First of the Countless: A Review of Cheryl S. Ntumy’s They Made Us Blood and Fury

Reviewed by Nkereuwem Albert

They Made Us Blood and Fury is a nightmare brought to life, dripping with characters that will drive a dagger into your very being. An epic fantasy novel that does not shirk from its gritty bits and moral ambiguity, Ntumy’s world is relentless and well put together, with layers within layers to consider.

One of the things I enjoy most in fantasy is worldbuilding that never feels like too much information; it is a difficult thing to execute, but in this novel, we’re given all we need to engage with the world without it ever feeling superfluous or inadequate, a line walked beautifully. Anyi is a beacon of glory to the Countless Clans, led by a council of elders and queens that provide lifeblood, a magical substance that can be moulded into anything, from medicine to weapons. Anyi has so much lifeblood that they give it away to the neighbouring kingdoms and cities, from Ka to Bediaku, Gbota and Xose. From believable history, to enthralling magic, to commerce and social structure, the world presented feels full and ready for a great story to be told within.

As the novel opens, we are thrown into an Anyi on the edge. The queen is dying and none of her heirs, the Divewe, can produce it. Reservoirs run dry and gods stay silent, leaving the Anyi with too little of the substance they once gave away in excess. Across the continent, in the empire of Ka, we meet Aseye, an Anyi native working with lifeblood in the imperial armoury. Setting her sights on starting her own practice, her life is complicated by the death of the Anyi queen and the secrets it unearths. There’s also the issue of Kwame–beautiful Kwame–an imperial courtier with a hidden heritage and conflicting loyalties.

Ntumy’s magic system is especially cool and inventive, with seers and blood-as-power done in ways that I’ve never seen. A culture where magic is embedded in the history, geography and economics of the world, we see the impact of lifeblood excesses and shortages play out both in the present and contextually. Spirit possessions and gods’ whisperings come at a terrible price. The creatures that manifest across the novel are beautiful, visceral and terrifying!

For all its detailed worldbuilding, They Made Us Blood and Fury is also an education in heart-rending character development. Aseye and Kwame are very compelling protagonists. Aseye’s past is shrouded in mystery that unravels with massive implications for the countless clans, and with Kwame, a character with conflicting loyalties and motivations that are unclear, we have an intriguing pair, written with raw intensity and unyielding prose that is very compelling to read.

The supporting cast—spread out across the Countless Clans—deliver, filling out the necessary points in this story beautifully and disturbingly as the novel progresses. In They Made Us Blood and Fury, you sense the threads that link the cast, but Ntumy still delivers excellent character arcs, in both positive and antagonistic directions. Fafa, Fia Kofi, and Mamiga are an excellent investigation into the choices we make to sustain life as we know it, even when we know better. The Divewe’s choices are driven by their need to survive and their thirst for the power they were destined for, now a destiny denied. The Kahene and the politics of his empire ask the necessary questions about imperialism and its swallowing of cultures and people alike. In the sandlands and the spaces between, the nomads offer Aseye philosophy that is antithetical to what is the norm in the countless clans, and the entirety of the supporting cast feel real and fleshed out, to the betterment of the novel.

All these elements come together to make a world in which the truth is always lurking, and this novel captures that eerie feeling perfectly. With a story told in journeys through the Countless Clans, there were many moments that shocked me and broke my heart, and pivots that grabbed my attention and made me perk up and hope, all ending with a flawless landing that leaves me wanting more of the Countless. Cheryl S. Ntumy delivers a very inventive fantasy novel on so many fronts, and I know this is not the end, so I will wait impatiently for the next book.

A review of Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures

Reviewed by Chukwunonso Ezeiyoke

Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures edited by Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn has 23 chapters with a preface, introduction, and afterword. The book started its life as a part of The Climate Action Almanac. “The book grew out of the Climate Imagination Fellowship, started at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination in 2021” (2026:ix). In its preface, the book announces that it foregrounds hopeful stories about climate imagination. The dominant climate narrative, it argues, is full of doom stories, which leave people feeling ‘hopeless, helpless, and disillusioned’ (Eschrich and Finn 2025: ix). This stand echoes Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism:Is There No Alternative?(2014). For Fisher, fear and cynicism do not inspire bold thinking; they form a bedrock of conformity and conservatism that hampers action and change. For Fisher, hopefulness changes the situation from one in which nothing can happen to one that allows for the actualisation of possibilities. Fisher’s stand can be traced to a theorist such as Fredric Jameson (2005), and further back, to Thomas More, the first known utopian novelist.

However, the word ‘utopia’ was hardly mentioned in the introduction or the preface framing Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Future, and it appears sparingly throughout the collection. This may be intended or unintended. However, there could be a good reason why the book was framed this way. Utopia has a bad reputation. An early criticism of it could be seen from Karl Marx in Manifesto of the Communist Party published in 1848. Marx accuses utopia of lacking materialism. More recently, Karl Popper (1945) links the concept of utopia to totalitarianism. As Julien Kloeg notes, ‘Utopianism’s bad reputation is partly due to its association with the attempt to realize communism in the Soviet’ as such it is considered ‘politically dangerous’ (2016: 451). Current criticism on Utopia is such that were directed to hopeful climate narrative such as carbon removal technology. Matt Simon (2023:online) argues that “carbon removal might even encourage the continued burning of fossil fuels, if countries can say they’re sucking carbon out of the atmosphere to offset their emissions” they could end up burning more fossil fuels instead of looking for clean energy. This, in turn, sustains the capitalist structure that privileges fossil fuel consumption. Perhaps these criticisms have led the collection to shy away from exploring the book’s connection to utopian unconsciousness, even though the book draws heavily from this tradition. Unconscious here “consists of those repressed impulses, desires, drives, wishes… that the conscious mind does not care to acknowledge” (Mark Bould 2021:15). Utopian unconsciousness is defined here as those hidden utopian ideological impulses of a text.

Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures is a mixed bag of memoirs, interviews, scholarly articles, and fiction. This disparity in the creative expressions employed by the authors in the book, luckily, does not result in a disjointed book. I think there is something symbolic about it, reflected in both the form and the content of the collection, namely: that the book champions diversity. Diversity in its form allows it to incorporate different styles of artistic expression under the umbrella of a single edited volume. This, in a way, is a stand it takes outside the totalitarian accusation levelled against the utopian unconscious in which plurality of forms, ambitions and aspirations is suppressed under the so-called singularity of purpose termed the ‘common good.’ A character in “City of Choice” by Gu Shi, translated by Ken Liu, a story within this anthology being reviewed here shares this sentiment thus ‘Should I really go forward? All choices come with costs. If the cost is the lives of those who are powerless, is it right to sacrifice them in the name of some greater “good”? (113). “City of Choice” is a type of story you read and reread, and it makes you angry and happy and angry again because life is messy and every decision comes with a cost, including the decision to freedom.

It is not only the style of the book that is diverse; the contributors come from different localities of the globe: “China to Wales, Germany to Nigeria, Sri Lanka to Mexico, Malaysia, India, the United States, and more” (Eschrich and Finn 2025:ix) to articulate different climate challenges of what is being done, what could be done, and the potential ‘becomings’ of climatic futures. A lot of the climatic ‘becomings’ shared by a good number of the authors in the collection are akin to what Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay and Jade Taylor call ‘co-futurism.’ Taylor defines it as a future that is interconnected and overlaps, also recognising “ethnic specific and regional specific futurisms” (2024: 1). Taylor’s definition is not specific to climate futurism; the collection, which focuses on climate, is part of futurism in general.

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SAUÚTI TERRORS Review

By Chisom Umeh

My first direct encounter with the Sauútiverse was in 2022 when, at the Ake Books and Arts Festival in Lagos, panellists Wole Talabi, Dare Segun Falowo, Stephen Embleton, and Cheryl Ntumy, members of the Sauúti Collective, introduced the shared world project. I sat there in the audience, watching as the lights dimmed and a video of the Sauúti creation myth was played to us. Over the animated visuals was an echoing voice apparently merged from the real voices of the Sauúti founding members. This voice, supposedly that of the Mother, the chief deity of Sauúti lore, told the story of the universe’s birth from a single Word.

The two-minute clip entranced me, and, long after the lights had been turned back on and the applause had faded, I was still transfixed by its power. There, on stage, the panellists introduced several aspects of this vast, sprawling secondary world featuring a two-star system, five planets, and three moons. Since then, the Sauútiverse has exploded, birthing two anthologies, three novellas, numerous short stories and poems, a novel, and additional works in the pipeline, all set in and exploring the diverse cultures, science, belief systems, and history of this intricately built shared world inspired by Africa. It has also been picked up and nominated for various awards, including the Nommos and the BSFA.

In this latest anthology, we’re shown a dark and terrible aspect of this world, not as a mere scare tactic, but to remind us that a universe this wide and sprawling wouldn’t be remotely realistic if it didn’t possess a horrific underbelly. Stories here do not shy away from the unsettling, the bone-chilling, the hair-raising, and the blood-curdling. The writers are super inventive in the ways they describe horror and fright. Across 18 short stories and poems, they boldly unleash all manner of terror. The writers commit strongly to Sauúti lore, which includes new words and Sauúti-specific terminologies. This, of course, can be a bit difficult for a new reader to grasp. But if they endure and get beyond that, they’d see that it adds to the overall uniqueness and beauty of the Sauútiverse.

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Ruminations on Place, Fantasy, and Nkereuwem Albert’s The Bone River

“I wanted to capture the essence of the place.”
Nkereuwem Albert

A review by Jesutomisin Ipinmoye

*The Bone River* by Nkereuwem Albert is an urban fantasy published by Phoenix, an imprint of Ouida Books focused on Science Fiction and Fantasy stories.

There are many things to love about The Bone River.

There is the magic system, the sense of a thick and present world bubbling away beneath the fabric of our own world. In Nkereuwem’s Calabar, miracles are the work of Pastors contorting magic in front of a blind congregation, and penises can, in fact, be stolen. By virtue of your initiation and belonging to one of four houses, you become a conduit to magic and mystery seeping out of the earth. You can command the dead, kindle fire from within you, and form familiars out of bone. You can shape it into beasts and seal gods. It is a land of infinite possibility. If you’re creative enough, you can conjure magic in service of peace—or to deceive.

This brings me to the story itself. By the time you put down Nkereuwem’s The Bone River, you would have witnessed how fragile peace can be, while war remains a latent possibility. This in itself should not be a discovery. We are well familiar with the flexibility of politicised narratives, the speculative reality of a truth wielded by authority. Surely, it should not take too much imagination to condense the abstraction of the lie beneath Calabar’s secret peace into a manner of critique about the cities we inhabit or the stories we tell about the blood that soaks our collective memories. After all, there is even greater violence than a certain bastard’s deception that is used every day as a tool to maintain a semblance of “status quo,” a peace with which no one is comfortable. And yet, the discovery of deception, as you read, grabs you. You know things like this happen, and yet, you are shocked. Why wouldn’t you be? It is the job of good fantasy to re-expose us to reality afresh. When you have seen and seen and seen with all your seeing eyes, the world unseen can and should shock you in new ways.

And then there is a stressful sapphic romance.

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Policing perception: weird fiction, Tony Benn, and the warped borders of the real

by Philip A. Suggars

There’s a moment in the Wachowski’s seminal 1999 movie the Matrix where Keanu Reeves’s elegantly blank Neo sees the same black cat walk past a doorway twice. In the movie, such moments are signals that the nefarious Agents are about to emerge into Neo’s simulated reality and give him the mother of all cardio workouts.

But what if something similar were to happen to you?

Perhaps you have a similar moment of déjà vu, notice that roses now seem to smell like freesias or that the sky suddenly looks a bit purple. Everyone you tell about this discovery, however, insists that everything is the “same as it ever was” (in the words of the old song). Roses smell as sweet as they ever did. The sky is the same old blue.

After a while you might accept that it’s your perception that is at fault, shrug a little, and decide to get on with the gardening. But at the back of your mind there might be a nagging doubt. Perhaps you were never supposed to notice the difference.

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Review: Delicious in Dungeon (2024)

By Marta F. Suarez

Dine or Die, with a Pinch of Comedy

Delicious in Dungeon (2024, Netflix). Season 1, Episode 3. Living-Armour Stir Fry and Soup [00:18:57]

Delicious in Dungeon (Netflix, 2024-present) is Studio Trigger’s adaptation of Ryōko Kui’s eponymous manga (2014-2023). The series is set in a fantasy world that merges and echoes different fantasy and manga traditions popular in Japan. The overall setting takes the viewer to the dungeon crawl genre, which recently experienced a resurgence in the country after Etrian Odyssey Nexus (2018). The characters’ races and skills are shaped by influences of Dungeons and Dragons, the Middle-Earth world set by Tolkien, and even the Final Fantasy universe, which itself draws inspiration from these narrative traditions. However, what makes Delicious in Dungeon significantly different is the resonances of cooking series like Mister Ajikko (1986-1989), a manga series that had several sequel runs over the years, including a recent 2015-2019 one, titled Mister Ajikko Bakumatsu-hen. The first season comprises 24 episodes, with a new second season coming soon this 2025.

In the world of the story, adventuring parties enter dungeons looking for the legendary Golden Country, a kingdom transported by a sorcerer to the depths of an expansive dungeon, which is said to contain the ultimate treasures. Lured by wealth, fame, and adventure, different guilds enter this dungeon with the hope of finding the lost realm. One of these teams is led by Laios Touden, a tall-man (human) Paladin Knight who starts this quest alongside his sister Falin, a magic wielder; Marcille, a half-elf mage; and Chilchuck, a halfling thief. The opening scenes present the party’s encounter with a magnificent red dragon, against which they are losing. As the beast defeats them one by one, Falin uses her last strength before being ingested by the dragon to teleport the other members of the party out of the dungeon. Still alive but on the surface, the party is now several floors above where the battle took place and too far to attempt to rescue Falin. However, due to the magic of the dungeon, Falin could be resurrected if there are some remains and she has not been fully digested. With this in mind, the group decides to return, defeat the dragon and rescue any remaining parts of Falin. However, with time being of the essence, they realise that they cannot afford to stop to resupply and find provisions, as that would risk their chance to succeed. In a conventional dungeon crawl storytelling, the party would possibly open containers to find cheese and fruit, pick edible mushrooms and seeds, or perhaps kill a rodent and eat a left-behind spoiled pie in a moment of necessity. In contrast, Laios introduces the unconventional idea of eating the monsters they encounter, setting the course for the series. With this decision, the party ensures their survival and the journey becomes also one of gastronomic exploration.

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Torque Control 301

By Phoenix Alexander

The organism is relentless

Calorie demanding, perpetually in need of hydration, oxygen, and a cocktail of other vitamins and minerals, requiring 4-8 hours sleep a night to repair itself from the ravages of the day, day after day. A lifetime’s worth of consumption.

This unkind—some might say anti humanist—characterization is famously articulated by the nefarious Agent Smith in The Matrix, where he attempts to psychologically break a human rebel leader, Morpheus, by telling him:

Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. (The Wachowskis, 1999)

The accusation, while effective for cinema, is not quite true. Smith implies that this “consumption” is a species-specific act, and not one located within a complex and interrelated ecosystem of both human and non-human life. If anything, plants should be the focus of his anger: they are the enablers of this “surviving,” this “spreading,” being masterful spreaders and survivors themselves. More radically: even drawing the lines between species may be a spurious rhetorical move. “A leaf is the only thing in our known world that can manufacture sugar out of materials—light and air—that have never been alive,” Zoë Schlanger reminds us in her recent book The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth (Schlanger, 2024). “All the rest of us are secondary users, recycling the stuff the plant has made… Think about it: every animal organ was built with sugar from plants” (Schlanger, 2024, pp. 27-28). Her (admittedly simplified) description is useful in exculpating the human organism specifically from the charge of excessive consumption. It is not our fault; we are enabled, built literally by component organisms and their byproducts, both visible and invisible.

Nevertheless, the human body and its source/s of sustenance tends to take on the nature of a problem to be solved in many science fictional narratives. From the replicators of Star Trek to the hideous ‘pigoons’ of Margaret Atwood’s Mad Addam series to the equally hideous ‘sligs’ of Frank Herbert’s Dune universe to the more mundane efforts of potato-growing in Andy Weir’s The Martian, authors and film-makers offer the gamut of appealing to radically unethical means of keeping the human organism alive in conditions that, even without the lack of food, threaten to kill it. (I am reminded here of the opening crawl to the movie Gravity: “Life in space is impossible”) (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013).

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Wave IX: a compressed essay-review by Carter Kaplan

By Carter Kaplan

Wave IX

J.G. Ballard’s story “Studio 5, The Stars” appeared in Science Fantasy magazine in 1961. The story is set in “Vermilion Sands”, a desert art colony suggesting the post-war “hothouse” desert compounds created in the American Southwest by painters like Max Ernst and Georgia O’Keefe. In Ballard’s Vermillion Sands, art, artists, poetry and landscape blend in remarkable ways, and the possibility of elements of virtual reality appear to be an operative dynamic, though this possibility remains unexplained, or anyway is deliberately obscured to enhance the futuristic feel of the community, and as well represent the confusion that should properly attend a world that is in contact with computers, simulation, and muddled human perceptions. The setting is thus an opportune field for blending a broad—indeed unlimited—range of aesthetic figures and themes. The plot follows the adventures of Paul Ransom, editor of the poetry magazine Wave IX. He is beset by submissions of bad writing (fragments in the form of computer tapes are often floating through the sky above Vermilion Sands). The poetry is produced by computers styled as Verse Transcribers or VT’s. The stale submissions form a point of departure for exploring the subject of poor writing, and how the production of poor writing is driven by complacency, intellectual laziness, cliché, formulae, cultural homogenization, stale involvement, theoretical strictures, official channelings, academic repetition, market forces, fossilized traditions, and so on.

Jean-Paul L. Garnier, the editor of Wave IX the book before us, presented Ballard’s story to the contributors and asked for submissions. There were very little instructions; contributors were simply encouraged to follow their inspiration. A variety of graphic images, poems and fictions were submitted. Here is a review of these pieces, followed by suggestions for further exploration and discussion. I am a contributor to the project, as described below.

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Dev Agarwal reviews ‘Pavane: a Critical Companion’ by Paul Kincaid

ISSN 2662-8562 ISSN 2662-8570 (electronic) Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon ISBN 978-3-031-71566-2 ISBN 978-3-031-71567-9 (eBook)

A review by Dev Agarwal

With his latest work, Paul Kincaid looks critically and in-depth at Keith Roberts’s novel, Pavane.

Keith Roberts (20 September 1935 – 5 October 2000) was a science fiction writer and illustrator. His work on Pavane appeared first as a series of novellas from 1966 and then as a collected book in 1968.

Kincaid notes that Roberts’ work is often admired by his fellow writers but neglected more widely as science fiction. In part, this could be due to reactions to the artist rather than his art itself. While his work is respected by those already familiar with it, Roberts’s personality probably damaged his wider lasting recognition. Kincaid observes that Roberts may have been “incapable of friendship, someone who distrusted everyone on principle, and fell out with everyone who became close to him.”

We must go back a generation to find writers discussing Roberts’ work. Both AJ Budrys and Kingsley Amis lavished praise on Roberts. Trillion Year Spree by Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove also cites him positively, but Roberts is otherwise “almost entirely absent from other surveys of the genre.”

This deficit of attention has only grown in the years since Roberts’ death, which makes Kincaid’s literary appreciation particularly relevant. Kincaid speculates that Pavane may suffer in genre terms from being neither fish nor fowl. It does not sit easily “in the technological territory of science fiction,” yet it is also not modern fantasy. Pavane is a particularly British work, a book made up of a cycle of stories, and one imbued by religion, sense of place, and the mythical past of the English countryside.

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Solarpunk and Guild Socialism

A lo-fi, low-key critique of solarpunk

By Jo Lindsay Walton

Joyce Ch’ng’s ‘The Barricade’ (2024) is a solarpunk short story in which nothing much happens. The lack of incident is probably deliberate: a gentle rejection of the idea that all narratives need conflict. Put your characters in horrible situations and watch them struggle to survive: this is standard creative writing advice. It may be more steeped in capitalist ideology than we care to admit.

By contrast, the closest Ch’ng’s story gets to real jeopardy is a flock of birds smacking into a solar panel. The solar panel is easily repaired. The bird strike could even be taken as a positive sign. It implies a lot of birds. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which helped to kick off (or revive) the environmental movement in the 1960s, takes its title from imagining the loss of birdsong.

Ida loved birds. Their songs would wake her up every morning. There were no more cases of poaching (or so the newspapers said). Native birds were returning. Numbers were climbing up once more, helped by careful husbandry and re-introduction of species.

Solarpunk is an eclectic genre. It typically envisions hopeful futures, where humans live in harmony with nature, and often with one-another as well. Solarpunk communities are often multi-species communities. The term solarpunk seems to have originated in an anonymous 2008 blog post, ‘From Steampunk to Solarpunk,’ imagining the widespread return of wind-powered sea freight. This contemplative excitement about technology, old or new—or both old and new—has continued to characterise solarpunk.

Crucially, solarpunk prefers to tackle technical problems and ecological crises in ways that serve social justice. Hannah Steinkopf-Frank writes, “imagining Solarpunk purely as a pleasant aesthetic undermines its inherently radical implications. At its core, and despite its appropriation, Solarpunk imagines an end to the global capitalist system that has resulted in the environmental destruction seen today.”^[1] The genre may not have a consistent set of politics, but it often resonates with degrowth and postgrowth perspectives, as well as pluriversal politics — that is, mobilising local, traditional, and Indigenous worldviews in ways that may diverge from mainstream sustainable development discourse.

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