A fast read with an intriguing concept that reverses multiple YA fantasy tropes: It’s a non-magical boarding school for teens who have experienced magic. And it’s not about the adventures they have going through the portal to a fantasy world, but about how they handle the trauma of coming back to the mundane one. The characters are interesting, and I’d like to read more about them, but halfway through it turns into a murder mystery. That gives it a plot, but it comes at the expense of the characterization. (And some of the characters.) It was entertaining, though, and it does make me want to check out the second book.
Entertaining, sometimes gruesome, sometimes funny and sometimes sad collection of stories about the gods of Asgard and the elves, dwarves and giants around them, book-ended by the Norse creation myth and the world-ending battle of Ragnarok. It’s a storytelling approach, not a scholarly description. And it’s not the shiny, techno-magical Asgard of Marvel’s Thor, or the ethereal Olympus we’ve come to think of with Greek myths. For all the magic and impossible feats that get tossed around, it’s still a gritty, harsh world with wars, murders, lust, deception and betrayal.
The stories are mostly separate, but a pattern emerges: not just when stories refer back to earlier events, but the slow transformation of Loki from the kind of trickster who steals Sif’s hair, tricks rival smiths into creating fantastic gifts, and generally outwits his opponents (while finding ways to embarrass the other gods if he can) to the kind of trickster who thinks it would be hilarious to trick a blind man into killing his own brother.
In his introduction, Gaiman notes that we don’t actually have a thorough record of the stories. Like most myths, they were told and retold and changed through oral storytelling. The Norse didn’t write them down until well after Christianity had established itself in the region. And so there are a lot of figures who are mentioned in passing in one tale or another that we don’t really know much about.
And I realized that most of what I know of the mythology comes from modern works influenced by it. Comic books of course, not just Marvel’s Thor, but Vertigo’s Sandman and the manga and anime Ah! My Goddess. The Ring Cycle (by way of Bugs Bunny). Oddly enough, a lot of it by way of Neil Gaiman himself: Sandman, American Gods, Odd and the Frost Giants, probably a handful of short stories too.
This has always been one of the annoying things about remote interactions in Mastodon: While you can seamlessly follow remote users and reply, boost, etc. through your home instance, if you just visit a remote user or post in a regular browser window, you have to jump through a few hoops to pull it into your own account’s view.
This automates the hoops.
Setup is simple: You enter your home username and site in the preferences.
Incidentally: Remember your username is case-sensitive! If you have mixed case in it, you have to type the capitals correctly!
A fun, breezy story about unexpectedly landing a job at a secret scientific base on a parallel world studying giant Godzilla-like animals. Which is about as dangerous as it sounds. Plus, of course, not all humans are interested in the kaijus’ welfare, and the KPS has to step up the “Preservation” part of its name.
There’s some interesting world-building in terms of what kind of environment and ecosystem would actually support 100-meter-tall animals, what kind of biology would be able to handle the size, the energy, shooting beams of radiation, etc. And what might evolve to protect itself in a world with kaiju. And of course: what role nuclear explosions have in the whole thing, because these are kaiju after all!
It’s also weird because it takes place in 2020. Like, real 2020, complete with Covid-19 lockdowns and everything. The main character starts out working for a GrubHub competitor at the beginning of the pandemic.
The first half of the season is mostly stand-alone episodes, vaguely linked by plot tokens in the form of faster-than-light signals from a winged being they dub the “red angel.” And those are the ones I liked best: Investigating a dark matter asteroid and finding the survivors of a ship thought lost during the war, with only one crew member responsive. Finding a small population of humans who were transplanted across the galaxy during World War III, and actually threading the line between interfering with a pre-warp culture and letting some of them know that yes, Earth survived and is thriving. Exploring what else lives in the ecosystem formed by the mycelial network*.
But after a while they start getting way too cavalier about changing the fates of entire planets without thinking the consequences through, doing things because the plot requires it, or because it would be more dramatic (regardless of whether it makes sense for the character to do it) and generally handing out idiot balls left and right.
Also: how big is Section 31, anyway?
Characterization
One of the things that gets better, though, is the Sarek/Amanda/Spock/Michael family relationship, both present-day and in flashbacks to Spock and Michael’s childhood on Vulcan. (And we get to see other biomes on Vulcan than just red-rock desert!) The season starts out with them dancing around some HORRIBLE SECRET™ of Michael’s, but once that’s out in the open (to the audience) and the two of them start having to work together, it’s interesting to watch them as they start dealing with their past and finally develop a rapport again.
Spock himself feels just a little bit off, but I can’t quite put my finger on why. Partly it’s the voice. (Same with Sarek, actually.) But I think it’s also because Ethan Peck isn’t as intense as Leonard Nimoy (or Zachary Quinto) when Spock is just being himself. Then again, he is recovering from trauma at that point, reevaluating how he wants to balance his human and Vulcan sides, and technically on vacation rather than active duty, so a bit of uncertainty makes sense. I haven’t picked up Strange New Worlds yet, but I’m curious to see how his portrayal carries over.
Captain Pike is an incredible contrast to Captain Lorca from season one, coming onto a ship where…let’s just say everyone starts out with trust issues. And they managed to keep Georgiou around, in a way that Michelle Yeoh is clearly having fun with.
It was nice to get to know the other crew some more. Saru is still my favorite of the second-level main characters. Even the third-level characters get a little more attention this time through, though in one case it’s a bit of too little, too late. And while we don’t see a lot of her, Reno is a great addition to the cast as someone who just cuts through the BS and calls things as she sees them.
Finale
As for the finale… The first half is tedious and all the worst aspects of this season are on display, plus an annoying display of two-dimensional thinking (on the parts of the characters, the writers, and the visual effects team) in a four-dimensional story.
Though let me say, once you get to see inside the Enterprise, they’ve done a great job of updating the aesthetics of the sets and costumes so it looks high-tech to modern audiences and still looks like the same ship we saw in the original show.
The second half actually moves really well and is (mostly) a satisfying conclusion, though one of the major dramatic threads in the battle just doesn’t make sense (apparently their blast doors are really strong). But the epilogue goes way further than necessary in explaining away why we never heard of Spock’s sister or the spore drive before. All you need to say is that Spock never mentioned Michael on camera and no one is known to have ever found another giant space tardigrade. Done.