End Game (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 25)

End Game: Collected Comic Strips from the Pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Martin Geraghty, Alan Barnes, Scott Gray, Adrian Salmon, et al.

Collection published: 2006
Contents originally published: 1996-98
Previously read: June 2006
Reread: May 2022

With this volume, we enter another period where I've actually read all this before; back when they came out, I read all four Paul McGann volumes, the special Ninth Doctor Collected Comics, The Betrothal of Sontar, and The Widow's Curse, so the strips from #244 to 399 are all rereads in their collected form. And then, I think issue #382 or so was my first, so from then on, I should have read almost all of the strips in the actual magazine (though since I live in the US and getting DWM is pretty spotty here, there will still be a lot of gaps). So what I am particularly interested in seeing is how the strips from this point on read differently, now that I am familiar with the preceding 243 issues of the strip!

This is the period where the Gary Gillat–envisioned retooling of the comic strip really takes off. We have a new Doctor whose story is primarily being told here; we have a new, strip-only companion for the first time since Olla the Heat Vampire way back in issue #134, almost a decade ago; we have a largely consistent creative team, as Martin Geraghty works on all but one of the twenty-six strips, Robin Smith all but two, and Alan Barnes all but seven; we have ongoing threads between stories for the first time since around The Mark of Mandragora. It's a clear attempt to recreate what made the comic special during the Dave Gibbons era—complete with callbacks to that era in many ways.

Overall, there's a real sense of the comic shifting what its approach is. It's not aping the tv show, it's not aping a series of novels, it's not aping Vertigo Comics. Most often, it's aping itself, in the Mills & Wagner/Dave Gibbons/Steve Parkhouse era. Big, loud stories, with lots of universal danger, epics with ponderous (in a good way) narration but also fun quips. I don't think it always works, but it's fun to read, and it's very noticeable. A different creative team might build up to a dramatic epic every so often... here we arguably get three of them in less than two years! Why not go for broke constantly?

from Doctor Who Magazine #247

End Game, from Doctor Who Magazine #244-47 (Oct. 1996–Jan. 1997)
story by Alan Barnes, pencils by Martin Geraghty, inks by Robin Smith, lettering by Elitta Fall

The eighth Doctor's comic strip debut gives us a new Doctor and a new companion, but also takes things back to the strip's roots with an old friend (Maxwell Edison, previously seen in a single two-part story way back in 1982) and an old setting (Stockbridge, the Doctor's home base in issues #61-83, 1982-83). It's fun to see Max again, though he actually doesn't really do anything here other than stand around—for obvious reasons the strip focuses more on new companion "Izzy S." It's also nice to see Stockbridge again, though End Game made me realize there wasn't really anything to Stockbridge: it's just a generic English village where something can go wrong, without any recurring characters or anything other than Max (though we do get a St. Justinian's mention). On top of all this, we get an old villain, too, though not one who ever featured in the strip before.

More important than the continuity, I suspect, is the style. Barnes and Geraghty are clearly aping both The Iron Legion or The Stockbridge Horror: we start with an ordinary English village, but quickly go cosmic. It has a great energy but I found it somewhat baffling; there are a lot moving parts here for a story made up of just four eight-page installments. The Celestial Toymaker trapping Stockbridge, Knights Templar who have betrayed their oaths, a distorted duplicate of the Doctor. To be honest, I wasn't really sure what was happening, but I enjoyed the ride.

New companion Izzy seems fun but hasn't yet done a ton to distinguish herself. She has potential, but there is a pretty awkward panel where she blurts out her whole backstory and personality to the Doctor, rather than have it be organically unfolded in the story.

from Doctor Who Magazine #248

The Keep, from Doctor Who Magazine #248-49 (Feb.-Mar. 1997)
story by Alan Barnes, pencils by Martin Geraghty, inks by Robin Smith, lettering by Elitta Fall

If we want to continue finding Dave Gibbons–era analogues for this new era (and the creators encourage us to do so in the notes), then this is (as they admit) Stars Fell on Stockbridge, a two-part story that kind of works on its own but is mostly there to set up the next story. There is a lot going on here: it's set in the future era of The Talons of Weng-Chiang (but also the time Earth is evacuated due to solar flares), there are gangs on the surface, there's a living sun, there's a malevolent android. But in all of this, the Doctor and Izzy don't really do anything they just get told what's going on by other people, get out of jams due to luck, then leave. It might ape Stars Fell a bit, but Stars Fell works as a story in way that this does not.

from Doctor Who Magazine #250

A Life of Matter & Death, from Doctor Who Magazine #250 (Apr. 1997)
story by Alan Barnes, art by Sean Longcroft (& Martin Geraghty), lettering by Elitta Fall

This begins what becomes a bit of a trend for the strip, if I recall correctly: the celebratory adventure on a special occasion. (There was a celebratory nostalgia strip before, Party Animals, but not for any particular reason.) Here, the 250th issue of DWM sees the Doctor and Izzy in a weird alien dreamscape where the Doctor is attacked by many of his old foes, and defended by old allies—all ones from the television series. It's not much of a story, and honestly not much of a celebration, either. The old villains get some good jokes (especially Dogbolter), but there's too much time spent on the actual story, which is not up to much. I liked Sean Longcroft's art in The Fangs of Time, but found it hard to distinguish characters here. I do like that whenever the strip celebrates its own past, it gives the impression that the Doctor's past from the comics is more important than that from the television programme. When he dreams up old enemies, he never dreams up the Master!

from Doctor Who Magazine #255

Fire and Brimstone, from Doctor Who Magazine #251-55 (May-Aug. 1997)
story by Alan Barnes, pencils by Martin Geraghty, inks by Robin Smith, lettering by Elitta Fall

This follow-up to The Keep folds in the Daleks and alternate Daleks and the Threshold. It has some great moments—the cliffhanger where the Doctor is exterminated, the appearance of the Threshold—but there was so much going on, that as in End Game, I ended up feeling a bit lost. Stars exploding, wormholes forming, fire elementals, ancient Time Lord secrets. On the one hand, full of energy and verve... on the other, what was this actually about? Felt like that got lost in the cracks somewhere...

from Doctor Who Magazine #256

By Hook or By Crook, from Doctor Who Magazine #256 (Sept. 1997)
story by Scott Gray, art by Adrian Salmon, lettering by Elitta Fell

The Doctor and Izzy land on an alien planet, and the Doctor is promptly arrested for murder while trying to buy jam, so it's up to Izzy to get him out. Izzy is always good for a couple good jokes per story, but she's absolutely delightful here. Gray's script is one of the funniest DWM tales I can remember, from the moment Izzy sees the Doctor forlornly looking out the window of the police cruiser, to the clever but perhaps all-too-obvious way she ultimately solves the mystery. My favorite story in the volume.

Tooth and Claw, from Doctor Who Magazine #257-60 (Oct.-Dec. 1997)
story by Alan Barnes, pencils by Martin Geraghty, inks by Robin Smith, lettering by Elitta Fall and Annie Parkhouse

Well, this one is The Dogs of Doom; like there, one of the cliffhangers is that the Doctor himself has been converted into a monster. There a werewolf, here a vampire. Plus we get the introduction of short-term companion Fey Truscott-Sade. I thought this one was fun... except Martin Geraghty uncharacteristically let the side down on art, as I often had to work hard to figure out which one of the myriad characters was speaking. Like, Izzy or Fey? Fey or seductive woman? Marwood or airplane pilot? Not sure what the issue was (too much crammed into panels?) but it ruined the effect of the story. On GallifreyBase, Martin Geraghty himself materialized to tell me: "I was moving house slap-bang in the middle of pencilling this story and the woman whose house I was moving into suddenly decided she wasn't leaving, forcing me to spend an extended period of time living at my brother's surrounded by boxes and sans drawing board.

"So yes, work done under some degree of pressure..."

from Doctor Who Magazine #263

The Final Chapter, from Doctor Who Magazine #262-65 (Feb.-June 1998)
story by Alan Barnes, pencils by Martin Geraghty, inks by Robin Smith, lettering by Elitta Fall

And this one is, of course, The Tides of Time, down to the return of the Higher Evolutionaries and Shayde and Tubal Cain, though it goes in for much more Gallifrey stuff than Tides of Time actually did. A bit too much, to be honest. It's fine, but a bit bewildering and a bit noisy, and once again, the mechanics of things get a bit amorphous as we move toward the climax.

from Doctor Who Magazine #271

Wormwood, from Doctor Who Magazine #266-71 (July-Nov. 1998)
story by Scott Gray, pencils by Martin Geraghty, inks by Robin Smith, lettering by Elitta Fall

The Threshold story comes to a climax. This has got some clever stuff in it, some great visuals, and at six parts, the story doesn't feel overstuffed like many of the previous ones have. The regeneration fakeout is excellent and really well done—and as the notes note, really only would work in comics. (Well, the audios actually did something similar recently, but they couldn't commit to it for so long!) The Threshold base on the moon is great, I loved the simplicity of the Threshold plan, the use of the Time Lord translation gift was excellent, Abraham White is a great villain. The characters get the space to breathe here. The reveal of what the Threshold are is dementedly clever. Solid stuff.

Stray Observations:

• Okay, some people say "Endgame" not "End Game." But, 1) look at that spacing between the "D" and "G" scrabble tiles, and 2) the running foot uses "END GAME" as well.
• I like this era of strip collections for including full credits breakdowns on the table of contents. On the other hand, I don't like the way the strips are reordered, to move the ones not part of the main story to the end. I guess this is supposed to provide a more continuous reading experience... but those "bonus" strips are mentioned in the "main" ones so it's actually more jarring!
• One thing I like about the DWM collections is their branding often prioritizes artists; the spine here read "GERAGHTY • BARNES • GRAY • SALMON," giving first billing to an artist, not a writer. But just to the penciller; poor Robin Smith is not so honored!
• I can't exhaustively list who cameos in A Life of Matter & Death, but I noticed Sharon, Gus, Ivan Asimoff, Shayde, the Time Witch, the Free-Fall Warriors, and even the little robot from The Iron Legion. No representation from anything post-John Ridgway that I noticed, though, and not even a Frobisher cameo, surprisingly.
• I guess I don't know where it would actually happen, but I'm surprised we've never gotten one of Fey's pre–Tooth and Claw encounters with the Doctor detailed anywhere. Maybe when the show is cancelled again and DWM resumes rotating past Doctor strips, they can give us that.
• No strip in #261! I think #184 was the last time?
• A member of the Order of the Black Sun appears, yet another reference to the strip in DWM's early days. Only, this comes from (Alan Moore–penned) backups that have yet to be collected, so I haven't read them. Someday, please, DWM?
• Overall, though, there is very much an attempt to create a DWM universe for the first time since Muriel Frost in The Mark of Mandragora. That said, I think nearly every single back-reference that's not just a cameo is to something Steve Parkhouse wrote, so it's a very limited universe.
  
• Alan Barnes is very much a master of the final page cliffhanger. So many good ones... undermined by the fact that they are usually placed on the right-hand side, so there's not a page-turn reveal. Not sure how they would have looked on original publication.
• The bonus features here are great, crazy detailed, including scans of proposals with scribbled-on notes by Gillat.

This post is the twenty-fifth in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers The Glorious Dead. 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
9. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Four
10. The Age of Chaos
11. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Five
12. A Cold Day in Hell!
13. Death's Head: Freelance Peacekeeping Agent (part 1)
14. Nemesis of the Daleks
15. Death's Head: Freelance Peacekeeping Agent (part 2)
16. The Good Soldier
17. The Incomplete Death's Head
18. Evening's Empire
19. The Daleks
20. Emperor of the Daleks
21. The Sleeze Brothers File
22. The Age of Chaos
23. Land of the Blind
24. Ground Zero
    

Glasshouse by Charles Stross

 Glasshouse by Charles Stross

I found this while looking for science fiction stories about mind uploading and life extension. It's set in a world where people can rebuild their bodies basically at will; the main character is a (seemingly male) military operative forcibly remade into a 1950s American housewife as part of a bizarre social experiment.

Published: 2006
Read: October 2021

It doesn't really explore the ideas about mind-uploading and consciousness transfer in a way that would make it useful in the class I plan to teach on the topic, but I didn't mind as I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. It's a very weird, very solid thriller, about escaping from prison—only the prison is society itself in a sense. Cool ideas, played with in interesting ways. This was my first Charles Stross novel, but I suspect it will not be my last.

Reading Glinda of Oz Aloud to My Son... Plus He Makes His Own Maps!

Glinda of Oz: In which are related the Exciting Experiences of Princess Ozma of Oz, and Dorothy, in their hazardous journey to the home of the Flatheads, and to the Magic Isle of the Skeezers, and how they were rescued from dire peril by the sorcery of Glinda the Good
by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill

With this, my son and I come to the end of L. Frank Baum's contributions to the Oz mythos. This was his fourteenth and final Oz novel, which we read about eleven months after we started back with Wonderful Wizard (though as we've taken a couple detours on the way, this was our eighteenth Oz book together).

Originally published: 1920
Acquired: May 2022
Read aloud: June 2022

Like many of the late novels, I remembered little of it, but I did remember the Flatheads and the Skeezers. These are two warring tribes in the Gillikin Country: the Flatheads' heads stop at their brows, so they have to carry their brains around in cans, while the Skeezers live in a great domed city that can be submerged in a lake. Beyond this and a scene that appears on the cover of the Del Rey edition, though, I remembered little of it.

Like a lot of the later Baum books, I don't think it's a favorite, but I did enjoy it. It's distinctly a novel of two halves. The first half could actually be called Ozma of Oz, except that we already had that book, for it's the book that focuses on the princess of Oz more than any other of the original fourteen. Ozma isn't really the protagonist of any of the Oz books after her transformation from Tip, not even the one called Ozma of Oz, but here she's the co-protagonist with Dorothy. Emerald City established Ozma's pacifist ethos, and this novel explores that in detail, along with what it means for Ozma to be a fairy. (I think Scarecrow was the first book to call Ozma a fairy, something not very consistent with the backstory she received in Marvelous Land or Dorothy and the Wizard.)

Anyway, when Ozma hears about the war between the Skeezers and the Flatheads, she's determined to stop it—but to stop it by showing the Skeezers and the Flatheads a better way to behave, not by using force or anything. We also get an explanation from Ozma of how her fairy magic differs from the sorecery of Glinda and the wizardry of the Wizard: fairy magic is innate and doesn't need tools (though Ozma's magic wand seems to help), while sorcery and wizardry are more powerful but require learning and tools to implement. There's some good problem-solving by Ozma and Dorothy, too. Ozma is ultimately ineffectual in stopping the war, though, despite her pleas; and she and Dorothy ends up trapped in the underwater city of the Skeezers.

The second half of the book, then, shifts focus to Glinda, along with a subplot about a Skeezer named Ervic trying to disenchant some fish. Glinda makes a rescue party: she needs to raise the submerged city, and we see her and the Wizard trying various means of doing this, and we see how their magic is more mechanical than that of Ozma. Though Glinda is well-organized, she's actually not very effectual, either; Scraps has the key idea that enables them to get into the city, Ervic cleverly tricks a Yookoohoo into disenchanting the fish (revealing them to be Adepts at Magic), and Dorothy figures out the magic word that operates the city. It's not a very high-stakes novel; another writer might impose some kind of deadline on raising the city, but Baum goes to great pains to establish that no one is in any danger! It actually has the feel of some Golden Age science fiction to me, a group of competent people working together to reason their way through a problem. So like Magic of Oz, I enjoyed read it on a chapter to chapter basis even if ultimately it kind of doesn't add up to much as you feel it might.

A large number of characters go with Glinda to help raise the Skeezer city, but unlike in some of his other books, Baum is less effective at giving them all something to do. Button-Bright has a nice scene of getting lost and told off by Glinda, but the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, the Cowardly Lion, Tik-Tok, Jack Pumpkinhead, Professor Woggle-Bug, the Shaggy Man, Uncle Henry, Cap'n Bill and Trot, the Glass Cat, and Betsy Bobbin are all there too, and most of them just fill out crowd scenes. It's nice for Baum to get so many favorite characters into his last novel, but I wish some of them had even got just one scene where they did something.

Like Magic, this felt influenced by the Great War then recently concluded: Ozma has to stop a war between two nations who have been usurped by dictators, a war their citizens don't want. Because of this, I used German accents for most of the Flatheads, and French for most of the Skeezers.

My son seemed to enjoy this one, though he was a bit worried that the submerged city wouldn't be raised. He even drew his own picture of the Skeezer and Flathead cities:

The green rectangle is the Flathead mountain, with the stuff on top being the Flathead village. The purple rectangle is the Skeezer dome; you can see it's above the lake at this point. The dark purple blocks inside the dome are the buildings of the Skeezer city. I think the red is the path from the one to the other?

He also drew this picture of Ozma's palace in the Emerald City:

The bits going up are the minarets. The big green blob is all of Ozma's stuff. The big oval that it is in has little shapes on its edge which are various rooms; specifically, the littlest one, directly to the left of the blob, is the Saw-Horse's room.

He also got a real tickle out of the Flatheads carrying their brains in cans, and the fact that the Supreme Dictator (Su-Dic) of the Flatheads and his wife made themselves smarter by stealing the cans of other Flatheads. A couple weeks later, he was playing Paw Patrol in Oz, and he had the idea that Mayor Humdinger was stealing the brains of all the Flatheads. I can just imagine it. "With all these brains, I can be the smartest mayor in Adventure Bay!"

So that's the end of our Baum journey, though there's plenty more Oz to go if we want. Here's all of the novels we've read so far together:

Belatedly realized I got the sequence wrong. We went Patchwork Girl, Sea Fairies, Tik-Tok, Sky Island, Scarecrow, Rinkitink. Oh well, not retaking the picture.

I've greatly enjoyed getting to read the Books of Wonder facsimiles, and glad for both my own sake and my son's that I upgraded from my mix of Del Reys and Puffins. The pictures looks great at their intended size, the reproduction is sharp, the color plates are really nice to see. Wonderful Wizard, Road, and Emerald City are probably the most interesting of the facsimiles, as they do cool things with color, but they've all been worthwhile. Neill's illustrations, color and black-and-white, are really something special.

On to Ruth Plumly Thompson!

Next up in sequence: The Royal Book of Oz

Hugos Side-Step: Martian Time-Slip / Dr. Bloodmoney / Now Wait for Last Year by Philip K. Dick

Five Novels of the 1960s & 70s by Philip K. Dick: Martian Time-Slip / Dr. Bloodmoney / Now Wait for Last Year / Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said / A Scanner Darkly
edited by Jonathan Lethem

I enjoyed volume one of the Library of America Philip K. Dick editions enough to go straight on to the second, which contains five novels. They fall into two distinct periods, so I'll cover them in two separate reviews. The first three are all works of the mid-1960s—Martian Time-Slip (1964), Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along after the Bomb (1965), and Now Wait for Last Year (1966)—and in fact, they overlap with the novels published in Library of America's Four Novels of the 1960s. (This post is part of my series about books that won the Hugo, plus related books. It ties in because Dick won the Hugo for The Man in the High Castle.)

Collection published: 2008
Novels originally published: 1964-66
Acquired: August 2014
Read: April 2022

I recently read a post about Philip K. Dick in r/printSF, where someone criticized his prose and characterization. A bunch of defenders of Dick swooped in to explain that, yes, his prose and characterization were bad... but the other aspects of his books made them good anyway. My reaction was, "Hold on! You guys are his 'defenders'!?" I feel like sf fans often don't know what characterization is, and these "defenses" prove it... because how many writers in 1960s sf or even contemporary sf match Dick for characterization? All of Dick's characters feel like real people to me, with their little obsessions, their fragile self-images, their internal contradictions, their neediness. What makes his books work, in my opinion, is that even though they are set in the future, their protagonists feel like people from now, where "now" is both the 1960s and the 2020s. People trying to do jobs they hate, support families, deal with prejudice, make it through bad marriages. I like the real workaday aspect to his characters, especially in Martian Time-Slip and Now Wait for Last Year. These are people on Mars or during an interplanetary war, yet they are ordinary people trying to get done whatever needs to be done. Now Wait for Last Year, in particular, is a triumph: I found the ending surprising but uplifting and fascinating, and not something that fits with the stereotypical image of Dick. A real portrait of character and character growth.

Similarly, people praise Dick for the disconcerting nature of his books. You're reading a story about some perfectly ordinary guy on Mars, and then suddenly the guy realizes he can see through people's skin and that everyone around him is a fake, or time starts skipping back and forth. This all done incredibly matter-of-factly, which is what makes it so effective... how does this happen if not through Dick's prose? I never once felt while reading a Dick novel that I read a clunky turn of phrase; Dick writes smoothly and without showing off. This is what makes his stuff work as a writer, because the creepy, weird stuff is as matter-of-fact as everything else. As I said in my previous reviews of Dick, I think he really captures the dissociated aspect of modern life, which has only gotten worse in the sixty years since these novels were written. I don't feel like I can see people's skin... but I do feel alienated from the people around me. The way people fall through time, in both Martian Time-Slip and Now Wait for Last Year, is very well done.

Something I don't think Dick gets praised for enough is his worldbuilding. I really enjoyed the early chapters of Martian Time-Slip, before the weirdness ratcheted up. I found its depiction of a new society, its interplay with the old, all compelling and realistic; I like the idea of a corrupt union man being one of the major players on a Martian colony, and its focus on humdrum things like land speculation. New world but same old bullshit. I also like that Dick reuses a lot of worldbuilding elements from book to book even when the books clearly don't take place in the same fictional milieu; it lets you quickly orient yourself. The exploration of how a great leader might extend his greatness via time travel or alternate selves, similarly, is a great idea the Dick plays with well... and he does so without getting bogged down in technical details, or committing to one interpretation of events, or anything else that might drain the weirdness from it.

I will say that I found Dick's postapocalyptic novel, Dr. Bloodmoney, the least interesting of the seven Dick novels I've read so far this year. Decent characters, some neat concepts, but I feel like no character was strong enough to grab me. But Dick published an astounding seventeen novels in the 1960s (if I am counting correctly), so it's not too surprising if they are not all winners.

I read an old winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel every year, plus other Hugo-related books that interest me. Next up in sequence: Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said / A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

Terra Ignota: Perhaps the Stars by Ada Palmer

Terra Ignota, Book IV: Perhaps the Stars: A Narrative of Events begun in the year 2454
by Ada Palmer

After no small delay, Terra Ignota finally comes to an end. This four-book series by Ada Palmer was about an attempt at a utopian future, a world that was better than ours but still flawed. At the end of book III, the flaws reached the breaking point of war finally breaking out, and the last book, Perhaps the Stars, chronicles the war and what came after. There are a lot of different ways you can think about these books, and I'm just going to highlight a couple that stuck out to me.

 

Originally published: 2021
Acquired: April 2022
Read: August 2022

Orson Scott Card has a concept he calls the MICE Quotient: stories are about milieus, ideas, characters, or events. Once a story sets out its flag as one of those things, he argues, it needs to stick to it, because it's created a pact with the reader. If you write an idea story—there's a problem that needs to be solved—the story can't end without that problem being solved. Now, like all writing rubrics of this kind, it's certainly an oversimplification, and I especially wonder if it's fair to apply a system that I think Card devised for discussing short stories to a story that is over two thousand pages long now that it's complete.

For me, Terra Ignota was a milieu story. If you go back to my review of the first volume, the thing that fascinated me most was the world itself. I like the idea of how nations might have to be redone when people can travel around the world almost instantaneously; I would have happily heard no end of detail about this. Now, I don't know if Palmer saw herself as writing a milieu story, but the milieu is what drew me in here. (It's definitely, though perhaps to a lesser extent, an event story as well.) The times when the series has worked less well is when it moves away from this: I struggled with book II a lot, because that volume "revolves around the political, sexual, and political/sexual intrigues of the Hive leaders... and I just really don't care about this at all. I kept losing track of who did what to whom, and I wasn't incentivized to spend the time to care." It felt like the series had suddenly lurched into being a character story, but I didn't care about these people very much, except as a vehicle for exploring the world. (Think of the Oz books here: Dorothy isn't a deep psychological portrait of a little girl, but Dorothy doesn't have to be; she just has to be a character capable of letting us see what Oz is like.) Which is to say, I feel like these books expect me to care about Mycroft Canner in particular much more than I ever did. I liked Mycroft as an unreliable guide to the future, but I never really cared about him.

So, the way this book begins is quite excellent. It had been almost four years since I had read book III, so my memories were quite fuzzy, but I soon oriented myself enough to enjoy what was going on. We were in a world at war... but a world that had not known war for centuries, and a world poorly organized to conduct it. How does war come to utopia? This is the focus of the early chapters, which are mostly told from the perspective of the Ninth Anonymous, Mycroft's successor as chronicler of events. It's lovely stuff, well thought out and well told, about human resourcefulness, about humanity at its best and at its worst. Our main viewpoint is people who are trying to not take sides, but to simply make the world a better place for everyone involved, in spite of it all, and it works really well. It was a milieu story, maybe crossed with an event story: what is utopia like when it's at war?

But, at a certain point, Mycroft comes back, and with him a whole slew of characters and conflicts that I struggled to engage with. Now I was in a character story again, and I just didn't care about these characters. Unfortunately, this material is quite a bit of an 800-page novel, and by the time the book went more milieu-focused again with the coming of peacefall, I was much less invested than I had been at the beginning. So I am glad I read this series all the way to the end, but I am not sure I ever really got the set of books I imagined I was getting when I read and enjoyed book I.

Okay, other thing to think about. These books are complicated, and are filled with small details. The way they were released and even more so the way I read them worked against my appreciation of that: I had a seven-month gap between books I and II, an eight-month gap between II and III, and a four-year gap between books III and IV. Were one to read them (relatively) straight through, I think one would appreciate them more. I also think they would benefit from a reread; Palmer is up to so much here that's not apparent right away, and small clues can portend big things. Or small clues can be big things: about halfway through book IV, I discovered the Terra Ignota subreddit, which has been doing a chapter-by-chapter reread of the whole series, and was most of the way through book IV when I found it. I began reading the commentaries from the posters there, and realized there was so much I was missing because I wasn't noticing it; this discussion in particular (note: contains massive spoilers) revealed that something hugely significant to both the Ninth Anonymous and Mycroft had happened, and I had failed to understand it or even notice it. Now, that's on purpose, I think, but man.

So these books were never quite what I wanted them to be... but what they wanted to be might be something quite extraordinary that I haven't given a fair shake to. I almost never reread books. Who has the time? But clearly at some point I am going to need to reread these. I glimpse greatness when I read Terra Ignota. My failure to see it might be the books' fault, but I can't shake the feeling that it's my own.

Reading The Magic of Oz Aloud to My Son

The Magic of Oz: A Faithful Record of the Remarkable Adventures of Dorothy and Trot and the Wizard of Oz, together with the Cowardly Lion, the Hungry Tiger and Cap'n Bill, in their successful search for a Magical and Beautiful Birthday Present for Princess Ozma of Oz
by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill

This, the penultimate Oz novel by Baum, I did have decent memories of from childhood, mostly of the magic word of transformation, Pyrzqxgl, which allows the speaker to transform any person into any thing. Kiki Aru, a Munchkin boy bored from living on dull Mount Munch, discovers the word and uses it to transform himself into an eagle and tour the countries adjacent to Oz; in Ev, he bumps into the old Nome King, Ruggedo, homeless since the events of Tik-Tok of Oz. Ruggedo persuades Kiki to use the magic word to create an army of beasts and help him conquer the Emerald City.

Originally published: 1919
Acquired: April 2022
Read aloud: May 2022

Meanwhile, the members of Ozma's court are looking for presents to get Ozma for her birthday. But what do you get the fairy princess who has everything? Trot, Cap'n Bill, and the Glass Cat travel to get a magic flower that the Glass Cat found on her travels; meanwhile, Dorothy and the Wizard go (along with the Cowardly Lion and the Hungry Tiger) to find some monkeys, because Dorothy's idea is to miniaturize some, train them to dance, and have them jump out of Ozma's birthday cake. (I guess when you live in a utopia, you have to seek what amusement you can.)

These three strands weave in and out of each other. Dorothy and the Wizard get to the Forest of Gugu right as Ruggedo is trying to assemble a beast army; Trot and Cap'n Bill get trapped on the island of the magic flower, and so the Glass Cat comes to ask the Wizard for help. I found it enjoyable to read a chapter at a time: it's nice to hear from Trot, Cap'n Bill, and the Glass Cat again, none of whom have had much to do across the past few books. I always like Cap'n Bill's practicality—he reasons some clever stuff about how to deal with the magic flower—and the flower itself is an interesting threat. I like getting to see the Glass Cat show off her stuff; Baum writes cats so well. The way the transformations are used is clever—there is some fun stuff where all the principal characters end up in weird bodies—and I like the way Kiki and Ruggedo are always trying to figure out how to out-scheme the other.

But when you finish the whole book, it all seems a bit dissatisfying, in that the book promises something more exciting than you actually got. The idea that Ruggedo might raise an army of beasts is an interesting one, but he doesn't really get anywhere with it; the beasts aren't really convinced by his rhetoric,* and the Wizard defeats them almost accidentally, and kind of anticlimactically. One kind of wishes the three plots converged in a way that made everything explode, rather than a way where they all kind of neutralize each other. The Cowardly Lion and the Hungry Tiger coming back to wild beasts after so much time living in the Emerald City seems to have potential, but Baum doesn't do anything with it.

So, overall, a solid but uninspiring late-period Oz novel. My son seemed to enjoy it, and he did not like the idea that the magic island might cause Trot and Cap'n Bill to shrink away to nothing. I think it was while reading this one that he told me how [His Name] in Oz would begin: "A magician will send me to Oz, because he doesn't know I live in Florida, he thinks I live in Oz!" Which, to be honest, seems like the way an Oz novel really could begin.

* Though it was published after the war, I am pretty sure both this and Glinda of Oz were written during it, and you can definitely see traces of it in both. Here, we have would-be dictators amassing armies.

"Oh, baby, wasn't I the one who made you want to stay?": Licence to Kill

Now that I've seen all the James Bond movies based on books, it's time to go through the remaining ones, which I'll be doing in release order. There's just seven of them (as I've determined it), of which Licence to Kill is the first. On the other hand, this is actually the last James Bond movie I've never seen, as I rented all the Pierce Brosnan ones on VHS back when I was a kid, and saw all the Daniel Craig ones in the theatre.

This might have been the first Bond film without a book title, but on watching it, it actually did turn out to be based on some books. Like a lot of the 1980s Bond films did, it went back and mined bits from earlier Bond books that had never been used on screen: specifically, this film takes the maiming of Bond's CIA counterpart Felix Leiter via shark from Live and Let Die and the character of Milton Krest, a supposed biological researcher up to no good on his yacht the Wavekrest, from the short story "The Hildebrand Rarity." What it does with them, though, is pretty original.

The movie has a great pre-titles sequence. Bond is best man at Felix's wedding in the Florida Keys, but the wedding is interrupted by some DEA agents showing up to tell Felix they have the opportunity to take out Sanchez, a Central American drug lord who's come to the United States to chase a fleeing girlfriend. Felix goes to help—and of course, so does Bond. There are some good hijinks like Bond jumping from the DEA helicopter to Sanchez's plane and tying a cable around it, and then Bond and Felix parachute right in front of the church to make the wedding. Good stuff.

If you want to make it up to your bride for being late, arrive via parachute.

Only, Sanchez escapes custody and then goes out for revenge; on Felix's wedding night, he kills his wife, and (as I said before) maims Felix via shark. So the movie follows Bond as he goes rogue in pursuit of revenge, deciding to bring down Sanchez's drug empire single-handedly when M revokes his licence to kill. The movie is one of the grimmer and darker Bond films, a lot more in line with a Daniel Craig story than anything the Bond films had done up until that point; Timothy Dalton's only other outing as Bond, had been a bit lighter, and films' previous attempt at an off-the-books Bond, For Your Eyes Only, wasn't quite this brutal. There are a lot of shocking cold deaths by both Bond and villains.

Overall, I liked it. The plot is complicated enough to be interesting, but not so complicated as to be confusing (as has been the case with a few recent Bonds, e.g., Octopussy, Quantum of Solace). The film might be a bit grim, but it still has some good moments of Bondian levity. We particularly enjoyed the sham religious leader who works for Sanchez, who shouts "bless your heart!" every time he gets outwitted, and much of the climactic battle is sublimely ridiculous, such as when Bond pops a wheelie in a gasoline tanker truck.

There are only two "Bond girls" here, and Bond doesn't seem very interested in one of them. There's Lupe Lamora, Sanchez's girlfriend. She sees Bond as a way out of her situation, and helps him so he can help her. She melodramatically and unconvincingly declares she loves him; she's not a very good actress.

This sets up a pretty great moment where Bouvier downs Bond's "shaken, not stirred" martini herself and makes a face.

The main Bond girl is Pam Bouvier, a former U.S. Army pilot, who ended up running drugs for Sanchez, but then decided to go straight by turning informant. Bond goes to her for information, but then hires her to fly him to Isthmus (the thinly veiled Panama analogue where Sanchez is based); she pretends to be his "executive secretary" while he infiltrates Sanchez's organization, and ends up helping in a variety of ways up to and including the climax. Bond and Bouvier are given a bit of a mutual-animosity-turns-to-passion thing: they make love on a boat in the middle of the ocean when it runs out of gas. Bouvier is in the line of Melina in For Your Eyes Only: she's not a secret agent, but she has her own competencies, and the film doesn't undermine them, presenting her as closer to an equal than most Bond women.

She's clearly meant to resent Bond's dominance, but also resent when Bond doesn't pay her enough attention—if there's a bit of commentary in here, it's that these short-haired independent women aren't as independent as they imagine! What I found fascinating, though, was the scene at the very end. Lupe is flirting with Bond, Bouvier is once again jealous—and Bond, recognizing this, pushes Lupe off on another guy, and then goes after Bouvier! Like, he is clearly concerned about her feelings, and wants to make it up to her. Would Sean Connery act like this?

In The Living Daylights, Dalton was a bit more emotionally sensitive than your average James Bond; here, on the other hand, he's out for revenge. This actually plays quite a bit on Bond's history: as happened to Bond himself, Felix's wife is killed on their wedding day. The film alludes to this very indirectly, and it actually took me a while to remember how close the parallels were, as they are never explicitly named. It seems a bit off, if I am honest, for your protagonist's emotional arc to depend on something that happened ten films prior, twenty years ago, and three actors before! I wish it had been discussed more directly.

It was interesting watching this in close proximity to Quantum of Solace, which is a very similar film: it pursuit of revenge, Bond defies M and has to flee his own people. Both movies focus on Central/South America, and in both, one of the Bond women is even a villain's girlfriend who gets abused! Quantum is all about whether or not Bond has gone too far; his emotional arc centers on this question. In Licence to Kill, neither Bond nor the film itself really engages in any introspection about Bond's choices. He just does it. M revokes Bond's licence to kill... but the end of the film doesn't even mention this! No one chews Bond out or welcomes him back into the service or anything. In Living Daylights, Dalton was effective at alternating between hardened killer and sensitive soul; here, he's all hardened killer, and I wish we'd seen more introspection, because I know he could have done it based on Living Daylights. I don't know that it needed to go all angst as the Craig films often do, but there was room for more emotion than we got.

When I wrote up Living Daylights, I said, "People say License to Kill is Dalton's good one, so I look forward to getting to see it," but I would pretty much place them on par with one another. Still, what a hit rate! If you only make two Bond films, I guess odds are neither of them will be clunkers.

Other Notes:

• David Hedison was only actor to play Felix Leiter more than once prior to Geoffrey Wright showing up in Quantum of Solace. I gather that since the film depended on Bond's relationship with Felix for its emotional core, they wanted an actor that had actually been seen on screen with Bond before. It's a bit odd, though, in that it's a different Felix to the one from the immediately previous film (John Terry); in fact, Hedison had previously appeared sixteen years prior, opposite Roger Moore! Still, he's pretty likable, though I found the ending scene where he's goofing with Bond about getting his golf swing back pretty odd. I wonder if the producers didn't kill him off in case they wanted to use him again, but the Pierce Brosnan films would go on to introduce a different American counterpart for Bond.
• I felt this was one of Desmond Llewellyn's better turns as Q, who sneaks off from MI6 to help Bond. On the other hand, Caroline Bliss puts in a pretty fleeting appearance as Moneypenny, her last.
• Bond infiltrating the villains and taking them down from within by sowing distrust was pretty nicely done, and felt more in line with the early Fleming Bond than what we often see on screen.
• I spent the movie suffering from a sense of vague recognition for both villains, Sanchez and his subordinate Krest. Upon looking it up later, it turned out that Robert Davi (Sanchez) played a recurring villain in Stargate Atlantis and Anthony Zerbe (Krest) was one of the principal villains in Star Trek: Insurrection.
• There's a scene at Hemingway House, complete with all the cats. This lets Bond make a real groaner of a literary pun about A Farewell to Arms.
  

Film Rankings (So Far):

1. Casino Royale
2. Dr. No
3. From Russia with Love
4. For Your Eyes Only 
5. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
6. Thunderball 
7. The Living Daylights
8. Licence to Kill
   
9. Spectre
10. You Only Live Twice
11. Goldfinger
12. Quantum of Solace
    
13. The Spy Who Loved Me
14. Moonraker
15. The Man with the Golden Gun
    
16. Octopussy
    
17. Never Say Never Again
18. A View to a Kill
19. Live and Let Die 
20. Diamonds Are Forever

Hugos Side-Step: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Ubik by Philip K. Dick

Four Novels of the 1960s by Philip K. Dick: The Man in the High Castle / The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Ubik
edited by Jonathan Lethem

Given I enjoyed The Man in the High Castle, and given that I owned it in a Library of America edition bundled together with three other novels, there seemed little reason to not just go ahead and read those three other novels as part of my journey through classic winners of the Hugo Award and adjacent works. Four Novels of the 1960s contains three other early sf works by Philip K. Dick: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), and Ubik (1969). I'd read Do Androids Dream before, back in high school, but the other two were new to me.

Collection published: 2007
Novels originally published: 1965-69
Acquired: August 2014
Read: January 2022

None are really like The Man in the High Castle, except in that they largely focus on "ordinary" people. These people all live in extraordinary worlds, and sometimes even do things that would be extraordinary to us, but in every case, they are people just doing jobs, working in offices, dealing with petty bullshit, even when their job is to hunt down killer androids or achieve corporate superiority through telepathic espionage. Dick is extraordinarily good at capturing a feeling of alienation from modern life: these books were written in the 1960s, and set in the future, but they feel every bit as relevant to the 2020s. These books are filled with people desperately seeking connections and meanings, and finding that the whole world is oriented against letting this happen.

In each case, Dick is also really good at what you might call "slippage," slowly easing you into an utterly weird thing that happens with total matter-of-factness, causing you to question the reality of what you are reading: the visions of the future in Three Stigmata, the entire alternate police force in Do Androids Dream, the advancing decay in Ubik. I liked all three a lot, but I especially liked Ubik; each chapter was a such a beautiful surreal poem, almost, as the world began to decay around our protagonists, and they desperately tried to hold it back with whatever "Ubik" happened to be at that moment. (And I loved the Ubik advertisements; as I've noted before in this reading journey, 1950s/60s sf was very much interested in the power of commercial advertising.)

The only disappointment was that in the end of each case, Dick seemed to feel compelled to tie everything up and explain it in the process. Do Androids Dream probably does this the least, but both Three Stigmata and Ubik get less weird near the end, as they explain why all the weirdness was happening, and this makes them a bit unsatisfying. I feel like it would be better to not entirely know or understand what was going on in these books. In being incomplete, I think they would feel more cohesive, ironically.

One last note: it's funny to compare Do Androids Dream to Blade Runner. I do like Blade Runner, but what is sort of subtext and an ending twist in Blade Runner—maybe Decker is the real replicant!—is just text in Do Androids Dream. You spend the whole book questioning who is real and who is not, because Decker himself is always doing this. I feel like Ridley Scott fanboys expect your mind to be blown by this, but where Scott ends is where Dick begins even though Dick came first, and I find that much more interesting, and that gives you much more to think about.

I read an old winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel every year, plus other Hugo-related books that interest me. Next up in sequence: Martian Time-Slip / Dr. Bloodmoney / Now Wait for Last Year by Philip K. Dick

Hugos 2022: Ballots for Graphic Story and Dramatic Presentation

And here is my last Hugo ballot post! We have my nominations and votes in the "visual" categories: comics, tv, and film. I should note that I was done with the comics back in June... and didn't finish the film/tv stuff until two days before the deadline. I find it easier to organize my reading than my watching, I guess. (I have linked the titles if I have written a review elsewhere, or if the work is freely available on the Internet.)

Things I Nominated

I don't read many comics right as they come out, so my ability to nominate things for Best Graphic Story is always pretty limited. This year I nominated the same thing I did last year... a My Little Pony / Transformers crossover comic! Seemed unlikely to me that The Magic of Cybertron would make the ballot, but I did my bit...

I nominated two tv episodes in Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form), both episodes of Star Trek: Lower Decks season 2 that I enjoyed immensely: "wej Duj" (Klingonese for "Three Ships"), where the lower-decks crew of the USS Cerritos are paralleled by lower-decks escapades on Klingon and Vulcan ships, and "First First Contact", the delightfully triumphant season finale. To my surprise and delight, "wej Duj" actually made the final ballot! It's the first Star Trek installment to make it since an episode of Discovery in 2018.

I also nominated some random Big Finish stuff I enjoyed, though I have no expectations that any of it will ever make the ballot. Two Torchwood audio dramas (The Five People You Kill in Middlesbrough and Madam I'm) in Short Form, and one Doctor Who audio drama (Shadow of the Daleks) in Long Form.

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Best Graphic Story or Comic

6. Monstress: The Vow, script by Marjorie Liu, art by Sana Takeda 

Below, I said I was only really interested in the backmatter in Die. Well, at least Die has interesting backmatter...

 

5. Die: Bleed, script by Kieron Gillen, art by Stephanie Hans

The first volume of this series was a finalist in 2020, the second in 2021. This is the fourth and final; I didn't enjoy those previous volumes enough to feel motivated to read the third before this, so I just skipped it. (It's about people trapped in a TTRPG, and each volume focuses on a different writer who influenced RPGs. The first did Tolkien, the second the Brontës, and this one Lovecraft; it turns out the one I skipped did Wells, so maybe I ought to go back.) I found this hard to follow—too many characters, and even though it came out as twenty issues across three years, it's clearly meant to be read in one go. It seems to be trying to say something interesting about queerness and RPGs, but I couldn't follow the story enough to tell you what. The most interesting part was definitely the backmatter, where Kieron Gillen interviews people about the evolution of RPGs.

4. Lore Olympus, Volume One by Rachel Smythe

This is a webcomic, now released in print, that retells the story of Hades and Persephone with modern trappings. The comics language here uses a lot of manga conventions, and manga tropes dominate the romance story, too. Overall I enjoyed it well enough. Some good jokes, nice art, but sometimes I struggled to keep the characters straight, and the emotions are a little overwrought. This is clearly the beginning of a long story (this volumes collects episodes 1-25 of a serial that has run 200 thus far), and I am not sure it is really aimed at me, though the end promises a darker turn that I would be curious to see the repercussions of.

3. Once & Future: The Parliament of Magpies, script by Kieron Gillen, art by Dan Mora

This is volume three of a series about the Arthurian mythos rising up again in modern Britain; I read volume one when it was a finalist last year. (I didn't intentionally skip volume two; I didn't realize I'd skipped an installment until there were a bunch of references to Beowulf in this one.) It's pretty fun stuff, with strong characters, good art, and occasional moments of genius... but like all the original Kieron Gillen comics I've read, I have this sort of vibe that he's almost but not quite as good as Brian K. Vaughan. Unfair but there you go.

2. Far Sector, script by N. K. Jemisin, art by Jamal Campbell

In some ways I enjoyed this more than Once & Future: as a somewhat erudite superhero comic, it's just more my jam than the non-stop-high-concept kind of thing Kieron Gillen tends to write. On the other hand, this is a good superhero comic but not a great one, and Once & Future is definitely up to more. On the whole, I would say my enjoyment of the two is pretty comparable, so I gave the edge to Far Sector on two bases: I do like superhero comics a lot, and it's also a complete story as opposed to a fragment.

1. Strange Adventures, script by Tom King, art by Mitch Gerads & Evan "Doc" Shaner

As soon as I finished this, it was clearly the best of the four Graphic Story finalists I had read thus far. Beautiful art, thematic complexity. There are snatches of greatness in, say, Once & Future, but this is the kind of thing this category ought to be rewarding.

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Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)

6. Encanto; directed by Jared Bush & Byron Howard; script by Charise Castro Smith & Jared Bush

This is (if you need to be told) an animated musical about a Colombian family who lives in a magical house, where each resident of the house has a magical power... except one. I really enjoyed this; it's a solid film with some great songs and interesting thematic beats. I really liked "Surface Pressure," about one sister's need to never stop doing what the family needs, and "Waiting on a Miracle," about the protagonist's desire to do something to help the family. It's a good depiction of the complexity of family dynamics, about how people want to contribute to a system that has disappointed them. I think it deserves awards, but I'm not convinced it deserves this award. Sure, it's got magic, but is it really in dialogue with the genre of science fiction and fantasy? Or is it more a contribution to the genre of children's animation? (if that makes sense) This is to say, don't let its low ranking leave you thinking I didn't like it. I just don't think it's in the core sensibility of what I seek to reward with a Hugo.

5. Dune, Part One; directed by Denis Villeneuve; written by Jon Spaihts, Denis Villeneuve, and Eric Roth

I have never been a Dune partisan. I largely bounced off the book as a teenager (though I probably would find it more digestible now), I have seen the Lynch film a couple times, and I remember enjoying the Sci-Fi Channel original miniseries. This adaptation is probably the best one you could imagine, with room to breathe due to the increased running time but also the budget not afforded the Sci-Fi Channel mini. It's impeccably cast, and like all Villeneuve films I've seen, it looks great. But I felt... somehow unmoved by it all. Magisterial, but I didn't feel invited into either the world or the characters' emotional lives. It's like you're at a remove the whole time.

4. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings; directed by Destin Daniel Cretton; script by Dave Callaham, Destin Daniel Cretton, and Andrew Lanham

Last year, my wife and caught up on Marvel films (at the time, Spider-Man: Far from Home was the most recent), and I felt like that was it: following Avengers: Endgame, there was nothing more I wanted out of them, and I was ready to move on. I haven't seen one since, though I guess I ought to go see Thor 4 in theatres given I saw the other three in theatres. All this is to say that I was actually quite charmed by this, which follows the Marvel origin story formula, but is a reasonably strong execution of it. It has a real sense of style and flair, a good soundtrack, some great set pieces, the best villain I can remember in a Marvel film for a long long time, and a totally gratuitous but excellent comic relief character.* On the other hand, I thought star Simu Liu was charismatic and likeable, but his emotional arc didn't really seem to be present, writing-wise. I really struggled with ranking this. Is it a better movie than Dune? I don't know. Certainly it is less ambitious, and do the Hugos need to award (what is by my count) the eighth Marvel origin movie? Anyway, as it often is, my tiebreaker was the question, "What am I more likely to rewatch?" And the answer to that question is definitely Shang-Chi.

3. WandaVision, created by Jac Schaeffer, directed by Matt Shakman

Thankfully, this was the only complete-season finalist this year. I found this pretty fun at first: the sitcom pastiches are excellently done, and the language of television is abused to disconcerting effect. Moments where the camera angle suddenly shifts out of the sitcom standard, or the credits roll and things keep on going, or the crossing over of the better Quicksilver, are wonderful. Elizabeth Olson and Paul Bettany get to show off more here than in every Avengers film put together. Plus the episodes that are basically just sitcoms are very well done ones! I found this less interesting the further away it got from that basic set-up, however. There are a lot of characters who ultimately don't serve very important functions, narratively or thematically, and by the final episode, the show has abandoned its interesting meta play in favor of a somewhat-above-average Marvel punch-up. The sitcom stuff was ultimately a puzzle to be solved, not an idea to be explored. The idea that someone who lost her real family life and found solace in sitcom families might try to make her own sitcom family seems ripe with possibilities for saying something about family, but the finale doesn't go there, and it has none of the playfulness that characterized the rest of the series. Still, we have a number of episodes of really enjoyable stuff prior to that point, and I was definitely more involved than in Dune, and I would happily see this win.

2. 승리호, directed by Jo Sung-hee, script by Jo Sung-hee & Mocan

Space Sweepers is a Korean space film, about space scavengers who end up in over their heads when they discover a robot with a hydrogen bomb inside it aboard a derelict spaceships... a robot in the form of a human child. Okay, look, it's not a great movie. The villain (played by Richard Armitage!) has no real motivation, and a couple of the characters' backstories feel tacked on, and I found bits of it confusing and/or clumsy. But, you know, group-of-underdogs-in-a-spaceship unite to do great things has basically been my favorite genre of sf film since Star Wars, and this is a charming example of it with a lot of heart. A special shout-out to the character of Bubs, who at first seems to be a quippy murderous robot, but is soon revealed to have extra dimensions. Is it really the second-best thing on this list? Probably not; I think on any objective measure of "good film" it goes below Dune. But would I be excited for it to win a Hugo? More than anything else on this list.

1. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Filmed Adaptation of the Chivalric Romance by Anonymous, written and directed by David Lowery

I didn't know much about this going in beyond that it was based on an Arthurian medieval text (one with which I am unfamiliar) and that it was controversially received. Well, I really enjoyed it: it reminds me of the kind of 1980s pre-Lord of the Rings fantasy film I might have randomly plucked off the shelf at Blockbuster as a kid, and been weirded out but entranced by, before the fantasy genre of film became codified as massive epics. Well, that crossed with a Tarkovsky movie! Beautiful, jarring, potent. Exactly the kind of thing I like the Hugos to expose me to (doubt I would have bothered otherwise), and the kind of thing I like to reward.

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Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) 

6. The Wheel of Time 1x06: "The Flame of Tar Valon", written by Justine Juel Gillmer, directed by Salli Richardson-Whitfeld

This seems like a perfectly acceptable piece of epic fantasy, if you're into that kind of thing. The mean thing to say is that I liked it better when it was called The Lord of the Rings.

5. Arcane: League of Legends 1x09: "The Monster You Created", written by Christian Linke & Alex Yee, directed by Pascal Charrue & Arnaud Delord

This is a 3D-animated cartoon on Netflix set in the world of the League of Legends videogame, and the only thing on the short-form ballot I hadn't even heard of before it became a finalist. I don't have anything against this, but it was the final episode of a nine-episode serialized story that made absolutely no concessions for anyone; there wasn't even a "previously on..." at the beginning. Which I get, no one but me is watching this show this way, but I had no ability to assess it really. It looks nice when it's still, but I found the way people moved a bit off, like it was, well, a videogame. Some very dramatic moments that had me curious about context... but also very gruesome in places, which doesn't appeal. I was going to put this below Wheel of Time but then I realized at least I was never bored watching this (though I didn't find the fights very interesting). 

 

4. Loki 1x04: "The Nexus Event", written by Eric Martin, directed by Kate Herron

I'm sure this was quite exciting to people who had been watching Loki, and indeed, there was some fun stuff in it: I liked Loki getting punched by Sif again and again. But, like, what is a "nexus event"? Maybe someday I will watch all of Loki, but until then, this didn't quite work on its own. My friend Christiana hates it when I evaluate tv this way, but I need some kind of limit. If I am obligated to watch the previous three episodes of Loki, am I not also obligated to watch the previous nineteen episodes of For All Mankind? And that's not happening.

3. The Expanse 5x10: "Nemesis Games", written by Daniel Abraham & Ty Franck and Naren Shankar, directed by Breck Eisner

As I always say, I stopped watching The Expanse during season 3 (not the show's fault), but since I read the books, I was mostly able to follow this out of context. It's another perfectly competent episode whose emotional beats might have landed better had I seen the previous nine episodes of the season, but landed well enough regardless, especially the bits with Naomi. The Expanse has made the ballot five out of the last six times, and this was the best Expanse finalist since "Leviathan Wakes."

2. For All Mankind 2x10: "The Grey", written by Matt Wolpert & Ben Nedivi, directed by Sergio Mimica-Gezzan

This did work on its own, to my surprise. For All Mankind is an alternative history show where the Space Race continued unabated after the 1960s. This episode is set in the 1980s, and America has a base on the Moon, Apollo-Soyuz is going ahead, there are missile platforms in space, and so on. I am a sucker for shows about competent people working together to solve difficult problems, and this is one of them. (I particularly liked Wrenn Schmidt as Margo Madison, director of Mission Control.) There are lots of good moments in this, a show about how even in dark times we can work together, and it very much made me want to go back and watch the first two seasons. Except, you know, it's on Apple TV+ (surely one of the less necessary streaming services; I signed up for a week-long free trial to watch this).

1. Star Trek: Lower Decks 2x09: "wej Duj", written by Kathryn Lyn, directed by Bob Suarez

Like I said above, I nominated this. This was a great episode of the overall strong second season of Lower Decks, with the story of the lower-decks Cerritos crew paralleled with their counterparts on Klingon and Vulcan ships, all coming together in a satisfying way. The character of T'Lyn, the Vulcan prone to "outbursts," was particularly fun, as was security chief Shaxs doing pottery. It's Lower Decks at its best, and you bet that if a show I actually watch gets a Hugo nomination, I am going to rank it highly.

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Overall Thoughts

This is one of the better Best Graphic Story ballots I've seen; even if I never enjoy Kieron Gillen comics all that much, there's no denying he's one of the medium's most acclaimed writers. There are no finalists this year that stick out as mediocre-but-nominated-for-some-other-reason. Monstress won for its first three volumes but hasn't won since; my guess is based on past voting patterns, N. K. Jemisin will win yet another Hugo.

Similarly, this is a strong long-form Dramatic Presentation ballot, with all six movies being fundamentally enjoyable. (I did not fall asleep during any of them, unlike last year.) I stand by the prediction I made last year before this year's ballot was even out: Dune will win.

I find the state of short form annoying... but what can you do about it when serialized shows dominate the sf&f television market? Now that The Good Place is no longer in contention, I have no idea what Hugo voters actually like.

* After the Mandarin reference, I reminded my wife of the events of Iron Man 3, which we saw some time ago. I figure that was it: we explain how this move relates to the other one for the continuity nerds in the audience, then move on. Little did I expect that five minutes later Ben Kingsley would turn up! If you told me that as originally filmed, his character left them before they went through the portal, I would believe it; I don't think he interacted with a main character again after they crossed over, so you could have totally beefed up his role in reshoots.