Power Girl: Power Trip by Geoff Johns, Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti, and Amanda Conner

Power Girl: Power Trip

Collection published: 2023
Contents originally published: 2005-10
Acquired and read: August 2023

Writers: Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti, Geoff Johns, Amanda Conner

Artist: Amanda Conner
Inker: Jimmy Palmiotti

Colorist: Paul Mounts

Letterers: John J. Hill, Rob Leigh

When I reread the "Power Trip" arc of JSA Classified (see item #39 in the long list below), I was reminded of how awful Geoff Johns's writing was... but also what a brilliant artist Amanda Conner was, and what a good fit she was for the buoyant, expressive Power Girl. So I decided to pick up this collection, which contains all twelve issues of her run on Power Girl vol. 2. (Unfortunately, it also includes that terrible JSA Classified story, but I skipped it rather than suffer through it a third time. Note that Geoff Johns gets first billing on the cover for writing just four of the seventeen issues included here, whereas Amanda Conner—the only person to work on all seventeen and the volume's clear star—is down in fourth. Must be nice to be the former president of DC!)

The twelve issues of Power Girl collected here run concurrently with Justice Society of America vol. 3 #29-40 and JSA All-Stars vol. 2 #1-6, taking place during the time when Power Girl is leading the JSA. (When the volume opens, the team seems to be unified still; by the time of the closing arc, it has split up, and Magog has left.) But the story's focus is on the fact that despite what's happening with the Justice Society, Power Girl is no longer frustrated at her lack of a clear origin, and just trying to be herself—whoever that may be. So for the first time in a long while, she's reactivated her civilian identity of Karen Starr, and is using it to build a technology company while she moves out of the JSA brownstone into an apartment of her own. She develops friendships, and builds up her own supporting cast. There's even her cat from her JLI days.

I would not have guessed Wonder Woman was great with cats... except to the extent that she's great at everything, I suppose.
from Wonder Woman vol. 1 #600 (script & art by Amanda Conner)

It's one of those runs that you can't point to a single issue and say "this is an amazing comic book" but where you can point to the whole and say "this is what a superhero comic book should be." It's funny, it's charming, it's goofy, it has a unique personality all its own. Sometimes Power Girl is battling the Ultra-Humanite and his former lover Santana, but sometimes she's stopping alien girls gone wild and a virile alien warlord who wants to repopulate his sterilized planet, sometimes she's helping out a teenage boy by going comic book shopping with him. Writers Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti have admittedly produced some real shit in their time at DC, but this plays to their strengths—or at least to Conner's, who is surely in the Top Ten of superhero comics artists, and consistently elevates any material she is given.

Bring back Vartox.
from Power Girl vol. 2 #12 (script by Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti, art by Amanda Conner)

In Conner's hands, comedy, action, and emotion all get good play, letting the whole story come alive. Sometimes the main conflict of one of these stories will end halfway through an issue, and the rest will just be about Power Girl chilling with her sidekick/new friend Terra—and it is always a delight. Conner hits the perfect note with PG's physical appearance, giving us a woman who is attractive but not objectified. I mean, Gray and Palmiotti definitely write in gratuitous moments, but they feel natural and part of the story. (Which is not always the case with Power Girl; shortly before writing this review, I read JSA All-Stars #1, where PG's costume gets strategically torn in such a way as to reveal her entire midriff, and where her boobs are always hanging in "attractive" unnatural positions... bleh.)

My favorite Atlee moment, though, is probably the bit where she pretends to be from Australia.
from Power Girl vol. 2 #3 (script by Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti, art by Amanda Conner)

Like many great runs, the worst thing about it is that it wasn't longer; I gladly would have read another twelve issues from this team. I felt that the supporting cast at Karen's new company barely got started in what they could do, and I want more Kara and Atlee bonding in New York City. But even though this comic lasted another fifteen issues, Judd Winick took over as writer and it became (to my understanding, anyway) a Brightest Day tie-in; neither the writer nor the change of focus appeals. That said, it did make me interested in picking up PG's newest series... the journey never ends, does it?

This post is forty-seventh in an ever-expanding series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers volume 2 of JSA All-Stars. Previous installments are listed below:

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

As a science fiction fan who attended a Jesuit high school, I am a big fan of the "Jesuits in space" subgenre of science fiction, and so I was delighted to receive this as a SantaThing gift a few years ago (and appropriately enough, I received the subgenre's other most prominent example, James Blish's A Case of Conscience, from the same program way back in its first year).

Originally published: 1996
Acquired: December 2021
Read: January 2023

I wouldn't say I loved this, but I liked it a lot. (It's too brutal for "enjoyed" to be the right word.) It bounces back and forth between the planning for and the aftermath of a terrible Jesuit expedition to the first known inhabited extraterrestrial planet. Russell is a very methodical writer, laying down her characters and themes and background in great detail, and I in particular enjoyed her rich character work here. All the people here really come to life, and you are very much invested in every step they take.

Brother Guy Consolmagno, S.J., the Jesuit astronomer and sf fan, tore into the book, saying, "the real crime of this novel is that the Jesuit characters take themselves far too seriously. Our real reaction to soul-shattering events is, more often than not, to laugh at ourselves and our predicament." It is a very serious book... but I actually think that's an unfair assessment of the characters, who have very well-developed senses of humor. But though I have been around many Jesuits (my high school and college best friend is one now), I am not one, so maybe that gives him a different perspective.

Terra by Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti, and Amanda Conner

Terra

Collection published: 2009
Contents originally published: 2007-09
Acquired and read: August 2023

Writers: Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti

Penciller: Amanda Conner
Inkers: Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner

Colorists: Rod Reis, Paul Mounts

Letterers: Rob Leigh, Travis Lanham, Sal Cipriano, Swands

After I read Justice Society of America vol. 3, I moved onto Power Girl: Power Trip, which collects a Power Girl ongoing that overlapped with it. But a few issues into it, I was starting to wonder what the deal was with "Terra," Power Girl's sidekick and friend, who comes from a hidden nation of subterranean people. Well, it turned out the answer was in this book by the same creative team of writers Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti and artist Amanda Conner, so I paused reading Power Trip to delve into this long out-of-print collection.

Terra is a bit frustrating in that much of the time, we view this new character from the outside; we don't get much of her own struggle. What are her stakes? This is never really clear. The first issue here teams her up with Supergirl, in one of her particularly selfish periods; Terra's perky selflessness serves as a contrast. Then she meets up with Power Girl and Doctor Mid-Nite, then (groan) Geo-Force. Her deal is that she tries to take care of collisions between the surface world and the subterranean one, protecting the underground ecosystem from human intervention and humanity from subterranean creatures. She comes from a whole thriving underground world with a myriad different kinds of life. It's a neat set-up for stories potentially, but one the volume on its own ultimately doesn't make a ton of use of—and since Terra never got another series, I'm guessing was never really used in future stories, either.

Like, I wanted to know more about her relationship with her dad.
from Terra #3 (art by Amanda Conner)

Alongside this, there's a subplot about a guy digging underground who accidentally turns himself into a living diamond. This culminates in him attacking Terra's people, and she and Geo-Force team up to defeat him. It's pretty perfunctory stuff, I feel like more could have been made of the bad guy. (There's also some stuff about this Terra's place as the... third, I think, superhero of that name, but I don't know anything about the Teen Titans, so it was all underexplained gibberish to me. For some reason, Geo-Force's memory has to be erased even though he learned that someone was impersonating his dead sister; seems a bit mean. How his dead sister can be from underground, I don't really know.)

Not hard to be more of a hero than this version of Supergirl.
from Supergirl vol. 5 #12 (art by Amanda Conner & Jimmy Palmiotti)

Then in a half-issue coda, Terra goes back to the surface and bumps into Power Girl again. This made me very glad I paused Power Trip to read this, because it's basically a set-up for that series, pushing Kara into the decision to resume living her civilian identity and lead a normal life.

Terra and Power Girl did not get off to a great start, to be honest.
from Terra #2 (art by Amanda Conner)

So writing wise, it's basically fine. Decent idea, but mediocre execution—which honestly feels par for the course for Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti, who are hacks (meant in the nicest possible way, of course) if ever there were any; they did, after all, write Infinite Crisis Aftermath, Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters, parts of Countdown, and what is probably the worst superhero comic ever. But what elevates it is their collaboration with one of superhero comics' best-ever artists, Amanda Conner. Conner's art is fun, bold, sexy, and above all, character driven. You get a sense of personality from her faces that mostly fails to come across from the writing. It's delightful, I knew I would love it, I did love it, and it's the whole reason I bought this book as opposed to just reading the issues on DC Universe Infinite, and it was worth it. Get Amanda Conner to draw every comic book, please.

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

The Cosmere by Brandon Sanderson: Warbreaker

Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson

After gifting me the Mistborn trilogy in order to get me to read it, my sister then gifted me another novel of the Cosmere by Brandon Sanderson, Warbreaker. I guess these take place in the same fantasy universe, but on different planets with different (shudder) "magic systems." (Seriously, has anything ever made magic less magical than the term "magic systems"?)

Originally published: 2009
Acquired: July 2021
Read: February 2023

As I remembering feeling about Mistborn, I felt this had some good ideas and would be solid raw material for a better story. The idea of two sisters that have to switch places is a good one, though I don't think Sanderson is adept enough at characterization to make as much of it as someone else might have. The magic system is a bit too convoluted, and as in Mistborn, too much of the climax comes in the form of revelations about its mechanics... but who cares? Also you can't use CamelCase in a fantasy novel, it's just not right! "BioChroma" is a terrible, immersion-breaking term.

It is cleverly put together, though. I did like the reveal that the comedy rogues who are always telling you how terrible they are are in fact actually terrible—if you've read Sanderson's Mistborn, you expect them to turn out like the criminals in that book, actually nice people at heart, so it's a neat use of his own past work to foil your expectations. I did kind of like the character of the languid god who wants to do more. The sequence where one sister is rendered homeless is pretty harrowing.

But it's all... a bit of a plod, you know? Almost seven hundred pages of small type, and I'm not convinced it needed to be that long, it often feels very repetitive.

Every nine months I read another novel of the Cosmere. Next up in sequence: Elantris

Five More Very Good Short Stories I've Read Recently

I liked writing this up last time, even if as far as I know it's yet another post that no one read, so here's another list of five very good short stories I've read recently (in no particular order), so you don't have to read about them buried in some anthology review or something. Go and read some excellent short fiction!

"Eros, Philia, Agape" by Rachel Swirsky

There was something about the way Rose loved him that he didn’t yet understand. Earlier that morning, he had plucked a bloom from his apricot tea rose and whispered to its petals that they were beautiful. They were his, and he loved them. Every day he held Rose, and understood that she was beautiful, and that he loved her. But she was not his. She was her own. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen a love like that, a love that did not want to hold its object in its hands and keep and contain it.

This is a 2009 short story originally published on Tor.com. I read it in the anthology Twenty-First Century Science Fiction. It was a finalist for Best Novelette at the 2010 Hugo Awards, but came in third to two stories I haven't read; it beat out a Paul Cornell story that I have read, and in that, at least, I agree with the voters.

The story is about the disintegration of a marriage, but the marriage is between a human woman and her robot husband and they have a human daughter. We simultaneously follow the woman and daughter after the break-up, the husband as he sets out on his own, and (in a series of flashbacks) how everything got to this point to begin with. It's beautifully told, well observed, and genuinely moving, with some haunting images. Yes, it's about a woman in love with a robot, but it uses that as a jumping-off point for a powerful meditation on kinds of love, especially what it means to own something you love—in many different ways.

"A Better Way of Saying" by Sarah Pinsker

The title after the mugging included an editor’s note: “Aphasia is a mental condition, vouched for by all our best novelists and dramatists.” Why was that necessary? It followed “For five years after this unfortunate occurrence, Florian’s life was a blank to him,” but it pulled the viewer from the narrative, in my opinion, by reminding them of the writers in the very moment they should have been losing themselves in the story. The acting was fine, the film well enough made, but I could barely stand to utter the words.

This is another Tor.com story, one I encountered in Pinsker's collection Lost Places; it was originally published in 2021.

It's a first-person tale set in the early twentieth century; the narrator is a boy hired by the owner of a movie theatre to read the intertitles of silent films aloud, for the benefit of the recent immigrants in the audience whose ability to read English isn't so great yet. Only he begins to decide that he could write those titles better himself. This is paralleled with his later participation in a real incident, where the actor Douglas Fairbanks on a press tour demonstrated his skill with a bow and arrow. It's a story with a small but powerfully effective fantasy element, and it's difficult to say much more about it without giving it all away. As usual for Pinsker, it's beautifully told, and it demonstrates why she continues to be the best writer of short sf&f of our times.

"Finisterra" by David Moles

Bianca had not thought hardly at all about the killing of a zaratán, and when she had thought of it she had imagined something like the harpooning of a whale in ancient times, the great beast fleeing, pursued by the tiny harassing shapes of boats, gored by harpoons, sounding again and again, all the strength bleeding out of the beast until there was nothing left for it to do but wallow gasping on the surface and expire, noble and tragic. Now Bianca realized that for all their great size, the zaratanes were far weaker than any whale, far less able to fight or to escape or even—she sincerely hoped—to understand what was happening to them.
     There was nothing noble about the way the nameless zaratán died.

This was originally published in F&SF in 2007; like the Swirsky above, I encountered it in Hartwell and Nielsen Hayden's Twenty-First Century Science Fiction. Here, I've linked to an on-line reprint of it in Clarkesworld.

It's about an engineer who's from Earth, but an Earth devastated by the economic impact of interstellar civilization; for her in particular, her options as a woman are limited with increasing conservative Muslim influence on society. She travels to a gas giant called Sky that has an oxygen atmosphere and giant flying animals, so large that communities have sprung up on their backs. It's evocatively written and sharply characterized, and it depicts a really interesting civilization that it explores in rich ways, connecting what's going on on Sky (a rich man is seeking to poach one of the giant beasts) to broader thematic concerns in the story. I had never heard of Moles before, but the story left me wanting to read more by him.

"The Education of Junior Number 12" by Madeleine Ashby

“Of course it’s funny. It’s hysterical. You’re railing at me for teaching my kid how to recognize the smutvids that won’t fry his brain, and all the while you’ve been riding a three-year-old.”
     “Oh, for—”
     “And very eagerly, I might add.”

Again, I encountered this in C21 SF. It was published on Ashby's publisher's web site in 2011, and it remains there, but somewhere along the line, a web site reformatting means that the current version of the story is missing all its paragraph breaks, so I'm linking to a Wayback Machine version of it.

This is sort of the dark mirror of "Eros, Philia, Agape" above—not that "Eros, Philia, Agape" wasn't itself pretty dark! A tie-in to a novel by Ashby called vN, it's about a self-replicating android (a von Neumann machine, or "vN") who derives its pleasure from pleasing humans at all costs, but also is forced to periodically reproduce; it trains its "Juniors" before releasing them into the world. The world of this story is a harsh one: the main character, Javier, does his best for his Juniors, but is limited by the need he has to please humans. It overrides every other desire he has. But, as the story points out in many ways, humans have desires to that aren't exactly ethical or rational, or vNs wouldn't be the way they are in the first place. It really works in its depiction of human selfishness. Is a vN so bad? They are callous to please others but humans are callous to please themselves. Cool technology, neat extrapolation of how it might be used and abused in society.

"The Algorithms for Love" by Ken Liu

“People have always associated the mind with the technological fad of the moment. When they believed in witches and spirits, they thought there was a little man in the brain. When they had mechanical looms and player pianos, they thought the brain was an engine. When they had telegraphs and telephones, they thought the brain was a wire network. Now you think the brain is just a computer. Snap out of it. That is the illusion.”
     Trouble was, I knew he was going to say that.

You might be noticing a pattern here: this story was also one I found in C21 SF. It was originally published in Strange Horizons back in 2004. Unlike most people, I find Ken Liu hit or miss, but this one I enjoyed a lot.

A lot of Ken Liu stories, I would argue, use relationships as a crutch for creating emotional investment in a technological concept, but this one is actually about the emotional relationship and the way it will be affected by technology. It's about a programmer who works on creating extremely realistic dolls, and it alternates between her life story and what she's up to in the present; eventually her dolls begin passing the Turing test—and this has her unsettled at the implications. Dark and creepy, I really liked it both for what it said about our future technologies and for what it said about ourselves.

The Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold, Part 3: Shards of Honor

Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold

This was the first-written Vorkosigan book, and (if you ignore prequels set well before the main series), it's also the first chronologically. Yet I chose to read it third, treating the first two Miles books, The Warrior's Apprentice and The Vor Game, as a duology, and then moving backwards to read the two Cordelia books as a prequel duology.

Originally published: 1986
Acquired: January 2022
Read: March 2023

It certainly was not intended to be read as a prequel, but I found that it worked quite well. Shards of Honor is told from the point-of-view of Cordelia Naismith, the captain of a science vessel from Beta Colony, who becomes entangled with Aral Vorkosigan, commander of a warship from Barrayar; they are the future parents of Miles. Cordelia is an important presence in the first two Miles books, but admittedly not much of a presence, in that she plays little role in those books, so it's nice to see her here. It's also good to get a perspective on Aral more sympathetic than the one we usually get from Miles, for whom his father is a principled but stern authority figure. Reading Shards of Honor this way, it does what the best prequels do: fill in and enhance our understanding of the later-set stories. I found a lot of little moments where one could aha! in seeing how Warrior's Apprentice and Vor Game were set up, not just with the characters of Aral and Cordelia, but also with Bothari, the damaged sergeant who comes across as more villainous in Warrior's Apprentice, but who turns out to have been kind of a victim here.

Like previous Vorkosigan books, this reminded me of the Hornblower series by C. S. Forester. Not so much in terms of content (this was much less of a Hornbloweresque military escapade than the Miles books, it's more of a combination survival-thriller-and-romance), but structure: Shards of Honor was originally published as a single novel, but it was clearly written as three novellas, one about Cordelia and Aral's original meeting and survival trek, one about them meeting again in a war zone, and one about the consequences on Beta Colony of Cordelia's adventures. Each (especially the first two) has a clear beginning and end, and clear character arc all of its own, and could be read entirely satisfyingly without the others; the second even contains bits of dropped-in exposition for people who hadn't read the first part! It's a little jarring in that the book doesn't even use something like "Part Two" to make the transition; you turn a page and suddenly you are months later in a different place reading about a different thing. But aside from that, the device worked for me—nothing in this book wears out its welcome, nor does it feel underdeveloped. Instead you get three solid stories for the price of one!

In terms of series chronology, Shards of Honor is followed by a short story called "Aftermaths" which is available in Cordelia's Honor, the Baen omnibus of Shards of Honor and Barrayar. I was prepared to track it down (it is, for example, available as a free episode of the Escape Pod podcast), but was pleasantly surprised to find it was included in my NESFA Press edition of Shards, a fact completely unmentioned on the NESFA website or the cover or in the introduction of my actual book! I'm glad it was; it's not essential to the ongoing story, but it is an effectively written story of those left behind by war.

Next up in sequence: Barrayar

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Titan: Sight Unseen

Star Trek: Titan: Sight Unseen
by James Swallow

early 2386 (a few months after The Fall)

I remember enthusing to Marco Palmieri about Titan at Shore Leave 2008, calling it my favorite original Star Trek fiction concept. There was a scene in the first or second book (I forget exactly which) that brought it all to life for me: a conversation between a bunch of Titan junior officers at the "Blue Table," where we saw this delightful array of perspectives and ideologies all in play together, all working toward the same goal. Subsequent novels tapped into that too; my particular favorite was Geoff Thorne's Sword of Damocles, but many were good.

Published: 2015
Acquired: February 2022
Read: July 2023

The last few Titan novels, though, have foundered. Seize the Fire was dreadful and Fallen Gods was even worse. The Poisoned Chalice was a good read, but its events promised a big change to the Titan format: the promotion of Will Riker to admiral. What would Titan look like with its lead assuming new responsibilities?

Sight Unseen only kind of answers that question. I don't think it's impossible for a Star Trek series to have an admiral as its lead, but it would have be different from what we are used to. Sight Unseen kind of plays lip service to that, and it informs the character details of the novel in important ways, but not the overall plot. Admiral Akaar pulls Titan off its mission of exploration to serve as Admiral Riker's flag in handling a sector on the Federation frontier... but Riker doesn't do any of the kind of things you might do as an admiral; the ship goes to answer a distress call and does some investigating. Not to complain about what this book isn't and probably isn't even trying to be, but I kept thinking about C. S. Forester's Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies, which really effectively took a captain character and gave him the new problems of admiralcy.

So I am of two minds because in sort of ignoring Riker's promotion, the book sticks closer to the core of what makes Titan appealing, but also it undermines the integrity of the series as it's developing because it is clearly shying away from its own status quo changes. This isn't exactly an "exploration novel" like many Titan books have been, but it does hew closer to the strengths of the Titan series than we've seen since James Swallow's last contribution, 2009's Synthesis. We have mysteries in space, daring rescues, clever problem-solving, good teamwork, and meaningful character conflict all in a fairly slick, well-written package.

Titan goes to rescue another Starfleet vessel that itself was assisting a recently contacted alien race with their new warp drive technology... only it discovers that both have fallen victim to the "Solanae," the mysterious aliens responsible for the events of the TNG episode "Schisms" (one I've never seen, fact fans). The creepy aliens begin preying on Titan's crew, and for Will Riker and Sariel Rager in particular, it brings back some bad memories. Soon, though, things get ever more complicated.

It's one of those books that's filled with little bits that work and all add up to make it fairly effective. Like I said, it doesn't feel like Riker is really doing admirally things... but the book does make good use of his and Captain Vale's new sets of responsibilities as well as Riker's previous experience with the Solanae. Riker is untrusting and paranoid, Vale is more open-minded and idealistic. It's not what we usually expect, but it makes sense for both characters, and it leads to some good conflict and moments between them. Riker getting to meet his own torturer (and what that torturer does) was good, too.

I also liked new characters Ethan Kyzak, a Skagaran rancher, and Sarai, the new executive officer. Kyzak is fun, and gives us a few good moments in the book, and Sarai brings some useful tension to the perhaps overly cozy Titan crew without crossing the line into villainy.

We also get good moments for lots of other Titan characters: Ra-Havreii and Pazlar and Torvig and WhiteBlue and especially Zurin Dakal. Some long-running threads are paid off; I have felt like the minor Titan characters have kind of been in stasis since Synthesis, so it's good to see them in motion again.

There are also lots of great sequences: the away team drifting in space, the creepy action on the Titan against the Solanae replicators, the Titan's purposeful creation of a wormhole, the way the transporter is used as a weapon, the rescue operation from the Solanae prison. Lots of clever, interesting stuff; the book was... well, fun isn't the right word given how grim it could be, but it balances the darkness well with punch-the-air moments.

There's an implacable enemy here, but the book also reaffirms in post–The Fall fashion the return to optimistic Federation values at the same time. This isn't going to be my favorite Titan novel, but it is a solid one, and despite my misgivings about its premise and the series's change of concept, proves that my favorite original Star Trek fiction concept still has legs on it. (I also have a bad feeling it may be the last Titan novel to do that, but I'll try to stay open-minded.)

screencap from "Schisms" courtesy TrekCore

Continuity Notes:

• I feel like, some small mentions aside, you could go straight from The Poisoned Chalice to Sight Unseen. The scenes in the beginning about Riker becoming an admiral and Vale becoming a captain feel like they pick up right from Swallow's previous book, without the events of Absent Enemies and Takedown; it doesn't feel like Riker has done any admiralling or had any meaningful interactions with Vale.
• The book is right to point out that Seasons 4-6 was a pretty creepy time on TNG: Rager mentions "Schisms" and "Night Terrors," but you could add "Violations" and others I'm sure I'm forgetting. (Despite Rager saying "that year," though, "Schisms" and "Night Terrors" are set in 2367 and '69 if you believe the Okuda Chronology, or 2366 and '68 if you believe me.)
• There's a reference to the TNG Dominion War novels by John Vornholt, which surprised me... but I actually feel like I read a different one of those recently. In one of David George's DS9 books? Am I imagining this?
  
• Despite a mention of Vale fighting Remans in Absent Enemies being acknowledged as a mistake (and even deleted from the text, thanks to the magic of ebooks), this book reiterates that she was on the Enterprise-E during Nemesis, despite what we actually saw in A Time for War, A Time for Peace.

Other Notes:

• It was cute to see Starship Spotter established as an in-universe text.
  
• I guess I will never get my dream of a Ravel Dygan / Zurin Dakal team-up, alas.
  
• This is the third Riker story in a row, after Absent Enemies and Takedown, to be a direct sequel to a TNG episode. It's beginning to make the world of Titan feel a bit insular.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Deep Space Nine: The Long Mirage by David R. George III

Twenty Years of Reading Logs, Part 3: DC Comics

Here's the third post in my series examining my reading habits over the past twenty years. This one tackles DC Comics. (That is to say, comics and other books set in the DC universe, and nonfiction about it; I'm not counting other comic books published by DC here.)

I almost did all comics in one post, but I decided my stats broke out enough different DC subseries into their own in order to justify a post just for DC. (My usual rule is to break out a series if I read three or more installments of it, in more than one batch.)

	2003-07	2007-11	2011-15	2015-19	2019-23	TOTAL	PCT
Crisis Crossovers	1	3	36½	11	0	51½	1.8%
Batman	1½	4	19⅓	17½	1	43	1.5%
The Sandman	0	27	9	4	1	41	1.4%
Superman	3½	17	5⅓	3½	½	29⅚	1.0%
Legion of Super-Heroes	0	0	8	13½	6	27½	0.9%
Green Arrow	0	21½	3	1	0	25½	0.9%
Birds of Prey	0	0	15	5	0	20	0.7%
Justice Society	0	1	3	0	10	14	0.5%
Manhunter	0	0	0	5	0	5	0.2%
Blue Beetle	0	0	0	3	0	3	0.1%
The Atom	0	0	0	3	0	3	0.1%
Supergirl	0	0	0	2	1	3	0.1%
Other DC Universe	4	20½	59⅓	34½	12½	129⅚	4.4%
TOTAL	10	94	159	102	31	395½	13.5%
PCT	1.8%	15.4%	23.6%	16.6%	6.4%	13.5%

Sorry for all the fractions. You can thank things like Superman/Batman, Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes, Superman/Batman/Wonder Woman, and Star Trek/Legion of Super-Heroes.

When I was in grad school, I used to request three comic book collections per month from interlibrary loan, like clockwork on the 1st, 11th, and 21st of each month. This was enough to keep me moving steadily, but not so much that it dominated my reading... too much, anyway. These were mostly, though not entirely, DC comics. This would have been something like 2009 to 2017, and indeed, those are the peak months for DC in my reading.

As you can see, I read a few different things in those days:

• Crisis Crossovers: I read all (as of then, anyway) DC's "Crisis" crossovers, including tie-ins: Crisis on Multiple Earths, Crisis on Infinite Earths, Zero Hour: Crisis in Time, Identity Crisis, Infinite Crisis, and Final Crisis. I also would have read some stuff not branded as "Crisis" specifically, but still universe-shattering crossovers; those would just be lumped into the "other DC universe" at the bottom.
• Batman: I read a bunch of "early days" of Batman stuff, working my way from Batman: Year One all the way to Batman: Year 100!
• The Sandman: I started with Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, but then moved on to many tie-ins and spin-offs, like Sandman Mystery Theatre and The Sandman Presents, as well as some of the pre-Gaiman Sandman stuff. Like with Crisis above, "The Sandman" statistic only counts stuff explicitly branded as Sandman; the spin-offs The Dreaming or Dead Boy Detectives, for example, would go under "other DC universe."
• Legion of Super-Heroes: I actually didn't get any Legion comics from ILL... because those I buy! Every six months I read one of my Legion collections. This makes the Legion the only one that really persists beyond when I left UConn in 2017.
• Green Arrow was actually the first superhero I read methodically via ILL. After my friend James loaned me the two Kevin Smith collections, I just kept going. At a certain point I had read every single post-Crisis pre-Flashpoint Green Arrow trade paperback, but I think they've collected some of Mike Grell's stuff since.
• Birds of Prey: Green Arrow introduced me to Black Canary and made me a fan for life, so after finishing with him, I moved on to her, including her co-starring role in this series.
• Justice Society is the DC series other than Legion I've read recently. I am mostly reading it in single issues, but I have picked up a few collections over the past few years.

These days, I read much less DC, and I am trying to buy much less, too, though there are some of their omnibus lines I try to keep up with. I do read an issue of some comic book every morning over breakfast, but since most of those aren't actually "books" per se, they don't get captured by my reading statistics. So having peaked at 2 DC comic collections per month, I'm now down to one every two months.

Discworld: The Shepherd's Crown by Terry Pratchett

The Shepherd's Crown by Terry Pratchett

Published: 2015
Read: May 2023

This is the last Tiffany Aching book and, indeed, the last Discworld book full stop. Like the other late-period Discworld I've read, one senses that it's not Pratchett at the height of his powers—though it is considerably better than the final City Watch novel.

Like all the books, it's about Tiffany's progression into adulthood and responsibility, and also about her connection to her place of origin. Like all Discworld books, it has some brilliant moments... that said, the book doesn't feel totally unified, on either a plot or thematic level. Seemingly important subplots vanish for big chunks; things are set up that go nowhere. Apparently Pratchett would write a complete draft, then go back and flesh it out by adding scenes, and I think you can tell he didn't get all the way through the process here. It's good, and certainly if you've read every other Tiffany book you'll want to read this one, but I think it's not as great as it would have been had Pratchett not been cruelly snatched away from us too soon.

Still, the adventures of the boy witch and his goat were hilarious. And all the stuff about Granny is amazing.

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Armageddon's Arrow

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Armageddon's Arrow
by Dayton Ward

early January 2386

Published: 2015
Acquired: December 2021
Read: July 2023

What's this... a Star Trek book about... exploring space!?

Armageddon's Arrow finally delivers on the premise promised some fourteen books ago(!), that Starfleet would get back to exploration. It's a decently enjoyable book that takes the Enterprise out into a totally new area of space, where they encounter a derelict planet-destroying weapon from a century in the future, its crew still in hibernation. It's got a bit of a classic TNG procedural feel, as the crew works to uncover what it is and what's going on... only then things begins to escalate as the enemy of the civilization who built it turns up and demands it as the spoils of war.

Like Force and Motion, I kept thinking what a strong Star Trek Adventures RPG scenario it would make: it's got basically three acts, and it piles on the complications. My complaint, though, would be that the opening act is a bit of a plod, because the reader knows more than the characters because of a totally unnecessary (and incredibly dull) two-chapter prologue about the launch of the weapon. (Similarly, the back cover probably gives away more than is strictly needed.) Strip that out and you'd have a tighter mystery. I also felt that the book kind of ignored the potential complications at times: I didn't think it was obvious, for example, that Picard ought to hand the Armageddon's Arrow over to the enemy species, but he did; wouldn't timeline contamination worries trump Prime Directive worries? Maybe not, but this is TNG—I expect a nice meeting scene where the characters debate all this! This skipping over of what seems like an interesting decision happens a couple times, and I kept thinking that in my putative STA game, I'd make the players hash this stuff out a bit more. The temporal issues mostly come in form of the characters repeatedly (too repeatedly) worrying about what the DTI will say about this, rather than worrying about what's happening in the present of the story.

Still, it's got some fun twists and turns, and Ward has a good handle on the characters. Nothing here will knock your socks off character-wise, but they also don't feel forgotten as they did in Takedown. Lots of characters have little arcs and stuff to do; it's the first time the TNG books have actually felt like an ongoing series since Losing the Peace! Hopefully we can get more of this going forward. I found that I'd actually missed T'Ryssa, for example, and Tamala Harstad has more to do here than in all her previous appearances put together. That said, some of the new characters are still a bit nothingburger (who cares about Dina Elfiki? and I guess only Una could make me care about Aneta Šmrhová). On the other hand, Worf gets some truly hilarious one-liners; my poor wife had to listen to me try to explain the one about time travel.

So yeah, I don't think this will set the world on fire... but if I wanted my world set on fire, to be honest, I wouldn't be reading Star Trek books! This is largely what I want out of my tie-in fiction, and I look forward to more TNG books in this vein.

Continuity Notes:

• The reference to the events of Takedown is so vague it seems pretty clear that Dayton Ward had literally no idea what it was about.
• The book carefully references a bunch of previous planet-killer-focused stories: "Devices and Desires" from Constellations, Vendetta, and Before Dishonor. Perhaps a bit too carefully; I got confused by the detailed recap of Vendetta, and I've read it. (Though summarizing Vendetta after summarizing Before Dishonor was disorienting.) The book even claims the idea that the Preservers built the doomsday machine (from Vendetta) is still the going theory; I'd thought modern Star Trek fiction had been a bit more attentive to the fact that the only confirmed Preserver intervention in canon was in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, not the one hundred thousand years ago that the planet-killer dates from, so I was a bit surprised to read this.

Other Notes:

• Picard lampshades that the Xindi weapon test in "The Expanse" makes absolutely no sense, which amused me.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Titan: Sight Unseen by James Swallow

The Kindergarten Trap

Son One turned five this summer, which means that this fall he began attending... kindergarten! It has been an adjustment; there has been a lot of complaining from him about how little playing he gets to do.

That said, his most consistent complaint is that he has to raise his hand to talk. Torture!

A couple weeks ago (I'm writing this back in September, but stockpiling it for the far future), I attended the "curriculum night" for his school, where his kindergarten teacher and the one from the room next door teamed up to explain what the kids were doing and what the expectations were.

Well I personally have not thought about kindergarten since I was last in it—that is to say, thirty-two years ago. If you are in a similar boat, let me tell you: kindergarten has gotten intense. The other teacher kept saying, "I've been teaching thirty years. Back then, kindergarten was naps and playing with blocks." They do not nap anymore. Indeed, their time seems to be strictly regimented. Reading, math, social studies, science. I think she said 60 minutes of math per day!? They are of course taking standardized tests. The teachers showed off some of the things they would be expected to read by year's end, which seemed fairly ambitious. Then they said the kids should be doing twenty minutes of homework per night!

While one parent raised his hand and asked when he would be told if his child wasn't reaching their benchmarks(!), I was furiously googling "has kindergarten gone too far" on my phone. The answer seems to be "yes," according to many experts, anyway. The drilling of worksheets diminishes the play-based learning that is actually beneficial to kids at that age. The teachers themselves pointed out that kids can often end the day tired, and especially during the first couple weeks, Son One was often complaining about how tired he was. There are studies showing that homework in elementary school has little actual effect on learning.

The thing is, though, that I mostly approach this as the kind of teacher that I am. I teach college-level writing, and writing is mostly dependent on reading. And have my students become better readers in my fifteen years of teaching? No—as any college instructor will tell you they have, if anything, gotten worse. In fact, by the time students get to high school they seem to be doing much less reading than was the norm when I was in school; here in Tampa we recently had a brouhaha about teaching Shakespeare, and the superintendent sent out a message to parents to reassure them, "many of our high school students may read one full novel" each year. One full novel!? Wow!

So what is all this in aid of? Hitting reading so hard in kindergarten isn't paying off thirteen years later.

I think like many things in education, it may be trying to solve curricularly what is really a cultural problem. But that seems like a post for another time.

Reading Roundup Wrapup: October 2023

Pick of the month: Galaxy Awards 1 edited by Latssep and Francesco Verso. To be honest, bit of a rum month. Not that this anthology was bad—it had four strong stories—but I don't think it would have won in a different month. But as you'll see, I didn't read much this month!

All books read:

1. Galaxy Awards 1: Chinese Science Fiction Anthology edited by Latssep and Francesco Verso
2. Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson, illustrated by John R. Neill
3. Legion of Super-Heroes: Before the Darkness, Volume Two by Gerry Conway, Roy Thomas, Paul Levitz, Steve Ditko, Frank Chiaramonte, Bruce Patterson, Carmine Infantino, et al.
4. Cybermen: The Ultimate Comic Strip Collection: Collected comic strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine by Alan Barnes, Andrew Cartmel, Mike Collins, Steve Dillon, Martin Geraghty, Scott Gray, David Lloyd, Alan McKenzie, Mike McMahon, Steve Moore, Grant Morrison, Paul Neary, Steve Parkhouse, John Ridgway, Adrian Salmon, et al.
5. The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber
6. Power Girl Returns by Leah Williams, Marguerite Sauvage, and Vasco Georgiev 

Low month! A couple long books (Galaxy Awards 1, The Wanderer, and the book I am wrapping up now), plus we went camping and not only did that mean no reading for a whole weekend, but also I kind of lost momentum upon our return.

All books acquired:

1. The Scalawagons of Oz by John R. Neill
2. Lucky Bucky in Oz by John R. Neill
3. Power Girl Returns by Leah Williams, Marguerite Sauvage, and Vasco Georgiev 

Thankfully, a correspondingly small number of acquisitions.

Currently reading:

• The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker
• The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 7 edited by Neil Clarke
• Elantris: Tenth Anniversary Author’s Definitive Edition by Brandon Sanderson
• The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume Two: Second Variety by Philip K. Dick 

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 2)

The Privilege of the Happy Ending: Stories by Kij Johnson

The Privilege of the Happy Ending: small/medium/large stories by Kij Johnson

Kij Johnson is a writer I don't know as well as I might like. That is to say, I read and enjoyed The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, and I think I have read some of her short fiction, but what I know of her makes me think I would like her a lot. So I was glad to get the opportunity to pick up a copy of The Privilege of the Happy Ending from Small Beer Press, which collects a bunch of her short fiction from the past decade.

Collection published: 2023
Contents originally published: 2012-23
Acquired: July 2023
Read: September 2023

Almost all the stories here focus on animals, and many of the stories use what we would recognize as postmodern or self-reflexive techniques. So, they may be a bit of an acquired taste for some readers—but for me, it is the kind of taste I have indeed acquired. I liked "Tool-Using Mimics," which offers a number of different explanations for a photograph of a girl with octopus tentacles; "Five Sphinxes and 56 Answers," which focuses on deconstructing the story of the sphinx as well as a young girl obsessed with the sphinx; and all three of the "Certain Lorebooks for Apartment Dwellers," which chronicle magical symbols, strange beasts, and bizarre dreams while also telling in brief snippets stories about relationships. I will say that Johnson has her go-to techniques in her stories, and for me this meant that when some concept or idea or trope turned up two times in rapid succession, it made me like the weaker implementation of it less than I might have had I read it in isolation. For example, I didn't really get into "Butterflies of Eastern Texas." The upside of a single-author collection is seeing how a writer develops a theme; the downside, I suppose, is that you might get tired of it.

There are only a couple stories I didn't get on with. "Coyote Invents the Land of the Dead" took me three tries to get through, and I never did figure out what was going on. "The Ghastly Spectre of Toad Hall" is a The Wind in the Willows sequel; I have only the vaguest memories of that book, which didn't help, but its anthropomorphic animals are an ill fit among the strange and uncanny animals of the rest of the collection. It might be good, but this is the wrong context for it.

I was glad for the chance to reread "The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe," and I found even more to enjoy in its depiction of middle age than I did the first time. Of all the stories in the book, this one engenders thoughts of a sequel: what would it be like for someone from a dreamworld to go on a quest in our world? But perhaps that's better left imagined. (This novella on its own makes the book good value for money; Tor.com sells it on its own for $15 in hard copy, but you can buy this whole collection for $17!) I particularly liked the volume's final story, "The Privilege of the Happy Ending," which is about a girl and her talking chicken trying to survive an infestation of weird, bizarre animals. As the title points out, it demonstrates how happy endings are privileges, by sometimes choosing to tell you what happens to side characters, and sometimes not. Not all stories have happy endings, but how happy an ending is depends on where you stop and who you care about.

So while I wish this was both a little less repetitive (surely Johnson has something to say about topics other than animals?) and a little more cohesive ("Toad Hall" is an odd fit, but to be honest, so is "Vellitt Boe"), it's a good way to be exposed to a master of the craft of short fiction. My links above indicate most of the stories can be found online... but though you could do that, will you? Read them in this book. As for myself, I will be seeking out her earlier At the Mouth of the River of Bees now.