thevampiremars's reviews
196 reviews

The writing is sardonic and meandering – that’ll take some getting used to. And there’s a lot that’s making me kind of uncomfortable, from cringey one-note characters to objectionable politics. Maybe this improves as the book goes on, but I’m just not in the mood right now.

I might come back to it eventually. We’ll see.

Love the artwork. I can see the French and Japanese stylistic influences – a little bit of bande dessinée, a little bit of manga... And Locatelli-Kournwsky’s knack for shape and silhouette is uplifted by de Santiago’s vibrant colours.

The fight scenes are slightly hard to follow, but that moment where

Troezen yeets a makeshift weapon and it flies out of the confines of the panel, seemingly towards the reader...

that was very cool.

There are some interesting concepts, like

magical girls being coopted by the state; the image of Naoko in her leotard and tights being deployed from a military aircraft

– ugh! So good.

It’s really promising! This volume is only the introduction, laying the groundwork for (hopefully many) future instalments. I’m hungry for more.

CONTENT WARNINGS:

invasion, injury (amputation, blood), trauma, alcoholism

 

Fruity

“Plums. Well. I did it. I – oh, sweet nectarines, I don’t entirely know what it is I’ve done – but I have most thoroughly and irrevocably done it nonetheless.”

Farcical, for better or for worse. Hijinks, lots of secrets and misunderstandings, everyone gasping and gaping and stammering in disbelief. Fun if you’re into that.

The main focus is Henry fumbling through life and figuring herself out –

her gender, her crush on Septimus, and her place in the world.

This coming-of-age narrative, along with the preoccupation with eloquence and grace (Henry struggles to find the words to express herself; she’s very aware of how clumsily she speaks so she overcompensates in her writing with verbosity, a very self-conscious performance of intelligence and charisma, modelled after the competent characters she looks up to) made me think she was maybe fourteen? I was surprised to find out she’s twenty-one. The quirky “figs!” exclamations and the “my wretched self” angst feel more befitting of a teenager than a full grown adult. It’s just a bit odd.

The other character I was drawn to was Pip Property, the eccentric and vaguely sinister cravat designer.

Except their villainous role was disappointingly undercut by the reveal that they’re simply “under coercion” (in their own words), and dampened by a humanising moment before then where we see them chilling in their home and even learn their deadname. It does feel like Reeve struggled with the whole queer-coded villain thing, toying with the idea of this enigmatic and transgressive figure stalking our protagonists, but also not wanting to demonise them and cast their queerness as evidence of evil. I say go all in and commit to writing a genderfucky pervert. Seriously, just do it. If the rest of the story is going to boil down to relationship drama with a veneer of quirky macabre, you may as well lean in and write a suitably flamboyant villain.

I dunno. I’m not sure what to make of it. It’s not for me, but there were aspects I enjoyed.

CONTENT WARNINGS:

sexism, transphobia, allusions to racism and antisemitism, anxiety and panic attacks, self-loathing, some drunken incestuous flirting, outing, blackmail, kidnap, gun violence, nonconsensual cutting of hair, injury, death, a severed head

 

My greatest criticism of Babel is how didactic it is. You can get away with a few exposition dumps in academic settings, but the overexplaining is something else. An example: Ramy and Robin have very different personalities, partially informed by their different experiences of racism. Robin can (sometimes) pass as white, so his MO is to keep his head down and try to blend in for his own safety. Ramy doesn’t have that option so he instead adopts extravagant personas, pretending to be an Indian prince if it means white people will be more courteous to him. The reader should be able to recognise these different approaches and infer the reasoning without being prompted, but Kuang opts to make it explicit through dialogue as Ramy explains all this to Robin. Okay, fine. But then that’s immediately followed by another paragraph explaining the exact same thing again, this time through narration. It felt a little patronising to have it spelled out in such a way.

On the topic of telling instead of showing, I saw another review which said the main characters didn’t have much chemistry and we only know they’re friends who would die for each other because we’re told as much, not because we’re actually shown it and made to believe it. I don’t disagree, but I think it makes sense that these four traumatised and alienated bookworms would form weirdly intense clingy-yet-detached relationships with one another. Not speaking from experience at all, haha...

Likewise, the pacing is odd in a way that does make sense. The first half was slow and lecturey and kind of felt like a chore to read, and it was difficult to track the passage of time because the narrative would hover on a particular day or week or term then jump forward a few months seemingly at random. It threw me off at first, but it was effective in conveying the feeling of university passing in a blur, of it existing as a liminal period before adulthood.

After that there was a lot of action and fraught emotion, then the last few chapters trudged towards tragedy.

One aspect I thought was really cool was the way the narrative would get kind of unmoored from chronology when emotion was heightened; we’d be told how a character looks back on this event rather than being walked through how they experienced it in the moment.

I thought that was particularly effective in the Lovell murder scene, where we’re told the outcome before the scene can reach that point. We have the argument preceding the attack, but before the attack itself is described we have this interjection: “He would try desperately to justify what he’d done as self-defence, but such justification would rely on details he could hardly remember, details he wasn’t sure whether he’d made up to convince himself he had not really murdered his father in cold blood. // Over and over again he would ask himself who had moved first, and this would torture him for the rest of his days, for he truly did not know. // This he knew:” How great is that?

The scene that had me hooked –

when Robin confronted and ultimately killed Lovell

– didn’t happen until around the 60% mark; everything up until that point felt like backstory setting up the actual story. Which is fine when you do eventually get that payoff, but while reading it I got bored and impatient. I think Babel might be better suited to people who read quicker than I do.

All in all, it does (mostly) come together. There’s an inventive and interesting magic system with a lot of thought put into its implementation and implications. Kuang is obviously building on real world history and sociology but that’s not a bad thing. The book is maybe a little on the nose with some of its messaging but it’s a good read once it gets going.

CONTENT WARNINGS:

imperialism/colonialism, classism, misogyny, racism, child abuse (verbal and physical), a brief scene involving sexual harassment, emotional manipulation, drug use and addiction, anxiety/panic, suicide, death, some gore, torture, police brutality, gun violence, impending war, terrorism, slavery, white fragility

 

“Something’s screwy...”

Alec Robbins, as the author/artist, gets to decide what everyone else thinks, feels, and does. Existing as a character within the fiction means he can not only conjure and control the other characters, but he can also control the relationships they have with him.

I think fans often overstate the commentary on intellectual property – it’s gestured at, but I don’t think the blurb is quite accurate when it describes the comic as giving “a middle finger to corporate IP.” I mean, sure, it makes you think; how can a character be owned the same way a logo is owned without being reduced to a lifeless and unchanging image, an icon? But Mr Boop doesn’t really go down that philosophical route, at least not primarily. Alec being sued is more threatening to him than it is to Betty, because he realises he can’t control her any more and he starts to spiral. I suppose you could interpret this as some commentary on fan entitlement but I think that would be too literal, taking the pop culture imagery at face value. It’s not about copyright, it’s about controlling relationships. At least, that’s how I read it.

“You’re living in a fantasy world, Alec.”

When Alec meets the ostensibly real Liz, he turns her into what he wants.

I also want to note how his solution to almost every problem is sex. It’s comedic, yes, but it’s also quite revealing. If all you have is a hammer, everyone gets nailed – that’s the level Alec is operating on. It’s like he simply cannot imagine a different mode. All he cares about, all he wants, is sex with Betty Boop.

But is this all imaginary? To what extent do the non-Alec characters in this comic have agency (within the fiction)? To what extent are they people? Maybe this is just a comic about a guy writing a comic. Layers!

Surprisingly complex postmodern comedy/tragedy/horror depending on how you want to look at it.

CONTENT WARNINGS:

sexual content, abuse, obsessiveness, depression, suicidality, death threats, gun violence, dereality

So concludes the Timewyrm arc.

I don’t actually have much to say because so much of Timewyrm: Revelation is inconsequential, seemingly designed to be clever or interesting then discarded as soon as the point has been made, rendering it pointless.

Saul is an interesting idea: a disembodied consciousness appropriated by the Christians who couldn’t exorcise him. Cool. But once that backstory is explained, Saul’s kind of just there. He isn’t given much to do, and he isn’t given much characterisation. Cornell simply presents the reader with a sentient church then moves on to the next thing.

Like Apocalypse, Revelation is a big pile of ideas. Yes, the ideas here are more innovative, but in a way that makes the lack of development even more frustrating. Apocalypse’s tropes were well-worn and familiar. Contrast that with Revelation, whose concepts require more explaining, and are intriguing enough to make me wonder what happens next. But there’s nothing. It’s just stuff, bouncing between half a dozen POVs like a DVD logo.

How does this arc end? Specifically, what is the Timewyrm’s fate at the end of this story? Well,

after two hundred pages of surreal mindscape nonsense, the Doctor is able to implant the Timewyrm into a human baby, which he names Ishtar. Except it isn’t really the Timewyrm any more since he removed all memory and personality and left only “bare life.” Okay. I get that this rebirth, as it were, is symbolically the opposite of the death she fled from and the destruction she wrought. Is this supposed to be a second chance for Ishtar, parallel to Boyle’s chance at a normal life? That worked well in the Ninth Doctor episode “Boom Town,” where Blon/Margaret was shown to be capable of kindness and mercy, but couldn’t undo the harm she’d done or let go of her killer instincts – the Doctor gave her a fresh start and a chance to “live her life from scratch.” But in the Timewyrm’s case the return to infancy seems to be purely symbolic, not representing any real opportunity for redemption. If her entire self has been erased, is she not functionally dead? Why not just kill her off? That would follow on from Apocalypse’s message that death is inevitable and ought to be accepted.

At least the Timewyrm actually does something in this novel,

even if she mostly acts through Boyle. Though that blue dragon form with steel claws just makes me think of Dragoon from Beyblade lmao

I do want to shout out the queerness baked into Ace’s characterisation in this book. It resonated with me quite a bit. Her caginess when asked about crushes, the awkwardness of her stereotypically feminine persona as a teen, the emphasis on her chosen name representing her true self and the way she’d become “used to fighting for her name.” I liked these quotes: “She could suffer pain and rejection and guilt as Ace, or she could slip away into the crowd of words and become nothing, floating loved in nowhere.” and “There were words you couldn’t say. There were films you couldn’t see, there were people you couldn’t know, there were ideas you couldn’t think. Not if you wanted to fit in, not if you wanted to be part of the world.”

I really wanted to like this book because there are some great elements. Until now, the Timewyrm books have more or matched their reputations; Genesys was bad, Exodus was fairly good, and Apocalypse was forgettable. Timewyrm: Revelation is well liked in the fandom, but I don’t think it lives up to the hype at all.

CONTENT WARNINGS:

dereality/surreality, existentialism, death, murder, violence, lots of blood, some body horror, child abuse, racism

I wanted to like this one but it really does lack substance. There are a lot of tropes just thrown together. For example:

Soylent Green zavát is people! And it’s also a drug which keeps people placid. And it’s also able to wipe specific memories. Somehow. The Second Doctor appears as a force ghost to solve the mystery which he shouldn’t know the answer to or be aware of in the first place. There are too many characters now so uhhh here comes a sea serpent!

It very much feels as though the author was making it up as he went along.

Despite all this stuff, there’s actually very little to connect these ideas together, and not a lot of momentum to drive the story forwards. Things just kind of happen. The Doctor in particular doesn’t do much. The villains mostly stand around being sinister while monsters chase the protagonists until they’re killed or scared away. The Timewyrm is sidelined yet again,

concealed within the mind of another villain (the Grand Matriarch this time) until she’s released at the very end. Only this time she isn’t mentioned during the story and when she is eventually present she doesn’t even get a line.

I’m starting to feel bad for her.

While I’m talking about the Grand Matriarch, I have to ask... why is she evil?

Rather, is she Lilith or is she the Timewyrm? Lilith is described as a “reluctant host” but it’s unclear to what degree she was being influenced or controlled. Terrance Dicks made a point of telling us Hitler was a fascist before the Timewyrm entered his mind, and she only amplified his psychic powers (I love Doctor Who) but here? Robinson presents us with a sweet little girl and a Matriarch intent on creating and controlling God and I suppose ascending to godhood by proxy – are they the same person, or is the Timewyrm merely puppeteering that body?

The politics of this story are a bit naff.

The novel’s answer to propaganda-fueled authoritarian rule seems to be rugged individualism; after calling the Kirithons “wimps!” for being oppressed, the Doctor offers them “the chance to be dependent on no one but [themselves]” and later reiterates that they’ll “have to fend for themselves” from now on. Coupled with the message that acts of kindness create dictators, it suggests that thinking for yourself is good (I agree), but moreover you should trust no one and help no one. I don’t like that.

Am I expecting too much from a 200-page Doctor Who novel? Maybe. But if Robinson wants to get political enough to say wake up sheeple, he might as well go all the way and write something actually radical.

In the end, Timewyrm: Apocalypse is just weak. I really did want to like this book, but as the story went on and the clichés piled up I started to lose interest. I can only hope Revelation will give the Timewyrm arc a satisfying conclusion.

CONTENT WARNINGS:

human experiments, torture, body horror (with some ableism tangled up in there), racism, cannibalism, violence (including gun violence), death, dissociation

Much stronger than Genesys. It takes a while to get going, but it eventually settles into its medium. Part One especially feels more suited to a TV script; Dicks relies too heavily on imagery (like the swastika-decorated Festival of Britain, and the sadistic Nazi with a riding crop) which doesn’t quite come across or hit the same way when read vs when seen. But it still kind of works.

In many ways it’s exactly what you’d hope for from a Doctor who novel following on from series 26: recognisable characters and a similar vibe, yet its scope and style are not something that could have been produced for TV.

The central premise is that classic alternate history trope: what if the Nazis won WWII/successfully invaded Britain?

The War Lords

are present to facilitate this story. The Timewyrm is tacked on as a contractually obliged afterthought.

The Timewyrm is trapped in Hitler’s mind. She’s given some personality in the prologue, then she’s out of action for the entire story, existing only as a minor plot point. She is released at the very end, giving some generic “I shall be the supreme power in the universe!” rant, then she’s gone and that’s that.

This may be a decent story, but it’s not a good Timewyrm story. Then again, Genesys was neither.

The War Lords

are... fine? They’re kind of boring, actually. But like I say, they’re just there to make the alternate history thing possible.

Their leader, Kriegslieter, is revealed to be significantly deformed. This serves no purpose other than to be horrifying and, I guess, to underscore how evil and/or alien he is. In conjunction with other somewhat ableist attempts in this book to paint Nazi officials as weak and sickly, it’s a bit disappointing.

I liked that the book touched on Nazi mysticism

and I thought it was interesting how “corpse discipline” was realised as an SS zombie horde – again, an intertwining of fascism and the body.

I only wish there was more of it. It only comes up towards the end of the book so there isn’t enough time to truly delve into its implications.

There is one unfortunate implication that I’ve seen other reviewers comment on:

the matter of agency and culpability. This relates to the undead soldiers, yes, but also the wider story with aliens interfering in Nazi affairs, manipulating history and ensuring that Hitler rises to power. Does the presence of these actors not in some way excuse the Nazis and even Hitler himself? After all, someone else was pulling the strings. Well... to his credit, Dicks does address this. The War Lords and the Timewyrm only “boosted” Hitler’s oratory powers and capitalised upon the infrastructure the Nazis had already built. The Nazis were already doing their thing, but with the War Lords’ help they were able to – in a timeline that never came to be – conquer Britain and declare victory over Europe. Okay, sure. I’ll take that.

I want to talk a bit about Ace’s characterisation.

In some ways she was reduced to a generic damsel-in-distress companion – wandering into obvious traps, screaming, fainting, then waiting for the Doctor to save her. When she isn’t captured, she’s just following the Doctor around and occasionally asking a question. She’s not completely unrecognisable, but she’s noticeably softened. It’s strange. Sometimes she acts as you’d expect, chucking Nitro-9 or having to be physically restrained from punching a Nazi, but at other times she’s kicking back and enjoying a glass of champagne. I was intrigued by what seemed to be the setup for an arc where she gets too comfortable with violence – eager to enact violence, even, and looking for excuses to do so – but that’s nipped in the bud and goes nowhere. Actually, she does take a gun from the Doctor because she knows he’d never use it, and shoots a Nazi (presumably killing him) towards the end of the novel. This isn’t commented on. But the Doctor does have this to say when Ace is chastising herself for panicking when held at knifepoint: “You’ve got to stop clinging to this macho image.” I know he’s saying that to reassure her it’s okay to be afraid, but then again... it’s like the default for her (for her) is assumed to be screaming and fainting (all the cliché companion stuff) and anything she does that subverts that must be part of some performance – a performance of masculinity, no less. There’s some gender going on here. Still, any sexism baked into Ace’s characterisation in Exodus is nothing compared to whatever the fuck was going on in Genesys.

I don’t have much to say about the Doctor. I did tire of the his bluffing and bluster after a while because it was the same thing over and over, but I liked how it was linked to ersatz goods – I thought that was cute. I also appreciated the scene after the climax where the Doctor was wondering whether he did the right thing,

restoring history to how it supposedly ought to be and freeing the Timewyrm in the process.

Again, I wish there was more of that.

Timewyrm: Exodus is a definite step-up from the previous novel but it’s by no means perfect. As a story about fascism, it’s not particularly deep. As a story about history and fixed events, it works fairly well. It’s a bit cheesy, but it’s sound. I would have given it four stars if the ending had been more satisfying.

CONTENT WARNINGS:

fascism, antisemitism, racism, ableism, violence, war, occupation, death, undeath, references to slavery and concentration camps

 

“But he is a good king, and he makes Uruk strong. And if he is at times a little rough, well — that’s just his manner.”

Let’s get to the point, shall we? Timewyrm: Genesys is infamous for its depiction (and defence?) of child sexual abuse. I was aware of this going in, but I wrongly assumed the issue was a single iffy scene, not something that permeated the novel throughout from chapter one.

Gilgamesh is a sexual predator. In his eyes, women (and girls as young as thirteen) are sexual objects who that exist to be groped, fondled, and raped.

...Except it’s not just in his eyes; his attitude is implicitly backed up by the narrative. There is much more focus on how embarrassing it is for a man to be cuckolded than how traumatic it is for a woman to experience rape. There’s also the fact that Ace is introduced to the reader naked and she examines herself in the mirror, assessing how “feminine” and “useful” (?) her body looks. This is before she arrives in Uruk, so it can’t be chalked up to ancient Mesopotamian cultural norms. Sexual objectification isn’t just a part of that society, it’s a part of this entire text. If this book is to be believed, women and girls are not human beings with lived experiences; they exist only as they are perceived (and used) by others. That’s the male gaze, baby!

I think there’s also something to be said about orientalism and primitivism. This book got me thinking about fantasies – far off lands with strange customs, where our taboos are freely flouted; barbaric societies which give us permission to be barbaric too; the consequence-free refuge of fiction. Pornography, even. If I were writing an essay (which I could) I would expand on this. But this is supposed to be a review of the book, not deep analysis. Moving on.

So Ace is harassed by Gilgamesh chapter after chapter after chapter. Gilgamesh is not so much a character as a personification of violence; he is the looming threat of rape (even if this is presented as mildly annoying rather than horrifying). How does the Doctor respond to Ace’s legitimate fear? Well,

he mocks her for being overly concerned about her “virtue,” lectures her about being more open-minded and embracing cultural differences, reminds her that most girls would be grateful for the king’s “attentions,” and hey, “suffering builds character.” In essence, shut up and take it.

 

The Doctor is out of character throughout;

he has no affection for Ace, and he leaves her alone with Gilgamesh (multiple times!) despite her literally begging him not to. Even when Gilgamesh isn’t a factor, the Doctor is constantly irritated by Ace and wishing she would just be quiet.

The titular Timewyrm is introduced by (a hologram of) the Fourth Doctor, and the Third Doctor’s personality takes the wheel at the climax.

Peel clearly doesn’t like the Seventh Doctor. Which makes me wonder why he volunteered to write the first of the VNAs.

Gilgamesh is one-note. He talks like a Klingon and thinks only of fighting and fucking. Enkidu is similarly flat and isn’t given anything to do, but I do think it’s neat that he’s a Neanderthal. There is very little focus on the relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu – in fact, they barely interact at all – even though their bromance is the crux of the original epic. 

The Timewyrm (usually referred to in this book as Ishtar) also does nothing for most of the story, then there are multiple pages of backstory exposition from another character, after which she’s a little more present in the narrative. But she feels kind of generically evil. Something something immortality something something brains something something nuke. She’s not a memorable character. And there are three more novels in this arc... Hopefully the other authors will pick up the slack and make her more interesting.

 

It’s a disappointing start to the VNA series and to the Timewyrm arc.

CONTENT WARNINGS:

sexism, orientalism, sexualisation/harassment/assault of women and teenage girls, emotional manipulation, drunkenness, violence, death