Reading Trouble Under Oz Aloud to My Kid

Trouble Under Oz is the second Oz book by Sherwood Smith and William Stout, and a direct sequel to their first, The Emerald Wand of Oz. Elements left hanging at the end of the previous one—the mysterious clouds hovering over Oz, Dorothy's disappearance—continue to be referenced, though not resolved; the big continuing element here is Rikiki, better known as "Rik," the son of the old Nome King, Ruggedo. Here, he returns to the Nome Kingdom to attempt to claim the throne from his father's usurper, Kaliko. Ozma summons one of the two sisters from the first book, Dori, to accompany Rik on his journey, wanting someone friendly to Oz to keep an eye on the situation.

There's a game you can play with Ruth Plumly Thompson's Oz novels, where you try to figure out what Baum book she had recently reread before writing her own. Sometimes it's quite obvious, such as she must have reread Patchwork Girl before writing Ojo in Oz. Other times, the need to reread is less direct, but you can see it in the vibes; I maintain she probably reread Sky Island before writing Speedy in Oz, based on how the books overlap in their overall approach.

Trouble Under Oz by Sherwood Smith
illustrated by William Stout

Published: 2006
Acquired: July 2022
Read aloud: March–May 2025

You can play this game with Trouble Under Oz, too, though in this case it's pretty easy. While Emerald Wand didn't have a lot of specific references to Baum's Oz novels (other than some iconography from the first), Trouble is replete with details from previous books that most later Oz authors have not follow up on. Of course, there's a lot of Nome stuff here: the mechanical giant guarding the Nome Kingdom from Ozma of Oz, the neighboring kingdoms of the Nomes from Emerald City, the two Nome spies (the Long-Eared Hearer and the Lookout) from Tik-Tik of Oz, and Klik the Nome chamberlain and Prince Inga of Pingaree (whose parents were prisoners of the Nomes) from Rinkitink in Oz. Thompson nor any of the later Oz writers ever came back to very specific details like this; Klik doesn't pop up in any of her novels, as far as I know. On top of this, just like how Ruggedo sends our protagonists down a tube to the other side of the Earth in Tik-Tok, here Kaliko sends our protagonists down a slide to a deep underground location in Trouble Under Oz—specifically, to the same underground location Dorothy and her friends visited in Dorothy and the Wizard, the Land of the Mangaboos.

I guess this was probably part of the mandate; it seems like in writing Oz books authorized by the "Baum Family Trust," Smith was aiming to write ones that were particularly Baumish. I think it works for the most part. I've always liked the Nomes, and Smith weaves details about them from Ozma, Emerald City, Tik-Tok, and Rinkitink into a coherent whole, as well as adding her own. For the first time (since Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, anyway), we see Nome children, and we hear about Nome women for the first time ever. Smith has a good handle on the Nomes, I think, particularly Kaliko, who I've always enjoyed, especially when reading aloud. A lot of the details were lost on my kid, though; it was back in April 2022 that we read Rinkitink, almost half their life ago! So references to the three pearls of Pingaree didn't really resonate. 

That said, when Dori, Rik, and Inga were dropped into the Land of the Mangaboos, my kid instantly recognized where they were before the text actually said, not because they actually remembered Dorothy and the Wizard (which we read back when they were three, almost four years ago), but because around Christmas they read the Shanower/Young comic adaptation of it. This stuff, to be honest, seemed a bit like padding to me (particularly the appearance of another group of mermaid that Dori helps), but my kid got a kick out of recognizing the locations from that book, and would tell me things about them before they came up in the story, such as about the bears of the Valley of Voe.

The meat of the book is the stuff in the Nome Kingdom: Kaliko immediately abdicates in favor of Rik, but it turns out that the Nomes have a plan—several competing plans, in fact. Dori and Inga must help Rik navigate them and stay safe themselves. Overall, it's a pretty enjoyable book; I found it moved faster than Smith's first one, and I appreciated the focus on Rik. I did think that, much like the first book, it set something up in terms of character it didn't quite deliver on. I feel like Rik ought to have learned or grown from his experience, especially from the contrast with Inga, but that Smith didn't totally land it. Still, I enjoyed it.

Like in the first book, Stout's illustrations are sparse and too portrait-y. Things that would be interesting to draw are often left unillustrated; where are Rik's friends? On the other hand, some things illustrated are so random I feel like probably he drew the picture first and Smith found a way to work it into the narrative during revisions, such as a Nome warrior who does nothing at all and a patchwork castle that Dori flies over. (Is this in Patch from Nome King?)

Next up in sequence: Sky Pyrates over Oz

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever by Nnedi Okorafor, Alberto Alburquerque, et al.

Today, I'm reviewing two comics that both feature elements of Black Panther crossing over with the wider Marvel universe. The first is an issue of Marvel Super Hero Adventures where Spider-Man meets Black Panther, "Spider-Man and the Stolen Vibranium." This is a kid-focused comic that begins with a frame: here a regular-looking Spider-Man captures a diamond thief, who Spider-Man tells the story to, which is rendered in a less naturalistic style.

from Marvel Super Hero Adventures:
Spider-Man and the Stolen Vibranium #1

In this story, the Black Panther—who doesn't seem to have met Spider-Man before—whisks Spider-Man away to Wakanda to obtain his help when Doctor Octopus invades the country seeking vibranium to incorporate into his technology. It's pretty simple stuff; Black Panther originally wants a divide-and-conquer approach, but Spider-Man points out that each brings their own knowledge to the table—Spider-Man knows how the Octobots work, Black Panther understands vibranium—and thus they need to work together. It's perfectly fine. 

Probably the high point was when my four-year-old, who's currently obsessed with Spidey and His Amazing Friends on Disney Plus, saw me reading it, and I explained what was going on to him. Black Panther is a recurring character on that show, but Kid Two didn't know that he was a king and was pretty excited to learn this.

from Avengers: Wakanda Forever #1

Similarly, the next storyline, Wakanda Forever, begins with Spider-Man. Wakanda Forever is a three-part storyline focusing on the Dora Milaje, who need to chase down one of their own, Malice, who went bad during Priest's run and who popped up in New York City in Black Panther Annual #1. In the first issue, Spider-Man helps the Dora Milaje deal with Malice and recovering some Wakandan technology from the Titanic; in the second, the Dora Milaje team up with the X-Man when Malice attacks Storm at a grocery story; and in the third, some of the Avengers turn up to a big battle with Malice in New York City.

I felt like this series was a big missed opportunity. The Dora Milaje—in the comics anyway—are a fascinating institution. In theory, they're all potential wives for T'Challa, but he chose to have them trained as warriors to serve him. But even still, they were not allowed to talk to people other than him. The whole reason Malice went bad is that she loved T'Challa but would never actually be allowed to marry him. But by the present day of the comic, the Dora Milaje are very different; they have the freedom to speak to anyone, and even be involved in romantic relationships. How might someone who devoted her life to a set of strictures that were ultimately lifted feel about that? How do the new-era Dora Milaje feel about this woman who came up through a much different system than them?

from X-Men: Wakanda Forever #1

None of this is explored; Malice is a pretty generic villain who went bad for pretty vague reasons in this story. What's gained and lost as traditions are modernized is something the story doesn't do anything with. We don't really learn anything about the three main Dora Milaje here, Okoye, Aneka, and Ayo, who may as well be anybody for all they demonstrate in terms of distinctive personalities.

The first chapter and some of the second are illustrated by Alberto Alburquerque, who does reasonably good work, as does Ray Anthony-Height, also on the second. But I thought Oleg Okuney's work on chapter 3 was pretty ugly.

Marvel Super Hero Adventures: Spider-Man and the Stolen Vibranium originally appeared in one issue (June 2018). The story was written by Jim McCann, illustrated by Dario Brizuela, lettered by Joe Caramagna, and edited by Sarah Brunstad. It was reprinted in Marvel Super Hero Adventures: To Wakanda and Beyond (2018), which was edited by Jennifer Grünwald.

Wakanda Forever originally appeared in Amazing Spider-Man: Wakanda Forever #1, X-Men: Wakanda Forever #1, and Avengers: Wakanda Forever #1 (Aug.-Oct. 2018). The story was written by Nnedi Okorafor; penciled by Alberto Alburquerque (chapters 1-2), Ray Anthony-Height (2), and Oleg Okunev (3); inked by Anthony-Height (chapter 2), Alburquerque (1-2), Juan Vlasco (2), Keith Champagne (2), and Oleg Okunev (3); colored by Erick Arciniega; lettered by Joe Sabino; and edited by Wil Moss.

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE

Hugos 2025: "Lake of Souls" and Other Stories by Ann Leckie

Lake of Souls collects all of the short fiction by sf&f writer Ann Leckie to date; compared to some writers (say, Sarah Pinsker), this isn't very much. Leckie is clearly much more at home in the longer form than the shorter. The book contains eighteen stories: three from the world of the Imperial Radch (though, like most of Leckie's returns to this setting, not set in the actual Radch), seven from the world of her fantasy novel Raven Tower, and eight works not linked to larger settings, including one story original to this volume, "Lake of Souls," which is a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Novelette. I read the volume prior to the Hugo finalists being announced, but did not get around to reviewing it until after.

The useful thing about reading a short fiction collection is that it really allows you to triangulate what interests a writer. Prior to reading Lake of Souls, I'd read every novel by Ann Leckie... but that amounts to, arguably, just five stories (the original Ancillary trilogy, Provenance, Translation State, and Raven Tower). Add on the stories in this book, and I've gone from five stories to twenty-three! With this broader sample size, you obtain a deeper understanding of what Ann Leckie is interested in, what she's using her fiction to figure out.

Lake of Souls: The Collected Short Fiction by Ann Leckie

Collection published: 2024
Contents originally published: 2006-24
Acquired: July 2024
Read: March 2025

One thing that clearly drives her fiction is the way that our biology shapes our needs and desires. This is most obvious in the title story, "Lake of Souls," which has parallel narratives about the unusual life cycle of an alien species and a human explorer trying to work it out, but we also see this in "The Endangered Camp," "The Justified," and Translation State. Even more specifically, there's definitely an obsession with eating, with sentient beings that can devour other sentient beings. In a more metaphorical sense, this is the premise that drives the Ancillary trilogy: the Radch devours the bodies of other cultures to sustain its own imperialist conquests. The stories here and elsewhere ask what are the ethical imperatives of consumption—if you are driven to do this by biological need, is it wrong to eat other sapient beings?

Biology also comes into her fiction through an interest in parentage. To what extent are our actions determined by those of our parents or other ancestors? Can we escape them or move beyond them? Does parentage shape our actions even if we are adopted or raised by someone else? Both her novels Provenance and Raven Tower were about this to some degree, as are many of the stories here: "Another Word for World," "Bury the Dead," "She Commands Me and I Obey," and "The Snake's Wife." In these stories, children work to escape to the shadows of their parents, to forge their own identities.

Perhaps both of these concepts are examples of a larger interest in what we might call "systems of constraint." We also see this in the stories that come from the world of Raven Tower. (Though one should note the short fiction all preceded the novel; it developed the ideas she originated there.) As I discussed in my review of that novel, Leckie is "very good at the sf thing of taking a what if? and thinking through its implications. Here, the conceit is that praying to or making offering to gods gives them powers, and that anything a god says is true becomes true: if so, how would this work? We get a lot of different permutations of this, many of them quite clever. Yes, technically it's fantasy, but like (say) Jemisin in The Fifth Season, it's approached with an sf worldbuilder's mindset, which is how I like my fantasy." All the Raven Tower stories take this basic premise of how godhood works and explore its ramifications in various ways. 

To me, these were—for much the same reason I enjoyed the novel—the best stories in the book. Leckie is very skilled at setting up a set of constraints and exploring how this would affect the actions of various people. If a god makes a promise, how can they fulfill it? If a person commits themself to a god, how can they fulfill their obligations? I found these stories inventive and clever, taking a basic concept from the real world—making promises—and applying a fantastic veneer to it in order to deepen our understanding of it. But as fantastic as it is, I would argue this is just another version of what Leckie is doing in her biology stories or her parentage stories. We live in a world where rules and commitments imposed by others shape our behaviors: how do we navigate that ethically? what kind of promises do we make under those constraints?

(There are other themes we could identify, too, which won't be very surprising to readers of her novels, particularly an interest in empire and issues of translation.)

There are a number of strong stories here, of course, but the real strength of this book is the deeper understanding I now feel like I have of one of my favorite sf&f writers working today. It took almost twenty years for Leckie to amass enough short fiction to fill a single volume, so I guess I won't look out for a second collection until the 2040s, but until then, I'll continue to enjoy her novels.

The Pelican History of England #6: The Stuart Period (1603–1714)

Originally, The Pelican History of England covered the seventeenth century with 1952's England in the Seventeenth Century by Maurice Ashley. That would be the only volume in the series, however, to be totally replaced. While some went into many editions, and Roman Britain was even substantially revised by a different author, in 1978, Stuart England by J. P. Kenyon was published, and that was it for England in the Seventeenth Century. Why? I don't know. I own a 1990 printing of the 1985 second edition of Stuart England; perhaps the first edition explained this choice, but Kenyon's preface to the second mostly focuses on explaining the changes since the first. Maurice Ashley didn't die until 1994, so it wasn't that, say, he was unavailable to update the book or something.

Anyway, how's the actual book? I find it interesting how the writers of these books were obviously granted a lot of freedom in their approaches; Kenyon does something I don't remember seeing before, which is he doesn't just open by laying out a thesis about the period in question, but he actually takes differing theses about the period in question as his topic. Kenyon rejects the "teleological approach of the Whig–Liberal historians" (15) where "a form of government... proceeded, subject to various trifling adjustments, down to the present day, and which not only made the nation Free and Right but showed it to be Great and Right" (14). That is to say, a lot of previous historians viewed this period as the gradual but inevitable evolution to the current system of British government, where the monarch's power is subordinated to that of a permanent, elected Parliament: "We have been brainwashed into accepting the... theory of inevitable, almost effortless parliamentary advance" (44). But this evolution was by no means inevitable... but if you don't accept the claims of the Whig approach to history, what do you have left? "Instead of striding along a brightly illuminated high road, the historian now shuffles uneasily in a thick fog from one lamp-post to another, the lamp-posts wide apart and eccentrically sited, and frequently shifting their position" (15). How's that for a metaphor!?

The Pelican History of England: 6. Stuart England
by J. P. Kenyon

Second edition published: 1985
Originally published: 1978
Acquired: March 2025
Read: April 2025

The body of the book mostly focuses on the shifting status of the monarchy versus Parliament, which makes sense in a period that saw the temporary abolition of the monarchy, and another monarch run out of the country and replaced with someone else. The introduction does lay out some other issues, such as the fluctuating status of the gentry (25), and Kenyon mentions in his preface that the first edition did have a chapter on literature and art that he cut (9-10), but overall it's monarchs that he focuses on here. (I like what he says near the end of the introduction about James I and Charles I: "It is a truism that they did not understand the English; it is not always acknowledged that their subjects took some understanding" [56]). At first, this made me view the book as the kind of traditional history that previous writers in the Pelican History series largely eschewed. 

But when I got to the conclusion, I realized Kenyon wasn't going through kings (and queens) because he was interested in kings qua kings; I realized it was because he was specifically interested in the status of the monarchy versus that of Parliament, which he portrays as much more complicated than it was usually perceived as: "It is conventional to assume that 1649 and 1688, and even 1660, represent the triumph of parliamentary over monarchical institutions. With the benefit of hindsight this may seem obvious; it was not so at the time, and it is to be doubted if it ever was.... [W]eak and disorganized as the monarchy often was, Parliament was more so... (353). Kenyon ends up claiming that if power was vested anywhere, it was in neither monarchy nor democracy but aristocracy; the most stable institution of the era was the House of Lords: "What was founded in 1688... was not parliamentary monarchy but aristocratic monarchy" (355).

So, as a guide to how the monarchy and Parliament negotiated their shifting power, I found this a strong and clear volume of the series, one of my favorites... though like many of the later volumes in the series, it certainly benefits from having 350 pages to cover a single century, as opposed to three centuries or more. Parliament became increasingly bold in this era, for example asserting that Charles I needed "to give up all his powers of command, appointment and policy-making right across the board, even in the education, upbringing and marriage of his own children" (151)! Unfortunately, Kenyon argues, "few people outside his immediate family felt any emotional attachment to the person of the King, and without this he lacked the catalyst which might have transmuted a very strong and widespread support for the institution of monarchy into loyalty to the monarch himself" (154). Sure, people liked the idea of kings, but not this king, unfortunately for him. Similarly, Charles II could have concentrated power back in the monarchy, but Kenyon argues it was once again a problem of the monarch's personality: "in the first few vital years of the Restoration, Charles squandered all his chances. He was not a lazy man, but he lacked concentration, his interests were too diversified, and he did not apply himself to the business of governing" (211-12). If England had had monarchs with different personalities, the long-term victory of Parliament would have been by no means assured. Even so, when James II came to power in 1685, Kenyon claims that "the monarchy was at the very zenith of its power" (242-43), which historian overlook because of their "foreknowledge of the Revolution, only three years away" (242).

The negotiations over the Glorious Revolution are fascinating; basically Parliament wanted someone else to be king because of James II's Catholicism (among other issues) but also needed to thread a very narrow needle to make this happen. How can you ignore James II's son the Prince of Wales but claim that Mary ought to be the new queen regnant on basis of her being the child of James II? (275) Parliament ended up exerting a lot of authority over the monarch when it required monarchs to declare they weren't Catholic, and that they weren't allowed to marry Catholics either (277). Later this was extended to the monarch having to specifically be an Anglican (305). It used to be that monarchs established a government, but now there was "the concept of government existing independently of the King, who is just another official, though the most important one" (277). This all eventually resulted in some disputes: "Was [Queen] Anne's title purely hereditary, as the Tories insisted, or was it, as the Whigs argued, dependent on the Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement?" (336) How much power did Parliament have over the monarch?

Kenyon is a lively and opinionated writer at times; I laughed at his description of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham: "Such men do not attract first-class historians" (84)! Quite a burn to whatever biographers had written about Buckingham before him! If the book has a flaw, it's that Cromwell, the Commonwealth, and the Interregnum feel kind of glossed over... but I suppose that makes sense; if Kenyon's interest is in the power of monarchy, then the actual Interregnum isn't really of interest to him, only how it began and how it ended.

In our current era in America, where the executive asserts continually expanded powers, it's fascinating and almost comforting to realize what an aberration that last couple centuries in America have been. For most of human history, rulers often did just summarily imprison or execute their opponents. Yes, it hasn't been that way for some time, but that's just a blip across the scale of most of history. Cold comfort, one supposes, but I will take what I can get.

Teaching the Medical Humanities: General Course Design

This is the first in a series of (probably) two posts about a class I taught last semester and this. This one covers my general approach to the course.

My university has recently implemented a new general education program; faculty members design and propose courses in various areas that students can take to fulfill distribution requirements. For obvious reasons, here in the Department of English and Writing, we offer a lot of courses that fulfill the "text-based humanities" requirement. My colleague Claire proposed one called "Global Medical Stories," where the idea was that students would read different kinds of medical narratives, engaging in the "medical humanities." Classes in our gen ed program have to be able to be taught by a variety of faculty—they can't be classes just one person can teach—so I was asked if I was interested in the class when it was under development, and my name put down on the application. This mean that when a section came open in Fall 2024, I was asked if I wanted to teach it, and I said sure; I then taught another section in Spring 2025. 

Going in I was a bit worried. I'd said "yes" on the basis that a lot of my scholarship ends up discussing medical issues, particularly my work on vivisection, public health, and biocracy. But was I going to teach Wilkie Collins's Heart and Science or Charles Kingsley's Two Years Ago or Fergus Hume's The Year of Miracle in a 200-level gen-ed class? It seemed unlikely. So what would I teach?

Eventually I decided I could probably find a bunch of medical science fiction. That would allow me to discuss interesting issues but also play to my strengths. I will always have plenty to say in a class on sf!

I plotted out a bunch of short stories (more on that in post #2), but felt like I was coming up short of enough to fill up a whole semester; in an act of desperation, I asked the bookstore to order Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith. I'd taught it a decade ago and it had worked well, and now, post-COVID, it was even more relevant.

Arrowsmith got me thinking about some episodes of Radiolab I had enjoyed, particularly "Every Day Is Ignaz Semmelweis Day" and "The Great Vaccinator," both of which I thought really explicated some issues the novel raised in a more nonfictional way. When I looked at my colleagues' syllabus, she had a lot of nonfiction about medical topics, but that's not an era I know a lot about... but Radiolab podcasts... now there I'm an expert! (And podcasts are obviously not fiction, but they are stories about medicine, so they fit the class anyway.) I decided to pair a number of course texts with podcasts as a way of showing that the issues in the science fiction stories were issues in the real world as well. Some I was able to come up with myself; a request for suggestions on r/Radiolab also jogged some others in my memory.

Here are the podcasts I ended up doing, organized by what unit I used them in:

1. Public Health
• "The Great Vaccinator": the development of the mumps vaccine
• "Every Day Is Ignaz Semmelweis Day": the invention of handwashing
• "Playing God": ethical issues around who to prioritize when medical resources are scarce 
2. Disability
• "Unfit": people with low IQs and sterilization
3. Genetic Engineering
• "CRISPR": what CRISPR is and how it works
• "Seeking Patterns": how a medication changed someone's whole identity
4. Life Extension
• "The Bitter End": what lengths doctors would not go to to save their own lives

So, I had a class. Open with Arrowsmith, taking breaks for podcasts, and then do sf in the second half of the course, also with some podcasts. I think the first semester went pretty well, but I refined my approach for the second semester, which I think went even better.

The class requires three "Signature Assignments": two papers and a presentation. It was pretty obvious to make the first paper about Arrowsmith and the second about the sf. The first time, I had the students do video presentations about the topic of their second paper. I don't really enjoy watching video presentations, to be honest, and this seemed to add a lot of work for both me and the students in the last couple weeks of the course. 

Inspired by what my colleague Nicole was doing for presentations in her text-based humanities course, the biggest change I made going into the second semester was to the presentations. This time, I had them pick a podcast I hadn't assigned (Radiolab episodes I hadn't taught, but also some others I knew as well as suggestions solicited on Facebook). I had students present on whatever one they chose, providing a summary of key points and a connection to a text from the class. (Students were allowed to present on ones not on the list as long as they got preapproval from me, but no one did.) I don't know what the students though, but I found them fun and interesting, though I think my prompt needs some slight refinement.

Like many classes, I think the first time went okay and the second time went quite well; I think the exams and papers reflect much more this time out that students are thinking about the kind of things I want them to think. But more when I wrap up my thoughts next time!

Rise of the Black Panther by Evan Narcisse, Javier Pina, et al.

The "Coates era" of Black Panther comics has seen a lot of a releases so far: twenty-five issues of the main series, plus three six-issue miniseries and assorted other stories. And, as I have chronicled here in detail, most of it has done little for me. I found Ta-Nehisi Coates's main series overly long and dull; I have found most of the miniseries fairly pointless.

from Rise of the Black Panther #2

So it was nice to find myself enjoying Rise of the Black Panther. This was an origin retelling for T'Challa, somewhat surprisingly the first one of them we've ever gotten since the character debuted way back in the day. Coates is credited as "consultant"; I am not sure what that means, nor why he should get first billing on the covers of a series he did not actually write. (Based on reading his Black Panther work so far, he's the one who needs a consultant on how to write comics!) The series is scripted by a new-to-me author, Evan Narcisse, and largely illustrated by Javier Pina, who did some good work for DC on Manhunter and Birds of Prey in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Of particular note are the beautiful colors of Stéphane Paitreau.

Narcisse does what a good retroactive origin story does in my opinion, which is take a lot of existing disparate threads and weave them all together into something coherent—something that works on its own even if you haven't read the stories that are being referenced. Over the years, we've learned a lot about T'Challa's youth, and Narcisse unites it all: we see T'Challa's birth mother (for the first time, I think), we see how his adoptive mother Ramonda (from McGregor's run) came into his life, we get bits of backstory from Captain America / Black Panther, we have Shuri (from Hudlin's run) woven into the texture of T'Challa's youth. Various comics have other the years given us a lot of different pieces of T'Challa's family; here we get to see T'Challa's Uncle S'Yan (from Hudlin's run) incorporated alongside T'Challa's half-brother Jakarra—a character from Kirby's run I had forgotten about and would have guessed most writers had too!

from Rise of the Black Panther #1

Perhaps because it had a lot of ground to cover, there's a lot more going on in these six issues than has been standard in the overly decompressed comics of this era. If the series has a downside, it's that the first issue is the very best one, leaving the later parts of the series feeling a little disappointing. Not that they're bad, but there's just not as much going on as in the first. The first mostly focuses on T'Challa's father, T'Chaka, and his relationship with the legacy of his father, as well as the son who sees him die. The issue is narrated by T'Challa's mothers; using a first-person narrator isn't something any of the series's later issues do, but it adds a lot of depth to what's going on, and I wish Narcisse had used this device more later on; imagine S'Yan or Shuri as the narrator of T'Challa's life, I think it could have been very effective.

But that shouldn't be taken as a strike against this comic. Unlike some other material of the "Coates era," I found that this series maintained a strong character focus. This is the story of how T'Challa chose in involve both himself and Wakanda in the outside world, and Narcisse effectively follows that thread through T'Challa's interactions with Namor, with S.H.I.E.L.D., with Killmonger. Plus, Javier Pina is a strong artist, with clear action and good character work; I found he blended fairly well with Paul Renaud, who also draws a couple issues. And, like I said above, Paitreau does some beautiful coloring here that really adds to the atmosphere and coherence of the story.

from Rise of the Black Panther #3

Overall, this works really well as an introduction to T'Challa and his world, as well as a standalone Black Panther comic. I'd imagine Marvel made it to make sure there was an origin on the shelves at the time the film came out, but I suspect it's likely to be an evergreen one. Solid work from a good creative team, and I'd particularly be interested in seeing more from Narcisse in the future.

Rise of the Black Panther originally appeared in six issues (Mar.-Aug. 2018). The story was written by Evan Narcisse, with consultant Ta-Nehisi Coates; illustrated by Paul Renaud (#1, 3), Javier Pina (#2, 4-6), and Edgar Salazar & Keith Champagne (#5); colored by Stéphane Paitreau (#1-6), with Morry Hollowell (#6); lettered by Joe Sabino; and edited by Wil Moss.

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE

Hugos 2025: Star Trek: Warp Your Own Way by Ryan North and Chris Fenoglio

Star Trek: Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way

Published: 2024
Acquired: December 2024
Read: April 2025

Written by Ryan North
Art by Chris Fenoglio

Colors by Charlie Kirchoff
Letters by Jeff Eckleberry

I received this book as a Christmas gift from my wife and kids, but was given a bump to actually read it when it was selected as a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story—the first Hugo finalist I'll be writing up on this blog. It's a choose-your-own-adventure-style comic book set in the world of Star Trek: Lower Decks, where you play as Ensign Beckett Mariner. (This makes it the first Star Trek tie-in to be a Hugo finalist; I really must update my Star Trek at the Hugos post.) Writer Ryan North is the perfect man for this project, as both a longtime comics writer who knows how to work within constraining forms and wrote a choose-your-own-adventure version of Hamlet.

It's very cleverly done, much more cleverly than it needs to be, to be honest. I'm going to spoil the whole thing here, so if that bothers you, don't read the rest of this post.

The book begins with you waking up; you can elect to bother Tendi and Rutherford in Engineering, Boimler who's off-duty, or your mom on the bridge. Depending on what you do, different bad things happen: a Borg attack, a tribble infestation, and so on. I ended up in the various paths around the Borg attack initially, and quickly came to realize they all ended with everyone dying... except that if you had only known the Cerritos's prefix code, you could have (for some reason) saved the ship. Eventually I went down one path where there were a pair of voices talking after you died about obtaining the prefix code, and about how you only ever went for a very limited range of choices.

Eventually, I exhausted all the paths, but skimming through it, I could see there was a lot of the book I hadn't gained access to yet. I started just flipping through, and eventually I found a page where instead of being able to pick between coffee and raktajino for breakfast (which is how the book begins), you were also able to pick tea. With a little bit of detective work, I was able to figure out how you ought to be able to get there" the mysterious voices say at one point that they can't introduce new choices but it is possible to add existing choices. If you add together the coffee page number with the raktajino page number, you get to the tea page—and that unlocks a whole new network of choices.

What you start to figure out is this is all a holodeck simulation, explaining why different bad things happen if you make different choices. There's Star Trek explanations for the whole structure and format of the book, justifying the form in terms of the content. It's very cleverly done! You as the reader also begin to participate in book, talking to Mariner about what she's doing and why. You have to help Mariner figure out a way out of this situation, which begins to turn even more grim than you might have imagined. There's another bit where you have to do math to make a jump from one part of the book to another, this one cleverly done, where on one bad ending, Mariner gives you half of a math problem, and you have to play out another bad ending to get the other half of the math problem, so that you can put both those things together and finally get to a path that allows you to play out a good ending.

So yeah, it's put together incredibly well (see my diagram of it on the right), using Star Trek tropes to explain a lot of choose-your-own-adventure tropes, and pushing the form into interesting, unusual directions. The ending is even kind of moving, as you save the Cerritos, but the crew of the ship don't really understand what actually happened. This was my first Best Graphic Story finalist, and I wouldn't have guessed it going in, but upon finishing it, it immediately felt like the one to beat!

I do have one very pedantic complaint: for a book where page numbers are essential, they are printed annoyingly small! It's harder than it needs to be to flip through this book, and you need to flip through it a lot.

The Pelican History of England #5: The Tudor Period (1485–1603)

My copy of the fifth "Pelican History of England," Tudor England, is a 1982 printing of a 1950 publication; unlike the other books in this series (which ranged from two to eight editions by the 1990s), it doesn't ever seem to have gone into a later edition. Also oddly, it actually overlaps with the previous volume in the series, England in the Late Middle Ages. That book's final section covered up through 1536, whereas this one jumps back to 1485. Though actually, as the books were published out of order, it's England in the Late Middle Ages (1952) that's the anomaly; Tudor England came out first.

The Pelican History of England: 5. Tudor England
by S. T. Bindoff

Originally published: 1950
Acquired and read: March 2025

Tudor England opens with King Henry VII's victory at the Battle of Bosworth Field, and it's central approach to the era is to consider how the monarchs of England attempted to stabilize what had been a pretty unstable era politically. As Bindoff says in his introduction, "A Crown which had become a football was ceasing to be a referee, and a game which begins... without a referee runs a risk of finishing without a ball" (8). So while it might be odd that there's a fifty-year overlap between this and the previous volume, I appreciated it because I found Bindoff's approach to the era much more focused and clear than Myers's. Unsurprisingly, Bindoff is very interested in the Protestant Reformation and how it took place, and how it was kept in position.

Like Myers, though, one of the thing Bindoff considers is how quick and easy the breach with Rome was under Henry VIII. Bindoff's take is that "[t]he air of inevitability which hangs about the great events of these years is the inevitability, not of gradualness, but of breakneck speed; and the fact that they took place so quickly goes far to explain why they took place at all... Something must be ascribed to the forcefulness of the royal personality which inspired it. Henry VIII is not, to most people, an attractive figure... [b]ut he was beyond question a masterful one" (95-6). Even when people rebelled against the Reformation, Bindoff argues that it wasn't really about the religion but governmental power; discussing one set of demands, he says of the protestors, "[t]hey made no attempt to argue the theological issues, and it is doubtful whether even the priests among the rebels would have been much interested in or conversant with these. What had stirred them and their flocks to anger was the sudden and, to them, unwarranted suppression by a remote government of the rites and symbols which made up so large a part of their religion" (156).

Bindoff argues that once done, rolling back the Reformation was a tricky business. Sure, England once again received a Catholic queen when Mary came to the throne... but "[i]f the Mann was now legally restored, it was because parliament had restored it; and if Mary were no accounted legitimate, it was because parliament had declared her to be so. What a statute had taken away, only a statute could restore.... In grounding his Reformation upon parliamentary authority Henry VIII had invested parliament with a competence in matters spiritual which not even the most Catholic of his successors could take away" (169). When Queen Elizabeth came along, Bindoff argues she basically didn't care about all this religious stuff, and kept her theological opinions private. "But was not a ruler whose only real belief was belief in herself, and whose only real devotion was devotion to her people, the ideal restorative for a country which had just undergone the drastic purge of the Marian Persecution?" (189)

If the crown had been a football, as Bindoff claimed at the beginning, it was Elizabeth who finally stabilized things after a long period of instability, and her ability to move beyond religious sectarianism seems to have been a major factor in that. Near the very end of her reign (1601), Bindoff remarks on a speech she gave: "Not many present could remember the time when she had not been Queen, and those who could did not cherish the memory.... [E]ven those who were already looking forward to the exciting novelty of a King could not deny the majesty of this Queen's leave-taking" (306).

Overall, I found this one of the more effective volumes of this series, certainly aided by the fact it only has to cover just over a century in its 309 pages, but also by Bindoff's clear focus. Many of the earlier volumes tried to take in the whole social picture of England, but by emphasizing how the monarchy led up to, carried out, and dealt with the repercussions of the Reformation, Bindoff provides a direction to this volume that keeps everything in context, even if there's less emphasis on broader social trends than there were in some previous volumes.

One bit that caused me to raise my eyebrows a bit, though, was Bindoff's take on the end of Queen Mary's reign; he says she "sank into a melancholia bordering on insanity"... partially because she couldn't have any kids (181). Would Bindoff speak this way of a male sovereign? Would any historian write about a woman sovereign this way now? I'm guessing "no" in both cases, and it made me want to read a more modern, more sympathetic take on her.

Reading The Emerald Wand of Oz Aloud to My Kid

In 2005, a major publisher released an Oz book, one consistent with the Famous Forty (or, at least, the original fourteen by Baum)—I am pretty sure this was an unprecedented event, as any major post-FF Oz book has been a "noncanonical" take like Wicked or Dorothy Must Die, and any canon-consistent book has been a small-press release from a publisher like Hungry Tiger Press or Books of Wonder or the Oz Club. But through book packager Byron Preiss, HarperCollins obtained the rights to brand their new Oz book as licensed by the Baum Family Trust.

To be honest, it's not totally clear to me what everyone involved got out of this. Everything in Baum's original books is in the public domain now, so what did HarperCollins need from the Baum Family Trust? Was it just a marketing hook? If so, it's hard for me to imagine it was really that much of a draw. The book was written by a legitimate fantasy author, Sherwood Smith, who had written dozens of fantasy novels before Emerald Wand, unlike most canon-consistent post-FF authors, who are Oz fans first and writers second. Two more would follow; the first two were illustrated by William Stout, who I guess is famous but I can't claim to have heard of.

Anyway, I've long been curious about it, so when my six-year-old kid and I finished all the other somewhat "official" Oz books written by Royal Historians and/or released, we continued on to these. The books feel less calibrated for reading aloud, though, than Baum and his imitators; the chapters have no titles, the chapter lengths are variable, and the illustration density is particularly low, not even one per chapter. I think there's a one-hundred-page stretch here with no pictures at all! It seemed to me this was more aimed at a middle-grade audience reading on their own. (Which certainly is an audience of a traditional Oz novel, but not the only one.)

The Emerald Wand of Oz by Sherwood Smith
illustrated by William Stout

Published: 2005
Acquired: July 2022
Read aloud: February–March 2025

Aside from a confusing opening chapter (more on that later), the book focuses on Em and Dori, two sisters from modern Kansas, supposedly related to Dorothy Gale. They are children of recently divorced parents, and Dori has dealt with this by retreating into fantasy and imagination; she's a big fan of the Oz books, and sends her toy ponies on adventures. Em has dealt with this by treating everything factually and rationally; she keeps her toy ponies in pristine condition on the shelf. The two are magically whisked to Oz during a tornado, where they end up in a country ruled by unicorns attended to by doting children. (I thought that the geography is right for this to be Unicorners from Ruth Plumly Thompson's Ojo in Oz, but double-checking, it looks like Unicorners is in the Munchkin country, and the valley here is in the Quadling.) Initially Dori is thrilled and Em is not, but both girls come to agree that it's an unpleasant place and attempt to make their escape, which takes some doing, including assistance from a friendly mermaid and a mysterious vagabond boy named Rik.

After this, the girls plus Rik travel to Glinda's palace to seek her help in getting home, only to discover that Glinda has become vapid; a wicked witch named Bastina (the niece of the Wicked Witch of the West) has cast a spell on Ozma, rendering her and all loyal to her empty-headed and impressionable, though this doesn't affect magically animated beings. Thus, the girls must work together with the Scarecrow, Scraps, Jack Pumpkinhead, and the Glass Cat to travel to Bastinda's castle and undo her enchantment, all the while trying to see how much they can trust Rik... who turns out to be Nome! (Specifically, the son of the original-but-deposed Nome King, Ruggedo f.k.a. Roquat. By this point, I think Ruggedo's a cactus according to Handy Mandy, but I don't believe these books ever specify his whereabouts.)

As always, my six-year-old seemed to have a good time; I think they particularly enjoyed the shenanigans involved in the battle against Bastinda and her dimwitted gecko guards. 

I found the book a bit frustrating because it promises something it doesn't quite deliver. The opening of the book really hinges on character conflict between Em and Dori, Em's logic versus Dori's imagination. One imagines, then, that the book ought to resolve this conflict... but it doesn't, not really. At a certain point, the girls are just getting along and everything is fine. It's frustrating, because it seems like the ingredients are all there: obviously Dori turns out to be right, when Oz is real, but surely Em should also turn out to be right, and I feel like the obvious moment for this is when the girls are in Unicorn Valley. Like, Dori's love of fantasy should have her seduced by the glamor of the unicorns in a way that Em is able to see through, and the girls learn to pool their strengths. But this doesn't quite happen; by the end, Em has just come around to Dori's side and they get along, but there's not really any moment or moments that push them there. It's frustrating because the book is so close on that score.

Smith's Oz feels a bit less whimsical than Baum's; she includes his whimsical characters, but her own additions to the mythos feel like very familiar ones to a twentieth-century children's fantasy fan: unicorns and mermaids and hints of dragons. It feels like Oz for the My Little Pony generation. (This was before Friendship is Magic, so I guess I mean the OG MLP generation; Smith would have been in her thirties when that came out.) There's nothing like the Dainty China Country or the Wheelers or what-have-you here. Some of the emphasis on using magic to perform mundane tasks (like doing dishes or washing clothes) feels a bit Harry Potter, which I suppose is right; this came out at the same time as the sixth novel, at the height of Pottermania. It feels like a more "conventional" fantasy realm than the one Baum gave us. I think the result of this is, unfortunately, that Smith's Oz doesn't feel like as "fun" a place for its main characters to travel through as Baum's. There's a joy in crossing (most of) Baum's landscapes that's largely lacking here.

I was intrigued by Smith's hints about the wider Oz world; Bastinda apparently went to some kind of magical school, but this isn't spelled out. Again, this is probably a Harry Potter–inspired thing, but Ruth Plumly Thompson did allude to a school for wicked magic-users in one of her books! I wanted to know more about the origins and motivations of Bastinda than we got here.

Perhaps we will, or perhaps Smith intended to, anyway. There are indications here of a larger story arc; Dorothy is missing, and Glinda and Ozma are unable to locate her with the Magic Picture or the Great Book of Records. There's also a mysterious cloud with evil faces in it that occasionally bedevils our heroes. Rik, too, is set up to return—he is a focal character in Smith's next book, Trouble Under Oz in fact. I enjoyed Rik, and Smith does a good job pacing out the clues as to Rik's true nature; my six-year-old picked up on it immediately before it was revealed. On the other hand, as alluded to above, I found the opening chapter frustrating. It contains an overwhelming amount of exposition about a magic crystal ball in Dori's possession, and I'm not sure why, as this all needs to be reexplained to Dori later on. My six-year-old—usually quite good with this kind of thing!—got confused pretty easily. Why not have us find out this stuff as Dori does? Feels like something an editor misguidedly demanded Smith add to the book.

The illustrations by Stout are pretty stately, usually portraits instead of scenes. I can certainly see their technical competence, but they feel devoid of the Ozzian whimsy that suffuses the work of Denslow, Shanower, and especially Neill.

Next up in sequence: Trouble Under Oz

Reading Roundup Wrapup: April 2025

Pick of the month: The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler. A bit of a squeaker on this one; I finished this book late afternoon on the last day of the month, but I instantly knew it was the best thing I'd read all month. More when I get around to writing up my Hugo finalists, I guess, but a beautiful piece of science fiction writing that packs a lot into its one hundred pages. Up until I read it, Warp Your Own Way was my runner-up, a funny but well-assembled piece of comics. I also really enjoyed "The Mountains of Mourning" in Borders of Infinity; if the whole collection had been as good, it probably would have been my top choice instead.

All books read:

1. Raising Kids with Big, Baffling Behaviors: Brain-Body-Sensory Strategies That Really Work by Robyn Gobbel
2. The Pelican History of England: 6. Stuart England by J. P. Kenyon
3. Someone you can Build a Nest in by John Wiswell
4. Star Trek: Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way by Ryan North and Chris Fenoglio
5. The Hunger and the Dusk, Volume 1 by G. Willow Wilson and Chris Wildgoose
6. So Let Them Burn by Kamilah Cole
7. Borders of Infinity by Lois McMaster Bujold
8. The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler

All books acquired:

1. The Martian Contingency by Mary Robinette Kowal
2. Star Trek: The Next Generation: Collateral Damage by David Mack
3. Someone you can Build a Nest in by John Wiswell
   
4. The Ministry of Time by Kailane Bradley
5. What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher
6. Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky
7. The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett
8. The Penguin History of England: 7: England in the Eighteenth Century by J. H. Plumb
9. Blackhawk: Blood & Iron by Howard Chaykin, Martin Pasko, Rick Burchett, Mike Grell, et al.
10. Star Trek: Starfleet Academy by Mike Johnson, Ryan Parrott, and Derek Charm
11. Doctor Who: The Evil of the Daleks by Frazer Hines with Mike Tucker & Steve Cole
12. A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher
13. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Toward the Night by James Swallow

The Hugo finalists were announced this month, which meant I picked up a bunch of books! Specifically, #3-7 and 12. Would have been an above-average month even without that, I guess. 

Currently reading:

• Memory’s Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection by James S.A. Corey
• The End of the World: Classic Tales of Apocalyptic Science Fiction compiled by Michael Kelahan
• Declarative Language Handbook: Using a Thoughtful Language Style to Help Kids with Social Learning Challenges Feel Competent, Connected, and Understood by Linda K. Murphy
• The Martian Contingency by Mary Robinette Kowal
• The Penguin History of England: 7. England in the Eighteenth Century by J. H. Plumb
• Blackhawk: Blood & Iron by Howard Chaykin, Martin Pasko, Rick Burchett, Mike Grell, et al.
• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Toward the Night by James Swallow

Up next in my rotations:

1. Victorians and the Prehistoric: Tracks to a Lost World by Michael Freeman
2. Star Trek: The Next Generation: Available Light by Dayton Ward
3. American Gods by Neil Gaiman 
4. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 669 (no change)