The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: Our Flag Means Death, season 1

TV #4 of 2026:

Our Flag Means Death, season 1

These ten episodes improve as they go along, particularly once the writers lay down their cards and start embracing the queer themes directly. Though the series has gained notoriety as the gay pirate show, the only indication of that status early on is that a few of the characters come across as a bit effeminate, which seems like part of the overall comic premise of them not being very skilled at their chosen profession. The captain especially is a bookish fop who’s rather hopelessly out of his depth, and the season is half over before it becomes clear that the same-sex relationships on his crew are real and heartfelt, not merely implied for an easy punchline. It takes even longer to confirm that our hero himself is in such a romance, and although the subtext is there beforehand, it’s of the plausible-deniability variety that’s disappointed fans of so many previous programs.

That outside context of how intense male bonds on TV usually resolve into empty queerbaiting helps to explain why it’s such a thrill when this zany sitcom charts its own path forward and the two men who have grown close are allowed to actually reach out, kiss, and embrace. It’s also neat if you know that their story is loosely based on true events, minus any documented evidence of a love angle. Stede Bonnet and Blackbeard were genuine pirates who united their ships and sailed together for a while, and the bones of that history offer a fascinating canvas on which to imagine a romcom-style narrative. There’s even a chaotic ex in the form of fellow historical figure Jack Rackham around to spark jealousy, and a messy breakup that one imagines will prove only temporary in the long run. (No spoilers — this is my first time watching, and I’m aware that the cancellation after season two came as a surprise to the creators, who had more they planned to do with the concept.)

It’s still not my favorite title on television. While I appreciate that there’s no textual homophobia from anyone, people are regularly insulted and/or framed as ridiculous for being namby-pamby failures of traditional masculinity, which is only a slight remove away. I’m not overly fond of the colloquial language either, which finds our 18th-century characters uttering things like, “Man, that guy is a dick,” and I never feel as though recurring guest stars Leslie Jones and Fred Armisen get into the proper spirit of the thing to craft roles beyond their own big offscreen personalities. Plus as I mentioned already, the strengths of the latter stretch of this first year tend to obscure the fact that it takes a while to get to that point, with the project only really coming into focus with the arrival of Blackbeard late in episode 3. (As is my perennial complaint about modern shows, a longer season could have mitigated that impression, of course.)

And yet, once it comes into itself, it’s pretty wonderful and manages to pull at the heartstrings effectively. On a representation level alone, the series is a delight — I didn’t even address the crew member who uses they/them pronouns, likewise to no apparent intolerance — and the comedy is plenty funny, too. It could definitely stand to shore up its weaknesses even further, but I think this initial outing is solid enough to earn a rating of three-and-a-half stars, rounded up.

[Content warning for gun violence, domestic abuse, cannibalism, incest, amputation, and gore.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Long Chills & Case Dough: A Sanderson Curiosity by Brandon Sanderson

Book #19 of 2026:

Long Chills & Case Dough: A Sanderson Curiosity by Brandon Sanderson

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

This short novella was written in the early 2000s and included as an extra gift to backers of author Brandon Sanderson’s massive Kickstarter campaign in 2023 (now subtitled as A Sanderson Curiosity, just like the drafts of The Way of Kings Prime and Dragonsteel Prime that the writer likewise put out as free bonus content.) And there it languished in my own Kindle library for several years before I stumbled across it again recently and remembered I had never actually read the thing.

Even approached as an unpublished beginner’s work, however, it’s a bit of a rough time. The basic premise is that a private detective in 2151 takes a case while narrating like a 1920s gumshoe, but that’s a genre mashup I’ve seen done better elsewhere, and the plot isn’t developed well enough to make up for the obnoxious protagonist. There’s no real reason for his affectation, which no one else in the setting shares, and he’s prone to delivering sexist prose far beyond the old style that Sanderson is imitating. To offer just one example, here’s the character describing a new client:

“This dish was such a looker that my orbs nearly burst from the gandering. She had a sleek body as full as her dress was sheer, and her kisser was gussied up with a bright, inviting shade of red. Her blue eyes were wide like a doe’s, and she had a look of quiet vulnerability on her divine face. She was a redhead, which is my favorite—along with blondes and brunettes.”

He speaks in that demeaning way out loud too, and there’s nothing like the usual Sandersonian worldbuilding or story arcs to help distract from it. Instead, the hero seems to solve the mystery by pure intuition and lucky coincidence, which doesn’t make for a very exciting read. You’ll find a glimmer of raw talent on display, and I suppose it’s interesting to consider through a lens of where the author’s career has gone in the decades since, but it’s ultimately not a title I would recommend to anyone.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: The Heir Apparent by Rebecca Armitage

Book #18 of 2026:

The Heir Apparent by Rebecca Armitage

Three-and-a-half stars, rounded up. I generally don’t like when a narrating protagonist keeps important things hidden from the reader for so long, but the character in this case is so well-rendered that it’s easy to be invested in her dilemmas regardless. She’s not a perfect person — she cheats on the man she supposedly loves, for instance, and she’s riddled with anxiety and an unaddressed eating disorder — but such flaws help make her feel more genuine in a scenario that could easily fall into daydream territory instead.

The plot, after all, might come across as wish fulfillment at first glance: like a cross between The Princess Diaries and The Goblin Emperor, our heroine learns that her estranged father and brother, who were respectively next in line for the British throne, have died in a sudden accident that leaves her the presumptive heir in their place. But she had left the royal life behind years ago to pursue a career as a doctor in far-off Australia, which is a future now threatened by the responsibilities that have fallen into her lap.

I really appreciate that all of this is still presented as a choice for twenty-nine-year-old Lexi. She can embrace her old role as Princess Alexandrina and agree to become her grandmother the queen’s successor, but she is also free to abdicate if she so decides. Two major factors complicate the decision in either direction: a budding romance back home that she will almost certainly have to give up if she accepts the new title, and her cruel conniving uncle whom she knows would make a terrible king if she steps aside.

Along the way the aforementioned secrets are slowly revealed to us, delivering a dose of gossip and potential scandal that seems drawn from author Rebecca Armitage’s time as a journalist covering the real-life royal family (in tenor, at least, if presumably not in any actual specifics). The ending doesn’t entirely work for me, and I wish certain backstory elements hadn’t been treated as surprise twists when they’re so obviously top-of-mind for the young woman, but overall it’s an enjoyable read.

[Content warning for depression, suicide, homophobia, racism, and classism.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Yellow Jessamine by Caitlin Starling

Book #17 of 2026:

Yellow Jessamine by Caitlin Starling

This horror-fantasy title has potential, but the novella format ultimately works against it by not offering enough room for adequate development of its ideas. An herbalist and shipping magnate in a blockaded city becomes aware of a strange new illness spreading through the population, rendering its victims into unsettling members of an apparent hive-mind. Worse yet, they seem to be interested in her specifically, and perhaps in her secrets, like how she originally secured her position by poisoning her father and brothers. It’s an intriguing concept, but as with the bare sketch of worldbuilding that we get, it’s never really explained to my satisfaction. The ending also seems somewhat unsupported, though a certain late plot twist is nice and the sapphic undertones of the antiheroine’s relationship with her maid add a welcome degree of specificity to the story. Still, I think this would have been a lot stronger as a full-fledged novel.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: Rocky (1976)

Movie #5 of 2026:

Rocky (1976)

The original Rocky film is one of those neat pieces of media where the on-screen plot aligns nicely with the behind-the-scenes story. Viewers get to see a poor boxer plucked from obscurity to fight the heavyweight champion in a nationally-televised bout, going further than anyone thought possible thanks to his intense training and stubborn determination. Most audiences are meanwhile aware that the production itself is a rags-to-riches tale: Sylvester Stallone was a struggling actor who wrote the script and rejected several lucrative offers over his insistence on playing the title role himself, in a breakout performance that cemented him as a Hollywood star. In the end the project was filmed on-location in Philadelphia for a budget of under a million dollars and earned over two-hundred times that at the box office, in addition to winning the Academy Award for Best Picture.

And overall, it holds up pretty well fifty years on! The pacing isn’t quite what we’d expect of a sports movie, with the training montage set to that iconic theme song only appearing at the 90-minute mark of the two-hour runtime and the match itself relegated to the final 15 minutes. But that’s because this isn’t really a boxing narrative at its heart — it’s a character study of Rocky Balboa, who obviously shares a lot of similarities with his creator. The Italian-American is a well-meaning but garrulous mansplainer who slurs his words, lives in a dingy apartment working as an enforcer for a small-time gangster to pay his rent, and generally isn’t too highly regarded by anyone who knows him. He has a crush on his friend’s sister who works at a local pet shop, although she’s so terminally shy that it’s a long time before it’s clear whether the attraction is requited or not. He’s a bit of a slow thinker, and so it likewise takes him a while to realize what an opportunity he’s been given to get in the ring with Apollo Creed and begin seriously preparing for it.

Ultimately it’s a heartfelt piece that earns its triumphant moments, both in the protagonist managing to ‘go the distance’ and become the first fighter to last all fifteen rounds against the champ (though he does still narrowly lose) and in him steadily wooing / thawing Adrian. I wish she had more interiority, and that our hero wasn’t so pushy in that scene where she’s clearly reluctant to come inside after their date, but there’s a reason the curtain falls on them embracing, rather than the winner of the championship being announced in the background. And as one man’s personal journey that inexplicably became a blockbuster, a franchise, and a fixture in the popular culture, this origin story absolutely rings with its ragged Philly authenticity.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Privateers by Ben Bova

Book #16 of 2026:

Privateers by Ben Bova

This 1985 sci-fi novel is the debut volume that author Ben Bova wrote in what became his Grand Tour sequence, although it would subsequently be rendered non-canonical by real-life events influencing how the later books developed. The story here is set in the mid-twenty-first century, in which the United States has functionally collapsed as a world superpower and an ascendant USSR instead directs the global agenda. If you’re reading through the series in chronological order like I am, you’ll have already met tech CEO Dan Randolph in the 2005 prequel Powersat, but he’s again / first the hero further on in his career now, having recently moved his operations to Venezuela after America nixed its space program.

From there he’s involved in another geopolitical thriller, with the Russians attempting to box all their rivals out of a lucrative asteroid-mining project. Seizing on a loophole in the law that holds no country technically owns the materials until they’ve landed at a processing station, the astronaut executive starts leading his people on piratical raids of the unmanned transfer vessels, while working behind the scenes to rally the nations to rise up together against the Soviet strong-arming.

Four decades on, it’s a pretty dated piece of fiction, and not only for the historical predictions that it obviously gets wrong. Prepare yourself also for language like a person being called “a Japanese” and behavior like the protagonist blithely patting his secretary on the rear, not to mention falling passionately for a woman young enough to be his daughter. This is not a work that takes its women very seriously overall; Dan’s other romance with the American president feels much sillier here than it does when she’s still a senator in Powersat (which retcons their personal history anyway), and his conflict with an enemy bureaucrat is in part an unnecessary love triangle with the younger lady. On the other hand, I suppose it’s eerily prescient in showing the residents of a decadent and isolationist USA clamoring to literally “make the country great again.”

This is not the strongest plot around, but it’s basically serviceable, especially given the context in which it was produced. Still, I’m eager for the saga to go farther off-planet and grow more speculative in the releases ahead.

[Content warning for gun violence, suicide, rape, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: The Highest Science by Gareth Roberts

Book #15 of 2026:

Doctor Who: The Highest Science by Gareth Roberts (Virgin New Adventures #11)

Author Gareth Roberts hasn’t had any fiction published professionally for almost a decade, ever since falling down the same transphobic pipeline as J. K. Rowling. (I can’t say how much of that is by choice versus industry blacklist, though I know he was specifically dropped from a planned Doctor Who anthology in 2019 after other writers threatened to withdraw their own submissions.) Unfortunately before then he was a recurring contributor to the Whoniverse both on and off the screen, beginning with this novel in 1993. I debated skipping it and his others in this series, but have contented myself with the knowledge that they’re long out-of-print and he isn’t profiting any by the secondhand edition that I read.

Setting his bigotries aside — which I realize not every reader will want or be able to do — this is a relatively strong installment of the Virgin New Adventures line, released during the franchise’s wilderness years when it wasn’t on television. Bernice Summerfield is still a fairly new companion for the Seventh Doctor at this point, but she feels better-defined than in the previous volume, even if she does spend half of this one on a brainwashed drug trip. She and her Time Lord friend are tracking a dangerous temporal fluctuation that ultimately brings them to an obscure planet where several other forces are likewise converging: a contingent of militaristic turtle creatures, the humans trying to stay out of their way, and a gang of interstellar criminals who believe the world is a lost fabled one hiding the ultimate weapon of the story’s title.

Roberts delivers some neat flourishes here, including a great twist near the end, and I especially love the scene where the Doctor convinces an enemy guard to delay his execution by reading through a phone book for supposed new orders. It’s also interesting to see how the author plays with gender a bit, despite his later views on the matter, having the single-sex aliens use exclusively male pronouns but still lay eggs and refer to themselves with words like daughter and mother. There’s a Douglas Adams-esque playfulness throughout, as in his episode scripts like The Lodger or The Unicorn and the Wasp, and that definitely helps mitigate the violence and darker themes, which can sometimes be overbearing in these novels. I just wish someone else had written it!

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

★★★★☆

Book Review: Slow Gods by Claire North

Book #14 of 2026:

Slow Gods by Claire North

Here’s a space opera full of imaginative worldbuilding detail that still manages to feel empty without compelling characters to populate the setting. Both the narrator’s tone and the general plot remind me of the Animorphs spinoff The Ellimist Chronicles, in which an alien being survives the destruction of his homeworld and steadily ascends to become something eldritch and extradimensional. The particulars in this novel involve the protagonist dying in the uncanny region that enables faster-than-light travel and somehow getting put back together again (or at least copied from a rough blueprint of the original), while the local apocalypse is a couple centuries away, with the news provoking massive social unrest. Our hero isn’t the only refugee to flee the area, though he’s perhaps the only one to have gained untold powers that render him functionally immortal.

This is the sort of sci-fi that’s brimming with big ideas — the queernormativity and variety of genders alone! — and to be fair, that leading figure has plenty of time to spend thinking about them. I just wish he didn’t dictate them at us in dry exposition so frequently, or that there wasn’t such a sense of remove in his affect. The story includes elements that should prove thrillingly topical, from personal betrayals to police brutality and genocides, but they’re all rendered flat in the execution. I know author Claire North has written effective deities before in works like The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, but I can’t remember any of them ever seeming so thoroughly disengaged in the events around them. (And despite my earlier Ellimist comparison, that K. A. Applegate creation likewise retained his essential emotions throughout, in a way that Mawukana na-Vdnaze appears incapable of.)

It adds up to an interesting fictional history account or encyclopedia entry, rather than a proper tale with anyone worth rooting for or against, in my opinion. I would read more from a series set in these parts, but I don’t think Maw was the right choice of viewpoint for it at all.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025 edited by Nnedi Okorafor

Book #13 of 2026:

The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025 edited by Nnedi Okorafor

I got my hopes up during the introduction to this collection, in which series editor John Joseph Adams explains the selection methodology: he himself read several thousand short stories of genre fiction published throughout a single calendar year, aiming to consume everything that possibly qualified, and picked eighty of his favorites — forty science fiction and forty fantasy — to pass to volume editor Nnedi Okorafor with their authorship redacted. She then read through those anonymous finalists and chose the ten she liked best from each category, resulting in the present publication.

I should have remembered that I had given three-star ratings to the two previous Adams-edited anthologies that I’ve read (Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse and A People’s Future of the United States), suggesting in the most neutral of terms that he and I do not share identical tastes in the matter. In this book especially, I feel like he and/or Okorafor — editing here for the first time — are often too impressed by a distinctive speculative premise and not putting enough weight into the shape of the tale that follows and the writer’s ability to deliver a satisfying ending.

(I have a few minor production critiques, too. Why put 2025 in the title when these pieces were all originally released from January through December 2024? Are we sure ‘fantasy’ is a more accurate label than ‘horror’ for certain selections? And why arrange the author notes by last name instead of order of appearance and stick them all together in an appendix far from the contents they describe? These aren’t dealbreakers, but they’re a little irksome regardless.)

Still, the work is more three-star solid than two-star subpar overall, and some of the entries are of course better than others. My own highlights would include:

“The River Judge” by S. L. Huang, in which an innkeeper’s daughter loses her childhood and becomes a force to be reckoned with in cleaning up after her father’s crimes;
“The Weight of Your Own Ashes” by Carlie St. George, in which an alien existing across multiple physical bodies dies in one, forcing a confrontation with her human girlfriend about the rest in a neat metaphor for more conventional bigotries;
“Yarns” by Susan Palwick, in which an older teacher learns how her perspective remains valuable even in a dystopian future that seems opposed to books and learning;
“A Stranger Knocks” by Tananarive Due, in which a Black couple in the Jim Crow south face off against a vampiric evil; and
“Ushers” by Joe Hill, in which a guy who gets premonitions of death has to explain to the FBI why he keeps narrowly avoiding mass-casualty events (somewhat similar to his dad’s recent novella Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream, come to think of it).

It’s a mix of familiar voices and ones new to me, whom I’ll now need to either check out further or else know to avoid. And in the end, isn’t that exactly what you’d hope for from a project like this?

[Content warning for racism, homophobia, transphobia, sexual assault, gun violence, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

The Matrix movies, ranked

Overall rating: ★★★★☆

Previously on Film Franchise Fridays:

★★★☆☆ Bill & Ted
★★★★☆ Indiana Jones
★★★☆☆ Jason Bourne