The 2026 Hugo Awards: "No Award" Statistics

One thing I find interesting about the Hugo Awards is their use of "No Award": you can rank "No Award" above finalists, basically saying, "I'd rather nothing win than this win." I am a pretty liberal user of No Award, but most Hugo voters are not; outside of the "Puppy years," No Award has only won five times, all in the 1950s through '70s.

But there definitely is a dedicated coterie of No Award users, and I find their votes indicative of broader issues. I last analyzed these stats in 2021, but I find myself motivated to do it again. (NB: I generated the graphs in this post with ChatGPT.)

First, here's all the categories ranked in terms of how many ballots were received: (Note that this does not include ballots where "No Award" was the first preference.)

If we compare this to 2021, it's broadly similar. As always, Best Novel comes out on top; as always, Best Editor (Long Form) is near the bottom. The biggest changes compared to 2021 are that Best Series was in 2nd then, but 6th here, and that the Lodestar Award slid from 9th to 17th! The new category of Best Poem (which I did not vote in myself) is basically right in the middle.

Note that the WSFS Constitution used to have a provision that "'No Award' shall be given whenever the total number of valid ballots cast for a specific category (excluding those cast for 'No Award' in first place) is less than twenty-five percent (25%) of the total number of final Award ballots received." If that rule was still in effect, the number of ballots submitted in Best Fancast, Best Fan Writer, and Best Editor (Long) means that all three categories would have received No Award! The cutoff was 623 ballots... and 624 ballots were cast in Best Fanzine, meaning it would have made it by one vote!

The intent behind this rule, I think, was to not go around awarding Hugos in categories voters don't really care about. I do think people were right to get rid of the rule; it would be pretty crappy to go to the Hugo ceremony and find out that you lost on this basis! But perhaps some other rule could/should be implemented that automatically sunsets a category that fails to make this threshold multiple years in a row or something. I haven't been very plugged into Hugo discourse this year (i.e., I haven't been reading File770 as much as I used to), so I don't know if anyone has noted this near bloodbath yet. 

Next, here are all the categories ranked by how many ballots placed No Award as first preference: 

As is typical, this largely is the inverse of my previous graph. Best Editor (Long) was last, while here it's first; Best Novel was first, and here it's last. I do vote No Award in both Best Editor categories because I think it's something readers are totally incapable of judging and thus should not be awarded; on the other hand, I don't No Award, say, Best Fancast; I just don't care about it and thus don't vote in it. (Maybe once I start my own podcast, I'll change my tune.)

One interesting piece of information given on the results is how many ballots ranked No Award above the eventual winner. This could mean 1) the ballot just No Awarded the entire category, or it could mean that 2) on that voter's ballot, No Award was placed higher than the winner. (This is reported because if more ballots place No Award above the winner than placed the winner above No Award, No Award wins, even if it doesn't on the normal counting method. I don't think this has ever actually come to pass, and I think it would require an incredibly polarizing winner for it to do so. This is called the "run-off.")

So here are all the categories ranked in terms of how many ballots had No Award ranked above the eventual winner:

It's broadly similar to the previous graph. My system for identifying particularly controversial winners, however, is to subtract the number of people who ranked No Award first from the number of people who ranked it above the winner. So this shows how many ballots had No Award in 2nd place or lower, but above the winner:

What this reveals, I would argue, is how many voters believed a category had some basic level of validity (so they didn't put No Award first for whatever reason), but didn't like what actually ended up winning.

The very clear standout this year is Best Related Work. That was won by Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer... and indeed, I ranked "No Award" above Inventing the Renaissance because I don't believe at all that it's related to the genres of science fiction and fantasy, except by virtue of it being by a historian who also happens to have written some sf. Best Semiprozine comes in second; I think there is a subset of voters tired of Uncanny's dominance in this category. In the last eleven years, it has won nine times! Let's award something else for a change. My guess is that Antonia Hodgson was a controversial Astounding Award for Best New Writer winner because she was first published back in 2014, just not in sf&f, and so qualifies for the award in letter, but perhaps not in spirit.

As always, Best Fan Artist does pretty good here. People who vote in this category believe in its winner!

I have posited the existence of the "No Award Curve," an inverse relationship from the total number of ballots cast in a category and the number of first-preference No Award votes. I asked, "Does it indicate that the bigger categories are bigger for a reason, i.e., people view them as more legitimate?" It continues to hold up this year: 

What I find most interesting about it are the categories that are off the curve, where more people voted No Award than you would expect given the size of the category. Best Editor (Long) used to be on the curve, but this year is the biggest outlier—perhaps sentiment against it is growing. (I wish I'd done this analysis from 2022 to 2025 so I would know! I'm too lazy to go back.) Best Poem, Best Series, and Best Fancast are the other notable outliers. Best Poem was a special category this year, making me wonder if people voted against it as a sort of "protest" vote, saying in essence, "please don't add this as yet another permanent category." Best Series always gets more No Awards than you would predict; there is clearly a subset of voters (like myself) philosophically opposed to its existence, even though it usually gets high participation.

Back in 2021, Best Video Game was a notable outlier, but it seems to have become an accepted category. 

Anyway, if I were King of the Hugos, abolishing Best Editor (Long Form) would be my top priority. (And, to be fair, I think Best Editor (Short Form) would have to go with it.) Best Series would be next! Best Poem seems fun; I just ain't ever gonna vote in it. But let's not add it until we've purged some of the other stuff first.

Star Trek: Return to the Taurus Reach: Harm's Way

The last of the Star Trek: Vanguard books I read as they came out was book five, Precipice, so from this point on, all my Vanguard reads will be new to me. Precipice came out in 2009, and the next Vanguard book, Declassified, came out in 2011. But 2022 saw the release of Harm's Way, an original series Star Trek book that takes place during Precipice and ties into the Vanguard saga. So, coming to the second half of the series as late as I was, I decided to read Harm's Way where it takes place chronologically, not by publication date. (Roughly, anyway. I didn't read it in the middle of Precipice, that would have been silly!*)

I seem to recall that, as originally designed by writer David Mack and editor Marco Palmieri, the premise of Vanguard was supposed to be flexible, to allow for any number of side stories from the saga's "main" story. (I think, perhaps, James Swallow pitched one, for example.) This ultimately didn't happen: each of the series's installments advanced the main story forward, instead of being just set against its backdrop.

Star Trek: The Original Series: Harm's Way
by David Mack

Published: 2022
Read: July 2026

Harm's Way possibly demonstrates why. The premise of the book is that three different ships end up investigating the disappearance of both Federation and Klingon scientists on a planet possibly containing traces of the Shedai meta-genome: the Enterprise, the scoutship Sagittarius from Vanguard Station, and a Klingon battlecruiser commanded by Kang from "Day of the Dove." (Interestingly, the book establishes that Kang and Kirk have met before, drawing on Michael Jan Friedman's My Brother's Keeper: Enterprise... a novel that presents an account of what the Enterprise did immediately after "Where No Man Has Gone Before" that totally contradicts Vanguard: Harbinger!) Kang and Kirk play cat-and-mouse games in space, while landing parties from the Starfleet and Federation vessels try to track the missing scientists on the planet.

The thing is, that for most of the book, the Vanguard stuff feels like set dressing. Most of the main characters of Vanguard are tied up by the events of Precipice, so the ones that put in substantive appearances here are minor, forgettable ones. We have a couple scenes of Admiral Nogura, one with Ming, one with the Andorian who replaced T'Prynn, but mostly it's the crew of the Sagittarius, who are pretty insignificant players in the saga of Vanguard and most of whom I barely remember even though I'm in the middle of reading the series. And since the book can't advance the plot of Vanguard, there can't be any new developments or discoveries when it comes to the meta-genome, that mean it's largely a maguffin: yes the crew has to track down this dangerous thing, but really it could be any kind of dangerous thing of the kind you're always tracking down in Star Trek stories.

I did think in the last third or so this changed a bit, for the better. The Vanguard series has consistently portrayed Shedai technology as something Starfleet is willing to go to untold lengths to either obtain or destroy, and so as events come to a climax, the characters on both sides make compromises I think they might not have otherwise. That I did find interesting and very much appreciated. Most of the planet-based stuff is your typical David Mack hard-action writing; if you like that kind of thing, it's well done, though I find contemporary idioms in the mouths of 1960s characters like Chekov and Sulu jarring.

The space stuff I wanted more out of. This is set shortly after "The Doomsday Machine," and Mack introduces an emotional conflict for Kirk: he's wondering if he would have made the same mistakes as Commodore Decker, and so second-guesses himself. This is an interesting idea, but I felt it didn't really go anywhere. Kirk is weirdly passive most of the book. I think Star Trek ship combat can support interesting inaction (see my second-favorite original series episode, "Balance of Terror"), but here, Kirk makes few interesting decisions and has few interesting ideas and few inspirational moments with his crew. Weirdly, the character to come out the best in the ship plotline is assistant chief engineer DeSalle. I just sort of feel like you've screwed up your original series novel if that happens. (DeSalle sucks, though I find him funny.)

Speaking of characterization, this book features the Vanguard characterization standby: a scene where a character is constantly annoyed by another character yet doesn't say anything to the extent that the annoyed character comes across like the asshole, not the one doing the annoying. Here, it's the Sagitarius's captain, who gets all precious about eating his breakfast pastry undisturbed when DeSalle wants to talk to him. You're the captain, put on your big-boy pants and say, "Let me finish my coffee first!"

So anyway, this is fine, but ultimately kind of inessential. Anyone reading (or rereading) Vanguard would never miss it.

(This my third week in a row reviewing a David Mack novel on this blog. Clearly he is my number-one author!) 

* Though I have been prone to such silliness in the past.

The Penguin History of Britain #3: The Early Middle Ages (1066–1284)

The Pelican History of England volumes had uniform branding, and promoted their series identity proudly on their covers and title pages. The Penguin History of Britain, on the other hand, seems to be more of a stealth series: I guess they want people to feel like they can read, say, volume nine without having read volumes one through eight? (Good thing, too, because there never was a volume seven.) For volumes one and two, the series identity and a list of series titles was given opposite the title page, but that was it. I was a little surprised, then, to discover that the cover of my paperback of volume 3, The Struggle for Mastery, actually does include the series title, in its subtitle: "Penguin History of Britain 1066–1284." One notes, however, that on the title page, the subtitle is just given as "Britain 1066–1284."

Anyway, what of the actual book? Reading the Pelican Histories, I sometimes felt like the books alternated between good ones and bad ones; I don't know if that was actually true, but it sure felt like it. So I should not have been surprised that, after I enjoyed volume two of the Penguin History so much, I found volume three very disappointing.

The Struggle for Mastery: Britain 1066–1284
by David Carpenter

Originally published: 2003
Read: August 2026

Carpenter does have a strong thesis, I think. What he focuses on in his introduction and throughout is where the idea of "Englishness" came from: it's kind of amazing, if you think about, that in 1066, England was invaded by the Normans, but a couple generations later, those Normans were English, rather than 1) the Normans trying to Normanize everyone, or 2) the Normans remaining perpetual outsiders. Carpenter also does a good job of genuinely incorporating the other area of Britain—there's a lot about Scotland and Wales here too. And also he does a good job of exploring Scottishness and Welshness. 

Unfortunately, though, these tidbits are sprinkled in amongst an overwhelming amount of detail. There are lots of people and actions in here... but Carpenter is not very good at highlighting the significance of these people and actions of making it clear who is important and why they are. I felt like big deals got the same amount of space as insignificant actions, and so it all blends together. This isn't the longest of the three Penguin Histories so far, but it does have the highest pages-per-year ratio thus far, and Carpenter does not use his extra space very well. Possibly this would read more clearly to someone more well-versed in the period, but as someone who is well-acquainted with the broad strokes of British history but not so much the early Middle Ages, I found I finished this book with little more understanding than I entered it.

(It's interesting to compare each Penguin History to its equivalent Pelican History. Of volume three of that series, which covers 1066 through 1307, I wrote that it was also overly detailed, but I did find its emphasis on political power interesting, something I didn't really see in Carpenter's history of the period. I dubbed it "reasonably accessible.")

(re)Reading Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz Aloud to My Kids

Kid One remembers Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz as one of their favorite Oz books. I don't think that's because of when we originally read it, as that was almost five years ago; rather, I believe that's because of the Shanower/Young comic adaptation, which they've read a couple times. As we began reading, it also became clear that their memories of Dorothy and the Wizard were muddled up with their memories of Sherwood Smith's Trouble Under Oz, which returns to some of the same locations, because they remembered the vegetable people and the mermaids under glass—the latter being something Smith made up for her book.

Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz by L. Frank Baum
illustrated by John R. Neill

Originally published: 1908
Previously read: September 2021
Acquired: July 2026
Read aloud: July–August 2026

I don't know why Kid One remembers it as a favorite, but it is one of my favorites. One of Baum's best, in my opinion, with lots of weird, genuinely alien creations and settings: the cold-hearted Mangaboos, the invisible bears, the silent gargoyles, the weird sights they see while climbing Pyramid Mountain, the dragonettes. It's all deeply imaginative stuff, and quite fun to both read and read aloud.

Kid Two seemed into it; I think he was especially happy to see the Wizard again. He was obviously particularly taken, however, by the Wizard's trick with the nine tiny piglets; he began to declare that he was going to do a similar trick with nine kitties and/or nine chicken nuggets! This one is pretty suspenseful in parts, but Kid Two mostly seemed okay with it.

Kid One did pick up on the discontinuities with how Oz history was relayed to us back in Marvelous Land—they remembered that according to that book, the Wizard made three trips to see Mombi, and one of them, gave Ozma to her. But I told them there was an answer for this, and we read "Oz and the Three Witches" by Hugh Pendexter between this and Road to Oz to bridge the gap. But more on that in a future post!

This was one of the only books that on our first pass through the series I did not upgrade to a Books of Wonder facsimile, considering my childhood Dover edition good enough, so this time I took the opportunity to make the jump. I'm glad I did it, of course, but Dorothy and the Wizard did seem to have fewer color plates than Marvelous Land or Ozma, so the effect is somewhat diminished. I do like John R. Neill's style on these, though; it seemed a bit more old-fashioned to my untrained eye? Like something out of The Water-Babies.

Reading Roundup Wrapup: September 2026

Pick of the month: Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold. I'm a simple man. I read a Vorkosigan book, I pick it.

All books read:

1. Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold
2. Star Trek: Vanguard: What Judgments Come by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore 
3. The Sea Fairies by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill
4. DC Finest: Events: Crisis on Infinite Earths, Part Two by Marv Wolfman, Roy Thomas, Alan Moore, George Pérez, et al.
5. Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny 

I am not getting my new reading year off to a very impressive start!

All books acquired:

1. Doctor Who and the Web of Fear by Terrance Dicks
2. Star Wars: Guardian of the Whills: The Manga by Jon Tsuei and Subaru

On the other hand, at least I didn't buy a lot of books.

Currently reading:

• The Hollow Crown: A History of Britain in the Late Middle Ages by Miri Rubin
• Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
• Again, Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison  
• Star Trek: Vanguard: Storming Heaven by David Mack
• Sea Sirens: A Trot & Cap’n Bill Adventure by Amy Chu and Janet K. Lee 

 Up next in my rotations:

1. Star Trek: Vanguard: In Tempest's Wake by Dayton Ward
2. The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois
3. The Poe Clan Vol. 1 by Moto Hagio 
4. On Progress in Physics and Subjectivity Theory: An Amateur’s Meanderings as Inspiration for Actual Physicists by N. Otre Le Vant 

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 676 (up 1)

Wait, how did it go up

Star Trek: More Beautiful than Death by David Mack

This is one of two original Kelvin timeline novels; chronologically it takes place in the middle of the other one, Alan Dean Foster's The Unsettling Stars. In terms of the comics, it must take place after the story arc Legacy of Spock as well. If this book lines up with Legacy of Spock, it's obviously pure coincidence (it was written before it but published after), but it basically does; you just have to squint and assume everyone says, "Last time we saw you, Sarek, it was when we were stopping you from being genocided in the Ceti Alpha system" off camera. Oh, and no one mentions the big refugee fleet. 

Star Trek: More Beautiful than Death

Published: 2020
Acquired: June 2023
Read: October 2025

Anyway, this chronicles an early mission of the Enterprise, just before it embarks on a long-term journey of exploration. The Enterprise takes Sarek to a planet with dilithium; once the Enterprise is there, they also have to help save the populace from mysterious wights. At the same time, Kirk wonders if he has a destiny, and Sarek's new aide sets her romantic sights on Our Man Spock. Time to make Vulcan babies to save the race!

There are a number of different things happening here, but they didn't really cohere for me; some are related for plot reasons, but the connections feel kinda arbitrary. I think the weakest part of the novel, though, is the alien planet is very difficult to care about, because it's weirdly mostly off-stage, like a low-budget TNG episode: we see basically just two guys from it, both on the Enterprise, nothing of the civilization itself, so when we're told they're in turmoil, it's all very abstract. Felt like a weird choice in a novel, where you could have easily afforded to show us the planet.

I did really enjoy the reveal of what L'Nel was up to—I didn't see this coming, but it made perfect sense, and was very satisfying when revealed.

My other favorite part of the book was Scotty. I think overall Mack had a decent handle on these versions of the characters, though I didn't find them quite as lively as in The Unsettling Stars. Decent Kirk (the bits where he defies orders through creative interpretations were well done), good Spock/Kirk interactions, fine work with Uhura and Sulu and McCoy... but Mack totally nailed the vibe of the Simon Pegg Scotty, I loved every bit with him in it. Could easily imagine Pegg saying the lines, and Mack did a good job marrying comedy with extreme competence.

Sarek sucks in this timeline even more than the regular one!

This is the second in a series of posts about the Kelvin timeline Star Trek comics (and novels). The next covers Star Trek, Volume 1. Previous installments are listed below:

1. The Official Motion Picture Adaptation

DC Finest: Crisis on Infinite Earths, Part Two by Marv Wolfman, Roy Thomas, Alan Moore, George Pérez, et al.

DC Finest: Events: Crisis on Infinite Earths, Part Two

Collection published: 2026
Contents originally published: 1985-99
Acquired: August 2026
Read: September 2026

Writers: Paul Kupperburg, Roy Thomas with Dann Thomas, Marv Wolfman, Alan Moore, Mindy Newell, Gerry Conway, Cary Bates, Tony Isabella & Alan Gold

Pencillers: Rick Hoberg, Todd McFarlane with Mike Hernandez & Ron Harris, Eduardo Barreto, Stephen Bissette, Stan Woch, Don Heck with Pablo Marcos, Paul Ryan, George Pérez, Mike Clark, Mike Harris, Arvell Jones, Tim Burgard, Curt Swan, Richard Howell

Inkers: Dave Hunt, Steve Montano, Romeo Tanghal, Tony DeZuniga, Randall, John Totleben, Alfredo Alcala, Don Heck & Pablo Marcos, Bob McLeod, Jerry Ordway, Vince Colletta, Tim Burgard, Al Williamson, Murphy Anderson, Dick Giordano & Richard Howell
Letterers: Gaspar, David Cody Weiss, Bob Lappan, John Costanza, Helen Vesik, Güsto
Colorists: Gene D'Angelo, Adrienne Roy, Tony Tollin, Tatjana Wood, Shelly Eiber, Nansi Hoolahan, Tom McCraw, Carl Gafford

The original Crisis on Infinite Earths miniseries was twelve issues long; this DC Finest compilation, the second of fourth, collects just one issue! Other than issue #5, the book is filled with tie-ins. This is presumably because the editors have attempted to create a reading order here, and at this point where at the point of Crisis where what's mostly going on is big storms. It is very easy to set tie-ins during this point in time, because you just have to say "big storms are happening" and then do your own story, so many writers obviously took that approach.

Still, my complaint would be that more than a couple issues ought to have been placed elsewhere. The two New Teen Titans issues included here explicitly overlap with events as late as Crisis #9, so I don't know why they're in this volume; the second of the two Wonder Woman issues clearly goes at a point where the heroes know about the Anti-Monitor, which hasn't happened as of Crisis #5.

In this issue, Clark Kent seems to be gainfully employed as a reporter, even though later in the book, we find out he's been fired.
from DC Comics Presents #86 (script by Paul Kupperberg, art by Rick Hoberg & Dave Hunt)

Other than that, though, the sequencing struck me as being fairly well done. Unlike other tie-in writers, who just went, "ooh there are storms," Roy Thomas was very careful about showing how his issues overlapped and dovetailed with Crisis, and the issues of All-Star Squadron and Infinity, Inc. included here all either lead into, overlap with, or follow on from Crisis #5, and their placement here reflects that; similarly, Swamp Thing #46 and Legends of the DC Universe: Crisis on Infinite Earths #1 are placed in relationship to Crisis #5. (I appreciate the inclusion of the Legends of the DCU issue, which was actually published thirteen years later; DC Finest is a mostly publication order endeavor, but they are willing to bend from that occasionally when it makes sense.) There are still some unavoidable problems—for example, in Superman #413, Superman is suffering from an issue he was not seen to be experiencing in DC Comics Presents #86—but I suspect there's no way around this!

This invasion seems to happen off-panel between issues even though #329 seems to pick up right from #328.
from Wonder Woman vol. 1 #329 (script by Gerry Conway, art by Don Heck)

Anyway, how are the actual stories? As you might guess of a random hodgepodge of tie-in issues, they're very much a mixed bag. I'll review them by clusters of character and theme here.

The answer is a bit cheesy, but in the way that a good Superman story ought to be cheesy.
from Superman vol. 1 #413 (script by Cary Bates, art by Curt Swan & Al Williamson)

There are three Superman-centric issues: DC Comics Presents #86 (a Supergirl team-up), Superman #413, and DCCP #95 (a Hawkman team-up). The first of these is fine; decent team-up superheroics, though nothing special. The second, though, is a proper great Superman story, and I really enjoyed it. Lex Luthor is causing Superman to hallucinate; this has causes Clark to be fired from his job because he's reported on things that haven't actually happen. Here it goes so far that Lex is able to convince Superman the Earth has been destroyed. Yet Superman is still able to triumph thanks to really thoughtful twist by writer Cary Bates that shows he really understands the character. It has little to do with the Crisis except that Lex disappears in a weird vortex (leading into Crisis #6 according to a footnote), but I was glad to get to read it because I liked it so much. On the other hand, I thought DCCP #95 was wretched. It's much more of a Hawkman story than a Superman one, and it ends so suddenly I thought I'd skipped a page.

I don't know who these guys are but I'm sure they're real people.
from The New Teen Titans vol. 2 #13 (script by Marv Wolfman, art by Eduardo Barreto & Romeo Tanghal)

The New Teen Titans issues here are, as I said, misplaced; they are also very much invested in the ongoing drama of that series and thus pretty hard to follow on their own. My favorite part was when Cyborg gets into a fight and smashes into the offices of DC Comics, where we see artist Eduardo Barreto being berated for turning in his pages late! 

There's just something weird about seeing the Alan Moore universe collide with the Marv Wolfman universe.
from Swamp Thing vol. 2 #46 (script by Alan Moore, art by Stephen Bissette & John Totleben)

The three Swamp Thing issues are dense and complicated, of course, being by Alan Moore, and I suspect I wasn't in the right mindset to appreciate them; they'd probably read much better in a Swamp Thing collection than they do here. The second doesn't seem to have anything at all to do with the Crisis, but the first and third do, and I suppose it would be weird to skip over the middle one. I was surprised how much the third issue was very much interested in and responding to the details of the Crisis; post-Vertigo, this kind of series would have a clear aesthetic division from the DC universe, but that hasn't happened yet. I was also surprised that Alan Moore is not only credited, he gets his name on the collection cover! Over at Marvel and Doctor Who Magazine, they're only crediting his work-for-hire material to "The Original Writer" and pretending his stories spontaneously generated themselves.

And they all lived happily ever after... until Wonder Woman was regressed to primordial goo and her entire history erased.
from Wonder Woman vol. 1 #329 (script by Gerry Conway, art by Don Heck)

Like New Teen Titans, the Wonder Woman issues are hard to read without the original context; there are a lot of recurring characters to keep track of. There's also a weird thing where an entire invasion of the underworld by the Anti-Monitor happens between issues, but the second issue kind of acts like you already know about this. But I did like that this put a button on the pre-Crisis Wonder Woman, resolving her conflicts with her mother and even marrying her off to Steve Trevor!

Caleb Mozzocco should have included this one on his list!
from Infinity, Inc. vol 1 #22 (script by Roy & Dann Thomas, art by Mike Clark & Tony DeZuniga)

I am a fan of both All-Star Squadron and Infinity Inc., Roy Thomas's two 1980s Earth-Two series, but I struggled with a lot of the issues included here. Some of the Infinity, Inc. issues work fairly well when they are about character drama, particularly the secret histories of Alan Scott, Jade, and Obsidian; there's also some decent stuff about Rick Tyler, the new Hourman, and Beth Chapel, the new Doctor Midnight. (Geoff Johns would go on to use Rick in JSA volume 1 and Justice Society of America volume 3, and he would also appear in JSA Classified and JSA All-Stars, but of course Beth would be killed off and replaced by a white man.) But it's also pretty clear that even though he was working very hard to tie into Crisis, Thomas struggled to give the characters interesting things to do: there are a lot of very boring, very generic fights, particularly in the All-Star issues, and the Shanghaied into Hyperspace! interludes are particularly dull. Although it's one of these Roy Thomas issues that has one of my favorite tiny details in the whole book, a quick meeting between Elongated Man and Plastic Man that occurs in the background.

Every time Marv revisits the Crisis, he metafictionally complains about how comics have gotten too grim.
from Legends of the DC Universe: Crisis on Infinite Earths #1 (script by Marv Wolfman, art by Paul Ryan & Bob McLeod)

Finally we have the two actual Crisis issues: the original's #5 and the Legends of the DCU tie-in. The latter I had read before, and it is pretty decent. Paul Ryan and Bob McLeod do a good George Pérez pastiche, and it's interesting to see a late 1990's DC sensibility applied to the mid-1980s. (The "Earth-D" focused on here is much more diverse.) Crisis #5 itself is pretty forgettable; lots of exposition and then some pointless fights. 

Are the Writers Upset about Substack's Pangram Integration Just the Ones Using AI to Write?

A point that I came across in writing my previous post about the false-positive rate of the Pangram AI detection software was that the blogging platform Substack recently integrated Pangram, with the position that while using AI to write is fine, undisclosed AI writing is not. (This seems like a reasonable position to me, to be honest.) Many Substack writers are now outraged, claiming their purely human-written and -polished prose is getting flagged by Pangram as AI-written.

This made me remember when, a few months ago, a facebook friend shared an essay on Tolkien by the Substack writer Genny Harrison, and reading it immediately tripped my internal AI detector:

"Not because the claim was obviously absurd, but because it was obviously compressed."

"That question is not radical. It is basic historiography."

"Recognizing that possibility is not an attack on Tolkien. It is what historical reading looks like."

"Tolkien is more than an author. He is a formative experience."

"it is no longer a myth. It has become a shrine."

"Middle-earth is not a crime scene. It is an inheritance."

If you've spent any time reading AI-generated prose, it couldn't be any more obvious. And indeed, if you copy a chunk of it into Pangram, it scores it as 100% AI-generated.

I was curious if she admitted to AI use or not, so I searched Harrison's facebook profile to see if she mentioned it, and found a post where she decried the integration of Substack's AI detector: 

The classifier is also only as reliable as the moment its labels were collected. Models change constantly. Humanizer tools exist for the sole purpose of defeating detection, and many of them work well enough to make the entire exercise resemble airport security for adjectives.

Think about who that leaves. The person running an essay mill through a laundering tool walks through clean. The writer most likely to be flagged is the one with a consistent voice, careful structure, and a habit of revising until the sentences behave.

That is the familiar genius of automated enforcement. The sophisticated learn how to evade it. The honest remain available for inspection.

Again, if you've read a lot of LLM-generated stuff, this sounds exactly like it. And indeed, well, I leave you to guess what the Pangram result is. One might note with a careful read of Harrison's piece that she never actually says, "I do not use AI to write my posts." She says she puts a lot of work into them, she frets about a lot of harms that AI detection might do in the abstract. I feel like this non-denial is pretty telling.

 

(One also notes that Harrison claims of Pangram's training data, "Someone wrote all of it. Somebody's novels, somebody's blog posts, somebody's dissertation, somebody's newsletter about mushrooms, all of it harvested and processed into a classifier that now stands at the door of my essay, deciding whether I am real. The exact grievance the anti-machine crowd has been shouting for three years, that these systems were built out of human labor nobody agreed to donate, applies with full force to the referee they just installed. They did not defeat the thing they hate. They gave it a badge and a percentage sign." This in fact totally untrue. Pangram states its datasets of human writing are "commercially licensed," which they actually paid for it, they didn't just rip it off the Internet as so many LLM creators did.)

 

a robot writing
(image courtesy NBC News)

Jump over to the Substack subreddit, and the posters there are outraged. Someone created a post called "Running list of Pangram’s 'AI Detection' errors and other related Substack errors." The comments are filled with people saying they didn't use AI, they've never even read anything written by AI, yet somehow their posts are being flagged!

 

But... can we trust them? I mean, Genny Harrison very strongly implies she doesn't use AI, enough that I would feel free to call her purposefully dishonest, and yet her essays score very highly. Anyone on Reddit can say, "oh, AI detectors are so unreliable," but what proves that they didn't use an LLM? Hence why the Pangram tests I covered in my previous post used pre-2022 material as a control when calibrating Pangram.

 

My favorite commenter on that reddit posts is the one who says,

I've got an open offer for anyone reading this. If you can find a piece of pre-2022 writing, with an accompanying web.archive.org link proving it's pre-AI writing, that is at least 100 words in length, and which Pangram flags as AI-generated, I will donate $100 to the charity of your choice. Everyone says they're getting tons of false positives, so this should be pretty easy, but for some reason every time I've posted this offer before, nobody has been able to do it. 

As far as I could tell, no one ever took them up on this offer.

 

Case closed?

 

Well, maybe not. In the course of researching this post, I came across another Substack post by the blogger Freddie deBoer (I read his work occasionally maybe a decade ago): "I Wouldn't Say Pangram is Broken, But I Would Say That It's Brittle." DeBoer says a reader accused him of using LLM to write part of one post, and linked to a Pangram result; deBoer actually paid for a Pangram account so he could mess around with it a bit and was able to reproduce this result. I am familiar enough with deBoer to believe that he is telling the truth when he says he did not use AI.

 

His post is worth reading in full, but points out the issues Pangram has with 1) very short texts, and 2) texts that switch back and forth between AI- and LLM-generated writing. One of the cofounders of Pangram actually pops up in the comments to concede Pangram needs to be better about handling these things. So though it seems that while Pangram might be very good... it also has its vulnerabilities. I do think, going by deBoer's post, that the frequency with which Pangram rates even longer texts as either 0% or 100% is a bit suspect, never in between, and the fact that it doesn't better foreground its confidence probability is also something that could use some improvement.

 

If you want to know, incidentally, I put a chunk of my previous post about Pangram into Pangram, and it said I am 100% human. 

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Coda: Oblivion's Gate

July 2387 / 2373, Borg timeline / Intertime / Sept. 1966
There are times that there's a disconnect between what a book says it's about and what it's actually about. Usually, I feel like this happens when the mechanics of the plot haven't been designed to emphasize the themes. Two examples that spring to mind are the third Mistborn book by Brandon Sanderson, The Hero of Ages, and the second Raybearer book by Jordan Ifueko, Redemptor. The former book is supposedly about how to use political power appropriately and trying to stop the end of the world... but unfortunately, most of the book is actually about the main characters standing in a cave trying to get through a door. So though one is told the fate of the world is at stake, it doesn't really feel like it. Similarly, in the latter book, the characters have a stated urgent goal of preventing the spirits of children from being carried off but the way they need to accomplish this is by assembling a ruling council, and that ends up feeling like a distraction from the other goal, and disrupts the urgency of it.

Star Trek: Coda, Book III: Oblivion's Gate
by David Mack

Published: 2021
Acquired: December 2021
Read: August 2025

I think that Oblivion's Gate suffers from a similar problem. In an interview with Paul Semel, David Mack says that "the entire novel is a rumination on what it means to find a 'good' death, a quietus with significance, and an exhortation to remember to live while one can, and not merely exist." (He also goes on to say that it "is meant as a sort of rebuttal to the pervasive hopeless nihilism of Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against The Human Race.") But when you read the book, it is mostly a succession of action sequences, the stakes of many of which feel quite arbitrary. It feels like a step back that much of the book is about fighting the Borg—Mack himself was the one who wrote the book that put an end to them, after all—and what does scene after scene on an alternate 2373 have to do with it?

If the book is about "find[ing] a 'good' death" and "liv[ing] while one can," then the plot needs to reflect that more. Which is to say, I think there needed to be more of a conflict about this concept. But the book actually dispenses with this conflict pretty quickly. All the characters look at the temporal evidence (more on that later), decide they need to die, and then they just do it. On the one hand, I guess this is admirable in a Star Trekky, aspirational sense. But on the other hand, it means the book gets very little drama out of the idea of finding a good death. If the book wants to be about the fact that sometimes there's nothing you can do other than die for the sake of someone else, then I think there needs to be characters who don't believe this, but come to.

This, to me, is the real problem of the Admiral Riker plotline, which began back at the beginning of book II and continues for a distressingly long period of time in this one. From a narrative standpoint, it's boring, and it's difficult to believe that all of the other characters let it go on so long. In Star Trek, people are always standing up against commanding officers who have gone crazy; I just don't buy that Troi and Vale and Sarai would put up with Riker's antics for long,* and it's just dull to read chapter after chapter of them going along with what is very obviously the wrong choice. But beyond this—what if Riker and Picard had a real conflict about what was the right decision to make, instead of Riker's opposition coming from him having a technobabble spacetime insanity? And thus the trajectory of the book was about one of them convincing the other of a necessity of finding a good death? Then the book's plot would be married to its themes.

The beginning of the book has to pile on a lot of technobabble about how the Borg caused the timeline divergence that created the "First Splinter"... and I found this all quite tough to take in, because it's so transparently setting up the stakes of the book in a very specific way, and ultimately comes across as too complicated to really buy into. Star Trek time travel (Christopher L. Bennett's best efforts aside) has quite arbitrary rules. Having all your characters decide to die on the basis of them is a risky choice, because if the reader doesn't believe in those rules, then everything that follows on from them will also fail to convince. Ultimately, I wonder if the trilogy's idea that timeline after timeline was falling to the Devidians was too much, and if a simpler arrangement would have been easier to buy: perhaps just both the "Prime Timeline" and the First Splinter are seemingly doomed to die, and the First Splinter characters realize they can save the other but not themselves. I don't know; it's not necessarily good criticism to say how you would have done it when you're not the writer. But I do know that how the stakes were set up here ultimately didn't work.

Readers of this series of posts will know that I was ultimately not a huge fan of many of the directions taken in the novels post-Destiny. Or perhaps to put it more accurately, the lack of direction; it seems to me that the later novels of the so-called "novelverse" lacked the clear character threads that pervaded (especially) the early Deep Space Nine relaunch and early Titan novels, instead lurching (like a "Big Two" superhero comic book) from big event to big event. 

But I feel like even if you were a big fan of everything the novels did from Typhon Pact onward, it would be hard to be fan of the way Coda wrapped it all up. What makes the novelverse appeal is the sense you're reading an enormous tapestry, one big story that moves forward. But what Coda does is cut this tapestry off. To the extent that there was one big story in the novels, we don't get to see it wrap up. Instead everything just blows up. The problem is, that without this trilogy, it would be much the same; if the last Destiny-era book had just been Collateral Damage, I don't think it would really be any different from what we got here. Why do we need a book to say that we're not going to get a resolution to, say, the Endalla storyline when we already know that we're not going to get a resolution to the Endalla storyline? If we were going to go back to the novelverse for one last spin, then I feel like that last spin needs to do something other than just arbitrarily cut everything off, because arbitrarily being cut off is what we had without this trilogy.

Moreover, I found the trilogy as a whole, and Oblivion's Gate in particular, chose its emphases weirdly. If the goal is to provide one last hurrah to the novels, why is so much of what the novels built up over twenty years since Avatar largely ignored? Why is so much time spent on things that the novels rarely dealt with? Across all three books, we have a lot of time spent on Wesley Crusher, a character largely absent from this era of Star Trek, book III of Cold Equations aside. Too much of this book in particular is spent on the mirror universe, always one of the weakest elements of the Destiny era. I feel like those wanting a wrapup to the books didn't want to know what happened to mirror Saavik or mirror K'Ehleyr.

On the flip side, many elements integral to the success of the Destiny-era fiction are 1) poorly done by, 2) reduced to cameos, or 3) not here at all. If you were a fan of Titan, you get to experience six hundred pages of them standing around like chumps while Riker goes crazy. If you were a fan of S.C.E./Corps of Engineers, you get one chapter of them which largely seems to be a joke about Tev's obnoxious pedantry. If you were a fan of DTI, you get a returning appearance by a character who ought not to have actually made one. If you were a fan of the Deep Space Nine relaunch, you get one last hurrah for the tv characters, but little that draws on the books (aside from the touching Quark/Ro scenes in the previous book). Why does the last-ever book about Kira mostly involve her standing there doing nothing while the mirror Ezri does nothing? If you were a fan of New Frontier (the series that really began the novelverse in any meaningful sense, I would argue), you just get a mention of the mirror Calhoun. I haven't read any Voyager books after Full Circle, but was there really nothing for them but small appearances by Tom Paris and B'Elanna Torres?

Ultimately, The Ashes of Tomorrow managed to get enough emotion out of the deaths of some of the characters to kind of get away with it despite the flaws baked into the design of this trilogy. But Oblivion's Gate doesn't have this, so you're ultimately just left with the metafictional necessity of it all—which honestly, can just never be satisfying. 

This is really driven home by the misjudged coda to Coda, where Benny Russell finishes writing Oblivion's Gate and then turns over a page and begins writing The Last Best Hope. Leaving aside that you could never convince me the same person could somehow write a David Mack novel and an Una McCormack one... why would Benny Russell do this? Why would he kill off every character and then just start writing adventures for them in an alternate continuity? 

There's clearly no narrative reason at all. The reason this all happened isn't because anyone thought it would make for a good story; the reason this all happened is because of the perils of franchise storytelling. But Benny's not subject to that, so it makes little sense. The only reason to tell the story of Coda is because a big tv show had to be made, and the novels have to tie into that. 

Possibly in some other timeline, there's a version of Coda that makes this worth; god knows that franchise fiction has often managed to get genuinely heartfelt stories out of what were clearly nonnarrative choices. (The obvious inspiration for this series, Crisis on Infinite Earths, is a great example of this.) But that didn't happen here.

On its own terms as a story, Coda ultimately has no reason to exist.

Stephanie Chaves-Jacobsen as Kadohata
(photomanip by Columbia clipper, I think)

Continuity Notes:

• The Defiant is in this book a lot... but did either book II or III of Coda even mention any of the various DS9/Defiant crew that David R. George III created for his post-Destiny novels? I get it, no one thinks those characters were more boring than I do, but it is kind of weird to totally exclude them from a novelverse wrapup.
• One notes that Mack makes sure to establish that the Borg can exist independent of the specific origin he ascribed to them in the Destiny trilogy.
• Totally random cameo from the mirror Kadohata. Why not, I guess.

Other Notes:

• I found this book's seeming claim that K'Ehleyr was the real love of Worf's life honestly kind of weird. They had a nice fling, I guess... and then she systematically kept information from him for years! Why not the woman he actually built a life with? Surely that's what love really is. Spending so much time on this plot was another thing that felt misjudged about the emphases of this novel.
• I thought the scene where René goads all the mirror universe characters into dying for no reason very improbable. Look, I know people in the mirror universe are kind of dumb in general, but one kid calls you a coward, and that's it, you sacrifice your lives pointlessly to prove him wrong?
• I also really hated making Wesley inadvertantly responsible for the Devidians via a bootstrap paradox. First, those kind of things are often dramatically inert; it means people take action for no other reason than that the plot requires them to take action. And second, why put all this on Wesley's screwup?
• I don't really get what was up with the "René gets old" subplot now that we've got to the end of the trilogy. Like, what did it add? It has been suggested to me that this is "because otherwise we have to read how a little kid dies," but of course the Rikers' daughter Natasha does die, and so does—more implicitly—the Siskos' daughter Rebecca. It thus occurs to me that if Coda were going to do weird time shit with a captain character's kid, surely it ought to have been the captain character's kid who already had weird time shit going on? Though that would have required the people writing this series to engage with David R. George's DS9 novels, though, which clearly was not a priority.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: The End of This Day's Business by Eleta Preloc

 * On p. 215, Sarai finally reaches the conclusion that Riker "most definitely is not 'all right.'" I actually sighed out loud at this.

"Starman" by Gerry Conway, Mike Vosburg, and Mike Royer

A long time ago, I didn't read superhero comics. It's hard to believe, I know! But compared to many of my interests, I came to them relatively late, not until I was in college. One of my gateways was a blog called, I think, Comics 101 by Scott Tipton (later a writer for IDW's Star Trek and Doctor Who comics). Tipton would do deep dives on different comics characters—his history of Green Arrow was responsible, for example, for my deep and abiding interest in the character. I feel like you can find this stuff all over the Internet these days, but back then it was much rarer.

One of Scott's favorite ever comics was James Robinson's Starman, which he did a multi-part deep dive on, and he made it sound so good and so much to my taste, than when DC released the six-volume Starman Omnibus set a couple years later, I blind-bought the entire run as it came out. These days, the giant hardcover omnibus that reprints everything in order is a common format, but back then it was brand new; in fact, I am pretty sure that Starman was only DC's second foray into it, following the Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus. If you read Reddit's "OmnibusCollectors" sub, you will see lots of people who blind buy stuff they don't actually like based on hype, but I like to think I am actually very good at it, and I loved the run; I even got my wife to read it, and she enjoyed it too. My reviews of it from the time are all posted here on this blog.

One of the things that Robinson was very good at was pulling strands of the DC universe together. Though Robinson's Starman, Jack Knight, was the son of the original Starman, Ted Knight, DC had actually published several unrelated Starman characters between the two. Robinson didn't ignore these, but worked them into his story. I've long been curious about the original appearances of those Starmen: Mikaal Tomas, Prince Gavyn, and Will Payton. So my next comics project is to read the back issues about those other Starman characters, and then reread the James Robinson run, with both those original stories, not to mention twenty years of further comics reading, to inform my understanding. (For example, Starman is heavily connected to the Justice Society mythos, something I knew little about when I originally read it, but now know far too much about!)

Back when I added them to my list of things to check out, the stories of Mikaal and Gavyn were both uncollected, and though they have been collected since, I've still elected to pick up their original publications, since the collected editions in question have a lot of other material that makes them more expensive than just picking up the back issues. The fourth Starman, Will Payton, has never been collected at all. (I do wonder if this will all get collected in a "DC Finest" someday and how it will be handled if so. A DC Finest is typically 500-650 pages long... all of the 1970s Starman content totals less than 150 pages. Would they collect it alongside either the end of Golden Age run, or the beginning of the late 1980s run? It will be a weird collection either way.)

---

So the first post–Golden Age Starman revival was in the pages of DC's 1st Issue Special, a thirteen-issue series where every issue was the "first issue" of a potential run. In most cases, however, the hypothetical run never materialized, and Starman was no exception. Until James Robinson brought him back two decades later, this remained the only outing for this version of Starman.

This Starman is Mikaal Tomas, who is a blue-skinned alien from space. (The lettercol implies he could be from the same planet as Shadow Lass of the Legion of Super-Heroes.) It's the 1970s, and disco and David Bowie are popular, so he wears a shirt with a plunging neckline and a gold medallion. I feel like I often hear this version of the character referred to somewhat dismissively as the "disco Starman"...

...but that must be by people who have not actually read the comic, who have just seen pictures of the character, because this is excellent. Seriously, this isn't high art, but I thought it was masterfully put together. The creative team here is an all-star one: Gerry Conway (Steel, the Indestructible Man, Sun Devils), Mike Vosburg (Starfire), and Mike Royer (Fourth World, Kamandi) were all probably at their heights when they assembled to do this.

If only you didn't suck, Mikaal!

Basically, in eighteen pages, this story does exactly what a good first issue ought to do. Efficiently and effectively, Gerry and the Mikes give us a clear premise and a number of drivers of future conflict. Mikaal comes from a planet whose inhabitants intend to invade the Earth; both he and his girlfriend think this is wrong... but only his girlfriend is willing to do anything about it, and she dies in the attempt. This spurs him to travel to Earth to try to protect its people, only his spaceship crash lands, injuring him. He is rescued by a grocery store owner; meanwhile, a pair of cops investigate his crashed ship, and one of them dies... and then he's followed to Earth! 

So we already have a clear cast of characters with some interesting dynamics, especially the cop who thinks that Mikaal's the bad guy. The action is clear and sharp, the exposition is efficient and not heavy handed at all, it ends on an excellent cliffhanger. I get why this was never followed up on (1st Issue Special was cancelled one issue later, and the Wikipedia page on the series quotes an interview with Conway that does a good job of explaining of why it never really worked as a "tryout" book anyway), but it's a shame. I flew through this issue, and I loved reading it.

Presumably this guy and his beef with Mikaal are never heard from again.

I'll be curious to see how much of it James Robinson actually draws on when he brings back Mikaal; I don't remember much beyond the bare fact of his existence!

(Incidentally, there's no indication this is set in the DC universe: the humans in the story certainly don't act like people who are used to superheroes and aliens flying around. Robinson would place the story specifically in the 1970s, not on DC's sliding timescale, so this actually works out, as it's set in the relatively superhero-light period between the retirement of the JSA and the emergence of the JLA.)

"Starman" originally appeared in issue #12 of 1st Issue Special (Mar. 1976). The story was written/edited by Gerry Conway and illustrated by Mike Vosburg & Mike Royer. 

This is the first in a series of posts about Starman. The next covers Adventure Comics #467-78.