Category Archives: Reviews

Reboot

Clearly the best character in the show.

FYI, this review contains some spoilertastic discussion of the end of the third season.

I associate Reboot with some very happy memories of coming home from middle school, plunking down on the couch, and watching episodes that my family had recorded on the VCR. What I remember is a fun action adventure show with characters who live inside of a computer. (It blew my eleven-year-old mind that bad guys could become good guys.) So imagine my delight when I was fooling around YouTube a few weeks ago and discovered that the whole thing is up there free.

What a memory trip. So many things are different from what I expected.

The CG in the first season is atrocious. The experience is like listening to a well-written radio play spinoff of TRON while watching this. Now that I can put the show in historical context, I realize that the animators made the characters blue and green to cut down on the Uncanny Valley. It helps a little. The animation gets gradually better each season until by the third, you can look at the characters’ faces to understand their emotions. The writers understood this and started to take advantage of long reaction shots. Episodes like “Web Riders of the Storm” hold up to modern day standards.

Some of the computer jokes have aged well (hidden messages in binary will always be funny), some haven’t (has anyone here ever used a SCSI port?). The character in the show can’t assume that every computer system has Internet access. Even the idea that a system crash is a real possibility is becoming outdated. I am writing this review now on a laptop that hasn’t crashed a single time in five years of operation. I think I had to use a force shutdown once. If you are just discovering this show, my advice to you is to pretend the characters live in a fantasy world that works sort of, but not quite, like a computer.

What I didn’t expect was this show provides so much to adults that will go straight over kids’ heads. Is that the Pixar lamp attacking Enzo? Look, now he’s dancing “Thriller!” That flock of bicycles is straight out of Blade Runner. There is a wonderfully dark moment near the end of the third season where the Sailor Moon team start the first few seconds of their transformation dance, and then they all die from falling debris. The main cast all have shades of right and wrong to them, and much of the third season has the audacity to focus on a pair of adults who have an implied sex life.

The show also gets high marks for its women characters. (Well, computer programs who look and sound like women…) It passes the Bechdel test left and right. AndrAIa is defined by her role as Enzo’s girlfriend. She holds her own well as a sidekick, but that’s all she is. But major props to Dot Matrix, who is not defined by her love for Bob. She winds up running Mainframe’s military and does so without becoming a cast-iron Amazon or taking away from the male characters. I had no idea how great a character she was when I watched the show as a kid. But Hexadecimal is still my favorite.

So. The end of season 3. I wish that Enzo had blown Megabyte’s brains out. We’ve already seen that Enzo’s capable of killing and the show’s willing to get that dark. He may even be struggling with PTSD. Then he finally, finally, gets into a situation where shooting somebody in the face is the right thing to do, and he won’t do it. I know it’s supposed to be part of his character arc that he’s turning away from the violent person he’s become, but I don’t buy it. Megabyte is the sort of supervillain who will always come back. (Guess what? He does in season 4.) So for Enzo’s supposed moral victory, he puts all of Mainframe in danger. Possibly the entire Net.

Despite that gripe, the end of the season was oddly satisfying. It’s as deus ex machina as a deus ex machina ending can possibly get, yet I don’t mind. It’s fitting with their world. The characters are at the mercy of a User they don’t understand and who ultimately saves them all through dumb luck. There’s something philosophical about that.

So if you’re looking for cheesy CG, great characters, and surprisingly grown-up storytelling, give it a try.

Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear

It’s traditional high fantasy, reimagined in Central Asia.

Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear follows the story of two characters through what looks to be a sweeping saga about the collapse of an empire. The first is Re Temur, a young man who’s distant in the line of succession to the Great Khagan and never expects to hold much power. But the death of the great Khagan and the resulting civil war thrust him into the limelight. The second main character is Samarkar, disgraced ex-princess of Rasa. To save herself from getting executed by her brother, she goes into training as a wizard. When she is ordered by the head of the wizards to investigate a Rasan city that’s been destroyed by the civil war, Sarmarkar’s and Temur’s lives intersect.

What I liked best about the story was the setting. Bear introduces us to a world that’s deep and rich, and even goes so far as to explain how people’s clothes are tied on. (Isn’t that something you always wonder about fantasy princesses?) But even given that, she lays on the Fantasy Counterpart Culture a bit thick. So far to the east, further east than where any of the characters live, there’s this empire called Song – I see what you did there, that’s totally China but named after a different dynasty. Far to the west, there’s a city called Kyav where the people are as pale as mushrooms and grow beets. Could that possibly be Kiev?

I’m not sure why Bear decided to split the difference – why she didn’t give the societies in her book their familiar modern names or come up with entirely new societies. Are the changed names an excuse to add fantasy creatures to the story? Maybe Bear plans to change the course of history, and Temur is totally not going to turn out to be Kublai Khan?

One thing she did with her really-guys-this-isn’t-Asia is she reimagined Islam as form of goddess worship. Women don’t catch a break, though. In this world, they’re forced to stay in seclusion because they’re incarnations of the One True Goddess. This is very interesting and I can’t wait to see where she goes with it.

At first I thought Temur was a blithering idiot, but I developed a grudging respect for him over the course of the book. This mirrored Samarkar’s own feelings about him, so it might have been intentional. (But how long is it going to take him to figure out his horse is magical?) Samarkar was far and away the more interesting co-main character. I loved her complex feelings about taking the wizard’s path and the interplay between the wizarding community and the seat of the government. In fact, I would have been happy to read a book set entirely in Tsarepheth that was all about the political intrigues of the wizards. But this is like me complaining that I wanted ravioli when somebody serves me chicken.

In my opinion, the plot was the weakest part of the book. I prefer first books of trilogies to stand on their own as books. Range of Ghosts is a grand tour of places and people we’ll need to know for the rest of the trilogy, which is great as a beginning, but not as a book. And by the end of the book, I kid you not, we have a wizard, a fighter, an ex-cleric and a monk traveling around together. It is a testament to Bear’s writing skill that she makes this look good, but I am waiting to see when she will pull the plot out of Dungeons and Dragons territory.

The Golem and the Jinni

I don’t know about this one. There was a lot that I liked, but there was also a lot that I didn’t like.

The Golem and the Jinni takes place in New York city from the summer of 1899 to summer 1900. As immigrants from all over the world stream through Ellis Island, a couple of supernatural beings drift into the city and there they form a bond. That’s all you really need to know. Sure, there’s some business about an evil wizard, but he doesn’t take up that much of the plot. The book is a series of portraits of people, human and non, who are getting used to life in a strange new country. It would have worked better as a set of loosely connected short stories, which makes me wonder if Wecker’s editor forced her to make it into a novel.

The characters are delightful and I have a lot of respect for someone who can wrangle an omniscient narrator as well as Helene Wecker does, but the book sags in the middle. It relies on a lot of coincidences. (The way the golem and the jinni meet each other is glaring. New York City is how big and they just happen to bump into each other the one night the golem goes out walking?) The book is nearly five hundred pages long, but it doesn’t give the feeling of sweeping epicness that would justify its weight.

This may sound strange, but I found the body count oddly satisfying. People die in this book and they stay dead. No Disney resurrections here. Yet whenever a character dies, there’s a reason it happened and it means something to the other characters. Wecker does a great job of making the book dark, but not too dark.

The blurb on the cover said this was Wecker’s first novel and I don’t believe it for a moment. She has too much of a command of the English language for this to be her first attempt. There’s a lot more manuscripts sitting in Wecker’s desk drawer, and I’m looking forward to seeing them.

Starship Troopers guest post

I’m guest posting over at Elfswood today. It’s a book review of Robert A. Heinlein’s novel, Starship Troopers.

The Lies of Locke Lamora

Scott Lynch pulls off an impressive feat with his novel, The Lies of Locke Lamora. He tells a story with a thieves’ guild in it and keeps a straight face. Oddly enough, it works.

What I liked best about the book was the setting. It takes place in Camorr, which is sort of a magical-technological version of Venice. The humans of the city are squatting on the ruins of some ancient, super-advanced civilization that went extinct under suspicious circumstances. The society’s somewhere in the Renaissance, but some alchemical Edison lit the city up with cheap, clean-burning magical light. Way cool.

Our main characters are Locke Lamora and his gang of con men. Conning the wealthy of Camorr out of huge sums of money isn’t strictly allowed by the thieves’ guild’s big boss, but Locke and company do it anyway. As Locke sets up for his next big sting, the book looks like it’s going to be a romp, like an Italian The Wrong Trousers. Then the plan goes more and more wrong. The book ends about as far from comedy as you can get.

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison

I’m delighted to report that The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison has a premise that’s truly original. While plenty of fantasy books have trod the territory of the half-human, half-elf moaning about his semiimmortal lot, I’ve never before seen a book where the main character has to cope with being half elf, half goblin.

The Goblin Emperor opens when the emperor of the Elflands and his three sons die in a freak airship accident. (Yeah, right, it was an accident.) The emperor’s unwanted half-goblin fourth son, Maia Drazhara, legally is next in line for the throne.

Maia is thrust into an Elvish court he’s utterly unprepared for. He has to consolidate his power, deal with racist courtiers, and spearhead a murder investigation for his father and half-brothers. Oddly enough, the world of the Elvish court is a refreshing break from Westeros. Maia’s not an idiot, and when he meets some genuinely good people at the court, they band together to form a functioning government.

The worldbuilding! Addison drops in so many casual references to the broader world that the place feels vast. What are these lion girls that the pirates like so much? Addison hints at winds of social change when Maia meets a woman on the crew of an airship. Most of the supporting characters could handle novels of their own. I have to give special props to Thara Celehar, the priest of Ulis with a dark and troubled past. His clerichood gives him the power to speak with the dead, which he uses to solve mysteries. A priest detective. That’s cooler than sharks with laser beams.

I hesitate to call this book steampunk because Addison uses such a light touch. Yes, there’s airships and an automaton unicorn, but Addison remembers there’s social issues to the Industrial Revolution as well, such as the exploitation of factory workers. The technology serves the people of the story, not the other way around, and there’s mercifully not a single pair of brass goggles to be found.

I have a few quibbles with the book. When I read about Emperor Edrehasivar VII, son of Varenechibel IV, who lives at the Alcethmeret and takes audiences at the Michen’theleian, I mentally cut out all the syllables in the middle as if it was Worchestershire. And … damn. I was going to have another quibble, but I don’t have one. This was a very good book.

Third Daughter by Susan Kaye Quinn

This review contains spoilers about who winds up with whom.

I’ve wanted this book to exist for a long time. For about as long as I’ve known steampunk existed (since about 2002), I’ve wanted to see a steampunk set in an India-like society. In real life, India got a huge infusion of British culture during Europe’s industrial revolution, setting up clashes between modernity and tradition, colonizer and colonized, and all sorts of fodder for great stories. So when Guin over at Twinja told me this book is finally real, I was pretty pleased.

Our heroine, Aniri, is the third daughter of the queen of Dharia. She’s a minor enough noble that she expects to marry who she wants once she gets her majority, but then her mother asks her to accept a marriage proposal from Malik, prince of the neighboring kingdom of Jungali. For espionage reasons. The premise? Fantastic! The execution? Well, it was all right.

What I didn’t like about the book is that it’s so soppy. Poor Princess Aniri has to choose between two men, both of whom are gorgeous, and one of whom’s a prince and the other is at least well off. And I have yet to meet the heterosexual man who talks like either Devesh or Prince Malik. As a matter of fact, I can’t think of anybody I know who talks like them. All these undying declarations of love are a romance novel thing, which isn’t my thing.

I thought it was too convenient that Devesh turns out to have another woman on the side. The story would have had subtler and more complex character development if Devesh had turned out to be a traitor and loved Aniri deeply. As it is, Aniri never has to make any difficult choices after all.

General Garesh walked straight out of a James Bond movie. Not my kind of villain.

What I really liked was the spy part of the book. Quinn sets up a three-way power struggle between the nations of Dharia, Samir, and Jungali that was believable and well thought out. I appreciate that Dharia’s vast empire has visible means of support. The Dharian people have a fertile wheat belt that supports their wealth, which we get to see.

Aetheroreceiver protocol is cool. The kingdom of Jungali is cool. It’s this sort of high-tech Nepal full of cliff cities where people get around by high wire lifts.

I liked Janak a lot. If the main characters were half as interesting as him, this book would have been fabulous. As it is, the book has great derring-do, pretty good politics, and characters who could use more depth.

Stand Still, Stay Silent

That’s the face of a dark, grim future right there.

Some time in our near future, a super flu kills off most of the people in the world. A handful of Scandinavians survive by dint of living on remote islands and being really tough people to begin with. Meanwhile, the magic of Nordic mythology, including mages, seers, and trolls, begins to wake back up.

Sounds pretty dark, right? Oddly enough, Stand Still, Stay Silent, a new webcomic by Minna Sundberg, isn’t. The main story’s set ninety years after the plague, and although humanity’s settlements are small and scattered, people live pretty well. The government of Iceland is finally willing to fund a research expedition to the forbidden zone, the Silent Lands. The budget they cough up is woefully short (you know academia so well, Minna!), so the expedition’s organizers can only afford to hire complete dorks. Enter our cast.

This webcomic’s beautiful. It’s like going on an armchair vacation to see the stark landscapes up at the top of the world, and since the artist’s a Swede who grew up in Finland, you know she knows what she’s talking about. On top of that, the comic’s got an impressive update schedule of four full-size, color pages a week.

If you want to check out this webcomic, here’s a couple pieces of advice before going in. First, feel free to start on page 56. The pages before that deal with the end of the old world, and if you’re passingly familiar with The Stand or World War Z, you already know everything you need to know. The really interesting part is the new world that takes its place. Second, Minna Sundberg loves to draw characters with fine, delicate chins and medium-ish hair. On top of that, they’re all wearing furs. If you want to keep track of characters’ genders, you may want to take notes.

The main story’s just setting up, and Sundberg has given us some tantalizing hints about this world. Why are they called the Silent Lands? Something about the monsters responding to human speech.

Check it out here.

Farthing by Jo Walton

Jo Walton’s a badly underrated writer. She’s not underrated by speculative fiction awards committees, just the public consciousness. Since the start of her career in 2000, Walton has won the World Fantasy Award, the Prometheus Award, the Nebula, and the Hugo (these last two for the same book). She could be the most decorated author you’ve never heard of.

Which is a shame. Walton does fluffy society novels, but twists them in ways you’ve never seen before. I was first introduced to her work by her 2002 novel, Tooth and Claw. It’s Pride and Prejudice if every character in it were a dragon. It’s a world where a maiden dragon’s need to maintain her “virtue” is dictated not just by custom but by biological reality.

Farthing starts out like a fluffy society novel, too. It’s set in an alternate 1949 where Britain and the Third Reich have fought it out to a draw and signed a peace treaty. At the start of our book, a bunch of flighty British nobles are cooped up in a friend’s country house for a weekend party. Sunday morning, one of the upper-class twits is discovered dead. While Inspector Carmichael tries to solve the mystery, he’s exposed to the antics of Lucy Kahn, née Eversley, a debutante who married a Jewish man, and her mother, who’s never forgiven Lucy for it. He wades through speculation about who’s sleeping with whose sister, who’s sleeping with whose servant, and who’s sleeping with other men. We see upstairs-downstairs as the servants split into factions, the ones who support Lucy’s marriage and the ones who don’t. There’s also a lot of wrangling over the difference between India tea and China tea, which still leaves me puzzled. Are these black tea and green tea, respectively?

It’s all quite amusing and fluffy until it slowly dawns on you that George Orwell is writing the novel.

That’s all I’ll say about how it ends. Though it’s a testament to Walton’s skill as a writer that while this is technically a sad ending, she manages to fill it with so much hope.

Cool Kickstarter Projects: The Bacterionomicon and Skies of Fire

First of all, I’m happy to announce that the Kickstarter campaign for Cannon Fodder‘s cover art is now fully funded. Thanks to everyone who backed the project. There’s still ten days left on the campaign, so if you want a copy of the book or you want to help it meet its reach goal, check it out.

Meanwhile, here’s a few more Kickstarter campaigns that I think are pretty awesome:

Image courtesy of the campaign page.

The Bacterionomicon by Nerdcore Medical

Nerdcore Medical is a tiny company based in Texas that makes educational games based on the founder’s own experience going through med school. Their latest project: the Bacterionomicon, a lushly illustrated book where antibiotics are cast as clerics and infectious diseases are eldritch abominations. Just check out the illustrations on this thing.