Excerpts Science Fiction Read an Excerpt From The Felicity Complex by august clarke Six women, lab-designed to serve billionaires in a luxury fallout shelter, rebel against their programming after the end times arrive. By august clarke | Published on June 30, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Felicity Complex, a dystopian SF satire by august clarke, out from Erewhon Books on July 28th. Welcome to the Felicity Complex! Constructed during the height of the Cold War, our unique hotel is prepared to protect you, the billionaire class, from nuclear annihilation! Shielded from radiation and supplemented with closed air systems and hydroponic gardens, this resort bunker offers a prime existence underground: full gymnasium and spa, gourmet meals, top-tier medical care, and the best in entertainment.Meet Hallelujah! Grown in a lab and educated in the ways of concierge hospitality, she believes in her duty to comfort the Lord-anointed refugees of the apocalypse. (Even if her lover Anastasia disagrees. Even if her creator Dr. Younghusband is disappointed in her.) Don’t worry—everyone is safe from communists in the Felicity Complex!Look, Hallelujah, guests have finally arrived! Hallelujah and her sister specimens have waited ages for you. Never mind the secrets other rich survivalists may be hiding. Just make sure they don’t notice the violent intentions behind our staff’s wide, wide smiles…A sendup of traditional womanhood and lampooning the paranoias of the elite, The Felicity Complex questions the ambitions behind the entitled few who plan for the end times—and who truly survives them. Buy the Book The Felicity Complex august clarke Buy Book The Felicity Complex august clarke Buy this book from: 1Before The specimen resembles a girl. It has tits. It has no concept of identity beyond its murky understanding of itself as Specimen 679-b, which isn’t exactly a name or title. The tubes down its throat and wrists are hooked up to some unseen display. It drifts otherwise untethered in the narrow confines of a glass vat, submerged in milky fluid, and stares directly at the fluorescent lamps overhead. The lamps buzz. A fly buzzes too, and bounces suicidally off the long, skinny bulbs. This is the only movement in the room. The specimen is playing a game. The game is a race. Staring directly at the light hurts, which is the point. It fries its eyes with the lamplight, then counts through the duration of the itchy, fizzy, healing feeling that follows. How fast can the specimen repair its retinas? So fast! The specimen’s personal best is twenty Mississippis. It’s trying to get its time down to fifteen. This is a bad run. Its eyes are still fizzing at thirty. Around the specimen, complex white boxes blink and hum, but it has become completely desensitized to the various box sounds. Its world is made of beige control panels with brown knobs, racks of blue wires, towering steel implements, and other glass vats. This specimen doesn’t know if there are other specimens in those vats. Other specimens probably existed at some point, for instance Specimen 1 through Specimen 679-a. Sometimes things fail in this laboratory and that pisses the scientists off. They curse and smoke cigarettes inside when that happens. The inciting incident could be the death and dissolution of other specimens. Who’s to say? The specimen has limited vision beyond the lamp above it. It can’t investigate. The lamp game is getting boring. The specimen considers bashing its head against the glass. It seems like something to do. A busted face would be more complicated to heal, so could make for a higher-stakes game. The idea gains momentum for the specimen. It thinks about what would happen to the milky fluid and the tubes in its face. It thinks about the possible skull-glass sounds. Glass is breakable! If it breaks the glass, perhaps somebody will show up and give the specimen attention. The specimen likes attention. It’s so exciting when somebody comes by to talk to it. Maybe Doctor Younghusband would visit. Now that’s a thought. Maybe he’d make a note on his clipboard. Maybe he’d examine the wound and personally chart its progress. Maybe he’d say, That’s interesting. Thirty-one Mississippi, thirty-two Mississippi, thirty-three Mississippi. The purple splotches fade from their vision. Embarrassing stuff. The specimen experiments with a headbutt. Thunk. The glass doesn’t break. Dull thud of pain, then something new: worry. The tube tugs at the back of its throat, which is irritating, then frightening. It gags, tries to swallow, and suddenly the glass vat shrinks. The specimen is trapped. It can’t extend its arms. It kicks and twists its hips, the milky fluid sloshes against the walls of the vat, and the tubes in its wrists scrape against the inside of its skin. Drugs and acclimation only last so long. It properly notices the tubes for the first time in a while. It hates the tubes. The tubes feel separate from the specimen, invasive. It looks at its wrists, and its body growing around the tubes implanted there. Hot-pink meat twines up the plastic like ribbons on a ballerina’s shoe. The specimen was shown a picture of a ballerina recently. It was on a slideshow. The specimen bites down hard on the tube in its mouth and screams. A machine above the specimen beeps like crazy. The laboratory door groans open and is quickly followed by the comforting squeak of loafers on vinyl. The scientists are here! The specimen prays that they will save it. “Jiminy Christmas,” says Doctor Slagle. He’s a scrawny man with shiny hair and a thick mustache. He wears a necktie with blue and brown stripes and his lab coat is too big for him. He has other qualities the specimen cannot parse in the middle of its panic attack. He looks like a weasel. He has tiny pointy weasel teeth. He fumbles his rubber-gloved hands over the vat’s latch and opens it. Cold air on the specimen’s face. Its nose and brow float just above the fluid’s surface. Milky liquid clings to its eyelashes in big, shiny dewdrops. Doctor Slagle lifts the specimen’s wrist out of the fluid. He feels for its pulse, measures it against the information on the monitor. He mutters something. Next, he measures the new growth of the specimen’s errant flesh around the tubes, then pinches the flesh ribbons and unwinds them. It hurts when he pinches. His eyebrows scrunch up. He produces a scalpel from somewhere and slices off the flesh ribbons. Ouch. He nabs the severed flesh with tweezers and stashes it in a little vial. The flesh ribbons writhe around in the vial, then go slack. He grimaces. He blinks at the cut he made. Not enough Mississippis have passed yet. It’s bleeding a lot. The milky fluid in the vat is turning pink. He peers at the specimen’s face. Contorted in terror. It is trembling all over. The specimen can’t speak while intubated, and the screams come out mangled and slurred. He says, “Okay. Tranquilizers, Pye.” The specimen doesn’t know how many scientists are in the room with it. It tries to count. It needs to know what’s going on. Doctor Pye grunts. He’s been looking at the monitor, the specimen can see him now from its vantage in the vat. He twists some knobs, then turns his back on the specimen. He fills a needle, flicks it. He loads up the specimen with a potent translucent liquid. The tranquilizer hits. Smoothness rolls through the specimen. Everything feels good. It no longer cares about the tubes or how many doctors are watching it. It chews on the plastic, dazed. The cuts on its wrists seal shut around the tubes. Itchy, funny. The water is still pink. “Now that we’re done freaking out,” says Doctor Slagle, addressing the specimen. It’s clear when he’s talking to the specimen because he overenunciates his consonants. “It’s a big day for Project Materia Prima. We got a new funding lead. Smile!” It smiles around the tube. “Just like that. Now, Doctor Younghusband is giving Mister Pink a tour of the laboratory today. Mister Pink is a very rich man. His money is Project Materia Prima’s only shot. If he likes you, we can afford to keep you alive. This is make or break, vat baby.” Doctor Slagle’s eyes flash. His pupils are huge, and the specimen can see itself reflected in them. He leans closer. He smells like sweat and bubble gum. His stripy tie dangles over the specimen’s face. The fabric brushes the tip of its nose. He says, “You’ve gotta do your very best impression of a normal human woman. You’ve got to sell it, Specimen 679-b. It’s life or death. Continuation or destruction. If we can’t sell you, that’s curtains. I’m going to take the tube out. Don’t bite me. Do not bite me. Understand?” The specimen looks at the curls in his hair. It tries to count the curls, but the curls are a maze, and the specimen is lost inside it. Wandering spirals forever. The curls have no beginning and no end and are therefore innumerable. They churn like waves in the ocean. Cresting, breaking, flowing. The specimen was recently shown footage of several natural landscapes, and the ocean was easily the best one. Very vat-like. Doctor Pye presses down on the specimen’s forehead, pushes it under the milky surface. As he tilts the specimen’s head back, its mouth opens, and Doctor Slagle reaches inside. There is something pleasurable and revolting about how it feels when he drags the tube out of its throat. The specimen likes how discomfort gives way to satisfaction. Liking things is easy right now. Doctor Pye puts the throat tubes away. No luck for the wrist ones, those stay hooked up. The specimen forgets the annoyance as soon as it thinks to be annoyed. Wavy and smooth. Its throat is obviously empty now. Breathing feels hilarious. The specimen coughs. The milky fluid gets in its mouth. It takes a swallow of blood-pink creamy brine. Mistake. Nausea rakes its insides, and the specimen retches and yucks. “Stop that. Be cool,” says Doctor Slagle. “It’s showtime.” “Doctor Younghusband. Mister Pink,” says Doctor Pye. “Boys!” booms a stranger. A molten, embarrassing specialness creeps up the specimen’s belly. It cranes its neck to see its maker. Doctor Younghusband stands perfectly still in the doorway. He is shorter, thinner, and older than anyone else in the lab. He is almost colorless. His tie is gray, and so are his slacks. He wears his necktie with a fancy knot. The specimen wonders who knots his ties for him. It wants to kill whoever that person is. Elegantly, Doctor Younghusband doesn’t say anything. That’s normal. Maintaining a professional mystery is part of his charm. The specimen has heard him speak three times, ever. He doesn’t greet his subordinates, doesn’t inspect the hugely expensive inscrutable equipment in the room, and doesn’t come greet the specimen. He stares unblinking at the fly on the fluorescent lamps. The specimen loves him so. The enormity of the specimen’s love for Doctor Younghusband momentarily obscures the stranger. Then it blinks, and all at once, Mister Pink fills the room. Mister Pink is an immense person in a white linen suit. His yellow hair wafts off his head like his skull is on fire. Apple-red cheeks, bright blue eyes, adorable little snub nose, and a wide, curving mouth. The specimen has never seen anybody so tall before. On tiptoe, this man could bite the ceiling lamp in half. Mister Pink takes huge, cartoonish strides into the laboratory. He runs his bejeweled hands over all the knobs and levers. Whenever he brushes up against something that makes Doctor Slagle or Doctor Pye cringe, he lingers there and tweaks the fiddly bits. He grins from temple to temple and whistles a jolly song. He flips a few switches. Doctor Slagle tries, “That’s—” But Doctor Younghusband silences him with a glance. Mister Pink takes his time wandering around. He looks at everything, touches everything. He traces a stubby finger along a bright blue cable and says in a chesty voice: “Mighty fine place you boys have here. What’s this one do?” Doctor Slagle says, “That one—” Mister Pink pulls the cord. A droning sound cuts out. Doctor Pye says, “Specimen 679-b, sir.” “Do you mind if I smoke?” Mister Pink stands over the specimen. He plucks a cigarillo from thin air and pops it between his huge, square, gleaming white teeth. He lights it before the scientists can say anything. He takes a drag. The smoke cloud swirls around the specimen. Then, he drags up a chair. He sits down beside the vat. “You poor, sweet creature, moldering in plastic Eden. Don’t worry, sugar. I’m here.” He rolls up his sleeve, plunges his thick forearm into the milky vat fluid. He takes the specimen’s wrist just above the tube and props it on the vat’s edge. Its hand dangles over the side. Mister Pink pulls a lacy handkerchief from his pocket. He gently dries the specimen’s hand. Then he shakes out the handkerchief, tucks it underneath the specimen’s wrist, and fishes around in yet another pocket. This time he produces a bottle that the specimen recognizes from magazines. It’s nail polish. Summery red. A smell fills the air. Acrid, sharp. Mister Pink swishes a wet, red brush down the length of the specimen’s index fingernail. Middle next, and so on. As he paints the specimen’s nails, Mister Pink says, “This one’s uglier than the last one, Stephen. How many more options do you have for me?” “This is the sixth and last specimen that’s internally coherent, reasonably sexually dimorphic, non-contagious, and verbal. The rest fall short. You won’t want them,” says Doctor Younghusband. It’s so exciting to hear Doctor Younghusband speak that the specimen doesn’t glean anything from what he says. His voice is crisp and precise. It feels clean. “You’ll make more eventually. For now, I’ll take the lot,” says Mister Pink. He paints the specimen’s thumbnail, then leans back, examines it again. He twists up his mouth. “That’s better. Darling, I am taking you away from this dreadful place. The world outside is dangerous and does evil things to beautiful people, but I’m in hospitality. I’m building a fortress. You’re invited. You’ll work for room and board in the Felicity Complex, my luxury bunker, and you’ll tend the modern kings and geniuses of the free world. If the Communists drop bombs on us to destroy the world, you’ll be the last champion of happiness. Picture the world smashed flat, and you done up in a frilly maid costume making sure civilization persists until tomorrow. Like the sound of that?” The specimen, her now, looks at her red painted nails. She wiggles her fingertips. She pictures it. In her mind, she sees some indistinct metropolis crushed to powder. The orange sky is empty, and the land is gouged and silvery, like the face of the moon. Loud, hot breezes sprinkle poisonous confetti on the rubble. The air itself is evil. There is no life at all. Then, an open gulch. There’s a bedroom at the bottom, like the ones in the movies. Glamorous, stately. Big wooden headboards, feather pillows, velvet throws, marble statues in the corners, candles flickering. Self-billowing curtains that open to nowhere. In the middle of the gulch bedroom stands the specimen as a frilly maid. She imagines her red nails curled around a feather duster. A flick of the wrist and the gloom is gone along with the cobwebs. Champion of happiness! No tubes. Doctor Younghusband jots something down on his clipboard. “Oh, yes,” says the specimen. “I’d like that very much.” Excerpted from The Felicity Complex, copyright © 2026 by august clarke. The post Read an Excerpt From <i>The Felicity Complex</i> by august clarke appeared first on Reactor.

News Not Alone Not Alone Trailer Gives Us Timothée Chalamet, Selena Gomez & Cute Lil’ Aliens Seeing this and Disclosure Day back-to-back would be an interesting experience By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on June 30, 2026 Screenshot: Illumination/Universal Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Illumination/Universal Pictures You don’t need a version of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” to understand that Universal Pictures/Illumination’s Not Alone is about the stars. And while today’s trailer is overlaid with just such a track, the cute little aliens and the main human characters working on a rocket ship convey that as well. The trailer also tells us, however, that the movie will focus on those two human characters and their burgeoning relationship. Those characters are an introverted rocket scientist named Joe (voiced by Dune’s Timothée Chalamet) and an astro-botanist developing a plant-fueled rocket named Fran (voiced by Only Murders in the Building’s Selena Gomez). Here’s the official synopsis, which sheds more light on the plot of the film: When Joe and Fran are brought together to prepare for the inaugural launch of this revolutionary rocket, there are immediate sparks, but neither is particularly adept at romance. Life becomes more complicated when three aliens—tiny, unruly and adorable—take refuge in Joe’s home. Dunk, Welly and Shirm are on the interplanetary run from a zealous-yet-inept officer of the law named Zandro. The aliens determine that Fran’s rocket could provide their means of getting back home to safety.  Let’s talk about those lil’ aliens! They’re voiced by Rob Brydon (Barbie, The Trip), Diane Morgan (Cunk On, Mandy) and Jamie Demetriou (Cruella, Jay Kelly), and clearly full of comic relief, and have a Minions vibe to them (though seem more like distant cousins than close relatives). The latter isn’t surprising given Illumination is behind the Despicable Me/Minions films. One co-director, in fact, is Eric Guillon, who was the designer for those features (and also co-directed Despicable Me 3).  The other co-directors are Claire Dodgson (editor of The Lorax, Minions, Despicable Me 3, Minions: The Rise of Gru) and Jonathan Del Val (co-director of Minions: The Rise of Gru and The Secret Life of Pets 2). Not Alone also features the voice of Brett Goldstein (Ted Lasso) as officer Zandro. Allison Janney (The West Wing, The Diplomat) and Lamorne Morris (Fargo, Spider-Noir) are also part of the supporting voice cast. The film premieres in theaters on April 16, 2027. Check out the first trailer for Not Alone below. [end-mark] The post <i>Not Alone</i> Trailer Gives Us Timothée Chalamet, Selena Gomez & Cute Lil’ Aliens appeared first on Reactor.

Books book reviews Language Magic and Culture as Power: The Killing Spell by Shay Kauwe The Killing Spell shines in “its exploration of power, racism and cultural erasure via limits placed on language.”  By Mahvesh Murad | Published on June 30, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share First time Hawaiian writer Shay Kauwe’s The Killing Spell is set on the west coast of the United States, 200 years after massive flooding drowned the Hawaiian islands, unleashing magic and monsters into the world, and forcing all surviving clans to enter into a land-leasing agreement with Los Angeles. The Hawaiian clans have been allowed to live in a designated area now known as the Homestead, which (while it is not explicitly meant to be) feels a lot like a reservation. Monsters appear out of the ocean occasionally even now, and attack the Homestead. Magic is controlled by spell casting, with language as the main system to channel it. People have different abilities, “sympathetic magic” that they can use, but being able to create a spell that can be used by others can only be done by “smiths,” those who have a certain command over language.  Kea is a smith, though she’s not very good at it and her abilities are unpredictable. She’s also unregulated, which means that she’s creating and selling spells without the knowledge of the powers that be. She can’t get certified to do this legally, because she’s not good with the spell casting languages, and though her native language is Hawaiian, which she casts spells in, it is not a language that is formally recognised by the LA Casters board. In fact, she isn’t terribly proficient in Hawaiian either, since the clans all speak English which was needed to assimilate into the dominant culture, and English is no good for spells.  At twenty-five, Kea is the reluctant head of her clan, which means she’s responsible not just for her siblings and a few younger cousins, but also her grandparents (in this case, that’s her entire clan). They have very little money and are heavily mortgaged, so Kea has to hustle hard to take care of them all. She just can’t catch a break though. Just when she thinks she’s on top of things, her youngest cousin breaks the wards protecting their chickens, a magic monster attacks their home, and Kea ends up in a fight with a vicious young man from another clan. It’s a fun, high octane start to the story, but none of it has very much to do with the main plot.  Someone has used a highly illegal death spell to murder LA’s most prominent political activist, a Filipino man called Angelo Reyes. Because of how language magic works, we are told that this spell could only have been written in Hawaiian, so Kea is hauled into LA, where the governing board of directors insist that she help them solve the murder to prove her innocence. In return, she will win their favour and blind eye to her illegal smithing; her family’s debts will also be paid off. It’s an offer she can’t refuse, even though she is quite certain she isn’t right for the job.  Kea is partnered with Sora, a man the board trusts. He and Kea dislike each other from the start, in a way that makes it clear that a romance will be forced upon them soon enough, even though it may feel stilted. As Kea tries to figure things out, we learn a bit more about her world and its magic systems. This is not a dystopia (aside from the occasional monster crawling out of the ocean), at least not one much further along than our current reality. Magic is controlled by language: Spoken words have power to harness the energy that flows through the universe and direct it: “Casting required tapping into the mana that flowers through the world and drawing it inside oneself. Every person’s capacity for holding mana was different—it was like everyone had a little jar of predetermined size inside them… people stored mana in their core [but] it wasn’t something anyone could create on their own. Mana came from around us, and to access it, people had to pull it into themselves.”  Buy the Book The Killing Spell Shay Kauwe Buy Book The Killing Spell Shay Kauwe Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Though mana may exist for all, a particular grasp of certain languages is needed to be a proficient spell caster. The purists at the LA Casters Board insist that only the classical Romance languages are used in magic, and those are the ones that are regulated and legally accepted as part of the system. The Asian languages are fighting to be recognised, and the board’s lack of acceptance of them is clearly just racism, since many of them are as old if not older than the Romance languages (see: Chinese). This is where The Killing Spell gets interesting, because even if the overall worldbuilding is a little vague, Kauwe is very clear on her political stance on cultural eradication. As Kea leads us through her investigation, we learn that even 200 years from now, in a future with magic and monsters, there remains a sort of hangover from the settler colonialism of the Americas. We don’t know if this is a system in place globally (or even what is happening outside of LA), but it is clear that control over language and its usage to access or channel magic comes from a racist colonial Eurocentric point of view. It reeks of systemic control over minority populations, cultural erasure, land grabbing, forced assimilation, takeover of power and worse. It is spelled out for us that the “slow, intentional strategy of places like Los Angeles had always been to starve us out, strip away our resources, and wait until the last of us died… No one cared about the stories of fallen societies. Their histories were overwritten with a false, shiny veneer… it would continue until we could no longer speak for ourselves—and the real way to kill a people was to cut out their tongue.” Kea’s self doubt and her lack of Hawaiian proficiency combined are what hold her back, but ultimately it is when she realises that true power lies in community and ownership of her own language and culture against all odds that she is able to make a real mark—both as a smith, and a Hawaiian. As she points out, “We learned only the histories of people society deemed important, the ones that mattered. LA thought the Homestead didn’t matter, and if they had their way, that would be true—we’d become a blip violently erased from their history. The only way our history would survive was if our people continued to live. If we took up space unapologetically.” And so we see Kea speak up again and again, even at great risk to herself. It’s a strong point in an otherwise lukewarm narrative.  The Killing Spell is being touted as the first adult Hawaiian urban fantasy, and feels a great deal like a coming of age story of a young woman trying to find not just her own personal identity, but also her role in a larger community. It is very readable enough, though the narrative does hop around at a jerky pace for the first third or so. While its protagonist is fairly compelling, the other characters aren’t particularly well-defined, and the plot can feel a little chaotic. What it does shine in, though, is in its exploration of power, racism and cultural erasure via limits placed on language.  In her preface, Shay Kuawe writes that all “languages are beautiful, special, and important, and your effort to cross cultures with nothing but a notebook and pen is a superpower. With every word, you are making magic.” And that, in itself, is often enough.[end-mark] The Killing Spell is published by Saga Press.Read an excerpt. The post Language Magic and Culture as Power: <i>The Killing Spell</i> by Shay Kauwe appeared first on Reactor.

News Her Private Hell Her Private Hell Trailer Will Make You Say “WTF?” (Complimentary) I am seated By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on June 30, 2026 Courtesy of Neon Comment 0 Share New Share Courtesy of Neon “Beautiful. Sweet. Powerful. You either have it or you don’t.” Sophie Thatcher (Yellowjackets) speaks these words at the beginning of the new trailer for Neon’s Her Private Hell, a film from writer-director Nicolas Winding Refn that has a very specific vibe to it, and that vibe is eerie, sexy, enigmatic, and a whole bunch of other adjectives one thinks of when one hears synth music overlaid with hazy neon lighting and sequined dresses. Here’s the official logline, which doesn’t do the film justice: When a mysterious mist engulfs a futuristic metropolis, unleashing a deadly and elusive entity, a troubled young woman searches for her father. Her quest collides with an American G.I. on a harrowing odyssey to rescue his daughter from Hell. Thatcher plays that troubled young woman, and Charles Melton (May December, Riverdale) plays that American G.I. The trailer also introduces us to the “Leather Man” who I assume is that “deadly and elusive entity,” and who I also assume is responsible for ripping a young woman apart like she was unshelled edamame. The trailer does its job: I want to see this movie. In addition to Thatcher and Melton, the film stars Havana Rose Liu, Kristine Froseth, Shioli Kutsuna, Aoi Yamada, Dougray Scott, Diego Calva, and Hidetoshi Nishijima. Refn directs and co-wrote the screenplay with Esti Giordani. Her Private Hell premieres in theaters on July 24, 2026. Check out the trailer below. [end-mark] The post <i>Her Private Hell</i> Trailer Will Make You Say “WTF?” (Complimentary) appeared first on Reactor.

Books Martha Wells Book Club Martha Wells Book Club: Queen Demon As Wells’ epic continues, good people are forced to do terrible things… By Alex Brown | Published on June 30, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share I have had Queen Demon on my desk ever since I received my advanced reader copy in summer 2025. You have no idea how hard it has been to resist reading it until now. I wanted it to be fresh for this column rather than a reread, but oh my god the anticipation has stressed me out! Now that I’ve finished, I’m even more stressed! I need the next book in this series like a dustwitch needs dust. Queen Demon starts, in both the past and present timelines, not long after where each left off in Witch King. In the present, Kai, Ziede, and Tahren have foiled Bashat’s attempt to crown himself emperor of the Rising World. In the past, they’re plotting their next move against the Hierarchs. Let’s start in the past. Most of this portion of the book is the ramp up to and the actual confrontation with the Hierarchs and their legionaries in the port city of Descar-arik. Bashasa leads a caravan of soldiers and civilian hangers-on toward the city while other groups of rebels lead distractions and revolts elsewhere in the Hierarchs’ conquered territory. As we’ve seen in Witch King, the Hierarchs aren’t the only people who want power. A woman who declared herself the Doyen of a group of Witches with the ability to manipulate dust and brainwashed them into doing her bidding is terrorizing humans. She is a mini Hierarch lording over her Witches, and things go poorly for her once she makes a play for Kai. The remaining dustwitches join him in launching an assault on the Hierarch, demons, and legionaries holed up at Descar-arik. Good people are forced to do terrible things and to use stolen power in cruel ways in order to stop the greater threat. Moving to the present, Dahin and another Immortal Blessed, Ilhanrun Highsun, have located what they think may be a Hierarchs’ Well. We saw the Well first hand in Witch King when it was used to eradicate the Saredi. The Blessed also have one, the Well of Thosaren, but where theirs is created with life, the Hierarchs created theirs with death. A lot of death. They fed the Well with thousands of people. That amount of power won’t fade away anytime soon. The fear is that surviving conquerors who escaped retribution by fleeing back home after Bashasa’s victory have already or will use the Well to create a new Hierarch and launch a new attack on the Rising World. Eventually the whole crew gets down to Sun-Ar, but it turns out it’s not the Hierarchs they need to worry about. The book ends on a whisper of hope in the past and a shocking moment in the present.  Much like my obsession with Moon and Chime in Wells’ Books of the Raksura, every time Kai and Bashasa are together, the one thought running through my mind is, “JUST KISS ALREADY!” I am lost for these two. They are so sweet together. Watching Bashasa get all flustered around Kai and Kai constantly not noticing or not understanding why. Ugh! I love them so much it makes my heart grow three sizes. I feel much the same for Tahren and Ziede, although at least Kai has enough sense to pick up on their attraction. A quartet of emotionally constipated dorks, aka one of my favorite romance tropes.  I find the contrast between Dahin and Highsun and between Kai and other demons really interesting. Kai suspects the Doyen may have some demonic ancestry that gives her the ability to psychically control mortals. That plus the demons he freed from the Cageling Courts only to have them turn around and willingly fight for the Hierarchs says a lot of not good things about his kin. They treat mortals as expendable in ways not dissimilar to the Blessed and the Hierarchs. We see this complexity play out in the conflict between Kai and Arnsterath. After the destruction of the Summer Halls, she attacks Kai for the crime of taking a body that wasn’t a pre-approved Saredi body, and an expositor, no less. Then she does the exact same thing. Kai uses his power to help people, at great cost to himself—he literally has to harm himself to draw on his magic instead of going the easier but more dangerous route of tapping into the Well—while Arnsterath uses her power to help herself, often at great cost to others. Arnsterath is the polar opposite of Kai. She sought to take back what control she lost when the Hierarchs decimated the Saredi, but that control is mostly personal. She wants power so that she no longer feels powerless, and she’ll take power away from others if she has to. I wouldn’t argue that she wants power for power’s sake though, at least not by the time she and Kai reunite. She has the opportunity to try and take the Well for herself, and it never seems to occur to her. With Dahin and Highsun, both think of themselves with the same sense of entitlement all Blessed do (except Tahren). Of course it has to be Dahin who finds the Well. Of course his plan is the best plan. Of course he can treat mortals, some of whom are friends, like pawns on a chess board. Highsun is much the same way. Of course it has to be Highsun who finds the Well. Of course his plan is the best plan. Of course he can treat mortals, some of whom are friends, like pawns on a chess board. They each want different things with the Hierarchs’ Well, but they use the same tactics to get there. If Dahin stopped acting like a Blessed for five minutes (or if he had spent any of the last six decades learning from his sister instead of antagonizing her) things probably would’ve turned out much differently and with fewer deaths.  Wells digs into power and its consequences in so many ways. I appreciated what Liz Bourke said in her Locus review of Queen Demon: “Yet her argument is not, unlike many epic fantasies, that evil is a force that is extrinsic to people, a corruption that arises separate from their choices. The destructive selfishness that makes other people pay the price for your power, that produces an ideology of su­premacy and enacts it in violence, is not a single choice but a whole series of choices, personal choices but also social choices of what to build and what to tear down, what to support, and when.” Everyone makes choices—from those who have power to those who do not, from those who want power to those who reject it, from those who make their power by taking from others to those who find power within themselves and through community action. Bashasa offers everyone the chance to join in the fight, to stay in the camp in the civilian attachment, to leave as refugees to one of their safe camps, or to go off on their own. Kai repeatedly offers Sanja and Tenes the opportunity to choose whether to stay with them, go to Avagantrum where Ziede’s daughter Tanis will protect them, to stay with the Cloister Witches, or go off on their own. Tenes has the most reason to want to leave (so she can try to find the family she was stolen from) but time and time again she uses what little power she has to stay and fight. Like Kai, she chooses to do the right thing, the hard thing, the thing that could cost her everything, even for people she barely knows. She has weighed her options and the consequences of each choice and made the one she believes will do the most good in the world.  Once the series is finished, I’d like to reread the whole thing chronologically, as in read first the sections from “The Past” across the series, then the present. Not that it doesn’t make sense or doesn’t work structurally to break up each book between past and present, because I actually like the way Wells jumps around in time in the series. I’d like to get a better sense of how the two sections stand apart from each other. And I think it would be a neat way to see a different angle on the story overall. Next month we will jump to the five Ile-Rien books, a series I have intentionally tried to learn absolutely nothing about. I’m going in fresh as new-fallen snow. I figured we’d go in publication chronology, starting with the first standalone, The Element of Fire. If you’d like to read along, I’ll be using the revised version compiled in The Book of Ile-Rien, published in 2024. [end-mark] Buy the Book The Book of Ile-Rien Martha Wells Updated and revised editions of The Element of Fire and The Death of the Necromancer Buy Book The Book of Ile-Rien Martha Wells Updated and revised editions of The Element of Fire and The Death of the Necromancer Updated and revised editions of The Element of Fire and The Death of the Necromancer Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget The post Martha Wells Book Club: <i>Queen Demon</i> appeared first on Reactor.