The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Empire Builders by Ben Bova

Book #27 of 2026:

Empire Builders by Ben Bova

I don’t know if this third Grand Tour installment (in chronological order) is objectively any weaker than the stories before, but at a minimum I’m growing pretty tired of our recurring hero Dan Randolph, dashing genius billionaire tech CEO and inveterate womanizer. A decade has passed for the character and his world since Privateers, but the now-50-year-old hasn’t changed much beyond getting divorced, and he now finds himself caught up in yet another political action thriller. It’s fun to an extent — his enemies try to imprison him and seize his companies, turning him into a merry fugitive for a while — and it’s interesting to see a 1993 novel centered around the emergent threat of climate change, though there’s of course a lot of science that author Ben Bova unwittingly gets wrong. But it’s the politics that I think really sink this one, even more egregiously than the speculation of future Soviet dominance in the previous title.

The premise here is that scientists have just discovered a looming ecological cliff: a ten-year window after which the Earth will become swiftly inhospitable if humans don’t take steps to start addressing the problem. Our all-American protagonist thinks every country and private corporation should be freed from regulations to pursue solutions as they see fit, with the international body that oversees them limited to providing cash incentives for doing so. His Russian opponent, meanwhile, believes that uniting all that chaos under control of his organization will optimize the approach, although he belatedly realizes the effort has been compromised by the literal mafia infiltrating his team.

It’s awfully blunt in its capitalism-versus-socialism themes, and it ends with the foreigner changing his mind and siding with the egotistical cowboy after all, which doesn’t feel like an honest engagement with the terms of their dispute. But rah-rah freedom, I guess? Good thing the real villains have once again kidnapped a woman that the businessman loves, so that he can be morally superior as well as correct about the ideal path forward for the planet.

I understand how these early works form an important backdrop to the tales of space exploration that follow, which thankfully focus on different characters. The developing worldbuilding in that direction is neat to observe, too, like the beginnings of a colony on the moon that Dan visits this time. But I’m very glad that his own role in the saga is now finally starting to wane.

[Content warning for gun violence, drug abuse, rape, suicide, and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

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TV Review: The Sopranos, season 6

TV #7 of 2026:

The Sopranos, season 6

As with its contemporary crime drama The Shield, the infamous ending to The Sopranos was one of the few concrete spoilers I knew about the show going into it, which admittedly shaped my expectations along the way. (To quickly weigh in on the controversy: I don’t think Tony unambiguously gets killed when the final scene cuts to black, but I would agree that the editing intentionally builds up audience tension to specifically license that possibility. My interpretation is that we’re meant to understand his life could be snuffed out as suddenly as Phil Leotardo’s at any point now, but also that he could end up like Uncle Junior in their confrontation right before, having improbably survived a long career in the mafia yet ultimately lost everything that matters anyway.)

If you do view this last season as the ratcheting prelude to the antihero’s potential death, either actively or in hindsight, there are plenty of thematic indicators pointing in that direction. From his initial foray into a comatose purgatory to how he steadily drives a wedge between himself and each of his closest associates over the episodes that follow, this year functions to isolate the man as never before, while also emphasizing what Dr. Melfi comes to see as his unrepentant sociopathy. Still, I don’t feel as though the overall thesis of this series is anything as trivial as “crime doesn’t pay” or even that Anthony Soprano’s particular character flaws have doomed him. In my last review I likened him to a crab in a bucket refusing to let anyone else escape the bad situation they’re in, and I think that’s where these closing hours land as well. After all, for as much as that ambiguous moment in the restaurant might linger with us, far more of the finale beforehand concerns the protagonist’s son A.J., and how he’s lured back into the comfortable materialism that he briefly seemed on the brink of leaving, one way or another.

Change isn’t impossible on The Sopranos, but it’s hard work that most people eventually give up on. Tony feels like a new man upon waking up from his coma, but it doesn’t take long for him to fall back into his old ways again. An addict like Christopher will likewise always be an addict, and parents have a habit of revisiting their own childhood traumas on the next generation. Even in the slow-brewing conflict between the New York and New Jersey mobs that finally comes to a head here, negotiations repeatedly break down because of both parties’ grievances over sins of the past. Every hurt or imagined slight resurfaces as an inflexible link in a heavy chain binding the warring mafiosos to their present path, no matter how they might privately wish otherwise.

That’s good stuff, but the season isn’t without its weaknesses. It was expanded somewhere in the production process to be nearly twice the usual length, with a large hiatus in the middle, and the story drags a little as a result. I’ve opted to watch and review both halves as the single entity that they were officially named, but the arcs across it could definitely have been tighter, with less attention given to diversions like Vito’s panicked exit after his sexuality is discovered by the crew. There are some weird hiccups following the time jump, too — Chris apparently breaking things off with the Julianna Margulies character, for instance, or Meadow similarly ending her engagement to Finn entirely offscreen. And although the body count ticks higher near the end, the program doesn’t always establish those departing characters beyond a vaguely-familiar face and a name, which obviously minimizes the impact of their loss.

I’m satisfied, though, and if I ever rewatch this title, I’m guessing some of these items might stand out less, given the tendency for figures to float through the background of scenes before suddenly gaining prominence in the narrative. (And there are shocking deaths of genuinely important individuals too, especially this season.) In the meantime I’ll be happy enough with the plot as it is, and not overly concerned about whether the hero survives past it or not.

[Content warning for racism, antisemitism, homophobia, slurs, domestic abuse, drug abuse, gun violence, lynching, suicide, torture, and gore.]

This season: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Seasons ranked: 5 > 2 > 1 > 6 > 3 > 4

Book Review: Doctor Who: The Well by Gareth L. Powell

Book #26 of 2026:

Doctor Who: The Well by Gareth L. Powell

As usual, a strong episode of Doctor Who leads to one of the better novelizations, helped along in this case by a few neat additions that author Gareth L. Powell has sprinkled in throughout. (In an afterword, he mentions that he grew up reading this imprint in the days when home recordings of the show weren’t as widely available, and he’s clearly relishing the opportunity to write for it now himself.) Thus we get military dossier excerpts and scenes from the enemy creature’s point of view that weren’t part of the original story on TV, in addition to good insights into the Fifteenth Doctor and Belinda Chandra’s respective characterizations at this stage of their journey together.

I still think the exact mechanics of how the monster stalks and kills its victims are a bit confusing, especially given the eventual reveal that this is a sequel to a Tenth Doctor adventure where it acted completely differently, but the sinister vibes and bleak ending are as top-notch as they were on television. If you’re unfamiliar, this is the one where the time-traveling Doctor and his latest companion arrive on a spaceship in the distant future, only to fall in with a squadron of soldiers investigating a mystery on the planet below. There they find slaughtered corpses and one scared survivor, who seems to have something hiding just out of sight behind her back…

It’s a spooky tale told well, while also contributing to the larger plot arc for its season of Bel not being able to return home in the TARDIS like normal. The novel is of course no substitute for watching that yourself, but it’s a solid revisiting with its own fun spin and continuity nods, recommended for the kind of fan who likes that sort of thing.

[Content warning for gun violence and suicide.]

★★★★☆

Movie Review: Rocky III (1982)

Movie #7 of 2026:

Rocky III (1982)

“Eye of the Tiger” is a great song, but I’m not sure in the final analysis if Rocky III is a great movie or not. Length isn’t always a determination of that, but this one shaves about 20 minutes off the runtime of its predecessors, resulting in a leaner picture that doesn’t have space for much outside the ring. Rocky is the reigning heavyweight champ after his victory in the previous film, and though he successfully defends his title, he seems to have grown complacent, and a hungrier opponent eventually defeats him, in addition to sparking a fatal heart attack in his trainer Mick. This causes the hero to do some soul-searching, accept the replacement training offer of his old rival and fellow former champion Apollo Creed, and ultimately come back with a more agile fighting method that once again wins the day.

It’s a classic feel-good formula, not too different from Rocky II, and Mr. T. in his acting debut is easy to root against as the arrogant Clubber Lang. It never quite justifies certain character choices, however. The protagonist initially announces that his first match opposite Lang will be the last fight of his career, so what makes him change his mind afterwards and seek to reclaim the championship? Why has Apollo retired himself instead of trying to overthrow Rocky and/or Clubber, and for that matter — although this is more of a meta-question for the series, I guess — why don’t we see that fool-pitying antagonist take another shot following this? Why is Balboa the only fighter in this world allowed to rise from defeat for a redemption bout?

One of the odder elements that the script does make time for — besides Paulie’s obnoxious racism — is a charity exhibition versus “Thunderlips” (these names!), a professional wrestler played by Hulk Hogan. The boxing/wrestling competition is an interesting idea, but it’s pretty silly in execution, with the kind of nonsense that goes on in that other arena played straight: fighters hurled into the audience, chairs broken over backs, and so forth. Those things are funny when part of the campy showmanship of the scripted entertainment sport, but hard to believe would happen to Rocky within the more grounded reality of his setting. In the end I think it weakens the effectiveness of the surrounding story, which is why I’ve settled on a three-star rating for this effort overall.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear by Seanan McGuire

Book #25 of 2026:

Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear by Seanan McGuire (Wayward Children #10)

This fantasy series follows various children who stumble into Narnia-style portals to other worlds, generally by showing us the unhappy homes they fled, a bit of their wonderful new lives, and then the resulting angst when they inevitably find their way back to Earth. It’s a loose sequence, but some entries are more standalone than others; this one in particular, for instance, probably works best for readers who remember Nadya from #3 Beneath the Sugar Sky, which introduced her and established the ending of her personal arc. This tenth volume is a prequel to all that, in which the young Russian girl is adopted by a Christian missionary couple from America and eventually escapes to a land of underwater rivers.

The strongest parts of the title come early, depicting the heroine’s fraught relationship with her adoptive parents, who see her as more of a status symbol than a real person. They especially don’t understand her neutral-to-positive feelings about having been born with only one arm, seeing the disability as something that makes her lesser and that she would of course want to fix with a prosthetic. It’s the kind of quietly devastating childhood that author Seanan McGuire writes so well, and helps us to see why a fresh start in Belyyreka would be so appealing for her character.

That realm itself isn’t anything special, though, and the story loses its focus and impact after the protagonist crosses over. It’s a little problematic too in giving the child a magical water appendage to wield, which she accepts despite it being the exact sort of cure that she rejected before on the reasonable grounds that there’s nothing inherently wrong with her body as is. The plot also cuts off abruptly in the end without resolution, even for those of us who know what happens to her next.

I do like the beginning a lot, and I’m disappointed that the rest of the work doesn’t live up to it. But at least it’s a short enough novella that it doesn’t overstay its welcome, I suppose.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Water Outlaws by S. L. Huang

Book #24 of 2026:

The Water Outlaws by S. L. Huang

I’m not familiar with the 14th-century Chinese novel Water Margin / Outlaws of the Marsh / All Men Are Brothers, but I’ve still really enjoyed this modern genderbent retelling, in which the central bandits are now predominantly female and/or queer. Even approached as a standalone fantasy story (in an East Asian-inspired empire, sort of like a less magical version of the Singing Hills Cycle setting), it’s an epic tale of those marginalized characters’ struggle for justice and how they break the law only to nobly oppose various corrupt officials. A feminist wuxia Robin Hood wouldn’t be a bad comparison, either.

The cast is a bit extensive — though not to the point of the 108 outlaws reportedly named in the original — but we’re primarily following two specific heroines: a combat instructor punished for resisting an attempted rape by a superior officer, and her scholarly friend who gets pressured into researching the creation of an alchemical weapon of mass destruction. While their paths soon diverge, they eventually reconnect as the band of criminals rally more and more people to their cause and the imperial response ramps up accordingly. Both women are flawed protagonists who face great sacrifice, hard choices, and a lot of uncomfortable growing along the way, which makes them pretty compelling conduits for the developing plot.

Interestingly enough, I favor the beginning of this book over its ending, which seems to be against the critical consensus that I’m seeing online. I’m not a huge fan of military battle fiction, so in my opinion the climactic action scenes tend to drag on a little, whereas the slower character-oriented moments capture my complete attention early on. I likewise prefer the smaller scale in the spinoff prequel The River Judge (which I had previously read in a separate anthology but has been included in some editions of the present volume) to the grand conflict here. Nevertheless, it’s a strong work throughout and an easy 4-star rating for me.

[Content warning for cannibalism, torture, violence against children, suicide, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

Book #23 of 2026:

Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

This 2025 novella imagines a future in which robots are free but second-class citizens, their status a contested compromise between those humans who see them as worthy of full equal rights and those who would deny their sentience and return them to a state of legal property. In fact, a civil war was fought over that conflict in the recent backstory, with the synthetic beings winning their limited freedom when California successfully seceded from the rest of the United States. In the present, four such characters have been abandoned by the owners of the restaurant where they work, leading them to take over operations and start trying to improve the establishment by putting actual care into the food that they make.

At the time of my writing, the top-rated review of this book on Goodreads is an angry 1-star screed that accuses it of glorifying generative A.I. by telling a story that encourages us to root for the creative expression of mechanical minds. I find this laughable for many reasons, but primary among them is that, like the best of speculative fiction, this work is clearly operating on the level of allegory. You can probably already tell from my opening paragraph above that there are strong parallels to be drawn between the plight of the automatons and that of certain real-life minority groups, and author Annalee Newitz also writes them in a way that reads as decidedly queer: joyously expressing their autonomy by changing their names and modifying their bodies, for instance, including one getting a mastectomy in order to be seen as less feminine. In other words, these are the genuine artificial intelligences of tomorrow, not the flashy gimmicks tech companies are peddling under that name in our own era. If you can recognize the humanity in a creature like Murderbot, you should be able to do the same for these protagonists who just want to craft quality noodles for their customers.

Though I feel bad for the writer over the negative misreading of their tale, it’s even funnier given that one of the main plot threads involves an anonymous critic review-bombing the noodle shop with complaints that robot-produced meals are inherently terrible for stealing jobs from deserving homo sapiens. It’s blatant anti-immigrant rhetoric from a heartless villain, and yet some readers are still echoing it in their own reactions to the text, demonstrating in my opinion a sad but incredible lack of self-awareness on their parts.

I’m being a bit prickly because the book itself won’t; this is cozy / hopepunk sci-fi about a found family pulling together and helping one another navigate their respective traumas, with no real action or sense of danger for any of the heroes. I can understand if that’s too sunny for someone’s individual tastes, but let’s not pretend it’s a defense of LLM plagiarism machines rather than a heartfelt plea for a kinder world shared by people of all possible backgrounds.

★★★★☆

TV Review: 12 Monkeys, season 3

TV #6 of 2026:

12 Monkeys, season 3

I still think this sci-fi series was more interesting back when its time-traveling protagonists were more straightforwardly trying to avert a plague and the subsequent dystopian future, rather than opposing an evil cult that’s nebulously aiming to somehow break the timeline itself. But with that caveat, this third year is a step up from the one before, as our heroes attempt to locate the mysterious “Witness” whose handlers keep him moving around in history. I especially like the added wrinkle that if even a single agent is alerted, they have the technology to return and warn their earlier selves, thereby rewriting events so that they were never there to be caught at all (and dramatically self-immolating in the process, due to the ensuing paradox).

But fun as that element is, this show just can’t seem to make the elusive leap from good to great for me. Characters continue to switch their motivations and allegiances on a dime, resulting in would-be shocking developments that carry no real impact on the audience. As I said last time, the plot “is packed with scenes of someone either betraying an ally or suddenly teaming up with an enemy, but it all feels weightless because we aren’t given enough room to let those relationships build up in the first place.”

With only one season of eleven episodes left to go, I’m invested enough to finish the story out, but I’ll be tempering my expectations pretty significantly at this point.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Time Traveler’s Passport edited by John Joseph Adams

Book #22 of 2026:

The Time Traveler’s Passport edited by John Joseph Adams

The assembled titles in this collection of time travel short fiction get nearly the full range of ratings from me, which is often true of such anthologies. But since there are only six stories here, I guess I might as well review them individually.

3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years by John Scalzi: Readable enough, but way too focused on explaining the rules of its central technology to actually develop a compelling plot or characters around it. This could have been interesting as the premise to a novel, but it’s pretty dry as a self-contained lesson on the protagonist’s professional duties. ★★☆☆☆

Making Space by R. F. Kuang: I love the idea of a dystopian future sending its children back in time for greater opportunities, which could be a brilliant allegory for real-life immigration concerns. But the ending takes a couple wild turns that I think cut against the effectiveness of the piece as a whole. [Content warning for infertility and miscarriage.] ★★★☆☆

For a Limited Time Only by Peng Shepherd: Major shades of The Time Traveler’s Wife, with the hero slipping in and out of his loved one’s lives while on assignment in the past. This really captures how fleeting the various stages of parenthood can feel, and how much a person might long to go back to the days when their kids were smaller. It’s even more poignant by the end, but I was caught up right from the start. ★★★★☆

A Visit to the Husband Archive by Kaliane Bradley: Confusing worldbuilding, involving alien visitors who “steal time” from humans — making them black out and have trouble remembering things, basically — which doesn’t exactly fit the theme of the book in my opinion. I also just find it to be a mean-spirited work in general, with dubious consent and borderline domestic abuse given how the character who retains his mental faculties treats his new wife like a lowly animal. Not a fan! ★★☆☆☆

All Manner of Thing Shall Be by Olivie Blake: I hated this one even more, somehow. It’s about a household of vampires who can travel in time to hunt their victims, but who are meanwhile stuck in a 24-hour time loop for some reason, and are generally just very aggressively dysfunctional with one another. The tone reads like all this is supposed to be the height of comedy, but the humor doesn’t land for me. It’s overstuffed chaos, not a satisfying narrative on any level. ★☆☆☆☆

Cronus by P. Djèlí Clark: This final entry likely would have been better at a longer length, but I like the slow reveal to us of just how wrong the heroine’s world is, which matches her own dawning realization that people have used the historical travel agency where she works to nefariously change the timeline, specifically by undoing civil rights advancements and keeping Black folks like her as a lower class of citizen (sort of like Recursion by Blake Crouch with an added social justice bend). I want more resolution than just her deciding she’s going to begin fighting back, though. ★★★☆☆

Overall rating: ★★★☆☆

Movie Review: Rocky II (1979)

Movie #6 of 2026:

Rocky II (1979)

Rocky (1976) was a genuine cultural sensation that deservedly launched its writer and lead actor Sylvester Stallone into Hollywood stardom. Expectations would thus have been pretty high for this sequel, in which he returns to those roles while also picking up directing duties, but in my opinion, it more than clears the original.

It’s a tighter, more focused script, for starters. The first film sometimes struggles to convey its titular boxer’s headspace and motivations, and we only hear in passing rather late in the piece that no contender has ever lasted all fifteen rounds in a match against his opponent Apollo Creed. This time, it’s clearer what the hero wants all along, and that desire moreover changes organically as the plot develops and events steadily chip away at his pride.

Initially, the Italian Stallion is content with the payday from his championship bout, and plans to retire from boxing with that nest egg providing for his family and his new fame helping to launch a different career for himself. He’s enthusiastic about acting in commercials, only to have trouble reading the cue cards, which we learn is due to him leaving school after ninth grade. He then seeks an office job, but is told how unrealistic that dream is too. The whole world seems to be saying that he’s good for manual labor alone, and yet he’s no sooner accepted a position at the old meatpacking plant where he used to train when budget cuts take that away from him as well. He’s finally humiliatingly reduced to cleaning up after other fighters in Mickey’s gym, where they increasingly mock and look down on the once-proud fighter.

All the while, Apollo is angrily goading him for a rematch, despite originally declaring that there wouldn’t be one. Although he successfully defended his title in the last movie, everyone saw Rocky go the distance and many of them think he should have been declared the winner instead. The negative press gets the champ agitating for another run at Balboa to more conclusively defeat him, which our frustrated protagonist eventually accepts. Still, his now-wife Adrian doesn’t want him to go back in the ring where he was hurt so badly before, and without her full support, it’s clear that his heart isn’t in his renewed sessions with Mick.

It’s here that the story takes an unfortunate dip into melodrama that I don’t feel is really needed. An overwhelmed and pregnant Adrian goes into early labor and slips into a coma, leaving her husband to abandon his efforts with the trainer entirely. It’s an eye-rollingly saccharine and soapy development, but I won’t lie that when she wakes up and asks him to go out and win, I find my heart stirring every time. The music swells, Mickey yells in a snarl, “What are we waiting for?!”, and another classic training montage through the streets of Philadelphia begins.

Soon enough, the rematch is upon us, with Creed more vicious than he was in the past. But Rocky is newly determined in his own way, and their back-and-forth keeps us on the edge of our seats, especially in the final round when both boxers are knocked down to the mat in their struggle. One man alone manages to rise to his feet, closing out the spectacle with what would turn out to be the franchise’s most famously enduring line: “Yo, Adrian! I did it!”

You sure, did, Rock. And who am I to argue with the new heavyweight champion of the world? Four-and-a-half stars for this one, rounded up.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★★★