Review: "The Lifted Veil" and "Brother Jacob" by George Eliot

Contents originally published: 1859-64
Acquired: September 2012
Read: October 2020

The Lifted Veil, Brother Jacob by George Eliot

This slim volume collects George Eliot's only two standalone pieces of short fiction. The first, "The Lifted Veil," I had known to contain scientific elements, but I did not realize until reading it that it was in fact a proper piece of what we would now call "science fiction." As ably demonstrated by the editor of my edition, Helen Small, Eliot invokes contemporary scientific terminology to justify the strange happenings of her story. It's a neat, dark, dismal story of a man who can piece the veil that separates us from each other and from the future, and is all the worse for it. The set piece that ends the story is dynamic and powerful. I'm sad it took me so long to get around to reading it, but glad to have experienced it. Though I don't think it belongs in my book project, I think it would be really interesting to teach in any number of contexts (an sf class, a Victorian lit class, a science and lit class).

The other story, "Brother Jacob," is a cute example of Eliot's attention to character, and fun enough, but ultimately feels rather slight. It's not very long, but still feels like there's not enough substance to quite justify its length, in terms of either comedy or drama. But even weak Eliot is superior work!

Review: Steel, the Indestructible Man by Gerry Conway, Don Heck, et al.

The nature of shared universe comics is that when reading them, they lead you to discover more comics that you also want to read. This is their curse and their blessing all at once. Hence, it was while reading All-Star Squadron that I discovered the existence of Steel, the Indestructible Man, a comic set on Earth-Two during World War II, and so I decided to catch up on it before wrapping up my WWII-set comics with The Young All-Stars.

 

Steel was created by Gerry Conway, a mainstay of DC in the 1970s and 1980s; around the time he wrote this, he was also working on Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes, All Star Comics, and Justice League of America, among many others. I haven't found Conway's work on team books to be very interesting most of the time,* but Steel reads differently than the others. I don't want to falsely attribute motives to him, but Steel reads like something he wrote because he was in love with the idea, rather than because he'd been assigned to and was capable of putting out serviceable work at great volume. The lettercol of issue #2 indicates that he was inspired by the research he did while writing the WWII-era adventures of the Earth-Two Wonder Woman to come up with his own WWII hero.

 

Steel is set about a year before America entered the war, when many Americans believed we shouldn't be involved at all. Steel is Hank Heywood, a promising medical student who gave up his career after a trip to Poland where he saw Nazi brutality firsthand, and enlisted in the Marines. Injured while taking down a saboteur, he survived only because of an experimental surgery by his old mentor, who use "bio-retardant" to heal his wound and enable his body to accept steel beams and motors in place of damaged bones and muscle. But after his surgery, he realizes he can use his newfound strength and durability to fight for the cause in a more direct way.

 

from Steel, the Indestructible Man #1 (art by Don Heck & Joe Giella)

The actual superhero plots are often pretty banal; Steel fights mediocre enemies like the Mineral Master and the Gadgeteer. Like Roy Thomas's later All-Star Squadron, though, what elevates the material is a sense of history, the way it weaves Steel into the real social concerns of the 1940s. Every mediocre supervillain here is somehow tied to the concerns of the war; Heywood himself is torn between using his abilities to push America into war and the dreams of his peace of his fiancée; on a practical basis, he has to work his superheroing in and around his responsibilities as a Marine private. Like the best superhero premises, it feels like a strong "storytelling engine," one that could have generated ideas and conflicts for years to come.

 

Additionally, Conway does some of his finest scripting here; much of the series is narrated in the first person by excerpts from Heywood's journal, which gives the whole series a strong sense of personality. Don Heck is an artist I can't claim to have thought much about (my notes tell me I have reviewed seven  previous comics he's worked on, but in none of those reviews did I ever mention his work aside from All-Star Squadron), but here he does great work. Like the best superhero comics artists, he draws cleanly and clearly, and is also good at communicating character. Steel's costume might be over-the-top, but it's also entirely appropriate, and presents a strong image. And some of the stories have some good zip to them, like the one where Steel confronts a newspaper mogul over his complicity in a friend's betrayal.

from Steel, the Indestructible Man #5 (art by Don Heck & Frank Chiaramonte)

The only thing I didn't like was issue #5, which for some reason takes a swerve into the Gothic, with a tale of twin brothers and deformed creatures in a spooky house in the middle of a dark forest. It's no coincidence this story is totally detached from the concerns of World War II!

Interestingly, nothing in the first five issues definitively places it on Earth-Two; though Superman, the Sandman, the Flash, and Hawkman would have been active by this point (among others), no one ever mentions them or calls Steel a superhero. If #6 had been published, however, it would have featured the origin of Baron Blitzkrieg, a character Conway and Heck created for the Earth-Two Wonder Woman comics... but there never was an issue #6. Steel was a victim of the so-called "DC Implosion," one of seventeen comics cancelled overnight. Issue #5 previews a #6 that never appeared, and Conway and Heck had even written and pencilled the issue.

That wasn't the end of Steel, though; Roy Thomas brought the character into the All-Star Squadron, a natural fit if there ever was one, given the common vibe of both series. Thomas even took the completed issue #6 and worked it into All-Star Squadron, using it as flashbacks in A-SS #8-9 to explain how Steel came to be involved in that adventure of the Squadron. I reread #8-9 to cap off Steel, and found them more interesting with the context of knowing who Steel was and wanting to see his adventures continue. Steel would continue as an A-SS member up through the Crisis, and his grandson would also star in Justice League in the 1980s, which I look forward to reading someday.

Steel, the Indestructible Man was originally published in five issues (Mar.-Nov. 1978). The series was created and written by Gerry Conway; designed by Don Heck; pencilled by Don Heck (#1-5) and Juan Ortiz (#3-4); inked by Joe Giella (#1, 3-4), Vince Colletta (#2), Bruce Patterson (#3-4), and Frank Chiaramonte (#5); lettered by Ben Oda (#1-3), Todd Klein (#3), Clem Robins (#4), and Karin (#5); colored by A. Tollin (#1), Adrienne Roy (#2), Bob LeRose (#3-4), and Jerry Serpe (#5); and edited by Allen Milgrom.

 

* Lest it sound like I hate all Gerry Conway work, I actually really enjoyed some of his Crisis crossovers, especially the "Crisis on New Genesis" one. Plus I liked Sun Devils, but that came later.

 

This post is the thirteenth in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers Superman vs. Wonder Woman: An Untold Epic of World War Two. Previous installments are listed below:

1. All Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever (1976-79)
2. The Huntress: Origins (1977-82)
3. All-Star Squadron (1981-87)
4. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume One (1983-84)
5. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume Two (1984-85)
6. Showcase Presents... Power Girl (1978)
7. America vs. the Justice Society (1985)
8. Jonni Thunder, a.k.a. Thunderbolt (1985)
9. Crisis on Multiple Earths, Volume 7 (1983-85)
10. Infinity, Inc. #11-53 (1985-88) [reading order]
11. Last Days of the Justice Society of America (1986-88)
12. All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant (1999)
    

Review: Doctor Who: Hyperion by Robbie Morrison, George Mann, Daniel Indro, Mariano Laclaustra, and Ronilson Freire

Collection published: 2016
Contents originally published: 2015
Acquired: September 2018
Read: October 2020

Doctor Who: The Twelfth Doctor, Vol 3: Hyperion

Writers: Robbie Morrison, George Mann
Artists: Daniel Indro, Mariano Laclaustra, Ronilson Freire
Colorists: Slamet Mujiono, Luis Geurrero
Letters: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

I'm of two minds about Titan's Twelfth Doctor ongoing. I find the plots very uninteresting. Evil fire monsters who are ancient enemies of the Time Lords invade the Earth, blah blah blah. It's Doctor Who at its most generic, which is a shame, because on screen, the Peter Capaldi era was Doctor Who at some of its most inventive and clever. In his three seasons, we only got three alien invasion stories by my count, and all of them (the 2014 Missy/Cyberman two-parter, the 2015 Zygon two-parter, and the 2017 Monks trilogy) did really interesting and clever stuff with the concept, and mostly used alien invasions as a way of exploring other issues: mortality, xenophobia, compliance and resistance. The Hyperion storyline does nothing like that; these are just stompy alien fire monsters who want to burn down the Earth and drain the sun, and the human guest characters are about as complex as a bad drawing. Plus there's this really clunky bit where the Doctor leaves in the middle of a crisis to get the stuff he needs to defeat the aliens from other times and places, which I think creates more problems than it solves.

But writer Robbie Morrison really gets the voices of Peter Capaldi as the Doctor and Jenna Coleman as Clara. I can imagine Capaldi saying these lines, and can hear how he would balance warmth and coldness in that way only he can do. So even if the experience of reading the overall story was meh, the experience of reading any individual page was usually pretty enjoyable, so long as the Doctor was on it. (On the other hand, George Mann, who pens a single-issue story about Victorian vampires, writes a pretty generic Doctor.) So far the best this series has been is the Las Vegas story in vol 2, which was fun and inventive just like the twelfth Doctor's era on screen. If Morrison can do more stuff like that and less stuff like this, he can do something really interesting, I reckon. I hope so.

I read an issue of Titan's Doctor Who comic every day (except when I have hard-copy comics to read). Next up in sequence: Four Doctors

Review: Thor: The Mighty Avenger by Roger Langridge and Chris Samnee

Collection published: 2013
Contents originally published: 2010-11
Acquired: December 2019
Read: October 2020

Thor: The Mighty Avenger

Writer: Roger Langridge
Artist: Chris Samnee
Color Artist: Matthew Wilson
Letterer: Rus Wooton

After reading and enjoying the Walter Simonson Mighty Thor, I picked up some more interesting-sounding Thor comics, the first of which was this set of nine single-issue stories by Roger Langridge (of Smithson and Doctor Who Magazine fame) and Chris Samnee (who would later illustrate a highly acclaimed run on Daredevil). This is pure comics, everything I want a superhero story to be. Fun but with a serious substrate, character driven, fast. In these stories, Thor comes to Earth for the first time, meeting Jane Foster, who is these stories is a museum curator. He's been exiled by his father-- but he doesn't know why, making it hard to redeem itself.

As much as I love the Thor films, Natalie Portman's Jane is their weak link. We need this Jane on screen!
from Thor: The Mighty Avenger #2

As he settles into life on Earth, he defends women against creeps, goes out drinking with the Warriors Three and meets Captain Britain, tries to confront Heimdall, battles dinosaurs with Captain America, meets other Avengers like Ant-Man and Iron Man, and falls in love with a human. Each story is entertaining on its own, but clearly also building up to a bigger thing. Part of a continuity all its own, it avoids much of the gloom and mediocrity that pervade contemporary superhero comics. The art is gorgeous, and makes you love Thor all over again. I have never been as interested in or charmed by Jane as I was here.

Jane may have hung onto Thor, but the readers didn't. :(
from Thor: The Mighty Avenger #8

The crime, of course, is that continuity-free superhero comics don't sell. This is a distillation of the best of Thor and Marvel, but that's not what the market wants, and thus this was cancelled after eight issues plus a Free Comic Book Day tale. The eighth issue wraps up some of the strands, but there was clearly more story to be told-- that never will be. This is disappointing but not so disappointing that I would recommend against the book. If you want fun, funny, epic, charming Thor comics, pick this up.

IT'S OVER!: Reflections on a Pandemic Semester

from the New York Times

I approached my course evals with more trepidation than any other semester than my first at UT.

Had what I'd done really worked? I was pretty sure not as I read my final papers in both my AWR 101 and 201 classes. Surely the whole point of AWR 101 to teach students how to analyze texts-- and I had never read a batch of 101 papers with so little quoting! How can you analyze if you don't have the details in your papers?! How could I have not gotten this through to them across the course of the entire semester!?!

On the other hand, when on the last day of in-person class in one of my half-sections I gave my pitch for evals and made a comment about how I'd do a lot differently, one student (one whom I thought didn't like the class at all!) told me she thought it was the best organized class she had. Someone else chimed in that it was the only class where he always knew what was going on! I think, to be honest, I'm often very inflexible in my courses: once I start, I don't change for anything except a hurricane. But I think this semester that was a boon, in that this hybrid thing is so confusing that students really benefited just from knowing exactly what was going to happen all the time.

Looking at my plan, I think there were two things I ended up not liking. One was making my "alternative work" and "weekly work" due on Saturdays. This was tough for students who do things at the last minute, and also made grading tougher for me: I had only Sunday to grade it, as opposed to Saturday and/or Sunday. This spring I will just tether my due dates to class dates, even for students who don't actually come to class that day.

The other thing I did was strip back a bit too much. I think it was a good impulse to not overwhelm them, but once we got to near the end of the semester in my Writing and Research class, I began to feel as though I barely had any time to actually talk about writing the actual research paper! Normally we go over several examples that I dissect in detail, but I ended up really only talking through one in not much detail. In removing scaffolding to make my class take up less time, I ended up removing what my students actually needed to climb to the top!

I have to say, one of the toughest things about this form of teaching is building rapport. I think I am often able to win students over to the difficulty of good academic writing with my classroom demeanor... this semester. most students got to experience that once a week in person (if at all), and let me tell you, I don't know how to be funny on Zoom. With the limited interaction of this semester, I'm not sure I ever "won" these classes the way I know I normally can.

And even aside from student learning, I found that sucked a lot of the fun out of teaching. I don't like running classes over Zoom; I don't like grading the million little piddling assignments that I come up with to substitute for in-class work. By early November I was so ready for it all to be over.

On the other hand, once or twice, only two students in my Friday 8:30am cohort showed up... when they were prepared, that was actually kind of nice for them and me! More like a conversation than a class.

So some of that can be fixed-- but much of it cannot! Only an end to this pandemic can bring teaching back to the way it was. Until then, we all soldier on I guess.

(As for my evals? They were basically fine. I didn't actually look up the numbers, but I think they were only down by a couple tenths from my normal scores. Which just shows to go, I guess, that students aren't rating you on how much they learned! But I suppose the Dean will be happy.)

Review: Transformers/My Little Pony: Friendship in Disguise! by James Asmus, Ian Flynn, et al.

Even though I tell him I'm largely only interested in the comics of IDW's main Transformers continuity, my comic book guy is forever sticking whatever random crossovers IDW does in my pull box. I have no interest in the Transformers meeting the Terminator or Marty McFly, but the moment I heard of Transformers/My Little Pony, I knew I had to get it. My wife is a big My Little Pony fan, so I have had a lot of exposure to the world, and the concept is so ridiculous that it would have to be sublime.

At its best, that is true. This isn't really one big story, but a series of short stories (each of the four issues contains two ten-pagers) set against a common backdrop. There are bookends that explain the set-up and provide a wrap-up: Queen Chrysalis tries to magically summon allies to aid in her takeover of Equestria, which pulls the Autobots and Decepticons from Cybertron through a malfunctioning spacebridge. The Decepticons agree to aid Chrysalis, while the Autobots try to help the ponies of Equestria. The six middle story provide a variety of encounters: Arcee and Rarity team up against Starscream, Spike and Grimlock battle the Constructicons, Pinkie Pie and Gauge's cooking show is interrupted by Shockwave, Fluttershy and Discord's tea-time is interrupted by Soundwave and his cassettes, Rainbow Dash and Windblade race while they battle some Seekers, and Insecticons attack the Apple family farm.

The frame is perfunctory but necessary; I did like that it opens by highlighting the absurdity of it all and also downplaying the continuity issues. (From the Transformers side, it seems to take place in the 1980s G1 continuity, but later characters like Windblade and Gauge are present; the Transformers wiki informs me there's not really a place in the MLP chronology it can fit, either.) The weaker stories don't really do much other than have a pony team up with an Autobot and mouth some platitudes about friendship. The only one I didn't like was the Apple family one, which didn't do anything clever or interesting.

from Transformers/My Little Pony #2
(script by Ian Flynn, art by Sara Pitre-Durocher)

But when it hits, it really hits. The Spike/Grimlock story might make no sense (how did Spike and Grimlock get to Earth?) but makes up for it with some delightful inanity as Spike saves the day by reading Modern Cybertronian for Everyday Conversations well enough to understand Teletraan I for Dummies, which he then reads well enough to reprogram the Ark's engines to use them as weapons against the Constructicons-- all seemingly in the matter of moments! I always like some good Grimlock jokes, and this has some great ones. (On top of this, my toddler liked it. He often sees me reading comics, or pulls one of my wife's MLP comics off the shelf, and asks to be read them, but gets bored after just a couple pages. But when I read him this story, he sat all the way through it and then asked for it again multiple times over the next couple days. And then a month later, I was reading The Transformers Classics UK and told him Grimlock was in it, and he started talking about "Grimlock and neigh-neighs," so clearly it left an impression!)

The Pinkie Pie/Gauge one has its moments, but the best of them all was the one about Fluttershy and Discord coming up against Soundwave. Soundwave's cassette robots all transform into animals, so Fluttershy tries to befriend them... this leads to a delightful moment where one clarifies that Ravage doesn't have a "boo-boo," he has "battle damage"... but then Fluttershy wins him over by applying "boo-boo creme" to it. At the same time, Discord turns all the animals in Fluttershy's sanctuary into Transformers in order to battle Soundwave, and in the end, Soundwave goes AWOL to spend time basking in friendship in Equestria.

from Transformers/My Little Pony #3
(script by James Asmus, art by Jack Lawrence)

There are some crossovers you can take seriously, I suppose, but a crossover like this doesn't deserve to be taken seriously. Or, indeed, benefit from it. Thankfully, the writers here largely understand that and make the best of it. I didn't really care about the plot-- but I don't think anyone involved expected me to. The end promises a sequel with the ponies in the Transformers universe, and if they make it, I will tell my comic book guy to put it in my pull box!

Friendship in Disguise! was originally published in issues #1-4 of Transformers/My Little Pony (July-Nov. 2020). The story was written by James Asmus (#1, 3-4), Ian Flynn (#1-2, 4), and Sam Maggs (#2-3); illustrated by Tony Fleecs (#1, 4), Jack Lawrence (#1, 3), Sara Pitre-Durocher (#2, 4), Casey W. Coller (#2), and Priscilla Tramontano (#3); colored by Tony Fleecs (#1), Lauren Perry (#1, 4), Luis Antonio Delgado (#1, 3), and Joana Lafuente (#2, 4); lettered by Jake M. Wood and Neil Uyetake; and edited by Megan Brown.

Review: Immortality, Inc. by Chip Walter

Published: 2020
Read: December 2020

Immortality, Inc.: Renegade Science, Silicon Valley Billions, and the Quest to Live Forever
by Chip Walter

Next school year I am going to be co-teaching a class on the science and science fiction of life-extension technologies (e.g., cryonics, mind uploading, and so on); this is one of the books we are thinking of assigning. The book covers a number of Silicon Valley-associated figures who are working on how to cure aging; it's framed by a discussion of Alcor and cryonic preservation of corpses, but Walter's main focus is on those people who are trying to stop interventions like that from every being necessary in the first place.

To me, the most interesting part was Walter's thesis about why research into these technologies have take off now; basically, he argues that the baby boomers are the first generation to see most people actually die of aging, and they're also the first generation where you can see a doctor and get cured of most things, thanks to widespread vaccination and the use of antibiotics. So they would also be the first generation to think of aging itself as a problem that can be medically solved, as opposed to an inevitability.

The focus of the book is on the people funding and doing this research; I found this kind of interesting, but maybe not interesting enough in proportion to the amount of time spent on the bios of a bunch of (frequently obnoxious sounding) venture capitalists. He also discusses some of the science behind it all. If there's a weakness to this book, it's that it's all a bit breathless and credulous; it felt to me like it was repeating these people's talking points instead of, say, interrogating them. I would have appreciated an outside scientific voice in the narrative, someone who could say if these people were actually pursuing viable lines of research, or if it was all an incredibly expensive vanity project.

 

It's very well researched (Walter did a lot of original interviews) and it gives you a lot to chew on, but I do wish the book had done some of this chewing for you, so to speak. (Okay, that's a bad metaphor.) I don't know enough about the science to know if I should believe in these technologies as they are presented. But maybe that's asking too much for what is clearly meant to be an easy-read pop science book. I think it will be very useful to teach, and with some good framing, I think our students will get a lot out of it.

The Title Fonts and Logos of Star Trek, Part III: Television, 2017-Present

Continued from my discussion of The Next Generation tv show and films, plus Enterprise, three weeks ago...

After twelve years away, Star Trek finally returned to television (kind of) with the debut of Star Trek: Discovery (2017-present). Discovery featured a new logo with a new typeface:

Peters over at FontShop identifies it as a customized version of "Redrail Superfast." Here's how the logo would look if rendered in the actual Redrail Superfast:

The main change I can identify is the removal of the more finicky serifs: in the base font, almost every letter has these points that go out and then down, but in the Discovery logo, they just go out, if they're there at all. It is somewhat reminiscent of the original Star Trek logo... but I am not a fan. I think it's two things: those Rs look off to me, imbalanced in some way, and only clearly Rs because of the surrounding context. The other is that its finickiness means it doesn't read well from a distance, unlike most other Star Trek logos. I think about this a lot because I shelve my Star Trek trade paperbacks in the dining room and often stare at my bookshelf while trying to get my son to slowly work his way through a meal:

Maybe the coloring is partially the issue, but I don't think the Disco logo stands out as well as the Deep Space Nine or Enterprise logos to either side of it; the novel titles are also in the customized Redrail Superfast, and similarly hard to make out, something the S&S cover designer seems to have admitted when they changed font for the sixth Disco novel.

As I mentioned in part I, the Picard (2020-present) promotional materials used the classic Star Trek font:

The subtitle font could be a number of different sans serifs, but I am pretty sure it is "DIN Condensed."

However, the logo that appeared on literally every piece of Picard tie-in material and advertising was not the logo used in the actual show! The actual show's logo looked like this:

It maintains the DIN Condensed for the subtitle (and in fact, the whole title sequence uses DIN Condensed for credits), but the "STAR TREK" is in Redrail Superfast. This was used in the show's title sequence and, as far as I can tell, literally nowhere else!

I think what happened here is an attempt at branding cohesion that someone changed their minds on at the last minute, because when the cartoon Lower Decks debuted later in 2020, this was its logo:

We have the classic "Star Trek" font for the series title, combined with a unique font for the subtitle. I couldn't find anyone on the Internet stating what the subtitle font is, nor could I figure it out myself; I suspect it's a heavily customized version of something preexisting, if not bespoke. It's definitely going for a comedy vibe, but it's also a little reminiscent of the classic TNG font, I think, with the gaps in the R and the D. (Here's a good post at the TrekBBS where a poster imagines what the logo would look like if it used the actual TNG font.) I should note that for its credits and episode titles, Lower Decks uses the exact font TNG used for those things, "Crillee Italic."

So we have a bit of a pattern emerging in the CBS All Access era, with classic "Star Trek" title and unique subtitle. This would be confirmed when Discovery returned for its third season in late 2020, debuting an all-new logo:

Aha, it all fits together! "Star Trek" for the title; "Eurostile" for the subtitle. Eurostile is one of the fonts used for the livery of Starfleet vessels; it's pretty close to what was used for the Enterprise logo, in fact. Interestingly, though, when the season three premiere debuted on CBSAA, it still used Redrail Superfast for the "Star Trek" part, but later they went back and changed it. So it seems like someone decided they wanted a consistent logo, but late in the game, it was decided that the "Star Trek" font was a better choice for this than Redrail Superfast.

I agree, though there's something indelibly original series about that logo that makes it an odd fit for a universal Star Trek brand. Maybe if it had been used all along, but as I discussed in part I, it has pretty much been contained to the original show and things meant to evoke it. It just seems wrong having it attached to a show about Picard! Surely it should have been something like this:

(forgive my crude mock-up)

The next Star Trek show we know anything concrete about is Prodigy, the Nickelodeon cartoon, which will air in 2021. It keeps the theme going:

There's also the Captain Pike spin-off, Strange New Worlds, but no logo has been released for that yet. Based on the current conformity of the CBSAA era, though, I think we can guess pretty safely what font will be used for the "Star Trek" part of the title, at least!

Continue on to next month's discussion of the fonts of the books...

Review: Kent State by Derf Backderf

Published: 2020
Acquired: October 2020
Read: November 2020

Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio

by Derf Backderf

This is the third Derf Backderf comic my father-in-law (like Derf, a Clevelander) has bought for me, but the first I have gotten around to reading. It chronicles the four days leading up to the Kent State Massacre, especially focusing on the details of the movements of the four students who would end up dying. Backderf's end notes demonstrate copious and seemingly rigorous research, drawing on a wide variety of primary and secondary sources, and integrating contradictory information into a coherent narrative; when he is unable to make a clear determination of truth, he explains why he made the choices he did.

It's a strong piece of graphic nonfiction; the ability of the comics page to alternate between exhaustive written detail and impressionistic visual imagery is well utilized by Backderf. Sometimes, in the actual gunning down of the four, he can use both at once to maximum effect. There's a crushing sense of inevitability to it all, but it's the kind of inevitability that on reflection is not inevitable: it's an inevitability born of bad choices, and if any one of a number of people in positions of power had reacted better, this need not have happened. But none of them had the wisdom or the foresight to act appropriately-- and as Backderf details, they also reacted inappropriately, spending the next couple months spreading misinformation to make themselves look good instead of reacting truthfully.

Backderf has a sort of "indie comix" style that is not "realistic" per se but I think is meant to evoke a feeling of "realism" through exagerration if that distinction makes sense-- his style wouldn't look out of place on American Splendor, for example. It works well for the buffonish authority figures and the scenes of mob violence; I found it was less successful when it came to differentiating the college kids who form the emotional heart of the story, and I couldn't always remember which one was which. It would be nice to reread it and see if I can keep them straight better, because I think their generic-ness undermined some of the story's emotional impact. But even so, it was impactful, and unfortunately, there are some ways it feels all-too-like the issues Backderf discusses in the 1970s haven't really gone away in the 2010s, and honestly have gotten even worse. (Though on the other hand, his world of politically engaged revolutionary college students seems a world apart from the one I know as a college professor now!)

Review: Doctor Who: Adventures in Lockdown

Published: 2020
Acquired and read: November 2020

Doctor Who: Adventures in Lockdown

edited by Steve Cole

This slim anthology collects Doctor Who material created or published during 2020's coronavirus lockdown; some of it was for the Doctor Who web site, some of it was released as part of the series of tweetalongs organized by Emily Cook, some of it is original to this book. I always like a good Doctor Who anthology, and this is a great one. Steven Moffat explains what the terror of the Umpty Ums is as the Doctor faces down the DeathBorg known as Karpagnon; Russell T Davies gives us a glimpse into the way the Time War could have ended if Paul McGann had regenerated straight into Christopher Eccleston; Neil Gaiman reveals an incident in the life of the Corsair; Pete McTighe discovers that the Doctor also enjoys watching her past adventures; Paul Cornell revisits both Daughter-of-Mine from "Human Nature" and Bernice Summerfield; Mark Gatiss reunites the Doctor with her granddaughter. All this and some great illustrations, too; my favorites included Valentina Mozzo's of the Doctor fist-bumping a Judoon and Chris Riddell's of the Corsair.

It reads briskly but it reads well. Moffat shows that he can always craft an engaging Doctor Who story by mixing the fear of a child with the solace of the Doctor and yet always find something new and fun to do with it. Plus, of course, good jokes! Davies's closing pages of a faux Time War novelization are an utter delight, firing off more great Time War ideas in ten pages than Big Finish has in ten dozen box sets. 

I really like Paul Cornell's "Shadow" trilogy: three linked stories of the Doctor coming to doubt that her punishment for Daughter-of-Mine in "The Family of Blood" was just, though the best one is probably the one that has the least to do with that premise; "The Shadow Passes" focuses on the thirteenth Doctor, Yaz, Graham, and Ryan spending time in a bunker on an alien planet. Cornell has a good grasp of the voices of these characters, especially the Doctor and Yaz, and make them likeable. I like the Doctor and her companions well enough on screen, but I feel that series 11-12 haven't done a great job using them. In fact, I think all of the authors here render a pretty great Doctor: Chris Chibnall, Moffat, Joy Wilkinson, and Gatiss also really shine. The promise of the thirteenth Doctor was, I think, a light of compassion burning in the darkness. The tv show struggles to make this work, often giving us a Doctor that seems ineffective and a "fam" that just stands there, but Adventures in Lockdown plays to her strengths, with Whittaker's compassion echoing off the page in a time where we need it most.

The only thing that didn't work for me is that seeing the script for "Rory's Story" is pretty pointless; that segment only worked for the novelty of getting to see Arthur Darvill play Rory once more. And though I did like "Shadow of a Doubt," it definitely loses something in not being read aloud by Lisa Bowerman.

Almost Heaven

(I am shocked to learn I've never used this as a post title!)

As longtime followers of my life know, my favorite holiday is Thanksgiving, and it's my favorite because of the longtime tradition of the Mollmanns: convening in a state park for the week of Thanksgiving, where we go on "forced marches" (hikes), eat Cincinnati chili, and have a hot-dog roast. This has grown from seven Mollmanns in 1973 to I think around fifty now, as it's gone from my grandparents and their five kids to incorporating four generations. I have thirteen cousins, almost all of whom are married now, and almost all of the married cousins have kids.

I'd have to verify the records, but I think this is just the second time since 1973 Mollmann Thanksgiving hasn't happened. (My recollection is that sometime in the late 1980s, when basically everyone in the family had a newborn at home, it was skipped.) Just another thing to thank the COVID-19 pandemic for.

But even if it was being held, I wouldn't be there. As my facebook followers-- but not, I think, my blog readers-- will know, Hayley is pregnant, and the baby is due in late December, putting any long trips out of the question.

Hayley had a good idea, though, which was that we could do our own Thanksgiving, visiting a Florida state park. When I looked into it, cabins were all booked up, but we ended up finding an Airbnb near the Croom Wildlife Management Area, a tract of the Withlacoochee State Forest, and we spent Wednesday through Friday there. About an hour away from Tampa, it was close enough that if Hayley went into labor, we would be able to make it to the hospital without issues.

We visited a couple different places in the area. We walked a little bit around the Dade Battlefield Historic State Park; we attempted a four-mile loop hike that would take us past the Withlacoochee River; two different times we attempted a short hike along the Withlacoochee River, but the first time we set off on the wrong trail, and the second time we mostly did it right, but went the wrong way for at least part of it. We learned (but should have known) that Little Buddy has his limits when it comes to forced marches. We probably made it through a mile of the four-mile loop: he was having fun at first, but then just obstinately refused to move. Unfortunately neither of us had thought to pack our baby carrier (I don't think we've used it for anything since last Thanksgiving), so we had to carry him out! Even the short hikes were a bit much for him.

Still, he clearly had fun. He got to pick up sticks and see trees and he made the connection that were were in a forest, just Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz (one of his favorite books right now). It made us realize that even in these pandemic-fused times, we could be hiking more in the area where we live!

The traditional Mollmann hot dog roast is Friday night, but since we were just going to be gone two nights, we did ours Wednesday evening. I made a fire (then Hayley remade it better); LB has experienced a campfire before, but he was too little to really get it at the time. We roasted hot dogs and made s'mores and sat out under the dark sky by the light of the flames. The next day, we did the traditional Mollmann chili (Hayley had made it in a crockpot a couple days before we left) and a pumpkin pie (that Hayley and LB made).

Sitting outside under the sky, it was nice to be out of the home, and it was nice to be away from responsibilities for a couple days. The monotony of life in this pandemic has been one of its worst features, and this has been exacerbated by the responsibilities of parenting and home ownership; I feel like we spend all our time at home lesson planning, grading, and trying to stop the house from becoming a total disaster. For a moment (before it gets really hectic later this month) we could step outside that and just be a family. It was a weird feeling, actually, knowing that this configuration of my life is coming to an end. LB has recently figured out the concept of family, and will sometimes when there's the three of us, he'll go, "Momma. Dadda. [Little Buddy]. Family!" He gets very excited when all three of us do something together. But as is so often true of life, no sooner does he figure it out than it will all change. (For the better, but changes are different nonetheless.)

In the morning we did a Zoom call with my immediate family; that night, we did a Zoom call with all the Mollmanns where we sang "Country Roads." Probably nothing so wretched has ever been heard. LB really enjoyed practicing "Country Roads," and continued to run around randomly going "Country Roads!" the next couple days.

and I thought Zoom faculty discussions were chaotic

 
I was happy to see my family even in this weird, chaotic way, and also happy to see the facebook posts roll in over the next couple days documenting how everyone handled things. My parents went to their lakehouse with my grandmother; one of my uncles and aunts were joined by four of their kids (and three spouses, and five of their grandkids) at an outdoor, socially distanced hike and eating of chili; another of my uncles and aunts when to a state park with their nieces and nephews (with whom they have formed a "double bubble"); my sister went to a co-worker's and had turkey but did chili the next day; and so on.

As I've discussed here before, the lack of the marking of time is one of the big mental drains of this pandemic. Days slide into the next without meaning. Tradition is one of those ways we mark time, and I was heartened that these traditions aren't just important to me, but to all the Mollmanns, all of whom figured out a way to celebrate in their own fashion. The pandemic (and pregnancy) make keep us all apart, but we can still celebrate together regardless.

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Department of Temporal Investigations: Shield of the Gods

Published: 2017
Acquired: March 2019
Read: October 2020

Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations: Shield of the Gods

by Christopher L. Bennett

April 2385
This, the final DTI book (thus far, anyway, but probably also forever) wraps up the "Vault trilogy" in a tale of the DTI trying to track down Daiyar, the rough Aegis agent who staged the heist in Time Lock. The book starts decently if not excitingly, with the DTI undertaking some policework to track down Daiyar.

Unfortunately, the policework never really goes beyond policework. In their best moments, Watching the Clock and The Collectors were fun because they transposed police procedural tropes to time travel shenanigans. For the most part, though, this is just an actual police story; the DTI is hunting down a fugitive, and there's not really any temporal shenanigans at all. They stake out a place she might go, shake down known contacts: it's all too familiar and all too uninteresting as a result.

The book feels like it's building toward a climax at least, but in the end, it all fizzles out. Daiyar has kidnapped DTI agent Ranjea and taken him into the past with her; our heroes don't know if the timeline has been changed because they're in a subspace bubble. They inch their way out of it and learn... yes, everything's fine. Then we have a lengthy flashback where we learn that Ranjea just kind of talked her out of it. It's a huge anticlimax.

It also felt morally reprehensible. The end of the book means that Daiyar has to just accept that genocides happen. Ranjea lectures her:

"[S]ometimes adults who go out into the world meet terrible fates. There is no avoiding that in every case."
     "And sometimes they go out and choose to inflict terrible fates on others."
     "Yes. That cannot be helped either. Once they are given the choice, the choice is theirs, and that means there is no guarantee that it will be the one you wished for. That is the self-determination prized by the Aegis, and by the Federation in its own way: The right, not only to succeed, but to fail. Not only to make the right decisions, but to be free to make the wrong ones. There cannot be one without the other. But what matters, what both our civilizations prize, is that all beings have the right to choose for themselves. To take responsibility for their own fates, and the fates of those they affect."​

That last line there does a lot of work. "Those they affect" is really those they commit genocide against! I know Star Trek's Prime Directive is pretty often dumb, but this felt like a particularly egregious example. I am perfectly fine with infringing on a species's right to self-determination if it stops them from committing a genocide, just like I'm perfectly happy with infringing on an individual's right to self-determination if it stops them from committing a murder. Yet this is supposed to be a positive outcome! 

The author responded to an earlier version of this review where I said, "You can't even plead that usual Star Trek canard, 'the timeline must be preserved' because the species in question wouldn't have survived to commit its genocides without temporal interference!" This isn't quite true, in fact; as Bennett pointed out, the species in question played a role in the Titan novel Orion's Hounds, where they were a pivotal part of an alliance against a cosmic threat. But I think this failed to register on me because it feels very abstract; Orion's Hounds came out in 2005, almost twelve years before Shield of the Gods. Relying on my memory of a decade-old tie-in novel (and one that wasn't a pivotal event story like, say, Destiny or Federation) just doesn't work. You can tell me it's important, but I don't feel it. 

Bennett argued that, "it's supposed to be a morally ambiguous outcome," but again, I didn't feel this. When the story turns on the protagonist giving someone a lecture, and that person accepting the lecture, it made me feel like the book wants me to accept that Daiyar did the right thing in standing down her plans, when in fact it seemed pretty clear to me that Ranjea and the DTI were morally the villains of the piece.

This left a sour taste in my mouth. This is a plodding, lecture-heavy book-- The Collectors showed that the DTI e-novellas had real promise for telling entertaining time travel stories, but I feel that Time Lock and especially this book hugely squandered that potential.

Continuity Notes:

• Shield of the Gods digs some into the Aegis, the mysterious alien backers of Gary Seven. There's some interesting logistics and such here that Bennett picks out; I wish the story had used them slightly differently

Other Notes:

• There's this one scene at the beginning where Dulmur updates the temporal agencies of all the other local powers on Daiyar and the DTI's search for her. It's really there to provide exposition (none of these other powers are relevant to the story), but it rankled me when Dulmur justifies why the DTI won't just let the Aegis handle it internally: Daiyar stole the time drive from the DTI, so it's their responsibility to get it back. But why should the other temporal powers be persuaded by the idea that Dulmur's pride is important?
• There's a bit where the DTI agents call out the fact that people mistake the Federation for a Starfleet dictatorship: "Sometimes it seemed that the rest of the galaxy--and even some Federation citizens--mistook Starfleet for the whole thing." This feels more like an out-of-universe complaint than a plausible in-universe one: this is a mistake fans make, not characters. Except that Captain Pike claims in Star Trek (2009) that the Federation is a "humanitarian and peacekeeping armada," so clearly some very smart people who should know better can't tell the difference in-universe either!

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: The Next Generation: Q Are Cordially Uninvited... by Rudy Josephs

Reading Roundup Wrapup: November 2020

Pick of the month: Kent State by Derf Backderf. My review is written but not yet published-- this was an effective, interesting, brutal entry into the genre of graphic nonfiction. My first Backderf but not my last!

All books read:
1. Doctor Who: Four Doctors by Paul Cornell, Neil Edwards, et al.
2. Star Trek: The Fall: Revelation and Dust by David R. George III
3. Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio by Derf Backderf
4. Star Trek: The Fall: The Crimson Shadow by Una McCormack
5. Star Trek: The Fall: A Ceremony of Losses by David Mack
6. Doctor Who: Adventures in Lockdown edited by Steve Cole
7. Doctor Who: The Turing Test by Paul Leonard
8. Star Trek: The Fall: The Poisoned Chalice by James Swallow
9. Weight by Jeanette Winterson
10. Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor, Vol 4: The Endless Song by Nick Abadzis, Eleonora Carlini, Elena Casagrande & Leonardo Romero
11. Star Trek: The Fall: Peaceable Kingdoms by Dayton Ward
12. The Iron Legion: Collected Comics from the Pages of Doctor Who Weekly by Dave Gibbons, Pat Mills & John Wagner, and Steve Moore
13. Dragon’s Claw: Collected Comics from the Pages of Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly by Dave Gibbons, Steve Parkhouse, Steve Moore, et al.

Through a quirk of how my reading lists operate, this ended up being a very tie-in-heavy month: five Star Trek books and six Doctor Who ones! Four of the Doctor Who ones were comics, which I didn't mind so much, but five Star Trek novels in one month turned out to be too many. In my younger days, I would do that regularly, but this is the first time I've read five Star Trek novels in one month since February 2004, and it turns out I crave a more diverse reading palette now.

All books acquired:
1. Star Trek: Prometheus: Fire with Fire by Bernd Perplies and Christian Humberg
2. Doctor Who: Adventures in Lockdown edited by Steve Cole
3. The Impressions of Theophrastus Such by George Eliot

All books on "To be read" list: 654 (down 7!)