The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Sphere by Michael Crichton

Book #31 of 2024:

Sphere by Michael Crichton

I went through a big Michael Crichton phase when I was younger, and I had vague memories of this 1987 title being one of my favorites from back then. Revisiting it now, I’m not quite so impressed, although that may have something to do with how the sci-fi genre has continued to grow over the decades since. This adventure no longer feels as distinctive in its execution, and it features a few Dan Brown-esque deliveries of unnecessary exposition, explaining fairly basic concepts like black holes and the mythological Medusa to our cast of expert scientists.

(The book has aged poorly in other ways, too — the white, male protagonist reads as a clear author stand-in, and he’s conspicuously framed as more rational and level-headed than the angry Black man and intensely-sexualized white woman who are his primary colleagues.)

But Crichton was an ideas guy more than anything else. The mind originally behind works like Jurassic Park and Westworld turns in a similarly exciting premise here: a civilian is whisked away by the military to consult on what he thinks will be an airplane crash, only to discover it’s actually a strange artifact buried beneath the ocean. A few hairpin twists follow in quick succession, any one of which could have been an interesting direction to stick with for the rest of the story. The thing is an alien spaceship! No, it’s a vessel from Earth’s own future that came back in time and crash-landed centuries ago! No, it’s that but it does contain an extraterrestrial object in its storage bay — the titular Sphere at last — that it picked up somewhere along its travels.

Eventually, the characters start communicating with the metal device, which exhibits a petty childlike personality akin to the little god-tyrant from the “It’s a Good Life” episode of The Twilight Zone. Impossible-looking creatures and other weird occurrences manifest around them, seemingly brought on by the intelligence within the orb, which they ultimately realize is responding to their own subconscious wants and fears. There follows a mildly-claustrophobic race against time as the majority of the underwater team succumb to various accidents and the survivors seek to wield the new power against one another.

I don’t mind spoiling all that in the space of this review, both because the novel is so old and because none of those developments strikes me as especially radical in the end. The strength of any techno-thriller lies with its action as much as its speculative elements, and the writer delivers a competent but not extraordinary performance at both. If he had gotten to the main point sooner and dwelt there for longer, I might feel more strongly about the work today.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Hallowe’en Party by Agatha Christie

Book #30 of 2024:

Hallowe’en Party by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #41)

This isn’t necessarily the worst Agatha Christie story, but it’s certainly one of her more repugnant ones. Multiple characters are casually racist, ableist, and homophobic, often to the point of spouting eugenic beliefs about certain people’s predisposition to violence, which come alongside their various inane complaints about modern society in general. None of that is exactly new for this author, but at her best, she sometimes manages to convey a slight distance to imply that such views might perhaps belong to her creations alone. Here the cruel tone so suffuses the work that it’s hard to read it as anything but an endorsement.

Against that dark backdrop, a thirteen-year-old girl is viciously drowned at the titular holiday gathering, her body left facedown in the tub that had previously been used for the innocent activity of bobbing for apples. Some writers would recognize that such a murder of a child is a particularly horrific crime and have their detectives treat the subject with powerful emotions of righteous fury or despair. For Hercule Poirot, it’s an intellectual exercise like any other case, rather than anything to get especially worked up about. Christie also has her mouthpieces describe the girl and her surviving friend in overtly sexualized terms, with the latter eventually confessing her love for a man who turns out to be her father. No thank you!

Setting all that aside has been too much for this reader. If you can manage, the remaining plot revolves around the victim’s boast at the party earlier in the evening that she had once witnessed a murder herself. Assuming that that must have been the killer’s motive for striking again, Poirot investigates several recent unexplained deaths and disappearances in the surrounding area, and of course puts all the evidence together in order to declaim a solution at his conventional parlor-room denouement. There’s no dwelling on the loss of the young teen — or her younger brother, killed while the protagonist was on the scene dallying and complaining about how much his feet hurt! — just a showcase of how clever the old Belgian has been and an offhand note that the murderer drank a fast-acting poison to avoid apprehension. It’s a weak ending to a flawed mystery, which I suppose explains why the loose Kenneth Branagh adaptation A Haunting in Venice appears to have jettisoned nearly everything but the character names.

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: The Game of Courts by Victoria Goddard

Book #29 of 2024:

The Game of Courts by Victoria Goddard

Another interesting little Nine Worlds / Lays of the Hearth-Fire prequel novella that sheds light on a minor character from The Hands of the Emperor — in this case, his Radiancy’s esteemed personal valet Conju an Vilius — but isn’t quite robust enough of a story to stand fully on its own. Instead, we get an abbreviated look at the cavalier’s arc in the wake of the Fall: losing himself in empty debauchery, realizing his life could still have purpose despite its losses, entering the Emperor’s staff, working his way up to his desired position, and unexpectedly befriending his lord’s idealistic new secretary Cliopher, whom he initially mistrusts and looks down upon. It’s a tale with the same cozy fantasy vibes as most of this series, and I love how the protagonist dedicates himself to an ideal of competency and then goes about steadily achieving it, almost like those great wordless montages on Better Call Saul. It’s also amusing to see a more skeptical perspective on how Kip’s early bureaucratic reforms would have appeared from the outside, after getting to know them so intimately in Hands.

This plot runs roughly simultaneously with the book Petty Treasons, and a few scenes even repeat, albeit from our new POV. I think the title probably works best in conjunction with prior releases like that for readers seeking a deeper understanding of how certain interpersonal dynamics originally came into effect, although I can’t yet speak for how it’s informed by the volume Terec and the Wild, which tracks the hero’s younger days and his ill-fated romance with a boy from his homeland. That composite feel for this saga can sometimes make it a challenge to assign ratings to individual entries, but this one ultimately seems a worthy addition to the rest. I’ll give it three-and-a-half stars, rounded up.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Red Rabbit by Alex Grecian

Book #28 of 2024:

Red Rabbit by Alex Grecian

The Weird Western vibes of this adventure novel are delightful, presenting a version of the post-Civil War midwest that’s populated with demons, ghouls, and similar entities, all treated matter-of-factly as threats that an unwary traveler might encounter like any other. I’m less sold on the plot, however, which finds a posse of strange bedfellows journeying together across that land to kill a particular witch. While this is the main thrust of the story, the protagonists’ motivation for making the trek isn’t entirely clear, especially given the occasional scenes from their target’s point-of-view that establish her as a relatively sympathetic figure (though definitely a sorceress of great power). And a late reveal that the quest has been magically-influenced all long doesn’t make it any more satisfying to read, either.

Besides missing a feeling that there’s really anything driving the action, this is a fun little picaresque that goes to some surprisingly gory extremes. The characters and their meandering storyline and loose worldbuilding rules aren’t enough to ever elevate the title into something special — and I think it’s odd how author Alex Grecian repeatedly uses the word “cowboy” in more of the modern sense of a drifter, rather than the period-appropriate definition of a working ranch hand — but it’s hard to beat the general atmosphere of the text.

[Content warning for gun violence, suicide, racism, torture, cannibalism, and violence against animals.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: True Detective, season 4

TV #8 of 2024:

True Detective, season 4

Officially subtitled Night Country, the latest installment of this sporadic anthology series takes place in a remote section of Alaska, during the time of year when it stays dark for weeks on end. Unsurprisingly, that turns out to be a great setting for showcasing the program’s typical themes of violence, corruption, conspiracy, and potential Lovecraftian horror. There’s even another cold case (no pun intended) weighing on the protagonists in the present, although unlike in previous seasons, the action unfolds pretty linearly, without the actors having to portray the same roles across multiple decades.

The initial premise is so reminiscent of John Carpenter’s movie The Thing as to feel like an intentional homage: a secluded research base uncovers something primordial deep in the ice, which seems to have turned the scientists against one another, or perhaps just driven them out of their minds. There’s also an unexpected connection to the unsolved murder of a local native woman from several years beforehand, which reunites the former partners who had worked on that case together. It’s a tour de force for the top-billed Jodie Foster as the jaded police chief antiheroine, but relative newcomer Kali Reis (better known for her boxing career) playing the bitter junior officer more than holds her own in the many scenes they share. Shout-out to the supporting cast too, including a put-upon Christopher Eccleston who’s somehow even less recognizable than he was as a pointy-eared Marvel villain.

The supernatural-leaning elements are of mixed effectiveness for me. That piece of the show’s fabric has never been more explicit than it is here, but in practice, it largely boils down to a few jumpscares and the hallucinations brought on by one character’s hereditary mental condition. Technically, it’s ambiguous whether these visions are originating from a higher plane or not, and the Alaskan environment admittedly invites a liminal reading where the rules of reality are more permeable than we might expect of the crime thriller genre. But ultimately the scripts aim to preserve the conflicting interpretations of all the spooky business in a way I don’t find entirely satisfying, much as I don’t think the minor links back to Rust’s philosophical ramblings from season one are at all necessary here.

For me, the story is better without all the mumbo-jumbo. Just two dogged cops, dealing with their personal demons and complicated professional history as they seek the truth that will bring an overdue measure of justice on behalf of a slain innocent, opposite the entrenched powers of the area with a vested interest in keeping things buried. That may sound similar to where this show has already gone twice before — let’s not talk about the misfire of season two — but it’s different enough to be worth the watch, and as electrifying as ever in this new female-led permutation.

[Content warning for gun violence, suicide, domestic abuse, death of a child, racism, torture, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Book of Thunder by John Peel

Book #27 of 2024:

Book of Thunder by John Peel (Diadem #4)

The third Diadem story wrapped up the major plot arcs that had been driving the action thus far, which means that this next volume has to function as a bit of a proof-of-concept for the saga moving forward. What are these books about, now that the threats of Sarman, the Triad, and the universe’s unbalanced magic have all been addressed and neutralized?

The answer, at least for now, appears to be a sequence of standalone crises. The previous novel ended on a sudden reveal that the protagonists’ unicorn friend Thunder was in some unspecified danger, which this sequel takes as its premise and resolves before springing its own dramatic cliffhanger out of nowhere: Score has been struck with a curse orchestrated by his gangster father back on Earth, where the other heroes will now have to visit in order to save him.

But first, the child sorcerers must help the unicorns against their latest enemy, who presents himself as one of their kind challenging Thunder for control of the herd but turns out to be a body-hopping magician up to vaguely nefarious ends. (His plan is basically to earn the animals’ trust, kill them for the magical properties in their horns, and then find another human life to take over. It’s a solid idea, but both deployed and defeated way too quickly. He even could have succeeded in goading Helaine into killing him — the act that triggers the switch — if he hadn’t monologued his whole M.O. at her beforehand. And no, there’s no mention of how she’s only just escaped a similar threat to her personhood from her past/future self on Jewel.)

As an episodic adventure, this is largely fine, especially given the intended middle-grade audience. I have my quibbles, like the fact that post-Triad we’re still seeing pictographic puzzles for the kids to solve, some without any justification for who would have written them and why (but not treated as a mystery or ever returned to, so far as I can remember). But it’s not actively bad for the most part; it’s just sort of blandly generic fantasy storytelling. And I’m sure the ‘horse girl’ demographic would likely feel more strongly towards the interlude when our warrior heroine transforms herself into a juvenile unicorn to secretly infiltrate the villain’s circle.

Personally, I’m more struck by the quieter domestic moments of series continuity here. Pixel, Score, and Helaine return to the castle of the foe they vanquished in the last book, and start treating it as their home. The blue-skinned boy still canonically has a crush on Helaine, but we’re starting to see more subtext of developing feelings between her and Score. Meanwhile their allies Oracle and Shanara each pop up again, and even work together for the first time. Those are the dynamics that keep me reading more than the current quest of the day, but it’s not exactly a gripping narrative.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: King: A Life by Jonathan Eig

Book #26 of 2024:

King: A Life by Jonathan Eig

This 2023 title is a major new biography of the assassinated civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., representing the first such work to be published in over three decades. It draws on extensive interviews with his surviving loved ones and colleagues, as well as recently-uncovered archival material like declassified FBI surveillance files and the manuscript to his father’s unpublished memoir. These documents help author Jonathan Eig paint an in-depth portrait of his subject, walking readers through every stage of the reverend’s fraught career pursuing equality for Black folks and other marginalized populations.

There are few big revelations here, although I was interested to learn both the extent of the Bureau’s monitoring of King and the fact that it primarily stemmed from his friendship with Stanley Levison, a Jewish man with former Communist ties whom J. Edgar Hoover erroneously believed was somehow using the preacher’s activism to subvert American capitalism. (While Eig doesn’t make the point explicitly, there are definite echoes to the modern conspiracy theory that accuses Jews of secretly fomenting social unrest amongst other minority groups.) The writer also places King’s radical commitment to non-violent protest in the context of his contemporaries, indicating when the wider movement generally supported his tactics as well as those moments when criticism flared and he seemed to have lost a clear moral mandate. Above all, the book illustrates what a disservice we do to King and his evolving philosophies — at the time of his death encompassing objections to the Vietnam War, a fear that racism in the north might be more extreme and intractable than in the south, and a mission to eradicate poverty nationwide — when we reduce him to his most famous “I have a dream” soundbyte (stirring though it was and remains).

Eig shows us the human Martin too, an individual with his share of uncertainties and weaknesses. He cheated on his wife with multiple women, was rarely home to spend time with his kids, and plagiarized many of his early speeches along with a significant portion of his doctoral dissertation. Like Marvel’s Stan Lee, he lied about elements of his personal history as he retold it, strategically shaping a larger-than-life persona that would render his arguments more appealing to his growing national audience. He was also attacked and severely injured several times over the years, and spoke bitterly / prophetically that he would likely be killed before achieving his goals. This account captures all of that, as well as the background violence of the era — the rapes, the lynchings, the police brutality, and more — that Black people and their allies were experiencing. It all weighed heavily on his soul every time he considered orchestrating a new demonstration somewhere that would inevitably spark such backlash among the most outspoken local racists.

Although the book doesn’t dwell too long on King’s legacy, it does a fine job of conveying his organizing and oratorical skills and everything they helped him to achieve. He did not originally set out to become a leader — or even a clergyman at all — but he was repeatedly in the right place to step up when various opportunities arose. He had friendly working relationships with US presidents even while their intelligence officers spied on him, and he used his platform to continually shine a light on injustice everywhere. While the movement started before him and continued on after his murder, he was utterly instrumental in a way Eig’s writing makes plain.

★★★★☆

TV Review: Animorphs, season 2

TV #7 of 2024:

Animorphs, season 2

At just six episodes in length (following 20 the year before), this second season of the late-90s TV adaptation of Animorphs plays out rather like a cheap afterthought. While I ultimately found some of the first run‘s quirks to be mildly endearing, it’s harder to mount a defense for any of the new choices that this one adds. The biggest plot element drawn directly from the K. A. Applegate books is the introduction of Erek the android, but that turns out to be merely the latest piece that’s bungled beyond all recognition in the transition to the screen, rendering a poignant critique of pacifism and chilling dose of childhood trauma into a simple chase through the woods and a string of goofy technobabble. This version of the character, a putative new ally for our heroes, also only appears once more, in the episode right after his debut — although I suppose perhaps he might have kept on recurring, if the series hadn’t been canceled.

As always for an adaptation project like this: I don’t really mind if the conversion to a new medium results in changes away from the source material, but it’s frustrating when the replacement story simply isn’t very good on its own merits. And this is pretty far from great.

We get no follow-up on Tobias regaining access to his human form at the end of last season: nothing about what that development means for him, or his love interest Rachel, or the rest of their friends who had thought him forever trapped as a hawk. Theoretically, as in the novels, he’s still primarily a bird and can only become his old self again for the usual two-hour limit. In practice, however, we basically now only ever see his teenage actor, just as we spend almost no time with Ax or Visser Three outside of human morph. (That enemy, confusingly, is given a new primary morph here, with the explanation that ‘Victor Trent’ was lost in the collapsing Yeerk Pool. But clearly the Visser escaped, which renders that justification completely nonsensical. Behind the scenes, I’m guessing that the Trent performer couldn’t return to the show for whatever reason, but the issue isn’t handled well by the scripts.)

Other weaknesses from the early episodes remain. The kids are still talking openly about all the alien invasion stuff when they’re out at the mall or wherever, and we aren’t seeing battle morphs so much as lots of little creatures like lizards and mice that can be used for surveillance and are, crucially, much easier / cheaper to film. There aren’t even any attempts this time to depict non-human Controller species like the Hork-Bajir, and there are certainly no heavy themes like the guilt and angst that regularly pained the child warriors on the page. Again, these are all divergences from the Applegate text that add up to a cartoonishly flimsy overall effect.

I can’t find any clear accounts of why exactly the series was canceled — though I imagine both the morphing effects budget and the low critical reception played a role — or when the writers learned the news, so I don’t want to judge too harshly that the program ends without any major resolution to its ongoing storylines. As with the last Classic Doctor Who serial in 1989, there’s a quick closing voiceover suggesting that the adventures will go on without our watching, which in this case means the protagonists continuing to find ways to fight back against the Yeerk invaders. But that’s not much of a takeaway for a show that’s never managed to sell the threat as convincingly as those Scholastic paperbacks sure did.

This season: ★★☆☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Seasons ranked: 1 > 2

Book Review: Unconquerable Sun by Kate Elliott

Book #25 of 2024:

Unconquerable Sun by Kate Elliott (The Sun Chronicles #1)

The hook for this 2020 space opera is that it’s loosely based on the life of Alexander the Great, as represented here by the female heir to a future queer-normative interstellar empire. In practice, however, I find myself wanting more of that princess character, and less of the other POV narrators, most of whom eventually make up her retinue. (The additional viewpoints aren’t redundant per se, but I feel as though the story could have been channeled more productively by keeping them to a minimum.) There are mentions of the royal heroine’s secret romance with one of her handmaidens, for instance, but neither woman is given enough clear characterization for that to especially matter to readers. Instead, we spend a lot of time on the instant and forbidden attraction between two different protagonists — he’s neurologically programmed to go into a murderous frenzy whenever he sees her face for some reason — and don’t really get to know Sun as a driving force in her own destiny.

Overall the political intrigue of the plot isn’t bad, but the historical model restricts its possibilities, and the worldbuilding never rises above its vague pan-Asian influences to allow the setting to register as anything remarkable. I probably still like the novel more than I dislike it as a whole, hence my three-star rating, but I doubt I’ll ever get around to the sequels.

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

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: The Marvels (2023)

Movie #1 of 2024:

The Marvels (2023)

A bit of a strange sequel to 2019’s excellent Captain Marvel film. In addition to teaming up the returning cosmic superheroine with the now-adult Monica Rambeau (introduced and given powers on WandaVision) and teenage fangirl Kamala Khan (introduced and given powers on Ms. Marvel), this title takes place in the present-day of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, forgoing all the period-piece fun of its 90s-set predecessor. There’s still plenty of comedy, especially where Goose the flerken is concerned or whenever the three leads get to share a space together without fighting anyone, but I miss the charming retro throwbacks like pagers and Blockbuster stores that the last movie offered.

The premise, as set up in the Ms. Marvel season one finale: for some reason, the ‘Marvels’ have begun switching places with one another any time they activate their respective abilities. Or something. In truth, although we eventually get a nice training montage of the team learning to do this more intentionally, the exact logic of how the effect triggers or not escapes me, which robs this element of much impact. (It’s supposedly consistent enough that the protagonists can strategize accordingly, but there are lots of moments when the CGI lightshow flares and nobody swaps around.)

We find out that the proximate cause behind the anomaly is a bland villain trying to destroy other worlds in order to save her own. Again, the plot mechanism here is fine, but poorly executed — opening stable portals in spacetime to siphon off natural resources like air and water and, uh, sunlight doesn’t seem like it would actually accomplish much in the long run? It’s also another example of this franchise’s weird reactionary politics: yes, Carol Danvers unleashed catastrophic climate change on your planet and feels bad about it, but it’s an activist seeking to reverse that fate who turns to gleeful murder and has to be punched to death for her crimes.

The best parts of this movie are the character interactions, and specifically those involving Kamala and her family, all ported over from the Ms. Marvel show. And it’s neat that this adventure features a predominantly female-led cast, with Nick Fury — thankfully not so grumpy as he was on Secret Invasion — as the largest supporting male role. The MCU still struggles with representing diversity both on-screen and behind the camera, but this is the latest indication of how far we’ve come from its macho early days.

But there’s just not much of a story here, unfortunately.

★★★☆☆