Agents of Shield, Season 5 | review by Stephen Theaker

This review originally appeared in TQF64 (March 2019). Daisy Johnson did not go on to appear in Avengers 4, unfortunately.

Agents of Shield has always been a decent, dependable show, rather than a knockout. Like Flash, Arrow and Legends of Tomorrow, we tend to catch up with it during the summer. But it has improved steadily, and looking back through online wikis about the characters, it’s striking how much they’ve been through, how many adventures they’ve had, and how much I enjoyed them. The division of seasons four and five into mini-seasons has re-energised the show. In season four the team met Ghost Rider, dealt with life model decoys and got stuck inside a virtual bubble universe, while in this season they are stranded in a desperate future timeline, and then try to prevent it happening in the present. (The latter storyline takes place contemporaneously with Thanos and his goon squad duking it out with the Avengers.) Regularly changing the premise of the show keeps the show feeling fresh. The main cast – playing Coulson, May, Daisy, Mac, Yoyo, Fitz and Simmons – are by this point very comfortable in their roles, and this season, originally thought to be its last, pays off our investment in those relationships. There are also references back to the previous four seasons throughout, tying the whole saga up in a bow. If this had been the end, it would have been a good one. But it’s been renewed, and though it’ll be a long, long wait till season six in the summer of 2019, it’ll be great to see Coulson back on the big screen in Captain Marvel, and I have my fingers crossed for Daisy Johnson in Avengers 4. Though it’s still not the fully-fledged Marvel Universe programme everyone was hoping for when it was first announced, it does its best. And though it’s still not a show I need to watch at the earliest possible opportunity, that’s only because the competition is so strong these days. The special effects are spectacular, the jokes are funny, the villains are hissable, and the stakes are high. Plus there’s Deke, who seems at first like a stand-in for Starlord and ends up being the breakout star of the season. I like Deke. Stephen Theaker ***

BFS Journal #18, edited by Allen Stroud (The British Fantasy Society) | review by Stephen Theaker

This review originally appeared in TQF64 (March 2019).

The eighteenth issue of the BFS Journal continues its laudable attempt to turn into an academic journal, a process that began when the current editor took over. Unfortunately this issue doesn’t seem to have been copy edited or proofread, which undercuts the lofty aims.

Redundant apostrophes (“the doom of their kingdom’s”), commas in odd places (“author Michael Moorcock, calls”), words missing, full stops used randomly in the references. Some author names and titles appear in all caps, others in title case. A quote ends with “emphasis in original” even though there’s no emphasis. Random formats for sub-headings. The titles of books referenced aren’t consistently italicised, and there are so many unpaired parethentical commas one could write an entire novel with the leftovers. One author likes to “peak behind the curtain of reality”, another is “wiling” away his time, etc. It’s a mess, basically.

The academic articles use the sensible and efficient author–date system, but its usefulness is hampered here by the years appearing at the end of the references, rather than straight after the authors’ names, as is usual, and multiple books by a single author are not always arranged by publication date. Looking up references is also slowed down by them sometimes being divided by type, meaning the reader must check one list for the author’s name, then the next. The references would also benefit from the use of a hanging ident, as is standard elsewhere, so that the authors’ names would stand out. Other references don’t lead anywhere at all (like Scholes, 1975, and Grove, 1879, in the article on Olaf Stapledon).

The articles are a mixed bag. David Sutton’s article about the history of the British Fantasy Society was extremely interesting the first time I read it, in the BFS booklet Silver Rhapsody, but serialising an old article over three issues of the Journal seems odd, especially when it’s already available on the society’s website. Hopefully the series will continue past 1984, where the original article ended. Two articles by Allen Ashley about the summer SF exhibitions are good, though like me he doesn’t seem to have been too impressed.

The more academic essays can make interesting points, but it is a bit like reading someone else’s university essays, and as evidenced by the letter from a long-time member that appears in the journal, they do not always show the deepest understanding of the fantasy genre. Or the world, in some cases – it seems a stretch to say that the world wars of the twentieth century have “snowballed” into the present day, as Shushu Li suggests. The same article’s bibliography suggests that Pelican Books, founded in 1937, published a book in 1905, which is quite a feat.

Another article’s title is “‘You Know Nothing Jon Snow’: Locating the Feminine Voice of Maturity, Motherhood and Marriage in 21st Century Fantasy Fiction”, and yet it talks exclusively about A Game of Thrones, published in 1996. (A publication date of 2011 is given. The journal would benefit throughout from the use of square brackets to indicate the original publication date of a book’s publication.) The same article manages to spell M. Lipshitz’s surname correctly and incorrectly in the same sentence. And it doesn’t mention Jon Snow or Ygritte once: the quote is from A Storm of Swords, not discussed in the article. Similarly, a fairly interesting article is called “Music in the Science Fiction Novels by Olaf Stapledon”, despite being entirely about one book, Sirius.

If the BFS Journal wants to be an academic publication, it has to be more rigorous than this, for the sake of its contributors as much as the society members who pay for it. If it’s peer-reviewed, the peers need to do their job properly. It needs to be copy edited and proofread. As a fan publication, the BFS Journal is admirably ambitious (and the return of issue numbers to the cover is very welcome), but as an academic publication it needs much more work. Stephen Theaker **