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 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

Hugos 2024: The Witches of World War II by Paul Cornell and Valeria Burzo

The Witches of World War II

Published: 2023
Acquired and read: April 2024

Writer: Paul Cornell

Art: Valeria Burzo

Color Artist: Jordie Bellaire

Letterer: Simon Bowland

This Hugo Award finalist takes several real historical witches or magicians who were alive during World War II and posits what they might have done if they were to use their magic to take down Adolf Hitler; it's written by my longtime favorite Paul Cornell and illustrated by a new-to-me artist, Valeria Burzo. (It's in six chapters, so I had thought it was a collection of six issues, but it seems to be an original graphic novel.)

Ever since I read Captain Britain and MI13, I have known that Cornell is a good comics writer, and this is among his better work. The concept is super fun, and the historical notes at the back bring a lot of enjoyment to the story, as you work out what really happened and what he embellished. All the protagonists pop off the page, and the story has a number of good twists and turns and audacious moments and big payoffs. I particularly liked what Cornell did with Aleister Crowley's "wickedest man in the world" shtick (though for some reason he consistently misquotes it), Doreen Valiente's struggle to believe in her own magic, and Rollo Ahmed's perpetual outsider status. This is a neat group of characters in reality, and it's neat to see them come together in fiction in a way they did not in reality.

It's an easy read but an interesting one too, and I liked Burzo's artwork a lot; combined with Jordie Bellaire's colors, it's simple but effective in communicating both character and action.

Library of America: More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon

American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1953-1956: The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth / More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon / The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett / The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson
edited by Gary K. Wolfe

More Than Human (1953) is the second novel collected in Gary K. Wolfe's American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1953-1956. While three of the books in its companion volume, Five Classic Novels, 1956-1958, were Hugo winners, none of the books published here were, mostly because they come at the very beginning of the process. Though the first Hugos were given out in 1953, the second set was in 1955; the 1954 Worldcon didn't do any—and this is the year that More Than Human would have been eligible. The book was a finalist for the 1954 Retro Hugo (awarded in 2004), which was intended to fill that gap, though it lost to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. And fair's fair, that book is a juggernaut. Even a very good book probably didn't stand a chance against it.

Collection published: 2012
Novel originally published: 1953
Acquired: July 2023
Read: March 2024

More Than Human is an expansion of Theodore Sturgeon's novella "Baby Is Three" (1952); the novella makes up the middle section of the novel, to which is added a first part, showing where all the main characters came from, and a third, showing where they all ended up. I had a vague inkling that I had read "Baby Is Three" though I remembered nothing about it, and when I finished More Than Human, I went and looked up "Baby Is Three" on ISFDB, which tells me I must have read it in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two A... which I remember as being my least favorite of the four SFWA "Hall of Fame" volumes that I have read! Sturgeon is someone I haven't read much by; as a Star Trek fan, I primarily know of him as one of the legit sf writers who was courted by Roddenberry and ended up contributing to the show; he wrote "Amok Time" and "Shore Leave," two of the second season's most significant episodes. (Trivia fans will note there is a character here named "Barrows," as well as in Sturgeon's "Shore Leave.")

Alas, the novel didn't do much for me. All science fiction is of course very much of its time, but there's a particular kind of science fiction that I feel like was popular in the middle of the twentieth century whose appeal has not really persisted, the story of (to steal a term from DC's "Captain Comet" comics) the "evolutionary throw-forward," the next phase in human evolution born ahead of time. Usually this entails precocious intelligence and psi powers. A lot of mid-century sf writers seem fascinated by this figure—but unfortunately I do not find it fascinating, and I rarely get anything out of such stories...* even if they are well told from a writing standpoint, which I must admit More Than Human was.

Sturgeon is a strong writer, with an above-average sense of voice and place for a 1950s sf author, and there were lots of little moments of characterization that shone strongly. Unfortunately, the actual story was one that largely failed to engage me. It's one of those cases where I can recognize the craft, but fundamentally the story is just doing something I don't care about.

That said, I am already a few chapters into the third novel in this anthology, Leigh Brackett's The Long Tomorrow, and it is much more my jam—and as different from the first two novels as they were from each other. It's a very diverse set of selections!

* One exception: I do remember really liking Wilmar Shiras's "In Hiding" (1948), which is collected in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two B. Maybe that's because, if I recall correctly, its precocious superchild was a Boy Scout!

Technologies of Immortality: Team Teaching

I've mentioned it a few times around here, but this semester I've been team-teaching an Honors course. Our Honors program made some big changes over the last few years; one of them was that Honors students would take classes called "Dialectics," where professors from three different colleges would teach a course on a common topic; these could be called "Where Did We Come From?", "Where Are We Now?", and "Where Are We Going?"

I applied to become an Honors fellow back in Spring 2020; the Honors program then arranged a big Zoom meeting where accepted faculty gave quick verbal indications of what they might be interested in. I was interested in science fiction, of course; my argument was that I could basically pair with any science professor, because no matter what science you talk about, there are science fiction stories about it.

I ended up paired with Ryan Cragun, a professor of sociology, and Kenyon Evans-Nguyen, a professor of forensic science who specializes in neurochemistry. We kibbitzed and eventually came up with a "Where Are We Going?" class about what I came to call "technologies of immortality": attempts to lengthen the human lifespan. Our three big examples were consciousness uploading, cryonics, and genetic life extension. I could talk about how such technologies had been depicted in sf, Cragun could talk about the real people trying to do this and the sociological implications of doing it, and Kenyon could talk about the actual science of it.

Like I said, this was Spring 2020... we ended up being scheduled to teach the class in Spring 2024, so I had quite a lot of time to prepare! I've chronicled some of that process here on my blog. In next week's post, I'll talk about my specific stories, but here I wanted to talk about the big picture of how we organized the course.

We bookended the course with the science fiction; the first three weeks were largely mine. Aside from the syllabus day, we began with the story "Bridesicle" by Will McIntosh, as a way of capturing students' attention with the course topic; the story features both cryonics and consciousness uploading. We then did one day on real attempts to extend life, to show this was something really happening, and then went back into the sf.

After that, we shifted to the sociology and the science. The students started learning about how neurons actually worked from Kenyon and about the sociological issues from Cragun. These Dialectics classes have sixty students, and you can't really take sixty students into the lab. So what we would sometimes do is split the class up into thirds: one third would go into the lab, one third would attend a sociology lecture, and one third would conference with me about papers. Across a M/W/F week, students would rotate through all three.

In the lab, they did things like:

• measure electrical activity in crickets
• drug crickets and see how that affected their electrical activity
• measure electrical activity in worms
  
• cool worms and see how that affected their electrical activity
• freeze onion slices in liquid nitrogen

"Dad, why are you a scientist?" asked my five-year-old.

I didn't always get to go (sometimes I had to conference), but I did do three of the labs.

We did a week on HeLa cells, where we had students watch The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and then Cragun talked about the racial issues, Kenyon talked about using HeLa cells during his postdoc (before the book came out, so he didn't know the significance), and I assigned an sf short story that riffed on them.

We also had them read a bit of Gregory Benford's cryonics thriller Chiller, specifically the afterword, where he discusses if he thinks cryonics will work, and we had them research and present on his assumptions.

Finally, at the end of the semester, we circled back to science fiction with two final weeks.

Some Dialectics faculty have the student do common assignments; we broke the grade into four categories, each worth 25%:

• Literature Assignments. I assigned a four-page literary analysis paper near the beginning of the semester, and a 1½-page "reflective" paper near the end, where they had to connect the sf to something from the sociology or science portions of the course.
• Lab Assignments. Kenyon assigned five lab write-ups to go with his five labs.
• Sociology Assignments. Cragun assigned a cumulative sociology research project, where they gathered survey data about attitudes toward immortality, and contextualized it in terms of a literature review they did.
  
• Quizzes and Presentations. I did random reading quizzes, and Kenyon assigned pre-lab quizzes.

I'll talk more about some of this in a future post, too.

---

Overall, I liked it a lot. If nothing else, Honors students are engaged and thoughtful, and I got to discuss literature as literature, not as a thing to write about in an AWR course.

Plus, it's fun to learn things! I wouldn't be in this job if I didn't believe that, and for a few weeks, I got to be a student again, learning about neurons and macromolecules and the history of religion and income inequality. I made some neat connections between my work and their work.

But I also really liked working with both Ryan Cragun and Kenyon Evans-Nguyen; I think we have similar dispositions and worked well as co-teachers. They are, like me, nerdy middle-aged dads! I am trying to convince them both to join my Star Trek Adventures campaign. I can imagine there would be some people you would be miserable team teaching with, but I really enjoyed working with the two of them. (Which is good, because we will do it two more times!)

Reading Roundup Wrapup: April 2024

Pick of the month: To Shape a Dragon's Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose. This was a Hugo (well, Lodestar (not a Hugo)) finalist, and so far, it definitely feels like the one to beat in its category. YA fantasy about a dragonriding school, but with some genuinely original twists on the genre and solid worldbuilding.

All books read:

1. Apocalypse Still: Stories by Leah Nicole Whitcomb
2. John Dough and the Cherub: A Whimsical Wonder-Story in which is Described the Marvelous Creation of John Dough, the Gingerbread Man; his meeting with the Incubator Baby called Chick the Cherub: their Adventures in the Isle of Phreex, the Land of Mifkets, Pirate Island and Hiland and Loland by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill
3. Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons by Kelly Sue DeConnick, Phil Jimenez, Gene Ha, and Nicola Scott
4. The Witches of World War II by Paul Cornell and Valeria Burzo
5. The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older
6. Abeni’s Song by P. Djèlí Clark
7. To Shape a Dragon’s Breath: The First Book of Nampeshiweisit by Moniquill Blackgoose
8. A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith 

I feel like I did a lot of good reading this month but I guess it's not reflected in my numbers. A lot of long books, I suppose. All but the first two were Hugo reads!

All books acquired:

1. Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons by Kelly Sue DeConnick, Phil Jimenez, Gene Ha, and Nicola Scott
2. The Witches of World War II by Paul Cornell and Valeria Burzo
3. Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh 
4. Unraveller by Frances Hardinge
5. Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher
6. The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty
7. Web of Angels by John M. Ford

#1-6 are all Hugo finalists, of course; I have a few more yet to arrive.

Currently reading:

• Showcase Presents Blackhawk, Volume One by Dick Dillin, Charles Cuidera, et al.
  
• Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Gamma: Original Sin by David R. George III
• Collected Poems by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Legion of Super-Heroes: Five Years Later Omnibus, Volume 2 by Tom & Mary Bierbaum, Tom McCraw, Stuart Immonen, Chris Sprouse, et al. 

Up next in my rotations:

1. The Pelican History of England: 3. English Society in the Early Middle Ages (1066-1307) by Doris Mary Stenton 
2. The Periodic Table by Primo Levi 
3. The Dispossessed by Szilárd Borbély
4. Star Trek: Prey, Book 3: The Hall of Heroes by John Jackson Miller

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 660 (down 1)

Library of America: The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth

American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1953-1956: The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth / More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon / The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett / The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson
edited by Gary K. Wolfe

At a certain point, I realized that I owned every Library of America science fiction release... except two. One, Five Classics Novels 1956-1958, contained five books that I already owned four of, so that seemed fair to skip, but the other had four new-to-me works, so I put it on my wish list and my wife got it for me for my birthday last year.

Collection published: 2012
Novel originally published: 1952
Acquired: July 2023
Read: March 2024

The first is The Space Merchants (1952), a novel that has long stuck in my head because Isaac Asimov briefly mentions it in his introduction to More Soviet Science Fiction under its alternate title of "Gravy Planet," which is, to be honest, a bit of a daft title, but certainly an evocative one. It is not about a planet of literal gravy, alas. It's also not about merchants flying through space, which is what I had imagined before reading it; it's about the people trying to sell the public on going to space, the people merchanting space.

Asimov cites it as an example of what he calls the "Stage Three-C" anti-utopian science fiction story: "It deals with a dreadfully overpopulated world in which advertising techniques have been made the only acceptable guide to human behavior. Its gambits are: 'If the population explosion goes on—' and 'If the theory that anything that is good for business is morally correct goes on—'" The former gambit has dated itself a bit, but the latter has held up, and if anything probably seems even more likely than it did back in 1952. Senators literally represent corporate interests, no form of advertising or corporate skulduggery is illegal—except where corporations infringe on each other, they can do whatever they like to people. The main character is an advertising executive put in charge of selling Venus to the American people, who suddenly finds himself on the outs when he had been on the top.

The actual story is what it is; I don't think it's terrible or anything, but it's not why you're reading the book. It's one of those sf books you read for the world. Pohl and Kornbluth have that 1950s sf obsession with advertising-as-science, which also appears in Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man (1952), Mark Clifton and Frank Riley's They'd Rather Be Right (1954), and Philip K. Dick's Ubik (1969), this belief that with the right combination of triggers, anyone can be sold anything. The advertising satire is one of the best parts of the book; the book definitely performs a Stage Three-C gambit with the ubiquity of advertising, and it's hard to imagine that Dick hadn't read The Space Merchants. The leap that Pohl and Kornbluth don't quite make (but are so close on) is that, as John Berger would highlight in Ways of Seeing (1972), advertising doesn't just sell you a product, it sells you the entire idea that the way to improve your life is through the purchase of product. What the novel does delve into, though, is how there's an invisible class divide when it comes to marketing—well, invisible to those on the top, anyway. Some people aren't even worth selling to!

It's a quick read and a fun one; Pohl and Kornbluth have an easy style and the protagonist has a strong narrative voice. This would be fun to teach in a class on early science fiction, or one in a class on advertising in sf.

I am only a little bit into the second novel, More Than Human, and so far it is a very different book! But more on that in a future post.