Book Retorts

This week Danielle returns to her teen detective roots with the Hardy Boys Casefiles book one, from 1987, Dead on Target by Franklin W. Dixon. Frank and Joe hardy are two young men who Sam cannot distinguish between despite Danielle’s instance that they are, in fact, very different characters. The book opens with a dramatic scene of Joe’s girlfriend, Iola, exploding in a car bomb at a political rally she was organizing for a presidential candidate. We cut back an hour and learn this rally is, in fact, a dress rehearsal for a political rally, which is definitely not a thing. After Iola gets explodified, Joe, who was a terrible boyfriend, is extremely distraught and Frank agrees to help him do what they do best: Incompetently attempt to investigate her murder until they luck into a solution. After talking to some people at the local mall, they’re attacked by unknown evil people with, hilariously, dart guns. They escape in the car of a government agent they met earlier named Mr. Gray. A brief car chase later, where Joe earnestly tries to murder some of their pursuers, and the Hardy bros are told to go hide in South Carolina while Mr. Gray and the secret government organization he works for, The Network, takes care of the terrorist organization that attacked them. The Hardys are not ones to listen to reason, so they muster all the hacking skills that existed in 1987, and hack into an airport computer to determine that Mr. Gray is headed towards London, and they follow him there. They quickly foil an attempted hijacking which, considering the terrorist weapons were a single grenade and a can of mace, wasn’t much of a threat to begin with. But the real mystery of this book, in Sam’s mind, is just one thing: How are these inexperienced bothers consistently able to insert themselves into a secret government anti-terrorism organization? And further, how has this terrorist organization, known as the Assassins, existed since the freaking Crusades? Unfortunately, the Hardys have no answers to these questions, but with any luck they may yet solve the mystery of who killed Iola, and bring them to justice. So join us for part one of this fast-paced reboot of the classic mystery series!

Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.

For more delightful weirdness, follow us on Bluesky or YouTube.

If you like our content and want more of it, please consider supporting us on Patreon.

For their 100th episode, Danielle and Sam are joined by their friend Jim who shares the first book of The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, the 2017 novel All Systems Red. In the dystopian future, The Company is the major monopoly in the universe. Survey teams exploring worlds are contracted by The Company which also supplies at least one security unit robot for each team. One of these SecUnits has hacked its own governor to give itself free will and named itself Murderbot, and it has decided to use its new freedom to binge-watch soap operas and generally avoid people. Also, while Murderbot is called a robot, it’s more of an human-looking android, possibly made from a corpse? It’s unclear. Muderbot also has a dark history from before it hacked itself where it was accidentally ordered to murder its entire survey team. Murderbot’s current assignment is a survey team of space hippies, and they eventually encounter another evil sabotaging survey team that isn’t authorized to be on the planet and is undermining the space hippies for reasons that are largely irrelevant. The EvilSurvey team has been hacking other SecUnits using syringe darts (no idea how that works), which Sam thinks just shows that fleshy, human-like security robots are a bad idea. Murderbot is already hacked, so the dart has no effect on them, but eventually Murderbot fakes being hacked to infiltrate the EvilSurvey team in a plan so convoluted it can only be described as parody. Sam and Danielle do their best to follow a plot that seems almost perfunctory in a story that largely takes place in the mind of an antisocial robot and that is steeped in satire and Jim does an admirable job in the face of Danielle and Sam’s goofy incompetence. So join us for our 100th episode where we’ve come a long way, but are still just as weird as ever!

Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.

For more delightful weirdness, follow us on Bluesky or YouTube.

If you like our content and want more of it, please consider supporting us on Patreon.

This week Sam brings the long-awaited conclusion to the 1989 Dan Simmons sci-fi epic Hyperion. The pilgrims, fresh off the tramway, make a pit-stop at Keep Chronos, the now abandoned former resort hotel. As they settle in for the night, the sky explodes into battle as the Ousters begin their invasion. Our pilgrims, however, don’t have time for such things as they’d rather hear the Consul’s story. The Consul tells a story within a story about how a man named Merin, a Shipman aboard the Las Angels who came to Maui-Covenant ferrying the parts to build a farcaster. There, he falls in love with a local named Siri, but Merin can’t stay, partly because he murdered a bunch of locals after they killed his friend (it’s complicated). So, as Merin sails the stars back and forth he ages mere months for each trip while Siri ages eleven years, but every time he returns they still meet up, eventually even having children. Long story short, Siri eventually dies and Merin leads a doomed revolution against the Hegemony to protect Maui-Covenant. The only part of that which is relevant is that the Consul is his grandson and bitterly hates the Hegemony, but has worked for them biding his time. He was there when the Hegemony and TechnoCore encouraged the Ousters to attack Bressia as a test of their military strength, losing his wife and son in the war. He was eventually picked to liaise with the Ousters, this time to get them to attack Hyperion so the Hegemony could make it part of the WorldWeb and stymie the anti-human factions of the TechnoCore. If none of those machinations make sense, don’t worry, it only gets more complicated from there. In the end, the Consul, with the help of the Ousters, manages to start the process of opening the Time Tombs, and now their opening is immanent. Would you like to know what’s in the Time Tombs? So would we, but we’ll all have to wait until the next book for that be answered, maybe. In the meantime, enjoy an ending that makes Danielle rethink why she ever agreed to doing this podcast, but at least she takes solace in our new favorite character: DJ Shrike, dropping beats in the Time Tombs!

Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.

For more delightful weirdness, follow us on Bluesky or YouTube.

If you like our content and want more of it, please consider supporting us on Patreon.

This week Danielle brings the 2006 time traveling romance movie The Lake House. When Dr. Kate Forster (Sandra Bullock) sells her lake house to apparently no one, she decides to leave a note for the next owners in the mailbox, like a totally normal human being. Alex Wyler (Keanu Reeves) moves in and receives her letter. This confuses him, because the letter mentions things about the house—like apparently impossible to remove dog prints in paint—that don’t exist. Instead of just ignoring this letter like a sane person, Alex writes back and puts the letter in the lake house mailbox. After Kate fails to save a man pancaked by a bus in front of her, she decides the best course of action is to return to the lake house and raid the mailbox there and see if the new owners took her letter. She finds the letter from Alex and they start exchanging letters, learning that Alex is writing from 2004, while Kate is writing from 2006. They also seem to have a magic dog that they both have owned for years even though it’s, again, the same dog and they don’t know each other. They engage in more time-communication shenanigans, like Alex planting a tree for Kate that suddenly magically springs into existence before her eyes. It should be noted Sam absolutely hates the nonsensical time mechanics of this movie. Alex engages in some light time-stalking of Kate, and then he kisses her at a birthday party Kate’s not-Alex boyfriend threw for her when she still doesn’t know who Alex is. It should also be noted that both their families know they are having romantic communications through time and, insanely, no one seems to care. So join us for what is amazingly, baffling, the least coherent time travel story ever heard on Book Retorts, which is really saying something.

Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.

For more delightful weirdness, follow us on Bluesky or YouTube.

If you like our content and want more of it, please consider supporting us on Patreon.

This week is the penultimate episode of Sam’s deep-dive into the 1989 Dan Simmons book Hyperion. We open with the pilgrims on the windwagon in the morning, and it’s shortly discovered that Het Masteen is dead or missing. The pilgrims soldier on using a tramway through the Bridle range, which is when Brawne Lamia shares her story. Brawne’s story is a cyberpunk noir (how rad is that?!) and it opens with a beautiful man walking into her office asking her to investigate a murder: his own. The man explains his name is Johnny and that he’s a cybrid, a cloned body driven by an AI living in the TechnoCore; and if you think that technobabble filled sentence is nonsense, you better buckle-up for the rest of this chapter. Brawne agrees to help him find the people who briefly killed him (it’s complicated) but manages to accomplish virtually nothing except stealing a high-tech recreation of a flying carpet. Johnny reveals that he’s actually a personality retrieval project intended to recreate the persona of John Keats (of course), and this is about the time both Danielle and Sam regret their almost complete ignorance on Keats’ work. Anyway, they escape to a planet that is supposedly the TechnoCore’s recreation of Old Earth for reasons that are unclear but has something to do with the desire of the AIs to create an Ultimate Intelligence to give them perfect predictive powers. Instead of grappling with such heady ideas, Brawne and Johnny have sex instead, because that’s what everyone in this book seems to do instead of getting answers. Eventually, Johnny concludes that he wanted to go to Hyperion which the TechnoCore adamantly did not want him to do, so the only way to find out why is a cyber-heist into the TechnoCore! Long story short, during the heist a cyberpuke’s head explodes, but they get the data they were after. Will it be the solution that solves the questions of the book? Not at all, but it does raise yet more questions! So come on all you cyberpukes and cruise the datumplane in this totally jacked-in episode of Book Retorts!

Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.

For more delightful weirdness, follow us on Bluesky or YouTube.

If you like our content and want more of it, please consider supporting us on Patreon.

This week Danielle returns to the Disney Channel Original Movie well with the 1999 TV movie The Thirteenth Year. The movie opens with a mermaid being chased by a far too enthusiastic fisherman and abandoning her extremely human-looking child in a basket on a boat in a reverse Moses situation. We later learn that this may, or may not, be a natural part of the mermaid lifecycle, and already the first few minutes of this movie would require years of study to unpack. The baby is found and claimed by two humans who own the boat, they name him Cody and raise him to help them administer their fiscally unsustainable $5 boat tours. Cody is also on the swim team, and boy does Danielle have opinions about swim meets in this episode. Cody is eventually partnered up with the school nerd, Jess, on a marine biology project when he discovers his body is going through changes. The kind of changes every young man deals with: scales on his hands, Sith lightning from his fingertips, being able to tell fish to do circus tricks, and the ability to climb walls; you know, the classic merperson things of lore. Cody’s mom negligently avoids taking him to a doctor, and his kinda girlfriend Sam (no relation) at first doesn’t care, until she sees him with arm fins later (seriously, this movie has no idea how merpeople work). Cody struggles to understand his new identity while trying to hide his changes from Jess’ dad, the same fisherman who chased his mer-mom all those years ago and is now obsessed with finding proof of fish-people. Sam (yes relation) wonders if there’s some common heritage between merpeople and centaurs, and then makes a bunch of terrible fish puns which Danielle does not appreciate. Anyway, Cody tries to reconcile his burgeoning mer-identity with his human upbringing, and also just absolutely crush it at the most well attended state swim meet ever. However, a time comes when he must make a very difficult choice between his human life and and mer-heritage. Kidding! This is a Disney movie, so it goes completely bonkers trying to make it a happy ending for everyone. So get ready for an Olympic-sized swimming pool of aquatic nonsense!

Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.

For more delightful weirdness, follow us on Bluesky or YouTube.

If you like our content and want more of it, please consider supporting us on Patreon.

This week Hyperion is back, as Sam delves into part four of the 1989 Dan Simmons epic novel. As the pilgrims continue their journey, they depart the venerable Benares and take off on a windwagon across the Sea of Grass. After Brawne almost kills Martin due to him being so annoying, Sol decides it’s a good time to tell his story. Sol grew up on an unimportant and small Hegemony world as a scholar, meeting his wife Sarai at school. They had a storybook romance and, after five years of trying, had their perfect daughter Rachel. And if you don’t think that’s a setup for tragedy, then you haven’t been paying attention to this book. After Rachel starts a graduate program in archeology she decides to do a study on, where else, but Hyperion of course. While inside the Sphinx one night something happens to Rachel and the next thing she knows she’s in a hospital and her parents are there telling her she’s aging backwards and slowly losing her memories day by day. Sol and Sarai do everything they can to try and help Rachel, but none of the doctors have any idea how to treat her “Merlin sickness”. As she grow younger, Rachel eventually decides to stop being told about her illness and asks her parents to just let her believe she’s living in whatever past day she thinks it is. Meanwhile, Sol is having dreams about a mysterious voice demanding he take Rachel to Hyperion and make a burnt offering of her, something that Sol categorically refuses, because of course he does, and Sol will continue to engage with what he thinks is god in long, esoteric ethical arguments, as you do. Sol and Sarai do their best as they watch their child slowly regress from the adult they raised to the child she was, losing herself along the way, and boy, this story is sad, sorry about that. On the bright side, Sam does a pretty cool Shrike voice and Danielle learns more bird facts, so get ready for one heck of an episode!

Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.

For more delightful weirdness, follow us on Bluesky or YouTube.

If you like our content and want more of it, please consider supporting us on Patreon.

This week we’re back in Wisteria, Maryland for the thrilling conclusion of the Elizabeth Chandler teen novel Legacy of Lies. After her spooky dream, Megan and Matt start to grow closer, closer than kinda-family even. Megan’s grandmother is not happy that Megan and Matt have started to connect, but not because of the creepy pseudo-incest implications, but because that means they’ll be united against her. To no one’s surprise, the grandmother continues to, and will always, be the worst. Objects in the house start getting moved to places they shouldn’t be, as if someone was moving them in the middle of the night. Spoiler: it’s not a ghost and is, in fact, much dumber than that. Meanwhile, Megan and Sophie decide to go to a party with Matt and Alex, although Danielle and Sam can’t agree on if this qualifies as a double-date. On the way there, even though Megan is going with Alex, he and Sophie start getting a little snuggly in the back of the car. Megan is unperturbed since she is starting to really crush on her sorta cousin anyway. Eventually, Megan starts to learn a little of her family’s history, and that her great aunt Avril and her grandmother Helen actually competed over a boy back in the day by the name of Thomas. Thomas was originally with Helen, but then cheated on her with Avril, and then he went back to Helen after Avril died of an overdose of a cosmetic known as Red Creep. Sam is much more interested in the Red Creep as a superhero (villain?), but nonetheless is still flummoxed why Helen would ever get back with Thomas, whom Helen eventually married and is Megan’s grandfather. Megan goes back to the not very impressive psychic of Mrs. Riley, who tells her that Megan is the reincarnation of Avril. This leads to Megan concluding that Matt is the reincarnation of Thomas, Sophie is the reincarnation of Avril’s best friend Angel, and Alex in the reincarnation of Angel’s lover who died in World War II (the whole town is chock-a-block full of reincarnations apparently). Megan also learns that Thomas was just after Avril’s money, but poisoned her (maybe with the help of Helen) because Avril wasn’t going to marry him, and now Megan (as the reincarnation of Avril) must kill the reincarnation of her killer (Matt, as Thomas) or be killed by him again because fate or something. If you think that’s the craziest thing this book has to offer, just wait until you hear the end and all the weird, nested reincarnation incest that results. So join us for a conclusion that is sure to leave you with one word rattling around inside your head: “What?”

Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.

For more delightful weirdness, follow us on Bluesky or YouTube.

If you like our content and want more of it, please consider supporting us on Patreon.

This week Danielle takes us to Maryland, or possibly England, in the Elizabeth Chandler teen novel from 2000, Legacy of Lies. Meet Megan, a teen whose whole personalty could be described in one word: sassy. Megan is the adopted daughter of an interracial couple, and her maternal grandmother does not approve of such things (this grandmother is, as should be clear, the worst). However, for some mysterious reason this grandmother has invited Megan to come stay with her in the small town of Wisteria. Even more mysteriously, Megan goes after her father inexplicably thinks it’s somehow a good idea. Megan arrives in town and meets her grandmother who doesn’t really seem to want Megan there. Megan also meets her cousin Matt, who is staying there and is, like, so super cute, and also super rude. Basically, her whole extended family is awful. Megan is also shocked to discover her grandmother’s house is the same one she’s been seeing in her dreams for years. While wandering around the family graves, as ya do, Megan notices a figure in her bedroom window, but dismisses that as nothing. At dinner, Megan’s relatives continue to be the worst and Megan leaves and finds herself given a job in a local secondhand store. There, Megan meets who new bestie, and then Matt and his friends walk in, and one of them of them is totally into Megan, while Matt pretends not to care. At the store, Megan learns that her grandmother’s sister died many years ago in the very house she’s staying in under mysterious circumstances, and supposedly her ghost still haunts the house to this day. That night, Megan hears a voice in the dark, she gets up to look and finds no one, but when she returns to her room there’s a girl in her bed: herself! Then she wakes up. Was it all a dream, or are ghosts real? Will Matt hook up with his “sorta cousin” Megan? The answer to both questions is almost definitely yes, but find out for sure next time in part two!

Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.

For more delightful weirdness, follow us on Bluesky or YouTube.

If you like our content and want more of it, please consider supporting us on Patreon.

It’s Hyperion week again as Sam brings us back to the 1989 Dan Simmons novel! We’re back on the river as the pilgrims continue their journey and Martin Silenus, the poet, takes his turn to tell his story. Martin claims to have been born on Old Earth after the Big Mistake but before the planet was entirely destroyed some five-hundreds years ago. He lead an idle and wealthy life, but always knew he wanted to be a poet. Danielle doesn’t care about that, she’s just excited they brought dinosaurs back just for fun. As Earth succumbed to the Big Mistake, Martin’s mother sent him off on a multi-century space journey in cryogenic stasis, hoping the money she set aside in a savings account would accrue enough interest during his travel to set him up comfortably when he arrived. It didn’t, and Martin, after suffering a stroke and losing his language abilities, was left working in the mud pits of Heaven’s Gate in indentured servitude. This turned out to be the perfect environment to inspire Martin’s poetry, as he wrote his cantos on toilet paper and regained his language skills. By pure happenstance, his work was noticed and published to great success making him instantly, and stupidly, wealthy. Martin buys a truly amazing house with rooms on thirty-six planets connected by farcaster portals that cost a truly ridiculous amount of money to maintain. After gadding about with friends doing drugs, he writes another book of poetry that’s a massive flop and leaves him deep in debt. He starts churning out hack sequels that, while popular enough, leave him unfulfilled and still in debt. Martin decides to liquidate his assets and accept the artistic patronage Sad King Billy of the Kingdom of Windsor in Exile. Sad King Billy decides to relocate his kingdom to, where else, Hyperion, and create the City of Poets. There, Martin is unable to find a muse, and so has surgery to transform himself into a satyr and devotes himself to partying. Right at the point where he’s about to kill himself nine-years later, people in the city start being brutally murdered and Martin finds himself with a new muse: the Shrike. How could this possibly go wrong?

Theme: Earning Happiness by John Bartmann.

For more delightful weirdness, follow us on Bluesky or YouTube.

If you like our content and want more of it, please consider supporting us on Patreon.