April 29, 2024
Reeves’s collaboration with bestseller Miéville (The City and the City), based on the actor’s BRZRKR comic books, disappoints. The U.S. government’s secret Belief Systems and Ancient Technology Migration Unit is “dedicated to the collaboration with; study, decoding, and keeping secret of; questioning and protecting (laughable as that was) of; and performing necessary wetwork with an eighty-thousand-year-old warrior who would not die.” This immortal warrior is Unute, also known as B, who periodically loses his supernatural powers only to be reborn out of a large egg, and is eager to finally die. Diana Ahuja, who works with the Unit, investigates Unute’s connection with the Life Project, a shadowy organization premised on the idea that society needs to be weaned off its addiction to death. She gets a lead on the project’s members by searching the dark web for people who are “interested in ancient magic and who are also investigating the biology of echidnas and platypuses, and who are big fans of Solange Knowles and Millie Jackson, and who speak German and Polish and Farsi and who are very keen on baking.” That risible, random assortment of qualities is consistent with an overall tone that undercuts suspension of disbelief. Leaden writing (“Thereafter would come to her the fundamental rewritings of history and prehistory occasioned by her new subject”) doesn’t help. This is tedious.
June 1, 2024
A warrior who can't be killed and who doesn't understand why. A government agency studying him. Ancient powers who worship him and seek to destroy him. And an immortal deer-pig. A novel cowritten by beloved sf movie star Reeves and beloved sf author Mi�ville (The Last Days of New Paris, 2016) doesn't disappoint, but it may not be quite what anyone expects. Set in the same universe as Reeves' BRZRKR graphic novel series, the nature of the narrative is revealed somewhat slowly, and the writing style is oddly anachronistic and very erudite. It's stylistically daring, combining sf, fantasy, parascience, history, and action. It's violent, propulsive, and introspective, ultimately offering a philosophical exploration of identity and the meaning of mortality, chaos, and entropy. The Book of Elsewhere gets under your skin and into your mind and revels in a pervasive sense of mystery. Or it could just be a weird riff on some of the most popular Reeves internet memes. Whatever it is, it works. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Reeves and Mi�ville each have their own legions of fans, and their collaboration is bound to draw both groups in.
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June 15, 2024
In which the Angel of Death really wants to take a holiday. "Memory is a labyrinth." Or perhaps a matrix. Actor Reeves teams up with speculative fictionist Mi�ville to produce a tale that definitely falls into the latter's "weird fiction" subgenre. The chief protagonist is the demi-divine Unute, known as B. He's not nice: "That man does not kill children anymore, when he can avoid doing so, but still, leave him alone," warns one of the narrators, whose threads of story are distinguished by different typefaces. B is a killer--early on, he explains to a psychiatrist, "I kill and kill and kill again," adding that he'd really rather be doing something else. B is also curious about the way things work, which leads him to experiment on unfortunate deer-pigs, the babirusa of Indonesia, to try to suss out what allows him to die but then come back to life, learning that he's not so much immortal as "infinitely mortal." B, as one might imagine, isn't the life of the party--and the reader will be forgiven for being a little grossed out by his experiments, which are infinitely grisly ("A gush of cream-- and rust--colored slime sopped out and across the gurney and onto the floor to mix with soapy water"). The structure of the story is both metaphorical (albeit B professes little patience with metaphor), with Unute morphing into Death itself, and rather loose, the plot picking up hints dropped earlier. It's not always easy to follow, but it's clear that Reeves and Mi�ville are having fun with the tale and its often playful, even poetic language ("the huff--huff of horny hard feet on the scuffed corporate carpet, a stepping closer, an incoming, a meeting about to be"). A well-written if elusive treat for fans of modern mythologizing.
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