Star Trek: Masks by John Vornholt

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Masks
by John Vornholt

A grad school friend who had been a bit of a Next Generation fan in his youth passed on to me the four TNG books he owned; one of them was Masks, which I was happy to have an excuse to reread, since I remembered getting from the library a few times in my own youth and enjoying it. (Though I also remember seeing the episode "Masks" for the first time and wondering why they were so different!)

 

Published: 1989
Previously read: ??? (mid-1990s)
Acquired: October 2013
Reread: June 2023

The premise is that the Enterprise is reestablishing contact with an Earth colony settled by a mixture of back-to-nature types and theatre nerds; the constant danger of volcanic ash in the environment means that everyone wears full-face masks, and an elaborate feudal culture has built up around them. No one can be seen in public without a mask; different masks connote different roles. To wear the mask of a craftsman, for example, one must demonstrate an appropriate amount of skill or be subject to a challenge. The Enterprise is ferrying an ambassador to the planet, who bears the gorgeous Ambassador's Mask that he bought off the Ferengi, who are also interested in the planet.

Set during season two, it's a solid adventure of the exact kind you might want from a tie-in novel. Later in his Star Trek career, Vornholt would turn out some pretty mediocre stuff, but this is good: a nice grasp on the characters, particularly Picard, where Vornholt picks up on the nascent strain of romanticism that I think the tv writers wouldn't lean into much until later. Characters like Data and La Forge and Worf get some good scenes, too. The best part of the book is the culture of the planet, with its permutations and complications; the Enterprise's away teams must start at the bottom and work their way up.

I did find the middle a bit weak, as it felt like the two different Enterprise away teams were wandering around in a bit of an aimless muddle trying to find each other. I also felt that the character of the ambassador seems very important in the early part of the novel, but kind of fades away unceremoniously by the end. On the other hand, I kept thinking about how I would adapt the whole thing to be a Star Trek Adventures RPG module, which I think would work very well—which indicates to me that this book captures the Star Trek vibe exceedingly well no matter its faults.

Twenty Years of Reading Logs, Part 2: General Science Fiction & Fantasy

Here's the second in my series of posts looking at how my reading habits have changed over time. This one covers science fiction and fantasy that is neither tie-ins nor comic books. In the Excel sheet I'm basing these posts on, I break out authors; some authors of course write both sf&f and non-genre literature. For the purposes of these posts, I'm placing authors in the category where the majority of their work that I've read falls. For example, M. T. Anderson and H. G. Wells write sf&f and literature and even nonfiction, but most of their work that I've read is sf&f, so I'm including them in this post.

Note that I only break out an author when I purposefully read three books by that author and I intend to read more. That is to say, if I read four John Scalzi novels not because they were by Scalzi, but only because they were Hugo finalists, I don't see that as worth tracking. I also include relevant nonfiction and comics with an author's count; a book about H. G. Wells is included in my Wells count, so too would be a comic adaptation of The War of the Worlds. (As that also implies, derivative works are also lumped in with that author; a Gregory Benford Foundation novel would go with Asimov's total.)

	2003-07	2007-11	2011-15	2015-19	2019-23	TOTAL	PCT
L. F. Baum / Oz	0	7	1	13	41	62	2.1%
H. G. Wells	0	7	10	15	3	35	1.2%
U. K. Le Guin	7	0	8	5	4	24	0.8%
The Expanse	0	0	0	8	10	18	0.6%
L. Snicket / D. Handler	13	2	1	0	0	16	0.5%
T. Pratchett	0	0	0	2	12	14	0.5%
I. Asimov / Foundation	2	10	2	0	0	14	0.5%
M. T. Anderson	2	5	2	3	2	14	0.5%
J. R. R. Tolkien	0	1	10	0	1	12	0.4%
S. Lem	6	2	2	1	0	11	0.4%
Pern	0	1	0	0	10	11	0.4%
Lensmen	6	4	0	0	0	10	0.3%
O. Butler	5	0	0	2	3	10	0.3%
His Dark Materials	0	8	0	1	1	10	0.3%
T. Pierce	0	8	0	0	0	8	0.3%
D. Duane	8	0	0	0	0	8	0.3%
D. Lessing	1	6	0	0	0	7	0.2%
N. Okorafor	0	0	0	5	2	7	0.2%
D. Gerrold	5	1	0	0	0	6	0.2%
A. Leckie	0	0	0	4	2	6	0.2%
G. Griffith	0	2	4	0	0	6	0.2%
Hyperion Cantos	2	0	1	3	0	6	0.2%
P. K. Dick	1	1	0	0	4	6	0.2%
The Dark Is Rising	5	0	0	0	0	5	0.2%
Y. H. Lee	0	0	0	4	1	5	0.2%
N. Novik	0	0	0	1	4	5	0.2%
I. Calvino	1	3	1	0	0	5	0.2%
L. M. Bujold	0	1	0	1	3	5	0.2%
B. Chambers	0	0	0	3	1	4	0.1%
B. Sanderson	0	0	0	0	4	4	0.1%
M. Padmanabhan	0	1	1	1	1	4	0.1%
K. S. Robinson	3	0	0	1	0	4	0.1%
C. Miéville	0	0	2	2	0	4	0.1%
Harry Potter	3	0	0	0	0	3	0.1%
O. S. Card	2	0	0	0	1	3	0.1%
R. Shearman	0	1	2	0	0	3	0.1%
V. Singh	0	0	1	2	0	3	0.1%
S. Pinsker	0	0	0	1	2	3	0.1%
Other SF&F	14	70	62	76	95	317	10.8%
TOTAL	86	141	110	154	207	698	23.8%
PCT	15.6%	23.2%	16.3%	25.0%	42.8%	23.8%

2016 was the first year I read for the Hugo Awards, and you can see that that's clearly when sf&f becomes a bigger part of my reading diet. I was a bit surprised to see general sf&f also fares well in 2007-11, but now that I think about it, that makes sense—I bought a lot of stuff from used bookstores around the time I graduated college, and would have read much of it over the subsequent years. But these days it's over 40% of my reading, both Hugo books and books I've read because of them.

On the other hand, what's a bit surprising to me is to see how there are some authors I think of as favorites, and whom I am actively reading my way through... and yet I haven't read anything by them for some time! For example: Lem, Calvino, Shearman. I need to prioritize them more... but I suppose by the very nature of the idea, you can't prioritize everything!

I was not very surprised to see that Le Guin and Wells (other than Baum) topped my list. Thank grad school for Wells, and I've been fairly steady with my Le Guin.

Some other thoughts on specific authors:

• Lemony Snicket / Daniel Handler: In college, I read all the Series of Unfortunate Events books, which were big favorites in my family, but other than his (excellent) adult novel Adverbs, I haven't read anything by him since.
• M. T. Anderson is, a bit to my surprise, the only one of these authors that I read in all five four-year slices—the most consistently read. I have another five books by him on my "To be read" list, so there's a good chance this could continue to be the case.
• Stanislaw Lem: I didn't realize I hadn't read a book by him in so long—not since April 2016, and even that was just a tribute anthology with only a few stories actually by him. I have eight books by him on my "To be read" list.
• Lensmen: I have read all of this series and am unlikely to reread, to be honest, but I do have E. E. "Doc" Smith's four Skylark books, plus a concordance, on my list.
• Diane Duane: I really must finish the "Young Wizards" sequence someday, though I would probably need to reread all of the earlier books first.
• Doris Lessing is probably not best known as an sf author, but I read her five-book sf series Canopus in Argos: Archives after finishing college. I own her Children of Violence series but haven't gotten to it yet. (And I think my wife owns The Golden Notebook.)
• Philip K. Dick: The official number of six is slightly deceptive, as three of them were Library of America collections containing four or five novels—this could be sixteen if I counted those constituent novels separately, which would vault him into my top five!
• Italo Calvino is another one where I'm surprised how long it's been; I last read a book by him in August 2012! But I do have four on my list.
• Naomi Novik, Lois McMaster Bujold, and Brandon Sanderson are all authors whose series I plan on methodically working my way through series soon, so I anticipate seeing these numbers be a bit higher in another four years. Sanderson's Cosmere every nine months; I haven't firmed up my plans for Novik's Temeraire (three read, six to go) or Bujold's Vorkosigan (three read, fifteen to go) yet.

Overall, I'm pretty happy that I read more sf&f, and especially more contemporary sf&f, than I used to... but I wish I read some of my supposedly favorite authors more often! We'll see if that's rectified in the coming years as I continue to tackle my reading list.

Black Panther: Panther's Prey by Don McGregor, Sandy Plunkett, Gene Colan, Dwayne Turner, Denys Cowan, Don Hillsman II, et al.

Black Panther Epic Collection: Panther's Prey

Collection published: 2021
Contents originally published: 1989-94
Read: August 2023

Writers: Don McGregor with Sandy Plunkett, Richard Bensam, Walter Simonson, Roy Thomas, Don Hillsman II & Dave DeVries

Pencilers: Gene Colan & Dwayne Turner with Sandy Plunkett, Ron Lim, Denys Cowan, Dave Hoover & Don Hillsman II
Inkers: Tom Palmer & Dwayne Turner with Scott Hampton, Jim Sanders III, Walter Simonson, Charles Barnett III & Don Hillsman II
Colorists: Glynis Oliver, Mike Rockwitz, Steve Mattson & Brad Vancata with Gregory Wright, Sandy Plunkett, Jim Sanders III, Noelle Giddings, Frank Lopez & Marianne Lightle

Letterers: Joe Rosen, Tim Harkins & Michael Higgins with Jade Moede, Gaspar Saladino, Jack Morelli, Clem Robins, Todd Klein, Bill Oakley & Rick Parker

After Don McGregor's Black Panther run from Jungle Action was cancelled back in 1976, he actually got invited back two more times: he did a story called Panther's Quest published in Marvel Comics Presents in 1989 and a four-issue prestige miniseries called Panther's Prey in 1991. This "Epic Collection" collects both of them, along with five short Black Panther tales by other creators from the same era.

Panther's Quest sends the Black Panther into South Africa in order to find his mother, missing since childhood. Sure, we did apartheid in a thinly fictionalized version of South Africa in the immediate previous Black Panther storyline, but why not do it again in the real place? This story ran twenty-five biweekly installments of (usually) eight pages... and it is interminable. Like, eight pages will go by and all that's happened is Black Panther has punched a guy. One thing I liked about McGregor's Panther's Rage was how it really made you feel the difficulty of what the Black Panther did, but this goes too far with it, because everything is immensely difficult, everything is enormously slowed down, it never feels like we're getting anywhere, being crushed under the weight of McGregor's enormously wordy style. Being set in South Africa means we again lose the worldbuilding that made Panther's Rage so interesting, too. It has it moments, including some nice side characters in South Africa, but ultimately, a tedious slog with little to say.

Thinking, thinking, always thinking.
from Marvel Comics Presents vol. 1 #33 (script by Don McGregor, art by Gene Colan & Tom Palmer)

Panther's Prey almost has the opposite problem: this is made up of four forty-page installments and is all over the place. Wakanda is modernizing, connecting with the outside world more—this is nicely demonstrated by the appearance of a food court selling pizza. But with the benefits of connecting to the outside world also come the downsides, and someone is smuggling crack into Wakanda and vibranium out... using an army of cyborg pterodactyls, of course! The story follows this main storyline, but also T'Challa's mother acclimating to life in Wakanda, what Monica Lynne's been up to in the U.S. since we last saw her in Jungle Action (McGregor ignores her later appearances), the guy organizing the drug smuggling operation, and updates to various members of Black Panther's Wakandan supporting cast. There's a lot of nice moments here but overall not much actually seems to happen despite the fact the story runs over one hundred and fifty pages. Black Panther doesn't even meet the villain until about ten pages from the end, and beats him by luck in about six seconds.

And in the end, crack is still a problem in Wakanda! Way to cheer me up, McGregor.
from Black Panther: Panther's Prey #4 (script by Don McGregor, art by Dwayne Turner)

The other stories here are nice to have for completism's sake, but not very memorable.

I did appreciate the reappearance of Monica's family from Jungle Action when T'Challa asks for her hand in marriage.
from Black Panther: Panther's Prey #4 (script by Don McGregor, art by Dwayne Turner)

What's interesting to me reading Black Panther chronologically is to see the development of the character I know from the movies. His mother, Raimonda, debuted in this volume, but she's not the imperious ruler of screen, but a South African woman romanced by T'Challa's father who returned to her homeland after her husband died. Many elements of the mythos have yet to appear at all. There's also still no sense of cohesion: McGregor doesn't really acknowledge that anyone used the character other than him since 1976. (Can't imagine why the "Black Musketeers" don't come up in discussions of T'Challa's family!)

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE

The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator by Gene Wolfe

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

Gene Wolfe is one of those writers that though I've long been dimly aware of him, my curiosity about him was particularly stirred up by the denizens of /r/printSF, where he has a particularly vocal and adoring group of fans. His work is famously inscrutable; the introduction to this book (by Ada Palmer of the inscrutable Terra Ignota) says that there are science fiction books that are confusing to the inexperienced reader sf—and as those books are to easier books, so is The Book of the New Sun to those books. That is to say, there are some science fiction books you can only read once you have learned how to read science fiction, and Gene Wolfe you can only read once you have learned how to read Gene Wolfe. So I was pleased when I was gifted the new "Tor Essentials" editions of The Book of the New Sun, and I recently read the first one, which collects the first two books, The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator.

Collection published: 2021
Contents originally published: 1980-81
Acquired: May 2022
Read: July 2023

Book of the New Sun is about a member of the guild of torturers, Severian; Shadow of the Torturer covers his adolescence in the guild, and then the beginning of his exile, when he is en route to take up a post as executioner at a distant city. At first I was wondering if the inscrutability of the book was somewhat exaggerated; sure, you have to read carefully, but that's because Wolfe has dense, rich prose, and a tendency to jump around a bit chronologically (at first; it soon settles down). The world itself is a little obscure, but I had my theories. I enjoyed these early parts a lot—a richly described world in both the macro and micro senses. The dense, traditional, circumscribed world Severian moves through is fascinating and interesting. Additionally, I always like coming-of-age stuff, and this is a good example of it.

Once Severian leaves, though, the book gets weird. It actually reminds me of medieval quest narratives, or rather my most recent example of one (it has been a long time since I was in grad school, after all), the film adaptation of The Green Knight: bizarre, weird things keep happening... that are presented so matter-of-factly and received so matter-of-factly that they thus become even weirder and bizarre. Severian is recruited into a troupe of players, and one feels that this is going to be some kind of picaresque, but then he's challenged to a duel, and now he's in a botanical garden where people live, and then he's on a carriage that accidentally smashes through a group of nuns, and then when you think the story has forgotten all about that theatrical troupe, they somehow catch up to him and they're all performing a play together!

So it's less difficult in the sense that you don't know what's happening, and more difficult in the sense that the logic underpinning the story and world doesn't seem to be the logic of story and world we know here in the twentieth/twenty-first century. Like I said, it feels like a medieval text, in that it sort of comes across as something assembled retroactively from a bunch of disparate texts about Severian: why would the theatrical troupe reappear so much later? Well, because some later scribes stuck an unrelated story about Severian's duel into the middle of the text! So captivating, but if at the end of the book you wanted me to tell you what was actually going on, I'm not sure I could have done it.

I think Shadow of the Torturer balanced on just the right side of the weirdness, and had the opening segment to keep it grounded; the story's continuation in Claw of the Conciliator was more confusing to me, more piecemeal, too disorienting. Though I liked a lot of individual incidents, there were many aspects of the story I didn't follow at all, and ultimately I struggled through this in a way I hadn't with Shadow.

Still, they say you don't read Book of the New Sun, only reread it, so I am in for the long haul I guess. There are four books, plus a coda, and they are all part of the twelve-book "Solar Cycle" so it could be quite a long haul if I am willing! In the short term, though, I think I will certainly finish out The Book of the New Sun.

Justice Society of America (2007–11) Reading Order

Volume 3 of DC's Justice Society of America comic (the one that began after 52 and came to an end with Flashpoint and the "New 52") is one of those titles that keeps getting sucked into crossovers and events, and thus what order you should read it in is not totally obvious. Thus, here I am to straighten it out for you.

Crossover/event titles are noted in bold.

• Justice Society of America vol. 3 #1-4
• The Lightning Saga
• Justice League of America vol. 2 #8
• Justice Society of America vol. 3 #5
• Justice League of America vol. 2 #9
• Justice Society of America vol. 3 #6
• Justice League of America vol. 2 #10
• Justice Society of America vol. 3 #7-8
• Thy Kingdom Come
• Justice Society of America vol. 3 #9-17
• Justice Society of America Annual #1
• Justice Society of America vol. 3 #18-20
• Justice Society of America: Kingdom Come Special: Superman #1
• Justice Society of America: Kingdom Come Special: Magog #1
• Justice Society of America: Kingdom Come Special: The Kingdom #1
• Justice Society of America vol. 3 #21-22
• Justice Society of America vol. 3 #23-28
• Justice Society of America 80-Page Giant #1 
• Justice Society of America vol. 3 #29-40
• The Dark Things
• Justice League of America vol. 2 #44-46
• Justice Society of America vol. 3 #41
• Justice League of America vol. 2 #47
• Justice Society of America vol. 3 #42
• Justice League of America vol. 2 #48
• Justice Society of America vol. 3 #43
• Justice Society of America 80-Page Giant 2010 #1
• Justice Society of America vol. 3 #44-50
• Justice Society of America 80-Page Giant 2011 #1
• Justice Society of America vol. 3 #51-54

Note that there were two books that seem like they ought to be part of this reading order, but I omitted. Justice Society of America Annual #2 ties into JSA All-Stars vol. 2, and is best read after #3 of that title; Justice Society of America Special #1 concludes a three-part storyline that began in Magog #11 and 12; there is no best place to read it because no one will ever trick me into reading Magog.

This post is a supplement to an ever-expanding series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers Power Girl: Power Trip Terra. Previous installments are listed below:

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Force and Motion

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Force and Motion
by Jeffrey Lang

January 9-10, 2386 (and innumerable flashbacks)

Published: 2016
Acquired: October 2021
Read: July 2023

One of my favorite novels is Lawrence Durrell's Justine (1957), which is told not in chronological order. Rather, at one point the narrator tells us, "What I most need to do is to record experiences, not in the order in which they took place—for that is history—but in the order in which they first became significant to me." Most Star Trek books are told fairly conventionally from a structural point-of-view; they begin at the beginning and proceed to the end. Even when they jump around a bit, that tends to be pretty structured.

Force and Motion is no Lawrence Durrell novel (for that to be the case, it would have to drop all the very helpful captions and just leave the reader to sink or swim) but it's still one of those rare, refreshing Star Trek novels that seems more interested in being a novel than in being Star Trek, if that makes sense. Nog and O'Brien are visiting Robert Hooke station to meet up with O'Brien's old captain, Benjamin Maxwell of the Routledge (see TNG's "The Wounded"), who is now the station's maintenance engineer.

In the present, there's a crisis: the station exists outside of Federation space in order to enable its residents to pursue a variety of slightly unusual experiments (my favorite was the one researching quantum beekeeping with fractal honeycombs). When Nog and O'Brien arrive, one of the experiments, a living breeding ground for microorganisms, is set free, seeking out a new energy source, threatening the integrity of the station. Nog and O'Brien and Maxwell must work together to save the other researchers and contain the threat. This is fun stuff—it's hard for DS9 as a series to incorporate "strange new worlds" but this one is able to pull in a lot of strange new concepts, and it has a bit of a classic Star Trek feel to it, with clever problem-solving. (In what is always a good sign, I found myself thinking of how I would rebuild it into a Star Trek Adventures module. Fairly easily, I think.) Mother is a neat idea, the spiders are fun, and I liked who the "villain" turned out to be.

That said, I wanted a bit more depth in the present-day stuff. It sets up some strands and ideas when it comes to O'Brien and Nog that I wish had been explored a bit more than they were: Nog and O'Brien needing to make new friends on this new station, Nog's recent trauma with Active Four and older traumas like Empok Nor. These are bubbling in there, but by novel's end, aside from the fact that they had gone through a crisis together, I didn't feel like Nog and O'Brien had grown closer much.

In the past, we see snippets of Benjamin Maxwell: him days after the Setlik III massacre, him just after the events of "The Wounded," him in therapy in New Zealand, him during the Destiny trilogy, him coming home to find his mother dead, him trying to settle into a new life. But these are all out of order scattered throughout the book. And it's not just him either, there are flashbacks to O'Brien during his time on the Routledge, Nog hanging out with Jake after school, O'Brien following "The Wounded," Nog meeting up with Jake for New Year's, and more.

Whenever a novel has a weird structure, I think it's important that that structure be significant. Like, anyone can choose to tell their story out of chronological order, but what prevents it from just being a gimmick? Well, if the form of the novel intersects meaningfully with the project of the novel, then it works. The project of Justine is the narrator attempting to understand Justine but eternally being unable to do so. He writes of one of his failed novels, "In art I had failed (it suddenly occurred to me at that moment) because I did not believe in the discrete human personality. ('Are people', writes Pursewarden, 'continuously themselves, or simply over and over again so fast they give the illusion of continuous features—the temporal flicker of old silent film?') I lacked a belief in the true authenticity of people in order to successfully portray them." Hence, the book is told out of order because the narrator doesn't believe in the continuity of people.

Force and Motion is told out of order for a very different reason. Benjamin Maxwell may have been a captain, but he started his career as an engineer and he ended it as one too: his goal is to put broken things together. In this case, the broken thing is Maxwell himself—his pieces are scattered all across the novel, and as we put them back together, so does he. Maxwell is a man who wanted to fix what he found, and when he lost his own family, he couldn't put himself back together anymore. Here, he rebuilds himself, not quite as he was before, but into something that works. Given how his first attempt to do so led to him leading a deadly attack, I really liked how his second attempt to rebuild focused on the protection of life at all costs—even the lives of a band of pirates. In the end, he gets to do something he'd never done before, and he gets to protect a new life-form. I loved a lot of the snippets we saw of him across the years: him in therapy telling stories about gerbils and (somewhat surprisingly) him talking to Worf were particular highlights. I've seen some complaints there should have been fewer flashbacks, or they should have been more linear, but to be honest, if that was the case, it wouldn't be a better novel, it would be a different one. It wouldn't come together.

There are lots of thematic connections without them hitting you over the head, lots of depth to mine here. In the end, Maxwell finds some broken creatures and helps them the way he failed to do so many times before. It's a meaningful ending to a good book.

This was to be Jeff Lang's last contribution to the Star Trek line, which is a real shame, because I felt like he was developing into someone like Una McCormack, an interesting distinctive voice with real stories to tell. I sort of felt like they gave him The Light Fantastic as a sop for mining his work so heavily in Cold Equations, but if so, I'm impressed and glad he was asked back to write this.

Continuity Notes:

• In one flashback, Nog is tending bar while O'Brien and Bashir talk about the Alamo. Did Nog really keep working in the bar when he was a cadet on his field placement?
• Given the book picks up on O'Brien's arachnophobia from "Realm of Fear" it seems weird it didn't also acknowledge him having a pet spider from the same episode.
• One of the flashbacks indicates that as of when Nog and Jake were kids, Nog's mom was already dead; this contradicts Ferenginar: Satisfaction Is Not Guaranteed, where she makes an appearance.
• Unlike some other recent DS9 books, this seems to slot into its location fairly well; the flashback of Nog and Jake on New Year's is set between The Poisoned Chalice and Nog's return to the station in part 2 of Ascendance.

Other Notes:

• I hadn't realized until reading Force and Motion how similar O'Brien and Nog were in one sense—they are both great vehicles for suffering. DS9 is famous for its "O'Brien must suffer" episodes but only upon reading this book did it really dawn on me that we got a string of "Nog must suffer" episodes too: "Empok Nor," "Valiant," "The Siege of AR-558," "It's Only a Paper Moon." I guess just like O'Brien's everyman status makes him a good vehicle for suffering, so too does Nog's innocent status.
• There are lots of good flashbacks, some of which I've already mentioned. The Worf one is excellent: "It might be an honorable course of action... But I do not think he would sleep well." The best day / worst day ones were also good. Also Maxwell waiting for the Borg and frustrated he can't serve in defense of Earth. Maxwell saving a dog. I liked the two with Jake a lot, especially Jake's reflections on what happened to Sisko after Jennifer died, which has some nice but not overdone parallels to Maxwell. Nog watching O'Brien and Bashir when they beat the Alamo was good, but even better was O'Brien's present-day explanation of why that moment mattered so much.
  
• It's nice to actually have a novel that actually makes some use of O'Brien, even though he's been back on the station for some five novels now, and we get some small updates on his family. I will never believe that Miles O'Brien lived on Cardassia as long as he lived on Deep Space 9, but this book does tell us that Kirayoshi resents having to live on the station. It would be interesting to see a kid who would rather live on Reconstruction-era Cardassia than the new Deep Space 9!
• There are lots of small nice moments of character here; I particularly liked one where Maxwell notices how much in sync Nog and O'Brien are on p. 133. Nog feeling like he's not as good friends with Jake's wife as he'd prefer rings true to my experience of what happens when a long-distance friend gets married.
  
• "Do they have ships that just clean up the mess after the big ships are finished doing whatever they need to do?" Well, actually, yes! Jeff Lang got that one right many years in advance.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: The Next Generation: Armageddon's Arrow by Dayton Ward

Hugos 2023: Galaxy Awards 1: Chinese Science Fiction Anthology

Galaxy Awards 1: Chinese Science Fiction Anthology
edited by Latssep and Francesco Verso

Before the Hugo voter's packet comes out, I do what I can to track down the works myself, so that I'm not dependent on the timing of the packet to do my reading. This year, I discovered that one of the Chinese finalists for Best Short Story, Channing Ren's "Resurrection," had been published in an anthology of sf translated from Chinese into English, so I picked it up. (Or, rather, I got my local library to buy a copy for its collection, and then borrowed it.) I liked "Resurrection" enough that when I finished my Hugo reading, I turned back to the anthology to read the other stories collected in it.

Collection published: 2022
Contents originally published: 2018-22
Read: October 2023

Galaxy Awards 1 collects eight pieces of short fiction published in the last five years; it isn't clearly indicated, but I believe they were all winners of the Chinese Galaxy Award for science fiction. Each story is included in both Chinese and English, and each is preceded by an illustration and a short note about the author.

Between this book and the stories that were Hugo finalists, my impression is that Chinese sf is a bit what an Anglophone sf reader might consider old-fashioned. Lots of scientists doing science things. Lots of what I think of as "invention stories"—stories that are set at the moment of the invention of a new technology, and so don't really explore the implications of it. The occasional twist ending that annoys more than delights. Other than "Resurrection" itself, which I enjoyed for its focus on a particular person confronting a strange new technology, the first five stories in this volume did little for me.

I think in theory both Lu Hang's "Tongji Bridge" and Hai Ya's "Fongon Temple Pagoda" could have been more interesting, as both are about how technology gets incorporated into a traditional Chinese institution, but in practice the stories were just not doing much: character decides to do this, they do it, the end. (I did think Hang's more interesting and character driven than Ya's, which I quickly began reading aggressively fast. Ya was also the author of the Hugo finalist "The Space-Time Painter," which I ended up not really evaluating because of translation issues.)

I found Jiang Bo's "Final Diagnosis" annoying—it has a super obvious twist at the end, but also does not lay the groundwork for its worldbuilding to convince, and its character work with the female lead is pretty poor. (Bo was the author of the Hugo finalist "On the Razor's Edge," which I also didn't care for.) "Turing Food Court" by Wang Nuonuo was interesting and well told, but again, the story is too much dependent on a final twist, and the details of the setting's technology seemed a bit too arbitrary. Why do robots need to be developed in pairs? Why does one need to destroy the other?

So five stories in, I was worried. But then I started Ben Lu's "Upstart" (this is the same author called "Lu Ban" on the Hugo ballot; he wrote "The White Cliff") and I ended up really enjoying it. This story was about a future where, in order to reduce overpopulation, people can voluntarily agree to have their lifespans shortened in exchange for a payout. The story focuses on one such "upstart," alternating between his original decision to undergo the procedure and his attempts decades later to have it undone. Neat worldbuilding, strong characterization, and a good twist at the end. Lu does a great job of thinking through how a world would be changed by a new technology, focusing not just on that initial moment of transition, but how it would look decades later. What kind of resistance to such an initiative would spring up? And then he goes ever further than that.

From the cheeseball title, I was dreading A Que's "2039: Era of Brain-Computer Interface" (and it really is a terrible title), but I ended up liking the story a lot. A man ends up in a car accident and needs an experimental brain-computer interface to escape paralysis; the story explores how it affects his relationship with his girlfriend, and most of the story is told from her perspective. Neat use of a new technology, good worldbuilding, and again, a good twist at the end. Not as strong as the story on either side of it, but still an enjoyable read.

Finally came what was my favorite story in the book, "Colour the World" by Congyun "Mu Ming" Gu. This is set in a future world where people can have their eyes enhanced to be more perceptive, seeing more gradations of color, and also interface with computers; the story focuses on a girl, who gets the new technology later than her peers but grows up to be a programmer for it, and her relationship with her mother, who never gets it at all. Great character focus, some beautiful writing that comes through in translation, neat exploration of how technology can literally give us new ways of seeing. Highly recommended, and it would be great story if you are interesting in explorations of the cyborg.

So, with four strong stories and four weak ones, it's certainly worth it as an anthology. That said, the book was for some reason released by an Italian press, and there are some irregularities in the proofing and layout; a character's name fluctuates in "Final Diagnosis," there are formatting errors in almost every author bio, the story titles are often inconsistent in different parts of the book, "2039" has random line breaks in the middle of paragraphs. Definitely the work of a small press.

Justice Society of America 80-Page Giants by Jesus Merino, Jesse Delperdang, Freddie Williams II, Scott Hampton, Victor Ibàñez, et al.

Alongside Justice Society of America vol. 3, DC published three "80-Page Giants," collections of seven ten-page stories (the other ten pages are ads). I have a lot of time for the 80-page giant format (see entry #11 in this series below, for example); usually these kind of collections will have a couple stories by big name writers and artist to anchor them, and then work by newer writers and artists to develop talent. I think the format works particularly well here, as a companion to an ongoing series, as it lets the creators spotlight characters from the main series in different situations, with a variety of voices and styles.

The first has a framing narrative, set between Jerry Ordway's and Bill Willingham's runs on the parent title. In the frame, the JSA brownstone becomes subject to dream logic, as characters move through time and appear and disappear at random. I kind of suspect this was picked to smooth over discontinuities between stories, but I didn't care because I thought it worked really well. It has a good dreamlike feeling to it, as characters disappear between page transitions and the logic is a bit hard to follow but also not totally random.

from Justice Society of America 80-Page Giant #1
(script by Zander Cannon, art by Scott Hampton)

Not all of the stories are great, of course, but I found enough to be worth reading. I liked "Heart of Steel" (Felicia D. Henderson, Renato Guedes, and José Wilson Magalhaes), which gives some much-needed pathos to Citizen Steel, "Mother's Little Secret" (Jerry Ordway), which explores the history of the new Wildcat, and "Spin Cycle" (Jen Van Meter, Jesus Merino, and Jesse Delperdang), which is a cute meeting between Cyclone and Power Girl while doing laundry. Particularly nightmarish is "Damage" (Zander Cannon and Scott Hampton), a bizarre story about Doctor Mid-Nite surgically removing people from Damage's insides, which I can't imagine working in any other format; good use of the frame, and a great collision of writing and art.

The other two collections have no frame; they're just collections of seven stories apiece. Typically, a few stories take place at the "now" of when the issue was released, and then a few must take place earlier on in the run of Justice Society vol. 3 based on what characters are present. These I liked for their spotlights on characters who may have been present in the main title, but were often unfocused on as it jerked from big event to big event. For example, one of my complaints about the parent title would be how Obsidian was either demoted to a disembodied presence or turned into an egg or going nuts again, so I appreciated "...the Not-So-Secret Origin of Obsidian!" (Marc Andreyko, Mike Norton, and Bill Sienkiewicz), which gave some unity to his disparate appearances and connected to what was being done with the character in Manhunter at the same time.

Liberty Belle/Jesse Quick quickly established herself as a favorite in Justice Society vol. 3 even though I felt like she didn't actually get much to do, so I enjoyed "Unstoppable" (Robert T. Jeschonek and Victor Ibàñez) where she takes on abusers, and "Guiding the Gifted" (Drew Ford, Andy Smith, and Keith Champagne), where she protects a kid with new powers. They both had a good domestic focus, but also a clear indication of how she doesn't take any crap. (Should I expand this ever-lengthening project to track down her appearances in Titans?) And again, there was a good Citizen Steel story in "The Tin Man" (Matthew Cody and Tim Seeley), where he falls in love with a patient he can never touch. I never really liked Steel much in the main series, so I was grateful for the positive focus these issues gave him.

from Justice Society of America 80-Page Giant 2011 #1
(script by Adam Beechen, art by Howard Chaykin)

I also appreciated this series following up on dropped plot points from the main one; for example, during James Robinson's run, Green Lantern became the guardian of a magic city on the moon, but Marc Guggenheim did little with this; here, we get "City of Light & Magic" (Matt Kindt and Victor Ibàñez), which actually looks into this. There's also one historical story, "Duty, Honor, Country" (Adam Beechen and Howard Chaykin), which is told from the perspective of the guy designated to serve papers to the Justice Society for their congressional hearing back in the 1950s. A neat angle on a story the comics have revisited a lot.

Overall, I was often disappointed with how Justice Society vol. 3 was jerked from big event to big event, eschewing the character focus that makes team books so appealing to me. These three anthologies did a lot to rectify that, and I was glad I incorporated them into my reading experience. Alas, the stories are not collected so far as I know, and the issues are not available on DC Universe Infinite, so if you want to follow my lead, you'll need to track them down on the secondary market.

Justice Society of America 80-Page Giant (Jan. 2010), Justice Society of America 80-Page Giant 2010 (Dec. 2010), and Justice Society of American 80-Page Giant 2011 (Aug. 2011) were each originally published in one issue. The stories were written by James Robinson, Felicia D. Henderson, Kevin Grevioux, Jerry Ordway, Jen Van Meter, Zander Cannon, Lilah Sturges, Marc Andreyko, Robert T. Jeschonek, Justin Peniston, Christina Weir & Nunzio DeFilippis, Jason Starr, Freddie Williams II, Brandon Jerwa, Steve Niles, B. Clay Moore, Matt Kindt, Matthew Cody, Drew Ford, Ivan Brandon, and Adam Beechen. They were pencilled by Neil Edwards, Renato Guedes, Roberto Castro, Jerry Ordway, Jesus Merino, Scott Hampton, Freddie Williams II, Mike Norton, Victor Ibàñez, Tonci Zonjic, Jesse Delperdang, Leandro Fernandez, Mateus Santolouco, Josh Adams, Tim Seeley, Andy Smith, Nic Klein, and Howard Chaykin, and they were inked by Wayne Faucher, José Wilson Magalhaes, John Floyd, Jerry Ordway, Jesse Delperdang, Scott Hampton, Freddie Williams II, Bill Sienkiewicz, Victor Ibàñez, Tonci Zonjic, Jesus Merino, Leandro Fernandez, Mateus Santolouco, Bob McLeod, Tim Seeley, Keith Champagne, Nic Klein, and Howard Chaykin. Colors were provided by Mike Thomas, David Curiel, Allan Passalaqua, Danny Vozzo, the Hories, Zac Atkinson, Tonci Zonjic, Alex Bleyaert, Chris Beckett, Mateus Santolouco, Thomas Chu, Nic Klein, and Jesus Aburtov, and letters by Rob Leigh, John J. Hill, and Swands. The stories were edited by Chris Conroy, Rachel Gluckstern, Mike Carlin, and Joey Cavalieri.

This post is forty-fifth in an ever-expanding series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment is a supplement covering a reading order for Justice Society of America volume 3. Previous installments are listed below:

Hugos 2023: Ballots for Novel, Related Work, and Lodestar

Here is my last set of Hugo ballots: these are all the book-based categories, including the biggie, Best Novel. I don't think I nominated in any of these categories, but I'm not sure. I really should have made a note somewhere.

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Best Novel 

[UNRANKED] The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi / Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

In previous years, I have made it a rule to read every single novel finalist, no matter what I think I will think of them. In some years this has worked out well for me; despite finding the first book of the Machineries of Empire just okay, for example, I ended up really enjoying the second. However, I have read enough John Scalzi to know that I am very much not a fan of what he generally does, and everything I heard about The Kaiju Preservation Society lead me to believe it was the Scalzi I dislike at his most Scalzi. Similarly, having ranked both books one and two of the "Locked Tomb" trilogy (now four books long) in sixth place and finding both unremitting, confusing slogs, it seemed unlikely to me that I would get much out of the third book, nor that I would want to spend a week reading its five hundred pages. So, for the first time, I have foregone reading two finalists. Maybe it will turn out I have missed out on some brilliant work... but I doubt it. (If one of them wins, I will eventually get to it as part of my project to read all Hugo-winning novels I have not previously read... in 2055.)

4. Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree

I did not like this at all, a mediocre novel with no interesting characters and no stakes and bleh prose. See my review linked above for more.

3. No Award

I try not to be an overdramatic hater, but really, if Legends & Lattes wins, it will be one of those books that makes me question the judgement of my fellow Worldcon members so much that I will wonder why I am even participating in this process.

3. The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Up until the last third or so, I thought this was going to slot in above The Spare Man. I wasn't in love with it, but it was doing some kind of interesting stuff. But the revelations near the end and the overly neat ending brought it down for me. Ultimately it came across as an unambitious novel that ought to have been ambitious. Spare Man, I think, largely does what it says it will do, but this does not.

2. The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal

Sometimes ranking almost feels too easy, you know? Like, you want ranking to be a challenge because that means you have a lot of very good books. (Or, well, a lot of very bad ones.) But The Spare Man has a very obvious slot to take. It was not incompetent or annoying, so it clearly goes above No Award, but I also didn't think it came across as one of the best books of the year, or even a great one, so clearly below Nettle and Bone.

1. Nettle and Bone by T. Kingfisher

Interestingly, I think Legends & Lattes and Nettle and Bone have a bit in common—even beyond the use of the "[NOUN] & [NOUN]" title format. (I think the Kingfisher was actually Nettle & Bone in the US, but I read the UK edition.) They're both fantasy novels that aim to provide reassurance to the reader in the face of darkness of the world: but while Legends & Lattes does this by having no stakes and mediocre humor, aiming for "heart," Nettle and Bone really does have heart because Kingfisher knows that in fiction, you can only get reassurance by having darkness to be reassured about. Nettle and Bone was an easy favorite for me as soon as I read it.

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Best Related Work

6. Buffalito World Outreach Project: 30 Translations of "Buffalo Dogs" by Lawrence M. Schoen

 

This book is made up of the English-language science fiction short story "Buffalo Dogs" and its translation into thirty different languages, including French, Italian, Hindi, Tamil, two varieties of Spanish, and Klingon. (Author Schoen is the founder of the Klingon Language Institute, and seems to have done that translation himself.) "Related works" are usually nonfiction, but according to the Hugo guidelines, works must be either "non-fiction or, if fictional... noteworthy primarily for aspects other than the fictional text..." So we're not being asked to assess the story here, but the project. (Along similar lines, a new translation of Beowulf was a finalist in 2021, and ended up winning.) For this to work, I think the paratext would have  to make the case that this was a worthy project... but in his introduction, Schoen devotes only about a paragraph to the book itself, and it pretty much just says, "I thought it would be fun, so I did it." Any sense of why this might have been a noteworthy idea, much less an award-winning one, is absent.

On top of that, I found the story in question pretty bad. I know we're not supposed to judge this category on the basis of its fictional aspects, but it's about a hypnotist who abuses his powers to violate people's consent in order to carry out illegal acts for not really any reason at all other than that he is greedy. Wow, what a hero! I also found the worldbuilding pretty unconvincing; it's clearly there to make the story work, but doesn't make sense on its own merits. The cover blurb for the book says, "Maybe, just maybe, the power of the buffalitos will bring us all together and we’ll begin treating one another better," but it's about a guy who goes around treating other people quite horribly! If you want to pick a story to bring the world together, there had to have been a better one. Anyway, I wouldn't give this an award, and I certainly wouldn't give it this one, which is much better aimed at nonfiction in my opinion, if not that of the other nominators.

5. Chinese Science Fiction: An Oral History, Volume 1 by Yang Feng

 

The Hugo voter packet contains this 402-page book in its entirety... in Chinese. There's also a 24-page PDF in English, but all that has been translated is the table of contents and introductions to each section. The book has seven sections, each interviewing one key figure in Chinese sf. There's not really much for me to judge here as a result, other than the general intentions of the book. In other circumstances I probably would have just left it off my ballot, but it seemed a much worthier winner than Buffalito World despite my lack of access to it.

 

4. Still Just a Geek: An Annotated Memoir by Wil Wheaton

Back in 2004, Wil Wheaton published an edited collection of some of his blog posts with additional linking material to turn it into a coherent narrative under the title Just a Geek. Last year, Just a Geek was republished with extra blog posts, but more importantly, footnotes. These footnotes clarify some stuff from the original book, apologize for bad writing or insensitive jokes, and expand on stuff he didn't say back then, about how his father emotionally abused him and how his mother deprived him of a childhood in her drive to turn him into a child star. I found it a bit of a mixed bag: the "comedy" footnotes were generally not funny and soon got wearying, the ones apologizing for misogynist early 2000s Internet discourse were necessary at first but not at the one hundredth iteration. 

 

I found myself wishing that the material about his parents had been worked in as extra essays; what's frustrating is that the most important one (about the abuse he and his sister went through on the set of the film The Curse) doesn't appear until very late in the book, but it provides important context for a lot of what you've been reading. Aside from this, the best material in the book was generally the original contents of Just a Geek: I liked the discussion of his cameo in Star Trek Nemesis a lot, as well as his interactions with his TNG castmates, which were very sweet. There's a good "found family" vibe to it. But given the best stuff is from 2004, and the new 2022 material—which is what makes this Hugo eligible—is not so great, I find it hard to rank it highly even though I did enjoy it.

3. "The Ghost of Workshops Past: How Communism, Conservatism, and the Cold War Still Mold Our Paths Into SFF Writing" by S. L. Huang

This is an essay published on Tor.com, about the history of the so-called "Milford model" of creative writing workshop—people from outside the sf&f field would know it as the Iowa model. It alternates between exploring the history of that model and exploring its repercussions, especially for attendees of the prestigious Clarion workshop from marginalized groups. It's a good piece of writing, but I always find it tricky to rate essays against books in this category. It's probably as long as it needs to be, to be honest, but I think it is beat out by Blood, Sweat & Chrome because that has the depth of being a book. Still, certainly more of interest to say about sf&f than in Wheaton's memoir.

2. Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road by Kyle Buchanan

This is an oral history of the long production of Mad Max: Fury Road, mostly from interviews by the author, with some archival material mixed in. I have actually never seen Fury Road, but found this pretty interesting nonetheless. The long genesis of the film was interesting in particular; I felt that the filming process needed more details on what exactly Tom Hardy's issue was (the book seemed to dance around this), but was still neat, as was the postproduction stuff. Probably I would get more out of the book if I—like the writer and many participants—was convinced of George Miller's genius, but I do like a good making-of book, and this is a decent one.

1. Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes by Rob Wilkins

This is a biography of the Discworld author by his longtime assistant, based on notes Pratchett made toward an autobiography that he never got around to writing. Lots of good details on Pratchett's youth and early career especially; I liked hearing about his working as a journalist and as a press officer for a nuclear power plant in particular. There's also great but devastating insight into his later years, as the cognitive decline of Alzheimer's began to take hold. I did think that at times Wilkins is (for perhaps natural reasons) a bit too into Pratchett's finances and contracts, and I felt like Pratchett's wife totally disappeared from the book, but if you're even a mild Pratchett fan (which is where I would categorize myself) there's a lot to get out of this book. This is a strong work about a key figure in the sf&f field, exactly the kind of thing the Hugo Award for Best Related Work ought to be rewarding.

(Abigail Nussbaum has a very good negative review of the book that I largely agree with... but I still think it's the best thing in the category!)

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Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book

[UNRANKED] Bloodmarked by Tracy Deonn / Dreams Bigger than Heartbreak by Charlie Jane Anders

Both of these are sequels to previous Lodestar Award finalists. Bloodmarked is a follow-up to 2021's Legendborn, where students at a North Carolina college turn out to be Arthurian knights reborn to fight monsters from another dimension... or something. It did not work for me, and I ranked it fifth. Dreams Bigger than Heartbreak is a sequel to 2022's Victories Greater than Death, a book I almost abandoned halfway through and ended up ranking sixth and one of the very reasons I instituted my "you are allowed to skip a book" rule this year. It seemed very unlikely that the sequels were likely to be serious contenders for me, and so in the interests of time, I skipped them.

5. Osmo Unknown and the Eightpenny Woods by Catherynne M. Valente

This is a fantasy novel about a kid who goes into a magical forest in order to fulfill his role in an ancient treaty between humans and the creatures of the forest. Though I have enjoyed some of Valente's work (she had three works on the Hugo short fiction ballots last year, and they were all strong), too often I am left feeling that if it had been half as long, it would have been twice as good. Most of her books are overnarrated; perhaps in deference to the younger audience, this mostly manages to avoid that (though the narrator is still twee and condescending), but instead fills up the pages with voluminous "funny" dialogue that goes nowhere. At one point the main character gets horns on his head but doesn't know it, and somehow there is a full ten pages of back-and-forth between Osmo being confused at another character saying "what's up with your head?" and someone finally saying "you've got horns!" By about page one hundred, this book had squandered all of its goodwill and I did not care about what anyone was trying to do, but there were another three hundred pages I had to read.

I did like the pangolin character a bit.

4. No Award

Look, other people must like it, but I feel like Osmo Unknown is bad. And it's a kind of bad that annoys me: like Seanan McGuire's, Valente's YA is self-consciously nostalgic in a way I find forced and annoying. Rather than capture what the fantasy of our childhood was actually like, it very archly tries to capture our nostalgia for reading fantasy in childhood—which isn't the same thing at all. Oz may be a fairly whimsical place, but the book doesn't smash your face into this fact, it just gets on with taking the world seriously. I don't believe actual young adults (or middle-graders, which is what Osmo Unknown skews toward in my opinion) would actually like this book. It's for adults nostalgic for when they were supposed to be reading young adult fiction. And this is, you know, a YA award.

3. Akata Woman by Nnedi Okorafor

As noted in my review, I did not find this as successful as the second book in this series. But, you know, it is fundamentally an actual young adult book in my opinion, so it's better than Osmo Unknown and better than No Award.

2. The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik

I had actually read this before voting because I enjoyed the previous book in the series so much. Like Akata Woman, it's the third book in a series where it turns out I liked the second book best. But though it was a bit of a letdown, I still enjoyed it well enough. In another year, though, it's hard for me to imagine this taking second on my ballot.

1. In the Serpent's Wake by Rachel Hartman

Like every other book on the ballot this year bar Osmo Unknown, this is a sequel to a previous finalist, and like every one of those sequels (that I read, anyway), this is not as strong as the book that preceded it. But I think I liked this best of all; honestly, I could go either way between it and The Golden Enclaves, both of which didn't totally deliver on the potential of where the previous installment had left off. I'll give the edge to this because I suspect Novik has the edge with the majority of the electorate, but again, it's hard for me to imagine this being my top choice in any previous year.

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Final Thoughts

Last year, I said that Best Novel was the weakest set I'd seen since I began voting in 2017. Well, it got worse! Very frustrating. I don't keep up with current sf&f much beyond reading for the Hugos, so I don't know what those books might be, but Nettle and Bone aside I believe there has to have been five books better than this. I don't have a strong sense of what will win this category; perhaps Nettle and Bone? Kingfisher has done pretty well on the ballot the past few years. Kowal is always popular, but I don't feel like Spare Man is going to be it. It was a bit surprising to see the Scalzi, and I think he has enough detractors I don't think it will be him. Oh god, it's going to be Legends & Lattes, isn't it?

On the other hand, this was a great set of Related Works finalists. I always grumble a bit when they skew away from nonfiction, but here we have five works of nonfiction; I also grumble when they're not books, but here we have five actual books. I think the Pratchett biography will win.

As I indicated above, this was also a weak set of YA finalists. Five of the six were sequels to previous nominees! C'mon, give me something new. I don't have a good sense at all of what might win here. Novik won last year, though some people grumbled about that. (I am not sure why; I think her books are much more clearly YA than whatever Osmo Unknown was supposed to be.)