The Tiger's Daughter By K Arsenault Rivera

The Tiger's Daughter

By K Arsenault Rivera

K Arsenault Rivera was born in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico and moved to New York when she was three years old. She grew up in New York and remains there to this day living with her partner. The Tiger's Daughter is her first novel, published by in 2017 by Tor Books. Tor Books is an imprint of Tom Doherty Associates LLC a publishing company founded in 1980 in New York City, which was bought in 1987 by St. Martin's Press and is now owned by the Macmillan Publishers.

The Tiger's Daughter is an epic fantasy story built around a romance. The epic fantasy is the story of a cultured, old powerful empire being slowly and surely brought to its knees by terrors without and rot within. Demons and corrupted former humans cluster at the borders and seep across the walls that guard the empire. While within the empire suffers from famine and plague as the powerful sink deeper into debauchery. This romance is the relationship between the two main characters, both young woman, with powerful legacies behind them and dangerous futures in front of them. Both these legacies and futures are deeply intertwined to the point that frankly, it would be surprising if they didn't become lovers or arch enemies. This is before we get into the fact that they might be demigods. Let me introduce you to each one in turn.

O-Shizuka is the daughter of the greatest hero of the prior generation and the brother of the emperor of Hokkaran. Her Mother is legendary for her sword work and generalized killing ability, gaining the nickname the Queen of Crows, for her habit of feeding the crows bread in her travels... As well as leaving behind mountains of bodies for them eat (Sound strategically and tactically. Be nice to crows and they’ll be nice to you). Her father, an imperial prince, is the most celebrated poet of his generation and her biggest fan (O-Shizuka's Mother, in turn, is a huge fan of his poetry so it works out pretty well). Now you would think that would be the kinda hard act to follow that would make a kid feel shadowed by their parents but let me add one additional tidbit. O'Shizuka's Uncle the Emperor? Has no children, legitimate or bastard, nor has he any siblings other then O-Shizuka's Father and so O-Shizuka is first and only in line for the throne (Excellent. No male-only primogeniture {I'm glad to know this imperial god-king system has your approval}). Most of us would be excused for feeling a bit under pressure. O-Shizuka on the other hand believes that this is exactly the kind of set up that she deserves and not only is she going to live up to these legacies and responsibilities, she's gonna rock them so hard that in centuries to come people will be referring to her parents as the prologue to her own mind-blowing heroics and poetry. This would be incredibly irritating if it wasn't for the fact that O-Shizuka not only lives up to her self imposed standards, being an empire-wide lauded duelist capable of beating hardened soldiers one on one by the age of 13; but her calligraphy is so famous and awesome that she can literally use it as money. She can walk into any shop she wants and walks away with just about anything just by offering to write them a nice sign. Oh, she also has superpowers like being able to glow, make plants grow whenever and however she wishes and when she walks into a garden every flower turns to face her. Let's be honest anyone of us would have a healthy amount of appreciation for ourselves at this point (That kinda shit would turn most of us into an insufferable narcissist, to be honest). Balancing it out is the fact that she lives in an enemy camp. Her Uncle the Emperor hates her for not being his daughter and for the fact that she's wildly unimpressed with him. Throughout her young life, she is faced with attempts to control her or marry her off to some man old enough to be her father. So in a way her pride is a defense mechanism because if she ever lets it slip she runs the risk of being enslaved. Instead of being annoyed with her, I often found myself sympathizing with her, especially as her situation would go from bad to worse as she grew up.

Shefali, the daughter of the Karsa of the Qorin people, a group of horse nomads that were only fought off a generation ago due to the heroics of the Queen of Crows is rather impressive herself. Her Mother was the woman who slew her brothers so she could avenge her sisters and then united her people without ever speaking a word. Still, without speaking a word, she breached the walls that held them away from the Hokkaran Empire and led her people in an attack deep within the Empire. When the heroics of the Queen of Crows and others made her position untenable she humbled herself by making peace with the Empire, marrying one of its nobles, and bearing two children with him before going her own way. Shefali was the younger of the two children and was given over to her mother to raise. She would face some resistance due to her mixed blood but would win over her relatives and people emerging as one of the greatest riders and archers of her people despite never mounting a horse until she was five. Not only that but she can speak to and understand horses and can hit any target with a bow even while blindfolded. Interestingly enough Shefali is actually rather humble about the whole thing but then she was brought up with a family that basically accepted her and wasn't constantly surrounded by enemies pretending to be friends. What's kind of interesting to me here is just how impactful that is without any attention given to it. While Shefali is considered the shy and untalkative one, it's her social network that the girls use throughout the book, be it Shefali's brother who was raised by their father instead of their mother or going on a mission given to them by someone who met Shefali in a town. Which leads me to suspect the narration isn't entirely trustworthy (it wouldn't surprise me that Shefali underestimates herself) but I'll come back to that.

The world that O-Shizuka and Shefali inhabit is a troubled one and Ms. Rivera takes time to show us that trouble in depth even if she doesn't dump a lot of information on us. From what characters say and do we can glean that the Empire and the world is barely holding back some fallen divine being, who turned on the other gods and leads corrupted armies of humans and other beings. These creatures bedevil and torment humanity which holds them back with armies and walls... okay mostly holds them back with armies and walls. Putting that aside, the Hokkaran Empire is a state with a number of internal issues; there are divisions between the various component states and political resentments. In addition, they have a ruling class that abandons its responsibilities in favor of losing itself in various debaucheries, power games, and artistic pursuits that do little except serve as social status symbols. Now at no point is this flat out said in the story; instead, we're shown a world where bandits operate openly and state paramilitary forces are too afraid to confront them (Dear God, don’t they even have competent junior officers who can take some initiative? {Under emperors like this, junior officers like that get executed}). The peasants abandon farms where the crops don't grow or turn rotten due to malign magical influence. The noble class lives in massive palaces and argues over the merits of old poetry styles standing in massive flower gardens while dressed in clothes expensive enough to feed entire villages. This story does a lot to show rather than tell, with Ms. Rivera doling out her world-building carefully and methodically so as not to overwhelm the reader or give so little as to lose their interest completely. This is done around O-Shizuka and Shefali with both girls serving as sort of tent-poles for the world and the story itself. This is mirrored by the fact that their friendship and later romance is the central column of the story itself and Ms. Rivera approaches that with the same level of care and craft that she does her world building. To be honest it's a more believable relationship than a great number of ones that I've read in the past. The only thing really concerning is how they don't have a lot of friends or allies outside of each other but Ms. Rivera takes care to explain why that's the case within the story. I've mentioned all the things I liked and thought were well done, that leaves what I didn't care for.

The story is told in the narrative device of a letter from Shefali to O-Shizuka, which while not written badly is a narrative frame that I just don't like. For one thing, it drains the suspense out of the story because we know the ultimate ending and leaves me wondering why Shefali wrote a letter that covers their entire lives together rather than telling her about what Shefali did when they were apart? While there are some things that O-Shizuka doesn't know in the letter (which lead to interludes in the “present day” of the novel) for the vast majority O-Shizuka does know what happened because she was bloody there! There's also the fact that Ms. Rivera seems to be modeling this on Victorian letters, which I'm honestly not a fan of. This makes The Tiger Daughter's an example of an Epistolary novel, which is a novel written and presented as a series of documents, like letters, diary entries, or documentaries. This is a format that's achieved recent success, with examples like The Martian or World War Z (although neither of them used the letter version) and has a number of classical novels using the format like Stoker’s Dracula. Now, this format can work and as I pointed out with my examples has worked in the past remarkably well. For example, The Martian was able to maintain suspense by keeping the narrative framing as diary entries by the main character that could have been recovered after his untimely end (Both The Dresden Files and The Laundry use this format as well. In the former it’s unstated by clearly a personal memoir, and in the latter as a series of memoirs designed to provide continuity of institutional knowledge). We can't do that with a letter that Shefali wrote to a still living O-Shizuka who is shown as ruling the Hokkaran Empire from the imperial palace, however. Another issue I have is a frankly personal one that I don't think will affect the majority of readers. I have mentioned in prior reviews that my parents are deaf as you could imagine this meant that I learned sign language at a fairly young age (ASL is his first language, in point of fact). There was simply no choice in the matter if I was going to communicate with my own folks. Shefali's Mother, due to a vow, doesn't speak but signs to communicate to the world (or writes notes), despite living with her Mother for years, Shefali doesn't bother to learn anything but the sign for her own name! (The Fuck?) Needing one of her cousins to translate everything for her. It's also galling because it reminds me how some of my Mother's own family never bothered to learn even the basics of sign language and that led to her being a stranger in her own home and family. This isn't as uncommon within Deaf circles as I would like (Ideal incidence rate is 0%.) and while it's not Ms. Rivera's intent to bring that up, I'm left thinking on it all the same. I'll admit this isn't a problem with the story as much as it is me reacting to something an element of the story reminds me of. That said these reviews are my own subjective experience and opinion of the story. So I have be honest and say that this sapped some of my enjoyment from reading an otherwise really good story. In the end, I have to give The Tiger's Daughter by K Arsenault Rivera a B. Despite my own issues, this story is clearly very much above average and I do think Ms. Rivera should be proud of that, considering some of the other first novels I’ve read.

Next week, we open with our first ever Patreon choice!  That being Heaven Sword & Dragon Saber by Louis Cha and Wing Shing Ma.  After that comes our second ever Patreon choice Lamplighter by D.M Cornish.  If you would like to select future reviews or recommend books join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads.  Of course, feel free to comment, and if you liked the review share it with your friends.  Above everything else though, Keep Reading!

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen
Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders 

Wayward Volume II: Ties that bind. By Jim Zub, art by Steve Cummings

Wayward Volume II: Ties that bind

By Jim Zub art by Steve Cummings

I discussed volume one way back in 2017 so while there will be a link at the bottom of the review let me cover the basics right here. Jim Zub is a Canadian comic book writer who broke into the industry when he created the comic Skullkickers, a sword and sorcery action comedy that ran from 2010 to 2015. Since then he has worked on numerous projects for Marvel, DC, and Image. In addition, he has done work for companies such as Hasbro, Capcom, the Cartoon network, and Bandai Namco. He is also a program coordinator for Seneca College’s animation program. Steve Cummings is an American born veteran artist who got his start for DC comics and since then has done work on comics for everyone from Marvel and DC, to IDW, Kenzer & Company, and Devil's Due Publishing among others. He also created a manga, Pantheon High for Tokyopop. Wayward was started in 2014 and takes place in a modern Tokyo where the shadows and dark places of the city are filled with all sort of supernatural creatures. Most of these are rather hostile and predatory towards our main characters, a group of teens with supernatural powers. Fair warning there are going to be some mild spoilers.

Ties that Bind starts by focusing on a new character Ohara Emi, who goes to the same high school that the main character Rori Lane attended before she went missing due to her home... Exploding. Emi is in her own words a standard Japanese girl, leading a standard Japanese life and feeling rather trapped by it. She does the same thing every week and knows that her future has been completely mapped out and there's no escape. That is until she sees that missing girl from school floating outside her window, then things get crazy. She finds herself falling into a group made up of Nikaido; a homeless girl who can generate feelings of calm or use anger to create destruction, and Ayane; the crazed girl created by the union of the souls of a group of stray cats (Woah…). This volume does a good job introducing her and fleshing her out, as well as linking her up to the main group. We also get more insight into the character of Ayane. Considering that was one of my complaints with the last volume I do appreciate that. Although Nikaido is still left in the background. Ayane and Nikaido believe themselves the only survivors of their little group and have been waging a vicious guerrilla war against the supernatural creatures of Tokyo through the means of murdering any small group or individual they find. To be fair, every time they've run into supernatural creatures so far, that creature has tried to kill and eat them, so I have a hard time blaming them for their killing spree. However, they lack any idea of what they're fighting and what their enemies want so there's a profound lack of strategy to their actions. So when they run into a group of supernatural creatures who instead of wanting to kill or eat them, offer alliance and suggestions on ways to do real damage to their enemies, the kids jump all over that without asking any real questions. Which is honestly not a smart decision but seems entirely realistic when you realize these kids aren't even old enough to drive in the United States. This is entirely the kind of move that a group of 15-year-olds under stress and living in an abandoned building would do, hell there are adults who have done dumber with less excuse (I really really want to make jokes about cold war and post cold war politics {you are a model of restraint to us all Doc}). So it feels realistic and not forced... Even if I'm facepalming more than a little at the characters here.

Meanwhile, Rori and Tomohiro (a young man who has to eat spirits to survive) aren't dead but find themselves dealing with their own challenges. Such as having to deal with Rori's powers, Rori seems to have a great wellspring of powers that flow from her ability to see and manipulate the strings of fate that bind people and objects together. This lets her do things like find people anywhere, see parts of the future and create new clothes (yeah I'm not sure how that works either [Well she can weave the strings of fate… why not other strings?]). The power also seems to rush right to Rori's head, as she starts making decisions for people she hasn't even met yet. Major ones and while we didn't get a chance for any fallout here, I'm really hoping to see it in future issues. That said, making such questionable decisions is also pretty realistic so I didn't feel like the character was doing something against her nature. Given how young she is and the fact that she is under a lot of pressure I see how she got there. I just hope she gets called out on it.

This volume does a better job of fleshing out our protagonists but our antagonists are still left a rather shady and mysterious group. They appear to be some type of governing body for the supernatural creatures of Japan who regard the teenagers as a threat to them. However, why the kids are a threat to them beyond our bad guys' own actions provoking them into a war stance is incredibly unclear. A good chunk of the group could have likely been brought onside with the proper introduction and mentoring for example. Instead of introducing yourself to a super powerful teenager by beheading her mother in front of her! This is just bad decision making on behalf of Team Bad Guy, a living hostage is always more valuable than a dead family member in these situations. I'm still in the dark as to what is driving this conflict and what the antagonist team wants or even who they really are beside a random collection of Japanese spirits and this leaves the plot a bit flat when you step away from the action. This doesn't feel like a mystery either as the protagonists are making no moves to find any of this out. So I can't consider a story element because nothing is done with this! If for example Emi and Nikaido had done some work to find out why all the supernatural creatures in Tokyo want them dead and who's pulling the strings here, it would have added some depth to the story. That said I do feel this was an improvement over Volume I, just not a huge one. That said I do enjoy the clear research that Mr. Zub puts into Japanese mythology and the appendixes in the back are a treat. So I'm giving Wayward Volume II a C+. It's good, but not that great.

So next week for our last review in March we're going to head back to fantasy novels for a bit and discuss The Tiger's Daughter by K Arsenault Rivera. Afterward, we'll be opening April with the winner of the Patron poll! If you'd like to vote on what books or graphic novels you'd like to see reviewed next month, then please join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads

In the meantime, if you enjoyed this review, please feel free to comment below, or share the link with your friends but above all Keep Reading.

Review of the first volume is here: http://frigidreads.blogspot.com/2017/09/wayward-i-string-theory-by-jim-zub-art.html

Red as always is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black is your not so humble reviewer, Garvin Anders. 

Darth Vader Vol 4: End of Games By Kieron Gillen

Darth Vader Vol 4: End of Games

By Kieron Gillen

End of Games brings the series written by Kieron Gillen to it's the dark, triumphant, but inevitable end. Set between the movies A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back, Mr. Gillen faced the struggle of writing an interesting story when everyone who picked up the comic knows what the ending is going to be. After all, we see Darth Vader commanding his own fleet in Empire, utterly secure in his power and without rival... Well without rival, as long as you don't count the Emperor of course. Mr. Gillen solved this dilemma by bringing in original characters that he could use to build suspense with, while not stealing the spotlight from our villain. Instead, Vader's arc is one of him recommitting to his path of power above everything else and not letting a single scruple or scrap of emotion stand in his way. Instead, Mr. Gillen explores what separates an antagonist from a villain. He does so while also letting us indulge in the kind of unstoppable destruction that only a villain of Darth Vader's resolve and power can bring us. In a way Vader is extremely refreshing in this series, there are no speeches about the greater good, no waxing on about necessary compromises or puffed up posing of hard men doing hard things. Instead, Vader does what he does, how he does it because he chooses to and simply dismisses any other concerns other than his own will. There is no attempt to present an argument to justify his actions to the audience. Darth Vader is a Sith and for him, his might makes him right and if you disagree, you had best be strong enough to stop him and so far no one has been. I wouldn't want every villain to be like this, but there is certainly a place for the pure simple directness of Vader's stance.

Throughout the series, Darth Vader has faced competition for his position; for his power; and for his very life. He has also been pursuing his own agenda in hunting the pilot that destroyed the first Deathstar, Luke Skywalker as well as trying to piece together what connection there might be between Luke Skywalker and Anakin Skywalker. To do all this, while in public disfavor with the Emperor, he has been forced to gather his own henchmen and troops outside of imperial law and engage in crimes and other immoral actions. He must also fend off ambitious Imperial officers who want his power and the creations of the mad Dr. Cylo, each one believing they can take his position as the Emperor's right-hand man. It's to Mr. Gillen's credit that he was able to tell the story and keep it interesting despite the fact that we know what is going happen. He does this by not trying to soften or subvert Vader at all but showing us why Darth Vader holds the power we see him holding in the movies. Because he has utterly destroyed through means fair and foul (but mostly foul) anyone who would threaten that position or try to sap his power.

While we know that Darth Vader is going to thrive and survive (at least until Return of the Jedi) whether or not his hirelings Dr. Aphra and the rogue droids Triple Zero and BeeTee are going to make it to the end of this storyline is an open question (BTW I love those droids). Honestly, the odds aren't looking good for Dr. Aphra who is increasingly being considered a loose end by Darth Vader instead of a useful asset. She was taken prisoner by the rebels in the last graphic novel (Vader Down) and her escape is covered in another series (that we will get to). Now Darth Vader is tracking her down and it's up in the air whether or not she'll survive being found. What's not in the air is whether or not Dr. Cylo the mad scientist who has utterly abandoned any idea of ethics and morality (and likely jettisoned his ethics committee into space along with it) will survive. Which is honestly just as well, because in all truth Dr. Cylo isn't that intriguing to me as a villain and while he's a great inventor and talented engineer, I'm left doubtful about his skill in pure science. Let me explain, Dr. Cylo lives in the Star Wars Galaxy and is old enough to remember times before the Empire. That means he remembers the Jedi and likely had at least heard a bit about the Sith-Jedi wars in history This makes the reactions and statements of himself and his hand-picked minions pooh-poohing the kind of power a fully mature and trained force user like Darth Vader can bring to bear somewhat baffling and rather foolish. They do this without any direct observation or experimentation, instead embracing arrogance and ego-driven faith in being smarter than anyone else in the room. Here's the thing, I know scientists. Hell, our editor is a scientist! Most of them will tell you that making such statements without observation (preferably direct observation) and experimentation to prove your theory is the kind of foolishness that leads to humiliation and laughter in the world of science (Plus, there is that working hypothesis gleaned from historical anecdotes that a force-sensitive can do things like telekinesis…). It's perfectly believable in Dr. Cylo's case since he's been exiled from the realms of peer review (creating cyborg lobotomized slave space whale ships, for example, tends to be a no-no for most science communities) and surrounded by slaves and minions but it honestly makes him a less interesting character. He's so busy screaming about what a genius is he that he doesn't notice Vader causally tying the metaphorical noose around his neck.

It’s the game of wits between Dr. Aphra and Vader and the sheer spectacle of Vader destroying everything in his way to his goals that carry this story though and I'll be honest that's very well done. While Cylo falls flat for me, Dr. Aphra comes across as an extremely clever and quick-witted character; using her wits and willingness to gamble on one outrageous idea after another to stay inches ahead of the vastly more powerful Vader. We also get to see that power on full display which is a draw in and of itself. This series shows us the savage glory of the Sith in general and of Darth Vader specifically and does a great job of showing the double-dealing, the backbiting and willingness to betray in the name of power and strength that lies at the core of the Sith ideology and their way of life. This storyline uses this to show us the weakness of the Sith and Vader. His drive and uncompromising position leads him to destroy possible allies and destroy still useful assets and in doing so weaken himself in the long run. It leaves him isolated, alone and without the ability to choose any method but the most direct and savage which deeply limits him compared to his opponents in the Rebellion and newly emerging Jedi, I say opponents because Vader doesn't regard them as his true enemies, his true enemies are all lined up in the imperial court just waiting for one moment of weakness. Which is one of the many reasons why the Rebellion won in the end. I really enjoyed End of Games, but I think more effort could have been done with Dr. Cylo to make him less of a one-note character but I found it fascinating how secondary Cylo was to the real conflict. End of Games by Kieron Gillen gets a B+ from me.  It's a strong and worthy finish to the series even if the main antagonist had worn out his welcome.

Join us next week for Wayward Volume II Ties that Bind by Jim Zub.


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The Red Knight By Miles Cameron

The Red Knight

By Miles Cameron

“Vade Retro Satanus”  The Red Knight page 563  

Miles Cameron is one of the pen names of Christian Cameron. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1962 and spent his childhood bouncing around between Rochester New York, Iowa City, Iowa, and Rockport, Massachusetts. After graduating from McQuaid Jesuit High School, he attended the University of Rochester and graduated with a BA in Medieval History. He then spent the next thirteen years as an officer in the United States Navy (...I now have this mental image of him making sailors refer to him as ‘M’lord’ after he issues orders). There he served as backseater in an S-3 Viking aircraft assigned to Sea Control Squadron 31 (VS-31) gaining his air observer wings. Afterward, he served as a human intelligence officer with NCIS and DHS in Washington D.C. He left the Navy in the year 2000. Before turning his hand to fantasy he wrote over a dozen historical novels covering a wide variety of periods and characters. He's also a student of a variety of martial arts and a historical reenactor focusing on the medieval period (Break out the dueling shields and copies of 15th century german training manuals!). His first books were written in cooperation with his father Kenneth Cameron, who was a playwright and novelist himself. Christian Cameron released his first solo novel in 2002; The Red Knight was published 2013 by Orbit books. Orbit books was founded in 1974 and bought in 1992 by Time Warner Book Group. Let's get to the book though.

The book takes place in a parallel world to our own, where Christ existed but the history and condition of the world is very different. Magic is real and man is not alone on the good earth, but man humanity wishes it was. The nation of Alba stands on the very edge of civilization. To the east across the vast seas lies the continent, the fully settled lands of man where the only foe that you face in war is other men. On every other border however lies the Wild; the domain of inhuman and alien intelligences who hold values and beliefs that are often frightening and bizarre to civilized men (I would be very interested in a map of this world…wait, are there dog-men in the Wild? Do they have souls? Can they be converted to Catholicism and baptized? {No dog-men... Yet.}). A generation ago, the father of the current King of Alba won a great victory against the armies of the Wild but the cost was great. Where his father could raise 20,000 knights and their troops, the current king has less than a fifth of that. The population is expanding and growing, so recovery will come if there is time. If. On the very northern edge of Alba stands the fortress nunnery of Lissen Carak, which is also the name of the rich town that surrounds it. The Abbey is not that old all things considered, two centuries ago it belonged to the Wild and the powers of the Wild simply called it The Rock. They want it back and are willing to kill every man, woman, and child living there to do it. The many creatures of the Wild, insect-like Boglins who mass in great swarms, the graceful and small Irks the mighty wyverns and the powerful and hauntingly beautiful creatures that men call demons. The “demons” are actually pretty interesting although Mr. Cameron doesn't go too in-depth into their culture; they are taller than men, winged with crested skulls and beaks. They often cover their crests and beaks with engraved decorations of precious materials which suggests a good understanding of tool use. The demons and wyverns also generate fear as a magical effect on humans so panic is always a real danger from their very presence. The Wild also has its human allies, first being native human tribes that live in the wild and govern themselves by the Wild's rules. The second is a rebel movement within human civilization known as the Jacks. Men who have grown fed up with the feudal order of peasants and lords and seek to kill off the aristocrats even if they have to ally with creatures who view humans as a good source of protein to do it (Damn people, just use a guillotine already…). Because yes, the creatures of the Wild will eat you and they won't wait for you to die before they start. In the face of all this, the Abbess has her nuns, some town militia and farm boys, and the mercenaries she called from the continent. These mercenaries are hard and sinful men, in some ways as dangerous as the creatures of the Wild and expensive, but they're her best bet against having her abbey and home destroyed out from under her and watching her people tormented and killed in their own homes like rabbits in a snare.

As for the mercenaries, they are led by a man who calls himself the Red Knight. He's young, only 20 years old and leading men who were fighting wars when he was still dirtying his own diapers. That said, he's got the talent, he’s got the training and he's got the luck to be one of the greatest war leaders of the age. If a stray arrow or wyvern doesn't turn him into fertilizer first (Or dysentery. So many Great Leaders died from dysentery…). The Red Knight is also a man with a hell of a chip on his shoulder. He was born into a world of wealth, power, and privileged but because he was born a bastard, he was loathed and always at odds with the rest of his family. It doesn't help that he wasn't the child of some amusement or forbidden love, the Red Knight is the child of a rape. Because of that, he was both the target and the vessel of his mother's hate, who raised him for one single purpose. To destroy all the works of man and civilization (Yeeesh. That’s a lot of pressure to put on a kid…). In his own words, to be the Antichrist, but either because of the abuse or despite it, the Red Knight instead has decided to try to be if not a hero at least, not a villain. This is a man who is convinced that God hates him, but he's going to do the right thing anyway and to hell with the Almighty. This is a difficult kind of character to write well, it easy to go overboard with the angst and the grim darkness of it all or to dance around it so much that you might as well not have done it. Mr. Cameron, however, does a good job of writing someone as angry as only an abused young man can be while keeping the character from going too overboard. I mean there are times when I want to reach into the book and smack the Red Knight on the head but Mr. Cameron is sure to make it clear that the Red Knight is being the kind of idiot that only a young man can be. It helps that the mercenary company provides a good cast of supporting characters from his squire Michael, and corporals Big Tom and Sauce, who is a woman at arms and even grunt archers with colorful names like No Head, Willful Murder and so on.

The Red Knight and his company aren't the only characters moving in this world however, there is also the Galle knight Jean de Vrailly, who upon having a vision of an angel decided to grab 300 lances (each knight is the head of a self-contained unit of troops called a lance about equal to a sqaud), sail across the sea and come to Alba to do great deeds. He's considered the greatest knight in the world and unbeatable in one on one combat, incredibly handsome and incredibly arrogant, classist and frankly a jerk. It's only the company of his cousin Gaston that keeps him from starting a war with the Alban natives at every turn and restrains his behavior (My god. He is an embodiment of French Knighthood…). There's also Peter, a man who was being dragged north in a slave convoy but escapes when the Wild attacks and accidentally breaks his chain. His own voyage gives us a very different but important view of the world. Another focus of the narrative is the young Queen Desiderata who struggles to support her older husband as he prepares for a war with the Wild, with a smaller army and fewer resources than his father would have had. I should speak a bit about the book's treatment of woman, in short, it's a very good treatment. As a historian, Mr. Cameron shows us the influence and power that woman such as the Abbess (who would in the real world would have been treated as equal to a feudal lord) the Queen and other wealthy and well-born woman had in their society. Sauce is a woman fighter but it's treated as a rare and strange thing that Sauce has to earn by putting more effort and achieving better results then a man in her position would be expected to. By mixing these two elements, one very clearly historical and the other perhaps not as historical, Mr. Cameron creates something realistic and believable.

Let me actually discuss how Mr. Cameron treats the world he has created, this is honestly one of the details and medieval feeling worlds I've seen without turning into an unreadable mess. Magic is approached using hermeticism which was a real philosophical and mystical tradition that existed in Europe. I should note that hermeticism was one of the first traditions to argue that the world could be observed and tested in experimentation, so while hermeticism was not science, it did help introduce ideas that would become the cornerstones of scientific endeavor. Magic users use a memory technique called a memory palace invented by the ancient Greeks. The idea is to use the memory of location and move through it in your mind to recall memories, you do this by placing what you want to remember along the route you take through the building in your memory. Like if you're memorizing a grocery list, you put the first item, let's say carrots as a large picture on the front door of the building. This creates a mindscape that gives us a whole new mode of interaction between magical characters who can communicate with each other from their mind palaces that non-magical characters cannot interact with. It also makes magic feel like an incredible mental discipline requiring years of training that demands concentration and devotion from its practitioners. I have to applaud Mr. Cameron for finding such a simple but evocative method for that. On top of that, Mr. Cameron uses his experience as a reenactor to give us detailed but not overblown accounts of battles and the arms and armor used. Warhorses get to star as the incredible killing machines they were, knights feel like an ancient analog to light armored systems almost unstoppable unless they run into another knight or a lucky hit gets into their joints or eyes. The book is also deeply littered with Arthurian references, such as the Red Knight himself, as there are a number of characters in the Arthurian Myths that went by the name The Red Knight. Other Arthurian characters appear in various guises but I'll let you discover them for yourself. The end result is a story with medieval characters who feel medieval instead of 21st-century people in medieval dress and that’s a good thing. That said I do have some criticism, Mr. Cameron rarely explains some of the things he was doing - like the memory palace technique - and the story is vast, so at times you might lose track of characters and some of the characters don't feel entirely necessary to the story. There's also a lot of jumping back and forth between characters so sometimes you might have to go back to remember what this specific character was doing when you last saw him. That said, all the stories do come together in the end and while the book is over 600 pages, I'm hard pressed to say which of those pages were wasted but also feel that this book could have used another editing pass to make it flow easier. This is still a very good book and it is without hesitation that I recommend it. The Red Knight by Miles Cameron gets a B+ and my promise that we will return to this series.

That said, last week we closed out a series and since we started one this week, let's end another next week. Next Week join us for Darth Vader 4: End Game. Keep Reading!

Red Text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen
Black text is your not so humble reviewer.

Just a reminder that we have set up a patreon to help us sort through recommendations and possible reviews.  Just one 1$ gets you a vote on what we review next month!  So Join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads

Warp World Forbidden Revelations By Kristene Perron and Joshua Simpson

Warp World Forbidden Revelations

By Kristene Perron and Joshua Simpson 

Warp World Forbidden Revelations is the final book in a five book series, the first book of the Warp World series, entitled simply Warp World was released in October of 2012. I reviewed that book in 2014 and followed up by reviewing every other book in the series. Before I get into that, let's talk about the authors. Kristene Perron worked for 10 years as a professional stunt-woman gaining an in-depth education in all the ways a person can be hurt or killed; nomadic in many ways she lived on both sides of the equator before settling down in Canada with cats and a husband. Her stories have appeared in numerous publications and she’s won awards for those works. Joshua Simpson is a native of East Texas (The poor soul) and has a long colorful list of careers, among them long-haul trucking, safety man for a nuclear power plant, stonemasonry; and he currently works as a pain relief specialist, focusing on nerve release techniques. Which as far as I can tell means he causes you short term pain in order to bring you medium to long term relief and improvements to your health (Basically when you’re injured, even relatively minor injuries, scar tissue can form and your sensory nerves close to those areas can get stuck on the scar tissue and become inflamed. The fix is to manually unstick them, which can be painful). Continuing my stubborn tradition of full disclosure, Josh Simpson is a friend of mine and he was incredibly kind in providing me an e-copy of this book for the review. That said this is my honest opinion on the book, as I believe that's what my readers deserve. I should note there are spoilers here for the series if you haven't read the books stop here, pick Warp World up and see if you're interested.

Forbidden Revelations brings to an end the saga of Seg Erananat, combat anthropologist, brutal reformer, unrepentant rebel and tired exhausted hero; and Ama Kalder, ship captain, rebellious slave and force of nature. They are also both hopelessly in love with each other and completely devoted to the same goals. Those goals were never humble or small either, first was the liberation of Ama's people from the colonial rule of foreign overlords, then it was the reform of Seg's people away from a system of monstrous slavery and dehumanization while huddling in increasingly smaller and smaller patches of their own planet. A planet that was being eaten by a phenomenon known as the Storm (Seg's people simply aren't very creative nomenclaturists as I've noted in the past) the Storm simply destroys any and all life it touches along with draining away the energy source known as Vita. Vita is if I just strip it down to the simplest explanation, a magical energy source created and fueled by faith and hope. Something that Seg's people were so lacking in that they developed a technology to visit other worlds to simply loot their stores of Vita; which they needed to do because the technology that powered the shields that kept the People (I mentioned not being very creative?) safeish was powered by Vita. Meanwhile, their social structure was barely held upright by the slaves they kidnapped from those same worlds and consigned to a nightmarish existence. Seg sought to turn the People to a less barbarous existence by creating a new settlement where there was no slavery and thus spread reform and liberty throughout the world. He failed and in the end, the World of the People was devoured by the Storm. There was one bright spot in this however, Ama managed to survive being exposed to the Storm and as a result, has gained new abilities and a growing understanding of the what the Storm is. However, these abilities come at a dark cost and leave Ama concerned if she is even human anymore. On top of that is another horrid wrinkle. I often wondered in my reviews why the People didn't just eat the cost of warping to new worlds to flee the storm and simply settle on a new world. This book also answered the question. Every time the People visited a new world, they opened a path for the Storm there and as a result, every world the People raided was destroyed by the Storm in a decade. The leaders of the People knew this and did it anyways for centuries, making them perhaps one of the most prolific bands of mass murderers ever as their victims could easily be numbered in the tens of billions if not more. It's interesting to note that even characters who wholeheartedly supported the People's system react with horror and remorse at this revelation, suggested that even in their degenerated brutal state some lines were simply too much.

Forbidden Revelation takes us back to Ama's homeworld, where her people the Kenda have been rebuilding their nation free of the imperial yoke. Two groups of the People have survived and found refuge in this world. One group made up of the people who followed Seg's vision of a better world and society and the other group is a band of mercenaries and spies who were lucky enough to escape into the Warp when their world was finally destroyed. The group that followed Seg ended up in Kenda lands, the group of people that gave birth to Ama and allied with Seg, way back in book one. Things have gone pretty well for the Kenda; they achieved independence and under the rule of Ama’s cousin Brin are slowly unifying and building a cohesive nation-state so as to resist any further aggression. The other group landed in the middle of nowhere. This group is taken over by Issensio, a spy who managed to cause a good amount of grief to Ama and Seg in prior books and has now talked and shot his way to being in charge of this group of People. Despite being washed out of the same school that produced Seg, he's one of the most intelligent, driven and gifted people on any world he ends up on and he's now driven to find a solution for a pressing problem. You see, due to everyone warping over to Ama's world and dumping thousands of people on it... It doesn't have a decade until the Storm shows up, it has a year, maybe... Tops. To that end he'll even ally with Lissil, the woman who schemed, plotted and decided if she couldn't rule Seg's settlement next to him, she would burn it all down. Lissil is from Ama's homeworld to, she's a Welf, a third ethnic group that was reduced to abject servitude below even the Kenda. Lissil basically fought her way up from the very bottom of the heap based on her willpower, physical beauty, native intelligence and utter lack of anything that could even be considered a moral code. She might not as dangerous as Seg, Ama, or Issensio but that's only because she lacks their training and resources.

Meanwhile, Ama wakes up separated from everyone else in the very stronghold of her first enemies. The capital city of the Shasir, the people who colonized the Kenda in the first place. She finds herself in the midst of a political and religious dispute. It turns out that the technology worshipping religion of the Shasir has some secrets of its own. Secrets that tie back to Ama's ancestors and to hidden secrets of her own world. Like why they bothered to hide a continent from everyone and what's on that continent and what ties these secrets to the Storm? The secret may be carried by a single priest named Sa'lais, a true believer who is bound and determined not to let his people repeat the sins of the past and use a weapon so horrifying that they built an entire religion around the idea of keeping anything like that from ever being developed again. Ama has to figure this all out fast because as usual she is surrounded by people who want her enslaved or dead and is operating on a quickly shrinking margin of error. However, Ama has learned a good deal since the early books and Mr. Simpson and Ms. Perron shows us a matured Ama who is more world-wise and less foolish then earlier books. She's also however colder in a lot of ways, some of that being fueled by the changes wrought in her by the storm and others by the deep emotional and mental scars left by the abuse she suffered at the hands of the People. While that gives her the tools to survive even in the very heart of her enemies, it does show us that she had lost part a piece of her goodwill and for lack of a better term innocence. Ama no matter what she has lost though is just getting started and will save her homeworld no matter who she has to go through to do it. Seg on the other hand...

Seg Erananat has seen better days, he's once again separated from Ama and now from everyone else in a strange new place that is somehow in between the World and Ama's homeworld and operates on completely different laws. He's not alone either, surrounded by people from his past he has to figure out who his enemies and who are allies are and do it with full knowledge that history may be entirely misleading. Seg is having to deal with all of this while under the massive stress of being afraid that everyone he loves and knows is dead, devoured by the Storm or lost somewhere in a hostile universe out of his reach. He's also carrying enough grief to kill a lesser man, as he not only saw his world die (and knows his actions hurried that along) but has lost out on his ambition of saving his people and making the People into something worth saving. He's also carrying personal grief for losing his family just as he buried the hatchet with them and made peace. He cannot even be sure that he saved the people closest to them or delivered them to even worse fate. So this Seg is one who is aged beyond his years, feeling like he has failed at everything and is very close to his limit. That doesn't mean he's out of tricks or out fight though, after all, men are most dangerous when they think they have nothing left.

This book reveals to us the nature of the Storm, the hidden secrets of Ama's world and the last terrible secrets of the People. These aren't the only revelations however, as we see just what kind of deals that everyone will cut and what actions they are willing to do when everything is on the line. While everyone has been playing for fairly high stakes throughout this entire series, Ms. Perron and Mr. Simpson have found a way to bring the stakes for the last showdown to an even higher level. The result is a series ending that brings us to new levels of tension and suspense even as they wrap everything up for the final curtain. On top of this, just about every action, the characters take on all sides make sense, I can't find anything to point at and yell that this an incredibly stupid action. Other than letting Lissil run around free but Issensio doesn't have a lot of choices there. I wouldn't call the book perfect however, there were parts of the storyline that dealt with Ama's family that I found a little too neat and pat for example. Also, the fact that we're on the very last book and thousands of pages in... They have to insist on dropping in new characters. Now bringing in a new character isn't a terrible thing but that means giving up space and time to develop them while competing against established characters. It's tough to do without annoying your audience (think of all the fan hated characters that show up in late seasons of television shows or loathed comic book characters who try to change the dynamic of beloved characters) while Sa'lais doesn't irritate, he simply doesn't get developed to the scale that characters like Viren, Gelsh or Jarin did across a couple of books they appeared in. So I don't really feel all that attached to him or invested in his journey in the book. I'll admit I would have rather seen more of Viren then Sa'lais but then Viren might be my favorite supporting character and in my opinion, he never gets enough face time. I'll also note that if you haven't read the last four books in the series you going to be utterly and completely lost as it picks right up from the end of book four and takes off running like a charging horse. That said, the book did completely pull me in and I completely enjoyed it. Warp World Forbidden Revelations by Kristen Peron and Josh Simpson gets an -A.

As always the red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text is me, your reviewer.

As a quick note, I've spent the last couple months going over recommendations and tallying them up.  Counting books that I already have and are "on deck" for review, we're at almost 140 books, my fellow readers.  That's a good 2 or 3 years worth and people aren't shy about adding more to the plate.  So after some consideration, I've opened a patreon.  1$ gets you a vote on what we review next!  So join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads

Join us next week for The Red Knight by Miles Cameron.  

Blade Runner 2049 Directed by Denis Villeneuve

Blade Runner 2049

Directed by Denis Villeneuve   

Over the three decades since it's release the influence and popularity of Blade Runner built up to the point that the final cut had a limited release in theaters in 2007 before being sold as a DVD and Blu Ray. Despite it being twenty-five years since the first version of Blade Runner was released and the very limited number of theaters and only being in theaters for a couple months... The final cut made about 33.7 million dollars and then the money from DVD sales came rolling in. At this point, even Hollywood executives realized what they were sitting on and so they set out to make a sequel. Ridley Scott ended up as executive producer and Denis Villeneuve, the French Canadian of Sicario and Arrival was his chosen director. Unlike the first Blade Runner film, there don't seem any great legends or feuds floating around on this one. Blade Runner 2049 had a producer who was determined to create a better experience then he had and a director who had worked on a number of American movies. Which is likely all to good, another movie with the kind of production drama that the first Blade Runner had would likely turn tragic. I do want to note that a construction worker was killed dismantling the sets for this movie in Hungry, I couldn't find his name but I feel it important to note his passing. That said, let's turn to the film.

The movie takes place thirty years in-universe from the original Blade Runner. The world has not done well for itself. While the Tyrell corporation has fallen, replicants continue to be made now by the Wallace Corporation led by Niander Wallace. Earth in the meantime has suffered an ecological collapse and a mass blackout that wiped out (nearly) all electronic records. This was accompanied by a number of replicant rebellions that led to a ten year prohibition on creating replicants (as well as a number of older models escaping out into the world to live in secret) until Niander Wallace, who made his fortune by creating ways to feed people despite the ecological collapse, received permission to restart production. Niander Wallace was played to great creepy effect by Jared Leto who stated that he based Wallace's behavior on the behavior of several silicon valley overlords he knew and turned it up to eleven (Yep! He basically dialed the standard corporate sociopath up that high. Honestly I’m not even sure he turned it up to eleven.). Niander Wallace is a man with a god complex, given that he controls the food supply of Earth and the labor force of the colonial words... He's a very powerful and wealthy man with a god complex. He is, however, a deeply frustrated man. His model of replicants, the Nexus 9, have life spans equal to humans, they are faster, smarter, stronger and always obey but he cannot make enough of them to satisfy his ambitions of spreading humanity across the galaxy (I can't say I sympathize honestly, he complains about only adding nine worlds to the total of worlds that humanity lives on, but the fact of the matter is if humanity was set up on ten worlds that would make us more extinction proof than any species in history). 

This is where our main character Police Officer KD6-3.7 (A fun note, P (for police) KD come together to make the initials for Philip K Dick) comes in. On a routine run K “retires” a Nexus 8 who claims to have seen a miracle. That's when K finds a box buried under a dead tree with a set of bones in it. The bones belong to a female replicant who died doing something impossible. The bones belong to Rachel and she died giving birth to her and Deckard's child. The news hits K's superiors in the LAPD like a thunderbolt, if replicants can give birth, it is the biggest and most fragile wall separating them from natural-born humans torn down. It also suggests rather firmly that the ideology that justifies enslaving replicants and treating them as objects is wrong. So, of course, there's only one thing to do here, find the child and kill it, while burying all the evidence and pretend this never happened (The systematic dehumanization of the replicants in this movie literally made me weep). So they set their super reliable hound K on the case, however, the clues and revelations that K finds on his way quickly subvert him as he begins to have suspicions about just who the child is and finds himself unwilling to carry out his orders. Especially as it comes to light that some of his implanted memories actually happened. If his memories are real... Then how much of his life is real and how Much is the lie? 

Ryan Gosling plays K and I find myself split on his acting choices here. He actually does a wonderful job playing K as the submissive and down-beaten slave (sure he's paid but he's still property without any rights so I would consider him a slave). He constantly looks down and to the right (replicants have an identification code on the underside of their right eyeball so to verify you have them look up and to the left) when around humans. He hunches and keeps his body language closed and when speaking to his superiors keeps his tone as neutral and emotionless as possible. This is really well chosen as the movie takes pains to show up that natural-born humans react with hostility and borderline violence to replicants. From fellow police officers screaming slurs to him, to the people in his apartment building vandalizing his door and howling diatribes at him whenever he shows his face. So a replicant like K would quickly learn to adopt such submissive postures and tone to avoid attracting additional abuse. However, when alone or with Joi (I'll get to her in a moment) his tone and expression doesn't change that much, so K is left feeling very flat as a character for a lot of the movie. I can see the argument of that's how such a person would act in real life but this is a movie and I have to sit through it (Then it is a you problem, and not an acting problem. I subscribe to that argument. You wear a mask long enough, and it’s hard to take off. You repeat the lie that you’re worthless and don’t deserve dignity to avoid a beating or execution for long enough and you come to believe it yourself, you become the mask you wear and live a life of despair. What you see is not flat acting, but a lifetime of situational depression and stockholm syndrome. {That’s great but this is a movie that I have to sit through, and it’s still Gosling being flat for over 90 minutes, having him show more emotion when alone with K would have made the audience connecting with him easier. Which is what you’re trying to do in a movie, sometimes reality has to take a back seat to audience engagement in movies about replicant cops hunting children. So yeah, it is an acting problem.}). He does get more expressive towards the back half of the movie but at this point, you've already sat through 90 minutes and the impression is made. 

That said it is interesting to note that K is the only character in this movie with a companion of any kind. While Niander has the replicant Luv to carry out his will, she isn't a companion so much as a minion/tool (Because Niander is a sociopath. He doesn’t have companions. He’s incapable of attachments of that type.). Niander is shown to be always alone unless attended on by Luv (seriously I don't even see a butler or a maid), which goes for every human character in the movie as well. This carries on the theme of alienation and isolation from Blade Runner while making K the sole exception. As for Joi, she is a hologram programmed to be a live-in companion, played by Cuban actress Ana De Armas. Joi is supposed to be an artificial intelligence, at first she comes off as a very advanced chatbot but as the movie progresses, she plans, advances her own ideas and expresses her own desires and envy of others. She even shows an awareness of the possibility of death and puts herself knowingly in danger to try and help K. Which brings up the question of just how real Joi was? (My answer is this: exactly as real as K or anyone else.) I think this sub-plot is the part of the movie most influenced by Philip K Dick, as he would enjoy the idea of grappling with the question of whether or not your relationship is real or if even the other person in the relationship is even real. As the question is never definitely answered in the movie. I admit that I tend to fall on the side of if Joi wasn't a sapient person at the beginning of the movie, she was one by the end. As I pointed out, she didn't just follow her programming but adapted to changing situations, developed her own ideas and plans and had her own desires. That strongly suggests being self-aware and sapient to me. While she did make K the center of her universe, there are plenty of human beings who do that, so I don't see that as a disqualification per se. I honestly would like to hear your opinions on the matter however so feel free to leave a comment. 

On the other side of Joi is Luv, a replicant specially made and named by Wallace to be his right hand. Luv is perhaps the most privileged replicant in history, as she runs the Wallace corporation in Niander's name. However, she is still property and it is perhaps being allowed to sit on the high ledges while having to live under another person's whim that creates the rage inside of her. Luv is played disturbingly well by the Dutch-born actress and model Sylvia Hoeks, who plays Luv as a woman who lives under restraint, who seems almost eager to kill humans whenever she can, to the point of murdering not just one but two police officers in their own damn police station (this is one of those things that leads to the world of Blade Runner feeling crowded but damn empty, how do you murder cops in their own station without anyone fucking noticing!?!). I'm not sure if it's because Luv resents being a slave so much as it is she resents humans getting to pretend they're better than her despite all the real power she has and knowing that her achievements only matter so far as her master and creator says they matter. We see this in the differences between her and K, she doesn't look down or hunch over when dealing with humans. However, every time she's in Niander's presence, she adopts the posture of a small child in front of an unpredictable parent and she expresses rage whenever a different natural-born human asserts themselves over her (with the exception of Niander). She never had to suffer the abuse that K did but she did have to learn that all her privilege and power doesn't change her disadvantaged position in society. Which explains the happiness we see when she gets to assault one of these uppity natural-born humans. 

She is also determinedly hunting the child on the orders of Niander as he believes that with the child's DNA he could finally unlock the final secret and make a replicant that can have children, allowing him to make a self-sustaining workforce that can spread quickly. I have to admit I'm kinda looking cockeyed at his statement. He creates replicants as full-blown adults, while any natural-born replicant would need at least a decade to grow up to be a useful laborer. Additionally, a woman, be she natural-born or lab-made human can only have so many children at once or so often. While it seems to me that a factory could pump out a lot more in a year. Lastly... You can make programs like Joi, so why not just churn out robots with half of Joi's intelligence, give them replicant overseers and send them off to make planets useful for natural born human colonists? This honestly seems like an overly complicated answer to the simple question of how do we get enough labor over there to make the planet usable. But I digress. 

As both K and Luv close in on the truth, they both also get closer to Deckard and frankly I don't the movie really can say whether Deckard is a replicant or not. We know that Mr. Scott says he is but well, it just isn't on screen (Does it really need to spell it out though? Having to spell it out just insults the intelligence of the audience, the film treats it as self-evident by the time he’s found.{No, the film doesn’t and it needs to provide some evidence! Which neither film does! The whole thing works just as easily with Deckard being a natural-born human. In fact, the idea that replicants and natural-born can interbreed makes for even more panic}). Niander offers the idea that Deckard was created solely to meet Rachael fall in love with her and get her pregnant but admits he can't prove it (But he is in a position to know Deckard is a replicant {Expect he isn’t, he flat out admits he doesn’t know and the only to know is to cut Deckard apart which loses the information they’re seeking}). Deckard dismisses the idea out of hand. Honestly, that idea doesn't hold water for me either, it's just to damn complicated and depends on Deckard not getting killed and frankly his courtship of Rachael (I abuse the term courtship here and I apologize) sat as much on her lack of options and desperate need for any emotional anchor in the storm as anything else. If Tyrell could have set all that up, he should have been able to foresee the need for some security in his own damn home to avoid having his skull crushed! So Blade Runner 2049 doesn't change my position on Deckard being human. 

Blade Runner 2049 is a very interesting movie in what it explores and suggest and to avoid spoilers I've avoided some of the more interesting parts. That said, this movie has massive pacing issues, at times moving slow enough that a tortoise in the desert could outrun it (Why aren’t you helping?) and at times so focused on its themes and their exploration that the characters and story suffer for it. It's run time is over 2 and a half hours and even Mr. Scott (a man who loves long cuts let's be honest) said it could have lost 30 minutes. It also tends to introduce plot ideas and not really do anything with them to my frustration. That said, again this is an interesting movie with a lot of ideas being dug into and there's a lot to discuss in it. The movie did alright at the box office scoring 259 million dollars against a budget of 185 million, of course, due to Hollywood math it needed to make 400 million to break even (look I'm primarily interested in books so I'm not going to spend a lot of time exploring that but seriously). So it was announced a commercial flop even as it became a critical darling winning 44 awards including Academy awards and being nominated for over a hundred in total. This led the director, Mr. Villeneuve, to declare it the most expensive art-house movie ever made. That said, the movie was one of the top sellers in 2018 for DVD and Blu Ray sales, bringing in another 21 million to the table. So much like it's parent film the final chapter is likely still be written but we'll have to see. I think that there are echoes of the themes and ideas that Philip K Dick wrote about in this work, the question of who and who isn't human, who is and isn't real is a very Dickonian question to ask in a story and it's interesting to have the characters defiantly shout out they know what's real, when the rest of the world says they don't. I'm giving Blade Runner 2049 a C+, despite the ideas and some interesting acting choices the super slow pace and the flatness of K's character works heavily against it but time will tell on that one. 

Well, that's it for our first Philip K Dick Month and it's been an interesting experiment. We are slated to do this again next February will likely do something like this when Dune is released next year but until then let's get back to books! Join us in March for the end of the Warp World Series, as we review Warp World Final Revelations. Keep Reading. 

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen 

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders

Bladerunner 1982 Directed by Ridley Scott

Bladerunner 1982

Directed by Ridley Scott 

“You were made as well as we could make you.” Eldon Tyrell

    A quick note, I will be spoiling parts of the movie here but the damn thing is as old as I am.  There's a limit to demanding a spoiler-free life folks. 

    Bladerunner is a movie that can and has fueled a small industry on the story of its troubled birth, examinations of its troubled childhood (as I extend the metaphor) and its rise into a celebrated and respected mature pillar of science fiction film.  There have been documentaries, books and more about it.  So this review cannot comprehensively cover everything, so I will simply attempt to hit the highlights.   Let's start at the beginning, 1968 when the novel is released, it gains attention quickly.  Martin Scorsese was interested in filming the novel but never made any move to buy the rights to it.  In the early 70s a screenplay was written but was widely regarded as terrible so never got close to filming.  In 1977 a screenplay was optioned and producer Michael Deeley convinced director Ridley Scott to direct it, although he had originally passed on it to try and direct Dune (that would fall through and David Lynch would direct Dune but that's a topic for another day).  What changed Mr. Scott's mind in many accounts was the death of his brother Frank from skin cancer at the age of 45.  This was a harsh blow and this left Mr. Scott in a grim and somewhat downcast mood understandably and you see this in the film.  Mr. Scott never read the novel, to be fair that was normal for the time and neither anyone else working on the movie.  They didn't even use the title, strangely enough, the title comes from a completely unrelated book written by Alan E Norse written around the idea of black market doctors and the men who smuggle them medical supplies called Blade Runners.  It's probably fitting that the movie that has an almost Frankenstein like beginning given it's about a race of people created in labs to be slaves.  

      The role of Rick Deckard proved hard to cast, months were spent in discussion with Dustin Hoffman, only for that to fall through, various others were also considered, Jack Nicholson, Clint Eastwood, and Burt Reynolds but in the end, Harrison Ford won out based on his performance in Star Wars.  The role of Roy Batty however easily went to Rutger Hauer and to be honest I struggle to imagine anyone else doing as well as he did in the role.  Actress  Daryl Hannah landed the role of Pris, a female replicant who is basically the second female lead of the movie.  The role of Rachael, the main female lead had a lot of competition as well and required several ladies to undergo repeated screen tests with Harrison Ford before Sean Young landed the role (bit of a side note, Philip Dick saw a picture of her and was instantly smitten, he asked to be introduced to her in a very, Philip K Dick style note to Mr. Scott, who perhaps wisely decided not to do so).  Of course just as the casting was nailed down the money was pulled, as the company that had signed on to finance the production pulled out, Michael Deeley would in two weeks, however, drum up millions of dollars to replace the lost funds and he would gonna need every dollar.   Because Ridley Scott was determined to make a perfect film, even if he had to kill everyone involved in the most expensive way possible to do it.  Worse as filming began, it became unclear if was murder was actually off the table.  Mr. Scott a British director was not used to American Union rules and by American standards was a micromanager.  This would also set off a brief war by T-Shirt as an unfortunate remark about how British Crews were easier to work with because you just give them orders and they would comply spread to the crew and they responded.  Luckily Mr. Scott was able to break the cycle with his own T-Shirts.   Mr. Scott would set up a video playback booth because he was frustrated in his attempts to get ahold of the camera at times (one of the things that infuriated the crew in the first place).  This leads him into conflict with Harrison Ford who now felt isolated from the director and wanted to work more closely with him as he had his own creative ideas.  Remember at this point Harrison Ford was coming off of not just Star Wars but Indiana Jones so he was a tried and tested veteran who wanted to be a partner with his director, not a minion. This fed into artistic conflicts, Mr. Scott wanted to run with the idea that Deckard was a replicant (I'll talk more on that later) and Mr. Ford hated the idea.  On top of that Ms. Young and Mr. Ford disliked each other so much that the crew called their love scene the hate scene.  Mr. Scott drove the movie over budget and the producers begin to threaten to take the movie away from him (so he was feuding with the crew, his star and now the producers, I feel like this movie was really just an extended super expensive session of conflict therapy in a way), on top of that there was the looming threat of a directors strike.  Mr. Scott's reaction to this?  To whip the crew and cast through several marathon filming sprees and finish the movie.  In fact, when they filmed the final scene of the confrontation of Roy Batty and Rick Deckard, everyone had been working for a straight 36 hours.  

    But they weren't done yet.  Test audiences were left confused and dismayed by the movie so it was decided to add a voice-over by Mr. Ford.  At first, was  Mr. Ford was lukewarm on the idea but he swiftly moved to hatred as he was forced to voice over the entire movie, 3 times.  Mr. Scott wasn't too thrilled either as he was mandated to film a happy ending with Harrison and Sean driving off into a lush forest.  The movie had a good opening weekend but bluntly it opened 2 weeks after E.T hit theaters and E.T just sucked all the oxygen out of the room and left Bladerunner kinda foundering in its wake.  The critics at the time weren't kind either mostly panning the film.  However, the film survived as a cult classic with fans often forming Blade Runner clubs and academics would fall over themselves to analyze the film and discuss the text and sub-text.  Cyberpunk works across all forms of media and across the planet would take visual and plot cues from the movie making a major influence going into the 21st century.  Hell, you can see its influence on things I've reviewed in the past like Altered Carbon.  New life was breathed into it with the release of the Director's Cut in 1993 with audiences declaring it a classic and Mr. Scott releasing the final cut in 2007 (which is the version I watched for this review).  Given that Blade runner finds itself deeply concerned with what is real and what is artificial, I find the fact that there are by some counts as many as 7 versions of the film to be an ironic echo of the theme.  But let's talk about the film, shall we?  Quick reminder, that for films I as always issue two grades, the first being a grade of how the movie stands alone and the second grade how it stands as an adaptation of the novel it's based on. 

    Taking place in the all to close year of 2019, Bladerunner gives us the story of Rick Deckard, a Bladerunner (a cop who specializes in killing replicants) trying to live in retirement but dragged back into the the line of duty to chase down 4 escaped replicants who are hiding out in L.A.  These replicants are seeking to find a way to gain a longer life span as they are near the end of theirs, all 4 years of it.  Deckard hunts down each one in turn while exposing Rachael, a new kind of replicant who was unaware of her lab-grown origins and implanted with artificial memories.  It's during his battles with the 4 escaped replicants that Rick Deckard resolves to save Rachael's life (as she's fair game to any other Bladerunner that finds her) and falls in love with her.  However, first, he has to survive a confrontation against a replicant that was designed to fight wars and has no problem killing to protect his own life.  Throughout these confrontations, Deckard is repeatably asked “It's painful to live in fear isn't it?” as the replicants seek to express the stress of living as a slave, of being a living thinking person who is property.  This is a life where you live based solely on the whim and desires of others.  They mostly express this by beating the crap out of Deckard but they are only about 4 years old.  Deckard's own understanding of that may be the motive for his desire to get out of the life of a Bladerunner, of course considering that Deckard is doing all of this under threat he might have a more first-hand understanding of what the replicants are going through.  After all, the only reason he took the job was the fact that his Police Captain let him know if he didn't that the police department would come down on him full force.    That can't be a very pain or fear-free way to live.

    Bladerunner is a good movie although it's a flawed movie.  The Cinematography is amazing in the movie and Ridley Scott uses the images to communicate a number of ideas and feelings.  The world seems run down and decayed, while there is no lack of luxury, it seems to exists in isolated islands amidst the smoke and haze of an L.A made up of neon lights and dirty streets.  The attention to detail in the settings and props is amazing even over 30 years later. The characters, even the human ones all seem very physically and emotionally isolated, everyone in this movie seems to live alone.  Be it Deckard, the geneticist Sebastian, the billionaire Eldon Tyrell, no matter their station or situation everyone is incredibly isolated from their fellow human beings.  No one has a live-in girlfriend or boyfriend, no one has a friend over, no one even has a generally disinterested roommate.  But that plays to the theme of how no one is above from the alienation and isolation that the society of this future has forced on humanity.  Even those who reap the benefits of that technology must suffer its negative effects.  Technology is everywhere as well (Deckard is able to go to a biologist with a powerful microscope and computers operating out of a roadside stall for example) but has not seemed to aid or uplifted humanity in general and nature is absent, in fact every animal shown in the film is an artificial creation with the implication given through dialogue that real animals are rare and incredibly expensive to get and maintain.   There are constant advertisements and encouragements to immigrate off-world to better lives.  This gives us a dark future where the planet may, in fact, be dying and mankind is fleeing out to the stars to avoid the consequences of its decisions.  The acting is great in this film as well, with Rutger  Hauer and Daryl Hannah being the stands out.  They had the difficult job of portraying replicants, lab created humans who only live about 4 years and spend those years in service doing jobs that no one else wants to do.  Rutger plays Roy Batty, who is a military model and his girlfriend Pris is a pleasure model.  Both actors were able to portray people who struggle with their emotions as they lack the context and experience to understand what they're feeling and react accordingly.  One scene that really stood out to me was when Roy is informing Pris that the rest of their band is dead, killed by Deckard and Rachael.  Rutger does this through using the same facial expressions I've seen on small children when I was tutor when they were deeply unhappy (sometimes over small things and sometimes upset over big things) and didn't have a way of expressing it.  Pris' instant acceptance of the news and her reaction combined a small child and a feral creature's.  Which made sense, for all their intellect, the replicants don't even have a handful of years and it takes humans decades to fully understand and come to grips with the emotions we're capable of.  Hell some of us don't manage it even with half a century of experience!  The replicant actors managed to convey a human being that is a mix of a small child trying to understand what they're experiencing and genius level super predator who will spare no effort to keep living.  

    This makes Roy's decision to save Deckard's life at the end all the more memorable since it would have taken no effort to let Deckard die.  I've seen a lot of argument about it and frankly being arrogant enough to review this movie and the novel, I'm of course going to pitch in my 2 cents.  Roy saved Deckard for a lot of reasons, but I don't think forgiveness was one of them as I've seen suggested.  Rather I think it was a mix of Roy realizing he was dying whether he killed Deckard or not and thus killing him would be meaningless, a very human desire not to die alone and a simple point blank rebellion against his creators.  Roy was built to kill, to be a war-machine that destroyed whoever he was told to without question or mercy. During his time on Earth, he continued this behavior has he murdered his way to his creator and when he was told that a longer life simply wasn't happening, he killed his creator as well. He also killed the one man who showed him nothing but kindness, the genetic engineer Sebastian.  Which might be the one killing that he honestly regrets, as his last words to Sebastian are an apology.  This time, this one time, Roy would show mercy on his own terms and prove he was his own man, not just a biological machine fulfilling its biochemical programming.  Whether or not Deckard deserves to be spared is kinda irrelevant to the thought process here.  It's about Roy making a decision as to whether or not he's going to spend his last moments as the piece of rampaging, malfunctioning military equipment everyone says he is or as the man he knows he is.  Whether that gives Deckard any grace is completely up to Deckard's actions I would say.   As you might guess this moment really stuck with me.  

    However, there are things I didn't care for.  The pacing is kinda all over the place managing somehow to be a slow film that doesn't get enough character interaction to really cement the relations to me.  Additionally, there's Mr. Scott's idea that Deckard is a replicant.  I just don't see it in the film, I mean yes it's odd that Deckard doesn't have anyone in his life and there's the now-famous ending with one character leaving a unicorn origami in Deckard's apartment when he had earlier had a dream of a unicorn but that frankly lends itself to several interpretations.   My own first thought was the fact that unicorns are often symbols of worthy but impossible goals.  Deckard's unicorn is leaving behind an empty of violence to live in peace with a loved one and Gaff leaving that unicorn in his apartment was a silent encouragement to pursue his unicorn even if it was doomed pursuit.  Because when it comes to a goal like that, the simple act of struggling to achieve it is worth something in and of itself no matter how doomed the struggle.  I'm also going to note that I don't see the point of going through the trouble of making a replicant only to strip such a person of all the physical advantages that would bring.  Deckard is clearly physically weaker than all of the replicants, even Pris the smallest and weakest of the replicants being meant for life in a whore house is able to physically beat the crap out of him without much effort.  If you're going to design a policeman in a lab, you might as well make him capable of standing toe to toe with the people he's fighting or it's just a pointless waste.   After discussions with friends who were big fans of the movie, the theory seems mostly held up by circumstantial evidence and a lot of reaching.  If you disagree please, walk me through it!  I would really like to hear from you in the comments.

    That said let's wrap up.  I think Bladerunner has earned its status as a strong science fiction influence and the film even in the face of its issues.  So as a stand-alone movie I give it a B+.  However as an adaptation?  The plot bears next to no resemblance to the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.  The only thing they really have in common is a police agent hunting rogue lab-grown human slaves in California.  Entire plotlines are chopped out, characters changed (Deckard is vastly different, as is Rachael and their relationship) and erased and the whole thing is barely recognizable beyond sharing the same visuals and starting idea.  So as an adaptation I'm going to have to give it a D+.  See it for its own sake but read the novel as well because you can look at one without having any idea of the other.  

No editor this week as he is moving across the continent to further his career.  Please join me in wishing Dr. Allen well and hopefully he'll rejoin us soon. 

Next week, we tackle Blade Runner 2049 to see if any of Philp Dick's influence reached it.  Keep Reading!

No editor this week as he is moving across the continent to further his career.  Please join me in wishing Dr. Allen well and hopefully he'll rejoin us soon.