The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Deep Black by Miles Cameron

Book #188 of 2024:

Deep Black by Miles Cameron (Arcana Imperii #2)

A competent military sci-fi / space opera that unfortunately shies away from the interpersonal drama that I found so appealing in the first book of this series. Our protagonist is no longer new to the service, her lies about her past have come out and been accepted by her friends and superiors, and while there may yet be shadowy forces back home angling to take her down, we see no further sign of them in this volume and the attacks against her ship as a whole are now out in the open, rather than conducted through secret traitors and sabotage. Even her friendship with her roommate feels curiously muted, although at least her romantic interest is still around.

Mostly this sequel explores the culture and factional intrigues of the two alien species and the artificial intelligence programs in the setting, which are all more complicated than previously indicated. We also get a weird retcon about the heroine’s family and her origins, which makes some of the last novel seem less plausible in hindsight (to no appreciable benefit, I must say). And as usual, there are lots and lots of intricate spaceflight maneuvers and combat tactics.

It’s fine, really! Not my cup of tea overall, which probably means I shouldn’t bother with any subsequent installments, but I could imagine readers who had other favorite parts of the original title enjoying this one better. For me, I’ll give it a simple three-star rating and find something else more to my liking.

[Content warning for gun violence.]

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: The Umbrella Academy, season 4

TV #53 of 2024:

The Umbrella Academy, season 4

Even for a messy series that’s always coasted on vibes and fun personal interactions at the expense of any legible story elements, this farewell season is a bit of a rough time. The shortened episode count doesn’t help, nor does the fact that the writers have run out of comic book issues to adapt, but the fundamental problem here is the same one the show has had all along: an inability to articulate the exact parameters of the latest dawning apocalypse, or anyone’s specific goals in either furthering or stopping it.

Writing out all the plot holes introduced in this final year — or remaining unresolved from earlier — is only going to sour my mood, so I’ll stick with one big spoilery example from the finale to illustrate the matter: the reveal that the Hargreeves siblings have to feed themselves to a giant raging monster thing in order to collapse the branching timelines back down into one. Set aside how much of the exposition there is really one character making an unfounded assumption and everyone else agreeing that it sounds right. We’re still left with the unfortunate detail that when this last arc started, those heroes didn’t have any marigold powers in them! They got their abilities again by drinking what was apparently the lone source in the entire universe, found conveniently bottled in the back of some random car, which the villains who wanted to bring about “the Cleanse” could presumably have just snagged and given to Jennifer on their own.

Now, is the protagonists’ noble sacrifice a nice moment? Sure. That particular scene is written and acted pretty well. But it all falls apart the longer you think about it, in a genre that’s meant to be built on such ideas. The foundations leading to the climax are so compromised here that hardly anything lands with the impact it should. One antagonist kills and replaces another at one point, and because neither side has motivations that make any sense whatsoever to the audience, it elicits nothing from me beyond a confused shrug.

The season isn’t a total wash. The reset to a new reality allows for a few interesting variations on the usual cast dynamics, and the six-year time jump is a boon for both Aidan Gallagher’s age and Elliot Page’s gender transition seeming more plausible with the elapsed time on-screen. There’s also a running joke involving that ubiquitous “Baby Shark” song that’s hilarious every time, in a fitting sendoff to the program’s typical great soundtrack choices. But it’s nowhere near enough to save the rest, in the end.

This is, sadly, perhaps the best conclusion that The Umbrella Academy could ever have achieved. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

[Content warning for gun violence, body horror, drug abuse, sexual assault and slavery, live burial, claustrophobia, and gore.]

This season: ★★☆☆☆

Overall series: ★★☆☆☆

Seasons ranked: 2 > 3 > 1 > 4

TV Review: What If…?, season 3

TV #52 of 2024:

What If…?, season 3

This once-promising Marvel cartoon continues to deliver diminishing returns, and since this third season is apparently intended to be its last, it’s hard not to feel a sense of good riddance at this point (and to ponder the wasted potential left on the table, truly the biggest ‘what if’ of them all). While it remains impressive just how many actors were willing to reprise their movie roles for this animated series, I can’t help but think that it must have been the paycheck alone that’s still bringing them back, rather than the opportunity to dig more into a beloved character. A particular shoutout to Clark Gregg there, star of seven seasons of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., who returns to the MCU as Agent Phil Coulson in order to… function as a generic stooge trying to secure Howard the Duck and Darcy Lewis’s egg offspring. At least Tom Hiddleston’s Loki gets a few laughs out of the experience.

When this show began, the premise seemed to be: let’s consider the familiar events of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and explore how they could have gone differently. Certain changes were small and others were large, but the writers generally took the assignment seriously and showed off some interesting hypothetical ramifications to these twists on the normal continuity. But somewhere along the line, that approach was reduced to a jamming together of heroes like action figures under the lazy philosophy that in a multiverse, anything is possible. We can simply say that Storm and Captain Carter are friends now, and not go into how they met or how their dynamic alters the conventional timelines. Or to take another example from this year, Red Guardian can intervene to stop the Winter Soldier from killing Tony Stark’s parents, but the episode is going to revolve around their offbeat buddy comedy — pursued by Goliath of all people — and totally ignore the more appealing question of how the new trajectory of Tony’s life would have progressed instead.

The ending as usual tries to gin up some larger reality-spanning conflict with the Watcher, which has always felt like a miscalculation to me. (You don’t need to bring Rod Serling into the plot to give The Twilight Zone higher stakes!) I won’t say it’s any worse than the previous finales, but it plays out as the same meaningless exchange of colorful laser blasts devoid of any specific character work. Natasha Lyonne is fun as the aforementioned bird-human hybrid, now grown to adulthood, but she’s again presented to us as a fait accompli, a static figure with no development shown on-screen or challenges overcome on her path to the superheroics. It’s ultimately a boring use of her and the rest of the talented cast, in a franchise that used to put more care into its origin stories and even such noncanonical spinoffs.

[Content warning for gun violence.]

This season: ★★☆☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Seasons ranked: 1 > 2 > 3

Book Review: The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year by Ally Carter

Book #187 of 2024:

The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year by Ally Carter

A cute winter mystery story, in which a famous elderly writer of detective fiction has invited several younger peers to her mansion for the holiday, along with her seemingly ungrateful relatives. Soon after the guests arrive, their hostess vanishes amid evidence of a murder attempt, leaving the other authors to solve the real-life whodunnit and somehow survive the ordeal (including being snowed-in by blizzard conditions, of course). With the farcical plotting and the inclusion of secret passages throughout the building, it feels more than a bit like a novel version of the movie Clue, which is a definite selling point.

The romance is an off-note for me, unfortunately, and too major of an element to set aside. The love interest is written as a smug jerk early on — repeatedly getting the heroine’s name wrong, among other red flags — and even after that’s cleared up as an apparent misunderstanding, he swings way too far towards the other extreme, calling her sweetheart and baby and declaring his love for this woman who he’s really only known professionally in passing until this weekend. It’s too much! He’s also boringly hyper-competent and brooding over a mysterious dark past, which further makes his connection with the protagonist seem driven by physical chemistry alone.

I think I would have liked the book a lot better overall if they had simply stayed prickly colleagues competing to see who could figure the case out first, instead of teaming up and getting together like that. But with the genre verging on rom-com and not quite enough Christmas spirit in the air, this title is settling firmly in the three-star rating tier for me.

[Content warning for gun violence, domestic abuse, and loss of a parent.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: Death in the Stars by Bonnie Langford and Jacqueline Rayner

Book #186 of 2024:

Doctor Who: Death in the Stars by Bonnie Langford and Jacqueline Rayner

Overall a fairly average Doctor Who-adjacent volume of science-fiction, somewhat marred by a plot structure that’s more akin to a three-part serial than one cohesive full-length adventure. (The mystery teased on the cover, in which the heroine winds up as both investigator and suspect in an outer-space whodunnit, doesn’t even spring until the final third of the book.)

This is also a work that I judge for not living up to its potential in two key areas. First, it’s the latest release in this franchise which has been entrusted to the actor-turned-writer behind the central character, which generally feels like a significant occasion. Theoretically, nobody should know the Doctor’s companion Melanie Bush better than author Bonnie Langford, who played the role on television from 1986 to 1987 and then again starting in 2022, in addition to many Big Finish audio productions over the intervening years. And yet she demonstrates no particular insights into that figure in the way that, for instance, Sophie Aldred did for her own such project about Ace. Beyond a few sly references to other Langford performances outside of the Whoniverse, this could have easily been a title tackled by the actress’s uncredited co-writer Jacqueline Rayner alone.

The second (and related) missed opportunity here is that it shines no light on elements of the protagonist’s life that remain unknown to us. Mel originally left the TV show in the company of the roguish interstellar voyager Sabalom Glitz, and this tale picks up soon afterward with the two new business partners still traveling together. It does nothing to connect the dots to explain how she ends up back on contemporary Earth later on, which was kept pretty vague in the episode The Giggle. Nor do we learn anything more about her past, which has always been a bit of an enigma after the character was infamously introduced to the series already midway through her tenure with the Sixth Doctor. This novel sure seems like it could have been the perfect chance to finally fill in some of those gaps in the canon, but for whatever reason, it turns out to be not so nearly so momentous or informative.

Take it or leave it as a generic Whovian spinoff, I suppose, but it doesn’t live up to the hype of a Mel story written by the woman herself.

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: Doctor Who: Joy to the World (2024)

Movie #17 of 2024:

Doctor Who: Joy to the World (2024)

[Note: No, I don’t know why Disney’s marketing has pluralized the last word of the title on this poster. I assume it’s just a typo.]

Whether as showrunner himself or, as here, contributing a script to someone else’s editorial oversight, Steven Moffat tends to deliver a very particular sort of Doctor Who that’s heavy on the clever time-travel plotting and lighter on the legible human / Time Lord emotions. In this year’s Christmas special, for instance, it sure seems like Nicola Coughlan’s titular character Joy is meant to be the centerpiece of the action, but the episode never really manages to lock in on her, especially given how long she spends either under hypnotic influence or off the screen entirely. (The politics are a bit muddled, too — I’ve seen people online cheering the supposed anti-Tory messaging, but the 2020 lockdowns to keep loved ones out of Covid wards don’t strike me as particularly evil or even misguided. Those rules that Joy rails against saved lives!)

Another odd miss in my opinion is the story’s relation to the program’s past, which Moffat and producer Russell T. Davies should obviously be pretty tuned-into. The Doctor saying he isn’t married? Or that he’s never stayed in one place for a whole year before? Those are bizarre things to observe as a long-time fan of the show, as is a fairly direct parallel between Joy and a different blonde Yuletide costar: Kylie Minogue’s Astrid Peth from Voyage of the Damned.

On the bright side: the mechanics of the Time Hotel are fun, and that period where the Fifteenth Doctor is forced to slow down and live a regular life for a while, though not as unique as it’s made out to be, is certainly a rarity for the series (at the cost, as noted, of sidelining Joy). I don’t know if we’ll be seeing his friend Anita from that segment again, but I can only imagine what audio dramas Big Finish will someday devise for the era.

Holiday specials aren’t always deep or meaningful, and this one is acceptably charming on the surface. But for an hour that feels intended to build to a moment of catharsis and, well, joy for a certain somebody, it doesn’t quite come together enough for me in the end.

[Content warning for loss of a parent.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: Beginnings Omnibus by Robin Furth, Peter David, Jae Lee, and Richard Isanove

Book #185 of 2024:

Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: Beginnings Omnibus by Robin Furth, Peter David, Jae Lee, and Richard Isanove

This graphic novel collects the initial arc of Marvel comic book adaptations of Stephen King’s post-apocalyptic western Dark Tower novels, comprising 30 individual issues published from 2007 through 2010 under the subheadings of The Gunslinger Born, The Long Road Home, Treachery, The Sorcerer, Fall of Gilead, and Battle of Jericho Hill (some but not all of which I had previously read). The first of those is a fairly straightforward retelling of the flashback sequences from the books The Gunslinger and Wizard and Glass, while the rest flesh out events that had been mentioned obliquely on the page but never before depicted in much detail.

It’s a fun read for Tower junkies, ably plotted by King’s research assistant Robin Furth and scripted by comics industry veteran Peter David. The creators capture the tone of Mid-World well, and if the art by Jae Lee and Richard Isanove is somewhat heavy on shadows and light on defined facial features, at least it serves to emphasize the heightened mythic atmosphere of the saga in this era. There’s definite closure in finally seeing the doom that came upon the protagonist’s kingdom and his family’s order of knightly gunslingers, as well as the desperate last stand of its few remaining survivors.

At the same time, the illustrated version is no substitute for the original prose, and the hero’s star-crossed romance with Susan Delgado feels particularly abridged from the familiar tragedy. I think this text probably works best as a supplement for existing fans who can enjoy — and debate the canonicity of — the added scenes with Roland meeting the Crimson King, setting his early sights on reaching the Dark Tower, and so on, rather than newcomers being introduced to the franchise here. That’s especially true given how the plot to this volume ends pretty anticlimactically, without even a personal showdown between the young man and Gilead’s warmongering enemy John Farson.

I’ll be reading on regardless, but I wouldn’t categorize this as a must for anyone else.

[Content warning for gun violence, suicide, sexism, ableism, incest, rape, violence against children, body horror, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Notes to a Science Fiction Writer: The Secrets of Writing Science Fiction That Sells by Ben Bova

Book #184 of 2024:

Notes to a Science Fiction Writer: The Secrets of Writing Science Fiction That Sells by Ben Bova

I saw this 1981 title on my mom’s shelf over the holidays, and since I’ve read plenty of the late author’s fiction here and there, I decided to take it down and see what he had to say about the craft from the inside. This book is explicitly aimed at the prospective writer of sci-fi short stories of the type Ben Bova used to screen for publication as editor of the magazines Analog and Omni, but it’s overall a decent rough guide to certain key elements that any creator should consider in constructing a speculative tale: character, background (what I’d probably call worldbuilding), conflict, and plot. Each of those four sections also includes an example story by the writer himself and a discussion of how that particular piece illustrates the topic at hand.

Some of this advice strikes me as very helpful indeed, while some feels needlessly restrictive in its myopic definitions. (Most telling is perhaps the author’s offhand comment that “a story without conflict is like a meal without meat,” which reads quite differently to me in 2024 than he presumably intended it 43 years ago.) It’s of course not Bova’s fault that the genre has continued to evolve and push boundaries over the decades, but as he does decry the “ludicrously crude” pulp of an earlier era, it seems fair to critique his own purported universal principles in turn.

Still, the author notes how skilled artisans can knowingly break all the normal rules, and I do think this would be a good primer for anyone interested in the basic mechanics of the business. I could certainly name things I’ve read that might have benefited from just this sort of crash course, so long as its lessons are taken with a large grain of salt.

[Content warning for gun violence.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Star Wars: The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire by Dr. Chris Kempshall

Book #183 of 2024:

Star Wars: The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire by Dr. Chris Kempshall

A staggering work that I would unequivocally recommend to any obsessive-minded Star Wars fans like myself. This book, written by an actual academic historian, applies the investigative principles of that field to the continuity of the franchise to create an in-universe textbook accounting for the complete mechanics of its subject. In 400 dense hardcover pages, author Dr. Chris Kempshall — writing from the perspective of a fictional professional of his discipline within the titular galaxy — covers how exactly the Galactic Empire came to power, governed, and was eventually defeated, far beyond the major events specifically depicted on the screen.

It’s a remarkable achievement. It not only takes in the entirety of the official canon (a collection of disparate movies, TV shows, novels, comics, games, and more, produced by hundreds of individual writers over several decades for a variety of intended audiences and age levels) and synthesizes them into one coherent narrative. It also draws relevant insights and raises significant critiques from across that body to help illuminate the underlying drama, with the inevitable blanks lovingly and plausibly filled in by the author himself, occasionally by integrating characters and elements from Star Wars Legends (the ‘expanded universe’ of pre-2014 stories that Disney categorized as non-canonical due to their haphazard and contradictory nature, but have often been a source of inspiration for the new canon like this). A certain sort of reader will get a kick out of seeing names like Hiram Drayson finally brought back into the fold, but the primary accomplishment here stems from Dr. Kempshall taking up such prior contributions and carefully thinking through their various implications.

For example: why, in a universe teeming with diverse intelligent lifeforms, do so many of the Empire’s officers appear to be white, male humans? The Doylist explanation would account for the realities and biases of 20th-century Hollywood when George Lucas was originally creating the saga, but this is a Watsonian production through and through. Taking that mission seriously means accepting the situation at face value and instead interrogating the premise to yield inferences about the prejudiced attitudes behind imperial staffing patterns and link them to similar forces at play throughout the setting. Likewise, Lucas and his co-writers presumably didn’t put much thought into the military and government command structure of the Empire, which results in a hodgepodge of conflicting signals shown on-screen. But the professor has, and he weaves a brilliant story of how for instance the Death Star’s destruction would have impacted the chain of command or how Darth Vader operated outside of that traditional hierarchy in ways that complicated the war effort and were a factor in his side’s ultimate downfall. As a result, the Rebel Alliance’s victories are awarded additional context that deepens their impact well beyond the initial authorial intent.

There are so many fun Easter eggs to spot for those of us who have partaken widely of the Star Wars canon, but the writer plays fair by citing fictitious references in his footnotes instead of specific published titles from our reality. That approach also creates some nice instances of dramatic irony, as there are plenty of cases where his everyman narrator figure couldn’t know the same details that we the audience might, like the identity of the mysterious early Rebel leader codenamed ‘Axis’ on the series Andor. On the downside, he’s sometimes forced to declare a given topic uncertain due to records remaining lost or classified, which I imagine has been at Disney’s editorial discretion for stories they aren’t yet ready to tell.

I think the weakest / least convincing part of the book can be found in its final section exploring the post-Endor era that gave rise to the First Order and the New Republic, but that’s more to do with the sparseness of the existing canonical record and the lack of critical distance there than a flaw in the author’s command of the material per se. Even comparable history texts from our world face a similar conundrum as their timeline approaches the present day, and the effort is commendable in attempting a moral lesson about complacency in a time of resurgent political extremism. Still, he’s on much stronger ground with the earlier supporting evidence behind how the Empire initially emerged from the ashes of the Old Republic and its civil war against the Separatist movement, and in how that transition created the circumstances that formed the background of the original films.

Overall: a treat to read and linger over, and accordingly one of my top books of the year.

[Content warning for slavery, genocide, police brutality, and torture.]

★★★★★

Book Review: Mislaid in Parts Half-Known by Seanan McGuire

Book #182 of 2024:

Mislaid in Parts Half-Known by Seanan McGuire (Wayward Children #9)

Broadly speaking — although this is as inaccurate in the details as Eleanor West’s flawed Logic / Nonsense dichotomy that she tries to fit all the student experiences into — there are two types of stories that the Wayward Children novellas alternate back and forth between. So far the even-numbered volumes have all been classic portal fantasies depicting the strange worlds that the kids slip away into, in all their terror and glory and refuge from a problem at home, while the odd entries focus on the difficulty those same protagonists face in resuming their old lives after returning and their subsequent time at Elly’s specialized school. As the ninth title, this one is in the latter category, following up on the heroine from the previous book who came back to Earth as a nine-year-old in a teenaged body, unrecognizable to the family who presumed her dead.

She additionally now has the magical gift of being able to find anything that she decides to look for, which her classmates soon realize extends to the mystical doorways themselves. As most of them yearn to go back to where they felt they belonged, this is an exciting development indeed.

It’s also one that hurts the series, in my opinion. Everything we’ve heard about the doors until this point has emphasized their unpredictable and bespoke nature — they appear only in their proper moment, to the person who needs to see them, and cannot be called upon demand. A lot of angst and drama has stemmed from various people longing to go back to those other dimensions, and from the heavy cost of ultimately accepting that they can’t. That’s all weaker now that the matter can be forced by a relative stranger on a whim.

The rest of the plot is better. A small group of friends, most of them familiar to us from earlier installments, go off exploring and eventually reach the nexus shop where Antsy lost her childhood. She confronts an old acquaintance there for abusing the trust of a child and speaks out about the importance of breaking the cycle of violence, while similarly weighty topics like transphobia, racism, and child sexual abuse are likewise addressed in passing.

My fundamental complaint remains that these books are too short for the issues and plots that they take on. That’s not an insurmountable challenge — I gave five stars to the last release, which shared the same main character — but it’s an element that author Seanan McGuire stacks against herself, and here, as usual, I’d argue that it gets in the way of her developing the story to a truly effective degree.

★★★☆☆