Fiction Reviews
Daedalus Is Dead
(2025) Seamus Sullivan, Tor, £16.99, hrdbk, 165pp, ISBN 978-1-035-08590-3
This debut novella delivers on the promise of its title. Daedalus, the mad scientist archetype of the Greek legends, does indeed spend most of the story dead, if talkative.
As you may well already know, Daedalus is best known for his role in two of the great tales of the mythos. Firstly as the builder of the Cretan labyrinth in which King Minos’s son, the Minotaur, is trapped. Second, as the man who flees that same king and island with his own son Icarus on home-made wings, only to lose his child when they fly too close to the Sun.
Daedalus generally comes out of the legends looking like a man on the wrong end of a raw deal. A genius forced to work for a wicked king, a bereaved and grieving father. Many of us wish our children would listen more closely, although seldom with such tragic consequences.
In Daedalus Is Dead, Sullivan offers us here a more ambiguous figure – in part by drawing on more of the source material than the highlights that we’re familiar with – showing us a man who is at least in part the architect of his own misfortunes.
For example, when Minos eventually tracks him down working for another king, Daedalus sees him off in a brutal but characteristically ingenious fashion. This backfires spectacularly when he dies and goes to Hades the Greek underworld, only to be punished for his crime by none other than his former lord and master (one of the perks of being the son of Zeus is that you get to judge the souls of the dead, however much of a tyrant you were in real life).
From chapter to chapter we follow our protagonist through what happens next in his afterlife, but we also hear his account of pivotal moments in his mortal existence. This Daedalus is an unreliable narrator of his own story, whose memories of his relationships with his wife, his son and Minos’ daughter Ariadne are decidedly rose-tinted.
This becomes increasingly apparent when he escapes his punishment with the help of Persephone – master builders are in demand even by the gods it seems – and begins a desperate quest to find his son and understand why he chose to fly up to the Sun instead of escaping with his father. To his credit, author Seamus Sullivan declines to give the reader an easy and unambiguous answer to this question.
At the same time Daedalus is pursued by the shade of the Minotaur – a child he imprisoned in a maze, in whose brutalisation he was dangerously complicit. There are clear parallels in the novella between both boys and their relationship with the title character as a parent or responsible adult.
As a sustained piece of controlled, high-quality, first-person writing, Daedalus is Dead is a notable achievement which, for me, also managed to shed new light on the original myth. With its fascination with gods and heroes (not to mention the narration and the use of the novella/short novel) it reminded me a little of Zelazny - high praise indeed in this quarter – even if the overall approach was rather more deconstructionist and downbeat.
While not without action, it is a character-led piece, so your appreciation will depend on how interesting you find Daedalus as a myth and a parent, whose lead character energy gradually spills out of him as his failings become increasingly apparent. As a parent myself, if not a myth, this certainly caught and held my attention; for others, your mileage will vary.
Overall though, this is a very good calling-card for Seamus Sullivan and his brand of thoughtful, literary (but still stylistically in-genre) speculative fiction. I’d not be surprised if Daedalus is Dead troubled the Nebula and Hugo novella shortlists this year (2026). Go seek it out for yourself.
Tim Atkinson
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