Yearly Archives: 2016

Weekend Links

Weekend Links: April 9, 2016

Leave a comment

I wasn’t planning for this to be such a spare week in terms of posts, but I didn’t realize there wouldn’t be any Supergirl or Lucifer, and I didn’t have anything else in particular planned. That’s all going to change soon, though. I’m still working out exactly what my next project is going to be and sorting out a plan for getting through all the reading I want to do, but basically all the shows I watch and write about will be ending about the time Game of Thrones starts, so for at least a couple of months that garbage show will be the only major thing I have to plan around. In the meantime, this has been a somewhat exciting week in the SFF world.

Probably the biggest news of the week is the release of a teaser trailer for the new Star Wars movie, Rogue One:

It looks amazing, and I for one am thrilled to see a new original story set in the Star Wars universe.

Some dude made a very creepy robot that looks like Scarlett Johansson.

A woman spent over two years freehand stitching the covers of Frank Herbert’s Dune.

Fantasy Cafe’s Women in SF&F Month has begun.

Lin-Manuel Miranda talked about books at the NYT, and it’s totally unfair that one man can be so charming.

WebUrbanist collected photos of a bunch of places I want to live.

The Millions tells us what is the deal with J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Story of Kullervo.

LitHub interviewed Ursula K. LeGuin.

There’s a new interview with Ken Liu at HuffPo.

Jeff VanderMeer’s Entertainment Weekly piece on editing The Big Book of Science Fiction is a must-read.

I haven’t read much Edgar Rice Burroughs–just A Princess of Mars, actually–so this piece about his Tarzan stuff was very interesting.

Winter is Coming has ranked all fifty episodes of Game of Thrones.

Meanwhile, Fandom Following talks about the Game of Thrones sexism debate.

Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway came out on Tuesday, and it’s wonderful. Her piece about how she came to the idea of it is excellent as well.

The Establishment takes a look at why cutting edge sci-fi is often penned by marginalized writers.

This is so much of why I love Bob’s Burgers.

The finalists for the 2016 Prometheus Awards have been announced.

Apparently Dragon Con is getting in on the awards game.

Finally, I read two excellent pieces of short fiction this week:

Television

iZombie: “Reflections on How Liv Used to Be” sets things up for a great season finale

Leave a comment

After last week’s slightly frenetic episode and with a two-part finale scheduled for next week, I rather expected “Reflections on How Liv Used to Be” to have a lot more going on than it turned out to. Instead of another frantically-paced hour of setup for the season finale, however, this episode actually slows things down considerably and takes its time dealing with the fallout from last week before ramping back up and ending on a significant cliffhanger.

Probably the biggest event of last week’s episode was Ravi’s confrontation with Major at the end of the episode, which was further complicated with Major’s return to zombie form, and these two get a good amount of screen time this week as they work through their situation. When Major wakes up, Ravi is waiting for an explanation about the Chaos Killer stuff, and that part of things is sorted relatively quickly, though both men agree that they won’t tell Liv, at least for now. This makes their most pressing issue Major’s rezombification and possibly impending death. Major’s immediate need for brains is filled with the last of the happiness brain from a few episodes ago, which is great on several levels, and it’s interesting to see how Major, the guy who at one point would rather have died than be a zombie, is handling it now—better, obviously, than when he’d just had the whole zombie thing sprung on him, but also, importantly, better in a way that seems to indicate real character growth on his part.

The bad news, of course, is that the zombie cure that Ravi has currently developed has some very negative side effects. Blaine still hasn’t gotten his memories back, and is struggling to just make it through his days. On the one hand, this generates one of the best scenes of the episode, when Ravi tells Blaine all the evil shit he’s done and then Major walks in and introduces himself absurdly cheerfully. On the other hand, it’s starting to be actually difficult to watch as Blaine goes through the motions of his life and is shamelessly taken advantage of by Don E and Chief. I mean, there’s no way that this is going to end well for either of those two, because surely Blaine’s memories are going to come back sooner or later, but it’s tough to watch in the meantime.

The case of the week is somewhat forgettable, functioning primarily as a way to give us a look at something like Liv’s pre-zombie normal. Unfortunately, that character work is overshadowed by the ways in which all the show’s various storylines are being systematically tied together. I’m not sure what’s going to happen with Drake, but his colleague in Vice plays a major role in this episode and provides several important pieces of information. He even mentions the z-word in connection with the Utopium trade, though he scoffs at the idea. Clive is so close—and yet so far away—to putting it all together, but this weeks’ award for good detective work has to go to Dale, who finally gets a break in her hunt for the Chaos Killer.

The bait and switch ending of this episode is a masterful piece of high tension television. Major is planning to purposefully infect Vaughn with zombieism, but Vaughn is being tipped off about Major’s failure to actually kill any of the people he’s been supposed to murder. Just as that situation is about to erupt, Dale makes her move, and the episode ends with Major facedown on the floor being arrested. There are several things going on at once here, and all of them are exciting. The last couple episodes have been steadily chipping away at various characters’ secrecy and connecting all of the show’s numerous plots to each other. Next week, we get to see just how much everyone figures out. It seems as if the only way out of some of these situations is going to be total transparency and honesty, but that literally never happens on television. I can’t wait to see what happens instead.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • “Can we play hooky and follow him around all day?”
  • Don E and Chief playing bluegrass was delightful.
  • Peyton is back to hassle Blaine about flaking on helping her nail Mr. Boss for doing so much crime.
  • Vaughn has Rita locked up in the basement, and she looks like she could cheerfully murder him, which I consider a likely event by the end of next week’s finale.
  • Robert Buckley has teased a character death next week. My money would be on Dale or Drake, but this could also be a good time to off Major, who has had a great arc this season and is probably at his most likeable since the beginning of the show, making his death the most potentially impactful. Major’s death could also have been foreshadowed this week with his blithe attitude about the cure and his seemingly sanguine feelings about being a zombie.
Book Reviews, Books, Fantasy, Novella

Book Review: Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire

4 Comments

Every Heart a Doorway is a sort of interesting twin to The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home, which I reviewed yesterday. In many ways, they are very similar books, both being fairly sophisticated examinations of the children’s portal fantasy genre, but Seanan McGuire’s novella of course has sharper edges and a more nuanced message than Catherynne M. Valente’s middle grade masterpiece. Like Valente’s series, however, Every Heart a Doorway is a book that is absolutely necessary for its audience, which I would say is primarily teens and young adults, but ought to include basically everyone. It’s a book that many people will identify with, and those who don’t see themselves in its pages could probably stand to learn a few things from it.

While Valente offers her heroine the opportunity to stay in the world she has found a home in, McGuire turns her eye to the young people who don’t get to stay. Eleanor West is one such child, and she runs a boarding school for as many others like herself that she can collect. It’s here that main protagonist Nancy finds herself when she’s sent home from an underworld that she loved because the Lord of Death wanted her to be sure before she committed to staying forever. At Eleanor’s school, Nancy meets other young people like herself and learns more about the different possible worlds while she waits and hopes for her door to reappear. Most of all, Nancy learns that most people never do find their door again, and much of the book is dedicated to exploring the different ways in which Nancy and the other characters are dealing with this reality.

Whereas Valente’s Fairyland ultimately delivers a fantasy in which one can find harmony and unity by integrating different aspects of oneself and changing one’s world to suit, McGuire offers a very different solution to problems of belonging, predicated on the sad truth that sometimes, if we can’t change the world we live in, we have to leave it behind. It’s a bittersweet lesson, and it comes at a steep price, but it also comes with the assurance that it’s okay to leave. In some ways, it’s the ultimate “it gets better” message, but what McGuire gives us in Every Heart a Doorway is something much deeper and more nuanced than that platitude. For Nancy and her friends, things don’t always get better or easier, but they nonetheless have the strength to find joy and meaning in their lives regardless.

Every Heart a Doorway is a book about making the best of things, but it’s also a book about not being afraid to take chances and not feeling guilty about doing what is best for yourself. It encourages a sort of healthy selfishness that more people—specifically marginalized people, who are often expected to be absurdly self-sacrificing—ought to cultivate. There are no martyrs here. There are tragedies, but not inevitable ones, and the overall message is one of hope, though a much more complicated and ambiguous sort of hope than in Valente’s series. This is an altogether more grown-up book, and in all the best possible ways.

This review was based upon a copy of the book received from the publisher for review through NetGalley.

Book Reviews, Fantasy

Book Review: The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home by Catherynne M. Valente

1 Comment

Catherynne M. Valente’s first Fairyland book, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, established this series from the very start as a superbly written and sublimely beautiful story for children, and The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home is a totally fitting conclusion to the story of September and her friends. It would perhaps be too much to ask for every installment of the series to be as good as the first one, and the fourth one (The Boy Who Lost Fairyland) stood out as decidedly different from the rest. Still, it did help to set up this finale, which is every bit as good—and even a little more polished—as the rest of the series.

As with all of Valente’s previous Fairyland books, The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home is both remarkably beautiful and remarkably fun to read. Having started off reading these books to my daughter as bedtime stories before she got too grown up to let me do it (and I’m convinced the only reason I got to keep reading to her until past her eleventh birthday was this series), I always suggest that those who can read the book aloud to the nearest child in their life, and that’s as true of the last volume of the series as it was of the first. Valente’s way with words only gets more refined with every novel she produces, and her gift for gorgeous near nonsense is on full display here.

Spoilers below this sentence. Continue reading Book Review: The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home by Catherynne M. Valente →

Television

Wynonna Earp: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of “Purgatory”

2 Comments

Friday saw the premier of another new show on SyFy, but Wynonna Earp arrived to little fanfare. The thing is, it’s not a bad little show, as far as I can tell. Sure, it’s got some kinks that need to be worked out, but there’s nothing wrong with it that justifies the nearly complete lack of promotion I’ve seen for the show. It doesn’t even seem to be getting reviewed by any of the regular places that I go to for television reviews, and that doesn’t bode well for the show going forward. We’ll see. In the meantime, let’s pick it apart a little.

Good: Showrunner Emily Andras also ran Lost Girl, another show that I liked quite a bit.

Bad: Andras describes Wynonna Earp as “Frozen meets Buffy” which is just unfortunate-sounding. I know that what she means is that it’s a show that centers on the sometimes complicated relationship between sisters while they fight demons, but there have got to be better examples of sister-driven media than Frozen, and the last episode of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer aired almost fifteen years ago. It’s starting to just be sad that Buffy is still the go-to reference for girl-powered urban fantasy shows.

I mean, SERIOUSLY?

Ugly: While I haven’t read the comics, the source material looks like garbage. The cover art alone makes me want to go take about fourteen showers.

Good: That said, the show doesn’t reproduce the grossly objectifying imagery of the comics, and Wynonna is dressed perfectly sensibly so far.

Bad: The aesthetic of the show is, still, nothing particularly special, however. Wynonna is in the mold of other urban fantasy anti-heroines like Bo or Faith or, more recently, Jessica Jones, to whom I’m sure she’ll be compared ad nauseum. The rest of the characters likewise fall neatly into the looks of well-established genre tropes.

Ugly: The special effects in the first episode are mostly terrible. Wynonna’s first encounter with a demon, in particular, is hideous to look at, with everything obscured by a sort of blurry gloom that doesn’t manage to convey much of anything other than that the production of the episode was fairly cheap and lazy. I would say that this forest scene owes something to Ash vs. Evil Dead, but Wynonna Earp doesn’t have even a fraction of that show’s panache.

Good: Melanie Scrofano seems well-cast as the eponymous lead character, playing her as a decent amalgam of Jessica Jones and Lost Girl’s Bo, and she’s nicely supported so far by Dominique Provost-Chalkley as younger sister Waverly.

Good: We don’t get to see much of him, but Tim Rozon looks great as Doc Holliday. I can see the fanfic already.

Bad: Shamier Anderson is a little wooden and somewhat superfluous as Agent Dolls. The only bright side is that I think this is a bad writing problem, not a bad acting problem, which means that it would be easy for things to improve for Dolls as the show goes on.

Ugly: With the exception of Anderson, the cast is entirely white. In 2016, there’s really no excuse for this sort of tokenism.

Good: The first episode works nicely as a neatly self-contained origin story for Wynonna, with no mystery about or obfuscation of her history. The whole premise of the show is very straightforward, there’s a coherent mythology so far, and Wynonna Earp seems to be very aware of what it is. Some might consider it unambitious, and its admittedly someone derivative, but I find it refreshingly unpretentious.

Bad: The flip side of the above point is that there’s not a lot going on under the surface, at least not yet. Wynonna and Waverly are engaging enough, but they aren’t exactly compelling in this first episode.

Ugly: While the revenants that Wynonna is tasked with killing are supposedly part of a curse against her family, what they apparently really want to do is murder girls in general. Yuck. The brutal murder of Wynonna’s fell bus rider, Kiersten, in the first minutes of the episode was later confirmed to be at least the third such murder in recent months.

Good: The big fight scene at the end of the episode mostly worked, and there was even a glimmer of style (and none of the very silly special effects of the earlier scene) on display as Wynonna finally accepts her destiny and takes up the Peacemaker to step into her Chosen One role. It’s a bit of same old story at work, but it feels earned here, the end result is satisfying, and the episode ends exactly where it ought.

My final verdict?

Wynonna Earp is fun so far, and with twelve more episodes in the first season there’s plenty of room for it to get better. I’m not always a huge fan of urban fantasy serials like this, but the Western setting is just fresh enough to be a nice change of pace, and Wynonna is a type of heroine that I generally like. It’s not a show without flaws, but I can deal with some cheesy production values if the characters and story are good, and so far those aspects of the show are, overall, promising.

Wynonna Earp airs Fridays on SyFy at 10/9c.

Weekend Links

Weekend Links: April 2, 2016 (Belated)

Leave a comment

For once, the belated weekend links are not due to anything remotely my own fault. Yesterday we had about a ten-hour power outage due to high winds here in Cincinnati. It was actually nice just listening to the wind howl without any electronic noises, but only for the first couple of hours. It was less fun driving around town trying to find a place to eat that had electricity (though it was a good excuse for Thai food, in the end) and it turns out that reading from a Nook screen in total darkness only exacerbates an allergy-induced sinus headache. By about 10 pm, I gave up hoping that the power would come back on and just called it an early night, which turned out to be wise since it didn’t come back on until about 2:30 am.

Needless to say, no power and no internet is not conducive to being very productive. Today has been better, but I’m still, frankly, a little exhausted from my big Up and Coming read through, and this weekend just hasn’t been as relaxing/recharging as I’d hoped it would be. That said, I’ve got some interesting things in the works over the next few weeks, and I hope to be making some announcements in the near-ish future.

Due to the very busy week of non-internet reading, this is another lighter week for links, but I did still manage to find a few neat things to share.

The Powerpuff Girls reboot starts tomorrow, but in the meantime you can Powerpuff Yourself.

Man at Arms: Reforged did Xena’s Chakrams:

Party Over Here’s mansplaining hotline is a legitimately great idea:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiCsbCr49Lc

The Fanwankers talked about Problematic Faves.

There’s a great piece at Mythcreants about Unreliable Narrators.

On Starships and Dragonwings has some tips for How to Use Biology Terms in Your Speculative Fiction.

Ken Liu’s piece on the differences between writing short and long fiction is a must-read.

In April’s Clarkesworld, Jason Heller writes about Hawkwind’s Space Rock Journey throughout Science Fiction and Fantasy.

At LitHub, Africa Has Always Been Sci-Fi: On Nnedi Okorafor and a New Generation of Afrofuturists.

Matt Ruff and Victor LaValle Take on Lovecraft and Race over at the B&N Review blog.

The winner of the 2015 BSFA Award is Aliette de Bodard’s The House of Shattered Wings.

The 2016 Aurora Awards finalists have been announced.

As have the winners and honor list for this year’s Tiptree Awards.

SF Signal’s April Cover Gallery for new releases is up. What are you most looking forward to this month?

 

Hugo Awards

My Final Hugo Ballot and a Bunch of More or Less Wild Speculations

2 Comments

Now that the Hugo nomination period is over (or will be in a couple of hours) it’s time for sharing ballots and wildly speculating about what we think is going to make the cut for the finalist list. My nominations and speculations about the categories I’m most interested in are below; I’d love to see yours in the comments.

Best Novel

  • The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
    I knew as soon as I finished The Fifth Season that it was going to be the best book I read in 2015, and nothing else really came close to it. It’s just a superb book, one of the most original fantasy novels I’ve read in years, and one that I think is likely to be influential in years to come, especially if the rest of the series holds to the same high standard as this first installment. I’ve seen this book getting a good amount of buzz among people who I usually agree with about these sorts of things, but that probably doesn’t mean much.
  • Barsk: The Elephants’ Graveyard by Lawrence M. Schoen
    Sadly, I think this title is a long shot even for the Hugo shortlist, in spite of its making the Nebula shortlist, which is actually what triggered my reading it. Because it was released so late in the year (12/28, I believe), I had actually been thinking of it as one of the first 2016 books, not a part of 2015 at all, and I suspect that a lot of other folks were under the same misconception.
  • The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu
    Ken Liu’s first novel is equal parts very familiar and very fresh. It’s an epic fantasy, but it’s far more influenced by literary epics than by mainstream fantasy, which seems to have prevented it from having the type of broad appeal I think it deserves. In an age where heavily character driven stories are extremely popular, The Grace of Kings isn’t, really, but it makes up for any failures of character development by having an excelling plot and superb worldbuilding.
  • The Just City by Jo Walton
    This little book has, I think, almost the opposite problem that Barsk has to overcome. The Just City came out early last year, and it’s such a sort of understated masterpiece that it might be very easy for it to be overlooked in favor of something more commercially popular, and I don’t expect to see it on the finalist list in a couple of months.
  • Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson
    Sorcerer of the Wildeeps was published of part of Tor.com’s novella line, but it’s over the word count for that category and I haven’t seen any official word on its eligibility. My understanding, though, is that the folks who tally the votes will shift stuff like this into the proper category if necessary. Unfortunately, I don’t see this being competetive in the Best Novel category if that’s where it ultimately ends up, but there was no way I was going to leave it off my ballot.

Best Novella

  • Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
    This one is a story that grew on me; I like it better and better the more I think about it, and just the fact that I find myself thinking about it so much after so long speaks to it being something very special.
  • The Builders by Daniel Polansky
    I think The Builders is going to be hugely popular when the first round of votes are counted. It’s highly entertaining, just great fun to read, in addition to be extremely well-written.
  • The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Djinn by Usman T. Malik
    I adored this novella, but it may be a little too grounded in the real world for a majority of Hugo voters to agree. Judging by the number of recommendation lists I saw it on, I expect it to have a good chance of making the final ballot, but I doubt it will win.
  • Speak Easy by Catherynne M. Valente
    Catherynne M. Valente is probably my favorite writer working today, and Speak Easy is marvelous from its gorgeous cover to every word on its pages.
  • The Citadel of Weeping Pearls by Aliette de Bodard
    Definitely my choices generally skew pretty heavily towards fantasy, but Aliette de Bodard writes some of the most beautiful space opera I’ve ever read. This may be a common nominee from the loves-Asimov’s-hates-Tor.com crowd, but I expect it’s a little cerebral for the folks who prefer books that are mostly full of spaceships and square-jawed Kirk-types. That said, I know the author was giving the story away for awards consideration, and that might have a big enough impact to ensure her a spot as a finalist. Alternatively, Tor.com’s new novellas could split the vote enough that it lowers the threshhold for finalists. With a dozen possible entries from Tor.com, it’s going to be an interesting year in this category.

Best Novelette

  • “The Oiran’s Song” by Isabel Yap
  • “The Long Goodnight of Violet Wild” by Catherynne M. Valente
  • “Another Word for World” by Ann Leckie
    This is the only story in this group that I think is a shoe-in for the category. Leckie’s Ancillary Mercy was well-liked and a solid finish to her trilogy, but I think it’s unlikely that it will get much traction for Best Novel. “Another Word for World”, however, is in a relatively sparse category to begin with (not many folks writing at novelette length), is by a popular author, and is available in a free anthology of mostly hard sci-fi.
  • “Follow Me Down” by Nicolette Barischoff
  • “Y Brenin” by C.A. Hawksmoor

Best Short Story

  • “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” by Alyssa Wong
    I will be very surprised if this story doesn’t make the finalist list considering the amount of buzz it’s gotten, especially with Alyssa Wong also on a lot of short lists (mine included) for the Campbell.
  • “The Lily and the Horn” by Catherynne M. Valente
    I just really love Cat Valente, okay?
  • “Of Blood and Brine” by Megan E. O’Keefe
  • “The Robot Who Couldn’t Lie” by Sunil Patel
    This one’s a bit of a tearjerker, but I could see it having broad appeal, being at the intersection of human interest and hard sci-fi concepts. If it makes the finalist list, I’d say this would be a smart bet to win.
  • “Archana and Chandni” by Iona Sharma

Best Graphic Story

  • ODY-C Vol. 1: Off to Far Ithacaa
    I feel like basically no one else “got” this book, but I loved it almost beyond words. Probably it’s a long shot, but I’m not into super hero comics, so it’s not like it’s knocking something else off my list.
  • Nimona
    I only read this because my daughter did. She couldn’t put it down at the bookstore, and she finished it in an afternoon. I read it at least as quickly, and probably love it even more than she does.
  • Rat Queens Vol. 2: The Far Reaching Tentacles of N’Rygoth
    Obv.
  • Bitch Planet Vol. 1: Extraordinary Machine
    This is the badass feminist sci-fi comic I’ve been waiting for my whole life. I’m not sure I think it will have enough mainstream appeal to win a Hugo, but it definitely deserves a nomination.
  • Monstress #1
    This little book is stunningly beautiful, but again isn’t a mainstream choice. I have a feeling only one of my choices in this category will make the finalist list, and this isn’t it. (It’s Rat Queens. Calling that now.)

Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)

  • Crimson Peak
    There’s no way this will make the finalist list, but it’s probably my favorite movie of 2015, and I figured The Martian and Star Wars: The Force Awakens don’t need my help. 
  • Mad Max: Fury Road
    This is an obvious choice, and if it wasn’t for The Martian, I’d give good odds on Fury Road taking home a rocket.
  • Advantageous
    I’m guessing it’s very unlikely that this will even make finalist, but I just want everyone to go watch it on Netflix ASAP.
  • Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
    I’m not a huge fan of book-to-television adaptations in general, but this one is remarkably good, true to the novel without being a slave to its source material.
  • Jessica Jones Season 1
    I know I’ve said I’m not into super heroes, but I am into Jessica Jones.

Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)

  • Into the Badlands “The Hand of Five Poisons”
    I almost nominated the whole first season of Into the Badlands in the Long Form category, but I don’t know if I can forgive it for ending on a cliffhanger and making me wait until 2017 for season two. That said, the episode in question is excellent, and the show in general has some of the best martial arts fight scenes ever put on television.
  • Minority Report “The American Dream”
    Sadly, Minority Report is dead, but it’s a show that I rather liked, and this episode came closest to living up to the show’s potential.
  • The Expanse “CQB”
    I’m not certain, but I think it’s highly likely that this is going to be this year’s winner in this category. Anyone who isn’t terrible loves this show, and this is almost certainly the best episode of the ones that aired in 2015.
  • Jessica Jones “AKA Smile”
    Best episode of the series, for sure.
  • Doctor Who “The Husbands of River Song”
    I was as surprised as anyone to like last year’s Christmas special, as I’ve long been a critic of Moffat-era Who, but it was quite good.

Campbell Award for Best New Writer

  • Becky Chambers
    The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet was the only book I read twice last year, and Becky Chambers would probably be my first choice for the Campbell, but I would be thrilled for any of the authors I nominated to win.
  • Sunil Patel
  • Alyssa Wong
  • Iona Sharma
  • Isabel Yap

 

 

Television

iZombie: “Pour Some Sugar, Zombie” strips away almost everyone’s secrets

Leave a comment

iZombie just gets better and better as it works its way towards the end of its second season. Like pretty much every episode these days, “Pour Some Sugar, Zombie” is jam-packed with important events, and that’s even without Drake, Mr. Boss, or Vaughn around to distract from the main characters. Smartly, this episode focuses primarily on Liv, Ravi, and Major, a nice change from last week which was very close to being entirely overstuffed.

The first and most exciting big news of the week is that Peyton is moving back in with Liv. I love that this wasn’t rushed, and the scene with Major and Ravi having drinks with the girls after helping Peyton carry boxes is just the beginning of a whole series of scenes this week that serve double purposes. In this case, it’s good to see the gang together and being friends—which is, incidentally, a great way to work in a somewhat dated reference to Friends—and the scene also introduces this week’s murder victim and sets up the case that Liv will be working on for most of the rest of the episode.

The case seems to be a pretty straightforward one to start with, and Liv isn’t even planning on eating Cassidy’s brain until Peyton shows up at the morgue to put in a special request. Unfortunately, the idea of Peyton hanging out with stripper brain Liv is much better than the execution of it here. There are elements of this sequence that I like, but it relies more than a little too heavily on stereotypes about dancers, made especially uncomfortable to watch by the fact that all of the dancers that appear in the episode are women of color, which adds a weirdly racialized tone to the stereotyping. Liv giving Peyton a lap dance could have been really funny, but instead it was just awkward, and not in a particularly fun way to watch.

The most compelling part of the episode actually ends up being Ravi’s journey to figuring out that Major is the Chaos Killer. This storyline is paced perfectly over the course of the episode so that the logical end of it, when Ravi finally confronts Major with his discoveries, feels organic and earned, a perfect dramatic payoff after a season’s worth of letting this hidden tension fester in the background. I like that Ravi doesn’t immediately go to Clive or Dale (or even Liv) when he figures it out, but instead confronts Major about it directly, and that it triggers Major’s reversion to zombie form makes it a great visual moment as well as a great emotional one.

In other news, after taking Ravi’s newest zombie cure last week, Blaine is no longer a zombie. However, he’s also no longer quite himself, either. There’s a lot of potential here for new directions in Blaine’s character growth, but I’m also somewhat concerned that this could be a prelude to writing him out of the series somehow, especially with Don E and Chief likely picking up the reins of Blaine’s business. That said, it seems much more likely that Don E and Chief’s move against Mr. Boss is going to fail spectacularly one way or another. My guess is that they are going to screw up big time in a way that helps to bring the conflicts between the show’s various factions to a head, and Blaine—either with his memory restored or not—will save the day somehow.

Also this week, after spending most of the episode bemoaning how she misjudged Drake, Liv finally finds out that he’s not a crook at all, but an undercover police officer. This is nicely seeded early in the hour when one of Drake’s handlers from vice shows up to ask Liv about him, but she ultimately finds out when she goes to visit Drake’s distraught mother. What remains to be seen is whether or not Liv actually does anything about this, especially in light of Major now being a zombie. As much as I, for the most part, dislike Liv and Major together, it’s a foundational fact of the show that the only reason they aren’t happily making little Livs and Majors now is because Liv is a zombie. Surely, this Chaos Killer business will get sorted out somehow, and then I expect Major and Liv to be interested in each other again, which makes Drake’s place on the show a little tenuous. I only hope he doesn’t go the way of poor Lowell.

With three episodes left in the season, there’s still a good amount of very tangled story left to unravel, but this episode has made some real headway in getting things set up for a wild ride of a season finale.

Miscellaneous Thoughts:

  • It’s good to get an update on zombie Rita, though I was hoping for something a little bigger from that development.
  • I know I complained about the stereotyping of the dancers, but “Helvetica” was a legitimately surprising and funny stripper name.
  • “Does he remember that he’s a dick?”

 

Television

Supergirl: “World’s Finest” brings the Flash to town for reasons

Leave a comment

“World’s Finest” was, well, fine, but not great. I kind of think that as someone who hasn’t watched even a single episode of The Flash (though I am peripherally aware of it, what with not living under a rock), it was just hard for me to get very excited about the crossover between the two shows. That said, Barry Allen was a nice addition to the team for a single episode, but I don’t think I could deal with him more often. As Cat Grant pointed out: “He was so unfailingly charming and nice he either had to be a superhero or a Mormon.”

The story of the episode is set up early, with the revelation of Siobhan’s powers and her hatching of a plan to band together with Livewire to take down Supergirl and Cat Grant. Unfortunately, this pair never quite manage to be a credible threat to Supergirl or, frankly, anyone else. When they are finally defeated, it’s practically the definition of anticlimax. Although I did get a little misty-eyed when the people of National City finally seemed to rally around Supergirl, I felt like that development really wasn’t earned. I would have preferred to see the show hold off on Supergirl winning back the city’s love until the penultimate or even the final episode of the season, especially after the way this episode ends.

While Barry Allen’s presence is pleasant and an interesting way of shaking things up—particularly as a way of moving things along with Kara and James’s relationship—it’s really not enough to carry the hour. Far too much time is spent simply explaining why and how he’s there, including an absurd whiteboard drawing of several circles being used to explain the multiverse theory, which comes off more as condescending to the audience than anything else. It’s just not that complicated a concept, and the show uses rather silly comic book “science” to explain it anyway (apparently Barry is just that fast), so the whole sequence just ends up being kind of unintentionally funny.

I did rather like the instantly friendly dynamic between Barry and Kara, but it wasn’t any material that couldn’t have been better off given to Cat or Alex (who is sadly absent this week), and the one lasting impact Barry has on this version of National City could easily be missed by an unobservant viewer: his giving the local police a way to hold and take care of metahumans on their own so that human bad guys don’t have to be sent to the DEO. On the one hand, I appreciate that this is a way of revisiting and resolving a theme from earlier in the season, but it’s done in such an offhand way that it doesn’t seem very important. At the same time, with a likely-final confrontation with Non on the horizon, Lucy Lane in charge of the DEO, and Alex and Hank on the run, this could mean that the show is working towards removing the DEO from the picture altogether. This may not be a bad idea, as the show has always struggled to balance its vastly different settings and CatCo is the more compelling of them, but it also feels like a cheap way to shuffle Lucy out of the picture now that she’s no longer necessary to maintain a love triangle.

In many ways, “World’s Finest” feels a little like the show spinning its wheels. Before the final few minutes of the episode, very little of consequence actually happens, and then it’s as if everything is happening at once, leaving us with a cliffhanger setup for the last two episodes of the season.

Miscellaneous Thoughts:

  • Siobhan’s Silver Banshee makeup looked like garbage.
  • Winn was cute this week, which I never say, but it’s true this one time.
  • KARA AND JAMES IS HAPPENING… OH SHIT.
  • I feel like there is definitely going to be at least one major character death in the next two weeks, but I don’t even want to guess which one. Before this week I might have hoped for Winn, but he’s starting to grow on me now that he’s not being a gross Nice Guy™ towards Kara.
Book Reviews, Books, Fantasy, Horror, Hugo Awards, Science Fiction, Short Fiction

Let’s Read! Up and Coming: Part 12

5 Comments

Reading Up and Coming, even though I feel like it’s been a frantic and sometimes frustrating pace, has been totally worth it. This final group of authors has produced some of my favorite stories in the collection, and made for an altogether pleasant last day of reading.

Nicolas Wilson

Nicolas Wilson starts things off with “Trials,” which I mostly liked very well. It’s a very Star Trek-ish novelette with some fascinating aliens and a mostly compelling plot in which a man travels to a dangerous ice planet and has to negotiate a treaty with the people there. Though it’s somewhat (if not entirely) corrected by the ending of the story, the only serious issue I had with “Trials” was the narrator’s motivation being “earning” a woman’s love so he could steal her away from someone else. It’s not romantic or interesting; it’s infantilizing and unattractively obsessive, and that he transfers his affections so easily to the alien woman he meets only serves to reinforce that the narrator sees women as interchangeable objects rather than as people with agency of their own.

Wilson follows this up with “Multiply,” a cute piece of odd couple romantic comedy about a pair of AIs traveling together. It’s not bad, but it’s a fairly pedestrian premise with an execution that doesn’t really rise above workmanlike. I chuckled a couple of times, but the banter between the characters became grating about halfway through the story.

Alyssa Wong

I read and loved Alyssa Wong’s “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” last year when it first came out, and if anything I loved it more the second time around. It’s definitely a story with several shades of meaning and multiple layers of genius to explore. “The Fisher Queen” is a similarly marvelous story about a young woman who finds out that her mother might be a mermaid of the sort that her people usually eat as fish, and in “Santos de Sampaquitas,” a young woman must deal with a god in order to protect her family. The beauty of Alyssa Wong’s language makes all three of these stories compulsively readable and highly enjoyable without distracting from the richness of her settings and the resonance of the themes she explores. Going into this project, Alyssa Wong was one of the writers I was almost certain I would nominate for the Campbell, on the strength of “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” alone, and her other stories here only made me more sure of that choice.

Eleanor R. Wood

“Fibonacci” has an interesting structure and a lovely cadence to its storytelling, but very little plot and not much in particular to say about its subject matter. Still, I liked it the best of the three stories Eleanor R. Wood offered here. “Pawprints in the Aeolian Dust” has a premise that I enjoyed at first, but it moved along so slowly and methodically that I found myself bored and losing focus about halfway through. “Daddy’s Girl,” about a woman whose father is an android in need of repairs, is fine, but nothing particularly special, and its sweetness turned cloying at the end.

Frank Wu

I wanted to love Frank Wu’s “Season of the Ants in a Timeless Land,” but it’s another story that I, sadly, just found my mind wandering throughout. The romance, such as it was, was unconvincing, and none of the characters were compelling enough to keep my attention very long. I also found the religious allusions and the mysticism of the ending off-putting.

Jeff Xilon

From Jeff Xilon come “H,” a very short stream of consciousness in which a drug is used to make soldiers into a sort of hive mind and “All of Our Days,” about a man who misses out on a chance at immortality when he takes too long enjoying having a body. Neither of these were awful, but neither one stands out as very accomplished either.

J.Y. Yang

I loved “A House of Anxious Spiders” so, so much. J.Y. Yang’s imagery of people fighting with spiders that live in their mouths and then losing their voice until a new one hatches is clever and powerful, but never cutesy, and Yang doesn’t shy away from an insightful examination of the ways in which even people who love each other can hurt each other deeply. Sook Yee’s and Kathy’s cruelties to each other will feel almost too familiar to anyone who has argued about something real with a person who knows you well. In “Temporary Saints,” a woman prepares the bodies of children who were briefly able to perform miracles, and “Song of the Krakenmaid” finds a woman dealing with an interesting cryptid and a cheating girlfriend.

Honestly, I’m not sure how I’ve never come across any of J.Y. Yang’s stories before since they are relevant to basically all of my interests, but you can be sure I’ll be keeping an eye out for them in the future.

Isabel Yap

I didn’t love “Milagroso” in spite of its interesting ideas, and “Good Girls” was at times actually unappealing to me, but I love “The Oiran’s Song” passionately. It’s brutal and sad, but it’s also remarkably beautifully written, and Isabel Yap has a distinctive voice that I look forward to reading more of.

Jo Zebedee

I read just enough of this excerpt from Inish Carraig to send me over to Goodreads to find out more about the book, which confirmed that it is not one for me. However, though it only has a few reviews, they all seem to be very positive so far. If you like post-alien invasion stories, this one might be one to pick up.

Jon F. Zeigler

On the one hand, I love an original fairy tale, and “Galen and the Golden-Coat Hare” is a well-conceived and nicely written one. On the other hand, I dislike the deeply conservative message of this one, which frames poverty as a virtue that should be preserved and justice as the upholding of a fundamentally unjust status quo. Zeigler plays with some interesting fairy tale conventions, and there’s a clever conclusion to the story, but I just can’t bring myself to consider the ending a happy one.

Anna Zumbro

I know it’s only a quirk of alphabetical chance, but I was a little disappointed that the last two stories in Up and Coming weren’t more impactful. “The Pixie Game” and “The Cur of County Road Six” are both extremely short stories about kids being kind of awful to each other, and “The Cur” is a particularly ugly.

Final Verdict:

Alyssa Wong, of course, is definitely on my Campbell ballot, but Isabel Yap and J.Y. Yang are strong contenders for the couple of slots that I still haven’t sorted out yet.