Okay, once again, I have failed to keep on keeping on with the blog. But, the vibes of Wednesday called to me, so here I am (as is becoming typical.) I have no idea what it is about Wednesday that provides time for me to think, "Oh, right, DW," but it does seem be The Day it Happens.So here we are.
Today, Saint Paul is blanketed in snow. I note this as it applies to several things I want to talk about.
First, my car, which is in the shop. It has not, in fact, failed me in any serious way. But, Mason is taking his drivers' license test tomorrow and our car needs to pass inspection. One of the things it needs to have? Two working front lights. What does it NOT currently have? YOU GUESSED IT. I was almost not able to bring the car in today because firstly, Troy is booked up weeks in advance due to all the holiday driving/travel that people do. I was able to plead my case with him and we agreed that if I dropped my car off ASAP in the morning, he'd just pop that new light into it at some point in between the regular work. If he has time, he'll make things more profitable for himself by giving me an oil change (which I told him to feel free to do, because Troy prices very failrly and a single light change is going to cost me almost nothing.)
But secondly? The sky opened up and DUMPED snow on us. I don't know the official number of inches, but we crested at least 4 inches (10.16 cm for my metric friends) because Saint Paul declared a Snow Emergency.
For out of town people, a "Snow Emergency" isn't really an emergency as in "OH GOD EVERYTHING IS SHUT DOWN," but more, "Hey, Saint Paulies, time to move your car to one side of the street or the other so that the plows can come through!" It's also the day when snow emergency workers, like ticketers, go to work.
You may recall from previous episodes that last snow season (2024-March 2025), I worked as what Saint Paul Public Works colloquially referred to as "taggers." Our official title might have been "ticketers?" But, our job was to drive around the city and write out parking violation tickets, get cars towed, etc., so that the plows could come through and do their thing.
I am hired for the snow season (2025-26), however the job has changed. We are now "runners" and will be no longer writing tickets. That job is now in the hands of retired and reserve police officers. What does a runner do, you ask? Let me describe it and you can tell me if you think this job will be any fun. A runner will ride along with a police officer, brush the snow from license plates, and stick tickets in windows.
Yep.
There is a reason they did not interview me for this job, nor ask for a resume.
However, it feels like a job that really doesn't need to exist, doesn't it?
The saddest part is that I LOVED being a tagger. It's sad because everything I previously loved about that job, the police officers now do. I believe I wrote about this at length before, but basically the things I used to love about the job are all very silly. No one likes handing out parking tickets. However, there were some "fun" things that absolutely played into that part of every kid who used to make siren noises and run around pretending to be a cop. (And yeah, ACAB, but when I did this, I was 5 okay??) Like, in the old job we used to get to use the radio to call in vehicles in need of towing, etc, and we got to use a code that included our temporary badge number. RADIOS, y'all. They're just fun. Because you get to say, "Over." Or in our case, "Clear." Once trained, we got to go out, alone, in company car with heated seats and (sometimes!) heated steering wheels. We got to put on the flashing lights. We got to wear a safety vest. We got to learn the somewhat arcane process of handwriting tickets in those old booklets you sometimes see if you watch 1970s cop shows. DUMB STUFF. But, like, it made the job tolerable, you know?
But the fun part was never, ever: go out in the cold and stick the ticket on the windshield.
Is the pay good? I mean, it's OKAY. But the shifts are TEN HOURS. It's never less than that.
Also, speaking of ACAB? I'm not particularly thrilled at the idea of spending ten hours in a squad with a cop. What are we even going to talk about? The last ICE protest I went to? Because "say, were you there?" could get pretty awkward, pretty quickly.
By chance, I had to turn down this snow emergency. As noted, Mason has his big test tomorrow and I need to be available to drive him out to the test facility. I do not try to work the late shift because I'm pretty sure Saint Paul would not pay me for sleeping in the squad car, and I can not do 8pm to 5 am. I'm too old for that shift. Luckily, there's usually also a day shift.
I'll let you know what it's like when I finally do one, though. Maybe I'll be surprised and there will still be awesome things.
Finished Saving Suzy Sweetchild, which has our protag not only dealing with the usual movie hassle but being called in to deal with the papers of a suddenly deceased in possibly suspicious circumstances academic, as well as (with the usual cohorts) trying to work out what exactly the game is with the apparent kidnapping for ransom of child star, who is beginning to age out of cuteness. We observe that the classic sleuths may sometimes have had two mysteries on their hands but very seldom had to multitask like this.
Some while ago I read an essay by Ursula Le Guin on the novels of Kent Haruf: I fairly recently picked up Our Souls at Night (2015), which is more or less novella length, as a Kobo deal, and it was well-written, and unusual if very low-key, and I daresay I might venture on more Haruf but am in no great rush to do so.
Then on to Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd (1953) - perhaps not quite as good as the earlier entries in the series - some of it felt a bit info-dumpy - Lanny and his friends who are promoting peace face the problem of Soviet Stalinist Communism in the Cold War era. I can't help contemplating them and thinking that they are probably going to be sitting targets for HUAC in a few years' time, because they are coming at the issue from a democratic socialist perspective and I suspect their Peace Program is going to be considered deeply sus by McCarthyism. Also, Lanny jnr is going to be of draft age come the 1960s....
On the go
To lighten the mood, Alexis Hall, Audrey Lane Stirs the Pot (Winner Bakes All #3) arrived yesterday.
Up next
The new (double-issue) Literary Review
Also (what was in the straying parcel last week) Dickon Edwards (whom some of you may remember from LJ days?) Diary at the Centre of the Earth: Vol. 1.
By the time today ends I will have shoveled our driveway and ways at least four times over the course of two days. We're finally getting a new garage door and opener, having needed one for several years. We had to wait for a non-standard-sized door to be ordered[^2], then once it arrived, we scheduled the installation for yesterday. Then, the night of the day before yesterday, it started snowing.
Yesterday morning, I called the garage door company to see if they would need to reschedule because of the weather. The woman I spoke to sounded almost amused by the idea. Since then, I have shoveled:
Yesterday morning, so I could get our vehicles out and the technician could get his truck to the garage.
Yesterday evening, so the technician could get his truck out of the driveway and I could get our vehicles back in.
Early this morning, so I could get our van out and go to the doctor. This included shoveling the huge piles that the snow plows had deposited at the end of the driveway.
Later this morning, when I got back from the doctor, I had to shovel the rest of the driveway so we can play vehicle Tetris[^3] and the technician can finish the garage door.
It's currently snowing, but not as hard as yesterday, so I may or may not have to shovel again when the technician has to leave this evening. Plus, I'll have to shovel the end of the driveway again when the city plows the sidewalks, which may or may not happen today. So I guess this winter's definitely giving me my exercise!
[^1] If you recognized the musical reference in the title, I'd like to offer my sincere apologies. If you didn't, please don't go looking for it — I doubt you need an earworm, and I'd prefer that you not think ill of me.
[^2] Because of course our house required a non-standard-sized door.
[^3] Right now we're forbidden to park on the street, so that the plows can run. When the technician gets here, A. and I will have to back our vehicles out of the driveway, then he'll back his truck up the driveway to the garage, then we'll pull back into the driveway. Then we'll have to do the whole thing in reverse when he leaves.
I spent 2023-4 (I chunk time in
academic years) trying to figure out what weird fiction was. For those of you
with access to journals that normally publish articles on Middle English
poetry, I can direct you to one result of it: ‘Would’st
thou be in a Dream, and yet not sleep?’: Piers Plowman, Gormenghast, and the World of Weird Fiction,
The
Yearbook of Langland Studies, Volume
38, Issue 1, Jan 2024, p. 123 - 165. Weird venue
for a manifesto, you say. Yeah. I’ve
come to the conclusion that the weird often combines technicality, one way of
coping with the unknown, with other, more fabulist, methods. Often the weirdest
stuff ends up directed to niche audiences. What is it that M JohnHarrison said in Wish I Was Here — good
luck with trying to be weird, see you at the ceremony?
In 2024-5, the process
was still going on in another way: basically, I was just sitting around with
the idea in my head and seeing what I was attracted to. A bit like dowsing. A
new book by Helen Marshall is always an event in weirdness, so if you haven’t already, take a look at The Lady, The Tiger and the
Girl Who Loved Death. Someone just directed my attention to Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker, which I had somehow missed
entirely; I haven’t
read it yet but it is number one on my holiday list. It sounds like a
posthumous work of A.S. Byatt, like he had a wicked months-long séance
while writing; we shall see. I have hopes. I was also lucky enough to be a beta
reader of the amazing Pam Mordecai’s
first collection of ghost — duppy, as she says — stories, Two Days in Mayaro,
which comes out next year with Goose Lane Press. Order it now!
So much for contemporary works such
as you usually see on year-end lists. I’ve spent much of the rest of the year reading Joseph
Conrad. Or, to be perfectly honest, listening to it, as read by the Australian
Peter Dann for Librivox. He’s
an excellent reader of Conrad, proof that you can find absolute gems on
Librivox, despite what audiobook snobs say. Librivox is one of those things
that give me hope that regular humans are still reading, sharing books aloud.
Speaking of generally vital crowdsourcing, this was also the year in which I
started giving Wikipedia a monthly donation. I’ve always used it a lot but it was crucial to a book I
wrote this year. It was time, and the evil stupidities marshaling themselves
against it need combating.
But. Moving on. Conrad. Weird, eh? Why read Conrad
in this day and age? Inexcusable old white guy? Well, it’s because, in my mind, Conrad is a weird writer. He’s always been an odd fit in the canon: a Pole who writes in
English, a man whose books are set everywhere other than Europe in a
Eurocentric tradition. A man on his second career. A modernist who grew up
reading patriotic Polish romances. I think it’s his extreme psychologism that gives him away. It’s like his characters are scarcely on Earth at all, despite
all the circumstantial detail; they’re
so deep in their own heads. Most of all, what makes me feel a kinship in
weirdness with Conrad is the extent to which his characters remain complete
mysteries to themselves. There’s
a lot of willful blindness about, but even more sheer unknowability. People
experientially contending with the limits of knowledge is the heart of weird
fiction to me, individuals just being thrown back into a state of dogged, often
confused, will. His protagonists do it all the time. Their heads are chock-a-block with knowledge, but it almost never helps them: it’s the wrong knowledge at the wrong time, or the right
knowledge rendered suddenly inaccessible by a panic attack, or huge amounts of
distracting knowledge that won’t
help you at the moment, and so on. People think they’re doing one thing, but they’re doing another. Ironic but weirdly attached narrators see
some of it, cranky or disaffected readers see more, but nobody ever sees it
all. Never a full revelation or resolution.
Conrad stories just sort of stop
with a bit of a sputter. Language frequently outruns itself, not lost in its
own convolutions like Henry James, but as if it’s just dropping a pin in meaning and rushing along before
it all gets away. There are actual grammar fails and a feeling of
precariousness that you just don’t
get with Virginia Woolf, say. There’s
a wonky, struggly weirdness to Joseph Conrad altogether. I really identify with
it. I expect the comparison would horrify him, but to me it all reads a lot
like Mervyn Peake. Gormenghast on the South Seas?Hearing it told in the
dispassionate voice of a middle-aged Australian — Peter Dann — is also strangely suitable. The last thing you’d want for Conrad is RP. I don’t think he ever even really aspired to be an “honorary Englishman” like Tom
Stoppard. He wanted to make a living. Dann’s Melbourne accent keeps things de-centred, antipodean;
Australia’s
a lot closer to Malaysia than London. Anyway, it works for me. If you’re prepared to look at weirdness in this way, it might work
for you, too. It’s
all on YouTube. Ramp up your ad blocker, and you’ll be okay.
Best
wishes to all in 2026 amid the global storm.
Sacraments for the Unfit, which Aqueduct released in 2023, isSarah Tolmie’s sixth book with Aqueduct Press. Others include The Stone
Boatmen, nominated for the Crawford Award in 2015, and The Little Animals,
winner of the Special Citation at the Philip K Dick Awards in 2020. In addition
to publishing short fiction, novellas and novels with Aqueduct, she has
released two novellas with Tor.com, The Fourth
Island and All the Horses of Iceland; the latter was listed as one
of the top fantasy books of 2022 by The New York Times. She has also written
three volumes of poetry for McGill-Queen’s University Press; the second one, The
Art of Dying, was a finalist for the 2019 Griffin Prize for Poetry. In her
other life, she is a Professor of English at the University of Waterloo. Her
website is sarahtolmie.ca.
The stories in Black Hole Heart refuse to be labeled. They burst from the confines of the page, swirling and switching genre gears, leaving the reader wondering what’s coming next. In these pages, one finds old Russian folk tales, golems, plotting cats, children old beyond their years, generation ships, and more. Teryna balances stories about inner lives and outer space with a deftness that explains why every one of these stories has found a home in a prestigious magazine or anthology: Strange Horizons, Apex, Samovar, Future Science Fiction Digest, Reactor, Asimov’s, Galaxy’s Edge, Podcastle, F&SF, and The Best of World SF 2. Translated by Alex Shvartsman with the kind of care and dedication that allows the stories to blossom and live in our minds long after they’re read, these glimpses of sometimes-dark, sometimes-hilarious worlds solidify Teryna’s place on the global speculative fiction scene. [1]
A fascinating and unique aspect of this collection is its experimentation with language. In “Ultilted” and “The Farctory,” Teryna and Shvartsman play around with spelling in order to create for the reader that unsettled, unbalanced feeling that the story itself will unfold. In the former, a young boy who discovers a music box that can take away the pain of his beloved grandmother’s passing finds people whom he can see are also in pain. Writing an untitled “contract” that is simply a rambling description of his own life, he finds a woman who’s contemplating suicide and gets her to sign it. What follows is a nighttime adventure through the city as the boy has this woman help him find the music box—and in so doing, regain his own sadness about his grandmother (which he realizes he wants back) while taking away the pain his new friend has been struggling with. “The Farctory,” too, relies on creative spelling to underscore the fact that the “color factory” the protagonist is trying to enter—in order to find the people who have disappeared from the city—is not what it seems. Indeed, it is a funhouse-mirror place where dimensions collapse upon themselves and colors explode, shadows walk around without substance, and time ceases to mean what it should. As Shvartsman himself has said on his website about the story, one could “describe it as an M. C. Escher painting in a written form.”
A few of these pieces evoke a sombre darkness, within which protagonists struggle against various horrors. In “Morpheus,” a man who has struggled all his life to keep a dream monster at bay realizes that it has never lessened in its power, as it has killed a classmate and an ex-girlfriend of his while he dreams. Despite sleeping pills and willpower, the monster has tried to control his host—but the host intends to fight back. As Teryna explained in an interview with Samovar (which published the story in 2019), “Morpheus” is “an attempt to poke at the inner world of that unpleasant fellow [“an emissary of evil”] and to understand how he became who he is.” It is also “an attempt to catch a dream by its tail.”
The horror evoked by evil is powerfully described in “No One Ever Leaves Port Henri,” where a Caribbean island is terrorized by its king, who has dispensed with the usual procedures for succession and merely picks a new host body for his soul each time he needs a change. A criminal and renegade named Joe Fellow, who didn’t expect to fall in love and have a son on this island—to which he escaped after breaking out of prison—learns that this same son has also been chosen to be the next King Henri. Despite Joe’s best laid plans, the current Henri, living in the body of a sickly boy, captures his wife and son (who were trying to leave the island) and tells Joe that he intends to inhabit him first and then his child. The strange power to compel people to do his bidding makes Henri especially terrifying, but he doesn’t count on the desperation of his wife/daughter and her plans for ending the nightmare on the island.
The majority of these stories, though dark at times, are genre-bending explorations of how protagonists deal with unusual and unexpected situations. Five people stranded in a massive storm in the Arctic Circle swap folk tales in “Songs of the Snow Whale,” each storyteller bringing to the group their own private sorrows and struggles, in the process forming a group dynamic that one could say is itself a kind of creation. Similarly written like a fairy tale, “Lajos and His Bees” imagines a man who has left his village to live in the mountains and has either discovered intelligent bees or has trained them to take various forms (I couldn’t help but think about Ernst Jünger’s 1957 science fiction novel The Glass Bees). The tragedy that results when he tries to settle down with a wife solidifies his reputation among the villagers as a legend, despite their fear and suspicion of him. This kind of uneasy admiration and fear is also built into “The Tin Pilot,” a story about golem war heroes who are first welcomed back from battle by the humans they saved but then seen as potential violent criminals who must be killed. The narrator goes through a complicated process of self-understanding, realizing that his own memories might be planted and he himself might be one of the golems targeted for elimination.
Teryna’s science fiction stories also explore the conflict between the individual and the group. A teenager living on a generation ship, TheErrata, is headed away from a devastated Earth and learns a lesson about the lengths some people will go in order to secure scarce resources for themselves. In “The Jellyfish,” a girl who has sold her body and mind to a social media company tries to escape after finding that she can’t get the numbers of clicks and likes she thought she could, thus trapping her in a kind of subterranean holding cell from which she will likely not escape. Thankfully, though, she has one person who has been looking out for her. “Black Hole Heart,” though not necessarily science fiction, asks us to consider diverging timelines that branch off from one single action. One thinks, after reading this story, about the potential for alternate universes.
One couldn’t end this review without a nod to the deeply humorous “Copy Cat,” in which a highly intelligent feline (“straight off the pages of Pushin or Bulgakov”) finds a way to string together reels of tape to produce recordings of his now-deceased owner saying what he, the cat, wants other humans to hear so that the cat can continue living in the apartment. (The erstwhile owner used to be a radio announcer, so there are a lot of tapes.) Somehow, the cat arranges for his owner’s funeral and maintains the apartment, scaring off anyone who tries to investigate where the old lady has gone. Always resourceful, this cat who “isn’t interested in a life of action and adventure” listens to the record player at night, his owner’s voice floating through the apartment.
A heady mix of genres, ideas, and worlds, Black Hole Heart will make you want to seek out every story Teryna has written and look out for whatever comes next.
Endnotes
[1] “The Chartreuse Sky” was written with Alexander Bachilo. “Madame Félidé Elopes” was translated by Anatoly Belilovsky. [return]
(1) HERE’S MY NUMBER AND A DIME. The New York Times know what happens “When the Phone Number in That TV Show Actually Connects Somewhere”. (Behind a paywall.) In the final season of the Netflix hit “Stranger Things,” which dropped … Continue reading →
Chris Barkley’s 2023 Hugo Award trophy was delivered today by UPS. Chris says the Hugo trophy is in “Pristine!” condition. Thus ends Barkley’s two-year wait to get the Best Fanwriter trophy (or else a replacement) he won at the Chengdu … Continue reading →
1. A patch with just the text "Tablet XII is Canon" 2. A patch with this text and the shape of the broken tablet above or below it 3. A patch that's in the shape of the broken tablet with the text written on the tablet?
Font would be vaguely cuneiform-y but legible.
For aesthetics, so far as I can tell with very sketchy research the best Tablet XII fragment is shaped kind of like this:
Our annual Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening series will begin tomorrow. It's been a difficult year for many of us. For me personally, although I didn't read less this year, I turned to many more rereads than in past years--including not only comfort reads but also a couple of door-stopper classics in translation that I last read many decades ago. War and Peace, which I hadn't read since my early adolescence, was astonishingly familiar to me (we're talking memories that are more than half a century old, here). Doctor Faustus, which I'd last read in the late 1980s, was apparently much less memorable. In my earlier readings I hadn't appreciated the attention their authors lavished on walk-on characters on the one hand, and the sharpness of the novels' political and social criticism on the other hand. Most striking, though, was how relevant I found them. What I didn't remember and couldn't have appreciated at age 12 was Tolstoy's scathing critique of the Great Man Theory of History, which I myself revolted against as a graduate student in History in the 1970s. My recent reread made me wish I'd read (or reread) War and Peace when I was a graduate student. Another reread that astonished me with its relevance was Machiavelli's Discourses. In many ways, that essay is more interesting than The Prince. But then if people were more familiar with The Discourses than with the Prince, the adjective Machiavellian would mean something entirely different than it does now.
While 2025 has been a difficult year, it has also been a year of building resistance, both in individuals and in grassroots communities. And so, for many individuals, reading, viewing, and listening pleasures this year have been in pursuit of sustenance as well as escape. I've been saying for years that what we most lack in the US is political imagination. I've long been hoping this will change; I'd like to think that the apparent chaos of 2025 and the irrevocable rupture of "what is" may at last have stimulated the expansion of our collective political imagination. Various old guards may be longing for a return to what was, but a good many of us know that not only is that impossible, it is also actually undesirable.
The
Pleasures series always includes
more than the pleasures offered by books, although books are the general
focus of this blog. In past years the series
has shown that reading, viewing, and listening pleasures vary widely. And that
is what has made me keep this series going. I love the variety of tastes
and
practices it repeatedly reveals. This year's iteration will include
posts by Andrea Hairston, Christopher Brown, Nisi Shawl, Sarah Tolmie, Eleanor Arnason, and others.
I
hope you'll enjoy reading
the pieces in this year's series as much as I do and that they'll swell
the list of titles you want to read, view, and listen to yourself. We
all know that the volume of books
published is so tremendous that that really wonderful work
often slips below one's personal radar.
A personal story to begin: I was a film critic at the Fresno Bee newspaper when Strictly Ballroom came out in 1992. My review of it was an unqualified rave, and I said something along the line that people who loved old-fashioned movie musicals should go out of their way to see it. Then, on opening day, I took my friend Kristin to see the film at a matinee showing at the Fig Garden theater, which was at the time the “high-toned” theater in town.
I didn’t expect there to be much of an audience for a small Australian film about ballroom dancing on a Friday afternoon, but the theater was packed, and mostly with older folks. Kristin and I took our seats and as we did so an older gentleman in the row in front of us, who I assure you did not know I was there, turned to his seatmate and said, “If John Scalzi is wasting my time I am going to find him and kick his ass.”
That’s when I knew that this entire audience was there because I, as the local film critic, has promised them a good old-fashioned time at the movies. And if they didn’t like it, and found out I was there, there was going to an actual geriatric riot as they tore my body apart, slowly, and with considerable effort, limb from limb.
Reader, my ass was not kicked.
And this is because, while Strictly Ballroom is, actually, not at all an old-fashioned movie musical, the vibe, the feel, the delight and, yes, the corniness of an old-fashioned musical is indeed there — that deliriously heightened space where nothing is quite real but everything feels possible, including the happy ending that’s just too perfect, and you know it, and you don’t care, because you’ve been there for the whole ride and that’s just where it had to go, and you’re glad it did. That’s what Strictly Ballroom nails, just like the musical extravaganzas of old. All it’s missing is the Technicolor.
Plus! It was the feature film debut of Baz Luhrmann, the Australian filmmaker who has gone on to give the world some of the most movies of the last 30 years, including Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge! and The Great Gatsby. Everything that made those movies the gonzo experiences they were is here, in primordial, smaller, and much less expensive form. Luhrmann could not yet afford more here. But he was absolutely going to give the most with what he had, which was three million dollars, Australian.
And also, a humdinger of a story about Australia’s delightfully weird ballroom dancing subculture, where men dress in tuxes with numbers attached to them, swinging around women wearing dresses that look like they skinned a Muppet and added sequins. The opening sequence, filmed in documentary style, introduces us to Scott Hastings (Paul Mercurio), a ballroom dancer whose path to the top of the field is all but assured — until, that is, Scott does the unthinkable: He starts improvising, and adding… new steps!
Which is just not done, ballroom dancing has standards, after all. Scott’s act of insurrection costs him, to the consternation of those around him, including his mother. But Scott is a rebel! He doesn’t care! He wants to dance his new steps!
No one believes in Scott and his new steps except for Fran (Tara Morice), a gawky beginner to the ballroom dancing scene, yes, but one who has some moves of her own from outside the ballroom world. Scott is intrigued, first by the steps and then for other reasons. Naturally Scott and Fran will be beset on all sides by disapproval of parents, institutions, the expectations of others, and ultimately, their own selves. Will they live a life in fear? Or will they dance their way to that promised happy ending?
It’s not even a little bit of a spoiler to say that there will be a happy ending — this movie was not made in the early 70s, after all, where the rebellion against cinematic norms would dictate that everyone in the film would have to be hit by a train or something. The interest of the film is how it gets to the happy ending. The answer is, with a lot of comedy, a lot of dancing and a couple of not-surprising-in-retrospect twists that are, the first time you see them, nevertheless a bit of a surprise. Scott is a classic pretty boy dancing rebel, Fran is a classic ugly duckling, and the two of them ultimately have their big dancing scene that we’ve been waiting for the whole film, which totally feels earned, even if it’s all a little ridiculous, in a good way.
And to be clear it really is all ridiculous, in a good way. Baz Luhrmann, who also co-wrote the movie (based on a play he put together, which in itself was based on his own experiences in the ballroom dancing scene) is not here for your cynicism or your snobbery. He knows the ballroom dancing world is something that can look silly and even foolish from the outside, but if you’ve decided to put yourself on the outside, that’s a you problem, now, isn’t it? It’s clear Luhrmann has deep affection for the scene and the people who are in it, and if the characters in the movie are a little too into it all, wrapping themselves up in it to the exclusion of much else — well, what are your passions? What weird little insular groups do you belong to? Speaking as someone who is extremely deep into the world of science fiction, and its conventions and its award dramas, which are in their way no less ridiculous (and also has had its own movies parodying its scene, more than one, even), not only am I not going to cast the first stone, I am going to claim a kinship. We are all a part of a ridiculous scene, and if we are not, we’re probably really boring.
I love that Baz Luhrmann loves ballroom dancing here, and lets us see his affection with an unwinking eye. I love that Scott is serious about his new steps as a way to crack open the moribund field he loves. I love that Fran unreservedly wants to be part of Scott’s revolution. I love that, in this small, bounded nutshell of a universe, this is all life-and-death stuff. I love that we see it all portrayed with a light touch, great comedy, and some genuinely fantastic dance scenes.
In fact, I will say this: Strictly Ballroom is, in its way, an absolutely perfect movie. Is it a great movie? Is it an important movie? Is it an influential movie? Honestly requires me to say “no” in all those cases. But those are not the same things! For what Strictly Ballroom is, it is genuinely difficult for me to imagine how any of it could have been done a single jot better. Everything about it works as it should, and does what it is meant to do. Everyone in the cast is delightful being the characters they are. In a movie about ballroom dancing, there isn’t a single step out of place, even the steps that are out of place, because they are meant to be where they are.
How many movies can you say that about? That you look at them and say, “yes, you one hundred percent did the thing you set out to do”? There are damned few, in any era. There is a reason this film received not one but two fifteen-minute standing ovations at the Cannes Film Festival, and won a bunch of awards around the world, and still holds up thirty-some-odd years after it was released. It’s because it’s a perfect little jolt of joy.
As a coda, another personal story: A few years ago I was in Melbourne for a science fiction convention, and as I was in my taxi from the airport, we passed a theater showing Strictly Ballroom, the musical. Well, I knew what I was going to do with my evening; I went and bought one of the few seats remaining (in the balcony! Center!) and enjoyed the hell out of the theatrical version, nearly as much as the cinematic version. Then, walking back to my hotel, I tore a muscle in my leg stepping off a curb and had to go to a hospital to have it dealt with.
It’s possible if I had not gone to see Strictly Ballroom that night, I wouldn’t have torn my muscle. But I did, and I don’t regret it. It was worth it.
According to a local anthropologist in Broome, the photos were taken by a nurse who was volunteering at the La Grange mission. In his opinion, the images are extraordinary — one of the rare moments of "first contact" on the Australian continent to be captured on camera. The originals were donated to a Catholic Church archive, which is not accessible to the public. But it turns out there are copies. On a dusty CD buried in the boxes of an elderly author.
I have a lot of questions here about disinterring the original - I have very cynical thoughts about the church 'archive', as probably a storeroom in a basement somewhere - and in general things which are literally hidden in the (unprocessed, uncared for) archives of some institution.
Charlie Wren hasn’t murdered anyone; in fact, he hasn’t done anything. This is the problem around which Kathleen Jennings’s Honeyeater revolves. All his life, Charlie has been plagued by disappearances among those in his social circles: first his childhood best friend, then, in the years since, countless housemates, acquaintances, and more. Now that another acquaintance, Alli, has gone missing, the police are, unsurprisingly, pretty interested in Charlie’s connection to her. Gowburgh, Australia, is a small city, and Bellworth a small suburb, so his slew of associations with the lost haven’t gone unnoticed—even if the incursions of strange, unnatural horrors (hungry plants, walking constructs) have done.
Charlie’s sister is a councilwoman, and he is in her debt for keeping him out of trouble to date. In service to that debt, and rather than leaving town as he has long dreamed of doing, he moves into their recently deceased aunt’s house, which is full of memories of his childhood, to try to clear out the detritus of her long, long life. He tells himself that maybe all those missing friends and loved ones have all just left town. Maybe they’ve gone somewhere better, as he longs to do.
And so he just sort of … exists. In this town he wants to leave, in a house he never wanted to return to, in a life in which he is, at best, a passive participant. And this is not a story of him being broken out of that inactive rut, finding his drive and solving a great problem; Jennings is far more interesting in his predicament, which is both one of the great achievements of the story, and its one small weakness.
Against Charlie’s passivity come two opposing forces. First there’s Grace, who drags herself out of the creek seeking the family Wren but absent her memories or reasons for this urge. She’s not quite human, and this seems to be getting worse, but she desperately wants to live despite the roses that threaten to burst from beneath her eye and skin. Charlie wants, in his somewhat ineffectual way, to help her, but she resents him deeply for the ease with which he grasps the thing she most deeply craves.
There is also a young girl, never named as anything more than “the taxi driver’s daughter,” who initially has nothing pulling her into the Wren’s yard but her curiosity, some sort of undefined relationship with the Wrens’ deceased aunt, and a half-completed art project. Over the course of the story, however, her curiosity becomes a significant motive force, and her presence a critical factor for change to occur for the characters and for Bellworth itself. Her relationship with the place, with the power it seems to have, and with her own identity is fundamentally different from those of the adults around her.
And on yet a third side sits Charlie’s sister Cora. She seems everything he isn’t—a go-getter and a successful councilwoman, a big name in the town—but over the course of the narrative it becomes clear that she is just as rooted in place as Charlie is, if in a different way. They are both enclosed by their being Wrens, a narrative that is only ever reiterated and reinforced by them, never by the other characters. Yes, Grace is seeking them, but she never holds their Wren-ness up as important or defining in the way both the siblings do, each treating it as if it is somehow the whole of their self, the prophetic force that has defined their lives for good or for ill.
The bulk of the story, though, is a tension that pulls between Charlie and Grace. As they try to solve the mystery of her appearance and existence, they cannot quite trust one another to be on the same side, or to be exactly who they say they are, and are in equal parts confused and aggravated by their dissimilar approaches to problems. Their dynamic defies a lot of conventional labelling—not friends, not lovers, not rivals, but clearly bound together by some uneasy thread of something inherent to Bellworth. As they and an increasing cast around them are beset with strange events, odd creatures, and an ugly undercurrent of something growing, they must work together, to an extent, but never quite fill out the well-worn shape of the typical “unlikely allies.” While never hostile, they are too fundamentally opposed in their very natures to be able to align in any way that serves either of their best interests. And so much of the plot isn’t in the happening, in the experience of the supernatural and the dangerous, but instead in conversations between them that circle round and round, trying to find a way for these incompatible people and approaches to reach something even approaching functionality and forward motion.
However, all of this comes at a price for the novel: The absence of trust between them, when paired with Charlie’s passivity, leaves a fair section of the plot in the middle of the book soggy and slow, weighted down by no one being in a position to do anything themselves, each unwilling to take the risk of giving information to any of the people around them. The characters spend some pages going back and forth, once again stuck in the sort of rut that Charlie has been living in his whole life, constantly worrying away at the same problems. In itself, this isn’t really an issue—rather, it writes large the exact problem that forms the core of the story and of Charlie himself. But centring that Sisyphean futility does make the story lag. It all goes on just that little bit too long, undercutting what otherwise feels like such a tightly crafted novel. The circling the characters are doing simply tips over at some point into no longer feeling productive: not feeding into their characterisation, not adding to the sense of looming creep or giving any more texture or nuance to the feelings of powerlessness. Just… reiterating.
But the novel isn’t fatally flawed by these choices. Indeed, by the time the conclusion of the story comes around, this feeling of circularity feels like only a pause in the otherwise tight flow of the narrative. It is a moment of doubt in the experience of this novel, where the whole edifice feels as though it teeters just a little on its grand foundation of inaction; but it rights itself so quickly that it would be easy to doubt that ever happened at all. And that ending-rightness almost seems to cast a new light on something that does feel like a problem, but with the hindsight of the rest of the book could be something else entirely.
Furthermore, outside of this niggle, there is a lot else to love. The very first, last, and constant impression Jennings gives in this book is one of loving attention on prose, which is here predominantly bent towards crafting a verdant, vegetal, and slightly putrescent atmosphere. She lingers on scents—flowering gum, jacaranda, damp vegetation—and on animals. The pages are full of the movements of birds and the shifting of branches, the flora and fauna consistently identified to provide a backdrop of heightened normality against which the unidentified forces pressing upon the story are more clearly visible. Both Charlie Wren and the narration recognise and can name the things around this small world: The neighbours, the places, the streets, and the houses are all name-checked over and over again, without explanatory context even as a nod to a reader unfamiliar with this invented city—and so those few things which lack this Linnean level of classificability stand out at the forefront. After all, when the supernatural appears directly on the page, it still cannot be explained: An unfinished scarecrow-like model may move of its own will, but there’s no sense of specific process underlying it. The novel’s cataloguing of the natural, then, pins specificity to the page, and helps emphasise the discomfort engendered by the plot’s unknowable actors and unnatural forces.
While the rise in turn of whatever kind of being Grace might be, the strange invisible presences, and the walking creations all fall very much under this uncanny banner, it is a more mundane figure that stands out the most: the taxi driver’s daughter.
This brings me to the power of names and knowability in this novel. On the one side of the equation, we have Charlie Wren, his sister Cora, and their long familial history with Gowburgh and Bellworth. The family have been in the area for as long as it has been Bellworth, so they have always claimed. These two specifically have been here all their lives, and Charlie finds it impossible to leave a place where he is a known factor, as does his sister. As I’ve already suggested, they are both, in their very different ways, stagnated by their being known factors, and specifically by that Wren name: As they, and especially Cora, keep saying, they’re Wrens, as if that means something grander, more inevitable and fundamental than just a family association. On the other end of the novel’s naming spectrum there’s the taxi driver’s daughter who is never named at all. Of all of the characters in the book, it is she and Grace—who pulls herself out of the creek without an understanding of her being or identity, and names herself—who are most able to enact change and movement. This stands in stark contrast to Charlie’s disenfranchised passivity and Cora’s resolute unchangeability.
But it’s never quite that simple, because the power splits again—there is something potent in the Wren-ness after all, but so, too, in the taxi driver’s daughter’s relentless yearning to stay in this place and to become fixed and known. The problem isn’t classification, then, but stagnation, looping right back to the core conflict of action/inaction around which the story turns.
Honeyeater is a book whose initial power is in its atmosphere—that crafted, lush prose which immerses and even overwhelms the reader in a sense of this particular place—but whose lingering impression is much deeper. It is not the rotting smell of the creek that sits in my memory, but instead the seductive inertia of Charlie’s life, his inability to break out of an easy pattern that defines and confines him, and how the seeming successful career of his sister can represent and conceal just as much of the same problems. The novel’s overarching problem, and its character-level ones, are both tied into this idea of stagnation, of being stuck in a place and coming to believe in how the world defines you—of being limited by your definition of yourself, and by putting too great a stock in some idea of legacy and permanence of place. This is especially true somewhere like Australia—and where any supposed permanence is a thin veneer over the truth of all the characters’ existence in this world, and the shape it takes.
This seems like a considered contrast with the novel’s natural elements: This world, this city, and the idea of a family line being in a place “forever” sits in opposition to the natural world that predated them, and which reminds the reader (and indeed, at several points, some of the characters) that their presence here is not so permanent as they would like to claim. There is a very obvious hole in how the story talks about that permanence: Any time Cora talks about the family’s heritage being rooted all the way in “the beginning,” either Charlie or the narration are quick to highlight that such permanence only begins at the foundation of the town as it is now. When, towards the end of the story, that heritage becomes linked with a violence that must consume, the story seems to me to gesture towards the colonial foundation at the root of the town. The emphasis both siblings place on their ancestry and their roles as fixtures of this place becomes all the darker, even if the nature of their inheritance is never fully named on the page.
Is it a weakness, though, to be so coy about one of the story’s focal points? Perhaps. But the more I consider Honeyeater, especially within the wider context of speculative literature being published and hyped at the moment, the more I wonder if that subtlety is … if not a benefit, then distinctly the lesser evil, and something of a contrast. So many of the hyped new releases feel desperate to explain their premises and their themes in clear, distinct, emphatically direct text, just in case the reader might miss it. In Honeyeater, Jennings is absolutely not following that approach. That the ideal might sit between what she’s given us and what is the seemingly dominant mode does not entirely dispel the relief I felt while having to grapple a little more with a text, and with having to wonder if the assumptions I made while reading did harmonise with what the author was giving me. That need to engage my brain, to draw those lines between description, character, and theme, felt like a more productive one than not to be trusted to find them at all.
There is, though, a line between this novel’s crafting first of its atmosphere then of its descriptive, sensory elements, and finally the direction of its themes. This interplay is why this is such an accomplished novel, in so many ways. Jennings steps beyond the vivid landscapes and unease of her previous novel, Flyaway (2020), and into something more singular. Every piece of it could be tied into its wider allusions, if the reader chooses to take the implications being laid down. For all the lack of direct pronouncement, that gesture towards colonialism, once considered, does feel rooted in the same soil that grows the story’s other interests: people and their relationships, with others and the world, the legacy of one’s own choices, and the heritage that forms the person. Every part has a function or a connection to another part of the story, and it feels so overwhelmingly considered that the initial hit of artful lightness it provides is all the more impressive. It is gothic all the way down to its vegetal heart, rooted in its place and deeply thoughtful about the power of that locality. And while it is not without flaw, that those flaws run counter to much of the current dominant mode of didacticism gives them an air of welcome relief. The book may itself be bogged down in the heat and stagnant rot of Gowburgh, but its approach is something of a metaphorical cool breeze.
You'd think we'd get snow, but no. Tomorrow's forecast thus far calls for a "wintery mix". The only wintery mix I want is cocoa and marshmallows, not whatever the hell happens to fall from the sky like soggy doom confetti.
19F, jesus. At least it'll be warmer tomorrow. Warm enough to get a fucking wintery mix instead of snow, which is what we really want.
A depowered witch discovers she is just one zany scheme away from regaining her power... provided her estranged mentor does not intervene. Which of course he will.
The winners of the 2025 Nommo Awards were unveiled at the Opening Ceremony of the Aké Arts and Book Festival in Lagos, on November 20. The awards are given by the African Speculative Fiction Society, composed of professional and semiprofessional African … Continue reading →
So much awful stuff happens to the protagonists in the last third of the show that I often don't make it all the way through. It's worth it, though - my favorite character suddenly gets enough growth to become my favorite character, and the villain dies in a very satisfying way, allowing me to say ( Read more... )
The loud voice is famous to silence, which knew it would inherit the earth before anybody said so.
The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds watching him from the birdhouse.
The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.
The idea you carry close to your bosom is famous to your bosom.
The boot is famous to the earth, more famous than the dress shoe, which is famous only to floors.
The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.
I want to be famous to shuffling men who smile while crossing streets, sticky children in grocery lines, famous as the one who smiled back.
I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do.
(1) MARGRET ATWOOD WAS THE GUEST ON BBC RADIO 4’S “DESERT ISLAND DISCS”. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Desert Island Discs is a long-standing (since 1942) favourite programme in which a guest is invited to be castaway on a … Continue reading →
There have always been “director’s cuts” and “extended cuts” of films, particularly in the era of the DVD and Blu-Ray, when a film’s distributor could slap in a few scenes that were cut out of the theatrical because the movie would be too long, or too laggy, or both, herald it as an “Unrated Director’s Cut” and eke out a few more bucks from the movie’s fans. Most of the time, this additional material did not change the course of the film in any substantive way — even the extended cuts of The Lord of the Rings trilogy mostly only added detail, with only one significant deviation between cuts that I can think of (that being the final disposition of Saruman).
Then there is The Kingdom of Heaven. The changes between the theatrical release, out in May of 2005, and the Director’s Cut, released on DVD in December of that year, are significant enough that in many ways they are different movies. The backstory of the hero is significantly changed, as is his relationship to characters shown early in the film; previously unknown children show up to play significant roles in the plot; and the final disposition of at least one major character in the film is entirely changed. Ridley Scott, who directed the film, called the extended version “the one that should have been released.”
So why wasn’t it? Well, because the extended version was three hours and ten minutes long, and in 2005, really only two filmmakers not relegated to arthouse status could get away with three hour films. One was Peter Jackson, whose non-extended The Return of the King clocked in at three hours and twenty minutes, and the other was Jim Cameron, who spent three hours and fifteen minutes sinking the Titanic. Everyone else, even Ridley Scott, needed their films shorter, preferably not longer than two hours, thirty minutes. The theatrical cut of The Kingdom of Heaven? Two hours, twenty-four minutes. Scott, no stranger to “director’s cuts,” (see the multiple extended versions of Blade Runner that are out in the world), waited for the home video release for the longer cut.
Most cineastes, fans of the film and apparently Ridley Scott himself will tell you that the extended cut of this film is the one to see, but today I am going to file a modified minority report. I think the theatrical release is perfectly good — and indeed in some places better than the extended version — and it’s the version that I end up rewatching, not the lauded longer version.
In both versions of this tale, the following is true: A French blacksmith named Balian (Orlando Bloom, trying to make the transition to serious actor after his franchise hits) is grieving the death of his wife when a noble named Godfrey shows up, declares himself Balian’s father, and bids him join his entourage as they journey to the Holy Land, which is, momentarily at least, between crusades. Balian passes, but then, one significant crime later, he’s on his way.
In the Holy Land, Balian quickly finds favor with the Jerusalem’s Christian king Baldwin, who is managing a tenuous peace with Saladin, his Muslim counterpart; he also quickly befriends Sibylla (Eva Green), Baldwin’s sister. Sibylla’s husband Guy dislikes Balian, which is not great because Baldwin is dying and Guy will be king soon, and when he is king, he’s going to pick a fight with Saladin. Devotees of history will know how this went for him, and it goes similarly in the movie. Suddenly it falls to Balian to defend Jerusalem from Saladin’s forces.
Now, going all the way back to my days as a professional film critic (now — lord — 35 years ago), I’ve always warned people never to confuse cinematic historical dramas with what actually happened in history, even when, as is the case here, an actual historic event (the Siege of Jerusalem) is being portrayed. Given the choice of historical accuracy and engaging drama, filmmakers will go for drama every single time.
This is absolutely the case here; in both versions of The Kingdom of Heaven, the very broad strokes of history are (generally) correct, but almost all the details are fictional as hell. The extended cut does not gain any substantial accuracy for being longer; indeed it takes a couple of opportunities to be even more historically incorrect because it’s interesting for the story. Balian did exist! He did defend Jerusalem! Everything else you should consider as being subject to artistic license.
With that noted, the drama portion is solid — the story of Balian, from humble beginnings to defense of Jerusalem, is engaging, and Orlando Bloom is on point personifying him. 2005 was still an era where people were trying to make Bloom happen as a leading man, a thing that didn’t get much traction outside of him being an elf or a pirate. I don’t think that’s Bloom’s fault, and definitely not here. He’s working as hard as he can to sell it, and he’s holding his own against folks like Liam Neeson, Jeremy Irons, David Thewlis and Edward Norton. If there’s any flaw in the character, it’s one noted by other characters in the film: He’s possibly too good (in a moral sense) for the world he’s in. But that’s the fault of the writers, not Bloom.
Where the film really shines for me, however, is the overall political milieu of the film. Surprise: the Holy Land has been a place of contention for millennia, a fact that (to put it mildly) continues to this day. The Kingdom of Heaven doesn’t shy away from the complexity of having a single place desired and claimed by, and fought over, both the Christians and Muslims. There are lots of places where the film could have easily tipped over into jingoism — this was the early 2000s, when the US’s 9/11 scars were still fresh, and we, a nominally-secular but de facto Christian country, had boots on the ground in Muslim nations — and bluntly it might have been substantially more successful financially if it had been.
Scott and screenwriter William Monaghan didn’t take that route, instead showing (among other things) the Muslim leader Saladin (Ghassan Massoud) as a man of integrity and moral force, keeping the hotheads in his own host in line, and showing respect and even kindness, first to King Baldwin, and then to Balian. The Christians in the film run the gamut, from honorable to despicable, and all of their range is given context in the story. Again, the story should not be seen as accurate history. But as an examination of how the high ideals of religion can run aground in the ambition of base humans, it has some striking moments.
Add to this the fact that Ridley Scott has a knack for visuals that has been near-unparalleled for more than 50 years, and you have a film that is a joy to look at.
To come back to the issue of the theatrical release vs the extended cut, here’s my thought on that: the extended cut is better for understanding the wider story Scott and Monaghan were trying to capture, but the theatrical cut is better paced and presented, and is a more engaging cinematic experience. “More” isn’t always better; often it’s just more. I’ve seen the extended cut and, having seen it and internalized the bits that aren’t in the shorter version, I can keep them in the ledger of my awareness while I’m enjoying the version of the film that actually, you know, moves at a compelling pace.
This is caveated with the acknowledgement that I saw the theatrical version first, liked it perfectly well, and then saw the extended version; it’s possible that if I had seen the extended version first I might prefer it more. But honestly I don’t know if I would have. Bluntly, I want my movies to feel like movies, not like a slightly-compacted miniseries.
That said, both versions are worth seeing, even if only one is going to be on my repeat-viewing list. I appreciate Ridley Scott making a handsome movie about a complicated plot of land, no less so now than in the time the film is set, and not pretending that, either then or now, there is anything easy or simple about the struggles there. I don’t think this film will convert anyone who wants to argue otherwise. But I’m glad Scott made the attempt.
The full list of nominees for the 2026 Golden Globes was announced on December 8. Ther 28 categories for nominations include a new award for Best Podcast. The Golden Globes say it is the first major award show to honor podcasting. The … Continue reading →
The third array of recent standalone tabletop roleplaying games using the Forged in the Dark rules system based on John Harper's Blades in the Dark from One Seven Design Studio.
As with the first two installments, I went to see Wake Up Dead Man on Thanksgiving weekend. It’s taken me till now to find the time to write up a review of it, but not for lack of enthusiasm. On the way out, my friend asked if this was my favorite of the Knives Out films. After taking a moment to reflect, I said yes. Because I really love the first two; but I do think this one’s better. It engages, in a way the other two don’t, with some big questions that the first two films evaded. Wake Up Dead Man still has all the things we love about the Knives Out formula: the metafictional nods to earlier crime fiction, the intricate yet logical and coherent plotting, the calling-out of the evils of our particular contemporary American moment, Benoit Blanc bonding with one of the people caught up in the murder mystery, twists that don’t make you want to kill the author, and the humor. Despite and even because of all the things I’m going to talk about, this is an extremely funny film.
So what’s different about this one? Well, this one takes on some big questions that murder always raises, and which Agatha Christie and friends–that first generation of clue-puzzle mystery writers whose model inspires this franchise–deliberately did not take seriously. Wake Up Dead Man uses the clue puzzle form, in all its ridiculous and creaky glory, to get to the heart of some of the genuinely urgent and important questions we are facing right now–about death, about faith, about community, about justice and mercy and love. Being forced to engage with these questions kicks Benoit Blanc further down the road from being essentially a comic metafictional device, as he is in Knives Out, to acquiring the kind of depth and interiority we normally expect from fully realized characters, as (I would argue) he is by the time we get to the end of this film. In Glass Onion, Johnson used the mystery plot to show us more about Blanc, partly by forcing him to acknowledge his own limitations. Wake Up Dead Man does the same, and it has a transformative effect on Blanc, on the franchise, and maybe a little bit on us.
As with Glass Onion, in this first post I’m going to try to avoid major spoilers. I’ll reblog it later with a discussion of the whole film, for those who’ve already seen it.
The list of mystery novels for the book club includes “Murder at the Vicarage” and “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd”, which call back to how the movie is structured.
Also, the display case reads “l'éveil appel”, which a friend who is studying French spotted as not-quite-grammatical French for “the call of awakening”.
I deeply appreciated what they did with Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I did not appreciate the fake French. I mean sure, they’re trying to get to something that sounds close enough to “Eve’s Apple,” but…what they have there is not a two-word phrase, but two nouns in search of a relationship. But! Who cares!
Saturday brought a lovely surprise: 2 Books, 1 Epic Life—Devouring “The Hild Sequence”—a LitStack Rec. They have a whole list, perfect for gift-buying, because this is a site run as part of Bookshop.org, for and on behalf of booksellers. In other words, it’s all about books that are actually great to read.
You should go read the whole thing for yourself—I mean, just look at this:
The Menu…
Sharon Browning also wrote the LitStack Rec for Slow River—which was a truly wonderful review. (“Slow River is indeed an transcendent work of art. Transcendent, and yet so accessible, so recognizable, so relatable – which only makes it more exceptional. It truly deserves to be read.”)
But if you just can’t be bothered to click through (I get it, I get it—Mondays are hard), here are 3 screenshot highlights:
Screenshot
But you really should go read the recs and buy from delicious books for friends and family. And, y’know, yourself. Because you deserve it, because, y’know, Monday…
Margaret Atwood seems to be claiming some kind of unusual prescience for herself when writing The Handmaid's Tale:
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, Atwood said she believed the plot was “bonkers” when she first developed the concept for the novel because the US was the “democratic ideal” at the time.
Me personally, I can remember that the work reading group discussed it round about the time it first came out - and I remarked that it was getting a lot of credit for ideas which I had been coming across in feminist sff for several years....
I think the idea of a fundamentalist, patriarchal, misogynist backlash was pretty much in people's minds?
I've just checked a few dates.
At least one of the potential futures in Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976).
Margaret O'Donnell's The Beehive (1980) .
Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue (1984) and sequels.
Various short stories.
Various works by Sheri Tepper.
I'm probably missing a lot.
And assorted works in which there was an enclave or resistance cell of women embedded in a masculinist society.
I honestly don't think a nightmare which was swirling around at the time is something that can be claimed as woah, weird, how did I ever come up with that?
I'm a bit beswozzled by the idea that in the early-mid 80s the USA was a shining city on a hill, because I remember reviewing a couple of books on abortion in US post-Roe, and it was a grim story of the erosion of reproductive rights and defensive rearguard actions to protect a legal right which could mean very little in practice once the 1977 Hyde Amendment removed federal funding, and an increasingly aggressive anti-choice movement.
As with the first two installments, I went to see Wake Up Dead Man on Thanksgiving weekend. It’s taken me till now to find the time to write up a review of it, but not for lack of enthusiasm. On the way out, my friend asked if this was my favorite of the Knives Out films. After taking a moment to reflect, I said yes. Because I really love the first two; but I do think this one’s better. Wake Up Dead Man has all the things we love about the Knives Out formula: the metafictional nods to earlier crime fiction, the intricate yet logical and coherent plotting, the calling-out of the evils of our particular contemporary American moment, Benoit Blanc bonding with one of the people caught up in the murder mystery, twists that don’t make you want to kill the author, and the humor. Despite and even because of all the things I’m going to talk about, this is an extremely funny film.
So what’s different about this one? Well, this one takes on some big questions that murder always raises, and which Agatha Christie and friends–that first generation of clue-puzzle mystery writers whose model inspires this franchise–deliberately did not take seriously. Wake Up Dead Man uses the clue puzzle form, in all its ridiculous and creaky glory, to get to the heart of some of the genuinely urgent and important questions we are facing right now–about death, about faith, about community, about justice and mercy and love. Being forced to engage with these questions kicks Benoit Blanc further down the road from being essentially a comic metafictional device, as he is in Knives Out, to acquiring the kind of depth and interiority we normally expect from fully realized characters, as (I would argue) he is by the time we get to the end of this film. In Glass Onion, Johnson used the mystery plot to show us more about Blanc, partly by forcing him to acknowledge his own limitations. Wake Up Dead Man does the same, and it has a transformative effect on Blanc, on the franchise, and maybe a little bit on us.
As with Glass Onion, in this first post I’m going to try to avoid major spoilers. I’ll reblog it later with a discussion of the whole film, for those who’ve already seen it.
As with the first two installments, I went to see Wake Up Dead Man on Thanksgiving weekend. It’s taken me till now to find the time to write up a review of it, but not for lack of enthusiasm. On the way out, my friend asked if this was my favorite of the Knives Out films. After taking a moment to reflect, I said yes. Because I really love the first two; but I do think this one’s better. Wake Up Dead Man has all the things we love about the Knives Out formula: the metafictional nods to earlier crime fiction, the intricate yet logical and coherent plotting, the calling-out of the evils of our particular contemporary American moment, Benoit Blanc bonding with one of the people caught up in the murder mystery, twists that don’t make you want to kill the author, and the humor. Despite and even because of all the things I’m going to talk about, this is an extremely funny film.
So what’s different about this one? Well, this one takes on some big questions that murder always raises, and which Agatha Christie and friends–that first generation of clue-puzzle mystery writers whose model inspires this franchise–deliberately did not take seriously. Wake Up Dead Man uses the clue puzzle form, in all its ridiculous and creaky glory, to get to the heart of some of the genuinely urgent and important questions we are facing right now–about death, about faith, about community, about justice and mercy and love. Being forced to engage with these questions kicks Benoit Blanc further down the road from being essentially a comic metafictional device, as he is in Knives Out, to acquiring the kind of depth and interiority we normally expect from fully realized characters, as (I would argue) he is by the time we get to the end of this film. In Glass Onion, Johnson used the mystery plot to show us more about Blanc, partly by forcing him to acknowledge his own limitations. Wake Up Dead Man does the same, and it has a transformative effect on Blanc, on the franchise, and maybe a little bit on us.
As with Glass Onion, in this first post I’m going to try to avoid major spoilers. I’ll reblog it later with a discussion of the whole film, for those who’ve already seen it.
Benoit’s new murder buddy is Father Jud Duplencity, a young priest who’s been sent to try to revive a dying church in upstate New York. As both he and the priest who sent him there knew he would, Father Jud comes into immediate conflict with Monsignor Jefferson Wickes, the cantankerous ratbastard currently clinging with a death grip to the tiny remnant of his flock. Nine months after Father Jud’s arrival, everyone involved in this town is well aware that Father Jud and Monsignor Wickes are locked in mortal combat–which means that when Monsignor Wickes dies under mysterious and possibly miraculous circumstances during Good Friday services, Father Jud becomes the prime suspect.
Agatha Christie and her colleagues and imitators popularized the clue-puzzle mystery in England during the 1920s, when a population exhausted by the death toll of the First World War and the subsequent influenza epidemic was looking for distractions. The clue-puzzle mystery hit big at the same time as crossword puzzles, and both forms of entertainment do a great job of occupying your mind while you are engaged with them. The difference between a murder mystery and a crossword puzzle, of course, is that murder mysteries are about death. Which is a little weird given that death is exactly what all the people who are consuming them by the ton are trying to forget about. I have my own crackpot theories about why, for people who have been through too much real death, the artificial deaths and investigations engineered in murder mysteries provide a kind of fantasy consolation. Such as: in the world of the murder mystery, the death of one person is a major event that brings the world to a halt, whereas in WWI there were so many people dying every day that nobody had time for that. In the world of the murder mystery the victim is killed by one person who has an intelligible motive, whereas in WWI the victim is killed by a gigantic murder machine which will never be held accountable for the carnage it creates, for reasons that take a half-hour to explain. And so on.
Leaving aside all these unverifiable theories, I do think we can say with some certainty that the murder mystery offered these readers one important thing that no other puzzle did: the diminishment of death’s power over them. When someone dies in an Agatha Christie novel, even in the story world, you don’t see a lot of grief or anguish or strong emotion of any kind. And for the reader, death becomes a game that entertains the mind but does not touch the heart.
As you spend more time with these clue-puzzle novels, however, it gets harder to ignore the fact that the question of who killed the victim and how is perhaps the least profound of death’s mysteries. The Big One, of course, is: what happens afterward? And that’s related to questions like: is there a God? If so, what’s God like and what does God want? If not, what do we do with the knowledge that life is short and it’s all we have? With our without the notion of a God, how do we decide what’s right, what’s fair, what’s good, or what is required of us? Is there grace? Is there redemption? What do we do about the evil we’ve done, now that we know it was evil? What is it that people really need from God, and how can we humans help them get it?
These are the questions that Father Jud has been wrestling with during his own formation as a priest; and they all become a lot more pressing now that a man who has well and truly earned his hatred has been killed. Even though the film keeps us guessing until the very end about whether Father Jud is Wickes’s killer, we’re all gonna fall for him anyway. He’s young, handsome without being obnoxious about it, smart, vulnerable, and bursting with a sincere desire to share the warmth and joy that he finds in Christ’s love with as many people as he can. Monsignor Wickes, on the other hand, is a bitter, cruel, belligerent monster whose “ministry” is abuse by another name, and whose theology comes straight from hell.
And here is where we start to see Rian Johnson switching up his own formula a bit. In both of the previous films, the viewer’s pleasure derives in part from how awful all the suspects are. Harlan Thromby’s family and Miles Bron’s friends are both composed of hypocritical parasites who have chosen to be as awful as they are and who desperately deserve a comeuppance. This is true to some extent for many of Wickes’s parishioners. The asshole-in-chief is Cy, a twentysomething right-wing media influencer who’s returned home after a failed run for public office. The fact that he’s constantly turning everyone else’s lives into “content” by filming everything he sees is important to the plot but also hilariously infuriating, for the other characters and for us.
But Wickes’s supporters, it is clear, are also his victims. By telling them the world is a horrible place, by tearing them down, by filling them with bitterness and resentment and hatred for everyone who’s not part of their in-group, he has isolated them and thereby bound them closer to him, which enables him to go on mistreating them. There is nobody in Wickes’s “flock” who is better off because of it; and most of them are being destroyed by their membership in this little cult. It’s horrible to watch; and that alone raises the emotional stakes of this film relative to the other two. Wickes’s church is a microcosm of the poisoned digital miasma in which we’re all suffocating now, and we can’t help hoping that at least some of these people can be rescued from the swamp before it swallows them.
Another twist has to do with, well, the twists. We do have a lot of the plot twists typical of this genre, which have to do with the whodunit. But in my opinion, the Big Twist–the one that we’ve come to expect from a Knives Out movie, the one that radically changes our perspective on the events we’ve witnessed–has nothing to do with who the killer is or how the murder happened. It’s about all of those Bigger Questions, including and especially the one at the heart of this whole genre: what is the cost to us of turning death into entertainment?
If none of that appeals to you, you should still go see this film, because there’s a lot else going on, all of it delightful. It’s got the strongest classic crime fiction reference game, for instance, of any of the three films. Blanc points out that Wickes’s death is the kind of thing that usually only happens in mystery novels; we then discover that the entire parish is in a book club which has been doing nothing for the past year but reading classic murder mysteries. The reading list goes by fast, but this film is definitely using bits of some of those novels to yank our chains. If you’re thinking that the ghost of G. K. Chesteron might be wafting through this film, you’re not wrong. (“Go to town, Father Brown!” says Blanc, as Jud begins tentatively offering a theory of the case) Also, if you like locked room mysteries, you’ll love this plot. (I don’t, much, but that didn’t infringe upon my enjoyment.) Blanc delivers a version of the lecture on locked room mysteries incorporated into John Dickson Carr’s novel The Hollow Man (published in the US as The Three Coffins), holding up a copy of the novel so we can all buy it and read it afterward (as indeed I have). There is a whole backstory involving Wickes’s grandfather and mother that demonstrates the foundation of raging misogyny on which Wickes’s entire ministry is built, and which helps develop Glenn Close’s character Martha, who turns out to be one of the film’s emotional centers.
But for me, what makes this the best so far is the way Blanc’s situational friendship with Father Jud changes both Blanc’s character and the whole point of this movie. Though Blanc still doesn’t believe in the supernatural or in Christianity, he can’t resist Father Jud. Blanc resolves the investigation the way he does because he has been convinced by Jud’s faith in the power of divine love that what humans need from each other–what these specific humans need from him–is something other than what the clue-puzzle detective usually gives them. To paraphrase the other film we saw this Thanksgiving weekend: because he knew Father Jud, Blanc has been changed for good. The title Wake Up Dead Man obviously refers to some of the features of the murder plot. But there’s a little animation added to the closing credits that suggests that it’s also a reference to what this investigation offers Blanc, the characters in the story world, and maybe us: renewal, reawakening, the recovery of some of the softness and compassion and beauty and wonder that this bitch of a decade has been trying to suck out of us.
Let’s celebrate The Universe Box‘s February 3rd release by Tachyon Press! I have opened the universe box that is my life, and will be sharing a piece of it every Monday. By Michael Swanwick: The Philly Tarot Deck came about by accident. … Continue reading →
Another unconscious person on public transit. This guy just seemed to be terribly tired, but when he slumped over, he knocked his stuff on the floor. Several times. I kept putting his stuff back, and mentioned him to the drive on my way out.
(1) LITTLE GREEN ATTRACTS BIG GREEN. “Elf movie costume sells for £239,000 at auction” reports BBC. (Article behind a paywall.) The outfit was screen-matched to a scene in the film due to distinctive hand stitching on the tunic A … Continue reading →
I will begin this piece noting that I am not unbiased in my thoughts about Moana, as my friend, the Oscar-nominated writer Pamela Ribon, helped write a significant chunk of this film’s story. I found out about her involvement after the fact, namely, by sitting there in the theater watching the credits when the movie was done, spying her name, and saying “Oh, shit! Pamie!” out loud, thereby confusing the friend I went to see the film with. How much Pamela’s involvement in this film raises my estimation of it is difficult for me to quantify, but I can assure you I liked it very much before I knew she was involved with it. So, there, you have my disclosure.
And in fact, I do like Moana very much. It’s my favorite film out of Disney Animated Studios in the last decade, and even (barely) edges out Coco when you include Pixar in the mix (Coco is wonderful, though, you should absolutely see it if you have not). Moana does many things well, both technically and in the story department, but what I like most about it is that, without making an overt fuss about it, it’s the most feminist and woman-forward animated film that Disney Animation has made.
Disney, mind you, has been mining the “girl power” vein for a while, most overtly since the Disney Renaissance era that began with The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. The Disney canon is so replete with these characters that they’re even their own marketing category within Disney itself: The Disney Princesses. The problem with the Disney Princesses, however, is one clear enough that Disney itself parodized it in a scene from Wreck It Ralph 2: Ralph Breaks the Internet (written — again! — by Pamela Ribon):
Moana is in this scene, but of all the “princesses” in here (not excepting Vanellope!) she is the one whose journey’s intersection with men (and more broadly, with patriarchy) is of a different quality. Men exist in and are even essential to her path through the story, but at every juncture of the story, she is the captain of her own fate. She is continually self-motivating, self-rescuing, and ultimately, the instrument of the story’s resolution in a way that does not depend on a man (it may depend on an ocean, which is never gendered, but let’s not get into that now).
I don’t think Moana, either the film or character, overtly makes a big deal out of any of this — there’s no point where Moana (voiced by a remarkably assured teen named Auliʻi Cravalho) has a story-stopping “girl power” moment, and the only person who explicitly calls out her princess-ness is a dude who does it as a winking fourth-wall crack, and the fact is never really brought up again. Moana’s not rubbing your face in its feminist bona fides. It’s not to say they aren’t there.
In any event, at no point is Moana’s womanhood presented as a disadvantage. She is early on explicitly tapped to be the next leader of the only village on a Polynesian island of no specific provenance (the voice cast of the film is primarily Polynesian, but from varying places in the Pacific: Hawai’i, Samoa, and New Zealand/Aotearoa most prominently). This ascent to leadership is something that Moana accepts with some reluctance, for while her people have lived contentedly on the island for centuries, their antecedents once roamed the waves in big boats, and Moana sees her destiny out there. This fact is a subject of some exasperation to her father, who wants her to focus on where she is.
The issue gets forced when a blight hits the island, killing both the fish and the coconut palms the villagers rely on. This blight, Moana is told by her grandmother, is the result of the trickster demigod Maui stealing the (literal, not figurative) heart of the goddess Te Fiti, inadvertently starting the blight as well as being the cause of the pause in sailing between islands. The good news is, as a baby Moana was chosen by the ocean! For what? Well, as it happens, to leave the island, find Maui, and force him to return the heart of Te Fiti. Simple enough, yes? Well. No.
It does not pass my attention that in this film the initiating problem, and the various obstacles that Moana encounters, originate with men, and the aid and advice she gets is at the hand of the women characters (there is the volcano demon Te Kā, who is coded as a woman, but hold that thought). Again, the film doesn’t dwell on any of this — and both Maui and Moana’s dad have understandable and defensible reasons for what they do — but it’s there. Men in this film, in ways large and small, exist to be routed around and made to understand that they are supporting, not main, characters in this tale.
No one exemplifies this more than Maui, played by Dwayne Johnson in a frankly delightful bit of typecasting. If ever a movie star exuded “main character energy,” it’s Johnson. That same sort of heedless self-regard oozes through Maui, who despite being in exile for a thousand years, settles back into his own internal spotlight the second someone else gazes upon him. That Moana is having none of his guff is neither here nor there to him; she whacks him with an oar with seconds of meeting him and he reacts with mild puzzlement rather than comprehension. His signature song, “You’re Welcome,” is a literal paean to how awesome he is, and it’s perfect that Johnson’s singing voice is, how to put it, deeply imperfect. Maui wouldn’t care if he was off-key. Being on key is for people who aren’t demigods.
But the fact is, this isn’t Maui’s story, it’s Moana’s, and Maui’s journey will be to learn that being of service — the thing he’s always prided himself on — is not about filling the hole in one’s psyche.
Moana’s journey is also one of service — she wants to save her island and her people. She doesn’t know if she can do it, and there are times when she is sure that she can’t, but she is determined to anyway, and besides there is no one else who can do it. She’s learning on the job, so to speak, and what I like about her his that her doubts and fears and acknowledgements of her own deficiencies are right there in her story… and she keeps on regardless, and will do it all by herself if she has to. What saves her, and by extension saves everybody, is her ability to see, not where she has a chance to be a hero, but where she has a chance to heal what has been broken. It’s her story but it’s never been about her, or, rather, just about her.
This is a fairly subtle piece of storytelling — a story where the “big bad” isn’t defeated, or even redeemed, but is restored, from a harm perpetrated long ago. And the hero’s reward? Not riches or fame, or true love’s kiss, or a man in any shape or form. She just gets to go home, with the knowledge there is a home to go back to. This is a hero’s journey, to be sure. But it’s a different hero’s journey than we usually get, and one that I don’t think we often get to see when when the hero is a man. This is what Moana does, that the other “princess” movies up to that point didn’t really manage to do.
(Mulan comes close. But, Shang.)
I think it’s important that, while the film was directed and largely written by people who were not Polynesian, the filmmakers actively consulted and collaborated with Polynesians and Pacific Islanders about the movie, and listened about a number of things, like Maui’s appearance and why Moana wouldn’t be disrespectful regarding coconuts. Likewise, while Lin-Manuel Miranda is the marquee name for the movie’s songwriting, he collaborated with Opetaia Foaʻi, a Tokelauan-Tuvaluan composer and songwriter. I’m not qualified to say that the filmmakers got Polynesia “right” — please listen to others with better knowledge on that score — but at the very least it is good that there was an acknowledgement they were telling a story in a milieu that people currently exist in, and to which they owed respect.
I have not seen Moana’s animated sequel, which came out in 2024 and shoved lots of cash into Disney’s coffers, and bluntly, other than the obvious “for even more money,” I am confused why Disney thinks it’s a good idea to do a “live action” version of the story a mere decade after the animated movie hit theaters (actually, I do have a theory about this — the “live action” remakes of the animated movies serve the same function as re-releasing the classic Disney animated films did before the age of home video: bonding another generation of children to Disney’s character and stories, the better to keep them in the economic chain that continues on to Disney’s theme parks and cruises. Even so). I don’t imagine I will be going out my way to see the “live action” version anytime soon.
But that doesn’t decrease my appreciation for Moana, the original film. Disney doesn’t need me to tell them they got this one right. But they did. Of all the “Disney Princess” movies, this one, in theme and story, is the true queen.
This week's bread: Country Oatmeal aka Monastery Loaf from Eric Treuille and Ursula Ferrigno's Bread (2:1:1 wholemeal/strong white/pinhead oatmeal), a bit dense and rough-textured - the recipe says medium oatmeal, which has seemed hard to come by for months now (I actually physically popped into a Holland and Barrett when I was out and about the other day and boy, they are all about the Supplements these days and a lot less about the nice organic grains and pulses, sigh, no oatmeal, no cornmeal, etc etc wo wo deth of siv etc). Bread tasty though.
Friday night supper: groceries arrived sufficiently early in the pm for me to have time to make up the dough and put the filling to simmer for sardegnera with pepperoni.
Today's lunch: savoury clafoutis with Exotic Mushroom Mix (shiitake + 3 sorts of oyster mushroom) and garlic, served with baby (adolescent) rainbow carrots roasted in sunflower and sesame oil, tossed with a little sugar and mirin at the end, and sweetstem cauliflower (some of which was PURPLE) roasted in pumpkin seed oil with cumin seeds.
I am nearing completion (fingers crossed) on a little winter solstice horror game that uses solitaire as its mechanic.
You will not be surprised to learn that this is is pretty much a solo journalling game with prompts. However, the solitaire mechanic does impose (I hope, anyway) a kind of melancholy fatalism.
I have been calling the game Solitary for obvious reasons, but of course there are many many many many games on Itch alone already called Solitairy. Any thoughts on an alternate title?
I can see you're not a cook. You can't exactly dice thyme. The leaves are pretty tiny. If they're fresh, you just strip them from the stem. I suppose you can then chop them more finely, but dicing? You'd have more luck trying to dice time.
By Vincent Docherty: Summary: In more detail: The traditional Q&A was held at SMOFcon 42 on Saturday 6th December 2025 in the Dieselverkstaden Culture House in Stockholm, Sweden. The Q&A was hosted by Vincent Docherty and Carolina Gomez Lagerlöf, chair of SMOFcon 42, and featured presentations by and questions … Continue reading →
The Critics Choice Association announced today the nominees for the 31st annual Critics Choice Awards on December 5. Notably, four new categories have been added to this year’s show: Best Variety Series, Best Stunt Design, Best Casting and Ensemble, and Best Sound. … Continue reading →
The LAcon V Worldcon committee today announced the schedule for the 2026 WSFS Virtual Business Meeting. The committee chose the dates taking into consideration the 147 responses received to their survey of the science fiction and fantasy community. The committee … Continue reading →
(1) IT COULD ALWAYS GET WORSE. “Nineteen Eighty-Four is here? Not quite, says Orwell lecturer”. Britain is not living in an Orwellian dystopia despite fears that Nineteen Eighty-Four has come true, the eminent Harvard professor Steven Pinker has concluded. Prof Pinker, the … Continue reading →
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The stories in Black Hole Heart refuse to be labeled. They burst from the confines of the page, swirling and switching genre gears, leaving the reader wondering what’s coming next. In these pages, one finds old Russian folk tales, golems, plotting cats, children old beyond their years, generation ships, and more. Teryna balances stories about inner lives and outer space with a deftness that explains why every one of these stories has found a home in a prestigious magazine or anthology: Strange Horizons, Apex, Samovar, Future Science Fiction Digest, Reactor, Asimov’s, Galaxy’s Edge, Podcastle, F&SF, and The Best of World SF 2. Translated by Alex Shvartsman with the kind of care and dedication that allows the stories to blossom and live in our minds long after they’re read, these glimpses of sometimes-dark, sometimes-hilarious worlds solidify Teryna’s place on the global speculative fiction scene. [1]
Charlie Wren hasn’t murdered anyone; in fact, he hasn’t done anything. This is the problem around which Kathleen Jennings’s Honeyeater revolves. All his life, Charlie has been plagued by disappearances among those in his social circles: first his childhood best friend, then, in the years since, countless housemates, acquaintances, and more. Now that another acquaintance, Alli, has gone missing, the police are, unsurprisingly, pretty interested in Charlie’s connection to her. Gowburgh, Australia, is a small city, and Bellworth a small suburb, so his slew of associations with the lost haven’t gone unnoticed—even if the incursions of strange, unnatural horrors (hungry plants, walking constructs) have done.
