Tag: Reviews

SPSFC#4 Finalist Review: Accidental Intelligence by Bryan Chaffin

July 31, 2025 / Dave / 0 Comments

This is my last review of a full read for the Peripheral Prospectors judging team for the final round of SPSFC#4. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is Accidental Intelligence by Bryan Chaffin. The book is available from many retailers.

With this review, I’ve now reviewed five of the six finalists. Here are the other four reviews.

The sixth finalist, Whiskey and Warfare, I will review in the coming weeks. It was named as a semifinalist from our judging group back in March and made it to the finals. I missed reading it back then because we divided our allocation among our team members. That meant that once it was named a semifinalist, our team’s rating for it was fixed, and I couldn’t add a score to it. So, I focused on the semifinalists and finalists where my reviews would count in the competition. But, I want to read it – I hear it’s cool! – and now I am done with the other SPSFC reviewing and have some time. There are a couple books from our quarterfinals I also want to get to now, especially Afterburn by D. Andrews.

Blurb

Private detective Mason Truman is being yanked around by invisible strings, and it’s an AI doing the yanking. Miranda. She’s subtle. Crazy. And she thinks she can see the future. It’s enough to drive Mason nuts. Miranda believes her fellow AIs are up to some kind of grand conspiracy against the Terran Republic, and she wants Mason’s help proving it. Conspiracies are above Mason’s pay grade, though, the kind of time-sink that can put a crimp in more serious pursuits. Like drinking coffee. And staying alive.

But Miranda won’t take no for an answer. Mason can help or Miranda will make sure he becomes intimately acquainted with the finer conversational techniques of the secret police. So Mason digs until he uncovers a cache of stolen communications between a cabal of rogue AIs. They’re planning what they call Eschaton—the divinely ordained end of humanity. Unless Mason and Miranda stop the arrogant pricks, the conspirators will destroy Earth.

Mason and Miranda have one chance, a way of bottling up the rogue AIs. All Mason has to do is lure the conspirators to the right spot in a sim world. That’s how Mason learns that when Miranda said she needed help, what she meant was bait.

My Review

I quite enjoyed my time with this book. To me, it was reminiscent of cyberpunk books like William Gibson’s Neuromancer that I read back in college, with a richly imagined near-future world, in this case the mid-2100’s, extrapolated from what’s going on in our world today, and with a sometimes dizzying array of concepts, terminology, subcultures, and tech. The world Chaffin builds here is fascinating, dystopian, and complex, and it will be interesting to see (as it was with William Gibson) how prescient he is about our actual future.

Plot and Characters

The book meshes a bunch of tropes in fun an interesting ways. The main character, Mason Truman, is an old-school private eye who wouldn’t be out of place in a 1930’s noir setting. The world he lives in is filled with technology, some of it really useful, like food generators, robotic doctors, and factotums – smart, connected electronic assistants, kind of like what Apple and Amazon wish Siri and Alexa could be. The fascist-flavored society, which now spans a number of worlds and colonies within the solar system, is governed by an uneasy alliance of human plutocrats and AI personalities. Each of the AIs originated as non-sentient software designed for a purpose and then gained sentience on its own, but they’re now blocking any effort that might lead to more AIs being born. There’s a military also, but it’s largely a pawn of the two major political forces. There’s a rich online virtual reality, the Omninet, which includes games, sims, tourism, socializing, and porn.

Mason is a fun character to follow, with a strong personality, a big mouth, and a fun relationship with his factotum, Sam. He’s got some friends and family who pop in from time to time and help him, and he befriends (fairly involuntarily) a kind of psychic outsider AI, Miranda, that the some of other AIs (a little rebel group) have created as a kind of experiment in reproduction and design. There’s an uberhacker named Peanut, a malicious ex-fiancé, and a military hero cousin who all also get involved.

What starts as a routine missing persons case become ever more complex, and the stakes get higher and higher, and the pace more frenetic, but I’ll leave off talking about plot to avoid spoilers.

My Thoughts

It’s clear why this book is a finalist. The world Chaffin has created has tons of detail, and it’s mostly introduced to us through action and dialogue, not through big info dumps, although sometimes Mason goes off on a topic in his head. That focus on the story is refreshing, although as a reader, you have to be on top of your game to take it all in and get up to speed. I really meant it in a good way when I said this reminds me of Neuromancer – there’s some wonderful extrapolation from what present-day LLMs can do to how they’d behave in a world where they’ve become sentient, and there’s some wonderfully clever thinking and speculation about what society might become when our virtual worlds become ever more of our focus. What’s even better, Chaffin gives us little hints of how we got from 2025 to 2139, with pieces of future history referenced throughout, but also from characters running into older technology which reveals the stepping stones Chaffin imagines humanity might use to get to the future where the book happens. This is great stuff. I wouldn’t say that all of it seemed 100% likely or workable to me, but that doesn’t matter. It was great fun to read about, and it was brilliantly deep and complex. This is the first novel I’ve read about future AI that seems to tie in closely to our current cloud computing and newly-LLM-filled lives, which I found really cool – just like Gibson took a limited Internet and imagined much of what cyberspace would come to be.

The pace of the book gets faster and faster as Mason caroms from clue to clue and plan to plan, facing sinister interference, threats, and calamity. There’s a kind of sci-fi action movie feel to the plot, with much of the last third of the book being a big chase climax spanning the real world and many cyberspace locations. That’s good for keeping up excitement, but it does mean some story elements get dropped or minimized as we go, with major characters sometimes just disappearing from the story with no further explanation or description, and occasionally with big plot elements not fully explained or resolved, at least to my reading.

That focus on pace and plot means the things we were learning about the characters become less relevant, and their actions become more and more constrained by outside forces. I liked the structure of the big plot showdown at the end – the parties involved, some big twists, the threats – but the execution left me a little dissatisfied, with an ambiguity to the ending and epilogue, and with a lack of clarity (at least to me) as to what actually happened in the world or even to the major characters. Despite a lot of scenery chewing from a couple of major villains, the ending felt a little rushed, and it seemed to me that Mason lacked agency for much of the climax and conclusion, merely bouncing like a pinball between various plot targets, aided or hindered by forces he couldn’t control. In the midst of that, though, there was a wonderful scene where he’s multitasking brilliantly – using his factotum to do research, talking an ally through a difficult task, and also trying to accomplish a task on his own, all while the world is falling apart, and it’s just a great image of a distracted, tech-heavy future, all condensed into a single scene.

VAGUE SEMI-SPOILERY BITS HERE: At the end, despite enjoying the book and having a lot of fun with it, I had a lot of questions, like: what is Sam becoming? what happened to Andrew? where does all this leave the AIs? does Mason get to his oft-stated goal of a normal life with abundant expensive coffee? what happens to Miranda, and what was she playing at? did Meredith get what was coming to her? Answering these would have made the book longer and more boring, for sure, so it makes sense that Chaffin wrapped things up. But I felt like I’d missed out on some promises made, and that some interesting and important threads were not tied off. The rush at the end also meant that Mason’s arc wasn’t resolved, at least for me. At times during the story, he felt more like a mouthy gumshoe archetype than a real person, and the ending, which didn’t really share where he’d arrived at or who he had become, didn’t help that feeling. A lot of the other characters seem to start to go on personal journeys, too, but again, many of these don’t really get very far, and we never see where they might lead. I also 100% did not understand what the epilogue was getting at, which may be a me problem.

Summation

If you’re up for a vivid near-future sci-fi story with a strong and capable cyberpunk feel, Accidental Intelligence delivers beautifully. For me, the worldbuilding was the strongest part, and the wide-ranging plot and colorful characters do a great job of painting a luminous, seedy picture of where we might be headed as a species.

SPSFC#4 Finalist Review: Bisection by Sheila Jenné

July 27, 2025 / Dave / 1 Comment

This is my second new review of a full read for the Peripheral Prospectors judging team for the final round of SPSFC#4. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is Bisection by Sheila Jenné. The book is available from many retailers.

Blurb

Tria and Resa have shared the same body since they were born. Like everyone on their home planet of Kinaru, their mind and body are divided down the middle: the logical right and the emotional left. Tria, the right, has a budding career as a biologist, while Resa dreams of more freedom than their home planet grants her.

When aliens land on Kinaru, Tria and Resa seize the opportunity to be the first of their people to travel to the stars. Karnath, the alien scientist assigned to study them, is convinced there is more to the Kinaru than meets the eye. But only days into the trip, crew members start turning up dead, and a mutiny redirects the ship toward a forbidden, war-torn planet—Earth.

To solve a conspiracy that threatens three planets, Tria must find out the truth of who her people really are, and Resa needs to finally tell Tria the dark secrets she’s been hiding all their lives.

My Review

I quite enjoyed my time with this book. It’s a space opera at heart, but it has some of the big concept what-if pieces central to, say, a classic Star Trek episode, where there’s an alien race who’s like us but different in one or two key ways. There are actually two such races here, and we get to explore both. Where I felt the book really shined was with the unique nature of the Kinaru species, brought to wonderful and touching life by the main character.

Plot and Characters

The book has an ongoing plot that alternates between first-contact, mystery, and thriller, but the real heart of the book are the central characters, Tria il Resa, who are two personalities who share a single body, with Tria being logical, coldly analytical, and a bit aloof, while Resa is emotional, artistic, impulsive, and romantic. It’s a little like if Kirk and Spock were forced to inhabit the same body, except that these two have always been together and are mutually respectful, caring friends.

Most of the first-person narrative is from Tria, who is accustomed to running things, as is tradition on Kinaru. The “rights” – the right-brained analytical types – are dominant over the “lefts,” who have a history of being subjugated, although it is a weird sort of beloved subjugation. We do get some chapters from Resa’s perspective, too, and it’s a real joy to see their different mindsets, motivations, and thought processes. This is the coolest part of the book – an awesome high-concept foundation, where it almost doesn’t matter what storyline you put on top of it – it’s going to be interesting to explore.

There is a storyline, though, and it crosses the galaxy to bring about conflict, betrayal, discovery, action, and even a little romance. Tria and Resa boldly stow away aboard an alien ship visiting their world, Kinaru, and after some initial consternation, they are adopted as guests of a scientific exploration ship sent to their world by the Shatakazans. The Kinaru are highly advanced socially, but they are probably somewhere near early 20th-century Earth levels of technology, so the advanced tech and space travel of the Shatakazans is something very new to Tria and Resa. The Shatakazans are reptillian and have a number of significant biological and social differences to humans, but they breathe the same air and act a lot like humans in a lot of ways, particularly personality-wise and with their wants and desires all feeling pretty human. Each Shatakazan chooses a faction tied to a philosophy, which is a neat concept to explore. Their planet is nominally democratic, or at least parliamentary, but it is more like a one-party democracy as existed in Mexico and Japan for many years, with minor factions not having much power.

We meet a bunch of Shatakazans, but the one who’s most developed is Karnath, a scientist and free soul. I had a little trouble keeping the rest of them straight, as they are numerous and have weird names, but that’s probably a me thing. To avoid spoilers, I’ll probably leave it there, but suffice it to say, there are a bunch of adventures Tria and Resa and their lizard buddies go on as the book winds its way to its conclusion, and we learn a lot more about their two societies as we go.

My Thoughts

It’s clear why this book is a finalist. It’s well-written and engaging, with some great big sci-fi concepts to explore, which it does in interesting and entertaining ways. The two-people-in-one-body concept is done really, really well. I was reminded a little bit of Heinlein’s I Will Fear No Evil, in which an old man and a young woman share a body, but this book has more to say, and the split between right-brain and left-brain identities, with the social structures that bifurcation forces on Kinaru society, makes it all the more powerful. This elevates this over some of the other books I’ve read for the competition which were simpler space adventures (although some of these are admittedly great space adventures). Bisection is thinky, in a good way, which is really great.

Where the book was a little weaker for me was in the nuts and bolts of the plot. A lot of it was admirably solid and well crafted, but there were a number of head-scratcher moments for me. Many of these surrounded plans, either by the protagonists or their enemies. These plans (both major and minor) often seemed very half-baked, where I felt like real people with the information they had might have chosen better strategies, or where the strategies they chose could well have been completely unworkable. In these moments, the people in the story became less real to me. In some cases, these questionable plans just work because the plot needs them to. In other cases, the questionable plans fail in completely predictable ways. As a repeated example, nobody in this book is any good at all at holding onto prisoners. Like, zero good jailers here. Major failures of basic jailing. There’s also a bad-guy plan at the heart of the adventure plot that is something that seems both ill-fated and poorly conceived, and yet it functions far better than it seems like it should, with the help of a local government acting in in a way I thought was not at all how it would act (or could act) in the situation presented.

There are a couple other minor bits that itched at me while I read. There’s a huge, huge mysterious coincidence the characters discover early on which cannot be anything but deliberate and engineered, but the explanations they float for how it could be (a weird intersystem comet, mostly) are not something serious scientists would entertain, or at least not phrase that way. Another thing that bugged me a little was the communication. Like Star Trek, there’s some universal translation going on here, but once it’s established, it’s basically perfect and almost never commented on, even when I wondered how certain parties would have gotten one of the translators. Of course, Star Trek does this shamelessly, even having the latex lips of the aliens form English words, so it’s not a big deal, and it would make any space opera a lot harder to read. Finally, there’s at one point a pretty major revelation which felt a little like a Greek god interfering in the mortal realm. For me, this took a good bit of agency away from the main characters, but it’s explained pretty well and leads to a few of the book’s absolute best moments, one of them completely, gloriously unexpected, so it’s forgiven.

All of these are minor nitpicks and easily ignored. The story is really about what happens when a race of people has one key difference from our own society, and the beauty of the book is how that plays out in their lives, their relationships, their culture, and their thoughts. The dawning realization of Tria that she has fundamentally misunderstood Resa, her closest friend, and in fact fundamentally misunderstood personhood, society, and basic humanity, is A-plus, gold-medal stuff, written beautifully. I loved it, and while I wished there was a little more of that and a little less of the action plot, I’ll happily take what I was given, and what Jenné chose to write.

Summation

If you’re up for a big-concept sci-fi story, hearkening back to those big concepts that Theodore Sturgeon and Philip K. Dick explored in sci-fi’s classical heyday, Bisection delivers. The beautiful, evolving, respectful conflict between the two main characters, one out of place in the galaxy, one out of place in her own society and her own body, is great, great stuff.

SPSFC#4 Finalist Review: On Impulse by Heather Texle

July 16, 2025 / Dave / 0 Comments

This is my first new review of a full read for the Peripheral Prospectors judging team for the final round of SPSFC#4. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is On Impulse by Heather Texle. The book is available from many retailers.

Blurb

When the Department trained me to catch criminals, I never dreamed I’d become one.

Agent. Suspect. Intergalactic fugitive.

I was one of them until I shot my partner in self-defense. Even though the Department cleared me of wrongdoing, my co-workers didn’t agree. They turned their backs on me, so I turned my back on them.

My partner’s actions never made sense. After ignoring my gut for a year, I asked my tech-genius best friend to dig into it. Now Jarrett’s gone dark, and I soon discover he’d been brutally murdered. An officer finds me standing over the body, blaster in hand. Even I admit it looks bad.

There’s no way I can trust the Department to investigate further—not if I’m already the prime suspect. My only option is to run. Is it impulsive? Sure. Will having law enforcement dog me across the galaxy make life difficult? Most certainly. I’ll have to stay one step ahead of them if I want to solve Jarrett’s murder and clear my name.

Doing that will require every trick the Department taught me—and a few I learned on my own.

My Review

I really enjoyed my time with this book. It’s a fun space opera romp with elements of police procedural, spy thriller, heist, and corporate villainy. There’s a plucky, engaging heroine (with the badass name of Reliance Sinclair) and a deep cast of secondary characters, even including a bionic guinea pig and a ship AI masquerading as a robotic cat. The AI designer has given the ship the temperament of an actual cat, which is a hoot.

The story is constantly in motion, with Reliance outwitting and evading or falling prey to many factions of enemies on her personal quest to figure out who killed her friend. The setting is some time in the future after Earthlings have spread out and terraformed and colonized many other worlds, although there are still people on Earth and Mars. There are no aliens or alien tech in the story – just a variety of human worlds, sometimes with interesting quirks like gravitational or climate differences or interesting (and violent) planetary histories. The worlds are more Earthlike than in some space operas, with regular Earth foods, animals, and plants.

Plot and Characters

The book happens in several phases, each with a different plot focus, but the first big chunk of the story is Reliance investigating the death of a friend, a fellow officer when she used to be a space cop. It’s an intriguing mystery which quickly gets her deep in the middle of danger from a bunch of directions, and Reliance sneaks and fights and wheedles and lies her way across multiple worlds.

The story is always interesting as Reliance unpacks more of the story and then gets herself emmeshed in what is going on. It’s interesting when she reflects back on her past as a space cop and when she uses skills or contacts from that time to advance her current objectives. She’s a fun character – resourceful, snarky, ass-kicking, and just a good time. The book is entirely within her first-person perspective. The other characters get less screen time, although we do meet a few criminals and spend more time with a set of cops who pursue Reliance through most of the book. I particularly liked a tech specialist cop named DeAjamae when she was hacking things – her constant patter of anger and expletives at the computers and systems she was using was really fun.

The inclusion of migraines in Reliance’s character is an interesting choice that gives her depth, and they play into later developments in a neat way. It was interesting to see a character having to deal with a chronic medical problem, and her coping mechanisms sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t.

My Thoughts

It’s clear why this book is a finalist. It’s well-written, fun, action-packed, and a good read, the kind you feel happy about when you’re finished. There’s fighting, action, some sad bits, and a really strong main character. The worlds Reliance visits aren’t always described in detail, but you get a sense of how many of them work and how the human society works overall.

If I were to pick at something, it would probably be some plot developments where characters interacting with Reliance make decisions that seem foolish or out of character but without which either Reliance wouldn’t survive or the plot wouldn’t progress. There were a few moments that reminded me of Scott Evil from Austin Powers lamenting, “Why don’t you just shoot him?” In particular, a decision by a certain bad guy as Reliance starts to figure everything out seems terribly risky and foolish.

It wasn’t just the big decisions – there were also small head-scratcher opponent decisions that let Reliance escape or avoid detection or wiggle out of tight spots. All of these let the story continue, and it’s a fun enough story that it’s not a big deal at all, but I found some of them pulled me out of the story while I thought about smarter things Reliance’s opponents could or should have done. There were also a couple of times where Reliance instantly has a unique answer to a problem, or a contact who can help that we didn’t know about before, and I think it would have helped credulity if those were hinted at earlier rather than popping into the narrative just as they are needed.

One other minor quibble was some lack of clarity on how advanced various technologies are and how they work. Tech seems quite advanced in some ways (terraforming, space travel), while in others it seemed more 21st century than 25th or whatever (e.g. physical drives and servers). Some of the tech didn’t quite seem consistent, either – I was never really sure how stuff like interplanetary communications and networking functioned, or how the blasters worked, or how injured somebody got when they were stunned, or how long the stunning was supposed to last. But those are problems every Star Trek series has run into also and mostly failed at, and only uber-nerds probably care.

All of those are minor nitpicks and easily ignored. The story achieves its main goal very ably, which is to tell an exciting, kick-ass, funny story with a charismatic heroine and a gallery of heroic and/or hilarious sidekicks and vile villains.

Summation

If you’re up for a fun romp with a lot of great futuristic plot elements and a main character who’s really easy to cheer for, then On Impulse is definitely for you. Because of my schedule, I actually ended up listening to this one via a text-to-speech app while driving to DC and back (11 hours or so round trip), and it made the miles fly by (even when the algorithm insisted on saying “spacedock” as “spacey dock”). A good time, and a book I’m glad I had a chance to read.

Wheel of Time Episode 8 Analysis (much delayed)

October 10, 2022 / Dave / 0 Comments

[Note: pretty big spoilers for Episode 8 and previous episodes follow]

APOLOGIES: It’s been a huge gap between my review of Episode 7 and Episode 8 here, like seven months. That’s probably a commentary on how little I wanted to finish this thing. Anyway, here goes.

RELATED DISCLAIMER: I have to admit, I didn’t remember what was going on much, because I watched Episode 7 back in February. So, I’m sure part of the WTF I experienced was from that. Maybe 15%.

D&D THEME FOR THIS EPISODE: The DM has taken a new job and is moving out of town, so the campaign is ending, and the DM knows they have only one session to wrap up all these half-baked storylines they’ve been sort of but not really paying attention to over the previous 16 months. Also, they split the party last time, which obviously you should never do, but especially when you’re trying to come to a fun conclusion. There’s no way this will be satisfying, but the players will pretend it was.

OBLIGATORY UNNECESSARY FLASHBACK: The episode started with a flashback to 3000 years ago in some kind of Swedish-decorated apartment with a couple in kind of cool modern-styled evening wear arguing about gender roles and playing with their baby. Relevance was not shown. However, it is clear that fashion in Tar Valon will suffer greatly over the next three milennia. Fun terminology note: This was technically a dragon arguing with a chair, which evokes Clint Eastwood’s Republican Convention speech.

MAIN “PLOT” RECAP:

— Moiraine has decided Rand is the actual chosen one because (I think) a psychic barmaid told her so. Moiraine is not taking the other potentially useful and loyal super-powerful witches and werewolves with her because everybody who comes to the well who’s not the dragon dies*.

*Actually, nobody who comes to the well who’s not the Dragon dies, negating several episodes worth of buildup and decision-making. Nobody dies at the well at all other than my hopes for a more satisfying ending.

— Moiraine’s taken Rand into some weeds called The Blight. If I were the manifestation of evil incarnate, I would try to do something more impressive than grow weeds and entrap local youth. The weeds look a lot like the Bermuda grass in my lawn, which had the unintended effect of me imagining all the characters therein as very, very small.

— The other formerly-chosen-but-now-not-chosen ones are stuck in a city called Fal Dara, where they have basically nothing to do, until the city conveniently comes under attack by an enormous army of bad guys, an army which would maybe have been better deployed in the Bermuda grass killing Rand and Moiraine if the Dark Lord had his act together.

— The climactic event, the one that we’re supposed to have been building up to all season, is a massive, well-choreographed sword and magic fight that you want to watch again in slow motion so as not to miss any of the exciting details and cool moves. Ha, ha, no it wasn’t. Instead, they go into a hole in the weeds, have a domestic dream on a farm, and talk to a low-rent Al Pacino in a dinner jacket, at which point Rand makes some kind of negging choice sort of respecting women while not actually really doing so, and Al Pacino leaves disappointed. Moiraine had a chance to kill Rand, and instead of doing so, to the vast regret of this viewer, she did not.

— Rand then acknowledges that he now knows he will eventually go nuts and destroy the world, and instead of taking his own life to save humanity, he just peaces out through the weeds, asking Moiraine for help in ghosting all his friends.

— Through a tortured sequence of coincidences, deux ex machinae, overacting, under-explaining, and dumbassery, everything and everyone gets saved, except for a few designated tragic side characters (TSC’s), most of whom announce their impending deaths just before they happen. As an author who worries about plot, realism, and continuity, this was very hard to watch.

THE CHARACTERS LEFT BEHIND:

— Mat with one t was left way behind. Apparently the actor left the show after episode 6 and was written out of the rest of the first season, which explains his awkward departure scene where he just looks into the Waze and everybody else shouts “Noooooo!” He’ll be back, recast, in season 2. There goes an opportunity to jettison one of our dumb-as-paint self-involved whiners.

— Perrin has somehow converted to pacifism in the middle of a war, which is inconvenient. This may derive from his time with the bucolic cart people, even though I’m pretty sure he straight-up ate somebody in Episode 7 after his time with the cart Quakers. When the Fal Darans decide to remodel the throne room while a war is going on in order to recover a magic horn they can’t blow (not making that up), Perrin helps, because Loial the Ogier (who, like Moiraine, has far too many i’s in his name) tells him to ask how he can help. He does this in a particularly painful scene reminiscent of a Mister Rogers episode. When Perrin finally gets a chance to bury an axe in an evil dude who’s stealing the magic horn and taunting him about his childhood, which the evil Arsenio Hall guy inexplicably spent selling lanterns in his village, Perrin just grimaces and watches the guy go. Super unsatisfying. Somebody should have buried an axe in somebody, dammit.

— Egwene gets all weepy at being left behind and then accomplishes not much. Eventually, she serves as a backup D-cell battery to the princess of Fal Dara, Amalisa Jagad (named by Robert Jordan through yet another stomping of fingers on the typewriter and then filling in some vowels in the interstices).

— Nynaeve gets subjected to the most pathetic post-one-night-stand declaration of love I think I’ve seen in a show from Lan, who should know better to come on this strong after the first date. Wait a few days and text, dude. You’re going to scare her away like this. After this, she has to teach Lan to find the woman HE’S PSYCHICALLY BONDED WITH FOR LIFE, and then she becomes another backup D-cell.

MISSED OPPORTUNITY AT EMOTIONAL DEPTH:

When the princess exceeds her recommended amperage and starts to blow fuses, Nynaeve seems to do something unexplained to save Egwene from the resulting air fryer cook cycle. This is badass and in character for Nynaeve. As a result, Nynaeve is rendered extra-crispy in what is apparently the unexpected noble death of a major character. Yay! Shortly afterward, Egwene cries and strokes her cheek, returning Nynaeve to medium rare and to life, thereby removing any emotional impact or badassery previously established. This unexplained capability, despite being at least a level 8 spell and exhibiting powers beyond what Jesus reportedly controlled, does not elevate Egwene above a second-rate love-interest character, and it also founds no major new religions. No death should ever appear tragic in this show from now on, because Egwene has control of mortality’s undo button.

STUPID-ASS WTF:

— The sa’angreal: Moiraine says a thousand male channelers gave all their energy to this one object, which means I guess it’s just the Aes Sedai version of TwitchTV. Why they would sacrifice all their power so that Rand can carry around a green tchotchke that he doesn’t appear to need, I don’t know. I suspect they all succumbed to some kind of email scam and had their channeling accounts drained through fraud.

— Geography: Moiraine says the Seven Towers of Malkier used to be a few miles from Fal Dara, which statement only makes sense if the Blight has somehow relocated the Seven Towers.

— The bad guy dream: Unless you’re really sure it’s a dream, maybe don’t stab yourself to get out of it. Talking to you, Rand.

— The other bad guy dream: If you’re ever tempted to end a season of a big-budget fantasy show with two guys talking about life choices on a farm, do not, and give up any career you perceive for yourself in entertainment.

— Trollocs: The estimation of trolloc horde sizes was just nuts. At one point, they say “there are 60 fades, which means there are 5,000 to 10,000 trollocs.” That implies a very specific and weirdly non-integer-divisible range of acceptable fade-to-trolloc ratios, which was very confusing. At another point, in the dark, the princess gazes at the big wall and says, it looks like there are 20,000 of them. When there are five of you, the difference between 10,000 and 20,000 trollocs is not very important, I’d think. Perhaps they have prepared the Gap by seeding it with glow-in-the-dark Trolloc-counting indicator markers for easy horde size estimation, but failing that, the numerical precision of these assertions (at night, from far away) was also hard to fathom.

— Chemistry: Moiraine mentions adrenaline, which has only been really known to modern science since about 1900. Apparently the organic biochemistry field in Tar Valon is seriously on point.

— Strategy: If you have five women who can destroy 20,000 trollocs and 60 (perhaps extending to 120) fades with lightning in under 18 seconds, maybe deploy them to the field BEFORE sending every male resident of your kingdom (except those emergency-remodeling the throne room) to their deaths.

— Overhyped danger: Moiraine tells Rand to “touch nothing” in the blight, making it sound as serious as when Mat picked up that obviously evil hissing dagger in the cursed city that one time. After impressing upon Rand the vital importance of this prohibition, she and Rand and Lan touch literally everything from there on out without consequence.

NOMINATIONS:

— Worst motivational speech ever: Agelmar Jagad. We’re all going to die, and then everybody we know is going to die, and then everybody else we don’t even know is going to die, so it doesn’t matter which armor I wear.

— Most pathetically obvious allegory ever: Naming dream-Egwene and Rand’s dream baby Joiya, so that when Rand rejects the opportunity to buy into the fake OnlyFans world of dream-Egwene, he has to literally give up Joy.

— Most rotoscoping in a final battle scene: Rand al’Thor, approximately 1800 degrees of rotation.

— Most obvious recreation of Merry and Pippin as a boring and unimportant side-duo: Egwene and Perrin (bonus for nearly matching one of the names).

MISSED OPPORTUNITY:

— When everybody was saying “The Gap will not hold,” within me was birthed a burning desire to see the tragic and pointless sacrifice of the male population of Fal Dara occur not in a modified dam-fort but instead in a denim-filled clothing store. It would have been far more entertaining than watching them shoot crossbows out of poorly-designed arrow slits.

TIMES THE SUBTITLES UNINTENTIONALLY CAPTURED THE SHOW’S ESSENCE:
— “Shallow panting”
— “Distant screaming intensified”
— [Dialog] “Must be an awful feeling”

There you go. Will I watch Season 2? Probably. Will I enjoy it? Probably not.

Wheel of Time Review and Self-Indulgent Complaining – Episode 3

December 1, 2021 / Dave

Wheel of Time Episode 3 analysis:

Note: pretty big spoilers for Episode 3 follow

D&D Theme for this episode: Don’t split the party. It’s confusing, hard to DM, and nobody gets a good story.

More ways that trollocs are a bad candidate for violent minions of the dark:

— When a fellow trolloc is wounded, they will drop everything, literally, including a perfectly edible unsullied human Wisdom, to eat a fellow trolloc’s entrails. I mean, having an army that encourages self-cannibalism is just a terrible liability.

— Trollocs apparently have terrible vision. We are given a shot of Trolloc-Cam™, which, given that we never see a deliberate first-person view from anybody else, is clearly an homage to the Doom movie starring the Rock. In this revealing insight into what it means to live as a trolloc, we learn that, unlike actual cows, who have a tremendously wide field of view, due to their role as, you know, prey, Trollocs apparently have hyperfocused forward-looking vision that gets dark and fuzzy around the edges. Hiring a faux-bovine murderous horde that can’t see their own elbows is just terrible Dark Lording, I tell you.

But maybe there’s just no other option:

— Apparently ravenous wolves aren’t a good backup evil horde, because just like Trollocs, they corner the Chosen Ones, and then, you know, just top moving and let them go. Unlike the trollocs, however, where there was always an excuse for the heavily-torched horde for stopping, in this case, the wolves were just like, nah, and nobody even tried to explain it.

Fun thing #2 – Times when the show was unintentionally a metaphor for itself:

— Metaphor #1: A sort of Czech Kenny Rogers gleeman gets up on stage in the bar, spends an inordinate amount of time preparing to play during extra-close camera shots, then gives a confusing and snarly performance that is like a verse and a half. Then he leaves, having played a set consisting of one song, and asks for money, which makes him just the laziest gig band ever. Here’s the metaphor part – his audience greets this overwrought performance with stunned silence and zero applause. Mining town dive bar patrons, you are me watching this show.

— Metaphor #2: Moiraine literally slept through the entire episode, not unlike some of its viewers

Speaking of this mining town:

— This is the kind of town where, when a stranger walks up, everyone gives them a five-second disgruntled stare. This happens a lot in fantasy movies, but I have only experienced it in real life when trying to order at a Taco Bell right before closing.

— This is apparently also the kind of town where half the people mine all day, and the other half day-drink and listen to melodramatic songs without applauding.

— The Chosen Douches are told, more or less verbatim, “If you steal, you will be run through our penal system, which consists of putting you in a cage, and afterward, shooting you with arrows.” (I know that is the sequence because the arrows stuck out of the bars). Just before this revelation, Czech Kenny has stolen money from Mat (AKA Douche #2), admits it to an audience of day drinkers, and is nonetheless not put in a cage and shot with arrows. Later on, Mat steals, twice, and he too is not cage-arrowed. That’s some bullshit.

— Also, putting somebody in a cage and then shooting them with arrows is redundant and a waste of both effort and arrows. Either penal solution will do nicely. Just pick one. And for the love of god, in a town with zero economy other than homicidal barmaiding or hard labor, take the valuable stuff off your ciminals either before or after cage-arrowing them.

— The Dark One’s plan apparently consists of hiring enough lovelorn barmaids with needlessly reinforced inn room doors, ensuring they receive intense A-level training in sword fighting, and then… leaving them as barmaids. Here’s a thought. If you have a massively lethal barmaid, just have her attack the Chosen Ones immediately, injure them, and tie them up. Do not go through an extended sequence of wood chopping, flirting, and drink service before doing this. Another idea: Use said massively lethal barmaids instead of Trollocs. At least it is likely that the barmaids can swim.

— Apparently, we are going to meet a race of violent gingers who are only violent when wearing black face bandanas and at no other times. Kind of a Westlands version of the Crips, but with a kerchief-related off switch. I would imagine this society gets very confusing whenever it gets dusty out.

Weird thing – The part with confusing physical geography:

— All of the Chosen Ones and their escorts leave the shattered city being slo-mo chased by creeping death mold.

— These escorts are the same ones who previously wanted only to find and escort the CO’s, and now are inexplicably quite content to have left them behind. Perhaps they know that whatever chases the CO’s will stop just before eviscerating them, because the water is deep, because my friend’s entrails look tasty, because I need a new torch, or just because.

— Physical geography observation: The way into the shattered city was a dense forest, like, with ferns and shit.

— Physical geography conundrum #1: One pair of Chosen Ones (the ones who thought riding a log to safety was a good idea) inexplicably emerges like an hour later onto a heavily weathered seacost-looking-place full of freeze-thaw weathered white boulders.

— Physical geography conundrum #2: Another pair of Chosen Ones (the ones who thought cliffdiving to safety in full heavy clothing was a good idea) end up like an hour later somehow in Siberia in autumn on a grassy plain, one that nonetheless has massive flint stones exposed at the surface.

— Physical geography conundrum #3: The escorts (the ones who just rode horses out of the city) end up like an hour later in a sort of forest/meadow biome.

— This last part is where we learn that bare-butt warrior guy feels all of Moiraine’s pain. This is asserted despite the fact that she’s been stabbed and poisoned by trollocs and is near death, and he’s just peachy and hasn’t even grimaced once. He leaves the Aes Sedai he is sworn to defend and maybe in love with LYING UNCONSCIOUS BY A TREE IN TROLLOC- AND WOLF-INFESTED WOODS while he goes and watches somebody pick flowers. Then the Wisdom tells him “this is going to hurt,” and it, like, totally doesn’t hurt. Not at all. And it’s over super quick. She’s like the opposite of the nurse who gives you shots, who says “just a quick little poke” and MOTHERF*$&ER that stuff hurts. Also, the Wisdom fled the trolloc horde, but apparently brought an entire home chemistry kit with her from her Fortress Of Solitude glowing geyser cave. Sure.

— In the Siberian autumn biome, where the wolves just give up, is a random band of benevolent jolly gypsies, who nonetheless surround their guests threateningly, demand answers to mysterious questions, and then tell them the answers. This is just obnoxious, and totally not how inquiry-based pedagogy works. And one of them totally looks like Sideshow Bob and I just couldn’t stop seeing that the whole time and thinking he had a tattoo that said DIE PERRIN, DIE.

As for ranking the Chosen ones, they all were kind of equally weaselly this time, which was disappointing. Mat, my main man from episodes #1 and #2, turned lazy and whiny, because I guess Rand is contagious or something. Rand wasn’t as bad, but I think that’s just because he couldn’t keep the Whine dial set at 11 the whole time. But his blue shirt was still totally annoying, as was his banter with the homicidal barmaid. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Chosen One with less game than he had, and yet homicidal barmaid was throwing herself at him.

We’re off until the next episode drops. This episode was actually marginally better than the first two, although I had to laugh when the Chosen Ones who had left Two Rivers following a cryptic person to the east and then ditched her finished the episode following a different cryptic person to the east. They must just station eastward-facing cryptic people all over the area here, like some kind of Aes Sedai WPA program.

Wheel of Time Review and Self-Indulgent Complaining – Episodes 1 & 2

December 1, 2021 / Dave / 0 Comments

My take on Amazon’s The Wheel of Time after two episodes:

(mild spoilers below, but nearly nothing has happened in two hours, so there’s not much to spoil)

Some observations:

If you ever find yourself a bone-faced needle-toothed oval-mouthed scream-enthusiast mid-level manager for a Dark Lord, do not employ Trollocs. They might look fierce, be OK at taking down a small village, and be too stupid to request dental benefits, sure, but consider the following:

— Your torch budget will break the bank. Seriously. Nearly every one of these dudes seems to need their own torch, even when just running through the woods. What do they do with them when the fighting starts? Is this a union rule?

— Every time they seem poised to capture the Chosen Ones, some technicality stops them. They can’t cross deep water. They won’t enter the shattered city. Tuesday is team-building day. Are these war axes fair trade? For beast-men, these guys are remarkably ineffective.

— They take bellowing breaks with alarming frequency. This time could much better be spent killing Chosen Ones, or even running through the well-illuminated woods.

— They have no situational awareness. They nearly exclusively target hapless villagers, not Chosen Ones, even in a town that’s like half Chosen Ones and their enablers.

Speaking of shattered cities, here are some observations:

— The build-up for the evil that overtook the city kind of oversold the reality, which ended up being creeping death mold that conveniently waits long enough to attack to build dramatic tension and allow for more brooding. A little Lysol would save your Chosen Ones and also spruce up the place.

— When your horse is being consumed by death mold, maybe start running then. The death mold can apparently ony move as fast as you can, which is admittedly pretty good for mold, but not really a threat. If you leave early, you’ll avoid many potential dangers.

— Mysterious sword-wielding gratuitous-naked-butt warrior dude told you to stay together and not eat anything you didn’t bring (although this sounds more like a Noom weight-loss strategy than a shattered city thing). That means if you find a glowing hissing dagger in a chest next to a dead guy, you should probably leave it there. Even in non-shattered-city situations, this is good policy.

Along those lines, if you have a deep trolloc-poisoned wound in your leg, and you’re traveling with an Aes Sedai, you should ask her to suck out the black goo. That’s literally all she can do that’s effective, compared to disassembling taverns, drowning ferrymen, speaking in riddles, and providing cool light displays for any needed raves. Having a wolf lick your wound in the woods is absolutely counterindicated, not FDA approved, and the wrong kind of homeopathy, even.

Also, I’m not clear on why the scenery-chewing bigot cult (1) has so many adherents, since they seem to kinda suck, (2) wears white in the woods, because that’s just stupid, and (3) thinks that the only armor you need is left-arm armor.

The main event: Here’s my ranking of the four Chosen Ones, in order of how much I hope they are not the actual Chosen One, which is also the order of how much I want them to die.

4) Mat (D&D Class: Thief) – bonus points for being funny, sort of smart about the situation they’re in, and actually seeming human through effective acting. Points off for being a total moron in the shattered city (see above), and for being Mat with one T.

3) Perrin (D&D Class: Fighter) – bonus points for tragic story and moments of quiet sorrow, and for being generally cool. Points off for not getting that leg thing looked at, and for ill-advised lupine alternative medicine.

2) Egwene (D&D Class: Magic-User, maybe? Still level 0) – bonus points for choosing career over loser boyfriend and for being smart in most non-romantic areas. Major points off for not actually dumping loser boyfriend after all and still caring what he thinks. Seriously, girl, just no.

[Huge step up in weaseliness goes here]

1) Rand (D&D Class: Rules lawyer. Rolled up bard, bought equipment for ranger, but wants to play barbarian regardless and wants everybody to deal with it) – No bonus points. Eesh. So horrible. No idea what the director said. Maybe “Remember Hayden Christensen in the Prequels? Go for that energy. People loved that.” This guy’s day planner is completely full, but all the entries are Brooding, Sulking, Whining, and Pouting. Seriously, even this guy’s lips make me angry, and I will never again think a sheepskin coat might look cool in the right situation. They should all just agree that there were actually only three Chosen Ones and find a convenient sucking river whirlpool to throw him in. If he’s the Chosen One, give me the Dark Lord instead.

And finally, if you are one of the snowflakes-who-call-people-snowflakes who are upset about the diverse casting, then you can bite the big one. It’s a fantasy world. Anybody can be there, and anybody should. If you’re not one of those snowflake people, but having a fantasy show without all white guys still seems wrong somehow, then congratulations, you’re feeling the faintest echo of what fantasy fans of color have been experiencing for decades, without the generous helping of actual discrimination and disempowerment that usually comes with it.

Looking forward to six more episodes of walking through the woods being emo while pursued by half-assed beast men, all while failing to deal with important own-goal issues like untreated wounds, taking the obviously cursed dagger, pouting so hard you dream of eating bats, and failed zero-chemistry teen romance.