The Strange Tales of Oscar Zahn 1

 
 
The Strange Tales of Oscar Zahn

by Tri Vuong

Ten Speed Books

2024 

 

  

The first volume of The Strange Tales of Oscar Zahn collects eight chapters of Tri Vuong's webcomic. Like the green yuri, Strange Tales was originally published online a few pages at a time, giving Vuong a bit more flexibility with chapter length than he'd've gotten with a print comic. The first and last chapters are stand alone stories, the rest are divided into a pair of three-part narratives.
 
Oscar is a ghost. He looks like a person with a skull floating where his head should be. He investigates other ghosts, and tries to help them achieve peace. He's quite chipper and amiable! Also, there's a giant ghostly octopus that lives shrunk down inside his skull that emerges at full size at inopportune moments to wreak chaos.
 
In the first story, Oscar helps an old woman living in a haunted house. In the second tale, he finds a ghost soldier still reliving WWI. In the third, rather complex story, Oscar tries to help an old sailor deal with his guilt for a shipwrecked crew he was unable to rescue, personified by a radio that continuously plays their final distress call. He gets help from a crew of ghosts that inhabit diving suits and try to preserve abandoned treasure, like a trove of Betamax tapes. The octopus really gets out of hand in this one. The final story is even shorter than the first; the old woman has trouble with her house again and moves into Oscar's apartment.
 
The structure of these stories is a quite similar to a lot of the Hellboy comics, where the title character mostly serves as an observer, giving the ghosts the audience they need for their dramas to finally finish playing out and achieve resolution. Vuong's art is sometimes pretty similar to Mike Mignola's, and the color pallet is a close match. Oscar has a different personality than Hellboy, but his adventures aren't that different; he even holds a cursed entity inside him. 
 
The similarities are enough to invite comparison. You might see more of what you already like here, but unless you are invested in the mystery of where the octopus came from, why it's haunting Oscar, and why he keeps trying to solve mysteries when the creature comes out every time and endangers everyone he interacts with, I think the individual stories themselves are not quite as strong as Mignola's.

What We are Seeking

 
 
What We are Seeking

by Cameron Reed

Tor

2026 

 

 

What We are Seeking is a scifi novel set in a distant future when humans have colonies on a number of other planets, despite being limited to sub-light speed. The colony worlds are few, and are theoretically connected by a network of generation ships that travel between them, though in practice the visits are few, and each established world has suffered a collapse and long rebuilding, when their original Earth tech ran out, but before they could build anything comparable themselves. 
 
We follow one young man as he arrives in a new place, learns about the existing community, and tries to find a place and make a life there. Author Cameron Reed has given us an impressive feat of world-building. The young colony, Scythia, is vividly imagined, both in terms of the alien wildlife native to the planet, and in terms of the colony's culture, which is just starting to blend the traditions of the two host planets. Every other society that a character hails from is still seen in realistic glimpses when relevant, starting on the first page with the culture of the ships, which alternate between a relaxed 'summer' when coasting at near light-speed and a stricter 'winter' when accelerating or decelerating.
 
The audience viewpoint character is John Maraintha, who comes from the verdant world of Essius, a forest world full of alien plants that are by turns medicinal and deadly poisonous. Essius is matriarchal and polyamorous, with children raised by the mother and her brothers. Men 'visit' other families for sex, but remain part of their mother's family for life. John is a doctor, and was orphaned by a wildfire while he was in med school, his whole family gone, which is how he ended up on a ship, and why he was chosen when Scythia messaged the ships to ask for another doctor for the colony. John's sexuality is seen as fascinating and threatening on Scythia, where both host cultures practice monogamy and patriarchy. Because of his own home culture, John finds it easier to get along with women, but now all his new friendships are viewed as suspect because he's assumed to be trying to visit everyone he becomes close to. For his part, John struggles to see marriage as anything other than oppression.
 
The native lifeforms of the planet Scythia are called 'dryads' by the colonists, because they alternate each generation between plant and animal bodies. So a bush might bloom with flowers that, when mature, fly off like butterflies that will egg-seeds in the soil, that will grow into more bushes. Some dryads beget insects (or rather, insect-like forms), some reptiles, some mammals. On Earth, ferns, mosses, and some parasites have alternating reproductive cycles, but nothing this extreme. The dryad ecosystem is robust, hostile to Earth plants, and dangerous to humans, which is why the colony is based in the desert, where dryads are sparse, instead of the forest. One species, called 'basket-men', might be a large, curious animal, or might be fully sentient.
 
The need to find out which is the reason for the other off-world visitor who arrived the same time as John. Subharma comes from a colony world where humans have formed a peaceful relationship with intelligent natives. He's come as a translator; he'll try to communicate with the basket-men, including eventually having high-tech brain surgery to make himself into someone capable of learning their native speech. John has a crush on Subharma and enjoys having him for a roommate. Subharma is super ascetic, follows a very strict diet, spends hours a day meditating, and seemingly has no interest in making friends, only in studying the basket-men.
 
The two host cultures that are starting to blend on Scythia are the Ishnurans and the Zandeheans. Ishnurna is only habitable at its two poles. Ishnurnans are very pale, and they have a culturally-recognized third gender. 'Jesses' use they/them pronouns, and we eventually learn that people we might think of as trans men, trans women, and nonbinary people all become jesses. Iren is currently the only Jess on Scythia, although a teen Zandahean wants to take the vows, which is controversial. Zandahea was colonized by Catholics, but during their collapse, the line of apostolic succession was broken (not a big deal for Protestants, but devastating to them). None of these groups is a monolith; Reed shows that they're internally diverse. We meet people with different perspectives on the basket-men, on jesses, on religion (the Zandaheans include some Renouncers), and despite the importance of marriage, we meet people having affairs, even closeted gay people in marriages of convenience. There are a couple people who are explicitly asexual, even though that term is never used, and in the same way that the others can't fully understand visiting, John is never fully able to wrap his head around that.
 
When John first arrives, he's annoyed to be sidelined by the doctor who made the original distress call, but has plenty more trainees now. He spends his time keeping house for Sudharma, learning about dryads, and becoming part of the local community. A key turning point comes when a basket-man arrives, then leaves, and John and Subharma follow it into the desert. This becomes like a descent into Hell when their van is damaged by wild dryads and their rations and water are ruined. Later John returns to the desert with Iren to catalog new species. He learns a lot more about them, and they become a much larger part of the story after that. This is mostly not an adventure story though, just people trying to shape their society into one that matches their values.
 
There are echoes of other scifi stories here. Human civilization being split between planets and ships is part of Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky. John's harrowing trip to the desert is a little similar to a trip to Mercury in Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312. But most of what's here is either a unique feat of imagination, like the dryads, or else an extrapolation of how aspects of contemporary society might change over a long future. The breadth and inventiveness of Reed's world-building is really something special here. I enjoyed Reed's previous book, a cyberpunk novel called The Fortunate Fall, and I'm glad she was able to publish this one too.

Paper Girls 5

 
 
Paper Girls 5
by Brian Vaughan
art by Cliff Chiang

Image Comics

2018 

 

 
In the fifth volume of Paper Girls, the girls have arrived in the future, to the time where the Old Timers, the older generation in a temporal conflict with their own descendants, are operating from. There's only one volume left after this, and the shape of the time war has become a knot.
 
From the girls' perspective, which is the order the comics take place in, the girls started out in the 1980s, where the Old Timers, led by the Grand Father, showed up and took over their neighborhood in the Cleveland suburbs by putting everyone else in suspended animation and erasing their memories of the intrusion. The Grand Father seems to be very long-lived; he still speaks contemporary English, while everyone below him speaks a dialect that has diverged so far it borders on gibberish. We didn't know the reason for this, but it seemed the Old Timers did it to capture a few far-future teens, who speak a language so different it's represented with alien script; they can only be understood with the help of translator machines. They also met a silent alien, a green sphere with many eyestalks that seemed to watch them.
 
Then the girls were accidentally transported to the 2010s. They met Erin's middle-aged self, and learned that she had no memory of time traveling as a teen ... and that Mac died of leukemia while she was still in high school. They found a message carved on KJ's field hockey stick that helped them navigate the invisible time portals around the city. They met another far-future teen, a clone of Erin, who accidentally brought some giant tardigrades with her. The tardigrades started wrecking up downtown, and the Old Timers showed up again en masse and middle-aged Erin risked her life (maybe even died) to help the girls escape through a time portal.
 
That portal led the girls all the way back to the Stone Age. They met the first time traveler, born in the 2010s, who was shocked to already find evidence of other time trips on her maiden voyage. They also met a cavegirl their own age, Wadi, and agreed to help her rescue her son Japoh from the three cavemen who took him. Tiffany carved the message they saw earlier into the field hockey stick, and stuck it through a fold in time for her past self to find. KJ encountered the spherical green alien again and touched it; she got fragmentary visions of future events, including her and Mac kissing. The girls helped with the rescue, but then time traveled again by accident.
 
This time they arrived on New Year's Day in the year 2000. Giant robots piloted by the Old Timers and the far-future teens were fighting openly in Cleveland, although they were invisible to almost everyone except time travelers. The girls met Tiffany's post-college self. She's a goth! The far-future mechas were clearly superior to the ones piloted by the Old Timers. The newly appointed Grand Father, a relatively young man was piloting one; a bad hit killed his girlfriend, who used her dying words to beg him to abide by their principles of preserving history, rather than using time travel to save her. He tearfully agreed, and managed to kill the other mech pilot. For safety amidst the ongoing battle, the girls and college-age Tiffany clambered up into the broken mecha shell. The young Grand Father saw them and assumed they were the ones who killed his girlfriend, and then the mech sent itself forward in time.
 
Now the girls arrive in a future Cleveland, a time when everyone talks in the near-unintelligible dialect of the other Old Timers we've met so far, and the Grand Father is the old man we first saw him as. He has the green alien in his office! We also learn something I maybe should've noticed sooner - the Grand Father is Japoh, the baby born in the Stone Age, who the girls helped to reunite with his mother. I'll talk more about what the girls get up to in the future in a moment, but first, let's review events from the Old Timers' perspective.
 
The lab that invented time travel rescued the stranded first time traveler. She brought back the cavepeople Wadi and Japoh, claiming they were her children. The Old Timer faction formed, and eventually Japoh was made its leader. Among his fights with the future teens, his girlfriend died, and he thought the paper girls were responsible. When the killer mecha finally reappeared, after years of waiting, he thought he had a chance for revenge. At the same time, reports came in of the tardigrades in the 2010s. The Grand Father decided to launch the all-out offensive we saw earlier (which his staff viewed as a major over-reaction), and then to intercept the girls in the 1980s.
 
The Old Timers say their goal is to preserve the first draft of history, as unchanged by time travel as possible, but what does that even mean here? Japoh doesn't know it, but he was only brought to the future to become a leader because the girls saved him as an infant. They were only in the Stone Age to save him because he invaded their neighborhood, which he did in response to events the girls got entangled in after they got lost in time during the invasion. Plus he only thinks he's mad at them because of mistaken identity! Cause and effect aren't just reversed here, they're completely intertwined and entangled. There doesn't seem to be any pre-intervention state! Every major event in this sequence has a cause happened after its effect, and that, in turn, could only have happened because the effect came first.
 
In the future Cleveland, KJ tries to talk to Mac about her vision of them kissing, but Mac doesn't want to hear it. KJ has been coming to accept that she might be a lesbian, while Mac seems more homophobic than ever. The two go to find a doctor, while Erin and the two Tiffanys go look for Wadi, who is an old woman despite whatever anti-aging drugs she and Japoh have been taking. The good news for Mac is that the future has a cure for leukemia; the bad news is that she doesn't really have it, she has a rare disease caused by time travel. The doctor tries to turn Mac over to the Old Timers, but KJ beats the guy up and rescues her friend. After briefly thinking she could change something, Mac accepts that she'll die, accepts that KJ's visions will come true, and kisses her, surprising them both. 
 
Wadi agrees to help the girls sneak past her son and get back to the 1980s. They get joined en route to the departure point by the future-teen clone of Erin. Once again, they're cornered and only make it out because someone sacrifices their life; this time it's college-age Tiffany. The girls are paying a terrible price for getting caught up in this mess. Mac is going to die of time travel sickness in high school, Tiffany will be killed in her mid-20s, Erin will die in her early 40s. 
 
There's one volume left, and I fear KJ win't make it out alive either. What started as a mystery and then maybe a fun adventure (even if they weren't in control of how they were time traveling) has become the reason three of the four will die young, seemingly with nothing gained, nothing to show for it. Future Erin and future Tiffany have already revealed they won't even remember all this afterward! I don't know if the last volume will salvage anything positive, or if it's going to be a total downer, but I guess I'll find out soon.

Witch Hat Atelier 13

 
 
Witch Hat Atelier 13

by Kamome Shirahama

Kodansha

2025

 

 

In Witch Hat Atelier 13, the annual Silver Eye Festival is still besieged by a monstrous leech that appears like a circulatory system, lowering over the fairgrounds like a cage. But in the previous volume, master witch Qifrey was able to defeat the disgraced former magical ambassador who created the monster, and most of the festival-goers have been evacuated to a safe distance. There's still great danger, but some of the most urgent issues have been addressed.
 
Coco was injured by the leeches, so Qifrey has brought her to the royal Healing Tower to receive medical attention. Master Beldaruit, Qifrey's old teacher and one of the three highest ranked witches, is there too. He creates a portable illusion of Coco, looking like a tiny little fairy with her face, to fly alongside Qifrey as he searches the evacuated capital city for Custas, the injured boy who learned forbidden magic in order to save his father.
 
Of all the things you might do with magic that are forbidden by the Pact, healing is by far the most tempting to try and the most difficult to understand restriction. The witches who use forbidden magic have used that possibility to draw in Custas, and may be trying to appeal to Coco along the same line. (Though Coco and her friend Tartah have both realized this on their own anyway, and are actively questioning why healing is forbidden, and if they might be willing to break the Pact to try it.) 
 
The forbidden witches hope that once someone tries one form of forbidden magic, they'll readily throw out all the rules and try the others too (and the Knights Moralis, who enforce the Pact, fear the same), but I wonder if the slope is really so slippery.
 
The Knights Moralis routinely use the one form of magic that directly affects people's bodies that the Pact allows - magic to erase memories. This lets them keep the secrets the Pact requires. Non-witches who learn how magic works can be made to forget it; witches who use forbidden spells can forget how to cast them. I suppose these spells are only allowed when they're defending the Pact, that you can't just erase someone's memory for your personal benefit and have it be okay, but there's an obvious contradiction here. Memory erasure is a much worse thing to do to somebody than healing them, and it does affect their body, so that the usual objection to healing sounds silly in this context.
 
That contradiction comes to a crisis point in this volume, because when Qifrey finds Custas, he's used more counterclock tattoos to save dozens of people from the poorest neighborhood from their injuries. Draw a counterclock spell on a shattered water jug, and its existence will rewind to a time before it broke, giving you a chance to pour the water into another container, or set down a cloth to catch the fragments, before it catches up to itself and shatters again, exactly as before. Draw it on an injured person and their body AND MIND will return to an earlier time before they were hurt. Custas saved his dying father and has kept him in a kind of half-life for weeks by drawing and redrawing the tattoo each day. For his father, it is perpetually the day before he died - he has no memory of being hurt, or anything else that's happened since then. He doesn't know and can't understand that his son is using forbidden magic.
 
While this is happening, the royal prince meets Riceh's timid older brother. (This is our first time meeting him too.) We learn that he was physically abused by a cruel teacher, who also tried to crush Riceh's creative spirit, which is why she reacts so badly against any compulsory or rote parts of her education. Shirahama has shown us over and over how bad teachers can basically destroy the students trusted to them. With the brother's help, the prince finds Riceh, Tetia, and Agott, and they use Tetia's sand-tents to provide temporary shelter to all the evacuees. We also briefly meet Agott's mother, who is pleased to see her daughter looking happy to be helping people in need.

The Blacktongue Thief

 
 
The Blacktongue Thief

by Christopher Buehlman
Tor
2021 
 
 
The Blacktongue Thief is an inventive, humorous, and very dark fantasy by Christopher Buehlman. It's the first book in a series (although the next entry is a prequel set a decade earlier), which becomes clear somewhere in the long middle section of cross-continental travel, when you realize that there isn't enough time left for the cast to complete their 'there and back again' in this book, and will probably only make it 'there'. The mission is to go into a land ruled by giants and ... well, there's some disagreement about what to do there.
 
Thief is set in a fantasy Europe that hues fairly closely to reality (and stereotype). Spain on the Iberian peninsula becomes Ispanthia, home to the Spanth, known for their fiery tempers and love of horses. Gaelic Ireland becomes Galt, a conquered region of English-analog Holt, home to people with literal black tongues who are known for being short, musical, and good at thieving and lying. The biggest difference from reality (aside from Manreach being a mirror image of Europe's geography) is an alt-historical element that's a classic of science fiction: most of the adult men died in a catastrophic war against the goblins, leaving women as the numerical majority and as the elites across the now matriarchal human civilization.
 
There were three human-goblin wars in the recent past. Humans won the Knight's War with the help of our war horses. Then goblins created a plague called the Stumbles that killed all the stallions and most of the mares and invaded again. Goblins won the Thresher's War, so-called because so many men were conscripted even the farmhands had to go fight. This was the route that wiped out a generation of men. Most recent was the Daughter's War (the subject of the prequel I mentioned) where humans trained and fielded an army of women, supported by magical, horse-sized war corvids, driving the goblins off the mainland and back to their island. 
 
You can see how Buehlman has taken some of the real world consequences of the Black Death, the invasions by Attila the Hun, intra-European fighting like the Thirty Years War, and more recent memories of women adopting new roles during WWII, and transformed them into elements of fantasy. His alt-historical worldbuilding is pretty impressive, and I hope to see more of his medieval women's world later on. As we travel the continent, we encounter everyday words in a half-dozen invented languages, verses of poems and songs, and see a number of ways women have taken charge. I would say Buehlman is relatively pessimistic - we mostly see women stepping into men's old jobs and titles and continuing them, rather than the roles themselves changing much.
 
Blacktongue Thief is narrated in the first person by Kinch, a low-ranking member of the Thieves' Guild, a continent-spanning mafia that seems stronger than most of the formal governments. He's a Galt, and thus the titular character. Kinch has a good voice; he's funny, profane, and basically good natured, he gives everyone nicknames, and Buehlman gets a lot of use of his many invented swears that all mean variations on "pussy" and "shit", and he mostly manages to make them seem humorous without just sounding silly. Kinch owes crippling student loan debts to the guild for training him (yes really), which is how he gets conscripted to go on a mission to travel to the mountains at the western edge of Manreach, where giants have recently started invading human lands, and to aid the guild in its goals once he gets there.
 
Kinch is assigned to accompany Galva, a Spanth corvid knight, who has her own reasons for going to the giant lands. She wants to rescue a princess and return her to the throne of Ispantha. Galva is brave, noble, serious, a demon on the battlefield, basically everything Kinch, the lovable loser, is not. The downside of having him as a narrator is that we don't get access to the interiority of any other character. You very quickly begin to suspect that the guild wants Kinch to sabotage Galva. Kinch suspects it too, and that they'll kill him and his family back home if he betrays the guild by not betraying Galva, but he might be willing to take the risk...
 
The pair get up to a fair number of other adventures along the way to the far west, despite the urgency of their goal. I found the book most engaging as they prepared to leave and once they arrived. The middle half of this 400 pager are taken up by the journey, and I wish that part had been shorter or more engaging, because it seemed to lack the energy and purpose of the first and last hundred pages. There's a hunt for a minotaur, a voyage at sea, a shipwreck, two separate encounters with goblins, a (cringe) comedy of errors when Kinch realizes they're being followed by an assassin from the Guild but can't tell anyone she's there... It's a lot. 
 
An early standout is a visit to the inverted tower of the witch Deadlegs, which also gives us the witch's apprentice Norrigal as a traveling companion. Kinch is instantly smitten with her, and watching their tentative romance shows us one place where women's equality has truly changed things. There's kind of a lot of magic in the book, especially magical tattoos, but some of Buehlman's best writing is when the magic is at its strongest and most mysterious.
 
This is definitely a fantasy world that's compatible with Dungeons & Dragons. Thieves have named levels within the guild. Adventuring types have clear roles and are basically fantasy superheroes. Magic is abundant, and even though we're told most of it is 'weak', it enables all sorts of cinematic combat and action. There are goblins and giants. Religion is polytheistic and the gods are interventionists, though mostly in minor ways. Kinch is aware of his 'luck' and knows if he's likely to succeed or fail at whatever he does next. This felt like he could see a pre-rolled dice at all times, and was probably the D&D-ism I liked least.
 
Overall though, there's a lot to like here, and I will probably try to continue the series.

Seek You

 
Seek You

A Journey through American Loneliness

by Kristen Radtke
Pantheon

2021 
 

 

Seek You is graphic nonfiction about loneliness. Kristen Radtke says she was inspired by the widespread social isolation of the coronavirus pandemic. Isolation isn't quite the same as loneliness - it's possible to enjoy a certain amount of time alone, and possible to be in the presence of others and still experience loneliness due to a lack of connection. What Radtke has produced is partly a personal essay where she looks back on the times in her own life when she's felt loneliest, partly an intellectual history of the idea of loneliness, and partly a tour through a few ways people have responded to being alone.
 
Radtke's tour includes the invention of the laugh track, Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone, the visual artist Yayoi Kusama, the rise of 'cuddle parties', and Casey Kasem's long distance dedications, among other topics. She talks about American gun culture, the way distrust of other people encourages gun ownership ... which then fuels more distrust, and the way mass shooters are invariably described as 'loners'. Cars are also isolating, especially compared to public transit, something Radtke feels viscerally when she moves from New York to Las Vegas.
 
At two different points in the book, Radtke talks about the research of psychologist Harry Harlowe, who is best known for his study showing that orphaned baby monkeys prefer a 'soft mother' made of cloth, who provides only comfort and nothing else, over a 'wire mother' made of metal but equipped with a milk bottle nipple. Many of Harlowe's experiments seem like animal torture, and he seems to me to have continued long past the point of learning anything new. These parts of the book were genuinely upsetting to read. Harlowe himself appears to have been a very lonely person. Radtke says that one benefit of Harlowe's research was to overturn the prevailing parenting advice at the time, which amounted to physical neglect in the name of preventing the spread of infectious diseases.
 
Two of the book's strongest sections are when Radtke talks about her father's teenage hobby as an amateur radio operator, and his late-night CQ searches for other operators, and later, when she talks about her own teen years on the early internet, maintaining a personal website and talking to strangers in chatrooms. Despite increasing concern about loneliness, it's not actually clear if more people are lonely now than in the past, or if it is simply more part of the public conversation. The similarity of Radtke's and her father's two activities serves as a kind of embedded metaphor for the universality of the human search for connection with others.
 
If Seek You has a throughline though, it's a growing pessimism about how people are harmed by loneliness and isolation, and how that harm becomes self-reinforcing as those people then find it harder to reconnect with others afterward. One of the findings of Harlowe's monkey research was that monkeys who had endured long isolation found it increasingly difficult to interact with others; they became stressed and overwhelmed by time spent with others, even to the point of self-harm. Beyond a certain length of isolation, they basically cannot rejoin the group; beyond another threshold, the other monkeys simply kill them.
 
Among humans, Radtke notes that lonely people often fear rejection more than they fear remaining isolated. This fear becomes self-fulfilling and self-defeating, as it taints every interaction with anxiety, making them awkward and uncomfortable, and can lead to people preemptively avoiding or rejecting others before they can be rejected. Loneliness is contagious with social networks - knowing a lonely person makes you feel lonelier yourself. And because lonely people withdraw from public and create solo spaces for themselves, they reduce the pool of potential people for others to meet or interact with and the shared space where such chance encounters might occur.
 
Seek You predates the much-discussed 'male loneliness crisis', and reading it, I thought about how people sometimes talk about men's very special and important pain as though women never feel lonely. The book also predates the rise of ChatGPT and Claude, although I suspect that Radtke must've felt more resigned than surprised when we started seeing news that lonely people were using chatbots as substitutes for human friends, that some people were even falling in love with chatbots, and that some people were developing 'AI psychosis' as their too-long chats overrode the sense of shared reality that comes from interacting with other people. It's easy to see links between Radtke's observations about the difficulty of connecting with others in "Seek You" with Alison Pugh's findings about the importance of it in The Last Human Job. 

The Spire

 
 
The Spire
by Simon Spurrier

art by Jeff Stokely

Boom! Comics

2016 
 
 
The Spire collects an 8 issue comic book miniseries written by Simon Spurrier and drawn by Jeff Stokely. It tells a neo-noir mystery, complete with a hardboiled investigator protagonist, set in a New Weird fantasy city. 
 
The namesake city of the comic, the Spire itself, is a towering cone of adjoining buildings, all in the same shade, like a sandcastle or a wasps' nest. It sits in a wasteland, called the 'Nothingland', and the outside air is poisonous to normal humans. The city's residents are a mix of humans and beings who are politely called 'Sculpted' but usually called by the slur 'Skew'. Their name seems to me to imply that the first sculpted were created from humans by genetic modification, probably to survive the outdoor pollution, and possibly to perform specialized work, during the 'antiki-times' where all the best tech comes from. 
 
There are various tribes of sculpted who all share the same traits, like the messengers - tiny bald men with the proportions of infants who fly on miniature wings and are propelled forward by farting. Humans resent the sculpted for taking up space in the Spire (when they could live outside), exploit them economically (giving certain low-paid jobs to the sculpted, and demanding annual tithes from the wasteland tribes), and then resent that too (because "they're taking our jobs"). The city is a multiracial society with an official policy of strength through diversity, but it's also tense. Also living in the wasteland are a religious sect who preach death to all the sculpted, and who use antiki-tech environment suits and shelters to survive the toxic air.
 
The modern-ish city, the unique nature of the humanoid residents, and the attention to race and class inequality reminds me of China Mieville's city of Bas Lag from Perdido Street Station. (I think Mieville had some babbling little flying men too, now that I think of it.) Stokely makes everyone look vaguely grotesque in a way that matches the low tone of Spurrier's writing. The city is dirty, people piss themselves in fear, mock each other for smelling like shit, swear constantly. The upper city dwellers, who get the majority of the natural sunlight, are racists and snobs, the religious are zealots who preach genocide, the cops and military are reading to beat anyone who's insufficiently respectful, and they'll actually carry out a pogrom before the book's over. But the overall tone mostly varies between ironic detachment and darkly humorous. There are only a few moments when it seems we're encouraged to feel sincere emotion.
 
Our hard-bitten investigator is Sha, the captain of the city watch. Sha is a Medusi, a sculpted person with jellyfish characteristics, including thin tentacles she can use for climbing and catching criminals, the ability to heal from injuries (except the missing eye she wears a patch over), and the ability to reshape her skin, temporarily as a disguise or more permanently if required. Sha's an amnesiac who is estranged from her tribe and never ages. She's like one "snikt, bub" away from being a female Wolverine. Sha is foul-mouthed, an overly demanding boss to her put-upon subordinant, obnoxiously rude to ever other member of the city government, and , inadvisably, is sleeping with the younger daughter of the royal family (who can't really understand that her family won't allow her to make a lesbian relationship with a racialized commoner public or official).
 
The mystery here is a series of murders of servants close to the matriarch of the royal family that start right after her husband dies of a disease of old age. The older daughter will soon take the throne ... unless the murderer ultimately plans to kill a royal and not just their staff. Sha is determined to solve the case and protect the family, even as the incoming queen prepares to undo her father's progressive reforms, make peace with the zealots, and persecute the sculpted anew. The solution to the mystery is based in events from decades earlier, shown in cryptic flashbacks, when the matriarch was young, and in the specific details of several sculpted tribes' abilities.
 
One detail we learn near the end is something Sha forgot long ago because of her amnesia - she's transgender. As a Medusi, she could fully and permanently reshape herself to become female without any outside help. That forgotten transition turns out to explain a number of things about Sha, and to be an important piece of the puzzle to finally solve the mystery by unraveling the killer's motivation. You can file The Spire next to All About My Mother as stories where a closeted trans woman gets someone pregnant, then abandons them in order to finally come out and begin living as a woman herself. I can only imagine the level of dysphoria that becoming a father might trigger in someone who was previously resigned to life as a man, but the nature of both narratives are that we see the aftermath of that decision, rather than the pain that led up to it, and the possibility that the couple could've remained together is never really considered.