Reviews – Page 20 – Diabolical Plots

Anime Review: Natsume Yūjin-chō Roku

natsumeroku

Natsume Yūjin-chō Roku is the sixth season of the long-running series (also known as Natsume’s Book of Friends). I previously reviewed seasons 1-4 here and season 5 here.

Natsume Yūjin-chō follows the ongoing misadventures of teenage Takashi Natsume, who has the ability to see youkai (spirits out of Japanese folklore) when most people cannot. Because the series is episodic, it’s generally easy to slip into the middle with minimal knowledge of what has happened in the past, but a few of Roku‘s episodes work better knowing Takashi’s (and his grandmother Reiko’s) history.

Takashi has met other people who can see youkai, and the sixth season features two two-part episodes dealing with exorcists and their relationships with their youkai familiars. Most humans who can see youkai find work in exorcism, which is a practice Takashi dislikes. Like his grandmother Reiko, who wrote down the names of youkai in what became the Book of Friends, he prefers to settle things on more humane terms without imprisoning any wayward spirits.

But he is friends with Natori, who is an exorcist, and because of that friendship Takashi becomes involved with couple incidents involving old familiars and how they behave when the human they were bonded with has passed on. Takashi also has to deal with the knowledge that the Book of Friends is not something he can share (since we learned it was a forbidden practice last season). This creates a real fear in him that he can’t let Natori know the truth about what he’s carrying, while at the same time Natori is aware that there is something Takashi is protecting that he will not share with anyone.

It was a surprising bit of story advancement in a series which largely works as a slice of life with youkai. And that’s not the only revelation, as Roku teases more of Takashi’s heritage, but this time in regards to a different ancestor we have not yet met.

The remaining episodes mostly run with the usual formula of Takashi encounters a youkai with a problem or who is causing a problem. This is not a strike against the series, as that’s long been the heart of the show, but it doesn’t break much in the way of new ground.

There is one episode worth calling out though, for being the first genuinely creepy episode of Natsume Yūjin-chō. Despite being a series about youkai, it’s usually tame with its imagery. Even if the characters are startled, they’re rarely meant to be terrified. “Nitai-sama” takes its cues from more horror oriented fare though, where the youkai is known to be malevolent and takes its time in revealing itself. It’s probably an insufficient scare for those used to actual horror, but the episode is definitely more intense than the usual for Natsume Yūjin-chō and especially will not go over well with people who have a fear of dolls.

Roku isn’t going to win anyone over who isn’t already watching, but for those who are, it’s a surprisingly forward look at potential stories to come. Now the question is, will there be a Natsume Yūjin-chō Nana (Seven)?

Number of Episodes: 11

Pluses: more of the same low key storytelling, plot development for Takashi, lots of lovely stories about the bonds between humans and youkai

Minuses: more of the same low key storytelling, season is on the short side, story doesn’t really do anything with the potential complications that come up

Natsume Yūjin-chō Roku is currently streaming at Crunchyroll (subtitled).

laurietom
Laurie Tom is a fantasy and science fiction writer based in southern California. Since she was a kid she has considered books, video games, and anime in roughly equal portions to be her primary source of entertainment. Laurie is a previous grand prize winner of Writers of the Future and since then her work has been published in Galaxy’s Edge, Strange Horizons, and the Year’s Best YA Speculative Fiction.

BOOK REVIEW: Club Dead by Charlaine Harris

written by David Steffen

Club Dead is a romance/mystery/horror novel from 2003, the third in the Sookie Stackhouse series of novels by Charlaine Harris, which is the basis of the HBO show True Blood–this book was used very loosely as the basis for season 3 of the show. The first book in the series is Dead Until Dark, (reviewed here), and the second book was Living Dead in Dallas (reviewed here).

Sookie’s vampire boyfriend Bill has been working on a project to the point of nearly total distraction. Now he has disappeared under mysterious circumstances and Sookie sets out to find out what happened to him. The clues lead to Jackson, Mississippi where it appears that Bill’s former lover and maker Lorena has summoned him (maker as in the one who turned him into a vampire). Clues seem to indicate that he is being held there against his will and their first stop is “Club Dead” the nickname for a major hangout for the supernatural in Jackson. Sookie enlists the help of Bill’s boss and local authority in the vampire hierarchy Eric Northman and newfound ally the werewolf Alcide Herveaux.

After being pretty disappointed overall by the previous book, I was happy that this one was much more satisfying. It still tends to suffer in comparison to the TV show, IMO, but this one differed from the TV show in enough ways to keep things more fresh which made it easier to keep interest (Since there are more books than seasons of the show I’m hoping that some of the books will be entirely new so that I can view those books at least with fresh eyes).

There was plenty new here to keep me interested, from Bill’s secret project, to how the attempt to break Bill out of Russell’s compound, and it kept me reading to the end.

The main thing that paled in comparison to the book was that Lorena, while playing a pivotal role in drawing Bill to Mississippi, was barely onscreen and we never got to learn much of their backstory together. That backstory is explored in much greater depth in the TV show during this season, through flashbacks from the point of view of Bill. The novels stick strictly to the point of view of Sookie, which misses a lot of opportunity for finding out more about the lives of other characters and this was one case where that was especially true. If you like the books, I would highly recommend you check out the TV show to dive much much deeper into the backstory of secondary characters.

All the books are quick reads, and I can burn through them much faster than I can most novels. They do have a tendency to over-summarize the events of past books, which might be helpful if I were reading them at the rate they were published or if I was jumping randomly into the middle of the series. But I think that might be an expectation of the mystery and/or romance genre readers, so that the books are easy to pick up in any order, so it may be an effect of the marketplace rather than the writing.

Overall, I was happy that this one was much better than the previous book, lots of action and mystery to keep things going, as well as a new potential romance element with Alcide. Looking forward to where the TV show and books seperate from each other entirely, so that I can just focus on the happenings of the book without mentally comparing every element to the TV show.

Anime Review: KADO: The Right Answer

written by Laurie Tom

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KADO: The Right Answer is an usual piece of science fiction for anime to tackle. While first contact scenarios are about as common in anime as in Western movies, they are usually played for action (when the aliens are hostile) or comedy (when the aliens are not). KADO chooses to begin with an alien whose motivations are obscure by our understanding.

Yaha-kui zaShunina arrives in a giant extra-dimensional cube that lands on top of a passenger plane, accidentally absorbing it and all the people inside. Fortunately, one of those on board is ace government negotiator Kojiro Shindo. When the alien entity does not appear to be immediately hostile and goes to the effort of absorbing the the concept of human language, the two of them begin to communicate.

zaShunina offers humanity a means of advancement, with technology far above what is currently available. We’re not talking spaceships, but an unlimited energy source for humans to do with what they will. He (zaShunina takes on a male appearance but probably does not actually have a gender) likens his offer to a person who has so much of something they no longer have need of it all. If he has more bread than he can possibly eat, why not share it? This is why he has come to give gifts to humanity.

It’s a completely reasonable line of thinking, but naturally wreaks havoc across Japan (where zaShunina landed) and the rest of the globe as it will completely revolutionize industry.

Much of the series deals with how deal with zaShunina’s gifts (because he doesn’t stop at unlimited energy) from the point of view of nations and individuals. It’s not an action-based series and all the human characters are adults, though one scientist is childlike to the point of annoyance, but her mentality works for the story so I’m a little more forgiving than I would otherwise be. People are rightfully concerned about what zaShunina will mean for humanity and whether humans are moving forward too fast.

For the most part the early conflicts move well, featuring reasonable and restrained responses that we hope would be mirrored should any such event happen in the real world.

Shindo is the lead protagonist, but it’s difficult to see inside his thoughts and know him as a person, which is likely why Episode 0 exists. Because he agrees to represent zaShunina in discussions early on, so the anisotropic being has a human representative, he ends up cut off from a lot of the cast. zaShunina also does not fully understand how humans work, so a lot of Shindo’s interactions with him don’t really show him as a person so much as an aide.

This changes later on due to the influence of Saraka Tsukai, another negotiator, who is the designated representative of the Japanese government. While most people are intrigued by the possibilities zaShunina brings them, Tsukai tends to be the one voicing the counterargument, that perhaps it’s best if humanity continues to struggle and advance based on its own labor rather than what an alien being has given them.

KADO: The Right Answer is largely a thoughtful piece, exploring the ramifications of human advancement through alien intervention, and expresses numerous points of view. This is the nice thing about it. We see the cautious and the eager. About the only thing we don’t see are bands of crazy protesters, but barring a few outside shots the story takes place in Japan so it’s possible that this may be more of a cultural difference.

Where it begins to fall apart is towards the end. We know the story can’t just be about zaShunina bringing gifts to everyone, so something happens to raise the stakes, and what happens feels contradictory to the tone laid by previous episodes. The resolution itself is a bit of headscratcher. There’s a small part of it that works, but the rest involves a pretty hefty sacrifice from a couple people that isn’t really discussed before it happened, so it doesn’t feel as polished as it could have been.

KADO is also one of a growing number of CG-animated anime. For budget reasons, CG is getting more popular, but still has difficulty recreating the two dimensional look of traditional hand drawn animation. KADO handles itself fairly well, and the CG is handy for a project like this where there are a lot of alien artifacts that need to look unusual and outside of our reality. The human characters are rendered pretty well too. Though they are clearly computer generated rather than hand drawn, they’re one of the better efforts in recent years.

Overall, I think KADO is a worthwhile experiment. It doesn’t hit the heights it could have, but it’s a worth a look.

Number of Episodes: 12 (13, if including Episode 0)

Pluses: interesting premise, range of human reaction of alien intervention is pleasingly diverse, adult cast

Minuses: negotiation theme ultimately has no impact on the ending, ending requires huge sacrifices that don’t have much setup, pacing is really slow

KADO: The Right Answer is currently streaming at Crunchyroll (subtitled), Funimation (dubbed). Funimation has licensed this for eventual retail distribution in the US.

laurietom
Laurie Tom is a fantasy and science fiction writer based in southern California. Since she was a kid she has considered books, video games, and anime in roughly equal portions to be her primary source of entertainment. Laurie’s short fiction has been published in Galaxy’s Edge, Strange Horizons, and the Intergalactic Medicine Show.

BOOK REVIEW: Living Dead in Dallas by Charlaine Harris

written by David Steffen

Living Dead in Dallas is a romance/mystery/horror novel from 2002, the second in the Sookie Stackhouse series of novels by Charlaine Harris, which is the basis of the HBO show True Blood–this book was the basis for season 2 of the show. The first book in the series is Dead Until Dark, which I reviewed previously.

In the previous book, Sookie met her first love–the vampire Bill Compton. She’s a telepath and her ability to read minds has proved disastrous to her love life, but she can’t hear vampire thoughts. They are together now, and he is teaching her new things about controlling her powers, as she learns more and more about the supernatural world.

In this book, after a car breakdown and a fight, Sookie is attacked by a maenad, yet another of the supernatural creatures that secretly exists in this world. Bill takes her to Fangtasia, the vampire bar in Shreveport, where the owner Eric Northman has only a little time to save her from certain death. Soon he negotiates with Sookie for her to do some work for him–Eric is the sheriff of area 5, a position of authority to vampires in the local area, and as a favor to another area he has promised Sookie’s mindreading abilities to help with an investigation in Dallas where the vampires suspect one of their human employees of betraying them. Dallas is also the headquarters of The Fellowship of the Sun, a newly founded church dedicated to revealing vampires for the monsters that the church believes them to be. Back in Bon Temps, the maenad’s influence is spreading–she demands tribute to her god, and will drive people mad if her demand is not met to her satisfaction.

This book was decently engaging and action-packed, with Sookie undercover in a strange city, surrounded by both supernaturals that she doesn’t fully understand, and by people who have dedicated their lives to trying to destroy the supernaturals. The plot in Dallas was all interesting and engaging, though I thought it was weird that Sookie didn’t immediately ask why the Dallas vampires didn’t just glamour (a kind of hypnosis) their employees to get the answer.

I found the maenad subplot extremely disappointing in the book. I’m not sure what it added at all, apart from giving us a sense of other kinds of supernatural things out there. The resolution to that subplot just felt like the writer had gotten themselves into a corner and just gave up trying to find a satisfying or epic way to resolve it. I was probably spoiled for it ahead of time because the maenad plot in True Blood Season 2, which was loosely based upon this book, was crazy and epic and freaky and really really good with a really cool resolution.

And, another thing that happened right at the beginning of the book that was extremely disappointing was the death of Lafayette Reynolds. Again, I have probably been spoiled by watching the TV show first, but he was one of my favorite characters in the show, in part because you don’t see a lot of queer people of color in SF/F/H shows. So it was a big letdown for him to play basically no important role in the books at all.

This book was okay. It’s possible that I’ve been spoiled by the higher stakes and engaging nature of the TV show that’s based on it, which probably isn’t fair since the TV show wouldn’t exist without the book. This one soured for me at the beginning with the death of Lafayette and only went down from there.

Anime Review: Attack on Titan Season 2

written by Laurie Tom

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Attack on Titan‘s first season aired far enough back that I don’t have a review on Diabolical Plots to point newcomers to, but suffice to say it’s good! It crosses over to mainstream media much easier than most anime, but the story was clearly far from complete, which brings us to Season 2.

Be aware that there will be first season spoilers as I tackle the second season!

Attack on Titan took four years to return, which is surprising considering how popular it is. Part of the delay was no doubt because the first season had chewed through most of the available manga at the time it was animated, but considering that the second season is only covering one additional story arc, rather than two, I’m not sure why the studio waited so long. The manga has completed three more story arcs since the end of the first season, so from a storytelling standpoint, there’s a lot to work with.

After a brief recap, Season 2 picks up only moments after the end of the first season, with Annie being hauled away while encased in crystal and the Scout Regiment trying to figure out what to make of the mysterious Titan that appears to be inside one of the great walls that surrounds their country.

When a priest hurries over and tells Hange to cover the hole in the wall so the entombed Titan doesn’t wake up, it becomes clear that there are a lot of secrets to their world that some people are privileged to know and others are not. Worse, Titans have appeared inside the greater Wall Rose, which should not have happened unless the wall has been breached.

The Wall Rose invasion kicks off a furious first half of the season as the Scouts try to figure out where, or even if, the wall has been breached. The breach of the outermost Wall Maria at the start of the first season devastated the human population. Losing the middle Wall Rose as well would be a catastrophe.

Worse, there’s a new intelligent Titan involved and many of our fresh recruits have been isolated from most of the military. They are unarmed, without the maneuvering gear that allows them to sling themselves into the air to fight Titans, and they’re about to get surrounded.

After the gut-wrenching opening, the real story this season is figuring out who the enemy of humanity really is, because they are facing something much more complex than the mindless Titans outside the walls. At the end of the first season, Commander Erwin Smith had promised to flush out the Titans hiding among humanity, and in Season 2, he certainly delivers.

Arguably the biggest reveal happens at the season’s midpoint, capping off the manic first half, but the story doesn’t quite regain its footing afterwards.

Though a short breather is nice, the story loses momentum when it stretches past a single episode, which it does. The animators do their best to try to keep the episodes exciting when most of the plot involves people sitting around, but to be fair, they’re constrained by the fact the series has chosen to hew extremely close to the source material and there is a chapter where the characters literally spend the entire time sitting in trees. It wasn’t so noticeable in the manga, but the same chapter fares pretty badly in animation, even with a few additional scenes to break up the view.

Fortunately, Studio Wit knows how to sell a climax and the season swings back to full spectacle with a blood churning rally at the end. The season doesn’t end with many answers, but we do have a better picture of the enemy and even more questions for future story arcs.

Much has been made about the studio only animating half the episodes they did last time, especially since Season 2 started with enough source material to last in the ballpark of 35 episodes, but with the wonky exception of the Colossal Titan, which was clearly an out of place piece of CG, allowing the animation team to focus on a smaller set of episodes seems to have turned out to be a good thing.

Every episode is much more detailed and pleasing on the eyes than the first season, and the first was no slouch when it came to animation. There are fantastic sequences of running along walls, riding through murderous Titans, and soldiers flying through the air with their omni-directional mobility gear. Any random screenshot will have much better shading and line work.

Composer Hiroyuki Sawano returns as well with one of his best soundtracks to date, remixing themes from the first season and adding new favorites, whether it’s the heart-pumping “Barricades” or the thoughtful “Call of Silence.”

Despite the pacing stumble in the second half and the lack of answers, I still recommend Attack on Titan: Season 2 to anyone who enjoyed the first. It plays to the series’ strengths and then pushes itself to become even better at what it does best.

Best of all, on the heels of the season finale, Season 3 was announced for 2018, so there won’t be as long of a wait for the next round.

Number of Episodes: 12

Pluses: Gorgeous and highly detailed battle sequences, midpoint plot reveal is a great twist, a lot of side characters from the first season really get a chance to shine

Minuses: A lot of first season questions are still unanswered, sitting in trees episode was unusually boring, pacing is off in second half

Attack on Titan Season 2 is currently streaming at Crunchyroll (subtitled), Funimation (dubbed), and aired on Cartoon Network. Funimation has licensed this for eventual retail distribution in the US.

laurietom
Laurie Tom is a fantasy and science fiction writer based in southern California. Since she was a kid she has considered books, video games, and anime in roughly equal portions to be her primary source of entertainment. Laurie’s short fiction has been published in Galaxy’s Edge, Strange Horizons, and the Intergalactic Medicine Show.

BOOK REVIEW: Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris

written by David Steffen

Dead Until Dark is a romance/mystery/horror novel published in 2001, the first in the Sookie Stackhouse series of novels by Charlaine Harris, which is the basis of the HBO show True Blood (I reviewed the 7th and final season here, though keep in mind that will be spoilery if you’re just getting started)

Sookie Stackhouse is a twenty-five-year-old waitress living in the small town of Bon Temps, Louisiana. She is also a telepath–she can hear people’s thoughts, whether she likes it or not. This has not been as useful as you might think, and has mostly served to make her a bit of an outcast. Among other things, she has found any semblance of a romantic life is impossible with this ability, since she can hear her date’s hidden thoughts, not great for a first-date kind of situation.

Not too long ago, science perfected the production of synthetic blood. Designed as a medical product, its announcement had wider effects than anticipated, when vampires all over the world revealed themselves to be real. The synthetic blood allows them to survive without feeding on humans, and so many vampires have chosen this time to reveal themselves and integrate into human society.

People as a whole are still getting used to the idea. There are plenty of humans who think vampires are monsters no matter their claims to peace. There plenty of vampires who would have rather remained hidden. When a vampire comes to live in Bon Temps, Sookie finds herself immediately drawn to him. His name is Bill Compton, and has taken up residence in the Compton house across the graveyard from where Sookie lives with her grandmother. When she meets him she is shocked to discover that she can’t hear his thoughts. With him, she can finally just be a normal person and not have to deal with every little thing he’s thinking at every moment. Shortly after, she discovers him behind the bar where she works about to be drained of blood (which fetches a pretty price as a drug), but Sookie manages to scare them off, and befriends Bill.

Meanwhile, women who have sex with vampires start turning up dead, and Sookie’s brother Jason is the prime suspect. He’s always been a bit of a womanizer, but Sookie knows he didn’t do it, so she agrees to help him clear his name.

This first book in the series matches the main events of season 1 of True Blood pretty closely. There are some major characters from the TV show missing, and some other ones are drastically different, but overall the main throughline is pretty close. The main thing that has taken a lot of getting used to in switching from the TV show to the books is that Sookie is the only POV character. This means that many of the other characters are barely onscreen at all and don’t have nearly as rich of backstories as they do in the books. Even Jason, who is the prime suspect and the brother of the protagonist, does not play a huge role in the books.

The tone between the books and TV show do feel drastically different to me. The TV show feels like a drama/horror show while the book feels mostly like a romance in the style of narration it uses. I find that I like the Sookie of the TV show better than the one in the book–she seems generally more engaged and competent on that side of things while the version in the book.

I don’t mean for this to be only a comparison between the TV show and the book. After all, the TV show wouldn’t exist if the book hadn’t already been successful. But having seen them both, and when a book and a season have a closely aligned plot, it’s hard not to draw comparisons.

There are sex scenes and… Well, I know that sex scenes are super hard to write. Make them too purple and they can get a little bit absurd, but push too far the other way and they can be too clinical. The sex scenes in this book can tend a bit toward the absurd side.

Overall, I enjoyed it, though the romance book narrator voice has taken some getting used to. I wouldn’t say it’s overly profound, but it’s an easy and relaxing read and this is the book that started the whole franchise. If you have seen the TV series, you should consider reading this to see where it all started. If you haven’t seen the TV series but have read the book, then you should consider watching the TV series to see a different interpretation of the characters and events, with a lot more backstory on the secondary characters.

MOVIE REVIEW: 10 Cloverfield Lane

written by David Steffen
10 Cloverfield Lane is a 2016 suspense movie published by Paramount Pictures.

After an argument, Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) leaves her boyfriend and drives solo across Louisiana late at night. After hearing reports on the radio of sweeping blackouts on the east coast, a pickup drives her off the road.

She wakes up in a cellar on a mattress on the floor, hooked up to an IV bag, and with a brace on her knee chained to the wall. Soon she meets Howard (John Goodman), who claims to have rescued her from the side of the road and is nursing her back to health, and that he is keeping her there for her own good. They’re in a fallout shelter under his farm, and he claims they’re both lucky to be there, because he says that war has broken out and the shelter is the only thing keeping them safe from the fallout.

He unchains her brace from the wall and lets her loose, and she tries to attack him to get loose but fails. She meets the other resident of the shelter, Emmett (John Gallagher, Jr.), and find Henry’s oppressive rules laid over their life together there. Is there really a war going on out there? Can she and Emmett find a way to escape? Is there anything to escape to?

If you’ve seen the movie Cloverfield you might have some suspicion about what’s really really going on above ground, but the connection was so tenuous (only the similarity in name and knowing they were both J.J.Abrams movies. I had that suspicion, but I also suspected that Abrams might’ve just chosen the title as a red herring so that you had to constantly wonder about what is going on up there.

Great suspense movie, and I was never sure where it was going. John Goodman plays a solid villain, creepy and malevolent even while he puts on a guise of reasonability in between threats. Excellent movie, high stakes, always kept me guessing. It’s free to view on Amazon Prime.

Using MetaData For Clean Sorting of Fiction Podcast Episodes

written by David Steffen

I’ve been listening to fiction podcasts for about 8 years, catching up on the backlog of one podcast before adding another. I’m currently keeping up with about 10 podcasts. I’m weird in that I prefer not to use a podcatcher, because I hate the iTunes podcatcher interface, so I manually download mp3s from the podcast sites and sync them as music tracks.

I don’t know how the podcatcher interface handles it, but for manually downloading episodes, mp3 metadata is everything for being able to find and play the songs on the iPod because it uses the metadata for sorting. I see some podcasts using these for ideal sorting, and others not so much or changing how they set the metadata from month to month and year to year. So, for certain podcasts I find myself manually editing the metadata over and over again, so I’m writing up this guide for suggestions.

So, here’s some tips for some metadata to pay particular attention to, if you want your metadata to handle sorting properly.

Album
If you use the podcast name as the “Album” field that will put all of your podcast episodes in a single directory in the album level, so they’re easy to find together.
Name
This may seem the easiest one to fill out, but I do find it especially helpful if the track number and the story title are in the name so that you can more easily pick up where you left off in a chain of episodes. i.e. “EP588: Rocket Surgery”
Track Number
If you make this the episode number, it makes the sorting work very nicely. There doesn’t seem to be an upper limit on the number, or at least none of the podcasts I listen to have hit it.
Album Artist
This is the metadata field that I see filled out badly the most often. Do NOT put the name of the author in this field because it is sorted by this BEFORE the track number–which means the album would be sorted by author name before track number, making episodes impossible to find. Also don’t use it for producer or anything else that might vary from episode to episode for the same reason.You don’t need to fill this field at all. I find myself deleting this metadata more than any other to get sorting to work properly.
Artist
If you want to put the author name in a field, use this one, because tracks are sorted by track number before this. (But again, not necessary, though it’s handy at a glance)

BOOK REVIEW: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

written by David Steffen

The Handmaid’s Tale is a near future dystopia published in 1985 about a United States of America that has become an oppressive theocracy. ((It has also very recently become a TV series streaming on Hulu, but I haven’t seen the show so I don’t have an opinion one way or the other about that)

Offred lives in Gilead, the theocratic country that the United States has become in a near future. The Christian Bible is the rule of the land, or at least a very strict interpretation of a very selective subset of the Christian Bible. Tales of the “way things used to be” are a constant mantra told by those in power to justify the extreme measures taken to uphold the current law, tales of when women could not walk the street without being harassed, when women were expected to paint themselves for beauty, when women had to fear rape and assault. Women are safe now, they say, treated as the precious vessels they are meant to be, to bear children as God intended. There is a wall in town where the body of criminals are hung on display: atheists and homosexuals and adulterists and traitors and others. All for the safety of the good citizens of Gilead, of course.

A lingering effect of the way things used to be is low fertility across the population, caused by some mixture of chemicals, diet, medications, intentional blocking of fertility, and other causes. In the new world women who can’t produce children are unwomen, sent to labor camps to live short miserable lives. Lower class women, at least. Upper class women may be assigned handmaids who, inspired by the tale of Jacob’s handmaiden in the Bible, may act as a pregnancy proxy for an infertile wife (according to the dictates of Gilead, no man is infertile, it is always the wife).

Offred is a handmaid, assigned to a military officer. The rise of Gilead is recent enough that she had had a family before the change, a family that was torn apart as Gilead declared second marriages void. Even her name has been taken–“Offred” is not the name that she had before, but is derived from the man she is beholden to, as in “of Fred”. She is watched very carefully, as she is considered a valuable vessel, and she is protected from everything, even herself–her room has shatter-proof glass in the windows, the ceiling fan removed, and the knives in the kitchen are locked away. Every month when she’s ovulating, she performs her duty in order to become pregnant, and time is running out before she is declared an unwoman.

In the prologue to the book, in the copy of the book that I read, Atwood talks about some of the narrative choices she made. When she decided to write a dystopia, she decided to do it without predicting any future technology, so nothing in the book is anything that wasn’t possible with technology at the time the book was written. This sets it apart from stories like 1984, which depends on the possibility of thought control, or The Hunger Games, which uses various future technologies.

Another thing that sets it apart was that Atwood wanted to base the theocracy of Gilead on actual scripture, and to base all the things people do to each other on actual things from history. This gives it a very different feel from many dystopias, because it feels like it could be just around the corner. The book was published more than thirty years ago, but I’m not surprised that it has become a recent show, because many of the concerns and issues at the root of this book are still concerns today–especially with too many members of the US government passing laws based in theocracy. Despite the separation of church and state inherent in the founding of the country, there are those who cling to the Puritan roots of that more than the word of the Constitution.

The Handmaid’s Tale is a chilling cautionary tale about where we could end up if we are complacent in the face of the rise of fascism. I can’t recommend the book enough–it is a dark read, so brace yourself. It is very well written, chilling, poetic, and moving. I don’t have Hulu but I’d like to pick up the show when I can, perhaps if it comes out in a box set.

THEATER REVIEW: Shrek the Musical

written by David Steffen
Shrek The Musical is a theater version of the 2001 CG Dreamworks comedy adventure Shrek. As with the movie, the play is about the ogre Shrek who lives a contented secluded life in a swamp, but his solitude is interrupted with an influx of fairytale creatures who have been evicted by Lord Farquad to transform his kingdom into his perfect image of a kingdom. When Shrek goes to confront Farquad (meeting Donkey, a talking donkey on the way) he is coerced into mounting a rescue mission of Princess Fiona from a dragon-guarded tower to bring her back to be Farquad’s bride.

The musical is an enjoyable adaptation of the movie, converting the existing plot by adding songs that fit into the themes of the original movie (the movie had a lot of music but it was pretty much all cover music of popular songs rather than being songs about the plot of the story). I particularly liked the song showing Princess Fiona growing up in the castle in isolation imagining what Prince Charming will come to rescue here–it’s done with three lookalike actresses of three different ages and the song finishes with them all singing on a balcony together, and I thought that was fun. The song “Let Your Freak Flag Fly” is also particularly fun.

If you liked the original, I think you’ll probably like this, though quite a few lines are lifted directly from the original. And if you’ve never seen the original, if you’ve got a sense of humor and an interest in fantasy humor story, give it a shot! Fun for the kids, too, we saw it at a children’s theater nearby and our four-year-old enjoyed it.