Adrian Collins's Blog, page 183

REVIEW: The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune

The House In The Cerulean Sea is a lovely book incorporating unique world-building and characters. It is a cross between Mrs. Peregrins Home for Peculiar Children, 1984, and a bit of Umbrella Academy. It is a captivating read and has been making the rounds amongst readers this past year with solidly five-star reviews, and it is wholly deserved of its praise; this is a gorgeous book. 

“Humanity is so weird. If we’re not laughing, we’re crying or running for our lives because monsters are trying to eat us. And they don’t even have to be real monsters. They could be the ones we make up in our heads. Don’t you think that’s weird?”

The House in the Cerulean Sea‘s main protagonist is Linus Baker, a gentle soul living a life of quiet desperation. He is a caseworker for a department that is in charge of Magical Youth. While Linus is calm and obedient in most aspects of his life, he is a champion of children and will defend those who can not protect themselves. This sentiment may sound a bit twee, but it comes off as a very authentic aspect of Linus’s personality. Linus loves kids and as a caseworker who audits orphanages and makes sure that the children are receiving adequate care. 

“Change often starts with the smallest of whispers. Like-minded people building it up to a roar.”

Because of the organization Linus works in, it is essential that Linus reports and observes the orphanages with objectivity. He needs to remain impartial and not get attached to the children. Linus generally does this well, as he is a more effective advocate for children when he is an impartial witness. But, even with all that he does for children, Linus is a lonely, unfulfilled person. He leaves the office every night, comes home, argues with his busybody neighbor, and goes to sleep. The only passions he allows himself are a love of music and a grumpy cat that he shares his life with. 

On a rather ordinary day, Linus’s life changes. Extremely Upper Management summons him. I love how the author creates this level of bureaucracy in The House in the Cerulean Sea. Instead of just upper management, we are talking Extremely Upper Management—the people who aren’t typically seen but who pull all the levers. They want him to evaluate Marsyas Island Orphanage, home to six special kids who aren’t human. In this world, Linus is very familiar with the non-human population and has worked with them many times. Even so, this is a strange project to be given. 

“Sometimes our prejudices color our thoughts when we least expect them to. If we can recognize that, and learn from it, we can become better people.”

Linus arrives at the orphanage, and this is where the magic happens in the story. The interactions between the six children: A wyvern, a gnome, a weredog, a green blob, a sprite, and the child of the devil and Linus are charming. It is also an exercise in acceptance. While Linus is unnerved and sometimes terrified by these children, especially in Baby Lucy, he sees their innocence and wants to protect them. He wants to teach them as an elder about courage and kindness, even in the face of townsfolk who don’t want their kind around here. Linus has a month on this island, and while he tries to keep his typical objectivity, it isn’t easy in the face of the beautiful interactions with the kids. 

Additionally, Linus needs to interact with the headmaster of the school. A Mr. Arthur Parnassus, whom Linus is intrigued by, but again tries to remain impartial as he is there to evaluate Arthur as well. The relationship between Arthur and Linus is written as if they are dim lights circling each other, but they get brighter as they get closer to each other. It is a beautiful thing to read. 

The entire story is uplifting. I know that many who read fantasy like it dark; I mostly look for morally gray characters and dark fantasy myself. The House in the Cerulean Sea seemed quaint and not something I would typically read when I originally read the blurb. But, there is something about TJ Klunes writing that is wonderful. It isn’t quaint or cutesy, but something far more elegant and lovely. The relationships that Linus has, first with the children and then with Arthur, have a healing quality that extends past the character and affects the reader. Marsyas Island Orphanage was healing for Linus’s soul after years of stagnation and repression, and it feels healing for readers like me after this long year of suckage. This story is like a warm mug of hot cocoa with a shot of whiskey in front of a fire. This story’s message is powerful, and it goes to the top reads of 2020 for me.

Even people who love the darkest and meanest fantasy will get something out of the story, and The House in the Cerulean Sea is well worth the journey to read it. 

Read The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune

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REVIEW: Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton

I received a review copy of Good Morning, Midnight in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to Lily Brooks-Dalton and Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Good Morning, Midnight follows two characters. Astronomer Augustine who resides in isolation in the Arctic, still studying although the rest of his team were evacuated the year before, and astronaut Sully who is returning to Earth with her space shuttle crew after a successful mission observing the moons of Jupiter. Silence on the radiowaves has left Augustine unable to contact the outside world, and with Misson Control falling silent, the crew of the Aether have no idea what awaits them upon their return to Earth.

Good Morning, Midnight is a beautifully written and thought-provoking dystopian fiction novel that focuses on exploring and analysing relationships when faced with an unknown and uncertain future. The book examines themes such as friendship, isolation, parenting, love, loneliness, longing, regret and the future’s uncertainty. This uncertainty is accentuated to the reader in the way that Brooks-Dalton never gives us any real detail to what has happened to humankind which heightens out affinity to our two protagonists and the scenarios they are facing. It is often uncomfortable to read how these characters are smothered by the silence.

The novel is quite a short read, clocking in at around 250-pages, with chapters alternating between Augustine and Sully, each taking about ten minutes to read. A key part of what kept me intrigued with Good Morning, Midnight was wondering if and how the two storylines would cross over and if the two protagonists had been chosen for a specific, important reason. As previously mentioned, this novel is beautifully written, with incredible and picturesque imagery, which is impressive as much of the novel is about the nothingness of space and the seemingly endless ice and snow. The language used is a definite juxtaposition with the hopelessness and forboding atmosphere the potential end of the world would present.

I’m glad that I read Good Morning, Midnight but my reading experience wasn’t wholly positive and I wouldn’t choose to read novels like this all the time. Reflecting on the narrative, apart from a handful of very standout moments, not that much actually happens. For every time that I was gripped and truly engrossed there was another time where I was a bit bored and had to force myself through to the next chapter. That being said, this book feels like an essential read for the days we are currently living through, with all of us now reanalysing our relationships, our priorities, our pasts, what we have taken for granted and are now forced to be without. That uncertainty and trepidation are emotions imbedded in Good Morning, Midnight. For that, it isn’t always a comfortable read. With it being a relatively short book and with many of us now having more time on our hands, this is a novel I would recommend people add to their to-be-read list this year. I give Good Morning, Midnight a 7/10 rating, and will soon watch Netflix’s The Midnight Sun which is based on this novel.

Read Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton

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REVIEW: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina Season Four

All I can say regarding season four and the final season of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina series is what a long strange trip it’s been. Some TV shows end terribly and leave a dark stain on the show’s memory, How I Met Your Mother and the new Battlestar Gallactica come to mind. Other shows go brilliantly, at a high point that gives the fans something to hold on to with fondness. For me, I think some of the greatest endings of all time are Six Feet Under and The Good Place. The finale of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina falls somewhere in an unmemorable middle. 

Sabrina Spellman (actress Kiernan Shipka) is a character that has always had a foot in many worlds. In the first seasons of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Sabrina, half-witch and half-mortal teenager, contradicted. Her mortal half reveled in cheerleading, high school, her best friends, and most importantly, her love interest Harvey Kinkle. In this, she was a stereotypical 16-year-old girl slowly learning about her coming adulthood’s joys and pains. However, the witch and much darker half of Sabrina always had an edge. She worshipped Satan as a witch of a coven. She celebrated dark rituals, had no problem maiming, and participating in acts that the brighter mortal half of Sabrina could not stomach. This dichotomy was always what made Sabrina a compelling character. 

For the series to work and for Sabrina to grow and change as a character, one side of her had to fall away. The bright side of Sabrina fell away. Slowly at first, and as the series came to a close with season 4, very quickly. With the rapidity of the season-closing, the last season of the show was sporadic and jumbled together. It didn’t do justice to any of the characters and give them a fitting au revoir. Each of the show’s episodes is based on one of the Lovecraftian Eldritch characters. 

 

The Darkness, the first terror, came in the guise of masked minors. They consume the physical light and the light and sanity of the mind. The Darkness can also kill with a touch. 

The second terror is The Uninvited. It takes the form of a beggar man that rips your heart out if he is not shown kindness from strangers. It is a lonely creature that gives off wanting to be included and loved. It is a terror and therefore needs to be dispatched, but its presence seemed less potent than the others, and I found myself pitying it more than fearing it. 

The third terror was strange and probably the most Lovecraftian, and that is of The Weird. It took the form of a sea creature that snuck into Spellman’s Mortuary as a trojan horse to infect Sabrina. 

The fourth terror was The Perverse is a terror that warps reality and turned Greendale into Father Blackwood’s dream authoritarian society. 

The fifth terror is The Cosmic, which is set to smash all known dimensions and realities together. Heaven, Hell, nor anything between is not safe from its effect. 

The Sixth terror is The Returned. A confusing terror that returns the dead loved ones to you, sort of. 

The Seventh terror is The Endless. It is the manifestation of something that never ends. 

And the final terror is The Void, the antithesis of The Endless. It is not just nothingness because the lack of something is still a space. The Void is nothing in the sense of an absolute lack of anything—no time, no space, no history… no nothing. 

Each one of these manifestations was a mini-story arc of an episode. But with the gravitas of the terrors, day to day concerns such as who wins “The Battle of the Bands” seem paltry and somewhat goofy even if the storyline has been shoehorned into having something to do with a Terror. Sabrina and Roz run for co-president in another episode and run as Witches. I love the solidarity and feminism the show was imparting, but I couldn’t help but want to scream and point at the impending doom that would swallow all life as we know it. As the series progressed, this problem of me jumping up and down got a bit more energetic, especially after the episode about The Endless that had great cameos from the aunts and Samson from the original saccharine Sabrina The Teenage Witch TV show. The ending of this episode seems bloated and confusing. 

Season four of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina was a midgrade season that ends an otherwise fantastic series. It had way too many side plots that felt too quick, too forced, and a bit convenient. Roz’s plotline, although fun, came out of the left field. Similarly to Sabrina’s love life, the ending seemed very sweet and cute until you look under the surface of it and see that it is dark and twisted in a very uncomfortable way. 

Showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and author of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina graphic novels had a lot to do, and not a lot to do it in. They were trying to have it all, and it did not payout in the long run, as there was not enough substance to these episodes. For me, the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina will go down as a tv show that I enjoyed, but more so in seasons one and two.  

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REVIEW: Legacy of Steel by Matthew Ward

In Matthew Ward’s barnstorming and epic follow up to Legacy of Ash, the battles are bigger, the characters more epic, the stakes higher, and the payoff phenomenal. Strap yourselves in, because after Legacy of Steel you are going need a few stiff drinks to calm your nerves.

Melanna Saranal saves her father from an assassin, and in the process brings the goddess Ashana back to the Hadari lands to help her people’s emperor to glory. Unfortunately for Tressia and its inhabitants, to Melanna Saranal’s father Kai, that glory is providing his daughter with a much larger empire, and he has his eyes firmly set on Tressia. He’s struck a bargain with the goddess Ashana to break an unbreakable fortress and bring the full might of his people forth to purge the Dark from the lands of Tressia.

In Tressia, the Crow Market is getting increasingly bold. New Privy Council member Josiri Trelan is struggling with much the same problem as we saw Viktor Akadra face in book one—his nature as a doer is not working when the battles are being fought with words and temperance , as opposed to with soldiers and swords. This new Privy Council is trying to cement its standing in this new world, and Josiri is struggling to remain in its good graces. To make matters worse, head of the Privy Council, Malachi, is still under the control of the Parliament of Crows, and they are digging their claws in ever deeper.

Apara the Kernclaw (assassin) isn’t so sure about the human sacrifice offerings the Parliament of Crows is putting up to try to draw the eye of ancient gods to pull them up to their former glory, but she knows she must do what she must do for her family. But now, her loyalties are split between them and the kernel of the Dark that Viktor Akadra put into her chest that means she must attend when he calls.

Roslava Orova, the Tressian Council’s Champion, is on the border of the Tressian empire and the oddly quiet Hadari Empire (where Melanna’s father has just raised a new host). And she’s now being asked to do the hardest thing she could imagine—take two days leave and talk to people while the front is quiet. Rosa’s lover, Sevaka, having shed her Kiradin family name and taken command of a ship, has joined Rosa on the Tressian border, and has been hooked into Rosa’s talking duties. They won’t be just talking for very long.

Legacy of Steel is one long brutal battle of a book in all the best ways. Our many characters are stretched to breaking point; new characters are brought in both human and god and new conflicts built upon the old ones; and fan favourites meet their untimely demise. I’ll say it again, that if you like Game of Thrones-level casts and unexpected character deaths, then this series is for you.

Ward’s character development in Legacy of Steel is excellent, and actually one of the many reasons you just never quite know who is going to die. You find yourself invested in so many of them, that when each one dies it’s heartfelt and it matters and that, good sirs and madams, is damned fine storytelling.

Ward’s writing throughout is also beautiful to read. There are no wasted words and Ward has so much to say.

The middle of the book, for me, requires special mention. Ward just delivers hammer blow after hammer blow, chapter after chapter. It was so good at this point that I just could not put it down. The author set a brilliant foundation for the story at the start of the book, and then just crushed my expectations and hopes before rebuilding them anew as he drove towards an epic climax. The amount of times I looked over at my wife with my jaw hanging open is just magnificent.

In Legacy of Steel Ward takes everything that was good about Legacy of Ash and dials it up to 12. By the time I hit the last ~10% I was exhausted. The story just got so massive. But, true to form, Ward knows this and brought me back to a manageable pace for a short time before sticking the boot in once more. He’s brilliant at knowing how hard he can push a reader, and then how to get your guard down once more so he can deliver a final stinging riposte as you go through the last few pages.

It does leave a conundrum though, with all the epic plays happening by the end of book 2 WILL THERE BE ANYONE LEFT FOR BOOK 3!!!??? The lands must be running short on leaders, soldiers, people, probably dogs and cats, too. Ward faces a problem of having to figure out how to dial Legacy of Light up to 14.

Legacy of Steel is a massive read. It’s a brilliant book two of a trilogy, and I cannot wait to get stuck in to book three.

Read Legacy of Steel by Matthew Ward

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REVIEW: Vampire: The Masquerade – Winter’s Teeth #3

Vampire: The Masquerade – Winter’s Teeth #3 is a continuation of what I think to be the most interesting new comic in years. I’m a huge fan of the Vampire: The Masquerade tabletop roleplaying game so I immediately picked up this comic when it first came out. I’ve been following each other with reviews and intend to continue to do so since I really enjoy the complicated politics, characterization, plus use of edgy vampires. It’s a throw back to the Goth Nineties with Sisters of Mercy playing in the back of my mind with every page.

Vampire: The Masquerade – Winter’s Teeth #3 is a bit different from the others in the series since it introduces another group of villains with a group of cybernetic vampire hunters. This is a little out there for a 5th Edition Vampire: The Masquerade adaptation, which was designed to be more down to Earth than previous editions, but works with the more gonzo 2nd Edition storytelling that I used to do in high school. The book takes this group up even further as they harvest the organs of the undead in order to implant them in their own bodies.

I was hoping that Vampire: The Masquerade – Winter’s Teeth #3 would follow up on the opening of the story with Cecily Bain murdering Cordell Block’s mortal Touchstone. Instead, that plot is rather unfortunately wrapped up in the middle of the comic. However, the events involved lead to an even bigger set of trouble for Cecilly and the Camarilla. Still, I have to admit I generally prefer stories to follow up on more personal stakes than big epic political struggles, at least when it comes to the World of Darkness.

I appreciate the deepening friendship between Cecily and Alejandra. Sometimes you don’t need very large and important conversations to establish that two characters are friends or becoming closer to one another. My favorite moment in the book is the discovery that Cecily doesn’t know how to use a modern laptop and is certain that her (ten year old) one is state of the art. Alejandra quickly disabuses her of that notion.

I find the Wolvers in Sheeps’ Clothing to be somewhat cartoonishly over-the-top villains but it’s hard to write one-shots for a setting where just about every character is one shade of evil or another. Cecily is not particularly a likable protagonist to begin with and her attempt to redeem herself by mentoring Alejandra just comes off as self-serving. That’s part of the books fun, though.

We also get a short story at the back of Vampire: The Masquerade – Winter’s Teeth #3 that fills in the history of “King Rat” the Nosferatu. King Rat turns out to have been a black Vietnam veteran who was embraced when he went down the wrong underground tunnel. He turns out to be probably the smartest and sanest of the Anarchs, so much so that I would be interested in reading comics about him.

There’s a big change to the status quo in the Twin Cities at the end of the book and I have to say I’m very excited about finding out what happens next. Honestly, this is probably my least favorite of the first five comic books in the series but still is an essential part of the story being told. I just wish they’d gone with less cartoonish villains than the Frankenstein-esque hunters.

Read Vampire: The Masquerade – Winter’s Teeth #3

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An Interview With Adrian Tchaikovsky

Arthur C. Clarke and BSFA award-winning author Adrian Tchaikovsky interviewed with me about his upcoming releases, his penchant for role-playing, acting, and stage fighting.

If you are a fan of stories that ask the big questions and tackle challenging ideas, look no further than his catalog of work where he is as comfortable writing fantasy as he is writing science fiction.

GdM: I read that you are a live-role player and are an occasional actor and trained in stage fighting. Can you tell me about those? Did they help or hinder your writing?

AT: Added to that, I’ve trained at Leeds Armouries in historical combat, and it all goes into the melting pot, basically. It gives you an expanded toolkit to write scenes, both from the perspective of how individual fight moves work, and (from LARP) the wider tides of battle, and some sense of what it’s like standing in the second rank of a pike block when a horde of enemies are charging down a hill towards you. Which is something that an office job doesn’t tend to provide. The challenge as a writer is, of course, to then pare down everything you’ve learned and experienced to the absolute bare minimum, so that your desire to communicate all this stuff doesn’t just clutter the page up.

GdM: I know that creating fight scenes must be different from the mind of someone trained in stage fighting. I’d love to know what the differences are and how you approach a fight scene.

AT: One big thing is that there are a number of Big Lies that tend to get seen a lot in fiction (and even more so on screen) that you can’t honestly espouse. Such as “the armour does nothing”, which is a big bugbear. People wore armour (at great expense and inconvenience) because it really does keep you alive. They tested C17th breastplates by shooting them with the firearms of the time. You also have an appreciation for just how clever and cerebral the study of the fight actually was. The experts in the field, whose manuals we still possess, were intellectuals with an in-depth knowledge of how the human body worked (and how to make it stop working via the precise application of sharp pieces of steel). However, as above, all that can end up getting in the way. Making use of all that knowledge without sacrificing the emotional and narrative impact of a scene is a real art form in itself.

GdM: You have been asked often about your writing’s influences from specific authors or genres. You have mentioned Gene Wolfe, Mervyn Peake, China Miéville, Mary Gentle, Steven Erikson, Naomi Novak, Scott Lynch, and Alan Campbell in the past. As a reader picking my favorite book, genre, or author would be akin to picking my favorite child. Instead, I’d like to know about a specific book, possibly from one of these authors, that affected you greatly and why.

AT: Honestly, as we’ve been talking about fights, let’s go for Mary Gentle’s Ash, still one of the greatest works of fantasy ever written. It is a mind-bending piece of work, seen from several perspectives that shift as the book goes on – with a framing device being the modern-day archaeologist uncovering the story of the titular medieval mercenary leader, save that the middle ages they uncover deviate more and more from accepted history, and are followed by physical discoveries that seem to back up the world of Ash rather than our own history. Behind this is Gentle’s iron-hard understanding of living history, including her absolute mastery of writing both close-in combat and massed battles. She really is one of the all-time greats, and she should be a lot better known and more widely celebrated.

GdM: You have three backgrounds that I found fascinating, and I would love to know more about how those focuses came about. In case readers don’t know, you are educated from The University of Reading in both zoology and psychology and then went on to work as a legal executive. What was your focus as a legal executive, and what made you choose psychology and zoology for your undergrad work?

AT: So the psych and zoo came from my existing interests, which have been fairly evident in my writing. I grew up with the natural world as a huge influence, from Attenborough to the books of Gerald Durrell. The Natural History Museum (which features as a location in Doors of Eden) was my favourite place in all the world. From there, wanting to understand the behaviour – the minds – of the nonhuman started to take precedence. Unfortunately, neither the psych nor the zoo elements of the university course particularly satisfied or focused on the areas I was interested in. I came out somewhat disillusioned with both.

The legal side of things was, basically, a complete fluke. I was on the dole in the mid 90’s and needed a job, and the Legal Aid Board was hiring. I did 2 years there, worked out there was no real career progression possible, but had become aware of the general idea of the legal profession. I had a zippy old typing speed, because of the writing, and on the strength of that I got a job as a legal secretary. After that I trained on the job as a legal executive (best of both worlds – training paid for by the firm while taking home a secretary’s wage). I ended up specializing in debt collection, litigation and landlord/tenant law, which I guess isn’t exactly the sort of heroic work that Daredevil’s Matt Murdock would sully his hands with.

GdM: Did your background in Zoology influence the creation of the Kinden in your Shadows of Apt series and the bioform characters in the Dogs of War Series?

AT: Honestly it’s more that the drives in my that led me to study zoology, went on to inform almost all of my writing. With a very few exceptions, my writing has the fingerprints of zoology all over it – spiders, dogs, wasps, even the aliens of Walking to Aldenbaran. It’s all beastly, frankly.

GdM: When I read The Children of Time and the in-depth creation you did around the spiders, I noticed that the spiders and ants are not anthropomorphized in the story. I have seen a lot of that in science fiction. Instead, you took aspects of their innate psychological and physiological traits and extrapolated on them. What was the research like for that? It seems like you had to parallel how the development would work naturally in a closed environment like a terraformed planet and how evolution would work when fiddled with by humans and bring those two ideas to harmony.

AT: There is a SF tradition where aliens are just humans, when you scratch the surface, save that they are humans with a more limited emotional palette. Or they’re humans pretending to be a human idea of what a particular animal is like. These are the angry, warlike aliens. These are the cat aliens (so many cat aliens!). With CoT, though the Portiids aren’t really alien, being of Earth stock, I wanted to present a species that was complex, nuanced, non-human and yet comprehensible to human readers. Hopefully at least some of that came through. (The octopuses in Children of Ruin almost broke me, frankly. They make the spiders look like our near cousins.)

The actual research I did was mostly on the practical aspects. I went to the Nat History Museum and had a very productive time with the entomology department chatting about what happens when bugs get big, and about insect behaviour, and that solved several issues I was having right then with the book. For the speculative behaviour and society, I was on my own. You end up going places that nobody can really research.

GdM: Your stories have important themes. For instance, you have Firewalkers, which touches on environmental and social class issues. In Children of Time, there are themes on the importance of empathy in things unlike yourself. The world, especially this last year, has been brutal. If you spend any time on social media or the news, it is enough to make someone feel powerless in the face of it all. Is story writing cathartic in a way? Does it help exercise some of the thoughts and ideas you see in the world?

AT: I write my fears and anger and anxiety because otherwise it’s screaming it all out of the window and they lock you up for that. And it does help, to a point. It’s the only way I feel I can actually influence the world even in a tiny way.

GdM: I am a huge fan of your novella/short novel work. I have read Firewalkers, Walking to Aldebaran, and Made Things recently. What is the process for writing a multi-novel story arc versus a much tighter story arc in something like Walking to Aldebaran?

AT: I’ve found the novella form absolutely perfect for exploring a single idea in detail. It means you can have a very tight focus, and the plot gets pared down to just that. As with a short story, everything on the page needs to serve that core concept much more tightly than in a novel, where you have room to expand, introduce more characters, develop subplots and the like. But where a short story really is like an iron boot, a novella can still go places and explore fully rather than just plant an idea.  For a multi-book series, of course, it’s the opposite. You can spread out in multiple directions, flesh out the world, go other places that might just get a hint or a mention in a shorter work. And that has its own challenges, because you’re often dealing with three or more arcs at once – the overarching series, the individual volume (I always give individual books a solid structure with a definite pay-off at the end), in-book arcs and individual character journeys. Essentially, each length has its own skillset and requirements, and its strengths and weaknesses.

GdM: How would you define the conflict type in Walking to Aldebaran? Is it Man vs. Himself, or Man vs. Supernatural?

AT: I’m going to say I try to avoid that kind of categorization when talking about writing. I think you get into a mental rut where something must fit into one box or another or else it can’t be ‘literature’ or some such. Basically, it’s throwing up walls that aren’t necessarily useful. If forced to make the call, I think it’s certainly vs Himself by the end. But you could just as readily say it was Human vs Human (for a given value of human) or Human vs Wild even. Which again suggests the categorization isn’t necessarily the most useful analytical tool.

GdM: You have two exciting novels coming out in quick succession for 2021. Firstly you have the release of Bear Head on January 7th as the second book in the Dogs of War series. And, you have the twisted time travel novella, One Day All This Will Be Yours. Could you tell us a bit about the two books?

AT: At the risk of sounding ridiculous there’s also The Expert System’s Champion, sequel to The Expert System’s Brother, also out in January. It’s a busy year, frankly. So Bear Head does indeed follow (some way behind) Dogs of War. Much of it’s set on Mars, where heavily modified human and animal bioforms are building the first Martian city. The rest is set on Earth, where the political situation is going rapidly downhill, and turning against bioform rights. Between these two planets is Honey, the bear from the first book, fighting battles and uncovering conspiracies. One Day… is very different. It’s the closest I’ve got to actual full-on comedy, for a start. It’s a spiritual (though not actual) sequel to Walking to Aldebaran, in that it explores someone who’s been abandoned in a weird and inhospitable place – in this case, the back end of time after a catastrophic time-machine war shattered all of history. The hero of One Day has a bit more self-knowledge than poor Gary Rendell though. He knows what a terrible person he is. He really is the worst time traveller. Doctor Who would despair. And, to round off the triple threat, Expert System’s Champion picks up from the earlier book some years later, when the hero has managed to carve a place for his misfits into the society that has rejected them, only to run into something alien from outside that threatens both groups. It’s me playing with alien exosystems and biology, with a bit of body horror thrown in. The usual.

GdM: In Bear Head, you touched on some interesting ethical questions, mainly around the treatment and modification of animals. What was the impetus for the idea of a bioform and its legal and cultural ramifications?

AT: Well this has its roots in the predecessor, Dogs of War, and the impetus is simply that this is the way our technological development goes, historically. We don’t put the ethical framework in place first, and then go ahead and do the R&D. We seek forgiveness later, rather than asking permission before, most especially if we’re talking military advances. Nobody convened a council of nations in 1940 so we could discuss whether we should do this whole nuclear weapons thing. And, although people really are trying to lay some AI ground rules, I am sure as anything that, if AI is ever achieved, it will be real before those ground rules are. Hence, in Dogs, when those bioengineered animal soldiers became the ideal military solution (after the great autonomous robot debacle the book touches on), people just made them, in the understanding that you could pull an Old Yeller on the poor mutts if you ever had to. Except once the mutts turned up on live TV talking and expressing their interior lives, that became rather more difficult. I think it would have been a mad book if I’d been writing about something like Rex and not going straight for the legal and ethical angle.

GdM: I have a great fondness for books about Mars; it seems like it would be the equivalent of the great western frontier, but for science fiction. Why did you choose Mars as the setting for Bear Head?

AT: Because it seems quite possible we’d go there, and because Mars is really not very hospitable, but it’s closer to habitability than, say, the Moon or Venus. The living situation that Jimmy Marten and the rest are coping with is towards the extreme end of the possible, but it’s just about plausible if you’re willing to start off with the idea of not How can we change Mars to suit us but How can we change us to suit Mars. And in the world left to us by Dogs of War, changing people is definitely on the table. Once you have that kind of bioengineering tech available, a lot of things become possible.

GdM: Jimmy is a wonderfully surly and sarcastic character. I had a lot of fun reading him. Is the grumpy or moody character with acerbic wit one of your favorite types of characters to write?

AT: Definitely. One Day All This Will Be Yours has probably my favourite, and obviously there’s Gary from Aldebaran. It’s where I tend to go for first-person narratives, because it permits a very personable, funny writing style that doesn’t get in the way of events. It’s also a huge contrast with Rex’s very earnest, direct first-person style from the previous book. Honey’s own sections are somewhere between the two. She’s idealistic and fundamentally honest, but she’s also been around the block enough times that there’s a certain cynicism ingrained in her.

I should also say that I got to do the audio narration for Aldebaran and I will shortly be doing the same for One Day and that particular narrative style is an absolute joy to read out loud.

GdM: Your novella, One Day All This Will Be Yours, is a hilarious and twisted time travel read. You talked a bit about the grandfather paradox problems and the “Killing Baby Hitler” ethical question with it. How did the idea come about, and how much fun did you have writing this story? Did you grow up watching Doctor Who?

AT: I did grow up watching Who, and that’s surely an influence. I am also building on a couple of short stories I wrote years ago, exploring the idea of time travel breaking time (one of these was a bit of daft fun called ‘2144 and All That’ which is in the Feast and Famine collection. The other, that just about fits into the continuity(?) of One Day, is ‘The Mouse Ran Down’ and has turned up in a few places, most prominently in The Time Travellers’ Almanac, which is an encyclopedic time travel anthology). There was also a David Gerrold novella, The Man Who Folded Himself, which covers very different ground but really set me thinking about different time travel narratives. Because there’s a lot out there about preserving the timelines and changing history and all that, so what if you have a set-up where that’s literally no longer important, because the use of time machines (and worse things) means history is basically, as the book says, in pieces all over the floor, like your aunt’s favourite vase.

GdM: Of all the creatures in time, why choose an Allosaur?

AT: For the genuine reasons the narrator gives. T Rexes are too big. We’re too small to interest them. If you want to feed someone to a dinosaur, without faffing about with little guys like raptors, an Allosaur’s your pick. Seriously, go find an Allosaur skull. It’s the perfect size for chomping someone in half.

GdM: Can you tell us a bit of what is in store for you for the later part of 2021?

The other major book in the works is the first of my big space opera series ‘The Final Architecture’. Book 1 is Shards of Earth, which has had a cover reveal recently. It’s set in a universe with limited faster-than-light travel – you can go along set paths, or you can get a special navigator like our hero Idris to go off the beaten track. It’s also a universe where Earth and a number of other human worlds got horribly reshaped by moon-sized entities called Architects in what humans laughably refer to in a war, and the Architects just thought of as ‘art’. The Architects have been gone for a while, but Idris, the war veteran who wants nothing but for his unnaturally long life to be as quiet as possible, has just discovered the first signs of their impending return. There are plenty of alien races for me to have fun with. There are cyborg insect hive minds (of course there are!). There are factions and cults and politics and a human civil war breaking out at just the wrong time. It’s SF where I can mess with artificial gravity and fast travel between stars and the like. I mean, originally that was supposed to be easier than the scientific rigor I was theoretically applying to the Children of… books, but then I got really into the fictional mechanisms of how it all worked and now I don’t think it’s ended up easier, just difficult in a different way…

And theoretically there will be a third Children book. I’m currently tinkering with a second draft of it. We’ll see how that turns out.

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REVIEW: Walking to Aldebaran by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Walking to Aldebaran, Adrian Tchaikovsky‘s deeply disturbing novella that hearkens back to Phillip K. Dick’s mind-bending science fiction, Lovecraftian cosmic horror, and the comedy of Andy Weir’s The Martian. While each of these genre types: psychological horror/science fiction, cosmic horror, or comedic horror/science fiction, would work in the setting of this story, a space artifact of massive proportions named the Frog God after its amphibians features, the combination of all three types allows the story to hit all the buttons. 

As a reader, you are mesmerized and transported by the intense attention to detail Tchaikovsky displays in his worldbuilding. You are made to laugh at Gary Randall, possibly the only survivor of his crew, as he quips and makes jokes about the aliens he meets, Star Trek, and having to eat the random creatures he finds amongst the tombs. This humor lulls the reader into a false sense of normalcy, all is right in Gary’s head, or so we think. Finally, Tchaikovsky brings out the existential Lovecraft-type terror of Cthulu monsters of unknowable cosmic origins that are hunting and being hunted by Gary. This combination of pacing and types makes Walking to Aldebaran both hilarious, unsettling, and horrifying in equal measures.

“Captain Kirk would have thought of something by now, I’m sure, but I have no red-shirted confederates to feed to it.”

Walking to Aldebaran’s premiss is thus, Gary is an astronaut and in combination with many national space agencies who put together a crew to investigate an object that was found in deep space. This is a decade’s long voyage to the thing deemed The Frog God, as Rocky McRockface had already been taken. It has a large orifice, about the size of the moon sitting in its “face.” It also had smaller orifices, some conveniently man-sized. All very enticing for a world desperate to see something alien. 

Gary and his crew set off on the long journey, sleeping in shifts. Gary is one of four pilots. All hail government redundancy. Three pilots will rest while one of the other pilots looks around nervously and touches nothing. 

“I was also one of the pilots, although space piloting is one of those situations where they should really equip you with a dog, so your job is to feed the dog and the dog’s job is to bite you if you touch any of the expensive equipment.”

Finally, after a long space flight equalling years, the crew arrives at the Frog God. After sending in most of the probes and had them immediately disappear or stop working entirely, it is decided a human team is necessary. They drive a vehicle aptly named Quixote through one of the many odd-shaped orifices. Once the team drives Quixote into the oddly human-sized-shaped hole, they discover and are either delighted or are suspicious tinged with terror. This particular hole has an excellent combination of blended oxygen, a nitrogen atmosphere with a comfortable .91G, and slightly under one pressure atmosphere. Almost as if it had been designed for them. That is a chilling thought; if there is a human-shaped hole, what goes in all these other holes?

“We weren’t prepared,” Gary extols. They had no idea what was ahead of them once they went into the oddly shaped human-sized hole. “We labored off into the dark, the beams of our lamps seeming more and more inadequate as the shadows gathered in front of us.” The team found in those first few long moments of discovery in the crypts’ bowels were pain and destruction. Astronaut Gary Randall, the creme of the top of human ingenuity and education, did the only thing he could do.

He ran like his ass was on fire, and eventually got lost. 

The crypts are very outside of the human understanding of physics and nature, those will be understood through a human lens. We humans, and Gary specifically, cannot fathom the purpose of what he was exposed to inside the crypt. Rooms with different pressure and atmosphere, and rooms that had no gravity. Pits, traps, creatures made of glass, ones made of intestines, all who want to kill Gary. No light, mostly no sound. Just Gary alone in the most foreign lands, in the blackest dark, with no hope, mentally dealing with things no human should or probably can. Gary’s proverbial cheese slowly slides off its cracker. He knows he is losing it. He doesn’t care; he is embracing the crazy. He is internalizing it and using it as a weapon. If he is crazy, maybe nothing crazy will upset him anymore. Gary finally cracks. 

Walking to Aldebaran’s chapters swing back and forth between the beginning and middle of the story and show the changes in Gary’s mental state. His altered state is funny, he cracks jokes constantly, and it is calming. You might think that his situation is funny. Until you remember the context of what he is living through. I liked how Tchaikovsky handled this. Instead of powering through Walking to Aldebaran from beginning to end, offsetting the chapters adds to the narrative’s wobbliness. Gary is off his damn rocker, and so is the way the story is being told. 

The ending of the story is terrifying. It is in line with how Gary progresses mentally, but the way that Tchaikovsky wrote it made it all the scarier. 

Walking to Aldebaran is a fine example of Adrian Tchaikovsky and why he is becoming such a force in Science Fiction/Horror/Fantasy writing. It is examples like this and how he can pack so much terror into such a short story that shows his skill—the story clocks in around 130 pages. Also, I recommend listening to this on audio. I had the fortune of listening to this and reading it simultaneously, and Tchaikovsky does the voice for it and does it well. I recommend it, and I know many readers looking for a little horror flavored science fiction would enjoy it. 

Read Walking to Aldebaran by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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REVIEW: The Expanse Season Five Episode Six – Tribes

The Expanse series five continues on from last week’s episode five Down and Out which started to unpick the aftermath of the asteroid impacts on Earth and the rise of Marco Inaros Free Navy. As always, if your not with us and up to E6, Tribes, turn back immediately. Spoilers abound.

Tribes starts with Crisjen Avasarala trying to get in contact with her husband who was on Earth when the second asteroid hit. The new interim Secretary General comes to see her. He seems a little shaken and out of his depth and asks Crisjen to be part of his new cabinet. After he leaves, Crisjen starts to cry.

Monica talks her way onto the Rocinante as Holden and Bull get ready to go after the Belters with the protomolecule. Holden gets a message from Naomi titled ‘if anything goes wrong.’

Back to Alex and Bobbie with the Razorback seemingly floating without power after ejecting their power core to shake off a missile. A Belter ship comes up and they go to board the Razorback but Bobbie is in full Martian power armour and lays waste to the boarding party as Alex leaps over the gap and drops a charge into the Belter ship’s engine. As the Belter ship pushes away and looks to turn its guns on them, the Razorback powers away and as the Belters go to follow, they blow up.

In the Belt, the Free Navy is debating what to do about Naomi. Marco says they should space her but Filip doesn’t want to and Cyn squares up to Marco and says he should do it himself. In the end, Filip pleads with Marco to spare her life. Afterwards, Filip confronts Naomi in her cell, saying she deserved to die, but Naomi finishes by telling him Marco wouldn’t die for him but would let him die.

Drummer’s fleet is waiting for Inaros and is suddenly find themselves surrounded and “asked” to dock with the Free Navy. As they board, they notice the various factions represented in the Free Navy and realise Marcos could command the loyalty of half of the OPA.

Drummer and Marco bicker about the past, about Fred and Ashford. To break the tension, Drummer’s crewmates ask about the future, specifically as Earth still provides soil and complex biotics. Marcos shows them evidence that after a few lean years, the belt can be self-sufficient within a decade–and it’s better than the way the Inners have been killing the Belters slowly since the Belt was established.

Drummer and company take their leave to discuss the offer to join the Free Navy and the consensus is that they have no choice but to join the Free Navy and they exchange crew with Inaros. Inaros introduces Filip to Drummer, pointing out that she used to be “friends” with Naomi before Naomi went off to Holden. Filip lets slip that Naomi is on Marcos ship and Marco cannot shush him in time. Curious about seeing another side of his mother, Filip goes to speak to her.

The main thrust of this episode is back on Earth with Amos and Clarissa Mao hiking through the snow. She’s concerned about being caught and Amos remarks that as there’s no prison left, they’ll probably just shoot her.

They find a dead body and as Amos is looting the body for useful things like boots and a jacket they discuss their families (or lack of) and very different backgrounds. There is a commonality of lacking a present parent, but Amos seems to have had more actual care despite Clarissa’s privilege…

They meet a guy at a fire who is wary of strangers but gives them advice on what’s going on in the area. He offers them a drink but Amos refuses and they make their way off as advised. Amos then stops to make sure he’s not following them. He tells Clarissa that people are always tribal, and when things are good the tribe gets big but when things are tough — ‘in the churn’ as he calls it — tribes get small. They’re a tribe of two right now. Clarissa says it’s better than one.

They approach a compound occupied by a guy who’s been shooting trespassers. Amos wants to trade for a rifle but the dude makes him strip to show he’s not armed. Once he’s stripped the guy says he’ll kill Amos anyway and take what he’s offering (a water recycler they didn’t actually have) but before he can shoot Clarissa activates her mod and rushes past Amos, beats the guy to a pulp, and then shoots him for good measure with his dropped weapon. Then she collapses. Amos carries her into the compound and makes her comfortable.

The episode closes with Amos and Clarissa talking about what they’ve done in killing a guy and taking his stuff. Amos says they needed supplies and rest, so it was worth the risk and he was willing to do what had to be done. Clarissa questions this and Amos says Holden wouldn’t have approved. “I need to get back to my crew.”

—

This is another character-heavy episode of The Expanse that is mostly about setting the wheels in motion for another action episode down the line.

As usual, there are a few things I want to draw attention to. Firstly is the cool attention to detail with space physics in the scene with Bobbie and Alex, both in Alex’s leaps between the ships, but in the way that he gets plastered to the floor when he activates the Razorback’s engines while standing perpendicular to the direction of thrust. Meanwhile, Bobbie, who is used to high G deployments and is wearing armour, manages to stay upright. That’s a nice detail to remember.

In Tribes, yet again, the relationships between the Belters in the Free Navy are fascinating, with the politics inside Drummer’s polyamorous crew being fascinating, the way that Cyn shows a lot more tolerance for Naomi and a degree of care for Filip compared to Karal being similarly interesting. It’s clear that the Free Navy is nowhere near as monolithic a personality cult as it appears and that exposure to the likes of Naomi and Drummer is widening those cracks.

Amos and Clarissa’s arc at this point seems almost totally divorced from the more overtly science fiction plots which are going on elsewhere in The Expanse but as the people on the ground in the aftermath of this series inciting moment (the asteroid strikes) they really are at the heart of the story.

The points made about how people act in desperation — even on rich, privileged Earth — about how trauma comes in many shapes, between folks as different as Clarissa and Amos and the similarity between this desperation and that felt by the Belters after years of oppression is integral to the human core of The Expanse. It’s a stark juxtaposition that as some of the Belters see that atrocity isn’t the way to make things better, we see people on Earth tearing each other apart for necessities.

Finally, I just love the closing beat where Amos once again realises he’s straying from a moral centre bereft of a Naomi or a Holden to keep him on track. If The Expanse was a purely grimdark story, he’d probably be the lead protagonist, the anti-hero living from moment to moment, capable of terrible things out of practicality or anger but never evil it’s its purest sense.

The inclusion of a traumatised and clearly neurodivergent character as a complex and anti-heroic one is fantastic as we all too often see such tendencies applied to either villains, paragons of virtue, or charity cases rather than sympathetic characters with agency. Wes Chatham’s performances continue to be one of the best things in an excellent show.

For me, Tribes was another character-based episode that’s clearly moving pieces and motivations around as we move towards the endgame of the series. That said, there’s plenty of action and intrigue to keep the more twitchy of us happy, seeing as we had one straight-up murder, a Martian marine in badass mode, and an exploding spaceship in this episode. Just a quiet one…

What did you enjoy in this episode and what are you looking forward to as the story continues?

Episodes 1-6 of Season Five and all prior seasons of The Expanse can be streamed via Amazon Prime and new episodes are coming every Wednesday.

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REVIEW: Mercury’s Son by Luke E.T. Hindmarsh

2020 has been a year that I feel has cemented my view that I live in a cyberpunk dystopia. Politicians have seemed more ridiculous, the propaganda more blatant, the technology more advanced, and the rich more sinister than ever before. With that, my reading tastes have returned to one of my favorite genres in that neon rain-soaked vision of reality that was popularized by Gibson and Sterling. Today’s offering is an independent novel, Mercury’s Son, by Luke Hindmarsh that I’m pleased to say has a review of mine quoted on its cover: “Blade Runner meets Memento.” I stand by that description.

The premise is that the world has suffered an environmental collapse and is now largely uninhabitable. The Temple of the Wounded Mother, a pro-environment Luddite church that blames humanity for all the ills of the world (fair cop), has taken over civilization and forced humanity into sealed arcologies. They regularly send out their fellow humans into the wilderness to help clean up the mess, even though this will kill them. Like all great corrupt churches, the Temple of the Wounded Mother is completely hypocritical in their views. While being anti-technology, they also maintain a monopoly on it to make sure they can control the masses.

Perhaps their most effective agent is Valko, a survivor of the war that destroyed the environment. He is a cyborg supersoldier that was cryogenically frozen for much of the world’s transformation from an advanced posthuman civilization to something closer to our own level of technology with rare exceptions. Worse, the events have left him with no memory of his past and a bitter resignation to working for people he hates because it’s a paycheck. Also, presumably, you don’t want to tick off the anti-technology government when you depend on technology to survive.

The book starts with the murder of one of the world’s few remaining scientists and Valko being dispatched to clear the case. However, given the scientist’s controversial views, it is entirely possible he was killed by the Temple of the Wounded Mother itself. So it becomes a delicate balancing act of investigating someone his superiors want the murder of solved while also not potentially upsetting his own position. In the end, Valko has to also determine how much of his remaining ethics he’s willing to throw away on behalf of a self-interested cult.

One of the most interesting elements of the book’s tech is the fact that Valko has the ability to read memories. It is not an ability without its risks and threatens to disturb what precious remaining sense of self-image he still has. However, I really liked this bit of technology and the potential uses it has in murder investigations. Valkyo has a somewhat ambivalent relationship with his cybernetics too as he wasn’t a transhumanist when he was upgraded for war and now there’s no way to reverse his condition. It leads to some interesting moments when he finally gets to meet with some pro-technology humans that don’t view him as a person first but a relic of a better time period.

The world-building is excellent and I really enjoyed exploring its dark, dystopian setting. It’s kind of interesting to note that for all the fact it is run by a fanatical corrupt religious organization and is in an environmental wasteland, society has more or less stabilized. Technology may have regressed and society but it human extinction seems to have been headed off for now. Extreme measures to let the environment rebuild itself over the course of centuries might even be justified, at least if you believe their propaganda. These are the kind of questions I found myself asking.

In conclusion, I highly recommend Mercury’s Son. It is a solid piece of cyberpunk dystopian fiction and the protagonist is a really interesting character. Environmentalism is a frequently overlooked element of fiction and it plays an important role in this story without being preachy. I think fans of Blade Runner and stories dealing with memories as well as the flexibility of truth will find it quite entertaining.

Read Mercury’s Son by Luke E.T. Hindmarsh

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REVIEW: Ashes of Prospero by Gav Thorpe

The Wolves are returning to Prospero. If you’re a Warhammer 40,000 fan, and you know how epic that sentence is, then you’ll love this book. Gav Thorpe’s Ashes of Prospero is full to the brim with action and lore that fans can really get their canines in to.

In Ashes of Prospero, The Space Wolves’ home world has barely survived an assault from the Thousand Sons traitor legion, and with the tribes they draw their initiates from hanging on by a thread after Magnus’ assault and the post-Chaos purges of the Grey Knights, and their Great Companies spread throughout the galaxy leaving few warriors at home, the Space Wolves are as close to breaking point as they’ve ever been.

Our main protagonist, Njal Stormcaller, a venerated rune priest (warrior wizard), lets his guard down for a heartbeat and a 10.000 year old splinter of the soul of a Thousand Son sorcerer buries itself within him, letting him know of an opportunity to find the legendary Bulveye and his Old Guard, the 13th company, lost for 10,000 years.

Arjac Rockfist, Champion of the Space Wolves, marches out to help a town beset by a vicious drake. It’s killed most of their people and left them in dire straights—and the slaughter shows no signs of stopping. It’s not the hardest thing he’ll need to accomplish as he is then asked to travel to Prospero with Njal to help him—and stop the rune priests from falling to Chaos is the need arises.

Lukas the Trickster doesn’t fit in with anyone, but he’s loved by the rebellious young Space Wolves. He wants acceptance, but rarely find it amongst his peers. He hopes that by joining the Stormcaller he can earn their respect (not that he’d ever let them know it).

As with many of the Black Library’s books, the authors know his primary audience of tabletop gamers and 40k obsessed readers well, and flips from close-in third person to more of a floating eye to make sure that even when the character is alone, the reader knows what armour and weapons they carry and that it aligns with the game miniatures.

To me, 30k and 40k books, when you’re many tens, probably hundreds in to the story, are all about the moments where you just want to punch the air because there is little other way to express the awesomeness. For this Space Wolves fan, it is, of course, the return of the 13th company. This booked skipped a ridiculous amount of other titles on my TBR simply because of the mere mention of the 13th, which of course potentially leads to to their missing primarch, Russ. I think if most people like me are honest, it’s stuff like this that keeps us coming back. Thorpe makes sure he hits these notes with a thunder hammer to keep you turning the pages.

Ashes of Prospero reads as a who’s who of 40k Space Wolves. Apart from some of the Great Company leaders like Ragnar Blackmane, there aren’t many characters from the tabletop setting that don’t show up. It feels like those scenes from The Fellowship of The Ring or The 13th Warrior where heroes and champions each stand up and offer their blade for an adventure. This is how I remember feeling reading the Space Wolf novels by William King and Lee Lightner, and that does not make me unhappy. However, if you haven’t read much Space Wolves lore, or you aren’t a already fan of 40k with the assumes embedded knowledge of the history and characters, then this book more tells you these people are awesome as opposed to showing you awesomeness, and so this is likely to fall a little flat.

The three main characters were interesting, with Njal feeling a little like a bumbling grandpa tripping through his mistakes and hoping it’ll work out at times, as opposed to the fearsome post-human he’s usually depicted as. Arjac and Lukas felt more on song for me, with Arjac being more aligned to your hulking viking champion character and Lukas very much the Loki of the group with his trickeries and also a well hidden desire to be a part of something.

The battles on Prospero are well depicted and full of action, and this book definitey sets up a couple of really key future storylines which I hope Black Library explore (preferably through Gav Thorpe, who I am a big fan of and we’ve been lucky enough to publish before). However the ending felt a little rushed, like there was little in the way of grand reflection of the saga created, or the momentous changes that two key happenings may have on not just the Wolves, but the imperium. I was left a bit unsatisfied by the ending, but can definitely appreciate the ride to get there.

Ashes of Prospero is a wonderful love letter to three decades of 40k and 30k Space Wolf players and readers. You can forgive the info dumps and the ending for that.

3.5/5

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