18 March 2024

Shadow Speaker by Nnedi Okorafor

The Shadow Speaker by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu

My wife was into Nnedi Okorafor before, as the hipsters say, she was cool, and thus she owns a first printing of the first edition of The Shadow Speaker, one of her earliest novels, from 2007. (It's about to be rereleased along with a sequel.) I borrowed it from her earlier this year and gave it a read.

Published: 2007
Read: February 2024

I think I am coming to realize that Okorafor just doesn't work for me as much as I want her to. I have read the three Binti books, the three Akata books, some of her comics, and just none of it clicks. (Except for the second Akata book, which I liked.) Most of her books are ambling, with character just kind of moving from place to place without any kind of clear throughline from an emotional or plot standpoint. This is more of that. It clearly works for lots of people, but I think this might be it for me and Okorafor.

15 March 2024

Reading The Magical Mimics in Oz Aloud to My Kid

The Magical Mimics in Oz by Jack Snow
illustrated by Frank Kramer

After John R. Neill died, the Oz series took a rest for a couple years, but it returned in 1946 with The Magical Mimics in Oz, by the series's fourth author, Jack Snow, and third artist, Frank Kramer.

Originally published: 1946
Acquired: July 2022
Read aloud:
February–March 2024

Jack Snow was the first person to be a bona fide Oz fan to write an Oz book, and you can tell; it's the kind of book where characters do things like say, "Oh, wasn't the Forest of Burzee where Santa Claus was raised?" so that you know the writer has read The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. (Although, weirdly, he gets the Guardian of the Gates confused with the Soldier with the Green Whiskers. Rookie mistake!) He was also specifically an L. Frank Baum fan; while Neill built on what Thompson had established, Magical Mimics doesn't reference any characters or concepts from after Baum; you could go straight from Glinda of Oz to Magical Mimics without missing a beat. And actually, it would read pretty well; Baum always included some minor characters from the last couple books in his most recent book's celebration scenes, and Lady Aurex from Glinda shows up in this book's. But if you are reading in publication order, Glinda was twenty-six years ago, so the odds are very much against you remembering her! A lot of minor characters that Thompson and Neill hadn't cared for pop up here in minor roles, like Button-Bright and Cap'n Bill. (I did add in a reference to the events of Runaway when reading aloud though; it fit quite naturally into one of Scraps's scenes.)

The premise of Magical Mimics is on the darker end. As always, someone is trying to take over Oz, but it's one of the more successful attempts, like Thompson's Wishing Horse. The Mimics are shapeshifters who want to invade Oz, but can't because of a spell of protection cast by Queen Lurline when she enchanted Oz. What they figure out, though, is that they can replace people who came to Oz after the spell was cast, so when Ozma and Glinda leave Oz on state business, they sneak into the Emerald City and replace Dorothy and the Wizard. Dorothy and the Wizard wake up in prison in Mount Illuso, the Mimics' home, while the residents of the Emerald City go increasingly concerned about Dorothy and the Wizard's strange behavior.

To be honest, I kind of wanted something more creepy and more complex, with Mimics slowly replacing Oz character after Oz character, while some other characters desperately tried to figure out what was going on. As it is, the book is pretty simple: the Mimics replace Dorothy and the Wizard, the other Oz characters wonder why they're acting weird but don't really make any progress or discoveries, meanwhile the real Dorothy and the Wizard meet a fairy who explains everything to them, she takes them back to Oz, and she defeats the Mimics. But perhaps Jack Snow knows his audience better than I do, because my five-year-old kid was totally on edge and nervous even with this very limited threat posed by the Mimics. They did not like that the Mimics replaced Dorothy and the Wizard, and did not like the tense chapter where the Mimic horde invaded the Emerald City and replaced everyone. So I guess it had enough jeopardy for the target audience!

Overall, I thought it was fine. I wish there had been more clever problem-solving by the Oz characters. Much like a Thompson novel, ironically, this one mostly sees the main characters stand around while a previously unknown powerful magic user takes care of everything for them. Dorothy and the Wizard don't do anything interesting to get away from the Mimics; the Emerald City characters don't do anything clever to figure out what the Mimics are up to. Toto turns out to be the real MVP of the novel, instantly realizing Dorothy has been replaced, evading capture by the Mimics, and striking at the Mimic King and Queen when everyone else is paralyzed by indecision. (The Scarecrow also shows some minor cleverness, admittedly, delaying the Mimics until Ozma and Glinda return to deal with them.) Thompson never did much with Toto, so it's nice to see him do some interesting stuff. Snow has the kind of languid pacing Baum often did, as opposed to the frenetic pacing of Thompson and Neill; Oz may be in danger, but Dorothy and the Wizard can still spend two chapters looking at a garden! Snow also captures a lot of Baum's sense of whimsy; both Pineville and the Story Blossom Garden feel like the kinds of places he might have thought of, not Thompson.

I'm sorry to say, though, that not only is Frank Kramer in third place for Famous Forty artists (thus far), it is a very distant third. There is an occasional nice picture (the one of Toto as Sherlock Holmes is fun), but overall most of his illustrations seem to aspire to competent at best. Baum hit gold with both W. W. Denslow and John R. Neill, so it's sad to see the publisher scrimping this time around.

Next up in sequence: John Dough and the Cherub

13 March 2024

Marvel Zombies: Battleworld by Simon Spurrier, Kev Walker, et al.

Marvel Zombies: Battleworld

Collection published: 2022
Contents originally published: 2006-15
Read: January 2024

Writers: Simon Spurrier, Robert Kirkman
Artists: Kev Walker, Sean Phillips
Inker: Jason Gorder
Colorists: Frank D'Armata, June Chung
Letterers: Clayton Cowles, Randy Gentile
 
I almost didn't even notice this existed, but while I was reading Nextwave, something I read clued me into its existence, which claimed that it was a really good Elsa Bloodstone story. I normally would be doubly skeptical of a story tying into both Secret Wars (ugh) and Marvel Zombies (double ugh), but then I saw it was by Simon Spurrier, who was one of the contributors to Titan's excellent The Eleventh Doctor: Year Two series, so I decided to give it a chance.
 
I read the Ms. Marvel Secret Wars tie-ins back in the day; I only have the foggiest notion what it was about. I think a bunch of timelines got smushed together into the same planet? You don't really even need to know that to understand this, as long as you're willing to accept 1) Elsa Bloodstone is commanding an army against a horde of zombies, and 2) it's possible to run into multiple versions of the same character.
 
This isn't high art, but it is surprisingly enjoyable and well done for what it is. Spurrier and artist Kev Walker take the post-Nextwave version of Elsa Bloodstone, but treat the character more seriously than Ellis and Immonen did. What would it be like to grow up with all this trauma? How would it affect you as an adult, and how could you relate to others after it happened? Spurrier explores this with a mix of horror and humor, and I wouldn't say I loved it, but it's much better than it needed to be. Walker impressed me as an artist, too; good with both character and action. At one point, I thought, "wow this guy should draw Star Wars"... later I realized he was the artist for Marvel's Doctor Aphra series, and I was probably subconsciously remembering some of the art I'd seen for that.
 
Don't mess with Elsa in any timeline.
from Marvel Zombies vol. 2 #3 (script by Simon Spurrier, art by Kev Walker)
 
The collection also contains one issue of the original Marvel Zombies series as a bonus, but no one's tricking me into reading that shit.

This is the fourth post in a series about Elsa Bloodstone. The next installment covers Monsters Unleashed! Previous installments are listed below:

  1. Bloodstone & the Legion of Monsters (1975-2012)
  2. Bloodstone (2001-06) 
  3. Nextwave, Agents of H.A.T.E. (2006-07)

12 March 2024

Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, No. XIX (Chs. 51-54)

The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens

Finally... the end!

Originally published: 1843-44
Acquired: December 2023
Installment read: March 2024

No. XIX (Chs. 51-54)
I wish I could say this whole novel was worth it for the scene where the elder Martin Chuzzlewit whacks Pecksniff with a walking stick, knocking him to the floor. It did make me laugh and want to cheer. Unfortunately, getting to see an annoying character whacked with a stick doesn't quite make up for having to read over seven hundred pages about that character... but at least Dickens himself knew the guy was annoying.

I also think Dickens himself clearly recognized that Martin Chuzzlewit was a failure of a protagonist; the last few chapters are far more interested in Tom Pinch and how he ends up than Martin Chuzzlewit and how he ended up. He's the one who gets what is clearly the protagonist's wrap-up, not Martin, with a whole chapter spent on his future happiness. The up- and downside of the serial novel, one supposes. If your protagonist doesn't work out, you can get a new one (shades of a tv show shifting who its lead is), but... but if your protagonist doesn't work out, you can't go back and make someone more interesting the protagonist from the beginning, all you can do is pack them off to America!

So, overall, did this work as a way to read Dickens? Well, I did not (as you can tell) like Martin Chuzzlewit much... but I think I would have liked it even less had I attempted to read it straight through! Hopefully next year's Dickens is better (but I doubt it).

This is the last in a series of posts about Martin Chuzzlewit. Previous installments are listed below:

  1. Nos. I–III (chs. 1-8)
  2. No. IV (chs. 9-10)
  3. Nos. V–VII (chs. 11-17)
  4. No. VIII (chs. 18-20)
  5. No. IX (chs. 21-23)
  6. Nos. X–XII (chs. 24-32)
  7. Nos. XIII–XVIII (chs. 33-50)

11 March 2024

The Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold, Part 4: Barrayar

Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold

My fourth Vorkosigan novel (third in chronological sequence, eighth in publication order) picks up right from the end of the previous one, Shards of Honor. Indeed, Bujold's very interesting afterword discusses how originally Shards was going to be longer but she realized she was introducing new complications instead of wrapping up existing ones, so she went backward and found a spot where it could stop, orphaning several thousand words that she'd written. It was another five years or so before she went back to that orphaned material and realized it could form the beginning of a second novel about Cordelia, one about—as the title is very clear about—her new life on the planet Barrayar.

I had actually read Shards and Barrayar before; over a decade ago my friend Christiana loaned me an omnibus edition of the two. Rereading the review I wrote at the time, it's almost hilariously lukewarm:

It has some adventure narrative tropes I find uncomfortable (the "other" being simultaneously more dangerous and more interesting than the home society), some slightly strange gender politics (the woman must give up her society utterly for the man she loves, who never seriously considers it), and some stuff that's just plain weird (everyone reveres one character who is a rapist), but overall I enjoyed it. It gets off to a rough start, to be honest-- there's a lot of journeying through a dangerous landscape, which I find tedious, and our protagonist Cordelia has a tendency to be rescued by other people a lot.  But at the one-third mark, she finally starts making her own decisions, fleeing her home planet in a fantastic sequence, and then traveling to Barrayar, where she marries Aral Vorkosigan and is forced to navigate her way in a strange society.  At this point, I was completely absorbed, and I loved all the political maneuvering and civil war stuff, and Cordelia herself shone quite well.

Originally published: 1991
Acquired: January 2022
Read: November 2023

On this read, it was pretty obvious to me that the books are interrogating the things I found uncomfortable, and I'm not sure why I didn't know that the first time; these books are all about that contact between cultures and danger of being fascinated by the "other"; the gender politics of Barrayar are continuously scrutinized. And when on Earth was Cordelia ever a victim who needed to be rescued!? What I do think is fair is that I clearly liked Barrayar more than Shards. While Shards is good, I definitely think Bujold got better as a novelist in the interim; Shards is like three linked novellas while Barrayar has a unity of plot and, especially, theme.

The other really interesting tidbit the afterword brought into focus for me was that this was a book about parenting. I just don't think I saw that at age 24, and even if I had, it would not have resonated the way it does as a 38-year-old father of two. Most of Cordelia's emotions and decisions are driven by the fact that she's a parent. This is obviously the case when it comes to Miles, but it's true almost everywhere in the book: the way she thinks about the boy emperor, Gregor, for example, or her ability to figure out what the emperor's mother Kareena is thinking. I definitely liked the book before, but this time through I felt it, there was a real intensity to it. The book is filled with great moments, some of them funny, some of them grim, all of them thoughtful and considered. I won't list them here, but if you've read it, you'll easily bring a number of them to mind.

Science fiction can sometime feel like a young person's game: young people doing epic stuff like fighting empires. But Barrayar is science fiction for the middle aged. Yes, there are evil empires, but it's about the struggle to be a good parent in all its myriad forms, the right you keep up every day, not always because you want to, but because you won't be yourself if you give up.

I know there are more Cordelia-focused novels in the saga's "main" sequence, but it's a shame there aren't more of these books about her younger days on Barrayar, because in some ways she's an even more interesting protagonist than Miles.

Every five months I read a book in the Vorkosigan saga. Next up in sequence: Cetaganda

08 March 2024

Screen Time

At a certain point, my wife and I began to use the removal of "screentime" (watching tv and tablet use) as a punishment. "I'm going to count to five, and if you're not brushing your teeth..." I don't think this was terribly effective—as any parent knows, the "counting to five" technique just lets your child draw it out when you don't want them to draw it out. What you really ought to do is a time out as soon as the child doesn't listen, but of course that makes things take even longer in the moment, even if in the long run it will supposedly have a better pay off.

It also had the problem of creating an expectation of screentime. Whereas screentime had been a thing for lazy weekend afternoons and the occasional after-school pre-dinner moment, once you are threatening to take it away, that implies the default is the existence of screentime. Furthermore, it also decouples the moment of punishment from the moment of the action, and in three- and five-year-old cognition, it's still pretty important for consequences to immediately flow from action. Not getting the screentime in the afternoon because they didn't brush their teeth promptly nine hours earlier isn't very effective. And finally, the moment of taking it away often makes things worse; now they aren't brushing their teeth and they're mad at you.

So I had an idea: could I flip screentime around? Could I make it a positive reward instead of a negative punishment?

I got an Etsy seller to make us a bunch of wooden tokens with "SCREEN TIME 30 MINS." engraved on them. So no longer do we threaten to remove screentime for negative behaviors; instead, we reward them for positive behaviors. If the morning routine is executed with a minimum of cajoling, then they get a screentime token. This also lets us reward other behaviors; Son One did a chore with no fussing the other day as soon as I asked, so I gave him one for that.

I think overall it's been to the positive. There are now firmly established limits on screentime, which is also a positive—something we had lost over the past year or so. A couple days ago we did have a situation where, having spent all his screentime tokens over a three-day weekend, Son One became quite upset in the afternoon that he hadn't gotten one that morning. He hadn't been terrible for the morning routine, but I had felt like he had required one too many reminders. This prompted an hour of whining!

We'll see how it continues. Son One in particular does well with systems; the main issue I have right now is if I say things like, "You're moving too slow, so you don't get a screentime token," that puts us right back where we started, so it's a little tricky to create that association between the behavior we don't want and the consequence.

07 March 2024

Reading Roundup Wrapup: February 2024

Pick of the month: The Runaway in Oz by John R. Neill. Tough month to pick—I didn't read much that was bad but I wouldn't describe much of what I read as standout, either. But I did enjoy this John R. Neill Oz book, a fun adventure story featuring my favorite recurring Oz character.

All books read:

  1. The Shadow Speaker by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
  2. Monsters Unleashed! by Cullen Bunn, Steven McNiven, Greg Land, Leinil Francis Yu, Salvador Larroca, Adam Kubert, et al.
  3. Monsters Unleashed!: Monster Mash by Cullen Bunn, David Baldeón, and Ramón Bachs
  4. The Runaway in Oz by John R. Neill, edited and illustrated by Eric Shanower
  5. The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley
  6. Monsters Unleashed!: Learning Curve by Cullen Bunn, Justin Jordan, Andrea Broccardo, et al.
  7. Elsa Bloodstone: Bequest by Cath Lauria
  8. Black Panther: A Cultural Exploration by Ytasha L. Womack 

A little low, but I've been making slow but steady progress through two very long books, both of which I think I will finish in March.

All books acquired:

NONE! 

Currently reading:

  • Marvel-Verse: Black Panther by Jerry Bingham et al.
  • The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens
  • The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 7 edited by Neil Clarke

Up next in my rotations:

  1. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Long Mirage by David R. George III 
  2. The Pelican History of England: 3. English Society in the Early Middle Ages (1066-1307) by Doris Mary Stenton 
  3. The Periodic Table by Primo Levi 
  4. The Dispossessed by Szilárd Borbély

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 663 (down 1)

Six months of no increase!

06 March 2024

Nextwave, Agents of H.A.T.E. by Warren Ellis, Stuart Immonen, et al.

Collection published: 2020
Contents originally published: 2006
Read: January 2024

Nextwave, Agents of H.A.T.E.: This Is What They Want
Nextwave, Agents of H.A.T.E.: I Kick Your Face

Writer: Warren Ellis
Penciler: Stuart Immonen
Inker: Wade Von Grawbadger
Colorist: Dave McCaig
Letterers: Chris Eliopoulos & Joe Caramagna

After her original appearance (see item #2 in the list below), Elsa Bloodstone was reinvented in the pages of Nextwave, Agents of H.A.T.E., a farcical maxiseries about a team of D-list characters who find out that the anti-terrorism organization they work for, the Beyond Corporation, is actually run by terrorists and testing its WMDs on Americans. You might think this would be a very dramatic thing, but it actually happens before issue #1. This is because Nextwave is not about stuff like characters or themes, it's about leaning into two things: 1) violence is a fundamental tenet of superhero comics, and 2) superhero comics are full of dumb shit.

The main characters are largely has-beens or forgotten: Elsa, of course; but also Jack Kirby's Machine Man, from his weird 2001: A Space Odyssey tie-in; Tabitha Smith, an X-Man named "Boom-Boom" with the powers to explode things; and Monica Rambeau, recently on the big screen but then kind of irrelevant and without a home, as a former Captain Marvel, then Photon, then Pulsar. Add to all these the original character "the Captain," who answers the question, "what if the worst person alive got the power of Captain America... and also he never figured out the answer to 'Captain What?'"
 
Perhaps the truest ever depiction of Elana Gomel's "violent sublime."
from Nextwave, Agents of H.A.T.E. #6

Ellis delights in making them all pretty awful. Tabitha is basically Paris Hilton with superpowers (very topical in 2006), Machine Man is always drunk and ranting about "fleshy ones," Monica rattles on about when she was in the Avengers but now doesn't give a shit, Elsa just likes to kill monsters. Each two-issue story sees them turn up somewhere and then dismantle a Beyond Corporation plan in as violent and gratuitous and stupid a way as possible.
 
In the first volume, Elsa seems like she could be the same character we knew from Bloodstone, just older, but in the series's second volume we are told she was raised by her father (not her mother, as established in her debut), who dropped her into monster pits as a baby in order to develop her skills. It passes my law of retcons: though different, I find it just as interesting as her old origin.
 
A very different mother for Elsa.
from Nextwave, Agents of H.A.T.E. #8
 
The book as a whole is good fun... one sort of feels like it's simultaneously (almost) Stuart Immonen's best work and like he was wasted a bit. Like, there's not a bad panel, scene, character, or composition here... but oughtn't he be illustrating things like Secret Identity or Moving Pictures? Though if they had got some hack to do this, it wouldn't have worked. At first I thought the whole thing was a bit of an Authority parody... then I remembered who wrote The Authority! But when I got to the end, I realized I was right. What kind of writer satirizes themself just six years later? Don't answer that, but it's funny anyway.
 
Collection published: 2019
Contents originally published: 2006-07
Read: January 2024

So is it great? I don't know. Is it worth your time? I don't know. But if Marvel reprinted the complete run at an affordable price again (I read it via Hoopla this time), I probably would pick it up. Healing America by beating people up!

This is the third post in a series about Elsa Bloodstone. The next installment covers Marvel Zombies: Battleworld. Previous installments are listed below:

  1. Bloodstone & the Legion of Monsters (1975-2012)
  2. Bloodstone (2001-06) 

05 March 2024

Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, Nos. XIII–XVIII (Chs. 33-50)

The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens

I was sick last week, so I was able to get through a lot of Martin Chuzzlewit. (If you think that sounds like I punished myself for being sick, you're right.)

Originally published: 1843-44
Acquired: December 2023
Installments read: February–March 2024

No. XIII (Chs. 33-35)
I seriously do not understand people who think the American segments drag this book down. The middle chapter here is about Americans being ridiculous and stupid (some Americans try to talk to Mark on a steamboat). The jokes are not top-tier Dickens, but at least they are jokes. I would much rather read them than whatever else is going on in this book.

No. XIV (Chs. 36-38)
This installment actually has some inklings of interest. Tom Pinch (who I am sure might have been in this book all along, but whom I last remember doing something interesting back in ch. 12) strikes out on his own, hanging out some with his sister, a much put-upon governess. Like the America stuff, it feels like a soft reset. Okay, Dickens thinks to himself, even after being packed off to America, Martin is still boring, so let's focus on this other guy, he seemed nice. I very much enjoyed all the stuff with him tramping about London:

Yoho, past hedges, gates, and trees; past cottages and barns, and people going home from work. Yoho, past donkey-chaises, drawn aside into the ditch, and empty carts with rampant horses, whipped up at a bound upon the little watercourse, and held by struggling carters close to the five-barred gate, until the coach had passed the narrow turning in the road. Yoho, by churches dropped down by themselves in quiet nooks, with rustic burial-grounds about them, where the graves are green, and daisies sleep—for it is evening—on the bosoms of the dead. Yoho, past streams, in which the cattle cool their feet, and where the rushes grow; past paddock-fences, farms, and rick-yards; past last year’s stacks, cut, slice by slice, away, and showing, in the waning light, like ruined gables, old and brown. Yoho, down the pebbly dip, and through the merry water-splash and up at a canter to the level road again. Yoho! Yoho!

(Was this chapter an inspiration for Little Blue Truck's Springtime? "Yoo-hoo duck!")

Anyway, will the second relaunch work? Well, who knows because then we get two chapters of tedium. The only thing more boring than Pecksniff is the two Miss Pecksniffs.

No. XV (Chs. 39-41)
With Victorian novels, I often play a game: how would you see it if it had a different title? For example, Adam Bede could be the exact same text and justifiably titled Dinah Morris or even Hetty Sorrel. But if it was, it would be much sadder. Or, how would we see Bleak House if it was called Esther Summerson?

Anyway, it seems to me Martin Chuzzlewit would much more justifiably be called Pecksniff, but then I would also hate it all the more. But on the basis of this installment, perhaps it ought to have been called Tom Pinch, and probably I might have liked it a bit more. There's no Martin, sure, but I'd much rather read about Tom Pinch doing stuff. This is a bit of a classic Dickens set-up: the down-on-the-luck fellow who gets a mysterious benefactor. But it's classic because it works. Chuck all the Martin and Pecksniff chapters and retitle this book, please.

No. XVI (Chs. 42-44)
Who is even less interesting than Pecksniff? Signs point to Jonah. Tom Pinch continues to seem like a nice book, though.

No. XVII (Chs. 45-47)
Okay, so I just said I found Jonah boring... but ch. 47 here, where Jonah does a murder, is one of the best in the book. Classic Dickens, totally captivating suspense.

No. XVIII (Chs. 48-50)
Okay, lots of boring stuff... FUCK ME, THE ELDER MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT HAS BEEN FAKING IT THIS ENTIRE TIME!? AND HE'S THE SECRET BENEFACTOR OF TOM PINCH??!? You do occasionally know how to hit a home run, Charles.

This is the seventh in a series of posts about Martin Chuzzlewit. The next covers installment no. xix. Previous installments are listed below:

  1. Nos. I–III (chs. 1-8)
  2. No. IV (chs. 9-10)
  3. Nos. V–VII (chs. 11-17)
  4. No. VIII (chs. 18-20)
  5. No. IX (chs. 21-23)
  6. Nos. X–XII (chs. 24-32)

04 March 2024

The Wife in Space by Neil and Sue Perryman, Volumes 1-8

The Miserable Git: The Wife in Space, Volume 1
The Scruffy Drunk: The Wife in Space, Volume 2
The Pompous Tory: The Wife in Space, Volume 3
The Mad One: The Wife in Space, Volume 4
The (Still) Mad One: The Wife in Space, Volume 5
The Fit One: The Wife in Space, Volume 6
The Court Jester: The Wife in Space, Volume 7
The Crafty Sod: The Wife in Space, Volume 8
by Neil and Sue Perryman

After the book from Faber & Faber, which chronicled Neil and Sue's lives with excerpts from the Wife in Space blog, Neil collected its complete contents plus extras in a series of limited-run volumes via Kickstarter. Alas, I couldn't afford the shipping costs as an American, but I did contribute enough to receive the ebook editions. Upon finally reading the Faber & Faber book, I then went on to read the ebooks.

Like I said, this collects the complete run of the blog, which I had all read before, though each volume usually contains two or more relevant bonus entries, such as Adventures in Space and Time for the Hartnell volume or The Stranger fanfilms for the Colin Baker one. The blog isn't available online anymore, so I was happy to have this convenient way to reread it, and happy to spend a month in the company of Neil and Sue, working my way through one of the best television shows ever made. The blog was often hilarious, always insightful, and never not infectiously enthusiastic; it made me realize what an awful long time it has been since I watched some classic Who, and though I have no enthusiasm for doing it all from the beginning in order, there's so much good stuff that I am keen to see again.

One of the delightful things is that Sue recognizes quality when she sees it, and is not held back by fan shibboleths. As a partisan of the Sylvester McCoy years, I was particularly pleased by her appreciation for stories like Rememberance of the Daleks and Curse of Fenric... but she also knows that Silver Nemesis is rubbish! Probably the most magical part of the books is when they watch City of Death along with Sue's daughter Nicol, and all of them become completely entranced by it.

The ebooks can still be purchased from Amazon or Smashwords; they also contain forewords by various Who luminaries. I particularly enjoyed Jenny Colgan's in volume six.