TV #2 of 2024: Star Trek: Lower Decks, season 2 I’m still not fully vibing with this cartoon’s irreverent tone, but it’s improved enough in this sophomore season that I’m willing to bump my rating up a notch from last time. My biggest issue in the program’s first year was the way the narrative seemed …
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TV #1 of 2024: Echo, season 1 I’m torn in my reaction to this premiere ‘Marvel Spotlight’ production — a designation meant to indicate a series that, while canonical to the wider Marvel Cinematic Universe, should stand on its own for any audience and focus on smaller-scale personal stakes that don’t majorly affect any ongoing …
Book #5 of 2024: The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet by Jeff Goodell A harrowing look at the impact of climate change on human and non-human existence, really contextualizing how innocuous-sounding figures like a few degrees of global average temperature increase are in fact catastrophic for us. Author …
Book #4 of 2024: Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse edited by John Joseph Adams This 2008 anthology collects 22 short stories about life after various apocalyptic scenarios, all but one of which had been previously published elsewhere (although Stephen King’s plague journal “The End of the Whole Mess” was the only entry I’d read before). …
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Book #3 of 2024: Orion and King Arthur by Ben Bova (Orion #6) This is a pretty good rendition of the classic Arthurian legend, especially in its emotional build-up to the king’s fated tragic end. (I like the initial wrinkle of him meeting Beowulf in his younger days, too.) It’s a little stranger as an …
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Book #2 of 2024: The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon (The Downworld Sequence #1) This is my least-favorite sort of science-fiction, where the fundamental worldbuilding mechanics that underpin the premise are so opaque that the action is rendered basically incomprehensible. The general idea here is that certain all-powerful AIs once ruled the world, before …
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Book #1 of 2024: North Woods by Daniel Mason My first read of 2024 is this moving sequence of interconnected stories taking place over centuries, following the successive inhabitants of a house nestled deep in the woods of rural New England. From the Puritans who built the home all the way through to its latest …
TV #62 of 2023: What If…?, season 2 Not nearly as impressive as the first year, which was a neat concept for a show but already had some issues in the execution that are worsened here. I swear, I’d feel so much more favorable towards this series if it truly were the anthology that it’s …
Book #136 of 2023: Defiant by Brandon Sanderson (Skyward #4) [Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.] A generally satisfying finale to author Brandon Sanderson’s YA space opera Skyward, following three previous novels and a sequence of tie-in novellas cowritten with Janci Patterson. The wider ‘Cytoverse‘ that began with the 2008 story Defending Elysium …
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Movie #10 of 2023: Doctor Who: The Church on Ruby Road (2023) Disney+ has decided to label this festive Doctor Who outing as Special 4, which suggests a certain close continuity with the recent David Tennant / Catherine Tate trilogy that doesn’t really pan out in the episode itself. Instead, as expected, the script is …
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