Cora Buhlert's Blog, page 15

Oscars Everywhere All At Once – Some Thoughts on the 2023 Academy Award Winners

I used to do an annual post commenting on the Academy Award winners, but a quick check of my archives reveals that the last time I did an Oscar winner comment post was in 2019. Of course, skipping the pandemic years does make sense, but I also stopped watching the Oscar livestream a few years ago, because just following the announcements on social media and later watching the highlights is a better use of my time. Plus, a lot of the time the sort of movies that get Oscar nominations are not movies I care about or have even seen.

Furthermore, I’ve now reached an age where I no longer believe that I have to be interested in something (Oscar-winning movies, certain literary award winners, the latest Wagner production in Bayreuth, cultural programs on TV), because “true cultured people” (TM) care about these things. So I stopped paying a lot of attention to the Oscars, because while “true cultured people”(TM) might enjoy Oscar bait movies, I sure as hell don’t. At least not in this universe.

Of course, I did miss seeing Will Smith slap Chris Rock live last year, but it wasn’t as if there weren’t a hundred replays of that particular moment. And personally, I wasn’t surprised that someone snapped and slapped an Oscar host, I was just surprised that it took so long for it to happen, considering how rude and condescending many Oscar hosts are.

As for why I’m commenting about the 2023 Academy Awards this year – well, that’s because even though many of the usual Oscar baits were nominated – the hollow historical drama of questionable accuracy, the biopic about a great man or woman (bonus points, if the biopic is either wildly inaccurate or downright offensive), the film that’s not a biopic, but pretends to be one (Lydia Tár may have a website and a Twitter account, but she’s not real, at least not in this universe), the war movie, a famous director revisits his sad childhood, which usually involves their parents getting divorced (at least, Kenneth Branagh’s version was about the traumatic experience of the Northern Ireland conflict escalating and invading his happy childhood), the contemplation of the American navel, the depressing slice of life drama filmed entirely in shades of gray and brown – the big winner of the night was actually a quirky indie science fiction movie with a majority Asian cast travelling through the multiverse.

One cannot state how remarkable the fact that Everything Everywhere All At Once not just won, but won big, really is. For starters, SFF films almost never win Best Picture or the acting categories. Only four SFF films have ever won Best Picture in the 95-year history of the Oscars, all of them in the 21st century. They are Return of the King in 2004, Birdman in 2014, The Shape of Water in 2018 and now Everything Evrywhere All At Once. Considering how many musicals have won Best Picture over the decades and how often musicals get nominated, this is remarkable. Also consider the lengthy list of popular and beloved SFF films that failed to win Best Picture Oscars (and sometimes weren’t even nominated), which includes The Wizard of Oz (had the misfortune of coming out the same year as Gone With the Wind), Miracle on 34th Street (lost to Gentleman’s Agreement), Mary Poppins, Dr. Strangelove or How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb (both lost to My Fair Lady), 2001 – A Space Odyssey, Planet of the Apes, Rosemary’s Baby (all three not even nominated, the winner was Oliver!), A Clockwork Orange (lost to French Connection), The Exorcist (lost to The Sting), Star Wars (lost to Woody Allan’s Annie Hall in a decision that aged really badly), Raiders of the Lost Ark (lost to the inexplicably popular Chariots of Fire), E.T. – The Extraterrestrial (lost to Gandhi in one of the most inexplicable decisions), Ghost (lost to Dances With Wolves), The Beauty and the Beast (lost to The Silence of the Lambs), Groundhog Day (not even nominated, the winner was the nigh unbeatable Schindler’s List), Twelve Monkeys (not even nominated; the winner that year was that insult to Scottish history Braveheart, the SF-adjacent Apollo 13 was also nominated), The Sixth Sense (lost to the terrible American Beauty), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (lost to Gladiator), The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers (lost to Chicago and A Beautiful Mind respectively), District 9 and Up (lost to The Hurt Locker in another inexplicable decision), Avatar, Inception and Toy Story 3 (lost to The King’s Speech, another inexplicable winner), Hugo and Midnight in Paris (lost to The Artist, which I’m actually fine with), Beasts of the Southern Wild (lost to Argo, which at least has an SF connection, while Avengers was not even nominated), Gravity and Her (lost to Twelve Years a Slave), Mad Max: Fury Road and The Martian (lost to Spotlight, which is one of those winners that have completely escaped my memory), Arrival (lost to Moonlight), Get Out! (lost to another SFF film, The Shape of Water), Black Panther (lost to the terrible Green Book) and Dune (lost to Coda, Don’t Look Up! and Nightmare Alley were also nominated). And a lot of those films were more accessible and more typical Oscar winners than Everything Everywhere All At Once, the scrappy little movie that could. Everything Everywhere All At Once is certainly the weirdest movie to win Best Picture since The Artist back in 2011 (and plenty of Americans are still angry about that).

For starters, while the idea of parallel worlds and a multiverse is far from new, it also hasn’t really been mainstream until fairly recently. Maybe the idea of a multiverse full of parallel universe where things are like ours, but just a little different is just a little too weird for mainstream viewers. As a result, a remarkable number of people assume that Marvel invented the idea of the multiverse sometime around 2020/2021, even though there have been plenty of multiverse and parallel world stories in movies and TV before that, including the original Star Trek‘s 1967 episode “Mirror, Mirror” (which spawned a host of sequels), the 1993 Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Parallels”, which sends Worf on an Odyssey through the multiverse and into Deanna Troi’s arms, the 1995 TV-series Sliders, the 1998 German movie Run, Lola, Run (which was famously snubbed by the Oscars and not even nominated, in spite of being a worldwide success)  and the somewhat lesser known Sliding Doors, the 2013 TV show Fringe, the various multiverse plots from the DC superhero TV-series, most notably The Flash, but also the entire complex of shows popularly known as “the Arrowverse” (now snuffed out of existence by DC’s latest restructurings) and the 2018 animated movie Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse (which actually did win the Oscar for Best Animated Film).

Science fiction has been playing the multiverse game even longer. The 1934 story “Sidewise in Time” by Murray Leinster is usually considered to be the first parallel universe story, though some people also make a case for H.G. Wells’ “A Modern Utopia” from 1903.  Jorge Luis Borges tackled the multiverse in his 1941 story “The Garden of Forking Paths”, while Michael Moorcock became the first to actually use the term “multiverse” in an SFF context in 1963. There have been many more since.

Americans superhero comics also really love the idea of a multiverse, because it allows them to reconcile conflicting versions of the characters with each other and to tell fun “What if…?” stories. DC Comics were the first to get into the multiverse, because unlike Marvel, who tried to maintain continuity with their Golden Age comics, DC just rebooted most of their superheroes at the dawn of the Silver Age and quickly found themselves faced with the fact that there were two version of The Flash, Green Lantern and other popular heroes. The solution they came up with in the early 1960s was that there are two parallel DC Universes, Earth One and Earth Two. The number of universes eventually snowballed, until DC tried to consolidate them all in the epic 1985 crossover “Crisis on Infinite Earths”, only for the number of universes to escalate once again, requiring another reboot and so on.

Marvel was more hesitant with the multiverse concept, though the Fantastic Four and the Avengers occasionally dealt with parallel universe all the way back to the 1960s. The first run of the What If…? comic started in 1977, featuring one-of parallel universe scenarios. Alan Moore’s and Alan Davis’ Captain Britain comics from Marvel UK from the early 1980s really dialled up the idea with an often nightmarish trip through parallel universes and also gave the main Marvel Universe the designation Earth-616. A little later, Marvel editor Mark Gruenwald came up with the classification of the Marvel Multiverse that also incorporated spin-off media like cartoons, live action TV shows and newspaper strips.

If you’re a habitual science fiction or comic reader, you ran into the idea of the multiverse a long time ago. For me, it’s been so long that I can’t even tell what my first encounter with the idea of parallel universe was. I suspect it might have been a rerun of Star Trek‘s “Mirror, Mirror”. However, if you’re not a habitual science fiction or comic reader, Multiverses are weird and sometimes hard to get your head around, as reactions from casual viewers of The Flash and the other Arrowverse shows to those show’s multiversal shenangigans show.

So the big question is how did a movie about the multiverse not just manage win a whole lot of Oscars, but also completely trounced the more conventional competition, winning seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress and Best Editing? If Ke Huy Quan had been nominated for Best Actor rather than Best Supporting Actor, Everything Everywhere All At Once would have joined the rarified ranks of movies who managed to win all five categories considered the most important. Only three movies have managed this feat, namely It Happened One Night in 1935, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1976 and The Silence of the Lambs in 1992.  That’s not just success, it’s an enormous success, particularly for a quirky indie movie.

At The Yale Review, David M. de León declares that the world right now is not just full of terrible things happening, because it always is, but that the pressure to do something about those things or at least care is overwhelming, so the idea of a multiverse where everything that can happen does happen is a lot more seductive or at least a lot more palatable.

Another possible reason is that decades of more subdued multiverse stories, which stick to one or two universes at a time rather than throwing everything at the viewer all at once have softened up mainstream viewers to the idea of the multiverse. Just as decades of timeloop stories and non-linear narratives have softened up audiences to the fact that not every story needs to be linear.

The nihilism that nothing really matters, that there is no point, no fate, not god and that the universe – none of them – doesn’t care about people at all that is addressed (and ultimately rejected) in Everything Everywhere All At Once, is a theme that is increasingly showing up in pop culture – one of the most unexpected examples was Masters of the Universe: Revelation of all things, but last year’s Oscar contender Don’t Look Up! is another, even bleaker example. I strongly suspect that this nihilist resurgence really is tied to the zeitgeist, where terrible things keep happening and things get worse instead of better. It’s definitely a trend worth watching.

Finally, Everything Everywhere All At Once is not just a multiverse story in the way the various Marvel movies are. Instead, it uses the multiverse as a device to tell a story about a family, about intergenerational trauma and about the immigrant experience. And all those are subjects that both Oscar voters and mainstream audiences can connect with and that many Oscar winning and nominated movies have tackled over the years, though in a far more conventional way. The changing make-up of the membership of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences also helps movies gain recognition that would never have won or even been nominated ten years ago.

In general, I haven’t been this happy with a slate of Oscar winners in forever – well, in thirty years of so at any rate. There are only a handful of winners I’m unhappy with, all of them for one particular film, but more of that later.

Let’s start with the good. I’m happy with all the winners in the acting categories. Michelle Yeoh is amazing and one of those actors who should have won a long time ago, except that she made the wrong sort of movies and in the wrong country. Michelle Yeoh is also the first Malaysian ever and the first Asian actress to win an Oscar in the Best Actress category. Miyoshi Umeki, the other Asian actress to win an Oscar, won Best Supporting Actress all the way back in 1958.

Ke Huy Quan is not only immensely likable – who did not get misty eyes at his acceptance speech and when he hugged Harrison Ford? – and gave a great performance, but his story is also a classic underdog story – from Vietnamese refugee kid to child star to “Once you’re no longer the cute kid, we have no roles for you” to Oscar winner. And Hollywood loves underdog stories.

Brendan Fraser is another underdog story. In the 1990s and early 2000s, he was everywhere and then suddenly he vanished due to what was later revealed to be sexual harassment followed by blacklisting. But he made a roaring comeback in The Affair and Doom Patrol. And even though The Whale is the sort of depressing Oscar bait I don’t like and Fraser’s role of the “a fat suit and make-up” (and The Whale did win Best Make-up) school of acting that usually annoys me, I’m still very happy for Brendan Fraser, because he’s incredibly likeable and has deserved the recognition for a long time now. Gavia Baker-Whitelaw reports about a backlash against the Oscar wins for The Whale, since fatsuits are considered controversial. I don’t like them myself and while they make sense in some cases, e.g. where a rapid transformation is needed, much of the time just hiring an overweight person would be a better choice. However, the backlash mostly seems to focus on the Best Make-Up category (which seems unfair as well, because the make-up artists don’t decide to use a fatsuit, they just build the things. The decision lies with the director, so blame Darren Aronofsky), since everybody is happy for Brendan Fraser, even if they don’t like the film. Brendan Fraser seems to have been adaopted by the Everything Everywhere All At Once cast, by the way. Maybe somewhere in the multiverse, there is a version of the film that Brendan Fraser was actually in.

Which brings me to what is probably the most controversial acting award of the evening, Jamie Lee Curtis’ win for Best Supporting Actress in Everything Everywhere All At Once. A lot of people are annoyed by this win, because they would have preferred Angela Bassett or Stephanie Hsu to win. And personally, I would have preferred Angela Bassett or Stephanie Hsu as well. However, there is no way that Jamie Lee Curtis would not have won, at least in this universe. For starters, Jamie Lee Curtis is Hollywood royalty, the daughter of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. She has been acting since her late teens, has been in some hugely successful movies and yet has never had a single Oscar nomination, because most of her acting credits are for horror movies, action films and comedies, i.e. ot the sort of genres that attract Oscar nominations. And her illustrious parents only ever had one nomination each – for The Defiant Ones and Psycho respectively – and never won. So Jamie Lee Curtis won not just because the Academy ignored her for 45 years, but also because it ignored her parents. Of course, much of the same applies to Angela Bassett – a lengthy career, but never really got the recognition she deserved (though she did have one previous nomination for the Tina Turner biopic What’s Love Got to Do With It). But Jamie Lee Curtis also had the advantage of being in the biggest winner of the year.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, the movie Angela Bassett was nominated for, did get to take home one highly deserved Oscar for Best Costume Design for Ruth Carter, who also won for Black Panther in 2019.

Guillermo del Toro has managed to break through the Disney/Pixar stranglehold on the Best Animated Feature category with his take on Pincocchio, which is another win that makes me very happy.

The extremely catchy “Natuu, Natuu” from the Indian blockbuster RRR won a highly deserved Oscar for the Best Original Song, beating out four ballads which might just as well have been nominated twenty or thirty or forty or even fifty years ago. There was also a great live performance of the song, complete with an amazing dance number. The win for “Natuu, Natuu” is also the first ever Oscar win for a song from an Asian movie. It’s also a win for SFF, because RRR is alternate history. The two protagonists, though based on historical figures, never met in real life and the British Raj were obviously not defeated via dance battles.

Now let’s get to the wins that I’m not happy with, all of which are for the same movie, All Quiet on the Western Front. If you’d opened any German newspaper or watched a German news program yesterday, you might be forgiven for assuming that All Quiet on the Western Front was the biggest winner of the night and won all the awards, because after several paragraphs of extolling the virtues of All Quiet, there would be a brief note – almost an afterthought – that Everything Everywhere All At Once actually won the highest number of awards and most of the major categories. Meanwhile, All Quiet on the Western Front took four categories, Best Foreign Language Picture, Best Cinematography, Best Original Score. Unfortunately, it did not deserve any of them.

In the interest of full disclosure, like most Germans, I was forced to read All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque in tenth grade and absolutely hated the book. I hated it so much that I gleefully sold my copy at a used bookstore the summer after I graduated and used the credit to buy comics. It’s not the worst book I was forced to read in high school – Emilia Galotti a.k.a. “honour killings are totally defensible, as long as you commit them to further the case of democracy” by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Drachenblut a.k.a. Der Fremde Freund (Dragon’s Blood a.k.a. The Distant Friend) by Christoph Hein a.k.a. “Hey, hitting women is just like hitting dogs, it means nothing, and also women who have abortions are evil. Also, there are no dragons in this book” were both worse, because they promote actively harmful messages. However, All Quiet on the Western Front is the book I hated most of everything I was made to read in high school.

That said, unlike Emilia Galotti and Drachenblut (sorry, but it was never called Der Fremde Freund, when I read it, even though the West German title is false advertising), my adult self does see that All Quiet on the Western Front is a valuable and important book, because it shows the horrors of WWI from a pespective of a young, initially idealistic and then quickly disillusioned soldier. This grunt’s eye view is what makes the book important. It doesn’t matter that this particular soldier happens to be German – he also could have been British, French, American, Russian, Austrian or from any other nation.

When I first heard that there would be a new adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front (the book already had two adaptations in 1930 and 1979), my initial reaction was “Why?” My second thought was, “Well, the 1930 adaptation was ancient even back when I was in high school, so a maybe they’re making this thing so that teachers have a newer film to show. After all, high school students are a captive audience.”

However, there is one huge problem. The latest version of All Quiet on the Western Front is not just grossly inaccurate, it also manages to undermine the point of the novel by introducing a subplot about a German politician at the peace talks in the woods of Compiegne, whereas the novel explicitly sticks to the grunt’s eye persepctive of protagonist Paul Bäumer and the politicians and their manoeuverings, which eventually cost Paul’s life are never seen, as distant from Paul as if they were on Mars. Paul doesn’t even really know why he is fighting or what for, except “for Germany”.

The latest movie also changes the ending and thus manages to undermine both the point and the title of the novel. Because – spoiler alert for a 95-year-old book – the day late in the war on which Paul is killed is considered so unremarkable by the military higher-ups that the daily front report only reads “All Quiet on the Western Front”. Paul’s life and his death meant nothing at all (which would actually bring the movie in line with Everything Everywhere All At Once). However, an unremarkable death on an unremarkable day is not the Hollywood way and so the movie kills off Paul in a hyper-dramatic battle scene, thus completely undermining the point that his death was unremarkable and meant nothing.

Because most Germans have read the novel at some point in their lives, the initial reviews of the movie were respectively savage with some critics even wondering if director Edward Berger had read the book at all. If you want a harsh review of All Quiet on the Western Front in English, check out Gavia Baker-Whitelaw’s.

Historians also criticised that the movie contained all sorts of factual errors from attacks that wouldn’t have happened that way to soldiers being executed en masse for alleged cowardice, when this was extremely rare in the German army during WWI. Of course, inaccurate historical movies are nothing unusual – hear me rant about Titanic some time – and All Quiet on the Western Front is not the least accurate WWI movie – the much lauded Wonder Woman is much worse in that respect and makes gross errors such as having the Ottoman Empire fight on the wrong side and having Diana kill real life German general Erich Ludendorff, who survived WWI, conspired with Hitler until turning against him for being not Antisemitic enough (!) and finally died of cancer in 1937. Yes, we know that the DC Universe is not ours, but did they have to use a real person rather than a fictional general?

However, once All Quiet on the Western Front won an unprecendented nine Oscar nominations, the German critics suddenly decided that they needed to root for the movie, even though the Oscars are not a football World Cup, where you root for the home team (and I know plenty of Germans who never root for the German team). Instead, you get frankly embarassing contortions such as Katharina Pötter, mayor of Remarque’s hometown of Osnabrück, cheering about the four Oscar wins for a movie which actually undermines the message of Remarque’s novel.  Does she honestly think Remarque would have approved of this movie?

Even weirder was the German press cheering the Oscar win for James Friend, the British cinematographer of All Quiet, and completely missing the fact that Friend beat Florian Hoffmeister, the German cinematographer of Tár. If you’re rooting for the home team, you’re doing it wrong. That said, James Friend is probably the most deserving of the people who won Oscars for All Quiet on the Western Front, though personally I think both Empire of Light and Tár were better. Probably Elvis as well.

The win for Best Production Design is completely inexplicable, because the Production Designer basically had to make WWI look suitable gray and grimy and also dress up someplace in the Czech Republic (because all of Europe looks like the Czech Republic, don’t you know) like a small town in early 20th century Germany. Never mind that there are plenty of German small towns that can easily be made to look like the early 20th century. Hell, you could probably have used Remarque’s hometown Osnabrück, though it’s not that small. Honestly, every other nominee in this category would have been a better choice.

As for Best Score, Gavia Baker-Whitelaw explains why Volker Bertelsmann’s score for All Quiet on the Western Front was a bad choice, because it is the sort of music that accompanies action films, not anti-war movies.

As for Best Foreign Language Picture, All Quiet was definitely the worst of the bunch. Personally, I would have preferred The Quiet Girl from Ireland or EO, the Polish movie about a cute donkey, but even the movie about the military dictatorship in Argentina and whatever the Belgian contender was, would have been better. Also shame on India for not putting forward RRR and saving us from All Quiet on the Western Front. At least India makes historical epics of questionable accuracy that are fun.

At least All Quiet did not win Best Adapted Screenplay, which would have been a complete joke, considering that the movie ignores and undermines the novel, and instead lost out to Women Talking by Sarah Polley, the other former child star to win an Oscar this year. And indeed Women Talking and Living were probably the best of an extremely poor set of nominees, since they actually adapt something. Because Glass Onion and Top Gun: Maverick are not adapting anything except their own prequels and All Quiet is an adaptation which ignores its source material. In fact, I’ve noticed that the nominees for Best Adapted Screenplay are increasingly only adaptations of anything if you squint really had, probably because there simply are fewer literary adaptations made these days. Maybe it’s time to retire Best Adapted Screenplay and just have Best Screenplay going forward, similarly to how the split between black and white and colour cinematography and costume design ended in the 1960s, when black and white films became an endangered species.

But the question, how did a movie like All Quiet on the Western Front manage to gain so many Oscar nominations and wins, when it’s not very good? This Spiegel article by Oliver Kaever attempts to answer the question and points out that a) All Quiet was produced and heavily pushed by Netflix, who are eager to have award-winning prestige projects on their platform, also see Roma and The Irishman. Oliver Kaever also suspects that the anti-war message of the novel, though not really captured by the movie, might have resonated with American audiences because of the war in Ukraine, which I personally find questionable, since in both the US and Germany, the war in Ukraine is officially viewed as a “just war”, not senseless slaughter like WWI. And unlike Germany – where a lot of people disagree with the official view and see the war in Ukraine as yet more senseless slaughter that should be ended as soon as possible – there doesn’t seem to be a lot of questioning in the US.

However, Oliver Kaever also hits on what is IMO the most important point, namely that All Quiet on the Western Front is a movie that caters to American (and British) tastes. Director Edward Berger actually specialises in this sort of fare, German historical movies and series that cater to American tastes. He previously helmed the three season series Deutschland ’83/’86/’89. Now Deutschland ’83 had terrible ratings, when it debuted on German TV and was actually pulled from prime time TV and shuffled off into the graveyard slot, because German audiences didn’t want to see “yet another Stasi drama”. The show then ended up on a streaming service and for some reason, Americans went gaga over the thing and actually caused the streaming service to commission two more seasons.

This illustrates a broader issue with the Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar (and also streaming services distributing films and shows globally that would originally have aired only in their country of origin), namely that the Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar rewards not actually the best movies from the respective countries, but the movies that most appeal to American tastes and stereotypes.

All four German movies to win Best Foreign Language Picture (with the possible exception of The Tin Drum, though I don’t like that one either) are not actually good, let alone the best examples of German filmmaking, but won Oscars because they conformed to American stereotypes, while better movies about the same subjects were ignored and often not even nominated. There are much better movies about former East Germany than The Lives of Others (still the worst of the four German Oscar winners, because it was actively harmful in standardising how we talk about East Germany, by focussing on all Stasi all the time – see Deutschland ’83). There are much better movies about the Third Reich than Nowhere in Africa (a win so baffling the director Caroline Link didn’t even show up, but elected to stay home with her sick baby). And in general, there are much better and more nuanced movies both about German history and the way we live now than that sorry quartet of stereotype confirming historical epics.

However, whenever Germany puts forward a movie that is not a stereotype confirming historical (and the “one pre-selected movie per country” rule is problematic in itself), the film usually doesn’t get nominated, no matter how good it is. Last year’s German entry, the science fiction romantic comedy I’m Your Man, was a vastly better movie than All Quiet and yet not even nominated, because “We want you to make historical dramas, not SF”). Goodbye, Lenin, one of the most successful German movies of the post-1968 era, and a worldwide success was not nominated, even though it is a much better movie about former East Germany than The Lives of Others. But it doesn’t conform to stereotypes. Aimee and Jaguar, a lesbian romance about a German and a Jewish women during the Third Reich based on a true story that made Steven Spielberg cry, was not even nominated, because lesbians were too shocking, I guess. Run, Lola, Run, an early parallel universe/multiverse film that was a worldwide success in 1998, was not nominated. Fatih Akin’s Head On, the movie about Turkish immigrant lives in contemporary Hamburg, which gave the world Sibel Kekili, and Akin’s In the Fade, a movie about neo-Nazi terrorism in contemporary Germany starring bonafide Hollywood star Diane Kruger, were not even nominated either – because Hollywood prefers its Nazis safely in the past and apparently can’t get its head around the existence of a large Turkish immigrant community. There are many more examples.

The most ridiculous example happened in 1991, when the newly united Germany snubbed one Nazi era film in favour of another Nazi era film, because there can be only one, prompting the producer and director of the first film to scream Antisemitism all over the German and international press and eventually persuading Poland, which had co-produced the movie, to put it forward. It was promptly nominated, because it was the more stereotype-confirming of the two movies, though both are actually pretty good and would have been worthy contenders.

This doesn’t just apply to German movies either. The British movies to get Oscar nominations and wins are usually historical dramas, often about the monarchy or the upper class or a war movie. A kitchen sink working class drama, a gangster film or an immigrant drama has little chance, no matter how good, because that’s not how Hollywood sees the UK.

Meanwhile, the Oscars regularly honour American movies which are about explicitly American issues with little interest in whether the rest of the world cares. I tend to call those films a bit snarkily “contemplating the American navel”. And there’s nothing wrong with them – the movies and the Oscars should serve their own audience rather than deliver what the rest of the world expects from Hollywood (which is mostly kicks, explosions, special effects and superheroes, which Hollywood does better than anybody else). However, it’s annoying when good German (or British or French or [insert country here]) movies get ignored in favour of movies catering to American tastes.

Another almost annual issue with the Oscars is that the “In Memoriam” segment omits several notable people whom we lost last year. The Guardian reports about actress Mira Sorvino being furious that her late father, actor Paul Sorvino, was not included. Other notable omissions include Anne Heche, Tom Sizemore, Chaim Topol, Lisa Marie Presley, Leslie Jordan and Charlbi Dean, who actually starred in one of the Best Picture finalists, Triangle of Sadness, before her untimely death at age 32. And while Tom Sizemore and Chaim Topol died very close to the ceremony, so that editing the “In Memoriam” reel may no longer have been possible, this excuse does not apply to the other omissions. The Tom Sizemore and Chaim Topol also reminds me of Bill Paxton, who died unexpectedly very shortly before the Oscar ceremony, and was omitted from the “In Memoriam” segment twice, the year he died and the following year.

Finally, I really love this story about Bill Nighy taking his granddaughter’s Sylvanian Families toy bunny as his date to the Oscars. And I strongly suspect that the bunny wasn’t the only toy that got taken to the Oscars, but the rest of them were probably hidden in evening bags and pockets.

Still, at least in this universe the 2023 Oscars were really good, with the exception of the four wins for All Quiet on the Western Front. Surely, there is a universe somewhere where something more worthy won instead.

Fanzine Spotlight: Remembrance of Things Past and Future

Before we get to the main subject of this post, I want to point you to a new fantasy story I have out. It’s called “Homecoming Gift” and was published as part of Wyngraf Magazine‘s flash fiction series. I’m very fond of this story and am glad that it found a home.

Hugo season is upon us and nominations for the 2023 Hugo Awards have opened, so my Fanzine and Fancast Spotlight project continues as well. For more about the Fanzine/Fancast Spotlight project, go here. You can also check out the other great fanzines and fancasts featured by clicking here. And if you need more Hugo nomination inspiration, also check out my series of Non-Fiction Spotlights and Semiprozine Spotlights.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I enjoy reading and discussing vintage SFF, particularly lesser known works. The subject of today’s spotlight does just that, because Remembrance of Things Past and Future is a blog focussed on reviewing and discussing vintage (and current) SFF published in magazines.

Therefore, I’m happy the welcome Brian Collins of Remembrance of Things Past and Future to my blog today.

Tell us about your site or zine.

Remembrance of Things Past and Future is devoted to science fiction, fantasy, and horror as published in the magazines. The history of SF especially is tied to the long history of magazine publishing; some of the old classics of the genre spent years stuck inside brittle magazine pages before getting turned to books. It’s a rather niche criterion for what can be reviewed (a story must have been originally published or reprinted in a zine), but it’s at the same time wide-spanning. I could review a Robert E. Howard serial from 90 years ago and also Elizabeth Bear’s latest (and no doubt good) outing without crossing the streams, so to speak. I review short stories, novellas (because I love those), novel serials, and even occasionally a “complete” novel. I do that last one as a special thing because I’m not a very good reader and I can’t fathom reviewing novels constantly. If it’s SF, fantasy, and/or horror and it was published in a periodical at some point, it’s on my plate. As to when I’ll cover any given thing is a different matter…

Who are the people behind your site or zine?

It’s a one-man show. I’m Brian Collins and I write, edit, and post everything (excluding comments, of course) on Remembrance. I do this for free. I’m a compulsive writer. I have a day job, and while it’s crummy it covers my back enough.

Why did you decide to start your site or zine?

I first started writing SFF fan material as part of Young People Read Old SFF [profiled here], but at some point I realized I needed a better outlet for writing about SFF—preferably one where I call all the shots. I’m very selfish like that. I also realized that a couple of my friends run blogs and, being a literary type, I thought it embarrassing that I didn’t run a blog of my own. After a bit of brainstorming, scheduling, and writing, I had created a new fanzine.

What format do you use for your site or zine (blog, e-mail newsletter, PDF zine, paper zine) and why did you choose this format?

It’s a blog. WordPress isn’t perfect (it can be glitchy at times), but it’s user-friendly enough and it’s more practical than a paper zine, as cool as that sounds. I’m not a printer—not even an amateur one.

The fanzine category at the Hugos is one of the oldest, but also the category which consistently gets the lowest number of votes and nominations. So why do you think fanzines and sites are important?

History is paramount. A lot of people love SFF but evaluate it in sort of a vacuum. There’s too much forgetfulness in fandom, and the low voter turnout for the fan categories tells me fans aren’t in touch with their own history (which, after all, involves the present) enough. For years I loved SFF but was stuck as a rogue agent, lacking context for so much of the field, until I started getting into other people’s fan projects.

In the past twenty years, fanzines have increasingly moved online. What do you think the future of fanzines looks like?

The era of the small-press fanzine that got mailed to a list of subscribers is basically dead. Well that’s sad. The good news is that the blog reaching maturity (user-friendliness and affordability) means that it’s now easy to start your own fanzine and spread the word through social media. I started using Twitter regularly partly so I could let likeminded folks know that I’ve made this thing and I think it’s good. Ah, but the bad news is that social media is terrible, and really, how do you find these outlets in the first place? A tough question that as a content creator myself I still have not been able to answer.

The four fan categories of the Hugos (best fanzine, fan writer, fan artist and fancast) tend to get less attention than the fiction and dramatic presentation categories. Are there any awesome fanzines, fancasts, fan writers and fan artists you’d like to recommend?

I was inspired to start my own blog because of Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations, Galactic Journey, and James Nicoll Reviews. Those are the big three for me. The Journey especially is what finally pushed me over the edge. Gideon and Janice Marcus are such lovely people; I sure hope I don’t bug them in DMs too much. Then there’s The Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog, which contrary to its name covers more than just books! Speaking of which, for fancasts my go-tos are Hugos There Podcast and Hugo, Girl!, both of which have such good names that I’m a little jealous. As someone who is a little obsessed (but not terribly) with the Hugos I find them indispensable.

Where can people find you?

My blog: https://sffremembrance.com/
My Twitter: https://twitter.com/bdcollins_1995
My Mastodon: https://wandering.shop/@bdcollins
My Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/Atlas_Nebula/

Thank you, Brian, for stopping by and answering my questions.

Do visit Remembrance of Things Past and Future, because it’s a great blog.

***

Do you have a Hugo eligible fanzine/-site or fancast or a semiprozine and want it featured? Contact me or leave a comment.

Fanzine Spotlight: SMOF News

Hugo season is upon us and nominations for the 2023 Hugo Awards have opened, so my Fanzine and Fancast Spotlight project continues as well. For more about the Fanzine/Fancast Spotlight project, go here. You can also check out the other great fanzines and fancasts featured by clicking here. And if you need more Hugo nomination inspiration, also check out my series of Non-Fiction Spotlights and Semiprozine Spotlights.

On of the most enjoyable things about the Fanzine and Fancst Spotlights has been to discover that there is a  huge range of fanzines and fancasts on any SFF-related subject imaginable. Case in point: The subject of today’s spotlight is a fanzine that focusses on convention news.

Therefore, I am happy to welcome Petréa Mitchell of SMOF News to my blog today:

Tell us about your site or zine.

SMOF News is a weekly newsletter about geek-oriented fan conventions, published every Wednesday evening (Pacific time). A typical issue is divided into four parts:

1) The big news of the week, or, if there isn’t any, informational articles about various aspects of cons.
2) News in brief, for minor news and routine items like Convention Adds Guest, Fan Fund Opens Voting, or (sadly) Convention Goes on Indefinite Hiatus.
3) Worldwide convention listings for the next five weekends.
4) One interesting link which does not necessarily have anything to do with conventions.

The overall tone it aims for is “industry newsletter”.

Who are the people behind your site or zine?

Just me and anyone kind enough to send me news tips or letters of comment.

Why did you decide to start your site or zine?

There was an unfilled niche. I used to contribute to a convention news blog, Con News, and didn’t have enough spare time to take it over when the editor had to give it up. Convention-related news doesn’t get much attention from more general fannish news sources unless it’s the editor’s home convention or one they’re attending that’s affected.

I’m one of the lucky people who suddenly had a lot more time on their hands when the world switched to remote work, and in late 2020 I got to thinking about that unfilled niche and what kind of publication I could create to fill it.

What format do you use for your site or zine (blog, e-mail newsletter, PDF zine, paper zine) and why did you choose this format?

Substack newsletter. Yes, I am aware of the concerns about who Substack offers a platform to. I looked around, and my other options were either Substack-like features being offered by social media companies, which had been knowingly profiting from bigoted content for far longer than Substack has been around, or pay-to-publish outfits which had no content filter at all. With no unbigoted platforms to choose from, I chose to endorse the one that I think has the healthiest model for paying writers (although SMOF News is 100% free).

I picked Wednesdays for publishing because if anything big happens at a weekend convention, there will usually be multiple accounts of it, official statements, and so forth available by Wednesday.

The fanzine category at the Hugos is one of the oldest, but also the category which consistently gets the lowest number of votes and nominations. So why do you think fanzines and sites are important?

Because they are fandom. Conventions are just the parties where fandom gets together.

In the past twenty years, fanzines have increasingly moved online. What do you think the future of fanzines looks like?

Pretty much like now.

The four fan categories of the Hugos (best fanzine, fan writer, fan artist and fancast) tend to get less attention than the fiction and dramatic presentation categories. Are there any awesome fanzines, fancasts, fan writers and fan artists you’d like to recommend?

I have subscribed to a zillion convention-specific newsletters, and my favorite so far is Metropol Con’s, Das Krähende Schwein/The Crowing Pig, because it usually contains items of general interest to sf fans that I wouldn’t have read about anywhere else.

For my fellow anime fans, I’d like to point out Sakuga Blog, which is primarily about appreciating the art of anime, but which has also become an important source for learning about the working conditions for animators in Japan; and Day With the Cart Driver, which you can count on for solid reviews and hilarious season previews.

Where can people find you?

Read and subscribe to the newsletter: https://smofnews.substack.com/
Or, if you prefer RSS: http://smofnews.substack.com/feed
E-mail: smofnews@gmx.com

Thank you, Petréa, for stopping by and answering my questions.

Do subscribe to SMOF News for all your convention news needs.

***

Do you have a Hugo eligible fanzine/-site or fancast or a semiprozine and want it featured? Contact me or leave a comment.

Some Comments on the 2022 Nebula Finalists

The finalists for the 2022 Nebula Awards were announced today. This time, the announcement didn’t happen that close to the Hugo nomination deadline, but then Hugo nominations close more than a month later than usual this year, which gives Hugo nominators enough to time check out worthy works they might have missed.

So let’s dive right in and take a look at the individual categories:

Best Novel

This category is a mix of the expected and the unexpected.

Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree was not only one of my favourite discoveries of 2022, it also gave a boost to the already simmering cozy fantasy trend and I’m really glad to see it nominated. This one is also on my personal Hugo longlist.

Ursula Vernon a.k.a. T. Kingfisher is a long-time Hugo and Nebula favourite, so the nomination for Nettle & Bone is not a huge surprise. And a most worthy finalist it is, too. Nettle & Bone is another book that’s on my personal Hugo longlist.

The Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir is one of the most popular SFF series of recent years. The first book Gideon the Ninth was a Hugo and Nebula finalist,  while Harrow the Ninth was a Hugo finalist. Therefore, the Nebula nomination for Nona the Ninth is not all that surprising and I expect to see it on the Hugo ballot as well.

Babel by R.F. Kuang has been showing up year’s best lists all over the place, so it’s no surprise to see it nominated here. I have to admit that I haven’t read Babel, because Kuang’s Poppy War trilogy did not work for me at all. Maybe Babel will be more up my alley.

I also haven’t read Spear by Nicola Griffith and The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. The Mountain in the Sea did get quite a bit of buzz, but I don’t recall seeing a lot of buzz for Spear, so it’s a pleasant surprise to see it on the Nebula ballot.

Diversity count: 4 women, 2 men, 1 writer of colour, 2 international writers*

Best Novella

This category is another mix of the expected and unexpected.

Becky Chambers is one of the most popular science fiction writers to come up in recent years and the nomination for A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, the second novella in her Monk and Robot series, is no big surprise, especially since the first in the series was both a Hugo and Nebula finalist last year. A Prayer for the Crown-Shy is also on my personal Hugo longlist.

C.L. Polk is a Nebula favourite and also was a Hugo finalist last year for their Kingston Cycle, so the nomination for their novella Even Though I Knew the End… is not a huge surprise. That said, I’m always happy to see fantasy romances recognised in a genre that traditionally has had issues with romantic elements. This novella is also on my personal Hugo longlist.

I have been enjoying Kelly Robson’s works, though I haven’t yet read her historical fantasy novella High Times in the Low Parliament. It sounds fun, though.

“Bishop’s Opening” by R.S.A. Garcia from Clarkesworld is another novella I haven’t read, though it also was a finalist for the Ignyte and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Awards.

I Never Liked You Anyway by Jordan Kurella completely passed me by. A quick Google reveals that it’s an Orpheus and Euridice retelling.

Tor.com still dominates this category with three of five finalists – the remaining two finalists were published in Clarkesworld and by the small press Vernacular.

Diversity count: 3 women, 1 man, 1 non-binary, 2 writers of colour, 3 international writers

Best Novelette

I have read only two of the finalists in this category. “We Built This City” by Marie Vibbert from Clarkesworld, and I’m very glad to see it nominated here. This story is also on my personal Hugo longlist.

I also read and enjoyed “Murder by Pixel: Crime and Responsibility in the Digital Darkness” by S.L. Huang, also from Clarkesworld.

For some reason, I did not read any of the three nominated stories from Uncanny, though John Chu, S.B. Divya and Natalia Theodoridou are all fine writers and I will certainly check out the stories before the Hugo nomination deadline.

The final finalist in the category “A Dream of Electric Mothers” by Wole Talabi from the anthology Africa Risen, which I haven’t gotten around to reading yet either.

It’s notable that Uncanny and Clarkesworld dominate this category with only one finalist published elsewhere.

Diversity count: 4 women, 2 men, 4 writers of colour, 2 international writers

Best Short Story

I can’t say much about this category, because I haven’t yet read any of the finalists. 2022 was a stressful year for me, so I read less short fiction than usual. I will try to remedy that before Hugo nominations close.

That said, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and John Wiswell are two of the most exciting writers to come up in recent years. They’re both lovely people, too, and I’m really happy to see them nominated here.

Ai Jiang is a name I’m seeing in the TOCs of the various SFF magazines more and more, though I haven’t read the story of hers that’s nominated. Suzan Palumbo is mainly known as a horror writer and coincidentally the second writer from Trinidad and Tobago on the 2022 Nebula ballot next to R.S.A. Garcia. I’m not familiar with either Samantha Mills or Ian Muneshwar.

This category has the greatest variety of sources of nominated stories and includes stories published in Asimov’s, F&SF, The Dark, Nightmare Magazine, Tor.com and Uncanny. We don’t see a lot of finalists from the print magazines in the Hugos and Nebulas anymore, because the online magazines are more accessible and therefore read by more people. It’s also notable that we have two finalists from horror magazines, proving that  the Nebulas are a lot more open to horror than the Hugos, since we’ve had several horror stories on the ballot in recent years.

Diversity count: 3 women, 3 men, at least 3 writers of colour, 3 international writers

Andre Norton Award for YA and Middle Grade SFF

I can’t really say much about this category, because I haven’t read any of the finalists and wasn’t even aware of most of them. I have heard of K. Tempest Bradford, of course, but mainly as an astute commentator on race issues in SFF and not so much as an author of middle grade SFF. The only other author in this category I’ve heard of is H.A. Clarke. Jenn Reese, Maya MacGregor and Deva Fagan are new to me.

Diversity count: 3 women, 2 non-binary, 1 writer of colour, 1 international writer

Ray Bradbury Award for Best Dramatic Presentation

Not a lot of surprises in this category.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is currently winning all the awards (and deservedly, too), so I’m not at all surprised to see it on the ballot.

Andor was the best of the three Star Wars series to air last year and put the political commentary, that has always been an integral part of Star Wars, front and center in a way that Star Wars rarely does. The nominated episode is the one about the prison break, which was truly excellent.

I’m really, really happy to see the gay pirate comedy Our Flag Means Death on the ballot, since it was such a delight and apparently still hasn’t been renewed.

Severance has gotten a lot of critical acclaim, though I haven’t gotten around to watching it yet, partly because office/workplace shows aren’t my thing at all, probably because I’ve never had that sort of office job. Though thankfully, no one has had the sort of hellish office job depicted in Severance.

Nope seemed to get less attention than Jordan Peele’s previous movies Get Out! and Us. It’s still a highly deserving finalist and I actually preferred it to Us, which didn’t really work for me.

The Sandman is a bit of a surprise, because the series came out ten to fifteen years too late and didn’t seem to get that much popular attention in a landscape crowded with excellent genre TV. On the other hand, it’s Neil Gaiman and it’s Sandman.

Interestingly, no Marvel movie or TV show has got a single nomination. Of course, last year’s Marvel movies weren’t all that great, but the TV shows were pretty good. So has Marvel finally lost its luster?

It’s also interesting that only two of the finalists are movies, the other four are TV shows. But then, we are living not just in a new golden age, but actually a golden deluge of genre television.

No diversity count, too many people are needed to make movies and TV shows.

Best Game Writing

I can only repeat what I said about this category in previous years, namely that I’m not a gamer, don’t recognise any of the titles except for Elden Ring and can’t really say anything about them.

No diversity count, too many people are needed to make games.

***

All in all, this is another excellent Nebula ballot. Those who are worried that not enough men are being nominated for the big genre awards will be happy to see that there are several men, including white men, on the ballot this year. Though I’m sure they will find something wrong with the men in question anyway.

I don’t see a lot of notable trends at first glance. We do have fairytale and Greek mythology retellings, both of which are popular right now, though the fairytale retelling trend seems to be waning a bit. We have a couple fo historical fantasies and the Nebulas continue to be more open to horror than the Hugos. Interestingly, there is comparatively little science fiction on the ballot. Cozy SFF is clearly on the rise – which will annoy certain people to no end – and a couple of finalists clearly fall into the cozy category. Definitely Legends & Latte and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy. You could also make a case for Our Flag Means Death and probably others.

Regarding publishers, Tor and Tor.com as well as Uncanny and Clarkesworld are still quite dominant, though let’s not forget that Tor is the biggest SFF publisher in the English speaking world. And we do have plenty of  finalists published in other magazines or by small presses. Even the “big three” print magazines get a look in – well, two of them, at any rate.

As for indie writers, Legends & Latte by Travis Baldree was originally self-published, but was then picked up by Tor. And I can’t tell if I Never Liked You Anyway by Jordan Kurella is self-published or published by a small press. Nonetheless, we used to see more indie writers on the Nebula Ballot five years ago (and the Nebulas were one of the first genre awards to nominate a self-published novel, well before SFWA started accepting indies), so something changed. Is it because indies don’t have the marketing budget of a big publisher and are thus invisible to many nominators (but then we do have a couple of small presses nominated and they don’t have much of a marketing budget either) or because indies don’t write the sort of thing Nebula voters are looking for or did the indies all take their ball and went home after the 20Booksto50K uproar of 2019?

All in all, it’s another very strong Nebula ballot.

*International authors means authors living and writing outside the US.

The Mandalorian and Baby Grogu are back and have become “The Apostate”

The Mandalorian is back and for now I’m doing episode by episode reviews of season 3. Previous installments may be found here.

Warning! Spoilers behind the cut!

When we last met our favourite clan of two, . Furthermore, Din Djarin also got himself a shiny new spaceship after the Razor Crest was destroyed. However, by removing his helmet to say good-bye to Grogu, Din had also violated the principles of his clan of fundamentalist Mandalorians and was cast out by his own people.

Season 3 of The Mandalorian opens not with our favourite duo, but with the Armourer, leader of Din Djarin’s splinter group of fundamentalist Mandalorians – and isn’t it interesting that all the leaders of this very macho warrior people that we see are women? The Armourer is forging a piece of armour which turns out to be a child-sized Mandalorian helmet. She then emerges from the cave, where a whole bunch of Mandalorians – at least fifty of them – are waiting. So there definitely are more Mandalorians in this particular splinter group than the ones who were killed in Nevarro. It’s also interesting that the last time we saw the Armourer in The Book of Boba Fett, she only had a single follower, a fellow named Paz Vizla. Now she has about fifty followers. Could it be that the fundamentalist splinter group are actually the majority of the Mandalorians that are left in the galaxy?

As for why the Armourer and her followers have gathered on a lake outside a cave, they are there for the initiation ceremony of an approx. ten-year-old kid. The kid is standing in the lake, recites the Mandalorian creed (or rather the creed of this particularly splinter group) and is finally fitted with the helmet and has to swear never to take it off in public. I’ve said before that the prevalence of what are essentially child soldiers in the Star Wars universe is disturbing, as is the fact that not only does no one seem to have a problem, but that the Star Wars universe has not one but two warrior cults which recruit children way too young to consent to anything to their cause. And in the Star Wars universe, being picked up and raised by Mandalorians is not the worst thing that can happen to a kid. At least, the Mandalorians only take in orphaned kids, emphasise togetherness and community and genuinely seem to care for the kids they take in. Case in point: There is a proud-looking Mandalorian in the front row of the ceremony, who appears to be the kid’s Dad (either biological or adopted).

However, before the kid can complete taking his oath, the ceremony is interrupted by the most Star Wars thing ever, a giant crocodile/turtle monster attacking the congregation and proceeding to eat several Mandalorians. The Mandalorians don’t fare very well in what is not exactly an impressive display of the prowess of the supposedly best warriors in the universe, since some fifty fully armoured up and armed Mandalorians can’t even take out a single monster. Lucky for them, Din Djarin and Grogu burst out of the sky in Din Djarin’s snazzy new starfighter and blast the monster, spraying its guts all over the beach and the surviving Mandalorians.

In their review at Tor.com, Emmet Asher-Perrin points out that pattern of Din Djarin has to kill some kind of large monster to solve somebody else’s problem is becoming very repetitive by now and besides, what about those monsters who just want to live their lives and go about their business. I agree that “Oh, there’s a giant monster! Let’s kill it before it eats us!” is repetitive, but then it’s been a Star Wars thing since long before Din Djarin and Grogu came along. Indeed, one of the many quirks of the Star Wars universe is that every cave, lake, river, sink hole, trash compactor or asteroid is inevitably inhabited by a giant monster which will try to eat our heroes. In fact, the biggest implausibility is that Star Wars characters are always surprised when a giant monster appears, because you’d think that given the prevalence of megafauna in the Star Wars universe, they’d have learned to scan for giant monsters before going anywhere.

Of course, Star Wars did not invent giant monsters lurking in caves or lakes or swamps and trying to eat our heroes. Pulp SFF is full of random giant monsters wanting to eat our heroes, as are Saturday morning cartoons (He-Man’s homeworld Eternia has almost as many random giant monsters as the Star Wars universe, only that He-Man doesn’t kill them) and most of them are a riff on the monsters of mythology. What do those monsters eat when there are no handy Stormtroopers, Mandalorians, rebels or civilians stumbling into their lairs? Who cares? Giant monsters are cool, which is why they keep popping up. Because inside all of us there is a ten-year-old kid who loves dinosaurs and giant monsters and thinks they’re the coolest thing ever. There’s a reason Schleich makes a lot of money selling toy monsters and dinosaurs.

You’d think that the Armourer would be grateful to Din Djarin for saving her and her little congregation of Mandalorians from a giant monster that was about to eat all of them. But then you’d be wrong, because the Armourer still thinks that Din Djarin is an apostate for taking off his helmet – and of his free will, at that – and wants nothing to do with him. Honestly, Din should just have let the monster eat her.

However, letting giant monsters eat your Mandalorian brethren, even if they want nothing to do with you, is not the way. And besides, Din wants to rejoin his people and redeem himself for the grave sin of taking off his helmet to say good-bye to his kid. He can redeem himself, too, by bathing in the sacred waters in the salt mines of Mandalore. There’s only one catch. The Empire literally nuked Mandalore from orbit and what’s left is a radioactive hellworld fused into glass. Din, however, believes that it is possible to go back to Mandalore and bathe in the sacred waters. As proof, he gives the Armourer a chunk of glass (which only proves that Mandalore was fused into glass) with some Mandalorian writing on it. The Armourer grudgingly admits that if Din manages to bathe in the sacred waters, he can return to the fold. Why in the universe Din Djarin would want to return to a bunch of fundamentalist fanatics is a question that remains unanswered for now?

After saving the Armourer’s bacon, Din and Grogu take off once again. We get a nice hyperspace interlude with Din sleeping in the cockpit, while Grogu is sitting in his converted droid port and marvelling at the universe, when we and Grogu suddenly see the shadows of some giant whale-like creatures accompanying the ship (which doesn’t have a name yet, as far as I know). James Whitbrook explains that these creatures are called Purrgils and have appeared in the Star Wars: Rebels animated series before. At any rate, their existence proves my point above that there is no ecological niche in the Star Wars universe that is not inhabited by megafauna. At least, the Purrgils seem to be harmless and don’t try to eat the ship, though Grogu finds them rather scary and crawls into the cockpit to cuddle with Daddy.

Din and Grogu travel – no, not to Mandalore, but to Nevarro to visit some old friends, only to find that the place has changed a lot since we last saw it. In season 1, Nevarro was the sort of rundown and dangeorus outer rim world we’ve seen so many times in Star Wars. By season 2, the place has started to clean up now that Werner Herzog and his Imperial holdouts are no more. This time around, the clean-up process of Nevarro’s one city (because every planet in the Star Wars universe has only a single city) has progressed further. The buildings have been repaired, there are automated messages welcoming travellers, there’s more green – including a tree full of wild Salacious Crumbs – and the market looks nicer. And it’s all due to one man, Greef Karga, who is now High Magistrate (he was only a plain Magistrate before) and sports an impressive gold chain and a cape that is born by two wheeled droids who follow him around everywhere. The little droids who only exist to carry Greef Karga’s ostentatious cape are of course another example of the beautiful absurdity that sets Star Wars apart from any other space opera.

It is notable with the development of both Nevarro here and Tatooine in The Book of Boba Fett that at this point in the history of the Star Wars universe, some five to ten years after the fall of the Empire, things are getting better on rim worlds like Nevarro and Tatooine. Okay, so the New Republic is mostly useless and neither Boba Fett nor Greef Karga are in any way democratic leaders, but life is getting better for the ordinary people and aliens of the Star Wars universe. Considering that the prequel and particularly the sequel trilogy showed that the Star Wars universe is a terrible place, has always been one and will always be one, it’s interesting that The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett both show what the original trilogy implied, namely that we encountered the Star Wars universe at a low point in its history. Things were better once and will be better once again. Personally, I’ve always preferred this view and one of my main gripes with the sequel trilogy is that it cemented the Star Wars universe as a place that’s forever terrible, no matter who is in charge.

Greef Karga is happy to see his old friend Din Djarin again and invites him to his office, where he offers Din a really nice plot of land to live on, while Grogu discovers the wonders of the swivel chair and uses the Force to steal candy. I for one was yelling at the screen “Take up his offer and build a home for yourself and Grogu”, but of course then there wouldn’t be much of a story, so of course Din declines in order to go on a dangerous quest to redeem himself in the eyes of people who neither want nor appreciate him.

The reunion of Greef Karga and Din Djarin is interrupted by the arrival of some space pirates led by a fellow called Vane. The space pirates are old associates of Greef Karga’s and haven’t yet gotten the memo that Greef and Nevarro have gone respectable now. And so they demand to be let into what used to be a bar, but is now a school. Greef Karga’s commitment to education is certainly admirable.

Greef Karga tries to persuade the pirates to share a drink with him in his office, since the bar is closed, but the pirates will have none of that. They want a drink, they want it now and they don’t care if the bar is now a school. Vane also reminds Greef that it was the money Greef made via deal with Vane’s boss, the Pirate King Gorian Shard, that allowed the bar/school to be built. Then Vane pulls a blaster on Greef. However, Greef may be respectable now, but he’s still got a quick draw and shoots the blaster out of Vane’s hand. This prompts the rest of the pirates to draw their blasters, but Din – who’d only been watching the entire exchange so far – shoots the lot of them. Only Vane escapes, but you know that he will be back.

Now Greef Karga also admits why he really wants to keep Din around, because he needs a marshall to deal with space pirates and other lowlives. “What about Cara Dune?” Din asks, whereupon Greef Karga explains that the New Republic recruited Cara for their special forces after she brought in Moff Gideon (who’s facing a war crimes tribunal). And that’s how The Mandalorian deals with the firing of Gina Carano following a series of increasingly problematic tweets. Now I liked Cara Dune the character a lot and hope that they will eventually recast her, since Gina Carano has slid even further into the morass of far right conspiracy theories since her firing and really is no longer tenable. At least the door is still open for the character to come back. And a different face can be explained away by injuries requiring plastic surgery or a disguise or something along those lines.

Din Djarin, however, doesn’t want to be marshall of Nevarro either. Instead, he needs help. Not from Greef Karga, but from IG-11, the bounty hunter droid turned nursing droid who heroically self-destructed in order to save everybody from the remnants of the Empire at the end of season 1. Din, who famously doesn’t like droids very much, wants IG-11’s help, because he needs a droid to explore what’s left of Mandalore and IG-11 is one of the few droids Din trusts, since he after all saved Din’s life.

The fact that IG-11 was destroyed would normally make it difficult for him to help Din. However, no one is every really dead in the Star Wars universe, not even Palpatine. And since IG-11 was a droid, there’s always the chance to repair him. And this is exactly what Din wants to do. Of course, the fact that IG-11 literally blew himself up might be a problem, but luckily surviving parts were incorporated into a statue commemorating the heroic droid. Emmet Asher-Perrin complains that the statue literally comes out of nowhere, but that’s not quite right, since it does appear in the background of the season 2 episode “The Siege”, as mentioned in my review of that episode. They are right, however, that incorporating parts of a sentient droid into a statue is rather creepy, akin to incorporating humans bones into a statue. And yes, I know that there are reliquaries containing bones and other bodyparts of saints, but personally I find that creepy as well.

Din, Greef and friends dismantle the statue and try to repair and reactivate what’s left of IG-11. They succeed, too, but unfortunately IG-11 has reverted to his previous bounty hunter programming and promptly attacks Grogu and is only stopped when someone tips a bust of Greef Karga (who of course has a gilded bust of himself in his office) onto the wayward droid. “That’s using your head,” Din remarks in what is the funniest line in the episode.

Because the remains of IG-11 are now even more smashed up than before, Greef takes Din and the droid remnants to a group of Anzellan droid smiths – billed as the best in the galaxy – who have set up shop on Nevarro. In case you don’t remember which of the many species in the Star Wars universe the Anzellans are, they are the species of Babu Frik, the tiny fuzzy droid smith who was the best thing about The Rise of Skywalker. We’re not sure if the Anzellan we meet on Nevarro is Babu Frik or another member of his species, but he’s still as cute and difficult to understand as ever. According to Guardian reviewer Jack Seale, his gibberish spouting voice is provided by actress Shirley Henderson who also voiced him in The Rise of Skywalker.

I wonder why Greef and Din tried repairing IG-11 themselves rather than take him to the Anzellans right away, though I guess that would have lost the IG-11 goes on a rampage and threatens Grogu action scene. However, Greef finally remembers the Anzellans and we are treated to a delightful interlude of Din sitting hunched inside the Anzellan workshop, while Greef is outside, helpfully translating Anzellan gibberish, even though Din – who has a knack for languages – can understand the Anzellans perfectly. And since Grogu goes where Daddy goes, he’s waddling around the workshop and spontaneously hugs and cuddles Babu Frik (if it’s indeed him), until Din tells him that Anzellan droid smiths are not pets. I certainly sympathise with Grogu, since Babu Frik is eminently huggable. It’s also nice to see two of the cutest creatures in the Star Wars universe interact with each other.

As for IG-11, Babu Frik declares that he cannot repair him without a new memory circuit. And since IG-droids are no longer made, finding a memory circuit will be difficult to impossible. Din, however, vows that he will find one and takes off with Grogu, who cheerfully waves good-bye to Greef Karga.

We now get another space scene with Din trying to explain the controls and instruments of his spaceship to Grogu with all the misplaced enthusiasm of a father trying to explain how to drive a car to a four-year-old. Still, Din is getting the hang of this  father thing, even though Grogu is still way too young to pilot a spaceship.

This father-son idyll is rudely interrupted by the return of the space pirates we met earlier on Nevarro. Of course, it was obvious that space pirates wouldn’t just let Din Djarin shoot several of their number without retaliation. And so we get a thrilling space battle in an asteroid field, but then space battles in an asteroid field have been a Star Wars staple since The Empire Strikes Back. At least, this asteroid field doesn’t come out of nowhere, since Greef Karga earlier mentions mining operations in the asteroid belt of the Nevarro system.

Din shows off his mad flying skills, while several of the smaller pirate craft either crash into asteroids or each other or a shot down by Din. However, the small pirate craft clearly aren’t out and about in deep space on their own and so Din and Grogu eventually meet the pirate mothership, while we meet Pirate King Gorian Shard who turns out to be a plant-covered alien creature. My first thought was Moss-Man from Masters of the Universe,  AV-Club reviewer Sam Barsanti compares him to the Swamp Thing and io9 reviewer Germain Lussier calls him “Salad the Hutt”. You get the idea. Gorian Shard is a plant creature. He is about to have Din and Grogu shot down, but Din gets away.

Their flight takes Din and Grogu… – no, not to locate a memory circuit, but to Kalevala, a planet in the same system as Mandalore. Din lands his ship on the landing pad in front of a Mandalorian castle, an enormous Brutalist structure. The camera follows Din and Grogu through a deserted hallway, until they meet the person they’ve come to see. It’s none other than Bo-Katan Kryze, would-be Queen of the Mandalorians, who is lounging on a throne and has clearly been hitting the bottle.

Bo-Katan’s fortunes have taken a turn for the worse, since we last saw her in the season 2 finale. Her followers have deserted her, since Bo-Katan failed to win back the darksabre, symbol of the rulers of Mandalore, from Moff Gideon. Instead, the darksabre is now in the possession of Din Djarin, who did take it from Moff Gideon. Din was perfectly willing to hand over the darksabre to Bo-Katan, however, she declined, for Mandalorian legend decrees that the darksabre must be won in battle or it will bring the ruler bad luck. It’s very clear that Bo-Katan is no fan of Din Djarin’s – because she thinks he’s a religious fanatic from a fundamentalist splinter sect (well, he is) and because he managed to ruin her plans for uniting the Mandalorians and taking back Mandalore by winning the darksabre.

Din, on the other hand, seems to be utterly oblivious to the fact that Bo-Katan doesn’t like him and comes to pledge his allegiance to her and offers her to help her retake Mandalore, so he can bathe in the sacred waters. He even tells Bo-Katan as much. Bo-Katan does not accept Din’s allegiance, especially since she no longer had any followers. Though she does tell him how to access the mines with the sacred waters and that the access point is located under the civic center in the city Sudari on Mandalore. The Mandalorians have civic centers? The mind boggles.

Bo-Katan bids Din and Grogu a rather sinister good-bye, as Din goes off on his mission. It’s clear that Bo-Katan means trouble for Din and Grogu, though Din refuses to see it. Cue credits.

Some reviewers have been complaining about the meandering pace and lack of clear direction of this episode, but then The Mandalorian has always been a meandering show that moves at its own pace and keeps sending Din and Grogu on various side quests. Particularly, the early episodes of every season so far have been Din and Grogu wandering around the galaxy on one quest or another. The pace usually doesn’t pick up until the halfway point, once we realise what the main objective of this season is.

I for one like that The Mandalorian is a show that takes its time and doesn’t mind spending an episode or two exploring the beautiful weirdness of the Star Wars universe. Because in this era of serialised shows with limited episode counts, all of those meandering side quests and adventures of the week that were a staple of TV shows will into the 1990s are a thing of the past. Furthermore, while the plot may or may not have an overarching aim, Din’s main motivation is being a good Mandalorian and a good Dad to Grogu. He doesn’t care about galactic politics.

As for what – if any – the overarching plot of this season and the show as a whole might be, for now Din’s objective is clearly to bathe in those sacred waters and redeem himself in the eyes of the Armourer. However, Din not only has won the darksabre in battle, which theoretically makes him King of the Mandalorians, Din and Grogu are also the best hope the Mandalorians have for a way forward. Because neither Bo-Katan nor the Armourer, both fanatics in their own way, are leaders you’d want to see in charge of the Mandalorians.

Personally, what I’d like to see is Din not only stepping up to lead his people, but also ditching some of the more idiotic ideas of the Mandalorians. No, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with people taking off their helmets once in a while and you don’t have to bathe in water-filled caves on a radioactive planet in order to redemm yourself. No, you don’t have to win the darksabre in battle to become ruler of Mandalore – there are better and less violent ways of determining your leader. And yes, you can be a Mandalorian and a Jedi and maybe Grogu will be the one to finally unite the two somewhat nutty warrior cults in the Star Wars galaxy.

Of course, I’ve also been waiting for forty years now for the Jedi to finally take a step forward to ditch some of their more idiotic and downright toxic teachings – you know, that whole no attachments, no families, no relationships, no sex, don’t be angry, don’t be afraid, there’s only light and dark and no shades of gray nonsense that the movies themselves have shown to be toxic and harmful time and again. Yet whenever it seems that there a step in the right direction – in Return of the Jedi, in The Last Jedi – the powers that control Star Wars inevitably pull back again to the status quo. It’s part of what makes Star Wars so frustrating – that there is no real path forward for this universe, just an endless cycle of misery and failure.

Of the four Star Wars TV shows to date, The Mandalorian is the one I like the most, simply because it at least leaves room for a way forward. There is no future for Obi-Wan Kenobi and Cassian Andor (good as Andor was), since we already know how and where their stories end. And The Book of Boba-Fett never really seemed to know where it was going and what it wanted to be. Din and Grogu, however, have a future that’s wide open, if not for their respective people, then at least for themselves.

And while I’d love to see Din and Grogu uniting the Mandalorians and perhaps even the Jedi and taking them forward, I also don’t mind watching them just zip through the galaxy in Din’s shiny new starfighter to explore the weird and wonderful corners of the Star Wars universe, make friends and enemies and solve other people’s problems and maybe even their own.

Because “The hero wanders the world, always on the run from something and solves other people’s problems, but never their own” used to be a TV genre not all that long ago. It’s the formula that fueled Route 66, The Fugitive, Time Tunnel, Kung Fu, The Incredible Hulk, The A-Team, Quantum Leap and many others. It’s clearly a formula that worked and still works (the Jack Reacher novels very much follow the same pattern), only that we hardly ever see it anymore in this era of serialised TV and season arcs.

So if The Mandalorian wants to bring back the wandering hero formula, I’m certainly all there for it. If the show actually wants to take the Star Wars universe a step forward out of its endless cycle of failure, misery, defeat, I’m all there for that as well.

First Monday Free Fiction: Seedlings

Welcome to the March 2023 edition of First Monday Free Fiction.

To recap, inspired by Kristine Kathryn Rusch who posts a free short story every week on her blog, I’ll post a free story on the first Monday of every month. At the end of the month, I’ll take the story down and post another.

March marks the start of spring when gardens begin to bloom and seeds are planted, so enjoy Seedlings, a sweet science fiction story about chickens, little girls and gardening… IN SPACE! from my Shattered Empire space opera series.

So follow Holly and Ethan as they plant…

Seedlings

The rebel world of Pyrs spun through the black vastness of space, a cold rock orbiting a dying star.

Once, Pyrs had held deposits of rare minerals, gallium, germanium and indium, gold and platinum, even diamonds. So humans had come to the inhospitable world to harvest the precious minerals. And then, once they had taken every last grain of ore, every last raw diamond, every last nugget of gold from the ground, they went away again, leaving behind a gutted husk of a planet, crisscrossed by a warren of tunnels and mine shafts. And so Pyrs was just another dead rock hanging in space again. Until the Rebels came and made it their home.

The Rebels no more liked Pyrs than the miners had. It was simply too cold, too dark, too far from its own faltering sun, let alone the galactic core. However, the Rebels had even less choice about living on Pyrs than the miners. For if you had a death sentence on your head everywhere in the civilised galaxy, Pyrs was the only place left for you to run.

Holly di Marco, former mercenary and currently one of the two thousand five hundred and sixty Rebels on Pyrs, was currently headed for the lone bright spot on that cold, dark lump of rock. It was called the greenhouse, a dome of glass collecting the rays of Pyrs’ fading sun, bundled and amplified by a cunning arrangement of mirrors. This meant that the greenhouse was the only place on Pyrs that got a bit of daylight for six hours a day, about as much as other worlds received on a grey and cloudy day.

The miners had used the place for recreation, an oasis allowing them to soak up the meagre sunlight. The Rebels, not having the advantage of regular supply ships, had given the greenhouse over to food production. The yield wasn’t much, but anything that spiced up the monotony of all protein sludge all the time was more than welcome.

Born on a planet that was only marginally more hospitable than Pyrs, Holly did not have much use for the greenhouse. Plants, particularly in larger numbers, tended to make her nervous. That much green just wasn’t natural.

As it was, Holly had only one reason for visiting the greenhouse and that reason was Ethan Summerton. Lord Summerton, to be precise, for Ethan had inherited the title by default after the Empire had murdered his father and brothers along with the rest of his family, leaving Ethan the sole survivor of a once numerous clan.

Holly had saved his life, which meant that she was stuck with him now, by decree of Arthur Madden, leader of the Rebellion, himself. Apparently there was an old Earth saying which claimed that once you’d saved someone’s life, you were automatically responsible for that person until the end of their days. Personally, Holly thought it was all just a load of bunk, but her objections had been overruled. So for the time being, she was stuck with Ethan, Lord Summerton.

Not that she minded much. For someone who had been born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth, Ethan was surprisingly non-annoying. He didn’t even insist on being addressed by his title. On the contrary, he said that whenever someone called him “Lord Summerton”, he always had to turn around, expecting to find his father standing behind him. And since his late father — either heroically killed in the service of the Rebellion or cut down in the streets like the traitorous dog that he was, depending on which version you chose to believe — was something of a sore spot for Ethan, Holly refrained from doing anything that might trigger painful memories. For heaven knew, he sure had enough of those.

In spite of his high birth, Ethan had ended up in charge of the greenhouse. Though the assignment wasn’t a jab against his aristocratic background. It was simply the most suitable job for him, given the circumstances.

Ever since joining the Rebellion, Ethan had been eager for revenge and desperate for a mission, a job or just something to do. Holly certainly sympathised. Being cooped up on Pyrs was bad enough when you had a job and the prospect of getting off planet eventually. When you had nothing to do, it was infinitely worse.

However, Ethan was also badly traumatised — seeing your entire family slaughtered in front of your eyes will do that to you — and simply not ready for any kind of combat mission. Before sending him into battle, he first needed to heal.

But sitting around cooped up in his quarters and brooding wasn’t conductive to healing either, especially not since Ethan hardly ever slept and was plagued by nightmares, whenever he managed to catch some shut-eye. What he needed was something to do, a job to stop him feeling like dead weight and take his mind of his murdered family, at least for a little while.

So Arthur Madden in his infinite wisdom had finally hit upon the long neglected greenhouse and turned it over to Ethan. For prior to suddenly finding himself an outlaw and a Rebel, Ethan had devoted his life to studying farming methods and cultivating plants and had even won a prize for breeding a new type of squash, whatever that might be. Apparently, he had originally turned to agriculture as a sort of “fuck you” to his illustrious ancestors and their long lineage of warriors.

“We also have a long family history of winemaking…” Ethan had once told Holly, “…and I prefer making wine to killing people.”

Not that Ethan ever got to grow any wine in the greenhouse — nice though that might be. No, it was mostly leafy greenish things and thick brownish roots and tubers that looked as awful as they tasted. Still, Ethan never seemed more at peace than when he was puttering about in the greenhouse, so Holly approved. For Ethan found little enough peace as it was.

Though there were also times in the long dark nights on Pyrs, when Ethan confessed to her that he felt useless, felt that he should contribute more to the cause, that he should go on combat or espionage missions like the other Rebels.

“Growing vegetables…” he said bitterly, “…isn’t nearly enough, when people, good people, are fighting and dying out there.”

Whenever he had one of those moments, Holly always assured him that vegetables were very important, even vital to the Rebellion. Not because she believed it, cause she didn’t. But Ethan needed to hear it and that was enough for Holly. Because she’d really come to like him by now.

***

Whenever the bulkhead door to the greenhouse cycled open, the first thing that hit Holly was the air, a couple of degrees warmer and several percents more humid than the rest of the base. The smell was next, since it turned out that plants quite literally grew in human shit. No wonder Holly had always been suspicious of greenery. Finally came the sniffles, which occasionally rose to the level of a fully blown sneezing attack, for it turned out that Holly wasn’t just suspicious of plants but actively allergic to many of them. Greens — you just couldn’t trust them.

Holly had barely managed to suppress the inevitable sneezing attack — for now — when she spotted a figure in a grey utility coverall hurrying towards her. Not Ethan. This was one of his assistants, an effusively polite fellow named Stuart.

“Miss di Marco…” Stuart sketched a bow which looked more silly than anything, considering he was wearing a utility coverall and mud-splattered work boots. “Lord Summerton has been looking for you.”

“Well, that’s helpful,” Holly said, “Cause I’ve been looking for him, too.”

Stuart bowed once more. “If you’ll follow me, Lord Summerton will be right with you.”

He bowed one final time and scurried off, presumably to fetch Ethan or rather Lord Summerton, as Stuart insisted on calling him. Ethan himself seemed more embarrassed than anything to be addressed as Lord Summerton and repeatedly asked Stuart to stop.

But Stuart didn’t care. His mother had taught him proper manners and brought him up to show respect to his betters, he said. Somehow, Stuart hadn’t quite gotten the hang of this whole democracy thing yet.

Still, odd as Stuart was, he and Ethan got along well, probably because they both hailed from the same planet, Caswallon, a farming world that had been home to the Summerton family since forever or at least since humanity had taken to the stars.

When the previous Lord Summerton, Ethan’s late father, discovered his conscience and decided to throw in his lot with the Rebellion, the Empire’s retaliation had been both swift and brutal. Not only had they slaughtered every member of the Summerton family they could get their hands on — no, once the Empire ran out of Summertons to avenge themselves on, they instead focussed their anger on the clan’s homeworld.

The Emperor wasted no time and put Caswallon under martial law and then let one of the more sadistic Imperial generals run riot. There were bombings from orbit, random arrests, disappearances, public executions and the like. The general, sadistic bastard that he was, even brought the good old practice of decimation back… in the most literal sense of the word.

As a result, any inhabitant of Caswallon who could get off planet, evading the increasingly strict controls at the only spaceport still in operation, did so. Not a whole lot of people managed to escape. Stuart was one of the few who did. And since he had nowhere else to go — any attempt to escape from the planet-sized prison that was Caswallon carried an automatic death sentence — he eventually made his way to the Rebellion where he met Ethan. They immediately hit it off, bonding over reminiscences of their lost homeworld and discussions of farming techniques. And if the thought ever occurred to Stuart that if only the elder Lord Summerton had minded his own business and kept away from the Rebellion, none of the horrors visited upon the planet of Caswallon would ever have happened, he kept it to himself.

Holly found a wall to lean against and surveyed the garden. There were rows upon rows of plants, some of them mere bushels of leaves close to the ground, others larger shrubs. There even were a handful of tall and menacing tangles of leaves and what looked like tentacles. Other plots had only been planted recently and were still bare brown soil, dotted with the occasional sprout of green. And because the ground was not enough to hold all the crops, there were also pots of greenery hanging from the ceiling and set onto shelves along the walls and generally crammed onto every available surface.

A labyrinth of pipes snaked overhead, studded with nozzles that sprayed water onto the plants at pre-programmed intervals. Micro-drones buzzed about among the rows of greenery to pollinate the plants. Powerful spotlights were set around the perimeter to supplement the meagre light provided by Pyrs’ weak sun. And above it all loomed the glass dome of the greenhouse and the blackness of deep space beyond.

Chickens — ugly, noisy, feathery things — were scurrying between the neat rows of plants, picking at the ground. The chickens had been Stuart’s idea. Apparently, his family had been keeping chickens back on Caswallon and Stuart believed the eggs they produced would enrich the Rebel diet. Stuart’s family had been keeping pigs, too, but Ethan vetoed the pigs. Too big and too smelly, he said. Holly was inclined to agree. The chickens were about as much animal life as she could handle.

At the far end of the greenhouse, Stuart was talking to Ethan who was engaged in some cryptic task or other. The other assistant, a tall taciturn fellow named Mikhail, was carting buckets full of soil back and forth, again for some unfathomable reason. Ethan sometimes tried to explain to Holly just what they were doing in the greenhouse. Holly didn’t pretend to understand much of it, even though she usually grunted and nodded out of sheer politeness.

Together, Ethan, Stuart and Mikhail made up the entire full-time staff of the greenhouse. But they sometimes had helpers. Such as the three little boys, too young yet for serious work, who were diligently putting plants from smaller into larger pots.

Pyrs, it was generally agreed, was no place for children, and so the Rebels made very sure that there wouldn’t be any more children born here. Nonetheless, there were children on Pyrs, because some of the men and women who joined the Rebellion already had kids. And even if everybody agreed that though Pyrs was a horrible place for children to grow up, leaving them behind would be even worse, because the Empire had absolutely no scruples about killing children.

The Rebels did their best to accommodate and protect the few children on Pyrs, to arrange for schooling and supervision. But nonetheless, it was hard, for Pyrs was a dangerous world and truly no place for children. For starters, the Rebel base was cramped, so the children constantly got under foot. Plus, pretty much everything on Pyrs, every room, every vehicle, every piece of equipment, was actively dangerous to children, particularly children of the more nosy sort who simply had to touch everything and press every button they could find.

The greenhouse was actually one of the least dangerous places on Pyrs. Because while plants might make you sneeze, if you happened to be allergic to them, and the squeaky, noisy chickens might stink and hack at you with their beaks, none of them could actually kill you. Besides, children — just like plants — apparently required sunlight to grow. And so the greenhouse was the ideal place for the children of Pyrs to hang out, when they were not in school. As a result, there was always a handful of children, not always the same handful, hanging around at the greenhouse.

Holly had often told Ethan that he should just throw out the children, if they bothered him. Let the people whose job it was to supervise the kids actually do their job for once. However, Ethan claimed that the children were welcome, that he did not mind them. On the contrary, he even found little jobs for them to do, jobs like digging holes or potting plants. Or maybe it was simply that the smaller hands of children were better suited to certain tasks than the giant paws of Mikhail and the only slightly smaller ones of Stuart.

A commotion somewhere among the endless rows of green leafy things attracted Holly’s attention. A little girl, much too young for any sort of useful work, was stumbling through the plot on unsteady legs, chasing after the ubiquitous chickens. The chickens outran her easily, for the girl was barely able to walk, much less run. Nonetheless, she did not give up, apparently having decided that a chicken would be a fine catch indeed, though Holly had no idea what in the universe the kid wanted with such a screechy, feathery thing. But then, children were weird.

Holly leant back to watch the uneven chase, a smile on her face, though she did not quite know why. And then it happened. The race between child and chicken was decided once and for all, when the little girl stumbled and fell face first into the soft brown ground, flattening a bunch of delicate leafy greens in the process. The child immediately erupted into a wail of pain and frustration, while the chicken fluttered away in a blur of wings and feathers.

“Uh-oh, kid,” Holly thought, a sinking feeling in her stomach, “You’re in trouble now.”

The girl’s wail was loud enough that Ethan and Stuart stopped discussing whatever vitally important thing they were discussing and turned around to see what was going on. It didn’t take them long to spot the source of all that uproar, for the little girl was not just wailing louder than a life-support failure alarm, she was also trying to push herself back to her feet again and managed to crush even more plants as a result.

“Now you’re really in trouble,” Holly thought.

Stuart scowled and set off towards the girl, but Ethan held him back. So he was going to deal with this tiny threat to his precious plants himself. A few long-legged strides and he had reached the little girl, who was still trying and failing to get up. Ethan bent down and picked the child up. Holly averted her eyes. She did not want to see what came next.

She expected more crying, but to her infinite surprise the little girl quieted down. So Holly made herself look and saw that Ethan had crouched down beside the kid and was gently brushing dirt from her clothes. Tears were still streaming down her little dirty face, but at least she was no longer wailing. She was also standing on her own two feet again.

Blood was seeping from a gash on the little girl’s knee, so Ethan reached into a pocket of his coverall and produced a tissue to wipe the blood away. The kid made a face, as the disinfectant did its work, but she did not start wailing again.

“Yes, I know it stings,” Ethan said, “But if you blow on it, it stops hurting, just like magic.” To prove his point, he blew some air on the kid’s scraped knee. “See? It’s already better.”

It was all bullshit, of course, but then kids were naïve and believed pretty much anything. And so the little girl stopped crying, wiped her eyes with her little hands and flashed Ethan an uncertain smile.

Ethan picked the kid up and settled her onto his hip. “And now come on, sweetie. We don’t want to keep Holly waiting, do we?” He planted a kiss on the kid’s forehead.

Holly watched as the little girl nestled against him, her tears already forgotten. And as she watched Ethan with the kid, she couldn’t help but think that this was the way the universe ought to be. A universe where a child did not have to fear beatings and punishments for a simple mishap. A universe where she would not have to work as soon as she was old enough. A universe where someone dried her tears when she was crying. A universe without pain or terror.

Her eyes stung with stupid, silly tears. Angrily, Holly wiped them away. Damn those blasted plants!

Ethan — wouldn’t you know it? — caught her just as she wiped away the last of the silly tears that ran down her cheeks. Even worse, he noticed.

“Holly, I… — What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Holly said. She pulled a not very clean tissue from a pocket of her uniform and heartily blew her nose. “I’m just allergic to your bloody plants, that’s all.”

Ethan gave her a strange look. With his tousled brown hair, mud-splattered boots and equally shabby utility coverall, not to mention a snot-nosed kid on his arm, he didn’t look very lordly at all. A chunky ugly ring — the symbol of his lordship — dangled from a chain round his neck. He wore it that way, so the ring wouldn’t get in the way when he was working in the garden — and because it was way too big for him and kept slipping off his finger.

“Still, I’m glad you’re here…” Ethan said, “…cause there’s something I want to show you.”

Abruptly, he turned around and stalked off again, still carrying the little girl. Her head was resting against his shoulder. She looked straight at Holly and stuck out her tongue.

“Okay, now you’re really pushing your luck, kid,” Holly thought and went after Ethan, careful not to step on any of his precious plants. The greens had suffered enough for one day.

She didn’t know what Ethan wanted to show her, but she had her suspicions. For ever since Ethan had taken over the greenhouse, he tended to use Holly as a guinea pig for his latest produce, probably to see if it was fit for human consumption. To be honest, most of it ranked barely above protein sludge in terms of taste. Endless green leaves and root vegetables weren’t Holly’s idea of a good meal.

Still, feeding his plants to her seemed to make Ethan happy. And since he did not have a whole lot of reasons for being happy these days, Holly usually humoured him and ate his plants without spitting, choking or making a face, even if she sometimes wanted to.

Today’s crop seemed to be something really special (or really horrible), for they all gathered around to see what her reaction would be, Ethan, Stuart, Mikhail, even the three young boys who had been repotting plants.

Ethan was happily blathering on about how his attempts to cultivate some plant or other had finally paid off and born fruit — yes, fruit. Holly nodded politely, though she didn’t really listen. Idly, she wondered whether Ethan was aware that all of his blabbering about plants and crops was lost on her, for they all looked the same to her, far too leafy and far too green.

“Could we get to the point, please?” she finally interrupted, because if she hadn’t, Ethan would still have been holding forth about his latest cultivation success a couple of standard hours later, “Cause the big boss wants to see us and I for one don’t want to keep him waiting.”

As if to emphasise Holly’s point, the little girl on Ethan’s arm yawned heartily.

“Arthur Madden wants to see us?” Ethan repeated, “What about?”

“I have no idea. Maybe he’s got a mission for us or maybe he just wants to compliment you on managing to grow… well, whatever it is you’re trying to show me.”

“Actually…” Ethan scratched his head. “…I didn’t tell him what I was trying to do. We didn’t want to tell anybody until we could be sure it worked.”

“Then it probably is a mission,” Holly said. She knew how eager Ethan was to finally do something for the Rebellion, something other than growing plants, that was. “But if you want to find out, I’d suggest you get a move on. Now.”

The perpetually subservient Stuart blanched at her bluntness, though Ethan didn’t. But then, he rarely got offended, unless Holly said something really shocking. Which, to her infinite shame, she sometimes did just to rile him up, if only because he was kind of cute, when he began to blush and stammer. And amusements were few on Pyrs.

“All right, so…” Ethan was about to finally feed her whatever edible plant he wanted to try out on her, only to realise that his hands were full because he was still holding the little girl. “Could you take her for a moment?”

Holly did not want to take the kid. She didn’t understand children, didn’t like them, didn’t know what to do with them. But before Holly could protest or as much as say no, Ethan had already dumped the kid in her arms.

Holly halfway expected the little girl to start wailing at once — that was what children did, wasn’t it? — but to her infinite surprise she didn’t. Instead, the little girl wrapped her little arms around Holly’s neck and settled herself against her shoulder, perfectly content. She was surprisingly heavy, too, for such a little thing.

Ethan, meanwhile, bent down to pluck something from one of his plants. This particular specimen didn’t look like much, just a small plant with green leaves and unremarkable white blossoms, barely twenty centimetres tall. There were certainly more impressive plants to be found in the greenhouse.

Ethan rummaged between the leaves of the plant until he found what he had been looking for. Then he straightened and held out his hand to Holly.

“Look. Isn’t this wonderful?”

The thing in his hand was most definitely not wonderful. It was a small bulb, bright red with small dark spots and what appeared to be tiny hairs. It looked like some kind of malign tumour or maybe the reproductive gland of an unknown alien species. And Holly most certainly didn’t want to put this thing into her mouth.

“Uhm, I…”

“Oh, of course…” Ethan blushed, which was rather sweet to be honest. “…I should wash it first. Sorry, I forget these things sometimes.”

And then he was off to wash his precious fruit. Unfortunately, it didn’t look any more appetising, when he returned.

Holly eyed the strange red fruit warily. “Are you sure this thing is edible?”

“Oh yes, it’s ripe, in case you’re wondering,” Ethan replied, “Now come on, try it. You’ll love it, I promise.”

Holly sincerely doubted that. But since he was so insistent, she allowed him to pop the thing into her mouth, privately vowing that she’d kill him, if he managed to poison her.

The fruit was sweet and sour, soft and tart, succulent and full of crispy bits all at the same time, a riot of flavour exploding in her mouth.

They all looked at her expectantly. “And?”

“Not bad”, Holly said, munching down the last of the fruit, “Not bad at all.” She smiled. “Best damn thing you’ve managed to produce so far.”

Ethan smiled back, inordinately pleased. “See, I told you you’d love it.”

“So what is it?”

“Uhm, a strawberry. Couldn’t you tell? I mean, it’s a bit small, but…”

Strawberry. Holly knew the term. But up to now, she’d always assumed it was a euphemism for sweet and pink and bland.

“Ah, so that’s what they’re supposed to taste like,” she said, “Explains a lot, actually.”

Ethan bent down to his row of plants again and produced a second fruit, a little smaller and paler than the first.

“I’ve got one more,” he announced, “So who wants to try it?”

“Me, me, me,” the young boys yelled seemingly all at once. Stuart looked as if he would have like to yell “Me” as well, but had barely managed to control himself. Mikhail was stoic as ever.

Ethan looked from one to the other. Finally, his gaze settled on the little girl on Holly’s arm.

“Emma. She’s the youngest, so she gets to go first.”

There was a bit of grumbling among the boys, but amazingly they all seemed to accept Ethan’s reasoning that the youngest kid got first dibs on the fruit.

Meanwhile, the little girl — Emma — obediently opened her mouth and let Ethan pop the strawberry inside. She munched and chewed and red juice dripped from her mouth. “Hmm,” she finally said. Then she wiped her mouth with her hands and her hands on Holly’s shirt and exclaimed, “More!”

“Sorry, sweetheart, but that was all we had.” Ethan fondly patted the little girl’s head and turned to the three young boys. He smiled apologetically. “You’ve got first dibs on the next crop, promise. And a Summerton always keeps true to his word.”

The boys nodded solemnly. Apparently, they had already absorbed the long list of things that Summertons did or did not do. Hanging out with Ethan would do that to you.

“Uh, Comrade Ethan…” Mikhail began. Everyone turned to him, if only because it was so rare that he said anything at all. Never mind his irritating habit of addressing everyone as “comrade”, which was apparently how things were done on his homeworld.

“…you forgot the crisps.”

“Oh, of course.” Ethan turned to Holly again. “We’ve been trying out a new process for preparing root vegetables,” he explained, “It was Mikhail’s idea. On his homeworld, they chop up root vegetables and fry them in large open pans…”

As if on cue, Mikhail produced a bag of something and offered it to Holly. Inside the bag, were dry chips, ranging in colour from pale yellow to dark red. Whatever the stuff was, it didn’t even look remotely edible. If anything, it looked as if Mikhail had scratched the insulation off the walls in his quarters and bagged it.

“They’re really quite good,” Ethan said, while Mikhail gave her an expectant look.

Holly looked at the flakes and decided that — polite or not — she really couldn’t bring herself to eat even one. Besides, she figured she’d already done her duty for the day, playing guinea pig for Ethan’s latest agronomic breakthrough.

“Thanks, but I think I’ve had enough experimentation for one day.” She flashed Mikhail an apologetic smile. “Another time, okay?”

If Mikhail was disappointed, he gave no indication of it. He simply nodded and went back to whatever he had been doing before Holly arrived. But then, Mikhail’s face never gave much indication of anything.

“But you must try the crisps,” one of the young boys who’d taken to hanging around the greenhouse insisted.

“Yes, try, try, try,” the other boys chanted.

Because it looked as if the boys were either about to start a riot or burst into tears, both of which would be equally unpleasant, Holly finally gave in. Besides, how much worse than protein sludge and nutri-cakes could it possibly taste?

So she reached into Mikhail’s bag and retrieved one of the chips. It was pale yellow and reminded Holly of those cheap and nasty, dry-as-wall-plaster protein cakes she’d had as rations while working security for a crime syndicate on the planet Kagawa. Those had been pretty bad and yet she’d survived, so how much worse could this stuff be? So she braced herself, closed her eyes and put the chip into her mouth.

The thing was crunchy, slightly salty and slightly earthy, and not at all bad. Probably great for deep space rations, except that the crumbs and the grease — and Holly’s fingers were stained with both — might cause electronics trouble.

Holly opened her eyes and found that everybody was looking at her expectantly.

“And…?”

“Not bad,” Holly said, still munching on her crisp, “Actually…” She wiped her grease and crumb stained hands on her pants. “…this is pretty good.” She turned to Mikhail. “Well done.”

Mikhail beamed. “Thank you, Comrade.”

“Mostly we used potatoes, for traditional reasons…” Ethan explained.

“Gimme,” the little girl on Holly’s arm crowed suddenly, startling Holly so much she almost dropped the kid.

She threw an imploring glance at Ethan, but he was still busily explaining how the crisps were made.

“…though we also tried parsnips, turnips, carrots and…”

“Gimme,” the little girl repeated, more insistently.

“…beetroot — Uhm, I think she wants a crisp,” Ethan pointed out.

Holly looked at Emma who nodded emphatically. And since no one else was volunteering, she reached into Mikhail’s bag again, retrieved yet another crisp and held it out for the little girl, who promptly snatched it and managed to slobber all over Holly’s fingers in the process.

“More,” Emma insisted, so Holly fed her another. And another.

“They would taste even better, if we had paprika…” Mikhail said, completely oblivious to his rapidly dwindling supply of crisps, “…and chilli pepper. Maybe we could grow some.”

“That’s an excellent idea,” Ethan exclaimed, “Growing herbs and spices would greatly improve the taste of our food in general…”

Holly felt another endless discussion of plant cultivation coming on, so she quickly interrupted them. “Uhm, sorry, but the big boss is waiting for us.”

“Of course. Sorry, Mikhail, but it seems I have a meeting. Let’s continue this when I get back.”

Mikhail nodded solemnly. “Of course, Comrade Ethan.”

“Let’s go,” Holly said, but then she remembered the little girl who was still nestled against her shoulder. She couldn’t possibly take the child to a briefing. But on the other hand, she wasn’t sure what else to do with her either. “Uhm, what about her?”

“Just put her down,” Ethan said, “She’s better now, aren’t you, sweetheart?”

Emma emitted a sound that might have been a “yes”.

“And she’ll be safe here, with Stuart and Mikhail and the boys. Maybe Mikhail even has some more crisps for you.”

So Holly cautiously set Emma back onto the ground and got a surprise, for before she could let go, the little girl suddenly slung her arms around Holly’s neck and planted a slobbering, strawberry-juice and salt dripping kiss on her mouth. Then Emma spotted a chicken and took off after it, whooping with glee.

When Holly straightened up again, she found Ethan smiling at her. “I think she likes you.”

“Which just goes to show that children are dumb,” Holly said and strutted off, not waiting to see if Ethan was following.

***

It was a long walk from the greenhouse back to the command centre. Ethan and Holly spent most of that long walk talking. Or rather, Ethan was talking, nattering on about plants and cultivation methods and soil quality and a dozen other things, while Holly nodded politely at appropriate intervals and pretended to listen, though truth to be told, she had mostly tuned out. Plants and their cultivation were a lot more interesting to Ethan than they would ever be to her.

Absentmindedly, she wiped her mouth on her sleeve, still wondering what had possessed that little girl to kiss her. Kids didn’t normally like Holly. They were afraid of her and with good reason, too. And the feeling was mutual.

“Thank you,” she said abruptly, cutting off Ethan in the middle of some doubtlessly fascinating lecture about fertilising agents, “Thank you for being so kind to the little girl.”

Ethan blinked, as if surprised by the sudden interruption. Probably not used to being interrupted, considering that Mikhail never talked and Stuart worshipped every word that fell from his mouth.

“Emma? She doesn’t talk much — apparently whatever the Empire did to her home and her family was really bad. But otherwise she’s a real sweetheart. You simply have to love her.”

“You could have punished her,” Holly pointed out.

“Punished her?” Ethan blinked, as if he didn’t quite follow. “Emma? What in the universe for?”

“She damaged your plants,” Holly said, “And you could have punished her for that. But you didn’t. And I wanted to thank you for that.”

Ethan turned on her, eyes blazing with barely suppressed fury, and Holly instinctively shrank back. She’d always known Ethan had a temper. She’d seen him angry, even furious before, had seen him beat some other guy to a pulp until the guards dragged him away. But until today, his anger had never been directed at her.

“You think I’d beat a child? A small child?”

Holly shrugged, willing herself to remain calm in the face of his freak-out. “You could have. Nobody would’ve said anything.”

“She’s a child.”

“And she chased your chickens around and damaged your plants,” Holly said calmly, “You’ve put a lot of work into cultivating those plants and the kid just crushed them because she was careless. You had every right to hit her.”

“It was just lettuce,” Ethan exclaimed, “Okay, batavia lettuce, which is kind of hard to come by, but just lettuce nonetheless. And Emma is a child. A living breathing human child. How… how can you even think I’d ever hurt a child over something as trivial as lettuce?”

He was still outraged, as angry as Holly had ever seen him. Worse, she didn’t even know why. After all, the little girl — Emma — was the one who’d done something wrong, had landed face first in a bed of prized baba-whatever lettuce, not she. All Holly had done was thank Ethan for not punishing the kid, for Emma — dumb as all children were — hadn’t.

“We could have eaten the lettuce,” she pointed out, as calmly as she could, “We can’t eat the kid.”

Though Holly had no doubt that somebody somewhere had done just that, consumed children for nutrition. Nonetheless, eating children was wrong, deeply and thoroughly wrong. Nobody had the right to eat children, not while there was still protein sludge and probably not even when there wasn’t.

“She’s dead weight, useless, too young for any sort of work. You don’t have to put up with her or the other kids hanging round the greenhouse…” Come to think of it, Holly had told him, repeatedly, that he should just throw the kids out, that no one would say anything or mind. “…and you certainly don’t have to tolerate her crushing your valuable lettuce.”

“She’s a child,” Ethan repeated for the third time, as if he was not just unwilling but unable to comprehend her point, “Children are precious, a gift, a privilege.”

“Not where I come from,” Holly said quietly, not looking at him.

“Then it must be a horrible place…” Ethan said, wrapped in his invisible cloak of righteousness as always, “…if they don’t value their own children.”

“It was,” Holly said, eyes fixed on her combat boots and the steel floors of Pyrs.

She felt Ethan’s hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“For being a self-righteous prick?” Holly asked, still not looking at him.

“That, too,” he admitted, “I shouldn’t have lashed out at you. Not you of all people.” He took a deep breath. “But most of all, I’m sorry that you were hurt by people who should’ve taken care of you, when you were a kid…”

“Nobody hurt me,” Holly snapped, harsher than she had intended and harsher than Ethan deserved, “At least no worse than many others.”

“I’m still sorry…” Ethan insisted, “…that you had to grow up in such a horrible place.”

Now Holly did look at him. “Whatever for? It’s hardly your fault, isn’t it?”

“No, but… I just think no one should have to grow up that way, that’s all.”

He was right, Holly thought. No one should have to grow up like she had.

“Especially not you,” Ethan continued, absurdly touching in his earnestness, “You deserved better.”

“Yes,” Holly said, “I guess I did. But some things can’t be helped.” She injected some cheerfulness she didn’t feel into her voice, all because she couldn’t stand that sad puppy-dog look on Ethan’s face anymore. “And besides, that’s all in the past. I’m better now.”

Ethan gave her a doubtful smile that suggested her faux cheeriness hadn’t quite worked as well as intended. “You sure?”

“Not really,” Holly admitted, if only because she found she couldn’t lie to him, “But I can’t let my past drag me down. And besides I’m not the only person in the galaxy who grew up in a horrible place.”

“No, but…”

Holly reached out and put a finger, still stained with grease and salt, on his lips to shut him up.

“Pyrs is a pretty awful place to grow up as well. It’s dark and it’s dangerous and it’s depressing and children really, really shouldn’t live here…”

She took her finger away, because she felt rather silly. Besides, she had his full attention now.

“…but they do, cause some things just can’t be changed. But you…”

She looked him straight in the eye, took his hand in hers, squeezed it.

“…you’re making this horrible place a little less horrible for those kids in the greenhouse. That’s a great thing, probably the greatest thing you can do for the Rebellion.”

Ethan shook his head. “It’s not. Anybody would’ve done the same.”

“No, anybody wouldn’t have done the same. Most people would’ve punished the girl or at least yelled at her. But not you. No, you took her in your arms and comforted her when she was crying, which is pretty fucking damn rare…”

Holly looked at him and saw him in a different light for the first time, not as a clueless if well-meaning aristocrat whose life experience was light years from hers, nor as a mission that had been thrust upon her against her will, an annoying tag-along she just couldn’t get rid of, but as a genuinely good person, a man she was proud to call friend.

“…and I just wanted to thank you for that, cause I don’t think anybody else here does.”

She smiled.

“And now let’s go and see Arthur Madden before he sends out a search party. Or worse Alanna Greyskull.” Holly shuddered at the thought of the much feared deputy leader of the Rebellion.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ethan countered, “Commander Greyskull is always perfectly civil to me.”

“Yeah, cause you keep addressing her as Commander Greyskull,” Holly replied, giving him a jab to the shoulder.

Ethan grinned at her, their disagreement already forgotten. “Well, it works, doesn’t it?”

Not the end…

***

That’s it for this month’s edition of First Monday Free Fiction. Check back next month, when a new free story will be posted.

Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre: “Cat Fight”

It’s time for another Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre photo story. The name “Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre” was coined by Kevin Beckett at the Whetstone Discord server.

Like “Held Hostage”, This is another story that features not my usual Masters of the Universe Origins figures, but the larger Masterverse figures, because I got lucky and found the Masterverse She-Ra for a good price. Once again there’s also a slightly different version of this story on Twitter.

“For the Honour of Grayskull, I am She-Ra!”

Of course, I already have a very nice She-Ra figure, but since Mattel never made any of her friends and particularly her three canonical love interests in Origins for reasons best known to themselves (especially since they did make most of the male villains), my She-Ra was a little lonely.

However, a couple of characters from the vintage She-Ra: Princess of Power cartoons did come out in the Masterverse line, such as She-Ra’s friend/rival/enemy/lover (it’s complicated) Catra.

Catra’s feline friend as a Schleich Eldrador Shadow Panther, which works perfectly in scale with her.

So now I have both She-Ra and Catra, let’s see what happens when the two former friends turned enemies meet:

In the Whispering Woods:

“Catra!”

“Adora!”

GRRRR!

“The Whispering Woods are rebel territory. You have no business here. Leave now and no one needs to get hurt.”

“Not a chance, She-Ra. If I’m leaving the Whispering Woods, I’m taking you with me as my prisoner. If I bring you back to the Fright Zone, the Mighty Hordak will reward me richly.”

“Hordak is using you, Catra. You don’t need to work for him anymore. Walk away and join the rebellion, just like me. And then we can be together again, be friends again, just like we used to be.”

“Things will never be like they used to be, Adora. You left me. You joined the rebellion and went back to your birth family and left me all alone.”

“I’m sorry. I wanted to take you with me, but…”

“Liar! You forgot all about me the moment that He-Man walked through the door.”

“He’s my brother, Catra! Hordak stole me from my family, when I was a baby and he probably did the same to you. Why do you still work for him?”

“Because Hordak made me Force Captain, once you left.”

“Don’t you see that he’s just making you do terrible things in the name of the Horde?”

“The Horde is only doing what needs to be done. Once upon a time you used to know that. Before you turned traitor.”

“No, Catra, I don’t want to fight you.”

“Then you’ll surrender to me without a fight? Good. That makes it easier for me to bring you in. Hordak will be so pleased.”

“We used to be friends, Catra, blast it! And while I won’t fight you, I will defend myself, if you force me to.”

“Look, I don’t want to fight you either, Adora.”

“Then don’t. Hordak doesn’t own you. You don’t need to do what he wants. You’re your own person, Catra. You can do whatever you want.”

“I…”

“What do you want to do, Catra?”

“I… I just want to kiss you.”

“I want to kiss you, too.”

“Then why don’t we…?”

SMOOCH.

PURR.

“Hordak won’t like this, you know?”

“Screw Hordak!”

“Ugh, I’d rather not.”

“Forget Hordak and kiss me.”

SMOOCH.

***

Yes, She-Ra is canonically bisexual and kisses girls. Live with it.

The fact that Adora likes girls wasn’t invented by the 2018 She-Ra and the Princesses of Power cartoon either. In fact, the remarkably good DC Comics Masters of the Universe run from 2012 to 2016 introduces Adora as the Horde enforcer Despara who’s a lot more evil than her counterpart in The Secret of the Sword. As Despara, Adora sports a buzzcut and shows an unusual interest in Teela and zero interest in any of the male characters. In fact, Adora’s two male love interests Bow (who never seemed very straight in the first place) and Sea Hawke don’t appear in those comics at all. Honestly, look at this panel and tell that there are no sapphic vibes here.

So yup, Adora likes girls. Will she end up with Catra or someone else? Only time will tell.

However, that’s it for today, folks. I hope you enjoyed this Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre Photo Story, because there will be more.

Disclaimer: I don’t own any of these characters, I just bought some toys, took photos of them and wrote little scenes to go with those photos. All characters are copyright and trademark their respective owners.

Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month for February 2023

It’s that time of the month again, time for “Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month”.

So what is “Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month”? It’s a round-up of speculative fiction by indie and small press authors newly published this month, though some February books I missed the last time around snuck in as well. The books are arranged in alphabetical order by author. So far, most links only go to Amazon.com, though I may add other retailers for future editions.

Once again, we have new releases covering the whole broad spectrum of speculative fiction. This month, we have urban fantasy, epic fantasy, portal fantasy, grimdark fantasy, sword and sorcery, fantasy mystery, paranormal mystery, paranormal romance, science fantasy, space opera, military science fiction, dystopian fiction, LitRPG, speculative poetry, starships, space marines, alien empresses, alien invasions, deadly plagues, crime-busting witches, granny gamers, highway angels and much more.

Don’t forget that Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month is also crossposted to the Speculative Fiction Showcase, a group blog run by Jessica Rydill and myself, which features new release spotlights, guest posts, interviews and link round-ups regarding all things speculative fiction several times per week.

As always, I know the authors at least vaguely, but I haven’t read all of the books, so Caveat emptor.

And now on to the books without further ado:

Complete Poems 1965-2020 by Michael Butterworth:

Across Michael Butterworth’s work, elements are reiterated but endlessly transfigured – hitchhiking girlfriends, elm trees, the moon, astronauts, the space race, collage artists, misophonia, marriage, divorce, beached whales, clifftops, the sea, the seasons, mental block, ale houses, the chemical laboratory, ambition, madness, pain, death and impermanence, silver birch trees, suicide, Zazen, riots, train seating indicators, camping, the Welfare State, crows and seagulls, the racist English and Canada geese… are some of his subjects. The subjects of destruction – war, the consumer society, ‘progress’, humanity’s inhumanity, the doings of men (and the necessity of a new woman), galactic war, drug wars, hunting – are never far away, hopefully countered by the tone of optimism found in his later poems inspired by Buddhist philosophy. The effect is at once familiar and yet profound, in language that has the confessional qualities and simplicity of early influences such as Sylvia Plath and the Beats, and the later influence of Zen poets such as Ry?kan. Occasionally the writing is startlingly radical – a reminder of the poet’s beginnings in the New Wave. A collection such as this one from Space Cowboy Books is overdue, and Complete Poems: 1965-2020 brings to more deserving attention a less heard voice in modern poetry.

Tale of the Uncrowned Kings by Steve Dilks:

Sorcery in Uhremon! It is a world of shadows and jewels, forbidden crypts and deathless gods.
A world where science vies for supremacy against blackest necromancy.
In these chaotic times, legends arise…
Erich Von Tormath, exiled prince turned freebooter and mercenary.
Zaran, thief and assassin.
Together, they dare plunder the sanctum of the most powerful necromancer in Uhremon.
Their prize? Gold and glory.
Should they fail… An unspeakable death!

War Head by M.R. Forbes:

When Ben first bought his starship, he expected to spend the rest of his days joyriding through the universe with his best friend.

As the most wanted criminal in a galaxy that’s about to be crushed in the iron fist of an evil tyrant, it’s fair to say things haven’t gone according to plan. Caught up in the middle of a looming intergalactic conflict and rejected by both sides, there’s only one thing left for him to do.

Take the biggest risk of his life…

And prepare for war.

Divine Revivification by Rachel Ford:

The pen may be mightier than the sword, but can a lowly junior scribe really be the key to ending a war among the gods?
Retiree and barbarian fighter Barbara Callaghan is building an alliance capable of defeating Odin, king of the Norse gods. At least, she’s trying to. But as the local populations shy from the cause, and even Loki seems to forget about her, she realizes she’s missing something.

Or, someone.

Army veteran Caleb Dunn, meanwhile, didn’t expect his summer job to turn into a new life, and a quest to save humanity from vengeful gods. And yet, with the shadow of Odin’s wrath looming large in the North, that’s the mission.
Fair enough – except that Caleb was tricked into starting The Old Gods as a junior scribe, a glorified writer and tax collector with no martial skills. Now he’s stuck playing a build that taps into none of his strengths, and all of his weaknesses.

Caleb is the key she’s been missing. Unfortunately, he is a noob. Some rapid leveling is required, and the services of a barbarian brawler, to ensure he survives the process.

With Barbara’s brawn and Caleb’s brains, these two fish out of water just might build an alliance powerful enough to put an end to the chaos.

Terra by Chris Fox:

The Birthplace of Mankind Rediscovered

The Ganog have arrived. Their fleets are endless. Their will implacable. They cannot use magic, but that isn’t stopping them from wiping out mages.

Behind them lurks a worse foe, the Gorthians, those holding the Ganog’s leash. They have devoured countless galaxies, harvesting them over and over to create more monstrosities.

If we are to survive, then we need allies. We need powerful magic. I can find both if I’m able to locate Terra, the ancient birthplace of mankind. Assuming we get there first. If not?

Our galaxy burns just like all the others…

Live Like You Were Scrying by Lily Harper Hart:

The weather in Casper Creek has yet to turn and Hannah Hickok is determined to take advantage of her downtime to engage in a bit of romance with her fiancé Cooper Wyatt. Unfortunately for her, the world has other plans.

An eerie howl draws Hannah and Cooper to Main Street during a snowstorm, and what they find confuses them. There’s some sort of monster stalking the downtown area, and a woman has appeared out of nowhere in the creature’s wake only to collapse in front of them.

Before Hannah can call for help, the woman disappears, leaving a mystery and a monster hunt on the menu.

Casper Creek’s history is long and storied. This time, however, the trouble can be traced back to Hannah’s own family. It seems the woman who disappeared has ties to her grandmother…and Abigail doesn’t want to share the details with anybody, including her own family.

Frustrated, Hannah keeps digging, but what she finds is a mystery for the ages. It seems the stories she always heard, the ones about her late grandfather being a saint, might’ve been more fiction than reality. The truth of his past is about to collide with Hannah’s future.

And nobody will ever be the same again.

Shades by A.L. Hawke:

They hunt angels on the highway.

Amanda’s road trip across the USA is a reward for graduating from college—and an opportunity to record her traveler podcast. On her drive, she gets the adventure she’s seeking after nearly being knocked off the highway. There she has a chance encounter with a shadowy man wearing shades.

Danger follows. A devil named Lilith directs her motorcycle gang to crash into Amanda’s car. The stranger in shades saves her. He calls her an angel, destined for ascension to heaven. That doesn’t sound so bad, until he explains that it means she’s going to die on this trip if she stays on the road.

Well, Amanda won’t disappoint her podcast fans. And as she drives in search of adventure, the devils won’t stop pursuing her. Not before they steer her into even more danger. There’s more trouble in store for her, all set as a trap to bring the man she’s falling in love with closer to damnation.

Content warning: This novel contains sexual scenes, adult situations, and profanity.

Tomorrowville by David T. Isaak:

“A cautionary tale of a cruel, authoritarian America of the future that’s leavened by barbed wit and irreverence.” — Kirkus Reviews

Gen-X computer hacker Toby is a classic American: impulsive, irreverent, intelligent, and inventive. And, after a silly accident in 2008, he can add “inanimate” to the list—because Toby is dead.

But only for a while. Eighty years later, medical science has advanced enough to bring Toby back to life.

Welcome to Southern California, 2088. The skies are clean, but the rich-poor social gulf has widened. The biggest industries are entertainment and the prison system. Taxes have been cut — because the main source of government revenue is the confiscation of property. Many new, designer recreational drugs are legal, and many other drugs are mandatory. And while the US leads the world in cosmetic surgery, in most technologies America lags far behind…

America has changed. Toby hasn’t. And in the collision between America 2008 and America 2088, Toby brings the system to its knees—just by being his freedom loving, problem solving self.

Read now and join Toby in Tomorrowville for love, sex, politics, and cyberspace—plus the occasional turbocharged wheelchair and robotic rat.

Ruby Road by B.R. Kingsolver:

It had been thirteen years, but my heart skipped a beat. My brain was bursting with things I wanted to say—many of them contradictory—things I had thought I might say if I ever saw him again. So, I said nothing.

He pulled a leather bag out of an inside pocket of his cloak, opened the drawstrings, and turned it upside down over a display tray on the counter. A flood of rubies—smooth but uncut—poured out. “I need you. There’s probably a whole mountain full of them. But I can’t find the vein myself. Come with me, and we’ll split the take.”

What I had—what he wanted—was a talent for earth magic. I sifted them through my fingers. The quality was extraordinary, the feel of them electric as they touched my magic.

Freaky Crush by Amanda M. Lee:

Poet Parker is living a new reality now that she knows what she is. Unfortunately for her, she still doesn’t know what she can do … and she doesn’t think she’s going to figure it out in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Since her uncle Sidney is in tow, Poet is hopeful for a quiet week. Little Rock has never been a hotbed of activity. Quiet isn’t what she gets, however.

What started as an irritation on the pedestrian bridge turns into a full-blown attack. It seems Little Rock has a seedy underbelly after all, and it’s something Poet was never expecting.

There’s a craven on the loose, a woman who can control actions and emotions … and she’s set her sights on Kade. The craven has a specific type, and Kade fits it to a tee. Unfortunately for him, the craven’s victims all end up dead.

Poet is determined to keep her loved ones safe, but it’s proving to be more difficult than she anticipated. With half her army vulnerable to the craven, Poet has to fight her own people, even as she desperately tries to protect them at the same time.

Poet’s new powers are necessary for the fight, but is she ready to embrace them? When the loas join the party and make things worse—because that’s what they do—things spiral.

It’s up to Poet to fix what’s been broken. That is if she can.

Hultichia by Marshall Ryan Maresca:

A mysterious and disturbing summons brings Aurien Pemmick, an untested deacon of the Church of Druthal, across the border to a peculiar and disquieting kingdom: Kellirac.

Despite being in this antiquated and superstitious place, Pemmick is determined to root out the truth behind the summons. But Kellirac proves to be a place of dangers beyond the natural realm, especially since Pemmick arrives on the eve of Hultichia: a sacred night where the locals claim the dead will walk.

Vibrations by P.E. Padilla:

To go back, he must go forward…

Sam Sharp has never been what people would call sociable. Affected profoundly by his father’s death when Sam was very young, he developed into a solitary and self-sufficient person. When he finds himself transported to Gythe, a world that is completely different from his home, yet strangely familiar, he is forced to seek help. Sam’s nature wars with his need to rely on the strangers he meets—a warrior, a scholar, a monk, and a telepathic creature—to help him find a way back to his own world.

When Sam finds that he has an affinity for the peculiar vibrational energy that exists in Gythe, he realizes it is his only chance for going home. But there is only one person who may have the knowledge to help him: the Gray Man, a tyrannical vibrational energy master with plans to rule the world. Can Sam trust others to aid him and to prepare him for the ultimate confrontation with the Gray Man, to learn the secrets of this mysterious adversary? If so, will he even be capable of using the vibrational energy himself to return home, or will he die in this strange new world?

The Secret Within by Sean Platt and David W. Wright:

Delaney West, a tough-as-nails private investigator who’s not afraid to break the rules, operates out of an apartment she shares with her grumpy orange tabby named Pumpkin. Clients come to Delaney for her unique gifts — talents that helped her put away some of the city’s most dangerous criminals. But when Delaney takes on a case to find the missing Jay Sutherland — a 20-something playboy with a rap sheet and a penchant for beating women — Del realizes this case is much more than it seems.

With the help of her father, who’s suffering from Alzheimer’s, in a nursing home, Del discovers that the truth behind Jay’s disappearance is linked to a group called The Night Society. But they’re no ordinary villains. Anika, Jay’s girlfriend, is the only person who may know his whereabouts, but she harbors a dark secret that could pit Del against an enemy she hasn’t seen since her childhood.

As she delves deeper into this web of mystery and danger, can Del put aside her commitment issues long enough to save Jay and herself?

The Gus Ascendancy by Jack Ravenhhill:

Sympathizin’ with aliens makes about as much sense as government cheese.

When Gus and the other alien sympathizers are granted psionic powers as acolytes of the hive mind, Sam realizes something needs to change – and that something is him. So he gives in to Ronan’s personality, which was imprinted onto him as Ronan died, letting it take over entirely.

Ronan had none of Sam’s people-pleasing tendencies, so the imprint gives Sam a confidence boost. But it also makes him headstrong and foolhardy. He goads Gus into a hasty attack on the hive that results in Gus starting his own break-away faction: The Gus Ascendancy.

Before Sam’s consciousness is completely overwhelmed by Ronan’s personality, Journey finds a way to psionically scour most of Ronan’s imprint away. Sam has just enough confidence left to negotiate a compromise with Gus.

But can Gus be trusted when so much power is almost in his grasp?

Nemesis of Mars by Glynn Stewart:

A failed attempt on the Mage-Queen
An old friend from the gutter
An enemy that should be dead…

When a kidnapping attempt on the Mage-Queen of Mars is thwarted by luck, leaving thousands dead in its wake, Prince-Chancellor Damien Montgomery returns to field operations one more time. The evidence leads to one place: Tau Ceti.
In Tau Ceti, Mage-Commander Roslyn Chambers finds herself without a posting as her teaching tour ends. Before she can take any kind of vacation, an old friend from her pre-Navy days shows up claiming to have information about the attempt on the Queen.

Montgomery is the Mage-Queen’s adoptive father and right hand man. Chambers is one of her few true friends. Neither will let the blood of innocents go unpunished.

Neither believes the traitors called Nemesis are dead – but finding them may cost more than either of them can pay!

The Bridge to Magic by Alex Thornbury:

The Blight. The end of Mankind. The Bridge that may be salvation or the final betrayal.

In this grimdark fantasy, Elika, an orphan on Terren’s streets, hates and fears the bridge that spans the great chasm to the Deadlands. Like everyone else, she clings to the hope that purging every lingering echo of magic from the world can stop the Blight.

Then she discovers that magic is hiding within her, and through her it seeks to enact the will of its own. Everything Elika knew about her past shatters, as long-buried secrets about her true birth emerge. Accused of being a mage, many doubt her loyalties. Her gang turns against her. The one man she thought she could trust and love, abandons her. Elika must soon decide: Either destroy the magic inside her or cross the bridge to her own uncertain end. But what awaits them in the Deadlands where the enemy of mankind roams wild? Her future or her end?

The Bridge to Magic is a story of a life between two deaths and an impossible choice to make. It is a story of finding hope, love and survival in a world where none seems possible.

Alien Empress by James David Victor:

Bringing humanity together to face a greater danger should be the easiest of tasks in a war that threatens to exterminate the human race. Or maybe not…

Holly and her team are facing enemies on all fronts, some alien and some not. Their only chance of defeating the Thaal is to cast aside their differences and fight for all of humanity. The only problem: the human factions hate each other as much as they hate the alien invaders. Can they defeat the alien Empress and save mankind?

Alien Empress is the ninth and final book in the Star Breaker series. If you like fast-paced space adventures with interesting characters who battle aliens, evil corporations, and space pirates, Holly Cropper and her team of Marines are ready to share their epic adventure with you.

Indie Crime Fiction of the Month for February 2023

Welcome to the latest edition of “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”.

So what is “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”? It’s a round-up of crime fiction by indie authors newly published this month, though some January books I missed the last time around snuck in as well. The books are arranged in alphabetical order by author. So far, most links only go to Amazon.com, though I may add other retailers for future editions.

Our new releases cover the broad spectrum of crime fiction. We have cozy mysteries, animal mysteries, historical mysteries, Roman mysteries, Victorian mysteries, Jazz Age mysteries, 1960s mysteries, paranormal mysteries, fantasy mysteries, crime thrillers, adventure thrillers, spy thrillers, historical thrillers, romantic suspense, police officers, FBI agents, amateur sleuths, spies, tabloid photographers, missing persons, serial killers, wrongfully accused suspects on the run, crime-busting witches, crime-busting socialites, crime-busting alchemists, crime-busting cats, murder and mayhem in London, Little Rock, Arkansas, Maine, the Florida Keys, Wales, Rio de Janeiro, Alexandria and much more.

Don’t forget that Indie Crime Fiction of the Month is also crossposted to the Indie Crime Scene, a group blog which features new release spotlights, guest posts, interviews and link round-ups regarding all things crime fiction several times per week.

As always, I know the authors at least vaguely, but I haven’t read all of the books, so Caveat emptor.

And now on to the books without further ado:

Murder With Method by Blythe Baker:

When an innocent man goes on the run from police, Sylvia finds herself harboring an accused murderer. Drawn into investigating the violent crime, her search for the truth leads her into the unfamiliar world of betting and horseracing.

As danger closes in around her, Sylvia will need all the help she can get. But new revelations about the past of her butler leave her doubting even the resourceful Miles can come to her rescue this time…

 

A Harmless Lie and a Dangerous Spy by Lori Bond:

A Runaway Victorian Bride. An Heir to a Duke. A Russian Spy. And a steamship bound for America…will two strangers be able to solve the mystery, catch a spy and stop a war, or will their growing romance cost them their lives?

Lady Caroline Stravers, only daughter of the Earl of Wickshire, does not want to marry the crude, older man her parents have chosen for her, so in the early hours of the morning she sneaks out of her fashionable London home to run away for Paris or America or perhaps Australia…

Jerry, Viscount St. David, has been sent to catch a Russian spy who stole plans for a new weapon. If he can keep the Russians from getting the plans, this could very well turn the tide of the Crimean War…

When the two run into each other at Paddington Station, a bargain is struck and Caroline agrees to help Jerry track down the spy in return for her ticket out to New York City.

The next day the two strangers, now partners, board a steamship bound for America to catch a spy. Wars, lives—and hearts—are on the line, but working in such close quarters leads both Caroline and Jerry to discover feelings neither expected. Will their new relationship lead to a stronger bond or jeopardize their mission and their lives?

Pernicious Woman by Beth Byers:

There’s nothing like a woman. Beautiful, saintly, clever, plain. It doesn’t necessarily matter. But a pernicious woman. One who spreads poison, who wrangles, who manipulates, who controls, who looms too large–that is a special kind of beast.

And she’s missing. When Smith and Beatrice go looking for her, they’re faced with the question of whether it isn’t better to fail. Maybe they don’t want to be good at their work. Maybe they don’t want to find her. Maybe they want to save those she torments rather than the missing woman.

Dead To Me by J.M. Dalgliesh:

Let go of your past… or it will be the death of you…

When a man’s body is discovered crammed into the boot of an abandoned car in a remote location, DI Tom Janssen and his team must unpick his life to find out how he came to be there.

The victim was a local man, popular with some although hated by others, and he had a habit of making enemies, enemies that any sane man would seek to avoid. For once, the team do not struggle to find a suspect or a motive for his murder, but with several to choose from, how can they determine who delivered the killing blows? Those who despised the man are unrepentant and as the investigation develops there seems to be more going on than a simple act of vengeance. What did the deceased have to hide and who was so intent on keeping their own secrets that they were prepared to brutally kill to do so?

With a killer at large the public are restless, reassured only by the suggestion that the murder is an act perpetrated by figures within the criminal community against one of their own, but when a troubled teenage girl disappears fear takes hold in the small coastal town. The only potential witness is an eccentric homeless man who comes and goes as he pleases, often disappearing for months at a time. Who did he see? What does he know? Will he be the next to be silenced?

What looked like a simple revenge attack will turn into a race against time for Tom and his team as they try to protect the innocent and reveal the guilty… only no one knows with any certainty who belongs in which camp.

Rio Flash ’62 by Andrew Deutsch:

Brazil. Rio De Janeiro. 1962. A time of dramatic political, social, and cultural clashes. Here, at the nexus of high society and low, style and street, pop music and passionate crime, a young tabloid photographer will do anything to get ahead – even protect a killer.

Beto Santera, raised on the struggling side of Rio, has just wrangled his first press photographer’s card. He has big dreams, small chances, and a chip on his shoulder. Beto is desperate to get ahead as a photographer but is scrambling to make ends meet.

His luck changes when he photos Sergio Fontes von Imperial, an outcast of a powerful Rio family, leaving the crime scene of a murdered popular Brazilian star. Beto makes a dark deal with Sergio, loses the negatives, and he gets access to the exclusive world of fashion, art, music, and nightlife. All the excitement Rio has to offer.

Then more killings occur. Beto is forced to make a choice, keep his career, or help catch the criminal.

A Mark of Imperfection by Rhys Dylan:

Know thine enemy …

Evan Warlow is a man with enemies. As a DCI in the Dyfed Powys force, that comes with the territory. But when two of his most vicious critics are abducted and turn up dead in a macabre tableau, tough questions need to be asked.

The uncomfortable answers lead Evan and the team back to his roots and an old case that has haunted him for years. The deaths in the forest have all the hallmarks of a dangerous killer with no fear of consequences. And when one of Evan’s fellow officers becomes the next target, it’s clear that the murderer isn’t finished yet.

There’s a coppery aroma of vendetta in the air. Unless Evan and the team can get to the root cause of the killer’s twisted anger, there will be more deaths. And guess who’s next on the list?

The Murders in the Mist by Elle Gray:

It seems that supernatural forces have taken a hold of Storyville, Maine… and unfortunately for FBI Agent Cora Pratt, things in town are only getting stranger.

After being led on a cross-country pursuit of one of the most prolific serial killers either one of them had ever seen, FBI Agent Coraline Pratt and her partner, Nolan Rogers, found themselves at the end of the line: Storyville, Maine. And almost immediately, strange things that had nothing to do with the Postcard Killer began happening around Cora. But when a woman she was connected to ended up brutally murdered, it felt like forces were conspiring behind the scenes to keep her there.

Now, Cora is racing against time to find another murderer. As the case takes a series of twists and turns she never expected, she finds herself more mystified than ever before.

Mysterious figures in masks, unexplainable displays of power, disembodied music, spirits of little girls, and abduction victims returning years older than when they were taken.

All the killings aside, things just kept getting weirder, and the questions are mounting — with Cora finding herself in the center of it all.

It’s a race against something otherworldly and for Cora the answers to Storyville’s mysteries will have dire consequences, not just for her and the townspeople but possibly the world…

Live Like You Were Scrying by Lily Harper Hart:

The weather in Casper Creek has yet to turn and Hannah Hickok is determined to take advantage of her downtime to engage in a bit of romance with her fiancé Cooper Wyatt. Unfortunately for her, the world has other plans.

An eerie howl draws Hannah and Cooper to Main Street during a snowstorm, and what they find confuses them. There’s some sort of monster stalking the downtown area, and a woman has appeared out of nowhere in the creature’s wake only to collapse in front of them.

Before Hannah can call for help, the woman disappears, leaving a mystery and a monster hunt on the menu.

Casper Creek’s history is long and storied. This time, however, the trouble can be traced back to Hannah’s own family. It seems the woman who disappeared has ties to her grandmother…and Abigail doesn’t want to share the details with anybody, including her own family.

Frustrated, Hannah keeps digging, but what she finds is a mystery for the ages. It seems the stories she always heard, the ones about her late grandfather being a saint, might’ve been more fiction than reality. The truth of his past is about to collide with Hannah’s future.

And nobody will ever be the same again.

The Curious Case of Emily Lickenson by CeeCee James:

Catnip and cadavers in the care home.

Cat blogger extraordinaire Emily Lickenson falls into a mystery when the head cook at the local care home unexpectedly dies.

As curious as a cat, Emily can’t resist investigating exactly what happened. She recruits her snoopy Aunt Mattie (who herself is half-convinced she used to be a spy) to hunt for clues in the midst of more red herrings than at a fish market..

The clever duo soon discover evidence of murder and a gaggle of suspects, a ditzy sous chef, grumpy cleaner who wanted the less than friendly chef sliced and diced.

Of course, Shakespeare, the cat is along for the ride, both sweet and sassy, and with nine lives!

In this quirky whodunnit you’ll find twists and turns, red herrings served with a slice of puzzle pie, and surprises that’ll have you turning the pages to find the killer before they find Emily. Perfect for those who love cozy animal mysteries with a pinch of humor, lots of clues, and a fun small town feel.

Freaky Crush by Amanda M. Lee:

Poet Parker is living a new reality now that she knows what she is. Unfortunately for her, she still doesn’t know what she can do … and she doesn’t think she’s going to figure it out in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Since her uncle Sidney is in tow, Poet is hopeful for a quiet week. Little Rock has never been a hotbed of activity. Quiet isn’t what she gets, however.

What started as an irritation on the pedestrian bridge turns into a full-blown attack. It seems Little Rock has a seedy underbelly after all, and it’s something Poet was never expecting.

There’s a craven on the loose, a woman who can control actions and emotions … and she’s set her sights on Kade. The craven has a specific type, and Kade fits it to a tee. Unfortunately for him, the craven’s victims all end up dead.

Poet is determined to keep her loved ones safe, but it’s proving to be more difficult than she anticipated. With half her army vulnerable to the craven, Poet has to fight her own people, even as she desperately tries to protect them at the same time.

Poet’s new powers are necessary for the fight, but is she ready to embrace them? When the loas join the party and make things worse—because that’s what they do—things spiral.

It’s up to Poet to fix what’s been broken. That is if she can.

Hultichia by Marshall Ryan Maresca:

A mysterious and disturbing summons brings Aurien Pemmick, an untested deacon of the Church of Druthal, across the border to a peculiar and disquieting kingdom: Kellirac.

Despite being in this antiquated and superstitious place, Pemmick is determined to root out the truth behind the summons. But Kellirac proves to be a place of dangers beyond the natural realm, especially since Pemmick arrives on the eve of Hultichia: a sacred night where the locals claim the dead will walk.

Fish On! by Wayne Stinnett:

Jesse McDermitt is finally ready to retire. But life has other plans. While diving on a remote reef deep in the backcountry of the Florida Keys with his wife, son and two friends, he discovers of all things, a car.

Not just any car, but a 1928 Duesenberg Model J, the most powerful and stylish automobile of its time. The car was once owned by a Saudi prince who was attempting to develop Johnston Key in the heart of Turkey Basin before Henry Flagler even finished the rail line to Key West.

But that’s not all Jesse discovers and what he finds next will make him the target of one of his own. He’s been mentoring a young operative who then decides to go rogue and now it’s up to Jesse to find the man and, if need be, eliminate him before he can hurt anyone else.

Shadow’s Force by Mary Stone:

Which is more dangerous…Mother or Human Nature?

Twelve hours earlier, Interim Sheriff Rebecca West was enjoying a casual lunchtime burger. Now she’s preparing for a hurricane headed straight for Shadow Island. While hauling sandbags and calming town officials, the last thing she needs is a stunned man stumbling into the sheriff’s department.

Covered in blood.

Clearly in shock, the man doesn’t know who he is and only mutters about needing help finding a mermaid. Is he distraught because he killed someone or because he witnessed a horrific event?

Rebecca needs to find out—and fast.

Fighting the torrential rain and wind, Rebecca discovers the victim, posed and decorated like a mermaid. Is the catatonic man the killer? Or is something more sinister at work?

With very little support, she has to work quickly before the island is completely cut off from the mainland and any evidence is destroyed by the natural disaster. It’s all hands on deck as Rebecca and the entire department scramble to prepare for a hurricane…and solve a murder.

The Deadliest Deceptions by June Trop:

Enter the world of first-century CE Roman Alexandria and participate in the perilous adventures of Miriam bat Isaac, budding alchemist and sleuth extraordinaire. Join her and her deputy Phoebe as they struggle to solve nine of their most baffling cases beginning with the locked-room murder of a sailor in which Miriam is baffled by not just who killed the sailor but how he could have died and how the killer could have entered and escaped from the room.

But be careful as you accompany them into the city’s malignant underbelly. Whether or not you can help them solve the crimes, your blood will flow faster as you escape to that world of adventure we all long for. Enjoy!

Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre: “Held Hostage”

It’s time for another Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre photo story. The name “Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre” was coined by Kevin Beckett at the Whetstone Discord server. You can check out all the Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre Photo Stories here.

This story features not the usual Masters of the Universe Origins figures, but the larger Masterverse figures (there are several Masters of the Universe toylines, ranging from mini-figures to the seven-inch Masterverse figures).

I primarily collect the Origins figures, because they have the biggest selection of characters as well as as a lot of vehicles and accessories and because they look like an updated and improved version of the vintage toys from the 1980s. Besides, the size is just big enough that you can pose them and do photo stories with them, but small enough that they don’t take up too much space.

However, the larger Masterverse figures also have their advantages. They have more articulation and detail than the Origins figures and they also have characters and character variants that Origins doesn’t have. In particular, Masterverse has more female characters and they look really good. You can also frequently pick up the Masterverse figures at a reduced price, so a few have found their way into my collection.

And since I have Teela and He-Man as well as Skeletor (in his even more powerful Skelegod form) and Evil-Lyn (in her Sorceress outfit from Revelation), I could make a photo story with them. There’s also a somewhat different Twitter version here.

In the Eternian wilderness, at the outer perimeter:

“And you’re sure that you’ll be all right going on patrol all on your own?”

“Oh please, Adam. I’m a trained soldier, Captain of the Royal Guard and your bodyguard. Also, I can kick your arse anytime.”

“Not in this form. Unless I let you. And now kiss me again.”

SMOOCH!

“That was wonderful – as always. But now I’ve got to go. And so do you. Your father is waiting.”

“He can wait a bit longer. After all, he only wants me to stand decoratively next to the throne.”

“Well, you are very handsome.”

“I want to be more than just a decoration. But whenever I try to say something or make a suggestion, it’s always, ‘Adam, you don’t know anything about politics or about the burden of being king.’ And how am I supposed to learn, if Dad never lets me do anything?”

“One day, your Dad will come around and see you for who you really are. And now go or he’ll be angry.”

“Be careful out there, Teela. Skeletor has been stirring up trouble again of late. And he’s gotten a lot more powerful as well.”

“I’m always careful.”

“No, you’re not. You’re reckless and impulsive and then I have to rescue you.”

“Careful there. Or I will kick your arse – whether you’re powered up or not.”

“I’ll take you up on that offer… later. Or Dad will have my arse for being late again.”

***

Later, still in the Eternian wilderness:

“Well, what have we here? The Captain of the Royal Guard and He-Man’s sweetheart. And all alone, too. What a catch!”

“I don’t want to fight you, Lyn. Get out of my way and no one gets hurt.”

“Can’t do that, sorry. Lord Skeletor will be furious, if I don’t bring him a present. And you’ll do nicely.”

“Why are you still hanging out with Skeletor, Lyn? You know what he is, what he did. You don’t need him.”

“Well, your father made it very clear that he’s not interested. And arsehole or not, Skeletor needs me.”

ZAP!

“What?!”

“Foolish girl! Your steel is no match for my magic. And neither is your pitiful magic.”

“What are you talking about? I have no…”

“Stupid girl. You really have no idea, do you? And now come. Lord Skeletor is waiting.”

***

Later, at Snake Mountain:

“Oh, Lynnie, you’re back. And you brought me a present. Nicely tied up, too.”

“I aim to please, Lord Skeletor. Found her wandering along the outer perimeter.”

“Let me go, Skeletor, or…”

“Or you’ll do what, Captain? You’re my prisoner now. Besides, it’s Skelegod or Lord Skeletor. Show some respect. Or I’ll rip your soul out of your body and snuff it out like I did with your loser Uncle Malcolm…”

“You monster! How could you hurt Uncle Malcolm?”

“He just wouldn’t shut up, ever. Ripping out his soul and snuffing it out finally did shut him up.”

“Fiend! When He-Man or my father hear of this, they’ll…”

“Oh, I’m sure they will. In fact, I’m counting on it. And if your boyfriend wants you back in one piece, he’ll have to surrender his Power Sword to me. As for your father, I’ve been wanting to kill him for a long time now. Or maybe I’ll give him to Lyn to play with first.”

“Oh, I’m sure Duncan and I will have so much fun together.”

“Leave my Dad alone, witch, or I swear I will…”

“So defiant, even in the face of death itself. Cute. We’ll see if you’re still that defiant, when I actually do kill you. And make no mistake, I will.”

The Masterverse Teela comes with an extra head with her hair unbound and down, so of course I put it to good use.

CLATTER!

“Lyn, take her headband and send it to He-Man along with a message demanding him to surrender his Power Sword to me or I’ll cut off her head. Or maybe I’ll flay her first or chop her into little pieces or…”

“Forget it, Skeletor. I’m not scared of you. And He-Man will never surrender to you.”

“We’ll see. Lyn, take her to the dungeon and throw her into a particularly uncomfortable cell.”

***

In the Eternian wilderness:

The Eternian wilderness is portrayed by the trees and bushes I crocheted for the Raksura Colony Tree community art project at the 2019 Worldcon in Dublin.

“I should never have let Teela go on patrol alone. Screw Father and his stupid council meeting. If Skeletor has hurt her… No, I mustn’t even think of that. She’ll be fine and I’ll get her back. All right, no one’s watching, so let’s do this…”

The classic shot of He-Man in front of Castle Grayskull. And yes, I’ve set up my Castle Grayskull by now. More photos will be coming soon.

“By the Power of Grayskull, I have the Power!”

***

Later, at Snake Mountain:

“Here I am, Skeletor, as you demanded. And now let Teela go.”

“He-Man, no! It’s a trap.”

“Bwahaha, of course it’s a trap. And besides, it’s Skelegod now or Lord Skeletor. And now hand over the Power Sword and maybe I’ll let you spend some quality time with your sweetheart in the dungeon, before I’ll kill you both.”

“And now be a good boy and give me that sword or I’ll rip off her head. Or maybe I’ll torture her first. Or maybe I’ll rip out her soul and turn her into one of my Skelecons like I did with her supremely annoying Uncle Malcolm…”

“If you hurt her, Skeletor, if you as much as harm a single hair on her head, then I swear that I’ll end you.”

“Oh, tough talk. Where’s all that high and mighty ‘Every life is sacred’ sermonising, when I’m threatening the life of someone you care about? And now hand over the sword, boy.”

“All right, Skeletor, you win.”

“Of course, I always win.”

“Here’s the sword. And now let Teela go.”

“He-Man, no!”

“Don’t worry, Teela, it’s going to be all right. Now!”

HACK! CLATTER!

“Teela, catch!”

“No! I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you both.”

“You’re welcome to try, Skeletor.”

“Lyn, do something!”

“I’ll kill you for this, He-Man. First I’ll kill your sweetheart – slowly and while you watch – and then I’ll kill you!”

“Touch my family and my friends again and I swear I will end you, Skeletor.”

“It’s still Skelegod or Your Supreme Majesty!”

“Not so fast, girl.”

“Get out of my way, Lyn. Or better, ditch Skeletor and come with us. You don’t need to stay with him.”

“And spend the rest of my life in the Royal Dungeon? No thanks.”

“Come on, Teela, time to go. Before reinforcements arrive.”

“No, they’re escaping. Lyn, do something!”

“And what?”

“Blast them, kill them, I don’t care.”

ZAP! CRACKLE! BOOM!

“You missed, Lyn!”

“You missed, too.”

“Did you even try to hit them?!”

“Of course, I tried. But He-Man deflected the bolt with that accursed sword of his and Teela is very athletic.”

“This can’t be happening. I’m thwarted… again. Get out of my sight, Lyn! And tell Beast-Man to summon the steeds.”

“Yes, Lord Skeletor.”

***

Later, in the Eternian wilderness:

“I think they’ve finally given up pursuit. Praised be Zoar, you’re safe. Don’t you ever do that to me again.”

“Thank you for the rescue, my hero. And now kiss me.”

SMOOCH!

“And now let’s go home!”

SWOOP.

“You can let me down, Adam. I’m fine. I can walk.”

“Are you sure? I’d better carry you back to the palace, so the royal physician can examine your ankle.”

“Adam, I’m fine, really. Especially when I’m in your arms.”

***

The bit with He-Man carrying Teela is a reference to the Filmation episode “The Problem with Power” (one of the best of that series), where He-Man picks up Teela to rescue her from an explosion and then simply doesn’t put her down again, but carries her all the way back to Eternos. It’s certainly one of the most romantic moments in the original cartoon, so I tried to recreate it. It doesn’t quite work, but it looks good enough. In general, the bigger Masterverse figures are good for both battle scenes and intimate/romantic scenes.

Fisto a.k.a. Malcolm really does get his soul ripped out of his body and snuffed out by Skeletor in the second half of Masters of the Universe Revelation in what is a genuinely shocking scene.

And that’s it for today, folks. I hope you enjoyed this Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre Photo Story, because there will be more.

Disclaimer: I don’t own any of these characters, I just bought some toys, took photos of them and wrote little scenes to go with those photos. All characters are copyright and trademark their respective owners.