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.

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.

DIE 4

 
 
DIE 4
Bleed
by Kieron Gillen
art by Stephanie Hans

Image Comics

2021 
 
 
From the start, I've found myself drawn to the high-concept worldbuilding of Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans' comic series DIE, but (especially after the first volume) I've been less impressed by the plot and storytelling going on there. The comic is at its best when introducing a character or idea and letting admire all the allusions and creativity on display in each one, but then less successful at setting them in motion. Which is especially a problem here in the final volume, "Bleed", because there's little left to introduce, and a lot of plot left to resolve.
 
As an example, consider the Fair. These are Die's equivalent of fairies, but they're also robots. They act fairly in the sense that they'll hear any request, and they have a 50 percent chance of granting it, so they are fair like a coin toss. The two faces of the coin are 0 for no and 1 for yes, because the binary outcome is like a computer bit, which is why they're robots as well as fairies. Also, the way that you meet them is by going to the Fair, a kind of traveling festival they run. 
 
Merging multiple inspirations like that and layering multiple meanings into one thing is kind of impressive ... but then in this volume, all we see of the Fair are their smashed bodies, because the flew to the center of the world to take part in a climactic confrontation that happened entirely off camera. We just see the ruins of the aftermath, like HG Wells's smashed time machine from whatever his role was in the decisive last battle, which Gillen and Hans decided not to show us any of.
 
This is what I mean when I say that the ideas of the comic are very careful constructed, while the story itself is ultimately pretty disappointing.
 
In the 1990, a group of teenagers found some magic dice that transported them to the fantasy world of Die. There, they each had a fantastic persona and access to powerful magical abilities. They spent a couple years trapped there, battling the evil Grandmaster, before defeating him and performing the ritual to return to Earth. But in the last moment, the Grandmaster grabbed Solomon, and so only five of the six friends made it home. Since they had vanished without a trace for two years, it was a big deal when they came back, but they were magically prevented from saying anything about what had happened.
 
Then, a couple decades later, when the survivors were all in their early 40s and facing the typical (stereotypical?) problems of midlife, they were transported back to the world of Die and thrust back into the old game, only with their former friend Solomon acting as the Grandmaster this time. They defeated Sol, but then couldn't actually agree about returning home, some because they wanted to avoid an impending divorce or a cancer diagnosis, others because they felt guilty about destroying a whole city to defeat their former friend. Basically whenever someone changed their mind to return, someone else changed it the other way to stay, so that collectively they just seemed to be dithering indecisively.
 
While the heroes spent the next two volumes of the comic squabbling and sabotaging each other, we got a bit of a tour of Die. It's a planet shaped like a d20, and each face is the realm of a different Master, an echo of a real person who had some idea that contributed to the history of roleplaying. There's Eternal Prussia, based on the original German military war game, Kriegspiel. There's Little England, a mash-up of Tolkein's Lord of the Rings and HG Wells's Little Wars, a war game for hobbyists to play on their living room floor. Eternal Prussia and Little England are locked in an unending war that resembles WWI. There's Angria, based on the Bronte siblings' childhood game of make-believe, a site of political intrigue, and the place our protagonists did most of their bickering. In this most recent volume, we also got to see an ocean face based on HP Lovecraft's fiction, which holds the stairway to the center of the planet. 
 
Near the end of the third volume, we got a call to action that seemed to set up an exciting conclusion. We learned that between the group's two visits, Sol had been busy working on behalf of the planet Die itself to send inspirations backward in time to ensure its creation. Supposedly Sol made the toy soldiers that inspired the Brontes' for example, and sent them to them so that they'd write their stories, so that Angria would be here waiting for teen Sol in the 80s. The friends learned that if Sol succeeded in making the dice that had transported them as teens, and sent them to himself, then the time paradox would resolve, Die would fully merge with Earth, and everyone would be trapped in a fantasy realm. To prevent this, the friends recruited the Fair, rallied Wells and the armies of Little England, plotted to entangle the plotters and schemers of Angria ... and then, as I mentioned, in this volume, Gillen and Hans decided not to show us any of that.
 
Instead, we watch the six sad adults mope down the stairs to the center of the world where they don't stop anything, but also nothing bad happens. Die, suddenly now personified as a guy with a d20 for a head, explains that they're too late, he's already successfully closed the time loop to ensure his own existence, and now that they've witnessed it, he can send them home. In explaining all the steps, he even claims to have caused WWI, which would otherwise not have happened, purely so that Tolkein would be inspired to write The Hobbit, which horrifies the friends, but they're too late to do anything about it. There's no mention of the planets merging; it seems less like anyone saved the day and more like the authors forgot what the consequences were supposed to be. When they get home, it's 2020, and they arrive in the middle of a global pandemic with no idea of what they've missed.
 
Along the way down the stairs, we finally get a bit of resolution about Ash's up-to-now unspoken feelings about gender. I felt let down about this too. On Earth, Dominic is a man and seems to be fine with that; on Die she is a woman named Ash and seems to be fine with that too. As they descend, we're told that the Grandmaster only caught Sol because Ash paused during the ceremony because she didn't really want to go back to Earth. We also meet the giant fiery spirit of Ash's femininity, who blocks the way unless Ash will agree to merge with her. 
 
Ash says that on Earth, Dominic thought about being a woman at least once a day, not that he minded living as a man, just that it was a thought he had every single day. And given the chance to have a woman's body, Ash didn't want to leave Die then and doesn't want to leave now. And she merged with the spirit of herself (?) which supposedly displaced Dominic entirely. And what this means, the characters tell each other, is that Ash is gender fluid. Dominic definitely wasn't a closeted trans woman! And he'll be fine having a man's body and social identity again as soon as they all leave, even though right now Ash can't bear to give hers up. Yes, the characters repeat, this isn't being trans, its gender fluidity. 
 
This development adds DIE to my list of disappointing works where a character is seemingly portrayed as being a trans woman, only for late-in-the-game dialogue to reveal that, oh no, they're definitely not that, they certainly couldn't be that, they're just like, really sensitive and in touch with their feminine side, or maybe their gender cannot be labeled in any way at all. 
 
I would be interested in seeing more authentic portrayals of nonbinary characters in fiction; I am not interested in seeing yet more characters who are written in every way like they're trans only to make a surprise announcement of some sort of nonbinary identity at the last minute instead. I'm not interested in listening to people who seem to think that saying you're bisexual or gender nonbinary is enlightened and expansive (so long as you publicly live a conventional hetero life), but that being gay or trans is small-minded and unworthy. It's not fair to the people who are treated like their identity is unspeakable; it's also not fair to the people who are treated like the name of their identity is a cudgel to beat the unworthy, while the actual experience of what they feel or how they live is never shown.
 
But then, many things about DIE disappointed me. The first volume seemed promising, but overall, the comic has seemed more like a neat idea than like a good story, and nearly every time I've felt interested in some aspect of it, character or plot or whatever, that aspect has been ignominiously dropped or anticlimactically abandoned.

The Sword of the Lictor

 
 
The Sword of the Lictor
by Gene Wolfe

Orb

1982, reprinted 1994
 

 
The Sword of the Lictor is the third book in Gene Wolfe's quartet, The Book of the New Sun. It's the most episodic of the books so far, basically a picaresque, as Severian leaves the city of Thrax and journeys north through the mountains until he arrives at a very high lake nestled among them, meeting potential allies and enemies all along the way. Based on Wolfe's description, I think these are the Andes mountains and Lake Titicaca of the far future. Over the course of the journey, Severian both literally and metaphorically leaves behind his career as a torturer and executioner, and starts to become something like a hero (though still without becoming someone I would call a good person). In the first book, Severian told us that this entire tale is being narrated in retrospect from a time when he has become the Autarch, and at this point it's still basically unimaginable how that might happen.
 
If there is a theme to Severian's journey in this book, beyond his transformation from villain to savior, it seems to be a kind of uncanny doubling. He interacts with nearly every major character he's met so far, or else with someone like them. He also becomes increasingly convinced of the power of the gemstone he found in the first book, the Claw of the Conciliator, and loyal to that power. The description of the Conciliator makes him sound like a Christ-like figure, which I suppose makes Severian something like a convert to Christianity, someone like St Paul who received divine revelation on a long journey.
 
At the start of the book, Dorcas says explicitly what was already clear to me from the original scene, that the Claw brought her back from the dead after her body had been preserved in a lake for a generation or two. She can no longer bear to stay with Sevarian now that he is the chief executioner in Thrax, and leaves to return to Nessus. Severian can't really bear to stay in this job either. He gets invited to a party thrown by the Archon of Thrax where he's expected to strangle a noblewoman to death; instead, as he did with Thecla, he has sex with her and then helps her escape her sentence. He is once again disgraced by his act of mercy, and is once again forced to flee to the north.
 
In the mountains, he stays the night with a family of farmers. Here he encounters the alzaebo, alive this time. In the second book, Severian drank a potion made from the alzaebo's brain and ate some of Thecla's, and it was this that put a copy of her mind inside his. The living alzaebo uses its abilities to hunt, imitating the voices of those it's eaten to draw out their living relatives in a way that's genuinely creepy. Severian fights off the alzebo but the only survivor is their young son, also named Severian, who is the same age our Severian was when he was orphaned and given to the torturer's guild. At the same time that he meets the alzaebo, Severian meets Agia again, and she again tries to kill him (I have no doubt she'll show up to make onee last attempt in the final book). She explains something that definitely wasn't clear to me earlier, which is that a particular recurring character I'd barely attended to is loyal to her as has been responsible to siccing the various alien monsters that ambushed Severian in the previous book on him.
 
After failing to save the rest of the family, Severian takes the orphaned boy on his trip through the mountains. He reads to him from the book of allegorical stories about the future history of the world. The neo-medieval character of the far future world Wolfe has written seems to be supported by the lack of any forms of mass transit, mass communication, or mass education, and by the dictatorial power structure that prevails at every level. People are trapped wherever they're born, assigned to be a farmer or guild member or soldier or noble, stuck with the personalist rule of whoever's in charge of their village or city, unable to learn much about any other way of living.
 
The little boy dies in the mountains, killed by traps left by a previous autarch, a man powerful enough to command an entire mountain be carved in his likeness. If the boy was like Severian's doppelganger, then he fails to save himself. The old autarch awakes from cryosleep with plans to reconquer and resubjugate the world, and Severian kills him, prefiguring on a smaller scale how he will have to defeat the current Autarch to take over the role. 
 
Severian also fights and kills his former friend, Balderdans the giant, another small-scale prefiguration of what I think is his fate to kill the alien giant Aiba, who lives in the ocean and grows large as a continent and plans to break the whole world. We'd heard repeatedly that Balderdans and Doctor Talos lived in a house in the north. Well, Severian finds it, and calling it a 'house' really undersold its size, or the way Balderdans rules all the villages around the lake. Nearly everything we initially thought we knew about the giant and the doctor has proven false or misleading by this point. 
 
Severian's executioner's sword is broken in the fight, completing his separation from his old life, and his two symbolic victories - against a lesser Autarch and a lesser Aiba - now set him up to complete the real versions of each task. I find Wolfe's plotting strange, but what initially appears to be an almost random sequence of events across this book looks by the end to be a map in miniature, a fractal part that repeats the pattern of the whole, including both what's come before and what has yet to come.
 
The other thing we've kept hearing is in the north is a war, between the country ruled by the Autarch, and a people called the Ascians, who we know nothing about. Severian plans to continue north and join the war in the next book, so I suppose we'll see.

The Council of Frogs

 
 
The Council of Frogs

by Matt Emmons
Second at Best Press

2023
 
  
The Council of Frogs is a fantasy comic by Matt Emmons. It's set in the wastelands of a post-apocalyptic future, but events are unquestionably guided by magic, rather than science. A tiny little frog goes out into a hostile world to deliver a message to a warlock for the sake of his community.

Generations ago, a war-mage died in battle, and his corpse sank into a bog ... then returned to unlife as a lich. His magic also fused with a purse of frogs' eggs; they became his children, unable to speak but imbued with intelligence. Now he's reaching the end of his unlife, and sends one frog as a messenger to ask the warlock to take over his duties as the frogs' guardian.
 
Our little messenger sets out on a quest to find the warlock. Along the way he encounters dangers in the form of hungry birds and human knights and war-mages. He's aided by a beast-man, an oracle, and eventually by the warlock too. Each of those three initially seem dangerous, and Emmons gives the little frog an expressive face that shows his fear. In each case, it kind of seems like they might be trying to win his trust so they can trick him ... but then no, they all turn out to be as honest and helpful as they initially said. No one who's actually hostile bothers lying to the frog; they just immediately attempt to eat him or stomp him underfoot. 
 
Something about this plotting choice bothers me, although I can't quite say what. Maybe it's just the contrast with the knee-jerk stranger danger of the media I grew up with? Over the Garden Wall also has characters who look scary, but whose protestations of innocence prove true, but somehow the depiction of the world as fundamentally less dangerous than it seems rings more true in OTGW. In The Council of Frogs, the world is in tatters, and human supremacists aim to kill or subjugate anyone who's unlike them. In that context, it's important for those others to trust each other and form coalitions for safety, but I feel like Emmons make that look easier than it should be.
  
Emmons portrays the world as a wasteland where medieval technology mingles with the last remnants of the old society. The frog meets the beast-man (who will eventually become his closest ally) near an oil pipeline. The oracle (who tells the way to the warlock) has four arms, two of them obviously robotic. The warlock himself is either a robot or wears futuristic plate armor. The knights and war-mages are armored as well, but their outfits are more obviously medieval. In the end, the lich does find a successor and passes on his magic to a new guardian, though not the one he initially expects.

Tower Dungeon 3

 
Tower Dungeon 3

by Tustomu Nihei
Kodansha

2025
 
  

The previous volume of Tower Dungeon ended on a cliffhanger, with a party of rival adventurers ambushing our heroes. In the brief, losing fight, Yuva (our audience viewpoint character) got knocked off a ledge, guaranteeing a 10 meter fall and a hard landing on the stone floor of the story below.

 

The whole mission had been a mess from the start. The Necromancer killed the king and kidnapped the princess, caused the legendary Dragon Tower to reappear, and took his hostage up to level 100, a kilometer above the base. The titular tower dungeon is big like a mountain, with a perfectly circular base, flawless construction, an impossible height and size. The royal guard sent to save her was massacred by the tower's perils, and the survivors were recalled by parliament, who wanted the royal-blooded guard to sit as a place-holder on the throne until the princess could be returned. 

 

Master archer Enriqo, fire magician Lilisen, and the recently conscripted Yuva were the only official rescuers left. A boom town sprung up outside the dungeon as ambitious adventurers sought to make their fortune by pillaging the tower. But the ambush wasn't just treasure hunters - they were a handful of former royal guards, now mercenaries, sent by an unknown rival member of the royal family to prevent the princess's rescue.

 

Now Tower Dungeon volume 3 opens with super-strong Yuva proving himself much hardier than anyone suspected. Until now, he's only used his strength to carry heavy supplies, and he's seemed to get hurt as easy as anyone. But he survived the fall, and we watch him scale the stone-block wall, endure several arrows, and overpower the mercenaries to save his friends. The trio seem bonded by the experience. Enriqo reveals something the mercenaries wanted - a magic arrowhead given to him by the departing guard captain, which should be able to slay the undead dragon on level 80. Lilisen was initially pretty dismissive of Yuva, but her feelings are warming rapidly.

 

Fearing there might be more mercenaries waiting back in town, they decide to push on despite their injuries. They find the all-girl adventurer gang the Excavators have been turned to stone by a basilisk, depicted here as a giant moth with eye spots on its wings. Yuva is turned to stone too, but Lilisen and Enriqo manage to slay the monster, returning everyone to normal. A goth gal from the gang kind of flings herself at Yuva which makes Lilisen visibly jealous. I think she likes him likes him. Later, she gives him a magic ring so they can hear each other's thoughts. The poor guy is so naive and innocent, but his thoughts reveal he likes her too.

  

The final chapter of this volume opens up the narrative a bit more. In his sleep, Yuva dreams of the kidnapped princess. It seems she's made a kind of psychic contact with him. Members of the royal family all have dragon blood, they live supernaturally long lives and some can transform into dragons. Lilisen's magic might be a draconic power too. The princess warns Yuva that the necromancer is trying to merge his consciousness with the zombie dragon, and that Bad Things will happen if he succeeds. When Yuva awakes and tells the others, Enriqo realizes something Yuva (raised by his grandparents in a tiny rural village) never guessed about himself - he's part of the royal family, and his super strength comes from his dragon blood.
 
Nihei continues to show us unusual takes on classic fantasy creatures. The basilisk moth is both imposing and different from any interpretation I've seen before. Up to now, interactions between Yuva and Enriqo have been a bit stiff and formal; between Yuva and Lilisen almost cartoony in their sibling-like antagonism. As the three become closer as a result of their shared experiences, their interactions also become friendlier and more genuine, with the barriers imposed by rank or rivalry coming down to allow more honest exchanges.

Fantasy Sports 1

 
 
Fantasy Sports 1

by Sam Bosma

Nobrow
2015

 
  

Fantasy Sports is a fun little graphic novel by Sam Bosma about a pair of adventurers who must defeat the mummy and win his treasure by ... beating him at basketball?

 

I've been looking for a term to describe fantasy stories like this one, where the worldbuilding is based on conventions derived from Dungeons & Dragons, but where the world doesn't specifically operate on game mechanics. The consensus among my friends is that there is no one standard name, but we might call the genre dungeon fantasy or rpg fantasy. I'm thinking of stories where Adventurers go into Dungeons to find Treasure and defeat Monsters. The adventurers might belong to guilds, and they probably have named sub-types based on their special abilities. These stories are usually a bit humorous rather than serious, and they often incorporate anachronisms and scifi elements - the kinds of things that come up while playing D&D with a group of friends.

 

In my search, a friend introduced me to the idea of litrpg, which is related, but I think different from what I'm talking about. In litrpg, game mechanics like character levels and hit points are literally true and part of the physics of the world, and the characters are aware of them. For dungeon fantasy, I'm thinking of Adventure Time and Delicious in Dungeon, not That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime.

 

In terms of length and humor, Fantasy Sports is kind of like an episode of Adventure Time. Mug and Wiz are uneasy partners in the Mage's Guild, and both would prefer to be paired with someone else. Mug doesn't actually seem to be a mage? He's a huge, muscly rage monster who can punch through stone walls and has no time for a nerdy sidekick. Wiz is a magical teen apprentice who thinks that Mug is too quick-tempered and short-sighted to teach her anything. 

They get sent into an ancient tomb their disparate approaches make quick work of all the traps an obstacles, but the final guardian is an undead pharoah who insists that he'll only give up his treasure if they can beat him at one-on-one basketball. Mug plays first, struggling against the pharoah's inhumanly long reach until Wiz gives him some advice to play to his own strengths. It's a near tie at the end when Mug gets injured and Wiz has to sub in. The pharoah's getting exhauated but convinced he'll win easily against a kid, and ... well, what do you think happens? C'mon. This is not the sort of story that has a sad ending. I think there are a couple more in this series, so I might try to check those out.

Mainly in Moonlight

 
 
Mainly in Moonlight
Ten Stories of Sorcery and the Supernatural

by Nicholas Gray
Meredith Press

1965, reprinted 1967 
 
 
Mainly in Moonlight is a collection of fantasy stories from the 1960s by Nicholas Gray. The stories are meant for older kids or younger teens. They're structured like fairy tales or bedtime stories. Each one begins "Once, not so very long ago," but they subvert the usual plotlines of the genre in a way that young kids might find frustrating or boring. These are stories of princes and princesses, sorcerers and magic, quests and adventures, but they never go quite how you expect, in ways that might be thought provoking, or disappointing, or both.
 
In Rhetorics of Fantasy, Farah Mendlesohn identifies four kinds of fantasy - portal fantasies, immersive fantasies, intrusive fantasies, and liminal fantasies, which are the kind I think is most relevant here. In a portal fantasy, we follow as someone from our world travels to a fantasy world. In an immersive fantasy, we are immersed in a fantasy world, following characters who are natives to it. An intrusive fantasy mostly takes places in our world, but fantastic characters intrude into it from some hidden and previously unknown place. And then there are liminal fantasies, which I think describes most of the stories in Mainly in Moonlight, where we follow a character who encounters the fantastic but turns away from it instead of going in.
 
In one story, we follow a lady-in-waiting who learns that a handsome prince has been transformed into a loathsome animal. She rushes to help him regain his human form, but when he offers to marry her she demurs. Unlike in "The Frog Prince", she wasn't looking for true love and didn't find it. She saved someone who needed rescuing, but that doesn't mean she wants to upend the rest of her life for him.
 
In the title story, "Mainly in Moonlight", a young man dreams his pregnant cat will give birth to a white kitten, and so he finds a sorcerer who'll make the dream come true, on the condition that he provides a month of drudgery and servitude in the sorcerer's house. He accepts but quickly regrets it. A creature trapped in the well promises to cast the spell instead, if only the guy frees him; he does, but is told he's now enslaved to the creature for a year. He's tricked by two other false rescues, before the sorcerer takes pity and gives him what he really wants - just to go home where (because the spirits did it all in one night) his cat has just given birth to three white kittens.
 
Things often come in threes in these tales. A meek king lives in fear of his selfish, demanding son. When the prince is visited by a great wizard in the night, he's given a simple task, which he immediately fails because he has no impulse control. As punishment, the wizard makes him spend decades as a tree in a snowstorm, conscious for every moment, then after two other tasks and two other failures, centuries as a cloud circling a mountain, a millennium as sand in a burning desert. By this point the prince has been fully broken emotionally, and is prepared to obey any command without question, but when the wizard returns him to the present and tells him to kill the king, the prince still refuses, because he finally appreciates his father's love. It's like the reverse of Abraham and Isaac, but the wizard never really wanted loyalty, just to teach a brat that lesson.
 
In one of the best stories, "According to Tradition", a selfish prince is paired with a generous younger brother. The king has always gone easy on his awful older son and been harsh and stern to the gentle younger, because he's a genre savvy monarch and knows from the tales that all beloved eldest sons are doomed and all meek, selfless second sons will ultimately inherit the kingdom. The boys go on a quest together, to rescue a neighbor girl who's been kidnapped by the fairies. Three times the meet a magical figure in need, the older boy is loutish, and the younger one helps out by giving up a cloak, a ring, an act of kindness. In the second half of the the quest, they face three trials, and each time someone who was helped returns to repay the favor. (I think this is a really classic fairy tale plot.) The older brother receives no help, but gets through by giving up his heart, his ability to wed a human girl, and then his humanity - he becomes a fairy himself. The younger brother is free to return home with the girl, whose kidnapping was only ever a pretext to spare the kingdom from the awful son.
 
"A Lady's Quest" deserves a special mention because it's about a tomboy princess rescuing her brother, who is implicitly, but very clearly, written to be gay. The prince hates hunting and the military, wants to laze about the castle in comfort, and calls whoever he's talking to 'darling' in every sentence. The princess opines that she'd've made a better boy and her brother a better girl ... and he doesn't contradict her. The prince invents a fake quest to get his father off his back, and uses it as an excuse to hang out with his very close male friend, who doesn't enjoy the company of ladies. Then the pair of them are kidnapped by a witch, and the princess gets to do what she's always wanted, and have a quest herself. She doesn't defeat the witch, just offers her a chance to come back to the castle, have friends, and be a lady-in-waiting. The witch agrees but fears she won't be any good at the feminine activities of a lady; the princess reassures her that her lack of skill won't matter. Nothing about the initial situation is resolved, no one uses magic to switch anyone's genders, the prince will still be put upon and the princess thwarted, but the story ends there anyway, in a move that's typical of these stories.
 
One thought I had about these stories is that by denying us characters who accept the fantastic, by denying us satisfying endings, Gray might be encouraging his young readers to make up their own second chapters to each tale, to imagine what a proper adventure and a traditional ending might look like for each of his reluctant protagonists.

Witch Hat Atelier 12

 
Witch Hat Atelier 12

by Kamome Shirahama

Kodansha

2024

 

  

The previous several volumes of Witch Hat Atelier set up all the pieces of a comprehensive disaster. Now they've been set in motion, and everything's in chaos. The girls have traveled to the annual Silver Eve festival, attended by witches from all over the countryside and by even more onlookers. The festival is a chance for witches to show off their newest spells and compete for royal patronage, and for the public to enjoy the spectacle. 

 

The king is there, ready to meet with the most promising inventors, publicly affirming the agreement about witches' role in society, while privately studying old forbidden healing magic. The Pact, you see, says that spells should only be cast on objects (never on people), prevents ordinary people from knowing the truth about magic, and bans witches from learning anything about first aid or medicine. The Knights Moralis enforce the Pact by erasing the memory of anyone who violates it (the only spell they allow to be cast directly on a person). So the king's secret is a serious breach of the law!

 

Coco and Tartah have started realizing they have feelings for each other. They also have serious doubts about the Pact. It's not just that Coco fears that saving her mother (who's been turned to stone) might require forbidden magic, she's also increasingly uncomfortable thinking about all the other people magic could help if it were used for healing. Coco feels especially guilty about Custas, who was injured and lost his dad in a landslide. The accident was partially caused by one of Coco's spells, which came out much stronger than it was supposed to. 

 

Custas is at the festival too, angry and volatile, using forbidden magic to compensate for his injured legs. And his dead dad is here, returned to a kind of cursed half-life by forbidden magic. The forbidden witch who taught Custas is here - she looks young and innocent, like one of the student witches. She wants an audience with the king, and extorts Coco to try to get one. Among her threats is the tantalizing promise that the king could truly heal Custas and his father.

 

The Knights Moralis are at the festival of course, there to prevent any breach of the Pact in the setting with the most contact between witches and ordinary people. They've arrested a very important witch, the old ambassador to the king, accusing him of taking bribes. And they've arrested a dirtbag witch who was selling magic glasses that can see through clothes (a very timely bit of commentary on Shirahama's part, considering one common use of AI image generators). One knight tried to arrest the forbidden witch who tutored Custas, but she turned the tables on him and erased his memory, taking almost everything he knew.

 

Now, in Witch Hat Atelier 12, in the king's jail, the old ambassador and the dirtbag plot to escape. The whole castle is warded against magic; it simply doesn't work inside. The ambassador draws a spell on the skin of the creep, with the idea that he can stick his hand out the window and get it to activate. (Apparently the ambassador already knew forbidden magic even if he didn't use it before his arrest.)

 

And that's what starts the disaster. As is so often the case, the king's jail has a guard monster, a leech that lived between the walls. When the creep sticks his hand out, the leech bites him, his blood mixes with the ink used to draw the spell on him, and everything goes wrong. The leech and man merge into one gigantic being, an impossibly vast multi-headed creature, like a net thrown over the entire festival biting at everyone there. 

 

The ambassador wryly observes that this is the secret reason for banning magic medicine and spells cast on bodies - that blood mixed with ink produces extraordinary, unpredictable results. This is a totally different justification than we've heard previously! (The avalanche that injured Custas happened after a forbidden witch replaced Coco's ink with something much more powerful. Could it have been as simple as ordinary ink mixed with blood?)

 

This is a disaster that could kill countless people. Olruggio and other adult witches use fire spells to burn the monster. The Knights Moralis try to fight the leeches and evacuate the public. They want to keep people safe, but they also fear too many people witnessing just how easily all the helping magic they've been seeing at the festival can be used as a weapon of war. In a moment of irony, the forbidden witch who looks like a school girl gets rescued from the leech by the knight whose memory she erased - he doesn't remember her, or anything really, but he still feels a duty to protect others.

 

Tetia and the other girls feel helpless watching ordinary people bandage the wounds of the injured, and start having doubts just like Coco's. Why shouldn't they do something to useful? In the chaos, Coco confesses what she's been thinking to Master Qifrey. His reaction isn't instant rejection as she feared it would be. He understands her doubts about the Pact.

 

Right now everything is chaos and everyone is in danger. The leeches can just barely be held back, but seemingly not truly injured or defeated. It's an ongoing disaster, and it'll continue in the next volume.

World Heist

 
 
World Heist

by Linnea Sterte

Peow 

2024

 

 

World Heist is a fantasy graphic novel about two thieves stealing a treasure from a long-ruined palace and then learning the history of their prize. It's quite short, and doesn't so much end as set up more to come, so that it feels like a single chapter plucked from a longer work.
 
I hope there will be more, because I can hardly describe how much I like artist Linnea Sterte's work. I'm enthralled by it. She works in flowing lines that look like they poured from a fountain pen, just black and a couple tones of grey. Her work reminds me some of Mobius and of Yoshitaka Amano because of how fluid it is, how pretty, how detailed and decorated, how strange.
 
The thieves go by the noms de guerre of Tiger and Task. We see them in action before we really understand what they're doing. Tiger has a cat's face and can turn into a cat, and he can see the past, useful when the palace you're robbing is so swallowed up by the desert it seems to belong in the Ozymandias poem. Task is a living spell, drawn onto the skin of a dead child, a ghost animating a corpse, and she seems to be able to open anything, which is useful when you're stealing, full stop.
 

  
What they steal is, as the title of the book suggests, a miniature world inside a magic egg. The world was a wedding present from a king to his young bride (or possibly to himself), or rather it's the dwelling place of the real present, a trapped god, a divine androgyne, who has remained alive inside the world in the egg across the vast expanse of time since. In the end, Tiger and Task free the god, who agrees to accompany them ... and you can see why I'd like to know what happens next. 
 
What's the next score? What's the bigger job they can complete now that there's a third thief in the crew? What do such fantastical beings even desire that the human world can offer them, and what trials and guardians would they have to overcome to get it? I hope we will get another chapter sometime, and I'll definitely be looking for more of Sterte's work now that she's drawn me in.

In Viriconium

 
 
In Viriconium

by John Harrison

Gollancz

1982, reprinted 2005 

 

 

In Viriconium is John Harrison's third book set in the fantasy city of Viriconium. Compared to the first two, it reads like the total collapse of Harrison's artistic ambitions, both in terms of the story told and the literary style of the telling. The Pastel City is a genuine masterpiece, a deconstruction of the traditional heroic quest, and still an exciting adventure story in its own right, with descriptions so vivid and with such careful word choice they read like poetry. A Storm of Wings was still good, a flawed sequel that tried to top the original, that failed, but went all-out doing so, trying to depict its own fictional world being supplanted by an alien story.
 
In Viriconium is little longer than a novella. It tells the story of a high-born artist trying and failing to convince a poorer but better artist living in the low city to move in with him while she recuperates from her disease. Since the last two books, hundreds of years have passed, and their events have been forgotten by the public. The city of Viriconium now seems basically like Victorian London, and I kind of want to say there's no longer anything fantastic about it that we can see. The plague that afflicts the city appears as a fog, which was in fact how Londoners at the time believed disease spread, and its symptoms appear to be the same as tuberculosis, which really was endemic then. Harrison suggests a couple times that the plague fog itself is somehow draining the wonder from the city, but it's not an idea he particularly commits to. If his goal was for this book to be a funeral for his dream city, for its dreaminess anyway ... I don't think that was worth doing, and also I don't think he does a very good job of it.
 
We follow the artist Ashlyme, who keeps sneaking into the quarantine zone to visit Audsley King, whom he admires. He meekly suggests her moving up to the high city for a bit, which she rejects in favor of staying in her own home with the fortune teller who's been acting as her caretaker. Ashlyme returns to the high city where he discusses his disappointment with his friend the astronomer, casts his jaundiced gaze on the hypocrisy of the art world and writes cynical diary entries about them, and is harassed by Tomb the dwarf, who's still alive and possibly now mayor of Viriconium, and who wants to date the fortune teller. There's one exciting scene relatively early on when Ashlyme and the astronomer try to kidnap Audsley King by force, and fuck it up spectacularly, but mostly the rest of the book is just Ashlyme making these rounds ineffectually. By the end it just feels pathetic. Maybe it's good the book's not any longer. Condensed into a short story, it might've been a fitting companion to KJ Bishop's "The Art of Dying".
 
There's sort of a theme of the magic going away, although even that is undermined by the very ending. We see Tomb acting like a rough practical man trying to put on society airs, more a mafioso than a mayor, ridiculous in his greased hair and brightly colored suits, unwilling to give up his low-born vices of berry gin and imitation coffee, still quick to thuggish violence in a world that has no use for it. We see the wizard Cellur once more, his memory gone from old age, making ordinary taxidermy birds now, in awe of the sight of a metal bird he no longer recognizes as his own creation. We learn that all the Reborn Men went into the wilderness and like, psychically projected themselves back to their own time, all except two twin brothers. Those two hang about the city acting like prattling jackasses, annoying just to read about, where they are inexplicably the darlings of the art world in the way that today's socialites might enjoy a tabloid scandal or reality star.
 
In the end, Audsley King dies, the astronomer dies, the plague fog which makes everything dull engulfs the whole city, Cellur is nowhere to be found, Tomb and the fortune teller magically go into her tarot cards leaving mundane reality behind, and Ashlyme finally loses his temper and screams at the two dipshit Reborn Men for being such awful pests. They respond by transforming into idealized versions of themselves, becoming giant sized and translucent, and then hovering over the city like guardian angels. So like, maybe the magic came back? Frankly, I no longer really care.
 
All this is also told not in the mix of formal narration and precise word choice Harrison used so well in the previous two books, but in plain, unremarkable prose, that I guess does succeed in capturing the mood of the author and characters alike having given up and abandoned all hope of anything seeming special or even just authentically nice. The book is adequate rather than bad, but comparison to the other Viriconium books makes it really disappointing.

The Tea Dragon Tapestry

 
 
The Tea Dragon Tapestry

by K O'Neill

Oni Press

2021

 

  

The Tea Dragon Tapestry is the third and last of K O'Neill's tea dragon books. O'Neill has grown quite notably as an artist and a storyteller across the trilogy, and I think this is their best work. Tapestry is a direct sequel to the original Tea Dragon Society, although these's a brief cameo by a couple characters introduced in the prequel Tea Dragon Festival.

 

In each of the the tea dragon books, O'Neill pairs someone who's young and getting ready to move into a more professional stage of life with someone who's burned out from too much work, who's trying to heal and reconnect with themselves. O'Neill sees friendships between these two types of people as mutually beneficial, the younger one reminding the older of what they used to be like, the older one helping the younger navigate the confusing first steps of a career. The fussy little tea dragons play a role in this relationship by forcing both parties to get out of their own heads, to engage with the world, and to take care of something that needs them.

 

In Tapestry, we rejoin Greta who wants to be a blacksmith and Minette who used to be a prophet and now works in a tea shop. Greta has learned blacksmithing from her mother and gotten pretty good. She's ready for a new teacher to help her continue to grow. One of the retired adventurers who runs the tea shop sent one of Greta's spoons to the master blacksmith who used to make their adventuring swords. Now he's come to town to test Greta to see if she's ready.

 

Minette found a tapestry she started but never finished when she was a prophet, and starts having strange, symbolic dreams. I think probably for anyone who's had one career, and had to leave it, there's a sense of shame or failure around what you left behind and why you left it. Minette's task will be to accept that chapter of her life, and to recognize that she's happy where she is now, that she has friends, community.

 

Greta needs to decide what to make to demonstrate her skill. She's also worried about her tea dragon, Ginseng, who is not actually fussy, but instead in mourning after the death (from old age) of its previous caretaker. Meanwhile, the master blacksmith reveals to his old friends the tea shop owners that he's been burned out at work, hasn't taken a new student in awhile, and is thinking of just shutting down his forge. For the test, Greta makes a present for Ginseng to let it know she'll wait as long as it needs to recover from its grief. The gift also touches the heart of the master blacksmith, who sees something he hadn't thought of before, and feels inspired to keep smithing. He also decides that, instead of asking Greta to return to his forge, he'll settle here for awhile and reconnect with his old friends.

 

Across all three books, O'Neill has offered a defense of working slowly, making things of quality, making time to spend with friends and pets, and being patient with oneself because all these things take time. This isn't just a list of different tasks; O'Neill clearly sees them as interconnected. Artisan work is a way to avoid burnout, because it's a way of working that lets you savor what you like about your job without using you up. New friendships need not only be with people at the same stage of life, but can be between people who are in some sort of transition, and can support each other, no matter what they're moving from or to. And as I said, that thesis is expressed more clearly in Tea Dragon Tapestry than I think it has been before.

DIE 3

 
 
DIE 3

The Great Game

by Kiren Gillen

art by Stephanie Hans

Image Comics

2020 

 

 

In the first volume of DIE, six teenagers in England in 1990 found six magic dice, and disappeared into the fantasy world of Die, an Earth-sized planet shaped like an icosahedron, a d20. They were trapped their for years, living out fantasy adventures in their roles as the mind-controlling Dictator, the lucky Fool, the emotion-powered Grief Knight, the cyberpunk Neo, the God Binder, who trades favors with supernatural entities, and the Master, who runs the game. Eventually the group learned a magic ritual that would let them leave and return home, but when they left, Solomon, their friend who'd first found the dice and acted as the Master, was seized by the evil Grandmaster who ruled the whole world of Die.
 
25 years after they returned, the now middle-aged friends got pulled back into Die. In the intervening years, Solomon had killed the old Grandmaster and become the new one. He wanted the game to resume, and the others couldn't leave without changing his mind or killing him. He holed up inside his fortress in Glass Town, protected by the armies of Little England and besieged by the armies of Eternal Prussia. The group has long since decided that although strange, the planet Die is real, and its inhabitants have the same moral worth as people living on Earth. Despite this, they also agreed to help Eternal Prussia break the siege and crack the giant bell jar protecting Glass Town so they could kill Sol and go home. The plan succeeded, but then not everyone was ready to leave yet...
 
So then in volume 2, the group split, then recombined, and split again. Initially, two members wanted to stay for awhile to avoid their problems back on Earth, while the others wanted to return immediately. With time to settle in though, everyone starts to feel guilty about what they did to Glass Town and worried about what Eternal Prussia might be doing in there. When they split up again, it's basically a disagreement about tactics instead of goals.
 
Now in volume 3, Dictator Ash and God Binder Izzy are co-ruling the nation of Angria, which is based on the fantasy world the Bronte siblings created together as children. The WWI-era hobbit army of Little England arrives at Angria's capital to demand Ash's surrender for her role in the fall of Glass Town. She arranges to meet with the Master of Little England, who turns out to be HG Wells. He explains that the German inventor of the original military wargame, Kriegspiel was drawn to Die, and his game formed the basis of Eternal Prussia. Wells blamed Kriegspiel for emboldening Germany's military, and wrote his own Little Wars game to try to discourage actual warfare. Ash disillusions him by revealing that WWI happened anyway, and Wells sets off in his time machine to do ... something. But the meeting succeeds in forging an alliance between Little England and Angria.
 
The others are all headed for Glass Town directly. Along the way, they meet a Fallen version of Neo Angela's daughter. The Fallen are like zombie orcs. When Sol became one after they killed him, they realized all the Fallen are former players who died on Die. They wonder how any Fallen could've already been there in 1990, if they were really the first players to arrive. (HG Wells and Charlotte Bronte are Masters, not players.) They also wonder how Angela's daughter could be there, and why she's years older than when Angela left. 
 
They learn from some helpful dwarves that Sol actually created the 12 toy soldiers that inspired the Brontes to write their Angria stories. Eventually the meet some Fair (robot elves from the future) who reveal that Die itself is from the future, but that it draws in people from the past to help ensure its own existence. It sent the toy soldiers back to recruit the Brontes, and the magic dice back to recruit Ash, Angela, and the others. What Eternal Prussia is making in Glass Town now, almost 30 years after their first visit, are the dice that will bring them here. If the dice are made and sent, the Die will merge with Earth in 2020. So Angela's daughter, and the other Fallen, are like the ghosts of people who haven't died yet, but will. Or they could all be saved, if the group can interrupt the creation of the magic dice...
 
Because Gillen is giving us a close-up view of these characters, we really only see three faces of Die - Angria, Little England, and Eternal Prussia, plus the Grandmaster's Realm on face 20. I can't help but wonder what would be on the other sixteen sides! 
 
Planet Die is an interesting villain. Like Roko's Basilisk, it's a malign intelligence from the future that's manipulating the past in order to ensure its own creation. Normally I wouldn't think if a planet as being a villain, but several characters who would know have suggested that Die either has or is being controlled by some sort of evil mind. I'm not totally sure how the Fair fit into this; maybe they're from further in the future, after Die merges with Earth. Ordinarily, in comics, I'd expect the good guys to win, but this is a dark enough fantasy that a downer ending seems possible. 

The Claw of the Conciliator

 
 
The Claw of the Conciliator
by Gene Wolfe

Orb

1981, reprinted 1994 

 

 

The Claw of the Conciliator is the second book in Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun quartet. Our narrator is Severian, an orphan with near-perfect memory who will someday become the new autarch. For all the strangeness of Wolfe's far future Urth, the first book used a couple of familiar narrative arcs to ground us. We watched as Severian grew from a boy to a young man as a member of the Torturers' Guild, and saw him exiled from his home for a forbidden act of mercy. Then, as he traveled, we saw him get challenged to a duel, which he prepared for and then fought, and he met some traveling companions.
 
In Claw we leave those narrative arcs behind, so I had much less sense of where the story might take me. At the end of the previous book, Severian was separated from the others by a disturbance in the crowd as they left the city of Nessus. At the start of this one, he's hoping to reconnect with them on the road. A town hires him to execute a criminal, and he tells us this will happen many more times in his travels, but that he won't mention it again.
 
Severian is recruited by the rebel leader Vodalus, and sent to deliver a message to a spy in the House Absolute, home of the Autarch. Before he leaves, he takes part in a ritual in which an alien carrion animal consumes a corpse, then the participants drink some of the animal's brain fluid, and experience visions of the person who died. The corpse belongs to Thelca, the prisoner Sevarian loved, and who he mercy killed to spare from further torture. Perhaps because of his perfect memory, Severian permanently receives a small piece of Thelca's mind as a second personality inside him. Later in the book, we'll see him remember things because she knew them, and in one instance, she'll possess his body.
 
Severian arrives at the autarch's House and is immediately imprisoned in a communal holding cell. Originally it was meant to hold people while they wait for trial, but most of the current prisoners were born there; their ancestors were accused of crimes generations ago, and never released or even tried.
 
Severian escapes and meets Vodalus's contact. He receives instructions to return the Claw of the Conciliator to the holy order it was stolen from, and to kill the Autarch as he goes to war. The Claw is a glowing gemstone that appears to have the power to heal injuries. Severian realizes the Autarch knows about Vodalus's communications network. This seems less like counterintelligence, and more like the Autarch wants Vodalus to succeed at overthrowing the autarchy. It seems possible that the Autarch somehow orchestrated Vodalus becoming a rebel, and maybe that he's chosen Severian as his successor, although if so, his methods and even his reasons are unknown to us.
 
Severian is reunited with his companions, who are there to perform a play a a festival - the impresario Dr Talos, the giant Baldanders, and Severian's girlfriend Dorcas, who was resurrected by the Claw decades after she died. They perform and then part ways, with Talos and Baldanders returning home, and Severian and Dorcas on the way to complete his two missions.
 

alien carrion eater illustration by Wayne Douglas Barlowe

 
   
Seemingly very little happens, aside from events being set in motion. We see examples of the government's cruelty - the execution and the hereditary prisoners. We see the power of the Claw. Severian is changed by the ceremony with Thecla's corpse. We learn that there's something strange about the relationship between the Autarch and the rebellion. And Sevarian is given goals to accomplish that will presumably lead to him becoming the new autarch. One chapter is transcript of a story Severian reads that sounds like a parable for killing the alien giant Abaia who lives in the ocean. Another chapter is the text of Dr Talos's play, about an autarch acquiring a new sun to replace the dying old one. I have to think that both of these are foreshadowing events that will happen in the next two books.
 
Wolfe has kind of a bleak vision of the future. We know that in the past, humans traveled by spaceship to other stars. Aliens have come to Urth to live and brought some animals with them to integrate into our ecology, and the aliens themselves intermarried with humans. The moon is green and forested, and at their peak, humans lived on Venus and Mars, and in domed cities underwater. But in Severian's time, society has become tradition-bound and quasi-medieval, and technology is perceived like magic. Severian's country is ruled by the autarchy, and it's engaged in a long war with its northern neighbors. Plus, you know, the sun is dying.
 
The giants intrigue me. We're told that Abaia is big like a mountain, and that he'll continue to grow until he can break the continents. Baldanders is an alien from the same species, just young and small enough that he can still live on land. Baldanders seems extremely hostile to a different species of alien who are part of the Autarch's court. If I've understood correctly, the hereditary ruling class, the exultants, are all descended from humans who had children with the alien courtiers. And Severian might be the child of an exultant.
 
Some things Vodalus says make me wonder if the rebels are somehow aligned with the giants against the Autarch. It's hard for me to see what advantage humans could hope to gain from allying with an alien who will eventually destroy the planet, but if there is a connection, I imagine it will become clearer later. It's almost as though a war between two alien societies is being fought on Urth, with humans on both sides of the conflict.
 
I see a kind of parallelism between Abaia who grows like a cancer on the earth, and the black hole growing at the heart of the old sun that's the cause of its decline. In Severian's time, the sun is large and red and no longer as warm as today, not because it's millions of years in the future (though it is thousands), but because of a cancer inside the star, eating it from within. If so, then story logic would seem to require that, to save the sun, Severian will also have to defeat the giant Abaia. How that will intersect with the rebellion and the war, I'm not sure. 

Tower Dungeon 2

 
 
Tower Dungeon 2

by Tsutomu Nihei

Kodansha

2025 

 

 

In the first volume of Tower Dungeon, super-strong farmboy Yuva got conscripted into the royal army to rescue the princess, who's been kidnapped by a necromancer and taken to the mountainous Dragon Tower. Yuva helped defeat a slime monster and recovered a gem that the necromancer says he's willing to trade for the princess. Then many of the royal guards were recalled to the capital, leaving Yuva with a straitlaced master archer and a bratty woman who knows fire magic.
 
Now in volume 2, the trio continues to explore for a safe (-ish) route up to level 100 where they can trade for the princess. Enriqo the archer leads them very cautiously. With their familiar staircase now guarded by giant suits of armor, he insists they map a new route. We learn that the dungeon is circular and 3 kilometers in diameter, which must make it like 15 or 18 km tall, given its proportions. Each level has numbered support pillars and is exactly 10 meters tall, though it seems that the very regularized main structure also holds more irregular and less well-built secondary features, perhaps later additions by less-skilled builders than the originals.
 
The trio gets lost in some repetitive, identical looking sections, then comes close to dying of thirst. Their equipment is stolen while they're sleeping, but when they give chase, they learn that the primordial human dungeon dwellers only wanted their salt (a precaution against another slime monster) for cooking. Yuva and his friends get back the rest of their stuff, plus some treasure, and the location of a water source and a secret staircase.
 
Back outside the fort, a boom town has sprung up to supply the soldiers going in. Besides Yuva's group, we meet a team of badass women adventurers who look like a roller derby team and all carry hammers, and a cat woman who wears a suit of armor. Fire mage Lilisen is eager to go back in the dungeon to beat out the new competitors. Yuva's sister has arrived from the village to work at the inn. She gets attacked by a 10 foot tall nobleman who can turn into a dragon, but the cat-lady knight protects her. Apparently everyone in the royal family is like 10 feet tall and a 'dracomorph', presumably including the princess.
 
Nihei seems to be drawing on tropes from both Dungeons & Dragons and dungeon crawling computer games like Rogue. The appearance of the stair guardians feels like a classic dungeon restocking procedure, and confusing architecture that trips you up as you make your own map is a staple of megadungeons as a genre. The sheer size of the place, and the identical superstructure of each level, is more like a video game though. Lilisen also shows Yuva you can break clay jars to find minor treasures, which is straight out of the Zelda games.
 
Yuva is our viewpoint character. He's from a small village and knows little of the outside world, so he needs Enriqo and Lilisen to explain how dungeons work to him. Along with us, he goggles at the noble cat woman and at the news that the kingdom's royalty are all giant shapeshifters. Yuva is kindhearted, which is why he talked to the salt thieves instead of fighting them. So far, his incredible strength has only been used for carrying heavy packs and breaking through a weakened wall into a secret passageway, but presumably he'll eventually use it for fighting, too. Yuva treats Enriqo like a boss and Lilisen like a sister, much to her annoyance.
 
The world Nihei is building here seems rough, crude, and brutal in a way that matches the style of his linework. The monsters are dangerous and strange in a way that borders on horror. The royal family is monstrous and inhuman, and at least one member is a Bluebeard-type who wants to cannibalize Yuva's actual little sister to prolong his life. Enriqo got a bladder infection when they ran out of water. The details add up to a world that's harsh and uncaring, where only people of incredible skill can survive.