Cora Buhlert's Blog, page 41

Cora’s Adventures at Flights of Foundry, the Obligatory 2021 Birthday Post and Some Other News

Life has been busy this last week, so here is an overview post about several of the things that happened in the meantime.

As you may recall, I took part in the virtual 2021 Flights of Foundry convention last weekend.

Last year, Flights of Foundry was one of the first virtual cons. Those experiences were clearly put to good use, because I found Flights of Foundry a well-organised and run virtual con. They used WebX for the panels, which doesn’t have a chat function, so questions were asked in Discord. This set-up took some getting used to, but worked well, once you did.

I was on three panels, moderating two, all on Sunday. My first panel was “Making Your Reader Hungry: Food in SFF”, which I moderated. Initially, there were supposed to be four panelists, but one had to drop out because of a scheduling conflict and one never showed, so I was down to two panelists, Nibedita Sen and Shweta Adhyam. Lucky for me, they were fantastic and I think we had a great and mouthwatering panel.

If the first panel of a con goes well, I’m usually a lot more relaxed about future panels. I also had three hours between my first and second panels, which was another bonus. My second panel, which I also was moderating, was “Romance in SFF” with Grace Draven, Cassie Hart, Elle Ire and Jeffe Kennedy. This was another panel that went really well and with barely a hitch except that one panelist dropped out due to connection issues for two minutes or so. As I’ve said elsewhere, the key to a good panel are really the panelists. If you have good panelists, who have interesting things to say and insights to offer, but who don’t ramble on endlessly, then the panel is certain to be good.

After the romance panel, I had ten minutes or so to switch gears, before I was due to appear on the panel “The Unique Challenges of Speculative Translation”. At least, I didn’t have to dash from one panel room to the next, which sometimes happens during physical cons. Also, I wasn’t moderating this one. Instead, the moderator duties were handled by the excellent Fabio Fernandes. My fellow panelists were Marina Berlin, Julia Meitov Hersey and Janna Ruth. We discussed pronouns, gendered languages and the unique challenges of translating Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie among other things.

Many of the Flights of Foundry panels and presentations were recorded and should be up on the Dream Foundry YouTube channel eventually, so you can still enjoy them, even if you did not get to see them live.

I didn’t get to attend as many other panels, presentations and readings as I wanted either, because Sunday, April 18, also happened to be my birthday, so inbetween panels I was unwrapping presents as well as dealing with phone calls and my lone birthday visitor (except for my parents whom I see every day anyway), my neighbour Rosi, which was a bit of an odd experience, because that’s not normally something that happens during a physical con. I also was out for an hour or so in the afternoon, enjoying nature and the fresh spring green. Initially, I wanted to get myself a celebratory ice cream, but the line at the ice cream parlour’s take-out window was way too long and also standing way too closely together that I decided to scratch that and just enjoyed a walk through the woods instead.

It’s my birthday and a weekend, too, so it was time for sailor’s curry, my favourite childhood dish.

For more about this North German maritime take on curry, go here. If you want my family recipe, it’s in the back of Freedom’s Horizon. Or you can just ask me.

Wrapped birthday presents.

Unwrapping presents while my Mom looks on.

Unwrapped birthday presents: Behold all the pulpy goodness.

I have now finished replacing my crappy old Robert E. Howard editions full of posthumously completed or altered stories with the Del Rey’s editions. I’m still missing Howard’s westerns and the boxing stories, but I’m not sure if I really need those. Maybe I should try some of the stories before buying to see if I enjoy them.

Some other things happened last week as well: On Wednesday, I was interviewed by a reporter of the local paper Kreiszeitung about my Hugo nomination. The article hasn’t come out yet, but it will be linked here, when it does.

In other news, the progress report No. 1 of Chicon 8, the 2022 Worldcon in Chicago, Illinois, came out last week as well. Normally, this is something I would post in the weekly link round-up at the Speculative Fiction Showcase, but not here.

However, I’m making an exception this time around, because I happen to be mentioned in this progress report on page 14. If PDFs are not your thing, you can also get the gist at File 770.

In short, Chicon 8 has decided not to run the 1947 Retro Hugos because the low participation does not justify the work and costs involved. Instead, Chicon 8 will be running a 1946 Retrospective to take a look at what SFF fiction, non-fiction, film, radio drama, comics and fandom had to offer in 1946. There will be program items, exhibitions and more.

And who will be running this great project? None other than yours truly.

You’ll be hearing more about this in time, but for now I’m really excited to share the SFF of 1946 with the members of Chicon 8 and the rest of the SFF community.

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier come to the conclusion that it’s “One World, One People”

It’s time for my review of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier finale. If you want my thoughts on previous episodes of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, go here.

Thankfully, Disney is about to come to an agreement with Alan Dean Foster about paying him, as Adam Whitehead reports. However, as Gavia Baker-Whitelaw reports, Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting, who created the Winter Soldier for Marvel, are not getting paid for the use of the character in the series due to bad contracts.

Warning: Spoilers behind the cut!

The final episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier starts off where the penultimate episode left off, with the Global Repatriation Council about to vote to forcibly relocate millions of people to their countries of origin (when the wrong people do that, it’s considered a crime against humanity), when the lights go out in the conference room, courtesy of Karli and the Flag-Smashers. The building is immediately put on lockdown and surrounded by heavily armed police officers. Bucky and Sam, who have deducted that New York City is where the Flag-Smashers will strike next and that the Global Repatriation Council is the logical target, are on their way as well.

Bucky just goes in through the front door – apparently the police no longer mind that he used to be a brainwashed Hydra assassin and also that he has absolutely no jurisdiction. Sam – in a brand-new Wakandan designed Captain America costume with wings – makes a grander entrance by smashing his shield though a window of the building and then bursting inside, ready to kick arse and rescue people. Though the kicking arse comes first, because Sam almost immediately runs into Georges Batroc, who really, really doesn’t like people in Captain America costumes in general, because they keep interfering with his nefarious activities, and Sam in particular, ever since Sam foiled Batroc’s kidnapping mission in Tunisia in episode one.

The first twenty-five minutes or so of this forty-eight minute episode are basically one big, non-stop action scene, where the various players (Sam, Bucky, John Walker, Sharon Carter, Karli and the Flag-Smashers, Georges Batroc, the NYPD, the GRC bigwigs) are fighting with and against each other in differing configurations. And that’s okay, because big action scenes are part of what we expect when we watch a Marvel movie or TV show, even if – as Germain Lussier points out in his review at io9 – it goes on a bit too long at the expense of the quieter character moments.

Sam, Bucky and Sharon Carter – who has somehow managed to fly in from Madripoor and sneak back into the US, even though she’s still supposed on the Most Wanted list, which should give Sam and Bucky pause, but doesn’t – quickly figure out that Karli’s plan is not to invade the GRC building to hold the council members hostage or take them out. Instead, the Flag-Smashers want to force an evacuation and then take the council members hostage during the ensuing chaos. But even though Sam, Bucky and Sharon see through that plan and try to prevent the evacuation, they fail, because Sam is busy tangling with Batroc, while Bucky pauses to talk to Karli on a phone a Flag-Smasher sympathiser hands to him.

The phone conversation between Bucky and Karli is an obvious distraction, so obvious that we wonder how Bucky managed to fall for it. Nonetheless, it’s a nice moment with Bucky – veteran of more wars than he cares to remember – tries to convince Karli that her fight won’t end well and that it’s not worth it and that the people she killed will always haunt her. Karli points out that she’s fighting for a cause bigger than herself. “Yeah, I did that, too”, Bucky replies, “Twice. And I failed. Twice.” The contrast between Karli, the idealistic freedom fighter turned terrorist, and Bucky, the jaded veteran who was exploited to fight for other people’s causes more than once, is nice, even though the purpose of the whole scene is just to distract Bucky long enough so the evacuation can proceed as planned.

Half of the council members are evacuated via a helicopter on the roof, which just happens to be piloted by a Flag-Smasher. Sam arrives too late to stop the helicopter and sets off in pursuit, showing off his new Wakandan wing-suit, the refurbished Redwing drone and some mini-Redwings. There is a thrilling chase through the street canyons of Manhattan and across the Hudson River. Sam rescues the pilots of a crashing NYPD helicoper and takes out the Flag-Smasher who pilots the helicopter with his shield. Luckily, one of the hostages (played by actress who also was in the new MacGuyver and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks) can fly a helicopter and takes over. It’s a nice action scene, which gives Sam a chance to show off his new Captain America suit and his gadgets. I also liked that Sam included the hostages in their own rescue.

The other half of the council members are evacuated via the parking garage in armoured NYPD vehicles. However, a burly Flag-Smasher has sealed the vehicles with some kind of device, so the doors can’t be opened neither from the in- nor the outside. The vehicles take off, headed straight towards an ambush set by Karli and the remaining Flag-Smashers. Karli also makes it clear that she is fully willing to kill the hostages. Her followers are not quite happy with that, but they still go along with her.

Bucky commandeers a motorbike (it’s a Honda, but I couldn’t make out the exact model) and goes after the armoured trucks with the council members, while Sharon takes out the burly Flag-Smasher who poses as an NYPD officer with a mercury vapour grenade which melts his face. For a supposedly good girl, Sharon is pretty damned murderous. However, Bucky and Sam are not around to see any of that.

Karli and the Flag-Smashers have set an ambush for the trucks at a construction site and are just about to take out the drivers, while the locked in council members are unable to escape, when Bucky catches up with them. “Give him someone to rescue”, Karli orders, well aware that true superheroes will always prioritise saving lives over taking out bad guys. So one of the Flag-Smashers sets one of the trucks on fire, leaving Bucky to desperately try to pry open the sealed truck. However, the weird locking device that the Flag-Smasher who had his face melted by Sharon attached is a challenge even for Bucky’s bionic arm.

Meanwhile, John Walker shows up like a bad penny, still decked out in the Captain America outfit he doesn’t really have a right to wear anymore. Unlike Bucky, who’s trying to rescue, Walker goes straight for Karli. “I didn’t mean to kill your friend”, Karli says, “I don’t kill people who don’t matter.” This understandably infuriates Walker even more, because Lemar mattered very much to him. Once again, Karli also sounds eerily like the Red Army Fraction‘s statements in which they declared that they didn’t really mean to kill the drivers and bodyguards they blew up along with the CEOs, bankers or prosecutors who were their true targets, but it’s war and shit happens*.

John Walker may have a homemade shield and supersoldier serum coursing through his veins, but Captain America he’s not and so he gets the shit kicked out of him by the Flag-Smashers. It also quickly becomes clear that a shield made from ordinary steel rather than vibranium doesn’t really cut it. However, when one of the trucks threatens to fall into the construction pit and Bucky is getting ready to try and catch it, John Walker does rise to the occasion after all and tries to save the truck and its passengers rather than go after Karli. However, John Walker alone is not enough to save the truck. Luckily, Sam has finished with his helicopter chase and shows up just in time to rescue the truck and his passengers with his tricked out new suit to the cheers of various bystanders, who are debating whether this really cool superhero who just rescued a bunch of people is called “Black Falcon” or “Captain America”.

While Bucky, Sam and John are fighting the remaining Flag-Smashers, Karli has escaped into what appears to be a subway tunnel under construction, where she is stopped by none other than Sharon Carter. Sharon and Karli point their guns at each other and Karli reveals that she knows Sharon and that – big surprise – Sharon is the Power Broker. Sharon offers Karli to work for her again – she can still use supersoldiers as muscle, which is apparently what Karli was originally supposed to be, before she stole the serum and decided to become a freedom fighter/terrorist. Karli, however, has a mission. Batroc shows up as well. Karli realises that Sharon double-crossed her and Batroc is working for Sharon. Meanwhile, Batroc, never the sharpest knife in the drawer, finally realises that Sharon is the Power Broker and promptly decides to blackmail her. Bad idea, because Sharon shoots him, though she is wounded herself in the exchange.

Before Sharon and Karli can continue their stand-off, Sam shows up – once again too late to see Sharon being villainous – and tries to convince Karli to give up. During the fight between Sam and Karli, it’s very obvious that Sam is fighting defensively rather than offensively. He doesn’t want to kill Karli, he wants to persuade her to give up. However, Karli isn’t giving up and points her gun at Sam at a moment, when he dropped his shield. We never know if she would have shot or not, because Sharon uses the opportunity to get rid of a witness while pretending to be a hero and shoots Karli, who then expires in Sam’s arms, while clutching the hamsa amulet of the late Donya Madani. It clear from the beginning that Zemo had a point when he said that Karli was too radicalised and that she wouldn’t stop unless she was killed. Nonetheless, the show takes the easy way out, because it’s not our heroes or even John Walker who have dirty their hands by taking out Karli. Instead, it’s a villain – Sharon – who does the dirty work.

We are now treated to a highly evocative shot of Sam carrying the martyred Karli in his arms, looking very much like a biblical angel. Karli is taken to an ambulance, but it’s too late. She’s gone. Meanwhile, Bucky and John Walker lure the remaining Flag-Smashers to a specific location by sending them a message via the Flag-Smasher app. Then they arrest the remaining Flag-Smashers and hand them over to the NYPD.

The GRC bigwigs try to thank Sam for saving them from those nasty terrorists, but Sam won’t have any of that. He declares – conveniently in front of dozens of news cameras – that as far as he is concerned the Flag-Smashers aren’t terrorists, because they had a point. He also declares that the GRC are no better than Thanos when they try to forcibly evict millions of people from their new homes. One of the GRC bigwigs points out that they’re helpless and don’t know what to do, whereupon Sam declares that if they want to feel helpless, try being a black man in America. He also says that the world and the GRC can do better. Oh yes, and Sam is Captain America now, even though he has no supersoldier serum coursing through his veins, neither blue eyes nor blond hair and no official mandate either. And yes, he knows that some people will hate him for that (even though everybody we see unabashedly cheers for Sam, regardless of race), but he’ll do what he has to do.

With this scene, Sam pretty much proves that he also has the other quality a good Captain America needs, namely – as Keith R.A. DeCandido points out in his Tor.com review – the ability to give inspirational speeches at the drop of a hat. And it’s not a bad speech, though it goes on too long and is a bit too blunt in parts – but then it seems Americans sometimes need their moral messaging in a blunt way. And Sam does manage to convince the heartless GRC bigwigs. To quote Daily Dot reviewer Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, “If only it were that easy in real life.”

That said, one part where I would have liked Sam to be more blunt is in drawing the parallels between the GRC’s attempts to forcibly relocate millions of people and the way refugees are treated by many governments in the real world. Indeed, the whole refugee parallel could have been made much more clear in the show, but instead it got buried under the muddled politics of the Flag-Smashers. And in fact, the most annoying about The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is how muddled and partly incoherent that motives of the Flag-Smashers are. Gavia Baker-Whitelaw notes that there are hints that the show originally was supposed to include a killer virus plotline, which was deleted due to hitting too close to home, and that that’s the reason why the Flag-Smasher plot is so incoherent. But it’s still annoying when it takes several episode to become even vaguely clear what the main antagonists even want.

This speech is the central moment of the finale, the moment where Sam fully takes on the mantle of Captain America. However, there are still some loose ends to tie up. And so we see Bucky visit his friend Mr. Nakashima, the old Japanese man whose son he killed, while he was the Winter Soldier, to finally tell him the truth about what happened that way. We don’t see much of their conversation, but we later see that Bucky left a gift for his therapist Dr. Rayner, the notebook he inherited from Steve with all the names crossed out, as well as a thank-you note.

Meanwhile, Sam goes to see Isaiah. Isaiah has seen Sam’s big speech and is not unimpressed, though he tells Sam that he’s no “Martin, Malcolm or Mandela”. Sam also takes Isaiah and his grandson to the Captain America exhibit at the Smithsonian, where a new display remembering Isaiah Bradley and his fellow black supersoldiers has been set up. The grandson is really impressed, because grandpa is a real hero now, while a touched Isaiah hugs Sam. It’s nice scene, though like AV-Club reviewer Sulagna Misra and io9 reviewer Germain Lussier, I can’t help but wonder how Sam managed to convince the Smithsonian staff to set up this display so quickly. Wouldn’t they at least require some hard proof that all that happened beyond the word of the new Captain America? Especially since we’ve been told earlier that the project was top secret. Also, what about Isaiah who was justfiedly terrified that he’d be imprisoned again or killed, if the powers that be find out that he’s still alive? Will he be safe now, because it would raise too many questions to kill someone who has their own display Smithsonian? Or has racism been solved in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, because Sam held a speech?

The remaining three Flag-Smashers are about to be transported to the Raft – the maximum security prison for superpowered prisoners on the high seas – when the truck transporting them suddenly explodes. We see Zemo’s elderly butler holding a detonator. Even from prison, Zemo – who looks remarkably satisfied with himself – still pulls the strings to make sure that there will be no more supersoldiers. Though I can’t help but notice that one Flag-Smasher, the helicopter pilot, is still unaccounted for.

Zemo also sends the photos of his handiwork to Contessa Valentina who promptly shows them to her new best friend Olivia Walker, wife of John. Since I’m not a sitcom person, I haven’t seen much of Julia Louis-Dreyfus, but I love her as Valentina. I also love the Bechdel-test passing heart-to-heart between Valentina and Olivia, though it takes a very twisted person to bond with a new friend over photos of charred Flag-Smashers. While they are looking at pics of charred corpses, Valentina and Olivia are waiting for John Walker to come out of the changing room in his new outfit – which looks exactly like his old outfit, only in black. “I don’t need a Captain America”, Valentina points out, “What I need is a US Agent.” John and Olivia are certainly pleased to be back in the superbeing game.

Wyatt Russell was great as John Walker and I am glad that they did not kill him off and that they made him a more nuanced character than the one-note Captain Nationalism he could have been. However, John also has PTSD and is at least as unstable as Karli and he did beat the Flag-Smasher Nico to death with his shield. And it bothers me that all this seems to have been forgotten in the final episode, where John redeems himself by helping to rescue some hostages. Though we don’t yet know where the Valentina subplot will lead.

The episode ends back in Louisiana, where the Wilsons and their neighbours are having a shrimp boil. Everybody is eager to take selfies with Sam, now that they have their very own Captain America, one who’s a Southerner and black. Bucky is also there and clearly advertising himself as a great potential stepdad by letting Sam’s nephews use his bionic arm as a jungle gym. It’s a lovely final scene and made me hungry for shrimp boil. I also find it interesting that Bucky seems most happy and at peace, when he is among black people, first in Wakanda and now in Louisiana.

However, there still is a post-credits scene with Sharon in front of a congressational committee. Sam kept his promise and Sharon not only gets a pardon, but also her old job back. However, Sharon is a bad girl now, not to mention the Power Broker. And so she’s calling up her contacts to offer US government secrets for sale – while still on the steps of the building where the hearing took place.

Sharon Carter, a long established heroic character from the comics, turning out to be a pretty nasty villainess was IMO the most unexpected and interesting development of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Of course, Sharon’s main role in the comics, though she is a SHIELD agent in her own right, is Steve Rogers’ love interest. Steve and Sharon never had all that much chemistry in the movie and now Steve has gone back in time to be with Peggy Carter (who is Sharon’s great-aunt), there really isn’t any role for Sharon anymore. Of course, they could have turned her into Bucky’s or Sam’s love interest, but turning her into a villain – and one no one suspects at that – certainly is more interesting. Though – as someone pointed out on Twitter – Sharon being the Power Broker means that many of her actions in the Madripoor episode make no sense. io9‘s James Whitbrook isn’t quite sure what to make of the Sharon development, while The AV-Club‘s Sulagna Misra points out that Emily VanCamp is not really an actress who is associated with unambiguously good characters, but is best known for the soap opera Revenge where she played a very Sharon-like character who took bloody vengeance on various rich people who had wronged her family.

Also, it’s notable that both Marvel TV shows to date – WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier – featured memorable female villains. WandaVision had Agatha all along, while The Falcon and the Winter Soldier had Karli, Sharon and possibly Valentina, depending on what exactly she’s up to.

All in all, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was fun, but also very muddled with regard to politics, locations and what the hell the main antagonists’ motives actually were. As Camestros Felapton says, it was sort of all right, but could have been much better. Several reviewers have pointed out that the show feels like a long Captain America movie chopped up into forty-five minute chunks. However, instead of using the extra-length to add some more dimension to the plot and charactrisation for the many characters, the result is just a muddled mess in many places.

Anthony Mackie is suitably likeable and charismatic and will be an excellent Captain America, in case there was ever any doubt. And Sam was also one of the less developed Avengers, so it was nice to get some more background about him other than “He used to be a soldier and is now a PTSD counsellor”. Plus, the show smoothed the transition from Steve Rogers to Sam Wilson as the new Captain America. Bucky was more developed from the start and so it makes sense that his arc often takes second place to Sam’s. The show has also found a new role for Sharon Carter, a character left at loose ends, and introduced two potentially interesting new antagonists in Valentina and John Walker. And the Isaiah Bradley subplot was powerful, much more powerful than the occasionally overly blunt “racism is bad” messages that the show delivered elsewhere.

In short, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier wasn’t bad at all and a lot of fun, but it could have been so much better.

*The utter disregard of the fate of those murdered bodyguards and drivers – not just on the part of the RAF, but also on the part of the media and the politicians who only felt that the blown up CEO, banker or prosecutor was worth remembering – always infuriated me even as a kid. The worst example I can recall was an interviews with the son of an RAF victim, in which he talked about his father and his two companions. I screamed at the TV, “You could at least fucking remember their names, because unlike your father, who provoked the terrorists by jailing their companions, the driver and bodyguard were only doing their jobs and did fuck all to deserve what happened to them.”

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Face the “Truth”

It’s time for my episode by episode reviews of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. If you want my thoughts on previous episodes of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, go here.

Thankfully, Disney is about to come to an agreement with Alan Dean Foster about paying him, as Adam Whitehead reports. However, as Gavia Baker-Whitelaw reports, Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting, who created the Winter Soldier for Marvel, are not getting paid for the use of the character in the series due to bad contracts.

Warning: Spoilers behind the cut!

The first of the truths this episode deals with is that John Walker, the highly decorated soldier handpicked by the US government to take on the mantle of Captain America, is a killer who just beat a man to death with Cap’s shield in front of dozens of witnesses and cameras.

This episode starts where the previous one left off, with John Walker running off in his blood-splattered Captain America outfit with the bloodstained shield. He’s having flashbacks and hearing the voice of the very dead Lemar in his head and finally runs into some kind of warehouse, which – judging by the writing on the door – is definitely not in Latvia. Though the writing doesn’t look Czech either. It might be Hungarian, but I’m not sure.

Sam and Bucky corner Walker in the warehouse and try to persuade him to come with them, because his emotional state and military record will certainly be considered with regard to the consequences of beating a man to death with the shield. Walker, however, is not willing to give up, neither himself nor the shield, and so we get a big fight which is a bit reminiscent of the climactic fight in Captain America: Civil War.

It’s a nasty fight and it’s clear that Walker is fighting to kill, while Sam and Bucky are trying to contain him. In the course of the fight, Walker rips off Sam’s wings and short-circuits Bucky’s arm, all the while screaming “I am Captain America.” Bucky and Sam finally manage to knock out Walker and take the shield from him with their combined powers. Sam tries to wipe off the blood stains to desecrate the symbol.

John Walker may have been a jerk, but the John Walker we’ve seen before wasn’t a killer. This one, however, is. Most likely, this latest version of the supersoldier serum has mental health side effects (also see Karli and the Flag Smashers going from idealistic young people who steal food and medical supplies to give to the poor to murderous terrorists). Furthermore, John Walker lost the stabilising influence of Lemar, while Karli lost the stabilising influence of Donya. Also kudos to Wyatt Russell’s performance as the increasingly disturbed Walker.

While watching the completely unhinged and murderous John Walker fight Sam and Bucky while repeating “I am Captain America” over and over again, I couldn’t help but think that for many people in the world who have been at the receiving end of US military power the face of America is not the all-around good guys Steve Rogers or Sam Wilson but the hateful visage of John Walker. If Steve represented the good side of America, what the country wants to be, even though it all too often isn’t, John represents the ugly and hateful side.

We suspect that the US government representatives who gave John Walker the title and shield in the first place also represent the ugly side of America (and the lead bureaucrat proves it later in the episode), but nonetheless John Walker killing a man (and the wrong man at that, since Karli was the one who killed Lemar, not Nico) on camera is a PR disaster and so John is ordered before a committee, stripped off the rank of Captain America and ordered to return the shield. He is also given an “other than honourable discharge”, which means he loses his military rank and pension. “But I was just following orders”, Walker says, apparently unware that that particularly defence stopped applying in 1945.

In his review at Tor.com, Keith R.A. DeCandido notes that Walker’s sentence seems both harsh – after all, he got three Medals of Honour – and not harsh enough – after all, he murdered Nico. Rare for me, I fall on the “not harsh enough” side here. John Walker is a murdered, plain and simple. And while there were mitigating circumstances such as the mental health crisis caused by seeing his best friend Lemar killed, he’s still a murderer and should be going to prison.

That said, I wasn’t particularly surprised that Walker got off with a much lighter sentence than he deserves, because when US soldiers commit crimes abroad, the sentences they receive are often much lower than if they had committed the same crime in the US. 1532 people have been executed in the US since 1976. However, the US military has not executed anybody since 1961. I’m opposed to the death penalty, so it’s a good thing that the US military is not executing people anymore. However, the discrepancy between civilian and military justice in the US is striking. It’s also notable that the last person executed by the US military was an African-American soldier who had raped and attempted to kill an eleven-year-old white girl in Austria. Of the four US soldiers who are still on death row, one is black, one is white and two are Muslim.

Later, we see a furious John Walker and his still supportive wife sitting outside the courtroom, when an attractive no-longer-young woman walks up to them and introduces herself as Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine. Most articles focus on the fact that this character is played by US comedy legend Julia Louis-Dreyfus (and indeed, I kept wondering where I had seen the actress before), but to comic readers the name will be immediately familiar. Because Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine has been an established Marvel character since the 1960s. In this time, she has been an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. alongside Sharon Carter, Nick Fury’s lover, a Skull infiltrator, Russian double agent and the latest incarnation of Madame Hydra (an earlier incarnation of whom ruled Madripoor and had a relationship with Wolverine, but then who hasn’t?). We don’t yet know which of these versions of the character Julia Louis-Dreyfus will play, though the brief scene in which she hands Walker’s wife a blank business card and tells Walker that she can use someone like him, that the shield doesn’t actually belong to the US government and that she’ll call Walker strongly hints that we’ll be seeing one of the more sinister incarnations of the character. This Vanity Fair article by Joanna Robinson also suggests that we’ll be seeing more of Valentina and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. And I really hope for a reunion with Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury which makes it clear that Valentina is his ex.

Next, we get to see the softer side of John Walker (yes, he still has one), when he goes to pay his respects to Lemar’s family. It’s obvious that John Walker is close to them and appears to view them as his own family. That said, he still lies to them (and probably to himself) that the Flag-Smasher he killed was the one who killed Lemar.

Meanwhile, Lemar’s real killer Karli and her Flag-Smashers have been driven underground. The Global Repatriation Council is turning over every stone to find them and has arrested the people in the Latvian refugee camp for sheltering them, which is sure to win hearts and minds… not. Sam and Bucky – aware that they can’t do anything until Karli shows herself again – go their separate ways. Before he leaves, Sam tells Joaquin Torres that he can keep the wings or what’s left of them, suggesting that Torres will follow in the footsteps of his comic counterpart and become the next Falcon.

Bucky goes after Zemo, who escaped in the chaos of the last episode, and finds him at the memorial for those who were killed when the Avengers and Ultron slugged it out in Sokovia. The monument looks like a real East European war memorial – probably because it is. The kyrillic letters at least spell Sokovia correctly. Zemo doesn’t try to escape and barely flinches when Bucky pulls a gun on him and pulls the trigger, only to reveal that the gun is unloaded. He also tells Bucky that Karli is too far gone to save. The only way to stop her is to kill her. Bucky hands Zemo over to the Dora Milaje who will return him to prison. Ayo tells Bucky that he should maybe stay out of Wakanda for a while. Bucky agrees and asks her one last favour. It’s only later that we learn what it is.

Meanwhile, Sam – shield in tow in a leather bag that looks as if it’s from the 1940s – goes to see Isaiah Bradley, whom we met in episode 2. Because he’s alone this time, Isaiah is less hostile and tells Sam his story. Sometime in the late 1940s, Isaiah and some other African American soldiers were given an attempt to recreate the supersoldier serum that created Steve Rogers. The soldiers were not told what was in the injections – they thought it was a tetanus vaccine (shades of the real life Tuskegee experiment here). There was something wrong with the serum the men were given and many were unstable or died. The others were still sent on missions. When several of them were captured, the US Army planned to blow up the POW camp rather than let their guinea pigs fall into enemy hands. So Isaiah went off alone to rescue them in defiance of orders. However, the other soldiers still died one by one and Isaiah was locked up in prison and experiment upon for his troubles. Worse, the authorities told his wife he was dead and never gave Isaiah the letters his wife wrote him in prison. Eventually, a sympathetic nurse helped Isaiah fake his death and gave him the letters, but his wife had already died in the meantime.

It’s a terrible story, made even more powerful by Carl Lumbly’s performance. It’s also telling how much Isaiah’s story mirrors Steve’s. Both Steve and Isaiah went against orders to rescue their comrades. Both Steve and Isaiah were separated from the love of their lives for decades. Both Isaiah and Steve spent years on ice. But Steve was the celebrated hero. Isaiah was the embarrasment who was hidden away.

Sam is understandably outraged and wants to make everything public, but Isaiah points out that this will mean his death, because the people who abused him and experimented on him will never let him live. He also tells Sam that a black man will never be allowed to be Captain America and that Isaiah doesn’t know why any self-respecting black man would want to.

Isaiah also points out something that I’ve seen critics point out several times, but that the Marvel movies have never addressed so far, namely that Steve Roger, symbol of America, would not look out of place on a Nazi recruitment poster. “Blond hair, blue eyes, stars and stripes”, Isaiah says. The comics have addressed this occasionally, usually by making it vey clear that even though Steve may look as if he stepped right out of a Nazi recruitment poster, he is someone who will always side with the downtrodden and the underdogs.

After his visit to Isaiah, Sam goes home to his sister in Louisiana where there is more trouble brewing. The person who wanted to buy the Wilsons’ fishing boat has dropped out, because the condition of the boat is too bad. We also learn that empathy is not only Sam’s superpower, but a Wilson family trait, since Sarah – though in dire financial straits herself – still makes sure that neighbourhood kids, who are even worse of, get something to eat every day. Apparently, Sam’s and Sarah’s mother was the same, which gives Sam an idea. “How many people in the neighbourhood still owe Mom and Dad something?” he asks. “Uhm, all of them”, Sarah replies.

So Sam calls up their neighbours, asking for help to fix the boat, and all of them show up. They also get help from an unexpected source, namely Bucky who comes by to drop of a present from Wakanda in a big high-tech suitcase for Sam. Since Bucky has superstrength and a bionic arm, he’s useful in repairing the boat. Sarah is understandably impressed by Bucky’s impressive physique, while Bucky in turn is quite taken by Sarah and her two boys. Sam, being the typically overprotective big brother, is not at all happy that Bucky is flirting with his sister. Though personally, I think Bucky and Sarah would be good for each other. Bucky is deeply traumatised and more than anything needs stability and kindness in his life. Sarah shares Sam’s empathy superpower and could certainly use a hand or rather a bionic arm around the house. Also, when we see Bucky lying on the Wilsons’ couch and watching Sam’s nephews play with the shield, he smiles, something we haven’t seen him do ever since his supposed “death” way back in The First Avenger. Also, it’s interesting that Bucky, a white man from the 1940s, has only ever found brief moments of peace among black people, first in Wakanda and then in friendly and overwhelmingly black seaside town where Sam and Sarah live.

The scene with the two little black boys playing with the shield is also powerful in a different way, because it shows us that Isaiah is wrong. To these little boys, the shield is not (yet) a symbol of oppression, but a cool gadget wielded by a cool hero. And how much more inspiring would it be for these little boys, if the hero who wields the shield were someone who looks like them, someone like their Uncle Sam?

Bucky and Sam also have a heart to heart among Spanish moss laden trees. Bucky confesses that the reason the shield means so much to him is that it represents the only tie to his past and the only family he still has. He also reveals that Steve and Bucky decided together to give the shield to Sam, which is why Bucky was so hurt that Sam rejected it. Bucky also tells Sam that neither he nor Steve had considered what it might mean to give the shield to a black man and he’s sorry. Now Steve and Bucky grew up together in Depression era Brooklyn, so they were bound to meet people of many different backgrounds. They were also certainly aware of the racism that still reigned everywhere – after all, there were plenty of lynchings in their lifetime and even though those did not happen in New York City, they would have heard or read about them. However, we also saw Steve and Bucky fighting alongside black soldiers. And when Steve was thawed out, literally the first person he meets is Nick Fury, a black man who is director of S.H.I.E.L.D. Later, he also meets Rhodey, a black man who is an officer of the US Air Force, and Sam, another black man who’s a former soldier. And Bucky spends most of his time after being deprogrammed in Wakanda, a highly developed African nation. Steve and Bucky might be forgiven for thinking that racism is a problem of the past. Sam, of course, knows only too well that it isn’t.

Sam in turn tells Bucky that it doesn’t matter what Steve thought or did, because Steve is gone (which suggests that he died between the end of Avengers: Endgame and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, since he was still alive, if very old, at the end of Endgame). Sam also tells Bucky that he shouldn’t wait for other people to tell him who he is. Sam also points out a fatal flaw in Bucky’s plan to make amends and the list in his little black book. So far, he’s mostly taking revenge by taking out wrongdoers he helped to enable as the Winter Soldier. Also, apologising to people he wronged might make Bucky feel better, but necessarily the people he wronged. Maybe, Bucky should try to make them feel better, for example by offering closure. And Mr. Nakashima, the old man from episode one whose son Bucky killed on a mission, certainly needs closure.

The Bucky and Sam scene is powerful and has been praised by several reviewers, including io9‘s Germain Lussier and The AV-Club‘s Sulagna Misra. It’s clearly also an important moment for the characters who go off to become who they need to be. We don’t quite know what Bucky will do yet, though we can guess. Sam, meanwhile, decides that yes, he’s going to be Captain America, and so we get a neat montage of Sam training with the shield, while showing off Anthony Mackie’s impressive physique.

Meanwhile, Karli and her friends realise that the people who helped them have been arrested for their troubles, which only serves to radicalise Karli even further. She’s planning something big. The next time we see Karli, she’s in New York City. There’s no mention of how the Flag-Smashers, though being the world’s most wanted, are able to travel from Europe to the US undetected. Karli also has a new associate, namely none other than Georges Batroc, the athletic terrorist who keeps getting foiled first by Steve and then by Sam and now wants revenge. He also brings weapons.

However, Karli may just have signed her own death warrant, because earlier we see Sharon Carter talking to someone on the phone in French. It’s implied that Sharon broke Batroc out of prison and sicced him on Karli, presumably to take Karli out. This suggests that Sharon is the Power Broker, who after all wants to kill Karli. Unless Valentina is the Power Broker and Sharon is her flunky.

We also get a brief scene of the Global Repatriation Council who decide to send all of the post-blip immigrants and refugees back to their countries of origin. This makes them not only even more obviously evil than they already are, but also obvious targets for Karli and the Flag-Smashers.

And indeed, Sam is just watching a report about the Global Repatriation Council’s decision on the news, when Joaquin Torres calls to inform Sam that Karli is in New York. Three guesses where she will strike. Sam finally opens the case Bucky brought him from Wakanda. We don’t see what’s inside, but I’m betting on a brand-new Captain America costume.

However, John Walker still thinks that he is Captain America and so he post-credit scene (yes, there is one) shows him making himself a shield of his own, studded with his three Medal of Honours. Okay, so Walker has no vibranium, but he does have superstrength.

“Truth” is the penultimate episode. The final episode will likely involve a race between Sam and Bucky on the one side and John Walker, maybe with help by Valentina, on the other to stop Karli and the Flag-Smashers. I also strongly suspect that Karli won’t survive, though she’ll probably die at the hands on John Walker or Batroc or even Sharon rather than our heroes.

“Truth” was a good episode, probably because it was quieter than some of the other and focussed on interpersonal moments rather than flashy action scenes. That said, I agree with Camestros Felapton that overall The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is very uneven. It certainly tries to tackle big themes, bigger than Marvel normally does, but it doesn’t quite pull it off. And whenever a deeper point puts in an appearance, e.g. John Walker as the ugly face of America which is the one that many people around the world associate with the US, or Isaiah’s remark that no self-respecting black man would even want to be Captain America, it always feels as if this deeper point snuck in by accident rather than design.

I’ll hold off judgment until I see how the final episode will pull everything together or not. But so far, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier seems like an ambitious show that bit off more than it could chew and doesn’t quite pull off what it tries to do.

Some Thoughts on the 2021 Hugo Finalists

So here is my Hugo finalist reaction post at long last. I know it took a bit longer than usual to get the post up, but since I’m a Hugo finalist myself this year, I took some time off to celebrate, congratulate fellow finalists and update everything that needed updating.

So let’s take a look at the finalists for the 2021 Hugo Award. You can also read the reactions by Camestros Felapton, Doris V. Sutherland, Font Folly, Rob Bricken and Alasdair Stuart. And if you want to read/watch the finalists for yourself, the always excellent JJ has you covered and lists where to find the 2021 Hugo finalists online for free (and legally) at File 770.

And now, let’s delve right into the categories:

Best Novel

This is an excellent, if unsurprising ballot, because all six finalists are books that got a lot of buzz and attention last year. Rebecca Roanhorse is one of the most exciting new voices in our genre and Black Sun is great novel.

N.K. Jemisin has won four Hugos in five years. The City We Became is an expansion of her 2017 short story Hugo finalist “The City Born Great”, which I enjoyed a lot.

Piranesi is Susanna Clarke’s first novel after her 2005 Hugo winner Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell and got a lot of buzz well beyond the SFF community. I have to admit that I haven’t read Piranesi yet, even though I enjoyed Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell a lot back in the day. However, I’m no longer the same person I was in 2004/05 and my tastes have changed. Also, as Adri Joy and Joe Sherry point out in their analysis of the 2020 Nebula finalists at nerds of a feather, times have changed a lot in the past sixteen years and the Hugo (and Nebula) ballots look very different today, so what felt like a breath of fresh air back then may no longer feel as fresh today. Which dosn’t mean that I won’t enjoy Piranesi, though it explains why I haven’t been moved to read it yet.

Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, Network Effect by Martha Wells and The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowal are all sequels to previous Hugo finalists and – in the case of the Murderbot and the Lady Astronaut books – winners. Harrow the Ninth and Network Effect are also both highly enjoyable. I haven’t read The Relentless Moon yet.

I’m a bit surprised that Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia did not make the ballot, but then it was maybe a bit too much horror for the tastes of Hugo voters.

Diversity count: 6 women (which I’m sure will lead to the usual wailing and gnashing of teeth among the usual suspects), 2 writers of colour, 2 international writers*.

Best Novella

Again, the finalists in this category are not particularly surprising, because all of them got a lot of attention and buzz last year.

Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire is the latest installment in her popular Wayward Children series, which has racked up several Hugo nominations and one win over the past few years. I have to admit that I don’t love the Wayward Children novellas as much as many others obviously do, but they’re clearly popular.

Sarah Gailey is another great new writer who burst onto the scene in the past few years as well as a previous Hugo finalist and winner. The novella seems to be their natural form and Upright Women Wanted is a great story, which also was on my ballot.

P. Djèlí Clark is yet another excellent new writer who came to prominence in the past few years. And yes, I know I’m repeating myself here, but it’s the truth. Ring Shout is part of the current mini-trend of Lovecraftian retellings from the POV of people whose mere existence would have horrified Lovecraft. I liked Ring Shout a lot, though it did not make my ballot in the end.

The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo, Finna by Nino Cipri and Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi all got a lot of attention last year. Unfortunately, I haven’t read any of them, so I can’t say more about the stories. However, I look forward to checking them out.

Last year, it seemed as if the dominance of Tor.com in the novella category had been broken, but this year it’s back with a vengeance, since all six novella finalists were published by Tor.com. I predict wailing and gnashing of teeth among the usual suspects.

Diversity count: 2 women, 2 men, 2 non-binary, 3 writers of colour, at least 3 LGBTQA writers**

Best Novelette

Yes, I know I’m repeating myself here, but this is another excellent selection of finalists.

“Two Truths and a Lie” by Sarah Pinsker is a great story and was also on my ballot.

“Burn, or the Episodic Life of Sam Wells as a Super” by A.T. Greenblatt is a story I enjoyed a lot, though in the end it did not make my ballot.

Whenever I see Naomi Kritzer’s name in the TOC of a magazine, I always know that I’ll get a story that’s well worth reading. “Monster” is not exception here. It’s not a happy story, but a very good one. It was not only on my ballot, it was also the first entry on my personal list of potential Hugo nominees for the year 2020. Sadly, “Monster” was a bit overshadowed by another story that came out in the same issue of Clarkesworld, so I’m glad to see it get its due.

Which brings me to “Helicopter Story” by Isabel Fall. This story, known then as “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter”, caused a massive uproar, since some people felt it was transphobic and thought that it was an attempt to troll Clarkesworld, based on the fact that no one had heard of Isabel Fall before and that her bio was extremly scanty. Things turned ugly, when the Internet suddenly fell on Isabel Fall’s head, leading her to pull the story. It also turned out that Isabel Fall was trans herself, but not yet out, hence the scant bio. Camestros Felapton chronicles the whole saga here.

I actually read the “Helicopter Story” back when it first came out, a week or so before all hell broke loose. At the time, my reaction was, “Nah, I’m not sure what to make of this one. Feels a bit transphobic. Not going to link it in the weekly round-up at the Speculative Fiction Showcase.”

Considering that as many people defended the “Helicopter Story” and nominated it for a Hugo as condemned the story, it truly seems to be a Marmite story. I suspect part of the reason is that Isabel Fall attempted something very ambitious with this story and didn’t pull it off.

Aliette de Bodard is another author whose stories I normally read as soon as they pop up in the TOC of a magazine. Nonetheless, “The Inaccessibility of Heaven” passed me by, probably because it came out at a time when I was very busy. However, I look forward to trying it.

“The Pill” by Meg Elison is a story I haven’t read. It’s also a Nebula finalist this year, so it clearly struck a chord.

We also have a nice distribution of sources here with two stories from Clarkesworld, two from Uncanny, one from Tor.com and one from a collection.

Diversity count: 6 women (cue wailing and gnashing of teeth), 1 writer of colour, 1 international writer, at least 2 LGBTQA writers

Best Short Story

Another selection of fine stories.

“Metal Like Blood in the Dark” by T. Kingfisher was also on my Hugo ballot, while “Little Free Library” by Naomi Kritzer, “The Mermaid Astronaut” by Yoon Ha Lee and “Badass Moms in the Zombie Apocalypse” by Rae Carson made my longlist, but not my ballot in the end, because there are simply too many good short stories out there.

I have read neither “A Guide for Working Breeds” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad nor “Open House on Haunted Hill” by John Wiswell, though both are also Nebula finalists this year.

Again, we have a nice distribution of venues with two stories from Uncanny, one from Tor.com, one from Beneath Ceaseless Skies, one from Diabolical Plots and one from an anthology.

Diversity count: 4 women, 2 men, 2 writer of colour, 1 international writer, at least two LGBTQA writers

Best Series

Repeating what I said back in 2019 and 2020, I initially was in favour of the Best Series Hugo, but I don’t think it’s working as intended.

When the Best Series Hugo was proposed, the argument was that a lot of popular and long-running series are overlooked by the Hugos – or the Nebulas for that matter – because the individual novels don’t stand alone very well and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

However in practice, such series, no matter how popular, are rarely nominated. Particularly The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher is notable by its absence, even though the Best Series Hugo seems tailor-made for this series.

Instead, the Best Series ballot tends to consist of trilogies by authors Hugo voters like and where individual volumes have often made the ballot before as well as of works set in the same wold that form a series if you squint really hard. I guess most Hugo voters simply aren’t series readers.

That said, the actual Best Series ballot looks pretty good this year. The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells is a hugely popular series where prettty much every installment has either been a finalist or would have been, if Martha Wells hadn’t withdrawn two Murderbot novellas from consideration in 2019. It’s also a great series.

October Daye by Seanan McGuire is something of a fixture on the Best Series ballot by now, since this is already its third nomination in this relatively new category. This is also the series that comes closest to the kind of longrunning series the award was initially created for. Besides, it’s a great series.

The Lady Astronaut series by Mary Robinette Kowal and The Interdependency by John Scalzi are both very popular series by popular writers. Volumes from both series have been nominated before and Lady Astronaut has won both Best Novel and Best Novelette. I’m not the biggest fan of either series and prefer other series by the writers in question, but I’m not at all surprised to see these series on the ballot.

I enjoyed The Daevabad Trilogy by S.A. Chakraborty quite a bit and am happy to see it nominated. I’m afraid The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang doesn’t work for me, though again I’m not surprised to see it nominated, because a lot of people seem to like it and besides, R.F. Kuang won the Astounding Award last year.

Diversity count: 5 women, 1 man (but it’s the dreaded John Scalzi, so cue wailing and gnashing of teeth), 2 writers of colour, at least 1 LGBTQA writer

Best Related Work

So far I’ve been very positive about the 2021 Hugo ballot. But I’m afraid I can’t be as positive about Best Related Work.

As I’ve stated several times before, I have a string preference for well researched in-depth non-fiction books in this category. Non-fiction books is also what the category was originally designed to honour, before the definition was expanded to cover things like the online version of the venerable SF Encyclopedia.

However, edge case finalists have appeared in the Best Related Work category for as long as I’ve been voting for the Hugos. And since I enjoy reading genre-related non-fiction, these edge case finalists have annoyed me for almost as long. A lot of those edge case finalists were perfectly fine in themselves, but they’re not what I’m looking for on the Best Related Work ballot anymore than I want a sausage, no matter how good, when I’m craving ice cream.

But whereas we only had one or two edge case finalists per year, when I started voting, by now they have become ever more numerous and edgier, until they’re drowning out what the category was designed for, namely non-fiction books. And I for one find this a pity, not just because I like genre-related non-fiction, but also because non-fiction books often take years to research, don’t pay very well or at all (academic publishing is terrible with regard to paying writers) and are written out of a desire to inform people about the genre or some aspect thereof. Non-fiction writers deserve to be honoured and not snubbed in favour of something that might be a perfectly wonderful projct, but is in no way even remotely non-fiction.

After the lengthy introductory, let’s take a look at the finalists, starting with the one which comes closest to what this category was initially designed for, namely A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler by Lynell George. It’s not only the sole actual non-fiction book on the ballot, but also a vey good one, which means that I will probably rank it highly.

Beowulf: A New Translation by Maria Dahvana Headley got a lot of positive attention last year and is certainly a deserving finalist. However, it is also an edge case, especially since translated works of fiction generally are nominated in the respective fiction categories. See the nominations and wins for Liu Cixin, Hao Jingfang and Thomas Olde Heuvelt and their translators Ken Liu and Lia Belt respectively. However, there were only eight years between the first publication of The Three-Body Problem as a serial in a Chinese science fiction magazine in 2006 and the publication of the English translation, which would go on to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2015.  The Beowulf manuscript, however, is roughly a thousand years old and the story is probably even older. Not to mention that there are lots of translations and adaptations of Beowulf floating around. So in the absence of a Hugo Award for Best Translation, Best Related Work is the most suitable category.

Another edge case is The Last Bronycon: A Fandom Autopsy, a YouTube documentary by Jenny Nicholson. Now I initially was opposed to documentaries ending up in Best Related Work, since Dramatic Presentation is a better fit and has actually been won by documentary works such as the TV coverage of the first Moon landing before. However, documentaries would likely never even make the ballot in Dramatic Presentation and if they did, they would get squashed by popular Hollywood movies and TV shows. Besides, documentaries and non-fiction use different mediums for the same purpose, to inform or educate about a specific subject. So I’m okay with documentaries nominated in Best Related Work by now.  I can’t say anything about The Last Bronycon specifically, because I haven’t watched it yet.

Blog posts and essays have been popping up in Best Related Work for several years now. One of them – “We have always fought” by Kameron Hurley – even won in 2014. There is no minimum length requirement, after all. That said, I rarely find individual essays or blog posts equivalent to full length non-fiction books or documentaries.

This year, Natalie Luhrs’ blog post “George R.R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into the Sun, Or: The 2020 Hugo Awards Ceremony (Rageblog Edition)” has been nominated in the Best Related Work category. It’s probably the most controversial finalist this year, not so much because it’s only 1600 words long, but because it contains the F-word and metaphorically threatens grieveous bodily harm to a pillar of the SFF community. There are also concerns whether a Hugo finalist whose title insults a Worldcon member might be a Code of Conduct violation. This is an interestingly precedent, largely because Natalie’s sweary post is not the first potentially offensive Hugo finalist. A lot of the finalists during the puppy years, including such gems as “Safe Space as a Rape Room”, Wisdom from the Internet or “If You Were an Award, My Love…”, were a lot more offensive than Natalie Luhrs swearing at  George R.R. Martin. “If You Were an Award, My Love” was also a direct attack against Hugo finalist and Worldcon member Rachel Swirsky.

ETA: My most excellent fellow Best Fan Writer finalist weighs in on Natalie Luhrs’ post and whether it violates the Code of Conduct. Like me, Paul is in the middle with regard to this issue with friends on both sides.

ETA 2: Camestros Felapton also weighs in on Natalie Luhrs’ post and whether it violates the Code of Conduct.

Natalie’s post was written in response to the neverending Hugo ceremony from hell of 2020, where toastmaster George R.R. Martin lost himself in endless reminiscences of “the good old days” and lost the audience in the process. A lot of us were angry about the disastrous Hugo ceremony and blogged about it. You can read my reaction, which is less sweary than Natalie’s but no less annoyed about the whole thing, here.

Most of the criticism seems to focus on the fact that the blog post might be offensive to George R.R. Martin. However, George R.R. Martin is a grown man, one of the most famous authors on the planet, has more money than God and should be able to take some criticism from a blogger, even if that criticism is sweary. And George R.R. Martin has certainly earned that criticism, though personally I would have phrased it (and did phrase it) differently. Besides, it’s not as if Natalie Luhrs is really going to build a rocket in her garden and shoot Martin and Robert Silverberg into the sun. She was just venting, like many of us.

That said, I’m not a big fan of inside baseball Hugo finalists, whether it’s Laura Mixon’s report about the internet troll known as RequiresHate (though I did end up voting for Laura Mixon), Jeannette Ng’s Campbell Award acceptance speech, Chris Garcia’s Best Fanzine acceptance speech or Natalie Luhrs’ angry rant. The Hugos are about the history of our genre, what we consider important and worth preserving. In cases like this, I always wonder whether anybody will even care about this controversy in ten, twenty, thirty or fifty years. Or will these controversies be as opaque to future fans as fanzine controversies of the 1940s are to us? Natalie Luhrs is a fine blogger and I hope we’ll see her on the Best Fan Writer ballot again someday. But maybe not for a single, angry blog post.

Which brings us to the two finalists that stretch the definition of Best Related Work to the breaking point, namely the virtual conventions FIYAHCON and CoNZealand Fringe. Now both virtual cons were projects created out of enthusiasm and love for the genre and brought many people a lot of joy and information. FIYAHCON was a great con. CoNZealand Fringe incurred some justified criticism due to appropriating CoNZealand’s name without asking permission and taking place on the same weekend, though there was no overlap with official CoNZealand programming, since CoNZealand Fringe ran on European time. But even though the organisers made mistakes regarding the name and timing, the project (which I watched come together behind the scenes) was born out of enthusiasm and a desire to cover subjects that the official CoNZealand programming did not cover. However, this category is still called Best Related Work, not Best Convention.

Some people have said that the nominations for Natalie Luhrs’ blog post and CoNZealand Fringe are intended to send a message to Worldcon that some members are dissatisfied with the convention and the way it does things. However, the Hugo ballot is intended to celebrate excellence in the field, not to send a message, no matter how justified.

I’m not the only one who is frustrated with Best Related Work becoming increasingly diluted until its original purpose is lost. Doris V. Sutherland expresses similar thoughts in her post about the 2021 Hugo finalists and indeed, a lot of people are unhappy with Best Related Work being stretched way past its breaking point. There is also an increasingly heated comment thread at File 770.

I expect that there will be one or more proposals to reform the category filed at the DisCon III business meeting. If someone comes up with a good one, I will certainly co-sign. Personally, I think the best solution would be to split Best Related Work in Best Non-Fiction for non-fiction books, documentaries and the like and Best Miscellany or Best Fannish Thing for things like virtual conventions, the Mexicanx Initiative, AO3, acceptance speeches, etc…

Diversity count: 12 women, 2 men, 1 unknown, six finalists of colour, eight international finalists, at least 2 LGBTQA finalists

After all that blather, let’s get on to…

Best Graphic Story

This category has felt a bit stale in recent years with the same popular series being nominated over and over again.

However, the 2021 Best Graphic Story ballot looks a lot more diverse than in recent years, with only two repeat nominees, Volume 5 of the perennial Hugo finalist Monstress by Marjorie M. Liu and Sana Takeda and Volume 2 of DIE by Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans, which also was a finalist last year.

The other four finalists are new to the ballot. Ghost-Spider vol. 1: Dog Days Are Over by Seanan McGuire,  Takeshi Miyazawa and Rosi Kämpe is a new Marvel series by a popular writer featuring a popular character, namely Gwen Stacy, formerly known as Spider Gwen. Invisible Kingdom, Vol. 2: Edge of Everything by G. Willow Wilson and Christian Ward is an interesting looking space opera comic. Once & Future Vol. 1: The King Is Undead by Kieron Gillen and Dan Mora is delightfully strange sounding comic featuring an elderly monster hunter, her grandson and undead Arthurian heroes and villains.  The graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, finally,  got a lot of positive reviews also beyond the usual comics sphere.

In previous years, the Best Graphic Story category was often dominated by Image Comics with the occasional webcomic mixed in. This year, however, we have a nice mix of publishers. Image has two nominations, Marvel, Dark Horse and BOOM Studios have one each, as has Harry M. Abrams.

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

Best Dramatic Presentation Long

2020 was a strange year for cinema, because a lot of the movies we might have expected to see on the Hugo ballot such as Dune, Black Widow, The Eternals, etc… never came out due to the pandemic. This might give smaller indie movies a chance to hit the ballot or it might mean a ballot composed almost entirely of whole seasons of TV shows.

In practice, option 1 is closer to what happened, though sadly none of the fine movies that got an eligibility extension at CoNZealand made the ballot. Now Bacurau was probably too obscure, but I had hoped that The Vast of Night or Color Out of Space might make the ballot.

So let’s take a look at what did make the ballot: The Old Guard is a great update on the old Highlander concept of immortals living among us, featuring a badarse Charlize Theron and the sweetest gay couple you’ve ever seen (they met during the Crusades and kept killing each other, until they found a better use for their time). Honestly, what’s not to love?

I already mentioned my thoughts on Birds of Prey and the very long title and Tenet in the Nebula finalist comments thread. Basically, I had forgotten the existence of Birds of Prey and the trailer didn’t appeal to me. As for Tenet, I have disliked Christopher Nolan’s since Memento. Though a German streaming service as Tenet, so I have no excuse not to try it. Though of the two DC superhero movies to come out this year, I would have preferred Wonder Woman ’84 to Birds of Prey. For movies which made it into the theatres before the pandemic hit, I would have preferred The Invisible Man, which was a great update on a classic story, to Birds of Prey.

I haven’t seen Palm Springs, but it got a lot of positive reactions and I’m looking forward to watching it. I’m not the target audience for Pixar movies, but they’re popular with the Hugo electorate and Soul actually looks more interesting than most. Besides, it’s on Disney Plus, so I should be able to watch it.

The one finalist in this category that really surprised me is Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. In fact, my initial reaction was, “Sure, the Eurovision Song Contest can certainly be genre-adjacent at times, but how can it be nominated, since it was cancelled in 2020?” However, this nomination is not for the actual Eurovision Song Contest, but for a comedy about the contest. Apparently, it has mild fantasy elements. No idea what to make of this one, since I hadn’t even heard of its existence before it was nominated.

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

Best Dramatic Presentation Short

TV was much less affected by the pandemic than movies and so the Best Dramatic Presentation Short ballot is very strong this year – with one exception.

Everybody’s favourite series about bountyhunting and raising alien Jedi babies, The Mandalorian, nabbed two nominations this year for the episode and “The Rescue”. I would have preferred “The Believer” to “The Rescue”, but I’m still very happy to see Mando and Baby Grogu nominated.

Doctor Who is almost guaranteed a slot on the Hugo ballot, whenever it’s on. And unlike some of the weak episodes nominated during the later Steve Moffat era, “Fugitive of the Judoon” is actually very good.

The Expanse is another perennial Hugo favourite. I’m woefully behind on the show and so I haven’t seen the nominated episode “Gaugamela” yet, but I’m sure it’s good.

The nomination for the two-part series finale of the new She-Ra and the Princesses of Power was somewhat unexpected, but then the series is hugely popular and also apparently very good. I haven’t watched it yet – the animation style does not appeal to me – but I’m a She-Ra fan of old and always happy to see a childhood favourite honoured. Besides, She-Ra is the closest to sword and sorcery and traditional planetary romance we’ve seen on the Hugo ballot for a long time, so go She-Ra with the power of Greyskull.

And now we get to the turd in the punchbowl, namely the inevitable episode of The Good Place. Though at least the series ended, so this is the last year we’ll have to deal with it. Now I think The Good Place is a terrible show. I find it literally unwatchable, but apparently lots of others feel differently. But even if a lot of people like The Good Place, can we maybe vote for something else this year? The Good Place has won three Hugos in a row and doesn’t need another, whereas The Mandalorian and She-Ra have never won (and this is the last chance for She-Ra, which has finished as well) and The Expanse and Doctor Who haven’t won in a while now.

I’m a bit surprised by the absence of Lovecraft Country, Star Trek Discovery and Star Trek Picard. Lovecraft Country got a lot of positive buzz last year. It didn’t end as strongly as it started, but it had some outstanding episodes along the way, one of which was on my ballot. The third season of Star Trek Discovery was its best to date and though Star Trek Picard‘s resolution was a bit weak, it had some excellent episodes along the way.

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

Best Editor Short

This is one of the categories where we usually get a lot of repeat finalists, simply because there are only so many editors working in the field. That said, Mur Lafferty and S.B. Divya are new to the ballot this year as editors of Escape Pod. Neil Clarke, Ellen Datlow, C.C. Finlay, Jonathan Strahan and Sheila Williams are all people we’ve seen in this category before. They’re all most worthy finalists.

Diversity count: 4 women, 3 men, 1 editor of colour, 1 international editor.

Best Editor Long

This is another category where we have comparatively little churn, because there are only so many editors. That said, a lot of this year’s finalists are younger editors who haven’t been on the ballot twenty times before.

Nivia Evans of Orbit is the only new name on the ballot and officially a Publishers Weekly superstar. Sarah Guan and Brit Hvide are on the ballot for the second time, Diana M. Pho for the third. Sheila E. Gilbert and Navah Wolfe have both been nominated a few times before and Navah Wolfe has also won most deservedly for two years in a row. Once again, they’re all very worthy finalists.

Diversity count: 6 women (duh – book editors are overwhelmingly female), 3 editors of colour (which is great, because publishing is still a very white industry)

Best Pro Artist

Maurizio Manzieri, who does the beautiful covers for Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya Universe novellas among others, is the only brand-new name in this category, though he is an established artist. Tommy Arnold, Rovina Cai and Alyssa Winans were finalists last year, while John Picacio and Galen Dara are relative Hugo veterans. Once again, they’re all excellent.

Diversity count: 3 women, 3 men, 3 artists of colour, 2 international artists

Best Semiprozine

This is probably the category with the most repeat finalists, simply because the pool of potential finalists is limited and the big zines with large reader-/listenerships are privileged over smaller venues.

Uncanny, Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Strange Horizons are three excellent magazines which have been around for a long time now and keep doing good work. FIYAH is not only a great magazine, their editorial staff are also some of the nicest folks in the genre, so I’m always happy to see them nominated. The two fiction podcasts Escape Pod and PodCastle round out the ballot and also show the rise of fiction podcasts. PodCastle is the only new finalist on the ballot. All six are great magazines/podcasts.

No diversity count, way too many people (a whopping 87 in the case of Strange Horizons) are needed to make magazines.

Best Fanzine

The good news is that we have six excellent finalists in this category. nerds of a feather has been offering insightful SFF reviews, interviews and commentary for many years now and has been nominated in this category several times before. Lady Business always offers great genre commentary, recommendations and reviews from a feminist perspective. With Journey Planet, every issue brings something new and it’s always fascinating. Plus Journey Planet is holding up the flag for traditional fanzines in a category that is increasingly dominated by blogs. The Full Lid is Alasdair Stuart’s and Marguerite Kenner’s weekly SFF e-mail newsletter. It’s always interesting and I’m always happy to find a new issue in my inbox. Quick Sip Reviews is one of the few places in the internet where you can find short story reviews (Locus and nerds of a feather also review short stories on occasion. There’s also Tangent Online). Finally, I’m really happy to see my friends Olav Rokne and Amanda Wakaruk of the Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog on the Hugo ballot, because they’ve been doing great work for years and deserve recognition.

That said, I’m a bit disappointed that my friends and colleagues of Galactic Journey did not make the ballot this year. However, there can be only six and Galactic Journey will be represented in my voter packet via some of the articles I wrote for them.

So did my Fanzine/Fancast Spotlight initiative make a difference? I’m not sure. The number of nominations for Best Fanzine is still low, the second lowest behind Fan Artist. That said, I featured four of the six finalist (plus two Journey Planet contributors for their individual zines). I also suspect that if the Fanzine/Fancast Spotlight had an impact, it will become more apparent on the longlist than on the actual ballot, which is also what happened with the Retro Hugo project last year.

No diversity count, too many people are involved in making fanzines.

Best Fancast

The fancast category tends to be a bit stale with the same podcasts getting nominated over and over again. This is a pity, because there is an embarrassment of great genre podcasts out there.

This year, however, we have a nice mix of repeat finalists and newcomers. Be the Serpent, The Coode Street Podcast and my friend of The Skiffy and Fanty Show have all appeared in this category before and I’m happy to see them on the ballot again, because they do great work. Worldbuilding for Masochists is new to me (and to the ballot). I look forward to checking it out. Finally, we have Claire Rousseau and the first time finalist Kalanadi representing the Booktube community.

I featured only one of the six finalists as a Fancast Spotlight and sent the questions out to another who didn’t get around to replying yet. However, I’m working on interviewing the others. This is also as good a place as any to announce that I will continue to do Fanzine/Fancast Spotlights, because there are a lot of great fanzines, blogs and fancasts out there I didn’t get around to featuring in the first round.

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

Best Fan Writer

This is my category and once again, I’m in most excellent company. Paul Weimer is a good friend, insightful reviewer, great photographer and one of the nicest folks in the SFF community. I got to know Alasdair Stuart when we were ballot buddies last year and am always looking forward to finding The Full Lid in my inbox. Charles Payseur has been doing great work for years reviewing short fiction. Elsa Sjunneson always offers great insights about the intersections between disability and SFF such as the portrayal of disabled characters. Finally, Jason Sanford’s Genre Grapevine column is a must-read. Jason was also the one who broke the story that Baen’s Bar, the forum of SFF publisher Baen, was being used by a handful of members to advocate political violence. He got a lot of crap up to and including death threats as a result, so I’m really happy to see him on the ballot. Besides, this is Jason’s first Hugo nomination, though he has been a Nebula finalists a few times.

I did see some grumblings online that the wrong people had been nominated and that it’s just the usual suspects. Of course, there are always complaints about the fan writer category and last year, 41 Hugo voters hated all of us so much that they no awarded the entire category. But then, no one has to like what I or my excellent fellow finalists write and they’re free to criticise our work.

However, I don’t think we’re “the usual suspects”. Paul, Elsa and I are on our second nomination, Charles and Alasdair on their third. For Jason Sanford, it’s his first nomination. None of us has ever won in this category, though Elsa won for her work with Uncanny. Dave Langford we’re not and indeed, the fan writer category has not had a single repeat winner since Dave Langford’s last win in 2007. And this is a good thing, because it means that we have a vibrant fan writing scene out there.

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

It is notable that Fan Writer is the only category, which is male dominated, which should appease the “Wah, where are the poor widdle menz?” brigade. On the other hand, they’re probably not happy with Paul, Charles, Alasdair and Jason either.

Best Fan Artist

Once again, we have a great selection of very different artists here.

Iain J. Clark has created some great artwork for the Dublin Worldcon and the 2024 Glasgow Worldcon bid. Check out “Shipbuilding over the Clyde”, which he did for the Glasgow in 2024 bid. Sara Felix creates beautiful jewellery, sculptures and other artworks. She has also designed several Hugo bases, but never won one. Laya Rose and Grace P. Fong both create beautiful fantasy art. Finnish artist Maya Hahto is best known for the humorous illustrations and mascots she created for Worldcon 75 and DisCon III. Cyan Daly is the only new name in this category. Her name was also new to me, but her work was not, because I had admired it on the cover of FIYAH Magazine.

Diversity count: 5 women, 1 man, 2 artists of colour, 4 international artists.

Best Video Game

This is a special one-off Hugo given out by DisCon III. I’m not a gamer, so I can’t really say much about the finalists except that I’ve heard about all of them and that I’ve heard only good things (except for some aggrieved fanboys complaining about The Last of Us, Part II). The finalists also seem to be a nice mix of big budget games by big studios and small indie games.

For those who like me are not gamers and have problems properly evaluating this category, DisCon III has promised to put up some demo and gameplay videos on their YouTube channel.

Lodestar Award for Best YA Book

This is the first of the two not-a-Hugos, which are awarded and administered alongside the Hugos according to the same rules.

I’m not a big YA reader, so I have read only one of the finalists, A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher, which was delightful.

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik got a lot of buzz, though I haven’t read it yet, because her work is hit and miss for me and besides, I don’t particularly like stories about magic schools. Legendborn by Tracy Deonn also seems to start out as a novel about magic at an exclusive school, but then it takes a turn into Arthurian territory. It also sounds really interesting.

Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger and Raybearer by Jordan Ifueko are also finalists for the Andre Norton Award and so I discussed them in my overview of the 2020 Nebula finalists.

Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas is completely new to me, though it looks interesting.

Diversity count: 5 women, 1 non-binary, 4 writers of colour, at least 1 LGBTQA writer

Astounding Award for Best New Writer

The renamed Campbell Award continues to offer up excellent finalists. Jenn Lyons and Emily Tesh are the only repeat finalists and I enjoyed their work very much last year. The debut novels of Micaiah Johnson, Simon Jimenez and A.K. Larkwood got excellent reviews last year and are also really great books.  Lindsay Ellis is a popular YouTuber and film critic with a huge following. She also was a Hugo finalist two years ago for her documentary about The Hobbit films and self-published a novel with a co-author in 2013, which did not meet the SFWA requirements and therefore doesn’t count towards the Astounding Award. I haven’t read her debut novel Axiom’s End, but I’m looking forward to trying it.

Diversity count: 5 women, 1 man, 2 writers of colour, 2 international writers

And that’s it. All in all, the 2021 Hugo ballot looks excellent and not just, because I’m on it. There are a few finalists I don’t particularly care for, but that’s always the case. Best Related Work is the only category I’m not really happy with.

Unlike previous year, I don’t see any particularly strong themes on this year’s ballot. We have several robot stories and two very different takes on the Arthurian legend, but otherwise the ballot is highly varied, covering the various flavours of science fiction, fantasy and even horror.

I’ll keep the comments open for now, but if things get rude or people start fighting each other, I reserve the right to close them.

 

*I identify “international” as a writer/creator living outside the US. If we include writers who are first or second generation immigrants, there would be several more.

**The number of LGBTQA people on the ballot might be incorrect, because I don’t know everybody’s orientation. Not to mention that not everybody is out.

 

Cora Goes to Flights of Foundry

I promise you that the detailed analysis of the 2021 Hugo finalists is coming, but for now I want to focus on a completely different convention.

Because this weekend, April 17 and 18, 2021, I will be at Flights of Foundry, a virtual SFF convention for people all around the world to enjoy. Registration is free, though donations are encouraged.

You can find me on the following panels:

Sunday, April 18 • 17:00 – 17:50 CET: Making Your Reader Hungry: Food in SFF

For a long time, speculative fiction rarely engaged with food. Over on the science fiction side of the fence, protagonists lived on food pills or ordered “Tea, Earl Grey, hot” from the replicator, while fantasy characters subsisted on the ubiquitous stew and quaffed tankards of ale. However, this has changed in recent times and now detailed food descriptions are a lot more common in SFF. Nor are we just seeing only stereotypical western and American food anymore, but also dishes from non-western cuisines and food traditions. This panel will discuss how food is portrayed in science fiction and fantasy and how this parallels real world developments, whether it’s meal replacement products like the unfortunately named Soylent or trends like pandemic baking.

Moderator: Cora Buhlert
Panelists: Nibedita Sen, Shweta Adhyam, Georgina Kamsika

Sunday, April 18 • 21:00 – 21:50: Romance in SFF

Romance has been a part of speculative fiction since its earliest days, even though SFF and romance are often viewed as polar opposites. Nowadays, SFF romance is a broad and varied field, encompassing anything from fantasy and paranormal romance via time travel romance to science fiction and post-apocalyptic romance. But even though speculative romance is popular and very successful, it is often ignored by the SFF community. This panel will give you an overview of the spectrum of SFF romance and discuss why speculative romance still doesn’t get the respect it deserves. And of course, we’ll also offer you reading recommendations.

Moderator: Cora Buhlert
Panelists: Jeffe Kennedy, Grace Draven, Cassie Hart, Elle Ire

Sunday, April 18 • 22:00 – 22:50 CET: The Unique Challenges of Speculative Translation

Translation is always challenging, but translating the weird, fantastic, and out of the world elements of speculative fiction presents its own special test of skill. This panel will discuss the trade-offs, linguistic tricks, and techniques these translators have utilized when working with speculative material.

Moderator: Fabio Fernandes
Panelists: Janna Ruth, Julia Meitov Hersey, Marina Berlin, Cora Buhlert

So what are you waiting for? Register and join us at Flights of Foundry.

Cora is a Hugo Finalist Again!

As you probably know, the finalists for the 2021 Hugo Awards have just been announced. You can watch the announcement video on the DisCon III YouTube channel. And I promise you that the detailed analysis of the finalists, which I know you’re all waiting for, is coming as soon as I can get it done.

But for now, I want to focus on just one category, namely the 2021 Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer. Cause if you take a look at that category, you will find – among most excellent company – my name.

Yes, I’m a Hugo finalist for Best Fan Writer again!

I’ve known about this for about three weeks now (for those who don’t know, the Hugo coordinators contact you beforehand to ask if you want to accept the nomination). Indeed, I got the mail from DisCon III about three hours after I posted my Open Letter to the 2021 Hugo Finalists on this blog.

It’s a great honour to be a Hugo finalist for the second time and I want to thank everybody who nominated me. I’m also in the excellent company of Paul Weimer, Alasdair Stuart, Jason Sanford, Charles Payseur and Elsa Sjunneson, all of whom are great fan writers.

Unfortunately, DisCon III recently moved their dates to the fourth advent weekend, which is way too close to the holidays for me to attend, even if the German and US government will let me travel. So sadly, I will lose out on my chance to attend the Hugo ceremony in person as well as the reception beforehand and the Hugo Losers’ Party afterwards again. That said, I got the full Hugo finalist experience in Dublin in 2019 as the designated accepter for Galactic Journey. But I’m still sad I can’t go, though on the plus side I don’t have to buy a new evening gown.

I also have a request. Like all Hugo finalists, I will be asked to put together a selection of writings for the Hugo voters packet. And that’s why I need your help. Which 2020 articles, essays or reviews of mine should go into the Hugo Voters packet? There is a full list here, so let me know in the comments which ones you think should go into the packet. You can still download my 2020 Hugo Voter Packet for free here BTW.

How can you vote for the 2021 Hugos? I guess pretty much everybody here knows how it works, but for those who don’t, it’s quite simple. If you buy a supporting membership for DisCon III, the 2021 Worldcon, you can vote for the Hugo Awards as well as vote to select the location of the 2023 Worldcon. You also receive all of the convention publications and get access to the Hugo Voters’ packet, which contains most of the nominated works either in part or as a whole. If you buy a virtual membership, you can also attend the virtual panels and other events online. If you want to attend in person, you’ll need an attending membership.

As I said above, the detailed analysis of the 2021 Hugo ballot is coming soon. But for now, I just want to say thank you for nominating me.

ETA: Many thanks to Malka Older for pronouncing my name (and those of the other finalists) correctly. Her unicorn hat as well as Sheree Renée Thomas’ cyberpunk headgear were also a delight.

“The Whole World Is Watching” The Falcon and the Winter Soldier

First all, I have a new article up at Galactic Journey today. This time around, I review the classic East German fairy tale movie King Thrushbeard, which stars a very young Manfred Kurg.

It’s time for my episode by episode reviews of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. If you want my thoughts on previous episodes of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, go here. Also, may I remind you that Disney is still not paying Alan Dean Foster and others.

ETA: Camestros Felapton briefly weighs in on the episode as well.

Warning: Spoilers behind the cut!

The episode starts with a flashback to Wakanda six years ago. The Dora Milaje Ayo tests the newly deprogrammed Bucky by reading out the Russian words which activat the Winter Soldier programming. “Don’t worry, I won’t allow you to hurt anybody”, Ayo assures Bucky.

Then she begins to read. The deprogramming took hold, but we see only too clearly how those words and the memories associated with them affect Bucky. Some great acting by Sebastian Stan here.

Fast forward six years and Ayo is confronting Bucky in the cobblestone streets of what is supposed to be Riga, capital of Latvia, but is really Prague. There’s a great aerial shot of Ayo and Bucky standing on differently coloured cobblestones BTW.

Ayo wants Zemo to avenge the death of King T’Chaka on her watch. Bucky couldn’t care less about what becomes of Zemo, but unfortunately they still need him. So he makes a deal with Ayo. He will use Zemo and when he and Sam no longer need him, Ayo can have him. Ayo is not happy about this, but she grudgingly accepts, though she only gives Bucky a few hours.

With Ayo appeased for now, Bucky returns to the apartment that Zemo just happens to have in Riga, where Sam has more bad news for him. Karli Morgenthau and the Flag-Smashers have bombed a depot of the Global Repatriation Council (which we saw at the end of the last episode), killing three and wounding eleven. Even though Karli has now officially upgraded herself from revolutionary to terrorist, Sam still thinks that Karli can be reasoned with. Zemo, meanwhile, is convinced that Karli is a lost cause. “She’s a supremacist”, he says and continues to point out that the serum only enhances who a person already is and that power always corrupts, whether it’s the Nazis, supersoldiers, Ultron or the Avengers.

“They’re our friends,” Sam objects. “The Avengers, not the Nazis”, Bucky feels compelled to add, as if there was any doubt. It’s one of the few genuinely funny lines in an episode that’s sadly low on the banter that made episode 2 so much fun.

Meanwhile, the other Flag-Smashers are also shocked that Karli has graduated from Robin Hood type thief to killer. But Karli feels no remorse, making Zemo’s point for him. She also plans to give the supersoldier serum to more of her followers. So Karli and one of her followers get the remaining vials of serum from their hiding on a cemetery. However, first they have another appointment to keep, the memorial for Donya Madani, the woman who died of tuberculosis in the previous episode.

In general, this episode does a better job in persuading us that the actual filming location (Prague) is the place it’s supposed to be (Riga), if only because most of the action takes place on cobblestoned street and in and around somewhat decaying Victorian and Art Noveau buildings, which are appropriate to both Prague and Riga. Zemo’s Moorish revival apartment certainly looks cool, though it’s not a style I associate with Latvia at all (though you do find it in Russia on occasion and Latvia was part of the Russian Empire until 1918) nor is it commonly used for apartment buildings in Europe, but mainly for public buildings.  That said, it’s not that unlikely that there might be a Moorish revival apartment building somewhere in Riga. Also, the signage on shops, restaurants, cafés, etc… in the background looks Latvian rather than Czech. It’s probably very bad Latvian – not that I can tell, because I only ever knew three words of Latvian and I forgot two of them – but at least they’re trying.

However, the cemetery where Karli and her henchman Nico have hidden the remaining vials of the supersoldier serum is an exception. It is clearly a genuine European cemetery with 19th and early 20th century headstones. However, some of the headstones are clearly in view, including the one underneath which Karli and her friend have hidden the serum, and the names on the headstones are obviously Czech rather than Latvian. Both languages look quite different, because Latvian is a Baltic rather than a Slavic language. Of course, there is a large Russian minority in Latvia, but any Russian headstones would have Kyrillic rather than Latin inscriptions.

Karli’s friend Nico even references the occupant of the grave, a man called Lukasz. That’s not a Latvian name and the spelling is Polish rather than Czech. Nico declares that Lukasz was his grandfather who fought the Nazis. Now the three Baltic states had the misfortune of being occupied in rapid succession by the Soviet Union, then the Nazis and then the Soviet Union again and remained part of the Soviet Union until it fell apart in 1991. In general, the Soviets were disliked even more than the Nazis in the Baltic states (except by the large Jewish population of the Baltic states, most of whom did not survive) and towards the end of the Soviet Union, the Latvians were quite open about that. Of course, it is possible that the Nico’s grandfather friend was a Pole who somehow ended up in Latvia and fought the Nazis, maybe as a partisan or with the Red Army. But I still wonder why they didn’t just set the episode in Prague, since that’s where they’re filming it anyway.

There’s also a moment where Zemo comments about a Victorian building that now houses refugees that it’s a pity what has become of the place and that he remembers it of old, from his childhood, when it was glamourous and beautiful and hosted parties.  Now Daniel Brühl, who plays Zemo, is 42 years old, which means he was a kid in the 1980s. And in the 1980s, Riga and all of Latvia were part of the Soviet Union (which did exist in the MCU, as the existence of Black Widow, Dotty from Agent Carter and Mickey Rourke’s character from Iron Man 2 show). And Soviet era Riga, while still a beautiful city, was not really a place for glamourous parties. The newly independent post-Soviet Latvia of the 1990s was initially poor, but has since joined the European Union and is one of the wealthier states in Eastern Europe. So it’s possible that the glamorous parties happened pre-Blip, but that’s not what Zemo says. Also, why did the showrunners pick a country with such a complicated history as Latvia, when they obviously didn’t research it?

Meanwhile, Sam, Bucky and Zemo try to track Karli via the late Donya Madani.  Since Donya Madani was clearly important to Karli and the Flag-Smashers, a sort of mother figure, Sam correctly assumes that they will show up at her funeral. After all, so Sam explains, the entire community showed up at the funeral of his aunt. The importance of funerals is a cultural phenomenon that Sam clearly understands, while Bucky doesn’t. At any rate, Sam thinks that once they find out where Donya’s funeral takes place, they also find Karli and the rest of her band.

So Sam, Bucky and Zemo set off for the refugee camp where Donya died. The refugees, not that they view themselves as such, are largely hostile and refuse to talk, because they don’t trust outsiders and with good reason, too. So Bucky and Sam get nothing out of the people. Zemo has more luck, because he bribes a little girl with some Turkish Delight in what is obviously a Narnia reference. He also tells the little girl that Sam and Bucky are “very bad men” and that the location of Donya’s funeral should remain a secret between Zemo and the girl. Once again, Daniel Brühl is absolutely brilliant and turns the one-note villain from the comics into a complex and fascinating character. IMO Zemo is one of the best MCU villains, en par with Loki or Killmonger (or Agatha, of course, since it was her all along).

Before Sam, Bucky and Zemo can head to Donya’s funeral and confront Karli, they get unwelcome company in the form of John Walker a.k.a. the faux Captain America and his pal Battlestar a.k.a. Lemar Hoskins, who have followed Bucky and Sam, hoping to apprehend Karli and the Flag-Smashers. John Walker once again proves that we were absolutely right to dislike him at first sight. He yells a lot and wants to send Zemo back to prison,, until Sam and Bucky point out that without Zemo, they can’t locate Karli.

As a compromise, they all go together. But Sam insists on confronting Karli alone. Because of his work counselling veterans, he believes he can get through to her. John Walker and Lemar aren’t happy about this, but they have no choice but to agree.

I really liked that they brought up Sam’s work as a counsellor for veterans with PTSD again, since that was how Steve (and we) first met Sam. Okay, theoretically they first met while jogging, but they first talked after one of Sam’s group therapy sessions. Also, as AV-Club reviewer Sulagna Misra points out, Sam’s experience as a counsellor puts him in contrast with both Bucky and John Walker, since both Bucky and – as we learn this episode, when he reveals that he was awarded his three Medals of Honour for a deeply traumatic mission – John have PTSD, only that Bucky was sent to court-mandated therapy, while John was handed Captain America’s shield and let loose with – as we will see this episode – terrible results. We also realise that Sam’s true superpower are not his wings, though they’re pretty cool, but his empathy.

So Sam goes in alone and watches as Karli and her friends stand around Donya Madani’s open coffin, while Karli holds a speech. We learn a bit more about the Flag-Smashers and their motives in this scene. Basically, when half of humanity was zapped by Thanos, immigrants were suddenly welcome with open arms into countries that would normally do everything in their power to keep them out. These immigrants were given the now vacant homes and jobs and generally had a better life, until the Avengers undid the Blip and everybody came back and the immigrants were suddenly unwelcome and unwanted and thrown out of the homes they’d made for themselves once the original owners returned. This is actually a pretty good explanation for why the Flag-Smashers are so angry, though we would have needed that two or three episodes ago.

We also learn just what the connection between Donya Madani and Karli and the rest of the Flag-Smashers was. Basically, Donya took in children and teenagers orphaned by the Blip (Karli would have been in her teens when the Blip happened) and took care of them, which is why she was so beloved.

Donya Madani, who due to her hamsa amulet is implied to be from the Middle East, likely was one of those immigrants who were first welcomed with open arms after the Blip and then discarded. However, Karli’s comics counterpart is Swiss and from a rich family. Karli’s nationality is unclear. Actress Erin Kellyman is British and has a notable Staffordshire accent, while Karli is most likely East European. That said, Karli is a white European woman, i.e. not someone who is affected by draconian immigration laws. Whether she’s Swiss or East European, most likely she hails from the European economic zone and therefore covered by the free movement of people regulations. Most of the other Flag-Smashers seem to be white Europeans as well, one is Asian and onr is black. In short, Karli is privileged and can go almost anywhere she likes, ditto for most of the other Flag-Smashers. So why exactly did she become a freedom fight/terrorist? Because of solidarity with Donya? Some more explanation would be helpful here.

Sam is nice enough to let Karli finish her speech, before he confronts her, while John Walker handcuffs Zemo to a valve and furiously paces the floor. Walker also wants to go in right now, though he promised Sam to let him talk alone to Karli. Lemar tries to calm him down and Bucky blocks his way – for now.

Meanwhile, Sam is actually making some headway with Karli. He tells her that Zemo thinks she’s a supremacist, which Karli thinks is ridiculous – after all, she fights for “one world, one people”. Though her words sound pretty genocidal.

That said, “supremacist” is not the term I’d use to describe Karli. Instead, Karli represents the ugly side of the left or what happens when idealism turns murderous. The closest real world equivalent to Karli I can think of is Ulrike Meinhof who went from leftwing journalist and activist who tried to change the world or at least postwar West Germany via her articles to Red Army Fraction terrorist in the space of a few years. Considering that the face of Meinhof and her RAF compatriots was on a Wanted poster in every post office in West Germany for years (even after her death, her face was still in the poster, only struck out), the subject of initially idealistic leftwing activists became murderous terrorists is rarely addressed in popular culture. When I was a kid, the Red Army Fraction was very much a bogeyman, faces on post office walls who were blamed for anything. Whenever we went to the post office and I waited for my Mom to conclude her business, I remember looking at those faces on the wall, reading their names and wondering about what to do, should one of those people ever decide to come into our little post office to buy stamps or something (ironically, something very similar happened in 2015, when three elderly former RAF members robbed an armoured transport on the parking lot of a local supermarket). What drove those faces on the wall of the post office to blow up CEOs, bankers and minor politicians (but never the ones you secretly hoped they would) and a remarkable number of former Nazis was not addressed at all, at least not in the media I had access to. Eventually, I came across more nuanced portrayals which both acknowledged that the violent reaction of the West German authorities to initially peaceful protests in the late 1960s contributed to the radicalisation of people who might otherwise not have become terrorists, but also make it clear that however idealistic their beginnings, in the end those people were ruthless killers. Seen from this perspective I find Karli an interesting character, an Ulrike Meinhof or Gudrun Ensslin in approx. 1968/69 who might still be redeemed.

I’m not sure if the history of the RAF influenced the writers of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier in any way. Though if you wanted to address the RAF, fictionalising them would IMO be the best way to avoid triggering and retraumatising surviving relatives of RAF victims, which actually happened when the movie The Baader Meinhof Complex (probably the most nuanced portrayal of the whole sorry saga) was released in 2008 and the widow of an RAF victim literally had to watch her husband murdered over and over again in the trailer during every commercial break on TV (and indeed, the trailer was later recut and the one currently on YouTube is not the trailer that was on TV back then).

Sam comes pretty close to convincing Karli that blowing up people is not the way, but then John Walker bursts in and ruins everything. A big chase and fight results, while Zemo ditches his handcuffs and slips away. Zemo is also actually the one who corners Karli and shoots her, whereupon Karli drops the remaining supersoldier serum vials on the floor. Zemo stares at the vials and then begins to stomp on them, revealing that he is definitely not tempted by the serum, while Karli escapes. However, Zemo misses a vial which is found by none other than John Walker. Uh, oh.

Back at Zemo’s apartment, Sam and Bucky are understandably furious at Walker and Lemar for messing up the mission. Before they can come to blows, Ayo and the Dora Milaje appear to take Zemo. John Walker gets in their face and points out that the Dora Milaje have no jurisdiction here (And you do, Captain Nationalism?). “The Dora Milaje have jurisdiction wherever the Dora Milaje find themselves to be”, Ayo replies in a moment that’s incredibly awesome, even though she is theoretically promoting the breaking of international law. John Walker, being the jerk that he is, does not back down, even though Sam tries to tell him that provoking the Dora Milaje is a really bad idea. So we get another fight, where Ayo and the Dora Milaje literally demolish Walker and Lemar. Sam and Bucky eventually decide to intervene, before someone gets killed, only to get their arses handed to them as well. In fact, Ayo literally disarms Bucky by locking up and detaching his Wakandan made cybernetic arm.
“Did you know that she could do that?” Sam asks. Bucky shakes his head.

Zemo is clearly enjoying the show (and seeing awesome black women beating up a jerk like John Walker is very satisfying indeed), but he still uses the confusion to slip away once again. Meanwhile, the thoroughly beaten John Walker stammer, “But they’re not even supersoldiers.” Why am I not surprised that Walker’s fragile white male ego can’t take getting beaten up by black women without superpowers? Also, can I point out how really awesome Florence Kasumba is as Ayo? Because she absolutely is. I’m also happy that two of the most interesting characters in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Zemo and Ayo, are played by German actors.

Sam calls up Sharon Carter to ask her to keep an eye on John Walker via satellite, so he won’t cause any more trouble. Meanwhile, Sharon informs him that the Power Broker is not pleased and that he (or she) is after Karli. Emily VanCamp isn’t given much to do except play tech support and indeed I suspect she’s only in this episode for contractual reasons.

Meanwhile, Karli decides to kill Captain America – faux Cap, that is – and destroy his shield. She also calls up Sam’s sister Sarah to set up a meeting, casually threatening Sarah and her kids, freaking out both Sam and Sarah. Of course, Karli later tells Sam that she’d never hurt his sister, but Karli has said a lot of things that turned out to be wrong. It was also nice seeing Sarah again, though I wish she’d have more screentime. And for that matter, whatever happened to Joaquin Torres?

Sam and Bucky go to meet Karli in full superhero gear, but before they can talk, Sharon informs Sam that John Walker and Battlestar are on the move and that they seem to have found the Flag-Smashers – or maybe the Flag-Smashers have found them. Karli apparently only set up the meeting to get Sam and Bucky away from Walker and Lemar. Sam and Bucky immediately come to Walker’s aid and we get another extended fight scene. Walker initially fares badly, but then he suddenly reappears much stronger and faster, implying that he has taken the serum. Sam is horrified and Lemar, who has no idea that his friend John now has superpowers, comes to his aid and is hurled against a pillar and killed by Karli.

I have to admit that I hate this development. I understand narratively why it was necessary to kill Lemar, but I still don’t like it. For starters, fridging black characters is sadly all too common, as Tor.com reviewer Keith R.A. DeCandido points out. And besides, I liked Lemar. He was the only one who managed to talk sense into John Walker. Lemar is someone I can see as a future Avenger, unlike Walker.

Alas, Lemar is dead. Karli, shocked at what she’s done, flees, as do the rest of the Flag-Smashers. John Walker is furious about the death of his best friend and goes berserk. He chases down one of the Flag-Smashers – I think it was Nico, the guy with the Nazi-fighting grandfather – and proceeds to beat the man to death with the Captain America shield, while dozens of people look on in pure horror and film everything on their smartphones. The episode ends with a striking shot of the bloodstained shield.

So the new Captain America is not just a jerk, he’s actually a killer, not to mention a liability for the US, because your national icon murdering people in public and on camera does not exactly win hearts and minds. None of this is really surprising, though it also highlights the parallels between Steve and John. Both were given the serum and turned into supersoldiers, both were used for propaganda purposes, though John embraces that role more than Steve ever did. Both saw their best friend and sidekick killed before their eyes, even if Bucky got better and Lemar likely won’t. But their reaction is very different. After Bucky’d death, Steve did not go berserk and started beating people to death with his shield.

As Zemo said, the serum strengthens the traits that a person already has. And so Karli, the radical activist, becomes a terrorist and John Walker, the rude and arrogant jerk, becomes a killer. Bucky is a bit of a special case, since he was not just given the serum, but also brainwashed. Meanwhile, Steve, who – in spite of his patriotic fervour – was genuinely good person became only better. And what will happen if – or rather when – Sam takes the serum? Well, I already said that his true superpower is empathy, so there’s your answer.

In general, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier continues to be highly uneven only two episodes from the end. The actors are good, the characters likeable (or they’re people you love to hate like John Walker and Zemo), the action is thrilling. It’s not just mindless action either, but the show actually has some big themes to address and question to ask. But in spite of good elements, the result is still a muddled mess. Why wait until past the halfway point to actually tell us what the Flag-Smashers motives are? Why is Karli’s background still a mystery and what little we can gather doesn’t make sense? Also, the full implications of first removing and then returning half of humanity are never really addressed, as Steve J. Wright points out. That was acceptable, as long as the Marvel movies and TV shows largely glossed over the consequences of the blip. But once they try to address this on a larger scale than just Wanda Maximoff’s individual psychodrama, everything falls apart, because obviously no one ever thought the consequences of the blip through.

The Falcon and Winter Soldier is still an enjoyable show, but it’s also a very frustrating one, because with a bit more thought, it could be so much better.

First Monday Free Fiction: Angoraphobia

Welcome to the April 2021 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 every first Monday of the month.

Since it’s Easter Monday, what could be more appropriate than a seasonal story? And so this week’s free story is “Angoraphobia” from my SFF collection Operation Rubber Ducky. No, the title is not a typo, though the story was inspired by someone mistyping “agoraphobia” as “angoraphobia”, whereupon I wondered, “So what would angoraphobia be then? A pathological fear of fluffy sweaters?” The story grew from there.

But what exactly makes a story about people suffering from a pathological fear of fluffy sweaters appropriate to the Easter season? Well, because there are also fluffy killer bunnies from outer space, ’nuff said.

So read all about the shocking new psychiatric condition known as…

Angoraphobia

“And this…” Professor Pohland came to a halt in front of a locked patient room. “…is a particularly interesting case. For you see, this patient suffers from an extreme form of angoraphobia.”

“Ahem…” One of the interns, a young man with pale skin and shaggy dark hair, raised his hand. Of course. There was always one. “Don’t you mean agoraphobia, Professor?”

“No, Mister…?”

Professor Pohland turned the full force of his glare onto the intern, who promptly crumbled.

“Zach… Zacharias.”

“No, Mr. Zacharias, I meant angoraphobia.” Professor Pohland turned on the rest of the interns, eyes blinking furiously behind his little round glasses. “So who knows what angoraphobia is? Anybody? Anybody?”

The interns exchanged glances, clearly confused. Finally, one of them, a young dark-skinned man with a chubby face, stuck up his hand. The clown of the group. Of course.

“Yes, Mr. Wendell?”

“Pathological fear of fluffy sweaters,” Mr. Wendell said, obviously barely able to keep himself from giggling.

“Well, this is surprisingly accurate, Mr. Wendell,” Professor Pohland said, “I’m stunned, I truly am. Though the official definition of angoraphobia is a bit wider than just pathological fear of fluffy sweaters. Indeed, angoraphobia involves a pathological fear of any products made from angora wool or similar materials due to the delusional belief that giant fluffy rabbits are trying to take over the Earth.”

Mr. Wendell broke down first, erupting into a fit of laughter. Soon all the interns were giggling.

“And that’s like… a thing?” Mr. Zacharias wanted to know, “I mean people believing that giant rabbits are trying to take over the Earth is honestly a thing?”

“Yes, angoraphobia is really a ‘thing’ as you so eloquently put it, Mr. Zacharias. The condition is on the rise with people being hospitalised for it all over the country, perhaps even all over the world.”

There was a new round of giggles.

“But shouldn’t it rather be ‘the delusional belief that giant fussy goats are trying to take over the world’?” Mr Wendell pointed out, “After all, angora wool comes from goats, doesn’t it? Or was it sheep?”

“No, Mr. Wendell, angora wool is indeed produced from the coat of the angora rabbit,” the Professor explained, “You are thinking of mohair, a similar fibre produced from the hair of the angora goat.”

“But whether it’s goats or sheep or rabbits doesn’t really matter does it?” another intern, a serious young woman with straight dark hair and thick glasses, pointed out, “I mean, the big question here is why are we suddenly seeing an epidemic of psychiatric cases of people suffering from the delusional belief that giant fluffy rabbits from outer space are trying to take over the world? Cause that’s a rather bizarre delusion to have, isn’t it?”

Professor Pohland turned his glare on her. “Delusions are bizarre by definition, Miss Krueger.”

“Yes, but why fluffy rabbits from outer space? Why not goats or sheep or turtles or ducks or something like that? Why rabbits? That’s rather specific, isn’t it?”

This one was smart. She knew what questions to ask. Time to defuse her.

“Miss Krueger here asks the right questions,” Professor Pohland said. In response, Miss Krueger’s thin lips actually condescended to form a smile. “Indeed, we do not know why we are seeing a rising incidence of this very particular phobia. But if I were to hazard a guess, I would suspect that it has something to do with some kind of Internet conspiracy theory similar to the Slender Man phenomenon.”

“Uhm, Slender Man is totally real, dudes,” Mr. Zacharias said. A glare from Professor Pohland silenced him.

“So is there a website or anything about this ‘fluffy bunny from outer space’ story?” the ever astute Miss Krueger continued, “Cause I really refuse to believe that such a bizarre idea simply develops in a vacuum.”

“Well, I suppose there is,” Professor Pohland replied, “Though I am not in the habit of visiting websites peddling delusional beliefs.”

Mr. Wendell tapped onto his smartphone and announced, “Eighty-two thousand hits for ‘fluffy bunnies from outer space’, though many of these seem to be for some kind of videogame.”

“But in the case of this patient, wouldn’t it be helpful to check those websites — well, not the ones about the videogame obviously — to investigate the origin of this particular phobia?” Miss Krueger wanted to know.

“Miss Krueger, it is not the psychiatrist’s job to take a patient’s delusions seriously,” the Professor snapped, “In fact, taking delusions seriously might seriously harm the patient’s recovery.”

Miss Krueger took a look through the small window in the door of the patient room. “Well, he certainly doesn’t look as if he’s on the way to recovery,” she remarked, “And anyway, I would simply like to understand why. I mean, how do we know about his phobia at all? Did he just walk into the clinic one day and started babbling about fluffy bunnies from outer space?”

“Actually, she has a point,” Mr. Zacharias added.

“With regards to this particular patient…” Professor Pohland consulted his file. “…he was arrested after going on a rampage in a store selling women’s knitwear, where he attacked both customers and staff, while yelling ‘You’re one of them’.”

Mr. Wendell was about to erupt into giggles again, but a glare from the Professor silenced him.

“Afterwards, the patient was committed for endangering himself and others.”

“And we have no idea how he came to fear angora sweaters and believe in fluffy bunnies from outer space?” the ever irrepressible Miss Krueger wanted to know, “All we know is that he rioted in a knitwear store?”

“I assure you, Miss Krueger, the patient’s symptoms are only too visible,” the Professor countered, “Perhaps a little demonstration is in order.”

Professor Pohland looked from intern to intern and finally settled on a quiet blonde girl who hadn’t said anything so far. “You there! Yes, you. I’m sorry, what was your name again?”

“Jenkins,” the girl said in a voice like a cartoon character. Oh yes, she would do very well indeed. “Jessie Jenkins.”

“Would you please come over here, Miss Jenkins?”

Miss Jenkins walked over to stand beside the Professor, who showed an inordinate amount of interest in her fluffy pink sweater.

“Well, it’s not real angora, of course…” The Professor wrinkled his nose. “But it’ll do. Come on, Miss Jenkins, let’s meet the patient.”

As if on cue, Professor Pohland unlocked the door and opened it. The patient, who up to now had been sitting on his bunk in a straightjacket, suddenly looked up.

“You’re one of them,” he screamed, “One of them.”

He probably would have launched himself at Miss Jenkins and the Professor, if the straightjacket hadn’t held him back.

“You’re one of them and you’ve come to get me,” the patient screamed, “But you won’t. I won’t let you.”

Professor Pohland shut the door in his face, while Miss Krueger put an arm around the trembling Miss Jenkins.

“You see?” Professor Pohland exclaimed triumphantly, “A mere glimpse of Miss Jenkins’ sweater was enough to trigger a fully blown psychotic break.”

“That was cruel,” Miss Krueger hissed, while still comforting Miss Jenkins.

“Cruel, but a necessary demonstration,” the Professor countered, “And I assure you that if Miss Jenkins were to go back into the patient’s room without her sweater, he would be perfectly docile.”

“You want her to go back in there?” Miss Krueger demanded.

“And you want her to take off her sweater?” Mr. Zacharias added.

“Merely for demonstrative purposes,” Professor Pohland replied.

Miss Krueger patted Miss Jenkins’ back. “It’s all right, Jessie. I’ll go with you.”

After approximately five minutes, Miss Krueger and Miss Jenkins returned. Miss Jenkins had taken off her sweater and was now sporting a pale pink blouse topped by a lab coat.

“Fine.” Professor Pohland flashed Miss Jenkins an encouraging smile. “Come on. I assure you, he won’t bite.”

Miss Jenkins took a hesitant step forward and then another, Miss Krueger always by her side.

Professor Pohland handed her the keys. “Here, Miss Krueger. If you’d like to do the honour…” Then he hung back, moving out of sight of the door.

Miss Krueger unlocked the door and cautiously opened it a crack. The patient was sitting on his bunk again, slowly rocking back and forth. As the door opened, he looked up.

Miss Krueger took a step inside, followed by a hesitant Miss Jenkins.

“Hello,” Miss Krueger said, “I’m Sarah and this is Jessie. We just wanted to see if you needed any help.”

The patient scrutinised first Miss Krueger and then Miss Jenkins. “You were with one of them,” he finally said, “Just a minute ago, you were here with one of them.”

“Yes, we were here a minute ago,” Miss Krueger said, “Jessie was here. Do you remember?”

“Of course, I remember,” the patient said, “You were with one of them. The two of you, a skinny white boy and a chubby black boy and one of them.”

“And who would ‘they’ be?” Miss Krueger wanted to know.

“One of the fluffy bunnies from outer space who’ve come to conquer Earth and exterminate us all,” the patient said, “Come on, you must have seen him. I mean, a six foot tall fluffy bunny is kind of hard to miss, isn’t he?”

He lowered his voice. “They’re dangerous, you know? You should keep away from him, keep far away from him. Cause they want to kill us all.”

Miss Krueger retreated, Miss Jenkins in tow. Once outside, she quickly closed and locked the door.

Miss Krueger shook her had. “Totally barking mad,” she said.

***

Two hours later, Professor Pohland was alone in his office, speaking into his computer.

“No, sir, we still have no idea why our glamour fails to affect a certain percentage of humanity. But our attempts to discredit those who can perceive our true nature has been a rousing success. Operation: Conquest and Extermination is still on track.”

A fluffy white paw rested on the mouse.

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.

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier tangle with the “Power Broker”

Apparently, I am doing episode by episode reviews for the entire series of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, so if you want my thoughts on previous episodes of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, go here. Also, may I remind you that Disney is still not paying Alan Dean Foster and others.

Warning: Spoilers behind the cut!

This episode starts with a commercial for the so-called Global Repatriation Council, a UN organisation that has been tasked with taking care of the people who were brought back into existence after five years of non-existence. The commercial is so dripping with pathos that it not only makes you roll your eyes, but also makes you want to join the Flag-Smashers, the organisation that opposes the Global Repatriation Council.

And just in case we didn’t get that the Global Repatriation Council are hypocrites and that the ad we just saw is nothing but propaganda, the show cuts immediately from the ad to a raid conducted by the Munich police and the Global Repatriation Council as well as the faux Captain America and his pal Battlestar on a Flag-Smasher hideout. Of course, the uniforms are all wrong for German riot police nor would any German police officer wear a German flag on their uniform – after all, it’s not as if Austrian or Danish or Dutch police officers would operate in Germany. Instead, they would have the coat of arms of the respective state (here Bavaria) on their uniforms. Not to mention that the German police would not conduct a raid together on German soil with forces from other countries, let alone the would-be superheroes Captain Nationalism and his Battlestar.

In fact, the hideout is the same we saw last episode (so it was in Munich and not in Austria, as we assumed), though Karli and her friends are long gone. Chicken liver man is still there, though, and not at all happy about having armed goons and would-be superheroes invading his warehouse or whatever that graffiti covered building is supposed to be. Battlestar attempts to interrogate chicken liver man in bad German (Dude, at the very least he learned English at school and can understand you all right, he just doesn’t want to answer). Chicken liver man spits into the face of faux Cap to cheers everywhere. “Do you know who I am?” faux Cap demands. “Yes, and I don’t care”, Chicken liver man replies. So let’s hear it for chicken liver man, unsung hero of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

However, once more the scene stops short of being great and questioning the assumptions that underlie that Marvel Universe and superhero movies and comics altogether. For both the Marvel and DC movies tend to assume that in general, ordinary people will like superheroes and worship them. However, neither the Marvel comics nor the Marvel movies have ever asked the question how people from other countries will feel when confronted by explicitly patriotic superheroes. Characters like Captain America, War Machine in his Iron Patriot phase, Captain Britain, Union Jack, Alpha Flight and others are not not universal heroes, they’re the heroes of a specific country. How did the people of Stuttgart feel when Captain America (the real one) showed up in his flag costume to fight Loki in The Avengers? For that matter, how did the people of Sokovia feel about that? Or the people of Lagos, which was trashed by the Avengers? Or how did the Afghan people or wherever that was supposed to be set feel when Rhodey in his full star-sprangled Iron Patriot get-up burst into that sweat shop looking for the Mandarin in Iron Man 3? I suspect a lot of them would have reacted more like chicken liver man than cheer on the Avengers. And Rhodey and Steve are good guys, who genuinely mean well, whereas John Walker is just a bully.

The Marvel movies usually gloss over those questions, though we do see that the people of Sokovia object to the Avengers, particularly to Iron Man, since their country got bombed by plenty of unwanted Stark missiles. Chicken liver man’s confrontation with faux Cap might have been a chance to actually ask those questions. Instead, it’s glossed over once again in favour of hollow action scenes. Though we do get a moment later on, where the villain of the piece, Baron Zemo, says that the reason he objects to superheroes is that if you put them on a pedestal, they lose all accountability. He also points out that making supersoldiers might just as well result in a world of Red Skulls than in a world of Steve Rogers. Or a world of John Walkers, for that matter.

When we last saw our protagonists Bucky and Steve, they were about to visit Helmut Zemo in prison in Berlin. We now see them at the prison, which looks like no German prison anywhere, escorted by a guard in a uniform that does not look like a German prison warden uniform either. Though at least, this time the wrong uniform is emblazoned with the Berlin coat of arms, so they got that bit correct. Bucky wants to go in and talk to Zemo alone. Reluctantly, Sam lets him.

Bucky meets Zemo not in a monitored visitor room, as would be normal, but in a Silence of the Lambs type cell with a glass wall. Of course, that sort of thing doesn’t exist in German prison except maybe in Stammheim. Also, why is Zemo held in a regular prison in Berlin and not in Stammheim which would be far more appropriate for a terrorist and supervillain?

When Bucky shows up, Zemo immediately begins to recite the list of random Russian words that will reset his brainwashing. “That doesn’t work anymore”, Bucky says and tells Zemo that someone has managed to recreate the supersoldier serum. Zemo is genuinely shocked, but then we know that he hates superbeings in general and supersoldiers in particular. He also offers to help. There’s only one problem. Zemo is still in prison.

There is a cut and we see Bucky and Sam in what seems to be some kind of garage. Bucky lays out a totally hypothetical plan for busting Zemo out of jail, while Sam vocally objects. We also see Bucky’s plan – distract the guards by inciting two random prisoners to fight, trigger a fire alarm, Zemo escapes in the chaos – play out on screen, which suggests that it’s far more than just a hypothetical plan. Cue Zemo walking into the garage.

Of course, the fact that the prison break plays out on screen gives the production team the chance to insert even more random errors. The uniforms of the guards are still wrong, the prison still looks wrong and the racial mix of the inmates is completely wrong as well. Because this is a show made by Americans, we see several black prisoners, because that is what you would see in a US prison. However, there are roughly half a million black people living in Germany, i.e. under one percent of the population. Of course, Berlin has a higher percentage of black people, e.g. there are about 20000 people of Ghanaian origin living in Berlin alone. And while our police and justice system may not be quite as racist as that of the US, it is still racist, so black people likely (I don’t know of any statistics) have a higher chance of going to prison for the same charges than white people. So black prisoners would not be unexpected in a regular prison in Berlin (and you would see a lot more in deportation detention), but I wouldn’t expect half of the prisoners we see to be black and the other half to be white. Meanwhile, there are no prisoners of Turkish or Arab origin, even though I would expect to see quite a few in a Berlin prison, since Berlin is home to approx. 250000 to 300000 people of Turkish origin and about 70000 of Arab origin. You would also see a few Asians, since Berlin is home to 83000 people of Vietnamese origin as well as a couple of thousand people of Chinese and Thai origin. So in short, the ehtnic make-up is what an American viewer would expect from a prison, but not what a German prison actually looks like.

Sam isn’t at all happy to see Zemo, though he is willing to go along with the plan for now. Sam is also surprised that the impressive collection of pricey vintage cars in the garage is actually Zemo’s. “So you were rich all the time?” Sam asks. “Of course”, Zemo replies, “I used to be a Baron before the Americans destroyed my country.”

At this point, my reaction was, “Dude, the Soviets confiscated the estates of German aristocrats, but the Americans usually didn’t and West Germany even paid compensation to aristocrats who lost their estates in the eastern parts of Germany, including what are now parts of Poland and Russia. But while the Americans and Brits bombed German cities to smithereens, they rarely bothered with country estates. Not to mention that all that happened decades before you were even born. So don’t whine, cause I’m sure you’re doing just fine.” And indeed, as we will see, Zemo is doing just fine. He has a collection of vintage cars, a private jet and a cool supervillain coat.

However, I eventually realised, we don’t really know whether the country Zemo is talking about really is Germany or whether he is referring to Sokovia. Of course, Sokovia went likely communist after WWII, so Zemo’s family would have lost their estates anyway. But the fact remains that the show isn’t particularly clear about what nationality Zemo even is. In the comics, Zemo is your bog-standard Nazi villain and of course German. Besides, Helmut is a German name (and Zemo is no name anybody anywhere ever bore outside a comic book) and actor Daniel Brühl is a dual German and Spanish citizen, but he could still play a Sokovian. However, the Sokovia we’ve seen is clearly a slavic, likely South East European country and Zemo is very much not slavic. Of course, migration as well as the extensive German and Hungaro-Austrian Empire dumped people with German names and German heritage all over Eastern Europe. But the whole thing is really badly thought out.

In the comics, Zemo is a cliché villain, yet another evil Nazi for Captain America to beat up. Gee, and John Walker wonders why chicken liver man might not like him, considering that Captain American was literally created to fight Germans and Japanese. And while the Japanese villains of the golden age Captain America comics have thankfully been consigned to the dustbin of racist history, the Nazi villains – the Red Skull, Baron von Strucker, Baron Zemo – made it all the way into the 21st century and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

That said, the Zemo was saw in Captain America: Civil War was a far cry from the evil Nazi cliché of the comics, as far as Ben Kingsley’s washed-up actor take on the Mandarin was from the yellow peril cliché of the comics. The way Daniel Brühl played him, Zemo was a soft-spoken but smart guy with a justified grudge against superheroes in general and the Avengers in particular. He’s also ruthless about using people and doesn’t care about who gets in his way. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. It’s nothing personal”, he tells Bucky in this episode, just as he said something similar to T’Challa in Captain America: Civil War, after killing T’Challa’s father. Next to Eric Killmonger and Loki, Zemo is probably the most nuanced Marvel movie villain. However, unlike Killmonger and Loki, Zemo is also badly underused. We see very little of him even in his own movie. Therefore, I was happy to see more of Zemo, especially since he’s also charismatic and actually sort of sympathetic, again like Loki or Killmonger. The fact that Daniel Brühl, the actor who plays him, is immensely likeable also helps. Brühl plays almost always good guys. Even if he plays ambiguous characters like Catalan militant activist Salvador Puig Antich, one of the last two people executed by garrotte in Spain, Brühl is still likeable and the 2006 movie Salvador does sympathise with him. You can see a clip of the execution scene here (warning, graphic), which I came across years ago while researching The Butcher of Spain.

Daniel Brühl’s take on Baron Zemo oscillates between likeable and menacing. Zemo really seems to enjoy winding up Sam and particularly Bucky, e.g. when he snatches Bucky’s notebook, which turns out to be Steve’s old notebook, and reads it, which is really a dick move. This leads to an amusing exchange when Sam tries to persuade Bucky to listen to the 1972 Marvin Gaye album “Trouble Man”, which he’d previously recommended to Steve. But while Steve apparently wound up liking it, Bucky declares that he only likes 1940s music. Sam is annoyed that Bucky won’t even try, while Zemo declares that “Trouble Man” is a masterpiece that perfectly captures the African American experience (and Zemo knows this how exactly?). “Well, he’s out of line, but he’s right”, Sam snaps. The title song of the album is here, by the way, and while I wouldn’t quite call it a masterpiece, it’s certainly good. Also, 1970s soul is not so far away from 1940s jazz and swing that Bucky or Steve would have problems relating. Rap or hip-hop would be a lot more difficult for them.

Zemo tells Sam and Bucky that they need to go to Madripoor in Zemo’s handy private jet to talk to someone named Selby who might know more. Now Madripoor is a location that particularly longtime readers of the X-Men comics will recognise. Basically, it’s a fictional cliched South East Asian city that’s also a hive of scum and villainy. It’s part Singapore, part Hongkong, part Bangkok, part Macau mixed with a large dash of western fantasies and prejudices about South East Asia. Wolverine spent a lot of time there in the 1980s and 1990s. It hasn’t been seen in the Marvel movies so far, largely because the rights were with Fox as part of the X-Men franchise. However, now that Disney bought up Fox, they can use Madripoor. Though if you’d asked me what the first things from the X-Men and Fantastic Four that we’d see in the Marvel Cinematic Universe would be, Evan Peters as Pietro Maximoff/Quicksilver and Madripoor would be far down my list.

The Madripoor we see in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is its typical cliched self. The production team apparently decided to go with the aesthetics of a stereotypical neon-drenched Asian cyberpunk city. However, all the vaguely Asian trappings are only facade. Because the people we see in Madripoor are a generic mix of black and white people with nary an Asian in sight – in a city that is supposedly located in South East Asia. The clothes the characters wear are also way too warm for a tropical climate, but perfectly appropriate for Prague in winter. Now I’ve seen quite a lot of people object to Madripoor, because it is a cliché and a tired one at that. However, I find Madripoor less objectionable than using real places and then showing them looking nothing like they look in reality. Because Madipoor (and Sokovia and Wakanda, for that matter) are fictional, they can look however the production wants them to look. Never mind that projecting orientalist fantasies about lawless South East Asian port cities onto real cities and countries such as Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Hongkong, etc… would be even more offensive. That said, a supposedly South East Asian city state without any Asians is just eye-rollingly stupid.

In Madripoor, our heroes and their pet villain head to a nightclub run by a woman named Selby who apparently deals in endangered animals, another Asian cliché. I don’t think Selby is a character from the comics – at any rate, I don’t recognise her. Zemo can go as himself, while Bucky has to pose as the Winter Soldier again. Sam is decked out in a colourful suit, which gave me fabric envy, and passed off as a gangster called the Smiling Tiger. “I look like a pimp”, Sam complains. “Only Americans would say that a well-dressed black man looks like a pimp”, Zemo counters. The often heavy-handed racism theme that dominated the last two episodes is almost completely absent in this one – except for Zemo’s two offhand remarks that he is very much aware that Sam is black and must have experienced a lot of racism in his life, something that Bucky doesn’t really seem to grasp.

At Selby’s night club, poor Sam is forced to drink a disgusting cocktail made from the guts of a freshly killed snake, since that’s apparently Smiling Tiger’s signature drink. Bucky is forced to play the Winter Soldier and attack some thugs on Zemo’s say-so, a role he plays a little too well, as Zemo can’t help but point out, though at least Bucky doesn’t seem to kill anybody in this scene.

Selby also finally delivers an infodump about the supersoldier serum. It was made by a scientist called Wilfred Nagel (Sigh, another bad guy with a vaguely German name) who works for the Power Broker who is the current ruler of Madripoor. Now the Power Broker is an established Marvel villain, though he had nothing to do with Madripoor in the comics. Instead, Madripoor’s ruler was a woman named Tyger Tiger who had an affair with Wolverine (but then, who didn’t?). Hydra also had a hand in ruling Madripoor, though this was the Hydra run by Viper/Madame Hydra (who – big surprise – also had an affair with Wolverine and was even briefly married to him) rather than Strucker’s Nazi Hydra from the movies.

Karli Morgenthau and her Flag-Smashers stole about twenty vials of the serum from the Power Broker who now wants them dead. Finally, Selby also reveals where Nagel is to be found, namely at the Madripoor container terminal. At this moment, Sam gets a phonecall from his sister – and why didn’t he switch off his phone during the mission? – which blows everybody’s cover. “Kill them”, Selby orders, but before her goons can carry out that order, Selby herself is shot by an unseen sniper.

“This is not good”, Zemo says in what has to be the understatement of the century, “We will be blamed for this.” And indeed, we see beepers going off all over the city and the local bounty hunters are on our heroes’ tail. They are saved by the timely appearance of Sharon Carter (Emily VanCamp) whom we haven’t seen since Captain America: Civil War, where she found herself outlawed after stealing Steve’s shield and Sam’s wings and returning them to their rightful owners.

So far, Sharon Carter, though a long established character in the comics, has been badly underserved by the Marvel movies. She’s barely in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. She gets a little more to do in Captain America: Civil War, but her main purpose in that movie is literally handing back the shield to Steve. Sharon doesn’t appear at all in Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame to the point that we have no idea whether she was dusted or not. Furthermore, Sharon’s traditional role in the comics as Steve Rogers’ love interest is void, because Steve went back to be with Peggy (who’s Sharon’s great-aunt) in the past. So Sharon Carter is a character at loose ends, though she still fares better than Steve’s other girlfriend from the comics Bernadette “Bernie” Rosenthal, who doesn’t exist in the movies at all.

We knew that Sharon would be in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, though the way she’s reintroduced is something of a surprise, because Sharon is angry. She’s really fucking angry, because while Sam and Bucky and Hawkeye and Ant-Man and Wanda and everybody else who sided with Steve during Civil War was pardoned and got their old lives back, Sharon is still on the run and can’t ever go back to the US. And Steve never even called (and neither did Sam), but went back in time to marry her great-aunt. So yes, Sharon has every right to be angry.

Sam promises that he’ll get Sharon a pardon – after all, he managed to get one for “the bionic staring machine” (Bucky) and what Bucky did was considerably worse. So Sharon agrees to help them and takes them to her fancy apartment where she hosts fancy parties and deals in stolen artwork. In short, Sharon has gone to the dark side, though how fully still has to be seen. “She’s kind of awful now”, Bucky whispers to Sam.

Sam and Bucky change their clothes at Sharon’s and everybody hangs out at one of her fancy parties. The next day, they all decide to see Nagel, only to find that the address Selby gave them before her untimely end (at the hands of Sharon, it is implied) is a seemingly empty container at the Madripoor container terminal. Sharon waits outside, while Sam, Bucky and Zemo investigate. “Check the rear wall”, I screamed at the screen, “It’s obviously fake.”

And indeed, the rear wall turns out to be fake and reveals a set of stairs that lead upwards, presumably to the container above. Not that assembling several containers into a larger connected structure isn’t possible. It totally is possible and a lot of mobile offices, classrooms, etc… are assembled this way. However, those are not shipping containers and – most importantly – they’re not on a container lot, where containers don’t stay in one place for long. But then, Iron Man 3 proved extensively that Marvel has no idea how containers work.

Up the stairs, Bucky, Sam and Zemo find a lab and Wilfred Nagel who looks not unlike the babyfaced Q from the Daniel Craig Bond movies and is just as much of an arse. Nagel delivers some more exposition. He used to work for Hydra on their supersoldier program. When Hydra was destroyed, he was recruited by the CIA for their supersoldier program and provided with blood samples of a surviving supersoldier test subject, Isaiah Bradley whom we met last episode. However, before Nagel could complete his work on the supersoldier serum, he was zapped by Thanos and when he came back five years later, the program had been discontinued. So Nagel went to the Power Broker and finally finished his serum. It’s different from the one that was used on Steve and doesn’t result in bulky muscles. That’s why the Flag-Smashers don’t look particularly muscular.

While Sam, Bucky and Zemo are interrogating Nagel, the bounty hunters have tracked down our heroes. Sharon holds them off, showing off her fighting skills. Once Nagel has finished delivering his infodump, Zemo shoots him to the shock of Bucky and Sam. It is notable that every character in this episode is promptly killed off, once they have delivered their infodump. The fight with the bounty hunters escalates and eventually the container lab explodes. Bucky manages to rescue Sam and Sharon, but Zemo has vanished. We next see him standing on top of a container, wearing the silly purple mask he also wears in the comics (where he at least has a reason, because his face is disfigured) and shooting at the bounty hunters. Sam, Bucky and Sharon join the fight and there is a lot of shooting and bullets flying. Bucky also finds a new use for a container lock bar, namely impaling bounty hunters.

The action is all very thrilling. Nonetheless, I didn’t like this scene, because Sam, Bucky, Sharon and Zemo kill a whole lot of people. Yes, they were bounty hunters and going to kill them, but nonetheless the cavalier killing of so many people bothered me, since the Marvel movies are normally a bit more nuanced about mass dealing of death. Zemo just happens to have one of his vintage cars stashed away in a container on just this lot and picks up Bucky and Sam. Sharon is picked up in a black Mercedes (car of choice for Hollywood villains and upper middle class Germans) by a black woman who turns out to be her bodyguard. “We have problems”, Sharon says.

Quite a few people, such as io9 reviewer Germain Lussier and Tor.com reviewer Keith R.A. DeCandido, suspect that Sharon might be the Power Broker herself. The scene with the bodyguard does seem to hint at that (and why would Sharon, who can take care of herself, need a bodyguard?). Sharon Carter out to be the main villain behind everything would certainly be an interesting development, especially since she’s a character left adrift without a purpose in the story now Steve has gone back to the past. And from what little I’ve seen of Revenge, Emily VanCamp can certainly play villainous women.

While all this is going on, Karli and the Flag-Smashers (that sounds like the name of a bad 1960s band) have made their way to Riga in Latvia, after being last seen boarding a plane in Slovakia. Of course, Latvia is nowhere near Slovakia, but then I suspect that the writers chose the locations by throwing darts at a map of Europe. And given Marvel’s geographic track record so far, we should probably be happy that they don’t get Latvia, a real Baltic country, and Latveria, fiction kingdom and home of Doctor Doom, mixed up.

Karli has a heart to heart with her fellow Flag-Smasher Dovich, who turns out to be the only Asian person from Madripoor. We learn that Karli wanted to be a teacher before she decided that terrorism was a more viable career path. It all feels very Red Army Fraction, only that the Red Army Fraction has been history for 25 years now. We also see her playing football with some kids in the yard of a 19th century building which houses a camp for persons displaced by the blip. Why is a refugee camp located in a random Victorian building in a European capital rather than in disused military barracks or a tent city, which is what refugee camps look like in the real world? Only Marvel knows.

Karli is called away from her football game by someone who tells her that “She hasn’t much time left.” Next we see Karli in a makeshift medical ward (Why no hospital? Especially since Riga has plenty of hospitals) standing at the bed of a woman we later learn is named Donya Madani. The woman holds a hamsa pendant in her hand, which to me suggest that she’s Muslim and likely Arabic, though Jews apparently also use hamsa pendants. The woman is apparently dying of tuberculosis. She obviously means a lot to Karli and Karli kisses the dying woman. All this would be very touching, if we had any idea who the dying woman is and what her connection to Karli is. Some people suspect that Donya Madani is Karli’s mother, though the question is how a red-haired and freckled Swiss woman with a Staffordshire accent came by an Arabic mother. Even if we assue that the hamsa amulet suggests she’s Jewish rather than Muslim (and Karli is likely Jewish as well), it still doesn’t make sense. Frankly, my first suspicion was that the dying woman was Karli’s lover. Also, while still way too many people die of tuberculosis, this mostly happens in developing countries, because tuberculosis is treatable. You won’t see people dying of tuberculosis in a EU country like Latvia.

Also, who exactly are the people in this displaced persons camp? Logic would suggest that they are people who were zapped by Thanos and then returned to life and found their homes, jobs, etc… gone. However, Karli and the Flag-Smashers explicitly would have preferred that zapped people to remain dust. They don’t care about the zapped people, they care about the ones who remained behind. But why would the people who were not zapped end up in a refugee camp? Honestly, none of this makes any sense.

A bit later, we see Karli and the Flag-Smashers raiding a depot of the Global Repatriation Council in Vilnius, capital of Lithuania. For once the location change makes sense, because Lithuania is the neighbouring country of Latvia and it takes maybe two hours to get from Riga to Vilnius. The Flag-Smashers carry off barrels and sacks of potatoes. When they leave, the depot with the guards still inside explodes behind them. Karli has set a bomb and officially crossed the line from misguided idealist to terrorist. She really seems to be determined to follow in the footsteps of the Red Army Fraction, though we all know how that story ended.

While Karli is jetting all over Eastern Europe, Bucky and Sam are trailing Karli and John Walker and Battlestar are tracking Bucky and Sam. John Walker and Battlestar have only made it as far as Berlin, where they realise that Bucky has apparently broken Zemo out of prison. Bucky, Sam and Zemo have made it to Riga, tracking Karli via the late Donya Madani. “Riga…” Sam explains, “…is a city near the Baltic Sea”, which is like saying “Washington DC is a city on the US East Coast near the Atlantic.” Because Riga is the capital of Latvia, which has been an independent state for thirty years now (and was a Soviet Republic for fifty years before that), and should be referred to as such.

That said, Riga looks more convincing than Munich or indeed any other place we’ve seen so far, even though it is likely portrayed by Prague as well. But the cobble-stoned street we briefly see does look like the Riga I visited back in 1989 on the first school exchange with what was then still the Soviet Union. On that cobble-stoned street, Bucky finds a strange ball, which he realises is a message. He follows it and finds himself face to face with Ayo (Florence Kasumba), one of the Wakandan Dora Milaje, who was on duty when a bomb set by Zemo killed King T’Chaka. Ayo is understandably still angry about this – after all, T’Chaka was killed on her watch. And now she wants Zemo.

I have to admit that I was thrilled to see Ayo again, especially since her involvement was not mentioned earlier. Also, with Florence Kasumba there is now a second German actor in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. And her role is much less cliched than Daniel Brühl’s, probably because no one in their right mind would make Florence Kasumba play a Nazi.

This episode was pretty much all action and indeed, the writer was also responsible for the John Wick movies, as Gavia Baker-Whitelaw points out at The Daily Dot. It certainly shows, because “Power Broker” feels very much like a 21st century action movie, whether a Daniel Craig James Bond movie or a John Wick or Jason Bourne movie. As AV-Club reviewer Sulagna Misra points out, there’s very little here that we haven’t before somewhere else.

The inaccuracies, which annoyed me so much last episode, are still present. And the motives of Karli Morgenthau and the Flag-Smashers are just as muddled as they were before. The jaunt to Madripoor was fun, but all the action can’t really hide the fact that the plot doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

In his review of the first three episodes, Camestros Felapton notes that The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is quite probably a bad series and nothing more than brainless action fodder. I’m not sure if it really is bad, but it at least isn’t very good so far. Marvel can do better.

Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan are good as always and Daniel Brühl is a delight as the ambiguously villainous Zemo, but the banter between Sam and Bucky, which made the previous episode so much fun, is largely missing from this one. In general, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier seems to have no idea what it wants to be. An action spectacular starring two popular Marvel characters? A serious meditation on racism, idealism and what it means to be an icon like Captain America? An exploration of the many problems the post-blip world faces? Any of these possibilities would be fine, but as it is, the series is just a muddled mess, fun enough to watch, but it falls apart once you think about it. And since there are only six episodes, this was already the halfway point, so they don’t have much time to pull this ship around.

WandaVision, of which I didn’t expect much, turned out to be so much better than anybody expected. Meanwhile, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is turning out to be worse than expected.

Clues and Easter Eggs 2021 – A Round-Up of Indie Easter Mysteries and Crime Fiction

Our monthly round-ups of new speculative fiction and new crime fiction releases by indie authors are a perennially popular feature. Therefore, we now offer you a round-up of our favourite Easter mysteries, crime novels and thrillers by indie and small press authors.

The holiday mysteries cover the broad spectrum of crime fiction. We have cozy mysteries, small town mysteries, culinary mysteries, animal mysteries, paranormal mysteries, historical mysteries, police procedurals, crime thrillers, police officers, amateur sleuths, drug dealers, vanished bodies, stolen Fabergé eggs, missing children, kidnappings, deadly Easter egg hunts, crime-fighting bakers, crime-fighting hairstylists, crime-fighting dogs and much more. But one thing unites all of those very different books. They’re all set on or around Easter.

As always with my round-up posts, this round-up of the best indie holiday mysteries 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:

The Easter Evader by Mathiya Adams:

MacFarland has been asked to solve a murder–but the body has disappeared!

The Easter Evader, a special holiday novella, just in time for those enjoying the Easter holidays who want something short to read. MacFarland must find out what happened to the body of a deceased teenager. Was it stolen for nefarious purposes, or is something even more sinister going on? Rufus and MacFarland join forces to solve the case of the Easter Evader.

 

The Easter Make Believers by Finn Bell:

When an innocent family is taken hostage in their home no one is prepared for how fast it all goes terribly wrong.

With the small community of Lawrence still reeling from shock, detectives Nick Cooper and Tobe White stand among the dead bodies knowing it’s not over. Relief that the two young daughters have survived quickly turns to fear for their missing father, somehow impossibly vanishing from a house surrounded by police.

The mystery deepens as Nick and Tobe realize they know every gunman lying dead here – up to last night they were the leaders of the biggest criminal gang in the country. The desperate search and rescue efforts soon collide with their own challenging investigation into a deeper, older tragedy.

Where they begin to learn just how far someone will go for those he truly, dearly hates.

Bloody Easter by Ray Boxall:

Crime thriller set in London in the present. Taking place over an eight day period during Easter, what starts as a massive police effort to finally end the criminal career of London’s biggest home-grown drug dealer turns into a nightmare as lives are lost, reputations destroyed, and personal relationships are shattered.

Nineteen years ago, as a teenager, Detective Inspector Ray Chalmers applied to join the Metropolitan Police Force, arguing it needed people like him from the City’s huge social housing estates as they could best relate to the criminals’ outlook and lives. But he told lies on his application form. Now, when agreeing to join the Serious Crime Squad that is after London’s biggest drug dealer, he omits to mention he once lived with the man’s sister-in-law.

In attempting to get his revenge on the man for destroying his teenage years, Ray leaves no stone unturned, using his private knowledge of the man. But no-one is prepared for the murderous response of the dealer’s secret Russian business associates.Then Ray’s secret past returns to haunt him when he meets the nineteen year old girl that he abandoned when she was only five months’ old. She has all the answers to the case, but is also the go-between for the drug dealer and his Russian associates, and has long written off her life as valueless. She also has her own secret agenda and, clashing with Ray, unleashes her resentment on him without caring about the possible consequences to herself. It leaves a guilt-stricken Ray with no choice but to prevent her from self-destruction, and stake everything on bringing the dealer and his associates to justice.

The Fabergé Easter Egg by Sharon E. Buck:

Parker Bell is being yanked back to Po’thole once again. This time she’s involved in an international mystery surrounding a Fabergé Easter Egg and a Russian billionaire.

Snowbirds Anne and Chauncey Livingstone aka Tsar Chauncey and Tsarina Anne winter in Po’thole, pronounced Po Ho by the natives and Pot Hole by anyone north of the Georgia state line, from the frigid tundra north (Maine). They have a Fabergé egg. Is it real or is it a fake? What does Russian billionaire Anatoly Petrov have to do with it?

Bestselling author and computer company owner Parker Bell is back in her hometown for international mystery, intrigue, and, of course, Po’thole’s own brand of craziness with the Lady Gatorettes – Misty Dawn, Mary Jane, Rhonda Jean, Flo, and Myrtle Sue – five hormonal caffeine-and-sugar infused women who are die-hard University of Florida football fans.

Why are the Russians so intent on trying to kidnap or kill everyone over the Fabergé Easter egg? Why in Po’thole of all places?

A hilarious romp with crazy characters and believable enough that it might be true. The Fabergé Easter Egg is the 3rd book in the Parker Bell Cozy Mystery series.

Egg Hunt by Cora Buhlert:

When a priceless Fabergé egg goes missing from a locked room in the London townhouse of Russian oligarch Yevgeny Ivanov, everybody quickly suspects Eva Hart, Ivanov’s cleaning lady and single mother.

But Detective Inspector Helen Shepherd has her doubts about this theory, for Eva Hart has no motive, since the egg is unsellable on the free market. But what does Eva’s little daughter Emily know? And what happened to the egg?

This is a mystery novelette of 7500 words or approx. 25 pages.

Easter, 1929 by Frank W. Butterfield:

Sunday, March 31, 1929

Mrs. Wilson Jones (Louise) of Albany, Georgia, wakes up on yet another Sunday morning to discover her husband didn’t come home after carousing down at Louray’s by the river.

But she doesn’t have time to worry. Easter dinner will be at her sister’s house and Mrs. Jones has biscuits to bake. So, she turns on the radio, begins to sing with The Chambers Family Quintet, broadcasting over WSJ in Atlanta, and gets the buttermilk out of the icebox. There’s work to be done and Mrs. Jones is a good cook, keeps a clean house, and always delivers on her promises.

Welcome to a year of holidays with Nick Williams and Carter Jones!

This is the eight in a series of short stories all centered around specific holidays.

Each story is a vignette that stands on its own and takes place from the 1920s to 2008.

Easter Buried Eggs by Lyndsey Cole:

The smell of burnt cake is not a good omen for Annie when she arrives at the Black Cat Cafe. But little does she know that her Aunt Leona’s cooking disaster is only the first of many problems she’ll be served in a big basket of cracked Easter eggs.

Annie quickly learns that being in charge at the Black Cat Café isn’t all chocolate-covered strawberries and carrot cakes. In addition to the variety of tasty pastries she needs to make for Easter, she stumbles on a body and what appears to be a robbery.

With money disappearing from bank accounts, snooping seniors appearing out of the blue, and clues turning up in the most unlikely places, Annie’s problems sizzle more than Leona’s hot cross buns.

Determined to help her new friends, Annie and her therapy dog land in the middle of a murder investigation. Clues pile higher than a basket of Easter eggs, all pointing to one of the seniors. Annie searches for something to keep her friend from landing in a jail cell but instead, Annie ends up right in the killer’s crosshairs.

Easter Hair Hunt by Nancy J. Cohen:

Hare today, dead tomorrow… Can a stylish sleuth pull a rabbit out of her hat to solve an Easter murder in this to-dye-for cozy mystery?

When hairstylist Marla Vail attends an Easter egg hunt at historic Tremayne Manor, she’s only there to fix hair for a client, Bonnie “Blinky” Morris. But when she’s asked to comb the grounds for leftover goodies, Marla discovers more than just a few dyed eggs. The dead body in the bunny costume is definitely not having a good hare day. And Blinky seems to have disappeared down a rabbit hole.

When trying to solve a murder, everyone needs a friend who’s all ears. For Marla, that’s her husband, homicide detective Dalton Vail. They make an eggcellent team. Dalton isn’t the kind to leap to conclusions, but with his wife seven months pregnant, and knowing Marla finds crime-solving to be irresistible, he worries about her running off on another hare-raising adventure.

Marla’s peeps are hoping for a happy ending, but she may have found a basketful of trouble this time. Can she crack the case before Blinky becomes the next victim?

Big Bunny Bump Off by Kathi Daley:

Spring is in the air and with the warm weather comes an abundance of babies; human and otherwise. Things seem to be right on course until Jack Frost comes to town throwing the entire town of Ashton Falls into chaos. When Zoe sees the Easter Bunny running from a murder scene during a freak snowstorm she must track down the ‘Cartoon Bandits’ in order to catch a killer.

 

 

Easter Escapade by Kathi Daley:

In the first ever crossover episode, Zak and Zoe join forces with Hawaiian visitors Luke and Lani, to find out who killed a historian visiting Ashton Falls in order to find a treasure map left by his grandfather a hundred years earlier. Meanwhile, Ellie and Levi move in with Zak and Zoe while the boathouse is being renovated and Alex helps Ellie prepare the nursery for baby Eli who is due to be born any day. Throw in some humor and Easter fun and you have a Zak and Zoe crossover mystery.

 

Hippity Hoppity Homicide by Kathi Daley:

It comes down to a few critical seconds as Zoe is forced to either outsmart a genius or watch her husband die.

With Easter only a week away, Zoe is pulled into a dangerous game after Zak is kidnapped, and the person who kidnapped him, challenges Zoe to The Sleuthing Game. Zoe is told that the only way to gain Zak’s freedom is to complete the challenges in the time allotted.

If she fails, Zak will die.

Zoe had promised she would retire from sleuthing now that she had an infant to care for, but the stakes are high, so she leaves the kids with Ellie, while she and Levi set out to beat a madman at their own game.

Lord James Harrington and the Easter Mystery by Lynn Florkiewicz:

Meet Lord James Harrington and his delightful wife, Beth; residents of the tiny village of Cavendish, deep in the heart of West Sussex in England. They adore hosting seasonal events, running their country hotel, keeping the local folklore alive and listening to the latest murder mystery on the wireless. But mysteries don’t always remain on the airwaves…

It’s Easter and the Cavendish residents are discussing the traditional festivities along with the proposed Easter egg hunt on the Harrington estate. But when the vicar’s dog digs up a bone, things take a turn for the worse. Retracing the dog’s walk, James uncovers a skeleton buried in the woods. Studying the remains, he identifies a number of expensive items. With the likelihood that the victim could be someone well-to-do, James is concerned that he may know the victim and puts his sleuthing hat on.

With investigations under way and a long list of suspects with motive and opportunity, James is confident that it won’t take long to solve the mysterious death. But a chance conversation turns the whole enquiry on its head. With his good friend, DCI Lane, involved in a current murder enquiry, James takes it upon himself to delve deeper. His questions take him from the quiet village of Cavendish to the beautiful city of Boston where more surprises await. James calls upon many of his contacts to help him track down the murderer. Will he bring the killer to justice or is he on a wild goose chase?

Join James, Beth and the Cavendish regulars as they enjoy the Easter events and embark on another adventure.

Easter Sunday by Thomas Hollyday:

A father’s love and family anguish. Hank Green’s young son, Bobby, is lost in a cave beneath a water-drenched swamp of the Chesapeake Bay. The wilderness is known for Native American mystery as well as an unsolved World War Two secret. Even worse, a powerful Easter Sunday storm with its flood surge is barreling down. Hank rushes to join the team of experienced local firemen and friends who will try to find and rescue his son before the boy drowns. Yet he feels once again his own numbing personal terror. He is overcome by a lifelong claustrophobic fear of entering closed spaces like caves. It’s a phobia he inherited from his immigrant father, a displaced person from the 1945 European war, and his own Vietnam experience. He knows if the others lose hope and fail, he will go on alone and risk his life to save his child. He must find a way to conquer his weakness but time is running out.

Killer Easter Pie by Carolyn Q. Hunter:

When a jewelry shop in the Old Market is robbed, and an expensive jeweled egg is stolen, it seems someone might be out to ruin Easter.

For pie shop owner Bertha Hannah, however, she has very little time to think about crime as she is preparing for the annual city Easter Egg Hunt at the community gardens. Businesses and churches from all over the city are contributing to the event, and Bert has a new pie recipe planned for the day.

Festivities are brought to a screeching halt, however, when a body is found in the bushes. Is this new death connected to the egg robbery? When the finger of accusation seems to be pointed in the direction of a friend, Bert knows it is up to her to solve this mystery before the Easter Bunny hops away with all the clues.

Easter Eggs and Shotgun Shells by Madison Johns

Being in charge of the annual Easter Egg Hunt is challenging enough for Agnes and Eleanor, but even more so when they assist Bernice in finding rabbits for the event. Unfortunately for the sleuths, instead of bunnies, they stumble across a body.

The sleuths are hunting for the killer now, but soon it appears the killer is hunting for them too. Can Agnes and Eleanor outsmart the killer or will they become the next victims?

 

Bunny Drop by Linda P. Kozar:

To bunnies everywhere! From jackrabbits to cottontails to lovable lop-eared cuties, chinchillas, harlequins, dwarfs, angoras and each and every breed, I dedicate this mystery to the rascally rabbits of the world. Oh, and especially to chocolate Easter bunnies. My favorite kind.

 

 

 

The Easter Egg Ennui by Katy Leen:

It’s almost Easter. Time for bunnies, bonnets, and bonbons. Not bedlam. Unless you’re Lora Weaver, that is.

With the scent of spring in the air and the promise of a long weekend looming, Lora is looking forward to a few days relaxing with her beau Adam, taking long walks and short naps snuggled together in the warm glow of Easter chocolate wrappers.

Until Lora spots a bouquet of Easter lilies at the home of bff Camille Caron’s aunt and soon finds herself donning a bunny suit and slinging more than Easter eggs.

Whiskers deep in a mêlée of sparring seniors, Lora must keep herself from falling into a rabbit hole she can’t escape. All while grappling with the clamorous Caron clan, mama-to-be Tina, and Lora’s enigma of a boss, Laurent, who may be hiding more secrets than a Kinder egg.

The Easter Egg Ennui is a holiday novella from the Lora Weaver series.

The Easter Sunday Slaughter by Imogen Plimp:

APRIL SHOWERS BRING MAY FLOWERS
And a bouquet of murderous intrigue…

Amateur sleuth (and ace baker) Claire Andersen is back! Winter melts to spring in scenic Galway, Maryland, uncovering blooming friendships new and old, a shyly budding romance, the rotten stench of organized crime, and family drama more garish than Claire’s emerging blood lilies.

Settling in just fine to her new Appalachian digs (and getting the hang of this whole proprietress of a B&B thing, too!), NYC native Claire Andersen is living a cozy small town fairy tale. There are quirky local characters and adorable little shops, not to mention a kitchen full of mouth-watering baked goodies. She’s a veritable June Cleaver—if Leave It to Beaver were nestled in the mountains and June were a recently retired empty nester, that is.

There’s just one problem. Claire can hardly say “Gee, golly” before her newly-acquainted and much-beloved neighbor winds up murdered in cold blood, right before Galway’s annual Easter parade. Hot off the heels of her last murder, Claire can’t help but get involved (much to the chagrin of the well-meaning albeit bumbling town sheriff). She can hardly help herself, after all. The murder did take place right next door … and the victim’s family is staying in her B&B… Ever the hostess, poking around is the least she could do.

Little does Claire know the victim’s family is just the tip of the iceberg. The rest of the iceberg consists of age-old secrets so duplicitous, they’d make Eddie Haskell run for the hills.

Mix in Claire’s feisty sidekick Evelyn, her ever-lovable bloodhound Rupert, and a mountain of mocha and strawberry buttercream cupcakes—and Claire finds she’s in business. The sleuthing business. Perhaps even the mafia business. But she’d better tread carefully—or she’ll wind up another discarded, frozen body in the aforementioned iceberg (with a spring thaw nowhere in sight).

Chicory is Trickery by Sheri Richey:

It’s springtime in Spicetown and Mayor Cora Mae Bingham discovers there may be trouble blooming along with the rhododendrons!

With construction in full throttle in the new subdivisions and the income tax filing deadline looming over her head, Mayor Cora Mae Bingham is revamping the Annual Easter Eggs-Travaganza and trying to figure out who is in the Easter bunny suit this year, when a dead body has to be added to her To-Do list.

 

The Easter Egg Murder by Patricia Smith Wood:

Harrie McKinsey and her best friend and business partner Ginger Vaughn discover that some secrets are best left buried when retired Senator Philip Lawrence hires their editing firm to assist him with a book about the famous unsolved 1950 murder of a cocktail waitress that led to the end of illegal casinos in New Mexico. When the Albuquerque newspaper announces that Senator Lawrence is writing the book, one person with a connection to the case is murdered and another narrowly escapes death. Despite the best efforts of Ginger’s husband and an FBI agent Harrie finds infuriatingly attractive, the energetic pair cannot resist trying to discover who is so anxious to destroy the book, the senator and his big secret. But will their proficiency and pluck be up to the challenge when they land in a dark house with a cold, calculating killer who has nothing else to lose?

A Medium’s Easter Epiphany by Chariss K. Walker:

A boyfriend changes everything!

In book five of the Becky Tibbs cozy, ghost mystery series, Becky must learn how to juggle her personal and business life now that she has a real boyfriend! This is a first for Becky and her new schedule sometimes feels overwhelming.

At Becky’s encouragement, Bobby and Barbara have finally decided to accept their special ability too. At least, they are open to using their gift if the opportunity presents itself.

Barbara actually manages to help someone new with their ghost problem and the meeting turns into something more. Unlike Marty, Barb’s ex-boyfriend, this new person, Christopher, accepts Barbara and her capabilities exactly as she is. In fact, he is impressed.

Jealousy rears its ugly head!

Marty finally goes off the deep end and Becky must help Patty come to terms with his rage.

Becky’s epiphany, or sudden realization, is a concept that would be beneficial to everyone.