We want to send you a galley of A.M. Dellamonica’s A Daughter of No Nation, the sequel to Child of a Hidden Sea—available December 1st from Tor Books!

Sophie Hansa has returned to our world. Unable to discuss the wondrous sights she has seen, and unable to tell anyone what happened to her in her time away, Sophie is in a holding pattern, focused entirely on her eventual chance to return to Stormwrack.

With the sudden arrival of Garland Parrish, Sophie is once again gone. This time, she has been called back to Stormwrack in order to spend time with her father, a Duelist-Adjudicator, who is an unrivaled combatant and fearsome negotiator. But is he driven by his commitment to seeing justice prevail, or is he a sociopath? Soon, she discovers something repellent about him that makes her reject him, and everything he is offering.

Adrift again, she discovers that her time spent with her father is not without advantages, however, for Sophie has discovered there is nothing to stop her from setting up a forensic institute in Stormwrack, investigating cases that have been bogged down in the courts, sometimes for years. Her fresh look into a long-standing case between two of the islands turns up new information that could get her, and her friends, pulled into something bold and daring, which changes the entire way she approaches this strange new world…

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What is it, the holidays or something? Only ten new fantasies set out on epic quests in December, including series additions from A.M. Dellamonica (Hidden Sea Tales), Carol Berg (Sanctuary Duet), Steven Harper (Books of Blood and Iron), and Julia Knight (Duelists Trilogy).

Fiction Affliction details releases in science fiction, fantasy, urban fantasy, paranormal romance, and “genre-benders.” Keep track of them all here. Note: All title summaries are taken and/or summarized from copy provided by the publisher.

WEEK ONE

A Daughter of No Nation (Hidden Sea Tales #2)—A.M. Dellamonica (December 1, Tor)

Sophie Hansa wanted to meet her birth parents. She and her stepbrother find themselves transported to a world made up of giant archipelagos and people who can magically alter themselves. It looked like Sophie had seen the last of the Fleet, until she finds the captain of her late aunt’s ship, Parrish Garland, waiting for her at her parents’ home. Sophie finds out that her birth mother has been imprisoned by her birth father for hiding their daughter. Sophie must return to Stormwrack to talk her father into releasing her mother. She must navigate the troubled social waters of her father’s home nation and finds herself in the middle of a conspiracy that could lead to civil war in the Fleet. Sophie, Bran, and Parrish must unravel a decades-old mystery to free Sophie’s mom and preserve the peace ensured by the nations united in the Fleet.

Ash and Silver (The Sanctuary Duet #2)—Carol Berg (December 1, Roc)

Ever since the Order of the Equites Cineré stole his memory, his name, and his heart, thinking about the past makes Greenshank’s head ache. After two years of training, he is almost ready to embrace the mission of the Order, to use selfless magic to heal the troubles of Navronne. But on his first assignment alone, the past comes racing back, threatening to drown him in conspiracy, grief, and murder. He is Lucian de Remeni, a sorcerer whose magical bents for portraiture and history threaten the safety of the earth and the future of the war-riven kingdom of Navronne. He just can’t remember how or why. Fighting to unravel the mysteries of his power, Lucian must trace threads of corruption that reach from the Pureblood Registry into the Order itself, the truth hidden two centuries in the past and beyond the boundaries of the world.

Blood Storm (The Books of Blood and Iron #2)—Steven Harper (December 1, Roc)

Ages ago, those who had the ability to change their shape lost it, leading to endless bloody battles for supremacy between the races, until one reluctant hero stepped forth to restore peace to the world. Even though Danr the half troll ended centuries of fighting, he still is not living the quiet life he longs for. Rumors have arisen that certain people are once again wielding the power of the shape. If Danr could learn to use it, he could become fully human and spend his life with his beloved, Aisa. But he is not the only one who craves the gift of changing form. Slavers have taken Danr’s friends captive, demanding the power of the shape as ransom. To obtain it, Danr must cross paths with the Fates, Death, and a giant wyrm that lives at the bottom of the ocean, before other, more dangerous parties uncover the secrets of shape changing.

Crucible: All-New Tales of Valdemar (Tales of Valdemar #9)—Mercedes Lackey (December 1, DAW)

In 1987, Mercedes Lackey published her first novel, Arrows of the Queen. This modest book about a magical land called Valdemar would be the beginning of a fantasy masterwork series spanning decades and including more than two dozen titles. Now the voices of other authors add their own touches to the ancient land where Heralds “Chosen” from all walks of life by magical horse-like Companions patrol their ancient kingdom, dispensing justice, facing adversaries, and protecting their monarch and country from whatever threatens. Trained rigorously by the Herald’s Collegium, these protectors each have extraordinary Gifts: Mindspeaking, FarSeeing, FarSpeaking, Empathy, Firestarting and ForeSeeing, and are bonded for life with their mysterious Companions. Travel with these astounding adventurers in these original stories.

Pathfinder Tales: Bloodbound (Pathfinder Tales #30)—F. Wesley Schneider (December 1, Tor)

Larsa is a dhampir, half vampire, half human. In the gritty streets and haunted moors of gothic Ustalav, she’s an agent for the royal spymaster, keeping peace between the capital’s secret vampire population and its huddled human masses. Yet when a noblewoman’s entire house is massacred by vampiric invaders, Larsa is drawn into a deadly game of cat-and-mouse that will reveal far more about her own heritage than she ever wanted to know. A dark fantasy adventure of murder, intrigue, and secrets best left buried, set in the award-winning world of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.

The Secret of the Nagas (The Shiva Trilogy #2)—Amish Tripathi, (December 1, Jo Fletcher Books)

Today, He is a God. 4000 years ago, He was just a man. The hunt is on. The sinister Naga warrior has killed his friend Brahaspati and now stalks his wife Sati. Shiva, the Tibetan immigrant who is the prophesied destroyer of evil, will not rest till he finds his demonic adversary. His vengeance and the path to evil will lead him to the door of the Nagas, the serpent people. A kingdom is dying as it is held to ransom for a miracle drug. A crown prince is murdered. The Vasudevs Shivas philosopher guides betray his unquestioning faith as they take the aid of the dark side. Even the perfect empire, Meluha is riddled with a terrible secret in Maika, the city of births. Unknown to Shiva, a master puppeteer is playing a grand game. In a journey that will take him across the length and breadth of ancient India, Shiva searches for the truth in a land of deadly mysteries only to find that nothing is what it seems. (U.S.)

WEEK TWO

Game of Thrones: The Noble Houses of Westeros: Seasons 1-5—Running Press, editor (December 8, Running Press)

In the seven kingdoms of Westeros, an intricate and perilous game is being played out among its participants, the great and noble houses. Alliances are formed, wars are waged, kings are murdered, and new monarchs are crowned. Game of Thrones: The Noble Houses of Westeros Seasons 1–5 serves as a guide to the key houses as their constant struggle for power persists and as the hierarchical structure of the kingdom evolves. The book is filled with essential information including each house’s sigil, history, home, family tree, character profiles, and is fully illustrated with series photography throughout.

WEEK THREE

No Reprieve (The Ascendant Kingdoms Saga)—Gail Z. Martin (December 15, Orbit)

Explore the origin of Blaine McFadden and his allies in this short story prequel to the epic Ascendant Kingdoms Saga. Condemned to exile in an arctic prison colony for murdering his sister’s attacker, Blaine McFadden has lost everything, his title, his family and his fiancé. Velant Prison holds the worst of the kingdom’s convicts, overseen by brutal guards who are exiles themselves. When a sadistic guard takes things too far, Blaine’s insubordination makes him a target of the prison’s notorious commander. To survive, Blaine needs to rely on his wits and his fists, and a few good friends to watch his back. (Digital)

Warlords and Wastrels (The Duelists Trilogy #3)—Julia Knight (December 15, Orbit)

Vocho and Kacha may be known for the first swordplay in the city of Reyes, but they’ve found themselves backed into a corner too often for their liking. Finally reinstated into the Duelist’s Guild for services rendered to the prelate, who has found himself back in charge, Vocho and Kacha are tasked with bringing a prisoner to justice. But this prisoner is none other than Kacha’s old flame Egimont. The prelate wants him alive, and on their side. However the more they discover of Egimont and his dark dealings with the magician, the more Kacha’s loyalties are divided. Soon she must choose a side, the prelate or the king, her brother or her ex-lover. The fate of Reyes is balanced on a knife-edge.

WEEK FOUR

A Fantasy Medley 3—Yanni Kuznia, editor (December 31, Subterranean Press)

Anthology. In “Goddess at the Crossroads,” Kevin Hearne shares an episode from his Iron Druid Chronicles hero Atticus O’Sullivan, revealing how one night’s encounter with the cult of Hecate served as inspiration for Shakespeare’s witches in the Scottish play. With “Ashes,” Laura Bickle revisits Detroit arson investigator and spirit medium Anya Kalinczyk as she and Hades’ Charon pursues a destructive fire elemental named the Nain Rouge. “The Death of Aiguillon” finds Aliette de Bodard exploring an episode sixty years prior to the start of her novel, The House of Shattered Wings, in which the survivors of an ongoing magical conflict in Paris eke out a grim existence, and one woman’s wish for a better life is granted at a terrible price. In “One Hundred Ablutions,” Jacqueline Carey tells the tale of Dala, a young woman chosen by her people’s overlords to be an exalted slave among slaves, and of the twining in her life of ritual, rebellion, and redemption.

Suzanne Johnson is the author of the Sentinels of New Orleans urban fantasy series, and writes paranormal and suspense as Susannah Sandlin. You can find Suzanne on Facebook and on her website.

We have a Mad! Yesterday, Joel Hodgson officially announced that Felicia Day would be joining the new MST3K as a Mad Scientist named Kinga Forrester, which makes her Dr. Clayton Forrester’s daughter, which raises a whole lot of questions I am not planning to ask. But a new Mad! Plus, we have new voices for Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot, Baron Vaughn and Hampton Yount. Both are stand-ups who were recommended to Hodgson by new host, Jonah Ray. So, there remains but one shadowy outline to fill! And while the AV Club said that this outline was, and I quote, “Patton Oswalt-shaped” I would like to put forward that it is also a bit TV’s Frank-shaped, no? Look at that fluffy hair! Could it be? Will the new MST3K turn its crank to Frank? Head over to the Kickstarter to see Hodgson welcome Felicia Day into the fold.

I have read more of Ryan Britt’s writing than any other person on this planet. This makes me the most qualified person—ever—to review Ryan’s first book, a collection of essays titled Luke Skywalker Can’t Read.

I believe that Pulitzer Prize finalist Karen Russell once summarized the former Tor.com staff writer as “an uncontrolled experiment”—perhaps during a speech at the U.N. I don’t know—so it is with this in mind that you must confront Ryan and whatever lizard-person theory he is writing about this week. Be on guard, but also, be accepting of the spaghetti pile of ideas that he brings to you. The plating is unorthodox but the meal is supremely tasty. (He put cheese in it.)

I personally spent 57 years here at Tor.com editing Ryan’s essays, listening to his daily pitches, and sharing a small office with him. This often meant listening to him explain how director and screenwriter Nicholas Meyer is responsible for the creation of all science fiction, or how Joss Whedon actually just uses the same 5 lines of dialogue in all of his projects and no one’s ever noticed, or how I should photoshop Data-as-Sherlock-Holmes into the BBC’s Sherlock promo art. What I’m trying to get at here is that Ryan is dyspeptically annoying. He makes your hair fall out. He makes you want to go to war.

I think this is what readers will initially feel as they first read Ryan’s memoir/essay collection/fan theory book, and the collection starts off by immediately addressing this perception. “This book isn’t meant to be the final word on anything” goes the Author’s Note, before diving into the first essay “Out of the Sideshows,” which looks at the emergence of geek culture into the mainstream. He recalls his years in junior high and the nigh-stereotypical stigmatization that came with being a geek. “If there’s a club where everyone agrees on being normal together, I wasn’t in it,” Ryan says. While he’s recalling his years in junior high, he’s also commenting on the discourse within present day geek culture and how that discourse is changing as geek culture becomes—and stays, judging by the fact that we’re in Year 8 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Year 6 of Game of Thrones—mainstream pop culture. Certain ideas enjoy widespread acceptance in geek culture: Wolverine is cool, Han shot first, Harry Potter is the one who kills around here… To challenge, or even play with, this sort of gospel invites annoyance.

Ryan does this effortlessly. I don’t think he knows how not to, honestly, even though he admits in his essay “I Know It’s Only Science Fiction, But I Like It” that he didn’t always feel the need to challenge his fellow geeks. His essays for Tor.com, however, are always based in this need to play with geek gospel; to hold it up to a different lens. So during his time in the office here, whenever he would pitch a robot-related or Prince Xizor-based essay idea I would encourage him to explore that idea with one caveat: He should anticipate the criticism his idea would receive and try and find evidence to address that criticism—that plot hole really—in his essay. That way a reader wouldn’t stop reading an essay to nitpick and would instead absorb the entire perspective that Ryan was putting forth.

The beginning of Luke Skywalker Can’t Read concerns this “anticipation of argument” that both he and I perceive in geek discourse. And it’s a really enjoyable read, not just because Ryan is funny, but because he doesn’t insist on looking at geek discourse in solely binary terms. Luke Skywalker Can’t Read, even though it argues that Luke Skywalker can’t read, doesn’t insist that there is an outright incorrect or correct way to talk about the pop culture that we love. He anticipates potential arguments, yes, not in order to shut them down, but to make his perception clearer.

As readers, he argues, our relationship with pop culture and geek icons goes deeper than right-and-wrong. These are stories and characters that we defend through argument because they impart a sense of fun more potent than anything else. In the memoir portions of Luke Skywalker Can’t Read, Ryan traces the origins of his own love of geeky stuff from his childhood, through adolescence, into his teenage and college years, and into adulthood. Ryan’s love changes as he does: It expands, it calcifies, it gets analytical, it softens, it gets drunk enough to allow me to pick him up one night at Professor Thom’s… In short, Ryan ends up discovering how he learned to love what he loves. Just why is he so enamored by Bram Stoker’s version of Dracula? Or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s version of Sherlock Holmes? Is he just putting on intellectual airs? (Sometimes, he admits.) Or is there something else?

Usually, there’s something else. For a long time I was afraid to read my review copy of Luke Skywalker Can’t Read, because I knew that once I did, my mental image of Ryan Britt as my friend would change. In my own life, exploring why I love what I love has ultimately meant exploring my sense of self. This same journey plays out for Ryan all throughout Luke Skywalker Can’t Read. His sense of fun, his overwhelming curiosity, not only reveals new ways of considering Star Wars, Sherlock, or Back to the Future, but also Ryan himself.

And that’s the point, Ryan argues. It’s no fun to just parrot what everyone else is saying. Go deep. Find what makes Firefly or The Lord of the Rings or Torchwood: Miracle Day fun (or not fun) for YOU. Then tell your friends, because hey, maybe it’ll be fun for them, too.

This is something that Ryan had to teach me, in person, when we first started working together all those centuries ago. I had to learn to stop rolling my eyes at his latest theory and just listen; have faith that his love for something like, say, Star Wars, was just as deep and legitimate as mine. I’m glad I did. Not only did I gain one hell of an uncontrolled experiment for a friend (and a Ric Olie action figure) I learned to have way more fun with the pop culture that I love. And while I can’t promise that this will happen to you, I promise that it will happen to you.

So go buy Ryan’s book! He’s fun.

Chris Lough writes for Tor.com and will ski on your lunch if he wants, Ryan.

One of my favorite stories about what it was like to see Star Wars: A New Hope when it was released in 1977 comes from my father. He went to see the film with his friend and roommate at the time, and when Vader’s Star Destroyer came into frame in the opening sequence, stretching on and on into infinity, the guy sunk into his chair and shouted to the theater “Oh shit, this is it!”

I love that story because it elucidates something so significant about that first Star Wars film; when it first came out, no one had ever seen anything quite like it.

I’m not saying that no one ever made movies about space or put aliens in stuff or made model ships that they danced across black screens. But the scope of Star Wars, the detail that went into its world-building, was unprecedented at the time. The journey is well-documented—smudging vaseline on the lens of a camera to blur out the secret wheels under Luke’s landspeeder, using string to get R2-D2’s jack into the Death Star’s computer socket, five guys standing outside the Falcon’s cockpit set and manually shaking the thing when the ship was caught in the Death Star’s tractor beam. No one working on the film truly understood what their hard work was going into, the actors couldn’t get George Lucas to talk to them (he was too shy), and when the young director returned home from the shoot, he found that none of the special effects were up to snuff and scrapped every single one of them.

The fact that Star Wars got made at all is a miracle. The fact that it became the cultural phenomenon and touchstone we know today is exasperating to think about due to the sheer impossibility of it. This funny little space movie should have been a cult classic, a fond childhood memory that 70s and 80s kids inflicted on their own groaning children. And yet here we are, living in a world where no one hears the words “I am your father” without snickering behind their hand. Where “cinnamon bun” is a legit (though nearly impossible to recreate) hairstyle, and practically every child has pretended to wield a lightsaber against their siblings. Where these films are entering their third trilogy and multiple generations will holds hands and march into theaters everywhere on December 17th to recapture that feeling all over again.

Can you rewatch this movie with a clear head? For my part, it’s impossible. It’s imprinted on the backs of my eyelids, its soundtrack put me to sleep as a child, its wide reach found me some of my dearest friends. But why? Why this film? This was the point of investment, the place where the world decided how seriously it was prepared to take a strange mythic space opera that started with a scroll of yellow slanted text. If everyone had thought it was a cute kiddie film, the next movie would have been a weird story where Luke and Leia got into a mud fight and tried to snatch a snazzy crystal out from under Lord Vader’s nose. (I’m not fibbing—click the link.) It would have been a fantasy adventure like Legend or Willow, fun and silly and far from any Top 100 movie lists. So this is the real question: why did Star Wars work?

And the honest to goodness reason might be simpler than anyone is willing to admit. It’s because, practically speaking, Star Wars is a perfect movie.

Most people are going to be in two camps when I say this. The first camp thinks I’m crazy to issue a statement like that when there are movies out there made by super smart people like Stanley Kubrick and Céline Sciamma and David Lynch and Ava DuVernay and Federico Fellini. The second camp thinks I’m crazy to issue a statement like that when Empire Strikes Back exists. And both points of view are totally valid, I’m not disputing either of them. But the first Star Wars film accomplishes something very special, something rarely appreciated by art communities of any kind. (Don’t even get me started on the fact that this movie lost out to Annie Hall at the Oscars the next year. I know we don’t expect that kind of recognition for genre films, but it really does make me want to break china.)

Star Wars: A New Hope is pure mythology, distilled down to some of its simplest forms. Good and evil. Life and death. Triumph and defeat. Light and dark. When Lucas screened the film for a group of his friends and most of them shrugged their shoulders, Steven Spielberg had the measure of it. He told them all that the film would make a millions of dollars because of its “naiveté and innocence.” That those qualities were Lucas to a tee, and that he’d finally found the perfect medium to express them in. To most, those words of praise probably sound like a vote against—after all, who actually wants to be called innocent and naive? Who wants to create art and have it labelled that way? But it’s a mistake to knock those qualities on principle, just as it’s a mistake to insist that Empire Strikes Back is a better film simply because it’s “darker.” And it’s also a mistake to dismiss context, to wit—

—Star Wars was released two years after the Vietnam War ended.

To pretend that this had no bearing on the success of the first Star Wars film is far more naive than Spielberg accuses the movie itself of being. Vietnam marks a specific point in the American cultural consciousness, a definitive loss in the mind of the public, a war that destroyed the lives of so many young soldiers. It was also a war that was actively and broadly protested, largely by the country’s youth. That do-no-wrong brand of American zealousness, the sort touted by World War I clarion calls like “Over There,” was badly shaken.

And what of Star Wars? Is it any surprise that many Americans would be excited by a film where good and evil were easily grouped, where rebels go up against an Empire of oppression and fear? The story of a young farmboy, a princess, and a rogue who happen to fall together at just the right time, and bring the fight for galactic freedom one giant leap forward? Perhaps innocence isn’t really the best term, technically speaking. Star Wars is idealism personified, and it arrived at a time when it was desperately needed.

The truth is, we often turn our nose down at optimistic narratives when they are the hardest to pull off successfully. We expect the worst in others, we believe in sarcasm and worst case scenarios. We have no difficulty with the grim and the fatalistic and the fallen. Dystopia has been a undisputed ruler of fiction for years because everyone can find truth in it. We find it easy to imagine that the stuff of nightmares may come to pass. Getting people to buy the reverie? To believe in good unequivocally? That’s a magic trick of the highest order. That requires that we bypass every barrier created of cynicism, pragmatism, and expectation. It requires that a story reach deep down and contact the child in everyone.

When I was young, I adored Star Wars because it appealed to my code, my fundamental makeup, my wildest dreams. Now that I’m no longer that person, I love Star Wars because it reminds me of that little girl I used to be. It reminds me that I still need her.

And the reason that audiences were able to take Star Wars seriously was the because the people making the film were asked to take it seriously. So often before this (and indeed, before Star Trek), genre stories were performed with a necessary tongue-in-cheek quality. Very few were willing to treat these tales with a genuine candor. But the cast of this film somehow rolled themselves into an intensely perfect package. Every single actor is superbly suited to their role, and gives a performance above and beyond what was expected of them–and there are so many stories to that tune, too. Harrison Ford threatening to shove Lucas against a wall force him to read his own dialogue. Alec Guinness’ disdain for the entire project, and annoyance that audiences only knew him as Obi-Wan after it was released. The used car salesman accent that Lucas originally wanted for C-3PO, and Anthony Daniels’ smart suggestion to try a stuffy butler cadence instead. If no one had been willing to put in the effort, it would have been far easier to dismiss the film as a whole.

Star Wars captured people for being dirty and worn. Its design didn’t emerge from a singular shiny’n’streamlined retro-future play box; there was a cohesion to each place, each group, tied together by color palettes, sound, geometry, the intensity of light. The script is anything but poetry, but it is masterful in its ability to get out just enough information without being trite or tedious. It teases ideas that leave the audience curious and desperate for more—what are the spice mines of Kessel? What is this Academy that Luke is so insistent on attending? How does the Senate in this galaxy function? How did Leia end up a member of the Rebel Alliance?

The narrative is framed with precision and intention in mind—there are very few scenes in film history with the ability to manipulate quite so astutely as Luke staring off into a twin sunset, desperate for a more meaningful life. There are few battle sequences that find the same tension as the Rebel Alliance’s run on the Death Star. There aren’t many Western saloon scenes that can match the Mos Eisley Cantina for atmosphere and attitude. The film never spends too long in any one place, but it makes certain that all of its beats play out distinctly. It is wonderfully balanced as well; the droids’ antics pinball off of Obi-Wan’s grave demeanor which provides an easy counterpoint to both Luke’s earnestness and Han’s growing irritation.

I can’t talk about the film without mentioning the various special edition cuts that most fans are forced to watch. With each of the original trilogy offerings, there are drawbacks and improvements to the alterations. For this film, they’re fairly obvious; the additions to the Mos Eisley Spaceport are largely unnecessary, the added scene with Jabba provides context (but looks horrible in every edition), and the altered special effects for the final attack on the Death Star look excellent and genuinely make the battle easier to read. There’s also the “Han shot first” dilemma, which I am not going to get into, mostly because I feel like it’s an argument made for the wrong reasons. (Short version: I think Han should absolutely shoot first, but it seems to me that the majority of fandom wants it that way because they think it’s a testament to how cool Han is. And I don’t think Han is the cool guy. He’s funny and charming and likable, but he’s not cool.)

Each beat in the mythic narrative is nailed with an ease that should still make filmmakers envious. We casually discover our hero at a junk sale. He is helpfully saved by a wise guide who gives him a call to adventure. They encounter a sidekick/scoundrel who is only willing to help them in order to fix problems of his own. They are fortunately captured in the same place their cool-headed princess/resistance fighter is being held. And on and on it goes, without ever having to try over-hard to make the story move along. It gives the first film a lightness, a sense of wonder that is commonly unmatched in cinema. There is tragedy, yes, and profound tragedy at that. But for every terrible action there is one swing across a chasm on by rope. There is one alien jazz song in a seedy spaceport bar. There is one panicked protocol droid crying over the death of his master by trash compactor, long after his counterpart has solved the problem.

Star Wars is a story that wears its influences on its sleeve, yet there are so many of them that it is hard to accuse the movie of being simply derivative or disingenuous. The combination of sources is too deft, too carefully woven. You can’t just read Joseph Campbell’s Hero With A Thousand Faces and understand everything Star Wars is about. You can’t watch one Kurosawa film and have its measure. You can’t sit through a Flash Gordon marathon and consider yourself wholly informed. You’d need so much more besides that: theology courses on Eastern and Western religions, an introduction to drag racing, World War II history, Frank Herbert’s Dune, opera, Arthurian legend, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and 633 Squadron. All this and you’d barely scratch the surface. It’s not a random culling of sources–it’s a deliberate homage to storytelling as an artform.

Star Wars isn’t simply fun, or entertaining, or enjoyably distracting. Its idealism honestly doesn’t cover it either, even if that’s a significant part of its appeal. No, when we’re down to the most elemental tenets of story, Star Wars is precisely one thing: it is joyful.

And how often can we say that about the stories that we love?

That’s really the secret sauce, in my opinion. We can pretend to profundity all we want, but we can’t prefer meaningful sadness every day of the week. It doesn’t make the smart, dark stuff any less important… we just see a lot more of it. While quality varies drastically across the board, there will always be more Breaking Bads. More Battlestar Galacticas. More Sopranos. But that first Star Wars film? It is a rare breed. And it is something that we need, desperately, the more jaded and critical we become.

Emily Asher-Perrin needs to swing across a chasm via rope just once. You can bug her on Twitter and Tumblr, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.

My reading has slowed down this autumn. (Well, it’s winter now, and it still hasn’t sped back up.) I’m told this is understandable when one comes to the end of a large and demanding project, but it’s peculiarly frustrating. There are several shelves of books I want to read and talk about! Like Genevieve Cogman’s The Masked City and Becky Chambers’ The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet, and Jacey Bedford’s Winterwood, and Julia Knight’s Swords and Scoundrels, and Charlie Jane Anders’ All The Birds In The Sky. To say nothing of books published in years previous to this one…

But such is, as they say, life. This week I hope you’ll let me tell you about three interesting novels that I have managed to read recently.

Lila Bowen’s Wake of Vultures is lately out from Orbit. (Bowen has also written as Delilah S. Dawson.) Set in a version of the early 19th-century American West with monsters and magic, Wake of Vultures stars Nettie Lonesome, aka Nat Lonesome, aka Rhett Hennessy: half-black, half-Indian, raised by white folks who didn’t call her a slave but treated her like one. When Nettie kills a man whose body dissolves into dust, she finds herself caught up in a peculiar destiny. One that involves killing monsters and learning who—and what—she is.

This is solid old-fashioned pulp adventure—with a non-binary-gendered non-white protagonist who’s attracted to both men and women. To me, that’s a number of points in its favour, even if I’m not normally a fan of US Western settings. And it’s fun.

I don’t know if I can describe Karen Lord’s The Galaxy Game (out last spring from Jo Fletcher Books) as “fun.” It’s interesting, and peculiar, and oddly gentle, though it sees revolutions and invasions take place. I cannot make sense of its structure: I do not understand why it makes the choice of viewpoints and viewpoint characters that it does. It seems more like a picaresque novel, a series of loosely connected incidents with no overarching plot. Science fiction as a genre is not usually given to the picaresque, and it’s a strange adjustment to make, as a reader: a jarring change to one’s assumptions about how narratives including spaceships and telepathy usually go. And yet the characters are sufficiently compelling that one finds oneself reading on, curious to see what next new change will come…

Nnedi Okorafor’s The Book of Phoenix is neither pulp nor picaresque. It is, instead, a complex, exciting book about personhood and power, colonisation and imperialism, villainy and truth. Phoenix is an accelerated organism, two years old but with the body and understanding of a forty-year-old woman. And other powers as well, powers the corporation that created her means to use as a weapon. But Phoenix is a woman with a will of her own, and when she achieves freedom from her creators, she’s going to make decisions that change the world—and maybe destroy it.

Like the rest of Okorafor’s science fiction (at least that I’ve read), The Book of Phoenix is willing to mingle the furniture of science fiction with the sensibilities of magical realism. The Book of Phoenix has a pointed political argument to make, the kind of argument about power and consequences science fiction has been making since its inception… but Okorafor opens up a universe that is wider and stranger and more interesting for its mythic and magical elements. The Book of Phoenix is fascinating and compelling, and I recommend it wholeheartedly.

What are you all reading?

Liz Bourke is a cranky person who reads books. She has recently completed a doctoral dissertation in Classics at Trinity College, Dublin. Find her at her blog. Or her Twitter.

Like the Wheel of Time series itself, The Wheel of Time Companion offers rewards for those who undertake a detailed readthrough. Now that the hefty new companion volume has been in stores for a few weeks, is there a favorite amongst the details you’ve discovered?

Personally, I love maps, so I’m excited to have the progression and troops movements of The Last Battle laid out in bird’s-eye view above the Fields of Merrilor. I also tend to get lost in the minutiae of Seanchan culture, following “See also” after “See also.”

How about you?

Also, if you missed Team Jordan and Jason Denzel on their Wheel of Time Companion & Mystic tour this past month, check out this neat video cut together by Denzel of the various stops along the way.

Hot off her Alias reread, Tansy Rayner Roberts reviews Netflix’s Jessica Jones. In this post: “AKA It’s Called Whiskey.” Spoilers for season 1.

“AKA It’s Called Whiskey”

Written by Liz Friedman & Scott Reynolds
Directed by David Petrarca

Upon discovering that they are both superhuman—Jessica superstrong, Luke unbreakable—the logical conclusion is for them to have a lot of sex. Loud, neighbour-annoying, wall-shaking, bed-breaking sex.

In between, they talk. Luke has never met another “gifted” (it’s adorable that they don’t have the vocabulary for this) and is genuinely pleased to get to know Jessica’s take on the weird world around them.

Jessica is reluctant to discuss the others out there—she knows more than she is letting on.

Their night becomes awkward when Jessica (for the second time) spots the photo in Luke’s bathroom cabinet, of Reva Connors, a woman we’ve also seen listed as one of the official fatalities from the bus crash that failed to kill Kilgrave.

Once again, their night together ends with Jessica saying sorry—this time, however, it’s a very heartfelt statement, and feels like something she’s been waiting to say for a long time.

Luke assumes that Jessica squirreled out of there because she panicked at the news he had a tragically dead wife. The flashbacks throughout this episode suggest something far more damaging—that Jessica witnessed (was responsible for?) Reva’s death.

The media storm around Hope’s claim not to be responsible for the murder of her parents is driving Jessica up the wall. She tries to get Jeri Hogarth to fix it, but the lawyer rightfully points out that without overwhelming evidence, arguing the “mind control” case in the court of public opinion would be career suicide.

Jessica turns then to Trish, a popular chat show host with a built-in audience, who also knows that Kilgrave exists and Hope is telling the truth. Trish is reluctant, but after talking to Jeri, gets fired up about doing a special show on the topic.

LUKE CAGE: Just say it, woman. Whatever it is you’ve not been saying since we first met.

Oh, sweetie. You really don’t want to know.

After yet another night of not-quite bed-breaking sex with Luke, Jessica takes the opportunity to sound him out on the idea of a man who has the power to control minds. Even Luke Cage, with his unbreakable skin, finds that too hard to swallow. Which isn’t good news for Hope and her case.

To Jessica’s alarm, Trish’s interview with Hope turns into a debate about the existence of mind control between Trish and Jeri—with Trish’s unresolved feelings about Kilgrave pouring out in a vicious tirade about him.

First time caller, British accent. Kilgrave purrs his way on to Trish’s airwaves, and while Hope has a meltdown at the sound of David Tennant’s voice, Jessica’s best friend makes a public target of herself.

Good thing Trish is now a lethal weapon and lives in a highly secured fortress, right? Only Trish is about to learn what Jessica has been telling her all along – traditional methods of protecting yourself don’t exactly work against Kilgrave.

Jessica has other things to worry about—like how exactly to steal medical-grade anaesthetic drugs from a hospital? After trying her most obvious routes, like attempting to threaten/bribe Jeri Hogarth’s soon-to-be-ex doctor wife, and checking in with the friends most likely to have drug dealers, she hits on a solution inadvertently suggested by her neighbour Ruben: Most people are at least a bit racist, which means that Malcolm, her young, black, druggie neighbour, is the perfect distraction.

After carting Malcolm to hospital and allowing him to create his special brand of chaos, Jessica liberates the necessary drugs to take Kilgrave down. She feels bad about using the kid when he gives her the puppy eyes of “I know what you did.”

It’s wrenching, because we’ve pretty much only seen Jessica’s nurturing side with Malcolm—despite his heroin addiction, he’s as helpless as a teddy bear, and there’s been a gentleness to her interactions with him that we haven’t seen her display anywhere else (though it’s hinted at that she used to be equally protective of Trish, back when she allowed herself to have friends). Betraying Malcolm’s trust in her shakes Jessica up, but she doesn’t allow herself to dwell on it.

Trish is on a hair trigger, and accidentally beats up a fan outside her studio, thinking he is attacking her. When the police come to investigate the matter, she is caught in a bind—to open her steel reinforced door or not?

It’s only one police officer, Will Simpson (Wil Traval) and he is not above using emotional/career blackmail to convince Trish to let him past the door. She caves, and he instantly attacks her on Kilgrave’s orders.

She disarms him, but the fight is brutal, showing off Trish’s skills at Krav Maga. (Jessica was there earlier and stunned by Trish’s impressive set up as well as her bruises—which she at first thought might have been caused by this legendary mother we keep hearing about.) Will is relentless, however, and ends up beating her to the ground. Jessica (who never uses Trish’s door, either) crashes in to save her friend, but ends up having to use one of the syringes of knock-out drugs on her so that Will can be convinced he has obeyed orders and killed his target.

His orders include returning to Kilgrave—this is Jessica’s chance! She tracks him back to a glass-walled apartment, where Kilgrave is holed up in his usual stolen luxury. This is her chance to confront the villain—except, of course, that he casually sends Will to throw himself off the building, and Jessica can’t let that happen.

For the first time since his supposed death, Jessica and Kilgrave’s eyes meet—and her flashback elaborates on her history with Reva. She sent the woman flying on Kilgrave’s orders, killing her—and for the first time was able to break free of his control when she realised Riva was dead…

(Based on what we know of the show so far, that’s going to be super significant.)

Saving Will gives Kilgrave a chance to escape—and Jessica has to knock out several of his protectors, one after the other, as he sends them in her way. Seriously, she needs to invest in a taser, or some less-hard-to-get knock out drugs, or she’s going to spend all her time immobilising people at this rate.

Kilgrave gets away, and Jessica is confronted with a roomful of recent pictures. Someone has been spying on her for him, constantly, for weeks. For once, instead of being the eye behind the lens of the creepy stalker camera, she’s the subject.

In a final piece of cleanup, Jessica fakes a fall off the roof into some garbage bags for Will, so that he thinks he did what Kilgrave told him. The police officer is muddled and stressed about apparently killing Trish, but Jessica sends him home without any answers.

She then goes to not-break-up with Luke, because what the hell was she thinking? He’s resigned, assuming that it’s either the tragic dead wife, or some other Jessica hangup that means she can’t have nice things, like relationships with unbreakable bartenders who have kind eyes.

I assumed at first that the Luke-Reva twist was Jessica’s life doing terrible things to her, but it’s starting to look like it was the other way around. Was she spying on Luke to find out how Reva’s widower had turned out? In which case, yes, it doesn’t matter how pretty his abs are, or how sexy and funny he is (sigh, Mike Colter’s Luke Cage is adorable), sleeping with him was the Presidential Suite of Terrible Ideas. Par for the course with Jessica Jones.

Comics and Continuity:

I didn’t think I was as fannish about Luke Cage as I obviously am, because when he gasped “Sweet Christmas” after great sex with Jessica, I actually made a very high pitched “squee” noise. (“Sweet Christmas” is one of those phrases Luke typically uses in the comics books to make it appear like he’s swearing, because he’s a “street” character in a G-rated world.)

Iron Fist/Danny Rand isn’t exactly one of my favourite comics characters, but the thought that Luke hasn’t met him yet made me genuinely sad for them. He needs his bro. Of course, his bro would hate Jessica, so maybe it’s a good thing they have not yet found their BFF soulmates. Something to look forward to.

(Potentially I suppose, he might know Danny, and Danny might not be all mystical supered yet. I guess we’ll find out next year.)

I love that Luke refers to the Avengers as “the big green dude and his crew”—does everyone assume that the Hulk is the leader because he’s the biggest? Has anyone told Cap? Hell, has anyone told Bruce?

Jessica reveals that she gave “the hero gig” a shot once, which is another hint about her past. But was she Jewel? No sign of a pink wig in any of the flashbacks so far!

LUKE: Tell me there’s a costume and you still got it.

In Alias, Luke was one of many possible love interests for Jessica, but once the series closed out, that was it for both of them—they have to be one of the most devoutly-‘shipped 21st-century canon couples of the Marvel Universe. (I base this assumption on the way that fanfic almost always pairs them together even as supporting characters, though I suspect that’s going to change as the Trish/Jess ship builds steam over on AO3.) This episode is so thoroughly immersed in Jessica/Luke as a potential couple—their shared sense of humour, past traumas, sexual chemistry, and deep curiosity about each other.

One of the worst pieces of writing advice I ever saw someone give was that humour has no place in sex scenes. The best fictional sex allows for a realistic sense of the absurd, and the way that Jessica and Luke tease and grin and flirt their way through experimenting with their mutually super-powered bodies (down to the cheeky text from him about buying a new bed) suggests that, serious real-life problems aside, they are well on the way to becoming the kind of couple who make their friends pull grossed-out faces in public.

All they have to do is sort out that pesky matter of her having murdered his wife, and deal with the psychotic brainwashing villain, and we’re good to go! Also, possibly they need to acquire more friends.

And how cool is it that explaining their superpowers is done like this:

JESSICA: Accident. You?

LUKE: Experiment.

That’s how you do an origin story! Spider-Man screenwriters, please take note.

Luke/Jess isn’t the only relationship given prominence in this episode—we finally get to see the warmth and history between Jessica and Trish. There’s one teasing detail in particular that stands out as a canon reference—Kilgrave refers to her as Patsy, and the fan who accosts her is after “Patsy Walker,” too—he even says he misses her red hair. So Trish isn’t just a modernised name for the show, it’s an example of her reinventing herself! Elegant radio personality Trish was once a redhead teen star with her own TV show…

With all these hints about her mother, we’d better get followthrough on that. Trish’s mother sounds almost as evil as Jeri Hogarth—and it can’t be a coincidence that Trish is awed by Jeri’s ruthless can-do attitude!

A word about Malcolm—there was a Malcolm in the original Alias, a fanboy who turned up randomly in Jessica’s office and kept volunteering for the position of sidekick/assistant. Eka Darville’s take on the character doesn’t really dovetail with that at all, apart from the occasional random appearances in other people’s rooms—if anything, Ruben has more notes in common with comics Malcolm, given his slightly sinister over-friendly attitude.

DOOR REPORT:

Jessica and Luke have sex without closing Jess’s cardboard door, and get peeped on by Ruben the upstairs neighbour. Jessica then hires a humorous father-and-son duo over to handle the repairs, but the price is terrifying—and they spotted her bluff about being able to pay. When she comes home to find the glass fixed (with the panel Trish had made for her), the lock has also been changed. There’s a note: pay us and you get the key. Jessica being Jessica promptly breaks the lock and carries on with a broken door.

“My father says this is our business, not a charity for women with broken doors.”

Tansy Rayner Roberts is a Marvel Comics tragic, and a Hugo Award winning blogger and podcaster. Tansy’s latest piece of published short fiction is “Fake Geek Girl” at the Review of Australian Fiction, and she writes comics reviews on her own blog. You can find TansyRR on Twitter & Tumblr, sign up for her Author Newsletter, and listen to her on Galactic Suburbia or the Verity! podcast.

Welcome back to the Lovecraft reread, in which two modern Mythos writers get girl cooties all over old Howard’s original stories. Today we’re looking at “The Man of Stone,” a collaboration between Lovecraft and Hazel Heald, published in the October 1932 issue of Wonder Stories. You can read it here.

Spoilers ahead!

“March 16—4 a.m.—This is added by Rose C. Morris, about to die.”

Jack, our narrator, introduces his friend Ben Hayden, an aficionado of the bizarre. Hayden has heard from a mutual acquaintance about two strangely life-like statues near Lake Placid, New York.  Say, didn’t the realist sculptor Arthur Wheeler disappear in that section of the Adirondacks? Hayden and Jack had better investigate.

They arrive in the rustic village of Mountain Top and quiz loafers at the general store. None are eager to talk about Wheeler, though one garrulous old fellow tells them the sculptor lodged with “Mad Dan” up in the hills. Could be Dan’s young wife and Wheeler got too cozy, and Dan sent the city feller packing. Dan’s no one to interfere with, and now he’s so moody he and his wife haven’t appeared in the village for a while.

Warned to keep away from the uncannier hills, our heroes head in that direction the next day. They have a map to the cave where their acquaintance found the statues, and when they find it, they see he wasn’t exaggerating. The first statue, at the cave mouth, is a dog too realistically detailed for even Wheeler’s skill. Hayden figures it was the victim of incredibly sudden petrification, maybe due to strange gases from the cave. Inside the cavern is a stone man, dressed in actual clothes. Our heroes cry out at its face, which is Arthur Wheeler’s.

Hayden’s next move is to seek out Mad Dan’s cabin. No one answers his knocks, but he and Jack enter via the window of Wheeler’s makeshift studio. Another horror awaits them in the dusty-smelling kitchen: two more stony bodies. An old man sits bound with a whip into a chair, and a young woman lies on the floor beside him, her face permanently frozen in an expression of sardonic satisfaction. Must be Mad Dan and his wife, and what’s this notebook carefully set in the middle of the table?

Hayden and Jack read the notebook before calling the authorities. The public has seen a sensationalized version of it in the cheap newspapers, but they can tell the real story. First, though, know that their nerves have been shaken, as have those of the authorities, who destroyed a certain apparatus found deep in the cave and also many papers from Mad Dan’s attic, including a certain old book.

Most of the notebook is in the cramped handwriting of Dan Morris himself. Let the ignorant villagers call him mad—he’s actually the scion of a long line of wizards, the Van Kaurans, and has inherited their powers and their Book of Eibon, too. He sacrifices to the Black Goat on Hallows Eve and would do the Great Rite that opens the gate, except the damn villagers prevent him. Well, he got along pretty well with his wife Rose, even though she balked at helping him with his rites. Then Arthur Wheeler boarded at his cabin and started making eyes at her.

Dan vows to do away with the sneaking cheats and consults the Book of Eibon for suitably torturous methods. Emanation of Yoth—nah, shopping for child’s blood attracts attention. The Green Decay, too smelly. Wait, what’s this manuscript insert detailing how to turn a man into stone? Too deliciously ironic.

Dan produces his petrifying potion in the cave near his cabin. He experiments with birds and Rose’s beloved dog Rex. Success! Wheeler, lured to the cave, is the next victim, for he readily accepts a swig of potion-doctored wine. Rose isn’t so easy to poison. She refuses to drink Dan’s wine until he’s forced to lock her in the attic and to introduce much lower doses in her drinking water. From the way she begins to limp and crawl, paralysis is setting in, but it takes so long that Dan is getting worn out with anxiety.

The last portion of the notebook is in a different hand—Rose’s. She has freed herself from the attic and bound the sleeping Dan into his armchair with his whip. After reading his notebook, she knows all, but she already suspected that Dan murdered Arthur Wheeler, who meant to help her divorce so they could marry. Dan must have used wizardry to get a hold over her mind and her father’s, or she’d never have wed him, never have submitted every time she tried to escape and he dragged her back to his cabin. Their union has been nothing but abuse for her; worse, Dan has tried to make her do blasphemous rites with him, rites too horrible to describe. She took only a sip of the water he gave her in her attic prison. Even that was enough to half-paralyze her, but she retains strength and mobility enough to force his own potion down Dan’s throat. He turns at once to stone, a fitting end. With Arthur gone, Rose writes that she’ll drink the remaining potion herself. Bury her “statue” with Arthur’s, and put poor petrified Rex at their feet. As for Mad Dan, she doesn’t care what happens to his stony remains.

What’s Cyclopean:  Perhaps due to Heald’s influence, the adjectives are kept to a dull roar. There are sinister abnormalities, but nothing cyclopean, rugose, or even gibbous.

The Degenerate Dutch: What else could the Van Kaurens possibly be?

Mythos Making: Dan swears by everything from Shub-Niggurath and Tsathagua to R’lyeh—and there are some definite hints that he may know just a little about another group that lurks in the Catskills.

Libronomicon: The Book of Eibon can tell us many things we don’t want our neighbors to know.

Madness Takes Its Toll: Mad Dan is aptly named, though not (or not only) for the reasons his neighbors seem to think.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

Oh, Rose.

And, oh, Hazel. The Heald collaborations are all new to me on this read-through, and I’ve not been disappointed yet. Every one carries the most minor of reputations, if that, and every one ranks with the top tiers of Lovecraft’s solo work. And they have some amazing touches, that appear nowhere else and must be Heald’s own. Fine touches of realism and motivation that add depth to the weirdness, ranging from amusingly apt trivialities—the narrator’s complaints about bad science reporting in “Out of the Aeons”—to horrors far more urgent than a few cosmic monsters.

It’s the latter that make this story stand out. It’s Rose’s predicament, slowly revealed even while the more overtly terrible petrification is accepted nearly from the start. Lovecraft, on his own, would likely have had Mad Dan motivated solely by… well, what explanation is really needed when the rural Dutch do terrible things in the name of inhuman gods? But that’s not enough for Heald, who makes the man an all-too-realistic self-aggrandizing abusive goat turd (I’m trying to be polite here), who’d be just as glad to use negging as mind control spells, if it got him what he wanted. He’s familiar, is what I’m saying, and the fact that he swears by Shub-Niggurath rather than some more popular deity is merely a matter of convenient symbol-set. Which makes him a lot scarier than most of Lovecraft’s bad guys.

And Rose. Oh, Rose. She gets something that very few of Lovecraft’s women get: she gets a voice. And not just the generic voice of the nearest available witness to events. This is the diary that was missing in “Thing on the Doorstep”—Asenath no longer erased, her horror no longer hidden in negative space.  Rose isn’t inserted to motivate the men. This story is ultimately hers—witnessed and reported at a remove like any other Lovecraft non-narrator, but hers.  And unlike most of those non-narrators, I care what happens to her.  I wish she hadn’t closed her story so neatly.

The other details work well, too, even the ones that are standard Lovecraftian furniture.  The just-friends-no-really Damon-and-Pythias couple who uncover the story have a decent motivation to do so, and don’t so much abruptly change their minds when they find it as discover more than they bargained for. And… actually do feel like they might be doing agape rather than just being repressed. The perfect statues are genuinely creepy (even if not as creepy as Dan himself). The Van Kaurens’ marginal notations in their Book of Eibon are believable—and one gets the distinct impression that these are not so much skilled wizard-chemists as people that have made much hay from one lucky (?) literary find. One also gets the impression that there are probably as many recipes for chicken soup and secret floor scrub in those margins as there are cleverly devised potions.

It doesn’t hurt that the setting is familiar—in fact, I’ll be up around New Paltz in a couple of days for Thanksgiving. Often, when Lovecraft writes about a place that I know, it’s either changed so much as to be unrecognizable—or he never managed to see it in any recognizable way in the first place. But a few miles west of New York City, in the rural Catskills… the fall colors are gorgeous, but there are still plenty of isolated caves where you could hide a suspiciously detailed statue. Hypothetically speaking.

I promise to be cautious if anyone offers me wine.

Anne’s Commentary

The point of view in this collaboration is reminiscent of another Arthur—that is, Conan Doyle. Jack and Ben Hayden seem as much Watson and Holmes as Damon and Pythias, the friends of ancient legend who trusted each other so deeply that Damon stood hostage for condemned Pythias, offering to be executed in his place should Pythias not return from saying goodbye to his family. (Pythias did return, though only in the nick of time because pirates captured his ship and tossed him overboard, you know, the classical equivalent of a bad traffic jam.) Hayden’s in charge, Jack his “faithful collie.” I guess Hayden could have gone to Mountain Top on his own, but his narration would probably have been more overbearing than Jack’s, needlessly so since all we need is for someone to discover the statue-corpses and the notebook that tells their story. Whereas Jack couldn’t be sole hero because he’d never have gone to Mountain Top to begin with, not being as hot to solve mysterious mysteries as Hayden. Plus, Jack wouldn’t have had the chutzpah to charge straight up to Mad Dan’s cabin.

So Holmes-Hayden scents game afoot in the coincidence of realistic statues where Arthur Wheeler disappeared. Watson-Jack tags along to record discoveries in an amiable, normal-guy kind of way.

I guess we could have simply jumped into the notebook after a short preface by the coroner, but I kind of like Jack’s chatty travelogue and occult naiveté.

The Book of Eibon (aka Liber Ivonis, Livre d’Eibon) was “discovered” by Clark Ashton Smith in “Ubbo-Sathla.” This “strangest and rarest” tome passed through innumerable translations from the original, which was written in the primordial language of Hyperborea.  Lovecraft himself stumbles upon it in “The Haunter of the Dark,” “The Dreams in the Witch House,” and “The Shadow Out of Time.” The Van Kaurans were hotshot, big-time wizards to have a copy all to themselves. I fear it suffered some deterioration in Mad Dan’s leaky attic, but probably nothing the curators at Miskatonic University couldn’t have arrested. Too bad those clumsy cops in New York didn’t know enough to turn the precious grimoire over to MU; burning it was really a crying shame! We might be able to find the Emanation of Yoth and the Green Decay in other Eibons, but that petrification trick was in a handwritten insertion, so alas, probably lost forever, along with the other Van Kauran papers.

Joining the proud ranks of Mythos magicians is Mad Dan Morris, a Van Kauran on his mother’s side. He appears to have good raw ability though nothing like the sophistication of a Joseph Curwen or an Ephraim Waite or a Keziah Mason. In background and current social standing he’s more like Wizard Whateley, inheritor of dread tomes and more dread traditions, but himself pretty much self-schooled, the decadent end of a decayed line. Like Old Whateley, he lives among wild hills and howls out the ancient rites at the proper times of year. Like Old Whateley, he knows the way to open gates that should stay shut; unlike Whateley, he lives in a community that will only stand for so much dark magic. It somehow prevents Dan from doing the “Great Rite.” It also makes him wary of snatching a child, and thus obtaining the blood necessary to make Yoth emanate.

Something else Dan shares with all the (male) magicians in Lovecraft is a proclivity for using and abusing women. Joseph Curwen is the mildest abuser of the lot—though he maneuvers Eliza Tillinghast into marriage by blackmailing her father, he treats her and his daughter Ann with remarkable kindness and respect. Smart man, for it would just be all muahahahaha impolitic to mistreat the progenitors of his line and enablers of his immortality.

Ephraim Waite is much nastier. He steals his daughter’s body, then kills his own carcass, into which she’s been transferred. Insult to injury, he’s not satisfied with his nice new housing because, ewww, girl cooties, the natural inferiority of the female and all that. We have hints that, as Asenath in school, he at the very least leers at other girls. Then he marries poor Edward Derby and makes him even more effeminate than Lovecraft dared to. Because only an effeminate man would put up with a domineering, abusive and ultimately body-snatching wife. Even if the “wife” was really a man in (eww) girl clothing.

Old Wizard Whateley murders his wife, then does to his daughter what I suspect Dan wanted to do with Rose—that is, to make her the feminine pawn in his dealings with the Outer Gods. What could be more unspeakably blasphemous (for Rose) than a husband who wanted her, oh, to sleep with Yog-Sothoth and bear His children? Not to mention possible lesser indignities like prancing naked on hilltops, with or without goatish partners. Lavinia’s kinda-human son is no better than her father, for Wilbur too treats her with contempt and ultimately does away with her.

Oh, and though he wasn’t a wizard, let’s not forget how Zamacona intended to dump T’la-Yub as soon as she got his sorry butt out of K’nyan. Oh, oh, and Red Hook wizard Robert Suydam, who marries Cornelia Gerritsen in order to sacrifice her to Lilith on the wedding night. Not cool, dude.

The introduction of a good-guy love interest for the put-upon woman is new to “The Man of Stone.” So is the bitter triumph of the put-upon woman over her abuser. I wonder if Hazel Heald had a hand in these changes to the usual narrative.

Anyhow, you go, Rose!  Rest at peace, if stonily, with Arthur and Rex, and let’s hope somebody took a sledgehammer to Mad Dan.

Next week, enjoy a couple of quick tastes of the Dreamlands with “What the Moon Brings” & “Ex Oblivione”.

Image: Barn near Riverside Cemetery, Providence. Photo by Anne M. Pillsworth.

Ruthanna Emrys’s neo-Lovecraftian novelette “The Litany of Earth” is available on Tor.com, along with the more recent but distinctly non-Lovecraftian “Seven Commentaries on an Imperfect Land” and “The Deepest Rift.” Winter Tide, a novel continuing Aphra Marsh’s story from “Litany,” will be available from the Tor.com imprint in Spring 2017. Ruthanna can frequently be found online on Twitter and LiveJournal, and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.

Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story. “The Madonna of the Abattoir” appears on Tor.com. Her first novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen along with the recently released sequel Fathomless. She lives in Edgewood, a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, uncomfortably near Joseph Curwen’s underground laboratory.

“You’ve spent more time in the friendzone than the Phantom Zone.”

I think we’ve found the best line on Supergirl thus far. It’s a gentle burn from Alex to Kara, about how the latter tries so hard to make everyone happy that she’ll let James Olsen talk to her about his gorgeous ex-girlfriend Lucy Lane, instead of presenting herself as a viable romantic option. But here’s the twist—Lucy is intimdated by Supergirl.

Spoilers for Supergirl 1×04 “How Does She Do It?”

Clearly that was the subplot that most interested me in this week’s episode (pushed back a week because of its bombing-centric plot), though honestly there wasn’t much meat on its bones to start with. The episode laid out three subplots and only managed to make small inroads into each… not unlike the episode’s central question!

Photo: Robert Voets/Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

Friendzoning and Competition

Lucy Lane claims she’s in town to work a case for the government, but it’s just an excuse (she admits it!) to see James. While everyone thought he broke up with her to move to National City, she dumped him. So, what’s changed her mind? For one, Supergirl.

My favorite scene in the episode was Kara running into Lucy at the local food joint and stammering about how cool and collected she is. (‘Shippers, take note of the earlier exchange with Winn during which Kara made a comment about how nice Lucy smells and “hell, I’d want to date her.”) “Just because I look a certain way on the outside,” Lucy calmly retorts, “doesn’t match what I feel on the inside.” It’s a keen reminder that even the beautiful, seemingly #blessed women are besieged by their own insecurities. For Lois Lane’s younger sister, her insecurities wear a big S: Turns out that the real wedge between her and James’ relationship was Superman, since James would drop everything whenever his buddy needed help. The Man of Steel became the other man.

“And this hero wears a skirt. How am I ever going to compete with her?”

Aww, Lucy. Even though Kara initially makes a “pfft” laugh at the idea of ever putting one of Lucy’s hairs out of place, it’s hard to compete with superpowers, eternal youth, and darn earnest goodness. Of course, that same goodness is what sends Lucy and James back into each other’s arms, and off to Ojai for a romantic Thanksgiving.

Photo: Darren Michaels/Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

“How Do You Have It All?”

In addition to juggling romantic distress, Kara volunteers to watch Cat Grant’s son Carter while his mother spends most of the episode off-screen accepting a prestigious award (and rubbing Lois Lane’s nose in it). Let me just say, I am so glad that Carter—who Cat describes as “gifted”—doesn’t turn out to be a little terror, as often happens on more clichéd plotlines like this. If anything, scenes like him and Winn playing video games on Cat’s giant TV screen setup are adorable. He does have a pretty strong crush on Supergirl, however, which leads him into a bit of trouble when one of Maxwell Lord’s ex-employees tries to bomb his company’s SUPERTRAIN and Carter goes trailing after Supergirl like a little duckling. (More on that in a few.)

Look, I get the constant need to hustle, but Kara is going to burn herself out sooner rather than later basically pulling two jobs. I also refuse to believe that Cat would realistically let such a low-level employee get away with taking so many lunch breaks and emergency errands without demanding more of her time. Hell, I have trouble leaving the Flatiron for a break most days.

But Kara feels our Millennial pain at trying to do everything and be everywhere; for her, it’s just more literal. As in, “how do I stop this sad man from activating the bomb strapped to his chest while also making sure Carter isn’t in the blast radius?” Of course, that’s not what she asks Cat at the end of the episode when, crisis averted, she wants to know how Cat manages to juggle everything. Of course, that sets her boss off:

“You have stumbled across the most annoying question of the century, and you’re too young to realize it. You learn. You start juggling one thing, and then you add another.”

Not all at once, Cat cautions, and not right away. “And not with that hair.” Now that we’ve seen the softer side of Cat, I’ll let jabs like that slide. And while this was a key conversation for the two women to have, I would have liked to see it come much later in season 1, when Kara is actually exhausted from her double life.

Photo: Robert Voets/Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

Maxwell Lord, Villain in the Wings

Now, Supergirl’s scene halting the SUPERTRAIN—having disconnected the portion with the bomber—lacked the heart of Spider-Man halting a subway car in Spider-Man 2, but it still got some attention. Turns out that all of this episode’s crises—the train, before that a bomb leveling a building, and before that, a drone—were all tests to see if Supergirl really could do it all. And they were set by Maxwell Lord himself. Now, this isn’t really a surprise, considering that in the comics Max is a major adversary of the Justice League, but for now, he’s got his sights set on one pretty young superhero. The drone tested agility, the bomb speed, but the train… that was all about choice. Who mattered so much to Supergirl that she would stop the SUPERTRAIN?

Photo: Darren Michaels/Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

And here I was so hoping that Carter was Maxwell’s son—remember his and Cat’s flirty banter at the CatCo party a few episodes back—but alas, they’re virtual strangers. And yet, where did he get his nerdery from? (Side note: The thought of Cat Grant playing Settlers of Catan with Carter is too adorable.)

At any rate, this episode sets up Maxwell Lord as a potential Big Bad… though of course, we haven’t seen Astra for a few episodes, so perhaps the former opponents will team up in the future.

Hey, so, if you don’t want a Wheel of Time Reread Redux post today, you are a turkey. A TURKEY. GEDDIT

(BECAUSE THANKSGIVING)

(GEDDIT)

(SO FUNNY)

Sigh. Okay. Today’s Redux post will cover Chapters 44 and 45 of The Great Hunt, originally reread in this post.

All original posts are listed in The Wheel of Time Reread Index here, and all Redux posts will also be archived there as well. (The Wheel of Time Master Index, as always, is here, which has links to news, reviews, interviews, and all manner of information about the Wheel of Time in general on Tor.com.)

The Wheel of Time Reread is also available as an e-book series! Yay!

All Reread Redux posts will contain spoilers for the entire Wheel of Time series, so if you haven’t read, read at your own risk.

And now, the post!

Chapter 44: Five Will Ride Forth

Redux Commentary

[Bornhald:] “Be sure [Niall] understands that we can no longer count on the Tar Valon witches being content with manipulating events from the shadows. If they fight openly for the Seanchan, we will surely face them elsewhere.”

[…]

[Byar:] “Do you believe it was the man Perrin, my Lord Captain?”

“Whoever it was, he is not accounted for, no? And he may carry word of us to the Seanchan.”

“A Darkfriend would surely do so, my Lord Captain.”

It’s so bizarre, on the surface, how Bornhald (and Byar) so blithely assumes that the Seanchan, Perrin, and the Aes Sedai must obviously all be working together, when of course nothing could be further from the truth. But then, to a mind so fundamentally bigoted, I guess it’s the only way to resolve the situation into something that fits with his warped worldview. People who are his enemies must be Darkfriends, and people who are Darkfriends must all be in cahoots with each other, The End.

I often suspect that a great deal of the root of things like bigotry and xenophobia and jingoism are owed to nothing more than some people’s desperate need for things—and people—to make sense. After all, if you can take whole swaths of people, based on certain traits which may or may not be arbitrarily chosen, and slot them all neatly into a box, and then affix a label to that box that clearly defines what all of those people are and therefore how they must be treated… well. That’s definitely a whole hell of a lot less confusing and aggravating than considering the idea that all people are individuals who may be nothing at all like other people with whom they share certain traits, arbitrarily chosen or not.

I mean, that’s just so messy, and uncertain. That might mean that effecting unilateral action against any given box-swathe of people could be, you know, wrong. In both senses of that word.

Because besides being prejudiced as all hell, I don’t think anyone would argue that Bornhald’s need to box people (literally and figuratively, whee!) into airtight categories has also led him into making crucial tactical errors. And that’s the crux of the matter, really: bigotry is morally reprehensible and it’s stupid for purely practical reasons.

Because if you can’t, or won’t, keep yourself from assuming monoliths where there are none—if you keep idiotically believing that every member of a box-swathe you assigned must behave exactly the same as every other member—then you will fuck up the most effective way to respond to threats from elements within that box-swathe, perceived or actual. This is a mistake I see being made over and over again in history. This is a mistake I see being made right now.

In the book, of course. Yes.

Anyway! Speaking of oblique commentary, I sure did talk in circles around my issues with prophecy in the original comments to this chapter, didn’t I? I’m not even sure what the hell I was trying to say there. “Prophecy is mean,” Past Leigh? What is that even. I suspect this may have been one of my more sleep-deprived posts.

My point about Verin kind of bulldozing the “five ride forth” prophecy into actuality still stands, though. Even if all the objections she raised to anyone else going were valid ones, mostly.

For some reason I was sort of surprised to realize that at this point Rand doesn’t actually know about the “five ride forth” prophecy. Vandene told it to Moiraine in Chapter 22, but Moiraine won’t rejoin the Superboys until the end of the book, so there was really no opportunity for Rand to have learned of it. And that’s assuming Moiraine would have told them about it even if she had been there, which is hardly a guarantee. Verin certainly didn’t, after all, I’m assuming out of a rather ruthless sort of kindness. And probably also practicality, seeing as they might well have refused to go if they knew it would mean the death of one of them.

Well, except Ingtar. He would have gone regardless. Which is kind of ironic, ultimately.

Chapter 45: Blademaster

Redux Commentary

“We have somebody to be our Leashed One.” Nynaeve tugged at the leash that held Seta, and the sul’dam gasped.

“No! No, please! If anyone sees me—” She cut off at Nynaeve’s cold stare.

“As far as I am concerned, you are worse than a murderer, worse than a Darkfriend. I can’t think of anything worse than you. The fact that I have to wear this thing on my wrist, to be the same as you for even an hour, sickens me. So if you think there is anything I’ll balk at doing to you, think again.”

Again, HOW I did not already adore Nynaeve by this point is beyond me. Because jeez, woman, get out of my brain. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Also, I laughed out loud at Elayne’s cheerleading the damane who face-punched Seta. Because I totally agree with the sentiment, obviously, but for some reason Elayne yelling it out like that was hilarious. Foolish, as Nynaeve points out, but still: hilarious.

Of course, the whole scheme was pretty foolhardy. If they had gotten a thoroughly brainwashed damane, one who would have fought back, instead of lucking out and getting one who wasn’t completely broken yet, the whole thing could have ended very badly. But still, I can’t see what else they could have done given the time constraints they were under.

Plus, you know, it was extremely viscerally satisfying, seeing Seta get a taste of her own medicine. And will get more so, in the Supergirls’ storyline—at least until it all goes to hell, anyway. But that’s later.

Meanwhile, the Supergirls’ foolhardiness has got nothing on Ingtar’s steadily increasing crazypants factor. But, again, it led to Rand being a badass and defeating a Vulcan blademaster, so it’s all good, ultimately.

Rand desperately wanted to seek the void. It was plain he would need every shred of ability he could muster […] But saidin waited in the void. The thought made his heart leap with eagerness at the same time that it turned his stomach. But just as close as Egwene were those other women. Damane. If he touched saidin, and if he could not stop himself channeling, they would know, Verin had told him.

So, obviously now we know Verin can lie with impunity because she really was Black Ajah (even if only technically), but I’m still not sure whether this was a lie or not. Because, as I pointed out in the original commentary, Verin is from Far Madding, and therefore knows that it is possible to be in possession of ter’angreal that allow women to sense men channeling, even if they can’t do it on their own. So it’s possible she was just being cautious in not assuming the Seanchan wouldn’t have anything similar.

But even so, it seems like a dangerously misleading impression to give to Rand, that any female channeler can detect the use of saidin. For one thing, quite aside from dealing with Aes Sedai or damane, it came awful close to costing him his fight with Turak. Not that Verin could have known that, I suppose, but still.

Probably what it actually was was sort of a lie, sort of not. Verin is more than sneaky enough to both want to cover all the bases and instill Rand with some extra caution re: Aes Sedai, even under semi-false pretenses. And also, probably, keep him from outing himself as a male channeler in front of all of Falme and the Seanchan to boot.

The amusing thing, though, is that Verin would have to assume that Rand was going to ignore the warning anyway at some point. Because I don’t quite see how he’s supposed to “proclaim himself, bannered cross the sky in fire,” as the prophecy says, without coming out of the male channeler closet, so to speak. And doing so quite spectacularly, in fact.

In conclusion, Verin is a cat, because who knows why she does a lot of the things she does. Maybe there’s a reason, and maybe she’s just pushing things off coffee tables because shattering noises are awesome. Either way, she’s probably laughing at you about it behind your back.

Cats, man.

As to my original commentary’s question about whether Mat would die if scratched by the dagger… well, we never really found that out for certain, it turns out. In the Last Battle Mat gets skewered by Mashadar and lives, before stabbing Fain/Mordeth/Shaisam/whatever with the dagger and killing him with it, but Mat never gets cut with the dagger himself. Presumably if it could kill the Fain conglomerate it could also kill Mat, but then I’m not sure how that squares with Mat’s declaration in AMOL that “Once you catch a disease and survive, you can’t get it again.” Because, wouldn’t that have applied to Fain, too? But it didn’t…

So, in conclusion, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And lastly and very randomly:

Turak’s eyes widened as Rand glided forward. So far he had only defended; now he attacked, all out. The Boar Rushes Down the Mountain.

This is so silly, and I probably mentioned this at some point in the original Reread, but one of my favorite jokes anyone ever made about WOT was courtesy of, I believe, Alistair Young, who once included in a list of imaginary sword forms the following:

The Boar Rushes Down the Mountain
The Boar Rushes Back Up the Mountain, Having Left the Gas On

I don’t know why, but that image absolutely never fails to crack me up. It’s possible that I am too easily amused sometimes.

Possible, but I prefer to believe that makes me CHARMING. Shut up.

Annnd on that note, we out! I wish a happy Thanksgiving to the Americans in the audience, and a lovely random November Thursday to everyone else, and I’ll see alla y’all next Tuesday with the next installment of the Reread Redux of TGH! Huzzah!

A novel within a novel. A comic, painting, or song within a novel. Many writers enjoy the playfulness of creating fictitious works of art that no one will ever read, see, or hear.

I, too, love to play this game. Fictitious paintings and photographs lie at the heart of my genre-crossover novel, Sleeping Embers of An Ordinary Mind. It’s been immense fun to write, and during the long drafting and editing process, I’ve re-visited several novels, and read new releases, that share this compelling theme. Here are five of my personal favorites.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Emily St. John Mandel depicts a post-apocalyptic world in which her characters desire more than mere survival. The central character, Kirsten, safeguards her own personal art treasures—two hand-drawn comic books, the hero of which is Dr. Eleven. Mandel’s interweaving and beautifully written narrative flits back and forth in time, connecting Kirsten with characters in the pre-apocalyptic world, including Miranda, the author of the unpublished comics.

“The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim” in Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges

Borges is a brilliant, surreal, and fantastical writer who frequently blurs the boundary between reality and illusion. “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim” is a short story that comprises a detailed review of a fictitious book, The Conversation with the Man Called Al-Mu’tasim: A Game of Shifting Mirrors, by a fictional author, Mir Bahadur Ali. The narrator even highlights the differences between two editions of the book. In a later autobiographical essay, Borges related that people took “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim” at face value, and one of his friends tried to order a copy of the book from London.

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

Kilgore Trout, a little-known pulp fiction author, is a character in several of Kurt Vonnegut’s stories and novels, including Slaughterhouse-Five (one of my favorite novels). In Breakfast of Champions, one of Trout’s stories has a devastating impact on wealthy Pontiac dealer Dwayne Hoover. He’s convinced by Trout’s story that he, the reader, is the only person alive with free will. He believes he’s surrounded by a race of robots and, terrified, embarks on a bloody rampage.

The Man in the Picture by Susan Hill

A Cambridge professor invites his former student to his university rooms where a small oil painting hangs on his wall—a disturbing scene at a masked carnival in Venice. A male figure in the foreground is restrained by two partygoers. He stares out of the painting as though trying to escape into the professor’s room. It’s a gothic ghost story in which the spooky painting entraps the professor and his unsuspecting student.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

The children incarcerated at Hailsham boarding school spend endless hours in art classes, engaged in creative activities in the hope of winning praise from the school’s patron, Madame. They believe their best paintings and drawings will be exhibited in her London gallery. But it’s a ruse. Madame uses the paintings as evidence, hoping to convince society that the cloned children are truly human and should be treated better. In this heartbreaking coming-of-age novel, Tommy agonizes over his inability to paint, instilling pity in his friend Cathy, and contempt among other classmates. Ishiguro, a one-time songwriter himself, takes the title of this novel from the lyrics of a fictitious song.

Anne Charnock‘s debut novel, A Calculated Life, was a finalist for the 2013 Philip K. Dick and Kitschies Golden Tentacle Awards. Her writing career began in journalism, and her articles appeared in the Guardian, New Scientist, International Herald Tribune, and Geographical. Her latest novel, Sleeping Embers Of An Ordinary Mind, spans from the 15th to the 22nd centuries in a multilayered narrative that asks questions about legacy, storytelling, and buried secrets. Find Anne on Twitter @annecharnock.

Much has been made of the sexuality in Jessica Jones. It’s true, Jessica and Luke Cage are Marvel’s poster children for enthusiastic (repeated, loud) consent, and Trish Walker gets to be the first Marvel heroine to have a guy go down on her onscreen. But one interesting thing is that in all the talk of how raw and realistic the sex scenes are, they are also shockingly dry. There is no fluid, there isn’t even much sweat, there are no stained sheets or post-coital showers. I have an idea about this…I think it’s that Jessica Jones, for various brilliant reasons, has focused all its attention on a different liquid entirely. I’ll have to ask you all to go with me into a fairly uncomfortable area, because we’re going to have to talk about piss.

But wait, let me back up.

[Beware of: spoilers for all of Jessica Jones; the ending of Daredevil Season 1; a graphic discussion of bodily function.]

In Jessica Jones’ sister show, the fantastic Daredevil, the link between physicality and control was paramount. When Matt Murdock lost his sight, he retaliated by sharpening his other senses, training his body through intense workouts, training his mind with meditation, and, one could argue, training his soul with a particularly hardcore Catholic moral code (well, except where girls were concerned….). Matt embodies the profoundly male and American ideal that when something terrible happens to you, you turn it into a strength rather than a weakness. We get the sense that Matt is able to use his body in this way, despite his lack of superpowers, because of the tight control he has exerted over it. Matt’s blindness is what allows him to become Daredevil, and over the course of the first season we watch his body get battered over and over again, as he uses his various types of training to steel himself against pain and get up again and again. By the end, even the incredibly metaphorical stab wound to his side isn’t getting the best of him anymore, and he’s able to defeat Fisk through sheer will.

Jessica Jones is all about the loss of control. Jessica is not a hero who trains or meditates, and she’s not a woman who plans. She doesn’t clean, she doesn’t hang her clothes up, and the only thing she’s responsible about is picking up steady amounts of bottom shelf whiskey. One of the first times we see her working, she’s lying to a woman on the phone to get information. But rather than seeing her sitting at her desk, she’s sitting on the toilet while she makes the call. She gets the info she needs with no problem, but then realizes that she’s out of toilet paper, and yells Shit! as she bangs her hand down on the naked roll.

Bathroom scenes quickly become a theme – both times she visits Luke Cage’s apartment she goes into his bathroom after sex, not to clean up (again, lack of fluid), but to snoop. She finds Reva’s picture tucked away in the medicine cabinet, an incredibly odd and intimate place to put a picture like that. Rather than framing it and putting it out in the living room or on a wall, Luke has stripped himself of his old life, and keeps one picture where presumably only he will see it. Jessica, in opening the cabinet and looking at the picture, is violating his privacy in a fairly terrible way… and the control goes back and forth between them as she invades his space, but is then gutted by the guilt she feels.

A few episodes later, she gives voice to that guilt when she almost tells Luke the truth. This scene doesn’t take place in a bathroom, at least, but Jessica does refer to herself as “a piece of shit”. Luke recoils and insists that she’s wrong about herself calling her a hard-drinking mess of a woman, but not “what you called yourself”. A few nights and a confession later, however, he agrees with her, and when he throws her words back at her, she looks like it’s worse than if he’d just hit her. In the spiral that follows she gets even drunker than usual, gets tossed out of a bar and into a pile of trash, and is informed by the homeless man she landed next to that she smells terrible. Again, we’ve been following a person who drinks constantly, wakes up at 3:00 in the afternoon, picks up yesterday’s clothes off the floor and puts them on sans shower – we can assume that hygiene isn’t on her list of priorities. But to have that stated, so succinctly, by someone who has fallen through the cracks of civilized society?

Oh, and about those showers: the only time we ever see people showering is 1.) Jessica, after an encounter with Kilgrave, and it’s clearly a “trying to scrub the evil away” type of shower, and 2.) Luke, at Jessica’s apartment, while under Kilgrave’s control, which seemingly was more an excuse for Luke to parade around in a towel than anything else. This was presumably a trap set for Jessica, because if they’d had make-up sex, Kilgrave to could claim responsibility for that, too.

And then we get to Kilgrave, and the show’s connection between control and bodily function becomes sickeningly clear.

Simply saying that Kilgrave is all about mind control would have been easy. Simply using the word rape over and over gets more difficult, harder to hear, harder to take as an audience, but still, we understand what the words means, and we can imagine situations and fill in the gaps. Showing rape onscreen, as some people feared Jessica Jones was going to do, would have been something completely different. As I think Game of Thrones has demonstrated over its last season, constantly showing women being brutalized pushes the audience away. At a certain point you’re just watching terrible things happen, and trying not to feel anything about it, so you can focus on the next scene.

Jessica Jones comes at physical control and violation in a different, more subtle way, and finds a new way to truly horrify its audience, and that’s though piss. From childhood we’re taught that the most shameful loss of control is related to bodily waste, and this continues throughout our lives. This becomes the focus of all of Kilgrave’s abuse. Before we ever meet The Purple Man in the flesh, when we see Hope Shlottman lying in bed – we don’t see semen stains, even though we know she’s been raped, and we don’t see blood – she tells Jessica, and us, that she wet the bed. That’s the worst thing.

When Kilgrave invades a family’s apartment, and locks the kids in the closet, the camera lingers on the urine trickling out from under the door. When he forces Laurent and Alva to stare out the window watching for Jessica, and she finally pulls up in a taxi, he orders them to “clean up that mess” – presumably their own waste, collecting beneath them on the floor while they’ve waited. When he orders a poor concertgoer to stand and stare at a fence “forever” the camera pans over him at waist height so we see the urine soaking his pants before we notice that he’s shaking from physical exhaustion. Their bodies have all given out, even as their minds remain bound to Kilgrave’s orders.

Kilgrave himself, though? During his brief incarceration Jessica thoughtfully supplies him with a bucket, but given that he’s being constantly watched through a sheet of glass, no privacy with which to use it, but it never becomes an issue, because we never see him use it. (Whether he simply doesn’t need to, or is able to exert more control than his victims, is left intentionally ambiguous.) But maybe even more telling, late in the series, when he breaks into Jessica’s apartment and starts rifling through her things, he also takes the time to use her toilet. He’s careful to life the lid with his foot, since he’s obviously too repulsed by her apartment to touch anything, but he also doesn’t flush. He’s marking his territory in the most elemental way he can. And when she and Kilgrave are holding an uneasy truce, still in her apartment, she retreats to the bathroom as a sanctuary to send texts, and yells that she’s peeing to cover the sounds of her phone.

Finally, when Hope Shlottman plays her final card and kills herself to get away from Kilgrave’s control, she doesn’t even get to have the usual dignified TV death, with cherry red blood flowing around in an artful pattern – no, when Jessica holds her head, the camera again mercilessly swings around so we see the pool of urine underneath her. Much as we could track the toll that Daredevil’s fighting took on his body through realistic wounds, in Jessica Jones death is final, brutal, and takes all social niceties with it.

Where Kilgrave’s mind control is literally him imposing his thoughts upon you, and forcing you to want things you don’t actually want, if you piss yourself, it’s your own body betraying your will. It’s your brain saying no, while your body does its own thing. It’s the ultimate split between the part of you that you think of as “you” and the meat that houses you. And so, as the show continues, what we see repeatedly are humans losing that most basic type of control because of Kilgrave’s actions. This split is not something that could ever be dealt with on Daredevil, where the soul is an absolute, and people can weigh giant issues like murder and damnation in between epic ninja battles. Here the superheroics are punctured, constantly, by fragile humans and their breakable, uncontrollable bodies. By allowing the show to take an unprecedented focus on something that’s usually glossed over, Jessica Jones’ creators have forced us to think about the loss of control, and the shame that can bring, in a far more visceral way than just showing us images of tortured people ever could have.

Leah Schnelbach has never seen a more urine-soaked show. Come take the piss out of her on Twitter!

Seventeen science fiction titles vie for your holiday dollars this month. Look for new titles from, among others, Gini Koch, Jay Allan, Jack McDevitt, and Jean Johnson, as well as a new Jonathan Strahan-edited The Infinity Project anthology.

Fiction Affliction details releases in science fiction, fantasy, urban fantasy, paranormal romance, and “genre-benders.” Keep track of them all here. Note: All title summaries are taken and/or summarized from copy provided by the publisher.

WEEK ONE

Alien in Chief (Katherine “Kitty” Katt #12)—Gini Koch (December 1, DAW)

As Kitty can tell you, it’s not easy being the wife of the vice president, especially not when he’s an alien from the Alpha Centauri system. Kitty & Company have been savoring a few months of quiet since they got back from Beta Eight. Their peace is shattered by the arrival of a mysterious female assassin, who might be Jeff’s missing niece, Stephanie. When the most dangerous prisoners in the most secure supermax prison escape with ease, things look bad. When the Mastermind releases a virus that kills people in a week, things go to Defcon Worse fast. It’s up to Kitty to save everyone important in the U.S. government before the virus spreads through the rest of the country, and then the world. This time, the Mastermind’s made it very personal. Either he’s going down, or Kitty is.

Challenging Saber (The Alliance #4)—S.E. Smith (December 1, Montana)

Sci-fi Romance. Saber, a wounded Trivator, believes he is no longer a fit warrior, much less strong enough to claim a mate. He does everything in his power to push away the human female he has fallen in love with. Taylor Sampson may be human, but that doesn’t make her weak. She survived living on Earth for four years after the world went crazy. She has her eye on the one stubborn Trivator that captured her heart seven years before. Taylor has one last requirement in order to complete her schooling. Then, she plans to show Saber that he is the man she wants, but when the planet she is on erupts into a civil war, she is trapped behind enemy lines. When Saber discovers that Taylor has been left behind, the warrior inside him refuses to think of her as collateral damage in a battle for power. Journey to a lawless, alien world and discover what happens when the beast awakens inside a damaged Trivator warrior when the woman he loves is threatened. (Digital)

Come the Revolution (Sasha Naradnyo #2)—Frank Chadwick (December 1, Baen)

Sasha Naradnyo had come a long way from the slums of Crack City on the planet Peezgtaan from Human gangster to head of security for Tweezaa e-Traak, the Varoki heiress to the largest fortune in the history of the Stellar Commonwealth. Then the largest nation on the Varoki home world collapsed into riots and civil war, a murderously anti-human Varoki fanatic made his bid for power, and the head of the Secret Police decided to take a personal interest in Sasha. Now Sasha must navigate the violence and anarchy of a growing revolution, come to grips with ghosts from his past who have suddenly turned up alive, make common cause with resistance fighters who want him dead, expose a conspiracy which will shake the Commonwealth to its foundations, and do it all without losing his soul.

Enemy in the Dark (Far Star Trilogy #2)—Jay Allan (December 1, Harper Voyager)

Successfully completing their mission to rescue Marshal Augustin Lucerne’s daughter, the crew of the Wolf’s Claw are enjoying some rest. Except Blackhawk. The space gun for hire cannot escape Lucerne’s pleas for help against growing imperial control in the Far Stars. His resistance crumbles when Lucerne presents evidence that the imperial governor has been manipulating the conflicts in the Far Stars. Convinced of the danger of imperial domination, Blackhawk and his crew board the Wolf’s Claw and set out to gather intelligence on the Empire’s movements. Deep in the territory of the Far Stars, he discovers that the imperial governor’s machinations are far reaching, and threaten the independence of every world this side of the Void. Blackhawk is beginning to realize he can no longer remain a prisoner to his own past while the future of the Far Stars is in jeopardy.

Meeting Infinity (Infinity Project #4)—Jonathan Strahan, editor (December 1, Solaris)

Whether it’s climate change, inundated coastlines and drowned cities; the cramped confines of a tin can hurtling through space to the outer reaches of our Solar System; or the rush of being uploaded into some cyberspace, our minds and bodies are going to have to change and change a lot. Meeting Infinity will be one hundred thousand words of SF filled with action and adventure that attempts to answer the question: how much do we need to change to meet tomorrow and live in the future? The authors contributing tho this collection are: Gregory Benford, James S.A. Corey, Aliette de Bodard, Kameron Hurley, Simon Ings, Madeline Ashby, John Barnes, Gwyneth Jones, Nancy Kress, Yoon Ha Lee, Ian McDonald, Ramez Naam, An Owomoyela, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Bruce Sterling and Sean Williams.

Nexis (Tricksters #1)—A.L. Davroe (December 1, Entangled Teen)

Young Adult. In the domed city of Evanescence, appearance is everything. A Natural Born amongst genetically-altered Aristocrats, all Ella ever wanted was to be like everyone else. Augmented, sparkling, and perfect. Then, the crash. Devastated by her father’s death and struggling with her new physical limitations, Ella is terrified to learn she is not just alone, but little more than a prisoner. Her only escape is to lose herself in Nexis, the hugely popular virtual reality game her father created. In Nexis she meets Guster, a senior player who guides Ella through the new world she now inhabits. He offers Ella guidance, friendship, and something more. Something that allows her to forget about the “real” world, and makes her feel whole again. But Nexis isn’t quite the game everyone thinks it is. And it’s been waiting for Ella.

Rhythm of the Imperium (Imperium #3)—Jody Lynn Nye (December 1, Baen)

The Zang, an elder race of the galaxy, are intelligent, curious, and powerful. They practice a most unusual art form: they bonsai star systems. Lieutenant Lord Thomas Kinago, accompanied as always by his personal assistant Parsons, sets out on a several-week jaunt to see the Zang destroy a moon to enhance the beauty of a star system. The trip is sidelined when Kinago’s uncle offers to take him to the seldom seen human homeworld, Earth. Kinago goes along, only to find on his return that the planet he’s just visited may be in danger of being eradicated. Earth lies within the protective sphere of the Zang, but enemies of the Imperium are lobbying to have Sol system turned over to them. It is up to Kinago and Parsons to save Earth. Kinago has the key, but will he be able to persuade the Zang to spare the human homeworld before it’s too late?

Slavemakers—Joseph Wallace (December 1, Ace)

Twenty years ago, venomous parasitic wasps known as “thieves” staged a massive, apocalyptic attack on another species, Homo sapiens, putting them on the brink of extinction. But some humans did survive. The colony called Refugia is home to a population of 281, including scientists, a pilot, and a tough young woman named Kait. In the African wilderness, there’s Aisha Rose, nearly feral, born at the end of the old world. And in the ruins of New York City, there’s a mysterious, powerful boy, a skilled hunter, isolated and living by his wits. As the survivors journey through the wastelands, they will find that they are not the only humans left on earth. Not by a long shot. But they may be the only ones left who are not under the thieves’ control.

Tarnished (Perfected #2)—Kate Jarvik Birch (December 1, Entangled Teen)

Young Adult. Ella was genetically engineered to be the perfect pet, graceful, demure, and kept. In a daring move, she escaped her captivity and took refuge in Canada. But while she can think and act as she pleases, the life of a liberated pet is just as confining as the Congressman’s gilded cage. Her escape triggered a backlash, and now no one’s safe, least of all the other pets. She’s trapped, unable to get back to Penn, the boy she loves, or help the girls who need her. Back in the United States, pets are turning up dead. With help from a very unexpected source, Ella slips deep into the dangerous black market, posing as a tarnished pet available to buy or sell. If she’s lucky, she’ll be able to rescue Penn and expose the truth about the breeding program. If she fails, Ella will pay not only with her life, but the lives of everyone she’s tried to save.

The Prison in Antares (Dead Enders #2)—Mike Resnick (December 1, Pyr)

The Traanskei Coalition’s greatest weapon is the Q bomb, and after years of failure, the Democracy has come up with a defense against it. The problem is that they killed most of the team that created it. The sole survivor, Edgar Nmumba, was kidnapped by the Coalition. Only Nmumba can duplicate the work fast enough to prevent the loss of another dozen populated planets. Nathan Pretorius and his team of Dead Enders will require all their skills and cunning to rescue him, sane and in one piece, from the Coalition’s best-hidden and best-guarded prison, somewhere in the Antares sector. But in a game of cross and double-cross, can they find him before it’s too late?

Their Fractured Light (Starbound #3)—Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner (December 1, Disney-Hyperion)

Young Adult. A year ago, Flynn Cormac and Jubilee Chase made the now infamous Avon Broadcast, calling on the galaxy to witness for their planet, and protect them from destruction. A year before that, Tarver Merendsen and Lilac LaRoux were rescued from a terrible shipwreck. In the center of the universe on the planet of Corinth, all four are about to collide with two new players, who will bring the fight against LaRoux Industries to a head. Gideon Marchant is an eighteen-year-old computer hacker. Sofia Quinn has a killer smile, and by the time you’re done noticing it, she’s got you offering up your wallet, your car, and anything else she desires. When a LaRoux Industries security breach interrupts Gideon and Sofia’s separate attempts to infiltrate their headquarters, they’re forced to work together to escape. Working together might be the best chance they have to expose the secrets LRI is so desperate to hide.

Thunderbird (Ancient Shores #2)—Jack McDevitt (December 1, Ace)

A working stargate dating back more than ten thousand years has been discovered in North Dakota, on a Sioux reservation near Devils Lake. Travel through the gate currently leads to three equally mysterious destinations: (1) an apparently empty garden world, quickly dubbed Eden; (2) a strange maze of underground passageways; or (3) a space station with a view of a galaxy that appears to be the Milky Way. The race to explore and claim the stargate quickly escalates, and those involved divide into opposing camps who view the teleportation technology either as an unprecedented opportunity for scientific research or a disastrous threat to national security. In the middle of the maelstrom stands Sioux chairman James Walker. Questions about what the stargate means for humanity’s role in the galaxy cannot be ignored. Especially since travel through the stargate isn’t necessarily only one way.

WEEK TWO

Inherit the Stars (Inherit the Stars #1)—Tessa Elwood (December 8, Running Press)

Young Adult. Three royal houses ruling three interplanetary systems are on the brink of collapse, and they must either ally together or tear each other apart in order for their people to survive. Asa is the youngest daughter of the house of Fane, which has been fighting a devastating food and energy crisis for far too long. She thinks she can save her family’s livelihood by posing as her oldest sister in an arranged marriage with Eagle, the heir to the throne of the house of Westlet. The appearance of her mother, a traitor who defected to the house of Galton, adds fuel to the fire, while Asa also tries to save her sister Wren’s life, possibly from the hands of their own father. But as Asa and Eagle forge a genuine bond, will secrets from the past and the urgent needs of their people in the present keep them divided?

WEEK THREE

No new releases.

WEEK FOUR

Barsk: The Elephants’ Graveyard—Lawrence M. Schoen (December 29, Tor)

In a distant future, no remnants of human beings remain, but their successors thrive throughout the galaxy. These are the offspring of humanity’s genius-animals uplifted into walking, talking, sentient beings. The Fant are one such species: anthropomorphic elephants ostracized by other races, and long ago exiled to the rainy ghetto world of Barsk. They develop medicines upon which all species now depend. The most coveted of these drugs is koph, which allows users to interact with the recently deceased and learn their secrets. To break the Fant’s control of koph, an offworld shadow group attempts to force the Fant to surrender their knowledge. Jorl, a Fant Speaker with the dead, is compelled to question his deceased best friend. Jorl unearths a secret the powers that be would prefer to keep buried. His dead friend’s son, a young Fant named Pizlo, is driven by disturbing visions to take his first unsteady steps toward an uncertain future.

The V’Dan (First Salik War #2)—Jean Johnson (December 29, Ace)

The V’Dan always believed they were the chosen race, destined to make a mark on the galaxy. For the last few centuries, they interacted peacefully with other sentient species, save for the Salik. Cold, amphibious, and vicious, the Salik were set on one goal: to conquer every race within their grasp. Now that the Salik’s ruthless war has begun, the fate of the galaxy is in the hands of two strange companions: Li’eth, a prince under siege and his rescuer, Jacaranda MacKenzie. A beautiful ambassador from the Motherworld, Jackie possesses more than the holy powers of a goddess. She brings a secret weapon, a strange, wondrous, and dangerous new technology that could be her and Li’eth’s last and only hope to save their people from extinction.

Can & Can’tankerous—Harlan Ellison (December 31, Subterranean)

This collection from one of SF’s leading authors showcases Ellison’s versatility. The first story, the 2010 Hugo-winner “How Interesting: A Tiny Man,” memorably depicts humanity’s smallness of spirit when people driven by irrational fears turn on an innocent victim. That scathing tale is followed by “Never Send to Know for Whom the Lettuce Wilts,” in which aliens plan to conquer humanity by subtly demoralizing methods such as the invention of wilted lettuce, buttons that cut thread, and the English language. Among the other eight pieces here are a modern re-envisioning of a schlock SF yarn Ellison wrote in 1957, 26 short pieces gathered as “From A to Z, in the Sarsparilla Alphabet,” and a loving tribute to Ray Bradbury.

Suzanne Johnson is the author of the Sentinels of New Orleans urban fantasy series, and writes paranormal and suspense as Susannah Sandlin. You can find Suzanne on Facebook and on her website.

We have a trailer for the second Arrow spin-off, Legends of Tomorrow! In the future, 2166 to be precise, awesomely-named DC villain Vandal Savage holds the whole planet in his grip. Luckily, a time traveler with his own sweet moniker, Rip Hunter, has zipped around collecting heroes to try to stop him. This leads to everyone going back to the ‘70s, and it looks like a lot of fun. There are also some fantastic actors here, including Arthur “Awww, Rory!” Darvil, Brandon “Underrated Superman” Routh, and Victor “Tap-Dancing Christ” Garber. Check out the full trailer!

Since the DC TV universe can’t use it’s biggest heroes, it’s doing a fascinating job of gathering smaller characters into cool configurations. Here we have The Atom, Firestorm, White Canary, Hawkgirl, Hawkman, Captain Cold, and Heat Wave all making time and 70s fashion their collective plaything, and it looks pretty groovy. Legends Of Tomorrow premieres January 21, 2016! Plus The Flash and Arrow will return the following week, so between that, Supergirl, Gotham, and the occasional dip back into Jessica Jones, you should be able to keep yourself comfortably wrapped in superheroes all winter.

Welp, they had me at “Buck,” but sure, let’s watch two-and-a-half minutes of the first trailer for Captain America: Civil War.

Interestingly, the ideological divide that puts Cap and Tony Stark on opposite sides seems to start with Bucky Barnes (makes sense, seeing as they’ve reframed Civil War within a Captain America sequel) and then brings in the “are they superheroes or vigilantes?” excuse.

“If we can’t accept limitations, we’re no better than the bad guys.”

“That’s not the way I see it.”

Sounds like Tony’s still feeling some guilt from Avengers: Age of Ultron.

“Sometimes I want to punch you in your perfect teeth.”

Yes.

“Sorry, Tony. You know I wouldn’t do this if I had any other choice. But he’s my friend.”

“So was I.”

AUGH. Bring it on:

The good folks over at The Planetary Society shared this amazing photo! This would be The Milky Way rising over the original Star Wars set in Tunisia. As you can imagine, this picture fills us with joy. How about you?

Today’s bestsellers are tomorrow’s remainders and Forgotten Bestsellers will run for the next six weeks as a reminder that we were once all in a lather over books that people barely even remember anymore. Have we forgotten great works of literature? Or were these books never more than literary mayflies in the first place? What better time of year than the holiday season for us to remember that all flesh is dust and everything must die?

Everyone thinks they’ve read a Robin Cook novel.

Brain, Fever, Outbreak, Mutation, Toxin, Shock, Seizure…an endless string of terse nouns splashed across paperback covers in airports everywhere. But just when you think you’ve got Robin Cook pegged, he throws a curveball by adding an adjective to his titles: Fatal Cure, Acceptable Risk, Mortal Fear, Harmful Intent. Cook is an ophthalmologist and an author, a man who has checked eyes and written bestsellers with equal frequency, but the one book to rule them all is Coma, his first big hit, written in 1977, which spawned a hit movie directed by Michael Crichton. With 34 books under his belt he is as inescapable as your annual eye appointment, but is he any good?

Consider Coma.

It wasn’t actually Cook’s first book. Five years previously he’d written The Year of the Intern, a sincere, heartfelt novel about life as a medical resident, which no one cared about. Stung by its failure he vowed to write a bestseller, so he sat down with a bunch of blockbuster books (Jaws for one) and tried to figure out their formula. I hardly need to point out that this is exactly what you would expect a doctor to do. And if Coma is anything, it’s formulaic.

The engine that drives this bus is Cook’s realization that organ transplant technology was well on its way to being perfected, but the problem with the procedure was a supply-side one: there simply weren’t enough raw materials. Couple that with the fact that, “I decided early on that one of my recurrent themes would be to decry the intrusion of business in medicine,” and the only thing surprising about the plot of Coma is that no one had come up with it before.

Susan Wheeler is one of those beautiful, brilliant, driven medical students who is constantly either inspiring double takes in her male colleagues or looking in the mirror and wondering if she’s a doctor or a woman, and why can’t she be both, dammit. In other words, she’s a creature of 70’s bestselling fiction. On her first day as a trainee at Boston Memorial she decides that she’s a woman, dammit, and she allows herself to flirt with an attractive patient on his way into surgery for a routine procedure. They make a date for coffee, but something goes wrong with the anesthesia and he goes into…a COMA.

Determined not to be stood up for coffee, Susan researches what happened to her date and discovers Boston Memorial’s dirty secret: their rates for patients lapsing into coma during surgery are above the norm. Susan believes that she might be on the trail of a new syndrome but her teachers and supervisors tell her to drop this mad crusade. Instead, she uses com-pew-tors to analyze her data and the shadowy figures running this conspiracy decide that enough is enough. If com-pew-tors are getting involved then Susan Wheeler must be stopped! So they hire a hitman to attack Susan, then change their minds and decide to send him back to murder her also too and as well. In the meantime, Susan’s falling in love with Mark Bellows, the attractive and arrogant surgery resident who is her supervisor.

Cook wasn’t kidding when he said that he had figured out the formula. There’s a chase, a narrow escape, a betrayal by a trusted authority figure, and a final scene with a striking standout image which you’ve seen on the posters for the movie: a massive room with comatose patients suspended from wires stretching out into the distance. Formula isn’t always bad, however, and Cook makes sure that the climax of his book happens in the last 20 pages, about three pages from the end he puts Susan in mortal peril that seems inescapable, then he brings in a previous plot point, now forgotten, that turns out to be the hinge that leads to her dramatic rescue as the police arrive, the bad guy is arrested, and quite literally before the bad guy even gets a chance for a final dramatic monologue, the book is over.

Coma is nothing if it’s not efficient, and the whole “Big business is stealing organs from comatose patients to sell to rich Arabs” conspiracy is realistically thought out. He originally wrote the novel as a screenplay, a format whose influence can still be seen in the fact that the novel begins each chapter with a scene description rather than dialogue or action, which gives it a brisk, businesslike tone and keeps too much personal style from intruding. Cook has also figured out that other part of the bestseller formula: readers like to learn things. Read a John Grisham and you’ll learn about the legal system, read a Tom Clancy and you’ll learn (way too much) about military hardware, read a Clive Cussler and you’ll learn about deep sea diving, and read a Robin Cook and you’ll learn about medicine. A lot about medicine. A whole lot about medicine.

In the section of his Wikipedia page marked “Private Life” it reads, “Cook’s medical thrillers are designed, in part, to keep the public aware of both the technological possibilities of modern medicine and the ensuing socio-ethical problems which come along with it.” Cook hammers this home in interview after interview: he wants to educate people. This is an admirable goal but it means that his books feature dry lectures on every aspect of medicine, and in Coma this tendency is already evident. Cook views his books as teaching tools and that causes them to lapse into the plodding rhythms of a lecturer unaccustomed to interruption. It’s a failing he shares with Michael Crichton, another MD-turned-author.

Coma spent 13 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list when it came out, mostly lingering around position 13 or 14, occasionally rising as high as position eight. It was made into a movie, and launched Cook’s brand, and the rest has been a long string of books with plots that sound suspiciously like Coma:

• “Lynn Pierce, a fourth-year medical student at South Carolina’s Mason-Dixon University, thinks she has her life figured out. But when her otherwise healthy boyfriend, Carl, enters the hospital for routine surgery, her neatly ordered life is thrown into total chaos.” (Host, 2015)
• “Dr. Laurie Montgomery and Dr. Jack Stapleton confront a ballooning series of puzzling hospital deaths of young, healthy people who have just undergone successful routine surgery.” (Marker, 2005)
• “A medical student and a nurse investigate medulloblastoma cases. By the time they uncover the truth about seemingly ground-breaking cures, the pair run afoul of the law, their medical colleagues, and the powerful, enigmatic director of the Forbes Center.” (Terminal, 1995)
• “A gigantic drug firm has offered an aspiring young doctor a lucrative job that will help support his pregnant wife. It could make their dreams come true—or their nightmares…” (Mindbend, 1985)
• “Charles Martel is a brilliant cancer researcher who discovers that his own daughter is the victim of leukemia. The cause: a chemical plant conspiracy that not only promises to kill her, but will destroy him as a doctor and a man if he tries to fight it…” (Fever, 1982)

There’s nothing wrong with this formula, and Coma is probably the book in which it feels freshest. But it’s interesting to note that Cook only turned to his formula after his first, non-formulaic novel was rejected by the reading public, and it’s even more interesting that the success of Coma didn’t make him want to repeat it right away. His follow-up novel? Sphinx, about Erica Baron, a young Egyptologist investigating the mysteries of an ancient Egyptian statue in Cairo. It wasn’t a hit. His next book? Well, you don’t have to teach Robin Cook the same lesson thrice. It was Brain, in which, “Two doctors place their lives in jeopardy to find out why a young woman died on the operating table—and had her brain secretly removed.”

 Grady Hendrix has written for publications ranging from Playboy to World Literature Today and his latest novel is Horrorstör, about a haunted Ikea.

Did the original Star Wars trilogy kick off an arms race that we’ll be seeing the results of in The Force Awakens?

I am so pumped up about the new Star Wars movie that I’m having dreams about it, but even as excited as I am, I still have to admit that the villains having a “Starkiller” weapon feels absolutely silly. The name brings me back to recess on the elementary school playground, and the kind of playfully impossible escalation that occurs between children playing make believe. “I shoot my mega laser at you!” “Yeah, well, I shoot my INFINITY laser at you!”*

*This always works.

I mean…come on, First Order. Wasn’t a planet-destroying Death Star bad-ass enough for you? It was certainly good enough for Darth Vader, and at least one of you quietly strokes his fire-gnarled mask as a form of stress relief. I promise I’ll still take you seriously if you build a Super Death Star. There’s no need for all these overblown star-killing theatrics.

Then I thought…actually, there probably is.

The Force Awakens takes place thirty years after Return of the Jedi, which means that the galaxy has had plenty of time to get accustomed to the idea of a moon-sized space station that can blow up planets. The fact that the Rebellion blew up not one, but two of these “Death Stars” in the span of five years has most likely left the impression that making Death Stars is a really stupid idea. They take so much work to build, and are always taken down by one hot shot in an X-Wing. Sure, the idea of a weapon capable of destroying a planet is fearsome, but thanks to Luke and His Rowdy Friends, that fearsomeness is tempered with just how ridiculously useless such a weapon has historically been in practice. Even when you take into account the tragedy of Alderaan’s demise.

In our own history, the development, use, and symbolic threat of the atomic bomb shares a few of the Death Star’s historical characteristics. Atomic bombs are a really stupid idea; not because they’re so hard to build and easy to thwart, but because the destruction they wreak is so indiscriminate and final. Atomic bombs are fearsome, but decades under their shadow has tempered that fearsomeness in our day to day lives. As individuals there’s nothing we can do to survive or stop a nuclear exchange, so any worry that we carry eventually exhausts itself. Even when you take into account the tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I imagine that the ordinary citizens of the Star Wars galaxy feel that way about Death Stars after a while. There’s nothing they can do to stop or survive a Death Star, so any worry or fear regarding them eventually exhausts itself. After a few decades, Death Stars probably even seem quaint, a symbol of a previous age of insanity, before the galaxy became tired of overblown, resource-intensive, wars.

This shot from the first real Force Awakens trailer says it all, really. The days when Star Destroyers soared effortlessly through the skies are gone.

Perhaps Kylo Ren and the First Order constructed a star-killing weapon in an attempt to pierce this jadedness, escalating to the next thing that seems impossible, now that planet-destroying lasers are almost rote.

There are some tactical benefits to a star-killing weapon versus a planet-killing weapon, as well. For example, an interplanetary civilization is more likely to have its resources scattered throughout a star system, instead of centered on one planet. Alderaan may have been destroyed by the Death Star, but that would still miss settlements on other stellar bodies within Alderaan’s solar system. It would also miss any shipyards or mining facilities that aren’t directly orbiting the main planet. For star-faring civilizations, destroying one planet in a star system doesn’t entirely eliminate that civilization’s ability to strike back. It certainly didn’t for the Rebellion.

Destroying a star in a way that makes it go nova takes care of this problem, though. A star’s destruction would eliminate almost everything in that system in a single shot. There are ancillary benefits to creating such a wide swath of destruction, too. The communication relays and hyperspace routes that the galaxy depends on undoubtedly rely on accurate location data for all known star systems. Blowing up those star systems pokes holes in those hyperspace lanes and communication relays, forcing reroutes and disconnecting not just the destroyed star system, but its surrounding systems from the galaxy at large. Considering the natural complexity of any galaxy-wide networks, it probably wouldn’t take too many attacks to snarl traffic and communication within an entire quadrant of the galaxy.

It’s also possible that nobody remembers Death Stars, and that the First Order is simply repeating the mistakes of history in constructing their Starkiller Base. Rey and Finn only seem to know about the Empire and the Rebellion as myth, after all, and the Death Stars were only a small part of that myth.

There’s another, more insidious, reason behind why the First Order would feel the need to construct a “Starkiller” weapon, though, and it mirrors our own experiences with the invention of the atomic bomb. Starkiller Base is the result of an arms race that has been ongoing since the first Death Star was completed.

We don’t know the finer details of the time between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, but we know that the Empire dissolved over the following decade and the similar-but-smaller First Order formed out of that dissolution. We also know that while the Rebellion began to grow into a governing body, it hasn’t re-formed into the mighty Republic we saw in the prequel trilogy. The fighting continues between the two sides, leaving wreckage scattered across the galaxy. Princess Leia hasn’t become President Leia or Chancellor Leia, she’s General Leia, and she’s been fighting for a long time.

We see that Leia’s Resistance has continued developing its star fighter technology–there are newer, shinier X-Wings–but did the Resistance stop there? Or did it also develop its own Death Star after the events of the Return of the Jedi?

The idea of the Rebellion/Resistance using Death Star planet-destroying technology is anathema to their ideals. But atomic bombs are anathema to our own ideals, too, yet we still develop and build them as deterrents. As the Rebellion whittled the Empire down, post-Jedi, it’s possible that they built their own planet-destroying laser as a deterrent. The Empire could try to build another Death Star, but if the Rebellion has one, too, then that approach becomes kind of pointless.

This kind of arms race could feature heavily in the story of The Force Awakens, actually, as one of the characters is intimately tied to the ravages of the Death Star superweapon. In fact, the very first time we see her, she’s holding the plans for it in her hand.

WE SEE YOU, DUDE.

General Leia.

Did Leia create her own Death Star laser in the decades between Jedi and Force Awakens? Her arguing for its creation as a deterrent wouldn’t seem out of character, for one. It also brings up a whole host of interesting questions for her character. You can imagine the huge argument Leia and Luke would have over this kind of action, with Leia arguing tactics and Luke arguing over their legacy as Skywalkers. Luke would point out that the last Skywalker who built the superweapon fell to the Dark Side. Leia would take a more nuanced view, arguing that not everything automatically equates to Dark or Light, and further, she’s not their dad. That temptation doesn’t exist for her as it does for Luke.

Leia would also probably argue that the spread of planet-destroying technology isn’t an “if,” but a “when,” so it’s possibly more responsible to take control of that process and focus it on deterrence rather than offense, as the Empire did. And who is more qualified to take up this responsibility than her? Luke, after all, wasn’t there to see the Death Star being used on his home planet. It’s not like Leia isn’t aware of the evil inherent in a superweapon. She is in fact, the only person in the entire galaxy capable of building a superweapon and using it responsibly.

Is this why Luke is gone from The Force Awakens? Did Leia go ahead with building a planet-destroying laser, driving Luke away? If so, is Luke coming back because Leia’s plan to use the Resistance’s laser as a deterrent simply lead to the development of a planet-laser-trumping Starkiller superweapon?

Is it then the duty of this new generation of heroes–Rey, Finn, Poe, and whatever Kylo is–to not repeat the mistakes of their previous generation? To toss superweapons aside? To truly be a new hope?

Chris Lough was a new hope once, but then he got lame. He writes other things on Tor.com.

Hot off her Alias reread, Tansy Rayner Roberts reviews Netflix’s Jessica Jones. In this post: “AKA 99 Friends” and “AKA The Sandwich Saved Me.” Spoilers for season 1.

“AKA 99 Friends”

Written by Hilly Hicks Jr
Directed by David Petrarca

“Nothing plays like pictures in court.”

Jessica gets a new client, and her paranoia—already off the rails thanks to the mystery photographer who has been stalking her on Kilgrave’s behalf—hits previously untapped levels. Audrey Eastman seems on the level, an angry woman looking for pictures of her philandering husband Carlo to support her divorce, but Jessica can’t be sure that this isn’t another Kilgrave trap.

Trish, meanwhile, calls in a panic because Sergeant Will the murderous cop is back with a bemused friend, banging on her reinforced security door. Jessica realises that the poor guy is acting out because he thinks there’s a dead body in the apartment.

JESSICA: He thinks he killed you. I recognise that look.

Trish and Jessica answer the door politely for proof of life, and let Will in on the truth out of pity. At the sight of the bruises around her neck, he thinks he’s a monster, and the more Jessica tries to explain, the angrier he gets.

Nice Guy Syndrome much? Will is ex-military, used to thinking of himself as a good, heroic person. What he did under Kilgrave’s influence contradicts his very sense of self—and while Jessica knows exactly what he’s going through, she doesn’t have a lot of patience with his determination to protect Trish.

Jessica has her own plan to keep her friend safe—and it’s awful. In a cringemaking scene, Trish makes a conciliatory statement on the radio to apologise for what she said about Kilgrave before.

Wow, so the theme of “compromises women make to protect themselves from the violence of men” has always been a strong part of this show, but this episode is awash with it.

Jessica might be keen on having a police officer in her Scooby gang (or indeed having a gang at all, she doesn’t do sidekicks), but Will is eager to be useful—he doesn’t bat an eyelid when she asks him to track down security footage to help find Kilgrave’s spy.

Jessica is still not sure if Audrey Eastman is legit. She goes so far as to track the woman’s movements for 24 hours, on the grounds that Kilgrave’s power has never lasted more than 10 that she knows of, without having to be “topped up.”

Her spywork uncovers a surprise: Audrey is practicing handgun target practice in a secured warehouse, which suggests she doesn’t just want a divorce from her cheating husband… Maybe it’s a good thing Jessica doesn’t usually look this closely at her clients!

HOGARTH: You need to control yourself. You are coming off distinctly paranoid.

JESSICA: Everyone keeps saying that, it’s like a conspiracy.

After an unpleasant encounter between her girlfriend/assistant and her soon-to-be-ex-wife, Jeri Hogarth summons Jessica to do what she does best—digging up dirt on spouses. Jessica is distracted by Hogarth’s office full of walk-ins—after Hope’s appearance on the radio, “Kilgrave made me do it” is the new favourite alibi for everyone from major criminals to knocked-up teenagers.

In a clever montage, Jessica sorts the legitimate Kilgrave victims from the liars—and we the viewers know enough to do the same. We already know that Kilgrave would never bother to seduce a teenager or her friends, but yes, he would make that man give him a great jacket, or make that woman play her cello for two days, or make that other woman smile incessantly.

Jessica encourages these witnesses to stay in contact, forming an unofficial “Victims of Kilgrave” therapy group. She loses her temper with Hogarth when the lawyer gets misty-eyed about how Kilgrave is wasting his “gift” on indulgences…

Ah, moral ambiguities, we love them here.

Speaking of anger and paranoia, Will is not doing great. When he brings Jessica the security camera tape of herself, he ends up screaming at Malcolm for looking at him funny while high.

In one of the super creepiest moments of the show so far (lotsa competition there!), Kilgrave communicates with Jessica via an adorable 8-year-old, who tells her “Patsy” Walker is safe thanks to the grovelling apology, and then starts swearing her head off about how Jessica is a bitch who could have stopped that bus. Cue awkward moment with the kid’s mother!

Will returns to Trish’s door, far more concerned with “making things right” than respecting her wish to be left alone. He brings her a parcel and she agrees to open it without letting him inside. Turns out—it’s a gun!

Wow, Will really does not get the whole Kilgrave situation, does he? If Trish isn’t safe behind her reinforced steel with her extensive martial arts training, how would she be any safer with a handgun? (It will certainly make it easier for Kilgrave to make her kill herself, as he has already threatened to do.) Still, Trish is impressed by the gesture.

Jessica tracks Carlo only to discover that he is with his wife… it’s a set-up. Audrey turns out to be an anti-super obsessive who is out to kill “gifted” people. Her mother was killed in “the incident” AKA the Chitauri invasion of New York, and Audrey is so swept up in anger and blame that she is acting out by trying to murder superheroes.

After the week she’s had, Jessica loses it. She rants at them both, smashing up their place one piece of furniture at a time. Among other things, she yells about how her own parents died in a random accident, but she doesn’t go around killing all drivers:

JESSICA: 99. You want to know how many of us there are? The last time I counted, I had 99 gifted friends, in this borough alone. And now every single one of them is going to know about this shit that you tried to pull. And they hate attempted murder, they really do. Cops hate it too, because… it’s against the law.

I’m assuming this is a lie, because the idea that Jessica has 99 friends, let alone superpowered ones, is highly unlikely. Her bluffing skills are excellent, though.

Hours later, Will and Trish are still talking through the security door, and it’s starting to look a lot more like a date (or at least a friendly therapy session). We learn more about Patsy Walker, teen star, and her tie-in merchandise, while Will confesses his own obsession with saving people via a frankly disturbing GI Joe anecdote. Finally, she decides to let him in.

TRISH: I might shoot you by accident.

WILL: It’s worth the risk.

Jessica’s survivor therapy group pays off—not in closure, but by providing useful evidence. A gutting confession by one of the victims of how he abandoned his baby son by the side of the road because Kilgrave wanted to ride around in his car provides a clue as to who Jessica’s photo-stalker really is…

When she follows the blue-and-white scarfed man via the security footage, there he is. And oh. It’s Malcolm.

Comics and Continuity:

“You shoot at me, I’ll pull the bullet out of my ruined jacket and shove it up your ass with my pinky finger, and who do you think that’s going to hurt more?”

This line is taken directly from the pages of Alias, delivered to someone equally deserving of scorn as Audrey Eastman. It’s pretty great that Audrey immediately wings Jessica with a bullet to see if it’s true.

Door Report:

It’s fixed! Jessica actually unlocks her door to let Audrey into her office—and she assists Malcolm with his key-turning skills, because he’s too befuddled to make it through his own door. Jessica is a key-turning champion.

She also snaps a chain on Audrey’s warehouse door, partly shatters Hogarth’s glass wall to make a point, and does a lot of furniture damage to the Eastmans’ apartment.

The main door featured in this one is Trish’s reinforced security door, which is still in good nick despite Will’s best efforts to physically beat it down. I wonder if the durability of that door is going to be plot relevant later?

“AKA The Sandwich Saved Me”

Written by Dana Baratta
Directed by Stephen Surjik

So many questions are answered in this episode, hooray!

With an “Eighteen Months Ago” tagline, we learn about Jessica’s life before Kilgrave—her run of crappy jobs, her stubborn refusal to use her strength for anything other than making a point to assholes, and Trish’s own desire to live a heroic life vicariously through Jessica.

I’m delighted to see that Jessica is the same bad attitude wrapped in a grouch wrapped in a hoodie before and after Kilgrave—she’s basically Daria without a college degree. Her sarcasm and defensiveness is exactly the same, not a result of trauma (or at least, not this trauma).

Trish’s longing for Jessica to act out her own superhero fantasies explains so much about her in the present day (the militant training regime, etc) and I love that she’s the one who came up with the name Jewel as well as the costume.

While Jessica constantly deflects her friend’s attempts to push her into the role of superhero, she still can’t help doing good and helping people when she can. In one notable scene, she rescues a small child from a traffic accident while dressed like a hoagie/sub sandwich.

We also see a tantalising hint of where Jessica’s real skills lie, as she peaces out of a cubicle job having not only liberated office supplies for her own amusement, but also having traced the dodgy financial crimes of her supervisor through the computer system.

Back in the present day, the comparison between “before Kilgrave” and “after Kilgrave” is horribly relevant with the raw revelation that Malcolm is Kilgrave’s spy. Jessica sees a picture of the kid from just six months ago where he looks happy and healthy—before he became a junkie.

And that’s Kilgrave’s secret—he isn’t only relying on his powers. Meeting Malcolm every day at the same time to receive pictures wasn’t enough to ensure his compliance via mind control, so he set himself up as his dealer instead, swapping the daily photos for drugs. Which of course means, he had to get him hooked in the first place…

We’ve had four episodes of Malcolm bumbling around, high and twitchy and basically harmless as background wallpaper of what a rough neighbourhood Jessica lives in, what a gritty world she takes for granted, and her general kindness when it comes to troubled youth. With this reveal, Jessica still sees him as a victim rather than a traitor, which shows us yet again what a good person she is under her sharp tongue and resting bitchface. Every time she finds another of Kilgrave’s victims, she adds a new person to her list of people to save.

This new information is the key to catching Kilgrave, as Jessica finds out when she follows Malcolm and spots the pattern: he goes to the park every day at the same time, wearing his blue striped scarf, and a different stranger approaches him with instructions as to where Kilgrave is waiting for him for the swap.

For those who have commented on Jessica’s limited wardrobe in the show, take note of the different variations of her stalking outfits, particularly the way she uses a variety of hoodies and caps in different combinations.

Jessica goes to tell Trish that it’s time to hero up (she doesn’t drive and plans for Trish to drive the getaway vehicle) only to find a surprise policeman in her best friend’s bed. Bonus points for Will going down on Trish in this scene; it’s not a sex act that we see nearly enough of in TV drama, and makes me think more kindly of him generally. It is hilarious that his response to Jessica interrupting their sex is to be aggressively shirtless in the following scene.

Will clearly wants in on the operation, citing his special ops background and experience, but Jessica rails against his involvement. The two of them wrangle over every detail, while Trish watches in amusement, well aware that her BFF and new man are fighting over her as much as they are over the correct way to kidnap a man in a nice suit during broad daylight.

The negotiation scene was one I found very believable. My partner thought Will was suspicious in the way he kept talking over the women and trying to control the decision making process, and therefore might still be under Kilgrave’s influence. I replied that no, that’s just a really believable interaction when a man feels he has more expertise than the women in the room. As is pointed out in the narrative itself, he does have a lot of relevant expertise, but also has some major points of ignorance, especially about Jessica’s capabilities. Also, Will’s own experience with Kilgrave means Jessica has good reason not to trust whether he will stick with the “Save Hope” program rather than killing Kilgrave outright.

Speaking of Hope, there’s a brief aside in this episode where she calls Jessica to come to prison, needing money. Hope has clearly been hardened by her time in prison as an accused murderer, and is expecting trouble. Like Jessica’s paranoia, hers bears out when she is attacked in her own bunk.

Will’s greatest contribution to the mission is a site in which to keep Kilgrave once they have captured him—a conveniently abandoned “safe house” floor in a warehouse district, including a sealed, soundproofed wall. At one point, Jessica and Will, separated by the soundproofing, use the opportunity to vocalise their distrust of each other without causing further conflict. Let’s hope neither of them read lips?

I also really appreciated the scene where Trish and Will are arguing about Jessica, and she asked him if he trusted her. His response is “With what?”, because he’s not willing to commit to that statement without context. Will is a fascinating character, so wrapped up in his own definitions of what the right thing is to do that he remains a wild card. I can’t help thinking that his righteous attitude is going to take him down a dark path…

The mission goes off brilliantly at first, with Jessica enjoying the chance to punch an unconscious Kilgrave on their way to the safe house. Team Anaesthesia Dart Gun For The Win! It goes wrong when they realise that Kilgrave has a tracker on him, and are promptly attacked by a mob of his security operatives.

The fight scene is gruelling, especially with its use of tasers—Trish is taken out with the first use of this weapon, whereas Jessica is tased repeatedly and she and Will fight a long and bloody battle. Most of the men get away, rescuing with Kilgrave’s unconscious body.

Will attempts to torture the remaining guy for information, but Jessica quickly realises the truth: This isn’t one of Kilgrave’s mind control victims at all. It’s just a dude who works for a private security company. Her mistake was thinking that Kilgrave would rely entirely on his power, but he’s much cannier than that—he’s hiring employees, too! Damn it. Why can’t he be a less intelligent super villain with fewer of his bases covered?

Trish is gutted that she was the weakest link in the fight, and Jessica can’t summon the energy to make her feel better about it. Instead, she goes home to sort out the one person she can help—maybe—Malcolm.

After rescuing him from a new supplier, Jessica handcuffs him to her bathroom sink and prepares to help him through withdrawal. He is miserable and angry, and confesses that he wasn’t always under Kilgrave’s mind control. Often, he simply took the pictures for the drugs.

Jessica digs her heels in, refusing to make a distinction between Malcolm’s addiction and what he did under mind control, because they are equally Kilgrave’s fault. She leaves him with the choice as to whether or not to continue as a junkie, by giving him access to that day’s payment.

Kilgrave calls Jessica, wondering why she didn’t kill him when she had the chance. He makes her an offer, to protect Malcolm by replacing him—sending one photo a day, “and don’t forget to smile.”

Another flashback shows us exactly how Kilgrave found Jessica (while saving a mugging victim who turns out to be Malcolm) and took her under his power. This is why Malcolm insists she can’t save him “again.”

Back in the present day, Jessica checks on Malcolm and when she sees he has ditched the drugs in the toilet, sends Kilgrave a selfie.

Ugh, ugh, ugh.

Comics and Continuity:

This beginning to feel as much like Trish’s origin story as it is Jessica’s. I hope we see Trish put on a mask and a Hellcat costume by the end of the season, and that she ends up as part of the Defenders team! She has the mad fighting skills.

Jessica’s refusal to wear a mask is very cute, up there with The Incredibles and “no capes!” for its commentary on Superhero Problems 101. (Also, the image of Trish with the mask askew on her face is reminiscent of Daredevil’s ninja costume, as well as hinting at Hellcat.)

The Costume, you guys. The Jewel outfit that Trish holds up hopefully for Jessica in the flashback is exactly what she wore in the comics! It makes so much sense—I had been wondering about that, because Jewel never entirely made sense as an identity that had come directly out of Jessica’s psyche, and makes even less sense with this especially nihilistic, sarcastic version of Jessica. If it turns out Trish has a pink wig somewhere in her wardrobe, I will be delighted. Though I will be completely OK with us never seeing Jessica actually wear the Jewel outfit or persona. She’s too cool for jewels. (Knightress, maybe… though there isn’t the excuse that all the other names were taken…)

When Kilgrave first approaches Jessica and shows such delight in her powers, she has a chance to take a superhero name for herself (it would obviously please him), but instead she speaks the truth: her hero name is Jessica Jones.

Under his influence, she speaks the truth: that she does it to help people. It’s a very different scene to the equivalent moment in the Alias comics, where “Jewel” was in the midst of a full-blown superhero career when he took her. That’s not the only tonal shift. We’re used to seeing Kilgrave all dark, growly, sinister and slightly broken but here in this flashback he’s charming and practically giddy at meeting a real-life superhero.

Still creepy as hell, of course, but somehow lighter and less troubled. It’s important to remember that while Jessica, Malcolm and the others are deeply damaged “after Kilgrave,” Kilgrave is living in an “after Jessica Jones” world. He has taken some damage as well.

Not nearly enough, but I live in hope.

Door Report:

No doors were damaged, rendered useless, crunched or otherwise harmed in the making of this motion picture.

Tansy Rayner Roberts is a Marvel Comics tragic, and a Hugo Award winning blogger and podcaster. Tansy’s latest piece of published short fiction is “Fake Geek Girl” at the Review of Australian Fiction, and she writes comics reviews on her own blog. You can find TansyRR on Twitter & Tumblr, sign up for her Author Newsletter, and listen to her on Galactic Suburbia or the Verity! podcast.