Review: The Children of Húrin by J. R. R. Tolkien

Originally published: 2007
Read: January 2021

Narn i Chîn Húrin: The Tale of the Children of Húrin

 by J. R. R. Tolkien

Christopher Tolkien has taken a number of fragments his father left about an ancient Middle-earth tale and stitched them together into a somewhat coherent narrative; the notes at the end give a pretty good sense of how he did it. This unites material from across Tolkien's life, and also uses some pieces from The Silmarillion to fill in the gaps.

It makes for an odd book. In The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien adopted a pretty usual novelistic style, keeping us close to events. In The Silmarillion, he took a more distant style (in fact, he saw The Silmarillion as a synopsis of a much more detailed work that he never wrote). Children of Húrin ends up swerving back and forth. We have some bits where we're in scenes and learning about the ways characters think; we have other scenes that do things like "they fought together for three years and became the best of friends" and we just have to accept that these characters are friends now. On average, I would say we're somewhere in between those two points in terms of detail. Closer to Túrin than we ever get to any Silmarillion character, but you'll never come to know Túrin the way you did Bilbo or Frodo or Faramir.

At times the book really comes to life; I liked the glimpses of Túrin's childhood, and I liked his robber baron years. On the other hand, the overall effect of the book is pretty muted. If one is meant to feel the tragedy of Túrin and his family... you just don't, there's not enough here to make you do it. I kept thinking I would like to see someone else take this and expand it so it can have the emotional effect it deserves to. I'd hate to see someone else try to fill in Tolkien's prose, but I also think someone else writing it from scratch wouldn't quite feel right. So perhaps it would work best transposed into another medium; the idea I had was that I feel like it would make for an excellent graphic novel, or series of graphic novels. (Get P. Craig Russell to do it!)

I of course got a lot of enjoyment out of the notes at the back explaining how the story had been put together. That said, I mostly read this because my wife owned it; interesting as it was, I don't think I would take the time to read the subsequent posthumous "novels" Christopher Tolkien assembled out of his father's materials (Beren and Lúthien and The Fall of Gondolin). Sometimes reading prequels can be interesting, of course, but this is so detached from the era of Lord of the Rings that it feels like a standalone fantasy world that reuses some of the same names.

Boldly Going Where I Have Not Gone Before: DMing Star Trek Adventures

Back in the Before Times-- about a year before the pandemic-- my friend Cari came to me and asked if I knew how to play D&D. I think she had been watching Community? Anyway, with her husband, my wife, a grad school friend of Cari's, and our friend Jordan DMing, we soon had a campaign underway, which lasted a little over a year. The pandemic meant we played out the last few sessions on-line, and soon Jordan moved away anyway.

But I have been hankering to play again. I have enjoyed RPGs; this D&D campaign was my third. Before the pandemic, it was one of the most consistent forms of social interaction I had, and it was nice to have one-- as can be so rare if you're an academic-- that had nothing to do with work! And I don't know where it came from, but it soon became a more specific desire to participate a Star Trek Adventures campaign.

USS Ayrton dispatches a shuttle toward the derelict Alcubierre

STA is the newest Star Trek RPG. There have been several over the years, but STA has gotten a lot of positive press for feeling like the show. It's not about fighting or leveling up, but working together as a team to overcome problems.

But I knew this mean that I would have to DM. It's not like someone else in my friend group was going to sign up to run a Star Trek RPG! But I have never DMed before, and if you've played with me, you will know my grasp of the combat rules is often slim. But the storytelling aspect of it all (for obvious reasons) strongly appeals to me.

So I put some feelers out there and got a positive response, and I made it my vaccination celebration: two weeks after I got my second Moderna shot, we would convene to talk basic principles and do character-building.

I have had a vague idea for a Star Trek setting in my head for many years now, based on-- of all things-- a lyric in the theme song to the original Star Trek. I wanted to do an exploration-focused game, so these things seemed to go together well, as my setting was an area of space that was difficult to access and thus largely unexplored, but not totally cut off, so familiar figures could still be seen. I also-- maybe because I had been watching Lower Decks-- wanted the characters to be ensigns just assigned to a starship, working their way up the ranks.

the dice are department color-coded!

Modiphius sells a lot of stuff for STA; I ended up buying the Starter Set and the Gamemaster Bundle. This gave me the Core Rulebook, a lot of paraphernalia like fancy dice and a DM screen, and a few pre-written starter missions designed to make it easier to ease into the game.

There are five of those missions: a three-mission story that comes with the Starter Rules booklet, a one-off you can download for free from the Modiphius site, and a one-off that is printed in the Core Rulebook. I worked out a sequence for those five missions that would allow my players to ease into the game and into my setting. The missions I basically kept intact; what has changed is some of the revealed lore and connective tissue. (I can't say much more because my players might be reading this!) Working out the story has been pretty fun, as the five missions ended up inspiring more ideas in me for my setting, which had developed pretty fast. My plan once we play through the five starter missions is to move onto one of the mission compilations Modiphius sells, adapting their stuff to fit my setting and characters. I'll probably talk more about the setting once the team plays through those starter missions.

I ended up with five players: Hayley, my friend Cari and her husband, and our friend Jeremy and his wife. I obviously have the most Star Trek experience in the group, but Cari has taught an AWR 101 class about Star Trek so you know she knows her stuff too! Jeremy has more of a casual exposure, and his wife Daniela has barely seen any. As Hayley pointed out when she read their bios, they are all playing stubborn people with maverick tendencies, so it will be interesting to see how they work as a group! (The nice thing about STA, though, is that you can railroad your players by giving them orders from an NPC captain!)

We played our first actual session on Sunday, getting through about half of a mission. My players picked up Tasks pretty well, I think, as we went on, coming up with creative ways to get out of jams. There's a bit where they have to open a door that's sealed shut because of power failure; the book gives some suggestions (burn through the wall and access the mechanism, wrench it open with brute force) but they came up with the idea of using the power from a tricorder to temporarily operate it.

the GM screen contains a wealth of information... but to stop Son One from playing with it, I didn't get it out right away... and then I forgot about it, and was constantly looking up stuff in the Core Rulebook that was conveniently printed here for my reference!

Combat was tough, for them and me. The basic Task system is pretty clear, but combat is a bit more complex, and they were sometime struggling to figure out what they should be doing. This was made more complicated by, well, a Complication, making it difficult for them to hit their opponents, limiting their effectiveness. Thanks to this, they ended up in a not-great situation pretty quickly, their commanding officer down, their security officer injured, but the Romulans still fine.

Again, some clever thinking got them through. They had the idea to close the door, shutting them off from the Romulans, and then while the Romulans were trying to reopen it, the away team used their phasers to melt the edges of the door together, and they made their escape.

I think they enjoyed it! I wish I was more au fait with the rules, but I guess DMing is a lot like teaching: you don't have to know everything, you just have to know more than they do.

Review: Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

Originally published: 1838-39
Acquired: December 2012
Read: January 2021

Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

This is Dickens's fourth book (after Sketches by Boz and The Pickwick Papers) but second proper novel (after Oliver Twist). I think it shows. It feels very eighteenth century, even though Dickens had already written the much more modern feeling Oliver Twist. There are two parallel narratives: one comes across as a sort of picaresque, a young lad traveling through the world getting into scrape, like Tom Jones (though not nearly so bawdy!), and the other is one of those novels where a young lady's virtue is under threat from conniving men, like Belinda.

The first one, the story of Nicholas, starts off roughly, with a long family history infodumped right on you, and then there's some stuff about Nicholas taking a job at a terrible school, which is decent, but the kind of thing I feel like later Dickens could make funnier and more horrifying, and then he gets a job writing plays for a theatre troupe, which is hugely entertaining, the theatre troupe being a ridiculous family only Dickens could write, but after that the book becomes sheer tedium. I would happily go the rest of my life never reading another word about Uncle Ralph.

Meanwhile, the story of his sister starts dull and ends worse.

This was an 800-page slog, my least favorite Dickens yet.

I read a Charles Dickens novel every year. Next up in sequence: Little Dorrit

Review: The Man with the Golden Gun by Ian Fleming

Originally published: 1965
Acquired: December 2020
Read: January 2021

The Man with the Golden Gun by Ian Fleming

This is the last James Bond novel; if I had known it would pick up right from the end of You Only Live Twice, I would have made sure to read it in that order, but oh well.

This isn't Fleming's best work; indeed, having now finished all the novels, I feel pretty certain that he peaked with On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and he should have just stopped there. It would have been a much better final Bond adventure than what came next. Man with the Golden Gun opens okay, with Bond-- after the events of YOLT-- having been brainwashed by the Soviets. But once he's been deprogrammed, he's sent on a mission to Jamaica to kill a thug, which feels way beneath his talents. I think another writer could really do something with this: Bond having to prove to other and himself that he's still the man who he used to be. But Fleming doesn't do that, and this is Just Another Bond Mission.

Fleming always does pretty well with the mechanics of it all: Bond playing detective is good, and Scaramanga is a good villain, and the final action sequence is excellent, and the last line is a sad summation of Bond's character. But the novel has a fatal flaw, which is that Bond could just kill Scaramanga outright early on, and his reason for not doing so is completely unconvincing. Honestly, if Fleming hadn't pointed it out, I might not have noticed it, but he lampshades it, and everything that follows from there is undermined as a result.

I read a James Bond book every four months. Next up in sequence: Quantum of Solace

Book Rankings (So Far):

1. Casino Royale
2. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
3. Dr No
4. Thunderball
5. Moonraker
6. For Your Eyes Only
7. From Russia with Love
8. The Spy Who Loved Me
9. Octopussy & The Living Daylights
10. The Man with the Golden Gun 
11. You Only Live Twice
12. Live and Let Die
13. Goldfinger
14. Diamonds are Forever
    

Friendship Really Is Magic: Thoughts on My Little Pony

I don't know if it goes for all toddlers, but Son One gets into things very intently-- and then moves on. So for a while, he watched Frozen every single day and was particularly obsessed with Sven. (Every time Sven was off-screen: "Where's Sven? Sven needs to come.") Then it was Super Truck, and we were constantly building him Super Truck characters out of Duplo. Then it was Paw Patrol, and Hayley made him a bunch of Duplo pups. ("They are not dogs," he would correct me, "they are pups.")

Now it's My Little Pony. He's actually been low-key into it for a while, and he previously had a period of being into it, but it recently really took off. Hayley has been a big My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic aficionado for several years now, and she has a lot of mini-figures and most of the tie-in comics from IDW, as well as a box full of G1 ponies from when she was a kid. For Son One, he's often really into things when he can draw connections. (It was mind-blowing to him, when about a year ago, he realized the planets in Chris Ferrie's Eight Little Planets were the same planets as in some other book.) The presence of pony toys, pony comics, and a pony tv show means he can always make these connections. "I have that one!" he'll exclaim when recognizing on screen a pony he has a toy of, or "I read a story about that one!"

His tv viewing is limited at home, but his comic reading is only limited by the patience of his parents, so we are constantly being asked to read a lot of pony comics to him. I do enjoy this, but to read a 20-page comic book out loud takes a while, and my commitment to doing all the voices means it also takes a lot of energy. (I am pretty proud of my Fluttershy voice, but I feel like Rainbow Dash never comes out how I would like.)

from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic #18
(script by Katie Cook, art by Andy Price)

During his first spate of pony comic reading, he was really into a storyline called Ponies of Dark Water, where the Mane Six turn evil because of magic water from a hot spring. Son One always wanted to read that one. "I want to read the one where they are evil." He would also tell us things like, "I have red eyes because I am evil Applejack." He hasn't asked us to read that one again of late, but he is still into ponies and other creatures that are or have been evil. (It's not entirely clear to me he knows what "evil" is, but he does know that opposite of, say, "good Celestia" is "evil Celestia.") He is especially into Princess Luna and her evil counterpart Nightmare Moon; a passing reference in one comic made me realize there is one episode where Princess Celestia is revealed to have an evil counterpart called Daybreaker, and when he watched that episode, he flipped out with excitement, and often asks if "evil Celestia" is going to be in a particular story. (Thankfully, the other day he told me, "I only like good ponies.")

As long as Hayley has been into MLP, I've known a lot about it. I absorb details about fictional worlds quickly and easily. But now that I am constantly reading these comics, I keep learning more and more. It's a weird experience primarily being exposed to a world through tie-ins, but if you've read as many tie-ins as I have, you know how to recognize the joins. "Ah, this character who just appeared must have been introduced in the show..." and you can even guess pretty accurately what the plot must have been. 

from My Little Pony: Legends of Magic #12
(script by Jeremy Whitley, art by Tony Fleecs)

I am also constantly asking Hayley questions. A lot are about how alicorns/princesses work, but there are no real answers to that. But a lot of questions were raised when I read Son One the twelve-issue Legends of Magic maxi-series; this detailed the lives of a number of ancient heroes of Equestria, and came out in parallel with a season of the television show that also did something similar. I could tell something was going on when I read it; there's a character introduced in issue #7 whose name is never used, for example, until issue #9, and that's because the episode that introduced his character (as a villain) aired between issues #8 and 9.

I was asking Hayley about this story arc... and so she came up with a sequence of episodes that would lead up to this. There are a lot of ongoing plots in MLP, so to understand that storyline, we would need to watch some other episode-- but to understand that, we would need to watch some other episodes, and so on. So when Son One gets his daily dose of tv, all three of us (and sometimes four) sit down to watch with him as we work our way through this sequence. So far we've watched eight episodes, and I'm not sure how many more there are to go.

But what I am realizing is that, like Son One, I am into the evil ponies. Some of the best tv characters are ones that start "evil" but become good. (TV Tropes has an article, of course.) Crais in Farscape, Zuko in Avatar: The Last Airbender, Dukat (for a time) in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Blackarachnia in Beast Wars / Beast Machines: Transformers, Astronema in Power Rangers in Space, and so on. (And in comics, there's Megatron in Transformers: More than Meets the Eye.) I think this is because they can often have a little bit of "edge" to them that our heroes lack, but also because they are emotionally complex: they genuinely believed in what they did, even if they no longer do, and so they might regret it but not regret it at the same time.

Because the premise of the show is that friendship is literally magic, MLP has more of these than most shows. You don't win by destroying or imprisoning people as you might most of the time in the above shows-- the characters who switch are very much exceptions in those. In MLP, though, you typically defeat someone by making friends with them... so the show is replete with ex-villains, many of whom go on to become recurring characters (and the ones that don't recur on screen end up doing so in the comics): there's Princess Luna/Nightmare Moon, Starlight Glimmer, Tempest Shadow, Stygian/the Pony of Shadows, Sunset Shimmer, probably others I'm forgetting.

Starlight Glimmer is probably the best of these on screen. In her first couple appearances, she was a unicorn who convinced a town they would live more happily if they had no cutie marks (the unique indication of ponies' talents), because difference is the cause of unhappiness; she then sought revenge on Twilight Sparkle. But Twilight learned that Starlight had been upset when a friend got a cutie mark indicating he was talented at magic and thus left her to go to magic school, and took her on as a pupil. I really like the subsequent episodes I've seen Starlight in, as she struggles with her self-worth.

from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic #67
(script by Jeremy Whitley, art by Andy Price)

Tempest Shadow was a secondary villain in the MLP movie; the character never appeared on the tv show, as she was played by Emily Blunt, someone the cartoon couldn't get on a regular basis. But the comics have no such restriction, and there's a great two-part comic story illustrated by Andy Price (the best illustrator of pony comics) where she confronts the tragedy in her past that led her to becoming a villain; it makes a great companion to the issue of the movie prequel comic also illustrated by Andy Price about how she met up with the Storm King. Like there's some legit great art in these things, and thus great character work.

On the show, once Nightmare Moon returns to being Princess Luna, she mostly seems to just turn up to crisis situations alongside her sister, Princess Celestia, who rules Equestria. (One of the only exceptions I've seen is the episode "A Royal Problem," where Starlight Glimmer switches the cutie marks of the two sisters to help them better understand each other.) But there are a number of comic issues that focus on her attempts to readjust to life in Equestria after spending a thousand years as an insane villain on the moon. (And even before she became Nightmare Moon, she was always kind of an outsider.) These are some of my favorite issues of the comics.

The comics even redeem characters the show apparently never does. On screen, Sombra was defeated-- in the comic story arc The Siege of the Crystal Empire, he gets reconstituted from being a spirit, but then is convinced to give up his evil ways. (Apparently, though, the show undermines this by bringing him back in a totally different way later on, still evil. Alas, as it's a great story arc.)

from My Little Pony: Friends Forever #7
(script by Jeremy Whitley, art by Tony Fleecs)

I recently read Son One one where Luna goes to Pinkie Pie to learn how to do comedy, and there's another good one where she teams up with Twilight's dragon spike to investigate arson in Dragontown. ("Forget it Spike. It's Dragontown.") The best one, though, is one (drawn by Andy Price again) where she takes over Celestia's job for the day. The tv show would do something similar later in "A Royal Problem," but this is much funnier, with much more emphasis on Luna's tendency to call other ponies her minions, and on her overall awkwardness. It's not quite how she is in the show... but it's in some ways better, and I always enjoy declaiming stuff in my Luna voice in the stories where she shows up.

Hayley has actually been after me to read her pony comics for years, but Son One is far more likely to throw a tantrum if I don't do it. But as Hayley pointed out to me, I really should be counting them on my reading list!

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: The Fall: Peaceable Kingdoms

Published: 2014
Acquired: October 2020
Read: November 2020

Star Trek: The Fall: Peaceable Kingdoms

by Dayton Ward

October 13-27, 2385
I've been trying to decide what I wanted out of this book. In some ways, The Fall is a loose mini-series; it's not like, say, Destiny, where you could publish the whole thing as one big book. But it is also not Typhon Pact; it's not just a set of books about a common situation, there's a sequence of plot developments that carry from book to book. The events of Revelation and Dust spark the events of The Crimson Shadow and A Ceremony of Losses; A Ceremony of Losses directly leads into The Poisoned Chalice; The Poisoned Chalice directly leads into Peaceable Kingdoms. At the end of The Poisoned Chalice, it's known that Ishan's chief of staff was responsible for the assassination of President Bacco, and Riker has reached out to Picard to try to stop it...

It feels to me this book thus needs to escalate from the previous books. Ceremony of Losses featured Starfleet ships firing on each other; Poisoned Chalice made you think enemies could be anywhere and everywhere across the galaxy. But Peaceable Kingdoms seems to deescalate the tension of the two previous books. It doesn't just do the same things over again, but does them less interestingly. While in Poisoned Chalice we met and got to know Ishan adherents, here they're all distant figures wearing black hats. While those stories went all over the galaxy, in this one, it's mostly about Crusher scrambling around on a desert planet, and the Enterprise investigating a freighter. It feels small when we need big. If this is a test of values... one never actually feels that Picard and the Enterprise crew are doing anything other than an ordinary mission. Give me Picard on the run or something.

It's also, well, boring. I never felt any tension during the bits where Crusher and (Tom) Riker were trying to stay out of the way of the people trying to stop them from uncovering Ishan's identity, and the Enterprise seemed to aimlessly meander. I struggled a lot with the flashbacks, too. The way Ishan's big secret plays out is too easy; we learn it early on, and from then, the only tension-- such that there is any-- isn't anything about Ishan, but just if Crusher can deliver the information. It was so easy to learn Ishan's secret, I expected some kind of further twist, but it never came.

It doesn't help that the bad guys are just not very good. In one part, La Forge gets a tip from Sonya Gomez that the da Vinci transported a special operations team pretending to be engineers from one civilian transport to another, and it was obvious to her that they weren't engineers. If you are in special operations and so bad at pretending to be engineers, why use a Starfleet Corps of Engineers vessel as your transportation for no readily apparent reason?

The big weakness at the heart of the novel, and thus The Fall, is Ishan himself. As I highlighted in my review of Crimson Shadow, it's weird reading The Fall in 2020, because it so clearly reads as a commentary on movements like Trumpism and Brexit in some ways, even though it was published 2013-14. The revelation that Ishan is actually a Bajoran collaborator who killed the real Ishan and took his place during the latter days of the Occupation... it reads like wishful thinking about Trump. I feel like there was a school of thought out there that Trump was some kind of Russian plant, and if we could just unmask him, this would all be over. But the scary thing about Trump wan't that he has some kind of secret (though admittedly he has pretty bad secrets), the scary thing about Trump is that he was exactly who he said he was. That Ishan should have this secret dark past is wish fulfillment and an easy out. Oh, you don't like this guy's policies? Well, conveniently for you, he's actually a murderer and a liar. But what if Ishan had been above board? Or at least clean enough not to get caught? What would our heroes have done then? I feel like that would have made for a much more interesting (if difficult) novel than the one we got.

Stephanie Chaves-Jacobsen as Kadohata
(photomanip by Columbia clipper, I think)

Continuity Notes:

• One reason I thought the Ishan story was fishy and too easy was that I felt like the novel was working so hard to convince that Ilona Daret was an old friend of Crusher's. There's this chapter where Picard and Crusher think about three different previously unseen adventures where they encountered Daret (pp. 26-7). My feeling was then whenever a Star Trek story tries to convince you a previously unseen character is such a pal, they're being set up for a betrayal (e.g., The Stuff of Dreams just a few books ago). Imagine my surprise when I looked something up on Memory Beta halfway through the novel and it turned out that Daret was in fact a preestablished character, from an insignificant anthology called The Sky's the Limit. No traitor at all, and not previously unseen, either. Except Dayton Ward spelled Daret's first name wrong. I bet the guy who wrote the original story was pissed.
• One of the flashbacks to Crusher and Daret is set on the Enterprise-D and includes Miranda Kadohata. Kadohata first appeared in the TNG relaunch novel Q & A, but it established that she had served about the Enterprise-D as well. Despite that, no work of fiction I am aware of had actually shown her on the Enterprise-D until now, some six years after she was introduced-- and some four years after she was written out!
• On p. 370, zh'Tarash says she will be serving out the remainder of Bacco's term... but A Time for War, A Time for Peace and Articles of the Federation seemed to establish that the new president after a special election serves out a complete four-year term, resetting the cycle. But in general there are a number of inconsistencies with the way presidential terms have worked in Destiny-era fiction.
  

Other Notes:

• People complain about Dayton Ward's tendency to recap too much; I didn't notice anything here, except in ch. 14, where Picard repeatedly thinks about things we know already from ch. 11. "In truth, the cargo run to the colony world was but one part of the ruse Admiral Riker had engineered as a means of giving Picard maneuvering room while the captain carried out a different, clandestine mission" (122). Yes, I know, because I read about it not even 25 pages ago! Later in ch. 14, there's a page-long recap of things the reader already knows about Bacco's assassination if they've been reading this very book.
• I said the bad guys were not very good... but on the other hand Velk has to be a Palpatine-esque master manipulator for this plan to work. How did he know that if Bacco was killed, he could persuade enough people on the Council to select Ishan as president pro tem?
• I have come around to the idea that Andorian readmittance would be fast-tracked... I am less persuaded by the idea that an Andorian could become president so quickly. It seems like pretty presumptive to begin campaigning for an office before you are even eligible for it!
  
• I might have missed something so I am hesitant to call this out... but is it a coincidence that Daret discovers incriminating information on Ishan at this exact moment in time?
  
• "Peaceable kingdom" is apparently a theological term, but I am shocked, shocked I tell you, to find out that it is also the title of a song by Rush.

The Fall Overall:
This five-book series contained one excellent novel, one highly enjoyable novel, and three novels that did little for me. It doesn't seem to be a coincidence, either, that the best of the five has the least connection to the main premise of the series; the idea of an increasingly authoritarian Federation coming into conflict with Starfleet idealism seems like an interesting one, but the series did little to make this plausible or compelling. But if it had done this, and had made Ishan less of a black hat, then that might have been too much politics for what is fundamentally an action-adventure series. I guess this is why I'm not very into the political turn of Star Trek fiction: the politics take over the story to the exclusion of what I enjoy about Star Trek... but the politics aren't complicated and realistic enough to convince, because then the books would be something totally different. They're sort of in the uncanny valley.

Weirdly, though The Crimson Shadow has little to do with the plot of The Fall, it probably is the only novel with something interesting to say about the themes of The Fall. None of the other novels really did much with the ideas of how institutions succeed and fail that Crimson Shadow spoke so eloquently to... but they should have. Based on the way real world politics have gone since these books were published, it seems like we could have had a series about a rising tide of nationalism across local space, tying them together more clearly and thematically.

I did like the dominoes thing-- the last three books each hand off to each other, but focus on largely completely different casts of characters. I think really the issue is Peaceable Kingdoms doesn't do anything that the two previous books don't do. It's the same domino we've already seen fall! (to stretch this metaphor to its breaking point)

Peaceable Kingdoms ends with President zh'Tarash stating the Federation is going to get back to exploring things, and there's an interview with James Swallow that describes this as an out-of-universe goal of The Fall as well: "I think we’re going to go back to some of the more traditional mode of what Star Trek is, which is about going to the strange new worlds and exploring all the cool stuff out there." But, you know, if you think Star Trek fiction should be telling more stories about exploring space, you could just commission stories about exploring space. I would have just opened the next TNG book with Bacco sending Picard an e-mail: "Dear Jean-Luc, everything the Borg wrecked has been sorted out, the Typhon Pact is all smiles, go out there and find some weird squid aliens and get into a moral dilemma or something." I'm not persuaded you needed to do a five-book political series to set up that there won't be more big political series! (Clearly this is why my Star Trek tie-in career went so well.)

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Prometheus: Fire with Fire by Bernd Perplies and Christian Humberg

Review: Annals of the Western Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin

Collection published: 2020
Contents originally published: 2004-07
Acquired: December 2020
Read: May 2021

Annals of the Western Shore: Gifts / Voices / Powers

by Ursula K. Le Guin

This Library of America edition collects three late-career YA novels from Le Guin, the loosely linked "Annals of the Western Shore." They are not very connected-- they take place in the same fantasy world, but there's no overarching plot, and each installment takes place in a very different part of that fantasy world. Each book has a different protagonist, but the previous book's protagonist makes an appearance as well, providing some continuity. Unlike most of the other Le Guin LOAs I've read, this one didn't contain any stories I've read before. (I own paperbacks of all three Annals but have never gotten around to them.) It took me a long time to get through all three stories, but I think that's the fault of me (or of the world), not of the books; once my semester I was over, I shot through the final story in just a couple days. Like, I am realizing, a lot of Le Guin's late career work, these are all bildungsroman. (Which is why they were marketed as YA; none of them feel like the kind of YA fantasy that have come to dominate in the post-Hunger Games era (thanks God), but that makes it hard for me to imagine these being published as YA novels now.)

The first, Gifts, is set in a mountain country divided up into small estates, each ruled by a man with some kind of "gift." Our main character, Orrec, comes from a family where people can unmake things and people, literally unraveling them, just by looking at them. He lives in fear of his own power, and also fear of his father, whose high expectations for him are seemingly impossible to live up to. It's an emotional, tragic story. Le Guin, of course, always gets how to do fantasy: this story expertly unfolds a different society, but also a person, and at the same time it's a metaphor for all fathers and sons. It's desperately sad in parts, in a way that's hard to talk about; some of what Orrec undergoes is awful.

It's also cleverly told; the story is narrated by Orrec, but often we are not told things in any kind of objective way; Orrec is very clear that he is telling us a story that someone else once told him. Everything is mediated through the experience of someone else. As much as anything else, the Annals are all about the power of stories, especially, the written word, to change the world, and this ranges from published books to the stories we tell ourselves, and Le Guin is always attentive to the details of how that works, and Gifts is all the better for it.

The second story, Voices, I struggled to get into. It's about a girl named Memer who might be able to hear the voice of books in a city occupied by an outside force that has banned its religion. It might not be the story's fault, but I never emotionally connected with this one. Memer's inner life and desires never came alive for me in the way Orrec or the third story's protagonist did; her goal was murkier. I'd be curious to reread this, though, at a time when I can give it more of my attention and see if I like it more.

The first two novels are each about 150 pages in my LOA edition; Powers is almost 300. Despite that, I read it the quickest of all three, and it was definitely my favorite. Powers is about a slave boy named Gavir in a place called the "City States" who is being educated so that he can educate future generations of his masters. He struggles with loving a literature that depicts ideals his actual society does not live up to-- and he might have powers he needs to keep secret. He eventually goes on a long journey, and what results is a moving story about finding and making one's place in the world; there are two different key parts where I started to tear up here. One due to relieved tension, and one where Gavir finally makes it, the power of stories having saved him in the end. I am a sucker for a good travel narrative and a good bildungsroman, and Le Guin blends both here to excellent effect. In discovering the world, Gavir discovers himself, and in discovering Gavir, we readers discover ourselves too. Shot through with tragedy, but also redemption. Stories blind us and save us, and I felt a little bit saved when I finished Powers. I look forward to reading and savoring this one again someday.

It was a bit weird reading the back matter, where it's brought out that some of the themes and ideas of the Annals are responding to things like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; that was just fifteen years ago, but worrying about the doings of Donald Rumsfeld feels like something from another century in the Age of Trump. We used to be so worried about what America was doing to the world, but that's almost quaint now that the country America is destroying is itself.

This is the fifth LOA edition of Le Guin, and the fourth that I have read. They have all being great opportunities to visit parts of the Le Guin canon that are new to me, and revisit ones that I already knew I loved. It's not clear to me that if a sixth is planned, but man, I really hope so. More Le Guin is always needed.

Are you Down for a Cross?

I actually don't think I've ever really blogged about it, but I've been a crossword aficionado for about a decade now, ever since one day at lunch during a lull in the conversation an older graduate student named Jon slammed down the student paper and said, "This is boring, let's do the crossword." Doing the crossword as a group became a daily ritual; the UConn Daily Campus syndicated the LA Times crossword puzzle, and we would all crowd around it, shouting answers at whatever poor sap happened to have the pencil.

The LAT puzzle, like the much more famous New York Times, increases in difficulty across the course of a week: Monday is easiest, Saturday the hardest. (Sunday puzzles are bigger than dailies, but if you control for that, in terms of difficulty, they're comparable to a Thursday.) I remember the sheer sense of triumph the first time we completed the Friday-- and then we looked up the the answers online and realized that due to a misprint, we had actually completed a Saturday puzzle! (The Campus was perpetually printing the wrong day's puzzle, or printing it with the edge of the image cropped off, or at a resolution too low to read.)

(I would e-mail whenever there was an issue; no one ever answered my e-mails, but usually things would get better for a little while when I did. One April Fools Day, they put a note in the paper that said something like, "To the guy who always e-mails us about the crossword, try going to google dot com  and typing in 'crossword.'" Made it!)

In the summer, when there were no copies of the Campus to be had, I would even print it off the LAT website so we could do it together. By my last summer, we had got so good at it that doing a Monday as a group was pretty pointless, so we switched to doing them competitively.

Most of my close friends left UConn a year or two before I did, though I continued to do the lunchtime ritual. Once I left, I largely switched over to doing on my phone, on an app called Shortyz.

My sister Catherine got into it at some point; I remember visiting her in Philadelphia when traveling for a conference, and doing a Sunday with her, and then for a couple weeks, texting about our crossword accomplishments. (I would brag whenever I finished a Saturday or Sunday with no hints.)

Just over a year ago, a post on r/crossword alerted me to the existence of Down for a Cross, a web site for collaborative crossword solving. You can select a puzzle, or upload your own .puz file, and it generates a unique link you can use to solve the same puzzle simultaneously.

After poking around with it for a bit, I sent one to Cat. This was April 11, so early in the days of lockdown: we were all trapped at home with nothing to do. It quickly became a daily ritual that after I put Son One down to sleep, we would do the NYT puzzle together. (I would still do the LAT on my own, except for the weekend puzzles.) 

My sister's desire to do puzzles somewhat outstripped mine, so she soon looped in our sister-in-law Jess, so now all three of us do the NYT together, and then they do some more besides that. Though we've missed some evenings for whatever reason, we always catch up on that puzzle later, meaning I-- who felt I had kind of stagnated with what the LAT has to offer-- now experience the complexities of America's premier crossword puzzle. We used to hate rebuses, but have quickly come to appreciate their unique challenges. (In fact, doing the NYT every day has pretty much sated my crossword desires, so I never do the LAT on my phone anymore.)

Crosswording was, I think, designed and is primarily thought of as a solo activity. But for many years, the crossword was a social act for me-- the joy of breaking through a difficult puzzle as a group is a big part of what I used to get out of it... and then did not for many years. Lockdown has definitely been tough in a lot of ways, but I am thankful for the weird ways it has occasionally brought us closer together.

Review: Heads by Greg Bear

Originally published: 1991
Read: February 2021

Heads by Greg Bear

I read this novella because of the premise: some lunar colonists come into possession of a bunch of cryogenically-preserved heads, from an Alcor-like foundation. Can they figure out a way to read the memories of those colonists? I've been reading sf stories about life extension technologies for a class I'm guying to teach. Well, this book has very little to say about its actual premise, as it mostly focuses on largely uninteresting and seemingly over-simplistic politics on the Moon. There's also some Scientology satire; maybe this would have felt fresher in 1991, but thirty years on it's pretty dull stuff. The revelation about why the Scientologists don't want the heads revived is blindingly obvious, but takes the protagonists a hundred pages to catch up to the reader on. I guess this is set in the same milieu as Bear's Moving Mars, but that was a much better book.

The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Four (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 9)

Collection published: 2013
Contents originally published: 1987
Read: February 2021

The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Four

editorial notes and assistance by James Roberts

Written by Simon Furman, Ian Rimmer, and Lew Stringer

Pencils by Geoff Senior, Will Simpson, Dan Reed, Jeff Anderson, and Lew Stringer

Inks by Geoff Senior, Tim Perkins, Dan Reed, Stephen Baskerville, Dave Harwood, David Elliot, and Lew Stringer

Colors by Steve White, Euan Peters, and Abadzis
Letters by Annie Halfacree, Richard Starkings, and Mike Scott

So far, Marvel UK's The Transformers has been on a nice upward trajectory: that comes to an end with this volume. It does get off to a nice start with the sequence of stories about Rodimus Prime of 2007 hiring a bounty hunter to kill Galvatron, who ends up tracking him to Earth of 1987 ("Wanted: Galvatron, Dead or Alive!"/"Burning Sky!"/"Hunters!"/"Fire on High!"/"Vicious Circle!"). The bounty hunter is Death's Head, who will be the character who connects Transformers to Doctor Who Magazine in the long run. You can see why Death's Head went on to get his own spin-off: he's a fun, expressive, dynamic character, and the four-way collision we get here between Death's Head, Galvatron, the Autobots of 1987, and the Autobots of 2007 is kind of explosive stuff Furman excels at. Big, fast-paced action, with enjoyable characters. I liked the IDW Ultra Magnus, and I am quickly coming to appreciate the Marvel UK Ultra Magnus as well, even though he's a very different character. (I am not sure why it is taking him months to locate the Ark, though!)

Kind of awkward to have your hand shot off, yes?
from The Transformers #120 (script by Simon Furman, art by Geoff Senior)

After that, though, it's a bit of a mix. There's "Ancient Relics!", a crossover with Action Force (the UK equivalent of G. I. Joe) that is mostly just tedious, uninteresting action sequences, with none of Furman's character flare. There's "Worlds Apart!", a really uninteresting tale of some Headmasters on Nebulos, apparently slotting in during an issue of the US Headmasters miniseries that hadn't even been reprinted in the UK mag yet at the time it came out.* And there's the UK retelling of the Headmasters series, and what can I say about the Headmaster concept except that I just really really hate it, because it overloads an already overloaded series with uninteresting characters.

Apparently the UK version of "The Headmaster Saga" presents a whole different reason the Headmasters traveled to Earth than the one the US stories gave, yes?
from The Transformers Annual 1987 (art by unknown)

But there is some decent stuff here, even if it doesn't rise to the high points of volume three. "Kup's Story" (a flashback of how Kup met Rodimus) is fun, as is "Ark Duty" (a flashback of Kup and Rodimus in the period leading up to Transformers: The Movie). The return of the Dinobots in "Grudge Match" was kind of silly (I liked the Dinobots throwing down the Predacons, but I didn't buy that they would let them off so easy), though I did like the "What's in a Name?" lead-in story that revealed Swoop's secret shame over "losing" his name. The "Ladies' Night" story, uniting three female characters from across the UK run, might have been more successful if the artists here were more skilled at drawing humans, not robots, but it was fine.

So that's what Rodimus Prime's alt mode looks like, yes?
from The Transformers #118 (script by Simon Furman, art by Jeff Anderson & Stephen Baskerville)

I did have to love "Stargazing," where a human boy teaches Starscream-- Starscream!-- the true meaning of Christmas. He thinks he's succeeded, but Starscream just wants to get one up on an Autobot.

This kid is Starscream's most compelling nemesis, yes?
from The Transformers #145 (plot by Simon Furman, script by Ian Rimmer, art by Jeff Anderson & Stephen Baskerville)

And Death's Head reappears in "Headhunt," which gives us our first glimpse of a 21st-century storyline not tied to the 20th-century one. I am curious to see how that is going forward, and how Furman pulls all the strands-- of which there are a lot at this point-- together. But this volume itself felt more like a chore than any previous one.

* The chronology gets a bit complicated here. The UK stories collected here (#113-45) overlap with the US stories collected in The Transformers Classics, Vol. 3, but those stories also overlap with the Headmasters miniseries, which wasn't collected until the US Classics, Vol. 7. And some of these UK stories fit in during Headmasters, and others are set purely in the future, and one ongoing plot from the UK strip is only tied up in the annual. And then also some of the US issues during this time reprinted UK strips! I suggest something like this, but your mileage may vary, and this also means you need to save some of the UK strips from this volume until you get to UK volume five: US #26-27; UK #113-20; "Vicious Circle!" (from UK Annual 1987); US #28; UK #125; US #29-30; UK #132; "Ark Duty" (from UK Annual 1987); UK #133-34; Headmasters #1; US #31; "What's in a Name?" (from UK Annual 1987); UK #135-38; US #32; Headmasters #2; "Doomsday for Nebulos"/"Stylor's Story" (from UK Annual 1987); Headmasters #3; US #35-36; UK #145-53; US #37; Headmasters #4; UK #130-31; "The Final Conflict" (from UK Annual 1987); US #38. This does rather stretch out Headmasters, so it functions as a sort of "meanwhile... in space" in advance of their appearance in #38. Okay wow that is messy... I should just do a Transformers reading order post at some point.

This post is the ninth in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers The Age of Chaos. Previous installments are listed below:

1. The Iron Legion
2. Dragon's Claw 
3. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume One
4. The Tides of Time
5. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Two
6. Voyager
7. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Three
8. The World Shapers
   

Semester's End Reflections: In Brief

My friend Angela complained-- like a month ago now-- that I haven't been blogging. Blogs, I said, are the first thing to go when life gets hectic. It's hard to justify spending the time on them when there is so much to do. (The book reviews that are appearing here these days were mostly written back in February and March, so I have done very little writing of late.)

But this week is finals week; I am writing this Thursday morning and it should post Friday morning, and that ought to mean I have just six or seven research papers left to grade in order to be done with the semester. I've taken care of most of my other school-related tasks, so I have time to do things like blog again.

Teaching four classes in hybrid format and having a toddler and an infant at home... well, it did indeed turn out to be a lot of work. But I muddled through to the end, and I think the adjustments I made this semester worked because this semester's final projects went better than last semester's on the whole. (My 101 was not as strong as I'd hoped... but my 201s were definitely more consistent.)

Last semester I scaled back feeder assignments to reduce workload, but my experience was that this 1) deprived students of opportunities to practice things they'd do on the final papers, and 2) gave fewer opportunities to acquire what you might call "cushion" points. So I put all those assignments back in, and I think it worked out. My grade distribution is more like its normal self. Not totally: there are some students with Ds who I think in a normal semester I could have pulled through to a C, but last semester I had a bunch of students who I think normally would have gotten Bs ending up with Cs, and that didn't happen as much.

In the fall, UT will be hybrid no more (supposedly). No more Zoom, no more half-capacity classes, no more recording videos. I hope this is true. Though this semester went better than last, I have struggled to build rapport with my students, and I am tired of teaching to four students at a time and/or asking black boxes to respond. (Actually, one section aside, my Zoom classes have generally been pretty good about keeping cameras on and responding to me.) I am pretty optimistic about the fall... but of course it is easy to be optimistic from this distance!

Now that it is "summer" I have two goals (among many): get back to that book project, and get some blog discipline again. My peak period, though, is the few weeks after my semester ends and before my wife's does (because that is also when daycare closes). We'll see how it goes...

You can't go home to Earth-Two again: The Young All-Stars

In the wake of Crisis on Infinite Earths, DC's All-Star Squadron was wound down and replaced by a new ongoing series, The Young All-Stars. Instead of focusing on established Golden Age characters, this focused on a group of largely original World War II-era characters, picking up from where All-Star Squadron had left off in early 1942. Some of the characters are vague analogues who were removed from the WWII era by the changes of the Crisis.

So there is:

• Arn "Iron" Munro, a strongman (sort of a Superman analogue)
• Flying Fox, a First Nations Canadian (a very loose Batman analogue, only in the sense that they're both spooky-looking flying creatures; his powers are all tribal mysticism stuff)
• Helena "Fury" Kosmatos, deriving her power from the Greek Furies (replacing the Golden Age Wonder Woman as the mother of Lyta "Fury" Trevor of Infinity, Inc.)
• Neptune "Neptune Perkins" Perkins, who has water powers (a preexisting character, but he had only appeared in two Golden Age stories before Roy Thomas picked him up for use in All-Star Squadron; kind of an Aquaman analogue)
• Danny "Dyna-Mite" Dunbar, who has explosion powers (the only one of these characters to actually have an ongoing feature during the Golden Age, he had been sidekick to TNT)
• Miya "Tsunami" Mishada, also with water powers (she appeared as a villain in All-Star Squadron)
• [joining the team later] Paula "Tigress" Brooks, a master of all weapons (eventually it's revealed that she'll go on to be the original Huntress, a villain who appeared opposite Wildcat in Sensation Comics, as well as opposite the Helena Wayne Huntress in the 1970s All Star Comics revival)

The problem is that I just never really cared about any of these characters. I don't think character is Roy Thomas's strong point, but on All-Star Squadron and Infinity, Inc., he was able to get there in the end; the All-Stars were a colorful lot who popped well, and the Infinitors started weak but became compelling. Is it because the All-Stars were (mostly) preexisting characters and the Infinitors closely tied to preexisting ones? Did Dann Thomas exert less influence on this series than on Infinity, Inc.? (My assumption, perhaps unfounded, is he comes up with the plots that reconcile forty-year old continuity errors, and she writes all the good character stuff and dialogue.)

Or is it the art? The more I read comics, the more I come to suspect things people perceive as "writing" problems are often art ones. If characters don't pop, is it because the writing is poor, or because the artists can't communicate character? I never really warmed to any of the series regular artists, and it went through a number of them. All-Star Squadron and Infinity, Inc. were both blessed by Jerry Ordway, who went on to be a superstar, and other collaborators included standouts like Tony DeZuniga, Vince Colletta, and even, I must admit, Todd McFarlane. Young All-Stars didn't have such great artists, and the ones it did have were rarely constant; the first twelve issues had six different pencillers and six different inkers. The only one of the title's regular artists I'd ever heard of was Malcolm Jones III, who went from issue #19 of Young All-Stars in Dec. 1988 to issue #4 of obscure new title The Sandman in Apr. 1989. But being good is not the same as being a good fit, and you might guess someone well-suited to Neil Gaiman's milieu isn't well suited to Roy Thomas's, no matter how good he is.

The premise of Young All-Stars picks up from that of All-Star Squadron, chronicling a superhero-centric take on World War II. When it's good, it's when it's actually leaning into this; my favorite story line was Atom and Evil! (#21-25), a post-Crisis retelling of Superman vs. Wonder Woman. This did the kind of thing I always enjoyed in All-Star Squadron, take real history and refract it through the lens of the DC universe in a way that was pretty fun. I liked the incorporation of a supergroup made up of representatives of each of the Allies, especially Kuei, the Chinese demon. I would like to see more of him, but it looks like he was never used again after his final appearance in Young All-Stars #27. I also liked the way it played with Superman vs. Wonder Woman; at first it looks like it's going to be a beat-for-beat replay of that story (with, say, Fury in the Wonder Woman role) but then it goes off on its own direction. It did, alas, remove some of Gerry Conway's moral complexity.

But most of the time the series doesn't do this. I'm not sure why (various comments in the lettercol made me think it was a DC editorial directive, but also Roy Thomas seems to act like it's a creative choice at times). I think what really makes the Earth-Two/JSA stuff interesting, as I've said, is the sense of legacy and history, but that's largely lacking here.

There's not as much connection with real history as in All-Star Squadron, and there's not as much DC history, either, as Iron Munro, Flying Fox, Neptune Perkins, and Tsunami are all characters who didn't really have any connection to the present-day DC universe. Fury's daughter is one of my favorite Infinity, Inc. and Sandman characters, but I ended up often feeling like her mother was a potentially strong character rendered impotent by the stories told about her, which mostly revolve around 1) her powers being too strong for her and 2) whether she should date Iron Munro. You get little insight into Lyta Trevor by reading about Helena Kosmatos. (We never learn, as far as I know, what must be the thing we most want to learn about Helena: why did she give up baby Lyta and who was the father.)

Instead, the series often focuses on tying the DC universe into pre-superhero fiction. Iron Munro, for example, is revealed to be the son of Hugo Danner, the protagonist of the 1930 novel Gladiator by Philip Wylie (co-author of When Worlds Collide). Gladiator may have influenced Siegel and Shuster's conception of Superman, and so here Hugo Danner becomes the literal father of The Young All-Stars's Superman analogue. Similarly, Neptune Perkins is revealed to be the grandson of Arthur Gordon Pym, from the novel by Edgar Allan Poe, in a storyline that also takes in the vril (from The Coming Race, though Thomas doesn't seem to know this is the origin of the term because he never mentions it), Captain Nemo (establishing he was Pym!), and Frankenstein's creature! When Hugo Danner eventually appears, in the Sons of Dawn storyline, we learn he's taken refuge in the "lost world" of Arthur Conan Doyle fame, and there's even a relative of Professor Challenger involved.

As a concept, I think this is interesting. Superhero fiction is a genre that has pretty freely borrowed from other genres, and engaging with this more directly is a fun idea. Gladiator may have influenced superman, "lost tribe" narratives are a staple of superhero fiction, the X-Men's Savage Land is a pretty obvious riff on Doyle's Lost World, superhero fiction is full of Frankensteinesque mad scientists and Frankenstein's-creatureesque monsters. Why not make all this text instead of subtext?

Well, because if you're Roy Thomas, you're unable to do so in a way that's interesting. Young All-Stars doesn't really tell stories that use these connections; rather, it relates backstory that reveals them. The Arn Munro/Hugo Danner thing has an issue where basically Arn just reads Gladiator. The Dzyan Inheritance is the four-issue story where we learn about Neptune Perkins's ancestry-- and fully the first two and half issues are just people giving exposition! Does knowing his grandfather was Captain Nemo develop his character? It turns out, no; in fact, he barely contributes to the story. Sons of Dawn is the closest any of these tales come to have a present-day repercussion, but then the story is a bit of racist nonsense about how if American natives see an attractive white woman, they immediately begin with the pillaging to get ahold of her. Plus: will Arn be tempted to join his father as a genocidal dictator? Well, no, of course not.

The shame of it all is that there are some potentially interesting threads. Helena wants to be using her powers to liberate Greece, but can't because of the spell cast by Hitler. Tsunami changed sides-- but is now fighting for a nation that puts her parents in camps. Flying Fox is a "fish out of water" in the modern world. All of these bits have potential, but the series basically neglects them in favor of much less interesting stuff. Flying Fox may as well have not been in this series for all he ultimately contributed to it beyond being a body in fight scenes.

There were a couple neat storylines aside from Atom and Evil! I liked the journey into Project M, America's attempt to create monsters to use in the war; the "Meanwhile..." issue that showed what the rest of the All-Star Squadron was up to was a fun one; the Millennium tie-in issues were fun, and a good use of the Manhunters. But too often I sighed as I opened another issue.

I'll be curious to see if future JSA writers make use of Young All-Stars concepts going forward. Something I had totally forgotten (I guess because it didn't mean much to me at the time) is that Arn Munro is actually the grandfather of the Kate Spencer Manhunter; he would sleep with the Phantom Lady, and she gave the child up for adoption, who grew up to be Kate's dad. Arn even appeared in the Forgotten and Face Off storylines, but rereading my reviews of them, I liked the Golden Age aspect of them the least! I know Helena put in some more appearances that I will get to. But did Flying Fox, Neptune Perkins, and Tsunami amount to anything? I have this inkling the answer might be "no" but comics writers always surprise me by bringing back the most obscure of concepts. Clearly Marc Andreyko was a big Young All-Stars (and Infinity, Inc.) reader, so who else was?

This post is sixteenth in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers Gladiator. 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)
• Wonder Woman: Earth-Two (1977-78)
15. Secret Origins of the Golden Age (1986-89)
    

Reading Roundup Wrapup: April 2021

Pick of the month: The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Five by Simon Furman, et al. This was good but its first-place positioning is rather by default, in a month where I did very little reading. Don't know what's wrong with me!

All books read:
1. Bernice Summerfield: Adorable Illusion by Gary Russell
2. Doctor Who: The Fourth Doctor, Vol 1: Gaze of the Medusa by Gordon Rennie & Emma Beeby and Brian Williamson
3. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Five by Simon Furman, et al.
4. Doctor Who: The Ninth Doctor, Vol 2: Doctormania by Cavan Scott, Adriana Melo, Cris Bolson, et al.
5. Doctor Who: The Twelfth Doctor, Vol 5: The Twist by George Mann, Mariano Laclaustra, Rachael Stott, et al.
6. Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor, Vol 6: Sins of the Father by Nick Abadzis, Giorgia Sposito, Eleonora Carlini, et al.

Just reading my Doctor Who comics over breakfast and that's it!

All books acquired:
1. Excellent Women by Barbara Pym
2. Star Trek Adventures: The Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook, system design by Nathan Dodwell
3. Bernice Summerfield: True Stories edited by Xanna Eve Chown

All books on "To be read" list: 664 (up 1)