The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies 2015-2016

written by David Steffen

This post covers two years of Beneath Ceaseless Skies–they didn’t publish quite enough stories in 2015 to do a list. Beneath Ceaseless Skies continues to publish quality other-world fiction, edited by Scott H. Andrews. This list only covers the stories they published on their podcast, which is a bit less than half of the stories they publish–one podcast every two weeks. They published 45 original stories on the podcast in 2015-2016.

The stories that are eligible for this year’s science fiction awards (like the Hugo and Nebula) are marked with an asterisk (*). BCS publishes all original fiction, but only that was first published in the 2016 calendar year is eligible.

The List

1. “The Punctuality Machine, Or, A Steampunk Libretto” by Bill Powell
Written as a futuristic time-travel musical plays written in the 1800s, with a full-cast recording. So much fun!

2. “The Sweetest Skill” by Tony Pi*
The third in a series of short stories about the candy magician Ao, who can make magical animated candies as well as negotiating arrangements with spirits of the Zodiac for greater powers. Again he is drawn into using his powers in the service of others. This story stands by itself, but if you want to find out more about his powers, and why he owes the debts that he does, you should also read the first story, “A Sweet Calling” published at Clarkesworld, and the second story “No Sweeter Art” published at Beneath Ceaseless Skies in previous years.

3. “The Night Bazaar For Women Becoming Reptiles” by Rachael K. Jones*
Jones has a penchant for the weird, and this story is a prime example. In the city in this story, everyone has a daytime life and a nighttime life, each with different lovers and different occupations and different expectations. The protagonist sells reptile eggs to women at the Night Bazaar that transform them into reptiles, but she longs for such a transformation herself.

4. “Blessed Are Those That Have Seen, and Do Not Believe” by D.K. Thompson*
Another entry in the St. Darwin’s Spirituals story, a kind of steampunk noir where Darwin invented goggles that allow the wearer to see spirits, and there are other supernatural elements as well.

5. “Court Bindings” by Karalynn Lee
The protagonist is the bodyguard of a princess against the assassins of foreign courts, while watching her grow in her magic to compel other living beings to her will.

Honorable Mentions

“The King in the Cathedral” by Rich Larson

“The Mountains His Crown” by Sarah Pinsker*

Hugo/Nebula Award Recommendations!

written by David Steffen

Having previously listing out award-eligible works that were written or published by me, here is my list of works that I think you might want to consider for Hugo and Nebula awards that were not written or published by me.

I’m working mostly from the Hugo Award categories, but a few of these categories overlap with the Nebulas as well.

The Short Story category is the one that means the most to me, so to help suggest more reading for anyone interested, I’ve listed 10 stories instead of 5.

Note that I have skipped any categories that I didn’t think that I was sufficiently knowledgeable enough about during the year of 2016.

Also, in any given category, the ordering does not mean anything–the order is not rank-order, so the first is not any different than the last, etc.

I left out the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, because I know a lot of amazing people on that list and I don’t want to make people feel bad they got left out (but I’m still going to have to pick 5 for my actual ballot!).

Best Novel

FIX by Ferrett Steinmetz

United States of Japan by Peter Tieryas

Best Novella

“Everybody Loves Charles” by Bao Shu, translated by Ken Liu (Clarkesworld)

“Chimera” by Gu Shi, translated by S. Qiouyi Lu and Ken Liu (Clarkesworld)

“The Snow of Jinyang” by Zhang Ran, translated by Ken Liu and Carmen Yiling Yan (Clarkesworld)

Best Novelette

“Fifty Shades of Grays” by Steven Barnes (Lightspeed)

“The Calculations of Artificials” by Chi Hui, translated by John Chu (Clarkesworld)

“The Venus Effect” by Joseph Allen Hill (Lightspeed)

Best Short Story

“Archibald Defeats the Churlish Shark-Gods” by Benjamin Blattberg (Podcastle)

“Beat Softly, My Wings of Steel” by Beth Cato (Podcastle)

“The Bee-Tamer’s Final Performance” by Aidan Doyle (Podcastle)

“The Night Bazaar For Women Becoming Reptiles” by Rachael K. Jones (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)

“The First Confirmed Case of Non-Corporeal Recursion: Patient Anita R.” by Benjamin C. Kinney (Strange Horizons)

“The Modern Ladies’ Letter-Writer” by Sandra McDonald (Nightmare)

“A Partial List of Lists I Have Lost Over Time” by Sunil Patel (Asimov’s)

“The Sweetest Skill” by Tony Pi (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)

“Thundergod in Therapy” by Effie Seiberg (originally published in Galaxy’s Edge, but the link is to free reprint in Podcastle)

“In Their Image” by Abra Staffin-Wiebe (Escape Pod)

Best Graphic Story

Gravity Falls: Journal 3 by Alex Hirsch and Rob Renzetti

Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)

Finding Dory

The Secret Life of Pets

Sing

Zootopia

Best Editor (Short Form)

Jen Albert (Podcastle)

Neil Clarke (Clarkesworld)

Graeme Dunlop (Podcastle)

Rachael K. Jones (Podcastle)

Norm Sherman (Escape Pod)

Best Professional Artist

Galen Dara

Best Semiprozine

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Drabblecast

Escape Pod

Podcastle

Strange Horizons

Best Fanzine

File770

Quick Sip Reviews

Best Fan Writer

Mike Glyer (File770)

Charles Payseur (Quick Sip Reviews)

GAME REVIEW: The Last Guardian

written by Melissa Shaw

The Last Guardian is a gorgeously detailed, thoughtful action-adventure fantasy game. You play a young boy who awakens in a cavern with a large mythical creature who is chained to the floor. As the story progresses, you form a bond with the creature, Trico, as the two of you navigate through environmental puzzles set in enormous, elaborate environments, some of ancient ruins, some of dizzying heights. Sometimes you need Trico’s help to survive or progress through a series of puzzles, and sometimes Trico needs yours.

Designed and directed by Fumito Ueda, who brought us the iconic Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, The Last Guardian shows the influences of both of those games, particularly Ico. In this game, however, you leave all the combat to your enormous companion.

Although the game offers you only a small selection of simple gameplay mechanics to find your way through each map, it combines these mechanics in an ingenious variety of ways to create challenging and thought-provoking puzzles. Rarely is the path through an area clear at first glance. Fortunately, the game lets you take your time in most sections, which also enables you to explore the lush maps, some parts of which serve no purpose other than to enhance the sense of grandeur and detail of this world.

One of the most notable aspects of the game is the creature design. It may seem odd to use a word like “realistic” to describe a 20-foot-tall, feathered beast with a doglike face, a catlike body, and glowing blue horns, but Trico scans as a realistic animal, with idiosyncratic but recognizable behaviors. His animation blending is seamless, so nothing interrupts the realism of Trico on-screen. He is an appealing companion, by turns protective, affectionate, curious, and fearful. He grows attached to you, following you around, howling mournfully when you’ve gone somewhere he can’t reach. Although Trico moves like a cat, he isn’t perfect; he sometimes misjudges leaps and has to scramble to complete them. His imperfections make him all the more endearing.

Like any real animal, Trico is not a perfectly controllable creature. He has his own agenda and his own limitations. The game requires patience. It can be difficult to communicate what you want to Trico at first, and even when you can, it can take him a little time to do as you ask. The game also requires you to let go of precise control sometimes, and let Trico find his own way rather than waiting for you to direct him.

This game is not without its frustrations. Camera control is sometimes restricted, making it difficult to see. At other times, the camera moves abruptly from one place to another, often to avoid clipping through solid objects. These movements are jarring, and since you move the player character relative to the camera, they can interfere with gameplay. In addition, the game has an atypical controller scheme, with no option to reconfigure it or to reassign buttons. And although it’s a virtue that it is difficult to fall off Trico inadvertently, the flip side of that is that it can be difficult to jump or drop from Trico when you want to. In terms of the story, near the end of the game, there’s a brutal and disturbing cut-scene that’s hard to watch, and another cut-scene that leaves you wondering what you’ve been feeding your friend.

On the whole, though, The Last Guardian is a magnificent game: often quiet and moving, sometimes abruptly exciting, always immersive and beautiful.

Melissa Shaw’s short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Realms of Fantasy, Analog, and several anthologies. Melissa is a Clarion West graduate and a “Writers of the Future” contest winner. She is currently writing for an as-yet-unreleased video game.

GAME REVIEW: TIS-100

written by David Steffen

TIS-100 is a assembly language parallel-node programming-focused puzzle game, published on Steam in July 2015 by Zachtronics.

For those who aren’t familiar with what “assembly language” is, it is the lowest level of programming language; it is actually what the CPU on your computer is running (mind you, it varies from processor to processor, so when I say “assembly language” it’s not a single language really). Programmers these days rarely write in actual assembly language–they write in some high-level language like C++ and then programs called compilers break those high-level languages down into assembly language.

Anyway, so each “level” of the game involves you being asked to write a program that completes a certain task. This could be copying data from one field to another, adding numbers, sorting numbers, multiplying numbers, and so on. To this end you have one or more inputs feeding into a grid of processing nodes, and one or more outputs, and your job is to process those inputs into appropriate outputs by writing instructions in each of the nodes.

There are quite a few limitations on what you will be capable of doing. Each processing node can only store two values, one in the accumulator (ACC) and one in the backup (BAK). There are also stack nodes that are available in some levels that you can use for more storage, and there are tricks you can figure out to keep track of more information, but generally that’s what you have to work with.

Not only that, but each node can only hold about 16 instructions–these instructions loop so it won’t just sit idle when they’re done, but there’s a limit to how many different tasks can be handled by a single node.

And it’s very easy to deadlock nodes. When a node passes data to another node, it wait indefinitely until the other node retrieves it before doing any other instructions. When a node catches data from another node, it will indefinitely wait until the other node actually sends some data. So, one way you can lock up your system is to have two adjacent nodes simultaneously send each other data–then they both wait forever for the other node to retrieve it, but the other node will never retrieve it because the other node is also waiting.

Once you think you’ve written something that might work, then you can run the system and it will test it against known input/output values and give you a passing or failing grade, as well as keeping stats like runtime and instruction count. You can also step through the code for debugging purposes.

If this all sounds horribly boring to you… it probably will be! It’s a very niche sort of game, certainly.

Visuals
Basically nonexistent. Mostly just text or colored blocks/bars on screen. It makes sense for the kind of game

Audio
Almost none. Which I found kind of nice because it was easy to play the game with sound off, so it’s easier to find a space to play it.

Challenge
Quite high puzzle challenge. the game provides a manual which explains everything you need to know about the language, so you don’t have to have any prior knowledge of programming. And, though it will feel familiar to anyone who has done some assembly language programming, I think that it is a made-up language so no one will know it before the game starts anyway.

That being said, I think that the game will be much easier for experienced programmers to start playing and to master, simply from being familiar with the kind of data manipulation and debugging mindset. This game is challenging for an experienced software engineer, so I imagine it would be significantly more difficult for someone with no programming experience.

Story
There is a hint of a story. The manual has a note attached to it that says that this old computer was found in your deceased uncle’s belongings, and it’s been given to you. There are also note files scattered in the various puzzles written by the uncle, talking about the machine and its oddities. I haven’t completely finished the game yet, so it’s possible that these coalesce into a coherent story at some point that actually affects gameplay, but at this point they just seem like set dressing rather than an integral part of the game. Which is fine! It’s a programming game, and it does what it does very well.

Session Time
As short or as long as you like! It is a very easy game to put down at any time. If you are working on a program and you want to shut it off, you can save and quit at any point without penalty, and shutting it down takes only a few seconds. Perfect for someone whose life is full of random interruptions. The one catch is that, for some of the more complicated puzzles, trying to get your head wrapped around the whole puzzle again might take some time, but there’s not much to be done about that.

Playability
The manual explains the language very concisely, and even gives some examples. It’s easy to experiment with various things to figure out what works and what doesn’t. The debugging features are super nice to help you break at any point and step through the code, watching the values of the memory storage at any given time to track down where something has gone wrong.

The game is difficult because that’s the point, but it has some very nice easy-to-use tools to help you solve the puzzles.

Replayability
There is some replayability inherent in the game. Once you solve a puzzle it is marked as solved, but it does keep statistics about how many nodes you used, how many cycles it took to run, and how many instructions it took to run, and it also tells you what the best possible solution as measured in those metrics is. So you can reply the game to try to tackle those goals to optimize your code. There are some really steep challenges to unlock as achievements, such as solving certain puzzles without ever using certain instructions.

Originality
I have never played another game like it. The only thing it reminds me of is taking an actual assembly language class way back in 2003.

Playtime
Whew, no way to predict this. It really just depends on how good you are at debugging and visualizing the puzzles in your head. I don’t know about anyone else, but I tend to continue cogitating on the problems even after the game is shut off too, and then suddenly when I’m doing something completely unrelated the solution will pop into my head. I think I’ve put in, maybe 2 or 3 hours on the game so far and indicators seem to suggest that I am about halfway done with the puzzles? Assuming the puzzles continue to ramp up in difficulty, this no doubt means that I am much less than halfway done in time. If all the pieces click in place for you, you could finish it as fast as you could type, or you could spin your wheels on the game forever, who knows?

Overall
This game is great! If you’re into this sort of thing. And, well, let me be honest, that’s not everyone. If you think the idea of debugging assembly-level code is great fun, then buy this game now! You won’t regret it! If you don’t have any experience with programming, maybe buy it for a programming-loving friend instead and then see if you can come over to their house and try it out? If you don’t have any experience with programming, and you do well at this game, then YOU SHOULD CONSIDER A CAREER IN PROGRAMMING, SERIOUSLY. Modern programming languages are not at all like this one, this is the kind of stuff that runs on the CPU, but is generally not what programmers actually write. But if you can handle this, you can handle high-level programming languages too.

Fun game, novel setup and interface, with the feel of real assembly language. Very challenging and it will be fun for those who like this very specific sort of problem solving, but it’s likely to be a big miss for a lot of people who probably won’t. Probably a niche interest, but for that niche I haven’t found anything else like it. $7 on Steam.

Book Review: Joyland by Stephen King

written by David Steffen

Joyland is a mystery novel written by Stephen King and published in 2013 by Hard Case Crime.

Devin Jones is a college student living in New Hampshire who takes a summer job in 1973 at Joyland, a local amusement park as a jack of all trades, but especially for “wearing the fur” which is the expression for wearing the park’s dog mascot costume. Besides the usual things one would expect from a college summer job–getting job experience, making friends, making money, Devin hears about an unsolved murder that happened inside the haunted house ride where a young girl’s throat was cut. Tales of the murder catch the attention of Devin and his friends and they speculate about who did it and how they got away from the scant evidence available. Devin also meets a wheelchair-bound young boy who is not long for this world and who might know more than he should.

I’m not a big reader of mystery books, so I’m probably not the best judge of whether any specific mystery book is a good one or not, but I enjoyed this reasonably well. The patchy details of the murder are mentioned early on and were enough to catch my interest. The carnie lingo and customs were interesting and were at least partially based on actual carnie lingo and customs (though not entirely, he freely admits in the author’s notes)). It caught my interest earlier than many Stephen King books have of late so that was a plus.

When I think back about the whole book I feel like quite a bit of it was kind of meandering and longer than it needed to be, but I only really picked that apart in retrospect so it must’ve kept my attention well enough while I was reading it.

There is… probably… a supernatural element but it’s very slight if so, which does make it unusual on my reading list.

All in all, I enjoyed the read well enough. I wouldn’t say there’s anything epic or groundbreaking here, but it succeeded at what it was doing.

DP Fiction #23: “Curl Up and Dye” by Tina Gower

Amelia fingered an unruly hair into place, willing her locks to stay safely tucked under her scarf. She prayed the stylists cleansed the utensils between appointments. Last thing she wanted was to pick up another tangle. Although, Dye for a Change was the highest rated Psychosomatic Hair Syndrome recovery shop on Karma-Yelp.

The bell clinked against the metal door like wind chimes. Burnt hair mixed with the distinct chemical scents of nail polish, astringent, and hair spray assaulted her as she entered.

“Be right with you!” Someone poked out from behind the screens, where silhouettes of women getting shampooed and styled played out like a silent movie, complete with music. Sweeney Todd. Cute. “Make sure to sign in!”

Amelia inched toward the sign in sheet, patting her scarf again to assure it hadn’t slipped, even though nobody sat in the waiting area. Her Milano knockoffs squeaked and groaned on the polished marble, as if the tile didn’t approve of her cheap shoes.

You think you’ll fool people? Amelia pushed the doubt aside. It was hard to tell what thoughts were her own.

As soon as she dotted her ‘i’, a short girl with spiked black hair, stud in her lip, a sleeve tattoo of a rose with a thorny stem, and nose ring sprang from the back room. “I can take you.” She motioned Amelia around the screens. Amelia avoided eye contact with the other patrons, dodging into a private corner where the girl flung a smock around Amelia’s neck. The stylist skimmed her fingers under the hem of the scarf, “May I take a look?”

Amelia swallowed a breath. “Can we discuss options, pricing?”

“Let’s take a look first.”

The stylist slid the scarf off in one quick motion. Amelia gasped.

“Oh my. Awful tangle.” The stylist inspected the mess. “A big one.” She picked at the base of the knot. “Looks like it started years ago and it’s been festering since.” She shook her head, her lips thinned to a line. She attempted an exploratory stroke of her comb. It snapped, the plastic needles ping-a-linged on the floor. “Wow, not good. We can untangle it in three, maybe four sessions. Or. . .”

“I’m willing to try anything. I’m desperate.”

A voice whispered—don’t waste our money—but it wasn’t Amelia, it was him.

The stylist fumbled in her apron for a brochure. “This package here.” She opened it, pointing to a cut and style.

Mid-priced. Two-hour session. It would be over, the whole affair, in two hours. Seemed fair to have two years of her life removed in two pampering hours.

“It sounds wonderful.” Amelia wanted it done. No, needed it done. Over. Fin. The end.

The stylist bit the stud on her lip. “We don’t usually take walk-ins for such extensive work, but I had a cancelation.”

Amelia sunk into her chair. “Wonderful. Get it out. I just want him out for good.”

“Bad breakup?”

“We were best friends. . .” Amelia squeezed her eyes shut. “I don’t want to talk about him.”

The stylist hummed along to the music, working through the tangle, cutting the sections that didn’t cooperate. “This could have been prevented. We’ll get you on a schedule. This section here–” She dangled the offending knot from her clippers. “-only manifested a month ago, right at the scalp. That’s how we know. Whoever caused this mess, it’s a good thing he’s gone.”

Amelia clutched the armrest. “I’m not paying you to critique my life. I just want you to fix it.”

Always blaming others for your problems.

“I shouldn’t have…that wasn’t me.”

The stylist tsked, making little cooing sounds as she massaged the scalp. “Don’t worry, these tangles grab a hold and it affects you. Deep. You’ll be yourself again. I promise.”

Amelia squeezed her eyes shut. She should apologize, say something more, rather than let all the blame fall on the tangle, but her throat tightened like she’d swallowed a wad of rubber bands. When he whispered into her thoughts it seized her confidence, her spirit, her identity. Amelia tucked the toxic bile in, as if it were another tangle.

The stylist moved silently, measuring strands against each other. She fluffed, buzzed, clipped. Amelia’s butt numbed while waiting in the chair. Her back ached and she’d memorized every pock in the ceiling tiles. Then the stylist whirled the chair around and flashed a hand-held mirror. “What do you think?”

Amelia’s hair curved around her face, teasing the top of her shoulders. The ends flipped out. Layers hid the worst of the damage, but Amelia could still see evidence of its hold, of his hold. She could still hear his voice in her head. No college. You’ll waste our money on a useless degree. I’ll take care of you. I’ve always taken care of you. Or: You can’t wear that. It will look like you slept your way into management.

She turned her head from side to side, noting the lack of weight from the knots and tangles. But the weight in her mind lingered.

The stylist lowered the mirror, her expression grim. “You don’t like it.”

“I’ll get used to it,” Amelia stared into the mirror mustering up some emotion, but nothing came.

The stylist pressed her lips together and arched an eyebrow. “Or you can curl up and dye.”

Amelia blinked. “Excuse me?”

The stylist wielded her curling iron as if it were a sword and shook the box of dye. “I recommend red. Extreme change. It’s the best way to strip your hair’s reaction to the trauma.”

The stylist went to work curling, painting, and origami folding small sections of hair into tin strips. Another hour and this time Amelia plastered on her best faux smile, gushing over the change. She paid, politely refused future appointments, and marched out her car on stilt-like legs.

At home she stared at the mirror for hours. The tangles were gone, but the voices remained.

You don’t need friends.

It should be just us.

Nobody else will love you.

He grew up next door. She’d known him her whole life, though they’d dated for only two years. There was only one option left.

Amelia needed to start over.

She plugged in the electric razor. Buzzed a clean swipe straight down the center. It wasn’t until the lock of hair dropped to the floor that her heart lurched in her chest. Oh fuck. What had she done? Her hands shook. The razor almost slipped from her fingers.

You’re an idiot. How will they know you’re a woman? Nobody will love–

Amelia cut the next section before the toxic thought could finish. Then the next and next. Quickly now, not thinking about what she was doing. How long it would take to regrow from this point. Even when she finished her fingers searched for an errant hair. She had it all. The knots and tangles lay flat on her bathroom floor. She kicked at them and they limply flopped from her toe.

She closed her eyes.

Waited.

A flood of relief at the silence.

The scarves were itchy anyway.

Author’s Note: The story came from a comment while talking with a friend. She had recently gotten her hair cut and while we all gathered around and admired the new style we got into a short discussion about how long it takes hair to grow. I made a comment about where in her hair I got to know her. She thought that was funny and we tried to figure what part of her life she’d “cut” from her hair. Later I was thinking about how that might be an interesting concept and the rest of the story untangled from there.

Tina Gower grew up in a small community in Northern California that proudly boasts of having more cows than people. She raised guide dogs for the blind, is dyslexic, and can shoot a gun and miraculously never hit the target (which at some point becomes a statistical improbability). Tina also won the Writers of the Future, and the Daphne du Maurier Award for Mystery/Suspense (paranormal category), and was a finalist for the Romance Writers of America Golden Heart ® (writing as Alice Faris). She has professionally published several short stories in a variety of magazines. Tina is represented by Rebecca Strauss at DeFiore and Company. Connect with her at www.smashedpicketfences.com

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BOOK REVIEW: Star Wars: Aftermath by Chuck Wendig

written by David Steffen

(note: I’m behind on posting my own reviews, I read this book and wrote this review a while ago, so references to the “The Force Awakens” movie being recent, etc are a symptom of that)

Aftermath is a Star Wars franchise tie-in novel written by Chuck Wendig and published in September 2015 by Del Rey. Since Disney decided to declare all of the pre-2014 novelizations as a separate timeline from The Force Awakens movie in 2015, Aftermath is one of the few novels in the official movie canon.

Aftermath picks up shortly after the original movie trilogy. The second Death Star has been destroyed. Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine are dead. The Empire is shaken and leaderless, but not gone (keep in mind that this book was published before The Force Awakens hit theaters, so we hadn’t yet met Kylo Ren and the First Order yet). The Rebel Alliance has become the New Republic, trying to restore as much order as possible in the wake of the conflict with the Empire.

The New Republic is seeking out the remnants of the Empire to keep them from regrouping. New Republic pilot Wedge Antilles, visiting planets on the outer fringe to seek out Imperial remnants, discovers exactly what he’s looking for on Akiva–a group of Star Destroyers gathered around a fringe planet–but he’s taken captive before he can broadcast a message to the New Republic. Broadcast frequencies have been jammed and the Imperials are closely monitoring traffic to ensure secrecy.

Former rebel fighter Norra Wexley returns home to Akiva after the war to reunite with the son that she left behind, not realizing that she is stepping into this secretive Imperial summit. Norra, her son, a bounty hunter, and an Imperial defector work together to find a way to fight back against this remnant of the Empire to interrupt it before it can gather its strength again.

I haven’t read a Star Wars novel since I was a teen, and I was happy to sink into the universe in print again, with the excitement of The Force Awakens movie still fresh in mind. I did read the book after seeing the movie, but I don’t think it made much difference in my appreciation for either one since Aftermath has very little character overlap with the movie.

It had some good action, fun sense of wonder tech stuff, space battles, fun banter, a few familiar characters, all what I would expect from a Star Wars book.

One thing that I thought was interesting about this book before I even read it was the angry reaction it spurred from a subset of fans who were upset at the acknowledgment of homosexuality in the Star Wars universe (and very excited reactions from a different subset of fans who were excited about the representation). I heard about it for months before I got around to reading the book and I was interested to see exactly what the portrayal of homosexuality was. The presence was so minor I’m not sure I would have even given it more than a passing thought, honestly, if it hadn’t been for the big to-do made about it ahead of time. I thought it was cool to see representation, no matter how minor, and I hope to see more.

All in all, I’d recommend it, and I’m looking forward to reading Chuck Wendig’s next Star Wars book installment. If you’ve seen The Force Awakens and you’re looking for a little something new in the new Star Wars universe (as opposed to the dozens of books that have been released over the past 40 years that have new been retconned out of the official universe) then you should give it a try.

Anime Review: ReLIFE

relife

Despite taking place mostly in a high school, ReLIFE seems to be designed to appeal to people in their twenties and thirties, following the misadventures of twenty-seven year old Arata Kaizaki.

Arata got out of grad school a little later than most, got his first job, and then quit after three months. Being twenty-seven and jack to show for work experience, he found himself completely unhireable by any white collar company. To make ends meet he ends up taking a part-time job at a convenience store which doesn’t pay enough to cover rent, and to make matters worse, his mom intents to cut off her support and have him move home.

His situation, being college educated and still struggling to obtain a full time job, is something easily relatable for anyone who’s been in a tough job market.

Fortunately for Arata, the ReLife company steps in and makes him a deal. They’re working on an experimental program to rehabilitate people who’ve fallen out of the job market, and they need test subjects. In exchange for being a program participant, Arata will be paid a full year’s worth of living expenses, and if the program is successful, he will also be given job opportunities.

Though initially skeptical, Arata ends up taking the program medication after a night’s drinking, and wakes up to find himself de-aged to seventeen. Initially he does not take this well, but considering his other options, he agrees to sign up.

The program sends him back to high school as a third year student (a senior in the US) where he will have to study and relearn what he’s lost. And it’s not simply the course material, which he’s completely forgotten like any other adult who’s been out of high school for ten years.

As we follow Arata’s adjustment to being a student in school, we see the difference in how he behaved as an adult, at the bottom of his company’s social hierarchy, and how he behaves as a student, where he feels free to say whatever is on his mind.

Watching Arata is the biggest joy in the series and the biggest source of comedy. At first it’s because he’s been out of school (and an adult) so long that he screws up things like forgetting to bring a pencil to class, bringing cigarettes to class, and worrying about outdated restrictions like whether it’s okay to bring cell phones to class.

But later, the fact Arata is twenty-seven makes a difference when it comes to friendships and his interactions with the other students. Because Arata is actually older, he pushes and encourages the teens around him to be more honest about their feelings and to step out of their comfort zones because he’s well aware that high school isn’t going to last forever.

The refreshing thing is that because he’s considered such a goof-up by his classmates (he’s forever in make-up test hell due to his grades) the exchange between him and his classmates feels equivalent. Arata may have more life experience, but he’s far from an older brother or mentor figure, and many times when he’s talking to them, he comes to realize how he may have failed in those very circumstances himself.

Arata is not the only adult character masquerading as a teenager in the story (he has ReLife support staff watching him too), and it’s interesting seeing the differences between how the adult characters pretending to be teenagers differ from the actual teenagers. None of the adults flat out behave as adults, but they’re much more inclined to act based what they think is the best action, where the teenagers tend to hesitate.

Unfortunately, the manga is still running and is only a handful of volumes in, so the ReLIFE anime doesn’t have anything close to an ending. The finish episode wraps up with a revelation about one of the characters and settles into a new normal as the credits roll.

It’s not particularly satisfying since this ends Arata’s story four months into his year as a high school student, but if one doesn’t mind the lack of an ending, it’s a fun watch.

Number of Episodes: 13

Pluses: painfully relatable for its target audience, adult perspective on high school hang-ups, Arata being a fish out of water

Minuses: whenever the show deviates from Arata and his immediate circle of friends, no ending, Arata’s ongoing incompetence at tests gets old after a while

ReLIFE is currently streaming at Crunchyroll and is available subtitled.

laurietom
Laurie Tom is a fantasy and science fiction writer based in southern California. Since she was a kid she has considered books, video games, and anime in roughly equal portions to be her primary source of entertainment. Laurie is a previous grand prize winner of Writers of the Future and since then her work has been published in Galaxy’s Edge, Strange Horizons, and the Year’s Best YA Speculative Fiction.

GAME REVIEW: Hacknet

written by David Steffen

hacknet >I need your help

>I have everything you’ll need

>I will teach you how to use it

>In exchange, I want you to find me

> My name is Bit

> And if you’re reading this

> I’m already dead.

This message, received out of the blue, marks the inciting action for the (mostly)-console-based white-hat hacking game Hacknet, published on Steam in August 2015 by Team Fractal Alligator.

The entire game interface takes place on a combination text console that’s made somewhat easier by the graphical interface. The text commands are Linux-based, so if you are familiar with Linux console commands then you’ve got a headstart on navigating the game world, but you do not have to be a computer expert to be able to pick up the game.

The automated message from Bit sets you on a mission to find out what happened to Bit. This is a rather roundabout mission, as it starts with you learning the console commands, working on simple hack missions, building the trust of hacking organizations, and gaining wider access and more powerful hacking tools.

The game gives the impression that it is written with real security principles in mind, and has some interesting points to make about bad security practices–i.e. choosing insecure passwords, reusing passwords, etc. But it’s certainly not a real-life hacking tutorial by any means. Most of the hacking procedures involve running executable programs that you have acquired either from the automated sending programs Bit left behind or from other sources–one program to break an FTP port, one program to break a web port, etc.

The game has some story, all centered around the central premise of hacking, as well as a fair amount of unrelated missions that you work through just to gain credibility with the hacking community. Since the player character has no backstory there is no story reveal there, you are who you are.

The game was generally pretty fun, though occasionally got a little repetitive. There were some particularly interesting missions, including one where you are forced to operate without the graphical interface, using the console only.

What really failed for the game is that there is a major unresolved bug that left me stuck in what would be an unwinnable state if not for walkthroughs. There are several stages of the game where you have to work on a list of missions given by hacker organizations to increase your credibility to a point where the next story mission can occur. These lists do not specify what order you must do the missions in the list, and when you pass the credibility threshold then the next story mission occurs immediately. Once that story mission starts, you can’t take any of the missions from the previous list, and you can’t cancel this mission to go back. So the issue happened when the story mission assumes you have a hacking utility program that you gained by doing one of the missions on the list. BUT THE GAME DOES NOT ENFORCE THAT YOU COMPLETE THE LISTED MISSION BEFORE THE STORY MISSION. So you end up on a long goose chase of a mission and have to hack into a computer, but you don’t have the right utility program to finish the job. It’s set up in such a way that it’s not super obvious that you are high and dry but I guessed that the programmers screwed up and found a walkthrough to confirm and to find a way around it. Without the walkthrough I would’ve had to restart the game and try not to repeat the mistake–with the walkthrough I could go to a particular IP address (which is only normally available as part of that mission) and could hack into it to get the hacking utility function.

That bug should’ve been found by the programming team, and should’ve been corrected by now. It should be a simple matter to correct–just don’t launch that story mission until the correct prerequisite mission is complete. Any competent tester would’ve found that dependency on their first try considering I wasn’t seeking bugs, I was just playing. This is embarrassing for the company and it makes me wary of getting other games from the company, even though I enjoyed playing this one overall.

Visuals
Almost nonexistent. The game allows different skins to be applied mid-game, but it’s mostly just color schemes and rearrangement of text information windows.

Audio
I don’t entirely know, I played it mostly without audio and didn’t experience a detriment from it.

Challenge
I think the game should be possible for someone with no programming or console experience, but I think it’s easier if you have some experience with that. The biggest challenge is trying to recognize when you’ve reached that unwinnable state and it’s time to find a walkthrough

Story
The story was okay. Nothing that I’d call exceptional, but it served the purpose of giving an excuse to do a bunch of hacking missions. The biggest sticking point is why Bit would, instead of reaching out to a friend, would send messages to a complete stranger who is completely unexperienced at hacking.

Session Time
Nice and short, just the way I like it. You can save and quit at almost any time.

Playability
Takes some learning to get all the console commands, and the few times that you have to use them at urgent speed might be very challenging for some. But I thought the game did a reasonable enough job teaching the navigation.

Replayability
If you don’t look up the walkthrough you’ll probably HAVE to replay to finish the game. And, completionists will probably have to replay multiple times because it doesn’t let you finish all the missions on a list before the story hijacks the mission list and then you can’t go back–the completionist in me found that kind of annoying as well.

Originality
I haven’t played another game based around hacking, nor working entirely through console commands (well, apart from old text-based adventures I suppose, but I mean where the console is actually an in-game console rather than just being the interface to a different kind of game).

Playtime
About 7 hours to finish according to Steam? That includes a fair amount of time trying to work around the game-halting bug..

Overall
Fun game, novel setup and interface, based around real Linux commands. The massive game-halting bug keeps me from really recommending it to anyone, unfortunately, and such lax game testing as that bug implies makes me wary of buying more games from this company again. $10 on Steam.

Anime Review: Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope’s Peak Academy – Despair

danganronpa 3 despair

Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope’s Peak Academy assumes familiarity with both with the original Danganronpa and Danganronpa 2 video games (the latter of which was never animated).

Because of this, this review will also assume familiarity with the franchise. Watching either Danganronpa 3 arc will be very difficult for the uninitiated, even if they’ve seen the first Danganronpa anime, and the Despair Arc in particular puts a large amount of focus on the cast of Danganronpa 2.

Despair Arc begins sometime in the middle of Class 77’s first year at Hope’s Peak Academy. This means that they have yet to meet Junko Enoshima (who will be in Class 78) and we get a chance to see them in their pre-corrupted personalities.

This arc unfortunately starts slow and the early episodes consist mostly of shenanigans that could only happen in such a wacky school for the supremely talented. If anything, Despair feels oddly constrained by events that have to happen to maintain continuity with the games’ backstories and to plug in gaps with Future Arc.

Though the initial focus is on Class 77 and the first episode makes it look like Despair is their story, the various classmates aren’t treated equally, and most of them don’t get much in the way of character development. Occasionally they disappear from an episode almost entirely. One of the most devastating events of their high school life that isn’t directly tied to the main plot (the Twilight Murder Syndrome story) is built up in a single episode following the POV of a character who wasn’t even involved, and then wrapped up off camera.

My two biggest issues with the Despair Arc are the lack of a cohesive story and the pacing, which likely stems from trying to fulfill too many functions.

Despair is not just the story of Class 77’s fall from grace. It’s also the story of the corruption of Hope’s Peak Academy and the Izuru Kamikura Project. And it’s the story of Junko Enoshima’s preparation for the most despair-inducing tragedy the world has ever seen. Though they all eventually get tied together because of Junko’s meddling there is no central cast to root for.

We’re essentially following the POVs of five groups of people (Class 77, Junko and Mukuro, Izuru/Hajime, Munakata and friends, and Principal Kirigiri’s group) for a total of 24 recurring characters who don’t always have much to do with each other. That’s a tall order for a 12 episode series that is also trying to fill in backstory for the Future Arc.

The second half of Despair ends up in a terrible hurry to get everything to happen and it’s unfortunate that in most cases, it falls on its face and the corruption of the Danganronpa 2 cast, which should have been the highlight of the prequel, ends up being the biggest letdown.

Junko certainly has some wicked moments that showcase just how devious she is, but she doesn’t quite reach the horrid peaks she had been built up to be in the game, the kind who can convince hundreds of people to kill themselves through sheer force of personality.

I suspect that Future Arc was scripted first and the reason for the odd pacing in Despair was to make sure that when something meaningful happened in Future there was a corresponding episode in Despair to expound upon it. Three of the Danganronpa 3 exclusive characters show up in just one episode of Despair and never return again, making their appearance a narrative anomaly. That episode was unsurprisingly sandwiched between two Future episodes that dealt with the conflict between the three.

Other parts of the series such as the student council killing game felt oddly done. We knew it needed to happen because it was mentioned in Danganronpa 2, but it didn’t feel like it happened naturally (though once underway it is incredibly gut-twisting and violent in a way that Danganronpa rarely is, because for once the brutality isn’t stylized).

Unlike the Future Arc I don’t think it’s possible to watch Despair as a stand alone. As a prequel it relies heavily on the audience being familiar with the cast, and Danganronpa 3 original characters sometimes pop in and out without much context. While Future viewers can appreciate them, they’re given little to no introduction for someone only watching Despair.

Even as a companion piece though, I find Despair difficult to recommend due to retcons and what may have been impossible to fulfill expectations. It has its moments, and the backstory for the Future Arc characters helps, but it doesn’t come together or offer nearly enough cohesion to be its own entity.

It’s worth mentioning that Funimation’s streaming service orders the Despair episodes as 1-11 and Future as 13-24. This is how they chronologically occur within the story. However, their airing order alternates starting with Future (so they aired 13, 1, 14, 2, 15, 3, etc). If viewed in airing order, the two arcs compliment each other with a plot thread raised in one storyline being immediately handled in another.

Episode 12 by the Funimation count is the Hope Arc, which closes off both the Future and Despair arcs and should only be watched after the end of Future. As far as Despair is concerned it’s more of an epilogue, since the story proper ends at 11.

Number of Episodes: 11 (12 if if Hope included)

Pluses: one more chance to spend time with old friends, Izuru’s motivation in Danganronpa 2 fleshed out

Minuses: more of a series of events than a plot, corruption of Class 77 handled poorly, divided focus between too many POVs

Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope’s Peak Academy is currently streaming at Funimation and is available both subtitled and dubbed. Funimation has licensed this for eventual retail distribution in the US.