The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Powersat by Ben Bova

Book #5 of 2026:

Powersat by Ben Bova

From 1985 through his death in 2020, author Ben Bova wrote around 30 interconnected novels in a loose sci-fi series he eventually called his Grand Tour. (It’s actually surprisingly difficult to get an exact count there, since this was seldom used as a marketing term and there are some entries with a more tangential connection to the continuity than others. His estate has also continued to publish volumes posthumously from his notes.) I read several of these stories when I was a teen, although I don’t think I ever got to this one, which came out in 2005 but is chronologically the earliest in the setting.

It’s a political thriller of the near-future, roughly analogous to the works of an airport / dad-lit writer like Michael Crichton. Our protagonist is a brilliant tech CEO named Dan Randolph, who has created a geostationary satellite that can collect power directly from the sun and beam it back to Earth at low cost. That would obviously revolutionize the energy industry, which is why a shadowy group of his competitors is trying to sabotage the project by any means necessary. In addition to navigating the resulting corporate espionage and terrorist attacks staged to look like equipment malfunctions, this character is also pining for his beautiful ex-girlfriend, who happens to be a United States senator.

Hopefully you already know from that description alone whether this is your flavor of pulp or not, but just to answer the obvious questions: yes, this is the sort of book where seemingly every woman is young, attractive, and interested in sleeping with the hero, and no, the Middle Eastern villains are not handled with particular nuance. I mean, the main antagonist risks his big scheme of turning the powersat into a weapon of mass destruction and targeting DC with a killer heat wave in order to drug and kidnap the executive’s secretary with the intent of later raping her, which is all really hard to justify under any kind of coherent motivation. I wouldn’t say it’s the worst product of its era, but it certainly hasn’t aged well in the decades since.

Still, this is a propulsive page-turner that sets the stage nicely for the tales of exploration and expansion ahead, as humanity builds off the technologies here to start visiting the rest of our solar system. I’m sure I’ll find some of those installments better and some worse as I progress through them, but this title successfully manages to launch it all with a bang.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Doctor Who: Lux by James Goss

Book #4 of 2026:

Doctor Who: Lux by James Goss

Novelizations are obviously set up for success on the strength of the source material that they inherit, and so one of Ncuti Gatwa’s best outings as the Fifteenth Doctor on Doctor Who unsurprisingly makes for a pretty fun read. And yet that characterization risks shortchanging the great work that author James Goss has done here, not only capturing the entertaining spirit of the piece but also finding ways to present it in an interesting new light — pun intended — or otherwise deepen its themes. It’s a real testament to his abilities that such a visual adventure, in which a living cartoon terrorizes a movie theater and at one point traps the protagonists within a film strip, still feels so engaging on the page. Although not quite as creatively daring as his previous stint adapting The Giggle, this volume shares a playful approach that’s unafraid to put a different spin on an original Russell T. Davies script.

That attitude comes out the clearest in the scenes featuring the three Doctor Who fans, who get to meet their heroes when the Doctor and his companion Belinda Chandra seemingly break the fourth wall to climb out of their television set. It’s a mindbending metafictional gambit in either medium, but the writer opts to use it as an overall framing device, rather than a midway plot twist. If you’re reading this book ahead of watching the episode, you’ll discover the story more like those characters themselves do, right down to their discussing before the program starts how it’ll be novelized by the guy who did The Giggle.

Our heroine likewise gets rendered well here, so early in her travels through time. She’s still learning the ropes and somewhat skeptical of her new alien friend, and she’s particularly affronted by his apparent acceptance of the racism they encounter upon their arrival in 1950s Miami. As on TV, the Doctor explains, “I have toppled worlds. Sometimes I wait for people to topple their world,” which is a reasonable enough answer to a question the franchise has historically had to dance around. But in this version, he goes further to mention, “I have seen this come and I see it go. And then I see it come back again. Don’t think you’re better than history, babes. Your world is burning, so all those old hatreds are waking up. Everything that happens, happens again.” It’s a timely warning that jolts both her and us, and is exactly the sort of addition we wouldn’t get if Goss were penning a more straightforward adaptation.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Two Twisted Crowns by Rachel Gillig

Book #3 of 2026:

Two Twisted Crowns by Rachel Gillig (The Shepherd King #2)

I liked the first volume of this fantasy series enough to pick up this sequel, and I do think it concludes the overarching story reasonably well. Unfortunately it does this in sort of a weird way, jettisoning the parts I enjoyed both most and least about its predecessor! That novel centered around a young woman with an ancient evil secretly sharing space in her head, granting her advice and a share of his power in exchange for following his obscure instructions. She also had a bland love-at-first-sight romance with a member of the oppressive upper-class who would kill her for her hidden magical abilities, although it turns out he’s one of the good ones trying to bring down the system from the inside. I found the heroine’s Venom-like repartee with the Nightmare to be fun, while not caring as much for the rest of the plot outside them.

In this book, that being has taken over her body completely, relegating our former protagonist to a largely passive role witnessing his old memories. The creature instead gets to walk around and have interactions with the love interest, who mostly pines and complains as a result, while they continue to track down the various mystical maguffins. I’ve seen some readers praising the two men’s banter, but it doesn’t carry the same spark as when he was only a whisper in the mind, in my opinion.

Where this installment shines for me is in its unexpected development of a few side characters, who step up to fill the void left by our original lead. Their own love story is one I haven’t encountered before in the genre — she overused an artifact that enhanced her beauty at the cost of her ability to feel deep emotions, and though they’re attracted to each other, he doesn’t want to act on it until they can manage to break the curse and undo its effects, which she knows might end his attraction altogether. That’s an interesting conundrum that plays out nicely, and if this were a standalone piece focusing on just those tragic figures alone, I probably would give it a four-star rating. As is, it dovetails back with the other thread in order to resolve everything, which works out alright, I suppose. But on the whole, it’s another uneven effort.

[Content warning for domestic abuse, sexual assault, and gore.]

This volume: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Volumes ranked: 2 > 1

Book Review: World Tales edited by G. Randal Rau

Book #2 of 2026:

World Tales edited by G. Randal Rau

The 1985 World Fantasy Convention, held that year in Tucson, AZ with a theme of “Writers of the Southwest,” produced this souvenir book to resemble an issue of the old pulp magazine Weird Tales. (Seriously, look it up; designer Donald D. Markstein did an amazing job imitating the classic appearance, with a new cover illustration and two full-page inserts provided by special guest artist Victoria Poyser.) It was a limited print run of just 1200 copies, but you can find them online today for a pretty reasonable price.

The guest of honor for the weekend was author Stephen R. Donaldson, who contributed one of three original stories to this volume. His effort, the Arabian Nights-inspired fable “The Djinn Who Watches Over the Accursed,” is by far the most confident and stylistically impressive, although it’s still not a favorite of mine — I rated it as three-out-of-five stars when I reviewed it as part of his later collection Reave the Just and Other Tales. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s “Such Nice Neighbors” is meanwhile fine but forgettable, while Evangeline Walton’s “The Forest That Would Not Be Cut Down” feels incomplete, as though excerpted from a larger work that would have better contextualized its characters and plot dilemmas.

Joining these pieces are a few nonfiction tributes, mostly for Donaldson himself. I would say those offer a nice treat for fans, but are obviously far from essential. And of course, the entire production stands as a time capsule of sorts, full of advertisements for recent and upcoming genre titles, most but not all of which have fallen entirely by the wayside over the following decades. I’ve personally read only Stephen King and Peter Straub’s The Talisman and Douglas Adams’s So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, though I recognize a few others like George R. R. Martin’s Night-Flyers and Clive Barker’s Books of Blood as well.

Overall it’s a neat find that I’m happy to have on my shelves, but I doubt I’ll ever open it again unless I need to look something up for whatever reason.

[Content warning for rape and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: The Matrix (1999)

Movie #1 of 2026:

The Matrix (1999)

This sci-fi parable of an artificial reality that surrounds us all is just a stone-cold classic, instantly iconic in its confident vision and worldbuilding. The Matrix really was like no other movie to come before it, or even any that followed, including its own sequels. The script is a masterpiece too, gradually easing us into the rules of its setting alongside our everyman-turned-prophesied-savior. (My favorite lines early on that become ironic in hindsight: Neo’s friend calling him “My own personal Jesus Christ!” when it turns out he basically is, and his boss telling him, “You believe that you are special, that somehow the rules do not apply to you. Obviously, you are mistaken,” when he very much is not.) An excellent story structure seamlessly transitions us from the strangeness to the explanations to the action crisis of the endgame, all without missing a beat.

It’s maybe a bit more exposition-heavy than I would ideally prefer, but when those scenes are as visually interesting as the ones here, that’s easy enough to forgive. Likewise the trope where the neophyte male protagonist easily outpaces the woman who’s been there for longer, and she proceeds to fall in love with him with no particular build-up. And like Fight Club or Office Space, which each came out the same year, it’s a little funny and incredibly 90s that the hero’s initial ennui — “You’ve felt it your whole life, felt that something is wrong with the world,” etc. — is accompanied by what appears to be a comfortable white-collar career. Like, okay, Gen X! Let us know when you have some real problems beyond selling out to the man.

But back to the visuals. The Wachowskis were making up their own iconography here, from the green tinge of the Matrix itself to the black leather, sunglasses, and trenchcoat costumes to of course the famous slow-mo ‘bullet time’ effects. They invented brand-new technologies for this film, which mostly still look great today, while also launching or restarting the careers of all the main cast. The whole thing works phenomenally in its own right, yet is all the more fascinating to reexplore through a queer lens given that the creators both subsequently came out as trans. And the soundtrack’s pretty outstanding too.

How could I possibly give this less than a full five-out-of-five stars?

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

★★★★★

Book Review: Star Wars: Master of Evil by Adam Christopher

Book #1 of 2026:

Star Wars: Master of Evil by Adam Christopher

This is a solid but basically unspectacular Star Wars novel, unfortunately saddled with a misleading title, publisher’s summary, and cover art. It’s only a Darth Vader story in that he’s around for a lot of the plot, but he gets just a handful of POV chapters here himself, all concerning mystical Force visions. Instead we’re primarily in the viewpoint of an officer of the Emperor’s red-clad royal guard, who’s secretly assigned to spy on the former Jedi. This is early enough after the prequel film trilogy that Vader is largely an unknown entity across the Empire, and forces like the newly-formed Imperial Security Bureau are jockeying for any available information on him.

There are stronger tales that could be told in that transition era, and the best parts of this one happen near the start, sketching out that element of the worldbuilding. Soon, however, everyone blasts off into hyperspace to look for the latest maguffin, which isn’t nearly as interesting. Along the way author Adam Christopher does some cool stuff with droids overwriting each other’s personalities, and it’s commendable how he deepens the franchise’s treatment of disability with a protagonist suffering a chronic illness, but this is pretty far from the dark descent of Anakin Skywalker that it’s been advertised as.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Stranger Things, season 5

TV #1 of 2026:

Stranger Things, season 5

A satisfactory-enough conclusion, although not one that ever lives up to the early years of this show, when it felt more like an intimate character-driven horror thriller meets Amblin adventure and not a Marvel-ified action blockbuster. In fact, I’d say this final season is about on par with the previous one, to the point where I might as well just quote from my last review verbatim:

“Late-stage Stranger Things has a character problem, in that there are simply too many of them at this point for the narrative to function remotely efficiently[…] In that sort of chaos, it’s hard for anyone’s personal dilemmas to register, and so we end up with a lot less specific character work in the writing, and more dialogue that’s just trading exposition back and forth[…] The best moments on this show tend to be when pairs or trios do find a way to steal away from the bigger party they’re in and have some quiet conversations, but that’s obviously more difficult to orchestrate the more folks there are crammed into a single location.

The bloating also manifests in a certain degree of plot armor, where despite how deadly Hawkins / the Upside Down can be in general, our numerous heroes are continually making it out of their scrapes unscathed. I know it’s silly to talk about realism in a series with psychic children and mind flayers and all that, but the absurd lack of consequences to any of the supposed danger […] does limit my audience buy-in. And since new additions continue to join the pack and its accompanying protective umbrella, this is an issue that’s only growing worse with time.”

A lot of those extra characters should have been shed for the concluding arc here, especially given the time jump and new military quarantine that kicks things off, but instead, the series doubles down, finding convoluted reasons for people like Murray to still be involved. More egregiously, the ensemble expands yet again, now including an aged-up and recast Holly Wheeler and several of her classmates. The writers are clearly pitching a next generation to mirror the original protagonists, but it’s at the cost of less time spent with those old friends who receive a smaller share of the screentime as a result.

With that being said, the back half of the finale slows down and delivers more of the interpersonal relations I’ve been craving, which is why I do ultimately prefer this over season 4. It’s a bumpy road to get there, filled with way too many scenes of everyone standing around describing their plans or theories or some needlessly-complicated bit of additional lore — seriously, the reveal that the Upside Down isn’t an actual other dimension, but rather a gateway to another world beyond it has got to be one of the most tediously groan-inducing ideas ever — but the show pulls it off in the end. I do have a few remaining logistical questions, like what happened with Linda Hamilton’s forces and why they brought in an actress of her caliber for so little a payoff, but I’m sold on the sentimentality of it all. And isn’t that why we got drawn into Hawkins and its mysteries in the first place?

[Content warning for gun violence, violence against children, suicide, gaslighting, and gore.]

This season: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

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

Book Review: Ripley Under Water by Patricia Highsmith

Book #203 of 2025:

Ripley Under Water by Patricia Highsmith (The Ripliad #5)

Author Patricia Highsmith’s final novel about the amoral Tom Ripley is unfortunately also her weakest. The only thing driving the plot this time is that a new couple has moved into town, seemingly with the express purpose of tormenting the antihero whom they’ve never met before. They don’t even know for sure that he’s committed any murders (or further crimes, for that matter), but they’re convinced enough to call with taunting messages pretending to be Dickie Greenleaf, whom he killed back in the first book, and to trawl the nearby river for the body of Thomas Murchison, who got dumped there in book two. In fact, this volume turns out to be more of a direct sequel to Ripley Under Ground than any other entry in the series, perhaps due to the similarity in titles.

It’s a flimsy premise, but it could still work if the antagonists offered any genuine threat. Instead they’re fairly bumbling in how they needle Tom throughout, and even when they do find the skeletal remains that they’re after — which theoretically could be used to prove his guilt — all they do is leave the wrapped bundle on his doorstep, where he’s able to clear it away before anyone sees. In the end they dispatch themselves in a bizarrely comical fashion, and while the protagonist worries over potential evidence they might have left behind to implicate him, nothing winds up surfacing. Overall it’s a pretty uneventful story, though I guess it’s nice to see that the Ripley character has stayed close with his forgery co-conspirators from the art gallery.

[Content warning for racism and domestic abuse.]

This volume: ★★☆☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

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

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Book Review: The Bride Wore Black Leather by Simon R. Green

Book #202 of 2025:

The Bride Wore Black Leather by Simon R. Green (Nightside #12)

And so the Nightside series comes to an end, more or less. (There’s still a collection of short stories in the setting, which I’ll be rereading next, and a few crossovers with some of author Simon R. Green’s other works that I haven’t ever read but don’t intend to at this point.) Overall I’ve gotten the dose of nostalgic fun that I expected from revisiting the books that introduced me to urban fantasy as a genre, and I do think this last volume sends the enterprise off nicely. On the other hand, it’s an uneven production that speaks to the issues I keep having with these novels, which is why I wouldn’t necessarily recommend them to any new readers myself.

We do get the core of a great story here, with seemingly the entire Nightside turning against protagonist John Taylor. He’s always occupied an uneasy place in the local power structure, and even more since he took on certain additional responsibilities from Walker, and so it almost doesn’t matter that he’s basically framed for the crime that finally puts him in everyone’s crosshairs. There’s payoff and catharsis in seeing so many recurring characters all magically gunning for the man, not to mention the well-earned heartbreak of friends like Razor Eddie and Dead Boy falling under the spell as well. Then as a corollary, it’s all the more thrilling when our hero turns things back around, exposes the true villain, and reconciles with his allies just in time to marry his bounty hunter sweetheart Suzie Shooter, whom he’s feared was also among his pursuers.

The problem is that everything I described above happens in the final quarter of the text, and the book feels far more rote beforehand. For the majority of the plot, John is teamed up with Julien Advent, looking into the antagonist’s schemes without making much headway — the mysterious figure wants to bring sunlight to the city of perpetual twilight, which is at least a suitably apocalyptic threat — and coming to terms with the idea that he probably needs to give up being a detective after this. That’s a partnership we’ve never seen much in action, but generally speaking, it’s the same sort of tale as usual. Taylor encounters some classic Nightside weirdness, bluffs on the strength of his reputation to get answers out of people, and uses his finding/retrieving gift to rip the dental work out of someone’s mouth, one last time. It all adds up to a charming enough conclusion that doesn’t overstay its welcome, but like many of the previous installments, it’s not quite as strong as it clearly has the potential to be.

[Content warning for gore.]

This volume: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Volumes ranked: 5 > 2 > 7 > 1 > 12 > 6 > 3 > 9 > 11 > 4 > 10 > 8

TV Review: 12 Monkeys, season 2

TV #58 of 2025:

12 Monkeys, season 2

The debut year of this program offered an uneven but promising sci-fi premise of a dystopian soldier and a contemporary doctor working together to try to prevent the pandemic that’s ravaged the planet by his era. It’s a loose reboot of the 1995 Terry Gilliam movie, less concerned about mental illness and ambiguous grips on reality and more focused on the twisty time-travel mechanics. I didn’t always love that initial outing, but I gave it three stars in appreciation of the mad-science Fringe vibes and how the characters deepened over the course of those episodes.

Unfortunately, this second run is a major step in the wrong direction. It starts out by immediately walking back the cliffhangers of the previous finale — despite the implication that the unstable Jennifer Goines would be kicking off the plague by spreading the virus around the world, she’s now revealed to still have the sample in her possession, where it can be safely procured and neutralized (though the outbreak remains on the horizon). Meanwhile, our new lovers had seemingly switched positions, with him stuck in the past and her sent forward to the future. That jolt to the status quo carried great potential and is clearly what the poster depicts, but it’s soon enough discarded too, in lieu of those protagonists both being relocated to 2044 as agents for further missions.

That’s disappointing, but the bigger issue concerns everything that spins out from there. The story grows ever more convoluted, at the cost of any larger moral clarity or legible motivations for anyone. Before, they were fighting to stop the disease from being released and bringing on doomsday. At this point, the talk is instead all on preserving or breaking the timeline itself, which is substantially goofier. The added lore regarding the mysterious Witness, the Monkeys themselves, and the people like Jennifer who somehow maintain the continuum is all a lot to take, but the narrative also fractures on the smaller level of face-to-face interactions. This season is packed with scenes of someone either betraying an ally or suddenly teaming up with an enemy, but it all feels weightless because we aren’t given enough room to let those relationships build up in the first place. Likewise, the worldbuilding rules on how/whether history can be changed at all remain maddeningly ill-defined and inconsistent, which limits the impact of any particular development or character goal.

With only two shorter seasons remaining, I’ll likely continue watching, and it’s not like this is entirely bad. Michael Hogan of BSG and Jay Karnes of The Shield are each a fun if short-lived addition to the cast, and Deacon’s promotion from recurring antagonist to prickly henchman for the heroes reflects a good writing instinct as well. I even like Cassie’s new battle-hardened characterization and that obligatory time-loop episode! But overall, this is a considerably messier effort that I hope doesn’t speak for the rest of the show to come.

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

★★☆☆☆