Welcome back, dear readers. It’s been a while. I hope everyone is having a great holiday season and reflecting back on a 2025 that had some meaningful personal milestones, even if it wasn’t what one could reasonably call a great year.

I had thought about doing a newsletter about my year-end favorites, but one of my favorites demanded to be written about at greater length. There are spoilers for the show below, so if you’re not caught up on Pluribus on Apple TV, feel free to skip to the “Links to Cool Things” section at the bottom where I’ll share those other favorites.

For everyone else, let’s set sail on the sand-seas of Wycaro!

Out of Many, One

There’s a line I think about a lot that’s attributed to JRR Tolkien.

Tolkien disliked people’s attempts to map a metaphor for World War II or any other struggle of good against evil onto the Lord of the Rings. So he speaks of applicability: the freedom for the reader to map their own understanding of the world onto what’s being written, rather than a strict one-to-one reskinning of something that already exists.

All this to say, I think Pluribus has applicability out the wazoo.

After a couple of episodes, I was sure this was a show about AI. The overly obsequious mass that knows everything, that just wants to give you everything you want even if it might hurt you? It mapped pretty neatly.

But as the season wore on, I don’t think it’s a show about AI. Or rather, it’s not just a show about AI. It’s a show about what it feels like to know that there’s something wrong with the rest of the world and what it means to try to live in and fix an imperfect world. And as such, it’s highly applicable to so many things and people.

While I’m approaching the show with my own biases (and knowledge of what kind of person Vince Gilligan is), I think there’s a case to be made for a conservative reading of the show. After all, the Plurbs have one mind, no individuality, are relentlessly sunny and happy and won’t harm a fly. They’re AI, sure, but they also could be from the worst, most hackneyed parody of well-meaning liberals/communists that the Daily Caller’s streaming service could whip up.

Of course, that’s not how I view it. I bring my own views of how the world has gone wrong to bear on the plot. I see Carol as a typical resistance liberal, aware that the world has gone very wrong but unaware of what to do about it aside from naming the problem. When it comes down to it, she still wants to live in the world, not blow it up.

But then there’s Manousos. Uncompromising. Unflinching. Unwilling to bend from his moral code even the slightest bit. I see in him the hardcore activists who know what needs to be done, but whose single-mindedness and emphasis on purity often turn into a circular firing squad.

Only by coming together – by letting go a little bit of what each of them clings onto – can they make real progress. I”ve seen a lot of speculation about why Carol has an atom bomb at the end of the season. Is it just a gag? A callback? I think it’s a statement: she’s no longer concerned with maintaining the status quo. She’s ready to blow up the world – at least metaphorically – in order to save it.

That’s my read. Is it the correct read? Hell no!

I don’t think there is a correct read.

When people heard there was a new sci-fi series coming from the Breaking Bad guy, it was marked as a return to his days on The X-Files. But Pluribus might be the least mystery-boxy sci-fi series since before Lost came out. Like one of my other favorite shows of all time, The Leftovers, the point of the show is not to unravel its central sci-fi premise and guess the solutions to its mysteries. Stuff happened, that’s not the point. The point is how people react to it.

In other words, it may be about aliens, but it’s actually very, very human.

(Side note: when I was coming up with pun titles for this newsletter, I started to think “Is Carol named after A Christmas Carol?” You could make an argument that throughout the season she’s visited by multiple ghosts. Although, in the spirit of the joining, all the ghosts are the same person. There’s Zosia as Christmas Past - embodying Carol’s late wife Helen until Carol tells her not to. There’s Zosia as Christmas Present, showing Carol how good it could be to actually live in this world as it is now. And there’s Zosia as Christmas Future, letting Carol know the fate that awaits her in one to three months. I doubt this is intentional, but it’s there!)

So, look. I write books for children. I’m no Tolkien. I think my metaphors can be a little on the nose. Or, as another great author is known for saying…

But like I said, I do think about Tolkien’s line about applicability a lot. My metaphors may be on-the-nose, but hopefully they won’t map one-to-one to something that’s happening in the world right now, which won’t have any meaning to readers in ten or twenty years’ time.

I always want to write as a human, about humans, for humans. And that’s not only applicable (hopefully), it’s something the Plurbs (a.k.a generative AI) can’t do.

And that’s why Pluribus was my favorite TV show of the year. And now, some of my other favorites…

Links to Cool Things

• The best video game I played this year that wasn’t for my day job (assume those are all great) was Blue Prince. This was actually a great year for games, and I played a lot of very good ones. (I’m currently obsessively grinding my way through Hades II, and it’s fantastic.) But nothing I experienced this year matched playing Blue Prince with my daughter, even though it’s a single-player game. Blue Prince is a puzzle game, where the puzzles are both procedurally generated – you’re building a house out of randomly generated rooms, and every in-game day the rooms you have access to are different – and also carefully crafted. No moment in gaming this year matched when – playing side-by-side with my daughter – we first drew the Rumpus Room (iykyk) and we were so blown away she held my hand. I highly recommend parents play single-player puzzle games with their kids. It’s the best!

• My favorite music of the year was Who Is the Sky by David Byrne. The album itself is…okay. It’s fine. But seeing Byrne perform the songs on his incredible concert tour gave them a whole new life. He just added new dates for next year, so try to catch him!

• My favorite movie of the year (so far) was Weapons, although I still need to see a ton of movies. But we saw Weapons in a crowded theater, and the sense of group catharsis during the climax was unmatched by any other movie experience I’ve had this year to date.

• My favorite book genre of the year (yes, it’s a cop-out) is the sci-fi/fantasy murder mystery. I love SFF and I love murder mysteries, and I’ve gotten really into books that combine them this year. I enjoyed three twists on mysteries (two of which are sci-fi) back-to-back by Stuart Turton, a superhero twist on mysteries by my friend Alex Segura, and the excellent second book in the Ana and Din fantasy mystery series by Robert Jackson Bennett.

And finally, I want to thank you for reading. This was a weird year for me, writing-wise, and the biggest thing that I really have to show for my writing this year that isn’t very behind-the-scenes and too early to show is launching Justin Aclin: The Newsletter. I’m very grateful to everyone who subscribed, and please do share it with your friends and tell them to sub as well.

Here’s to things getting much better in the New Year!