The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Stephen Leeds: Death and Faxes by Brandon Sanderson, Max Epstein, David Pace, and Michael Harkins

Book #125 of 2023:

Stephen Leeds: Death and Faxes by Brandon Sanderson, Max Epstein, David Pace, and Michael Harkins

[Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with the first credited author of this book.]

This audiobook production is set within Brandon Sanderson’s existing Stephen Leeds / Legion trilogy, and an afterword makes it clear that he really only licensed out the characters and series premise to the other three writers listed on the cover. The result is a pale imitation of what made the earlier books work — to the extent that they do; I have mixed opinions on those original novellas myself — with a drearily slow investigation and a love interest so poorly written that I was erroneously convinced she would turn out to be a villain in disguise, especially after the protagonist immediately starts referring to the hacker he’s tracking as a man, despite not having any evidence as to the suspect’s actual identity. The tech-thriller genre and the concept of the hero hallucinating imaginary subject matter experts are inherited, but not taken anywhere new or interesting this time.

My ratings for the associated Sanderson stories have ranged from two stars to four, and since this volume is unequivocally worse than all of them, I suppose I have no choice but to give it my lowest possible score in turn. That’s an unfortunate surprise, as I’ve liked some of the author’s previous co-written ventures, like Sunreach with Janci Patterson or Dark One: Forgotten with Dan Wells, although I now suspect those were truer collaborations than this. Still, it’s certainly given me pause about jumping on any future titles just because they carry Sanderson’s name on the front. It hurts me to say this about one of my favorite novelists, but he’s really damaged his brand for me here.

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

★☆☆☆☆

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Book Review: Orion Among the Stars by Ben Bova

Book #124 of 2023:

Orion Among the Stars by Ben Bova (Orion #5)

Author Ben Bova’s time-traveling super-soldier Orion was originally introduced as an agent who could be sent by his all-powerful Creators to anywhere in the continuum that was in some way under threat, but for the most part, each subsequent novel in the series has ended up stranding him somewhere in earth’s ancient past in our comfortable established history. This fifth volume is a welcome change from that pattern, finding the hero instead placed in a thrilling military sci-fi adventure, where he commands a squadron of beleaguered troops in a desperate interstellar war. His arrogant overlords are as demanding and inscrutable as ever, and his star-crossed love interest is absent as usual, but the plot rhythms are all different, and the unfolding story allows for some interesting new worldbuilding including a loose Lovecraftian tie-in. Swapping swords for blasters hearkens back to a certain memorable epoch near the end of the first book as well, not to mention other genre touchstones like Starship Troopers, and is theoretically a great step forward for the saga.

It’s unfortunate (and hard to ignore on a reread) that the most promising aspects of this title do not in fact ever amount to anything in the final remaining sequel, but that’s hardly a fault here and now. On its own terms, it’s a neat little space opera in miniature — somewhat dated to its 1995 publication year, but overall one of the better Orion installments. You could read just the debut novel and this one and walk away satisfied, I think.

[Content warning for gun violence, torture, gore, racism, Islamophobia, mention of rape, and mention of violence against children.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales, and Gavin Edwards

Book #123 of 2023:

MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales, and Gavin Edwards

A lengthy and informative behind-the-scenes account of the movie and TV juggernaut known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with plenty of in-depth production details that I didn’t previously know, despite my being a pretty big fan of that series and having seen every single entry released thus far. The authors do a good job of relating the unlikely history of the record-smashing franchise born from a struggling comics company, especially when it comes to contextualizing the existing superhero adaptation landscape at launch, the complicated character rights with Marvel products like Spidey and the X-Men at rival studios, and the relative obscurity / unpopularity of now-household names like Iron Man and Captain America. (The former, in fact, was apparently only greenlit as the centerpiece of the interlocking saga’s debut film after a survey panel found he was the hero that kids were most interested in playing with as a toy upon hearing about the various powers of all the different options.) The whole enterprise was a bigger gamble than it might seem in hindsight, and was certainly less well-planned than the producers have liked to claim in public.

All of that is interesting to learn as a rags-to-riches triumph that perhaps carries the seeds of its eventual self-defeat — the Marvel machine scaling up to a pace where quality controls suffered and individual creators felt stifled under the uniform house style and the weight of connected continuity obligations — but as a book, this project is considerably hampered by its rather arbitrary 2023 publication date. The writers cover everything up to when their manuscript was presumably due in to the editors, but troubling later events like rising villain star Jonathan Majors getting arrested on assault charges or the newest Ant-Man sequel underperforming at the box office obviously don’t have the necessary distance for a full reckoning. This year could well be a turning point for the MCU, but this particular title isn’t capable of providing the definitive narrative of that as it does for the franchise’s origin story.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: At Bertram’s Hotel by Agatha Christie

Book #122 of 2023:

At Bertram’s Hotel by Agatha Christie (Miss Marple #11)

This… is not a mystery. It’s not even a spy thriller or an in-depth character study, two other genres where author Agatha Christie dabbles on occasion. Instead it’s the story of a police inspector immediately suspecting an outlandish criminal conspiracy involving the staff and many guests at a prestigious hotel and then uncovering just enough circumstantial evidence to prompt one of the perpetrators into confessing that he’s right. Miss Marple is there on the fringes of the case as well, although she doesn’t contribute much overall.

While a couple elements suggest a more typical whodunnit — the protagonist is brought into the affair when an old priest goes missing from his room; later in one of the final chapters, a security guard is shot dead by a temporarily-unknown assailant — we’re offered little by way of concrete clues, and the main character’s initial theory of wrongdoing is never challenged. It’s a maddeningly bizarre scheme, too, with doppelgangers providing alibis and identical cars with similar license plate numbers further confusing witness testimony, all to rob a train and smuggle the loot out of the country via luggage leaving the hotel. Everything is needlessly complex, and the whole novel feels like just an excuse for the writer to dwell on the sort of ornate hospitality establishment from her younger days that was then going out of fashion. It’s an evocative setting, and Marple herself is fun as ever, but the plot is far too thin to be effective.

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Resurrection Walk by Michael Connelly

Book #121 of 2023:

Resurrection Walk by Michael Connelly (Mickey Haller #7)

Author Michael Connelly’s latest novel delivers another solid installment of courtroom drama that never quite twists in an unexpected direction or otherwise kicks into any higher gear. The plot: attorney Mickey Haller is contacted by a woman serving time in prison for killing her husband, who protests that she’s innocent and wants him to represent her in her appeal. And then he does, with the help of his half-brother Harry Bosch as the lead case investigator. It’s all pretty straightforward, without even any real mystery over who the true culprit must have been, and overall seems like a weaker retread of when the two protagonists first teamed up to work together back in 2015’s The Crossing (when Harry was a lot more conflicted about assisting the defense after decades as a homicide detective for the police).

Connelly is a competent writer who rarely disappoints and occasionally manages to stand out as exceptional within his law-and-order thriller genre. This new title isn’t one of his best, and the ending feels particularly abrupt, with the resolution to a few open matters suggested but ultimately unconfirmed. Still, the book’s presentation of all the procedural beats of its central trial is good enough to get a passing grade out of me. An easy three-out-of-five stars.

[Content warning for gun violence.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros

Book #120 of 2023:

Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros (The Empyrean #2)

A surprisingly-quick sequel to May’s runaway ‘romantasy’ bestseller Fourth Wing, but I suppose the publisher wanted to strike while the iron was hot — no pun intended. This one is just as great, although truth be told, it probably could have been half the length, especially given that accelerated release schedule. At 623 pages in hardback, it’s even longer than its predecessor, and it also falls into more of a discrete two-part structure, with various plots and tensions building to a natural climax midway through the text and resulting in a massive status quo change for the series that easily rivals the cliffhanger ending to book one. As an editor, I likely would have pushed for this volume to end there, and for the remainder of the narrative to have been saved for the next sequel after another six months. And as a reader, I likely would have awarded such a novel a full five stars, as it’s considerably stronger than the somewhat more padded material that follows in this one.

But let’s back up a second. The debut title in this series introduced a dragon-rider cadet in her first year at a literally-cutthroat academy where both the coursework and the fellow students regularly kill a large portion of each graduating class. Though originally trained to be a scribe, she made it through unscathed (at least physically), fell in love with the resident bad boy, and learned some society-shaking secrets about the larger war effort along the way. This sequel finds the heroine reentering her school nevertheless, which is a bit of a relief — I’ll try to keep the Harry Potter comparisons to a minimum, but the framework of daily assignments and schoolyard rivalries helps scaffold the ongoing story as it did in that famous wizarding saga, and is similarly missed when it eventually falls away. This book especially calls to mind The Order of the Phoenix, given that Violet is now in an openly antagonistic situation with a few particular teachers and their lackeys, who abuse and flat-out torture her under guise of the accepted rules.

The back half of the novel is a little messier, though the action in the battlefield and the bedroom alike is still pretty well-written. It gets harder to put up with certain flaws in both the protagonist and her beau, however, each of whom is doing that tiresome ‘keeping secrets from my loved ones in order to protect them even as they beg me to open up’ nonsense and occasionally falling prey to standard rom-com miscommunication woes. There’s a lot of repeated breaking up and making up in the central relationship, which at some point starts registering as clear manufactured drama rather than serious conflict with actual stakes. At least there’s a deadly enemy on the horizon and numerous significant character deaths to remind us of what really matters.

But I’m a fantasy reader at heart, not a romance guy. While the steamy bits are fine, it’s primarily the dragons and their bonded humans that I’m here for, and on that front, this volume is a definite success. I wonder how long we’ll have to wait until book 3?

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Bosch: Legacy, season 2

TV #57 of 2023:

Bosch: Legacy, season 2

I’m still mad that the first season of this Bosch spinoff sequel ended with — spoiler alert — its young female lead getting abducted from her home by the serial rapist she’d been investigating. It was a cruel cliffhanger and threatened fridging, and while I have no idea whether there were any serious conversations among the production team about using the event to potentially write her out of the franchise or not, the possibility seemed frustratingly real to me as a viewer who’d watched her grow up from a child on the original series and now had to wait a year-and-a-half to see the matter resolved. It remains an indefensible writing choice.

But given the baggage of that damaging lead-in, I think this second run acquits itself fairly well. Maddie’s kidnapping rightfully dominates the first couple hours, and since her name stays prominently in the credits, I don’t consider it a spoiler to mention this deep into my review that she’s safely rescued in the end. She’s also pointedly not assaulted sexually by her captor — it appears he’s such a racist that he only preys on women of color and targeted the white cop on his trail simply as a bargaining chip — and going forward, the incident seems to complicate but not derail her burgeoning career in law enforcement. It’s probably the best resolution to that particular plotline we could have hoped for.

The remaining episodes largely adapt Michael Connelly’s novel The Crossing, with Honey Chandler stepping in for the Lincoln Lawyer as usual due to the rights issues and that character’s own show over on Netflix. The meaning of the book’s title is twofold: retired LAPD detective Harry Bosch, now a private investigator, has ‘crossed over’ to work for a defense attorney for the first time, and he’s hunting for the elusive point when the true killer(s) crossed paths with both the victim and the innocent defendant. Honestly, I think this story works better on paper, where we get to see the two half-brothers team up, the bad guys are a little more devious and hard to identify, and Bosch feels more obviously conflicted about his new allegiance. But it’s not bad here in its streamlined version.

That’s the program in a nutshell, really: not bad. Never going to win any major awards or attract a large fandom or anything, but a solid middle-of-the-road product that still winds up better than some ambitious bombs I’ve seen lately. This season even manages to make a seemingly-filler subplot about Harry’s hacker friend Mo ultimately connect back with the larger thread about the FBI investigating Bosch and Chandler, which is a pleasant surprise. I’d have to say it’s a perfectly cromulent show overall, especially when it’s not actively threatening its heroines with rape.

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

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Picard, season 1

TV #56 of 2023:

Star Trek: Picard, season 1

Patrick Stewart seems to be enjoying himself in reprising the title role of this Star Trek sequel series set and produced decades after his time on The Next Generation, but this whole first season is built around a huge miscalculation of what sort of story would be worth taking the character out of mothballs over. I wouldn’t dismiss the plot idea outright as a misstep for the franchise — though it cribs more than a bit off Battlestar Galactica with its identical androids who don’t know they’re androids and the video game series Mass Effect with its beacons to signal advanced synthetic lifeforms — but it’s never a tale that feels personal or essential for Jean-Luc Picard to be involved with, and it’s ultimately executed pretty poorly, with wide gaps in the narrative logic and needless retcons to established canon.

We learn that the Romulans, for example, have a super-secret cult operating inside of their already fairly secretive security force, and that this inner group has for millennia been dedicated to the destruction of all artificial life. This is despite the fact that they obviously never did anything to Data or any of the other synths seen in previous Trek series, and while their clandestine nature explains why we’ve never heard of them before, it doesn’t account for how brazenly they operate here or how little they seem to mind having their ancient secret finally outed. And of course, their entire existence carries no dramatic weight, as we’re given no Romulan protagonists to invest in who might plausibly feel betrayed to find out about the order and its murderous actions carried out in their name.

But that’s this season in a nutshell. It goes for flashy concepts that fall apart the longer you think about them, features a few frankly silly coincidences, draws certain key developments out for too many episodes, and tries to cram in last-minute declarations of how much the characters mean to one another despite their having basically just met. As expected for a nostalgia piece like this, the most affecting moments are when the hero rejoins his old crew members Troi and Riker, allowing the program to slow down and reflect on their shared history and catch us up on everything they’ve been doing in the meantime. But that’s a brief interlude in all the underbaked chaos, and must be balanced with how the show brings back three (arguably five!) other named characters from TNG and Voyager only to subsequently kill them off.

On the Voyager connection — yes, Seven of Nine is here too, for some reason. If this year’s storyline doesn’t seem especially relevant for Picard, at least the Borg angle brings this other fan-favorite into play. But the two powerhouses don’t share that many scenes together, leaving her inclusion feeling like yet another squandered opportunity.

I missed The Next Generation when I was growing up, and perhaps came at it too late to ever be a properly committed fan. If you are that sort of viewer, maybe this all works better for you and you’ll be able to glide over the bumps on the emotional wavelength of getting to see your old captain again. Make it so! Engage! Tea, Earl Grey, hot! I won’t deny that there’s a totemic power in those familiar elements, which is something TV and film producers seem to be increasingly realizing in greenlighting belated follow-up projects like this. But spot-the-reference isn’t enough to sustain a work of fiction that hopes to become iconic in its own right, and this one sadly falters along its other dimensions. I hope the writers get more serious in the seasons ahead.

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

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: Loki, season 2

TV #55 of 2023:

Loki, season 2

This first second year of a Disney+ Marvel show could have easily faltered, given the production troubles that have been leaking out about the studio in general, the pivot away from their previous model of standalone miniseries events, and the recent domestic abuse allegations and arrests of major villain actor Jonathan Majors. As it happens, however, the Loki team have struck gold again, producing a followup run that’s even stronger than the series debut (and one that generally keeps Majors to a minimum, though that seems just by random chance, since the timing of the Hollywood strikes would have prevented any significant rewrites after the news about him began to break).

The Doctor Who vibes are turned up full-throttle, and the Bill and Ted ones too, as we get plenty of predestination paradoxes, time loops, and other staples of time-travel action and comedy. This also feels like much more of an ensemble piece, with greater roles for previously one-note characters like Casey and Hunter B-15 and a terrific showcase for new addition and recent Academy Award-winner Ke Huy Quan as O.B.

The ending of the finale loses me a little — it ultimately collapses back into the Loki show alone and features a lot of everyone else staring in wonder at the CGI spectacle before them without the necessary exposition to convey what exactly it means and how it affects them all personally — and I think six episodes probably wasn’t a large enough order to adequately tell this stage of the story. There are a few promising subplots and character arcs early on that wind up getting dropped in the crisis of the last couple hours, and that’s especially frustrating because this corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, featuring variants and branched timelines, seems pretty isolated from what’s going on in the prime continuity of the MCU movies. A hypothetical third season has yet to be announced, nor is it clear how the program and its particular iteration of the protagonist would go on from how this installment ends. So if this is the end of both Loki (the show) and Loki (the villain-turned-reluctant-time-agent), I suspect it will always feel a bit unfinished to me.

Despite my nitpicking, however, I am overwhelmingly very happy with this title. It’s been a lot of fun to watch, and while its own future and that of its wider franchise remain uncertain, it’s a definite bright spot here and now.

[Content warning for body horror.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter

Book #119 of 2023:

Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter

Not everything in this short novel quite works for me, but for the most part, it’s an arresting and bitterly funny satire on modern corporate life, skewering the emptiness and performativity inherent to some degree in any buzzword-heavy tech job. The protagonist describes letting her ‘fake self’ take over to get through the assignments and meaningless rituals of the day, while her boss openly encourages her to think outside the box of legality and morals for ways to bring down their company’s competitors. The atmosphere of the piece is also rather striking — although there isn’t much of a traditional plot arc, author Sarah Rose Etter manages to convey a nicely escalating apocalyptic feel to the narrative of a woman and a culture in crisis, helped along by setting the story in early 2020 on the cusp of the initial COVID-19 outbreak.

As for the less effective elements: I’ve personally found the heroine’s drug abuse to be a little over-the-top (doing regular lines of cocaine just to get through the workday, all while worrying and later confirming that she’s pregnant), and I think representing her lifelong depression as a hovering black hole only she can see is an interesting idea that isn’t really the right choice for this particular project. There are times when Cassie seems meant as an audience-identification figure for a universal critique of the toxic capitalist system around her, and other moments when she’s a weird and traumatized loner whose perspective plainly can’t be trusted, and I’m ultimately not sure the book balances those opposing impulses as well as it could. Still, it’s a sharp bit of writing that isn’t afraid to cast its female characters in an unflattering light, and the figurative language throughout is pretty creative. I’d recommend it, overall.

[Content warning for suicide, gore, domestic abuse, sexism, disordered eating, and abortion.]

★★★★☆