Warning: Some spoilers

Death comes for us all. But if you happen to be an extra in a movie or an NPC (non-player character) in a videogame, death can come rather gratuitously. Your role, after all, is to serve the plot and potentially make a hero(ine) look good. You are expendable by definition. You are such a trope that you have your own term: red shirt, in homage to the frequently fatally phasered security personnel in Star Trek. Red Shirts are those characters where you just know, as soon as they walk into view, that they will not last until the credits roll.

What ought a group of workers to do when they are systematically maltreated? Organise, of course! That is the starting point for John Scalzi’s Redshirts. Set on the Universal Union (UU) Intrepid, a thinly veiled analogue of the USS Enterprise from Star Trek, it regales the story of four wary ensigns who must uncover why so many people on the UU Intrepid die on away missions under mysterious, avoidable and often gruesome circumstances, and how they might escape the same fate.

Redshirts was my first return to John Scalzi after The Interdependency trilogy, which I found intriguing in setup but underwhelming in execution. Redshirts worked much better for me. It is more tightly written. Scalzi’s style and pace work better at the scale of a small company of friends on a single spaceship than for the grand space opera of a collapsing civilisation. And Scalzi exploits the creative premise much more adroitly than in The Interdependency, tying everything together in a satisfying and touching ending.

What made the conclusion the more pleasing is that about midway through the novel, I started to worry that Scalzi wasn’t going to be able to stick the landing. The first half of Redshirts has our four ensigns figuring out what is going on on the UU Intrepid and, more importantly, how they avoid getting killed by whatever ‘it’ is. The challenge of Redshirt’s conceit is that the reader knows what is going on from the prologue and is thus well ahead of its heroes. Finding out how they unravel the mystery is entertaining, but it is not clear how they might get themselves out of this predicament in a satisfying way.

This is where Redshirt’s first major twist comes in, and I’m not going to spoil that here. Suffice to say that our putative disposable heroes manage to use the power of tropes in their favour to get themselves out of harms’ way. More or less.

And the ‘more or less’ is important here. Not being a redshirt does not guarantee a long and happy ever after. In the long run we’re all dead, and many have perished in circumstances that were more tragic, calamitous or avoidable than those of the sacrificial redshirt. This is where Scalzi pulls a second, more philosophical twist. The complaint of the redshirt is not death itself, but a death that is pointless, stupid, and above all bereft of agency. The demand of the redshirt is not immortality, but a life worth living and a death worth dying. In a way not dissimilar to Castlevania, the latter half of Redshirts is in part a meditation on what it means to act in the world, to have agency, to make choices, and to grow, and the consequences of us either not using that potential or it being taken away from us.

In some way, redshirts are the necessary corollary of Ada Palmer’s heroic protagonist: for the single hero(ine) to hold all the agency in the universe, they must deny it to everyone else. Redistributing agency across a larger group of characters requires a different mode of writing. At a minimum, something like the ensemble cast we see in Redshirts itself, where solving the mystery is the effort of a group of reasonably ordinary people, rather than the predestined fate of the Chosen One. Beyond that are more composite approaches such as The Ten Percent Thief, that abandon the traditional form of the novel altogether.

Redshirts does for single-episode disposable companions what Terry Pratchett’s Guards! Guards! did for the nameless battalions of disposable guards and goons. It does so with similar panache, if not the same level of genius or wit. There are also acknowledged nods to Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series about the lives of fictional characters after they’ve exited stage/screen/page left. Like these inspirations, it is a rewarding combination of witty writing, entertaining plot and cultural commentary, with some philosophical reflection thrown in to boot. It won’t change your life, but it will make you stop, smile and remember for a moment that we don’t all have to be heroes to make a change in the world.

Notes & Suggestions

• The ‘dead wife’ trope also makes an appearance in Redshirts, and on a sympathetic reading also finds itself subverted. Explicitly positioned as a plot demand, the dead wife in Redshirts is not the motive force for a hero, but instead a reason for withdrawal and fear, with Scalzi compassionately incorporating it in the book’s conclusion. I wrote a bit more about the dead wife trope in my review of Castlevania.
• Ada Palmer’s essay on the damage caused by a monoculture of heroic tales is well worth reading and can still be read in Uncanny Magazine. I engaged with it in my review of the Mass Effect series, particularly Mass Effect 3, as well as The Ten Percent Thief.
• How to exert our agency is of course the question of our times, or of life really. It is a question we must each answer for ourselves, but if you are looking for some inspiration on what is to be done, Erik Olin Wright’s How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century is not a bad starting point.

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Warning: Contains minor spoilers

The good thing about having low expectations is that you set yourself up to be pleasantly surprised. I didn’t even have high expectations of The Mandalorian and Grogu and still it managed to disappoint. Castlevania was the reverse. I picked it for some light background entertainment and it delivered on that, but also a surprising amount more for an animated television series based on a venerable videogame franchise about vampire hunters. Like the videogames that inspired it, Castlevania tells the story of a member of the monster hunting Belmont family as they square off against the forces of evil, usually represented by Dracula. This time the honour falls to Trevor Belmont, last surviving member of the Wallachian branch of the family. Down on his luck, excommunicated and roving from town to town to drown his sorrows in ale, Trevor does not start off as the hero the world needs to stop Dracula’s war against humanity. One key arc across Castlevania’s four seasons is Trevor’s fairly typical hero’s journey from cynical vagrant to competent saviour

All of this is executed in a visual style that draws heavily on its videogame lineage. The animation is vibrant, violent and visceral. The combat is fast, flashy, and familiar to anyone who has every played a fantasy roleplaying game (RPG). Castlevania is not for the faint of heart. It is the sort of show where half the scenes have blood splattered over them and people’s intestines have a tendency to escape from their bodies. Yet for a series that revels in gothic horror and videogame violence, Castlevania also contains surprising meditations on damnation and redemption, agency and fate, cruelty and kindness. And for a story set in medieval Europe, the cast is pleasantly diverse in terms of ethnicity, sexuality and gender. It’s come for the gore, stay for the existentialism.

Castlevania is a story told in four parts, its corresponding seasons really not meant to stand on their own. The short first season only serves to introduce the story and the main characters, setting the scene for Dracula’s war against humanity to avenge his murdered wife. Season two sees our heroes vanquish Dracula. A surprising move, to kill the main villain only halfway through a series, this creates the space and impetus for the remaining characters to develop and find new purpose in the aftermath of Dracula’s defeat. Without the gravitational pull of Dracula holding friends and foes together, characters are scattered to the winds, confronted with their inner demons and the fact that defeating the devil does not in fact exorcise all evil from the world. Season four is the grand finale, culminating not only in a final epic bossfight, but also our heroes’ search for purpose. Throughout there are nods to Dante’s Divine Comedy, with season three especially representing a descent into Purgatory for most of our protagonists, and season four their ascension back into the land of the living.

Our heroes are Trevor Belmont, disgraced monster hunter, Sypha Benades, mage and scholar, and Alucard, son of Dracula and therefore half vampire. Opposing them are Dracula and his war council composed of vampire aristocracy, as well as two human sorcerers, Isaac and Hector, who have their reasons for siding with the vampires against humanity. Yet the war council is riven with dissent, animosity and plotting, most prominently by Carmilla of Styria who has her own reasons for joining the fight. A depressed and disinterested Dracula is unable to either exercise control, or prosecute the war with the zeal expected of him, creating a power vacuum in which other players seek to make their moves. With Dracula’s defeat at the end of season two, both heroes and villains must discover who they are, and who they might become.

Sympathy for the devil

Casting Dracula as a vengeful but also depressed and mournful widower is one way in which Castlevania complicates the straightforward ‘good versus evil’ story of humans against vampires. This Dracula is not evil incarnate, driven by cruelty or power for its own sake, but a man whose wife was brutally murdered by the Church. Eradicating all humans in response is not exactly reasonable and Dracula falls well within the category of ‘men who should have gone to therapy’, but it nonetheless frames his motivations as driven by something more human and understandable than mere bloodthirst, even if the dead wife trope is worn and problematic. At least Castlevania has the decency not to turn the vengeful widower into its hero, unlike some recent popular movie franchises.

The nuance is not limited to Dracula, but extends to the show’s other vampires and demons. Dracula’s night creatures (souls summoned from Hell into demon bodies) are introduced as simple rampaging monsters, but are revealed to have capacity for thought, reflection and suffering. We are prompted to wonder whether their predisposition for murder is really their own, or that of the masters who summon them and give them purpose, and whether under different circumstances they might not be capable of construction as well as destruction. But the most interesting and complex character is Carmilla: a female vampire leader on Dracula’s war council. She is Machiavellian, cynical and power-hungry, and yet as we discover more about her, it is impossible not to feel sympathetic towards her. Carmilla is a woman who has suffered at the hands of a deeply patriarchal and misogynist society, ruled by “stupid old men” she despises but who also hold power over her even now that she has vampiric powers. Within the context of medieval Europe, she is the logic of ‘girlboss feminism’ incarnate: the philosophy that if you cannot dismantle the structures of oppression, your only path to emancipation lies in the accumulation of power. But because there are always men with more power than you, complete security can only be achieved through complete world domination. Driven by this logic, Carmilla’s ambitions gradually but inexorably expand as the series progresses, starting with the desire to take over Dracula’s castle but ending with plans to subjugate all the kingdoms of Europe. And it is hard to fault Carmilla for her analysis, even if she does turn into a megalomaniac villain who repulses even her closest allies, because this is after all a story that started with a strong woman being burned at the stake merely for being more learned than a bunch of insecure and deeply reactionary men.

Hell is other people

The nuanced representation of Castlevania’s vampires is mirrored in its ambivalent view of humanity. The Wallachia of Castlevania is a place where life is violent and as per Thomas Hobbes often solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Neither just victims or heroes, much of the violence and treachery we see is inflicted on humans by humans, not any supernatural creatures. The first act of violence in Castlevania is after all the murder of Dracula’s wife by the overzealous clergy of Targovishte, and the suffering, pain and death inflicted by humans does not end there. Season three presents the nadir in this regard for heroes Sypha and Trevor, as they are confronted with some deeply unpleasant characters not just among their enemies, but also among their supposed allies.

Suffering is everywhere in Castlevania, and for some characters this means humanity is beyond redemption. Dracula’s war council includes two humans, Isaac and Hector, who after being hurt and cast out from their communities have thrown in their lot with the vampires because they believe the world is better off without humans at all. During their travels, Trevor and Sypha similarly come across people who have either gone over to the dark side of Dracula, or concluded that there is simply no point in going on living. The sense of futility is heightened because the onslaught of vampires and demons across Wallachia means that while some people may survive individually, communities are fractured and broken. It is the social web that humans rely on for meaningful existence beyond survival that is lost.

Nor does faith offer solace. Castlevania’s Christianity is that of a vengeful Old Testament God, with punishingly strict rules on sin and damnation. If lying to save yourself from being tortured to death can land you in Hell, then what hope is there for anyone? And yet, while most characters in Castlevania assume they are damned to go to hell, their reality is equally so grim that it leads some of them to wonder what difference there really is between a life or afterlife of suffering.

Beyond good and evil

You cannot order a society based on a moral doctrine that condemns everyone equally to hell. If you are damned no matter how small the sin, you might as well be selfish while you can. Castlevania definitely has no love to spare for the Church as an institution or for Christian doctrine, but this does not mean it has no sense of good and evil. It is just not based on theology. Instead, in Castlevania the greatest sin is stasis: the inability to grow and change. It is the characters who through introspection or action learn to exercise agency, develop, and adapt who ultimately survive. Our hero Trevor Belmont is the most obvious example, but Castlevania’s most interesting story belongs to Isaac, the erstwhile servant of Dracula turned saviour of demons and men. If Trevor’s arc is the traditional hero’s journey, Isaac much more closely follows in the footsteps of Dante, passing through his personal purgatory before emerging transformed on the other side.

Contrary to our human heroes, Castlevania’s vampires are unable to change, and that is what causes their demise. In a way, its vampires can be seen as the ultimate existentialists, thrown into an existence they cannot change not once, but twice. Born as human, reborn as vampire. Neither birth is a choice, and if the human life is short and full of suffering, vampiric life is an eternity of hunger spent in darkness. Castlevania asks whether vampires are indeed in some sense beyond good and evil, because if preying on humans is necessary for survival, then is it really a moral choice at all? But the consequence of being placed beyond human morality, of being damned by definition, is that vampires also cannot transform, either themselves or the world. This point is made explicitly: if for humans the greatest virtue is growth, for vampires it is stability and stasis. A world that, like vampires themselves, never changes and never dies. An undead existence that is indeed neither dead nor alive, but just an eternal now, though not in the mindful sense.

The lesson Castlevania imparts that we are only truly alive when we purposefully act in the world, not in isolation but together with others. It is agency grounded in both introspection and cooperation. I would like to say that the show also promotes agency for the sake of kindness towards others, but while it points in that direction towards the end, it has racked up too tremendous a body count to sustain that a pure message of kindness. It is an animated series about vampire hunters after all, not a treatise of existentialist philosophy or a socialist instruction manual. But for a show about vampires and violence, it has surprising depth and rewards viewing with an eye for more than just the epic battles, blood and gore that it shows you on the surface.

Notes & Suggestions

• Aoko Matsuda wrote an excellent short story about the trope of the woman who must die for the sake of the plot and/or the male protagonist, which you can read in Granta.
• It has been too long since I read it myself, so I drew from this blog for a more detailed analysis of how Castlevania draws inspiration from Dante’s Divine Comedy.
• Castlevania interest in what happens after the villain has been vanquished is shared with Loki and The Mandalorian, both of which also observe that evil is not so easily rooted from the world. Each of these series take a different perspective on this theme. Castlevania is a story of personal growth, Loki of ongoing struggle and transformation, and The Mandalorian of retribution. What all of them share is the recognition that in the fight for justice, there is neither final defeat nor victory.

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About halfway through watching The Mandalorian and Grogu I realised that I had no idea what this movie was about. Mando (Pedro Pascal), our titular Mandalorian, was on some typical Star Wars Outer Rim world with seedy bars and flickering neon lights, dealing with the local crime boss / ex-Imperial warlord. At no point had the movie established why I should care about this particular warlord or this particular mission. Fine, the Empire is evil and we all enjoy some gratuitous violence against stormtroopers, but by this time I’m about an hour in and it is not clear what the stakes of this movie are. From its auspicious beginning in 2019 with the first season of the TV series, The Mandalorian has now met the fate that befalls all Star Wars intellectual property, namely to have it squeezed of all value until what remains is some by the numbers, unimaginative fanservice. Where did Mando lose his way?

The appeal of The Mandalorian’s first season lay not only in the cuddly cuteness of baby-Yoda Grogu, but its ability to add something new and fresh to the then slightly stale Star Wars franchise. Its Western-inspired style and atmosphere, a main character without Jedi powers, and the smaller settings and personal stakes made it a welcome change from the epic but incoherent narrative of Disney’s cinematic reboot. Despite hiding behind his mask, Mando was much more relatable than your average Jedi, because he was human, fallible and forced to navigate a morally ambiguous world. Set after the fall of the Galactic Empire, The Mandalorian added depth to the familiar Star Wars story. Complicating the self-congratulatory happy ending of The Return of the Jedi, it shows its audience how the post-Imperial world is full of petty warlords, failing social systems and anarchy on the worlds not protected by the fledgling New Republic. Add to that Mando’s personal and moral dilemmas as he is forced to grapple with his unexpected responsibility for the young Grogu and it is not difficult to see why The Mandalorian made for entertaining television.

What is so baffling about The Mandalorian and Grogu is that jettisoned practically all those elements that powered the success of the TV series. After entering into the service of the New Republic and deciding to take on Grogu as his apprentice at the end of season 3, there are no psychological or moral quandaries left for our protagonists to contend with, removing one possible source of good storytelling. Mando’s history and honour code are now also familiar to the audience, so they don’t add the same burst of novelty as before. The original Western-inspired setting has been replaced by some cookie-cutter, computer-generated planets that have no evocative atmosphere or aesthetic to speak of, beyond feeling like budget Bladerunner. And finally, stuff just happens without much of a plot to hold it together.

There is the semblance of a plot, of course. Mando has to save Rotta the Hutt, son of deceased crime-lord Jabba the Hutt, from some godforsaken moon and return him to his aunt and uncle who now run the Hutt crime syndicate. In exchange for the safe return of their nephew, who the Hutts clearly care about as much as the Empire cared about health & safety, they will lead the New Republic to one of the most elusive ex-Imperial warlords they are after. A weak attempt to make the secondment to a pair of criminals into an interesting moral dilemma lasts for about thirty seconds before the movie just moves on. If all this sounds rather convoluted, that is because it is. And if it sounds like the plotline for, at best, a two-episode arc in a TV series, that is because it is.

The predicament of The Mandalorian and Grogu is neatly summarised in an observation from this excellent essay on the difficulties of writing new stories within the Star Wars universe, or any franchise where authors are forbidden from adding or changing key events in the foundational lore:

The challenge placed before the author, in essence, is to tell an engaging story that doesn’t matter and doesn’t change anything about the characters or the world they live in.

As the author of that essay points out, there are ways around this problem depending on the medium. You can shift the focus form the grand epic narrative to the personal stories and sacrifices of the people living in your imaginary world. You can tell stories that add depth to the worldbuilding by exploring histories, cultures, characters or concepts that the key works in a franchise barely have time for. That is what The Mandalorian and Andor did so successfully: while not able to alter Star Wars’ grand narrative, they added not just depth and complexity to the timeline between the movies, but also a sense of realism that the trilogies, with their primary colour approach to good and evil, tended to lack.

If all that fails though, a movie can always fall back on bombastic cinematics, fast-paced action, or spectacular violence to mask the absence of a solid story. This path of least resistance is what The Mandalorian and Grogu has taken, and even that without much commitment or panache. Saddled with a plot that was likely salvaged from the cancelled fourth season and fully lacking in the character development department, The Mandalorian and Grogu instead relies on a series of fully predictable but modest set-piece battles, buttressed by a veritable parade of Star Wars cameos that have to make up for the consistently atrocious dialogue. What is supposed to be the grand finale involves a tedious melee between three bloated CGI sandworms, the incineration of some utterly expendable leftover droids from the Clone Wars series and some ridiculously implausible X-wing pilot banter that’s there purely for the fanservice.

The Mandalorian and Grogu is an ignominious instalment in the iconic story that started in 2019. For all that the movie manages the impressive feat of being convoluted, incoherent and predictable at the same time, it does not even possess the redeeming quality of being entertainingly bad. Instead, it is of the type of forgettable blandness that comes from being designed by committee to such a degree that all risk or creativity have been expunged. The purpose of the thing is what it does, of course, so presumably it is still achieving its objective of maintaining Disney+ subscriptions and Star Wars merchandise sales.

It appears that there are plans for a second movie, which will serve as a grand finale to tie several strands of the Star Wars franchise together, including Ahsoka and The Mandalorian. Based on past experience, I’m not hopeful that something exciting will emerge from combining multiple mediocre ingredients, but we can always hope that like Mando in season 2, The Mandalorian somehow manages to redeem itself.

Notes & Suggestions

• Coming right up to the beginning of the original trilogy and the Rogue One sequel, Andor is arguably even more constrained by the existing canon. Despite this, it tells a much more intriguing story and manages its conclusion as well as can be expected of a story where we know the ending in advance. It’s almost as if interesting characters having to make morally ambiguous choices under pressure make for better television than a parade of cuddly toys.
• I’m not the greatest fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but Marvel’s Thunderbolts demonstrated that it is possible to do something interesting with a fatigued franchise, precisely by focusing on the human element instead of merchandise opportunities.

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I’ve never been much of a fan of horror, but occasionally I can be tempted by content with a Lovecraftian vibe. Boardgames like Arkham Horror, or stories where the entities from the Dungeon Dimensions lurk just beneath the surface. Dredge, a videogame about fishing with a demonic undercurrent, fitted very neatly into this mould. It sets the familiar mechanics of a resource gathering and adventure game in a world of quaint fishing villages that are clearly haunted by a dreadful event from their past. It is up you, an amnesiac fisherman, to piece the puzzle together and uncover what dreaded horror plagues this world. At about 10 hours of gameplay Dredge is a neat little game built on a solid gameplay loop and an intriguing setting. Nonetheless, as I progressed, I found it became more tedious than I had expected given its setup, the charm of its mystery rather diminished by its unwillingness to let me engage with the central mystery in any meaningful way.

The core gameplay loop of Dredge is that of a typical gathering game: you collect resources to survive and improve, so that you can collect more resources to get even better at collecting resources, so you can… well, you get the picture. For a game of this type, and a horror themed one at that, Dredge is actually fairly forgiving. While you have to fish to earn the money to upgrade and repair your boat, you don’t need it to simply survive. There is no timed mechanic that means that it’s game over once you run out of money. This means that if you are in a tight spot, you can always return to safer grounds, make enough money for the repairs or upgrades you need, before venturing forth to more treacherous but profitable waters.

As you start the game, you wash up in Greater Marrow, a small fishing village on one of a small cluster of islands. You quickly find out that the village has seen better days, but since a mysterious fog rolled in 20 years ago, things have been going downhill. Your sense that there is something profoundly amiss intensifies when you catch your first aberration: a grotesquely mutated variant of the fish species commonly found around the islands. The villagers are also taciturn or outright strange, and there is much that is hinted at but not spoken of. Not to mention the mysterious guy in the ruined mansion who wants you to collect some obviously occult artefacts for him. In short, it is a veritable parade of Lovecraftian tropes.

Working with the creepy and clearly deeply suspect occult resident of the ruined mansion is however the only way to move the game forward, and he will send you to collect five artefacts from each of the game’s main areas. Each small archipelago is its own biome with its own fish species, and one specific ‘boss’ enemy standing in the way of retrieving your quest item. Dredge does not involve combat, and you will have to avoid or outrun the monsters that might kill you, with each area set up as a small puzzle to deal with the main monster residing in it. In this Dredge is not unlike Subnautica: there is clearly something going on with nautically themed games that eschew violence.

Exploring each area for the first time is interesting and exciting, and creates a useful impetus to purchase the necessary upgrades for your vessel. Yet I found that the more I played, the less Dredge managed to captivate me. The fishing itself becomes increasingly monotonous, and while catching a new type of fish is initially exciting, the novelty wears off rather quickly as the game doesn’t do anything with its piscine variety. Barring some largely irrelevant sidequests, all you do is simply sell the fish to merchants, and nobody is really curious about why your latest flounder has seventeen eyes and a suppurating dorsal fin. In this, like so many other games, Dredge is haunted by the inescapable spectre of capitalism. Yes, there are 150 unique fish to catch, each with a detailed page in your fishing handbook, but in the end all that really matters is how much you can sell them for. The real devourer is the market that converts even eldritch fish into money.

It also didn’t help that for the most part, it becomes trivially easy to avoid fishing at night, allowing you to circumvent the game’s panic mechanic that makes you see things that may or may not be there, but will definitely imperil your vessel. Players with a more completionist bend may well be invested in the hunt for every last species of fish, but for me the interchangeable and repetitive nature of the fishing held little appeal and eventually got in the way of the story.

At the heart of Dredge there is indeed a typical Lovecraftian story about human hubris and the horrors it can bring forth from the Other Side. The game tells you that there is a Mystery with a capital M with about as much subtlety as a Kraken tearing a ship in two. You easily find enough clues to piece together that Something Bad happened twenty years ago because someone made some Poor Life Choices, and this may well have something to do with this creepy occult dude who keeps getting you to dredge up eldritch artefacts for him. But having that insight doesn’t really help you, as the game doesn’t let you do anything with that information except go out and fish some more. I kept expecting that by exploring the world further, I would find some way to avoid Creepy Occult Guy from inviting Cthulhu over, but there are no options but to keep on fishing. The characters you meet in the game aren’t much help either in unravelling the mystery, as most of them only have a handful of dialogue options limited to their specific sidequests, which you quickly exhaust.

Games are not obliged to hand you all the lore or exposition you want, and often a lack of knowledge is what builds the sense that there is something eerily wrong with a place that you cannot put your finger on. In Dredge however you can very quickly put an entire tentacle on the source of the wrongness. The game misunderstands what the appeal of a good mystery is. It is the ability to gradually piece together clues to uncover something that is hidden, and in a horror setting that might involve both the realisation that not all is as it seems and the occasional confrontation with an eldritch entity. Dredge, on the other hand, confuses this lack of information with giving the player a lack of options, turning what could have been an intriguing puzzle into an exercise in futility. Several times I left the game languishing for a while as it really wasn’t clear to me what the point was of proceeding further, given that the only course available to me was to sail straight off the proverbial cliff. There is a superficial similarity here with Universal Paperclips, which also asks the player to continue playing along a very dubious trajectory. But in Universal Paperclips the questionable goal and the gameplay are mutually reinforcing so as to make the game compelling. In Dredge the disconnect between the gameplay and the story diminishes both.

Misgivings notwithstanding, I did complete Dredge in the end. It even offered a reasonably neat ending, though I could not shake the feeling that I only avoided a worse fate because I found a fork in the plot through sheer luck. On reflection, I expect that players who derive more pleasure from the fishing, exploring and upgrading will quite enjoy the game, and not mind so much how they are driven forward by the suspect orders of Creepy Occult Guy. Or maybe there is actually a meta-story here, a self-referential critique about the need to let go rather than persisting in a harmful course of action. For me though, that irony was lost on me, and the lesson I learned from Dredge was that the real horror was drudgery all along.

Notes & Suggestions

• Letting go is also one of the core themes in Citizen Sleeper, but its strong focus on player agency and the greater presence of in-game characters mean it engages it with greater sensitivity and effect. It is not an entirely fair comparison as Citizen Sleeper is not set up as a mystery, but unlike Dredge, making choices is at the heart of the game, which means that by the time you reach any of the possible endings, you are invested both in how you got there, and how you might proceed.

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The Left excels at diagnosis. There is no shortage of books, articles, papers, podcasts, documentaries, reports and more decrying the ills of late-stage capitalism. From deepening inequality to the breakdown of the biosphere, we can argue convincingly how capitalism fails us. What, however, is to be done about it?

Here we are on substantially weaker ground. Marx famously declared that he was not in the business of writing the cookbooks for the post-revolutionary workers’ state, and this injunction against utopianism has hung like a shadow over socialist writers ever since. The nature of actually existing socialism limited the imagination even further, equating post-capitalist society with dreary authoritarianism. Yet even where alternative futures are being imagined, such as in visions of degrowth or solarpunk, the question of how we get from here to there often remains unanswered. Attaining the future we want is not merely a matter of having the right ideas, it is also about building the power to get there.

Erik Olin Wright’s How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st century directly grapples with this question. Wright’ final book, it builds on decades of Marxist sociological research and activist practice, distilling these into a delightfully short primer on how to change the world. It is not an instruction manual for building a community group or trade union along the lines of Jane McAlevey’s Organising for Power and similar works, but a guide to what anti-capitalist organisations can do to move us closer to a better future. Although the book contains some policy ideas, it is not a catalogue of nice but unachievable policy prescriptions either, but instead presents a strategic framework that organisers can use to assess whether their efforts are likely to erode capitalist dominance.

Ecosystem socialism

While it might be assumed that readers picking up a book titled How to be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century would already be persuaded of the evils of capitalism, Wright nonetheless starts off with a succinct overview of the arguments against it. As an Analytical Marxist, Wright has disavowed Marxism’s original foundation on the teleological movement of history and the exploitation of workers through the extraction of surplus value. Wright’s case against capitalism is instead purely moral, grounded on capitalism’s inherent tendency to undermine equality, freedom and community. It is an elegant first chapter, and while traditional Marxists may well find it too milquetoast for their liking, it will appeal to a much wider left-wing readership. The availability of multiple arguments against capitalism in any event strengthens rather than weakens the case.

Wright’s Analytical Marxism similarly excuses him from the search for a revolutionary subject charged to be the sole agent of historical progress, something much left-wing writing has been agonising over after the failure of the traditional proletariat to usher in the socialist new dawn. Hopes have been pinned on revolutionaries in the global periphery, other oppressed groups such as women or ethnic minorities, students, or a new generation of ‘networked workers’. Not that hope in the working class has been fully abandoned either: there are still those yearning for a return to the centrality of the working class led by a reinvigorated communist party to act as the revolutionary vanguard. Wright avoids this fruitless search for a single historical subject, and instead roots his analysis in a recognition that capitalism harms people in many different ways, leading them to organise against it for different reasons and with different goals. It is diversity instead of uniformity, and to Wright this is a strength rather than a weakness, although he does not downplay the difficulties of organising across an ecosystem of groups, communities and movements. In this, he his much closer to writers like Rodrigo Nunes who in Neither Vertical nor Horizontal also advocates for ecosystemic approach, than to Jodi Dean’s argument in Comrade for a return to the traditional communist party. Or, as revolutionary poet Diane di Prima explained:

NO ONE WAY WORKS, it will take all of us shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down.

If I wanted to get there, I wouldn’t start from here

Once you recognise that it will take a multitude of us shoving at the thing from all sides, the logical next conclusion is that it will also take a multitude of methods. Wright thus takes the holistic view that an ecosystem of actors will deploy a range of strategies to bring about the demise of capitalism, depending on their situation, capacities and preferences. How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century identifies five types of strategy: smashing capitalism through revolution, dismantling it by political means, taming it to limit its worst effects, resisting it locally, or attempting to escape it altogether. Discarding revolutionary rupture on the grounds that it is neither likely nor desirable in advanced democracies, Wright concludes that a combination of the other four strategies must be used to erode capitalism.

Selecting ‘all of the above’ may look like a trite way out of an analytical quandary, but Wright’s assertion is deeply considered and its value lies precisely in its ability to pragmatically transcend both the sterile argument about an ideologically ‘correct’ course of action and the fatalistic sense that because revolution is not on the horizon everything is futile. It cannot be denied though that Wright’s assertion here rests in large part on faith. In essence, Wright’s gambit is to replace the belief in an inevitable historical telos with a hope that the strategic combination of the four strategies remaining to us will be sufficient to carve out a path beyond capitalism through gradual change. This is of course not a novel position. Reformist or gradualist approaches have been advocated for as long as there have been socialists, with the most famous proponents of this approach probably the British Fabian Society. What How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century adds is a recognition that parliamentarianism alone is also not enough, but that it will require the combination of political advances, grassroots campaigning, and the nurturing of anti-capitalist modes of living in the interstices of the capitalist system to secure victory. By pointing at the interdependency of these strategies, Wright prompts us to identify opportunities to deploy them in mutually reinforcing ways: changing laws or institutions to make cooperatives more viable, or using grassroots action strategically to extract political demands. Although not explicitly referenced, How to Be an Anti-capitalist In the 21st Century bears the influence of André Gorz’ non-reformist reforms: changes that don’t just deliver immediate material gains, but change the terrain on which class struggle plays out to our advantage.

The ecumenical perspective may not appeal to all, and traditional Marxist or communist readers will likely take issue with absence of dialectical materialism or the endorsement of market socialism. For socialists wedded to revolutionary rupture, I imagine that Wright’s alternative will feel either too soft, too utopian, or both. Wright does not dispute that eroding capitalism is not going to be easy. He is well aware that conditions are far from optimal, the road long and arduous, and success far from certain. Yet for anyone who accepts that revolution is either unlikely or undesirable, How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century gives a lot of useful food for thought. This is true even if the reader does not wholly agree with Wright’s premises or conclusions, and that is precisely because Wright’s proposal is expansive and accommodating of different approaches and perspective. In essence, Wright’s strategic programme is a contemporary rearticulation of Laozi’s ancient wisdom that water is stronger than stone:

There is nothing softer and weaker than water, And yet there is nothing better for attacking hard and strong things. For this reason there is no substitute for it.

At ~150 pages, How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century can only give a cursory introduction to many of the concepts and strategies discussed, though it is a testament to Wright’s mastery as an academic and writer that he does everything he covers a great degree of justice in the limited space available. It is a great tragedy that Wright was never able to write the intended, more extensive companion book for How to Be an Anti-Capitalist In the 21st Century due to his death to acute myeloid leukemia in 2019. Instead, How to Be an Anti-capitalist will have to be a starting point or roadmap for those who want to engage more with socialist thought, rather than a detailed compendium in itself. But its real value lies in what it was always intended to do: offer activists not only a framework and a theory of change to take into the world and act, but also the hope to do so. The purpose of philosophy is not, after all, to merely understand the world, but to change it.

Notes & Suggestions

• None of this is to say that anti-capitalism is easy, and the capitalist system has both direct and indirect ways of facing off challenges. Some of the very direct tactics were exposed in Confessions of a Union Buster, whereas Hegemony Now! analyses the more subtle methods by which consent and compliance are maintained.
• One attraction of Wright’s approach is that it doesn’t lock you into one specific form of activism on the ground that this is the One True Path. You don’t have to stand outside your local library flogging badly stencilled pamphlets. On the other hand, this does mean that you have to work out for yourself what you can do. Wright’s strategic outlook accommodates a multitude of approaches, so if you are unsure, see if there are campaign groups active in your local area, or based on issues that are important to you. If you are in work, always join a union, or set one up if there isn’t one yet. If you want to influence national politics where you live, join or donate to a political party to support them. How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century tells you that you don’t have to do everything yourself. All it asks is that you find ways for your actions to clear the way for others.

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On 19 November 1998, videogaming changed forever when game developer Valve released Half-Life. 50+ ‘Game of the Year’ awards and inclusion in various ‘most influential games’ rankings attest to the fundamental shift Half-Life represents within the first-person-shooter (FPS) genre of videogames, taking it to a new level from the standard previously set by 1993’s Doom. In terms of immersion, storytelling and worldbuilding, there is a before and after Half-Life.

Valve followed its success with Half-Life 2 in 2004, the six year development time a first indicator of what would infamously become known as ‘Valve time’. Like its predecessor, Half-Life 2 represented another levelling up in the standards of FPS videogames through the introduction of realistic physics effects, advances in rendering of NPCs and the more extensive setting compared to its predecessor. Included with Half-Life 2 was an updated version of Half-Life, rendered on Valve’s new game engine. Without any real upgrades to graphics or gameplay, however, this was such a disappointment that some fans set out to completely rebuild Half-Life themselves. The product of this work is Black Mesa, a full remaster of the original game, completed after its very own 16 year long development journey. When the definitive version was finally published in 2020, the world of videogames had again moved on, and Half-Life 2 was hardly cutting edge anymore. Nonetheless, Black Mesa’s positive reception and the ability of a fan-based team to deliver a critically acclaimed remaster are a testament to the enduring legacy of Half-Life and the potential for a games industry not wholly captured by risk-averse triple-A studios.

Half-Life was my formative FPS. I have replayed it so many times that I can recall entire sections of it better than real places where I have lived, and I cannot help run its opening sequence in my head whenever I’m on any form of light rail. When Half-Life 2 came out in 2004 the payoff felt worth the long wait, and Valve displayed their expected panache for storytelling and game design, introducing physics in ways that had never been seen before, laying the groundwork for their next hit, 2007’s Portal. Next, however, was an abortive foray into ‘episodic’ games with Half-Life 2: Episode 1 and Half-Life 2: Episode 2, each with development times that rivalled those of full, standalone games. The long awaited Episode 3 never materialised, nor did Half-Life 3, and from here Valve’s creative output effectively ceased. My suspicion that Valve were holding out for another step-change in gaming technology was confirmed when Half-Life: Alyx was released in 2020 as a virtual reality (VR) exclusive. Alyx did not advance the Half-Life story however, and nothing has emerged from Valve since, leaving the Half-Life universe the gaming equivalent of Game of Thrones.

The most memorable commute in videogames. Video is from the original Half Life.

It was therefore exciting to see the development of the Half-Life remaster running in parallel with Valve’s metamorphosis from a vanguard game developer to toll collector on Steam, the largest PC game distribution platform. As the community effort consolidated into the Crowbar Collective and was eventually endorsed by Valve, I played several of the incomplete and demo releases, until the definitive version of Black Mesa finally landed in 2020. Now a recent replay presented an opportunity to assess how well a six year old remaster of a 28 year old game stands up against the games of today.

Welcome to the Black Mesa Research Facility. Have a safe and productive day

The strongest quality of Black Mesa remains the organic storytelling and worldbuilding it inherits from Half-Life. From the moment we enter the Black Mesa Research Facility using the iconic monorail train from Level 3 Dormitories to Sector C Test Labs, we know that there is a whole intricate world out there beyond the player's direct experience, and this approach is sustained throughout the game. It is one of the areas where Black Mesa outdoes its source material, because Crowbar Collective was able to significantly expand and enhance the last four chapters set in the alien ‘Xen’ world, using materials Valve omitted from Half-Life to meet its release schedule, as well as retconned references to Half-Life 2, strengthening the connection between the two games. Black Mesa tells this story without cut scenes, dialogue, quick-time events or an extensive encyclopedia of lore. Instead, we build our understanding of this world from environmental clues, snippets of overheard conversation and brief interactions with NPCs.

This lack of interruptions means that Black Mesa maintains excellent pacing. There are slower and more frantic sections, but the core gameplay is hardly ever interrupted by cut scenes or other non-playable events. Chapters build logically on one another, with a gradual and sensible escalation in terms of weaponry and enemies. Despite eventually carrying the armaments of a small platoon and wearing high-impact reactive armour, Black Mesa mercilessly punishes any attempts to Rambo through combat, forcing the player to think and strategize while on the move. As ‘cover’ was not a mechanic supported by the Source engine there is no sequence of conveniently placed chest-height walls to hunker behind, and instead the most taxing combat sequences require mobility and careful use of the environment to overcome.

The logical, linear structure makes Black Mesa delightfully simple (if not necessarily easy), but can feel contrived and railroading when contrasted with contemporary games. Funnelling the player down a single path means that the Black Mesa Research Facility has an unusual number of locked doors and explosive-proof windows, which can occasionally break suspension of disbelief or cause frustration, in particular when the ‘correct’ path is not immediately clear and the game refuses to offer multiple routes to the same objective in a way that we have come to expect from more modern games.

That annoyance of being railroaded is felt more strongly when confronted with various platform or physics puzzles that now feel anachronistic and interfere with flow. While Black Mesa vastly improved on the jumping challenges in the ‘Xen’ chapter, we still have an entire chapter of platforming through a waste processing plant that was clearly designed before Health & Safety was invented and which is both tedious and unconvincing, especially when contrasted with the rest of the in-game environment.

Graphics are where Black Mesa is weakest, which is no surprise for a game using a game engine, textures and assets from over two decades ago, some updates by Valve in the intervening years notwithstanding. Half-Life 2’s NPCs were a massive step up in 2004, but two decades on appear mildly wooden and repetitive, with the the player facing the same four soldiers over and over again. As someone not too invested in the latest graphics I would say the environments hold up okay as a whole, as long as you don’t look too closely at any of the textures.

Somewhat outdated graphics notwithstanding, the Xen chapters are an enormous improvement over the original, infusing the last third of the game with a sense of wonder that it did not previously possess.

The right man in the wrong place

Despite its age, there remains something refreshing about Black Mesa, in particular when compared to more expansive modern games. It is proof of the adage that less can indeed be more. This is a game that still features the mute protagonist, without conversation trees, side quests, morality points, or weapon upgrades. Repeatedly I found myself comparing Black Mesa to the last shooter I played: the Mass Effect remaster, and doing so favourably.

Despite being set in a single facility, Black Mesa feels grander than the world of Mass Effect, even though the the latter is spread over much of the galaxy. It achieves this not through the multiplicity of locations or the size of the game, as 1998 technology seriously limited both. It convinces you because throughout the game, the Black Mesa Research Facility implies that at any time, you are only seeing part of a greater whole. Every area is littered with signs pointing to other locations, processes or activities that you never experience. All around you NPCs are taking their own actions: marines fighting aliens, security personnel trying to survive, scientists desperately seeking a solution while being massacred by aliens and the military alike. Mass Effect, by contrast, always feels small. Even in the third game, its locations feel oddly circumscribed, and plastering some flying cars on the skybox does not fix that. This is not true for all parts of the game, but for a surprising amount of it, its locations are so obviously designed around gameplay that they don’t really convince as ‘real’ locations, let alone as parts of a greater universe.

This sense that you are not the centre of the universe extends to the player as well. Playing as Gordon Freeman in Black Mesa, you start as a recent PhD graduate at the bottom of the academic pecking order, paying off your student loans by shoving mysterious samples into the ‘anti-mass spectrometer’. When this accidentally makes you instrumental to creating the dimensional rift that starts the alien invasion of the research facility, the key reason it is you and not anyone else who has to go to the surface for help is because you happen to wear that convenient armour. For the first half of the game you are directed by other scientists and events, and it is only as the game progresses and the military starts hunting you specifically that the game acknowledges that you are somehow special. Contrast this to Mass Effect, where from the opening sequence it is established that Commander Shepard is a very special boy/girl. Mass Effect opens with your superiors at the highest levels of government discussing why you, and only you, are uniquely qualified for consideration for the galaxy’s most prestigious special forces outfit. Black Mesa opens with you running late on your commute to work. It is unavoidable for an FPS to make the hero(ine) the central character of the story, but Black Mesa tells you right up to the end that there were others like you who tried and failed, and that your ultimate victory was in no way predestined. In Mass Effect, everyone agrees (and tells you, ad nauseam) that you are the saviour of the galaxy. In Black Mesa, on winning the game you effectively get told you were just the statistically expected victor from among a larger pool of contenders.

Community action

At sixteen years of development, Crowbar Collective’s successful release of Black Mesa feels almost as unlikely as Gordon Freeman’s victory over Half-Life’s endboss. Gaming is now a mature enough industry to have its fair share of reboots and remasters, but in the main these are pushed by studios themselves, or whoever ended up with the relevant intellectual property. That is, when studios care enough to continue looking after their legacy. Recent years have seen controversial decisions by studios to discontinue games altogether, leaving players with unsupported and at times unplayable software. It has brought into focus the insidious nature of an industry that sells players ‘licenses’ to play, rather than ownership of games. While not the worst offender, Valve itself has come in for scrutiny over its lacklustre updates to its portfolio of legacy games, in particular given the dearth of new releases in recent years, as well as its facilitation of large studios extracting every last drop of value from games through Steam. Though unlike some of its competitors, Valve has at least shown itself willing to support an ecosystem of modifications and spin-offs, with Black Mesa probably the most elaborate example of this.

Black Mesa is a testament to both the enduring impact of Half-Life and the perseverance of its community of fans. With its somewhat outdated graphics and gameplay it may not hold much appeal to a new generation of gamers who did not experience the original and can choose from a plethora of games inconceivable in 1998. That would be a shame however, because Black Mesa's storytelling remains outstanding, and the game still offers a balanced, well-paced challenge to players. As an entry point for one of gaming's most iconic series it is superior to the original. The Black Mesa Research Facility, while cutting edge in 1998, may now look a bit dated, but it is still worth a visit.

Notes & Suggestions

• In response to studio decisions to discontinue games that still had a vibrant (albeit often small) gaming community, gamers have banded together in the Stop Killing Games initiative. One of the asks of the campaign is for studios to adopt legacy arrangements for games, rather than simply shutting them down. Good Old Games, a competitor platform to Steam, also runs an extensive library of older games as well as a ‘games preservation programme’.
• The honour of most extensive fan-built project probably goes to Tamriel Rebuilt, an effort to build the entire fictional world of Tamriel from the The Elder Scrolls series as a modification of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Bethesda games generally attract lots of player-made modifications, especially for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which has resulted in fully-fledged standalone games such as The Forgotten City. While Bethesda’s openness to player involvement has always been welcomed, this has not prevented the studio from occasionally trying to monetise players’ free labour, with connivance of our friends at Valve. The efforts of the Tamriel Rebuilt community were also covered in Tribune and Ars Technica.
• Yahtzee Croshaw has one of his usual entertaining videos on Black Mesa, covering some of the same points.

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During World War I, a British archeologist singlehandedly forged a multitude of Arabian tribes into a unified army, leading them to victory over a decaying Ottoman Empire, in so doing bringing Arabia into the modern world, i.e. that of Western-style national statehood. This hero would become the legend known as Lawrence of Arabia, the white man who donned desert garb and with his Arabian comrades conquered Damascus. At least, that’s the story of the movie, as I understand. The story told by T.E. Lawrence himself in his autobiographical Seven Pillars of Wisdom is rather more complex and ambiguous.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom is Lawrence’s own account of his role in the Arab Revolt, written some years after events from his notes and diaries (though most were lost) and going through several iterations before its final version. From the outset, Lawrence recognises that the Arab Revolt played only a minor part in the Allied victory in World War I, and that if it was critical to this victory, it was so in the sense that British authors tend to ascribe a sense of crucial importance to any single operation because it was part of the totality of the war effort (see also dambusters etc.). Nor does Lawrence suggest he tells his story because he was uniquely instrumental to the events of the Arab Revolt. By his own words, he tells his story because he was there. As such, he is as much, or perhaps even more, of an unreliable narrator as you might expect. Nevertheless, Seven Pillars of Wisdom is assuredly not a heroic tale or adventure novel about how good old British pluck saved the day. Instead, we accompany a profoundly emotionally conflicted man into a struggle where he is forever doomed to be an outsider to both his own and his adopted peoples. On top of which Lawrence is emblematic of so many of the pathologies of 1920s English repressedness that his memoir could double as a psychoanalytical field manual. Seven Pillars of Wisdom is now the sort of historical artefact that requires a 100 page introduction (which my copy duly has), and on the whole, the surface level war story of a few brave fighters facing overwhelming odds is the least interesting part of it.

Events, dear boy, events

Its nature as a memoir rather than a novel means that Seven Pillars of Wisdom lacks an overall plot, at least in the traditional narrative sense. There is a trajectory, starting in the deserts of the Hejaz in 1916 and terminating with the fall of Damascus in 1918. Damascus is Lawrence’s lodestar from the very beginning, but with the book written after events unfolded, it is hard not to suspect some of this is a backward projection. The narrating Lawrence at any point in the book is always a superposition of the contemporaneous Lawrence in situ and the future Lawrence telling his story with the benefit of hindsight. Combined with his literary writing style and tendency to embark on long introspective digressions, all this makes Seven Pillars of Wisdom oscillate unsteadily between being a memoir, a historical account, and a war story.

Real life is much messier than a story, with less structure, and hence Lawrence’s retelling often feels like a series of disconnected events following one after the other without much in the way of connecting tissue. Seven Pillars of Wisdom presents the reader with a constant procession of people, places and communities, many of whom are introduced with an assumed familiarity, only to never be seen again. Keeping track of the manifold characters and places isn’t made easier by Lawrence’s refusal to adhere to a single rule for transliteration from Arabic to English. With Lawrence rushing between villages, riverbeds, oases and most importantly, railway lines, always in the company of an rotating cast of comrades, there is simply too much going on, a significant part of which would be considered irrelevant digression from a narrative perspective. There is a sense in which Seven Pillars of Wisdom truly is ‘one battle after another’, with its endless sequence of skirmishes, reconnoitres, and a truly astonishing level of destruction levelled at railway lines.

War of manoeuvre

Lawrence’s account of the campaign in Arabia contrasts markedly with the common understanding of World War I as fought on the Western Front. Where the the latter is remembered as a war of stasis, the Arab Revolt is a mobile guerrilla war predicated precisely on refusing a pitched battle with the enemy. The Arabian forces use stealth and mobility, tying down the Ottomans in a futile defence of their extended supply lines. In the first chapters of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence muses on contemporary military theory and its applicability, or lack thereof, to the situation in Arabia, foreshadowing the contrast between wars of position and wars of manoeuvre that we see developed a decade later by Antonio Gramsci. Compared to the masses of forces involved elsewhere in the war, the Arab forces are pitifully limited in number, ill-equipped and riven with internal tribal rivalries. Even within the Middle Eastern theatre of war, the Arab Revolt is a side-show to the main event, which is the British and French advance against the Ottoman Empire. Lawrence himself is fully aware of this, and Seven Pillars of Wisdom never pretends the fight to be anything else.

Given Lawrence’s knowledge that the Revolt will only play a minor part on a secondary front within the Great War, his determination to claim victory is not based on the strategic value of his efforts, but a professed desire to help the Hashemite dynasty, in particular Crown Prince Faisal I, secure a truly independent Arab State. This is to be achieved through a combination of direct conquest of the lands to be incorporated into the putative Arab Kingdom, consolidating the variegated tribes into a single national body politic, and lending sufficient assistance to the British to gain standing as a reliable ally. It is this latter consideration that causes Lawrence no end of anguish, given his fears that Britain will in the end do what serves the Empire, even if it means reneging on its promises to its Arab allies. Time and again Lawrence returns to the feeling he is a traitor, engaged in a deception against the Arabian tribes whose fealty he is working to enlist for Faisal, and it is no surprise that on entering Damascus, victory tastes bitter to him.

Complex white saviour

Lawrence’s constant unease about the trustworthiness of his British superiors towards the Arab forces is only one part of the profound emotional turmoil that afflicts him, which means Seven Pillars of Wisdom is not the straightforward Orientalist white saviour narrative that I had come to expect. At a surface level, the Orientalism is definitely there, with a white man leading a motley collection of noble savages towards their destiny, i.e. a modern, European-style nation state. Below the surface however, Lawrence is aware that his leadership is less to do with the innate superiority of the white race, and more with his role as a conduit for British rifles, money and supplies for the Arab cause, as well as his status as a neutral outsider with no stake in the many inter-tribal rivalries flaring across a still divided Arabian peninsula. Significant parts of the book are devoted to Lawrence describing debilitating illnesses, fatigue and lack of endurance compared to his fellow guerrillas, even as his experience with desert warfare increases. Conversely, once he has adopted the indigenous ways of living with the desert, Lawrence can only gaze in bemusement on his compatriots who refuse to exchange their patently unsuitable khaki uniforms for the much more appropriate indigenous dress. Although he does not articulate this explicitly, one gets the sense that Lawrence is well aware that British supremacy is not due to the innate superiority of the white master race, but the result of being the ones holding the Vickers machine guns.

Not that this means the racism and Orientalism isn’t there. In keeping with Western sensibilities of the era, Lawrence cannot help but essentialise his Arab comrades, as well as every other people, including the English. It makes for a pervasive but also uncommitted and inconstant racism, with Lawrence readily pronouncing on the innate characteristics of the Arab race on one page, only to completely deviate from all of this in his detailed psychological profiles of the most prominent members of the Revolt or his most intimate companions. There is something intriguing about seeing the racist logic operate so openly on the page, with Lawrence unable to grasp how the immense diversity of personas and communities he describes directly contradicts the generalising tenets of his racist ideology. Time and again Lawrence will make sweeping pronouncements about Arabs, Turks, Indians or the French, only for these to immediately break down in his recounting of the actual people he meets. Even the Turks, who come in for most of Lawrence’s spite, are humanised when encountered as individuals, in particular the conscripts, prisoners of war, and the many casualties. His role in the Revolt makes Lawrence acutely aware of the great variety across the Arabian tribes he encounters, and while he is unable to divest himself of a belief in some inherent ‘desert culture’, the racism on display in Seven Pillars of Wisdom is of a completely different nature than our prevailing ‘clash of civilisations’ discourse, which lets Western leaders launder their realpolitik via some putative grand theory of history. The idea of unified ‘Christian’ and ‘Islamic’ cultural blocs will have seemed patently absurd to Lawrence, engaged as he was in enlisting the aid of Arab muslims against their Turkish overlords as part of a protracted European ‘civil war’.

Nor is it only his deep ambivalence over his role in the Revolt that causes Lawrence anguish. From his writing emerges a profile of a conflicted man profoundly repulsed by all things physical, most of all his own body, and hence with a deep-seated envy of people who inhabit their bodies with ease. Time and again Lawrence seems to seek bodily transcendence in the harshness of the desert, but this remains always beyond his reach. Neither is he intellectually confident, for while he is an educated man, he is not a trained soldier and therefore feels inferior to the military command in which he is embedded. If it were not for his duty to king, country and the Revolt, Lawrence might plausibly have taken the road of Frank Herbert’s [Dune Messiah](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuneMessiah “Dune Messiah – Wikipedia”)_ and walked into the desert to disappear forever.

Imperial mandates

I cannot help but wonder to what degree the recurring episodes of self-loathing were retroactively amplified by the developments that followed the end of World War I. As Lawrence was writing his memoirs on return to England in the 1920s, the Arab state that he helped bring into being was destroyed in its infancy by French colonial forces, exercising their ‘mandate’ to Lebanon and Syria as agreed with Britain in the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement, of which Lawrence was probably already aware when fighting with his Arab irregulars. Only a few years later, Arabia is indeed unified, but not under the Hashemite dynasty of Faisal I, but under the rival house of Saud, again with connivance and support of the British. Within a decade of the conquest of Damascus, everything that Lawrence told his Arab comrades they were fighting for has been crushed, one way or another, by the European Powers, endorsed in this by the nascent League of Nations. It is the beginning of a long series of betrayals that endures to this day, which includes Mandate for Palestine, the Nakba, the Suez Crisis, the assassination of Iran’s Mossadegh and the invasions of Iraq, Libya, and Iran, as well as the unwavering support for Israel’s military adventurism and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. Seen in the light of the abject failure of the League of Nations to defend Arabian right to statehood in the 1920s, is it any wonder that the newly established Arab nations of the 1940s were disinclined to abide by a United Nations decree that the better half of Palestine was to be awarded to its recently arrived minority Jewish population?

Over a hundred years after its first publication, Seven Pillars of Wisdom is mainly interesting as a historical artefact that shows both the continuities and discontinuities of Western involvement in the Middle East. The British Empire has been eclipsed by the United States and its Israeli vassal as the primary imperial force, but the subordination of people’s right to self-determination to Western national interests remains. Direct colonial subjugation has disappeared, replaced by indirect economic control. And the racism is still there, but now grounded in Islamophobia rather than Orientalist essentialism. From the perspective of a family in Syria, Iran, or Palestine today, it must seem that everything changes so that everything can stay the same. The question is how many more white saviours they must suffer before they can take charge of their own destinies.

Notes & Suggestions

• An unavoidable comparison on reading Seven Pillars of Wisdom is with Frank Herbert’s Dune, for which it was a direct inspiration. In between the fighting and travelling, Lawrence gives a great deal of attention to the desert itself: the different compositions of sand and stone, the shape and topography, the sensation of various environments. Echoes of the desert, the Bedouin, and the outsider become leader can all be found in Dune. This essay offers an interesting discussion of the similarities, differences, and varying degrees of Orientalism in both books.
• Lawrence’s account of the exercise of imperial power is by its nature personal and small in scale. For an impersonal and macro-level account of how colonial policies readily sacrificed the lives of millions on the altar of imperial ambition, Late Victorian Holocausts gives a gruesome account of the catastrophic famines inflicted on European colonies in the 19th century as a consequence of their forcible integration into the global market.
• The Palestine Solidarity Campaign is the main British organisation campaigning to secure Palestinian rights and defend them against the ongoing occupation and genocide.

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A common theme in fantasy worldbuilding is that once there was a Golden Age, but now the magic has vanished or is draining away. The Elves have departed. The Gods have been slain. The Mysteries have been forgotten. So prevalent is this trope that the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy has a specific term for it: thinning”). It describes that feeling evoked by worlds that used to be fuller or richer, brimming with magic, mystery and wonder. But by some mysterious force or process, they have become emptier, flatter, greyer. In a word: thinner.

We saw thinning at work in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, where the plot centred on an attempt to restore a lost magic to England. But the example most fantasy readers will be familiar with is J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The Middle Earth walked by Frodo and Sam is a world where the most titanic struggles have already been fought, the mightiest empires have risen and fallen, the gods have walked the earth and retreated. Everything in The Lord of the Rings, from Lothlórien and Gondor all the way to Sauron himself, is a shadow of a grander age. The Lord of the Rings is at least in part a novel about how to move on in a world literally set in the ruins of the past.

The world of Martha Well’s Witch King has similarly thinned, but here there is no mystery about why the world is emptier than it once was. It is thinner because invaders from across the sea landed on its shores and massacred everyone and everything. Witch King is not a story of melancholic longing for some imagined but lost Englishness, but a direct reckoning with the effects of genocide, trauma, and loss, and what happens to those left alive to move on from it.

Witch King starts with demon Kaiisteron (Kai) and witch Ziede finding themselves imprisoned, but quickly liberated by the misguided attempts by an ‘expositor’ (i.e., a sorcerer) to enthral Kai. Thus inadvertently freed, Kai and Ziede must discover who betrayed them, and to what end, and what fate has befallen their friends and allies.

This situation creates a great amount of anxiety for both Kai and Ziede, and as the story progresses, we gradually find out why. Both were there when their world first burned, when their friends were slaughtered and their ways of life destroyed. Witch King is structured like braid, with alternating chapters set in the present and the past. It is from the past chapters that we learn that when Kai was young and had only recently crossed into the human world, a people called the Hierarchs came from across the sea and exterminated almost all the societies they encountered, saving only a few to be either subjugated or enslaved. In their war, the Hierarchs have two advantages over their enemies. First, their united forces, arrayed against a fragmented patchwork of city states, tribes and principalities that comprises Kai and Ziede’s world. Second a form of blood magic powered by death and suffering. It is the latter that allows the Hierarchs to wage the magical equivalent of nuclear warfare, making their merciless advance unstoppable.

The Hierarchs’ genocidal invasion has echoes of the Roman conquests of Gaul and Carthage or the arrival of conquistadors in the Americas, and it is probably no coincidence that the Hierarchs’ soldiers are called legionaries. The level of death and destruction is a clear departure from from Wells’ previous Murderbot Diaries series, which despite being set in a dystopian future did tend to see its heroes prevail over their adversaries. Not so in Witch King, where we watch with Kai as his people are massacred, his fellow demons imprisoned, and his connection to the Underearth severed.

Witch King is not a story about heroic resistance, but of loss and how to come to terms with it. The majority of the novel is set after first the invasion and then the defeat of the Hierarchs. The chapters set in the past tell us some of the events of the invasion, but here we are constrained by Kai’s own limited knowledge of what is happening, and that strand of the story terminating before we arrive at the successful counter-offensive against the Hierarchs.

The purpose of the ‘past’ chapters is therefore not to describe heroic battles, but to explain why ‘present’ Kai, Ziede and their allies are the way they are. Our heroes suffer from trauma and survivors guilt that expresses itself in panic, mistrust, and a reflexive tendency to deploy force or violence in defence of self or loved ones. Each of the characters who lived through the war is struggling to recover who they were, restrain the negative impulses they’ve developed due to what they’ve suffered, and to integrate their experiences into a new self that can move forward. There has been a profound break in the world of Witch King, and the novel put me in mind of The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin, which ends on this reflection:

“Sometimes a god comes,” Selver said. “He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another.”

The inhabitants of Witch King were not as innocent or pacifist as the Althesians in Le Guin’s novella, but it is nonetheless implied that before the arrival of the Hierarchs, their communities coexisted mostly peacefully. It is therefore not only our heroes, but their entire society that has to come to terms with trauma and having been fundamentally altered. To defeat the Hierarchs, the fragmented city-states and other political entities that existed before the invasion were forced to unify into the an alliance called the Rising Worlds Coalition. But just as Le Guin’s Althesians could not put murder back into the dream-world, neither can Wells’ societies unlearn domination, autocracy and imperialism.

The search of Well’s characters for a new identity not governed by their traumatic experience is thus mirrored in the search of their communities for a future beyond mass death, war and domination. In both cases it involves internal conflict and work to unlearn reflexes forged in pain and despair. One of Kai’s key motivations is to prevent the Rising Worlds Coalition, which began as an alliance of independent states formed to fight the Hierarchs, from itself turning into a for mof empire. I was reminded of Hannah Proctor’s meditations on collective grief in Burnout, and how communities can be sundered by a trauma that, while shared, is nonetheless experienced uniquely individually. What is clear, is that Wells does not believe that simply putting the King back on the throne of Gondor is going to be a solution to anything.

The absence of the actual war of the Rising Worlds Coalition against the Hierarchs does leave an odd gap in Witch King’s worldbuilding, which is compounded by Kai’s ignorance throughout much of the ‘past’ chapters. We hence only gradually and incompletely discover the world’s lore, with Wells offering little in the form of exposition. The absence of characters launching into lengthy but implausible explanations makes for refreshingly natural reading, but combined with Wells’ creative approach to existing fantasy concepts and her invention of new ones, makes the story and the finer points of the lore hard to follow. Character abilities occasionally emerge just when they are convenient to progress the plot, lending a mild feel of deus ex machina to parts of the story, though unlike in for example Mal Goes to War, this did not impair the overall plausibility for me.

Witch King is an intriguing new direction for Wells, although it shares with the Murderbot Diaries the centrality of found family, the importance of trust, and the almost casual inclusion of diverse representations of gender, ethnicity, sexuality and disability. A crucial difference however is that where Murderbot’s journey of self-discovery starts almost from a blank slate at the point they gain autonomy, Kai’s journey is instead one of recovery after a cataclysmic rupture. It is a courageous decision to write a fantasy that focuses not on the ultimate battle, but the aftermath, with its painful work of reconstruction, reconnection and healing. In a world of ecological breakdown, warfare and genocide, these themes are more valuable than yet another simplistic triumph of good over evil. At the conclusion of Witch King there is therefore clearly more to do, and I am interested to see where Wells takes this story next.

Notes & Suggestions

• Anxiety, grief, loss, anger, and trauma are emotions that will, in varying degrees, be familiar to people organising in activist spaces, from marginalised communities, or who have simply been hurt by the world. Hannah Proctor taught us that none of us can be whole in a broken world, but that collective healing is a process that can sustain us. If you are struggling, seek assistance if it is available to you, but more importantly, reach out to friends, family or comrades that you trust. Readers in England and Wales can access Mind for support. Readers in Scotland can turn to SAMH.
• Readers who enjoyed Wells’ Murderbot Diaries may also enjoy Citizen Sleeper, a relatively short videogame exploring the same themes of community, the autonomy of constructed sentiences, and corporate dystopia.
• Perhaps surprisingly, Marvel’s Loki shares Witch King’s argument that the real work only starts after we defeat our enemies, while similarly engaging with themes of grief, despair, and recovery.

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Warning: Contains spoilers

Fantasy has a subgenre that asks itself “what if history, but with magic?”, and within that subgenre there is a peculiar penchant for novels set during the British Regency era with its High Society romances and the thrill of the Napoleonic Wars. Bridgerton with Dragons, if you will. Because after all, what is more dashing than a well-bred aristocrat wizard wearing the uniform of His Majesty’s Royal Navy?

Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell falls within this genre, but takes a deeper approach than adding magical creatures to a romance or adventure story. Set during the Napoleonic Wars, it tells the story of the two titular magicians and their efforts to restore magic, specifically English magic, to the world. The novel’s 900+ pages of high society salons, the Peninsular War and expeditions to elven lands are quite possibly less about magic, and more about what does or does not define Englishness. Clarke’s novel almost feels like an incantation itself, a magical tome containing an intricate spell to conjure up a lost England for the reader.

Powerful spells require excellent concentration and superb command of one’s ingredients however, and this is where Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell does not always have the wizardry required. It is a daunting undertaking to sustain pace and dramatic tension across hundreds of pages, and at times Clarke does not succeed at this. But it is the ending where for me the story unravelled and the spell broke. There is much to enjoy in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, in particular for fans of the English classics, but the finale did not deliver the magical fireworks that its premise promised.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is built on an almost dialectical series of interconnected juxtapositions that start with the contrast between the two mages and spirals out from there. We are introduced first to Mr Norrell, a deeply insecure, narrow-minded and vindictive member of the minor gentry set outwith Society by virtue of both his status and personality. His deep-seated anxieties drive his contradictory impulses of wanting to restore English magic, while simultaneously sequestering any magical books he can find away in his private library lest anyone else might read them. Norrell is a man who craves intellectual companionship with the same strength with which he fears potential competition. It is a rare moment indeed when he overcomes his caution and takes on Jonathan Strange as his apprentice, who is psychologically the complete opposite of Norrell, the yang to Norrell’s yin. Equally riven by contradictory impulses, Strange oscillates between the insouciant and carefree nonchalance that only comes from being securely born as an aristocrat into high society, and obsessive fixation on whatever interest or task he has set himself. Strange takes up magic on a whim, but his unthinking self-confidence means ends up drawn far deeper into the mysteries of the art than Norrell.

Unbeknownst to themselves, both magicians find themselves in conflict with The Gentleman with Thistledown Hair. A faery with no regard for morality, honour or good manners, he represents the dark and wild side of English magic that Norrell seeks desperately to excise from his modern approach to magic, and to which Strange becomes fixedly attracted. Yet it is Norrell who first sets the Gentleman on a course against the magicians, by compelling him to assist in the resurrection of Lady Pole, a young woman, to secure Norrell’s access to the highest levels of government.

Together with various other characters orbiting the three magicians, Lady Pole represents a third juxtaposition within the novel, between the three mages and their collateral damage. For what unites Norrell, Strange and the Gentleman is a callous disregard for the consequence of their actions. Even though the three mages are constantly at odds with one another, they share a deep carelessness about other people: Norrell because he cares only for himself, Strange because he does not care for others, and the Gentleman because he cares not at all.

The characters hurt by the three mages represent various oppressed groups in Regency England: women, black slaves, the poor and working classes. Norrell’s bargain with the Gentleman to restore life to Lady Pole sees the latter lead a double life in the Faerie, leaving her exhausted and seemingly mad, to eventually be secluded away for the sake of propriety. Strange’s neglected and ignored wife Arabella is similarly enchanted, as is Stephen Black, black butler to the Pole household who is neither slave nor free man. And poor, working and even middle class magicians are excluded from the revival of English magic as it established as a gentlemanly pursuit.

And therein lies the final contradiction, for while Norrell, Strange and their Government Ministers dream of a thoroughly English magic for the modern age, the magic itself stubbornly refuses to conform to their aristocratic sensibilities. Magic was brought to England a thousand years earlier by the Raven King, a human foundling raised by faeries who conquered Northern England to establish his own kingdom. The Raven King’s magic is indeed English, but it is the magic of gnarled oaks in dark winter forests as much as of the green rolling hills in the imaginations of Norrell, Strange, and the past and present English upper classes, ensconced in their stately homes in the Home Counties. There is an obvious implied argument here that it is not just the magic, but Englishness itself that is much darker, older and wyrder than the national myth of the green and pleasant land and the people that own it. That England’s blasted moorlands, mountain crags and snow-covered forests, and the people that dwell there, have an equal claim to Englishness.

Breaking open the dominant notion of Englishness to make it more inclusive has merit, but the risk of an argument about the cultural self-conception of a specific part of a small island nation on the periphery of the Eurasian continent is that it becomes, well, insular. The outsized cultural influence of the Anglosphere notwithstanding, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell does not escape this inherent provincialism, and instead rather leans into it. In part this is because the debate at the heart of the book implies that magic is something uniquely English, there being no evidence or engagement with foreign magical practices past or present throughout the novel. On top of that, the style and format of the novel further reinforce its profoundly inward-looking nature. To pay homage to English Romance novels, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is written like a contemporaneous account of the novel’s events (footnotes included!), but the price of this is that despite Clarke’s possible misgivings about the English upper class, they still dominate the pages and provide our lens on the story’s events. Unable to escape their inbred sense of superiority, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is unfortunately suffused of the infamous “Heavy Fog in Channel – Continent Cut Off” mentality.

The centrality of upper class characters is also one of the reasons why Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell did not fully work for me as a narrative that attempts to bring marginalised groups back into the story, though I don’t dispute this is a possible reading. It is undoubtedly the case that the female and working class characters have more common sense and see things more clearly than either of the two titular magicians or the upper class characters who are frequently depicted as either incompetent, venal, or both. But with the exception of Mr Norrell’s manservant Childermass and the vagrant prophet-magician Vinculus, most of the marginalised characters have their agency curtailed either directly (as in the case of Lady Pole who is enchanted by the Gentleman) or indirectly (as in the case of Stephen Black who has no standing on account of his race). While they act as a foil for the arrogance of the wizards and their class, they do not exert their own power on events until the final part of the book, and even then their role is instrumental, but not directive.

This is is because as we approach the novel’s finale in the third act, we discover that Clarke chose to play with that most dangerous magic of all: prophecy. Jonathan Strange and Gilbert Norrell may believe they are directing the return of magic to England, but gradually it is revealed that they are mere ingredients in someone else’s spell. A spell by none other than John Uskglass, the Raven King himself, to restore his magic to England.

It is an intriguing development, falling somewhat short of a twist by virtue of serious foreshadowing, but it has the effect of collapsing the dramatic tension just as we approach the conclusion, For as soon as we know that events are preordained, the actions, agonising and arguments of the protagonists cease to be compelling. The outcome of the story may well be interesting, but it is so in the way of a game of chess: we might be invested in the outcome and the play, but nobody will enquire after the moods or motivations of the pieces.

For this reason I was ultimately also not persuaded by the thesis that Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell emancipates its marginalised characters by moving them from periphery into the centre of the story. Because the centre of this story is empty, a void spun around the absent figure of the Raven King who turns out to have been pulling everyone’s strings all along. In a way, Clarke does manage to equalise the standing of her upper class magicians and her other characters, but it is done by reducing the former rather than elevating the latter.

As an argument about who magic belongs to, the denouncement of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell may work very well, but as a story it fizzled out for me. By this point, the reader has spent hundreds of pages of sometimes laboured prose in the company of two unpleasant magicians, whose idiosyncrasies, inability to communicate and failure to notice crucial events perform precisely as the plot demands. It may have worked if Clarke had also intended Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell as a pastiche of a comedy of errors, but I doubt that is the case. In a way the ending retroactively justifies these odd lapses of judgement and the fact that the cause of English magic ever came to rest on the shoulders of two men so ill-equipped to bear it, but satisfying it is not.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is an ambitious, at times audacious work. It mixes evident affection for fantasy and the English classics with a critique of both genres, taking its story from what feels like a familiar beginning into an unexpected direction. But at over 900 pages it also feels drawn out, with great lapses where nothing seems to happen and the reader is left waiting for events to unfold. Since it was published in 2004, fantasy has seen much innovation and a proliferation of protagonists from diverse backgrounds, and by comparison Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell can feel dated. It should certainly still appeal to readers with a love of the ‘historic Britain with magic’ subgenre, in particular those who are intimately familiar with the English classics. But beyond that it is somewhat too much like its wizards: learned but long-winded, adroit but unfocused, and ultimately just not in control of its magic.

Notes & Suggestions

• There were times when Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell reminded me of Gormenghast, probably because of the similarities in length, the drifting plot and the constant sense of something ominous in the background. Where Peake uses Gormenghast Castle as the structure that contains his protagonists, Clarke could be said to use the whole of the English landscape. But England is much larger than Gormenghast, and we never spend enough time outside of London to give it the same dominating presence as Peake’s Castle.
• ‘Men failing to communicate’ is also central to the plot of Akira, and I suppose it is generally a common trope. Akira’s sheer energy and much shorter runtime mean it gets away with it in a way that Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell does not.
• I enjoyed putting this review in dialogue with a 2008 review of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Elizabeth Hoiem, published in Strange Horizons magazine. Although I eventually tracked down the original, I initially accessed it using the Wayback Machine, which seeks to preserve web content even after the original pages expire. A laudable aim that always values support.

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This year saw the remaster of critically-acclaimed Akira, probably the movie most credited with introducing anime to a Western audience. Like 1982’s Blade Runner from which it draws inspiration, Akira imagines a future so proximate that we are now living it, in this case a vision of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Remasters generate renewed interest and the potential to bring a classic to new audiences, as well as the chance for the more elderly among us to indulge in nostalgia. It also presents an opportunity for a critical contemporary reappraisal of art that, by virtue of the passage of time, has taken on a second nature as representative of a specific cultural and historical context from which it is ever further removed. Such reappraisals have seen some movies retroactively acquire cult status, while others have fallen from grace and found themselves relegated to the dust heap of history.

Akira appears however to have escaped such re-evaluations, with recent reviews generally reaffirming its cult status and importance to the cultural exchange between Japan and the West, in particular with regards to animation. This is a missed opportunity given both Akira’s richness and its historical and cultural specificity, which should provide plenty of stimulating touchpoints for dialogue with our present moment, especially considering our dystopian zeitgeist and the enduring popularity of the cyberpunk genre. A film that dared to imagine our present moment deserves better than being engaged only in terms of its cultural legacy.

Akira follows the exploits of Kaneda, leader of motorcycle gang the Capsules, as he finds himself and his gang in the crosshairs of a covert military research effort to create humans with psychic abilities (dubbed ‘espers’). A collision with an escaped esper imbues one of Kaneda’s gang members, Tetsuo, with psychic powers, resulting in him summarily being whisked away by Colonel Shikishima to a secret military facility for experimentation. Kaneda’s resolution to free his friend sees him join forces with Kei, a revolutionary, whose cell intends to liberate the espers. What follows is a chaotic crescendo of violence as the hubris of men inexorably raises the stakes, resulting in an epic final stand off between Kaneda and Tetsuo at the construction site for Tokyo’s 2020 Olympic Stadium, by which point large swathes of Neo-Tokyo have already been laid waste and the civilian casualties have mounted into their thousands.

The titular Akira himself is not so much a character as the loop around which the movie’s story is wound, functioning both as the point of origin of the movie’s events and their resolution. Though absent, he is the centre of gravity for many of the movie’s protagonists. For some of Neo-Tokyo’s denizens he is an object of cult worship, for the remaining espers a quest for transcendence, for Tetsuo his last hope of controlling his spiralling psychic powers, and for colonel Shikishima a dangerous secret to be supressed.

Both aesthetically and narratively Akira is a tour de force. We start with the high-octane energy of Kaneda’s futuristic motorcycle gang having it out with their rivals, and the movie sustains this frenetic pace until the credits roll. Its visuals embody the gold standard of 1980s Japanese animation, rendering the cyberpunk world of Neo-Tokyo in exquisite detail and its inhabitants with a vital energy. With the notable exception of mechas and kaiju, Akira is a catalogue of futuristic anime staples, from secret government programmes to towering skyscrapers and thinly-veiled references to nuclear destruction. If much of it feels familiar, it is because of how this movie inspired so much of what followed.

Even in the background details, there is a richness and depth that suffuses the film, never leaving the viewer in doubt that there is much more to this world than we get to see. We get snippets of debates in smoke-filled council chambers suggestive of political wranglings that are never explored. Exchanges between NPCs that are there purely as scenery convince us that Neo-Tokyo is filled with people living their own lives, wholly unrelated and oblivious to the unfolding story. Our protagonists come with their implied backstories to which minimal exposition is devoted. All this leaves us with the impression that all we get is a glimpse into this sprawling, chaotic, complex world.

That complex chaos is one aspect of Akira that diverges from many contemporary cyberpunk dystopias. Akira’s central dystopian anxiety is that of chaos and decay, not calamitous collapse or totalitarian control. Neo-Tokyo is a complex system disintegrating under the weight of its own internal contradictions where nobody is in command, and any attempts to exercise control only serves to destabilise the system further. The overriding sense is of a lack of order, apart from what groups such as the Capsules can locally impose, and this is further reinforced by the alienating effects of the inchoate storyline and the soundtrack. Contrary to the claustrophobic control of Silo or The Ten Percent Thief, the chaos in Akira is expansive, too big to contain. And unlike the external collapse of Interstellar or Oryx & Crake, in Akira it is the inherent instability of the society itself that is maintaining it in a state of permanent implosion.

If the rampant chaos and decay are one way by which Akira signals the dystopian status of Neo-Tokyo, the treatment of women is another. Using overt oppression of women as the signifier for dystopia is common, and while it can be done well (most famously in The Handmaid's Tale), Akira's uncritical use of this trope is problematic. Akira features three main female characters: Tetsuo’s girlfriend Kaori, revolutionary Kei, and esper Kiyoko. Kaori’s role is primarily to suffer. Early on in the movie an ill-fated escape attempt with Tetsuo sees her brutally physically and sexually assaulted. Rendered in Akira’s signature vivid style, the harrowing scene is compounded by the suspicion that the (presumed male) audience is meant to find the half-naked and violated Kaori vaguely titillating. Kaori’s only other key appearance is at the movie’s finale, where her ineffectual attempt to calm an out-of-control Tetsuo leads to him crushing her to death. Kaori is easily the most innocent and caring character in the film, and the only one who sees that Tetsuo needs compassion, not machismo. But in Neo-Tokyo, empathy is a fatal liability punishable by death.

Kei’s portrayal is much more sympathetic, and as a revolutionary she has significantly more agency than Kaori. Nonetheless, she is gradually eclipsed by Kaneda even though of the two she ought to be the more capable warrior. Her flaw is a tendency to think before she acts, unlike Kaneda who blunders into situations but surmounts them through sheer force of will. This disempowerment begins shortly after the two characters meet, when Kei’s disinterest in Kaneda’s flirtatious overtures immediately results in an aggressively abusive response from the latter. This is portrayed not as a flaw in our hero, but as an acceptable if maybe somewhat immature way for a man to express frustration at the rejection of his advances towards an attractive woman, and will be painfully recognisable to any female viewers. Akira avoids a a standard romantic arc for Kei and Kaneda after this inauspicious start, but we are nonetheless to understand that Kaneda's boisterous energy and dedication to Tetsuo gradually win Kei over.

Kiyoko, finally, is probably the most effective of the three espers. But while her two male counterparts are depicted as miniature adults, Kiyoko retains the trappings of a little girl, stuck in a slightly bizarre and unsettling father/daughter relationship with colonel Shikishima.

Between them these three characters are undeniably instrumental to the resolution of the story, and the organised, capable and thoughtful Kei in particular contrasts positively with loose-cannon goofball Kaneda. Over the course of the film however, the agency of the female characters progressively erodes, and combined with overt violence against women as an indicator of the dystopian nature of Neo-Tokyo, a latent misogyny suffuses the movie. One might argue that this is simply reflective of the movie’s times, were it not for the fact that Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind came out four years before Akira, proving that dystopian anime with a much more positive female depictions was eminently possible.

A potential counterargument here is that the entire movie could be interpreted as at least in part a critique of toxic masculinity. It is after all propelled by Kaneda and Tetsuo’s inability to express their friendship other than through competition and violent one-upmanship, and it is the incessant desire of men to obtain power and exercise control that pushes Neo-Tokyo deeper and deeper into crisis. Multiple times characters choose coercion and anger over compassion and understanding, fuelling the spiral of violence until it comes to a catastrophic terminus. In this sense, Akira falls squarely in the ‘things men do to avoid going to therapy’ category, although in fairness it seems likely that in Neo-Tokyo mental health services are even more eviscerated than they are in austerity Britain. In the end, Akira doesn't have the self-awareness to pull off this critique, as it does not manage to point at any alternatives, but rather forecloses them as it did with Kaori’s brutal death. At its heart, Akira is too excited about being a movie for boys about boys doing boy things, with fast motorcycles and big explosions.

None of this invalidates Akira’s status as an iconic and historically significant movie, nor detract from the its exquisite craftsmanship, raucously immersive story, and its dystopian critique. It is nonetheless intriguing that its overwhelming spectacle appears to have stunned contemporary reviews into a mere reaffirmation of the cult status we already knew Akira possessed, preventing engagement with aspects of the movie that have aged for better or worse. With nearly forty years between now and the movie’s release, it feels like an opportunity was missed to more critically evaluate Akira and ask what it can offer those who live in the future it sought to anticipate, as well as which of its cultural descendants may have transcended their source material.

Notes & Suggestions

• This review was inspired and greatly influenced by my partner, and I want to thank her for her suggestions and contributions.
• Despite the obvious violent or dismissive treatment of women, I only found one mildly obscure commentary on this aspect of Akira. An interesting and more holistic evaluation of many of the themes present in Akira, including alienation, Japanese history and the ubiquitous references to nuclear warfare in anime can be found here.
• The aesthetic influence of Akira can be clearly seen in Pluto, although there the skyscrapers and technological prowess appears in utopian rather than dystopian guise.
• A worthwhile counterpoint to the usual failure of action heroes to communicate (or go to therapy) is Marvel's Thunderbolts.

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