I like to build little playlists of soundtrack music for myself to listen to as I work. A lot of these are pretty obvious: I have a Star Wars one with all the opening and closing tracks from each film, plus significant character themes.
One of my favorite ones is based around the Star Trek movies, which is based around tracks from each film that focus on the Enterprise. Here's the complete set:
Jerry Goldsmith, "The Enterprise" (from Star: The Motion Picture: Limited Edition)
James Horner, "Enterprise Clears Moorings" (from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: Newly Expanded Edition)
James Horner, "Stealing the Enterprise" (from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: Newly Expanded Edition)
Jerry Goldsmith, "A Tall Ship" (from Star Trek V: The Final Frontier: The Complete Score)
Cliff Eidelman, "Clear All Moorings" (from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country: The Complete Score)
Dennis McCarthy, "The Enterprise B" (from Star Trek Generations: Expanded Collector's Edition)
Jerry Goldsmith, "How Many Ships" (from Star Trek: First Contact: Limited Edition)
Jerry Goldsmith, "Star Field / Positronic" (from Star Trek Nemesis: The Deluxe Edition)
Michael Giacchino, "Enterprising Young Men" (from Star Trek)
Michael Giacchino, "Undersea Enterprises, Inc." (from Star Trek Into Darkness: The Deluxe Edition)
Michael Giacchino, "Yorktown Theme" (from Star Trek Beyond: The Deluxe Edition)
The Enterprise theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture of course needs no introduction or justification. Say what you like about the six-minute flyby of the ship, but the Enterprise has never looked better on screen, nor has it ever been treated better by a filmmaker. Part of that is, of course, Jerry Goldsmith's beautiful score for the sequence, which captures the majesty and the beauty of the starship in a way no one else ever has, before or since. My iTunes tells me it's not my most-played track on the list, but that's only because I originally had the non-limited edition of the TMP soundtrack; if you added my plays of the same track from that version, it would take the top spot.
Goldsmith reprises the Enterprise them in the other tracks from him I have on the list: "A Tall Ship" from ST V, "How Many Ships" from First Contact, and "Star Field" from Nemesis. "A Tall Ship" is good stuff; I think on the whole, the ST V soundtrack finds interesting things to do with Goldsmith's original themes from TMP in new ways, and this track is no exception. Unfortunately, the directors of the TNG films never gave the Enterprise-E the kind of extended beauty shots the directors of the original films did, so the tracks from FC and Nemesis just feature brief restatements of the Enterprise theme from TMP over short establishing shots. (I'm sure there's a reprise of the Enterprise theme somewhere in Insurrection, but I don't have it on my list.)
For both ST II and VI, my list uses the track in the movie where the Enterprise is launched from spacedock. Arguably, neither James Horner nor Cliff Eidelman composed an "Enterprise theme" the way that Goldsmith did (or Giacchino later would), but both of these are great bits of music that turn something procedural into something majestic. Horner's piece is exciting and thrilling, while Eidelman's is almost mournful—the last time we would see the "original" Enterprise on the big screen. (Yes, I know the Enterprise-A is not really the original Enterprise, but it looks like her and it has the original cast on board.) I use the version just called "Clear All Moorings" from the original ST VI album, not the one that adds the "Spacedock" theme from the complete score.
Other than Goldsmith's original theme, my favorite Enterprise-focused piece of music is certainly "Stealing the Enterprise" from ST III. This is the thrilling piece that plays during what is the very best sequence from the entire film, when the Enterprise crew steal the Enterprise in order to travel to the Genesis planet. I could watch that sequence a million times and never be bored. "And... now, Mr. Scott." "Sir?" "The doors, Mr. Scott." "Aye sir, I'm working on it." The surprised relief on the faces of William Shatner and James Doohan as the doors finally open is utterly convincing. Oh, and then "GOOD MORNING CAPTAIN." Listening to the music never fails to bring me back to this.
There are actually two version of this track on the ST III expanded soundtrack; I have the one closer to the music used in the finished film on my Enterprise playlist, but there's also one with some nice Prokofiev-esque flourishes as well.
Lastly, there are the three tracks composed by Michael Giacchino. Though his style of scoring isn't totally to my taste, one can't deny that his score was the first to treat the Enterprise with the reverence she deserved since the original films—though this is because J. J. Abrams gave him the space to do it. The scene where Kirk first sees the Enterprise in space has this amazing theme under it. (I prefer the 2:40 version from the original soundtrack to the longer version from the deluxe edition, since what's added onto the longer version is not Enterprise-focused.) The scene from Into Darkness that most prominently reprises this is the reveal that the Enterprise is hidden underwater on the planet Nibiru. Can you hide a starship underwater? Who cares, so long as it looks and sounds this cool.
The track I selected from Beyond isn't Enterprise-focused per se, but it's in the spirit of the tracks I selected from ST II, III, and VI, except in reverse: instead of the Enterprise launching from spacedock, it's from a scene where the Enterprise returns to spacedock, a beautiful scene of the stasrship making its way into and through the amazing Starbase Yorktown. Yorktown is the focus here, not the Enterprise, but still it's a worthy track anyway. As one of the commenters on the YouTube video I've linked says, "Yorktown is the Federation itself represented in one city. We the audience, and the characters on the Enterprise, get to see this beautiful 'snow globe' filled with people from all walks of life and all races living and working together harmoniously. All the while they're surrounded and supported by technological marvels so advanced that they're damned close to magic.... This sequence tells the audience, and Kirk's crew, 'This is worth fighting for.'"
Put all this together, and you have a beautiful 34-minute journey through some of the best film music ever composed. Will the playlist ever get any longer? The prospects on this front seem pretty dim at the moment (it has been ten years, the longest of any such gaps), but I live in hope.
I spent the first several months of 2025 working my way through the Pelican History of England, a series of nine paperbacks chronicling English history. These were originally published from 1950 to 1978, with updates extending to 1995, but beginning in 1996, Penguin allowed the series to fall out of print as they replaced it with a new series, the Penguin History of Britain. This series was made of longer volumes (compare the Pelican Roman volume's 189 pages to the equivalent Penguin volume's 539!) and originally published in hardcover. My plan is to work my way through this series in 2026, beginning with David Mattingly's An Imperial Possession, which covers British history from the arrival of the Romans to their withdrawal. (Like with the Pelican History, the volumes were not published in chronological order; this came out sixth.)
An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman Empire, 54 BC–AD 409 by David Mattingly
The Pelican Roman volume was one of my least favorites; I wrote, "I don't know that I've ever read a history book by an archaeologist before; if I am to be uncharitable, it certainly reads like it was by an archaeologist." Unfortunately, David Mattingly is also an archaeologist and unfortunately, the book has much the same issue as its predecessor, in that it feels more like it jumps from place to place cataloguing things rather than telling a story about the time Britain spent under Roman occupation. However, the issues aren't as strong; presumably because of the greater space, I did have a better sense of the broader context and story. Of the Pelican volume, I complained, "But I often felt like I didn't know why things were happening:
why did the Romans decide to conquer Britain? why did Boudicca rise up
against it all? why did Roman influence fade? Often it felt like were
just getting brief summaries of places things had happened without the actual context for the actual happenings." These questions are all ones that Mattingly actually does address here. On the other hand, I still do feel like we got a lot of description of what a villa's layout is without much of a sense why we might care to know this.
The best part of the book is its first chapter, where Mattingly argues that the British have too often identified with the Roman conquerors of Britain, rather than the British that were conquered. Because Britain itself was an empire when many of the histories of Britain began to be written in the nineteenth century, there was a tendency to for writers to see the Romans as benignly civilizing a bunch of "primitives," because that was how the British post hoc justified their own invasions of "primitives." As Mattingly points out, "[e]ven today, more than half a century beyond the effective end of a British empire, mainstream views of the Roman empire are.... closely bound up with issues of national nostalgia for our own lost empire. As a result, we have a curious and ambiguous relationship with our Roman heritage, which is difficult to reconcile with the hard facts of Roman conquest and domination" (4). If we move away from this way of viewing Roman Britain, Mattingly claims, then we get a more accurate view of the power relationships: the British elite weren't "Romanizing" because they recognized the Roman way of life as better, but because they wanted to maintain what power they could in a time of Roman domination. It's not as strongly put, but it reminded me of Howard Zinn's first chapter in A People's History of the United States, revealing the self-serving stories our national myths are rooted in. I just wish this project had been better and more clearly carried out into the rest of the chapters of the book, which occasionally feel more like Mattingly is trying to score points against rival scholars rather than speak to a general audience.
This is an anthology of original sf put together by Ursula Le Guin and her agent, Virginia Kidd, back in 1980. Between this and Le Guin's other anthology that I've read, the Norton Book of Science Fiction (1993), I think I have to conclude that while Le Guin's short fiction is very much to my taste, Le Guin's taste in short fiction is not exactly to my taste. There's a whiff of the Ellisonian form of the "New Wave" in here, stories that trade a bit too much on sex or violence or literary effect but forget to be an interesting story. I'm not enthusiastic to write up stories I dislike, though, so you'll mostly just have to infer those by omission. (The book has fifteen stories and two sets of poems.)
Interfaces edited by Ursula K. Le Guin and Virginia Kidd
Still, there was some good stuff. "The Reason for the Visit" by John Crowley didn't totally make sense to me, but I was fine with that, because the conceit was interesting and the way it was told was very well done. (I don't want to give away the premise, because working it out for yourself is one of the story's pleasures.) I liked the narrative voice of "The New Zombies" by Avram Davidson and Grania Davis, though otherwise found the story trite and obvious. "Earth and Stone" by Robert Holdstock was weird and I didn't exactly get what happened, but I did enjoy the ride. Gene Wolfe's "A Criminal Proceeding" was a great little piece of dystopian satire, I found it hilarious and sadly prescient. I enjoyed Edward Bryant's "Precession," though mostly for its depiction of grading student essays and dealing with student freakouts, which was apparently little better forty-five years ago. I did not totally get James Tiptree, Jr.'s "Slow Music," about those who opt not to become immortal, but I liked what I did get.
My favorite story, though was Michael Bishop's "A Short History of the Bicycle: 401 B.C. to 2677 A.D." The story does one of my favorite sfnal moves, which is to take a pretty absurd premise and extrapolate with utter seriousness; in this case, it's the idea that bicycles are a creature that independently evolved on an alien planet; the story alternates between the scientist studying the ecology of bicycles and extracts from scientific writing. It's a weird idea well told; it's also a strong metaphor for the human treatment of nature. Lots of well done little details and good jokes, a perfect little tale. From the ISFDB it seems to have only been reprinted the once, in a collection of Bishop's work from 1983, which seems a real shame, as it deserves a wider audience.
As I have been reading all these apocryphal Oz books aloud to my kids, my wife keeps commenting that instead of reading them all these mediocre latter-day books, what I really ought to be doing is rereading some of the original ones. Kid Two, after all, was not even born yet when I read the original Baum novels, and even for Kid One, it was so long ago, they barely remember them. I felt like this had some merit—do I really want someone to remember, say, The Patchwork Bride of Oz moreso than Patchwork Girl?
I've been picking the apocryphal Oz books at random from a list I assembled; most recently, that lead me to The Speckled Rose of Oz by Donald Abbott, which takes place during the gap between Wonderful Wizard and Marvelous Land, when the Scarecrow rules the Emerald City. Well, this seemed like a clear enough reason to go back at last: reading a book set in a gap neither of my children recollected seemed pretty pointless! So I decided we'd reread Wonderful Wizard, then do Speckled Rose, then continue on into Marvelous Land.
Even though Kid One had Wonderful Wizard read aloud to them five years ago, they are still fairly familiar with its contents: they've heard the audiobook a couple times, read the Shanower/Young adaptation at least twice, and seen the MGM film. And Kid Two has seen the MGM film as well.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum illustrated by W. W. Denslow
Originally published: 1900 Acquired: January 2011 Previously read: umpteen times Read aloud: March–April 2026
It was well worth rereading. First off, it's just very good. The book has been often imitated, even (especially?) by Baum himself, but rarely bettered. Maybe it's the nostalgia, but I think the book has a sort of joy and a pleasure in it that has very rarely been captured by other Oz books. The Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, the Cowardly Lion are all at the most themselves: each possessing a singular virtue that they don't believe themselves to possess. Oz itself is a land of wonders and marvels, full of unknown dangers and extraordinary beauties. The characters' problem-solving skills are at their most important, because the landscape they move through is full of mysteries, and there are no convenient Magic Belts or wishing pills that can save them. To a degree, anything can happen. But also problems can be solved through the rational application of thought; I think Baum very much gets the pleasure of what China Miéville calls "rationalized alienation": this world works different from ours, but you can figure it out. Things don't differ arbitrarily; if you accept his starting premises of how a living scarecrow or man of tin would work, then what follows on them those ideas makes sense. So there is pleasure to, say, the Scarecrow and company working out how to get the Cowardly Lion out of the deadly poppy field. And this would be hard to get back to in a later book, where these characters are all "celebrities" and have very powerful friends.
Partially, though, I don't think the other books ever could capture what made this one work so well. I am thinking of what Brian W. Aldiss says in The Trillion Year Spree about the difference between the original Dune and its sequels, a difference he said was "perhaps true of most series novels in SF. The first novel derives much of its power from our delight in and discovery of a new environment. The pleasure of future volumes is different in kind. Familiarity and complexity replace the higher satisfaction of revelation" (398).
It was also worth doing because of the increased age of the kids. Unlike on previous reads, I think they got that the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and Cowardly Lion are intelligent, kind, and brave even before they see the Wizard... though also Kid One insisted that the Wizard must not be a humbug because he did give the threesome what they wanted, so I don't think they totally got how (at least as I think the first book makes clear, though later ones seemingly walked this back a bit) the gifts were nothing more than placebos. What Kid One did grok on this reading was the fact that much of what appears in the Emerald City is not actually green, and that the Wizard is just tricking everyone through the use of the green spectacles.
And of course the illustrations of this one are so good. We usually read a chapter or two before bedtime, and the kids listen in their beds, with me coming to show them any pictures. But the original book (which we of course read in its Books of Wonder facsimile edition) has pictures on almost every page, so I let the kids sit next to me as I read it.
It was interesting reading the book shortly after the two Ages of Oz books by Gabriel Gale and Lisa Fiedler. Those are prequels to the original series, so I could see some of the connections a bit better... though also the account given by the Winged Monkeys of their history does not agree with what Gale and Fiedler added in in their books!
Almost a decade ago(!), I read through all of Barry Gifford's stories about Sailor and Lula, collected in a single volume. Sailor and Lula are two young lovers from the South who grow old together across the course of the books; most of the books are rambling road trips, excuses for Gifford to embed stories within stories with weird dialogue and strange personalities. The philosophy of the stories is perhaps best explained by this exchange from Sailor's Holiday:
"Ain't it somethin'... how it's just one weird thing happens after another?"
"Stay tuned.... I got a powerful hunch there ain't never gonna be a end to it."
However, there was technically one Sailor and Lula story omitted from "The Complete Novels." In 1995, in the seventeen-year gap between the sixth and seventh Sailor and Lula novels, Gifford published Baby Cat-Face. Upon reading it, I can see why it was omitted: it consists of three short stories (maybe one is a novelette?) with some linking material: "Baby Cat-Face," "Mother Bizco's Temple of the Few Washed Pure by Her Blood," and "The Lost Sons of Cassiopeia," but Sailor and Lula only appear in the first one, which is actually set before Wild at Heart, the first Sailor and Lula story. It would have been an odd inclusion... though perhaps no odder than Perdita Durango. (Maybe "Baby Cat-Face" could have been included on its own?)
Anyway, the short but unhelpful review of Baby Cat-Face is that if you like the kind of thing Barry Gifford does, then Baby Cat-Face is a good example of it. If you don't like the kind of thing that Barry Gifford does, then don't read this book. I do like the thing Barry Gifford does, so I enjoyed reading this a lot; I think I blew through the whole book in a day.
The first story was definitely my favorite, that classic Barry Gifford structure where we follow a bunch of people in their own strands as they encounter weirdness. The young woman Baby Cat-Face goes on a bus ride with a former music star, and their bus gets commandeered by members of a feminist art institute who force them to watch ballet at gunpoint. It's just full of weird goofy stuff which is a joy to read, such as when the bus hijacker, who is a very large woman, declares, "My name is Daylight DuRapeau. My mama say she name me Daylight 'cause she had a feelin' the world was gonna see a whole lotta me. And as y'all can positively witness, there be considerable of me to see."
The later parts of the book I found less interesting; Baby Cat-Face joins a weird cult and then ends up giving birth to a kid with magical powers. I certainly don't object that it's weird, but it is a style of weirdness less to my taste than what Gifford was doing in "Baby Cat-Face" itself. Still, one is never not entertained reading Barry Gifford, and it all reads quickly and pleasantly no matter how weird and disturbing it gets.
This actually isn't the end of my Sailor and Lula journey; after The Complete Novels came out in 2010, Gifford actually released one more Sailor and Lula story in 2015, so I'll track that down next. Hopefully in less than another decade!
Here we wrap up the UK's Target: 2006, and thus can jump back into the story that my reading order wraps around it, the Transformers: The Movie comic adaptation. From there we then go back into the regular US book for the first time in a long while... but then my order sees us take another detour, as I'm reading installments of Transformers Universe by their publication dates relative to the US stories.
Target: 2006, Parts 7–9 & Epilogue / "Judgement Day" (part 2) / "The Final Battle!" / "Aerialbots over America!" / "Heavy Traffic!", from The Transformers US #21-22 (Oct.-Nov. 1986) / The Transformers UK #85-92 (1 Nov.–20 Dec. 1986) and Transformers: The Movie #2-3 (Jan.-Feb. 1987), reprinted in The Transformers: Til All Are One Compendium One (2025)
scripts by Simon Furman, Ralph Macchio, and Bob Budiansky; pencils by Will Simpson, Geoff Senior, Anderson, and Don Perlin; inks by Tim Perkins, Geoff Senior, Anderson, and Ian Akin & Brian Garvey; letters by Starkings, Annie Halfacree, Janice Chiang, and Hans IV; colour by Jozwiak, Gina Hart, and Nel Yomtov
from The Transformers UK #85
Obviously the highlight of the closing portion of Target: 2006 is the Galvatron-versus-Ultra-Magnus battle. This is good stuff, of course, and thank goodness most of it is drawn by Geoff Senior! But overall I found the resolution to Target: 2006 very disappointing.
It's cleverly conceived: Galvatron has come back in time of 1986 to build a giant gun to destroy Unicron with; he can't do this in his own time of 2006 because there he's under Unicron's control. (Quite how Galvatron can nonchalantly jump through time is never explained.) But this entire plan is contingent on the idea that Galvatron is not changing history: it needs to be a predestination paradox, otherwise there won't be a big gun waiting for Galvatron in the year 2006. (Why Galvatron needs to build this gun on the future site of Autobot City, or why the Autobots would somehow let this gun sit there undisturbed for twenty years, are also not explained.) This means that Galvatron has to be very careful when in the past: if anyone who is alive in 2006 is killed in 1986, then the future Galvatron comes from will not come to pass.
Galvatron is followed to 1986 by three Autobots from 2006, Hot Rod, Kup, and Blurr. (One of the underwhelming aspects of reading Target: 2006 in the middle of the movie comic adaptation, by the way, is that Kup and Blurr barely feature in its first issue, so when they pop up in 1986, it's less "oh it's those guys!" and more "who are those guys?") Their plan to stop Galvatron is to trick him into thinking that he's created a divergent timeline: they manipulate him into thinking he's killed Starscream. Since Starscream killed Megatron in 2006, leading to his rebirth as Galvatron, this means Galvatron must have created a new timeline, and therefore burying a gun in this 1986 won't accomplish anything in his 2006, so he gives up and returns to the future.
from The Transformers UK #88
This is clever... but it's basically all communicated after it happens. The entire resolution is dependent on rules for time travel that haven't been clearly communicated to the reader! Thus it all comes across as arbitrary. If even just once, Galvatron had gone, "oh i must be careful not to kill x otherwise i will create a divergent timeline and undermine my whole purpose in the past," then the resolution would have come across as way less of an ass-pull.
I also didn't like that it turns out that the three 2006 Autobots had been sent back in time by Unicron and were secretly being manipulated by him. I mean, on the one hand, I get why Furman did this: it's ever weirded to believe the Autobots have this technology than to believe that Galvatron has it, and it kind of beggars belief that these characters could run off to have this adventure in the middle of the movie. But on the other hand, it gives Unicron a knowledge base and a power set that exceeds anything we see him use in the movie, and makes it hard to believe that he could actually be defeated if he can mind control his enemies this way!
So, as the first of Furman's "Furmanist" epics, this is enjoyable enough... but it leaves much to be desired. Hopefully future iterations are stronger.
from Transformers: The Movie #3
From Target: 2006 I jumped back to p. 5 of issue #2 of the movie adaptation. My main note on reading this is that the way scripter Ralph Macchio cut down the film is very inconsistent and ruins a lot of the gags and arcs of the film. For example, Kup's bit about always saying places remind him of other places he's been is down just to two iterations: one in issue #2 where that characters react to it like he's done it a bunch already, and then once in #3 where the joke is that for once it's something that doesn't remind him of anything... but this pay-off doesn't work at all if we've only seen him do it one other time. Similarly, the joke about the "universal greeting" actually working doesn't make any sense if we didn't see the characters try to use it and fail.
This is probably worst, though, with Hot Rod's character arc. Not that it's an incredibly complex one, but "young hothead learns to be responsible and becomes the destined leader" really only works if we saw him be a young hothead... and those scenes were largely cut from issue #1!
Still, I thought the art was strong; I think Don Perlin has very much bedded in as a Transformers penciller at this point, and Ian Akin and Brian Garvey match him well on inks every time.
It's very weird to go from the Furmanist style of Target: 2006 and the movie to the Budianskian approach of "Aerialbots over America!" Suddenly it's wacky hijinks at Hoover Dam. In particular, Megatron disguises himself in his gun mode... and a dam employee just walks into work holding him, right past a security guard! I guess the pre-9/11 world was a different one entirely. Also, I think we're at the point where the never-ending need to introduce new characters and concepts begins to escape Budiansky's control: so many new characters so quickly. I really do hate anything involving combiners.
Early in the compendium, they sometimes included the UK edits to the US stories to make it all stick together, but as of this point, they seem to have stopped bothering. You would never know reading US issues #21 and 22 that, according to the UK issues, Optimus had just spent a bunch of time trapped in a limbo dimension!
Afterburner – Grimlock, from Transformers Universe #1 (Dec. 1986), plus other issues; reprinted in The Transformers: Til All Are One Compendium Four (2025)
written by Bob Budiansky, art by Ian Akin & Brian Garvey, colored by Nel Yomtov, lettered by Brenda Mings
I want to read more about debbie downer Dreadwind. from Transformers US #74
Transformers Universe was a four-issue guidebook to Transformers characters published by Marvel US: each page featured a drawing of a Transformer (usually in both robot and vehicle mode), a paragraph-long description of the robot's personality, and a brief description of its abilities and weaknesses. Annoyingly, these are uncredited in this compendium and on the Transformers wiki, but I think Bob Budiansky wrote the words and Ian Akin and Brian Garvey did the art. After the series's original four-issue run, further profiles were included as backmatter in issues of the US comic; this reprinting intersperses those alphabetically. (This stretches the issue's original 24 pages out to 58!)
The character portraits are solid stuff, nicely done. I usually skipped "abilities" and "weaknesses" but enjoyed the bios well enough. These profiles very much show up one of the big weaknesses of the Marvel Transformers comic, which is that there just wasn't enough space for most of these personalities to ever manifest in it. Too many new characters being added all the time for anyone to get an interesting moment.
I bet I would have loved this stuff when I was eight, though. Which is really the target audience for Transformers, not sad forty-year-olds.
This is the eighth in a series of posts about Marvel's The Transformers. The next covers US issue #23 and UK issues #93-104. Previous installments are listed below:
This scholarly monograph has a topic that is kind of hard to put into a few words (hence the not-very-descriptive subtitle), but basically it's about how Doctor Who became a fan-driven thing. What happened as Doctor Who shifted into being written and created by fans, and written and created for fans? Booy takes as his jumping-off point the debut of Doctor Who Weekly (later Doctor Who Magazine), which cultivated an audience of people interested in the mechanics of television production. Over time, these people came to write for the tv show, thus shaping it from the inside—and eventually they ended up running the whole thing once the show returned in 2005! The subtitle says "to the present" but really Booy is interested in the final decade of the classic show, which is covered in a series of
detailed chapters.
I found this a quick and easy read. Some "aca-fan" stuff is awful, either bad scholarship or bad fandom, but Booy is good at both. This is clearly written by someone who knows fandom from the inside but also knows how to bring the rigor of critical analysis to it... but also someone who can write in an engaging, accessible way. It's a little digressive at times, but overall I enjoyed it; Booy has a unique angle and executes it well.
(Booy cites the work of Australian media critic Alan McKee, pointing out in a footnote that McKee himself had a short story published in DWM back in the 1980s. Shortly after reading Love and Monsters, I happened to copyedit a journal article that cited McKee... I guess he has also published on Australian aboriginal horror film!)
Sometimes you happen to read the two right things around the same time to realize there's a connection between them.
I like to think that I mix my "lowbrow" reading with "highbrow" reading. So, on the one hand, long excavations of mediocre comics from the 1980s; on the other hand, literary critical theory. Such a coincidence happened earlier this semester, when I was reading my way through Marvel's 1980s Transformers comics and rereading bits of Farah Mendlesohn's Rhetorics of Fantasy for a couple different projects I have been working on. (More on those anon, I'm sure.)
Something I've been thinking about a lot during this rereading of the Transformers canon, and occasionally reference in my posts on it, is the essay "Budianskian and Furmanist: A New Model of Storytelling Analysis" by the poster only known as "Broadside" (it's totally possible she gives her real name somewhere, actually, I dunno) on the blog of the Transformers wiki. In this essay, Broadside posits that there are essentially only two form of Transformers storytelling, Budianskian and Furmanist.
from The Transformers US #20 (script by Bob Budiansky, art by Herb Trimpe and Ian Akin & Brian Garvey)
The modes are named after the two biggest writers on the G1 Transformers comics. Bob Budiansky was the editor for the US comic's first few issues, and then with issue #5 became the writer; he was the man who developed a lot of the major elements of the G1 mythos, including the names of almost every character. As Broadside says, "Budiansky believed that the most interesting thing about the entire Transformers setup was that the Transformers were on Earth. The vast majority of his stories revolved around ideas of culture clash and worlds colliding; Bob’s Autobots would be perplexed and fascinated by human behaviours, from small-town life to professional wrestling."
from The Transformers: Robots in Disguise Annual 2012 (script by James Barber, art by Guido Guidi)
Simon Furman became the primary writer of the UK Transformers comic after its first few installments, and took over for Budiansky on the US comic after he moved on. As Broadside says, Furman's approach "looks at Cybertronians from an internal perspective; it’s concerned with how they interact with each other, and the lore and history and substance of their own world. The point of the robots as characters isn’t to contrast with the human experience, but to be a stand-in for them."
Example of the Furmanist mode include the 1986 Transformers film, Beast Wars and Beast Machines, and More than Meets the Eye and Lost Light from IDW.
Broadside herself points out that each writer was totally capable of working in the other mode. When Furman returned to Transformers in the 2000s for IDW, the story he wrote was Budianskian; I would argue that the very first Furmanist Transformers story was Return to Cybertron, which was by Bob Budiansky. (My claim is that Furman's first true Furmanist story was Target: 2006, which comes after this, and is obviously inspired by it.)
Broadside claims neither of these approaches is better than the other, it comes down to your preference—but that often Transformers stories succeed best when they realize what mode they ought to be working in. I haven't seen the two shows she uses as examples, but she says "[the Furmanist show] Cyberverse flourished when it got out from under its vestigial Budianskian trappings, [the Budianskian] EarthSpark gets bogged down when it delves into the Furmanist lore of the Thirteen..." She is definitely partial to the Budianskian mode.
from The Transformers: Infiltration #5 (script by Simon Furman, art by E. J. Su)
I myself prefer the Furmanist one; my two favorite Transformers stories are Beast Wars / Beast Machines and More than Meets the Eye / Lost Light, both of which feature no human characters. Some of my least favorite Transformers stories are Budianskian, such as the G1 cartoon and the Michael Bay films. All other things being equal, I clearly have a preference. But I can still enjoy a Budianskian story: Furman's original IDW arc is excellent, and it's all told from a human perspective, while one of my favorite-ever Transformers stories is "Showdown!", a G1 comic by Budiansky about the relationship between Skids the Autobot and Wyoming grocery store cashier named Charlene who dreams of being a cowgirl.
And Furmanist storytelling definitely has a failure mode: what I like about the Furmanist style is how it allows the Transformers characters to pop, but all too often, Furmanist stories can turn into tedious expositions of lore. (James Barber wrote some great Furmanist stories about the state of postwar Cybertron for IDW, but also wrote some really tedious ones about complicated machinations by Shockwave that mostly seemed to be there to resolve continuity issues.) As I quoted Broadside above, in a Furmanist story, "[t]he point of the robots as characters isn’t to contrast with the human experience, but to be a stand-in for them." When the stories spend too much time diving into the "lore," this aspect gets lost.
Like any good literary theory, this isn't just a tool for classification, but one of better understanding: I think I am appreciating Budiansky's G1 comics more on this reread with this insight to use as a lens.
from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (story by L. Frank Baum, art by W. W. Denslow)
Such a thing is also true of Farah Mendlesohn's Rhetorics of Fantasy. I think about Mendlesohn's classification of fantasy a lot, because it doesn't just allow you to put fantasy into different buckets, but it also it creates a better understanding of what it's doing. Mendlesohn breaks fantasy down into four categories, based on the relationship between the the viewpoint of the reader and the fantastic. In "the portal-quest fantasy," for example, the viewpoint of the reader is with a character who travels into a new-to-them fantastic world: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is probably the most obvious examples of this, we travel into a new world with Dorothy, and we discover it alongside her.
The two that are relevant here, though, are what Mendlesohn calls the "intrusion fantasy" and the "immersive fantasy." In the intrusion fantasy, we are in a "real" world, our viewpoint is aligned with characters who do not know the fantastic until in intrudes in their world. From my own recent reading, I would say that Neil Gaiman's American Gods and Sam Swicegood's The Wizards on Walnut Street are good examples of this. This, surely, is the Budianskian mode! In this style of storytelling, the reader and the character have to work together to understand the fantastic.
The immersive fantasy, on the other hand, is one where our viewpoint is aligned with a character who does know the fantastic, even though we do not. This is your built-up secondary world fantasy, where we are in a complex magical world and need to work to figure it out. Indeed, the pleasure is in coming to understand this fantastic world that the characters already get but you do not; from my recent reading, I would categorize Robert Jackson Bennett's The Tainted Cup and Natasha Pulley's The Kingdoms as good examples. What is Furmanist storytelling but immersive fantasy?
(Sort of a side note, but it's worth pointing out that stories can operate in multiple rhetorics under Mendlesohn's system. The Lord of the Rings, for example, is a portal-quest fantasy, because even though the entire thing takes place in a secondary world, we move from the "normal" world of the Shire to the wider magical world of Middle-earth with viewpoint characters who do not understand the latter. Or you have Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown, which starts as an immersive fantasy—we are in the magical land of Damar—then becomes an intrusion fantasy—Damar is threatened by magic from another realm—and finally a portal-quest fantasy—the character travels into that realm to stop it.)
It's probably little surprise, then, that I enjoy Furmanist stories more than Budianskian ones on the whole, because I also tend to prefer immersive fantasies to intrusion ones. Writing my last few paragraphs, it was easy for me to think of immersive fantasies; it was much harder to think of intrusion ones. I like that sense (to paraphrase Jo Walton for the umpteenth time) that the world itself is a mystery we must solve, and you very much get that from the immersive fantasy.
But that also makes the origin of what I think of as the failure mode of Furmanist stories clear. Surely one of the foremost writers of the immersive fantasy in our time is Brandon Sanderson. Sanderson often writes stories that seem like they ought to be portal-quest fantasies, or are engaged with thinking about the parameters of the portal-quest fantasy, but are not portal-quest fantasies; the first Mistborn novel, The Final Empire, is a good example of this. I spent much of the beginning of the book thinking the characters were going to go on a quest, but this never happens; eventually you discover the state of the world is due to someone who did go on a quest in the distant past. But like a bad Furmanist story, Sanderson often becomes interested in "lore" for its own sake; to quote my own review of the third book:
I've always been interested in the people and the politics of this series; the godlike entities have never interested me for their own sake. This volume, however, seems to think I'll find vast cosmic entities interesting just, uh, because? This might be what other people read fantasy fiction for, but I just can't get into it. Instead of paying off character and thematic threads from the first two books, the book seems more interested in paying off mysteries of backstory that I didn't even know were mysteries! Like, one of the big reveals of this book is "where did the kandra and koloss come from." I didn't know that the kandra and koloss were supposed to come from anywhere! They're weird fantasy creatures, this is a fantasy novel, why would I think they come from anywhere any more than a dog comes from somewhere in a piece of mimetic fiction? But there's an explanation that ties it into the novel's "magic system." So many things get explained that I never wanted an explanation for.
This is sort of the equivalent of telling me about Primus or the Fallen or the origins of the Matrix of Leadership in a Transformers comic. These things don't matter in and of themselves, they only matter if they tell us something about the characters. (I make a related point in my review of the sixth Mistborn book, The Bands of Mourning, but I haven't posted that yet, so only click the link if it's after June 3rd.)
What was particularly striking, though, as I mapped Mendlesohn's theory onto Broadside's is that Transformers doesn't have an obvious equivalent to the portal-quest fantasy. Where is the story about a human character who travels to Cybertron, where the human is the viewpoint character throughout? This seems like such an obvious good idea that I can't believe it hasn't been done... but there's so much Transformers out there that surely someone has and I just don't know about it! But if not, please give me a call, Skybound, and I'll write it for you.
This is a side post to a series about Marvel's The Transformers. The next covers US issues #21-22 and UK issues #85-92. Previous installments are listed below:
(I want to note that the greatest film series of our time, Marvel's Thor, did cover all three of these Mendlesohn rhetorics across its first three films. The first Thor movie is an intrusion fantasy (Thor comes to our world), The Dark World is a portal-quest fantasy (Jane goes to Asgard), and Ragnarok is immersive (it's all about what's going on the fantasy world). If only Transformers could reach such heights!)
As a Victorianist, I was of course made to read a lot of Brontë novels in undergrad and grad school, either in coursework or beyond: Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, The Professor, Villette. But they were all by Emily or Charlotte... never Anne! I did once pick up a copy of Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall but of course it has taken me over fifteen years to get around to reading it.
I was familiar with Kate Beaton's "Dude Watchin' with the Brontës," which tells us that marrying alcoholic brooding men with no emotional intelligence was a thing that Emily and Charlotte were into, but not Anne, and indeed, that's basically the thesis of Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Our protagonist is a gentleman farmer who gets a new neighbor, a woman with a daughter; he's attracted to her but she's mysterious. Eventually she tells him the story of her first marriage, which was quite terrible. It's easy to read this as what it really might be like to be married to, say, Heathcliff. Then everything works out. It's definitely more pious than the works of Charlotte or Emily, and I don't know that it was more to my actual taste than Jane Eyre, which probably beats it for character complexity. But it, despite being a bit on the slow side, certainly wasn't as boring as The Professor or Villette.
So I am glad I finally read it, and I intend to seek out Anne's other novel now, but I doubt I will ever become a superfan of any of the Brontës, as influential as they all are.
So here we hit the tie-ins to The Transformers: The Movie. In the US, this was a three-issue adaptation of the movie, which I haven't actually read before, as IDW's Transformers Classics reprints included it in volume 7, not in the volume it would have fit in by publication order, and I only read the first four volumes. In the UK, this was the storyline Target: 2006, where a set of film characters travelled back in time to the present during the events of the film.
I certainly wouldn't recommend this for a new-to-this-material reader, but I decided to read chronologically. Which is to say, for the film characters, Target: 2006 probably takes place after Galvatron says, "Decepticons, to Earth" on p. 5 of issue #2 of the film adaption, so I read the film adaptation up to that panel, then jumped to the beginning of Target: 2006, read all of it, then returned to p. 5 of issue #2 of the film. The Til All Are One compendium, much more sensibly, places the film adaptation in its entirerty after the last part of Target: 2006.
I also read a story from the 1986 annual here, which would have been released around this time, though the compendium places it much earlier. "State Games" is a text story that serves as a prequel to "A There Shall Come... a Leader!" from the 1985 annual, but I like reading it here because it includes Emirate Xaaron, who appears in the present day in Target: 2006, nicely setting up our return to Cybertron in that story arc. (The very short text feature "Cybertron: The Middle Years!", included in UK issue #83, bridges the gap between the long-ago Cybertron of "State Games" and "There Shall Come..." and the present-day Cybertron of Return to Cybertron and Target: 2006.)
That makes this my first batch of Marvel Transformers stories to include no regular issues of the US comic.
In the National Interest, Parts 2–4 / "State Games: A Tale from Cybertron" / "The Planet-Eater!" / "Judgment Day!" (part 1) / Target: 2006, Prologue & Parts 1–6, from The Transformers UK #75-84 (23 Aug.–25 Oct. 1986), The Transformers Annual [1986], and The Transformers: The Movie #1-2 (Dec. 1986–Jan. 1987); reprinted in The Transformers: Til All Are One Compendium One (2025)
stories by Simon Furman, James Hill, and Ralph Macchio; pencils by Will Simpson, Johns Stokes, Don Perlin, Jeff Anderson, Ron Smith, and Geoff Senior; inks by Dave Hine, Tim Perkins (with Andrew Leary), Will Simpson, Ian Akin & Brian Garvey, Jeff Anderson, Ron Smith, and Geoff Senior; letters by Annie Halfacree, Janice Chiang, and Starkings; colours by John Burns, Gina Hart, Tony Jozwiak, Nel Yomtov, and John Burns
from The Transformers UK #74*
In the National Interest is fine. It has to balance out one thing that I enjoy and one thing I don't, in that I do like the Dinobots, especially the ongoing subplot about Sludge's crush on human reporter Joy Meadows, but on the other hand, the convoluted clandestine machinations of the Intelligence and Information Institute (Triple-I!) rapidly get tedious. Whenever secret organizations get involved in Transformers stories, I tune out; they really shift things away from the core appeal of Budianskian storytelling, I think. Still, good showing for the Dinobots.
"State Games" is a decent text story, showing how the war between the Autobots and Decepticons came about. It packs in a lot of exposition and thus gets a bit overwhelming, but it has some interesting ideas; the kernel of the idea that was explored in great detail in the IDW continuity, that Megatron and his comrades had legitimate grievances, comes from this story. It's not as nuanced as it would be later on... but it is pretty nuanced for a 1980s kids comic! Note that in this story, "Optimus Prime" is just a guy's name, not some kind of title, even though it came out a month after The Transformers: The Movie, where we learned there was a mythical significance to "Prime." Not a criticism of the story, but it shows you how much the Transformers mythos was being made up as it went along.
from The Transformers: The Movie #1
The first half of the comics adaptation of the movie is fine; it's a bit jumpy and narration heavy, and I wonder how much it would make sense to someone who hadn't actually seen the film. The death of Optimus Prime seems kind of crammed in... on the other hand, the capture of Megatron by Unicron and subsequent transformation into Galvatron is very well done. Mostly reading it made me aware of how much work the film's soundtrack and editing did in making the events seem grandiose.
As mentioned above, I directly segued from page 5 of issue #2 of the comic into Target: 2006. In this story, Galvatron attempts to escape Unicron's control by travelling back in time to 1986. (The actual movie was set in 2005, as was the comic adaptation; in the UK comic, the movie's events were set in 2006, and the UK printing of the comic adaptation edited it to be consistent with that, but the compendium doesn't include those edits.) However, this isn't very clear at first: Target: 2006 is designed to be someone's introduction to the movie mythos, and so these things are very gradually revealed to the 1986 characters (and thus the reader) across the course of the story's first seven parts.
Thus, reading it with the added context of already having read/seen the movie undermines it a bit... but to be honest, is probably also helpful, because there is a lot going on here. When Galvatron and his minions come back in time, three Autobots including Optimus Prime disappear, so they are disarray; this means that back on Cybetron, the Autobot resistance becomes aware that something has snuffed out the Creation Matrix, and so Ultra Magnus travels to Earth to find out what, even though he's a key part of a planned attack by the Wreckers on the Decepticon elite that can't be adjusted. So we're not just following Galvatron's machinations but also Ultra Magnus's adventures and what's going on back on Cybertron! Plus, Furman jumps around a lot chronologically; each installment almost always begins a bit after the previous one ended and then fills in some, if not all, of its events retrospectively. I admire his structural ambition, but I very often got lost and some key details of the story eluded me (I was very surprised when Starscream woke up in the Ark... totally missed where he was brought back to it).
from The Transformers UK #82
Still, the ambition of the story is admirable. This is surely Furman's first go at what we would now recognize as "Furmanist" storytelling: using the mythos of Transformers to its own end, rather than tying it into human characters, extrapolating from the much more "space opera" mode of the movie. I always like Ultra Magnus, and this is a good showing for him. I do think one of the story's big weaknesses is that not every comic book artist is cut out for drawing Transformers; you can probably get away with this in a story with a lot of human characters, but in a Furmanist story with only robots, you have to be good at drawing robots. Unfortunately, Will Simpson is not. It's a breath of fresh air when Geoff Senior turns up to do the last two installments reviewed here.
The other weird thing about reading in this sequence is that Kup and Blurr were pretty much completely cut out of the comics adaptation of the film, despite being prominent in the actual film, so when they appear with Hot Rod at the end of part six, you're very much like, "Who are those guys?" It's also jarring to have Target: 2006 heavily revolve around the comics version of the Matrix, where it's the "Creation Matrix," a computer program in Optimus's mind (than can be mentally transferred between people, even into a human being), when the story it ties into has the very different "Matrix of Leadership," a physical object in Optimus's chest.
I like to build little playlists of soundtrack music for myself to listen to as I work. A lot of these are pretty obvious: I have a Star Wars one with all the opening and closing tracks from each film, plus significant character themes.
Sometimes you happen to read the two right things around the same time to realize there's a connection between them.
