The Crew: Big Trouble in Little Mogadishu by Christopher Priest, Joe Bennett, Danny Miki, et al.

After his run on Black Panther came to an end, Christopher Priest began a short-lived ongoing called The Crew, a team book that included one-time Black Panther Kasper Cole (now the White Tiger) among its members. I wasn't super into Kasper part of Priest's Black Panther run, but The Crew was included in the Christopher Priest Black Panther: The Complete Collection volumes, which you can read for free on Hoopla, so I figured why not read it?

from The Crew #2

It was kind of worth reading, kind of not. Certainly it wasn't worth it for Kasper, who continues to spin his wheels as a character, arguing with his girlfriend and expectant mother of his child, chasing promotion so he can afford to support his mother and girlfriend. The ongoing thing about his dad wasn't picked up at all, and by the end of these seven issues, Cole isn't really anywhere we haven't already seen him.

from The Crew #4

The other three members of the "Crew" (never called that in the story) are James "Rhodey" Rhodes, the one-time Iron Man and War Machine; Junta, a superpowered information broker whose mom is a robot who I think appeared in one issue of Black Panther vol. 3; and Josiah X, the son of a black man who was experimented on during World War II in an attempt to create super-soldier serum. The first few issues look at each man in turn; the "team" really only kind of comes together with issue #7, when of course the title was cancelled. Junta probably could have become fun with time, but the real standouts here are Rhodes and Josiah.

Rhodes I don't think I have ever actually read a comic about before, but I liked what Priest did with him here; a man who use to be on top but has found himself at the bottom trying to climb his way back up using his sense of justice as a guide. I don't know how the character is in actual Iron Man comics, but I would read more stories about him if they were like this.

from The Crew #6

Josiah X (called "Justice" in behind-the-scenes information but not in the actual book) is a really interesting character, a black Muslim community organizer who dons Captain America iconography. Can such a man reconcile the contradictions that led to his own existence? How can he wear the emblem of the country that treated him and his father so disposably? Priest and artist Joe Bennett do their best work with Josiah, and unfortunately only scratch the surface of the character. I gather he hasn't really appeared since, but I am curious to pick up the Captain America: The Truth miniseries where his father originally appeared.

As I've alluded to, it's a bit of a slow burn, which was probably a mistake for a book that bundled together a bunch of has-been and also-ran characters; I cannot imagine it sold well at all. I enjoyed it well enough, but by the end of seven issues, I wasn't convinced we needed seven issues to see the Crew take down some pretty ordinary gangsters. A decent read, but not really for Black Panther–related reasons. I gather the Crew returns during Ta-Nehisi Coates's run, but not with this line-up.

from Black Panther 2099 #1

I also read the 2004 Black Panther 2099 one-shot, set in (as always) a dystopian future. T'Challa is dead, his lineage has ended, and Wakanda is invaded by Latveria. A new Black Panther must step into the vacancy at long last. Not much of interest actually happens; the guy has basically no personality and no struggles. It ends with a twist, but it's a pointless twist if there's no more stories about this set-up, which of course there weren't.

Big Trouble in Little Mogadishu originally appeared in issues #1-7 of The Crew (July 2003–Jan. 2004). The story was written by Christopher Priest; penciled by Joe Bennett; inked by Danny Miki (#1-7) and Rich Perrotta (#7); lettered by Ken Lopez (#1-2), Rus Wooton (#3-5), and Dave Sharpe (#6-7); and edited by Tom Brevoort. It was reprinted in Black Panther: The Complete Collection, Volume 4 (2016), which was edited by Mark D. Beazley.

Black Panther 2099 was originally published in one issue (Nov. 2004). The story was written by Robert Kirkman, illustrated by Kyle Hotz, colored by Jose Villarubia, lettered by Dave Sharpe, and edited by Tom Brevoort.

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE

Antkind by Charlie Kaufman

Antkind by Charlie Kaufman

I keep trying to explain this book to people. On its surface, it's simple. Film critic B. Rosenberger Rosenberg discovers a film that's three months long (including breaks for bathroom, meals, and sleep), stop-motion animation that took decades for its creator to complete—and it's the greatest film he's ever seen, it's going to make his career. Except, in a freak accident, the only copy is destroyed, and he must try to recreate it through hypnosis as his life falls apart.

Originally published: 2020
Acquired: December 2023
Read: January 2024

But that's barely it. Narrator B. is neurotic, prone to overthinking things in a way that reminds me of a lot of mid-to-late-century American literary fiction that I haven't actually read, like David Foster Wallace or Thomas Pynchon. Every exchange is excruciatingly overthought. The book is full of weird sidebars and extended digressions, sideplots that seemingly have nothing to do with the book's ostensible main thrust, like B.'s romantic pursuit of a woman he meets at the hypnotist, his exchanging of apartments with a neighbor who does advertising videos for fast-food chain Slammy's, or B. being visited in his dreams by a "Brainio" filmmaker from the future who wants him to novelize her film before she makes it. And that barely scratches the surface.

On LibraryThing, Antkind has one one-star review and one five-star one, perhaps the epitome of "mixed." But the book is over seven hundred pages long, and I feel certain you cannot write a seven-hundred page novel that will please everyone. Even if a reader likes what it is doing, will they like it being done that much? It took me just over a week to read it, and I found that in each chunk of 80-90 pages, I found something to enjoy, even if much else that was happening was inscrutable or dull. Antkind could easily be pompous or dull or pretentious, but it's saved from such a fate by how funny it is. Kaufman is very frequently laugh-out-loud hilarious. There are a lot of good Trump jokes, but there's tons of fun stuff here.

Does it all add up? I am not so sure. Perhaps no seven-hundred-page novel does. Antkind surely is a foremost example of Henry James's "large loose baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary." But I found a lot to like here even if I didn't always love it. Much like the film the novel ostensibly is about, Antkind cannot be described, only experienced, and any discussion of it can scratch the surface at best. Perhaps derivative, but enjoyable enough to be worth it.

Reading The Runaway in Oz Aloud to My Son

The Runaway in Oz by John R. Neill
edited and illustrated by Eric Shanower

There are a number of Oz books that some fans call "quasi-canonical"; that is to say, they have some sort of claim to official status, but they are not part of the "Famous Forty" (the novels from the original publisher(s) of the series). For many, it's that they were written by a Famous Forty author, but released by a different publisher. It has been my intention to incorporate those stories in me and my son's marathon through the Oz books—but where they ought to have been published, not where they were.

Originally published: 1995
Acquired: July 2022
Read aloud: January–February 2024

The Runaway in Oz was intended as the Oz book for 1943, but John R. Neill died before he finished editing the manuscript or even started doing the illustrations; the publisher opted to forego an Oz book for the year, and the next would not appear until 1946. In 1995, however, Books of Wonder finally published the book with the blessing of Neill's family, edited and illustrated by contemporary Oz superstar Eric Shanower. I opted to read this to my son following on from Lucky Bucky as if it was the Oz book for 1943. By the time we got to 1995, I am not so sure he would remember who, say, Jenny Jump was!

In some ways, this is probably the best of John R. Neill's four Oz books. In a comment on the late, lamented Tor.com, editor Eric Shanower says one of the things he did was "[t]ake out whatever made no sense"—in a John R. Neill book this could, of course, be quite a lot, and Runaway certainly has a cohesion lacking in, say, Wonder City or Scalawagons of Oz. It has two clear, parallel plots in the classic Baum/Thompson fashion, one about Scraps running away from the Emerald City and one about Jenny Jump, Jack Pumpkinhead, and the Wogglebug trying to find her. Yet it still has that John R. Neill fancifulness, with details such as the Wogglebug literally creating a castle in the air while he dreams—one he intends to use to take a vacation!

The best part of the book is probably the beginning, where Scraps antagonizes in turn Jellia Jamb, the Tin Woodman, and Jenny Jump. Convinced everyone is "mean" for simply telling her to behave herself, she resolves to run away. It's a very child-like, very accurate response, and it led to some good moments with my five-year-old, who likes to declare that I am mean whenever I enforce a rule or boundary, no matter how gently I do it. Were Jellia or Jenny being mean to Scraps, I asked? No, he declared. Hmmmm... Will this lesson sink in? Well, I am less sure about that.

You might think, then, that the book would end with Scraps learning to accept some responsibility for her actions, but this only kind of happens. There is a great scene where Scraps returns to the Emerald City, seemingly in prisoners' garb (a sheet, in a callback to Patchwork Girl), but I feel like an author who was not John R. Neill could have pulled things together a bit more strongly. I do like the somewhat Ozzy moral that sometimes it's right to run away, but it does seem to me that Scraps largely gets away without actually learning anything even if she does inadvertently face some consequences.

So the book was lively and focused, but not always totally successful at what it seemed like it was doing, if that makes sense. And while it certainly had a coherence lacking in Wonder City, Wonder City was so manic it almost gets away with its many faults, which isn't quite the case here.

Eric Shanower illustrates, and it's certainly a beautiful edition. Shanower's character designs are clearly influenced by Neill's, but he has a somewhat different style, with a tightness of line that makes the weirdness of what he's drawing seem more real. This being a Neill novel, there's a lot of fanciful imagery, and Shanower does a great job with it; probably my favorite was the army of quinces! The flat people were also pretty great. 

I could also detect (so I believe) a bit of fannishness in Shanower's editing. This is the first book to get east and west right since Ruth Plumly Thompson took over, and there's an extended passage of exposition reversing Jenny Jump's "lobotomy" from Wonder City. Actually, I very much enjoyed Shanower's Jenny, particularly all her costume and hairstyle changes. It's a shame Neill's work is still under copyright, because that means Jenny (and Number Nine) haven't been available to other authors, and they're strong characters I'd like to see in other Oz stories. I also like the continuing friendship between Scraps and Jack Pumpkinhead.

Things my son really did not like: the stressful sequence where the air castle disintegrates, Scraps being turned all black by the quinces. But on the whole, he reported enjoying this one. Both of us like the Patchwork Girl a lot, so perhaps we were destined to! Even the three-year-old is into her; whenever we read a chapter at bedtime, he would point to the cover and declare, "Scraps is rainbow. Scraps is rainbow!" A couple weeks later, I asked him if he remembered what color Scraps was and he said "Scraps is rainbow... but she turned black!" So the books are starting to sink in for him as well.

Next up in sequence: The Magical Mimics in Oz

Symphony for the City of the Dead by M. T. Anderson

Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad
by M. T. Anderson

To be honest, there's very little chance I would normally pick up a biography of Dmitri Shostakovich, even though such a topic does sound interesting in a hypothetical sense; I simply just don't read a ton of nonfiction. But tell me about a biography of Dmitri Shostakovich written by the best YA author currently working, M. T. Anderson, and of course I'm all over it.

Originally published: 2015
Acquired: April 2017
Read: August 2023

This takes in Shostakovich's whole life, but mostly focuses on the siege of Leningrad, when the Nazi army cut the city off from any supply lines; it chronicles Shostakovich's life up until that point but also provides a lot of historical information about the history of the Soviet Union for context. Even though it's for a YA audience, I found it totally successful for an adult audience, and even ended up recommending it to my father, a WWII buff but definitely not a YA reader, who enjoyed it so much that a couple months later he was citing facts he learned from it back to me, having forgotten I was the one who recommended it to him to begin with. Anderson even does some original research here; poking around on Google Scholar, it seems that academics are citing his work in peer-reviewed journals already.

The book is pretty horrifying. WWII-era Soviet Russia was a pretty awful place to live even before the Nazis showed up. Anderson does a great job exploring the intersection of politics and art, how art is shaped by politics and works to defy it. Anderson writes about music beautifully (no easy feat!) and really gets us into the head of Shostakovich in particular and the world of Russia in general; I learned a lot about Stalin from this, actually. Overall, excellent work, and a good example of why M. T. Anderson is one of my favorite authors full stop, not just one of my favorite YA authors.

Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, Nos. X–XII (Chs. 24-32)

The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens

Originally published: 1843-44
Acquired: December 2023
Installments read: February 2024

No. X (Chs. 24-26)
I read this installment over a week ago and forgot to write it up. I seem to have blanked it all from my memory.

No. XI (Chs. 27-29)
"Pip's our mutual friend." One future Dickens protagonist and one future Dickens title, both in one line of dialogue.

No. XII (Chs. 30-32)
FOR GOD'S SAKE CUT BACK TO THE AMERICA PLOTLINE, CHARLES, I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE. WHY OH WHY WOULD YOU HAVE THREE WHOLE INSTALLMENTS OF MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT WITH NO MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT!?

This is the sixth in a series of posts about Martin Chuzzlewit. The next covers installment nos. xiii–xviii. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Nos. I–III (chs. 1-8)
2. No. IV (chs. 9-10)
3. Nos. V–VII (chs. 11-17)
4. No. VIII (chs. 18-20)
5. No. IX (chs. 21-23)
   

Mighty Marvel Masterworks: The Black Panther, Volume 1 by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Roy Thomas, John Buscema, et al.

Mighty Marvel Masterworks Presents The Black Panther, Volume 1: Collecting The Fantastic Four Nos. 52-54, 56, Tales of Suspense Nos. 97-99, Captain America No. 100, The Avengers Nos. 52, 62, 73-74 & Daredevil No. 52

Collection published: 2022
Contents originally published: 1966-70
Read: January 2024

Writers: Stan Lee, Roy Thomas

Pencilers: Jack Kirby, John Buscema, Barry Windsor-Smith, Frank Giacoia
Inkers: Joe Sinnott, Syd Shores, Vince Colletta, George Klein, Johnny Craig, Sam Grainger, Tom Palmer
Letterers: Sam Rosen, Art Simek

I've been reading Black Panther comics in original publication order, but read this out of sequence because it's a collection of material from 1966-70 that wasn't released until after I'd read other material from this era. I didn't discover it until I'd got up to the early 2000s; I jumped back to read it after finishing Christopher Priest's run. Confusingly, it's called Mighty Marvel Masterworks Presents The Black Panther, Volume 1 but the stories collected are totally different to those collected in Marvel Masterworks Presents The Black Panther, Volume 1. Not sure why Marvel would have two so similarly titled reprint series, but I'm sure it must make sense to someone. (Note that the marketing calls this volume Claws of the Panther, but that title doesn't actually appear on the cover, title page, or copyright page of my digital copy from Hoopla.)

The story collects the Black Panther's original two appearances in Fantastic Four #52-53 (which I had already read, so I did not reread), plus the half of #54 where he appears (which I had not), and then goes on to reprint early guest appearances alongside the FF, Captain America, and Daredevil, as well as a few of his appearances with the Avengers. The first few stories are all Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, then Roy Thomas takes over as writer with John Buscema on pencils.

Playing baseball against Mr. Fantastic doesn't really seem fair.
from The Fantastic Four vol. 1 #54 (script by Stan Lee, art by Jack Kirby & Joe Sinnott)

Fantastic Four #54 and 56 are largely curios. It is neat to see the Black Panther play baseball against the Fantastic Four, but you have to suffer through a lot of blather about the Inhumans even though it's only ten pages long; the Panther doesn't really appear in #56, which is about Klaw returning to bedevil the Fanstastic Four. This has some amazing Kirby art but the writing is not Stan's finest, with a pathetic Sue and some pretty random resolutions. The Captain America comics didn't do much for me either, they are very much Captain America stories with Black Panther as a supporting character who could pretty much be any other hero, though I guess it shows that Marvel were interested in keeping the character going.

Who was this loser, anyway?
from The Avengers vol. 1 #52 (script by Roy Thomas, art by John Buscema & Vince Colletta)

Then Roy Thomas takes over, and he clearly is very interested in the character because we suddenly get him and his world fleshed out a lot more. The Avengers stories weren't great, but were noteworthy. We get the story where Black Panther joins the team, the first appearance of Man-Ape, and a two-parter that introduces singer Monica Lynne, Panther's future fiancée who would play a big role in Don McGregor's and Christopher Priest's work. The story where T'Challa joins the team is weird; it has him in a mask where his lower face is visible, and he's not called "the Black Panther," his codename is just "the Panther." Clearly this minor attempt at a revamp did not stick—to the extent that in that in one of the later stories we're told he deliberately hides that he is Black so that he can avoid judgments on his skin color! The story has him being framed for murdering the Avengers, but the eventual explanation for what happened makes little sense. It is pretty easy to read this story with Priest's retcon that T'Challa only joined the Avengers to spy on them in mind, too.

You would've been happier in the long run if you'd stayed out of it, Monica.
from The Avengers vol. 1 #74 (script by Roy Thomas, art by John Buscema & Tom Palmer)

The two-parter was pretty interesting at first; Black Panther and Monica get mixed up in the attempt of white nationalists to stir up racial animus. Initially, it seems like it's about them taking down the kind of people who might say things like "pointing out racism is the real racism!" Pretty woke, Roy Thomas! But then we learn that the white nationalist demagogue and the Black anti-racism crusader are part of the same evil organization, working together to undermine America. Not so woke after all. But you can see why Monica stuck around; she instantly pops off the page.

Is this that "concrete city" they're always talking about?
from Daredevil vol. 1 #52 (script by Roy Thomas, art by Barry Smith & Johnny Craig)

The best story here is the Daredevil one. It's a bit nonsensical in parts, but it's a neat story about the police trying to find Daredevil (he's been poisoned) but mistaking Black Panther for him, and so T'Challa helps them find Daredevil. Barry Windsor-Smith does some of the best non-Kirby art in this book, good atmosphere. We don't learn much about Black Panther here but it is well told.

So overall, a decent collection to read if you want a sense of where the Black Panther came from.

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE

How Often Do I Agree with the Hugo Electorate?

In my recent post comparing my final ballot to the winners of the 2023 Hugo Awards, I noted that my first place choice and the actual final winner were the same in four of the nine categories in which I vote. I then speculated, "I think this is a record."

But was it a record? Good question! I trawled backward through my old posts to see how often the broader Hugo electorate had made the right choice (i.e., my choice).

Here's how many categories my first-place choice and the voters' has coincided in each year:

• 2017: 4 (Novelette / Short Story / Related Work / Dramatic Long)
• 2018: 1 (Short Story)
• 2019: 1 (Dramatic Long)
• 2020: 1 (Novel)
• 2021: 4 (Short Story / Related Work / Dramatic Short / Lodestar)
• 2022: 1 (Lodestar)
• 2023: 4 (Novel / Short Story / Related Work / Dramatic Long)

Far from being a record, four matches is my second most common result! I had not realized that my distribution was so sharply bimodal; either I agree in one category or four. Never zero, two, or three!

I then wondered how I did more broadly. To figure this out, I looked at whatever I ranked first and then averaged where it ranked in the final results. That is to say, if my picks for first came in fifth, sixth, first, first, sixth, first, first, and second, that would average out to 2.9. A lower score is better; thus on this graph, I've flipped things around.

You'll see that 2023 actually is a record at 2.3; I've never been so consistently in agreement with the other voters. My low point was 2019; I don't know what was wrong with everyone else. 

I am not sure what we can infer from this: it may be that in years where I match up well, there's a weak finalist pool and thus only one obvious winner for me and everyone else.

Having compiled this data, it was then easy to also figure out what was the category where my tastes are most often aligned with the broader electorate's:

I didn't find anything too surprising here. Dramatic Long usually has one very good choice and a bunch of Marvel movies, so I am not surprised to see I usually line up well here. I have picked the eventual first-place winner three out of seven times.

Two categories do much worse on a regular basis. I have never picked a first-place winner in Graphic Story; indeed, one time my first-place pick finished in second, and all other times fourth or sixth. But it is a category usually made up of a bad set of finalists (in my opinion), and one where my tastes clearly do not line up with others' at all. Novella fares even worse, with my first-place pick coming in fifth on average. I have never picked the winner, and my pick for the winner has come in sixth three times and in seventh once! (In 2019, I liked the set of finalists so little that I voted No Award in first.) Though apparently me and the voters do pretty well for Short Story,* when it comes to novella-length fiction, we just do not get on.

Which is to say, the electorate loves Tordotcom novellas and I do not.

* My first-place choice has come in first four out of seven times, actually, which is my best result for any category, but this is counterbalanced by my first-place choices coming in fourth, seventh, and fifth in the three other years.

Mistress Masham's Repose by T. H. White

Mistress Masham's Repose by T. H. White

One of my favorite pieces of writing about what science fiction is and what it does comes from China Miéville's introduction to H. G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon. Miéville argues that science fiction is not really about the future: "It is, like any worthwhile literature, 'about' now, using a technique of rationalized (rather than free-for-all) alienation from the everyday to structure its narratives and investigate the world." But, he points out, there's also a pitfall if you go too far in the other direction: "When 'mainstream' writers dip their toes into the fantastic, they often do so with the anxiety of seriousness, keen to stress that their inventions are really 'about' other, meaningful things." What makes the fantastic work for its readers and writers, he claims (and I agree), is that it does both at once. You get a metaphor for the present day but within the world of the story, it's literally true (unlike in mimetic fiction, where metaphor is just metaphor), and that's pleasurable. He uses Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels as an example of this:

In Swift, for example, Gulliver's journey to Brobdingnag [...] clearly casts a remorseless light on Swift's own society; it also, however, features a sword fight with a giant wasp, a passage the enjoyment of which depends on the specific uncanny/​estranging impact of literalizing the impossible: simply, it is a great, weird idea. Weirdness is good to think with, and is also its own end.

Miéville goes on to mention "the pleasure he [Wells] took in his oddities" as one of the things that distinguishes First Men from being only satire.

It's been a long time since I actually read Gulliver's Travels, not since childhood, but it's my memory that though certainly Brobdingnag, Lilliput, and all the other fantastic countries Gulliver visits are literally true, and the book has certainly provided its share of "great, weird" imagery—that iconic image of Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians, which is on so many book covers and probably appears in every screen adaptation—Swift's emphasis is more on the social satire than the "great, weird" ideas. Like, sure we get swordfights with giant wasps and such, but the point of the novel is to see our human foibles writ large and writ small and writ equine. (I, for one, always though the journey to the place where they got electricity out of cucumbers was underrated.)

Published: 1946
Read: December 2023

Mistress Masham's Repose is a 1946 children's fantasy novel by T. H. White, best known as the writer of The Once and Future King. It's clearly intended to be read aloud (the name of the dedicatee, Amaryllis Virginia Garnett, is even mentioned by the narrator a few times), though in that very British way where there are passages that the adult reader will get much more out of than the child listener, a lot like Kingsley's The Water-Babies. I found it on my wife's shelves and decided it looked interesting enough to read; the book is a sort-of sequel to Gulliver's Travels.

The premise is that there's a young orphan girl named Maria who lives on the rambling country estate that she inherited from her parents, but does not have the money to maintain. Her legal guardian is a cruel vicar, and her day-to-day guardian is an even crueler governess. Her only friends are the estate's sole servant, a cook, and a local absent-minded professor of classics. One day, exploring an island on the estate, she finds a colony of Lilliputians, brought to England and forgotten about, where they've been living for centuries in secret.

The pleasure of the book is that it takes the "great, weird idea" of the Lilliputians very seriously, probably more seriously than Swift himself did. Anticipating books like Mary Norton's The Borrowers (1952) and John Peterson's The Littles (1967), the book gives us a group of little people operating in our world, and asks how they might survive, what they might to do, say, fish in a world where the fish are to them as whales are to us, or how they might be able to intervene to battle against human adults.

The book not only gives the reader this pleasure of the fantastic, it also explores how the characters themselves experience that pleasure. There's one extended sequence where the Professor imagines what he would do if they also got hold of a Brobdingnagian giant. What would be the logistics of capturing it? How would you transport it back to England? What would you do with it then? He doesn't go through with any of this, he can't, but it's fun to see him work it all out. In another passage, Maria and the Professor debate if an island could really fly in the way Swift imagined for Laputa. (And the Professor points out "that Dr. Swift was silly to laugh about Laputa. I believe it is a mistake to make a mock of people, just because they think. There are ninety thousand people in this world who do not think, for every one who does, and these people hate the thinkers like poison. [...] Better to think about cucumbers even, than not to think at all." The book is filled with great, quiet observations like this.)

The book also finds limits to literalizing the impossible. Maria, for example, concocts an idea that Lilliputians might be able to fly in toy airplanes, and tries to make it happen. But she is (metaphorically) crashed down to earth when her pilot (literally) crashes down to earth. As she learns, we can have some fantastic imaginings that cannot be well, realized. Realistic concerns get in the way. This is disappointing to Maria, of course, but part of what makes the book pleasurable to us—if the book is to feel real, there need to be some things that cannot happen.

It's also very funny. I was forever quoting bits to my wife (who, if she had actually read the book, did not remember it all). When the Professor tries to get the local Lord Lieutenant to intervene to protect Maria from the cruelty of the vicar and the governess, who have locked her in the estate's torture dungeon, the Lord Lieutenant objects that such things aren't heard of these days:

"But, good Lord, my dear chap, you can't do that sort of thing in the nineteenth century, or the twentieth, or whatever it is. I mean, you take the first two figures, and add one, or subtract one, I forgot which, for reasons I never could fathom, possibly owin' to these X's which those chaps are always writin' on monuments, and then it is different. Now, take horses..."
     "Whether you can or can't, it has been done. I tell you..."
     "My old Grandad, or his grandad, I can't remember which, used to ride a hunter in a long point until it foundered, old boy, died, absolutely kaput. Now you couldn't do that sort of thing nowadays, not in this century, whichever it is, without getting the Society for Cruelty to Animals after you. Absolutely couldn't do it. Not done. Out of date. I heard it was the same with dungeons?"

I mean, it's funny if you like pompous out-of-touch English people going on about things, and I certainly do. The book is is filled with stuff like that.

Overall, Mistress Masham's Repose has good "worldbuilding" (I kind of shudder to apply the term here, but it fits) and good comedy, but also good themes and great hair-raising escapes and dangers and ingenious protagonists. I found it an utterly delightful 250 pages. I don't know if it would work for most readers, but it's the kind of book that felt squarely aimed at me, and all the better for it.

"With the sleekness of the jungle cat whose name he bears, T-Challa - King of Wakanda - stalks both the concrete city and the undergrowth of the Veldt. So it has been for countless generations of warrior kings, so it is today, and so it shall be for the law of the jungle dictates that only the swift, the smart, and the strong survive! Noble champion. Vigiliant protector. BLACK PANTHER"

In 1998, Christopher Priest began as the writer of a new volume on Black Panther for Marvel's "Marvel Knights" imprint; this was, I think, intended as a twelve-issue run and ended up lasting until issue #62 in 2003. Black Panther vol. 3 would introduce a lot of what will be familiar to contemporary viewers of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, including the Dora Milaje, Everett K. Ross (played by Martin Freeman on screen), Wakanda vying for a place in contemporary geopolitics, and the Black Panther's more thoughtful, stoic demeanor.

from Black Panther vol. 3 #10
(script by Priest, art by Mike Manley)

Priest thinks through what it would mean for the Black Panther to be a king—he's not a superhero, though he is a fairly hands-on king. He's not going around recusing babies from trees or even punching supervillains, he's defending a nation from its threats, and he's doing so using political cunning even moreso than superpowers. In order to make this work, we mostly see T'Challa from the outside, usually from the perspective of Everett K. Ross, his liaison in the U.S. Department of State. Ross is meant to provide T'Challa with transportation and assistance during a quick trip to New York City, but ends up embroiled in T'Challa's machinations, which results in things like losing his pants to the demon Mephisto, becoming regent of Wakanda, accidentally offending Bill Clinton by roller-skating through the White House, and being exiled to a U.S. listening post in the Arctic.

from Black Panther vol. 3 #21
(script by Priest, art by Sal Velluto & Bob Almond)

The first twelve issues are almost certainly the highlight. The story is told out of order as Ross attempts to make some kind of sense of everything he's gone through, to little avail; with its out-of-order vignettes, all preceded by some kind of caption, it came across as an attempt to do Quentin Tarantino on the comics page. This is surely one of the most 1990s moves you could pull, and Priest and his ever-changing artistic collaborators pull it off perfectly. I was constantly laughing at the reversals facing Ross, as he confronts his own prejudices about Africa and the increasing series of absurdities he is faced with. Upon reading this series, it became very clear to me why Ross is played by Martin Freeman in the movies, because who does "put upon" better than Martin Freeman, but it also became clear to me that the movies had largely failed to take advantage of the character.

Priest's Panther instantly marked itself as the best run on the character I'd read thus far, taking the best aspects of Don McGregor's run in particular (though we don't spend much time in Wakanda here, Priest very much builds on McGregor's sense of it as a real, complicated place). You can very easily see why it kept getting extended, even though it was apparently always on the verge of cancellation. A revolving door of artists at the series's beginning soon gives way to Sal Velluto and Bob Almond, who illustrated thirty of the series's sixty-two issues, excellently capturing the humanity and the action alike. Priest is always coming up with new spins on old concepts, always keeping things fresh.

from Black Panther vol. 3 #25
(script by Priest, art by Sal Velluto & Bob Almond)

The Dora Milaje are not exactly what they became on screen, not an army of warrior women; here, they're wives of the king, one from each tribe in Wakanda as a way of maintaining political balance. They may only speak to the king (in Hausa) and must defend him with their lives. One of my favorite characters was Chanté Giovanni Brown, a teenager social justice crusader from inner-city Chicago who renamed herself "Queen Divine Justice"... and then learned that as the estranged descendant of a Wakandan tribal leader, she was a new Dora Milaje. I feel like we have really missed out by not getting her on screen.

That said, he perhaps sometimes keeps things too fresh. One gets the sense of a juggler continually adding balls to his act, forgetting to maintain balls he already launched into the air. (Okay, how's that for a metaphor?) Soon there's the Hulk (okay, the bit where Queen Divine Justice bonds with him is cute), and then Power Man and Iron Fist, and there's a crossover with Deadpool (ugh), and a flash-forward to a dystopian Black Panther, and all sorts of other stuff, and I found myself missing Ross and the supporting cast of the book's earlier days, whose stories had more faded away than actually come to an end. Though there's always a lot to like, from, say, issue #30 to 40 especially, I found myself a bit adrift in the book's overcomplications.

Also, suddenly a second T'Challa appears, one written and even drawn in the Jack Kirby adventurer fashion, complete with friend Abner Little. This is hilarious, especially given how much the two Black Panthers like each other, but the mystery of who he is and how he got there is drawn out too long and not really resolved satisfactorily. Like, we get all the answers we need, but the story just kind of fizzles out.

However, with the Enemy of the State II storyline, where Wakanda annexes part of Canada and T'Challa pits himself against Tony Stark, the book showed a marked improvement, again recapturing that energy and focus of the first twelve issues, and then there's a two-parter where the whole cast is inadvertently tossed through time into the Wild West, which is of course hilarious.

from Black Panther vol. 3 #51
(script by Priest, art by Jorge Lucas)

But, having got its mojo back, the book must have seemed in even more danger of cancellation than ever, for with issue #50, it's suddenly drastically retooled. T'Challa is missing, presumed dead,* and the main character is suddenly Kevin "Kasper" Cole, a New York cop who finds a discarded Black Panther suit and begins using it to take down corrupt cops, the whole series suddenly transforming into a seedy crime novel of sorts. Priest does an okay job with it, but it's just never as interesting as what he was doing. Unfortunately (aside from a terrible two-issue fill-in by the usually reliable J. Torres), Kasper is the main character for the rest of the run. He has its moments, but I found his character beats a bit repetitive, and, well, no one is reading Black Panther for a grounded crime thriller about corrupt cops. Kasper briefly counts as a new Black Panther, but by series's end, has become the White Tiger, endorsed by T'Challa and given the heart-shaped herb for his own superpowers.

I read the whole run on comiXology, having got it for free in a sale; it's also been collected as four trade paperbacks called Black Panther: The Complete Collection. The first three volumes collect all of stuff actually focused on T'Challa, and they are well worth your time to pick up. I have a lot of Black Panther comics to go, but it seems unlikely to me that any of them will top this.

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE

* Well, kind of. In one issue we're told he's supposedly dead, in another, we learn he's still a member of the Avengers!

Twenty Years of Reading Logs, Part 6: Nonfiction

Here's the last post of my series that's been celebrating how my reading habits have evolved over two decades. This one will be very short! It covers nonfiction and I (mostly) don't track subcategories when it comes to nonfiction. (I sort of do, in that if I read a nonfiction book about, say, Star Trek, I count it with my Star Trek numbers, not my nonfiction numbers.)

	2003-07	2007-11	2011-15	2015-19	2019-23	TOTAL	PCT
General Nonfiction	27	38	73	46	19	203	6.9%
PCT	4.9%	6.2%	10.8%	7.5%	3.9%	6.9%

What is not very surprising is that my nonfiction peaks in the 2011-15 period, when I was in grad school, and specifically, I am sure it's all down to 2012-13, when I was reading for my doctoral exams, and had to read myriad works of literary criticism and history. I've never read that much nonfiction before or since! I probably should be better about keeping up with my field.

Reading Roundup Wrapup: January 2024

Pick of the month: The Wife in Space by Neil and Sue Perryman. Okay, this is kind of a cheat. I don't think any one volume of The Wife in Space (I read three of them this month, and five of them last) is the best book I read all month... but I do think that as a unit they are the best thing I read in January. Delightful experience reliving the best of what Doctor Who has to offer.

All books read:

1. The Fit One: The Wife in Space, Volume 6 by Neil and Sue Perryman
2. The Court Jester: The Wife in Space, Volume 7 by Neil and Sue Perryman
3. Mighty Marvel Masterworks Presents The Black Panther, Volume 1: Collecting The Fantastic Four Nos. 52-54, 56, Tales of Suspense Nos. 97-99, Captain America No. 100, The Avengers Nos. 52, 62, 73-74 & Daredevil No. 52 by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Roy Thomas, John Buscema, et al.
4. Lucky Bucky in Oz by John R. Neill
5. Black Panther: The Complete Collection, Volume 4 by Christopher Priest, Dan Fraga, Jorge Lucas, Jim Calafiore, Patrick Zircher, Joe Bennett, et al.
6. Antkind by Charlie Kaufman
7. The Crafty Sod: The Wife in Space, Volume 8 by Neil and Sue Perryman
8. Nextwave, Agents of H.A.T.E.: This Is What They Want by Warren Ellis, Stuart Immonen, et al.
9. Nextwave, Agents of H.A.T.E.: I Kick Your Face by Warren Ellis, Stuart Immonen, et al. 
10. Empire of Ivory: Book Four of Temeraire by Naomi Novik
11. Marvel Zombies: Battleworld by Simon Spurrier, Kev Walker, et al.

Okay numbers. I read (or still am reading) a number of long books: Antkind, Empire of Ivory (ish), Martin Chuzzlewit, The Best SF of the Year, so even though my reading has been pretty consistent, I haven't racked up a lot of books... except that my morning comic books have been collected editions (#3, 5, 8-9, 11), which have made up what would otherwise have been a little deficit. (Often my morning comics are single issues, which don't count for my reading statistics.)

All books acquired:

1. Star Trek: The Next Generation: Headlong Flight by Dayton Ward
2. The MTMTE Notebooks: Vol. 3 by James Roberts
3. The MTMTE Notebooks: Vol. 4 by James Roberts
4. The Complete[d] Saucer Country by Paul Cornell, Ryan Kelly, et al.
5. The Norumbegan Quartet, Vol. 3: The Empire of Gut and Bone by M. T. Anderson

Currently reading:

• The Shadow Speaker by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
• The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens
• The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 7 edited by Neil Clarke
• Monsters Unleashed! by Cullen Bunn, Steven McNiven, Greg Land, Leinil Francis Yu, Salvador Larroca, Adam Kubert, et al. 

Up next in my rotations:

1. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Long Mirage by David R. George III 
2. The Pelican History of England: 3. English Society in the Early Middle Ages (1066-1307) by Doris Mary Stenton 
3. The Periodic Table by Primo Levi 
4. The Dispossessed by Szilárd Borbély

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 664 (no change)

Holding steady!

Adventures with the Wife in Space by Neil & Sue Perryman

Adventures With the Wife in Space: Living with Doctor Who
by Neil Perryman
with constant interruptions from Sue Perryman
from an idea that seemed like a good one at the time by Neil Perryman

My wife and I were big fans of the blog Adventures with the Wife in Space, where Doctor Who fan Neil Perryman got his "not-we" wife Sue to watch every episode of classic Doctor Who, from 1963 to 1989. Sue wasn't a fan, but she does teach television production, so she can appreciate it and comment on it interestingly... plus she's quite funny. A book of the blog came out for Doctor Who's fiftieth anniversary, which my wife got me for Christmas that year. In classic Steve Mollmann fashion, I finally got around to reading it just after the sixtieth anniversary (though thankfully before the new edition of the book came out).

Published: 2013
Acquired: December 2013
Read: December 2023

The first half of the book chronicles Neil's life as a fan from childhood and his adult life with Sue, up until the invention of the blog. I can see how if you were not previously invested in Neil and Sue, this might not be super-interesting, but I really enjoyed getting to hear their relationship history spelled out in detail—mostly it had been something you just had to infer from their blog posts before. Neil's name upon meeting Sue was hilarious, and it was great to get the whole living-in-a-caravan story explained. The second half details the blog, how it came about, and how it carried on. Both halves are filled with small excerpts from blog entries.

The whole thing is quite funny, of course, but also somewhat moving. The back cover spells out the book's premise somewhat flippantly: "Neil loves Sue. He also loves Doctor Who. But can he bring his two great loves together?" It's a part of the fan experience that will resonate with any fan, I suspect. One way a fan shows their love is by sharing something they love. But of course other people don't always love what their loved ones love. Longtime readers of my blog know that I introduced my older son to Oz, one of my childhood loves, and over two years later, we're still reading them together. Sometimes it works, and it's magical. But as I write this, I've been thinking about introducing him to Doctor Who... but will he love it? I am honestly a little trepidatious! Neil captures this quite well. He and Sue were married for years before he dared to share what he loved with her... but for them it paid off, and as he tells it, even made their relationship stronger!

Highly recommended if you're a certain type of Doctor Who fan, or even if you just know one. Though you may benefit from reading the blog first. As for me, I'm using the book as a launching-off point for a reread of the blog, in the form of the ebook collections of it I've bought over the years but have never gotten around to reading.

Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, No. IX (Chs. 21-23)

The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens

Originally published: 1843-44
Acquired: December 2023
Installment read: February 2024

No. IX (Chs. 21-23)
Back to Martin in America for these three parts, which are less funny than the previous American ones and thus also less interesting; mostly they are about Martin getting caught up in a land speculation scheme. There are some jokes but they are much less densely packed in, and the book is back to feeling flabby and slow; you always get the point of a scene long before it is over. The satire about the racist, anti-emancipation Americans was pretty potent, though:

It was hastily resolved that a piece of plate should be presented to a certain constitutional Judge, who had laid down from the Bench the noble principle that it was lawful for any white mob to murder any black man; and that another piece of plate, of similar value should be presented to a certain Patriot, who had declared from his high place in the Legislature, that he and his friends would hang without trial, any Abolitionist who might pay them a visit. For the surplus, it was agreed that it should be devoted to aiding the enforcement of those free and equal laws, which render it incalculably more criminal and dangerous to teach a negro to read and write than to roast him alive in a public city.

Alas, it had little to do with Martin.

This is the fifth in a series of posts about Martin Chuzzlewit. The next covers installment nos. x–xii. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Nos. I–III (chs. 1-8)
2. No. IV (chs. 9-10)
3. Nos. V–VII (chs. 11-17)
4. No. VIII (chs. 18-20)
   

Hugos Side-Step: The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume Two

The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume Two: Second Variety
by Philip K. Dick

The second volume of Philip K. Dick's complete short stories has been variously published under the titles Second Variety, We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (not actually included in the 1999 Gollancz edition I have, and confusingly also the title of volume five in the Gollancz editions), and Adjustment Team, and contains stories originally published from 1953 to '55 (the collections overlap in publication date a little bit because they are collected in sequence of composition). I'm reading it as part of my project of reading old Hugo winners and related books; it's a "related book" on the grounds that The Man in the High Castle won the 1963 Hugo and I liked it enough that I've kept going with Dick's stuff since.

Collection published: 1999
Contents originally published: 1953-55
Acquired and read: November 2023

I didn't find this quite as strong as the first volume. There are a lot of fantasy stories in this one, which are less to my taste, and a few too many stories where some spooky happens at the end and then the story stops, also a few too many stories about people exploring space. Which is usually my favorite subgenre of sf, but not one that plays to Dick's strengths. Some are undermined by seventy years of subsequent science fiction: "Second Variety" could be great, but if you've read later stuff, or even just another stuff by Dick, you'll see the twist coming. A similar complaint can be lodged at some of the time travel stuff here. Some of the stories have good concepts but don't totally convince on the worldbuilding, like one about a father in a world where robots do the childrearing... only he's somehow never heard of this dramatic change in social norms, or another about robots that are discriminating against humans, but ends up making everything too easy for a human to push against it.

That said, when Dick hits, he scores. There's some good satire of military imperialism in "Some Kind of Life," where every year some new excuse is thought of for good Terrans to go off to war—for the benefit of the Earth economy, of course. "The World She Wanted" is a weird story about someone convinced she can arrange the world the way she wants... and maybe she really can! "Breakfast at Twilight" is a neat glimpse of an ordinary suburban family suddenly plunged into a world at war. "Human Is" is a little bit predictable but effective all the same, about a man who may have been replaced by an alien. Dick loves this theme, of course; "Human Is" focuses on a wife uncertain about her husband but there's another where the replaced person themself is uncertain. On slightly similar lines, there's "Small Town" about a guy who obsessively builds a model of the town he lives in in his house's basement, taking out his dissatisfaction with his real life on the model...

My favorite here, though, was "The Commuter," where the main character begins slipping into another world, a world where a commuter town was built in the suburbs that never existed in his own. Like Dick's best stories, it captures the unease and uncertainty of modern life.

I read an old winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel every year, plus other Hugo-related books that interest me. Next up in sequence: ...And Call Me Conrad by Roger Zelazny

The 2023 Hugo Awards: Thoughts on the Final Results

Normally I make this post pretty shortly after the results are announced. But one of the things I like to do in it is go over the nominating statistics for each category, commenting just not on what won, but also what was on the longlist.

If you follow the Hugo Awards, you'll know that this year the voting statistics came out pretty shortly after the award ceremony, as normal... but the release of the nominating statistics were dragged out on and on and on.

Well, they finally came out last week, and it was a shitshow. Charlie Stross has a fairly good summary at his blog, but the short short version is that a number of works were eliminated for "eligibility" issues... with absolutely no explanation of what those eligibility issues might actually be. It is pretty hard to infer any explanation other than political censorship, though as Ada Palmer points out at her blog, this was almost certainly preemptive self-censorship rather than any kind of official ruling from the Communist Party of China.

But anyway, at last I am here to tell you what I think of the results, and how they compared to my own votes.

Category	What Won	Where I Ranked It	What I Ranked #1	Where It Placed
Best Novel	Nettle and Bone	1st	Nettle and Bone	1st
Well, thank God sanity prevailed. Legends & Lattes, to the detriment of literature everywhere, made it to second place, but it could have been worst. Famously, this is the category where R. F. Kuang's Babel clearly had enough nominations to make the ballot (it's third on the official report) and was ruled "not eligible" for no reason. A lot of people had been surprised it didn't make the ballot (it had won the Nebula after all) and it turned out there was very much a reason for this. Without this spurious action, The Daughter of Doctor Moreau (which placed fifth) would not have made the ballot. Interesting to note that sixth-place finalist Nona the Ninth actually got the third most nominations (ignoring Babel).
Best Novella	Where the Drowned Girls Go	[UNRANKED]	What Moves the Dead	4th
What Moves the Dead in fourth!??! What the fungus?!!?!! A Wayward Children novella in first!??!??!! Is there something wrong with people?!!?!!??!!! I found this very dispiriting. Note that Drowned Girls actually came in seventh on nominations, only making it onto the ballot because Becky Chambers declined nomination for the second "Monk and Robot" novella. Well, I think anyway. Who knows what the hell is up with these fudged nominating statistics.
Best Novelette	"The Space-Time Painter"	[UNRANKED]	"If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You"	2nd
I know the con was held in China, but it still seems pretty improbable that the winning story was the one with no official English translation! At least "Speaking to God" came in second and "Difference Between Love and Time" last. (The Chinese novella "Colour the World" by Congyun "Mu Ming" Gu received the second-most nominations but was ruled ineligible for no given reason. I have read this and thought it was very good, and it probably would have received my second-place vote if it had been listed.)
Best Short Story	"Rabbit Test"	1st	"Rabbit Test"	1st
Not only did this story justly win first, it's also one of the most decisive victories in Hugo history, getting a majority of first-round votes with no need for instant-runoff voting.
Best Graphic Story or Comic	Cyberpunk 2077: Big City Dreams	5th	Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow	4th
I wrote, "I am going to go out on a limb and claim this will be Tom King's year to finally win it... but he came in sixth last year, so what do I know?" Well, Tom King came in fourth, so I did not know much, and the story that won isn't one I could have predicted at all. At least it wasn't Dune: The Novel: The Film: The Graphic Novel?
Best Related Work	Terry Pratchett: A Life in Footnotes	1st	Terry Pratchett: A Life in Footnotes	1st
I (and everyone else) saw this one coming. I can't argue. The longlist, as usual, looks goofy but the actual final ballot was decent.
Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)	Everything Everywhere All at Once	1st	Everything Everywhere All at Once	1st
Four categories where the voters and I agreed? I think this is a record. Thanks to two ineligibility rulings and one declined nomination, only a couple more nominations would have put ninth-place Ms. Marvel season one on the ballot.
Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)	The Expanse: "Babylon's Ashes"	5th	Stranger Things: "Dear Billy"	3rd
The Expanse always wins, so not too surprising. I would have thought Stranger Things would come in second, but I guess Andor (which did) is more to the core sensibility of the Hugo voter. Last year, I wrote that I was sure a Strange New Worlds episode would make the ballot, but "A Quality of Mercy" was down in tenth, and "Spock Amok" (which I nominated) in twelfth. But surely "Those Old Scientists" will make it next year?
Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book	Akata Woman	3rd	In the Serpent's Wake	4th
A weak ballot this year, so I find it hard to be fussed.

As I am often am, I enjoy the short fiction I get exposed to via the Hugos; doubt I would have come across, say, "Rabbit Test" or "Resurrection" (which I am teaching the morning this posts!) otherwise. But some of the long-form works made this year tough. Hopefully next year the Best Novel, Best Graphic Story, and Best Young Adult Book ballots are stronger.

Oh, and hopefully the concom doesn't preemptively censor the ballot.