The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: Farscape, season 1

TV #33 of 2024:

Farscape, season 1

Another sci-fi series that I missed at the time and am belatedly getting into now. I like this one a lot so far! It feels a bit like Star Trek crossed with Stargate — the latter in part because Farscape stars Ben Browder and Claudia Black would later be cast in the final seasons of SG-1 — but definitely develops its own unique vibe as this first season unfolds. I appreciate that it’s genuinely weird in a way that this genre often isn’t, with aliens that feel properly alien to a contemporary audience perspective. The fact that several members of the main cast are portrayed by elaborate Jim Henson Company puppets helps there (adding a dash of Star Wars-style flair to the visual diversity of the piece), but the characters are also refreshingly allowed to stake out moral positions that the human protagonist wouldn’t.

In fact, I would say that John Crichton, that square-jawed all-American astronaut who enters a wormhole and finds himself launched halfway across the universe, is by the far weakest part of the ensemble so far. He’s clearly intended to be an everyman and our identification figure among all the strange circumstances and peoples around him, but he grates on me a little, especially when he makes frequent Earth pop culture references that no one else could possibly understand. That’s off-putting and somewhat inscrutable as a character choice, like a Star Trek Tamarian still muttering, “Shaka, when the walls fell” long after they’ve learned a common language to communicate with other beings. Nevertheless, Crichton does get more interesting over time, both in the relationships he forms and in his response to the various traumas he experiences.

But even by the time we reach the finale, I wouldn’t say that the cohort aboard Moya, the living prison ship whose inmates broke free and stole away with her in the pilot, could be considered a tight friend group or a found family or anything. They’re a crew by necessity alone, and are at each other’s throats as often as pulling together as a team. And I love that, just how I love this style of television storytelling: an ongoing serialized plot that plays out slowly over the course of a 22-episode season, with plenty of episodic installments that dig into the characters instead of needing to move the story along. It’s like Buffy, or The West Wing, or Deep Space Nine, or The Good Wife, and it seems so luxurious compared to the modern push for eight-hour miniseries that relentlessly drive serialization at the expense of characterization and memorable standalone episodes. I’m really looking forward to seeing where this show continues to go from here.

[Content warning for gun violence, body horror, and torture.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Doctor Who: I, TARDIS: Memoirs of an Impossible Blue Box by Steve Cole

Book #109 of 2024:

Doctor Who: I, TARDIS: Memoirs of an Impossible Blue Box by Steve Cole

A cute idea with a fairly adequate execution, attempting to retell nearly all of Doctor Who — from An Unearthly Child in 1963 through The Legend of Ruby Sunday in 2024 — from the perspective of the alien hero’s wondrous time machine. To author Steve Cole’s credit, this book meticulously covers every single classic serial and modern-era episode in that span with at least a couple sentences apiece, and occasionally offers a fun take on persistent continuity questions.

(The Brig, Sarah Kingdom, and Wilf are all deemed official companions of the Doctor, or “strays” as the narrator calls them, and the UNIT dating controversy — a plot hole concerning contradictory indicators whether certain stories take place in the contemporary 70s or near-future 80s — is due to the TARDIS itself returning to the same spacetime coordinates so often in those days that the timeline got a bit frazzled. And did you know that the inner technology of the contraption shifts in response to the time period around it, hence why it had more wires and levers in the 60s and more digital display screens today? The book even posits that the Fugitive Doctor’s TARDIS similarly took on the appearance of a police box due to psychically sensing that form in the later Doctor’s mind, which is a satisfactory enough answer to another puzzle that’s plagued fans since its introduction.)

On the weaker side, a lot of this information reads like just one long monotonous recap, and I’m not quite sure who the intended or ideal audience for it would be. It’s too spoiler-y for anyone not already deep in the trenches for this franchise, and yet it doesn’t exactly provide those of us from within that group with much new material. The text itself is presented somewhat like a personal narrative, but it repeatedly loops back and goes over the same stretch again and again: we hear the general story of each Doctor incarnation, then a short biography of each companion, and then the detailed episode-by-episode account, which obviously all cover common ground. And despite being written in the voice of the TARDIS, that inhuman narrator merely relates events with some occasional irreverent commentary, rather than undergoing any sort of meaningful plot or character arc.

The choice of what to include or not is odd, too. The two crossovers on The Sarah Jane Adventures make the cut, as do some of the supplemental minisodes like The Night of the Doctor, Clara and the TARDIS, and Destination: Skaro, but others like Time Crash are left out, as is the Twelfth Doctor’s appearance on Class and everything from the wider licensed Whoniverse like the Big Finish audio dramas (with the exception of those offscreen companions listed by name in The Night of the Doctor, who get a similar shout-out here). The book moreover ends in a curious place, at the start of the penultimate episode of the show that’s aired to date. After all of the earlier details that would spoil a reader who hadn’t seen the relevant episodes yet, Cole for some reason plays coy about who the ultimate villain of that latest season turns out to be and doesn’t mention anything about the finale at all. Was there a concern on the BBC’s part that someone would read this title while having watched all 61 years of the series barring that one last hour? Were they so concerned about preserving a certain twist that they embargoed it for a tie-in novel that wouldn’t be published until well after the season had concluded? Was the manuscript due before the writer could watch Empire of Death for himself?

So it has a few issues. I’ve still appreciated this work as a chance to revisit a show that I love, but I have to say that it doesn’t do much beyond scratching the itch of reminding us about particular installments, without diving deeper at moments when it feels like it could. (The Doctor’s Wife, for instance, that magical Neil Gaiman script when the TARDIS first comes to life and speaks on-screen, isn’t highlighted as especially more significant than the stories around it. They didn’t even get actress Susanne Jones to read the audiobook, which seems like a no-brainer to me.) One exception that does deserve highlighting is the TARDIS’s anger and resentment at the Third Doctor for ripping out its innards and tinkering with them like a car mechanic, which strikes me as the most distinctive element this volume contributes to the wider canon. Most of the rest of it, unfortunately, doesn’t make much of a lasting impression.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Miss Marple’s Final Cases and Two Other Stories by Agatha Christie

Book #108 of 2024:

Miss Marple’s Final Cases and Two Other Stories by Agatha Christie

This Agatha Christie collection, published posthumously in 1979, turns out to be a bit of a misnomer, as all nine of its assembled stories are ones that had been previously collected in decades past: The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories (1939; “Miss Marple Tells a Story” and “In a Glass Darkly”), Three Blind Mice and Other Stories (1950; “Strange Jest,” “Tape-Measure Murder,” “The Case of the Caretaker,” and “The Case of the Perfect Maid”), and Double Sin and Other Stories (1961; “Sanctuary,” “Greenshaw’s Folly,” and “The Dressmaker’s Doll”). So it’s not really the capper on elderly sleuth Miss Jane Marple’s career that it purports to be, but it’s at least a solid assortment of her early adventures, along with a pair of unrelated tales verging on the supernatural.

This is a bit of a letdown for me, since I’d already read all those other titles, but the works here are decent in their own right. As is often true of this writer’s shorter fiction, the mysteries are less whodunnits that a reader can solve on their own and more excuses to show off the investigator’s brilliant insights, which generally take the form of lucky guesses based on supposed universals of human nature rather than evidence-driven conclusions. Still, they’re fun enough, with “Greenshaw’s Folly” a particular favorite of mine.

[Content warning for domestic abuse.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Stars Too Fondly by Emily Hamilton

Book #107 of 2024:

The Stars Too Fondly by Emily Hamilton

This 2024 sci-fi novel develops into a cute queer hopepunk piece by the end, but it takes some time to get there and makes a lot of strange choices along the way. I’ve found it difficult to remember that the main characters are supposed to be 27-year-old postdocs, as they read more like teenagers to me and the story around them hits a pretty YA vibe throughout. (It starts with them sneaking onto an abandoned spaceship in an old science facility and inadvertently pressing a button that sends them warping off towards a distant planet, after all.) The heroine’s love interest is bizarre, too: a holographic copy of the former captain of the ship, whose human self vanished with her crew 20 years ago.

Now, I am all for genre fiction exploring the sentience of artificial intelligence and the boundaries of possible relationships with machine life, but this is a topic that’s handled much better in the various Star Trek shows or the Becky Chambers Wayfarers series. Here the focus is less on whether the romance / partner is meaningfully real or not and more on the fact that the lovers can’t touch, which feels like both a narrowly-defined view of love — particularly with the protagonist having an explicitly aro/ace friend on board! — and something that futuristic technology could potentially help resolve. Even weirder, the mysterious first-person narrator of the book is ultimately revealed to be the original captain, who has been trapped in some timeless other dimension watching her holo-self fall for the newcomer. Yet instead of that causing the drama that one might expect when she’s later rescued and the two women meet face-to-face, she slides seamlessly into place in the relationship her digital duplicate began. It’s an odd plot arc!

My biggest gripe, however, concerns the utter lack of cultural worldbuilding details for the future setting of the book. It’s 2061, and yet everyone’s references are somehow stuck in the twentieth century. One person, making fun of another’s hacking prowess, calls her “Hackie Robinson,” “Hack Kerouac,” and “Hack Skellington,” all within the span of a single paragraph. Even setting aside the poor quality of the puns there, only riffing on hack/Jack, why would someone of this time period reference a baseball player who died in 1972, a writer who died in 1969, and a movie that came out in 1993? Similarly, when the group accesses the shipboard media library for entertainment, they inexplicably choose to watch While You Were Sleeping (1995), Independence Day (1996), The Watermelon Woman (1996), and episodes of Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001). There’s no culture from their own recent past that’s ever drawn upon, and no textual explanation to justify this random 90s fixation.

These are small matters, perhaps, but they add up to a work at large that doesn’t feel especially well thought-out beyond its basic beats and the welcome #ownvoices sapphic representation. I give the title two-and-a-half stars rounded up, recognizing that it’s the clear product of a debut author still honing her craft.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Second Sight by Chris Archer

Book #106 of 2024:

Second Sight by Chris Archer (Mindwarp #4)

This fourth Mindwarp novel follows the same general structure as the first three: another kid in this fictional Wisconsin town turns thirteen, discovers they have special powers, and then quickly has to use them to avoid falling into the clutches of a shapeshifting alien hunter. For our latest protagonist, her new superhuman skillset involves a variety of psychic phenomena, from premonitions of impending danger / pop quizzes to astral projection and the ability to telepathically speak her thoughts.

The problem is, it’s a bit unfocused as a story for the majority of the text. Characters pop up for a scene or two and then disappear again, introducing conflicts with Elena’s mother and a few school bullies that never get resolved. Instead she mostly just has a vision and is shocked to see it come true, repeated several times. Finally about two-thirds of the way through she meets up with the teens from the previous books, who fill her in on the stakes of the threat against them just in time.

It’s a familiar enough schtick by now, and at this point in the series, I really need more forward momentum on whatever the larger narrative is supposed to be instead of these roughly identical plot beats and vague X-Files conspiracy chatter. The ending at least strikes a different tone that I hope the remaining sequels continue to explore, but overall this feels pretty weak even by the standards of other 90s middle-grade sci-fi.

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin

Book #105 of 2024:

The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin

While not quite as strong as author Gabrielle Zevin’s recent bestseller Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, this 2014 title is the first of the three books I’ve now read from her backlist that clearly demonstrates her creative talents growing in that direction. Plotwise, it’s A Man Called Ove by way of Silas Marner, wherein a misanthropic widow learns to open himself up to life and joy again after he adopts a young child someone has left abandoned in his bookshop. That story unfolds over the next couple decades, tracing his new daughter’s unusual childhood living above the store with the protagonist, along with his own slow reengagement with their fictional New England island community.

There are some occasional missteps here and there. The start of the bookseller’s romance with a friendly publishing agent feels a bit abrupt, one of several elements that get shortchanged by the reliance on steady time-skips by the advancing narrative. And when two-year-old Maya first arrives, the characters all hilariously refer to her as a baby and worry about things like teething that a toddler of that age would almost certainly be well past. (I wonder if maybe Zevin and her editors hadn’t had much experience with kids before, although the later discrepancies that caught my eye as a parent can largely be explained away by the girl’s general precociousness.)

But the novel overall is charming without ever tipping over into cloying, at least for me personally as a reader, and I’ll admit to enjoying the cast of book-lovers despite objectively recognizing that as a fairly obvious piece of pandering to the literary crowd. A few small mysteries are easy to guess but not really the point of the work, and even the tearjerker ending hasn’t made my eyes roll too much. Ultimately I suspect this is a volume that most people will either love or hate, and though I’d like to be more cynical about it, I can’t help that I’m closer to the former camp in my own reaction. I give it three-and-a-half stars, rounded up.

[Content warning for racism and suicide.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Teckla by Steven Brust

Book #104 of 2024:

Teckla by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #3)

Another crisis with antihero Vladimir Taltos, sorcerer-assassin and crime boss of his local fantasy city. This third adventure takes place soon after book one (the second volume being a prequel), and offers probably the most straightforward plot yet: the protagonist’s wife has gotten involved with a circle of protesters agitating for better conditions for their minority group and other marginalized peoples in the empire, and since one of their members was just killed by a rival in Vlad’s criminal organization, he’d like to shut the whole thing down or at least extract Cawti from the middle of it. But when his meddling serves only to make everyone mad at him, he has to scramble to find a way to both save his crumbling marriage and get the new target off his back.

A lot of this novel is pretty preachy, even for a reader whose politics are broadly aligned with those of the Teckla (and presumably author Steven Brust), and it’s early enough in the series that the specifics fall a little flat outside the context of any real-world analogues. I suppose it’s interesting to position the lead character as fairly ambivalent to the social movement happening around him and to not really shift that stance by the story’s end, but it’s a creative choice that tends to flatten him on the page. I also rolled my eyes at the scene where he finally has his enemy at his mercy and is begged by an onlooker not to slay the man… despite having just fatally torn through his bodyguards without similar complaint and still being fundamentally, you know, a hired murderer. We’ve seen Vlad kill before and we’ll see him kill again, no matter his grandfather’s ongoing sad objections to that profession. It feels strange to have him spare this particular victim without any obvious change of heart, although it does set up a fun cynical ending wherein the assassin buys out his competitor’s stake in the slums so that he can improve matters marginally enough to stem the riots before the imperial forces need to step in.

Nothing about this is particularly exceptional, but it’s a solid slice of genre entertainment, overall.

[Content warning for torture, domestic abuse, sexism, suicide, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Way of Kings Prime: A Sanderson Curiosity by Brandon Sanderson

Book #103 of 2024:

The Way of Kings Prime: A Sanderson Curiosity by Brandon Sanderson

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

This is not The Way of Kings, the debut novel in the series The Stormlight Archive that author Brandon Sanderson published in 2010. It’s rather his initial attempt at telling a story in that world, originally written back in 2002 and later released independently for interested fans. Knowing that but little else, I put off this read for a long while and ultimately went into it expecting to find a basic rough draft of the finished version. Yet this is instead a totally separate beast, with a few similar elements of setting and characters in entirely different circumstances and plot. It’s like an alternate universe in a way — not canonical to the official books, and seemingly disconnected from anything in the writer’s broader Cosmere continuity, which wasn’t really a fleshed-out concept yet at the time of writing.

I feel like there are a few potential ways to approach and assess this title. By the standards of the eventual ‘real’ Way of Kings, it’s understandably a bit of a letdown and the product of a less-honed creative talent. The worldbuilding in particular feels noticeably unfinished by comparison: there are highstorms but no spren, an order like the Knights Radiant but no required oaths to join it, and so on. We don’t get as many fun cultural flourishes either, resulting in the whole exercise seeming more like a generic fantasy construct than anything quintessentially Sandersonian. The protagonists suffer when measured against their ultimate polished analogues too — especially the women, and especially Jasnah’s romance with the Herald Taln, which doesn’t quite ring true for either figure.

On the other hand, this is actually a pretty good story by the standards of the genre at large, and it’s less reliant on certain overused tropes than the author’s similarly unpublished early work Dragonsteel Prime. Divorced from the expectations of its superior future iteration, it’s a solid tale of political intrigues and military campaigning, with compelling heroes and a despicable villain or two. My biggest critique of the volume on its own terms is that although some matters do come to a satisfying conclusion, the ending is rather abrupt and leaves a lot of issues unresolved. It reads like the intended opening arc of a grand unfolding narrative, with clear setup for sequels that will now never come to pass, which is a little frustrating after spending 800 pages with the thing (or 37 hours on audiobook at regular speed, if you prefer).

The most incredible aspect here is probably that Sanderson finished penning such a massive tome, realized it wasn’t working out as well as it could, and then started all over again from scratch, eventually producing something both stronger and somehow even longer as the first of a planned ten-book series that is itself just a subsection of the larger Cosmere saga. The amount of work behind such a project is fairly staggering to think about, and The Way of Kings Prime is an important step on the way there. It’s worth checking out, despite not living up to the real deal.

[Content warning for ableism, torture, rape, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Bee Sting Cake by Victoria Goddard

Book #102 of 2024:

Bee Sting Cake by Victoria Goddard (Greenwing & Dart #2)

I’m still not loving the Greenwing & Dart sub-series nearly as much as the other books I’ve read in author Victoria Goddard’s broader Nine Worlds saga, but this second volume is a marked improvement over the first. Taking place only a few days later, it feels far more settled in its tone and its particular corner of this fictional universe, and it benefits tremendously by not having to rehash those details for the audience (who in consequence would unfortunately be lost if they skipped the weaker novel and started here, I’m afraid). It also introduces a fun new addition to the cast in the form of the protagonist’s visiting school friend Hal, although the fact that he’s actually an incognito duke, in the same adventure where Jemis learns that he’s inherited a noble title of his own through his reclusive grandmother, is perhaps a bit much. Generally I prefer to read about people triumphing over difficult straits by means of their wits and their inner resolve rather than simple birthright and others’ fawning reaction to it, and this piece sometimes blurs that line more than I would like.

The plot remains fairly low-stakes and cozy; while there are death cults and hired thugs and a riddle-asking dragon flitting around on the periphery of the tale, the heroes largely shrug them off to process lingering hurts from their respective backstories and discuss plans for the upcoming community fair and its associated baking contest. It’s all Regency-pastiche fantasy of manners, and it’s neat as always to spot references and connections to the writer’s work across this shared continuity. But I do hope this specific branch continues to improve throughout the remaining volumes ahead. For now, it’s landing fine as a pleasant diversion with some charming extensions to the underlying series worldbuilding, but is rarely delivering anything wholly compelling on either a character or a story level.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Jewish Noir edited by Kenneth Wishnia

Book #101 of 2024:

Jewish Noir edited by Kenneth Wishnia

A quintessential mixed-bag anthology. There are some legitimately great short stories in here, and if I assigned a rating to each of the 33 entries and took their average, I suspect I would wind up at a mean value of three-out-of-five-stars or so. At their best, the tales in this 2015 collection hit the vibe of something like Michael Chabon’s novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, telling dark and complex hardboiled plots in a richly #ownvoices Jewish social world and/or with recognizably Jewish characters relying on elements of their ethnoreligious background to navigate difficult circumstances. “Nakhshon” by Robert Lopresti, “Your Judaism” by Tasha Kaminsky, and “Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die” by Charles Ardai are to be particularly praised on that front, and I think editor Kenneth Wishnia makes a strong point in his introduction when he notes how traditional noir genre themes of alienation and fatalism are issues that are often wrestled with in modern (post-Holocaust) Jewish thought as well. So there’s a bit of a natural overlap between those two traditions, which proves to be a productive storytelling font for many of the authors featured herein.

My problem as a reader is that the book is not merely uneven, with a mix of better offerings and worse ones throughout. It’s also disastrously lopsided, with most of the worst offenders stacked near the start: stories that are so poorly-written, disjointed, mean-spirited, and frankly racist that I almost quit the venture less than a dozen titles into it. Luckily I instead flipped ahead, whereupon a few randomly-selected pieces of higher quality reassured me that I should probably go back and read the rest of the way through. But that experience shades my general feelings on this volume, especially when I consider how I’m rather directly in its target audience as both a lover of crime thrillers and a Jew. If I had such a hard time getting into this collection regardless, I imagine others will struggle with it even more. I’m likewise unconvinced that every story in these pages necessarily deserves to be categorized as both noir and more than passingly Jewish, which again dampens my appreciation for the enterprise as a whole.

Still, I’m glad that I did push on and finish everything. It’s introduced me to a lot of new contemporary writers I might choose to read more from, alongside some cool older stuff like an obscure Harlan Ellison reprint (“Final Shtick”) and a hundred-year-old feature from a Yiddish newspaper that had never been translated into English before (“A Simkhe” by Yente Serdatsky). But overall, I’d have to say that it’s a pretty flawed endeavor.

[Content warning for antisemitism, sexism, homophobia, racial slurs, drug abuse / overdose, gun violence, domestic abuse, violence against animals, bullying, lynching, Nazi medical experimentation and concentration camps, torture, pedophilia, suicide, rape, and gore.]

★★☆☆☆