The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: Star Wars: Tales of the Empire, season 1

TV #20 of 2024:

Star Wars: Tales of the Empire, season 1

This six-part animated Star Wars anthology is pretty clearly modeled on the similar Tales of the Jedi project from 2022, and it inherits some of the same structural weaknesses. At least this time around, the story pushes forwards for one of its two focal characters — Barriss Offee, a former Jedi last seen getting locked up for bombing the temple during the Clone Wars — and doesn’t just provide general background filler, as was largely the case before. Here we learn that that protagonist subsequently became an Imperial Inquisitor for a while, before losing faith in their mission and returning to her old Jedi ways.

The other half of this season, though, is spent on Thrawn’s loyal servant Morgan Elsbeth from the live-action Mandalorian and Ahsoka shows, whose backstory proves not particularly revelatory. This is solid but unremarkable Star Wars for the most part, and although it isn’t the worst of the franchise, it never comes close to justifying its existence, especially as a separate series rather than Tales of the Jedi season 2.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Alien Scream by Chris Archer

Book #75 of 2024:

Alien Scream by Chris Archer (Mindwarp #3)

Easily the best entry so far in my reread of this 90s middle-grade sci-fi series. The formula is pretty firmly established by this point — a kid in the small Wisconsin town turns 13, develops strange powers, and winds up getting attacked by a shapeshifting alien assassin — but the teens have such different abilities and personalities that it hasn’t grown repetitive just yet. Our latest protagonist is a laid-back class clown who suddenly gains the ability to speak / sign every language fluently, and while that may not seem useful in a fight, by the end of this novel he’s learned he can also understand and command swarming insects like termites and ants and send faxes over the phone with only his voice. (Look, it was more impressive back when this was written, okay?)

What really elevates this volume above its predecessors is the stronger characterization, the fun of seeing both previous heroes from a new perspective, and the ensuing crossover / team-up vibes, although for now the group is simply sharing notes on their respective experiences and trying to decipher the sinister conspiracy against them, not actually joining together in combat. I also appreciate author Chris Archer’s deft hand at writing a teenage crush that’s obviously mutual — to this adult reader, at least — while keeping the first-person POV narrator oblivious and sweetly worried about embarrassing himself.

(Newsflash, Jack: she stopped by your table to wish you a happy birthday, walked you to the nurse’s office after you hit your head, and called your house later to check up on you. I know you feel like you can’t trust anyone, and that the version of her you saw near the end of the book was in fact an imposter who knocked you out and strapped you to a bomb, but I do think that the real girl might prove receptive if you ever worked up the courage to ask her out.)

Great genre silliness, carried off well. I remember very little of how the story goes on from here, but I’m totally on-board after this installment.

★★★★☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Picard, season 3

TV #19 of 2024:

Star Trek: Picard, season 3

The first two seasons of this Star Trek: The Next Generation sequel were generally at their strongest in those moments that reunited the cast of the original show, which is probably why this last year goes ahead and makes it a full-fledged reunion. As before, there’s a real thrill from seeing the old crew together again, but the plot mechanics to get us to that point are a little rough and coincidence-heavy. (Picard’s new friend Raffi is working with Worf even before they’re dragged into the admiral’s orbit? Why?) It’s also nice that this season doesn’t feel obligated to shoehorn in all the regular Picard characters like Elnor or Agnes, though that admittedly adds to the unevenness of the program at large.

The core of this new story is neat, offering a paranoid conspiracy thriller of Changelings infiltrating Starfleet, where no one is sure who else can be trusted. It’s a premise that Trek has already gone to in Deep Space Nine and other titles, but it’s still handled pretty well this time around. The fact that the enemies also want Picard and the adult son he’s just met is somewhat strange, however, with the eventual explanation and connection to the Borg not particularly satisfying. There’s no effort to justify why those two species would ever team up, or to reconcile these Borg with the redemption / evolution that another faction underwent last season on this show.

Plus, as fun as all the TNG callbacks are — we even get Ro Laren and holodeck Moriarty for some reason — they tend to draw attention to who hasn’t been included in this adventure. No sign of Wesley Crusher or Guinan, both of whom have popped into the Picard series before and presumably would have liked to see their old friends and family too, and no mention at all of Miles O’Brien! Heck, if Data can be brought back for the umpteenth time here — continuing to lessen the impact of all his previous deaths — then I really need an accounting of why Tasha Yar couldn’t be resurrected in some fashion as well, even if simply for a quick cameo as a Changeling taunt. Similarly, while Tuvok makes his first canonical Trek reappearance since Voyager ended, his emotional scenes with Seven of Nine only underscore how her stronger relationship was always with Janeway, who gets referenced but not actually shown.

This series has never come close to living up to its nostalgic potential, even / especially for a viewer like me with merely a passing fondness for the earlier Patrick Stewart show, but at least it manages to end on a surer footing than it began.

This season: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Seasons ranked: 3 > 2 > 1

Movie Review: Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971)

Movie #5 of 2024:

Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971)

A welcome bounce back for the series. Like its two predecessors, there’s a fatalistic darkness to this Apes film, but it’s carried off better here in balance with a certain comic playfulness. The producers wrote themselves into a corner by concluding the prior adventure with a bomb blowing up the entire planet (and presumably all our known characters with it, though several had already been shot to death by then), but this next sequel concocts an ingenious solution to that problem: time-travel! Since chimpanzee scientists Dr. Zira and Dr. Cornelius were conveniently absent from the final act of Beneath anyway, this script establishes that they were working with a genius friend on patching up the crashed spaceship from the first flick. Somehow, the three apes were able to launch it into orbit just before the doomsday weapon went off, and thus got to watch the world explode as they retraced Taylor’s trajectory backwards through space to modern Earth.

It’s a tad silly, but a great setup for the plot that follows. In a nod to the climax of the original novel — in which the hero flies home to discover that apes have taken over in his absence — this movie starts with contemporary humans swarming a spacecraft that’s just landed in the ocean, only for the astronauts to remove their helmets and reveal that they’re apes (and to cue up the title card with a funky 70s soundtrack). Though initially hesitant to disclose their intelligence and power of speech, the “apestronauts” ultimately do just that, setting them on an arc somewhat analogous to how Taylor was treated by their kind back home. Here, though, they’re welcomed as celebrity sensations after the initial disbelief and shock, and viewers get a rather glorious montage of their ensuing shopping spree and media blitz.

Cornelius and Zira have been staunch allies for the humans in the franchise all along, but their promotion to central protagonists is a good one. From this point forward, the Planet of the Apes series has its sympathies pretty firmly on the side of the apes, with humanity at large cast as the intolerant xenophobes (offset by the occasional exceptions in the role the chimpanzee couple used to occupy). Plus, by sending a small company of apes out of their home society and into the present day, this particular movie gets away with a significantly smaller makeup and sets budget, much like Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home or Galactica 1980.

The humans grow more worried about their visitors the more that they let slip about their own time and what they know of Earth’s history (some of which, unfortunately, seems to contradict the state of ape knowledge established in the first film). The new origin story for apekind: a plague killed off many animals, prompting humans to turn to our primate cousins for pets and then slaves. Eventually an ape named Aldo learned to say “no” and began a revolt movement, leading to the downfall of our species and its civilization.

Though those events are far in the future, the president’s scientific advisor Otto Hasslein — name-dropped in both previous movies for his theories on relativistic space travel — fears that Zira’s unborn child will represent a bridgehead force precipitating man’s early decline. The apes are interrogated more harshly, with a specific focus on the devastation they witnessed in the war and Zira’s confessed medical experimentation on live human subjects. Hasslein ultimately procures authorization to neuter the chimps and end their pregnancy, spurring them to break out of their government holding facility and go on the run before he can. Though the scientist is ordered to take the fugitives alive, he instead shoots Zira and her newborn baby and is subsequently killed by Cornelius in revenge, who then gets slain by sniper fire himself. So much for our heroes, once again.

It’s the third downbeat ending in a row for the franchise, but there’s one further twist before the credits roll. Earlier Zira and Cornelius had stayed briefly at a traveling circus where an ordinary chimpanzee had recently given birth herself, and it’s now revealed that the two mothers swapped babies off-screen. Milo — named for their companion who died in a mishap near the start of the film — is the infant who’s still alive, and the movie ends with him exclaiming, “Mama! Mama!” in a manner eerily reminiscent of the doll Taylor found back in the Forbidden Zone that proved ancient humans could talk. It’s not quite a Terminator-style causality loop, but it does appear that Hasslein may have inadvertently helped bring about the exact fate he was trying to prevent. All in all, a neat little piece of science-fiction.

★★★★☆

Movie Review: Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)

Movie #4 of 2024:

Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)

From one of the best movies in the franchise to probably its very worst. This first Planet of the Apes sequel is a real head-scratcher, and it’s a testament to the strength of the original (and the profitability of branded merchandise, one might imagine) that the series continued at all after this. Former star Charlton Heston reportedly wanted nothing to do with a followup, and only agreed to return for a minor role if his character Taylor could be killed off, presumably so that no one would ask him to be in any further installments. Accordingly, he’s there at the beginning of the script and then at the end — where he does in fact die — with the question of his fate in the meantime helping to drive the main storyline.

In his place, the film introduces Brent, another crash-landed astronaut from our time who looks hilariously similar to Heston, though with approximately half of the natural charisma. The logic here is strained: Taylor’s crew in the last movie was supposed to be on a colonization voyage at relativistic speeds, with no hope of ever returning to contemporary Earth, yet Brent now says that his own mission was launched to find out what happened to theirs. Whatever strange force sent the one ship hurtling back to our planet in the far future has apparently struck the second one as well, and so the newcomer finds himself retracing Taylor’s steps almost exactly.

He runs into the mute woman Nova, now wearing Taylor’s identifying dog tags, and accompanies her to the nearby city to seek out the chimpanzee scientists Zira and Cornelius. They’re as delighted as they were over Taylor to meet another talking human, and they show him on a map the Forbidden Zone where the other man was heading. While there, he overhears that a gorilla army accompanied by Dr. Zaius will soon be marching into the same area to investigate certain illusions that have been reported, looking for the resources that they may be hiding and to confront any responsible beings who dwell there.

Just ahead of the soldiers, Brent and Nova stumble into a dilapidated New York subway station, and his reaction to the discovery that he’s back home again is pretty muted compared to Taylor’s anguish at the end of the previous movie. And here’s where things take a serious turn for the surreal, as the pair discover a civilization of mutated psychic humans there underneath the irradiated desert, complete with fleshy masks to appear normal and worshiping a giant doomsday bomb.

Most of this is far less interesting than the film imagines, with not enough runtime spent with the actual apes or the thorny philosophical and ethical musings that elevated the Heston feature. The returning characters all feel flattened into caricatures, and the mutants are too weird and uniform to stand out as distinctive personalities themselves. It’s a pale imitation of what made Planet of the Apes tick, and a dreary miscalculation of what divergences from the formula would be entertaining.

The simian army soon arrives underground, as the mood of the piece grows ever more nihilistic. Under the telepathic influence of his captors, Brent is forced to strangle and drown Nova and fight against Taylor, and although the three of them survive that particular encounter, they are each subsequently shot and killed as the gorillas open fire. As Taylor succumbs to his wounds, he curses at Zaius and presses the control panel to ignite the weapon, which blows up the planet as promised. Cut to a blank screen with an ominous voiceover declaring, “In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe lies a medium-size star. And one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead.” Roll credits, where we see that the mutants have been listed under names like Fat Man and Negro. Somehow, the studio would go on to make another three direct sequels.

A lot of this seems like it might have worked on paper. Tone down the outlandish campiness of the future mutated humans, give everyone involved more sustained characterization, and tie back to the events of the first film more closely, and the basic plot points could have been sound enough. (Dr. Zaius, once a complicated antagonist who buried the knowledge that humans can talk and suspected Taylor came not from space but from a tribe in the Forbidden Zone, now gives absolutely no indication of that history here where it would seem highly relevant.) The new lore about the ape Lawgiver is nice, as is the mirage of his statue bleeding. I like that Nova gets to blurt out Taylor’s name before she dies, implying that the devolved humans aren’t a totally lost cause, and it’s nice to see the two chimp allies again, although they don’t get to interact with Taylor and disappear from the script well before the end without any particular closure.

Mostly, though, this is just a mess.

★★☆☆☆

Movie Review: Planet of the Apes (1968)

Movie #3 of 2024:

Planet of the Apes (1968)

Over half a century on, this first Apes film holds up remarkably well. It’s that tricky blend of smart and thrilling, the big-budget equivalent of Star Trek: TOS, which was airing on TV at that time. The ape costumes and makeup are believably immersive, while the worldbuilding details of simian society are likewise fleshed out enough to feel like a distinctive cultural environment. The script is also well-paced, building from a reflective philosophical tone to bursts of frenzied action and back in steady cresting waves. In fact, the title of the piece gives the premise away significantly in advance, especially for an audience familiar with the franchise that followed. For the first half-hour or so of this initial movie, the three astronaut characters believe they’re the only humans on the planet where they’ve crash-landed, and it’s even longer before any of the intelligent apes actually arrive on the scene.

Soon after, we’ve whittled our focal cast down to just Charlton Heston’s Taylor, subsequently joined by the important resident non-humans. The structure of the plot is brilliant here, as well — having received an injury to his throat in the hunt that occurs a quarter of the way through, he spends the next quarter of the text as an abused prisoner, as unable to speak out to prove his intelligence as any of the devolved chattel humans like Nova around him. It’s a kafkaesque nightmare experience that results in him recovering enough to finally shout his classic line, “Take your stinkin’ paws off me, you damn dirty ape!” at approximately the halfway mark of the overall runtime.

The back half of the story continues the legalistic madness, and is where Planet of the Apes shines as a funhouse mirror for the racism and opposition to science of our world. While the chimpanzee researchers Dr. Zira and Dr. Cornelius are soon convinced that Taylor is telling the truth about his origins, the orangutan politician Dr. Zaius stubbornly refuses to accept it and instead moves rapidly against them. The astronaut is forced to defend his humanity — as it were — in open court, regardless of the inherent absurdity there.

Ultimately, of course, the finale delivers the infamous twist that the titular ‘planet of the apes’ has been Earth all along. Taylor and his new friends were right when they insisted that the evidence supported their heretical theory that the humans of this world had a thriving civilization before the apes did, but he’s been wrong to think that his spaceship traveled hundreds of lightyears away on its relativistic journey through space. In some fashion that the movie does not explain, the rocket apparently got turned around and deposited him and his crew right back where they started.

That reveal is so well-known at this point as to be baked into people’s general understanding of the series as depicting a future Earth where the apes are in charge, but it’s worth unpacking to consider in its original context. Parallel / contingent evolution was rather commonplace in science-fiction of that era, which often populated alien planets with human-like beings and other lifeforms that looked much like our fellow animals on Earth. By convention, the coincidence was typically ignored, much as this film ignores how the apes’ written and spoken language is somehow exactly identical to Taylor’s.

The original tension of Planet of the Apes, beyond the immediate plight of the protagonists, was the fear that if apes on that distant world overthrew the humans there, the same fate could easily happen to us back here (with a reasonable reading of the subtext being a strained metaphor for twentieth-century race relations). In fact, in the French novel that the movie is based on, the surviving astronaut races home in the end to warn his compatriots about the danger he’s witnessed, only to find that he’s too late and the same ape revolution happened while he was away. La Planète des singes was not our world, and contemporary audiences in 1968 had no reason to expect that the adaptation would shake out any differently. The twist in the Rod Serling screenplay plays brilliantly against that expectation, capping off the enterprise with that iconic shot of Lady Liberty, a moral about humanity’s fatal embrace of nuclear weapons, and Charlton Heston kneeling forlorn on the shore.

What a movie! It’s no wonder so many sequels and reboots have followed, loose as the ongoing storyline and franchise continuity have occasionally grown between them.

[Content warning for sexism, gun violence, and biomedical experimentation.]

★★★★★

Book Review: Postern of Fate by Agatha Christie

Book #74 of 2024:

Postern of Fate by Agatha Christie (Tommy and Tuppence #5)

This 1973 title was the 74th and final novel that author Agatha Christie ever wrote, in addition to the last in her sequence of Tommy and Tuppence adventure stories. (Unlike for her better-known detective series, she did not set aside any additional installments for posthumous publication.) I won’t speculate about the writer’s declining mental faculties at this stage of her life as I’ve seen other reviewers do, but I will say that this book is easily the worst of its lot and a bit of a sour note to end on.

Among its stronger qualities: our married protagonists have continued to age, and are now moving into a new home in their 70s. Their banter back and forth is as affectionate as ever, and their instincts as retired spies / investigators remain relatively sharp. I also love their dog, whose perspective in a few key scenes is a fun change of pace for the narrative.

The premise is both absurd and poorly developed, however. In examining the books that the previous owners have left behind in the library, Tuppence discovers a secret message in one of them: underlined letters that spell out, “Mary Jordan did not die naturally. It was one of us. I think I know which one.” She eventually learns that the woman in question was a spy during World War I, and that the boy who owned the book perished soon afterwards himself.

Two former intelligence agents happening to uncover a relevant plot at their doorstep is as silly as those times when Poirot or Marple stumbles across a fresh murder whilst on holiday, and the actual investigation here mostly consists of asking older folks in the community what they remember from long ago (and receiving contradictory information in reply). The couple’s own contacts in the business, meanwhile, are justifiably convinced that the Beresfords know more than they’re letting on about the affair and have moved into this particular address specifically to pursue the case further.

Yet it’s not entirely clear what that pursuit entails. They’re not seeking to identify the killer — nor do they, in the end — and the clues that they find are largely other things that have been left sitting in the house for decades, suggesting that no one cares any longer or has ever bothered to cover their tracks. Nevertheless, someone in the present day is apparently trying to stop or even kill the heroes for looking into the matter, though their motivation isn’t explained and their traps are so ineffective it’s a wonder that they’re noticed at all.

Anyway. Nice to check in on Tommy and his missus one last time, but their best days are firmly behind them at this point.

This volume: ★★☆☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

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

Book Review: Doctor Who: The Phaser Aliens & Other Stories edited by Michael Stevens

Book #73 of 2024:

Doctor Who: The Phaser Aliens & Other Stories edited by Michael Stevens

A new audio production collecting six previously-published Doctor Who stories, one for each of the first half-dozen incarnations of that sci-fi franchise’s Time Lord hero. It’s an interesting snapshot of the series history, since the contents were originally written contemporaneously from 1965 to 1984 — and so in the earlier entries, the protagonist is sometimes called “Dr. Who” instead of “the Doctor,” his ship is sometimes just “TARDIS” without the definite article, and he’s strongly implied to be a human from Earth’s future rather than any sort of alien, because such continuity details either had yet to be solidified on-screen or were simply not a concern for the BBC editorial team at that point.

On their own merits, the tales are all fine but somewhat unremarkable. I’m at a loss as to why these particular titles have been selected for a new life in 2024, although the cynical part of me notes that none of the original authors are known and wonders if that played a role in their curation, to minimize the payout of royalties. The audiobook features the voice talents of actors from across the classic and modern eras of the show as well as the licensed Big Finish spinoffs, which I suppose is a further draw. But overall, this is a pretty insignificant and forgettable collection.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard

Book #72 of 2024:

The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard (Lays of the Hearth-Fire #1)

This is currently my very favorite book, which I’ve now read twice in as many years. What follows is an updated version of my original review:

The Hands of the Emperor is a wonderful warm hug of a novel, rich in characterization and gentle affirmation of community trust. It’s rare for a 900-page fantasy tome to feel so cozy, let alone to forgo any significant romance or acts of violence throughout its duration. But this self-published 2019 work is remarkable in any number of ways, each more endearingly quaint than the last. I am honestly not even sure that I would say it has a plot, although events do gradually unfold in support of the central character arc: a quietly effective middle-aged civil servant belatedly earning (or realizing he already has) the love and admiration of his colleagues, his far-off relatives, and his boss.

It’s an incredibly slow unveiling. Cliopher Mdang, private secretary to the ruler of the entire world, spends the first quarter of the text escorting his liege on an incognito holiday, the result of a breach-of-protocol invitation blurted out upon a stroke of insight about how lonely the other man must be in his peerless existence under elaborate courtly taboos, unable to be touched or looked directly in the eye. The two have known each other for decades — or possibly even millennia, as time has fractured in the cataclysmic backstory and now passes slower in some parts of the realm than others — but their relationship has previously only ever been professional. We essentially get to meet His Radiancy the individual as Kip does, whilst simultaneously getting a feel for the viewpoint protagonist himself and the dazzlingly intricate worldbuilding details that author Victoria Goddard has devised for the various cultures of the setting.

The tone here is something like The Goblin Emperor crossed with The West Wing. Or the musical Hamilton, if it weren’t a tragedy and showed its title figure as more in touch with his island origins like Disney’s Moana. It turns out that in his rise through the levels of government, our hero has been subtly reworking that system, pushing for law and policy changes that will contribute to a more equitable society. Inspired by his distant egalitarian homeland, he’s rooted out corruption, instituted a universal basic income, improved the postal and transportation services, and implemented countless further such ideas that in an aggregation of incremental steps have functionally revolutionized the empire. It’s a rejection of grimdark cynicism, a hopepunk ode to the fundamental principle of good governance’s ability to help people, and it’s absolutely riveting to see in action, especially once its unassuming architect starts being openly acknowledged and rewarded for it.

This is also a story about cultural conflicts: about coming from a small backwater province to the capital of the known universe and facing misunderstanding and scorn for the customs of home. About keeping those folkways kindled inside as a guiding beacon, and ultimately proving that oral traditions are not primitive but lavish and meaningful and preserved over generations as a powerful representation of identity. About finding a way to make Kip’s family understand why he left and everything he’s accomplished in the wider civilization, and about his personal journey to realize how he needs to be a better advocate for himself in their eyes.

Above all, I would say that this is a book about being seen and accepted and loved for who you are. The evolving dynamic between Cliopher and the Last Emperor is not romantic — and I’ve heard that in the sequel, the diligent bureaucrat is more explicitly characterized as asexual — but it is deeply intimate and a model of trusting fealty as the lord and his loyal aide come to reveal more and more of themselves to one another. The meaning of the title is twofold: Kip both serves as the metaphorical hands of the Emperor in interpreting and enacting his will across the kingdom and yearns to be able to grasp His Radiancy’s actual hands in friendship. The catharsis of when he finally does, along with several other key moments in the long path there, is emotional and soothing and genuinely heartfelt. Adults being competent at their jobs and earnestly decent to the fellow souls in their lives! Is that what people mean when they describe genre fiction as wish-fulfillment?

There is some periodic darkness, on the margins. The trauma of the Fall that most characters lived through continues to affect them, and the protagonist feels intense isolation and survivor’s guilt that has to be carefully unpacked and confronted, with the occasional panic attack along the way. The possibility of suicide is raised obliquely in passing, and we learn that his former superiors used to torture their political enemies, in the old days before his reforms. One minor character comes from a tribe that engages in sacred ritualistic cannibalism, while another gets casually deadnamed at first mention, although there’s no indication of any transphobia that would give that act the same violent impact it carries in our world. (“Clia was [__] originally, but she changed her name when she was of age to declare herself a woman.”) I raise these issues to respect reader sensitivities, but in general, I’d say that they only cause the pervasive spirit of humanitarian acceptance that powers the novel to stand out more clearly.

This was my initial introduction to both Goddard as a writer and her broader Nine Worlds saga, and having subsequently now read eleven of the other titles in that continuity before circling back around to this one — everything but At the Feet of the Sun and the Greenwing and Dart, Tales from Ysthar, and The Red Company Reformed subseries — I still think it’s probably the best entry point for newcomers. The rest have generally been great as well, though, and they’ve definitely added delightful further background context for me on this reread. Like Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, the Nine Worlds series is less of a single unfolding narrative and more of a loose configuration of smaller contained stories that’s forgiving of practically any reading order but builds in enjoyment the deeper you go and the more connections you start to spot. Nevertheless, my personal recommendation would be to begin right here, with a thoughtful islander striking up an unprecedented conversation with his lord.

★★★★★

Book Review: Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson

Book #71 of 2024:

Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson (The Space Between Worlds #2)

Not quite on the jaw-dropping level of its predecessor, which juggled an action-packed plot across multiple parallel worlds with ease, but still an excellent bit of science-fiction in its own right. We’ve shifted protagonists for this sequel, following a genderfluid servant of the warlord emperor on one particular planet (introduced as a supporting character before) as they face incursions from yet another dimension. Previously, the technology that enabled such multiversal travel required one’s doppelgänger in the destination plane to be dead in order to function, with the traveler essentially filling the void upon arrival. This new antagonist civilization, however, has devised a means to kill off the duplicate as part of that process, resulting in a string of violent deaths and lookalike enemy agents hiding the evidence to infiltrate the hero’s society.

It’s a largely character-driven story, made up of a cast of marginalized people processing their respective traumas in ways that aren’t necessarily always the healthiest. As they negotiate existing class tensions in their dystopian desert community alongside the newer existential threat from the outsiders, they inevitably hurt and betray one another in escalating fashion as the crisis worsens. The result is an angry and often uncomfortable read, especially for how it reframes and casts doubt on some of what we thought we knew from the previous novel — certain negatives turned to positives in the eyes of the different narrator, for instance, and the former heroine’s idealism viewed far more cynically. (Both books do stand alone fairly well, but obviously you’d be missing a lot of background context if you jumped into the series here.) Luckily author Micaiah Johnson is as sharp as ever, and while there’s little of the Mad Max spectacle that the setting perhaps deserves, the work nevertheless crackles with a desperate and furious energy.

[Content warning for racism, misgendering, police brutality, torture, body horror, domestic abuse, suicide, and gore.]

★★★★☆