On Books
On Books (ASFN26)
By Kelly Jennings
Alexis Hall, Hell’s Heart
Theodora Goss, Letters from an
Imaginary Country
Emily Tesh, The Incandescent
Justin Key, The Hospital at the End
of the World
Neon Yang, Brighter than Scale,
Swifter than Flame
A.D. Sui, The Iron Garden Sutra
I have something to confess. I have never made it past the first one hundred pages of Moby Dick, even though it was required reading when I was a Ph.D. candidate. But I understand it is an excellent book. And now that I have read Hell’s Heart, by Alexis Hall (Tor, March 2026), I can stop feeling guilty about avoiding Melville’s novel, since, frankly, this one is better. (When I was reading Hell’s Heart, my spouse asked me what it was about. “It’s a retelling of Moby Dick,” I said, “set in the storms of Jupiter, and with a lot of queer sex.”)
There is also a great deal of gender-bending. Ishmael, or I, as she names herself, is a trans woman in this version. The Captain, A, is also a woman, as is Q, the barbarian from that savage, isolated place known as Terra. (As the novel puts it, “The Great Churches bicker constantly, but they all agree that after the Exodus there was nothing left on Earth but cannibals and criminals.”) Like Queequeg, in other words, Q is thought of by the rest of the crew as a savage heathen; she even has an “idol,” which is clearly a cellphone, that she constantly consults. And like Queequeg, she is a foil for the rest of the crew, as she is far more moral than the rest of them, despite their obsessions with their various religions.
The remainder of the crew are given names, not just initials, but as with I, A, and Q, they map onto the characters in Melville’s novel, as does the plot, as do the themes. Furthermore, just as Melville’s novel interrogates the events, ethics, and religions of his time, so Hall in Hell’s Heart interrogates the events, ethics, and religions of our own. Ostensibly, the main religion of Melville’s culture was Christianity, but, as we all know, capitalism has always been the true religion of the U.S. Then and now, one can worship whatever God one likes, so long as that worship doesn’t interfere with the worship of profits.
Similarly, religion is an obsession of the characters in Hall’s novel. The main religion in Hell’s Heart is un-abashedly a prosperity gospel (you can receive salvation for as little as $19.99/month!). I especially enjoyed how this religion interpreted the anti-wealth verses in the New Testament to be blatantly pro-wealth. That I’ve heard some of the exact same interpretations from “Christians” in the American South added extra spice to the bleak humor of Hall’s tactic. There’s no forgiving of debtors in this Christianity, not any more than there was a freeing of slaves in Melville’s novel.
Hell’s Heart also contains the Church of Starry Wisdom, a religion that worships the Devouring God, who will eventually consume everyone in the universe, but the white people last. The darker your skin, the sooner the Devouring God will eat you. This seems especially apropos for the current moment in the U.S., when everyone is fine with having their faces eaten by the hyena, so long as those other people get their faces eaten first. There are other religions as well—the captain’s religion is clearly vengeance, for example—but those are the two main religions among the crew, who, when they aren’t having sex, watching porn, or beating one another up, spend a great deal of time arguing about religion. “We had to make our own fun,” as the narrator puts it.
The Pequod (as the ship is still called) hunts through the layers and storms of Jupiter’s atmosphere for Leviathans, as the immense indigenous life forms are called. Slaughtered and dismembered, the various sorts of Leviathans yield valuable goods—their bones are used for timber or carved into household items, and their chitinous plates are used for roofing and ship’s shells. The most valuable part of the Leviathan, however, is the cerebrospinal fluid, also called spermaceti, which can be refined into a powerful fluid used to fuel the outer worlds, which is where the Exodites (people descended from the Exodus from Earth) live.
As the novel progresses, the main character begins to call the Leviathans gods, and indeed one of the characters, washed in the spermaceti of a Leviathan, has a religious experience and becomes a prophet. Thus the ship’s religion of profit and capitalism merges with the Church of Starry Wisdom and the subtext becomes text. The ending will not be (much) of a surprise to anyone who knows how Moby Dick ends, but Hall manages to keep us engaged nonetheless. I will admit I did skim through some of the chapters where Hall, in imitation of Melville, goes into excruciating detail about Leviathan classification, taxonomy, anatomy, uses, and metaphorical purposes. Similar chapters cover ship’s construction, hunting tactics, and the proper way to harvest the bodies of Leviathans. Hall doesn’t spend as many pages on these treatises as Melville did, but it was still too much for me.
Those who have actually read Moby Dick, rather than (like me) just the SparkNotes, will probably appreciate this book even more; but you need not have read Melville’s novel to enjoy this one. Besides being extremely readable, Hell’s Heart has—for a book with so much queer sex—surprising depth. Don’t miss it.
I had read occasional short stories published in magazines by Theodora Goss in the past, but Letters from an Imaginary Country (Tachyon Publications, November 2025) is the first collection of hers I’ve read. It has made me an instant fan. I won’t talk about the writing, though Goss’s writing is amazing; or about the genre (are these stories science fiction? Are they fantasy? Slipstream? Something else entirely?). Instead, let me dive right into the stories.
My favorite category includes “Frankenstein’s Daughter” and “England Under the White Witch,” stories in which Goss reimagines classic works. In the latter, the White Witch from Narnia has come to England and is using that country as the base from which she is slowly colonizing the world. Everywhere she rules, endless winter follows. The story isn’t about the White Witch herself, however; it’s about those who follow, support, and fight for her. Or rather, it’s about one of her supporters who now, as she grows old in the White Witch’s world, begins to have second thoughts. She tells us of her life, beginning with how she and her mother lived before the White Witch conquered England, showing us what life was like at the time and how the Witch used the injustice and misery of that world to bring people—women and girls especially—into her army. There are parallels to the C.S. Lewis novel, which those who have read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe will enjoy; but I had never read the Narnia series and I loved this one nonetheless.
I loved even more “The Secret Diary of Mina Harker.” This may be because I have read Bram Stoker’s Dracula more than once, each time more and more against the grain. Those who have read the original Dracula may have been equally disenchanted with Stoker’s tendency to fail to fulfill the narrative promises he sets up—Jonathan Harker’s seduction by Dracula, for example, which is hinted at and then ignored; Mina’s transformation, erased in such a ham-handed way; the polycule Lucy clearly desires, between her and the three men—the very men who hunt her down and murder her once she has become a vampire. What is Stoker doing, we readers may ask ourselves, seeing—many of us—a far more interesting story that Stoker either didn’t conceive of or was afraid to tell. In her long short story, Goss gives us that more interesting story, or at least one version of it. It’s a delightful read.
Another series of short stories Goss includes in this collection are the “Imaginary Country” stories. Two of these purport to be submissions to an academic journal called Journal of Imaginary Anthropology. A third, “Letters from an Imaginary Country,” concerns an academic from an imaginary country (Thule) who now studies and translates works from that country. This is an epistolary story, constructed from letters and emails sent between this academic and various people, folk heroes, and government officials. This one, first published in Goss’s collection, is probably the most political of the Imaginary Country stories. The other two made me think of the novel Observer, by Nancy Kress and Robert Lanza, which takes as its premise the theory that we create reality by observing it. In Goss’s stories, as people think about and write about imaginary countries, those countries become real places, with real people in them, who experience real events. Goss’s stories explore what this might mean, both for the creators and the countries.
Other notable stories in the collection include “Dora/Dóra,” in which Goss (who emigrated from Hungary as a child) writes the story of a child who didn’t emigrate along with the story of a child who did—the same child, who becomes two different children. They meet as teens and we get their intertwined lives from that point on. A couple of Goss’s stories are set in Hungary or have characters who are Hungarian, and her knowledge of that country gives us some lovely worldbuilding.
Another story I liked a lot is “Beautiful Boys,” about an academic who is studying aliens who take the form of beautiful boys (pueri pulchra) from their late teens into their twenties. “They can be any race, any color. They often finish high school but seldom finish college. On a college campus, they have almost unlimited access to what they need: fertile women.” This is why the Beautiful Boys come to Earth, the academic explains: to implant their seed in fertile women, whom they then desert. The academic is running a study on these pueri pulchra. The first part of the study is complete—she and her fellow academics have devised a test that can identify the aliens with a 98% accuracy rate. The second and third parts of the study, still to be funded, will investigate the reproductive cycle—why do the aliens travel between planets to reproduce?—and what the alien children (all male) are like, what their function is, what becomes of them? This is one of the few stories I remember reading by Goss before picking up this collection, and it’s a good one.
As you can probably tell from the descriptions of the stories above, Goss writes fiction that is closer to slipstream than hard science fiction. Every single story in this collection, however, is wonderful, so even if slipstream is not your usual jam, you should probably give this one a look.
I’ll be honest, when I picked up The Incandescent by Emily Tesh (Tor, 2025) my first thought was, do we really need another book about a boarding school for sorcerers? However, having finished the novel, I have to say that yes, we do. At least, we need this particular novel.
I was trying to explain to someone what makes this story about a boarding school for sorcerers different. Well, it’s gay, I said, but that’s not what makes it great. It’s told from the point of view of the Dumbledore character—in this case, an Oxford-educated sorcerer in her late thirties—and that is one of the great bits. Then there’s the magic system. People do magic in this world by making contracts with demons from another dimension, and the cost to the magic user runs from high to unacceptably high (as in, the demon eats your family, your friends, your city, or your world). There’s also a subplot involving sorcerers being hired to work for corporations or for the military. As those of us who have worked in schools know, the pay is dismally low compared to other venues for people with professional degrees. I enjoyed this subplot, especially the parts about how despite the endless work, teaching is nonetheless (for some of us) the correct choice. We don’t get rich, but we do know we’re doing good and necessary work every day.
Mostly, though, I think the novel works so well because Emily Tesh, a teacher herself, actually understands how schools, and boarding schools specifically, work, and that shows on every page of the novel. Her main character, Dr. Saffy Walden, is a brilliant teacher and administrator who loves teaching, loves her students, loves her school. Throughout the first half of the book, Tesh lets us see all these aspects of her character, as well as her power and skill as a sorcerer. This makes us, the readers, like her a lot; it also informs the plot.
Walden has flaws, as who does not. They are flaws one might expect a sorcerer of her background (privileged) and talents (immense) to have—she thinks very well of herself, for example. Because of how Tesh structures the book, letting us see Walden in action through the first half, by the time the real trouble kicks off about midway through, we also think very well of her. We understand why she makes the mistakes she does, and we are desperately rooting for her to come out of this okay. Further, the resolution of the plot also comes out of Walden’s character as Tesh has created it for us.
In the end it is probably the characters Tesh creates for us that make this book so wonderful. Walden is a great character, but so are her students (the Upper Sixth) and the people she gets into relationships with. One of these is Marshal Laura Kenning, from a centuries-old organization of Marshals who are responsible for dealing with demons and wild magic; another is Mark Daubery, a handsome forty-something appointed by the school’s board to deal with the aftermath of a demonic incursion. He’s the uncle of one of Walden’s students, so she knows he does “military stuff,” but his old-boy charm—like Walden, he’s an alumnus of the school and from a privileged background—lets him slide through her usual defenses. Finally, there is Walden’s ex, Roz Chan, whom she met while studying in America. Roz, who took a military job, is now extremely wealthy. She says she sleeps perfectly well at night, despite the things her job requires her to do. The money makes it worth it, Roz says. This money makes it possible for her to care for her parents and her wife, and to give her children the kind of privilege Walden has always had. “I don’t regret anything,” Roz says. “I made my compromises. We all do.”
This book is also about that—the privilege that goes with wealth and an expensive education at a prestigious private school. One of Walden’s students in the Upper Sixth, Nikki (probably the Hermione character, or maybe the Harry/Hermione character), had her entire family eaten because she, as a seven-year-old, did magic with a demon she could not control. Sorcerers on her level always become wards of the state, and are sent to Chetwood for their own protection and for the protection of the rest of the world. Nikki, a Black British student, was formerly a state school student. Her family was not impoverished, but she was not someone who could ever have afforded Chetwood School if she hadn’t been such a powerful sorcerer. And she is a powerful sorcerer. Walden sees in Nikki not herself, but someone with the power and intelligence to surpass Walden, if she has the right education and training.
In contrast to Nikki, we have Will, the nephew of Mark Daubrey, who comes from wealth and privilege. He is also a good sorcerer, but having never had to face the consequences of his actions, he frequently bumbles into error, endangering his classmates and the school. He is careless, occasionally heroic, and charming. Walden likes him, but she sees clearly that he is very likely to grow into someone like his uncle.
What makes this book so excellent? All of these aspects—characters, structure, plot, worldbuilding, social commentary—working together in a perfect unified whole. I’ve liked Tesh’s earlier books, but this one is a big leap forward for her. 10/10, stellar work.
The new novel by Justin C. Key, The Hospital at the End of the World (HarperCollins, 2026), is set partly in the city where I grew up, New Orleans, and partly in New York, where the main character of the novel, Pok Morning, grew up.
The novel takes place in a near-future world managed almost entirely by AI. Children have their entire lives mapped out for them by AI programs; AI surveillance programs tailor the lives of every individual, everything from exercise to meals to volunteer work; and, importantly for Key’s novel, an AI program known as the Shepherd system has taken over medical care. Since the Shepherd AI retains the biases of its programmers, this can be a problem for patients. For example, the Shepherds suggest treatment plans, which theoretically patients are free to refuse; but in fact refusal of recommended treatment (for example, aborting a high-risk fetus) in a world where no other medical system is readily available carries its own risks. Only a single city, New Orleans, still has medical schools, physicians, and hospitals outside the Shepherd system. It is the medical school in New Orleans, Hippocrates, which Pok’s father, Phelando Morning, himself a physician, wishes his son to attend.
Pok Morning has aimed his life at medical school. The “top twelve” medical schools are all run by the Shepherd AI. Pok—who has always been a stellar student, who has always done the work recommended to him by the AI, who has a perfect CV—is rejected by all twelve schools. Determined to fix whatever he’s done wrong and reapply, Pok accepts the new regime laid out for him by the AI system—extra classes, dietary and exercise recommendations, shadowing impressive doctors to beef up the extracurricular section on his CV. When Pok’s father, who has been working outside and against the Shepherd system, suddenly dies, Pok finds himself in trouble with the Shepherds. He is accused of killing his father and a bounty is put on his head.
Although Pok believes what the Shepherd system has taught him (and everyone else)—New Orleans is a failing city, and Hippocrates is a joke, a school for people who aren’t smart enough to get into a real medical school—he nevertheless flees New York, ending up in New Orleans, attending the medical school there.
After this set-up, which occurs in the first chapters of the novel, the rest of the narrative takes place in a future New Orleans. I started to say a Utopian future New Orleans, but it isn’t, really, a Utopia. It’s a sustainable city which seems therefore impoverished in contrast to the upper-class New York from which Pok comes. Though Key keeps this city in the background of the novel, the worldbuilding has a level of detail that makes the city both convincing and attractive. Well—mostly attractive. I’m not sure I’d want to live in a New Orleans with limited electricity (and air conditioning!), but the complex culture Key creates might make it worthwhile. Importantly, Key’s New Orleans seems like a real place, the way a city might have to work in the future if we are to survive as a species. This to me—though as I say above, Key keeps all this in the background—is one of the most interesting parts of the book.
The overall plot of the novel has to do with the Shepherds and their attempt to monopolize and monetize the medical system, creating an AI-run one-size-fits-all approach to medicine, with AI-trained and AI-dependent doctors and nurses. (A great detail Key gives us is the way in which Pok, a star student in New York, is suddenly helpless in the anatomy lab without AI assistance.) There’s also the murder mystery attached to Phelando Morning’s death, and a plague, as well as Pok’s struggles with his first semester of medical school. The central theme of the book, though, is the argument against AI-run medicine, as well as against having a single, unified medical system, with only one way to provide care allowed. Key makes this argument compelling, so much so that sometimes the other plot strands seemed a little distracting.
I’ve been a big fan of Justin Key’s short stories and novellas, and this, his first novel, does not disappoint.
If you, like me, have somehow missed reading anything by Neon Yang so far, their new novella, Brighter Than Scale, Swifter Than Flame (Tor, 2025) is a good place to start. It is the story of Kunlin Yeva, who slays her first dragon when she is thirteen years old. In this world, dragonslayers, or at least some of them, possess dangerous magical power which they must learn to control, to keep from haphazardly killing those around them. In consequence, Yeva is sent by her father to be trained by the guild of dragonslayers in Mithrandon, the capital city of the Sun Empire.
Yeva is a child of mixed heritage, her father from the Empire and her mother, a powerful magician in her own right, from an adjacent kingdom called Quanbao (Quentona in the language of the Empire). Because of this heritage, Yeva looks different from the other guildknights, who are mostly men; she also speaks differently, and has been used to eating and living differently. As a result, she is shunned and tormented by the other guildknights. The fact that she is more powerful than any of them does not help. When she is given her armor, which includes a helmet that covers her face, she puts it on and vows never to take it off where anyone else can see her.
Over the years, as she and the other guildknights hunt and slay dragons, nearly everyone forgets who she is under the armor. They forget what she looks like, where she came from, and that she is a woman. She becomes legendary as much for that mystery as for her power—and she is a very powerful knight. When rumor comes that the neighboring kingdom of Quanbao is harboring a dragon, Yeva is sent to investigate and to deal with (kill) the dragon, if it exists.
Most of the book takes place after Yeva reaches Quanbao. Her mother at this point is dead, and a distant memory to the adult Yeva; but everything from the food to the language to the appearance of the people in Quanbao reawakens memories of Yeva’s childhood and of her mother. Slowly, bit by bit, the queen (Quanbao is matrilineal), Lady Sookhee, persuades Yeva out of her armor. Bit by bit, Yeva unravels the secrets of this kingdom, and of Lady Sookhee. Yeva has been indoctrinated into obedience to the Empire, and the tension in this part of the book rises from the reader’s uncertainty about whether Yeva will be able to win against that indoctrination.
This is a story about colonization and its effects on the colonized, and also a love story (spoilers: Yeva and Lady Sookhee fall in love). It contains wonderful worldbuilding, especially for such a short novel (167 pages in print). Honestly, I would have liked another thirty or forty pages, perhaps developing the relationship between Yeva and her cousin, and maybe a little more about Yeva’s mother, and more about the dragons. Still, this is a good read, with a satisfying conclusion. I’m interested in what Yang does next.
I love stories about generation ships—Ursula K. Le Guin’s 2002 novella Paradises Lost might be my favorite—so I snapped up The Iron Garden Sutra (Erewhon Books, 2026) by A. D. Sui as soon as I read the description. Le Guin’s novella takes place among the community on a generation ship. Sui’s novel, in contrast, is set in the far future, when people travel across the vast distances of space via “gates.” Humanity now lives in stations and on planets hundreds of light-years from Earth.
Meanwhile, the generation ships which left Earth starting at the end of the twenty-first century, before gate travel was discovered, have one by one begun to arrive at their destinations. None of these ships, except one, ever have any surviving human crew or passengers, but an academic field has arisen to study the ships and what remains inside them. In Sui’s novel, a generation ship called The Counsel of Nicaea has arrived at Doshua Station and placed itself in orbit. This is unusual behavior for generation ships, which usually just drift along their trajectories until someone goes out to collect them. Also, this is the first of the generation ships to arrive anywhere in over three hundred years. However, as usual, no living human survives aboard the ship.
As with Le Guin’s novella, religion features heavily in Sui’s novel, though in a very different way. Le Guin, writing at the time when religious fundamentalism was beginning to gain political power in the United States and elsewhere, writes a cautionary tale about what happens when fundamentalism attempts to replace reality with its (limited) conception of the world and the Universe. Here in Sui’s novel, a religion called the Starlit makes it a practice to send some of its monks out to help people who are dying—or, in the case of the Nicaea, those who have already died. (There is a brief mention that the crew and passengers on most generation ships are “homogenous in religious makeup,” the Nicaea, obviously, being Christian.)
The Starlit sends specific monks, called Vessels, to use prayer (sutras) to help the dead and dying “return to the Infinite Light.” Because the monks must learn enormous amounts in order to deal with people all over the galaxy, they are all fitted with an AI (inserted into their brain stems). Because AI have committed atrocities in the past, the only other category of people allowed to have AI inserted into their brains are pilots, who must traverse the gates, another task that requires enormous amounts of knowledge.
When Iris, the Vessel assigned to the Nicaea, arrives, he finds a team of academics already aboard the ship and engaged in scholarship. Though their academic goals and Iris’s religious goal do not seem to be in conflict, most of the academics (engineers, biologists, archaeologists) react to his arrival with hostility. This is at least partially due to Iris’s AI, known as VI-FAI (Vessel Iris’s Friendly AI). In this future, possessing an AI, even when itis necessary, is disapproved of—considered “gross,” as one character puts it. Also, at least one of the characters, Engineer Yan, has a backstory reason for his anger toward Iris. (Spoilers: it’s an enemies-to-lovers trope.)
That’s the setup for this lengthy novel, which gets to the plot fairly quickly—the academics and their security team begin to die, one by one. Is someone murdering them? Or is something even weirder going on? The ship itself, though devoid of human survivors, is filled with plants which have escaped from the hydroponic gardens. These include trees, vines, various mycelia, carrots, potatoes, and other plants. There are also small animals such as mice and crabs. This lush backdrop starts out faintly disquieting. After the murders begin, the environment soon becomes spooky, even creepy, and when all communication to the “universal feed” is disrupted, and the airlocks stop working, things get very much worse.
The murder mystery part of the novel is not very mysterious—the readers know what’s going on well before the characters do. The strength of the novel lies in Sui’s ability to create tension between characters, and to use backstory to add depth to the story. An earlier novel I read by Sui, The Dragonfly Gambit, struck me as too short; this one, on the other hand, feels too long—the second act sags a bit. But the conclusion is satisfying, and even in that slow second act, the tension between Iris and Engineer Yan kept me reading. The relationship between Yan and the other instructors and students in the party is also well done, as is the plot strand that deals with AI (including VIFAI), their rights, and their dangers. At 384 pages, this is an interesting if sometimes overwritten work.