Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean (edited by Kirsty Murray, Payal Dhar, and Anita Roy) is a collection of collaborative works between Australian and Indian creators—artists and writers both—inspired by feminist principles and the global struggle of girls in patriarchy. As the introduction notes, brutal crimes against young women in late 2012 in both countries sparked protest and activism; the world took notice, too. The anthology was born out of these conversations about “the fate of all young women,” and as the title emphasizes, it is about “impossibilities, dreams, ambitions and a connection to something larger than humanity alone.”

The notable thing about this collection for young readers isn’t just that it came out of feminist principles, but also that it’s doing something I don’t see often at all: pairing up creators from different fields and cultures to create collaborative stories based on the theme. It creates a unique tone in the anthology, wherein it seems clear that everyone is experimenting and playing off of one another. In a sense, it reads more like an art project than a short story collection.

This is in part because the pieces are mostly brief, in some cases close to being flash-fiction, so they move quickly from one to another and focus for the most part on one image or concept. This makes for a fast read that primarily skims the surface of its theme rather than digging in deep. It’s a bit like watching a flipbook or a set of flashcards of intriguing concepts and singular moments—it provokes bursts of investment and emotional insight, fast then done, and stacks those all up back to back to create one fairly seamless whole.

It’s fascinating, to be honest, though I’m not sure it’s objectively comparable to the majority of the anthologies I’ve read recently. On a story-by-story basis, I often found myself feeling like I’d barely taken a sip before moving on to something else. The one unfortunate side effect of this rapid-fire organization, which is engaging as a conceptual whole, is that the individual stories—considered as separate pieces with their own space to breathe—are often lacking depth. There’s simply not room to dig in and explore; there’s only room to give us one idea, one moment, one thought, before it’s over.

Some of the contributors do better with this limitation than others. “What a Stone Can’t Feel” by Penni Russon is effective in its exploration of the strength of bonds between young women and the unfairness of suffering and loss, while also presenting an intriguing speculative conceit (the protagonist can enter into other objects to become part of them). “Arctic Light” by Vandana Singh also manages to encompass the complexity of a young woman’s choice to join an environmental direct action team and her subsequent arrest and imprisonment in a remarkably short space. Samhita Arni’s “Cast Out” takes on familiar themes in feminist criticism: girls cast out for their magical ability, which is prized in boys, forming their own culture and safe space then seeking to gift it to other girls. (It reminds me of Maresi, a feminist young adult novel I reviewed recently here.) The opening story, “Cat Calls” by Margo Lanagan, is also charming and speaks rather directly to the theme of the anthology: a group of girls and boys banding together to address and stop street harassment.

Others, though, are either too short or too predictable to quite work for me. “The Runners” by Isobelle Carmody and Prabha Mallya doesn’t succeed with its cloyingly obvious parable about a matriarchy and its treatment of android men. “Cool” by Manjula Padmanabhan took up too much of its limited space with exposition and then took a strange turn into the boy protagonist wanting to dance with his virtual teacher—but nothing else happens, and it ends abruptly. I also found “Back Stage Pass” by Nicki Greenberg too over-played to coax much of a response from the reader, which is an unfortunate note to end the collection on.

Overall, it’s an interesting project that works better taken as one giant art project—collaborative, global, and intersectional—than it does as a short story collection. I adore the concept and the motive, but I’d have liked to have seen a more solid collection of individual parts as well. It might have given the final product a stronger showing, though it stands up fine on its own in the end. There could always use to be more diverse and feminist stories for young readers, though, so it’s a definite success in that category as well.

Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean is available March 7th from Simon & Schuster.

Brit Mandelo is a writer, critic, and editor whose primary fields of interest are speculative fiction and queer literature, especially when the two coincide. They have two books out, Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction and We Wuz Pushed: On Joanna Russ and Radical Truth-telling, and in the past have edited for publications like Strange Horizons Magazine. Other work has been featured in magazines such as Stone Telling, Clarkesworld, Apex, and Ideomancer.

A series of proposed LEGOs celebrating the women of NASA has been approved by the LEGO company! Science editor and writer Maia Weinstock’s Women of NASA project “was a way for her to celebrate accomplished women in the STEM professions. In particular those who’ve made a big impact through their work at NASA.” Now that they’ve gotten the go-ahead, you’ll be able to get LEGO sets for all the small scientists in your life.

Weinstock’s sample set includes Margaret Hamilton, formerly-Hidden Figure Katherine Johnson, Sally Ride, Nancy Grace Roman, and Mae Jemison!

What other historically scientific women would you like to see LEGO-fied?

[via Geek Girl Con!]

Although it’s a superhero story in prose, the Wild Cards saga begins with nothing less than alien first-contact. In 1946, Tachyon lands on earth alone, desperate to stop the release of a gene-altering virus engineered by his family on the planet Takis. His failure allows the virus to fall into the hands of a pulp-worthy villain who carries it high above New York City. There, in a desperate and heart-stopping sky battle worthy of the best WWII flick, Jetboy attempts to stop the release of the alien biological toxin. The young fighter pilot gives his life in the attempt, but the virus is released in a fiery explosion six miles up, floating down to the city below and carried across the globe in the upper atmosphere’s winds. On that day in NYC, 10,000 people die.

The effects of the virus are immediate and devastating, exactly as its alien creators envisioned. Each person transformed by the virus responds in a completely unpredictable manner. What can be predicted, though, are the numbers: 90% of those affected will die horrifically, 9% are hideously transformed, and 1% gain spectacular powers. The arbitrary nature of the individual outcomes lead first-responders to nickname the virus the Wild Card, a metaphor applied to the victims as well. The majority who die draw the Black Queen; those who manifest the gruesome side effects are cruelly labeled Jokers; and the few graced with enviable powers are elevated to the designation Ace. Even the “natural” and unaffected themselves will bear the label “nats.”

The history of humankind changes on September 15, 1946, ever after known as Wild Card Day. This first installment in the Wild Card series covers the event and its aftermath, exploring the historical, social, and personal impact of that day. Although some of the action occurs on the West Coast, in D.C., and abroad, most of the events center on NYC. Each story recounts the experience of a nat, a joker, an ace, or the lone resident alien, beginning in 1946 and ending in 1986.

Like other shared world books, writing Wild Cards involved multiple authors. Each wrote their own chapter about a major character of their creation, interwoven into a world populated with figures imagined by the other authors. The chapters are broken up by interstitial shorts, most of which were written by editor George RR Martin. The book’s timeline ends in the year it was actually written in Real Life (1986; it was published in 1987), although three new chapters appear in the expanded edition released in 2010 by Tor.

For a book compiled from segments written by fourteen different authors, Wild Cards is remarkably consistent in its tone and thematic unity. While stylistic differences in the writing are clear, they are in no way jarring. The interludes further the world-building and add depth to the book’s tonal range, whether through the first-person oral histories of the Army men scrambling to deal with Tachyon’s landing, or the convulsive headtrip of Hunter S. Thompson in Jokertown. The shared topography grounds the plot and characters in a lived environment, especially the richly-developed NYC with its landscape of diners, Jokertown clubs, and monuments to Jetboy. Strikingly, for a tale that demonstrates historical and social change over four decades, it remains decidedly character-driven.

There’s a lot to love about this book. From the get-go, it is relentless, with the first several chapters a non-stop, heart-wrenching, chill-inducing kick to the face (featuring Jetboy, the Sleeper, Goldenboy, and Tachyon). In the following stories and eras, we’re introduced to characters that will continue to populate the series for many books to come.

Time’s Passage

For readers interested in investigating the past, the sense of history permeating Wild Cards is one of its most remarkable and consistent features. The book provides a longue durée view of a world changed forever by a single event, with the results rippling onwards through time. Our jokers and aces populate a United States rocked by social and political upheaval, dealing with issues that continue to be timely: police violence, persecution of minorities, violent protests, class conflict, government failure, and the scarring legacy of war.

Wild Card history begins in a post-WWII USA, but the spirit of each successive era suffuses the tale. The virus is released into cities filled with veterans, families hollowed by lost sons, children trained in air raid drills. Later, the crippling fear of blacklists ratchets up the tension in “Witness,” with the Red Scare and the Cold War that follows. The day that JFK died, so memorable for those who lived through it, becomes the day that ultimately births the Great and Powerful Turtle. The heady activism of the ’60s, with its demonstrations and idealism, give way to excesses of the’70s. The jokers’ fight for civil rights fairly catapults from the page. The book ends in the gritty 1980s, with Sonic Youth even making an appearance at CBGBs. As alternate-history, Wild Cards humanizes each of these crucial periods in U.S. history through the experiences of individual jokers, aces, and nats.

Historical popular culture is a presence as well. The entire story begins in 1946, after all, with a crashed spaceship and an alien in New Mexico. Tachyon may not look like a little green spaceman, but he ties traditional science fiction to the flyboy fandom of WWII war comics. The Turtle’s buddy-story with Joey brings to life the comic-collecting nerds of the 1960s’ Silver Age. The James Bond spy secrecy of the Cold War appear in “Powers,” whereas The Godfather and representations of the Mafia underlie Rosemary and Bagabond’s story. Wild Cards is authentic alt-history, but is also self-aware and self-reflexive in its shout-outs to the pop culture of its various time periods.

Class War and Persecution in Jokertown

On the surface a story about monsters and superheroes, Wild Cards is first and foremost a story about people; sadly, the jokers are treated in a way practically lifted from recent headlines. They are the most vulnerable population in the Wild Cards world, victimized and exoticized; for safety’s sake they live together in the Bowery district. Yet, even there they are beaten by police and are drafted into Vietnam in disproportionate numbers, the ultimate “cannon fodder.” They’re a population plagued by depression and suicide, until their anger finally explodes into violence and the Jokertown Riots. All our own past failings as a society come to the fore in the plight of the jokers, an eminently recognizable echo of real life. The jokers provide the dark mirror that reflects our failings back at us.

While jokers and their experience touch on the long history of persecution and civil rights in the U.S., one social area that Wild Cards does not so successfully represent is the women’s movement. The book exhibits limited roles for women and rather unbalanced gender dynamics; one wonders how the new powers brought by the virus might have impacted the history of feminism and the experience of women. What would have happened, for example, if Puppetman were a woman?

We Can Be Heroes? Even Jokers?

Such a world needs heroes most of all. Martin and his crew of contributors developed the Wild Cards universe in the mid-’80s when the superhero genre was undergoing dramatic transformations. Together with Watchmen (1986) and Batman: Year One (1987), Wild Cards portrayed comic book heroes in a newly seedy, dark, and cynical manner. It makes sense, then, that a pervasive theme of Wild Cards is the exploration of heroism in all its forms.

Time and again the wild cards universe shines a light on what it means to be a hero, even deconstructing the notion altogether. The very structure of the book allows for the contrast of heroic figures one after another. It all begins with Jetboy, the war hero and fighter pilot, who survived the battles of WWII to finally die in mortal combat in an effort to protect the fates of all. Jetboy was the last great nat hero, before his only failure ushered in the new era of the wild card.

Jetboy as the last hero of the old world is immediately contrasted with the first wild card hero, introduced in the next chapter. Croyd Crenson, the boy Sleeper, draws a reinfection by the virus every time he sleeps, shifting through new physical manifestations and powers, man to lizard and everything in between. Croyd does not fit the hero’s mold so flashily embodied by Jetboy. Frequently he’s monstrous; he becomes a drug addict; he’s a thief and a crook. But we find that his thieving supports his siblings and incapacitated parent; amphetamines allow him to patrol the Bowery’s streets to protect its vulnerable population from joker-bashers. Living in constant fear of drawing the Black Queen every time he sleeps, perhaps Croyd’s faults can be forgiven, since he relives Wild Card Day each time he wakes. Thanks to his many transformations, though, Croyd becomes both joker and ace. Even when his mind later becomes unhinged, Croyd remains a striking figure as the first hero of jokers.

Jetboy and Croyd find their opposite with the subsequent chapter, that of the first wild card villain, Goldenboy. Everything about him seems heroic, but his fatal flaw leads to an irreversible decision. As an easy-going kid with good looks, super strength, and a literal golden halo surrounding him, he becomes a member of the Four Aces, fighting for democracy and all that’s good in the world. In segregated 1947, his best friend is Tuskegee airman Earl Sanderson, himself a hero in the early civil rights movement. But whereas Earl fought for every privilege in a country entrenched in racial inequality, Goldenboy had every opportunity handed to him. As a handsome, young, white, and invincible hero, his life was one of ease, both before and after Wild Card Day. The cracks in his hero façade become evident as his success grows: he is a womanizer, a profligate spender, and ultimately proves himself incapable of standing up for what is right. His greatest and most important battle comes not in the field, against coups or enemy forces. It comes instead on safe home soil, in a civilized government building, surrounded by the powers of democracy for which he ostensibly fought. His testimony as a “friendly witness” in front of Congress reveals that, when truly powerless and afraid, Goldenboy is not a hero, but a villain: the Judas Ace.

The Wild Card authors return again and again to what it means to be a villain, or a hero, with Puppetman and Succubus, with Fortunato and Brennan, etc. The Turtle explicitly lays out why it matters, even when powerless:

“If you fail, you fail,” he said. “And if you don’t try, you fail, too, so what the fuck difference does it make? Jetboy failed, but at least he tried. He wasn’t an ace, he wasn’t a goddamned Takisian, he was just a guy with a jet, but he did what he could.”

The structural circle of heroism comes together at the end of the book with a nat, Brennan, the focus of the story once again. This time, a nat character finds himself surrounded by more powerful jokers and aces. He tries, like Jetboy—but this time, he wins.

Powers: “I’m not a joker, I’m an ace!”

Another unending source of delight and horror within the Wild Cards universe can be found in the powers manifested by those that the virus changes. The advantage of working with multiple authors reveals itself in the real diversity of wild cards drawn by the characters. The virus is infinitely flexible by its very nature, with the result that the authors are able to stretch their creativity. Some of the powers are fairly standard, such as the ability to fly, read people’s minds, or walk through walls. But most of the powers are paired with a handicap: the Turtle’s incredible telekinesis only works when he is hidden from sight within his armored, floating shell; all the various animals of New York City attend to their protectress Bagabond, who herself struggles to interact with humans and lives homeless on the streets; Stopwatch halts time for 11 minutes, but ages significantly when he does so.

It is the joker manifestations that truly add heart to the story, however, bringing a formidable pathos to the world. Many others changed by the virus exhibit physical deformities or illness. The jokers are our wounded and injured—the scarred, the disabled, the sick, those living with chronic pain and emotional despair. Even for the beautiful Angelface, the slightest touch bruises the flesh and her feet are continuously black and blue. Society treats these figures with disdain and cruelty; they are brutalized, their rights ignored, and until Tachyon opens his Jokertown clinic, they are even unheeded and shunned by the medical establishment. In the aftermath of Wild Card Day, these are the people that fell through the cracks, those who lost their voice in a world that would rather pretend that their pain does not exist. Rather than the feted aces with their superhero powers drinking cocktails at Aces High, it is the horrific treatment of jokers that makes Wild Cards feel so disturbingly real.

With this first volume, the Wild Cards series gets off to a stupendous start. This initial entry sets the stage for what’s to come in the later books, providing background to the virus and the historical and social changes it caused. Wild Cards is immeasurably enriched by the various authors who bring it a multiplicity of viewpoints and ideas, all expertly wrangled by the editor. In the end, the book’s greatest strength (and what made it stand out in 1987) is that it represents a variety of eras and a multitude of voices: ace, joker, nat.

Katie Rask is an assistant professor of archaeology and classics at Duquesne University. She’s excavated in Greece and Italy for over 15 years.

This Friday, Wolverine’s time on movie screens comes to an end. For now. You can’t keep a good franchise down, and coating one in adamantium and unleashing its berserker fury pretty much guarantees a return for some version of everyone’s favourite grumpy Canadian at some point in the next couple of decades.

But not this version of him. Hugh Jackman and Sir Patrick Stewart, two of the anchors of the labyrinthine network of X-Men movies, are both stepping down with Logan. Early word is that it’s a fantastic, and very fitting, swan song, too—but, in order to get my head in the right place for it, I thought it would be best to re-trace James “Logan” Howlett’s cinematic steps through his solo. Here’s what I found.

2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine is as busy as its title. In the space of 107 minutes, it attempts the following:

• Establishing a shared origin story for Wolverine and archenemy Sabretooth
• Introducing the Weapon X program
• Introducing characters like Wraith, the younger version of Col. William Stryker, and the Blob
• Introducing Gambit, with an eye to giving him his own movie
• Introducing Deadpool and doing…just…MYSTIFYINGLY terrible things to him
• Introducing Cyclops and, presumably, Emma Frost
• Providing an alternate explanation for the Three Mile Island incident

It definitely manages to accomplish some of these things. The opening half hour or so, tracking James and Victor from their shared, adulterous past through every war up to Vietnam, is really very good. The opening credits in particular—a balletic montage of violence that shows us the two men’s diverging paths—constitute a piece of storytelling more elegant than anything that follows them.

Likewise, a lot of the stuff dealing with Stryker’s deniable ops team is great. Ryan Reynolds is so good as Deadpool that it’s somewhat amazing that the studio left him hanging for almost a decade before giving him a movie of his own. Dominic Monaghan does wonders with only half a dozen lines as Bradley/Bolt, the team’s living battery. Almost silent, he’s charming and kind and clearly has no idea how to live with or around people. Likewise, the always reliable Kevin Durand plays the Blob as a sweet, naïve powerhouse and even Will.i.am does impressive work as John Wraith. Likewise Daniel Henney, as Agent Zero. They feel like a fractious, interesting unit—one that you’re going to be spending some time with over the course of the film.

Not as much as you’d think, though. And that’s the first problem.

Origins plays like three movies wrapped into one, and only one (plus a few bits here and there) is actually good. The opening act is great, and what follows is never less than interesting. Jackman’s take on Wolverine has always been at its best in quieter moments, and the act that he spends chopping wood in the Canadian Rockies is surprisingly good. A lot of that comes down to how fundamentally watchable Jackman and Lynn Collins as Kayla Silverfox are—they’ve got an easy chemistry, and together they make Logan’s half hour or so of peace feel earned and genuine.

And that’s the other problem. Because it’s not. The film drags Logan back into the fold in one of the stupidest ways it possibly could: by faking Kayla’s murder at the claws of his brother. The revenge angle makes sense, but the execution? Not so much. The movie asks us to buy that a man with massively enhanced senses is fooled by some fake blood, a complete lack of wounds, and a suppressed heartbeat. What the hell were they going to do if he buried her?

But no, vengeance—or rather “VENGEAAAAAAAANCE!”—is all-consuming, and off Logan runs to fail to kick Victor’s ass and then back to Stryker, who whisks him away to Alkali Lake to get his metal skeleton and new name. The film tries to hide the massively rushed pace behind the thrill of comics nostalgia: We’re going to see the adamantium in action! He’s finally going to go all Barry Windsor-Smith! ON SCREEN!

And he does. And it’s genuinely impressive for the five minutes it takes Logan to wake up, realize he’s about to be lobotomized, attack the structure Wolvie Berserk-style, and leap out into the lake.

Then? Everything goes to hell. A mystifying cameo from what seems to be a thinly-veiled version of Superman’s Ma and Pa Kent leads to an impressive (if bloodless) action sequence and visits to the various members of the old gang in the interest of further VENGEAAAAAAANCE!

This plotline involves some gratuitous fat shaming, shoddy wire work, and a bit of exposition to justify giving Kevin Durand the full-size blob suit. That, in turn, leads to a visit to New Orleans to see Gambit, and another basically pointless, if fun, fight sequence. If there’s a true victim of this movie’s lack of attention span, it’s pretty clearly Taylor Kitsch. Hollywood’s unluckiest leading man is actually pretty good as Remy Lebeau—his accent fluctuates, sure, but he has the charm and physicality down, and those can’t be taught by a dialogue coach.

One meaningful exchange of blows later, Wraith is dead at Victor’s hand, and Gambit and Logan are flying to Stryker’s secret headquarters on Three Mile Island. This is the point where the movie pretty much gives up the ghost. When Kayla reveals her deception, things are clearly getting bad. When Wade shows up, mouth sewn shut and with multiple other mutant’s abilities implanted in his body, things get worse. When Logan is shot with lobotomizing adamantium bullets? That’s as bad as it gets.

To be clear, Logan’s origin has always been a mess, but this? This feels like a greatest hits disco cover played at the wrong speed. Director Gavin Hood has a decent eye for action and the script is always at least diverting, but that’s it. Origins, ironically much like X-Men: Apocalypse, feels less like a movie and more like a checklist, embodying the worst elements of comics-based adaptation and almost none of the best. It’s still fun, especially that first hour, but the third act just falls apart.

That’s a problem the sequel shares, for subtly different reasons. Director James Mangold, who’s stuck around for Logan, first came aboard the franchise with The Wolverine and almost manages something truly brilliant. For the first two-thirds, the movie is a jet-black, blood-spattered exploration of Wolverine’s time in Japan. The opening sequence, set as the atomic bomb is dropped on Nagasaki, is flat-out brilliant, as the clever use of sound and the growing recognition of exactly where and when Logan is make for a profoundly unsettling opening that’s unlike anything else in the series.

What follows is, for the most part, pretty great, too. Logan is living wild after being forced to murder Jean Grey in order to save the world in a previous X-Men movie, 2006’s The Last Stand. He’s haunted by Jean (in a nicely understated cameo by Famke Janssen) and has no interest in engaging with the world.

That is, until Yukio (Rila Fukushima) tracks him down. She works for Mr. Yashida, a young soldier that Logan saved in the opening sequence. Now, decades later, he’s dying and wishes to repay his debt once and for all. Yashida now runs a massive technology company and believes he knows how to help Logan finally get what he wants most: to die.

Mark Bomback and Scott Frank’s script is complicated, morally ambiguous, and two-thirds of a surprisingly great contemporary noir movie. Logan, mentally and emotionally wounded already, stumbles into Japan with no conception of the situation that he’s walking into. Haunted by Jean, he becomes a pawn in Yashida’s family struggles with his son Shingen (Hiroyuki Sanada) and granddaughter Mariko (Tao Okamoto). All three members of the family want different things for Yashida and for his company, as do Kenuichio Harada (the always excellent Will Yun Lee), head of the Yashida’s personal ninja clan, and Doctor Green (Svetlana Khodchenkova), Yashida’s doctor.

Again, two-thirds of the movie work brilliantly: Jackman’s turn as a mournful, guilt-ridden Wolverine is clearly ground he’ll return to in Logan, and he’s genuinely excellent here. The moment where he realizes where he is, finding the exact spot at which he survived the bombing of Nagasaki, is extraordinarily powerful and that’s all due to Jackman’s near silent, minimal performance. He plays Logan as old, even when he doesn’t look it, and the mournfulness that comes with that powers most of the second act. It also makes his romance with Mariko feel earned; Tao Okamoto is not well served by this script but she’s excellent when not being kidnapped, and she and Logan fit perfectly. There’s shared trauma and shared peace in the relationship that gives the act they spend together a lot more impact and energy than you’d expect.

The action impresses too, especially as The Wolverine features two of the best action sequences in the entire X-Men franchise to date. The first is a fantastic run-and-gun that starts at a funeral and finishes with Logan and his assailants fighting on the outside of a speeding bullet train. It’s unique and crunchy and NASTY in a way that uses action to express character and location beautifully. It’s also the best use of this film’s MacGuffin: Logan’s mysteriously ailing healing factor.

The second impressive sequence is far smaller in scope but with a far more personal impact. Yukio protects an unconscious Logan from a demented Shingen in one of the best close-quarters fights committed to recent film. Again, there’s a clear emotional reason for everything that happens and again, character drives the action. Yukio is smaller, faster, and more agile, but trapped protecting Logan. Shingen is larger, possibly more skilled, and certainly more brutal, but can’t maneuver as well. The acrobatic game of bladed chess that ensues is a delight and feels dangerous in a way that few western action sequences do.

Unfortunately it’s also the last time the movie feels dangerous. Third-act bloat strikes again and, aside from a beautifully nasty sequence that involves Logan and way too many arrows, the final act disappoints. The out-of-left-field appearance of a massive suit of Silver Samurai power armour was, Mangold revealed recently, mandated by the studio and it shows. Yukio, Mariko, and Kenuichio are all shuffled into background for a traditional, and dull, superhero throwdown. Again, it’s still relatively fun, but it feels far more manufactured and by-the-numbers than the rest of the movie, especially as Viper (the film’s most extraneous character) is seemingly there just to give Yukio someone to fight.

But even then, the film manages to end well. Logan’s newfound peace feels justified and hard-won, and the premise of Yukio taking on the role of his “bodyguard” and travelling the world together is great fun. It’s a shame we won’t get to see those stories, but it’s impossible not to feel oddly relieved at knowing that they exist. We know Logan’s peace doesn’t last—the chronologically mystifying Days of Future Past stinger in the trailers confirms that. But it’s enough that he gets even a little respite.

That level of affection and genuine concern that we feel for this character constitutes the adamantium-laced spine of these movies. Despite everything thrown at him by mutants, humans, writers and studios, Logan gets back up. It always hurts. He always does it. I suspect Logan is about to change that forever. If it does—or even if it doesn’t and we get an actual happy ending—one thing will be clear: He’ll have earned the rest.

Alasdair Stuart is a freelancer writer, RPG writer and podcaster. He owns Escape Artists, who publish the short fiction podcasts Escape Pod, Pseudopod, Podcastle, Cast of Wonders, and the magazine Mothership Zeta. He blogs enthusiastically about pop culture, cooking and exercise at Alasdairstuart.com, and tweets @AlasdairStuart.

A Gathering of Shadows may have put V.E. Schwab on the New York Times Bestseller List for the first time, but it’s sequel–the final installment of her Shades of Magic trilogy–has debuted even higher! A Conjuring of Light is #6 on the Print Hardcover New York Times Bestseller list, marking a fitting end to a riveting series.

You can take a peek at her touring schedule for A Conjuring of Light, and wait with bated breath for the movie adaptation that Schwab herself will be producing along with Gerard Butler’s production team.

You can also check out Schwab’s Twitter feed, and stare at her sitting on this sweet throne made out of her books (on the right there). #lifegoals

Legion is exactly the kind of television I should like. It’s full of the things I love. There are great TV actors like Dan Stevens (if you haven’t seen The Guest, omg go stream it immediately), Aubrey Plaza, Bill Irwin, Katie Aselton, and the phenomenal Jean Smart. It’s a comic book show outside the limitations and purview of a meddling film studio—just look at the consistently enjoyable CW, DC, and Netflix Marvel mini-’verses that are as good as they are because they more or less stand alone from the film franchises. And it’s got a bananas premise by a creator (Noah Hawley) known for his steady yet absurdist work, quality notwithstanding (*cough* My Generation and The Unusuals were undermined by too much quirk and not enough plot *cough*).

So why, after all that, is Legion not my new favorite show? Let’s dig down into the first four episodes and try to uncover what the show gets right and what it’s fumbled.

“Chapter One” introduced us to David (Stevens) in the psych ward, his budding romance with Syd (Rachel Keller), another supposedly mentally ill young woman who refuses to touch anyone, as well as his weird and inexplicable friendship with Lenny (Plaza). There, he’s interrogated by representatives of Division 3—who, we later learn, want to either turn him into a weapon or kill him. After Syd unexpectedly (and accidentally) uses her powers to swap bodies with David, they are both forcibly rescued by the Summerland crew run by Dr. Melanie Bird (Smart).

“Chapter Two” delivers David to Dr. Bird’s compound in the woods. Cary Loudermilk (Irwin) and his body-sharing sibling Kerry (Amber Midthunder), run brain scans trying to determine exactly what kind of mutant David really is. Meanwhile Dr. Bird, with the assistance of “memory artist” Ptonomy (Jeremie Harris), explore David’s memories looking for the onset of his powers. If they can learn what triggered his abilities as a child they can help him control them as an adult. As it turns out, David wasn’t always the put-upon nice guy we thought he was. During his tempestuous relationship with his last girlfriend, Philly (Ellie Araiza), he and Lenny were addicts of some kind of vapor drug, leading to him robbing his own shrink (Scott Lawrence) to fuel his habit.

Meanwhile, David’s sister Amy (Aselton) is captured and tortured by The Eye (Mackenzie Gray), the mutant psychic muscle for Division 3. David’s uncontrollable powers—which now include levitation, telekinesis, telepathy, teleportation, and a possibly sentient subconscious—turn against Syd, Ptonomy, and Dr. Bird when they take an ill-advised excursion deep into David’s mind. There, they’re chased by the yellow-eyed monster and its childish companion/counterpart The World’s Angriest Boy. Neither creature is an organic part of David’s memories; they’re something else, something powerful, something semi-independent.

The show goes down the rabbit hole for “Chapter Four.” With David in a catatonic state as he wanders the astral plane, Kerry, Syd, and Ptonomy go on the hunt for answers to David’s past. Turns out, Lenny was really a dude named Benny, that David’s childhood dog King didn’t exist at all, and that he broke into his shrink’s office to destroy evidence and nearly killed his doctor. David finally breaks free of the astral plane after a disheartening conversation with Dr. Bird’s husband (Jemaine Clement), but in his haste The Eye shoots Kerry and escapes.

Where the first episode was all flair and little substance and the second all substance with little flair, the third manages to balance equal amounts of both without boring or overwhelming the audience. The fourth episode goes all in on the bizarre, and depending on your tolerance for cryptic-for-the-sake-of-cool visuals, it either worked like gangbusters or fell flat like it did for me.

On the surface, Legion tells the story of David Haller, a young man who is either mentally ill, a mutant, or a mentally ill mutant. In the first case, given what we’ve seen so far, it’s quite possible that  David is hallucinating everything involving Syd and Lenny and that he’s still in his tiny room in Clockworks Psychiatric Hospital. The third possibility raises the question as to whether his mental illness is separate from, or caused/triggered by, his mutant abilities. (Mr. Robot is rooted in a similar premise and has worked wonders with it, even throughout a wonky second season.) The second option, though, veers into some uncomfortable territory in terms of disability tropes—he’s crazy, no wait, he’s magic!—in which case ugh, no, please don’t. It’s only been four episodes and we don’t have enough information to know what’s happening, but I suspect they’re going to take the laziest route possible and make David’s disability a superpower, because TV and movies always take the easy route.

It’s his relationship with Syd that I think I have the hardest time buying, and that’s saying a lot given that Legion is a comic book show about mutants. What we see of her relationship with David is intentionally enigmatic. I barely tolerate insta-love in books and Hawley has the guts (or gall?) to base a whole show on it. I totally buy David and Syd being romantically and sexually attracted to one another—make two conventionally pretty, cishet white people the stars of your show/movie and Hollywood law dictates that they must have the hots for each other—but with very little setup, the audience is supposed to believe that they’re both willing to risk their lives for each other. Something else has to be going on, right?

Visually, the show is spectacular. Jaw-droppingly spectacular. In every episode, Hawley and company pull off one mind-boggling and gorgeous visual set piece…then do two or three more like it’s a piece of cake. The trips into David’s subconscious in the second and third episodes left me goggling in admiration. Not to mention the stellar contradictions between the 1960s Mod costume design and the futuristic technology. What era is Legion set in? Who the hell knows, and that it really doesn’t matter is part of the fun.

Legion’s biggest problem right now is that it’s too reliant on earning the mantle of prestige TV, to the point where the story keeps getting buried under all the sparkly. Not every show needs to be wall-to-wall action. Some of the best prestige TV, shows like Rectify or The Leftovers, let their characters drive the plot. Even Hawley’s Fargo is largely contemplative save for bursts of bloody activity. So far Legion hasn’t figured out how to balance character-driven introspection with a fantastical structure without falling into the  cryptic enigma zone. Legion doesn’t necessarily need to be about anything at all, but it seems so intent on meaning something important, or at least telling an important story—yet hasn’t done the story work to earn it.

Frankly, if I weren’t covering this for Tor.com, I’d probably just pile the eps in my DVR and binge the whole season one weekend over the summer. For me, the plot and the characters are fairly meh, but the visuals, music, and actors are what keep me coming back for more. Legion is a good show, maybe on the way to being great if it can work out its kinks.

Final Thoughts

• “Don’t give a newbie a bazooka and be surprised when she blows shit up.”
• “That bitch’s secrets have secrets.”
• “He believes he’s mentally ill, but at the same time, part of him knows the powers are real.”
• In case you don’t know (potential spoilers via the original comics): Legion was the illegitimate son of Charles Xavier and Gabby Haller. Not only can he absorb the personalities of others but he also has multiple split personalities, as well telekinesis, telepathy, pyrokinesis, and the ability to both time travel and warp reality. Eventually David had thousands of split and absorbed personalities all trying to gain control of him and his powers. I think he currently no longer exists—he erased himself from existing—but Marvel has yet another new event crossover looming on the horizon so he of the bizarro hairdo could always return.
• Oh man, forgot to mention the killer soundtrack. Wowza.
• That dance number in the first episode was completely pointless, plot-wise, but it was awesome to behold.
• Check the nods to Kubrick and Pink Floyd.
• The story that Dr. Bird’s dead husband-slash-coffee machine tells her about the woodcutter and the crane? Back in 2006 the Decemberists did a hauntingly beautiful album based on that folktale called “”The Crane Wife” that you should definitely check out.
• So far, David is the only straight-up X-Men mutant I recognize, and even then he’s only tangentially related to the comics—no Charles Xavier as a dad, for instance, despite all the X-Men logos. Syd’s closest relation would probably be Rogue. Hawley’s stated that the show won’t play into the X-Men franchise or universe.
• Due to some winter-related shenanigans, I couldn’t cover the premiere, but I’ll be back at the end of March to cover the last half of the season and the finale.

Alex Brown is a teen librarian, writer, geeknerdloserweirdo, and all-around pop culture obsessive who watches entirely too much TV. Keep up with her every move on Twitter and Instagram, or get lost in the rabbit warren of ships and fandoms on her Tumblr.

Did you want to see CGI’d Johnny Depp as baby Jack Sparrow hanging out on Javier Bardem’s big old ship?

I mean, why not, right?

The latest trailer for Pirate of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales gives us a better idea of what the plot might entail, from Bardem’s grudge against Jack Sparrow to Barbossa’s role in this whole mess.

And we’ve got another Will-Elizabeth replacement team? Man, it’s hard to find reliable ingenues these days.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales is in theaters May 26, 2017.

Maybe you already have enough John Scalzi books to build a book fort—and if you do, why aren’t you showing us pictures of said fort?!?

If you don’t have a full-fort collection, well, now’s your chance! You can enter to win a whole pile of Scalzi books, including a galley of The Collapsing Empire, by clicking right here.

The winner will receive a copy of each of the following:

Old Man’s War
Ghost Brigades
The Last Colony
Zoe’s Tale
The Human Division
The End of All Things
Agent to the Stars
The Android’s Dream
Fuzzy Nation
Lock In
Redshirts
Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded
The Collapsing Empire (galley)

While you’re waiting moderately patiently to find out if you’ve won, why not take a peek at the beginning of The Collapsing Empire?

Ofwarren fulfills her purpose on the Birth Day, the kind of day that is hoped for by all of Gilead and that brings the Handmaids together to help bring new life into the Republic. Later, Offred finds herself in a completely unexpected—and incredibly illicit—situation alone with the Commander, as he asks for something ridiculous and demands something illegal.

The index to the Handmaid’s Tale reread can be found here! As this is a reread, there will be spoilers for the rest of the book, as well as speculation about the TV series.

VII: Night

Summary

Offred lies in bed after Nick kisses her in the sitting room, still trembling with the visceral desire to be with someone. She reflects that you can’t actually die from lack of sex—”it’s lack of love we die from.” She could touch herself, but her body feels like “something deserted.” She craves another body to wrap her arms around, to be close to.

She believes in three different fates for Luke: He was shot in the head when she and their daughter were captured; his body is decomposing in the forest, rejoining the earth, his face fading (both physically and from her memory). He is a prisoner somewhere, aged ten years from physical labor or punishment; he wonders why he has been kept alive, what his fate holds. He got away and made contact with the resistance.

In the third scenario, he will send her a message, hidden in some mundane daily detail like her food or shopping trips:

The message will say that I must have patience: sooner or later he will get me out, we will find her, wherever they’ve put her. She’ll remember us and we will be all three of us together. Meanwhile I must endure, keep myself safe for later. What has happened to me, what’s happening to me now, won’t make any difference to him, he loves me anyway, he knows it isn’t my fault. The message will say that also. It’s this message, which may never arrive, that keeps me alive. I believe in the message.

Offred believes in all three versions of Luke at the same time, because the contradiction allows her to believe in something: “Whatever the truth is, I will be ready for it.”

She wonders if Luke hopes.

Commentary

Reading about the three Lukes, I couldn’t help but think about the belief in multiple soulmates—that various circumstances, decisions, and timing could arrange different but equally complementary partners for someone. It’s not what Offred means here—her coping mechanism is more about not being taken aback if and when she finds out his fate—but the truth is, even if all three of them were reunited, they would not be the same people as before. I wonder what the three versions of June that Luke believes in are: an Unwoman working in the colonies until the labor or the pollution kills her? A Jezebel?

There is something so tragic yet sweet about how Offred conducts these imaginary conversations with Luke in which she asks his forgiveness for what she’s done during the time they were apart.

Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I, too, am disembodied.

The use of disembodied was especially striking, because of all of the focus there is on the Handmaids’ bodies. And yet, they only truly matter when someone else is inside them: men impregnating them, or babies growing in their wombs.

Offred’s similarly strong belief in the resistance is a callback both to the war stories she watched on television in Part VI and the pornography that the Handmaids-in-training are forced to watch at the Red Center in Part VIII: images and agendas presented as truth, meant to shock and appall, pointed to as justification for all manner of sins. And yet, Offred has grown to expect the existence of the resistance, as integral to the Republic of Gilead’s workings as the Angels and the Eyes:

I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light. There must be a resistance, or where do all the criminals come from, on the television?

As Moira says in the next part, it could all be actors on a set. As Offred says, it’s hard to tell.

VIII: Birth Day

Summary

Offred’s entire daily routine is completely thrown off by a Birth Day—expected but unpredictable as to when it falls, and requiring the full attention of every Handmaid in the area. The red Birthmobile picks up Offred and the others, stopping at each home with a siren that seems to scream Make way, make way! (Which sounds rather similar to “Mayday”…) Some of the Handmaids laugh, others cry, others pray; they can chatter amongst themselves and furtively try to find friends, as Offred asks one to look out for Moira. On a Birth Day, Offred reflects, “we can do anything we want.” Then immediately revises that: “within limits.”

A flashback to the Red Center fills in some of the worldbuilding regarding infertility in the Republic of Gilead: There is a one-in-four chance that babies will be born with deformities, unable to survive outside of the womb. There was no one cause, but excessive levels of pollution and radiation (including exploded atomic plants along the San Andreas fault, triggered by earthquakes), plus a nasty syphilis mutation, conspired to hinder women’s chances to give birth. The Handmaids, then, are the “shock troops” who “march out in advance, into dangerous territory” to try and bring new life into the world. And if they don’t, well, the Unbabies are quickly and quietly disposed of.

They are taken to the home of Commander Warren, which is much more ostentatious than that of Offred’s Commander. The Wife of Warren and Ofwarren (formerly known as the sniveling Janine) both wear cotton nightgowns; but while Ofwarren is struggling through contractions in the master bedroom, the Wife is downstairs among the other Wives, who pat her tiny belly as if she too is giving birth.

Offred’s focus is on Ofwarren, as the Handmaids surround her in a ritual that is both supportive (chanting, guiding her with their voices) verging on hysterical, as they all feel phantom pregnancy symptoms: pain in their wombs, swollen breasts, as if they too are giving birth.

Another flashback: Aunt Lyda showing the Handmaids-in-training the incredibly violent pornography but also showing them film reels of Unwomen—that is, feminists like Offred’s mother (who she glimpses more than once) marching for Take Back the Night, against rape and domestic abuse. Oddly, some of the signs haven’t been censored, though Offred wonders if this is an oversight or a warning. But these images are muted, as they don’t want them to hear what the Unwomen are saying.

“Breathe, breathe,” the Handmaids encourage Ofwarren. “Hold, hold. Expel, expel, expel.” Janine is in agony, as no anesthetics are allowed (I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children), but the Handmaids help her to the Birthing Stool. This strange two-seated chair mimics the Ceremony in that the Wife of Warren perches on the higher seat, holding Ofwarren between her legs as if the baby girl who emerges came from her own womb. To wit, the other Wives take over, handing the baby to the Wife as if she has just labored. The Handmaids stand around Janine, still crying helplessly, to block out the painful sight.

Back at the Commander’s home, Offred is off the hook for chores or other household duties… except for the Commander’s strange command to join her in his office. She is terrified, but she cannot refuse him… and on top of that, she’s curious about what he wants from her, because wanting is a weakness that conversely gives her power.

What he wants is someone to play Scrabble with.

Offred could shriek with laughter, she’s so relieved. At any rate, it’s still illegal for her to stare at the letters, to form words with them: Valance. Quince. Zygote. Limp. Gorge. She wins the first game and lets him win the second. They are co-conspirators.

Then he says, “I want you to kiss me.” This more than anything else, she cannot refuse. But he’s sad, because he wants her to kiss him like she means it.

This, like much of this part, is a reconstruction.

Commentary

It’s interesting that Offred makes the distinction between these parts being reconstructions, which would imply that she was not able to record them until later, when she had to recreate the memories but could also interject more perspective thanks to hindsight. With theories about these chapters being out of order, perhaps this section of the book reflects the point where Offred begins recording The Handmaid’s Tale:

When I get out of here, if I’m ever able to set this down, in any form, even in the form of one voice to another, it will be a reconstruction then too, at yet another remove. It’s impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which would mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many. But if you happen to be a man, sometime in the future, and you’ve made it this far, please remember: you will never be subject to the temptation or feeling you must forgive, a man, as a woman. It’s difficult to resist, believe me. But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.

If you consider The Handmaid’s Tale (that is, Offred’s recordings) within the context of the symposium at the end, “even in the form of one voice to another” is how her story does get told, though unfortunately she’s not present to join in the conversation.

Offred looks to the past a lot in these two parts; it seems to be her way of disconnecting from the very visceral moments in the present—the smell, the chanting, the blood, the pain—though she does always return and recenter herself as needed.

Not a hope. I know where I am, and who, and what day it is. These are the tests, and I am sane. Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.

I had forgotten how grotesque the Wife’s part of the Birth Day is, how the other Wives coo over her while letting the Handmaids do their work. On the one hand, the Aunts have reminded the Handmaids and us to be sympathetic to everything the Wives go through, as these women they consider sluts and rejects get to have the glory of bearing new life. But on the other hand, it seems vain, desperate, in denial about the reality of Gilead.

Offred’s flashbacks to her mother are a part of the book I had completely forgotten, that I found so affecting on this latest read. I’d like to talk about that more in the comments, but it is so striking that Offred’s mother made a point of being a single mother, having no interest in keeping Offred’s father in the picture, and that Offred would argue “I’m not the justification for your existence” when that’s exactly what has happened to the Handmaids:

What confronts us, now the excitement’s over, is our own failure. Mother, I think. Wherever you may be. Can you hear me? You wanted a women’s culture. Well, now there is one. It isn’t what you meant, but it exists. Be thankful for small mercies.

Thankfully, a small comfort in this women’s culture is figures like Moira, who we discover escaped the Red Center in the most badass way possible: by fashioning a shiv out of a toilet lever and stealing an Aunt’s clothing, then walking right out there like she knew exactly who she was. Her escapade, which gets passed down from Aunt Lydia through tattletale Janine to the other women to try and suss out Moira’s accomplice(s), instead becomes a piece of hope, turning her into a Joan of Arc-esque figure of resistance.

Welcome back to the Warbreaker reread! Last week, Vivenna was manipulated into approving Denth’s plans, thinking they would benefit Idris. This week, Siri’s new nighttime routine is disrupted, and Vasher begins some manipulations of … SQUIRREL!

This reread will contain spoilers for all of Warbreaker and any other Cosmere book that becomes relevant to the discussion. This is particularly likely to include Words of Radiance, due to certain crossover characters. The index for this reread can be found here.

Click on through to join the discussion!

Chapter 20

Point of View: Siri
Setting: The God King’s bedchamber
Timing: About a week after Chapter 18

Take a Deep Breath

Siri waits to enter the bedchamber, no longer afraid of the nights. Bluefingers, uncharacteristically attentive and nervous, reveals that she is working toward exactly the wrong goal: an heir will put both herself and the God King in grave danger. Shaking off the encounter, Siri enters the bedchamber for what has become her nightly routine: remove gown, wait a few minutes, bounce and moan, then snuggle in for a good night’s sleep. As she settles in, she reflects on Bluefingers’s odd behavior and warnings.

Suddenly feeling something odd, she opens her eyes and screams to discover the God King himself looming over her. Oddly, he stumbles back, looking uncertain, and Siri instinctively speaks softly to calm him. Once they’re both over the shock, he sits on the bed—giving her a momentary fear that he’s going to decide to consummate their marriage now—and pulls out … a book of children’s stories. And he seems to want her to do something with it. Confused about his request, she finally asks out loud why he doesn’t just tell her what he wants. He opens his mouth to reveal the truth: his tongue has been removed. Siri’s thought race toward the inevitable reason, and she gazes at him in horror. He begins to withdraw, but she catches his arm and explains her reaction. He is clearly pleading for her to read to him, and the rest of the situation finally registers, to her dismay. Still, she sees strength and determination in his eyes, and realizes he’s pointing at the first letter of the first word; she resolves to teach him to read.

Breathtaking

“You have to tell me something!” Siri said.

“Vessel,” Bluefingers said, leaning in. “I advise you to please keep your voice down. You don’t know how many factions shift and move inside the palace. I am a member of many of them, and a stray word on your part could… no, would… mean my death. Do you understand that? Can you understand that?”

She hesitated.

“I should not be putting my life in danger because of you,” he said. “But there are things about this arrangement with which I do not agree. And so, I give my warning. Avoid giving the God King a child. If you want to know more than that, read your histories. Honestly, I would think that you’d have come to all this a little more prepared.”

I really never can figure out just how much of what he says I should believe. His motives are so much different than she is intended to assume… But we do know that he wants to make sure she doesn’t trust the priests, and I’m guessing he’d prefer she didn’t trust the God King either. I’m not quite sure why he actually suggests reading the histories, though.

Also: I’m beginning to think that even if she’d paid more attention to her lessons, she wouldn’t have learned the right things to figure out what’s going on here. From what I can tell, their lessons were solely the Idrian perspective—which is to be expected, to some extent, but it’s like they completely forgot that there might be a Hallandren perspective which should at least have been acknowledged. Even Vivenna doesn’t seem to have any comprehension of the Hallandren view of their shared history, nor of Hallandren’s own history over the last couple of centuries. Really?

Local Color

Sanderson’s annotations for Chapter 20 address something we’ve talked about before—characters who deliberately don’t tell you everything they know. We all know it’s frustrating, so he really, really tries to make sure his characters have a very good reason for not telling. At this point in the story, we sort of have to take Bluefingers’s word that his life would be in danger if he revealed too much; later we’ll learn that his motives go far, far beyond his own personal danger. So, okay then.

The remainder of the annotations address the use of black and white in BioChromatic magic, the surprise of discovering the difference between perception and reality of the God King, and the origins of that plot.

Snow White and Rose Red

Siri’s rebellious streak comes to the fore in a big—and unusually helpful—way in this chapter.

She’d mostly been feeling smug that she’d maneuvered her way around the priests and the supposed danger of failing her wifely duties, so Bluefingers’s ambiguous warnings were… perhaps less effective than he’d hoped. Except, of course, that she really doesn’t trust the priests, which was one of his goals; I’m not sure how much credit Bluefingers gets for that, since it’s arguable that their own behavior has at least as much to do with her mistrust as his warnings.

Anyway… The revelation of what had physically been done to Susebron, combined with her observation of the politics of the Court of Gods,  leads her inescapably to a greater understanding—not of her precarious situation, but of his. Not only has his tongue been removed to keep him from using his Breath, he has been kept completely ignorant, not even taught to read, so that he is completely under the control of his priests. Now the cautions against touching or kissing him make even more sense, since clearly the priests would not want anyone to get close enough to him to learn of his limitations.

His unexpected decision to make himself vulnerable to her this night, and the resulting revelations and realizations, take her mind off herself in the best way. For what may be the first time in her life, flouting the immediate “authority” puts her firmly on the side of the one who’s supposed to be the actual authority—and, of course, eventually will be.

This moment, and the discovery of who Susebron really is, completely change the tone of Siri’s plot going forward.

As I Live and Breathe

Siri wonders why Susebron mostly wears black, when his aura does such impressive things with white. The answer (from the annotations) is that it’s all about Awakening—white provides no power source for an Awakener, and black provides more than any other color. There are two things that feel backward to me about this: Why would the priests want him to have such a strong potential? And why is black (the absence of color) a better source than white (all colors)? To the first, I can only assume it’s a matter of perception: most people don’t know the God King can’t speak to Awaken anything, but he has this magnificent aura, so those who know Awakening would see it as a very powerful display. To the second… well, I guess it would imply that wavelengths absorbed are used for Awakening, rather than wavelengths reflected?

In Living Color

Susebron. My stars. I suppose they removed his tongue before he was even given that massive supply of Breath, or immediately afterwards, so he doesn’t remember it happening? Still. What a monstrous thing to do to a child!

Chapter 21

Point of View: Vasher
Setting: Court of Gods
Timing: Undetermined, but presumably the same night as Chapter 20

Take a Deep Breath

Vasher stands on top of the God King’s palace, watching the sunset and pondering the nature of his sword. Once darkness falls, he goes into action: pulling color from the rooftop, he Awakens his trousers and shirt, then descends the massive stone blocks which form the pyramid shape of the palace. Reaching the ground, he carefully moves toward the palace of one Mercystar, a goddess involved in politics but without large influence—all the while, with Nightblood nagging that Vasher is bad at sneaking and should just attack, that being much more fun and all.

After brief reconnoitering, he approaches his chosen door doing a crazy-old-man routine (with Nightblood complaining all the while); the kindness of the guards’ offer to help him find a shelter makes him feel guilty for knocking them both out. Once inside, he proceeds down the servants hallway and prepares his rope belt for further shenanigans—which promptly appear in the form of a handful of servants. The rope grabs one, but awkwardly, so Vasher slings the sheathed Nightblood in the general direction of the group. Only one stops to pick it up, with predictable results, as the other two run away yelling for help.

Leaving the first two servants incapacitated but not dead, Vasher starts toward his goal, but realizes he’s not going to make it before others arrive. Frustrated, he removes a dead squirrel from his pouch and Awakens it. Sending it to wreak as much chaos as it can, he dashes to the place his informant indicated, and finds the object of his search: a trapdoor. He opens it and drops into a tunnel underneath the goddess’s palace.

Breathtaking

The sword couldn’t see. But with its powerful, twisted BioChroma, it could sense life and people. Both were things Nightblood had been created to protect. It was strange, how easily and quickly protection could cause destruction. Sometimes, Vasher wondered if the two weren’t really the same thing. Protect a flower, destroy the pests who wanted to feed on it. Protect a building, destroy the plants that could have grown in the soil.

Protect a man. Live with the destruction he creates.

I… can’t really explain why this struck me so profoundly tonight, but there it is. Sometimes it’s hard to know what to do when your task is to protect. For an Awakened sword commanded only to destroy evil but not really understanding what “evil” is, the task is impossible—but the sword, having no conscience, never feels guilty about the destruction, so it’s also easy. The human, though having far greater understanding, also has a far greater burden to bear when a difficult decision must be made.

Local Color

Y’all just need to read the annotations for this chapter, because any attempt at summarizing the key points would be worse than useless. I’ll just list them to make you want to go read about it, okay? Sanderson talks about how Awakening works, and some of the changes the procedure underwent during the writing process, with the result that someone who is really skilled can use simple commands to do extremely complex functions. Then there’s an interesting section on the personal background behind the whole crazy-person rationale, the kindness of the guards, and the general good-heartedness of most of the people who work in the Court. He concludes with further insight on creating Lifeless—particularly the squirrel—plus the various motivations of all the people in this web of deceit, none of whom understand nearly all they think they do about the others. Also, Vasher’s mysterious informant is Bluefingers.

In Living Color

Vasher, here in scruffy-form, isn’t obviously a Returned; in fact, first-time readers wouldn’t actually know that he was Returned at this stage, would they? I don’t think we’ve been told yet, anyway. Still, here he is, and I had to work out the answer to a question about him this week. As he’s Awakening his clothing, drawing color from the roof of the God King’s black palace, he makes a mental note that he’d never thought of black as a color until he became an Awakener. Since he claims that, like all Returned, he remembers nothing from his life before Returning, exactly when did he become an Awakener?

Just formulating the question made me realize that technically, Returned are not usually Awakeners despite their enormous single Return-Breath. They may have the Fifth Heightening, but they can’t use that Breath to Awaken anything unless they’re willing to die for it.  Here in the Court of Gods, all the gods and goddesses are carefully provided with their single life-Breath every week, so none of them have any extra Breath to use for Awakening. They’re super-beings with virtually no power. Weird.

Vasher, obviously, has a huge quantity of Breath; he already had a little of it when we met him in the Prologue, and then he gained a whole LOT more from Vahr. We’ll find out eventually that there was a time when he had thousands of Breaths and gave them all away. Apparently he makes a habit of accumulating a lot, using them for whatever mission he’s on, and then starting over if he needs to.  So presumably, he started acquiring Breath back in his scholarly days, and learned about Awakening then.

You know, an awful lot of people’s Breath have been held by this one man over the years…

As I Live and Breathe

This is seriously an Awakening-heavy chapter. Funny that, after the Chapter 20 commentary on black as a color, here we have Vasher using it and actually thinking about it. Like him, I’m amused to think of Treledees reaction when he sees a couple of grey patches on the roof of this proudly all-black pyramid. ::snicker::

So. One: he draws color from the roof of the palace where he’s kneeling to Awaken his trouser legs, with tassels wrapping around his feet and ankles and the legs stiffening to provide additional strength. This gets used almost immediately, as he jumps down the side of the palace. (Rock climber’s dream!) It also comes in handy when he needs to subdue two guards at once, and again  when he jumps blindly through the trap door into the tunnel under Mercystar’s palace.

Two: while still on the roof he Awakens his shirt so that he’s got what amounts to an extra set of fingers on each hand, which he expects he may need later in his expedition; this drains the color from more of the rooftop, and drops his Breath level to the Second Heightening. (Apparently the more complex the Command, the more Investiture it requires. Makes sense, I guess.) These extra fingers come in handy very soon, when he reaches the two guards at the door and uses the super-strength tassels on one hand to strangle the first guard while he uses his other hand and Nightblood’s hilt to knock the wind out of the second guard. With his super-strength legs sweeping the second man’s feet from under him, and cutting off his air supply, the poor guys didn’t stand a chance.

Three: in the servant’s corridor of Mercystar’s palace, he unwraps the trusty chunk of rope he always wears as a belt, and suddenly needs to Awaken it to grab a servant.  This uses most of his remaining Breath, as well as drawing all the color from his boots and cloak – the only things he’s wearing that aren’t already Awakened. All that grey, in a land obsessed with color, will instantly give him away as an Awakener; there are occasional hazards in any job.  At least he can recover the Breath from the rope before he moves on.

Don’t Hold Your Breath (Give it to me!)

Permanently Awakened Objects!! Nightblood is particularly mouthy today; he seems to be feeling underutilized (a.k.a., bored). I find myself ambivalent about this sword: on the one hand, his chatter is hilariously entertaining, but on the other… he really does one thing. He kills. If Vasher leaves him sheathed and brings him back under control fast enough, as with the servant in the palace, he causes damage that is not (necessarily) permanent. Once drawn, it would be a whole different story, but he never gets more than an inch or so out of the sheath this time. Which is a good thing, IMO, but he sure grumbles about it.

The truly entertaining one for this chapter, though, is the fourth Awakening, when Vasher pulls a dead squirrel out of his pouch, and we get to watch the entire process of creating a Lifeless:

“Awaken to my Breath,” he Commanded, “serve my needs, live at my Command and my word. Fallen Rope.”

Those last words, “fallen rope,” formed the security phrase. Vasher could have chosen anything, but he picked the first thing that came to mind.

One Breath was leached from his body, going down into the small rodent’s corpse. The thing began to twitch. That was a Breath Vasher would never be able to recover, for creating a Lifeless was a permanent act. The squirrel lost all color, bleeding to grey, the Awakening feeding off the body’s own colors to help fuel the transformation. The squirrel had been grey in the first place, so the difference was tough to see. That’s why Vasher liked to use them.

“Fallen Rope,” he said to the creature, its grey eyes looking up at him. The security phrase pronounced, Vasher could now imprint the creature with an order, much as he did when performing a standard Awakening. “Make noise. Run around. Bite people who are not me. Fallen Rope.” The second use of the words closed its impressionability, so it could no longer be Commanded.

I had to quote the whole thing, because it’s both informative and hysterical. It only takes one Breath, but it’s a Breath gone forever. The reason all the Lifeless are grey is that the color required for Awakening is drawn from their own bodies. I guess that’s a good reason to use a grey squirrel, aside from the general ubiquity of squirrel everywhere. The funny bit, though, is the Command itself—I laugh every time I read this.

Make noise. Run around. Bite people who are not me.

Nice. Why do I suspect that the last four words are the result of painful experience?

Exhale

Well, there you have it. Two chapters this week! It’s a bit odd to think that while Siri is bouncing, Vasher is on the roof watching the sunset; while Siri starts teaching Susebron to read, Vasher sneaks into the tunnels underneath the Court complex. Bluefingers thinks he’s got a hand in each pie, though neither one is working out the way he assumes they are.

One other observation, regarding Vasher and Nightblood. Vasher very carefully tries not to damage anyone more than is absolutely necessary to get them out of his way. While his rationale is that “corpses cause more trouble than men who get knocked out,” I do get the impression that he honestly doesn’t want to hurt them. For one thing, he felt bad about hurting the guards at all, since they were actually trying to be kind to the crazy-dude-on-the-doorstep. For another, only one of the four servants showed any interest at all in Nightblood, which says that these are generally good people; Vasher would be highly aware of that detail too, and seeks to avoid injuring them any more than is necessary. Nightblood, on the other hand, spends half his time begging Vasher to just draw him already, and the other half critiquing every move Vasher makes.

You didn’t use me much. You could have used me. I’m better than a shirt. I’m a sword. I really am better than a shirt. I would have killed them. Look, they’re still breathing. Stupid shirt.

No wonder Vasher “lost” the thing!

Well, that’s it for the blog—now it’s time for the comments! Join us again next week, when we will cover Chapter 22, in which Lightsong and Vivenna play their respective games.

Alice Arneson is a SAHM, blogger, beta reader, and literature fan. For those keeping track, the Oathbringer beta read has reached Part 4 now, and it continues to be a wild ride.

The Expanse continues its run of great episodes this week with “Paradigm Shift”—we go back in time to meet Solomon Epstein, inventor of the Epstein Drive; bounce between proto-molecule shenanigans in the Belt and political machinations on Earth; and check back in with Bobbie Draper, whose mission to Ganymede is not quite what she expected…

I’ve recapped the highlights below!

I’ve gone back and forth on this since last night, but I think I like the structure of this episode. The way the show cut back and forth between the first test flight of the Epstein Drive and the machinations around the proto-molecule worked to highlight the excitement and danger of new technology.

It’s also interesting to see just how quickly everyone fragments.

In another act of trying to affirm the Roci crew as a family rather than just a ragtag bunch of misfits, Naomi and Holden hold a family meeting to explain that they’re, um, involved now. Alex is just annoyed when he learns how long they’ve been together, because he and Amos had a wager about when the shenanigans started, and he lost. Then Holden unleashes his Eyebrows of Concern on Amos, checking to make sure they’ll still cool, bro, and Amos says that Naomi is “like a sister to me… I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’d do her if she’d let me.”

Then he walks away, as Holden keeps his Eyebrows in Concerned Stance, but for an entirely new reason.

I love Amos.

When the Roci crew arrives back at Tycho Station, they’re hailed as heroes, and they see that Diogo has already founded a cult of Miller, and is inventing appropriately iconic last words for him—but he neglects to mention that Miller advised him to get laid. Heh.

But almost immediately:

• Naomi and Holden argue over what to do with that last bit of proto-molecule they stashed away
• Alex gets in a fight over a girl, and Amos rescues him
• Alex is pissed that he needed to be rescued
• Amos is pissed that Alex is resentful
• Holden is pissed that Fred Johnson kept thirty of Earth’s nukes
• Holden lies to Fred Johnson about that secret proto-molecule stash
• Fred Johnson knows that Holden is lying to him, but doesn’t know why
• Holden, Amos, and Alex outvote Naomi, and decide to destroy the stash
• Naomi lies and tells them she’s torpedoed the stash into the sun. She has not.
• Naomi goes behind Holden’s back to unlock the 30 nukes, thus arming Tycho Station
• Diogo dedicates his first sexual experience to Miller

Meanwhile, on Earth, a career politician tells the truth.

What the hell is going on in this show?

Avasarala comes in to visit the UN’s Deputy Director, her smile so huge it has to be fake, and asks him to invite Jules-Pierre Mao in for a meeting. He says he can reach out through Jules-Pierre Mao’s children.

And then Avasarala assures him that if they cannot be convinced to cooperate, she will “rain hellfire down on them all.” She proceeds to outline how she’ll plan to destroy the lives of each and every one of his children, through the generations, making sure that all Earthers know that it was the Mao family who endangered the planet, until their name is ruined and they all die “pariahs.” It’s intense, and really lovely to watch Avasarala unleash her full political power.

Throughout this rollercoaster of an episode, we check in with Solomon Epstein, testing his Drive 137 years in the past. He’s shocked by the success of his experiment, and then shocked by the fact that the high-Gs mean he can’t turn the Drive off, or call for help, or breathe. This plotline goes from being comic to incredibly poignant, as we see the cost of new technology, and see this inventor who has only been a name as a real living human, who loves his wife, wants to start a family, and has no idea that his invention will lead to the triumph and pain of life in the Belt. While not quite as emotionally draining as last week’s meeting of Miller and proto-Julie, this gave the hour some depth that it may have lacked otherwise.

But now lets get to that shocker of an ending! Apparently this is the opening of Book Two of The Expanse, Caliban’s War.

Bobby Draper and her team are deployed to the soybean farms of Ganymede. They’re really annoyed about this detail, since there isn’t much glory in defending a securely biodomed soybean crop. But then, just as her officer’s ship goes out of range, she notices a troop of Earthers who are charging the Martian platoon.

Suddenly there are explosions, a space battle right above them, and Bobbie’s on the ground with a pierced helmet. Her team seems to be dead, and there’s a giant, huffing, monster looming over her. Then she blacks out again, and we cut to credits.

So…

I have questions.

Thoughts Randomly Floating in the Void of Space

• How long does Naomi expect to juggle all these deceptions while sleeping with the main guy she’s deceiving?
• What’s going to happen to Alex next time, when Amos doesn’t protect him?
• I loved the detail that Amos, who grew up in brothels, is now renting a room in one.
• The moment when Epstein talks about how his one last chance is to call his wife, and then he drops the phone, was perfect. I didn’t know that Epstein didn’t live through his first test, so that was the moment that I realized that this entire plot was going to end tragically.
• OK, most of all though: what the hell is that thing attacking Bobbie?
• Is this another newly engineered weapon? Is it a specially bred animal, or a machine?
• I have to say, I understand that the show’s producers wanted to introduce Bobbie sooner, and handhold those of us who haven’t read the books as we saw a Martian perspective on the clash between Earth, Mars, and the Belt. BUT. I think I’d be a lot more invested in Bobbie and her team if this was how I met them. The scenes between her team were so similar to arguments among the Roci crew that they just felt like filler to me, rather than teaching me anything new about Martian society.

So what say you, citizens of the internet? Was anyone else as touched by Dr. Epstein as I was? And did anyone else yell at their screen when that TERRIFYING THING loomed over Bobbie?

If you were a 90s kid who grew up on the likes of Darkwing Duck and DuckTales, you know that there was nothing quite like those weirdo, wonderful shows. If you’re a sci-fi fan and also one of those 90s kids, you probably freaked out when you heard that David Tennant would be voicing Scrooge McDuck in the upcoming reboot for Disney XD. If you’re a fan of catchy theme songs, you probably loved the cast’s rendition of those signature “Woo-oo”s.

And now the trailer is here.

IT’S SO GOOD.

Aaaaaahhhhh I want to squish it like a stuffed animal, I don’t think I’ll ever stop smiling, my face is broken now. Broken face of smiles.

Really enjoying the animation style, loving the set-up, couldn’t be more pleased with Tennant as Scrooge and also everyone else in the cast. And Launchpad. Oh, Launchpad. I missed that guy.

Do we even need Indiana Jones 5 now? I feel like DuckTales has it covered.

Hello, Tor.com! Welcome back to the Movie Rewatch of Great Nostalgia… sort of.

You see, Bob, we’re doing things a little bit differently today. As you may or may not know, O my Peeps, this past week was Mardi Gras, and concurrently things here in New Orleans have been just a little bit fun-yet-insane, as is right and proper. Therefore, in the interests of PARTY TIME, EXCELLENT, I decided to give my long-suffering sisters a bit of a break re: nostalgia, and go catch some beads and eat king cake and dress their progeny up like Ghostbusters instead. Because I am a caring and benevolent eldest sibling, I’ll have you know.

Ergo, instead of watching a movie and having the three of us nostalgize about it (yes, I have just verbed “nostalgia”, step back), I thought I’d fly solo this week, in order to talk to you about a realization I recently had about me, and some dude named James Cameron who never amounted to much in Hollywood oh wait.

Because we need to talk about James Cameron, and how he created, both by accident and design, something of a watershed moment in both cinematic history and much more importantly in my own personal popular culture horizon embiggenment. Mostly because it’s probably not the watershed moment you are thinking of.

What is the moment I am thinking of, you want to know? Of course you do! Click on to find out!

Because, you see, the James Cameron moment I am talking about is not Avatar, or Titanic, or the Terminator movies, or even Aliens, all of which could be considered defining moments in film history in their own ways. (Cameron, it turns out, mostly only deals in big moments, in every sense of that phrase.) No, the one I’m talking about is probably his least acclaimed film (er, other than Piranha 2: The Spawning, which I think we can safely ignore): 1989’s The Abyss.

Now hear me out, y’all.

Watershed moments tend to be tricky things to identify when they’re actually happening; they are much more the purview of hindsight. Events that seemed unimportant or transitory at the time become, in retrospect, blindingly obvious turning points in the Way Things Are (or, in the Way Things Are Done). Whatever its overall merits as a film, I contend that The Abyss represented several of these seminal moments, all at once.

The first and most obvious, of course, were the special effects. Cameron’s now-famous (or infamous) face-imitating water tentacle in The Abyss was far from the first use of computer-generated imagery to appear on film, but as I recall it, it was the first to truly grab the public’s attention—to show the audience the kind of hyper-realistic yet fantastical special effects CGI could (and would) become capable of. Cameron’s simple water tentacle paved the way for the CGI wonders of Jurassic Park and The Matrix and Lord of the Rings and everything else that followed after, including Cameron’s own later films. I don’t think it would be too much to contend, in fact, that it changed the face of motion picture special effects forever.

The second (and probably most surprising) was the political aspect of the film. I can’t be certain, of course, but I’m betting that Cameron had not remotely anticipated that The Abyss would also turn out to be, more or less, the last real Cold War movie released in America during the actual Cold War—i.e., before the Berlin Wall fell and that era quite abruptly ended. (The film was released in August of 1989, and the Wall fell on November 9th, three months later.) Given how pivotal the Cold War was to the entire plot of The Abyss, that must have been quite the thing for everyone involved.

But neither of these aspects, I must confess, really meant much to me at the time. In 1989 I was still too young to appreciate the irony of the politics of The Abyss, nor did I really understand how groundbreaking its special effects were, beyond a decided reaction of hoshit that is SO COOL.

Nor did Young Me care that plotwise, the ending of The Abyss was an implosion of nonsensical nothing (or, in the case of the extended cut, an implosion of nonsensical sermonizing), or that Cameron apparently nearly drove all his actors into nervous breakdowns during the grueling and extremely damp shooting process. I didn’t know or care about any of that; I just thought it was awesome. But for quite a long time I didn’t really examine why I thought it was so awesome.

It wasn’t until years later that I realized that what elevated The Abyss for me personally to something special wasn’t cutting edge special effects or historical relevance or even super-cool action sequences; it had all those things, for sure, but then so do many other films. No, what really pushed The Abyss over the edge, ha ha, into something exceptional for me was really just one thing: the character of Lindsey Brigman.

Lindsey was a revelation for Young Me, and I didn’t even really get why at the time, even though I certainly do now. All I knew then was that I was fascinated with her, and thus I shamelessly cajoled my sisters into renting The Abyss over and over (and over) so I could watch her and the rest of the crew of Deep Core do their stuff. (Not that my sisters argued much. Why my mother didn’t just buy the damn VHS so we wouldn’t keep spending rental money on it every other week for years at a stretch is beyond me.)

I didn’t understand the fascination, at first. But now I know that it stemmed from—well, a lot of things, but mostly from watching in awe how Lindsey so fearlessly navigated her environment. And I’m not talking about the part of that environment that you couldn’t breathe and could crush you with its pressure (and also possibly contained aliens and/or rogue nukes); I’m talking about the part of that environment that was so aggressively, overwhelmingly masculine that it had almost more testosterone in it than seawater.

The Deep Core rig, for all that she had designed it herself, was a place that was deeply hostile to Lindsey, on both accounts. And I found her courage in the face of the latter even more impressive than the former, truth be told.

It may not seem like a big deal now, but I cannot overemphasize how much her character was an eye-opener for me as a kid. Lindsey Brigman not only dared to be in the kind of profession I had been told, obliquely and subtly but all the more inexorably for that, that only men could do, but she had no compunctions about telling all and sundry comers to their faces that she was better at it to boot. She returned the hatred and sexism confronting her on all sides, even that from her own husband, with either casual competence or iron-willed defiance. She believed in herself and her principles enough to stand up to everyone on the rig when no one believed her, believed in them enough to get right up in a batshit crazy Navy SEAL’s face, to demand that her voice be heard, and to hell with anyone who thought she should sit down and shut up.

And at the same time, she was not afraid to embrace her so-called feminine side, and the strengths that that granted her. Of all the characters in the film, she was the one who most valued empathy over Cold War paranoia, who saw wonder instead of fear with the first contact of non-human life forms, whose first instinct was reasoned compassion instead of unreasoning violence.

In short, she was everything you’d want in a hero—or at least, everything I’d want in a hero—and she was a girl. It was so cool. The existence of the character of Lindsey Brigman may not have been a watershed moment for anyone else, but she certainly was for me.

And I know what you’re thinking. You’re like, but Leigh, what about Ellen Ripley?

What about Aliens, which Cameron directed four years before The Abyss, in which Sigourney Weaver portrays what is generally considered the most iconic female action heroine of all time?

And I answer, y’all. Do not think I am forgetting Ripley. She is the apple of my feminist eye! But the thing is, because of weird child-limiting experiences, I actually first saw Aliens after I saw The Abyss. And Terminator 2, of course, where damsel in distress Sarah Connor from the first Terminator movie was transformed into the most badass mother/protector possibly ever put on film, was not released until 1991. No explanation needed.

Except, there was kind of an explanation needed. Because in the process of thinking about which female action heroines really truly inspired me as a kid, I was sort of stunned to realize what you have already no doubt already noticed: of all the cinematic action heroines I saw on screen while growing up that I felt were truly worthy of the title, James Cameron was directly responsible for approximately 90% of them.

Huh.

Even Ellen Ripley, whose character of course both preceded and followed Cameron’s involvement in the Alien series, counts in that tally, because the Ripley of Aliens will forever be the definitive one in my book.

Ridley Scott devotees may be baying for my blood over that one, and there’s no doubt that my preference is at least in part a personal peccadillo. Scott’s Alien was, in essence, a horror film more than it was anything else, and while I can appreciate its iconic place in that genre, I myself have never had much of a taste for horror. For me, anytime you put a horror flick up against an action flick, action is going to win every time.

So there’s that. But my preference of Aliens over Alien is owed to more than just liking action more than horror, and again the reason why comes back to how Ripley’s character was portrayed: as indomitably, unquestionably heroic.

And that’s the thing about all of these characters, really. It’s extremely difficult to explain to a hostile audience what the difference is between a genuine action heroine and an artificial “male character with boobs” one, but the difference has always been exceedingly obvious to me. Just as it has always been obvious to me that whatever that difference was, James Cameron knows it, and that knowledge has nearly always been made evident in the female characters he has created for his films.

This is not to imply perfection, of course; far from it. I’m not going to dispute that Cameron’s writing skills are frequently subpar. The scene in Titanic, for instance, where Rose’s mother painstakingly explains to Rose that they are women and therefore “our choices are never easy,” like Rose doesn’t fucking know that already, is pretty cringeworthy from a “things people would actually say to each other” standpoint. But from an “empathy with your female characters” standpoint, it’s a hell of lot more nuanced and true than what you get with 95% of male directors out there, and I appreciate that.

My point is, for all the amazing technological advances and box office mania James Cameron has bestowed upon Hollywood these past four decades, I consider it of equal if not greater significance the amazing gender parity he pioneered as well, seemingly not through deliberation but merely through enlightened personal preference. Cameron, clearly, loves his heroines, his strong independent take-no-bullshit-or-prisoners ladies, and what’s more, he respects them, to boot. He could not have created a character like Lindsey Brigman (or Rose, or Sarah Connor, or etc.) if he did not, in my not so humble opinion.

And just as his technological innovations paved the way for later SFX brilliance, I believe, his Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor and Lindsey Brigman led the way for characters like Trinity and Rey and Furiosa, and the many more female action heroines that have gloriously sprung up over the past decade or so. I do not say they are all entirely owed to him, any more than I say they are all perfect, but I do say that James Cameron has, and had, the agency and the power and the will to speak to an overwhelmingly masculine and exclusionary genre of film, and tell it, “no, I have a better idea, let’s include women,” in a time when almost no one else was bothering to do so, and the result has changed the face of action/sci-fi films forever—for the better.

And it changed me for the better, too. So thank you, James Cameron. Whatever else you do in this life, know that you let this one girl believe that girls can be heroes too, and that knowledge has been more valuable than gold. That’ll do, dude. That’ll do.

And that’s it for today, my dears! Come back in two weeks for Moar. Cheers, and a belated Happy Mardi Gras to you all!

We want to send you a galley copy of Paul Cornell’s Chalk, available March 21st from Tor.com Publishing! Read an excerpt—and a note from Cornell—here.

Andrew Waggoner has always hung around with his fellow losers at school, desperately hoping each day that the school bullies—led by Drake—will pass him by in search of other prey. But one day they force him into the woods, and the bullying escalates into something more; something unforgivable; something unthinkable.

Broken, both physically and emotionally, something dies in Waggoner, and something else is born in its place.

In the hills of the West Country a chalk horse stands vigil over a site of ancient power, and there Waggoner finds in himself a reflection of rage and vengeance, a power and persona to topple those who would bring him low.

Paul Cornell plumbs the depths of magic and despair in Chalk, a brutal exploration of bullying in Margaret Thatcher’s England.

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I’d intended to have the next few posts focus on some of the other French salon fairy tale writers, or perhaps Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie’s retellings, or some of the stories of Nobel Prize winner Anatole France, or even the bitter, fierce yet hopeful collection The Armless Maiden, edited by Terri Windling. And posts on all of those, and more, are coming.

But for the past few weeks—since January 20, to be exact—I’ve found myself thinking of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

In many ways, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” barely meets the definition of fairy tale. Not only does it not contain a single fairy, it contains none of the other trappings of fairy tale: no talking animals, no quests, no magic. What it does have is an emperor, of no particular place or realm, and various courtiers, reminiscent of many of the minor characters in the French salon fairy tales, and oh, yes, like many fairy tales, a rather pointed moral.

And the tale features one element common to myth and fairy tale: the trickster. Or, in this case, two tricksters—two men claiming to be weavers able to weave something so beautiful, so fine, that they would be invisible to people unfit for their current jobs—or just very stupid.

In a rather immediate giveaway that something might be just slightly off with their claim, the fake weavers immediately ask for fine silk and gold cloth, instead of providing their own magical material. Truly intelligent people might have noticed this, but even moderately intelligent people could figure out that admitting that they could not see the cloth might lead to—Well. Their emperor was not exactly the most intelligent or insightful person, after all.

And so, everyone in the story, from the emperor, to the courtiers, to the people in the streets, pretends to be able to see the beautiful cloth and clothes—right up until the moment when a small child shouts out, “The Emperor has no clothes!”

Andersen was presumably familiar with another tale about a trickster figure who started out in the apparel trade: “The Brave Little Tailor,” collected and rewritten into its current form by the Grimm brothers. Very similar tales also appear in Italian and Polish collections. In the Grimm tale, a small, not particularly physically imposing figure, the little tailor, uses a real event—killing seven flies in a single blow, to convince others, including a giant and a king, that he is a great warrior, capable of killing seven warriors in a single blow. As in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” his deception is finally uncovered only when it’s too late: The tale ends with the announcement that the little tailor was a king, and remained one until his death.

Both tales heavily focus on the connection between deception and fear.  It’s not just that the tailor is good at lying and tricks. The giant, the king and the guards in “The Brave Little Tailor” choose to believe the tailor because it’s too risky not to. The one person who does figure out the truth—the little tailor’s wife—gains nothing from this knowledge other than humiliation. That same risk features in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” where nearly everyone goes along with the deception in order to save their lives—and ensure that no one around them will claim that they’re stupid.

There, however, the resemblances end. For one thing, the weavers in Andersen’s story do just one con, and then leave; the tailor needs to do several tricks—pretend that he’s throwing a rock instead of a bird, for instance, and later trick two giants into killing each other. Which leads directly to the second difference: He may use tricks instead of actual strength, but the tailor does manage to rid the country of various giants, a unicorn and a vicious boar. The weavers do nothing other than humiliate the emperor and his court. And the tailor, for all his tricks, rarely outright lies, exactly—well, apart from the moment when he claims that a bird is a rock. The weavers do nothing but lie. The tailor makes use of good luck; the weavers take advantage of human nature. The tailor is a social climber, impressed by the spaciousness and splendor of the castles he enters; the weavers are sycophants, unimpressed by anything except the opportunity to make a buck, who apparently simply vanish at the end of the tale. Above all, “The Brave Little Tailor” is a story of triumph. “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is a tale of humiliation. One is fairy tale, the other satire.

A more direct inspiration was a Spanish tale by Juan Manuel, Prince of Villena, “Lo que sucedio a un rey con los burladores que hicieron el paño,” or  “What Happened to a King with the Rogues Who Wove the Cloth,” found in his 1337 collection El Conde Lucanor. At the time, the collection was notable mostly for its use of medieval Castillian/Spanish, instead of literary Latin; Don Juan Manuel, an aristocrat and scholar, was dedicated to promoting Spanish as a literary language, as well as publishing translations of Arab and Latin books into the more common language, two hobbies that earned him considerable criticism from contemporaries, who thought he should be focusing his time on more important pursuits.

Apart from promoting the use of Spanish, El Conde Lucanor focused on issues of morality, using tales as moral lessons, including, issues of honesty and deception. In “What Happened to a King with the Rogues Who Wove the Cloth,” three weavers manage to convince a court that only legitimate sons can see the cloth they weave, critical in Spanish and Arab courts that allowed only legitimate sons to inherit thrones and lands. The king isn’t just terrified that his subjects will think him unfit or stupid, but that he will lose his throne—and thus says nothing, until a stable boy, in the fortunate (for the story) position of not inheriting anything, exposes the deception in front of the court, leaving the king humiliated—and in a much worse position that he would have been had he confronted the weavers earlier. It’s not only a discussion of deception, but a reminder to other aristocrats and Spanish royals that their social inferiors were watching—and not powerless.

Andersen read the story in a German translation, changing several elements, including the character of the emperor, who has no worries about his legitimacy, but does have an obsession with clothes and a few concerns that, just perhaps, either he or his underlings are unfit for office. Rather than a potential threat, the emperor sees the clothes as a potential tool—a way to determine the abilities of his courtiers. Andersen, of course, lived in a world where in living memory, aristocrats had been overthrown in part because of a perceived obsession with clothing and other superficial matters (to greatly oversimplify one aspect of the French Revolution), but also a world where inadequate, unqualified courtiers and bureaucrats, given positions thanks to birth and rank instead of talent, had helped bring about the collapse of political systems. And, like the Grimms, he lived in a world where members of the lower and middle classes, had, much like the brave little tailor, used political turmoil and their own talents to climb into positions of power.

Andersen himself was somewhat in this category: Born into dire poverty, he used his storytelling talents to mingle among the upper middle class and even the aristocracy and royalty. Here, he found not only lingering memories of the French Revolution, but several people who seemingly remembered nothing of it, focused on the superficialities of clothing and jewelry, along with hypocrisy, all elements that inspired his retelling.

But as he told others, he also found inspiration in something else: a remembered moment from his childhood, when, as he recalled, he was disappointed to realize that King Frederick VI was just a regular man—something his mother did not want him noticing too loudly.

This, perhaps, was the memory that led him to change, at the very last minute (by which I mean, “after the story went to the printers”), his original ending, of courtiers and aristocrats happily admiring the naked emperor and his new clothes, in a vicious satire of contemporary European courts. Instead, he chose to remind his aristocratic listeners—and any others—that, just as in medieval courts, others were watching, and might even speak out.

At the same time, Andersen was somewhat skeptical of the power of simple observation and comment. After all, his tale ends not with the overthrow of the emperor, or any of his ministers, but with the emperor deliberately deciding to continue walking regardless, and his chamberlains holding up his non-existent train with even more dignity than before.  He might have been unmasked; he might have been humiliated. But he is not removed from power, and at most, all of his people can say was that he was tricked—in a deception they were initially more than willing to join. It’s both a harsh criticism of politicians, and an acknowledgement of the potential limitations of speaking the truth.

“The Emperor has no clothes” has gone on to enter the political and popular lexicon, as a phrase depicting and condemning the all too common habit (one I’ve participated in) of feeling afraid to stand up against the status quo, of the majority viewpoint. Andersen would not, I think, have objected to reading the tale in this way: After all, his story is an indictment against just that kind of thinking. But it’s also an illustration that sometimes, just observing the truth may not be enough.

Mari Ness lives in central Florida.

Many of you reading this site will know that the greatest book of writing advice ever written, ever, ever, ever, is Stephen King’s On Writing. There is a particularly important passage in that book where King encapsulates his entire writing career, his battle with substance abuse, and his belief in art’s purpose into one brief anecdote about his writing desk. I remember being especially struck by the story the first time I read it, so I was pleased to see it turned into a touching comic by Zen Pencils!

King has been open about his dependence on alcohol and drugs for decades now, detailing his family’s staged intervention and mentioning saying that he can’t even remember writing Cujo. Put into this context, the writing desk becomes a powerful symbol. When King started out, he and his wife, the writer Tabitha King, shared a small trailer with, at that point, two children. The Kings worked long hours in various menial jobs, with Stephen carving out a few hours at night to write literally wedged into their laundry closet—it was the only way he could have privacy from the kids. What’s fascinating is that once he became successful? His big reward to himself was a giant desk…where he could do even more work. But even this seemingly spartan gift became a curse when it fed into his own sense of self-importance, and eventually addiction.

Tucking himself into a corner allowed him to observe life again rather than dictating it, and fed into his sobriety and artistic philosophy.

Founded in 2012 by Gavin Aung Than, an illustrator based in Melbourne, Australia, Zen Pencils highlights a few inspirational quotes each month. While Than’s own favorite is Teddy Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” speech, the quotes run the gamut from Bill Hicks to Carl Sagan, with stops along the way to honor J. K. Rowling and David Bowie.

And while I love each and every one of those, this look into Stephen King’s life and philosophy should be framed and hanging above ever writer’s desk, safe in a corner, helping readers make sense of this world or imagine new ones.

The jokey name for this week’s episode is something of a misdirect: There’s very little joking around (except about geology), and little fun to be had in Fillory, or in our world. We’re just about halfway through The Magicians’ second season, and there’s still some groundwork to lay in order to get wherever it is we’re going. After last week, it’s hard to blame the show for chilling out a bit, even if this episode isn’t its best.

“It has to be some other dongs.”
“There are no other dongs.”

“The Cock Barrens”—which refers to a geologically … intriguing area in Fillory’s neighboring land of Loria—like all of this season’s episodes, tries to keep up with every character. But the balance feels off. It might seems weird to nitpick a magical show’s relationship to reality, but in both Quentin and Julia’s storylines, time and distance don’t make sense, and it’s distracting.

After failing to raise Alice’s niffin by doing a wonderfully awkward Cirque du Soleil dance at the location of her death in Fillory, Quentin heads back to our world for her memorial—and to face her parents. It’s no ordinary memorial, sure (there’s a sacrificial goat wandering around), but that still doesn’t explain the speed with which he and Daniel, Alice’s father, construct a sort of plastic-tubing pyramid in the backyard. It’s like no time passes between Quentin arriving at the memorial, them building the pyramid, and Daniel breaking his legs falling off a ladder—they’re wearing their suits the entire time.

This certainly isn’t the point of the sequence, but it’s a strange detail for the show to overlook. Alice’s parents, as we know from the first season, might kindly be described as “imperfect.” Daniel can’t overcome his fear of heights, and winds up confessing to Q about the moment he feels he lost young Alice’s trust. Stephanie only sees her own version of the truth, and can’t bring herself to complete a spell that requires accurately describing Alice—the true Alice, not her mother’s version of her.

What an unexpected position for Quentin to be in: He’s the person insisting that other people stop thinking of themselves, that they try to see Alice as she was, not as they wanted her to be. Q has to hold things together, despite his guilt and his broken heart, and he does it because ghost-Alice keeps appearing, guiding him, telling him secrets. She’s red-eyed and sooty; he’s barely functional. They make a great pair—and it’s not until the end of the episode that we understand just how much of a pair they are.

I was wrong about what happened to Alice. I thought niffin-Alice did die, and this was a different Alice, a ghost-Alice. But no. Niffin-Alice is just trapped in Quentin’s back tattoo. She’s been playing with him—and with her parents and their grief and guilt. “We’re stuck with each other,” she sneers at Q, and suddenly Olivia Taylor-Dudley’s casting makes more sense than it ever did. She’s sweet-faced, believable as the most capable girl in school, Brakebills’ own Hermione—and then she’s terrifying, flat and cold, having fun breaking her parents’ hearts all over again. Quentin has his very own villain, and he’s carrying her around like a backpack.

I like to think that we could somehow set Niffin-Alice on Reynard, but Julia is still doggedly hunting down the one woman who’s ever banished the trickster. How she gets from Brooklyn to what looks, in her spelled atlas, like the middle of California, I don’t know; how Kady gets there too, just in time to save Julia, stretches credulity even farther. But, again, not exactly the point. The point is Dana, the woman who banished Reynard decades ago. Julia goes to her for help, and gets exactly the opposite: Dana tells her she has to have Reynard’s child, that harnessing its power while giving birth is her only chance. No, Julia says. “Not your choice anymore,” Dana replies.

Dana is terrifying, and not just because she has some sort of magic-hiding creature locked up in a kiddie pool full of kitty litter. She has decided that the way she did things was the right way, and therefore the only way, and this little sour snippet of plot goes hand-in-hand with what happened to Julia last week, when she tried to get an abortion. People just keep trying to take Julia’s choices away.

Julia is having none of it, and neither is Kady. Who cares how she got there, really, when she gets that great punch in? Who cares where the haxon-paxon came from, if it’ll keep Julia hidden from Reynard? (The little moment when Julia understands that it’s trapped there, too—the sympathy in her face is perfect.) I’m less sure, though, how I feel about Dana’s fate. No one deserves having to encounter Reynard twice.

Back in Fillory, Eliot’s problems seem almost … mundane. He’s still trying to cope with his looming fatherhood (“Like I needed more people calling me daddy”), the FU fighter in the dungeon, his relationship with his wife, the general problems of Fillory and, oh yeah, the prince of Loria who shows up to make demands.

Making “Prince S” this Lorien’s name feels like a joke with no punchline (other than “Fuck your parents, dude”). On the one hand, S is a challenge for Fillory’s king and queen—a ruler with some practice at the job and no patience for these Earth-born newbs. On the other, he’s a bossy jerk with gender issues and a crappy plan for getting what he wants. (Penny’s underused this episode, but pairing him with the single-minded royal mapmaker was a minor stroke of genius.)

Phallic rock formations aside, there are some telling moments in Fillory this week. Fen explaining to Eliot that she had a life before he arrived—the she didn’t know if he would ever show up—is what the two of them need: honesty. She knows he’s not really into her. He knows, now, that there’s more to her than a naive girl who wants to serve him. “I’m a realist who wants you to succeed,” she says. “I want us to.”

Marriage: it’s complicated. And Eliot’s marriage is more complicated than most.

Eliot: “You could’ve been a little diplomatic.”
Margo: “By agreeing to marry a complete stranger on the spot?”
E: “I did it!”
M: “Well, that was different.”
E: “You’re right. This would only really be equivalent if S was a girl and you found pussy, you know, interesting in a sometimes-you-like-Thai-food kind of way and now it’s all Thai food forever, till you die.”
M: “No. He’s a man. Who seems arrogant and entitled and unclear on the concept of consent. I can’t imagine what could possibly go wrong.”
E: “Look, I’m not saying do it. It’s just, you’re a queen. I’m a king. We don’t necessarily marry for love. It’s part of the job.”
M: “Fine. I’ll talk to him, but only to negotiate us out of this epic clusterfuck. I’m staying a virgin.”

This conversation needed to happen. Margo hasn’t had to do much, or give up much, or struggle with the same thing everyone else has. She mostly gets to run around being efficient and occasionally bitingly supportive and, yes, also occasionally traumatized, but she hasn’t lost a friend or a lover or her hands, and she’s not trapped in Fillory. Eliot calling her out on not having to do the hard stuff is entirely fair. It’s fair for him to acknowledge that he did this isolating, difficult, life-changing thing—the very thing that she’s horrified to even consider. It’s also fair for her to say that it’s different, because she would go from being a queen to being an object, based on what S says. It’s not the most graceful of acknowledgments that every struggle is different, but I think that’s what the show has been (somewhat awkwardly) trying to get at all along: the traditional structures of so much fantasy only benefit straight men. Magical marriage is rarely so magical for anybody else.

In Eliot’s not-so-magical marriage, he and Fen are being more honest with each other, but trust isn’t fully established, and he probably still feels like more of her friends might show up to murder him at any moment. But they made a human together. And he’s starting to actually like her. None of this balances out the fact that—to continue his metaphor—Eliot does not want Thai food all the time, but if they can get their political shit together, they might be formidable. Especially with Margo on their side.

Margo who cannot resist a challenge. Margo who is no virgin queen, no how, no way, and will be delighted to prove that to S. The two of them trying to play each other is intriguing, but also a fraught mess: Who’s bullshitting whom? Is he just distracting her from figuring out his illusion? Does she think one night in the sack will change his mind about demanding access to the Wellspring? Is this all just meant to illustrate her impulsiveness, and how far she’ll go when she’s angry? Is a declaration of war really the most interesting place the Fillory plotline can go? I’m skeptical—for now.

MAGICAL TIDBITS

• “Your majesty, you said you wanted a unicorn milk latte.”
  “I was joking! Wait, you milked a unicorn?”
• I 100% love the moment when Penny and Eliot try to check in with each other while steadfastly refusing to admit that each of them might care how the other one’s doing.
• I can’t wait to see what’s going to happen when Penny calls in the favor Margo now owes him.
• “This whole marriage thing is absurd. You have no idea who the other person is. It’s dangerous.”
• Dana’s son is going to be—or maybe is already—relevant, right? She says, “He’ll never know who he really is. He doesn’t even know who I am. I made sure of it. It’s for the best. He’s a good man. He’s an influential man.” OH IS HE.

Molly Templeton only got a little distracted by Eliot and Margo’s over-the-top costumes this week, she swears.

Charlie “Coop” Cooper is back in The Wrong Dead Guy, the raucous second book in Richard Kadrey’s Another Coop Heist series. The Department of Peculiar Science has finally made an honest man out of Coop; the former crook has gone legit with a real job in a downtown LA office building, albeit one filled with terrifying monsters and evil curses. Things are going well with his girlfriend Giselle, and Coop keeps busy at work by helping Bayliss figure out who keeps stealing her office supplies.

When his boss sends him on a caper to steal a second-rate mummy on display at the rundown Brian Z. Pierson Museum of Art, Antiquities, and Folderol, Coop puts his sticky fingers and magical immunity to government-sanctioned use. Unluckily for him, the incompetence of others mucks the whole thing up, and soon enough Coop ends up on the deadly end of the mummy’s curse. The newly reawakened Harkhuf has a hankering for ending the world and resurrecting his presently dead lover.

Meanwhile, back at DOPS, Coop’s arch-nemesis, Nelson, wields the mook-y might of the mail room and plots his sinister revenge, and a pair of agents are besieged by neglect and an ever-growing squid. Between enthralled rent-a-cops, undead mail clerks, monsters run amok, backstabbing psychics, mystical pachyderms, Richie Rich eco-terrorists, creepy clones with a lobotomy fetish, and skittish scientists, Coop has his work cut out for him.

Like its predecessor, there isn’t much to the plot of The Wrong Dead Guy. Harkhuf sends his thrall to retrieve an amulet and book so he can wake his bloodlust-y girlfriend, Coop unintentionally gets in his way, and grudge-bearing Nelson intentionally gets in Coop’s way. If this were a television show, the plot would just about cover a two-part episode with room for wisecracks. Yet what the plot lacks in depth it makes up for in breadth of humor, manic action, and spitfire dialogue. A lot happens in this novel. Like, a lot. “Action-packed” doesn’t even begin to cover it. Other, lesser authors would make any number of Kadrey’s set pieces into a final climax, but he just keeps piling on the chaos and ramping up the tension.

My biggest gripes with The Everything Box were that it was overly long on running gags and too short on character development, and unfortunately The Wrong Dead Guy hits the same pitfalls. Too often the jokes go on and on and on. Many go on so long that they circle back around to being funny again, but then keep going until they end up in “beating a dead horse” territory. That being said, the jokes are so offbeat and off-the-wall that even the least funny ones can still squeeze out a snicker or two. Probably my favorite passage comes midway through after Bayliss goes through an extremely unpleasant audit that leaves her a little worse for the wear. It’s just so enjoyably bonkers that even though it’s a bit of a dad joke, I can’t help but smile every time I read it:

They found Bayliss at her desk. Where her keyboard normally sat was a pair of sneakers filled with paper clips. The walls of her cubicle were papered with colorful Post-its. Each one had an inspirational quote and a tiny drawing in black ink, but they all seemed a little off. Hang in there, baby was at the top left of her cubicle. While the saying was normally accompanied by an image of a cat hanging from a tree branch, Bayliss’s Hang in there, baby featured a dragon in an evening gown eating what appeared to be a washing machine full of bowling shoes. Next to that was There’s no I in teamwork, with a drawing of an ice cream cone holding an ax chasing a bat with a machine gun.

“That one doesn’t even make sense,” Morty said. “Why doesn’t the bat just shoot the ice cream cone?”

“It’s probably a pacifist,” said Coop.

Comedy routines only go so far to help the reader get to know the characters. It almost felt like the characters stopped existing the moment they stepped offstage. Worse, they all sorta sound the same. Everyone is all dry humor and cynical sarcasm to the point where there’s little difference between any of them. Most of the characters are hardly more than a collection of quirks and in-jokes, so much so that for several of them you could swap names around and never notice the difference. That being said, the characters that do get fleshed out are an absolute treat. Coop is the put-upon straight man of Kadrey’s frolicking farce, and his growing exasperation at the increasingly wonky circumstances paired make him stand out from the rest of the cast.

If you haven’t read The Everything Box, I strongly suggest reading that before tackling The Wrong Dead Guy. The sequel isn’t completely impenetrable without having read the first, but it won’t make nearly as much sense without that foundation. There is some key worldbuilding in the first book that isn’t explained in the second, particularly the reason for Coop’s employment at DOPS, his tempestuous relationships with Phil and Giselle, and his immunity to magic.

I don’t know that I’d go so far as to place the curse of the sophomore slump at the feet of The Wrong Dead Guy, but it hovers in the vicinity. However, it’s still a far better book than most of its peers. The sequel wasn’t as fun as the original, but despite my aforementioned quibbles, the second book was stronger overall than the first.

Reading The Wrong Dead Guy is like watching a master juggler in action. Every time you think you’ve got a hang on all the moving pieces, Kadrey throws another one in the mix. The ending is telegraphed early on, but if ever there was a book that was about the journey rather than the destination, this would be it. Reading this book is like getting a lesson in the craft of writing. If Raymond Chandler co-wrote an urban fantasy mystery series with Charles Yu and the Coen brothers, you’d end up with Kadrey’s Another Coop Heist series.

Kadrey has done a fine job building on the momentum, humor, and premise of the first book, and frankly I can’t wait to see where he takes it in the third. The Wrong Dead Guy is goofy, bloody romp that’ll have you laughing and cringing at the same time. It’s a damn good read from a damn good author.

The Wrong Dead Guy is available now from Harper Voyager.

Alex Brown is a teen librarian, writer, geeknerdloserweirdo, and all-around pop culture obsessive who watches entirely too much TV. Keep up with her every move on Twitter and Instagram, or get lost in the rabbit warren of ships and fandoms on her Tumblr.

Hannibal fandom shows no sign of slowing down. Last week saw the third annual Red Dragon Con, where fannibals converged in London with Bryan Fuller, Hugh Dancy, Demore Barnes, Scott Thompson, and Aaron Abrams to celebrate the show and toss flower crowns into the air in triumph. Plus, apparently, Fuller and Dancy cosplayed as Hannibal and Mason Verger, respectively, and some gorgeous being carved this terrifying banana in honor of The Red Dragon, the character portrayed by Richard Armitage during the show’s third (and final, sob) season.

Hannibal has given us many gifts.

[via Bryan Fuller’s magical, sparkling Twitter]

I have to confess that my love of asteroids started in film, namely the (admittedly ridiculous) asteroid chase in The Empire Strikes Back. It was solidified by the gloriously melodramatic film Meteor and its shots of the asteroid hurtling towards Earth with the booming “it’s going to kill everyone!” music that played every time it was on screen. I suppose these are why I always smile when an asteroid pops up in the science-fiction I read, which thankfully, has many more imaginative uses for them.

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

This novel contains so many concepts to fall in love with, but the idea of terrarium asteroids is my favourite (with sunwalkers a close second!). Robinson writes of a future in which asteroids are hollowed out, and biomes created within, with their own gravity thanks to the rotation of the asteroid. Some are created to preserve delicate ecologies that are no longer sustainable on Earth, some to provide beautiful and exciting environments to visit for holidays or even live in. This use of asteroids is featured in his novel Blue Mars, but in 2312 they have become an art form for the protagonist, Swan Er Hong, a way to express herself as well as serving a need to preserve rare species. I love the idea of hundreds of these asteroids in space, all rocky and unassuming on the outside, but each its own jewel within.

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

The Sparrow is a beautiful and heart rending novel which tells a first contact tale in flashbacks as we follow the slow, painful recovery of a Jesuit priest who is the only person to return from a mission to a planet called Rakhat. After detecting a form of music coming from the planet via the SETI project, a crew is formed to go and make contact. Their craft is made from an asteroid mostly hollowed out already by a mining company extracting minerals. I love the idea of using what is considered waste material, sticking an engine on it and hurtling across space inside it.

Eon by Greg Bear

Like many books published in the mid 80’s, the Cold War and the omnipresent threat of nuclear war are both an inspiration and theme in this novel. The Berlin Wall was still very much in place and Bear envisages a near future where the Cold War still rages between the superpowers. Then a massive asteroid appears on the edge of the solar system and moves into orbit and, of course, the superpowers race to understand and claim it. My favourite use of the asteroid in this novel is contained within the seventh chamber which forms The Way, effectively a portal to other dimensions. What’s not to love about that?

Titan by Stephen Baxter

In Titan, Baxter writes of a future which takes America down a just-plausible-enough-to-be-terrifying path of religious extremism and intellectual degradation. It has a fundamentalist Christian President who rules over an isolated country that now teaches its children that the Earth is at the centre of the solar system. This climate of anti-science makes it all the harder for a team of scientists to go and investigate the potential of life on Titan, but after various set-backs and awful events, they manage to get there. In this novel, (spoilers ahead!) an asteroid is used by the Chinese in retaliation for attacks from the US but their plan to merely threaten with it backfires, and it smashes into Earth causing catastrophic damage. Whilst this is a horrific use of an asteroid, I do have a morbid fondness for extinction event stories (thanks Meteor).

The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham

Okay, you have to give me a pass for this one because it features meteors, rather than asteroids, but it’s one of my favourite novels and I love the way they are used as a starting point in this ‘cosy catastrophe’ novel. At the beginning of the book, the protagonist and his wife are on the deck of a ship, watching several meteors plummet into the ocean. Of course, the meteors turn out to be an alien invasion. It’s the slow build of the threat this novel which makes it so deliciously tense. Many overlook this novel for the other “meteor shower begins cosy catastrophe” by Wyndham; ‘The Day of the Triffids’, but I urge you to give this one a try if you haven’t already.

This post originally ran October 29, 2015.

Emma Newman writes dark short stories and science fiction and urban fantasy novels. Between Two Thorns, the first book in Emma’s Split Worlds urban fantasy series, was shortlisted for the BFS Best Novel and Best Newcomer awards. Her novels Planetfall—a scifi narrative about a secret withheld to protect humanity’s future—and After Atlas are available now from Roc. Emma is an audiobook narrator and also co-writes and hosts the Hugo-nominated podcast ‘Tea and Jeopardy’ which involves tea, cake, mild peril and singing chickens. Her hobbies include dressmaking and playing RPGs.