A review by labocat
Once & Future by Cory McCarthy, A.R. Capetta
3.0
I love a good Arthurian retelling, especially one that takes a lot of liberties with it while at the same time taking it down to its essence, and this certainly does that. I love the inclusion and diversity (racially, gender, and sexuality-wise), the concept of the cycles, and the themes it brings up of corporations as the future dictatorship.
However, it falls flat in a lot of important places. Pacing-wise, it jumps all over the place, with short bursts of action followed by long-drawn out conversations about the consequences of everything. It also falls prey to one of my least-favorite sci-fi pitfalls: entire planets represented by a single city or people. Settings feel in service to necessity of the plot or Arthurian saga rather than organic worldbuilding. There's also an odd sense of scale, flashing back and forth between whether or not these actions will carry any weight when it's on a planetary-scale and then having one impromptu moment in a market square be of equal weight.
It also doesn't know what sort of tone it wants to have, and while nothing needs to be doom and gloom and destinies all the time, Merlin being an incessant pop culture machine (endearing gay disaster that he is, he's also clearly supposed to be the closest thing to an audience proxy, so despite references to having lived through cycles that extend past our own time, most of his references are solidly 20th/21st century focused) in addition to the disjointed pacing means that it never quite settles into a groove and so loses a lot of its potential impact.
It gets a lot of points for its treatment of Morgana, by which I measure most retellings these days, as well as giving Gwen(ivere) importance and agency. It loses some of them by how it chooses to end, with a decision that left me entirely off-kilter, even though I probably will get the book from the library in the end.
However, it falls flat in a lot of important places. Pacing-wise, it jumps all over the place, with short bursts of action followed by long-drawn out conversations about the consequences of everything. It also falls prey to one of my least-favorite sci-fi pitfalls: entire planets represented by a single city or people. Settings feel in service to necessity of the plot or Arthurian saga rather than organic worldbuilding. There's also an odd sense of scale, flashing back and forth between whether or not these actions will carry any weight when it's on a planetary-scale and then having one impromptu moment in a market square be of equal weight.
It also doesn't know what sort of tone it wants to have, and while nothing needs to be doom and gloom and destinies all the time, Merlin being an incessant pop culture machine (endearing gay disaster that he is, he's also clearly supposed to be the closest thing to an audience proxy, so despite references to having lived through cycles that extend past our own time, most of his references are solidly 20th/21st century focused) in addition to the disjointed pacing means that it never quite settles into a groove and so loses a lot of its potential impact.
It gets a lot of points for its treatment of Morgana, by which I measure most retellings these days, as well as giving Gwen(ivere) importance and agency. It loses some of them by how it chooses to end, with a decision that left me entirely off-kilter, even though I probably will get the book from the library in the end.