The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Horses of Fire by A. D. Rhine

Book #131 of 2023:

Horses of Fire by A. D. Rhine

I’ve generally been enjoying the recent cottage industry kicked off by the popularity of Madeline Miller’s Circe in 2018, wherein ancient Greek myths are given novel-length treatment and in the process often reapproached with a feminist lens. On the surface, this title is just such a work — a rendition of the Trojan War through the eyes of three women at the heart of the besieged city-state. Together the kidnapped Helen, her sister-in-law Andromache, and their servant Rhea offer us an immersive view of the Bronze Age society that debut author A. D. Rhine (a pen name for the team of Ashlee Cowles and Danielle Stinson) has extrapolated from various mythological, historical, and archaeological records.

The ensuing worldbuilding is interesting, but the result is too far removed from traditional accounts of the siege like Homer’s Iliad. This is somewhat a matter of taste, but in my opinion, a successful retelling either presents a familiar tale from a different character angle or else fills in the existing gaps in the narrative with plausible additional material. It doesn’t explicitly contradict what’s been established before except to intentionally raise questions of honesty and bias in the earlier narrator(s). I know that mythology is an inherently fluid, oral tradition and that Homer isn’t the absolute authority on the war from his stories, but I’m at a loss here as to how we should interpret radically new inventions like a plague ravaging Troy or Paris trying to poison his way up the line of succession. So many of the standard Trojan plot points have been stripped away that the remaining elements are almost a distraction whenever they do appear. The Greek forces are particularly missed, as they are mostly cast as a distant impersonal threat and given no substantial individual characterization until very near the end.

If this had been a reimagining simply inspired by the Trojan War and set in an entirely-new fantasy world, I’d probably feel a lot more charitable towards it (though the lack of closure in the final pages would likely still bug me). As is, it’s too well-written to rate lower than three-out-of-five stars, but it never manages to come together in a satisfying fashion for me, especially compared to the excellent 2019 Natalie Haynes book A Thousand Ships that likewise retells this conflict from a women’s perspective. I could easily see other readers liking it a lot more, however, if they don’t approach it with the same preferences I’ve brought to the experience.

[Content warning for sexism, domestic abuse, rape, pedophilia, torture, claustrophobia, slavery, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

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Movie Review: Doctor Who: The Giggle (2023)

Movie #9 of 2023:

Doctor Who: The Giggle (2023)

In hindsight, I probably should have approached these three David Tennant/Catherine Tate Doctor Who specials as a single season of television, miniature though it’d be, rather than a trilogy of discrete movie equivalents. More even than the previous round of Tennant specials that followed series 4 from 2008 to 2010 in the lead-up to his regeneration into Matt Smith, these installments have really all felt of a coherent piece with one another across their run. That’s true both on a level of plot / character — exploring the Fourteenth Doctor’s fresh trauma and allowing him the chance to rehabilitate his earlier self’s treatment of his friend Donna Noble — and as a practical, metafictional transition period for the franchise.

It’s no secret that Whovian viewership has dropped off in recent years, and the BBC has clearly been positioning the upcoming Fifteenth Doctor’s tenure under returning showrunner Russell T. Davies as a great starting place for new viewers. These 60th Anniversary Specials, likewise under Davies, don’t seem to have been part of that same commercial push, but they do form an important throat-clearing effort to win back the segment of the old audience that had started tuning out. The inherent nostalgia appeal of the stars of a decade-and-a-half ago returning to our screens is one element of that, but we’ve also gotten some lovely spins on Classic Who canon tweaked for the modern age and a resolution of sorts to some lingering matters from the Jodie Whittaker years. Though it’s not the cameo-heavy celebration of all six decades that some fans might have wanted, it’s been three strong hours of scripts packed with continuity nods that never obscure the emotional impact of each story. Honestly? This is Davies in his wheelhouse, completely showing off. You want moves, Rose? RTD2 will give you moves.

Which brings us to today’s final outing, The Giggle. Dragging back a First Doctor villain from 1966 is maybe even odder of a choice than adapting the old Beep the Meep comic storyline in The Star Beast, but as usual, Davies makes it work. Guest star Neil Patrick Harris chews the scenery with Master-ish aplomb (and with a variety of Count Olaf-ian accents), and while it’s not quite in line with the character’s original appearance, it’s close enough to get the point across and ultimately succeeds better than The Celestial Toymaker serial ever did at establishing a distinct identity for the figure. He’s a spiteful clown and a cosmic threat who can rewrite reality at will but respects the rules of established games, and that’s driven home in a variety of unsettling setpieces.

Against it, we have our familiar Doctor and his stalwart bestie, joined by some more old friends from UNIT — including Melanie Bush from the Sixth and Seventh Doctor eras, as the latest Classic companion to pop back up again for an adventure. (More of that going forward, please! I’d love to get some additional Classic characters back for an episode here and there that doesn’t try to wring pathos out of their appearance but instead just lets them be trusted competent auxiliary support like Mel is in this special.) And as a regeneration story, it offers us our first look at Ncuti Gatwa in the TARDIS, already dazzling in his role as Tennant’s successor.

There’s a late-act twist you likely won’t see coming if you managed to avoid the leaked rumors, and while my fannish brain wants a little more in-universe explanation for how it’s going to work going forward, it’s no more objectionable than other big swings Doctor Who has taken in the past. And the benefit of the move is clear too, not just for the immediate fun team-up that results from it, but also to satisfy that impetus I mentioned above of presenting the Gatwa era with as firm a fresh start as any incoming Doctor’s ever had. Thematically and then more or less literally, the Fourteenth Doctor’s adventures with Donna represent the Time Lord finally going to therapy and talking through some of that pain they’ve been running from for so long. There’s even an acknowledgement of poor dead Adric from the Fifth Doctor days! (Sarah Jane’s death is also finally made canon, twelve years after the passing of her actress Elisabeth Sladen, while Wilfred Mott is graciously allowed to live on despite the fact that Bernard Cribbins died before he could film the scenes intended for this episode.) It’s no wonder Fifteen seems so much lighter after all that.

It’s a pretty effective passing of the torch, overall. Davies does indulge in some of his weaker impulses, like a new round of ominous yet vague forebodings, and I don’t love that the Toymaker is ultimately defeated more through athleticism and luck than a clever Doctorish plan. But this is an inventive and satisfying way to close out Tennant’s unexpected reprisal of the alien time-traveler, which has turned out to be far more than just a blip of a detour on the path from Whittaker to Gatwa as the main series actor.

[Content warning for gun violence and body horror.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

Book #130 of 2023:

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

This sci-fi novel starts and ends pretty well, but it loses its way rather dramatically for a large section in-between. The early worldbuilding presents us with something like Ender’s Game (or perhaps Brandon Sanderson’s Cytoverse) by way of The Giver — a dystopian militarized society whose patriarchal horrors have been thoroughly internalized as normal by the teenage heroine who grew up indoctrinated among them. Of course children on her space station are raised as soldiers, apart from their parents, competing with each other to be awarded the best commissions on the base. Of course there aren’t enough of those army positions to go around, so some young women from every cohort coming of age are instead assigned to permanent duty in the nursery: submitting sexually to any man who wants them, forcibly bearing children, and helping to raise all of the resulting babies for the minimum of years still required. It’s deeply unsettling, especially as the protagonist gradually realizes that that’s the intended fate her commanders have in store for her.

This isn’t as bleak as The Handmaid’s Tale, and it could probably be classed as YA fiction despite the heavy themes. Though Kyr is held and kissed against her will at one point by her uncle the cult leader (and it’s clearly a traumatic experience for her), the incident goes no further and we aren’t subjected to graphic scenes of any other assault. As the first portion of the story closes, the warrior girl seems on a path to finally realize and confront the awful extent of her people’s brainwashing propaganda.

And then she travels back in time to before she was born, defeating the alien invasion that inadvertently led to her existence and subsequently spending a while in the alternate timeline that could have been her life. After discovering the same villain is pretending to be humanity’s savior there too, she storms his headquarters to seize and destroy the reality-bending technology for good, but not before using it to return to a slightly-different version of the moment the plot initially began.

From that stage on, things are back on track and resolve well enough with the righteous mutiny we’ve been expecting all along. Both here and at the start, author Emily Tesh does a fine job with her narrator’s characterization as an insensitive bully we nevertheless come to understand and respect. But I can’t rate this title too highly when so much of the middle is an inessential diversion that almost feels lifted from another project altogether.

[Content warning for homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, eugenics, gore, genocide, suicide, and gun violence.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me by Jamison Shea

Book #129 of 2023:

I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me by Jamison Shea

This debut novel and its heroine should have been right up my alley: an #ownvoices queer Black teen, striving to prove herself in the cutthroat and frequently racist world of French ballet, who makes a pact with a dark force for guaranteed success at the cost of her humanity. In practice, though, we don’t really feel that loss, nor do the character relationships (including the love interest) ever register as anything deeper than mere plot contrivances. This is the latest YA project to dabble in tropes from The Secret History without establishing why the central clique would be so compelling to the protagonist — or vice versa — and that turns out to be just one of several elements that come off as underwritten in the end.

There are weird time skips and dropped details too, like when the dancer finds the body of a murdered classmate and calls the police but the narrative jumps forward to the next day before the officers arrive, with no indication of what they say to her, whether they consider her a suspect, and where their investigation goes from there. (And they apparently don’t search her either, given that she’s pocketed the dead girl’s phone.) We likewise don’t get much clarity as to the nature of the setting’s supernatural power or its limitations, let alone any thematic reflection on the justifications for cheating to get ahead in a corrupt system.

I don’t need every story to be a morality play with tragic consequences for misbehavior, but in a title that wants to cast its main player as monstrous, there ought to be some sort of escalating horror for the reader over what she’s choosing to become and what all she’s giving up to get there. Although this piece occasionally gestures in that direction, it doesn’t deliver nearly enough in my opinion. The publisher’s blurb deems it a “villain’s origin story,” but I’m not leaving with any particular interest in how her arc continues in the forthcoming sequel.

[Content warning for self-harm, gore, body horror, torture, body-shaming, and domestic abuse.]

★★☆☆☆

Movie Review: Doctor Who: Wild Blue Yonder (2023)

Movie #8 of 2023:

Doctor Who: Wild Blue Yonder (2023)

The second of three David Tennant / Catherine Tate specials we’re getting this year is even better than the first. It’s less busy, for starters, with a premise that’s mostly just the Doctor and Donna exploring a derelict spaceship at the very edge of existence. (You couldn’t rightfully call this a bottle episode, given the all-new sets and the opening and closing scenes that take place elsewhere, to say nothing of the clear Disney CGI effects budget. But that’s the general vibe: a plot-minimal two-hander that gives our main cast time to slow down and open up with one another, amid some delightfully creepy cosmic horror.)

I can already predict the prior Doctor Who adventures this will be compared to: Midnight or the Library two-parter in the original Russell T. Davies era of the program, or perhaps something like Flatline or Heaven Sent under Steven Moffat. All of which is to say, there are aliens here too, and they are properly strange in their outlook on humanity. Terrifying and wickedly funny, too, albeit in a different mode of Davies humor than the more crowd-pleasing romp he delivered last week with the Meep. I wouldn’t necessarily claim this as an all-time classic — it’s not quite clever or distinctive enough for that, and without spoilers, I have to say that the beat near the end where Donna thinks she’s about to die is neither set up nor resolved especially well — but it’s a great flex for how excellently weird this show can be when it paradoxically has less to prove.

Will it work as well for brand-new viewers, or for lapsed ones tuning back in? I’m not sure. There’s explicit talk of the Flux and the Doctor’s Timeless Child secret, which stands as a reassuring sign that the Chris Chibnall years aren’t being brushed aside but is probably a bit distracting and confusing for an audience without that context. And of course, it’s a story built on a foundation of trust that the Doctor and this companion forged back in 2008, layered with subtleties of how the Time Lord character has changed in the time since then. I don’t think newbies will be lost, but it doesn’t feel as purposefully friendly towards them as I imagine the Fifteenth Doctor’s upcoming tenure will be.

This is, after all, an installment that ends on a guest appearance from the late Bernard Cribbins as Donna’s grandfather (and fan-favorite quasi-companion) Wilfred Mott, filmed shortly before his death at age 93. It’s a lovely grace note that helps to bring her arc full circle, just in time for whatever Toymaker shenanigans are awaiting in the final chapter ahead. This TARDIS team is proving to be so much more than just the Series 4 redux we might have expected, so as usual, I can already tell the franchise is going to rip my heart out when we have to say goodbye to them all too soon.

[Content warning for body horror and suicide.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer

Book #128 of 2023:

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer

This 2023 title is an expansion of author Claire Dederer’s viral 2017 article, “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” She’s no closer to coming up with a definitive prescriptive answer to that question of how one should treat Woody Allen movies, Kanye West songs, or the like given certain disquieting personal truths about those artists — she longs in vain for a magic calculator that could somehow weigh the quality of a piece against the sins of its maker — but her honest soul-searching is thought-provoking and helps to illuminate the boundaries of the discussion.

I am particularly struck by her observation that biographical details about creative types are nigh-unavoidable in our modern day, alongside her analysis of how they color our enjoyment of a work like a stain: boycotting J. K. Rowling after learning the depths of her transphobia is a conscious act that an ethical consumer can choose to make, but the emotional reaction that the news enacts on your engagement with her fiction is utterly involuntary. (And you are likewise not a better critic or a more objective audience member if you can set the relevant monstrosity aside; you are just likely privileged enough to not feel the stain quite as viscerally.)

The book as a whole meanders a fair bit. It’s a memoir of sorts, touching on the writer’s own potentially monstrous qualities like her alcohol addiction, and it also dwells a lot on the gendered expectations we put on male versus female creators, especially when it comes to judging women for supposedly neglecting their families in order to create their art. These are all valid and interesting topics, but I’m not sure they really all hang together under a central thesis of monster-hood the way Dederer intends.

Early in this essay collection, the culture critic cites a useful framework for her / our line of work, ascribing it originally to the 19th-century Italian poet Alessandro Manzoni. In essence, the idea is to critique an artistic production from a threefold perspective, exploring in turn the author’s intent, the worthiness or remarkability of that goal, and how well it has ultimately been accomplished. That’s a structure that I find mirrors my own typical approach to a review like this, but in this particular example, I cannot say that Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma is a complete success.

[Content warning for gun violence, pedophilia, rape, racism, sexism, and antisemitism.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Classic Doctor Who, season 9

TV #59 of 2023:

Classic Doctor Who, season 9

Narrowly more good than great in my opinion, and certainly less innovative than the Third Doctor’s first two seasons, which radically overhauled the series on several levels and then introduced the delightful recurring villain the Master. The main change this year is just that the Doctor seems free to travel in his TARDIS again — which probably helps the earthbound UNIT stuff from growing stale, but does somewhat reduce the distinctiveness of this particular era, now that the protagonist is back to the same business as his predecessors.

Still, the show is in a comfortable rhythm at this point, and no individual story is too awful, even if some of the script ideas exceed the effects budget rather spectacularly. (I challenge anyone to take Kronos seriously in The Time Monster, flailing around in that absurd costume. It can’t be done.) There are loads of fine moments, especially among the major cast members, who are feeling pretty well-drawn overall. It’s a nice hangout season, but ultimately not a favorite of mine.

[Content warning for gun violence.]

Serials ranked from worst to best:

★★★☆☆
THE MUTANTS (9×15 – 9×20)
THE SEA DEVILS (9×9 – 9×14)
THE TIME MONSTER (9×21 – 9×26)

★★★★☆
DAY OF THE DALEKS (9×1 – 9×4)
THE CURSE OF PELADON (9×5 – 9×8)

Overall rating for the season: ★★★☆☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Lower Decks, season 1

TV #58 of 2023:

Star Trek: Lower Decks, season 1

I can’t complain too much about this show. It’s an animated half-hour comedy that, sure, makes me laugh most episodes. But I don’t think it’s really living up to its mission or its potential, at least in this first year.

The series takes its name from an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that broke from that program’s typical convention by focusing on a group of characters who would ordinarily be in the background of the action and showing how they faced their own unique challenges and still meaningfully contributed to the success of the bridge officers we’d normally be following. This cartoon likewise places us among the menial workers on a Federation starship, though the contrast is less effective since we don’t already know the upper ranks on the U.S.S. Cerritos (and since the ship itself is situated as a bit of an underdog in the fleet).

My main issue here is tone. It feels reductive to say that this doesn’t feel like Star Trek, when the whole point is obviously to present a different sort of take on the usual material. And I do admire the ways that the writing finds to skewer some of Starfleet’s traditional pompousness! There are also some fun fan-service references, like a cutaway scene of Q’s shenanigans or a minor character insisting Wolf 359 was an inside job. But the scripts sometimes lean a bit too far in portraying a fundamentally cynical and harsh moral universe, in my opinion. Star Trek generally reflects an optimistic look at humanity’s future among the stars, so what are we to do with a schlimazel like Brad Boimler, who basically gets penalized by the narrative again and again for the apparent fault of trying to do his assigned job and advance in his career?

His crewmates fare somewhat better. Tendi and Rutherford aren’t treated nearly as cruelly by the plot, although again, the implication seems to be that Boimler’s flaw is caring too much, in a franchise that has previously always expected and rewarded that kind of behavior. Meanwhile the last lead Beckett Mariner is a new type of Star Trek hero, a competent badass who does get promoted for her efforts but then inevitably acts out in order to get busted back down. That leads to some entertaining story moments, but I find her a little tiring and underwritten as a character, especially when so many of her antics come at Brad’s expense. Her connection to the ship’s captain is similarly an interesting idea that doesn’t really go anywhere just yet.

I’ve seen some comparisons of this show to Rick and Morty, and I’m not familiar enough with that other series to weigh in on whether that’s the strangeness I’m sensing in its DNA or not. But there’s definitely something that’s holding me back from embracing it to the degree that its clever humor should rightfully merit. (That closing joke about the Enterprise finale and theme song, for example? Delightful.)

Still, it’s early days yet! Barclay was abused by TNG in his first few appearances too, before Trek found a way to organically develop and redeem him. I hope a similar grace can eventually be found for the animated denizens of these lower decks.

[Content warning for gun violence.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: System Collapse by Martha Wells

Book #127 of 2023:

System Collapse by Martha Wells (The Murderbot Diaries #7)

The second half of this latest Murderbot adventure lives up to my high expectations for the series, but the first part is an experimental departure that doesn’t really work for me. We start in media res, with the neurodivergent cyborg showing unusual signs of trauma, then jump backwards to where the storyline properly begins. Only, we’re still in the dark about whatever happened just prior to that, which the narrator literally designates as “[redacted]” and doesn’t explicitly reveal until much later on.

And while I think that could be an interesting new character note for the rogue AI, in practice I find it mostly a frustrating distraction. (The same plot beats of the protagonist’s unexpected emotional struggles and fear responses could have been presented straightforwardly, rather than coyly framed as supporting a mystery whose ultimate answer isn’t particularly revelatory.) Once that element is cleared up and the sci-fi action settles back into its usual groove, I like the book a lot more, although the crew subsequently staying up all night to make a documentary is still a little goofy. Overall it’s not bad, and I continue to enjoy spending time in Murderbot’s head, but this is definitely my least favorite installment yet.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Narrow Road Between Desires by Patrick Rothfuss

Book #126 of 2023:

The Narrow Road Between Desires by Patrick Rothfuss

An interesting novella focused on the minor character Bast from author Patrick Rothfuss’s ongoing / long-dormant trilogy The Kingkiller Chronicle. I have a few outside complaints about this title — it’s the second such side release for the series, all while readers have been waiting since 2011 for the third and final novel to end Kvothe’s saga, and it’s basically just a revised and expanded edition of the writer’s short story “The Lightning Tree,” which I’d read back in the Rogues anthology many years ago — but setting those issues aside to take the project on its own terms, it’s a fun little piece that doesn’t require any particular background knowledge.

Whether you’ve encountered him before or not, the protagonist is clearly some sort of supernatural yet innocent-appearing trickster figure, written off as a bit daft by the adults of his village whilst sought out by their children as an entertaining storyteller who can be bargained with to solve all manner of knotty problems. (Left unspoken is how that understanding must fade as the latter folks grow into the former, though I suppose it could be attributed to either magic or a natural forgetting process.) Some of his solutions are sorcerous, but most simply stem from his wits and his insights into human nature. We follow him over the course of a single day as he enacts several of those stratagems, requesting a price from one supplicant that inevitably winds up instrumental in helping another one later on. It’s lightweight but charming overall, although it touches on a few sensitive topics I’ve noted below.

I can’t remember at this point how the present book compares to the shorter original version, and I’ll again express my frustration that there’s still no signs of The Doors of Stone, but this is a fairly pleasant cozy fantasy read in and of itself.

[Content warning for domestic abuse and a few scenes of one person spying on someone else bathing, though that all turns out to be consensual in the end.]

★★★★☆