07 February 2025

Reading The Rundelstone of Oz Aloud to My Kid

After The Forbidden Fountain of Oz, Eloise McGraw returned to Oz one last time, making The Rundelstone of Oz the last book written by a "Famous Forty" author. It was originally published in a periodical called Oz-story with pictures by Eric Shanower, and then republished as a standalone volume by Hungry Tiger Press with more illustrations.

Rundelstone is an unusual Oz novel; aside from the opening chapter (set in the Emerald City), the entire book takes place in the confines of a single village, and most of it even takes place on the grounds of a single castle! Despite this, it still manages to feel pretty Ozzy. The protagonist is a living puppet, part of a performing troupe of living puppets, but Poco doesn't, say, desire to be a real boy or anything; he just is a living puppet, the kind of thing you might expect to find in Oz. Poco enjoys his life, but suffers because of the cruel maestroissimo of the troupe, its one human member, who bullies all the puppets, but especially Poco.

The Rundelstone of Oz by Eloise McGraw
illustrated by Eric Shanower

Originally published: 2000
Acquired: July 2024
Read aloud:
January–February 2025
Poco and his troupe come to the town of Witheraway, where Poco is enchanted—supposedly by accident—by the town's "witherd" (he's not a wizard because there's only one legal wizard in Oz), and the troupe leaves without him while he's in the form of a cuckoo clock. The witherd make him into his lead servant, but as time goes on, Poco become suspicious that there's something more afoot.

With its emphasis on its protagonist's interiority, personal fears, and character growth, this reminded me a lot of McGraw's first Oz book, Merry Go Round, and though I didn't enjoy it as much, as I did enjoy it quite a lot. McGraw is more attentive to this kind of thing than any other Oz writer, and though I can see how some readers may want more cool locations and weird creatures, I enjoyed the change of pace. It feels Ozzy enough while feeling different from all the other books too. (I've seen it suggested that Rundelstone is most like Ozma of Oz, but that really has just one confined section.) Poco is on a quest of sorts, but not a physical journey, a quest to find out what happened to his troupe and a quest to discover his own confidence. The book moves a little slowly, perhaps—an adult reader will certainly be ahead of Poco—but I found it was perfectly paced for a six-year-old listener, who will be a bit less savvy to when characters are lying and what the truth might be.

You can't go wrong with Eric Shanower illustrations; he of course brings a lot of key moments to life. My kid pronounced they enjoyed the "whole thing." They do tend to get confused when there's a lot of "off-screen" backstory, which there is a bit here, with the origin of the Spellstones in Fyordi-Zik. We're told this in a lump of exposition, and I had to remind them of it a few times later on. I only found myself dissatisfied by the very ending. Though Ozma doesn't turn up to sort everything out too early (as she does in some Oz books), meaning Poco is ultimately responsible for solving most of the situation, I did find myself wishing she'd turned up a tiny bit later so he could do a tiny bit more on his own and prove himself.

But much like with Merry Go Round, I found myself wishing there was a sequel. I want to know what other scrapes Poco and the Troupadours get into with their itinerant lifestyle—and how they get back out again!

Next up in sequence: The Emerald Wand of Oz

06 February 2025

Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son, No. XV–XVI (Chs. 46-51)

No. XV (chs. 46-48)
She did not sink down at his feet; she did not shut out the sight of him with her trembling hands; she did not weep; she did not utter one word of reproach. But she looked at him, and a cry of desolation issued from her heart. For as she looked, she saw him murdering that fond idea to which she had held in spite of him. She saw his cruelty, neglect, and hatred dominant above it, and stamping it down. She saw she had no father upon earth, and ran out, orphaned, from his house. (721)

Not much to say about this one... except that I called it! Precisely at the three-quarters mark, Dickens gives us our next big moment in the story, the total collapse of good feeling between Dombey and his wife, which leads to Dombey striking Florence, and Florence fleeing his house into the refuge of Captain Cuttle. Cracking stuff: any Dickens novel can have its languid moments, but he knows how to twist a knife like few others.

Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens

Originally published: 1846-48
Acquired: December 2024
Installments read: January–February 2025

It's interesting how deliberately structured and plotted Dombey and Son is, because this was very much not the case with Dickens's previous novel, Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44, which I suffered through last winter). Indeed, I don't think it's the case with any previous Dickens novel. Maybe Oliver Twist? I don't remember that one well. But it certainly wasn't true for Pickwick Papers (1836-37), or Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39), or The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41). The only other early Dickens novel I haven't read yet is Barnaby Rudge (1841); I guess I'll see how structured that one is... but I kind of doubt it's highly structured given what I know of it.

I wonder what happened in 1846 that turned Dickens toward plotting things out in more detail and pacing more deliberately... perhaps he suffered through Martin Chuzzlewit as much as I did and wasn't keen to repeat the experience! The introduction and notes to my Penguin Classics edition don't mention anything about this as far as I noticed, but they do recommend reading the 1974 Clarendon edition of the novel for an account of its composition. I will put in an interlibrary loan request for it.

No. XVI (chs. 49-51)
'Hope. It's that as animates you. Hope is a buoy... but Lord, my lad, like any other buoy, it only floats; it can't be steered nowhere.' (757)

Well, guess what... Walter is alive! Given this seemed quite obvious from the moment his body failed to turn up, it's a little annoying that Dickens dragged this out for five whole installments. It's like the guy hasn't been on the show a whole season!

But anyway, decent stuff as we move into the endgame, but I particularly liked the little glimpse we get of Dombey: "Mr Dombey and the world are alone together" (781).

This is the sixth in a series of posts about Dombey and Son. The next covers installment no. xvii and beyond. Previous installments are listed below:

  1. Nos. I–IV (chs. 1-13)
  2. Nos. V–VII (chs. 14-22)
  3. Nos. VIII–X (chs. 23-31)
  4. Nos. XI–XII (chs. 32-38)
  5. Nos. XIII–XIV (chs. 39-45)

05 February 2025

Doctor Who at Christmas: The Church on Ruby Road

For fourteen years now, I've read a Christmas-set Doctor Who book every Christmas, beginning with Short Trips: The Ghosts of Christmas in 2011. The most recent book in this sequence is Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson's novelisation of "The Church on Ruby Road," the 2023 Christmas special. (And, seemingly, the last, but perhaps I will be surprised; I have certainly thought this sequence to have ended before.)

As readers of my blog know, I've recently been reading novelisations of Doctor Who stories from the 1963-89 version of the show. These were important books, because in those days it was difficult to rewatch stories—or, in many cases, even watch them to begin with. But what's the point of a novelisation in the 2020s, when I can just pop the episode on Disney+ whenever I want? In the case of some stories, it's to give you a deeper understanding of the episode as its writer saw it; of the twenty novelizations of post-2005 stories, fourteen of them have been written by the writer of the original story. However, that's not the case for The Church on Ruby Road, whose script was by Russell T Davies, but whose novelisation is by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson. (Fun fact: Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson's first novel was published thanks to a contest sponsored by Ben Aaronovitch, himself a writer of Doctor Who television stories and novels.)

I would argue that, ideally, what a good novelisation does is allow you to approach the ideas of a story based on the strengths of a different medium. How would you tell this story novelisitically, if it was a novel to begin with? I think that's the question I'd ask myself if I was novelising a modern Doctor Who story. Paul Cornell did a decent job of this with Twice Upon a Time; shorn of the spectacle and performances of the tv version, he gave us a book with more of a character arc.

Doctor Who: The Church on Ruby Road
by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson

Originally published: 2024
Acquired and read: December 2024

When The Church on Ruby Road succeeds, it's because it's doing that. Like Russell T Davies's previous pilot for a new Doctor Who programme, "Rose," a lot of "The Church on Ruby Road" is told from the perspective of the new companion, and The Church on Ruby Road leans into that, making new companion Ruby Sunday the focal character, getting us into her head more.

Aside from this, though, it's a pretty straight down-the-line novel of the tv script, doing that kinds of things that work well on screen but not always on the page, like quick cuts away to mysterious strangers; for example, I found it jarring when, in a book that had been pretty solidly focused on Ruby up until that point, we suddenly went to the Doctor saving a random woman from a giant sculpture falling onto them. This works fine on screen, but it kind of disrupts what had until then been a tight focus in the novel. I would have liked to have seen the novel be mostly (entirely would be impossible) told from Ruby's perspective, reorganizing scenes to make this work.

Indeed, I think the thing that's missing here is a strong character arc for Ruby, and what is particularly frustrating is that I also think there's a really obvious one! "The Church on Ruby Road" is, appropriately enough for Christmas, a riff on It's a Wonderful Life. Like George Bailey, Ruby is removed from history—and the resulting world is worse off. In It's a Wonderful Life, this resolves George's character arc; he had seen his life as futile and pointless, and he is shown that it's not. But in "The Church on Ruby Road," there's no such pay-off; it's just a problem for the Doctor to solve. And yet... the obvious character hook for Ruby is right there! Ruby thinks she needs to know who her biological mother  was to have a good life. What the Doctor's journey into the Ruby-less timeline could have shown her is that she doesn't need her biological mother to have a good life, she already had one. Adding this into the book would have 1) given it more of a character-focused, and thus novelistic, pay-off, and 2) leaned into the Christmas themes more, which are to be honest, a little thin in the book devoid of the visuals of the screen version.

Now, I know you shouldn't criticize a book by saying what you would have done. So I guess what I am saying is, I don't know that Jikiemi-Pearson needed to implement my idea per se. It's a competently written book based on a decent tv story. But I do think this book needed something to make it pop, to make the project of novelizing a tv show broadcast in 2023 more of a productive undertaking.

I read a Doctor Who Christmas book every year. Barring a surprise announcement in the next ten months, this is the last post in this sequence.

04 February 2025

Reading Roundup Wrapup: January 2025

Pick of the month: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. No contest this month! Great, interesting little book.

All books read:

  1. The Pelican History of England: 1. Roman Britain by I. A. Richmond, revised by Malcolm Todd
  2. Toto of Oz by Gina Wickwar, illustrated by Anna-Maria Cool
  3. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
  4. Doctor Who: The Stones of Blood by David Fisher
  5. The Pelican History of England: 2. The Beginnings of English Society by Dorothy Whitelock
  6. Doctor Who Magazine: Special Edition #62: The 2023 Yearbook edited by Marcus Hearn
  7. Blackhawk by William Rotsler
  8. The Pelican History of England: 3. English Society in the Early Middle Ages (1066-1307) by Doris Mary Stenton

Another relatively light month in terms of total books read, but that's because I continue to chip away at two very long books. Only four installments of Dombey and Son to go!

All books acquired:

  1. Doctor Who: The Stones of Blood by David Fisher
  2. The Pelican History of England: 2. The Beginnings of English Society by Dorothy Whitelock
  3. Heavenly Tyrant by Xiran Jay Zhao 
  4. Doctor Who: The Androids of Tara by David Fisher
  5. Notes on Vermin by Caroline Hovanec

Currently reading:

  • The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8 edited by Neil Clarke
  • Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens
  • Heavenly Tyrant by Xiran Jay Zhao
  • Doctor Who: The Androids of Tara by David Fisher
  • The Pelican History of England: 4. England in the Late Middle Ages by A. R. Myers

Up next in my rotations:

  1. The End of the World: Classic Tales of Apocalyptic Science Fiction compiled by Michael Kelahan 
  2. Victorians and the Prehistoric: Tracks to a Lost World by Michael Freeman
  3. Star Trek: Coda, Book I: Moments Asunder by Dayton Ward
  4. American Gods by Neil Gaiman 

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 667 (down 3)

 


03 February 2025

Black Panther: The Man without Fear! by David Liss, Francesco Francavilla, et al.

So after the events of Black Panther volume 5 and Doomwar saw Shuri enshrined as the new Black Panther, Marvel did something weird with T'Challa. I don't know anything about the behind-the-scenes of this era, so I don't know how this decision was arrived at, but he became the new main character... of Daredevil!? After Daredevil: The Man without Fear! #512, came Black Panther: The Man without Fear! #513, T'Challa inheriting the numbering and setting of Matt Murdock's comic. This would last for around eighteen issues, the title changing again after #523 to Black Panther: The Most Dangerous Man Alive!

from Black Panther: The Man without Fear! #518
Going in, I was skeptical. Very skeptical. I love mid-tier comics characters, but if you read a lot of mid-tier comics characters, it quickly becomes clear that publishers are always jerking them around trying to figure out what works. Now, this is part of what makes me love them; DC will put, say, Green Arrow or Power Girl through some weird permutations over the years, and that itself is a fascinating story. But it can also be very frustrating when a character you enjoy gets jerked into an unproductive or even, frankly, stupid new status quo.

The beginning of issue #513 did little to allay my misgivings, as it works very quickly to establish why T'Challa would take over for Matt Murdock as the protector of Hell's Kitchen, giving up his nation, his technology, and his marriage to do so... and I did not buy it. Not at all. T'Challa, even at his lowest moment, is a very confident man. I don't buy for a minute that he needs to "find himself"... nor do I buy that if he did need to find himself, that he would do so by giving up everything that makes him who he is. He knew what he was doing when he destroyed Wakanda's vibranium; he would not brood over his decision and retreat from his country.

from Black Panther: The Man without Fear! #515
But getting through this improbable decision quickly turns out to be the right call on writer David Liss's part, because that just lets him get on with doing what it is he wants to do, which is tell a violent, street-level crime story. I don't know why T'Challa has been put in one, but accepting that he is in one, Liss and artist Franco Francavilla do a fantastic job with it. It's very much a story of its era, about damaged men doing bad things, like The Sopranos (which ended in 2007) or Breaking Bad (which began in 2008). It's a bit tropey in that way, but it's a satisfying example of the tropes, and the moral certainty of T'Challa himself keeps things working well, not swinging too far in glorifying toxic masculinity, as his dedication to ordinary people is what saves Hell's Kitchen. There are good twists and turns here, especially in the opening arc about T'Challa ingratiating himself into the community (he owns a diner) and coming up against an Eastern European crime family and a serial killer and a victim of experiments to create superpowers.

from Black Panther: The Man without Fear! #523
Certainly, Liss is aided by the excellent art of Francesco Francavilla, one of those cases where the artist assigned to a comic complements what it's trying to do completely perfectly; even if the scripts wouldn't work at all, I think this art would sell them! The art is character driven and moody, but also the action is clear. I know of Francavilla's work (most famously, he drew the zombie comic Afterlife with Archie, and he also had an acclaimed run on Detective Comics), but I'd never actually seen it outside of previews and reviews before, and it truly is excellent stuff. He does his own coloring here, and the colors are beautiful, too. The fill-ins are by Jefte Palo, whose work I enjoyed on the Secret Invasion story arc during Black Panther volume 4, and does a solid job here, aided immeasurably by one of my favorite colorists, Jean-Francois Beaulieu (cf., Doomwar, Marvel's Oz comics).

After the opening six-issue arc, we get a two-issue story about Kraven the Hunter pursuing T'Challa, who obtains unwanted help from his wife, Storm. This is solid, though the scientist antagonist makes a hard villain turn I didn't totally buy. Finally, there's a three-issue Fear Itself tie-in; I don't really know what Fear Itself was, to be honest, but you don't have to. Liss's take on it is that a mystical force stokes anti-immigrant sentiment in Hell's Kitchen, forcing T'Challa to battle a former Fantastic Four villain called the Hate-Monger and a knock-off of himself called the American Panther. Like too much popular culture from the early 2010s, it's depressingly prescient of our current moment, but it's very well done.

So do I think T'Challa needed to be the vehicle for gritty urban vigilante stories? Well, to be honest, I'm still not convinced. These stories seem to have little to do with what makes Black Panther work as a character or a premise. But if it had to be done, it's hard to imagine that it could have been done better than this, and first half of the first issue aside, I enjoyed nearly every panel of this run.

Black Panther: The Man without Fear! originally appeared in issues numbered from #513 to 523 (Feb.-Nov. 2011). The series was written by David Liss, illustrated by Francesco Francavilla (#513-15, 517-18, 521-23) and Jefte Palo (#516, 519-20), colored by Jean-Francois Beaulieu (#516, 519-20), lettered by Joe Caramagna, and edited by Bill Rosemann.

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE

31 January 2025

What Is a Dalek?: Nicholas Briggs's Dalek Empire, Series One and Two (2001–03)

Back before Big Finish became a Doctor Who content machine, spin-offs were a rare thing indeed. The very first of them came in 2001, a four-part miniseries called Dalek Empire about a Dalek invasion of the galaxy... with no Doctor around to stop it. Written, directed, sound-designed, and composed by Nicholas Briggs (plus with Daleks and one other character played by him), the series strikes a very different tone to other Big Finish releases; it doesn't just feel like Doctor Who without the Doctor in it as many of Big Finish's later spin-offs have. 

It was successful enough to spawn three further series: Dalek Empire II: Dalek War (2003), an immediate sequel; Dalek Empire III (2004), set thousands of years later; and Dalek Empire: The Fearless (2007-08), an interquel set during the original Dalek Empire. There was also a Doctor Who story where the Doctor met a couple of the main characters, Return of the Daleks (2006), and a Short Trips volume (2006).

I picked the set up in a Humble Bundle sale in 2014... but with my Big Finish backlog, didn't get around to listening to them until late 2024! I'm sorry I waited so long, and here I kind of want to review them, but mostly want to think a little bit about what the Daleks "represent" in each story.

Dalek Empire Series One

As much as I have gone off a lot of Nick Briggs's writing tics at this point, it's interesting how much I enjoy his approach to something like this. I wouldn't say he's a great master of characterization, but I think he does a good job with some archetypes that a set of skilled performers successfully bring to life. The ground-level view here also plays to his strengths a lot. The stuff with Suz and the Daleks is genuinely clever.

As he often did early in his career, I think Briggs make some interesting structural choices; I really like the bait-and-switch about who the narrator is, which totally wrongfooted me. Some comedy aliens with sound effects, so points off for that, but overall this plays to his strengths in that the end is totally about the futility of resistance, which isn't something I want from all or even most of my Doctor Who stories, but does seem to me the exact kind of story the Daleks deserve on their first solo outing. And at the end, we even learn that the Daleks themselves are kind of pointless. A lot of stuff here, Briggs would do again later but worse (e.g., the Cutbert stories), so it's good to hear it done well.

The cast is largely great. I particularly like Gareth Thomas as Kalendorf, though I hope he gets more to do in series two. Sarah Mowat is excellent, she teeters between likeable and unsympathetic perfectly. And the guy who plays Alby Brook manages to make a somewhat stock character come to life.

What I really miss is the early 2000s Big Finish sound design. It's funny that when Briggs became the head honcho, the company largely moved away from this style. I don't know if I have the vocab to support my claims, but it's not doing the "episode of the new show without pictures" style that dominates now, but it has a real tactile feel to it. I miss those clunky Nick Briggs space doors opening and closing! When you listen to a piece of sound design and music by early 2000s Nick, you live it. I much prefer the "moody noise" style of music to the "orchestral warblings" that dominate Big Finish now. All those clunking doors and electronic dings... beautiful!

Even the covers are unique and beautiful; again, a lot of 2020s Big Finish product looks samey, all photoshopped floating heads, but from the moment you pick up the CD (or open up your download, I guess), you know you're in for something different here.

I also miss that early 2000s "Big Finish universe" feel; it's not distracting, but in addition to the ties to the main range Dalek Empire stories, we also get ties to The Sirens of Time (the Knights of Velyshaa) and Sword of Orion (the Garazone sector... complete with the notorious cell phone ring!).

Dalek Empire II: Dalek War

Dalek War is less focused than the original Dalek Empire but I still enjoyed it a lot. Like in a good movie, we actually don't know these characters—Kalendorf, Suz, Alby—very well in the sense that we've only spent a few hours with them, but in actuality you become quite attached to them, which really makes the ending quite effective. Maybe it's because I was an emotional wreck for other reasons at the time, but I teared up a bit at Kal and Suz's final scene in Dalek Empire II. Would not have expected that of a Nick Briggs script, to be honest.

What Is a Dalek?

Surely the best Doctor Who monsters "mean" something beyond the literal. A Sontaran, for example, is over-the-top patriotism and militarism; hardly subtle, but a good Sontaran story does something thematically with this. (Part of the reason they work so well in the Crimean War in Flux, for example.) A Cyberman can represent ideas about transhumanism or conformity—the monster doesn't have to be the same thing in every story.

Daleks are often stand-ins for fascism and/or xenophobia; in the original series, this is probably most clear in their first and last stories, The Daleks and Remembrance of the Daleks. The latter, in particular, makes it very obvious by having the Daleks team up with humans who think England should have allied with the Nazis during World War II!

I spent a lot of the first two series thinking about what the Daleks "mean" for Nick Briggs. Though there are flashes of Daleks-as-fascists here, that's not really his mode. So what is it? The ending drove home that they are humanity's need for conflict, for war (what, if we want to get pretentious, literary theorist Elana Gomel calls "the violent sublime"). The frame story of DE II makes it clear that the Daleks will always be with us, they will always comes back-- just as war always comes back. The flip-flopping of who is on whose side in DE II shows that someone will always be fighting someone else, and Kalendorf's story in particular shows that if he wasn't fighting the Daleks, he would be fighting someone. The Daleks always return, because humanity always returns to violence. It's bleak, but hey, it's Nick Briggs writing a universe (essentially) without the Doctor, of course it's bleak.

29 January 2025

The Fourth Doctor Novelisations: The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977) and The Horror of Fang Rock (1978)

People tend to lump Terrance Dicks novelisations into three periods, is my understanding: his early period, where the idea of a Doctor Who novelisation was relatively brand new and he was still going all out; his middle period, where he was cranking them out, but they were solid renditions that expanded on their screen counterparts; and his late period, where they were just the scripts with "said the Doctor" stuck in occasionally.

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

Collection published: 2022
Novels originally published: 1977-78
Acquired and read: December 2024

I haven't read enough of them to know if this is a fair characterization, to be honest, but it does seem to me that if it is, Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang and Doctor Who and the Horror of Fang Rock clearly belong to the middle period. I don't think either of these will set your world alight, but it did seem to me that both stories must have engaged Dicks's imagination enough that, like The Pyramids of Mars (1976), he gives the stories enough embellishment and energy to bring it all to life for a reader whether you've seen these stories or not. (I've seen The Talons of Weng-Chiang a number of times over the years, Horror of Fang Rock just the once almost two decades ago.)

I am of the camp that considers Talons one of Doctor Who's best stories, and Dicks captures it on the page well, especially its characters: Tom Baker's moody Doctor and Leela's directness are both on the page, and Dicks does particularly well, I thought, by Jago, Litefoot, and Li H'sen Chang, each of whom gets some nice moments of internal characterization that complements and expands on his screen performance. I imagine there are times cramming a six-parter into (in my Essential Terrance Dicks edition, anyway) just over one hundred pages could backfire, but it works well here, as we fairly rocket through an engaging story. Dicks clearly enjoyed Robert Holmes's script and brings it to life.

He also does well by his own script in The Horror of Fang Rock, another pseudo-historical of an alien trapped on Earth. There's good period details here, and he (of course, I suppose) captures the complications of the script well. I did find the guest cast somewhat thinner, though. The lighthouse crew are strong enough, actually, but the survivors of the yacht crash don't feel very lively; I'm guessing (it's been a long time since I saw the tv serial) that skilled performers brought them to life more. Still, this is good stuff, especially the early parts where Dicks is setting the scene.

As of this writing, I've read six novelisations reprinted in the Essential Terrance Dicks range, the five in this volume plus The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1977) from volume one; I don't know what happened, but Talons and only Talons contains a large number of typos—missing quotation marks, incorrect words, line breaks in the wrong position. (See the last page of ch. 12 on p. 268 for an example of the latter.) Not having access to the original book, I don't know if this faithfully reproduces an original copyedit that was not careful enough, or if it's a product of whatever OCR process converted these twentieth-century books for a twenty-first-century reprinting.

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

28 January 2025

Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son, Nos. XIII–XIV (Chs. 39-45)

No. XIII (chs. 39-41)
Towards his first wife, Mr Dombey, in his cold and lofty arrogance, had borne himself like the removed Being he almost conceived himself to be. He had been 'Mr Dombey' with her when she first saw him, and he was 'Mr Dombey' when she died. He had asserted his greatness during their whole married life, and she had meekly recognised it. He had kept his distant seat of state on the top of his throne, and she her humble station on its lowest step; and much good it had done him, so to live in solitary bondage to his one idea. He had imagined that the proud character of his second wife would have been added to his own—would have merged into it, and exalted his greatness. He had pictured himself haughtier than ever, with Edith’s haughtiness subservient to his. He had never entertained the possibility of its arraying itself against him. (608-9)

Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens

Originally published: 1846-48
Acquired: December 2024
Installments read: January 2025

Not much to report about this one, which continues the depiction of the slow deterioration of the Dombey marriage—see above. Also some good but sad stuff about Florence. The new Mrs Dombey's mother dies.

No. XIV (chs. 42-45)
'Does that bold-faced slut... intend to take her warning, or does she not?' (669)

Another one that I found a bit slow and a bit plodding. More Florence, please! I mean, Dombey is thrown from his horse and injured and all, but there's a bit too much Carker. I get that he's up to no good, but I find something about Dickens's underhanded villains who spend a lot of time "on screen" a bit dull; I mean, he's not as bad as Pecksniff from Martin Chuzzlewit, but I feel like less would be more with this guy, but instead we just get more. Which is not more.

That said, at times, he's chillingly effective. When Dombey is injured, Carker brings a message from him to Edith (only I am suspicious that the message probably does not represent Dombey's actual intentions), trying to drive a wedge between Edith and Florence:

'His instructions were,' he said, in a low voice, 'that I should inform you that your demeanour towards Miss Dombey is not agreeable to him. That it suggests comparisons to him which are not favourable to himself. That he desires it may be wholly changed; and that if you are in earnest, he is confident it will be; for your continued show of affection will not benefit its object.'
     'That is a threat,' she said.
     'That is a threat,' he answered, in his voiceless manner of assent: adding aloud, 'but not directed against you.' (683)

I've been reading this book a solid month now, you know, and though my reading has slowed a little of late, I'm almost at the three-quarters mark, so I ought to finish it up in February.

I'm worried about that three-quarters mark, though; so far, Dickens has made the worst things happen at the ends of installment nos. v and x. What will no. xv bring?

This is the fifth in a series of posts about Dombey and Son. The next covers installment no. xv and beyond. Previous installments are listed below:

  1. Nos. I–IV (chs. 1-13)
  2. Nos. V–VII (chs. 14-22)
  3. Nos. VIII–X (chs. 23-31)
  4. Nos. XI–XII (chs. 32-38)

27 January 2025

Black Panther: Klaws of the Panther by Jonathan Maberry, Gianluca Gugliotta, et al.

In Doomwar, T'Challa destroyed all Wakandan vibranium worldwide in order to prevent Doctor Doom from using it for nefarious purposes. Of that move, I wrote, "this happens at the very end of the story, so we get no implications of his choice. This isn't so much an issue for Doomwar itself [...] but one that I am afraid future Black Panther stories will not really engage with. I guess we'll see!" Well, I was wrong, because the very next in-continuity Black Panther story is all about the worldwide vibranium shortage.

Klaws of the Panther continues writer Jonathan Maberry's focus on Shuri as the new Black Panther; in this story, she travels to the Savage Land to obtain some vibranium to replace Wakandan stocks. (Apparently "S.L.V.", an abbreviation you will read way too much in this series, is different from Wakandan vibranium.) What she finds, though, is that someone got there ahead of her—longtime Black Panther nemesis Klaw (he killed her dad) has teamed up with the mad scientists of A.I.M. to do... um, something vaguely nefarious with vibranium and sound.

from Klaws of the Panther #2
While I enjoyed Maberry's Doomwar, this miniseries continued some of the trends I didn't enjoy from Maberry's run on Black Panther volume 5. A bit too much going on about Shuri's inexperience and anger and propensity for using violence. This bothers me for two reasons. The first is that it feels like the kind of thing you do with a female hero specifically; I don't think men are as likely to continually get storylines about how they are bad at superheroing because they are inexperienced and their emotions get in the way. Second, I just don't think the character of Shuri from the comics is (thus far, anyway) as interesting as the one played by Letitia Wright in the movies! Give me the warrior-scientist who can bring her brother up short. I am wondering if at some point the comics character will become more like her film counterpart.

Anyway, as my brief synopsis above perhaps hinted, I didn't care much for the story here. I don't really care for Klaw—no offense, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, but what does it mean for a person to be made of living sound... especially if they just seem to be a person still?—and all the stuff about "S.L.V." got too abstract and complicated. On top of this, each issue sees Black Panther teaming up with a different hero: Shanna the She-Devil, Wolverine, Spider-Man, and the Black Widow in turn. The team-up with Shanna is natural enough given the plot, and the meet-up with Wolverine is fun enough (and also makes sense if you buy the series's conceit about Shuri needing to manage her anger better), but the inclusions of Spider-Man and the Black Widow seem kind of pointless and random.

from Klaws of the Panther #4
On top of all this, I didn't care for the art by Gianluca Gugliotta with assists from Pepe Larraz. Like too many superhero artists drawing stories about women, he always makes sure to include perfectly round breasts and butts even if he has to contrive the angles to make it happen... but weirdly his faces are kind of ugly. The action is decent enough if you ignore that, and I do find José Villarrubia an above-average colorist.

Unfortunately, though the story's events spin out of the choices T'Challa made in Doomwar, I don't think the implications are meaningfully explored here; there's little from Wakanda in this story. The hunt for "S.L.V." could basically be any maguffin. The strength of Black Panther as a concept is in Wakanda itself and its politics, both internal and international, and Klaws of the Panther doesn't have that. I'm curious how the loss of vibranium and Shuri's tenure as Black Panther will both shake out in the long term, because while this series finished in 2011, there wouldn't be another Wakanda-focused Black Panther run for another five years! That's an eternity in comics time, and I feel pretty certain the changes set up in Reginald Hudlin and Jonathan Maberry's runs will be forgotten by then.

Klaws of the Panther originally appeared in four issues (Dec. 2010–Feb. 2011). The story was written by Jonathan Maberry, illustrated by Gianluca Gugliotta (#1-4) and Pepe Larraz (#3-4), colored by José Villarrubia, lettered by Albert Deschesne, and edited by Lauren Sankovitch.

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE

24 January 2025

Star Trek Adventures: Playing "The Siege of Starbase Epsilon-12"... on Christmas!

This summer, when I was running my Star Trek Adventures campaign, I was also watching season two of Strange New Worlds. (Me to my wife: "'I fly the ship' is clearly Ortegas's Value.") When I got to the episode "Under the Cloak of War," I went, "I want to do that!" Specifically, "Under the Cloak of War" is a flashback about what a couple characters did during the Federation-Klingon War before the series started; it has a much different tone to the rest of SNW.

My STA campaign was set after the Dominion War, but the backstories my players had put together established that some of the had served on the ship during the war, with a slightly different crew. So could I do an episode set during the Dominion War? And make it super grim and very depressing? But the problem I had was that I can only fit four episodes into a summer campaign; if I saved this idea for a hypothetical campaign next summer, would I want to make one of my four episodes a flashback?

An answer arrived when, during the last session of the campaign, one of my players suggested a winter break reunion. That seemed like the perfect opportunity for a one-off story, especially given that not everyone from the summer would be available to play this time out.

So I reached out to my players and determined I had enough interested to run it. Thus I had to find a suitable mission! I wanted something set during a war, something grim, but also something with not very much space combat, since it's the one aspect of STA that has never clicked for me. And, to be honest, I didn't want a whole lot of ground combat either; I wanted it to still be Star Trekky and let my players show off their diverse skills.

I reached out on the STA facebook group and someone pointed me at The Federation-Klingon War Tactical Campaign, a sourcebook on how to run a whole campaign set during Discovery's first season. I read through the missions until coming to "The Siege of Starbase Epsilon-12" and it clicked for me immediately. [When I played the mission and wrote this up, I didn't know who wrote the scenario, but I've subsequently learned it was Alison Cybe.] A little bit of combat, but lots of other good use of STA mechanics, something for every one to do... and so grim the mission opens with a note to read your players about how sometimes people die and you can't do anything about it! So I had the basis for...

"Captain’s Log, Stardate 51963.1. The Diversitas has been assigned to transport a special tactical team to its new assignment on the Cardassian front. Our ship’s doctor, security chief, and pilot are currently off ship on detached duty, which is unfortunate, as I understand that the tactical team’s ordnance expert and surgeon both served with our own Mooria Loonin before the war.
     "As the war enters its ninth month, I find the crew’s spirits particularly low. Even with the Romulans joining the Allies, we are fighting a defensive war that seems to be progressing nowhere, the Dominion chipping away at Federation territory one system, one planet, at a time. Though the
Diversitas has been spared any frontline actions thus far, everyone on the crew knows someone who has been touched by the conflict. The mood has been brought even lower due to the fact that, for our human crew anyway, on Earth, today would be Christmas Eve. I am told some crew have decided to hold a small celebration in the ship’s bar."

Planning the Mission

Science Station Eldorado Omega under attack
(from the Federation-Klingon War Tactical Campaign;
I don't think my players noticed that they're Klingon ships)
The premise of "The Siege of Starbase Epsilon-12" is that the player ship receives a message sending it to a science outpost under attack from the Klingons. The first act is getting there and battling the Klingons, chasing them off. 

The second act is the heart of the mission: the players need to evacuate 600 scientists from the station... but they can only beam 20 every thirty minutes... and in eight hours, the Klingons will return. On top of this, 15 scientists will die every thirty minutes from their injuries... and 50 will die every thirty minutes from a radiation leak in the station's reactor! The players have a lot of stuff to do: saving lives, fixing reactors, repairing the station (if you fix the docking arm and/or station transporters, you can increase the rate of evacuation), and so on. 

Jem'Hadar attack ships
(image courtesy Daystrom Institute Technical Library)
On top of this, there's a number of timed incidents, such as a series of plasma fires, or the discovery that a torpedo has buried itself in the station infrastructure. You can also, as GM, spend Threat to do things like injure players, break things they already fixed, or even reveal that a Klingon commando is hidden on the station.

All of this was very adaptable to the Dominion War setting; I just made the initial enemies Jem'Hadar instead of Klingons, and had the reinforcements who come at the end be Cardassians. The only weak part of the mission as written is that the third part is another space battle; going into our first session, I left that part blank, figuring I'd decide on a third act once I saw how the first two went! Other than this, I don't think I made many changes.

Commander L'San
(from the Alpha Quadrant Sourcebook)
As always, I made some cosmetic reskinnings. "Starbase Epsilon-12" became "Science Station Eldorado Omega"; the moon the station orbited (did it have a name? I don't remember) became Matamoras IV-C. The station commander, L'San, is a Vulcan woman... but we'd done a science station commanded by a Vulcan woman back in "Abyss Station" (and I wanted her to cameo here), so I made L'San into an Aurelian man.

Also, as I planned the mission, I got the idea that we wouldn't just be playing around Christmas, but that it ought to be Christmas, so I set the whole mission on December 24-25, 2374... worst Christmas ever! I named all the acts after Christmas carols, and the scenes after lyrics from them:

  1. If We Make It through December
    1. Got Plans to Be in a Warmer Town
    2. I Shiver When I See the Falling Snow
  2. God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
    1. Let Nothing You Dismay
    2. To Save Us All from Satan's Power
    3. Tidings of Comfort and Joy
  3. Soul Cakes
    1. The Dogs at Your Front Door
    2. Any Good Thing to Make Us All Merry

Jem'Hadar torpedo embedded in station infrastructure
(screen capture from DS9: "Starship Down")
(And, as always, I changed the name of the episode to be more pretentious.)

Playing the Mission

Of my players from the summer, four were able to play in this one-off. Of those four, two had characters established as being on the USS Diversitas during the Dominion War:

  • Debi as T'Cant, first officer
  • Kenyon as Nevan Jones, engineer

The Diveristas had a different captain, security chief, science officer, and medical officer during the war, so my usual captain (Ryan) and usual security chief (Austin) would have to play different characters; I suggested they switch it up and play different roles, too, which they embraced. That gave me:

  • Austin as Stojan Mayer, captain
  • Ryan as Phalnox Drin, science officer

Admiral Ross: "Merry Christmas, captain."
(I'm not sure what episode this screen capture is from)
I also reached out to two players from my original campaign who I liked playing with a lot. They hadn't wanted the three-month weekly commitment of my summer campaign, but were excited to join in on this smaller commitment... and even agreed to reprise their characters! They had been fresh-faced ensigns in 2371, so things were perfect for them to be a little bit further along in 2374. I made them members of special tactical squad being transported by the Diversitas:

  • Cari as Jor Lena, ordnance expert
  • Andrew as Gurg bim Vurg, surgeon

I encouraged the players to lean into the Christmas stuff, and they got into it; our "teaser" was a depressing ship's Christmas party interrupted by orders from Admiral Ross sending the Diversitas to Eldorado Omega.

Jem'Hadar battlecruiser
(image courtesy Ex Astris Scientia)
Playing the first act, though, confirmed to me that either 1) space combat in STA is terrible, or 2) I am totally misunderstanding it. It's basically impossible for my players to win! Even if they score, say, seven Damage, that gets eaten up by the Resistance the enemy vessels have... which then in turn gets eaten up by shields, meaning it takes forever to score any meaningful damage. And it takes a bunch of Breaches to destroy a ship. So I fudged it, but tried to do so consistently: first shields are taken down, then it gets eaten up by Resistance; if the players get a couple Breaches, the enemy ship is destroyed.

Thankfully, anyway, my characters got creative; they made a holographic image of their ship and remote-controlled torpedoes to come out of it, distracting one of the Jem'Hadar ships. Once they disabled one of the ships, they tractor beamed it into a second, causing the third to flee. This took up basically the whole first session. At one point, they lost all their shields, but some good rolling by Kenyon brought them completely back up. By the end of the first session, though, I definitely didn't want to do another space battle for act three. I came up with an idea for a space chase and a mechanic to implement it.

I had estimated that act two would take up the entirety of the second session... after three hours of actual play, we had got through four of its eight hours! The mission as written requires a lot of decision-making about who should do what when, so it proved pretty time-consuming, especially as my players got to grips with their options. In session three, they finished act two in just under two hours, and thus we had just over an hour for my space chase! So I did it in a pretty simplified way.

Overall, I think act two was very effective. I used glass gems to represent the station personnel, each representing five. As they beamed from station to ship, I moved them from one jar to another; as they died, I dropped them into a pile labeled dead! The game mat I used to track who was doing which task that took how much time (very important).

battling a Jem'Hadar commando
(from the Gamma Quadrant Sourcebook)
The players did good jobs thinking through who should do what task; Andy as Gurg focused on healing, of course (any interval where no one succeeds at a certain Medicine task, fifteen people die), and refused to leave that task to work on others despite the captain's orders, a good Value-based moment I gave him extra Determination for. Austin taking a Talent making the captain good at time management turned out to be critical, shaving lots of time off some of the longer tasks.

I did spend four Threat to introduce a Jem'Hadar commando... who immediately got KO'd by the science officer! But Ryan had deliberately (because of the wartime theme) built a science officer to also be good at fighting, complete with focus in MMA. And unfortunately I had no Threat to make the Jem'Hadar roll better. I had thought about trying to kill off his character because he was the one who could die, but now I'm into Ryan's idea that after the war, Drin gave up his Starfleet career to become an Orion pit fighter as "the Dominion Dominator"! 

Just pretend this is a New Orleans-class ship and that there's no wormhole.
(from the Gamma Quadrant Sourcebook)
Going into the last session, I thought it would set the tone to get the players to read out personal logs, so I incentivized this by offering an extra point of Determination to every player who wrote one up and read it at the session's beginning. Five of the six players did this, and I really enjoyed the logs... but that did mean going into the last session the group had eleven points of Determination available to it! They got pretty low on Momentum; had they not had all that Determination, I probably could have forced them to give me more Threat and made things a bit harder. But I liked the log thing, and I think in future campaigns I might ask one player to do it per session.

Lots of people did die... (140 I think), but few who could have actually been saved, I think; the players did save most everyone they could have, and they were creative and thoughtful in their application of Star Trek–style thinking to the problems they were facing. Maybe just having six players made it too easy? Third act aside, I found the scenario a strong one, and a good one for what I wanted; my players reported enjoying it.

Science Station Eldorado Omega
(this is a starbase design used on Discovery/Strange New Worlds
...but I flipped it upside down to match the battle image above!)
During the first session, Ryan got AI to write and perform a sea shanty–style Christmas carol about our battle: I found it pretty amazing. You can hear it here; my favorite line is, "And Jor Lena, she was laughing, her console aglow, / 'Let’s deck their halls with torpedoes, ho-ho!'"

Star Trek: Ekumene:
  1. "Patagon in Parallax"
  2. "A Terrible Autonomy"
  3. "Stinks of Slumber and Disaster"
  4. "Angels in Your Angles"
Specials:
  1. "Hear All the Bombs Fade Away"