Unrivaled (2023)

I picked this up as a part of my BookBale Kickstarter from Caezik Press.  With these four stories I figured I couldn’t go wrong. Four novellas that all won awards?

I’d only read one of them before–Nancy Kress’ “Beggars in Spain”. This one’s an interesting topic–what if people could be genetically engineered to not sleep, with no ill effects?

Mike Resnick’s “The Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge” was an interesting structure. I never would have read this on its own, I think.

Lois McMaster Bujold’s “The Mountains of Mourning” was probably my favorite in the collection. Even though I have never read a Vorkosigan novel, I think this is a prequel or early-set work so that I wasn’t lost in the world. It has me thinking I should probably reach out for the first novel proper as I think I’d like them.

Lastly (but first in the collection) is Joe Haldeman’s “The Hemingway Hoax”. I know of Joe’s interest in Hemingway, but thankfully this wasn’t too ‘inside baseball’ and it ended up with quite a SFnal bent to it. I enjoyed it a lot.

The only other comment I have on this edition is that the epub version I read had something strange where if characters were italicized on the right border of the page, the right edge, sometimes serif of the characters were cut off!  It didn’t stop me from figuring out text, but it was distracting and occurred through the whole book.

If you’ve buying from BookBale or Caezik, look this collection up. Well worth it.

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues (HBOMax, 2025)

While this had been on my radar as going to be released at the end of 2025, the tragic event of the murders of Rob and Michele Reiner made me watch this “mockumentary” followup in a very different light.

While I am a fan of the original movie, I do not know all of the songs and the key lines by heart.  The setup of the sequel is that the band needs to reunite for one more show.  Rob Reiner “Marty” is back as the director/interviewer.

Sadly, I think the movie suffers from having to follow in its own footsteps.  There are some good bits with some “special guests” and the best thing is that there is a definite story arc in the 90 minutes.

In hindsight, it was bittersweet to see Rob Reiner do a bit of slapstick.

I have to shout out the newcomer Valerie Franco as Tap’s latest drummer. This seems particularly relevant now that Rush has tapped a new drummer; I think once again Spinal Tap was ahead of the curve!

This movie won’t resonate like the first one did, but it is going to serve as the standing stone of Rob Reiner’s last film, and it does that honorably, and with some honest laughs along the way.

Wake Up Dead Man (Netflix, 2025)

We got to this one fairly quickly as we’ve enjoyed the two previous “Knives Out” stories.  As usual this one’s got a great cast (I didn’t even recognize Thomas Haden Church).

This one carves up a twisty plot as the others did.  Strange to see Mila Kunis in the main position of authority but I liked her performance.   Daniel Craig’s accent doesn’t seem over-the-top this time around.

It’s a bit long.  It doesn’t exactly -plod- but it does take its time.  My wife says she had most of it figured out, but I had only figured out a couple of points before the reveal.  She gave it bonus points for some Netflix meta-referencing, too.

Still, it was a good watch and use of our Netflix money this month.