06 November 2024

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Prey: The Hall of Heroes

April 2386
Well, if you've been following my reviews of the Prey trilogy thus far, you'll know it hasn't set my world alight. Me on book 1: "But I wanted Picard, Riker, La Forge, and so on to do something interesting and clever, to figure something out. Hopefully that's what books 2 and 3 are for." On book 2: "This book feels like it's treading water for the people in it, even as the plot is always getting more complicated... Miller writes in a way that's fun and easy to read, I never dreaded this book or anything, but it doesn't feel like it has enough of a point to be three novels."

Star Trek: Prey, Book 3: The Hall of Heroes
by John Jackson Miller

Published: 2016
Acquired: July 2023
Read: September 2024

Well, unfortunately, a hundred pages into book 3 and I was dreading it. A hundred pages into this book and it seemed like almost nothing had happened. In the Enterprise plot, the crew scrutinizes a series of astronomical bodies looking for hidden ships; you know you're in trouble when Picard is complaining about how boring this is. Meanwhile, Worf and Kahless seem like they keep having the same conversation with the Unsung again and again; meanwhile meanwhile the Unsung themselves are just sitting in canyons hiding; meanwhile meanwhile meanwhile we keep cutting to what the very one-note Korgh is up to. It was tedious and very little sense of forward momentum.

Eventually the Kinshaya invade, but by this point I was too disengaged to care. And to be honest, whether the Kinshaya invade the Klingon Empire, whether they fall subject to Breen manipulations, I found it difficult to care about. It's all pretty political and pretty abstract in terms of stakes. As I repeatedly commented about the first two books, it never really feels like anything is at stake here for the characters. Why do these events matter to Picard, to Riker, even to Worf? I very rarely felt as if they did. Over one thousand pages is ultimately a lot of time and space to devote to something with no there there.

The shame of it is I felt like there could have been something really substantial to this, especially for Worf. Worf was discommendated himself on screen but I don't think he ever hit the point of actually questining the discommendation system, even if he himself was done an injustice. I think an arc about Worf at first thinking what was done to the Unsung was just, and then coming to reflect on what was done to him, and the limits of Klingon honor, could have been very interesting. But that's not here; even if the book ends with Worf proposing some changes to the system, it doesn't feel like the book does much to lead up to it. Or a book about Worf struggling to convince Kahless of this—now that sounds like an epic struggle. But mostly Worf just seems to chill out with Kahless and the Unsung, and then it all climaxes and ends.

I find it hard to say much about this series. Until this volume, which got pretty boring, I would have said it was competently written. As I've said before, Miller captures the voices of the preexisting characters well, but doesn't really give them interesting, characterful choices to make; his original characters could be interesting (I thought Shift had real potential), but are in practice fairly one note. It's weird, this is a thousand-page story in an era where Star Trek books can in theory do whatever they want... but it feels like the trilogy was written back in the late 1990s, with the goal of making sure all the characters and all the politics had to be end up back where they began so as not to upset anything the tv show might do.

a Kinshaya, from the old FASA Star Trek RPG
via Memory Beta
Continuity Notes:

  • There are a lot of callbacks here to Typhon Pact: The Struggle Within, which I don't think had ever been referenced in any other books before. I did appreciate Miller folding the political upheaval in those books into a broader narrative about the Kinshaya, though I don't think most Star Trek writers have been capable of handling the Kinshayan theocracy in an interesting or compelling way, and Miller is no exception.
  • One of the High Council members here was also in the Prometheus trilogy, a very minor sliver of continuity that connects those books to the English-language Destiny-era novels. It is very minor, though; I had to ask the author on the TrekBBS what the connection was, because I had read there was one but had not noticed it at all!
Other Notes:
  • There's this whole exchange about the term "Unsung" on pp. 128-29 that makes no sense to me. Kahless asks if in Klingonese "Unsung" is rendered as lilIjpu' bomwI'pu' or ghe'naQDaj qonta' pagh, and then Worf tells him it was actually Hew HutlhwI'pu'. But... how are they having this conversation, if not in Klingon? Like, in what language is Kahless actually saying the word "Unsung"? How can he not know how the Unsung referred to themselves in Klingon if he must be talking to them all in Klingon? Did I miss some kind of reference indicating the Unsung are all speaking some other language? But even if they are, surely Kahless is speaking Klingon and communicating with them via the universal translator?
  • As I did after reading Typhon Pact: Zero Sum Game, I continue to think that the Breen are a genuninely clever worldbuilding idea that books have never really done anything clever with, but this book comes the closest so far.
  • The last scene where Riker hunts Korgh down is genuinely clever in its final line.
  • I think Doug Drexler is very good at what he usually does... but cover art featuring characters is not what he usually does. What is going on with Worf's hair?

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

 

05 November 2024

Reading Roundup Wrapup: October 2024

Pick of the month: Sheine Lende by Darcie Little Badger. I didn't read much this month, but this was clearly the best of what was otherwise a mediocre bunch. 

All books read:

  1. Sheine Lende: A Prequel to Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger
  2. The Ozmapolitan of Oz by Dick Martin
  3. Storm by Eric Jerome Dickey et al.
  4. The Neurodiversiverse: Alien Encounters: A Science Fiction Anthology of Stories, Poetry, and Art edited by Anthony Francis and Liza Olmsted
  5. The Ascent of John Tyndall: Victorian Scientist, Mountaineer, and Public Intellectual by Roland Jackson [unfinished]

This was a tough month. There was, for example, a hurricane; that and other things conspired to knock me off my groove, and I only got back into my regular reading routine in the last few days of the month, just in time to finish The Neurodiversiverse. This was my worst month since February 2022, when I read three books. Hopefully next month is better!

All books acquired:

NONE!

Currently reading:

  • Star Trek: The Next Generation: Headlong Flight by Dayton Ward
  • The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8 edited by Neil Clarke
  • Black Sun Rising: The Complete Doctor Who Back-Up Tales, Volume 2 by Mick Austin, Vincent Danks, Dave Gibbons, Alan McKenzie, Mick McMahon, Steve Moore, Paul Neary, Steve Parkhouse, John Peel, Gary Russell, Geoff Senior, John Stokes, et al.
  • Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
  • Brothers in Arms by Lois McMaster Bujold

Up next in my rotations:

  1. Star Trek: Titan: Fortune of War by David Mack
  2. The Pelican History of England: 3. English Society in the Early Middle Ages (1066-1307) by Doris Mary Stenton
  3. The End of the World: Classic Tales of Apocalyptic Science Fiction compiled by Michael Kelahan 
  4. Victorians and the Prehistoric: Tracks to a Lost World by Michael Freeman
Books remaining on "To be read" list: 663 (down 1)

04 November 2024

Unfinished: The Ascent of John Tyndall by Roland Jackson

In my eternally-in-progress book project about scientists in characters in Victorian literature, I often refer to real men of science as reference for the way science was really developing in the era. There are probably three I refer back to more than any others: Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, and John Tyndall. Darwin and Huxley are perhaps obvious touchstones; the most significant Victorian scientist of them all and then the man who professionalized science. Each has an excellent biography, which I read back when I was preparing for my Ph.D. examinations: Janet Browne's two volumes Voyaging (1995) and The Power of Place (2002) for Darwin and Adrian Desmond's From Devil's Disciple to Evolution's High Priest (1994) for Huxley. There are some good scholarly studies of Tyndall—particularly the book that turned me on to him to begin with, Ursula DeYoung's A Vision of Modern Science (2011)—there has never been a systematic biography of Tyndall.

The Ascent of John Tyndall: Victorian Scientist, Mountaineer, and Public Intellectual
by Roland Jackson

Published: 2018
Half-read: June–October 2024

But in their own era, Tydnall was the equal of the other men. He was a prominent physicist, figuring out why the sky was blue; he also did a lot of work on heat and glaciers. He used to get in scraps with John Ruskin about whether glaciers moved. Ruskin trusted the results of his own eyes (he'd never seen a glacier move, and neither did anyone he talked to), while Tyndall made a model glacier out of ice cream. Tyndall gave a notorious speech called the Belfast Address, where he advocated for scientific materialism, and like Huxley he was one of proponents of the professionalization of science. His star has faded in a way the others' haven't, perhaps because he's not associated with a single big paradigm shift like evolution. And I guess because of this, there's hasn't been a biography of him. But he certainly deserves one, and as someone who I'm guessing has thought about Tyndall more than almost anyone else alive, I am squarely in the target audience for one.

So I was excited when last year I discovered that back in 2018, Cambridge University Press had finally published one. I finally picked it up this June, intending to read it along with a few other scholarly books I'd been meaning to around to before finalizing my book manuscript.

Four months later, the summer long over, I finally gave up on it. I normally don't count unfinished books for my statistics or review them on my blog, but I read 369 pages of it, which 1) is longer than many books I give myself credit for because I read all of them, and 2) seems like more than enough to make a fair impression of, given the book is 576 pages long including front- and backmatter.

A good biography doesn't just give you a chronological telling of a person's life, it gives you a sense of them as a person, as a personality; both Browne's Darwin and Desmon's Huxley are good examples of this, particularly the latter, a book I refer back to a lot in my own writing. Unfortunately, the only sense of Tyndall one gets here is of as a dull plod. Is this because he was a dull plod? There is perhaps necessarily something of the dull plod to all scientists, and Tyndall himself wrote as a young man in the 1850s that after three years of scientific study, "I lack the warm aspirations which I once felt, and I believe this is a necessary consequence of my pursuits: / Love is exiled from the heart / When knowledge enters in" (qtd. in Jackson 69). But I don't feel like the man who delivered the Belfast Address could have been a dull plod... right?

So, I suspect it's down to the writing of Roland Jackson that's the dull plod, not John Tyndall. We move from fact to fact to fact, all of which are extensively documented. Kudos to Jackson, and I mean it; he very clearly did the work to assemble everything Tyndall did. But one drowns in details here with little sense of the actual man who did all of these things. What were his passions, his conflicts, his drives? One doesn't really know... and this is the thing I really wanted out of the book, particularly a sense of how his radicalism in some senses—the Belfast Address, his promotion of scientific education—conflicted with his conservatism in others. Notoriously, Tyndall backed Governor Eyre's horrific actions in putting down the Morant Bay Rebellion. As Sarah Winter says

Tyndall advocated that clear racial distinctions should be applied to reach an appropriate understanding of which categories of British subjects were entitled to due process protections: “We do not hold an Englishman and a Jamaica negro to be convertible terms, nor do we think that the cause of human liberty will be promoted by any attempt to make them so.” Tyndall implies not only that the races are separate species, but also that Eyre’s violent suppression of the Morant Bay uprising was legitimate on that basis, as long as such impositions of martial law are restricted to Jamaica, and, by implication, other imperial territories with white minority populations. [...] In Huxley’s terms, Tyndall reveals his deepest political commitment to a social order based in human inequality, defined according to racial differences.

In Sarah's take, anyway, it seems to me there ought to be a lot packed in this incident that would give us insight into Tyndall. It strikes me, for example, that the scientific impulse to classify, to sort has led Tyndall to make some morally reprehensible choices... and indeed, Stephen Jay Gould has shown how the scientific project often reinforced white supremacy even at the cost of the careful observation that is supposedly the cornerstone of the scientific method! On top of this, Tyndall spent a lot of time in America, where it seems to be he no doubt must have made a lot of observations about people of color (which I'm guessing he didn't often encounter in Britain).

But even though there's a whole chapter called "Eyre Affair and Death of Faraday," all the insight Jackson gives us into this moment is that Jackson wasn't as liberal as Huxley (who supported the investigation into Governor Eyre, and also supported the North during the American Civil War, while Tyndall sympathized with the South). That's it? Other big moments like the Belfast Address seem similarly buried in a slew of facts about who Tyndall ate dinner with and what hikes he went on in the Alps. There's just too much detail here, and no sense of narrative.

As I said above, I'm basically the target audience for a Tyndall biography... but by September I had pretty much stalled out completely on this book, somewhere in the middle of chapter 13. It's got its nuggets of insights, and I think there are a few bits I will end up making use of in my book. But I also don't think it's worth my time trying to get through to the end. The magisterial biography of John Tyndall, alas, remains to be written.

01 November 2024

Reading The Ozmapolitan of Oz Aloud to My Kid

After illustrating several Oz books by others—two by the McGraws and two by Ruth Plumly Thompson—Oz superfan Dick Martin illustrated his own Oz book for the International Wizard of Oz Club, The Ozmapolitan of Oz. The book takes its title from a "newspaper" sometimes produced by Reilly & Lee to promote the Oz books; here, for the first time, it is established within an actual Oz book, depicted as being founded by the Wizard back when he was the ruler of the Emerald City. The protagonist is Septimius "Tim" Septentrion, a copyboy for the paper who thinks it could be something great instead of the lazy operation it is. With Dorothy, Eureka the Pink Kitten, and a Mifkit named Jinx (possible the Mifket from Scalawagons), he sets out on an expedition to promote the newspaper and obtain interesting stories.

The Ozmapolitan of Oz by Dick Martin

Originally published: 1986
Acquired: December 2023
Read aloud:
September–October 2024

The newspaper angle ends up being incredibly unimportant in the end; Tim and company don't travel around doing journalism or anything like that, it's just the usual Oz hijinks of bumping into random people and places and moving on. Indeed, the book is definitely on the low end for incident, because usually the protagonists just meet someone, talk to them, and go somewhere else, and their overarching goal is honestly pretty hard to care about. They have no particular destination, they have no particular problem they are trying to solve. Nor do they really solve any particular problems, and most of the places they go are not really very interesting. It's like a weak Thompson novel but without Thompson's manic energy or commitment to excruciating puns. You're just left with... not much of anything, to be honest.

Martin tries to add in some kind of suspense, I guess, with a mysterious crow following the adventuring party about, and a mystery involving Tim. The details are so slight, however, there's little to glom onto; I think my six-year-old didn't even remember there had been a crow in the book before when it showed up for the second time. It turns out Tim is a prince trying to prove himself—the fun twist here is that he is trying to prove he can accomplish things because in his country royalty are not supposed to accomplish things. It's sort of an inversion of Thompson's Purple Prince of Oz. But unfortunately we don't even know he's trying to prove himself until we're told what the twist is, so it all falls flat, and my six-year-old didn't really follow it at all. I think it could have added some suspense, but not if it's all dumped on you in the second-last chapter.

On top of all this, Tim is a pretty dull protagonist, Dick Martin is one of those writers who doesn't remember how plucky Baum actually made Dorothy, and you could take Jinx the Mifket out of the book without affecting a thing. Only Eureka shows an ounce of characterization or energy. If you read Oz books for the interactions between interesting characters (and I do), there's none of it here. Sometimes Jinx and Eureka snipe a bit but that's about it.

Plus, weirdly, it seems like Dick Martin is as uninterested in providing visuals of his own ideas as he was those of the McGraws and Thompson. The pictures are scanty and often dull.

Anyway, I guess it has a few moments of charm (I like the bit where Eureka tricks a dinosaur with grammatical terms) but overall I found this had little going for it, and it seemed to leave little impression on my kid.

Next up in sequence: The Hidden Prince of Oz

30 October 2024

The Neurodiversiverse: A Science Fiction Anthology of Stories, Poetry, and Art

The Neurodiversiverse is a new anthology of original sf; the subtitle "Alien Encounters" makes me think it might be the first in a series, but I'm not sure. The premise of the anthology, as the ungainly title indicates, is to look at neurodiversity in an sfnal context. The stories here are largely (entirely?) #ownvoices one, being written by neurodiverse people about situations where neurodiversity is an asset to encountering the alien. So there are stories about people with autism, OCD, ADHD, and so on. I received a free review copy from LibraryThing's EarlyReviewers program.

The Neurodiversiverse: Alien Encounters: A Science Fiction Anthology of Stories, Poetry, and Art edited by Anthony Francis and Liza Olmsted

Published: 2024
Acquired: September 2024
Read: October 2024

The problem with the book is that the basic premise sets up a basic formula that is hewed to pretty consistently without variation and without—on my part anyway—much of interest. A neurodiverse person applies to work with aliens or is contacted by aliens, and then it then turns out that their special way of seeing the universe is matched by the aliens and/or a boon for speaking with aliens. Unfortunately, many of the stories feel short: we meet our protagonist, the aliens reach out, boom done. We don't really get to explore the actual diversity of neurodiversity, the stories have little conflict. Now it may be that this all isn't for me, that the kind of people who are represented here would get more out of it, I don't know. I can only tell you how I reacted to it. But fundamentally, I felt like these stories were mostly superficial representations of both neurodiversity and alien intelligence, and they quickly grew repetitive. Too many of the stories also depict the alien encounters as kind of boringly utopian; our neurodivergent protagonist meets aliens, things are now great. I suspect fewer longer stories could have been more interesting.

There were two exceptions that worked much better for me than the rest of the volume. The first was "The Grand New York Welcome Tour" by Kay Hanifen, which is about a tour guide for aliens. The protagonist has OCD, and their job is to escort alien delegates around; the story benefits from taking place much later than first contact, from focusing on the actual interactions in detail, and from showing us diversity among the aliens. It's not super deep but I did enjoy it. The other is "The Pipefitter" by Tobias S. Buckell. This one seemed to me to ignore the anthology remit a bit (not much from the aliens) and was all the better for it, a problem-solving, action-adventure story about a maintenance worker on a giant colony ship during a crisis situation. It deftly employs one of my favorite tropes, the seemingly insignificant person who proves their importance when they come through while others don't. If the stories had all been this good, I would have enjoyed the book much more.

I also enjoyed Cat Rambo's story about superheroes, but its connection to the anthology premise seemed even more minimal than Buckell's. Well done take on realistic heroes, though.

Also there are some poems, if you're into that kind of thing. I can be, but I wasn't into these.

28 October 2024

Two Prequels to Lodestar Award Finalists

The Left-Handed Booksellers of London by Garth Nix

Published: 2020
Read: September 2024

Whenever I finish voting in the Hugo Awards, I circle around to see what finalists from this or previous years have had follow-ups that I would like to read. So far this year, I've read two of them, both of them finalists for the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book; in each case I picked the book up from my local library.

The Sinister Booksellers of Bath by Garth Nix was a finalist this year, but it was second in a series, though it stood alone pretty reasonably. I looped back to pick up the first book, The Left-Handed Booksellers of London. I am glad I did, because it explained some aspects of the setting I hadn't picked up in Sinister Booksellers (I hadn't realized the books took place in an alternate timeline, for example. Nor did I realize that Merlin's body magically transformed; I just thought he was gender nonconforming. Honestly, that was kind of a disappointment.) I did end up feeling like my take on the first was pretty much confirmed, though. That the main characters are booksellers is kind of irrelevant, unfortunately; the book occasionally invokes other fantasy novels but it's all a bit tacked on, and the characters are all a bit thin because they're ultimately there in service to an action plot. I think a better book could have been written with this premise. A third installment is forthcoming; I probably won't bother to get it from the library.

Sheine Lende: A Prequel to Elatsoe
by Darcie Little Badger

Published: 2024
Read: October 2024

Elatsoe was a finalist in 2021, when I ranked it second; this was a fantasy set in an alternate magical United States about a mystery-solving girl with a ghost dog. 2024 saw the publication of the prequel Sheine Lende, about her grandmother when she was a mystery-solving girl with a ghost dog. Like the original, it's a solid, well-crafted book, with intriguing worldbuilding. What really stuck out to me about this one was the structure. Storytelling is central to the book, and the book contains a number of embedded stories, and sometimes even stories within stories, and will sometimes shift between events happening, and events being recounted later, and the recounting being recounted! Some things don't quite add up—as is, of course, true of all stories, fictional or not. Though I think probably Elatsoe has got my heart more, Sheine Lende feels like the more accomplished, skilled book on the whole, and I look forward to seeing what Little Badger comes up with next.

23 October 2024

The Return of the Daleks (From Stockbridge to Beyond Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 53)

The Return of the Daleks: The Complete Doctor Who Back-Up Tales, Volume 1
by Steve Dillon, David Lloyd, Steve Moore, and Paul Neary

Collection published: 2024
Contents originally published: 1979-80
Acquired and read: July 2024

This is an exciting volume. Well, it should be. At long last, having (largely) collected the main strip, DWM is turning its attention to the (largely) Doctor-free back-up tales. The only problem is that, for some of these stories (the Abslom Daak and Kroton ones) it's my third time paying for them to be collected! This isn't so much a knock against this book, I suppose (it would probably be silly to do a volume containing all back-ups except those ones), as against the now utterly redundant Dalek and Cybermen "ultimate comic strip collections." Or, perhaps, a knock against me for buying them. But then, I kind of suspect that if those books hadn't sold well, this book probably wouldn't exist.

As always, I only read the new-to-me stories.

The Final Quest, from Doctor Who Weekly #8 (Dec. 1979)
written by Steve Moore, art by Paul Neary
A Sontaran warrior, shamed by his sole defeat (which he has kept hidden from all others), goes on a quest to find the ultimate weapon. If you've read any other Steve Moore story, you won't be surprised there's a dark comeuppance awaiting him. Decent enough, let down by the fact the the usually dependable Paul Neary seems to struggle to draw Sontarans.
The Stolen TARDIS: A Tale of the Time Lords, from Doctor Who Weekly #9-11 (Dec. 1979)
written by Steve Moore, art by Steve Dillon
Set on Gallifrey (seemingly in the distant past), this one begins badly: a traveling circus materializes, and the Time Lords are just like, "Wow, let's watch! This isn't suspicious at all!" It's very kiddie. But it soon becomes a cat-and-mouse time-travel game between Sillarc (an alien trying to steal a TARDIS) and the TARDIS technician Plutar (a failed Time Lord), with some clever four-dimensional thinking of the kind we never got on screen until The Curse of the Fatal Death. Fun stuff.
K-9's Finest Hour, from Doctor Who Weekly #12 (Jan. 1980)
written by Steve Moore, art by Paul Neary
The idea of a K-9-focused tale is a fun one; unfortunately, in this one, he saves the day thanks to the incompetence of his opponents more than anything else. I would have liked to have spent more time on him doing something, rather than being carried around!
Warlord of the Ogrons, from Doctor Who Weekly #13-14 (Jan. 1980)
written by Steve Moore, art by Steve Dillon
Despite the efforts of Doctor Who tie-in authors everywhere, nothing will ever be interesting about the Ogrons.
Twilight of the Silurians, from Doctor Who Weekly #21-22 (Mar. 1980)
written by Steve Moore, art by David Lloyd
This is a pretty decent story about the last days of the Silurians (or Eocenes). Another decent Steve Moore "dark comeuppance" story; its real strength is how David Lloyd draws the lithe, lizard-like bodies Silurians, without the restriction of having to fit a suit around a person.
The Outsider, from Doctor Who Weekly #25-26 (Apr. 1980)
written by Steve Moore, art by David Lloyd
I found this kind of dull, a story about an astrologer collaborating with an invading Sontaran to subjugate his own planet, who of course gets his comeuppance. David Lloyd, at least, draws better Sontarans than Paul Neary.
Stray Observations:
  • Other included stories and what previous collections to find them in: (see below for links to my reviews)
    • The Return of the Daleks (in Daleks: The Ultimate Comic Strip Collection, Volume 1)
    • Throwback: The Soul of a Cyberman and Ship of Fools (in The Glorious Dead)
    • Abslom Daak... Dalek-Killer and Star Tigers (in Nemesis of the Daleks)
  • Most of the stories are narrated by Tom Baker's Doctor. In Throwback, he says the story comes from "this tape I found in the Time-Lords' records..." He seems to be speaking directly to the reader; in The Final Quest, he says, "You may remember my battles with a Sontaran called Lynx," and in Twlight of the Silurians, he mentions, "your own world, Earth." K-9's Finest Hour makes this clear, because he tells that story in response to people wondering why K-9 wasn't in the main strip! (The story doesn't really answer that question, though.)
  • DWM's famous materialization sound effect, "VWORP VWORP" first appeared in issue #46's The Collector (Nov. 1980), but a predecessor, "VR-A-A-W-P! VR-A-A-A-W-P!", appears in part one of The Stolen TARDIS. Not quite as striking.
  • I was surprised to learn from the commentary on The Outsider that the Sontarans weren't established as clones until The Invasion of Time. Is that really true? I had never noticed if so. Hard to imagine how such a bad showing for the Sontarans established such a now-definitive piece of lore.

This post is the fifty-third in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers Black Sun Rising. Previous installments are listed below:

21 October 2024

The Cosmere by Brandon Sanderson: Mistborn: The Alloy of Law

The Alloy of Law: A Mistborn Novel by Brandon Sanderson

Published: 2011
Read: August 2024

Knowing what I know of Brandon Sanderson fans, I suspect this is a minority viewpoint, but this was my favorite Mistborn novel thus far. Set centuries after the original trilogy ("Era 1"), the fourth book takes place in a nineteenth-century kind of setting, with trains and industrialization. Shorn of the need to carefully establish all the rules of allomancy and feruchemy that I quite frankly do not care about and can never be made to care about, the book just gets on with having a fun adventure. 

This one doesn't dive deep into the "lore" of its world, it just focuses on two characters fighting crime together, and their interactions were for me the primary delight of the novel. The mystery itself is pretty so-so (there are basically no suspects, then they figure out who did it), but I always enjoyed reading about Wax and in particular Wayne and what they were up to. For a Sanderson novel, it's quite short (less than half the length of any previous Mistborn novel!) and quite focused. It still has some weird choices (it has rotating third-person narrators, but this isn't clear until about one third of the way in, which means our first jump to a new perspective is quite jarring), and I always feel like Sanderson puts more effort into the magic systems than making the politics and economics of his worlds convincing, but I had a good time here, and if its other books are like this, I will enjoy "Era 2" of Mistborn much more than I did Era 1.

Every nine months I read another novel of the Cosmere. Next up in sequence: Mistborn: Shadows of Self

18 October 2024

Did the Wordlebot Make a Mistake? (Wordle No. 1214, 15 Oct. 2024)

No one needs me to explain what the Wordle is; I don't remember exactly when I picked it up, but I've been doing it since around the time it took off. (Unfortunately, I lost my stats in summer 2022 when my phone stopped working and I didn't have a New York Times account yet, so I only have a record of my last 833 games.)

And like many Wordle aficionados, I'm sure, I like to check out my scores against the Wordlebot. The Wordlebot, of course, plays with a 99 skill score, meaning it's in the 99th percentile for quality of guess. But when I went through the Wordlebot analysis of Wordle no. 1214, from Tuesday, October 15, 2024, I decided that its analysis of my guesses was wrong.

Here's my claim. Spoilers, of course, for a past Wordle.

So my initial guess was what has largely been my initial guess,* IRATE:

 

As you can see, the Wordlebot gives this a 94 skill score, though your opening word choice doesn't factor into your overall skill score.

Unless I get a whole lot of information from my first guess, I usually use LOCUS as my second:


It gives me three key consonants (L, C, and S) and the remaining two vowels. It's not always a great guess, but in this case it was; I got a 96 skill score off it and narrowed things down to just five words. 

With this information, my third guess was CODER:

 

Wordlebot gave me a 90 for this; I'm not very sure why COVER is considered the superior pick.

Anyway, it was clear to me that there were three options left, just as you can see in the above screenshot: CORER, COVER, and COWER. Probably, anyway. Sometimes I systematically go through all the possible letters but still miss an option. And I had three guesses left. I could of course just make each guess in turn, but 1) that meant a decent chance of scoring 6 guesses overall, and 2) what if I had indeed missed something and the answer was some other word I hadn't noticed?

So I decided to be a bit strategic and guess VOWED. This would eliminate COVER and COWER if they were the answer, leaving me free to guess CORER on my fifth guess, and thus giving me the space to guess one more word if it somehow wasn't the right answer.

As you can see, Wordlebot says, "Nice," but actually gives it a 51 skill score. It would have picked COVER. But had it picked COVER, it would have then picked, presumably, COWER, and then CORER, meaning with the information I had, it would have have taken the Wordlebot 6 guesses, whereas it took me 5.

Why is this? While the Wordlebot said CORER, COVER, and COWER were all possible, it actually didn't think CORER very probable. See this list:

You'll see it gives COVER a 99 skill score, COWER a 96 skill score... and CORER a 6 skill score! Ouch. And if you scroll down to the "Comparing our guesses" frame, you can see it assigns a very low probability score to CORER:

COVER is 51%, COWER is 48%... and CORER is 1%! 

Why is this? The Wordlebot's understanding of what makes for a probable word is derived from the NYT's own corpus. As per their explanation, "The bot's probabilities are estimated based on how common a word is, using the frequency of appearances in The Times since 2000 as a rough and imperfect proxy. This means the bot, just like humans, has to guess whether borderline words will wind up on the new (hidden) Wordle solution list." 

I do have to admit that CORER seemed somewhat less likely to COVER or COWER to me, but that COVER was fifty times as likely is not a ratio I would have come up with. But the NYT is a newspaper, and I guess newspapers probably talk about people covering and cowering a lot more than they talk about people using apple corers. But in day-to-day existence, while "corer" probably isn't used as much as the other two words, I don't think I would assign such a lopsided ratio.†

So while I can see why Wordlebot went with COVER, as it basically had a 50% chance of getting the solution in 4 according to its own metrics, it would have actually got it in 6, whereas I guaranteed getting it in 5 with my strategy. So I think I deserve a better skill score than 51 on VOWED, and a better skill score than 84 on the puzzle overall, neener neener.

* Once IRATE was the actual answer, I switched to a strategy I saw on the Wordle subreddit for switching things up, which was to use the previous day's answer as the next day's starting word. This was fun if tricky, and taught me to be a bit more strategic about my guesses. But as I neared exceeding a particularly long streak, I switched back to using IRATE in order to make things easier on myself.

† Interestingly, in the Google Books Ngram corpus for 2022, "cover" appears 150 times as often as "cower," and "cower" appears 10 times as often as "corer."