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Continuing with the Harry Potter re-read.

Book 4: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

  • Before reading thoughts
    • I know this is where Harry grows up a bit and the series takes a dark turn. It also gets some heft, doubling up from the first three 300-400 pagers. But man do I not remember a specific thing about this book. There’s some kind of big Quidditch thing at the beginning and then the Triwizard tournament punctuates the school year. Somehow Harry is in the tournament even though there’s an age limit, I guess because he’s Harry Freaking Potter. But I don’t know who wins the tournament or anything in the resolution. Are we finally rid of the Dursleys in this one?
  • Book review on Goodreads
    • My big takeaway from the first reading of this series was that Rowling got in over her head with the last four books, taking on way more plot complexity and drama than she was really ready to handle at that stage of her career. But on the re-read I’m not feeling that as strongly—she has her shortcomings but mostly she’s so damn good at characters and pacing, and carefully builds out the wizarding world so well that it’s not a mystery why these books have been so endearing.
  • Film reaction:
    • Maybe the first movie I didn’t really like. Perhaps because this is the first of the “long” books. Even the short books had to be hacked to bits to fit into even a long movie, but now it’s outright butchery. Why even bother trying to cram this into one movie? Every ounce of subtlety is gone, it’s just brief emotional flourishes and action sequences, i.e., a regular big-budget movie. As long as this movie is, it still feels like a trailer for a longer, better movie. This is the first time I thought that perhaps someone who hadn’t read the book might not even understand what is even going on. They only vaguely hint about the ongoing investigations and weird happenings in the magical world, the strange incidents at the end of the World Cup are very sloppily handled. (I’d love to watch a future movie before I read the book just to see if I could actually follow it, but I don’t think I’m willing to trade that for the book-first experience. Someone who likes movies more than me should do this and report back, please.) One of the major book themes is how the pressure of fame and destiny are weighing on Harry, and they just barely touch this. Ron is just pissy one day and we don’t really know why. They do a pretty good job with the whole dance sequence, but probably teenage love tribulations are notoriously relatable and un-subtle, and therefore entirely film friendly. (An aside: I have a particular aggravation towards movie dialogue that starts with “Welcome to…” It seems so self-conscious, like they’re thinking about how to make the movie trailer friendly, while also providing a quick way to establish what the hell is happening in a given scene. It’s such a movie thing. And this film might set the record. Welcome to Hogwarts. Welcome to the Triwizard tournament. Welcome to the first task. Stop bloody welcoming me!) Anyway as this was the first long book, and they had a new director on board, I can cut them some slack. Maybe they’ll do a bit better with the next ones. But I’d say my odds of watching all the movies has dipped below 50%.

Book 5: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

  • Before reading thoughts
    • As with Book 4, disturbingly little remains in my brain from Book 5. This is also true of Book 6 and 7. Maybe because I never read any of them more than once and only saw the fourth movie (once). When you read something that long that fast, it’s not unlike cramming for an exam. Everything’s loaded up in the RAM but nothing goes into long-term storage. All I got is that this was “the angsty one.” A lot of general unpleasantness with Harry’s attitude and Umbridge’s crushing presence, but no plot details at all.
  • Book review on Goodreads
    • When I got on Goodreads I retroactively rated all of these, with Book 5 getting tagged with just a 3/5, lowest of the series, purely on its feel of constant despair. Re-reading mostly just validated that, BUT I came around on the rating and bumped it up a star. Nothing this long that keeps the pages turning probably deserves a middling rating. It’s still a problem that Rowling’s writing suffers the most when things get dramatic, and with a lot of drama in OOTP there’s a lot of poor writing, but there’s enough done right to overcome it.
  • Film reaction:
    • If Goblet of Fire was the first movie I didn’t really like, this was the first movie I thought was outright bad. The unavoidable plot butchery continues, and it felt even more charmless and confusing. I found myself longing for the Prisoners of Azkaban’s willingness to add little touches that weren’t even in the book. As usual the visual and performances are great, although where did the soundtrack go? The first few movies have a great score and now it’s an afterthought. Basically, if I were tasked to be a film critic, despite my general disinterest in modern movies, this would be my usual template review. Looks great, story is boring. There’s a new director and screenwriter for this one, maybe that’s to blame. But mostly I’d guess they don’t have a lot of creative freedom with something like this. Work through the plot points as efficiently as possible so we can all get rich. Make it look good so people can post screengrabs of it when they review the book for the rest of eternity. Criticism doesn’t really enter into it. Anyway, the odds of me watching the remaining three movies are really not that good. OOTP just seemed like an inferior rehash directly after reading the book, and more of a chore than anything. It’d make more sense maybe to watch them years later if I wanted to revisit HP but was busy reading other things. I can’t really even say the last couple of movies helped solidify HP details in my brain, which was kinda the whole point of watching them in addition to reading. They’re in such a rush that it’s just a different form of cramming.

Not sure if I’ll need to do another post for Books 6-7. I’m definitely reading them (have just started Half-Blood Prince, at this writing) and will write something up on Goodreads, but the movie watching is absolutely in doubt. Plus I remember so little about those books it’s probably not even worth noting what the “before reading” thoughts are. I can do them now, in fact: I don’t remember anything. Horcruxes are a thing (and that’s as specific as I can get), and (spoiler) Snape kills Dumbledore.

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Benjamin_Sisko_toasts_the_good_guysS6E20, “His Way” (Ira Steven Behr & Hans Beimler)

Affliction: Monotonousness of Episodes in the Holodeck or “MEH” Syndrome.

Symptoms: Misgivings regarding upcoming Star Trek episodes revolving around the holodeck and/or holosuites. General lack of enthusiasm. Drowsiness.

Causes: Syndicated television programs attempting to tell stories in genres outside their areas of expertise. Delusions of grandeur and/or boredom amongst writing or production staffs, resulting in wasting 45 minutes capturing the look, but not the feel, of these genres.

Treatment: Scathing takedowns on pointless blogs in the farthest reaches of the internet’s long tail. Skipping to the next episode.

K and I saw this one coming in the Netflix queue, with Odo dressed in a tux and a vague description about Bashir’s “new character” and we honestly floated the idea of just skipping it. But we braced ourselves and dove in, and, well, it certainly did not go the direction I had been conditioned to expect. Rather than yet another holodeck episode, it’s The One Where Odo and Kira Finally Get Together.

Some quick reading about the episode tells me that DS9 fans are rather split on whether or not this should have ever happened. I guess I have to say I’m firmly in the camp of “I’m good either way.” I’m happy for them finally clicking though. Sexual tension gets agonizing after a while and this has been going on for, what, like three seasons? It’s not a main theme or anything but I guess they had to make something happen one way or another. I have a feeling it won’t actually last that long and will be forgotten by the end, but that’s just a vague prediction. Not unlike a couple who are friends for a very long time and then test out more serious waters, sometimes it’s like, hey wow we could have been having sex this whole time, that was dumb, and sometimes it just gets inexplicably weird. We’ll see. Memory Alpha tells me neither Rene Auberjonois nor Nana Visitor thought the two should ever get together. I wonder if that will cost them some chemistry points if neither really believes in it. Again, we’ll see.

Anyway, as to the episode itself, it had its good and bad. Like a lot of holodeck episodes, it’s riddled with clichés. This time, Trek does Vegas jazz clubs. But it does do some interesting new things. Somehow Julian’s creation of Vic Fontaine has become self-aware to the point of understanding he’s a hologram and is qualified to readily dispense love advice to our hopeless blob. He can even tap into the ship’s communication network and bust in on other holosuites when he feels like it. But luckily it’s not to cause mayhem, he’s just persistent. The Vic Fontaine character is charming, but the acting is a little mailed in, as if even James Darren realizes he’s just a pale Sinatra imitation.

Overall: Let’s go 4 out of 5. Mostly, it all comes together in the end for a fun one and I liked Vic Fontaine more than I thought I would.

S6E21, “The Reckoning” (Harry Werksman & Gabrielle G. Stanton/David Weddle & Bradley Thompson)

“The Reckoning” leans on a few Trek tropes that don’t do much for me:

  • Prophetic mumbo-jumbo: I know the Bajoran prophecy ones are important to the whole arc of the series, and Sisko in particular, but they all sort of blend together. We’ll see some hokey Bajoran religious stuff and Kai Winn patronizing people and “Twin Peaks”-style visions. This one even gets a bit self-referential as Dax reminds Sisko he used to call the prophets “wormhole aliens.” We never really established they were any kind of prophets, remember. But either Sisko has come to think of them that way, or it just rolls off the tongue better than “wormhole aliens.” Either way they’re a classic case of “sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic.”
    • Anyway whatever the prophets turn out to be, this is probably not going to go well for Sisko because of his deal with the Prophets back in “Sacrifice of Angels” wherein they agreed to delete the Dominion invaders in exchange for some future penance.
  • Technical mumbo-jumbo: Well we see your made-up religious stuff and raise you some made-up science stuff. We understand that they could just flood the promenade with chroniton particles that could just flush out the alien invaders. But there’s the unpleasant matter of the bill: Sisko knows that they need to let whatever goofy prophet thing happen to pay his penance.
  • An alien technology that is deciphered at precisely the pace that works for the episode: In this case, a weird stone slab. Sisko feels compelled to smash it, so he does, even though it’s a priceless artifact.
  • Guest characters wandering back into everyone’s lives in order to make the ultimate sacrifice: Jake’s name is still in the credits but I had really started wondering if he was even still on the show. We see Nog, Garak, and Dukat more than him. Hell, we see Weyoun and Damar more than him. They’ve had more Morn episodes this season than Jake episodes. I guess they just ran out of stories about his leisured writer lifestyle. Well anyway he’s back today, and probably going to almost get killed to put Benjamin into some kinda compromising position…yep, there it is.

So things are set up for Jake to be the penance, which would be spectacularly cruel. But again, DS9 is a good show, and doesn’t usually do what’s expected. As it turns out it’s Kai Winn who pushes the chroniton button (sure, she knows how to do that?) to stop the battle and punt to another day. So everyone is safe, for now.

Here is where I should say why or why not this was interesting but I’m choosing (C) I’m confused. I was pretty sleepy by the end of this one but even re-reading the summary I’m not sure it entirely clicks. Something something Kira is super faithful, something something Sisko has a prophet hotline. And Winn doesn’t like any of that so her reasons for stopping the battle were pure selfishness, something to the effect that Sisko letting Jake get vaporized by a prophet means that Sisko is the most faithful, so she won’t let him have the satisfaction.

Overall: 2 out of 5. Just not enough really making sense here. And we still need someone to do some penance so more of this is probably coming.

S6E22, “Valiant” (Ronald D. Moore)

Back in the clumsy and absurd “Starship Down” the “I think the ship can handle it!” DS9 trope emerged where a vessel is pushed way beyond its design based only on the gut feeling of its commander. Of course this happened all the time in previous series, especially TOS, but in DS9 these actions tend to have consequences. Sometimes, sorta, I mean, plenty of extras died in “Starship Down” but all the named characters pulled through, so, all good. When the tactic has been employed other times it usually gets similarly mixed results: missions succeed but messily. “Valiant” shows us what probably should happen, i.e., complete failure.

I kinda liked the premise here, that the mysterious Top Guns of Red Squad are actively engaging the Dominion behind enemy lines, and doing so both successfully and in total secrecy, to the point where they’ve begun to believe their own hype. They’ve all given themselves cute little titles and pretend they count. When they rescue Jake and Nog after a Jem’Hadar cruiser wings them, Nog is immediately conscripted as Chief Engineer because he knows some stuff about warp cores. (Valiant having made it this far, one supposes, with the other cadets leaning heavily on desperate google searches like “warp core how to fix”.) But the post immediately goes to his head, leaving Jake as the lone naysayer. When Valiant has an opportunity to launch a surprise attack on a massive Jem’Hadar battleship, and the crew is exhausted and underprepared and would still get carded at Quark’s (just making an observation on their youth, of course; obviously no one gets carded at Quark’s), their greenie-popping captain weighed the odds that they’d succeed versus the odds that they were doing something incredibly stupid, and went ahead and did it anyway. Jake says, “My father would never try to pull off something like this.” Oh, sweet, naïve Jake.

So like this doomed mission, I’m not sure what this episode hoped to achieve. Maybe make some point that the DS9ers are so special they can overcome self-inflicted bad odds, because here’s an example of what happens when you don’t have Kira/O’Brien/Dax/Worf/etc. covering up your mistakes. The youthful crew can’t really pull off their reputations, the performances here just really aren’t that good, but the characters themselves don’t have a lot of depth. Everyone looks the other way at Captain Greenies, the first officer is all bluster, and everyone else is kids who are ready to go home. There’s some weak resistance about not defying one’s captain, supposedly a “great man” but even Jake doesn’t fall for that. Mostly there’s an effective meta-lesson about Fancy Title /= Actual Experience.

Overall: I think it’s a memorable one for its premise, and has some good takeaways, but gets a little silly in details and execution. Come on, Jake and Nog are literally the only survivors? 3 out of 5.

S6E23, “Profit and Lace” (Ira Steven Behr & Hans Beimler)

Ferengi episodes may be graphed on Silly vs Gross axes, where the optimal episodes have a measure of both. It’s still OK if they are just silly (“Little Green Men” comes to mind) but not so much if they are purely gross, unless the grossness can be effectively conveyed into humor. “Profit and Lace” walks a real fine line here, but mostly can’t get out of its own way.

Ferengenar is being dragged by the lobes into a progressive future of female equality, if only because somehow it never occurred to anyone that it would instantly double both consumers and the labor force. Zek and Rom may believe in the principle, and Quark, grudgingly, when it’s in his interest, but it’ll be the economics that drive real change. Or maybe not, as Brunt has leveraged Zek’s insistence on female equality into ousting him as Nagus. But Quark et al have a scheme to earn the political will, in the form of soda baron Nilva, who is open to the ideas if it’ll help business. Ishka ought to be able to convince him, but Quark yells and her so violently she has a heart attack, and he agrees to help out of guilt, agreeing to a temporary sex change and planning to sway Nilva. Only he unexpectedly falls lobes over [whatever disgusting Ferengi equivalent to heels] for her. So, just another day on DS9.

Some of the humor plays well: Zek is always great, the farcical elements of Quark’s scheme (think Tootsie) generally work, and I liked bits like Brunt’s rival Tiny Ron or increasingly stomach-churning descriptions of the vile Sluggo Cola. But most of it either falls flat or is genuinely uncomfortable. As much as we enjoy Quark’s comeuppance at being pursued by Nilva, it doesn’t really tip the scales. In the opening scene we are reminded of Quark’s propensity for genuine creepiness as he tells Aluura, his model employee of a dabo girl, that despite her excellent professional performance her job’s in jeopardy anyway if she doesn’t learn oo-mox. Haha, it’s not sexual harassment because it sounds like a silly Ferengi thing! I think a more fitting sentence for Quark is to get sued or something, rather than Nilva chasing him around like Pepe Le Pew.

Memory Alpha has a bunch of quotes from Armin Shimerman who raises probably the most important reason this all falls flat: Quark doesn’t learn anything. At the end, to put an extra icky stamp on it, we find out that Aluura has decided she’s into oo-mox. That actually makes it worse. Go ahead fellas, try this with your women employees. You never know!

Overall: Closer to a video you have to watch for HR compliance than a comedy. In the running for worst episode of the series. Do better, DS9. 0 out of 5.

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Sometime last decade I embarked on a project to read all Hugo Award-winning novels. I thought I would get done around 2011. I was only off by eight years.

Not that it’s an especially long list—about 70, depending on how you count them—but I certainly wasn’t reading only off the list until completion. I sprinkled them into the regular flow. Only sometimes the flow wouldn’t drift back to the list for months at a time. I’d vaguely acknowledge that I’d read most of them and as I’m only in my early 40s I still (probably) have plenty of time to finish before I die. So progress was slow and intermittent until finally in the last few months I made the final push to pick off the last few.

What’s on the list?

In the end I thought it was useful to assign the ones I’ve read to tiers:

  1. Classics – everyone (not just SF people) should read.
  2. Important/Zeitgeisty books – ones SF readers should know; these would fit into an SF class curriculum.
  3. Great SF books – solid recommendations.
  4. Fine for SF fans but not vital.
  5. Skip it – doesn’t mean it’s bad (but they might be), just not that important to the genre. Take ’em or leave ’em.

So: Are you finally done?

Not quite. But close enough to draw some final conclusions. At the moment I’m in the middle of Fritz Leiber’s The Wanderer, and after that, I’ll have just two to go: John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar and Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice. I’ll take care of both over the next few months.

I’ve only read a fraction of all the total nominees. If I really wanted this project to count, I’m not even close to done.

But you’ve officially read every other Hugo winner?

Well, uh, no.

TLDR answer: I gave them all a fair shot but this was supposed to be an enjoyable project, and it turned out that sometimes it wasn’t, so I made peace with not being a completist.

Specifically, I didn’t finish (or sometimes even start) these:

  • Downbelow Station, CJ Cherryh, 1982
  • Startide Rising, David Brin, 1984
  • The Uplift War, David Brin, 1988
  • Cyteen, CJ Cherryh, 1989
  • Mirror Dance, Lois McMaster Bujold, 1995
  • Blue Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson, 1997
  • Paladin of Souls, Lois McMaster Bujold, 2004

Somewhere along the way I accepted that I wasn’t going to truly read every single Hugo winner. Some just aren’t that good. Or maybe they are objectively good, but they just aren’t my thing. Lois McMaster Bujold’s books played some part in that. She’s won four Hugos, and I read two, plus another in the same series, and found them consistently mediocre. I still faced two more, one a part of a totally different series, meaning I probably had to commit to other series books too, and….I just didn’t wanna.

Brin’s and Robinson’s books both have the problems that they are parts of series, and the series aren’t that great. I started and bailed on Startide Rising, which was disappointing; I actually quite liked the first book in the Uplift series (Sundiver, not a Hugo winner). But Startide Rising was terrible and it was a pure slog to make it even as far as I did. I had no interest in finishing it, so I definitely didn’t want to read another book in the series on top of that. Blue Mars is the most likely one from this list that I’ll eventually read, but similarly, I’d have to overcome predecessors I didn’t like first. Red Mars was the first in the series, and pretty good, but I got completely bogged down in the sequel, Green Mars. I’d have to re-read them both to get back to Blue. Maybe in the unlikely event I can retire at 50 and suddenly find myself with an abundance of free time.

The Cherryh books are hugely long complex books about fictional politics, which for me means they are hugely long complex books I won’t read. I obeyed the “read 100 minus my age” pages rule and dutifully returned them to the library unfinished.

(Also worth mentioning that there are three Retro Hugo winners I haven’t read but I don’t feel like they are required.)

Ann Leckie’s book came out since you started the project so it’s understandable that it’s still on the shelf. Which means Stand on Zanzibar will be your last classic winner standing. Why that one?

Mostly it gets the honor because I think it occupied a medium-hanging-fruit niche that made it seem neither especially vital nor bad. Also it’s long, and I don’t know anything about John Brunner. Ironically I happened across a used copy of it years ago so it’s been sitting on a shelf behind me, unread, for probably at least a decade. It sounds good, and has a good reputation, so I haven’t been specifically avoiding it. But it kept getting skipped because I didn’t know that I wanted to wade into its 650 pages just yet. I’d either go for lower-hanging fruit of shorter books by known authors, or try to knock off one of the oddball ’70s winners with mixed reviews, or embarrassing ’50s schlock first. At some point Brunner’s was the last one with a strong reputation left in the pile, so I saved it for the end.

Was this a worthwhile project? Do you think SF fans should read all the Hugo winners?

Nah. Some of them really just aren’t that great. I gave them an average rating of 3.7 out of 5 on Goodreads, compared to my overall average of 3.9. Maybe that should be expected. I generally pick books I’ll probably like and the hit rate is bound to be better than any curated list, where I will sometimes have a different opinion. Especially since some of the entries on that list are known to have been poor choices. So here’s the part where I wonder if this was even worth it. By comparison I’ve read 15 of the Modern Library Top 100 with an average rating of 4.3. Not much data but probably enough to conclude I should have spent the last ten years reading those instead. If I had unlimited time I could read through a bunch of lists and gather similar data. That would be really interesting if I was going to be alive for 1000 years. I’ll probably have to settle for incomplete data.

Anyway no list is definitive and I already did the Hugos so I may as well wrap this up. I picked the Hugos fairly arbitrarily over the Nebulas, and I can think of at least three other SF awards. Based on the results here though I’m probably not going to bother with the other lists. Like any yearly award, the Hugos probably capture some zeitgeist, but (especially in retrospect) many years they didn’t pick the best book, and some years there were several good books and only one could win. Years are arbitrary end points.

Final conclusions, especially for readers who’ve skipped to the end of this rambling write-up?

  1. Working through lists of books (or movies, albums, restaurants) is fun, but don’t be a slave to them. I’m glad I read most of these but some of the best decisions I made were the omissions.
  2. Yearly lists that try to capture the most important thing that happened without the benefit of historical hindsight probably miss at least as often as they hit.
  3. It was worth it, but in the end, not as informative as maybe I’d hoped. I read authors I might have otherwise missed, but I’m still lacking in some important SF work. And I definitely should have skipped some of the predictably mediocre Hugo winners in favor of, say, Pulitzer winners.