Hello, Fellow Travelers. It’s a big galaxy out there, and this month, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover, so let’s get ready for launch.

🚀 Work in Progress: Maps, Covers, and a Little Patience

First, a genuine thank-you. The response to the 3-D Space Maps has been nothing short of wonderful. For those who missed them last time, head over to this post and see what all the excitement is about. I hold the view that star maps should be displayed in 3-D and that perceiving distance in this manner alters one’s perspective of space; these principles directed me as I designed the Seven Worlds RPG and brought life to the writing of Thorn of Concordia. I believe they’ll make this upcoming book feel like a truly different kind of reading experience.

Now, about the book covers, I have some bummer news: In short, we ran into a snag. Our cover design team changed, which has pushed the reveal date back by a few weeks. There’s a silver lining, though: This new design effort will include all the extra goodies for the hardback edition, including the end papers. That means that the end book will be far more complete and beautiful than what I originally planned. I think you’ll agree it was worth the wait when you finally see it.

Why in space does everything have to take so long?

📚 The Book, the Movie, and the TV Show

I’ve spent a lot of time this month immersed in consuming SF, which is, ironically, a pleasure I have little time to do now. One of them was a book, EXO, by Fonda Lee, suggested by an author friend. Then there was a rewatch of a movie, Arrival, by Denis Villeneuve, at the request of my daughter, who wanted to see it. And finally, there was a Netflix SF show from last year that is special due to its provenance, Latin America; that show’s called The Eternaut, or El Eternauta in Spanish, and it has a story behind it.

If you haven’t read or watched one or more of these, are looking for some ideas for your next read or binge, perhaps my (relatively spoiler-free) notes might help you decide (or, depending on your preferences, save you from spending your time unwisely).

Let’s do this!

“The aliens are… good?”: EXO, by Fonda Lee

I had the pleasure of first meeting Fonda Lee (not that she’ll have any idea of who I am) when I attended a “Writing Fight Scenes” seminar she gave many years ago at Norwescon in Seattle. She clearly knew what she was talking about, and her recommendations greatly influenced a couple of fight scenes in Thorn of Concordia. I confess that, while her hit novel Jade City fascinated me with its ideas and plot, I struggle to get past sex scenes, so I couldn’t finish it (shame on me). Several years later, I attended Fonda’s master class on Narrative Pacing in Fiction at Futurescapes 2024 and again came out inspired by her wondrous ideas. So when I learned (somewhat late) that she’d written a science-fiction novel, I jumped at the chance to read it.

EXO is a science fiction novel that carries its Young Adult (YA) badge unapologetically. It’s set on Earth, a century after the Zhree, a race of aliens, conquered us and made us their colony. To maintain order, the Zhree have selected young, promising humans and genetically enhanced them to become Exos, soldiers ready to defend the new status quo against Sapience, a ruthless human resistance movement bent on kicking the aliens out. Teenage Donovan Reyes is one of these Exos, and he firmly believes that, by bringing order and prosperity to a world plagued by war and inequality for centuries, the Zhree are ultimately a force for good.

But Donovan is not just any grunt: He’s also the only son of the Prime Liaison, the human “ambassador” and point of contact with the aliens, something that bothers him not only because of his strained relationship with his dad but also because he is afraid of receiving any special treatment because of who he is.

The story begins when Donovan and his partner lead a patrol to capture some Sapience spies, and the mission goes wrong. Donovan ends up captured by the rebels and, given that he’s the Prime Liaison’s son, his abduction triggers a series of events that threaten to affect the entire peace between humans and Zhree.

The first thing I should say about EXO is that it passed my baseline test: The book grabbed me enough that I finished it in just three days. Not every book has that effect on me, for a variety of reasons (see my comment on Jade City, above). So, yes, it’s well written, it zips along, and it has the right combination of utilitarian language and beautiful/interesting sentences that will grab a YA reader’s interest.

I’m a stickler for science when I read these books, yet I can say that almost nothing bothered me. No deep explanation is made of how the Zhree’s genetic tech works on human bodies the way it does, other than that it took them a few years of painful trial and error to get it right (which makes sense); the aliens’ empire is based on FTL, which isn’t explained either (but who am I to complain about that?). That the Zhree’s gravity is (conveniently) not that dissimilar from ours, and that their communications (conveniently) uses the same auditory bandwidth we do, transmitting on our atmosphere like ours, may be hard aspects to swallow, but even those have been tempered with a multitude of details, like the use of the aliens’ bodies to complement sound. That their thinking patterns are not truly alien is also noticeable but, to be honest, the author never made a pretense of saying this is a YA Hard-SF book, so it all works.

The story follows the beats of the genre as expected: Donovan is special (partly because of who he is, partly because of whose son he is) but has a lot of growing up to do. Donovan’s tense relationship with his father aligns with his unspoken quest for independence (another YA staple), and the appearance of a rebel girl named Anya (the love interest) forces him to acknowledge the inherent contradictions in the society he’s supposed to defend. There are several major twists in the story, one of which contributes to making Donovan even more special than he already is, and a couple of surprising turns that, even in the strict context of a YA story, keep you guessing what’s going to happen next.

So, all good, but here’s the part I found excellent: Both sides are morally gray. And boy, are they gray. This is no Districts-good-Capitol-bad YA. The Sapience rebels do some clearly evil things and have distinctly segregationist and racist views (assuming one considers the Zhree as part stand-ins for other races, as well as conquerors), and consider citizens not aligned to them as enemies. At the same time, the ‘local’ Zhree seem to truly care for and appreciate the humans they have conquered; nowhere is that more obvious than when the local Zhree meet a Zhree from their homeworld, and their different views on Earth and humanity become clear. This lends the book an unpredictability that wouldn’t be there if the lines between good and bad were more neatly defined. This shades-of-gray attitude also extends to key characters such as Donovan’s father, and to another important character who appears halfway into the book.

The ending sets up the next book in the series while showcasing the first stage in Donovan’s growth arc.

In short, this was an enjoyable SF read, one that combines traditional YA tropes and beats with a relatively grounded scientific structure, and a shades-of-gray representation of the various factions that elevates the story and will keep you guessing towards the end. I’m ready to jump into book two.

“The aliens ‘talk’ funny”: Arrival, by Denis Villeneuve

I had already seen this movie by one of the best serious SF directors alive today (at least until Alfonso Cuarón follows up Gravity with another amazing SF movie), but my eldest daughter wanted to see it for the first time, and I’m not the kind to say ‘no’ to a good SF flick!

Arrival is dear to my heart because it approximates my ideas on SF, which is that SF is a mechanism to explore interesting ideas around society and human interaction (Thorn of Concordia and A Cóndor to the Stars will make this clear when they come out). In the case of Arrival, the two parallel themes are the multiple meanings of language and how language encapsulates time, and the inevitability of choices. Heady themes!

My recommendation isn’t heady, though, but simple: If you like SF and haven’t watched this movie, go watch it now!

First, the plot: Dr. Louise Banks is an expert linguistics professor haunted by the death of her young daughter. When twelve massive alien spacecraft arrive on Earth, ominously floating over apparently random locations of the planet, Louise gets forcibly recruited by the Army. Why? Because as panic grips humanity, the governments of the world are desperate to communicate with the aliens and thus find out whether they are friendly or a threat. And they need a linguist to do that.

Louise successfully cracks the alien language, which is an appropriately strange visual structure of weird circular symbols, and which suggests the aliens communicate very differently than we do. But how?

Before Louise can solve the mystery, all hell breaks loose when part of her translation appears to suggest the aliens have come to Earth to offer humans a ‘weapon.’ The major Earth governments immediately go into a pre-emptive war footing, not trusting each other to not take advantage of the ‘weapon’ if the aliens in one spaceship give it to one of them before the others.

Then, when everything seems lost and global war appears inevitable, Louise delves deeper into the linguistic nuances of the aliens’ communication, trying to understand why the aliens made this offer… and discovers something that changes the entire movie.

This is the kind of film where saying more will ruin the experience, so I won’t. Suffice to say, the movie’s twist is expertly handled, forcing the viewer to re-examine everything that has come before in a different light, and giving audiences one of those have-to-talk-about-it post-film experiences we can’t help but enjoy.

The scientific presentation is excellent, which is not to say things make much sense beyond whoa, they’re so much more advanced than us! There are of course lots of hand-wavy things, like how the ships float, why they don’t emit energy, how the aliens reshape gravity, and more. It all still breathes an air of serious believability, starting with the basic alienness of the aliens and ending with the textures, the language, and more. The suspension of disbelief is masterfully achieved.

Villeneuve is making his name nowadays with the Dune trilogy (and before that with Blade Runner 2049) but, as good as those films are, I’ve enjoyed Arrival more. Now I just need to wait for one of my other daughters to ask to watch the movie so I can watch it again! But you don’t have to wait for that; go and watch Arrival. Now.

“The aliens are definitely bad”: El Eternauta (Netflix)

As much as I like SF, there are many sub-genres within space SF, and I can’t watch several of them. Horror SF tops that list, specifically “Alien monsters eating/killing humans.” I simply get too scared, even at my age. Paradoxically, this historically has been the most common (or perhaps most accessible?) kind of SF in the market. From Alien to Prometheus, passing through the Predator movies, even crossing into Stranger Things, bad and powerful alien monsters doing bad, gory stuff to screaming humans (and then taking control of them for good measure) appears to be one of the most popular SF subgenres people gravitate to.

This makes El Eternauta, released by Netflix in English as The Eternaut, an unlikely choice for me. But I couldn’t avoid it, not if I want to be consistent with my theme of promoting SF with a strong Latin American bent. Not even if the alien monsters do bad, gory stuff.

Which is all a very long way of saying, I recently watched El Eternauta despite my misgivings… and, now that I’ve done so, I don’t regret my decision one bit.

El Eternauta is a big-budget Argentinean six-episode TV show based on the 1957-1959 serialized graphic novel of the same name by Argentinean writer Héctor Germán Oesterheld. There are few examples of Latin American SF and El Eternauta is one of them, a classic any fan of Latin American SF should check out (even if the 1957 version shows its age in more ways than one).

On the surface, there’s nothing unique about the general plot, and little has changed since H.G. Wells framed it in The War of the Worlds: A bunch of normal people live their normal lives until what begins as a strange, deadly snowstorm that heralds an alien invasion brings a societal apocalypse, forcing the protagonists to fight for their survival even as their odds seem (and most likely are) impossible.

You’ve seen or read all this before. But what makes the story different, and El Eternauta impossible to stop watching, is simply that this happens in Latin America. What happens when aliens land on New York, Chicago, or Paris? You already know that, and have seen it several times. Bur what would happen if the aliens landed on Buenos Aires instead? Well, now that’s something we’re here to watch.

The plot goes out of its way to mine the specifics of modern Argentinean and Latin American society to frame these differences at all levels, from the architecture of the houses (which affects how the survivors bunker to defend themselves), to the breakdown of traditional Latin American neighborly relationships (which are different than those in the US), and more. We see the plight of a food-delivery bicycle driver as everything falls apart. We watch a crowded-tenement HOA meeting descend into survival chaos. It turns out that the alien tech can disable modern circuit-driven cars via an EMP, but not decades’ old, decrepit cars… and guess what, Latin America is teeming with decades’ old, decrepit cars! And so on and on. It turns out that surviving an alien invasion in Latin America is very different (and yet similar) to surviving it in NYC.

In short, in El Eternauta, it’s the little things. That doesn’t mean the alien invasion itself is not excellently done; the horror and the revelations are timed perfectly, and you don’t have to be Latin American to enjoy an excellent alien-invasion, post-apocalyptic yarn… with a serving of Latin American cultural ingenuity on top.

(speaking of servings, of course two characters wistfully talk about how they miss Peruvian food in the show. As a Peruvian, I’m legally obligated to mention this, lest I have my passport taken from me).

I will also say that while the production values are uniformly good, the sixth and final episode of the season is simply amazing, and one of the best examples of Latin American SF production values I’ve ever seen. Thanks, Netflix, for opening your fat wallet and throwing some pennies Latin America’s way!

The big question for me now is: Will I be hardy enough to watch Season 2 when it comes out, or not? I confess I shudder to think of more post-apocalyptic monstery stuff. Yet this one’s a keeper. When S2 comes out and I make my decision, you’ll all be the next ones to know!

In the meantime, if you want to see how alien invasions fare when set in the developing world, or are just looking for a good post-apocalyptic invasion story, El Eternauta is not a show to miss.

That’s all for this month, friends. Thank you for reading, for your enthusiasm about the space maps, and for your patience on the cover news. As always, I’m very open to your comments or feedback. Do you agree with my takes on these three works? Would you frame anything differently? I’m just an email away.

More soon.

Clear skies,

L.E.