Double Diagnosis

from The Tampa Bay Times

I got a postcard in the mail over break from the Moffitt Cancer Center, addressed to "RESIDENT" at my address, saying I could get $25 for taking a COVID antibody test as part of a study. "Why not?" I thought, and I signed up. The deal was that they wanted to monitor how the antibodies lasted, so you got $25 for the first visit, and then if you were positive, you would have two follow-up visits, and get $50 each for those.

We've been pretty locked down here since March. I do go out once a week to shop for groceries, and I run the occasional other errand, and of course I teach on campus twice per week, but that's it. Before her maternity leave began, Hayley did teach at her school, but only one of her classes was in person. We took a trip for Thanksgiving, but never came close to other people except briefly outdoors. We had some people over back in October, but everyone stayed six feet apart outside. We have had some visitors since our second son was born, but they were all people who have been pretty careful themselves. That seems like a lot now that I list it out (and I feel like there are a couple things I am forgetting), but it's not much social contact for ten months! And we have been avoiding the major dangers: no eating at restaurants, no large social gatherings, and so on.

So could I have caught COVID? None of us had ever had any symptoms if so. Getting my blood drawn was a pretty painless experience (the researcher: "I've having trouble finding a big vein. Did you drink water this morning?" me: "Only coffee." her: "That's the opposite of what I need!"), and after just under a week I got the e-mail with my results.

I am negative for antibodies.

Hayley asked me if I had wanted to have had it. I thought about this and a couple days later realized, kind of, yes. But not because it would mean I was immune (probably) now. Because it would mean that I was so strong my body had fought it off without me even knowing! As we all know, the strength of your immune system is an indication of your moral fitness.

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Back in November, I started to realize I could hear the noise wherever I went.

I don't know exactly when I first noticed it; sometime over the summer, I think. In quiet moments, sitting on the living room couch after Little Buddy had gone to bed, I would hear a faint (I thought) electronic whine. I assumed it was a lightbulb (the lightbulbs above the living couch burn out every six months, so clearly there is some kind of issue there) or maybe my computer's charger or something. I couldn't hear it most of the time, so I didn't worry about it.

But in November, I started to realize that I was always hearing that noise, whether I was sitting on the couch or not. So I started paying attention to it, and discovered that it was always with me. A very faint, very high-pitched whine, only in my left ear. It seemed unlikely to me that I had a bad lightbulb in my car and my office and outside, too. I remember I told Hayley about driving up to our Thanksgiving cottage, and she spent the car trip googling tinnitus.

I see my primary care doctor every January just before the semester starts, so I saved the thought until then, though I needn't have bothered, since all he did was say, "go see a specialist."

I did that this past Tuesday. First I had my hearing tested by an audiologist. This was pretty neat; they put you in a soundproof booth with headphones on and play lots of tones and words at you. She said I had some very slight damage in the high frequencies in my left ear.

The physician actually said I had beautiful hearing and he was jealous. And he confirmed that yes, I do have tinnitus. ("Tin-i-tus, or as it's known on the street, ti-nai-tus.") But I don't have significant hearing loss, I don't any related issues like dizziness or vertigo, and basically there is nothing that can be done. He did say a low-salt diet might help, but that otherwise my best bet is to just keep the environment from being too quiet so it doesn't annoy me too much. I should come back if my symptoms got worse, and thankfully we now had a baseline hearing test for me so we could tell if I began to suffer hearing loss.

I have heard of many people where tinnitus impacts their quality of life negatively. (William Shatner got tinnitus during the filming of the Star Trek episode "Arena," as did Leonard Nimoy.) I think it would take a big amplification of the noise for that to happen to me, thankfully, but I will keep an ear out!

Review: NeuroGeneration by Tan Le

Published: 2020
Read: January 2021

The NeuroGeneration: The New Era in Brain Enhancement That Is Revolutionizing the Way We Think, Work, and Heal
by Tan Le

Tan Le is an entrepreneur in the area of brain-computer interface; this is a quick-reading overview of where attempts to alter the human brain stand in a number of different areas. She writes chapters on topics such nootropics, brain-computer interfaces, bionics, cyborg implants, AI, and cellular brain repair. Despite Le's personal investment in this area, it kind of feel like a series of breathless pop-science articles you might read in, I dunno, Wired. Plenty of breadth but I don't think much depth; two very short chapters cover the "risks and ethical dilemmas." (I did find the discussion of the lack of diversity in neural imaging research interesting.) There's lots of potential, but to a degree one wonders if we're really on the verge of a breakthrough revolution like Le says, or if this is a lot of technological hype that won't go anywhere. I don't think she penetrates deep enough to answer that question. I did think she had a thoroughly sensible take on AI, which was nice, and there was definitely enough neat stuff in here that I hadn't know to make it all worthwhile.

Review: The Expanse: Persepolis Rising by James S.A. Corey

Originally published: 2017
Acquired and read: October 2020

Persepolis Rising: Book Seven of The Expanse
by James S.A. Corey

After I found the middle trilogy of The Expanse a bit rough, the opening book of the final trilogy is a return to form. Humanity is increasingly an interstellar civilization, but that comes under threat as General Duarte and the Laconian Navy return through the gate they vanished across so many years ago-- now with fantastic destructive powers in their hands, thanks to their use of the protomolecule. The book alternates between the Laconian occupation of Medina Station (where the Rocinante crew get caught out) and a wider vision of the Laconian invasion of the solar system (as they crush Earth, Martian, and Belter resistance).

Like the best of The Expanse books, this one balances character, action, and engaging plot twists; despite its large size, I read it quickly, and I found it more engaging than any Expanse novels since Abaddon's Gate. While I wouldn't say the middle books had to be the way they were, one can see how the set-up they did is paying off as The Expanse moves toward a climax and a conclusion. The book is suspenseful; Holden and the Rocinante crew work best when they're on the back foot, scrappy underdogs trying to push their way out of situations so complex as to be beyond the capacity of a handful of cargo haulers, and that really comes across here as they have to figure out how to deal with an occupying force. Lots of good character moments, lots of clever action. I was a big fan of Singh's arc, the commander of the occupying forces. The Expanse is back, and I ended the book hyped for number eight.

One quibble, though, and I can't decide if it's a big quibble or a little quibble. There's a thirty-year jump between this book and the last! I'm fine with that on principle, but Holden and the other Rocinante crewmembers aren't written like sixty-somethings, they're still written like thirty-somethings. In terms of characterization, it's like they were all held in stasis for those three decades. Clarissa, for example, still comes across as someone they barely know, even though they've literally spent half their lives working with her! It just totally fails to convince, and was seemingly only done for plot reasons: Laconia needed three decades to develop to the point where it could threaten the solar system. I feel like a more sfnal solution could have been found, protomolecule time shenanigans or something. But as annoying as it is, once the book gets underway, you basically stop thinking about it, so they kind of get away with it? Like I said, I don't know if it's a little quibble or a big quibble.

One last thing, mostly an observation. The character of Drummer was technically in the first couple books, but she was really just a passing reference. She debuted on season 2 of the television program (2017), and over the next couple years her role got bigger and bigger because the actress who plays her (Cara Gee) was so good they wanted to give her more to do; Drummer replaces roles played by different characters in books three and five. Persepolis Rising was the first book to be written after season 2 went into production, and suddenly Drummer has a huge role in it, one of those moments where the adaptation feeds back into the original. And it's easy to see how the show could maneuver the character to be in the same position as the book one by this point in time, so the two versions who had somewhat different stories would end up converging into one! Neat. (Except that between when I finished Persepolis Rising and wrote this review, it was announced that The Expanse would come back for a sixth season, but not a seventh, so there never will be a tv version of these events. Oh well.)

I read an Expanse story every eighty-ish days. Next up in sequence: Auberon

Wonder Woman: Earth-Two

There's one last 1970s Earth-Two comic set retroactively during World War II that I didn't discover until reading All-Star Squadron, following Steel and Superman vs. Wonder Woman. In November 1975, the tv movie The New Original Wonder Woman aired on ABC, adapting the Golden Age comic book by setting Wonder Woman's adventures in World War II; this lead to a tv show from April 1976 to February 1977, similarly set during World War II.* These days, comics readers often complain when comics contort to be more like their television or film counterparts, but it's nothing unique to this moment: the Wonder Woman comic switched to a World War II setting to tie in to the tv show.

I don't know how they might have handled it without the multiple Earths set-up, but DC already had a method of depicting WWII-set adventures of Wonder Woman. In Wonder Woman vol. 1 #228 (cover-dated Feb. 1977, but actually released Nov. 1976), the Earth-One Wonder Woman encounters a villain who has traveled across time and dimensions from Earth-Two in 1943. She fights him, and ends up pulled back to his home dimension and time, and teams up with her Earth-Two counterpart to defeat him. Wonder Woman returns to 1970s Earth-One at the end of the issue-- but from that point onwards, Wonder Woman vol. 1 continues to follow the 1940s adventures of the Earth-Two Wonder Woman, not following its star back home.

The Earth-Two Wonder Woman would star in Wonder Woman for the next year in a series of adventures by a variety of writers and artists, and often guest-starring various members of the Justice Society; many were written by the ubiquitous Gerry Conway. My understanding is that these stories often owed more to the tv show than to the Golden Age comics they were supposedly set between; I think in the original Golden Age comics, Diana Prince was a nurse, but in these stories, she's in Army Intelligence, for example. Roy Thomas would of course pick up some details of these comics for All-Star Squadron, pitting some of the original Axis villains devised by Conway against the Squadron.

During this time, the Earth-Two Wonder Woman also had a feature in World's Finest vol. 1 that ran from issue #244 (Apr./May 1977) to #249 (Feb./Mar. 1978), and she played a role in "The Reality War!", a celebratory story in issue #250 (Apr./May 1978) that featured a whole mess of DC characters; she also had an epic 64-page story in DC Special vol. 2 #9 (1978).

But as you can tell if you pay attention to the dates, DC's tie-in had been a bit belated, and thus it didn't last long. In issue #243 of Wonder Woman vol. 1 (May 1978), released over six months after the tv Wonder Woman had switched to a contemporary setting, the Earth-One Wonder Woman was again pulled through time by a villain to Earth-Two (this time to 1945). The two Wonder Women teamed up again, and before returning to the future, the Earth-One Wonder Woman erased the Earth-Two Wonder Woman's memory of her, thus neatly explaining why the Earth-Two Wonder Woman hadn't known of Earth-One in any of the set-later-but-published-earlier JLA/JSA team-ups! Then, from #244 onwards, Wonder Woman vol. 1 again focused on the adventures of the Earth-One Wonder Woman.

So, are they any good? I don't know. I had intended to read all of these stories and review them... but I couldn't! Most go for silly money on the secondary market, if they're available at all, and few have even been digitized, so you can't read them on comiXology or DC Universe Infinite. My write-up here is just based on what I've read about these comics, not actually reading them myself. 

DC has done some good collections of older Wonder Woman comics the past few years, including collecting the "Diana Prince, Secret Agent" era (1968-73), and the "Twelve Labors" storyline (1974-76). It would be nice to see those continue into a reprint of this material; Wonder Woman #228-43, DC Special #9, and the Wonder Woman stories from World's Finest #244-50 would make a great, if a little chunky, collected edition. Maybe DC could toss in Superman vs. Wonder Woman and/or Wonder Woman vol. 1 #300 if they were feeling generous. The former I've already covered; the latter is a 1983 story where the Earth-One Wonder Woman visits her Earth-Two counterpart in the present, and establishes that Diana Prince married Steve Trevor and has a daughter, Lyta (later, of course, Fury of Infinity, Inc. fame). I would buy it! Below I'll list what chronologically such a collection would include, and what its credits would be. (Thanks to the Grand Comics database for the covers used in this essay and for credits information.)

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Wonder Woman: Earth-Two

Writers: Gerry Conway, Martin Pasko, Jack C. Harris, Alan Brennert, Denny O'Neil, Roy & Dann Thomas
Pencillers: Jose Delbo, Don Heck, Mike Vosburg, Bob Brown, Jim Sherman, Mike Nasser, Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, Russ Heath, Steve Ditko, Dick Ayres, Joe Staton, George Tuska, Ross Andru

Inkers: Vince Colletta, Joe Giella, Dick Giordano, Bob Wiacek, Bob Smith, Dan Adkins, Steve Ditko, Frank Chiaramonte

Colorists: Liz Berube, Jerry Serpe, Adrienne Roy, Carl Gafford, D. R. Martin
Letterers: Milt Snapinn, Joe Letterese, John Workman, Ben Oda, Bill Morse, Gaspar Saladino, Clem Robins, John Constanza

• Wonder Woman vol. 1 #228-29
• World's Finest vol. 1 #244
• Wonder Woman vol. 1 #230-31
• World's Finest vol. 1 #245
• Wonder Woman vol. 1 #232-33
• World's Finest vol. 1 #246
• Wonder Woman vol. 1 #234-35
• World's Finest vol. 1 #247
• Wonder Woman vol. 1 #236-37
• World's Finest vol. 1 #248
• Wonder Woman vol. 1 #238-39
• World's Finest vol. 1 #249
• Wonder Woman vol. 1 #240
• All-New Collectors' Edition #C-54
• DC Special vol. 2 #9
• Wonder Woman vol. 1 #241
• World's Finest vol. 1 #250
• Wonder Woman vol. 1 #242-43, 300
  

* The show continued after that, but switched to a contemporary setting for seasons 2 through 4.

This post is a supplement in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers Secret Origins of the Golden Age. 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)
13. Steel, the Indestructible Man (1978)
14. Superman vs. Wonder Woman: An Untold Epic of World War Two (1977)
    

Review: Star Trek: Picard: The Dark Veil by James Swallow

Published: 2021
Acquired and read: January 2021

Star Trek: Picard: The Dark Veil
by James Swallow

Like the early Discovery tie-ins, it looks like the Picard tie-ins will be prequel stories; this one is a story of Riker and Troi and their son Thaddeus on the Titan, about a year after The Last Best Hope and fifteen years prior to season one of Picard. It's not just a random adventure, but one which ties into the Romulan machinations of season one and sets up some aspects of "Nepenthe," the Picard episode featuring Riker and Troi.

The actual story is fine; to be honest, it's somewhat generic Star Trek stuff: an alien race with a secret, a battle against Romulans. Generic can sing with the right sparkle, and Swallow has shown himself capable of such sparkle in the past, but this one didn't quite succeed on that level. Maybe it's because I found most of the Titan crew pretty bland? I'm not sure I could point at something done wrong, but I found it hard to invest in the plot. I did like the original character of the Romulan commander, who was very interesting, and a good portrayal of a more open Romulan who was nonetheless recognizably of his culture.

Where the book does really succeed, though, is in its portrayal of the Troi-Rikers. I could imagine everyone one of Riker and Troi's lines being read aloud by Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis, and the characters convinced as older versions of the people we saw on screen so long ago in The Next Generation-- this is what Riker would be like as captain and father, and what Troi would be like too. Thad was a pretty lively character, too, building on the hints we got about him in "Nepenthe." Probably my favorite scene is one where Riker's executive officer talks to him about how it's hard for him to be captain when his son is in mortal danger... but then Riker just goes ahead and does it anyway. It rang true. I'd be up for more Riker-Troi-Thad(-Kestra) Picard prequel novels. Even as I think Picard is the worst of the new CBS All Access Star Trek shows thus far, the Riker-Troi family is one of its strongest parts.

Review: Superman vs. Wonder Woman by Gerry Conway, José Luis García-López, and Dan Adkins

Collection published: 2020
Contents originally published: 1977
Acquired and read: December 2020

Superman vs. Wonder Woman: An Untold Epic of World War Two

​

Writer: Gerry Conway

Artists: Jose Luis Garcia Lopez and Dan Adkins

Letterer: Gaspar Saladino

Colorist: Jerry Serpe

 

My journey through the comics of Earth-Two is always revealing things I missed and have to go back for; when looking up the history of Baron Blitzkrieg while reading All-Star Squadron, I discovered that he was the villain of issue #C-54 of All-New Collectors' Edition in 1977, a giant "tabloid-size" comic set during World War Two. I decided I would go back and read it before returning to WWII in The Young All-Stars, but quickly realized that doing so would be prohibitively expensive: the original issue goes for $50+ on-line, and while it was reprinted in Adventures of Superman: José Luis García-López, Volume 1, that collection is out of print and goes for $200! But in a total coincidence, right at the moment I had given up reading the story, DC announced a facsimile-sized reprint, and in another coincidence, that reprint was released the month I was due to start reading The Young All-Stars!

 

That dude is my favorite.

 

The story is set in June 1942, and involves Superman and Wonder Woman independently discovering the existence of the Manhattan Project, as well as an effort by the Axis powers to steal its secrets. Though both don't want the bomb in Nazi hands, Wonder Woman doesn't want it in any human hands, while Superman has greater faith in America to do the right thing, and in the end, the two come to blows over it all-- though of course, they set their differences aside to punch some Nazis.

 

Wonder Woman!

The story, to be honest, is not the point. The point of this is to see Superman and Wonder Woman battling rendered in the beautiful art of José Luis García-López at an enormous size. In this regard, the book utterly delivers. Superman fights robot planes; Wonder Woman throws cars at Nazis; Diana Prince sneaks into military file rooms; Superman and Wonder Woman fight each other in Chicago and then on the moon. It all looks great.

 

You might notice a bias toward cool Wonder Woman moments in my scans-- that's because the story itself seems to be biased toward Wonder Woman over Superman, perhaps because Conway was at the time a regular writer of Wonder Woman?

Perhaps for this reason, the book fudges some Earth-Two details. Superman and Wonder Woman are drawn how their Earth-One versions looked in the 1970s, not how their Earth-Two versions looked in the 1940s. But given García-López created the style guide all DC merchandise was beholden to in the 1980s, why would you have him draw anything other than these characters' most iconic forms? The book also has things like Clark Kent working for Perry White at the Daily Planet, not-- as would be the case on Earth-Two-- him working for George Taylor at the Daily Star. On the other hand, it features Earth-Two villain Baron Blitzkrieg, and even includes a footnote referencing the Earth-Two-set World's Finest vol. 1 #246 for those who want to know his origin. So I think writer Gerry Conway is trying to have his Earth-Two cake and eat it too; use the iconic Earth-One versions of the characters because this is a story with broad appeal, but slip in some Earth-Two references for the dedicated comics nerds who worry about how such a story can exist in continuity. (Conway was at the time the writer of the adventures of the Earth-Two Wonder Woman in her self-titled comic and in World's Finest.) As far as weird continuity details go, we also learn that the moon of Earth-Two is home to the ruins of an extinct civilization, one that destroyed itself with the atomic bomb. Did any other comics writers pick up that weird nugget?

Roy Thomas would also go on to use Sumo in the Commander Steel storyline in All-Star Squadron.

While the story doesn't need to be very good, it actually has some nice touches that elevate it. It's framed as a series of declassified reports, the moral conflict is a good one, the appearance by Albert Einstein is fun, the way Diana Prince infiltrates military records is a great sequences, and the ending has a sharp piece of irony with President Roosevelt declaring to both superheroes, "As long as I am president... America will never use the bomb to kill. Never." Ouch. I understand that Roy Thomas depicted a post-Crisis version of these events in the Young All-Stars storyline Atom and Evil (as of this writing, I am on YA-S #14, and Atom and Evil begins in issue #21), but I would have liked to have seen him weave the pre-Crisis version of All-Star Squadron into these events, which I'm sure was his long-term plan.

 

The idea that Conway and his artists are reconstructing a story from declassified documents doesn't make a ton of sense, but it is cute.

Anyway, if you are at all interested in this story, this oversized reprint is a gorgeous way to experience it, and I highly recommend it. (Unfortunately, my scans here can't do justice to the best of its art, because its full-page panels are too big for my scanner!)

This post is the fourteenth in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment is a supplement discussing the Earth-Two Wonder Woman comics. 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)
13. Steel, the Indestructible Man (1978)
    

The Title Fonts and Logos of Star Trek, Part IV: Novels and Books, 1967-91

Continued from last month's discussion of the fonts of the tv shows...

What launched this whole series was actually me thinking about Star Trek books. In the old days, Star Trek books weren't quite so branded. The original Star Trek book, James Blish's 1967 book originally known as just Star Trek (later printings would dub it Star Trek 1), used a font reminiscent of the tv one, but not the actual one. (Based on messing around with font identifier sites, I think this is something called "BF Anorak Condensed Bold Italic," except that Anorak is a 1999 creation, so I am assuming it's a knock-off of a vintage font I can't identify.)

The first Star Trek novel, Mission to Horatius (1968), did use the proper logo...

...but it was an outlier. When Spock Must Die! (1970) launched Bantam's line of original Star Trek fiction it used no logo at all, just the text "A STAR TREK NOVEL" at the top of the cover. So this isn't Star Trek: Spock Must Die!, but Spock Must Die!, a novel that happens to be based on Star Trek.

This was pretty typical of the Bantam Star Trek books, as well as the early Pocket releases, which all took this approach. They would have to wait for re-releases to get proper logos, which seemed to mostly happen around the mid-1980s. Maybe with the adventure of Star Trek: The Next Generation, it was that Star Trek was becoming more of what we now call a "franchise"?

Here's how Spock Must Die! looked for its 1984 reprinting, for example, which doesn't have much of a logo, but there's sort of a distinctive font, and the "an original ... adventure" part is so small you don't see it from a distance. The horizontal line coming off "STAR TREK" feels reminiscent of horizontal line in the Star Trek: The Motion Picture logo-- a film Bantam didn't have the rights to, so maybe they were dancing around it all! In the US, Bantam's Star Trek novels didn't get a proper logo on the covers until they were reprinted in the late 1990s!

One of the earliest, if not the earliest, unique-to-the-books logos was from Corgi, a publisher which reprinted Star Trek books in the UK in the 1970s. This is the earliest use of it I can find, from a 1972 reprinting of James Blish's Star Trek 2. Corgi would use this for all its reprints in the 1970s and 1980s. I can't decide what I think of this one.

The 1970s also saw a weird, unique logo used on a range of Star Trek publications, mostly from Ballantine, including Star Trek Blueprints (1974), the Star Fleet Technical Manual (1975), the 1975 reprintings of The Making of Star Trek and The World of Star Trek, and the children's picture book The Prisoner of Vega (1977). I like this one; it has a sort of delicious curvy 1970sishness to it that Star Trek by and large has not gone for.

The font is called "Wexford"; that link gives you a nice range of images of it in use, almost all on groovy 1970s science fiction book covers! Wexford was never officially digitized, but someone made their own interpretation of it called "Wexley" which you can get. (Another guy-- who specialized in making knockoffs of sci-fi fonts-- made his own version called, appropriately, "Majel.")

Alan Dean Foster adapted the episodes of the 1970s Star Trek cartoon under the banner title Star Trek Logs (1974-78). Their early printings used a sort of non-logo logo, with just the word "STAR TREK" written in what I am pretty sure is "Futura Pro Bold Condensed Oblique." Futura is a classic of science fiction fonts; the base font was originally designed in 1927, and it still has a futuristic look you will recognize from movies, perhaps most notably 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Reprintings from 1977 onward (as well as the two that were first published 1977-78), though, replaced that with this unique chiseled-steel logo, which I think is pretty cool. Again, it's a unique logo as far as I know.

The history of the logo on early Pocket Books covers is less interesting. Early Pocket novels, as I said, were much like the Bantam ones in not using a logo. See, for example, the cover of the first original novel from Pocket, The Entropy Effect (1981). Later Pocket novels would drop the "TIMESCAPE" logo (Timescape was an sf imprint from Pocket, trading on the fame of Gregory Benford's Nebula-, BSFA-, and Campbell Memorial-winning 1980s novel Timescape), but would otherwise keep to a design much like this for the first half-decade.

The font used for the words on the cover of The Entropy Effect is also from the Futura family; specifically it's "Futura Display." That's how you know it's the future, I guess! Amazingly, despite many tweaks to the cover template, Futura Display lasted all the way up to the 97th and last numbered original series novel, In the Name of Honor (2002). That's a twenty-one-year run, which seem pretty incredible for design consistency. (I should note that not every one of the 97 novels used it, as some books adopted special cover designs for whatever reasons.)

r

The first mass-market paperback Star Trek book from Pocket to use the logo on the cover was Chain of Attack (1987). (Some of Pocket's "giant novels" and hardcovers did use logos.) This seems to have been an attempt to clean up the branding with the imminent arrival of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I suppose that at that point, you wanted to clearly know what kind of Star Trek novel you were dealing with-- and also putting "A STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION NOVEL" on the cover would be a bit much!

The only other interesting novel logo of the pre-2000 novels is from a re-release of James Blish's adaptations. The original ones had been released in a pretty arbitrary order across thirteen volumes; for the 25th anniversary, Bantam republished them in three chunky volumes, organized by season. See, for example, the cover here of Star Trek: The Classic Episodes 1 (1991). This one I find interesting because it's kind of an adaptation of the logo used for the original series movies, but thicker and italicized.

It wasn't actually unique to the novels, but used on a range of 25th-anniversary merchandise, including the computer game and some trading cards:

I had thought I could get by just doing one post on the books, but that's clearly not the case, so I'll end it here.

Next time I'll cover the logos used by Pocket/Simon & Schuster for their fiction not based on any one television series...

Most cover art supplied by ISFDB. Thanks to Ian "Therin of Andor" McLean for his picture of the 25th-anniversary trading cards, and to the TrekBBS poster Avro Arrow for pointing me toward a couple of these I hadn't noticed myself.

Review: Doctor Who: The Endless Song by Nick Abadzis, Elena Casagrande, Eleonora Carlini & Leonardo Romero

Collection published: 2016
Contents originally published: 2015-16
Acquired: September 2018
Read: November 2020

Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor, Vol 4: The Endless Song

Writer: Nick Abadzis
Artists: Eleonora Carlini, Elena Casagrande & Leonardo Romero
Colorists: Arianna Florean & Claudia 'SG' Ianniciello
Letters: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

"Year Two" of Titan's Tenth Doctor series kicks off with this volume, which consists of three stories. The first, "The Singer Not the Song," is the best of them. This series's strength is in its nostalgia for the Russell T Davies screen era, and this story feels like it could have been produced by the man who gave us "Gridlock" or "Planet of the Ood": the Doctor and Gabby visit a planet of "conceptual beings" that can only be heard, not seen... but human music is being used to infect them with a conceptual plague. It's a fun science fiction idea, and the story does some fun stuff with it-- though I couldn't shake the feeling that a story about music would work much better on screen than on the comics page!

Then comes a story that mostly recaps Year One, as Gabby's friend Cindy (who stayed back on Earth at the end of The Fountains of Forever) reads Gabby's sketchbook. I usually enjoy Gabby's sketchbook excerpts, but this was less interesting than their normal use of giving the reader a window into Gabby's mindset during stories; plus, it all turns out to be in aid of foreshadowing something to do with the ongoing Osirian storyline... a storyline that has thus far utterly failed to interest me on any level.

The final story takes the Doctor and Gabby back to the time of the Neanderthals, where alien slavers are kidnapping them for slave labor. Some early shenanigans with the TARDIS translation aside, it's dull, plodding stuff.

from Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor: Year Two #5
(art by Elena Casagrande)

Terrible cover model aside (I mean, I'm sure she's a nice person, she just doesn't look right), Gabby looks her proper self in this volume, which isn't surprising, as most of it is drawn by Elena Casagrande and Eleonora Carlini, who I think are uniformly excellent. Great faces, great facial expressions, beautiful vistas, solid storytelling. Something about Leonardo Romero's art turned me off; not enough expression in it, I think. Looks like he drew it with a computer. (I mean, I know probably everyone here drew with a computer-- but I don't like it when the inking is all the same thickness.)

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: The Eleventh Doctor: The Then and the Now

Review: Doctor Who: Four Doctors by Paul Cornell, Neil Edwards, et al.

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

Doctor Who: Four Doctors

Writer: Paul Cornell
Artists: Neil Edwards, with Arianna Florean, Marc Ellerby, Rachael Smith, and Neil Slorance
Colorist: Ivan Nunes
Letters: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

Not to be confused with Big Finish's The Four Doctors, Titan's Four Doctors is actually unique among multi-Doctor stories. Most feature a "current" Doctor and a number of "past" Doctors; the current Doctor's story is still being told, but the past Doctors' stories no longer are. Or, as in the way Big Finish often does it, all the Doctors are past Doctors. But in a sense, the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth Doctors are all "current" Doctor because they were all featuring in ongoing series at the time they appeared in Four Doctors; this is a proper crossover in that it crosses over all three of Titan's then-ongoing series. So we have the tenth Doctor with Gabby (presumably fresh from the events of The Fountains of Forever), the eleventh Doctor with Alice (late of Conversion), and the twelfth Doctor with Clara (though this must go before the events of Hyperion, as there was a reference to Danny Pink being dead in that collection, which hasn't yet happened here). So in a way we don't normally see with multi-Doctor stories, this could have ramifications for the ongoing adventures of the earlier Doctors, not just the current ones.

from Doctor Who: Four Doctors #4 (art by Neil Edwards)

All that said, I felt the story didn't actually do that. It's nice to see Gabby and Alice here, but in this crowded story, they are generic companions, with none of the flavor of their main series, except for a brief excerpt from Gabby's sketchbook. This is much more a twelfth Doctor story, as the story turns on a choice he made in the television program being changed to create an alternate timeline.

from Doctor Who: Four Doctors #3 (art by Neil Edwards)

Cornell's story is a bit too complicated at times, but really the whole thing is there to justify some multi-Doctor sparkle, and the story makes that work admirably. Cornell has a good handle on the voices of all three Doctors, and their banter is a delight. But it's not just banter, it's personality-- like I said, the whole story hinges on a believable but terrible act on the part of the twelfth Doctor. Plus, the story is actually about something, which is not true of so many of the Big Finish multi-Doctor stories I have heard; yes, the time shenanigans seem gratuitously complicated, but the whole story is about the Doctor's fear on the day that he forgets to fight it. Plus there are some charming ideas, like Clara trying to stop all the incarnations of the Doctor from converging on the same Parisian cafe.

from Doctor Who: Four Doctors #4 (art by Neil Edwards)

Artist Neil Edwards is pretty good at likenesses, which is essential for a comic like this to really work, though I thought he did better at the companions than the Doctors. His Clara is perfect, and he also does a very good job with Gabby, even though she has no (as far as I know) real person referent. Definitely better than many of the artists of the actual Tenth Doctor ongoing! (Although there's a brief River Song cameo, and his Alice Kingston is unrecognizable.)

from Doctor Who: Four Doctors #5 (art by Neil Edwards)

All this plus some jokes about the Doctors doing stand-up. And the Voord? I don't think this is perfect (too much time spent on time shenanigans), but as an attempt to do something interesting with the often creaky genre of the multi-Doctor story, it succeeds admirably.

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: The Tenth Doctor: The Endless Song

Birth-Story II

I feel like somehow we expected forewarning. Like, we had this sense it was a bit off, even though we were less than two weeks away from the due date-- and our first one had been born two weeks away from the due date! Last time, I even wrote about it was anticlimactic and sudden... and yet I was surprised all over again this time.

I guess maybe it was because of the way it happened. Hayley had gone in for her weekly check-up, and she called me afterwards. I couldn't hear a word she said though, except for "today." After us calling each other two or three times but to no avail, she finally just sent me a text: "We are going to the hospital today. I need to be there in 2-3 hours or so." When I asked why, she replied, "My fluids are high." This was around 2:30 on the Monday before Christmas.

What! So there I sat googling while she drove home. I guess too much amniotic fluids can carry some risks, and the midwives thought it was better we induce and deliver the baby than let things go on. So Hayley came home and we finalized things. Last time, we hadn't even finished packing the hospital "go bag"-- thankfully we had just wrapped that up a few days prior! My sister had come into town to stay with us and help with Son One leading up to, during, and after the birth; she would watch him while we went to the hospital.

Hayley pointed out that there is a lot of "hurry up and wait" at hospitals, so our plan was that we would get ready, I would drop her off at the hospital, and then I would go back home to eat dinner and help put Son One to bed before returning to the hospital.

She was right. I had dropped her off at the hospital around 5pm; by the time I got back to the hospital around 8pm, she was still sitting in the triage room, waiting, along with her doula. She had been hooked up to the monitors, though, which had revealed that she had been having tiny contractions she couldn't even feel.

(Last time around, me, my mother, and the doula all went to the hospital with Hayley. In the pandemic era, things are much different. Back in March, when we found out she was pregnant, we were told she could have just one support person. Later, they changed that to a doula and a support person. But even so, things were more restrictive; last time, I came and went after the delivery, but this time I was only allowed to do that once per day.)

We kept on waiting. They kept coming in, saying they were just waiting for a labor and delivery room to be cleaned so she could use it, and then coming in and saying it again. It turned out that lots of women were coming in in labor, and so kept getting priority over someone who needed to be induced. Clearly, a lot of people were determined to get their deliveries over and done with by Christmas!

A little bit before midnight, the midwife came in and told me and the doula that we should just go home and get a few hours' sleep, as things weren't moving along... a few minutes later, as we were packing up, she came back and told us never mind, a room was free!

Hayley was finally started on pitocin at 12:30am. The contractions were still much smaller than last time, though, so much though that she actually got some sleep-- something that would have been impossible last time around. Things didn't move very quickly; finally around 6:30am, the midwives decided to break her water manually, and the contractions intensified.

It was almost funny how quickly they intensified. Hayley suggested I get go some breakfast from the cafeteria because they weren't that strong; by the time I got back, she didn't want to make any small talk because she was being hit by them over and over.

I've seen labor and delivery twice now, and I remain in awe. It is clearly so hard and so painful. Hayley pushed and pushed once she was told to, and the moment where you realize no there really is a human head coming out down there had me biting down on my lip to stop from crying. The kind of happy tears, the flood of joy that you've seen someone do something amazing. In that moment, I was so proud of her. I feel like I am not being adequate to the experience here, but it does very much transcend my ability to talk about it meaningfully and without cliché.

At 8:55am on Tuesday, December 22nd, our Christmas baby was born.

Last time, you may recall, there was a fourth-degree laceration and a lot of blood. The midwife was totally on top of it and prepared to stop that from happening. Hayley had wanted to give birth on her hands and knees (as she did last time), but the midwife had a plan to get things lined up for everything to go as smoothly as possible. Once she realized this, Hayley gave in, and everything was fine; there was just a tiny tear that was sewn up with a single stitch.

Given there were no complications for mom or baby, we were thankfully out of the hospital the next day.

Last time I wrote one of these, I reflected on what it was like being a dad now. Well, now I have been father for two-and-a-half years, and trying to stay on top of two kids is a whole 'nother thing entirely! But that, I think, will be fodder for another post.

Review: Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson

Published: 2006
Acquired: July 2020
Read: September 2020

Mistborn: The Final Empire

by Brandon Sanderson

My sister has been after me to read Brandon Sanderson-- her favorite fantasy writer-- for years, and finally she bought the Mistborn trilogy for me to force me to read him. I found it hard to get into at first; the exact focus of the book was difficult to discern. Was this is a quest book about defeating a Dark Lord? The back cover of my Tor Teen edition made me think so, but no. Was it a heist novel? Seems like it for a bit, but no. I couldn't calibrate my generic expectations for what felt like too long. Once I figured out what the book was-- this long-term plan for rebellion alongside the growth and development of Vin as a character-- I came to really get into it and enjoy it. I also liked how, though not a quest novel, it played with the conventions of a quest novel, given what we ultimately learn about the origins of the book's Dark Lord. (Whose identity I called, though I don't know if I would have picked up on the clues without Sanderson's ostensibly spoiler-free chapter-by-chapter on-line annotations.) But if it's not a heist novel, then I think it doesn't need the large cast of characters with a diverse set of skills, many of whom never contribute much and who don't distinguish themselves. I did really like Vin, though, and Kelsier turns out to be pretty interesting... and my favorite character was Sazed, the loyal and thoughtful companion.

People-- such as my sister-- praise Sanderson for his worldbuilding. I agree that he has very thoughtful worldbuilding, and I enjoyed the ways he thought through some of the consequences of allomancy, with ideas such as the metal "roads" between cities, and how people avoided metal jewelry, and so on. But the way this was communicated was confusing, especially at first. Was allomancy a widely known skill that shaped society (as many details indicated), or something talked about in hushed tones (as Vin's lack of knowledge indicates)? I thought it confusing that the idea of Mistborn was introduced first, and then the idea of Allomancers was introduced, given that Mistborn have all the powers, and Allomancers have one each-- it's like Avatar: The Last Airbender beginning by explaining who the Avatar is, and then going back to explain what bending itself is later. And thank God for that metal chart in the back of the book, because I found all the pushing and pulling, internal and external stuff hard to keep track of.

All of this makes me sounds grumpy. But though I had trouble getting into it, I enjoyed it more the more I read it. The reveal of Kelsier's true plan was a good one, and the last chunk of the novel had me on the edge of my seat. It's a solid fantasy novel if not a great one, and I am willing to keep reading based on the assumption that given this was Sanderson's second published fantasy novel, he must have got even better as time went on.

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Q Are Cordially Uninvited...

Published: 2014
Acquired: April 2019
Read: October 2020

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Q Are Cordially Uninvited...

by Rudy Josephs

2380 / some indeterminate anniversary*
Picard and Crusher entered into a romantic relationship in Death in Winter and got married "off-screen" between Before Dishonor and Greater than the Sum. Q Are Cordially Uninvited... opens on their anniversary, where Picard and Crusher are forcing La Forge and Worf to watch a holo-recording of their ceremony. (They must be good friends indeed to suffer through such a thing.) This leads into a revelation that they did not have an uneventful little ceremony as we were told, but that Q showed up on the night of the wedding to whisk Picard away on an adventure.

But why? Why did there need to be an untold adventure on the eve of the wedding? After reading Q Are Cordially Uninvited..., I still don't know. This book doesn't really tell us anything about Picard, Crusher, or their relationship. Q brings Vash into the adventure; at first this seems to be because he wants to try to reignite the Picard/Vash thing, but instead it turns out that Q is the one who wants to be with Vash again. Most of the book is spent with Picard, Vash, and later Crusher searching for some ancient archaeological treasure on an alien planet, but the book doesn't exactly have the thrills of Indiana Jones. It's a pretty generic Star Trek ancient mystery, and it's hard to care about any scenario that is orchestrated by Q, where anything can happen, and does.

I did think Rudy Josephs had a good handle on the voice of Q; there were a couple lines in particular that really nailed John de Lancie. But Q is actually off-screen for big chunks of it all.

At the end, Q makes a special wedding for Picard and Crusher, the big one they won't "actually" get. This felt more like fannish wish fulfillment than anything anyone should have actually written. And then the book... just stops. I literally said "that's it?" when I turned the "page" on my Kindle, so abrupt was it (the frame story is not returned to), and so pointless did it all seem. This seems to mostly exist to plug a gap, but I'm not convinced anyone actually wanted this gap plugged. Even more weirdly, the writer of Greater than the Sum informs me that that book was purposefully written to seed a gap that a later book would go back and fill, but I wouldn't have guessed it, because there's nothing at all interesting in what Greater than the Sum says about the wedding. Not in a bad way; I mean, in GttS it just basically seems to be, "they went and got married," like normal people do. (As I recall, anyway; it's been over a decade, but I did skim some of the relevant bits to write this.) There's no hint that there's a gap to fill, yet here we are.

Continuity Notes:

• Weirdly for a book seemingly designed to plug a continuity gap, the body of evidence indicates Rudy Josephs knows little about the Destiny-era continuity. The only Enterprise crew to come to Picard and Crusher's holo-recreation of their wedding are La Forge and Worf-- screen characters both-- and at the actual wedding we're just told that "Picard's current crew" are there. Couldn't even look up Kadohata and Leybenzon on Memory Beta?
• Picard and Crusher only know of Q's wife from Voyager logs... but they met her in The Q Continuum trilogy. Additionally, Picard doesn't seem to remember that he learned there were reasons behind Q's various visits to the Enterprise in Q & A.
  
• Greater than the Sum said that Guinan officiated Picard and Crusher's wedding, which is not what we see go down in the official ceremony here. Can we blame Q's interference for this somehow?

Other Notes:

• I feel like you can do one joke in your title ("Q Are Cordially Invited" or "You Are Cordially Uninvited"), but two is overegging the pudding. 
  

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: The Fall: Revelation and Dust by David R. George III

* The frame story doesn't specify what anniversary it is for Picard and Crusher, who got married in September 2380 as per Greater than the Sum. I think I picked here to read it assuming it was the fifth, but that would overlap with The Fall. If it's the fourth, that would put it before The Stuff of Dreams, either just before or just after The Body Electric, which takes place in September 2384. I think it could literally take place on any of the first four anniversaries, though, and possibly on later ones as well.

Reading Roundup Wrapup: December 2020

Pick of the month: The Then and the Now by Si Spurrier & Rob Williams, Simon Fraser, and Warren Pleece. This is one of those months where I read a lot of decent-to-good stuff, but nothing that was standout excellent, and so picking this was a struggle. But I did quite enjoy this, yet another installment of probably the best Doctor Who comic book.

All books read:
1. Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor, Vol 4: The Then and the Now by Si Spurrier & Rob Williams, Simon Fraser, and Warren Pleece
2. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume One by Simon Furman, et al.
3. The Well of Ascension: Book Two of Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson
4. Superman vs. Wonder Woman: An Untold Epic of World War Two by Gerry Conway, Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, and Dan Adkins
5. Immortality, Inc.: Renegade Science, Silicon Valley Billions, and the Quest to Live Forever by Chip Walter
6. The Tides of Time: The Complete Fifth Doctor Comic Strips from the Pages of Doctor Who Monthly by Dave Gibbons, Steve Parkhouse, Mick Austin, Steve Dillon, et al.

Bit of a low month for me in terms of numbers of books. But one was a Brando Sando novel, and I am about 150 pages away from finishing a Charles Dickens novel as I type this the morning of the 31st, so in terms of numbers of pages read, I am probably doing quite well. (Perhaps-- I guess four of my six were comic books, which might negate that.) And what might be happening around here that would give me less time to read? Nothing at all!

All books acquired:
1. Doctor Who: Twelve Angels Weeping by Dave Rudden
2. Superman vs. Wonder Woman: An Untold Epic of World War Two by Gerry Conway, Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, and Dan Adkins
3. Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Light Fantastic by Jeffrey Lang
4. Star Trek: Prometheus: The Root of All Rage by Bernd Perplies and Christian Humberg
5. The Man with the Golden Gun by Ian Fleming
6. JSA: Ragnarok by Paul Kupperberg
7. Cease & Desist: Inspired by the Music of They Might Be Giants, as illustrated by Todd Alcott
8. The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie
9. Annals of the Western Shore: Gifts / Voices / Powers by Ursula K. Le Guin
10. Ground Zero: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine by Scott Gray, Martin Geraghty, Alan Barnes, Gareth Roberts, Adrian Salmon, et al.
11. Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch
12. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms: Book One of the Inheritance Trilogy by N. K. Jemisin

As always, December is a month where I take in a number of books, though surprisingly only the last five on this list were Christmas presents.

All books on "To be read" list: 662 (up 8)