All posts by SF Bluestocking

Doctor Who, Television

Doctor Who: “Extremis” isn’t nearly as interesting an experiment as Steven Moffat thinks it is

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**This is a spoilery review.**

You can tell, watching “Extremis,” that Steven Moffat thinks he’s very clever. It’s a Moffat episode through and through, with all the self-satisfied smugness and overwrought convolutions that come along with that. The thing is, “Extremis” isn’t experimental or groundbreaking or particularly intriguing. It’s what amounts to a dream sequence mashed together with an extended flashback. Which is fine. But there’s not much actual story here, just exposition about the past and set-up for the future, none of which is nearly as compelling as Steven Moffat seems to think it is.

Perhaps the most significant part of the episode, if only because it’s the part of the episode that’s easiest to make good sense of, is the flashbacks that work on multiple levels. Most viewers have been saying for weeks that the vault under the university must contain Missy, and this is confirmed in “Extremis.”  While it’s not clear what for (and it could be any number of things, really), sometime shortly after the end of the Doctor’s time on Darillium Missy is sentenced to death, and the Doctor is summoned to be her executioner. While the Doctor hems and haws about whether he should pull the kill lever and Missy begs for her life, Nardole shows up and reads to the Doctor from River Song’s diary. He’s been sent by River to take care of the Doctor, which explains why he’s been lurking around all season, just waiting for this episode to have something important to do.

The other half of the episode finds the Doctor (seemingly) called upon by no less personage than the Pope himself to help translate an important religious text. It’s this part of the episode that is most frustratingly Moffat-eque, falling apart to a large degree if you think about it for more than a minute. There are some great moments, both humorous and dramatic, and we’re introduced to a menacing new enemy of humanity, but the truth is that the Veritas and the Doctor’s quest to understand it just doesn’t add up to anything that makes much sense at all. In the end, we learn that what we’ve been watching is simply a simulation being run by an invading species of aliens to work through how they’re going to get past Earth’s defenses. As other characters commit suicide in droves at their realization of their own unreality and his friends simply dissolve into pixels, the AI Doctor inside the simulation puts it all together and turns out to be so lifelike that his own way of dealing with unreality is to send an email to the real Doctor and let him know what’s going on, setting up what seems to be the big bad of the season.

Unfortunately, none of this holds up to much scrutiny. The biggest unanswered question, though, is a simple one, and the lack of an answer undermines the whole premise of the episode: If what we are watching, for most of the episode, is a simulation put on by aliens with a plan to invade Earth, and the real Doctor doesn’t find out about any of this until the end of the episode when the simulation Doctor contacts him, where did the invading aliens get the data for their simulation? And if they can either access data (such as the Doctor’s blindness) that only the Doctor and Nardole know about and they can build a meticulously lifelike simulation for their purposes, are they seriously still limited by a quirk of random number generation? Also, they can’t lock down their network so that their own AIs can’t become self-aware and contact real people outside the simulation? It’s such a common Moffat-era Who problem that complaints about it are frankly just banal at this point.

In the end, “Extremis” isn’t nearly as profound or experimental as Steven Moffat intends it to be, but it nonetheless manages to be entertaining. The Pope and several Cardinals pouring out of Bill’s bedroom to interrupt her date is legit hilarious, even if it does happen in the simulation. The Doctor’s suggestion to Bill that she go for it with real life Penny, even though Bill thinks Penny is out of her league, is sweet. Michelle Gomez is a constant delight as Missy. There are some interesting ideas about religion and faith being explored, even if only in the most facile manner. Like many a Moffat-penned episode, “Extremis” is fine as long as one doesn’t think too hard about it.

Miscellany:

  • One Moffat-era trope I wish would disappear forever is people all over the universe being absolutely terrified of the Doctor’s wrath after basically reading the first page of his Google search results. It’s tiresome and patronizing, and the Doctor isn’t actually that dangerous unless you’re a Dalek.
  • I hope we get to see more of Bill with Penny, who seems nice.
  • The visual comparison of River Song’s diary to a Bible is potentially interesting, but it’s pretty much left at that.
  • After last week’s episode using zombie imagery of a kind, it seemed redundant to have this one do the same, even if it was a different take on the zombie look and especially if these zombie aliens are going to make another appearance or two.
Blog News, Weekend Links

State of the Blog and Weekend Links: May 21, 2017

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I would love to have a week go by without some large (or at least large-feeling) part of it spent on dealing with life crises. This week, it was my car again; after having some expensive work done on it last week, I was back at the shop again this week with more mystery problems. Fortunately, everything has been under warranty, but it’s still stressful and frustrating and time-consuming to deal with when I’d much rather be working on other things. Add to that the fact that apparently no one makes/sells a classy-looking cat cookie cutter small enough to be cut out in fondant that would fit on top of a cupcake (my daughter has pretty specific late birthday cupcake desires), and it’s not been a great week.

That said, I’m looking forward to the rest of May and June. Hopefully my car troubles are finally solved (I’m really trying to be optimistic about it); this week is my daughter’s last week of 8th grade; Into the Badlands wraps up tonight, which will free up my Mondays for a little while; and a week from this Monday is the premiere of Still Star-Crossed, which is probably the thing I’m most excited to watch this summer. This week, I’ll also be figuring out my schedule for my big summer blogging project, Let’s Read! Gormenghast, and I expect to be starting that the first week of June. It’s shaping up to be an awesome next few months, barring any major disasters.

The big story of this weekend is the Nebula Awards, which were given out last night. Congratulations to all the winners!

Earlier in the week, George R.R. Martin talked a little bit about all the Game of Thrones spinoff series pilots that HBO has ordered. I’m still processing my feelings about this, but I’m basically stuck on appalled horror at the thought of it all at the moment. I guess we can only hope that Benioff and Weiss aren’t involved in any of it.

In more exciting news, a new anthology edited by Navah Wolfe and Dominik Parisien was announced this week: Robots vs. Fairies, set to be released in trade paperback in January 2018.

Also released this week was the first proper trailer for Star Trek: Discovery. I’m still a little concerned about the final project after its production delays and creative staff shakeups, but this looks awesome:

If you’re looking for something good and short and fiction to read this week, be sure to check out Mikki Kendall’s “Snow White” over at Fireside Fiction.

Black Gate has an exclusive preview of Archipelago, a new shared world serial novel being Kickstarted by Charlotte Ashley, Andrew Leon Hudson and Kurt Hunt. They had me at “pirates, monsters and world-changing magic.” Check out the campaign.

At Lady Business, Ira and Anna tried to boil the Vorkosigan Saga down to five books. I’ve been meaning to read this series for a while, and this is genuinely helpful guidance for where I might want to start with it.

Tor.com is selling a bundle of their Hugo-nominated works for just $20, perfect if you aren’t a Worldcon member.

Tor.com and the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog teamed up for a Space Opera Week, which was slightly underwhelming overall, but did manage to produce some good individual posts:

Perhaps the best contributions to Space Opera Week, however, were from Cora Buhlert on her own blog:

Finally, Pornokitsch talked about the largest ever analysis of film dialogue and how totally unsurprising the revelation that women have been getting shortchanged was.

Book Reviews, Books, Fantasy, Novella, Young Adult

Book Review: Keeper of the Dawn by Dianna Gunn

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Dianna Gunn’s Keeper of the Dawn combines a smartly plotted adventure with a sweetly written romance in a richly imagined fantasy world with plenty of space for more stories if the author chooses to return to it. Unfortunately, it’s all a bit much for a novella-length work. It’s a little overstuffed, and the sequence of events, while well-considered, has a tendency to read like a run-on sentence of “and then this happened and then this happened” and so on; all characters aside from the protagonist are underdeveloped, sometimes to the point of being cardboard; and the denouement could have used good deal more space to breathe. Still, there’s a lot to like about Keeper of the Dawn, and there aren’t so many YA lesbian romances featuring asexual heroines that it’s not still important representation despite its flaws—especially when the biggest flaw is simply that the story could have used another hundred pages or so to address its shortcomings.

While the secondary characters leave quite a bit to be desired, Lai is a mostly well-crafted protagonist with a distinct character arc and notable growth over the course of the book. Her early motivations are a little obscured by the trauma and disappointment of her failure in the trial to become a priestess—it would have been nice to have a deeper understanding of why being a priestess was so important to her and what it was about her mother and grandmother that made her want so much to emulate them. The failure to achieve a lifelong dream works well as the spark to start off Lai’s journey, but there’s too much time spent in the early part of the book dealing with Lai experiencing some mild-to-moderate bullying and struggling with her own resentment over her widower father’s remarriage. It delays the start of the story, and it’s confusing and frustrating when none of this stuff is revisited later or resolved by the end of the book.

That said, once Lai gets going, things improve a great deal. Her decision to run away is impulsive, but it makes sense for her as a character, and the early aimlessness of her journey as she tries to figure out what to do with her life after such a major disappointment is relatable, if not always entirely compelling. Still, even at her lowest point, Lai never falls into the unnecessarily and unpleasantly melodramatic angst that some teen heroines are prone to, and once she discovers the possibility of a future that though different than what she had hoped for herself has the potential to be equally fulfilling, Lai is steadfastly driven to succeed. One particularly admirable trait of Lai’s is that, though she is disappointed by her early failure, she never loses a core of confidence in herself that sustains her through hard times and encourages her to find different ways to achieve her goals of worshiping her goddess and honoring the memories of her mother and grandmother.

The worldbuilding is overall strong, and the idea of sister cultures separated by hundreds of years and miles but still connected through their shared faith is an interesting one. As with many other aspects of the book, it would have been nice to see some of these ideas given more space for development, but fortunately Gunn doesn’t overdo it with details. Necessary exposition about the world is delivered in a competently sparing fashion that never overwhelms the reader with history and backstory. Much of the in-universe history is only learned as Lai learns it on the page and with a minimum of info-dumping. There are a couple of issues with unfortunate implications—primarily with the strict-seeming binary gendering of social roles—and the use of stereotypes as shorthand for cultures and characterization but nothing especially egregious.

Finally, the romance between Lai and Tara is nicely done, without relying too heavily on hackneyed YA romance tropes. At the same time, it’s a romance with a good, comfortable, lived-in quality, without any major relationship-derailing conflicts and with an uncomplicated happy ending. The depiction of Lai’s asexuality seems sensitive, and it’s nice to see a YA-targeted romance that deals so frankly with issues of consent and addresses the potential problems of mismatched sex drives in a healthy and mature way. As a love interest, Tara isn’t extremely exciting, but what she lacks in excitement (which too often means emotional or physical danger in romance) she more than makes up for by being a solid, kind and caring presence, helping Lai to settle into her new community and being a supportive partner to Lai as she undergoes her new set of trials to become a Keeper of the Dawn.

In the end, the biggest shortcoming of Keeper of the Dawn is that it ought to have been longer. There’s a novel-sized story here, especially with the decision to include so much material about Lai’s life before she runs away, and to squeeze it into a novella-sized word count, some areas have to suffer. Another hundred or two hundred pages would have made that decision easier to justify, and it would have offered plenty more space for Lai to work through her issues with her father and stepmother and to explore her feelings about her best friend achieving the goal she had for herself. It also would have allowed the ending of the story to play out less hurriedly, giving more room for Lai to have a return journey instead of just a time-jump and for her to, again, process her feelings about returning to her people and family of origin. The extra length would also have allowed Gunn to give more depth to the secondary characters and add even more worldbuilding flourishes to make her fantasy world come alive.

iZombie, Television

iZombie: “Dirt Nap Time” digs deeper into a bunch of this season’s plots

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“Dirt Nap Time” contains another unremarkable case of the week as well as another tediously irritating brain for Liv to eat (though by no means as terrible as last week’s). What is lacks in case of the week panache, however, it makes up for in interesting plot developments, which are occurring at the show’s habitual near-breakneck pace this season.

**Spoilers ahead.**

The episode opens right where the last one ended, with Major having to answer for where his other dose of the cure is. Liv gets a great unlikeable moment when she refers to Natalie unkindly as Major’s “zombie hooker friend,” which she immediately apologizes for, though it’s still a bit of meanness that serves as a reminder that Liv isn’t a flawless heroine. Much of this episode is subsequently taken up with Liv trying to find out who stole the cure from the morgue, but both the prime suspects—Blaine and Don E.—convincingly deny responsibility. Interestingly, the prime suspect from the viewer’s perspective last week seemed to be Fillmore Graves, but that theory is largely weakened this week with the revelation that Justin hasn’t told anyone else about the cure yet; he was apparently waiting until he could ask Major about it.

The other thing Justin asks Major about this week is if Major minds Justin asking Liv out on a date, which is weird. On the one hand, I get it, “bro code” or whatever. On the other hand, it’s 2017. On the other other hand, it seems really early for Liv to be dating again and for Major to be so seemingly okay with it. I know that they can’t be together while Liv is still a zombie, but literally just two weeks ago they were reconnecting in a way that strongly suggests that they are (or at least ought to be) an endgame couple. I’m not a fan of overwrought relationship drama, in general, but this episode seemed to just be going to the opposite extreme with this. Maybe it shouldn’t be completely torturous for Major to see his friend going for it with Liv, and maybe Liv shouldn’t spend her whole life moping about Major, but at the same time it feels unbelievable that they wouldn’t have more feelings about what’s going on between them. That said, Liv’s date with Justin at the Scratching Post is a highlight of the episode. If it wasn’t developing so quickly, I’d have far more positive feelings about their obvious chemistry and the adorableness of their passing notes back and forth between Major.

The murder mystery this week starts off well enough, with a surprisingly promiscuous preschool teacher, but the interrogations of various persons of interest are a mixed bag and the revelation of the murderer, while somewhat unpredictable, is surprising in a way that manages to be both bad and dull. It’s weird. The worst part about it, though, is Liv’s bizarre behavior while on preschool teacher brain. It’s genuinely unsettling to see her baby talk at adult people and play with puppets in the interrogation room, and it’s for the most part extremely unfunny. iZombie is really at its best when it lets Liv’s brains-induced personality shifts show us something unexpected about the murder victims and give us a better sense of who they are as individuals. It’s that insight that makes Liv and her visions valuable for solving cases, and it’s disappointing to see the show waste two weeks in a row on over-the-top portrayals of unpleasant caricatures instead of actual characters. It diminishes interest in the murders and it makes Liv herself unlikeable while its going on.

Perhaps the most interesting storyline this week is Peyton’s work on the dominatrix murder case. She and the public defender handling the case are working together to hammer out a deal for the accused murderer, and it’s reiterated that without the guy’s confession Peyton’s case is flimsy. Indeed, when the details of the case are laid out, none of it adds up, and things take another turn for the unusual when another lawyer shows up to oust the public defender and refuse Peyton’s offer of a plea deal. When the accused hangs himself in his jail cell, Peyton goes to Ravi to ask about getting Liv to eat the guy’s brain and find out his secrets. Although the dead man has a history of mental illness that Ravi and Peyton both acknowledge that Liv won’t like, Ravi sets the brain up in his blue memory serum anyway. It’ll need to soak for ten days, so it’s uncertain if we’ll get to see new developments on this front next week or if it’ll have to wait until the episode after that.

Miscellany:

  • I’m having a very hard time giving a shit about Blaine’s redemption arc or whatever. I always loved villainous Blaine; he’s been a great antagonist. And amnesia Blaine was a potentially interesting way to craft a redemption arc for a character who is such a garbage person. But faking-his-amnesia Blaine is just villainous Blaine with an extra layer of assholery on top, no matter how much time he spends feeling sad about Peyton dumping him.
  • Major’s decision to stay at Fillmore Graves makes sense, but there’s no way this is going to turn out well, right?
  • What happened with the guinea pig?!
  • “We don’t all want to be astronauts, Liv.”
  • “It is sorta like being the drummer for Spinal Tap.” -Ravi, on Liv’s boyfriends
  • Liv telling Don E. to “use his words” was the only laugh-out-loud moment of the episode for me.
  • So… Justin is now on video going full zombie. That’s probably not a great development for zombies in general.
Into the Badlands, Television

Into the Badlands: “Nightingale Sings No More” is a great set-up for next week’s finale

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In addition to being a truly excellent episode on its own, “Nightingale Sings No More” is a creditable lead-in to next week’s season finale, setting up the finale’s major conflicts while offering some dramatic payoff of its own. It’s a briskly paced hour with a good mix of character work, dramatic moments and action, including one of the season’s best fights. Most importantly, however, the show seems poised to end with a decisive wrap-up of the season’s major storylines next week rather than a frustrating cliffhanger like the first season did. What will be interesting next week is to see if things are tidily concluded in anticipation of not getting a season three or if there will be hints of next season’s potential storyline.

**Spoilers ahead.**

The pre-credits scene reveals some more of Bajie’s past—and that the Widow is Bajie’s lost apprentice, Flea. It’s almost disappointing how obvious it was, especially after I know I wrote this speculation down in my notes weeks ago, but it works well enough. It’s also a revelation that quickly bears fruit, as Bajie and his erstwhile protégé are reunited this week. Some shows might have made us wait for that, but Into the Badlands is nothing if not prone to racing through story and not wasting time on diversions. In the flashback scene, we also learn that young Minerva had the book of Azra when she came to the monastery and that it’s something that she was asked by Bajie to keep secret from the Master and the other abbots there—a secrecy that Bajie also asks M.K. to enter into later in the episode when they are trying to steal the Widow’s book to combine with Sunny’s pocket watch (something tells me the watch is the key to deciphering the book). Bajie ends the episode presumably captured (along with M.K.) by the Widow, and this storyline will likely feature largely in next week’s finale.

Sunny is quickly changed out of that ridiculous white number Chau gave him and into something much more practical, but right as Sunny and the Widow are about to formulate their strategy against Quinn, Quinn’s flunky Gabriel shows up and drops several info-bombs on Sunny—namely that Veil is Quinn’s wife now and that it was the Widow who sold Veil to Quinn in the first place—before suicide bombing the Widow’s compound. In the ensuing chaos, Sunny escapes into the woods and seems intent on facing Quinn alone if need be. Sunny’s trust in the Widow hasn’t been robust at the best of times, but obviously finding out about the Widow’s betrayal of Veil—even sans details—sends him off on his own. It’s a little disappointing that he didn’t stick around for an explanation, but I expect something of that sort may yet occur next week. By the end of this episode, the Widow seems overdue for a reckoning.

Meanwhile, the reunion between Tilda and M.K. is sweet, but somewhat sullied when it turns out that Odessa was a cog being shipped on the same boat where M.K. went on a rampage and killed his mother and a whole bunch of other people. While it’s a little too convenient that Odessa would have this first-hand knowledge, it’s also a good way to force Tilda to really think about who her friend is and what he’s capable of and whether or not she’s okay with that. Interestingly, Tilda seems to have chosen a side by the end of the episode. When she goes to ask her mother where M.K. is, it turns into a broader confrontation about the Widow’s general ethics in her war to change the Badlands, and this turns into a gorgeously executed mother-daughter fight scene in the Widow’s conservatory that effortlessly accomplishes the twin goals of serving the story/characters and looking amazing. Though the scene ends with Tilda seemingly killed—after begging her mother to kill her, even—that’s, if anything, a confirmation that she’s definitely not dead.

At Quinn’s not-so-secret hideout, things go from bad to worse for Veil, who tries to stand up to Quinn and has Henry taken away from her and finds herself locked up in the ventilation room. A lot of shows might have decided to have Veil raped to show how bad things are for her, but after last week’s near miss it seems that Veil is off the hook for having to experience sexual violence for character growth. I hate that the bar here is so low to pass, but “not unnecessarily depicting the rape of female characters” is always a bonus in a fantasy drama, and Badlands finds plenty of other ways to put its women through hell. For Veil, being separated from her son and kept in isolation is torture enough, and when Lydia finally brings Henry to her—along with the news that Quinn has rigged the whole complex to explode before he’ll let Henry be taken away from him—their situation takes on a renewed sense of urgency. Quinn’s mental state is obviously deteriorating in a major way, and there’s no telling exactly what will set him off or when. As Lydia says, they can’t wait for Sunny; they’re going to have to find a way out on their own.

Miscellany:

  • Quinn’s careful grooming of Gabriel is chilling.
  • Bajie’s ploy to infiltrate the Widow’s compound was a much needed bit of light humor in an otherwise serious and quite dark episode.
  • Waldo is still touting his no emotions philosophy, and no one ever listens to him.
  • I kind of love that Odessa wasn’t jealous. Maddison Jaizani really sells the moment, too. I only wish the Odessa/Tilda relationship would get more screen time.
  • It’s interesting that it’s Odessa who rats M.K. and Bajie out to the Widow after she expressed her own lack of trust in the Widow just recently. I guess she’s more scared of M.K. than she is distrustful of the Widow, but I wonder what she’d think if she knew the Widow had similar powers to M.K.’s and that she’s trying to reawaken them.
  • The casual cruelty of the Widow telling Tilda to call her “Baron” rather than “Mother” seemed a little pre-emptive. While Tilda has been having some doubts about the Widow for a while, their relationship has otherwise been pretty normal (for them), and it seems weird that it’s the Widow who would be the first to upset the status quo in this fashion.
  • Tilda’s echoing of the Widow’s “Don’t start what you can’t finish” just destroyed me.
Doctor Who, Television

Doctor Who: “Oxygen” is a good episode that could have used a bit more room to breathe

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**Spoilers abound.**

“Oxygen” is another solid Doctor Who adventure, for all that it retreads some of the same thematic ground that was already covered in “Smile” and “Thin Ice” just a couple weeks ago, specifically regarding the dangers of robots (of a sort) executing their programming in a more extremely literal fashion than is strictly healthy for humans and the dangers of unfettered capitalism, which is also not particularly healthy for humans. It’s an ambitious enough episode in that it takes a strong stand and conveys a coherent progressive message, but it suffers from being a bit overstuffed and at times feels distracted as it tries to touch on more topics than can reasonably be done justice in just forty-five minutes. It’s an episode that, while overall well-done, could have benefited from some tighter editing and spending a little more time on the central thesis instead of getting sidetracked with ideas and asides that never quite fit within the main narrative.

The episode begins with two events. First, a nice-seeming couple is working on a space station when they are attacked by what appear to be some kind of space zombies. Meanwhile, the Doctor is pining for space and feeling cooped up being stuck on Earth to guard whatever (whoever, really) is in the secret vault that he and Nardole have secreted under the university. While Nardole does his best to keep the Doctor on Earth, Bill is game for a space jaunt, and soon enough the three of them are answering a distress beacon on the now seemingly abandoned space station. The bare bones of the rest of the story is that there are no space zombies (a disappointment, to be honest); just a bunch of company-owned space suits designed to sell oxygen to workers on a mining station in an especially evil take on the idea of a company town; the station itself is kept empty of air, and all air needed by the workers is metered out through the suits. At some point, either someone at the company or the AI technology in the suits themselves realized that it was cheaper for the company to not have human workers at all, and the suits have been systematically killing their occupants as a cost-cutting measure.

For an episode of Doctor Who, it’s surprisingly dark, and perhaps the most interesting thing about this story is that there are some real consequences for the characters in the end. Bill gets another glimpse of a future that isn’t, at least in some ways, as optimistic as she might prefer. More importantly, she is not only in real danger; she has a serious brush with death that must highlight just how dangerous her travels with the Doctor can be. The deaths of most of the workers on the space station are permanent, however, and the Doctor is only able to rescue two out of forty of them, which gives “Oxygen” a staggeringly high body count, even compared to similar episodes. That the news of the event leads to the eventual downfall of capitalism as humanity’s economic system of choice is cold comfort, especially when the Doctor adds to that bit of information that humans still find new and different mistakes to make after capitalism. Surely this will be true if humanity survives long enough to spread to the stars, but still. This is a family show.

What’s most surprising and compelling about this episode, however, is that it’s the Doctor himself who faces perhaps the most significant and transformative change of the episode. When Bill’s space suit malfunctions right as they’re about to go into the vacuum of space, the Doctor gives her his own helmet to save her life. It works, but though the Doctor’s tolerances to space are greater than any human’s, he’s still injured, left blinded until they can return to the Tardis, where he expects to be healed (or at least says so). In the end, however, we learn that the Doctor is still blind, which may well be a permanent state of affairs, at least until his next regeneration. Going forward, it puts him at a decided disadvantage for future adventures—offering an unprecedented chance for the show to explore disability in a thoughtful manner—and gives him a secret that he’s keeping from Bill, who has no idea that the treatment the Doctor underwent on the Tardis didn’t work. The Doctor is a character who’s defined by periodic major changes, but there’s never been a time in the rebooted show where the Doctor experienced this type of potentially profound change. It will be interesting to see how the show handles it in the weeks to come.

Miscellany:

  • I like Matt Lucas quite a bit, and I was happy to see him get some more screen time this week, but I’m still not sold on this weird dynamic between Nardole and the Doctor.
  • This was the most passive I think Bill has been to date, and I’d have loved to see her have a bit more to do, even if the episode was already overstuffed with happenings. This was the first time Bill has felt so purely like a tourist in an episode, and had so little to contribute to the solution of the hour’s problem.
  • The blue guy and every interaction anyone had with him would be my top pick for what to cut to make room for everything else to have a bit more time to shine.
  • Alternatively, just a straight up extra 15 minutes would have done this episode some good.
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?