Snacks that make you shrink (or grow gigantic), mad tea parties, murderous croquet: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a bonkers enough story on its own that it’s impressive to see the ways in which so many authors have been able to retell it.

In these thrillers and pastiches and history lessons, Alice Liddell is a princess on the run, a mad inmate, or only a tangential part of the story; some retellings focus on other citizens of Wonderland, from the maligned White Rabbit to the misunderstood Queen of Hearts. No matter which of the many ways into Wonderland these writers choose, the stories are as enticing as a bottle that says DRINK ME.

Heartless by Marissa Meyer

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Marissa Meyer invents a back story for Wonderland’s primary antagonist: Catherine, who would rather create otherworldly confections in her dream bakery than accept the King of Hearts’ proposal. While Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles series used the familiar fairy-tale scaffolding of Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, and others’ stories to climb straight into space, this standalone novel is different—it’s not about space, but time. Readers know that Cath has no choice but to eventually become the brutal, nonsensical Queen of Hearts; but, as Mahvesh Murad wrote in her review, “It isn’t hard to imagine how she will end up, when she must give up the life she had imagined as a valid alternate—full of a cold, heartless hatred that clouds all judgment.”

Mad Hatters and March Hares, edited by Ellen Datlow

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Dave McKean’s cover about sums up the tone of Ellen Datlow’s anthology: whimsical, nostalgic, yet undeniably creepy. Some of the collection’s contributors return to Wonderland, like Angela Slatter’s examination in “Run, Rabbit” of the White Rabbit’s fate for bringing Alice there in the first place, or Matthew Kressel’s surreal tour of Wonderland as theme park in “In Memory of a Summer’s Day.” Others hook into the story’s legacy and archetypes to go super-meta, from the Cheshire Cat falling down a hole and turning into a little girl (Seanan McGuire’s “Sentence Like a Saturday”) to Alice Liddell and Peter Pan having a heart-to-heart (“The Flame After the Candle” by Catherynne M. Valente). Some of the characters bear no resemblance or connection to Alice and her bizarre friends, but their stories—Ysabeau Wilce’s tamale girl in her own portal fantasy (“The Queen of Hats”), Katherine Vaz’s cafe owner mourning her murdered daughter (“Moon, Memory, Muchness”)—make readers want to follow them down the rabbit-hole.

After Alice by Gregory Maguire

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The moment that Alice tumbles down the rabbit-hole, she leaves the real, logical world behind. But that world doesn’t stop spinning—so how did 1860s Oxford react to her disappearance? Indifference, mostly. In Gregory Maguire’s imagining, Alice’s fifteen-year-old sister Lydia is too busy serving as the lady of the house after their mother’s death to notice her curious younger sister has slipped away. Alice’s playmate Ada does find the rabbit-hole, but she’s late enough that she must navigate Wonderland on her own, acting as the Orpheus to Alice’s Eurydice in her attempts to drag her friend back to the light.

The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor

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In a clever reversal, heir to the Wonderland throne Alyss Heart and her bodyguard Hatter Madigan go through the looking glass… to the other side. But upon their arrival in Victorian London, the two are separated, with Alyss left only with an aspiring author to hear her grievances. But where she hopes that he’ll publicize her story—of her parents’ murders at the hand of her aunt Redd, of tea parties replaced by bloody battles—he instead gets every detail horribly wrong. Can Hatter find Alyss in the real world? Can she harness her powers of Imagination when not in Wonderland?

Alice by Christina Henry

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Placing Alice in a mental institution has been done before, not least because it seems like the most appropriate reaction to one’s daughter emerging from a rabbit-hole declaring she has seen all manner of impossible things. But what if young Alice emerges with (gulp) a flayed face and unable to say anything but “the rabbit” over and over and over again? And what if her fellow patients at the institution include a Mad Hatcher she speaks to through walls, and the mysterious creature known only as the Jabberwock? Christina Henry’s violent revenge tale is not for the faint of heart, but if you make it through, you’ll be rewarded with the sequel, Red Queen.

Automated Alice by Jeff Noon

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“I suppose that Carroll’s rabbit hole and looking glass can be seen as a Victorian version of Gibson’s ‘jacking-in’ to Cyberspace,” Jeff Noon told Spike magazine in 1996, summing up his thought process behind Automated Alice. Both a “trequel” to Carroll’s two adventures as well as the third installment of his own series that began with Vurt, the book sees Alice step through a grandfather clock into alternate-universe 1998 Manchester. There, she encounters a strange robotic doppelgänger powered by termites (the eponymous Automated Alice) and gets framed for a series of murders when the jigsaw pieces found on the bodies match one of her puzzles. Noon seeks to pay homage to Carroll not just with the characters, but with the writing style and accompanying illustrations by Harry Trumbore.

Alice in Sunderland by Bryan Talbot

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The greatest shipbuilding port in the world during Lewis Carroll’s time and a supposed inspiration for his Alice books (it literally rhymes with “Wonderland”), Sunderland possesses a rich history. In his 300-page, nonlinear graphic novel, writer-illustrator Bryan Talbot delves into Carroll’s famous visits and the legacy of the area itself in relation to art and imagination. To do so, Talbot must draw himself into the narrative; true to the book’s subtitle—An Entertainment—he takes on the roles of both Traveler and Storyteller for what Teen Reads describes as “theatrical performance with academic lecture.” Fitting with Alice’s journey, it’s the kind of topsy-turvy tour that readers should just give themselves over to, and all the nonsense will give way to sense.

What are your favorite Alice in Wonderland retellings?

Originally published December 2017.

If there’s anything cooler and geekier than writing science fiction, it’s designing games. I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve been able to do both during the course of my career—I’ve published thirteen novels and over a hundred game products. While I’m probably best known in game circles for my work on the Dungeons & Dragons game and the Forgotten Realms world, there’s one game that is especially near and dear to my heart: Axis & Allies Naval Miniatures.

So here’s the story of how I got to make my favorite game.

I’ve always been a little crazy about battleships. I always loved visiting historical ships as a kid. I read everything I could get my hands on about battleships, I spent many long weekends fighting out battles with cardboard counters and sprawling hex maps. Heck, I even served in the Navy for a few years. When I went to work in the game industry, I remained keenly interested in naval history and wargaming, but I didn’t find many opportunities to combine my naval hobby interest and my game design career. There just isn’t all that much demand for a naval history game. It’s a niche of a niche. (And no, the game Battleship doesn’t count.)

Then in 2006 the opportunity of a lifetime for a battleship geek and game designer fell into my lap: Wizards of the Coast decided to produce a collectible naval miniatures game based on Axis & Allies, a WW2 strategy boardgame. And they assigned me to create the new minis game.

(Seriously. This was a lifelong interest of mine, something I’d dreamed about since I was ten years old, and they asked me to make it my primary job for months and months as we worked up and playtested the game. I would have done that for free, I wanted to do it so much.)

For those of you who don’t know what a collectible miniatures game is, it’s basically a hobby game where you build an “army”—or a fleet, in this case—by collecting miniatures representing different units (or ships). Then you take on your opponent in a tabletop battle that usually involves rolling lots of dice to see who sinks who. In the case of a historically themed miniatures game like Axis & Allies Naval Miniatures, the various units are waterline models of ships that fought in World War 2, such as USS Enterprise or USS Iowa or the German battleship Bismarck or the Japanese battleship Yamato. For our game, we produced sturdy plastic miniatures at the 1/1800 scale—the largest ones we could reasonably afford to manufacture—fully assembled, and then factory-painted in their historical paint schemes.

Not only did I get to design the game that you’d play with these pieces, I also got to choose the ships and planes we’d include in the game, create their game stats, provide a little bit of flavor text about why they were important, and work with the CAD sculptors to make sure they got the pieces as correct as they could given the various manufacturing constraints for making small, detailed game pieces from plastic. In short, it was absolutely the most fun I had in a career built around doing fun things as often as I possibly could.

The game went on to become an unexpected hit, at least by the standards of hobby miniatures games. Wizards of the Coast produced five expansions through 2011, each set introducing dozens of new pieces, and I led the design each time. (I would have done those for free, too.) We produced A&A Naval Miniatures sets until we literally ran out of ships that we hadn’t done models for. Tens of thousands of 6-inch long Yamatos and Iowas are out there in the world now; I’m the guy who figured out a fun game to play with them and made sure they’d look good enough to satisfy all the other battleship geeks out there.

Well, all good things come to an end. In 2011 Wizards brought the Axis & Allies miniatures line to an end, and decided they could no longer afford to retain my services. I moved on to other things. But I’m still just giddy that I had a chance to make the game that I’d wanted to play since I was a little kid, and do a good job of it.

I’m still a battleship geek at heart, but now I’m using that obsession to write military science fiction. The technology of my Sikander North universe winds up favoring space battles that feel just a little bit like the big-gun encounters of Tsushima or Jutland or Ironbottom Sound. They’re railguns instead of naval cannons and Alcubierre drives instead of steam engines, and I suppose that in space you don’t hear the thunder of the salvoes. But the tactics and the tension come to life in much the same way. I still pick up books on naval history whenever I can, and devour them voraciously. They say you should write what you know; guilty as charged.

After all, I’ve always been a little crazy about battleships.

Originally published November 2017.

Richard Baker is a former United States Navy officer, world-renowned game designer, and author who resides thirty minutes south of Seattle, in Pacific, WA. His works include the New York Times bestseller Condemnation and the highly-acclaimed The Last Mythal trilogy. His game design credits include the Alternity Science Fiction Roleplaying Game, and the Axis & Allies Naval Miniatures Game—the best-selling naval war game of all time. His military SF series Breaker of Empires includes Valiant Dust and Restless Lightning, available from Tor Books.

Oh, Viggo. Truly, you are the only Aragorn for us. Er, the only Strider. Only Elessar. Whatever.

Viggo Mortensen did a few things with his character that transcended typical actorly dedication; he only used his heavy steel sword on set, rather than the lighter aluminum ones built for stunts (and the stunt guys had the bruises to prove it). He was prone to dragging the sword around everywhere, and got stopped by the cops when he was spotted carrying it in public. He asked for more of his lines to be written in elvish. He once kicked a helmet so hard that he broke his toes, but still stayed in character for the take.

It’s pretty well-known that his casting in Lord of the Rings occurred late in the game, after they had already started shooting, but do you know the other names that were considered? Because they’re mostly big-deal picks, and imagining any one of them in the role leads to a strange alternate reality.

Daniel Day-Lewis

DDL was one of Jackson’s first picks for the part (he was offered the role several times but kept turning it down), and while we can see general appeal, the idea of casting someone who’s even more method than Mortensen was bound to be a misfire. Daniel Day-Lewis refused to wear a warmer coat and got dangerously ill during filming for Gangs of New York… because warmer coats would not have existed for a man of his position in that time period. Daniel Day-Lewis would only speak to the crew on Nine in Italian, because his character was Italian. Daniel Day-Lewis learned how to expertly fire a heavy flintlock gun for The Last of Mohicans, and brought the thing to a Christmas dinner. Daniel Day-Lewis was once playing Hamlet at the National Theatre in London and felt like he was talking to the ghost of his actual dead father, so he walked off the stage and never played the part again.

You see how this could have been a problem, right? During filming, they lose track of Lewis because he’s too busy trudging through the wilderness being a ranger for real. He only speaks to the crew in elvish. He won’t rehearse fight choreography because he wants the sequences to “feel authentic.” It’s a disaster in the making. Sure, the performance would have been great, but would it have really been worth the suffering? Even just Daniel Day-Lewis’ personal suffering?

Stuart Townsend

Townsend was the one who was actually cast in the part before Viggo came on board. He did two months of training and got to film all of one or two days before Jackson realized he’d made a mistake in casting such a young actor—Townsend was only in his late twenties. So he was sent home, and Mortensen was abruptly drafted.

While you gotta feel for the kid (his film career hasn’t been all that exciting, and he was similarly shuffled off of Thor’s cast roster when he got traded out for Josh Dallas in the part of Fandral), it’s easy to see what Jackson was worried about. Baby-faced 87-year-old Aragorn, flirting with elves and getting all kingly and expecting people to follow him into battle. Teeny-bopper Aragorn raging about the fear that would take the heart of him! Isildur’s Heir and His Mighty Pout—perfect emo band name.

Hate to say it, but age does lend you gravitas. It’s probably best that Aragorn didn’t end up looking like someone who just finished his grad school program and decided to hike the Appalachian Trial before getting a real job.

Russell Crowe

Crowe was another top pick on Jackson’s list, and he was keen on the role, but had to turn it down due to prior commitments. Coming off of the incredibly popular Gladiator back then, this idea kind of makes sense.

Kind of.

It does mean that most of Aragorn’s lines would be delivered in soft, pained murmurs, punctured by smatterings of full-throated roars: “Are you not entertained, Sauron?” We’ve seen him be Robin Hood, and that performance was sort of grouchy and meh. It’s arguably the closest to Aragorn the guy has ever come. So… perhaps not. Then again, if he played the role like Javert and sang some elvish poetry in a furious tenor, that would have been a hilarious way to get butts in seats.

Vin Diesel

Diesel auditioned for the role, though he was never offered the part. He would have had the bushiest beard of all. And he probably would have scared the orcs away by smiling at them.

Let’s face it, Vin Diesel is a very different kind of hero. He’s got that cuddly aspect that we know from Groot and the Iron Giant, but action roles are where he gets lean, mean, and growly. Which would have been a really interesting take on Aragorn’s character, though pretty far from his characterization in the books. An Aragorn who was all swagger and biceps. An Aragorn who could kill you with a teacup.

It wouldn’t have seemed much like Lord of the Rings, but it would have been a sight to behold.

Nicolas Cage

This was very real. Jackson offered the role to Cage early in the game. Cage wanted to take the role, but was concerned about having to spend so much time away from his kid. But if he had decided it was worth it, or packed the family up and moved them with him…

Nicolas Cage is never anyone but Nicolas Cage. We all know this. He has an irrefutable Cage-ness. He’s great at extremes because that is clearly where he lives. His vocal delivery does not conform to other languages or accents—they must bend around him. He would have never blended in with the ensemble cast that Jackson ended up assembling. Suddenly, the king’s return would seem like the entire point of the LOTR trilogy. Frodo? Who’s that? What’s this Ring thing about?

All I can see is Cage.

It would have been the most distracting casting choice of the 21st century, and the 21st century had only just begun.

Bonus: Other Near-Miss Castings

Liam Neeson was offered the role of Boromir. It’s probably best that he turned it down because it would have been hard for anyone to dispute his right to a throne.

Sylvester McCoy was considered for Bilbo, but Radagast was a better choice in the long run.

Lucy Lawless and Uma Thurman were wanted for Galadriel and Arwen respectively, but both actresses were unable to meet the production schedule due to pregnancies. It would have been a pretty different film series once you replace Blanchett and Tyler with Xena and The Bride, that’s for sure.

David Bowie wanted to play Elrond, though he was never approached, and that’s probably for the best because he would have been insanely difficult to see as anyone other than Bowie-in-an-elf-costume.

But perhaps the best possibility of all: though many were considered, one of the first actors offered the role of Gandalf was Sean Connery… who turned it down because he just “didn’t get” the script. After all, who was he going to sleep with? Where were all the guns for him to fire? How many puns would he be allowed to drop? None? Well, that’s a bust. Connery says no deal.

Originally published in February 2015.

Emily Asher-Perrin wants a peek in at alternate universes for the express purpose of seeing movies with different casts. You can bug her on Twitter and Tumblr, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.

Okay, so we all care about what’s happening to our super friends in Avengers: Endgame, but you know who else we care about? All the normal people who were hanging around doing normal stuff when Thanos’s Snappening happened—you know, like the Avengers: Infinity War post-credits scene barely scratched the surface of showing. This wouldn’t be the first story that saw a world forced to reckon with a sudden and massive population culling, but you wouldn’t know it from the first trailer. Considering how brilliantly series like The Leftovers and Y: The Last Man addressed these kinds of worldbuilding details, we can’t help but we curious about what happens in this universe.

What is the actual death and damage cost?

If 50-percent of the population died/disintegrated just as a result of the Snap, that doesn’t take into account the people in the cars and buses that suddenly lost their drivers, or the planes without pilots. Surgeons going poof while patients are still under anesthesia. Dogs without their human walkers. The frothing pitchers of milk dropping to the floor, never to become lattes. Amusement park operators leaving people at the top of the ferris wheel. The rock-climbers who plummet to their deaths when there’s no one to belay them. And think about the detritus left behind: kites floating away, surfboards drifting off to sea, scuba tanks sinking to the bottom of the ocean, smartphones cracked on the pavement where they fell. There’d be no way to avoid the evidence—and countless left-behind things would become monuments and memorials, all over the world.

The collateral damage, whether loss of life or injury and destruction through the sudden absence of half the world, is nothing to sniff at.

Where are the Avengers?

The trailer makes it seem very likely that the remaining Avengers immediately retreat to the compound to assess the situation and form a plan to handle it. Which means that they are totally MIA to the rest of the world. Earth’s Mightiest Heroes abandoned their posts, as far as the planet knows, with the small exception of the people who tuned into the news and heard world about Tony Stark taking on a big spaceship in New York City. In all likelihood, the population doesn’t care much about the superteam, as far more immediate issues will take precedence. But that’s still a scary footnote alongside the omnipresent death and suffering. At the very least, there are probably a bunch of kids out there asking parents (or whoever is available to take care of them), “Where did Iron Man go?”

And no one has an answer.

Who assumes control?

Even among smaller groups, people are going to have to step forward to organize whatever relief efforts crop up in the wake of the snap. This is likely fall to whoever is present and has some form of relevant experience, but the whole situation gets wonkier as you move further up the food chain. Do nations even matter anymore? (Not likely.) Does whatever is left of the UN try to form some vague umbrella of governance and aid? (Probably?) Are there crime syndicates trying to make power grabs, or are they just as devastated? (Depends on the group, we guess. That’d be a job for the Defenders—oh wait.) There’s probably an immediate push toward cooperation that will last for a while, but there’s really no telling what springs up in the days and months that follow if things aren’t put to rights quickly.

How does this change faith?

Chances are, the Snapture didn’t match religious groups’ expectation for the Rapture, apocalypse, or whatever their respective doomsday event was called. Part of picking up the pieces for those left behind is restructuring their views on death, the afterlife, and life going forward. New religious cults always rise up in these stories, and if there is a Korean Church of Asgard then you know there’s at least one Snap Cult out there.

What is the psychological toll?

Most of the people on Earth watched friends, loved ones, coworkers, store clerks, and terrified strangers just vanish before their eyes. Even without the religious questions that would entail, very few people on the planet would fail to find that utterly traumatic. Survival mode is certainly a thing, but that won’t prevent shock and night terrors and depression and sudden panic attacks. Every single person everywhere is now the survivor of a war that they had no idea they were participating in. That’s going to leave serious scars that no one is prepared to handle on a massive scale.

What about all the Good Boys?

Listen, we didn’t want to go to this place, but now we can’t stop wondering about all the dogs who think their owners just abandoned them. DAMMIT THANOS.

…and all that cold pizza?

In New York alone, the number of snaptured delivery folks means there are a lot of take-out bags just sitting on the sidewalk next to a small pile of dust.

But the biggest questions we need answered are:

• Who Captain America shaved (himself);
• What Cap shaved (face);
• When Cap shaved (before Endgame?);
• Where Cap shaved (Wakanda?);
• Why Cap shaved (because Endgame?);
• and How Cap shaved (Peggy Carter memorial razor?).

Netflix has released the first teaser for The Umbrella Academy, its television adaptation of Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá’s comic about a dysfunctional group of superpowered siblings who must prevent the apocalypse.

Interestingly, while the comic is set in an alternate-universe 1977, this adaptation appears to be set in the present-day (whether it is an AU remains to be seen), with the members of the Umbrella Academy all born in 1989. Which would explain the excellent use of Tiffany’s “I Think We’re Alone Now”:

In comparison to the teaser, Netflix’s official synopsis is pretty spare, but still gives viewers a sense of what they’re in for:

A dysfunctional family of superheroes comes together to solve the mystery of their father’s death, the threat of the apocalypse and more.

The series stars Ellen Page, Robert Sheehan, Tom Hopper, Mary J. Blige, and more.

The Umbrella Academy comes to Netflix February 15.

Update: We mistakenly identified this as an entirely new trailer when it was just the first trailer with some added footage. We’ve updated accordingly and will post when the real second trailer is released.

The latest footage from Godzilla: King of the Monsters continues to be lyrical and weirdly affecting, establishing that humans are the real monsters and the mythological titans must save us from ourselves. Including Godzilla, of course, but also King Ghidorah, who gets the big (albeit grainy, so not the top image) reveal in this trailer.

The video opens with a compilation of the viral marketing clips that have been tweeted from the @MonarchSciences Twitter account over the last few days. The movie stars Millie Bobby Brown, Vera Farmiga, Sally Hawkins, Kyle Chandler, Charles Dance, and many more familiar faces:

The official synopsis, from Warner Bros:

Following the global success of Godzilla and Kong: Skull Island comes the next chapter in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ cinematic MonsterVerse, an epic action adventure that pits Godzilla against some of the most popular monsters in pop culture history. The new story follows the heroic efforts of the crypto-zoological agency Monarch as its members face off against a battery of god-sized monsters, including the mighty Godzilla, who collides with Mothra, Rodan, and his ultimate nemesis, the three-headed King Ghidorah. When these ancient super-species—thought to be mere myths—rise again, they all vie for supremacy, leaving humanity’s very existence hanging in the balance.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters will save us all May 31, 2019.

The Thirteenth Doctor’s first season has come to an end with a final battle against a familiar face…

Summary

The Doctor detects nine distress calls coming from the same area of a planet called Ranskoor Av Kolos (translated to “Disintegrator of the Soul”), and decides to go investigate. She gives everyone special neuro-balancers because the planet throws off waves that interfere with a person’s mood and ability to focus. When they arrive on the planet they meet a man named Paltraki (Mark Addy) who has lost his crew but doesn’t know how. The Doctor gives him a neuro-balancer, and they are contacted by the person in charge of planet: Tzim-Sha. He wants something that Paltraki and his crew retrieved, and will kill them one by one if it’s not returned. It’s some kind of buzzing sphere contained in what looks like crystal, but the Doctor can’t figure out what it is. Graham tells the Doctor that when they see Tzim-Sha, he plans to kill him for Grace. The Doctor insists that he not do so, but he doesn’t seem to care.

The Doctor meets a woman named Andinio (Phyllis Logan), who is part of a very small and select people named the Ux. They have incredible abilities to bend matter and such, and serve a creator. Andinio believes that Tzim-Sha is that creator and she and her cohort Delph (Percelle Ascott) have been doing his bidding. The parcel that the Doctor is carrying is a captured and miniaturized planet, and they have shrunk many more for their “creator.” The Doctor meets Tzim-Sha again, and he admits that he’s been waiting to get back at her for what she did to him on Earth 3,407 years ago. He’s also strapped to machinery and barely alive anymore. Now he plans to take the Earth, but the Doctor is certain that the world cannot maintain stability with so many tiny planet on it. In the meantime, Ryan and Graham are helping to free a group of stasis-bound people who Tzim-Sha has been holding hostage, including Paltraki’s crew. He and Yaz try to stop Andinio and Delph from taking the Earth (Delph wants no part of this thing, but Andinio leaves him very little choice). The Doctor instructs Paltraki to help Ryan and Graham, and she and Yaz try to figure out how to stop the Ux. They end up fitting the duo with their neuro-balancers so that they can think clearly.

The Doctor calls the TARDIS to her with the sonic screwdriver, and together with Andinio and Delph, they put all the planets back where they belong. Graham gets the chance to kill Tzim-Sha, but makes the choice not to on Ryan’s plea, and they put Tzim-Sha in stasus instead. The Doctor tells Graham that he’s one of the strongest people she knows. They takes the survivors away from the planet and let Andinion and Delph go searching for a new place to serve their creator.

Commentary

Honestly, I enjoyed this episode overall, even with its multitude of weaknesses and plotholes. And if it’s not enough for some people because it’s supposed to be a season finale, then I count that as a good thing. For my money, Doctor Who shouldn’t attempt a big kapow season ender and then try for it again immediately after with the holiday special. It needs to be one or the other, and it seems like the big baboom is being saved for the New Year. As it stands, this was a fun, dramatic space episode set in the future with some good character work and a few neat conceptual ideas thrown into the mix. It was fun, and everyone was in top form. If you’re new to the show (which it seems as though a good portion of the audience is this season, given the high viewing numbers that Whittaker and Chibnall have drawn), then something that’s less bombastic is likely to work for you, too.

The biggest mistake in this episode is that I kept hoping Grace would be in one of those stasis pods with the people Tzim-Sha was keeping alive. Somehow. I wish that they’d just made it abundantly clear from the start that there was no way for that to happen. I still wouldn’t have been happy for her to have missed out on this whole season of adventures, but I can’t stop being upset that she’s not going to be a companion.

We’ve reached our end goal with Ryan and Graham’s relationship solidifying, on the other hand. It’s pretty aggravating that Graham thinks murdering Tzim-Sha is going to somehow make up for Grace (revenge is a common plot scheme, but the commonality of it means that it rarely ever packs the punch you need it to, and instead makes the character seeking revenge seem out of touch), but Ryan is mostly responsible for snapping him out of it, calling him granddad once again and making it clear that he loves him. They even finally get their fistbump in, which is a lot to ask on Ryan’s part, so things between them are clearly golden.

Yaz, on the other hand, has delightfully assumed the role of the person closest to the Doctor in their little trio, the one who goes off with the people they meet in order to safeguard them and get intel, the person who agrees to the tough choices, the person who says to the Doctor “I’m not leaving you.” After worrying that Yaz might get sidelined as the one female companion with a female Doctor, the opposite has really been true. Yaz has come into her own, and clearly enjoys being Thirteen’s friend and confidant and partner in crime. Their relationship is closer than ever, which is pretty much everything that I could have wished for. The idea that a female version of the Doctor would have an even more seamless bond with the other women in her life really does ring true.

There’s a decidedly Star Wars/Darth Vader vibe going on with Tzim-Sha in this episode, and I kind of wish they’d leaned into it more? It works, but it could have been sharper and even more interesting if they’d just let it be more Vader-y. It also would have had the benefit of making Tzim-Sha a more interesting villain who had truly evolved in all the time since he’d seen the Doctor last. The whole reveal of him in that chamber attached to all those apparatuses was actually pretty cool, but it wasn’t used. And then he suddenly doesn’t seem to need it later? It’s just not that well conceived or pulled through the whole plot. On the other hand, really cool aspects of the plot, like Paltraki not having the use of his memory for most of the episode, was a really smart device that could have been used more.

There are some weird plot holes in this episode, or at least plot bits that weren’t thought all the way through. For example, if Tzim-Sha wanted to nab the Earth to get back at the Doctor, why didn’t he go after the Earth first? Sure, the other planets have relevance according to him, but if he really cares about what the Doctor did all that much, you’d figure he would start there. How do the powers of Andinio and Delph actually work, and why? Why does the planet throw off mess-with-your-head waves again? They seem to be a pretty interesting and advanced species who we don’t really learn much about (particularly in regard to the trappings of their actual religion). If Tzim-Sha had meant to get back at the Doctor all this time, why wasn’t he more actively seeking her out? Why does he need “trophy” people in stasis instead of the other trophy format that we know his people already do? At the end of the day, Chibnall is good at reverse engineering mysteries and murders (which you know if you’ve watched Broadchurch), but his SFF plotting could use some more meticulousness.

All in all, there could have been more care taken with the general premise and world-building, but I’m just as happy to not have the season finale be OH NO IT IS EVERY VILLAIN THE DOCTOR EVER FACED AND EIGHTEEN UNIVERSES ARE IN PERIL WHATEVER SHALL WE DO PROBABLY YELL AT THE STARS WHILE LOCATING A MACGUFFIN. Ultimately all the important hallmarks are there, including a crystallization of the Doctor’s personal M.O.—when Graham asks if it really needs to be them helping with the distress calls on Ranskoor Av Kolos, the Doctor replies, “No, not at all. But everyone else has passed them by. You think we should do the same?” If you need a better motto for living a good life, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find it.

Also have to appreciate the Doctor finally admitting to Ryan that she sets very specific rules for new recruits, but that they do actually change all the time.

Yeah. I’ll take this. I’ll take the Doctor telling people to “travel hopefully” and reminding them of the wonder in the universe. And also I’m incredibly excited for the New Years Special.

Bits and asides this week:

• The Doctor mentions having dragged a planet across the universe using the TARDIS (the Tenth Doctor and a bunch of friends had to do this with the Earth in “Journey’s End”) and using the TARDIS to rebirth a Slitheen egg (which the Ninth Doctor witnessed in “Boom Town”).
• Graham says “Yippee ki-yay, robots” in perhaps the nerdiest reference to Die Hard ever made on television. And I say this with the knowledge that Brooklyn Nine-Nine is constantly making nerdy references to Die Hard.
• Someone finally enjoys the Doctor’s decision to refer to her crew as “fam.” It’s only Yaz, though. Graham and Ryan are still less than impressed.
• Coming out of this episode, I still feel really bad for Delph. Poor guy deserved better.
• This is not the first time the Doctor has encountered someone who miniaturized planets. The Fourth Doctor and Romana encountered a planet named Zanak, which had hyperspace engines and was piloted by a half-robot that used it to plunder the resources of small planets in the serial “The Pirate Planet.”
• Yaz says that there’s seven billion people on Earth perhaps not realizing how far they are in the future; Tzim-Sha says it’s been over 3400 years since he last saw the Doctor, so it’s a practical guarantee that the population is much larger. (Looks like it’s doing okay, though, since there’s a lot of greenery and blue oceans still left.)
• Continuing to call the TARDIS a Ghost Monument is just really very excellent. Count me a fan, please always keep this up, it’s such a good name.
• The Doctor makes mention that teachers used to limit her questions in school in order stop having to teach. Which is probably something that every student has faced in one class or another. And given the Doctor’s rough relationship with her people, it comes as even less of a surprise.
• Hi Mark Addy, does anyone remember when you played younger Fred Flintstone in that weird live-action Flintstone prequel Viva Rock Vegas? (I know he’s done far better things than that, but it’s way too fun to remind everyone of that awkward, awful thing.)

Emily Asher-Perrin will continue to travel hopefully. You can bug him on Twitter, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.

Gormenghast Castle is hidden. When Titus Groan, the Earl of Gormenghast, finally escapes, he is shocked to find that no one has ever heard of it. The walls of his ancestral home that stretch for miles; the jagged towers and crumbling courtyards, the endless corridors, staircases, and attics, the weirdos and cutthroats who live there—it all goes unseen by the outside world. Whatever happens there happens in shadow and obscurity.

But all that might soon change. The Gormenghast books, in this moment of dragon queens and sword swingers, seem poised for a long overdue resurgence. November 17th marked the fiftieth anniversary of author Mervyn Peake’s death. That means his dark fantasy trilogy (Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone) is headed into the public domain this year, while a potential TV adaptation is swirling about, with Neil Gaiman and other notables attached.

Gormenghast is violent, creepy, escapist fantasy. There are burning libraries, hordes of feral cats, insane people locked away in long-forgotten wings, tall towers and dark dungeons. The story is a grisly yet whimsical affair: a power struggle unleashed by the machinations of a surly kitchen-boy. With its bleak moral outlook and macabre humor, the books are a brilliant match for contemporary appetites.

But anyone setting out to bring Gormenghast to TV ought to be wary… It was tried once before. A cheesy BBC effort from 2000 showed the potential difficulties of filming a Gormenghast that captures the feeling of Peake’s books, whose dense, poetical writing and cutting social satire is nearly the opposite of George R.R. Martin’s no-nonsense prose. Peake is a maximalist, given to long fits of description—there are shadows and sunbeams in Gormenghast that have more personality than some of Peake’s characters.

It isn’t surprising that a 1984 radio play written by Brian Gibley was more artistically successful, with Sting in the role of Steerpike. (Sting, with a horse, a dog, and one of his children named after characters in Gormenghast, is almost certainly the world’s most famous Peake fan.) At the height of his fame, Sting owned the film rights to the books and claimed to have written a movie script that never appeared, for better or worse.

Since then, the fantasy genre has only grown. Much like Christianity, it’s matured from a backwater cult into a full-blown cultural phenomenon, with tribes and nations all its own. The Guardian’s review of the 2000 BBC miniseries declared “this should be the perfect time to televise Gormenghast.” And The New York Times agreed: Peake fever was imminent. At long last, fantasy was fully part of the mainstream. And yet Gormenghast eluded fame then, and continues to occupy a marginal space even among fantasy buffs—despite the intermittent efforts of enthralled bloggers. Gormenghast’s coronation in the pop-culture pantheon is long overdue.

But Peake’s whimsical prose has always been a major hurdle for potential readers. Like Poe on acid, Peake will set a scene with torrents of gothic description—a four-page devotional to a minor character’s coughing fit or someone’s bout of drunkenness—and then shift in the very next scene to a tone of arch-irony worthy of Austen. Similarly, the thread of Gormenghast’s plot, while lush in some places, is hopelessly threadbare in others. Like Moby-Dick it is built largely from its digressions. It is not a story overly obsessed with action. There are no dragons roaming its halls. There are no spell-books, no heroes, and no magic. There are no zombies to slice and dice.

The story’s main preoccuptation is the castle itself: its society brittled by age, its highest offices becoming ever more remote from life, governing only themselves, torturing themselves with needless rites. Gormenghast is gripped tight by self-imposed strictures—by a social confinement so complete that the people in the castle are convinced that the outside world is literally nonexistent. Complete obedience to arbitrary values, internalized self-loathing, absolute power wielded to no particular end at all, a deterministic universe that refuses to acknowledge the individual psyche: compelling stuff! But, as Westworld has showed its viewers all too frequently, the grand problems of ontology are sometimes better left offscreen.

Making a good soup from the stock of Gormenghast will be a delicate process. The BBC adaptation chose to lean heavily on costumes and comic elements. But on the page, Peake’s outrageous sense of humor is always double-edged, paired with grotesquerie, pity, or spite. That is hard to film. And contemporary audiences may not take kindly to the books’ jabs at the amusing speech patterns of the lower class, or the way a person limps. Peake has a keen social imagination but he is a raconteur, not a moralist. Even his most generous readers can’t help but wince at the portrayal of the noble savages who live in the Outer Dwellings clinging to the castle walls, who are never allowed to be anything but proud and naively primitive.

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Still, if Gormenghast is treated with too much gravity, it will look ridiculous. So much of the power of the books comes from Peake’s brutal irony and his refusal to take the plight of his characters too seriously.

One area in which Gormenghast is much stronger than the competition, however, is its brilliant antihero. Steerpike is a charismatic, ruthless schemer—a Macbeth untroubled by his bloody hands, talented like Tom Ripley and grimly competent in the manner of Deadwood’s Al Swearengen. The dramatic center of the castle, Steerpike has none of the vacuous evil of a Ramsay Bolton or a Joffrey Baratheon, none of the remoteness of Sauron. Steerpike is full of evil urges, and manipulation is as natural to him as breathing. But his crimes are tempered by his oily charm and righteous class resentment.

Born to a life of kitchen service, he acts boldly to cheat the system from within, gaining access to its highest ranks through sheer pluck, excellent timing, and some sturdy climbing rope. Steerpike sees his own advancement as a restoration of moral order, and he is only a villain because he isn’t particularly troubled with the means by which he restores it. He sees the injustice of his society, and that further obedience to its arbitrary moral facts will only hamper him. In a world of thoughtless obedience his greatest crime is that he dares to imagine equality of opportunity. He is a homegrown antagonist, raised in the castle’s ossified culture but ambitious enough to escape it. Why should he play by the rules of a world that sees him only and always as a servant—that refuses to acknowledge his capacities and his potential? He schemes to transcend the social confinement to which the heroes are thoughtlessly chained, but we are doomed to root against him. Peake, brilliant and cruel, shows us that we would rather preserve a rotten system than topple it.

In a way, Peake’s focus on structural injustice and moral luck might hamper a transition to TV. Westeros may well be a land lost to cynicism and ignorance, but Game of Thrones is obsessed with old-fashioned moral conduct, the quest to figure out right from wrong in a place overcome by casual evildoing. In the midst of senseless and exuberant violence, an endless winter of barbarity, there remains a dream of spring. The Starks will be avenged. The war will someday end. The ice zombies will be vanquished.

There is no comparable struggle for the future of Gormenghast Castle. The battle for the heart of Gormenghast is over. Apathy and decadence won, ages and ages ago. Peake’s interest in the future of Gormenghast extends only as far as Titus, the reluctant heir, and his desire to escape. But before Titus is allowed to leave, he must defend the broken system from which he so desperately longs to escape.

No elves come to save Gormenghast in its darkest hour, no desperate alliances are formed. It isn’t a place where shiny swords get forged to fight evil. It is a place where cowards sharpen kitchen knives in the dark, and the heroes are oblivious until the last moment. Titus is only moved to fight against Steerpike’s evil when it presents a credible threat to his social status. And in the end, the person who hates Gormenghast the most must restore it to order and strength—an unflinchingly cruel narrative choice, with such potential for excellent drama.

Gormenghast’s magic is ultimately only as potent as the imagination of its fans. If a new adaptation succeeds it will do so by staying faithful to its bleak outlook, florid language and bizarre mise-en-scene. We might soon be ready for Peake’s unapologetic weirdness. For now, though, Gormenghast castle is still obscure, unknown by a world determined to ignore it.

Ethan Davison is a graduate of Columbia University’s fiction MFA. Recently he wrote about the critic Martin Seymour-Smith at The Millions. You can follow him on Twitter @eadavison.

Nearly Roadkill: An Infobahn Erotic Adventure by Caitlin Sullivan and Kate Bornstein is a novel that is not widely known today; at the time I’m writing this column it has only six reviews on Goodreads. In some ways this is understandable. Published in 1998, Nearly Roadkill is a cyberpunk adventure and erotic romance set in a future so near, it is in many aspects indistinguishable from the late 1990s. But if we can get past the technical details of an almost entirely text-only internet, where the term “website” still needs to be laboriously explained, we find some of the most groundbreaking discussions about gender and sexuality in speculative fiction—discussions that are still just as powerful as when they were written.

This is no accident: Nearly Roadkill is, as far as I’m aware, the first speculative fiction novel with trans characters (co-)written by a trans author.

Kate Bornstein is much better known for their nonfiction, spanning a wide range of subgenres from memoir to edited anthology to self-help for teens, all with a queer and trans focus. Generations of trans people have read their work and were exposed to their activism, and their words on queer suicide prevention have probably saved many lives. Nearly Roadkill, by contrast, is little known, and often treated as a weird footnote in their oeuvre.

Bornstein wrote this novel together with journalist Caitlin Sullivan, and it was at least partially an autobiographic venture for both authors. In Bornstein’s memoir A Queer and Pleasant Danger (subtitled “The True Story of a Nice Jewish Boy Who Joins the Church of Scientology and Leaves Twelve Years Later to Become the Lovely Lady She Is Today”), we get to read about how Nearly Roadkill came into being: “I was sitting–very gingerly–at a booth, writing notes for a book idea that Caitlin Sullivan and I had been tossing back and forth. We’d been having fun playing around online with virtual identities and cybersex. We joked that we were doing research for a book.” Some of the personae mentioned do indeed surface in the novel: “I never played myself. I was variously a skateboard dude, a lesbian Star Trek officer, or food for some vampire.”

Right at the beginning, we are plunged into steamy online chat sex scenes between the two protagonists Winc and Scratch, both using ze/hir pronouns and appearing to each other in these various guises. But then the plot shifts and the novel focuses more on how the new internet regulations have made Scratch and Winc essentially into outlaws. By not registering with their real names and other personal details—including a binary gender choice—they are hindering the big business conglomerates from targeting advertising more efficiently at them. The issue is stunningly timely, and would have been remarkably prescient at the time the book was written: beyond issues like Facebook’s real-name policy, Facebook itself didn’t even exist in 1998, and companies were still experimenting with the first attempts at targeted online advertising.

When it comes down to the details, however, you might need to exercise your suspension of disbelief regarding how the internet works in the novel. Frankly, the technical details worked better for me when they were handwaved outright—for example, when hacking is presented as witchcraft. But as in the previously reviewed Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany , I found the social aspects of the book have aged far better…

After copious cybersex in various gender and presentation combinations, Scratch and Winc end up meeting each other in person due to a need to save a fellow outlaw from danger. This is where I felt the novel really begins to shine. The two of them both struggle intensely after meeting the other, and it turns out that they experimented with a range of gender expressions for radically different reasons. This happens quite a ways into the narrative, but I need to provide at least a brief discussion of the relevant plot points, because I feel this may impact whether readers are inclined to pick up the book. I will try to restrict spoilers to the following paragraph:

Winc is a nonbinary person who had previously lived as a trans woman, while Scratch is the kind of second-wave feminist cis woman who wants to abolish gender. Their views clash very sharply, and all the terrible arguments that surface are disputes that still play out today in relation to trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs); Scratch accuses Winc of trying to invade women’s spaces, and so forth. This book has a reputation of “that weird one with a lot of chatlogs of cybersex,” but that characterization entirely ignores the novel’s main conflict of trans exclusion in feminism—a conflict that is incredibly painful to many trans people to this day.

Nearly Roadkill offers a detailed, in-depth exploration of different streams of feminism and how the differences between them aren’t just about words and principles, but about very real people getting hurt. The book pulls absolutely no punches, and goes so far beyond basic Intro to Gender territory that it still reads as if on the cutting edge two full decades after it was published. Both main characters need to give a lot of themselves in order to sustain their romance and deal with their undeniable attraction toward the other. There’s also the fact that while they understand each other so well, they are in other ways on opposite ends of the political spectrum. They love each other desperately, and they don’t want to lose each other.

The book does have its ‘Intro to Gender’ character in the person of Mr. Budge, a cis man and criminal investigator chasing Scratch and Winc, who ends up registered on the internet as a woman due to a technical mishap. While Winc and Scratch explore the outer reaches of gender, Mr. Budge finds that all of a sudden no one takes his work emails seriously now that his sender information says “Ms. Budge.” The counterpoint works surprisingly well, and demonstrates how different people can have different experiences and struggles even in the same general social context.

Those who want to read the book in its entirety as porn will be disappointed, because there is much less sex after the initial kaleidoscope of shapeshifting smut. But the book can’t quite be read without the sex, either. The graphic sex scenes demonstrate key points: both that the internet enables a level of experimentation with identity and sexuality that was previously unavailable, and also that something remains constant across all those shiftings—these characters are undeniably attracted to each other, and not just to whatever persona they assume at any given point. They also have boundaries and limits, and their interactions both online and offline help them to change and develop as people. They are still working out how the internet shapes and alters them and how they relate to it—much like Mr. Budge, in this respect.

The book is not perfect. It often meanders, and it could have used another editing pass. Despite the length (almost 400 pages, some typeset with a very narrow font), some issues are only ever briefly mentioned, without elaboration—I predominantly had this feeling about race, which came up many times, but was mostly handled in passing and in ways that sometimes gave me pause. But the fact remains that this kind of non-beginner-level gender discourse is just now reaching the mainstream of SFF publishing, and it is very worthwhile to take a look back at works like Nearly Roadkill which were so ahead of the curve.

Next time, we will take a look at a book from 1990 that has only been translated to English this year! Translated books are always hard to find for this column, and I am very happy I chanced on another one…

Bogi Takács is a Hungarian Jewish agender trans person (e/em/eir/emself or singular they pronouns) currently living in the US with eir family and a congregation of books. Bogi writes, reviews and edits speculative fiction, and is currently a finalist for the Hugo, Lambda and Locus awards. You can find em at Bogi Reads the World, and on Twitter and Patreon as @bogiperson.

One of the hallmarks of Star Trek from the very beginning was to have at least one alien character who provides a non-human perspective on things. It started, naturally, with Spock on the original series, and also includes Worf on The Next Generation (and to a lesser extent, Troi and Data), Tuvok, Neelix, Kes, and Seven of Nine (and to a lesser extent, Torres) on Voyager, T’Pol on Enterprise, and more than half the cast of Deep Space Nine.

On Discovery, that role has gone to Saru, who has in one season vaulted himself into the upper echelons of great Trek characters. His compassion, his intellect, his unique perspective as a prey animal, all combine to make him a most compelling character.

So it’s just a pity that this focus on him doesn’t really work.

“The Brightest Star” gives us our first view of the Kelpien homeworld of Kaminar, as we meet Saru and his father and sister. His father is a priest who is in charge of the ritual whereby the Kelpiens sacrifice a certain number of themselves regularly to the Ba’ul.

It’s never explained who the Ba’ul are, or why they do this, or what they gain from it, or really anything. To be fair, that’s the point, but it’s still frustrating to never actually get those answers. Saru seeks those answers, only to be shot down by his father Aradar.

The Ba’ul device that appears and takes away the sacrifices is apparently very badly maintained, as a piece falls off it, and Aradar says that this happens sometimes. The pieces that fall off are to be disposed of and not examined in any way.

Saru, of course, won’t have any of that. He tells Aradar he’ll get rid of it, but he keeps it for himself. Eventually, he figures out how to turn it into a communications device, and sends out a signal. That signal is answered by Starfleet, and he meets in secret with a shuttlecraft piloted by Lieutenant Philippa Georgiou. Saru’s ability to manipulate Ba’ul technology makes him worthy of being contacted, but Starfleet can’t interfere with Kaminar generally because they haven’t achieved space travel. (They’re barely aware of the grander universe, thinking of it only in terms of it being where the Ba’ul come from.) So Georgiou makes him an offer: come with her to see the rest of the galaxy, leaving his homeworld behind forever, or stay on Kaminar with the heavens denied him.

The Saru we know from a season of Discovery, and from the short exposure to him here, can only make one decision. Saru’s scientific curiosity is as great as any Trek character this side of Data. He goes with Georgiou, leaving his father and sister and life behind.

This is the first of the Short Treks that fails in my opinion, and it does so on two levels. The first is that this is very much not a story that should be told in 10-15 minutes. Both “Runaway” and “Calypso” were perfectly designed for the short format. But “The Brightest Star” feels like the outline of a longer story, not a story in itself. We get no context for the Kelpiens’ life. We know nothing of the Ba’ul, nor of what actually happens to the sacrifices. There’s so much story left on the floor here because of the limitations of the timeframe. What else to the Kelpiens do besides farm? What form of government do they have? Are all of them doing what Saru’s village is doing? More to the point, how does the rest of the galaxy view what’s happening there? Georgiou knows that Saru manipulated Ba’ul technology, and she also mentions that her contacting Saru was a controversial and fraught decision in Starfleet. Why didn’t we see those arguments? Why isn’t Starfleet doing something about the Ba’ul’s enslavement of the Kelpiens? (Assuming it is enslavement—even that is not clear.)

The story of Saru’s background is one that requires a full one-hour episode at least. What we get here is maddeningly abbreviated.

And it also just isn’t very interesting, which is the second failure. Saru and his people have been described as prey animals, as a people who are regularly hunted, and who know when death is approaching. This fascinating notion is tossed aside for a bog-standard primitives-are-directed-by-beings-with-greater-technology that we’ve seen a thousand times before on Trek, from “The Apple” and “The Paradise Syndrome” on the original series to “Justice” and “Homeward” on TNG, none of which are episodes you want in your list of comps. Worse, it makes the Kelpiens out to be less alien than we originally thought, as their being “prey” is just to do what the folks on Eminiar and Vendikar did in “A Taste of Armageddon,” wander into oblivion when they’re told to and that’s it. That’s not being prey, that’s being enslaved. Nothing in what we see of Saru’s life here tracks with what we’ve been told about the character in “The Vulcan Hello” and “The Battle at the Binary Stars,” nor what we’ve seen particularly in “Choose Your Pain” and “Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum.”

Because humans are (likely) the only sentient species on Earth and because we’re also at the top of the food chain, the notion of a sentient prey animal is something that is truly alien. It’s one of the things that appeals about Saru, and to see it abandoned here to turn the Kelpiens into generic “primitives” right out of mid-twentieth-century portrayals of Natives is disheartening to say the least. Worse, we get that most tired of clichés, the traditionalist father and the kind but not-understanding sister, played with complete blandness by Robert Verlaque and Hannah Spear.

Short Treks is a great concept, one that promises lots of nifty storytelling possibilities in the short format, from fascinating spotlights to character studies. But “The Brightest Star” fails that promise on every level. (Well, except acting. Doug Jones is still the best, and he makes even this misfire eminently watchable, and it’s never bad to see Michelle Yeoh in anything.)

Keith R.A. DeCandido first started writing about Star Trek for this site in 2011 (including rewatches of The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and the original series, and reviews of most of the movies and each episode of Discovery and Short Treks), first started writing Trek fiction in 1999 (he’s written sixteen novels, thirteen novellas, seven short stories, six comic books, and one reference book, and also edited three anthologies), and been watching Star Trek since birth. His rewatch of live-action superhero movies appears every Friday here on Tor.com, and 2019 will see the publication of three new novels of his: Alien: Isolation (based on the videogame), Mermaid Precinct (latest in his fantasy/mystery series), and A Furnace Sealed (debuting a new urban fantasy series).

Imagine you’re Martha and Jonathan Kent, and Kal-El’s ship crashes into your backyard—the universe answering your dreams for a child. So you bury the ship in the barn, raise this otherworldly visitor as your human son, and all is well until Clark begins manifesting powers. Except instead of doing good and growing up into a beloved icon to protect America and the world… he acts a bit more like Damien from The Omen.

This appears to be the premise of Brightburn, James Gunn’s new superhero horror movie starring Elizabeth Banks. While Gunn is the biggest name listed on the creative side, he’s serving as producer; it’s written by his cousins Brian Gunn and Mark Gunn (known for Journey 2: The Mysterious Island and Journey 3: From the Earth to the Moon) and directed by David Yarovesky (the Guardians of the Galaxy: Inferno video short).

Watch the trailer, which goes from sweet to creepy in the flash of a laser-eye:

No synopsis, just an ominous tagline from Sony Pictures:

Imagine what he could become.

Brightburn comes to theaters May 24, 2019.

If only real Saturdays lasted as long as this one does in Good Omens! Alas, it is Monday once again—but fear not, I am here to help get your week started on the right note! Yes, it’s time to rev up your engines, because The Good Omens Reread rides again…

Let’s do this thing!

Summary

The Four Horsemen have set out on their final journey, speeding down highways with little regard for others. Following them are the four hapless bikers from the bar, who are convinced that they can help somehow (and also it’s just damn cool to be riding with the Horsemen). They are going to be important—they can all feel it in their bones. They decide to choose names for themselves, trying to come up with appropriate-sounding horrors that can stand up to the likes of “War” and “Death.” The Horsemen ignore them as the bikers bicker amongst themselves.

We join Madame Tracy hard at work conducting a séance. Her clients are regulars and have the usual set of questions to ask. Much to Madame Tracy’s astonishment she actually channels a real spirit: Aziraphale speaks through her, wrecking her séance and ordering her clients out the door. Madame Tracy is incensed, puts on a pot of tea, and pours two cups. With the necessities taken care of, she demands to know what the hell is going on.

Proving once again that Agnes Nutter was always right, Newt and Anathema have indeed jumped each other’s bones following their near-death experience in the storm. Newt is elated. Anathema goes right back to business. They have a world to try and save, after all. Newt has some complicated feelings to work out, but must push them aside to focus on what’s important: not dying.

Shadwell dreams about the death of Agnes Nutter and then wakes up, confused and rather freaked out, in Madame Tracy’s bedroom. He receives an even bigger shock when he walks out to find Madame Tracy talking to herself in two different voices. He bids the demon begone and Aziraphale, who is having a VERY trying day, has had enough of him. Madame Tracy begs him to just sit down and listen, and Aziraphale fills him in on the oncoming apocalypse, but Shadwell doesn’t seem convinced. Antichrists are out of his jurisdiction. Utterly flummoxed, Aziraphale finally tells him that the Antichrist is the biggest witch out there. He’s the head witch! He finally has Shadwell’s attention. With that sorted, they head off to Tadfield on Madame Tracy’s scooter.

The Horsemen stop for nothing on their ride. Certainly not traffic accidents. They soar over a broken-down truck full of fish and sheet metal and continue merrily on their way. Their four biker followers are not so lucky. Their motorcycles don’t soar so much as… crash. Death hangs back: There’s a reason why those four weren’t also in the Book of Revelations.

Crowley is stuck in the notoriously bad traffic of London, pondering what he’s going to do with Armageddon nipping at his heels. The idea of just holing up in a posh restaurant to work on getting deeply, blackout drunk comes to mind. He can’t bring himself to give up, though. Crowley is, in the depths of his black, corroded little heart, an optimist. There must be a way to do something. This can’t truly be the end. Sacrifices will have to be made, and he uses his beloved Bentley to ram through the traffic and get to Tadfield at all costs. Unbeknownst to Crowley, Hastur the demon lord has escaped from his answering machine prison, and he’s going to have to face much bigger problems than London traffic soon. The beloved Bentley, a character in its own right, goes up in flames in Crowley’s haste to reach Tadfield; at this point, the car’s held together through the sheer force of Crowley’s will.

The quarry, headquarters of Adam and his friends, is the calm center of the storm. They sit and wait for the “friends” that Adam claims are coming. Enough is enough for the Them, though. Pepper takes matters into her own hands in order to knock some sense into her friend. They quiz Adam on what part of the world he wants. He deflates under their questions and says all he’s ever wanted was Tadfield. He loves Tadfield with all his heart. Challenged by his friends’ objections, Adam freaks out and for a moment seems to have gone mad with his own power. His friends are horrified and begin to back away, fleeing from him—and it’s like a bucket of cold water suddenly washes over him. His head clears and he’s Adam Young, eleven-year-old boy, once again. He knows now that they have to stop what he’s set into motion.

With his friends by his side again, Adam offers them a thought experiment. There’s another gang in Tadfield and it belongs to Greasy Johnson. They fight occasionally and most of the time (okay, at least a solid half of the time) the Them win. But what if Greasy Johnson and his gang went away? How great would that be? Except, as Pepper points out, it would be boring. They need an adversary. Everyone needs their own Greasy Johnson. With that settled, they get on their bikes. Adam has a plan.

Aziraphale is rather underwhelmed by Madame Tracy’s scooter. It manages to go about 5 mph carrying both her and Shadwell. This is unacceptable unless they plan to reach Tadfield sometime next week. Aziraphale is forced to take matters in hands, and thanks to the judicious application of a little angelic magic, they are soon zooming across England, hovering about five feet off the ground and making much better time.

Speaking of transportation: For once in its life, Newt’s car is proving to be useful. He and Anathema drive to the American military base just outside Tadfield to try to avert nuclear Armageddon. Agnes’ prophecy cards are completely out of order but Newt insists that doesn’t matter anymore: Pick a card, any card, and have your fortune told. Anathema selects one that concerns the army base. They stop and get out. A big tree has fallen across the main entrance road so they try to go in the back way. What’s the worst that could happen? Agnes is pretty sure neither of them get shot by the U.S. military. What’s a little gunfire when the world is ending anyway? It should be fine…

Commentary

Now the seriousness of the end of the world is setting in—not as many laughs in this section. It’s such a fantastic chunk of the book, but you can tell things are starting to narrow to a close, bringing all the key elements together.

Adam finally comes to his senses, thanks to his friends, and realizes that he was on the cusp of making a huge mistake. He also knows it’s not too late; he can still make things right somehow. I love the analogy involving Greasy Johnson. It’s a brilliant way to demonstrate that existence without conflict and competition is boring, and only serves to create a vacuum. Heaven will always need Hell and vice versa. One without the other would just be tedious. Adam now knows there has to be a balance and he’s ready to make it happen. Pepper, Wensleydale, and Brian are really incredible in this chapter, as well. It must be terrifying to stand up to their friend, especially when he’s bringing literal hell down upon the world, but they muster up their strength and common sense and are able to pull him back from the brink. Without them, the world would have been lost.

I love how Aziraphale has so little patience for Shadwell. Madame Tracy adores him (for some reason I’ve never figured out), but Aziraphale is just despairing that he’s stuck with the Witchfinder again. What are the odds? Oh, cruel fates, how could you? Madame Tracy is just wonderful in this section. The séance going wrong is just absolute perfection; I love the woman’s dead husband finally getting the chance to tell her to shut up. Of course Madame Tracy doesn’t find it very funny, though. She may have just lost three good paying clients. She’s livid with Aziraphale. She does the most British thing possible and makes a pot of tea in a rage—and then sets out two cups. I’ve always loved that detail. It’s the little things in this book that truly make it come to life.

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The poor Bentley! I always feel sad when we get to this part of the book. It’s clear that Crowley loves that car so much, and to see it burning and breaking apart is always a little tragic. Crowley knows he has to sacrifice the Bentley to stop the end of the world but it still must hurt quite a bit. It hurts me, at least. Crowley holds the car together with sheer willpower and manages to dumbfound police and spectators alike as he smashes his way through a traffic-clogged highway. You can start to feel the desperation coming off Crowley in this scene, and it always shifts the tone of the narrative for me: The demise of the Bentley shows what Gaiman and Pratchett are willing to destroy as we get closer and closer to the end. For now, it’s just a beloved car. Soon, it will be people.

Speaking of poor souls who don’t make it, the bikers following the Horsemen reach an ignoble end trying to keep up with them. The scene is played for laughs, but I always find it to slightly horrifying and rather sad. Maybe it’s just me. It’s easy to get attached to the bikers quickly because they offer such quality comic relief. Their deaths seem to signal that comedy time is over.

This section also contains the most nightmarish scene in the whole book: Hastur getting loose from the answering machine. My skin crawls just thinking about it. I mean, I know they’re telemarketers, but they don’t deserve to die that way. It’s horrifying on a Cronenbergian level. Neil, which one of you was responsible for this? I need to send whichever one of you it was the bill for my therapy. It takes a lot to freak me out—I read H.P. Lovecraft as bedtime stories—but this section legitimately gave me nightmares when I first read Good Omens.

We are now past the turning point of the story. We have a little way still left to travel, but we are well and truly not in Kansas anymore.

Pun Corner

This section was a little bit more somber but it still contains some excellent puns and jokes—some light in the darkness. Balance is important.

[After Anathema says there’s no time for another roll in the hay] “Why not?” said Newt. He was about to point out that it might not take long, but an inner voice counseled against it.

NEWT. Oh, honey, no. Oh god, poor Anathema…

[Footnote on Aziraphale’s little white lie about the Antichrist, and the road to Hell being paved with good intentions.] This is not actually true. The road to Hell is paved with frozen door-to-door salesmen. On weekends many of the younger demons go ice-skating down it.

This amazing mental image—I love it. Do you think Hell has updated their road to include those scam callers who use your own number to call you? We don’t really have many door-to-door salesmen anymore, but my phone number calls itself more than any other number and I’d like to think divine (infernal?) justice will find the culprits one day.

“It’s like the man said in the history books. A plaque on both your house.”

This was met with silence.

“One of those blue ones,” said Brian, evenly, “saying ‘Adam Young Lived Here,’ or somethin’?”

I love Brian so much, you guys.

Meghan Ball is an avid reader, writer, and lifelong fan of science fiction and fantasy. When she isn’t losing to a video game or playing the guitar badly, she’s writing short fiction and spending way too much time on Twitter. You can find her there @EldritchGirl. She currently lives in a weird part of New Jersey.

“So, you’d want to make Godzilla our pet?”
“No. We would be his.”

The new trailer for Godzilla: King of the Monsters has that excellent exchange, plus the promised look at each of the legendary titans—some who will help save humanity, some who could wipe us out unless Godzilla agrees to protect us as if we were man’s—er, monster’s best friend.

The synopsis from Warner Bros gives some more info about the film, which is the middle installment in a quartet of MonsterVerse films that began with Godzilla and Kong: Skull Island, and will conclude with Godzilla vs. Kong in 2020:

Following the global success of Godzilla and Kong: Skull Island comes the next chapter in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ cinematic MonsterVerse, an epic action adventure that pits Godzilla against some of the most popular monsters in pop culture history. The new story follows the heroic efforts of the crypto-zoological agency Monarch as its members face off against a battery of god-sized monsters, including the mighty Godzilla, who collides with Mothra, Rodan, and his ultimate nemesis, the three-headed King Ghidorah. When these ancient super-species—thought to be mere myths—rise again, they all vie for supremacy, leaving humanity’s very existence hanging in the balance.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters comes to theaters May 31, 2019.

“If you control our sleep, then you can own our dreams… And from there, it’s easy to control our entire lives.”

January is a dying planet—divided between a permanently frozen darkness on one side, and blazing endless sunshine on the other. Humanity clings to life, spread across two archaic cities built in the sliver of habitable dusk.

But life inside the cities is just as dangerous as the uninhabitable wastelands outside.

Sophie, a student and reluctant revolutionary, is supposed to be dead, after being exiled into the night. Saved only by forming an unusual bond with the enigmatic beasts who roam the ice, Sophie vows to stay hidden from the world, hoping she can heal.

But fate has other plans—and Sophie’s ensuing odyssey and the ragtag family she finds will change the entire world.

The City in the Middle of the Night is available February 12 from Tor Books, and Charlie Jane Anders is going on tour! Check out the full list of dates and venues below.

Buy it Now

Saturday, February 9
Writers With Drinks at The Make Out Room
(special early exclusive sold by Borderlands)
San Francisco, CA
6:30 PM

Tuesday, February 12
The Strand
New York, NY
7:00 PM

Wednesday, February 13
Charis Books
Atlanta, GA
Time TBA

Thursday, February 14
Barnes & Noble – Downtown (#2850)
Philadelphia, PA
7:00 PM

Friday, February 15
Brookline Booksmith with S.A. Chakraborty
Boston, MA
7:00 PM

Saturday, February 16
Politics and Prose with Sandra Newman
Washington, DC
1:00 PM

Sunday, February 17
Anderson’s Bookshop
Chicago, IL
2:00 PM

Monday, February 18
Left Bank Books
St. Louis, MO
Time TBA

Tuesday, February 19
Book People
Austin, TX
7:00 PM

Wednesday, February 20
Skylight Books
Los Angeles, CA
7:30 PM

Thursday, February 21
Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore
San Diego, CA
7:30 PM

Friday, February 22
The Elliott Bay Book Company
Seattle, WA
7:00 PM

Saturday, March 2 – Sunday, March 3
Tucson Festival of Books
Tucson, AZ

Saturday, May 4 – Sunday, May 5
Bay Area Book Festival
Berkeley, CA

Sunday, May 12
The Loft’s Wordplay
Minneapolis, MN

The latest installment in the mini-anthology series Short Treks —“The Brightest Star”—is the first of these new stories not to take place on the starship Discovery, but, so far, it’s probably the installment that will be the most satisfying for hardcore fans. Not only do we find out how and why Mr. Saru joined Starfleet, there’s also a huge surprise cameo from a very familiar character at the very end of the episode. But the actions of that person, particularly in relation to Saru’s species, will bring up a very old Trekkie question: was the Prime Directive violated here?

Huge Spoilers for Short Trek’s third episode, “The Brightest Star” follow. Stop reading now if you don’t want to know what happens.

Though the entire story of “The Brightest Star” is set on Saru’s mysterious home planet of Kaminar, the universe outside plays a pivotal role in the episode. It turns out that the Kelpiens are a pre-industrial society incapable of interstellar travel and pretty much enslaved by another, more technology advanced unseen alien race called the Ba’ul who occasionally will beam a few of them up like cattle in a process that the Keplien religion calls “the harvest.” We never see these unseen alien butchers, but the relationship between the two species mimics that of the Morlocks and Eloi from H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, with Kepliens like Saru as the “prey species.” This holds true even in the Mirror Universe episodes, where the Terran Empire was like the Ba’ul here, and kept Kelpiens as livestock.

But Saru doesn’t want to remain livestock—even though he doesn’t really know what happens to his brethren after they are taken. After stealing some technology from his captors (or farmers?) Saru starts texting—presumably via subspace—with an unseen ally. If you remember “Pen Pals” in The Next Generation (the one where Data corresponds with an alien child named Sarjenka) it’s kind of like that, only the audience doesn’t know who Saru is talking to until the very end. After asking for help, a Starfleet shuttle shows up, and out steps Lt. Philippa Georgiou, an officer (but not yet the captain) on the USS Shenzhou. She tells Saru that he can leave with her, but because of “many complicated rules,” he can never return to his home planet. She also mentions that the Kelpiens are a “pre-warp” civilization. In the larger canon of Star Trek, this should mean that Georgiou couldn’t have gone there in the first place, right? Didn’t she totally violate the Prime Directive? Data did in “Pen Pals” and Picard was pissed. Is Georgiou’s captain (whoever that is) also super pissed?

Briefly, the Prime Directive is basically a rule all Starfleet people have in all of Star Trek which prevents them from messing with a lesser-developed culture. In reality, it’s mostly a plot device to create a moral problem for futuristic enlightened humans to feel guilty about stuff they can’t do anything about. Weirdly, Star Trek Into Darkness has the most simple example of a Prime Directive plot: When a volcano threatens to wipe out an entire primitive alien race on a random planet, Kirk decides to save them by using advanced technology. The caveat here is that this is only okay if the natives never see them. Of course, they do, and that film implies that the native aliens now worship the Enterprise as a God. Now, according to real-deal Prime Directive, the Enterprise in Into Darkness shouldn’t have been there in the first place, because messing with the natural development (including weather and volcanos!) of another planet is a huge no-no. And in “Pen Pals,” Data’s correspondence with Sarjenka is similar: he was straight-up violating the Prime Directive because her impending doom was caused by nature, not any outside technological interference.

But it’s different in “The Brightest Star,” because the enslavement of the Kelpiens is not part of the natural development of the planet Kaminar. In fact, we don’t even know for sure if Kaminar is their home planet, it could just be a giant farm planet owned by the Ba’ul, and in their jurisdiction of the galaxy. Who knows, maybe in Ba’ul culture, what they do to the Kelpiens is considered ethical to them, the same way we rationalize free-range chickens.

The point is, Georgiou is presumably aware that Saru’s people are being enslaved by a species with an advanced culture, which we’re led to believe are from a different planet. This makes the situation a little bit more like the original series episode “A Private Little War,” or the film Star Trek: Insurrection. In both stories, there were two factions on a planet, but the technology distribution and basic civil rights were all out of wack. Captains Kirk and Picard (respectively) took up literal arms, personally, to help the less aggressive side of the conflict not get completely screwed.

The big difference in “The Brightest Star,” of course, is that Saru’s people are willing participants of this enslavement. “When my people look up at the stars they see only death, and they welcome it. They do not question it,” Saru says at the beginning of the episode. And this is probably the element that made what Georgiou did a little trickier. Because this is seemingly a choice on the part of the Kelpiens, the situation is similar to The Next Generation episode “Half a Life,” in which Lwaxana Troi falls in love with a man from a species of aliens who commit ritual suicide at fifty-years-old. (It’s like Logan’s Run, only for olds.) In that episode, Picard was appalled that Lwaxana would try to interfere with those customs, but there wasn’t a legal Prime Directive problem, because the ritual suicide aliens totally were part of the Federation and had warp drive.

It’s also not entirely clear if the Prime Directive really exists at this point in Trek history. When I reached out to one of the writers of “The Brightest Star”—Erika Lippoldt—she told me:

“In the writers’ room, we’ve talked about how these events took place at a point in time when the Prime Directive was not so well-defined, or at the very least not as strictly enforced (compared to The Next Generation). Therefore, more leeway was given for Starfleet’s commanding officers to use their discretion as to how they enforce it.”

Lippoldt’s statement is backed-up by canon, too. In “A Private Little War,” which takes place in 2268, Kirk makes reference to having visited the planet when he was way younger, and the people there knew he was from space. Presumably, at the time Georgiou makes contact with Saru, Kirk is probably a cadet. So, the short answer to all of this could simply be: Starfleet was way more loosey-goosey about the Prime Directive in the decades before the original series, which is when this all happens.

Further, Lippoldt asserts that”Georgiou didn’t violate the Prime Directive so much as make an exception to it.” Which means, Lt. Georgiou’s Prime Directive problem in “The Brightest Star” is unique within Star Trek.

In some ways, it might apply because the Kelpiens are seemingly acting of their own free will, and it’s possible this arrangement with the Ba’ul is part of their “natural development.” On the other hand, it’s very clear that this culture is oppressive, promotes intellectual stagnation, and removes free will from the individual, even if the majority wants to keep getting beamed-up and eaten. It’s an interesting thought experiment, and when Georgiou tells Saru “you caused quite a stir,” it’s perhaps the most tantalizing detail in the episode.

So many great Star Trek stories have dealt with debates about the Prime Directive, and it would have been wonderful to hear more from Georgiou on these points. But even in focusing on Saru, “The Brightest Star” took Star Trek’s well-trodden non-interference storyline boldly where its never gone before.

Ryan Britt is an entertainment journalist and longtime contributor to Tor.com. He is the author of Luke Skywalker Can’t Read and Other Geeky Truths and the entertainment editor for Fatherly. He lives in Portland, Maine with his wife and daughter.

The Refrigerator Monologues, Catherynne M. Valente’s brilliant mashup of the intimate confessions of The Vagina Monologues with a scathing commentary on comic books’ tendency to fridge superhero wives/girlfriends/sidekicks, is being adapted for television. Amazon Studios will produce Deadtown, a pilot that will in turn establish what Deadline describes as “an original superhero universe set in the modern era with an underlying theme of female empowerment.” Shauna Cross (Whip It, If I Stay, What to Expect When You’re Expecting) will write the pilot.

The official synopsis for Deadtown:

Five recently-dead women meet in Deadtown, a purgatory where they discover that their entire lives were merely in service to the superhero men they happened to cross paths with, resulting in each of their deaths. Or in comic book terms, they were “refrigerated”—frozen out of the story once they provided emotional backstory for the men. Until now. They start to discover their own powers, tell their sides of the narrative, and decide to write their own damn stories. And a group of seemingly ordinary women discover their own true power. It’s a subversive, kick-ass exploration of what it means for women to find their inner power—and use it.

Putting aside the use of “refrigerated” over “fridged,” this sounds like a world ripe for subversive, triumphant stories in the same tone as Valente’s book. The author excitedly shared the news on Twitter as well:

So…it would seem that the time has come to tell you what I have kept secret for so long.

THE REFRIGERATOR MONOLOGUES IS GONNA BE A TV SERIES ON AMAZON!https://t.co/5oAgElySzO

— Catherynne Valente (@catvalente) December 7, 2018

If you’ve read the book, whose story are you most excited to see adapted? And if you haven’t, check out an excerpt!

In this segment of Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, the Dowager Lady Vorpatril is hosting a dinner party for her son’s in-laws who have just arrived from Earth. It’s been just over six months since this blog last discussed a dinner party. Lady Alys is much better at them than her nephew, but the evening is not without its dangers.

Ivan’s unscheduled morning meeting with Admiral Desplaines and an ImpSec agent has made it clear that Ivan’s personal life has a great many political implications. His in-laws—previously thought to be deceased—are a matter of significant concern to ImpSec. There is some question about whether Ivan should be relieved of duty until the situation is resolved. Ivan deploys his Vor-ish dignity to reject this calumny. It’s not entirely clear to me how ImpSec chooses to follow up. Did they involve themselves in the dinner party through any of the three ImpSec operatives who attended, or did they pursue other avenues of investigation? I suppose they could have done both.

Ivan hopes to speak with Tej before the party. They have a lot to talk about. But this is not to be. Literary romance absolutely requires piss-poor communication between the protagonists. Thus far, Ivan and Tej have exchanged all kinds of stories and reminiscences, and Captain Morozov has given Ivan a lot of assistance in that basic Barrayaran socio-political briefing Cordelia wished she’d had when she arrived. If they keep talking, and keep having sex, Ivan and Tej will have quadruplets by chapter 20. I know, she has a contraceptive implant. She’s had one for years. I don’t write the rules of romance. Somehow, something would have happened. To keep it from happening, something needs to keep Ivan and Tej apart. That something has been transported to a hotel in vehicles Ivan rented after paying bail for nine people.

Ivan and Tej can’t talk in the morning because they’re escorting most of the Arqua family to a hotel. They can’t talk during the day because Ivan is at work. They can’t talk in the evening because they’re going to a dinner party. If I were in their shoes I think I would have texted, but Ivan and Tej don’t have smartphones. I don’t know if comm links can support texting. It’s going to be a while before Ivan and Tej have another meaningful conversation.

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The Arqua family made much of Ivan’s uselessness in the previous chapter. I think Ivan might have come off better if they had let him order takeout rather than going to dinner with Alys, but this works better for the plot.

Despite Alys’s careful preparation and her efforts to keep the conversation pleasant and inoffensive, there are some notable moments of drama in the evening. Moira Arqua (the former haut lady who is Udine’s mother) reminisces about the destruction of Vorkosigan Vashnoi. Her first husband lost a son at Vorkosigan Vashnoi, to friendly fire. But no one presents a genetically engineered bug, or points out that the dessert is bug barf. Alys has borrowed Ma Kosti from Vorkosigan House (Miles and his family are visiting Sergyar) to ensure that dinner is delicious, and in hindsight, the Arquas are making a deliberate effort to keep conversation light and innocuous. They’re just curious refugees, trying their best to understand their new surroundings. What could they possibly be plotting?

They start the evening with an effort to suggest that Grandmother has fond girlhood memories of Ladderbeck Close, the facility where she worked during the Occupation, and wishes to see it again. I assume that the odd, not particularly Barrayaran name is a literary reference of some sort—I have not been able to track it down. In a stunning coincidence, the site of Ladderbeck Close is now occupied by ImpSec HQ. What a crazy random happenstance!

Further efforts to appear guileless and innocent include Sophia Arqua trying to pump Ivan for information about Simon’s finances. Ivan casually declines to comment on his um-stepfather’s income. Sophia is about as subtle as a brick. Ivan fears something is afoot, but Illyan sequesters himself in his study with Shiv and his best brandy after dinner, and Ivan is left alone to entertain the ladies. Well, mostly alone. By is there too. Alys’s seating chart put By in a position that allowed him to hear everything, and absorb very little.

When Ivan and Tej finally do have a chance to talk, Tej doesn’t want to. She knows her family’s scheme to dig for buried treasure. She’s unwilling to tell Ivan about it unless he’s in. Ivan can’t be in a plot unless he knows what it is. Tej can’t tell Ivan the plot unless he’s in. But there IS, definitely, a plot, and Tej is involved in it. Shouldn’t she tell Ivan anyway? Ivan argues that she should, since they are married. Tej feels the question is more complex. Ivan works with classified information all day. He keeps secrets all the time, for what Tej thinks of as “his gang”—the Barrayaran Empire. Tej sees little practical difference between Ivan’s secrets and her own. If anything, the endangered status of House Cordonah makes Arqua family secrets more important. Plus, the Arquas have hostages to protect.

Ivan and Tej REALLY don’t want quadruplets, so the stifling of communication that results from this is probably for the best. But in the moment, the information causes Ivan serious concerns for Simon Illyan’s safety. What if Shiv Arqua is hustling him? He seems to have tried! Illyan mentions elephants to Tej as he says goodnight—she has no idea what he’s talking about, but I do. Men are motivated by many things. Illyan may still have a stable full of elephants, and he may yet yearn for an elephant of his own. For all the talk of his retirement, Illyan is curiously professionally active. At this moment, I’m not at all certain how he feels about that.

Ellen Cheeseman-Meyer teaches history and reads a lot.

I opened this book with trepidation, fearing it would be another misfire in the mode of The Defiant Agents. The cover copy of the edition I have is not encouraging. “…He alone, because of his Indian blood, had the key…”

Ouch. No.

Fortunately, while there are definitely elements of its time—in this case, 1960—the novel itself is a lively and enjoyable adventure. The racial determinism is relatively low-key, and the take on colonialism is surprisingly self-aware. This is no Defiant Agents (thank god). It reminds me much more of the Beast Master books.

Terran Space Service man Kade Whitehawk has screwed up royally in his last posting, but to his shock, he’s given a promotion: He’s assigned to a Mixed Team on the planet Klor. The team runs a trading post on a planet ruled by the alien Styor, whose galactic empire is fading. Kade hates the Styor. Really, really hates them.

Klor has intelligent native life, the Ikkinni. The Styor keep them as slaves and control them with mechanical collars. The Terrans lease some of these from a local lord and treat them as decently as possible, but freeing them is not an option.

Kade comes in as an outsider. His predecessor was of the same ethnicity as Kade, a North American Indian, and he was even of the same tribe, which is a truly remarkable coincidence. He was killed by violence; part of Kade’s job is to find out what happened.

Kade does quite a bit more than that. He finds that his predecessor, Steel, was researching Klorian grasses, and had sent a sample for testing. It comes back just as Kade arrives, as suitable for Terran livestock.

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One of the Styor lords has a thing for exotic animals. He’s imported a bear for his menagerie; Kade helps to deliver the animal. As he does so, he catches on to what Steel was planning.

It’s the same thing Kade is thinking. That the Plains tribes held off white colonizers for years with the help of horses stolen from Spanish invaders or else gone feral from the colonial herds. (The Spanish are the villains here. Northern European and British colonists, not so much. The book is of its time, after all.) This world has no such animals. But if it did, what might the Ikkinni do with them? Might the furred, more or less mammal-like natives fight off the evil reptilian Styor and win their freedom?

Kade gets one sharp check which impressed me, from a biologist who points out that the introduction of a non-native species might be an ecological disaster. This was written in the era of technology-conquers-all, though the environmental movement was just starting to gain traction. Kade, like most people in 1960 (and for that matter all too many of them in 2018), plows on past and imports a stallion and six mares.

Supposedly the horses are meant for the Styor collector, but the situation on the planet heads rapidly downhill. The Trade Post is destroyed by the Styor; Kade just happens to be off base at the time, and a couple of other Terrans manage to take shelter in a bunker and survive.

Kade tries to get to the bunker, but he can’t get near it before the rescue ship has come and gone. He’s exiled in the outback with a hostile native guide and his herd of horses. His attempt to interest the Ikkinni in the horses has failed: they’ve been fed propaganda that depicts the offworld animals as demons come to destroy the natives.

He discovers completely by accident that Terran stunners, under the right conditions, can shatter slave collars and free their wearers. The cost is high; not all Ikkinni survive the process. But the Ikkinni as a culture believe that, to cite a later and different fictional universe, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. It’s better to die than remain enslaved, and if some don’t survive, the freedom of the rest is worth it.

The Ikkinni now have a goal: to get hold of as many stunners as possible. And, gradually, they come to see the value of the horse. Its speed and its ability to carry weight can change their world as it did that of the North American Indians.

Kade walks a narrow and precarious line with his sometime allies and sometime enemies, while also trying to figure out what happened to the Post and how to let his people know he’s still alive. He’s the catalyst for a slave rebellion that could make life very uncomfortable on this planet. Norton handwaves the larger consequences: This is a fringe world, the empire has bigger problems, there’s unlikely to be a massive wave of enforcers from offworld. The Ikkinni just might win.

He’s not supposed to be doing any of this, as far as he knows. In fact he expects his next posting to be a labor camp.

But when he finally reconnects with the Service, he discovers that he’s been an unwitting agent of a long term Terran plan to destabilize the Styor empire. This, like his previous posting, is a job interview. Instead of being a screw-up with his open antipathy toward the Styor and his ongoing sabotage of Styor rule, he’s just the kind of man the Service wants.

That’s a happy ending for Kade. The Ikkinni have a chance at freedom, and eventually (very much so considering the equine birthrate of one foal per mare per year, though the Service indicates that it intends to send more horses to Klor) driving the Styor off the planet. Which suits the Terrans perfectly. They’re playing a long game, with the goal of bringing down the evil slavelords.

There is a fair amount of “racial memory” in play here, but it’s mitigated by Kade’s knowledge of history and his solidly practical approach. He is a kind of “brown savior,” but it’s clear the Ikkinni have their own ways of dealing with what he has to offer. They’ll take it and run with it, and they won’t let themselves be trapped into slavery again.

The ecological question could become a major issue as the horse population increases, but in Kade’s calculus, whatever frees the Ikkinni and gets rid of the Styor has to be worth it. Norton doesn’t take that as far as she might, but she has other priorities and an inflexible word count.

Of course I have to talk about the horses. You knew that, right?

I had never pegged Norton as a horse person. The vast majority of her books either slide past the riding animals or give them a minimal role in the narrative. Here they’re crucial to the plot, and Kade spends a great deal of time having adventures with them.

They’re done surprisingly well. I don’t think she ever did any long-distance riding (or much if any riding at all) or she would have mentioned certain details about what happens when a person hasn’t ridden in a while; and she doesn’t make enough of the difficulty of teaching an adult non-rider to ride. She makes the classic mistake of having her rider “knee” the horse to make it go (it’s the lower leg that does it).

And yet, in other ways, she clearly did her homework. She selects a good equine type for this alien environment, the small, hardy horse of the East Asian steppes from Kazakhstan to Mongolia. It’s not the more gracile and aesthetic animal of the American Plains, but it can survive under difficult conditions, and it’s smart and tough and can, when it needs to, think for itself.

She knows (as many didn’t in 1960 and many don’t even now) that the lead mare is in charge of the herd and the stallion is its defense force. She gives both horses personalities and responsibilities, and shows how Kade respects their decisions when the situation gets complicated.

The rest of the mares are basically extensions of the leader, but that’s all right. The story doesn’t need any more than that. It’s a good example of a non-horse person writing a horse-centered story well enough to make it work.

This is a pretty good adventure overall, with a character who, if not tremendously engaging, is decently enough drawn to get the job done. The political and social setup took quite a bit of thought, and the Ikkinni are just enough different from Kade’s culture and mores to offer both friction and contrast. It’s a far better book than I expected. I actually enjoyed it, and would read it again.

I’m off to Eye of the Monster next, forewarned that it might not be quite as comfortable a read as The Sioux Spaceman. I’m prepared. We’ll see what happens.

Judith Tarr’s first novel, The Isle of Glass, appeared in 1985. Her most recent novel, Dragons in the Earth, a contemporary fantasy set in Arizona, was published by Book View Cafe. In between, she’s written historicals and historical fantasies and epic fantasies and space operas, some of which have been published as ebooks from Book View Café. She has won the Crawford Award, and been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and the Locus Award. She lives in Arizona with an assortment of cats, a blue-eyed dog, and a herd of Lipizzan horses.

The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part won’t hit theaters until February, when we’re deep into winter’s bitter chill, but here’s a cute little short to tide you over and help you go into the holidays with peace and goodwill. “Emmet’s Holiday Party” has everyone’s favorite normal special guy bringing cheer to Apocalypseburg despite Wyldstyle’s brooding about the impending Duplo threat. That cheer includes a tree dressed by Wonder Woman’s lasso, Green Lantern’s lights, Unikitty’s rainbow puke, and Batman in an ugly Christmas sweater.

Honestly, we would watch an entire LEGO Movie holiday special.

Grab a cup o’nog from Alfred and enjoy this charming short:

The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part comes to theaters February 8, 2019.

Welcome to Week Twenty of my read of The Great Hunt. This post means that the installment for The Great Hunt is now as long as the one for The Eye of the World was, and we still have a lot left to cover! Somehow I get the feeling this is a trend that will only continue as the Read does.

There is a lot of really interesting world building in Chapters 36 and 37; we learn a little more about the Ogier and about the Machin Shin, and through Rand’s experience of the other worlds, we get to see a view of this one that neither he nor we have quite had yet. We also learn some more about what happens to a man who can channel, and that there are other effects besides just losing their mind. And it’s not pretty.

Everyone follows Juin through the Ogier town towards the biggest of the mounded homes, at the base of a Great Tree. Rand notices Loial’s increasing discomfort as they walk, and eventually suggests that Loial wait outside, Mat chiming in as Rand assures Juin that the Elders surely only want to talk to the humans. Loial nervously agrees and sits down beside the steps, hiding his face in a book.

Inside, they find the Ogier Elders sitting in a half circle on a dais, Verin in a chair facing them. Four women and three men, aged, white-haired, and dignified.

Hurin gaped at them openly, and Rand felt like staring himself. Not even Verin had the appearance of wisdom that was in the Elders’ huge eyes, nor Morgase in her crown their authority, nor Moiraine their calm serenity. Ingtar was the first to bow, as formally as Rand had ever seen from him, while the others still stood rooted.

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The Eldest Ogier, seated in the center, introduces herself as Alar, and she tells them that Verin has explained their need. But they have not allowed anyone to travel the Ways in over one hundred years, and she wants to makes sure that they understand how traveling the Ways risks not only death and madness, but perhaps their very souls as well. Despite some of the humans’ protests that they understand the danger, she commands that another Ogier be brought before them.

The Ogier, Trayal, seems completely vacant. His eyes stare at nothing, his face holds no expression, and he responds slowly to being prodded into walking or to being stopped. Alar explains that Trayal was the last of their stedding to travel the Ways, and when she asks Verin to touch him, Verin is shocked to find that the Ogier is “empty.” Although Trayal’s body is alive, there is nothing at all inside.

“Nothing,” one of the Elders to Alar’s right said softly. Her eyes seemed to hold all the pain Trayal’s no longer could. “No mind. No soul. Nothing of Trayal remains but his body.”

“He was a fine Treesinger,” one of the men sighed.

Alar motioned, and the two women turned Trayal to lead him out; they had to move him before he began to walk.

Verin repeats to Alar and the other Elders that, despite the risks, they must follow the Horn of Valere, and Alar agrees to take them to the Waygate, although she remarks that she isn’t sure what is worse: that the Darkfriends have the Horn or that it was found at all. She asks about Loial, then, and Rand is quick to tell her that they need him to go with them, and that Loial wants to. Perrin chimes in that Loial is a friend, and Mat that Loial carries his own weight in the party. Even Ingtar asks if there is some reason Loial can’t come with them. And Verin points out that they need someone who can decipher the Guidings.

But Alar is more interested in Rand. She asks if Rand has drawn Loial into ta’maral’ailen, the Web the Pattern weaves around Rand because he is ta’veren. Rand doesn’t really answer, saying only that he just wants to find the Horn, and that Loial is his friend. Alar remarks that Loial is young by Ogier standards, that Rand is young too but ta’veren, and she commands that Rand look after Loial, and bring him home safely to Stedding Shangtai “when the weaving is done.” Rand says that he will, and it feels like swearing an oath.

She leads them to the Waygate, Ingtar sending Uno to fetch the other Shienarans as Loial falls in at the rear of the party, anxiously asking Rand if Alar said anything about him. Mat and Perrin reassure him, and when Rand asks about a flower Loial is holding, the Ogier admits that it was given to him by Erith. He quickly dismisses the matter after Rand worries that this means Loial doesn’t want to come after all, but he is also careful to preserve the blossom inside one of his books. As they walk, Mat and Perrin tease Loial and each other, the banter reminding Rand of being home.

They pass Ogier working in the trees and are joined by the rest of Ingtar’s party, and Rand doesn’t even feel that they’ve left the stedding until he realizes that they have reached the Waygate. Since there can be no channeling inside a stedding, he knows they must now be outside its bounds… and then he realizes that he no longer has that sense of something missing. Saidin is back.

There is a low stone wall around the Waygate, built, Alar says, to warn people away from the Waygate. She stays away from it, and Juin further still, but tells the others they may pass. The soldiers grip their swords and everyone takes a deep breath, as Verin proceeds to pull the Avendesora leaf from its place. But as the doors start to open, Rand can see that instead of the silvery effect of the Waygate entrance they should be seeing, the space between the doors shows only blackness.

He shouts for Verin to close it, that it’s the Black Wind, and she replaces the leaf quickly.

Alar let out a shuddering breath. “Machin Shin. So close.”

“It didn’t try to come out,” Rand said. Juin made a strangled sound. “I have told you,” Verin said, “the Black Wind is a creature of the Ways. It cannot leave them.” She sounded calm, but she still wiped her hands on her skirt.

Rand wants to argue but figures it is pointless, while Verin gives him a look as she muses over the fact that Machin Shin would be at both Waygates they have tried. Rand feels like she is suggesting that the Black Wind is following him. But in any case, as Alar points out, the Ways are no longer passable, and the party cannot use them.

But the need to go to Toman Head has not lessened, and the group, over Ingtar’s complaints at the time wasted, begins to brainstorm different ways to get there. They could try yet another stedding, but Verin is certain Machin Shin will be waiting there as well. Then Hurin remarks that what they really need is a Portal Stone, given how much more quickly they were able to cross the land there than in this world. Verin points out that they have no idea where to find a Portal Stone, unless Rand or Hurin or Loial can find the one in Kinslayer’s Dagger—Rand reluctantly says that he can, but Alar interrupts to say that, while she did not know that anyone was still able to use the Portal Stones, there is one nearby.

“The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills,” Verin observes, “and the Pattern provides what is needful.” She instructs Alar to take them there at once, as they have already lost too much time.

Everyone in the party seems more eager and relieved to be trying the Portal Stone instead of the Ways, even Hurin. Only Rand is hesitant, knowing that Verin almost certainly expects him to be the one who uses the Stone.

Alar takes them to the Stone, explaining that they turned it upright when they found it toppled over but did not move it—it was as though the Stone resisted being moved. To the Ogier it is like a monument to what was lost, and the knowledge that was forgotten. But Verin hopes that it will be more than that. She thanks Alar and says that they won’t keep her any longer, and Alar observes that although most of the events of the outside world—the False Dragons, the Hunt for the Horn—have passed the Ogier by, she does not think that this will be so with Tarmon Gai’don.

Alar leaves, and Ingtar falls into his usual refrain of questioning the path Verin is choosing, whether the Horn really is at Toman Head, and if he couldn’t still make Barthanes tell them the truth. Verin reminds him that he swore that he would ride to Shayol Ghul itself to find the Horn, and asks if he will balk at this, which puts Ingtar’s back up.

Verin, under the pretense of wanting to ask Rand about his recent experience being transported by a Portal Stone, asks him to come aside and look at it with her. Rand is relieved for a moment, thinking that Verin intends to use it herself, but she tells him that she would be killed before she ever came close to channeling enough of power to work the Stone. But she has enough knowledge from studying books in the White Tower to help him a little.

Rand replies that he doesn’t know anything except for the symbol Selene showed him for their world, which he doesn’t even see on this stone. Verin retorts that naturally it wouldn’t be there; the symbols aid in getting to a world. She remarks that she’d love to talk to Selene, or even better, get a copy of her book, given that no such tombs were believed to have survived the Breaking.

Verin explains that the symbols on the stones indicate the different worlds and the different stones within those worlds, and points out one particular symbol, two parallel wavy lines crossed by an odd squiggle, that she knows is the Portal Stone on Toman Head because she once visited it. She asks Rand if he ever plays dice.

With one finger she outlined a rectangle containing eight carvings that were much alike, a circle and an arrow, but in half the arrow was contained inside the circle, while in the others the point pierced the circle through. The arrows pointed left, right, up and down, and surrounding each circle was a different line of what Rand was sure was script, though in no language he knew, all curving lines that suddenly became jagged hooks, then flowed on again.

“At least,” Verin went on, “I know this much about them. Each stands for a world, the study of which led eventually to the making of the Ways. These are not all of the worlds studied, but the only ones for which I know the symbols. This is where gambling comes in. I don’t know what any of these worlds is like. It is believed there are worlds where a year is only a day here, and others where a day is a year here. There are supposed to be worlds where the very air would kill us at a breath, and worlds that barely have enough reality to hold together. I would not speculate on what might happen if we found ourselves in one of those. You must choose. As my father would have said, it’s time to roll the dice.”

Rand points out that he could kill everyone, and when Verin asks if he’s unwilling to take that risk for the sake of Mat and of the Horn, he counters asking why Verin is willing to take it. He tells her about how he can’t always touch saidin when he wants to, and even if he accomplishes it, what good would it do the Horn or Mat if he took them somewhere they couldn’t breathe. Verin tells him that he is the Dragon Reborn and that she doesn’t believe that the Pattern will let him die before it is done with him, and when Rand repeats that he won’t be a false Dragon, and Verin only answers that he is what he is, and gives Rand the choice of picking a symbol or letting Mat die.

Rand heard his teeth grinding and forced himself to unclench his jaw. The symbols could all have been exactly alike, for all they meant to him. The script could as well have been a chicken’s scratchings. At last he settled on one, with an arrow pointing left because it pointed toward Toman Head, an arrow that pierced the circle because it had broken free, as he wanted to. He wanted to laugh. Such small things on which to gamble all their lives.

Verin instructs everyone to gather close, and Rand summons the Void. The One Power comes when he calls, and he directs it to him to the symbol. He hears Verin say that something is happening, and the world flickers.

Rand finds himself in the farmhouse with Tam as the Trollocs burst through the door. They take Tam down, and as Rand leaps to help his father, a sword stabs through his chest. He hears a voice whispering inside his head: I have won again, Lews Therin.

The world flickers, and he hears Verin finish saying that something is wrong.

Rand marries Egwene, and they have children together, and Tam has grandchildren to play with before he dies. Rand suffers from dark moods and the sense that there should be something more to his life, as news of False Dragons and war comes to the Two Rivers, the news of Artur Hawkwing’s armies returning and destroying the White Tower and the Aes Sedai. Egwene becomes Wisdom, and her cures work amazingly on everyone but Rand, who suffers from sickness and whose darkest moods often coincide with terrible lightning storms, or wildfires. People whisper that Rand is crazy and dangerous. When Egwene dies his sickness gets worse, and his body begins to literally rot away.

Then news comes that Trollocs and Fades and other monsters have come out of the Blight, destroying the conquering armies. Rand goes to war alongside the men and many of the women of the Two Rivers, and dies by a Trolloc’s sword as a voice whispers: I have won again, Lews Therin.

The world flickers again, Verin’s voice continuing to say that something is not right, and then flickers back into another world. This time Egwene dies, and Rand leaves the Two Rivers, carrying a heron-marked sword from Tam. He wanders, eventually becoming employed amongst the Queen’s guard in Caemlyn, where he finds himself often staring at Elayne and feeling as though this isn’t the way things were meant to be. The rumors that he is mad aren’t enough to drive him out of the Queen’s employ, or even the wasting sickness that comes with it, because of the return of Hawkwing’s armies. Rand leads a company to fight them, all the way to the Mountains of Mist, only to be pushed back and back to Caemlyn. When Elayne, now Queen, refuses to leave Caemlyn, Rand cannot leave her. He uses the Power during the battle, but it is not enough, and when he dies he hears that voice: I have won again, Lews Therin.

The world flickers again, Rand struggling to hold on to the power, to the symbol, as Verin screams that something is wrong. The pattern continues, the world flickering into a hundred different lives, more, in which he lives and dies, is consumed by his power, claims to be the Dragon reborn, and countless other identities. And each time he dies and hears that voice in his head.

Then the contact with saidin suddenly vanishes and Rand falls to the ground, numb and only vaguely aware that there is stone under his cheek. He sees Verin struggling to get up, hears Uno throwing up. Everyone is down, their faces full of shock and pain and fear, and the horses are stiff-legged and trembling. Rand shakily asks what happened.

“A surge of the One Power.” The Aes Sedai tottered to her feet and pulled her cloak tight with a shiver. “It was as if we were being forced… pushed… It seemed to come out of nowhere. You must learn to control it. You must! That much of the Power could burn you to a cinder.”

“Verin, I… I lived… I was…” He realized the stone under him was rounded. The Portal Stone. Hastily, shakily, he pushed himself to his feet. “Verin, I lived and died, I don’t know how many times. Every time it was different, but it was me. It was me.”

“The Lines that join the Worlds That Might Be, laid by those who knew the Numbers of Chaos.” Verin shuddered; she seemed to be talking to herself. “I’ve never heard it, but there is no reason we would not be born in those worlds, yet the lives we lived would be different lives. Of course. Different lives for the different ways things might have happened.”

“Is that what happened? I… we… saw how our lives could have been?” I have won again, Lews Therin. No! I am Rand al’Thor!

Verin points out that the important thing is that they have arrived, but judging by the foliage it is now late autumn, and they have lost time in traveling rather than gaining it. She tells Rand that he must let her guide him; even if she cannot teach him, she can perhaps prevent him from overreaching. Then she goes to Ingtar, who starts up, insisting that he walks in the Light, and that he will find the Horn and pull down Shayol Ghul’s power. Verin soothes him and uses her Power on him, returning Ingtar to himself, although the memory of what happens still shadows his eyes. Verin makes the rounds, while Rand goes to Mat and then to Perrin. Panicked, Mat asks Rand if he knows that Mat would never betray him, while Perrin seems to have almost tried to claw out his own yellow eyes, leaving the red marks of his nails on his cheeks and forehead.

Rand explains to them that they have made it to Toman Head in their own world, and assures Mat that Fain and the dagger are still here, though he fears that Fain might have grown tired of waiting and gone to Emond’s Field or to hurt Egwene.

Verin comes to do her healing on Mat and Perrin as she informs everyone that it is time to get moving. She tries to put her hands on Rand but he refuses to let her, and insists that he doesn’t want any Aes Sedai’s help. They all mount up, and ride away from the Portal Stone, Rand desperately hoping that he is right, and Fain is somewhere ahead, waiting for him.

Like Rand, I’ve really enjoyed the little bits of camaraderie and banter between the boys and Loial; it was one of the things I was hoping to see when they all ended up traveling together. There are lots of little bits of character work in these exchanges that you can’t get when characters are facing big events and dire circumstances, like the way Mat can’t see past his own opinions to look at Erith through an Ogier’s eyes, or the way Perrin continually connects with Rand, knowing that they both have a dark secret that they fear. It was also interesting to see how Loial is viewed by his own people; the reader is used to thinking of him as young and brash for an Ogier, since he never hesitates to describe himself that way, but this is the first time I’ve considered him as young and vulnerable. Alar’s concern for him as a much older matriarchal figure had me considering Loial’s adventures in a new light—in early chapters, and especially in The Eye of the World, Loial seemed to be looking after and guiding Rand, due to his extensive knowledge and great size, but now the reader is reminded that he needs looking after, too. I am glad Rand takes that charge seriously. Also, his reaction to getting the flower from Erith was seriously adorable. As a guy who also really likes getting flowers, I definitely approve.

What happened to Trayal reminds me again how in the world of The Wheel of Time, souls are a concrete thing that are generally understood to be real in a more physically evident way than we can see in our own; even if what Verin sensed—or rather, didn’t sense—in Trayal was better labeled as consciousness or something like that, the existence of reincarnation proves the existence of a soul. And that makes Machin Shin even more frightening; as horrible as the kind of death the Black Wind’s voices promise sounds, the prospect of having one’s soul destroyed, no promise of either reincarnation or afterlife with the Creator, is even worse. It speaks to the courage of every person who stood before the Elders that they were still willing to take such a chance. And what would happen if Rand was caught by the Black Wind and his soul destroyed like that? Perhaps it wouldn’t matter, since the Dark One is planning to end the Dragon’s reincarnation cycle anyway, but Rand losing his soul and having there never be another Dragon seems even worse than the Dragon Reborn dying prematurely.

I was surprised that the return of his connection to saidin was so subtle that Rand didn’t even notice it at first. I wonder if it would always feel that way, or if in time he’ll be so aware of it that its presence or absence would be more in the front of his mind. I suppose visiting a stedding was probably good for him—for a short time, he wasn’t subjected to the taint, and its decay was paused. Also I found those two sentences (“Saidin was there. Waiting”) particularly chilling.

It was only on my second read through that I realized that Verin’s implicit suggestion that the Black Wind was following Rand could be true. My initial assumption was that Fain knew which Waygate was closest to the one at Barthanes’s and just had the two blocked off. He wants Rand to follow him, but he also wants to make sure he’s ready and prepared… he needs time for that, and he can’t crawl into Turak’s ear like the little Wormtongue he is with Rand and Ingtar right on his heels. I wonder if Fain has bothered to consider, or is even aware of, Mat’s need for the dagger. Probably not, and Mat’s predicament lends an urgency to Rand’s mission that Fain might not have counted on. Perhaps he expected that if Rand could not catch him, he would just ride to Toman Head the normal way, frustrated and worried, but not quite so desperate. Anyway, though obviously Verin knows more than I do, it seems impossible that Machin Shin would be able to track Rand while he’s in the outside world. The Ways are basically their own world, and have no connection to Randland other than the Waygates.

I knew Rand and company were in trouble as soon as I read the title of Chapter 37, and what Rand and everyone experienced through the Portal Stone appears to be exactly that “what might be.” I found this section incredibly useful from a world-building standpoint, we got to see some of the Seanchan’s intended end-game, as well as what it would be like for Rand to have refused to leave Emond’s Field. In addition to the unchecked wave of Shadowspawn that eventually overruns everything, proving (to me anyway, though maybe not yet to him) that Rand is the key to stopping the Dark One, we get to see what Rand’s future might look like unless by some miracle the taint can be removed or controlled. I found it very interesting that Rand’s descent into madness didn’t look much like Fain’s, or even Lews Therin’s. I wonder if this means that Rand has a lot of discipline and self-control that helps his insanity stay a little more in its own lane, so to speak, or if there’s another reason for the wasting nature of it. Speaking of wasting, I had no idea that the taint came with such horrible physical symptoms as well. It makes sense though, since the taint is a corruption over the force that creates the world (half of it anyway), that decay would occur in the part of the world that it touches. And while I haven’t had many thoughts about the up-coming TV show (mostly because I don’t feel like I know the world well enough yet) I kept imagining how effective the montage of these scenes would be.

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In some ways, this also reminds me of Nynaeve’s trials through the s’angreal. Rand is seeing the worlds of if, and in many ways that was what Nynaeve was being shown too. I suspect both of them might find that some of their experiences, some of the bits of information, are useful moving forward. Perhaps Rand will remember something he learned about the Seanchan, or about the Shadowspawn, that will help him win a victory in a decisive moment. Maybe he will remember something of his own heart, and make choices that bring him back to Egwene, or that help him figure out how to manage the madness of the taint.

But even more interesting is the question of what everyone else saw themselves do in their other lives. Lots of people seem to be feeling guilty, Mat, Ingtar… even Verin was surprised by some choices she made in another reality. Speaking of Ingtar, he is just getting more and more squirrely and out of control. I wonder if my assessment of him as a Darkfriend wasn’t a little off the mark, but close. Like maybe he was the one who let the Darkfriends into Fal Dara, but then regretted it after, and all of this has been an attempt to make it right. He says he “has to” find the Horn because it is his attempt to redeem himself and walk in the Light again. Certainly he must have been a Darkfriend in one of those other realities, given his passionate insistence that he walks in the Light.

Verin said that a surge of Power pushed them. It’s possible that Rand dragged them through all those realities because he didn’t know what he was doing, but it is also possible that Ba’alzamon had a hand in what happened. I keep wondering if the heron he branded into Rand’s palm might connect them in some way, allowing Ba’alzamon to reach out and affect Rand or steer his use of the Power. Maybe he was trying to frighten Rand and break his spirit by showing him so many realities in which the Darkness won. And I am still musing on his choice to refer to Rand as Lews Therin—I have to figure at this point that it’s just because it irks Rand so much to have the identity of the Dragon he knows most of, and who is the most hated. But perhaps Ba’alzamon, too, has a special fondness or hatred for Lews Therin Telamon, since it was through his actions and the resulting counter-strike that the rules of the game were altered quite a bit.

Can I just say, my first thought when Rand was looking for the symbol Selene showed him is that the Portal Stone is a little like the DHD in Stargate, which gave me a chuckle. I wonder if Selene really has the book Verin’s so interested in at all; more likely she just knows how the Portal Stones work because she was alive before the Breaking, during which plenty of people knew how to use them. You know, because she’s Lanfear. And why does the Portal Stone take you to worlds where humans can’t survive? I suppose in the Age of powerful channelers they may have had workarounds for that, either driven by the One Power or perhaps technological, because otherwise there would be no point. I tend to forget technology when I’m reading these books, and it’s good to remind myself that there were Ages of great technology as well as those of great “magic,” as it were.

The one thing that Verin hasn’t acknowledged, however, is that although they haven’t gained time in the grand scheme of things, the use of the Portal Stone has gained time for Mat. If they had ridden to Fal Dara, time would have passed for them, whereas in this case, it appears that it hasn’t, which means Mat still has his few weeks despite the fact that it’s late autumn now. That’s not as good as getting to the Horn three months ago, but its a dang sight better than Mat being dead. I also appreciated how understanding Rand was in not holding Mat’s accidental confession of betrayal against him, even privately. Rand knows what he did in some of those other worlds, but it’s also pretty enlightened for him to understand that the Mat of another reality is not this Mat. I have trouble with those concepts and I’ve read a lot more science fiction than Rand has.

Also, if anyone is going to have themselves tested exactly as they were in one of the Portal Stone realities they saw, it’s Mat. Let’s hope he learned something today!

Next week we go back to join the girls for a while, and we get to see more of how life is going in the White Tower for Egwene, Nynaeve, Elayne, and Min, and then we get Chapter 39, the title of which does not foretell what I thought it would, and our heroines trust Liandrin way too easily. But they don’t have the knowledge that I do, so I tried not to grind my teeth too much!

Sylas K Barrett would definitely like to spend some time in a stedding. They probably don’t get wifi there, though.