29 May 2020

Review: Doctor Who: Weapons of Past Destruction by Cavan Scott, Blair Shedd, et al.

Comic PDF eBook, n.pag.
Published 2016 (contents: 2015)
Acquired September 2018
Read December 2019
Doctor Who: The Ninth Doctor, Vol 1: Weapons of Past Destruction

Writer: Cavan Scott
Artist: Blair Shedd with Rachael Stott
Colorist: Blair Shedd and Anang Setyawan
Letters: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

I felt like this failed to capture the tone of the era it's supposedly recreating. It felt too action-y, too continuity-y. The Doctor talks a lot about the Time Lords and the Time War in an era that on screen was content to mostly hint obliquely. The plot seemed to pile complication on complication and incident on incident for the sake of it. It's a shame because Cavan Scott did a great job capturing this era in Night of the Whisper.

I also didn't care for Blair Shedd's weird faces, or his tendency to use silhouettes for random panels, which I think is meant to look artistic but is actually done to save him time drawing things.

28 May 2020

Review: Discworld: Thud! by Terry Pratchett

Hardcover, 373 pages
Published 2005

Borrowed from my wife
Read December 2019
Thud!: A Novel of Discworld by Terry Pratchett

Thud! is a solid City Watch novel, not up to the lofty heights of Jingo or Night Watch, but a solid adventure with some interesting things to say in the line of, say, Men at Arms. There's ethnic tensions brewing between trolls and dwarves, both in and out of the city, and Vimes has to (as usual) simultaneously investigate a murder and stop mass political violence as well. There's a lot of fun stuff here: the auditor who becomes a Watch member himself, another Nobbs and Colon investigation, the high-speed trip to Koom Valley, Vimes's devotion to his daily ritual with his son. But some of the threads don't feel effectively drawn through, and I got a bit confused at all the stuff with the Summoning Dark, a demonic sigil accidentally absorbed by Vimes.

27 May 2020

Hugos 2020: The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein by Farah Mendlesohn

Hardcover, 477 pages
Published 2019

Acquired April 2020
Read May 2020
The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein by Farah Mendlesohn

This is a book-length academic study of the works of Robert Heinlein. And at over 400 pages of content, it's quite a long book! I haven't actually read a ton of Heinlein (Double Star, Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, and Friday are it), but I still enjoyed this. Mendlesohn situates Heinlein in his historical and literary context, especially when it comes to issues of race, gender, and sexuality, showing both where he was ahead of the curve and where he couldn't see beyond his own limitations. Her argument is there are some things he gets flack for, which is undeserved if you read it in the context of his time and his body of work, but there are other things for which he deserves castigation, especially Farnham's Freehold.

These parts of the book are worthy but honestly a little too thorough, though I understand why. On the other hand, I really enjoyed the chapters about Heinlein's technique and rhetoric, and about the themes of civic engagement, revolution, and personal responsibility in his work. By reading all of it, from the early shorts to the juveniles to the late-period novels, Mendlesohn is able to show how Heinlein saw society and the self and the relationship between them. It deepened my appreciation of the Heinlein I have read, and made me want to read more of it. (Upon finishing it, I promptly ordered a copy of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, though who knows when I will actually get around to reading it.)

As in her book Rhetorics of Fantasy, Mendlesohn is attentive to detail when she needs to be, but her real strength as a critic is identifying trends and explicating why they matter. She's also a lively and engaging writer. This is a model of good criticism in general, and good sf criticism in particular.

26 May 2020

Review: Doctor Who: Serve You by Al Ewing, Rob Williams, Simon Fraser, Boo Cook, and Warren Pleece

Comic PDF eBook, n.pag.
Published 2015 (contents: 2015)
Acquired September 2018
Read December 2019
Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor, Vol 2: Serve You

Writers: Al Ewing & Rob Williams
Artists: Simon Fraser, Boo Cook, and Warren Pleece
Colorist: Gary Caldwell
Letters: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

This opens with a timey-wimey issue, which didn't entirely succeed for me in practice, but I liked the idea, because it played with time and the comics page in much the same way that Moffat played with time and television on screen. It captures the spirit of its era without feeling like it's trying to recreate it slavishly in another medium. The next two stories bring us back into the SERVEYOUinc story arc, as Alice deals with the apparent resurrection of her mother and the destructiveness of grief. It's good, character-based stuff, showing how much the character of Alice has come to life in half-a-dozen issues of this title. (I do wish ARC and Jones were taken more seriously, however.)

The last story here serves as a mini-climax to the SERVEYOUinc story arc (though I think there is more to come), with the Doctor momentarily taking over the company and being corrupted by power. I liked the idea, but didn't think the execution entirely rang true. Still, of the four Titan Doctor Who strands I've read so far (those featuring the ninth through twelfth Doctors), the eleventh Doctor one is clearly the most interesting and most successful. It's the only one I think is trying to do something other than ape its screen era.

25 May 2020

Review: Doctor Who: The Weeping Angels of Mons by Robbie Morrison, Daniel Indro, and Eleonora Carlini

Comic PDF eBook, n.pag.
Published 2015 (contents: 2014-15)
Acquired September 2018
Read December 2019
Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor, Vol 2: The Weeping Angels of Mons

Writer: Robbie Morrison
Artists: Daniel Indro & Eleonora Carlini
Colorist: Slamet Mujiono
Letters: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

The Weeping Angels seem to me to be a uniquely televisual monster. Their whole gimmick is that they don't move if you can see them-- so you need a medium that clearly delineates movement. It's particularly clever, because Weeping Angels aren't just frozen when characters see them, but when you the audience are looking. Big Finish have done okay by them, but it's definitely been diminishing returns, and the way Big Finish must indicate movement by stings of music is often inadvertently hilarious, and people have to say things like, "Gosh, that statue wasn't there a second ago!" aloud.

Comics, I think, start out from even more of a disadvantage, in that in a comic nothing is moving when the viewer is looking at it. Possibly a clever writer could make use of this somehow, but judging from The Weeping Angels of Mons (not to mention Terrorformer), Robbie Morrison is not one. This is a generic Doctor Who pseudo-historical. Plus, if you think about it, a Weeping Angel actually isn't that scary in terms of what it does: yes, it plucks you out of time... so that you can live a long and fulfilling life! Most of the tv and audio episodes featuring them manage to get around that, but this one's setting flags up the problem. If you're a soldier in the trenches of World War I, this is actually a step up! Again, a clever writer could probably make something of that, but this story does not.

from Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor #7 (art by Daniel Indro)
One of the real high points of Titan's first Tenth Doctor volume was the Doctor's new companion, Gabby Gonzalez, who felt like a real person with a distinctive voice. Unfortunately, there's none of that present here, where Gabby could be literally any young female companion. This isn't just a writing problem, but an art one, as she suddenly looks like a generic non-Hispanic white woman.

22 May 2020

Review: Discworld: Night Watch by Terry Pratchett

Mass market paperback, 422 pages
Published 2003 (originally 2002)

Borrowed from my wife
Read October 2019
Night Watch: A Novel of Discworld by Terry Pratchett

This is the last of the trilogy of City Watch novels that for me was the best of the whole sequence of eight; Night Watch is my favorite of them all except for Jingo. Like in Jingo, this book is an exploration of how the real injustice in society isn't street crime-- but also how the police aren't really equipped to deal with that. Vimes finds himself in the middle of a revolution, trying to figure out how he can stop it all from going horribly wrong. It's partially a prequel (and one I'm not entirely convinced lines up with how Vimes was introduced in Guards! Guards!, but whatever), but that just adds to the sense of crushing inevitability. He can't, of course. My favorite scenes were the ones where Vimes's common sense and common decency helps win out over the self-interested and the craven. This didn't quite read the heights of Jingo-- I found some of the time travel stuff very confusing-- but I enjoyed it a lot, and to be honest, I kind of wish it had been the last City Watch novel.

21 May 2020

Fiction for a Pandemic

The world doesn't need more shelter-in-place/quarantine/pandemic thinkpieces, but there are two books I keep thinking about. Lots of people have been going on about Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, a book I have not actually read, but I am given to understand is about a virus that wipes out 99% of the human race in a very short span of time, like in Survivors, which doesn't really feel like the coronavirus!

No, the science fiction story I keep thinking of is Sarah Pinsker's "Our Lady of the Open Road." It's set in a near-future United States, where the lingering social effects of a pandemic mean that people are skeptical of strangers, and large social gatherings are strongly discouraged, if not outright banned. Most music acts are now holograms that can be projected into one's living room, watched safely from home; the story follows one of the last live music acts, as they travel the country, desperately trying to cobble a living together out of underground live gigs.

At the time, it felt very fanciful. Now in this time where all concerts, all sporting events, all church services, all commencements, all parades, all blueberry picking has been cancelled it feels eerily prescient. A novel, Song for a New Day, that expands on the novella came out in 2019. I haven't picked it up yet, and now I'm not sure I have the courage to do so.

There are lots of science fiction stories about plagues and pandemics and viruses, but the book I keep coming back to actually isn't science fiction, or even about a plague, pandemic, or virus. It's Mrs. Miniver by Jan Struther, a domestic novel set on the eve of World War II.

One of the weird boons of the coronavirus has been reconnecting and building new connections. Bereft of face-to-face contact except with the people who work at Publix, we've been participating in a lot of video calls. Weekly ones with grad school friends, and more with other family and friends, all people who under normal circumstances I talk to once every couple months at best. My sister and I have started doing crossword puzzles together using a site called Down for a Cross; we do at least one every day if not three or four, and it has become a daily ritual I really look forward to. I am getting to spend more time with my son, and I am more deliberate about the time I do spend with him. We go on walks through the neighborhood every day, sometimes two or three times, which means not only do we get some good family bonding, but that I have talked to my neighbors more in the past two-plus months than in the whole three-plus years I have lived in this community.

The passage I keep mentally coming back to is one near the end of the novel, where Mrs. Miniver writes a letter to her sister about all the ways the nation has come together since the war began, and how grand that is:
I can think of a hundred ways already in which the war has "brought us to our senses." But it oughtn't to need a war to make a nation paint its kerbstones white, carry rear-lamps on its bicycles, and give all its slum children a holiday in the country. And it oughtn't to need a war to make us talk to each other in buses, and invent our own amusements in the evenings, and live simply, and eat sparingly, and recover the use of our legs, and get up early enough to see the sun rise. However, it has needed one: which is about the severest criticism our civilization could have.
It oughtn't to need a pandemic to make me reach out to friends and family, and to talk to my neighbors. However, it has needed one.

20 May 2020

Hugos 2020: Monstress: The Chosen by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda

Comic trade paperback, 167 pages
Published 2019 (contents: 2019)
Acquired April 2020

Read May 2020
Monstress, Volume Four: The Chosen

Writer: Marjorie Liu
Artist: Sana Takeda 
Lettering & Design: Rus Wooton

I keep claiming I'm done with this series, and keep coming back because it keeps ending up on the Hugo ballot. (In fact, it has won three years in a row!) I think, however, that this was my favorite volume since the first, though I still can't say that I love it or anything. This one had more focus on Kippa, the fox Arcanic and my favorite character. I can't say I think giving her a mythical destiny is my favorite thing (I much prefer her as an ordinary child caught up in horrible events), but I did like her steadfast belief in goodness, even in horrible events, and the sly cleverness she shows in this volume. This one also had a coherent story that I could follow from beginning to end. The political stuff, however, I don't care for, and the mythic stuff, I just can't follow. Plus I cannot be made to care about the main character's destiny or backstory.

The art is still very good, if not even better than it's ever been.

19 May 2020

Hugos 2020: Dragon Pearl by Yoon Ha Lee

Trade paperback, 310 pages
Published 2020 (originally 2019)

Acquired April 2020
Read May 2020
Dragon Pearl by Yoon Ha Lee

This is a fantasy novel with space opera trappings. Basically the premise of its world is: what if Korean mythology was true... but it was the future and humanity had colonized space? Thus we have a fox spirit main character, and once she goes aboard a Space Forces starship, she meets tigers and demons and dragons serving among a predominantly human crew. The ship runs on flows of luck energy; if there's a ghost aboard, it loses battles because of the bad luck. That worldbuilding, the way the novel mixed fantasy underpinnings with sf tropes, was probably my favorite part of it.

It fits into the Star Wars archetype: Min is from a backwater planet and yearns for more. When she finds out her brother (in the Space Forces) has been branded a traitor, she follows him into space, using her fox powers to charm others and disguise herself. The beginning of the book is a bit one-thing-after-another in a way I found relentless: Min accidentally falls in with police she must play along with; she escapes from into working at a casino; she escapes from there into an under-attack spaceship; and so on. It all felt a bit too constructed, and there was little room for reflection. Things even out, though, once she disguises herself as a Space Force cadet, and makes friends that she must systematically lie to in order to continue her investigations. Her on the ship was my favorite part of the book, and where I felt it got the most interesting. In the end, things wrap up with a series of reversals-- not all of them expected, which was good-- but of course you'll be unsurprised to learn that Min triumphs. I didn't think it was great, but I did think it was fun, and unique.

18 May 2020

Hugos 2020: LaGuardia by Nnedi Okorafor and Tana Ford

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2019 (contents: 2018-19)

Borrowed from my wife 
Read May 2020
LaGuardia: A Very Modern Story of Immigration

Writer: Nnedi Okorafor
Artist: Tana Ford
Colorist: James Devlin
Letterer: Sal Cipriano

I moderately enjoyed this, which places it in the upper tier of Okorafor books I've read. It's an obvious riff on Trump-era immigration politics, where it's aliens who have trouble immigrating into a xenophobic United States. I think a good sfnal take on a contemporary issue will make you think about it in a new way; this, however, didn't really make me realize anything that I didn't already know. It's fun, but ultimately shallow. I felt it suffered because the character work seemed very rush-- key emotional truths about the characters are just kind of tossed off, and as a result, the ending doesn't land with the punch that it wants to. I had sort of a mixed reaction to Tana Ford's art, which I realized when I read the backmatter might be down to the inking (which she does herself) and/or the coloring (by James Devlin). I found her pencils more expressive and organic.

14 May 2020

Hugos 2020: The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders

Trade paperback, 366 pages
Published 2020 (originally 2019)

Acquired April 2020
Read May 2020
The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders

The front cover blurb on my copy reads, "This generation's Le Guin," which made me scoff. I mean, I enjoyed All the Birds in the Sky, but it read to me like an above-average YA novel in many ways-- not a piece of genre-defining fiction. But I did read The City in the Middle of the Night about a month after reading The Left Hand of Darkness for the third time, and I can see it. City in the Middle won't redefine the genre, but it is working squarely within the genre as Le Guin redefined it; like Ancillary Justice, you can see very clearly how Anders is following in the footsteps of her predecessor. Like Left Hand, this is a story about societies and how they shape us, and how we reach across the barriers. Like Left Hand, there's a focus on two different societies, one more rigid, one seemingly more flexible. Like Left Hand, it's about how histories define both self and world. Like Left Hand, it's about how we fail to reach across the barriers. Like Left Hand, it's about how exploration is about redefining the self. And like Left Hand (and Ancillary Justice!), it's got a long, cold journey on a sled in it.

The novel is set on a tidally locked planet, in human colonies in the planet's tiny habitable zone. Thus "day" and "night" are directions, not times, and there is no natural timekeeping system for the planet to adopt. We primarily see two different cities, one where a consistent time system is rigidly enforced, one where there is a complete absence of consistent time from person to person. I loved the worldbuilding, especially in Xiosphant, the rigid city. But like the best science fiction, it's not all about the world; it's also about the people, people who both feel like totally a product of their world and like people you could actually know. Following the adventures of Sophie and Mouth tells you something about their world, and something about yourself. The book has a real emotional truth that impressed me a lot, especially after reading the complete lack of truthful characterization (or worldbuilding, come to think of it) in Gideon the Ninth. Near the end, the worldbuilding feels less important, which was disappointing; I wanted more of human culture on the planet January than we ultimately got.

But this book feels real throughout, in terms of character and in terms of world. It does what great sf does: explores an idea both literally and metaphorically. I have four more Best Novel finalists to read, but this feels to me like the one to beat.

11 May 2020

Hugos 2020: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Hardcover, 448 pages
Published 2019

Acquired and read April 2020
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

This was the first Best Novel finalist I read for the 2020 Hugo Awards. I hope it's also the worst, because I found it a horrendous slog. The cover blurbs set you up to expect something dynamic and exciting: Charles Stross blurbed it as "Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space!" I kept waiting for that bit happen, and was over halfway through before I realized that it was already happening. Reading that description had caused my mind to conjure up something more exciting than people solving banal puzzles on a planet. Sure, the planet is in space... but aren't all planets in space? Seems like a meaningless appellation in that case. And I don't think any haunting ever actually happened? A lot of the blurbs emphasize its pulpiness... but that led to me expect a lot of action, which there was very much not. And I didn't think there was anything particularly twisted going on, either.

Basically, Gideon is a servant of a noble house in a space empire, and goes with her mistress to a meeting of all the noble houses to solve a puzzle. I think this book very much lives or dies on if you care about Gideon. I never did. A lot of the character points are deployed weirdly late in the narrative; near the end, you learn something Gideon always thought was true is actually not true, but even though Gideon always thought it was true, you the reader learned about it so recently the reversal has no impact. The worldbuilding is thin; I never felt like I had an understanding of how this society functions. Who does this empire actually rule over? What actually is the magic system? Gideon talks like someone from a 2020s streaming series, not someone from a far-future feudal society.

It eventually became a chore to read this, one of those books that's over four hundred pages long, but if you asked me what happened, I could only come with about two hundred pages of incident at best. It's published by Tor's Tor.com imprint, and indeed, it reads like a mediocre Tor.com novella stretched out to novel length. I'm prepared to believe that, like last year's finalist Trail of Lightning, it's a good example of a genre/type of book that's Just Not for Me, but I don't really see anything award-worthy in what's at best a competently executed action novel.

01 May 2020

Reading Roundup Wrapup: January–April 2020

Pick of the months: Bleak House by Charles Dickens. I'm just doing one big wrapup for the past four months because of how little I've read. This was the best of the few books I read during that span: Dickens at his peak, perhaps? I felt this did a good job of merging the all-London mode of novels like Our Mutual Friend with the narrow-bildungsroman mode of novels like Great Expectations. It's really two novels in one, and all the better for it.

All books read:
1. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
2. You Only Live Twice by Ian Fleming
3. Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the Twentieth Century by Sarah Cole
4. Nemesis Games: Book Five of The Expanse by James S.A. Corey
5. All Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever by Gerry Conway & Paul Levitz
6. Star Trek: Discovery: Dead Endless by Dave Galanter
7. The Huntress: Origins by Paul Levitz
8. Snuff: A Novel of Discworld by Terry Pratchett
9. Doctor Who: Vampire Science by Jonathan Blum & Kate Orman
10. Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
11. The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick by Mallory O’Meara

All books acquired:
1. All Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever by Gerry Conway & Paul Levitz
2. A Short History of the Crimean War by Trudi Tate
3. The Huntress: Origins by Paul Levitz
4. Columbus Noir edited by Andrew Welsh-Huggins
5. Star Trek: Picard: The Last Best Hope by Una McCormack
6. Death’s Head: Freelance Peacekeeping Agent by Simon Furman & Walter Simonson with Ferg Handley
7. Arrival by Ted Chiang
8. Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
9. Monstress, Volume Four: The Chosen by Marjorie Liu
10. The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley
11. The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein by Farah Mendlesohn
12. This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
13. The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders
14. Dragon Pearl by Yoon Ha Lee
15. Minor Mage by T. Kingfisher
16. To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers
17. A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

#8-17 are all of course for the purposes of Hugo reading (with more to come).

Books on "To be read" list: 658 (up 1)
Books on "To review" list: 23 (up 9)