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Written on the Dark by Guy Gavriel Kay

The great city of Orane, capital of Ferrieres, is thrown into chaos when a prominent nobleman is murdered in cold blood. Thierry Villar, an advocate-turned-poet, is enlisted by the city authorities to investigate the murder, despite the likelihood of it being political in nature, threatening the city and the kingdom's peace. But that peace is already under threat, as the armies of Angland under King Hardan V have landed on the north coast.

A new Guy Gavriel Kay novel is something to be savoured. If my previous review, of Joe Abercrombie's The Devils, said that book was a whiskey with no chaser, a new Guy Kay book is comparatively a fine wine, to be savoured and its short length to be lamented, despite that also being a strength.

Written on the Dark, like much of his work, takes place in the same world, one closely based on real medieval Europe, but with the names, geography and underlying ideals (like religion) all shifted a bit aware from reality. There is no magic, in the sense of wizards hurling fireballs, but there are prophetic dreams that often seem to come true.

This book is set in the much-mentioned land of Ferrieres, an analogy for France, to the north-east of the lands in The Lions of Al-Rassan and north-west of those explored in the Sarantine Mosaic duology. Kay has a special affinity with France, with his early novel A Song for Arbonne taking place in a different version of that kingdom, and his later book Ysabel just straight-up taking place in actual, contemporary France. The real historical period being riffed on here is the Hundred Years War between England and France, during which time France also suffered significant internal upheaval and civil conflict, most notably between the French crown and Burgundy (here realised as Barratin). Kay provides a list of historical sources at the end of the novel, but as usual he doesn't have precise, 1:1 correlations, instead throwing together different people and events from across a couple of centuries to see what happens when they coexist. Some of the more obvious touchstones are present - Joan of Arc is present, albeit restyled as Jeanette of Broche - but these tend to be dealt with fairly curtly in favour of our main cast.

The main cast is described in impressive depth, with Thierry Villar an overconfident, possibly even arrogant, man who makes one mistake too many and has to make amends by investigating a murder, the ramifications of which could rock his entire world. His friend and tavern-worker Silvy, fellow poet (of higher station) Marina di Seressa, the king's provost Robbin de Vaux, and the somewhat-mystical Gauvard Colle, all fully-realised figures, are all drawn into the story of feuding politicians, scheming priests and marching armies.

As usual with Kay, his interest is less in mass combat and battles and more in the motivations that move people to violence and its consequences. He is not a bloodthirsty author: skirmishes which leave even a handful of casualties are shocking, and not to be relished, and mass battles are catastrophes that people will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid. The real battles here are fought with wits, penmanship and rhetoric. Thierry's preferred battlefield is the courthouse, the diplomatic table or the tavern where his improvisation, oratory and humour can be best appreciated.

The traditional strengths of Kay are on full display: his grasp of history in both the broad strokes and close-up detail, his firm grasp of who his characters are and what they want, and his measured prose, sometimes minimalist, sometimes ornate, known when to deploy words like bludgeons and when like scalpels. There is more humour in this book than perhaps some of his previous ones, but the amount of heart present will not be a surprise to established fans. The book may even mark a better onboarding place to Kay's novels for brand new readers than some other recent ones, being more firmly a total standalone (Children of Earth and Sky, A Brightness Long Ago and All the Seas of the World arguably forming a thematic trilogy, itself following on from the at-least nominally thematic duology of Under Heaven and River of Stars).

The biggest negative about the book is one that's not really a negative: at 300 pages on the money in hardcover, this may be Kay's shortest novel to date. The sumptuous expanses of some of his earlier, 500+ page novels are not to be found here. But that short length results in a razor-sharp focus that is quite compelling.

By this point it feels redundant to say it about a Kay novel, but Written on the Dark (*****) is a beautifully-written portrait of its world and its people, with added focus and clarity making it a good jumping-on point for new readers. The novel is available now worldwide.

The Devils by Joe Abercrombie

Brother Diaz has been summoned to the Chapel of the Holy Expediency to receive a mission directly from the ten-year-old Pope. He is to join a group of "devils," evil-doers repenting for their sins in (unwilling) service to the Papacy. Their goal is to guide the young heir to the throne of Troy to her throne, despite four cousins all keen to ensure she never gets there. Carrying out this quest are an immortal warrior, an invisible elf, an overly-proud necromancer, a jack of all trades, a vampire, and a werewolf. This quest may see them learn the meaning of friendship and found family (but probably not), and realise that the real friends are the zombie warriors we resurrected along the way.

The Devils is the latest novel from Joe Abercrombie, the undisputed king of dysentrypunk. Through many novels he has written stories soaked in blood (not always the best printing process for easy reading, but still), told with verve, humour, and sometimes worrying psychoses. This latest book is a semi-standalone, capable of being read by itself but also setting up a loose trilogy of episodic adventures for the Holy Expediencers.

The storyline is pretty straightforward, with street orphan-turned-professional-thief Alex finding out she's the long-lost Princess of Troy, a fairly unlikely prospect but one proven by the traditional means of a holy birthmark and a long-lost sigil. The Papal Shambolics have to guide her to her destiny, which involves (as this is an Abercrombie novel) a veritable morass of slaughter, bad jokes and bodily fluids spraying in all directions. Along the way we get to know the rest of the group, their hopes, their desires, and their propensity to solve problems with sharp bits of metal. It's a solid cast of characters, likeable but (heavily) flawed, seeking redemption or something adjacent to it, drawn with reasonable colour and depth.

The Devils feels like Unfettered Abercrombie. His First Law books, particularly the recent(ish) Age of Madness Trilogy, mix the dark humour and knockabout antics with weightier stories of societal development and an extended meta-arc which, though it can be summed up as, "what if Gandalf was a total a##%~*~@?", has a lot of depth. The Devils feels like Joe had decided he needed a break from those weightier elements and he could just have a knockabout good time. This is a veritable "beer and pretzels" book where themes and intricate worldbuilding are side-courses, not the main appeal.

This has the simultaneous effect of making The Devils possibly Abercrombie's most outright enjoyable work, with action and comedy to spare, but also maybe his slightest, and most disposable. First Law fans may bemoan a lengthy gap until we return to that world (if we ever do) and the mouth-watering Glokta vs Bayaz struggle his last book set up, and others may ponder if Joe could have been better-served by exploring fresher fields altogether (presumably less filled with recruits corpses). But that's the perennial problem: do you want your favourite artist to deliver you what they're best at, no surprises, or reach for the worrying button called "space jazz concept album?"

The Devils (****) is straight-up Abercrombie, no chaser. It's fun, funny and uncomplicated, and is on the shelves worldwide right now.

Currently 20 hours into the superhot game of the minute, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. It's a JRPG made by a French studio which is about a fractured future world where people are stuck on an island city (possibly a shattered remnant of Paris) and are ticking down to extinction through a creepy-AF mechanism. Every year an expedition is launched to try to destroy the threat and stop the countdown, and every expedition has failed. Obviously this expedition has a better shot because it's the one under the player's control.

Very unusual world, brilliant soundtrack, interesting and impressive combat (think Final Fantasy with a touch of Dark Souls, turn-based but with realtime parries and counters), great characters. It feels like a China Mieville novel come to life. Very compelling so far. My only complaint is that the game is not well-optimised for mouse and keyboard (it frequently misses keyboard inputs for some reason, whilst registering them fine on controller), to the point that I had to drop the difficulty to "Story" to get on with it. Of course, I then found that "Story" difficulty in this game is what most people would call "Normal", whilst actual "Normal" is "Really Hard," and "Expert" is "Supernatural Reflexes Only Needed."

Not not quite deserving fully of the hype levels that have been raised, but it is very good indeed.

The Rose in Darkness by Danie Ware

Opal, a gleaming beacon of the civilisation of the Imperium of Man. A peaceful world deep within the Imperium, where vast crowds pay homage to the Emperor and his great hero, Saint Veres, in a glorious celebration held once every eight hundred years. The Skull of Saint Veres is a great relic, one which has been ordered to be moved to a shrine world, but the local leaders are reluctant to part with it. Sister Superior Augusta of the Order of the Bloody Rose arrives to expedite the process, only to find bubbling cauldrons of discontent and heresy waiting for her. She realises that Opal's opulence and tranquillity is a facade, one that is dangerously close to breaking.

My prior explorations of the Warhammer 40,000 universe have mostly been through the works of Dan Abnett and Sandy Mitchell, not to mention Paul Kearney's two books in the setting, which have meant reading a lot about Space Marines, Imperial Guard and Inquisitors. The Rose in Darkness was an appealing read as it meant switching focus to another one of the Imperium's orders, the Adepta Sororitas or the Sisters of Battle. The belligerent death-nuns of the Emperor, the Sisters step in to situations which local militias can't handle but sending in the Space Marines would be massive overkill, with the addition that their religious rites and devotion to the Emperor give them an insight that some of the other orders lack.

This book is a good exploration of what kind of situation requires the Sisters' attention, as they have to respect local traditions, honour the local Saint's day but also be firm in their objective of removing the planet's most holy relic, which the local leaders are understandably upset about. The negotiations are interrupted when it becomes clear that some outside force is stirring up trouble on Opal, and it's up to the Sisters to identify the threat. When it is identified, all hell breaks loose, resulting in lots of crunchy battle sequences of the kind that make up the backbone of most Warhammer 40,000 fiction.

Danie Ware paints Opal in all its Imperial splendor. Most 40K fiction takes place on the ragged frontier, where the Imperium is fighting some kind of conflict against an exterior threat, but here the trouble is much harder to pin down. Unleashing a storm of bolter fire to take care of an Ork invader is one thing, but when the threat is more insidious and you cannot tell friend from foe, it's a more nuanced challenge, something that Augusta and her troops struggle to initially engage with. The author is operating with a constrained page count here but deftly characterises figures so even briefly-appearing players (like the planet's governor and military commander) are given at least some depth and flavour.

The book's main success is this idea of a world deep inside Imperial space, blessed by the Emperor, relatively rich and opulent, but whose workers are poor and downtrodden, sometimes even starving when the rich nobility sits in comfort just a few miles away, creating a sense of natural anger and resentment even without strange cults or xenos interference. The feeling of tension ramping up through the book is remarkably successful. It also helps the book gives us POV characters both in the Sororitas and in the local population, so we get both an insider and outsider's perspectives as events on Opal reach breaking point.

It is worth saying that The Rose in Darkness is bleak as hell, even by 40K standards. Most other 40K fiction I've read takes the view that, sure, things are bad, people die, a lot of things blow up, but the most positive - or least-negative, anyway - outcome is infinitely preferable to the worst-case scenario. The Rose in Darkness instead evokes the idea of fighting against the dying of the light, of fighting a long defeat for the sake of fighting it, and true heroism is counted by people making a stand for the right reasons in the dark, where nobody will ever see or hear.

The Rose in Darkness (****) does what good 40K fiction does well - chunky action sequences, mixed in with moments of supernatural horror - but it does it with an air of melancholy and futility that I had not previously encountered in the setting (despite its reputation), which is interesting, but I suspect won't quite be for everybody.

The question now is whether Andor Season 2, Episodes 8 and 9, are the best instalments of Star Wars since Empire Strikes Back, or just the best instalments of Star Wars full stop.

Some of the early going this season was a bit questionable, but they've paid things off amazingly.

With the confirmation of the OBLIVION remaster that means the FALLOUT 3 remaster (leaked at the same time) is almost certainly coming as well, which pretty compelling. I think FO3 needs one almost more than OBLIVION.

Discworld #32: A Hat Full of Sky

Tiffany Aching has begun her apprenticeship as a witch, working for Miss Tick, who has one soul but two bodies. After a dull start to her work, they are accosted by a hiver, a formless spirit which can possess living bodies, driving them to acts of malice. Tiffany has to fight for her body and soul, but fortunately has a group of surprisingly capable allies: the diminutive, oft-drunk Nac Mac Feegle, and the formidably competent Granny Weatherwax.

A Hat Full of Sky is the thirty-second Discworld novel and the second (of an eventual five) to focus on the character of Tiffany Aching. Originally published in 2004, Terry Pratchett had decided to write a series of Discworld books aimed at younger readers. Amusingly, due to Pratchett's utter refusal to talk down to children, he doesn't entirely seem to know how to do this, so has knocked off the occasional double entendre from his writing and shaved off about 100 pages from his average page count but otherwise carried on as normal.

As a result, A Hat Full of Sky feels like vintage Pratchett, just more focused (no bad thing; some Discworld books tend to circle the drain a few times before finding their point, which is not the case here). The cast is much smaller than normal, the scope more intimate, bordering on the claustrophobic. Given the nature of the story is very internal, this feels appropriate.

The main story, ostensibly, is about Tiffany getting possessed and "turned bad," although Pratchett seems to be ahead on the curve on how this could have been tedious. Tiffany only spends a small amount of time possessed by the hiver, with most of the book revolving around events before and after. Pratchett is often less interested in the most obvious route to humour or action, and more interested in causes and results. Pratchett is also a very human writer, so here his focus is more on the impact caused by events on Tiffany's character and even feeling empathy for the hiver, the "monster" of the story.

That's not to say the book isn't funny. Pratchett's skill at wordplay and minor-but-amusing worldbuilding details (some of them drawing on real-life folklore, as the afterword attests) remains undimmed. He also spends a bit more time making the Nac Mac Feegle a deeper and more interesting culture. Them showing up drunk, head-butting a badger and yelling "crivens!" can only get you so far, so here a more thorough exploration of Rob Anybody's character and the motivations of his new queen - who finds the tribe's allegiance to Tiffany bemusing - adds more depth to a group previously only known for knockabout comedy value.

Pratchett also deploys Granny Weatherwax with restraint, though she has more page-time than in The Wee Free Men. One of Discworld's most iconic, formidable and impressive protagonists, it would be easy for Granny to take over the narrative and deal with Tiffany's problems for her in five minutes, so Pratchett is good at using her tactically during the book's finale, so as not to outshine our actual protagonist. Tiffany herself develops nicely here, the traditional "why am I not being taught actual magic on Day One of learning to be a witch?" storyline being quickly displaced by a more thoughtful, intelligent examination of responsibility, empathy and consequences.

A Hat Full of Sky (****) is Pratchett at his most focused and disciplined here, delivering a smart, tight story. It's not the most expansive Discworld story and some may prefer the more widescreen/deranged antics of, say, the City Watch in Ankh-Morpork, but it's a very solid read.

The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers

The planet Gora has no reason to exist other than just having the fortune to exist in close proximity to five wormhole terminuses. The planet has become a place for travellers to rest briefly before moving on. But a freak satellite cascade crisis stops all ship departures. The crews of three ships are forced to take refuge in one another's company, for good and ill.

The Galaxy, and the Ground Within is the fourth and apparently concluding book in Becky Chambers' Hugo Award-winning Wayfarers series, following on from The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, A Closed and Common Orbit and Record of a Spaceborn Few (Chambers has a superb facility with book names, it has to be said). This isn't a series in the traditional sense with continuing characters and narrative elements, more something like Iain Banks' The Culture with a shared setting and occasional references to the events of other books but each volume can be enjoyed fully as a stand-alone.

Like the other books in the series, The Galaxy, and the Ground Within is a very relaxed novel. There is personal jeopardy but it is brief and limited. The book's primary interest is more about how people - in this case examples of multiple different alien species - interact and work together in the face of adversity. It's something of a space disaster novel, where the disaster is very brief and isn't going to kill anyone after a short period, but its consequences take days to play out during which our protagonists have to figure out how to endure.

Basically, this is science fiction mashed with the structure of John Hughes' The Breakfast Club, and it works really well. We get to know the three alien visitors, the owner of the space hotel they have to stay in and her son, and none of the characters are human, which is surprisingly rare in science fiction. Each one of the four species the characters belong to gets a lot of development in terms of their personal characterisation and also worldbuilding related to their different species, and how this limits their interactions. One of the species relies on colour cues to determine the other person's mood and intents, whilst another can only leave their ship in an environment suit. Being space travellers - wayfarers - means they have some natural curiosity about other species, but sometimes find it hard to deal with those with a very different worldview to their own, informed by a totally different biology and history.

If the book has a theme, it's probably the rotest of the Star Trek rote: to understand one another's differences and find ways of getting along. It feels like a well-explored idea, but also a universal and constant one, and one it never hurts to revisit. Especially here with the circumstances well set-up to facilitate that story.

Chambers always walks a tightrope between her books being chill and enjoyable, and boring, and Record of a Spaceborn Few started tilting alarmingly towards the latter. The Galaxy, and the Ground Within (****) tilts back towards the former. For those who need action, intrigue and lasers in their space opera, steer clear. For those who are more interested in worldbuilding and character dynamics, this is a fine and enjoyable slice of lived-in science fiction. The novel is available now.

Exodus Book One: The Archimedes Engine by Peter F. Hamilton

Fleeing a ravaged Earth, humanity launched near-lightspeed arkships across a large part of the galaxy. Many have vanished, some established isolated colonies in remote systems, but the greatest success was in the Centauri Cluster, a group of millions of stars within a few hundred light-years of one another with thousands of habitable worlds between them. The Green Signal was sent across the galaxy to attract more arkships. But in the tens of thousands of years it took them to arrive, the humans of the Centauri Cluster become technologically advanced, becoming near godlike beings called the Celestials. The late-arriving humans, for whom only years or decades had passed at relativistic speeds since the fall of Earth, these Celestials might as well be a different species.

The arrival of the arkship Diligent in the Crown Dominion, the only Celestial empire to allow humans their own worlds, settlements and businesses, after 40,000 years in deep space at first seems like business as usual. But the owner-ruler of the Diligent is one of old Earth's most ruthless businessmen, who sees an opportunity in the ossified power structures of the Crown Dominion to further the cause of ordinary humans. At the same time, the arkship's arrival gives the rebellious son of a rich family an opportunity to become a Traveler, an interstellar starship captain. Elsewhere, a police officer is recruited by a Celestial archon to become his eyes and ears in the Crown Dominion's home system, and a potential recruit to succeed a Celestial ruler sets about her destiny with impressive ruthlessness. Both within and outside the borders of the Crown Dominion, threats are gathering which could change - or obliterate - the fate of billions, humans and Celestials alike.

Peter F. Hamilton, Britain's biggest-selling living science fiction author, is known for his brick-thick, far-future space operas featuring living starships, immense space battles and impeccable worldbuilding. His most recent space opera trilogy, The Salvation Sequence (Salvation, Salvation Lost, The Saints of Salvation), operated on a different level, with three relatively constrained novels working with a tight focus to deliver a very effective storyline. It worked very well, but arguably lacked the epic grandeur of his best work.

The Archimedes Engine cheerfully throws that approach out of the window and slams down the accelerator. This is, once again, a huge (900 pages in hardcover), dizzyingly epic space opera which swaps between a large number of storylines, planets and starships, with a meticulously constructed plot that combines breathless action setpices with impressively atmospheric worldbuilding. Hamilton hasn't delivered a book quite like this since 2004's Pandora's Star and 1996's The Reality Dysfunction, so it's impressive to see that, twenty years on, he's still got it.

The Archimedes Engine does have one major differences to his earlier work though: this is, to some degree, a collaborative project. It is part of the wider Exodus project which also incorporates an episode of Amazon's recent Secret Level animated series (Exodus: Odyssey) and a forthcoming, massive video game RPG from the same team as Mass Effect. Reading interviews with the creatives, it seems that they came up with the underlying concepts and gave them to Hamilton to flesh out, with them then providing guidance on those ideas. The result is an impressive amount of worldbuilding, since it is needed to drive not just this novel, but TV and video game projects as well.

The core principle of the setting is incredibly straightforward: FTL (faster than light) travel is utterly impossible. Spacecraft are limited to the speed of light. There are "Gates of Heaven," incredibly powerful devices which can accelerate spacecraft to 99.99% of lightspeed in an instant (that's 500,000 gees, thank you very much) without obliterating them, but that's about it. Starship crews buzz around at relativistic speeds, with only a few days or weeks passing for their crews as they travel from one system to another, but potentially years at a time passing for their friends and family back home. Even a round-trip to a star a modest fifteen light-years away will see at least thirty years, a quarter of a human lifetime in this time, elapse for those left behind. This makes it incredibly important to work out which journeys are necessary and which are not; an early meeting in the book, which takes three years out of someone's life, feels like it could have been an email, which is even more annoying in this context.

Hamilton's not actually done this before, his previous work has largely relied on FTL travel, usually via wormholes, so seeing him track where his characters are as decades pass for them is quite interesting (his friend Alastair Reynolds is more of a dab hand at this, as his signature Revelation Space setting similarly lacks FTL travel). To some degree the action in the book is largely constrained to the Kelowan system, which limits the problem, but several subplots do see trips to other star systems, allowing decades to pass when they return. Fortunately this is a setting where people like to set in motion very long-term plots.

Hamilton juggles a huge number of plots, subplots, characters and worldbuilding information with typical aplomb. For all the praise given to Brandon Sanderson and Steven Erikson for this, I think Hamilton has them both beat when it comes to building a series of wildly disparate threads over the better part of a thousand pages only for them to converge with a titanic clash at the end. The Archimedes Engine is no different, with storylines that seem utterly disconnected colliding with the force of matter and antimatter, leaving the reader eager for the sequel (though you'll have to wait until late 2025 for that).

As an author, Hamilton does have a number of long-standing, almost infamous weaknesses. One is that no matter how far future, bizarre or strange the setting, his characters can have a tendency to break down into English idioms, sayings and insults. This is a nice change from SF novels which have characters doing the same thing with American vocabulary, but can be a bit distracting. Fortunately, his other infamous (though probably over-stated, especially in his later work) tendency towards sex scenes of wildly variable plot relevance is here altogether missing. Characters hook up, but tasteful fades to black are the order of the day. Also, for some reason, Hamilton seems to have lost faith in his recurring plot device of a benevolent billionaire/trillionaire who helps save the human race from the goodness of his heart, so our stand-in in that role in this book is a much more morally grey character.

Where the book is a bit more variable is the quality of the characters. Thyra, the would-be-heir to the crown of Wynid who has to fight against her low rank of birth to gain her Queen/Mother's favour, is probably the standout here, but she does take a back seat in the back half of the book. Finn is the very beige young callow youth protagonist who goes on a wild adventure (this book's Joshua Calvert), though he works enough as a bit of a blank slate for the reader to experience the crazy universe through. I'm more surprised that Hamilton didn't do more with Ellie, the Diligent crewmember we spend the most time with, though mostly not as a POV character. As someone who's spent her life on a low-tech arkship, she's probably better-placed to act as our eyes and ears in the setting, but perhaps that would have been too obvious. It's Gahji, the Celestial politician trying to make sense of the increasingly weird goings-on, and Terence Wilson-Fletcher, police detective (and our spiritual surrogate for the Commonwealth universe's Paula Myo, still Hamilton's finest character creation) who emerge as the most interesting protagonists. Other characters descend into the usual morass of petty criminals, scheming politicians and greedy businessmen. It works well, but isn't his most vivid cast.

The Archimedes Engine (****½) is Peter F. Hamilton back on top form, doing what he does best: large-scale, epic space opera, in a well-realised setting, with a huge, multi-faceted plot that builds and concludes hugely satisfyingly at the end. This is the first in a duology, so there is a significant cliffhanger. The second book, The Helium Sea, seems tentatively scheduled for later this year. The book is available now worldwide.

Exodus, the video game, is currently unscheduled but likely to arrive in 2026 or 2027. There is a significant amount of worldbuilding and background information that can be seen on Archetype Entertainment's website.

The Murderbot Diaries #7: System Collapse

Murderbot is back, navigating a tricky situation on a frontier planet where the interests of its employers are tested against those of the Barish-Estranza megacorp. Murderbot's team are working with the colonists to secure their own self-governance, whilst Barish-Estranza is trying to get them classified as indentured servants of the corporate interests and get them shipped offworld as effective slave labour. The situation is complicated when a hitherto unknown group of colonists is discovered underground in the polar region, with both factions rushing to contact them before the other.

System Collapse is the seventh book in Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries series. It follows the misadventures of "Murderbot," a former security robot or SecUnit which has achieved sentience and aligned with a group of humans seeking equal rights for sentient machines, a position the megacorp-dominated far future is distinctly opposed to. Murderbot is once again operating undercover along with its powerful AI ally, ART, and a group of humans on a frontier colony being divided by legalese and moral controversies.

This is a novel rather than a novella, but still a short one at only 250 pages. The book is also slightly out of pace chronologically, taking place soon after the events of the fifth volume, Network Effect, whilst the sixth volume, Fugitive Telemetry, took place earlier in the series. Not a major issue but a quick refresh of Network Effect might be in order before tackling this book.

As usual, Wells delivers an effective mixture of action, existential musings, and light comedy. Murderbot's ongoing development towards being a fully-realised sapient being is here interrupted by an involuntary shutdown, leading to a crisis of confidence as it fears what would happen if the problem recurred during a dangerous situation, resulting in its own destruction or that of allied humans. Murderbot's attempts to fix the problem are complicated by its discomfort with the well-meaning but overwhelming attempts by ART and its human allies to help. This introspection could become a bit too much, but the limited page space means the story has to proceed at a clip, and it ends up being an effective personal crisis for Murderbot to navigate whilst it deals with more traditional action-adventure and mystery plots.

There is also a nice subplot as Murderbot has to create its own media to convince a bunch of colonists about corporate corruption and indentured service, which is an interesting twist given Murderbot's own addiction to TV shows. This is a nice idea but it's given relatively short shrift, when it feels like it could have been expanded into a much larger episode. Interesting to see if the author revisits the concept later on.

The book also has an interesting line where an antagonist is turned into an ally, and seeing how Murderbot deals with this trope it's familiar with from its media exposure should be more interesting and fun then it ends up being.

Still, System Collapse (****) does what the series does best: a short, punchy story with enough time for thoughtful musings on the nature of sentience and self-volition, whilst fitting in some very nice action setpieces, worldbuilding and characterisation. The book is available now. New omnibus editions of the previous books should also be launching around this time, and the Apple TV+ adaptation of the books looks like it will launch later this year.

The Stormlight Archive Book 5: Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson

The war between the forces of Odium and those of the Knights Radiant has entered a dangerous new phase. Dalinar Kholin has negotiated a contest of champions, himself against Odium. Both sides have only ten days to seize as much territory as possible before this war will come to an end. But a devastating reversal has taken place which the Knights have no knowledge of: the shard of Odium has changed hands, and its new shardholder is a cannier, smarter foe far more willing to bend and flex than its former owner. From Shinovar in the west to the Shattered Plains in the east, the fate of Roshar, and perhaps the entire cosmere, hangs in the balance.

That sound you can hear right now is of reinforced bookshelf supports being delivered to hundreds of thousands of SFF fans across the globe. Bookshelves creak, strained by a weight they were never designed to hold. Yes, a new Stormlight Archive novel from Brandon Sanderson has arrived.

At 1,330 pages in hardcover and just a tad under half a million words by itself, Wind and Truth is the longest book in the series to date. It's also the most interesting. Whilst this is only the fifth of ten books in the series (and the seventeenth of potentially forty in the much wider Cosmere setting), it's the end of the first major story arc and has to "park" the various storylines for a planned ten-year timeskip before the sixth Stormlight book picks things back up. That book probably won't appear until the 2030s, with Sanderson committed to writing a new Mistborn trilogy and two sequels to Elantris before resuming this series.

In this sense Wind and Truth is Stormlight's equivalent to George R.R. Martin's A Storm of Swords, which also had to "park" a massive array of character and plot arcs in the Song of Ice and Fire series in preparation for a five-year timeskip which, in that case, never happened (and arguably caused problems that series is partially still confronting two and a half decades later, but that's a debate for elsewhere). It is a climax book that has to deliver massive payoffs and tee up the second half of the series but can't actually end the series.

In some senses it delivers: Wind and Truth is a massive countdown to a continent-shaking confrontation between Dalinar, the highly redoubtable, reformed war criminal turned leader of the resurrected Knights Radiant, and Odium, the principle force of evil on not just this planet, but the entire Cosmere setting. But, in arguably Sanderson's most satisfying plot twist to date, the previous incarnation of Odium was killed at the end of the prior novel, Rhythm of War, and replaced by what had appeared to have been a minor, sympathetic semi-antagonist up to that point, one with detailed knowledge of Dalinar and his allies. This creates a situation in which our heroes are fighting an enemy they literally know exists, and knows them better than they do themselves.

This results in Odium launching a complex, multi-pronged scheme to defeat and conquer as many of Dalinar's allies as possible, as fast as possible, and their increasingly desperate attempts to fend him off and survive until the deadline, with the slight problem that Dalinar still has no idea on how to actually win that confrontation when it arrives.

This structure gives us a ticking clock element, and four primary storylines that continue through the novel: Dalinar entering the Cognitive Realm to learn the deep backstory to the setting and figure out how Odium was defeated, or at least checkmated, in the past (with Shallan unwittingly tagging along); Kaladin and Szeth visiting Szeth's homeland of Shinovar to find out what's going on there; Adolin leading a desperate battle in western Roshar to fend off Odium's forces; and Sigzil and the rest of Kaladin's old Bridge Four unit leading a similar desperate battle in eastern Roshar. Characters like Lift, Wit/Hoid, Renarin and Rlain, Venli, Jasnah and Navani also have notable subplots.

This makes for a busy novel that - somewhat - justifies its yak-stunning length. This is an improvement over Oathbringer, which probably could have been reduced in length by half without losing anything too major, and Rhythm of War (aka Die Hard with a Sprengeance) which was not far off the same. Wind and Truth has a lot going on and Sanderson juggles it mostly quite well. That's not to say the novel doesn't occasionally feel indulgent: strategy meetings where characters debate the plot rather than getting on with the plot recall some of the sludgier moments of The Wheel of Time, and the elaborate Cognitive Realm TED Talks on Ancient Rosharan History start indulging in redundancy when we get to revisit the entire storyline a second time later in the novel, from a different POV.

The plots themselves also vary in quality. Kaladin and Szeth's trip around Shinovar feels like a different, almost completely self-contained novel, one that takes place in two time periods as we see both Szeth's flashback storyline and his present-day storyline, which are very similar and take place in many of the same locations (again causing a feeling of redundancy). The divorcing of their storyline from the rest of the novel makes it feel a bit disconnected, at least until the end makes its relevance clear. This storyline also drags, especially as Kaladin has been learning the art of therapy and gets to try out his various new learned techniques on Szath's numerous neuroses with all the enthusiasm (and ill-advised lack of forethought) of someone who's watched a few too many YouTube videos on mental health and not read enough deep studies or done enough actual studying. Prioritising mental health is a good thing, and that message in one of the biggest-selling modern fantasy series is laudable, but the emphasis placed on it sometimes feels incongruous, if not pace-killing.

Adolin's storyline is probably the most traditional hoo-rah epic fantasy one here, with lots of military planning, cool action sequences, epic battles and desperate fights for survival against overwhelming odds. This sequence is great (you can almost see an anime adaptation in your head as it goes on), but is potentially a bit overwrought by the time the battle has been going on for eight or nine days and eight or nine hundred pages.

Dalinar's storyline is the most important in the book, but also the vaguest. Much of his story has him viewing narrated histories about Roshar's deep past that you can almost imagine Ken Burns narrating, which is both catnip to lore...cats, but potentially boring to everyone else, so Sanderson interjects a lot of action by having Dalinar stalked by the mysterious Ghostbloods and having Shallan acting behind the scenes to stop them. A lot of this stuff is pretty good, but again you start to ponder if this could have been structured differently (especially when Dalinar gets to experience everything he's just seen again, but from a different point of view).

The final major storyline is the best-paced, with Sigzil and his team returning to visit the Shattered Plains (the evocative setting for the first book in the series, The Way of Kings) and getting embroiled in a humdinger of a complicated battle, which is further thrown for a loop by the arrival of a third side.

We flip between these storylines quite regularly, allowing all to be serviced on a frequent basis, although this can result in plot-whiplash as the reader is thrown from city to city to illusionary dream dimension to intense battle to tragic deaths to cutesy romantic exchanges and strained humour without much regard for tonal consistency.

The book is a lot even by the standards of the series so far, which can both breathlessly enjoyable but also frustrating, especially for those who find some storylines deeply engrossing and others much less so.

This is also the book which does feel like it breaks Sanderson's (already shaky) long-ago promise that readers would not have to have an in-depth knowledge of the entire Cosmere universe to enjoy any given series or even novel within it. We even spend brief parts of the book visiting Scadrial to set up the forthcoming Mistborn: Ghostbloods trilogy, and allusions to other books come thick and fast. At one point the book stops to give us a potted plot summary of Warbreaker (where the sword Nightblood first appeared), whilst one part of the ending exists to set up the events of the previously-published The Sunlit Man. This may be good from the point of view of the wider Cosmere setting, with Sanderson incorporating more elements into Stormlight that were originally planned for other books and series (thus reducing the total number of books he still has to write in the setting, which was starting to look a bit over-ambitious), but those Stormlight fans who weren't keen on Mistborn or his other works may be less happy about those wider setting elements colliding with Roshar here.

Of course, for those who love the interconnected elements of Sanderson's wider universe, this book will be outrageously enjoyable, satisfying, and prime Wiki-fodder.

Summarising a book of this breadth and heft is tricky, especially when you want to avoid "1990s flight sim expansion pack review syndrome" ("if you liked the last thing in the series, you'll like this too, I guess"). If you've read the previous books in the series, you're going to read this, and you'll have a good time; Sanderson sceptics will find little here to convince them otherwise. Wind & Truth (****) is better than the last two Stormlight books, but not as strong as The Way of Kings. Sanderson's weaknesses - a prosaic prose style, occasionally jarring use of modern language mixed in with more formal syntax, haphazard characterisation - are still present and correct, but his strengths are here as well: impressive worldbuilding, fascinating magic, explosive action sequences and satisfying moments of plot revelation and payoff. This novel also has an impressive amount of incident going on, paced surprisingly well for the book's staggering length. The book is available worldwide now.

The History of the World Begins in Ice by Kate Elliott

Kate Elliott has always been one of fantasy's more interesting voices, shifting her tone and voice to explore different ideas. Her Spiritwalker Trilogy (Cold Magic, Cold Fire, Cold Steel) has always felt a little underrated, as it's probably the most light-hearted of her adult fantasies, a comedy of manners set in an icepunk alt-history Europe populated by feuding mages and dinosaur lawyers. This companion volumes encourages a welcome re-appraisal of the original trilogy.

The History of the World Begins in Ice collects together eleven short stories and eleven essays about the worldbuilding and character-crafting of the Spiritwalker Trilogy. Familiarity with the trilogy is an advantage, otherwise you might not catch all the references, although most of the stories (many published previously in unrelated anthologies) do stand alone to a degree, and some work as even a good sampler or intro to the main series.

The Spiritwalker books walk a tightrope between being funny, dramatic, romantic and tragic, and the stories in the collection reflect that. "The River-Born Child," about a young boy with a strange origin who does not believe that should impact his right to happiness or friendships, is maybe the most tragic of the stories but has a redemptive ending. "Bloom" and "A Compendium of Architecture" are entertaining tales serving as origin stories, to some extent, for characters in the main trilogy, but work well enough here as standalones. "To Be a Man" revisits one of the more entertaining side-characters from the trilogy in a particularly lusty and comic tale.

Beatrice, who in another universe was the main protagonist of the trilogy before narrowly missing out to her cousin Cat, gets both her own long narrative (annotated with literary criticism of wildly varying credibility by Cat) and a long-form poem. Cat and Andevai, the star-crossed lovers of the main trilogy, get another story to expand on their romance, "The Courtship," which is entertaining, despite the feeling that their romance got a lot of screen-time in the main trilogy. Andevai's sartorial choices, which I remember forming about a third of his characterisation in the main sequence, are fortunately downplayed here, but do make return appearances in later stories (few phrases in all of fantasy make my heart sink more than the words "dash jacket," but I try to bear it here with equanimity).

The highlight of the collection is "I am a Handsome Man," where it feels like the star of his own, equally worthy novel series, Apollo Crow, crashes headlong into the misadventures of the trilogy's main cast and they have to figure out who the real good and bad guys are. I'd read a lot more about this hero (?) and his adventures. "A Lesson to You Young Ones," is the shortest story in the collection, which is unfortunate because it's also the only one to really focus one of the signature concepts of the setting, the surviving humanoid dinosaurs. These are both a really cool concept (not totally original, obviously) and one that's not really made enough of in the trilogy or this story collection.

"Finding the Doctor" is the longest story in the collection and also the most like the main trilogy, featuring as it does cold mage Andevai and the redoubtable Cat joining forces to take on a hazardous mission, this time behind the lines of the Roman Empire as it resurgently tries to advance beyond the Alps, threatening Cat's plan to find a reliable midwife for her cousin. The mix of drama, geopolitics, romance and restrained comedy is the trilogy in miniature, and a good sampler if you're pondering taking on the main series.

The concluding story, "When I Grow Up", is one of the best as it tackles the next generation of characters, as the main cast of the trilogy gets older and their children seem poised to succeed them in a story that's both heartwarming and bittersweet.

The essays in the collection are also fascinating as Elliot ponders her ideas for the trilogy: a world that recalls the geography of Europe during the last Ice Age, with Britain and Europe joined by Doggerland, much larger islands in the Caribbean, and the endurance of the Roman Empire, with no Germanic tribes overrunning Europe, thus leaving Europe divided between the Romans, Celts and the Mande tribes of west Africa, displaced into Europe by various events. Further essays discuss how the Creole languages of this alt-Caribbean were created, and how each of the main characters was created. Elliott notes how by placing emphasis on trivial character tics (like Cat's appetite) she was able to make characters more rounded, at the expense of readers sometimes wondering if that was a hint at some greater mystery.

The History of the World Begins in Ice (****½) is a splendid volume by one of fantasy's more underrated but consistently excellent voices. Part short story collection, part behind-the-scenes glimpse at how you build a fantasy world and inhabit it with interesting people, it's a compelling read, and both a solid introduction to the Spiritwalker world and a welcome continuation of it. The book is available now.

AVOWED is set in the same world as PILLARS OF ETERNITY and PILLARS OF ETERNITY II: DEADFIRE, earlier CRPGs from Obsidian. Those were party-based isometric, whilst AVOWED is first-person with a single protagonist, so the setting has about twelve years of development behind it already.

ATOMFALL looks interesting. It's based on the Windscale disaster, which was Britain's closest thing to Three Mile Island. It wasn't actually that bad, it was more a case of it could have been really bad but they got it under control.

Obsidian have previously shown good work when taking a Bethesda first-person RPG engine and combining it with their own writing chops (Fallout: New Vegas).

Obsidian's recent own-brand first-person RPG (Outer Worlds) was somewhat underwhelming and only sold okay (and only because it was a low-budget project).

If Avowed does meh, especially because for some reason they are not leaning hard on the Pillars of Eternity name recognition, that might convince Microsoft it's better to use Obsidian on an established IP with a certain degree of guaranteed, backed-in sales rather than continuing down this road of original IP material which is not selling great. Outer Worlds 2 will also be instructive in that regard. Obsidian may also want to use the "From the original creators of Fallout!" card whilst they still have Leonard Boyarsky on their team and Tim Cain as an advisor.

That said, Grounded's quiet success (20+ million sales and growing) and massive, massive profitability (the game cost peanuts, years ago) is giving Obsidian a lot of leeway with Microsoft on their other projects. And Pentiment costing little, doing surprisingly well probably helped them as well.

Starfield sold something like 10 million copies on release, not including people playing on GamePass, so clearly there was no financial blowback for the game being underwhelming.

There's also not much to be done to produce games more quickly. AAA video games now take 4-8 years to make of full-time production, let alone pre-production before that. Elder Scrolls VI only entered full-time production in 2023, so the people expecting it to come out much before 2028 (I encountered one enraged person who is expecting it to come out next year and would not be told otherwise) I think are in for disappointment. I wouldn't be surprised if we didn't see it before 2030, and Fallout 5 until the mid-2030s, unless they do get entire second teams on them.

If Avowed does not do too great, I can see Microsoft tasking them to make a new Fallout game in the interim.

It feels like it's a good time to re-express my flabbergastness that Bethesda still hasn't released Elder Scrolls 6.

And if we see it in 2028 I'll be surprised, and if it was delayed until next decade, that would not be too surprising either.

And if ES6 comes out and it's like Starfield, or just a slightly prettier Skyrim, I think that's when the wheels will come off the Bethesda juggernaut.

Fairly generous?! Are you getting paid by Bethesda (genuine question) because 5-6 hours of story content and absolutely nothing else new about it for $30 US dollars is NOT "fairly generous" it's a cash grab.

Shadows of the Erdtree, THAT was generous (basically a whole other game for $40).

It's more like 12-15 hours of content. You can maybe speedrun the main quest through the expansion in 6 hours or so, but not doing any of the side-quests and not doing the exploration of the area around the city (which leads to locations and side-quest chains which do not spiral out of main questline).

In that sense it's pretty much exactly like Point Lookout, Old World Blues or Nuka-World, but not quite on a par with Far Harbor or Dragonborn amongst Bethesda expansions. And of course the base game is Bethesda's weakest in some considerable time (perhaps since Daggerfall), although some of the criticism is overblown. Now including Shattered Space, I have 93 hours in Starfield which is less than half what I have in Skyrim or Fallout 4, and only more than New Vegas, Oblivion and Fallout 3 because they are smaller games with less actual content in them (though I do have more in New Vegas but only because of multiple playthroughs).

Currently playing STALKER 2 and it's making me wish that Fallout 5 will take more of a cue from this (obviously not as insanely punishing though) and not the increasing trend towards blandness that Bethesda is pushing.

Thoughts on STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl after 4 hours in the game.

It's oddly similar to the original game, with a similar introduction and route to the first safe town/hub, skirting anomalies. The graphics are obviously vastly superior and this game is much more forgiving, although this is only relative to the first (insanely harsh) game. The first zone mutant you meet is an invisible bullet sponge guy that will likely kill you a few times before you get its attack pattern sussed. However, ammo is easier to come by, weapon degradation is not as ludicrous and virtually all human enemies will go down with a single shot to the head. Less than 4 hours in, I stormed a heavily-guarded paramilitary outpost (the game is vague on whether these are Russian or Ukrainian government troops, or some kind of rogue militia) and killed a couple of dozen guys inside through stealth and the use of a silenced pistol. It was still considerably harder than most modern FPS games, but satisfying. Because the game is systemic rather than proscripted, you can also cheese it a little in places, but not too much.

One complaint is that there's a few pretty cool action setpieces that happen in cutscenes when they would have made for good gameplay sequences. For a game as open-world as this one, that was an odd choice.

The English language VO is utter drivel. Play in Ukrainian with subtitles of your choice.

The game mostly feels like a cross between Far Cry 2 without the annoying regenerating enemies bullshit and Fallout: New Vegas in survival mode with the difficulty ramped up to Hard even when you're playing on Normal. A more punishing, less whimsical Fallout is probably the closest touchstone, which will likely irritate STALKER fans as the first STALKER predated all of the modern Bethesda Fallous, but still. So far, so outstanding.

Bugs were not too bad. One CTD, one wounded guy in a bed I was talking to decided to levitate up to around 3 feet above the bed to continue the conversation (alas, he did not say, "There is no Dana, there is only Zuul"), and one guy took shelter from an Emission Storm next to a tree rather than the town's hardened shelter, which resulted in his very rapid death. Not sure if that was a bug or the game saying, "some people are just really stupid, right?"

Discworld #31: Monstrous Regiment

With war raging - or shambolically bumbling around - bar worker Polly Perks decides to go searching for her missing brother. She poses as a man to join the army and is assigned to a new regiment, only to find out almost the entire company has had the same idea. With women doing men's work also deemed an Abomination Unto Nuggan, the regiment has to keep their heads down, infiltrate an enemy keep, and work out how to rescue/escape their assorted family members, and, if possible, end the war before it causes any more damage.

Throughout his prolific career, Sir Terry Pratchett had a knack for using his witty dialogue, sharp prose and keen knowledge of history and culture to explore many different concepts. In most cases, he produced a brilliant Discworld book exploring a certain idea, like the press or the dangers of fundamentalist religion. But, when he turned his attention to the idea of war, he uncharacteristically dropped the ball. Jingo was perfectly okay, but lacked his trademark intelligence and depth.

Ten books later, he decided to give it another go, and this time nailed it. If Jingo was about the superficialities of going to war for absolutely no sane reason, Monstrous Regiment is about war as a much more complex force. Here we have burned-out homesteads, villages standing amidst salted fields and people's homes being invaded for reasons they don't really understand. Borogravia is fighting a defensive war against invaders, but it's also been a bellicose lunatic in the past, and is being flattened under the weight of the abuse heaped upon it by its own rulers. This creates a complex stew of ideas and themes, which is where Pratchett is at his best.

Polly and her fellow soldiers have little interest in the greater geopolitical complexities of the war, instead just trying to rescue individual people from the maelstrom. But, thanks to a chance encounter with newspaper reporter William de Worde (cameoing from The Truth), their mission inadvertently becomes famous across half the continent, and takes on a grander importance. It's also symbolic of the losses Borogravia has suffered, where an entire regiment is made up of women because there's increasingly few men left able to fight.

As in his best, most cutting books, Pratchett remembers to keep the funny: the regiment consists of an assortment of funny characters, the most memorable being Maladict, a suave, reformed vampire who has sworn off blood but developed an equally crippling addiction to coffee. But there's an undercurrent of seriousness here that is powerful: more than a few of the recruits have been victimised, and how they deal with trauma is a subtle but constant theme of the book. Sergeant Jackrum also emerges as one of Pratchett's most fascinating characters, a counterpoint of his more familiar Commander Vimes (who has a few brief appearances in the novel as an Ankh-Morpork liaison) who went down a decidedly more disturbing path (with more than a whiff of Life on Mars' Gene Hunt to them as well, for good and ill).

The book unfolds with a very deliberate pace: at just under 500 pages this is one of the longest Discworld novels but it earns its length by dividing the narrative into several distinct sections as the mission unfolds, as well as the larger-than-normal cast giving Pratchett a lot of characters to develop. But this also gives the book the feel of holding a stick of dynamite that's about to go off. Pratchett is known for being funny but he is absolutely at his best when he is angry, and I get the distinct impression as he wrote the book and continued researching things like the treatment of people in war, especially women and "non-conformists," he got progressively angrier. By the time the book concludes, the humour is so laced with white-hot rage that it is positively acidic. But Pratchett also never loses control. He doesn't go into some lecturing rant (a weakness some of his other books suffer from) and he never dissipates the focus on the story or characters.

Monstrous Regiment (*****) is Pratchett's take on war - actual, messy, horribly murky war - and gender and politics. It's a long book, by his standards, but he maintains the pacing and tension to deliver one of his finest and most thought-provoking novels.

I've been playing SHATTERED SPACE, the first big expansion for STARFIELD. I hadn't logged in for a while and missed a bunch of big updates, so it was a surprise to find vastly improved maps, a buggy for much-improved surface travel, and much better wayfinding.

The actual new expansion is fairly generous, featuring a huge, creepy space station to explore and then a visit to the Va'ruun homeworld. This is a completely bespoke-created planet with a fairly large map, lots of new (handcrafted!) points of interest and a surprisingly large array of quests and sub-quests to go through.

It does feel a bit like Bethesda retreating from their own design ideas in the game (so no space travel is needed after reaching the planet), which is a bit dull, but they are trying to double down on a more familiar, ELDER SCOLLS/FALLOUT-y design, which works okay.

Still can't help feeling that they missed out on a lot of potential here, and when faced with the prospect of doing something new or just reskinning OBLIVION again, they chose the latter. Oh well.

There was a supplement for Waterdeep. FR1 Waterdeep.

There was also the City System box set for 1E, the Waterdeep: City of Splendors boxed set for 2E, and the City of Splendors: Waterdeep hardcover book for 3E, plus the adventure Waterdeep (part of the Avatar Trilogy), and Volo's Guide to Waterdeep. Waterdeep is probably the most heavily-covered city in the Forgotten Realms if not the most heavily-covered fantasy city in TTRPGs full stop.

However, I think they're not quite what was being looked for, which was a full-on adventure/campaign using the city. All of those resources had small-scale sample adventures with them, but not some kind of big uber-campaign like Enemy Within, which was really something else in its day.

I've put together a distinctly non-interactive map of Golarion (Imgur likes to shrink things down, so sorry if it's not fully legible). I was hoping to get some feedback on anything that was obviously wrong there.

I've been mapping the Forgotten Realms and things like Westeros and the Wheel of Time world for years (via here) and I was inspired to map out Golarion after playing Kingmaker a couple of years back.

The main project is a new map of the traditional area (Avistan/northern Garund) in an AD&D 2nd Edition style, and that's mostly done, although the completionist in me demanded I also include the full areas mapped for
Iobaria and Qadira, which pushed the map boundary way off to the east (so even the far western end of Iblydos sneaks onto the very edge of the map). And then I got the angle on some mountains wrong, so they need to be reworked. But hopefully that will get done with a few weeks' more work. It is massive.

The agreement with the Tolkien family allows them to make five seasons, it doesn't mean they've pre-greenlit five seasons (they haven't, and they haven't even greenlit Season 3 yet but that is incoming) and if the viewership drops significantly, they'll take the short-term financial hit rather than carrying on making a very expensive show and taking a bigger and bigger long-term hit.

Season 2 seems to have gotten 40 million viewers for its initial episode release over the first ten days or so, which is down somewhat on Season 1 (53 million in the same time period), but still pretty healthy compared to the current streaming market. This seems to be in line or still exceeding Amazon expectations. Any further slip, or the revelation that they had a poor completion rate for Season 2, might complicate that further.

FALLOUT LONDON came out today. Getting it working with Steam is fairly daunting, I'm just trying to work out if I really want to buy FO4 again on GoG (which is far, far easier to get working with the mod).

The gameplay videos all look really good though. The size of the thing is bonkers, the modders had been saying that it was like an expansion and then it came out and the map is bigger than Boston in FO4 and the in-game tracker indicates there are over 200 quests, which is more than in FO4 and its DLC combined. Calling this a mod is insulting, it's almost a whole new game.

It's set 100 years before the events of The Phantom Menace, as the opening scrawl (it has an opening scrawl, well not a proper one but some text) says, in the High Republic Era.

The central conceit was a bit shlocky but not too bad (the OG trilogy had its fair share of soap opera twists as well). The cast is solid and this is the first live-action Star Wars show that seems really happy to bring in the aliens, after almost none at all in Andor. And new aliens as well!

It also seems interesting in setting up the antagonists as having possibly valid reasons for doing what they're doing rather than just because they're evil.

Paper Girls by Brian K. Vaughan & Cliff Chiang

1 November 1988. Erin Tieng, a new resident of Stony Stream, on the outskirts of Cleveland, Ohio, is starting her new role delivering newspapers. Falling afoul of Halloween revellers, she joins forces with three other paper girls for mutual protection: Mac, KJ and Tiffany. The girls find their job complicated by the normal problems: creepy residents, overzealous cops, bullies and, obviously, a trans-temporal war between two different groups of time travellers from the far and even further futures. Sucked into a conflict spanning millions of years, the four girls have to work out how to survive, get home and prevent the annihilation of the universe. And get their papers delivered on time.

Paper Girls was an American comic book published between 2015 and 2019. Written by Brian K. Vaughan, better-known as the writer of the epic science fiction saga known as, er, Saga, the series has become a cult hit over the years. Amazon started adapting the show in 2022, creating a first season that was well-cast and excellently paced with some intriguing variances from the source material whilst also remaining faithful to the big picture. Obviously, being good, it could not be allowed to survive beyond a single season.

The original comic series was collected into a single volume a few years back, large enough to be used to stun a yak if wielded correctly. Read as a single piece, Paper Girls is relentless in its pacing. Every issue throws new ideas, new factions, new characters (or different versions of existing ones) and new creatures at the reader. Weird alien beings from another dimension? Sure. Dinosaurs? Obviously! Older versions of the main characters suffering from existential and mid-life crises? Go wild. This turns the book into a compelling page-turner, if an occasionally confusing one. Unlike the well-paced Saga, it's sometimes easy to lose the thread of what's going on in Paper Girls, what each faction is after, what resources they have access to and so forth.

In a way that increases the reader's empathy with the core quartet of girls, who sometimes get as lost in the morass of competing timelines, alternate selves and wars being fought for obscure reasons that haven't even happened yet. Our central quartet are grounded, interesting characters who grow and learn from their crazy experience. Sure, maybe they take the insane events a little too easily in their stride (the TV show works a bit better by slowing down the craziness, giving them more time to adjust to what's happening), but that also feels true to the 1980s SF movies the comic feels like it's homaging.

Ultimately the crazy SF antics are a backdrop to the simple notion of adolescent friendship. As Stephen King said, the friendships you form in later life are nothing like the ones you form at and before the age of 13 or so, and the whole book feels like it revolves around that idea. This gives the story universality, but can feel a bit like an overtrodden path, especially as contemporary projects like the superficially similar Stranger Things (which started after Paper Girls but obviously got a lot more attention) also went down the same route. But universal narratives which a lot of people can relate to remain powerful, especially if attached to the furniture of combat robots, weaponised lizards and religions emerging from modern corporate entities.

Paper Girls: The Complete Story (****) is a fun, breathless read, if sometimes a tad overwhelming or confusing. The well-drawn central characters pull the narrative back on course when it threatens to meander, and there's enough crazy SF antics to keep genre fans entertained.

Deathless Divide

The undead plague continues to roll across the United States of America. The east coast is almost gone, and the midwest is under siege. Escaping the ruin of Summerland, Jane McKeene and nemesis-turned-ally Katherine Deveraux try to make it to a neighbouring town, where a scientist hopes to have unlocked a cure for the undead curse...or at least an immunisation. Betrayals threaten, and the last hope of California gleams on the horizon, if they can make it that far.

Deathless Divide is the sequel and follow-up to Justina Ireland's 2018 novel, Dread Nation, picking up moments after that book ended. The first half of the novel is essentially more Dread Nation, continuing story and character arcs directly from that book (you can't really read this novel as a standalone). This remains compelling, with Jane and Katherine's fiery frenemy relationship continuing to provide a solid dramatic spine for the story.

Halfway through, there's an abrupt time jump to a point where things have become considerably more apocalyptic, with Jane and Katherine now separated and pursuing different storylines, which eventually lead them back into contact and on the road to their much-dreamt goal of reaching California. This allows Ireland to explore the two characters' growth and change, or in Jane's case a regression as she becomes hyper-fixated on vengeance against someone who wronged her, to the point of destroying every other relationship in her life.

The book has a grimmer tone even than its forebear, with a real end-of-the-world vibe missing from a lot of other apocalyptic fiction, but Katherine's determination to be bright and optimistic and behave properly cuts through that in an entertaining fashion. The continent may have been consumed by a ravening horde of undead, but that's no excuse for not keeping your weapons cleaned and riding a horse in an appropriate manner for a lady.

Ireland continues to further her successes from Dread Nation: there is some excellent action, some good character arcs and development, and some great use of the premise to explore issues of Civil War and Reconstruction-era racism and resentment (no matter how insane that is in the face of a much bigger, all-consuming threat). She also provides some great zombie action (no easy thing for a foe this overexposed and tired), and the interesting idea of being able to create an inoculation against the undead, raising the bizarre idea of maybe people and zombies could just coexist?

Unfortunately, the book's structure provides its biggest weakness: the move from being a direct continuation of the fall of Summerland to a much larger-scaled story involving travelling to and across California feels a little jarring, and the action in the latter half of the novel, including some very major character beats as they find things they've been looking for since the opening of the first book, feels very compressed. I get the impression, accurate or not, that this could have been a trilogy with the two halves of the novel each serving as its own book. Instead, compressing the two distinct stories into one novel makes things feel a bit too rushed, especially in the rear half.

Still, Deathless Divide (****) is a worthy follow-up to its forebear, being entertaining, well-written and thought-provoking whilst delivering good action. It just feels like the story could have been improved with a little bit more room to breathe.

Okay good. (You're moving fast!) (I didn't and then screwed up and had to replay about four hours worth of adventure.)

I just rolled with that, it was too much work to go back and do it.

I also did the Goblin Camp completely arse-backwards, by sneaking into the heart of the keep via the underground passages, befriending the bizarrely Scottish spiders, releasing said spiders, then healing them as they tore through the goblin ranks.

That then made the entire camp hostile to me (it wasn't me, it was the spiders!) and I had to fight my way out instead of being able to poison half the camp first. I also couldn't save the owlbear cub doing it that way. I only barely survived by summoning the ogre reinforcement squad and letting them soak up a lot of incoming fire.

Yeah, Larian's quest design is pretty ropey. In both cases, doing the quests in reverse order broke some things, which seemed a bit lame given how much they're boasting about their interactivity.

Yay!

Now I'm just hoping against hope to see some cameos from the games relevant to how the series ended... I know they want to focus on the show's characters, and they should, but it would be cool to see some more familiar faces...

I don't think they have officially greenlit it, they just leaked that the show had been talking to California's government about a big tax break if they moved Season 2 there.

However, it's been Amazon's #1 show for a week and it picked up serious buzz and positive reviews. I suspect Season 2 will be greenlit, especially as the tax break basically means they get two episodes for free.

As for your last point:

The start of the game does seem to be threading the wire of "hiring all the cool characters from the memes and trailers" and "killing them off-hand thinking they're a random encounter."

So far (three episodes in), pretty good. Lots of call-outs to the game but the main story works reasonably well, and the three-POV structure allows them to flesh out the world better than in the games.

It's also amusing seeing how they try to actually have moments in the show that follow the game, like Lucy blatantly failing a Speech check on the Ghoul.

Michael Emerson also outstanding in a small role.

Ciaphas Cain #9: The Greater Good

The Imperial planet of Quadravidia has come under attack by the Tau. Commissar Ciaphas Cain arrives to advise on the defence of the planet, after several previous encounters with the untrustworthy species. However, the Tau call an unexpected ceasefire in the face of a greater, mutual threat: an incoming Tyranid Hive Fleet. Cain's mission moves from combat to diplomacy as he has to broker a deal between the Tau and Imperium - the latter not known for its interstellar diplomacy - and then help defend the planet from the new alien menace.

We're back in the mayhem with the ninth novel of Sandy Mitchell's Ciaphas Cain series, in which the grim darkness of the far future is alleviated by the presence of the most self-preserving and undeserved glory-receiving specimen in the Imperium of Man.

The Greater Good puts Cain's reputation front and centre as he has to negotiate a peace deal between the Imperium - whose entire ideology is "shoot aliens in the face and never, ever talk to them," - and the Tau, a race dedicated to the somewhat nebulous concept of "the greater good." There's a degree of a comedy of manners here as the two species' highly incompatible ways of working clash with Cain trying to avoid war in the face of the greater Tyranid threat.

This stuff takes up a few chapters and then we're back to the battle front as bullets fly and large things explode spectacularly. Mitchell is accomplished at both the action and the black comedy sides of the setting (Cain sometimes feeling like the Only Sane Man in the entire barmy Warhammer 40,000 universe) and serves up both with aplomb here. Particularly entertaining are the deranged human scientists who think experimenting on live Tyranids is a good idea (spoiler: it isn't) and the Space Marines who worryingly agree with them.

There's a nice amount of variety to the story, as it moves from diplomacy to grim humour to action, although it does feel some ideas are left under-explored, such as the human inhabitants of the Tau Empire and how they regard the Imperium from a human, outsider perspective. There's also the usual advice that, although the omnibuses are most economical way to enjoy Cain's story, it's perhaps a good idea to read other things between the books, as Mitchell is perhaps less concerned than other authors in the setting with varying his prose style or characterisation between stories.

Still, this is an exciting action story with some laughs and some brief moments of thoughtful discussion. The Greater Good (****) is definitely one of the stronger entries to the series.

Also included in the Ciaphas Cain: Saviour of the Imperium omnibus is the long novella/short novel Old Soldiers Never Die (****), which is a fast-paced zombie story as Cain and his trusty Valhallan allies find themselves stuck on a planet beset by a particularly nasty Chaos curse. Ciaphas Cain vs. Zombies is just as good as it sounds on the tin, and the short format means the story doesn't outstay its welcome.

The Spacing Guild refuse to put satellites in orbit around Arrakis. They claim that the static of the storms makes them useless, but in reality they're being paid off by the Fremen using spice they're mining in the south. The Harkonnens and the Emperor suspect this but cannot prove it.

I think the film did a reasonable point of making out that the Fremen in the northern hemisphere are only part of the entire Fremen culture, and those who are actively fighting and engaging the Harkonnens are really only Stilgar's forces from Sietch Tabr and a few allies. So the numbers of Fremen involved in combat operations is minuscule compared to their true numbers. When the other northern Fremen and all the tribes of the south ally, their numbers completely take the Harkonnens and Emperor by surprise. By blowing the Shield Wall with atomics (the use of nuclear weapons in warfare is prohibited; their use against geographical features is permissible) they are able to attack from an unexpected vector. The storm also grounds Harkonnen airpower. Without that the Fremen are technologically much closer to their opponents.

The Fremen are not badass just from living in harsh environments, but from their personal mantra of discipline and warrior culture, not just on Arrakis but on every planet of the Zensunni Wanderings before that, stretching back well over ten thousand years. The reason the Fremen are so good is that there is no real technological disparity (versus Native American warriors, whose bravery and skill was often not in doubt, but were outclassed by the discipline, superior firepower and superior numbers of the invaders), with them also having firearms, las-weapons, aircraft (in small numbers) etc, as well as having Reverend Mothers with skills comparable to Bene Gesserit, contacts in the Spacing Guild and so on.

Admittedly one area the 1984 movie improves on is giving the Fremen the weirding modules to give them a technological edge on the Harkonnens to entail a speedy victory, whilst the novel has Jessica teaching many of the Fremen the weirding method of combat (hyperfast martial arts) which doesn't happen in this film for some reason.

Ciaphas Cain #8: The Last Ditch

Commissar Ciaphas Cain and the Valhallan 597th are deployed to Nusquam Fundumentibus to deal with an incursion of orks. The campaign promises to be standard, although still dangerous, until Cain learns of a far greater threat lurking on the planet, one which sees both the humans and orks as enemies.

The redoubtable Ciaphas Cain - the science fantasy by-product of an unholy union between Flashman and BlackAdder - returns in his eighth novel. Once again, Cain is deployed to a trouble spot which seems a bit iffy, but practical to deal with. Also once again, complications ensure which gives Cain an enormous headache and results in a highly enjoyable adventure for the reader.

The previous Cain novel, The Emperor's Finest, was solid but did not represent the series at its best, with too much of Cain and Jurgen running around in isolated corridors where the opportunities for Cain - and Mitchell - to show off their skills with entertaining dialogue and character observations were limited. Fortunately, The Last Ditch is a return to form. Whilst we once again get a lot of action sequences, we also get a lot more character development and even politics, as Cain has to balance the needs of the 597th in fighting the ork incursion with the civil administration of the planet, who are trying to hold things together in the face of collapse. Of course, Cain (and the aromatic Jurgen) ends up at the hot end of the fighting despite desperately trying to find reasons to stay behind the lines.

The timeline means we get to spend more time with the characters of the 597th, including the batty Sulla, whose insane hero worship of Cain (further enhanced by excerpts from her later-published, badly-overwritten memoirs) remains extremely amusing. However, by this time Cain has been fighting (successfully) alongside the 597th for so long that Colonel Kasteen and Major Broklaw just go along with anything he suggests, which means relatively little tension in that quarter.

Tension is restored by the difficult relationship between the 597th, Cain and the planetary governor, who for once is (relatively) immune to Cain's charms and tries to continue politicking even in the face of an overwhelming alien threat. This is promising, but Mitchell punts off this storyline for Kasteen and Broklaw to deal with off-page, meaning we only get edited highlights from the subplot whilst Cain is off elsewhere.

Another potential source of rich conflict is Cain encountering a younger, more gung-ho Commissar fresh out of the academy, all too eager to start executing Imperial troops the nanosecond they slack off. Cain's more pragmatic, cooperative approaching clashing with the raw orthodoxy of the Commissariat would again be an interesting storyline, but again it's cut short by Commissar Forres relatively quickly coming around to Cain's way of thinking and becoming a useful ally.

Still, if Mitchell dodges these potentially engaging storylines, what we have is fun enough. A relatively epic narrative featuring a raging war across an entire planet told in a commendably concise number of pages, with enough plots twists, reversals, action sequences and wry humour to satisfy fans of the series, The Last Ditch (****) is entertaining. The novel is available now as part of the Ciaphas Cain: Saviour of the Imperium omnibus, along with the preceding and succeeding novels and several short stories.

Final trailer.

The show launches on 22 February, so not long to see if they've nailed it.

Ciaphas Cain #7: The Emperor's Finest

Having narrowly escaped from an encounter with the feared necrons, Commissar Ciaphas Cain finds himself assigned as liaison to the Reclaimers Space Marine chapter, noted for their formidable weaponry, immense bravery and sometimes over-eager interest in technology. When rebel insurgents launch an uprising on Viridia against the local government, Cain fancies they are in for an easy campaign against an inferior foe. Of course, it's not long before genestealers abound, and Cain finds himself stuck with an overeager noble lady keen to ensnare him in political games, and a hellbound pursuit of a rogue hulk through deep space.

The misadventures of Ciaphas Cain are probably among the most purely entertaining in the Warhammer 40,000 canon. Whilst most books focus more on the "grim darkness" and "only war" bits of the setting, Sandy Mitchell's signature series instead tries to lighten things up, at least relatively. Commissar Cain believes himself to be blustering, cowardly and too eager to run at the first sign of trouble, but is constantly manoeuvred by fate into positions where he has no choice but to apparently-eagerly run to the front lines or into the most dangerous area possible, often surviving by the skin of his teeth and sometimes unexpectedly saving the day in such an outrageously public way. By this seventh novel in the series, things have gotten ludicrous enough that Cain is now getting full honour salutes from squads of Terminator Space Marines for his bravery (roughly akin to an angel saluting a particularly tenacious chimpanzee).

Of course, Cain's complaints about his cowardice and self-serving needs do seem to be contradicted by his actual proven ability to get tasks achieved and his impressive combat skills, and his constantly-present (via footnotes of varying degrees of bewilderment) editor-confessor, Inquisitor Amberly Vail, seems unsure about to what degree his "confession" is actual modesty, or even some psychological defence mechanism to rationalise a deeper-seated need to face death on a daily basis. This deep in the series it's a still a mystery (one I doubt will ever be solved), so it's probably best to move on and enjoy the ride.

The Emperor's Finest is, like most books in the series, fairly short but also packs a ton in. The book has three distinct sections, which less-disciplined authors might have tried to expand into a whole novel by themselves. The battle for Viridia is entertaining, with Cain acting as a liaison between the superhuman Space Marines and the ordinary human defenders, and getting into a Warhammer 40,000 meetcute (which means moderate flirting over the roaring exchange of bolter fire) with the governor's daughter, Mira. A slightly more interminable middle section follows as the Reclaimers try to track down the origin of the tyranid infestation, a space hulk cheerily named the Spawn of Damnation, whilst Cain tries to both win the respect of the Reclaimers and fend off Mira's attempts to lure him into political intrigue. The final section sees Cain, Jurgen (Cain's aide, think of the product of an unholy union of Baldrick and Gregor Clegane) and the Reclaimers let loose aboard the space hulk and finding things are far more complicated then they first imagined.

Mitchell delivers this with typical panache, with moments of humour and levity mixed in with above-competent action sequences and Vail's wry footnote interjections. However, the formula feels a tad off this time around. After a promising start, Mira never really develops into an interesting character and her storyline feels a bit rote. Cain's interactions with the Reclaimers and their crewmembers also hold a lot of promise but again are not fleshed out well: Cain's achievements in the book (from an outside POV) are highly impressive but I'm not sure he's done enough to earn the Reclaimers' overwhelming respect at the end. Cain is also at his best when in circumstances with lots of options for his natural self-serving tendencies to emerge and the reader to be left in doubt about his selfish/brave motivations. Here he spends a third of the book trapped on a space hulk with his back to the wall and no choice but to proceed to survive, which makes for a solidly tense adventure but doesn't service the character's best attributes.

Still, the book is short, to the point, has good action and some doses of light humour that the setting rather badly needs at time, so it's hard to complain too much. The Emperor's Finest (***½) delivers the required entertainment, but doesn't go above and beyond like the better books in the series. The novel is available now as part of the Ciaphas Cain: Saviour of the Imperium omnibus, along with its two succeeding novels and several short stories.

Baldur's Gate III was a well-deserving winner. The combination of traditional RPG mechanics with modern production values was hugely compelling, even if, strictly speaking, many other Gatelikes had better stories or mechanics or both (Pillars of Eternity 2, the two Pathfinder games from Owlcat, Tyranny).

Basically, any game where you can interrupt a villain's long monologue to yeet him into lava is going to get a round of applause from me.

Alan Wake 2 was outrageously good as well. The rotating between the two protagonists, the mechanics allowing newcomers to get onboard without any familiarity with the first game (which has aged middlingly, being generous), the excellent voice acting, the ludicrous graphics (the first time a game has actually tricked my brain into seeing it as photorealistic, at least in certain areas/lighting conditions) and the "walking around inside a music video" sequence which is easily the best single video game setpiece of the year (BG3 actually has its own banging musical number during the battle in Avernus, but it's not quite as impressive).

Phantom Liberty was also both excellent in its own right and completed Cyberpunk 2077's redemption arc in full. Getting Sad Keanu on the train (and being able to use trains!) was the icing on the cake.

Starfield was okay...ish, but easily Bethesda's weakest game since Daggerfall. Some interesting stuff in there but also some genuinely baffling design decisions.

Book 2: Blade of Dream

Garreth Left is the heir to one of the merchant families of Kithamar, but their economic prospects have become dire. An alliance with a faction outside the city provides salvation, but at a price that Garreth is not willing to pay. Elaine ab-Deniya Nycis a Sal is a princess of the city, the daughter to the heir apparent to the throne. Moving into the palace for the first time, she uncovers mysterious secrets that she should - but cannot - let go. Elaine and Garreth's destines entwine with those of a city watch captain and the ruler of the city's criminal underground, and a tumultuous year continues to turn around the great city of Kithamar.

The Kithamar Trilogy is Daniel Abraham's latest fantasy work. The co-author of the Expanse space opera series and the solo author of the Long Price Quartet and the Dagger and the Coin series, Abraham has long been praised as an author of character-based fantasy with interesting, original worlds and forms of magic. This trilogy takes a new approach, with three books set in the same city at the same time but involving different characters, sort of a fantasy version of Krzysztof Kieslowski's classic Three Colours film trilogy. Each story more or less stands alone but reading the whole trilogy results in greater understanding of the epic events unfolding under the surface: each book has a piece of the puzzle that becomes clear when all three are read.

Balancing this metaplot with the needs of the book at hand can be tricky, and the first book in the triad, Age of Ash, did not always succeed in doing so. It remains an excellent book but there was a greater feeling that you didn't have all the pieces of the puzzle. Blade of Dream is much more successful in crafting a compelling narrative on its own as well as working as part of a broader whole.

The story this time is perhaps a tad more traditional fantasy. Garreth is the young man unsure of his station and ambitions who rebels against the stifling destiny his family want to force on him. Elaine is the noblewoman likewise unsure of her station who has few friends she can trust, as opposed to those who want to take advantage of her station. They are thrust together by circumstances and find a new way forwards, through political intrigue, back-alley stabbings and full-on conflict between the city guard and a criminal organisation. Blade of Dream is literally a "higher" book than Age of Ash, taking place in the mercantile and royal districts whilst Age of Ash was more at home in the downmarket slums.

Blade of Dream certainly works as a far above-average example of a medieval (ish) city-set fantasy, but it's also a powerfully emotional book. Abraham delves into his characters' heads to craft very three-dimensional and interesting protagonists, and what drives and motivates them. I've occasionally mused that Abraham could be the closest author we have to becoming a natural heir of Guy Gavriel Kay, but that feeling is hugely intensified by this book. The traditional fantasy trappings could be dropped altogether and this would still work wonderfully as a character study. But those traditional fantasy trappings are here, and realised well with a compelling mystery and some fascinating worldbuilding.

Blade of Dream (****½) is an improvement on its forebear and marks this trilogy as Abraham's most mature and interesting work yet. The final novel in the trilogy, with the working title Judge of Worlds, is due out next year.

Discworld #30: The Wee Free Men

Nine-year-old Tiffany Aching is serious and studious for her age, and has little truck with myths and superstition. When her brother is kidnapped by an evil supernatural force from another universe and she is offered an alliance with the Nac Mac Feegle, a species of diminutive-but-psychotic warriors, this offends Tiffany's worldview. But pragmatism wins out, and she has to reluctantly embark on an adventure.

The Wee Free Men is the thirtieth Discworld novel, and when you're thirty books into any series you might be forgiven for resting on your laurels a bit, especially when the previous one, Night Watch, is often cited as the best thing you've ever written. For Sir Terry Pratchett, this was not an option. Having experimented with a Discworld book for younger audiences, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, he decided to start a whole new sub-series within the wider Discworld framework that would be aimed primarily at younger readers.

Pratchett being Pratchett, this meant relatively little changes or compromises to his usual vision. Some of the very occasional double entendre gags are gone, the book is somewhat shorter than usual, but beyond that Pratchett didn't really censor himself at all. If anything, this is a more thoughtful, contemplative Discworld book than the norm, with some enjoyable setpieces interrupted by Tiffany's internal musings on life and her ambitions.

Tiffany is smart, curious and sensible, not given to recklessness but also having a strong moral centre. She may be a quintessential Discworld protagonist, being often the only sane person in the room and constantly wondering why selfishness and hatred even exist. She is cut from the same competence cloth as Granny Weatherwax and Samuel Vimes, but lacks their experience and cynicism. She is a well-drawn protagonist who has to overcome problems presented by capable enemies, rather than because she's holding an idiot ball (something many other writers could learn from).

What is impressive about The Wee Free Men is how much of it is told from within Tiffany's head: the Nac Mac Feegle are not given to in-depth dialogue (although they have a few bon mots of wisdom) and many of the other characters are evil, monsters, stupid adults or even less-communicative children. Just about the only person Tiffany can have a decent 1:1 conversation with is a sentient toad. This means we get to lock into Tiffany's thought processes and motivations in a lot of depth, which is refreshing.

Taking part in a hitherto-unexplored part of the Disc with almost no recurring characters (not even Death, making this the first Discworld novel that he skips out on), at least until the last chapter, The Wee Free Men also makes a viable on-roading point for the entire series. Technically the main villain did (briefly) appear in Lords and Ladies, but that is really not alluded to in the book so is not hugely important.

The Wee Free Men (****½) sheds a lot of the extended subplots that had started padding out the Discworld books around this time and is focused and entertaining, with a small but well-drawn cast of characters. It's funny, but intermittently, with musings on growing up and responsibility. For the first in a new, YA (or outright children)-focused series, it's surprisingly contemplative and thoughtful, and all the richer for it.

Impressive.

Guns, speedboats, some "hey fellow kids," humour (an ingame version of TikTok I could do without), races, and graphics that blow everything else out of the water. They're back in the zone.

The biggest gawp-worthy thing here is the crowd density. Games have been making big strides here (Cyberpunk 2077 and even Starfield had huge improvements in this area), but GTA6 might be the first time the crowd density for a Miami-level city looks convincing.

Also, the series' first proper female protagonist in a singleplayer, mainline title, as people have speculated for years (you could play a woman in both GTA1 and GTA Online, but no real storyline to speak of).

Unsurprisingly, it's back to Vice City with a very strong "Florida Man" vibe. Alligators look like they're going to be a huge, constant threat in the game as well.

I meant the pip-boy "character" not the device.

The release date announcement trailer is an animation of Vault Boy.

Apparently Vault Boy (and possibly Vault Girl) not only appears in the TV show but even get an origin story.

She does have a Pip-Boy, it's just not as bulky as the ones in the games.

First trailer.

Looks very good. They lean into both the humour and the horror of it all. And they have their own Dogmeat!

Major preview of the TV series.

Salient points:

Set in 2296, 219 years after the Great War and 9 years after Fallout 4.

Starts in Vault 33, which is ruled over by Overseer Hank (Kyle MacLachlan).

The show has three main characters. Lucy (Ella Purnell) is our main POV character, Hank's daughter from Vault 33. She has to leave the vault for the first time in her life to recover a technological gizmo necessary for the vault's survival (or something).

The second POV character is Squire Maximus (Aaron Moten), an initiate in the Brotherhood of Steel. They are also on the trail of of the tech-artifact, and dispatch the airship Caswennan (a sister-ship of the Prydwen from Fallout 4) to recover it.

The third POV character is "The Ghoul" (Walton Goggins), formerly Cooper Howard, a family man whose life was obliterated on the day of the Great war. Cooper was exposed to radiation, becoming a ghoul with an unusually sharp intellect. He is somewhat mean and morally dubious, but has his own, rough code of honour.

The TV show will predominantly be set in California and will feature several locations, including the ruins of Los Angeles (presumably the Boneyard from Fallout 1), outposts of the New California Republic, Vault 33 and a frontier, Wild West-looking town.

As well as the 2296 storyline, a major subplot is a flashback to the Ghoul's younger days, when he had a family. Through him, we get to see the buildup to the Great War and its aftermath.

The show debuts on 12 April 2024.

Fallout: The TV Show will hit Amazon Prime on 12 April 2024.

From the look of it, in the show Padan Fain is more directly an agent of the Shadow rather than being a random wild card.

As for combining books 2 and 3...eh. Did they at least sound the Horn and the Heroes arrived? That's kind of important to me.

Yes, in the Season 2 finale. That was a pretty good scene.

I'd say Season 2 has been a comprehensively better season than the first (and infinitely better than the mess the last two episodes degenerated into, although I try to give them some leeway due to COVID). The writing is better, there's a clearer vision of what the story is supposed to be, the effects are better, and more consistent, and the Seanchan have been depicted reasonably well (even down to the American accents). The actress playing Lanfear is also great, although the actor playing Ishamael I think has turned out to be too limited.

However, the show has also accelerated into what was always going to be its biggest issue, that they will (assuming 8x8 episodes) have less episodes than GAME OF THRONES to tell a story almost three times as long, which would always entail a very high degree of adaptation. For Season 2 they linearly adapted Books 2 and 3 and merged them into one story, which isn't actually a bad idea (The Great Hunt and The Dragon Reborn repeat a huge number of ideas and tropes between the two books) anyway, but is 100% necessary for the story they're telling. I would have personally merged them by having the Seanchan caputre Tear and still have the Sword in the Stone in play, but maybe they felt that was far too on the nose.

I would rather have the red eagle people that did that one minute introduction of Ishmael that was shown once at midnight to keep the development rights working on this than the current crop of people.

They are working on this. They're the main rights-holders, and provided the rights for Amazon and Sony to make this show.

Red Eagle have, pretty consistently across multiple projects, shown they have zero problem dumping any kind of fidelity in return for money.

This was pure Star Wars. The slightly goofy, friendly aliens, the non-verbal creatures with a vague comedy presence, the evil-but-competent Imperial commander planning stuff with more mystical bad guy Force-users, some stunning vfx (the arrival of the Chimera is an all-time epic shot), the young callow hero(ine) being somewhat out of her depth but also competent enough to deal with the situations. Thrawn is very hard to get right but they seem to be doing a really good job, and the actor playing Ezra is pretty spot-on. It's also doing an interesting mix of deepish lore cuts (the idea of Bokken Jedi, the Dathomiri witches) and new stuff, even if some of the new stuff is a remix of the old stuff (non-Tusken Raiders and Ewoks-but-they're-turtles-I-guess).

The show was far too slow to start with, but the last two episodes were outstanding. And it's odd that it's taken this long for someone to actually say "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..." in dialogue (and it's amusing that it's Doctor Who who gets to say it).

My guess is that next week is Ahsoka arriving and trying to stop their departure, and in the last episode Thrawn returns to the SW Galaxy and wreaks some havoc, leaving things on a cliffhanger for the movie. Which I'm guessing they were expecting to be shooting by now and out next year, which now won't be the case due to the strike.

I thought that was very good. Some outstanding, epic imagery: the Clone Wars battles, the Ghost and the X-wings skimming along the water, the rescue, the New Republic cruisers amongst the whale pod. This is one of the rare nu-Star Wars episodes that feels like they actually spent the rumoured $15 million per episode.

I think I get what they are going for with the rest of the season and maybe into the follow-up movie:

> Both Team Baylan and Team Ahsoka find Thrawn in the other galaxy.
Shenanigans ensure to stop Thrawn's return. During this, they find Ezra. Maybe he's a prisoner or maybe he's joined Team Thrawn or he's escaped and is MIA in the new galaxy. Ahsoka, Sabine and Ezra form a power trio to stop Thrawn.

> The shenanigans fail. Thrawn returns to the Galaxy Far Far Away, probably at the end of Episode 8.

> The movie or Season 2 (if there is going to be a Season 2 before the movie) is then Thrawn uniting the Imperial Remnants into a single fleet and fighting the Republic. A wild card is Moff Gideon's cloning plot, which culminates successfully in the creation of Snoke.

> Huge war ensures. Thrawn is killed and both the Imperial and Republic fleets are decimated. The Imperials and Republic agree to a truce, with official recognition of the Imperial Remnant as the First Order, with Hux's dad and Pellaeon playing a key role. Pellaeon signs the peace treaty with the New Republic (I swear to god if they do this, we just need to lynch the person responsible for terminating the EU, this is just a mildly time-disjointed version of the EU at this point).

> Wild card possibility: an alien threat in the next galaxy. Not the Yuuzhan Vong (way too NSFW for Disney-SW) but a force fulfilling a similar threat. They invade the Galaxy Far Far Away and the Republic and Imperials stop fighting to unify and defeat the invaders. Thrawn is killed in the process (maybe Ahsoka as well?) but the victory allows for a New Republic/First Order peace treaty.

Something someone on Reddit pointed out: the only shot from the trailers left is the one of Thrawn. Absolutely everything else was seen in Episodes 1-5, and we don't know anything from 6-8 at all apart from (SPOILERS) they find Thrawn.