Tag Archives: Review

The Let Down

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I tend to stick to genre related things when I have down time and want some entertainment. My downtime is relatively limited so I want to go with things that look or feel like something I would find enjoyable. Often, I put movies or shows onto a list (watch later, or whatever the particular service calls it). Then, as most people do (I suspect) I go and watch many things that are NOT in fact on my list. Occasionally I’ll go back to one of the lists and pick up something I’ve been meaning to watch. Something that strikes the “I’ve been meaning to watch that…” chord.

Yesterday, I went back and pulled Dragon Blade off one of those lists. A sort of historical looking action/sword fighting movie with Adrian Brody, John Cusak and Jackie Chan. Great line up, right? The movie being something about Romans attempting to lay some kind of claim to the silk road. Cool. Has to be cool… right?

No. Not so much.

I’m not going to review the movie here. It was a mess. There’s a reason you haven’t heard of it. In fact, I’m not going to link to the trailer for this thing either. Do not recommend as the meme goes. What I will say is that it’s such a let down to wait and wait until what feels like just the right time (sword fighty Saturday matinee, amiright?) and then just get let down.

Do you find your level of expectation having an impact on how you feel about a show or film once you’ve finished watching it?

Hypothetically

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Hypothetically, our science fiction and fantasy group focuses on reading things within those categories. This was not the case this month

The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Side note – I hate that Kindle automatically marks things as “read” on here no matter how many times I change the setting. It’s terrible and stupid to boot.

On to the book itself. I don’t know how a romance novel snuck into the line up for the science fiction book club, but it did. I remain skeptical, but the book does contain scientists and it is fiction… so we’ll go with it?

I found the people in this book to be very real, if not entirely relatable or likable. I know we’re supposed to be cheering for the main character, but she just lies to people all the time. She’s very damaged and unlikable (at least to me).

I have seen others that have been down on this book as a whole, but it was light and quick and gave me everything I was expecting from a romance novel.

If this is the sort of story you enjoy, I would suggest going and reading Bellwether by Connie Willis. It’s a bit older (96) and was nominated for a Nebula award. The story revolves around a scientist studying fads and prediction. IF you enjoy that, then go and read more of Willis’s work – you’ll be glad you did.



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Colonyside

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I do like the jungle planet

Colonyside by Michael Mammay

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This one fits the same mold as the previous two in the series.

Carl still doesn’t really grow or learn… we get more and more back story, and that’s good, but he gets played again and again. His blind spots are massive and he ignores them.

This is a good book that fans will enjoy. I’m glad I read it to finish out the series (and this one does end a little better) but I think I’m done.



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Spaceside

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Spaceside by Michael Mammay

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’m going to be less spoilerific for this review.

Carl is still Carl in this book. The track record of 0 growth continues unbroken. He does have more background given about his life and reason for being in the place where he is, but he doesn’t move forward or learn… again.

There are a couple of returning characters that are enjoyable as much as side characters can be. I didn’t peg the story as quickly this time, but I think some of that was based on the way the whole thing became something of a corporate convoluted mess. I did NOT like the ending where things are resolved… mostly, except a couple of really important things. That sort of ending really irritates me. Give me an epilogue or something – wrap it up. I’ll pick up the next one if the character and/or story interest me. Forcing somebody to get the next one by leaving major things hanging is a jerk move and I resent it.

Once again, this is a very good action thriller that needs the space travel / aliens thing in order to work. Fans of military science fiction will still very much enjoy this story… just know you’re going to need to get the next one for this one to be fully resolved.



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Reading and Reviewing

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Last year was a rough year as far as the total number of books I read. This is a very mood based thing for me – but this year seems to be off to a quick start. I’ve managed to polish off 3 books so far – and I’m digging into the 4th already.

Part of this, I’m certain, is the extended time I’ve spent in medical waiting rooms already. I suppose one can put a silver lining in there if you were really working at it.

The first book I finished this year was Planetside… and I just kept forging ahead with the next 2 in the series. Here’s my review of the first one.

Planetside by Michael Mammay

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is going to be a spoilerific review ~ fair warning.

I wasn’t certain what I was getting into when I picked this one up. This was a reading group selection for Watch The Skies. It was touted as something military science fiction fans would like. Having powered through this one very quickly, I agree with that.

Around page 45 (ish?) I figured out what happened to the missing Lieutenant. I made a note in the book specifically because I was hoping I was wrong, but I wanted to place that marker in case I wasn’t. I had figured out what happened right then – just not all the specifics of how or why. The guy isn’t among friendlies on the ground and he never gets back into space on the medical ship… that doesn’t leave a lot of choices.

The main character, Carl, has precisely 0 character growth during this story. He does not learn nor does he change at all. His predictability proves to be a significant factor in duping him into making an extremely harsh choice. Firing the missiles/triggering the bombs is definitely a discussion worthy topic.

The secondary characters were well written and believable, but I struggled with the doctor who went from so very strong willed to shooting herself in what felt like an extremely short number of steps. That felt forced and incongruous with her character as written.

Having said all that, I did still enjoy this book. It’s well written and fast paced. It’s a very solid action/thriller style story in space, complete with aliens. I’d love to see this turned into a film.



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SPEAR

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Spear by Nicola Griffith

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


First – I hate beyond measure that no matter what I change the settings to on the Kindle it marks these things as read on Goodreads before I get out here to post things. That is a completely different topic, so to the book review.

Giving this book 2 stars doesn’t seem fair, but the “it was ok” that hovers up is the closest thing I could say based on the super limited star system.

The writing, the language, the way this book came together just drew me in. I was enthralled. I love the way this author uses words. I was reading this magical story and loving it.

I was loving it because of my lack of knowledge. I don’t know they myriad forms that the Arthurian legend carries through history. I’m going to say that’s on me. I went into this book cold, no reviews, no understanding of what it was, no blurbs, nothing. I grabbed it from a publisher I know to serve up things I enjoy. This certainly seemed to fit the bill. Then, about 2/3 of the way through the story Christianity was thrown in. That jarred me hard enough to almost stop reading right then and there. THAT is most certainly NOT what I want in my fantasy stories. There’s more to it than that, but we’ll leave it as ‘bad’ in terms of the story.

Then I started to pull all the parts together and understand this as a King Arthur retelling.

IF you want a gender swapped story from the King Arthur story vein, this is an excellent choice. I still believe what I said about the language. It’s wonderfully written. I may go and look at other works by this author… but I will certainly look into what the story is before hand. My feeling toward the story never recovered after that jarring moment – so I don’t know that I could recommend the book.



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BALTICON – The Panels

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I posted my schedule back before I headed to the con, so it would seem only fitting to post notes from each of those panels. I often prepare far more than gets used when it comes to panel information. Sometimes this is a question of not having enough time to shove it all in, sometimes it’s a question of sharing panel time and other times the panel just doesn’t go the way I thought it was going to.

I’m going to load these up one at a time so I can give each panel its own space – and even try to tie together with the virtual space!

My first panel of the Balticon weekend was Rating Books in the Algorithm Age and it was in fact my only virtual panel for the weekend.

Here’s the description and what I had prepared as notes~

Rating Books in the Algorithm Age

Do numeric rating systems such as “X out of 10” lead to a loss of nuance? Can the ubiquitous five-star rating system (as used by Amazon and Goodreads) lead to grade inflation? Is a well-written entertaining work deserving of top ratings, or does it also need to be groundbreaking? When a rating is going to be amalgamated without context, what are a reviewer’s ethical responsibilities?

Yes, any scoring system with limits like x out of 10 has a loss of significance. It’s designed and designated specifically to be ‘shorthand’. Can it help? Sure… to a point.

Grade inflation can (and does happen). Of course I’m going to give my book 5 stars. So’s my mom cause I asked her to (no, she won’t read it). It’s unethical to ‘stuff the ballot box’… or is it? Is campaigning for you book and getting your friends to pump it up and get attention?

Well written and entertaining is completely subjective. I have a particular prize winning work that I LOATHE and I know more than one person that thinks it’s amazing. It’s terrible, but the story of how the story got published caught me more than any rating. It was all about how the friends and family of said book got it out there to my attention.

When I do reviews for the things I read, I state up front if I got the work for free (pretty sure there are rules about this, but I genuinely don’t know them). I will say things in the very first line of the review like, “OF course it gets 5 stars… it’s mine after all”.

I have taken a long time to recognize and understand what I like about stories, and have started to apply that knowledge to how I talk about the books I really like. If you like something I like, and that continues to happen, then maybe you can trust my opinion about a book. I have one friend (Molly) who knows that if I love a book, she’ll hate it. Our tastes tend to be diametrically opposed. She knows this and takes all of my reviews with that thought in mind.

How you feel about the author can (should it?) effect how you review a book. I know a number of authors. I recommend the work of my friends.

Will I recommend a book, no matter how good, after I met the guy and he was a total dick to me? NO.

Will I recommend a book, no matter my political feelings about an author, if that guy was SUPER nice to me? That’s way more complicated.

Those were my notes. What do you think?


Which Witch?

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The Witcher of course…

Totally misleading cover too~

The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I picked this up to read it because my fan group Watch The Skies picked it as one of our monthly reads. I don’t know if I would have picked it up if not for that – based on the show based off this material.

People who know me, know that I have a fantasy bent and are frequently trying to point out sword and sorcery type things they think I’ll enjoy. I love and appreciate that.

This is NOT one that I’m going to agree with them on. Is this sword and sorcery (aka ‘traditional fantasy’)? You bet it is. Even given that it falls into my favorite genre it’s just not working for me. It feels dated as I read it some 35 years after the initial publication. It feels slightly ‘man centric’. Misogynistic is too strong a word perhaps, but the stories lack female characters with more than passing agency. The book itself, as I understand it, was an assembly of many short stories and the book didn’t feel smooth or well fitted as a story because of that. The stories themselves were all clearly variations on fairy tales of our world (beauty and the beast, snow white, etc.) and that just didn’t land well with me.

All in all, it gets 3 stars, but barely. I’m glad I read it as it gives me more context for the show, but beyond that I don’t foresee me digging into this series / franchise.



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Legend of Who?

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Pre-pandemic, if you’d asked me about the Legend of Vox Machina I would have stared at you blankly. I had heard, vaguely, of Critical Role but that would be about it. The team producing the web hit Critical Role has certainly made a massive impact on media and the route things have to production.

I’ve talked in other places about something people are labeling “the Mercer effect” as it relates to the expectations of people when they play Dungeons and Dragons. The team at CR (and it IS a team, including a lot of production) create a drama that people can follow along with BUT it doesn’t meet the expectations of players when said players get to their own game tables. Most people don’t have a production team to help run their game, nor do they do it as part of their job so even regular old game / planning time is limited. A new players view of the game can be warped by production quality.

Now, take that same story with all the warping. Get professionals to set the script, trim the action, do the voices and then have crazy good animation and you get Vox Machina’s first season on Amazon video.

I have watched the whole season. I can say that I enjoyed it. It is a very well done animated series.

The criticism(s) I have for it revolve around that warping.

I don’t watch CR when they role play their campaign on YouTube. IF I have that many hours, I’m playing or I’m designing my own game for when I’m playing. It’s not a polished show and you’ve got to wade through it all to get to the good stuff. That’s the whole point I hear you saying, but really – I don’t have that kind of time. Am I maybe missing some Easter eggs or not understanding the ‘in’ jokes? Absolutely. Do I care? No. No I do not.

Having watched the show I get what people mean about expectations. They fight and kill a dragon in the first or second episode. I have NO idea what the actual level of the characters are in the CR game, but in MY world dragons are epic, boss level fights that don’t get resolved that quickly. Dragons are part of the name of the game and defeating them like some kind of minor winged reptile without the kind gravitas they deserve just doesn’t seem right to me. It set me off for the whole series. This is made worse by the fact that one of the main bad guys is (or appears to be) a vampire. That in NO WAY works out that way in my world. Are vampires exceptional and challenging monsters? You bet. Do they have more power than dragons? Never. So – my hang up on that one, but I think it ties in with expectations.

Percy has a gun. Yes, it’s demon related and possibly magical in nature, but it’s still a gun. This is not a chocolate in my peanut butter kind of situation. I don’t want guns in my swords and sorcery game. I play fantasy for a reason. IF I want guns I’ll play a role playing game with guns. This was an aspect of the show that clearly worked, but just took me out of the right head space.

Editing the story down to basically half hour episodes is both good and bad. It’s good, because the writers got to the meat of what’s going on without requiring me to wade through all the dice rolling and background decision making that goes with any good role playing game. I really appreciated being able to get through the shows in a timely manner. What they did while doing that is skipped past longer story arc development. I know – can’t have it both ways, but this is the expectation thing again. Part of the joy of the game is working up all those deep character backgrounds and having all the other players know and use that info. It’s that shared aspect that makes the game great. The animated show didn’t give the feeling of weight that all that stuff was in there. It’s not easy to describe that feeling when you don’t know all the backstory, but you KNOW all that backstory is there. You can feel it with little details.

In the end, it was a fun ride. I found myself pointing and laughing on more than one occasion, remarking that actions / choices reminded me of our own game or that we’d had remarkably similar actions in our game. It’s relatable, but it’s just one version of how the game goes. It’s not MY version and maybe it’s not YOUR version either. It’s worth checking out. It’s fun. I look forward to the next season – just don’t expect to see a dragon defeated that easily in any game I run.

Kid Cosmic

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Normally I’d put this sort of thing under the “You Should Be Watching” section of Watch The Skies, but I feel that a lot of members of the group would find the fact that I keep going back to animated television shows aimed at kids to be problematic. Since I am a dad, I find myself leaning toward these shows more and more, even when my own kid isn’t completely interested. I say “isn’t completely interested” because often times she will jump in halfway through something I’m watching. It’s not cool when I suggest it (because what kid wants to think their parents are cool or know anything, right?) but then gets caught by the actual show.

This is the case with Kid Cosmic. I can’t call it a subversion of the super hero genre, but it is certainly an interesting look at that genre and what sort of effect that genre has on kids. This hits close to home for me because I remember all the times when I was a kid that I watched Spiderman (as part of the Electric Company show I believe) and then went directly out to play and imitate that hero.

~ Side note ~ Yes, kids have always done this. Imitating what they see is part of developing who they will become. Yes, it can be dangerous. It was then and it is now. Teaching kids safety will ever only go so far. Pushing boundaries is part of being a kid. One of my earliest memories of being a super hero ended with a trip to the hospital for stitches. It’s going to continue to happen. If you’re a parent too, be prepared.

Kid Cosmic actually takes this whole concept head on. The star of the show is steeped in the heroic stories of comic books. He’s got energy and enthusiasm to spare. He finds cosmic stones in a crashed space ship and just knows to his core that he’s supposed to become a hero and save the planet. He scoops up the stones and does his level best to prepare to be a hero. The problem with this prep is that he really sucks at it. Constantly.

In an interview about the project, the creator (Craig McCracken) states that was at least part of his point, “It’s just part of being a kid, and I like the idea of exploring that fantasy, but also this blind confidence that they’re going to be immediately great at it.”

It’s a dose of realism in a genre that is packed with over the top expectations. A short, ten episode season is available on Netflix right now. My daughter and I have watched them all. There’s a good, solid message in the show along with some very entertaining moments. Definitely worth checking out if you’re into the super hero genre, kids fantasy shows, or just good writing.