Last vlog for NaNoWriMo 2018, unless I record one more epilogue a bit later to show how I reorganized my Scrivener project.
Validating 50,247 words. Lack of editing. Thoughts on what to do next. Reflecting on the month.
There are in fact 31 vlog videos, which you can find in this NaNoWriMo 2018 Playlist on YouTube. All the ups and downs of writing for 30 days.
It’s interesting to watch view statistics when you upload a series of videos to YouTube. You might think, as I do, that if you say, “I’m going to upload a series of videos to YouTube, one every day, and here’s the first one,” that people would know and understand how to find and watch the complete series if they’re interested, and you’ll get similar view statistics on each video. But you’d be wrong. The first video will get some views, if you have any followers at all, and then the remainder of the videos will get zero views because everyone will wander away and forget about you amid the rest of their busy daily lives. So from time to time you have to keep reminding people, on social media, or in blog posts like this one. :)
Anyway, in this video: Surprisingly good writing sessions. A week of NaNoWriMo, cutting off dying scenes, new characters help invigorate the writing, longest writing session so far, nervousness about writing female characters as a dude, the long-awaited dark side of NaNoWriMo (competition), running out of plot notes is going to make the rest of NaNoWriMo even harder.
Considerably more talking than writing on day 4. Morning update: Irish accents, daylight savings, second Mythica movie, nervous about iOS Scrivener, feeling mute when I’m not able to type on a keyboard, struggling to differentiate character voices in dialog. Evening update: the story so far, NaNoWriMo community and me.
Kind of a long one. A better day. Hilarious text-to-speech on the iPad, switching scenes, what I like about my writing so far, blanks between writing sessions, thinking about getting Scrivener for iOS, starting fresh every day, finally getting into the world of the story, bringing complex modern sociopolitical themes into the backdrop of the sword-and-sorcery city setting.
I’m trying an experiment this year for NaNoWriMo. Instead of writing blog posts about my progress, I’m recording “vlogs” about it. I created a YouTube channel where you can watch me ramble about my NaNoWriMo journey this year.
My goal is to record a short video every day talking about my progress, the challenges I run into, how I deal with them, etc. Things that I think might be educational or inspiring or helpful or just funny to other writers. A lot about “the writing process” and how I’m feeling about the project as I go along. Thrills, chills, spills. Stuff that I would normally write about, but I’m just going to talk about them instead. I would rather reserve my writing energy for the NaNoWriMo draft as much as possible.
I’m going to leave the videos unedited. On day one, I threw out my back for the fourth time in the last couple months, which makes it virtually impossible to sit in a chair normally and type. I was very upset and discouraged about it, and the video I recorded on day one reflects that. I was going to throw it out, but I decided no–I want to make an “authentic” sort of a “documentary” about this year’s NaNoWriMo, so I went ahead and uploaded it anyway, with the hope that I might look back at it later and be able to say, “Wow, I did a great job digging myself out of that really low point.”
Anyway, that’ll be over on YouTube. The thrills of victory and agonies of defeat and all that. (So far, I have to admit, it is mostly agony of defeat.) I disabled comments though because I don’t really want any feedback from YouTube commenters hehe. It’s purely for educational purposes and my own personal entertainment.
I woke this morning to an almost literally freezing cold house, which means that we can no longer pretend that the cold months of the year won’t happen. By “we” I mean “me,” because there are some people who actually like the transition from summer to fall. I personally spend most days between November and March in three or four layers of clothes, moving slowly, barely staving off uncontrollable shivering fits, unable to concentrate, hiding in the darkness that consumes most of each day.
You may have noticed I haven’t posted much this year, which is because this has largely been a complete disaster of a year. It started with a cataract in one eye, then some doctor visits to get high blood pressure under control so I didn’t have a stroke, then hurting my hands just from playing a game, to the point that I could barely even type for two months. In between all of that, I utterly failed to make any progress on my Survey project. I got to the point where I would get panic attacks even thinking about continuing to work on it, so convinced was I that it was the worst, unsalvageable dreck I had ever written. I had such incredibly high hopes for it and it’s just … not good.
But a funny thing happened. Not long ago, a whole bunch of Monty Python stuff dropped on Netflix, including the final live show they did at the O2 in 2014. It was amazing. I mean, they only did about five sketches, and they clearly weren’t in their prime, but I found it incredibly inspiring to see these guys up there at age 70 doing something entirely new, and approaching it with a level of professionalism and skill that I wish I had even a tiny percentage of. I found myself watching a lot of documentaries on and interviews with the Python folks, hanging on every word, trying to absorb every bit of wisdom I could glean, hoping just a tiny little bit of it would rub off on me.
So last week I was inspired to finally write some new material for the Survey project, which is what it desperately needs. It has a beginning and “kind of” an end, but there is no middle and I have no idea what to put in there. But I just started writing and I’m going to keep trying to write stuff every day until November.
Because the abominable temperature change means another year of NaNoWriMo is almost here, and of course I’m planning to give it another try. (I have done it every year since 2009, but I skipped 2015, which I regretted.) I recently reflected that this will be my ninth attempt to write a novel to start my writing career, and the previous eight attempts have been miserable failures, resulting in either unsalvageable, incomplete drafts, or manuscripts that aren’t even close to the level of quality that I would want to release, and require so much editing that I might as well just start over. Actually, I think I tried to write some stuff during the summer events, too, so maybe more than eight failures.
As such I approach NaNoWriMo with a lot less enthusiasm than I once did. But I really enjoy the process, and for some indefinable reason I fall into the daily writing lifestyle with relative ease. If only there was something to help with the other 11 months of the year.
Join me as I re-watch The Expanse, Season 1, to try to find out where the show went wrong for me.
I’ve decided that I’m just going to quote Wikipedia’s brief episode summaries here, instead of spending all of my time writing my own summaries. The point of these posts is to explore what I think of the episodes, not retell the episodes.
The Big Empty was written by Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, and directed by Terry McDonough. I am noting the writers and directors, by the way, to see if I notice any patterns in which writers or directors create the episodes I like or dislike.
From Wikipedia: “On Ceres, Miller investigates the theft of water, now severely rationed due to the Canterbury‘s failure to arrive. In Julie Mao’s apartment, he finds clues placing her aboard the Scopuli. On Earth, Avasarala sends the suspected OPA captive to Luna after her superior, Undersecretary Sadavir Errinwright, disapproves of “gravity torture”, but the captive commits suicide. In the asteroid belt, the Canterbury‘s shuttle is damaged by debris from the ice hauler’s destruction. Using the last of their air, the survivors build an improvised antenna to place a distress call, which is responded to by the Martian navy flagship, the MCRN Donnager. After Nagata identifies the distress transponder aboard the Scopuli as using Martian military technology, Holden broadcasts a message to that effect to the Solar System, as insurance against being killed as inconvenient witnesses.”
SyFy.com also has a nice recap: The Expanse Recap – The Big Empty | SYFY WIRE
I am also going to link to Tor.com’s more detailed episode recaps and reactions, because I often read them myself (their recaps, and others like them, inspired this series), though I don’t always agree with them: The Expanse: “The Big Empty” Focuses on Character Rather than Action | Tor.com
Overall I would characterize this as a solid episode. It was a bit of a letdown after the strong ending of the first episode, as I expected it to continue strong, but instead it only continued, well, “solid.” It’s a measure of just how much of a visceral punch the final scene of the first episode was when I felt a letdown from a “solid” episode.
Still, I enjoyed the survival story of Holden and company trying to avoid dying in the shuttle. The tension was high because, since we’re just starting out in this show, we have no idea who the “untouchables” are, so everyone feels like they’re in peril. The shuttle scenes definitely set the tone for a show about “hardcore” science fiction, where space is dangerous and any number of things could kill you at any moment. This is not your grandma’s science fiction, where you just push a few buttons and warp to a new galaxy.
And for that reason alone, I rate it better than the first episode, and one of the better episodes of the season. Add to that some solid character-building amongst Holden’s ragtag team and you’ve got a pretty good episode here.
One glaring misfire for me, though, is that this episode doesn’t do anything to endear Holden to me. I can’t believe I’m saying this, considering how I feel about his flat performances in Season 3, but Holden is a bit of an emotional wreck and a hothead in this episode. I’m reminded of a child trying to act like an adult. The rest of his crew is right not to trust him, especially after he reveals to Naomi that he is the one that forced them to investigate the distress call and ultimately got the Canterbury destroyed. He seems to have forgotten all about Ade during this hour.
Miller is the one showing all kinds of likable character traits in this episode, letting a water thief go instead of busting him. We will see that kid Diogo again later. Miller and Havelock’s storyline in this episode shows the class warfare on Ceres Station very well. It’s interesting, but still felt like backstory and I’d rather move things along. I’m still want to find Julie Mao floating in that spaceship from the prologue.
There weren’t very many highlights in this episode. Like I said, it was just a solid, workhorse of an episode, with very few peaks or valleys.
I laughed when Naomi said, “I’m sorry, does anyone need a back rub first?” Naomi is at her best in this episode, taking charge of the situation, and in her element.
I also liked Miller’s partner’s zinger in the Ceres administrator’s office: “Maybe if everyone in Ceres had this view, they’d respect you more.” It earned him a cactus plant from the administrator.
I did not buy it when Holden “dropped” his wrench and it went flying off into the vacuum of space. The way it was shot, it made me think the wrench should have simply floated there next to his hand until he recovered it, because it would of course have the same relative velocity in the vacuum of space. Instead he let go of the wrench, and it looked like it was pushed away by some unknown force, as if they were flying through an atmosphere. It stood out in a show that is going out of its way to tell us it’s trying to “get the science right.” It was another situation that was, perhaps, explained in the book, but visually it made no sense to me, and I was left feeling like the show “made a mistake.”
They pulled the old “he’s dead and we gave up on CPR but then he woke up a few seconds later anyway” trope, which earned a groan from me.
Miller learned that Julie Mao had a fractured relationship with her rich father Jules-Pierre Mao, someone we will learn much more about in the second and third seasons. She left Ceres Station on the Scopuli, but Miller isn’t aware of the distress call or the incident with the Canterbury yet. It lets the audience know that Miller’s case and Holden’s experiences are connected somehow, although for myself, the connection seems really tenuous and most of the time, I’d rather be following Miller’s investigation, as I am a sucker for mysteries.
Naomi found that the distress beacon planted on the Scopuli to lure the Canterbury was made from Martian military technology, leading us to think that Mars is responsible for the Canterbury’s destruction. I had to re-watch that scene to puzzle out how they leaped to the conclusion, because they glossed over that little factoid really fast. They didn’t show very well that a) Holden and company had removed the distress beacon device from the Scopuli, b) they brought it with them on the shuttle, and c) Naomi took it apart to see who made it. Zooming past important plot details is a recurring theme in the show. I criticize the show a lot for telling instead of showing, but sometimes you have to tell the audience things, and if it’s important, it should really be highlighted.
I am learning to like the Miller character just from watching him build a strange relationship with this missing girl that he knows nothing about. He is bonding more with the person who is not there, than with the people on the station with him. He is the stereotypical gruff-exterior-but-sensitive-inside character, and this is an archetype that I know well and understand.
Holden’s archetype, on the other hand, continues to elude me in the second episode. I don’t know what to make of him, and I can’t predict how he’s going to behave. His decision to send out an “open letter” to the entire system about the Canterbury seems completely irrational in the moment, an ill-conceived plan that only succeeds by luck. (I am not entirely sure that it did succeed, actually–other events interrupted how that story would have played out.)
We learned that Naomi is a take-charge, natural leader, and there’s probably a lot more to her than meets the eye. It’s her first episode to shine, and I like her a lot more than Holden.
Amos seems like a remorseless amoral killer, but for some reason is completely loyal to Naomi. He says casually that he would have had no trouble throwing Holden off into space, or shooting him in the back of the head while he sent his message, if Naomi hadn’t stopped him. I don’t yet know what to make of him, but he makes me nervous.
Back on Earth, we learned that Chrisjen is “two heartbeats away” from running the government, but we still don’t quite know what her role is. It’s very mysterious, but it clearly involves intelligence work. She worries a great deal about Mars allying with The Belt against Earth.
We are introduced to the Undersecretary General Sadavir Errinwright in this episode, though he doesn’t have much of a role except to explain that the “gravity torture” that Chrisjen used on the OPA operative isn’t cool.
I’m going to try to rank the order of the episodes that I liked. In a perfect world, the rankings should end up in the reverse order of the episodes, because ideally, with a serial series like this, you would want the audience to like each successive episode more than the previous one. We’ll see how it turns out, and I’ll be interested to compare my rankings with the rest of the Internet.
I started to write a blog post about The Expanse Season 3, Episode 7 (Delta-V). That episode seemed to be the beginning of a brand new story arc, perhaps the start of a new book in the source material. I didn’t particularly care for the episode, and I ended up ranting about all the things I didn’t like about The Expanse, especially in Season 3. I’m fully aware that others love this show and praise it endlessly, and most consider Season 3 to be the best one yet, while I’m over here struggling to find a single thing to hold onto and enjoy. I wondered what I was missing. Surely I must be missing something?
So I decided to re-watch the first season, which I remember liking but not necessarily loving. After that, I plan to re-watch the second season, which I remember liking more at first, then throwing my hands up in despair near the end of the season when I stopped watching completely. I’m hoping to learn from a second viewing where the show went wrong for me. The show is densely packed with information, so perhaps it simply requires a second viewing to understand it. (I see this as a flaw, but maybe I’ll learn something different.)
Then, maybe, I can go back and re-watch Season 3 again, and see it differently.
I started re-watching Season 1 on Saturday, May 26th, 2018, when I watched the first five episodes and made some notes. The next day I watched the next five episodes and made some more notes.
I know everyone will ask: No, I have not read any of the books. I own the first audiobook, and plan to listen to it eventually. But I am a firm believer in watching the television or movie adaptation before reading the book, if you have a choice about it. That way, you can enjoy both mediums. Reading the book first almost always results in a disappointing viewing experience of the visual adaptation, with incredibly rare exceptions (eg. Lord of the Rings). That’s my philosophy, anyway.
For this post, I’m going to summarize the plot. I quickly learned that’s a fool’s errand, and for the rest of my posts, I’ll lean on others to do that heavy lifting.
The first episode was written by Mark Ferbus and Hawk Ostby, and directed by Terry McDonough. Directing duties for the first season were split among four different directors, with McDonough helming the most at four. I didn’t remember it very fondly, to be honest.
The show begins with a credits sequence which, if I’m not mistaken, we don’t see again until episode 9. It’s quite good, though it is somewhat reminiscent of Game of Thrones. I love the music. I’m puzzled why they don’t use it more.
After the credits, we get a text prologue to explain the system-wide political state of The Solar System. This is an immediate disappointment.
I don’t like it when movies and television do this, as it strikes me as lazy, and I’m immediately put off. It feels like I have to do homework before I can even start to relax and enjoy the show. It’s the equivalent of starting a book with backstory and worldbuilding, instead of starting with a story.
Thankfully, that sin is quickly forgotten because we launch into a very atmospheric, beautiful, tense visual prologue showing a woman trapped in a space ship. We will come to know her as Julie Mao, but for now, we have no idea who she is, but I’m completely captivated by her dire situation. We seem to understand a lot about her from this brief screen time, even though she doesn’t say anything. She is smart and resourceful as she struggles to survive on the derelict ship, floating in zero-gravity without food or water. The scene ends when she arrives in the engine room, where a glowing blue “growth” covers everything, and a body jitters. She screams and we cut away.
It was one of the best scenes of the episode, and it set the stage for the whole season. Very well done.
But … after the prologue, I found the majority of the rest of the episode to be pretty flat. Granted, every story has to start somewhere, and this one starts out on Ceres Station in the Asteroid Belt with a lot of explanations about the political climate on the UN-controlled station, and a lot of background information about living in low-gravity. Intellectually, I found the backstory and worldbuilding interesting, but I felt no real connection with Miller, the first lead character we meet here. He appears to be a typical doesn’t-play-by-the-rules noir cop trying to show his new, fish-out-of-water rookie partner the ropes on the station. I don’t hate it, but it feels like a trope I’ve seen a million times before. Miller will become my favorite character on the show, but for now, I don’t see it.
The real story begins when Miller’s chief at “Star Helix” (a private security force, one assumes, hired by the UN) gives him a new assignment: Find a missing girl named Julie Mao. This is the woman from the prologue.
We cut away to the next major plotline, which consumes most of the rest of the episode, involving the space trawler Canterbury near Saturn, gathering ice. We will get to know The Expanse’s scene-switching techniques very well over the course of the show. The show tends to use captions to describe new settings to us, and if we happen to blink or miss the tiny text, we might be lost. I never get used to this, and I don’t care for it. I find it to be a crutch, to compensate for what wasn’t filmed due to lack of time, budget, or imagination. There isn’t much consistency in when they use the captions, either.
Here I will also mention that I don’t care for the show’s tendency to cut away from scenes just as they start to get interesting. I am largely letting all the exposition from Ceres Station wash over me, not really caring what’s going on or understanding why any of it is relevant to any kind of story, when Miller is given this assignment to find Julie Mao from the prologue. Suddenly my ears prick up and I lean forward thinking, “Ah ha, now we’re getting somewhere!” Then we cut away to something else entirely, never to return in this episode, and I sink back in disappointment.
Out in space, we meet Jim Holden on the Canterbury, arguably the person who will become the main character of the show if not completely in season 1, then certainly by the end of season 2. I’ll be honest, initially, I find him to be kind of a jerk. Or maybe childish is a better word. He looks like a college kid to me. He’s a lazy second officer, who has a chance to move up to the executive officer position, but doesn’t want it. He’s having an affair with the ship’s navigator Ade, and he seems to like her a lot more than she likes him (which is understandable to me, because see aforementioned comment regarding jerkness). He’d rather stay in the comfortable second officer position, with no real responsibilities, not making waves. He sure doesn’t seem like hero material to me.
I have to mention that we see Jonathan Banks (who played Mike in Breaking Bad) criminally underutilized in a very brief scene as an executive officer who goes a bit bonkers. I am stunned at how little screen time this fantastic actor gets, and assume he must have a larger role later, but he never returns.
We meet several other lead characters on the Canterbury here, but they have no special role in this episode. We’ll get to know them later.
Canterbury receives a distress call from a freighter identified as Scopuli. (Learning and familiarizing ourselves with the names of ships is another unique concept in The Expanse. Ship interiors all look basically the same, so we have to make sure we read the captions to confirm the setting.) Legally they must investigate, but the captain orders them to purge the logs of the distress call and ignore it, fearing pirates (and losing their “on-time bonus”). Later, Holden secretly un-purges the log and informs HQ about the distress call, forcing his captain to respond anyway.
It’s not at all clear to me why he does this, but upon reviewing the scene a few times, we can see that he finds another signal buried in the noise of the distress signal, and hears a weak voice saying, “please help me.” I assume we are meant to think that Holden feels bad for whoever is in trouble out there, but this is an assumption I have to make. Whatever is going on inside Holden’s head remains entirely hidden, and this is a problem that I will come back to quite often in the show. (Much later we will learn that this voice message is Julie Mao trying to broadcast a signal from inside her cell.)
Ironically, Holden himself is ordered to lead the team to investigate the Scopuli and they take a shuttle over, leaving the Canterbury behind. They find the Scopuli empty, and the distress beacon planted. It’s a trap! (The distress beacon sounds more like an owl than a distress beacon, by the way.)
Another, unknown ship appears out of nowhere (it had been using an unexplained “stealth technology”). Holden is ordered back to the Canterbury, but en route, the stealth ship fire torpedoes. The Canterbury is destroyed–nuked completely, valuable cargo and all–leaving Holden and his team stranded in the shuttle.
It is only at this moment, at the very end of the show, that I find my first personal connection with the character of Holden, who actually looks shocked and upset at what happened. My interest in the show is renewed. I haven’t cared much about what has been going on and I’ve lost interest since we left Julie Mao. But as Holden is en route on the shuttle, as the unknown ship’s torpedoes are on their way to the Canterbury, the tension and stakes ratchet up quickly. Holden contacts his girlfriend Ade back on the Canterbury. He assumes the unknown ship to be pirates, just trying to disable the Canterbury to take her cargo. Holden is afraid for her, and tries to tell Ade to stay calm. Ade tries to tell Holden something, then the torpedoes hit and completely destroy the Canterbury in a blinding flash. It’s a great scene, and hooks me into watching the second episode.
There is a third brief storyline which takes place on Earth, showing United Nations official Chrisjen Avasarala interrogating an OPA (Outer Planet Alliance–a Belter organization) suspect (OPA is viewed as a terrorist organization by Earth) about stolen stealth technology. Chrisjen’s most notable characteristic is that she is played by Shohreh Aghdashloo, an actor who you may not know by name but would certainly recognize her very distinctive Iranian-American voice. We don’t precisely know what position Chrisjen has in the government, but it’s probably something in the intelligence field.
In future posts, I will be referencing some other recaps. Here’s what they have to say about this episode:
From Wikipedia: “The series opens with Julie Mao alone aboard a spaceship in a Scopuli suit. On the dwarf planet Ceres, Detective Miller is assigned to find Mao and return her to her rich parents on Luna. In New York, UN executive Chrisjen Avasarala interrogates a captured operative of the Outer Planets Alliance (OPA), a militant Belter group, about contraband stealth technology. On its way to Ceres, the ice hauler Canterbury receives a distress signal from the freighter Scopuli, and acting Executive Officer Jim Holden is ordered to lead a rescue mission with the ship’s engineer Naomi Nagata, the mechanic Amos Burton, the pilot Alex Kamal, and the medic Shed Garvey. They find the ship empty but for a distress transmitter, but as their shuttle heads back to the Canterbury, a stealth ship destroys the ice carrier with nuclear torpedoes.”
The Pilot for The Expanse Is a Tense Socio-Political Thriller Inside a Gritty Space Opera | Tor.com
The visual effects were fantastic, and this will be a highlight in (nearly) every episode, so I won’t keep repeating myself. Julie Mao’s floating hair in the prologue, for example, was a great effect that sold me on the zero-gravity environment immediately. (Never to be repeated, unfortunately.)
I was intrigued by only two compelling scenes in the first episode of The Expanse: Julie Mao’s prologue is fantastic, and so is the torpedoing of the Canterbury in the final sequence. Everything in between felt like plain old, formulaic backstory and exposition to me. Necessary to set the stage for the rest of the series, perhaps, but still, flat and not very dramatic. Most of the details went right on by me and I hoped they weren’t important. (As I will learn, though, the show does not let you get away with this for long.)
The first long sequence where the camera flies into Ceres Station was interesting to watch, puzzling out where the cuts and edits were, while the voiceover provided background on the political situation. That voiceover seemed like it set the stage just as well, if not better, than the prologue text before the episode.
Holden, stunned, at the end: “They nuked her. She’s gone.” Referring to perhaps both the ship and his girlfriend. I was stunned, too, because the show accelerated from zero to sixty in the blink of an eye. And that’s where the episode ended, and I couldn’t wait to start the next one. The second episode would turn out to be better than the first, but for Holden, this moment, when his naked emotions were on display, would be one of his only highlights for me as a character in the entire season.
The obvious CGI bird on Ceres Station: I honestly couldn’t tell whether it was intended to be a real bird living on the station, or intended to be some kind of future robot bird toy, or something else entirely, and the show gave me no clues. (Miller did toss the bird some food later in the episode, so I guess that means it was supposed to be a real bird?) In any case, it looked very fake in an episode with otherwise great visual effects. Perhaps it was meant to look strange because of the low-gravity environment? After three viewings of the episode I still can’t figure out what I was supposed to get from watching that silly bird, and this is a hint at future problems with the show. I imagine anyone who read the books instantly understood the bird and its significance, but us television viewers are left out in the cold, thinking the show has “made a mistake.”
There is a distinct lack of information technology professionals in the future: When you delete logs for nefarious purposes, there should not be an “undo” feature to get it back. I laughed out loud when Holden seemed to simply un-delete the distress call log. Maybe there was more to it (again, perhaps in the book?) but that’s what it looked like. There was a tab on the screen just for deleted logs! How is that “hiding” anything?
I’m going to use this section to try to document what we learn about the characters and the story in each episode, for myself if nothing else. Because it’s actually quite difficult to keep track of this stuff, and this is a problem I will definitely have with the show as we get farther into the second season. Unless you study the episodes, you can very easily forget important details. With some shows you can just watch and enjoy the character drama without necessarily knowing all the technical details, but this is not one of those shows.
Ceres Station, a UN-controlled station in the Belt, is a political mess, with the lower-class Belters fighting for their rights against an oppressive UN administration. Belters live in deplorable conditions that seem to be worsening, and their civil unrest is reaching a boiling point as the show begins. All of this makes perfect sense to me, by the way, and I have no trouble believing in this Future Solar System they’ve built.
Miller is an aging cop on the down slope of his career, a mental and physical wreck, an outcast from his Belter people because he works for Earthers at Star Helix. “Star Helix badge” and “welwalla,” he’s called–“traitor to my people.” He’s a stereotype, to be blunt, but I will grow to love this character over time. He’s handed an assignment to find Julie Mao for her father.
Holden is a reluctant Earth officer just trying to get by and not make waves when he stumbles into a big mess after responding to a distress call on the Scopuli. He strikes me as one step removed from a college frat boy. I actively dislike this character initially, but over time I will grow to … tolerate him, I guess? He won’t ever be the reason I watch the show, let’s just leave it there.
Back on Earth, Chrisjen Avasarala is a grandmotherly figure who is actually involved in quite a lot of shadowy spy work for the United Nations. Her pleasant demeanor hides a very dark side.
Published by Del Rey.
A magical debut novel for listeners of Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, and Neil Gaiman’s myth-rich fantasies, The Bear and the Nightingale spins an irresistible spell as it announces the arrival of a singular talent with a gorgeous voice.
I have this idea that I will try to read a sample of a Kindle book every day or at least a few times a week for a while. I don’t read enough, but I can’t really bring myself to buy Kindle books if I’m not sure that I’m going to like it and read the whole thing from start to finish. I feel pretty guilty if I buy a book but then don’t like the first chapter, and I feel pretty resentful when I try to read a whole book that I don’t like. So I’ll just take advantage of these free Kindle samples while they’re available.
I picked this sample because it appeared on a list of Amazon’s best fantasy of 2017. After I got the sample, I stumbled on a list of the 100 Best Fantasy Novels of All Time from Unbound Worlds (a subject for another post), which also listed the Bear and the Nightingale. It seemed like synchronicity.
The sample contains two short chapters.
I was struck immediately by the tone of the writing. It is written in the style of a fairy tale. It demands to be breathlessly read out loud by a master storyteller with perhaps a slight British accent to a drowsy child at bed time. That alone sets it apart from anything else I’ve read recently. It also suggests that, should I go on to continue, it would probably be more enjoyable for me to listen to it as an audiobook. (The audiobook is read by Kathleen Gati, who I don’t know offhand.)
I enjoyed the two chapters I read. It begins tightly focused on one house and its occupants in the cold Russian wilderness, so it was easy to be drawn into the story. The first chapter contained an interesting meta in that one of the characters actually did tell a story to some children, in the style of a fairy tale. So it was a fairy tale wrapped inside another fairy tale. The story meant nothing to me, and I can only presume it will serve as foreshadowing.
The real story begins in the second chapter, when an older woman declares to her husband that she is pregnant with her fifth child. Here we learn that this woman’s mother was “special” and she predicts her fifth child will have the same “gifts.” We aren’t told exactly what that means but we are led to believe there is magic is at work (the chapter’s title is, “The witch-woman’s granddaughter”). The husband is nervous about it, but supportive. The nurse is against it, but promises to help and raise the child should the mother die in childbirth, which we are told is a very strong possibility.
A reference to Ivan I sets the story around the 13th or 14th century.
Based on editorial descriptions of the book, the second chapter is likely also a prologue to the real real story. In any case, I was interested enough in the first two chapters that I would continue to the third chapter. That’s more than I can say for a lot of books.
Published by Del Rey. Read by Luke Daniels. Produced by Random House Audio.
Unchained from fate, the Norse gods Loki and Hel are ready to unleash Ragnarok, a.k.a. the Apocalypse, upon the earth. They’ve made allies on the darker side of many pantheons, and there’s a globe-spanning battle brewing that ancient Druid Atticus O’Sullivan will be hard-pressed to survive, much less win.
Listen time: About 9 hours, 5/22-23. (At 120% speed.)
This is the ninth and allegedly final book in the Iron Druid Chronicles.
At this point in the series, we all know what we’re going to get, and this book is no different. There is one slight change, however, in that there are three different POVs interwoven throughout the book: Atticus, of course, but also Granny-wail (whose name I have literally no idea how to write, as I’ve never seen it written down), and Owen. It is essentially three different stories woven together into one book, because the three druids each have their own separate tasks to complete.
Previous books have only dabbled with occasional secondary POVs. This one takes them all on full force, and it’s a bit of a shift in tone. Not unpleasant, just different.
Oberon is sidelined for much of the book, for reasons that make perfect sense in the situation, but his perspective is sorely missed. We miss him as much as Atticus does.
As for the story itself, I hate to say it but I found it somewhat uninteresting and anticlimactic. The vast majority of the book describes a gigantic battle on three fronts, and as such, most of the text is about fighting, and that gets old. I honestly don’t care about fighting techniques or which hand is used to block which punch from which direction, in this book, or any other. There isn’t much in the way of character development. It is basically just one last, large-scale battle which brings back many of the side characters we’ve seen in the previous eight books for various cameos. Honestly it felt like a very short book.
Still, I found it to be a satisfactory ending, if not particularly grand or noteworthy. Without spoiling too much, I didn’t feel much of any emotion one way or another at how it ended. In fact, it didn’t really “end”–thanks to the final epilogue, there is no reason Hearne couldn’t pick things up again sometime in the future and keep going. To be honest, I feel like Hearne just got bored writing these books and wanted to do something else, and I can certainly sympathize with that. The latter books felt almost like he was contractually obligated to write them, and didn’t have quite the same zest and zeal as the initial three or four books.
I will say though that I have appreciated how the series from beginning to end has shown a broad and varied view of many different cultures’ religious pantheons, both historical and modern. I feel like I’ve learned a lot from reading these books, and been exposed to a lot of things I might not otherwise have been. The ninth and final book is no different, giving us a glimpse of The Monkey King and the culture surrounding him, something that I might have laughed about as a joke prior to this book, but is actually a real Chinese legend.
Luke Daniels’ reading was, as always, fantastic. Even if the text is not all that interesting, he is able to make it sound interesting with his tremendous array of voices. I can’t even imagine reading these books as plain text now.