Star Trek: The Destiny Era: The Missing

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Missing
by Una McCormack

late November 2385

Published: 2015
Acquired: February 2021
Read: June 2023

Well, look! Following on from Lust's Latinum Lost, our first DS9-branded book in five years, we now get our first actual DS9-branded novel, shelved right next to The Never-Ending Sacrifice.

But as a Deep Space Nine novel, it might seem a bit odd. Its main characters are Beverly Crusher and Katherine Pulaski, both main characters on The Next Generation. Beyond that, there's a lot of Ro Laren, who appeared in TNG on screen, though she became a DS9 prose character way back in 2001's Avatar, Book One. Plus, it follows up some on the events of Typhon Pact: Brinkmanship, a TNG novel in all but name, and it features chapter openers extracted from Captain Picard's logs!

Yet, I said "it might" because until it was pointed out by a poster on the TrekBBS, I didn't even really notice! It felt like a DS9 novel right from the off. I think this is down to a few reasons. One is that Pulaski, prickly and full of personality, but fundamentally decent, fits right in with the DS9 cast. I really enjoyed the way McCormack wrote Pulaski, which felt a bit redemptive, in that I think it's what TNG might have been going for in season two, but didn't quite accomplish most of the time. I liked her developing friendship with Crusher, and McCormack does a good job of writing her as someone whose personality traits are sometimes weaknesses, but which she knows how to leverage as strengths. I never thought I'd say this, but more Pulaski please.

Another plus is the return of Odo to the fold. I guess he was up to something in The Fall that I didn't remember, but here he comes to DS9 to intervene on behalf of an old Cardassian colleague and ends up drawn into the events of the novel. McCormack excels with Odo just as she does so many other DS9 characters, capturing his dialogue—and his occasional lack of it. The scenes between him and the Tzenkethi asylee Cory were a particular highlight, both when he runs into her in the station temple and when he seeks her ought in the station security cells. Plus there's some great stuff with Quark and Odo. (And just Quark in general; he's not a big part of this book, but all his scenes work well.)

But most of all this works as a Deep Space Nine book because it feels like a Deep Space Nine book. It's about the kind of things Deep Space Nine was about: the legacies of colonialism, empire, and war, the tension between idealism and realpolitik in espionage, and the making of families by people who have none. There's four plotlines here: a group of travellers called the People of the Open Sky come to DS9 and there's something a little suspicious about them, the civilian science vessel Athene Donald launches with a crew including Typhon Pact members and immediately runs into some belligerent aliens, the Tzenkethi expert from Starfleet Intelligence, Peter Alden, comes to DS9 with asylee Cory and she runs away, and Ro and Odo try to track down some Cardassian prisoners who never returned home after the Dominion War. All four plots intersect with those three themes.

Colonialism, empire, and war always run through DS9, of course; here we see them in the People fleeing them, but unable to ever fully leave them behind; Ro must deal with some harsh crimes perpetrated against the people who once did much the same to her people. That tension between idealism and realpolitik is a key one, and the novel keeps it complicated. Should Castellan Garak do what is political or what is right? Is Peter Alden too suspicious for his own good? Is he exploiting Cory? It would be easy to sneer at Peter (some in the original review thread for this book seemed to find him a caricature), but though Pulaski sneers at him, I don't think the novel does; sometimes he's wrong... but he's also right a couple times, and without his know-how Pulaski would have never saved the day... and in the end, it turns out she's been the one who's too pessimistic.

And then we come to family. The "missing" of the title are the children, family, and friends we've lost. Maybe we left them because we had to walk away, maybe they left us. Maybe we were left by them. The People leave their original society, Odo is left by his people, the Cardassians leave prisoners with the Romulans, Cory leaves Ab-Tzenketh, Pulaski and the Athene Donald leave the Federation, Ro left her people way back when. Even Crusher leaves hers. They are all missing. But what goes missing can be found: the People find a new home and a new family, Odo made his own family on DS9, the Cardassians made a new home and so even do Cory and Peter, Ro made a new family in Starfleet even if it took a long time. And at the end Crusher goes back to her family: missing and found.

That's not all; the book plunges into questions of exploration and first contact in ways that feel very Star Trek but also put some pressure on it—surely the most Deep Space Nine of moves. You can see the influence of Ursula K. Le Guin here; her League of All Worlds, later the Ekumen, comes across as influenced by Star Trek's Federation in some ways, and here the influence comes back, some of the questions Le Guin posed being returned to their point of origin. Crusher even cites Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," and I found this a much more interesting engagement with its ideas than the somewhat ham-handed take on them in Strange New Worlds.

All of this is wrapped up, of course, in McCormack's deft characterization and strong narrative voice. I often feel that Star Trek novels are written by people who want the words to be as unobtrusive as possible, as though the words get in the way of the story. But the words are the story, and McCormack's playful narrative voice is fun to hang out with. It's not perfect—one occasionally feels something important to the plot has been elided or rushed (is there no Defiant to help the Athene Donald?)—but what is important to the book is always there in full so it's hard to be annoyed with it since you're always being entertained by it.

I keep thinking about a line from the very first chapter, what Picard thinks is the ultimate challenge: "the challenge that one sets oneself: to be pitted against the unknown and to find within oneself the capacity to respond not with fear but with curiosity, empathy, and humility." It's a good summation of what Star Trek teaches us we can do, and what this novel reminds us that we must find in ourselves to do again each day.

image courtesy ScreenRant

Continuity Notes:

• Doctor Crusher is taking a leave from the Enterprise to replace Bashir as CMO of Deep Space 9 following the events of The Fall. This was a thing I totally did not remember happening. To be honest, I remembered hardly anything about the status quo of DS9 following The Fall, and had to be reminded and/or look a lot of stuff up.
• I read this after Picard: Second Self but of course it was published first; both books focus on the fallout of the Romulan/Cardassian front during the Dominion War, describing it as one of the most brutal. I don't think this derives from anything on screen, so McCormack is carrying over one of her own ideas from the Destiny continuity into the new one.
  
• One would think if there was an ongoing galactic terrorism crisis targeting space stations where the perpetrators seemingly had the ability to just appear anywhere it would come up in this book set on a space station where the villains have the ability to just appear anywhere. One would think.

Other Notes:

• I felt like there was a bit of meta shade directed at earlier books when Pulaski observed it didn't make sense for someone in a marriage to work through a problem by temporarily splitting up.
  
• O'Brien appears very suddenly and very late, almost like two-thirds of the way through the book someone reminded the writer he was back on the station so she started using him as a character from that point on.
• Starfleet's worst chief of security, Jefferson Blackmer, appears in this book. Not even McCormack can totally salvage a character whose entire personality is "likes space stations," but he is more interesting here than in any of his David R. George III–penned appearances. He offers his resignation to Ro, but alas, she does not take it.
• Oh! Garak is in this. He's well written, of course, but my favorite part was how Odo responds to Garak's new position of authority.
  
• McCormack's inspiration was a tweet from Dan Tostevin, my former editor at Unreality SF. He showed me this tweet back when the novel came out, but I think his twitter has vanished now.
  
• I want to know what "excellent speculative novel" about a first contact Picard mentions reading. It sounds Le Guinnish but doesn't map onto anything I can think of from Le Guin.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: The Next Generation: Takedown by John Jackson Miller

Hugos 2023: The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal

The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal

This is a science fiction murder mystery, set in the 2070s aboard a Luna-Mars cruise; it's a bit of a Thin Man take, I guess, except I've never seen any of those films. (My knowledge of The Thin Man entirely derives from knowing that DC's Elongated Man is also a bit of a Thin Man take.) That is to say, the protagonist is married to a retired detective who is framed for murder, so she must investigate the crime to exonerate him.

Published: 2022
Acquired: July 2023
Read: August 2023

It has some interesting stuff going for it: reasonably consistent worldbuilding (which is important for a murder mystery), cocktail recipes as chapter epigraphs (some of which I would like to try), some fun stuff with a lawyer on an ever-increasing communications delay, accurate-feeling depictions of disability and service animals, but also good extrapolation of how they might work in the future.

I'm not a terribly prolific reader of mysteries, but I have read my fair share (mostly Sue Grafton and Elizabeth George), and I did not think this was a very good example of the genre. It takes a while for it to get started: the murder happens pretty early on, but it's over eighty pages in before the protagonist actually starts asking questions. There are a lot of characters who are technically suspects, but none of them really feel like suspects; you as a reader are never like, "oh i bet that guy did it" because you are not really given enough to grab on to with all the many characters to be suspicious of them. Or even to be not suspicious of them, which is itself suspicious in a murder mystery. There are a few too many coincidences: three owners of major technology companies just happen to be on this cruise. One character has a completely coincidental link to the backstory of the protagonist and another completely coincidental link to the backstory of her husband. The solution depends on a piece of information not revealed to the reader until the end... but it felt like something that could have very easily but subtly been revealed much earlier to good effect.

I also struggled with the protagonist and her husband. She was basically fine, but I felt like Kowal is capable of better character work than we ultimately got with her. There are a lot of good ingredients to her—genius inventor, wealthy heiress, PTSD sufferer—but I didn't think they came together in a meaningful way. As for him, I struggled to understand his reasons for not wanting to get involved. I mean, sure, he's retired... but if you're the murder suspect and shipboard security clearly incompetent and the murderer is still on the loose, maybe your retirement rationale of "i got too famous to be effective" isn't very relevant any more!

(Despite the repeated assertions of someone I talked to on LibraryThing, this is clearly not set in Kowal's "Lady Astronaut" universe, but our own future.)

Twenty-First Century Science Fiction

Twenty-First Century Science Fiction
edited by David G. Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden

This is an anthology of post-2000 sf written by authors who "came to prominence" after 2000. That is to say, they may have published something prior to 2000, but they didn't break through into wider consciousness until after; see for example Charles Stross, whose first publication is all the way back in 1985, but achieved wider acclaim with his 2001 novel The Atrocity Archive. I got the book as a parting gift from my boss back when it came out in 2013, but as is usual for me, did not get around to reading it for another decade. In a way, this was helpful for evaluating the book's "argument."

Collection published: 2013
Contents originally published: 2003-11
Acquired: December 2013
Read: April–June 2023

It's been my thesis that large anthologies (and this one clocks in at 572 pages, with over thirty stories) are arguments. In this case, the argument seems to be: "These writers are the future of science fiction." In that case, reading it ten years late lets me estimate how right the editors got it. Did these talents pan out?

Overall, I have to say yes, but sort of with reservations. There's no denying that, say, Mary Robinette Kowal has gone on to be a juggernaut of twenty-first century science fiction. But enjoy as I might her "Lady Astronaut" books, the story included here ("Evil Robot Monkey") didn't grab me—this isn't the reason. (Though given the story was a Hugo finalist, it must have grabbed other people.) Similarly, some of the stories feel like stretches, in that they're sf tales from writers much better known for publishing fantasy or even horror, like Jo Walton's "Escape to Other Worlds with Science Fiction" or Daryl Gregory's "Second Person, Present Tense"; these were two stories I enjoyed a lot, actually, but I wouldn't put either Walton or Gregory in the pantheon of great twenty-first century sf writers, based on what I've read of them at least.

And of course, there are a couple stories I found outright bad... but they're by writers whose work in general I struggled to enjoy yet I cannot deny that those writers are generally popular. I speak here of John Scalzi's "The Tale of the Wicked," which requires all of its main characters to be idiots, and Catherynne M. Valente's "How to Become a Mars Overlord" which at eight pages still had me skimming to get to the end. So I guess the anthology is right to include them: both works read as fairly typical for their writers even if I did not like them. They are a key part of twenty-first century sf. I just wish they weren't.

But of course there are areas where the editors totally get it right. I always like a bit of Vandana Singh, and her story "Infinities" (one of only three rereads for me in the book) is a typically excellent piece of work. I don't think Rachel Swirsky has ever published a novel, but her story "Eros, Philia, Agape" is astounding, a masterful tale of what might it mean for an android to love, and she's an acclaimed writer of short science fiction and fantasy, with two Nebula wins and a number of Hugo and Nebula finalists. Madeleine Ashby is someone I haven't read much of, but I really enjoyed her story "The Education of Junior Number 12" here (another story of androids in love, actually, but very different from the Swirsky) and everything else I have read by her I have enjoyed; she's an incisive writer on the cutting edge of current technology, and now I want to seek our her related novel, vN. Ken Liu is an acclaimed writer of short sf, and though I've personally found his stuff hit or miss, "The Algorithm of Love" is probably the best thing I've read by him, a dark meditation on the implications AI might have for human consciousness.

"A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel" is a pretty typical piece by Yoon Ha Lee: told in the form of a series of encyclopedia entries, so purely exposition, it nonetheless manages to say interesting things about how societies interact, especially with a really strong last line, and it's no wonder he went on to do acclaimed work like Machineries of Empire. Peter Watts is a highly acclaimed writer of hard sf about consciousness, and his story "The Island" here is great on many levels, examining how people think, how machines think, and how something we don't even understand thinks, and how different that might or might not be; dark but highly effective. There's a Cory Doctorow story here, too: "Chicken Little," about a lot of stuff, including immortality, marketing, and rational calculations of risk. I don't think I've ever enjoyed a Doctorow story before, but I thought this was great. So you have a lot of great stuff here by acclaimed writers.

Beyond that, though, you have great stuff from writers I actually had never heard of... but if Hartwell and Nielsen Hayden are making an argument, it's that I should have heard of them, and so I'm prepared to accept that it's not the anthology that's at fault but the universe—or, perhaps, me. I'd never heard of David Moles, but I loved his story "Finisterra" about a gas giant with an Earth-like atmosphere where people build communities on the backs of giant floating life-forms. Similarly, I didn't know Karl Schroeder but found his "To Hie from Far Cilenia" very intriguing, a story about digital communities overlapping with the physical world that we might not even notice unless we learn how to see differently. "The Prophet of Flores" by Ted Kosmatka was fascinating, set in a world where the Earth really was created in 4,000 B.C. but otherwise science is the same, and exploring what implications the discovery of the so-called hobbits of Flores would have. It was expanded into a novel, which I'll have to seek out. These people ought to be the face of twenty-first century sf if they're not.

It's not all great, of course; I've mentioned a couple I didn't like already, and there were some more that I bounced off of, including Stross's "Rogue Farm" (too clever for me, maybe), Marissa Lingen's "The Calculus Plague" (some improbably bad research ethics; where's the IRB?), Paul Cornell's "One of Our Bastards Is Missing" (I love Cornell but have never gotten much out of his Hamilton shorts), Oliver Morton's "The Albian Message" (less a story, more a thought experiment), and Alaya Dawn Johnson's "Third Day Lights" (I just could not be bothered to work out what was actually happening). But most of what was left was usually good, if not great, or among the best short stories I've read in the past year.

One story is a bit tragic: Kage Baker's "Plotters and Shooters" was good fun, a take on Ender's Game where the protagonists are all thirty-year-olds who are stuck in their mothers' basements. But Kage Baker can't be the future of sf, because she unfortunately died at the age of 57 in 2010. It reminded me I really must get around to finishing her Company series, though.

There's a lot of great stuff here; I think this probably has one of the best hit rates for an anthology I've read outside of something like The Science Fiction Hall of Fame volumes. Perhaps the real argument here is that "Twenty-first century science fiction is in rude health." If that's the case, then the editors have assembled evidence that demonstrates their conclusions thirty times over.

Recipe: Sweet Potato Pozole

So the confession to make here is that I've never had authentic pozole! I adapted this recipe from one in a Moosewood vegetarian cookbook, but their recipe uses squash, and I'm not a big squash guy; over the years, I've made other refinements. My wife once brought leftovers into work, and her actual Mexican coworkers made fun of her for it, and gave her a recipe for the authentic stuff... but I lost it. I keep meaning to get some pozole at a Mexican restaurant, but we haven't gotten around to it yet.

But regardless of its authenticity, I really like this and that's what matters; like many soups, it's even better after it sits in the fridge overnight and you reheat the leftovers. (I need to come back and take a picture of this dish, otherwise it's not an authentic food blog post.)

Ingredients:

• vegetable oil
• 1 chopped onion
• 2 garlic cloves, pressed
• salt
• 28-oz. can chopped tomatoes, with juice
• 2 sweet potatoes, peeled and cubed
  
• can of beer
• three bell peppers (one red, one orange, one yellow), chopped
  
• 2 15-oz. cans hominy, drained
• 2 tsp. lime juice
• tiny dash red pepper flakes
  
• 1 tbsp. oregano
• shredded Mexican cheese, avocado cubes, and/or crushed tortilla chips for garnish

Directions:

1. Warm oil in a soup pot. Add onion and sauté on medium-high heat for 5-7 minutes, until golden.
2. Stir in garlic and ⅛ tsp. salt and sauté for 2 more minutes.
3. Add tomatoes, sweet potatoes, and beer and simmer for about 10 minutes.
4. Add bell peppers, cover, and cook for 10-15 minutes, until sweet potatoes are tender.
5. Stir in hominy, lime juice, red pepper flakes, ¼ tsp. salt, and oregano. Simmer for 5 minutes.
6. Serve with your favorite garnishes.

Most recently I used a lager for the beer (specifically Landshark), and I think that came out really good; one time I used a beer I thought did not work at all but I don't remember what that was, sorry. The original recipe calls for 2-3 tbsp. chiles in adobo sauce, but there's no way my wife or children would go for that, so I dialed it back to just the red pepper flakes.

I think it pairs well with cornbread. My favorite garnishes are the cheese and chips, but I'm sure you can think of other good stuff too!

Bernice Summerfield: True Stories edited by Xanna Eve Chown

Bernice Summerfield: True Stories
edited by Xanna Eve Chown

This Bernice Summerfield anthology is set during the run of the Doctor Who: The New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield audio box sets from Big Finish, specifically between volumes three and four, when Benny is stranded in the "unbound" universe introduced in 2003's Sympathy for the Devil, where David Warner is the Doctor, the Time Lords all perished in a devastating war, and the end of the universe is imminent. Though of course the Doctor and the Time Lords can't be mentioned directly, because this anthology lacks the "Doctor Who" branding.

Originally published: 2017
Acquired: April 2021
Read: June 2023

It's basically fine. It feels to me like this set-up ought to have been a rich one for Benny stories—what is the point of an archaeologist when history itself is coming to an end?—but what we get here is a pretty generic set of Benny stories, the fairly typical mad escapades. The set-up here is only loosely depicted, and there's not much done with Benny as a person, even by the usually dependable Kate Orman ("Hue and Cry," cowritten with Q(!)) and Jonathan Blum ("Never the Way," cowritten with Rupert Booth). Both of these stories felt like they could have used another draft to make them pop more, though I did like Benny's sense of resigned responsibility upon realizing that she's trapped in predestination paradox for the umpteenth time. But how does she feel about the situation in this universe? Why is she going on random adventures when reality is coming to an end? I feel like something more akin to the thematically linked anthologies of the Collection era (e.g., A Life Worth Living, Collected Works) could have worked a charm here, but alas, this is all pretty frothy stuff instead. I think Victoria C.W. Simpson's "Futureproof" is the one story trying to engage with the series premise meaningfully, but it didn't really go anywhere, unfortunately.

That said, my favorite of the mere six stories was one of the frothiest ones: Tim Gambrell's "Stockholm from Home," where Benny is inadvertently enrolled into an old-person's home... from which there is no escape! And at the same time, the aliens are invading and Benny is getting spam e-mail from a would-be insectoid lover. Bonkers but fairly entertaining.

I read a post–New Doctor Who Adventures novel every three months. Next up in sequence: Bernice Summerfield: In Time

Hugos 2023: Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow by Tom King and Bilquis Evely

Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow

Collection published: 2022
Contents originally published: 2021-22
Acquired: July 2023
Read: August 2023

Writer: Tom King

Artist: Bilquis Evely

Colorist: Matheus Lopez

Letterer: Clayton Cowles

This is Tom King's third nomination for the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story or Comic, this time with artist Bilquis Evely for a Supergirl story. While the previous Tom King comics I've read have all been about taking apart heroes, breaking them down in the face of the violence at the core of the medium, this one takes a different approach to Supergirl, showing what makes her keep going (even if admitting to a bit of tragedy and darkness).

The basic premise is that on Kara's twenty-first birthday, she travels to an alien planet with a red sun in order to get drunk and feel it without her powers; she happens to get caught up in the quest of a girl named Ruthye to hunt down the man who killed her father—and then that killer makes off with Kara's ship into space. So Supergirl and Ruthye go on a quest across galaxies to find that man and bring him to justice. The story is narrated by Ruthye, and we entirely see Supergirl through her eyes, always at a remove. The narration is dense, but it really works, and what the narration doesn't give us, Evely's beautiful art does, highlighting the strength and flaws of this powerful woman.

The story shows what make Supergirl Supergirl: not the powers (though they certainly help), but how she chooses to use them—which goes back, as one flashback chapter points out, to before she had the powers. I though that issue (#6: "Home, Family, and Revenge") was the single best Supergirl origin I have read, really tapping into the tragedy in a way that other origins (such as Jeph Loeb and Michael Turner's shit) have neglected, and it's beautifully paired with Supergirl riding Comet the Super-Horse in a desperate race. King embraces the tragedy of Kara Zor-El, but he also doesn't shy away from the ridiculousness of the history of the character.

Overall, I really liked it. Surely the best of Big Two superhero comics, and I was glad to have an excuse to pick it up and read it. It's my first Best Graphic Story finalist, but it feels like the one to beat.

(I will say, though, that content appropriateness choices at DC continue to baffle me, just like with Strange Adventures. Genocide and mass graves? A-okay! Someone saying "fuck"? Better cover that #%$&@ up with grawlixes! They throw me out every time. Either actually swear or don't.)

These Heroic, Happy Dead by Luke Mogelson

These Heroic, Happy Dead: Stories by Luke Mogelson

This is the last of the books I got from LibraryThing's EarlyReviewer program before I fell horribly behind and started being more selective about what I requested to keep my workload manageable. It's a collection of war-themed short fiction from 2016. Hardly "early," but finally the cloud of guilt will no longer hang over me when I request new books!

Collection published: 2016
Contents originally published: 2010-16
Acquired: January 2016
Read: June 2023

I don't have much to say about this book, to be honest. Mogelson doesn't seem to have actually attended an MFA program, but he has the kind of spare, observational, undistinctive style I associate with MFA programs. The stories are all war stories, but they focus on the people affected by war, not the fighting: damaged vets, family of veterans, people in combat. Too many are about men who become abusive toward their family. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but in Mogelson's hands these don't really rise above the level of cliché; they don't have much interesting to say about these kind of men. The mean thing to say would be that Luke Mogelson is no Tim O'Brien.

Still, there are a couple stories that stick in the mind a couple months later. I liked "New Guidance," about a translator assigned to a military unit whose always at a distance from everyone else, and "Kids," about a military base's strange relationship with local kids who might be working with terrorists. The best was "Visitors," about a woman whose veteran husband is in prison for killing a man, and who must navigate the weird terrain of her new life.

The back cover trumpets that characters recur between stories at different stages of their lives; I have seen this done well elsewhere, but I assume the back cover flags it up because the links are so slight, and add so little, that you wouldn't notice unless someone told you. There are probably people who will really like this book, but I just was not among them.

Reshelving and Reboxing My Comics

My wife has been trying to get craft room under control; since we moved here six years ago, it has kind of become a dumping ground for unplaceable objects. Recently, she realized one box was in fact full of my stuff, and passed it on to me. Going through, it seemed to be made up of odds and ends that were probably thrown together at the last minute when we were moving. There were papers from my grad school creative writing group, extra cords and webcams, a small shelving unit for books, bumper stickers a friend mailed me from South Carolina, CD copies of the amateur audio dramas I made in high school and college.

Some of it was clearly not worth saving, and at the time I had been in too much of a hurry to make that call, so I tossed it. What I wanted to save, though, was mostly of sentimental value; it didn't have any place to go but back into a closet. My office closet, however, was a mess. Boxes of junk piled on the floor, two nonfunctional VCRs, wrapping paper and gift bags, random boxes of stuff poorly balanced on other stuff. There was no room to put another box in there.

What I have long intended to do is put some HDX wire shelves in there, the ones you can get at Home Depot; a couple years ago I put those in the boys' closet, and they're easy to set up and of flexible heights. The problem with that, though, is that one corner of my closet is entirely taken up by comic longboxes. The closet is not deep enough for them to face out, so they were put in sideways, in two stacks of four. This had been pretty annoying as my comic collection has grown, because if I want to add/remove a comic from a box on the back in the bottom, I have to move seven boxes out of the way to do it!

So I decided to replace all my longboxes with, well shortboxes. These would work with the depth of my closet, and could fit with those HDX shelves. A few days later, a set of boxes came from BCW and I began transferring my comics over.

I have a comic collection that is not small, but always feels small compared to what I know some collectors possess; not counting collected editions, which I shelve like books, I currently have 1,884 comics, which range alphabetically from ABC A-Z: Top Ten & Teams #1 to Young Romance: The New 52 Valentine's Day Special #1, and in publication sequence from Classics Illustrated #124 (Jan. 1955) to Fallen Friend #1 (Sept. 2023). I like them organized alphabetically (of course).

My comics are very oddly distributed across the alphabet:

My complete runs of All-Star Squadron and Alpha Flight (vol. 1), as well as sizeable collections of Action Comics Weekly and Adventures of Superman (vol. 1) lead to a hefty number of A comics; I also have a complete run of Green Arrow (vol. 2) and of course a number of Star Trek and Transformers comics. On the other hand, am I the only comics fan to have no comics beginning with X?

In longboxes, this meant two whole boxes for A and G getting its own box. In the smaller shortboxes, arranging things got trickier, given my inclication to not split letters up across boxes unless absolutely necessary, and never to split series across boxes at all. (Officially, a BCW shortbox holds 150-75 issues.)

I ended up solving the problem by pulling Alpha Flight, Green Arrow, and Star Trek into their own boxes, and then doing the rest alphabetically. I plotted things out with no letters spanning multiple boxes, but when transferring to the new boxes, found that I had to break D across two boxes. (D could fit in one box itself, but that would leave my whopping 11 E/F comics in their own box; once those are in the D box, not all the Ds fit anymore, so I had to move some into a box with C.) 

I then moved the boxes onto my newly assembled shelves, back into the closet. All in all, what had once taken up eight longboxes now fits fifteen shortboxes:

It's hard to get a good picture of, because they are tucked in and the door gets in the way, but I think they look pretty good. (To access anything in the right two columns, you need to move a box on the left out of the way, but that's still much more accessible than they were.) I have very limited room for expansion, however! Not sure where I will put my seventeenth shortbox.

My old boxes were just labeled with giant marker letters, but I decided to make somewhat nicer labels this time, which you can see better in these pictures:

On the label this time, I indicated any title that I had more than twelve issues of, the first title in each box, the last title if the same letter appeared in the next box, and the first title following any series moved out of sequence (e.g., Amazing Adventures is the first title alphabetically after Alpha Flight, which belongs in the middle of the second A box). For "titles" I went by what you might call the "least common denominator" going by how the title begins; "Batman" covers Batman, Batman '66 Meets the Legion of Super-Heroes, Batman 80-Page Giant, The Batman Chronicles, Batman: Batgirl, and so on, whereas Magnificent Ms. Marvel is listed separately from Ms. Marvel because they begin with different words. (I know you don't care, but my wife certainly doesn't, and I have to explain it to someone.)

This done, it was easy to assemble a second shelf on the left side of the closet and consolidate or dump the rest of the materials in my closet. I now actually have a whole empty bin, whereas before I would have claimed the closet was crammed to bursting.

The next project: organizing all the junk that my office floor has somehow become a repository for...

(Also if you live in the Tampa area and want some gently used longboxes, I have ten of them.)

Return to Pern: Dragonseye

Dragonseye by Anne McCaffrey

This Pern prequel follows up on Dragonsdawn and The Chronicles of Pern, moving us to the tail end of the First Interval, just before the first return of the Thread in the Second Pass. Though it shares no characters in common with those books, it works to show the transition from Pernese society at the time of the First Pass to what we're used to from later books.

Published: 1997
Acquired: April 2023
Read: May 2023

I found this element a bit hit or miss. One thing it wants to set up is the transition to the Crafthall/Harper system. On the one hand, having all the computers finally go down, meaning educators decide to transition to easily reproduced songs, discarding most pre-Landing history, makes sense. (It is pretty jarring to see the word "PCs" used in a Pern book, though!) On the other hand, there's a single College in this book. How does this become the various Crafthalls of later stories? Well, one character is just like, "What if we were a bunch of separate Crafthalls operating on an apprenctice/journeyman system?" As sort of frustrated me in Chronicles, things don't slowly evolve to be like they are later on; instead some character just decides it will be that way. Similarly, in the two hundred years since the last Fall, the feudal system we know from the later novels has totally implanted itself... but why? Why did everyone decide this was best to the point of writing it up in an official Charter? That said, I did appreciate the explanation as to why fire lizards, so common in the time of Dragonsdawn, were all but mythical by the time of Dragonsong.

Overall, I think the idea of this book was much better than the actual book. The conflict ought to be, I think anyway, that this is the first return the Thread has made to Pern; there haven't been thousands of years of Passes and Intervals for Pernese society to organize itself around. Yes, they know from the predictions made in Dragonsdawn that the Thread will return... but the scientific predictions of experts often don't receive wide acceptance in society, as we know fairly well by this point in the twenty-first century. So some won't believe the Thread is really coming back; why do all the hard work of preparing for it? How do you convince everyone else it is coming back?

The problem is that only one Lord Holder doesn't believe it's coming back, and he is an awful awful person. He's a gambler, he's stingy, he doesn't pay his debts, he charges high taxes, he tacitly condones rape, and he tortures his citizens. So obviously he's a bad person, and obviously the other characters are going to take care of him. I think it would have been much more interesting for a character much more reasonable to doubt the coming of Thread, and for removing him to be a politically more difficult undertaking. It seems to me that the tension of this book ought to be if Pern will be ready for the Second Pass... but there's never any tension, because barring one guy, everyone is ready from the novel's very beginning.

Like all McCaffrey novels, it reads fairly easily (I allotted five days to read it and ended up zipping through it in three) and it has its moments, but it goes on a bit, and it felt to me like she ran out of plot about a hundred pages from the end because suddenly the book shifts to focus on two characters we barely saw in the rest of the book. As is too often the case in her later books, it loses the "hardscrabble" feeling that made the early Pern books. The return of the Thread is a moment of triumph! But surely it ought to be a moment of grim resignation, surely everyone ought to have been hoping the predictions were wrong, because the return of the Thread means that Pern is doomed to this terrible cycle for all time.

This is the seventh installment in a series of posts about the Pern novels. The next covers All the Weyrs of Pern. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Introduction
2. Dragonsong / Dragonsinger
3. Dragondrums
4. The Masterharper of Pern
5. Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern / Nerilka's Story 
6. Dragonsdawn / The Chronicles of Pern
   

Hugos 2023: Nettle and Bone by Ursula Vernon

Nettle and Bone by T. Kingfisher

Ursula Vernon (here writing as "T. Kingfisher") is one of my favorite discoveries from reading Hugo finalists; I have enjoyed her YA/middle-grade novels (such as the 2021 Lodestar Award winner A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking) and her adult short stories (such as the 2017 Best Novelette winner "The Tomato Thief"). I was curious, then, to read my first novel of hers with an adult audience.

Published: 2022
Acquired: July 2023
Read: August 2023

It actually turns out to have a lot in common with her YA work. Like Defensive Baking and Minor Mage, this is about someone who sets out to right an injustice—an injustice it should not be her responsibility to right, but which only she is willing to take on. Like in those books, the protagonist goes on a journey through a magical land, acquiring friends along the way, and developing an ethos of care in the face of brutality. Plus: lots of jokes! So basically, Vernon is doing in Nettle and Bone the thing she did in the other books of hers I liked, only this time with an adult protagonist, darker themes, and some more horrific magic.

The main character of Nettle and Bone is Princess Marra, whose older sister has been married off to a cruel prince in order to secure a vital alliance; Marra, shunted off to a convent, decides to see if she can help that sister, enlisting the assistance of a "bone-wife" (a woman who can talk to the dead), a disgraced knight, a kindly little old lady, and a dog made of bones. I wouldn't say it's as funny as a Terry Pratchett novel (surely praising with faint damnation!) but it is in the same sort of area as him, especially his work in the Tiffany Aching novels: how to care for others, how to be a better person, how to see the dark power that runs through the real world and overcome it. This is exactly the kind of fantasy fiction I enjoy, and a well-executed example of it. I loved this cover to cover, and if my first Hugo read, Legends & Lattes, quickly established itself as the lower bar,  Nettle and Bone is the high bar; if any of my remaining novels are better than it, they must be excellent books indeed.

Discworld: A Hat Full of Sky / Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett

A Hat Full of Sky
Wintersmith
by Terry Pratchett

Originally published: 2004
Read: December 2022

I sort of struggled with the first Tiffany Aching book, but I blame that on the fairies. I don't know what it is about fairies, but they kill my interest in anything stone dead. Therefore, I was open to enjoying the later ones more—and thankfully I did. I'm going to take two of them into one post here 1) in the interests of catching up, and 2) because I read them a bit ago and they've blurred together.

A Hat Full of Sky sees Tiffany begin her education as a witch, taken on as an apprentice and leaving home for the first time. It begins to delve into what it actually means to do witchcraft, as Tiffany comes into conflict with other apprentice witches who are more into it for the glamour than for helping other people. There's a lot of good comedy with the Feegles, the little blue men who in this one travel across country to warn Tiffany about impending danger by working as a group to operate a suit of clothes. Good jokes, good themes; I did feel (as I often do with Pratchett) that the end was a bit of a fizzle, in this case a bit drawn out, but otherwise this has a lot to recommend it.

Originally published: 2006
Read: February 2023

Wintersmith continues the themes of A Hat Full of Sky, as Tiffany has to teach one of her fellow apprentices about what it means to be a witch. Honestly, the ostensible central conflict of the novel—about the Wintersmith—comes across as almost ancillary, but I didn't mind, because there's a lot of good stuff along the way. The climax to this one, though, is again a bit disappointing. I mean, I love the Feegles journeying into the afterlife, but Tiffany gets sort of left out in favor of them and Roland. (Though I did like Roland too.) But those are quibbles: much as the City Watch books work their way through the details of the intersection of violence and politics and law, the Tiffany books spend their time working out something even more basic, what it means to be a person who helps. It's serious work... but that doesn't mean it can't also be funny.

The three middle Tiffany books (stay tuned for my comments on the fourth one soon) feel like a distinct unit, a little trilogy; I think what distinguishes them from The Wee Free Men is that Pratchett figured out what he wanted to say through Tiffany by the time he wrote Hat Full of Sky, about what it means to be a witch: to do the hard work that needs doing because it helps others, and for no other reason. Wee Free Men is more of a prologue and The Shepherd's Crown more of an epilogue to all this than part of it.

Reading Handy Mandy in Oz Aloud to My Son

Handy Mandy in Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson, illustrated by John R. Neill

My son has been hyped up for Handy Mandy for a long time, entirely on the basis of its protagonist: a girl with seven arms from a place where everyone has seven arms. Two are skin, one is wood, one is iron, one is leather, and two are rubber, and she uses different hands for different jobs around the house. I liked Mandy (who gets nicknamed "Handy Mandy" upon her arrival in Oz) a lot; she's the kind of somewhat grotesque main character that Baum often went in for (e.g., the Tin Woodman, the Woggle-Bug) but that Thompson has largely eschewed in her own Oz work; moreover, she is Thompson's only original female protagonist, since she usually used Dorothy (plus one outing for Trot and one for Betsy) or an original male character. Mandy is good fun: hardworking and determined, but with an impetuous streak that often gets her into trouble. Her co-protagonist is Nox the Royal Ox, who is essentially cut from the same mold as Kabumpo, but Thompson always does well by her animal characters, so I didn't mind.

Originally published: 1937
Acquired: June 2022
Read aloud: July–August 2023

So Mandy is fun and Nox is fun, but the actual events of the novel made it one of Thompson's more mediocre outings. I have seen Eric Shanower complain that everyone says they like Purple Prince of Oz but no one who says so can actually remember anything about it beyond the main characters, and Handy Mandy has a similar problem. On their quest to find King Kerry, the lost boy kind of the minor Munchkin kingdom of Keretaria, Mandy and Nox encounter nothing of real interest or difficulty, though there is some fun stuff, such as one of Nox's horns turning out to be a "horn of plenty" which can generate whatever kind of stuff you might want in great volume.

Kerry turns out to be in the Silver Mountain, where the Wizard Wutz is collecting magical objects from across Oz prior to a takeover bid. (If I can play the game of "what Baum novel did Thompson reread before writing this one?", it seems to be Lost Princess.) Mandy and Nox luckily have one of those tools, a silver hammer that summons an elf named Himself (who Thompson also calls a dwarf). However, in classic Thompson fashion, the wrapup of the plot depends a lot on coincidence, and the silver hammer is so powerful that the protagonists don't really do anything interesting other than use it repeatedly.

The eventual explanation for all the doings of the magic hammer don't really make any sense, I think. It belonged to Wunchie, a witch of the west who used it to control the rulers of minor Munchkin kingdoms (Thompson always confusing east and west in Oz) up until two years ago. How do Ozma and Glinda not notice things like this!? Moreover, Wunchie used the hammer to depose the king of Keretaria and install Wutz's agent on the throne... but Wutz installed an agent on the throne of Keretaria in order to search the country for the silver hammer! The ending has all the hallmarks of Thompson making something up on the spot that doesn't accord with the details seeded earlier in the novel; surely the silver hammer was meant to be from the Silver Mountain and surely the "W" on it was meant to be for "Wutz," not the introduced-and-disposed-of-off-screen-in-the-literal-last-chapter Wunchie.

Wutz has an army of secret agents across Oz stealing magical artifacts; in addition to the one in Keretaria, we hear that another stole the Great Book of Records from Glinda, and we also see in flashback how another stole the Magic Picture and a jug that used to be Ruggedo (the deposed Nome King) from Ozma's palace. The agents all have numbers, and while reading it dawn on me that the book came out in 1937... and the late 1930s were the heyday of espionage thrillers about sinister agents plotting against England, with films like by Hitchcock and his imitators The 39 Steps, I Was a Spy, The Man Who Knew Too Much, On Secret Service, Sabotage, The Secret Agent, and The W Plan. I never thought I would read an Oz take on Hitchcock, but I think this is one—surely there is a Baum Bugle article in this, but probably better off written by someone who knows more about 1930s spy thrillers than I do! It's a bit weird thinking of Oz books as refract popular films of the time... but I imagine this happens more often than modern readers realize; the pop culture of the past no longer reads as pop culture to use a century on. And Captain Salt was Thompson's take on Kipling, so why not do Hitchcock next?

My son seemed to enjoy it, though. Thompson does lots of fun stuff with Mandy's seven hands that appeals to the imagination of a five-year-old, and when we finished the book he had lots of follow-up questions about the plot. (Not all of which I could answer satisfactorily. What was up with that magic flower?) I think he was a bit nervous when Wutz and Ruggedo stupefied the inhabitants of Ozma's palace and stole the Magic Belt, but later he told me it had no "bad parts." Also Neill provides a number of excellent two-page spreads, which compensates a bit for the loss of the color plates. It looks as good as it could given the constraints he was under by this point.

It is in the public domain, so I wonder if there are any fan follow-ups that take this fun character and put her into a more interesting plot. I have my own ideas...

Next up in sequence: The Silver Princess in Oz

Return to Pern: Tales of the First Pass

Dragonsdawn
The Chronicles of Pern: First Fall
by Anne McCaffrey

After Moreta set a precedent, McCaffrey continued to write prequels to her original Pern novels, jumping even further back, to the original settlement of Pern, in a pair of books: Dragonsdawn, which depicts the coming of the first colonists and the coming of the first Threadfall, and The Chronicles of Pern, a collection of short fiction set before, during, and after the First Pass. Prequels are a tricky business: fans like to complain about them, but fans must also consume them because people keep making them. I think there's a balance you have to get right. At its best, a prequel can take tantalizing hints of backstory and make them in a compelling story in its own right; at its worst, prequels join unnecessary dots and rely too much on familiar images and ideas.

Published: 1988
Acquired: March 2008
Read: May 2023

These books are probably somewhere in between those two poles. Dragonsdawn thankfully skews toward the first. It doesn't totally line up with the hints we got in prologues to the earlier Pern novels, but it's an enjoyable story in its own right, so it doesn't matter. It's divided into three parts; the first is all about the colonization of Pern, giving us a cast of characters coming to this new world after a long journey, all eager to make a world of their own for various reasons. We get to see what the colony ought to have been like in great detail, and we know as readers what hints they cannot interpret correctly about the doom to come. The second section jumps ahead eight years, with the coming of the Thread, and the reactions of the colonists to this devastating threat. 

I read a comment on Reddit recently that I really liked and summed up my feelings about Pern very well: "There's a hardscrabble vibe to Ms. McCaffery's early books that disappeared by the later ones." The first couple sections of Dragonsdawn recapture this vibe really effectively; these people have to work for what they are doing, they are not comfortable.

It's got some great twists and turns in it, particularly what happens when one character steals a shuttle and tries to get away from Pern; I also appreciated the clarification on the Red Star. In the original books, it seems scientifically risible: how could a planet launch organisms at another? how could the Red Star follow Pern in its orbit for fifty years but not the other two hundred? Dragonsdawn makes it clear that in fact the Red Star picks up organic matter in the Oort cloud and drags it into the inner solar system, and it passes right back out, but it takes fifty years for what it's dragged to all be used up. (Though this explanation makes other aspects of Thread a bit of a nonsense: why doesn't Threadfall happen at night? how does it happen with a regularity so predictable you can know where every Threadfall will happen fifty years in advance?)

There's also a real disconcerting shift here, in that though you know intellectually from the earlier books that the Pernese are descended from Earth humans, it's a much different thing to see them in spaceships, talking about the Federated Sentient Planets (apparently used in McCaffrey's other sf) and its space wars, and referencing facts about Earth history, geography, and culture. It's just not right! And that's what makes it work as a prequel: it's familiar enough to line up with the Pern you know, but different enough to be interesting.

I will say, though, that once the dragons come along, it gets less interesting, because it becomes more obvious how things are going to play out. Will the new dragon species breathe fire? Well, yes. Will they figure out how to go between? Well, yes. The last section becomes a sort of boring inevitability.

Collection published: 1993
Contents originally published: 1991-93
Acquired: April 2023
Read: May 2023

This feeling continues into the weaker stories of The Chronicles of Pern. Will the first Hold be established? Well, uh, yes. Will there be more Weyrs? Of course. McCaffrey has a somewhat annoying tendency to not let things evolve from what we saw in Dragonsdawn to where we started in Dragonflight, but to depict it as happening in a single moment as a single decision. For example, in the story "The Second Weyr," we learn that one guy made the decision about how Weyrleaders and Weyrwomen would be picked, and his rule was followed for the next thousand years exactly as is without any changes. It doesn't feel historically real. Another story is mostly about how someone got across a river in order to set up how Ruatha Hold got its name: dead boring exposition of something I didn't care about. Another story tells the evacuation of the Southern Continent from Dragonsdawn in more detail, and falls victim to the "cozy" problem of later Pern novels; what ought to be a harrowing trip comes across more as a heartwarming story of an old guy rediscovering love. Plus despite being titled "The Dolphins' Bell," I felt like the dolphins were barely a factor!

"The Survey: P.E.R.N.ᶜ" isn't really a story but is kind of neat to read, about the explorers who first discovered and classified Pern. For me, though, the real standout of the whole book, and what made it worth it, was "Rescue Run," about a Fleet ship coming into the Pern system and checking for survivors. The final line of the story is a genuine killer. A great read, Anne McCaffrey at her tough best.

This is the sixth installment in a series of posts about the Pern novels. The next covers Dragonseye. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Introduction
2. Dragonsong / Dragonsinger
3. Dragondrums
4. The Masterharper of Pern
5. Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern / Nerilka's Story
   

Hugos 2023: Akata Woman by Nnedi Okorafor

Akata Woman by Nnedi Okorafor

Originally published: 2022
Read: July 2023

Akata Woman is the third book in Nnedi Okorafor's "Nsibidi Scripts" YA fantasy series, and the second to be a finalist for the Hugo-adjacent Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book (in fact, the second book won the first award). I thought the first book was just okay, but found the second much more enjoyable.

Unfortunately, I thought this was back to the level of the first one. The cast of characters, protagonist Sunny aside, seemed largely interchangeable to me, and the plot never really took off. Basically, Sunny and her friends go to a place, it gets described, then they go to a different place, repeat until suddenly the book comes to an end. An okay travelogue, but it did little for me.

The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens

The Old Curiosity Shop: A Tale by Charles Dickens

This past Christmas's Charles Dickens novel (which I am very belatedly writing up in May, and even more belatedly posting in August) was The Old Curiosity Shop, the novel that famously includes "the death of Little Nell." Even though I had not read it, it's responsible for the fact that I always call my friends' daughter Nell "Little Nell." Stories that Americans stormed the docks to obtain copies of the final installment (where she dies) when it arrived are untrue, as demonstrated by Carra Glatt in this truly excellent essay from Ninteenth-Century Studies (which is unfortunately behind a paywall).

Originally published: 1840-41
Acquired: January 2023
Read: February 2023

Having read the novel, I agree that it must be untrue, because by that point the novel has gotten so boring that the only reason I can imagine storming the docks is to throw all the copies of the final installment into the sea, to save one having to read it. Like most Dickens novels, it starts out well, with Nell, her grandfather, and her friend Kit all sharply drawn in the usual Dickensian fashion. Good pathos and good comedy and good mystery. Nell and her grandfather taking to the road in desperation is well done, and there's so tense stuff as they set forth; Kit's mother provides some good comedy.

But like so many Dickens novels, I am finding, it fizzles away its good start. Soon Nell and her grandfather fade out of the story, and we are reading page upon page about these incredibly boring people adjacent to her family and oh my god please make it stop.

I found it interesting how the first few chapters have a first-person narrator that just bows out of the story. The peril of serial publication! Dickens published this in his weekly periodical Master Humphrey's Clock, which prior to this was made up of short stories narrated by the eponymous Master Humphrey, but sales began to fall off and Dickens realized he needed to provide a novel for the audience he had built up with The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickleby.

I read a Charles Dickens novel every year. Next up in sequence: Martin Chuzzlewit

S. P. Maldonaldo, Artist of Oz

A couple weeks ago, I was doing a Google search for something relating to Captain Salt in Oz—Ozamaland, maybe?—and ending up finding a neat drawing of the book's principal characters on some guy's blog: Tandy, King Ato, and Captain Salt riding Nikobo the hippopotamus as she swam through a sea forest, Roger the Royal Read Bird flying overhead, along with a winged fish.

My then-four-year-old son was close at hand, and demanded I print the picture out so he could color it, which he did enthusiastically. (The past few months he has declared on many occasions himself to be an "artist.") After doing so, he asked if he could do another Oz coloring page, so I poked around the site a bit more. It belonged to a guy named Shawn P. Maldonaldo, who illustrated a number of modern small-press Oz books, and occasionally posted his work to a blog. Son One got very into it for a few days, and we went through a lot of them. A particular highlight was his set of Ozma paper dolls; Son One had never done a paper doll before and got a big kick out of them (and Son Two asked for his own set to color and cut out too).

I was a bit disappointed to see the site hadn't been updated since 2014; I went looking for the guy on facebook to see if he'd transitioned over there or something, but had little luck in tracking him down.

So, a week later I open the newest issue of The Baum Bugle and read an obituary for him; he died earlier this year. Rest in peace, Shawn Maldonaldo; you provided a few hours' good fun for my Oz-loving son (and me).

Son One's coloring of Polychrome

My own coloring of Jack Pumpkinhead

 

The Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold, Part 2: The Vor Game

The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold

In chronological order, The Vor Game is the fifth Vorkosigan novel—in publication order, it is the seventh! The way Bujold jumped around the timeline is often unreal; she wrote books set seventh and ninth before jumping back to this one. It's one of the many ways, however, that this series reminds me of a favorite series of mine, the Horatio Hornblower novels by C. S. Forester. Forester also jumped back and forth in his hero's life; I'll have to keep reading to find out if Bujold introduces as many continuity errors in the process as Forester did. In my hybrid order, however, The Vor Game is the second book.

Originally published: 1990
Acquired: January 2022
Read: November 2022

There are many ways this series is like Hornblower, and I'll talk about another one in my next post, about Shards of Honor: the other one I want to discuss today mostly focuses on the opening segment of this novel, which was originally published as a standalone novella, "The Weatherman." Following the events of the previous book, The Warrior's Apprentice, Miles Vorkosigan has graduated from the military academy and is sent off to his first posting... to monitor the weather at a forlorn ice-encrusted remote military base on his home planet. But, of course, he eventually ends up in the same kind of dilemma that Hornblower so often ended up in, one where the dictates of military service run up against his personal morality. Can he save the lives of innocent men without violating the chain of command? Like Hornblower, he distinguishes himself with clever, intellectual solutions to his problems. The way he thinks up to get out of this situation is brilliant. I love this kind of thing, a hero who is both principled and clever. That was the moment I texted my friend (who has been pushing the books on me for a decade): "This book is so totally my jam."

Then Miles is off on another adventure. This is also a very Hornblower move, the novel made up of multiple disparate stories, but the next adventure keeps twisting and turning. Soon Miles is hunting down the mercenary group he created in Warrior's Apprentice, and then he's uncovered a vast plot, and now he has a very important dignitary to protect, etc., etc. To be honest, it kind of threw me. I wanted more adventures of Miles in the service! How does he learn to fit himself into that hierarchy? It's a very Hornblower question...

...but you know, while it seems to me Bujold must have been inspired partially by Hornblower, this is not Hornblower. It has its own identity, and its own questions to ask. Once I adjusted to that, I came to enjoy the book much more; I think it's the kind of novel that even though it was good the first time, it will improve on a reread, once you can see how it all fits together. The question isn't how does Miles make himself fit, but it seems to be, where can Miles find that he can fit? At least, I think so! Bujold has wrong-footed me before, and I am sure she will do so again, but I look forward to finding out where Miles is when I next pick up his story, with Cetaganda. (But first, we jump backwards a bit...)

Next up in sequence: Shards of Honor

Reading Roundup Wrapup: July 2023

Pick of the month: Force and Motion by Jeffrey Lang. Bit of an odd choice, to be honest. Would I say that this Deep Space Nine novel was better than Gene Wolfe in some abstract philosophical sense? Probably not. But it was the book I read this month that I had the best time with. Just a solid wacky well-told Star Trek adventure. (That said, had I just read The Shadow of the Torturer, I probably would have liked it best, but The Claw of the Concilator pulled it down for me.)

All books read:

1. Chiller: A Scientific Suspense Novel by Gregory Benford
2. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Force and Motion by Jeffrey Lang
3. Legends & Lattes: A Novel of High Fantasy and Low Stakes by Travis Baldree
4. Star Trek: The Next Generation: Armageddon’s Arrow by Dayton Ward
5. Ogres by Adrian Tchaikovsky
6. Captain Salt in Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson, illustrated by John R. Neill
7. Shadow & Claw: the first half of The Book of the New Sun: The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator by Gene Wolfe
8. Even Though I Knew the End by C. L. Polk
9. Akata Woman by Nnedi Okorafor
10. Into the Riverlands by Nghi Vo
11. Still Just a Geek: An Annotated Memoir by Wil Wheaton
12. Star Trek: Titan: Sight Unseen by James Swallow

I started my Hugo reading with Legends & Lattes, and #5 and 8-11 were also Hugo finalists. Still, I found time to slip some other books in too.

All books acquired:

1. John Dough and the Cherub: A Whimsical Wonder-Story in which is Described the Marvelous Creation of John Dough, the Gingerbread Man; his meeting with the Incubator Baby called Chick the Cherub: their Adventures in the Isle of Phreex, the Land of Mifkets, Pirate Island and Hiland and Loland by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill
2. Paradox in Oz by Edward Einhorn, illustrated by Eric Shanower
3. The Living House of Oz by Edward Einhorn, illustrated by Eric Shanower
4. Star Trek: Prey, Book 3: The Hall of Heroes by John Jackson Miller
5. American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1953-1956: The Space Merchants / More Than Human / The Long Tomorrow / The Shrinking Man edited by Gary K. Wolfe
6. Birds of Prey: Huntress by Greg Rucka, Rick Burchett, et al.
7. Legends & Lattes: A Novel of High Fantasy and Low Stakes by Travis Baldree
8. Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow by Tom King and Bilquis Evely
9. Monstress, Volume Seven: Devourer by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda
10. Interfaces edited by Ursula K. Le Guin and Virginia Kidd
11. Nettle and Bone by T. Kingfisher
12. The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal
13. What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher
14. The Privilege of the Happy Ending: small/medium/large stories by Kij Johnson
15. The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

July is always a big month: #1-3 and 5-6 were birthday presents, while #7-9, 11-13, and 15 were all Hugo finalists. (I know there's the voter packet forthcoming, but some I like to buy myself in hard copy.) 

Currently reading:

• Black Panther Epic Collection: Panther’s Prey by Don McGregor, Sandy Plunkett, Gene Colan, Dwayne Turner, Denys Cowan, Don Hillsman II, et al.
• Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad by M. T. Anderson
  
• Sword & Citadel: the second half of The Book of the New Sun: The Sword of the Lictor and The Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe
• Bernice Summerfield: In Time edited by Xanna Eve Chown
• The Privilege of the Happy Ending: small/medium/large stories by Kij Johnson

Up next in my rotations:

1. Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett
2. Otherworld Barbara Vol. 2 by Moto Hagio
3. Adventures With the Wife in Space: Living with Doctor Who by Neil Perryman with Sue Perryman
4. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Long Mirage by David R. George III
   

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 666 (down 1)

Seven months with no increase!!