The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

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 standalone fantasy story (in an East Asian-inspired empire, sort of like a less magical version of the Singing Hills Cycle setting), it’s an epic tale of those marginalized characters’ struggle for justice and how they break the law only to nobly oppose various corrupt officials. A feminist wuxia Robin Hood wouldn’t be a bad comparison, either.

The cast is a bit extensive — though not to the point of the 108 outlaws reportedly named in the original — but we’re primarily following two specific heroines: a combat instructor punished for resisting an attempted rape by a superior officer, and her scholarly friend who gets pressured into researching the creation of an alchemical weapon of mass destruction. While their paths soon diverge, they eventually reconnect as the band of criminals rally more and more people to their cause and the imperial response ramps up accordingly. Both women are flawed protagonists who face great sacrifice, hard choices, and a lot of uncomfortable growing along the way, which makes them pretty compelling conduits for the developing plot.

Interestingly enough, I favor the beginning of this book over its ending, which seems to be against the critical consensus that I’m seeing online. I’m not a huge fan of military battle fiction, so in my opinion the climactic action scenes tend to drag on a little, whereas the slower character-oriented moments capture my complete attention early on. I likewise prefer the smaller scale in the spinoff prequel The River Judge (which I had previously read in a separate anthology but has been included in some editions of the present volume) to the grand conflict here. Nevertheless, it’s a strong work throughout and an easy 4-star rating for me.

[Content warning for cannibalism, torture, violence against children, suicide, and gore.]

★★★★☆

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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 property. In fact, a civil war was fought over that conflict in the recent backstory, with the synthetic beings winning their limited freedom when California successfully seceded from the rest of the United States. In the present, four such characters have been abandoned by the owners of the restaurant where they work, leading them to take over operations and start trying to improve the establishment by putting actual care into the food that they make.

At the time of my writing, the top-rated review of this book on Goodreads is an angry 1-star screed that accuses it of glorifying generative A.I. by telling a story that encourages us to root for the creative expression of mechanical minds. I find this laughable for many reasons, but primary among them is that, like the best of speculative fiction, this work is clearly operating on the level of allegory. You can probably already tell from my opening paragraph above that there are strong parallels to be drawn between the plight of the automatons and that of certain real-life minority groups, and author Annalee Newitz also writes them in a way that reads as decidedly queer: joyously expressing their autonomy by changing their names and modifying their bodies, for instance, including one getting a mastectomy in order to be seen as less feminine. In other words, these are the genuine artificial intelligences of tomorrow, not the flashy gimmicks tech companies are peddling under that name in our own era. If you can recognize the humanity in a creature like Murderbot, you should be able to do the same for these protagonists who just want to craft quality noodles for their customers.

Though I feel bad for the writer over the negative misreading of their tale, it’s even funnier given that one of the main plot threads involves an anonymous critic review-bombing the noodle shop with complaints that robot-produced meals are inherently terrible for stealing jobs from deserving homo sapiens. It’s blatant anti-immigrant rhetoric from a heartless villain, and yet some readers are still echoing it in their own reactions to the text, demonstrating in my opinion a sad but incredible lack of self-awareness on their parts.

I’m being a bit prickly because the book itself won’t; this is cozy / hopepunk sci-fi about a found family pulling together and helping one another navigate their respective traumas, with no real action or sense of danger for any of the heroes. I can understand if that’s too sunny for someone’s individual tastes, but let’s not pretend it’s a defense of LLM plagiarism machines rather than a heartfelt plea for a kinder world shared by people of all possible backgrounds.

★★★★☆

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 third year is a step up from the one before, as our heroes attempt to locate the mysterious “Witness” whose handlers keep him moving around in history. I especially like the added wrinkle that if even a single agent is alerted, they have the technology to return and warn their earlier selves, thereby rewriting events so that they were never there to be caught at all (and dramatically self-immolating in the process, due to the ensuing paradox).

But fun as that element is, this show just can’t seem to make the elusive leap from good to great for me. Characters continue to switch their motivations and allegiances on a dime, resulting in would-be shocking developments that carry no real impact on the audience. As I said last time, the plot “is packed with scenes of someone either betraying an ally or suddenly teaming up with an enemy, but it all feels weightless because we aren’t given enough room to let those relationships build up in the first place.”

With only one season of eleven episodes left to go, I’m invested enough to finish the story out, but I’ll be tempering my expectations pretty significantly at this point.

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

★★★☆☆

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 them individually.

3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years by John Scalzi: Readable enough, but way too focused on explaining the rules of its central technology to actually develop a compelling plot or characters around it. This could have been interesting as the premise to a novel, but it’s pretty dry as a self-contained lesson on the protagonist’s professional duties. ★★☆☆☆

Making Space by R. F. Kuang: I love the idea of a dystopian future sending its children back in time for greater opportunities, which could be a brilliant allegory for real-life immigration concerns. But the ending takes a couple wild turns that I think cut against the effectiveness of the piece as a whole. [Content warning for infertility and miscarriage.] ★★★☆☆

For a Limited Time Only by Peng Shepherd: Major shades of The Time Traveler’s Wife, with the hero slipping in and out of his loved one’s lives while on assignment in the past. This really captures how fleeting the various stages of parenthood can feel, and how much a person might long to go back to the days when their kids were smaller. It’s even more poignant by the end, but I was caught up right from the start. ★★★★☆

A Visit to the Husband Archive by Kaliane Bradley: Confusing worldbuilding, involving alien visitors who “steal time” from humans — making them black out and have trouble remembering things, basically — which doesn’t exactly fit the theme of the book in my opinion. I also just find it to be a mean-spirited work in general, with dubious consent and borderline domestic abuse given how the character who retains his mental faculties treats his new wife like a lowly animal. Not a fan! ★★☆☆☆

All Manner of Thing Shall Be by Olivie Blake: I hated this one even more, somehow. It’s about a household of vampires who can travel in time to hunt their victims, but who are meanwhile stuck in a 24-hour time loop for some reason, and are generally just very aggressively dysfunctional with one another. The tone reads like all this is supposed to be the height of comedy, but the humor doesn’t land for me. It’s overstuffed chaos, not a satisfying narrative on any level. ★☆☆☆☆

Cronus by P. Djèlí Clark: This final entry likely would have been better at a longer length, but I like the slow reveal to us of just how wrong the heroine’s world is, which matches her own dawning realization that people have used the historical travel agency where she works to nefariously change the timeline, specifically by undoing civil rights advancements and keeping Black folks like her as a lower class of citizen (sort of like Recursion by Blake Crouch with an added social justice bend). I want more resolution than just her deciding she’s going to begin fighting back, though. ★★★☆☆

Overall rating: ★★★☆☆

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 more than clears the original.

It’s a tighter, more focused script, for starters. The first film sometimes struggles to convey its titular boxer’s headspace and motivations, and we only hear in passing rather late in the piece that no contender has ever lasted all fifteen rounds in a match against his opponent Apollo Creed. This time, it’s clearer what the hero wants all along, and that desire moreover changes organically as the plot develops and events steadily chip away at his pride.

Initially, the Italian Stallion is content with the payday from his championship bout, and plans to retire from boxing with that nest egg providing for his family and his new fame helping to launch a different career for himself. He’s enthusiastic about acting in commercials, only to have trouble reading the cue cards, which we learn is due to him leaving school after ninth grade. He then seeks an office job, but is told how unrealistic that dream is too. The whole world seems to be saying that he’s good for manual labor alone, and yet he’s no sooner accepted a position at the old meatpacking plant where he used to train when budget cuts take that away from him as well. He’s finally humiliatingly reduced to cleaning up after other fighters in Mickey’s gym, where they increasingly mock and look down on the once-proud fighter.

All the while, Apollo is angrily goading him for a rematch, despite originally declaring that there wouldn’t be one. Although he successfully defended his title in the last movie, everyone saw Rocky go the distance and many of them think he should have been declared the winner instead. The negative press gets the champ agitating for another run at Balboa to more conclusively defeat him, which our frustrated protagonist eventually accepts. Still, his now-wife Adrian doesn’t want him to go back in the ring where he was hurt so badly before, and without her full support, it’s clear that his heart isn’t in his renewed sessions with Mick.

It’s here that the story takes an unfortunate dip into melodrama that I don’t feel is really needed. An overwhelmed and pregnant Adrian goes into early labor and slips into a coma, leaving her husband to abandon his efforts with the trainer entirely. It’s an eye-rollingly saccharine and soapy development, but I won’t lie that when she wakes up and asks him to go out and win, I find my heart stirring every time. The music swells, Mickey yells in a snarl, “What are we waiting for?!”, and another classic training montage through the streets of Philadelphia begins.

Soon enough, the rematch is upon us, with Creed more vicious than he was in the past. But Rocky is newly determined in his own way, and their back-and-forth keeps us on the edge of our seats, especially in the final round when both boxers are knocked down to the mat in their struggle. One man alone manages to rise to his feet, closing out the spectacle with what would turn out to be the franchise’s most famously enduring line: “Yo, Adrian! I did it!”

You sure, did, Rock. And who am I to argue with the new heavyweight champion of the world? Four-and-a-half stars for this one, rounded up.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★★★

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 beyond the bad weather remains undetermined, since radio transmissions that night were sparse and all 29 crewmen went down with their vessel. Author John U. Bacon addresses some of the likelier contenders in this new work published just before the fiftieth anniversary of the wreck, but his primary focus is on contextualizing the event, rather than exploring the mystery.

To that end, he offers a fascinating lesson on the Great Lakes and their mid-century shipping industry, as well as the surrounding local culture. Drawing on extensive interviews with surviving loved ones and other interested parties, he paints a vivid picture of the Edmund Fitzgerald as it was operated back then, and of how the loss was witnessed from the outside. He also discusses safety reforms and better storm-tracking technologies that have been instituted in the wake of this notorious disaster, although he again stops short of identifying which if any of the managing firm’s cost-saving and regulation-skirting behaviors conclusively contributed to it.

Now, does this constitute an “untold story,” as the subtitle boldly asserts? Perhaps not, and the book would presumably be stronger if the writer truly had uncovered some fresh angle to share with the world. But it’s a valuable oral history regardless, thankfully procured and shared with us while the shipwreck is still within living memory.

★★★★☆

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 end. Although the show is nominally an adaptation of the obscure comics figure from the title, there aren’t any heroics in the classic sense here. Instead we’re presented with Simon Williams as a struggling actor, hoping to land a part in the remake of an old superhero movie that he loved as a kid while hiding the fact that he has super strength himself. There’s not as much self-referentiality as you might expect for the idea of that kind of franchise existing within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, like what it means for people who can see the Avengers on the news to watch a fictional version as popular entertainment, but the series does have a few Hollywood A-listers playing themselves, which is fun until you start considering the implications for too long.

(Simon compliments Joe Pantoliano on his role in The Matrix, for instance. Do you think Jeri Hogarth from Jessica Jones or Bill Foster from Ant-Man and the Wasp has seen that one? Does our protagonist know that there’s somebody who looks exactly like him in the latest sequel?)

Of course, this is a pretty standalone tale, despite the surrounding continuity. The main connection to the wider MCU is in the form of Simon’s fellow actor Trevor Slattery, returning from Iron Man 3 and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings to be a co-lead here. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Ben Kingsley have a great buddy comedy energy together, with just enough of a larger plot to grease the wheels and keep things moving around them. We never do get to see much of the actual Wonder Man project, but I like this as a character piece and an exploration of the hero keeping his special abilities a secret while trying to live a regular life, which is a nice change of pace for the genre. In fact, it’s easy to read those powers as an allegory for other aspects of one’s identity that aren’t always safe to share, like neurodivergence or queerness, which adds another interesting layer to events.

This is also simply an entertaining look at acting as a career, which I’ve heard compared to shows like The Studio or Barry. It delves into minutiae like audition tapes and callbacks, regularly highlighting the ridiculous demands we put on performers in pursuit of a paycheck for their craft. I wouldn’t be surprised if the usual Marvel audience disdains the program for being so different from the norm, but I feel like it’s a relatively strong offering on its own offbeat terms.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★★☆

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 get past in order to enjoy it, which I haven’t been entirely able to do myself.

First is the odd structure: our 19-year-old protagonist suddenly realizes that she has two conflicting sets of memories, one of which feels hazy and dreamlike but somehow truer, in which she had occasional magical adventures growing up. In the other, which until recently had been all she knew, nothing unusual has ever happened to her at all. Most of the book then consists of her sitting around remembering / reliving the more wondrous version of events, with only the last quarter of the text devoted to her actually taking steps to actively investigate and resolve the discrepancy.

The bigger issue is that in her childhood, the heroine became friends with a local man who remained a close part of that fantastical life (but whom she apparently never met in the mundane false reality). Now, I don’t mind when stories feature adults and children being friendly in a platonic Mr. Tumnus and Lucy sort of way, but it’s clear even from age 10 that Polly has a serious crush on the fellow — she’s jealously petty towards his girlfriend, for instance — and that he likewise seems to return the feeling on some level. Her attraction deepens as she grows, resulting in her trying to kiss him as a young teen, and by the time her present self is getting around to rescuing him from the peril that he’s in, their romantic interest is pretty firmly mutual.

It makes for an uncomfortable read, particularly given how little her absentee parents care about this strange man’s interactions with their girl. I wouldn’t necessarily call it grooming, since he’s a perfect gentleman who doesn’t appear to have any ulterior motives before she’s grown, but it’s charged in a way I don’t much appreciate and mirrored by a few older boys and men offering advances or comments about her appearance throughout. Although the main character always demurs — until inside the fictional construct she finds herself engaged to one of them — the effect is to contrast these would-be suitors with the dashing Tom Lynn, whom we understand she wouldn’t push away so readily.

Another minor element here is that the writer is intentionally paralleling / retelling the ancient Scottish ballads of Tam Lin — get it? — and Thomas the Rhymer, which I’m not very familiar with. Perhaps that’s why the climax is so hard to follow and seems to cut off right in the middle of the action, though I imagine the lack of resolution there wouldn’t be especially satisfying anyway. Overall I’d have to say it’s a rare miss from an author whose work I normally adore.

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: Our Flag Means Death, season 1

TV #4 of 2026:

Our Flag Means Death, season 1

These ten episodes improve as they go along, particularly once the writers lay down their cards and start embracing the queer themes directly. Though the series has gained notoriety as the gay pirate show, the only indication of that status early on is that a few of the characters come across as a bit effeminate, which seems like part of the overall comic premise of them not being very skilled at their chosen profession. The captain especially is a bookish fop who’s rather hopelessly out of his depth, and the season is half over before it becomes clear that the same-sex relationships on his crew are real and heartfelt, not merely implied for an easy punchline. It takes even longer to confirm that our hero himself is in such a romance, and although the subtext is there beforehand, it’s of the plausible-deniability variety that’s disappointed fans of so many previous programs.

That outside context of how intense male bonds on TV usually resolve into empty queerbaiting helps to explain why it’s such a thrill when this zany sitcom charts its own path forward and the two men who have grown close are allowed to actually reach out, kiss, and embrace. It’s also neat if you know that their story is loosely based on true events, minus any documented evidence of a love angle. Stede Bonnet and Blackbeard were genuine pirates who united their ships and sailed together for a while, and the bones of that history offer a fascinating canvas on which to imagine a romcom-style narrative. There’s even a chaotic ex in the form of fellow historical figure Jack Rackham around to spark jealousy, and a messy breakup that one imagines will prove only temporary in the long run. (No spoilers — this is my first time watching, and I’m aware that the cancellation after season two came as a surprise to the creators, who had more they planned to do with the concept.)

It’s still not my favorite title on television. While I appreciate that there’s no textual homophobia from anyone, people are regularly insulted and/or framed as ridiculous for being namby-pamby failures of traditional masculinity, which is only a slight remove away. I’m not overly fond of the colloquial language either, which finds our 18th-century characters uttering things like, “Man, that guy is a dick,” and I never feel as though recurring guest stars Leslie Jones and Fred Armisen get into the proper spirit of the thing to craft roles beyond their own big offscreen personalities. Plus as I mentioned already, the strengths of the latter stretch of this first year tend to obscure the fact that it takes a while to get to that point, with the project only really coming into focus with the arrival of Blackbeard late in episode 3. (As is my perennial complaint about modern shows, a longer season could have mitigated that impression, of course.)

And yet, once it comes into itself, it’s pretty wonderful and manages to pull at the heartstrings effectively. On a representation level alone, the series is a delight — I didn’t even address the crew member who uses they/them pronouns, likewise to no apparent intolerance — and the comedy is plenty funny, too. It could definitely stand to shore up its weaknesses even further, but I think this initial outing is solid enough to earn a rating of three-and-a-half stars, rounded up.

[Content warning for gun violence, domestic abuse, cannibalism, incest, amputation, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Long Chills & Case Dough: A Sanderson Curiosity by Brandon Sanderson

Book #19 of 2026:

Long Chills & Case Dough: A Sanderson Curiosity by Brandon Sanderson

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

This short novella was written in the early 2000s and included as an extra gift to backers of author Brandon Sanderson’s massive Kickstarter campaign in 2023 (now subtitled as A Sanderson Curiosity, just like the drafts of The Way of Kings Prime and Dragonsteel Prime that the writer likewise put out as free bonus content.) And there it languished in my own Kindle library for several years before I stumbled across it again recently and remembered I had never actually read the thing.

Even approached as an unpublished beginner’s work, however, it’s a bit of a rough time. The basic premise is that a private detective in 2151 takes a case while narrating like a 1920s gumshoe, but that’s a genre mashup I’ve seen done better elsewhere, and the plot isn’t developed well enough to make up for the obnoxious protagonist. There’s no real reason for his affectation, which no one else in the setting shares, and he’s prone to delivering sexist prose far beyond the old style that Sanderson is imitating. To offer just one example, here’s the character describing a new client:

“This dish was such a looker that my orbs nearly burst from the gandering. She had a sleek body as full as her dress was sheer, and her kisser was gussied up with a bright, inviting shade of red. Her blue eyes were wide like a doe’s, and she had a look of quiet vulnerability on her divine face. She was a redhead, which is my favorite—along with blondes and brunettes.”

He speaks in that demeaning way out loud too, and there’s nothing like the usual Sandersonian worldbuilding or story arcs to help distract from it. Instead, the hero seems to solve the mystery by pure intuition and lucky coincidence, which doesn’t make for a very exciting read. You’ll find a glimmer of raw talent on display, and I suppose it’s interesting to consider through a lens of where the author’s career has gone in the decades since, but it’s ultimately not a title I would recommend to anyone.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★☆☆☆