Science Fiction and the Hermit Crab

In my immortality Honors class (which is probably due a post of its own, but at this point, I'll just wait until the semester is over), the students read "Lena" last week, which is a short story by Sam "qntm" Hughes that's written in the form of a Wikipedia article. As I prepared to teach it, this got me thinking: was there a term for stories, especially science fiction stories, told in nonnarrative forms? I could think of a couple examples right off the top of my head other than Lena; one was Isaac Asimov's thiotimoline stories, which are written in the form of peer-reviewed chemistry articles, another was Yoon Ha Lee's "Entropy War," which is written in the form of rules for a dice game. Some people love this form: Hughes uses it a lot, actually, so does Lee; among its most famous practitioners is surely Stanislaw Lem, who wrote a number of works of fiction in the form of introductions or reviews for books that did not exist!

I posted on r/PrintSF and r/AskLiteraryStudies asking if anyone else knew a term for these kind of tales; the latter was a dud, but the denizens of PrintSF (my favorite subreddit) came up with a bunch of examples and a couple suggestions for terms.

"Epistolary fiction" was suggested, and as a Victorianist, I am of course very aware of epistolary fiction, but what strikes me about all the examples I came up with is that it's a narrative told through a nonnarrative form. I have long had a fascination with what you might call the "non-novel novel," such as Nabokov's Pale Fire, a novel in the form of a poem with annotations and other critical apparatus. Epistolary fiction uses narrative forms, like letters and diaries, for the most part. (I once tried to do this myself. I began a book in the form of an episode guide to a fictional 1980s BBC science fiction show; my writing group seemed largely baffled but were game for it.)

There's also the term the "false document" story, which is one I'm not very familiar with, to be honest, and I'm trying to track down its precise origin and meaning. I think "false document" probably includes both epistolary fiction and what I'm trying to capture here.

The term I really liked, and had not heard before, so thanks to the PrintSF poster who suggested it, was "hermit crab fiction." If you Google "hermit crab fiction," the top hit is a locked Medium post by Dan Brotzel, but I was able to find it on the Wayback Machine. He defines them as "stories made from found verbal structures such as a shopping list or board game rules or FAQs or even a penalty charge notice," but he's not the originator of the term, which largely seems to be one used by creative writers, not literary critics. He doesn't really explain the term, but I assumed it was something like a story disguising itself by looking like something else.

But through him I was able to trace its origin, which actually comes out of creative nonfiction. Specifically, the term "hermit crab essay" was coined by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola in their textbook Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction (McGraw-Hill, 2005*). They define it as a form of lyric essay that "appropriates other forms as an outer covering, to protect its soft, vulnerable underbelly. It is an essay that deals with material that seems born without its carapace—material that is soft, exposed, and tender, and must look elsewhere to find the form that will best contain it" (111). So in its original concept, the "hermit crab" metaphor was about emotional vulnerability, something of importance to creative nonfiction, I assume, but not necessarily other genres of writing.

The emphasis on nonnarrative form isn't there in this original definition, as they say the "shells" may come "from fiction and poetry, but they also don't hesitate to armor themselves in more mundane structures, such as the descriptions in a mail-order catalog or entries in a checkbook register" (111). So if you're talking about nonfiction, a fictional form is a transformation. As the term has caught on later, though, in its use by fiction writers, it mostly seems to be about nonnarrative forms, as I said above.

They end their section on the hermit crab with this:

Think in terms of transformation. The word itself means to move across forms, to be changed. Think of the hermit crab and his soft, exposed abdomen. Think of the experiences you have that are too raw, too dangerous to write about. What if you found the right shell, the right armor? How could you be transformed? (113)

There's a big emphasis on emotional expression and protection from this transformation. To move back into science fiction, where I started, there's clearly something different at work. "Lena" and the thiotimoline stories and "Entropy War" are not about emotional vulnerability. Indeed, you might argue they're almost about the opposite. There are a lot of these hermit crab sf stories; just while writing this blog post I thought about three more I hadn't before!

I can't find any evidence of previous work on nonnarative forms in sf (which isn't to say it doesn't exist, as I haven't looked very much yet), so it seems to me something worth thinking about and theorizing further.

* At least, 2005 is the copyright date given on my library's first edition copy. The catalog entry, however, includes 2004 in the call number, and some people on the Internet claim it came out in 2003, so who knows when it was actually released.

Black Panther: A Cultural Exploration by Ytasha L. Womack

Black Panther: A Cultural Exploration
by Ytasha L. Womack

I was doing some citation-checking for the academic journal I work for, and one of the essays I was editing cited Ytasha L. Womack's book Afrofuturism; looking her up led me to discover she had recently written this coffee-table book about Black Panther. Given my current project to read through Black Panther comics, it seemed like the kind of thing I ought to read, and so I requested my local library purchase a copy.

Originally published: 2023
Read: February 2024

Black Panther: A Cultural Exploration is divided into seven chapters. Not counting backmatter, the book runs about 160 pages, and it reads quickly, as it is profusely illustrated; I got through it in one day. The first chapter is the longest, a fifty-page history of the comics character from Lee and Kirby through McGregor and Priest up to Hudlin and Coates. Chapters two through six each take an aspect of the character and his world and contextualize it in African culture, African-American history, and Afrofuturism, exploring concepts such as black panthers, African religion, utopia, warrior women, and so on.

It's neat but I often wanted more depth. Even at fifty pages, the history of the character just skims the surface. The other chapters are much shorter, and I often found myself thinking there had to be more to say about, for example, Black Panther and actual African religion, than we were getting here. But perhaps then this wouldn't be the book that it is—I am a hardcore comics fan and a literary scholar, and I don't think this book is aimed at either of those small audiences, much less both of them!

As a comics fan, I found some aspects of the books a little frustrating; references to specific issues don't always give dates, and there are, for example, six different issues called Black Panther #6, so clarification is pretty important. Sometimes comics are cited by story arc titles, which isn't very precise.  At one point the book says Reginald Hudlin wrote Shuri, but he did not; he wrote Black Panther vol. 5, which starred Shuri. At another, a page of art clearly from 1991's Black Panther: Panther's Prey #2 is mislabeled as being from 1966's Fantastic Four #52. Imagine mistaking Jack Kirby for Dwayne Turner! Most consistently and most annoyingly, there is a lot of beautiful cover art included throughout the volume, but this goes uncredited more often than not.

I do feel like I'm nitpicking a bit here. This book, after all, is probably not really for me, who has read (thus far) every Black Panther comic published from 1966 to 2006, but for someone who has seen the films and wants to know more about where the character came from. I think Womack's book is particularly valuable in its positioning of the character in the history of Afrofuturism and similar movements; there's a lot of good details here about the genre, and a lot of directions an interested reader could go if they wanted to know more. I found the discussion of "protopia" particularly valuable. And the book contains a lot of beautiful illustrations, both from the comics, and from the wider social world that the book seeks to illuminate. Just know that if you're an intense fan and/or an academic, there might not be as much here as you might hope for.

Liberation of the Daleks (From Stockbridge to Beyond Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 51)

Liberation of the Daleks: Collected Comic Strips from the Pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Alan Barnes and Lee Sullivan

Collection published: 2023
Contents originally published: 2022-23
Acquired: November 2023
Read: December 2023

I did briefly think that I should maintain the chronology of this project; that is to say, I thought about saving Liberation of the Daleks until The White Dragon (and a hypothetical second volume of thirteenth Doctor comics) was out... but I was won over by the idea of reading Liberation while the fourteenth Doctor was still the current Doctor, and indeed, I was able to finish it the morning of the same Saturday that The Giggle debuted on Disney Plus. I doubt I will ever again read a Doctor's entire comics run while they are the current screen Doctor.

Liberation of the Daleks, from Doctor Who Magazine #584-97 (Dec. 2022–Dec. 2023)
story by Alan Barnes, art by Lee Sullivan, colours by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

It's DWM's longest story! By issue count, at least; I think The Glorious Dead still has it beat out by approximately ten pages. Picking up from the end of The Power of the Doctor, this leads right into Destination: Skaro... though I am unconvinced that its events really could squeeze into the sixty minutes the Doctor states have passed between the two stories in Destination: Skaro. I am pretty sure it took me longer than sixty minutes to read it!

It's a bit bonkers, and it's not very deep, but it is fun. One of Alan Barnes's strengths as a writer has always been rearranging pop culture iconography in interesting ways: here the Daleks attack the World Cup Final in 1966, only it turns out that it's all a simulation from the future, an amusement park where people go to experience Dalek wars... and the park enslaves real Daleks to make it all work. When the Doctor escapes from the simulation, he brings real Daleks with him.

from Doctor Who Magazine #590

It's not very deep, but it is deep enough; the story does some fun stuff with the disjunction between how we perceive Daleks as viewers (fun, goofy) and how they function in the narrative of Doctor Who (purveyors of genocide); probably the best of the many strong cliffhangers is the one where a bunch of tourists began chanting "EXTERMINATE," hoping to be exterminated! As you would, of course. It casts a lens on Doctor Who's own story, but also reflects the way that, say, Nazis come across in real pop culture. Alan Barnes amps it up as the story proceeds by even bringing in the TV Century 21 Daleks, contrasting their even more goofy iconography with the brutality of the "actual" Daleks.

It does give a feeling of being made up as it went along. Mostly I don't mind this (so does, say, the original Star Beast) but it does seem like the whole story could have ended with part eight but keeps going with a whole new subplot.

Lee Sullivan does a great job with Daleks of course, but all throughout; he captures new series Daleks, classic series Daleks, TV21 Daleks, all of them. James Offredi matches him on coloring with some good work, especially on the TV21 stuff.

If you thought this would be a deep plunge into the mysteries of the fourteenth Doctor (and I can see why you might have, though the story itself discards this pretty quickly), this isn't it. But it is a solid piece of DWM fun.

from Doctor Who Magazine #593

Other Notes:

• For those of us who keep track of such things, these fourteen strips tie Alan Barnes for the twelfth-longest run as writer of the DWM strip with Steve Parkhouse (#86-99), and tie Lee Sullivan for seventh as artist with David A Roach (#451-64). For total written, it moves Barnes from fifth to third (at 41 strips, a bit below Steve Parkhouse's total of 46), and Lee Sullivan from eighth to seventh (at 44 strips). But I believe there's more to come after this for both, so their numbers will move even further up.​
• This is Barnes's first contribution to the main strip since #380, a gap of 204 strips! This would place him in second for largest gap (if we discount the returns for issue #500), behind John Tomlinson's record of 210... except that Lee Sullivan makes his first contribution since #317, setting a new record of 267!
• I'm given to understand that the conceit of TV Century 21 was that it was a news magazine from one century after its time of publication. Because of that, the humorless pedants of the Tardis wiki have counted all sorts of weird stuff as "valid" because it was printed in TV21 alongside the Dalek strips. Like, they'll count Thunderbirds... but (up until recently) not Scream of the Shalka or Death Comes to Time!? Anyway, if they are paying attention to Liberation, they need to take all that stuff back out, because Barnes establishes the TV21 comic strips are an in-universe 21st-century children's fiction.

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

Woo! Spring Break!

As an academic, I do of course get a spring break, but as an academic, I spend my spring break doing exciting things like grading annotated bibliographies and cleaning the house; it never feels like a real break from anything even if I do get to take it easier.

This year, I've been saying that my real spring break is NCSA, the annual conference of the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association. Usually in mid-to-late March, NCSA is my opportunity to be away from home and kids (I do love my kids but I don't love the bedtime routine), to do something fun (i.e., go to panels), and to hang out with my friends.

I have three grad school friends who do nineteenth-century stuff, but I don't know that all four of us have ever made it to NCSA at once since I first attended in 2017. But this year we managed to make it happen, and not only that, but two of them brought their spouses and children! So we were able to get in some good socialization; in particular, some of the kids I had never even met. While the four of us would go to panels, the spouses would take the kids to do fun things around the city.

But of course the panels are fun things. I say it a lot, but it bears repeating: I wouldn't be in my line of work if I didn't think listening to smart people say smart things was a worthwhile use of time. Some academics can sneer about conferences, but I always secretly suspect those people are self-centered narcissists, the kind of person who is smart but doesn't believe anyone else can be smart. But I always learn about such interesting things at conferences!

NCSA in particular is the best, and I don't just say this because my friends go there and I get to hang out on my employer's dime. The conference is interdisciplinary, so there are presenters from literary studies, history, art history, and more; it's also transnational, so there are people who work on British, American, German, Italian, and so on. Sometimes this has its downsides, of course (people who work in different disciplines and fields can be interested in things you just are not), but often you get to learn about some neat things that overlap with your own work... or even don't and are just interesting!

Just some presentations (not by my grad school friends) that I particularly enjoyed (no slight to anything I saw and left out, I saw a lot!):

• Reilly Fitzpatrick from Baylor University on the rights of women in Middlemarch (I had never thought about the pregnancy plotline in Middlemarch before... of course there are so many things happening in Middlemarch it is impossible to think about all of them)
• Celeste Seifert from the University of North Carolina on vivisection in Arthur Machen
• Shelby Lynn Jones from Purdue University on General Lew Wallace (author of Ben-Hur) and his time as ambassador to the Ottomon Empire
• Danielle Nielsen from Murray State University on the depiction of academic disciplines in H. Rider Haggard's She (which I have not read but clearly need to)
• Antje Anderson from University of Nebraska-Lincoln on the early short fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt (which is usually taken as being about white people who she thinks can be read as mixed-race; she is working on a new critical edition of Chesnutt's fiction)
• Meoghan Cronin from Saint Anselm College on U.S. adaptations of Dickens novels for children (I asked a question about Cranford... more evidence that I am turning into my advisor)
• Laura White from University of Nebraska-Lincoln on the now-forgotten-but-then-popular British children's author Mrs. Molesworth (Laura is working on a project about children's fantasy, and I enjoy getting to hear about a new piece of it every year)
• Lillian Durr from Missouri State University on Frankenstein's creature as nonbinary
• Corrie Kiesel from Louisiana State University on the depiction of folkways and gossip in The Ring and the Book (which I read the summer after graduating college and have not thought about since!)
• Alyssa Culp from Illinois Wesleyan University on how Bavarian morgues were made scientific and professional in the nineteenth century
• Sarah J. Reynolds from the University of Indianapolis on eclipses in the nineteenth century
• Victoria Russell from Keele University on the influence of Erasmus Darwin on nineteenth-century radical movements (as someone who worked a bit on Charles Darwin and nineteenth-century radical movements, this was super-interesting)
  

My own presentation this year was about George Gissing's Born in Exile, one of the novels in the chapter of the book manuscript I am currently working on. The conference theme was "thresholds" and I discussed Born in Exile as a novel about the threshold of professionalization—I think it's the first British novel (by a significant writer, anyway) about what we would now called a professional scientist, and the novel explores how that would change science from the earlier era of the "devotee." (A typology I am greatly indebted to Robert Kargon for.)

One of the other things I like about NCSA is its integration into the local community. The conference is always three days; the second day always has a keynote by an historian who works on something relevant to the city in which the conference is being held. This year that was Emily Bingham, who wrote a book about "My Old Kentucky Home," the minstrel song that is still sung at the opening of the Kentucky Derby, with some mild sanitizing. It was a topic I didn't know anything about but found very illuminating. (The composer of the Kentucky state song never visited Kentucky; another fun fact is that he also composed what is now the Florida state song, and he also never visited Florida.)

Then in the afternoon of the second day there are no panels, but the conference does organize official excursions; this year my friends and I went to Oxmoor Farm, a farm in Louisville that was occupied by the same family from the 1780s to 2005! It was expanded several times over the centuries, and was a great window onto the history of the area. (I think the tour guides in these situations are always excited to have a group of experts come along, ready to nerd out over Zachary Taylor or whatnot. Actual quote from one tour participant upon hearing what the site archaeologist had uncovered in the slave residences: "Half-dimes!? Are you shitting me!!?")

I returned home tired but excited. And also energized to actually work on my book. Will this summer be its summer!?

Next year's NCSA will be in New Orleans, with the theme of "Fusions." I will be there, of course!

Monsters Unleashed! by Cullen Bunn, Jay Leisten, David Baldeón, Ramón Bachs, Justin Jordan, Andrea Broccardo, et al.

Collection published: 2017
Contents originally published: 2017
Read: February 2024

Monsters Unleashed!

Monsters Unleashed!: Monster Mash

Monsters Unleashed!: Learning Curve

Writers: Cullen Bunn, Justin Jordan

Artists: Steve McNiven, Jay Leisten, Greg Land, Leinil Francis Yu, Gerry Alanguilan & Michael Jason Paz, Salvador Larroca, Adam Kubert, David Baldeón, Ramón Bachs, Andrea Broccardo, Francesco Gastón, Bachan, Alex Arizmendi, Alberto Alburquerque 

Color Artists: David Curiel, Michael Garland, Marcio Menyz, Chris Sotomayor

Letterer: Travis Lanham

 

Monsters Unleashed! was a five-issue miniseries that was then followed by a twelve-issue ongoing series, collected across three volumes. The main character is Kei Kawade, a young monster fan who during a worldwide invasion of monsters from outer space discovers he has the power to summon monsters by drawing them. He is eventually recruited by S.H.I.E.L.D. and Damage Control and becomes known as "Kid Kaiju." He is mentored by monster hunter Elsa Bloodstone, and I read this as part of my working through her key Marvel Comics appearances.

 

Good thing some of the monsters are on our side!
from Monsters Unleashed! vol. 2 #4 (script by Cullen Bunn, art by Salvador Larroca)

 

The original miniseries and the first eight issues of the ongoing are all written by Cullen Bunn and feature eleven different artists. I really did not care for any of it. The opening miniseries is in particular tedious, with umpteen different superteams (the Avengers, the Guardians of the Galaxy, &c.) fighting monsters again and again and again. Too many characters, too many artists, no interesting character work or plotting. After that, the series just focuses on the ongoing adventures of Kid Kaiju and Elsa, but I still found little to latch onto or be interested in.

 

Collection published: 2017
Contents originally published: 2017
Read: February 2024

Actually, that's not quite true. There's some okay stuff here—I particularly liked the appearance of the Mole Man, the original nemesis of the Fantastic Four, who kidnaps Kid Kaiju to get his help resurrecting his army of monsters. It's always a neat move to make an old, somewhat pathetic, villain into a figure of sympathy, and Cullen Bunn does it well here. But the big conspiracy of monsters, and the two different Fin Fang Fooms largely left me cold. Elsa is present, but contributes little, and seems pretty watered down from her characterization in Nextwave and Marvel Zombies (though I did like the bit where she becomes queen of some insect monsters). Some of the artists are pretty bad; Andrea Broccardo in particular can't seem to decide if Elsa is twelve or sixty-two years old.

One other big issue is that Kei summons five monsters into existence to be a team of his own... but while five big monsters might look okay (I don't think of the series's myriad artists ever had the knack of making me interested in monster fights), their lack of meaningful characterization (they are, after all, monsters) means you have a lot of characters that it's just not possible to actually be interested in.

 

Am I just biased in favor of fellow Mole-Men?
from Monsters Unleashed! vol. 3 #4 (script by Cullen Bunn, art by David Baldeón & Ramón Bachs)

 

Thus, I was really not looking forward to the last four issues. Whenever a series comes to an end and a new writer takes over for the last few issues, I think every comics fan knows that whatever you've been reading, it's about to get worse as a couple extra issues are cranked our regardless of quality in order to fill up a trade. In this particular case, I was dreading it even more because I knew writer Justin Jordan only from the execrable Team 7, and the book abandoned all attempt at artistic consistency, with four different artists on four issues.

 

It's my favorite food, too, Scraggs.
from Monsters Unleashed! vol. 3 #9 (script by Justin Jordan, art by Francesco Gastón)

Collection published: 2018
Contents originally published: 2017-18
Read: February 2024

But... to my surprise... with those last four issues, suddenly the series became really good! Instead of attempts at big Marvel-spanning epics, Jordan gives us four done-in-one tales, each teaming Kid Kaiju up with one of his monster team, allowing us to finally get to know them as characters—not to mention him. Suddenly the book is fun and funny, exactly the kind of thing I would have liked all along. But four issues of it were well worth it (though perhaps not worth reading the previous thirteen). We get colonies of giant bees and Cthuloid menaces worshipped by loser cultists and Transformers expys on the loose in New York City. (One issue is about the Inhumans, but I guess you can't win them all.) I was suddenly able to tell all the monsters apart from one another, and I didn't even mind that Elsa—ostensibly my whole reason for being here—was written out after issue #10. Good stuff, and I wish Justin Jordan had written the series from its beginning.

This is the fifth post in a series about Elsa Bloodstone. The next installment covers The Death of Doctor Strange and Marvel Action: Chillers. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Bloodstone & the Legion of Monsters (1975-2012)
2. Bloodstone (2001-06) 
3. Nextwave, Agents of H.A.T.E. (2006-07)
4. Marvel Zombies: Battleworld (2006-15)
   

Shadow Speaker by Nnedi Okorafor

The Shadow Speaker by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu

My wife was into Nnedi Okorafor before, as the hipsters say, she was cool, and thus she owns a first printing of the first edition of The Shadow Speaker, one of her earliest novels, from 2007. (It's about to be rereleased along with a sequel.) I borrowed it from her earlier this year and gave it a read.

Published: 2007
Read: February 2024

I think I am coming to realize that Okorafor just doesn't work for me as much as I want her to. I have read the three Binti books, the three Akata books, some of her comics, and just none of it clicks. (Except for the second Akata book, which I liked.) Most of her books are ambling, with character just kind of moving from place to place without any kind of clear throughline from an emotional or plot standpoint. This is more of that. It clearly works for lots of people, but I think this might be it for me and Okorafor.

Reading The Magical Mimics in Oz Aloud to My Kid

The Magical Mimics in Oz by Jack Snow
illustrated by Frank Kramer

After John R. Neill died, the Oz series took a rest for a couple years, but it returned in 1946 with The Magical Mimics in Oz, by the series's fourth author, Jack Snow, and third artist, Frank Kramer.

Originally published: 1946
Acquired: July 2022
Read aloud: February–March 2024

Jack Snow was the first person to be a bona fide Oz fan to write an Oz book, and you can tell; it's the kind of book where characters do things like say, "Oh, wasn't the Forest of Burzee where Santa Claus was raised?" so that you know the writer has read The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. (Although, weirdly, he gets the Guardian of the Gates confused with the Soldier with the Green Whiskers. Rookie mistake!) He was also specifically an L. Frank Baum fan; while Neill built on what Thompson had established, Magical Mimics doesn't reference any characters or concepts from after Baum; you could go straight from Glinda of Oz to Magical Mimics without missing a beat. And actually, it would read pretty well; Baum always included some minor characters from the last couple books in his most recent book's celebration scenes, and Lady Aurex from Glinda shows up in this book's. But if you are reading in publication order, Glinda was twenty-six years ago, so the odds are very much against you remembering her! A lot of minor characters that Thompson and Neill hadn't cared for pop up here in minor roles, like Button-Bright and Cap'n Bill. (I did add in a reference to the events of Runaway when reading aloud though; it fit quite naturally into one of Scraps's scenes.)

The premise of Magical Mimics is on the darker end. As always, someone is trying to take over Oz, but it's one of the more successful attempts, like Thompson's Wishing Horse. The Mimics are shapeshifters who want to invade Oz, but can't because of a spell of protection cast by Queen Lurline when she enchanted Oz. What they figure out, though, is that they can replace people who came to Oz after the spell was cast, so when Ozma and Glinda leave Oz on state business, they sneak into the Emerald City and replace Dorothy and the Wizard. Dorothy and the Wizard wake up in prison in Mount Illuso, the Mimics' home, while the residents of the Emerald City go increasingly concerned about Dorothy and the Wizard's strange behavior.

To be honest, I kind of wanted something more creepy and more complex, with Mimics slowly replacing Oz character after Oz character, while some other characters desperately tried to figure out what was going on. As it is, the book is pretty simple: the Mimics replace Dorothy and the Wizard, the other Oz characters wonder why they're acting weird but don't really make any progress or discoveries, meanwhile the real Dorothy and the Wizard meet a fairy who explains everything to them, she takes them back to Oz, and she defeats the Mimics. But perhaps Jack Snow knows his audience better than I do, because my five-year-old kid was totally on edge and nervous even with this very limited threat posed by the Mimics. They did not like that the Mimics replaced Dorothy and the Wizard, and did not like the tense chapter where the Mimic horde invaded the Emerald City and replaced everyone. So I guess it had enough jeopardy for the target audience!

Overall, I thought it was fine. I wish there had been more clever problem-solving by the Oz characters. Much like a Thompson novel, ironically, this one mostly sees the main characters stand around while a previously unknown powerful magic user takes care of everything for them. Dorothy and the Wizard don't do anything interesting to get away from the Mimics; the Emerald City characters don't do anything clever to figure out what the Mimics are up to. Toto turns out to be the real MVP of the novel, instantly realizing Dorothy has been replaced, evading capture by the Mimics, and striking at the Mimic King and Queen when everyone else is paralyzed by indecision. (The Scarecrow also shows some minor cleverness, admittedly, delaying the Mimics until Ozma and Glinda return to deal with them.) Thompson never did much with Toto, so it's nice to see him do some interesting stuff. Snow has the kind of languid pacing Baum often did, as opposed to the frenetic pacing of Thompson and Neill; Oz may be in danger, but Dorothy and the Wizard can still spend two chapters looking at a garden! Snow also captures a lot of Baum's sense of whimsy; both Pineville and the Story Blossom Garden feel like the kinds of places he might have thought of, not Thompson.

I'm sorry to say, though, that not only is Frank Kramer in third place for Famous Forty artists (thus far), it is a very distant third. There is an occasional nice picture (the one of Toto as Sherlock Holmes is fun), but overall most of his illustrations seem to aspire to competent at best. Baum hit gold with both W. W. Denslow and John R. Neill, so it's sad to see the publisher scrimping this time around.

Next up in sequence: John Dough and the Cherub

Marvel Zombies: Battleworld by Simon Spurrier, Kev Walker, et al.

Marvel Zombies: Battleworld

Collection published: 2022
Contents originally published: 2006-15
Read: January 2024

Writers: Simon Spurrier, Robert Kirkman

Artists: Kev Walker, Sean Phillips

Inker: Jason Gorder

Colorists: Frank D'Armata, June Chung

Letterers: Clayton Cowles, Randy Gentile

 

I almost didn't even notice this existed, but while I was reading Nextwave, something I read clued me into its existence, which claimed that it was a really good Elsa Bloodstone story. I normally would be doubly skeptical of a story tying into both Secret Wars (ugh) and Marvel Zombies (double ugh), but then I saw it was by Simon Spurrier, who was one of the contributors to Titan's excellent The Eleventh Doctor: Year Two series, so I decided to give it a chance.

 

I read the Ms. Marvel Secret Wars tie-ins back in the day; I only have the foggiest notion what it was about. I think a bunch of timelines got smushed together into the same planet? You don't really even need to know that to understand this, as long as you're willing to accept 1) Elsa Bloodstone is commanding an army against a horde of zombies, and 2) it's possible to run into multiple versions of the same character.

 

This isn't high art, but it is surprisingly enjoyable and well done for what it is. Spurrier and artist Kev Walker take the post-Nextwave version of Elsa Bloodstone, but treat the character more seriously than Ellis and Immonen did. What would it be like to grow up with all this trauma? How would it affect you as an adult, and how could you relate to others after it happened? Spurrier explores this with a mix of horror and humor, and I wouldn't say I loved it, but it's much better than it needed to be. Walker impressed me as an artist, too; good with both character and action. At one point, I thought, "wow this guy should draw Star Wars"... later I realized he was the artist for Marvel's Doctor Aphra series, and I was probably subconsciously remembering some of the art I'd seen for that.

 

Don't mess with Elsa in any timeline.
from Marvel Zombies vol. 2 #3 (script by Simon Spurrier, art by Kev Walker)

 

The collection also contains one issue of the original Marvel Zombies series as a bonus, but no one's tricking me into reading that shit.

This is the fourth post in a series about Elsa Bloodstone. The next installment covers Monsters Unleashed! Previous installments are listed below:

1. Bloodstone & the Legion of Monsters (1975-2012)
2. Bloodstone (2001-06) 
3. Nextwave, Agents of H.A.T.E. (2006-07)
   

Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, No. XIX (Chs. 51-54)

The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens

Finally... the end!

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

No. XIX (Chs. 51-54)
I wish I could say this whole novel was worth it for the scene where the elder Martin Chuzzlewit whacks Pecksniff with a walking stick, knocking him to the floor. It did make me laugh and want to cheer. Unfortunately, getting to see an annoying character whacked with a stick doesn't quite make up for having to read over seven hundred pages about that character... but at least Dickens himself knew the guy was annoying.

I also think Dickens himself clearly recognized that Martin Chuzzlewit was a failure of a protagonist; the last few chapters are far more interested in Tom Pinch and how he ends up than Martin Chuzzlewit and how he ended up. He's the one who gets what is clearly the protagonist's wrap-up, not Martin, with a whole chapter spent on his future happiness. The up- and downside of the serial novel, one supposes. If your protagonist doesn't work out, you can get a new one (shades of a tv show shifting who its lead is), but... but if your protagonist doesn't work out, you can't go back and make someone more interesting the protagonist from the beginning, all you can do is pack them off to America!

So, overall, did this work as a way to read Dickens? Well, I did not (as you can tell) like Martin Chuzzlewit much... but I think I would have liked it even less had I attempted to read it straight through! Hopefully next year's Dickens is better (but I doubt it).

This is the last in a series of posts about Martin Chuzzlewit. 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)
6. Nos. X–XII (chs. 24-32)
7. Nos. XIII–XVIII (chs. 33-50)
   

The Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold, Part 4: Barrayar

Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold

My fourth Vorkosigan novel (third in chronological sequence, eighth in publication order) picks up right from the end of the previous one, Shards of Honor. Indeed, Bujold's very interesting afterword discusses how originally Shards was going to be longer but she realized she was introducing new complications instead of wrapping up existing ones, so she went backward and found a spot where it could stop, orphaning several thousand words that she'd written. It was another five years or so before she went back to that orphaned material and realized it could form the beginning of a second novel about Cordelia, one about—as the title is very clear about—her new life on the planet Barrayar.

I had actually read Shards and Barrayar before; over a decade ago my friend Christiana loaned me an omnibus edition of the two. Rereading the review I wrote at the time, it's almost hilariously lukewarm:

It has some adventure narrative tropes I find uncomfortable (the "other" being simultaneously more dangerous and more interesting than the home society), some slightly strange gender politics (the woman must give up her society utterly for the man she loves, who never seriously considers it), and some stuff that's just plain weird (everyone reveres one character who is a rapist), but overall I enjoyed it. It gets off to a rough start, to be honest-- there's a lot of journeying through a dangerous landscape, which I find tedious, and our protagonist Cordelia has a tendency to be rescued by other people a lot.  But at the one-third mark, she finally starts making her own decisions, fleeing her home planet in a fantastic sequence, and then traveling to Barrayar, where she marries Aral Vorkosigan and is forced to navigate her way in a strange society.  At this point, I was completely absorbed, and I loved all the political maneuvering and civil war stuff, and Cordelia herself shone quite well.

Originally published: 1991
Acquired: January 2022
Read: November 2023

On this read, it was pretty obvious to me that the books are interrogating the things I found uncomfortable, and I'm not sure why I didn't know that the first time; these books are all about that contact between cultures and danger of being fascinated by the "other"; the gender politics of Barrayar are continuously scrutinized. And when on Earth was Cordelia ever a victim who needed to be rescued!? What I do think is fair is that I clearly liked Barrayar more than Shards. While Shards is good, I definitely think Bujold got better as a novelist in the interim; Shards is like three linked novellas while Barrayar has a unity of plot and, especially, theme.

The other really interesting tidbit the afterword brought into focus for me was that this was a book about parenting. I just don't think I saw that at age 24, and even if I had, it would not have resonated the way it does as a 38-year-old father of two. Most of Cordelia's emotions and decisions are driven by the fact that she's a parent. This is obviously the case when it comes to Miles, but it's true almost everywhere in the book: the way she thinks about the boy emperor, Gregor, for example, or her ability to figure out what the emperor's mother Kareena is thinking. I definitely liked the book before, but this time through I felt it, there was a real intensity to it. The book is filled with great moments, some of them funny, some of them grim, all of them thoughtful and considered. I won't list them here, but if you've read it, you'll easily bring a number of them to mind.

Science fiction can sometime feel like a young person's game: young people doing epic stuff like fighting empires. But Barrayar is science fiction for the middle aged. Yes, there are evil empires, but it's about the struggle to be a good parent in all its myriad forms, the right you keep up every day, not always because you want to, but because you won't be yourself if you give up.

I know there are more Cordelia-focused novels in the saga's "main" sequence, but it's a shame there aren't more of these books about her younger days on Barrayar, because in some ways she's an even more interesting protagonist than Miles.

Every five months I read a book in the Vorkosigan saga. Next up in sequence: Cetaganda

Screen Time

At a certain point, my wife and I began to use the removal of "screentime" (watching tv and tablet use) as a punishment. "I'm going to count to five, and if you're not brushing your teeth..." I don't think this was terribly effective—as any parent knows, the "counting to five" technique just lets your child draw it out when you don't want them to draw it out. What you really ought to do is a time out as soon as the child doesn't listen, but of course that makes things take even longer in the moment, even if in the long run it will supposedly have a better pay off.

It also had the problem of creating an expectation of screentime. Whereas screentime had been a thing for lazy weekend afternoons and the occasional after-school pre-dinner moment, once you are threatening to take it away, that implies the default is the existence of screentime. Furthermore, it also decouples the moment of punishment from the moment of the action, and in three- and five-year-old cognition, it's still pretty important for consequences to immediately flow from action. Not getting the screentime in the afternoon because they didn't brush their teeth promptly nine hours earlier isn't very effective. And finally, the moment of taking it away often makes things worse; now they aren't brushing their teeth and they're mad at you.

So I had an idea: could I flip screentime around? Could I make it a positive reward instead of a negative punishment?

I got an Etsy seller to make us a bunch of wooden tokens with "SCREEN TIME 30 MINS." engraved on them. So no longer do we threaten to remove screentime for negative behaviors; instead, we reward them for positive behaviors. If the morning routine is executed with a minimum of cajoling, then they get a screentime token. This also lets us reward other behaviors; Son One did a chore with no fussing the other day as soon as I asked, so I gave him one for that.

I think overall it's been to the positive. There are now firmly established limits on screentime, which is also a positive—something we had lost over the past year or so. A couple days ago we did have a situation where, having spent all his screentime tokens over a three-day weekend, Son One became quite upset in the afternoon that he hadn't gotten one that morning. He hadn't been terrible for the morning routine, but I had felt like he had required one too many reminders. This prompted an hour of whining!

We'll see how it continues. Son One in particular does well with systems; the main issue I have right now is if I say things like, "You're moving too slow, so you don't get a screentime token," that puts us right back where we started, so it's a little tricky to create that association between the behavior we don't want and the consequence.

Reading Roundup Wrapup: February 2024

Pick of the month: The Runaway in Oz by John R. Neill. Tough month to pick—I didn't read much that was bad but I wouldn't describe much of what I read as standout, either. But I did enjoy this John R. Neill Oz book, a fun adventure story featuring my favorite recurring Oz character.

All books read:

1. The Shadow Speaker by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
2. Monsters Unleashed! by Cullen Bunn, Steven McNiven, Greg Land, Leinil Francis Yu, Salvador Larroca, Adam Kubert, et al.
3. Monsters Unleashed!: Monster Mash by Cullen Bunn, David Baldeón, and Ramón Bachs
4. The Runaway in Oz by John R. Neill, edited and illustrated by Eric Shanower
5. The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley
6. Monsters Unleashed!: Learning Curve by Cullen Bunn, Justin Jordan, Andrea Broccardo, et al.
7. Elsa Bloodstone: Bequest by Cath Lauria
8. Black Panther: A Cultural Exploration by Ytasha L. Womack 

A little low, but I've been making slow but steady progress through two very long books, both of which I think I will finish in March.

All books acquired:

NONE! 

Currently reading:

• Marvel-Verse: Black Panther by Jerry Bingham et al.
  
• The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens
• The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 7 edited by Neil Clarke

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: 663 (down 1)

Six months of no increase!

Nextwave, Agents of H.A.T.E. by Warren Ellis, Stuart Immonen, et al.

Collection published: 2020
Contents originally published: 2006
Read: January 2024

Nextwave, Agents of H.A.T.E.: This Is What They Want
Nextwave, Agents of H.A.T.E.: I Kick Your Face

Writer: Warren Ellis

Penciler: Stuart Immonen

Inker: Wade Von Grawbadger

Colorist: Dave McCaig

Letterers: Chris Eliopoulos & Joe Caramagna

After her original appearance (see item #2 in the list below), Elsa Bloodstone was reinvented in the pages of Nextwave, Agents of H.A.T.E., a farcical maxiseries about a team of D-list characters who find out that the anti-terrorism organization they work for, the Beyond Corporation, is actually run by terrorists and testing its WMDs on Americans. You might think this would be a very dramatic thing, but it actually happens before issue #1. This is because Nextwave is not about stuff like characters or themes, it's about leaning into two things: 1) violence is a fundamental tenet of superhero comics, and 2) superhero comics are full of dumb shit.

The main characters are largely has-beens or forgotten: Elsa, of course; but also Jack Kirby's Machine Man, from his weird 2001: A Space Odyssey tie-in; Tabitha Smith, an X-Man named "Boom-Boom" with the powers to explode things; and Monica Rambeau, recently on the big screen but then kind of irrelevant and without a home, as a former Captain Marvel, then Photon, then Pulsar. Add to all these the original character "the Captain," who answers the question, "what if the worst person alive got the power of Captain America... and also he never figured out the answer to 'Captain What?'"

 

Perhaps the truest ever depiction of Elana Gomel's "violent sublime."
from Nextwave, Agents of H.A.T.E. #6

Ellis delights in making them all pretty awful. Tabitha is basically Paris Hilton with superpowers (very topical in 2006), Machine Man is always drunk and ranting about "fleshy ones," Monica rattles on about when she was in the Avengers but now doesn't give a shit, Elsa just likes to kill monsters. Each two-issue story sees them turn up somewhere and then dismantle a Beyond Corporation plan in as violent and gratuitous and stupid a way as possible.

 

In the first volume, Elsa seems like she could be the same character we knew from Bloodstone, just older, but in the series's second volume we are told she was raised by her father (not her mother, as established in her debut), who dropped her into monster pits as a baby in order to develop her skills. It passes my law of retcons: though different, I find it just as interesting as her old origin.

 

A very different mother for Elsa.
from Nextwave, Agents of H.A.T.E. #8

 

The book as a whole is good fun... one sort of feels like it's simultaneously (almost) Stuart Immonen's best work and like he was wasted a bit. Like, there's not a bad panel, scene, character, or composition here... but oughtn't he be illustrating things like Secret Identity or Moving Pictures? Though if they had got some hack to do this, it wouldn't have worked. At first I thought the whole thing was a bit of an Authority parody... then I remembered who wrote The Authority! But when I got to the end, I realized I was right. What kind of writer satirizes themself just six years later? Don't answer that, but it's funny anyway.

 

Collection published: 2019
Contents originally published: 2006-07
Read: January 2024

So is it great? I don't know. Is it worth your time? I don't know. But if Marvel reprinted the complete run at an affordable price again (I read it via Hoopla this time), I probably would pick it up. Healing America by beating people up!

This is the third post in a series about Elsa Bloodstone. The next installment covers Marvel Zombies: Battleworld. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Bloodstone & the Legion of Monsters (1975-2012)
2. Bloodstone (2001-06) 

Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, Nos. XIII–XVIII (Chs. 33-50)

The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens

I was sick last week, so I was able to get through a lot of Martin Chuzzlewit. (If you think that sounds like I punished myself for being sick, you're right.)

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

No. XIII (Chs. 33-35)
I seriously do not understand people who think the American segments drag this book down. The middle chapter here is about Americans being ridiculous and stupid (some Americans try to talk to Mark on a steamboat). The jokes are not top-tier Dickens, but at least they are jokes. I would much rather read them than whatever else is going on in this book.

No. XIV (Chs. 36-38)
This installment actually has some inklings of interest. Tom Pinch (who I am sure might have been in this book all along, but whom I last remember doing something interesting back in ch. 12) strikes out on his own, hanging out some with his sister, a much put-upon governess. Like the America stuff, it feels like a soft reset. Okay, Dickens thinks to himself, even after being packed off to America, Martin is still boring, so let's focus on this other guy, he seemed nice. I very much enjoyed all the stuff with him tramping about London:

Yoho, past hedges, gates, and trees; past cottages and barns, and people going home from work. Yoho, past donkey-chaises, drawn aside into the ditch, and empty carts with rampant horses, whipped up at a bound upon the little watercourse, and held by struggling carters close to the five-barred gate, until the coach had passed the narrow turning in the road. Yoho, by churches dropped down by themselves in quiet nooks, with rustic burial-grounds about them, where the graves are green, and daisies sleep—for it is evening—on the bosoms of the dead. Yoho, past streams, in which the cattle cool their feet, and where the rushes grow; past paddock-fences, farms, and rick-yards; past last year’s stacks, cut, slice by slice, away, and showing, in the waning light, like ruined gables, old and brown. Yoho, down the pebbly dip, and through the merry water-splash and up at a canter to the level road again. Yoho! Yoho!

(Was this chapter an inspiration for Little Blue Truck's Springtime? "Yoo-hoo duck!")

Anyway, will the second relaunch work? Well, who knows because then we get two chapters of tedium. The only thing more boring than Pecksniff is the two Miss Pecksniffs.

No. XV (Chs. 39-41)
With Victorian novels, I often play a game: how would you see it if it had a different title? For example, Adam Bede could be the exact same text and justifiably titled Dinah Morris or even Hetty Sorrel. But if it was, it would be much sadder. Or, how would we see Bleak House if it was called Esther Summerson?

Anyway, it seems to me Martin Chuzzlewit would much more justifiably be called Pecksniff, but then I would also hate it all the more. But on the basis of this installment, perhaps it ought to have been called Tom Pinch, and probably I might have liked it a bit more. There's no Martin, sure, but I'd much rather read about Tom Pinch doing stuff. This is a bit of a classic Dickens set-up: the down-on-the-luck fellow who gets a mysterious benefactor. But it's classic because it works. Chuck all the Martin and Pecksniff chapters and retitle this book, please.

No. XVI (Chs. 42-44)
Who is even less interesting than Pecksniff? Signs point to Jonah. Tom Pinch continues to seem like a nice book, though.

No. XVII (Chs. 45-47)
Okay, so I just said I found Jonah boring... but ch. 47 here, where Jonah does a murder, is one of the best in the book. Classic Dickens, totally captivating suspense.

No. XVIII (Chs. 48-50)
Okay, lots of boring stuff... FUCK ME, THE ELDER MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT HAS BEEN FAKING IT THIS ENTIRE TIME!? AND HE'S THE SECRET BENEFACTOR OF TOM PINCH??!? You do occasionally know how to hit a home run, Charles.

This is the seventh in a series of posts about Martin Chuzzlewit. The next covers installment no. xix. 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)
6. Nos. X–XII (chs. 24-32)
   

The Wife in Space by Neil and Sue Perryman, Volumes 1-8

The Miserable Git: The Wife in Space, Volume 1
The Scruffy Drunk: The Wife in Space, Volume 2
The Pompous Tory: The Wife in Space, Volume 3
The Mad One: The Wife in Space, Volume 4
The (Still) Mad One: The Wife in Space, Volume 5
The Fit One: The Wife in Space, Volume 6
The Court Jester: The Wife in Space, Volume 7
The Crafty Sod: The Wife in Space, Volume 8
by Neil and Sue Perryman

After the book from Faber & Faber, which chronicled Neil and Sue's lives with excerpts from the Wife in Space blog, Neil collected its complete contents plus extras in a series of limited-run volumes via Kickstarter. Alas, I couldn't afford the shipping costs as an American, but I did contribute enough to receive the ebook editions. Upon finally reading the Faber & Faber book, I then went on to read the ebooks.

Like I said, this collects the complete run of the blog, which I had all read before, though each volume usually contains two or more relevant bonus entries, such as Adventures in Space and Time for the Hartnell volume or The Stranger fanfilms for the Colin Baker one. The blog isn't available online anymore, so I was happy to have this convenient way to reread it, and happy to spend a month in the company of Neil and Sue, working my way through one of the best television shows ever made. The blog was often hilarious, always insightful, and never not infectiously enthusiastic; it made me realize what an awful long time it has been since I watched some classic Who, and though I have no enthusiasm for doing it all from the beginning in order, there's so much good stuff that I am keen to see again.

One of the delightful things is that Sue recognizes quality when she sees it, and is not held back by fan shibboleths. As a partisan of the Sylvester McCoy years, I was particularly pleased by her appreciation for stories like Rememberance of the Daleks and Curse of Fenric... but she also knows that Silver Nemesis is rubbish! Probably the most magical part of the books is when they watch City of Death along with Sue's daughter Nicol, and all of them become completely entranced by it.

The ebooks can still be purchased from Amazon or Smashwords; they also contain forewords by various Who luminaries. I particularly enjoyed Jenny Colgan's in volume six.