavery. Remove that ability, and humanity would exist peacefully. Earlier, he created Valeria as a tool to help with this process: designing her to eventually reprogram humanity before she rebelled and snuffed him out.

There’s elements of Crasedes Magnus’s plan that feels very much like something out of a supervillan playbook: have grievance with the world, create master plan, profit??? And while that borders a bit on the cliche side of things, Bennett does a masterful job of playing up Crasedes Magnus as a horrifying and yet sympathetic character. We learn that he has a deep relationship with Clef, and that their own personal origin story sets up his motivations in a fairly logical manner. The thing here is — and this is where the best villains are made — he’s not entirely wrong about what he wants to accomplish. Technology certainly leads to inequality (just look around at the present state of the world or hell, even the 20th century) and oppression around the world, and there are points where drastic action is required to enact change.

We see both sides of the coin here: Sancia and friends getting information from a would-be ally who’s trying to dismantle the system that led to their respective enslavements, and Crasedes Magnus, who might have understandable motivations, but who has become so corrupted by his own power that any system that he puts into place will be just as bad as what he’s trying to replace — or worse. It’s a solid setup for the final installment of the series, and I’ll be interested in seeing how this ends up.

(Originally published on Transfer Orbit)

Alix E. Harrow's The Ten Thousand Doors of January is a beautiful novel about the power of stories

Alix E. Harrow's debut novel The Ten Thousand Doors of January is an astonishing, beautiful novel about the power of stories and the doors that they open.

Harrow introduces us to January Scaller, a young woman who's the ward of a wealthy patron named Mr. Locke. He lives in a mansion on the shores of Lake Champlain in Vermont, and has amassed a fortune and fancies himself as an amateur archeologist, collecting the curiosities from around the world to display in his home, or to sell to his wealthy friends. Locke employs her father to travel the world to find and procure objects for his collection, leaving January behind. When she's young, she accidentally comes across a door that leads her abruptly to another world, and later, discovers a book that tells of doors between a multitude of worlds, and that her own life is a key part of the story.

Speculative fiction is a genre that relies on tropes. Science fiction has its alternate reality stories, while fantasy has portal fantasies. Harrow's novel blends the two as January learns more about her past, her father, and the nature of Mr. Locke's collection. The book is part coming-of-age, part father-daughter narrative, and part thrilling adventure as January flees from her comfortable life in search of a family that she's scarcely known. 

The book operates on a couple of levels. On one, Harrow examines the value of storytelling and diversity. In this particular world, she depicts stories and legends of fantastical creatures, monsters, magical abilities, and the like as a byproduct of a porous boundary between worlds: creatures and magic and stories leak through into our own. January's father (and others) is someone who tracks down stories to their origin, sometimes to alternate worlds. It's a wonderful thought: that the richness and prosperity of a creative society comes from the chaos of stories from different cultures and worlds.

On another, the novel examines the efforts people make to take advantage of the world, and to lock others out. Locke and his friends, as we find out, have benefited greatly from plundering treasures from other worlds, and seek to protect their own by shutting down the doors to other worlds. It's a tragic viewpoint, and Harrow makes the argument that it's a mindset brought on by extreme capitalism. By doing so, the book argues that a successful society is an open one, whereas a capitalistic one where a small number of people control the economy or its resources is will fail in the long run. 

Those ideas power the adventure that January goes through. She's a mixed-race child, someone who doesn't quite fit in Locke's world, and upon learning of the presumed death of her father and making a couple of realizations about Locke's line of work and nature, she flees with the only friends she has in the world, trying to find her father and long-lost mother. The story takes a little while to get up and running, but once it begins firing on all cylinders, it moves. Harrow weaves together a powerful story about the nature of stories, the importance of family and love, and freedom. I don't often tear up over emotional swells in books, but this one brought out the water works by the end. It's certainly one of the best novels that I've read all year. 

How I made it: BOTW Fisherman's Shield

When I started this week, I didn’t figure I’d be doing any sort of big prop build or anything. I’ve dipped into playing Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild quite a bit in the last couple of weeks, and I realized that it would be pretty simple to make one class of shields that you can pick up in the game.

One of the things that I love about this game is how much cool design is in it. There are tons of weapons, costumes, and equipment that you use throughout the game. I made Bram a costume from the game a couple of years ago, and while he’s outgrown it, I’ve still got the Shiekah Slate and Guardian Sword ++ hanging in my workspace.

I didn’t end up making a shield for him that time around, but it’s something that’s been in the back of my mind over the years since I started playing. Somehow, the idea got into my head on Monday that I could build one pretty simply. I took a bunch of screenshots, and began looking at the designs. There are three that I liked in particular: the Emblazoned, Hunter, and Fisherman’s shields, all of which have roughly the same design: they’re made of wood, with a metal edging and painted design.

After doing a little looking around online, I figured out the best way to build this: glue together a couple of boards, then cut them into a circle. Fortunately, I have a pile of 1x4 boards behind my shed, and I ended up cutting down two of them into 2 foot lengths.

From there, I glued and clamped them together, and let the new slab sit overnight.

I let that dry overnight. (The board and jug of water on top is to make sure it lay flat-ish — it popped apart the first couple of tries when I clamped them together) In the morning, it was fully dry. I figured out where the center was, and drew out the outline of the shield, then cut it on my bandsaw. Once that was done, I took a sander to it to smooth down some of the roughness, and then a planer to take down some of the high points. I didn’t do too much here: I wanted to leave some rough surface to make it appear rough-hewn and a little less polished. Once that was done, I bought a handful of bolts and nuts, and pre-drilled the holes for them to go into.

I picked up a roll of aluminum flashing with the intent of using that as the metal edging. Tutorials that I’d seen online showed a method for folding it over the edge in tabs. I started with that, measuring out a ring and used resin to hold it into place. But once getting it on there and once I started to fold it down, I realized that it just wouldn’t look good: I’d have to fill in the lines with bondo or something, and it wouldn’t quite have the same effect. I ended up tearing that off and started from scratch, using a sheet of thin EVA foam for another project. This time around, I just traced out the outline and cut out a ring.

EVA foam is wonderful (I’ll be talking a lot about it in my book), but you can’t jut paint it up: there’ll be little bubbles and holes. I thinned out some Elmer’s glue to use as a sealant, waited for it to dry, then hit the entire thing with some metallic spray paint. Because the bolts in the ring had to match, I painted the tops as well. I set those aside to dry, and moved onto the next part: painting the shield face.

The first step was to paint on the background: I mixed up some blue and green to get the approximately right color, and painted it on. Once that dried, I took coarse sandpaper to the surface, roughing out the lines between boards in a way that matched the one in the game. I used my Dremel to score in the deeper gouges. Weathering is a critical part of any costume. I’ve described it as a story in and of itself, because it conveys that the object has gone through some sort of journey of its own. The scratches and gouges show that something happened to it.

Those lines proved to be really useful for the next part: the fish. I ended up hand-sketching this on, using the lines as a guide for width and hight for the various triangles. I sketched out the outlines in pencil, then painted them up in light blue and yellow. They’ll need another coat once it dries completely, but the first coat went on really well.

After that, I had to put the ring on, now that it was dry. I put the ring on the front, then flipped it over, using a pick to mark where needed to make a hole for the bolt in the foam. I used another attachment on my Dremel, and drilled in the holes. Note to self next time: measure out the holes a bit better, or mark which ones are which. It turned out that there’s only one way for it to go on once the holes are drilled in, and it took a little while to figure out the right orientation.

Once I figured that out, I put the bolts in, screwed on the nuts, and tightened them: I didn’t do so too tightly, but enough that the bolt sank into the foam a bit, making it look as though it was really driven in hard enough to bend the “metal”.

With that, it was done — ish. I’ll touch up the paint a bit, shave down some of the foam edging, and then wait for for the weather to warm up a little tomorrow to hit the entire thing with a coat of matte clear coat. Once that’s dry, I’ll add on a little extra weathering and grime around the edges, gouges, bolts, and so forth, to give it a little more of a used look. After that… I’ll have to find some space on the wall.

This was a lot of fun, and when I started, I expected it to take a week or so. It came together really, really fast, which surprised me a little. I think this was a combination of a) acrylic paint drying really quickly, and b) it’s not really a hard form. I’ve got plenty of other boards lying around, so this likely won’t be the last one I make. Next time, I’ll do a little more to make sure that the boards are completely flat, that the circle I’ve drawn is a bit better, and will probably take a little more time to sketch out the design. This one came out pretty nicely, but there are little places that I’d work to improve upon for next time.

EDIT: touched up the paint, clear-coated and weathered it. I can say that now it’s done:

The Book is DONE

So…

I wrote a book!

The first draft of Cosplay: A History, or whatever we’re going to call it, is now complete. And by complete, it’s like a house with walls, a roof that’s leaking, and that’s in dire need of some more furniture, plumbing, and a couple of coats of paint.

But, that first draft is done, and it came in quite a bit longer than I thought it would be. If all goes well, it’ll get longer yet: I have a ton of interviews with a ton of cool people, and there’s a lot more to include before this is done. Like any history project I’ve ever worked on, there’s always something cool to add, and at some point, it’ll be done-done.

The book is now turned in, and it’ll go through the whole editorial process, notes, comments, and beta readers, then publishing. I honestly have no idea when it’ll work its way through that system. Hopefully, you’ll be able to get your hands on a copy in the near future.

Now, I’m going to go play Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, which has been my self-imposed reward for finishing.

Some Thoughts on The Rise of Skywalker

This was originally published on my newsletter (read / subscribe here):

I thought about doing a straight-up review of Rise of Skywalker, but that moment’s sort of passed. I saw it three times in theaters and generally enjoyed it. But there are a couple of moments that I specifically want to call out that reinforce my general opinion of J.J. Abrams: he’s not really a good filmmaker.

First, some context, and spoilers, obvs.

When Disney/Lucasfilm announced Abrams as the director for the rebooted series, it didn’t really come as any surprise. He’s been Hollywood’s wonderkid for years now, helped reboot Star Trek, and has had a deep sense of nostalgia ingrained in his filmmaking: Mission: Impossible III was a solid action flick (and a reboot), while Super 8 was a throwback-slash-love letter to Steven Spielberg. Disney had a tough job to do when it brought back Star Wars: it had to reassure fans that it knew what they wanted, and it didn’t want to deviate too far from that nostalgia and look / feel of the world. Abrams delivered that with TFA: a film that somewhat remade A New Hope and tee’ed up a roadmap for more films.

Then Rian Johnson directed The Last Jedi — an excellent film and departure from expectations that really should have set the franchise on a new direction. It attracted considerable ire from some parts of the Star Wars community, some with legitimate irritations about its structure and plot, others who descended into sexist and racist garbage because they don’t feel that women and characters of color should have a prominent role in the franchise. When Colin Trevorrow dropped out from Episode IX, Disney brought Abrams back in. The Rise of Skywalker does bring about an end to the saga in a solid way, considering the piecemeal fashion that the entire series has come together. Abrams had to not only bring about an end to the sequels, but give a good ending to the prequel AND original trilogy AND characters AND so forth.

The problem with ROS is that because Abrams is nostalgic and loves the material, he never really pulls any risky punches. TFA brings in a lot of very familiar tropes — which is fine, considering that Disney needed the best possible launchpad to kick off a new franchise — but ROS does the same thing: there’s nothing risky or dangerous about the film. There’s plenty of action and excitement, but it’s … kind of predictable at points.

One thing that bothered me most of all is that there’s no risk of danger to most of the characters, save for Snap Wexley during the final battle. Chewie is seen loaded into a First Order ship, which Rey then destroys by accident. Later, C-3P0 gets some knowledge that they can only get with a hard reset. In both instances, the characters survive: Chewie was loaded onto a different ship, while C-3P0 just gets backed up. Both resurrections undercut the character’s peril. Rey would have had a much harsher lesson when she got mad, and C-3P0’s sacrifice would have upped the ante for everyone involved. Carrie Fisher’s real-world death felt like it was handled a bit better, because that was a pretty immovable part of the production, and they had to build around it a bit. But in this instance: Leia’s death felt like it had importance: it helped to redeem Kylo / Ben Solo to get him to help save the day at the end — where he then dies.

Another element that soured really quickly was how the film reduced Kelly Marie Tran’s role as Rose Tico, a pivotal character from TLJ. She’s barely seen in the film, and while the filmmakers say that that’s because she had more screen time with Carrie Fisher’s recycled footage and that technical difficulties cut her out, it looks very much like Lucasfilm capitulating to the racist garbage fans who chased her off of social media a couple of years ago. It’s not a good look.

The McGuffin of a long-lost artifact that leads to a hidden treasure, but only if it’s used in the right spot at the right time. It worked for Indiana Jones. It doesn’t work when you have a decaying structure. It’s even worse when your story relies on TWO such McGuffins.

But most of all, after thinking about this for a while, I think what I resent the most about The Rise of Skywalker is that it makes The Last Jedi feel like a minor footnote in the larger franchise. I saw someone describe TFA as Episode 7, TLJ as Episode 7.5, and ROS as Episodes 8 and 9. I think that’s an accurate way to look at them, and it’s illuminating (and frustrating) to see how piecemeal the franchise was put together. Disney’s Marvel franchise plotted out a huge arc over a ton of films: they had at least something of an end-goal in mind. With Star Wars, it looks as though they were just building it piece by piece, hoping that they would get a good conclusion out of it.

As a result, Rise of Skywalker feels very much like it’s a film that’s filling two roles: J.J. Abram’s original idea for how the trilogy should have played out, while The Last Jedi makes some solid, fundamental comments about the nature of the Jedi Order, power, fallibility, and so forth. But TLJ’s messages are essentially contained to one film, and as such, it acts as a coda for TLJ. Walking out of the film in 2017, I felt like the movie should have been the finale: it was a little too out there, and it would have set up the next iteration on a solid footing: a demonstration that whatever comes next would be different. Instead, Abrams’ film shows that Disney / Lucasfilm are willing to play it safe, something constructed with plenty of input from Marketing, rather than focusing on a story that inspires wonder and awe, like those originals did years ago. Moreover, the big revelations, like Rey is really Palpatine’s granddaughter, the return of Palpatine himself, and the whole point of the First Order / Final Order really went unsupported — something that really should have been baked into the story structure of the franchise from the start. But Abrams really isn’t a director that’s interested in longer-term payoff: his body of work is characterized by the desire to spring mysteries on the audience and let them squabble about it while they wait for the next installment. That makes for a compelling in-the-moment scene, but long-term, I don’t think that it’ll be as interesting.

That all said, there were parts that I liked. Leia was handled well, I liked overarching story of Ben Solo falling to the dark side and finding redemption (although again, this should have been supported better?), the final scene, and the sheer kinetic energy. I suspect that there’s a 3 or so hour version of this kicking around somewhere, because there’s a lot in there, and the whole thing feels like it would be better if it were allowed to breathe a little. Rey and Kylo’s battle, where they’re in two different locations — that’s probably the most fascinating part of the film, visually and thematically.

Talking with someone this morning about it, I wish that Disney took on a similar approach to that of HBO’s take on Watchmen or even Rogue One: a wonderfully constructed story that takes cues from the original story’s intent and building blocks, and tells a related, but different story set in the same world. For the time being, it looks as though we’re going to get a bit of a pause on new Star Wars films for the time being, which is good. We don’t need 2-3 a year, and I’d rather LFL uses the time to get something good and interesting than another rehash of what we’ve already seen.

My most anticipated novels of 2020

In years past, I’ve put together lists compiling the books that I’m most excited to read in the coming year. I’m generally happy with my forecasting skills, and writing up such a list helps me figure out what looks like I should keep my eyes out on. This year is no different, and there are a number of really excellent-looking novels coming out that I’m eager to get onto my to-read list. Here’s what I’ve got my eyes on:

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu, January 28th

I’ve been a fan of Charles Yu’s since his wonderful, meta debut novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. He’s a unique writer who plays with form and style quite a bit, and his next is a take on Asian representation in Hollywood, which looks particularly interesting. (Especially because he’s one of the writers for HBO’s Westworld.)

The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by Ken Liu, February 25th

Any book by Ken Liu is an instant buy for me, especially one with his short fiction. His debut collection The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories was a wonderful volume, and new collection contains a number of his newer short stories (many of which I haven’t read yet.)

Gravity of a Distant Sun by R.E. Stearns, February 18th

R.E. Stearns’ debut novel Barbary Station is one of my favorite recent space operas, and she’s bringing her Shieldrunners trilogy to a close with Gravity of a Distant Sun this year. This series is full of fantastic characters, concepts and action, and I’m hoping that it’ll be a good end for Adda and Iridian.

Sixteenth Watch by Myke Cole, March 10th

I like Myke’s books quite a bit, and this is his first science fiction novel, about the future of the Coast Guard in space. He’s also a former Coast Guard officer, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what he brings to the military SF field.

Otaku by Chris Kluwe, March 3rd

Chris Kluwe’s a former football player and gamer who’s written a lot about the genre over the years, and this is his debut. This one’s being called a classic cyberpunk adventure, but what’s really attracted my attention is the fantastic cover.

A Pale Light in the Black by K.B. Wagers, March 3rd

Another Coast Guard in space type of book — I’ve liked K.B. Wager’s debut space opera novel Behind the Throne, but just haven’t kept up with the series. This looks like a really fun space opera.

Hearts of Oak by Eddie Robson, March 17th

I’m not entirely sure what this story is about, other than it’s about a strange city, but this is one of those books where I’m sucked in by the cover.

The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin, March 24th

N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy has become one of my favorites, and she’s taking on some new issues with The City We Became, which is set in the same world as her fantastic short story The City Born Great (which you should go read right now.)

Shorefall by Robert Jackson Bennett, April 21st

I loved Robert Jackson Bennett’s Foundryside — it’s what I’d call a fantasy cyberpunk novel. The sequel picks up the adventures of Sancia Grado and her friends as they spark a magical revolution in Tevanne. Foundryside was a smart novel, and this one looks like it’ll be just as good.

Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang (translated by Ken Liu), April 14th

There has been a lot of great Chinese science fiction out there, and the one that I’m looking forward to the most is Hao Jingfan’s Vagabonds, about tensions between Earth and Martian colonies. Bonus: brilliantly executed cover.

The Last Emperox by John Scalzi, April 14th

Scalzi books are always a fun read. I was a little iffy on The Consuming Fire — I wanted less people talking in rooms and more interstellar stuff, which he really excels at. This caps off the trilogy, and I’m eager to see where how he closes it out.

Network Effect by Martha Wells, May 5th

I loved Martha Wells’ Murderbot series, and her next entry in this world is Network Effect, a full-length novel. I’m looking forward to seeing how she scales up into a longer story with Murderbot, and am excited to return to this particular world.

Thrawn Ascendancy: Chaos Rising by Timothy Zahn, May 5th

Zahn is continuing his adventures of Grand Admiral Thrawn, and kicks off a new trilogy set in the Unknown Regions. I have a sneaking suspicion that he’ll be tying in a bit of the revelation that came in Rise of Skywalker. Hopefully, we’ll get a bit more character development than in the prior installments.

Alphabet Squadron: Shadow Fall by Alexander Freed, June 23rd

I loved Freed’s Alphabet Squadron last year, and felt like it’s a good continuation of the X-Wing series tradition. Freed is continuing the adventures of Alphabet Squadron’s members as they take on the Imperial Remnant. I’m excited to see where this goes.

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, June 30th

I really enjoyed Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s novel Signal to Noise, and I’ve been meaning to read Gods of Jade and Shadow. This one looks like an interesting story about the high life in Mexico, along with some ancient dangers.

The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowal, July 14th

Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronaut novels The Calculating Stars and The Fated Sky were both fantastic alternate history reads that tackled hard science, gender and racial equality in the space race, and I’ve been waiting for a while for this next installment.

Holy Crap, A Girl Called Eddy has a new album

Rewind to the fall of 2004. The year before, I got my first computer, and I’d spent much of that time ripping the collection of CDs that I’d acquired over the years to its music library. When I’d exhausted that, I started roaming around the internet looking for free songs. I missed out on Napster / Limewire — I was too paranoid about getting a virus or something — but I did scour the iTunes and Amazon stores for freebies. I came across some really great bands that way, including one song by a group called A Girl Called Eddy.

The band is the moniker of singer Erin Moran, and I love her voice — it’s low, seductive, bristling with energy and movement. The song was The Long Goodbye (there was a B-side called Under the Warm Sun as well), and man, it was a song that got me through the angsty years of college crushes and girlfriends. I ended up picking up the rest of the album, and in the 16 years since I first came across it, it’s been one of those albums that I’ll throw up on the speakers and listen to.

Last night, while poking around the iTunes store, her named popped up in the ‘upcoming albums by artists you already own section’, which shocked me. Over the years, I’ve wondered if A Girl Called Eddy was one of those glorious one hit wonders — something that strikes and never gets followed up on. It seems as though that’s not the case, as her next album, Been Around, is set to be released on January 17th. I’m kicking myself, because news about the album seems to have broken last fall.

There’s always a worry that followup albums — especially the ones that come years and years after — can never live up to a brilliant first effort, but if this new album is anything to go on, it’s going to be good. Been Around is a wonderful track, one that I’ve listened to a dozen times already while I’ve puttered around this morning. Hopefully, the rest of the album will be just as good.