The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Shape-Shifter by Chris Archer

Book #117 of 2024:

Shape-Shifter by Chris Archer (Mindwarp #5)

A fun twist for this middle-grade 90s sci-fi series. For four books now, we’ve been hearing backstory about how Todd Aldridge mysteriously vanished on his thirteenth birthday, and watching as a succession of his classmates have both gained access to special powers and quickly had to fend off alien assassins as they turned that age themselves. For this fifth installment, the new protagonist turns out to be the missing boy himself: first for a few prequel chapters set before his disappearance, and then after he wakes up in the hospital nine months later, with no memory of where he’s been for all that time.

Given the formula established in the previous volumes, it’s natural to assume that this latest story will follow a familiar route, with the hero developing awesome abilities and fighting off an eerie shapeshifting foe (while also presumably getting to the bottom of his amnesia). Instead, the last quarter of the text reveals that that setup is ultimately a red herring, because the narrator we’ve been following is in fact one of the deadly predators himself, overlaid with the abducted kid’s personality to be the perfect sleeper agent to lure in the others. It’s a great plot beat, and one I don’t mind spoiling for discussion purposes, since a) this novel came out 1998, and b) the title and the back of the book largely give it away already.

Once “Todd” solves the mystery of his blackouts — those moments when his true self comes to the surface in murderous fashion — the ending is a wild rush of his human identity battling back the treacherous impulses of his subconscious and shifting his physical form from situation to situation to try and save his friends from being captured by his ostensible allies. It’s a funhouse mirror of the way these stories usually go, as he’s still using a bizarre and recently-discovered skillset in order to solve the problem in front of him, but the change of pace is everything that Mindwarp needed to breathe new life into its basic premise.

[Content warning for body horror.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Mirrored Heavens by Rebecca Roanhorse

Book #116 of 2024:

Mirrored Heavens by Rebecca Roanhorse (Between Earth and Sky #3)

A satisfyingly epic conclusion to this queer and Mesoamerican-flavored fantasy trilogy. As expected, it doesn’t quite hit the heights of the first volume, while cementing the middle book as a fairly forgettable bridge towards this more eventful finale. But everything wraps up nicely here, with some Game of Thrones-style intrigues, slaughters, and betrayals.

My critiques from earlier in the series remain. The sweeping romance between Xiala and Serapio isn’t especially convincing, since they only ever knew each other for a month and have subsequently spent a much longer time (and a rather substantial portion of these novels) apart. And the action is somewhat scattered across the nations of this world, though events do thankfully converge as the ending draws near.

But mostly this is a whirlwind of plot that delivers upon several long-running story arcs, puts characters through a sequence of emotional wringers, and shows off more of the delightful pre-Columbian-inspired worldbuilding. Minor quibbles aside, I’ve loved getting to revisit this setting and see its drama of reborn gods, dark magics, politics, and war all the way through to its bloody end.

[Content warning for genocide, torture, and gore.]

This volume: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Volumes ranked: 1 > 3 > 2

Book Review: Taltos by Steven Brust

Book #115 of 2024:

Taltos by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #4)

We’ve once again jumped around in the timeline for this fourth Vlad Taltos installment, though as usual, the context clues make it pretty easy to place the adventure in its proper spot within the protagonist’s personal lifespan. In this case, it’s his earliest outing yet, providing a chronological series order thus far of 4-2-1-3. For Vlad, the main action of this tale concerns how he first met a few major allies whom returning readers will already know, together with a sequence of flashbacks from near the start of his shady career, as he was promoted from enforcer to hitman for his fantasy criminal organization. (Curiously, it’s also the only volume of the seventeen that have been published to date not named for one of the Great House animals like Jhereg, Phoenix, or Dragon.)

So yes, this title explains how the human assassin Vladimir Taltos came to move in the same circles as the Dragaeran nobles Morrolan, Aliera, and Sethra Lavode (and in the process acquired Spellbreaker, his magic-negating golden chain). In some ways, it’s a just-so story: the antihero’s association with such powerful individuals was always an odd feature of the previous novels, so this prequel sets out to retroactively justify it. The venture more or less works, although it’s probably most interesting for dropping certain hints about Sethra that won’t pay off until book #7, Orca.

Yet it’s not the strongest plot in its own right; in both the present and the past, Vlad is a surprisingly passive character who displays little of the ingenuity or initiative we typically see of him. At least he’s as sardonic as ever, repeatedly asking, “How can you tell?” in response to everyone in the fabled Paths of the Dead — long story — remarking that he’s a living being unlike them. In the end he escapes with his new friends as he must to set up the sequels, but all told it’s not an especially memorable excursion.

[Content warning for torture and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: James by Percival Everett

Book #114 of 2024:

James by Percival Everett

Mark Twain’s 1885 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an admittedly flawed work: progressively antiracist for its time, with its young white southern protagonist helping a Black man escape from slavery and generally coming to believe in the abolitionist cause more broadly, but with a tendency to position Jim and his fellow enslaved characters as foolish and childlike (to say nothing of its controversial heavy use of the n-word to describe them). In other words, it’s a prime candidate for an informed retelling, presenting the story as it might have appeared from the perspective of Huck’s traveling companion, were he given the dignified adult interiority that his original creator denied him.

This new book, unfortunately, misses the mark in that regard. In my opinion, author Percival Everett veers too far in the opposite direction, crafting a hero so learned and erudite — and only pretending otherwise when around white folks like Finn — that the enterprise hits a satirical tone that winds up undermining the rest of it. The plot swings wildly from comedic bits of code-switching farce to genuine horrors of the era like gun violence, corporal punishment, and rape, whilst also deviating rather heavily from the source text by the end. (It’s one thing to cast Huck as an unreliable narrator and correct minor details that he apparently got wrong. It’s quite another to swap in an extended arc where James kills multiple enslavers in a quest to rescue his lost wife and children.)

The most intriguing tweak to the Twain canon is the notion that “Jim” might have secretly been Huck’s biological father, but this element is thrown in so offhandedly and so late in the matter that it ultimately doesn’t register very much or affect the wider tale. A version of this title that had centered that change, and/or offered a more grounded lead character throughout, could have really been something special. As is, the project is fine, but hardly one that feels like it needed to be a take on Huckleberry Finn at all.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Seinfeld, season 8

TV #35 of 2024:

Seinfeld, season 8

The penultimate year of this 90s sitcom is the first one without the involvement of co-creator Larry David, and the difference is rather immediately felt. Structurally, the show stops using a clip of Jerry’s standup act to launch each episode — reportedly the actor-producer was now too busy to keep writing that part of the material — in lieu of a short scene as a cold open that may or may not impact the remainder of the plot. But the general tone feels altered, too: more cartoonishly zany and absurdist, with wild swings of character personalities to chase a joke. It’s more of an escalation of that existing strain than anything brand-new, as the days are long past when this was truly a “show about nothing” that could spend a grounded 20 minutes on little but the characters waiting around and talking. But it’s noticeably accelerated here, somewhat like the later seasons of The Office.

On a basic level, the series is still pretty funny from week to week (though broader and perhaps a touch more mean-spirited, not to mention borderline transphobic in Jerry’s reaction to a girlfriend with “man hands”). There are a few minor serialized story arcs, like George being appointed to a charity foundation or Elaine getting promoted to run her company, but these all run for only a few episodes apiece before seeming to exhaust the concept and petering out. Overall the comedy is basically as competent as ever at this stage, but that’s nowhere near the strength of this program in its prime.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Whiskeyjack by Victoria Goddard

Book #113 of 2024:

Whiskeyjack by Victoria Goddard (Greenwing & Dart #3)

Another noticeable step forward for this Regency-pastiche fantasy series, though still not quite strong enough to clear the three-star rating tier for me. (I thought it might for a while, but the lengthy scene where Jemis applies esoteric Kabbalistic cryptography to decipher a hidden code in a letter and thereby unlock a slew of associated conspiratorial implications is both hard to follow and deeply silly, which really saps the narrative momentum.) I do appreciate the protagonist’s emotional journey throughout this novel as well as the slowly-developing larger plot around him, but I want more from the supporting characters — especially Mr. Dart, who nominally should be a co-lead in these affairs but has generally wound up as a bit of an afterthought so far.

Nevertheless, starting the story with the hero in prison is a great idea, as is the trumped-up murder charge against him, alleging that the dragon he killed in the previous volume was the famous vanished poet Fitzroy Angursell in disguise (a truly hilarious notion for anyone familiar with that adventurer’s antics in the wider Nine Worlds canon). The young lad quickly stages a jailbreak with the two older gentlemen in his cell, who prove to have some surprising connections to him and his friends, and the whole enterprise progresses from there in typical madcap fashion. The eventual conclusion to the affair is rather delightful, drawing to a close several ongoing threads from the first two books, but it rushes past certain consequences that seem like they would merit more attention on the page. I am hoping that the Greenwing & Dart series continues to improve after this, in line with the superior later works that I’ve read from the author.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: One Way Back by Christine Blasey Ford

Book #112 of 2024:

One Way Back by Christine Blasey Ford

Author Christine Blasey Ford doesn’t spend much time in this new memoir belaboring the sexual assault she experienced as a teenager at the hands of future Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. As she notes, the whole world watched her testimony at his confirmation hearing in 2018, which is now part of the permanent legal record despite the fact that the Republican-majority Senate went on to confirm him nonetheless. This book instead shares an intimate view at the parts of her story that we haven’t necessarily heard before: the agonizing decision to come forward and reopen that old trauma when she first learned her assailant was being considered for nomination, the slow process of actually finding people who would listen and take action on her behalf, and the difficulties she’s faced ever since, unable to possibly resume her ordinary life.

It’s a heartbreaking account, and a valuable look at an under-discussed aspect of the #MeToo movement’s ongoing mission to hold abusers like Kavanaugh accountable — the heavy toll that can fall on survivors who dare to speak up and identify them. For altruistically sharing that truth, Dr. Ford has been sent death threats (including some against her children), ridiculed, doubted, and criticized on a national stage, stigmatized by friends and family, and forced to move and employ private security for a semblance of safety. While she doesn’t regret the choice she made or advise other victims to stay silent, she’s realistic about the enormous human cost that’s come from reaching out with what she knew so that the politicians involved could make a more informed decision about a lifetime appointment to the highest bench of the judiciary. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to either keep her attacker from that elevation or preserve her own good name.

The writer’s journey over the following years hasn’t been all bad. Tens of thousands of supportive messages have rolled in, key allies like Oprah or then-Senator Kamala Harris have continued to regularly check up on her, and she’s slowly regained a tentative equilibrium in her new reality. She’s taken solace in her lifelong practice of surfing as a source of meditative calm, and remained grateful for the loved ones who have stuck with her throughout everything. But the fact that she’s finally reached a place where she feels able to process and relate these matters can’t obscure the utter nightmare she’s passed through to get there.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Translation State by Ann Leckie

Book #111 of 2024:

Translation State by Ann Leckie

Like her previous novel Provenance, this latest sci-fi story from author Ann Leckie technically stands on its own, yet is set in the same continuity as her earlier Imperial Radch trilogy, which provides a fair degree of important background context on the various species, technologies, and politics of the space opera setting. I think a reader starting here would have a hard time following everything, but for those of us who do come at the text with the relevant prior understanding, it’s a pretty fun read.

This book delivers our first clear look at the Presger, a strange alien race dwelling on the outskirts of humanity’s interstellar civilization, with whom they maintain a tenuous peace treaty. Or more specifically, it puts us in the eyes of some genetically-modified human-Presger hybrids, who have been raised to bridge the two fundamentally incompatible perspectives. There are strong vibes of Octavia E. Butler‘s stories featuring such interspecies mediators, and how they inevitably wind up feeling torn between their multiple heritages. There’s also a recurring bit about a piece of serialized entertainment called Pirate Exiles of the Death Moons, which feels like a deliberate nod to the similarly-titled show in the Murderbot series by Martha Wells. And of course, we get Leckie’s own usual focus on the cultural construction of gender, with commonplace neopronouns, characters encouraged to explore and redefine their identities, and the occasional struggle of language to encompass all that.

The plot could stand to be a little more complex. One protagonist is looking for another, a third is hoping to flee their desperate circumstances, and then they all end up together, first in a Star Trek “The Measure of a Man”-style hearing to claim legal recognition and finally to escape from a sudden disaster. The course of events seems heavily telegraphed after a certain point, with few remaining surprises along the way. Still, it’s a joy to watch it all unfold regardless.

[Content warning for domestic abuse, body horror, cannibalism, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: A Whisper in the Walls by Scott Reintgen

Book #110 of 2024:

A Whisper in the Walls by Scott Reintgen (Waxways #2)

This second novel in the Waxways YA fantasy trilogy has quintessential middle volume problems, laying foundations for the conclusion ahead at the expense of the immediate story at hand. It also represents a significant step down in quality from its predecessor, which benefited from the tight focus of a wilderness survival tale as the characters battled their way home to their fortified city-state through a succession of dangerous outside magics. In lieu of repeating that premise and stranding the survivors again, author Scott Reintgen takes the more reasonable approach of following them through certain political intrigues that were established as background notes (and given prominence by the cliffhanger ending) in the previous title. Unfortunately, the ensuing execution isn’t nearly as compelling.

In order to expand his canvas, the writer invents a new rival house whose heirs escaped its destruction as children by fleeing to exile in a remote land. These siblings make sense as potential allies for the returning protagonist Ren, but their introduction feels as abrupt as when A Song of Ice and Fire / Game of Thrones suddenly swerved to cast the distant kingdom of Dorne as a relevant player in the action. Splitting across three POV figures moreover blunts the effectiveness of the primary heroine’s narrative, and the schemes that the trio devise together to take down their common enemies seem too thin to succeed the way they do, relying on slim odds and lucky coincidence without apparent contingency options for failure. When everything goes more or less according to plan regardless, it all reads as a fairly perfunctory achievement.

The complicated romance and the ways in which the girl feels torn between her heart and her dreams of revenge remain appealing, and I imagine I’ll probably read the final novel whenever it comes out. But this is pretty middling as far as sequels go.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Classic Doctor Who, season 13

TV #34 of 2024:

Classic Doctor Who, season 13

Tom Baker’s second year as the Doctor — Elisabeth Sladen’s third as his intrepid feminist reporter friend Sarah Jane Smith — is a pretty good one, although it finds the series still shaking off the final vestiges of his predecessor’s era. This season gives us the last regular appearance of Sergeant Benton, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, and their wider UNIT organization, all of whom had been mainstays of the program since season 8. (We also bid a quiet farewell to co-companion Harry Sullivan, who was originally intended to be an Ian Chesterton-like man of action for an older Fourth Doctor and didn’t ultimately have much to do once the spry young Baker was cast in the role instead.) The Brig and UNIT will both sporadically return after this, but not for a while yet; in general we’re moving away from the hero having a steady homebase and supporting crew on contemporary earth and back to the standard model of him simply traveling in his TARDIS to various crisis points throughout time and space. Those adventures are meanwhile shifting more towards the gothic horror end of the science-fiction genre, under the guiding vision of producer Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes.

Another key development is that our protagonist team has now shrunk to a duo. The Doctor has occasionally journeyed somewhere beforehand with just a single companion in tow, like taking Jo Grant on a side trip to Peladon, but that was always a one-off aberration within a broader support network. Even before the establishment of UNIT, the Time Lord generally traveled around the universe with two or three friends along for the ride. Yet by the end of this season it’s clearly become the Doctor and His Young Female Companion show instead, creating an intimate new baseline dynamic that the franchise would maintain (with occasional breaks) for many years to come. Consequently, Sarah Jane is the first person that the Doctor deems his best friend on-screen, a shorthand we’d see employed on the series across plenty of subsequent iterations as well.

Other elements introduced during this 1975-1976 run would likewise return, albeit far in the future. We’ve got Zygons and the Sisterhood of Karn, each of whom would come back to the program for the 50th-anniversary celebration in 2013! Sutekh, next seen again in 2024! And a curious display of old faces that some fans interpreted to represent pre-Hartnell Doctors, in a theory that would eventually be confirmed in 2020. It’s a strong sequence of episodes throughout, and especially over the stretch from PYRAMIDS OF MARS through THE BRAIN OF MORBIUS. Somewhat less impressive at the start and end, but still a solid winner overall.

Serials ranked from worst to best:

★★★☆☆
PLANET OF EVIL (13×5 – 13×8)
TERROR OF THE ZYGONS (13×1 – 13×4)
THE SEEDS OF DOOM (13×21 – 13×26)

★★★★☆
PYRAMIDS OF MARS (13×9 – 13×12)
THE BRAIN OF MORBIUS (13×17 – 13×20)
THE ANDROID INVASION (13×13 – 13×16)

Overall rating for the season: ★★★★☆