Science's Less Accurate Grandmother: November 2022

30 November 2022

Doctor Who: Trading Futures by Lance Parkin

Doctor Who: Trading Futures
by Lance Parkin

This book is kind of "Doctor Who does James Bond"—you can get that as soon as you look at the cover, which could come out of a Bond film title sequence. But though it has its goofy moments, and definitely owes something to the Pierce Brosnan films in particular, it's not a parody. Rather, Parkin does that thing Doctor Who does so well: crash the Doctor into the conventions of a different genre and see what happens. Parkin explore the consequences with seriousness. Well, as serious as Doctor Who ever gets, anyway.

Published: 2001
Acquired: August 2022
Read: September 2022

What would a Bond villain look like in the Doctor Who world? Bond villains, when not Soviets themselves, were often trying to incite conflict between East and West for their own reasons. Parkin gives us a new Cold War in the twenty-first century, and then thinks of a Doctor Who way an arms dealer might trying to make money off this conflict: selling time travel. The result is a fast-paced action story, but one firmly in the Doctor Who realm. Especially early on, the way the Doctor gets out of James Bond-esque jams nonviolently is inspired, and a sequences where the Doctor stages a bank robbery to protect people from a tidal wave is delightful, a perfect extrapolation from the eighth Doctor in the tv movie. The Doctor's sort-of companion for the story, Malady Chang, feels exactly like a female ally character from a Pierce Brosnan film.

Parkin always does well by Eight, I reckon, and he also has a good handle on Anji, who here gets to plausibly bluff her way into the confidence of the villain. The subplot about Fitz pretending to be the Doctor probably could have gone further, but was enjoyable anyway. Some people praise Parkin for his Big Ideas about Doctor Who, and while he does indeed have them, he can also write solid Doctor Who books without them. A perfect example of the kind of fun you can have with a "regular" Doctor Who book.

I read a post–New Doctor Who Adventures novel every three months. Next up in sequence: Blue Box

28 November 2022

Hugos 1964: Way Station by Clifford D. Simak

American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1960-1966: The High Crusade by Poul Anderson / Way Station by Clifford D. Simak / Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes / ...And Call Me Conrad [This Immortal] by Roger Zelazny
edited by Gary K. Wolfe

Every year, after I vote in the Hugo Awards, I then read the oldest book to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel I haven't previously read. In 1964, the award was given to Clifford Simak's Way Station. Simak is an author I haven't read much of; last year, I read his 1967 novel Why Call Them Back from Heaven?, but other than that it's just pieces of scattered short fiction in anthologies like The Science Fiction Hall of Fame. (I do remember liking his story "Immigrant" in Galactic Empires, Volume I.)

Collection published: 2019
Novel originally published: 1963
Acquired: February 2022
Read: September 2022

Way Station is an odd book: after the American Civil War, a Union soldier named Enoch returns home to Wisconsin and is recruited to operate a "way station" for Galactic Central, a place where aliens can materialize and rest on their way to destinations further out in the spiral arm. For this, he is essentially granted immortality. At the time the book takes place (much of it is told in flashback), four things converge: the CIA discovers and takes an interest in this immortal man, a political faction in Galactic Central wants to close the way station on Earth by any means necessary, Enoch takes a woman into his home when she's abused by her father, causing the locals to end their longstanding policy of ignoring him, and an important peace conference is breaking down, meaning the Cold War may be about to turn hot.

Like Fritz Lieber's The Big Time (1958), also a Hugo winner from this era, it has big ideas, but takes a subdued, personal, perhaps even slow approach to them. That said, many like to point to Simak's style as "pastoral sf." (Searching "pastoral, science fiction" as a tagmash on LibraryThing brings up sixty-nine works, though only the top dozen would really seem to count. Simak is its top practitioner with his 1965 novel All Flesh Is Grass, and Way Station itself comes in sixth.) It's a defense I buy: I imagine that even in 1963, this felt like a story from another era. Simak's style captures the emotions Enoch must feel as a man out of his own time and the tone really communicates his isolation without slipping into being maudlin. The flashbacks we go into about Enoch's life over the years, encounters he's had with various aliens especially, are effective and Simak manages to evoke a world that is beyond Enoch's comprehension (and ours) but tantalizing and promising. Probably one of the most admirable parts of the novel is the way Simak communicates Enoch's orientation toward the universe, one of wonder and hope.

Given that even good contemporary sf often seems to want to emulate streaming television programs rather than play to the strengths of prose, I appreciated how different this book was. (Oddly, a Netflix film adaptation of this book was announced in 2019, though nothing has been heard since.) That said, I occasionally found myself wanting to skim—the pacing is a bit too languid from time to time!

There is, in the end, a lot going on here, and at the novel's conclusion, all those things kind of collide. Simak handles this very effectively, as elements of different plots and strands cross with one another in unexpected ways. But there's not just a unity of plot but also one of theme. People these days like to talk about "hopepunk" (thanks, I hate it), but sf has always provided us with hope. In Way Station, hope comes from caring: Enoch cares of course, but so does the woman Enoch rescues, and so do many of the various aliens Enoch meets, and so does Enoch's postman, and even the CIA agent assigned to shadow Enoch does, and without all of these people caring about things, the ending would have gone much differently. Near the end, Enoch thinks this:

A million years ago there had been no river here and in a million years to come there might be no river—but in a million years from now there would be, if not Man, at least a caring thing. And that was the secret of the universe, Enoch told himself—a thing that went on caring.

It's a sentiment worth awarding.

(I read this in a Library of America edition, collected with three other early 1960s sf novels, all of which were Hugo finalists, and one other of which also won. More on that in the next post in this sequence.)

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: The High Crusade by Poul Anderson

23 November 2022

Transformers UK #180–89, 199–205, 219–22, 228–34: Time Wars and Other Stories (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 28)

I read IDW's five Transformers Classics UK volumes alongside Panini's Doctor Who Magazine collections because they lead into Death's Head's appearance in A Cold Day in Hell! I then followed Death's Head out of A Cold Day in Hell! into his own series, and I even picked up The Sleeze Brothers based on its connection. But it was always my intention to eventually go back to The Transformers UK and find out what happened after volume five.

This, however, was made more complicated by the fact that IDW's reprint series stopped with volume five. The UK-original stories from #180 to #289* are available in three different ways:

Titan did a series of reprints of almost all of the Marvel UK material, but organized thematically, rather than by publication order
IDW reprinted some key UK storylines under the Best of UK branding, though mostly early stuff later collected in the Classics UK series
Hachette reprinted every G1 comic in a 100-volume partwork, The Definitive G1 Collection

The Hachette reprints appealed, especially as they integrated the UK and US strips, but they are expensive... if you can find them for sale at all! So I ended up going with the Titan ones, even though their reprints of the black-and-white strips (#215 onwards) are in the manga-sized "digest" format, about half the height of the UK originals! Except I couldn't find a copy of the Titan Time Wars collection anywhere, but thankfully IDW had a Best of UK: Time Wars I could use instead. The digest-sized ones have a cover price of $9... for some I have paid over $30 on the secondary market!

(There are two UK stories I will never read, because Titan reprinted both in collections that otherwise entirely contained stuff I already read, so it's hard to justify paying so much for single stories. These are "Cold Comfort and Joy!" from #198, reprinted in Second Generation, and The Fall and Rise of the Decepticon Empire from #213-14, reprinted in City of Fear.)

I worked out a somewhat idiosyncratic order for them: I didn't want to be jumping from volume to volume too much, so I tried to balance original publication sequence with fewer transitions between volumes. If Classics UK had continued, it would have run three more volumes, so I've divided the run into three roughly equal chunks to review here on my blog. Today I'm covering the first of those chunks, thirteen stories from twenty-eight original issues (plus one annual) distributed across five collections.

from The Transformers #180

The Big Broadcast of 2006 / Space Pirates!, from The Transformers #180-87 (20 Aug.–15 Oct. 1988), reprinted in Transformers: Space Pirates (Titan, 2003)

scripts by Simon Furman; pencils by Lee Sullivan, Dan Reed, and Dougie Braithwaite; inks by Dave Elliott, Dan Reed, Dave Harwood, and Lee Sullivan; colours by Steve White and Euan Peters; letters by Glib

"The Big Broadcast of 2006" was actually a US story (reprinted in Classics, Vol. 4), set in the future era of The Transformers: The Movie. But while the US comic never did anything with the future era other than this story and the movie adaptation, the UK comic had by this point depicted a robust and detailed future history—which was completely contradicted by this tale. UK writer Simon Furman solved this problem by writing a two-page frame to "Big Broadcast" that established it was a story being told by Wreck-Gar, full of lies to mislead his Quintesson interrogators: "Wreck-Gar's whole account is full of absurdities and contradictions." As the Quintessons point out, by this point in the UK continuity, Galvatron, Cyclonus, and Scourge were all in the 1980s, not the future. And besides, the UK continuity was up to 2008, not 2006. It's a clever conceit, though I imagine it will have more impact if I ever read it where it "goes"; this just reprints the two UK pages.

It leads into the next UK future epic, Space Pirates!, one of those future stories that actually doesn't intersect with the present-day timeline. I wasn't really convinced this one held together, to be honest; the maguffin that everyone is chasing after didn't make a ton of sense to me, and the story requires seasoned warriors to make dumb decisions for everything to hang together. I do like a bit of Rodimus angst, but I feel like such angst was done much better in IDW's original continuity two decades later. Now, arguably a lot of Simon Furman epics probably wouldn't make sense if you delved into them, but this one didn't grab me the way some of those others did, so I'm less apt to forgive it its mistakes.

from The Transformers Annual 1989

"Firebug!" / "Dry Run!" / "Altered Image!" / "All in the Minds!" / Time Wars, from Transformers #188-89, 199-205 (22-29 Oct. 1988, 7 Jan.–18 Feb. 1989) and The Transformers Annual 1989, reprinted in The Transformers: Best of UK: Time Wars (IDW, 2009)

plot by Simon Furman; scripts by Dan Abnett, Ian Rimmer, and Simon Furman; pencils by Jeff Anderson, Lee Sullivan, Dan Reed, Andrew Wildman, and Robin Smith; inks by Jeff Anderson, Cam Smith, Lee Sullivan, Dan Reed, Stephen Baskerville, and Robin Smith; colours by Euan Peters and Steve White; letters by Tom Frame, Glib, Annie Halfacree, Glop, and Peter Knight

This is a couple smaller stories, and then another big Transformers epic. Most of the small stories lead into the epic Time Wars, aside from one about the Wreckers battling a fire creature. There's Shockwave using the resurrected Megatron as a weapon against his future self, Galvatron, with the aid of Cyclonus and Scourge, also from the future, and then a Galvatron/Megatron showdown... which turns into an alliance, truly a delightful thing. I guess the one about Scorponok also leads into Time Wars, but it feel disposable.

Anyway, it all leads into the cross-time epic of Time Wars, which honestly I don't think makes sense even by Transformers time travel standards. A bit too much noise and fury, and not enough for someone to actually grab onto, once again, though it has its moments.

from Transformers #222

Survivors! / "The Hunting Party", from Transformers #219-22, 229 (27 May–17 June, 5 Aug. 1989), reprinted in Transformers: Way of the Warrior (Titan, 2005)
scripts by Simon Furman; art by Dan Reed, John Stokes, and Simon Coleby; letters by Glib

After Time Wars, the UK Transformers comic changed gears, going small scale—and black and white! Survivors! picks up from the end of Time Wars, chronicling the Wreckers, who haven't been given new orders since those events. They end up teaming up with some former members of the Decepticon Mayhem Attack Squad, Carnivac and Catilla, to take down the deranged Skids. All the characters, all feeling like abandoned warriors, join up together at the end. I'm curious to see where this goes, as "The Hunting Party!" indicates that the new Mayhem Attack Squad has orders to hunt down Carnivac and Catilla for going AWOL. Bad Transformers who become good Transformers is probably one of my favorite tropes (see Dinobot, Blackarachnia, MtMtE Megatron), so this has some real potential if it gets follow up on.

from Transformers #230

The Big Shutdown! / A Small War!, from Transformers #230-33 (12 Aug.–2 Sept. 1989), reprinted in Transformers: Perchance to Dream (Titan, 2006)
scripts by Simon Furman; art by Lee Sullivan, Jeff Anderson, and Geoff Senior; letters by Helen Stone, Stuart Bartlett, and Glib

These two stories are united in being about Thunderwing, who is rising to power as Decepticon leader on Cybertron. (I think there is a power vacuum because of the events of Two Megatrons!, which was actually published later!) The Big Shutdown! is a delightful hardboiled pastiche, as the Autobot detective Nightbeat must stop Thunderwing from committing a series of murders on Earth as part of a test being administered by the Decepticon leadership back on Cybertron. The end confused me, but I greatly enjoyed the rest of it, and I hope we get more Nightbeat in this series.

A Small War! jumps ahead to when Thunderwing does lead the Cybertronian Decepticon forces, and it introduces the Micromasters, a group of Autobots who are tiny (i.e., human-sized). The Micromasters get captured, but escape anyhow—only the Decepticons, led by Thunderwing, now also have the secret of their construction. This is fine; it mostly seems to exist to set up the Micromasters' first US appearance in a story I haven't read yet. (It appears in Classics, Vol. 5, but I've only read up through vol. 4.)

from Transformers #234

"[Double] Deal of the Century!" / "Prime's Rib!", from Transformers #228, 234 (29 July & 9 Sept. 1989), reprinted in Transformers: Earthforce (Titan, 2005)
scripts by Simon Furman, art by Andy Wildman, letters by Stuart Bartlett and Helen Stone

Finally, we have two small standalone tales. "[Double] Deal of the Century!" introduces Double-Dealer, the Transformer who plays both sides; to be honest, I was thoroughly confused by it because I'm often bad at recognizing Transformers, and that's even harder when they're in black-and-white. "Prime's Rib!" is a random future story, set in 1995 (so about halfway between the 1980s "present" and the 2005+ "future") explaining how there can be a girl Transformer in Arcee if Transformers don't have gender. Optimus Prime had her built to appease angry feminists on Earth! Hilarious if you can take it ironically, I guess. But also pretty stupid.

* The UK comic continued to #332, but from #290 on it was all reprints of US content.

This post is the twenty-eighth in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers The Flood. Previous installments are listed below:

21 November 2022

Hugos Side-Step: The VALIS Trilogy by Philip K. Dick

VALIS and Later Novels by Philip K. Dick: A Maze of Death / VALIS / The Divine Invasion / The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
edited by Jonathan Lethem

So every time I vote in the Hugo Awards, I read the oldest Hugo-winning novel I haven't already read. If I like it, I tend to pick up other stuff in the same series or by the same author. Hence, my reading of The Man in the High Castle (winner for 1963) has caused me to spend the year working my way through every single Philip K. Dick novel that was republished by the Library of America. So after eight months and thirteen novels, these three stories finally draw my Dick journey to a close.

Collection published: 2009
Novels originally published: 1981-82
Acquired: August 2014
Read: August 2022

The so-called "VALIS trilogy" is more of a duology plus a third book with thematic links to the first two. VALIS (1981) and The Divine Invasion (1981) are both science fiction novels where people have encounters with pink laser beams that impart to them the existence of God, and where the existence of the movie-within-a-book, VALIS, is discussed. On the other hand, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982) is a non-sf novel about an Episcopal bishop trying to find proof of the existence of God. But in terms of how the novels work, I think VALIS and Transmigration are closer together, and Divine Invasion is the outlier.

VALIS and Transmigration are both about the search for God and the search for meaning. VALIS begins with a story about the science fiction author Horselover Fat, but the first-person narrator quickly admits that Fat is him, it's just that these events are too painful to recount directly. But as you keep reading, it seems that the narrator must be a separate person from Fat because they have conversations, and then you realize that the first person narrator is Dick himself! But eventually all this is explained (well, as much as anything is explained in a Dick novel), and I really enjoyed the play with narration. I also just really enjoyed the story in general: Fat is someone with marriage issues, with drug issues, but most of all, with meaningfulness issues. He's chasing after meaning, and maybe he finds it in VALIS... but then there are aspects of VALIS that turn out to be disappointing. Like the best Dick novels, it balances trippiness with ordinariness, and it's definitely in the top tier of his work.

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer is very similar to VALIS in many ways: it's about our desperate search for religious truth and our disappointment when we think we've found it. It is also, like VALIS, told in the first person—maybe I am forgetting something, but I think these are the only two Dick novels to be? If so, it's a real shame, because it's highly effective here. The narrator here is Angel Archer, the daughter-in-law of Timothy Archer, a radical bishop who soon becomes involved in a sexual relationship, a discovery of the origins of Christianity that might disprove the divinity of Christ, and supposed communications from the spirits of dead loved ones. What do we chose to believe in, and what do we not? Angel is a great narrator, with the strong sense of personality and voice; the events of the novel are tragic but often kept at a remove, in a way that feels very emotionally honest. There are lots of great bits: I really liked a conversation between the bishop and a car enthusiast about making the link between cause and effect; I liked how Angel (who was an English major in college) continually reflected on the way that literature gave her something to believe in, how it served as a sort of substitute religion—but also how that substitute keeps her at a remove from reality. As an English major (and, now, English professor), I can empathize, and I find the critique interesting. The last bit of the novel is really great.

Dick believed himself to have experienced a divine revelation in reality, but you wouldn't know it from these two novels. They're both about the limitations of belief in a way that I found very interesting. VALIS is technically sf, but I felt you could probably read it as a realist novel if you wanted to; on the other hand, there is the possibility that something supernatural actually did happen in Transmigration. (Angel doesn't think so, though, and neither did I.) Though they grapple with similar themes to much of his early work, I had a real sense that Dick had "leveled up" as a writer.

The Divine Invasion is different from the other two, because instead of being about belief, it's about the things one might believe in. It's also more like Dick's earlier novels, being set in the future, about colonists on other planets. A space colonist has to marry a woman who's undergoing a virgin birth; the child is God apparently. The child undergoes an experience much like the Temptation of Christ, though Dick puts a nice little spin on it. This book had its moments. Probably my favorite is that much of the novel is a flashback that the colonist has while he's in cryogenic suspension, only a malfunction in the mechanism means that his tube is picking up a radio station broadcasting string versions of music from Fiddler on the Roof. So the whole time the story is unfolding, he keeps asking other characters if they can hear the music. Which means we never see how things "actually" went! (If you believe Dick's VALIS cosmology, though, I think everything happens all at once, so there is no difference between the actual events and the recalled events.)

I liked all the stuff about the colonist; it was solid, mid-tier Dick, about an ordinary guy trying to stay afloat, work through a bad marriage, and deal with extraordinary things happening to him. A lot like, say Martian Time-Slip (1964) or Now Wait for Last Year (1966), both favorite novels by Dick. On the other hand, the religious discussions between the kid and other characters were frequently dull. I prefer reading about someone searching for truth, I guess, to hearing what Dick's supposed truth actually was. VALIS and Transmigration are skeptical in a way that Divine Invasion is not. So a decent work, but clearly (to me anyway) the weakest of the three.

Dick died after he wrote Transmigration but before it was published. It's a real shame for any number of reasons, but particularly because you have the impression Dick was about to kick into a third phase of his literary career. After the early write-tons-of-novels-and-some-will-be-great-and-some-will-not phase (1955-70) and the drugs-have-slowed-me-down phase (1970-77), he was picking up the speed again, and also developing his technique and talent in ways he had not done before. Alas, the final phase consists only of these three novels. I would have loved more sf novels like VALIS and more realist novels like Transmigration.

I've really enjoyed this journey... but I also have the vague sense that even though Dick published some thirty-plus novels while he was alive (and several more were published posthumously), that in these thirteen I've read the best of what he has to offer, and I'd be better off not chasing down, say, Time Out of Joint (1959) or The Penultimate Truth (1964). But if anyone thinks there's some Dick novel I haven't read that I really ought to, let me know! On the other hand, I've never read any of his short fiction except "The Minority Report," and it's been collected in its totality in five volumes, so I will be going through it. Not immediately, though; I need to take a break and tackle (now that I've voted in the 2022 Hugos), the Hugo-winning novel for 1964...

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: Way Station by Clifford D. Simak

18 November 2022

Reading L. Frank Baum's The Enchanted Island of Yew Aloud to My Son

The Enchanted Island of Yew by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by George O'Connor

By the time my three-year-old and I had finished Grampa in Oz, our copy of The Lost King of Oz was still a few days away, so I pulled out my four remaining non-Oz fantasies by Baum and asked him which one he wanted to read, and he picked this one, and we made our way through it while we waited.

Originally published: 1903
Acquired: ???
Read aloud: July 2022

Yew was added to the map of the countries near Oz by the International Wizard of Oz Club, but my memory of the book was that Baum made no explicit connection between it and his other fantasy milieu; no one from Yew, for example, attends Ozma's birthday party in The Road to Oz. But my memory was wrong. The book uses ryls and knooks, immortal forest creatures that Baum most prominently used in The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, and the book even indirectly mentions Santa Claus when a fairy says that only one mortal has ever been made into an immortal. So it connects to Life and Adventures at least, and Baum made explicit links between that and his Oz mythos.

(I wonder if it was a fortuitous coincidence or a purposeful reference, that in this book, a fairy cannot be turned invisible by a magic mirror, and that in Lost Princess, the Wizard says fairies cannot be turned invisible against their wills. On the other hand, it was jarring to read this book's statement that humans can't be turned into fairies right after Grampa, where a human is transformed into a flower fairy.)

Anyway, this is about a fairy who requests that a mortal girl transform her into a mortal boy for one year so that she can go on adventures. If it wasn't for the fact that it was written and published after Wonderful Wizard, it would read like a dry run for it: Yew is segmented into five countries, one for each compass point with one in the center. "Prince Marvel" even meets an ordinary man who rules by pretending to be a wizard. But what worked in Wizard seemed to me less effective here. Dorothy's adventures in Wonderful Wizard are strung together by her wanting to get home, and Baum's better Oz books have a similar thread holding them together. Prince Marvel goes some interesting places—I liked King Terribus of Spor, and the Hidden Kingdom of Twi, where everything exists twice over, is surely one of his best executed magical communities—but his motivation is to just... have adventures. As a character, Marvel falls flat. You could do something interesting with the idea of an immortal fairy having to learn how to cope as a mere mortal, but in fact, Marvel only solves two problems without drawing on fairy powers. Throughout the rest of the book, he casts spells, or calls on ryls and knooks and goblins for assistance, or depends on his fairy immunity to others' magic, which seems to undermine the whole idea of the book.

I also felt like Baum was making this up as he went along, and his pacing rather got away from him. The book has twenty-seven chapters, and by the end of the nineteenth, Prince Marvel has got out of the second of Yew's five countries, meaning the last three countries must be covered in just eight chapters! So the book's problems get easier to solve, instead of harder, and Marvel amasses a large group of travelers around himself, most of whom do nothing.

Like Rinkitink (which was originally drafted around this time, too), you can also see the Baum's tone is different here than he would later adopt in the Oz books. There's a lot more physical jeopardy than in the Oz novels, but more than that, even the hero goes around threatening to hang and flog people! When Prince Marvel defeats a band of thieves, he even has them up in nooses, ready to hang, before they convince him to change his mind, and later on, he really does flog the imposter sorcerer Kwytoffle. (It's weirdly harsh compared to how the Wizard was treated in Wonderful Wizard for doing the exact same thing!) Some of it I edited out, but thankfully my son just doesn't really know what "hanging" or "flogging" mean. Indeed, he reacted more strongly to the idea that Kwytoffle might turn our heroes into grasshoppers and June-bugs! I also had to edit out some racism around a "blackamoor" that Marvel wrestles.

detail of the Oz Club map showing Yew in relation to Oz

Still, there's stuff to like here. Twi, like I said, is one of Baum's best developed magical communities, one of those ones where he really builds a world out of a funny idea. But my favorite segment of the book was Prince Marvel's encounter with Wul-Takim, the king of thieves. When Marvel is going to hang Wul-Takim, the erstwhile king of thieves claims he's reformed, and since Marvel promised to hang fifty-nine thieves but they are thieves no longer, he can't hang them. And then Wul-Takim asks Marvel what he's going to do with the thieves' treasure, Marvel tells him he's going to give it to the poor; Wul-Takim points out that as Marvel has taken all their stuff, they are in fact the poorest people on the island of Yew! It marks Wul-Takim as a fun character, and I was glad he continued to aid Marvel periodically throughout the book.

I also really liked Nerle, Marvel's squire, the son of a baron who has been so accustomed to his every desire being fulfilled, that his greatest joy is in suffering and deprivation. It's a shame that these two characters don't inhabit a stronger novel, but they definitely enlivened this one. And reading the blustering Kwytoffle's dialogue aloud was pretty enjoyable.

Like I said, Baum never referred to Yew in his Oz works, and to my knowledge, neither did any of the other "Famous Forty" authors. This is probably because of the coda, which establishes that a hundred years after the time of the novel, Yew had been civilized, and thus was no longer a place of magic. This isn't really consistent with what emerged in the later Oz novels, that Oz was part of a larger collection of magic lands, but it is consistent with how Oz is presented in Wonderful Wizard and Marvelous Land, as a place quite close to the United States (hidden in the American West somewhere?) that is magical because it hasn't been "civilized" yet.

My edition is a Books of Wonder one from the 1990s. The book was originally published with illustrations and color plates by the highly regarded Fanny Cory, but these would have been uneconomic for Books of Wonder to reproduce, so the book was reillustrated by George O'Connor. They're perfectly fine illustrations, but nothing very memorable. However, he went on to be a New York Times–bestselling, award-winning illustrator of picture books and YA graphic novels a decade later. His Wikipedia page doesn't even mention Enchanted Island, which I think was his first published work.

Next up in sequence: The Lost King of Oz

16 November 2022

Oblivion (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 27)

Oblivion: Collected Comic Strips from the Pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Scott Gray, Martin Geraghty, Lee Sullivan, John Ross, et al.

Collection published: 2006
Contents originally published: 2001-03
Previously read: January 2008
Reread: August 2022

In my comments on The Glorious Dead, I wrote, "I don't have the feeling that the strip is trying to ape the storytelling style of the Mills & Wagner/Gibbons/Parkhouse era. Rather, I feel like it's forging its own identity a bit, trying to figure out what the shape of a late 1990s DWM story is on its own terms." Now that we're in the early 2000s, this is more true than ever. The tv show is dead, long live the tv show—now what can the strip be like without it? There aren't even really many callbacks to the previous history of the strip anymore, just its own immediate continuity.

2001 is the year I became a Doctor Who fan, though I didn't discover the strip until I started picking up these reprint collections a few years later. What made me a Doctor Who fan is the spiritual counterpart of this era of the strip: the Paul McGann audio dramas. Like the comic, the audios had a lightly serialized background story with strong character drama in the foreground... and every single installment felt big, like you were watching a movie, or if not that, like the writer was trying to make a statement about Doctor Who every week. Indeed, the very first issue collected here had a cover-mounted CD containing episode one of the very first Doctor Who audio drama I ever heard.

This volume consistently feels like it's cribbing in a way—it's cribbing from the tv show that hasn't come back yet. The audios and the comics of this time, like the show when it returned, reinvented Doctor Who to be like Buffy or Deep Space Nine, without ever losing what made it work in the first place.

from Doctor Who Magazine #303

Ophidius, from Doctor Who Magazine #300-03 (Feb.-May 2001)
story by Scott Gray, pencils by Martin Geraghty, inks & colours by Robin Smith, lettering by Roger Langridge

This is like an RTD series opener. Well, maybe more accurately, an RTD Year Five Billion episode: "okay, you like us, now here's some weird colorful stuff only we can do." The arrival of color to the strip works perfectly in this bold, exciting story that launches a new story arc for the eighth Doctor and Izzy. Ophidius is a great setting, the Doctor and Izzy are both on fine form, and new character Destrii is great—I never read this without foreknowledge of what her true purpose was, but I suspect it works well, as she bonds with Izzy only to betray her. In fact, it's a lot like Moffat's The Impossible Astronaut: you think you're watching a standard series premiere only to realize something much more unexpected and unusual is happening.

The bodyswap plot is a great idea, and would only work in comics. On tv, you wouldn't want to write out one of your leads temporarily like this; imagine Billie Piper being replaced! On audio, you'd have a new character with a new voice, and I think the continuity of personality wouldn't come across. You could do it in a novel, but I don't think it would work as well, as you wouldn't have the clear visual reminder of what had happened. But in comics, you can swap character appearances without worrying about actors, and you can get the same character "voice" but with a totally different appearance.

from Doctor Who Magazine #304

Beautiful Freak, from Doctor Who Magazine #304 (May 2001)
story by Scott Gray, pencils by Martin Geraghty, inks & colours by Robin Smith, lettering by Roger Langridge

This one-part story follows up Ophidius with the character implications. Scott Gray and Martin Geraghty are at the peak of their creative voices here: the character voices shine, the art is gorgeous. "I d-don't want to be strong... I w-want to be me..." is a devastatingly effective line; the sequence of the Doctor plunging Izzy into the TARDIS swimming pool is gorgeous. I don't really remember seeing much of the TARDIS interior in the McGann run up until this point, but they use it really well here. Again, this is the kind of story you could only do in the strip: with its highly variable story lengths, you can spend eight pages on a character moment and nothing else.

from Doctor Who Magazine #309

The Way of All Flesh, from Doctor Who Magazine #306, 308-10 (July-Nov. 2001)
story by Scott Gray, pencils by Martin Geraghty, inks & colours by Robin Smith, lettering by Roger Langridge

I remembered this one as being very bad, but upon reading it, realized I was confusing it with a different DWM story about artists in the early twentieth century, The Futurists. In this one, the Doctor and Izzy meet Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego, and discover evil aliens are using the Mexican Day of the Dead to harvest life-force. I don't have much to say about this one... in that it is yet again a solid, well-done story from the Gray/Geraghty team, enhanced by the way it plays off the ongoing character beats. Amazing visuals, nice conversations between Izzy and Frida.

Character Assassin, from Doctor Who Magazine #311 (Dec. 2001)
story by Scott Gray, art by Adrian Salmon, lettering by Roger Langridge

Another one of those largely continuity-free one-off strips celebrating something. (The last of the McGann era, if I recall correctly.) A fun but disposable adventure of the Master in the Land of Fiction.

from Doctor Who Magazine #313

Children of the Revolution, from Doctor Who Magazine #312-17 (Jan.-May 2002)
story by Scott Gray, art by Lee Sullivan, colours by Adrian Salmon, lettering by Roger Langridge

What can I say? Another strong outing from Scott Gray, this time joined by Lee "Best at Daleks" Sullivan on artwork. Opening with an extract with Izzy's diary is a clever move; it gives us some personality insight, but also lets us quickly and efficiently do some exposition. It has multiple great cliffhangers and several powerful visual moments. "Good Daleks" is a strategy many different Doctor Who stories have pulled (all the way back to Troughton's debut, but more recently Victory of the Daleks on screen and Dark Eyes on audio), but surely this is the only good "good Dalek" story? The way they are revealed and then that reveal is out-revealed is great; the humans' prejudice against Daleks being a driver for the story is very well done; everything looks fantastic underwater; there's a helluva cliffhanger; Izzy is once again on top form. Gray and Geraghty might be firing on all cylinders, but Sullivan can step up to the plate, too. The growing pressure on the Doctor as a character is nicely done as well; more on that soon.

from Doctor Who Magazine #326

Me and My Shadow / Uroboros / Oblivion, from Doctor Who Magazine #318-28 (June 2002–Apr. 2003)
stories by Scott Gray, art by John Ross and Martin Geraghty & David A. Roach, colours by Roger Langridge and Adrian Salmon, lettering by Roger Langridge

Technically, this is three separate stories: a one-issue prologue and then two big stories. But these eleven strips feel like the kind of three-part series finale that Russell T Davies and Steve Moffat would go on to write: this is the comic's "Utopia"/"The Sound of Drums"/"Last of the Time Lords" or its "Face the Raven"/"Hell Bent"/"Heaven Sent." A story even bigger than The Glorious Dead! Each part works fine on its own from a plot perspective, and there's a shift in approach and location between each installment, but in terms of theme and character, the stories all add up to one big story. Me and My Shadow is fine, a well-enough-but-a-little-confusing story about what Fey has been up to since she was dropped off at the end of Wormwood.
But then we launch into Uroboros and it's magnificent again. The reveal of Destrii in Izzy's body is great. We get more insight into Destrii as a character, and it very much intrigues. The characterization of the Doctor is excellent, being pushed in different directions but never becoming unrecognizable; I very rarely say this, but I would love to get to hear Paul McGann perform some of the anger here. The idea of following up a previous adventure and seeing its consequences is strong; at the time this was a Bush/Blair 9/11 allegory, but it reads even more prescient (unfortunately) these days. This is the kind of comics that just propels you from installment to installment.

It also propels you straight into Oblivion, the explosive finale: Izzy versus Destrii as we finally find out what exactly has been going on. I did get a bit muddled in the backstory of Oblivion and the nature of the threat here, but what really works is of course the character stuff. Izzy taking on Destrii is fantastic; the reveal about Izzy's sexuality, which makes sense of some pretty heavy-handed characterization from way back in End Game even moreso. Her decision to go home is great, and perfectly timed. The sequence paralleling the lives of Izzy and Desrtii is very well written and beautifully drawn.

from Doctor Who Magazine #311

Other Notes:

I was a bit surprised to recognize the Mobox in Ophidius: eighteen years later, Scott Gray would reuse them in a thirteenth Doctor strip adventure. When I read The Power of the Mobox, it had been over a decade since I first read this volume so I didn't recognize them at all, and so I experienced the callback in reverse order!
Did the strip skip issue #305? No, that was the VNA throwback The Last Word, not collected until much later in The Age of Chaos, though I read it much earlier. It did, however, skip #307, which ran a TV Comic reprint. The backmatter here doesn't mention any script or art issues, but I feel like surely there must have been some.
The appearance of what are clearly Martian tripods in "Character Assassin" is a bit cheeky—The War of the Worlds wouldn't come into the public domain in the UK for another sixteen years!
Surely Izzy is—by a wide margin—the strip's best original companion thus far. Though I guess the competition here isn't exactly fierce. I mean, I do like Frobisher, but well-rounded person, he is not exactly.
Making Izzy gay this way—not explicitly clear until her last story—probably feels a bit underwhelming to modern audiences who get much better representation on a regular basis. But she's Doctor Who's first clearly gay main companion, and dealing with that is made to really matter here. The tv show doesn't make it here until 2017; even the audios not until 2011. (I know all of these are arguable.) It does feel a bit like Scott Gray watched Willow come out on Buffy and thought he could do it too. In a good way.
Destrii's Uncle Jodafra is a fun one-off character, and I seem to recall he returns along with her in the next volume.
Interesting to note that in both Izzy and Destrii's stories, a picture of the Enterprise is used as a stand-in for escape. It's the sort of spot the TARDIS itself might be used normally, but of course they couldn't be watching Doctor Who, and I'd rather see Star Trek here than one of those dumb stand-ins the tie-ins use sometimes. So it's a bit jarring, but I also don't know what a better option would be. Anyway, I reckon Scott Gray would write an excellent Star Trek comic.
Pretty amazing to think that much of this was running in parallel with McGann's second audio season (Jan.-June 2002), which was doing much the same thing as I said above, and has almost as good a hit rate. (I rate five of its six stories highly; actually, the bad one is a bad "good Dalek" story.) Charley dominates the audio companions for much the same reason Izzy does the comics ones, and the run manages to do interesting stuff with the Doctor as well, just like this. What a time to be a Who fan in general, and an eighth Doctor one in specific. (And though I haven't read the eighth Doctor novels of this era very systematically, most of the ones I have read are also strong: EarthWorld, The Year of Intelligent Tigers, The City of the Dead, The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, Camera Obscura. I guess on the other hand, though, you've got Escape Velocity and Time Zero in this era; the McGann comics have never done anything that bad for sure.)
Uroboros/Oblivion is thus the Neverland of this run. I really like Neverland, but one thing that sticks out when comparing this comic run to the audios is that Gray is able to write big epic finales that don't need to draw on Time Lord mythology to have scale and scope. Though he did go to that well in Wormwood, neither this nor The Glorious Dead engage with that aspect of the Doctor Who mythos. I think the Time Lords can be crutch for writers looking for grandeur, and Gray is perfectly capable of working without it.
I feel like my reviews here have kind of undersold this run. If you just read synopses of it all, I'm not sure it would come across better than any other era of DWM history. What makes this era sing is less the big stuff (though the arc is very well done) or the premise of any individual tale (though there are some good ones), but the way the dialogue shines and the story is paced and the art is perfect. It's just well done; I may as well have been grinning all the way through reading this.

This post is the twenty-seventh in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers issues #180–89, 199–205, 219–22, and 228–34 of The Transformers UK. Previous installments are listed below:

14 November 2022

JSA Presents Green Lantern by Steven T. Seagle, Tony Bedard, Junior Thomas, John K. Snyder III, Dennis Calero, Staz Johnson, et al.

JSA Presents Green Lantern

Collection published: 2008
Contents published: 2002-08
Acquired and read: August 2022

Writers: Steven T. Seagle, Tony Bedard, Junior Thomas

Artists: John K. Snyder III, Dennis Calero, Staz Johnson/Mike Norton, Rodney Ramos/Jack Purcell, Allen Passalaqua

Letterers: Todd Klein, Travis Lanham, Jared K. Fletcher, Rob Leigh

This slim collection contains three stories (four issues originally, one double-sized) about Alan Scott, the original Green Lantern. One is a "retro" story, set in 1944; the other two feature him in the present day, a bit ahead of where I am at with my reading otherwise, with the events of Infinite Crisis and 52 coming in between. (I left off with JSA #45, published April 2003; the first present-day issue collected here was published June 2007.) It seems many developments await Alan Scott, but most noticeably he became director of and then quit the government black-ops organization Checkmate, and his daughter Jennie-Lynn "Jade" Hayden has died.

The first story is "Brightest Day, Blackest Night," which tells the story of Alan's first run-in with Solomon Grundy in the Slaughter Swamp outside Gotham City. Nazi agents crash a passenger airplane in the swamp to get their hands on an inventor aboard it, as well as his invention, but run afoul of an angry Grundy. Green Lantern comes to the rescue, aided by his romantic interest, reporter Irene Miller, and taxi-driving sidekick Doiby Dickles. The story seems designed to show off the painted art of John K. Snyder III, which is brimming with atmosphere, and captures well both the brutality of Grundy and the majesty of the Green Lantern. Unfortunately, the art isn't consistently great at storytelling: though I thought on the one hand, the body language of Irene really brought her to life, on the other hand, there were times it was just completely unclear to me what was happening. That the scientist had a niece also on the plane who also survived the crash was something the illustrations only seemed to intermittently depict, for example.

The art does a good job of capturing the light/darkness interaction.
from Green Lantern: Brightest Day, Blackest Night (script by Steven T. Seagle, art by John K. Snyder III)

The second story, "Johnny Mimic," is the best in the volume. Johnny Mimic is a criminal with an uncanny ability to recreate heists; Alan apprehended him back during the Golden Age, but let him go if he promised to be good—and he did. But decades later, the Super Human Advanced Defense Executive want Johnny to help them figure out a heist, and if Alan can't convince him nicely, S.H.A.D.E. will do it by force. The three-way tension between Alan, Johnny, and Father Time (leader of S.H.A.D.E.) is well done, and the story is genuinely surprising in terms of both what had happened and what goes on to happen. Johnny is not an actual preexisting character, but feels like one. The story does a strong job of playing Alan's optimism off the more cynical tone of contemporary comics. This is a solid, perfectly executed done-in-one comic with good moments of charm. Unsurprisingly, it's written by Tony Bedard who's good at this kind of thing in general, and Dennis Calero handles the art well.

Like Johnny Mimic's wife, I am always up for a bit of Green Lantern charm.
from JSA Classified #25 (script by Tony Bedard, art by Dennis Calero)

The final story is "Giving Thanks"/"Ghosts of Christmas Past"—you might not be surprised to realize it takes place across the holiday season, going from Thanksgiving to Christmas. Alan battles perennial JSA villain Vandal Savage, who taunts him by seemingly bringing Jade back to life. It's a bit plodding at times (the battle went on too long with the same character beats repeated again and again), but the final ten pages or so really shined, as Alan must make a tough decision, and then we follow the emotional fallout of it. I get that she wasn't really there, but Jade felt very generic here, not the well-rounded character that Roy and Dann Thomas created in Infinity, Inc. Anyway, it's fine. I remember not liking how Jade was killed off in the Infinite Crisis Companion; I'm curious to find out if she has any kind of meaningful role in JSA before that point, or if she's brought back just to be killed as so often happens with minor female superheroes.

This post is thirty-sixth in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers issues #46-87 of JSA. Previous installments are listed below:

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

The Huntress: Origins (1977-82)

All-Star Squadron (1981-87)

Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume One (1983-84)

Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume Two (1984-85)

Showcase Presents... Power Girl (1978)

America vs. the Justice Society (1985)

Jonni Thunder, a.k.a. Thunderbolt (1985)

Crisis on Multiple Earths, Volume 7 (1983-85)

Infinity, Inc. #11-53 (1985-88) [reading order]

Last Days of the Justice Society of America (1986-88)

All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant (1999)

Steel, the Indestructible Man (1978)

Superman vs. Wonder Woman: An Untold Epic of World War Two (1977)

Wonder Woman: Earth-Two (1977-78)

Secret Origins of the Golden Age (1986-89)

The Young All-Stars (1987-89)

Gladiator (1930) ["Man-God!" (1976)]

The Crimson Avenger: The Dark Cross Conspiracy (1981-88)

The Immortal Doctor Fate (1940-82)

Justice Society of America: The Demise of Justice (1951-91)

Armageddon: Inferno (1992)

Justice Society of America vol. 2 (1992-93)

The Adventures of Alan Scott--Green Lantern (1992-93)

Damage (1994-96)

The Justice Society Returns! (1999-2001)

Chase (1998-2002)

Stargirl by Geoff Johns (1999-2003)

The Sandman Presents: The Furies (2002)

JSA by Geoff Johns, Book One (1999-2000)

Wonder Woman: The 18th Letter: A Love Story (2000)

Two Thousand (2000)

JSA by Geoff Johns, Book Two (1999-2003)

Golden Age Secret Files & Origins (2001)

JSA by Geoff Johns, Book Three (1999-2003)

JSA by Geoff Johns, Book Four (2002-03)

11 November 2022

Five Very Good Short Stories I've Read Recently

This (possibly) marks the start of an irregular feature around here. (God knows I need more of these, but actually, having things I do regularly makes it easy for me to come up with ideas for posts!) Obviously I write up all my reading of "books," but what of short stories? Either they're buried in an anthology review, or I read them on their own and I never mention them at all. So, here they are, complete with links where you can read them too. (I definitely read some good stuff for the Hugos, but I didn't write it up here because I always write those stories up in detail already.)

"An Important Failure" by Rebecca Campbell

Then he fitted it, and it hid so perfectly in his violin, maybe no one would know the terrible thing he had done, the secret history he had stolen like all the other secret histories that constituted his violin.

I read this in The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 6; it was originally published in Clarkesworld in 2020. It's about a kid who's an apprentice violin maker in the near future, when the trees are burning away and dying off, and he hears a beautiful violin performance that makes him want to present the performer with the perfect violin. But making such a thing is a series of difficulties, especially if the world's going to pot. After a somewhat confusing start (I always read my BSFY stories over lunch after teaching, which usually means I am not in a very focused mindset), it quickly grabbed me. I often hate writing about music, but like Sarah Pinsker, Rebecca Campbell has the gift of making the beauty of the sound come alive in prose. Genuinely moving without being maudlin, and the way it keeps coming back to various "failures" is the kind of thing that resonates with me at thirty-six years old. Things are going to hell and the world wasn't meant to be like this, but there's some beauty to find in all of it anyway.

"AirBody" by Sameem Siddiqui

“You’re not gonna soak the dal first?”
     “Oh so now you’re such a refined cook?”
     “I can make dal.”
     “Then tell me, why soak the dal? What difference does it make, aside from wasting two hours of our lives?”
     “Well it’s just, what . . . it’s just what you do.”

Like the Campbell, I read this in Clarke's Best SF of the Year, and like the Campbell, it was originally published in Clarke's own Clarkesworld Magazine in 2020. It's set in a future where people can temporarily "rent" the bodies of other people in different locations; like, you might live in San Francisco, but rent someone's body in New York so you can go to a meeting in person without traveling. The main character is a young Pakistani man in the D.C. area who rents his body to an "aunty" back home. It's very cute, has some great worldbuilding, and good jokes—a satisfying tale of missed opportunities.

"Your Boyfriend Experience" by James Patrick Kelly

Was I aroused? I was. Was I that twisted? Maybe.

I read this in Clarke's Best SF of the Year, but it originally was published in an MIT Press sf anthology called Entanglements: Tomorrow's Lovers, Families, and Friends (2020). The above link will only work if you have access to the MIT Press Direct database of ebooks. (My university, for example, does not subscribe to it.) It's a kind of disturbing story about a couple where one partner is very interested in food, but the other, a developer, has never been able to share his interest. The developer is working on a project to make a male robot companion for gay men, and he tests it out on his partner. Pretty emotionally intense, very strong. I was left somewhat uncertain by the ending, in the best possible way.

"Exile's End" by Carolyn Ives Gilman

The story enthralled the public. It was better than finding a species given up for extinct. It was a chance at redemption, a chance to save what was lost, to reverse injustice, to make everything right.
The reality of the Atoka faded into inconsequence.

Like all the above stories, I read this in Clarke's Best SF; it was originally published on the Tor.com blog in, yes, 2020. It's told from the perspective of an museum curator on a human colony planet—her museum's pride and joy is a native artwork depicting a native woman who plays a key role in her planet's founding myth, someone who bridged the gap between human and colonizer. (Like a more significant Pocahantas.) Those natives are all dead now, so the artifacts in her museum are all that's left... until someone turns up, claiming that there's a small population of them still alive on a distant colony world, and they want their stuff back. It's a striking story, beautifully told, about what art is: how it derives its meaning from what we attach to it, not what it actually looks like, and how different people and different cultures can attach different meanings to the same physical artifact, and thus see it in completely different ways. There's no easy answers here and no sanctimony, just a strong tale of the conflict of cultures.

"Hobbies" by Clifford D. Simak

The pups were bringing in the cows for the evening milking.

Here's the exception. This story was originally published in Astounding way back in 1946; it was later incorporated into Clifford Simak's fix-up novel City, which is where I read it. (My link above goes to a scan of the issue of Astounding in which it originally appeared.) City spans several thousand years of future history in eight short stories; "Hobbies" is the sixth one. I read it in context, of course, but I think it would work on its own. In the future, humanity has largely abandoned the Earth, and those humans that are left have all their needs provided for. In Simak's future, dogs have been raised to sentience, and there are also robots left behind by humankind. The end result of all this is purposelessness: dogs and robots were made to serve humans, but there are none. Even humans themselves don't know what to do. Humanity no longer strives forward, no longer strives to survive. City is my third Simak in the last year, and "Hobbies" is pretty typical of him: atmospheric, detailed, contemplative. But "Hobbies" is also that style at its best. There's something very moving about all these people and things and animals drifting through the world, trying to find reasons to be.

Hugo Reading Progress