The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Doctor Who: Cat’s Cradle: Warhead by Andrew Cartmel

Book #108 of 2025:

Doctor Who: Cat’s Cradle: Warhead by Andrew Cartmel (Virgin New Adventures #6)

Andrew Cartmel served as the script editor for the last three seasons of Classic Doctor Who (1987-1989), which were also the years that produced the final protagonist team of the Seventh Doctor and his companion Ace. The author thus had great control over their specific personalities, which he transfers well into this first novel he contributed to the ongoing Virgin New Adventures line in the 1990s that continued their journeys through time and space after the TV series went off the air. It’s technically the middle volume in the Cat’s Cradle trilogy too, although it’s almost entirely unrelated to the book that came before it, Time’s Crucible by Marc Platt. (That story set up a strange glowing feline as a sort of avatar for the TARDIS, which was going through a bit of a crisis. The timeship is still largely out of commission here, and the cat makes a cameo appearance, but that’s about it as far as the continuity goes.) Meanwhile, two characters introduced midway through this adventure, Justine and Vincent, would reappear in the subsequent Cartmel titles Warlock (VNA #34) and Warchild (VNA #47), though that’s all I know about the later works so far.

As for this installment, it’s a thrillingly globe-hopping spectacle, set in a dystopian cyberpunk near-future in which the world is choked by smog and one corrupt megaconglomerate functionally runs everything. The Time Lord is in his full manipulative chessmaster mode, operating less as a traditional action hero and more as a quiet presence nudging pieces into place from behind the scenes. Ace is his reluctant catspaw — pun intended — and it’s clear that she’s growing into a more battle-hardened and jaded young woman than she’d previously been characterized as, although the development certainly fits her character and what all she’s been through. The Doctor drops her in Turkey with no support to recruit a dangerous group of mercenaries, one of whom she ultimately has to kill in desperate armed combat, on a mission to retrieve what turns out to be the cryogenically-preserved body of a teenage boy with latent psychic powers.

I do have a few critiques. This is a tale that’s heavy on atmospheric worldbuilding but thin on a legible plot, and the ultimate aim of the villain is to create a process for digitally uploading the consciousnesses of the uber-rich… which isn’t particularly evil save for his methods to accomplish it, which for some reason require sacrificing his wife and son. And while the Doctor foils that scheme, he doesn’t even attempt to topple the overarching system that preys on the working class — literally harvesting them for body parts after arresting and executing them on trumped-up charges — and is steadily poisoning the planet, driving girls into underage prostitution, and other such sins. He and Ace stride off triumphantly in the end despite the widespread suffering they’re leaving behind, which doesn’t feel especially earned. There’s also a totally unnecessary scene at one point when that heroine, stepping naked out of the shower to save the still-drowsy telepath from drowning in the nearby bathtub, gets groggily groped for her efforts. It’s a step up from the pervasive misogyny and threats of sexual violence that hung over John Peel’s Timewyrm: Genesys, but maybe only just — and the one genuine romance of the piece is too predicated on instantaneous attraction to ever register as a meaningful opposite.

And yet! This is overall a neat departure for the franchise, and one not bogged down in the usual lore-heavy complications. It’s full of clever insights into the Doctor and how he thinks about history, and my understanding is that its darker turn proves very influential on the volumes that follow. There’s little indication of the so-called Cartmel masterplan, in which the former editor apparently intended to reveal if the show had gone on that the Doctor was a mysterious figure from Gallifreyan prehistory — as the preceding Platt title did ironically start to explore — but we do get a strong sense that that character constitutes an ancient and implacable force hiding behind a jester’s act, somehow powerful and inscrutable beyond normal human morality, which is one of my favorite characterizations in Doctor Who. We see those hints through the eyes of the ordinary people who populate this text, as he repeatedly swirls into somebody’s life and completely upends it with but a few well-placed words.

Does it hang together as a coherent narrative? I’m not so sure. But the mood is fairly intoxicating throughout.

[Content warning for gun violence, racism, and gore.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Aisle Nine by Ian X. Cho

Book #107 of 2025:

Aisle Nine by Ian X. Cho

An unfortunate dud for me. I appreciate the satirical anticapitalist edge here — sure, I’ve seen Buffy; I’ll accept that if portals were spitting out monsters worldwide, including in the middle of a crowded grocery store, business would continue unaffected and shoppers would go on asking inane questions and otherwise treating the low-salary workers like dirt — but that comes at the cost of some hazy worldbuilding about the nature of the situation and an overall comedic tone that I think ultimately cuts against the effectiveness of the piece. I couldn’t really connect to the characters, either, with the amnesiac hero in particular feeling like a perpetual generic blank slate. Add to that a tepid plot and a few predictable twists, and well, I can’t say that I’ve found too much in this YA apocalyptic horror novel to actually recommend.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: The Eyes Are the Best Part by Monika Kim

Book #106 of 2025:

The Eyes Are the Best Part by Monika Kim

Ji-won is a fun protagonist: a Korean-American college student who’s been dealing with some hard times lately, but who is even more obviously having a completely unhinged and over-the-top reaction to them. Or that’s obvious to the reader of her private thoughts, at least — to her classmates and family, she seems the same quiet girl as ever, even as inwardly she’s growing increasingly fixated on her immigrant mother’s folk belief that eating the eyes of a cooked fish will bring good luck. Before long, she starts craving that delicacy raw… and from her own species, instead.

The horror of the piece creeps up on us American Psycho-style, first in unsettling dreams and then in opportunistic attacks on isolated strangers that still might just be the antiheroine’s feverish imaginings. By the time it’s clear that no, this demure teenager actually is a committed cannibal and budding serial killer, we’re too invested in her deranged POV to do anything but watch in appalled fascination. Besides, her Umma’s new boyfriend and her own obnoxious stalker are both such loser fetishizing racist jerks anyway — the former perving on her underage sister and the latter acting like his performative feminism gives him the right to claim her as a model Asian girlfriend — so is it really so bad to root for them to become her next bloody victims? I support women’s wrongs, as the bumper sticker says.

This was an absolute rush to read, and while I called the ending early on, it represents the sort of neat plotting that’s still super enjoyable to see unfold. Recommended for anyone who can handle the racism and the gore, not to mention a deliciously monstrous and thoroughly unrepentant young woman as the lead character. I daresay she’s the YA #ownvoices Dexter you didn’t even know you’ve been looking for.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer

Book #105 of 2025:

Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer

I read this novel back in high school, a few years after it was first published in 2000, and when I saw it recently on my mom’s shelf, I remembered it vaguely as a Michael Crichton kind of science-fiction, channeling the writer’s deep background research in service to a thrilling plot. As it turns out, however, the writing style is more akin to something like Ayn Rand or Daniel Quinn, with authorial mouthpieces debating philosophical worldviews back and forth until the stronger argument eventually prevails.

There’s really not much story here — although it begins with the fun premise of an alien arriving on earth and asking to speak to a paleontologist, the bulk of the text follows the two of them having a long drawn-out conversation about the potential existence of a divine creator, with the extraterrestrial insisting that that’s the unavoidable implication of all available evidence and the atheist human stubbornly refuting that claim. A minor subplot involves a Stephen King-esque fundamentalist terrorist scheme to destroy the fossil collection at the protagonist’s museum, and events take a somewhat surreal turn in the last fifty pages once that situation resolves, but otherwise, the only real arc beyond the cerebral exchange of ideas consists of our hero processing his terminal lung cancer and swiftly impending death.

As for the visitor’s thesis, it’s largely a rehashing of old creationist talking points, though they might be new to a given reader. There are a lot of factors around either our planet or the universe itself which would seem incredibly unlikely to have arisen by chance, which suggests to such thinkers that an intelligent designer is behind it all. To this author Robert J. Sawyer adds revelations that similarly defy coincidence, like mass extinctions on the other being’s homeworld overlapping exactly with ours, which collectively tip the scales towards the reality of some sort of god, loath as the scientist is to accept that.

I do enjoy the characters and the depiction of academia here, but it’s fair to say that not much happens in the book, nor is there any pressing tension besides the man’s diagnosis and the extremists steadily approaching his institution. That final 15% or so is also deeply weird: a nearby star suddenly goes supernova, a presence intervenes to block its effects, and the spaceship blasts off to investigate whether it’s the literal deity or not, with the patient brought along in cryosleep to extend his remaining days. It’s a mindbending excursion that sits awkwardly against the majority of the title before it, and contributes to the overall uneven tone.

I don’t want to be too harsh about the work. It’s kept me turning its pages at least twice in my life now, and I’m sure the logical thrust of the piece could blow one’s mind if encountered at just the right moment. But the strongest supporting arguments tend to be the purely invented ones, which makes the whole crisis of faith and its resolution come across as fairly contrived. That wouldn’t necessarily be a deal-breaker in a storyline with more going on, but since the Socratic dialogue is the entire point of the thing, it rings a bit hollow for me in the end.

[Content warning for gun violence, suicide, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Isles of the Emberdark by Brandon Sanderson

Book #104 of 2025:

Isles of the Emberdark by Brandon Sanderson

[Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.]

This is the latest “Secret Project,” a name that author Brandon Sanderson gives to the books he’s written in his spare time outside his regular public writing schedule and produced via crowdfunding instead of traditional publishing. Although technically a standalone piece, it is set within his sprawling cosmere saga, which means the standard preliminaries apply: you don’t necessarily need to have read any or all of the previous releases in that massive setting, but there are common histories and worldbuilding principles that the text assumes you’re probably familiar with. The immediate plot is focused enough that a total newcomer could still follow along, but the bewildering array of characters, factions, species, and types of ‘investiture’ magic can be overwhelming even for those of us who have done all the relevant homework.

This novel is interesting for being an expansion of the writer’s 2014 novella Sixth of the Dusk (previously collected in the anthology Arcanum Unbounded). That is, it’s a sequel that incorporates the earlier story — with minor edits for tone — as a sequence of flashback chapters, which is an approach I don’t think I’ve seen before. In that initial excursion, the protagonist is a native tracker in a Polynesian-inspired culture who navigates a deadly island while reflecting on the more technologically-advanced outsiders who have recently come to his planet. In this fuller version, it’s clearer that the new arrivals are Scadrian — using powers endemic to the Mistborn books — and the entry takes place in some future era, when that civilization is a militaristic space empire. Here an older Sixth ventures into the Cognitive Realm, in search of allies or other means to resist the impending colonialist forces.

I like this tale when it focuses on either our hero or his co-lead, the young dragon Starling. She doesn’t have as well-defined a motivating arc to begin with, but once their paths cross about midway through the book, she’s fun to watch trying to find a way out of their particular predicament. I also appreciate how a central theme of the work concerns the importance of oral knowledge and other traditional folkways, both for their own sake and as a method for resisting imperialism.

I am less sold on the many crossover elements, and the increasing feeling throughout the franchise that tracking them has been left as an exercise for the hyper-attentive reader. Major canon revelations are nice, and subtle Easter egg connections back and forth can be a delight, but I shouldn’t have to look up the right wiki or subreddit or explainer video to be sure I’m catching everything. The balance is off here in my personal opinion, which is a deepening complaint I’ve had about the cosmere for a while now. The present adventure remembers to tighten its scope at times to let the main characters shine, but their supporting cast is thin and the larger impacts regularly feel like they’re getting in the way of the plot at hand. Sanderson at his best can deliver such lore in service to the struggles of specific personalities, but when those two impulses are in conflict, I will always favor fiction that prioritizes the people over the grander continuity details.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Nightingale’s Lament by Simon R. Green

Book #103 of 2025:

Nightingale’s Lament by Simon R. Green (Nightside #3)

Not great, but I like it better than I did on my last read in 2019. I’ve described the Nightside books before as having rhythms similar to a police procedural TV show, and after a pilot outing and a fairly thrilling followup, this third volume represents our first real filler episode. It’s still fun, to be clear! Author Simon R. Green continues to spin some really imaginative setpieces and character concepts for this urban fantasy setting, and I appreciate that Shotgun Suzie and Razor Eddie are both mentioned but absent, given their prominent roles in the two previous adventures. In their place, we’re introduced to a few new faces who will go on to become recurring presences too, most notably the unkillable zombie teenager Dead Boy.

The problem is, there’s not much powering the plot this time around. The series debut carried the inherent energy of introducing everything, and the second novel offered cataclysmic stakes with the forces of heaven and hell ripping apart the city in the hero’s wake. In this next story, it’s just that same noir-ish detective taking on a more mundane case, investigating a singer whose soulful performances are driving audience members to suicide. That sort of reset might have been necessary — we can’t have the apocalypse every installment, even in the Nightside — but it’s a pivot that ideally should have come with some personal angle for the protagonist to spark our investment. Here, he’s merely a bloke on a job.

The larger mystery arcs involving his unknown enemies and vague portentous rumblings about his vanished inhuman mother are featured again, but not meaningfully advanced. You could skip over this title and never notice it, which is hardly a ringing endorsement. There simply are no major developments in its pages, enjoyable as it remains to see John Taylor overcoming a sequence of escalating magical threats with bluffs off his reputation and a pocketful of black pepper as much as his own special talent.

[Content warning for body horror, gore, and repeated use of a transphobic slur. In general, this series is embracing of genderfluid pronouns and what it calls cross-dressing — though you could certainly accuse it of exoticizing queer identities and equating them with the rest of the macabre pulp weirdness — but it was written in Britain in the early 2000s, and that obviously shades how such matters are presented.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Mark Twain by Ron Chernow

Book #102 of 2025:

Mark Twain by Ron Chernow

Ron Chernow is a consummate biographer, probably best known for popularizing the tale of an overlooked Founding Father into an account that became the basis for the hit Broadway musical Hamilton. Here he turns his attentions a century forward to the life of author Mark Twain, who represents a considerably less obscure subject matter. We likely all have an image of the man in our heads, have read or at least discussed his controversial bestseller Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and are acquainted with the basic facts of his existence: born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, grew up in the sort of small frontier town he’d later set his fiction in, piloted a riverboat for a while, and eventually turned to writing and public speaking, for which he crafted a wealth of humorous aphorisms that are still widely quoted today. (A personal favorite: “Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”)

This new biography expands upon those facets at great length — it’s yet another Chernow text clocking in at over 1000 pages — with plenty of direct excerpts from Twain’s own journals and private letters. It goes further, however, to round out its portrait beyond the avuncular mustachioed figure in that canonical white suit. Outside of his books themselves, we learn of the writer’s failed business ventures, and how he was constantly falling for some fast talker’s harebrained get-rich-quick scheme. We hear a lot about his progressive politics, which included a lifelong friendship with Frederick Douglass and an unpopular aversion to American imperialism in the Philippines. And we get a sense of the wilder culture around him, which he navigated as one of the country’s first real celebrities.

We also see how dependent he was on his wife Livy, who served as his editor and household manager, and how rudderless he was after her passing, elevating his secretary to a romance-free but otherwise similar role whilst ignoring how his adult daughters chafed against her even as she had the younger one needlessly confined to a sanitarium. (To the extent the employer-employee relationship was effectively a marriage, the two subsequently had a huge and legally protracted divorce that played out in the popular press.) He ultimately outlived three of his four children, including a son who died as a toddler.

Above all, Mark Twain was a complicated man, which Chernow captures ably. Although generally a liberal thinker, he had his share of hangups and misconceptions, like an appreciation for Jews that seemed based on many of the same stereotypes that drove antisemitism in others. He could be racist in one moment and an avowed egalitarian in the next. Most awkwardly, he spent much of his final decades obsessing over the company of young girls aged ten to sixteen, whom he recruited into a private fan club for himself — though always with a chaperone and apparently never a hint of impropriety. The biographer largely avoids either lionizing or judging Clemens throughout, and he speculates here that the children may have represented the widower’s attempt to recapture his bygone happy family days. That two of his daughters were still alive at this point and frustrated over these newcomers taking all their father’s attention is but another irony in a lifetime full of them.

Could the work have been tightened up in places? Sure. This is an exhaustive and frequently exhausting narrative, pulling out minutiae that other biographies — including the subject’s own infamously rambling memoir — perhaps would have skipped right past. But one doesn’t read Chernow for the digestible takeaways, despite how I’ve tried to summarize them here. We read an author like this to immerse ourselves utterly in the lives of others, and Sam Clemens offers a wonderful specimen for that type of lens.

[Content warning for slavery and racial slurs.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Classic Doctor Who, season 19

TV #34 of 2025:

Classic Doctor Who, season 19

I’m maybe overly charitable towards Peter Davison’s first season as the Fifth Doctor, but there were inevitably going to be growing pains after seven years of his predecessor Tom Baker. And to be clear, I am still not saying that this is great television, as a whole. The acting and writing for the new lead take some time to settle in, and his costars have an even rougher go of it. There’s decent potential to this era, which the later Big Finish audios have really brought out, but in practice here, Nyssa stands around a lot and Tegan and Adric repeatedly squabble over nothing grounded. We should feel pathos about the boy’s departure in EARTHSHOCK — largely the reason I rank it as the best of this run, although the long-delayed return of the Cybermen is fun too — but as with so many other promising elements, it’s somewhat muddled in the execution.

At least Fivey is an interesting protagonist: considerably more passive and helpless than the brash Fourth Doctor, which is only exacerbated when his sonic screwdriver is destroyed in THE VISITATION (a development that surprisingly sticks around until the Eighth Doctor movie a decade and a half further on). If Baker was an arrogant genius who could wave a powerful device to get past any narrative barrier, his replacement is forced to hem and haw and rely on the characters around him more and more. Three companions proves to be a bit too much for the scripts to handle, but I likewise have to give some credit for the attempt at something new — okay, old again, technically — from the aging show.

But it’s hard to know what to do when the Master randomly puts on a transparently racist disguise and no one bothers to mention it, or when the world’s most boring murder mystery unfolds with only one suspect, whose motive appears to be that he’s an ableist caricature himself. I can’t defend such matters, and I mostly tolerate this moment in Doctor Who rather than truly enjoying it. We’re on the slow slide towards cancellation at this point, and while I promise it’s not all downhill, I can’t honestly claim that any of these particular stories would constitute a must-watch.

Serials ranked from worst to best:

★★☆☆☆
TIME-FLIGHT (19×23 – 19×26)

★★★☆☆
CASTROVALVA (19×1 – 19×4)
BLACK ORCHID (19×17 – 19×18)
FOUR TO DOOMSDAY (19×5 – 19×8)
THE VISITATION (19×13 – 19×16)

★★★★☆
KINDA (19×9 – 19×12)
EARTHSHOCK (19×19 – 19×22)

Overall rating for the season: ★★★☆☆

TV Review: Reservation Dogs, season 3

TV #33 of 2025:

Reservation Dogs, season 3

I rated the first two seasons of this show as 4-out-of-5 stars apiece, and I’m tempted to lower my rating of this last one to a 3. Structurally, it’s kind of a mess, without nearly enough scenes of the kids all hanging out together as friends. Instead, they’re repeatedly siloed off into their own separate adventures — two full episodes this year (out of just ten total) featuring only Bear, for instance, and another that’s entirely a flashback to a previous decade absent any of the regular actors. Even in the remaining installments where everyone does appear, it’s often simply for a quick check-in moment at the start or end.

And yet! For all the looseness of the plot and the missing sense of group camaraderie, those individual stories generally remain enjoyable slices of Oklahoma indigenous life and community, centered around protagonists we know pretty well at this point. It’s not my ideal way to use these characters, especially for their farewell time with us, but I can’t fault the writing too severely when it’s as well-observed and funny as ever. I’m assuming the wonkiness is at least partially due to limited cast availability too, with the scripts making the best of that unfortunate constraint. The result may be the weakest iteration of Reservation Dogs yet, but it’s still better than a lot of shows out there, all the way through to its unsurprisingly heartfelt end.

This season: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Seasons ranked: 1 > 2 > 3

Book Review: The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard

Book #101 of 2025:

The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard (Lays of the Hearth-Fire #1)

This is currently my very favorite book, which I’ve now read three times in as many years. (I’m not necessarily committing to maintaining an annual reread, but I’m not ruling it out, either.) Like Kip scribbling additions to his undelivered letter every time it came back to him after the Fall, what follows is an updated version of my original review:

The Hands of the Emperor is a wonderful warm hug of a novel, rich in characterization and gentle affirmation of community trust. It’s rare for a 900-page fantasy tome to feel so cozy, let alone to forgo any significant romance or acts of violence throughout its duration. But this self-published 2019 work is remarkable in any number of ways, each more endearingly quaint than the last. I am honestly not even sure that I would say it has a plot, although events do gradually unfold in support of the central character arc: a quietly effective middle-aged civil servant belatedly earning (or realizing he already has) the love and admiration of his colleagues, his far-off relatives, and his boss.

It’s an incredibly slow unveiling. Cliopher Mdang, private secretary to the ruler of the entire world, spends the first quarter of the text escorting his liege on an incognito holiday, the result of a breach-of-protocol invitation blurted out upon a stroke of insight about how lonely the other man must be in his peerless existence under elaborate courtly taboos, unable to be touched or looked directly in the eye. The two have known each other for decades — or possibly even millennia, as time has fractured in the cataclysmic backstory and now passes slower in some parts of the land than others — but their relationship has previously only ever been professional. We essentially get to meet His Radiancy the individual as Kip does, whilst simultaneously gaining a feel for the viewpoint protagonist himself and the dazzlingly intricate worldbuilding details that author Victoria Goddard has devised for the various cultures of the setting.

The tone here is something like The Goblin Emperor crossed with The West Wing. Or the musical Hamilton, if it weren’t a tragedy and showed its titular politician as more in touch with his island origins like Disney’s Moana. (Immigrants! They get the job done!) It turns out that in his rise through the levels of government, our hero has been subtly reworking that system, pushing for law and policy changes that will contribute to a more equitable society. Inspired by his distant egalitarian homeland, he’s rooted out corruption, instituted a universal basic income, improved the postal and transportation services, and implemented countless further such ideas that in an aggregation of incremental steps have functionally revolutionized the realm. It’s a rejection of grimdark cynicism, a hopepunk ode to the fundamental principle of good governance’s ability to help people, and it’s absolutely riveting to see in action, especially once its unassuming architect starts getting openly acknowledged and rewarded for it.

This is also a story about cultural conflicts: about coming from a small backwater province to the capital of the known universe and facing misunderstanding and scorn for the customs of home. About keeping those folkways kindled inside as a guiding beacon, and ultimately proving that oral traditions are not primitive but lavish and meaningful and preserved over generations as a powerful representation of identity. About finding a way to make Kip’s family understand why he left and everything he’s accomplished in the wider civilization, and about his personal journey to realize how he needs to be a better advocate for himself in their eyes.

Above all, I would say that this is a book about being seen and accepted and loved for who you are. The evolving dynamic between Cliopher and the Last Emperor is not romantic — and I’ve heard that in the sequel, the diligent bureaucrat is more explicitly characterized as asexual — but it is deeply intimate and a model of trusting fealty as the lord and his loyal aide come to reveal more and more of themselves to one another. The meaning of the title is twofold: Kip both serves as the metaphorical hands of the Emperor in interpreting and enacting his will across the kingdom and yearns to be able to grasp His Radiancy’s actual hands in friendship. The catharsis of when he finally does, along with several other key moments in the long path there, is emotional and soothing and genuinely heartfelt. Adults being competent at their jobs and earnestly decent to the fellow souls in their lives! Is that what people mean when they describe genre fiction as wish-fulfillment?

There is some periodic darkness, on the margins. Abusive marriages are mentioned, the trauma of the Fall that most characters lived through continues to affect them, and the protagonist feels intense isolation and survivor’s guilt that has to be carefully unpacked and confronted, with the occasional panic attack along the way. The possibility of suicide is raised obliquely in passing, and we learn that his former superiors used to torture their political enemies, in the old days before his reforms. One minor character comes from a tribe that practices sacred ritualistic cannibalism, while another gets casually deadnamed at first mention, although there’s no indication of any transphobia that would give that act the same violent impact it carries in our world. (“Clia was [__] originally, but she changed her name when she was of age to declare herself a woman.”) I raise these issues to respect reader sensitivities, but in general, I’d say that they only cause the pervasive spirit of humanitarian acceptance that powers the novel to stand out more clearly.

This was my initial introduction to both Goddard as a writer and her broader Nine Worlds saga, and having subsequently now read 29 further titles in that continuity — everything but The Return of Fitzroy Angursell, The Redoubtable Pali Avramapul, and At the Feet of the Sun, which take place following this one — I still think it’s probably the best entry point for newcomers. The rest have generally been great as well, though, and they’ve definitely added delightful background context for me on my rereads. (The novella The Tower at the Edge of the World, detailing a certain character’s backstory, is particularly fascinating — I wouldn’t suggest picking it up first, but revisiting this one afterwards provides some excellent dramatic irony.) Like Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, the Nine Worlds series is less of a single unfolding narrative and more of a loose configuration of smaller contained stories that’s forgiving of practically any reading order but builds in enjoyment the deeper you go and the more connections you start to spot. Nevertheless, my personal recommendation remains for folks to begin right here, with a thoughtful islander striking up an unprecedented conversation with his weary sovereign.

★★★★★