Reading The Hidden Valley of Oz Aloud to My Kid

The Hidden Valley of Oz by Rachel R. Cosgrove
illustrated by Dirk

The Hidden Valley of Oz is a landmark book for me: though not the last book in the "Famous Forty" (there is one more to go), it is the last that I had not read before, as I owned the fortieth and final one, Merry Go Round in Oz, when I was a kid. So my reading it aloud to my five-year-old kid was the first time I had ever read it, and the last time I will ever discover a new "canonical" Oz novel.

Originally published: 1951
Acquired: July 2022
Read aloud: May–June 2024

Like Jack Snow, it seems like Rachel Cosgrove was very consciously aping L. Frank Baum in her contribution to the Famous Forty; more specifically, she was definitely aping The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In Wonderful Wizard, an American child is whisked through the air to Oz where grateful locals think they are a witch or wizard and send them on a quest for a distant ruler with animal companions in tow. In Hidden Valley, an American child is whisked through the air to Oz where grateful locals think they are a witch or wizard and send them on a quest for a distant ruler with animal companions in tow. While the Munchkins were grateful to Dorothy for killing the Wicked Witch of the East and send her off to see the Wizard of Oz, Jonathan "Jam" Manley lands in the Gillikin country. He doesn't kill anyone for the Gillikins, but they send Jam off to find the Emperor of the Winkies, because they believe his axe is the key to liberating them from the tyranny of a giant named Terp the Terrible.

This "back to basics" approach also manifests in who Jam meets, and how the story is told. When Jam meets the Emperor of the Winkies, he is of course the Tin Woodman, and they are joined on their journey by Dorothy and the Scarecrow (plus also the Hungry Tiger). So we get a classic formula for an Oz story, told with a set of classic characters. The way it is told is also very Baum: unlike in a Ruth Plumly Thompson or John R. Neill novel, where the characters plunge from encounter to encounter, for the first time in a long while, we have an Oz story where they amble from encounter to encounter, slowly walking from point A to point B and back again, encountering various obstacles on the way. And like in one of Baum's better novels (e.g., Dorothy and the Wizard, Patchwork Girl), those encounters are ones that require clever thinking on the part of our protagonists to escape danger. That said, the dangers are very Thompsonian: two of the three irrelevant enclaves that Jam and company meet are ones that want to convert the protagonists into their own weird way of living (as books and snowmen). The original animal characters here, Percy the White Rat and the Leopard with Changing Spots especially, are fun additions.

So far so good. But I found the book weak in a couple key areas. One is that there are simply too many characters in the adventuring party: across the course of the book we have Jam, Percy, Pinny and Gig (two guinea pigs), Jam's sentient kite, Dorothy, the Tin Woodman, the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, Spots, and the Rhyming Dictionary. Though there's no point where all eleven characters are in the party at once, Cosgrove clearly struggles to give them all something to do, and twice resorts to characters just leaving the group for sort of flimsy reasons. And among the ones who don't leave, it's really only Percy, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman who consistently contribute; Jam feels like an also-ran in his own book, Dorothy might as well not be there, and the Cowardly Lion and the Hungry Tiger are wasted. I like the emphasis on clever problem solving, something sorely missing from many of the recent Oz novels, but it would have been nice for Jam to do something in the book. The climactic fight against Terp seems like the place for that, but it's actually the previously hapless Gillikins who do most of the heavy lifting for some reason! The party comes up with a clever plan, but I wish the party had been the ones to put it into action.

The book is also let down by the illustrations, probably the worst to ever appear in an canonical Oz novel. Sketchy and utterly lacking in whimsy or charm or imagination. And so few of them too! ("The food at this place is really terrible." "Yeah, I know; and such small portions!")

My kid seemed to enjoy it; they were particularly fascinated by the fact that the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman used hypnotism to defeat the monster guarding the magic muffin tree that made Terp the Terrible into a giant. I think they particularly liked the new animal characters. But I don't think it's one they loved either. Which, I think, is a fair assessment. I am hoping Cosgrove's other Oz novel is more involving.

Next up in sequence: The Wicked Witch of Oz

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Gamma: Original Sin

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Gamma: Original Sin
by David R. George III

March 2386 / 2380

Published: 2017
Acquired: June 2023
Read: May 2024

Ah, we've finally tied off all the lingering threads of the Deep Space Nine time jump. Now the story can move forward at last! David R. George III set up some new concepts in his previous book, so surely we'll be building on them.

What's that? We never heard the story of Rebecca Sisko's kidnapping? Oh, well, I guess so...

To be honest, I had forgotten this had even happened. It was part, I think, of the litany of bad things that was used in Rough Beasts of Empire to justify Sisko running away from his family, along with "neighbors who the reader never saw died." Because, as we know, the thing good fathers do when their children are kidnapped is spend less time around them. I don't think this was a story that actually demanded to be told.

Original Sin has two parallel plotlines; in the present day, Sisko's command, the USS Robinson, has set out on a journey of exploration in the Gamma Quadrant, but Rebecca is kidnapped (along with a bunch of other children aboard the Galaxy-class starship). This reminds Sisko of the last time she was kidnapped, so we get that filled in, too.

It is dead boring. I can't imagine anyone reading all the post-Destiny DS9 novels up until this point and thinking to themselves, "Gee, I really want more of Sisko sitting around thinking about how worried he is," but that's exactly what we get here. Ad nauseam. It may be realistic that Sisko does nothing to find Rebecca in the flashback while a trained investigator works on it... but that kind of realism is not what I read Star Trek books for! Seriously, he's barely in the flashbacks, it all focuses on some investigator lady who I assume must have been in earlier books but whom I did not remember at all. Like, what's the point of this? It just goes on and on and on. Also, at at least one point, the frame narrative deflates the flashback by telling us something about it before we actually get to see it (p. 142). C'mon, why do this?

In theory, Sisko is the active character in the present-day narrative, but it also feels like little happens here. The kids are kidnapped, the Robinson crew putzes around a lot, they rescue the kids, the end. No plot twists, no character development, no interesting worldbuilding. The whole thing is incredibly linear and dull. Thematically, there doesn't seem to be anything going on, there's just people doing stuff... but why? The original Mission: Gamma novels (see below) largely managed to explore interesting alien cultures and tell gripping character stories, but this does neither.

Other Notes:

• Am I supposed to parse this as a book called Gamma: Original Sin? Or a book called Original Sin in a subseries called Gamma that only lasted one installment? Or was this supposed to be book five of Mission: Gamma but someone screwed up? (This is, after all, the publishing era where Section 31 and The Lost Era were revived for further installments, a decade on.)
• Are the crew of the Robinson the least interesting "leads" to ever grace the pages of a Star Trek book?

Deep Space Nine Overall:
Other than a Cardassia-focused Una McCormack book, this is our last Deep Space Nine novel. As someone who found the original sequence of DS9 relaunch novels from Avatar to Unity one of the best things Star Trek fiction has ever done, I have found the sequence from Rough Beasts of Empire to here one of the worst. All the characters have been dispersed, many of them eliminated, others changed to the point of unrecognizability. The characters never seem to do anything except think about the past, slowly; ongoing plots are doled out so slowly as to become profoundly tedious. I really like how Alvaro Zinos-Amaro puts it in his review of the novel for the late, lamented* Tor.com:

The sequence in which the Robinson is encased in null space is neat, but it sticks in my mind as a microcosm of the relaunch series itself at this point. We’re in uncharted waters, but seem to have become adrift in a kind of oblivion, with too many recent books expending significant effort on filling in previous gaps in the chronology and slowly crawling us back into the “normal space” of present time, rather than boldly pushing the story forward.​

Or as the TrekBBS's David cgc once put it, referring to the very slow doling out of ongoing plotlines in this era, "'When are the[y] going to get to the fireworks factory?!' ... [T]he answer turned out to be 'never.'"

But worst of all is surely the handling of Sisko. The trajectory of the original show was to take a guy who was uncomfortable with this alien planet and its society and to show him slowly becoming part of it. He began a Starfleet officer and ended up the Emissary. (I have my issues with Sisko in "What You Leave Behind," but this was not one of them.) Post-Destiny, this was entirely undone. He totally abandons Bajor, he becomes a guy obsessed with exploration. Why? Nothing about this captures what made the character appealing in his original run. Fundamental to the way I think about Sisko is something Michael Piller says in the Deep Space Nine Companion: Picard is the explorer, but Sisko is the builder. But the Sisko of the books builds nothing: not a planet, not a station, not even his own family.

I don't think David R. George understands Sisko at all and if there is any saving grace to the abrupt cutting off of the DS9 novels with so many threads unresolved, it's that I don't have to keep reading about this boring character masquerading as Sisko.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Prey: The Hall of Heroes by John Jackson Miller

* You don't have to find it funny but this is a joke. I have been reliably informed that despite the seemingly misguided rebranding to the bland Reactor, the site is very much alive. I hope this is true but I promised to eat my hat if it wasn't, so now I am hoping the site dies, sorry.

Legion of Super-Heroes: Five Years Later Omnibus, Volume 2 by Tom & Mary Bierbaum, Tom McCraw, Stuart Immonen, Chris Sprouse, et al.

Legion of Super-Heroes: Five Years Later Omnibus, Volume 2

 

Collection published: 2022
Contents originally published: 1992-94
Acquired: June 2022
Read: May 2024

This volume collects the second half of the so-called "Five Year Later" Legion—which is also the last two years of the original thirty-six-year Legion continuity. It not only collects the main Legion title and the Legionnaires spin-off, but also some issues of L.E.G.I.O.N. and Valor that tied into it. It's a pretty nicely put together collection, and it means that DC has collected all the Legion material from 1958 to 1984 and from 1989 to 1994 in hardcover. All they have to do is the five years of Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 3 (and some ancillary material from that time) and they'll be done. C'mon DC, you can do it! But as for this volume itself, I'll take it in chunks because it's so big:

Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 4 #40-48

Writers: Tom & Mary Bierbaum with Tom McCraw
Pencillers: Stuart Immonen, Chris Sprouse

Inkers: Ron Boyd, Karl Story, John Dell III

Letters: John Workman, Bob Pinaha

Colorist: Tom McCraw

These issues set up the new status quo for the Legion; you may remember that in the previous volume, a group of younger (cloned?) Legionnaire surfaced, the so-called "Batch SW6." The opening story sees the two Legions divvy up responsibilities; the older (original?) will take responsibility for the wider United Planets, while SW6 Legion will stay on "New Earth," the collection of linked domed cities that's all that's left following the destruction of the Earth.

Most of these nine issues are given over to a tedious storyline about the return of Mordru, using an army of the dead to try to take over the galaxy. I found the beats of this storyline very repetitive, and it dragged on and on. Writers Tom & Mary Bierbaum, on their own after co-plotting with Keith Giffen in the previous volume, are good at character moments and comedy, but I think not great at telling big stories; there are lots of nice moments and good ideas, but the overall story just isn't big enough to justify the space given to it. The art is excellent, though; well done Stuart Immonen especially.

Legionnaires #1-8

Writers: Tom & Mary Bierbaum
Pencillers: Chris Sprouse, Adam Hughes, Colleen Doran

Inkers: Karl Story, Mark Farmer, John Nyberg

Letterer: Pat Brousseau

Colorist: Tom McCraw

Legionnaires also starts with a multi-part story, this one about a new Fatal Five assembling to take down the new Legion. Again, it's okay but too drawn out, and again it has great art, here from Chris Sprouse.

What did really work for me in this set of eight issues were the last two, a pair of standalone stories. The first features some exquisite Adam Hughes art in an adventure where the Legion visits the Atlantis dome; the character driven stuff really suits the Bierbaums' strengths in a way that wasn't true of the earlier stories, and Hughes is all-time great when it comes to "acting"; his Legionnaires are expressive and lively. I would have loved to have seen a longer run from him on the Legion. There's also a Brainiac 5–focused story that I found so-so, but really shines thanks to some Colleen Doran art. Again, she's an all-time great, and Legionnaires was lucky to get her early in her career.

The fun thing about seeing the young Legion in a 1990s comic is that they come across as genuine teenagers in a way that wasn't really true of the 1960s squares of the era from which they were supposedly plucked.

Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 4 #49-52 & Annual #4

Writers: Tom & Mary Bierbaum, Tom McCraw
Pencillers: Stuart Immonen, Darryl Banks, Joe Phillips, Christopher Taylor, Nick Napolitano

Inkers: Terry Austin, Ron Boyd, Wade Von Grawbadger, Dan Davis, Pam Eklund, Rich Faber

Letters: Bob Pinaha

Colors: Tom McCraw

This section opens with a "Bloodlines: Earthplague" annual; it is of course terrible, but all of 1993's Bloodlines annuals were, so I don't know how much we can blame the Bierbaums for this. (It is, however, kind of misplaced; it takes place during the Mordru storyline from earlier in the book.) A skateboarder dude with attitude gets powers and travels to the thirtieth century and lives it up... and it's just awful all around, not helped by some really bad art. (There are five credited pencillers and four credited inkers.)

The last four issues here are transitional standalones: a comedy Tenzil "Matter-Eater Lad" Kem story, a big celebration for the fiftieth, a story about Kent Shakespeare and some Legion-adjacent children, and a Timber Wolf story. Most are not great. The Tenzil one was nowhere near as funny as previous Tenzil adventures; I am not sure what happened there. The one about the kids was confusing; maybe I would have liked it more if I could remember who these characters were, but I mostly did not. (It's been over two years since I last saw most of them in the previous Five Years Later omnibus.) The Timber Wolf one mixes great Stuart Immonen art with terrible Christopher Taylor art, and seems like a bit of a regression for a character I don't particularly like to begin with.

That said, I did really like #50, which was also the swansong of the Bierbaums on the main book. One thing I've really liked about their run is the sense of the Legionnaires as real people that have grown and aged and come to terms with themselves, and that's really present in this issue; there's a great conversation between Light Lass and Timber Wolf, for example. There's a strong Element Lad focus here, which really works; I think they nicely picked up the baton of treating these characters as people in a way that Paul Levitz had begun and no one before him had. It's a shame all this work got wiped out by later writers, even when DC did return to the "original" Legion.

Legionnaires #9-15

Writers: Tom & Mary Bierbaum
Pencillers/Breakdowns: Chris Sprouse, Adam Hughes, Brian Stelfreeze, Joe Phillips, Chris Gardner, Frank Fosco, Jeff Moy

Inkers/Finisher: Karl Story, Stuart Immonen, Mark Farmer, Wade Von Grawbadger, Jason Martin, Dennis Cramer, Ron Boyd

Letterer: Pat Brousseau

Colorist: Tom McCraw

I wouldn't call this great, but it's a reasonably strong run from the Bierbaums; instead of doing one big story, it's more in the classic 1980s style of the Legion, where there's a bunch of different stories on the boil all at once, rotating in prominence, with the character work being the main throughline. I think this plays to their strengths more than other work in the volume, and I think had they been allowed to stay on the title, they could have eventually made it great. Unfortunately, what should have been the best subplot (Kono and a disguised-as-a-woman Tenzil infiltrating space pirates) turns out to be the worst. I don't know how they screwed that one up but it just doesn't make sense at all.

Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 4 #53-59

Co-Plotters: Tom McCraw, Stuart Immonen, & Ron Boyd
Words: Tom McCraw, Mark Waid

Colors: Tom McCraw
Art: Stuart Immonen & Ron Boyd, Chrstopher Taylor & Dave Cooper

Letters: Bob Pinaha

Tom McCraw's brief run on the Legion is freaking awful. They're once again on the run and against the government, which feels like a regression; they adopt stupid new codenames; they suddenly start acting and posing in a very 1990s "attitudinal" way. I don't really know what anyone was going for here but it was pretty badly done.

L.E.G.I.O.N. '94 #69-70 / Legionnaires #16-18 & Annual #1 / Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 4 #60-61 & Annual #5 / Valor #20-23

Writers: Tennessee Peyer, Mark Waid with Ty Templeton, Tom McCraw, Kurt Busiek
Pencillers: Arnie Jorgensen, Derec Aucoin, Paul Pelletier, Jeff Moy, Stuart Immonen, Curt Swan, Ron Boyd, Wade Von Grawbadger, Craig Hamilton, Ted McKeever, Colleen Doran, Chris Gardner

Inkers: James Pascoe, Mark Farmer, John Lowe, Wade Von Grawbadger, Ron Boyd, Jose Marzan, Jr., Dave Cooper, John Lowe, Robert Campanella, Karl Story, Colleen Doran, Dennis Cramer

Colorists: Gene D'Angelo, Tom McCraw, Dave Grafe

Letterers: Gaspar, Pat Brousseau, Bob Pinaha

First we get some pages from two issues of L.E.G.I.O.N. that wrap up Jo Nah's search for the missing Tinya Wazzo, though he finds out that L.E.G.I.O.N.'s Phase is no Tinya, but her cousin. This is a retcon I don't buy and tend to ignore, but good on DC for including the pages here. (I think these are the only issues of L.E.G.I.O.N. to ever be collected?) After that we get two Elseworlds annuals, one where the Legion are Arthurian knights in space, and one where it's an Oz riff. Neither is a great Elseworlds tale, though the Arthurian one has its moments.

Finally, we get a set of timebending Zero Hour tie-ins that draw this era of the Legion to an end. A couple issues of Valor are here, though Colleen Doran art aside, I don't rate them highly; even Mark Waid can't make this dud of a premise work. (The SW6 Valor has to replace the original Valor and do everything he did, but earlier and quicker, for some reason.) Then time anomalies begin threatening the Legion and Legionnaires in the thirtieth century, their continuity slipping around them; Cosmic Boy turns out to be the Time Trapper; a series of increasingly complicated but meaningless reveals about nothing are made. It's the worst kind of superhero comics, where what happens is more important than how.

And then it all comes to an end. I guess I can see why DC decided to start over with the Legion, but it seems to me that this was the beginning of the slow thirty-year death of the Legion. No longer was the Legion a single ongoing story to which different authors and artists added their bits, but rather it was now continuously jettisoned and started over arbitrarily. Even when later runs were strong (I do really like the "threeboot"), the overall health of the Legion as a concept never recovered. I wonder if there was a way to continue on from this era and make it work (probably such a way requires there to never have been an SW6 Legion) but we'll never know.

But regardless, this is a great collection in that it provides ready access to a key slice of DC history. Even the bad choices here are interesting, and the good choices are great. I'm pretty close to owning an unbroken 1958-94 run on the Legion, and I look forward to savoring this volume as the culmination of the original dream.

I read a Legion of Super-Heroes collection every six months. Next up in sequence: Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Volume 1

Returning to Star Trek Adventures: A New Campaign

My Star Trek Adventures campaign that I have previously chronicled here fizzled out with its ninth episode in late 2022 or early 2023, partway through a playthrough of "A Plague of Arias"; it is always hard to schedule a group of academics to do something, and when we did schedule people were always late and/or cancelling at the last minute. Plus two members of our group had moved to Orlando, over an hour away, so attending had become quite a commitment. So that was the end of Beyond the Rim of the Starlight.

But recently I've been jonesing to play again, especially as I made some new friends, coworkers who I thought would both enjoy playing.

So I came up with an idea: if getting academics to do something during the school year is tough because they're always so busy, maybe we could do something over the summer? My idea was that in the summer you could play weekly in the evenings, because no one is teaching or whatever. Now because they don't teach in summer, that means academics all go on trips... but that's fine, character absences are fairly easy to organically work into the STA narrative, you just say that guy didn't beam down that week or they're in engineering or whatever.

I cleared with my wife that a weekly campaign in the summer would be acceptable (as long as we weren't the ones hosting) and then began recruiting. First, I asked the members of my old campaign who were still around; my friend Cari turned me down, considering the weekly commitment too much, but Claire accepted. My team-teachers Ryan and Kenyon were both up for it, and Ryan volunteered to host. Ryan also said his wife and son, Debi and Toren, would be interested, Debi in a general sense and Toren as a pinch-hitter. I also asked Austin, the husband of a colleague. He and his wife host a monthly board game night for our department, so I knew from that he'd be a thoughtful player.

That got me up to five players (plus a part-time sixth), but then it occurred to me that a new-ish professor of psychology whose office is next to mine, Forest, would be a good candidate too. She accepted—and then asked if her husband, Joel, also a big gamer and Star Trek fan, could participate. This would get me up to seven players, but after some soul-searching, I decided it would probably work because there very rarely would be circumstances where all seven were playing at once. (Indeed, Joel is going on a six-week research trip soon.)

We started with a "session zero" (six of the eight players were able to make it), which I broke into three parts.

First, we discussed basic parameters. I asked what the players liked about Star Trek in general and what they would like to see in the game and jotted down a list of notes. Then, we discussed when the game might be set and what style of play they'd like. There were only two things I wanted to veto: after my previous campaign, I wasn't interested in doing "lower decks" again, and I also had no desire to do a war campaign—but I was pretty sure my players weren't interested in one either. They were into a more science/exploration-focused campaign... somewhat intimidatingly, five of my seven players have Ph.D.s in science or math!

Based on the fact that all players were familiar with the TNG-era shows, we settled on a post–Dominion War, pre–Romulan supernova campaign. (2377, for you chronology nerds out there.)

I also had them fill out a "lines and veils" sheet I got from a friendly poster on Reddit.

Second, we played through a simple scene. It occurred to me that it's hard to generate a character meaningfully when you don't know the system, so I had them all pick existing Star Trek characters and pull up their character sheets from the packs that Modiphius gives away. (I think we had Riker, Data, Worf, O'Brien, La Forge, the EMH, and I forget the last one.) I then set the group the challenge of getting through a door, improvising enough problems to give each one a Task roll to make, and explain concepts like assists, Focuses, Values, Momentum, Threat, and Determination. With a premade character, I think these ideas were easier to demonstrate and it gave them an understanding when they built their own characters.

Finally, they built their characters and the ship. The characters they came up with:

• Ryan as Captain Rucot, a Cardassian captain on a postwar exchange program. I was eager to try out a player captain, having eschewed this in my previous campaign, and while I've played D&D with people I would not trust to be captain, having seen Ryan in the classroom, I felt fairly comfortable with him taking the position. I think there is probably some neat stuff to be done with a Cardassian captain... though I don't know how much we'll get to do with it in the time we have available.
• Debi as Commander T'Cant, the Vulcan first officer who used to work in Intelligence. Debi ended up writing a pretty interesting backstory, using her own background as a geneticist.
  
• Kenyon as Lt. Commander Nevan Jones, chief engineer. Nevan is half-Betazoid, but his mother was human and it was a one-night stand, so he never knew his father and doesn't know how to deal with his empathic powers; he prefers machines because they don't give him any feelings to cope with.
• Claire as Lieutenant Mooria Loonin, the flight controller and an unjoined Trill. Claire was the one player who carried over from my previous campaign, and expressed a desire to keep the same character. This worked out fine in terms of backstory, as Loonin had been a newly graduated ensign on the command track in 2371; it seemed reasonable she could be a pilot and senior officer by the end of the Dominion War.
  
• Austin as Lieutenant Frector, chief of security. Frector is a Ferengi woman who worked as a Starfleet Intelligence asset during the Dominion War and then was fast-tracked to through the Academy afterward. Without much physical prowess, she depends on her contacts and wits to prevent violent situations before they escalate.
• Forest as Doctor Alita Faraday, chief medical officer. Faraday has a cybernetic implant she designed herself that lets her interface with technology, and a keen interest in cybernetics.
• Joel as Lieutenant j.g. Oliver Johnson, chief science officer. Newly graduated from Starfleet Academy on the Ph.D. track, Oliver is in his first-ever Starfleet assignment and a bit green. He once travelled through time (for three whole weeks) and is not supposed to talk about it (but tries to find ways to work it into conversation anyway).
• Toren as Tronen Krackenng, the Klingon counselor. This was based on a joke I made during character creation that Toren took and ran with.
  

We decided that T'Cant, Jones, and Loonin served on the ship during the Dominion War, while Rucot, Tronen, Frector, Faraday, and Johnson were all newly assigned. It does seem like a lot, but Toren only plays if we don't otherwise have six; in the first five sessions, he's only played twice. So at most, we have six players.

We ended up going with a New Orleans-class ship because of the exploration profile. Jokes about how the crew seemed like the one Starfleet would put on the brochure to show how diverse they were led to them going with the name USS Diversitas.

I wrote up the following paragraph to describe the ship:

The USS Diversitas was launched in 2366, during the Federation’s “New Renaissance” period, after the Cardassian wars had come to an end, before the threats of the Borg or the Dominion had made themselves known, an era when a renewed devotion to exploration spread through Starfleet. Its mission of exploration was interrupted by the Dominion War, where it largely served away from the frontlines but was fairly distinguished nonetheless. A year after the end of the war, its mission of exploration has been renewed, but its captain and several longstanding officers have chosen to retire or move on, resulting in a largely new crew… 

And I made a dedication plaque:

As for the series title? Star Trek: Ekumene, because the ship is going to be exploring the Ekumene sector... but they will discover more about the meaning behind the series title as it continues!

Showcase Presents Blackhawk by Dick Dillin, Charles Cuidera, et al.

Showcase Presents Blackhawk, Volume One

Collection published: 2008
Contents originally published: 1957-58
Acquired: March 2024
Read: May 2024

Pencilled by Dick Dillin

Inked by Charles Cuidera, Sheldon Moldoff

Writer: Dave Wood

Quality Comics's Blackhawk came to an end with issue #107 in December 1956, but without missing an issue or a month, DC Comics picked the title up right from there, continuing with issue #108 in January 1957. The DC version of the title ran all the way to issue #273, but of these 166 issues, all that have been collected are the first twenty; by this point, each issue consisted of three eight-page stories, so this Showcase Presents volume contains sixty stories, reprinted in black and white (as was usual for the Showcase line).

The early issues collected here are not very good... and somehow the book manages to get worse as it goes. If Blackhawk has a unique selling point, it's that it's about fighter pilots taking down dictators in World War II. But the fact that these characters are fighter pilots is almost entirely incidental; they use their airplanes to get to adventures, but the airplanes are very rarely part of the adventures.

But worse is the fact that these are very generic Silver Age stories about fighting "Crime," in that really boring way I associate with the squarest of Batman stories. In every installment, some boring-ass villain with some stupid gimmick pops up, and the Blackhawks put him away, looking as smug as all get out as they do so. Something that gave the original Blackhawk stories in Military Comics an edge was that the Blackhawks were renegades, they were operating outside the law, without government sanction, to do what they thought were right. These Blackhawks are the kind of obnoxious do-gooders who have chummy lunches with mayors.

As the stories go on, they even managed to get worse, as they become more and more like a generic DC superhero comic, with stories of alien invasions and time travel and people with superpowers. This, surely, is not what anyone wants out of Blackhawk. I accept that World War II was probably old hat in the 1950s, and we weren't far enough away from it for nostalgia to kick in, but surely there must have been a way to maintain a unique identity for this title other than this. Just have them flipping do things in their airplanes if nothing else!

I complained about characterization in my review of the Military Comics Blackhawk stories, but it's usually even worse here. Blackhawk himself might as well be the only character most of the time; Andre, Olaf, and Hendrickson get the occasional bit of dialogue with characteristic French, Norwegian, or German phrases sprinkled in; I'm not sure the writers even remember Chuck and Stanislaus exist, I'm willing to bet that only artist Dick Dillin does and just keeps sticking them into group scenes. The racial caricature has been significantly dialed down for Chop-Chop... but oddly, this ill-serves the character, because now he's just another person to stand there and contribute nothing to group scenes. In the old days, he did stuff!

Dick Dillin is a bit of a square-jawed illustrator; I know him best from his later run on Justice League of America (from 1968 to 1980), where I really enjoyed his stuff. He's fine here. I bet if these were good stories, he would be great, but he's just not being given much to work with.

One thing I am curious about is when the Blackhawks technically become DC universe characters. The only hint of that here is in one where Blackhawk temporarily gains superpowers, and he compares himself to Superman... but of course Superman could be a fictional character that he knows about from reading comic books!

This is the third post in a series about the Blackhawks. The next installment covers issues #151-200 of Blackhawk vol. 1. Previous installments are listed below:

1. The Blackhawk Archives, Volume 1 (1941-42)
2. Military Comics #18-43 / Modern Comics #44-46 / Blackhawk #9 & 50 (1943-52)
   

Stolen Hours and Other Curiosities by Manjula Padmanabhan

Stolen Hours and Other Curiosities: The Collected Science Fiction Stories
by Manjula Padmanabhan

Since I encountered her play Harvest in graduate school, I have been a fan of the Indian writer Manjula Padmanabhan. She's one of those writers who refuses to be confined, having published autobiographical memoir, children's novels, picture books, literary short stories, and—most interesting to me—science fiction. Her play Harvest is about residents of a country in the Global South selling their organs to rich foreigners, but I think more attention is due to her prose fiction, and I even published an article in the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies about a pair of her short stories, "Gandhi-Toxin" (1997) and "2099" (1999).

Up until now, her sf stories have been scattered among her various short fiction collections (Hot Death, Cold Soup [1996], Kleptomania [2004], Three Virgins [2013]), mixed in with literary fiction, but last year, Hachette published a collection of all her sf work, plus a few new stories as well, and after discovering me on this blog, she generously reached out and offered me a copy of the collection.

Collection published: 2023
Contents published: 1984-2023
Acquired: May 2024
Read: June 2024

Padmanabhan is not the kind of writer one would ever categorize in "hard sf"; her approach as a writer is more to take an interesting sfnal idea and explore it in ways that are both playful and serious all at once. It's not too surprising to me that she doesn't seem to have made a big splash in the world of Anglophone sf fandom even in our modern era of more diverse writers; I feel like I am struggling to articulate it, but there's something that's a bit... silly in a way that isn't true of the diverse sf that comes out of the Tor.com/Uncanny sphere. I think those stories, even when they are very good and I like them, can feel a bit "worthy," but I think Padmanabhan is just doing what interests her.

The book contains twenty-six short stories, arranged in something approximating reverse publication order. This means that the book begins with stories that are new to me, and then transitions into the more familiar. The first story is "The Pain Merchant" (2021), about a world where pain has been eliminated, so people buy and sell pain illicitly. It is a bit hard to believe in one sense—no one in the future world seems to have thought through the implications of this advancement before it happened—but Padmabhan does what I like in sf, which is work out the second-level implications of a technology in a way that exposes something about human nature. Her story "Interface" (2018) is about our smart devices achieving some kind of intelligence: what would they think of us? (Coincidental shades of the Doctor Who episode "Dot and Bubble," actually, which I watched the night before writing this review.) Along similar but opposite lines, I enjoyed "Upgrade" (2020), about an older woman who gets an artificial house assistant.

Some of the stories are more fantastic than others, perhaps technically not sf, as Padmanabhan admits in her introduction, such as "The Empty Glass" (2023), about gods holding a conference in India. What keeps them in the sf orbit, for me anyway, is that she gives them a very grounded feeling. Sure, "The Empty Glass" features gods, but the story focuses on journalists trying to gain access to the conference. Or there's "A Government of India Undertaking" (1984), which is about reincarnation... but focuses on the arm of the Indian bureaucracy devoted to managing it. There's also "Freak" (2013), a funny story about a journalist investigating the story of a young woman who claims to have found the yeti. ("'Coz I'm God Emperor Dune! I'm gonna get the Nobel! I'm gonna be the POPE! I've captured the YETI!") I also really like "Feast" (2008), about a English vampire who at first thinks that India is a new venue with lots of unsuspecting victims but eventually discovers that the country's different belief systems have unexpected repercussions. Even her most fantastic premises are typically embedded in mundanity in a way that keeps them feeling "rational" and thus like sf, not fantasy. (Not that there's anything wrong with fantasy, I just personally prefer sf.)

Many of her sf stories take place in the future of India, but she's not confined by this. (I think there can be kind of restrictive pattern in postcolonial sf, where every story has to deal with the repercussions of colonialism or imperialism or globalism in some way.) I thought her story "A Cline's View" (2023) was a weird, disturbing take on what the mores of a genetically enhanced human with feline senses could contribute to the justice system. The title story, "Stolen Hours" (1996), is a weird story about a malevolent teenager on an asteroid colony, and one that is run through with both Padmanabhan's senses of whimsy and malevolence.

Of course it also contains all of my old favorites. "Gandhi-Toxin" is here (though under its original title of "Essence of Gandhi"), a really clever story about the unexpected difference between pacifism and passivity; global biotech companies attempt to weaponize Gandhi's genes to make the world easier to steamroll. So too is "2099," about a magazine editor who uses cryosleep to find out what the future will be like. (This also reverts to its original title, "India 2099," but also is a somewhat different text to the version contained in Kleptomania.*) I was happy to have a chance to reread "Sharing Air" (1984), about a future society where the atmosphere is so polluted everyone needs an individual supply of clean air—and thus sharing air becomes an act of decadence.

Like any collection, not every story is going to work for everyone. Probably because I am not from India, I found the Ramayana riffs, "Exile" (2013) and "The Other Woman" (2012), somewhat impenetrable, though the latter had some good jokes, and I am not sure what was happening in "The Annexe" (1996). But this is an interesting collection of stories from a unique talent, and I hope putting all of her sf into one place helps it reach a wider audience.

(Now to update my complete list of her short sf!)

* Not to go too deep into it, but Padmanabhan revised and expanded "2099," originally published in magazine called Outlook, when she collected it in Kleptomania. The version here seems to have started from the Outlook version but with different changes, so any alterations from the Kleptomania version aren't present here. I think it's the same as the version found in this 2016 issue of Weird Fiction Review.

Silence in the Book Club!

A few months ago, a friend of mine posted in a group chat about the idea of "silent book clubs." This is a new trend (I guess it's a BookTok thing?) where people get together to read books. But unlike what you might associate with book clubs, people getting together to talk about books, in these people get together to not talk. The idea here is that everyone works on a book they want to read, away from the distractions of home and work.

My friend Kim thought this sounded stressful—would these people judge her for the slightest noise she made? (my friend Kim is always afraid of being judged)—but to me it sounded potentially fun.

I totally forgot about it for a couple months until I came across a post in the Tampa subreddit, where someone was looking for things to do, and someone else recommended the newly formed Silent Book Club of Riverview. (There is also a Tampa one, but Riverview is a Tampa suburb close to the Tampa suburb that I live in.) I have been looking for things to do that bring me into contact with other people more often, so I hunted down and joined the facebook group.

bookstack for April meeting

The first meeting I attended was the April one, which was at a coffee shop—actually one closer to my neighborhood than Riverview, conveniently enough. The meeting was on a Sunday, and ran from 1:00 to 3:00pm. The procedure is that you have from 1:00 to 1:30 to check in, order drinks, and get set up, then everyone reads silently from 1:30 to 2:30. The last half hour is for chit-chat or more reading or whatever.

I did indeed get a nice hour of uninterrupted reading time; I read most of The Mimicking of Known Successes, a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Novella. One fun thing is that we were given a target word, and anyone who found that word in their own reading got a prize. I did not find it, but it was fun to hear the other readers read their sentences aloud.

I had kind of imagined there might be some kind of discussion prompt for the last thirty minutes ("what did you read? how was it?" or the like), but it wasn't very structured, and if there's anything that makes me awkward it's talking to people I don't already know in an unknown environment, so I hightailed it out of there after the bookstack photo and the group photo.

bookstack for May meeting

Still, I was into it enough to go back for the May one, which was held at a brewery. This place had loud music, and I accidentally staked out a table basically as far away from the organizer as it was possible to be, so I had a hard time hearing anything she said this time. If there was a target word, I do not know what it was. But I did get a nice hour of uninterrupted reading time with Naomi Kritzer's Liberty's Daughter, a Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book finalist.

I had thought maybe I would chat with some people after? But I am awkward and wasn't sitting near anyone and so I once again bolted ASAP. I will be back in the future, I expect, but I am finding that I do wish there was a little more talking at the silent book club! Am I part of the problem?

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Prey: The Jackal's Trick

Star Trek: Prey, Book 2: The Jackal's Trick
by John Jackson Miller

March 2386

Published: 2016
Acquired: May 2023
Read: March 2024

The Jackal's Trick picks up the plot threads from Hell's Heart, but shifts focus in terms of character somewhat. Whereas Hell's Heart gave us a lot of the Enterprise crew as its main Starfleet characters, this one, especially in its earlier chapters, focuses more on the Titan crew. Hell's Heart had no mention of anything from Titan: Sight Unseen except for Riker's new job; suddenly, here there are recurring characters from Titan like the new XO, Riker's aide, and Ethan Kyzak the North Star cowboy and references to specific scenes in Sight Unseen. (Did James Swallow turn in the manuscript after Miller wrote book 1 before he wrote book 2?) This works to the book's benefit; while Hell's Heart had somewhat bland Enterprise characters reacting to Klingon machinations again and again, The Jackal's Trick has a lot of fun scenes with the Titan crew as they manage to actually deal some setbacks to the Klingon cult.

I enjoyed Worf's strand a fair amount, as he is taken prisoner and tries to teach an Unsung child about honor... only he killed that child's father in honorable combat! Kahless gets some fun moments. Probably the real MVP of the book is Valandris, who is going through a challenging time in terms of values and circumstances. I enjoyed following her narrative, and I look forward to seeing where it—and that of the rest of the Unsung—goes in book 3.

Still, though, if the novel as a form is about characters who grow and change, it feels like Prey is curiously short of them given it's made up of three novels. Surely there's more fun to be gotten from a Tuvok/La Forge team-up than this? A big part of the problem are the two principal villains, Korgh and Cross. Both are very one-note... but feel like with a few tweaks, they could have been more fun and have more depth. Korgh is a wronged man, and one who has used dishonorable methods to reclaim his honor. Surely we could have more sympathy for him, and experience more of his turmoil? But whenever we go to his perspective, he's just cackling manically (inwardly) at a fullproof plan. Whatever interest I saw in Cross from book 1 was undermined almost right away in book 2 when he turned out to be a creepy psychopath. I feel like he could have been the kind of villain you kind of want to win because he's so clever, but again all his scenes feel the same.

This book feels like it's treading water for the people in it, even as the plot is always getting more complicated. I think in those old days, when Star Trek fiction had a lot of three-book series but not much of an ongoing story, you could have a trilogy that told an exciting story but didn't really move much forward. But this book is part of an ongoing tapestry—and yet it feels like no one in it is allowed to change or develop, even the characters original to it. Miller writes in a way that's fun and easy to read, I never dreaded this book or anything, but it doesn't feel like it has enough of a point to be three novels.

Continuity Notes:

• "The Federation has been at peace with the Klingon Empire since Kirk visited Khitomer." Well, you know, except for the war!

Other Notes:

• Perhaps I'm wrong, but I'd guess there's a straight line from Miller enjoying writing Kyzak here to The High Country.
• On p. 116, Cross is proud of himself for using a particular Klingon word... is he supposed to be speaking tlhIngan Hol the whole time? Because if so it would be easy to use a particular word! If not, it raises a bunch of questions best left avoided.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Gamma: Original Sin by David R. George III

"Over land, over sea, / We fight to make men free! / Of danger, we don't care, / We're Blackhawks!" (Military Comics #18–43 / Modern Comics #44–46 / Blackhawk #9 & 50)

The Blackhawk feature debuted (as covered in my previous post in this series, see below) in Quality's Military Comics in 1941, and continued through every issue of that title. Military Comics changed its name to Modern Comics with issue #44 in November 1945 (the war was, after all, over) and persisted up until issue #102 in October 1950, the Blackhawks continuing as a feature all the way to the end, even as the rest of the magazine's contents shifted away from warfare.

Meanwhile, Blackhawk also got its own self-titled magazine; this confusingly debuted with issue #9 in Winter 1944, with issue #10 not following until Spring 1946. The series was published quarterly from #10 to 18, then bimonthly from #18 to 33, and then finally monthly from #33 to 107, the series finally coming to an end (sort of) in December 1956.

I had previously planned to jump straight from March 1943's Military Comics #17 to January 1957's Blackhawk #108, but after finishing The Blackhawk Archives, I was curious about the rest of the Blackhawks' wartime adventures. While all of the Blachawk content published by DC is still under copyright, the Blackhawk material published by Quality is not, and thus you can get legal scans of all of it for free from the Digital Comic Museum. But did I really want to read eighty-five issues of Military/Modern Comics and ninety-nine issues of Blackhawk before finally making it to the material collected in Showcase Presents Blackhawk? That's a lot of presumably repetitive and not always high quality material!

from Military Comics #20 (script by Bill Woolfolk, art by Reed Crandall)

I ended up deciding to see out World War II. This meant going all the way to Military Comics #43, of course. I originally intended to stop with the first issue branded Modern Comics, but upon reading it, I realized that though the book's title had changed, the actual comic story in #44 was clearly written during the war, so I kept going until I came to the first postwar story. This would turn out to be Modern Comics #46, where the Japanese that the Blackhawks battle are referred to as "renegades" who refuse to accept that the war is over. #9 was the only issue of Blackhawk published during the war, so I did read that; I also jumped ahead to read one other postwar issue, Blackhawk #50 (March 1952), as that included both a text feature giving the origin of the Blackhawks and the debut of recurring Blackhawk villain Killer Shark.

from Military Comics #25
(script by Bill Woolfolk, art by John Cassone & Alex Kotzky)

(Note that I did read the text features if they were stories about the Blackhawks, but I did not read any of the myriad other features contained in Military Comics. No time for Cherry and Choo-Choo, alas!)

So how were the actual stories? I have to say, and maybe this is just familiarity breeding contempt, that the earlier stories collected in Blackhawk Archives have a vibrancy and power largely missing from these. As the series goes on, it feels like it gets more formulaic, the aeronautic nature of the Blackhawks feels less relevant, and the energy diffuses from both writing and art. 

Part of the problem is definitely the changing theater of war. In the first seventeen issues, the Blackhawks were mostly battling the Nazis in occupied Europe, with occasional forays into the Pacific, but by about Military #25 or so, the action has entirely shifted to the Pacific, and is all about battling the Japanese. This means, you might imagine, a lot more racism; whereas the Nazis were obviously depicted as nasty and often caricatured, they were also shown as dominating a people who would rather not have them. There were no good Nazis, of course, but there were good Germans! The Japanese, on the other hand, are villainous to a man, racial caricatures all the way down. A Nazi is allowed to be clever, but it seemed to me that Japanese was only allowed to be conniving, if you register the distinction.

from Military Comics #32 (scripter unknown, art by Mort Leav)

This all grew quite wearying. 

To me, the weird thing about Blackhawk is that though it has a clear lead character, it still seems like it ought to be an ensemble cast. But the Blackhawks who aren't Blackhawk, Chop-Chop, (and to a lesser extent) Olaf and Andre might as well not be there. Who the hell is Chuck? Or Hendrickson? (In one issue, Blackhawk calls him "gentle" and I was like, "He is?") Or the other one? I couldn't tell you; the writers certainly don't seem to know. I'm not asking for three-dimensional characters in my 1940s war comic, but even just two dimensions could be nice at times.

There were a couple parts I enjoyed. Military Comics #20 features a woman pilot joining the Blackhawks temporarily and totally running rings around their sexist expectations. She will only tell them her name is "Sugar" because she's "hard to get." This one was good fun. My understanding is that the "Lady Blackhawk" character doesn't join until the 1950s, but a lot of later references have retconned her to being active during the war; could we thus make this the story where Zinda Blake joins the team?

from Military Comics #35 (scripter unknown, art by Al Bryant)

Similarly, Military #34-36 has a multi-issue plotline (one of only two during this whole era) where a female photographer named Eve Rice ends up staying with the team for a bit. Once again, she's a fun character, who flummoxes the men with her competence, though she's also a bit of a manipulator and she endangers the team a lot by needing to be rescued. Also there's some spanking! After her third appearance, she disappears, but I think a modern writer could do some good stuff with her.

The other multi-issue story is Captain Hitsu and His Suicide Squadron in #31-32; it's nice to see an enemy that Blackhawk can't defeat in one fifteen-page story, and this one features some fun flying, which became a rarity in the later Military Comics issues.

Like I said above, I also read Blackhawk #50. The much belated origins for the Blackhawks are nice; back in Military Comics #1, we learned a bit about Blackhawk himself, but not much about the other members of the team, and here we finally get a lot spelled out that was only implied. The text feature also gives a rationale for the Blackhawks' post-WWII activities, something we didn't see in the actual comics!

from Blackhawk #50 (scripter unknown, art by Bill Ward)

The issue also gave me a taste of what the Blackhawks' postwar remit was; having helped take down a couple dictator nations, here they go around defeating dictatorial thugs. There's Killer Shark, who uses airplanes that turn into submarines to terrorize vaguely eastern European countries. The Blackhawks fight off a dictator of a small country forcing his nation into an unwanted war long enough to let his people negotiate a peace treaty. And then there's a goofy one about a would-be dictator building a flying octopus. Nothing here with the power of the early issues, but at least the writers had gotten far enough on characterizing Hendrickson to render his dialogue in a German accent.

There's little greatness to be found in these issues, to be honest, but there is a bit of the day-in day-out appeal of formula. Every month (well, every day, since that's how I read them), open up a new issue and find out what the Blackhawks have done to make the world safe for democracy this time. Hard to not find something appealing in that.

This is the second post in a series about the Blackhawks. The next installment covers Showcase Presents Blackhawk, Volume One. Previous installments are listed below:

1. The Blackhawk Archives, Volume 1 (1941-42)
   

Reading The Shaggy Man of Oz Aloud to My Kid

The Shaggy Man of Oz by Jack Snow
illustrated by Frank Kramer

There are some who praise Jack Snow as a writer for his more Baumian vibe, preferring him to Ruth Plumly Thompson and John R. Neill. I don't remember his books at all, though I know I read them when I was a kid; I got them from the library so I only read them the once. When I found my spreadsheet of Oz books from when I was twelve, I rated both of Snow's books 10/10, so clearly I myself was among those who enjoyed them. But reading them as an adult, it's less that Snow has a Baumiam vibe and more that he just rips L. Frank Baum off... while not really capturing what made Baum successful to begin with.

Originally published: 1949
Acquired: July 2022
Read aloud: April–May 2024

It is pretty clear that to write The Shaggy Man of Oz, Snow must have reread Road to Oz, Emerald City, and John Dough and the Cherub. Road because Shaggy Man features the Shaggy Man, and that book was the character's introduction; Shaggy Man even, in a classic fanboy move, explains a seeming inconsistency between Rod and Tik-Tok of Oz when it comes to the powers of the Love Magnet. But in a different kind of classic fanboy move, Snow can read the text closely enough to reconcile a minor discrepancy but not close enough to get the actual point of the text! In Road, Shaggy initially tells Dorothy that he got the Love Magnet from an Eskimo who gave it to him... but at the end of the book, he admits he actually stole it from a young woman because he felt unloved. If Snow reread Road to write Shaggy Man, he evidently didn't make it all the way to the end, because he presents the original story of the Love Magnet as fact here.

To me, this totally misses the point of not just the Love Magnet, but the Shaggy Man as a character. He's a man who was unloved but came to be loved, and then learned he didn't need this artificial tool to be loved. It's a very common trope for Baum. But there's no hint of that characterization here; in Snow's hands, Shaggy is just a somewhat genial blank slate. There's a weird bit where the Shaggy Man and his young companions, Twink and Tom, supposedly teach a group of people the true meaning of love... but they do so via the Love Magnet, which doesn't create real love at all! I mean, I guess it's very L. Frank Baum in that the book called Shaggy Man of Oz seems very disinterested in the actual Shaggy Man (see also: Tik-Tok of Oz, Scarecrow of Oz), but it's frustrating. Thompson ignored the Shaggy Man throughout her run on Oz, but despite sticking him the title, Jack Snow might as well be ignoring him too.

We read John Dough and the Cherub immediately prior to Shaggy Man because they have a side character in common, the King of the Fairy Beavers. What this revealed to me, though, was that Snow was basically totally ripping off John Dough. In John Dough, John Dough and the Cherub escape an island via a flying car they steal; in Shaggy Man, Shaggy and his young friends escape an island via a flying car they steal. In John Dough, the characters travel to Hiland; in Shaggy Man, the characters travel to Hightown. (Though Highland is nothing like Hiland; Snow uses the name as a jumping off point but that's it.) In John Dough, the characters are trapped in the Palace of Romance whose inhabitants never stop telling stories; in Shaggy Man, the characters are trapped in the Valley of Romance whose inhabitants never stop watching plays. In John Dough, the King of the Fairy Beavers pops up and solves all the main characters' problems; in Shaggy Man, the King of the Fairy Beavers pops up and solves all the main characters' problems.

My five-year-old seemed to largely enjoy the ways the books coincided; they clearly expected Hightown and Hiland to be the same things, and the Valley of Romance and the Palace of Romance to be so as well, but they soon got over it. To me, though, it was frustrating. Like, I just read this book! And like in Magical Mimics, the supposed main characters contribute little to the resolution of any of their difficulties. The Shaggy Man and his young friends only do one clever thing, using the Love Magnet in the Valley of Romance; it's the King of the Fairy Beavers who figures out a way to cross the Deadly Desert, to breach the Barrier of Invisibility, to defeat Conjo the mischievous wizard who wants to take over as the Wizard of Oz.

Lastly, Snow clearly reread Emerald City because the characters use the Nome King's tunnel from that book... and the King of the Fairy Beavers defeats Conjo the exact same way Ozma defeated the Nome King in Emerald City. It's boring and anticlimactic.

I already complained about the Shaggy Man; on top of that, Twink and Tom are surely the least interesting "American kids whisked to Oz" in all the Famous Forty, below even Zeb. I don't think they did anything striking in the entire book. Bring back Peter and Bob Up!

My five-year-old said they enjoyed it... though I also think they got a lot less excited about it than some other Oz books we've read of late. I also don't like that Snow has many short chapters, as opposed to Baum and Thompson's somewhat fewer but longer ones. If you do one chapter aloud at a time, it means you move through it somewhat slowly, and very little seems to happen. Boy did it drag.

But that's it for Jack Snow, who made just two contributions to the Famous Forty. Next we get someone new again!

Next up in sequence: The Hidden Valley of Oz

Reading Roundup Wrapup: May 2024

Pick of the month: Shubeik Lubeik by Deena Mohamed. As you might imagine from a month where I read a bunch of Hugo finalists, I read some pretty good stuff. But this was my favorite, a powerful graphic novel from a world where wishes are real.

All books read:

1. Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
2. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Gamma: Original Sin by David R. George III
3. The Sinister Booksellers of Bath by Garth Nix
4. Shubeik Lubeik by Deena Mohamed
5. Saga, Volume Eleven by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples
6. I AM AI by Ai Jiang
7. The Culture by Iain M. Banks
8. The Shaggy Man of Oz by Jack Snow, illustrated by Frank Kramer
9. Showcase Presents Blackhawk, Volume One by Dick Dillin, Charles Cuidera, et al.
10. Unraveller by Frances Hardinge
11. Legion of Super-Heroes: Five Years Later Omnibus, Volume 2 by Tom & Mary Bierbaum, Tom McCraw, Stuart Immonen, Chris Sprouse, et al.
12. Liberty’s Daughter by Naomi Kritzer
13. Mammoths at the Gates by Nghi Vo 

Most of my reading for the month was Hugo finalists, of course, but I have kept up a brisk enough pace that I've been able to slip in some other stuff, mostly bits of some long things. I dipped in and out of a Legion of Super-Heroes omnibus (#11), but also Ursula K. Le Guin's Collected Poems and Manjula Padmanabhan's collected science fiction stories (see below). Plus, my Oz book with my kid (#8) and my usual breakfast comics (#9).  

All books acquired:

1. Stormwatch, Volume 1: The Dark Side by Paul Cornell, Miguel Sepulveda, et al.
2. Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Volume 1 by Otto Binder, Al Plastino, Jerry Siegel, John Forte, et al.
3. Miracleman: The Silver Age by Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham
4. Translation State by Ann Leckie
5. Stolen Hours and Other Curiosities: The Collected Science Fiction Stories by Manjula Padmanabhan
6. Ethan of Athos by Lois McMaster Bujold
7. Borders of Infinity by Lois McMaster Bujold
8. The Hidden Prince of Oz by Gina Wickwar, illustrated by Anna-Maria Cool

Currently reading:

• A Traveller in Time: The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller edited by Nina Allan
• Collected Poems by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Stolen Hours and Other Curiosities: The Collected Science Fiction Stories by Manjula Padmanabhan
• Ethan of Athos by Lois McMaster Bujold

Up next in my rotations:

1. Miracleman, Book One: A Dream of Flying by The Original Writer, Garry Leach, Alan Davis, et al.
   
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: 664 (up 4)

I have held pretty steady for some months, but I did pick up quite a few things this month that went onto my list. My first increase since August 2023!

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Prey: Hell's Heart

Star Trek: Prey, Book 1: Hell's Heart
by John Jackson Miller

February 2386 / Summer 2286

Published: 2016
Acquired: April 2023
Read: March 2024

Read enough of an author's work, and you begin to notice what interests them, their recurrent themes and obsessions. LibraryThing tells me I own twenty-six books with contributions by John Jackson Miller, of which I have read seventeen, from 2006's Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic to 2023's Strange New Worlds: The High Country. As a writer, Miller is often interest in cons and grifts, hoodwinking other, misdirections, sleights of hand, these are all things his villains love to do, but also his protagonists. This is so blatant that in the KOTOR comics he has a grifter actually named "Gryph"! There's a lot of illusion and trickery especially in his novel Picard: Rogue Elements, but a fair bit too in the long con of The High Country. (You can see why they got him to write a Section 31–themed Discovery novel, though I didn't read that one)

Book 1 of Prey is all about a long con, one of the longest cons of all. The Enterprise-E is summoned to help transport various members of the House of Kruge to a ceremony to honor them, in order to set up the House's participation in a vital negotiation between the Khitomer and Typhon powers. The House of Kruge has been leaderless since the events of The Search for Spock a century ago, no squabbling family member able to achieve dominance over another. But when the ceremony comes under attack, it turns out that there's an agenda a work, one that's been in action for a full century!

John Jackson Miller has a good grasp of character voices, but the problem with a novel about a con being run on our heroes is that they largely spend it reactive—and for the most part, the reader is ahead of them. It's pretty obvious that Galdor, gin'tak of House Kruge, is up to something and in league with the assassins who attack the summit even before this is explicitly revealed, but it's something our heroes still don't know after 383 pages. This is a long time to read about main characters who continually react to crisis after crisis, making no headway in understanding what's going on. Like his writer, Galdor is moving all the pieces into position for a dramatic payoff in future installments... but that doesn't necessarily make for riveting reading on its own. (And, unfortunately, as can often be the case with stories of deception, who Galdor was pretending to be was kind of more interesting than who he turned out to actually be.)

Like with Takedown, I felt that Miller handled the screen characters well in the sense of capturing their voices, but less so in the sense that it doesn't really feel like the book matters to them. This is even true with Worf, to whom the events of the book ought to matter a lot. What's at stake for his character? Kahless, I guess? Honor? But these stakes come across as more hypothetical than actual. The nonscreen characters, though, are there in name only, if at all. (Though, it's not Miller's fault if Šmrhová doesn't have a personality.) The previous Next Generation novel, Armageddon's Arrow, did a good job of giving the Enterprise crew little bits and bobs, but this pulls back from that, much as it also pulls back from the Enterprise's suppose renewed mission of exploration yet again.

Don't get me wrong, there are a couple good twists, and some strong action. But I wanted Picard, Riker, La Forge, and so on to do something interesting and clever, to figure something out. Hopefully that's what books 2 and 3 are for.

Continuity Notes:

• It feels like a weird thing to complain that I wanted more continuity references in a book that manages to tie the events of Search for Spock to those of DS9's "Captive Pursuit," but I thought it was weird how vague the references to Insurrection were given this takes the Enterprise back to its setting. Picard never thinks, "Oh Anij who I claimed to want to spend hundreds of days with is close by" or anything like that.

Other Notes:

• There's an extended flashback in the middle to the Enterprise-A bumping into the "Unsung" Klingons. I felt like this went on a bit, and again, it seemed like there should be more character stuff at stake, especially for Kirk. Meeting a group of discommoded Klingons who refuses to do anything at all as their ships drift to their doom seems like a good Star Trek Adventures scenario, I'll have to remember that.
  
• When Cross was unmasked, I immediately thought, "Oh, it's The Wizard of Oz." One page later, Cross is quoting the movie and calling its title character a hero. Korgh thinks that he "rather doubted the hero of any children's story would appreciate the worship of a man who had helped engineer the decapitation of one of the great houses of the Klingon Empire." Korgh needs to read The Land of Oz, where we learn the Wizard was willing to hand an innocent baby off to a wicked witch in order to guarantee his own power, ending a royal line.
  
• Cross is a nice lively character among the often dour, honor-obsessed Klingon cast. I hope we get a good amount more from him in books 2 and 3.
• I don't feel that Martok came across as very well; he has to be a bit of a dunce for things to work.
  
• Today I learned that it's spelled "painstik" for some reason.

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