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Hello and welcome to the Form of the Geek, my name is Chris, and these are my thoughts on what I've read and seen this week. I'm recording this on June 27th, 2016.
I have finished the Hugo packet, save for the novels, and have started to enter non packet territory. So this week you get my unvarnished thoughts on Best Novella, the rest of the Best Graphic Story category, and Best Dramatic Presentation, short form. Enjoy.
Novella:
Penric’s Demon:
Excellent. Certainly worthy of award consideration, and Lois McMaster Bujold is a proven award winner, so it shouldn’t be surprising. Penric is a younger son in an impoverished minor country noble family who is on the way to his engagement to the daughter of a rich local cheese merchant. It’s a political marriage, meant to ennoble the cheese merchant’s family and infuse some much needed cash into the estate of the local lord. Think Cora and Robert’s marriage in Downton Abbey and you’ll get the picture. Anyway, on the road to town there appears to be some sort of emergency going on and an old woman is on the ground with a handful of guards milling about not sure what to do. Penric does what he can to comfort the old woman as she dies and before he knows what’s happening he’s been. . .possessed isn’t quite the right word, inhabited maybe? It appears that in this world there are five gods, the father, the mother, the son, the daughter, and the bastard. The old woman was the host for one of the bastard’s demons. Before I go too far, this is not considered a bad thing. The bastard is venerated just as much as the other four gods are, though he’s got some pretty specific areas that he’s responsible for. Hosting one of his demons can be a pretty prestigious deal, and the devotees of the bastard can wait for years for the opportunity. Penric just happened to be at the right place at the right time. Or wrong place, depending on your point of view. Regardless, he gets packed up and shipped off to the next major town that has somebody in the Bastard’s order of sufficient importance to know what to do. On the way, he and the demon, who he names Desdemona, get to know each other and it’s a pretty interesting pairing. This sheltered and unlearned but reasonably intelligent young man and this woman who has lived 13 lives inside of each others heads.
Thinking back on it, not a whole heck of a lot happens, there’s one point where someone tries to kill him so they can steal the demon, complete with a fight and narrow escape, but other than that it’s mostly talk, but it’s really really well done and interesting to read. The world that Bujold built is really interesting, and there’s three books in the series that come before this novella, and I may need to check them out before too long.
Binti:
Good, if a bit padded. I don’t know if there is a culture that does the washing with clay mixed with oil thing as described here, but if there isn’t she made it compelling. I want to know more about these people who explore by turning inwards. I want to know more about the Meduse. I want to know more about this world that Okorafor has created, but I also think this story needed one more solid edit. Introspection is good, but you need to have balance in your storytelling.
Binti is the first person from her tribe to be accepted into the most prestigious university in the galaxy, which appears to occupy an entire planet. On the way there their ship is invaded by a people who hate humans and everyone is killed but the pilot and Binti. Why Binti wasn’t killed in the attack is the question that occupies much that remains. She learns about them, they learn about her, it goes on, she learns that why they did what they did had a purpose and she volunteers to negotiate a peace for them, which works out rather easily. The whole interplanetary relations diplomacy bit was a little simple, much too much faith is being placed in the reasonableness of academics here. As I say, it’s good, but it’s a little padded in the middle and the ending is a little too neat.
The Builders:
It appears to be some sort of heist story involving talking rodents. I’m thinking The Great Mouse Detective-ish. I don’t know for certain, however, because I got bored pretty quick and dropped it.
Slow Bullets: Another I couldn’t make it through. War criminal appears to have tagged a soldier on the other side as the war is ending with a different internal ID thing that they call a slow bullet. He probably made it look like she was him, but I didn’t enjoy it so I gave it up.
Perfect State: As I said on the Facebook page, this story is incredible. Due to massive overpopulation, the majority of the human race is kept as brains in jars living inside of individualized computer simulations where each individual is the most important person in the world. The few people who are left living in the real world monitor them and develop challenges for them as they come to dominate their worlds to basically keep them entertained. There are connections between the worlds and a limited amount of competition can be created for people after they’ve conquered their worlds in whatever manner is most appropriate. This is the story of one man who gets tired of knowing that everything is a lie and wants to live a more authentic life. It’s awesome. It’s my pick for winner by a long way.
Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form:
My Little Pony, Friendship is Magic: The Cutie Map.
I don’t really see the appeal. It’s a decent Saturday morning cartoon type show. It has a nice innocuous message about how everybody is special in their own way and making everybody the same is bad, buy our toys. Other than that, there’s not much too it. Any bronys out there who want to tell me about it, I would love to hear it, and you do you, man, but I don’t get the attraction.
Jessica Jones: AKA Smile
That was really really good. I have seen over and over that this show really gets the life of an abuse victim, and I totally see that. My only complaint is why oh why did David Tennant have to use the same accent he used as Doctor Who? My only saving grace there comes from a quote from BBC Radio 4 Friday Night Comedy. At the end of the shows that they do they ask a question of the audience and read out some really clever responses. I do not remember the question asked that elicited response, but one of the audience members responded with “Why does David Tenant look so devastatingly handsome as Doctor Who and not as anything else?” It’s really true. He looked terrible as Killgrave. I greatly enjoyed this, and I feel silly for not having watched it up to now.
Doctor Who: Heaven Sent
Solving puzzles, kicking ass, and taking names, even if it takes a couple billions years to do it, that’s The Doctor’s way. I love Doctor Who. I love this episode. It’s everything a Doctor Who episode should be. Also, is it just me or did that whole castle remind you of a Zelda dungeon?
I’m having trouble finding the episodes for Grimm and Supernatural in places where I don’t have to pay extra for them that probably won’t make my computer burst into a ball of flames. I’ll keep trying though.
More Graphic Stories:
Erin Dies Alone:
This is pretty darn good. It’s a webcomic about a depressed twenty something woman who lives alone in her apartment when her imaginary friend from childhood comes back into her life and they play video games. And when I say play I mean they enter into the video games. And at one point bring a character from one of them back into the apartment.
Full Frontal Nerdity: Meh. Nerdy jokes that aren’t all that funny.
This week in Review the MCU we have the grand finale of Phase One, The Avengers. Having watched these movies back to back to back like I have, and not one at a time over the span of the years it took to get them all to screen I’m not viewing them in the way that they were originally intended, but that gives an interesting perspective. I once watched Monty Python’s Meaning of Life with the commentary from the Pythons themselves on and during the short at the beginning about the Accountants taking over the firm and sailing the building off into the sunset they talked about how when the movie was in theaters there was a bit of a disconnect between the two parts. The beginning of it was big and cinematic in scale while the main movie, the actual Meaning of Life part of it, was smaller and really made more sense as a TV thing. Eventually the other Pythons got the last laugh over Terry Gilliam and his big cinematic masterpiece because most of the people who will ever watch The Meaning of Life will watch it on their TVs. That’s a really long way to say that The Avengers, while it was certainly a big cinematic event, binging Phase One like I did makes it feel like the season finale of season one of a major prestige TV show.
We’ve had all the main characters get their own episode, Iron Man even gets two, and you have the thread of SHIELD and the Avengers Initiative weaving its way throughout. The McGuffin of the whole thing, the Tesseract, shows up in at least three of the movies that I noticed and then it all comes together with a recurring villain in Loki making a big show of trying to take everything over. All of our heroes come together and each of them uses their unique talents to contribute to the massive threat that Loki and the Chitauri pose to them.
I liked Loki’s development as a character from Thor to here. I can totally see him placing the blame for all of his problems on Thor. He’s a narcissist of the highest order and not taking responsibility for his actions in Thor and doubling down on them was the best decision they could have made. Having the Chitauri be the bad guys would have been fine, but using Loki as the conduit for the conflict brought everything together nicely.
And having Hulk be the big hero in the climactic battle was awesome in a way that is not at all expected. I haven’t seen Age of Ultron, but if he doesn’t find a way to punch Thor across a room just for the heck of it again I’ll be disappointed.
In short, a good, but not great movie, like much of the rest of Phase One. Typically snappy dialogue from Joss Whedon, excellent pacing giving every character their spot to shine.
Next week we move on the Phase Two and catch up with Tony Stark in Iron Man 3.
It dawned on me that I haven't been talking about Civil War II, the current event from Marvel. I'm buying most of the titles for it, and while it has been a little spotty in places, the overall effect has been largely successful. The plot is very Minority Report. There's a new Inhuman that has visions where he can predict the future with a really high degree of accuracy, but it's not set in stone. Everything is malleable, it's all probability based. Iron Man sees more problems than solutions with this, Captain Marvel thinks it's marvelous. Then War Machine gets killed and Iron Man flies off the handle and kidnaps Ulysses, the Inhuman in question. It's all going downhill quickly. So that's the main plot, but in a move that should be a surprise to nobody I want to talk about how this effects Ms Marvel.
Ms Marvel 8 opens during the partition of India in 1947. Kamala's ancestors live in India, but are fleeing to Pakistan to escape the sectarian violence. It's extremely sweet. It seems a little non sequitur to the rest of the story at this point, but that may change as further issues come out. In any event, Captain Marvel has summoned Ms Marvel to her space station to make her an offer, and as Captain Marvel is Kamala's hero she naturally leaps at the chance.
The offer is to see how Ulysses’ powers work for street level heroics, such as what Ms Marvel is usually doing. Ms Marvel is put in charge of a group of volunteers and together they will stop crimes before they start in Jersey City. It works, too. Somebody stole a tank and it's going to blow up and she and her little crew stop him before he can cause that to happen. Kamala is flying high until she talks to her new live in sister in law Tyesha who points out to her the ill effects that mass incarceration has had on the African American community and she asks Kamala if maybe the villains need saving, too.
Kamala is now really conflicted. She loves and trusts Captain Marvel, but she lives and trusts Tyesha too. Status quo wins for the moment until the last page where she busts down a door that unbeknownst to her belongs to her friend Josh. He's supposedly going to cause something terrible to happen. Major major cliff hanger. Then you turn the page and see the teaser for next month's issue where Kamala appears to have spray painted an ugly message over a picture of Captain Marvel. I think she's chosen a side in this war, and it isn't her hero.
That’s it for this week. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns you can leave a comment on the website formofthegeek.blogspot.com or on the Facebook page at facebook.com/formofthegeek. I’m also on twitter @holeintherug. If you enjoyed the show, please take a moment to leave a review on iTunes. It really helps other people find the show. Thank you for listening and I’ll talk to you again soon.
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