Movie #7 of 2026: Rocky III (1982) “Eye of the Tiger” is a great song, but I’m not sure in the final analysis if Rocky III is a great movie or not. Length isn’t always a determination of that, but this one shaves about 20 minutes off the runtime of its predecessors, resulting in a …
Author Archives: Joe Kessler
Book Review: Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear by Seanan McGuire
Book #25 of 2026: Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear by Seanan McGuire (Wayward Children #10) This fantasy series follows various children who stumble into Narnia-style portals to other worlds, generally by showing us the unhappy homes they fled, a bit of their wonderful new lives, and then the resulting angst when they inevitably find …
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Book Review: The Water Outlaws by S. L. Huang
Book #24 of 2026: The Water Outlaws by S. L. Huang I’m not familiar with the 14th-century Chinese novel Water Margin / Outlaws of the Marsh / All Men Are Brothers, but I’ve still really enjoyed this modern genderbent retelling, in which the central bandits are now predominantly female and/or queer. Even approached as a …
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Book Review: Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz
Book #23 of 2026: Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz This 2025 novella imagines a future in which robots are free but second-class citizens, their status a contested compromise between those humans who see them as worthy of full equal rights and those who would deny their sentience and return them to a state of legal …
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TV Review: 12 Monkeys, season 3
TV #6 of 2026: 12 Monkeys, season 3 I still think this sci-fi series was more interesting back when its time-traveling protagonists were more straightforwardly trying to avert a plague and the subsequent dystopian future, rather than opposing an evil cult that’s nebulously aiming to somehow break the timeline itself. But with that caveat, this …
Book Review: The Time Traveler’s Passport edited by John Joseph Adams
Book #22 of 2026: The Time Traveler’s Passport edited by John Joseph Adams The assembled titles in this collection of time travel short fiction get nearly the full range of ratings from me, which is often true of such anthologies. But since there are only six stories here, I guess I might as well review …
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Movie Review: Rocky II (1979)
Movie #6 of 2026: Rocky II (1979) Rocky (1976) was a genuine cultural sensation that deservedly launched its writer and lead actor Sylvester Stallone into Hollywood stardom. Expectations would thus have been pretty high for this sequel, in which he returns to those roles while also picking up directing duties, but in my opinion, it …
Book Review: The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald by John U. Bacon
Book #21 of 2026: The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald by John U. Bacon As made famous in the Gordon Lightfoot ballad the following year, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald was a cargo ship that sank in Lake Superior in 1975, “when the gales of November came early.” The exact cause …
TV Review: Wonder Man, season 1
TV #5 of 2026: Wonder Man, season 1 This Marvel miniseries is a little shaggy in its storytelling — did we really need an entire episode devoted to the minor character Doorman, in a season with only eight installments in total? — but it pulls its various threads together enough to satisfy me in the …
Book Review: Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones
Book #20 of 2026: Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones This 1984 fantasy novel offers a weird and problematic little bildungsroman. Author Diana Wynne Jones excels as usual at the quotidian slice-of-life business and the unexpected intrusion of magic into the ordinary, but there are a few major hurdles that readers will need to …
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