The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Fevered Star by Rebecca Roanhorse

Book #184 of 2022:

Fevered Star by Rebecca Roanhorse (Between Earth and Sky #2)

Black Sun was one of my top reads of 2020, an adult fantasy debut set in a refreshingly diverse world inspired by pre-Columbian indigenous civilizations. Any sequel would likely struggle to match it, and sure enough, this bridge title in the trilogy suffers from classic middle-volume syndrome. The worldbuilding remains well-realized, but it’s not as impressive / noteworthy the second time around, and the story feels less propulsive too after the major event that the first book built up to for its climax. The whole series plot is very scattered, yet there was a sense before that matters were at least converging towards an inevitable collision. In this novel, there are a lot of pieces being moved around to set up the finale, but without as clear a throughline connecting everything together.

And some of the connections we do get seem mighty tenuous. Xiala is too passive here by far, and her primary motivation is finding her way back to Serapio, the one-night-stand she’s elevated into her one true love. In his viewpoint chapters he barely thinks about her in return, for good reason — he’s focused instead on his new role as deity incarnate, the weighty expectations of his estranged community, and his sudden ability to turn into a flock of crows to escape them. Her own part of the narrative is much more interesting once it starts focusing on her respective backstory and homeland, though she’s still not an especially agentive protagonist.

I don’t hate this overall. It reminds me of mid-to-late Game of Thrones, where the general vibe of intrigue is entertaining enough and individual moments can be highly effective despite the somewhat aimless surrounding context. I continue to enjoy the thematic palate that author Rebecca Roanhorse is drawing from, with reluctant divine avatars, identities outside the gender binary, and conflicts over mixed heritages and contrasting worldviews. All the elements are present for the conclusion to blow me away again, but this segment has been a bit of a slow and winding trek to get there.

[Content warning for torture and gore.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Dark Hours by Michael Connelly

Book #183 of 2022:

The Dark Hours by Michael Connelly (Ballard and Bosch #3)

Much like author Michael Connelly’s previous novel The Law of Innocence incorporated the real-life COVID-19 pandemic, this 2021 title reflects the strained state of policing in the aftermath of protests over the murder of George Floyd and the systemic racism it embodied for many. The cops are generally feeling bitter and embattled about the criticism and calls for their defunding, and while our protagonists Renée Ballard and Harry Bosch don’t seem to hold that view themselves, they mostly express this by staying quiet when their colleagues complain — which is somewhat disappointing on a character level, but probably realistic (and in keeping with how Connelly has written Bosch reacting to overt bigotry before). With many officers quitting and those who remain acting to slow-walk their orders and sulkily insist on doing the bare minimum they can get away with, the heroes have far fewer resources or trust from the public than usual.

The international health crisis is also still raging, providing a textured backdrop of masking, work-from-home, video chats, elbow-bumps, discussion of vaccination, and the like. I wouldn’t say that this dates the novel so much as it further grounds it in its particular moment in time. It’s an atmosphere unlike any release of the 30+ in this franchise before, despite the fairly generic title.

In this environment, Harry and Renée are investigating two separate matters: a close-range execution that used the quaint L.A. custom of firing guns into the air on New Year’s Eve as cover, and a string of serial rapes that has the police stumped. The balance of these plots isn’t perfect — it seems like we spend too much time with the former, which is surely way less urgent than the ongoing threat to local women — but each is developed with the writer’s typical skill and brought to its thrilling respective climax.

Overall, I would say that this is one of the better stories in the Bosch universe. Ballard has really come into her own as a heroine, and I like that this book finds her at an understandable crossroads over whether she wants to stay in a department that’s continually mistreated her (and others) to try and reform it from within, or to give up that responsibility to become a more effective agent for justice as an official partner in Harry’s PI practice. We don’t learn her ultimate answer inside these pages, but it’s a strong note illuminating an already above-average volume of the series.

[Content warning for suicide and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Bands of Mourning by Brandon Sanderson

Book #182 of 2022:

The Bands of Mourning by Brandon Sanderson (Wax and Wayne #3 / Mistborn #6)

[Note: I am Facebook friends with this author. Review originally written in 2016.]

The fight scenes in this novel are top-notch, and it’s great to see new applications of the basic magic principles Sanderson introduced in the first Mistborn books, but the plot here is pretty thin. I love The Alloy of Law (Mistborn #4, which introduced the current setting and crop of characters), but I just don’t see where he’s going with this trilogy that’s following it. I’m also feeling kind of let down by the slow progress on the Cosmere front… Not to get too spoilery, but there’s a point here where it looks like we’re about to get substantive cross-world interaction, but then it turns out the strangers are just from a different part of Scadriel.

Anyway. A bad Brandon Sanderson book is not a bad overall book, and if you like Mistborn / the Cosmere, of course you should read this one. But I can’t shake the feeling that this whole trilogy is just a transition to introduce the concepts that are going to support the next setting in this world.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: Origin Stories by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé, Sophie Aldred, Jasbinder Bilan, Nikita Gill, Mark Griffiths, Katy Manning, Emma Norry, Temi Oh, and Dave Rudden

Book #181 of 2022:

Doctor Who: Origin Stories by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé, Sophie Aldred, Jasbinder Bilan, Nikita Gill, Mark Griffiths, Katy Manning, Emma Norry, Temi Oh, and Dave Rudden

A mixed bag, as such collections often are. The premise of this Doctor Who title is that its entries are prequels exploring various incidents from before the characters ever meet up with the Doctor on-screen, and because this is a sci-fi franchise, the authors have all included some sort of alien (or at least, futuristic tech) element in their stories. That works well for the ones whose protagonists led strange lives prior to their canonical time on the show, which indeed have turned out to be my favorites in this book: young Davros seeking the advice of a rumored psychic in Temi Oh’s “The Last of the Dals,” Vastra hunting a murderer in the days leading up to her people’s hibernation in Dave Rudden’s “The Big Sleep,” and Missy killing the Time Lords who brought her child self before the Untempered Schism in Dave Rudden’s “Tempered.”

On the other hand, though, we have a lot of tales here about the ordinary humans who will eventually join the TARDIS as wide-eyed companions, with the writers generally acting to preserve the later TV continuity by deploying some form of a memory wipe at the end. Thus, despite the presence of a few imaginative team-ups — Ace with the Thirteenth Doctor in Sophie Aldred’s “Chemistry”; Yaz and Ryan with the Second Doctor in Emma Norry’s “The Myriapod Mutiny”; Martha with the Ninth Doctor in Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé’s “Doctor Jones” — most of these individuals do not make it out of their adventures actually remembering them, which limits the entertainment value and impact alike. (The licensed audio dramas from Big Finish have done a far better job, in my opinion, of finding ways to cross people’s timelines without resorting to such reversals.)

Ultimately there’s stuff here for fans to enjoy, like former cast members Sophie Aldred and Katy Manning writing for the roles they once played, but only “Tempered” comes close to adding anything essential to our understanding of the characters or the series mythology.

[Content warning for gun violence, insects burrowing into people, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special (2022)

Movie #19 of 2022:

The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special (2022)

At 42 minutes from start to post-credits scene, this second Marvel Studios Special Presentation is…. fine. It’s fine. It’s in no way essential to any ongoing series plot, but it’s a decent check-in on the various Guardians of the Galaxy characters, I guess. We spend most of that runtime with Drax and Mantis, who have decided Peter is sad about a lifetime of missing Christmas back on earth, and that they can rectify this by going to his home planet and kidnapping Kevin Bacon, as played by himself. They bring the actor to outer space, he and Quill both freak out a little, and then there’s some empty platitudes about Christmas. Roll credits.

And, look — the expected quips and the I-am-Groot-ing are here, and they’re entertaining enough. But this does nothing to push either the cast or the franchise forward, as each of the full Guardians movies accomplished in its own right. It’s a wholly tangential enterprise that’s honestly more akin to the thin storyline of the new Cosmic Rewind ride at Epcot, and I’ll admit I’m further disgruntled at the implied diversity gesturing of the “Holiday Special” nomenclature, when this turns out to be Christmassy through and through. (And it’s not nearly as effective a use of that yuletide theming as last year’s Hawkeye miniseries, either.)

This isn’t a misfire; it’s just not much of anything, leaving ultimately less of an impression than Werewolf by Night, the previous entry in this new peripheral / experimental MCU space. Call me a grinch, but I really don’t see the point of it. Two-and-a half stars, rounded up with a shrug.

[Content warning for alcohol abuse and gun violence including police violence.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Andor, season 1

TV #57 of 2022:

Andor, season 1

On paper, this prequel to a prequel might have sounded like a wholly unnecessary franchise extension, but in practice, Star Wars has literally never been better. Ostensibly a show about Cassian Andor five years before the movie Rogue One takes place, it has turned out to be more of a look at the scattered rebellion movement coalescing around him at that point, as well as a deep thematic reflection on what leads people to rebel, why fascist governments must be resisted, and how such oppressive regimes ultimately contain the seeds of their own destruction by being too unwieldy to react to ground-level efforts against them. As Princess Leia once said, “The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”

Andor the series is very concerned with that dual process of tightening and slipping through. Fourteen years after Palpatine declared himself emperor at the end of the prequel film trilogy, the heavy hand of imperial occupation is everywhere. Its military holds demonstrations in cowering city squares, its leaders attempt to suppress local cultural practices, and its bureaucracy has levels upon levels tasked with identifying and stamping out signs of dissent. Yet it’s simultaneously a lumbering beast unable to deliver an agile response to the exact threats it provokes. One focal character, imperial officer Dedra Meero, seems alone in even recognizing that disparate strikes and thefts taking place across the galaxy are linked in a pattern of concerted rebel activity, and she has a difficult time getting the old-boys-club of her superiors to understand and address the situation.

That’s not to argue that she’s positioned as some sort of feminist #girlboss protagonist in the narrative. She is still a fascist, a bigot, and a torturer, but the series is strengthened by her inclusion, particularly when she proves powerless in the immediate physical struggle of a riot in the finale. And while her analytical skills and insights should theoretically make her a formidable opponent, the machinery of empire is simply too big to ever use her effectively. In one of the most cutting pieces of dramatic irony on this series, her intense efforts to turn over every stone to locate Andor come at a time when he is already in imperial custody at a hellish labor camp under an assumed name.

Cassian himself isn’t necessarily the most developed leading man, and of the various minor missteps in this debut season, his truncated arc registers most keenly. His early introduction gestures at an interesting baseline for him — indigenous origins; adopted against his will; still searching for his missing birth-sister decades later — but these elements are swiftly dropped and never revisited. If this program runs for two years as planned, tracing the titular figure’s path from reluctant recruit to the trusted rebel agent of Rogue One, this first half doesn’t quite spend enough time fleshing out his interiority to sell the beginning of that transformation.

But like I said, this isn’t really his story after all. Presented as a sequence of mini-movies, it’s instead the story of a raid on a garrison payroll supply, and how it inspires both further totalitarian crackdowns and people on distant planets like Ferrix to start standing up for themselves against their common oppressors. It’s the story of inhumane prison conditions and a desperate uprising and grasp at dignity there. It’s the story of a far-flung network of rebels who don’t even know one another yet, and the empire’s hunt for the one man (an excellent Stellan Skarsgård) they’re belatedly realizing may be at the center. And it’s the story of Mon Mothma, secretly funding the resistance and scrambling to cover her tracks whilst maintaining her high-society role as a senate busybody. Cassian Andor connects these diverse threads, but the plot as written doesn’t need him to be an agentive hero, and for the most part, he’s not.

Maybe the series is misnamed. Ironically, Star Wars already had a show called Rebels, which narrowly focused on one small cell of the movement. This one that more earns the title is instead named after some guy who isn’t much of a conventional protagonist. Oh well.

I could continue to nitpick here and there — I think Mon’s scenes tend to amount to simple check-ins that repeat the same thematic material and diffuse the tension built up by the lower strata of operatives like Cassian — but overwhelmingly, I’ve been astonished by this production week over week. It’s taken concerns that have been part of the background texture of the Star Wars premise all along and made them suddenly vibrant and vital, and via characters like Maarva and Kino it’s provided a thesis and a rallying cry for viewers in a time of rising fascism in real life. All with nary a Jedi in sight, and hardly even any aliens or droids.

What an accomplishment. A new franchise high point, for sure.

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

★★★★★

Book Review: Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction by Grady Hendrix

Book #180 of 2022:

Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction by Grady Hendrix

A whirlwind tour of decades of English-language horror publishing, spanning from Rosemary’s Baby in 1967 through the middle-grade era of R. L. Stine and Christopher Pike in the mid-90s, and quite a lot in between. While author Grady Hendrix covers too much material to go into significant depth about any individual titles, his pithy summaries and juicy notes on particularly outrageous moments speak to a rich passion and extensive knowledge of the genre. He discusses trends in the industry and in common plot tropes from exorcisms to vampires to haunted houses to animal attacks, while conveying an enthusiast’s chagrin that so much of this pulp fiction seemingly hasn’t made an impact on the culture that’s remembered today. The writer doesn’t mention his own novels at all, but it’s clear how their strengths must derive in part from everything Hendrix has taken in and is writing in celebration of and/or reaction to.

I listened to this 2017 book on audio, and felt torn between a 3-star (“I liked it”) and 4-star (“I really liked it”) rating. I’m rounding up to the latter based on the inclusion in the print edition of so much cover art, which is its own forgotten 20th-century treasure trove. The text describes these images and highlights certain prolific artists too, but I’m sure the visual effect is even more striking.

[Content warning for lurid descriptions of everything from rape to racism to torture and gore. Horror is a genre that can go pretty dark, and this title doesn’t gloss over any of it.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Enterprise, season 1

TV #56 of 2022:

Star Trek: Enterprise, season 1

In my ongoing aim to watch through the entirety of the franchise, I have now seen 27 whole seasons of Star Trek. That’s all of The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, and Deep Space Nine, in addition to most of Voyager, and this, the debut year of the prequel show Enterprise. It is hands-down, categorically the worst of the lot.

Trek is often hit-or-miss for me anyway, with the highs generally making up for the lows and an overall baseline competence in sci-fi storytelling throughout that keeps me engaged even when I’m not loving it. This season, however, is just viscerally unpleasant in all its pettiness. Debuting a mere two weeks after 9/11, it was surely conceived and produced before that atrocity and the US response, at least initially. Yet Scott Bakula as the new captain radiates an aw-shucks George W. Bush energy, and the narrative around him already reflects the crusading cultural atmosphere that would ride our military into a forever war in the Middle East. So many of these early episodes consist of Archer and his crew brashly asserting that they have the right to butt into situations and apply their own morality, with strawman protests against that intervention raised and quickly overruled.

Consider this exchange:

VULCAN ELDER: I don’t have to tell you, Captain. We don’t condone these actions you are about to take.

CAPTAIN ARCHER: No, you don’t have to tell me. Just try and stay out of the way and everything will work out fine.

That’s from an episode airing in October 2001, the same month that America launched “Operation Enduring Freedom” to kick off the invasion of Afghanistan.

If I were being charitable, I might ask whether this jingoism represents an actual attempt in the scripts to say something critical about the franchise backstory — a genuine conscious effort to imagine how Starfleet officers might have been at the start, with the idea that they’ve mellowed some in the century between this and TOS. At times it almost seems like the point of these adventures is to show why humanity eventually adopted the Prime Directive, or at least to provide an interesting now/then contrast via space exploration without it. But it feels more like the writers were just writing what they knew when looking 150 years forward, which turned out to be xenophobia and a wholesale conviction of one’s own moral superiority. For the most part, they aren’t saying, watch how our heroes stumble without firm principles to guide them. Instead, the thesis appears to be no, Archer’s right, and the Federation should have been interfering more all along.

There’s not many specifics to this mission yet either, like DS9 and Voyager immediately set up as premises for those programs. Rather it’s like TOS and TNG in just sort of vaguely boldly-going, which I thought / hoped Trek was past by now as a concept. Even the theoretically-new canvas of this era mostly just results in the translators and transporters not working as well, over any notable period-particular conflicts. While there’s some time-travel and talk of a temporal cold war, it’s in such generalities that it barely registers as more significant a concern than the ship’s delayed arrival at the resort planet Risa.

Without a larger plot this kind of show largely just becomes about the characters, and they too haven’t impressed me much by this stage. One hour is just a long joke at Tucker’s expense that he’s been emasculated by a female alien non-consensually impregnating him, with no sympathy for the assault on his bodily autonomy (and ending with the vulcan T’Pol smugly / transphobically mentioning that she’s searched the history databases to confirm he’s the first human man to ever become pregnant). Another finds Hoshi ignoring Malcom’s insistence that he’s a private person who doesn’t especially want to share things with his coworkers, calling up his friends and family on earth and browbeating the doctor into letting her look at his medical records, all in an effort to learn his favorite food. And there’s a repeated male discussion of T’Pol’s looks and speculation on her sex life over multiple episodes, which has to be the laziest way for the dialogue to demonstrate humanity’s early unease with aliens as our crewmates and would-be equals.

Nevertheless I’m not ready to quit this show. Beyond my simple completionist tendencies, I would say that the building blocks are here for Enterprise to pull its act together and be at a minimum no worse than the other Trek series. Yet in this initial run, though, it’s pretty miserable throughout.

Also? The theme song sucks.

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Into the Riverlands by Nghi Vo

Book #179 of 2022:

Into the Riverlands by Nghi Vo (The Singing Hills Cycle #3)

This is the first volume of the Singing Hills Cycle that hasn’t quite worked for me. We’re still following nonbinary Cleric Chih as they wander around this East Asian fantasy world recording people’s stories, learning the truth behind the lore, and finding unexpected adventure themself, but the balance among those elements feels somewhat adrift this time. Specifically in that second category, there’s not much substance provided about the events that may have inspired the latest local legends — we / the protagonist understand by the end that the tales haven’t necessarily been preserved faithfully, but that’s a fairly trivial point this far into the series, and this novella differs from its predecessors in not really providing any detailed alternate account for the reader to entertain. The itinerant warrior companions make this title a fine example of wuxia fiction, but there’s nothing that especially elevates the material or moves me like #ownvoices author Nghi Vo has before.

Luckily these installments are so self-contained / disjointed that there’s no larger narrative for an off-note to disrupt, and I expect I’ll continue to enjoy the venture overall. I just wouldn’t say that this particular outing represents Chih’s saga at its best.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin

Book #178 of 2022:

The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin (Earthsea #2)

Earthsea is a very loose children’s fantasy series, somewhat akin to The Chronicles of Narnia: although certain characters recur across volumes, each book has a fairly distinct structure and tone, and there isn’t much of an overarching plot. This second novel, for instance, sees the former protagonist Ged pop up in a supporting role in its back half, but it neither relies on reader familiarity for context / impact nor spoils his earlier adventures for newcomers. (In fact, if you are only going to read one Earthsea title, or want to see it at its full strengths before committing to more, I would categorically recommend checking out this one rather than the first.)

Our story takes place in the Kargish empire, previously mentioned as the home of warlike barbarians, but not depicted at much length. Here we see that they engage in human sacrifice, corporal punishment, and other such unsavory customs, with worldbuilding details presented in sparse but effective matter-of-fact clarity through the eyes of our young heroine. We also learn that this is a civilization built upon the exploitation of a single ritually-designated child, a sharp theme to which author Ursula K. Le Guin would return a few years later for her classic piece “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.”

Within this setting — a land of pale-skinned natives contrasted with the darker peoples throughout the rest of the Earthsea archipelago who are more literate, cosmopolitan, and technologically-advanced, which definitely feels like the writer thumbing her nose at convention and racist expectations — we are shown the coming-of-age of the latest priestess. She’s been taken from her family, stripped of her given name, and brought up to inherit the wisdom of her predecessor, who is said to have been her own self in a previous reincarnation. Besides her eventual intersection with Sparrowhawk, this figure is notable in the long line of that tradition for living in a moment when the old ways are falling out of favor — still dutifully observed, but not honored, and relegated as subordinate to the worship of the God-kings who have have risen to rule in the recent past.

One thing I love about the narrative of this novel, and that I think sets it apart in the genre, is how thoroughly non-magical it is for most of its run. Arha believes utterly in the Nameless Ones she serves, but she slowly comes to realize that not everyone around her feels the same, and until the end, readers are given no direct evidence of their power. Despite the presence of Ged, the reality of wizardry in the rest of the series, and this volume’s status as a fantasy book, it’s easy to wonder if her political rival is correct and she’s just clinging to a dying superstition, and to accordingly view her religion’s teachings through a mundane / grounded critical lens. That aspect furthermore underscores another important throughline of the text, which is the girl coming to repudiate her role in her society’s cruelties and agentively choose a new path forward for herself. Without going into spoilers, both threads pay off beautifully in the conclusion, and cement this as the high point of the franchise for me.

★★★★★