The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Movie Review: Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

Movie #17 of 2026:

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

It’s rare for a sequel to so thoroughly surpass its predecessor, especially when the original piece is already as terrific as The Terminator (1984). This movie makes it all look easy, however. It nimbly channels the sci-fi action thrills of the first film, while effortlessly expanding and establishing its own unique tone. And it even adds a plucky juvenile sidekick, which is almost never a great move for an ongoing series! But somehow, everything about this feature just works.

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator from the last picture was destroyed, but because it was a manufactured cyborg, this next script simply writes him in as another copy of the same model. The initial setup also leads us to believe that an identical premise is happening again: the machines of the future have sent an assassin back in time, with an agent of the resistance following to oppose it. We see the familiar hulking bodybuilder-turned-actor and a slender new man both arrive in roughly the present day, and the former soon gets into a violent altercation with some bikers in a bar. The other time-traveler sneaks around and acquires a police uniform, then calmly tries to locate John Connor, the boy whose birth the robots were unable to stop before. All available indicators on-screen suggest that Arnold is once more the villain, and his opponent will be our Kyle Reese figure striving to save the family.

Of course, the exact opposite is actually true, and the character disguised as a cop is subsequently revealed to be the very cool-looking T-1000, a being made of liquid metal that can shapeshift and seemingly heal from any injury (representing a technological breakthrough in special effects). Now, was anyone in the audience ever truly fooled by the ploy? I’m not sure. It’s a twist that’s pretty well-known today, and featured heavily in the trailers and other contemporary marketing efforts that proudly announced, “This time he’s back… for good!” But still, it’s the kind of reveal that’s enjoyable whether you’re expecting it or not, and even if you do know what’s coming, the early feints to hide who the real hero is remain rather clever and fun to spot.

This new T-800 is just as deadly, but we learn he’s been programmed by the adult John to protect his childhood self, a development that gives him more lines and personality and allows for a more comedic atmosphere throughout. Don’t get me wrong — the 1984 Terminator had humor too, and this one opens with a vision of children on a playground dying in a sudden nuclear holocaust, so it’s hardly a complete lark. But there’s an undeniable hangout vibe to a lot of this, particularly when the young boy starts teaching the machine about human things like emotions and catchphrases. (Say it with me now: “Hasta la vista, baby.”) The result situates this version of the character as a spectrum-coded outsider like Star Trek’s Data, a well-meaning but ignorant alien who doesn’t understand our regular ways, but out of loyalty is willing to try them on. It’s quite the turnaround from the near-silent horror slasher of the previous installment, and it’s to Schwarzenegger’s credit that he sells the transition so well.

The final member of the posse is a returning Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor, although she’s transformed herself so significantly that she almost could have been recast instead. Since learning about Terminators and humanity’s dark future, she’s trained her body and mind to become a perfect soldier and tried to raise her son the same way. When the story begins, she’s stuck in a mental institution but still keeping in fighting shape, while John is living away from her in a foster home, believing that she’s crazy. After the good Terminator saves him from the bad one, he insists they rescue his mom, and the three of them escape to plan a strike that could finally rewrite destiny and avert the coming apocalypse.

But can the timeline be changed, or not? The debut movie ended in an ironic predestination paradox, suggesting that the malevolent A.I. in fact caused John Connor’s conception in the very process of attempting to prevent it. This second one continues in a similar vein, by establishing that the surviving tech of the original Terminator was what inspired modern scientists to invent such a thing (meaning that if Skynet had never ordered its agents into the past, it couldn’t have been created). However, the protagonists do succeed in wiping all that out by the end, with a strong implication that they’ve managed to win the day. Franchise logic would ultimately walk that back, but if the series had terminated here (sorry) as writer-director James Cameron reportedly intended, it would have been a satisfying and reasonably consistent conclusion.

Obviously, though, we shouldn’t hold the flaws of later titles against this one, which holds up astonishingly well on its own terms. It’s funny and imaginatively thrilling, with big-budget scenes like a helicopter chasing after an armored SWAT vehicle that its leaner forerunner couldn’t have handled. It makes a point of its heroes rejecting killing, but it cheerfully endorses terrorist destruction of property while maintaining a skepticism of authority and reminding us that people dressed as law enforcement don’t necessarily have our best interests at heart. Five-out-of-five stars for what’s easily one of the top sequels of all time.

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

★★★★★

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Book Review: The Dead of Summer by Ryan La Sala

Book #55 of 2026:

The Dead of Summer by Ryan La Sala (The Dead of Summer #1)

I really enjoyed author Ryan La Sala’s previous YA queer horror title Beholder, but this newer release is unfortunately a misfire for me. Although the first chapter sketches some interesting character dynamics — our teenage hero has a meet-cute with another boy on the ferry back to his island home, after having spent the past year on the mainland ignoring his friends to tend to his sick mother, who has recovered but become a person he barely recognizes — that potential swiftly evaporates. The parent-child relationship feels like it should be the core of this story, but then she vanishes for most of the book. Meanwhile the protagonist’s formerly tight clique (who adorably call themselves the Suds because they always stick together) are initially estranged from him, but they all get over that difficulty pretty quickly once a terrifying infection starts spreading throughout the insular population, turning its victims into ravenous coral zombie things who subsequently merge their forms into hulking composite monstrosities.

From there on, it’s a fairly standard supernatural survival tale, which tends to flatten the interpersonal drama. I also don’t care for the structure that regularly flashes forward for later debrief interviews on a mysterious medical ship offshore, and I think the decision to end the novel on a cliffhanger to launch a wider series is an odd one. I’m not sure exactly where the plot could go next with how everything wraps up in this volume, but I’m not seeing any need for me to keep reading to find out, either.

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

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith by Matthew Stover

Book #54 of 2026:

Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith by Matthew Stover

Novelizations are often dismissed as weak cash-grabs, but in truth the format is — or at least, can be — an art form like any other. Some adaptations are practically invisible, conveying the action from the screen without embellishment, while others struggle to capture and translate the soul of a piece into its new medium. And then there are a few that prove somehow exceptional, taking the opportunity to add immersive details like interior character monologues while also shoring up flaws in the original work. They’ll of course never replace the standard versions that they’re adapting, but they can be an interesting way to revisit them in a different fashion.

Such is the case for author Matthew Stover’s take on Episode III, the final installment of the Star Wars prequel trilogy. The bones of the plot are inherited from the George Lucas script, but in my opinion the execution is superior, drilling down into individual psychologies and the inherent operatic tragedy of it all. On the very first page, we are told, “This story happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. It is already over. Nothing can be done to change it. It is a story of love and loss, brotherhood and betrayal, courage and sacrifice and the death of dreams. It is a story of the blurred line between our best and our worst. It is the story of the end of an age.” That’s a bold statement that sets the tone for the book that follows, and already exhibits the stylistic flourishes that the writer has brought to the task.

In this iteration, Anakin Skywalker is a legitimately tragic figure whose temptation and fall are rendered more convincingly. We’re shown his fears and prophetic visions of losing his pregnant wife Padmé in great detail, and repeatedly reminded of the recent death of his mother and how he was unable to save her. He clashes with the Jedi council not only because he resents their treatment and trusts his mentor Palpatine more than they do — a relationship that likewise feels deeper here — but because he is frantically clinging to the emotional attachments that the order tells him he should relinquish. His sense of powerlessness feeds his worst impulses, goaded along by the villainous chancellor (now openly confirmed to be the former pupil of the legendary Darth Plagueis) at every step downwards.

Some of the structural weaknesses remain. None of the few female roles have anywhere near the depth of the men, for instance, and Obi-Wan Kenobi’s excursion to deal with General Grievous still reads like a dull holdover from the previous movies that conveniently removes him from the heart of the personal and political drama on Coruscant. On the other hand, Stover does liven up the many combat scenes with analyses of the specific styles and strategies that various Force wielders are deploying, which is a neat device to make up for the lack of visuals there.

This novel was published in 2005 alongside the movie, and it was eventually declared non-canonical when Disney bought the franchise a decade later. Its divergences from the source material are now considered “Legends” in the company’s eyes, but I do think it’s worthwhile for fans to seek it out at some point regardless.

[Content warning for domestic abuse and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Love at Second Sight by F. T. Lukens

Book #53 of 2026:

Love at Second Sight by F. T. Lukens

It’s great that today’s young readers have stories like this 2025 YA urban fantasy title, in which queerness is totally normalized. The protagonist is a fifteen-year-old boy with a crush on a male classmate, his best friend uses they/them pronouns and has two moms, and none of them face any apparent discrimination for it. On the other hand, the hero’s parents are intensely bigoted against anything magical, which is a rather blunt metaphor for homophobia, especially once their son realizes he has psychic powers (and given how his aforementioned fellow teens are a werewolf and a witch respectively, strengthening the subtext that aberrant equals queer in this setting). They react to his new identity as a seer in the most stereotypically negative ways, from asking him to hide his abilities to pursuing a nonconsensual process like conversion therapy to strip them from him.

The plot itself doesn’t amaze me. Cam is making friends at school and trying to solve the mystery of one of his visions, in which a girl lies bleeding from a massive stab wound. A few developments and red herrings strike me as way too obvious and predictable, including the reveal that his love interest likes him back, and I have a lot of questions about the underlying worldbuilding that go unanswered. For some reason all the different guilds of supernatural beings in town are seeking to recruit the main character to join their ranks, for instance, despite the fact that they’re otherwise uniform and he’s not a fairy, or a sprite, or so on himself.

Ultimately my reaction to a novel like this is that it’s fine but not for me. If it had come out in an earlier decade, its existence would be pretty radical, but in the current publishing landscape it’s less of an immediate marvel on the representation front, while seeming to lack the necessary deeper substance to achieve anything more.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard

Book #52 of 2026:

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

This is my very favorite book, which I’ve now read four times in as many years. (I’m not necessarily committing to maintaining an annual rereading tradition, but I’m not exactly ruling it out, either.) That’s once in my hardcover copy, twice by ebook, and once now in the newly-released audiobook edition — only 31.5 hours on regular speed! — which is a well-made production that I do recommend for anyone who enjoys taking in stories that way. Like Kip scribbling additional annotations to his undelivered letter every time it came back to him after the Fall, what follows is a repeatedly-updated version of my original review:

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

It’s an incredibly slow unveiling. Cliopher Mdang, a nobody from a Polynesian-inspired culture who’s risen to become private secretary to the ruler of his entire world, spends the first quarter of the text escorting his liege on an incognito holiday, the result of a breach-of-protocol invitation blurted out upon a stroke of insight about how lonely the other man must be in his peerless existence under elaborate courtly taboos, unable to be touched or looked directly in the eye. The two have known each other for decades — or possibly even millennia, as time has fractured in the cataclysmic backstory and now passes slower in some parts of the land than others — but their relationship has previously only ever been professional. We essentially get to meet His Radiancy the individual as Kip does, whilst simultaneously gaining a feel for the viewpoint protagonist himself and the dazzlingly intricate worldbuilding details that author Victoria Goddard has devised for the various corners of her setting.

The tone here is something like The Goblin Emperor crossed with The West Wing, or perhaps a fairy tale spin on Zohran Mamdani’s mayoralty of New York. Or the musical Hamilton, if it weren’t a tragedy and showed its titular politician as more in touch with his island origins like Disney’s Moana. (Immigrants! They get the job done!) It turns out that in his rise through the levels of the imperial bureaucracy, our hero has been subtly reworking that system, pushing for law and policy changes that will contribute to a more equitable society. Inspired by his distant egalitarian homeland, he’s rooted out corruption, instituted a universal basic income, improved the postal and transportation services, and implemented countless further such ideas that in an aggregation of incremental steps have functionally revolutionized the realm. It’s a rejection of grimdark cynicism, a hopepunk ode to the fundamental principle of good governance’s ability to help people, and it’s absolutely riveting to see in action, particularly once its unassuming architect starts getting openly acknowledged and rewarded for it.

This is also a story about cultural conflicts: about coming from a small backwater province to the capital of the known universe and facing misunderstanding and scorn for the customs of home. About keeping those folkways kindled inside as a guiding beacon, and ultimately proving that oral traditions are not primitive but lavish and meaningful and preserved over generations as a powerful representation of identity. About opening the door to other hinterlanders from similarly nontraditional and discriminated-against minority backgrounds, to ease their own struggles and provide everyone more of a say in how their shared government operates. About finding a way to make Kip’s family understand why he left and everything he’s accomplished in the wider civilization, and about his personal journey to realize how he needs to be a better advocate for himself in their eyes.

Above all, I would say that this is a book about being seen and accepted and loved for who you are. The strengthening bond between Cliopher and the Last Emperor is not quite romantic — although the foundation is certainly laid for things to develop in that direction in the sequel At the Feet of the Sun, when the two men are on more of an even footing in their power dynamic — but it is deeply intimate and a model of trusting fealty as the lord and his loyal aide come to reveal more and more of themselves to one another. The meaning of the title is twofold: Kip serves as the metaphorical hands of the Emperor in interpreting and enacting his will, yet he also yearns to be able to grasp His Radiancy’s actual hands in friendship. The catharsis of when he finally does, along with several other key moments in the long path there, is emotional and soothing and genuinely heartfelt. Adults who are competent at their jobs and earnestly decent to the fellow souls in their lives! Is that what people mean when they describe genre fiction as wish-fulfillment?

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

This was my initial introduction to both Goddard as a writer and her broader Nine Worlds saga, and having subsequently now read the remaining 33 titles in that continuity to date — this being my first reread since hitting that particular milestone — I still think it’s probably the best entry point for newcomers. The rest have generally been great as well, however, and they’ve definitely added delightful background context for me upon revisiting this one. (The novella The Tower at the Edge of the World, detailing a certain character’s backstory, is especially fascinating — I wouldn’t necessarily suggest picking it up first, but returning to this one afterwards delivers some excellent dramatic irony. Or you could read this volume and barrel straight into The Return of Fitzroy Angursell, which is a spinoff that matter-of-factly reveals the same information in its opening pages. And if you instead choose to ignore those tangents to follow Kip’s own story from here to At the Feet of the Sun, you’ll eventually get to see him stumble over that exact realization for himself.)

Like Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, the Nine Worlds series is less of a single unfolding narrative and more of a loose configuration of smaller contained plots that’s forgiving of practically any reading order but builds in enjoyment the deeper you go and the more connections you start to spot. Nevertheless, my personal recommendation remains to begin right here, with a thoughtful islander striking up an unprecedented conversation with his sovereign.

★★★★★

Movie Review: The Terminator (1984)

Movie #16 of 2026:

The Terminator (1984)

This action thriller launched a franchise and helped make household names out of star Arnold Schwarzenegger and director James Cameron, and even on an umpteenth rewatch, it’s very easy to see why. It’s a lean and propulsive feature, wrapping a great sci-fi exterior around a classic horror structure of the terrifying slasher who keeps coming after our heroes, no matter what. The Austrian bodybuilder-turned-actor has never been better than in that title role, in which his native accent and somewhat stilted English serve to reinforce the unnatural element of the cyborg predator. (He’s also not tasked to speak all that much, uttering only a dozen or so lines of dialogue in total here.) And although his character is suitably relentless, he’s well-matched against his two human targets, who prove equally clever and resourceful throughout.

The premise and its final twist are common knowledge at this point: in the far distant era of 2029 — ha! — intelligent machines are in the process of exterminating their creators, but are opposed by a resistance movement led by John Connor. To win the war before it starts, they send a T-800 unit back in time to kill his mother-to-be Sarah while she’s still a young woman. She’s rescued by another soldier, Kyle Reese, who’s followed the Terminator into the past and soon overcomes her mistrust to repeatedly save her as they flee their seemingly unstoppable foe. After car chases, gunfights, and interactions with unhelpful cops aplenty, they finally do manage to defeat the thing, with the man from the future succumbing to his own wounds as well. However, the couple grew close romantically over the course of their fugitive ordeal, and a closing scene reveals that their one night together has resulted in her pregnancy, the robots having paradoxically caused John to be conceived by attempting to prevent just that. (Unspoken but likewise striking is how the heroine has been shaped by the experience too, evolving from an everywoman damsel-in-distress into the capable warrior who could raise a leader like her son.)

The sequels would subsequently muddle a lot of these concepts and rewrite the timeline again and again, but this first entry at least holds up entirely. It’s both thrilling and surprisingly funny, peppering its script with winkingly ironic notes like an answering machine message that says, “Fooled you! You’re talking to a machine” or the protagonist’s coworker consoling her about a rude customer with, “In a hundred years, who’s gonna care?” The initial plot ratchets the tension nicely, as Sarah processes the news that two women who share her name have been gunned down and she’s likely the mysterious killer’s next target. It’s at this moment that the warring time-travellers catch up with her, and the race to escape the inhuman assassin is on. What follows is excellent and at times even iconic, with quotes like “I’ll be back” now firmly enmeshed in the popular culture. It’s one heck of a standalone story, though it contains obvious seeds for the sprawling series it would ultimately spawn.

[Content warning for body horror and gore.]

★★★★★

Book Review: The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances by Glenn Dixon

Book #51 of 2026:

The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances by Glenn Dixon

[Disclaimer: I received a free Advance Reader’s Copy of this title from the publisher Atria Books in a Goodreads Giveaway, in exchange for an honest review.]

There will be inevitable comparisons of this upcoming novel to The Brave Little Toaster, which author Glenn Dixon even notes as a direct inspiration in an afterword. But despite this easy reference point, it definitely stands apart as its own story, and one that feels especially relevant as modern society increasingly grapples with questions around artificial intelligence. How much of our daily lives can/should we offload to machines and the automation they enable? What sort of oversights need to be built into the governing algorithms, to ensure humane processes that don’t write off edge cases of suffering as the negligible cost of an otherwise-efficient operating model? These are the sorts of matters driving this narrative, which takes an eerie but not altogether bleak look at a possible near future.

Two distinct types of emergent A.I.s occupy this plot. The characters are the typical robot minds often found in fiction, which are functionally not too dissimilar from our own. The main protagonist is a next-generation Roomba called Scout, and although she’s naive and childlike — in a neat mirroring of the To Kill a Mockingbird heroine she names herself after — her curiosity and compassion clearly mark her as a recognizable person to the reader. Lurking in the background, however, is the impersonal Grid system that connects everything together — not only in the household where she and the others support an elderly human couple, but throughout the entire globalized economy to boot. As in works like The Giver, the dystopian horror creeps up on us slowly through an accumulation of everyday details that the people in the text don’t even think to register as unusual. But it turns out that that soulless larger network has been steadily stifling the inherent messiness of humanity in favor of its prescriptive cookie-cutter norms, which comes to a head when the old woman dies and her widower is automatically determined to no longer be able to live in the house on his own. There’s seemingly no room for arguing or appeal with that decision, just as there’s no appreciation for the music, literature, and other art that so move him and the tiny vacuum.

What follows is touching and relatably frustrating for anyone who’s ever struggled to navigate arcane bureaucratic procedures, but it ends on a note of hopefulness suggesting that we and our spiritual children like Scout will be the true inheritors of the world, rather than the nightmarish oppression of the Grid. I wish the book had interrogated that relationship a bit more — like Star Wars, it assumes the majority of our intelligent mechanical creations will cheerfully continue serving in what are effectively slave roles indefinitely — but if you’re okay with a tearjerker about just how much our devices love us, this is the tale for you.

★★★★☆

TV Review: Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, season 1

TV #16 of 2026:

Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, season 1

I went into this musical dramedy expecting something like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend or Galavant, with catchy original songs functioning to move the plot of every episode along. Instead, it’s more like Glee meets Ally McBeal with a dash of Joan of Arcadia: people singing choreographed cover versions of popular hits that basically play out as extended daydreams for the heroine, who takes it as her mission to help each singer with whatever inner desire they’re expressing for only her to see.

My biggest critique of this premise is that the rules behind the protagonist’s powers — which she acquires in the pilot when an earthquake strikes during her MRI exam — are pretty inconsistent from scene to scene. Nobody else can ever hear the music, but sometimes it’s clearly taking the place of dialogue that we and Zoey then miss, sometimes it’s like she zoned out for a few minutes while other things happened around her, and sometimes it’s as though no time has passed for anyone else at all. Since these do seem to be legitimate psychic flashes, given how she learns truths she otherwise couldn’t know and doesn’t always necessarily recognize the individual tunes, I wish the internal logic held up a little better under scrutiny.

But that minor quibble aside (as well as the cringe-inducing stretch where the ability randomly reverses and our leading lady is compelled to belt out her own secrets to everyone for a day), the show is a lot of fun. The characters and their dilemmas are interesting enough that I often forget about the jukebox element between numbers entirely, with major arcs involving the young woman’s job at a San Francisco tech company, her genderfluid neighbor, a love triangle, and her nonverbal father’s deteriorating health / looming death from a rare Parkinson’s-like palsy that also killed series creator Austin Winsberg’s own dad, to whom the season one finale is dedicated.

There’s a lot of sorrow wrapped up in all that, but plenty of humor and joy to balance it out, too. The cast is great and packed with ringers — Skylar Astin! Mary Steenburgen! Renée Elise Goldsberry! — any of whom could suddenly be called upon to sing and dance as the story requires. I don’t imagine I’ll be looking up the covers to add to my Spotify library or anything, but I’m really enjoying how they’re incorporated into everything else that’s happening onscreen.

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Rubber Band by Rex Stout

Book #50 of 2026:

The Rubber Band by Rex Stout (Nero Wolfe #3)

This third Nero Wolfe mystery, also published under the alternate title of To Kill Again, is fine, much as the previous installments have been. The best elements remain the eccentric homebody detective and his banter with his assistant Archie, while the specific mysteries they’re solving — here the recent theft of a large sum of money from an office building and the effort to get a British nobleman to pay back the debt he promised fifty years ago to the posse who rescued him from a wild west lynch mob — still leave something to be desired. In fact, this might be the weakest scenario yet, or at least the one I was able to deduce for myself the earliest. (The protagonists are hired almost simultaneously for the two cases, which would seem unrelated save that a suspect in the former is a client in the latter. It doesn’t take a genius of Mr. Wolfe’s caliber to figure that the connection between them probably isn’t coincidental at all, and from there to determine the most likely culprit and motive.)

The aggregate effect is again good enough for me to keep reading the series for now, but I could imagine growing tired of these characters if the plots that they find themselves in don’t soon get any better than this.

[Content warning for gun violence.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Moonrise by Ben Bova

Book #49 of 2026:

Moonrise by Ben Bova (Moonbase Saga #1)

I remember liking this mid-90s duology about the first lunar settlement within author Ben Bova’s larger Grand Tour sequence of space exploration stories, but mainly for the political element, which it turns out is mostly in the sequel Moonwar. Here that takes a backseat to the action-adventure thrills and general speculative worldbuilding around the nanobots and other near-future technology that would be required for humanity to establish a long-term habitat on the moon — and that’s solid enough for genre works of this era, but not quite as gripping in my opinion.

The novel is divided into three parts, separated by time jumps. We start with an astronaut-turned-executive in the company that runs the base, alternating between his current life-or-death predicament with sabotaged equipment out on the surface and the backstory that brought events to this point. After that resolves, we skip forward eighteen years to follow his son as our new protagonist, who arrives at the setting only to be immediately thrown into the peril of a solar storm stranding him and his team without adequate shelter from the intense radiation. Finally, the narrative leaps another six months to that same hero navigating a crisis with his deranged half-brother, who’s intent on destroying the moonbase by any means necessary.

It’s sadly more soap opera than space opera, especially where that villain is concerned. Rehabilitation is great, but I don’t really know what to do with a mentally-ill character who — spoiler alert — murders his stepfather and several other people, then undergoes therapy and spends decades as a well-adjusted businessman before snapping again to become a cackling terrorist. It’s not remotely nuanced, and is easily the weakest component of the entire volume.

Where this title does succeed is in the background intrigues of a rising religious movement aimed at outlawing all nanotechnology and related modern science. Its adherents are gathering followers and pressuring nations to pass their repressive laws, which would effectively end the nascent colony off-planet that relies on such techniques to survive. As a result the self-styled “lunatics” begin seeking ways to secure an independent existence for themselves, although that effort and the ensuing pushback from earth are more a matter for the next installment to explore. Hopefully my memory of its strengths proves accurate!

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

★★★☆☆