Next Station: Otherland
I'm currently using public transport in Marseille, southern France, experiencing my first real culture shock. Imagine, the bus is packed but nobody insulted me yet? Nobody stepped on my foot? I didn't have an elbow/ walking stick/knife in my ribs??? Someone just SMILED ??!!! France somehow seems to handle this whole transportation thing better than oh-so-efficient Germany. The question of how to get from A to B drives humans around since they first crawled out of the primordial ooze. But our beloved SF/fantasy authors don't look back, they look to the stars and dream up all kinds of transportation. We start with Wolf's favorite spaceships: The "Millenium Falcon" from Star Wars and "The Galactica" from Battle Star Galactica.
In Corey's Expanse series, pretty physics go-getters like the "Rockhopper" scurry through space: little propulsion, but plenty of time for daring slingshot maneuvers. Caro loves "the Lexx" from the TV series of the same name. It looks like a dragonfly - or like a pretty bumped-up genitalia, har har.
I'm blushing, beam me up, Scotty! Although I've been feeling quite uneasy about beaming ever since I read Stephen King's short story "The Jaunt". I don't want to experience eternity after all. The Farcasters in Dan Simmon's "Hyperion" offer a compromise, they're like beam portals. Speaking of portals: Everyone knows "Stargate", but do you know "The Night Land" by William Hope Hodgson? Here, the protagonist is drawn into the consciousness of an inhabitant of the dying Earth.
If you suffer from claustrophobia, I would dodge space elevators. You should avoid the Luna trilogy by Ian McDonald, "Elevator to the Stars" by Arthur C. Clarke and Lavie Tidhar's "Central Station". If you’re a fighter and battle your fears heads on you can simultaneously tackle your fear of heights in "Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator" by Roald Dahl.
Technology takes us far, the DB takes us nowhere, but it would be nice to have a fully developed rail network like in China Mièville's "Railsea"...although there are quite different dangers lurking there than no coffee in the board restaurant. And if you're really tough, you should embark on the brutal journey into the heart of dystopia in “Snowpiercer". If, like me, you watched "Pirates of the Caribbean" too early and have been calling Swabians "landlubbers" ever since, you should read "The Bone Ships" by RJ Barker and "The Adventures of the Pirate Amina al-Sirafi" by Shannon Chakraborty. Ships are simply a great means of transportation, as long as you don't throw up over the railing. Finally, here are some of the strangest objects of transportation in SF and Fantasy: A giant flying peach in "James and the Giant Peach". Gliding boards in Simon Weinert's "Tassilo" (actually not so strange until you've read the book! At this point, a big recommendation for this wonderful pearl of German Weird Fiction). And if that’s too small, why not move a whole castle? In Diana Wynne Jones' "Howl’s Moving Castle", not only does a whole house wander around, but it also has portals INSIDE. And if that's not enough, you should just throw everything overboard and become part of a MOVING CITY à la Mortal Engines by Philip Reeves. That in turn makes my entire text absurd.
Have fun with the novelties in January,
Esther from the Otherland
One more thing on my own behalf:
Dear Otherlanders,
I'm looking for a small 1-2 room apartment in Berlin starting in April, where I can build myself a permanent nest. My maximum budget is 600 euros. District doesn't really matter, but preferably near the Otherland ;). If a little elf whispers something to you, send us a carrier pigeon (email)!
All the best,
Esther
Science Fiction
Welcome to the fourth and final installation in the story of Area X, an unexplained, hostile stretch of coastline with otherworldly properties.
Through the Southern Reach series, Vandermeer has written a world with a post-Darwinian and post-Lovecraftian mentality for our age of climate catastrophe.
There are recognisable tropes throughout the series and the fourth part has them in abundance: you were broken before you got here; by the time you realise something is wrong, it is too late; nature is awesome (in the Biblical sense), wonderful and weird; and the universe is indifferent to all of it. If you can relax into a sense of profound discomfort, that’s Area X. If you have ever heard people talking about the “uncanny” and wondered what they were on about, that’s Area X. If you have ever looked at a white rabbit and been unsure if it was the regular or Monty Python and the Holy Grail variety, if a dog was just a dog or… well, you get the idea.
I bought Annihilation one summer on holiday. I read it in one sitting that afternoon, and returned to the bookstore the next day to buy the next two, Authority and Acceptance. I now have five(!) different editions of the first one at home. It is so high on my list of favourite books that when the anniversary edition arrived this autumn, I couldn’t believe it only appeared ten years ago. I was a little unsure about a fourth installment, but quickly brought over. The structure is clever, and very slowly draws you into this disturbing world of unknown actors and unexplainable events. Similar to the Ambergris universe, here we have three seemingly separate short stories that build into the early days of Area X. The first part does a good job telling a really creepy narrative in largely detached, documentary-style prose: a history of a scientific disaster twenty years before Area X existed. The second section is a novella in itself, and shows Central agent Old Jim attempting to work out what’s going down at the coast before all Hell breaks loose. Part three follows dysfunctional, drug-addled special ops soldier Lowry, as he and a team of scientists get sent in through the barrier in the infamous first expedition.
What a trip. I loved the literary references in this one, from Alice in Wonderland (rabbits with tech) to Peter Pan (crocodilians with vendettas) to Jurassic Park (“Shoot her! Shoooot her!”). Along the way there are many returning characters for eagle-eyed fans (Gloria, Henry, Whitby, and Grace) but honestly this would be a great introduction to the series even if you haven’t read any of the others. As far as I’m concerned, Mr. Vandermeer can keep writing Southern Reach novels until he runs out of A words and I will happily devour them. (Suggestions: Androgyny, Ambrosia, Alimony, Axolotl, Adversary, Ankylosaur, Ambergris, Antlion, …)
[Tom]
Churning sand and dust. The sound of an inhaling god. The slop of sand on my face. On my exposed hands. The whoosh of air over my short hair. The witch took me. I glanced down just in time to see my feet leave the ground…
Najeeba is one of the Osu-nu, of Adoro 5. Untouchable. Unmarriable. To be avoided. At only 13 years old she gets The Call – the annual pull to travel the Salt Roads. But how can that be? No girl has ever recieved The Call, so when she joins her father and brothers to ride camelback over the desert, it is to cold comments from her fellow villagers. And maybe there was a reason to the rule, because Najeeba’s presence on the Salt Roads sets new, unexpected things in motion. Nothing will be the same again.
When I’ve lined up books this year, I’ve tried to have one by Nnedi Okorafor for every 5 or 6 regular books. If there is a better modern writer whose books guarantee satisfaction I have yet to read them. The reigning queen of Africanfuturism, Okorafor crafts works that question the fundamental assumptions of sci-fi while having so much fun in the process. She Who Knows is book one of a brand new trilogy set in the same universe as Who Fears Death. There we follow the amazing Onyesonwu as she makes very large ripples on the surface of the world. Here we see the story of her mother, Najeeba, and her otherworldly powers. Okorafor’s tale feels like a newly-discovered hoard of folktales, it has the violence of real life alongside the childlike wonder of truly imaginative worldbuilding. Part two, One-Way Witch, will be here at the end of April.
[Tom]
Beyond and Within
Solarpunk
Solarpunk is a pretty new sub-genre. Following on from the late twentieth century’s Cyberpunk, it had its roots in the 2012 volume Solarpunk: Histórias ecológicas e fantásticas em um mundo sustentável and later in Adam Flynn’s 2014 article Solarpunk: Notes towards a Manifesto, before gaining popularity online, particularly on Tumblr.
It is the sub-genre of Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion and We Are the 99%; of digital craftspeople, off-grid energy independence, and open access; of tiny-houses and Strong Towns. Verso’s introduction is a little aggressive on Cyberpunk’s “failures” but points out some useful parallels between the two movements. In terms of responding to society’s ills, Solarpunk picks up the baton for the twenty-first century. Verso argues that it puts forward “solid strategies for creating a desirable future”, championing a fair, sustainable, and innovative Earth.It's a fun selection of tales, sometimes serious, sometimes carefree. Ken Liu’s “Byzantine Empathy”, for instance, shows two college friends’ diverging approaches to foreign aid, one as the logical spokesperson for the US as ‘world police’ and the other as an IT innovator dealing in smart contracts and VR. I think Liu has a clear favourite in terms of who we are meant to side with, but boy, he doesn’t make it easy. A powerful little exercise in moral philosophy. “Rules for a Civilization” by Jerri Jerreat starts with a teacher in a very futuristic classroom asking students to put together a list of laws for the first ever human community. What seems like a fun pedagogic exercise soon gets put to the test as the Earth’s new climate sends them Toronto’s biggest hurricane since 1954.
Future tech is a big part of Solarpunk’s vision, too. Gustavo Bondoni’s “Drawing the Line” details the daily lives of workers on the green corridor holding back the ever-expanding Sahara, while Ingrid Garcia’s “Have Space Bike, Will Travel” follows zero-gravity space bikers on satellite salvage duty – and rescuing everyone from faulty missiles. And “For the Snake of Power” packs a political punch too, as a worker for the Phoenix city power company realises she can continue fixing during the ‘brown outs’ or play whistleblower, lose her job, and potentially save hundreds of lives from heat-death.
After such an abrasive, self-congratulatory introduction, you kind of have to perform, but there are several tales here which are more exposition than plot. In tales like Thomas Badlan’s “Orchidaceae” and D. K. Mok’s “The Spider and the Stars” the authors’ visions are fun enough to pull you through, but nothing really happens. Plot definitely takes a back seat. Others have plot but have their punk ethics in a twist. “The Spiral Ranch”, for example, is about futuristic cowgirls on a high-rise pasture with rustler problems. It is fun, but a bizarre defence of the cattle industry which seems to think its only problem is how much room farms take up. For such a beautiful-looking volume, there are also a strange number of typos, spelling mistakes, and grammatical errors. (I found them in almost every tale.) It’s even stranger when you consider that all of the tales have been published before elsewhere, so the proof-readers really shouldn’t have had too much work.
Still, the book genuinely looks fantastic and every new collection like this does great work carving out a space for Solarpunk. There are some great little gems in here. I particularly enjoyed Lucie Lukačovičov’s “Lizard Skin”, a futuristic crime drama in which Goan cop Vassudev is assigned to look into a death at an oil-spill clean-up company where a volunteer is burned alive. What starts as an accident investigation soon looks like murder. The environmentalist crew are all outspoken pacifists, but one of them clearly not as much as the others. Andrew Dana Hudson’s “The Lighthouse Keeper” is about Bast, a beloved community maintenance man struck down by an unexpected heart failure. He wants to go back to work, but now the company has given him an apprentice to train. It's a sweet tale that makes fond traditions of new tech.
[Tom]
Fantasy
I am doing really well with recommendations for books this year – friends, family, customers. This was a great shout out and something I would have overlooked otherwise.
As the title suggests, Cohen’s debut short story collection offers up a cast of many Sarahs in a magic realism version of the U.S. It starts off as regular fun at the fair and then suddenly runs off into the hall of mirrors wearing neon lipstick, full leather and a Buffy the Vampire Slayer t-shirt.
You get everything from super-trippy dream hotels with malleable, push-through walls to body-work gigs in downtown sex-joints where the clients have the most unusual theatrical quirks. There’s a tale of psychological twinhoods threatened by gender flux and solved by exorcism and cannibalism. There’s a love story retold entirely through gossip, a couple who decide to turn into trees, and a fable on Mother Nature’s losing fight against God. They are all queer, sensual, experimental, and spacey.
Almost all of Cohen’s tales end up being simultaneously weird, touching and intelligent in equal measure, tackling everything from modern identity to sense of self. Shallow voices and deep topics. Strangely, the first one—in which every single character is named Sarah—is the tamest of the bunch. Stick with it though.
It’s worth it.
[Tom]
The Long London Quintet #1
The Great When
A picnic neither has the energy to eat arrives, and everybody’s shadows are unrolled across the unmown ground, black carpets welcoming midnight celebrities. It’s Febuary, 1945, and a lone songbird bounces rhapsody from off a lowering ionosphere as they sit bickering, amiable and intermittent, in the failing light of English magic
Once you’ve got the hang of Moore’s style, The Great When is such a pleasurable read. The words start to flow and they’re sometimes beautiful, sometimes dirty and sometimes very funny and witty in characterisations and descriptions of situations.If you love London, you’ll love to walk through its streets of ’45 with our protagonist Dennis Knuckleyard who is 18 years old, started work in the bookshop of Coffin Ada, (but sees the only possible carreer in espionage) and will soon find out that there is an other London.
As all of Moore’s works, this opener in a new series aspires to be more than just dabbling entertainment, it has so many layers - historical, literary, social and nerdy layers, its characters are actual characters and the further you get the more exciting the story becomes.
Be ready to be blown away by one of the most imaginative, well-versed, fanciful masters of the English language!
[Caro]
Toads are capable of sarcasm. But their blood runs too cool for hysteria.
The well-known fairytale-elements are there: the castle, the humongous hedge, the knight, the sleeping lady – but wait, everything else is different! Kingfisher has her own story to tell about what’s behind the curtain of The Sleeping Beauty, about the long sleep of the girl in the tower and what waking her up would mean; and she is a master-story-teller! „Thornhedge“ is told from the perspective of Toadling who watches over the castle and its sleeping occupant. Her story is mesmerizing and magical and it contains such cool things as curses, shape-shifting, a friend in need who is a friend indeed and the answer to the question what happens to the babies that get plucked from their cribs when the fairies put a changeling there in their stead. This is dark, this is something new, this is so clever and – oh, it has a happy end!
For whom? For everyone who likes psychological, un-romantic, magical stories that also give a glimpse about the mechanics of the fairy tale that was the inspiration.
[Caro]
Horror
Witchcraft for Wayward Girls
Audiobook from libro.fm
The year is 1970 and we follow a group of teenage girls temporarily living in the Wellwood Home in scorching hot Florida.
They’re living there temporarily because they’re all pregnant, which is not acceptable in the society they live in, so they are secretly driven there by night, hidden by their families until they give birth, after which it is understood the babies will be adopted to married, affluent families.
Our focus is on fifteen-year-old Fern who thought her high school boyfriend would be as happy as her to hear about her pregnancy; Rose, a hippie girl who is determined to take her daughter after birth and live self-sufficiently on a farm; Zinnia, the only black girl among them and a budding musician; and finally little Holly, barely fourteen, who does not speak and acts rather feral, and so young really, you have to wonder how she ended up as the youngest in a home for the youngest. All have a sad story behind them, some more, some less and in this environment of utter powerlessness, Fern encounters a librarian who will change her life by giving her a book about witchcraft, and help her get a little of power back. It’s not all roses though, craft is something not everyone can deal with, so maybe they weren’t supposed to be a coven? A meeting with a group of women living apart from society, in the woods will even more intensify things.
Hendrix’ characters are likable, lovable, rootable, they always are, and here some more because of their age and situation. You just can’t but feel with these little people in an impossible situation and feel upset at the unjust done to them, or them being the only ones responsible for consequences of unprotected sex, even more so in the case of child SA. Assuming this has some historical truth to it, how many men are out there who weren’t held responsible for the babies they helped creating and who maybe don’t even know and care about what happened to their girlfriends and that they too have a child somewhere? So you see, the plot was very engaging and the pace really well, you can read or listen to this in one breath.
I am mentally rating this a little lower than what I usually rate Hendrix though, because this felt like a historical novel with really few elements of supernatural/horror. And it was OK since the character work is so good, and it’s not a boring book, this time it didn’t really deliver on the horror front.
[Inci]
Hotel
Audiobook from libro.fm
This is what we know about The Hotel:
It is bigger on the inside than the outside.
Doors and windows do not stay in the same places.
The Hotel listens when you speak.
The Hotel watches.
We’ll be there soon.
On a godforsaken patch of mud and stormwater in the fens stands The Hotel. It has developed a reputation for hauntings. Unlucky characters appear to gather there, drawn in like moths to a flame. A woman drowned for being a witch. A builder beaten to death by her colleagues. A cleaner obsessed with the occult. Two bored girls playing very dark games as their parents ignore them. Charged hen dos, unseen interns, and a paranoid nightwatch. The Hotel collects and adapts. Curses and family histories. AI and genes. And there are monsters in The Hotel: Bluebeards and Eleanors and Jacks and Keziahs…
Originally written as a fifteen-part series for BBC Radio 4, The Hotel is the latest offering from one of the UK’s finest horror short story writers. Daisy Johnson has been catching everyone’s eye since her collection Fen, and has since given us the award-winning Everything Under and the weird-thriller Sisters, as well as contributing to numerous collections (check out the fantastic Hag). The Hotel is essentially a collection of feminist ghost stories, all revolving around the one location, and all slowly but surely building a web of miserable happenstance. It is a cool 150-page gem of a horror story: all the parts have a traditional mould, but Johnson makes them demonstrably hers. You get your recognisable monsters, but it is often the real world that is more monstrous.
If you are missing Halloween already, or just want to read some great female protagonists, check in at any time, day or night. The WiFi password is in your room and breakfast goes until I WILL BE THERE SOON
[Tom]
Sunny Place for Shady People
Audiobook from libro.fm
After the first two blistering collections, I think all horror fans were hoping Mariana Enríquez would return to writing her deliciously unique short stories. Megan McDowell’s translation comes in hot on the heels of the Spanish original, Un lugar soleado para gente sombría, and offers up twelve new tales of terror.
Enríquez is like a one-woman Twilight Zone. If you have read either of her two short story collections, you will not be disappointed by this new addition. If you’ve never read anything by her before this is a great place to jump in. A Sunny Place for Shady People draws on the expected artists of darker social criticism like Jack Kerouac, Nick Cave, Thomas Ligotti, and Cormac McCarthy, but also on the unexpected: Mildred Burton, Anne Carson, Taylor Swift and The Velvet Underground. There’s definitely a change in tone from her early material. You still get the young teenage characters but there are also a lot of mature characters. There’s a lot of talk about being in your 40s as a woman in the Americas, a lot about what it means to be that age in a country that is still recovering from decades of political tyranny - societies torn apart, neighbourhoods where death is small news and where people disappear without comment. That sounds like it should be brutal. It should have trigger warnings on it everywhere for problematic content. I won’t say that’s not there, but Enríquez’s is a thoughtful brand of horror. It’s very much slow and creeping, and it’s got some violence to it, of course, but it mostly has this amazing sense of dark societal and cultural realism mixed with these flashes of pure imagination.
Where to start? Want to go to pathology and check out your surgically-removed fibroid? It’s a whopper! 2kg. Why not take it home? Keep it? Reattach it… That’s the way of “Metamorphosis”: a gritty little cry into the abyss against the shit that forty-something-year-old women have to take as given. Something different? The titular “A Sunny Place for Shady People” depicts a political journalist with a traumatic past hunting through the streets of Los Angeles for weird tales. She stumbles across the story of a young tourist inexplicably found drowned in the water-tank of a cheap motel. Now a cult has gathered there seeking answers from beyond. I challenge you to find a more honest depiction of LA. In “My Sad Dead” a modern-day exorcist (a retired nurse who can calm the dead) paints a picture of her district going to the pits. It is a heartfelt reflection of residents who can’t or won’t leave broken neighbourhoods, and of a woman who collects tragedy. “Different Colors Made of Tears” is a haunting set in a second-hand clothes store: a properly disturbing little tale using all of Enríquez’s fashion knowledge – like most of her work, there’s this individualism coupled with a damn perfect construction of the horror short story format that turns a simple idea into something deeper and more enduring. My favourite might be “Hyena Hymns” – a tale on the social minefield of visiting the in-laws, here made even more horrific when it turns out they live next to a zoo which burned down, leaving a host of escaped or torched animals. Now the only ones left are a clan of hyenas, and they might not be living…
Absolutely go and read this. For anyone who was disillusioned by Enríquez’s recent attempt at a novel, she is back in her favoured terrain here. A lot of these stories are only about 20 pages long and, in that space, Enríquez manages to pack in so much character background, so much depth to her figures, that you feel all of them have these incredibly complex connections and trauma stretching back over decades. And they are canny, too. They’re not just your regular horror characters, who make all the stereotypical wrong moves and end up the helpless victims. They fight and they punch and they spit and they get dirt under their punk-rock, hand-painted fingernails and you’re rooting for all of them - even the really, really, really weird ones. Genial.
[Tom]
A Sunny Place for Shady People collects twelve of Mariana Enriquez' short stories which heavily focus on social ills and real life horror, mixed with a touch of supernatural terror. Again and again, the ghosts of the forgotten, the neglected, the poor, the children, the abused, the murdered, the revengeful; but also the rough life on the streets of Buenos Aires, a burned down zoo, mental illnesses, folklore, drama, body horror, and even some Lovecraftian dread, worm-like people, a seaside town, fever dreams, terrible portraits painted by artists who got the call...
I loved reading all stories, but of course I have my highlights; Different Colors Made Of Tears in which the employees of a vintage clothing store discover that clothes donated by a certain gentleman make the wearer feel exactly how his late wife, to whom the clothes belonged, felt before she died. My sister works in a store which rents historical costumes to filmmakers, and I absolutely love visiting her, as the sheer volume of clothes everywhere just gives an incredibly unique vibe not comparable to anything, and to know that they have been worn by people, sometimes by people who are dead now... That's a feeling which Enriquez perfectly captured in this story, the descriptions of the clothes and jewels were as spectacular as the dresses themselves must have been.
Another favorite is A Local Artist for the suckers of Lovecraftian horror, art horror and Thomas Ligotti. I'm not saying more.
This is definitely one of the best horror collections published this year and a big relief for me personally, as I wasn't a big fan of the author's last novel, Our Share of Night Enriquez proved that she still delivers when it comes to short stories.
[Inci]
Sinophagia: A Celebration of Chinese Horror
Audiobook from libro.fm
It is always exciting to discover horror that reflects different, new understandings of the genre, something outside the run-of-the-mill literature straight out of the same writing workshops following the same pattern.
So, of course this collection of Chinese stories is a blast. Speaking of East Asian horror, Japanese and South Korean writings already have carved a solid place for themselves in the shelves of bookstores, but Chinese horror? Not so much.
In her foreword the editor and translator Christine Ni explains the struggle to curate and adapt the stories for the Western reader and provides extensive knowledge and a new understanding as to the status of horror in China and the Chinese way of writing scary stories. For example, it was most interesting to read that the genre doesn’t even have a proper name in Chinese, comparable terms being hard thriller or a word synonym to “terrorism”, haha.
Ultimately, this anthology contains lots of folk tales, lots of myths, urban legends and ghost stories, but also a psychological horror story which ranks among my favorites. I have to admit that my attention somewhat drifted during a longer streak of stories heavy on myths which bordered on dark fantasy, but I definitely had my highlights too, and they are:
The Yin Yang Pot by Chuan Ge is about a soup which has the power to unite lovers forever. Forever! Comes with a wonderful surprise ending.
Forbidden Rooms by Zhou Haohui; fun fact – I’m currently watching all SAW movies and I wasn’t prepared to find people locked in a room trying to escape and the Chinese equivalent of Jigsaw (but not that extreme) here, but it fits the overall atmosphere I’m subjecting myself to right now.
Huangcun by Cai Jun – in a twist of fate, an author meets a girl who claims to come from the fictional village he invented. He decides to visit her, but do I even have to ask if it is a good idea?
The Death of Nala by Gu Shi – gut punch psychological horror about a woman whose sadistic son kills their cat, and both her grief for the cat and worry about her son.
Very nice work, though, as I mentioned above, not always for my taste, but a mixed bag which probably has something for everyone. Let's hope for a second tome.
[Inci]
Letters to the Purple Satin Killer
I know some short stories by horror author Joshua Chaplinsky that I like and my hopes for Letters to the Purple Satin Killer were accordingly higher than if this title were by an author completely unknown to me.
It's not that I didn't like this or I'm disappointed or something, it's just that the story consists of exactly what the title says: letters to notorious serial killer Jonas Williker, who always left a stripe of purple satin with (or in) his victims' bodies, by family, friends, fans and some random people writing to him during his time in jail until his execution, and nothing more.The brutal rapes and murders Williker committed have left their mark on popular culture and he's equally loved and loathed by the masses. So the letters he receives include letters from his mother, giving some background to a child turned sadist, two childhood friends who both had crushes on him, a random woman who declared herself his friend and to be fair faithfully keeps writing him until he is executed, some collectors of memorabilia, some mentally sick teenagers, young men who can relate to him, and some formal correspondence like a digital platform which publishes his poems. Through the letters we learn more about the writers of the letters than we do of their sadistic recipient, reflecting their own lives and emotions and wishes on him, while murderer Williker stays astonishingly objective, blank.
I guess what was missing in this book for me was the lack of connection, or the failure to build up to something bigger and coherent, but in the end, they were just letters who kind of loosely hang there, some of the writers disappearing without any explanation. So it kind of dragged for me and the tone of voice of some characters were kind of similar and not distinct enough. Kind of a missed chance, as the concept is actually cool.
Non-Fiction
How to Stop Fascism
Audiobook from libro.fm
Vladimir Putin assaults the Ukraine, Donald Trump dismantles the US, and in our own lands far-right political parties attempt to revive policies which already brought the world to ruin once before.
Everywhere we look, the ideals of fascism proliferate. What these 21st-century fascists want is clear: to destroy liberal democracy, human rights, and the rule of law; to cancel out the rights won by women since the 1960s; and to create monocultural ethno-states using cataclysmic violence. But why? Didn’t we do all of this before? Where did all of it spring from? And how can we stop it?
Paul Mason turns his journalist’s pen on the ideals of fascism – not a movement dependent on war or unemployment but rather a “recurrent symptom of system failure under capitalism” that relies on ideological deterioration. Throughout modern history, Mason argues, it hasn’t been a failure to fight that has doomed tens of thousands of workers to imprisonment, torture and death. It was a failure to understand the threat. "They thought they were fighting a party. In reality, they were resisting a process of mass psychological conversion. And so are we."
Chilling, provocative, and blunt when it needs to be, Mason’s study is an all-in-one armoury of anti-fascist evidence, a get-me-up-to-speed history lesson, and an activists’ to-do list for the resistance. If you read nothing else of this, look through the “Components of the Fascist Process” (pages 192-99) and wonder at how far through the list we have come since the book was published back in 2021. If, on the other hand, all this sounds like it would spark your interest, you might want to also take a look at Mason’s PostCapitalism.
[Tom]
Feeding the Monster
In the small but excellent category of non-fiction horror, Anna Bogutskaya, pro-podcaster and film critic, has released her book Feeding the Monster: Why Horror Has A Hold On Us.
The book is a thorough and thoughtful review of the last two decades of horror film, the rise of so-called “Art Horror”, and modern society’s changing worries. The chapters go between five key concepts in horror film: fear, hunger, anxiety, pain, and power. Each topic has a host of movies attached, as well as anecdotal interactions from Bogutskaya’s in-depth engagement with all things horror - a life split between hiding behind sofa cushions and staring transfixed at the television.It really is a very personal work, and it's tricky not to like this book. As we would expect from her other outings, Bogutskaya is a fun, trustworthy host, and she really pours all of her enthusiasm for the genre into her book. I came away with absolutely loads of Horror movies that I now have to go and look up, and you have got to like any volume with a 7-page horror watchlist at the back.
[Tom]
RPG
“So, you guys are Cyberpunks, aren’t ya?”
“What’s it to ya?”
Mike Pondsmith’s Neuromancer-esque empire blossoms into the 21st century (again) with a starter kit based on the popular Edgerunners animated series. For those like me who are fans of the anime series, you will be pleased to see David, Lucy, Maine, Dorio, Kiwi, Rebecca and co dropping in and out as NCPs, and the generally fast, unforgiving, and brutal nature of the genre well represented in the game mechanics. R. Talisorian Games’ Cyberpunk universe, not to be confused with the literary sub-genre it tries to emulate, has been tweaking parts for some three and a half decades now, with mixed results. While Red certainly has fans, the 2077 computer game was flashy but didn’t really get the point of the genre, instead just presenting a Silicon Valley corpo’s capitalist dream day out. One reviewer described it as “all cyber, no punk”. Edgerunners definitely gets back some of the key spirit, revelling in the new future while wading through all of its suspect morality. You might as well have fun in this version of Night City, cos there are not a whole lot of ways out.
This latest pack gets you the Edgerunners’ Handbook (background lore), a compressed rule book which will do you if you don’t have the CP Red core rules to hand, and The Jacket, an entry-level mission pack where you get to rub shoulders and bump cybernetic heads with some of the show’s regulars. Wanna do your own thing? There’s enough here to get chromed to the max or just run around the meatspace like a gonk, neh? Sounds nova, though I will say, as a heads up, my copy (and several others we have come across) had severe misprints on a number of pages. There are PDF options available, so it’s a bummer but not a deal-breaker. Preem.
[Tom]
Eat the Reich
The ever-inventive game designer Grant Howitt and inimitable graphics artist Will Kirkby team up on a lean, mean, action-movie machine of a roleplaying game. Eat the Reich promises an over-the-top story of ultraviolence and supernatural chaos.
You play Nazi-hunting vampires in WWII Paris, thrown into 1940s France in specially-outfitted drop-coffins. No hours of character creation in this one. You get six pre-generated characters: Iryna (gothic socialite warlock), Nicole (gun-toting explosives expert), Cosgrave (cockney wideboy necromancer), Chuck (decomposing cowboy), Astrid (ex-fighter pilot with a predatory symbiote soul coiled around her heart), and Flint (a massive man-bat monster). Additional options allow extra creativity, but everything you need is here. In terms of gameplay, the game is designed around the Havoc engine: D6s plus a fast, dynamic play style promoting action over rules. Players can expect two or three two-hour sessions or one mega-evening if you are on Berlin time. If you still want more after that, there are ideas for further Fascist-hunting escapades across Villa Torlonia, Tokyo’s Imperial Palace, or the Pazo de Meirás.
Howitt and Kirkby pull everything they loved - and some things they found cringeworthy - from Danger 5, Inglorious Bastards, Suicide Squad (2021), and the Wolfenstein games, and shove it all into five to six hours of pure, bloody fun. This is the prettiest (splatter included) two-shot RPG on my shelf. Good job, Mr. Kirkby. The premise sounds like it should be trashy as Hell. And it is. Gloriously. It also sounds like it should be insensitive, but Howitt provides a host of suggestions on approaching safe play, antiheroes, historical inaccuracy, discrimination, and player expectations. For a game whose expressed end goal is to board a battle-zeppelin chained to the Eiffel Tower and decant Hitler’s blood, the guidelines here are surprisingly thoughtful. Honestly, most game designers could do with reading the first six pages.
[Tom]
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