TV #26 of 2022: The Time Traveler’s Wife, season 1 I remember enjoying the original novel that this miniseries is based on, but I read it way back in early 2016, so I can’t comment on specific adaptation choices in much depth. (I never saw the old movie with Rachel McAdams, either.) But six TV …
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Book #33 of 2022: The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley This novel has its share of flaws, but I almost want to give it four stars regardless. The worldbuilding and time-travel mechanics are excellent, as is the gradual way these elements are introduced in the text. We open on a late nineteenth-century England that is merely …
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Book #32 of 2022: The Girl I Was by Jeneva Rose I dig the premise of this novel, featuring a 35-year-old from 2019 somehow transported back in time to meet herself as a college freshman in 2002, but I’ve found both versions of the character to be insufferably vapid and cruel, and I don’t buy …
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Book #12 of 2022: The Runes of the Earth by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant #1) While I think the first trilogy of this fantasy saga remains its most thematically brilliant segment, and the second neatly integrates a new co-protagonist for a different perspective and set of psychological issues to work …
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Movie #2 of 2022: Doctor Who: Eve of the Daleks (2022) This standalone adventure is Doctor Who at its absolute best. The premise of a steadily-shortening time loop, while not totally original, is still fairly distinctive, and is executed here with great aplomb, alternating humor with tense terror via the ticking clock of the countdown. …
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TV #86 of 2021: Doctor Who: Flux Doctor Who is a franchise that thrives on change, and so I have to credit soon-to-be-former showrunner Chris Chibnall for structuring this season as basically one single six-episode story, an experiment in serialization the likes of which the show hasn’t attempted since maybe Trial of a Time Lord …
Book #343 of 2021: Elfangor’s Secret by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs Megamorphs #3) Is there any Animorphs opening more unsettling than this one, with its in-media-res presentation of an alternate universe where our heroes are still fighting the same covert alien invasion, but as citizens of a racist, slave-holding empire? Rachel is nowhere to be …
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Book #221 of 2021: Doctor Who: Adventures in Lockdown edited by Steve Cole This 2020 publication is a lovely collection of short fiction, all either written during the COVID-19 pandemic or at least unreleased until then. Only three of the sixteen entries are brand-new for this title; most were posted free online over the course …
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Book #207 of 2021: The Double Life of Danny Day by Mike Thayer This middle-grade novel goes far on the strength of its high-concept premise, which is that the ten-year-old protagonist lives every day twice. He treats the original go-round as a bit of a practice session, either goofing off or scribbling notes on quiz …
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Book #83 of 2021: The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman This 2007 title is a genre throwback in all the worst ways. It’s more interested in the scientific mechanics of time travel than in its flat characters, the women seem only there as objects of sexual wish-fulfilment, and the accumulated plot holes are pretty …
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