The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Movie Review: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

Movie #14 of 2024:

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

Prequels are tricky creatures, by design working towards an ending that the audience already knows. The ones that work best tend to focus not on lining up the logistics of the original piece, but rather a) telling compelling new stories that happen to occur earlier and b) tracing internal character evolutions rather than mechanical plot movements. In other words: the 2014 film Mad Max: Fury Road already told us that Imperator Furiosa came from an egalitarian community in a verdant oasis far from Immortan Joe’s Citadel, and that she feigned loyalty to the warlord until finding the right opportunity to return there. Seeing that same information play out on screen over several hours needs to bring something more to the equation, much as the shows Better Call Saul or Andor have done to elevate their own source material.

The effort here is moderately successful. With Alyla Browne and Anya Taylor-Joy stepping into Charlize Theron’s former role as the child / younger adult Furiosa, we watch as she’s captured by slavers, briefly rescued by her mom, caught again, and traded from one captor to another, subsequently coming of age whilst gaining the skills she’ll need to thrive in the post-apocalyptic setting of the Mad Max wasteland. Around her, those two villains are clashing — the tyrannical Immortan she’ll later betray in Fury Road and newcomer Chris Hemsworth as Dementus, a bloodthirsty chaos agent who killed her mother and hoped to raid their homeland. Although our protagonist initially plans to simply flee for home, she gets caught up in the war against Dementus and an emotional connection with another of the Citadel lieutenants, rising in Joe’s ranks and esteem as her quest for vengeance overlaps her personal concerns with his own strategic ones.

The problem is that too much of this movie isn’t about the title character’s growth or journey at all. Although she’s on screen for most of its runtime, she is mostly there as a witness to the conflict between the two antagonists, leading to lengthy scenes where our only driving concern is her specific survival, which we know is assured due to the constraints of the prequel format. The surrounding action is relatively meaningless, as nothing about Furiosa as a person or her animating goals is contingent on which evil bloke happens to triumph in the present squabble. Even the aforementioned quasi-relationship that develops between the heroine and Praetorian Jack is shortchanged by the script, relying on a few mutually longing looks and a time jump — one of several in this disjointed narrative — to sketch out their dynamic.

All that’s left is the crowd-pleasing spectacle of the violence itself, which reasonably satisfies that requirement but never feels quite as focused as the tight plotting of Fury Road. In my recent review after rewatching that film, I praised how “the editing of these sequences is always crystal-clear as to what’s happening where and when.” By contrast, this follow-up periodically loses its grasp on such matters. The exact size and location of Dementus’s forces in particular is a real head-scratcher, swelling and shrinking and moving all around the map as the immediate scene requires.

Is it fun to revisit the setting of Fury Road? Undeniably. The new worldbuilding details aren’t as rich, but it’s a delight to see the gleefully suicidal War Boys and their chrome spray paint again, not to mention all the modded cars and campy name / outfit choices as everyone races back and forth across the desert. There’s even a little thrill in spotting a few returning minor characters and places like Gastown and the Bullet Farm that were only mentioned in dialogue before, even if this sometimes strays into that trap of purely existing to answer logistical questions that no one was really asking. Overall, I wouldn’t say this newest Mad Max title is mediocre…. but it’s certainly not going to be awaited in Valhalla, either.

[Content warning for gun violence, sexual assault, and gore including amputation.]

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Star Trek: Discovery, season 5

TV #25 of 2024:

Star Trek: Discovery, season 5

In theory, the impulse to revisit the ancient race of alien progenitors from a memorable episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation is a fine one for the modern franchise to explore (if sort of an odd fit for Discovery, which began as a direct TOS prequel before rocketing off to be the chronologically latest Trek series, bypassing the TNG era entirely). But the execution here is comically inept and tedious, establishing that during the intervening years, a well-meaning group of scientists found the technology, hid it, and crafted an elaborate sequence of riddles so that only someone worthy enough to follow them all would be able to find the prize.

This turns the last year of Star Trek: Discovery into a Da Vinci Code-esque scavenger hunt leaping from one silly puzzle and bland maguffin to the next, racing against a pair of under-developed antagonists who can’t articulate a compelling motivation for their actions any better than our heroes can. (The mercenaries initially just want to sell the device to the highest bidder, while the Federation wants to seize it to prevent anyone else’s abuse. That the latter could obviously just vaporize one or more clues to ensure the thing stays hidden forever doesn’t occur to them.) Both sides also make wild assumptions about the tech that are somehow never questioned: that the same power that could “create” life — aka, seeding a genetic pattern to influence evolutionary progression over millennia — could likewise destroy it, and that in addition, this machine could therefore bring a person back from the dead.

You can justify a lot in science-fiction with the right technobabble spin, so I want to pause and underline just how ill-supported these ideas are by the surrounding narrative. There’s no explanation for these suppositions at all! One character simply announces an unhinged belief about the doohickey they’re all chasing, and everyone else nods solemnly and accepts it as a solid fact. (And that’s not even getting into my long-standing contention that the transporters in this setting could easily resurrect dead people from their stored molecular patterns, either. When one of the villains this season dies, the surviving partner’s goal becomes undoing that death via the progenitor tech, all while ignoring the overgrown fax machine on every spaceship that could literally print out another healthy copy in seconds.)

This is just not a very good storyline, and it’s even worse as a farewell to a long-running TV series. There’s practically no attempt here for Discovery’s characters to reflect on their past and the journeys they’ve taken since; even the episode which finds the main heroine hurtling through moments in the ship’s history doesn’t bother to bring back any former cast members she had a meaningful relationship with. (Ethan Peck, Anson Mount, and Michelle Yeoh are all filming their own Trek spinoff properties right now — you’re telling me none of them was available for a quick cameo reprisal on their parent show?) As a production, Discovery’s memory seems to reach back only to the start of season 3 when Michael and Book first met — though I guess we also get some random continuity nods in the finale, belatedly setting up the Short Treks episode “Calypso” and connecting the enigmatic Dr. Kovich to Star Trek: Enterprise for some reason. Generally, though, this hardly feels like it’s conversation with the show’s own roots, which is a disservice that robs an already-shaky plot of its maximum potential impact.

No one else on the program is served particularly well by these last scripts, either. Reno is forgotten (though given an irritating line of dialogue that’s a pun on Seven of Nine, a character she almost certainly wouldn’t have heard of before), Culber gets a weird half-arc about being possessed by a dead Trill that doesn’t ultimately lead anywhere interesting, Saru’s only there to get married, and background characters like Owosekun or Detmer receive no more development than they ever have, making it unintentionally hilarious when Tilly yells at the new guy for not getting to know the crew as individuals. One big complaint about Discovery has always been that it’s the Michael Burnham show more than a true ensemble, but even she faces no challenge greater than the latest nominal threat to the universe and patching up her relationship with her ex, following a breakup that the writing never remotely manages to sell as requiring any significant effort to resolve. She barely even knows the opponent in her big climactic final battle, and there’s no mention of her anxieties about leadership, or thorny relationships with the chain of command, or complicated family life, or Vulcan upbringing, or anything else that defined the character early on.

So no, it’s not great television. A few episodes work alright as generic sci-fi adventure fare, which is why I’ll rate this year as highly as two stars out of five. But it’s a remarkably poor ending, and so terribly far from Discovery at its best.

This season: ★★☆☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Seasons ranked: 1 > 3 > 4 > 2 > 5

Book Review: Home Is Where the Bodies Are by Jeneva Rose

Book #81 of 2024:

Home Is Where the Bodies Are by Jeneva Rose

In an afterword to this novel, author Jeneva Rose discusses how she set the action in her own small hometown, even revisiting her old childhood house for research, since she was using it as the home for the story’s fictional family as well. In a note on Goodreads, she also mentions how she drew on personal experience for the main character “dealing with a person suffering from addiction” and “for the guilt I endure in still having been unsuccessful in helping them to recover.”

Unsurprisingly, those true-life elements tend to be the strongest pieces of this work, although the heroine is so insufferable in her judgmental and patronizing attitude toward her drug addict sister that I feel like Rose must have either the keenest and humblest degree of self-awareness possible or else none of it whatsoever. The bigger problem, though, is the rest of the plot, which turns out to be a tired and predictable thriller with gaping logistical flaws and a rather inelegant structure.

The core premise doesn’t arrive until a quarter of the way into the text, but I suppose it’s decent once it does: the adult children of a recently-deceased woman are going through her belongings when they pop on one of her home videotapes, which seems to depict their parents panicking next to the dead body of the neighbor girl who went missing when the kids were younger. Events spiral out from there, with the three siblings digging into the case and flashbacks from the mom’s perspective illuminating what they haven’t discovered yet.

But it’s all so trite and ridiculous, especially compared to the more grounded emotions around the addiction storyline (or the somewhat similar recent Black Mirror episode “Loch Henry”). The mystery on the tape is something that the characters stumble across on a complete whim, and even after witnessing its bombshell contents and reeling over the implications, they exhibit no apparent urgency about reading the letters or opening the safety deposit box that was left to them in the will. If they had, of course, they would have learned the truth right away, which doesn’t really make sense for the mother to have left behind for them, given the (totally obvious) identity of the culprit that’s eventually revealed.

Her scenes are frustrating too, since at least in the present, the other viewpoint protagonists are in the dark and questing for answers alongside the reader. The chapters set in the past instead play coy with what certain people know when, which feels like an artificial sideshow for our benefit rather than a thread that ever organically impacts the primary narrative. A more focused version of this tale could have excised those sections entirely and been vastly improved. As is, this is now the second title from this writer (after the time-travel yawn The Girl I Was) that interested me with its summary but then underwhelmed and irritated me in its execution, so I think I’m just done with her books at this point.

[Content warning for suicide and gun violence.]

★★☆☆☆

Movie Review: Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Movie #13 of 2024:

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

This remains the very best action movie I’ve ever seen, although one that’s remarkable for plenty of other reasons besides. It would be reductive to describe the film as one long car chase, since part of its strength rests in how the script elegantly factors in regular quiet character moments to break up the kinetic violence. But plotwise, it couldn’t be simpler: a warlord is sending out an armed convoy across a post-apocalyptic desert wasteland, unaware that his trusted driver Imperator Furiosa — a never-better Charlize Theron, down an arm via digital magic — has taken the opportunity to smuggle the villain’s harem of enslaved wives to freedom. When he learns of her deceit, he sends the rest of his forces roaring after her in their own spiked and armored diesel chariots.

Max is here too, the returning hero of a much earlier trio of movies (1979-1985) where he was played by Mel Gibson. Now thankfully recast as Tom Hardy, the drifter functions as our viewpoint into this particular dystopian society, but his previous adventures don’t impact events in the slightest, so audiences can safely skip them (as I did the first time I watched this). At best, franchise completionists will merely understand why that protagonist is so attached to his car at the start; otherwise the piece is surprisingly light on any callbacks or continuity implications.

On its own terms, however, it’s incredibly effective, with phenomenal worldbuilding introduced via the prop, set, and costume design as well as the distinctive dialogue. “Witness me!” “I live, I die, I live again!” “You will ride eternal, shiny and chrome.” Such expressions suggest a vaster culture than we actually get to see, which in my opinion is the sweet spot for a two-hour motion picture like this, providing just enough detail for our imaginations to fill in the rest.

The characters are terrific too, further fleshing out the feminist angle of the story with the women — along with Max and another eventual male ally — banding together in egalitarian community-building and hope for the future as an alternative to the tyrannical patriarchy that they’re fleeing. Refreshingly, our two leads Max and Furiosa develop a shared trust but not a romance, and even the secondary relationship that leans more in that direction is ultimately more about deprogramming a radicalized young man through affirmation of his humanity than making him fall in love. It’s the rare Hollywood blockbuster that features no kissing or apparent desire for it; even the cruel Immortan Joe seems driven less by lust than by the entitled belief that his brides and their unborn children represent nothing but his property.

But the primary selling point is of course the grand spectacle of the racing vehicles, the gunfire, the explosions, and the people leaping / being knocked from one car to another at breakneck speeds, all in a gorgeously-saturated color palette and to the tones of a killer pulse-pounding soundtrack. The thrills are superb, and the editing of these sequences is always crystal-clear as to what’s happening where and when — despite sometimes dropping multiple frames at a time to make things play out even faster. It’s immensely watchable and deeply cool, with the 120-minute runtime simply flying by without so much as a hint of bloat.

I saw this movie at least twice in theaters back in 2015, and the experience is still burned into my brain almost a decade later. While I have high hopes for the new Furiosa prequel as well, it’s hard to imagine how it could ever top this. What a lovely day, indeed.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★★★

Book Review: Stargazy Pie by Victoria Goddard

Book #80 of 2024:

Stargazy Pie by Victoria Goddard (Greenwing & Dart #1)

Two-out-of-five stars, which is the lowest I’ve rated any of the dozen or so books that I’ve read by author Victoria Goddard thus far. I’m heartened that this 2016 novel is one of her earlier works, because it means I know firsthand that her talents improve after this, but I’m honestly not sure I would have finished this title if it was the first one I had picked up. As is, my primary enjoyment has been in spotting the worldbuilding references to the writer’s broader Nine Worlds setting: particularly the outlaw poet Fitzroy Angursell and his banned epic Aurora, along with the general depiction of life in the wake of the cataclysmic Fall of Astandalas.

The immediate plot here concerns the protagonist returning to his provincial hometown after leaving college in disgrace, reconnecting with a few old friends, and investigating an odd but seemingly inconsequential mystery — the titular seafood dish, which someone has left sitting by the fountain in the town square — that winds up uncovering cult activity and an even larger criminal conspiracy. The characters are fine, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the sub-series launched by this volume grows stronger in subsequent installments. But the story is delivered rather poorly, with important developments happening by chance, oblique connections that readers don’t have enough context to follow, and other passages heavy with exposition that the recipients plainly ought to have already known.

The tale is structured like a Regency-pastiche whodunnit (with some fantasy genre flourishes on the side), but the heroes don’t really assemble clues in a reasonable or interesting way. Instead they blunder about, make intuitive leaps, and get caught up in a sequence of unrelated machinations. And yet it doesn’t quite land as a comedy of errors, either! It’s altogether strange, and although the narrator’s personal backstory is fairly compelling once we learn all the relevant details, the narrative around him is a remarkably poor showing for it.

[Content warning for drug and alcohol abuse and sexual assault.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: You Like It Darker by Stephen King

Book #79 of 2024:

You Like It Darker by Stephen King

A new collection of short fiction from horror master Stephen King, five entries of which are brand-new for this volume and seven of which have previously appeared elsewhere. (Personally, for instance, I’d already read “The Turbulence Expert” in the King-edited anthology Flight or Fright and “Laurie” as a free extra included at the end of his novella Elevation, both published in 2018.)

If I were grading these stories individually, I don’t think I’d give any a rating lower than three-out-of-five stars, which I will round up to four for the book as a whole given how much I’ve enjoyed a few items in particular. The closing title “The Answer Man” is one of those, spinning a timeless question of how much guaranteed foreknowledge a person might actually want to learn. It also has a curious backstory that’s worth highlighting: the author reportedly put the first several pages away in a drawer and then forgot about them for another 45 years, giving this tale an even longer creative gestation than the gap between King penning the iconic opening line of what would become his Dark Tower series in 1970 and finishing its seventh and final novel in 2004. In some ways, this new story represents a collaboration between the writer’s younger and older selves, which is fitting for a plot that likewise tracks a single individual over the course of his lifetime.

Two of my other favorites here are “Rattlesnakes,” which is an unexpected Cujo sequel (and minor crossover with Duma Key), and the novella Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream, which is a classic case of King devising a wicked premise and then chasing it to discover where it leads. An ordinary man has an unsettling nightmare about where a dead body is buried, so vivid in its details that he’s able to seek out the place that he saw upon waking, despite having never been there before. When he finds the corpse right where he dreamed it, he attempts to report it anonymously to the police — but they’re able to trace the call and can’t be convinced that he’s not the murderer himself, as they obviously don’t believe his wild claim of how he came by his information. What follows is a mounting pile of circumstantial evidence and an unhinged detective closing in around the protagonist, while he scrambles to prove what can’t possibly be proven.

Overall, this is vintage King — a mix of genres that delivers the intended chills, and a welcome sign that the 76-year-old Mainer has no intention of slowing down quite yet. Some of the contents may be stronger than others, but I imagine any ‘Constant Reader’ of the man will like this work just fine.

[Content warning for gun violence, suicide, rape, domestic abuse, gaslighting, death of children, body horror, and gore.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Abbott Elementary, season 3

TV #24 of 2024:

Abbott Elementary, season 3

Every serialized TV show — which in today’s landscape includes most sitcoms — has to branch out and try new things as it goes along, lest the initially-entertaining formulas for its episodes grow stale through over-repetition. Sometimes that change in direction can feel like an organic extension of what has worked before, bringing a fresh energy that takes the series to even greater heights. But sometimes, unfortunately, experiments can fail.

Abbott Elementary in its third season is still a solid program that I’ve generally enjoyed watching from week to week. I like these characters, and I regularly laugh at the brand of humor that derives from their personalities, their profession, and their particular situations. (The current highlight for me: custodian Mr. Johnson revealing that he always keeps a little bit of mop water in the bucket for next time like a sourdough starter. So gross!) But this year shakes up its usual structure by sending Janine out of the classroom for a job at the local school district, and while I can’t fault the impulse to break from the norm, the result winds up feeling pretty half-baked, sourdough pun not intended.

The main problem here is that the show can’t commit to its new paradigm. Its lead character is nominally working somewhere else and repeatedly regretting that she hasn’t been spending time at Abbott, but circumstances actually keep bringing her back there every episode to interact with the rest of the cast. Moreover, her office life stays fairly underwritten, with only a few flat supporting characters and no challenges that ever arise, develop, and get solved solely in that sphere. By contrast, consider how The Office would occasionally toy with storylines like Jim transferring to the Stamford branch or Michael starting a rival paper company downstairs from Dunder Mifflin, where those felt like fully fleshed-out alternate locations with their own casts and distinctive rhythms. The district side of this series feels so empty by comparison.

Like any strained love triangle between a protagonist’s obvious endgame and what TV Tropes calls the Romantic False Lead who delays that happily ever after, Janine’s eventual return to Abbott full-time is an entirely foregone conclusion. It doesn’t help that those two career options for her are literally and simplistically represented in the show’s narrative as two potential guys she could date, either. There’s of course her long-running will they / won’t they dynamic with her fellow teacher Gregory Eddie standing in for the school, while her new coworker played by Josh Segarra (doing his best without much in the scripts to work with) is set up as a possible suitor in the other camp. In the end, as is heavily telegraphed throughout, she goes with the former.

Looking again at The Office, since that remains one of the primary series that this half-hour mockumentary seems to model itself after, there are vibes here of Michael and Jim both turning down corporate jobs to stay with their ragtag team of scrappy underdog friends in Scranton. But those dilemmas came across as more in doubt in the context of their respective arcs, and therefore more triumphant in their ultimate resolution. On Abbott, it’s instead all very pat.

Other weaknesses shake out from that flaw at the creative core, or else are less hidden than they might have been in a stronger surrounding plot. A teachers book club devolves into bitter squabbling over optimal post-apocalyptic strategies? A.I. detection software, tested for the first time in front of students for some reason, reveals that Boomer luddites like Melissa and Barbara have been using ChatGPT to answer emails? Jacob is largely reduced in his role to that of a supportive gay best friend for both Gregory and Janine? The jokes are there, but it’s all way below the quality level of storytelling I had expected after the first two seasons of this show.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, season 2

TV #23 of 2024:

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, season 2

The second year of this TOS prequel and technical Discovery spinoff isn’t flawless, but I’m comfortable saying it’s the single best season of Star Trek we’ve gotten since Deep Space Nine went off the air a quarter-century ago. The first run of Strange New Worlds already distinguished itself with a firm grasp of its characters and a zippy sense of fun, and this follow-up doubles down on both those strengths, continuing to rotate through who gets to be the focal protagonist(s) each week so that nearly everyone gets their turn to shine. It even takes the standoffish security officer La’an, who had probably the most under-served role last time around, and turns her into one of the most emotionally engaging elements of the show, all thanks to an improbable time-travel adventure with an alternate-universe version of James T. Kirk.

That wild sense of experimentation also lifts the series. Although the big musical episode falls a little flat for me — the songs themselves aren’t especially catchy or distinctive from one another, in my humble opinion — it’s the sort of swing that I can’t imagine any other iteration of Trek attempting, let alone managing to use in a “Once More, with Feeling” style to push the crew to express long-building but restrained emotions. That it can be in the same conversation as that classic Buffy the Vampire Slayer story, which built on over 100 previous episodes of evolving plot threads versus SNW’s 18 at this point, is a true testament to how well the newer program has been developing its own personal arcs in such a limited space.

More successful than “Subspace Rhapsody” for me is the Lower Decks crossover “Those Old Scientists,” which sounds ludicrous on paper but turns out to be a perfect meld of the two shows’ different sensibilities (and a real tour-de-force for actor Jack Quaid, who obviously was not cast or had ever approached his role on the cartoon with a thought for how the character would look in live-action). Despite the inherent goofiness, that hour plays out in a way that respects both sides of its creative DNA, while also finding room for the little character moments that elevate it further. Nurse Chapel realizing from an offhand comment by Boimler that her time with Spock has an expiration date on it; La’an bringing up her own recent experience visiting the past… I love how this series carefully takes the time to fold updates on ongoing character arcs like that into the most one-off of episodic adventures. Lower Decks is considerably looser with anything resembling a consistent storyline — good luck establishing when exactly the portal trip takes place in the animated continuity, other than the main cast all being together on the Cerritos — but this is an episode that couldn’t work outside of this particular moment on Strange New Worlds without some significant changes. It’s one of the biggest differences in vibe to the made-for-syndication TOS, but also part of why I consistently find this series to be a more enjoyable exploration of that era.

The show goes dark on occasion, too, beginning this year with one character under arrest for a plainly racist Starfleet law that must be challenged in court like the anti-android rules in TNG‘s “The Measure of a Man,” and then repeatedly exploring the traumatic ramifications of Discovery’s big Klingon war better than that program ever bothered to do. But at its grimmest, just as at its most gimmicky, the characterization soars.

I do have a few small critiques, in closing. The ten-episode length of the season is in line with other contemporary genre TV series, but it’s a real disservice to this one, which wants to both juggle a variety of ongoing storylines like DS9 and regularly experiment in format like the sitcom Community. Both goals would yield substantially stronger results in a longer season! We could maybe even get to see the starship explore more actual strange new worlds, as that title increasingly feels like a holdover from an earlier creative vision for this show and not an accurate description of its present ethos at all. It’s similarly a problem how little Captain Pike gets to do here, and while I’ve heard that that was a specific choice to allow his actor more time with his newborn child, it still leaves this stretch a little aimless, thematically speaking. With so few episodes, space is at too much of a premium to sideline the central figure of the captain like that.

Finally, I want to say that this program is suffering from a lack of canonical queer representation — especially compared to the much weaker Discovery, which for all its flaws includes Stamets, Culber, Adira, and Reno all in the main cast. Trek as a franchise is supposed to be all about building a welcoming future for everyone, and very specifically featured a multicultural bridge crew for Kirk’s Enterprise when the original show launched in the mid-1960s. While that racial diversity thankfully remains, it feels like an abdication of duty for this modern flagship series to not embrace a wider band of gender and sexuality in an era when LGBTQ+ rights remain under threat. I’ll get off my soapbox now and reiterate how great I find this show overall, but this is one area where it’s definitely letting me down.

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

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard

Book #78 of 2024:

The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard

An astonishing debut novel that introduces one of the most original conceptions of time travel that I’ve ever encountered, yet then wisely waits to fully deploy it until the very end. For the majority of the plot, we are instead lingering in the present moment with the heroine, experiencing her teenage hopes and setbacks and taking in the peculiar details of her reality. (Peculiar to us, that is — like The Giver or Never Let Me Go, this title masterfully and naturalistically presents its setting through characters who have grown up never questioning it, though the contours will prove wholly alien to readers.)

Essentially, this story is set in a small isolated community bordered on either side by its own past and future. Crossing to the east would bring a person back into town but twenty years further ahead, while crossing to the west would deliver them the same distance backwards. As far as anyone knows, that situation stretches on in both directions indefinitely; there is no true outside world or even any remote idea of such a thing in the characters’ minds. And within the span of this text, at least, no external presence ever does intrude on the valley(s) and the inhabitants’ particular existence therein.

To preserve the timeline, travel is highly restricted. Armed guards patrol the borders, and a prestigious council weighs visa petitions delicately, allowing occasional masked visitors to see their loved ones from afar — either those to the west who have passed away in their own time or those to the east whom the petitioners can’t reasonably expect to live to see grown. Such visits are dangerous and must be carefully coordinated on both sides, but because they clearly remain allowed later on, they cannot be outlawed today.

It’s a fascinating high-concept premise, but one that would be bloodless without the living and breathing individuals at its core. We watch as the sixteen-year-old protagonist comes of age in this strange place, forging new friendships and a budding potential relationship whilst striving to be chosen for a career among the elite decision-makers who evaluate visitation requests. She’s also burdened by the accidental insight that the young man she’s drawn to will inevitably soon die, since she’s recognized the older versions of his parents as the obscured figures watching the schoolyard on a recent visit.

Although the action eventually picks up, sending the now-adult lead on a desperate and illegal quest to save her long-dead friend and reorient her own life accordingly, this is primarily not a thrilling adventure tale like most entries in the science-fiction genre. It’s rather a slow and sadly wistful look at youth and grown-up regrets over squandered potential and the ways people change over time, with or without improper knowledge of future events. The specter of the neighboring valleys adds a melancholic tinge to the first half of the novel leading up to the boy’s death, after which we jump forward to follow his bereft paramour as a jaded woman in her thirties, for whom nothing has ever gone according to plan. Given the setup, it’s predictable enough that she’ll ultimately be driven to attempt the journey back to her younger days, but author Scott Alexander Howard continues to spool out the narrative gradually for us, earning the character-based resolution that could have seemed mandated by the needs of the plot alone.

I won’t spoil the actual ending in terms of the results of her mission, but it’s almost inconsequential compared to the overall effect of everything in the work building up to that point. Suffice to say, I loved this book the entire way through, and will now eagerly await whatever its talented writer devises next.

[Content warning for gun violence, domestic abuse, and alcohol abuse.]

★★★★★

Book Review: Dragonsteel Prime: A Sanderson Curiosity by Brandon Sanderson

Book #77 of 2024:

Dragonsteel Prime: A Sanderson Curiosity by Brandon Sanderson

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

A fresh release of an old unpublished novel — one that began all the way back as author Brandon Sanderson’s undergraduate honors thesis, and long existed as only a single physical manuscript that could be checked out from the BYU campus library upon request. Though he’s now seen fit to share the book more broadly, he cautions readers in a new introduction that we probably won’t find it up to his current standard, nor should we take it as wholly canonical to his Cosmere continuity of interconnected stories that followed. Instead, it is best considered as what he calls “half-canon,” offering a glimpse of worldbuilding details and character backgrounds that inform the subsequent works but would be contradictory to take literally. If a revised iteration of Dragonsteel is ever published for real, it will be with widespread changes from this early edition.

(The subplot involving Bridge Four on the Shattered Plains, for instance, was later incorporated into the author’s Stormlight Archive series, where it fits better with a protagonist who’s an adult slave rather than just an impulsive teenage army recruit. So that’s hardly going to appear in the finished version of this one. I’d also imagine that the young mind which named a certain magical force “the hor” and its practitioners “horwatchers” gave no thought to how those particular names would sound in the mouths of future audiobook narrators.)

So, is this ‘Sanderson curiosity’ worth the read? I’d say it is, for the uber-fans willing to tackle 700 pages of non-canon material. In addition to displaying how the writer’s personal style of epic fantasy developed over time, it gives us an interesting look at the quasi-origins of the dragon Frost and the man who will someday be called Hoid, both still on their original homeworld of Yolen well before the mysterious Shattering of Adonalsium in the general saga’s backstory. If you’re caught up with the latest Cosmere happenings, the information on Realmatic Theory won’t be as surprising, but it remains fascinating to see how much of that concept was already planned out so far ahead of its official debut. I’m sure the select group who gained access to this title before such revelations had gone public were even more struck by them.

Nevertheless, the text does have some of the issues that its creator suggests. The various plot pieces don’t quite cohere together, and the story ends without resolving very many of its specific component arcs. The overall effect is more generic than classic Sandersonian, especially concerning the rules-based magic system, and the familiar tropes aren’t tweaked enough to register in a crowded genre. I’m not surprised to learn that multiple publishers rejected this draft, although the raw potential talent is certainly there on the page. But in the end and from a modern perspective, “curiosity” seems an apt label for it.

[Content warning for fatphobia, racism, slavery, rape, and gore.]

★★★☆☆