Hugos 2020: The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

Trade paperback, 394 pages
Published 2020 (originally 2019)
Acquired and read June 2020

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

I felt like this riff on portal fantasies had an interesting idea but never really kicked into gear. I've been focusing a lot in my Hugo reading comments over the past few years on a subgenre forming around Ancillary Justice, but the "self-aware portal fantasy" is another one that clearly has a strong presence, in things like McGuire's "Wayward Children" sequence (as well as Middlegame to an extent), Kingfisher's Summer in Orcus, and Brennan's In Other Lands. These are portal fantasies written by and for adults who were children who grew up consuming portal fantasies. Harrow sets her novel at the time of some of the earliest ones (the bulk of the action is set in 1911), and thinks about this question: if our world is full of portals to other worlds, what's coming in to our world?

The problem I had is that the resulting novel is pretty mundane. The book talks about the promise of the portal, the idea that going through a door can take you to this amazing world, and as someone who grew up on Oz and Narnia (and started my own novel about being swept away to Oz when in middle school), I empathize with that feeling. But the novel neverrnever makes you feel it. We barely glimpse any other worlds, and the ones we do... aren't very interesting, to be honest. Harrow talks about that sense of magic you get when crossing over the threshold to Narnia in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in the interview in the back of my edition, but I never felt that here.

There was flashes where I was intrigued or drawn in. January is a good protagonist, her childhood is depicted evocatively, the way the doors worked was neat, and there are a couple harrowing (heh) sequences. The prose is good, though it occasionally drifts into an overly precious Seanan McGuireesque mode. The reveal of the big bad, though, was annoying, because multiple characters are surprised by who it is and what his plan is, even though there's literally no other rational interpretation of events. If I was supposed to be misdirected as a reader, the book failed miserably; if I was supposed to know what was going on even as the characters were misdirected, the book made it a misery to read about. The idea of this book is a lot more interesting than the actuality of it.

"A world at war! And against the forces of Axis darkness, the mightiest heroes of Earth-Two have banded together, under direct orders of the President, as the... ALL-STAR SQUADRON"

All-Star Squadron is an important moment in the history of superhero comic books. In the letter column of issue #10 (Feb. 1983) is the first recorded occurrence of "retroactive continuity," the word later shortened to "retcon." Writer Roy Thomas uses it in response to a letter from Lee Allred (who would himself become a comic book writer of, among other things, Fantastic Four and Batman '66 Meets the Legion of Super-Heroes). Allred praises Thomas for his "matching of Golden-Age comics history with new plotlines." Thomas's reply makes it clear the word is not his coinage: "As for what Roy himself (myself) is trying to do, we like to think an enthusiastic ALL-STAR booster at one of Adam Malin's Creation Conventions in San Diego came up with the best name for it, a few months back: 'Retroactive Continuity.' Has kind of ring, don't you think?"

Retcons would go on to be one of the major creative forces of the superhero comics industry, and it all begins here! Well, kind of. That statement's untrue in two ways. One is that comics writers had long been willing to "retcon" things when needed. The other is that this actually isn't how we now think about retcons. Often these days, "retcon" is used to mean an idea that retroactively wipes out old continuity: think of all the different origins of Green Arrow. Sometimes the new origin is justified in-story (e.g., a timeline change), but sometimes a new writer just tells an old story a new way. But Roy Thomas means the opposite. This isn't new continuity that retroactively disregards old, but new new continuity that retroactively slots in.

All-Star Squadron takes as its premise that all the Golden Age comics adventures happened as written. (Basically, anyway.) But in between those adventures, these ones happened. The series begins on the eve of Pearl Harbor; after the Japanese attack, President Roosevelt organizes every American superhero into the All-Star Squadron, who will fight the Axis on the home front. This gives Thomas access to every character published by DC in the 1940s, plus those published by Quality Comics (whose characters were published by DC after the company ceased operations in 1956). The resulting organization has an extraordinary amount of members (over fifty), though in practice the comic tended to focus on a smaller set of the larger membership. Thomas weaves the adventures of the A-SS (um...) in and out of real Golden Age stories, as well as real World War II history.

It's pretty enjoyable stuff. There are two sets of characters Thomas tends to prioritize: the core Justice Society members (e.g., the Atom, Doctor Fate, the Spectre, and so on) and a set of characters whose adventures are much less chronicled (usually Liberty Belle, Johnny Quick, Robotman, Commander Steel, Firebrand, the Shining Knight, Amazing-Man, Tarantula). I tended to enjoy the book more when it focused on this latter set. I don't think the JSA qua the JSA is notably interesting: too many of them are square-jawed heroes who come from money, and of course their storylines are fairly set in stone.

But the other characters-- whose own series were short-lived, and whose futures were wide open-- give Thomas a canvas to do more. I really liked both female leads. Liberty Belle is the leader of the All-Stars, a real Golden Age character given new life here. I liked her a lot: a fierce, opinionated woman who swam the English Channel to escape the Nazis and who now argues in favor of American military intervention in the war through her radio show, she's a strong leader character in the Saturn girl mode. Plus she has a cool costume, complete with jodhpurs. (It took me some research to figure out why her pants had this weird thing on them.) Firebrand is a Roy Thomas creation, a distaff version of an existing Quality Comics character. Wealthy society girl Dannette Reilly replaces her brother when he's incapacitated during Pearl Harbor and she spontaneously gains fire powers. Again, a fun character. Many of the others are good, too: Robotman is a tragic character with a perpetual smile, Commander Steel too has a tragic background. (Steel was a retcon character from a brief 1970s WWII-set ongoing. More on him when I eventually jump back to his series.) I liked Amazing-Man, a black Olympic medalist spurned by his own country. These characters could change, go places, enter relationships, and so on.

This is the kind of comics I like. A team made of diverse personalities, working together. I did feel sometimes as though I liked the idea of the characters more than the actualities, as Thomas will never be praised for amazing dialogue or character-focused plots. But it's the kind of comic series that's greater than the sum of its parts: I have fond memories of its sprawling cast, even if I couldn't point at a specific story and say, "That one made good use of them."

The stories weave in and out of existing Golden Age stories, as I said. Thomas usually fills you in or recaps, which is fine. He was at times more interested in the retroactive continuity than the other elements of storytelling. In Annual #3 (1984), for example, we learn that Green Lantern stepped down as chairman of the JSA because he accidentally killed someone. This isn't a character point-- it's never mentioned before or since, it never affects any decision he makes-- it's just there to explain why he was abruptly replaced as chair between issues in the original All Star Comics run of the JSA. Or Hourman struggles with an addiction, but Thomas doesn't get any character mileage out of it; it just explains why he switched from using a pill for his powers to a ray. There's also a lot of time spent explaining how some characters are on Earth-Two in these stories even though they were on Earth-X in a JLA/JSA crossover from the 1970s. At first it's interesting, but it goes on and on and it's honestly contrived even for this medium.

What was more interesting was the way Thomas grounded the series in the war. I know the comics actually do a lot with the war, but in my experience, it's in a pretty jingoistic, simplistic way. Thomas weaves All-Star Squadron in and out of the actual events of World War II. The All-Stars deal with the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, attack Japan (unsuccessfully) in revenge, save Churchill from assassination during a real America visit, discover the Ultra-Humanite was responsible for a real act of sabotage, fight in the real Battle of Santa Barbara, and so on. The Justice Society members enlist as ordinary soldiers and officers, but soon end up activated as the Justice Battalion under the command of the War Department, Roy Thomas expanding a real Golden-Age story into a multi-issue saga.

Probably my favorite of all of these was when Thomas had the All-Stars involved in a real 1942 Detroit race riot in issues #38-40 (Oct.-Dec. 1984). (Black defense workers brought in to increase production were met with hostility by white residents.) He's not afraid to criticize his own leads; at first, many of the All-Stars (who are all white except for Amazing-Man) are all, "Well, really, both sides are violent and thus should be criticized" before finally realizing that maybe it's worse to be a violent racist than someone using violence to defend themselves from violent racists.

One aspect of the series is somewhat ridiculous: it ran sixty-seven regular issues; the first sixty make it from December 1941 (Pearl Harbor) to April 1942. That's twelve issues per month of story time on average, though February disproportionately has twenty-three issues (plus two annuals) devoted to it. It took two years of actual release time to get through February, almost an issue for each day of the month! To make it to V-J Day, All-Star Squadron would have needed to run about 528 issues. To be able to do that, it would still need to be running now, as with issue #1 debuting Sept. 1981, #528 wouldn't be reached until Oct. 2024 if I've done my sums right.

I feel like this was somewhat optimistic.

I would really like to know why Roy Thomas took this approach. Why stretch it out so much? He did go on to cover May and June 1942 in the sequel series The Young All-Stars (which I haven't yet read), but that still leaves over three years of wartime uncovered! So we have seven months packed with superhero incident, and many more comparatively empty. He had to know even at best, All-Star Squadron would make it to 100 issues tops. It sometimes feels contrived within the story, even; there's a story set in 1942 that explains a powers and costume change the Atom underwent in 1948. Why are we explaining this now and not in 1948? Or, there's a bit where we're told Robotman built a special aircraft to transport the All-Stars in his spare time. What spare time!?

The art is always solid; Thomas was assigned and/or picked good collaborators, the best of which was Jerry Ordway. Ordway's done great stuff since as both writer and artist, but this was his first ongoing comics assignment; he inked most of issues #1-20, and pencilled most of #19-29 (before departing to co-create Infinity, Inc., again with Thomas).

There are some specific stories worth commenting on in brief:

• #9-10: "Afternoon of the Assassins!" / "Should Old Acquaintance Be Destroyed…" (May-June 1982) wraps a frame story around an unpublished issue of Gerry Conway's Steel, the Indestructible Man series from the 1970s. Conway's dialogue is left mostly intact; Jerry Ordway inks over Don Heck's 1970s pencils. It's a clever idea, though in practice, I found the Steel flashbacks kind of dull. I wonder if I will enjoy them more when I read the preceding issues.
• #13: "One Day during the War…" (Sept. 1982) is a slice-of-life story following a number of All-Stars on a single day. It's neat, and quiet, and the kind of thing I wish Thomas had done more often. (Though Dannette gets over her anti-Japanese racism improbably easily.)
• #18-26 and Annual #1 (Feb.-Oct. 1983) form a gigantic epic about the All-Stars battling the Ultra-Humanite and his/her minions, as well as another version of the Ultra-Humanite from 1984, and their own descendants in Infinity, Inc.! A big cast, a big story, it slowly build from a single confrontation with Thor(!) to a massive showdown. Great stuff, superhero comics at its best.
• #36-37: "Thunder over London!" / "Lightning in Berlin!" (Aug.-Sept. 1984) bring in Captain Marvel from Earth-S, temporarily under Nazi mind-control. It has its high points (I liked how Superman was mad because he thought Marvel was a knock-off), but it's way too easy for the All-Stars to sneak into Hitler's HQ and back out again. That should have been much more tense!
• #50-56: Special Crisis Cross-overs (Oct. 1985–Apr. 1986) cover how the Crisis affected 1943. This was neat, because I had a little frisson when I realized that #50 was leading into a scene I remembered from reading Crisis on Infinite Earths for the first time... all the way back in 2008! But this time I had a context for who Dannette Reilly was! And the sub-plot about Mr. Mind popping over from Earth-S to do a really bad job of running a supervillain team was some inspired comedy. Some of it was tough reading, though; the issue about defending Cape Canaveral against time-lost Indians seemed to have nothing to do with anything. But there was some fun stuff... even though the Crisis sounded a death-knell for All-Star Squadron, as several All-Stars could not have existed in this new context, and several others would have to be substantively changed. Roy Thomas grumbled in a letter column that at first he was told he could have an exemption for his series: Earth-Two could exist in the past, even if in the present it had been merged with Earths-One, -Four, -S, and -X. But I can see why this wasn't allowed to happen: if the goal of Crisis was to reduce confusion, saying there was an alternate Earth in the 1940s whose history had been erased doesn't seem like it would do it.
• #52, 55-59: Shanghaied into Hyperspace! (Dec. 1985, Mar.-July 1986) is a series of back-up stories showing what the Justice Society was up to during the Crisis. A Nazi plot (supplied by the Monitor) launched them into space, each to a different planet in the solar system; a passage by Harbinger knocked each rocket into a different timeline. This is apparently an expansion of an actual JSA story, the parallel timelines conceit being used to explain why the eight planets are nothing like they are in reality or even other DC stories. An okay idea, but Thomas is (as he often is) too faithful to the terrible stories, and they are deathly dull to read.
• #57-60: "Kaleidoscope" / "I Sing the Body Robotic!" / "Out of the Ashes… Mekanique!" / "The End of the Beginning!" (May-Aug. 1986) are technically post-Crisis, but the crimson skies remain as Roy Thomas ties up loose continuity ends before the series completes. He explains this as a the timeline changes being delayed by Mekanique, a robot villainess from the future. There's a neat bit where at the beginning of #60, a photo is taken of the All-Stars, then Mekanique lets history change, then the photo is developed, and you can compare the "original" to the photo and see which characters have been replaced (e.g., the Golden Age Superman no longer exists, but now Uncle Sam is there, as Earth-X's history has been folded in).

Issues #61-67 are an extended epilogue, no longer advancing the story of All-Star Squadron as The Young All-Stars was prepared. There are origin stories for Liberty Belle, the Shining Knight, Robotman, Johnny Quick, and Tarantula in #61-63, 65-66 (Sept. 1986–Feb. 1987), some of which are interesting, some not. Liberty Belle, the Shining Knight, and Johnny Quick didn't get very developed origins during All-Star Squadron's main run, so that was nice, but on the other hand, the stories of Robotman and Tarantula were hashed out in detail already. Plus we get a fun missing adventure in #64 (Dec. 1986), slotting in between issues #46 and 47 (June-July 1985). The last issue, #67 (Mar. 1987), rounds things out with a retelling of All Star Comics #4, the first real JSA adventure. As always, Roy Thomas is so faithful to the original as to make you wonder why he bothered! It's a fizzle of a last year for a comic that had been moving from success to success prior to Crisis.

On the whole, All-Star Squadron is the exact kind of superhero comic I enjoy. I like comics for the way they span large chunks of time, take in multiple issues and ideas, and build a tapestry. The joy of them for me is in the almost accidental way they do so: I love Green Arrow, for example, for his lack of constancy. If the character had been the same all along, I don't think I'd like him so much. All-Star Squadron is fun because it takes that accidental continuity and brings some coherence to it. But at the same time, it's just another installment in the accidental picture of Earth-Two, drawing on what Gerry Conway and Paul Levitz did in the 1970s, and providing a foundation for what other writers like James Robinson would do in the 1990s and beyond.

Oh, and having their base in the Trylon and Perisphere from the 1939 World's Fair was super-cool. 

This post is the third in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume One. Previous installments are listed below:

1. All Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever (1976-79)
2. The Huntress: Origins (1977-82)
   

Review: The Huntress: Origins by Paul Levitz, Joe Staton, et al.

Comic trade paperback, 224 pages
Published 2020 (contents: 1977-82)
Acquired January 2020
Read February 2020

The Huntress: Origins

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Writer: Paul Levitz

Penciller: Joe Staton
Inkers: Steve Mitchell, Bob Layton, Bruce Patterson, Jerry Ordway, Bob Smith, Mike DeCarlo
Colorists: Adrienne Roy, Anthony Tollin, Gene D'Angelo
Letterers: Todd Klein, John Costanza, Ben Oda, Janice Chiang, Bruce Patterson, Jean Simek, Milt Snapinn

The Huntress was, I think, the first concept original to Earth-Two to receive an ongoing feature since Earth-Two became Earth-Two, i.e., since the end of the Golden Age and the return of its characters as alternate reality denizens in the Silver Age. It demonstrates the potential of the concept: the Huntress is a character who could only exist on Earth-Two, a young woman trying to find her own way in the world while living up to the legacies of her superhero father and supervillain mother. You couldn't tell this story on Earth-One, but this kind of thing would become the backbone of Earth-Two stories, and then with the integration of Earth-Two, into DC's approach to its superheroes in general.

This story, where she has to defend a retired Alfred, was one my favorites, I think.
from Wonder Woman vol. 1 #294 (art by Joe Staton & Jerry Ordway)

The individual stories here are probably nothing special, but they work. Helena works at a public-interest law firm by day and fights crime by night. There's a nice sense that this is all grounded in the social realities of Gotham; you've read much more fanciful Batman-adjacent stories. The Huntress was always a feature in an anthology title, so the stories are typically serialized across installments of about eight pages, which keeps them moving briskly. I couldn't single any one story out, but I know that as I read them, I was always interested and engaged.

Nice eyebrows.
from Wonder Woman vol. 1 #271 (art by Joe Staton & Steve Mitchell)

Part of that is because of Joe Staton. Staton, I think, is a now-neglected heavyweight of 1980s comics, an era where he did good work on Legion of Super-Heroes, Green Lantern, Action Comics, and Millennium (among, I'm sure, others). I always like his atmospheric style, but it's particularly suited to adventures in Gotham City at night, sometimes blocky, but with Helena's athleticism and attractiveness always clear.

A very helpful torturer.
from Wonder Woman vol. 1 #289 (art by Joe Staton & Bruce D. Patterson)

This volume collects the first five years of Huntress solo adventures, all of the ones written by Paul Levitz. Joey Cavalieri took over writing the character after that, with Staton continuing on art at first, up until the point the character was obliterated by the Crisis,* but none of that material has been collected. Unfortunately, as I'm willing to track down some pretty random stuff, but buying a ton of issues of Wonder Woman because of a back-up feature doesn't really appeal.

* Well, beyond, actually, as Cavalieri also wrote the 1989-90 ongoing series that introduced the post-Crisis Huntress, who had no relationship to Bruce Wayne or Selina Kyle.

This post is the second in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers All-Star Squadron. Previous installments are listed below:

1. All Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever (1976-79)
   

Review: All Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever by Gerry Conway, Paul Levitz, Joe Staton, et al.

Comic hardcover, 446 pages
Published 2019 (contents: 1976-79)
Acquired January 2020
Read February 2020

All Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever

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Writers: Gerry Conway, Paul Levitz

Pencillers: Ric Estrada, Keith Giffen, Joe Staton & Wally Wood
Inkers: Joe Giella, Dick Giordano, Dave Hunt, Bob Layton, Joe Staton, Wally Wood
Colorists: Liz Berube, Carl Gafford, Adrienne Roy, Jerry Serpe, Anthony Tollin
Letterers: Todd Klein, Bill Morse, Ben Oda, Milt Snapinn

I've decided to read my way through most of DC's Earth-Two/Justice Society work. Specifically, I'm interested in what they did with the concept from the late 1970s to the early 2000s. The Justice Society qua the Justice Society doesn't particularly interest me: I have no need to read a bunch of 1940s team-up comics. Rather, one of the thing I like most about DC is the sense of legacy and development, and I think you could argue that really starts with the Justice Society of America: because those characters didn't need need to stay eternally youthful like the Earth-One/Justice League ones, they could age, have children, change identities, and such, and when Earths-One and -Two were merged during the Crisis, this aspect of the premise got incorporate into the wider DC universe. So I'm not reading (much of) the old stuff, and I'm not going into the Geoff Johns era because, really, a little bit of Geoff Johns goes much too far in my experience. (And then in the "New 52" era, DC abandoned what made the concept work entirely.)

Helena, you're the best.
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #465 (script by Paul Levitz, art by Joe Staton & Dave Hunt)

Anyway, I think that whole approach to the JSA really begins here, with its first ongoing revival in the 1970s. At this point the JSA had guested in a number of Crisis on Multiple Earths stories, but this was the first time they appeared as the stars of their own series since they were shunted out of All Star Comics back in 1951.

Go Justice Society!
from All-Star Comics #74 (script by Paul Levitz, art by Joe Staton & Joe Giella)

That said, this isn't that great. I mean, it's totally serviceable superhero action... but that's about it, with a couple exceptions. Gerry Conway and Paul Levitz have the sort of storytelling where the JSA is plunged from adventure into adventure: usually each storyline ends with a hook for the next already underway. But this actually makes the adventures seem small-- the pacing is never able to emphasize anything. It also makes it feel like these characters don't really have any lives outside of this title, since there's no gaps where they can live their own lives and have solo adventues. I mean, they literally don't, since none of them have ongoing series... but I would argue that they ought to feel like they do. Where do Sylvester Pemberton or Power Girl even live? What do they do when not superheroing? They feel more like, I dunno, the Teen Titans or the X-Men, than they do the multiversal equivalents of the Justice League.

Bruce Wayne: in any reality, still a jerk.
from All-Star Comics #69 (script by Paul Levitz, art by Joe Staton & Bob Layton)

Most of the original threats here aren't very interesting, either. Vulcan, the astronaut who's always on fire? Some underground people? (Why is it always with the underground people in comics?) The writing is a little inconsistent, too. No one seems to know if Power Girl can fly or just jump really far. (In the earliest Golden Age comics, Superman could just jump really far, but by this point, he was long able to fly, and Power Girl ought to have the same power set.) Sometimes the book seems to be about a subset of the JSA called the "All Star Super Squad" but this is pretty inconsistently indicated, and eventually fades away.

And to think, Roy Thomas brought this guy back. Roy Thomas gonna Roy Thomas, I guess.
from All-Star Comics #60 (script by Gerry Conway, art by Keith Giffen & Wally Wood)

I did think it was interesting that the "parallel Earth" angle was occasionally pushed: this Earth has no apartheid in South Africa, for example. Not much was done with that, however.

If I was decades out of time, surely the thing I'd be reading about was earthquake science, too. (In later issues of All Star Comics, as well as Infinity, Inc., it becomes clear he didn't even look up his own family!)
from All Star Comics #59 (script by Gerry Conway with Paul Levitz, art by Ric Estrada & Wally Wood)

That said, this comic has some interesting seeds and nuggets. I liked the development of Dick Grayson, now American ambassador to South Africa. I liked the introduction of Power Girl, even if she was sometimes written too broadly. (I think you can write a confident feminist, and not have her come off like this.) I liked the secret origin of the Justice Society. I liked the Wildcat focus issue. I liked the idea of the Star-Spangled Kid being out of time. (In execution, I didn't always understand it. Why was he so lonely? Weren't all of the Seven Soldiers of Victory out of time? Go hang out with them!) I liked the introduction of the Huntress. I liked the death of the Earth-Two Batman. I liked the explanation for why the JSA was inactive from 1951 to the mid-1960s.

Oh, poor Helena.
from All-Star Comics #71 (script by Paul Levitz, art by Joe Staton & Bob Layton)

You can see how later writers, especially Roy Thomas in the 1980s, would pick up and develop what was done here. There's the kernel of a good premise here, but (as it often is in mass-produced superhero comics) it will take a while for it to develop.

I haven't got to it yet, but I'm pretty sure Roy Thomas turned this one-issue story about the end of the original JSA into a whole epic.
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #466 (script by Paul Levitz, art by Joe Staton)

(A couple quibbles about this collected edition. It's clearly from the same "masters" as the Justice Society, Volume 1 and Volume 2 collections of 2006. Those collections replaced references to issue numbers from the original comics with ones to collections of that era. Now, those make no sense: they should have been updated again or (my preference) changed back to the originals. Also, it would have been nice if Justice League of America #171-72 had been included here, between Adventure Comics #465 and 466, since those issues of Adventure lead into the JSA's appearance in JLA and follow up on it. Also, I remember it as being rather good! Also also, I think choosing "All Star Comics" as the series imprint is weird; I feel like people are far more likely to find what they want and know what they're looking at with "Justice Society" branding. Collections of issues of Action Comics are never called "Action Comics" on the cover, and if they are, it's "Superman: Action Comics.")

This post is the first in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers The Huntress: Origins.

All the Star Trek Stories You Need to Watch before Viewing Picard Season One

(Season one of Picard finished three months ago; I may or may not bother to write up a review of it. However, I started this post when the season was airing and so wanted to finish it off.)

from Picard 1x05: "Stardust City Rag"

Back before Picard started airing, my wife and I viewed a series of episodes I thought might give her context for Picard: she's seen little Next Generation and less Voyager. This definitely helped, but even at the time, I knew we'd left some stuff out-- and I was mostly just guessing based on the trailers and rumors. There were several other episodes I had not guessed would turn out to be relevant. (Definitely some random guest stars!)

So once the whole season was over, I sat down and figured out every episode you needed to see to understand the new show. Either because it directly fed into Picard, because it gave some useful character context, or because it set up another episode on the list. Now, you don't really have to see all of this (Hayley had seen only thirteen of them before Picard began, though we circled back to watch a couple more once I realized they were relevant), but they might help give you maximum enjoyment of the many callbacks and Easter eggs, and make you care about some stuff you wouldn't otherwise.

On the other hand, they might make you like it even less! (I found that some of the stuff Picard did did not ring true with "The Measure of a Man," for example.)

from TNG 4x02: "Family"

I've separated out my rationales into a separate list at the bottom of the post because knowing why some episodes fit in will spoil some aspects of Picard clearly designed to be surprising. Note that the list does assume you have a general familiarity with both The Next Generation and Voyager already: I did not go so far as to, say, include "Encounter at Farpoint" to introduce you to the Enterprise-D crew, or "The Child" to introduce Guinan and Pulaski, or "Endgame" to explain how Voyager got home.

1. TNG 1x13: "Datalore"
2. TNG 2x09: "The Measure of a Man"
3. TNG 2x16: "Q Who" 
4. TNG 3x16: "The Offspring"
5. TNG 3x26: "The Best of Both Worlds"
6. TNG 4x01: "The Best of Both Worlds, Part II"
7. TNG 4x02: "Family"
8. TNG 4x03: "Brothers"
9. TNG 4x11: "Data's Day"
10. TNG 5x23: "I Borg"
11. TNG 6x26: "Descent"
12. TNG 7x01: "Descent, Part II"
13. Star Trek: First Contact
14. VGR 3x26: "Scorpion"
15. VGR 4x01: "Scorpion, Part II"
16. VGR 4x02: "The Gift"
17. VGR 4x06: "The Raven"
18. VGR 5x15/16: "Dark Frontier"
19. VGR 6x16: "Collective"
20. VGR 7x02: "Imperfection" 
21. Star Trek Nemesis
22. Star Trek (2009)

from VGR 6x16: "Collective"

Rationales

1. Prerequisite for #8; first appearance of Lore; first discussion of Data's backstory
2. First appearance of Bruce Maddox
3. Prerequisite for #5; first appearance of the Borg
4. Data's first attempt at creating a daughter
5. Picard is assimilated
6. Continuation of #5
7. Continuation of #6; first appearance of Chateau Picard
8. Prerequisite for #11; first appearance of Soong
9. Data's friendship with Maddox established
10. Prerequisite for #11; first appearance of Hugh
11. Prerequisite for #12
12. Final pre-Picard appearance of Hugh
13. Picard re-encounters the Borg
14. First appearance of Seven of Nine
15. Continuation of #14
16. Continuation of #15
17. First exploration of Seven's backstory
18. Further exploration of Seven's backstory
19. First appearance of Icheb
20. Significant point in Seven and Icheb's relationship
21. Final pre-Picard appearance of all TNG characters; death of Data; first appearance of B-4
22. First mention of Romulan supernova

Review: The Expanse: Nemesis Games by James S.A. Corey

Trade paperback, 563 pages
Published 2016 (originally 2015)
Acquired July 2019
Read January 2020

Nemesis Games: Book Five of The Expanse
by James S.A. Corey

This didn't quite work for me, though I did like it better than book four. For the first time, the non-Holden members of the Rocinante crew are point-of-view characters, which is nice, but the book often feels aimless. Both Amos and Alex go to check up on old acquaintances, easily resolve what's going on, and then get roped into a totally unrelated adventures, which feels like a weird structural choice.

Halfway through the book, something big and significant happens, but it's so big it becomes abstract. But the book does pick up from that point and become the usually solid James Corey action thriller with an appropriate touch of character and thematic depth. So I look forward to seeing what future books do with this, but I feel like this middle trilogy is a bit of a slump.

Listening to James Bond at the BBC (Part III: You Only Live Twice)

So far, I've listened to eight James Bond adaptations produced by BBC Radio, in a series begun in 2008 and still ongoing (a ninth came out earlier this year). These are narrated by Martin Jarvis and star Toby Stephens as Bond, and you can read my commentary on them here and here.

But back in 1990, the BBC did a one-off starring Michael Jayston as Bond, written and directed by Michael Bakewell (who also adapted the excellent BBC Lord of the Rings, fact fans). Curiously, they adapted You Only Live Twice, so the play is the culmination of a rivalry between Bond and Blofeld we never heard begin and revenge for a killing we never experienced. I've no idea why someone decided the sole James Bond novel that needed adapting was the closing installment of a trilogy. The closing moments of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, with the death of Tracy, are dramatized for us as a prologue, however.

Like the BBC adaptations of 2008 onward, it's a pretty straight adaptation. Some condensation, of course, but otherwise no real liberties are taken with the original plot. This means that it lives or dies on the quality of the source material... and You Only Live Twice is the fourth-worst James Bond novel. We're told Bond is self-destructive, but mostly he sits around and listens to other people give him lectures on Japanese culture. The fact that he's been asked to infiltrate the citadel of the man responsible for killing his wife is still a mind-boggling coincidence. And, unfortunately, on radio the defeat of Blofeld is even more glibly easy than it was with Fleming's tense prose.

Michael Jayston plays Bond. I think he does a good job, but he doesn't have much to do. He's snobby when he needs to be. I found him his most effective when he's being charming to Kissy Suzuki; for the first time, personality comes through. I would have liked to have heard him in an adaptation of one of the better Bond novels, like From Russia with Love or On Her Majesty's Secret Service; I suspect he would have done much better than Toby Stephens in those. (Stephens is almost never charming.) I did like Ronald Herdman's Blofeld, and James Laurenson's Dikko Henderson was suitably ridiculous.

You might not be surprised to learn that only one Japanese character is (as far as I can tell) played by a Japanese actor. Sayo Inaba (who had a starring role in the 1980s BBC sf programme Star Cops) plays Kissy Suzuki, but most everyone else is white, including Clive Merrison in the principle Japanese role of Tiger Tanaka. (British telefantasy mainstay Bert Kwouk is also in it... but he's Chinese. Close enough?) I would say this wouldn't fly today, but Sophie Aldred was putting on a Chinese accent in Big Finish's The Avengers: The Lost Episodes just a couple years ago!

Overall, this is a curio. It won't really give you anything you can't get from the book, except for the trivia that only one actor has played both James Bond and Doctor Who. (Jayston played the Valeyard, the "amalgamation of the darker sides of [the Doctor's] nature, somewhere between [their] twelfth and final incarnation" in 1986's The Trial of a Time Lord.)

Review: The Lady Astronaut of Mars by Mary Robinette Kowal

Kindle eBook, n.pag.
Published 2014 (originally 2012)
Acquired and read August 2019

The Lady Astronaut of Mars by Mary Robinette Kowal

This novelette was the first-written story in Kowal's "punchcard punk" Lady Astronaut series, but it is set last. Unavoidably, as she clearly tweaked aspects of it when it came time to write the full-length novels, this story jars, and I think I would have been better off reading it in publication order, rather than chronological order.

The broad details line up with the later-written novels, but it doesn't quite fit. This story says Elma used to have a habit of folding paper eagles out of discarded punch cards, something she never actually does in the prequel duology. This story riffs on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, with an orphan named Dorothy on a Kansas farm with an uncle named Henry and an aunt named Em; no one comments on what a weird coincidence that is. It must be meant to be a literary device, not a literal thing, but that's not the tone of the very grounded novels. (The character of Dorothy also appears in The Calculating Stars, but the Oz elements are downplayed.) I think worst of all is that the entire plot of the novelette revolves around whether Elma will go through a "tesseract field" to another star system, a fanciful thing that doesn't fit with the hard sf approach of the novels. As a result, it's hard to buy the emotional dilemma upon which the entire novelette rests.

Review: The Fated Sky by Mary Robinette Kowal

Trade paperback, 381 pages
Published 2018
Acquired and read August 2019

The Fated Sky by Mary Robinette Kowal

The Fated Sky continues the story begun in The Calculating Stars, of Elma "Lady Astronaut" York, and her mission to get into space. When the book opens, she's making regular runs to the lunar colony... but her real goal is to go on humanity's first trip to Mars, which is what occupies the majority of the book.

It's enjoyable stuff. I like those kind of space problem-solving stories; this is Apollo 13 or The Martian, but with more human drama because they're all cooped up together for so long. My biggest issue is that it feels a little tension-free at time, just because you know how a novel like this has to be structured, and it doesn't really throw any big surprises at you, just little ones. I think I probably liked the first one more, but this one had some great moments here and there.

Review: The Walking Dead: Compendium Four by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Stefano Gaudiano

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2019 (contents: 2015-19)
Acquired October 2019
Read December 2019

The Walking Dead: Compendium Four

​

Creator, Writer: Robert Kirkman

Penciler, Inker: Charlie Adlard
Inker: Stefano Gaudiano
Gray Tones: Cliff Rathburn
Letterer: Rus Wooton

Finally our long national nightmare is at an end. Finally no one has to read anymore Walking Dead comics.

I found this a volume of two halves. The first half was enlivened by the "Negan reforms" subplot, Negan being one of basically two characters I have ever given a shit about in this series.

But then Negan departs the series and it goes on to be more "Rick waffles about a thing." Rick's community discovers a massive society out in Ohio, but they are dystopian. I found a lot of this improbable. The first journey to the other society was very lengthy and protracted over weeks; by the end of the book, it felt like the characters were zipping back and forth in hours. (There's one bit where a group of characters comes to the rescue of another by coming a day later. Why would you decide one day after someone left to follow them in the case they needed help at the end of their weeks-long journey? And how come you couldn't get one group member to run a little faster and catch them up?) The new society has a rule that everyone automatically gets the same social status as they had before the zombie apocalypse... but like, why? And how would that be enforced? Why would everyone buy into it?

There's potential in finding a new group of survivors who did things differently than Rick and thus were more successful (usually they only find less successful groups), but as always Kirkman manages to strip the debate of all nuance by making the people with a different perspective slatheringly evil. And as always Rick seems like he's going to face a moral dilemma, but doesn't have to make an actual hard choice because events take it out of his hands.

The epilogue issue is dumb, too. Everyone venerates Rick, but I don't know why, because what useful thing did Rick ever actually do? In his final issue, Rick talks about how they can create a new society with potential to undue the mistakes of the old one... when we actually see the new society, it's just as shitty as ours. Well done, mate, you sure showed how good your values were.

Plus the revelation that the series's back cover blurb is an in-universe inscription on a statue of Rick is staggeringly stupid.

Anyway, I don't know why I staggered all the way to the end even though I never really liked this series except in short spurts, but it was always a quick read at least. You couldn't pay me to start watching the tv show, though.

Review: The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman

Hardcover, 633 pages
Published 2019
Borrowed from my wife
Read November 2019

The Book of Dust, Volume Two: The Secret Commonwealth
by Philip Pullman

This was okay. I think it's just not the genre one would expect from a His Dark Materials follow-up. The Golden Compass was a quest fantasy, one of the best I can remember; this is... essentially an espionage thriller? Those have very different terms, and unfortunately, those terms don't really capture what made me want to read the book in the first place. I did appreciate the deepening of Lyra's world, but Lyra herself felt lost in this book. Way too many times was she bailed out of a situation not by her own cleverness, but because someone happened to notice her and take pity on her and help her out. What happened to the clever Lyra Silvertongue? I know that's a plot point, but it's not very interesting to read about a character who used to rescue herself constantly be rescued by other people. The potential is there, though, so hopefully Pullman uses this foundation to tie it all up effectively whenever volume three comes out.

Hugos 2020: Middlegame by Seanan McGuire

Trade paperback, 528 pages
Published 2020 (originally 2019)
Acquired May 2020
Read June 2020

Middlegame by Seanan McGuire

I enjoyed the premise of this fantasy novel: an evil alchemist creates a pair of twins to embody the Doctrine of Ethos. One is the power of mathematics, the other language, and they're raised on opposite sides of the country. Only they discover than can talk to each other telepathically, and they begin a long-time, on-and-off sibling relationship that the book chronicles to good effect. There are times the cut each other off, times things get bloody, times they actually meet. Also, one has the power to roll back time, so periodically when things go horribly wrong, the book resets a few chapters and then goes off in a different direction.

I would say I was really enjoying it up until the point where they figure out what's going on, at which it kind of went off the rails. A lot of exposition has to be delivered very quickly, and it's very clunky. I felt like they accepted things too easily in some ways, and were weirdly resistant to them in others. And then the climax feels like the climax to an action movie, not a character novel, and is too dependent on what up until that point had been a pretty minor element of the novel (the novel within a novel, A. Deborah Baker's Over the Woodward Wall). Plus I didn't find the powers of the twins, once expressed, very compelling. "Math" seemed to boil down to "can do anything if the author can think of a number word to use"... but on the other hand, "language" was basically just "is very persuasive when speaking," which I kind of wanted more for. Like, wouldn't an understanding of stories be more interesting and apt? But in fact, the language twin feels like a dunderhead when it comes to comprehending stories.

I had a lot of nitpicks, too. In a great book you forgive nitpicks, but in a mediocre book, you tend to blow them up. Things that bothered me: Ohio is not in the Central Time Zone, I had no idea what the book meant by Roger's "New England accent, thick as pancake batter" (and I lived in New England nine years!), the details of graduate school and academia did not ring true (for example, no one would refer to their time in a graduate program as their time "in college"), and the excerpts from Over the Woodward Wall did not feel at all like something supposedly written in 1896 (for example, no one in 1896 would call a child "average" outside of a scientific context).

Review: Stringtown on the Pike by John Uri Lloyd

Hardcover, 414 pages
Published 1900

Acquired July 2019
Read November 2019

Stringtown On the Pike: A Tale of Northernmost Kentucky by John Uri Lloyd

I read this as part of my project to read novels set in or near my hometown of Cincinnati; "Stringtown" is a fictionalized version of Florence, Kentucky, about 12 miles away from Cincinnati, and 26 miles from where I grew up. A few scenes are set in Cincinnati, as the protagonist goes to UC for chemistry classes. It's set shortly after the Civil War, and I gather was very popular in its day. (Lloyd wrote a further five novels about the denizens of Stringtown.)

It's also inexplicably boring. People just talk and talk about stuff that doesn't matter; there's no coherence to this thing, and when there is, half of it is in terrible black dialect, so it's virtually unreadable. I got bogged down in this book for months. Tons of side-stories that go nowhere, a main plot that borders on the incomprehensible, a romance you won't give two shits about. I regret slogging through to the end.

Hugos 2020: Paper Girls 6 by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2019 (contents: 2019)
Acquired and read October 2019

Paper Girls 6

Writer: Brian K. Vaughan

Artist: Cliff Chiang
Colors: Matt Wilson
Letters: Jared K. Fletcher

I enjoyed Paper Girls through to the end, though I kind of suspect I would have liked volume 6 more if I had read it in quick succession with the rest: the time shenanigans get complicated, and I read the thirty issues stretched out over twenty-nine months; volume 6 came ten months after volume 5! But I enjoyed the character beats here and the triple-bluff ending and the glimpse at the paper girls' future, even if it probably doesn't happen that way. Someday I'll sit down and read it all in quick succession. (Who am I kidding? I never have the time to reread anything.)

Review: Best State Ever by Dave Barry

Trade paperback, 229 pages
Published 2017 (originally 2016)

Acquired December 2018
Read September 2019

Best. State. Ever.: A Florida Man Defends His Homeland
by Dave Barry

My brother-in-law bought this for me shortly after we moved to Florida; I read a lot of Dave Barry in my youth but probably none for the past two decades. The first two chapters are the best parts, where Barry mounts a defense of Florida and then provides a history of it. Lots of good jokes that I subjected my wife to.

The remaining chapters are a series of visits by Barry to weird places in Florida, where he chronicles his adventures. The jokes here aren't as dense as in the first chapter, but I was still entertained, especially at his visits to the Weeki Wachee mermaid show ("no other nation on Earth possesses the capability to put on a more powerful display of underwater mermaid patriotism") and the Villages (a retirement community where supposedly old people have lots of sex, but Barry can't find any, just old people belting Jimmy Buffet karaoke). He also visits the skunk ape museum, a fancy night club, a shooting range, and as many bars on Key West as he can. It probably took me less than a couple hours to read, and I enjoyed the experience.

Review: Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Trade paperback, 1037 pages
Published 2003 (originally 1852-53)

Acquired December 2019
Read January 2020

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

I really enjoyed this, the most recent of my attempts to read a Charles Dickens novel every year. You might say that Dickens had two different approaches to the novel: there's the bildungsroman that focuses on a single character, told in the first person, like David Copperfield (1849-50) or Great Expectations (1860-61). Or there's the "vast sweep of London" novel, taking in numerous strands and characters, like A Tale of Two Cities (1859) or Our Mutual Friend (1864-65). Bleak House is both, alternating between sections told in the first-person past tense by Esther Summerson (Dickens's only female narrator) and those told in the third-person present by an omnipotent narrator. (Anyone who thinks Victorian novels were stodgy in their formats has clearly never actually paid attention to them. Take that, modernists!)

Each of these would be a good novel on its own. Esther is a great Dickens protagonist, Dickens bringing his usual attention to detail when it comes to the development of the self. There are some great jokes (I love the one about the kid who fell down the stairs). The other half is one of Dickens's best crafted sweep-of-London novels, I think, with so many disparate parts that all revolve around a central point even when it doesn't seem like it. There are lots of great characters: the Jellabys, Vholes (if you made the law comprehensible, men like him would be out of work!), Sir Leicester, many more.

I'd be curious to see sometime if I'm right, but I actually think you could read each of these strands as its own novel and it would work fine, a book called Esther Summerson and another called something like In Chancery or Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Dickens has done great work (well, and bad) in both of these forms, but here he's wedded them together. I think it works really well, thanks to the divergent styles. Dickens is always interested in how people are shaped by societal forces, and Bleak House gives us both a novel of a person and a novel of societal forces at once, letting Dickens explore that balance to its fullest effect. Esther wouldn't be Esther without all the machinations around Jarndyce and Jarndyce, but if her sections were told like all the others, I think she might get lost in the novel. This isn't my favorite Dickens (that's probably still Great Expectations), but it's definitely up there.

"I want to feel love, run through my blood": Spectre

Strictly speaking, Spectre isn't an adaptation of any one James Bond novel, but when it was released in theatres, the book tie-in was The SPECTRE Trilogy, collecting Thunderball, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and You Only Live Twice into one volume, so I decided to watch it after finishing all three of those books, treating it as an adaptation of the set. It's quite a jump to go from Sean Connery in 1967 to Daniel Craig almost fifty years later!

Spectre came out in theatres in November 2015, when I was just barely into this project of reading all the Bond novels and watching their accompanying films; at the time, I had just made it up to book #3, Moonraker, and hadn't even watched the film of it yet. So my primary Bond reference point when I saw it was the three previous Daniel Craig films, each of which I'd seen in theatres as they came out, as they were the only Bond films I'd seen for over a decade. I remember not liking Spectre, finding it goofy and somewhat contrived.

But this time watching Spectre, my context isn't three gritty films featuring Daniel Craig, but the past five years of working my way through the entire Bond canon. Goofy and contrived? Even the good James Bond movies are usually goofy and contrived. I remember, for example, not being a fan of the car chase in Rome, but this time I enjoyed it, down to the bits where Bond gets stuck behind an old Italian man's tiny car, and where he lands in the middle of the street and casually discards his parachute. Those parts don't really mesh with the tone of Casino Royale, but they wouldn't be out of place in For Your Eyes Only or You Only Live Twice.

Indeed, there's clearly an attempt to "do a Bond film" here, with lots of familiar set pieces: a street festival foot chase, a car chase in a city environment, a downhill snow chase (no skis, alas), a train fight, a stay in the villain's lair where he acts the host. You can see echoes of many other films. But they're usually lively: I really like the opening shots in Mexico City, for example, and I've already mentioned the Rome chase. The snow chase had some great moments (Bond just resignedly crashing his de-winged plane into a barn); I didn't find the train fight very strong, though.

That said, the Mexico sequence I remember as being a little more effective. Maybe it works better with the drums surrounding you in theatrical sound, and with you not distracted by folding your laundry?

The weakness of the film comes when it lurches away from the spy formula into the superhero formula. On original viewing, the way Bond's "team" (M, Q, Moneypenny, and Bill Tanner) acts as back-up during the final battle didn't sit well with me; it feels like something out of, say, Thor 2 or Man of Steel. This time that didn't bother me, but the decision to link Bond's history with Blofeld's is awful. Bond (in both his prose and Daniel Craig version) is a spy, a blunt instrument, a man who would have self-destructed if he hadn't found a way to channel his tendencies, and who is very good at what he does. To make him special, into a person who just happens to be linked to the leader of the planet's greatest crime syndicate... that's not Bond, that's Batman.

I'm not even sure why it was done. There's no point where Bond approaches the situation differently because of his shared history with Blofeld, no point where it causes Bond to reconsider something about himself. Blofeld has a perfectly good motivation for not liking Bond, based on how Bond has (retroactively, anyway) spent the previous three films screwing with Blofeld's plans. It was dumb when I saw it in theatres, and it's dumb now. On the other hand, I remember hating how Christoph Waltz slowly became more like the Donald Pleasance Bond across the course of the film, but it didn't really bother me this time. And I did enjoy Waltz's performance: he's no Terry Savalas, but he's surely one of the better Blofelds.

The other thing I remember hating in theatres was the second climax-- after Bond's escape from Blofeld's lair, he returns to London and his team deactivates the creation of a new international surveillance system that is going to be hijacked by Spectre. There's a big countdown and stuff, but it all feels contrived: surely if Q shut it down a couple hours after it was turned on, everything would be fine. It feels like a tacked on attempt to raise the stakes... but it was fine. As tacked-on attempts at global jeopardy go in Bond films, you could do a lot worse.

As always, Daniel Craig nails the part. I like the sense of weariness in the quiet moments, the sense of ruthlessness in one-on-one scenes like Bond interrogating Mr. White. Léa Seydoux was great as Madeleine Swann; I always think Bond "girls" are well done by when they are shown to be highly competent, just in a different line of work than Bond himself. The scene on the bridge at the end where Bond essentially picks between M and Madeleine was a good piece of visual storytelling.

Sam Mendes's visuals are great, too. I like how big he makes places look. The scene where Bond boats into the Alps, for example, is really striking.

So I wouldn't place this as a top-tier Bond film, but it's a good mid-tier one with moments of depth. 2015 Steve, you were far too harsh on it. Its new context made it work much better.

Other Notes:

• In my sequence, this is the first appearance of Ben Whishaw's Q, Naomie Harris's Moneypenny, and Ralph Fiennes's M. Harris doesn't make a huge impression (though she gets two very good scenes) and M's role I don't care much for, but Whishaw nails it as his version of Q. I love the bit where he delivers a put-down that as written is like one Desmond Llewelyn's Q would make, but here it's an awkward flop of a joke, and all the funnier for it.

• My memory was that the part where Daniel Craig seduces Monica Bellucci was one of the most convincing seductions in Bond, but my wife told me I was wrong.
• Dropping this one in at this point in the sequence was definitely confusing to my wife, who has only seen the Bond films we have watched together. There are lots of callbacks to Quantum of Solace and Skyfall, two films she hasn't seen. I tried to explain them to her without spoiling those films.
• I thought it was weird that the film kept acting like MI6's headquarters (a real building just built in the 1990s) was this old, decrepit wreck in need of demolition... but when I checked Wikipedia after watching the film, it turned out that I forgot it was destroyed in Skyfall. It'll be a while before I get to that one. (I'm go to watch all the non-book Bond films in release order once I've made it through all the books.)

 Film Rankings (So Far):

1. Casino Royale
2. Dr. No
3. From Russia with Love
4. For Your Eyes Only 
5. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
6. Thunderball
7. Spectre
8. You Only Live Twice
9. Goldfinger
10. The Spy Who Loved Me
11. Moonraker
12. Never Say Never Again
13. A View to a Kill
14. Live and Let Die 
15. Diamonds Are Forever