The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: Black Mirror, season 6

TV #33 of 2023:

Black Mirror, season 6

After four long years — twice the length of its previous longest gap — the infamous anthology series is back with another star-studded cast in five new twisted installments. Despite the program’s frequent focus on the dark underbelly of emerging technologies, I’ve always maintained that Black Mirror is a show more about the moral failures (and occasional triumphs) of people than about the devices that happen to aid them. And that feels especially true this time around, with the majority of its episodes — “Loch Henry,” “Mazey Day,” and “Demon 79” — not being particularly tech-driven at all. The last two of those, which close out the season, aren’t even set in the present or future, instead taking place in the decidedly non-dystopian eras of 2006 and 1979 respectively.

Regardless, it’s a strong sequence, although I personally don’t like the pair of horror period pieces quite as much as “Joan Is Awful,” “Loch Henry,” and especially “Beyond the Sea,” which all have some stomach-turning ironic twists to their already-delightful high concepts. A woman finds that the terms and conditions of her streaming service allow it to air a barely-fictionalized version of her life that puts all her flaws on display for the world to see. A couple budding documentarians turn their attention to the history of a local serial killer, only to learn that the case isn’t nearly as cold as anyone thinks. And in the most heartbreaking hour, far-distant astronauts with an Avatar-like connection to cyborg versions of themselves back on earth discover how helpless they are when personal tragedies strike at home.

The shorthand criticism of this series has always been Daniel M. Lavery’s iconic and admittedly funny formulation, “what if phones, but too much,” but in my opinion that’s never been less fair an assessment of the show’s aims, themes, and general operating procedures. Showrunner and primary writer Charlie Booker is producing a modern Twilight Zone here, a genre-hopping tour de force that uses black comedy, shock horror, and political satire to explore the unintended consequences that can spin out from any number of intriguing premises, often with a twist ending adding further impact to the current affair. In the more sci-fi-oriented stories, that can involve smartphones or their imagined descendants, but either way, it’s the core human frailties that really drive the plot, as they continue to do throughout this latest batch.

[Content warning for sexual assault, torture, domestic abuse, racism, gun violence, violence against children, incest, and gore.]

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Classic Doctor Who, season 7

TV #32 of 2023:

Classic Doctor Who, season 7

Previously for this rewatch, I’ve been assigning each season of Classic Who an average rating that’s the literal mean of my ratings for the individual serials within. I’m going to cheat a little this time, though, both since there are only four stories in season 7 and because some consideration is probably owed to how thoroughly the creative team under incoming producer Barry Letts managed to overhaul the series for it. So I will round that 3.25 average up to a score of 4 stars overall instead.

We’ve got a new Doctor, of course, joined by a new companion Liz Shaw who sadly wouldn’t return after this. The program is also rather strikingly presented in color for the first time — welcome to the 70s! — and it depicts a radical reimagining of the core premise to the production. For six years, audiences had watched as the First or the Second Doctor piloted the TARDIS to a different time and place at the top of every serial, getting involved in local events and then swiftly retreating once the relevant victory is secured. Now, the Third Doctor finds himself marooned on contemporary(-ish) earth, where he is forced to maintain a collegial working relationship with UNIT, the military taskforce defending the planet from alien incursions that had previously popped up during the Second Doctor’s tenure. It’s a bold redirection, and a smart writing choice for the additional supporting cast and the ways in which they butt heads with the Doctor over the proper approach to each emerging threat.

Not every such storyline works for me. I think The Ambassadors of Death gets lost in its twisty government conspiracy and string of surprise reveals of who’s in on it, and at seven episodes, that serial and two of the three others all have a lot of unnecessary subplots and similar digressive elements that could stand to be tightened up. (Following this, no Doctor Who serial would ever go longer than six episodes in total.) But the better parts are pretty great, and the Autons and Silurians introduced during this run would go on to rank among the iconic recurring creatures of the franchise. Best of all is the final outing Inferno, which whisks the Doctor away to a fascist alternate reality and its cruel doppelgängers of his now-familiar UNIT allies. That’s a move the show literally couldn’t have done before this point, without a stable home setting and characters to invert, and it’s a terrific way to end Jon Pertwee’s debut year.

Serials ranked from worst to best:

★★☆☆☆
THE AMBASSADORS OF DEATH (7×12 – 7×18)

★★★☆☆
DOCTOR WHO AND THE SILURIANS (7×5 – 7×11)

★★★★☆
SPEARHEAD FROM SPACE (7×1 – 7×4)
INFERNO (7×19 – 7×25)

Overall rating for the season: ★★★★☆

Book Review: Those Who Hold the Fire by Victoria Goddard

Book #85 of 2023:

Those Who Hold the Fire by Victoria Goddard

This prequel to author Victoria Goddard’s The Hands of the Emperor is rather short — the Nine Worlds wiki lists it as a novelette, not even a full novella — and it’s pretty dependent on the reader bringing outside context from that longer original story in order for its emotional beats and heavy foreshadowing to land. I would not advise anyone to start the Lays of the Hearth-fire sequence here, but if you’ve previously met its protagonist Kip Mdang as an adult, this is an enjoyable look at him at age thirteen, less confident than he’ll someday be, yet already determined to both embrace the ancient cultural practices of his people and make his mark on the wider world. It’s maybe a bit much to suggest that he was thinking of eventually serving an emperor so early in his life, and the scant length keeps this work from really digging into the hero at this stage, so different than we’ve seen him before. But it’s a nice depiction of a particular coming-of-age moment during his apprenticeship to his uncle Buru Tovo, and one which resonates with what we know of his future journey.

Overall the title works better for me than the writer’s Portrait of a Wide Seas Islander novella, so I suppose I’ll give this one a rating of three-and-a-half stars, rounded up.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Yellowface by R. F. Kuang

Book #84 of 2023:

Yellowface by R. F. Kuang

A scathing dark satire of race, the internet, and the contemporary publishing landscape. Our protagonist is a great antihero in the tradition of Tom Ripley or Shakespeare’s Iago who secretly resents a more successful friend — only in this case, she never acts against her in life. But when the other writer dies suddenly in her apartment with no other witnesses, June seizes the unpublished manuscript of her next novel and begins working on it, ultimately passing the finished story off as entirely her own and watching it become a runaway bestseller. Complicating matters further, the book is about the Chinese laborers who were impressed into service in World War I, opening the white woman up to criticism that she didn’t have the right to authentically address that subject, even before rumors start circulating that the late Athena Liu may have been the true author after all. (Critics also pounce on the fact that June’s publishers have released the volume under her middle name Song rather than her last name Hayward, as though aiming for a more ambiguous presentation of her ethnicity.)

It’s a sharp character study and less of a suspense thriller than I expected, although the big secret definitely looms over events as a Chekhov’s gun just waiting to fire and take down the unscrupulous thief. But she also repeatedly makes things worse for herself via her subsequent actions, as though her tragic flaw is her unconscious inability to ever simply rest on her stolen laurels (in addition to her positively staggering amounts of unexamined racism and accordingly ironclad conviction that she couldn’t possibly be a bigot). And though I cited Othello above, the Shakespearean figures June truly resembles are MacBeth and his wife, as she becomes guiltily haunted — both metaphorically and at least psychologically, if not quite literally — by the ghost of the dead woman. She sees the face of her personal Banquo in crowds, and is tormented by anonymous abusers hiding behind her name and appearance online.

A lot of this text focuses on the drama of Twitter, where self-righteous call-out threads can swiftly tank a person’s reputation, and although I tend to believe such ‘cancel culture’ campaigns are generally well-intentioned and do more good than harm, author R. F. Kuang emphasizes the escalating secondary threats and unavoidable trauma of becoming the internet’s main character of the day. She also adds the important detail that no one in the digital panopticon is safe from being targeted themselves — Athena gets posthumously critiqued for her own ethical missteps at one point — and the even more damning observation that all the kerfuffle is largely ignored by the wider public, who if anything merely register that a canceled individual is newsworthy and proceed to buy more of her books.

This aspect feels very of-the-moment, and I honestly don’t know how well it will age! In a future where blue checks and Substacks and whatnot have joined the virtual graveyard, will this section of the plot still resonate with readers? I really couldn’t say, but I think it’s a meaningful reflection of our current era as it stands.

I’ll likewise maintain my agnosticism over whether we’re meant to see Athena as a self-insert for Kuang, whose personal biography she suspiciously mirrors. I know that’s been a sticking point for other reviewers, but I feel more invested in the emerging portrait of the antiheroine who survives her, and in the conflicting emotions of whether to root more for or against the plagiarist whilst being so firmly situated inside her perspective. It’s a masterful balancing act, and while I don’t love this novel overall as much as the author’s earlier work Babel: an Arcane History, it’s still a timely and chillingly immersive tale.

[Content warning for panic attacks and rape.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Magical Bears in the Context of Contemporary Political Theory by Jenna Katerin Moran

Book #83 of 2023:

Magical Bears in the Context of Contemporary Political Theory by Jenna Katerin Moran

I had complicated feelings about the intense weirdness of author Jenna Katerin Moran’s novels Fable of the Swan and The Night-Bird’s Feather, but in each case, I gradually came around to the volume’s charms and felt like it ultimately managed to achieve something sublime. When I saw this collection of short fiction, I was curious to see whether the constraints of that medium would help offset the writer’s unorthodox sensibilities (since short stories by their nature allow for more unexplained elements in service to their emotional impact) or amplify them (since there wouldn’t be as much time for the absurdities to accumulate gravity and finally click). Unfortunately for me as a reader, I’m afraid the result falls more toward the latter option.

The running throughline that gives this book its title is an urban fantasy realm populated by Care Bear knockoffs with darker powers and a general noir tone: Femme Fatale Bear, Nihilism Bear, Transgression Bear, and so on. Not every chapter connects directly to that setting, although the whole work apparently takes place within the wider ‘Hitherby Dragons’ series, whatever that entails. But whether ursine-related or not, these entries generally leave me cold. They do manage to amuse with puns and other witticisms, and as usual, there is a strong streak of the surreally absurd that leads to some ridiculous imagery, like fetuses using placenta as currency — because ‘plaquarteras’ would be too much money; get it? — or a Fisher-Price playset that becomes a postapocalyptic weapon. But none of it moves me the way the characters in those longer plots eventually could. It instead mostly reads like a sequence of unedited free-writes, and while I hope that it finds its proper audience, I just don’t get it overall.

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Orion by Ben Bova

Book #82 of 2023:

Orion by Ben Bova (Orion #1)

I loved this science-fiction novel — and to a lesser extent the loose series that follows — when I was a teen, and I’m glad to find that it holds up pretty well today. It’s definitely a product of its 1984 publication date in some ways: the hero is a muscular ubermensch with such complete control over his body that he can consciously regulate his temperature or speed up his perceptions during battle, his love-at-first-sight romantic interest is practically the only woman in the book and doesn’t get nearly as much characterization as the men, and the perspective on non-western cultures can be a bit simplistic (in addition to using some now-outdated racial terminology). But it’s also a great time-travel story that helped spark my lifelong interests in anthropology, history, and comparative religions.

Our titular protagonist is living in the late 20th century when he learns that he is actually the champion of a godlike being, who directs him to stop an enemy intent on destroying humanity’s progress towards a utopian galactic civilization. They use the names Ormazd and Ahriman respectively, the Zoroastrian deities of light and darkness, and it’s eventually revealed that all earth’s various divine legends are based on them and their ilk (although we don’t get to see much of them until the sequels). Here, the dark figure is attempting to destroy an experimental fusion reactor, and when Orion successfully stops him, he next finds himself relocated over time and space to the Mongol Empire a few generations after Genghis Khan. It turns out he and his adversary are moving in opposite directions across history, and in each era, the warrior must uncover and oppose Ahriman’s plan to subvert the natural timeline. And in their every encounter, he knows the other man better while being less well-known in return, River Song-style. A reincarnation of the same woman accompanies him too, although she doesn’t retain her memories from life to life, only her personality, her physical appearance, and her attraction to Orion.

The plot ultimately reaches back to the Stone Age and beyond, where there are some solid sci-fi twists, which I won’t spoil here but will merely note have stayed with me for a good long while. The saga goes in some odd directions after this point — I believe the next volume dumps Orion into the Trojan War for some reason — but this first one was always my favorite, and it’s been fun reencountering it as an adult, even if the flaws are a bit more evident than I had remembered.

[Content warning for gun violence, gore, violence against children, genocide, and rape.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: A Flaw in the Design by Nathan Oates

Book #81 of 2023:

A Flaw in the Design by Nathan Oates

This story idea had potential! English professor Gil has been estranged from his millionaire sister for years, ever since her troubled son tried drowning the man’s daughter when they were kids. Now he’s 17 and orphaned, and his parents’ will has sent him to live with his uncle’s family, where everyone else seems convinced that he’s turned his life around but our hero believes that he’s still the same sociopath underneath — and possibly even responsible for the car crash that killed his mom and dad. Unable to make anyone else see reason, the protagonist steadily declines into an angry and paranoid wreck, especially after his precocious nephew joins his creative writing class and starts submitting assignments of fiction that read like thinly-veiled confessions and threats.

All of this could have worked, were it not for how little I cared for either character. The teacher repeatedly lies to his wife and children for no particular reason, and there’s a quasi-predatory vibe to the way he talks about both his female students and his teenage daughters that really set me on edge, even when he isn’t lashing out at them directly. Meanwhile the boy is pretty far from a criminal mastermind, and I found it impossible to root for him either, no matter how much I came to dislike his older relative over the course of the novel. He’s set up as some sort of evil genius, but his actions belie that at every turn, making all manner of mistakes that any reasonably sharp opponent could have seized on to prove his guilt. Luckily for him, he’s instead given Gil, who brings plenty of his own unforced errors to their contest.

I kept reading in the hope that some postmodern twist at the end would help redeem this project. Maybe the kid is innocent, and all the evidence against him is just combined coincidence and delusion? Or maybe the uncle is the truly wicked one, and he’s trying to frame the youth in order to steal away his fortune? But no — it’s exactly as straightforward as it first appears, with one mediocre figure squaring off against another such that neither’s victory could ever feel particularly well-earned. How tedious, save for the chuckle I got at the book’s ironically apt title.

[Content warning for rape, racism, incest, and suicide.]

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson, season 3

TV #31 of 2023:

I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson, season 3

I laughed during every episode, if not necessarily during each sketch. As usual, comedian Tim Robinson’s offbeat humor fluctuates between entertaining and simply off-putting, with a bit too much angry shouting for my tastes and plenty a skit that either goes on too long or lacks that solid punchline ending that would really bring it all together (or both, of course). Still, the season is short enough at six 16-minute episodes, and the writing retains that sense of earworm catchphrases that are destined to be memed, from “shirt brother” to “They’re trying to make it look fake!”

My favorite installments this year: Tim Meadows at his daughter’s wedding reception, the rat mom at her boss’s birthday party, the man on a date with an unfortunate hairstyle, and the ad for the Darmine Doggy Door.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Witch King by Martha Wells

Book #80 of 2023:

Witch King by Martha Wells

I am all for complex fantasy worldbuilding, but it’s not a great sign that at the end of this standalone novel, I still don’t believe I could accurately summarize the distinctions it draws between demons, witches, expositors, blessed immortals, hierarchs, and the like, all of whom theoretically use magic in different ways, let alone keep track of the extensive cast of characters that populate each faction. It never feels as though author Martha Wells has neglected to invent the important details per se, but they aren’t really presented in a readily-internalized manner for us. I’ll join the other reviews I’ve seen in speculating that this all might be easier to follow in print than on audio — although I’d also note that as someone who listens to hundreds of audiobooks a year, I am rarely this adrift.

I think part of the problem is that this story is pretty narrowly focused on its protagonist (in two unfolding timelines), leaving the other characters and the realms around them as far more of a basic sketch. And while I was initially intrigued by the setup in the present, when that nigh-immortal hero wakes up in a tomb and has to scramble to escape and learn who betrayed him and left him for dead, both his hunt for answers and the flashbacks detailing his original rise to power gradually lose my interest due to the continued murkiness of their overall stakes. I enjoy Kai’s sardonic voice, which carries echoes of the writer’s famous Murderbot, but I just am never clear on why I should care about what he’s trying to achieve either then or now.

Two-and-a-half stars, rounded up.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Gilmore Girls, season 5

TV #30 of 2023:

Gilmore Girls, season 5

This is kind of a weird season of television! I’m not sure if I ever noticed before this rewatch, but this does seem to be the point where the series starts running out of ideas, making some choices that don’t feel especially true to the established characters and others that are clear repeats of the past, to predictably diminishing returns. Richard and Emily begin in a prolonged fight, but since the Jason Stiles subplot that was the catalyst to that last year has been unceremoniously dropped, there’s no real further discussion of why they’re continuing to squabble, even though they do. Meanwhile, Rory is likewise fighting with Lorelei over the subject of her renewed relationship with the sullen Dean, who’s by now married to someone else and (unsurprisingly) still no more appealing as a romantic option for his ex. It’s the first of many odd choices the Yale sophomore will make in this run.

In other developments, Lorelei and Luke are now dating, which is great payoff for their long-standing flirtatious dynamic. Except then her parents, who have previously limited themselves to arch comments about her love life, take it upon themselves to break up the happy couple — and Luke allows it, despite plainly not caring for their opinions, revealing on an earlier date that he’s carried a torch for Lorelei the whole time he’s known her, and promising her that he’s seriously committed to making things work now that they’re together. In light of that context, the breakup feels like simple arbitrary drama, particularly when the pair ultimately reconcile a few episodes later.

Rory’s own next romance reads as somewhat groundless too, for while I like Logan in the eventual boyfriend role, he’s a smug jerk throwing his money around the first few times they meet, and neither the writing nor the acting sells Rory’s attraction well enough to mitigate that negative impression for me. It’s also pretty silly that a) his family interprets a girlfriend of a week as a marriage prospect, and b) they reject Rory, a fellow Yale student and grandchild of their high-society friends, so forcefully. It’s more empty melodrama that’s hard to take at face-value, especially coming after Richard Gilmore earlier in the season helped Rory play a prank on Logan to suggest the families truly were in courtship talks.

In a similar vein, Mitchum Huntzberger negging the girl in his workplace evaluation is abrupt and mean-spirited, and while it’s not clear whether he means it as genuine professional feedback or as another effort to steer her out of his son’s life, it’s patently obvious to the viewer that his comments are wrong. We’ve seen Rory thrive and meet all manner of challenges for five years now, and just this season we’ve witnessed her grow in competence and confidence from her timid arrival at the newspaper to an integrated intern teammate in a few short weeks. It’s difficult to see Mitchum’s dismissive view of her journalism skills as remotely legitimate, which also makes it tough to accept that Rory ever could — let alone to make sense of her disastrous final choices here.

Elsewhere Paris starts dating Doyle, which seems reasonable, and Lane starts dating her roommate / bandmate Zach, which…. does not. The intended trajectory of Lane’s love life got messed up by her previous beau’s actor leaving for a different show, and the attempt to graft whatever that would have become onto his friend who’s still around reads as a desperate stretch to keep Rory’s nominal bestie still relevant to the plot despite the distance between Stars Hollow and Yale. Like many elements this year, it’s effective enough in the moment to fill out the weekly 45 minutes, but not entirely satisfying from a bigger-picture perspective.

[Content warning for transphobia.]

★★★☆☆