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Person of Interest: Season 4

A powerful new AI has been created and allied with the United States government. However, Samaritan has its own agenda and no interest in being shackled by human control. Meanwhile, the Machine has gone undercover, trying to resist Samaritan or align its goals with humanity. With this becoming less likely, the Machine's operatives - living incognito for fear of discovery - have to take the fight to Samaritan where they can, whilst also dealing with a burgeoning gang war in New York.

Person of Interest's fourth season marks a significant shift in the show's format. Our erstwhile heroes are living under cover identities they cannot endanger without immediately being detected and eliminated by the Samaritan AI and its operatives. This forces them to have to act within the normal confines of their job at all times, even when dealing with their regular "persons of interest." This adds an interesting new tension to the show.

This tension means our characters can't go in all guns blazing as much as they did in previous seasons, and helps with the problem last season that our team was too overpowered, between Finch's elite hacker skills, Reese's formidable military abilities, Shaw's exceptional infiltration skills and Root as an even eliter hacker and competent combatant and AI-assisted assassin, not to mention access to two highly competent police officers (before one of them was killed off). Our crew have to be more circumspect in Season 4, forcing the writers to be more creative.

The result is probably the strongest run of episodes in the show's history. The already exemplary cast is expanded by the addition of some pretty big names (either at the time or in the years since) including Cara Buono (Stranger Things), Winston Duke (Black Panther), Wrenn Schmidt (For All Mankind) and Jamie Hector (The Wire), who are all superb. John Nolan (uncle of showrunner Jonathan and his director brother Christopher) continues to impress as semi-antagonist John Greer, and Enrico Colantoni has a bigger role as recurring frenemy gangster Carl Elias. Camryn Manheim also continues to be superb as "Control," this season moving from enemy to extremely reluctant, situationally-dependent ally.

What is interesting is that format encourages both greater serialisation and a renewed focus on the person-of-interest-of-the-week cases, an unusual move in a show with a continuing storyline in its penultimate storyline, when you'd expect the serialisation to have completely taken over. Instead, the threat of Control or the growing war on the streets between Elias and new kingpin Dominic often take a backseat to whomever the person of interest is.

This has several benefits, most notably it encourages the main storyline to be less convoluted than if it had had to fill 22 episodes. The show notably eliminates several factions this season to make the main storyline much clearer: The Machine versus Samaritan, who is allied to the US government, but some government officials are very uneasy about the deal they've made.

The gang war storyline could threaten to be formulaic, but it is elevated immensely by Winston Duke and Jamie Hector (here playing the right-hand-man rather than the boss, which prevents too many comparisons with his epochal turn as Marlo on The Wire), whose formidable charisma makes the Brotherhood are force to be reckoned with. The show also cleverly integrates the gang war into the main storyline with Samaritan, in a way it never managed with the HR storyline which dominated the first two-and-a-half seasons and threatened to become tedious. This storyline is better-handled and better-paced, being wholly contained within this one season. There's also a number of short arcs revolving around new recurring characters, and some PoIs from previous seasons return in clever ways.

The season also features several of the show's very best episodes: The Cold War features the first direct confrontation between the Machine and Samaritan, whilst If-Then-Else has the team trapped and the Machine has to run tens of thousands of simulations on their best way of escaping. The what-if nature of the episode is tremendous fun, allowing the characters to have several moving/dumb-as-hell death scenes. One sequence, where the Machine cuts the detail of the simulation to move things along faster, resulting in the characters becoming paper-thin descriptions of themselves, is the funniest thing the show has done so far. A twist ending prevents the episode from being too lightweight.

The back half of the season suffers a little from losing one of the regular castmembers due to behind-the-scenes circumstances beyond their control, which makes some episodes feel a bit clunky, with the introduction of some recurring characters clearly meant to just stand in for the missing one. It's not a major problem and some of the new characters are interesting, but it is a slight bump in the road. As we get to the end of the season it throws up another one of the show's best-ever episodes with Terra Incognita, where Reese has to investigate one of Carter's cold cases, resulting in the return of Taraji P. Henson in flashback sequences. The two-part season finale is also huge, packed with big plot twists and revelations that are quite satisfying.

Person of Interest's fourth season (*****) is potentially its very best, with excellent ideas and plot twists being undertaken by a cast at the top of its game. 

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Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett

Tiffany Aching is continuing her training as a witch under the fearsome Miss Treason, though Granny Weatherwax is still keeping watch from afar. Tiffany makes an unfortunate choice during a winter festival and attracts the attention of the Wintersmith, a mythological figure who, this being Discworld, is rather less mythological and more real than Tiffany prefers. Once again, she joins forces with the Nac Mac Feegle to try to overcome this threat...before she is sucked into the mythological story against her will.

Wintersmith is the thirty-fifth Discworld novel (out of forty-one; the ending is just starting to edge into sight) and the third to focus on the character of Tiffany Aching. Nominally, this is a YA-focused Discworld novel. However, given Sir Terry Pratchett's resolute refusal to talk down to younger readers, there isn't a vast amount of difference between this and an "adult" Discworld novel, save toning down Nanny Ogg's double entendres a tiny bit.

Wintersmith's theme, as much as can be said, is about the interaction between mythology and reality. The Wintersmith - not quite a god but more than just a spirit - is brought into the real world by Tiffany's actions and fixates upon her, forcing her to try to find a way of removing his interest.

As is usual with Pratchett, there are plenty of laughs, some impressive character development - Roland, Tiffany's would-be romantic interest, gets plenty of solid advancement here - and some thoughtful musings on the ideas of responsibility and how some people prefer comforting illusions and lies to harsh reality. But the book also has some weaknesses. The Wintersmith himself is the latest in a long line of incorporeal characters who want to become human but don't quite get it (Death famously spent a book or two flailing around this idea) and his level of threat is quite vague for most of the book. The idea of an ancient spirit falling in love with a young teenage girl is also a bit weird, and doesn't really go anywhere.

If anything it's the numerous subplots and side-character which fare much better. Roland's attempts to evade the attentions of his aunts and turn into a good would-be ruler are entertaining, and Tiffany's tutoring of a superficial and apathetic young witch into a more responsible figure feels like it could be a whole book by itself. The Nac Mac Feegle also don't have much to do and Pratchett's attempts at giving them more development feel a bit more perfunctory here than in A Hat Full of Sky. Still, at least they are not overused.

Neither are Discworld heavy-hitter characters Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg, who back off for most of the book to let Tiffany deal with the threat of the Wintersmith herself. This is a good move by Pratchett, who resists the temptation of fanservice to better develop his new(ish) protagonist.

Wintersmith (***½) is a solid, if unspectacular, slice of Discworld. It has great characters, comedic moments and some nice thematic ideas, but the central plot feels a bit wooly and never quite gels together into a concrete threat. But the Nac Mac Feegle storming the Underworld with the help of a sentient cheese and negotiating a discount on crossing the River Styx is an all-timer Discworld moment.

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Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files - Volume 04

Mega-City One, 2102. A Psi-Judge has made a dire prediction. Mega-City One will be annihilated in the coming decades if the "Judge Child" is not found and returned to the city. Judge Dredd has located the child, but he has been whisked off into deep space by hostile forces, resulting in the Justice Department having to fund Dredd on a long, expensive trek across settled space in search of the child...with the fate of Mega-City One and perhaps Earth itself hanging in the balance.

The fourth instalment in Judge Dredd's Complete Case Files turns the comic into something a little unexpected: a full-blown space opera. Having traversed the Cursed Earth, saved Mega-City One from an insane tyrant and brought law and order to the Moon, Dredd is now representing humanity and Earth on the interstellar stage as he goes in search of the titular Judge Child. At 26 issues, spanning a full half of a year (and half this collection), the story is a proud epic to follow up on the Cursed Earth and Day the Law Died sagas, but again it's somewhat episodic, an excuse for the writers to come up with increasingly crazy characters, planets and aliens for Dredd to come up against with the search as a framing device.

It's still a reasonably good story and a somewhat iconic one, introducing the Angel Gang and Judge Hershey, who will go on to be a key player in future stories spanning decades (including a sequel in this very volume, where a serial killer starts trying to pick off the survivors of the mission). The ending is interesting but a bit under-explored, and it has to be said that the sudden shift back into standalone adventures and short arcs is a bit jarring, especially when some of these can be best described as "bonkers whimsical." A story about an evolution virus escaping in Charles Darwin Block and "devolving" the inhabitants into angry monkeys is vaguely entertaining, if a bit obvious. A recurring storyline across multiple stories sees Mega-City One gripped by yet another craze, this time for plastic surgery to make people incredibly ugly, which of course makes the creator of the first "Ugly Clinic" insanely wealthy and ripe for criminal exploitation.

The second major story arc, though considerably shorter, is Pirates of the Black Atlantic, in which a pirate group based in the Black Atlantic off Mega-City One's coast causes absolute havoc, even going as far as getting their hands on a nuclear missile, forcing Judge Dredd to storm the vessel. The story itself is slight, despite the devastation inflicted, but more importantly is the ending, in which it turns out that another faction was manipulating the pirates, and Dredd exposing them only delays their plans, not halts them. But that's a story for Volume 05 to pick up on.

The remaining stories have Dredd teaming up with an alien reporter, dealing with pop stars and stopping a graffiti craze in Mega-City One, resulting in the first appearance of Chopper, the Midnight Surfer, a key Dredd character who will recur many times in future stories.

The volume is interesting in being basically made up of a huge epic, several short arcs and a whole bunch of standalones, mixing the approach of previous volumes, where Volumes 01 and 03 were standalones and Volume 02 contained two massive sagas, an approach also favoured in Volume 05. I would say that the Judge Child story, though well-conceived with some great characters, feels a bit slight. The massive build-up to a limp ending is a classic case of storytelling bait-and-switch (albeit one with some further pay-offs down the road), and the story really only ends up being memorable for the secondary characters it introduces. The standalones are a mixed bag, but there's a lot of interesting worldbuilding going on and some good laughs (Walter the Wobot also continues to be a low-key presence, which I am thankful for), as well as a few more, briefly thoughtful moments. The collection ends up being interesting, but it is really the calm before the absolute storm that is Volume 05.

The Complete Case Files Volume 04 (***½) contains every Judge Dredd story printed from Prog (issue) 155 to Prog 207 of the comic 2000AD, published from March 1980 to April 1981. The stories are set in the years 2102 and 2103. The writers in this collection are John Wagner, Alan Grant and Kelvin Gosnell. The artists in this collection are Brian Bolland, Ron Smith, Mick McMahon, Ian Gibson, Steve Dillon and Brett Ewins.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Person of Interest: Season 3

The Machine continues to provide intelligence to both the United States government to deal with large-scale threats to national security, and to its creator, Harold Finch, to deal with crimes that are "irrelevant" on the large scale but hugely important on the individual. But, to Finch's distress, the Machine has also chosen a new operative, the hacker of dubious morality known as Root. As Root operates as the Machine's free-roaming agent of chaos, Finch's police allies are consumed by the battle against corruption, and Finch slowly becomes aware that a second, potentially more powerful AI is about to be born.

Person of Interest's first two seasons were mostly made up of procedural, episodic stories linked by a few continuing arcs. The third season nominally continues in this mode but the story arcs are now much more front-and-centre. We have former antagonist Root gradually coming in from the cold as a fellow ally (albeit a very unpredictable one) in the service of the Machine, and the police storyline becomes more desperate as a now-demoted Carter and still-in-the-loop Fusco work to finally expose the machinations of HR. The team's ability to deal with the numbers has been augmented by the full-time joining-up of Sameen Shaw, though having two extremely competent ex-government agents on the team does threaten to make them a bit overpowered.

For a show that basically started off as a two-hander between John Reese and Harold Finch, it's now quite busy, with an ensemble cast to rival any other show's, to the point that Reese feels like he's getting lost in the mix a bit. The results in a mid-season decision to reduce the cast by one, with a huge build-up to a major climax that finally resolves the long-running HR storyline. I'm going to be honest and say that this storyline was never the most gripping, and only really worked because the actors involved (particularly Taraji P. Henson's Carter and Clarke Peters's Alonzo Quinn) are so damn good. Still, once it's wrapped up, it's at least wrapped up for good.

The show shifts gears in the latter part of the season thanks to a superb episode where Finch is reunited with one of his former friends (an outstanding guest turn by Saul Rubinek) and learns that a second AI may be on the verge of coming into existence, which triggers a complex multi-episode story arc involving our team, the intergovernmental organisation Decima, the US government, and an anti-surveillance state hacktivist terror group known as Vigilance. Though this arc risks getting a bit convoluted at times (there's only so many secret organisation names one can take), it remains pretty gripping, as well as timely.

This storyline exposes Person of Interest's central core theme, and the one that will span the rest of its run: the struggle to create an AI Aligned with human interests, and will therefore protect us, and the dangers of creating one that is Unaligned with them, and may simply choose to destroy us, with the Machine as the former and Samaritan as the latter. This was science fiction in 2014, when this season aired, but is a distinctly closer idea now.

The strengths of the show remain the core cast's excellent performances, the strong exploration of increasingly topical ideas, and the show's interesting willingness in maintaining its number-of-the-week storylines, sometimes right in the middle of critical arcs, always giving each episode its own identity instead of completely losing itself to serialisation. It's a tricky balancing act the show handles well.

On the negative side of things, the HR storyline outstays its welcome by at least a few episodes, and the interweaving of different conspiracies from multiple organisations risks tripping up the plot a few times, but the show at least is willing to kill off significant recurring characters and entire organisations to maintain a strong plot focus.

Person of Interest's third season (****½) is its strongest so far, with some gripping storylines and thorny questions raised, with no pat answers given. The show is available on physical media and streaming worldwide.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files - Volume 03

Mega-City One, 2101. The city is recovering from the rule of the insane tyrant Cal and, as usual, it's up to the firm and unyielding vigilance of Judge Dredd to make sure stability is maintained. But with his niece Vienna being targeted by criminals, crime rising in the city hab blocks, and a vast invading army of flesh-eating spiders headed towards the city, Dredd has his hands full. And that's before the sinister Judge Death arrives from another dimension...

The previous two volumes in the Complete Case Files series presented two different sides to the Judge Dredd mythos. Volume 01 was mostly stand-alone stories with little linking material. Volume 02 is divided into two huge arcs, The Cursed Earth and The Day the Law Died, with only a few standalone stories. Volume 03 is, once again, mostly stand-alone stories, although these are now usually mini-arcs of 2-4 issues apiece, with the occasional one-off strip.

This approach, coupled with a greater interest in worldbuilding and continuity (things that were more optional in the first volume) means that the omnibus covers a lot of ground. Several Judge Dredd core concepts are explored here, such as city fads that the population of Mega-City One latches onto to avoid going totally insane, with "boinging" (jumping around the city in indestructible plastic bubbles) the first to be investigated. We also learn more about Mega-City One's TV stations and what kind of shows are popular, and we get several arcs in which the city is under threat from a vast horde out of the Cursed Earth, being, er, druid-led hippies and killer insane spiders respectively. In another story, Dredd joins forces with a talking cat (genetic engineering, natch), fights horror-themed robots running amuck (Dredd vs. the Hunchback of Notre Dame is an underrated face-off) and has to take part in an international incident as Mega-City One has to evict Sov-Block warships from the Black Atlantic off the coast. Smaller-scale stories see Dredd having to deal with the introduction of the most amazing-tasting chocolate in the history of the city, and dealing with a super-genius child whose parents did not set appropriate boundaries (this story gets a sequel a mind-boggling thirty years later).

But the volume saves the most memorable story for almost last. Dredd's most iconic, famous foe is Judge Death, a semi-incorporeal being from another dimension who killed his homeworld's population, ensuring justice by making life itself a crime. Dredd has to join forces with Psi-Judge Anderson, arguably the second-most-iconic judge in the whole franchise apart from Dredd, to take down the enemy. This is a foe so formidable that it's hard to see how Dredd can plausibly win, and to their credit the writers realise that as well, and come up with a novel solution that doesn't resolve the situation permanently, but puts it on hold for another time (in this case, Volume 05).

Those looking for another long-running, epic arc may be disappointed not to find one here, but this collection of shorter arcs is head-and-shoulders better than Volume 01. The stories are funnier, the satire is sharper and the world is feeling more consistent. This is still far from Dredd at its best, but we're certainly well on our way to getting there, and it's satisfying to finally meet Dredd's most formidable adversary, and one who will continue to plague him for decades to come.

The Complete Case Files Volume 03 (***½) contains every Judge Dredd story printed from Prog (issue) 116 to Prog 154 of the comic 2000AD, published from June 1979 to March 1980. The stories are set in the years 2101 and 2102. The writers in this collection are John Wagner and Pat Mills. The artists in this collection are Brian Bolland, Dave Gibbons, Mick McMahon, Brendan McCarthy, Ian Gibson, Garry Leach, Ron Smith, John Cooper and Barry Mitchell.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Person of Interest: Season 2

Harold Finch and John Reese continue to use the predictive powers of the Machine to help people in trouble, but a new factor has entered the equation: Root, a skilled hacker with an evangelical belief in the Machine. Whilst Root goes deep undercover to track down the physical location of the Machine, New York becomes a battleground between the feuding criminal gangs, the police and HR, a shadowy cabal of corrupt police officers and public officials.

Person of Interest's first season was a solid, if slow-burning, introduction to the series. It set up the central characters and premise, and gradually complicated the premise as the series drove on. Serialisation was embraced only slowly, as some apparently one-off characters became recurring allies, enemies or potential frenemies, with the main focus remaining on the mystery-of-the-week.

Season 2 basically continues this format, although serialisation is embraced a little bit more. It takes two episodes for the cliffhanger ending of the first season, where Finch is kidnapped by Root, to be fully resolved and this makes for a great storyline pitting talented actors Michael Emerson and Amy Acker against one another, whilst Reese (Jim Caviezel) tries to keep up on the still-incoming numbers with the help of Detectives Fusco (Kevin Chapman) and Carter (Taraji P. Henson). Along the way they acquire a dog, Bear, who quickly becomes an integral part of the team, and help a conman named Leon, played by Emerson's Lost colleague Ken Leung, who becomes a reluctant ally.

The throughline of Season 2 seems to be "let's make the team bigger," with some episodes seeing Finch, Reese, Fusco, Carter, Leon and returning ally Zoe (Paige Turco) joining forces to deal with cases, which can be a bit jarring after the more claustrophobic first season which was basically the Finch 'n' Reese Show. Most episodes don't require this level of all-hands-on-deck though, so the show develops multiple subplots such as a new love interest for Carter, Beecher (Sterling K. Brown) and a new criminal conspiracy storyline involving Carter, Fusco, returning occasional frenemy Elias (Enrico Colantoni) and the shady Alonzo Quinn (The Wire's Clarke Peters). In fact, the acting firepower of the season is impressive, with Peters and Brown particularly impressing.

The show does a good job of developing these subplots whilst keeping the main storyline ticking over, with a surprisingly light touch. I was expecting Root to play a much bigger role this season but her appearances are sporadic, and more impactful when they do take place. The stories-of-the-week are quite entertaining, though at times they do feel they're feeding off a big book of TV stock premises, such as the main character and a female lead having to go undercover in suburbia to uncover a hotbed of murder and mayhem, or the mob hitman who falls for his target. Still, these stories are usually well-executed.

The season takes a huge upward swing with its sixteenth episode, Relevance, which introduces Sarah Shahi as government assassin Sameen Shaw (with as sterling guest turn by Ebon Moss-Bachrach as her partner), whose number is picked up by the Machine. Uniquely, the story is told from Shaw's point-of-view exclusively, with Reese and Finch showing up without much warning. The clever script plays with and breaks the conventions of the show, and Person of Interest's tendency to pull its punches to keep the mass audience happy goes out the window. Shaw is a sympathetic and wronged character, but she is also resourceful and ruthless in a way that makes even Reese look amateurish. Shahi's performance is absolutely outstanding, and the twists and turns in the plot make this easily the best episode of the first two seasons. Making Shaw a regular after this (though it takes a few episodes for her to come back) is a no-brainer.

The season ends with an impressive two-parter which blows open a lot of the show's premise. We learn what's been going on with the Machine in the presence, and what happened to Reese and Ingram after turning it over to the US government. Root makes her long-awaited move and the value of having Shaw on the team becomes clear, with the show building to a big cliffhanger, even if maybe it hedges its bets a little so as not to make a return to the status quo impossible.

Still, Person of Interest's second season (****) is a sharp improvement on the first season's promise. Expanding the cast is a good idea which brings more storylines and ideas into play, and the show admirably mixes some good serialised plots with some inventive episodes-of-the-week (though there's a few rote ones as well). The show's improvement in quality impresses. The show is available on physical media and streaming worldwide.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Citizen Sleeper

In the distant future humans can digitise their consciousness and place it in android replicants, "Sleepers." A Sleeper escapes indentured servitude on a freighter and finds themselves on the Eye, a large space station formerly controlled by the Solheim Corporation but is now contested between several factions. A former trade union turned civil authority, Havenage, uneasily shares the station with a criminal operation named Yatagan. The Sleeper must navigate between these factions and find some way of escaping the station and living a good life.

Citizen Sleeper was originally released in 2022 and attracted significant acclaim on release. The game can be summarised as part roleplaying game, part survival resource-juggler and part adventure game. The game is smoothly minimalist, playing entirely from a map of the Eye space station, occasionally with character art displayed whilst conversations are held.

The story unfolds over multiple days. At the start of each day, you roll a series of dice. The results of the dice can be applied to different activities, such as doing a day job for money, investigating the station to further the storyline or hacking into the station network and uncovering the secrets of its long-dormant mainframe (evading ancient security programmes in the process).

Citizen Sleeper's storyline feels quite tight at the start but then starts sprawling in numerous different directions. There are multiple ways to escape the station, different factions to align with, and a dozen or so significant characters you can develop relationships with, some of whom can help you, others hinder. Some characters are antagonistic but can be won over to help you; some are initially friendly but have hidden, darker agendas you might deal with.

Your Sleeper requires food and energy, meaning you sometimes have to make tough choices on whether to do more activities or spend dice on sustenance. But if you take too long, you can start losing dice (representing your growing weakness). The numbers you roll on your dice also have different application. In general, the higher the number the better, but some tasks require you to precisely match a number and you can't do anything without anything else, meaning you may have to wait a few days and several rerolls before accomplishing that task.

Your character does level up periodically and you get new abilities such as being able to reroll dice once a week or being able to tackle specialist tasks.

It's a compelling mix of interesting systems, complicated further by various ticking clocks, such as a character completing their own mission before they are ready to help you or until pursuers catch up with you on the station. Things stay just on the right side of being overwhelming, and the game is generally fair with you about keeping your character informed about what's going on and what possibilities there are for things to do next. However, the game can also be relatively ruthless in shutting down the possibility for hedging your bets: once you commit to a course of action, some other possibilities are invalidated.

With a single run of the game taking less than eight hours (depending on your choices, you might wrap up one in maybe four), it's short enough to encourage multiple replays and it can be surprising to see how your choices can impact the game. One playthrough might see you developing a major quest to discover your original human identity; in another, this might barely be mentioned as a factor in the story. One run might see you explore the entire station and visit every location, the next might see you leaving the station with half the map still in darkness. Your impact on the story is considerable, and fascinating.

Obviously this is a low-budget game, but the production values are quite impressive. The graphics are minimalist but atmospherically effective, the soundtrack is superb and the writing is quite compelling. Most of the NPC characters are well-written and engaging, and the game does a good job of holding your attention and making you make tough choices, with the consequences for failure being usually as interesting as those for success. Citizen Sleeper does a lot with not a lot of resources.

That said, the game can feel a bit punishing, especially near the start, and occasionally too reliant on the RNG number gods to progress to the next part of the story, resulting in bursts of wheel-spinning. The game is still short enough that this is not a major problem, but it can be a source of occasional frustration.

Citizen Sleeper (****) is a fascinating and well-written game, with a lot of substantive choices to make and encouraging of replays. The game is available on PC, Nintendo Switch, Microsoft Xbox One and Series X/S, and PlayStation 4 and 5. A sequel, Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, was released last year.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

New China Miéville novel gets cover art and blurb

China Miéville's enormous new novel now has cover art and an expanded blurb.

"From the bestselling, award-winning master of uncanny fiction comes a defining work, twenty years in the making – a deeply moving, decade- and continent-spanning epic of grief, global tumult, and grim conspiracy.

"Maur’s life has been shaped by an unbearable loss. But in the aftermath of what is an apparently ordinary tragedy, deeper, stranger questions arise . . . Their answers may lie within the dark heart and darker history of an old soldier who shares Maur’s obsessions – and is violently pursued by the same unknown, unquiet forces.

"So begins The Rouse, a book unlike any other: at once a sprawling saga of a bloody century, and the intimate story of two lives, their loves, regrets and secrets – and a terrifying journey into infinite mystery."

The Rouse, all 1,264 pages of it, is currently due for publication on 17 September 2026.

Blogging Roundup: 1 November 2025 to 31 March 2026

 

The Wertzone

News

• Tor Books release the rights to The Sword of Shadows series by JV Jones, allowing new publishers to come on board or self-publishing

• Ultra-long web saga The Wandering Inn to get physical releases starting this autumn

• For All Mankind renewed for sixth and final season

• Peter Jackson to produce yet another frankly unnecessary Lord of the Rings film

• Firefly animated TV series in development

• Hulu passes on Buffy the Vampire Slayer sequel series after shooting a pilot

• Two missing Doctor Who episodes recovered

• Cast of Firefly tease possible reunion

• Red Dwarf co-creator returns to franchise after thirty years with new novel

• Royal Shakespeare Company confirms launch of Game of Thrones: The Mad King for Summer 2026

• Pinnacle Entertainment launches Deadlands 30th Anniversary Kickstarter

• Baldur's Gate TV series in development at HBO from Last of Us team

• Sales of A Song of Ice and Fire surpass 100 million

• Hugh Cook's epic Chronicles of an Age of Darkness series returns to print

• Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere setting picked up for adaptation by Apple TV

• Blake's 7 reboot in development

• New Malazan novel, Legacies of Betrayal, slated for October 2026 release

• Kathleen Kennedy steps down as the head of Lucasfilm

• Hosting an event with Peter F. Hamilton in late January

• Total War: Warhammer 40,000 announced

• Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic announced

• Brandon Sanderson hits 50 million sales

• Creative Assembly announce Total War: Medieval III, confirm another game announcement for next week

• Tor Books passes on completing JV Jones's Sword of Shadows series, author to pursue self-publishing

• RUMOUR: Something may be up with Half-Life 3

• Paramount shelves the Star Trek "Kelvinverse" permanently

• Mass Effect TV series to be an original story set after the original video game trilogy

• China Mieville announces new novel, The Rouse, for 2026

Features

• RIP Nicholas Brendan

• RIP Dan Simmons

• RIP Rob Grant

• RIP Jean Rabe

• A Preview of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

• Doctor Who Review Index (2025)

• A revised Malazan reading order

Reviews

• Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files Volume 02

• Age of Mythology: Retold

• Slow Gods by Claire North

• Person of Interest: Season 1

• Relics of Ruin by Erin Evans

• A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: Season 1

• Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files Volume 01

• Dispatch

• Pluribus: Season 1

• Empire of Exiles by Erin Evans

• Sniper Elite 3

• Red Dead Redemption

• Doctor Who: Season 26 and the TV Movie

• The Outer Worlds 2

• Doctor Who: Season 25

• Forge of the High Mage by Ian Cameron Esslemont

• Doctor Who: Season 24

• Doctor Who: Season 23 - The Trial of a Time Lord

• No Life Forsaken by Steven Erikson

• Doctor Who: Season 22