The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The Redemption of Althalus by David and Leigh Eddings

Book #37 of 2023:

The Redemption of Althalus by David and Leigh Eddings

A good fantasy novel but ultimately not a great one. I still like it in parts, just not nearly as much as I did in high school, and I suspect that this will probably be the last time I ever reread the thing, particularly given its length (almost 800 pages in my paperback copy). While the core of the story remains sound, detailing how an incorrigible rogue improbably winds up as divine champion and repeatedly outsmarts his goddess’s enemies, in practice it all feels too easy for the protagonist and his band of allies. They’re rarely significantly challenged, and the bad guys walk into their clever schemes at every turn. Even the structure, wherein Althalus recruits his team one-by-one and then they each take the spotlight to pick off their respective counterpart on the opposite side, seems too pat and preordained.

There’s a weird vein of gender essentialism running through the volume, as well. Although it’s arguably an improvement over the minimal female representation in the likes of Tolkien, the women in this text tend to be characterized as petulant brats whose emotions must be tiptoed around, and a lot of talk goes into pairing them up with the default romantic partners, cloyingly referred to “that boy-people and girl-people stuff” throughout. The ensuing relationships have as little spark or tension as the main plot, and certainly offer no room for queerness and/or asexuality to exist within this setting: we are told of the deity simply that “it’s part of her nature to bring boys and girls together.” Even compared to other genre books from the year 2000, it’s a bit disappointing on that front.

The tale does have its charms, from a talking cat to time-travel and doors that can open to anywhere in the world. It includes a heavy deal of military strategy, if that’s your thing, and I especially enjoy the more folkloric sections depicting the hero’s time as a thief before his titular ‘redemption.’ But the flaws are more obvious with a few decades of hindsight.

[Content warning for ableism, fatphobia, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi

Book #36 of 2023:

The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi

Kaiju are giant monsters like Godzilla, the subject of a thriving genre of fiction in Japan and elsewhere over the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond. The premise of this story posits that such creatures exist in a parallel world, accessible via nuclear energy — either from engineered explosions on our end, or naturally as part of the inherent biological paradigm on theirs (the stuff that feeds their plasma breath). The protagonist is recruited to join the international organization that maintains an outpost in that other earth to study the beasts, although it’s so clandestine that the exact nature of the job can’t be shared before arrival beyond a vague mention of fieldwork and animal rights.

The ensuing tale takes a heavy and acknowledged cue from Jurassic Park, right down to the dangerous fallout when someone’s capitalistic greed interferes with the regular safety protocols. It’s not the most complicated plot — when the antagonistic figure from the beginning of the novel pops up again around the middle, it’s easy to predict he’ll be the eventual big bad — but it’s also not aiming to be. In an afterword, author John Scalzi likens the book to a pop song, a bit of lightness that he needed as a palate-cleanser after living through 2020 and the end of the Trump presidency in general. It’s quippy and perhaps a bit self-satisfied over how cool everything’s supposed to be, but it’s undeniably pretty fun. It feels ready-made to be adapted into a decent popcorn flick someday.

The writer’s casual approach to gender diversity is appreciated, too. The main character is depicted in first-person perspective and never explicitly identified by pronoun or other gendered description, representing an ambiguous blank that anything could be reasonably read into. A new colleague uses they/them for themself, and our narrator Jamie has a passing thought regarding another acquaintance’s deadname. Such cues signal these folks’ identities and the rest of the cast’s acceptance of them without taking over the narrative, allowing for welcome representation in the midst of the gratuitous kaiju element.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Classic Doctor Who, season 5

TV #8 of 2023:

Classic Doctor Who, season 5

I guess I have to concede, based on the average ratings I give its seven component serials below, that this season of old Doctor Who is still narrowly more good than great overall. But it’s easily my favorite of this rewatch yet, with some fun minor continuity across it: The Web of Fear is a direct sequel to The Abominable Snowmen, revisiting its antagonist, minions, and a helpful ally after four decades away (or a few weeks, for the Doctor and his friends), and the first and last adventures of the year both find the TARDIS team going up against Cybermen. For a modern fan, this run also introduces the sonic screwdriver, Ice Warriors, and major recurring character Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, each of which is neat to see debut even though absolutely nothing at the time indicates they’ll have any future importance to the franchise.

Victoria is in most of these stories, and she’s not my favorite companion, since her role seems often reduced to a screaming hostage and/or wet blanket. But dependable Jamie remains for the physical action, the fish-out-of-water / culture clash element, and his verbal sparring with the Doctor, and in the final installment, brave sheltered neurodivergent genius Zoe stows away to join the crew as well. The two of them will be with the Second Doctor for the remainder of his tenure, and she’s already showing more personality and initiative than her predecessor. While I don’t remember the following season too clearly, I’m feeling optimistic that this is where Classic Who is really settling into a groove of consistent quality sci-fi.

Serials ranked from worst to best:

★★☆☆☆
FURY FROM THE DEEP (5×29 – 34)

★★★☆☆
THE ICE WARRIORS (5×11 – 5×16)
THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMEN (5×5 – 10)

★★★★☆
THE WEB OF FEAR (5×23 – 5×28)
THE WHEEL IN SPACE (5×35 – 5×40)
THE ENEMY OF THE WORLD (5×17 – 5×22)
THE TOMB OF THE CYBERMEN (5×1 – 5×4)

Overall rating for the season: ★★★☆☆

Book Review: Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Book #35 of 2023:

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I went through a brief Heinlein phase in high school, and I suspect that if I had read this book back then, I probably would have liked it better. (Even today, I’ll note that I prefer it over Slaughterhouse-Five, the only other Vonnegut work that I’ve read, but that’s unfortunately not saying very much.) In their favor, both golden-age science-fiction writers have plenty of interesting ideas and occasional pieces of beauty that stop me in my tracks. Here, for instance, it’s the last rites in the fictional religion of Bokononism, each sentence intoned by the officiant and repeated back by the person who’s dying:

“God made mud.
God got lonesome.
So God said to some of the mud, ‘Sit up!’
‘See all I’ve made,’ said God, ‘the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.’
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.
I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
Nice going, God.
Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly couldn’t have.
I feel very unimportant compared to You.
The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn’t even get to sit up and look around.
I got so much, and most mud got so little.
Thank you for the honor!”

The ritual exchange is perhaps a bit simple, but it strikes a chord with me much as elements of Stranger in a Strange Land’s own weird faith once did, and is easily my favorite part of this novel. Against that, however, are the other ways that this author resembles his contemporary that gradually turned me off the latter: the smugly self-satisfied perspective of the intellectual able-bodied white man, so confident that everyone else in the universe is his inferior and present only for his amusement and/or sexual satisfaction. Again and again, the narrator of this story is casually, cruelly bigoted in the way he perceives others (or specifically, Others). He claims to have fallen in love with a woman upon seeing a photograph of her. He reacts to everything about her dark-skinned island nation with a wry disdain. He brushes off the arrival of a little person on his plane with the mental note that such folk* “are, after all, diversions for silly or quiet times.”

I’ll grant that this title is a broad satire — mostly on religion, but eventually on the possibility of modern technology and human error inadvertently causing the apocalypse — and that protagonists are not necessarily the mouthpieces of their creators. Yet overall, I’ve found this to be an unpleasantly mean-spirited comedy, in a way that doesn’t feel entirely intentional. It’s funny at times, in its meandering plot! And the Bokononist teaching that certain souls are intertwined by fate reminds me pleasingly of how Stephen King treats the concept of ka and ka-tets in his Dark Tower series. But in the final judgment, this is one classic that’s left me cold as ice-nine.

*Vonnegut even uses a term now generally considered a slur for people with dwarfism, although I’m not sure how that usage might have been different in 1963

[Content warning for suicide.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Sabriel by Garth Nix

Book #34 of 2023:

Sabriel by Garth Nix (The Old Kingdom #1)

A thoroughly excellent modern fantasy classic, published in 1995 but just as enjoyable now upon my umpteenth reread. (I can’t remember when I first encountered it, but I do recall thinking in amazement that it was like a written version of the Diablo games. And that assessment pretty much holds up.) I love the landscape that author Garth Nix has constructed for this novel: a snowy realm of magic and undead terror, located just beyond the border of a more ordinary-seeming nation roughly analogous to Edwardian England. His vision of the Old Kingdom feels so distinctive and intricately-designed, with its cultural practices of Charter Magic and its seven bells of necromancy, each of which wields a different power over the revenant spirits that hear it. Even the land of the afterlife itself is rigorously defined in its precise domains and the ways that a careful adept can delve there. Yet despite this massive level of worldbuilding detail, it’s all presented to us naturalistically as the story unfolds, yielding to few of those expository asides so common in the genre.

Sabriel herself is a great protagonist, the eighteen-year-old heir to her father’s role in putting down the dead, but raised away from any danger, where he would regularly visit and train her. As a result, she gets to be both competent at her family craft and a bit of a novice to whom things must be explained, letting readers learn the rules of the world alongside her. She’s brave and overwhelmed in equal measure, and the plot that kicks off when she goes searching for her missing guardian forms a terrific introduction to the series and its tone. That journey builds nicely in scope and stakes over the course of the book, and I especially appreciate how it returns full-circle to its initial setting by the end.

And have I mentioned Mogget, the powerful eldritch monstrosity bound by the heroine’s ancestor and presently taking the form of a sardonic but loyal housecat, begrudgingly dispensing wisdom with all the usual feline mannerisms? Truly one of the top fantasy sidekicks, and all the more so when he inevitably turns loose and becomes a deadly threat in his own right.

The one element that doesn’t entirely work for me is Touchstone, the other major character who joins the party about midway through the tale. He’s too important to events for the accidental way they stumble across him here, and I wish that that introduction could have been better motivated in the text and not such a randomly lucky coincidence. The romance that develops between him and Sabriel, while hardly the focus, is likewise rather under-developed in my opinion, coming across as frustratingly perfunctory and proximity-based rather than arising due to any genuine emotions via vulnerability, trust, or shared experiences.

Those problems strike me every time I revisit this title, but in the final analysis, I think they’re minor enough to let slide. Overall it’s fantastic, and while I’ve enjoyed the sequels that Nix has continued to write over the following years, none of them in my eyes have ever quite lived up to the original, which could have easily remained or been approached as a standalone adventure. Still, I’m looking forward to seeing the rest of them all again soon.

[Content warning for gun violence, child endangerment, slavery, and gore.]

★★★★★

Book Review: Ordeal by Innocence by Agatha Christie

Book #33 of 2023:

Ordeal by Innocence by Agatha Christie

A rather silly beginning, in which we learn that the stranger who could have corroborated an accused murderer’s alibi was hit by a truck, developed a case of short-term amnesia, and promptly departed for a two-year polar expedition, thus missing the publicity about the trial and the call for him to come forward. By the time the witness and his memory both return, the prisoner has already died of pneumonia, but the poor man feels honor-bound to inform the surviving relatives of the deceased that he was innocent of killing his mother. Of course, this means that someone else in her inner circle likely murdered her instead, and over the rest of the book, they descend into mutual accusations and tense suspicion.

I do like these elements of the psychological thriller, but the effect is weakened by author Agatha Christie’s need to bind it up with her typical whodunnit plot. If the dead man were guilty after all and everyone’s relationships were soured for nothing, or if the ultimate truth never came out in the end, that would have been a bolder and more effective writing decision, in my opinion. But as presented, the reveal seems arbitrary and perfunctory, especially after the apparent culprit runs away, everyone else swiftly reconciles, and the novel closes on an abrupt marriage proposal between two characters who barely know one another but are now confessing their undying love. With such a disappointing start and finish, even the livelier middle can’t save this title from itself.

[Content warning for racism and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn

Book #32 of 2023:

Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn

A frustratingly three-star read. The premise is fine, but it’s one I’ve seen too many times before: an assassin’s employers for some reason decide they’ve become expendable, try unsuccessfully to kill them off, and then find themselves on the receiving end of the killer’s particular talents. That’s the basic gist of seemingly all the Jason Bourne movies, the back half of the show Killing Eve, and plenty of other stories as well, and the only distinctive thing this novel does with the concept is have its protagonists be a quartet of women in their sixties, looking to retire from the business after decades of black-ops work. Of course, they’re all still capable hitpeople, and the villains inevitably wind up being overconfident men whose sexism and ageism lead them to underestimate their opponents at their peril. The whole piece plays out exactly as expected, and while there’s a degree of catharsis in a skillfully-executed (pun intended) take-down, the heroines face no significant challenges or distinguishing plot twists throughout.

I’m also mildly disappointed in this book from a Jewish perspective. We’re repeatedly told that the clandestine organization was originally formed to extrajudicially hunt down Nazis after World War II… but then the major discussion that ensues is all about the stolen art of that regime and the importance of returning it to its former owners once recovered from a target, rather than, you know, the antisemitic slaughter of millions and other moral outrages we generally loathe Nazis for and might want revenge over. There’s one Jewish character, and in an afterword author Deanna Raybourn thanks her sensitivity readers for assisting with that portrayal, but her Judaism is only mentioned in a single scene in which she goes to a Catholic church to pray because she can’t find a temple nearby. This woman never discusses the Nazi element, even though she logically would have felt the personal dimension of that mission quite keenly over her 40 years of working for a firm built around delivering their just desserts.

Overall, the plot is competent enough that I’ll throw it my three-star median rating. But it shows a lot of neglected potential like that and a thorough lack of creativity in general that keeps me from embracing it fully.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: A Sliver of Darkness by C. J. Tudor

Book #31 of 2023:

A Sliver of Darkness by C. J. Tudor

This is a pretty consistently solid collection of horror (or horror-adjacent) short stories, many revolving around some type of dystopian apocalypse and its aftermath. Oftentimes I find such ensembles to vary dramatically in quality across their contents, but here I think I’d give each individual entry either a 3- or a 4-star rating, meaning that even when a particular title doesn’t entirely work for me, there’s usually some element or another that I feel is well-done or otherwise distinctive. My favorites include “End of the Liner,” about an authoritarian regime on a cruise ship following a global disaster, and “The Block,” which is sort of like the movie Attack the Block — young kids battling monsters in a low-income high-rise — only featuring ravenous zombie-like creatures instead of aliens.

Overall, though, I’m counting more 3s than 4s in my personal reactions, so the lower score for the book as a whole feels appropriate. (It doesn’t help that the stories I highlighted above are literally the first two in the volume, or that the closing piece “Butterfly Island” is probably the weakest, an ordering that adds a slight yet still disappointing downward trajectory to the text.) If there’s a common flaw throughout, it’s a tendency to end on one or more twists, typically in the form of a reveal that the current protagonist is somehow crueler than they’ve previously appeared. That’s fine in certain situations, and is even indicative of the genre to an extent, but it plays out to diminishing returns to read a variation on it again and again in quick succession.

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

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)

Movie #3 of 2023:

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)

It looks like I’m out of step with the critical consensus on this one, based on the early reviews, but whatever: I really liked the latest piece in Marvel’s increasingly complex cinematic universe! Maybe I’m just riding the high of being back in a movie theater for the first time in three-and-a-half-years, but I do think this was something special. I’d even say it’s the strongest of the three Ant-Man movies so far, although it sheds a lot of what previously defined that series: corporate espionage, Scott Lang’s criminal history / talents, and a variety of imaginative uses for the signature shrinking and growing technologies. That last element is still present to some extent, as is the wry banter that marks most MCU features, but it no longer feels as focal, which I suppose may have disappointed audience expectations. Instead, the tech mostly just powers the sequel’s premise: a return to the sub-microscopic “Quantum Realm” that Janet van Dyne was rescued from in 2018’s Ant-Man and the Wasp.

As it turns out, there are entire civilizations down there, and Janet was intimately involved with them during her decades away. Specifically, she has a past with the franchise’s new supervillain Kang, whom she inadvertently helped rise to power and then rallied against as a freedom fighter. It’s a bit of a retcon, but a fair one, and a device that drives the remainder of the plot. In fact, Janet is such a major player in events that I have to assume she’s the titular Wasp this time around; her daughter Hope by contrast is tied with original Ant-Man Hank Pym for least essential cast member by far. And the narrative is structured such that the three of them are together for most of the runtime, while leading man Scott is separated from them with his daughter Cassie (now aged up enough to be a trainee hero herself, and played by newcomer Kathryn Newton with charmingly earnest aplomb).

While the setting is infinitesimal, it feels pretty cosmic, with vibrant colors and weird lifeforms evoking its franchise sibling Guardians of the Galaxy and especially Star Wars. The story parallels aren’t exact, but you’ve got your evil empire and your landspeeders and your imposing creatures who turn out to be stalwart allies, all amid an overall space opera vibe. There’s even a Lando Calrissian figure, played in a delightful turn of obvious stunt-casting. Perhaps it’s not what the majority of movie-going critics wanted from a superhero flick, but it all worked well for me! And the movie definitely goes its own way within that genre framework too, with the alternately hilarious and creepy MODOK (and his surprising connection to a previous film) proving a particularly Marvel-esque addition.

Ultimately, not much about this film probably matters to the future of the series. It doesn’t largely affect the status quo for the main characters, and by virtue of its tiny scope, its adventure is a bizarre side outing that none of the other Avengers or their ensemble sidekicks are likely to ever hear about. We know Kang will return — the subtitle for the next Avengers movie has already been announced as The Kang Dynasty — but his whole deal is that there’s a multiverse of his variants out there causing havoc, one of which had already been introduced and explained all that on the Disney+ show Loki. So I don’t know that meeting the one in this film is strictly necessary for viewers.

But personally, I enjoy the sense that the Marvel heroes are all dealing with smaller crises on their own time, only crossing over to team up on the major occasions that really call for it. And it doesn’t get much smaller than this.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Afterward by E. K. Johnston

Book #30 of 2023:

The Afterward by E. K. Johnston

I like the idea of following up with a band of adventurers after they’ve completed their quest to save the world, and all the more so that our focus is on a pair of young women who became romantically entwined on that adventure but are now apart and dealing with their separate smaller crises. One, a thief, finds herself too recognizable to still carry off any big jobs in that profession, yet unfortunately neither qualified nor inclined to do much of anything else for work. The other, a knight-in-training, is honorbound to marry someone soon to pay off her debts — likely with the aim of producing heirs, even though she is not attracted to men. But they can’t seem to stay away from one another, no matter how much it hurts for each to see the beloved she can no longer be with.

That portion of the novel is fine. But it’s accompanied by a great many flashbacks to the backstory, few of which manage to deepen the characters or inform their present beyond what the initial premise already established. This section of the narrative is also significantly thinner, relying on reader familiarity with genre tropes to fill in the blanks with the appropriate archetypes. And I wish the later chapters wouldn’t throw another big magical threat into the plot, since the appeal for me until that point had been the lower stakes of the domestic drama. Although the publisher’s description of this title promises “a tale both sweepingly epic and intensely personal,” in my opinion the balance between those two elements is off, and the latter is by far the stronger.

[Content warning for gore and parental death.]

★★★☆☆