BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER legacy sequel series in development

A new Buffy the Vampire Slayer project is in development at Hulu. This is not really surprising, with multiple attempts to resurrect the franchise having been discussed since not long after it concluded the first time around in 2003. However, this attempt appears to be closer to a pilot deal than any of the others, and is the first to have Buffy herself, Sarah Michelle Gellar, attached in an official capacity.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer started as a movie script written by Joss Whedon. The resulting film, released in 1992 and starring Kristy Swanson and Donald Sutherland, did poorly at the box office but found a dedicated cult fanbase on home video. This led to a TV show being picked up by Fox in 1996, for airing on The WB starting the following year, with Whedon as showrunner and Gellar in the starring role. Buffy the Vampire Slayer ran for seven seasons (ending in 2003) and 144 episodes, winning both critical and commercial acclaim for its canny mixture of supernatural fantasy, horror, drama and light comedy. Its spin-off show, Angel, ran for five seasons and 110 episodes from 1999 to 2004.

Although the story continued in comics, attempts to resurrect the franchise in other formats failed. Spin-offs focusing around the characters of Spike (James Marsters), Giles (Tony Head) and Faith (Eliza Dushku) were in development at one time or another, but none made it off the ground.

In 2010 an attempt to reboot the franchise as a new movie series foundered, whilst a 2018 attempt at a total reboot with Whedon producing and Monica Owusu-Breen showrunning also failed to gain traction. Whedon's subsequent fall from grace for alleged toxic behaviour on the sets of his various projects seemed to stall any further development on projects closely associated with his name.

Sarah Michelle Gellar distanced herself from the show after its conclusion, not attending conventions and gently discouraging speculation over a reboot or sequel with herself involved. She starred in two Scooby Doo movies with husband Freddie Prinze Jr., as well as Cruel Intentions and The Grudge, and occasional TV work, most recently Paramount+'s Wolf Pack. She has mainly focused on business interests outside of television and film. However, she recently spoke of Buffy more warmly having sat down to watch the show with her own children for the first time, and found the experience rewarding.

The new iteration of the show being discussed is a successor series which will focus on a new regular cast, with Gellar's Buffy and possibly other actors from the original series appearing in recurring roles. Oscar-winner Chloé Zhao (Eternals, Nomadland) is being touted as a producer, writer and possibly director for some episodes. Nora Zuckerman and Lila Zuckerman (Poker Face, Prodigal Sons, Agents of SHIELD, Fringe) will produce and showrun. Rights-holders Fran Kuzui and Kaz Kuzui (who produced the 1992 film) will produce alongside Dolly Parton, whose production company worked on the original series. Whedon is not involved at this time.

The original Buffy the Vampire Slayer ended with Buffy finding a way of creating more Slayers, allowing others to take over the burden of saving the world and allowing her to have a vacation. Some of the spin-off media posited that Buffy would effectively become a mentor to a whole new generation of Slayers, and working more in the capacity of a general directing her forces against larger threats. Whether this project would go in a similar direction, or return to the status quo of a single Slayer, remains to be seen.

Netflix's THE SANDMAN to end with Season 2

Netflix has confirmed what has been strongly rumoured for a good two years now, that the upcoming second season of The Sandman will the final one.

Despite early reports that Netflix were eyeing three to four seasons for the show, the first season's just-good-enough performance (which saw an unusually long delay before the second season was commissioned) and the impending problem that main character Dream plays a smaller role in many of the storylines in the middle and latter part of the graphic novel series, barely appearing in some issues, saw Netflix move to make the second season the final one. The series will continue to adapt the primary story arc of the comics, but in an abridged format, with some of the middle-series storylines and episodes likely to fall by the wayside.

Extremely fortuitously for Netflix, they made this decision before filming and a long time before accusations of sexual misconduct were made against Sandman creator/author Neil Gaiman by eight women. These accusations, which Gaiman has strenuously denied, has seen both publishers and another production company, Amazon Studios, cutting ties with the author.

Netflix has not yet confirmed a broadcast date for Season 2 of The Sandman beyond "2025."

Rebecca Yarros sells 12 million copies of her EMPYREAN series in under two years

Rebecca Yarros' Empyrean fantasy series has sold (non-paywalled reference) a startling 12 million copies in less than two years, marking it as one of the fastest-selling fantasy series of the 21st Century. The first book in the series, Fourth Wing, was published in May 2023 and was followed by Iron Flame in November 2023 and Onyx Storm in January 2025. Two more books are projected to bring the series to a conclusion.

Onyx Storm itself is the fastest-selling adult novel published in the last twenty years, shifting 2.7 million copies in its first week on sale. Onyx Storm saw bookshop midnight openings, launch parties and other events that haven't been seen since the release of the final Harry Potter novel in 2007, without the dual adult/child appeal of that book.

For comparison, Yarros' sales in two years are approaching half those of Brandon Sanderson's non-Wheel of Time books in twenty (Sanderson has sold 40 million books, with over 12 million of those being his three Wheel of Time novels, for approximately 28 million sales of his solo work). Yarros has sold approximately a quarter of the total sales of her colleague Sarah J. Maas, who has sold just over 40 million books in thirteen years. 12 million is also approximately the same number of books that George R.R. Martin sold of his Song of Ice and Fire series before the TV adaptation began.

The only author who can be said to had a more impressive debut was Patrick Rothfuss, who shifted over 10 million copies of his debut novel The Name of the Wind alone (though nowhere near as fast).

With two more books to come and an adaptation of the books underway at Amazon MGM Studios, it's clear that these figures are only going to continue rising in the future.

What will be interesting to see is if this influx of new readers benefits the rest of the fantasy genre, but it does confirm that Romantasy's current sales dominance is no danger of ending soon. 

New MURDERBOT editions criticised for poor quality

As I noticed previously, readers have been calling for omnibus editions of the critically-acclaimed Murderbot Diaries science fiction series for some years. The series, by Martha Wells, consists of five novellas and two short novels which has been positively festooned with awards, praise and strong sales, but their high prices for a short page count have put them out of the reach of more frugal SFF fans.

The books have been reissued in the last few weeks in new omnibus editions to hopefully address the issue. Whilst the format is still not generous - with only two books per edition rather than a more appropriate three (the first three novellas combined only come to 450 pages) - it was still a marked improvement over prior editions in terms of value for money. Unfortunately, the new editions have been called out for terrible proofing and formatting.

The problem appears to be that the books have been released in a print-on-demand format, with all the hallmarks of shoddy formatting and/or corrupted files being used. Given the publisher is Tor Books, the largest and most popular SFF publisher in the United States, and its UK off-shoot, the poor quality of the books is most surprising, especially given they are charging the price of a full, properly-formatted and edited paperback edition.

Images from Amazon

The three omnibus volumes are each a different height and size to the others, with the cover images not aligned correctly, and in the interior there is an inefficient use of space.

Multiple reviewers have pointed out the problem on the Amazon review pages, and via BlueSky, noting they have returned the books for a full refund.

Hopefully this problem can be fixed quickly; as one of the highest-profile science fiction book series of recent years, and with an imminent TV adaptation on Apple TV+, it would be a shame for new readers to be put off by poor quality books. The series, and readers, deserve better.

Age of Empires II Definitive Edition Chronicles: Battle for Greece

The Aegean Sea and its coasts are the battleground between the two great powers of antiquity: the vast Persian Empire and the Greek city-states, led by the two rivals of Athens and Sparta. Armies march, huge navies are constructed and the powers clash over a century of warfare, with the dominance of the ancient world in the balance.

Back in 2019, Microsoft released Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition, a comprehensive remake of the classic 1999 real-time strategy game. The result was probably the best video game remake ever created, which not only updated the original game's graphics, controls and userface whilst fully retaining the spirit and style of the original, but also added a massive amount of new content. This was then expanded through no less than six new expansions: Lords of the West, Dawn of the Dukes, Dynasties of India, Return of Rome, The Mountain Royals and Victors and Vanquished.

This latest, seventh expansion marks a shift in format. Chronicles: Battle for Greece follows in Return of Rome's footsteps by adding civilisations from the ancient world to the game. Whilst Return of Rome remade some of the campaigns from the original Age of Empires game, Battle for Greece is a wholly new campaign built from the ground up. It adds the civilisations of the Achaemenids (the Persian Empire), Athenians and Spartans, but the game eschews the traditional expansion format, with 5-7 missions for each civilisation, largely separate in time and setting. This time around the game has a fully voiced, expansive, 21-mission sequential campaign which moves between the three sides. There are fully-animated cutscenes (though heavily stylised, Blizzard's cinematic department can sleep easily here, but still very nice), full voiceovers and a story that unfolds across the game. The feeling is more like Age of Mythology (which recently also saw a comprehensive remake via Age of Mythology Retold) than any prior Age of Empires campaign, with a strong narrative and character focus.

The story is appropriately epic, spanning almost the full century of the Greco-Persian Wars, which saw the Greeks square off against the Persians (not for the last time) before fighting an internal conflict, the Peloponnesian War, over which Greek city would come to dominate the rest. This is a much more zoomed-in campaign than normal, with minor battles and campaigns being featured alongside the much more famous ones like Marathon, Salamis and Thermopylae.

Most of the 21 missions are huge, taking multiple hours to complete apiece with numerous twists and turns. The expansion took me 27 hours to complete on moderate difficulty. Some missions have timers, some missions require you to undertake operations without a home base, and some have you relying on allies to provide troops whilst you fight with them in the field. The few times you do get a town centre and can play a "normal" game of Age of Empires both feel like a relief but also an acknowledgement of the game's limitations; those missions are usually the easiest and most straightforward. Some of the missions are intricate puzzles with you having to work out how best to hit targets in the optimal order. One memorable mission has you having to win a democratic election (this is Greece, after all), meaning you have to keep the people happy, which you can do by fair means (hosting lavish games, winning glorious victories) or foul (smearing your opponent's name through rumour-mongering). Most of the missions are inventive, showing once again how to get surprising results out of what is still, under the 4K sheen, a 26-year-old game.

The game can also be frustrating. The campaigns do feel like a 2024 design hosted on a 1999 foundation, but those foundations sometimes shine through: a few too many missions have you completing the last mission objective only to be "surprised" by a final twist objective, usually some variant of "fight off this massive enemy army which has appeared outside your city with no warning, somehow." It's the type of cheap mission design I'd hoped we'd have seen the last of somewhere around 2005. The game's traditionally eyebrow-raising pathfinding and AI awareness issues are also present and correct. The expansion has changed a lot about how the game works, especially naval forces, but underneath it's Age of Empires II through and through.

The narrative focus could be of interest to people who perhaps find the traditional Age of Empires II campaign a bit remote and hands-off. The stories here are more personal and more engrossing, reflecting the massive events happening through individual ambitions and failings. It's a strong success, leading to one of the strongest expansion campaigns we've seen for the game. However, the campaign does feel a little on the long side, with some very bizarre difficulty spikes that can be deeply frustrating. The expansion also ends on a cliffhanger, confirming there will be a follow-up focusing on the life of Alexander the Great.

Age of Empires II Colon Definitive Edition Subcolon Chronicles Subsubcolon Battle for Greece (****) is a good time, and an easy recommendation for Age of Empires II fans who want more Age of Empires II (even granted this game has more content for it than almost any other video game ever made, after a quarter century of expansions and updates). Those who've perhaps not tried out the game before may find the narrative focus of this expansion are more compelling way of playing the game, although the mission design often assumes experience with how the game already works. Some frustrations and annoyances ultimately do not derail what is a nice twist on the Age of Empires formula. The expansion is available right now.

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Exodus: The Archimedes Engine by Peter F. Hamilton

Fleeing a ravaged Earth, humanity launched near-lightspeed arkships across a large part of the galaxy. Many have vanished, some established isolated colonies in remote systems, but the greatest success was in the Centauri Cluster, a group of millions of stars within a few hundred light-years of one another with thousands of habitable worlds between them. The Green Signal was sent across the galaxy to attract more arkships. But in the tens of thousands of years it took them to arrive, the humans of the Centauri Cluster become technologically advanced, becoming near godlike beings called the Celestials. The late-arriving humans, for whom only years or decades had passed at relativistic speeds since the fall of Earth, these Celestials might as well be a different species.

The arrival of the arkship Diligent in the Crown Dominion, the only Celestial empire to allow humans their own worlds, settlements and businesses, after 40,000 years in deep space at first seems like business as usual. But the owner-ruler of the Diligent is one of old Earth's most ruthless businessmen, who sees an opportunity in the ossified power structures of the Crown Dominion to further the cause of ordinary humans. At the same time, the arkship's arrival gives the rebellious son of a rich family an opportunity to become a Traveler, an interstellar starship captain. Elsewhere, a police officer is recruited by a Celestial archon to become his eyes and ears in the Crown Dominion's home system, and a potential recruit to succeed a Celestial ruler sets about her destiny with impressive ruthlessness. Both within and outside the borders of the Crown Dominion, threats are gathering which could change - or obliterate - the fate of billions, humans and Celestials alike.

Peter F. Hamilton, Britain's biggest-selling living science fiction author, is known for his brick-thick, far-future space operas featuring living starships, immense space battles and impeccable worldbuilding. His most recent space opera trilogy, The Salvation Sequence (Salvation, Salvation Lost, The Saints of Salvation), operated on a different level, with three relatively constrained novels working with a tight focus to deliver a very effective storyline. It worked very well, but arguably lacked the epic grandeur of his best work.

The Archimedes Engine cheerfully throws that approach out of the window and slams down the accelerator. This is, once again, a huge (900 pages in hardcover), dizzyingly epic space opera which swaps between a large number of storylines, planets and starships, with a meticulously constructed plot that combines breathless action setpices with impressively atmospheric worldbuilding. Hamilton hasn't delivered a book quite like this since 2004's Pandora's Star and 1996's The Reality Dysfunction, so it's impressive to see that, twenty years on, he's still got it.

The Archimedes Engine does have one major differences to his earlier work though: this is, to some degree, a collaborative project. It is part of the wider Exodus project which also incorporates an episode of Amazon's recent Secret Level animated series (Exodus: Odyssey) and a forthcoming, massive video game RPG from the same team as Mass Effect. Reading interviews with the creatives, it seems that they came up with the underlying concepts and gave them to Hamilton to flesh out, with them then providing guidance on those ideas. The result is an impressive amount of worldbuilding, since it is needed to drive not just this novel, but TV and video game projects as well.

The core principle of the setting is incredibly straightforward: FTL (faster than light) travel is utterly impossible. Spacecraft are limited to the speed of light. There are "Gates of Heaven," incredibly powerful devices which can accelerate spacecraft to 99.99% of lightspeed in an instant (that's 500,000 gees, thank you very much) without obliterating them, but that's about it. Starship crews buzz around at relativistic speeds, with only a few days or weeks passing for their crews as they travel from one system to another, but potentially years at a time passing for their friends and family back home. Even a round-trip to a star a modest fifteen light-years away will see at least thirty years, a quarter of a human lifetime in this time, elapse for those left behind. This makes it incredibly important to work out which journeys are necessary and which are not; an early meeting in the book, which takes three years out of someone's life, feels like it could have been an email, which is even more annoying in this context.

Hamilton's not actually done this before, his previous work has largely relied on FTL travel, usually via wormholes, so seeing him track where his characters are as decades pass for them is quite interesting (his friend Alastair Reynolds is more of a dab hand at this, as his signature Revelation Space setting similarly lacks FTL travel). To some degree the action in the book is largely constrained to the Kelowan system, which limits the problem, but several subplots do see trips to other star systems, allowing decades to pass when they return. Fortunately this is a setting where people like to set in motion very long-term plots.

Hamilton juggles a huge number of plots, subplots, characters and worldbuilding information with typical aplomb. For all the praise given to Brandon Sanderson and Steven Erikson for this, I think Hamilton has them both beat when it comes to building a series of wildly disparate threads over the better part of a thousand pages only for them to converge with a titanic clash at the end. The Archimedes Engine is no different, with storylines that seem utterly disconnected colliding with the force of matter and antimatter, leaving the reader eager for the sequel (though you'll have to wait until late 2025 for that).

As an author, Hamilton does have a number of long-standing, almost infamous weaknesses. One is that no matter how far future, bizarre or strange the setting, his characters can have a tendency to break down into English idioms, sayings and insults. This is a nice change from SF novels which have characters doing the same thing with American vocabulary, but can be a bit distracting. Fortunately, his other infamous (though probably over-stated, especially in his later work) tendency towards sex scenes of wildly variable plot relevance is here altogether missing. Characters hook up, but tasteful fades to black are the order of the day. Also, for some reason, Hamilton seems to have lost faith in his recurring plot device of a benevolent billionaire/trillionaire who helps save the human race from the goodness of his heart, so our stand-in in that role in this book is a much more morally grey character.

Where the book is a bit more variable is the quality of the characters. Thyra, the would-be-heir to the crown of Wynid who has to fight against her low rank of birth to gain her Queen/Mother's favour, is probably the standout here, but she does take a back seat in the back half of the book. Finn is the very beige young callow youth protagonist who goes on a wild adventure (this book's Joshua Calvert), though he works enough as a bit of a blank slate for the reader to experience the crazy universe through. I'm more surprised that Hamilton didn't do more with Ellie, the Diligent crewmember we spend the most time with, though mostly not as a POV character. As someone who's spent her life on a low-tech arkship, she's probably better-placed to act as our eyes and ears in the setting, but perhaps that would have been too obvious. It's Gahji, the Celestial politician trying to make sense of the increasingly weird goings-on, and Terence Wilson-Fletcher, police detective (and our spiritual surrogate for the Commonwealth universe's Paula Myo, still Hamilton's finest character creation) who emerge as the most interesting protagonists. Other characters descend into the usual morass of petty criminals, scheming politicians and greedy businessmen. It works well, but isn't his most vivid cast.

The Archimedes Engine (****½) is Peter F. Hamilton back on top form, doing what he does best: large-scale, epic space opera, in a well-realised setting, with a huge, multi-faceted plot that builds and concludes hugely satisfyingly at the end. This is the first in a duology, so there is a significant cliffhanger. The second book, The Helium Sea, seems tentatively scheduled for later this year. The book is available now worldwide.

Exodus, the video game, is currently unscheduled but likely to arrive in 2026 or 2027. There is a significant amount of worldbuilding and background information that can be seen on Archetype Entertainment's website.

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RIP David Lynch

News has sadly broken of the passing of legendary director, producer and occasional actor David Lynch, four days before what would have been his 79th birthday. A connoisseur of the strange and inexplicable, Lynch is best-known in genre circles for directing the first feature film version of Dune in 1984, and creating the deliciously strange television series Twin Peaks (1990-91, 2017).

Born in Missoula, Montana in 1946, Lynch moved around a lot as a child, living in five different states in his formative years (including an inspirational stretch in Washington State). As a Boy Scout he was present at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in January 1961, on Lynch's 15th birthday. Early plans to be a painter fell through after a dispiriting trip to Europe, so he pivoted to film to support his young family.

His first short film was Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) (1967), an "arty" but somewhat baffling short piece, setting the tone for his career. Several promising short films followed, and then his first full release, Eraserhead (1977). Lynch spent five years making the movie, remounting it every time he raised enough money to shoot a bit more material. The film proved polarising on the festival circuit, but it picked up a cult following after a wider release in 1977. Stanley Kubrick and Mel Brooks both highly rated it.

Such plaudits saw Lynch taken more seriously and producer Stuart Cornfeld agreed to help him fund his next project. After considering several scripts doing the rounds, Lynch chose The Elephant Man purely based on the title. The film, starring John Hurt as the deformed Joseph Merrick, was rapturously received and earned Lynch his first Academy Award nomination. George Lucas was a huge fan and offered Lynch the chance to direct the third Star Wars film, an idea Lynch found baffling and declined.

Perhaps appropriately, Lynch instead decided to join forces with novelist Frank Herbert on an adaptation of his 1965 novel Dune. Herbert had been furious when viewing Star Wars in 1977, finding many points of similarity between his novel and Lucas' film. Herbert considered legal action, but was advised to instead leverage the resulting sci-fi craze to get Dune on the screen instead. Despite production difficulties, Lynch enjoyed making the film and working with Herbert, and also considered the cast most impressive: a young actor he discovered, Kyle MacLachlan, became a frequent collaborator. However, Lynch fell out with the producers over the film's final cut (which bombed at the box office in 1984), and a later attempt to re-edit the film into a TV mini-series without his permission angered him.

Lynch returned to more of his traditional output with the intense, surreal and disturbing Blue Velvet (1986), also starring MacLachlan. The film was praised by Woody Allen and saw Lynch regain some of the kudos he'd lost with Dune.

Lynch then surprised many by deciding to move into television, helped by ex-Hill Street Blues producer Mark Frost. After developing a Marilyn Monroe biopic series, they hit on the idea of a murder mystery in the American north-west under the working title "Northwest Passage." ABC bought the project and it hit the screens in 1990 as Twin Peaks. Again starring MacLachlan, the show saw the FBI brought into investigate a puzzling murder in Twin Peaks, Washington. The mystery gripped not just the USA, but every country it was broadcast in, and "Who killed Laura Palmer?" because the single-most-asked question of 1990. The first, eight-episode season was acclaimed, as was its haunting soundtrack, but ABC wanted a full 22-episode second season, which stretched viewer interest past the breaking point. Aware they were losing the audience, ABC insisted on the killer being revealed early, to Lynch's immense frustration. Aware the show would not be returning, he ended the second season on a brutal cliffhanger that raised a whole load of new questions. Lynch returned to the series with a bizarre prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), that answered few questions and alienated many fans of the show.

Lynch returned to film, directing Wild at Heart (1990), Lost Highway (1997) and The Straight Story (1999); the latter shocked audiences for being a relatively straightforward story with no sex or violence, though it did retain some of Lynch's surreal imagery.

Lynch again decided to work in television, developing a new project for ABC about a young woman who arrives in Los Angeles and gets mixed up with some strange local characters and another woman with amnesia. The pilot was half-finished when ABC decided to shelve it, but Lynch worked out a deal to turn it into a feature film. Mulholland Drive (2001) was a surprise hit when it launched, attracting wild critical praise and moderate commercial success. The film was praised for launching the career of Naomi Watts and enhancing the career of up-and-comer Justin Theroux. The film has several times topped polls to find the best film of the 21st Century (so far).

Lynch continued to work in film, releasing Inland Empire (2006), but admitted he had become pickier about projects. He collaborated with Werner Herzog on the latter's My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? (2009) and with the band Nine Inch Nails on a 2013 music video ("Came Back Haunted"). To the surprise of some, he decided his next project would be a reprise of Twin Peaks, by producing, co-writing and directing 18 new episodes for Showtime. The third season of Twin Peaks aired in 2017 and received significant critical praise.

In 2022 Lynch did finally return to film, but in an acting role. He portrayed director John Ford in Steven Spielberg's autobiographical film The Fabelmans. New projects were definitively ruled out by his diagnosis with emphysema in 2024, which he blamed on his lifelong smoking habit.

David Lynch was very much one of a kind. An intense artist, he had a bemusing sense of humour and little interest in playing by other people's rules. His films are mostly unified by their strangeness, a mirror to the weirdness of life (both the everyday and the extraordinary). Although Dune is his only overtly science-fictional work, and Twin Peaks dabbles in fantasy, a lot of Lynch's other work taps into his fascination with quantum mechanics. Mulholland Drive, perhaps his most popular and well-regarded film, spins on a dime between two different versions of Los Angeles, with the same actors playing suddenly very different characters. Lost Highway and Inland Empire both employ similar devices.

Lynch could direct more conventionally, with The Elephant Man, Dune, The Straight Story and elements of Twin Peaks hinting at a more commercially-aware side, and many a Hollywood producer probably regretted Lynch not adopting a more conventional approach. But that was never in Lynch's style. He is survived by four children, and will very much be missed.

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew

The people of the planet At Attin are carrying out a Great Work for the Galactic Republic, which requires their planet to be sealed off from the rest of the galaxy by an unbreachable barrier. The children of At Attin are encouraged to study hard to get great jobs to carry out the Work, with only ancient stories of Jedi percolating through to reach those with imagination. When four children stumble across a buried starship which inadvertently carries them far from At Attin, they have to use all their resourcefulness to get home, through a galaxy decidedly less civilised than they were led to believe.

Skeleton Crew is yet another Star Wars TV show from the Lucasfilm/Disney+ production line. Since The Mandalorian debuted five years ago, the production line has pushed out a whole raft of Star Wars projects, which have all looked fantastic but, to varying degrees, struggled to hit the high notes of the franchise. The first season of Andor and the first two seasons of The Mandalorian were very good, but its third season, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Ahsoka were all patchy, The Acolyte flawed and The Book of Boba Fett bafflingly structured.

Combined with the well-documented struggles in getting a new movie in the franchise off the ground, this has led to the conclusion that Star Wars, at least as a live-action concern, was in trouble under Disney's stewardship.

Fortunately, and most unexpectedly, Skeleton Crew didn't get that memo. Jon Watts, who masterminded Marvel's take on Spider-Man, rocked up with a mission: to make the Star Wars / 1980s kids' movie crossover event that we never knew we wanted, but it turns out was a great idea all along. Taking inspiration from the likes of The Goonies and Flight of the Navigator, the film jettisons almost all the baggage of the extended Star Wars canon that has been weighing down the rest of the franchise for a near-stand-alone adventure in which some kids find a spaceship and get into hijinks.

You might think that sounds fair enough but maybe not enough to sustain eight episodes, but Watts and his team expand the storyline to incorporate subplots revolving around the kids' families trying to work out how to find them from back home, as well as expanding on Jod, the mentor character they encounter along the way who agrees to be their guide through the dangerous galaxy beyond At Attin. Jude Law plays Jod with absolutely maximum relish, turning in a great performance that mixes humour and roguery in classic Star Wars fashion. The kids are all fine (due to their age, the occasional scene where they mistake enthusiasm for skill can be overlooked), and many of the other adult actors are great, though Kerry Condon (Rome, Better Call Saul) feels under-utilised.

The episode count allows our characters to visit several planets (all new) and learn more about the galaxy and its recent past, meaning that total Star Wars novices should be at home here. The impressive action set-pieces come thick and fast, and the lighter tone is mostly successful after too many Star Wars projects that feel weighed down by the need to be serious. But, like the best 1980s kids' movies, the show also knows it won't work without some darker moments and real jeopardy, and a late-series shakeup to its format is highly effective at darkening the show without making it unsuitable for its audience.

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew (****) is not high art but it achieves its objective of being breezy fun for kids and adults alike. Easily the best Star Wars TV project after Andor and the early part of The Mandalorian, it's almost a relief to find an adventure in the Galaxy Far Far Away that can simply be enjoyed and not merely tolerated. The show is airing now on Disney+ worldwide.

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Further allegations against Neil Gaiman emerge

Last year, allegations of sexual assault and non-consensual behaviour were levied against Neil Gaiman by five women, reported through several venues. Through spokespeople, Gaiman denied these allegations, stating that all of his relationships have been consensual.

Today, New York Magazine and its website arm, Vulture, have published an extremely detailed follow-up investigation, totalling 11,000 words. For the article, the investigation talked to eight women in total who all reported non-consensual and abusive behaviour from Gaiman. Gaiman's ex-wife Amanda Palmer is quoted as saying that she believed as many as fourteen women had reported problematic behaviour from Gaiman over many years.

Some of the reporting is extremely graphic, detailed and disturbing.

The investigation did not interview Gaiman directly, but through his representatives he repeated his position that all relationships were consensual, despite the vast power differential in several of them (one of the women involved was employed as his nanny; another was living in one of his houses with the intimation that she would be kicked out if she refused to sleep with him).

The allegations have already negatively impacted Gaiman's career: Amazon have cancelled the third full season of his TV show Good Omens and instead are airing a single 90-minute special to wrap up the story. Netflix are deep in post-production on Season 2 of Sandman and had been expected to heavily promote the show after its first season was acclaimed, but now seem to be experiencing headaches over how to handle the situation. Rumours of varying credibility have indicated that the story has been tweaked so Season 2 can serve as a final conclusion to the whole saga if necessary. Gaiman has not published a solo, full-length novel in some twelve years, though he has published some books for younger readers and story collections.

At least two police investigations based on the reporting have taken place, with one of them still ongoing.

Gaiman has long been considered a cult figure in science fiction and fantasy circles. He rose to fame with his 10-volume graphic novel series The Sandman, published from 1988 to 1996, followed by novels including Neverwhere, American Gods, Anansi Boys and The Ocean at the End of the Lane, as well as his collaboration with Terry Pratchett, Good Omens. He has sold well over 40 million graphic novels and books, and won numerous awards. Since the allegations rolled out last year, the response from his fans and former collaborators has been one of shock, but this is now turning into anger as the seriousness of the situation escalates.

Update: Neil Gaiman has made a public statement, again denying that many of the incidents took place, whilst saying that everything he did was consensual. 

Martha Wells's MURDERBOT DIARIES series gets omnibus editions

Martha Wells' The Murderbot Diaries has been one of the most critically-acclaimed science fiction series of the past eight years, winning two Nebula Awards, four Hugo Awards and a Locus Award. The story of a former combat SecUnit which gains sentience and tries to find its way in a corporate-dominated future is compelling and very moreish. It's also been famously expensive, with each short novella being sold as a full-priced novel, making getting a full collection a questionably pricy endeavour.

Fortunately Tor Books has heard the complaint and the series is now being reissued in omnibus format, with two novellas to each omnibus. These will also act as a tie-in with the upcoming TV show based on the books, starring Alexander Skarsgård.

There is some minor confusion because of the seven books in the series so far, five are novellas, one (Network Effect) is a 350-page average-sized novel and one (System Collapse) is a 250-page short novel. The books are also not published in chronological order.

Publication order is as follows:

1. All Systems Red (2017)
2. Artificial Condition (2018)
3. Rogue Protocol (2018)
4. Exit Strategy (2018)
5. Network Effect (2020)
6. Fugitive Telemetry (2021)
7. System Collapse (2023)

Chronological order is as follows:

1. All Systems Red (2017)
2. Artificial Condition (2018)
3. Rogue Protocol (2018)
4. Exit Strategy (2018)
5. Fugitive Telemetry (2021)
6. Network Effect (2020)
7. System Collapse (2023)
   

The omnibus editions collect the books as follows: 

1. All Systems Red & Artificial Condition
2. Rogue Protocol & Exit Strategy
3. Fugitive Telemetry & System Collapse

Presumably Network Effect, the full-length novel, will be reissued on its own to match these new editions.

The Murderbot Diaries omnibus editions are hitting stores and digital platforms in the United States about now, and will arrive (for the first time for the series) in the UK on 17 February. Some foreign language editions have had omnibus versions for some time, and those that haven't will hopefully now get in on the act.

The Murderbot Diaries TV series is expected to launch this year on Apple TV+.

System Collapse by Martha Wells

Murderbot is back, navigating a tricky situation on a frontier planet where the interests of its employers are tested against those of the Barish-Estranza megacorp. Murderbot's team are working with the colonists to secure their own self-governance, whilst Barish-Estranza is trying to get them classified as indentured servants of the corporate interests and get them shipped offworld as effective slave labour. The situation is complicated when a hitherto unknown group of colonists is discovered underground in the polar region, with both factions rushing to contact them before the other.

System Collapse is the seventh book in Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries series. It follows the misadventures of "Murderbot," a former security robot or SecUnit which has achieved sentience and aligned with a group of humans seeking equal rights for sentient machines, a position the megacorp-dominated far future is distinctly opposed to. Murderbot is once again operating undercover along with its powerful AI ally, ART, and a group of humans on a frontier colony being divided by legalese and moral controversies.

This is a novel rather than a novella, but still a short one at only 250 pages. The book is also slightly out of pace chronologically, taking place soon after the events of the fifth volume, Network Effect, whilst the sixth volume, Fugitive Telemetry, took place earlier in the series. Not a major issue but a quick refresh of Network Effect might be in order before tackling this book.

As usual, Wells delivers an effective mixture of action, existential musings, and light comedy. Murderbot's ongoing development towards being a fully-realised sapient being is here interrupted by an involuntary shutdown, leading to a crisis of confidence as it fears what would happen if the problem recurred during a dangerous situation, resulting in its own destruction or that of allied humans. Murderbot's attempts to fix the problem are complicated by its discomfort with the well-meaning but overwhelming attempts by ART and its human allies to help. This introspection could become a bit too much, but the limited page space means the story has to proceed at a clip, and it ends up being an effective personal crisis for Murderbot to navigate whilst it deals with more traditional action-adventure and mystery plots.

There is also a nice subplot as Murderbot has to create its own media to convince a bunch of colonists about corporate corruption and indentured service, which is an interesting twist given Murderbot's own addiction to TV shows. This is a nice idea but it's given relatively short shrift, when it feels like it could have been expanded into a much larger episode. Interesting to see if the author revisits the concept later on.

The book also has an interesting line where an antagonist is turned into an ally, and seeing how Murderbot deals with this trope it's familiar with from its media exposure should be more interesting and fun then it ends up being.

Still, System Collapse (****) does what the series does best: a short, punchy story with enough time for thoughtful musings on the nature of sentience and self-volition, whilst fitting in some very nice action setpieces, worldbuilding and characterisation. The book is available now. New omnibus editions of the previous books should also be launching around this time, and the Apple TV+ adaptation of the books looks like it will launch later this year.

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

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

1937, Marshall College, Connecticut. Renowned archaeologist Indiana Jones is back teaching when an imposing man breaks into the college and steals an ancient cat mummy. An incensed Jones pursues the man, following clues to the Vatican, where the Catholic Church is negotiating a delicate coexistence with Mussolini's fascist government. Allying with an old friend and an intrepid Italian reporter searching for her missing sister, Jones runs afoul of an old German nemesis and embarks on an epic journey that will take him all over the world in pursuit of the greatest archaeological discovery of all time.

Indiana Jones is one of the most beloved film franchises of all time, with the collaboration between Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Harrison Ford delivering two of the best action-adventure films ever made, two okay ones and one stinker (your mileage may vary on which is which), whilst also delivering a ton of decent spin-off media, including books and a TV show. However, the franchise has often faltered in the sphere of video games. A lot of titles have been generic action games wearing a Fedora and leather whip skin, diverting but not really nailing the spirit of the movies or the character. Arguably the last all-time classic Indiana Jones video game was Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, released way back in 1992.

Now there's a new challenger. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has an original story and was developed by Machinegames - best known for the Wolfenstein action series - for Bethesda and Microsoft. The game is mostly played from a first-person perspective, and sees the player controlling Indiana as he goes on a round-the-world trip to stop the Nazis from getting their hands on a number of powerful, ancient artefacts. Harrison Ford declined to return as Indy, so omnipresent voice acting superstar Troy Baker takes up the role, delivering a performance which both nails Ford's sound and cadence, and is a good performance in its own right.

Where The Great Circle really succeeds is taking a step back and thinking thoughtfully about who Indiana Jones is and isn't as a character. Jones is happy to whip out a gun and shoot enemies in a pinch, but he isn't a seasoned sharpshooter. He's happy to sneak up on a bad guy and knock them out, but he's not a stealth assassin. His main skills are deduction, speaking a dozen or more languages, and exploring ancient ruins filled with curiously well-maintained traps. He is also kinda goofy as a character, prone to the occasional terrible joke and being a bit cack-handed, factors which the game also tries to invoke.

As a result, the game allows you to fire guns, but sees this as a fail state and usually this results in you getting overwhelmed, unless you are able to escape in the confusion, or you're dealing with very isolated enemies. Indy is awkward with guns and sometimes panics during reloading, which can be frustrating but does dissuade you from relying on them (headshots or pointblank shotgun blasts not resulting in instant kills is very dumb, though). You can sneak up behind people and knock them out, but doing this with your bare hands is tricky, so grabbing a blunt instrument and whacking them on the back of the head is often a better move. In theory, enemies are supposed to panic and sound the alarm upon discovery of bodies, so you can move bodies elsewhere, but in practice this only seemed to work about half the time, and never if you've moved the bodies from elsewhere. Fighting a bunch of bad guys in the Vatican and hurling their bodies from a balcony just to find the enemies below politely stepping around them without comment was odd.

Indy's most reliable weapon is his straight-from-the-films ability to wear somewhat flimsy disguises and, despite not looking like any locals at all, immediately fit in. Arriving in a new location can see a lot of careful travelling until you find a local uniform and then just stroll into enemy bases. Of course there are ways of still being discovered - enemy officers know who all their men are and will get suspicious at a new guy loitering around - as well as there being drawbacks. Otherwise friendly locals may refuse to help you if they see you in a German military uniform, but you can find local garb or just Indy's standard gear to regain their trust.

The game isn't an open-world affair, but instead has three open-ish maps which you can traverse, each one of which has multiple ruins you can explore, to service the main story, side-quests or optional activities. Penetrating ruins requires some jumping, using your whip to traverse distances or climb to higher exits, and solving puzzles. All of this is done in a very enjoyable way, and after years of solid Tomb Raider and Uncharted games, it's satisfying to see their main inspiration finally getting a game worthy of his name. Optional activities include finding relics for a museum, taking photographs of impressive sights and locating notes on everything from local cuisine to personal correspondence. Indy also spends a lot of time undercover in Italian and German military camps, where he can find locked safes and cases containing useful equipment. There are also collectibles including comic books and more useful skill books, which allow Indy to learn new skills to enhance everything from combat to stealth to improved medical skills.

Structurally, the game has some light Metroidvania elements as you can revisit previous locations with later-acquired skills or equipment to open new areas, although this element is not strongly publicised, and in fact is a bit weird: you have to wait until the game autosaves before leaving for a new location, otherwise anything you've done since will be deleted, and the game's incredibly urgent and pressing storyline means that Indy can't fly between, say, the Vatican and Connecticut willy-nilly, so any re-visits to previous areas is "non-canonical," you're really just remembering your original time in that location in a different way. This is an awkward mechanic that never really feels right, but is necessary since finding all the collectibles and side-objectives on your first visit to an area is almost impossible. It can be amusing to go back to earlier areas after levelling up your fighting skills in later areas, as the blackshirts in the Vatican are laughably easy to take out in fistfights once Indiana as even just moderately improved his unarmed combat. Watching cardinals and nuns step gingerly around a substantial pile of unconscious fascists never stops being entertaining.

You also spend a lot of the game with a companion, in this case Italian journalist Gina Lombardi (Alessandra Mastronardi) who is working hard to expose the dangers of Italian fascism and also looking for her sister, an archaeologist who fell in train with Indy's German rival, Emmerich Voss (Marios Gavrilis, who not so much chews the scenery as gloriously consumes it wholesale). Gina can be useful in helping solve puzzles and provide hints if you get stuck in a particular area, though she does have a slight tendency to get in your way and block doorways (though she gets out of the way sharpish if you have problems). Gina fits right into the classic pantheon of Indy love interests who can hold their own. Voss is also a glorious opponent, prone to tedious pontificating and lording it over Indy despite being mostly reliant on Indy to work out the location of the artefacts and then trying to steal them. Also an honourable mention to the late Tony Todd, who provided a fine performance (mocap and voice) before passing away in November.

Despite the mounds of side-content, the game does not outstay its welcome: I finished the whole game, in fact almost 100%ing it (and only being prevented from doing so by a bug), in a very reasonable 38 hours. It's refreshing to play a game that isn't so overstuffed with optional side-content that it becomes a tedious grind. The game also mixes up its small open-world-ish hub areas with much more focused interstitial levels (like a trip to the Himalayas and a side-visit to Shanghai), which also helps pacing.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle's biggest success is feeling like the Indiana Jones movies. The writing, dialogue and puzzles are all on-point, and the revelation of the final objective of the game is genuinely impressive (to the point you can imagine Spielberg and Lucas cursing as to why they never had that idea). If it was a movie, it would probably be at least the third-best one in the series. Like Batman: Arkham Asylum before it, The Great Circle feels like an authentic, additive entry to its franchise, not just a generic tie-in with some iconography slapped on the top.

The game does have flaws. Although I understand why they made guns awkward to use, there are moments where it can be very frustrating, and headshots not killing someone immediately is daft. The mechanic for revisiting previous location is awkward. The game is graphically beautiful (stunning, in fact) in terms of environments and lighting, but character models aren't quite there and can slip into the uncanny valley (Indy is also prone to making some odd faces and expressions). Idle dialogue can be gratingly repetitive (the sixty-first time Gina reminded me she couldn't swim felt a bit unnecessary). There are also some bugs with the game tripping over itself in trying to track objectives and some achievements not triggering until you run backwards and forwards a few times. During the game's finale a door opened but didn't "really" open, leaving the area beyond an empty void until I worked out how to trigger the proper cut scene. Early patches have eliminated some of these issues but others remain (being on 98% completion despite completing 100% of the game, but the game not recognising the last 2%, is irritating, if inconsequential).

But overall, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (****½) is easily the best Indiana Jones video game ever made, true to the spirit of the source material and a cracking good adventure even for casual fans of the franchise. The game is available now on PC and Xbox, and should launch on PlayStation 5 this spring.

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

Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson

The war between the forces of Odium and those of the Knights Radiant has entered a dangerous new phase. Dalinar Kholin has negotiated a contest of champions, himself against Odium. Both sides have only ten days to seize as much territory as possible before this war will come to an end. But a devastating reversal has taken place which the Knights have no knowledge of: the shard of Odium has changed hands, and its new shardholder is a cannier, smarter foe far more willing to bend and flex than its former owner. From Shinovar in the west to the Shattered Plains in the east, the fate of Roshar, and perhaps the entire cosmere, hangs in the balance.

That sound you can hear right now is of reinforced bookshelf supports being delivered to hundreds of thousands of SFF fans across the globe. Bookshelves creak, strained by a weight they were never designed to hold. Yes, a new Stormlight Archive novel from Brandon Sanderson has arrived.

At 1,330 pages in hardcover and just a tad under half a million words by itself, Wind and Truth is the longest book in the series to date. It's also the most interesting. Whilst this is only the fifth of ten books in the series (and the seventeenth of potentially forty in the much wider Cosmere setting), it's the end of the first major story arc and has to "park" the various storylines for a planned ten-year timeskip before the sixth Stormlight book picks things back up. That book probably won't appear until the 2030s, with Sanderson committed to writing a new Mistborn trilogy and two sequels to Elantris before resuming this series.

In this sense Wind and Truth is Stormlight's equivalent to George R.R. Martin's A Storm of Swords, which also had to "park" a massive array of character and plot arcs in the Song of Ice and Fire series in preparation for a five-year timeskip which, in that case, never happened (and arguably caused problems that series is partially still confronting two and a half decades later, but that's a debate for elsewhere). It is a climax book that has to deliver massive payoffs and tee up the second half of the series but can't actually end the series.

In some senses it delivers: Wind and Truth is a massive countdown to a continent-shaking confrontation between Dalinar, the highly redoubtable, reformed war criminal turned leader of the resurrected Knights Radiant, and Odium, the principle force of evil on not just this planet, but the entire Cosmere setting. But, in arguably Sanderson's most satisfying plot twist to date, the previous incarnation of Odium was killed at the end of the prior novel, Rhythm of War, and replaced by what had appeared to have been a minor, sympathetic semi-antagonist up to that point, one with detailed knowledge of Dalinar and his allies. This creates a situation in which our heroes are fighting an enemy they literally know exists, and knows them better than they do themselves.

This results in Odium launching a complex, multi-pronged scheme to defeat and conquer as many of Dalinar's allies as possible, as fast as possible, and their increasingly desperate attempts to fend him off and survive until the deadline, with the slight problem that Dalinar still has no idea on how to actually win that confrontation when it arrives.

This structure gives us a ticking clock element, and four primary storylines that continue through the novel: Dalinar entering the Cognitive Realm to learn the deep backstory to the setting and figure out how Odium was defeated, or at least checkmated, in the past (with Shallan unwittingly tagging along); Kaladin and Szeth visiting Szeth's homeland of Shinovar to find out what's going on there; Adolin leading a desperate battle in western Roshar to fend off Odium's forces; and Sigzil and the rest of Kaladin's old Bridge Four unit leading a similar desperate battle in eastern Roshar. Characters like Lift, Wit/Hoid, Renarin and Rlain, Venli, Jasnah and Navani also have notable subplots.

This makes for a busy novel that - somewhat - justifies its yak-stunning length. This is an improvement over Oathbringer, which probably could have been reduced in length by half without losing anything too major, and Rhythm of War (aka Die Hard with a Sprengeance) which was not far off the same. Wind and Truth has a lot going on and Sanderson juggles it mostly quite well. That's not to say the novel doesn't occasionally feel indulgent: strategy meetings where characters debate the plot rather than getting on with the plot recall some of the sludgier moments of The Wheel of Time, and the elaborate Cognitive Realm TED Talks on Ancient Rosharan History start indulging in redundancy when we get to revisit the entire storyline a second time later in the novel, from a different POV.

The plots themselves also vary in quality. Kaladin and Szeth's trip around Shinovar feels like a different, almost completely self-contained novel, one that takes place in two time periods as we see both Szeth's flashback storyline and his present-day storyline, which are very similar and take place in many of the same locations (again causing a feeling of redundancy). The divorcing of their storyline from the rest of the novel makes it feel a bit disconnected, at least until the end makes its relevance clear. This storyline also drags, especially as Kaladin has been learning the art of therapy and gets to try out his various new learned techniques on Szath's numerous neuroses with all the enthusiasm (and ill-advised lack of forethought) of someone who's watched a few too many YouTube videos on mental health and not read enough deep studies or done enough actual studying. Prioritising mental health is a good thing, and that message in one of the biggest-selling modern fantasy series is laudable, but the emphasis placed on it sometimes feels incongruous, if not pace-killing.

Adolin's storyline is probably the most traditional hoo-rah epic fantasy one here, with lots of military planning, cool action sequences, epic battles and desperate fights for survival against overwhelming odds. This sequence is great (you can almost see an anime adaptation in your head as it goes on), but is potentially a bit overwrought by the time the battle has been going on for eight or nine days and eight or nine hundred pages.

Dalinar's storyline is the most important in the book, but also the vaguest. Much of his story has him viewing narrated histories about Roshar's deep past that you can almost imagine Ken Burns narrating, which is both catnip to lore...cats, but potentially boring to everyone else, so Sanderson interjects a lot of action by having Dalinar stalked by the mysterious Ghostbloods and having Shallan acting behind the scenes to stop them. A lot of this stuff is pretty good, but again you start to ponder if this could have been structured differently (especially when Dalinar gets to experience everything he's just seen again, but from a different point of view).

The final major storyline is the best-paced, with Sigzil and his team returning to visit the Shattered Plains (the evocative setting for the first book in the series, The Way of Kings) and getting embroiled in a humdinger of a complicated battle, which is further thrown for a loop by the arrival of a third side.

We flip between these storylines quite regularly, allowing all to be serviced on a frequent basis, although this can result in plot-whiplash as the reader is thrown from city to city to illusionary dream dimension to intense battle to tragic deaths to cutesy romantic exchanges and strained humour without much regard for tonal consistency.

The book is a lot even by the standards of the series so far, which can both breathlessly enjoyable but also frustrating, especially for those who find some storylines deeply engrossing and others much less so.

This is also the book which does feel like it breaks Sanderson's (already shaky) long-ago promise that readers would not have to have an in-depth knowledge of the entire Cosmere universe to enjoy any given series or even novel within it. We even spend brief parts of the book visiting Scadrial to set up the forthcoming Mistborn: Ghostbloods trilogy, and allusions to other books come thick and fast. At one point the book stops to give us a potted plot summary of Warbreaker (where the sword Nightblood first appeared), whilst one part of the ending exists to set up the events of the previously-published The Sunlit Man. This may be good from the point of view of the wider Cosmere setting, with Sanderson incorporating more elements into Stormlight that were originally planned for other books and series (thus reducing the total number of books he still has to write in the setting, which was starting to look a bit over-ambitious), but those Stormlight fans who weren't keen on Mistborn or his other works may be less happy about those wider setting elements colliding with Roshar here.

Of course, for those who love the interconnected elements of Sanderson's wider universe, this book will be outrageously enjoyable, satisfying, and prime Wiki-fodder.

Summarising a book of this breadth and heft is tricky, especially when you want to avoid "1990s flight sim expansion pack review syndrome" ("if you liked the last thing in the series, you'll like this too, I guess"). If you've read the previous books in the series, you're going to read this, and you'll have a good time; Sanderson sceptics will find little here to convince them otherwise. Wind & Truth (****) is better than the last two Stormlight books, but not as strong as The Way of Kings. Sanderson's weaknesses - a prosaic prose style, occasionally jarring use of modern language mixed in with more formal syntax, haphazard characterisation - are still present and correct, but his strengths are here as well: impressive worldbuilding, fascinating magic, explosive action sequences and satisfying moments of plot revelation and payoff. This novel also has an impressive amount of incident going on, paced surprisingly well for the book's staggering length. The book is available worldwide now.

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