Category: General Blog

The Unraveling: Every Gender Is a Jail

Post author By lnlupa
Post date May 20, 2025
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Oh, yeah, the two genders. Obviously.

There are a lot of valid critiques of Western gender norms and the ideologies which venerate binarism and “traditional” sex roles. Many have taken to science fiction to air these critiques in various formats and frames. What Benjamin Rosenbaum asks with his book The Unraveling, is what if you had all that gender critique and a bag of cyberpunk/body-modding/deep future craziness chips?

I read this book in preparation for the 2025 NarraScope conference, where the author will be speaking on his work in ChoiceScript development. Sidebar: if you’re interested in the topics this blog discusses, why not NarraScope? I consider it the premiere North American game design conference for people who aren’t absolute buffoons of capital 🙂 You can even attend via Discord without leaving the comfort of home.

Okay, so The Unraveling is about a youth named Fift Brulio Iraxis who lives on a planet far from Earth many centuries in the future. Fift and everyone else on this planet possesses multiple bodies all inhabited at once. Strict norms about conduct and gender roles rule Fift’s society, and Fift’s own ability to conform to zir gender of Staid is in question. This is risky not only for Fift but also for zir’s sprawling cohort of parents. Everyone lives under constant peer-to-peer surveillance through an internet connection embedded in all their heads.

Like all effective utopian/dystopian literature, The Unraveling uses its exaggerated setting to confront the troubles of our world. The genders of Fift’s world, Staid and Vail, have no relation with genitals or reproductive role, both of which are completely malleable thanks to tremendously advanced body modding technology. Instead, these two genders oppose each other along a binary of emotional expression: the Staids are meant to be constantly serious, scholarly, and rational, while the Vails are assumed to be perpetually rash, lively, and libidinous. If these sound like arbitrary divisions that no one could possibly live up to every minute of every day, congratulations: you are soooo close to a big realization about gender in general. The Unraveling succeeds in thoroughly defamiliarizing the reader with the ideas it deconstructs without having to constantly double-back to reference real world Western gender norms. It makes no sense to divide the world between Staids and Vails, and I, a reader who had no meaning to assign to the words “Staid” and “Vail” until beginning to read this book, can easily see how silly this division is. And with that lingering thought in my head, I might wonder if it really makes that much sense to fervently divide the world into “men” and “women”, when those categories becomes incoherent under even cursory inspection.

This clarity of intention does not make The Unraveling necessarily an easy read. Rosenbaum unloads a truckload of new future terms to describe Fift’s society and all it contains. The protagonist’s multiple bodies force the interweaving of two or three different conversations, locations, and streams of thought during many pivotal scenes. This painstaking engagement with the minutiae of unusual consciousnesses and impossible technology reminded me sharply of Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep (a high compliment since that book also rocks).

Not only can Fift’s POV shift between three different bodies, but ze can also look in on any other citizen using the distributed surveillance technology which has ossified their society into stultifying dullness. Though the world of The Unraveling is free of many of the miseries we face today (war, disease, premature death, etc.), Rosenbaum is wise enough to see that any seeming utopia will have citizens who find themselves unsatisfied with the structures that keep the peace. Rule through consensus maintains a large core group of somewhat-satisfied, somewhat-bored people who spend all their time chasing approval from viewers in order to achieve a modicum of success, and that leaves people who fail to conform on the margins of society, viewed only pruriently and disapprovingly. And while the misfits of Rosenbaum’s world are not starving, like they often are in ours, they’re also not free to live full lives. Lampooning the practices of a society dependent on surveillance and consensus ratings from peers without slipping into the goofy anti-cancel-culture dingusery of contemporary right-wing SF isn’t easy, but Rosenbaum succeeds because of his expansive compassion for all the characters.

At the heart of The Unraveling is the romantic friendship of Fift and zir classmate, a Vail-gendered person named Shria. Young people in the world of The Unraveling are expected to mix only with those of their same gender and never with others, and as Fift and Shria grow closer, they push the limits of what their society will allow. Because they happen to live in a time of growing discontent, their taboo-breaking catapults them into celebrity/symbol status. I will admit I didn’t always find the Fift/Shria relationship compelling, but I also think Rosenbaum knew some readers might feel this way because he tweaks the skeptics near the book’s end with the inclusion of humorous in-universe shipping discourse. More than anything else, the connection between Fift and Shria is an engine to fuel questions about why the world they inhabit is so rigid and whether that rigidity truly benefits anyone.

I think I was also perhaps unsatisfied with the emotional depth of Fift and Shria’s relationship because Rosenbaum draws some of Fift’s other relationships with such poignancy. Fift’s relationships with zir numerous parents moved me profoundly. Each parent loves and care for Fift in their own way, and yet is deeply imperfect and wounded by the pressures of their intrusive and controlling society. In each of Fift’s parents I saw some failings of my own family members and myself, and in the text’s affirmation of their sincere love I was reminded of the constant tension between our love for others and our infinite capacity to fail them. Though society at large castigates Fift and zir family, and zir parents castigate themselves for raising such an abnormal child, Fift’s slow-growing bravery and conviction testifies to the best of zir parents’ efforts in raising zir.

I read some reviews of this book which complained about the ending: its abruptness and lack of resolution. But this is a key part of the viewpoint Rosenbaum advances. Fift was never going to be able to change the belief systems of a whole world, not with Shria’s help or anyone else’s. Ze was only one small part of a big wave of change and confusion, a societal Unraveling. The book leaves Fift as a young adult, with zir own life and future. It is not the future zir parents planned for zir, nor is it the future society insisted ze desire. It isn’t perfect. But it has its own unique satisfactions because Fift chose it. This is a good way to look at one’s own gender expression–it may not be what people are expecting or what they believe is right, but if you chose it and created it and feel comfortable in it, then it’s right for you. Fift doesn’t lead a gender revolution that changes the whole of zir society. But ze creates a small space for zirself and zir friends to thrive, and ze does so not by inventing new different additional colors of straitjacket for everyone to wear, but by genuinely enforcing the rule of “wear what you want”. In time, the space Fift built might grow to encompass the world, as the Ages pass.

Tags Literature, Review, Science Fiction

Book Review General Blog

SFF Novellas: I’m Reading Them

Post author By lnlupa
Post date May 13, 2025
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Every time I go to the library I'm creating a Doctor Syntax-level event.

Because there are many SFF novellas at the library.

Artificial Condition by Martha Wells

Par for the course for me, I pulled down a random Murderbot book from the library shelf and started reading the series there. My goal was to prepare myself for the upcoming AppleTV+ series. You might ask “Why not read the first book in the series then?” and to that I must answer :P.

In this entry, Murderbot’s investigation into its missing memories is interrupted by a contract to protect a group of naive and bumbling scientists. Murderbot grumpily saves them with the help of a rather sassy research ship.

I declare Artificial Condition solid. I needed a bit of a push to get through the first few chapters because I was not quite following the plot. Say, maybe one should start a series at the beginning? No, it’s the kids who are wrong. As the plot picked up and Murderbot’s motivations became clearer, the novella drew me in and I came around. In a concise less-than-200 pages, Murderbot saved a group of scientists and advanced its investigation into its background.

It was fun. It was fine. It was Not That Deep. I don’t think Murderbot is the Second Coming (First Coming?) of neurodivergent representation in literature. Murderbot is no more or less like a neurodivergent person than Count Pierre Bezhukov or Dorothea Brooke. If you feel like Murderbot, then I’m glad Murderbot is there for you. I don’t really feel like Murderbot, even though there’s something deeply abnormal about my cognition. I thank Martha Wells for producing another entertaining entry in the canon of “Weird Robot Adventures”. If in the future I want to be comfortably entertained for an afternoon, I’ll consider Murderbot among my first-tier opportunities.

The Truth of the Aleke by Moses Ose Utomi

I also started the Forever Desert novella series with the second entry. Teehee. I am evil.

This story was a successful standalone, though it contained many references to the prior novella, which in my defense is a book that I had never heard of. (We need to go back to having numbers on the spines of books that are parts of series.) I learned of The Truth of the Aleke through the widespread disappointment that it wasn’t nominated for the Hugos this year, and having finished it I’m also surprised. While the prose style of the story is simple and direct, it engages with complex and troubling themes that benefit from being couched in a such humble package.

In The Truth of the Aleke, an idealistic and naive young man named Osi discovers that the cause to which he’s devoted his life is mere cover for oppression and extractive violence. Then, and this is critical, he discovers even more than that. In a time where we (including myself) are enamored of surface-level societal critique that warms the liberal-left cockles of our disappointed hearts, I commend Utomi for drilling not just down into the substrate of violence, but out the other side, to confront the nasty and intractable truth that the victim-victimizer dichotomy is less of a profound moral order and more of a vise in which many people are squeezed until they die.

Utomi unfurls the story of Osi like a fable, short chapters summarizing the milestones of his journey. Over and over, Utomi reaches what appears to be a natural stopping point, a final familiar lesson for Osi to learn: “We’re not so different after all”, “Don’t believe everything your rulers tell you”, “Give peace a chance”. And always Utomi collapses that assumption with another twist, until Osi and the reader are left with the awful truth: people with power are always playing you, and if somebody who doesn’t have power wants it, then they’re looking for ways to play you too.

I was not surprised when Utomi opened his Acknowledgements with a short discussion of the influence of 9/11 on the creation of the book. The deluge of grievances and opinions unleashed by that event carried us off a cliff and we’re still tumbling, abyss-bound, to this day. It drove Utomi to write one of the most subtly and starkly cynical books I’ve ever read. The Truth of the Aleke should be required reading for all of us feeling inappropriately Rebel Alliance-pilled in these times. We know everything bad that happens in Andor will be worth it, because we already know what unassailably well-meaning Skywalkers will take over after. Osi finds out that veeeeeeeery few people are Skywalker-blameless.

The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle

I don’t actually think I’ve read any H.P. Lovecraft stories. Or if I have, I’ve forgotten them. But I have read Victor LaValle’s The Changeling, and that book is so brilliantly terrifying that I’d pick up anything else he did (Admittedly, this approach has backfired once already because A People’s Future of the United States was mediocre).

But it didn’t backfire in the case of The Ballad of Black Tom, a powerful rewrite of one of Lovecraft’s most racist stories (a disturbing distinction in the oeuvre of a man who was notably racist by the standards of a super racist world). LaValle skillfully inverts Lovecraft’s sweaty-handed terror of urban interracial encounters into a disturbing account of how relentless racialized violence is scarier than any googly-eyed squid kid from under the sea.

Why not end the world, when the world hates you? LaValle’s Black Tom asks this question, and white people give him no good counter-arguments and lots of strong evidence for killing everyone, as is our wont. Many have commented on the core of Lovecraft’s horror being a white man’s mortal fear of irrelevance, that the scariest thing H.P. can think of is somebody important literally not giving a shit about him. Meanwhile, one day of indifference from the powerful would be a relief for Black Tom.

This world, the real world, strains at the seams with the amount of horror packed inside. The addition of dead gods who lie dreaming is a sort of respite from that horror, not a greater terror. This is what LaValle reveals to us with The Ballad of Black Tom, writing back to his fallen hero, Lovecraft, to let H.P. know how trite and risible his eldritch fears were in comparison to the villainy that slumbers in human hearts. It makes for an interesting counterpoint to Ring Shout, which I read just about a month ago. P. Djèlí Clark fuses the Klan and the Cthulhu to make a point about the dehumanizing nature of hate, whereas LaValle divides them to suggest that hate is what makes human beings the most dangerous creatures on Earth. It’s up to you which story you believe in; luckily, both rip.

So that’s SFF novellas, lately in my reading, though not entirely lately in publication history. You might ask “Are you ever gonna read books that have come out recently? Are you going to provide reviews in a timely fashion to inform the potential reader? What is the purpose of this exercise?”

To which I must answer :P.

Tags Fantasy, Literature, Review, Science Fiction

Book Review General Blog

Feminist Materialism in My Real Children

Post author By lnlupa
Post date May 6, 2025

Yeah, sure, this is probably the only meaningful thing that ever happened to her.

Last year I read Jo Walton’s Among Others, a lovely book about a Welsh teen’s magical coming-of-age in the wake of her twin sister’s death. I thought that book was quietly bold, so I looked into Walton’s other work and marked My Real Children for priority investigation. And happily My Real Children was at my local library (yes, this is another “my local library” post).

In this book, Walton unfurls an entire human life, twice. The novel’s protagonist is Patricia (sometimes Pat, sometimes Trish), a British woman born early in the 20th Century. Late in life, confined to a nursing home due to dementia, Patricia discovers a strange divergence in her memories: she remembers two completely different lives. In one life, where she is nicknamed Trish, she marries her college boyfriend and he proves to be an extremely typical awful 1950s husband. In another life, where she is nicknamed Pat, she falls in love with a female botanist and becomes a successful travel writer. And yet despite the obvious disparity in those premises, it’s not so easy for Patricia to say which life she wants to be real, if she can only choose one.

For one thing, she has several children in both lives and will not say that she loves her four children with dismal Mark any less than she loves her three children with scientist Bee. Her experiences mothering all seven of these children provide the structure that defines her adulthood and the love that sustains her.

Moreover, the world itself is profoundly different in these timelines. Though Trish’s personal life smothers beneath her husband’s cruelty, around her a stable socialism-tinged peace extends over the globe, science and diplomacy surging ahead to support a successful international moon colony. And while Pat luxuriates in familial and romantic contentment, multiple nuclear exchanges during the 20th century drive many nations into hard-right turns darker than the ones we’re experiencing IRL.

These developments seep into Walton’s narrative not through a direct engagement with foreign affairs or international politics, but through the daily details of Patricia’s life. My Real Children is a deeply materialist novel, attending closely to the moment-by-moment, year-by-year activities that accrete into Patricia’s life. When Pat and Bee wish to have children together, Walton relays their quest through its logistics: their investigation of IVF, their selection of a suitable father, and the physical mortification of pregnancy and birth. When Trish discovers second-wave feminism after years of marital unhappiness, her ideological development expresses itself in the changes she makes to her daily life, the meetings she joins, the friends she makes, an expansion of horizons once curtailed by marital expectation.

Not every reader will enjoy this approach. Walton’s unflinching commitment to the material and quotidian marginalizes the more straightforwardly science fictional story elements, and the “reason” or “explanation” for the doubled timeline is never revealed. The book’s pacing is relentlessly rhythmic, metronoming back and forth between timelines in several-year chunks, getting faster and faster until Patricia’s nearly out of time. There’s no obvious a-ha punchline at the end of Patricia’s lives (there’s not gonna be one for your life either, but many people are uncomfortable hearing about that).

All this is critical to the feminist ends towards which Walton writes. She offers the book on the predication that everything hinges on Patricia’s answer to Mark’s marriage proposal, but this is sleight of hand skillfully carried out. Though the timeline splits at this point, Trish going with Mark to be married, Pat going off unmarried to meet Bee, there is no indication that this split is responsible for the other divergences in the timeline. Mark amounts to nothing in either timeline, so his marital status is not the pivot point on which nuclear war hangs. Bee makes tremendous contributions to botany in both timelines, whether Pat is there to support her or not. This decision, held up as the central moment of the book, does not affect the world outside Patricia and her children, all of whom grow up to be very average people who do little to affect the flow of history.

Like so many women, Patricia’s whole world is reduced to the decision to marry a man or not. The book sets us, the readers, up to buy into this idea, at least at first. After all, this is the point of divergence! This is the core of the multiple timelines! We need to get the Infinity Stones so we can go back and make sure Patricia makes the right choice! (Which is?)

As her lives go on, we see that in so many ways Patricia’s decision about marriage is less significant than we’ve been led to believe. Pat’s family life with Bee is happier than Trish’s, but Trish actually has a much richer life outside the home as she becomes involved with feminist and environmentalist politics. In both timelines Patricia’s mother, and then Patricia herself, slide slowly and inexorably into dementia. In both timelines, Patricia experiences horrible heartbreak, disappointment, and loss. In the end, both sets of her children consign her to a miserable senescence in a nursing home.

Through these timeline rhymes, Walton paints a truly astute, intelligent, and complex picture of women’s struggles using the second-wave feminist frame which corresponds with Patricia’s lifetime. Mid-century feminist theory highlighted clearly how women are so often the prisoners of social and historical forces, constrained by the expectation that their lives only matter in the context of who they marry and mother. Patricia does not escape these expectations. She is not the most active or heroic protagonist, not the masculinist hero who Makes His Own Destiny through the power of having always had all the options. But Walton’s loving attention to Patricia’s life in all its mere and minor aspects reveals her as a true, whole person, doing her best to create an endurable life out of the circumstances built up around her. Moreover, Walton subtly upends the expectation that men will be active agents in their Heroic Singular lives. The most significant men in both of Patricia’s lives are humiliated by chance and history, made miserable playthings of infirmity long before Patricia is.

Walton employs the multiple timelines of My Real Children to reveal an urgent and profound conclusion: no matter how many lives we lead, no matter which choices prove pivotal to our development, and no matter the sex and gender assigned to us by our culture, we are all much smaller than history. Our task then is to follow Patricia’s example and make the best of what we have, even when the world around us is terrifying, even though sorrow is always hovering in the offing.

Tags Literature, Review, Science Fiction

Book Review General Blog

Recently Reading Hugo Nominees, Part I

Post author By lnlupa
Post date April 29, 2025

Robot by Emilipothèse. Witch by Nice M Nshuti. Background, captions, and crap Photoshop job by yours truly.

I’m trying something new this year to take my mind off the horrors: I’m going to read all the 2025 Best Novel Hugo nominees. Probably not in time for the actual awards ceremony, but you never know. How hard can it be to read six books by August…

Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Though I know him by his reputation as an exceedingly prolific genre writer, I had never read an Adrian Tchaikovsky novel until a few days ago, when I finished Service Model, one of his two(!!) novels nominated for the 2025 Best Novel Hugo. I actually wanted to read Alien Clay but couldn’t get it, so I picked up Service Model instead, with some trepidation.

Service Model tells the picaresque story of a valet robot, Uncharles, who finds himself spat out into a strange, fallen world after the suspicious death of his master. The tone of the book is rather wry, juxtaposing the dystopian circumstances of Uncharles’ world with the unflagging propriety programmed into him. I’m not generally very high on aggressively comedic novels, unless they’re exceedingly dark or dry. While I love Catch-22, I’ve never quite clicked with books like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And the first section of Service Model had me nervous, as the absurd opening scenario’s tortured robot logic tried hard to be broad and silly. However, Tchaikovsky’s sharp and digestible writing style made the pages move quickly, and once I got into the second section I began to enjoy the book more.

Where Service Model shines most brightly is in Uncharles’ development as a character. Each surreal situation Uncharles encounters changes him in significant ways. Some elements of this change are telegraphed broadly (he begins the book named Charles), but in other ways Uncharles’ development unfurls subtly, making each new challenge he faces an interesting test of whether he will turn away from his core servile functions. Uncharles’ humility and preprogrammed obsession with service make him a refreshing protagonist for science fiction, a genre overrun with libertarian ubermenschs who can’t move ten feet without flexing about their independence and chadly nature. Watching him grow from a being addicted to service, even to cruel masters, into someone who offers his care specifically to someone he loves is quietly powerful.

Indeed, I found the second half of the novel, especially its conclusion, to be the strongest part of the book. As Uncharles’ journey meanders into darker and darker scenarios, the humor of the book feels more necessary and the significance of Uncharles’ humility greater. It’s in this later section that Tchaikovsky most directly engages the vast Problems of Our Times, weaving the parable-like story of Uncharles into a critique of the current zeitgeist for shifting critical labor onto machines who can’t choose or desire for themselves. A key character introduced near the book’s conclusion delivers blistering polemics on the risks of this voluntary shirking of human responsibility, a harsh moral that is delivered intertwined with a second, kinder corollary about the value of mercy over cold justice. The climactic struggle (expressed both physically and philosophically) between the gentle Uncharles and the harsh remnants of the old world paid off the earlier, less interesting portion of the book.

I enjoyed Service Model, and its commentary on Our Times satisfied my desire for an award nominee to be at least Medium Deep. I will read more of Tchaikovsky’s work.

A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher

I did sincerely set out to enjoy A Sorceress Comes to Call. I’ve always heard good things about T. Kingfisher’s writing, and despite the back cover advertising A Sorceress Comes to Call as a fairy tale reimagining (sigh and sigh), I began my approach to the novel with interest.

The early chapters introduce the reader to Cordelia, a traumatized young teen whose mother uses her sorcerous powers to abuse and control Cordelia (among others), and Hester, a good-hearted but curmudgeonly member of the lesser gentry whose brother becomes the latest target of Cordelia’s mother’s gold-digging ways. Hester and Cordelia are both likable viewpoint characters, and Kingfisher captures Cordelia’s victimization by her cruel mother with genuine poignancy.

This was a promising start! But the work as a whole ultimately did not cohere for me. The plot grinds awkwardly into gear, the early energy of the story giving way to a somewhat plodding series of faux-Regency dinner and parlor scenes in which characters talk about what might happen and what they might do about it and what they might feel about it, without the wit and subtlety of literature actually from that period.

And the book’s period setting also disappointed me. The worldbuilding is about as dense as a slice of fancy prosciutto: that is to say, when I hold it up to the light, I can see through it. Hester and Cordelia inhabit a British-tinged world of etiquette and strategic marriages, but there is no specificity to it and no grounding. Clothing and other period indicators are left vague in description, ‘lest the reader discern whether this world is more Regency or more Victorian. The Church is a Christian one, but without any distinguishing qualities of denomination or belief that would inform character behavior. There may or may not be a king or a parliament, but no one ever feels like discussing them. Why are these gentlefolk rich? How do they maintain themselves? These are questions which fascinated the writers of the actual Regency and Victorian eras, but which our contemporary authors prefer to handwave. I admit to some bias here because of my general disgust with the category of recent media I’ve taken to calling “New Aristocracy Apologia”, a chasm into which most undercooked depictions of Old British Times fall.

Yes, now there will be a blog post on New Aristocracy Apologia.

But my core criticism returns to the book itself: as A Sorceress Comes to Call went on, its poignancy faded. I felt as though Kingfisher pulled several punches, leading to a climax which resolved so neatly and cleanly that I never really feared for the characters. The only major character killed by the villainess is quickly recouped via convenient supernatural means so that she can have a bigger, more heroic death later. I’m not convinced that the fantasy elements added much to the narrative at all: while the plot would certainly be different without them, they do not drive the narrative to a new kind of meaning, beyond the first few chapters where the sorcery evokes the particularities of parental abuse to a chilling effect. But the strength of that metaphor fades over time as meandering plot takes over.

To be clear, I do not think this is a bad book per se. The writing moves along, entertaining and comprehensible, and each major character speaks with a distinctive and recognizable voice. I appreciated having two female protagonists, both of whom were active, well-defined, and interesting up until they only acted in ways I completely expected. The book is reasonably entertaining, though I would have enjoyed more if it were half as long and didn’t give me as much time to think about being underwhelmed. Unfortunately, this is an unforgiving world and I am an unforgiving girl, particularly when I’m reading something because it’s an award nominee. A Sorceress Comes to Call does not offer a particular perspective on the topics it takes up other than “child abuse and manipulation are bad”, and in that way it is fundamentally Not That Deep.

Having checked one-third of this year’s Best Novel nominees off my list, I feel very medium about this year’s slate. Service Model proved a pleasant surprise, but was more confirmation bias than galactic brain in its reflection of our tattered society. A Sorceress Comes to Call lacked the intellectual rigor to reflect much at all, a statement which is true but also betrays me as the kind of d-bag who reads for intellectual rigor (as if you didn’t already know).

Luckily all the other 2025 Hugo nominees at my library are checked out, so I have a few weeks for my disgruntlement to fade. Hope, please spring eternal.

Tags Fantasy, Literature, Review, Science Fiction

Book Review General Blog

Recently Reading Fantasy, Part II

Post author By lnlupa
Post date April 22, 2025

Me partying with my fantastical bros

Last week, I reported on P. Djèlí Clark’s Ring Shout and The Haunting of Tram 015, as well as (sigh) Catherynne M. Valente’s Speak Easy. But they are not my only recent fantasy checkouts.

Wonders of the Invisible World by Patricia McKillip

Another barrier between me and Speak Easy may be that I don’t particularly care for fairy tale rewrites. Call me a fake feminist, call me a hater of fun, or call me a person who just isn’t super-interested in fairy tales – it’s up to you. Either way I was a little wary when I picked up this Patricia McKillip collection and saw a lot of familiar fairy tale titles in the contents.

I needn’t have worried. This is my first encounter with McKillip’s work, and I’m going to make sure it is not the last. Each of her stories in Wonders of the Invisible World is an artful, subtly engineered piece, her prose unshowy but perfectly calibrated, and her endings always perfectly timed. The stories leave me wanting more, and since it’s a collection I can turn the page and get another hit.

McKillip captures a glorious wonder at the possibilities and mysteries of magic, and her attention to the experiences of women in these fantasy settings is particularly compelling. While princesses and witches are familiar fairy tale heroines, McKillip investigates the everyday predicaments and dissatisfactions of women with a clear-eyed kind of feminism that inspires reflection. Jack O’Lantern and Naming Day root themselves in the very mundane humiliations endured by women since time immemorial, and then deploy their fantastical elements to produce a brief but wondrous liberation for their female characters. They have a truly mature loveliness that sees the humanity and complexity of everyday life, not just the badassery of grand defiant heroes.

A few of her stories are a little too gentle for my taste, using their fantastic elements to shy away from the harshness of real life, but perhaps that’s the value of fantasy: we can struggle and suffer and in the end all come home safe. And other stories in the collection are chillingly clear-eyed about their subjects: the best of these, Xmas Cruise, is a heart-wrenching comment on climate change and environmental degradation, and shockingly prescient for a story from 1993. As with her feminist stories, McKillip uses her unerring gaze to lay bare the weaknesses which keep us from saving either ourselves or the other beings which inhabit the Earth.

All of her particular talents come together in the collection’s final story: The Doorkeeper of Khaat. This piece conjures up a fully realized science fiction world, inhabited by familiar yet alien cultures, and sets them spinning around a young poet, whose idealism and romanticism are obviously fated to be his doom. The story darts around all expected resolutions to settle into a meditation on the mysteries of love and loyalty across generations and cultures. How far would you go for someone you loved? And what kind of person do you become when you stand between worlds?

All of the stories in Wonders of the Invisible World are good, and besides those already mentioned I also enjoyed Knight of the Well, an eminently satisfying fantasy mystery. Each of the stories I’ve mentioned in this review could have been dragged out to a novel’s length, but McKillip deploys a deft hand in keeping them at exactly the right length to intrigue, amuse, and ultimately leave one wondering. I will be returning to her work posthaste.

The City in Glass by Nghi Vo

I don’t remember where I first heard about this book – probably on one of the millions of other SFF blogs I follow. I have not read any of Nghi Vo’s other books, and I’ve been afraid to buy them because they’re so short. I can’t afford $8 for an afternoon. Well, okay, now that I write it out, that is less than I’d pay for a movie ticket, but the movie also doesn’t come live on my already-overstuffed shelf after I watch it.

All this to say, I didn’t know what awaited me within the pages of The City in Glass, but luckily it proved to be pretty sick. The setting, themed around a vague Classical Era Mediterranean vibe, drew me in, as I have been a Hellenic wonk since childhood. I’m also continually interested in the lives and minds of long-lived spiritual beings like angels and demons, and this fed my fascination with the psychology of things which can’t die and (pretend that they) can’t change.

The book is a short, speedy account of the aftermath of a city’s smiting and the grieving process of an immortal demon who has lived in the city since its early days. The demon, Vitrine, has spent her endless days cultivating the city like a garden, nurturing it into a wild and wealthy trading hub full of brilliant and debauched citizens. So of course a group of angels show up to spoil the fun. They destroy the city utterly, obliterating all life in a chillingly nuke-like spectacle, except for Vitrine, who cannot die. In her anger, she pierces one of the angels with a powerful curse: love for her. The angel, experiencing debased emotions like guilt and shame for the first time, is barred from his celestial home, and comes to reside with Vitrine in the ruins of the city, despite her hatred.

Vitrine and the angel proceed to have a world-historically toxic relationship (slay!) while slowly the city reestablishes itself around them. There’s fascinating ambiguity around the power and influence of the immortals, the question of whether the city would have risen again without their interference. Throughout its restoration, Vitrine and the angel push and pull at each other, driving at each other with searing philosophical questions and plucking favorites from among the mortals inhabiting their domain. In the end, their relationship hits its climax in tandem with the climax of the city’s resurrection, and all come together (lol) in a bloody and delirious whirlwind.

Fundamentally, this is a book that is mostly about very literally unrelatable characters discussing ethics and philosophy while toying with very briefly alive human beings. I can see how this is all a tremendous turn-off for some people (the weak…), but for me it’s a rare delectation. It’s a short piece which does not overstay its heady concept, it moves quickly and skillfully across thousands of years, and it offers, as its culmination, perhaps the most gloriously improbable sex act I can imagine. What higher praise can one offer?

In conclusion, my return to library usership has been a smashing success. I still managed to mostly select books that I really enjoyed, but at least they were different from my usual fare. I guess my taste is just too good… I must continue to dare, and trust that in my eventual fall we will discover some truly exciting reviews.

Tags Fantasy, Literature, Review

Book Review General Blog

Recently Reading Fantasy, Part I

Post author By lnlupa
Post date April 15, 2025

Me, pursuing new books to read.

With a newly minted library card in hand, I’m excitedly exploring the stacks of my local with a mind to dare. For the last year or so, I’ve been in a between-residences limbo which denied me the comfort of a local library to call my own. This has increased the general cowardice of my reading, in that I don’t want to spend money on books I don’t know I’ll like. Thus, my book purchases have all been the glowingly reviewed work of authors I’m already convinced are lit. Honestly, I’m getting bored of the book reviews I’ve been posting here because they’re all so relentlessly positive.

But no longer! I came home from my first trip to the library with a varied collection of short fantasy works to peruse, which I will describe for you here, and in a second post next week.

Ring Shout and The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark

I’m already cheating the requirements I set out above, because I did pick these due to a prior appreciation of Clark’s work. I heard many positive endorsements of Ring Shout when it came out, and I enjoyed the first Dead Djinn in Cairo novella. And both novellas met those standards.

Ring Shout tells the story of Maryse, a Black woman who hunts KKK demons in the 1920s American South. A Buffy-esque monster-slayer, Maryse deals with her tragic past and romantic troubles alongside the fiendishly literal monstrosities of American racism.

The Haunting of Tram Car 015 follows two paranormal investigators in the steampunk Cairo of Clark’s earlier Dead Djinn stories as they attempt to exorcise a mysterious spirit from the public transit system.

Ring Shout is the showier and more ambitious of the two novellas, pulling together magic, history, and a spiky metaphor to make a short adventure that strains a bit in its truncated length. There’s certainly enough material within the novella to populate multiple books or an entire TV season. Though many alluring elaborations lurk in the story’s corners, Clark ignores the siren call of excess world-building because he has something he genuinely wants to say about the nature of hate and its close sibling violence. I’m not sure I entirely agree with what he proposes at the end of the story, but I continue to think on it. This is a better outcome than the story concluding with total author-reader alignment, because that’s a sign that what I’m reading isn’t going anywhere interesting, it’s just sucking up to me. Thankfully, Clark has actual ideas which can’t just be slurped up like slop.

In comparison to Ring Shout, The Haunting of Tram Car 015 is Not That Deep. It’s a detective adventure story in one of Clark’s most fascinating alternate worlds. Honestly, as an enthusiastic dilettante historian of Southwest Asia, I would love for Clark to drop a world-building book about the Dead Djinn timeline, rather than keep piecing details together from the stories. However, as an advocate of art as a real thing worth doing, I must support Clark’s use of his worlds as backdrops for actual stories and not merely mental masturbation tools for nerds who love treating imaginary places as incontrovertible realities.

Anyway, Tram Car 015 is super-concise and super-enjoyable, using the very familiar detective story structure to have some fun with a spooky type of Central Asian spirit which was new to me. In the background, suffrage activists organize to pass a bill granting Egyptian women the vote. But this detail never fully connected with the main plot, at least in my reading, even though the spirit haunting the tram car preys specifically on women. The gory and fearsome legends surrounding the spirit also never quite paid off for me because the monster is ultimately defeated in a very clean fashion (though the resolution is clever and broadly satisfying). Tram Car 015 offers the pleasures of another episode of a favorite TV show – a good episode that isn’t the show’s finest – and that’s perfectly reasonable. I’d much rather live in a world overflowing with interesting projects from Clark, a wonderfully imaginative writer, than a world where I’m waiting eternally for him to produce one conclusive masterpiece. His popcorn stories are as tasty as his truffle risotto ones, if less filling.

Let the man cook!

Speak Easy by Catherynne M. Valente

In the introduction above, I complained about my overly positive reviews and hoped the library would allow me to explore a wider range of reactions. Well, the gods made good on my accursed wish. I picked up Speak Easy with curiosity, having enjoyed many of Valente’s short stories, but having also heard from folks who strongly dislike her writing. I never understood what irritated them so, until now.

Speak Easy is a fairy tale rewrite of the “Twelve Dancing Princesses” which is also a Roaring ‘20s pastiche which is also an exploration of the toxic dynamic of a real life famous literary couple which also includes heavy allusion to the fairy characters of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Does this sound like too much? Even to me, a person who loved Riverdale?

It is. And it all strains beneath the ACME 1000-lb weight of Valente’s overdone ‘20s slang narration. The story is buried beneath an incomprehensible quantity of period-appropriate slang, the writerly equivalent of a living room with crazy print wallpaper and crazy print upholstery and crazy print lampshades and a big old crazy print rug, in that I felt vaguely nauseous the whole time and wanted to go home.

One might say this is an appropriate reaction to the debauched Jazz Age, to which I would say, “It also repeatedly made me want to stop reading the book, and the book is only 150 pages long.” I have read French postmodernist cultural critique that was easier to decrypt and more coherent than Speak Easy. So I now see the Valente-haters’ point. I’ll continue to read her short stories where I encounter them, but it may be a while before I pick up one of her longer works again.

So that’s a W and an L, but since I learned more about my own reading tastes, it’s really two Ws. Next week, I’ll report on the other two books I pulled on my first adventure as a licensed library user. Sadly, neither was disappointing.

Tags Fantasy, Literature, Review

Comics General Blog

Rebuilding My Relationship to Comics #2: Mister Miracle

Post author By lnlupa
Post date April 8, 2025

Prison hasn't changed much in 150 years, huh?

Every superhero is somebody’s favorite, no matter how weird and esoteric and dumb their costume is. There is someone out there who loves them, usually for a painfully personal reason. Superheroes are a little like patron saints or household gods.

Mister Miracle is one of my favorite superheroes. I’m a bit of a sucker for the Fourth World and the New Gods in general – they’re so weird and grand and operatic and stupid. But Mister Miracle and his supporting cast are my favorites. Maybe this is because Mister Miracle and Big Barda were in the Justice League when I first read the comic as a kid. Maybe it’s because Mister Miracle is an escape artist character whose name is literally Scott Free.

Maybe it’s because his costume is mostly yellow.

Or maybe it’s because he’s the god of escape. Whether the New Gods of the Fourth World are actually divine beings is an unfathomably confusing question when they frequently hang out with the strongest being in existence and actual Christian angels and the daughter of Hippolyta of the Amazons, but I tend to think of them as gods in the manner of the Hellenistic or Norse pantheon. That is to say, powerful beings imbued with influence and power, but also very fallible. So let us imagine Scott Free as a sort of embodiment of not only freedom, but escape. The god of getting away, getting out of it. What does a god need to escape from?

Kirby tells us that Scott Free was the infant son of Highfather, the benevolent patriarch of New Genesis, a high-tech Heaven world. New Genesis is ever at odds with Apokolips, the high-tech Hell world. Just as everything on New Genesis is good, pure, and wise (sort of), everything on Apokolips is evil, monstrous, and corrupt (sort of). To secure peace between himself and Apokolips’ ruler, Darkseid, Highfather agreed to a tremendously screwy arrangement wherein he would give his son, Scott, to Darkseid, and Darkseid would give his son, Orion, to Highfather. So Scott, the son of paradise, is doomed to grow up in Hell so that the rest of Heaven’s inhabitants can live in peace.

Darkseid commends the infant Scott into the hands of Granny Goodness, the depraved matron of an evil orphanage. There’s barely time to go into all Granny’s depravities here; honestly, just go and watch the Justice League Unlimited episode about Mister Miracle. It’s twenty minutes, so it’ll be faster than me explaining it to you. I’ll wait.

…

Okay, so now you know: Granny torments Scott for his entire life, sending him into traps and torture devices, each more fiendish than the last. She thinks that she is training him to give up his will and serve Darkseid; she’s actually training him to escape. In the end, Scott gets so good at escaping that he escapes Apokolips and Darkseid in the company of Barda, who has escaped her indoctrination by Granny because of the liberatory power of an actual positive relationship with Scott.

So Mister Miracle is the god of freedom from Apokolips, Darkseid, Granny. Big Evil. He’s also a god of never giving up, of enduring years of torment without capitulation. Sometimes the key to freedom is endurance, not flash or skill.

I know what that’s like. To me, the story of Mister Miracle is not only the four-color extravaganza, the hallucinatory delight of Kirby’s creativity. It is an ecstatic truth about what is required to survive in the hands of those who hate you, about always having a place in your mind or heart that is further away than they can reach.

I know that we all hate Tom King now for some reason (BatCat wedding catastrophe? Always co-opting existing characters to tell basically the same story over and over? CIA stuff?), but he was on the money with his Mister Miracle miniseries, showing Scott face down real mental health issues buried at the heart of his divine family drama. Among all the tools in your escape artist’s tool belt is that last big trip.

But that’s where the endless renewal of superheroes comes in handy, for once. Superheroes don’t/can’t commit suicide, because they can’t stay dead. And when we tunnel through King’s postmodern misery, back to Kirby’s original text, we are returned to the core battle that animates the New Gods’ stories: the battle between life and death.

Darkseid is annihilation as a being, a pure authoritarian who seeks to obliterate all independent life and thought, replacing it with his own. He and his venal cronies seek to debase everyone and everything in existence. The Miracle is that even in the heart of their empire, someone still escaped.

Scott’s freedom is contagious, dangerous, indissoluble. He can get out of any trap or prison, though after some escapes it’s hard to get home. In the very lowest times, this is how I live too, in flight from the world and its cruel inhabitants.

No matter how far I’ve fallen away from comic books as a medium, I can’t give up on Mister Miracle. I stop to look again whenever I see him, because he knows me. We’ve been to all the same places, and we’ve fought the same battles. He reminds me that freedom starts in your mind.

Tags Comics, New Gods

Cinema General Blog

Q1 Report on The Cinema

Post author By lnlupa
Post date April 1, 2025

Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash

As March ends, we reflect on what the first quarter of the year brought us. Obviously, when historians look back on this time, they will think of it as a nightmarish clusterfuck (certainly I will), but they won’t be asking themselves the most important questions: what movies did I watch, and were they good? Luckily I’m always keeping this in mind.

My first quarter of movie-watching has been particularly productive because of the introduction of Mubi to my streaming repertoire, and I recommend it for the discerning art-cinema fan. Unlike most major streaming services they are funding and distributing movies that are actually good and so are providing a service actually worth paying for (unlike some people I could name who recently made a shit-ass movie of The Electric State for no reason).

Biggest Ws

Blessedly, this quarter brought a plethora of cinematic Ws to my doorstep, and they were fairly evenly distributed between movies I was hoping would be good and movies that arrived to me as a surprise.

I watched a lot of good movies about people going through something crazy, taking on a new identity, and then becoming a great force for justice? comedy? revenge? something in their new life. Foremost among them was The People’s Joker – if you’ve heard of Batman, you should see this movie. It is a work of full imagination and full wackiness, and thus it is full cinema. This is a movie with so much sincerity and heart and humor that even my mom enjoyed it, and she is actively trying to learn less about Batman every day.

But she’s not immune to the Batman concept, because she was just as excited as I was to go see the new movie adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo. Were compromises made with the narrative in the adaptation? Was a lot left on the cutting room floor to make a movie that was still three hours long? Are there moments where the Count deploys disguise technology that definitely hadn’t been invented in the 1800s? Yes, yes, and yes. But as a counterpoint, I offer you this: it’s a movie about a guy going on a big adventure for basic clear emotional reasons, and on the way he perpetrates schemes and travels across glorious vistas. And it doesn’t have any threat of a sequel. They don’t make’em like this (fun to watch for the entire runtime) anymore.

I also watched several movies about video games, which should surprise no one as I am sometimes a leading scholar of cine-ludic connections. However, the two best video game movies I watched this quarter were about human relationships to game worlds, rather than Koopa or Sonic or whoever. The Remarkable Life of Ibelin reveals the World of Warcraft-based life of a young man with a serious physical disability. If you are a gamer who has ever relied on games to get you through a difficult time in life, this film will almost certainly break you. If you are interested in films that challenge popular narratives about gaming or disability, this should move to the top of your watchlist. It walks a very interesting and fine line between genuine melancholy about the limitations placed on its protagonist by his disability, while also completely upending his own family’s belief that his life was one devoid of rich emotion and connection.

Grand Theft Hamlet is the other video game documentary which slayed me this quarter. Much lighter than Ibelin but equally concerned with video games as a place to go away from life’s pain, Grand Theft Hamlet tells the story of frustrated theatrical performers trying to stage Hamlet in Grand Theft Auto Online while IRL theaters were closed for Covid. The struggle to mount the play successfully is simultaneously stupid and tremendous. I have seen some call the behind-the-scenes drama in the film forced or overdone, but as a habitual participant in low-budget theater productions I must emphasize that this is how putting on a play really is. It is always this dramatic, it is always this stupid, you always lose hope just before you put it on and it’s great. This is why people who work on the stage are such toxic people 🙂

Lastly, I must salute our friends at PBS for supporting the film Aurora’s Sunrise. This film is an animated documentary about the Armenian genocide, told from the perspective of a survivor who was heavily involved in efforts to raise the profile of the genocide in the US after she escaped Armenia. It is simultaneously a heartwrenching genocide drama, a fascinating portrait of PR as it was done in the 1910s, and a transporting visual experience. The Armenian genocide has been repeatedly covered up and denied by the Turkish government and its allies. It is good to keep Aurora in our minds now, to remind us of what she suffered and to remind us that our bodies and minds are where we keep the truth alive, even when the powerful deny it.

Biggest Ls

Q1 2025 was not without its horrendous Ls, however. Fewer they were in number, and yet so heavily they weigh upon me. The most mind-boggling of them was Abel Ferrara’s New Rose Hotel. I looked forward to this film for some time: it’s literally a Christopher Walken/Willem Defoe cyberpunk heist adventure, how could it go wrong? But then I started watching it and I remembered that I don’t actually like William Gibson stuff, especially when it is being done in a style that is slightly jankier than a student film. The shots in this film are composed so tightly you know they were just filming it all in the same hotel room, using different corners to play different locations. I acknowledge that the film could be interpreted to have Deep Themes, but I interpret it as horseshit. But it’s not a total L because some of Christopher Walken’s line readings are sooooooo funny.

Most disappointing of all the Ls was Mickey 17. I had such hope when the movie was announced, I had very medium feelings upon seeing the trailers, and then I had such a crushing experience in the theater. It wasn’t a film that was all bad, but it was a film with so many elements that didn’t work. Robert Pattinson is excellent (if you like Robert Pattinson when he’s in his quirked-up white boy mode), and the alien creatures are extremely charming. So much of the rest of the movie is aimless and dopey. Steven Yeun is wasted on a go-nowhere subplot, Toni Collette grinds an unfunny running gag into absolute powder, Mark Ruffalo is doing the least compelling and most obvious Trump impression of all time, and most of the film’s female characters are trapped in an eye-rolling love triangle subplot which is both biphobic and pointless. Nothing comes of Anamaria Vartolomei’s character whatsoever. Her female love interest gets fridged, she hits on Mickey for some? reason?, and then she gets a new girlfriend at the end. To what end, I might ask? Poor Naomi Ackie, putting her all into a character whose most fun scene is her horniness for RPatz. For the rest of the film she is his emotional support GF. If you like Bong Joon-Ho doing broad comedy and heavy social satire, please watch Okja instead.

The worst L I took this quarter was Red One. It was my fault we watched it, and it sucked harder than a rock. Nothing about it was funny-bad. Everything about it was execrably bad. I hated every minute I spent experiencing it. I never want to see Chris Evans or The Rock again.

Hot Takes

I shall leave you with a few hot takes for the road, something to inspire Letterboxd Harvey Oswald to take me out.

Hot take most likely to sign my death warrant: I still think The Brutalist is a pretty good movie. I don’t really care that they used Respeecher. I am slightly less impressed with Adrian Brody and Felicity Jones’ accent work. That’s the sum total of the effect this news had on me. There are better targets to beat up on – for example, the companies making LLMs and Gen AI bullshit engines and roasting the earth to do so. Let’s **** up a ******** instead of blowing up Brady Corbet on Letterboxd 🙂

Hot take most likely to sign my death warrant after the Libertarian takeover: Gerard Butler’s character is unequivocally the bad guy of Law-Abiding Citizen. I can’t believe this is not widely understood. When Jamie Foxx gave the killer a plea deal at the beginning of the movie, he was doing The Right Thing. He was Doing His Job, and not in a Nuremberg way. This is how the American justice system works, and fundamentally we do not actually want a world of vigilante justice, especially when Gerard – and I can’t emphasize this enough – moves on to just killing whoever he feels like to prove a point! He tries to kill the mayor of Philadelphia with napalm when she had nothing to do with his case. He is Dumb Hannibal. He is a serial killer. He is cooked (literally, at the end of the movie <3). Stop thinking killing people fixes stuff. You are smoking that shit that made America post-9/11.

Hot take most likely to make someone explain the movie to me at length even though 1) I watched it, and 2) I have a four-year degree in Cinema & Media Studies from a global top 20 university: Park Chan-Wook’s Decision to Leave is Just Fine. It is a very artfully crafted thriller that looks beautiful and goes on too long. It’s not Vertigo. It’s Vertigo-adjacent, but it lacks the melodramatic heights of improbability that made both Vertigo and The Handmaiden rock. Decision to Leave is great on a craft level and fine overall.

With those thoughts to bear you into cinema-hell, I bring Q1 2025 to a close. What does Q2 have in store? I can’t say with certainty yet, but I pray that it starts with “FFFFFFF” and ends with “rancis Ford Coppola”.

Tags Cinema, Review

Book Review General Blog

Vorkosigan Saga: Mirror Dance

Post author By lnlupa
Post date March 27, 2025

Because they're twins.

Big news in weird decisions by me: I’ve started reading a lengthy novel series by picking up a random installment in the middle. That series is The Vorkosigan Saga, and that installment is Mirror Dance.

Now, in my defense, I didn’t go in entirely unprepared. I had previously read several of the Vorkosigan short stories and skimmed a scan of A Civil Campaign, and most importantly I had received a tremendous blow-by-blow description of every single major event in the series from my sister, Daisy, a certified Vorkosigan maniac. When I happened upon a cache of Vorkosigan novels left out for the taking, I captured them and brought them back home, determined to see what enchanted my sister so.

I started with Mirror Dance because I was going on a train trip and the pile of free Vorkosigans I found included two copies of Mirror Dance, so I didn’t have to fear retribution from Daisy if the book was damaged by Amtrak’s tender mercies. At last, I would immerse myself in Vorkosimania.

The Vorkosigan Saga, written by Lois McMaster Bujold, comprises a number of novels, novellas, and short stories concerning the adventures of one Miles Vorkosigan, the son of space nobility, who is a minor genius and deals with a number of chronic health problems. As he is the son of a major Vor Lord (yeah, really) of the planet Barrayar, he has many terrible responsibilities and constantly confronts the prejudices of a planet set against people with visible disabilities. He also goes through a lot of Drama, on both the interplanetary scale and the interpersonal, as well as sometimes the cringe. The publishing dates on the series extend from the late eighties to the late twenty-tens, so journeying back into the deep archives uncovers its fair share of uncomfortable material. Mirror Dance specifically has some moments of unpleasantness regarding the narration around Miles’ nonbinary coworker, as well as some eye-rolling but comparatively minor moments of orientalism.

On the plus side, Mirror Dance is a truly soap opera or Bollywood-level plot. Miles’ somewhat deranged clone brother, Mark – originally grown by villains to kill Miles and family – comes out of hiding to suborn Miles’ private mercenary group in an ill-fated attempt to rescue other young clones who will soon be harvested for their organs. Miles discovers Mark’s altruistic treachery and rushes off to try and stop him. He catches up to Mark just slightly too late. That’s when it gets complicated.

There’s soooooo many moments of twin hijinks in this. Mark and Miles continually switch identities, including another cover identity of Miles’, Admiral Naismith. One gets abducted and pretends to be the other, then the other gets caught and has to pretend to be the first one. Miles’ friends, romantic interests, and coworkers are tormented by the doubling of their Vorkosigan-related troubles. The Vorkosigans’ enemies are entirely reduced to despair by the end.

Mirror Dance also goes to some very dark places. The tone of the Saga as a whole is interesting. Bujold possesses a solid, straightforward prose style with a wry edge which keeps the reader bumping along comfortably with every plot twist, and she throws in jokes and humorous encounters with near-clockwork regularity. But every so often, she pulls back the curtain to remind us that humans in space are just as capable of depravity as humans here on Earth.

The vessel of much of the darkness in Mirror Dance is Mark. While Miles, despite the challenges of his youth, could count on a loving, powerful, wealthy family to support him through everything, Mark grew up in the hands of violent men with dark intentions and a profound hatred for the people from whose DNA Mark grew. He trained as an assassin, but he was also relentlessly victimized by his creators: bullied, tortured, and eventually sexually assaulted. This damage causes Mark to act in some very unwise and unethical but realistic ways. His trauma around intimacy drives him to nearly reenact his own abuse on someone very vulnerable, which will understandably turn a certain subset of readers against the character and story entirely. But Mark’s journey to redemption gives the story a hard core of genuine feeling which elevates it above a simple space romp, and his tremendous failings make him more poignant and sympathetic in my eyes. As someone who’s made my own mistakes and had my own mental challenges, I felt for Mark, even if some of the mistakes he made were much worse than mine.

I won’t try to claim that Mirror Dance is the best entry point for The Vorkosigan Saga. But it worked for me. More than any of the previous stories I’d read in the series, Mirror Dance captured my interest because of the strong and compelling central relationship between Miles and Mark. This relationship grounded the sillier and soapier moments and leavened the darkest and most serious ones. I would like to read more of Miles’ adventures, if only to make sure Mark is okay.

Tags Literature, Review, Science Fiction

General Blog Television

Intersections in Real Life

Post author By lnlupa
Post date March 12, 2025

Back when I had my Cohost blog, I wrote a post about the Babylon 5 episode “Intersections in Real Time”. This is one of my favorite episodes of B5 and, in my opinion, some of B5 creator J. Michael Straczynski’s strongest writing ever. A total format shift and one of the only episodes to have no sequences on the titular space station, this episode has our hero, John Sheridan, imprisoned by Earth’s fascist government. Sheridan is tortured in the hopes that he will sign a false confession renouncing his beliefs and supporting EarthGov’s xenophobic platform. The episode is functionally a two-man play, a rhetorical war between Sheridan and the bland officious technician assigned to torture him.

The last time I wrote about this episode, I wrote about its most quotable climactic moment, in which John Sheridan insists that he can still win his war, even here, even alone, simply by never giving in to the demands of the state. I’m not going to repeat myself too thoroughly here – this is just set up for what I want to say now.

The torturer casts doubt on the idea that Sheridan’s faith in resistance to the evils of EarthGov will ever lead him to victory. Sheridan tells the torturer that he wins, “every time [he says] no.” Every refusal is a tiny revolution.

Foremost among J. Michael Straczynski’s works outside Babylon 5 is his autobiography, Becoming Superman. This is a book which I would genuinely recommend to almost anyone (over the age of, like, 13; it has some deeply disturbing scenes), whether or not they have any interest in science fiction television, comic books, or the screen arts. The core of the book is the terrifying abuse and misery which Straczynski undergoes as a child and the escape from it provided by his devotion to nerd standbys like Superman.

The insanity of Straczynski’s childhood is engineered and escalated by his father, a man of mindbogglingly low character who subjected his wife and children to an endless reign of terror. Straczynski’s father was a no-shit actual real life Nazi who helped do the Holocaust. That is the level of moral impoverishment we are discussing here.

Returning to B5 episodes like “Intersections in Real Time” after reading Becoming Superman, I saw so much of Straczynski’s personal story in the work. His firsthand experience with day-in, day-out torment. His desire to inoculate against fascism, thanks to a childhood spent imprisoned within it. His certainty that there is value in moral victory, even if that moral victory does not liberate you from your oppressor immediately.

There are other parts of Becoming Superman that I thought while rewatching the episode as well. Late in life/the book Straczynski is diagnosed as autistic, and so I pondered the ways in which embracing one’s abnormal subjectivity is another kind of resistance, one which must be constantly shored up against a world which says “But why can’t you be normal after all?” After Babylon 5, Straczynski collaborates with the Wachowskis, maybe the most prominent transgender film directors in Hollywood, to make work that highlights LGBTQ+ life. That’s not Straczynski’s personal experience, but by then he knows what it means to win just by living and still believing, and so I see how he and the Wachowskis might still be able to connect.

Death of the author is a major critical concept for a reason, and it is worth approaching work on its own merits and for the meanings you the interactor draw from it. It also helps you maintain a little distance from the creator, which is important in our current era of “hero-worship perpetually curdling into misconduct revelations”.

After reading Becoming Superman, though, I just can’t stop seeing the author in Babylon 5. Straczynski is the show in a very real way that’s hard to articulate. Later, if he gets busted for crimes, that’s going to make it suck a lot for us fans, but for now it’s a powerful relationship, a sharpening and a clarifying of what the show is for.

I recommend both Babylon 5 and Becoming Superman, not only for the chance to watch a great show and read a great book, but for the reminder that survival is a kind of bravery, one that is the first step towards achieving everything else we long for.

Tags Science Fiction, Television