Review: Space Trucker Jess

Oct. 20th, 2025 08:36 pm
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Review: Space Trucker Jess, by Matthew Kressel

Publisher: Fairwood Press
Copyright: July 2025
ISBN: 1-958880-27-2
Format: Kindle
Pages: 472

Space Trucker Jess is a stand-alone far-future space fantasy novel.

Jess is a sixteen-year-old mechanic working grey-market jobs on Chadeisson Station with a couple of younger kids. She's there because her charming and utterly unreliable father got caught running a crypto scam and is sitting in detention. This was only the latest in a long series of scams, con jobs, and misadventures she's been dragged through since her mother disappeared without a word. Jess is cynical, world-weary, and infuriated by her own sputtering loyalty to her good-for-nothing dad.

What Jess wants most in the universe is to own a CCM 6454 Spark Megahauler, the absolute best cargo ship in the universe according to Jess. She should know; she's worked on nearly every type of ship in existence. With her own ship, she could make a living hauling cargo, repairing her own ship, and going anywhere she wants, free of her father and his endless schemes. (A romantic relationship with her friend Leurie would be a nice bonus.)

Then her father is taken off the station on a ship leaving the galactic plane, no one will tell her why, and all the records of the ship appear to have been erased.

Jess thinks her father is an asshole, but that doesn't mean she can sit idly by when he disappears. That's how she ends up getting in serious trouble with station security due to some risky in-person sleuthing, followed by an expensive flight off the station with a dodgy guy and a kid in a stolen spaceship.

The setup for this book was so great. Kressel felt the need to make up a futuristic slang for Jess and her friends to speak, which rarely works as well as the author expects and does not work here, but apart from that I was hooked. Jess is sarcastic, blustery, and a bit of a con artist herself, but with the idealistic sincerity of someone who knows that her life is been kind of broken and understands the value of friends. She's profoundly cynical in the heartbreakingly defensive way of a sixteen-year-old with a rough life. I have a soft spot in my heart for working-class science fiction (there isn't nearly enough of it), and there are few things I enjoy more than reading about the kind of protagonist who has Opinions about starship models and a dislike of shoddy work. I think this is the only book I've bought solely on the basis of one of the Big Idea blog posts John Scalzi hosts.

I really wish this book had stuck with the setup instead of morphing into a weird drug-enabled mystical space fantasy, to which Jess's family is bizarrely central.

SPOILERS below because I can't figure out how to rant about what annoyed me without them. Search for the next occurrence of spoilers to skip past them.

There are three places where this book lost me. The first was when Jess, after agreeing to help another kid find his father, ends up on a world obsessed with a religious cult involving using hallucinatory drugs to commune with alien gods. Jess immediately flags this as unbelievable bullshit and I was enjoying her well-founded cynicism until Kressel pulls the rug out from under both Jess and the reader by establishing that this new-age claptrap is essentially true.

Kressel does try to put a bit of a science fiction gloss on it, but sadly I think that effort was unsuccessful. Sometimes absurdly powerful advanced aliens with near-telepathic powers are part of the fun of a good space opera, but I want the author to make an effort to connect the aliens to plausibility or, failing that, at least avoid sounding indistinguishable from psychic self-help grifters or religious fantasy about spiritual warfare. Stargate SG-1 and Babylon 5 failed on the first part but at least held the second line. Kressel gets depressingly close to Seth territory, although at least Jess is allowed to retain some cynicism about motives.

The second, related problem is that Jess ends up being a sort of Chosen One, which I found intensely annoying. This may be a fault of reader expectations more than authorial skill, but one of the things I like to see in working-class science fiction is for the protagonist to not be absurdly central to the future of the galaxy, or to at least force themselves into that position through their own ethics and hard work. This book turns into a sort of quest story with epic fantasy stakes, which I thought was much less interesting than the story the start of the book promised and which made Jess a less interesting character.

Finally, this is one of those books where Jess's family troubles and the plot she stumbles across turn into the same plot. Space Trucker Jess is far from alone in having that plot structure, and that's the problem. I'm not universally opposed to this story shape, but Jess felt like the wrong character for it. She starts the story with a lot of self-awareness about how messed up her family dynamics were, and I was rooting for her to find some space to construct her own identity separate from her family. To have her family turn out to be central not only to this story but to the entire galaxy felt like it undermined that human core of the story, although I admit it's a good analogy to the type of drama escalation that dysfunctional families throw at anyone attempting to separate from them.

Spoilers end here.

I rather enjoyed the first third of this book, despite being a bit annoyed at the constructed slang, and then started rolling my eyes and muttering things about the story going off the rails. Jess is a compelling enough character (and I'm stubborn enough) that I did finish the book, so I can say that I liked the very end. Kressel does finally arrive at the sort of story that I wanted to read all along. Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy the path he took to get there.

I think much of my problem was that I wanted Jess to be a more defiant character earlier in the novel, and I wanted her family problems to influence her character growth but not be central to her story. Both of these may be matters of opinion and an artifact of coming into the book with the wrong assumptions. If you are interested in a flawed and backsliding effort to untangle one's identity from a dysfunctional family and don't mind some barely-SF space mysticism and chosen one vibes, it's possible this book will click with you. It's not one that I can recommend, though.

I still want the book that I hoped I was getting from that Big Idea piece.

Rating: 4 out of 10

AWS outage

Oct. 20th, 2025 10:11 am
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[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.

Tea Dragon Mystery Box

Oct. 19th, 2025 03:55 pm
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[personal profile] chuckro
Friday Afternoon Tea was at Worldcon in Seattle, and they have a huge variety of tea blends, some of which seemed very exciting and some of which seemed ill-thought-out. While debating which tea(s) to get I noticed they had mystery boxes, and I was sold on that. Especially since you could choose the caffeine level of the box, because I would never actually get through a box of herbal teas. (Especially since Jethrien is allergic to chamomile and can’t drink half of them.)

Read more... )

Overall: I was really happy to try this, though if I ever got it again I’d want a completely different mix. Except for Napali Silver Yeti; I’d just buy that by itself. Oh, and I bought a tea dragon pin from them, too.
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[personal profile] chuckro
The Delicacy – The story opens in Scotland with Rowan and Tulip, the poor chicken-farming sons of a mother who wants desperately for them to suffer in poverty for her New Age principles. The boys receive an inheritance from their dead aunt and decide to move to London to to start a farm-to-table restaurant. The going is rough until they happen upon a new mushroom that customers go crazy for, then everything starts coming up Tulip and the success goes to his head, driving a wedge between him and his brother. But what is the secret of the amazing mushrooms? (Hint: It’s not a happy ending.)

Ballad for Sophie – Framed as an intern from Le Monde interviewing a reclusive former pianist, this goes through the life story of said pianist and his rivalry with Francois Samson; set to the backdrop of WW2 and the following decades. DuBois hated being a pianist and was pushed into it by his mother, by his agent, and by necessity; and he was always jealous of Samson’s magical talent. This has decent characterization, a cute twist, a just a little magic that might or might not be real. I enjoyed it.

Doughnuts and Doom - A cute little queer romance between an aspiring witch with performance anxiety and an aspiring rock star without an audience. Not a lot of depth, but cute.

In Perpetuity - A slow-moving story about the afterlife that details the drudgery of it, and the various criminal machinations that take place between life and death. It’s bizarrely anticlimactic, in that every one of the arcs and hooks ends abruptly with a “Oh, that part’s over now.” Maybe it’s symbolizing the randomness and suddenness of death? Or maybe it’s just not great writing. (Honestly, given the way the pacing and a bunch of the later bits play out, I feel like the writer was pantsing and just dropping things.)

Lost Dogs - A shaggy dog story by Jeff Lemire, about a giant of a man who goes to the big city with his wife and daughter and only finds fights, pain and suffering.

A Radical Shift of Gravity - Told in anachronic order, this is the story of one man’s life when the force of gravity sudden changed…but only on humans. It intersperses pieces of his life from before the shift, after the second shift that broke down society, and finally to his explorations as an old man when time stopped holding on to humanity as well; and tries to tie together the changes to the world with the evolution of his relationship with his daughter. It’s an interesting idea but I’m not sure how well it works, especially since it tries to scatter in science (from people who in-story are supposed to know what they’re talking about) and the science is nonsense.

In Utero - 12 years ago, a mysterious giant explosion rocked the city. Now, a girl gets dropped off at a cheap holiday camp in a closed shopping mall and makes a new friend…who reveals the monsters behind the explosion. It’s interesting how much this story is just causal about a dragon with psychic powers and I wonder if that’s just coming from a more eastern perspective—that’s not a combination you see much in western dragons. Credit to this that it’s a kids adventure (with the tropes common to that—no children are harmed), but the adults are experiencing it as a horror movie and authority figures and parents are shown reacting (and panicking) appropriately as they get appropriate information.

Loved and Lost: A Relationship Trilogy – Slice of life comics, based loosely on reality, in no particular order, about a man’s relationships (including lots of sex) circa 2001. (Honestly, they should have been in a particular order. There’s no benefit to putting the comic where her cat likes him 40 pages before the comic where she introduces her cats. It just feels sloppy.) I will give him credit for being ridiculously honest; this may be the most realistic depiction of “idiot 20something romance” I’ve seen on paper, especially since he does nothing to disguise the parts where he’s a needy and judgmental jerk. Looking back to the same time period, I can see some “I’m in this picture and don’t like it.”

Lisa Cheese and Ghost Guitar (Book 1): Attack of the Snack – A wacky comic starring a unicorn cyborg who wants to be a folk musician but ends up in a battle between rival ninjas. I feel like there’s some “Ren and Stimpy” DNA in this; it’s that kind of random wackiness where you lose track of what’s going on and just kinda go along for the ride. (What was up with the broccoli monster? I could never figure out whose side it was actually supposed to be on.)

Funny Things: A Comic Strip Biography of Charles M. Schulz – A biography of “Sparky” Schulz in the style of a collection of Peanuts comics. I think the major problem here is that it’s too long and doesn’t have quite enough jokes that aren’t just, “We referenced some classic Peanuts strips.” (My standup teacher calls that “laughter of recognition” and thinks it’s the weakest form of joke.) Schulz lived an interesting life and clearly wrestled with various mental health issues during it, but this spends too much time being repetitive about them and not getting into tangential things it alludes to (like his children being sent off to private school; or his heart attack, which only gets mentioned when he has a stroke 20 years later). I think the author got so engrossed in Schultz’s life he forgot that his readers wouldn’t have read all the supporting material before picking up this book.

Super Trash Clash – Dul’s well-meaning mother buys her the video game “Super Trash Clash,” which is hard and terrible. She trades it away, but regrets it because it was a gift and goes on a wild chase to try to retrieve it. This is a story of numbers-filed-off Super Nintendo nostalgia; it’s short and cute.

Space Junk - In a sci-fi situation that wouldn’t be believable 20 years ago but makes perfect sense in our Dumbest Timeline, we see a colony of feral teenagers living on a mining colony that’s closing up, because the adults were all sent ahead to the next planet without them and they’re expected to follow. And we’re focused on broken teenagers who are angling to stay behind on the planet, when the only mechanisms to make them go are peer pressure and a useless therapist. And in the middle of this is the mystery of moving space junk. On one hand, this tells a story; on the other it doesn’t actually explain anything. (On the gripping hand, most of the plot holes can be explained by, “The system is really, really stupid and probably makes money from somebody on a different planet via fraud.”)

Radical: My Year with a Socialist Senator – A comic artist embedded herself with a newly-elected NY state senator and catalogued her experiences. (Though to some degree, it feels like she wanted to do this with AOC and got the next best thing—she’s very explicit about wanting to write about “the movement” rather than the person, and acknowledges that she’s leaving out all sorts of details.) It’s interesting to see how the sausage is made, though like anyone, she has her biases about the process and the people. It’s particularly interesting that this was 2018-2019, so the tail end of the first Trump regime and just before covid hit. And boy, it is NOT flattering to Cuomo.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume III: Century – Alan Moore is back on his bullshit, with the League (mostly Mina, Alan and Orlando) dealing with a cult trying to birth a “moonchild” and usher in a new age over of the course of the 20th century. (And it leaps right over Mina apparently running a group of superheroes in the 60s.) The initial concept of the LXG was cool and I remember really liking the first volume, but Moore moved over to increasingly obscure characters and increasingly obtuse plots. Well, until we time-jump to 2009 and learn that Harry Potter is the antichrist and they call in Mary Poppins (who might be God) to stop him and then jet off with a former Bond girl.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol IV: The Tempest – Then we pick up with Mina and Orlando getting eternal youth for said Bond girl and a geriatric Sir James himself pursuing them. Interspersed with that, we finally learn about the hero team Mina managed in the 60s. Again, the combination of obscure references and then needing to file the trademarks off often makes it hard to tell what he’s referencing. And then the world ends and Alan Moore disappears up his own ass in an ouroboros of referentiality. This needed a heavier hand to edit it down to a reasonable number of plots and characters so that something of actual note happened to anyone you cared about; as opposed to a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scene for a hundred characters you barely remember.

Mary Tyler MooreHawk was a Tom Swift pastiche starring a girl with mickey mouse hair. It’s…honestly really overdone? Also it’s done in a “zine” style with the comics interspersed with fake magazine pages and prose pieces. I couldn’t get into it. This also had a couple of other random Alan Moore works, including From Hell, which I gave up on in an earlier bundle, and The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, which is a tome of hermetic high magic that I just cannot handle. I also skipped Nemo: River of Ghosts.

Overall: I don’t think anything leapt out at me as amazing, but there was a lot of decent stuff; entertaining but forgettable reads.

Fall Movie Catch-Up

Oct. 14th, 2025 11:30 am
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[personal profile] chuckro
The Incredible Shrinking Wknd - An indie film clearly made with no budget (and originally in Spanish) that I watched because it’s got a time-loop. It’s...not great. It tries to hit the beats from Groundhog Day (in a cabin the woods) but doesn’t give the audience enough information and doesn’t actually give the protagonist enough character or enough growth. There are also random events that don’t figure into the larger story or actually pay off—two of the friends kiss her at random points but nothing comes of it; she gets a nail in her foot (and it’s established that her body doesn’t re-set with the loop) but goes on long hikes in subsequent loops. This wasn’t a winner, unfortunately.

Boss Level - Frank Grillo gets caught in a Groundhog Day loop where ridiculous assassins sent by his ex-wife’s boss kill him. Fortunately, he’s former spec ops and is well-trained at murdering them back, especially when he gets to practice every day. This doesn’t take itself particularly seriously and the science is the usual nonsense, but it’s at least internally consistent nonsense. And overall this is a fun, vaguely video game-themed action movie with lots of explosions and a moral about the true meaning of family.

Venom: The Last Dance - Wow, what a goddamn mess of a movie. Our best guess was that there were at least three writers, one who wrote the Eddie/Venom buddy comedy dialogue (delightful!), one who came up with cool CGI action sequences (Venom horse!), and one who wrote the framing story about Knull and the Codex (really, really stupid!). Why did Dr. Paine even appear in this movie and why did she have so much backstory, when she did nothing of importance? Why bother with a stinger about Knull when 1) Venom won so he’s still sealed away and 2) It’s not like they’ll have any sequels to use him in. Who’s going to fight him? Madame Web and Morbius? If you liked the previous two movies, you can enjoy this by fast-forwarding through any scene Eddie isn’t in.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice - This was fascinating, especially having rewatched the original movie recently, because it’s much more reliant on the intervening decades of which characters became breakout fan-favorites than on the plot of the original movie. The Maitlands (remember them, the main characters of the original?) barely get a line about what happened to them and Beetlejuice gets a LOT of screen time. That said, they packed this with too many subplots that end up barely mattering and filled the rest with fanservice. It’s too busy a movie for how little actually happens, if that makes sense. Oh, and the “MacArthur Park” sequence at the end is way too long and does not, in fact, recapture the magic of “Day-O.” I support Winona Ryder getting a paycheck at every opportunity; but frankly this was mostly only worth it for Catherine O’Hara and William Dafoe chewing scenery.

Transformers One - This was fun! How well does the continuity work? Who cares! There are no squishy humans, everything is brightly colored so you can tell what’s going on, there are awesome Transformer battles, and it remembers that it’s both a call-back for us middle-aged fans but also a cartoon for kids.

R46H Hand-held Console

Oct. 11th, 2025 04:16 pm
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[personal profile] chuckro
I’ve previously reviewed the R36S and the R36H, low-end handhelds sold under a variety of brand names (BOYHOM is a popular one). Like Anbernic’s RGXX series, there are a number of variations that are all basically just external hardware differences; they’re all running the same ArcOs in the same internals. These all use the RK3128 chip, usually 1 gig of RAM, and whatever battery gets them 4-5 hours of playtime. They play up to PS1 just fine and are usually loaded with N64, NDS and PSP games that they can, at best, do a mediocre job with. And they have a full Retroarch menu so you can use cheats and fast-forward and edit all of your inputs and filters and things. And they all run $30-50 on AliExpress, depending on sales and taxes.

Read more... )

Overall: For PS1 and earlier systems, this is a perfectly cromulent device. For not much more money (especially in this era of randomized tariffs), the Anbernic RG40XX-H is this but better.

Weekly media report - 2025 10 08

Oct. 8th, 2025 06:44 pm
gentlyepigrams: (books - reading is sexy)
[personal profile] gentlyepigrams
Again, all about the books, and I'm halfway through two others.

Books
The Pomegranate Gate, by Ariel Kaplan. Jewish mythology inflected fantasy that touches on medieval history but is more interested in the fantasy side of things. I wish I knew a little more about the mythology the author was writing from but I enjoyed it for the most part. She was aiming a bit for the GGK vibe, less in the writing than in the tragic structure, but there were a couple of twists that I not only wasn't expecting but was not sure about (in terms of how well they were going to work for me). Definitely going to read the second in the series though.
Dark Moon Defender, by Sharon Shinn. Third in the Twelve Houses series. This time it's Justin who gets a romance and has to deal with the anti-mystic nuns who are nefariously working to overthrow the kingdoms. The personal plots, the overarching plots, and the cultural stuff all progress nicely. Next time round with this series I'm going to jump forward/back to 2.5, the most recently released book, and catch up with the aftermath of the romance in 2.
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