Cheryl Morgan

Issue 80

May 31, 2026 Cheryl Morgan Issues

This is the May 2026 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.

Art: The Alcázar of Segovia: This issue's cover is a drawing of the Alcázar of Segovia, by Gustave Doré

Platform Decay: Everyone's favourite SecUnit is back in a new adventure. It is a good job no soft and squishy humans are involved. Oh, wait... Children?!!

Oathbound: Tracy Deonn's Arthurian-themed YA fantasy trilogy has reached its conclusion.

Cynefin: What does Welsh nature poetry have to teach us about the world? Quite a bit, actually.

The Prince of Annwn: Cheryl embarks on reading the most famous adaptation of The Mabinogi: that by Evangeline Walton

Salvation’s Child: The first book from Paul Cornell's comics company is from Adrian Tchaikovsky's Final Architecture series

Celtic Magic: A Practitioner’s Guide: Do you want to cast spells like an actual druid? Sadly historical sources tell us little, but Brigid Ehrmantraut does her best with what we have.

The Monster and the Clown: The second book in Mats Strandberg's children's series pits little Frank Steen against a deadly foe: A CLOWN!

Human Voices, Alien Conversations: A book of interviews from across the SF&F community. Lots of famous subjects, and also Cheryl

Hay Festival 2026: If it May is must be Hay. Once again Cheryl has been taking in the famous book festival.

Åcon 2026: As is traditional at this time of year, Cheryl has been off to the Åland Islands to meet her Nordic friends. This year's Guest of Honour was Emily Tesh.

Editorial – May 2026: Cheryl has no idea what happened to May. It was a whole month, right?

This issue’s cover is once again from the British Library’s free collection. It is a drawing of the Alcázar of Segovia in Spain. The castle began life as a Roman fort, then became a Muslim base under the Berber Almoravid dynasty, and reached its final form under the Christian Castilians. Much of the final form can be credited to King Alfonso VIII and his English wife, Eleanor, who was a sister of Richard the Lionheart (and therefore a daughter of the brilliant Eleanor of Aquitaine).

The art is by Gustave Doré who, amongst other achievements, was apparently a favourite artist of HP Lovecraft. You can see why. There is a definite Cyclopean air to the image. You can find more about the image and the book it comes from here.

As usual, there is a larger image of the unadorned art below.

Platform Decay

May 31, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 080, Book Review, Martha Wells

A new Murderbot book is always a reason for celebration, and one of the reasons for that is that Martha Wells tries hard to make them very different. Platform Decay is very much in the condensed thriller mode. It is also a book about airports.

The story opens very much in media res with Murderbot and his new SecUnit pal, Three, breaking their way through the security of a giant orbital platform. This is not quite Ringworld. It is only a ring surrounding a planet, not a ring surrounding a star, but it is impressively huge for all that. And Wells makes it obvious that she has read Larry Niven’s classic work and adapted it for her own purposes.

It takes a while before we are given the full plot, but it is not too spoilerific to mention the key point because it is in the sales blurb. Murderbot is on rescue mission. Some people that Murderbot cares about (yes, it can and does care about humans, how did that happen?) have been kidnapped. As it happens, this is the doing of our old enemies, Barish-Estranza. Someone has to bring them home.

Inevitably complications arise, and this requires our hero and his rescuees to travel through what is essentially a giant space station, parts of which are much less well adapted to human habitation than others. People want them dead, and it is only a matter of time before they are caught, unless they can get out before then.

The orbital is divided up into many separate zones, each controlled by a different corporation, or alliance of smaller corporations. It is like an artificial planet made up of many separate fiefdoms arranged in a big ring.

Which is where the whole airports thing comes in. Wells, being a famous author, has doubtless spent a lot of time in them over the past few years. They are, for the most part, horrible places. Some airports do make more of an attempt at being habitable than others, but they are all dedicated to precisely two things: Security and Shopping. It is an airport’s job to get you on the right flight with a minimum of danger, and to delay that process for sufficiently long to deprive you of large quantities of money while you wait.

The orbital, then, is a giant ring of interconnected airports, with living and office space attached. Wells is, I suspect, venting her dislike of such spaces. More power to her!

Except that Murderbot is quite at home in an airport. Indeed, the more anodyne and anonymous the better. Firstly, all the messy detail added to make humans feel comfortable is just another source of security risk. And secondly, if there is nothing going on for hours on end, it can just sit back and watch media.

Along the way there is also a story about how children, manipulated by an adult that they trust, can be persuaded to do terrible things.

Yeah, Murderbot, children are a pain in the butt. But adults, adults are Evil.

Title: Platform Decay
By: Martha Wells
Publisher: Tot
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Oathbound

May 31, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 080, Book Review, Tracy Deonn

I have at last got around to the final(?) volume in my favourite YA fantasy series. Tracy Deonn’s Legendborn Cycle plays absolutely fast and loose with Arthuriana. But, unusually for such things, it does so with great respect for the legend’s Welsh heritage. Oathbound is no exception.

Let’s recap. The Legendborn Order is a magical secret society set up after the Fall of Camelot to preserve the Round Table and continue its mission to protect the world from evil, specifically from demons. It does this in large part by selective breeding whereby certain families can effectively channel the spirits of the various key players and assume their power.

Except that, over the centuries, humanity has won out over the mission and the Order is now based in the USA and deeply corrupt. Not to mention misogynistic and racist. The heirs of Morgaine quit long ago and set up their own, rival organisation. What’s left is essentially a club for old, white men who happen to have rather a lot of magical power and no morals.

But, a few hundred years ago, an act of greed and lust by a leader of the Order resulted in the actual genetic heritage of Arthur going into a line descended from a female slave. And thus we have the Order’s greatest secret: the Scion of Arthur, the supposed leader of the Order, is actually a teenage Black girl called Briana Matthews.

Our heroes are the younger generation. We have Bree, her love interest Nick (Lancelot), their wild and unpredictable best friend Selwyn (Merlin) and so on. All this Arthurian stuff is tempered by the fact that Black people also have magic. Bree, of course, has both, which, makes her extra powerful.

When we last left them, Bree had just been kidnapped (semi-willingly) by the demon king Erebus (Annwn), who has been impersonating a leading member of the Order for many years to infiltrate and control them. He is trying to recover a magical crown, stolen from him by the original Merlin, and kept safe by the Morgaines, but has recently been stolen again. Bree, for her part, believes that she needs to learn from Erebus so as to be better able to face down both him and the Order, so she agrees to become his pupil. Making a deal with a demon king is, of course, a very risky business.

Meanwhile Nick is desperately searching for Bree and Selwyn, being Merlin, has gone mad. Well, he’s becoming a demon, which is kind of the same thing.

Of course there is also a romance to sort out. Bree and Nick went through the whole not trusting each other a long time ago, so now it is time for some serious Arthur/Lancelot fic, but with a gender-swapped Arthur. Much of this is managed through the cunning stratagem of having the pair of them trapped in the home of a powerful demon, at a society event for rich bastards (Deonn is thinking Gatsby but I am thinking Epstein Island) at which they end up having to be engaged. And for complex magical reasons Bree has forgotten who Nick is, and Nick is worried that he should not physically touch Bree. Cue relationship trauma.

There’s very little in the way of actual sex scenes, but Deonn does a magnificent job of describing how aroused Bree is by the handsome, muscular Nick. I think Nick is probably way too good to be true, but that’s because he is Lancelot. Anyway, Deonn had me lusting after him too, so I guess she’s done a good job.

This is the final book in a trilogy, so things mostly come out right in the end. But I’m not certain that this is the end for the characters as there is a lot more that could be done with the story. If there are more books, I will buy them,

Title: Oathbound
By: Tracy Deonn
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Cynefin

May 31, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 080, Book Review, Carwyn Graves

Cynefin is one of those strange Welsh words, like hierath, that is very hard to translate. The simplest explanation is that it means a natural environment. So, for example, you might say that a camel is in its cynefin in the desert, or a koala up a gum tree. But cynefin can also be applied to humans to mean the place where you are most comfortable. It can even be turned into a verb to mean the act of settling into a new home or job.

It also means a sheep track.

And none of this is quite what Carwyn Graves means when he chose the word as the title of his new book.

Graves, for those of you not familiar with his work, is first and foremost and agriculturalist. He is an expert on Welsh apple varieties (of which there are many, he has written a book). But he has become more and more interested in the relationship between the Welsh people and their land, and in this book he explores how they have expressed that connection through poetry.

Diversion: Welsh poetry. You are probably familiar with the concept of haiku—a Japanese poetry form with a very strict structure. That, dear reader, is nothing compared to Welsh poetry. The englyn (pl. englynion) is a form of Welsh poem that has enough rules to require a lifetime of study from the budding bard. So yes, syllables must be counted. But rhyme is also important, and stress and alliteration. It is all to do with cynghanedd. I won’t pretend to understand how it all works.

In his book, which is subtitled Wisdom from a Thousand Years of Welsh Nature Poetry, Graves takes us on a tour of poets from Taliesin through Dafydd ap Gwilym to R S Thomas, interrogating how their poetry is informed by a connection to the land and stands in opposition to, you guessed it, the English, who manage to get it all wrong.

The trouble with English nature poetry (not just you, Wordsworth, but you are a fine example) is that it is all about the poet as observer. There is a sort of Cartesian dualism to it that abstracts the poet from the subject and lays claim to a position of intellectual observation. In Welsh nature poetry, Graves argues, poet and nature are one. The poet lives in nature, works in nature, and is in communion with nature.

Eventually this takes us all the way to technology and smart phones and the utter disconnect that people these days have from the natural world. If we want to save the planet, Graves is arguing, we need to be more Welsh. Or at least get in touch with nature the way that a Welsh poet would.

He’s not entirely correct in his arguments. Graves puts a lot of the blame on the Enlightenment, and certainly this is where our current obsession with neutral standpoints, objective observation and so on derives from. But the Enlightenment was the way it was because of a rediscovery of the philosophical and scientific thought of the ancient world, in particular Classical Athens. In other words, it is all your fault, Aristotle, you misogynist creep.

But having said that, Graves is pretty much spot on with his conclusion. We do need to live more in contact with our environment. You can’t have a cynefin that is a sterile, chrome-and-plastic-walled space station in which everyone eats nutrient bars 3D-printed by machines and remain human. Also Graves writes beautifully, and the window he opens onto the complexities of Welsh poetry provides a view on a deep and tempting rabbit hole of research. Cynefin: you’ll feel at home with it.

Title: Cynefin
By: Carwyn Graves
Publisher: Calon
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Prince of Annwn

May 31, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 080, Book Review, Evangeline Walton

For reasons that will become clear later in the year, I am doing some fairly deep dives into The Mabinogi. I now own three different translations, three modern interpretations, and a poetry version. I also have a couple of recently published novels based loosely on the Fourth Branch that I need to read. I have previously reviewed two of the modern interpretations here, but now it is time to tackle the big one: Evangeline Walton’s version.

Walton appears to have written the books in the first half of the 20th Century. One of them, based on the Fourth Branch, was published in 1936, and sank without trace. Then, in 1970, Lin Carter, freelancing for Ballantine Books, discovered it. He took it to Betty Ballantine who was enthralled, but she could find no contact information for the author. She resorted to placing ads in the SF&F media (presumably Locus and the various fiction mags), and getting no response she was about to publish anyway when she got a postcard from August Derleth saying that he had a 20 year old address for Walton. Miraculously it was still good, and Ballantine went on to publish all four books.

The Prince of Annwn is based on the First Branch and tells two parts of the story. It contains Pwyll’s adventure in which he takes the place of Arawn, the King of Annwn, and also the tale of how Pwyll woos Rhiannon. It does not include the story of the birth of their son, Pryderi, and his abduction by a monstrous claw, which is by far the weirdest part of the First Branch.

Walton is, of course, attempting to create a coherent, four-part story based on The Mabinogi, and in the process expand all four Branches to novel length. This is quite an undertaking, and I won’t know for a while yet how successful she has been. But there are some things that are immediately obvious.

The first is that Walton’s work was heavily informed by late 19th and early 20th century theories of Celtic culture. In her notes on The Prince of Annwn she cites Nora Chadwick and Roger Loomis, neither of whose work I would rely upon these days. She also uses a particularly lurid tale about the Irish that she gets from Giradlus Cambrensis. Given that Gerald, bless him, was heavily involved in the first attempts by the Normans to conquer Ireland, I’m not sure I would be taking too much of what he said at face value.

The other point is that there is a very strong feminist element to Walton’s work. She introduces to the narratives the Old Tribes and New Tribes, the latter apparently being invaders from Ireland. The Old Tribes have much more of a matriarchal culture, while the New Tribes are fiercely patriarchal. This should be really interesting when we get to the Fourth Branch. It does rather remind me of late 20th century ideas about Celtic culture being some sort of feminist paradise (thank you, Jean Markale).

When Walton was writing it was generally the fashion for historical fantasy to use cod-mediaeval language rather than modern patterns of speech. Personally, I prefer the latter. I know people will claim that it is anachronistic, but so is the fake mediaeval speech that writers tended to produce. Given that you are inauthentic either way, why not make the book readable?

I note that Walton’s books appear to be currently out of print. That’s not entirely surprising given their age, but it is rather sad considering their impact on the field. I discovered from an article by Anna Fiteni that Stevie Nicks owns some rights to the books, but that may just be film rights… I see that a new audiobook edition is on the way.

Title: The Prince of Annwn
By: Evangeline Walton
Publisher: Overlook
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Salvation’s Child

May 31, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 080, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Comic Review, Mike Collins

So, Paul Cornell and Lee Harris have started a comics company. The mission statement of Cosmic Lighthouse is to help speculative fiction writers produce graphic novel editions of their work. And their first project involves none other than Adrian Tchaikovsky.

The story that Adrian has chosen to write for his graphic novel is set in the world of his Final Architecture space opera series. I have reviewed all three volumes here. I very much liked those books, and both Paul and Adrian are friends so I wanted to support them anyway.

Specifically the story is about Xavi, the first ever Intermediary. That is, she is a person able to communicate it a limited way with the Architects, and more importantly to sense when they are about to emerge from Unspace. Before the creation of Intermediaries, Architect incursions seemed entirely random and unpredictable, which naturally kept everyone else on the back foot.

A key thing about graphic novels is that they are far more visual than plain text. Tchaikovsky’s aliens are refreshingly weird, but they are not always described in any great detail. For the graphic novel, artist Mike Collins actually had to draw these creatures. I suspect that a lot of readers will have imagined them somewhat differently—I know I did—but that always happens and Collins’ interpretations of the various alien species are certainly interesting. We get to see an Essiel, which is quite something.

Another issue that Collins had to deal with is the appearance of the Partheni. They are born by parthenogenesis, so they are pretty much clones. But does that mean they all look alike? Not necessarily. To start with their appearance will change with age, and each woman will have her personal style.

Collins found an interesting way around this problem. The audiobooks of the Final Architecture series were narrated by Sophie Aldred. She had got to know Adrian in the process, and obviously she knew Paul Cornell through the Doctor Who community. Given that Ace would not have been out of place amongst the Partheni (aside from the whole military discipline bit), Cornell suggested that Mike make her the model for the warrior women. Aldred is now much older than when she first played Ace, so Collins had access to an archive of photos of her taken over many years and with many different looks. These formed the basis of his Partheni characters.

As to Tchaikovsky’s contribution, the smart thing that he chose to do was to write a prequel. Salvation’s Child is set before the events of the trilogy, and tells a very important tale about how the events in those books came to pan out. So comics readers get a good introduction to the world of the books without any major spoilers.

All in all this is an excellent start to Comic Lighthouse, and a gather from Cornell’s happy comments on Blue Sky that the book is doing very well. Here’s hoping that a bunch of other SF&F writers get to see their work in comics form. I note that Lee Harris is the editor for Murderbot, so I know who I want to see them tackle next.

Title: Salvations Child
By: Adrian Tchaikovsky & Mike Collins
Publisher: Cosmic Lighthouse
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Celtic Magic: A Practitioner’s Guide

May 31, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 080, Book Review, Brigid Ehrmantraut

That is probably a title that will get you thinking of shops in Glastonbury hawking New Age remedies and Celtic-themed Tarot cards. However, Celtic Magic is anything but that. There are suggestions for actual spells that you could perform, but they are taken from actual historical records and are therefore very weird indeed, and often a bit disgusting.

For a snakebite: Take a live chicken (preferably a cock) and pluck the feathers from its anus. Hold its anus to the wound. Hold it there until the chicken has died. Repeat as necessary until all the poison has been drawn out.

I promise you that if you do that Jo Hall will never speak to you again.

So no, this is not something that you get out for ceremonies under the full moon. It is scholarship. Dr Brigid Ehrmantraut is a lecturer in history at St Andews with a bunch of degrees from Cambridge and Princeton. She knows her stuff. And luckily for us she has chosen to share her expert knowledge in a highly accessible and entertaining form.

Celtic Magic is divided into two main sections: one on the ancient world, and one on mediaeval magical practices as evidenced from the Celtic nations. Ehrmantraut is at pains to point out that there is little evidence for any direct survival of religious practices from the first period to the second. Furthermore, the second period is deeply influenced, not just by Christianity, but by the whole of the Classical world.

Both sections provide useful guides to understanding (and where necessary debunking) ideas about how Celtic peoples understood the world, and how they attempted to use magical practices to manipulate it. Ehrmantraut is at the forefront of current research into the mediaeval Celtic world so she’s well worth reading. She has also written quite a bit on Classical Reception in Mediaeval Ireland, which is a fascinating subject.

There is also a short section titled Afterlives which deals with people such as James Macpherson and Iolo Morganwg who forged ancient Celtic documents as part of their campaigns to restore the glories of the Celtic past and put us on a similar footing to the Greeks and Romans.

I should note that Thames & Hudson have done a bang-up job with this book. It has a beautiful, embossed cover utilising themes from the Gundestrup Cauldon. It contains many illustrations from 19th century artists re-imagining the Celtic and Classical worlds, all done in a tasteful greenish monochrome to match the emerald green of the cover. There’s an Evelyn de Morgan painting of Medea in it that I particularly love. And the book is traditionally bound with proper stitching, something you almost never see these days.

So yeah, this book was catnip for me, and might be for you too.

Title: Celtic Magic: A Practitioner's Guide
By: Brigid Ehrmantraut
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Monster and the Clown

May 31, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 080, Book Review, Julia Marshall, Mats Strandberg, Sofia Falkenhem

The Monster and the Clown is the first sequel to Mats Strandberg’s Frank the Monster, and it continues the adventures of little Frank Steen, a were-puppy, as he tries to adjust to life in a small town that is terrified of monsters.

In the first book, Frank discovered a secret community of monsters who live in the basement of the town library. He thought that perhaps amongst them he would be safe. But in this new book a real and terrifying monster comes to town: A CLOWN!

Kruger the Clown is a professional monster hunter, and his circus thrives on the strange creatures that he captures and forces to do tricks. Having heard that Frank’s town was plagued by monsters on the national news, Kruger has decided that Yrred would be a good place to go hunting.

As you may recall, these books are intended for children who don’t fit in. Frank’s parents can’t understand why he isn’t a “normal” little boy like his brother, Oliver. The other kids at school can sense that Frank is a loner and tease him mercilessly. Only amongst the monsters can Frank find friends.

However, this book will test Frank’s friends to the limit. The older monsters have heard of Kruger and are frighted of him. Only Frank and his two best friends, Magnolia and Jas, are brave enough to try to stand up to the clown and rescue the young centaur that he has imprisoned. But what can a were-puppy and two young ghosts hope to do against the terror of: A CLOWN!

Yes, it is fun, and silly, and heartwarming. It is also very much about how kids can have a keen sense of right and wrong, while adults are too afraid to act.

As with book 1 in the series, Sofia Falkenhem’s art beautifully complements the story, and Julia Marshall has transformed the original Swedish into excellent English.

These books should be in every school library. Most adults will be blissfully unaware that they are about being a queer kid.

Title: The Monster and the Clown
By: Mats Strandberg & Sofia Falkenhem
Translator: Julia Marshall
Publisher: Gecko Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Human Voices, Alien Conversations

May 31, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 080, Book Review, James Machell

Ok, it is a bit cheeky to review a book that I am in. But this is me getting interviewed, not me writing, and anyway there are plenty of much more interesting sections for you to read.

Human Voices, Alien Conversations is a collection of interviews conducted by James Machell. The idea is to cover the breadth of the field by talking, not just to authors, but also to artists, editors and critics, and to include minor names as well as big ones. Which is doubtless how I got in.

The authors run the gamut from Chip Delany and Pat Cadigan to P Djèlí Clark and Ai Jiang. The Delany interview is perhaps the most disappointing in the book. Machell admits that it was the first he did and he was still learning. His questions are very short, and the answers shorter. But it does contain this gem:

Machell: Is there any advice you would give to an aspiring writer?
Delany: Don’t be a writer. You will just be unhappy.

In contrast, Ken Liu has written short essays in reply to some of the questions. And John Clute is, well John Clute.

The artist interviews include what sadly became the last ever interview given by Chris Moore, so the book is notable just for that.

Neil Clarke, inevitably, gets asked about the plague of AI slop. His response to that question is almost two pages long.

One of the stranger choices for interview is Matthew Holness, a former actor who now writes novels under the name, Garth Marenghi, an author character that he once played in a TV comedy. I’m unfamiliar with either aspect of Holness’s work, but I applaud Machell for his breadth of interest.

The other interviewees are Bogi Takács, Paolo Bacigalupi, John Picacio, Samantha Mills, Jeff Noon, and Steven Youll. If insight into how the various parts of the SF&F community works is of interest to you, this book is worth a look. Thanks for including me, James.

Title: Human Voices, Alien Conversations
By: James Machell
Publisher: Space Cowboy Books
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Hay Festival 2026

May 31, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 080, Convention Report

You don’t get much in the way of SF&F content at the Hay Festival (or Gŵyl Y Gelli as we call it here), but thankfully they seem to manage to concentrate most of it in a single day, which makes things much cheaper for us folks who don’t want to see the celebrity authors. This year was particularly interesting for me as the genre day featured two debut Welsh authors whom I very much wanted to meet.

First up was Anna Fiteni. The Festival had put her on the tiny Spring Stage and not given her an interviewer. But that was probably for the best. The crowd she got mostly filled the tent, and an interviewer would only have asked her why she had chosen to write for children. She hasn’t, of course. The Wicked Lies of Habren Faire is YA fantasy. Anna insists that it is not Romantasy, and by the strict trope rules of that sub-genre it may not be, but her publishers are certainly treating it as such.

Without an interviewer, Fiteni had to fill 45 minutes by herself. She did so in large part by giving a lecture on why fantasy is important to Wales. If you want to get a feel of what she said, she has a post on LitHub covering much of the same ground. Despite being understandably nervous (first Hay, debut novel, up there by herself) she did a great job. And she definitely came over as One Of Us (Book-nerd, Progressive, Queer-adjacent). And she’s currently reading Kari Sperring’s history book, The Welsh Kings, as research.

Someone asked Fiteni who her favourite writer was. Somewhat to my surprise, she said Shirley Jackson.

Liam Higginson was also at his first Hay with a debut novel. But because his book is adult horror and he’s a bloke he got a bigger tent, and Clare Fuller to interview him. I’ve not yet read The Hill in the Dark Grove, but I am now much more looking forward to it despite it being horror. The excerpt that Higginson read was very good, and he said all the right things about the book (including his answer to my question about its relationship to The Owl Service).

Higginson was like a kid in a sweet shop throughout, and he too came over as very nerdy. The book involves an ancient burial mound and he spent quite a bit of time talking about his love of Wales’s deep history, and Time Team. He also reads Lovecraft, and is aware of what an awful human being Howard was.

Higginson was also asked who his favourite writer was. Shirley Jackson again.

Samatha Shannon also managed to avoid the hostile interviewer trap, by doing a joint event with her best buddy, Saara El-Arifi. The two clearly know each other very well (and are beta readers for each other, if not alpha readers). They merrily swapped anecdotes about such things as loudly swapping euphemisms for genitals for use in sex scenes while writing together in a café. The event was sold out, as is only to be expected.

I had been hoping to hear more about El-Arifi’s new book about Cleopatra, but the audience was clearly there for Sapphic fantasy and that was what they were given. Shannon talked about how she realised that she was gay while writing The Priory of the Orange Tree, and El-Arifi said that her partner came out as non-binary after reading Faebound. It was a happy little queer cwtch all round.

My main take-away came from listening to Shannon talk about the origins of Priory in her getting angry with Richard Johnson about his (Elizabethan era) book, Famous Historie of the Seaven Champions of Christendom. Sadly it was relevant to a paper I was giving at Aberystwyth University the following day. It is indeed a terrible book, for all sorts of reasons.

I was also weirdly fascinated by the fact that El-Arifi writes in the bath. She has a plank of wood on which to rest her laptop, and periodically adds more hot water to keep warm. I hope she has the laptop running on battery.

Finally, in the evening, there was Gwenno, who was magnificent. It was just her and an electronic piano. No band. That lack was, I think, a bit felt on the more upbeat numbers such as ‘Eus Keus’ and ‘Dancing on Volcanoes’, but it did very much show off Gwenno’s superb voice. I’ve seen a review of Utopia that states that her voice “sounds like it might float past the Earth’s atmosphere if she let go of the string”, which I think is very apt.

It was a magnificent show, and I’m very glad I went, despite the fact that it meant I did not get to Aberystwyth until gone midnight.

My thanks to my pal Jo Lambert for the picnic. It was a very bookish day, very well spent.

Åcon 2026

May 31, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 080, Convention Report

So, Finland once more.

Those of you who have been following my witterings for some time will know that Åcon is a relaxacon. It has a membership cap of around 100, and takes place in a relatively inaccessible part of the world, in that you have to take a ferry to get there. So I guess it is a bit elitist, but it is also quite wonderful.

Åcon is a joint project of Finnish and Swedish fandom. The Åland Islands are technically in Finland, but the population is Swedish-speaking and the islands are located mid-way between the two countries. They are also officially a demilitarized zone, except during major ice hockey tournaments.

Actually there is often a major ice hockey tournament on during the convention. There was this year, but there was no Finland-Sweden game on during our weekend, so all remained peaceful.

How long things will remain peaceful is another matter. Åland, like Finland, was once part of the Russian Empire. There is a Russian consulate on the main island, in the town of Mariehamn. The Russians have made no secret of their desire to reclaim Åland. When the Ukraine War started, the people of Åland took it upon themselves to protest. At 5:00pm every day they gather for half an hour outside the Russian Consulate to tell those inside exactly what they think of military adventurism. Every day, since the war started, they have kept this up.

When I am in Åland I try to go along and lend my voice for a day. The location is only a short walk from the Åcon hotel. This year I was surprised to see a police car on duty. However, one of the locals explained to me that this was nothing to do with the protest. The police were on hand because a football team from Helsinki was in town to play Mariehamn. Last time this happened, one of the football fans had thrown a beer bottle at the Russian consulate. The Russians had turned this into a major diplomatic incident, claiming that the missile had been a bomb. They did the whole “We are the real victims here” thing. So the Mariehamn police were on hand to observe.

Oh, but wait, I haven’t said anything about the convention. Åcon only ever has one Guest of Honour. (It is too small to afford more.) Some of these visits have been quite legendary. There was Hal Duncan drinking the Finns under the table. And there was Emma Newman and the life-size cardboard Tom Hiddleston. But one thing that every Åcon has in common is that the GoH has an absolutely amazing time.

This year the GoH was Emily Tesh. If you follow her on Blue Sky you will know that she too had an amazing time. She also did some panels. I was lucky enough to be invited to be on the one about boarding school stories, because a bunch of the Finns are fans of the Crater School books and wanted me to talk about them. I ended up giving Emily a set of the ebooks. She seemed to like them.

There were also panels about Romantasy and romance in science fiction. I attended the latter and was somewhat boggled to discover that Catherine Asaro has been almost forgotten. Kudos to Tommy Persson who at least remembered her books, and the fact that she was a hot-shot physicist, even if he had forgotten her name.

In her GoH speech, Emily started talking about the novel that she is currently working on. She is a former Classics teacher with degrees from Cambridge and Chicago. She was taught by Paul Cartledge, so she knows a thing or two about the Spartans. The new book will be, in part, her homage to the Iliad, and will feature a couple of likely lads called Achilles and Patroclus (both of whom are dead). Except, you know, Skyros, gender stuff. I was unsurprised to discover that Emily loves Wrath Goddess Sing as much as I do. The book is still a long way from being finished, but I wants it, my precious, I wants it so much.

Åcon is also something of a foodie event. This year we were treated to a tasting of hot sauces produced by a local company using chilies grown on the islands. You can find out more about them (complete with heavy Viking-themed marketing) at their website. I may have bought rather a lot.

I also took time to re-visit the clipper ship, Pommern, and the Maritime Museum, both of which have had major refits since my last visit. They are certainly well worth a visit if you are at all into ships. And the museum has one of only two genuine pirate flags (captured from actual pirate vessels) in the world.

So that was Åcon for another year. How long I will be able to keep going I don’t know. It is expensive, and travel gets harder every year. But it depends on who the GoH is, and I guess also whether the world can manage not to get any more insane than it is already.

Editorial – May 2026

May 31, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 080, Editorial

Wait, where did May go? Oh yes, there was an election. And then I went to Finland for a week. And then I had to fit in a month’s worth of work before going to Hay. Right.

Oh well, at least all that travel meant that I got a lot of reading done. This issue is the result.

June should be a little more sane, but July has the Eurocon-Finncon trip. Thank goodness I am not bored.

Issue 79

April 29, 2026 Cheryl Morgan Issues

This is the April 2026 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.

Art: Shui Rhys and the Tylwyth Teg: This issue's cover comes from an 1880 book about Welsh goblins

Project Hanuman: Stewart Hotston's debut novel bravely takes on The Culture and does something interesting with it

Y Dydd Olaf: The most famous Welsh science fiction novel starts off with the best of intentions and ends up in a horrifying dystopia.

Wythnos yng Nghymru Fydd: The first science fiction novel written in Welsh was an advert for Welsh nationalism

The Orb of Cairado: What's that you say? A new novella set in the world of The Goblin Emperor? Take my money!

Welsh Witches: How many witches have there been in Wales? Here are the stories of 100 of them.

Eastercon 2026: Like a phoenix, Eastercon is reborn

Llandeilo Lit Fest: Small but perfectly formed. The Wizard's Tower team take part in their local literary festival.

The Ghosts Who Sit Upon Imaginary Thrones: A whole book full of Anne Sudworth art? Catnip to Cheryl!

Editorial – April 2026: With a momentous election about to happen in Wales, this issue takes a look at how Welsh science fiction saw the future of the country.

Art: Shui Rhys and the Tylwyth Teg

April 29, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 079, Art, Thomas Henry Thomas

This issue’s cover is an illustration from a book called British Goblins. It was published in 1880 and was written by Wirt Sikes, the United States consul to Cardiff from 1876 to 1883. Despite the title (or perhaps recognising that Britain was once entirely Welsh-speaking), the book looks only at Welsh folklore.

The term Tylwyth Teg means the Fair Folk, or Fairies, though the image presents a very Victorian era vision of such people. In Welsh folklore they are generally human-sized.

This particular image was sourced from the Public Domain Image Archive / Internet Archive / California Digital Library. There is a scanned version of the book from the Internet Archive, and a review of it, available here.

The main page for the book credits Sikes with the illustration, but there is a clear signature on the piece. The scan of the book states that the art was by a leading Welsh artist of the time, Thomas Henry Thomas. Amongst other achievements, he was also in large part responsible for the design of the Welsh flag.

Shui Rhys was a farmer’s daughter from Sir Ceredigion (Cardiganshire). According to legend, when tasked with minding the cows, she would come home very late claiming that she had been dancing with the the pobl bach (little people). Eventually one night she never came home.

The library does not have a larger image available for download, so I’m afraid that the image I have provided on the cover is the best you are getting.

Project Hanuman

April 29, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 079, Book Review, Stewart Hotston

The most obvious thing (to me) about Project Hanuman is that Stewart Hotston has read the Culture novels by Iain M Banks, and thought about what it would be like to live in that world. There are obvious parallels. Hotston’s Arcology is a far-future civilization that is proud of its progressive politics and is run primarily by AIs (actual intelligences, not LLMs), just like Culture Minds. But there are differences too.

Let’s start with the joke. Ship names are a big thing in the Culture. So in the Arcology Hotston has a tradition that ships cannot have names until they have done something worthy of one. I guess it means that he doesn’t have to spend much time making up names for the ships.

More importantly, Hotston has taken on board the criticism that, in the Culture, human beings are essentially kept as pets by the Minds. In Hotston’s world this is much more explicit. His AIs are quite dismissive of humans, and indeed of any other organic life forms that they might encounter in the universe. Most humans seem quite happy with this. Indeed, the majority of them don’t live in bodies anymore. They have uploaded themselves into a quantum version of cyberspace known as Information Space. As such they are effectively immortal.

Thirdly Hotston makes it clear that the Arcology’s progressive politics are akin to those of the late 20th Century American Empire. That is, they make a great show of imposing their views on the rest of the galaxy, and are deeply contemptuous of any civilisation that they deem politically backward. They have a particular dislike of slavery, but are blind to the fact that they keep their humans as pets.

And finally, while Banks’ society is very Western, Hotston has the Arcology based on India.

As with Banks, Hotston gets his drama by introducing people who are outside of mainstream society. Our primary viewpoint character is Praveenthi Saal (Prab to her friends) who is one of those rebels who insists on living in a human body. She works as an Interlocutor, someone whose job it is to communicate with other organic lifeforms on behalf of the Arcology.

The other main character is Kercher, a starship pilot. In Hotston’s world, pilots are not heroes. They are largely unnecessary. But there is a need to quarantine dangerous people from the rest of society, and the Arcology does this by sentencing criminals to a life as pilots.

Having spent a good deal of effort on building his world, Hotston proceeds to blow it up. The plot of the novel revolves around a race of beings who appear to match, or even surpass, the Arcology’s mastery of Information Space. They launch a sudden surprise attack and most Arcology worlds are destroyed. Prab escapes because there is a ship on the planet where she lives and it requests the help on an Interlocutor in time for her to get on board. Kercher is the pilot.

Space Opera, because it does things on a grad scale, tends to result in death and destruction on a grand scale as well. This is something else that Hotston has thought about. Elsewhere he has talked about the issue of “Who Matters?” (See also my review of When There Are Wolves Again.) Most of the people on Prab’s homeworld die, including all of her family. For the rest of the novel she is haunted by the fact that she was able to save so few.

Our heroes then proceed to Akhanda, the massive ringworld that is the home base of the Arcology. There they are given a precious cargo and told to flee. For this service, the ship is given the name, Hanuman.

The name, of course, comes from the monkey god in the Hindu pantheon. Early in life, Hanuman is cursed by a sage and forgets most of his divine powers. This is all part of Hotston’s use of Hindu mythology in his worldbuilding, but I don’t know enough about it to comment further.

The rest of the book tells how Prab, Kercher and Hanuman manage to evade their enemies long enough to give the Arcology a chance of survival. Along the way their meet a number of interesting alien races (all of whom seem to have been bullied by the Arcology in the past and are delighting in its downfall). These include a race of three-legged and three-armed, communist, slave-trading aliens known as the Otto who live on a gold-plated rogue planet. They also include a race of giant bacterial colonies called the Operand who claim to have been around for billions of years.

I very much enjoyed reading the book, though I am not entirely convinced by the ending which seemed a little contrived. Possibly I didn’t understand the philosophical point that Hotston was making. I am also hoping that Hotston writes some more books in this world. Given the somewhat apocalyptic nature of the narrative, this might be complicated, but there are, I think, some unanswered questions.

Specifically Hotston talks quite a bit about immortality and the cycle of samsara: life, death and rebirth. As I noted earlier, most of the inhabitants of the Arcology are effectively immortal, until such time as an enemy destroys their data storage and all of their backups. Hotston spends quite a bit of time discussing the need for death, but he doesn’t talk much about birth. This is shame, because Prab is not actually human. She was created by her parents within Information Space because they wished to have a child. They are royally pissed that she chose to inhabit a human body. Actual humans are quite weird enough about the children that they engender. I’d like to know more about this more extreme situation.

Title: Project Hanuman
By: Stewart Hotston
Publisher: Angry Robot
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Y Dydd Olaf

April 29, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 079, Book Review, Owain Owain

The Last Day (Y Dydd Olaf) by Owain Owain holds a special place in the history of Welsh literature. It is one of a very small number of science fiction novels written originally in Welsh. It is also quite experimental in nature. Up until recently it was available only in Welsh, though Gwenno Saunders wrote a concept album based on the book, which I have reviewed in an earlier issue. However, in 2024 Parthian produced an English language version translated by Emyr W Humphreys. This is my review of the English version.

Unlike most of my reviews, this one is going to be deeply spoilerific. That’s partly because the book is very short (a novella by modern standards), partly because there is no other way to address the deeply complex narrative, and partly because the story begins at the end. In the first chapter the narrator announces that he is about to be euthanised, and we know from the prologue that he was.

Our narrator is known only as Marc, and we eventually meet him as a wide-eyed eighteen-year-old about to leave the small Welsh town where he grew up and head off to university in England. He will be accompanied by his childhood friend, Pedr, and will leave behind the girl for whose affections they have been competing since they were seven. Anna is a year younger than them, but will join them in due course.

Fifty-two years later, Marc is being held in what appears to be a concentration camp. It is called Sunset House and he is due to be euthanised because he is deemed surplus to society’s requirements. As it happens, he will die on December 31st, 1999. The last day of the 20th Century.

The story is told through interlaced timelines: one following Marc and Pedr as they grow older, and one presenting the few weeks before Marc’s death. All of the narration comes from Marc’s diary. He tells us that he is writing it in Welsh because by doing so he can evade the government censors. Anything deemed controversial (and some of it is) is replaced in the text by nonsense phrases, most often ‘fratolish hiang perpetshki’.

At university Marc and Pedr meet a West African student called Cwansa who is a political radical. Together they create an organisation called the Council of Fraternities which aims to bring together many different marginalized groups with the aim of creating true equality in society. With hindsight we can see that this noble project has been hijacked and that an appearance of equality has been achieved by turning much of humanity into cyborgs, while a significant number are earmarked for euthanasia, and a very small number known as the Few are actually in charge. They are ruled over by an autocrat known as the Computer-General, who appears to be a cyborg himself, or at least connected to the main computer that runs everything. It transpires that Marc has elected to be euthanized because he does not want to be ‘assimilated’.

The science fiction plot is fairly clear, and Owain actually has Marc mentioning reading 1984 and Brave New World, so that readers can see his influences. But it is not entirely clear what is going on because there are frequent references to something called ΩΔ which may be an alien world. Then there is the mysterious prologue supposedly written by the Higher Committee of the New Few, ten years after Marc’s death. We have no idea what this new world is like, but it does appear to have overthrown the regime of the Computer-General.

However, Owain is just as invested, if not more so, in his human story. Marc is socially awkward, for reasons that become slowly obvious. His father died when he was quite young, and he has been raised by his mother as an only child. Consequently he is significantly poorer than Pedr, who is able to buy his university textbooks new while Marc has to scour second hand stores. Anna’s father appears to disapprove of Marc, presumably due to his poverty. And then there is his father’s sister, Aunt Bodo, who also seems very poor and who may have a strained relationship with Marc’s mother.

While both boys pursue Anna, Pedr is a confident young man who is sure he will have a string of female conquests in his future, whereas Marc is unhealthily obsessed. At university Marc meets Siwsan who preempts the 1960s fashion for free love by shagging every bloke that moves. This does not seem good for Marc’s psyche, even though it teaches him a lot about sex.

Thanks to their friendship with Cwansa, Marc, Pedr and Anna become key figures in the Council of Fraternities. Anna eventually becomes involved with Cwansa. Pedr comes to see that things are going badly wrong, and begs Marc to use his friendship with Anna to influence Cwansa, but Marc seems reluctant to do so.

At this point we are deep into unreliable narrator territory. Marc appears to be deeply sunk into self-pity. Pedr, despite what Marc thinks of him, appears to clearly perceive the danger. As to Anna, well, that’s difficult. She and Marc have spent a lifetime telling each other than they don’t understand each other, but her true motivations are hard to discern. Is she simply unnerved by Marc’s obsession with her, or is she deeply ambitious and manipulative?

The prologue further complicates matters. The New Few state that Marc’s diary was published anonymously by someone who a) translated it; b) arranged the order of the extracts; and c) added a short epitaph addressed to Marc.

It is made clear that much human knowledge was lost in the 20th Century. Whoever rescued Marc’s diary must have a) been able to read Welsh; b) had a personal interest in him; and c) been in a powerful position within the Few. That has to be Anna. Which then leaves us asking, what in the diary has she left out?

Also, why is there no mention of ΩΔ in the prologue? Was Cwansa the Computer-General? It is not clear in the text. There is so much left unexplained.

A modern reader is likely to find the text somewhat problematic. Marc and Pedr display very sexist attitudes, some readers may find Siwsan a somewhat unbelievable character, and it is unclear whether the sole person of colour in the text is a villain or not. However, having been alive in the 1960s, I can assure you that the extreme reluctance of many of the characters to say what they think or discuss social issues is entirely realistic. So is the sexism, of course, and racism would be too. Eugenics was also very much in the air.

The period in which the book was written may also shed some light on the plot. Prior to WWII there was a lot of support for the USSR amongst British Socialists, of which there were many in Wales. After WWII it became increasingly obvious that something had gone very badly wrong, and that what had once seemed a noble project had become a vicious authoritarian regime.

I now need to address the legend of the book. It was written in 1968 and submitted for the Prose Medal at the 1970 National Eisteddfod. The judges declared themselves unable to make an award that year, because Y Dydd Olaf was obviously by far the best submission, but was so complex that they felt it unsuitable for the general reader. That’s very unusual for such a short book.

The book was picked up for publication in 1976. The publisher’s preface states (in translation), “Nothing like this book has been seen before in our language, nor anything quite like it in any language.” It was certainly unique in Welsh, but I am fairly sure that Owain was influenced by what he was reading in the wider science fiction field.

In 1967 extracts of John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar were published in New Worlds. The complete book was published in 1968. It caused a sensation because of its use of the so-called Dos Passos Technique, weaving fake news reports and the like in with the narrative. Owain does this. Extracts from Marc’s diary are interspersed with medical reports from Sunset House. I’m pretty sure that the judges at the Eisteddfod would never have seen anything like that before.

Finally I should address that fact that, for the first time, I am reviewing books in translation where I have some facility in both languages. I am wary of commenting on the quality of a translator’s work, unless the English is particularly poor. You, as readers, will be primarily interested in whether the book is a good read or not. It is not as if you have two rival translations that you need to choose between.

And yet, when you do know both languages, whole new vistas open up. I don’t have a copy of the original Welsh, but Nat Harrington’s review in The Ancillary Review of Books supplies a few words that got me thinking.

Firstly, Owain’s name for his authoritarian government is Cyngor y Frawdoliaeth, which I would have translated as the Council of the Brotherhood. I think that gives much more of an impression of an organisation run by dudebros who work in IT, which is exactly what Marc and Pedr are. It also locates the narrative more firmly within the history of Socialism. And I’m wondering if Owain was aware of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, because I know I was at the time.

Secondly, the name of the authoritarian leader, in Welsh, is Yr Uchel Gyfrifydd, the literal meaning of which is the High Accountant. I’m wondering if there is some relation to the Marvel villain, the High Evolutionary, who was also about at the time when the book was written.

Thirdly I am now wondering about the word, ‘assimilated’. Did Owain use the verb ‘cymathu’? Or is Humphreys invoking thoughts of the Borg in a modern reader?

Emyr Humphreys is a well-respected translator with an excellent track record, so I’m not about to question his judgement. But this does illustrate how translation can subtly change the meaning of a work.

Anyway, there it is. The Last Day is an experimental SF novel about a bunch of sexist, ambitious dudebro IT workers who start off with the best of intentions but end up creating an AI that enslaves the world. It was written in 1968. Obviously it had no chance of predicting the future, did it?

Title: Y Dydd Olaf
By: Owain Owain
Publisher: Parthian
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Wythnos yng Nghymru Fydd

April 29, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 079, Book Review, Islwyn Ffowc Elis

While Y Dydd Olaf is the most famous science fiction novel written in Welsh, it was not the first. That honour, I believe, belongs to Wythnos yng Nghymru Fydd. The title translates literally as A Week in Wales That Will Be, but it is more usually called A Week in Future Wales. It is, fairly obviously, a time travel story. The book was published in 1957 by Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, and the author, Islwyn Ffowc Elis, has apparently admitted that it was intended as blatant political propaganda.

The plot is fairly simple. Our hero, Ifan Powell, meets a German scientist who was invented a means of time travel. Powell turns out to have the right genes to become a time traveller (apparently you need significant Neanderthal ancestry) and off he goes. When he arrives in 2033 he finds a Wales that is independent of England and is flourishing in its freedom.

After a week, Powell has to return to his own time. But he has fallen in love with a girl from the future world and begs to be sent back so he can be with her. Dr. Heinkel warns him that the future is as yet undetermined, and when he goes back Powell might find himself in a very different possible future. Blinded by love, Powell insists on going.

Of course he ends up in a frightening dystopia in which Wales no longer exists as a concept. No one speaks Welsh, and the counties that currently make up the country are now located in Western England. England itself is a police state ruled with an iron fist from Westminster, and Powell barely escapes with his life. He immediately dedicates his life to the cause of Welsh independence to make sure that dystopia never comes into being.

While the book isn’t a very good novel, it is fascinating to see what a Welshman of 1957 sees as being utopian and dystopian about the future.

The science is fairly typical for the period. There are video-phones, but they are big and clunky because they rely on cathode ray tubes like old televisions. Cars can drive themselves. Houses can reconfigure themselves using something like smart matter. Wales has sent a manned mission to the Moon.

The economics of future Wales are fascinating. The government is not opposed to capitalism, but it is opposed to anyone becoming very rich. Most businesses are cooperatives, owned by the workers. The taxation system is designed to prevent concentration of wealth. So, for example, having one shop is fine, but the more branches of that shop you open, the higher the tax rate becomes, until it is simply not economic to open more.

What hasn’t changed much is society, which is still very 1950s. The world is run by men, and it is only the advent of smart ovens that can prepare Sunday lunch automatically which means that wives can go to church in the morning instead of having to stay home and cook. Smoking is still widespread, but science has invented a new form of tabaco that does not give you cancer.

The future Wales of Elis’s imagination is deeply Christian, mostly teetotal, and largely vegetarian. Given that the author was a Presbyterian minister, this is perhaps not surprising. Most people can speak some Welsh, but everyone is fluent in English as well and people can choose the language that they prefer to use. Wales is friendly with many other small, independent nations in Europe, including Bavaria and Friesland, and it is part of a Pan-Celtic League with Scotland, Ireland and Brittany,

It is fascinating to see how current some of the issues raised by Elis still are. Those self-driving cars are not entirely independent. They are centrally controlled by a master computer system, and in built up areas they are limited to 30 mph. On motorways (there is one from North Wales to Cardiff, I would love to know where Elis thought it would go) they are limited to 60 mph. Also the government is very protective of the Welsh countryside. It is mandatory that all power lines be buried underground rather than be carried on pylons. That would go down very well around here right now.

Elis’s utopia is not entirely free of problems. There is still a small section of the population that agitates for reunification with England. They are very reminiscent of Reform, in particular being obsessed with the level of immigration into newly wealthy Wales. However, the gangs of ‘Purple Shirt’ thugs that they employ are clearly based on Oswald Mosely’s Black Shirts.

The dystopia, on the other hand, is terrible. To start with, gambling is rife. It all started with those terrible Premium Bonds. Now there is a National Lottery! And worse still, the perfidious English have forced the whole of Wales to convert to Catholicism! Oh dear…

Other aspects are somewhat more believable. Most of the country has been given over to government-run forestry plantations, saving only the coastal towns which provide second homes for holidaying English people. Unemployment is rife and the cities are full of gangs of desperate youths.

It is important to understand the historical context in which the book was written. At the time, all of Wales was consumed with fury over the plans of Liverpool City Council to drown the sleepy farming valley of Tryweryn to create a reservoir that would supply water to the city. A key point is that this was enabled by an Act of Parliament which was forced through by a Labour government, with all English MPs voting in favour and all Welsh-based MPs voting against (save for one Conservative who abstained). It is therefore perhaps not surprising that Elis does not advocate full-on Socialism with state ownership of everything.

The book was re-published in Welsh in 1993, at which time Elis, in a foreword, sounds much more optimistic about the future of his country. While he saw there was a lot to be done, Wales had come a very long way. An English translation was produced by Stephen Morris in 2019, and it is now available as an ebook and in print.

Title: Wythnos yng Nghymru Fydd
By: Islwyn Ffowc Elis
Publisher: Cambria Futura
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Orb of Cairado

April 29, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 079, Book Review, Katherine Addison

Well this is a strange one. As you can probably guess from the cover, The Orb of Cairado is a book in Katherine Addison’s Goblin Emperor world. However, it is not a novel, and unlike the last three books it does not feature Thara Celehar. That’s just the start.

The book is a novella, and it starts with news of an airship crash. Many of you, I suspect, will have forgotten that. I had a vague recollection of what was going on, so I looked it up, and I was right. In The Goblin Emperor, Maia inherits the throne because his father and half-brothers die in an airship crash. This is the same event, returned to after four novels.

However, this is not a story about the royal family. Rather it is a story that happens because of the death of the pilot of the airship. It is a story about a disgraced academic called Ulcetha Zhorvena. Ulcetha’s friend Mara was the airship pilot. In Mara’s effects his widow finds a message for Ulcetha.

Backtrack a while (the book does this too). Ulcetha is in disgrace because he has been accused of stealing a valuable antique from the university where he worked. Although no one has any proof, he is the person of lowest social class who might have committed the theft, so he gets the blame. Because of this, Ulcetha is reduced to writing fake provenance notes for a dealer in fake antiquities.

However, thanks to the message from dead Mara, Ulcetha finds himself on the track of a far more valuable artefact, the fabled Orb of Cairado, a gem of incalculable value. This eventually leads to a D&D like quest through the lower levels of a destroyed palace, and to a murder of a fellow academic.

Spoilers ahead…

The ending of the story will, I suspect, annoy a few readers. Ulcetha solves a mystery and does the right thing, but this causes him further social disgrace and he ends up fleeing his home city. It is a long way from a happy ending. Jo Walton & Ada Palmer’s new book about speculative fiction, Trace Elements, talks quite a bit about the author-reader contract. This brief quote is relevant:

“…the author-reader contract promises that when a character the reader has become invested in exits the narrative for the last time there will be some sort of resolution which gives the character closure.”

Ulcetha is the main protagonist of the novella, and at the end he gets cast off into the wilderness.

However, I am not sure that it is the end. The story also involves another famous gem which comes into the possession of Ulcetha’s villainous employer. It is not clear how this happened. My guess is that there may be a second novella in the works that will tie up the various lose threads and result in a more satisfying outcome for the characters.

Or I could be wrong. Addison might just want to end the story on a less than happy note, rather like Mary Gentle did with the Golden Witchbreed duology. (Yes, I still remember that, it was painful.) That’s entirely her right. And it does at least shine a spotlight on the awful social politics of the world she has created. Class prejudice is a terrible thing, and we should learn to despise it. But my guess is that there is a follow-up novella on the way.

Title: The Orb of Cairado
By: Katherine Addison
Publisher: Solaris
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Welsh Witches

April 29, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 079, Art, Book Review, Efa Lois

How could I resist a book with a title like that?

Wales has a strange relationship with witches. During the height of the witch craze in the 17th century around 500 people were executed for witchcraft in England. A further 300 were executed in Scotland, almost all of them in the Lowlands. The number of witches executed in Wales in the comparable period was just five. There are many theories as to why this might have been the case.

The most obvious explanation is that Wales was largely Welsh-speaking at that time, and in order to find and accuse witches a witch hunter would have to speak Welsh. Highland Scotland, which was majority Gaelic-speaking, also seemed to escape the worst of the craze. However, it has also been suggested that the Welsh valued their village witches, and would not give them up in the way that the rest of the country did. It is notable that the five deaths were all of people who fell foul of the local gentry in some way.

That there were witches in Wales seems beyond doubt. In Welsh Witches, Efa Lois collects the stories of 100 of them. Some are from more recent times, but the majority are folk tales that could easily date back to the 17th century.

Many of the stories have common features. The witches are all women, and they mostly live alone. If not they live with other women who are often described as sisters. There is little sign of black cats, sabbats or broomsticks, but many of the witches are able to transform into hares.

Most of the witches lived in the countryside, and often they are accused of harming fellow villagers or livestock. A typical story is that the witch begged for a favour from a farmer or his wife, and was refused, leading her to take revenge. This suggests that the witches were mostly poor people who needed to beg.

Nevertheless, the witches seem to be easily bullied. In several stories, when the victim or a friend confronts the witch, she repents and lifts the curse. In some of these cases there is no obvious reason why the victim fell ill in the first place, which suggests that the witch may have cured an illness that she did not cause.

All of the stories are quite short. There are 100 of them, after all. Lois hasn’t put a lot of effort into dressing them up for the modern reader. What she has done instead is accompany each story with a picture. Her art style is very 1960s, reminiscent of the pop art work of Peter Max, or Heinz Edelmann’s work on the Beatles animation, Yellow Submarine. The witches are often drawn as brown or dark skinned, which is a rather welcome development.

I did, of course, check for local witches. There are several who lived in Carmarthen, including a group who used to sail the Tywi on giant scallop shells. There was also one in Llandeilo. But none are recorded as having lived in the Aman Valley. I can only assume that Twrch Trwyth keeps his home free of malign influences. I’d better put out an apple or two for him just in case.

Title: Welsh Witches
By: Efa Lois
Publisher: Seren
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Eastercon 2026

April 29, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 079, Convention Report

One of the disadvantages of having a dealer table is that you don’t get to see much of the convention. You spend all day behind the table, and in the evening, once you have eaten, you are probably too tired to do anything else. However, I did do a few panels, and I tried to keep up with what everyone else was saying about the event on social media and the convention Discord. Here’s what I saw.

The Birmingham Metropole is possibly unique in that it is easier to get to by air than by land. In theory it is right off the M42, and a short walk from Birmingham International train station, but over Easter all land-based transport in the UK grinds to a halt. I tried to minimise the pain by driving up on the Thursday and back on the Tuesday, but I still took 19 minutes to travel the last 4 miles on the M42 on Thursday afternoon.

The good news about this is that we get a lot of foreign visitors. There were quite a few Americans at the con (and possibly some didn’t go back). There were also people from all over Europe. I got to meet Cora Buhlert in person. Besides Germany, there were people from Norway, Sweden, France, Ireland, and probably a few places that I missed. This is very welcome.

The Metropole has plenty of space for an Eastercon. Indeed, there is so much space that they hosted another convention alongside ours. This was Haruhicon, a Japanese Culture convention. The Eastercon committee and the Haruhicon folks got together and made a deal whereby they could come to our Dealers’ Room and Art Show, and we could visit some of their spaces. This worked very well. Amusingly we were told that Haruhicon spaces were adult only, and there were some small children among the Eastercon crowd, but mostly your average Haruhicon member looked to be of the right age to be a child of the average Eastercon member.

Everyone seemed very pleased with the experiment. The Haruhicon folks definitely took advantage of our Dealers’ Room. Some of them bought books. And our people ventured the other way, if only because there was a sake dealer in the Haruhicon space. On social media both conventions’ members were saying how happy they were with the arrangement.

I managed to get time to make a quick tour around the Art Show. It looked very impressive. Jim Burns, Fangorn and Anne Sudworth were all there, so there was some very high quality art on display. I bought a small and very spooky piece which the artist, Sophie Jonas-Hill tells me was inspired by David Barnett’s novel, Withered Hill.

My panels were mostly in the Pavilion Room which was next to the hotel swimming pool and smelled strongly of chlorine all weekend. Thankfully my nose is not very sensitive. The programming team did an excellent job of scheduling me around Dealers’ opening times, for which I am very grateful. The panels all seemed to go very well and, as is customary these days, the discussion on Discord was really interesting. It was a pleasure to be on a panel with Karen Lord, and I’m sad that I had so little time to chat with her.

Quite a few of the panels are available on replay, but if you see this paragraph it means that I haven’t had time to watch any of them yet.

We did a book launch. The room was way too small, and the hotel was so unreasonable about catering that I can only conclude that they were trying to put us off, but it went very well. My thanks to everyone who came long, and apologies to anyone who was put off by the crush.

After the dismal experience of World Fantasy I was not expecting much in the way of sales. I am pleased to report that I was dead wrong. I should have brought a lot more copies of Fight Like A Girl #1 and #2, and The Sword Garden. We sold out of some of Juliet and Chaz’s books as well, and all of The Sea-Stone Sword. I think some of the other dealers were less happy. Quite a few people left on Saturday evening, but that could well have been because they had other things to do over Easter.

What we were missing was a mainstream bookseller. Books on the Hill were there, but they left early and did not seem to have a lot of new books. I was hoping to pick up the new Paul McAuley, but they didn’t have it.

I didn’t attend the award ceremony because I was tired and hungry, and we had no books in the short lists. People seemed happy with the results. I am especially pleased for Beth Faulds as she has a story in Wiz Duo #2.

There were a few small complaints about the badges not having any means of differentiating types of members. I don’t think this can be blamed on Alan and Colette as they regularly produce differentiated badges for BristolCon. I guess it must have been a cost-saving measure by the convention. But other than that there were very few complaints. Indeed, most attendees seemed to be very happy.

This is important. We have had several years in which conventions were recovering from COVID, and there were serious questions as to whether in-person events would ever recover. Last year, while an excellent little event, was hamstrung by the idiocies of Brexit. But this year was absolutely hopping. What’s more we have firm bids all the way out to 2030, and a possible for 2031. I have not seem Eastercon look so healthy in years.

Llandeilo Lit Fest

April 29, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 079, Convention Report

Literary Festivals, with the honourable exception of Cymera, tend to be quite unfriendly to genre literature. If anyone doing SF&F is invited, it is likely to be a well known mainstream author who is ‘slumming it’, and whose mediocre attempt is billed as ‘revolutionary’ by people who have never read another SF&F book.

Gŵyl Lên Llandeilo (Llandeilo Literary Festival) is a little different. It is very small, compared to the behemoth of Hay. It is also very Welsh. One of the reasons it is well known in Wales is that 50% of the programming is delivered in Welsh. Simultaneous translation is provided. Being very Welsh, the programme often includes quite a few political and protest-oriented books. Perhaps that is why they let me in. Or it may be because the programme contains a lot of LGBTQ+ books. Or maybe poor Kate thought that if she gave me a slot I would shut up and go away. Who knows? Anyway, this year Wizard’s Tower was on the programme. Result!

The town of Llandeilo reminds me quite a bit of Glastonbury, through without the occultists. It is a small market town that has seen much better days, and which definitely should not have heavy traffic running through it. Glastonbury’s main shopping street now has few cars, but Llandeilo is still on the A483 and has giant lorries threading their way through a road that is barely wide enough for one of them in places. Apparently a bypass is on the way.

The town might be devoid of occultists, but it does now have an independent bookshop. Llyfrau Madfall Swnllyd (Noisy Newt Books) is a lovely little addition to the town, and runs literary events through the year. The town also has a fabulous chocolatier, a lovely little donut shop, and the best hairdresser in Britain (YMMV, but I love her). There are also various craft and antique shops, and an organic grocer, Y Pantri Glas, where you can buy produce from Roz & Jo’s farm.

There is no Tor or Chalice Well, and no Abbey ruin with a tomb of Arthur & Guinevere. But Llandeilo does have Dinefwr Castle, once the home of the great Hywel Dda, and the nearby Newton House stately home. The town is named after St. Teilo who was a friend to the likes of Dewi, Dybrig and Cadoc, and therefore would have known Arthur had he existed. The church houses a digital display of an ancient gospel manuscript which contains some of the earliest known writing in mediaeval Welsh, the real thing having been looted by the English long ago and now housed in Lichfield Cathedral.

This year the festival kicked off on the Friday with a few events at Newton House. I went along to catch up with the brilliant Welsh food writer, Carwyn Graves. The event took place in the dining room of the house, surrounding us with portraits of the Rhys family and their relatives. A man sat behind me was wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Iolo Morganwg on it, and the two older ladies sat next to me were chattering away in Welsh before things got going.

This year Graves was not actually talking about food, despite being accompanied by his long-term partner in food-related projects, the chef, Simon Wright. His new book, Cynefin, is subtitled Wisdom from a Thousand Years of Welsh Nature Poetry. I’ll do a proper review when I have read the book, but suffice it to say that, this being Graves, we ended up talking about Taliesin, Vergil, theories of consciousness and TikTok. He’s wonderfully erudite.

On Saturday morning I was up early for Efa Lois whose book on Welsh witches is reviewed elsewhere in this issue. I didn’t learn much new, but I did ask about the art and Lois revealed that she had been to university in Liverpool and thinks she might have soaked up some of the atmosphere.

The Festival programme had an unfortunate typo in the entry for this one. The book is titled Gwrachod Cymru (Witches of Wales), but in the programme book it is Gwarchod Cymru, which means protecting or taking care of Wales. The word, gwarchod, is also used to describe babysitting. I rather like the idea of all those witches taking good care of Wales.

There were several queer-themed items on the programme, but the one I was most interested in featured Anthony Shapland. I first met him at the Festival two years ago, and it was immediately clear that he was going to be a literary superstar. His debut novel, A Room Above A Shop, has gone on to fulfil that promise. He’s now one of the hottest properties on the Welsh (and indeed British) literary scene.

Shapland didn’t start out as a novelist; he is a film-maker by inclination. One of the things I love about his work is how sharply observed and visual it is. Somehow he manages to describe how his characters are feeling by describing how they move their bodies. Given that the lives of gay men in 20th century Wales were often about keeping very quiet about things, this fits perfectly with the book. There are apparently discussions about a possible film. Shapland says he wants the first few chapters to be without dialog. I hope he gets his way, and some actors capable to carrying it off.

On Saturday afternoon I sat in on a discussion about the history of protest in Wales. The book, Hands Off Wales, by Dr. Wyn Thomas, is primarily a history of protest against the drowning of Welsh communities to provide reservoirs that serve English cities. But Thomas links this to the current protest movement against the erection of an electricity transmission line through the Tywi Valley. Dim Peilonau!, as people say around here.

Clearly the farmers have a right to be upset. They are not losing their homes, as those in the drowned villages did, but they are seeing around a 30% drop in the value of their properties. And if they are on a mortgage, that is very bad news.

On the other hand, while Thomas kept saying that he was not against renewable energy, everything else he said suggested otherwise. In particular some of his facts were badly wrong. It is true that Wales was a net exporter of electricity in 2016, but that was largely thanks to coal and nuclear–fired power stations. With the phasing out of coal, and Wylfa being decommissioned, our exports are now near zero, and we are expected to become net importers in the near future. Because build of renewables has not kept pace with the rest of the UK, electricity generated in Wales is now 58% more carbon-intensive than the UK average. (Data here). This is something that an incoming Welsh government will have to deal with. Meanwhile, and very sadly, I can see a large number of anti-pylons people voting Reform because Reform is standing on an anti-renewables platform.

Sunday was genre day, starting with us. We got a decent crowd to the Fight Like A Girl event, including people who had driven from Tenby and Swansea to be there. Roz, Jo and Lou Morgan were great panelists. I just had to wind them up and let them talk. Of course it helped that we had the superb original launch event at the Hatchet Inn in Bristol to talk about, not to mention Anna Smith Spark’s shoes, but the books are great too. Hopefully we sold some, and will get invited back next year to talk about They Are Still Here.

Immediately that was done, I left Roz, Jo and Lou to deal with the adoring public and rushed off to the Newt to see Peredur Glyn talk about his new book, Anfarwol. Don’t expect a review of that in a hurry as my Welsh is not up to reading it, but it was delightful see an audience at a bookshop in Llandeilo discussing the work of HP Lovecraft, all in Welsh. I got Peredur to sign my copy of his Galwad Cthulhu (Call of Cthulhu).

All in all, it was an excellent weekend. My thanks to Kate Glanville and the rest of the team, and to Rhiannon and her partner at the bookshop. I suspect that I ate too many donuts.

The Ghosts Who Sit Upon Imaginary Thrones

April 29, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 079, Anne Sudworth, Art, Book Review

One of the delights of this year’s Eastercon was having Anne Sudworth in the art show again. I love her work, and would buy more of it if I had the walls on which to put it. One of the reasons Anne was at the convention was because she had a book coming out. That book is The Ghosts Who Sit Upon Imaginary Thrones, and it is beautiful.

I am, of course, utterly unsuited to review an art book. I know nothing about the techniques that go into producing work like this. I only know that the end result is achingly beautiful. I would just fill this review with pictures from the book, but wisely Anne makes sure that all images of her work that are online are of quite low resolution.

The book does also contain a number of Anne’s poems. I wasn’t aware that she wrote them before getting the book. Once again I am not a good person to review such things, but the poem that Anne wrote about sitting at her sister’s deathbed is heart-rending.

Of course when you are lost for words to describe something, the wise thing to do is find someone who has done the job well and quote them. The back of the book sports a quote from some chap called Nicholas Cage, who has apparently been in a movie or two. This is what he had to say:

“Anne Sudworth’s art awakens the inner glow I felt as a child when I beheld a tree for the first time under moonlight. She recalls in me a soft, light green illumination that restores my imagination; gives me strength in my adult life, and never stops burning no matter how dark the night gets. Like Graves’ ‘White Goddess’ her paintings are poetic, magical gifts direct from the source.”

Thanks Nick, couldn’t have put it better myself.

Sudworth is publishing the book herself, and it does not appear to have much in the way of distribution yet. Presumably it will be available from her website in due course.

And here is an image of the one Sudworth that I have a print of, in memory of a very special black cat.

Title: The Ghosts Who Sit Upon Imaginary Thrones
By: Anne Sudworth
Publisher: The Anne Sudworth Studio
Purchase links:
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Editorial – April 2026

April 29, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 079, Editorial

There is a keen sense of history being made in Wales right now. Ever since devolution, the Labour Party has held a vice-like grip over the Senedd. But there is an election happening next week and, thanks to Kier Starmer’s massive right-ward shift in policies, and the sense of utter betrayal felt by most of the British electorate, that is about to change.

In England, the Green Party is rapidly gaining around from Labour, as they are seen as the only viable left-wing party. But in the rest of the UK it is a very different matter. May’s elections could see Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland all having devolved governments run by parties in favour of independance from England. Scotland, of course, has had this for some time, but for Plaid Cymru in Wales this is a 100-year-old dream come true.

However, votes are yet to be counted. The English media, from the BBC to the Daily Mail, are all shilling for Nigel Farage and his billionaire-backed neo-Fascist party. The polls say that they are neck-and-neck with Plaid. Thankfully Wales has Proportional Representation (though it is probably the worse possible PR system ever devised and the voters are going to hate it when they find out how it works). There should be enough non-Fascist members in the new Senedd to prevent Farage’s bullies from forming a government. But Farage probably doesn’t care much of he loses. His objective is not to govern Wales, but to destroy it, and he can do a lot of that work simply by being the official opposition.

With all this going on, it seemed like an ideal time to look at the two most famous science fiction novels written in Welsh. Both of them imagine dystopian futures for the country, though one offers an utopia as well. English translations of both books are available.

Next month I will be off to Finland for Åcon. I hope to get a lot of reading done while traveling, though much of that is going to be the next batch of novels from Wizard’s Tower.

Issue 78

March 30, 2026 Cheryl Morgan Issues

This is the March 2026 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.

Art: Athena Parthenos: This issue's cover features a statue of Athena

The Hymn to Dionysus: The latest Natasha Pulley novel does not feature Katsu the Clockwork Octopus, but Cheryl loved it anyway.

Epic of the Earth: These days we know that war is an environmental disaster, but that's nothing new. As Edith Hall points out, the Trojan War, as reported by Homer, came at massive environmental cost.

The Bacchae: Natasha Pulley's The Hymn to Dionysus is based heavily on an ancient Greek play by Euripides. What is the original like, and why is it more queer than Pulley's version?

The Curve of the World: Vonda McIntyre's final novel befor eher death has been prepared for publication by her friends. It will be releasd by Aqueduct later this year. Cheryl got an advance peek.

A Sword of Bronze and Ashes: A Bronze Age themed issue cannot be complete without a look at Anna Smith Spark's contribution to the period.

Introduction to the Mabinogi: As ancient legends go, the Mabinogion is seriously weird. Perhaps a simple introduction is what the story collection needs.

K-Pop Demon Hunters: The surprise movie hit of the year is great fun, but does it also have a deeper message. Cheryl thinks so.

Starfleet Academy – Season 1: Star Trek has gone for the YA market with the latest series. Surely it can't be as bad as the internet culture warriors claim.

Editorial – March 2026: This month's issue has something of a Bronze Age theme. Also Cheryl looks forward to Eastercon.

Art: Athena Parthenos

March 30, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 078, Art

This issue’s cover features a statue known as the Varvakeion Athena. The surviving copy, held in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, is a Roman copy of a Greek original. This photograph is of a plaster copy held in the Classical Art Museum of Sapienza University in Rome. Cheryl took the photo while attending a conference at the university in February.

A larger version of the photo is available below.

The Hymn to Dionysus

March 30, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 078, Book Review, Natasha Pulley

I am rather fond of Natasha Pulley books, though I am also terribly behind on reading them. This one, I am sorry to say, does not feature Katsu the Clockwork Octopus, but it does contain other clockwork things. Also, as it is set in Mycenaean Greece, it is many centuries before Katsu’s time, so I guess it is a bit much of me to expect him to put in an appearance.

A little mythology primer is in order to start with. In legend, the city of Thebes (the one in Greece, not the one in Egypt) was founded by a chap called Cadmus (or Kadmus, as Pulley has it, to help the reader with pronunciation). He had several children, including two daughters called Agave and Semele. The latter was younger and prettier, and she caught the eye of that serial philanderer, Zeus. She had a son.

Cadmus was not best pleased. He assumed that his younger daughter had been hanging out with some low-life boy. Agave was even less pleased. She thought the whole ‘my son’s father is Zeus’ thing was a crass attempt by Seleme to get her boy declared the next king rather than Agave’s son, Pentheus. Both of them wanted the baby killed.

In desperation, Seleme called upon Zeus to show himself. So he did, and she was promptly struck by lightning and died. Because Zeus is a bastard like that. As to the baby, well…

The story comes to us most famously in a play by Euripides called The Bacchae. More of that elsewhere in this issue. For now suffice it to say that baby Dionysus survives, travels the world, and eventually comes home and wreaks terrible vengeance on those who have wronged him. Greek theatre did tend towards the extremely bloodthirsty.

In her book, Pulley marries this myth with the story of the Trojan War, and with the actual historical event that we know as the Bronze Age Collapse. During the 12th century BCE, various civilisations around the Eastern Mediterranean disappeared, or suffered major problems. The Mycenaeans and the Hittites vanished, several successful cities on the Levant coast were clearly sacked and burned. And the Egyptians complained bitterly about enemies they called the Sea Peoples, who seem to have behaved in roughly the same way that the Vikings did in Western Europe two thousand years later.

The causes of the Bronze Age Collapse are hotly debated by historians (see also Helen King’s book in this issue), but one explanation is climate change. Pulley uses this, and in the book Thebes is suffering from a deadly drought. Their crops have failed. Agave, who is now Queen, has arranged to buy grain from Egypt, but at significant cost. Everyone is asking which god the city has offended, but they can’t name the one obvious god because Agave still refuses to believe that her nephew was divine.

The hero of our story is Phaidros, a Theban warrior. As a boy he was apprenticed to Agave’s brother, Helios. When he was very young, and therefore someone who didn’t understand adult politics, he helped rescue baby Dionysus from death. The god has not forgotten.

Meanwhile Phaidros has grown up, has been to Troy, and has come home with what we recognise as dreadful PTSD. He doesn’t understand royal politics any better now, but he does know a god who might help his people.

For anyone who loves Classical myth and history, this book is total jam. Pulley does play fast and loose with the history at times. Some of the traditions that she ascribes to the Thebans are more appropriate to the Classical period rather than the Mycenaean; some are stolen from Sparta. The giant statues of gods with their hidden clockwork mechanisms are more of a creation of Ptolemaic Egypt than of the Bronze Age. In myth there are Talos and the golden gynoids who assist Hephaestus, but no one actually made things like that for real until much later. Of course this is all thousands of years ago, and it makes for a good story. Besides, the book is not meant to be a strict historical novel.

There are several things I really like about the book, one of which is the treatment of Hector’s wife, Andromache. Pulley has her in the book as an Amazon-like warrior. And given that her name literally means “fighter of men” that’s a far better characterisation than the pathetic, helpless victim in Homer’s version.

I also loved the Egyptian diplomat. He’s very funny. And the leopard, obviously. Tiresias is in the book, and in Euripides as well. Pulley uses they/them pronouns, which is reasonable for someone who has lived part of their life as a man and part as a woman.

The book has two main themes. The first is PTSD, and frankly anyone who was at Troy, particularly if they participated in the sack, will not have come out of it entirely sane. There’s a great little comment at the start where five-year-old Phaidros says:

Cities are things you broke and set fire to. It was hard to imagine why anyone would live in one on purpose.

The other main theme is about political power, and how it dehumanises people who want it or acquire it. Mycenaean society was very palace-centred, and the palaces, Pulley suggests, were very like Westminster: everyone is lying to everyone else and on the lookout for an opportunity to stab a rival in the back.

While the book is a gay love story (it is a Natasha Pulley book, what did you expect?), I should also note that it is nowhere near as queer as Euripides’ play. Check out my review of that in this issue to see why.

Title: The Hymn to Dionysus
By: Natasha Pulley
Publisher: Gollancz
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Epic of the Earth

March 30, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 078, Book Review, Edith Hall

While Euripides and Natasha Pulley both imagine what Bronze Age Greece might have been like for the purposes of their fiction, there are plenty of Classicists who do their best to find out what it was really like. That includes literary critics. The works ascribed to Homer are believed to have been written down almost 3000 years ago, and since that time they have been the subject of review and debate. There were literary critics in Classical Greece (around 500 BCE), in the Roman Empire, in Byzantium, and in Renaissance Europe who wrote at length about the Iliad and Odyssey. Not even Shakespeare can claim to have been so well studied.

Each successive generation of critics will, inevitably, see the works of Homer (and I’m assuming that there was a Homer for brevity’s sake) through the cultural lenses of their own time. It is therefore inevitable that someone should write a book that sees the Iliad as a work of climate fiction. That book is Edith Hall’s Epic of the Earth.

As I note in my review of The Hymn to Dionysus, there is considerable academic speculation that the Bronze Age Collapse was caused, at least in part, by climate factors. But it could equally have been precipitated by economic factors. As Hall skillfully points out, the Iliad is absolutely stuffed full of references to profligate use of natural resources, in particular, trees.

Think about it. There may not have been a thousand ships, but there must have been a lot, and they all needed wood to build them. Then there were to fortifications that the Achaeans built on the Plain of Troy from which to mount their assault on the city. They would have brought smiths with them to repair their weapons and armour, and to make new ones. That too required a plentiful supply of wood to feed the furnaces. The poem is also full of mentions of huge funeral pyres on which dead heroes were burned. And that’s without mentioning the daily requirement for cooking fires for that vast army.

Now of course the Iliad is fiction. But there is genuine archaeological evidence of the changes wrought upon the natural world by mankind in ancient times. North Africa, for example, was considerably less desert-like until the Romans managed to make a mess of things by straining the land’s agricultural capacity to breaking point. Some bright spark has also calculated how much wood would have to be burned to have created the quantity of Iron Age slag that has been found around the Mediterranean. It amounts to 926 soccer fields of trees annually.

Hall has a particularly graphic example from Israel. The Timna Valley was once forested (with acacia and broom). But it was also an area rich in copper ore. There are thousands of mines, and ten major processing sites with furnaces that date from the 11th century BCE. By the mid 10th century they were running out of trees and having to import them, and by the 9th century the industry collapsed. The area is now a desert and the local environment has still not fully recovered from the industrial pollution.

The text of the Iliad also contains some remarkable passages about the power of the natural world, and why men should respect it. Achilles, as we all know, was eventually killed by stealth and treachery: Paris shot a poisoned arrow at the only part of his body that could be pierced by a weapon. But Achilles was defeated by an enemy in the story, and only lived to see out his fate because Hera sent Hephaestus rescue him. That enemy was the River Scamander, which had become thoroughly pissed off with being a dumping ground for the Achaeans’ rubbish, and for the corpses of dead Trojans. Here’s Emily Wilson (book 21: 360-370):

Cascading under him, the surging river
wore out his body, and defeated him,
nibbling the dust away beneath his feet.
Achilles, son of Peleus, looked up
towards the spreading sky and groaned aloud.
“Pity me, father Zeus! See how no god
is willing to defend me from the river!
After this, anything is bearable.”

So much for the evidence, but what is the point? Well, Hall hopes that by highlighting the environmental messages hidden in plain sight in one of the most famous pieces of literature in the world, she can get us to think more responsibly about how we treat the natural world. It is a bold and welcome initiative, but I’m not sure that she pulls it off.

My first concern is that the book is not very accessible. Hall’s scholarship is prodigious. I learned a huge amount about the Iliad from reading this book. But it is very dense. If you want an easy to read introduction to Bronze Age Greece, Emily Hauser’s Mythica is a much better bet. If you want thorough and detailed scholarship, Hall delivers.

I’m also wondering who, aside from us ancient history nerds, would actually care. Ask people what they remember about the recent Troy movie and they will probably mention Brad Pitt’s CGI muscles. The BBC series became mired in the UK’s idiotic culture wars, and was apparently not very good. The people outside the Classics world who care a lot about the Iliad are, sadly, the people who think that Achilles was a hero. They are not the sort of people who are likely to listen to an environmentalist message. They are much more likely to go and cut down some trees just to ‘own the libs’.

So while I think that the Iliad contains many valuable lessons about responsible use of natural resources, I’m not sure that Hall has delivered those lessons in a manner than will make them accessible to the general reader. Which is a shame, because it is a very laudable project.

Title: Epic of the Earth
By: Edith Hall
Publisher: Yale University Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Bacchae

March 30, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 078, Book Review, Euripides

I wanted to include a review of Euripides’ play in this issue because, while it is clearly the inspiration for Natasha Pulley’s novel, it differs significantly, and is in some ways much more queer than Pulley’s gay romance. I should note that I am by no means an expert on ancient Greek theatre. You need Juliet McKenna for that. She studied it at university, and has written (under her JM Avery penname) three books featuring an Athenian playwright turned detective. As with Edith Hall’s book on the Iliad, the more I read about Euripides, the more I realise I do not know.

Unlike the novel, The Bacchae opens in full in media res. Pentheus is already king of Thebes, and Dionysus has already persuaded all the women of the city (including Agave) to head out into the forest and worship him in a drunken frenzy. Pentheus is furious, and demands to have everyone involved arrested.

Dionysus then turns up and hands himself in. He pretends to be a priest of the god from Lydia (western Turkey in modern geography). His interaction with Pentheus is weirdly reminiscent of Jesus talking to Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate. Both are presenting as men, but claiming to be representatives of a god. Apparently some academics have even suggested that Saint John used The Bacchae as inspiration when writing his gospel.

But while Dionysus claims to be a man, Pentheus sees something very different. He is struck by, fascinated by even, how effeminate this young priest is. Dionysus is both an insult to Greek masculinity, and strangely sexually attractive. Having failed to make the young man see the error of his ways, Pentheus has him imprisoned in the stables. Ominously, the god replies:

“But be sure that Dionysus will extract punishment for this violence—the god you say does not exist. For in wronging me, you put him in chains.”

Dionysus escapes easily and frees those of his followers that Pentheus managed to catch. Pentheus becomes more and more angry, and orders his army into the forest to arrest all of the women. At this point Dionysus re-appears and suggests an alternative. Would Pentheus not like to see what these women are getting up to? Of course the king is tempted, and soon Dionysus has him dressing as a woman so that he can sneak amongst the female celebrants undetected. Pentheus seems quite excited by this, but also desperate that none of the men of the city see him least they laugh at him. Inevitably the disguise fails, and the women, led by Agave, kill him.

Scholars fail to agree spectacularly on the question of what the play means. Perhaps Euripides is warning his Athenian audience against the dangers of tyrannical rulers, which is certainly an issue that exercised them greatly at the time. But perhaps he is instead suggesting that populist mobs, especially those that allow women to escape traditional gender roles, are dangerous and should be feared. Perhaps he is warning of the dangers of disrespecting the gods, or of the dangers of foreign religions (Dionysus having claimed to have come from Lydia and to have travelled through Persia to Bactria and Arabia.) What is clear is that Pentheus fails at kingship, though whether that is because he is too autocratic, or because he lets his emotions get the better of him, is unclear.

Euripides himself is also a fascinating character. He is often accused of misogyny, and yet his plays contain more and better roles for women than any other Greek playwright. Harry Tanner in The Queer Thing About Sin suggests that Euripides was part of the throuple with two other poets, Pausanias (not Pausanias the geographer, nor the man who assassinated Philip II of Macedon) and Agathon, and that they fled together to Macedon when public sentiment in Athens started to turn against gays. But that’s a book I am working through very slowly because way too often I see Tanner assert something as fact that I’m pretty sure is actually hotly contested. Everyone seems to agree that Agathon was a notorious twink, but the exile in Macedon is thought by many to be an invention.

Part of the problem is that most of what we know about Euripides’ life comes from his being featured as character in other people’s plays, particularly those of Aristophanes. And Aristophanes rarely put someone he knew in a play unless he planned to mock them mercilessly.

Nevertheless, the plays of Euripides (or rather the few of them that have survived, he wrote a lot more) are so full of queer themes that I have an entire academic collection of essays called Queer Euripides. That includes a piece on The Bacchae by Glasgow-based trans woman, Professor Isabel Ruffel. She’s by no means the only trans classicist to be fascinated by that play.

Having thought a bit about it, I tend to agree with Ruffel that the trans message in The Bacchae is not really centred on Pentheus. To start with, the women of Thebes can be said to be behaving in a highly gender-non-conforming manner. They are not being good little trad-wives at all. Also there are two other characters who cross-dress: Cadmus and Tiresias, who also join the revellers. Cadmus does so because he has come to the realisation that Dionysus is his grandson and he wants the glory of this to reflect upon his family. This is the wrong motive, and Dionysus punishes him for it. But Tiresias, who has spent much of their life living as a woman, is spared. They are allowed into the women-only space of the Bacchanal, because they are accepted as a sister.

As I noted, there are many interpretations of the play, but the image of an angry, misogynist, transphobic ruler being brought down by a gang of wild women and a trans person is perhaps one we should focus on right now. Perhaps it might even come true.

Title: The Bacchae
By: Euripides
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Curve of the World

March 30, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 078, Book Review, Vonda N McIntyre

This book is Vonda McIntyre’s last novel. She finished it just before she died, and it has been lovingly crafted into publishable shape by her many friends, most notably Timmi Duchamp, Nisi Shawl, Debbie Notkin and Kath Wilham. It would have been great if Vonda had been able to live to see praise being heaped upon the book, but praise it we shall anyway.

In keeping with the theme of this issue, The Curve of the World is set in the Bronze Age. The characters do have some iron implements, but they are all sky-iron, made from meteorites, not smelted from mined ore. The main character, Iakinthu, is Cretan, what we know as Minoan, although that name was invented by Sir Arthur Evans. We don’t know what those people called themselves, but McIntyre has chosen to call them Idaeans. While the most famous Mount Ida in the world is the one next to Troy, there is also a Mount Ida on Crete. It is sacred to Zeus’s mother, Rhea, who is often syncretised with Cybele.

The Idaeans are a sea-faring and trading nation. Iakinthu was a famous bull dancer in her youth, but nowadays she is a successful and wealthy trader. Her ship, the Flying Fish, run for her by her lover, Aranthau, who is a skilled navigator, plies the Mediterranean, and even further afield, in search of people with whom to trade.

In her acknowledgements, McIntyre cautions readers against trying to match the book against our world’s timeline least their heads explode. The acknowledgements are at the back of the book, but I worked this point out early on. While the world of the book is clearly based on our world, it is not the same. The Idaeans trade happily with Egypt, where the Pharoah is a woman. So far so good; we know that Hatshepsut traded extensively with Crete. But they also trade with Hind (India) and with Sheng (China). From Sheng they get paper, which in our world was invented by the Chinese eunuch, Cai Lun, some time in the first century CE. Some paper-like products were known a few hundred years earlier, but certainly not as far back as Minoan times.

In any case, while the Phoenicians did sail beyond Gibraltar, there is no evidence that the Minoans did. In the book, Iakinthu and Aranthau go far beyond that. The title refers to fact that at sea the curvature of the world is obvious because you can see so far, and things appear on the horizon.

Idaean culture is largely matriarchal and peaceful. The Idaeans are all about commerce, not about conquest. But not every culture in the world sees things the same way. There is a culture called the People–fairly obviously Amazons–who are fiercely matriarchal and give away boy children. And then there are the Northerners: fair-haired, blue-eyed pirates who are fiercely patriarchal and want to conquer and enslave everyone who is not like them.

The Idaeans have a tradition of mutual fosterage which they use in diplomacy. So, for example, an Idaean teenager might be taken to live with the People for a few years, and a teenager from the People leaves with the Idaean ship in return. In this way different cultures learn about each other, and build ties of family and friendship. It is a matter of honour that, at the end of the agreed period, the young people are taken home, and given the choice as to where to stay.

The main plot of the book revolves around a child that Iakinthu has acquired in an unusual way. The Idaeans are horrified by slavery, and some years ago Iakinthu traded for a young boy the like of which she had never seen before. Rhenthizu, as she named the boy, was taken as a slave while very young and traded across the world. His original home is a place called the Salish Sea. Iakinthu knows only that it lies west across the ocean, but she has promised to one day take him home.

To ease the unlikelihood of the journey, McIntyre tells us that Iakinthu has twice before sailed across the Sunset Sea. She acquired and returned a given child called Uinthi who is what the Maisusutha people call Two Spirit. When Uinthi went home he promised his foster mother to try to find information about Rhenthizu’s people. That gives us a start on the adventure.

Many obstacles are placed in Iakinthu’s way before she can complete the journey, including a giant kraken, a terrifying volcano, and a warlike people ruled over by Lady Jaguar from whom they barely escape with their lives. There are definitely a few heart-in-mouth moments as the story progresses.

However, the main point of the book is to contrast the Idaean worldview with that of other cultures that they meet. Their desire to make friends and trade is in stark contrast to wish of the Northerners and Lady Jaguar to conquer and enslave. Given what has happened in the world since McIntyre’s death, that message is far more urgent now than it was when she wrote it.

There will, I am sure, be smart-arse reply-guys who will complain that the book is hideously historically inaccurate and that a voyage of the type it describes would be impossible. I don’t think it is. It seems like McIntyre’s world is one in which the rampant industrialisation of the late Bronze Age did not happen, allowing time for more development of maritime technology. We know that a Phoenician expedition circumnavigated Africa. We know what some Polynesians made it all the way to South America and settled there.

Most recently some interesting evidence has turned up about the pattern of Phoenician trading. It has long been assumed that they proceeded slowly around the Mediterranean, gaining the courage to go just a little further each time. We now know that they were much more adventurous; that they went as far as they could, as quickly as they could, because the further they went the better chance they had of meeting new people and finding new goods to bring back. Which is exactly what Iakinthu does in the book.

Nicola Griffith has said of the book:

“…it is a marvelous vision of how the world might have been, perhaps once was, and might, still, one day be. The world needs this novel.”

As the global trading system that we have so carefully built over the past few decades begins to crumble as a result of militarist madness, the truth of that is becoming ever more obvious.

Title: The Curve of the World
By: Vonda n McIntyre
Publisher: Aqueduct Press
Purchase links:
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

A Sword of Bronze and Ashes

March 30, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 078, Anna Smith Spark, Book Review

Kanda is a middle-aged farmer’s wife. She has three children, a husband who is not very bright but is kind and gentle, a house, some cows and some sheep. But once upon a time, oh once…

In the Hall of Roven there were six warriors, the Six Swords as they were known. The Lord of Roven, like Arthur of legend, had them swear to protect the weak and innocent. They would ride out to right wrongs, and to kill the wicked. Greatest of all of them was Ikandera Thygethyn, whose name means Great Warrior. Unlike Lancelot of legend, she was a woman.

The trouble with fighting the good fight is that it involves fighting. When the battle is won, when all of your enemies lie dead at your feet, when your sword and armour drip with the blood of the slain, who are you, if not a monster?

And so, like Camelot of legend, Roven fell. Because those who fought for it, and those who ruled it, and those who lived in it, were all too human. The Six became scattered. Some died, and some ran away.

The trouble with running from your past is that, no matter how well you hide, the past has a habit of catching up with you.

Thus it is that Kandra and her family must face the terror that destroyed Roven. There are three of them. Their names mean Burning, Hunger and Empty. They cannot die, save if they are struck by the black sword of the greatest warrior the world has ever known, the warrior who has forsaken the way of the sword forever, and who has buried that blade where even she should not be able to retrieve it.

The thing that people say most often about Anna Smith Spark’s work is that it is lyrical. If one is going to write about great warriors of times long forgotten, such a style is perhaps appropriate. In any case it leaves the rest of us mere scribblers gasping with envy. There are few people around who can write like that.

But A Sword of Bronze and Ashes is not just a beautifully written tale of heroic warriors. It is also a tale of a woman desperately trying to preserve her family, though her husband is terrified to discover the truth about his wife, and her teenage daughters are disdainful of their elderly mother’s abilities. Kanda needs to save her family, and perhaps the world, but mostly she is just too tired.

“I am the mother of three children, Calian. A great deal of my time is spent running to and fro doing pointless things.”

So the book is about being a parent as much as it is about being a warrior. It is also about why people turn to evil. The bad guys, Geiamnyn (Burning) in particular, are recognizable from social media. They were once ordinary and vulnerable, then they became hurt and angry, and eventually the anger so consumed them that there was nothing left except hate, and a desire to hurt others as they had once been hurt.

A Sword of Bronze and Ashes is sold as being set in the Bronze Age. Certainly the technology is appropriate. Smith Spark even had the horror of industrialised mining with child labour to satisfy the ever increasing demand for metal. Though that, of course, dates as far back as the flint mines of the Neolithic. But the book is not an historical novel. Nor is it an attempt to make use of Bronze Age mythology because, frankly, we have very little idea of how and who they worshipped. It is a fantasy novel, and it is its own thing.

What I can say is that the Hall of Roven, which is clearly a hill fort, seems to be populated by the Tylwyth Teg more than by ordinary mortals. I would love to read more about them. And I do want to know why the Lord of Roven, despite very obviously being a man, is heavily pregnant.

Title: A Sword of Bronze and Ashes
By: Anna Smith Spark
Publisher: Flame Tree Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Introduction to the Mabinogi

March 30, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 078, Book Review, Shân Morgain

I came across this book via an article in one of the Welsh newspapers. Being interested in Mabinogion scholarship, I figured I should take a look. While the book is, as it says, an introduction, I’m glad I did.

A word on terminology is in order before I start. These days the word ‘Mabinogion’ is often held to be a foreign mis-translation, and Lady Charlotte Guest is most frequently blamed for it. The truth is not that simple.

Each of the four branches that make up the main part of the collection of stories ends with the phrase, ‘thus ends this branch of the Mabinogi’. Or rather, three of them do. The first branch, in both fully extant versions of the text, ends with the word ‘Mabynnogyon’. This is now generally assumed to be a scribal error. The word ‘Mabinogi’, used at the end of the other three branches, is a perfectly valid Welsh plural and there is no need to add anything to it.

The use of ‘Mabinigion’ can be traced back to the Welsh antiquarian, William Owen Pughe, who is best known for his work on an English-Welsh dictionary. Pughe’s translation of the Mabinogion was never fully published, but his work was known to Guest and she presumably got the title from him.

In her Oxford edition of the Mabinogion, Sioned Davies suggests that the word ‘Mabinogion’ be used for the full collection of eleven stories that are found together in both the White Book of Rhydderch and the Red Book of Hergest. However, the four branches, which form a semi-coherent whole, should be known as the Mabinogi. Shân Morgain’s book, being only about the four branches, is therefore correctly an introduction to the Mabinogi.

While there are several theories, no one actually knows what ‘Mabinogi’ means.

The first thing to note about Morgain’s book is that it is in need of some care and attention from a graphic designer. Having little in the way of artistic skills myself, my own philosophy of book design is to keep things as simple as possible. Morgain is much more ambitious, and the end result reminds me somewhat of the ‘ransom note’ design fashion that appeared in the early days of Pagemaker on the Mac.

Thankfully the text, while very enthusiastic at times, is solidly informative, if not academic. Morgain does have a PhD, for a study of the character of Rhiannon that she did through Swansea University. It is open source so I have downloaded it and am looking forward to reading it. This book is intended for a much more general audience and eschews footnotes and the like.

A little over half the book is taken up with short versions of the stories of the four Mabinogi. As the book is an introduction, these are neither intended to be a faithful translation nor a literary one. They are there to familiarise the reader with the plots and characters.

The rest of the book is an introduction to Mabinogi scholarship, and is pretty clearly based on the research that Morgain did for her PhD. It covers the breath of scholarship on the stories, from Edward Lhuyd in 1707 down to the present day. It also covers examples of the stories in popular culture, from Evangeline Walton through to modern video games. None of this is covered in very much detail, but there is enough to enable you to follow things up should you need to.

Of particular interest is the section on Patterns in the text. This is a Structural Analysis approach building on the work of John K Bollard. What this does is identify ways in which the structure of the four Mabinogi stories mirror each other, thereby showing that the author(s) were putting quite a bit of thought into the writing process.

On the downside I was surprised to see very little mention of the context in which the stories were written down. While the Mabinogi probably originated in a bardic tradition of oral storytelling, which may stretch back into pagan times, they were written down by Christian monks who had their own cultural and political issues to deal with. In ‘Peredur’, for example, which is not part of the four branches but is included in the Mabinogion, some scholars claim to see commentary on the civil war between King Stephen and Empress Matilda.

Morgain clearly has a strong love for the source material, which tends to make the reader doubt her claims at times, which is probably unfair. She has a particular disdain for people such as the Goddess Movement who re-purpose the stories and claim to have re-discovered the ‘authentic’ meaning of the tales. But as long as you admit to having re-worked the stories for your own purposes she’s fine with that.

If you have an interest in the Mabinogi, and wish to further your scholarship, I think this book is an excellent introduction. I certainly learned things from it. But if you are just interested in the stories this is probably taking you a step or two down a road you don’t want to follow.

Title: Introduction to the Mabinogi
By: Shân Morgain
Publisher: House Morgain
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

K-Pop Demon Hunters

March 30, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 078, Movie Review

Yes, I know, I am very late to this. But I got there in the end. And yes, just like almost everyone else in the world, I love it.

I should note that the first few minutes of the film are quite cringeworthy because, as fantasy plots go, this one is solidly stereotypical. In each generation, three women are chosen to hold back the demon hordes through their singing. In our time, inevitably, that means a K-Pop girl band.

Thus we have Huntrix (always written as Huntr/x), comprised of: Mira, the lead dancer, who is a rebellious bad girl; Zoe, the rapper and lyricist, who is sweet and desperate to please; and Rumi, the lead vocalist, who has a dark secret. The group was trained by a mysterious woman called Celine, and they are managed by a more-competent-than-he-looks, massively over-stressed guy called Bobby.

The girls’ singing is used to maintain a magical barrier called the Honmoon. Celine has explained that, if they can strengthen it sufficiently, creating what is known as a Golden Honmoon, then the demons will be barred from the mortal realm forever. Gwi-Ma, the chief demon, is desperate to foil them before it is too late.

Our primary plot point arrives when Juni, a somewhat less stupid demon than most, comes up with the idea of creating a boy band to steal the limelight from Huntrix. The less popular the girls are, the less able they will be to keep the demons out.

Thus we have the Saja Boys, with Juni as their lead singer. Inevitably, Juni and Rumi fall in love, and the fans can smell a good ship a mile off.

Equally inevitably, love saves the day, but there is enough uncertain about the ending to leave us all desperate for a sequel. Along the way we get some great songs, and more than a few tears.

Visually I think the film owes quite a bit to Frozen, with Rumi’s purple braid echoing Elsa’s blonde one. But hey, if you are looking to appeal to a teen girl audience, Frozen is an entirely sensible source of inspiration.

Watching it, I was fascinated by the gender displays, particularly by the Saja Boys. Sure, they are supposed to be teenagers, but they are very pretty teenagers. One of them is even called Baby and wears pink. Presumably Emma Bunton didn’t trademark that image. Another one is called Abby. This is because he has spectacular abs, but the scriptwriters must have known that Abby is a girl’s name over here. While many of the people involved in the production have Korean backgrounds, they seem to mostly live in the West.

Naturally my favourite character is the blue tiger spirit that Juni uses as a go-between for himself and Rumi.

What struck me most about the film, however, was the ending. Without giving away too many spoilers, in order to defeat the demons Rumi has to confront her dark secret and live as her authentic self. The same is true to a lesser extent for the other two girls. As Juni notes, one of the main sources of Gwi-Ma’s power is shame. Celine, representing the older generation, convinces the girls that they must always appear perfect to their public. If people knew the truth about them, she believes, they would be shunned. As it turns out, authenticity wins the day. And thus, though the subject is never mentioned in the film, K-Pop Demon Hunters is a trans allegory.

I mean, Rumi can’t take off her clothes in front of the other girls lest her secret be revealed. How more obvious do you want it?

Waited so long to break these walls down
To wake up and feel like me
Put these patterns all in the past now
And finally live like the girl they all see
No more hiding, I’ll be shining
Like I’m born to be

‘Golden’

Starfleet Academy – Season 1

March 30, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 078, TV Review

Well this was a strange one. I was very dubious about the whole concept because it sounded like Paramount was going for the teen angst market and there would be very little actual Star Trek in it. That, thankfully, proved to be wrong. Academy is very much a Star Trek show. And the first season, while patchy, ended up much better than I expected.

The first couple of episodes didn’t work well for me. They seemed to have a required plotline and the characters were just pawns being moved around to achieve those ends. The whole Betazed diplomatic negotiation thing was particularly silly. I was unimpressed by the Venari Ral as bad guys as well. Paul Giamatti chews the scenery magnificently as Nus Braka, but I can’t get my head around an enemy who are simultaneously a bunch of rag-tag pirates and also the technological equals of the Federation. If they can afford ships like that, why don’t they have uniforms? Or at least better clothes.

Then we got the War College, which had me doing a serious double-take. Most people will have been completely oblivious to what was going on here, but anyone who has spent time in the Bay Area will known exactly what subtext was being presented. As we all know, Starfleet Academy is based in San Francisco. It is effectively a university, and their sports teams play in red. The War College is also in the Bay Area, and their sports teams play in Blue. Oh dear. Those friends of mine who went to Berkeley will not be happy.

If this still means nothing to you, imagine that the show was set in England, that the two rival colleges wore dark blue and light blue, and that a rowing contest was a key part of the plot. It is that unsubtle. Someone on the show went to Stanford and wanted to get one over on the old enemy.

Episode 4 made me quite angry. It had the right idea, in that we were told that Klingon culture was important. Caleb’s attempts to be a (non-white) saviour were rightly condemned. But then we had the stupid fake space battle. Everyone on the Federation ships knew it was fake because they were ordered to shoot wide. There is no way that the Klingons would not know that it was fake too. How, exactly, is this respecting Klingon culture? There is no honour in battle unless there is actual risk.

What I would have done is make Klingon ownership of Faan Alpha contingent on Jay-Den winning the debate contest. They would have had to get Caleb sufficiently angry to put up a good fight, but they’d been laying the groundwork for that anyway. That way there would have been real stakes, and Jay-Den would have come out of it a hero.

Oh, by the way, how much did staging that enormous fake space battle cost the Federation? I know this is a post-scarcity universe, but the expenditure on munitions and crew time must have been enormous.

SAM is a lovely character, and the Emergency Holographic Doctor is one of the best things to have come out of Voyager, but I have never been terribly convinced by the idea of holographic beings.

With episode 6 we finally start getting some serious plotting, and real stakes. It almost worked. Except that as soon as it was revealed that the Sargasso was the only starship available to guard the experimental research labs on Starbase J-19 Alpha the nature of Braka’s plan was suddenly blindingly obvious. It was necessary to keep that information from the viewers so that Vance and Ake didn’t look like absolute idiots when they were unable to work it out.

Then we get an interlude episode, and another plot in which the characters appear to be mere pawns. Obviously I’m very happy to see a gay Klingon in a skirt, but both Darem and Jay-Den were badly served by this sloppy episode.

Back to the serious stuff with episode 8. This was probably my favourite of the season. My only complaint is that, if the students were so traumatised by the events in episode 6, why did we see none of it in episode 7?

Finally we had the two-part finale, in which we get the culmination of Venari Ral plotline and Caleb gets re-united with his mom. It was all nicely dramatic, with some proper science, but it did seem to wrap things up very quickly and easily. Part of this is a result of seasons being so short these days. There just isn’t time to develop a proper story arc. And part of it must have been because the Trek team must have been worried that the show would be cancelled after the first season, if not half way through it.

We now know that there will be a second season, but probably only because it has already been shot. And we have to hope that there is no more Trek in development for a while, least Bari Weiss get her filthy hands into the production. I have seen people on social media joking about a all-mirror-universe series, which is probably not far off what she’d force them to produce.

Which is a shame. Academy has a good bunch of characters. Holly Hunter is magnificent as Chancellor Ake. It is great to have Robert Picardo and Tig Notaro back on a regular basis. Tilly’s guest appearance was fabulous. And Admiral Vance actually seems like a proper Admiral, as opposed to the dubious characters who have held that rank in previous series.

Of course, when everything calms down again (if it does), there is always the prospect of a new series. The one I would like to see would have Genesis Lythe as first officer on Captain Boimler’s ship. I’m sure they would hit it off just fine…

Editorial – March 2026

March 30, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 078, Editorial

This issue has acquired something of a Bronze Age theme. It all began when Natasha Pulley’s book got the the top of my TBR pile. Given it’s Trojan War theme, I figured I should do Edith Hall’s book too. Then Timmi Duchamp asked me if I would like an ARC of the new Vonda McIntyre. And with all that on the go, I had little choice but to add the Anna Smith Spark.

The stories in the Mabinogi are not specifically Bronze Age. They were written down in mediaeval times. But the oral traditions might date back that far.

Star Trek Academy is definitely not set in the Bronze Age, but the academy’s starship is called the USS Athena.

Which leaves only K-Pop Demon Hunters, for which I have no Bronze Age connection whatsoever. But they are loveable so I have no regrets.

Meanwhile Eastercon is almost upon us. I have seven new books to launch, and four panels to do. Full details over on my blog. One of the panels I am doing is about fanzines, so I will be talking a lot about Salon Futura. I hope to see some of you there.

Issue 77

March 1, 2026 Cheryl Morgan Issues

This is the February 2026 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.

Art: The Hand of the King’s Shadow: This issue's cover is by Ben Baldwin and is the cover for Chaz Brenchley's The Hand of the King's Evil

Slow Gods: Space opera is alive and well in the sure hands of Claire North

The Owl Service: The Owl Service is one of the UK's best loved fantasy stories for young adults, but it is a story set in Wales, and inspired by Welsh mythology. How does it read in Wales?

Killing Hares: It is not easy, being the village witch. People have expectations of you, and they are not always very grateful for what you do.

The Wicked Lies of Habren Faire: This one is a straight up romantasy novel, set in Wales. Get your annoying but handsome fairy prince here.

The Great God Pan: The biggest name in Welsh fantastic fiction is undoubtedly Arthur Machen, but his work is well over a century old now. How does it stack up?

The Book of Three: The Chronicles of Prydain are very obviously rooted in Welsh mythology, but Lloyd Alexander was American. How does he do?

She Is Here: Finally, Nicola Griffith arrives at the PM Press Outspoken Authors series. About time, in Cheryl's opinion.

Editorial – February 2026: Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Sant Hapus, pawb! This issue is a Welsh fantasy special.

Art: The Hand of the King’s Shadow

March 1, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 077, Art, Ben Baldwin

This issue’s cover is Ben Baldwin’s art for the latest Chaz Brenchley Outremer book, The Hand of the King’s Evil. You can’t have a fantasy version of the Crusades, with djinn, if your heroes don’t get to ride on a magic carpet once in the story.

As usual, the unadulterated art is available below.

Slow Gods

March 1, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 077, Book Review, Claire North

People have said elsewhere that science fiction is dying, and if you take a look in your local Waterstones you can see why. But lack of books on shelves does not mean lack of books being written, it just means that current fashions in retail have changed. And when you have books as good as Claire North’s Slow Gods, how can a genre possibly be dying?

Mawukana na-Vnadze lives in the interstellar empire known as the Shine. It is called that because of its fascination with celebrity and power. People who have both are said to have Shine. Those who don’t are a waste of oxygen.

We should all accept now that, regardless of when they are set, speculative fiction books are a product of the era in which they are written. That is particularly true of Slow Gods, which is firmly rooted in the ruthless Capitalism of Donald Trump’s America. The only thing it misses is the obsession with Large Language Models as a means of doing away with the need for workers, and that’s presumably because all books take time in the writing. And also because the book is space opera and so deals with actual silicon intelligences.

The entity known as the Slow is one such being. It is unimaginably old and deeply ineffable, which leads many people, especially its fellow silicon intelligences, the quans, to regard it as a god of some sort. Like most gods, it rarely actually says anything. Which means it is a major event when it does. In warning the galaxy of an impending supernova, it most definitely indicated a status as a benevolent divinity. Human, quan and alien astronomers quickly confirmed the danger. Thankfully the warning had come in good time. There were decades to make plans to save the planets that would be in the blast zone. And so plans were made, except in the Shine where such activities were deemed a waste of resources.

Yes, Slow Gods is, amongst other things, a book about climate change.

Every space opera has to deal in some way with the unimaginable distances between stars. Some used ‘jump gates’ providing an instantaneous means of travel from one part of the galaxy to another, and also a potential economic bottleneck that can drive the plot. Others assume that there is travel through ‘hyperspace’, which can be a very weird place. North has opted for this solution, calling it arcspace, and it is a deeply strange and disturbing environment.

Arcship pilots are a breed unto themselves. Most do not survive long in the job. They have no ‘spice’ to ease their work. In some civilisations pilots are well-trained elite workers given generous retirement packages when their minds can no longer cope. Not so in the Shine, where retirement is not an option. There are always plenty of excess humans who fall into debt and cannot earn their way out of it. Shine pilots fly one mission, almost certainly die on it, and are quickly and cheaply replaced.

This was the fate of Mawukana na-Vnadze, except that Maw did not exactly die. Like Schrödinger’s cat he became both dead and not dead. A version of his ship was found, prior to its flight, in another part of the galaxy. There was no body, but copious amounts of blood that matched Maw’s DNA. Another copy of the ship was found elsewhere, with something alive on it that both was and was not Maw.

This person became known as Mawanuka-from-the-Dark. Two things were obvious about him. Firstly he was by far the best arcspace pilot in the galaxy, seemingly suffering no ill effects from his flights. And secondly he was impossible to kill. Or rather, if you did kill him, he would come back to life again as soon as his corpse was not being actively observed.

This new version of Maw both terrified and obsessed everyone. Logically he was too dangerous to let live. Practically he seemed impossible to kill. And also he might soon be very useful. Because war was coming. The Shine’s solution to the supernova was quite simple: they would just conquer neighbouring star systems that were outside of the blast zone and move there.

This will be a concept that is familiar to the people of Greenland and Canada.

For the civilisations of the galaxy, war is a problem, because peace relies on Mutually Assured Destruction. The more powerful civilisations rely for survival on the space opera equivalent of nuclear submarines. Blackships lurk in the vast emptiness of space, armed with planet-killing missiles that are virtually undetectable. A blackship war would mean the end of most of galactic civilisation.

The Shine therefore embarks on conventional warfare, picking on smaller, mostly defenceless civilisations, and daring the rest of the galaxy to risk escalation by opposing it. Fearing their own destruction, they do nothing.

It is all horribly familiar, isn’t it. Here’s one character’s view of the behaviour of the Shine:

Cuxil had not been raised to understand Shine, but many minds were now whispering to hers who had been born to it, bred to it, and they knew nothing was Shinier then boldly breaking all the rules, then making one tiny concession to those who are meant to enforce them, who say thank you, oh but thank you for doing that one little, little thing.

Which is exactly how Trump & co. get away with most of their outrages.

Or consider this:

What do you do when someone lies to your face so calmly, so repeatedly, so blithely?

Slow Gods, then, is a book about the fight against Fascism. It being space opera, there is no guarantee that the solution it provides would work for us. After all, there are no analogues to the Slow and Mawanuka-from-the-Dark in our world. But the book also addresses two existential issues of our time.

The first concerns the powerlessness that we all feel in the face of an advancing far-right war machine. Can we do anything worthwhile to oppose it? Should we even try? Is despair the only option?

The second concerns the consequences of taking action. If we fight, people will die. We might have to kill. Most of the population of the Shine are innocent of the crimes of their leaders, save only that they are too ignorant and powerless to resist. Civilians die in wars. How can we claim to be moral if we are killers of innocents too?

These are deep questions. It is significant, I think, that two of my favourite books from 2025—Slow Gods and The Everlasting—are both about resisting Fascism, albeit in different ways. I’d be happy for either of them to walk off with major awards. Both science fiction and fantasy are still very much relevant, and very much engaging with the issues of the day.

Title: Slow Gods
By: Claire North
Publisher: Orbit
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
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The Owl Service

March 1, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 077, Alan Garner, Book Review

The Owl Service was first published in 1967, which is about the time I discovered The Lord of the Rings and vowed never to read a children’s book again. Yes, OK, I was a precocious git. But even though the book is much beloved by most UK fans of my generation and the next, I had not read it until now.

The attraction of the book is obvious. It is a fine piece of YA horror with the tension ramping up from one chapter to the next. It is not an easy book to read, but a clever teenager will doubtless warm to the challenge and love it all the more because of the effort it asks of them.

I suspect that a lot of present-day book reviewers would decry the book as ‘badly written’ because of how hard Alan Garner makes the reader work. It isn’t until you are well into the book that you can sort out who all of the various characters are, and what their relationship is to each other. The TV series was doubtless much easier to follow.

Also Garner expects you to understand what is happening (and often what has happened off screen) from the conversation. He is really very good at giving you a great sense of the action from a few well-chosen turns of phrase. Even in his own time some critics apparently complained that books for children should make the plot more plain. But that, I think, would detract from the building sense of dread.

However, I wasn’t reading the book for a general review. It is well known enough without me. I was reading it specifically as a work of Welsh fantasy. That requires asking some very specific questions. It also means spoilers.

I should start by noting that the book is very much of its time. Growing up as a Welsh kid in an English town, I was well aware of the contempt that most English people had for the Welsh back then. Also the sense of shame that many Welsh people had about their own language at the time was very real. It was engendered by the notorious Blue Book reports of 1847, and even when my mother was in school during WWII Welsh kids would be beaten if they dared to speak their own language. Things are very different now, but even so I think that almost all of the people who vote for Reform in the May elections will be people who don’t speak Welsh.

The main Welsh characters in the book don’t come off very well. Sometimes that is for believable reasons. Nancy has clearly been very badly traumatised by the previous cycle of the curse, and Gwyn has had a hard upbringing because of that. Huw Halfbacon seems at times as if he could have walked out of a rural village in Lovecraft’s New England, probably complete with gills, but he too is a victim of the curse.

Before being too upset with Garner, however, we should bear in mind that the closed rural community that he describes in the book is not something that is particular to Wales. I have already mentioned Lovecraft, and many other horror writers have used such communities as a setting. Some of them have been in England. I note also that Gwyn is a character who would have been very familiar to many of the kids I went to school with. We couldn’t wait to get out of Somerset.

Garner is not exactly kind to the English either. Roger and Alison are spoiled upper middle class brats. The horror expressed by Alison when ‘Mummy’ threatens to stop her attending choir and the tennis club if she doesn’t stop talking to Gwyn is magnificently out of proportion to the true horror of what it going on in the plot.

By the way, I am fascinated by the character of the new Mrs. Bradley, Alison’s mother. She never appears on screen. Clive, her thoroughly wet husband who would do anything for a quiet life, seems utterly cowed by her. How Clive got to be a wealthy captain of industry is a mystery to me. He probably inherited the role from his father.

The key point, however, is that at the end of the book it is the English who break the curse. Roger and Alison go back to their comfortable lives in Birmingham and can forget about their awful experience in Wales. Nancy is already ruined, and Gwyn loses everything in the events of the book. That doesn’t come over well for a Welsh reader.

I note that Garner seems to have skimped a bit on the research. He clearly thinks that Lleu Llaw Gyffes from The Mabinogion has a name that rhymes with ‘clue’. That would be true if he name were spelled Llew, which is often is. But Garner spells it Lleu, which rhymes with ‘ley’. Roger and Alison would make this mistake, but the Welsh characters would not.

Another disappointment is that the book doesn’t connect well with the source material. The only things that Garner really takes from the Fourth Branch are the love triangle and the flowers/owl nature of Blodeuwedd, and even then it isn’t really a love triangle because Roger and Alison don’t have that sort of relationship. Gronw is beholden to Lleu, but Lleu is no English overlord, he’s the heir to the kingdom of Gwynedd. Blodeuwedd is not English either, and Garner ignores the fact that she’s a golem made by Gwydion and Mab to get around a curse that Lleu shall never have a human wife.

All of which leaves me thinking that, while I am sure that there is a very good modern fantasy story that could be written about the love triangle between Lleu, Blodeuwedd and Gronw, The Owl Service is most definitely not it. Nor, indeed, is a small, tight-knit, rural community the correct setting for it. None of which takes away from the book’s power as a work of supernatural horror set in such a community. It is just a misuse of the source material.

Title: The Owl Service
By: Alan Garner
Publisher: Harper Collins
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
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Killing Hares

March 1, 2026 Cheryl Morgan 077, Book Review, E M Duffield-Fuller

I came across this book because it was being promoted by the Welsh Women in Publishing group on Facebook. Then I saw that the author, E M Duffield-Fuller, was doing an event at a local bookshop in Llandeilo, so I went along to meet her. I’m glad I did.

In some ways Killing Hares is a strange book. The cover screams romantasy at you. The publishers (a Welsh feminist small press) are marketing it as mainstream fiction. It is neither of these things. It is a fine piece of feminist fantasy about the difficulty of being the village witch.

Cerys is a huder (pronounced heeder), a worker of magics who, if the need arises, can call upon the power of the land to protect her village. The only trouble is that such powerful magic is likely to be fatal. Cerys’s mother died when the warlord known as the Iron Crow brought a dragon into their valley, causing young Cerys to have to grow into her role with no mentor.

Years later, the Iron Crow is still a threat, but Cerys is chafing against the restrictions of her role. Most importantly, for her to have a successor, she must have a girl child. Cerys has no desire to marry any of the young men of the village. Marrying an outsider would be unthinkable. And the village elders are getting impatient.

The village of Mervale is not actually in Wales. The book is set in an alternate world. But if you think of the nearby big town of Hardritch as Cardiff, and the Iron Crow as the English, it is all very familiar. Besides, Cerys is a Welsh name and huder is pronounced as if it is written in Welsh. Also there are some locations in the book that are familiar to anyone who knows Aberystwyth, which is where EM Duffield-Fuller lives. (She’s doing a doctorate in Literature at the university.)

Because the book is not set in our world, it does not need to be set in a specific historical period, but it feels quite 19th Century. The Iron Crow’s people are experts in metal magic, which leads to industrialization. Also the social attitudes of people in Mervale seem quite Victorian to me.

The plot revolves around the fact that the Iron Crow is once again seeking to extend his power to encompass Mervale. There is a spy active near the village and he has been setting magical traps for unwary locals. Meanwhile Cerys finds a young girl called Thraigthe who appears to be a runaway slave of the enemy. She takes the girl in with a view of making her an apprentice. The villagers, of course, are suspicious of any outsider, and with the looming threat the need to get Cerys pregnant seems very urgent to some.

I really like the way that the book portrayed small village politics, and the way in which it makes clear that what really matters is what sort of person you are. Someone whose family has lived in the village for generations can be a monster, while an outsider newly come to the community can be a good person. The book also makes the point that it doesn’t matter how important and powerful a young woman is, some men will still see her as someone whom they can order about and use as they see fit. In the book, at least, they come to regret those attitudes.

Title: Killing Hares
By: E M Duffield-Fuller
Publisher: Honno
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

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