The New Blackhawk by George Evans, Steve Skeates, Ric Estrada, et al.

After eleven years at DC, Blackhawk was finally cancelled in 1968 with issue #243 (see item #6 in the list below); retooling the Blackhawks as superheroes had not worked, and nor did a short-lived back-to-basics approach in the title's last two issues.

But the Blackhawks were not dead. In 1976 not only was the concept revived, but so was the previous title. It's hard to imagine in this modern era, where every time someone sneezes, a series starts over with a new #1, but despite being gone eight years, DC chose to pick the series back up with issue #244 for a new run.

In some ways, this was back to basics; in others, it's an attempt to reposition the team for the 1970s. The actual content of the issues doesn't dwell too much on what happened while the Blackhawks were "gone," they just plunge you right into the new set-up. The Blackhawks (the core seven members all present and accounted for, though "Chop-Chop" is now "Chopper"; Lady Blackhawk does not appear and is not even mentioned) are mercenaries based out of Blackhawk Island. They'll come and save you... if you can pay their fee! Between adventures, though, they (mostly) don't live on the island, but inhabit a variety of alter egos. Blackhawk, Chopper, Chuck, and Stanislaus all work for Cunningham Aircraft, developing and testing new planes; Andre and Olaf reside in Europe (Olaf is a ski instructor who seems to hit on married women; if it's specified what Andre does, I don't remember). Henderson, friend- and family-less aside from the Blackhawks, is the one who stays on the island and maintains it between adventures.

from Blackhawk vol. 1 #250

New allies and enemies are introduced, most prominently Duchess Ramona Fatale, a mercenary who the Blackhawks sometimes battle, sometimes work alongside. (She's nicknamed "Patch" because she has an eyepatch, though I'm not sure why someone who can go by "Duchess Fatale" needs a nickname!) She and Blackhawk have sexual tension, no doubt exacerbated by her tendency to undertake adventures in a bikini. (During her first appearance, this is because her base gets attacked while she's relaxing on the beach, so she has to flee with no other possessions; it's not clear to me why she continues to run around in just a bikini in later stories!) Henderson's daughter eventually turns up (I think this is the first-ever indication of such a character), mad at her father for abandoning her; the letter page in one of the later issues hints she may become a new Lady Blackhawk, but nothing along those lines ever happens in the stories themselves.

They do have new, very 1970s, uniforms, with plunging necklines. Disco Blackhawk!

A text page in issue #244 fills in some background and carries out some retcons, indicating that the Blackhawks emerged after World War II,* and that it was only rumored they battled aliens, and that they were superheroes is just fiction. It also indicates they've been missing since 1968 (and so must have only recently reemerged); the only indication this run is set in the DC universe comes from this page, which says the JLA issued a release of "No comment" when the Blackhawks vanished. "Bart," the name given for Blackhawk in #242, is used in this series, but the text page also says Chopper's real name is unknown even though he received one in #203 (see item #5). At first, there's not a lot of connections to old adventures, but the War Wheel reappears in issues #249-50, and Killer Shark in #250.

from Blackhawk vol. 1 #249

I found that the stories themselves were fine, but the run started stronger and got weaker as it went. I very much enjoyed the first three issues, all written by Steve Skeates with George Evans on art (joined by Ric Estrada for #246). The first is strong opening story setting up the new status quo for the Blackhawks and a fun adventure alongside Duchess Fatale. The next two issues make a two-parter, about the Blackhawks battling the Anti-Man... who turns out to be "Boris," a member of the Blackhawks seen just once in Military Comics, before the line-up was standardized as the seven we know now. This is perhaps a bit silly, but other than that, it's another fun adventure, with mercenary action and good twists; I enjoy the way Skeates is always embedding a lot of flashbacks into his narratives. Evans and Estrada are strong artists, well-suited to the action-heavy style of these issues, but also capturing the appearances of the characters going way back.

David Anthony Kraft takes over with a two-parter after that, and this I did not enjoy; it felt like one of those stories that randomly and arbitrarily piles on twists, and has lots of mediocre fake-outs, where in one issue it seems like someone is dead... and in the next issue the resolution is just, "oops, no I'm not." I did appreciate the presence of James Sherman of future Legion of Super-Heroes fame as guest penciller on #248, though. Skeates returns with #249, but I felt like the series didn't have enough time to get back on track; I totally lost what the "Empire of Death" was actually trying to do in the end, and it was clear every issue had a totally different take on Henderson's daughter Elsa.

from Blackhawk vol. 1 #250

The creators clearly had long-term plans that didn't pan out; incoming editor Jack C. Harris refers to Kraft, Estrada, and Evans as the ongoing creative team on the letter page in #248... even though Kraft would never write another issue! Issue #250 ends on what I suspect was originally scripted as a cliffhanger, with Chuck supposedly dead (and Chopper seriously injured), but the issue leans into its status as the last one, with a final panel caption of "AND NOW... OBLIVION!" and a vignette on the issue's text page about Chuck's funeral that indicates Blackhawk disbanded the team to they could "go their separate ways and lead the private lives that they have never known." It's surprisingly well written...

...and given that the Blackhawks never made another pre-Crisis appearance in the present day, it might even be true! All their future appearances were set during World War II, so there's nothing to contradict the idea that this was their final adventure and that Chuck was actually dead.

from The Brave and the Bold vol. 1 #167

The first of those WWII-set tales would be issue #167 of DC's Batman team-up title, The Brave and the Bold. Writer Marv Wolfman gave us the first wartime tale since the war ended (other than the "World War II Combat Diary" back-up tales featured in issues #196-227, see item #5 below). He was able to make this work as a Batman story by setting the story on Earth-Two and thus teaming the Blackhawks up with the Golden Age Batman—something that could never happened during the actual Golden Age, since at that time, Batman was a National Comics character and Blackhawk a Quality one. (This is also, I think, our first indication that there are Blackhawks on Earth-Two in the pre-Crisis DC cosmology; more on that in a future post.)

It's a fun enough story, though the Blackhawks and Batman actually have very little interaction. In Gotham, Bruce Wayne investigates a mysterious Nazi conspiracy, while on the front lines, the Blackhawks follow a different trail to the same ending. This culminates in a big battle in Gotham Harbor to destroy a Nazi doomsday weapon, where Batman joins the Blackhawks in a Bat-plane. I would have hoped for more interaction, and with eight main characters in seventeen pages, the story feels a bit cramped. But on the other hand, Dave Cockrum delivers on art—great, dramatic action.

But... cancellation at issue #250 doesn't mean there's no issue #251. Stay tuned!

The New Blackhawk originally appeared in issues #244-50 of Blackhawk vol. 1 (Feb. 1976–Feb. 1977). The stories were written by Steve Skeates (#244-46, 249-50†) and David Anthony Kraft (#247-48); pencilled by George Evans (#244-45), Ric Estrada (#246-47, 249-50), and James Sherman (#248); inked by George Evans (#244-46, 248-50), Al Milgrom (#247), and Frank Springer (#250); colored by Liz Berube (#247) and Carl Gafford (#248-50); lettered by Gaspar Saladino (#247-48); and edited by Gerry Conway (#244-48) and Jack C. Harris (#249-50).

"Ice Station Alpha!" originally appeared in issue #167 of The Brave and the Bold vol. 1 (Oct. 1980). The story was written by Marv Wolfman, illustrated by Dave Cockrum & Dan Adkins, lettered by Ben Oda, colored by Adrienne Roy, and edited by Paul Levitz.

This is the seventh post in a series about the Blackhawks. The next installment covers Blackhawk by William Rotsler. Previous installments are listed below:

1. The Blackhawk Archives, Volume 1 (1941-42)
2. Military Comics #18-43 / Modern Comics #44-46 / Blackhawk #9 & 50 (1943-52)
3. Showcase Presents Blackhawk, Volume One (1957-58) 
4. Blackhawk vol. 1 #151-95 (1960-64) 
5. Blackhawk vol. 1 #196-227 (1964-66)
6. Blackhawk vol. 1 #228-43 (1967-68)
   

* That the Blackhawks emerged postwar is confirmed by a flashback in #246, showing them having one of their early adventures on "an old W.W.II beach" during the Cold War.

† Issue #249 is credited to "Harold A. Harvey," but the Grand Comics Database indicates this is a one-off pseudonym for Skeates.

Reading Roundup Wrapup: February 2025

Pick of the month: The Rundelstone of Oz by Eloise McGraw. I didn't read very many books this month... but once again, an Eloise McGraw Oz book is the best one I read. She always does such interesting, character-focused stuff that's distinct from Baum or Thompson yet consonant with it; I wish more latter-day Oz authors took her approach.

All books read:

1. The Rundelstone of Oz by Eloise McGraw, illustrated by Eric Shanower
2. Heavenly Tyrant by Xiran Jay Zhao
3. Doctor Who: The Androids of Tara by David Fisher

Not my best month! I've been stressed and tired I guess. Hopefully March is better.

All books acquired:

1. The Flash by Mark Waid Omnibus, Vol. 2 by Mark Waid et al.
2. Star Trek: The Next Generation: Available Light by Dayton Ward
3. The Legion: Foundations by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Chris Batista, Chip Wallace, et al.
4. Doctor Who: Warriors' Gate and Beyond by Stephen Gallagher
5. The Flash by Grant Morrison and Mark Millar: The Deluxe Edition by Grant Morrison, Mark Millar, Paul Ryan, John Nyberg, et al.

Currently reading:

• The Pelican History of England: 4. England in the Late Middle Ages by A. R. Myers
• Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens
• Uniquely Human: Updated and Expanded: A Different Way of Seeing Autism by Barry M. Prizant with Tom Fields-Meyer
• The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8 edited by Neil Clarke
• Lake of Souls: The Collected Short Stories by Ann Leckie
• Doctor Who: Warriors’ Gate and Beyond by Stephen Gallagher
  

Up next in my rotations:

1. The End of the World: Classic Tales of Apocalyptic Science Fiction compiled by Michael Kelahan 
2. Victorians and the Prehistoric: Tracks to a Lost World by Michael Freeman
3. Star Trek: The Next Generation: Available Light by Dayton Ward
4. American Gods by Neil Gaiman
   

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 670 (up 3)

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Hearts and Minds

2031-67 / late 2386
Way back in installments #1 and 4 of this chronological marathon, I read two original series novels, From History's Shadow and Elusive Salvation, because their events would be referenced in a Destiny-era book. Over seven years later, that connection finally pays off with Hearts and Minds, which provides a third and final installment to Dayton Ward's "secret history" sequence of novels about the Aegis and the U.S. security apparatus. Was it all worth it? Well, I may have appreciated the connections more had I read the books closer together, like they were released. That, I suppose, is the downside of reading in chronological order.

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Hearts and Minds
by Dayton Ward

Published: 2017
Acquired and read: December 2024

Like those original series novels, we have two parallel plotlines here. In one, an alien spaceship crashes on Earth in the early twenty-first century; it and its pilot are recovered by I-31, a secretive branch of the U.S. military. In the other, the Enterprise-E continues its exploration of the Odyssean Pass, coming upon an early war civilization... about which Commander Taurik apparently knows a devastating secret.

What I can say about this book is that it's basically fine. I found the twenty-first century plot more engaging than some of the ones in previous "From History's Shadow" books, probably because it's more focused, just revolving around a couple characters and one inciting incident, instead of trying to work in a whole bunch of stuff. That said, there's still the occasional clunky passage where characters think about all the stuff that happened in their plotline since the last time we checked in on them, as opposed to actually seeing this stuff happen.

The future plotline is also stronger than in some of those earlier books, revolving around the Enterprise coming to this planet that has gone through a devastating war, and slowly uncovering the role humanity might have played in it. Like a lot of Ward novels, I'm starting to realize it would play well as a Star Trek Adventures episode, with an away team captured, some technical challenges and puzzles, an escape attempt or two, and a solution based around diplomacy and the extension of trust. I liked this—enough that I wish there had been a bit more to it. I felt like it had room for some more complications if the Enterprise had got to the planet faster, where the real meat of the story resides.

The two storylines don't just intersect from a plot perspective, but also from a thematic one; both are about extending trust to the "other" and foregoing violence even when it seems like the only option.

On the other hand, there's this subplot about Taurik that doesn't really go anywhere. When the Enterprise returned to Federation space for the events of the Prey trilogy, Taurik was debriefed by the Department of Temporal Investigations about a discovery he made regarding future history in Armageddon's Arrow. At that time, the DTI and Admiral Akaar apparently also fill him in on what is known about the Eizand, forbidding him to tell anyone else. Once Akaar and Taurik reveal this to Picard, this creates tension. I thought this was well done...

... but by the novel's end, it's not clear at all 1) why Taurik got this briefing, or 2) why this information had to be kept from Picard. Like, in the novel's final scene, clearly the place it should be explained, it's all just shrugged aside. What point was there in keeping this information from Picard and undermining his command authority? What was Taurik actually expected to do? It's bizarre, like the book forgot about an idea it set up at the beginning in favor of dealing with the repercussions of Section 31: Control.

So overall, it reads fine and quick, but I think with some decent tweaks, it could have been even better.

Continuity Notes:

• The Historian's Note says this takes place before Section 31: Control, but is best read after it; it's probably more accurate to say the two books overlap, with the final 2386 scene here occurring after the main events of Control.
• The Ares IV mission from Voyager's "One Small Step" is fit into Ward's future history. I read this book only a few weeks after Strange New Worlds: Asylum, where the Ares IV mission also plays a role... and in the acknowledgements, writer Una McCormack thanked Dayton Ward for drawing her attention to it. I guess he's got a thing!
• I did like getting to hear about Roberta Lincoln one last time; the book apparently ties into a Strange New Worlds story about 9/11 that I haven't read.
• We learn that in the 2020s, humanity returns to the Moon, but it's an ECON mission that does it. (The ECON is lead by China and India, and also includes Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Russia, Singapore, and Vietnam.)
• Gary Seven mentions the Optimum Movement as among the organizations threatening humanity's integration into interstellar society; this is a reference to the novel Federation, where its posited as the organization Colonel Green from "The Savage Curtain" and the twenty-first-century soldiers from "Encounter at Farpoint" belonged to.

Other Notes:

• The twenty-first century plotline has a doctor named April Hebert; this character name would also be used (I presume by Ward) for the commodore commanding Narenda Station in the STA scenarios about the Shackleton Expanse. (I used the character in my own STA campaign, but changed her into a man named August Hebert.)
• Picard is a The War of the Worlds fan. I approve.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: The Next Generation: Available Light by Dayton Ward 

The Fourth Doctor Novelisations: The Stones of Blood (2011)

The last Target novelisation of a fourth Doctor story was 1991's The Pescatons; the last of an actual television story, 1983's Meglos. The fourth Doctor's era was not completely novelised at this point, in that there were two Douglas Adams tv stories with no novelisations, The Pirate Planet and City of Death, but with the rights to those up in the air, the novelisations of Tom Baker stories were seemingly over.

But the 2010s gave us something new:* the renovelisation. As AudioGO released a series of audio readings of Target novels, there were a few circumstances where they didn't do readings of the original Target, but commissioned readings of newly written (or edited) texts. The first of these was 2011's The Stones of Blood, where instead of doing a reading of Terrance Dicks's Doctor Who and the Stones of Blood (1980), original tv writer David Fisher was commissioned to produce a wholly new novel for audio. I guess technically this was not a Target novelisation, but in 2022, it became one, when the text of the new reading (edited, apparently, to play to the strengths of the page) was released as part of the Target range by BBC Books.

Doctor Who: The Stones of Blood
by David Fisher

Originally published: 2011
Acquired and read: January 2025

What is the point of a novelisation? As I read through these books (as well as some of the new series ones; I did The Church on Ruby Road [2024] a couple weeks back), it's a question I find myself thinking about a lot. In 1980, the answer was obvious: Terrance Dicks, no matter how slim his work, let you experience a tv story you otherwise had basically no way of experiencing. But now we have the story on DVD. So why do we have a novelisation of it... much less two?

The thing Doctor Who fans seem to have glommed onto in novelisations is these little bits of business, moments of backstory that we can get in prose but not on tv without lumpen exposition. Clearly David Fisher was told this when Michael Stevens approached him with the commission. The book opens with a chapter about the history of standing stones at the story's heart, the Nine Travellers, and the mysterious women who always pop up around them; we also get an interlude about the functioning of Justice Machines. On top of this, there are little bits of history for various characters; the ones that popped out to me the most were the ones for very minor characters, Martha Vickers (a member of the cult) and Pat and Zac (the campers who randomly get offed by the Ogri in the middle of the story when they need some blood to recharge). The one about Martha is fun; we learn she joined the British Institute of Druidic Studies because she's tired of singing "Jerusalem" and find that the orgies make it more fun than meetings of the Women's Institute! We even learn that her father was a hunter but also a conscientious objector who refused to sign up during World War II. The one about Pat and Zac is surprisingly detailed; we even learn the names of their pet cat and dog!

Do we need all these bits? Do they make the story "better"? Well, I think that depends on what you mean by "better." If I never had them, would The Stones of Blood be worse? No... but did I find them fun? Well, yes. There are lots of cute little discursive bits built into this, but Fisher manages to not overwhelm the text with them.

Beyond that, how does this work as a novelisation? I don't think I've seen The Stones of Blood since I was in high school (so about two decades ago), when I watched the complete "Key to Time" season, but my main memory of it is finding all the stuff all the stuff with the Justice Machines in hyperspace pretty tedious. Reading the book, I found all this material zippy and charming! I don't know if it was cut down or punched up, or if it's just that the performances and effects of the tv story made their banter ponderous instead of the rapid-fire way it reads on the page. It's still a bit of a weird swerve, to be honest, but the novel gets away with it in a way that's not quite true of the tv version, I think, where the two halves of the story are so different. I don't know how Dicks's effort at this story was (and I never will), but I found this a fun and enjoyable read.

The 2022 BBC Books edition contains a foreword from David Fisher's son, Nick, that's a tribute to his father, who passed away in 2018. (Tragically, Nick—himself a tv writer—passed away from a drug overdose just a month after the book came out.) It's a good read, and I learned a bit about David, a man I otherwise knew nothing about; he found it "strange and a little uncomfortable" that despite a lifelong writing career that included novels and his own tv programmes, he was most famous for Doctor Who. But he must not have been turned off, otherwise he wouldn't have done this, much less come back for a second one!

Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Doctor Who: The Androids of Tara

* Plus, of course, the not-Target novelisations of those two Tom Baker stories, which were eventually abridged into Targets.

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

This book is a perennial favorite on the /r/printSF subreddit, so I've long been curious about it. The basic premise of the book is that in the far future, a human attempt to elevate life on an alien planet to sapience goes awry, causing a spider civilization to be uplifted. Generations later, some of the last humans in existence come to the same planet seeking a refuge, and finding much more than they bargained for.

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Originally published: 2015
Read: November 2024

Children of Time mostly consists of two parallel narratives. One spans generation upon generation as the sapient spiders evolve and build their civilization; the other follows the last humans on their ark ship, especially one particular character, a "classicist" who gets woken up because he knows the languages and procedures of the humans of the era that seeded the spider planet.

I think there are a lot of neat ideas in this book but I felt like they were not told in the way that I find most compelling in my science fiction. Tchaikovsky has very clearly thought through the spider civilization, and that's probably the book's triumph. But—as I am always saying around here—the pleasure of sf is that it's a mystery, but the world itself is a mystery. By beginning at the beginning of the spider civilization and carrying you along with its development, the book circumvents that; you understand their society exactly because you see it grow step by step. I think I would have rather 1) just began the spider perspective sections at the end of their development, so that you as the reader had to work to understand this society from the perspective of one of its members, or even 2) not had any spider perspective sections at all, and get the human characters to have meaningful interaction with the spiders sooner, so that you as the reader come to understand this society along with the human characters. To me, the clash of cultures was the thing I was most interested it, but it's only at the very end of the book, and we don't get very much of it.

This isn't to say I didn't enjoy it. But I think what I enjoyed about the book—the "rationalized alienation" that Tchaikovsky put into the development of spider society, and actually also (and this I feel like doesn't go commented on enough in discourse around the book) the way the human society on the ark ship also changed over time—could have been maximized more with a different approach.

Five Very Good Nineteenth-Century Science Fiction Novels (not by H. G. Wells)

Earlier this week on Reddit, a post in r/printSF (the very best sub) asked, essentially, "Who are all the good nineteenth-century science fiction writers who aren't Jules Verne and H. G. Wells?"

Well, never was a question so well designed for me! Unfortunately, I came to it kind of late; I did write a reply but I think most people had moved on from the thread by then. But it occurred to me as given I gave five novels, the comment would also make a good installment of my sporadic "Five Very Good..." series here on my blog, where I list five things in some category.

These aren't necessarily the five best; I've skipped some heavy hitters like Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872) in favor of some less common and probably less good good ones because I found them particularly interesting in some way. Unfortunately, the thing you will find when you read a lot of nineteenth-century British science fiction is that the reason we only talk about Wells now is that, largely, only Wells was any good. Wells was excellent at taking the tropes of what was a pretty crappy genre in his day and doing very clever things with them, such that he redefined the tropes! Wells didn't write the first alien invasion story or the first time travel story or the first invisibility story... but he did write the first good alien invasion story, the first good time travel story, the first good invisibility story. (And what I mean by good is that his stories have both the exact right level of scientific rigor but also the ability to say something about a concept outside of science.)

But anyway, here are books I would recommend if you want to read some fun nineteenth-century sf. If I've reviewed them on this blog before, I've included a link to the post.

Jane Loudon, The Mummy!: A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827)
For a while I was obsessed with this book... and I still do think it's pretty great. It's a world where multiple revolutions have left England a Catholic country with a matriarchal monarchy. Education has come to all classes, leading to incredibly smart laborers-- and thus rich people act incredibly stupid so no one mistakes them for poor people. Technological inventions abound, extending to sending mail by loading letters into metal balls that are launched into a steam-powered cannon, aiming for a net at the house of the recipient. Which is awesome and hilarious all at once. There's a lot of satire going on, here: on class, on gender, on science, on progress. Some of it is funny, all of it is fascinating. Genuinely fun and readable; most early sf isn't. And I haven't even gotten to the mummy accidentally resurrected by a mad scientist who hides in the English palace and dispenses political advice. (You can get the original three-volume edition from Google Books, but I think the reprint edited by Alan Rauch is just fine for casual reading despite being abridged; he captures all the good bits.)

Richard Jefferies, After London, or Wild England (1885)
Several generations into the future, after a mysterious disaster has ripped through the heart of Victorian Britain, the Thames is a giant lake and London a deadly swamp. With the upper and middle classes having fled the country for parts unknown, civilization and technology collapsed, leaving a new feudal order to come about, constantly under threat from invasion by the Welsh, the Irish, and the Scottish, all out for revenge. The first third of the novel is just a description of this postapocalyptic world, telling how animals and plants have been affected (Jefferies was a nature writer), and about the political and social setup, with marauding bands of "gipsies" and the sinister Bushmen lurking between cities for hapless travelers. It's well-thought-out, detailed world-building, the best I know of in the nineteenth century, almost Tolkienesque. There are so many fruitful avenues for stories suggested in just five chapters.

George Griffith, The Angel of the Revolution: A Tale of the Coming Terror (1893)
Griffith isn't a great writer, but he is a genuinely clever one, basically the first guy to unite the Verne-style "amazing technology" story with the Butler/Lytton-style "strange society" story, giving us a novel about anarchists who use airships to bomb Europe into submission... leading to a utopia! He wrote a lot of novels, and was the leading writer of "future war" fiction for a long time; Wells even makes fun of him in The War in the Air. Angel is his first and best book. Lots of fun stuff; it was reissued under the title "Tsar Wars" for a reason, though the best edition to get is the annotated one Steven McLean edited for Victorian Secrets Press.

T. Mullett Ellis, Zalma (1896)
Count Pahlen (a Russian nobleman, Tsarist counter-spy, and professor of biology) give his illegitimate daughter up to the Catholic Church, which raises her in a convent and plans to marry her to the heir to the throne of England to turn it into a Catholic country, but the plan fails, and Zalma rejoins her father, who is actually the ringleader of an anarchist conspiracy. Her father dies before he can bring his plans to fruition, and so Zalma decides to dump anthrax on all the capital cities of Europe from balloons. And that just scratches the surface of how bonkers this book is. Sometimes meandering and dull, of course, but usually fascinating. (The book has no modern reprint, but the complete text is available on the HathiTrust site.)

M. P. Shiel, The Purple Cloud (1901)
Not quite nineteenth-century, I guess, but close enough. What would you do if you were the last person left alive? Why, you'd probably conclude that the world was made for you-- why else would only you have survived?-- and so you'd tour the cities of Europe, burning each of them down when you were done. Because once you're done with them, certainly no one else is ever going to see them. The novel is filled with brilliant bits where we get to see the narrator trying to cope with being the last man-- and seeing the world those last panicky humans left behind. There's just a lot of nice little moments peppered throughout the novel, which feels so intense and so real. Shiel's ability to depict human isolation without ever getting dull is extraordinary. (I recommend the "Bison Frontiers of the Imagination" edition, which uses the weirder 1929 revised text.)

Heavenly Tyrant by Xiran Jay Zhao

I read Xiran Jay Zhao's Iron Widow back in 2022, when it was a finalist for the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book. I ended up ranking it second, writing, "The narrative voice is distinct and clear, the turns of the plot are gripping, the exploration of gender roles is interesting and critical without being obvious, the worldbuilding is excellent." I was into it that I would have read the sequel... if I had known it came out, which it finally did in late 2024. But then I saw Heavenly Tyrant as an offering through LibraryThing's EarlyReviewers program and figured it was worth the punt.

Heavenly Tyrant by Xiran Jay Zhao

Published: 2024
Acquired: January 2025
Read: February 2025

As I started reading, I realized my memory of the first book was pretty vague. I remembered the set-up, that the main character was kind of a mecha pilot battling kaiju, and that her world had a lot of misogyny. What I didn't remember was the actual plot, that the first book ended with her declaring herself empress but also a long-dead but revered emperor coming out of suspended animation. But the way Zhao opens this novel lets you fill in the backstory pretty quickly. I don't know if I'd go so far as to say it would work for someone who hadn't read the first, but it does work pretty well for someone who doesn't remember the first.

The book is very interesting, because the emphasis doesn't really fall on being a mecha pilot and battling kaiju at all. I don't remember the first book well enough to know where I expected the story to go next, but I doubt it was in the direction it did. After waking up from her injuries, Zetian, the main character, finds that she is still empress... but only in the sense that she's now betrothed to Qin Zheng, the resurrected emperor, who's seized control of the government. But Qin Zheng is no ordinary tyrant; he actually turns out to have been (unmentioned in the history books) a "laborist," basically this world's equivalent of socialism, devoted to removing power from capitalist oligarchs and returning it to the people. So while on the one hand Zetian has to navigate what Qin Zheng's intentions toward her might be, she is also working alongside him to bring about the revolution for ordinary people that might also give women the freedom and independence they deserve. There's a lot here about how to build and maintain power in a revolution, about how to use catastrophic violence ethically in pursuit of a greater good, one of the ideas I find most fascinating in science fiction, and it's all done fairly well.

I was less into the relationship between Zetian and Qin Zheng. At times, it seems like we're supposed to take it as Zetian is genuinely afraid of Qin Zheng and the power he has over her... at others, her "defiance" is more like flirtatious banter, not motivated by fear. That said, there were still some effective twists and turns, and I ended up being drawn into it in the long run even if always a bit skeptical of it.

The novel's climax is weird—one subplot throughout the whole book is about Qin Zheng wanting to confront the "gods" that rule their world, and then they finally do it. There's a lot of exposition, and it suddenly feels like you're reading a very different book to the one you were reading. But there's going to be a third Iron Widow book (at least), and I am willing to reserve judgment until I see how this all plays out there. Zhao is an inventive writer who does interesting things I wouldn't expect, and I am along for the ride.

Black Panther: The Most Dangerous Man Alive! by David Liss, Shawn Martinbrough, et al.

Black Panther: The Man without Fear! continued directly into another series, Black Panther: The Most Dangerous Man Alive!, furthering the adventures of T'Challa substituting for Daredevil in Hell's Kitchen. This series even continued the numbering, though its very first issue was numbered #523.1. (I think these "point one" issues are supposed to be jumping-on points for new readers, but I can't imagine something more alienating to a casual comics buyer than seeing a decimal in an issue number!) The series lasted just six issues; after this, Black Panther would lie fallow for four years.*

David Liss continues on as writer, and the idea of T'Challa as a sort of substitute Daredevil also continues, with him coming up against the Kingpin, who has taken over the ninja clan the Hand. But Most Dangerous Man Alive brings in more elements of Black Panther than Man without Fear did; it turns out the Kingpin is trying to seize the assets of the Bank of Wakanda, and eventually, T'Challa summons his sister Shuri to help stop him.

from Black Panther: The Most Dangerous Man Alive! #525

I was pretty into it at first. The first story in #523.1 is a nice one-and-done showing off the series at its best. The second story, in #524, is part of the Spider Island crossover, so Black Panther has six arms for some reason, but you can pretty much ignore this and enjoy a great action story about T'Challa teaming up with a petty criminal to rescue a kidnapped girl.

But though I liked the Kingpin of Wakanda story that runs through the rest of the title at first, I quickly grew tired of it. It's a neat idea for Kingpin to be threatening T'Challa where it really hits, but you start to realize it's contrived. Why would the Kingpin just happen to make this move shortly after T'Challa moves into his neighborhood? Why do four members of the Board of Directors of the Bank of Wakanda happen to live in New York City within striking distance of the Kingpin? It turns out there's not really four issues of story, either; I felt like this one went in circles. How many times can T'Challa one-up Typhoid Mary and Lady Bullseye? The guest appearances of Luke Cage and the Falcon seemed kind of pointless. And though it was good to bring in Wakanda more, I found myself missing some of the elements of this series, like T'Challa's diner and recurring characters other than Sofija.

from Black Panther: The Most Dangerous Man Alive! #529

Probably the art is partially responsible, too. #523.1 and 524 are by Jefte Palo and Francesco Francavilla, respectively, carrying over from the previous run. Jefte Palo is good, and Francesco Francavilla is great, of course; that the somewhat goofy premise of a spider-armed T'Challa works at all is surely down to how well Francavilla draws it. But the rest of the issues are mostly by Shawn Martinbrough and Michael Avon Oeming, neither of whom, in my opinion, really have the right style for this series, especially Oeming, who is a bit more cartoony. (Francavilla does provide some great covers throughout the run, though.)

I also found the very ending of the series disappointing; I spoke in my write-up of Man without Fear about how I found the initial set-up of the series contrived, but once you get over that, it's a good read. Unfortunately, the end of the series brings that back into view. Guess what T'Challa learned from this experience... that Wakanda is where he belongs! No dip.

Black Panther: The Most Dangerous Man Alive! originally appeared in issues numbered #523.1 and 524 to 529 (Nov. 2011–Apr. 2012). The series was written by David Liss; illustrated by Jefte Palo (#523.1, 529), Francesco Francavilla (#524), Shawn Martinbrough (#525-26, 529), and Michael Avon Oeming (#527-28); colored by Jean-Francois Beaulieu (#523.1, 529), Felix Serrano (#525-29), and Jesus Aburto (#529); lettered by Joe Caramagna; and edited by Bill Rosemann.

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE

* These two series are both included in the reckoning of Black Panther volume 1's "legacy numbering"... but given their numbering is based on Daredevil volume 1's, are they also included in its legacy numbering? Inquiring minds need to know!

What Is a Dalek?: Nicholas Briggs's Dalek Empire, Series Three and Four (2004–08)

A couple weeks ago, I wrote up my thoughts on the first two series of Dalek Empire; here are my thoughts on the third and fourth ones. Again, I'm kind of reviewing them, but I'm more interested in thinking through what Daleks "represent" in each of the stories. While in first two series I argued they stood for the "violent sublime," humanity's propensity toward violent conflict, I think Briggs quite smartly does not keep the representations the same, but cannily explores something different every time out.

Dalek Empire III

Series three of Dalek Empire is very different to the first two, in that it jumps millennia into the future. Series two was framed by a couple historians trying to uncover what the "Great Catastrophe" was that ruined the galaxy; series three moves us into the era of those historians, as one of them tries to warn the galaxy about the Daleks... though it is, of course, too late. While series one and two had a main cast of about three characters across four discs, series three is more sprawling, both in terms of the number of cast members, and in the fact that it occupies six discs. Like he often does, Briggs uses a lot of nonlinear storytelling. I don't think the characters here will be as close to my heart as Suz, Alby, and Kalendorf, but I admired the audacity and scope of this a lot. The cliffhanger ending to episode four is genuinely beautiful. Well done, Nick Briggs, on writing, directing, music, and sound design. (And, some actor named David Tennant. Wonder why he never made it big, he was quite good.)

It was the day after the U.S. presidential election, when I listened to episode three, though, I realized what the Daleks represent in Dalek Empire III.

If I was going to be pretentious, what I love most about fiction is a sense of what you might call "epistemic crisis": the world does not work the way you think it does. Your systems for understanding the world are at fault. Obviously this drives mystery stories, honestly a genre I don't partake of very much, but always enjoy when I do. My favorite genre is science fiction, and of course this permeates science fiction; as Jo Walton says, sf stories are mystery stories where the world itself is the mystery. What are the rules then? It's a game I love to play. (I don't like fantasy as much because the game is more arbitrary there.) I don't do a lot of thrillers, but again, when I do, that's why I enjoy them; I love that disconcerting feeling you get in the best of them. Everything you know is wrong. (I've discussed this idea at length in this review of We Have Always Lived in the Castle; am I the first person to ever argue that Shirley Jackson and Nick Briggs are doing something similar?)

The critic George Levine argues that even the realist novel is about epistemology, it's about finding a system you can operate under in the world. He says that practice of realism “suggest(s) how central [...] was the enterprise of knowledge seeking and truth telling, how often plots turn on the power of protagonists to develop the proper temper and state of mind to allow realistic confrontations with the ‘object’—what one might see as the acquisition of the proper ‘method.’” One must figure out how the world works. (This is what I love about Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith, of course.)

Throughout Dalek Empire III, there's this ongoing undercurrent of epistemic crisis. The Graxus Rangers find out that they are ultimately disposable, that the society they thought valued their environmentalist efforts in fact didn't value them at all, and is happy to throw them away in the name of expediency. There's a thriller-type quality as they keep being surprised by the way things have shifted politically and they hadn't noticed. Listening to this right after the election, it was impossible not to notice this. The world didn't work they way they thought it did. The Daleks are simply the literalization of this discovery. There's a creeping unease to these sections that really resonated with me.

At the end of Dalek Empire III episode three, we get epistemological crisis upon epistemological crisis. Giorgi Selestru realizes he doesn't have the level of authority he thought he did, as the Galactic Union Council moves against him politically. Galanar turns out to not be a human being. Siy Tarkov's daughter turns out to have been dead all along. Galanar himself finds out that he's been created by the Daleks. The world doesn't work the way you thought it did. Again and again, characters have their assumptions shattered. It would be easy to criticize Nicholas Briggs's out-of-sequence storytelling and layered narration as gimmicky, and certainly there are authors for whom this kind of thing is a gimmick, but just like in the first two series, it is anything but. The whole story is about the shifting, contingent nature of knowledge. How could it be told any other way?

The Daleks are an epistemic rupture made metallic flesh: you are exterminated by your own lack of understanding of the nature of the universe. If only you had understood, might you have survived? But of course you can't. The universe never conforms to our expectations; that's why we need fiction to try to make sense of it all.

I had all these thoughts formulated following the end of episode three. If that had been all there was to Dalek Empire III, I would have been satisfied. Indeed, I might have worried I was projecting a bit. But as I listened to episode six, I only found more evidence for my assertion. Again and again, characters confront the fact that not only don't know what's really going on, there is no way to ever know what's going on. Did Elaria betray the Graxus Wardens to the Daleks? How did the Daleks track down their ship? Did Elaria switch sides and aid the Galactic Union? We don't know and we never will know. The only certainty that Galanar can find is that Siy Tarkov, a man who threw away two decades of his life working to stop the Daleks, will become one himself. Siy Tarkov realizes that humanity will make itself more Dalek-like willingly, it will choose to become fascist. No wonder Galanar becomes homicidal.

At the end, though, Galanar is brought before the Dalek Supreme, and in this conversation—a brilliant, clever exchange, perhaps the best thing Nicholas Briggs has ever written—we realize that the Daleks aren't just a force of epistemic crisis, they are also an embodiment of the futility of attempts to prevent it. Why do Daleks do what they do? Because the universe doesn't work the way they think it does, either. In the Dalek Supreme's last conversation with Galanar, she reveals her own lack of knowledge of how the universe works. Fascism is an attempt to stave off epistemic crisis: by forcing the universe to work the way you think it works.

The only power you can have then, in the face of the Daleks, in the face of epistemic crisis, is acceptance. Not acceptance of what the Daleks, the fascists do, but acceptance of the fact that the universe will surprise you in terrible ways. You can't force it not to, otherwise you will become them.

Dalek Empire: The Fearless

Though Dalek Empire III ends with a lot of unknowns that certainly could be followed up, the fourth series of Dalek Empire totally ignores them—perhaps wisely, given what I wrote above. Would the ending of Dalek Empire III be so effective on a relisten if, when you heard it again, you knew the answers to all of those questions?

In the extras to series two, Briggs had stated his original intention was for series two to be a series of one-offs set during the war. I think this was even his original intention for series three as well. Each time, though, he was persuaded to continue the story and move it forward instead. He finally did move backward with the final series of Dalek Empire, The Fearless, which returns to the time of the first set (it's set during episode three of series one, I think), though it's one big story as opposed to a number of one-offs. We even get an appearance by Suz.

But even if the story moves backward chronologically, it moves forward thematically. If you are first-time listener, do not slot this in chronologically, because episode one of The Fearless picks right up from episode six of Dalek Empire III. In the latter, Siy Tarkov speculates that the only way to  defeat a Dalek is to willingly make yourself more Dalek-like... and that's exactly what humanity is doing in The Fearless, which focuses on a group of Earth Alliance soldiers in dehumanizing power armor, mainly one played by Noel Clarke (Mickey on the tv show) named Salus Kade.

I thought this idea was potentially quite strong, but I found The Fearless the least effective and least interesting of the four Dalek Empire sets. Thematically, at least, I feel like it's a bit too bound in Salus Kade specifically and thus not interested enough in the broader social forces that give rise to something like fascism. Kade's life is horrific, but it's also very specific and unique. Noel Clarke gives it his all, but I think the character as written is a bit one-note, and Clarke doesn't do enough to open him up. (Even though, on the extras, he reveals himself to be a very thoughtful performer.) I did really like Maureen O'Brien (Vicki in the tv show) as the ruthless general.

I like the idea of exploring humanity's tendency to fascism, it's a very obvious use of the Daleks but surprisingly not one we see in a lot of stories, but the story doesn't do enough with the concept. Unfortunately!

The Fourth Doctor Novelisations (Kind Of): The Five Doctors (1983)

Okay, so while The Five Doctors may be a "fourth Doctor novelisation" in the sense that it's a novelisation with the fourth Doctor in it, it's not really a "fourth Doctor novelisation" in any meaningful sense. I mean, even by the standards of multi-Doctor stories, it's clearly not a fourth Doctor one, as the Doctor appears in just two small bits!

Doctor Who: The Essential Terrance Dicks, Volume Two
by Terrance Dicks

Collection published: 2022
Novel originally published: 1983
Acquired and read: December 2024

But I'm reading it as part of this sequence because 1) it felt weird to read four of the five books included in The Essential Terrance Dicks, Volume Two, but not read the fifth, and 2) I don't have any unread fifth Doctor novelisations to lump it in with, so it made most sense to read it here. This is the one book in this sequence that's a reread, because I own the individual book (though I don't have an entry for it on my reading log, meaning I must have read it before September 2007, when I started tracking).

Anyway, as novelisations go, this is one of those ones that doesn't really add much to the televised story; it's pretty much the script put on the page. There's no extra bits, no added depth. You could imagine a writer adding more continuity references, or working in stuff that wasn't feasible to do on screen—Dicks, after all, wrote the script, and must have been keenly aware of its limitations!—like giving us more Tom Baker, but he doesn't. Unfortunately, that means it doesn't have much to offer a reader, a modern reader anyway. To be honest, The Five Doctors isn't a very exciting story... but it is a deeply pleasurable one to watch, it's just fun to see all these characters on screen doing their thing in the same story. I enjoyed it even when I was a neophyte Doctor Who fan and had never seen Jon Pertwee or Patrick Troughton in a story before; in fact, I remember even my kid sister (not a classic Who fan by any stretch of the imagination) getting drawn in when I watched the DVD.

But take out Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee (and Lis Sladen and Nicholas Courtney and...), and frankly, this story doesn't have a lot going for it. Which is fine for the script, it was meant as a vehicle for seeing old friends again, and it accomplishes that perfectly. But that means on the page, the story has little to recommend it beyond reminding you of a tv story you'd rather be watching. I can see how this would be helpful in 1983, when you had no way to watch the story again, but in 2025, I can just stick in my DVD.

Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Doctor Who: The Stones of Blood