Author: Cheryl Morgan

Cheryl Morgan is the editor of Salon Futura and owner of its publisher, Wizard's Tower Press. She is also non-fiction editor for Clarkesworld Magazine. Cheryl has won three Hugo Awards: Best Fanzine in 2004 for Emerald City, Best Fan Writer in 2009 and Best Semiprozine for Clarkesworld in 2010. She is a director of San Francisco Science Fiction Conventions and of Association for the Recognition of Excellence in SF & F Translation. She lives near Bath in the UK.

Wythnos yng Nghymru Fydd

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.

book cover
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

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.

book cover
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

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.

book cover
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

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

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

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.


book cover
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

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

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

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

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.

book cover
Title: The Hymn to Dionysus
By: Natasha Pulley
Publisher: Gollancz
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Epic of the Earth

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.

book cover
Title: Epic of the Earth
By: Edith Hall
Publisher: Yale University Press
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The Bacchae

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.

book cover
Title: The Bacchae
By: Euripides
Publisher: Oxford University Press
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The Curve of the World

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.

book cover
Title: The Curve of the World
By: Vonda n McIntyre
Publisher: Aqueduct Press
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A Sword of Bronze and Ashes

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.

book cover
Title: A Sword of Bronze and Ashes
By: Anna Smith Spark
Publisher: Flame Tree Press
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Introduction to the Mabinogi

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.

book cover
Title: Introduction to the Mabinogi
By: Shân Morgain
Publisher: House Morgain
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K-Pop Demon Hunters

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

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

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

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.

Slow Gods

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.

book cover
Title: Slow Gods
By: Claire North
Publisher: Orbit
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Owl Service

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.

book cover
Title: The Owl Service
By: Alan Garner
Publisher: Harper Collins
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Killing Hares

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.

book cover
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

The Wicked Lies of Habren Faire

077, Anna Fiteni, Book Review

This one is definitely romantasy. Specifically it is an enemies to lovers romance featuring a human girl and a fairy prince. You wouldn’t think that from the first few chapters, but it gets there very quickly.

Sabrina Parry is a teenage girl living in a small Welsh village called LLanadwen. It is 1842 and her father is just about to be sentenced to transportation to Australia for his part in the Rebecca Riots, a protest against toll gates. Sabrina’s mother has died recently, and her sister, Ceredwin, is very sickly having barely survived the illness that killed their mother. The only other member of the family is an elderly grandmother, so Sabrina is going to have to be the breadwinner.

A note on names. Sabrina is the Roman name for the goddess of the river Severn. The original Welsh name for the river is Habren. In Welsh adjectives generally appear after the associated noun, so the ‘Habren Faire’ of the title would be ‘Fair Sabrina’ in English. (Well, apart from the fact that Faire is not a Welsh word, but the fairies in the book speak English because otherwise most of the book would be in Welsh.)

Anyway, Sabrina is trying to face up to being the family breadwinner, and hopes that Ceredwin, being much prettier, will find a husband despite her sickly nature. But then Ceredwin runs away into the woods near the house. Sabrina chases after her, and find herself in Gwlad y Tylwyth Teg–Fairyland. Searching for her sister there, Sabrina meets a very annoying fairy prince called Neirin and discovers that the land is suffering from a mysterious sickness than only a human can cure. The fairy king has offered a boon to anyone who can save his people.

Much of what follows is the romance plot in which Sabrina slowly discovers just how duplicitous the Tylwyth Teg can be, and how badly the handsome Neirin is manipulating her. Anna Fiteni handles this part very well. At no point did I feel that the emotions of the characters were being manipulated to serve the required tropes of the plot.

Eventually, of course, Sabrina must save Fairyland, save Ceredwin, and win her prince. Along the way we discover that the book is very much about the mistreatment of the Welsh by wealthy Englishmen.

The history is interesting. There is no such village as Llanadwen, but it is entirely reasonable that it should exist somewhere along the Taff Vale railway which runs from Cardiff Docks through Pontypridd to Merthyr Tydfil, taking coal from the mines to sell overseas, and also to the ironworks in Merthyr. The line was built by Brunel and opened in 1840.

The Rebecca Riots, on the other hand, were more of a Carmarthenshire thing, though 1842 is a year in which the rioters were very active. Also I could find no evidence of a mining disaster in the area in 1842, though there was one in 1844 so that plot element is entirely plausible.

However, despite having done some decent research, Fiteni doesn’t seem that interested in writing an historical novel. Time moves differently in Fairyland and the Fairies have access to future times. Sabrina meets a soldier who has died on the Western Front in WWI, and a girl who entered Fairyland in 1998. This is used as an excuse for the fact that everyone talks and thinks like present day people rather than Victorians.

One example of this is that, when Sabrina discovers that Ceredwin has been visiting Fairyland regularly, and has a lesbian relationship with a mermaid, she’s not particularly concerned by this. Obviously lesbians existed in 19th century Wales, but such things were very much not talked about.

Something else that I would have picked up on as an editor is carelessness with names. Sabrina knows that true names have power in Fairyland, and sometimes this concerns people, but sometimes it doesn’t. Morgen, the mermaid, gives her name to Sabrina unprompted when they first meet.

My guess is that this mostly won’t matter. The people who will be buying the book will be doing so for the romance plot and won’t particularly care about the things that I found weird. I note also that the book reminded me quite a bit of the sort of fairy tale written by that famous person whom we don’t talk about any more. If Fiteni can fill that void in the market, she’ll do very well.

From my point of view I am happy to see someone from Wales write fantasy that is rooted in Welsh culture. There is quite a bit of Welsh language in the book, though it is generally explained. The chapter titles are all in Welsh. Translations are provided for these, and though they are in brackets the publishers have chosen to put them in bigger, bolder type than the actual titles. It is clear that Fiteni is more interested in writing a romance than an historical fantasy, but I’m pleased that she added a lot of Welsh content and quite a bit of feminism.

book cover
Title: The Wicked Lies of Habren Faire
By: Anna Fiteni
Publisher: Electric Monkey
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Great God Pan

077, Arthur Machen, Book Review

Ask people about famous Welsh fantasy writers and they will probably look blankly at you. Ask them, “what about Arthur Machen” and they may well reply, “oh, was he Welsh?” The Great God Pan is a classic of 19th Century Gothic fiction. Parts of it are even set in Wales. But it is, after all, rooted in Classical mythology rather than Welsh. Machen (Arthur Llewellyn Jones) was born in Caerleon, the home of Legio II Augusta, and he spent a lot of time thinking about the Roman Empire.

The end of the 19th Century is an interesting time for speculative fiction. Machen published the final version of The Great God Pan in 1894. HG Wells published The Time Machine in 1895. The two books are very different. One helped kick-start the burgeoning genre of science fiction. The other is acknowledged as a classic of the horror genre but, like the work of HP Lovecraft, it can seem very stilted to a modern reader.

The basic plot of the story is very straightforward. A young gentleman is invited to witness a scientific experiment which, he is assured, will allow the test subject to see into the mystical realm and gaze upon The Great God Pan. The experiment appears to be a failure as the subject ends up a drooling idiot. Years later the same gentleman becomes aware of a number of high profile suicides of wealthy men, which he links to a particular woman, and thence back to the consequences of the experiment that he witnessed.

The problem, for both Machen and Lovecraft, is that they must somehow convey in words that which is too horrible for the mortal mind to witness without descending into madness. It is a task in which they both fail, because if they didn’t no one would survive reading their books.

What is then left for the horror writer is to convey a sense of creeping, escalating unease. That’s something that Alan Garner does very well in The Owl Service. Neither Machen nor Lovecraft seems to have that skill. Whether that is actually a lack of skill, or something cultural that differentiates the late 19th century from our own time, I can’t tell. I’m not well versed enough in horror as a genre.

What we can say, however, is that Machen’s influence on later writers has been immense. Bram Stoker, Lovecraft, and Stephen King have all been fans. He also has the unusual honour of having written a story that gave life to an urban legend (‘The Bowmen’ is the source for the Angel of Mons legend). And he had a fascinating life, including being friends with Oscar Wilde and a member of the Golden Dawn. Not bad for a kid from near Casnewydd.

book cover
Title: The Great God Pan
By: Arthur Machen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Book of Three

077, Book Review, Lloyd Alexander

Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles are most definitely aimed at much younger children than The Owl Service. Also Alexander was an American so, although he clearly has a great fondness for Wales and Welsh legend, he’s not going to get things right.

To be fair, he says up front that his Prydain is not Wales, even though it might look very like it when you look at the map, and many of the characters have obviously Welsh names, but his hero, Taran, hails from Caer Dallben which, on the map, is pretty obviously Bristol. That probably didn’t go down well with Welsh readers.

Obviously I am way too old for the target audience, but I could see the attraction of the book. It has a bunch of amusing, relatable characters and the young hero goes on a meaningful and character-building quest. I’m not surprised that the book did so well.

On the other hand, although the influence of The Mabinogion is very obvious, the book owes at least as much to Tolkien. If I wanted to do an elevator pitch for it I would do something like ‘Peregrine Took as the hero of a mash-up of The Mabinogion and The Lord of the Rings.’ Taran is no Frodo, he’s always getting into trouble. Gwydion is an Aragorn-like figure. Gurgi is a hairier and less damaged version of Smeagol (not Gollum). Medwyn is Gandalf and Radagast. Eilonwy is Eowyn and Arwen. His Tylwyth Teg are the comedy dwarves from The Hobbit (which surely will have earned Alexander a curse or two). Only Fflewddur, the incompetent bard, doesn’t seem to have an obvious origin in LotR.

Well, and Hen Wen, of course. Pigs are special.

There is a pronunciation guide at the back. It is, um… not good.

The Book of Three is only the first of the Chronicles. There are four other books in the series, which I shall read because they are short and fun. As fantasy books for kids they are great. As Welsh fantasy they are rather less impressive.

book cover
Title: The Book of Three
By: Lloyd Alexander
Publisher: Square Fish
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

She Is Here

077, Book Review, Nicola Griffith

I have very much enjoyed other books in the PM Press Outspoken Authors series. It has taken them a while to get around to doing a book with Nicola Griffith, but it has finally appeared and I have to say that it is about time. Griffith is very many wonderful things, and outspoken is very much one of them. She’s proudly lesbian, and proudly disabled, not to mention proudly female and Yorkshire. This book represents some of that.

One of the interesting things about this series is that each volume contains a variety of types of writing. In this case there are essays, there are short stories, there are poems, and there is an interview conducted by Nisi Shawl. The idea, I guess, is to give you an insight into the writer in all her aspects.

Most of the material in the book has previously been published elsewhere. The non-fiction includes Griffith’s contribution to Letters to Tiptree, her thoughts on author branding and on being a disabled writer, a letter to Hild of Whitby, and Griffith’s thoughts on being, and having, a wife.

The thing that will be of most interest to Griffith fans is a previously unpublished novella. ‘Many Things in Dumnet’ is a fantasy story set in an alternate world that has a lot in common with early mediaeval Europe. Anya, the heroine, travels from the Empire to an island that feels like Ireland given the names of the gods. Anya is not sure why she needs to go there, but her purpose becomes clear during the course of the story.

Griffith plays very much fast and loose with Irish mythology, even more so than she does in Spear. That’s fine by me because it is very clear that the story is not supposed to be set in Ireland. The names are just useful shorthand in the worldbuilding. Also the world is very interesting. There is enough there for me to want to know much more. Whether we will ever see any more is another matter. There is, after all, at least one more Hild book that needs writing. But if you need some new Nicola Griffith words while you are waiting, She Is Here is will worth a look.

book cover
Title: She Is Here
By: Nicola Griffith
Publisher: PM Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Editorial – February 2026

077, Editorial

This issue is going live on St. David’s Day (Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Sant). Partly in recognition of that, I am reviewing several works of Welsh fantasy. Some of them are written by English and American authors, but others are actually written here, and in one case published here. I do have an additional reason for doing all this, which will doubtless be something I can talk about in due course. But for now, please enjoy my reflections on the representation of Wales in fantasy.

Meanwhile things are very busy at Wizard’s Tower. I have a bunch of books on pre-order already, with more to come very soon. Eastercon is going to be very busy. There will be a book launch. Hopefully I will see some of you there.

Talking of conventions, I am just back from two days at the Plaid Cymru spring conference, which was held in the ICC Wales just off the M4 at Newport. This has occasionally been mentioned as a potential venue for either an Eastercon or Worldcon. Yeah, no.

The building itself is very lovely, though an absolute nightmare if you have hearing difficulties, which I do. But it is designed solely for a car culture. There are some hotel rooms on site, but not enough for a Worldcon and probably too expensive for an Eastercon. There is supposedly an hourly bus from Newport railway station, but really the only way to get there is by car. I stayed in a nearby Premier Inn. You could see the ICC from my hotel, and it was only 0.3 miles away, but there was no way to walk there as there is a gigantic roundabout in the way, with the M4 passing over it. Also the food choices at the venue are very limited. I ended up living off croissants and sausage rolls, which is not a great diet.

So no, if we want to do a convention in Wales, we need a better venue.

Issue 76

Issues

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


  • Art: The Sword Garden: This issue's cover is Ben Baldwin's art for The Sword Garden by Peadar Ó Guilín

  • The Everlasting: Alix E Harrow's The Everlasting is one of the stand-out books of 2025, not just for the beautiful writing, but also for the issue it addresses

  • The Incandescent: Emily Tesh's follow-up to Some Desperate Glory is a very different type of book, but no less entertaining

  • Winter’s Orbit: A few years late, Cheryl finally catches up with one of the new stars of UK science fiction

  • Frank the Monster: Swedish writer, Mats Strandberg, has written a series of books for children about a small boy who becomes a monster. Cheryl has a look at the first of the series.

  • Free Planet: A new comic series that is very science fictional, and very text heavy. That has to be of interest to you lot, right?

  • Percy Jackson – Season 2: Percy Jackson and friends are back for a second season of TV adventures in Greek Mythology. This time he's travelling in the footsteps of Odysseus.

  • Brigands & Breadknives: It is time once again to curl up with a cosy tale of lovely people in a fantasy universe. Yes, Travis Baldree is back.

  • Gŵyl Y Golau 2026: Spring is coming, and in Wales we celebrate the Festival of Light to recognise the turning of the year

  • Editorial – January 2026: To no one's surprise, Cheryl is very busy

Art: The Sword Garden

076, Art, Ben Baldwin

This issue’s cover is the art that Ben Baldwin had done for the new Peadar Ó Guilín novel that Wizard’s Tower will be launching at Eastercon. The Sword Garden is something of a mash-up of fantasy, science fiction and horror. I really can’t say mcuh more than that without giving things away.

As always, an unadorned version of the art is available below.

The Everlasting

076, Alix E Harrow, Book Review

It is, I think, undeniable that Fascism is on the rise world-wide right now. It is also undeniable that Autocratic rulers love a good national myth to bolster their popularity. That has been the case from at least Augustus and The Aeneid, through Hitler and Wagner, to the present day. I have academic friends who have devoted their careers to keeping an eye on how far-right political movements mis-use legends from the past to recruit in the present.

What we haven’t seen much of yet, which is why Alix Harrow’s The Everlasting is so welcome, is writers of fantasy fiction engaging with this issue. Harrow doesn’t, perhaps, provide much of an answer, but she absolutely highlights the problem.

Owen Mallory is a mild-mannered history professor and accidental war hero. Since childhood he has been obsessed with the legend of Una Everlasting, the valiant knight whose exploits enabled his country of Dominion to grow strong a thousand years ago. With his expertise in linguistics, no one is better qualified than Mallory to translate and interpret those ancient tales. Imagine his surprise and delight, therefore, when an anonymous donor sends him a copy of the long-lost book, The Death of Una Everlasting, which chronicles the heroine’s final adventure.

However, no sooner has he started to translate the book than it is stolen away again. A clue left for him leads him to the office of Vivian Rolfe, Minister of War, and wannabe dictator. You see, the book is a fake. It hasn’t been written yet. At least, it hasn’t been written as well as Ms. Rolfe would like. Mallory, she thinks, is the ideal man to complete the job to her satisfaction.

Sharp eyed readers will have noticed a lot of Arthurian references here. One character called Mallory, another called Vivian, and a book whose title recalls the historical Mallory’s most famous work. The ancient capital of Dominion is called Cavallon. Una’s last quest is in search of the Grail. It is also true that mediaeval Arthurian romances could be as much attempts to re-write myth to suit the political needs of the time as any other piece of propaganda. Yes, even the bits in The Mabinogion.

There is more to the book than that, however. Having set up our expectations with the outline I gave above, it quickly pivots to a time travel tale that totally eschews the idea that one should try not to change the past. Ms. Rolfe, it appears, is less the Lady of the Lake, and more Kang the Conqueror, and she wants to use legend to re-shape history to her own ends. Or, as Vivian puts it:

“In order to have a future worth fighting for, you must have a past worth remembering.”

Set against this, Mallory finds an unusual ally in Una herself who, after a lifetime of slaying the enemies of Dominion, has sickened of the bloodshed and wants nothing more to do with her legend.

As every good novelist should, Harrow gives her antagonist a good motivation. A lone woman in a man’s world of politics, Vivian is only too aware of the fragility of her position, and of how the men around her will conspire to take her down at the slightest sign of weakness. Her response is utter ruthlessness, and a desire to control, not just the present, but everything in the past as well.

The Everlasting is an enormously ambitious book. It also has some fabulous descriptive passages. Here’s one that stood out for me:

But I remember the cold. The weather turned as we left the hills, the sky turning the bluish-white of a frostbitten finger. Each night we huddled miserably on either side of the wind-whipped fire, sleeping fitfully and shivering ourselves awake.

Pretty much every review I have seen of this book talks about how extraordinary and amazing it is. Not only is it beautifully written, it also speaks most urgently to the time we are living through. I am expecting it to walk off with a heap of awards, and I shall be rather disappointed if it doesn’t.

book cover
Title: The Everlasting
By: Alix E Harrow
Publisher: Tor
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Incandescent

076, Book Review, Emily Tesh

Well that was fun. There is some serious politics, and indeed some serious reflection on the profession of teaching, in The Incandescent, but it is by no means as weighty as Some Desperate Glory. What it is, is highly enjoyable.

As you are probably aware, the basic concept behind the book is a school for magicians story told from the point of view of one of the teachers. My school days are a very long way behind me, but kids certainly got up to some dodgy stuff, mostly involving sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. These days things seems to be much more complicated, with kids bringing knives to school, starting OnlyFans accounts and getting recruited by far-right groups from America. Add to that the fact that teachers are no longer allowed to be as cruel as they were in my day, and it has gotta be tough.

Consider now how much more difficult the job of teaching would be if some of your older pupils had the knowledge of how to summon powerful demons, but not power to control them, nor the wisdom to avoid getting possessed. And bearing in mind that a school full of magically gifted children is a literal smorgasbord for demons. Safeguarding, anyone?

Thus is life for Dr. Walden, the Director of Magic at Chetwood, a private school in the south of England where parents with lots of money can send their magically gifted children. There are a few scholarships for children from poorer backgrounds as well, but only those whose gifts are so extreme that they are judged a danger to themselves and everyone around them. Thus Nicola Conway, a Black girl from London whose entire family was wiped out in a demon-related incident when she was just seven.

There are other kids in Walden’s upper sixth Invocation class as well. There’s Aneeta, the sensible and competent daughter of wealthy Indian parents; Will, a rich kid who knows he will fail upwards all his life so can’t be bothered to apply himself; and insecure Matthias, who has been rescued from parents who were religious extremists who abused him terribly.

(I note in passing that the spoiled rich boy in Emberclaw was also called Will. Calling naughty schoolboys William is a bit of a thing in the UK.)

If all of this reminds you a little of a certain school for gifted youngsters in update New York, you would be onto something. Walden teaches at Chetwood for deeply personal reasons, but she is one of the best demonologists in the world. She turned down a job offer from the Pentagon. She has a pet demon, bound into tattoos on her arm. It calls itself Phoenix. You can see where this is going, can’t you. Oh dear.

The other central element of the plot is a love triangle. Walden has to choose between Mark Daubery, a independent Magical Security Consultant employed by the school after a demon attack (and also Will’s uncle), and Laura Kenning, the dashing Chief Marshall (Marshalls being descendants of a mediaeval order of demon-hunting knights who these days do security for places like Chetwood). You can probably tell how that will turn out too.

So yes, it is all quite predictable, but the way in which things play out will keep you reading, especially when things start to go seriously badly wrong for our heroine.

In the meantime Emily Tesh keeps us entertained with bits of fun. Walden is known as Saffy to the rest of the staff. The obvious assumption for anyone from the UK is that her actual name is Saffron, which is both a nod to the cruel naming habits of British parents, and an invocation of the wonderful Absolutely Fabulous sitcom. But you’d be wrong, as I was, if you thought that. Her name is Sapphire. Which brings to mind a very different Joanna Lumley character, gives us a very different sense of Walden’s character, and reminds us of a certain Greek poet from Lesbos.

I also appreciated the scene in which Mark arrives at the school in an Audi, showing off his fancy driving skills. That, I suspect, is intended to bring to mind the outrageous piece of product placement in Avengers: Endgame in which Tony Stark does the same thing in an Audi E-Tron. Which in turn tells us who Tesh would want to play Mark in the film of her book.

Something else worth noting is that the first few chapters are a masterclass in worldbuilding without boring your readers. I particularly liked the chapter in which Walden sits in on a class on magical ethics and the kids get to discuss whether demons are people. Is that relevant to the plot? You bet it is.

It is possible that non-British readers might be a little lost with all the background of the British class system, at which Tesh is poking sharply, but my suspicion is that most of you will have seen and read enough to be almost as familiar with it as we are.

Anyway, I hope most of you will enjoy this book as much as I did. Yes, the plot is predictable, but you read along, nodding to yourself, and thinking, “oh, you did that, of course you did, but I loved the way you did it”.

book cover
Title: The Incandescent
By: Emily Tesh
Publisher: Orbit
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Winter’s Orbit

076, Book Review, Everina Maxwell

When I was at Eastercon last year the name that seemed to be on everyone’s lips was Everina Maxwell. This was not someone whose work I was familiar with, but she was getting recommendations for good queer rep. She had two novels out already, and they were space opera. Clearly I had some reading to do.

Also she appears to be part of a writing group with Emily Tesh, and they gush over each other in the acknowledgements to their books. Tesh apparently had a significant amount of input to Winter’s Orbit, which is Maxwell’s debut novel.

Set against this, I tend to find books by women about gay men to be rather cringe-worthy. That gave me pause for thought, but I got through Winter’s Orbit with only minimal cringe. There are no lovingly detailed scenes of passionate sex, and no throbbing penises. There is a romance plot between the two main characters, but Maxwell has managed to find a way to fit that into the plot and provide a good justification for the confusion.

Kiem is a playboy prince of a stellar empire. At the start of the book he is told that he has to marry a nobleman from a colony planet because an important trade treaty depends on it. This Jainan had previously been married to Kiem’s cousin, Taam, but he had died in a flying accident and the whole diplomatic situation has been thrown into chaos.

Jainan, for his part, is aware that he’s just a tool in imperial politics and that, for the good of his people, he has to keep his new husband happy. Kiem’s public reputation is something of a drunken arsehole. Not offending his is going to be hard.

However, that’s just Kiem’s public persona. While he does enjoy playing the fool, he’s actually very tender-hearted and can’t bear the thought of poor Jainan being forced into a new marriage mere days after his previous husband has died. So the last thing that Kiem wants to do is force Jainan into anything, whereas Jainan is desperate to find out what he needs to do to make Kiem happy.

The possibilities for confusion are significant. I wish all romance plots were this cleverly thought out.

Meanwhile there is space opera to be done. It soon becomes obvious that Taam’s death was not an accident. The Internal Security service has Jainan as their prime suspect. The trade negotiations are in danger of falling apart. Both Kiem, who wants nothing to do with politics, and Jainan, who is an engineering nerd at heart, are completely out of their depth.

Two things need to happen by the end of the book. Firstly the romance plot needs to be resolved so that Kiem and Jainan can work together. Much of this happens in the middle of the book while the pair of them are stranded in snowy wastes, something I feel sure is a quiet nod to The Left Hand of Darkness. The other is that both our boys must learn to use their respective skills effectively to defeat the bad guys.

Fortunately help is at hand in the form of Kiem’s ultra-efficient personal aide, Bel. In much the same way as Alfred looks after Bruce Wayne, and Jarvis looks after Howard and Tony Stark, Bel is always two steps ahead of where Kiem needs to be, and has everything that he needs ready and waiting. She’s also not afraid to talk back to her employer, which is just what Kiem needs.

The gender politics of the world are quite interesting. Everyone seems to be able to choose the gender they want, with at least three options available. People signal their gender in different ways depending on local planetary custom. Amongst Kiem’s people it is done with jewelry. Neither clothing nor bodily shape is a reliable indicator. There is no mention of medical gender transition, and I get the impression that it doesn’t happen, so it is not a world that I would be comfortable in, but it is an interesting one.

That aside the worldbuilding is quite sketchy. There is clearly a whole galaxy outside of the little empire that Kiem’s people rule, with powers far greater than them. We don’t see much of it. One nice touch is that the animals on Kiem’s world have Earth-like names, but are nothing like the equivalent Earth animals. The thing that they call a ‘bear’ is a six-legged lizard. Kingfishers are dangerous raptors that have been hunted to extinction. This provides a nice air of alienation.

What impressed me most, however, were the characters. Aliette de Bodard, in her blurb for the book, says “It’s characters stayed with me long after I raced through the last chapters.” I feel very much the same about the book, and I’m actually rather sad that we don’t get to see more of Kiem, Jainan and Bel in Maxwell’s second novel, Ocean’s Echo. It is set in the same world though, so hopefully we’ll get more of that galactic civilization that we have only glimpsed for now.

book cover
Title: Winter's Orbit
By: Everina Maxwell
Publisher: Orbit
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Frank the Monster

076, Book Review, Julia Marshall, Mats Strandberg, Sofia Falkenhem

I don’t often review books for children here, but Mats Strandberg wanted to send me a copy of his latest book, and it is very lovely so here we are.

Frank the Monster is aimed at fairly young kids. The blurb I got from the publishers says ages 6-10. The central character is nine years old. So obviously it is quite short, and the language is very simple. The book is beautifully illustrated by Sofia Falkenhem.

Young Frank Steen is a bookish nerd. He’s unpopular at school, and a disappointment to his parents thanks to his sporty and popular kid brother, Oliver. Frank spends a lot of his time alone, or hanging out with his kindly elderly neighbour, Alice. If that wasn’t bad enough, everything changes for the worse at his 9th birthday party when he is bitten by Alice’s dog, Woof. Frank now finds that he will sometimes turn into a wolf at night.

With no one to guide and advise him, Frank has no idea how to behave in wolf form, and soon the town is consumed with panic about the furry monster that stalks the streets at night. Frank, who has had enough of being seen as different to already fill his short life, is terrified. But being a nerd he goes to the library, finds out about lycanthropy, and looks up possible cures. He’s delightfully serious about the whole thing.

Most of the cures were horrible. Like the werewolf having to drink the blood of an unborn child. Or stab themselves three times in the hand. Or be shot with a silver bullet. That way you’d die, but at least you’d be a human again.

Eventually Frank finds other monsters living in his town, and they take him in and give him advice. Because yes, this is a Found Family story. The publicity notes that Strandberg is, “Sweden’s leading horror writer”. It should perhaps have also noted that he is one of Sweden’s most famous gays. Frank the Monster is a charming story about the difficulty of growing up knowing that you are different from other kids, and eventually finding your own tribe (or, in Frank’s case, pack).

Because books for kids need to be very short, there isn’t space in this one to fully explore the issues. Frank still hopes that one day he will be able to come out to his parents, but that day seems a very long way off. Thankfully there are two sequels already written. I’m looking forward to them.

I should note that Julia Marshall’s translation into English is flawless. I’m pleased that some publishers are still employing human translators.

The book is currently on pre-order and will be available in April.

book cover
Title: Frank the Monster
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

Free Planet

076, Aubrey Sitterson, Comic Review, Jed Dougherty

Thanks to Paul Cornell, I was sent review copies of the first 6 issues of this comic. Paul thinks it will be of interest to the science fiction community, and I can see why.

Free Planet aims to tell the tale of a newly liberated planet, originally known as ‘Aides but now called Lutheria. It was formerly a colony of the Interplanetary Development Alliance, but after a lengthy war has won independence. The story revolves around the lives of the Freedom Guard, a group of elite soldiers formed to safeguard the planet’s fragile freedom, but this is to some extent a hook on which to hang the worldbuilding, and lengthy discussions of the nature and cost of freedom.

Our heroes are, as is to be expected, a ragtag bunch. They are led by Gloria Sunandez, a former IDA officer who led a mutiny on the IDA flagship. Also in the group is Victor MacLiu, the idealistic son of the commander of that flagship. There’s Talun, a military strategy robot whose analysis of the war led him to choose the rebel side, and a notorious terrorist responsible for several massacres of civilians. We have two mechanics from the Machinist Religion—apparently the always come in pairs—representing the orthodox and reform branches of that organisation.

Something that distinguishes Free Planet from a lot of comics is that it is very text heavy. There are panels that a festooned with worldbuilding asides, that sometimes seem to contradict what is happening in the panel. Each issue closes with a couple of pages that are largely dense prose, providing further background. These are often full of economic and political explanations of the situation facing the Lutherians. Clearly the comic’s creators want their readers to think a lot about what is happening.

The art takes some liberties with convention as well. Issue #3 is the best example. The story is about an attack on Lutheria by a Warhammer-like civilization called the Orouran Empire. Our heroes have to do the gutsy little fighter pilots taking on a vast dreadnought thing. In order to give a feel of the nature of space combat, some of the pages are drawn sideways or upside down. This makes them quite difficult to read on an iPad unless you lock the screen.

In addition to the politics and military action, there are some classic science fiction themes. Talun, being an AI, is the source of considerably suspicion. There are squid-like aliens who claim to be able to predict the future. The idea of a religion that worships the Great Machine of the cosmos is very science fiction. So there’s a lot there of interest.

What there isn’t, yet, is any sign of a conclusion. And given that this is a comic series there need not be. But the world of the comic is so vast, and so much in introduced in the first six issues, that they could go on for a very long time before any of the storylines are resolved. Fortunately there is more than enough in the first few issues to get me wanting to read more. I figure that a lot of you would find it interesting too.

As the Salon Futura website isn’t really set up to acknowledge all of the creators of a comics series, here is the credits list:

  • Writer/Creator: Aubrey Sitterson
  • Art/Creator: Jed Dougherty
  • Colours: Vittoria Astone
  • Letters: Taylor Esposito
book cover
Title: Free Planet
By: Aubrey Sitterson & Jed Dougherty
Publisher: Image
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Percy Jackson – Season 2

076, TV Review

So, everyone’s favourite demigods are back from a second season. As I very much enjoyed the first season of Percy Jackson and the Olympians, I was keen to catch up.

Book 2 in the Percy Jackson series is called The Sea of Monsters, and the story riffs primarily off The Odyssey. Grover the satyr has been captured and his being held prisoner by Polythemus the cylops, so Percy and Annabeth have to go on a quest to rescue him. For reasons that are not properly explained, Polythemus is now the guardian of the Golden Fleece, which has miraculous healing properties. And the whole thing is a set-up because Luke and his gang of rebels want to use Percy to get the fleece so that they can then steal it and use it to resurrect Kronos.

That’s all very straightforward, but the joy of the series lies in the charisma of the teenage stars, and also in the way that Rick Riordan has bent Greek mythology to his will. In this season we get to meet Polythemus, Scylla and Charybdis, the Sirens and Circe. Annabeth, who is a daughter of Athena, knows the story of The Odyssey inside out so knows how to foil the various dangers their will meet. Percy, who is canonically dyslexic, looks that the name Charybdis and says, “I’m not even going to try to pronounce that.”

Season two also introduces a fourth teenage character to the team. Tyson is a young cyclops whom Percy’s mom has adopted. The CGI on his single eye is a bit dodgy, which I found very distracting, but he’s a great character. The main point is that, despite being a giant, and ugly by human standards, he’s very competent at a whole range of things, and just as much a hero as Percy.

Adaptations from books can sometimes be a disaster because the TV people don’t understand or respect the original content, but Rick Riordan is very much involved in this series and it is very much the better for his presence. Some of the plotting is excellent, and doesn’t feel at all like plot-by-numbers meets diversity-by-numbers the way some of Starfleet Academy appears to be turning out.

Talking of Starfleet Academy, it is interesting to compare the way that pupil-teacher relationships are handled in various stories. In The Incandescent the sympathy is largely with the teachers, for whom the kids are both sacred charges and a dangerous enemy. The Percy Jackson stories are much closer to Pink Floyd’s The Wall, particularly in this season as Chiron the centaur has been fired and replaced by Tantalus who, quite frankly, looks like the sort of person who deserved to be condemned to eternal torture. Starfleet Academy will, I think, try to find some middle ground, aided by the fact that the kids are that much older, but that remains to be seen.

The Circe episode was a particular favourite for me. Riordan manages to make her both sympathetic and deeply duplicitous at the same time. The way that she keeps prisoners on her island without them realising that they are prisoners is delightfully devious. The Sirens are also in this episode. As it is a kids’ show, they can’t use sexual allure on Percy and Annabeth. Instead they exploit psychological weaknesses. The way that they trap Annabeth is brilliantly done.

I happened to see the book on sale while I was watching the series. I haven’t read it through, but dipping into it I can see that a lot has been changed. A whole lot of characters have been dropped, which is generally the case with movie/TV adaptations. I’m a bit sad that Hermes no longer carries a caduceus with two snakes who have comedy speaking parts, but I can understand why they had to go. The location of the action in the book is supposedly the Bermuda Triangle, which makes sense, but it doesn’t add a lot so the TV series drops it. The TV series also ends on a much better cliffhanger.

Which, yes, it does. Thankfully the production team have been working hard and season 3 is not that far away. I’m looking forward to it.

Brigands & Breadknives

076, Book Review, Travis Baldree

So, here we are again. Travis Baldree books are cosiness personified. What lovely, kind people has he been writing about this time?

The main character is Fern, the bookstore-owning ratkin who was the star of Bookshops & Bonedust. But the book is set after the events of Legends & Lattes. A shop has become vacant next to Viv’s coffee shop, and she has persuaded her old friend Fern to up sticks and move cities to take it. Fern, who is suffering something of a midlife crisis, has agreed, but the move does not solve her feelings of restlessness.

Thus it is that Fern ends up falling into a drunken sleep in a wagon belonging to a legendary elven adventurer called Astryx One-Ear, Blademistress and Oathmaiden. And when she wakes up she’s off on an adventure with no turning back for many days.

Astryx is hundreds of years old and very world-weary. The examination of the feelings of very ancient elves is one of the more interesting aspects of the book. Astryx also has a magic sword. It is not called Stormbringer, or Excalibur. It is called Nigel, and it is a bit of a diva.

As is a requirement for Baldree’s books, pretty much everyone we meet is excessively nice. This extends even to the monastery run by the followers of the god Tarim, a one-eyed, tentacled monstrosity who wants to destroy the universe. His clergy, rather than being mad cultists as they would be in a Lovecraft story, have dedicated their lives to persuading His Terribleness to delay the destruction of the world for just a few more days, pretty please.

I never really got to grips with Fern’s motivation and fairly constant self-pity, and I suspect that the book might have bored me to tears had it not been for the other principle character, Zyll the goblin. Zyll is Astryx’s prisoner. There is a massive bounty on her head, and these days Astryx makes her living as a bounty-hunter. Quite what awful things Zyll has done to warrant this bounty are not clear, but we can she that she is very capable, and owns a multi-coloured coat full of pockets each of which appears to be a bag of holding containing all sorts of useful things.

It soon becomes clear that Zyll is way smarter than Astryx and Fern, and indeed could escape any time she wants. Clearly she does not want to do so, yet. This is setting us up for a twist ending which I think Baldree pulled off brilliantly. In the meantime Zyll manages to provide some fine comedy moments.

Clearly these books are very popular, and if what you want to read is something warm and fluffy with only mild peril they are probably the best thing going. Personally I prefer books that give me a little more to think about.

book cover
Title: Brigands & Breadknives
By: Travis Baldree
Publisher: Tor
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Gŵyl Y Golau 2026

076, Angharad Wynne, Event Report, Music Review, Simmy Singh

As some of you may remember, this time last year I attended an event at our local National Trust property, Dinefwr. Gŵyl Y Golau, which means Festival of Light, is the Welsh equivalent to Imbloc. Last year’s event was quite spectacular because it was done with the aid of a grant from the Welsh Government to explore the connection between music and the environment. That grant has now ended, but Simmy Singh and Angharad Wynne had so enjoyed last year that they wanted to do it again.

So what was different? Well, no money to bring in Nigel Shaw and Bethan Lloyd. Simmy did find a local percussionist and guitar player to perform with her, but as with so many musicians these days she also had a multi-instrument backing track. The songs that had all three of them working hard were probably the best entertainment, but Simmy also played a track from her new album which was really impressive.

The event was run over two days. The Friday majored on story-telling, with Simmy mainly providing a musical accompaniment to Angharad’s tales. Saturday was mainly music, with Angharad providing the occasional break to let the musicians recover after an energetic number.

There was supposed to be a Saturday morning event too, which would have been a guided walk around the estate with Angharad telling stories connected to the location. Sadly that had to be cancelled because it was pissing it down. All things considered, however, we did pretty well with the weather.

One of the things I picked up listening to Angharad is that there is an international community of story-tellers. This is quite separate from the written fiction community. Angharad talked about working with traditional story-tellers from Africa and India. It is a bit of a shame that our communities don’t talk more. We could learn a lot. So many written fiction writers are terrible at reading aloud, but Angharad can keep an audience spellbound for an hour, speaking entirely from memory.

Like last year, part of the event was held around a bonfire in the gardens of Newton House. We said goodbye to Mari Lwyd, who will go to sleep now until next winter. We had fairly clear skies, and a full moon for Saturday, so I guess we also had Diana’s blessing. There is no Celtic god who is specifically associated with the moon, though there are plenty of goddesses that you can use if you wish.

As with last year, much of the purpose of the event was the welcome the starting of spring. Gŵyl Y Golau is the mid point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. We should start seeing lambs in the fields soon. It is very much a festival of New Hope, if you’ll permit me a brief Star Wars reference. Here’s hoping that the things we hoped for will come to pass. It is about time that the Evil Empire got a good kicking.

Editorial – January 2026

076, Editorial

This one is a couple of days late going live, which is partly because I’ll get more readers if I publish on a weekday, and partly because I wanted to wait to be able to write about the Gŵyl Y Golau event.

February is a short month, but hopefully I will get a lot of reading done because I am going to Rome for an Assyriology conference. Travel is always good for the reading. And with any luck I will have some LGBTQ+ History Month things to write about in the next issue as well.

Meanwhile things are very busy at Wizard’s Tower. We have a whole lot of books due out this spring, and several projects that I can’t actually tell you about yet. Thankfully March should be fairly quiet, travel-wise. My first convention of the year will be Eastercon.

The other thing that is very much occupying my time at the moment is the forthcoming Senedd elections in May. Thankfully Fauxrage and his merry band of Fascist wannabes seem to be making a terrible mess of things. It is hard to pretend to be a fresh and radical voice in politics when you are also a keen supporter of Trump and Putin, and your MPs are largely refugees from the last Tory government. Of course if Plaid Cymru do end up with the majority of seats, they will have to actually run the country. Given the current international economic climate, that won’t be easy. We continue to live in interesting times.

Issue 75

Issues

This is the December 2025 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


  • Cover: Malcolm’s Grave Stone: Some fine Pictish stone carving

  • Once Was Willem: Mike Carey's latest novel is a big departure from his previous work, but very welcome in any case

  • When There Are Wolves Again: A new E J Swift novel is cause for excitement these days. How does the latest one stack up?

  • Carved in Stone: Ever wanted to write a story, or run a game, in the world of the Picts? This book has all of the worldbuilding that you need.

  • Emberclaw: L R Lam's gay dragon romance is up to its second installment.

  • These Burning Stars: Is science fiction dying? Hopefully not, and Bethany Jacobs is busily trying to keep it alive.

  • The War Between the Land and the Sea: The new Doctor Who spin-off series was shown over the holidays. Inevitably, Doctor Who fandom and the UK media hates it. Are they right?

  • The Lord of the Rings Re-Watched: It is almost 25 years since Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring hit movie screens. It wowed us then. Does the trilogy stand up to a re-watch?

  • Editorial – December 2025: In which Cheryl is not looking forward to 2026

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