The Expanse may have been cancelled, but we still have seven episodes left! And I for one am still hoping that if enough of the audience watches the show live (gasp!) and tweets along, either Syfy itself or a Streaming God will hear our pleas. This week’s episode, “Immolation,” gave us some amazing action, a few resolutions, and—dare I say it?—at least one happy ending.
At least, it’s happy for now.
This is an all-space episode—don’t look for Earth, cause you won’t find it. Also, after several character building episodes, “Triple Point” is just action and tension alllll the way down. There are three threads: The UNN Agatha King menaces the Martian ship Hammurabi, and they, along with the Pinus Contorta crew, converge over Io. Meanwhile Jules-Pierre Mao and Dr. Strickland work on their nefarious plot below.
Come talk about it with us, won’t you?
This week’s episode of The Expanse, “Reload,” was another connective tissue episode. There were a few spikes of pure action, but for the most part this episode was about the ever-cascading consequences of “IFF.”
Plus, spoiler alert: Errinwright still hasn’t been kicked in the shins. What the heck, show? Hurry up and kick that jerk already.
OK show, I have but one request: can Pastor Anna kick Errinwright in the shins next week?
This week’s episode of The Expanse, “Assured Destruction,” gave us the War Room of the UN, the protomolecule labs on Io, and two different hints that Amos has the most interesting backstory of anyone on the show. It also featured two of the Game of Thrones-iest sequences yet. But before I get into that, a quick recap.
Last year, The Expanse got a double-episode season premiere — and it really could we have used one this time around too. The way the show lets its narrative bleed from one season to another means that there’s never any downtime, and no need to ramp back up again, when a new season starts; we’re still in the thick of it, and the “it,” right now, is on the verge of all-out interplanetary war.
But war isn’t even the biggest part of the scope of this show, as the very first scenes of “Fight or Flight” make clear. It’s not James Holden we start with, fixing the Rocinante after getting rid of a glowing blue space monster; it’s not Chrisjen Avasarala, betrayed and pinned down on what amounts to an enemy ship.
(Spoilers for everything up to and including the season three premiere!)
Plenty of things about Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi have been divisive, but few have been as derided as the Canto Bight sequence.
“The whole thing is just a disgracefully bad bit of storytelling.”
“…feels pointless and tacked on…”
Was it put there as a merchandising tool, a way to sell space pony plushies and several dozen more figurines? Does it fail to advance the story at all? Does it matter?
No, and no, and yes. Canto Bight is neither a fluffy diversion nor a tacked-on way to find something to do with Rose and Finn. It’s absolutely vital to the themes of The Last Jedi, and if you took it out, you’d lose more than just a few lines of dialogue about morality and wealth in the galaxy.
Canto Bight isn’t really about the rich people at all. It’s about the reality of life under a fascist First Order, and about unsung, unflashy work that needs to be done to fix the galaxy.
Spoilers for The Last Jedi follow.
If The Last Jedi is the Star Wars feast we’ve been waiting for all year, Canto Bight is an odd appetizer platter, an array of tidbits that you might find unnecessary—or you might find appealingly curious.
Why do we get a whole book centered on Canto Bight, of all the Star Wars locations? The casino city was teased in Vanity Fair this summer, when Rian Johnson described it as “a playground, basically, for rich assholes.” One glittering city on the desert planet of Cantonica, it sits next to a giant manmade sea and is largely a resort city for the wealthy and glitzy. It’s so fancy, it has rare Alderaanian trees—or what people claim are Alderaanian trees. This city has its own mythology, as Mira Grant (the pen name of Seanan McGuire) explains in “The Wine in Dreams”:
It began, as most beautiful things do, with money, with ambition, and with deceit. “Come to Canto Bight, the greatest city of pleasures the galaxy has ever known,” they cried, and if they lied in the beginning, the ones who carry the cry now are telling the complete and utter truth. They crafted reality out of story.
Magic is gone, but the Muntjac is ready for its close-up! The ship that takes Quentin on a tax-collecting adventure in Lev Grossman’s second Magicians novel, The Magician King, is likely to play a major role in season three of The Magicians, which is going to involve one heck of a quest: Just a little trip to get magic back, no big deal…
Check out the new trailer for season three, and let the theorizing begin!
Unlike many fantasy and young adult heroes and heroines, Frances Hardinge’s main characters aren’t chosen ones. They’re the other kind: misfits, orphans, oddballs, changelings. They’re young women chafing against responsibilities, sexist societies, the nature of their own existence. These characters are primarily interested in survival, though that focus has a tendency to align with bigger things: freedom, or justice, or knowledge.
After finishing A Face Like Glass, I went head-over-heels for Hardinge, and binge-read everything else I could get my hands on in the span of a few weeks. Each one of her books makes its own argument for why you ought to be reading Hardinge—but since you might not have time to read five or six or eight books right this second, here are three places you might start. These aren’t necessarily my favorite Hardinge tales, but each of them, in its own way, presents a common Hardinge theme: a world reshaped, in large part thanks to the choices of a stubborn girl.
What do you remember when you think of books you read long, long ago? Plot? Character? Setting? Or something more nebulous?
I tend to remember how a book felt, which is about as nebulous as things get. There’s usually one lingering image in my very visual-reader brain, as well. Jo Clayton’s Serroi books feel defiant, a small green girl in a looming landscape. Melanie Rawn’s dragon books are regal, but there’s one image of a picnic that I can never shake, and another of a valley.
Patricia A. McKillip’s The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, on the other hand, is a mountain home, a dragon, solitude, and defensiveness. Rereading the book, which Tachyon Publications just reissued, was a singular experience: marrying those feelings with what actually happens in the book, which both is and is not what I remember.
“That night, everybody lost something,” Moïra Fowley-Doyle’s Spellbook of the Lost and Found begins. “Not everybody noticed.” The lost things are small or large, tangible or less so, valuable or personal or some combination of the above. They slipped away during a bonfire party, the kind that goes on probably too long and ends when you fall asleep in a field in the wee hours of the morning.
And somehow, Fowley-Doyle’s sentences feel like those nights—like the lull at the end of a party when questionable choices are so easy to make. Olive wakes up the next day missing a shoe and her best friend, Rose. She and Rose went to the party to get drunk and cry, which seems like a perfectly valid reason to go to a party. But three other girls—Holly, Laurel, and Ash—went because their diaries were missing.
It’s what they found that sets Spellbook in motion.
If you’ve got ten or so hours to spare between now and July 16th, I highly recommend binge-devouring season six of Game of Thrones, even—or maybe especially—if you watched it when it aired last year. What seemed, week to week, like an inconsistent, fairly unsatisfying season (certain moments aside) turns out to be a solid stretch of narrative setup and motion when you gulp it down in a sitting or three. Every season of intrigue and betrayal moves the narrative forward, but finally, by the end of season three, the pieces are in intriguing place on the board—places that suggest season seven will be a battle of consolidation and compromise as various parties begin to take the Night King’s threat seriously.
There’s going to be war. Everyone’s talking about it. But who’s left to fight?
There exists no convincing argument that movies should never be based on board games, because Clue exists, and therefore disproves any such argument. That said, the game of Battleship is a categorically stupid idea for a movie. Battleship is basically bingo with a bit of deductive strategy and no wacky prizes at the end. People in movies cannot sit around yelling YOU SUNK MY BATTLESHIP at each other, a fact which must have been clear to the people behind Battleship. Despite its dubious source material, Battleship is the one of the greatest dumb action movies of the early twenty-teens. Writers Jon and Erich Hoeber and director Peter Berg clearly took their Hasbro/Universal paychecks, gave the game a serious side-eye, and opted to keep just a few elements: big honkin’ battleships, cylindrical missile things, and goofy coordinates.
Everything else is newly made-up big dumb action movie gold.
C.A. Higgins’ Lightless begins aboard a unique spaceship, the Ananke, that has a black hole for a heart. That’s how Althea Bastet sees it, anyway. Though she’s the ship’s engineer, her practical skills are tangled up with her affection for the ship she thinks of as hers. The black hole powers the ship and its purpose, but Althea dreams that of the black hole as a heart, a bloody, embodied thing.
Althea can tell when something is wrong aboard her ship, and at the opening of Higgins’ series, she knows. Lightless takes places entirely aboard the Ananke; it’s not exactly a locked-ship story, as other characters come and go, but the cat-and-mouse game that drives one of its storylines makes the ship feel claustrophobic. But Lightless is only the first in the trilogy, and while Higgins’ tale never leaves the Ananke entirely, the subsequent books—Supernova and the closing Radiate, which comes out next week—spread across the entire solar system. It’s a surprise, to move from Lightless’s narrow hallways to the surface of Mars and beyond, but Higgins’ shifts in viewpoint are effortless. She seeds each book’s story in the pages of the previous books, connecting everyone in a narrative that loops back on itself. Though the perspective is different, Radiate begins where the action of Lightless starts: with Matthew Gale (called Mattie) and Leontios Ivanov (called Ivan) boarding the Ananke.
Some spoilers for Lightless and general discussion of Supernova and Radiate follow.
It’s because of American Gods that I have a sprawling perfume collection. Ten years ago, Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab—BPAL for short—released their first line of scents based on Neil Gaiman’s novel, and I found I could no longer resist the temptation to find out what these beloved fictional characters might smell like.
If you are turning up your nose, thinking, Oh no, not perfume, I hate that stuff, wait! So was I. I loathed perfume. I held my breath walking past perfume counters, leaving a wide berth around the salespeople positioned to offer customers a spritz of something terrifying. When I saw references to BPAL online, I scrolled a little faster, certain it was not relevant to me.
But there is nothing like a story to make a person change her mind about a thing.
