Let's Dance!

When Child One was younger, they wanted to be a cheerleader. I think this is because they would see the cheerleaders practice in the mall area at my wife's high school. But when you are three, there are not really cheerleading classes you can sign up for, so we signed them up for gymnastics at the Y, since this would let them practice the skills they could later use in cheerleading.

One day, though (as I remember it), they saw all the girls go by in their tutus on the way to dance class. "I want to do that," they said. So we switched them to dance class. (This would be when they were around 4½.) We put them in the 4-6 class, but after one session, the teacher suggested bumping them down to the 3-year-old class because their coordination skills weren't quite there yet.

May 2023 recital

They did dance class for several months, culminating in the May 2023 recital, where their class danced to the song from the "Enchanted Tiki Room" at Disney. (They do a big recital, where all the kids from all the dance classes at the Y show off, from age 2 up to age 17.) I would not say Child One is an extraordinary dancer, but as the lone four-year-old in a class of three-year-olds, they were the best at sticking to their routine in front of a large audience! At the end of the recital, all the dancers get a rose from their teacher, which they really treasured. They were also very into the bow tie they got to wear.

Unfortunately, we had to pull them out of dance shortly after that, because summer travel meant we were going to miss more dance classes than we were going to make. We intended to put them back into class once things calmed down, but once they were out, they insisted they didn't want to do it anymore! Often, they like things to be a certain way.

But then in October, they were digging through stuff in their room and found the rose. "When am I going to get another rose?" they asked. "Well," I said, "never if you're not in dance class." So they demanded I sign them back up! There wasn't room in the class, actually, but the dance instructor let them overenroll. (She's great, I really like her. She has been teaching dance at our YMCA for over twenty years!)

May 2024 recital

So this May, their second recital rolled around. Now in the 4-6 class, they did the title song from The Beauty and the Beast; they were the Beast, while all the girls in the class were Belle. They got a vest with gold buttons to supplement their bow tie, which they were very into. And they racked up another rose! Again, the class was very nervous in front of our large audience, but Child One held their own. It was definitely a proud dad moment watching them up there in front of all these other kids. 

Hopefully this time they don't drop out for six months!

The Cosmere by Brandon Sanderson: Elantris

Elantris: Tenth Anniversary Author's Definitive Edition

by Brandon Sanderson

This is my fifth Cosmere novel, but Brandon Sanderson's first. I read Warbreaker first, and you can definitely see how Warbreaker is a rewriting of this: a city of gods who don't do anything, a princess in an arranged marriage arrives in a foreign city, the man she was to marry isn't what she thought, the princess recruits disaffected merchants to her cause in one-on-one meetings.

Edition published: 2015
Originally published: 2005
Acquired: March 2021
Read: November 2023

I liked Warbreaker better. The chapters here about the prince and the princess are okay, if plodding. (More on that in a bit.) But the chapters about the religious fanatic dude were interminably dull. You would think a Mormon would be able to write a religious fanatic with more nuance.

I think the big problem I am having with Brandon Sanderson novels is that they all feel very... incremental. A tiny bit of progress is made in each section, again and again and again. There are very rarely any big moments that seize you, it's just a very slow very steady climb to the end. There are things that should be big on the way, but something about the way he writes mean they never feel big; he doesn't seem to know how make the energy of the novel ebb and flow in a way that propels the reader forward. It's just plod plod plod until you get to the end—which as always is a totally uninteresting reveal about the magic system. Wow, the prince guy figured out how to write magic words! This is the kind of thing that in Le Guin would be the thematic, emotional, and character lynchpin of the novel... but here it's just a thing that explains all the elements of the "magic system" you never wanted explained to begin with.

Every nine months I read another novel of the Cosmere. Next up in sequence: Mistborn: The Alloy of Law

Temeraire by Naomi Novik, Book 4: Empire of Ivory

Empire of Ivory: Book Four of Temeraire
by Naomi Novik

Empire of Ivory begins right after the conclusion of Black Powder War, with Temeraire and his crew making it back to Britain and finding out why Britain's dragons did not come to the aid of Europe as Napoleon's forces overran the continent: a deadly sickness has spread among the dragons, incapacitating most of them.

Originally published: 2007
Acquired and read: January 2024

Without giving too much away, it turns out that Temeraire is immune to the sickness, probably as a result of something that happened to him in Africa on his long sea voyage from Britain to China in Throne of Jade. Thus, reluctantly, Will Laurence, Temeraire, and a group of sick dragons must set out for Cape Town to see if they can recover and reproduce whatever it was that made Temeraire immune.

Unfortunately, though there are lots of good moments of characterization and worldbuilding throughout the book, what results was to my mind the dullest of the Temeraire books thus far. I had a grad school professor who use to talk about the "paradox of tedium": how did you communicate the tediousness of work in your novel without the book itself becoming tedious? But if you didn't make the book itself tedious, then you failed to capture the emotional experience your book was supposedly about. I don't know if that quite applies to Empire of Ivory, but too much of the book is spent in a state of stasis, waiting to see if something works again and again and again, without much to pull the reader along. We do eventually get some more interest and complexity, and the book ends up delving into the role of dragons in (an) African society. There's some good stuff here, though the book doesn't go into as much depth as Throne of Jade did with China, and more tantalizes than spells out. It ends up feeling like a sideshow from the main plot rather than central to it.

That said, the last couple chapters were brilliant. As I am coming to realize is often the case with Novik's work, all the pieces have been carefully put into position to create a climax, and even when the positioning isn't intrinsically interesting, the climax is still highly effective. I may have found Empire of Ivory a weaker book (which isn't to say it's a bad one), but it still left me eagerly anticipating the next installment. How are they going to get out of this one?

Every ten months I read an installment of Temeraire. Next up in sequence: Victory of Eagles

The Summer of the Book?

Back in 2021, I wrote a "book revision progress report," outlining how many chapters of my eternally-in-progress monograph had been completed and how many I needed to go. These are my chapters:

1. Frankenstein
2. Wives and Daughters
3. medical reform novels
4. domestic fiction
5. air-war novels
6. novels of biocracy
7. professionalized scientists

Plus an introduction and a coda; I'm not revising in order, so as of that point, I had finished revising chapters 2, 4, 3, and (almost) 6.

Where do I stand now?

CHAPTER 1
I had been doing a pretty good job of getting out a chapter every summer. But something happened (I don't remember what), and I just was not able to finish a chapter Summer 2022; I got partway through this chapter and stalled out. But thankfully I came back to it Summer 2023 and got it done, and I am actually very happy with it now. It's hard to say something original about Frankenstein, but I believe I have, and the chapter has a clearer purpose in my project. Finished Summer 2023.

CHAPTER 7
This chapter was originally a hodgepodge. It is made up on analyses of three novels: George Gissing's Born in Exile, Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, and H. G. Wells's Ann Veronica. Only originally, the discussions of Born in Exile and Ann Veronica had been part of chapter 4, and the discussion of The Secret Agent chapter 5/6 (which was then one chapter about revolution/future war). Back when this was my dissertation, it was pretty late in the day that I hived these three texts off into their own chapter, and there was no overall throughline, and there was literally no engagement with previous scholarship about the professionalization of science.

So this one needed a lot of work, in terms of tracking down sources and arranging things so that it actually made a point. I finished the bulk of the research and rewrote the Born in Exile portion Summer 2023, and then across the course of the school year worked slowly but steadily on the Secret Agent portion, finishing that up right after the school year ended in early May. My goal for early summer, then, is to revise the Ann Veronica part, and this seems quite doable. Should Finish Summer 2024.

CHAPTER 5
This is the thus the only chapter I haven't touched since grad school, but the chapter is based on an article I published in Science Fiction Studies and thus in fairly good shape, I would guess. My main thing would be seeing if there's anything from the last eight or so years that I need to accommodate or incorporate there. It's hard for me to imagine it will take me long to revise this. Should Finish Summer 2024.

That leaves revising the introduction and also going through the project in its complete form to make sure it's coherent, that ideas I came upon at one point are reflected throughout the project and referred to consistently. (I am a bit worried that the way I used Daston and Galison's terminology from Objectivity in some early chapters is not consistent with how it got used in some later chapters; I think I introduced a set of terms I really like from Robert Kargon about halfway through the book, but they really should be there from chapter 2 onward.) I reread the intro earlier this year and found it a bit stiff, but I think it can be made to work; basically like a lot of work produced by graduate students, it comes across as a little defensive, and I don't think it needs to be.

I also keep toying with a coda, but I think I will do it; I have a pretty straightforward idea.

So could 2024 be the summer of the book? I think so, but it will require some pretty deliberate focus on my part. Once the kids get out of school, things always get tricky around here!

Hopefully the editor that expressed interest before there was a pandemic and I had two kids is still alive.

Doctor Who: The Quality of Leadership by Keith R.A. DeCandido (ed.)

Doctor Who: Short Trips #24: The Quality Of Leadership
edited by Keith R A DeCandido
based on a concept by John S. Drew

I bought this direct from the editor at a convention back in July 2008. A few months later, I think he asked me on LiveJournal when I was going to review it—early reviews being very helpful to the early sales of books. I told him I would read it when I got to it on my reading list, and he seemed a bit peeved.

Published: 2008
Acquired: July 2008
Read: March 2024

He was probably right to be peeved, as it's over fifteen years later, and my review cannot be of any use to him, as the book is long out-of-print. But anyway, I've finally got to it. The book is an unusual Short Trips installment, as editor Keith R. A. DeCandido is American, and thus has a different set of contacts than your usual Short Trips editor, many culled from the world of Star Trek tie-in fiction; you will not find your obligatory Justin Richards or Stephen Cole story here. Instead the volume features Star Trek novel luminaries Peter David and Diane Duane, and also a lot of people who worked with Keith on the Corps of Engineers ebooks, like Terri Osborne and Richard C. White. It even features the first Doctor Who fiction of Una McCormack, who would later become a prolific contributor to the Doctor Who audio and novel lines.

The anthology has an interesting premise, of the Doctor's encounters with various leaders, but the way the premise is implemented makes it less effective than it could be. The anthology has a frame story, about a dying ruler of an alien world who met the Doctor at the beginning of his reign; the Doctor told him stories about leadership to inspire him. Unfortunately, though there are many stories here about leaders, few seem to have anything to do with leadership. The very first one he tells, for example, Peter David's "One Fateful Knight," is supposedly about King Arthur... but it's more a story that King Arthur is in than a story about King Arthur. Mostly it's a pretty poorly thought out prequel/sequel to Battlefield, which is one of my favorite seventh Doctor tv stories, and which this tie-in totally fails to get. It does have a couple okay jokes, but it's a big misfire to lead off with.

Other stories seem to have similar problems: the Doctor's companion Romana replaces Boudica in "Good Queen, Bad Queen, I Queen, You Queen," but the complications of this, the leadership lessons of this, seem largely skipped over. Like, could the original Romana really replace a warrior queen? I think we need more than we get here. Plus there's a wacky twist I did not see the point of. Along those lines, I felt we got little of King Theodoric's leadership in Diane Duane's "Goths and Robbers" (though she does good Tegan) or Martin Luther's in Richard White's "The Price of Conviction" or King Henry VIII's in Linnea Dodson's "God Send Me Well to Keep." These stories weren't bad, but I couldn't imagine the Doctor choosing to tell them to inspire a young prince to greatness. 

One of only a few to really hit the theme right was Kathleen O. David's "On a Pedestal," where the Doctor, Jamie, and Victoria meet William Wallace (the Braveheart guy), though bits of it were pretty rushed. Some didn't fit the theme terribly well but got away with it; I'm not convinced that Plato counts as a "leader," but Allyn Gibson's "The Spindle of Necessity" is an interestingly written story with a good grasp of the sixth Doctor's voice and a neat conclusion, so who cares.

You might imagine the premise lends itself to "historicals," and you'd be right. Mostly this is fine, but many of them have to contrive reasons for the Doctor to be there, and they don't always convince. There are just three stories about fictional leaders; two are really tedious sci-fi tales where I wasn't even sure who the "leader" character was supposed to be.

One, though, was my favorite story in the book, James Swallow's "Clean-up on Aisle Two," about a night manager at a 24/7 market. More than any other story in the book, it actually has something to say about leadership, plus it has a strong sense of voice and a well-characterized seventh Doctor. (Several of the stories in the book suffer, I think, from being written by Americans trying to do British.) In moving away from an actual leader, it seemed to me that Swallow was the one who came the closest to what I thought the book was actually going to be about.

Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Doctor Who in an exciting adventure with the Daleks

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: I, the Constable

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: I, the Constable
by Paula M. Block & Terry J. Erdmann

supposedly 2385, but after The Long Mirage

"But the sun seldom shines above Bowog Bog."

Published: 2017
Acquired: May 2022
Read: March 2024

This brings the Block/Erdmann Quark trilogy to a close, though this one has a stronger focus on Odo, especially at first. Quark learns that an uncle of his is dead and he might inherit... except Rom recently made it legal for wives to inherit, and his uncle has three! So Quark goes to Ferenginar to try to woo them, but disappears; Odo, at a loose end waiting for Federation bureaucracy to resolve the issue of the Dominion refugees following the events of The Long Mirage, reluctantly volunteers to go to Ferenginar and find Quark.

It's fun enough, probably my favorite of the three of these enovellas. The humor is a bit broad and sometimes overegged (there's a joke about Rom wearing a hat that's laid on way too thick), but I think the Ferengi work best when there's some kind of cultural contrast, and it's more entertaining to read about Odo trying to navigate Ferengi society than Quark trying to navigate it. Block and Erdmann have a strong grasp of Odo's voice, and enjoy seeing him in the familiar role of investigator, instead of the wishy-washy ex-Dominion leader he is in George's stories. I wish the mystery was more of a genuine mystery; once Quark reenters the story, things get a bit less interesting.

But it's fun to see Odo encounter different aspects of Ferengi culture. We get to meet a Ferengi homicide investigator—and we learn there's so little violent crime on Ferenginar they have just one guy who investigates it and he still doesn't have much to do! This is opposed to the huge Ferengi Commerce Authority devoted to combating financial crime. I zipped through it (hard not to, it's so short), and I had a good enough time.

Grand Nagus Gint

Continuity Notes:

• Some of these DS9 enovellas have slotted into their timeline slots kind of awkwardly, but this one picks up from the end of The Long Mirage fairly well; the status quo for all the characters is pretty much as David R. George III left it.
• Quark insists the Rules of Acquisition can't be amended and haven't been for 10,000 years, but on-screen evidence indicates this is not correct; we know from Enterprise that there were fewer rules in the twenty-second century than there are in the twenty-fourth.
  
• Rom designs a communication device and Odo shifts his own comm badge to match the new design. I don't really buy that Odo can successfully imitate comm badge components on the molecular level, but I think my preferred explanation (Odo pins a real comm badge to himself) probably doesn't hold up either.
• Rom also gets excited that he "actually invented something." What about those self-replicating mines?

Other Notes:

• There's a character here named "Quirk"; we learn that both "Quirk" and "Quark" are derived from the "same Ferengi word for 'splattered mud,' but different regions have different mud..."
• "Everybody makes jokes about the 113th Rule: 'Always have sex with the boss.'" Including Quark himself, in Legends of the Ferengi.
• Never thought I would read a clear Virginia Woolf reference in a Quark comedy story.
• Okay, but surely someone ought to say, "Forget it Quark, it's Ferenginar," at some point?
  

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Prey: Hell's Heart by John Jackson Miller

Technologies of Immortality: Course Assignments and Critical Texts

With this post, I wanted to talk a bit more about my immortality-focused team-taught Honors course. Specifically, I want to talk about two readings that I assigned that were not science fiction, but rather about it. (My previous post about the precise stories we assigned may be of use.)

For Honors students here at UT, these "Dialectics" courses replace their usual general education requirements. Thus it was important to me that I just not assign literature, but also that I assign something about fiction, to expose the students to literary criticism. I ended up deciding that the two most useful pieces would be two pieces that have been influential on my understanding of science fiction, though neither is a traditional work of literary criticism. I paired each one with one of our groups of sf texts and thus one of our assignments.

Isaac Asimov: "Social Science Fiction"

I've posted here in the past about Isaac Asimov's three-part typology of science fiction: adventure-dominant, technology-dominant, and sociology-dominant. These he articulated in his introductions to the 1962 anthologies Soviet Science Fiction and More Soviet Science Fiction. What I only recently learned (thanks to a query on Reddit) is that he originally discussed the three types of sf in somewhat different terms in a 1952 essay called "Social Science Fiction"; I don't know why this essay wasn't reprinted in Asimov on Science Fiction along with the two Soviet ones, but it has been reprinted a number of other places, including Damon Knight's 1977 anthology Turning Points: Essays on the Art of Science Fiction.

In this essay, he calls the three categories "adventure," "gadget," and "social," and I like how he articulates the differences through a series of examples about how you'd write a story about the automobile if it was sf. An adventure story about the car would use it in a thrilling chase, a gadget story about the car would focus on how internal combustion engines work in exhaustive detail, and a social story about the car would have it already having been invented and focus on the question of "what do we do about automobile accidents? Men, women, and children are being killed by automobiles faster than by artillery shells or airplane bombs. What can be done?" (41).

As you might guess from the essay's title, he's mostly concerned with what social science fiction is and how it works, giving definitions and examples. It's got its weird parts (there's a long digression about the "chess game" of history I don't care for at all) but overall it's a strong definition of sf that gives student writers a lot to work with. I particularly like his statement, "It is easy to predict an automobile in 1880; it is very hard to predict a traffic problem" (41). What social sf tries to do, though, is predict those traffic problems.

Social Science Fiction Paper

What my first paper assignment for the students asked, then, is that they look at one or two stories from the course and think about how it was exploring what you might called the "traffic problem" of immortality. It's easy to predict cryonics, consciousness uploading, or genetic life extension in the 2020s; what's harder to predict is what the implications for society are. They could look at one story in detail, or they could compare two; they could explicitly bring in Asimov if they wanted, or an essay from the MIT Technology Review we had assigned about genetic life extension. (I also said they could cite some stuff I had referred to in class and linked to on Canvas, but not assigned as reading: a New York Times article about cryonics, an MIT Technology Review article about mind uploading, a Jo Walton blog post about "incluing," an essay by Patrick Parrinder about scientists in sf, and some other stuff.)

Here's the prompt:

Overall I was happy with how these came out. Lots of good insights and connections. Perhaps most extraordinarily, the texts the students selected were basically evenly balanced! If you are a writing instructor, you will know how rarely this happens when you give options; everyone will gravitate towards one or two texts. But in this case, every text was chosen by several students.

Grading sixty four-page papers isn't great, especially when you're also teaching two sections of a writing course, but I was able to make it work by just stretching the grading out across an entire month.

China Miéville: "Science, Fiction and Science Fiction"

I find the Asimov piece very useful as a teacher and a thinker—I even cite it in my never-complete book. But it represents a view of sf I don't totally agree with, and in the essay, even Asimov admits it's not quite the full picture, as he struggles to place Ray Bradbury in any of his three categories. So it was important to me that we also talk about how I primarily view science fiction, what I sometimes think of as the doubling effect. This is described really well by China Miéville in his introduction to H. G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon, and I'm forever quoting it to people.

Basically, Miéville's argument is that sf uses "rationalized alienation" to present other worlds to the reader: this isn't the world you live in, but it's different along rational lines. However, sf isn't really about science or the future, no matter what some people (like Asimov) might say. It's about now, using metaphors.

This is definitely true of a lot of the works we read in this course. Is Will McIntosh's "Bridesicle" about a possible future for cryonics? Sure. But it's really about now, about how men treat women as lifeless bodies that solely exist for their own pleasure... even when their intentions are ostensibly good! Is José Pablo Iriarte's "Proof by Induction" about a technology that lets us access the memories of the deceased? Sure. But it's really about now, about how we're unable to let go of the dead even when that's the healthy thing for us to do. Is Ren Qing's "Resurrection" about a soldier brought back to life? Sure. But it's really about now, about how you might be "dead," but it doesn't matter, the government needs you to go back out to the front line. Each of these sf stories takes a metaphor and makes it literal.

Nicely, Sam "qntm" Hughes made this point about his own story "Lena," one of the ones I assigned: 

Quite a lot of science fiction isn't about what it's about.

"Lena" is about uploading, but uploading isn't real. It doesn't exist.

...

The reason "Lena" is a concerning story isn't that one day we may be able to upload one another and when that happens we will do terrible things to those uploads. This isn't a discussion about what if, about whether an upload is a human being or should have rights. (I want to be abundantly clear: within the fictional context of "Lena", uploads definitely are human beings, and therefore automatically, inalienably, have rights.) This is about appetites which, as we are all uncomfortably aware, already exist within human nature. Upload technology is not the last missing piece of this.

Miéville argues that the appeal is that it's not just metaphor, you get the metaphor but also the literal truth. As he says of Gulliver's Travels, "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" (xviii). If it was just metaphor, you wouldn't get the sword fight, and that's what makes the story awesome!

This was particularly why I assigned Joe Haldeman's "Four Short Novels," which I think has absolutely no value if you think of sf in an Asimovian sense; he doesn't want to tell us anything about what the year 3001 might be like. Rather, he wants us to reflect on the society we live in now—it's a purely Miévillian piece of sf. 

Final Reflective Paper

I did want there to some kind of writing assignment tied to the readings from the last two weeks of class; I also wanted there to be an assignment that explicitly brought together the different strands of the course, which we didn't otherwise have. But this had to be manageable for both the students and for me. They were doing big group research papers for Cragun, and I would have less than a week to grade whatever I assigned, so it couldn't be a big paper.

I ended up assigning a 1½-page paper that only had to be three paragraphs long. My thought was that the paper would have to be about just one story from the second half of the course, and that it would have to make one concrete, specific connection to something from the sociology or science components of the course.

Here's the prompt:

I'm only halfway through reading these as I write this up back on May 3rd, but overall I am enjoying them so far. They're easy reads, easy to grade, and the students are making solid connections.

Unlike the previous paper, though, there's a clear clustering: a huge plurality of papers about Paolo Bacigalupi's "Pop Squad," tying it to something Professor Cragun taught them about overpopulation. The runner up is Orson Scott Card's "Skipping Stones" and income inequality.

But even in just half the submissions, every story has been represented once. A few about Haldeman's "Four Short Novels," a couple about "Lena," one about Greg Egan's "Border Guards" and religion, and one about Ken Liu's "Staying Behind" and religion. And some of the angles on "Pop Squad" have been unique; in particular, I got a couple good papers about aspects of gender I hadn't thought about. Additionally, I was worried about the students only picking sociology as the thing to connect to, but I did thus far get a couple about science: one about how what they learned about neurons is oversimplified in "Staying Behind" and "The Gods Have Not Died in Vain" and another about the issues of preserving bodies in liquid nitrogen, which was briefly mentioned in "Four Short Novels."

No one is directly citing Asimov or Miéville, but most are clearly thinking about their sociological issue in either an Asimovian or Miévillian sense, either arguing these stories show us something about the future, or that they show us something about our own society through the lens of sf.

As is often the case in teaching, I don't know if they had fun, but I did, and that's what matters to me.

The White Dragon (From Stockbridge to Beyond Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 52)

The White Dragon: Collected comic strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Martin Geraghty, Scott Gray, Russ Leach, Jacqueline Rayner, and David A Roach

Collection published: 2024
Contents originally published: 2020-22
Acquired and read: March 2024

It's finally here... but one can't help being disappointed. While The Mistress of Chaos gave us eighteen months' worth of comics, which came out to eighteen strips, The White Dragon is over two years of comics... yet only fifteen strips. The factors involved are no one's fault, of course, but it's disappointing that Jodie Whittaker was the incumbent Doctor for four years yet received the smallest run of strips since Eccleston; it's also disappointing that these volumes have been getting progressively slimmer since The Crimson Hand and that this one couldn't extend to collecting all of Jodie's run.

I have read all of this before, but distribution of DWM in America was particularly erratic during this era, and I read many of these stories stretched out over months or even out of sequence; I think I got one of the later issues of Hydra's Gate before the first. In particular, I was pleased to get to read The White Dragon in one go.

The Piggybackers, from Doctor Who Magazine #549-552 (Apr.-July 2020)
story by Scott Gray, pencil art by Martin Geraghty, inks by David A Roach, colours by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

The Doctor and the fam land in America during the Cuban Missile Crisis; aliens are of course afoot. You can always count on Scott Gray for a decently put together story with interesting visuals and nice moments, and marry him to Martin Geraghty, and of course it's a recipe for success. I enjoyed this story, particularly the titular piggybackers and how they looked. Geraghty does some great work throughout (right from the first page, with the "Duck and Cover" riff), but I did feel like it didn't totally come together; there's an attempt to subvert expectations that kind of left it fizzling out at the end when it ought to have been exploding. The climax is over very quickly. I do like how careful Gray is to give everyone something to do; not to spend all my time ragging on the show, but it was rarely so deliberate during this era.

from Doctor Who Magazine #560

The White Dragon, from Doctor Who Magazine #559-62 (Jan.-Apr. 2021)
story & art by Scott Gray, colour art by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

Scott Gray bows out of DWM with the third story that he both wrote and illustrated; I enjoyed both of his previous goes, but this is the best of them, and it's a good way to bow out. No big torturous epic involving the history of Gallifrey; just a sharply done celebrity historical in an interesting location with a cool guest star and a bunch of nice moments for Ryan. (Ryan spent a lot of The Piggybackers mute, so it's good to see him get a meaty part here to balance things out.) This to me is pure DWM, one of those stories I find it hard to comment on because it doesn't do anything flashy but it does everything right. A story of kung fu is perfect for Gray's cartoony dynamism, and this story has a lot of great visuals and good beats. If the tv show ever did a Bruce Lee episode, we would be lucky if it was half this good.

from Doctor Who Magazine #571

The Forest Bride / It's Behind You!, from Doctor Who Magazine #570-72 (Dec. 2021–Jan. 2022)
story by Jacqueline Rayner, art by Russ Leach, coloring by Pippa Bowland and Mike Summers, lettering by Roger Langridge

I get that the strip is working under constraints here. As Rayner spells out in the extras, there had to be fewer pages, fewer panels per page, and even fewer words per panel! (The last one surprised me; does that let them pay Roger Langridge less?) But whatever the reason, I found these weird, unenjoyable stories. The writing clearly struggles with the space alloted; in The Forest Bride, the Doctor knows all about someone's daughter, but going over and back over the strip, I can't figure out where she actually learned this. The conclusion is too cursory and quick to work. Similarly, I didn't really get what It's Behind You! was going for; there's just a bunch of scrambling about and then the story's over. Even though it's a premise clearly tailor-made for jokes about pantomime, there are almost no jokes about pantomime, just fairly pointless action. And if you've heard Oh No It Isn't!, you'll know this isn't because Jac Rayner doesn't know how to makes jokes about panto.

I don't think Russ Leach's art is quite supporting what Rayner's writing is doing. In the notes, Rayner talks about the creepy vibe she wanted for The Forest Bride, but I didn't think the art gave it that, especially the coloring, which is all too bright and cheerful. (On part two, the coloring is credited to Pippa Bowland, but there is no credited colorist for part one.)

from Doctor Who Magazine #575

Hydra's Gate, from Doctor Who Magazine #574-77 (Mar.-June 2022)
story by Jacqueline Rayner, art by Russ Leach, colour by Mike Summers, lettering by Roger Langridge

Unfortunately, giving Rayner and Leach a bigger canvas doesn't result in better work. This four-part story is a bit of a jumpy struggle; I think they're trying to make it all work with economic storytelling, but too often it's just confusing. "Yaz has found the Legionary!" Hang on, was she looking for one? Since when? It's not just the writing, but also the art; I had to reread a sequence on the last page of part one several times to figure who was speaking and where a kid had come from, and in part four there's a bit where a robot loses its head but the Doctor catches it in a net I kept going back over to puzzle out. Again, things seemed terribly underexplained, and the climax rushed, introducing a new jeopardy only to resolve it instantly more than once. Reading Rayner's notes in the back, I think there's a good story here, but it probably needed eight pages per installment and a lot more panels per page to tell it.

Stray Observations:

• Liberation of the Daleks didn't say "Doctor Who Magazine Graphic Novel" in its indicia, and that this is #32 to The Age of Chaos's #31 indicates Liberation doesn't count. But in this era of triple dipping (the Abslom Daak strips have appeared in Nemesis of the Daleks, Daleks: The Ultimate Comic Strip Collection, and soon Return of the Daleks), I can't help but worry this means someday we're going to get a "Doctor Who Magazine Graphic Novel" that does have Liberation in it...
• For some reason, part two of The Piggybackers is six pages instead of the usual eight. I don't think we can blame COVID for this, based on the dates.
• We'll never know (well, hopefully we will someday, but I imagine not in the short term) what plans Gray might have had had he stayed on the strip: who was Mother G? Rereading The Piggybackers, I feel like he was setting up some stuff here too. The US's Brideport is compared to the UK's Stockbridge, and the story ends with the Doctor making a comment about how Abner Endicott was going to keep watch over the town, which felt unusually significant. Was this all going somewhere? Anyway, my bonkers theory is that Mother G was Mother Goose!
  
• If you read the extras hoping for some insight into Gray's departure from the strip, you won't find it here. But I suppose we've got one more graphic novel with his content forthcoming, whenever Monstrous Beauty ends up being reprinted, so he's not done yet.
• The departure of Ryan and Graham (between The White Dragon and The Forest Bride) gives them 26 strips as main companions, which ties them with Peri and Fey for eighth-longest run. (Yaz's run, which will top out at forty when she finally leaves after The Everlasting Summer, puts her in third, behind only Izzy and Clara!)
• Russ Leach's comments on Hydra's Gate actually cover his entire run on the strip, so I imagine we won't be hearing from him in future volumes.
• Martin Geraghty mentions in his notes that it's January 2024 as he writes them, which seems like an astonishingly quick turnaround for a book that was shipped by the end of February!
• This volume gives almost every contributor cover credit, even the inker and two colourists. Interestingly, it does so in alphabetical order, as opposed to the usual precedence/prominence technique used on previous volumes. This makes it one of few DWM graphic novels to give first billing to a non-writer on the cover, and the first to do so in a very long time. (The others, fact fans: The Iron Legion, Dragon's Claw, The Tides of Time [all Dave Gibbons], Voyager, The World Shapers [both John Ridgway], and End Game [Martin Geraghty]).
• I didn't notice until I shelved it, but even though this collection doesn't have the cover design the graphic novels have used since 2012, it does (unlike Liberation) maintain the spine design.
  

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

Hugos 2024: Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

This was my first Hugo Award for Best Novel finalist this year; I knew nothing at all about the book going in, though I must have heard of it at some point because I later realized it was on my "to check out" list at the public library (at list I have been populating for five years but never checked anything out from). I do really like when I can encounter books this way, when I can let them work upon me with no expectations or weight at all. As I say around here a lot, part of the appeal of sf is that the world itself is a mystery, and the less you know going in, the better the mystery is!

Published: 2023
Acquired: April 2024
Read: May 2024

So I am going to undermine the book by telling you what it's like, but hey, if that's a problem for you, you shouldn't be reading a book review blog. Another thing I enjoy about sf is articulating subgenre; Some Desperate Glory clearly comes out of the same space/movement as Ancillary Justice, Machineries of Empire, and A Memory Called Empire. Like those works, it's in the space opera zone to some extent, and it's about what makes empire equally appealing and horrifying...* although, not quite. While those other works are about a society's outward projection of power, Some Desperate Glory is more about a society's inward projection of power—facsism. How does a society exert power over its own members, shape them into the people they need to be? How does it cause us to shape ourselves, how do we become complicit in this? Our viewpoint character is a fascist who has totally bought into the rhetoric of her own people, but we can see what she cannot, the ways in which this has rendered her shortsighted and awful. This is a little frustrating at first, because it's so obvious that she's in the wrong, but kind of fascinating, too; I think Tesh did a good job inhabiting Valkyr's headspace.

Every now and again something really significant would happen in a very understated way, and this was my biggest actual problem with the book. I would end up missing something really quite important and have to go back! I don't know if these parts were done that way on purpose, or if it's just an unfortunate writing tic, but I found it frustrating. Maybe if I was reading in a less distracted environment, but I am the parent of two children five and under as well as a professor who squeezed the book in small chunks during final week so there's no much I can do about that!

Other than that, I really enjoyed the book. I was getting "this is pretty good vibes" for most of it, but then in ch. 27 (specifically, on p. 357 in my 2023 Orbit paperback) the characters make a ridiculously audacious choice that genuinely made me laugh out loud from the sheer pleasure of it. From then on, I was in love. Like those books I listed above, Some Desperate Glory is about doing the right thing in the face of a society determined to prevent it. What makes this sequence work so well is how far Kyr and the other characters end up going to make this happen, how they learn what matters is not just saving themselves from fascism, but others as well. Lots of great payoffs in the last hundred pages, making ultimately a very satisfying novel about the difficult lengths one has to go to in order to make oneself into the person one ought to have been.

There's more to talk about, harrowing stuff about gender and queerness especially. But I'll leave that for people better equipped to do so.

* The Traitor Baru Cormorant doesn't take place in space, but otherwise it overlaps with these as well; if you like all these space novels, you'll probably like Traitor as well.

The Blackhawk Archives, Volume 1 by Chuck Cuidera, Dick French, et al.

Longtime readers will know that one of the things that fascinates me most about superhero comics is how a concept can develop and change over a long span of time; it's what caused me to read the Justice Society from 1976 to 2013, for example, or the Black Panther from 1966 to the present.

There are a lot of fake-out deaths in this series.
from Military Comics #16 (script by Bill Woolfolk, art by Reed Crandall)

So, even though it's not a superhero comic per se, I've long been fascinated by Blackhawk. About a squadron of unaffiliated pro-Allies fighter pilots, Blackhawk began as a feature in Quality's Military Comics in Aug. 1941. This very World War II–focused comic lasted through all of that title's run, surviving a name change and the end of the war, until what was now Modern Comics came to an end with issue #102 in Oct. 1950. In the meantime, though, it had picked up its own self-titled book, which ran for ninety-nine issues until Dec. 1956. At that point, DC acquired the title from Quality without skipping a beat, and under DC, it ran another 166 issues until Nov. 1984 (albeit with a couple hiatuses). It then got a few post-Crisis revivals (including a three-issue 1988 miniseries and a sixteen-issue 1989-90 ongoing), and even an eight-issue "New 52" run (2012-13). Plus some of the characters have made appearances elsewhere; Blackhawk himself appeared in a 1996-97 arc of Sandman Mystery Theatre, Lady Blackhawk in Guy Gardner and Birds of Prey, and both together in Batman Confidential. And on top of all that, there was a Blackhawk novel!

That's quite a history for a comic which, to be honest, doesn't strike me as having a very adaptable premise, and over the years the premise has had to be reinvented repeatedly. If your comic is all about stopping the Nazis from overunning Europe, what can its point be in 1950, or 1960, or 1970, or 1980, or 1990? How have our conceptions of the Second World War changed over time? That's what I want to find out, starting from its 1941 debut and going all the way through its last pre-Flashpoint incarnation in 1990. (Based on previous experience with writer Mike Costa, I have no desire to subject myself to the New 52 run.) That's fifty years of comics history!

The Blackhawk Archives, Volume 1

Collection published: 2001
Contents originally published: 1941-42
Acquired and read: March 2024

Writers: Will Eisner with Bob Powell, Dick French, Bill Woolfolk

Artists: Chuck Cuidera, Reed Crandall

It all begins here, with the seventeen stories collected in this DC Archive Edition. The archive editions feature high-quality hardcover reprints of Golden Age material, but there must not have been much of a demand for Blackhawk, because twenty-three years on, a second volume has yet to appear. Like many Golden Age comics, Military Comics was an anthology title, with a variety of features, in this case half were about the Army and half about the Navy. Blackhawk is the only one to have had any lasting permanence, and only the Blackhawk stories are represented here.

These seventeen issues give little characterization but lots of Blackhawks-on-Nazi and Blackhawks-on-Japanese action. The earliest issues take place in the European theatre, but as the series goes on, we get more stories that focus on Japan. Ususually the Blackhawks fly somewhere, get involved in some kind of Nazi plot, foil it, and move on. To be honest, I don't think dogfighting plays to the strengths of the comics medium; it comes across as a series of still images of airplanes. So, the plots often revolve around the Blackhawks infiltrating or extricating or committing acts of sabotage.

In the early stages, the make-up of the group is pretty vague, but soon it settles down into a set of regulars, each from a different European country: Blackhawk, Hendrikson, André, Stanislaus, Olaf, and Chuck. (Plus Chop-Chop, but more on him later.) I know Blackhawk himself is eventually named Janos Prohaska, but that's not in this book. Most of these characters get little in the way of distinctive dialogue; André is the vaguely smooth French one, Olaf is an oaf, and that's about it. I couldn't pick the other three out of a line-up.

Is this really a viable repeat dogfight strategy?
from Military Comics #1 (script by Will Eisner & Bob Powell, art by Chuck Cuidera)

The earliest issues, written by Will Eisner and illustrated by Chuck Cuidera, have them getting involved in different Nazi plots: Blackhawk hunts down the German baron who killed his family and spars with a nurse, they steal radium from Paris before the Nazis can use it to build a bomb, the meet up with the nurse again to help her defend a refugee column, they try to stop the Nazis from capturing a munitions ship in the Suez Canal, and so on. None of it's high art, with crude but powerful writing and art, but it's fun if often ridiculous. There's a bit where André realizes that they need an avalanche to stop some Nazis... and so he flings himself down a mountainside, killing himself in order to be the incitement of an avalanche!

This return of the nurse would probably be more effective if they'd thought to give her a name on her first appearance... or if we ever saw her again!
from Military Comics #3 (script by Will Eisner, art by Chuck Cuidera)

Even without the credits, you can tell a new writer takes over with #5, because suddenly things get less war-focused and more fantastic. Weird-looking people called the Scavengers, killer germs, an island that suddenly appears in the middle of the Atlantic, a haunted castle, and so on... These stories are written by Dick French, and left me wondering how the title had run out of ideas so quickly! The haunted castle one is pretty stupid—the ghost turns out to be André wearing a suit of armor because he's embarrassed by his disfigurement—but at least it has strong art by Chuck Cuidera, with lots of cool layouts that really capture the vibe of the castle. The next story is even stupider, though, as the Blackhawks kidnap a Jewish plastic surgeon from a concentration camp to repair André's face but because he's mad with grief he makes a mistake, but this turns out to be that he looks exactly like the Nazi general who kidnapped the surgeon's daughter, so André replaces him! Like, lol, wut?

In this issue the art is so clearly in the lead that I believe Chuck Cuidera's claims that he did the writing himself on all his Quality Comics Blackhawk stories.
from Military Comics #9 (script by Dick French, art by Chuck Cuidera)

Thankfully Bill Woolfolk soon takes over as writer and Reed Crandall on art, and I found their vibe much closer to the first four issues', and more consistently enjoyable. Woolfolk also gives the other team members more to do, especially Olaf... though he also has more of a thing for phonetic accents. Blackhawk gets to face down Von Tepp's brother "the Butcher," though he also keeps meeting Asian women who have fallen in love with him and switch allegiance. Crandall is a good artist, but I do kind of miss how Cuidera drew Blackhawk's face!

All the ladies love Blackhawk. Personally, I think I'd go for Henrickson.
from Military Comics #17 (script by Bill Woolfolk, art by Reed Crandall)

Chop-Chop is a Chinese man who is sent by Blackhawk's Red Cross nurse flame in Military Comics #3 to ask for the Blackhawks' help; he fixes up a busted Nazi plane and manages to to fly it to Blackhawk Island all by himself. He's a weird character, in that visually, he's an offensive racist caricature, and also the white characters mostly don't respect him... but he's sometimes a buffoon and sometimes surprisingly competent, perpetually underestimated even by his own teammates. Also he can curse up a storm! I am not totally sure what the writers are going for with him other than "Chinese people are victims of imperial aggression yet also hilarious," but I guess I'll see what future creators make of him as I go on.

Is Chop-Chop the father of the cousin from American-Born Chinese?
from Military Comics #16 (script by Bill Woolfolk, art by Reed Crandall)

Overall, these were fairly fun, and though I originally intended to jump from this volume to when DC took over in 1957, I ended up deciding I'd like to see out the war before moving ahead.

This is the first post in a series about the Blackhawks. The next installment covers Military Comics #18-43, Modern Comics #44-46, and Blackhawk #9 & 50.

Technologies of Immortality: Reading List

This is a sequel to last week's post; I wanted to provide my reading list (with commentary) for my co-taught "Technologies of Immortality" course.

illustration by Galen Dara for Joe Haldeman's "Four Short Novels"

I divided the readings into two halves. The ones from the first half of the course focused on technologies of immortality being in their early stages, societies where they were just being invented or had only recently come into use. In the second half, I wanted societies much further on, where the technologies were commonplace and the long-term ramifications of the technologies on society could be explored. As I said in the previous post, we usually focused on three specific technologies: digital consciousness uploading, cryonics, and genetic modification to extend life.

If the stories are freely and legally available on the Internet, I've linked to them below. We did a reading ranking on the last day of class, where I had the students sort all of the stories they'd read from 1st (best) to 13th (worst); at the end of each paragraph, I've given how the story ranked by mean and median, and how many students ranked it first or last. Every story was some student's favorite... except two.

Prologue

• Will McIntosh, "Bridesicle" (2009). This is a disturbing story about both cryonics and consciousness uploading; it's about a woman named Mira who dies in a car accident and wakes up in a cryonics facility centuries later. The problem with cryonics has turned out to be that revival is expensive, so the dead don't have the money to be revived... but it turns out that men will pay to revive women who are frozen if the women will sign a marriage contract. The story also incorporates elements of consciousness uploading; people can have mental copies of loved ones called "hitchers" stored in their minds. I liked it a lot as a way to begin; it's a good story, well told, but also works well to grab the attention of students as to the purpose of the course. I think this was Professor Cragun's favorite, and it was something both we and the students referred back to a lot. The story was later expanded into a novel (Love Minus Eighty, 2013), and at first I was skeptical of this, but the students raised a lot of interesting questions about the world in class I'd like to see fleshed out. A student also told me they heard an interview with McIntosh where it was originally written about the man doing the revival; I am curious about this because the story would have nowhere near its power in that format! [ranked 1st by mean, 1st by median, 1st by 18 students, last by 1 student]
  

Part I

• Vanessa Fogg, "Traces of Us" (2018). We began part I of the course with this, because it's actually about the development process for consciousness uploading; it follows a pair of graduate students (later, postdocs) who are working on different aspects of consciousness uploading. It's very cute, a bit sad, and Fogg did some solid research on the science here; Professor Evans-Nguyen was impressed by the rigor and specificity. Fogg's blog post here gives good insight into her inspirations. [ranked 2nd by mean, 3rd by median, 1st by 1 student]
  
• José Pablo Iriarte, "Proof by Induction" (2021). This is also about a nascent version of consciousness uploading; a technology called the "coda" has just come into existence, which captures a digital snapshot of consciousness at the moment of death. This consciousness can't evolve or change, but you can interact with a deceased love one to obtain closure (or ask questions like, "where is the will?"). The main character is a math professor interacting with his father, another math professor, as they try to solve a proof together. The story explores the process of grief and dealing with the fact that your loved one will never change. [ranked 4th by mean, 4th by median, 1st by 1 student]
  
• Greg Egan, "Learning to Be Me" (1990). A very weird but very good story about a technology called the Ndoli jewel, an implant in your brain that records your neural processes with the eventual goal of taking over for them. The narrator has a series of existential freakouts over the fact that even if his jewel lives forever, it's not him living forever. [ranked 5th by mean, 6th by median, 1st by 2 students, last by 2 students]
  
• Channing Ren, "Resurrection" (2020). This is a Chinese sf story, again about consciousness uploading. A military engineer dies in battle, but his duplicated consciousness was copied into an artificial body, and then the body dumped on the doorstep of his grieving mother, who is now very confused—and only has a couple weeks with him before he gets sent back to the front. This one began to shift into looking at the social consequences of the technology; Cragun set up in an earlier class that one way sociologists like to look at situations is to as cui bono?—who benefits? And here we see that; it's not the resurrected who benefits from this technology, but those who already have political and economic power. [ranked 5th by mean, 6th by median, 1st by 1 student, last by 1 student]
  
• Ken Liu, "The Gods Will Not Be Chained" and "The Gods Will Not Be Slain" (2014). These are two linked short stories about a girl named Maddie, who (spoilers) discovers that her dead dad isn't actually dead, but that his consciousness has been uploaded to the Internet. I will admit to finding Liu a bit hit or miss, but it is a very accessible story, and again, we get a shift into the social implications of this technology, as Liu explores both who the actual beneficiaries of consciousness uploading would be, what they would use it for, and what the long term consequences would be. [ranked 8th by mean, 8th by median, 1st by 6 students, last by 4 students]
  

Interlude

• qntm [Sam Hughes], "Lena" (2021). This is a hermit-crab story, told in the form of a Wikipedia article about the first digital consciousness. The story explores the dark implications of such a technology, how it would lead to exploitation; the story is named for a famous test image, and HeLa cells are another inspiration. (I taught it in the middle of the course, alongside The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.) What rights do we have to these products of ourselves—our images, our cells, our consciousnesses—that are not ourselves? The story explores these questions in a stripped back, kind of casually horrifying way. I think a couple students really liked it, but most struggled with the unusual conceit. One thing I really liked is this rant from the author: "'Lena' is a true story. You knew it was when you read it." [ranked last by mean, last by median, last by 7 students]
  

Part II

• Greg Egan, "Border Guards" (1999). I opened the "consequences" part of the course with a couple sequels to stories from the earlier parts of the class. This is a sequel to "Learning to Be Me"; it has no characters in common, but instead jumps centuries into the future to see what kind of society might result from the Ndoli jewel being commonplace. How would people treat relationships? What kind of problems would they have? It's a very optimistic story and too much detail about quantum soccer aside, has some beautiful imagery. It's easy to kneejerk reject these technologies, but I liked how this one not only challenges our preconceptions about the necessity of death, but explicitly calls out other fiction that argues for the necessity of death for being intellectually lazy. [ranked 11th by mean, 11th by median, last by 9 students]
  
• Ken Liu, "The Gods Have Not Died in Vain" (2015) and "Staying Behind" (2011). These two follow up the Liu stories from the first half. The first is the third Maddie story; the other takes place in the same world, looking at those people still living physical existences after the majority of humankind has been uploaded. The final Maddie story kind of fizzles out, but that's the point, I would argue: Maddie reaches no clear decision about whether it's better to live a physical existence or be uploaded, because Liu wants the reader to explore it for themselves. "Staying Behind" picks right up from the end of the previous story (despite being written first), and like Egan's "Border Guards," it pushes against our preconceptions—the story is told from the perspective of someone resisting this technology, and he's clearly wrong to do so. So... are we? I can find Liu a bit schmaltzy sometimes, but here he's at his best. Really well put together, clever connections, unsettling conclusion. ["Gods Have Not Died..." ranked 12th by mean, last by median, 1st by 1 student, last by 5 students; "Staying Behind" ranked 10th by mean, 9th by median, 1st by 1 student]
  
• Paolo Bacigalupi, "Pop Squad" (2006). In a world where everyone lives forever, wouldn't overpopulation be a problem? Especially if climate change continues unabated, and the amount of resources available to support humanity keeps dwindling. The story follows a police officer on the "pop squad"—he kills illegal babies and arrests their mothers. It's vividly, gruesomely told... but that's the point, as Bacigalupi is actually confronting you with something that happens everyday. Everyday the United States turns away immigrants with children, and those children suffer because we won't share our resources, and we want to continue to live in our current lifestyle, we do exactly what the characters in this story do, we just don't have to see it. [ranked 3rd by mean, 2nd by median, 1st by 8 students, last by 7 students]
  
• Orson Scott Card, "Skipping Stones" (1979). From the moment I knew I was teaching this class, I knew wanted to track this story down and read it, which I read in Card's collection The Worthing Saga. It's about a world where people can use a drug called somec to enter suspended animation; the rich get more than the poor, and it's about a rich boy and poor boy who start out friends but grow apart as one ages years while the other ages decades. Not a very complicated story, to be honest, but a good example of how social class dynamics will impact these kind of technologies. (A student pointed out that as technologies of immortality go, it was "stupid": you don't actually live longer. But as long as people have inequal access to the technology, there is a benefit. The inequality is the point.) [ranked 7th by mean, 5th by median, 1st by 3 students, last by 3 students]
  
• Joe Haldeman, "Four Short Novels" (2000). A weird story, but I knew I wanted to end on it: it's four sketches of "novels" about living forever, each with a different conceit: "Eventually it came to pass that no one ever had to die, unless they ran out of money" or "...unless they were so horrible that society had to dispose of them" or "...unless they wanted to, or could be talked into it," and so on. They are funny and have some neat ideas in them... but not really about immortality at all. It was important for me to end with a story that demonstrated China Miéville's claim that sf isn't actually about science or the future. But more on that next time! [ranked 9th by mean, 10th by median, 1st by 3 students, last by 6 students]
  

[Incidentally, "Pop Squad" had the highest standard deviation, and "Traces of Us" the lowest.]

Overall, I was really happy about the collection of stories we read. They were largely high quality tales, and not a single one of them was a dud in the classroom; I was able to get something interesting out of everyone of them. I do wish there were more stories that were more optimistic about these technologies, but I was limited by what sf authors are actually writing! (Later I should do a post on stories I rejected.)

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: The Long Mirage

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Long Mirage
by David R. George III

late January 2386

The Long Mirage picks up from the last David R. George III Deep Space Nine novel, Ascendance, following up on the stories of Quark, Ro, Nog, Kira, and Odo, most prominently. And this is absolutely going to sound like damning with faint praise, but... it is a book about people with goals trying to accomplish them! After my frustrations with Ascendance ("Can you really write sixty pages of a novel with no clear narrative direction? Apparently so."), this is a blessed relief. Quark wants to find Morn... and sets out to do so. Ro wants to avoid her boyfriend and figure out her relationships with Quark... and sets out to do so. Nog wants to fix Vic Fontaine's program... and sets out to do so. Kira wants to figure out the mystery of the falsework and help with unrest on Bajor... and sets out to do so. Odo wants to find out what's going on with a Dominion ship approaching the station... and sets out to do so! Amazingly competent plotting. I'll tackle each of these in turn, and talk about the extent to which they work.

Published: 2017
Acquired: May 2022
Read: March 2024

A long-deferred thread in this series has been what happened to Morn... and to be honest, I don't think what happened to a glorified extra is sufficiently interesting to drag out for years of both publication time and story time. But in this book, instead of getting updates on it from some other character, Quark actually goes to find out for himself, and Ro comes with him. So that's nice, but in the end, the two characters don't really accomplish much themselves; basically, they bump into some other characters also looking for Morn, and those characters tell them everything they want to know, and that's it. So although Quark and Ro are actually taking action, their actions don't really drive the narrative, nor do they really do anything interesting or clever. Their relationship gets a couple good scenes but nothing in it seems to really resolve or develop.

In the Nog plotline, he and Candlewood (DS9's science officer who, like most of the new crew, lacks any kind of personality or character hook) go into Vic's program to unravel its issues once and for all. Okay, so I am glad this has finally happened, but it beggars belief that it took Nog two years to undertake the really obvious action of asking Felix for help. What follows is a fun enough Las Vegas escapade, but like the Quark/Ro plot, it's undermined by someone turning up and explaining everything to Nog rather than Nog piecing anything together himself. On the other hand, Nog does get some good moments of coming up and executing a plan... which does actually work! Of all the book's plots, this is the most successful, though I wish it had felt like something was actually stake for Nog rather than us constantly being told this was the case. I also did appreciate how it turns out that the Morn and Vic plots actually go together.

The Kira plotline is okay. I can't really muster up any enthusiasm for her relationship with Altek Dans, and I refuse to believe there's anyone out there who can. I did like she got a classic Kira moment, in doing the right thing that no one else liked. I didn't find the resolution to the falsework dilemma very compelling; the whole thing about a remembered childhood comet seemed fairly uncompelling and circumstantial.

The Odo plotline is, alas, like the ones from earlier Deep Space Nine books, in that no one is called on to make a choice. The ship of Dominion refugees turns up, they tell Odo what they're doing, the end. There are no interesting decisions or character moments at all. Like, why even do this?

So yes... this is probably the best of the post-Destiny Deep Space Nine novels, in that the characters actually try to do things... but it's still pretty boring and could have been a lot better.

Molly O'Brien, age 26?

Continuity Notes:

• This does reference The Light Fantastic, but the Nog stuff doesn't have any reference to Force and Motion. We do learn a little bit about what the O'Brien kids are like as teenagers, though, which is nice.

Other Notes:

• Occasionally we get scenes from the third-person limited perspectives of holosuite characters. I don't think this makes any real sense. Surely they do not have interiority?
• Characters in this book are often weirdly skeptical of people's claims to have traveled through time given this is, you know, Star Trek.
  
• Compared to other DS9 books of this era, this one has surprisingly little recapping; indeed, unlike Ascendance, which constantly recapped itself, this one barely recaps previous novels at all. Thank the Prophets!

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Deep Space Nine: I, the Constable by Paula M. Block & Terry J. Erdmann