Department of Unpopular Opinions

Wakanda Forever is not a good movie. There, I said it.

What's wrong with it? I'm glad you asked!

1. Namor & Co. are the bad guys for the single and sole reason that they are fighting the good guys, and they are fighting the good guys for the single and sole reason that the good guys need someone to fight.
2. The protagonist changes from Queen Ramonda to Princess Shuri halfway through the movie.
3. Shuri's motivation for the first half of the movie is T'Challa dying offscreen, which is then totally forgotten and irrelevant for the second half of the movie, because REVENGE! (Or not.)
   
4. Climactic fight: World's! Stupidest! Plan!
5. 90 minutes of plot squeezed into a 160-minute film.
6. Plot threads with no consequences. For example: 
1. Vibranium-seeking mercenaries
   
2. General Okoye loses her job, resulting in ... what? A battlesuit?
   

In my opinion there's also some remarkably bad overacting, but that's an aesthetic judgment that's open to disagreement.

I can turn my brain off for some of the lapses of logic--for example, the Wakandans don't bother to fight the Atlantians using, oh, say, high tech depth charges--because these things are just a given in a Marvel movie. The point of the movie is to have lots of hand-to-hand fight scenes, so by definition guns and stuff don't work well, because if they did you wouldn't have the fight scenes. But "that's just how it is" can't salvage a movie that's nonsensical and poorly structured even on its own terms.

Doesn't Ring True

Well, it's no Picard . . . but Amazon's Rings of Power is no masterpiece, either. It's high-school-level Tolkien fanfic (believe me, I'd know). The writers clearly have only the vaguest idea of what JRRT was trying to do; they seem to think they can replicate The Lord of the Rings by throwing in a bunch of pointy ears and adding special effects. It looks gorgeous, but it's hollow.

And it's predictable. I spotted the obligatory BIG TWIST in the finale right around episode 4. Don't believe me? Ask my friend Allen; he and I discussed it extensively.

The Lord of the Rings is one of the best-loved novels of all time. If you think you're a better fantasy writer than its author . . . well, you're probably wrong. The writers of The Rings of Power certainly are.

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Here's another writer's longer take. I mostly agree with it, though with less passion and more meh.

Book Review: The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.
Neal Stephenson, Nicole Galland
Science fiction, fantasy

[I can't speak to coauthor Nicole Galland's contribution; I don't happen to have read any of her books.]

Okay . . . see . . . Neal Stephenson writes these books that are . . . it's kind of hard to explain, but it's . . . well, the ideas are always . . .

Let's start again.

Did you ever want to read a book in which, for perfectly logical reasons, there is a beautifully-done alliterative poetry Norse Saga entitled "The Lay of Walmart"?

So, yes, it's deadpan funny. Other Stephenson touches: 

• multiple points of view
• multiple timelines
• sarcastic takes on bureaucracy
• historical exegetics
• not maybe the strongest ending in the world

For the rest, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. is fast-paced, very readable, and decently if not deeply characterized (the characters are maybe a little more likable than is common in N.S.-land). The elements it's assembled from are a trifle, ah, shopworn; it will remind genre readers of, among others, some of Connie Willis's novels, except not pointlessly and interminably muddled. Within the Stephenson ouevre, it's not far in plot and complexity from Reamde, but funny; a longer and less-gonzo Zodiac is perhaps a fair comparison. I enjoyed it very much, but it's a book that will stand or fall on whether you enjoy the actual writing.

Book Review: The Delirium Brief

The Delirium Brief
Charles Stross
Fantasy, horror, humor

In which the Laundry goes pear-shaped.

Really, there's not much more to say about this one. It's black humor, heavy on the black. It features our original protagonist, Bob Howard, and shows the ways he has and hasn't changed. It's quite definitely on the arc towards the series climax.

If you like the series, you'll like the book. If you don't know the series, this is quite probably the worst place to start, since it's bringing together threads from not one but several previous entries. (The author suggests starting with The Atrocity Archives or The Rhesus Chart.) If you haven't tried the series . . . how does a paranoid cynical Lovecraftian bureaucratic comedy spy thriller satire pop-culture horror novel sound to you? 

Book Review: Lawless Lands

Lawless Lands
Emily Lavin Leverett, Misty Massey, Margaret S. McGraw (editors)
Science fiction, fantasy, Western

Big disclaimer up front. One of my closest friends in the world has a story in this collection. Furthermore, I read and commented on an earlier draft thereof. There's no way I'm feeling impartial about that one; I think it's really good.

So let's talk about the collection as a whole. I don't like to damn it with faint praise, but it's decidedly a mixed bag. A number of the stories are all written from basically the same plot outline--several of them are near-clones of one another. There's a lot of dark fantasy/horror, which I personally don't find very interesting or imaginative; your mileage may vary.

There are some ups as well as some downs, I'm happy to say. Among these I'd single out:

• Seanan McGuire's "Pixie Season," which offers a welcome relief from the general diet of gloom & doom & gritty & despair & earnest & more doom & more gloom.
• Dave Benyon's "The Stranger in the Glass" doesn't, much, but it has a neat idea at its core.
• Laura Ann Gilman's "Boots of Clay" has a more interesting cast of characters and a decidedly different kind of conflict.

I will say that Mr. B.S. Donovan--"Old B.S." to his friends--has undeniably achieved a different voice than any other story in Lawless Lands. I can't imagine that this will be his last sale.

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P.S. In case you somehow managed to miss it, there's also this.

Book Review: The Name of the Wind

The Name of the Wind
Patrick Rothfuss
Fantasy

I tend to avoid genre fantasy nowadays--even though the genre is fundamental to my identity as a reader. To steal a quip attributed to Samuel Johnson, that which is good isn't original, and that which is original isn't good. There's plenty around that's neither.

Swords-and-horses fantasy, in particular, excites my liveliest suspicion. I did not (and do not) care for A Game of Thrones, to take one obvious example. I made an exception for The Name of the Wind, because several people whose judgment I respect recommended it. Even so, it took me a while to work myself up to the task.

And on balance, it was decent. I wouldn't recommend The Name of the Wind to anyone who isn't a lover of genre fantasy. (Or a 13-year-old, which is a heavy overlap anyway.) For anyone who is, it's readable. If it were a food, it wouldn't be filet mignon, but it wouldn't be deep-fried Twinkies either. It'd be, say, a hamburger. Not a Big Mac. Not an Artisanal Grass-Fed Beef Caramelized-Onion-and-Kale Burger. A hamburger.

Let's start with the obvious commendation: I finished it. At 600+ pages, that's no small thing. Then, too, the writing--particularly some of the descriptive passages--is better than average. The characterization is also better than average, if not up to mainstream-literary standards. There isn't an excess of magic (which lazy authors use in place of actual thought), and such magic as exists is nicely described. It is, in short, comfortable.

It's also familiar. Some of The Name of the Wind is reminiscent of the Earthsea trilogy,* particularly A Wizard of Earthsea. More of it recalls Harry Potter, including analogues for Snape and Draco Malfoy. There's a brief but explicit bow to Tolkien. There's what almost has to be a one-sentence wink to Terry Pratchett. I see echoes of some more modern genre books as well, such as Scott Lynch's "Locke Lamora" series--particularly the third book, The Republic of Thieves; though in this case, it must be said, the resemblance is not in the plotting nor the pacing, which in The Name of the Wind are episodic and decidedly unhurried.

Now, part of the appeal of fantasy is that it's evocative. Far more so than its sibling genres, fantasy is about the echoes. Great fantasy reminds us of fairy tales, myths, and epics: of Beowulf facing the dragon, of King Arthur and Modred, of Robin Hood, of Greek or Norse gods, of the sheer wonder that we remember from our first trips to the well of Story, when we were young and the world was wider and the colors brighter.

Less-than-great genre fantasy reminds us of other genre fantasy. That's The Name of the Wind's limitation. It was a fun read. I'll probably pick up the next volume from the library. I won't put off reading anything else to get to it, though.

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*Yes, trilogy. The misguided rumor that there were further books in the series is unworthy of discussion in these pages electrons.

Book Review: League of Dragons

League of Dragons
Naomi Novik
Fantasy

This is subtitled "The Last Temeraire Novel." That should give you a clue. If you like the Temeraire novels, you'll like League of Dragons. If you don't, you won't. If you've never read them, don't start here.

That's pretty much it. Novik is still good at the things she's good at, and still not good at the things she's not good at. She has no gift for creating memorable secondary characters. Her plotting is somewhat random; League of Dragons has a duel that leaves the main human character wounded, for example, which reads like an outtake and could easily have been cut. The action scenes can get a little bit repetitive, although they're well-written.

But her dragons are wonderful. They fully meet John W. Campbell's famous challenge ("Write me a creature that thinks as well as a man, or better than a man, but not like a man"). If housecats could talk, this is what they'd be like--self-centered, vain, competitive, and somehow lovable. The series isn't as good as its first book, but for a fantasy fan it's worth reading just for the dragons.

Book Review: The Nightmare Stacks

The Nightmare Stacks
Charles Stross
Fantasy, humor

I was a little bit disappointed with last year's The Annihilation Score. When you switch viewpoint characters in a long-running series, you have the chance to do something new and different, and The Annihilation Scores kinda didn't. The Nightmare Stacks, to a pretty fair extent, does.

Oh, it's got what you expect from a Laundry Files novel. It's got black humor and genuine horror and snappy dialog and imagination and stuff. It's also got some new elements. For example, our new viewpoint character Alex is both a nerdy young guy and a powerful though newly-minted vampire--sorry, victim of PHANG Syndrome--and he's trying to reconcile the two. Also, even more than in The Annihilation Score, the world of the The Annihilation Score has very definitively diverged from our own, which makes for a different reading experience as well. The antagonists are very well written, the bad parts are appropriately sobering, and the ending is a real twist.

In an odd way, this is one of the more . . . hopeful books in the series. Yes, we're deep in CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN where REDACTED and REDACTED cause a disastrous REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED. On the other hand, our guys get to encounter an menace that isn't immune to bullets. In fact, the good guys are pretty effectual!

I'll also note that the book is kindly dedicated to the late great Sir Terry Pratchett. It's a very appropriate tribute, in part because The Nightmare Stacks (even more than 2014's The Rhesus Chart) can be read seen as a Strossified riff on a theme that Pratchett also used.

If you like the series, you'll like The Nightmare Stacks--in fact, I think you'll like it a lot. If you're unfamiliar with the series, this isn't a bad place to start. There are minor spoilers for some of the recent books, but nothing earth-shattering, and Alex is a good introductory viewpoint character.

Book Review: Ten Little Wizards

Ten Little Wizards

Michael Kurland

Fantasy, mystery

Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy series is one of the minor classics of Silver Age science fiction/fantasy. Darcy solves crimes in an alternative universe where magic not only works, but has been put on a scientific basis. Darcy's sidekick Sean O Lochlainn is a forensic sorcerer, but the stories themselves are all fair-play whodunits. (If you see a parallel to these guys, you're not alone.)

After Garrett's death, Michael Kurland wrote two pastiche follow-up novels: A Study in Sorcery and Ten Little Wizards. I'd bought and read the first many years ago, but I'd never run across the second. Speaking of magic, though--e-books to the rescue!

I wish I could say, after all that, that Ten Little Wizards is brilliant. It's ... serviceable. Garrett didn't have a terribly distinctive writing style, so there's nothing to complain about on that score. Kurland's description of the setting is reasonably close to Garrett's, but in this one--more than in A Study in Sorcery--it's a trifle unfocused, as if Kurland had a bunch of bits he wanted to throw in but didn't know quite how they all went together. The puzzle is somewhat weak; the murderer is unmasked kind of by accident, and the unmasking isn't very satisfactory.

Also, the magic is not credible. Garrett was always careful to give a scientific-sounding explanation whenever Master Sean did his tricks, using (for example) the "Law of Sympathy" and the "Law of Contagion" noted in our world by James Frazer in his book The Golden Bough. There are a couple of bits in Ten Little Wizards that just don't fit the classic mold. It may sound odd to the uninitiated to start complaining "Hey, magic can't do that!", but if nothing else it's a tribute to Garrett's original conception.

I enjoyed reading the book. I'm glad to have finally completed the series. Still, this is more a book for dedicated fans of the original than for general readers.

Book Review/Essay: The Fellowship

The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams
Philip and Carol Zaleski
Literature, biography

The Fellowship is a readable, detailed, and sympathetic biography by a pair of Smith College professors. It's nice to see the Inklings get some scholarly attention, even if it's only a fraction of the attention that's been given to contemporaries such as the Bloomsbury Group. It's not, perhaps, for the casual reader; if your interest starts and ends with Middle-Earth and Narnia, you might want to work your way up to this one.

Inevitably, the coverage of the Inklings is uneven. Lewis and Tolkien get roughly equal time, with Lewis emerging as the driving force of the group. Williams and Barfield share a second tier. The remainder of the group, aside from Lewis's brother Warnie, gets only token attention. 

To be honest, that's fine by me. I've read some Charles Williams, but in general I find him obscure and unengaging. I have read nothing by Barfield, and based on this account I'm unlikely to do so; each of us would consider the other as spouting tendentious gibberish. No doubt both men were genuinely deep and original thinkers, but they wrote for an audience of which I'm not a member.

If anything, that points out the genius of Lewis and Tolkien. Both of them were first-rate intellectuals (critical snobbery aside), and far more deeply versed in theology, literature, and philosophy than I will ever be. They put that depth into their writings; and yet both men--especially Tolkien--can be read for pure, unadulterated pleasure. 

This, I think, is one of the two major divides between JRRT and the vast legions of schlock artists who've followed in his footsteps. You might not see the genuine depth of The Lord of the Rings, but you can still feel it. The sense of mingled loss and consolation, for example, that pervades the book isn't an accident; it's fundamental to Tolkien's Christian, Catholic, and Boethian philosophy.

The other (and related) major divide is that all the Inklings were fascinated by myths: how they work, why they work, and what they're good for. Commercial fantasy writers focus on the mere trappings of myth (swords, magic spells, divine power, etc.) without having the least idea of why. The result is a kind of literary placebo, which dulls the imagination rather than stimulating it. It is to the genuine stuff what Nabisco's "Chips Ahoy!" is to home-made chocolate cookies.

Confession: I've read my fair share of this writing. I hope never to do so again. Life's too short to spend it killing your own brain cells.

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Humphrey Carpenter's J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography is a good starting point for the curious. Lewis has had a good many studies of his life and work, but they've mostly taken a rather academic slant.

Book Review: The Shepherd's Crown

The Shepherd's Crown
Terry Pratchett
YA fantasy

This is the late, great, Sir Terry Pratchett's last novel. It's better than his final adult novel, Raising Steam--it's a connected story, at least--but that's not saying much. Basically, it reads like a set of outtakes and Post-It notes and cribs from other novels, strung together in rough order. Much of the substance borrows from, and to some extent undermines, the far superior Lords and Ladies.

For the rest, there are too many disparate elements for it to work. A few of the elements show bits of the old Pratchett genius. If you're both a Pratchett fanatic and a completist (ahem), the book may be worth your while on that basis, or as an homage to Pratchett's memory. As a story, sadly, it's not really worthwhile.

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If by some criminal mischance you've never read Terry Pratchett, I'd recommend starting with Guards! Guards! and then proceeding to its two immediate sequels, Men at Arms and Feet of Clay.

Book Review: The Annihilation Score

The Annihilation Score
Charles Stross
Fantasy

This is the latest in the "Laundry Files" series. In case you're not familiar with it, Charles Stross had the clever idea of combining the two most paranoid genres in fiction--cosmic horror and espionage--and setting them in a realistic government agency (the eponymous Laundry). That is, the spies don't swan around Monaco in tuxes; they trudge around Whitehall filing expense reports and undergoing team-building exercises.

It is, as I said, a clever notion. Stross has used it to play with various genres and genre combinations, with an odd but winning combo of horror, humor, and genuine characterization. In this case, a marriage breaks down; a new government agency springs into being; and Britain suffers from an outbreak of superheroes. 

To be honest, I think Charles Stross missed a trick here. He sets up the book as a departure from his oeuvre, in two ways:

1. In previous books, the Laundry has done its work invisibly, with any little incidents being explained away. In The Annihilation Score, the truth comes out with a bang. There's no longer any pretense that this could be a secret history of our world.
2. Our usual protagonist, Bob Howard--former IT guy turned computational demonologist--is largely off-stage. The protagonist is Bob's wife Mo.

However, this setup doesn't actually change anything. Mo's narrative voice is largely indistinguishable from Bob's, and the plot and resolution are largely similar to several other books in the series. Don't get me wrong: The Annihilation Score is a fun read. It's just that the setup led me to expect more, and there is no more here.

If you liked the other "Laundry Files" books, you'll probably like The Annihilation Score. If you haven't tried them, don't start here; go back to the beginning.