Monthly Archives: May 2017

Blog News, Weekend Links

State of the Blog and Weekend Links: May 14, 2017

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It’s been a bit of a rough week, productivity-wise, for me. Monday, I ended up having to take my car to have its transmission rebuilt, which left me without a car until Friday, which–it turns out–is still an inconvenience even when you do live within walking distance of everything truly essential. It also meant that my partner was working from home all week, which is fine, but I’m definitely looking forward to having my alone time back this coming week.

On the bright side, I read quite a bit, finishing three novellas (All Systems Red, Killing Gravity and Reenu-You) and a novel (The Guns Above), and I’m hoping to finish the rest of The Radium Girls tonight. After several weeks of what, for me, was a reading slump, I’m starting to feel somewhat normal, at least in this one aspect of my life. The other good thing this week was finally getting some flowers for my balcony yesterday. I spent more than I wanted (I was hoping to spend under $20, but ended up closer to $30), but the two big hanging baskets of fuchsias I got were definitely worth it. I cannot wait til all the buds on them start opening up in a few days.

The finalist list for this year’s Locus Awards is out, and it’s excellent.

Maurice Broaddus’s post about wrestling with writer’s block has been helpful to me this week.

There’s an amazing Humble Book Bundle going on right now: the Super Nebula Author Showcase, which is full of wonderful work by a great selection of diverse authors.

Sleepy Hollow has finally been cancelled.

There’s a new Andy Weir book, Artemis, coming out November 17.

Michele Tracy Berger wrote about the Big Idea in her novella, Reenu-You.

Paul Semel interviewed Martha Wells, the author of All Systems Red, book one of her Murderbot Diaries series.

Speaking of robots, there’s a ton of neat real robot photos right now over at The Big Picture.

At Nerds of a Feather, Joe Sherry talked 6 Books with John Joseph Adams, editor of Cosmic Powers: The Saga Anthology of Far-Away Galaxies, which I reviewed a couple days ago (spoiler: it’s awesome).

Lady Business is the place to go this week if you’re looking for some woman-focused space adventure recs.

The Skiffy and Fanty Show tackled the topic of inclusivity in fairy tales.

At Tor.com, my current favorite re-teller of fairy tales, Ursula Vernon, wrote “Reshaping the Bizarre Structure of Fairy Tales.”

Mari Ness’s series of fairy tale posts also continued this week with a look at Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

There’s an interesting piece at Pornokitsch about the tendency of SFF readers to separate art from the artist.

At the Millions, Daniel Jose Ruiz wrote about the friction of geekdom and race.

Finally, this Fantasy Faction post about how the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off (SPFBO) is revitalising SFF is a must-read.

 

Book Reviews, Books, Collections and Anthologies, Short Fiction

Book Review – Cosmic Powers: The Saga Anthology of Far-Away Galaxies, Edited by John Joseph Adams

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The new John Joseph Adams-edited anthology, Cosmic Powers, is the first great anthology of the year, jam-packed with smart, entertaining sci-fi adventure stories that bring a nicely modern sensibility to old ideas and tropes. There are several recurring themes throughout the anthology. Religion figures largely in many of these stories, and several of the stories deal with gods or with beings who have amassed nearly godlike power with the aid of time and technology. Artificial intelligences of various kinds make several appearances, as do post-humans of multiple kinds. Examinations of families both biological and found are significant as well, and several stories look at the responsibility of people to each other, personally, and to humanity as a whole; it’s “the personal is political” writ across space and time. It’s a remarkably cohesive collection that nonetheless contains a wonderful variety of stories by a diverse group of authors to offer a well-rounded perspective on the idea of stories that take place on a cosmic scale.

The collection kicks off on a strong note with Charlie Jane Anders’ very clever, very funny adventure story, “A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime,” and Tobias S. Buckell’s “Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance,” which is at least as clever as its predecessor, telling the story of a maintenance robot’s creative circumvention of its own programming. It’s seldom that any anthology starts off with three knock-out stories in a row, but these two are followed up with Becky Chambers’ “The Deckhand, the Nova Blade, and the Thrice-Sung Texts,” a delightful epistolary exploration of the Hero’s Journey from the perspective of an unlikely Chosen One.

The next three stories aren’t as good. Vylar Kaftan’s “The Sighted Watchmaker” is fine, and I’m sure it will be appealing to those who enjoy this kind of thing, but it wasn’t for me. It lost me with the Richard Dawkins epigraph and never quite managed to recapture my interests. I had already read “Infinite Love Engine” by Joseph Allen Hill in a recent issue of Lightspeed, but rereading it didn’t help me “get” it any better than I did the first time. I want to love the sheer weirdness of it, but it verges on a degree of psychedelia that makes it difficult to nail down exactly what the story is about. Still, I expect this is a story that I’ll return to again; I think maybe I just need to read it the right way and it will all make sense. “Unfamiliar Gods” by Adam-Troy Castro, with Judi B. Castro, is a mostly straightforward deal with the devil story, played for laughs and with an absurdist “twist,” but it’s not particularly funny or thoughtful.

Caroline M. Yoachim’s “Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World” covers some of the same thematic ground as “The Sighted Watchmaker,” but more effectively and with an interesting story structure that works well to break up Yoachim’s big ideas into easily digestible portions. “Golden Ring” by Karl Schroeder and “The Universe, Sung in Stars” by Kat Howard similarly work with ideas relating the nature of god and time, but neither of these approach the excellence of “Seven Wonders.” The Kat Howard story is beautifully written, but all the lovely, poetic prose in the world isn’t enough to make up for a somewhat trite premise.

From Alan Dean Foster comes the workmanlike but ultimately anti-climactic “Our Specialty is Xenogeology,” in which a Star Trek-ish team of space explorers almost make first contact but then think better of it. I expected to love A. Merc Rustad’s “Tomorrow When We See the Sun,” having liked all the previous work of theirs that I’ve read, but I didn’t. (Still can’t wait til I get my copy of their first short fiction collection, though. So You Want to Be a Robot and Other Stories came out May 2 from Lethe Press.) I barely remember Jack Campbell’s “Wakening Ouroboros” and Dan Abnett’s “The Frost Giant’s Data,” and together with the sadly unremarkable Kameron Hurley tale, “Warped Passages”—which is only notable due to its seeming connection to Hurley’s excellent space opera, The Stars Are Legion—they made for a finish to Cosmic Powers that wasn’t nearly as strong as its start.

Fortunately, there’s still a few more excellent stories tucked in the middle. Seanan McGuire’s “Bring the Kids and Revisit the Past at the Traveling Retro Funfair!” is a cool, fun adventure with some high stakes. It’s perhaps a little too tidy, but I’d definitely be down to read the continuing adventures of these characters as a novel. Linda Nagata’s “Diamond and the World Breaker” has a similar tone and similarly high stakes, and I loved the exploration of the mother-daughter relationship between Diamond and Violetta. As the current parent of fourteen-year-old girl, I found the conflict relatable, and Nagata does a good job of capturing some of the frustration and joy of watching one’s child grow up. Sandwiched between these two stories is “The Dragon the Flew Out of the Sun” by Aliette de Bodard, a thoughtful musing on the long-term ways that war damages communities and families. It’s the story in the book that is least like any of the other stories collected here, but it resonates in a compelling way with the stories that immediately precede and follow it.

Finally, there’s a new Yoon Ha Lee story, “The Chameleon’s Gloves,” set in his Hexarchate universe but offering a very different perspective than what has been seen of that world so far. Before now, the Hexarchate stories have been very concerned with specifically military stories, with a lot of focus on the complex calendrical mathematics that fuel the Hexarchate’s technology, but “The Chameleon’s Gloves” is a bit smaller, more personal story centered around a character who is something of an outsider to all of that. It’s not my favorite thing Lee has ever written, and if you really want to get a good idea of his oeuvre you ought to pick up his superb 2013 collection, Conservation of Shadows, but it’s a great place to start, especially if you’ve only read Ninefox Gambit and not any of Lee’s short fiction.

iZombie, Television

iZombie: “Some Like It Hot Mess” fails at humor but succeeds at storytelling

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“Some Like It Hot Mess” is season three’s first brain flop, in which Liv eats a brain from someone so unlikable that it also makes Liv herself largely unlikable and definitely unfunny. It still manages to be a decent episode, with some great emotional moments, a significant setback and a major reveal, but Liv’s “hot mess” brain is absolutely an albatross around its neck.

**Spoilers ahead.**

The episode opens with an introduction to party girl Yvonne, who will be this week’s murder victim, and she doesn’t seem like a bad sort. Self-absorbed and flighty, sure, but not the worst. However, as we get to see more of Yvonne’s personality through Liv after she eats Yvonne’s brain, it starts to grate. I’m not really sure what the joke is here, to be honest. I suppose it’s that Yvonne is vapid, talentless and irredeemably self-centered, but none of that is particularly funny, and the portrayal works mostly in cheap stereotypes without much depth of thought. While iZombie often plays with stereotypes and worn tropes for comedic value, the show’s treatment of Yvonne is genuinely unkind and oftentimes unpleasant to watch—particularly when you can tell that the show was going for a laugh and it doesn’t land.

That said, it’s possible that the writers wanted to use this experience, for Liv, as a way of reiterating for the audience why it’s so crucial to Liv that she get the cure for her zombie-ism. More than once in this episode, Liv’s brain-influenced behavior is hurtful to her friends, damaging to her relationship and/or professionally embarrassing. The thing is, this is all stuff we’ve seen many times before in one way or another, and while all of that is heightened by consuming the brain of someone as unpleasant as we’re supposed to think Yvonne was, this heightening feels superfluous. It’s especially so in light of the fact that Liv starts the episode off expressing her fatigue over the whole zombie/vision thing; this makes the cringeworthy saga of Liv on “hot mess” brains feel particularly torturous in a way that’s, frankly, at least as fatiguing for the audience as it must be for poor Liv.

The star player of the week is Robert Buckley as Major, who we first see gleefully scarfing down ice cream with his reinvigorated taste buds at the beginning of the hour. As expected, he starts to lose his memories soon enough, though not before pranking Liv by answering the door and pretending to have forgotten her. It’s a fine line to walk, and the scene could have come off as cruel, but it works largely because once Liv is inside the house we learn that Major has been writing letters to everyone he cares about—including a very fat and tear-stained one for Ravi. Major is coping, and it’s sweet. Of course, then he gets on a bus to Walla Walla, where his mom and her girlfriend (wife?) live, which is terrifying for Ravi and Liv, who have no idea where he is, but offers us an interesting and unknown before now part of Major’s backstory. He’s always been a very reactionary character, responding to things that happen to him, and the extra depth provided by even the barebones story of his parents’ divorce and his choosing his dad over his mom is a nice development, even if his mom doesn’t enter into the story again. iZombie doesn’t often include these kinds of grace notes in character development, probably because it’s such a wildly plot-heavy show.

Speaking of plot! The big revelation of the episode, of course and finally, is that Blaine has been faking his amnesia—for months. It’s Don E. who convinces Ravi of Blaine’s duplicity, and Ravi who gives Peyton this information in another scene that walks a fine line; Ravi is still hung up on Peyton, and she knows this, but Ravi does (barely) manage to deliver the news in a way that doesn’t come off as self-serving or jealous. While Peyton doesn’t take it well, she does seem to take it to heart, and it’s Peyton who smartly maneuvers Blaine into confessing it all to her: he did lose his memories, but only for a couple days, and he’s been faking ever since because it gave him the chance at a fresh start. It’s a surprisingly sympathetic performance, but we oughtn’t forget that Blaine is an actual murderer and that his sexual relationship with Peyton has been under false enough pretenses to arguably amount to rape by deception. In any case, that the memory loss is temporary is good news for Major and should be good news for Liv (who is already planning her own ice cream feast), but by the time the gang gets back to the morgue, the place has been tossed and the cure is missing. Worse, Major gave his other dose to Natalie.

Miscellany:

  • Clive’s exasperated “Oh, boy” when he hears a brief description of Yvonne’s personality was the single perfect comedic moment of the episode.
  • What kind of monster drinks pepper vodka straight?
  • Peyton is working that dominatrix murder case, and she points out that the confession seemed fishy with there being so little hard evidence connecting the suspect to the murder.
  • I feel like there was some point trying to be made about Nice Guys™ in the interrogation of Yvonne’s friend from the grocery store, but I don’t really know what point that was.
  • I wonder why Blaine is making Ravi’s blue stuff.
  • I have a strong suspicion that the obvious suspect isn’t who took the cure from the morgue. My money is on Fillmore Graves taking it.
Into the Badlands, Television

Into the Badlands: “Sting of the Scorpion’s Tale” is a sharp return to form after a couple of slow weeks

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After some slower episodes mid-season, Into the Badlands was back in peak form this week with “Sting of the Scorpion’s Tale,” which continues to pull the show’s different storylines back together and brings back the martial arts action (sadly lacking in the last few weeks) in a big way. It’s nice to see how this show has developed and improved over its first season, and 1ith just two episodes left in season two, things seem to be really shaping up for a decisively epic finale after this week’s events. One of the major frustrations of the first season of Into the Badlands was its bizarre cliffhanger ending that left pretty much everything unresolved; if anything, I’m starting to suspect that season two may have too tidy an ending (though the advantage of that would be starting season three with essentially a blank slate to soft-reboot the series if they wanted to). Either way, this episode brought a nice infusion of energy and urgency to a story that had been lagging a little for a couple weeks, and that bodes well for the final two episodes of the season.

**Spoilers below.**

The episode opens with the Widow and her butterflies attacking Baron Hassan in a lovely (if too short for my taste) fight sequence that ends with poor Hassan losing his head. We shortly learn why when the Widow and Tilda arrive at Quinn’s bunker for an exchange of grisly trophies. While the Widow was taking care of Hassan, Quinn carried out his own assassination—of Baron Broadmore. And all Broadmore’s wives and children, which doesn’t sit well with the Widow, who still fancies herself a protector of women and children. She’s appalled, but not enough to break their alliance off just yet, and she even defends her decision to Tilda later in the episode when Tilda confronts her mother about having turned Veil right back over to Quinn. It continues to feel as if there’s a major conflict brewing between mother and daughter here, and I have a strong suspicion that it’s going to happen very soon.

Sunny, M.K. and Bajie finally make it through the wall, only to find out that Baron Chau’s clippers are involved in smuggling people into the Badlands—because of course Chau is always looking for new cogs to sell to the other barons. Sunny is able to turn this to his advantage though, and once Chau learns who he is, Sunny is able to formulate a plan that allows him to free M.K. and Bajie as well. I didn’t love Chau’s weirdly long, very clunky new update to Sunny, but their plan to draw out the Widow and defeat her is plausible enough, as is Sunny’s ultimate betrayal of Chau as soon as the Widow tells him that she can take him to Veil. What’s less plausible is that both M.K. and Bajie start off thinking that Sunny has really betrayed them, which makes no sense and is literally the opposite of everything we know about Sunny at this point.

The final major storyline of the week is one that I wasn’t expecting but that, in hindsight, should have been pretty predictable. With both Lydia and Veil back in his possession, but now without an heir and with his brain tumor continuing to progress and likely to kill him, Quinn is thinking about the future—and he’s got his eye on baby Henry to take Ryder’s place. All Quinn has to do is marry Veil to make it official, which he proposes over a dinner of raw steak in a scene that makes Lannister family dinners seem healthy and functional. Veil is ready to kill Quinn before willingly going through with this farce, but Lydia encourages her to instead go through with it, if only to protect Henry, and this is an honestly fascinating dynamic.

While Lydia was jealous and distrustful of Quinn’s other second wife, Jade, there’s none of that here. Instead, Lydia—despite her own seemingly confused feelings for Quinn—is encouraging and kind to Veil. Sure, Lydia is pragmatic about the marriage, but it’s made clear that she sees this as about survival, a temporary sacrifice that will keep Henry safe and secure Veil’s future, even if it means submitting to violation. Overall, this forced marriage is handled with a reasonable amount of sensitivity, and Veil is fortunately saved in the nick of time from being actually raped on her wedding night—and she’s saved by the news that Sunny is back, which is obviously a huge relief to her and also sends Quinn off to prepare to defend the bunker. I only hope that Veil gets another chance to kill Quinn herself before Sunny gets to him.

Miscellany:

  • Veil’s “What does your being sorry do for me?” was a powerful and necessary moment.
  • I hope we aren’t going to get a Tilda-M.K.-Odessa love triangle, but Tilda and M.K.’s joy at being reunited was still sweet.
  • So, Sunny is definitely going to find out what the Widow did to Veil, right? Because that is not going to go over well.
  • Kind of a bummer to not see Jade at all this week. I kind of thought Sunny and company might meet her on their way, but apparently not. I hope she hasn’t been written off the show entirely.
  • Speaking of people written off the show, what ever happened to all the folks Sunny pissed off on his way back to the Badlands? Could dealing with all those enemies be the premise of season three?
Doctor Who, Television

Doctor Who: “Knock Knock” is fine, I guess

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Doctor Who has always been an inconsistent show, and “Knock, Knock” is the first stumble of this season. It’s not that it’s terrible; it’s just that there’s nothing particularly good about it, either. The story is pedestrian, the special effects are lackluster, the scares aren’t scary enough, and Bill isn’t given nearly enough to do. Your mileage may vary, but I found it to be an overall very “meh” episode that failed to satisfactorily explore its themes.

**Spoilers below.**

The increased focus on showing us some of the companion’s life apart from the Doctor continued this week, with the whole episode’s story built around Bill moving out on her own—into a house with five housemates. They struggle, as many young students do, to find something affordable, but eventually settle on a huge, old house that’s serendipitously offered to them, suspiciously cheap (natch) by a very strange old man. It’s a classic horror movie set-up, and the first half or so of the episode follows the expected horror show formula: Bill and her friends sign an obviously shady contract, move in to their ill-advised lease, and the house eats one of them right away. The Doctor shows up, and hijinks ensue as the solve the mystery of the house and its appetites.

It’s the back third or so of the episode where all the actual Doctor Who happens, but there’s not much depth here. When the Doctor is helping Bill move in, he invites himself into the house and introduces himself to her new housemates, but steamrolls right over Bill’s objections and her attempts to set a totally reasonable boundary. This could, very generously, be interpreted as being in parallel to the toxic relationship between the episode’s antagonist and the wooden woman we come to find out is his mother. Even more tenuously, this theme of relationships needing to have proper boundaries set and respected could be connected to the final scene of the episode where it’s all but revealed that the Doctor’s prisoner is the Master (I mean, obviously it’s the Master, right?), but that’s a real stretch. I suppose the story of the boy who wanted to save his mother is a little sad, but it’s tough to have strong sympathetic feelings for a guy who murdered a couple dozen young people in the last sixty or so years.

All in all, it’s simply not clear what message we’re supposed to take away from any of this. The Doctor oversteps a reasonable boundary with Bill, but the ends here—Bill’s five housemates are all rescued by the end of the episode—seem to justify the means. Bill and her friends really were wrong to rent the house to begin with, the Doctor was right to be suspicious, and through the Doctor’s quick-thinking the day is saved. It’s a facile thesis, and the ending, with the five eaten young people (though, interestingly, only the five, not the eighteen or so others before them) rescued and whole, completely sidesteps having to deal with any permanent consequences for any of the decisions anyone made in this episode. Even the ending of the Landlord and his mother is depicted as more bittersweetly tragic than anything else, and he’s a literal murderer responsible for the deaths of numerous people and who has been keeping his own mother imprisoned and taking advantage of her memory loss for decades. It’s genuinely wild that anyone thought this story was a great idea.

Listen, though. It’s fine. The bar for this show’s success has been set absurdly low for the better part of a decade now, and this episode isn’t without its positives. There’s a genuinely funny moment when Bill breaks the news to one of her boy housemates that she prefers girls, and the boy in question just smiles good-naturedly and responds kindly and with good humor, just like any decent person ought to in that situation. The casting of David Suchet (of Poirot fame) as the Landlord is inspired. We finally do get very close to confirmation of who the Doctor and Nardole have got imprisoned (though Matt Lucas is still shamefully underused in this role). While “Knock, Knock” won’t go down as a standout episode in any aspect, it’s a perfectly serviceable bit of almost-mid-season filler/fluff. I suggest not thinking too hard about it. The folks running the show certainly didn’t.

Miscellaneous Thoughts:

  • Even that episode title was something of a missed opportunity. Was “Knock” not good enough? Or was “Knock on Wood” already taken?
  • Also, maybe it’s just because I recently had to deal with a bug infestation in my own home, but yuck. Also, also, where did all those bugs go at the end?
Blog News, Weekend Links

State of the Blog and Weekend Links: May 7, 2017

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I don’t have much news this week, personal or otherwise. My productivity has been middling–not terrible, but not as good as I’d hoped coming into the week–partly do to depressing news stuff going on and partly due to new upstairs neighbors who are noisier than any upstairs neighbors I’ve ever had in the almost ten years I’ve lived here. Turns out, constant banging and yelling and loud television at all hours of the day and night has the effect of interfering with my sleep and triggering terrible headaches, which are kind of a distraction when I’m trying to write or do other quiet-ish activities.

I watched the first episode of American Gods, which was better than I expected, to be honest, and the new episode of Lucifer was pretty good, but I didn’t have much to say about either of them. “The Bone Orchard” was pretty much just exactly the first two chapters of the book and “Candy Morningstar” was fun but unexceptional.

I’ve been in a little bit of a reading slump for a couple weeks now, which is a bummer, especially as things I want to read start piling up. April was a little slow with new books, but just this week had half a dozen new releases I’d like to get through, and there’s at least two or three more every week between now and July. If I’m honest, I’ll probably end up having to scale back some of my reading plans in the next couple of months, not to read less, but just to prioritize the May and June releases I want to read so I can move on to some July-October ARCs I’ve already got sitting around. There is some very exciting stuff coming out in the back half of 2017, and I don’t want to miss any of it.

Finally, I think once a couple more TV shows I’m watching wrap up, I’ll be starting a new Let’s Read! project. Though I (sadly) never finished Dune last year due to a lot of travel and some other unforeseen stuff, this year I’m determined to get through Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy. I managed to get some Ballantine mass markets from the 70s that are too wonderful not to read. I’m currently taking suggestions on how to split these up into manageable chunks for writing about.

The shortlist for this year’s Clarke Award was announced this week. Once again, I’ve read half of it. I have got to make some time to read The Underground Railroad and After Atlas.

Also posted this week are the nominees for the 2016 Shirley Jackson Award. I’ve read far fewer of these, but horror and dark fantasy have never been my favorite things to read. It’s nice to see The Ballad of Black Tom, The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe and The Starlit Wood on there, though.

If you’re interested in comics, the 2017 Eisner Awards finalist list is out, too. I’m not a

Speaking of new releases, Tor.com has got you covered for May:

One of the books that came out on May 2 that I’m looking forward to digging into this week is Robyn Bennis’s The Guns Above. To promote the book, Bennis has been making the rounds of the guest-blogging circuit, and it’s only made me more excited for this title.

There’s a great interview with Mishell Baker over at the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog. Baker also revealed the cover this weekend for the next book in her Arcadia Project series: Imposter Syndrome. It’s gorgeous, and I can’t wait to have all of this series on my shelf.

At the Wertzone, the next installment in the Cities of Fantasy series is all about Minas Tirith.

At Tor.com, Sarah Gailey’s piece on the alternate history that makes up American identity is a must-read.

You can now make yourself a Pop! figure avatar.

The first half of the content from the May/June 2017 Uncanny Magazine is up, and there’s so much great stuff in this issue. My recommendations:

Seriously. It’s a great issue of a great magazine, and the material that’s not online yet is just as amazing as what’s already out. I strongly suggest just subscribing to the magazine, and now is a great time to do it, during Uncanny‘s 2017 subscription drive over at Weightless Books. A subscription right now is $2 less than the regular price, and they’ve got some great perks on offer if they hit their milestones.

iZombie, Television

iZombie: “Spanking the Zombie” is half hilarity and half heartbreak

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“Spanking the Zombie” is basically half fun murder mystery and half heartrending tragedy, but somehow it works. I do have a couple quibbles about it, but it’s overall a very good episode that avoids the biggest potential pitfalls in its concept, advances the overarching plot of the show in a big way and has a strong chance of making the viewer cry like a baby at the end.

**Spoilers below.**

This week, Liv and Clive are investigating the murder of Roxanne Greer, a dominatrix known to her clients as Sweet Lady Pain. Unfortunately, Roxanne’s brain isn’t fresh. Ravi has been keeping it soaking in memory serum for a couple of weeks, which leads to one of the grosser brain-cooking scenes in the show’s history. The blue color of the liquid the brain’s been in is a very unsettling non-food color, and pan-frying it doesn’t improve the look of it. Liv is also apprehensive about eating dominatrix brain at all, and her reluctance only just manages to avoid being kinkshaming. It’s a fine line, but they manage to convey pretty effectively that it’s more about that sort of thing being outside Liv’s personal comfort zone rather than having it come off as truly judgmental.

Liv almost immediately has a vision, which turns out to be the first of many intense visions she experiences this week, an unintended effect of the memory serum—which is interesting, since it supposedly had no effect on Blaine at all. I have the feeling that chances of Blaine faking his amnesia have risen considerably with this development, though we don’t see Blaine (or Peyton) at all this week. The other interesting thing that’s done with Liv’s visions this week is that, instead of filming all the visions so the audience gets to see what Liv sees, we see much more of Liv’s visions from the point of view of other characters. It’s a neat way of showing a little more of the mechanics of this mythology, and it feels significant, though it’s not clear what the significance of this new perspective might be just yet.

The murder mystery itself is nicely twisty and provides an excuse to bring back two of my favorite minor characters: erstwhile weatherman Johnny Frost (Daran Norris) and sleazy defense attorney Brandt Stone (Ken Marino), who are even more fun together than they have been apart. Obviously neither man is the murderer, but they are instrumental in figuring out who is. While they’re at it, they bring a level of humor and snark that, along with Liv’s vamping around dominatrix-style, makes this one of the funniest cases of the week in the show’s history. The only problem with this case is the wrap-up. Once the actual murderer is captured, he basically confesses immediately—with an odd line to the effect that it doesn’t even matter how or why he murdered Roxanne—and that’s the last we see of the guy.

It’s a strange anticlimax to an otherwise entertaining story, and the crack about the murderer’s motives and the details of the crime not mattering might be meant in a meta, self-deprecating way by the show’s writers, but it mostly just feels weirdly abrupt and dismissive of the whole previous half hour of storytelling. In a way, it’s true that the show’s murder mysteries are often episode filler and comic relief between more dramatic moments and more overarching plots, but it’s not true that these stories don’t matter or that no one cares about the resolution of them, even in an episode that’s about to end with a gut punch like this one does.

This episode starts and ends with Major. First, we see him participating in his first actual mercenary mission with the Fillmore Graves crew, during which he ends up being stabbed a whole bunch of times. When he returns to Seattle, he collapses and his friend Justin brings him to the morgue, where Ravi and Liv realize that it’s time for Major to take the cure, memory loss or not. First, though, they have to keep him alive until his stab wounds heal up enough that they won’t immediately kill him when he turns human, so they stabilize him and take him home. After Ravi goes to his own bed, Liv and Major kind of rekindle their relationship and say some tragically bittersweet goodbyes. It’s beautiful and sad, and I have so much love for how messy Liv and Major’s relationship is. They never manage to be quite at the same place at the same time, but there’s something wonderful about their quiet, consistent love for each other. Next week, I guess we’ll find out if Major really is going to lose his memories and what that’s going to mean for their friend group.

Miscellaneous Thoughts:

  • “Frankly, I resent being questioned every time a hooker or stripper or dominatrix gets killed in this town.”
  • All of Liv’s scenes with Jimmy the sketch artist were excellent.
  • Lack of Ravi/Peyton/Blaine drama was a definite plus this week. Ravi actually got to be likable again.
  • Don E. makes a new zombie/friend, and the Scratching Post is open for business, but this storyline felt decidedly tertiary and was completely disconnected from the main story this week. It’s fine, and cool scene with them playing air guitar together on the bar, but I still don’t see where this stuff is going.
  • No follow-up on Justin’s shock when he learns about the zombie cure, and he isn’t fully briefed on it before he disappears from the episode, but I can only imagine that this is going to be a big deal in the next week or two. Surely he will go back to Fillmore Graves and tell people there, and I have a feeling it’s not going to go over well.
  • “Give me a new name. One that’s less silly.” Oh, Major.
Book Reviews, Collections and Anthologies, Short Fiction

Book Review: Wicked Wonders by Ellen Klages

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Ellen Klages is having a good year, which is also a boon for those of us who love good short fiction. Klages’ Tor.com novella, Passing Strange, is sure to be among the best of 2017, and it was a fortuitous discovery for me as I hadn’t read anything by Ellen Klages before. When I saw that she had a new collection of short fiction coming out from Tachyon just a couple of months later, I was thrilled.  I was even more thrilled when I got approved for the ARC on NetGalley, and my excitement turned out to be totally warranted. Wicked Wonders is, with one significant and honestly baffling exception, full of consistently thoughtful, clever, affecting stories, all overlaid by a sort of gently reassuring feeling of nostalgia.

The only major criticism I have of the collection specifically concerns the story “Woodsmoke,” which starts off as a nice story about girls bonding (maybe even falling in adolescent love) at a summer camp but then turns into the horrendously sensationalized reveal that one of the girls has an intersex condition, complete with immediate misgendering and melodramatic handwringing about “I don’t know your real name.” It’s a bizarre bait and switch that feels like a betrayal of the characters (who deserve better treatment) and the spirit of the story (which up to that point was fine, if unremarkable). Frankly, I don’t know what Klages was about with this story, and her explanation of it in the Story Notes section at the back of the book is unhelpful except to say that she hopes to make it part of a novel length work at some point (please no). If “Woodsmoke” had appeared early in the collection, I may have stopped reading the book altogether because it was so deeply upsetting; as it is, I can only recommend Wicked Wonders with a major reservation.

Regarding the rest of the collection, many of the stories in Wicked Wonders deal with childhood, and Klages has a real knack for capturing something of the bittersweetness of coming of age moments. “The Education of a Witch” explores a young girl’s identification with a villainess, and it’s a story that will likely be relatable, albeit in different ways, both to those of us who grew up before princess culture and those who grew up immersed in it. “Singing on a Star” is looks at the anxieties that surround a child’s first sleepover. Often, Klages’ stories feature precocious girls with creatively clever and interesting ways of looking at the world, as in “Gone to the Library” (which also features a cameo by Grace Hopper).

Most of these stories deal with transitions of one kind or another. In “Amicae Aeternum” (a story which legit made me weep when I read it and is literally making me tear up as I write this), a young girl says goodbye to her best friend before moving very far away. “Echoes of Aurora” is a gorgeously melancholy autumnal love story that deals with a non-childhood life change. “Hey, Presto!” is a smart and thoughtful coming of age story about a young woman reconnecting with her father and discovering they have more in common than she previously thought. In “Goodnight Moons,” a story that that recalls nothing more than Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, an astronaut takes a much bigger leap for humanity than she thought she was going to when she signed up to go to Mars.

Also evident in this collection is a sharply wry sense of humor, and Klages often uses ironic turns of phrase and sly references to great effect. “Sponda the Suet Girl and the Secret of the French Pearl” is a smart and funny original fairytale that should appeal to fans of Ursula Vernon. “The Scary Ham” is a short, humorous nonfiction story about the grieving process (and it was a very scary ham). “Mrs. Zeno’s Paradox” carries social nicety between women to a logical extreme, making use of a single strong central joke for maximum effect.

To be sure, there’s a decided slightness to all the stories in this collection, which is sometimes at odds with the ostensibly serious subject matter Klages writes about. While there is a little darkness in some of the stories, Klages’ endings are almost universally happy, or at least optimistic, and I suspect this won’t appeal to all readers. Still, there’s something to be said for short, sweet stories that don’t require a great deal of thought to understand and enjoy, and Wicked Wonders, for the most part, has a pleasantly restful quality that makes it quietly delightful to read.

This review is based on an advance copy of the title received from the publisher via NetGalley.

Into the Badlands, Television

Into the Badlands: “Black Heart, White Mountain” is laser-focused, but on all the wrong things

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Season two of Into the Badlands has, overall, been a vast improvement on the first season, which was too short to really develop its ideas and suffered, furthermore, from poor pacing. The expanded episode order of season two has really given the writers more room to play and the whole story has been allowed to breathe in a way that just, generally, improves the viewing experience. However, too much of a good thing is possible, and “Black Heart, White Mountain” slows things down to a frustrating degree, with most of the episode laser-focused on Sunny, which means that the far more interesting storyline—Quinn and the Widow’s attack on new Baroness Jade—doesn’t get nearly enough screen time to do it justice.

**Spoilers below.**

The pre-credits scene this week is the beginning of a lengthy dream sequence Sunny has while unconscious, broken up into parts that stretch across most of the episode. It turns out that in Sunny’s dream life, he lives with Veil and their son, Henry, on a small farm in the woods, but as the episode goes on Sunny finds himself haunted and tormented by ghosts from his past that destroy his dream life while picking at all Sunny’s worst fears and insecurities. An aura of tragedy has surrounded Sunny all season, and it becomes palpable in this episode; Sunny is terrified that he will never be able to truly leave his past as a Clipper behind him and that it will poison everything he tries to do forever; he worries that his past will get people he loves killed; and he’s scared that his child might follow in his footsteps. It’s all pretty straightforward redemption arc material.

What’s not entirely clear is how the viewer is meant to feel about Sunny’s anxieties. On the one hand, in-universe, his concerns seem to be well-founded. The Badlands are an ugly place, and Sunny has made a long list of enemies. Without eliminating or making peace with his enemies and changing the whole rotten system, it seems likely that Sunny will never fully escape his past and that his son may make similar decisions to cope with living in such a deeply messed up world. On the other hand, it also feels as if we may be meant to see Sunny as different, even as uniquely incorruptible, persevering as he is to try and build a better life for himself and his family and to do the right thing as much as he’s able. Perhaps we’re meant to think Sunny’s anxieties are exaggerated or neurotic, and they’re being set up as potential conflict between Sunny and the more optimistic characters in his life, namely M.K. and Veil, both of whom have a faith in Sunny that Sunny doesn’t have in himself. Sunny seems like the kind of guy who would “selflessly” leave his family behind to save them from himself. I just hope that tired old trope isn’t the direction things are heading.

While Sunny is working through his inner demons, Bajie and M.K. have to figure out a way to save him. While their bonding and the revelations about both characters are well-done, like Sunny’s dream sequence they just take up far too much space in the episode. Things get slightly more exciting when they finally arrive at the monastery, where they try to sneak in and out while the monks are having dinner, only to be discovered (predictably) by the Master. The ensuing fight is underwhelming, and in the end M.K. and Bajie manage to find a cure for Sunny’s condition and make their getaway without too much trouble. That the Master is left, presumably, alive is simply par for the course with this show; all of Sunny and Bajie’s journey so far has basically been about pissing off every person of note in the world on their circuitous route back to the Badlands. I only wish the Master felt like more of a credible threat. This is the first episode in which the Master has been portrayed as explicitly villainous, and we still don’t know enough about her motives to be certain that M.K. and Bajie haven’t simply misunderstood what the Master is trying to do with the monastery and the way she trains those who share their “gift.” The ease with which she’s outwitted and defeated here doesn’t make her seem very dangerous.

The most interesting thing to me about this storyline, however, is Bajie’s story about his novice, Flea. When he first tells M.K. about her, Bajie lets M.K. believe that Flea died at the monastery, but we learn at the end that that’s not the case after all. Instead, Bajie freed Flea before he left, and he’s been searching for her ever since; the Badlands is the only place he hasn’t looked yet. Also, probably, the city that M.K.’s book and Sunny’s compass might lead them to. After killing off Ava so unceremoniously last week (and mostly forgetting about her this week), it was nice to have a missing woman who isn’t fridged, even if Bajie’s story about Flea has some holes in it and confuses his motivations. This is the first we’ve heard of Flea, and Bajie’s stated goal of finding her seems at odds with his previous reluctance about going to the Badlands at all. Generously interpreted (assuming we are to believe it at all, which is still questionable), this Flea story adds some depth and complexity to Bajie’s character, but it doesn’t feel organic or like a truly integrated part of his personality, and it’s rather a big change from what we’ve been shown about Bajie so far. That Bajie has stolen and kept Sunny’s compass further confuses things as it suggests that Bajie may just be out for himself after all. We’ll see.

The storyline that is shortchanged this week mostly concerns Jade, who is the first Baron targeted by Quinn and the Widow in the war of revenge against their former confederates. We first see Jade this week in the bath, but she quickly works out that something is wrong when her servants don’t respond to her calls, and she goes to see what’s going on. It turns out that her cogs are in revolt, her clippers are defecting, and Quinn and the Widow are in her house, capturing her by the time she’s finished getting dressed. There’s not much actual combat to be seen here, probably due to time constraints, which is too bad as I’m positively itching to see Jade get to actually fight; she certainly seems game for the challenge. Instead of a fight, we get a short conversation between Quinn and Jade where he accuses her of tearing apart his family and she stubbornly points out that he did that himself. Jade truly loved Ryder, and that’s something that Quinn doesn’t understand and isn’t willing to truly engage with. Jade is ready to die and tells Quinn so, but in the end, he decides to exile her instead.

This is either a sad ending for Jade or the start of a new and glorious redemption/revenge arc for her, and there’s some great potential here if the show decides to develop her character more. It’s far more interesting than anything Sunny, Bajie and M.K. did this week, in any case, and the storyline could have benefited from just a generally deeper treatment. Sarah Bolger as Jade nailed her scenes with Quinn, but it’s left unclear what she said that caused him to decide to spare her life, and we see almost nothing of note with the Widow and what went into her decision-making process here. The Widow doesn’t kill women; she just gives them to predatory men when it’s convenient to her, apparently. This is way beyond “problematic fave” territory at this point and well into “undeniably garbage, self-serving White Feminist” neighborhood. I’m curious how much longer Tilda is going to stick with her mother at this rate. She cannot be totally okay with this, right? Maybe if this storyline was given a bit more time to play out, we’d know.

Miscellaneous Thoughts:

  • Having Sunny start his dream sequence without his tattoos is a nice touch, though a little on the nose.
  • Artemis looks just like Samara from The Ring, and it’s kind of hilarious.
  • I wish they’d saved the episode title “The Hand of Five Poisons” for this episode. It would have worked on so many levels, so it’s a real missed opportunity.
  • What possible good could a gas mask do for Sunny when he starts having trouble breathing because his lungs are collapsing or whatever? It didn’t even look cool.
  • I would love to see a little more of the Master’s history with Bajie, as their antipathy felt very personal.
Doctor Who, Television

Doctor Who: “Thin Ice” is the best episode of the season yet, but it’s still a mixed bag

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In “Thin Ice,” the Doctor and Bill visit the last ever Thames Frost Fair and uncover a mystery, as the Doctor and his companions are always wont to do. It’s highly reminiscent of other Regency-to-Victorian era episodes of the show as well as of the season five adventure, “The Beast Below.” If this season of the show has an overarching theme so far, it seems to be rehashing all the show’s old tropes in new arrangements, and this is both fascinating and frustrating. To be fair, there’s precious little new under the sun, and I don’t expect to be blown away by the originality of the show week after week, but I’m not certain that this most recent iteration of the series is doing enough to set itself apart from previous seasons. There’s some great stuff in “Thin Ice,” but there’s also some tiresomely dull stuff, a tendency to zoom past emotional moments without giving them time to really land, and a sense of self-righteous smugness about some of the episode’s messaging.

Once again, Bill is proving herself to be a great companion to the Doctor, and we’re starting to see more and more of the easy chemistry and nicely accomplished comedic timing between Pearl Mackie and Peter Capaldi. Bill’s a little bit street wise, and she’s got a sensible level of independence along with a stubborn streak that lets her stand up to the Doctor, who can be a little bit of an intellectual bully at times. Bill’s confidence and cleverness let her adapt to unexpected situations, and the joy she takes in novel experiences is infectious and quite fun to watch. At the same time, this season is continuing very deliberately the themes of the last two seasons relating to the Doctor’s lack of humanity, and like previous companions, Bill is becoming something of a conscience for her mentor. Unlike with the last couple of companions, however, the show is doing a great job of truly showing us why and how Bill is up to that often onerous task.

**Spoilers below.**

This week’s mystery revolves around a great beast chained to the bottom of the Thames, where an unscrupulous nobleman, one Lord Sutcliffe, is feeding it humans in order to extract a valuable and highly efficient fuel that the beast produces as waste. It’s a simple enough plot and a straightforward mystery without any unexpected twists or turns, but that’s fine. There’s something to be said for that kind of comfort television, and “Thin Ice” is definitely in the comfort TV neighborhood. It’s got lighthearted fun, cute kids, and a happy ending where a racist asshole gets what’s coming to him. There’s not much not to like about it. Unfortunately, there’s not much in particular to actively praise about the episode, either.

Perhaps the episode’s biggest problem, though it’s by no means a dealbreaker, is the ease with which it skips from emotional beat to emotional beat without taking time to really examine why these moments are supposed to work. Bill’s concerns about facing racism in Regency England are quickly moved past, as are her concerns about her potential to change the future in unexpected ways. In a show that in general takes a blithe attitude towards its treatment of most of the usual ethical and practical considerations surrounding time travel, it may be best to just leave it alone. I did rather like the Doctor messing with Bill about it, but even that isn’t terribly funny if you think about it; he’s joked around Bill’s concerns rather than actually answering them.

When a little boy dies right in front of Bill’s eyes, she’s outraged at the Doctor’s lack of reaction—and it’s not touched on, but he saves his sonic screwdriver without making a move to save the child—but even this is quickly glossed over. At first Bill seems deeply upset by the experience, and she’s angry with the Doctor for being able to move past it so quickly, but she moves past it fast enough herself. It’s an interesting way that the Doctor seems to corrupt his companions. By removing them so far in space and time from their natural contexts, the companions are often forced to abandon normal human standards of ethics and morality in favor of more broadly logical, but surely less humane, rules for living. For all that the show continues to try and portray the companions as a humanizing force in the Doctor’s life—and the Doctor gives Bill a great deal of power and agency in their partnership this week by treating her as a sort of commander—the ways in which the 2000-year-old Doctor changes his companions tend to never be adequately dealt with, and this episode is no different.

As far as the overall messaging of this episode, it’s a decidedly mixed bag. It’s nice to see fictional whitewashing called out, and I’m always happy to see a racist get punched in the face, but did the Doctor really need to give a long-winded speech about the sanctity of life or whatever? The decision to free the Thames sea serpent thing at the end of the episode is laudable, but it’s done with an awfully self-satisfied tone considering that there’s no assurance that the beast isn’t going to leave to be a human-eating menace elsewhere. As fantastical as the episode was, we also get a reminder that a black girl couldn’t inherit a fortune in 1814, which necessitates it being given to a little white boy with a much smaller role in the episode. It’s fine, I guess. Whatever. But the overall tone of the episode verges on smugness, especially in the delivery of the Doctor’s lines about whitewashing and his speech about what the true measure of humanity’s goodness is.

For all that the folks behind the show do seem to be making an effort to engage with and address common criticisms, they’ve still got a regrettable tendency to always want to prove that the Doctor is the smartest and best person in the room. He might need a human companion to keep him in check and remind him to do the human thing, but that’s not going to stop the Doctor from making self-indulgent pedantic speeches that challenge the humans around him to be better than they are. Yay.

Miscellaneous Thoughts:

  • The episode seems to imply that Frost Fairs were common occurrences on the Thames, but they weren’t. Even during a mini Ice Age that caused more extreme than usual winters in England, the Thames never froze solid enough for this kind of thing more than once every ten years or so.
  • I guess Nardole is part of the overarching plot this season but not adventuring with the Doctor and Bill. Too bad, though. I would like to see Matt Lucas get a bit more to do.