The Quiet Year is a map-making storytelling game by Avery Alder. The group will collectively tell the story of a community which, after a long war, has finally succeeded in driving off the Jackals. The community doesn’t know it, but they will have one quiet year — a time to come together, to rebuild, to prepare for the future — before the Frost Shepherds arrive and the game comes to an end.

The central focus of play is the map itself: We begin with a blank sheet in the middle of the table and a brief setup phase will see the group quickly sketch in the broad strokes of their community. We will also determine which Resources are important to our community, and which one of those Resources is in abundance (with all others being in scarcity).

(The Resources section of the setup phase is subtly brilliant: There are no predefined Resources. Instead, each player creates a Resource and adds it to the list. This, all by itself, radically alters the game each time you play it. A community in which Transportation, Solar Power, and Food are the key Resources is a completely different community than one in which Clean Water, Steel, and Mana are the key Resources.)

Once the setup phase is complete, the game proceeds in turns. On their turn a player will:

• Draw a card
• Advance active projects
• Take an action

CARDS: The game is played with a deck of standard playing cards. There are fifty-two weeks in a year and fifty-two cards in a deck, and thus each turn represents a week of time. Each suit of cards represents one season (hearts are Spring, diamonds are Summer, etc.), and each season of cards is randomized.

Generally speaking, each card you draw will offer you an option between two questions. The active player has to answer the question, which will also often mean adding to the map or updating the map. For example, if you draw the 10 of Hearts you must choose between:

• There’s another community somewhere on the map. Where are they? What sets them apart from you?
• What belief or practice helps to unify your community?

Whereas the 5 of Spades offers a choice of:

• Winter elements destroy a food source. If this was your only food source, add a Scarcity.
• Winter elements leave everyone cold, tired, and miserable. Project dice are not reduced this week.

The game ends immediately when the King of Spades is drawn (and the Frost Shepherds arrive). This can happen at any point in the last season of thirteen cards (even the very first week of winter), so as the year continues more and more uncertainty about how much time you have left will begin to creep in. (And this will naturally influence the group’s predilection towards breaking ground on new projects vs. other options.)

ACTIVE PROJECTS: Various cards and actions will establish projects. Most projects are entirely the creation of the player initiating them and will be given a timeline of 1-6 weeks (i.e., turns). These projects are tracked on the map using six-sided dice, and the dice count down one pip each week.

TAKE AN ACTION: Finally, a player can choose one of three actions. They can Start a Project; they can Discover Something New; or they can Hold a Discussion. Each of these influences the story of the community in different ways.

THINGS I DON’T LIKE

There’s one other “significant” mechanic in the game: Contempt tokens. I’ll let the rulebook explain them:

If you ever feel like you weren’t consulted or honoured in a decision-making process, you can take a piece of Contempt and place it in front of you. This is your outlet for expressing disagreement or tension.

(…)

If you ever want to act selfishly, to the known detriment of the community, you can discard a Contempt token to justify your behaviour. You decide whether your behaviour requires justification. This will often trigger others taking Contempt tokens in response.

And that’s it. As a mechanic, Contempt tokens are empty and meaningless. They’re also somewhat incoherent: The beginning of the rulebook specifically points out that we, as players, have two roles in the game: To represent the community itself and care about its fate and ALSO to “dispassionately introduce dilemmas … create tension and make the community’s successes feel real.” So how is acting to “the known detriment of the community” something that needs to be “justified”? Furthermore, there IS no “decision-making process” in which you can be consulted; the game explicitly tells you NOT to discuss the decisions you have to make in the game.

Having played with Contempt several times, I’m simply going to be dropping them from future sessions. They don’t add anything to the game and, worse yet, simply confuse new players due to their incoherence and lack of point.

THINGS I DO LIKE

Everything else.

The Quiet Year is a beautiful game that creates beautiful stories. The choices presented in each season are elegantly balanced to push play in particular directions without drowning out the creative input and interests of the players.

The storytelling engine is specific enough to push interesting events into the narrative, but general enough to never constrain you: You can set The Quiet Year in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, a Martian colony, the African savannah, or a Middle Ages village just after it’s been scourged by the Black Death and never hit a discordant prompt.

You can learn The Quiet Year in about 15 minutes, you’ll get 3-4 hours of play before the Frost Shepherds arrive, and then — if you’re anything like the people I’ve played with — you’ll immediately begin trying to figure out when you can play it again.

(There’s also an alternate setup you can use for a shorter game if you’d like.)

A FEW OTHER DETAILS

The game is designed for 2-4 players, but I found that it expanded well to 5 or 6. (I did not play with only two players, although I am curious what that experience would look like.) The designer has noted in online discussions that the primary problem with a larger player count is the down time between turns, so this will be at least somewhat dependent on how much your group is entertained in the audience stance. (Players also often have narrative input on other players’ turns.)

In addition to an $8 PDF, The game is also available in a $50 bag that contains everything you need to play: Rulebook, custom cards (with the text printed on them so you don’t have to consult the tables in the rulebook), dice, and counters. I, personally, don’t think the experience offered by The Quiet Year is worth that much, but your mileage may vary.

A QUIET YEAR

I wasn’t sure how well The Quiet Year would play online in the Era of COVID-19, but it was actually a spectacular experience. You’ll obviously need some form of shared whiteboard for the group (I found that one built into Zoom worked just fine). You can try to get fancy with the playing cards, but I found it easy enough to just act as a facilitator with a physical deck of cards to one side of my keyboard.

The one thing I will say, is that I think post-apocalyptic narratives have a completely different feel when you’re playing them during an actual apocalypse. And this impact is particularly substantial if it’s an interactive medium.

To give you some sense of what The Quiet Year is capable of, this is the narrative of one game that I played: Our community collapsed completely and murdered each other in internecine warfare. (So the year was perhaps not as quiet as it might have been…)

Our village was located in a valley. At sunrise and sunset we all stopped and collectively meditated upon the passing of the days.

Some among us even went so far as to worship the Sun.

Expeditions beyond the mountains to the west returned with members horribly burned by a “bright light.” Clearly they had found the place where the Sun sets and been burned for their hubris.

The Sun Sect grew.

To the southeast there was a horrible Pit; a bottomless black void. It was surrounded by skulls and strange runes. No one had placed them there; no one dared to touch them.

One day a woman named Petra climbed naked out of the Pit and came to the village.

Other outsiders came who wore Moons on their clothes. They were ostracized.

Petra and another girl named Sibyl convinced many young members of the village to enter the Pit and learn its mysteries.

They did not return.

We reclaimed the mine to the southwest. Our supply of metal was abundant! But we discovered that those working at the site contracted a strange disease that made them incredibly pale. They were referred to by the slur of “moon-facers,” and this term was soon being used to also refer to those who wore the symbol of the Moon.

Around this time, a flood destroyed our food stores. Tensions grew between the Sun Sect and the Followers of the Moon.

Faced with this persecution, some of the Followers of the Moon assassinated three of the four Elders who led our village. They then fled to the northern end of the valley, leaving the last remaining Elder — a man named Jonas — in charge.

Jonas was a member of the Sun Sect. He took control of the citizen’s militia and reforged it as the Swords of Dawn.

A few weeks later, foresters heard the voices of Petra and Sibyl among the trees of the forest. Their words could not be understood, but they seemed filled with portent.

A beam of purple energy shot out of the Pit. The faces of the others who had gone down into the Pit could be seen writhing within it. Petra herself emerged from the beam and declared herself a Priestess of the Moon.

Jonas died in his bed, pale as if moon-touched. The community was left leaderless. (Elders could only be nominated by existing Elders, Jonas had refrained from doing that, and now all the Elders were dead.) The Sun Sect moved into the power vacuum and the Swords of Dawn enforced order.

The Sun Sect declared that the Pit had grown ascendant because we had turned out back on the Sun. They decreed that a child must be taken to the highest mountain in the east and sacrificed to the rising sun.

This was done. Almost the entire Sun Sect marched up to the mountain peak.

But as the sacrifice was about to be performed, a huge avalanche wiped out the entire expedition.

Petra and the moon-facers took control of the village. A string of murders followed, leaving mutilated bodies in the woods. Then the beam of energy from the Pit washed across the sky, blotting out the Sun.

One of the last surviving members of the Sun Sect — angry, vindictive, and driven mad by this last divine sign — set fire to the forest! Our stores of lumber and the entire northern forest was destroyed.

When the envoys from the south arrived to trade their grain for our lumber, we were unable to pay them. Trade collapsed. The famine worsened.

But the morning after the fire, a beam of golden energy shot up into the sky from the site of the child sacrifice.

So there was a golden beam to the northeast and a purple-black beam to the southeast.

A new religious leader emerged: Wren argued that we had strayed too far from the Way of the Sun and we needed to sacrifice MORE children into the Sun’s golden beam, to at least match the number who had passed into the Pit.

Wren led a pilgrimage up into the mountains and they did, in fact, cast many children into the golden beam. The energy of the golden beam spread, blotting out the black dome that had shaded the valley and replacing it with a golden dome of sun-like light.

But the light shone 24/7.

Many in the village suffered from sleep deprivation as the eternal light shone on.

The valley was then hit with a plague, which further decimated the population. Then a massive thunderstorm rolled in. It rained for days and days and days. The river flooded, wiping out our village and forcing the population to scatter into the hills, creating a number of small, scattered “niche” communities.

As the waters receded in the valley below, we saw — in the burnt fields of the forest — what we at first thought were new trees. New trees that grew rapidly with the blessing of the Sun’s eternal light!

But what actually grew was strange: Purple-pink growths that fruited large, pear-shaped fruits that glowed with a bluish light.

Strange goliaths, of whose existence we had seen hints on our earlier expeditions, came from the west and settled among the strange trees, somehow feeding upon the glowing fruits.

An entire niche community vanished mysteriously overnight. When people from a neighboring community arrived, they found food still cooking over open fires. The only clue was the word RELLIK scratched into the dirt.

At the opposite end of the valley, it was discovered that the skulls and bones of the children sacrificed to the golden beam had appeared in the bone ring around the Pit. This connection between the two beams raised metaphysical questions that our desperate community had no time to properly consider.

A children’s crusade led almost all of our remaining children back down to the floor of the valley. There they ate of the glowing fruits.

Petra was badly beaten. She was forced into hiding, circulating from one family to another to hide her from the Sun Sect.

One of these families, seemingly driven mad, killed and ate her.

Other incidents of cannibalism forced the niche communities into armed compounds that no longer spoke to each other.

Strange changes were seen among the children eating of the purple pears.

The Swords of Dawn marched on the mine to wipe out that source of the “moon-faced plague.”

As the mine burned, the Frost Shepherds arrived.

A QUIET YEAR.

Style: 4
Substance: 4

Author: Avery Alder
Publisher: Buried Without Ceremony
Cost: $8.00 (PDF)
Page Count: 15

SPOILERS AHOY!

Insofar as it is possible for a movie to be objectively bad (in terms of internal logic, continuity, and so forth), this movie is objectively bad.

Insofar as it is possible for a movie to be subjectively awful, for me this movie is awful. Almost unremittingly terrible. Total garbage.

As I wrote in my reaction to The Last Jedi, the sequel trilogy — as a result of the foundation thoughtlessly laid by J.J. Abrams in The Force Awakens — is fundamentally built on a nihilistic foundation that diminishes the original films instead of building on them: “If you accept the sequel trilogy as canon while watching the original trilogy, it makes the original trilogy films weaker and less powerful. And that’s really not okay, in my opinion.”

Impressively, with The Rise of Skywalker, Abrams has done it again. Not only does the film make the original trilogy exponentially worse if you accept it as canon, it manages to ALSO make The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi retroactively worse films if you accept it as canon.

We could talk almost endlessly about the myriad ways in which this is true — the incompetent damage done to the mythic arcs of Anakin and Luke by bringing Palpatine back; the retroactively neutered character arcs; the thematic incoherence; and on and on and on — but it’s largely pointless because the film is so godawfully bad that it just doesn’t matter.

Trying to analyze all the ways in which this movie is terrible is actually a fractal exercise in madness. You can talk for hours and not exhaust all the ways in which the film is bad, because the closer you look at the film the more flaws you discover. So rather than trying to do that, I will instead look at two significant ways in which the film is terrible and hope they will serve as exemplars of all the other ways in which the film is terrible.

PALPATINE’S FLEET

One of the film’s major problems is that it’s filled with nonsense. Palpatine’s fleet is a good example of this because every time the film mentions them, it seems really committed to making them even more ridiculous.

First, the ships were apparently buried and erupt out of the earth. This makes no sense. They aren’t designed to land. It doesn’t make sense that you bury them.

Second, they show a comically large number of them on screen. It seems as if the image is meant to be threatening, but it misses the mark and ends up in the comedic absurdity of a five-year-old who has just learned how to copy and paste in Photoshop.

Third, we discover that “his followers have been building [the fleet] for years.”  But… how? Where did the supplies come from?

Fourth, we’re told that in 16 hours “attacks on all free worlds begin.” This is an almost comically short amount of time for them to even pretend to deal with the problem, but don’t worry: The film will shortly make it clear that this is impossible.

Fifth, we’re told that the fleet will increase the First Order’s resources “10,000 fold.” Assume that the First Order has as few as 100 ships currently. We’re being told that Palpatine has one million Star Destroyers. The visual was comedically inept before; the dialogue makes it even more absurd.

And where are the crews for these ships going to come from? This scene also features First Order leaders declaring, “We’ll need to increase recruitments. Harvest more of the galaxy’s young.” Okay, great. Let’s say a star destroyer only needs a crew of a hundred people. So you immediately kidnap a hundred million kids and instantaneously have the infrastructure to indoctrinate and train them. Great. Your fleet will be ready to go in, I dunno, let’s say 10 years?

This is, of course, the fleet that’s supposed to be launching attacks in less than a day.

Sixth, it’s revealed that every single star destroyer has a Death Star laser strapped to its belly.

… no comment.

Seventh, we’re told that the ships can only leave Exegol one at a time by following the signal from a navigation beacon. This is, prima facie, stupid. The film will also contradict this claim multiple times. But whatever, let’s accept the conceit that you can trap the fleet on Exegol by destroying the navigation beacon.

But if this is such essential infrastructure, why would you only build one tower? And why is it completely undefended and unshielded? And given that it’s completely undefended and unshielded, why do the good guys need to land a ground assault team?

Seventh, ha ha ha. Just kidding. The star destroyers can totally have navigation beacons built into them that will allow them to leave Exegol without a ground-based navigation beacon. They just turn that ground-based beacon off and use the ship-based one instead!

But only one ship has it! Because why would you include “able to leave drydock” technology into more than one ship?

Okay. Fine. It’s a very super-special navigational tower and it’s super-expensive and they can’t include it on every ship. Or even more than one ship. Sure. I mean, we’ll ignore the fact that the Rebels didn’t require one of these super-special navigational towers and Rey broadcast the navigation signal across hyperspace from an X-wing, but, sure, those are the “rules” and that’s just—

Eighth, GOTCHA! They blow up the super-special navigation tower, but the star destroyer can still send out the navigation signal! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Any star destroyer could do it, in fact!

Ninth, so they blow up the whole star destroyer! And that’s it! No way out now! Hee hee tee hee.

What’s that, you say? The ground-based navigation tower was never destroyed and could just be flipped back on? And then none of it matters anyway because they just blow all the star destroyers up?

Ho ho hee ha ha ha ho ha.

To be clear: The whole movie is like this.

Take virtually any element of the film and you will find nothing but nonsense. (Think about the Sith dagger for a moment if you’d like to see what I mean. Really think about it: Where did it come from? Why does it exist? What function was it supposed to serve? And how lucky was Rey when she walked up to that one specific, unmarked spot on the coast?) And many of these separate areas of fractal nonsense end up overlapping with each other, which serves to exponentially increase the stupidity.

ROSE

Beyond the nonsense, the other pervasive element in The Rise of Skywalker is the unrelenting retconning of The Last Jedi. It is not merely that the instances of this are so numerous as to be beyond easy cataloguing, it’s that they’re all so… pointless. For example, rolling back Poe’s entire character arc so that he’s once again not ready to assume the mantle of leadership doesn’t lead the character anywhere interesting, it just puts him in a stunted cul-de-sac. Kylo Ren reforging his helmet similarly doesn’t go anywhere; he wears it a couple of times, takes it off largely inconsequentially in the middle of a random scene, and then we just never see it again.

But perhaps the best example of this is how Chris Terrio & J.J. Abrams did Rose dirty.

Rose, of course, was the new major character in The Last Jedi who became an important mentor and friend to Finn before eventually falling in love with him.

And in The Rise of Skywalker, she is basically nonexistent: She pops up here and there to deliver lines as Generic Rebel Person, and is never given a single meaningful contribution or interaction with the other cast members.

Okay. That’s unfortunate. But maybe it’s just unavoidable? There’s already a lot of stuff going on in this movie and it’s possible there just literally wasn’t time to include more material for Rose.

Except, no. Because the movie goes out of its way to create a different female sidekick for Finn who can hang out with him for the final mission. It’s painfully clear that it would have taken literally zero effort for Rose Tico to fill that role. The only reason not to do this is because you’re deliberately attempting to erase The Last Jedi.

But just ignoring Rose isn’t enough. They even include a little scene where Finn says, “I’m going to sacrifice myself,” just so Rose can say, “Okay,” and contradict herself from the last film. (And then somebody else gets to rescue him anyway.)

Is it just sheer pettiness? An abject cowardice that waves the white flag to the most disgusting, misogynist, racist trolls in Star Wars fandom? It ultimately doesn’t matter. It’s a travesty.

To be clear here: It doesn’t matter whether you liked The Last Jedi or if you hated it. Expending all of this narrative energy in order to retcon the previous installments in a series for no other reason than to “fix” some abstract point of continuity that you consider to be “broken” is not how you make a good film. It’s not that continuity isn’t important; it’s that when you focus on continuity-for-the-sake-of-continuity, you are failing to do literally everything that goes into telling a great story.

There are whole scenes in this movie that exist for no other purpose than to say, “Remember this thing that happened in The Last Jedi? WELL, IT NEVER HAPPENED.” These suck the oxygen out of the room. They do not further plot or character or theme. They take up space and time that could be better focused on virtually anything else, disrupting effective pacing and structure.

CONCLUSION

There’s other stuff we could talk about here. Like how the film not once, but twice pretends to kill off a legacy character only to bring them back and then have them do literally nothing else of consequence for the rest of the movie. Or how the movie lacks any subtext, even going so far as to introduce a new droid whose entire job is to announce what emotion you’re supposed to be feeling at any given moment. Or that the movie is trying to cram about three or four times more content into it than the filmmakers are capable of integrating. Or some of the truly baffling editing choices that cut away from the action for no discernible purpose. But it’s all just variations on a theme.

And that theme is:

This movie is total garbage.

There are a handful of moments that are legitimately beautiful or clever or poignant. But I mean that literally: I can count them on one hand. And they are fleeting and largely inconsequential to the whole.

I am certain that I will not dissuade anyone who was planning to see this film from doing so. But I honestly wish that I had not seen it myself.

Imagine The Da Vinci Code except (a) the writing is exceptional and (b) it takes place 9,000 years in the future. Or National Treasure if the American Revolution was a space opera. Or Indiana Jones as a Star Wars movie.

A Talent for War by Jack McDevitt is one of the best books I’ve ever read. So good, in fact, that after I finished it, I immediately flipped back to the first page and read it cover-to-cover a second time.

PREMISE & EXECUTION

Alex Benedict is an antiques dealer. He was raised by his uncle, an archaeologist, but they have become estranged due to his uncle’s disapproval of his “tomb robbing.” Nevertheless, when the passenger ship carrying his uncle disappears into hyperspace and never returns, Alex receives an enigmatic message from his uncle, delivered in the event of his death and describing an incredibly historic find, the details of which are too sensitive to trust to the message and have instead been left as an encrypted file at his uncle’s house. By the time Alex returns home, however, the file has been stolen and he is left with nothing but a few breadcrumbs and a tantalizing mystery to pursue.

A Talent for War is, of course, Benedict’s pursuit of that mystery.

The book opens with the loss of the passenger ship Alex’s uncle was on:

On the night we heard that the Capella had slipped into oblivion, I was haggling with a wealthy client over a collection of four-thousand-year-old ceramic pots. We stopped to watch the reports. There was little to say, really, other than that the Capella had not re-entered linear space as expected, that the delay was now considerable, and an announcement declaring the ship officially lost was expected momentarily.

Over the next few pages you get a taste – just a little sampling! – of both the rich, layered complexity of the novel and its melancholic-yet-epic scope.

You can see here that McDevitt has introduced the tragedy of the Capella in a completely personal-yet-irrelevant manner: The main character receives it as a bit of trivia on a news broadcast playing in the background; the way in which we so often learn of the myriad tragedies that afflict our world. From this simple point McDevitt builds outwards, step by step:

It’s happened before. But never to anything so big. And with so many people. Almost immediately, we had a hit song. And theories.

We delve into the people onboard who were famous and then into those who become famous because they were onboard. And the narrative moves from how the news was reported to how the event becomes history and even, to a certain extent, legend and myth.

And then, abruptly:

About ten days after the loss, I received a transmission from a cousin on Rimway with whom I’d had no communication in years. In case you haven’t heard, he said. Gabe was on the Capella. I’m sorry. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.

Tragedy and news and history and epic are all abruptly collapsed back onto our protagonist; the abstract weight of it all collapsing into something personal and painful and immediate.

This, by itself, is pretty great storytelling. But that’s not all that happens here. Through the lens of the Capella tragedy, McDevitt encodes a ton of essential world-building: how space travel works, how the human polity is organized into a confederation of colonies, how media and information technologies work, etc. And he’s also subtly establishing some of the major themes that will guide the entire book.

In just eight triumphant pages, McDevitt has completely drawn you into his world, his story, and his main character.

This short sequence, however, also demonstrates the difficulty of explaining what makes A Talent for War so great, because to at least some degree I have now spoiled the effect. One of McDevitt’s primary tools in the novel — and one which perfectly suits the nature of its narrative — is the masterful pacing, structure, and shaping of the revelation of knowledge. Thus, the more I discuss, the more I am robbing the book of some of its power.

So I will do my best at this point to speak in generalities.

At the time of his disappearance, Alex’s uncle was on the trail of a major archaeological find. The loss of his original notes forces Alex to dive in, partly following in his uncle’s footsteps and partly charting his own course. In its most basic form, therefore, A Talent for War is a mystery. (Or perhaps it would be more accurate to describe it as an interplanetary thriller.) What elevates this narrative, however, is the beautiful, multilayered texture that McDevitt lends it.

First, as we follow Alex in his investigation we become invested not only in the story of his life and the characters around him, but also in the historical story and personages he’s investigating.

Second, and perhaps most importantly, that historical story is constantly shifting. Each new piece of information that we (and Alex) learn not only adds to that story, it also transforms our understanding of what we already knew. Thus the narrative is not linear; it is instead a holographic patchwork, the parts of which are in a constant state of overlapping flux. It is not one story, it is many stories; it is a myth told and retold not only on the page, but in our own imagination. The effect is electric, forcing us not only to deeply engage with the narrative, but also to immersively walk the same investigatory path that Alex does. We are Alex Benedict, uncovering the lost secrets of cosmic history, sharing in the satisfaction – and frustration! – of watching the puzzle pieces click into place.

Perhaps the greatest triumph of A Talent for War is that we do, in fact, care — and care passionately — about the fictional history that Alex is delving into. It’s comparatively easy for Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, for example, to make us care about the Lost Ark or for The Da Vinci Code to make us care about the holy grail because we are already living in the modern world, hate Nazis, and know the importance of Christianity and its lore. McDevitt has none of those advantages and must instead establish all of that from scratch. Impressively, he does it so seamlessly that you don’t even really notice it happening; you simply arrive at the end of the novel and discover that you are intensely invested in the outcome. Partly this is because McDevitt makes us care about the “historical” characters that are living the history that Alex is uncovering, but it’s also because he makes it intrinsically clear that the history is important to the “modern” world Alex lives in, and we see that reflected in every aspect of the world — politics, characters, architecture, culture. Everything.

And perhaps the most daring thing McDevitt does is to NOT provide an authoritative answer to every question. Thus we are forced to become active readers, piecing information together for ourselves and reaching conclusions that the narrative doesn’t deliver to us on a platter. In some cases, however, there is simply… enigma. Mysteries for which there is no solution. It is these little patches of uncertainty which lend the final patina of reality to Alex Benedict’s world and the immense depth of history which lies beneath it, for certainty and absolute truth can only be found in that which is artificially constructed.

As with the beginning of the novel, so at the end we find ourselves standing atop a pinnacle of myriad, kaleidoscopic complexity. One which is thrilling and epic, while simultaneously being melancholic and intensely personal. The personal is reflected into the epic, giving it humanity and truth; the epic is reflected into the personal, making it grand and true. Thus, like a house of mirrors, the totality somehow eludes your grasp.

Which is why you, too, might find yourself immediately flipping back to the beginning of the book and reading it once again.

If you do, what is most remarkable is that you will find yourself somehow reading a completely different book than the one you just finished. Everything which you have learned in your first journey along this road will cast a fresh light on each step of the story, utterly transforming your understanding of it. Even as you once again approach the end, the totality of what you have learned on your second reading will change your perception of what you thought you knew before.

And that is the mark of greatness.

GRADE: A+

A WORD ABOUT THE SEQUELS

Fifteen years after A Talent for War was published, Jack McDevitt returned to Alex Benedict and began writing sequels (starting with Polaris in 2004).

These are good books. They’re fun books. There are not infrequent moments when you’ll find yourself caught up in both the action and the enigma, unable to put the book down and staying up far later than you’d intended to compulsively turning the pages.

But sadly (and I say this mostly so that you can prepare yourself) they pale in comparison to A Talent for War.

First, they lack the incredibly beautiful, multilayered texture of the original. They are far more linear in their construction, with one revelation following another but never truly forcing you to revisit that which you already knew.

Second, they become increasingly formulaic in both their plots and prose.

Third, and perhaps least forgivably, they become lazy.

Where A Talent for War delves deep into the historical material being researched, allowing you to compellingly follow in Benedict’s footsteps as he pieces together the lost secrets of the past, the sequels generally just provide a rough summary of findings. Not only is this less thrilling, but it also means that the sequels lack the double narrative of A Talent for War: Where the original not only invested you in the story of Benedict but also the story of those historical personas he was pursuing in his research, the sequels lose that extra dimension and become lesser works as a result.

Most frustrating, however, is a complete lack of care for continuity. Contradictions abound, sometimes within books, but even more frequently between books in the series. For example, one book (Firebird) ends with a character stating that such-and-such an event will happen four years from now. The next book, Coming Home, is dated one year later, but the event has already inexplicably taken place. At another point in the series, the characters all appear to simply forget that the epochal events of Echo (the fifth book in the series) happened. The conclusion of A Talent for War, in fact, is apparently retconned out of existence, although it remains completely unclear to me whether this was an intentional choice or just another glitch. There even comes a point where one of the characters says, “How could we have missed this?!” while ignoring the fact that they literally discussed this very thing just fifty pages earlier.

This becomes a constant, frustrating grind on the series, in large part because it is not just a matter of trivia; these continuity errors cluster around the major events of the plot, sapping credibility and the suspension of disbelief from the characters, world-building, and narrative.

I do not, however, want to leave you with a completely (or even predominantly) negative impression of these books. Like I said, they’re fun. I enjoyed them. You’ll likely enjoy them, too. But they ultimately do not live up to the astonishing triumph of A Talent for War.

A guide to grades here at the Alexandrian.

The trickiest part of finding an audio book is that it has to be both a good book AND have a good narrator. What I’ve discovered is that it’s much easier to find a narrator you like and browse the corpus of books they’ve done looking for other titles that look appealing than it is to look for appealing titles and then just hoping that the narrator will be good.

Enter Ray Porter, who consistently elevates everything he’s involved with. (I’ve previously listened to his presentations of Dennis E. Taylor’s Bobiverse and Peter Clines’ Threshold series among others.) I’m browsing through the literally hundreds of audio books he’s recorded when I suddenly discover that I already own one of the books he’s done: A Pathfinder Tales tie-in novel called Death’s Heretic by James L. Sutter.

Truth be told, I’m not entirely sure how I acquired it. It must have been part of a bundle or a free book-of-the-day deal or something. But, in any case, it had been sitting in my Audible library untouched for several years at this point.

And that’s a pity. Because this book is really good.

HIGH FANTASY NOIR

In form, Death’s Heretic is a noir detective story in a fantasy setting.

Over the years, I’ve read any number of such stories. Often they have a steampunk veneer. Many of them take place in crapsack worlds. But a lot of them are just literally Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler with a veneer of magic and a smattering of fairy wings lightly dusted over the affair.

Death’s Heretic, on the other hand, stands out from the pack by truly owning its identity as a D&D… err, sorry… Pathfinder novel. Rather than trying to limit its scope to some “noir” subset of Pathfinder, it instead embraces the totality of Pathfinder’s cosmology and interprets it through the lens of a noir story.

Let me see if I can explain the difference: Whereas a typical “D&D noir” novel would open with a dame walking into a detective’s office and saying that her dad was killed by a fireball spell, Death’s Heretic opens with an angelic representative of the Goddess of Death requesting assistance because someone was killed and, when they attempted to resurrect them, they discovered that their soul had been kidnapped from the afterlife.

There’s also a dame, but you can see the difference. It’s not just that there are more fantasy elements being thrown into the mix; it’s that the fantasy elements are being allowed to fundamentally alter the nature of the story. It’s one thing to set a noir story in a weird, selective version of Waterdeep that somehow ends up looking like 1930s San Francisco with the serial numbers filed off, and it’s another to take the totality of Waterdeep, frame a story there, and truly see where it takes you.

Sutter pushes the envelope in other ways, too: He actually divorces himself quite strongly from noir tropes in general by setting the story not in some fog-drenched metropolis, but rather in the sun-drenched empire of Thuvia. Strong elements of pulp fantasy are also naturally pulled in as part of the setting. And that’s just the beginning, as Sutter relentlessly cranks up the dial as the narrative progresses.

BUT ALSO…

Death’s Heretic has more going for it than just novelty and creativity, though. Sutter just writes a legitimately good novel: The characters are interesting and multidimensional. He takes the time to weave together a number of interesting themes revolving around mortality, immortality, and the nature of faith.

Ultimately, this is one of those reviews I write specifically to call attention to something really nifty that I think is (a) not well-known enough and (b) that people would really enjoy if they knew it existed.

So now you know.

I hope you have a great time with it.

GRADE: B-

A guide to grades here at the Alexandrian.

The Hero’s Journey is over-hyped, largely because so many people using it really just mean, “I watched Star Wars once and i thought it was pretty dope.” And also because it’s an example of people using a critical apparatus designed to analyze content as a tool to create content, and the result of that is usually poor and often results in cookie-cutter narratives.

But the Hero’s Journey is more than “I watched Star Wars once and I thought it was pretty dope,” and it’s worth checking out Campbell’s original writing on the subject. Campbell’s treatment is very complex and made up of many modular parts that can be slotted into the macro-structure of Departure-Initiation-Return.

Which brings us to Captain Marvel.

The story in Captain Marvel does fall into the basic pattern of the Hero’s Journey. But it’s a really cool example of it because the non-linear presentation of that story deliberately obscures the Hero’s Journey, and then unifies its revelation to the audience with the hero’s revelation of self, thus narratively unifying both Crossings of the Threshold.

Let me unpack that.

The opening beats of the Hero’s Journey are the Departure:

The Call to Adventure, in which Carol is transformed by the explosion: “The hero goes forward in his adventure until he comes to the ‘threshold guardian’ at the entrance to the zone of magnified power.” The threshold guardian in this case is Yon-Rogg. Carol defeats the guardian as trickster, outwitting him and targeting the power core instead of engaging in direct confrontation.

The Belly of the Whale, in which Carol is brainwashed by the Kree: The belly of the whale represents the separation of the hero’s known world and self. In this case, Carol literally leaves her entire world (and her entire self) behind.

(Note that the “Meeting the Mentor” beat sometimes found in the Departure is in, fact, absent from this particular Hero’s Journey because there is no Campbellian mentor figure in the story.)

I’m not going to analyze every step of the Hero’s Journey in the film, because the key point is what happens at the opposite end of the structure: The Hero gains the Ultimate Boon and then Returns to the World they left behind, Crossing the Return Threshold and becoming the Master of Two Worlds. My point is that these final beats and the Crossing of the Return Threshold are narratively unified to the original Crossing of the Threshold because the moment in which Carol crosses the threshold is revealed to us in this moment and it is, in fact, Carol recovering and, importantly, ACCEPTING and EMBRACING her memories that signifies the Crossing of the Return Threshold.

This is an incredibly clever and very intricate use of the Hero’s Journey, greatly intensifying its impact by folding it back on itself. You see the beginning and the end simultaneously, like an ouroborus wyrm swallowing its own tail.

But the film also does something else even more unusual and clever with the Hero’s Journey structure: The entire Kree psyops campaign targeting Carol is structured as a dark inversion of the Hero’s Journey. In this structure, the first meeting of the Supreme Intelligence is positioned as Meeting the Mentor. Being captured by the Skrulls is the primary guardian of the threshold, and the Earth is positioned as the “unknown and dangerous realm” in which Carol’s adventure takes place. At the end of the film, the Supreme Intelligence tries to position Carol’s refusal to come back to the Kree as a Refusal of the Return (another classic beat in the Hero’s Journey), with the implication being that she must claim the Ultimate Boon (of the tesseract) and Cross the Return Threshold by coming back to the Kree.

It’s only by rejecting this dark inversion of the Hero’s Journey that Carol can achieve her true apotheosis.