The Last Labyrinth, the Lost Ending

Gwendolyn Womack's new novel, The Last Labyrinth, is a well-paced, well-written romantasy time travel story that uses music as its magic. But it has one fatal flaw. 

The setup: Womack's heroine, Magellan, is a modern woman, a musical prodigy who can play any instrument like a virtuoso, even if she's never touched it before, and she doesn't need sheet music. As the novel opens, we learn that Magellan has a talented roommate, Wren, a singer, who tries to bring Magellan out of her shell a bit; Magellan has a number of phobias that keep her pretty much confined to her apartment, except when she's out performing. One night, the skies all over the world light up with an aurora the likes of which humanity has never seen, at impossibly low latitudes. It's around this time Magellan receives a mysterious diary, purported to be that of  Gwenddydd, Merlin's sister. (This framing--that of powerful women being identified only in relation to the men in their lives--recurs throughout the novel, to good effect). 

While Magellan is playing at a wedding, the world begins to unravel, thanks to the auroras. In a panic, she runs off to play the venue's pipe organ, and this transports her to 1829, where she meets Rhys, a handsome bachelor who happens to be caught in a financial trap, needing to wed a rich bride to save his family estate. 

Meet-cute and time travel shenanigans begin. Magellan learns that to save the world, she must assemble four movements of a symphony. She has half the first movement, and she discovers Fanny Mendelssohn has the second. To gather the other movements, she must collaborate with other important women musicians of the past, all while surviving not only the differences in language, culture, and technology, but the demonic forces who try to stop her from saving the world. Thankfully, she has Rhys at her side, who's no Superman but does have a talent for languages--very useful given their circumstances. 

The plot serves as a great vehicle for the romance and for Womack's point about talented women being overlooked by history, and how that fault persists over the centuries. It's also fun seeing how the predestination paradoxes play out. 

Here's my issue: We learn that the final confrontation will happen when Magellan returns to 2026, when she'll put the final movement of the symphony together and somehow gather all the world's musicians to play it together, the only way to seal the rip in the universe. 

The novel ends before we get to that moment, with the ultimate fate of the world and the characters we've come to love unresolved. It's fine, of course, for novels to end on a note of ambiguity, but this really feels like the writer just ran out of steam and didn't have the means to craft the epic finale she envisioned. 

The novel is still worth reading; it's clever, exciting, suspenseful, and warm. Magellan is a great heroine, and Rhys is flawed but worthy partner for her. I really wanted to see them triumph, though. 

There's no word of a sequel, nor is there a hint of one in the author's afterword. It feels like this is the novel Womack decided to deliver. That's her right, but I really wish she'd given us that grand finale. 

Farrah and the Fall Guy

There's a really sweet cameo with Farrah Fawcett at the very end of the pilot episode of The Fall Guy, the hit action-adventure series that ran for over 100 episodes from 1981 to 1986. 

Lee Majors, as stuntman Colt Seavers, performs a stunt in blonde drag, crashing a car into a bunch of watermelons. When the stunt is over, he pulls off his wig and walks up to Farrah's trailer. 

"That was a great stunt, Colt."

"Anything for my leading lady," Colt replies.

"Come here. You taking care of yourself?" Fawcett asks.

"Well, I always do."

"No you don't," Fawcett says, shaking her head sadly. "I know you...remember?" 

"Ready on the set," someone from the crew calls, offscreen. Farrah calls out a "Thanks." 

"Well, I guess I'd better let you go," Colt says. 

"You be careful," Fawcett says. 

"You too." 

Seavers kisses the back of Fawcett's hand, and he strolls off, still wearing a dress.

"Hey," she calls. "You still have great legs." 

Seavers points a finger gun at her, and she laughs. 

It's a beautiful little scene that celebrates the couple's relatively brief marriage, and the mutual respect and kindness on display is quite heartwarming. It's a truly lovely moment. 

The pilot itself is well made, with a great villainous performance by Eddie Albert, a fun James Coburn cameo in an early sequence to bookend Farrah's, and some great old-fashioned 1980s action. It was a fine beginning for a fun show. 

Quality over Quantity in a Time of Troubles: Books I Read in 2025

At last, 2025 is over. I'd hoped to surpass 100 books this year, but other things became more important. 

In 2025, I read

• 67 works of fiction and 17 works of non-fiction
• 39 science fiction novels, 17 mainstream novels, six Star Trek media tie-ins, and five fantasy novels
• 26 books by women and 58 books by men
• 42 books from the 2020s, 17 from the 2010s, nine from the 2000s, five from the 1990s, four from the 1980s, two from the 1970s, four from the 1960s, and one from the 1950s

COMMENTARY AND ANALYSIS

For the first time in a long time, only a couple of books this year were re-reads for me. This wasn't an intentional choice, but in retrospect it seems to have left me open to some wonderful discoveries. Here are my favourite reads of the year, plus a disappointment or two: 

I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman. 39 women and a girl are locked in an underground cage for years, then suddenly released to emerge to an emptied world, barren and inhospitable. Whatever calamity befell the world is left a mystery. A compelling rumination on the struggles of womanhood in hostile spaces, and a bleak commentary on human empathy--or the lack of it. 

Titan, by Stephen Baxter. I've never been Baxter's biggest fan, but 2025 was the right year for me to finally finish his so-called "NASA trilogy." The book's political climate eerily mirrors the troubles we're facing today, and as the world turns inward, NASA has one more shot to perform some pioneering science and exploration--a do or die, one-way trip to Saturn's largest moon, Titan. The technical details of the mission are fascinating, especially set against the frightening backdrop of an American government sliding into theocratic fascism. No parallels to 2025 in this book from 1997! Even more compelling are the battle for survival on Titan itself and the speculative leaps made by novel's end. 

A Short Stay in Hell, by Steven L. Peck. So it turns out that when we die, unless we follow Zoroastrianism (the one true faith; who knew?) we go to hell. Hell is a library that contains every book that fits onto 410 pages, and if you find the one book that tells your life story--without any spelling errors, typos, or grammatical errors--you're free to leave. Unfortunately, every letter, number, and punctuation mark is randomly generated, which means that the vast, vast majority of the trillions and trillions and trillions of books in Hell is garbage. Your book exists, but the time required to find it would take longer than the age of our universe. Much longer. There's no torture in hell, and its residents are supplied with good food and comfortable quarters. But there's no entertainment other than chatting or having sex, and no one gets sick. Of course, people can hurt and even kill each other, but you always wake up fully healed. Practically speaking, you're trapped in an eternity of boredom. This book terrified me. 

James, by Percival Everett. A retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the escaped slave befriended by Huck in Mark Twain's novel. Offers excellent perspective on the Black experience in white spaces--this is a rich novel, an angry novel, uncompromising in its critique of the world we've built. 

Julia, by Sandra Newman. George Orwell's 1984 seen through the eyes of Julia, Winston Smith's lover. It's just as bleak and nauseating as Orwell's original story, given more dimension thanks to its new perspective. We even get to see the fall of Oceania, an event foreshadowed by 1984's afterword. Spoiler: the new regime may or may not be an improvement on the old regime. 

Exordia, by Seth Dickinson. The first couple of chapters led me to believe this novel was going to be comic. I was wildly wrong. Dickinson's story of alien invasion is one of the scariest, most visceral, and most exciting examples of the trope in years. A wonderful cast of characters, human and alien, take us on a thrilling rollercoaster ride. It's smart, fun, terrifying, and satisfying. 

The Bridges of Madison County, by Robert James Waller. This is one of several books I read from Mom's collection after her passing. I wasn't expecting to enjoy this novel as much as I did, but I admit to tearing up by the end. A beautiful love story that captures the feeling of those special moments in time we know must be brief, but stay with us forever. 

The Compound, by Aisling Rawle. 20 (quickly 19) young men and women play out a dystopian version of Big Brother against the backdrop of the world we might live in in just a few years--a catastrophically warming world with constant wildfires and resource shortages, civilization finally beginning to play the price of our greed and ignorance. The Compound is a thoughtful critique of consumerism, the male gaze, and violence--but it offers a thread of hope in its tale of resilience and reconciliation. Or, if not hope--then at least some grace. 

The Rose Field, by Philip Pullman. I was enjoying the last of Pullman's Lyra Silvertongue novels until about three-quarters of the way through, when Pullman seems to lose focus and direction. The big action setpiece feels like it's been inspired by a video game or a poorly-run Dungeons & Dragons campaign, and the ending, well...I think the only word is anticlimactic. Although maybe ironic also fits, since a search to recapture Lyra's imagination seems to end in a rote critique of runaway progress--a topic handled with far more dexterity by The Compound, above. 

Prelude to Space, by Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke chose the perfect title for this one; it really is a prelude to the big space adventures we never get to see. Instead, Clarke covers the technical and bureaucratic challenges of getting men (of course men) into orbit. I found it interesting, but most readers will consider this very, very dry. Which it is. 

I'm Thinking of Ending Things, Foe, and We Spread, by Iain Reid. Nothing is what it seems in Reid's work, and I love that. All three novels are creepy, atmospheric, heartbreaking, mysterious, and best left unspoiled. I ached deeply for all his poor doomed protagonists, trapped in worlds they never made. 

Weird Medieval Guys, by Olivia Swarthout. Gorgeously designed, brilliantly illustrated, and hilarious, a balm for my battered nerves this year, a great gift from Leslie. 

The Gone World and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Tom Sweterlitsch. I wish this guy would write more novels! Sweterlitsch combines deeply sympathetic characters with high-concept speculative fiction settings and challenges in a way that's unlike any other writer. 

And finally, this year I read the seven existing novels in Matt Dinniman's Dungeon Crawler Carl series. Not only are they great fun, especially for anyone who's ever played a tabletop role playing game, the bad puns, crass humour, bloodthirsty violence, and existential dread are tempered by a truly empathetic and humanistic outlook; Carl, our protagonist, never gives in to despair or hate despite the cruelty of the alien invaders who have turned Earth into the latest of their sadistic interstellar reality show playgrounds, wiping out almost all life on the planet. 

MONTH-BY-MONTH

January: 11

The Dead Fathers Club (Matt Haig, 2006)
The Possession of Mr Cave (Matt Haig, 2008)
Notes on a Nervous Planet (Matt Haig, 2018)
Julia (Sandra Newman, 2023) 
How to be Perfect (Michael Schur, 2022) 
Tower of Glass (Robert Silverberg, 1970) 
Light Raid (Connie Willis and Cynthia Felice, 1989) 
Take a Look at the Five and Ten (Connie Willis, 2020) 
Seasons of Light and Darkness (Michael A. Martin, 2014) 
Golden State (Ben H. Winters, 2019) 
Terra Incognita (Connie Willis, 2018) 

February: 10
Some Desperate Glory (Emily Tesh, 2023) 
The Art of Mike Grell Volume 1 (Mike Grell, Tom Monarch, and Jeff Messer, 2025) 
Water Witch (Connie Willis and Cynthia Felice, 1982) 
The Fall Risk (Abby Jiminez, 2025) 
Promised Land (Connie Willis and Cynthia Felice, 1996) 
The Armageddon Engine (James Swallow, 2024) 
The You You Are: A Spiritual Biography of You (Ricken Lazlo Hale, 2022) 
Vulcan’s Soul Book I: Exodus (Josepha Sherman and Susan Shwartz, 2004) 
I Who Have Never Known Men (Jacqueline Harpman, 1995) 
Shadow Play (James Swallow, 2024)

March
The Whole Man (John Brunner, 1967) 
Titan (Stephen Baxter, 1997) 
The Godwhale (T.J. Bass, 1974) 
Star Trek: Lost to Eternity (Greg Cox, 2024)

April
American Housewife (Anita Abriel, 2025) 
Exordia (Seth Dickinson, 2023) 
Dungeon Crawler Carl (Matt Dinniman, 2020) 
Carl’s Doomsday Scenario (Matt Dinniman, 2021) 
The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook (Matt Dinniman, 2021) 
The Gate of the Feral Gods (Matt Dinniman, 2021) 

May
The Butcher’s Masquerade (Matt Dinniman, 2022)  
Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (Robert F. Kennedy, 1969) 

June
The Eye of the Bedlam Bride (Matt Dinniman, 2023)
George Perez: Storyteller (Christopher Lawrence, 2006)
This Inevitable Ruin (Matt Dinniman, 2024) 

July
Never Flinch (Stephen King, 2025) 
James (Percival Everett, 2024) 
The Enemy Within (Kristine Kathryn Rusch, 2014) 
Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy (Martha Wells, 2025)
White Eagle Speaks: Reflections of Lives and Passing Thoughts (Leonard Carriere, 2000) 
Prairie Light (Courtney Milne, 1985) 
Keith Langergraber: Theatre of the Exploding Sun (Liz Wylie, 2013) 
Shadow of the Machine (Scott Harrison, 2015) 
The More Things Change (Scott Pearson, 2014) 
Christmas with Norman Rockwell (John Kirk, 1990) 
The Professionals (Keith Langergraber, 2016) 
The Adventure of the Demonic Ox (Lois McMaster Bujold, 2025) 

August
Vulcan’s Soul Book II: Exiles (Josepha Sherman and Susan Shwartz, 2006) 
The Making of The African Queen, or How I Went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall, and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind (Katherine Hepburn, 1987) 
The Bridges of Madison County (Robert James Waller, 1992) 
The End of the World as We Know It (Christopher Golden, 2025) 
A Short Stay in Hell (Steven L. Peck, 2012) 
When the Moon Hits Your Eye (John Scalzi, 2025) 

September
I Hope This Finds You Well (Natalie Sue, 2024) 
The Gone World (Tom Sweterlitsch, 2018) 
Tomorrow and Tomorrow (Tom Sweterlitsch, 2014) 
Dominion (C.J. Sansom, 2012) 
Not Quite by the Book (Julie Hatcher, 2025) 
The Shattered Peace (John Scalzi, 2025) 
The Art of Fantastic Four (John Lind, 2025)
A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction (Adrian Hon, 2020) 

October
3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years (John Scalzi, 2025) 
The Intergalactic Interloper (Delas Heras, 2020) 
Best of All Worlds (Kenneth Oppel, 2025) 
Back to the Future: A Visual History (Michael Klastorin, Randal Atamaniuk, 2015) 
Weird Medieval Guys (Olivia Swarthout, 2023) 
Final Orbit (Chris Hadfield, 2025) 
Silver Screen Fiend (Patton Oswalt, 2015) 
I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Iain Reid, 2016) 
Foe (Iain Reid, 2018) 
We Spread (Iain Reid, 2022) 

November
Prelude to Space (Arthur C. Clarke, 1951) 
Assassins from Tomorrow (Peter Heath, 1967) 
The Productions of Time (John Brunner, 1967) 
The Collected Essex County (Jeff Lemire, 2009) 
The Rose Field (Philip Pullman, 2025) 

December
Testimony of Mute Things (Lois McMaster Bujold, 2025) 
The Compound (Aisling Rawle, 2025) 
Ten Thousand Light Years from Okay (Tracy Dobmeier and Wendy Katzman, 2025) 
The Witch Doesn’t Burn in This One (Amanda Lovelace, 2018)
The Mermaid’s Voice Returns in This One (Amanda Lovelace, 2019) 
Machines Like Me (Ian McEwan, 2025) 
Gold Dust (Catherine Asaro, 2025) 

And so ends 2025. Check out Bruce's list, and now you can see what Leslie was reading, listening to, and experiencing in 2025. 

The Motion Picture

"Just a Motion Away," from Gino Vanelli's 1984 album Black Cars, tells the story of two people in the process of possibly reconnecting after many years apart. Perhaps they were former lovers, or merely potential lovers who remained apart for reasons unknown to us, the listeners. 

The point of view of the singer-narrator makes it clear he's hoping the person he desires feels the same way, and encourages them to leave the past behind and start a new chapter. To paraphrase some of the lyrics, "Chance is knocking on our door to open up our ailing hearts once more . . . it's just a motion away." 

Whenever I hear this song, I wonder about the nature of that motion, the one that will set our lovers on a new (and perhaps more fulfilling) path. Do they reach out to hold hands? Do they hug? Smile? Nod yes? 

For several decades now, I've thought of fictions, large or small, as simply things that really happen on some other plane of existence (or, conversely, whatever we imagine springs into being on those other planes). When a story ends ambiguously, or when it's missing key details, I can't help but wonder about these things. Because somehow, somewhere, they happened or will happen. 

Is that madness? 

 

Movies I Watched in 2019

I watched 1,065 movies this year. That seems rather a lot.

There was only one week when I didn't watch a film: while Sylvia and I were on vacation on the east coast. I can explain why I watched Mr. Arkadin twice; it's a great film, and there were two versions on the DVD set. The others were accidental rewatches.

Letterboxd gave members the ability to add a featured list to their annual statistics; I chose my Top 50 Iconic SF films. Below that, you can see my breakdown of films according to genre, national origin, and language.

The pie charts show that I reviewed only a fraction of the movies I saw, that most of the movies I watched predated 2019, and that I only rewatched a few films. The bar chart shows my ratings spread. Finally, Letterboxd reveals that I watched 197 of the movies on my watchlist, but that I also added almost 1,700. This seems to be a losing battle.

I'm not sure how Letterboxd defines which actors are stars and which are not, but in any event, here are the stars I watched most this year. Aside from John Wayne, the top row is dominated by Looney Tunes voice actors, which makes sense because I watched four box sets of WB cartoons in 2019. Paul Fix, Ward Bond, and Yakima Canutt were in a lot of westerns, and so they appear because I watched a lot of westerns last year. I went through a Stallone phase and a Schwarzenegger phase in a fit of nostalgia.

Here's a very different look at the stars: "highest rated." I'm not sure how Letterboxd determines this.

Here are the directors I explored most this year. Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, Frank Tashlin, Robert McKimson, Bob Clampett, and Tex Avery appear because of those Looney Tunes box sets. Heise, Lumiere, Melies, White, and Dickson appear because I try to screen early cinema whenever I can. John Ford, David Lynch, and George Cukor are favourites, of course.

And here's the mysterious "Highest Rated" version of my director list.

The rest of the crew. This year, Letterboxd added co-director and studio stats.

The "Highest Rated" version.

My most liked review and list...such as they are.

And finally, my world map, which shows where the movies I watched in 2019 were made.

Here are some stats that Letterboxd didn't capture: I watched 38 Best Picture nominees in 2019, bringing my total to 533 out of 557, or 95.69%. Those nominees were:

Trader Horn
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
Four Daughters
Romeo and Juliet
Vice
Bohemian Rhapsody
Green Book
One Foot in Heaven
A Star is Born
The Favourite
Blackkklansman
Broadway Melody of 1936
Becket
Born Yesterday
Decision Before Dawn
Moulin Rouge (original) 
Julius Caesar
The Country Girl
Friendly Persuasion
The King and I
Peyton Place
Auntie Mame
Sons and Lovers
Separate Tables
Rocky
Prizzi’s Honor
A Thousand Clowns
Darling
The Mission
The Color Purple 
America America
Fanny
Ship of Fools
Hold Back the Dawn
Finding Neverland
Love Story
Gosford Park
Good Night, and Good Luck

Here`s how the decade-by-decade screenings went down:

1880s: 7
1890s: 107
1900s: 12
1910s: 11
1920s: 39
1930s: 85
1940s: 138
1950s: 165
1960s: 110
1970s: 80
1980s: 51
1990s: 52
2000s: 60
2010s: 150

My focus in 2019 was to capture films from a wide range of decades, directors, and styles, while also dusting off some discs that I`ve owned for years but had not yet watched and exploring some actors and directors in more depth. I think I accomplished that, making my way through four out of six Looney Tunes box sets, a bunch of 21st-century Best Picture nominees, a ton of John Wayne films, and a mixture of classics and not-so-classics from across 14 decades of film. 

Let`s see what the 2020s have in store...

My Little Valentine

This is the first photo taken of Sylvia and I as a couple, way back on May 3, 2003. Happy Valentine's Day, Sylvia! 

Anonymous Love Note, circa 1989

Back in the late 80s and early 90s, when I had all my hair and I was still fit, my friends used to tease me about my many girlfriends. Of course I had no girlfriends at all, but that didn't stop the teasing, including this anonymous note, slipped under my door at 139 Kelsey Hall sometime early in my third year of university. I'm pretty sure my friend Susan Shyluk (nee Neumann) was responsible for this light mocking. I was rather befuddled the morning I woke up and found the note. (I kept it all these years because I'm a sentimentalist.)

A little earlier - sometime in second year - I discovered that someone had slipped a girl's bracelet into the pocket of my jacket. Completely lacking in self-confidence and desperate for female companionship, my heart leaped - a girl liked me! Why else would she do such a thing? What a wonderfully cryptic and yet romantic gesture.

My hopes were dashed about an hour later, when my friend Kim (who, it can now be confessed, I was somewhat enamored with) knocked on my door and asked for her bracelet back. She'd stuffed it into my pocket because I'd left my jacket on the floor in the proximity of the volleyball court where she was playing, and my pockets provided a convenient place to stash her stuff.

I meekly handed over the bracelet. If I couldn't have True Love, the trust of a good friend was equally precious.

Super Adjective Theatre

Superman's Girl Friend Lois Lane ran for several decades. Always a strange comic, it got even weirder in the swinging sixties and seventies when its writers started portraying Superman as a sexist dope just so he could be an effective foil for Lois' revitalized feminism. Superman sure looks like a stuck-up member of the establishment here, a far cry from his origins as a populist radical.

I find their final exchange hilarious, but on reflection if Superman were a real person I suppose it would be only natural to pepper your language with super-this and super-that, especially ironically. If I had super-powers, I'd constantly say things like "I'm super-writing this press release!" or "Oh oh, I've got to super-unplug the toilet again!"

Meanwhile, Sylvia would probably say "I'm getting super-tired of this routine. Please find some  new material."