The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

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.

★★★☆☆

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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: ★★★★☆

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.]

★★★★☆

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.

★★☆☆☆