Star Trek Adventures: Playing "Abyss Station"

"Abyss Station" is an installment of the "Living Campaign," a set of free Star Trek Adventures given away on the Modiphius web site. I had it in mind as one we might do during my first STA campaign, but I never got around to it. A few things appealed:

• It had an ancient mysterious structure, something that would tie well into the ongoing story arc of that campaign.
• I read some comments about the mission somewhere (maybe on the STA subreddit) that made it sound fun.
• One of my players in that campaign was always complaining that his character's Focus in "Philosophy" was useless, and this featured a philosophical debate.

When it came time to plan my new campaign, I realized it would slot well into my new story arc as well, tie into a new player's Focuses, have some good exploration/diplomacy stuff, and allow for the splitting up of the characters.

Thus it became the second episode of...

"Captain’s Log, Stardate 53820.4. The Diversitas under my command has successfully completed its first mission, and we have resumed our journey through the Ekumene sector. Word from Ryuku indicates there have been no more Rock Beast attacks. However, the mysterious android corpse found among the members of Return to Harad is befuddling my crew…"

Planning the Mission

The premise of "Abyss Station" is that the player ship is summoned by Abyss Station, a Federation science outpost in the Omega Draconis system. The Omega Draconis system has a black hole for a primary (Omega Draconis A*, pronounced a-star), whose radiation jets provide dim light and heat to its sole planet, Omega Draconis I, inhabited by a prewarp civilization, the Ithik. The black hole is also orbited by an ancient alien facility of unknown origin. Abyss Station sent a landing party down to the facility but it didn't come back, and now the black hole is rotating, its radiation jets about to come into alignment with Omega Draconis I, which will render the planet uninhabitable.

The mission-as-written assumes your players will split up into two groups, one to explore the alien facility, seeking the away team and a cause as to why the black hole started rotating, and the other beaming down to Omega Draconis I to figure out if the Ithik can be evacuated.

There are some STA missions where I make lots of changes, either because I have a better (for me and my players) idea or because I want to tweak it to fit into my narrative. I actually did not make a lot of changes to this one, mostly just in the set-up. At the end of their first episode, my players discovered that one of the members of the terrorist cell they'd been battling was an android; this episode opened with them investigating the android (which was deactivated) to determine its origin. They found it used a mysterious element in its construction, and that the only other place in the sector known to contain that element was the alien facility orbiting Omega Draconis A*. I then laced some further clues into the episode; one of its reveals is that the Ithik have artificial mitochondria, and I had those too contain the mysterious element. 

Omega Draconis A*
(image of Sagittarius A* from New Scientist)

Other than that, I just fleshed out some bits. The mission as written is pretty vague about what the players might find inside the alien structure. I decided they would have three encounters and worked out what they would be:

• a room with an ancient computer interface that they could try to get working again (if they did, it would reveal a video detailing the origin of the facility)
• a room with a hostile robot and a chasm they'd have to cross, as well as an Extended Task to unlock the door to get out
  
• a room with an injured member of the previous Starfleet team to visit the facility, who was in imminent danger of death but could not be stabilized in the room; I would do an Extended Consequences track that they would have to beat to get out

Additionally, I was going to lose one of my players for six weeks, so I worked that into the narrative. Joel, who plays the science officer, was going to command the away mission to the facility. His backstory included the idea that his body once got flooded with tachyons, sending him through time; I planned that an inopportune moment, a device in the alien facility would recharge him those tachyons and send him six weeks into the future... but where!?

A lot of elements of the mission as written fit well into my players' established characters and personalities. For example, the players have to convince the Ithik mayor there really is a threat requiring evacuation, and they need to go through his ministers; one suggested person is the Minister for Athletics, who challenges a player character to physical competition. Our security chief mostly relies on her brains and thus has a low Fitness score, setting up an interesting challenge! And our executive office has a backstory that she used to be a dancer, but struggled to fit this into her Vulcan need to suppress emotion; I also made a Minister for the Arts who could challenger her to a dance-off.

As always, I changed the title to be more pretentious. In this case, "A Terrible Autonomy." I also came across a quotation by Thomas Henry Huxley including the word "abyss" which I decided would make a good motto for Abyss Station, explaining both its somewhat portentous name and the logic of T'Lah, the villain of the story: “Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.”

Playing the Mission

I have seven regular players, plus Toren who steps in whenever the numbers are low; we also ended up with a visitor to one session. He just came to watch, but the number of players was such that I actually rolled up a support character for him to play.

• Ryan as Rucot, captain (sessions 1-2)
• Debi as T'Cant, first officer (3)
• Kenyon as Nevan Jones, engineer (1-3)
• Claire as Mooria Loonin, pilot (1-3)
• Austin as Frector, security chief (2-3)
• Forest as Alita Faraday, medical officer (1, 3)
• Joel as Oliver Johnson, science officer (1)
• Toren as Tronnen, counselor (1, 3)
• [plus special guest star] Scott as Anthor, anthropologist (2)
  

I paced this one pretty well, with one session per act. In the "teaser" for the first episode, my players had a lot of questions about the android I had not anticipated! But I did get them on track with where I wanted them to go. I got a little bit of RP out of them when Oliver, nervous about how his first mission had gone, went to the ship's counselor. What resulted was a funny scene, where Tronnen, the Klingon counselor, advised the scrawny nerd that what he really needed to do was hit the holodeck and battle ten Klingon warriors for a good warm-up, and then twenty for a real workout.

the alien facility in the Omega Draconis system
(all images of it are from a game called Planetary Annihilation)

I said they would need to split up into two different groups, one for investigating the alien facility and one to speak to the Ithik, but left the breakdown to them other than that Oliver Johnson had to be in command of the facility team. They decided Captain Rucot and Tronnen would head to the planet, while Oliver, Nevan, Loonin, and Faraday would shuttle down to the facility. For the facility group, the first session ended with Oliver vanishing into the future.

The mission as written, because it is TOS era I suspect, has the away team to the planet just beaming down and announcing who they are. But I really really hoped my players would surgically disguise themselves as Ithik... and indeed they did. This made for a very funny scene where the seemingly primitive Ithik called them out for who they were... and a delightful last note for the session where the Ithik mayor clapped Captain Rucot on the back and asked how much he liked playing games. As Ryan pointed out, playing games with aliens never goes well in Star Trek!

In the second session, I alternated between the away teams on the planet and the facility, which went very well. The planet team first went through the Minister for Philosophy—whose belief was that no one existed other than the Ithik and thus the away team was a figment of the Ithik's superior imagination! But they managed to convince him if that was true, there could be no danger in evacuating the planet. Frector then had her showdown with the Minister for Athletics, getting good use out of her Value "Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better." The mission as written says the players need to convince three ministers to win over the mayor, but my players came up with a scheme to win over the mayor by playing to his obsession with games, and inviting him onto the holodeck. They debated a bit what the game should be (dabo?) but eventually realized they needed something new to him, and settled on an interactive murder mystery. Sherlock Holmes was suggested, but I pointed out that a Cardassian captain was far more likely to suggest an enigma tale, where everyone is guilty but the state needs to figure out of what.

Unfortunately, Debi was sick, so there could be no encounter between T'Cant and the Minister for the Arts as I'd planned.

The Ithik were great fun to play, and my players seemed to get a big kick out of them. Over-the-top, arrogant, complacent, friendly, and exuberant. Their population numbers in the hundreds, but they have dozens of ministers in the government; when the players asked if they knew anything about the facility, they said there were theories from hundreds of competing cults. ("Oh, everyone around here belongs to two or three cults, you know.")

Meanwhile, the away team on the facility had a good time. Forest, playing Faraday, had to back out at the last minutes, but was willing to let the others play her character while she was gone. They did good with the video room. The Extended Consequences challenge—my first attempt at this—turned out to be a little too easy but they did well at it too.

Fighting the security robot turned out to be quite difficult! Unfortunately, neither Faraday nor Nevan are good in combat... but the real point of the combat was to get away, not defeat the robot. They did some good lateral thinking, rigging a phaser to fire remotely and distract the robot, then using debris to make a bridge to cross the chasm. I realized that then having an Extended Task to unlock the door was probably overdoing it, so I dropped that element. (I repurposed it in the next session, making an Extended Task to reactivate the facility's control room, with each breakthrough granting control of one system.)

In the last session, things converge, as the player ship evacuates the planet, heading to Abyss Station to drop the Ithik there, only for Abyss Station's commanding office, T'Lah, to steal a shuttle in an attempt to use the alien facility to fire a black hole at the Dominion homeworld! The players have to stop her from both ends.

They did great! The players on the facility used their controls to lock T'Lah and the two Ithik helping her into a room; Frector and Tronnen meanwhile bluffed her into thinking they were sympathetic to her cause.

Abyss Station
(screenshot from DS9's "Blaze of Glory," I think)

In the video the players had been found, there had been no images of the designers of the facility, just th Ithik who did the construction. The players asked the Ithik about the "Engineers" (as Loonin dubbed them) but were told they never saw them, they just had blueprints downloaded into their brains, which they then obeyed. Thus the players came up with the plan of finding a blueprint for shutting the station down and beaming it into the brains of the Ithik. Clever problem-solving at its finest!

Claire complained at the mission's end that though they had solved the immediate crisis, they didn't have any clear answers—only more mysteries! What was the relationship between the Haradin android, the Ithik, and the Engineers? Well, some things would have to remain for future episodes...

This was a fun one overall, and like I said, worked with minimal tweaking. Highly recommended.

Star Trek: Ekumene:

1. "Patagon in Parallax"
2. "A Terrible Autonomy"
3. "Stinks of Slumber and Disaster"
   

The First Doctor Novelisations: The Tenth Planet (1976)

Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet by Gerry Davis

This was the first novelisation to feature the first Doctor after Target brought back the books in the 1970s. Doctor Who books are a different thing now; while each of the first three novels essentially stood on its own, now it's a range. These things are being pumped out (approximately) every other month in early 1976, and soon it will be one every month. Now there's a sense of completism to it all, I think. We had the first first Doctor story (sort of anyway), so the gap that needs to be plugged is we don't have the last first Doctor story. How do we get from William Hartnell to Tom Baker? This is a necessary part of that chain. (Though the first second Doctor story wouldn't come along for more than fifteen years!)

Originally published: 1976
Acquired: November 2013
Read: July 2024

To me, the book was qualitatively different from the previous three I've read so far. When it came to The Daleks (1964), The Zarbi (1965), The Crusaders (1966), it seemed to me they'd all been designed to work as a book first and foremost. Especially The Daleks and The Crusaders, you could pick them up and know nothing of the television program and be satisfied, I think; The Zarbi not as much, but as I discussed, Bill Strutton is definitely trying to operate in the same space as The Daleks.

But for the first time, The Tenth Planet is clearly not a novel but a novelisation. It is designed to plug a gap in your viewing of the television programme. That is to say, I don't think there's really that much going on here. We get the scripts on the page, but no sense of character, no sense of atmosphere. The Doctor and his companions almost feel lost in this, observers to the arrival of Mondas at Earth. I know there are constraints here from the story as produced, but it feels like the Doctor is barely even in this book.

This is a doubly momentous event in Doctor Who history—the first Cyberman story, the first (what would eventually be called) regeneration story—but nothing about it as rendered by Gerry Davis feels momentous. Basically a bunch of people hang about in a space center talking about stuff. I could see how this material would come to life on screen with some good acting and direction (it has been a long time since I watched The Tenth Planet, so I don't really remember if it gets that or not), but it never comes alive on the page. I found this a plod in a way that was not true of the three previous books.

It has its fun bits like any novelisation. The afterword points out a nice emphasis on the Doctor's hands that foreshadow what will happen to him. We get a different potted history of the Cybermen than has become accepted (they originated on Telos and moved to Mondas here, which to be honest makes a kind of nonsensical story even less plausible). The date of the story is moved from 1986 to 2000, and the origin of Ben and Polly is moved from 1966 to about 1974. In modern novelisations, I feel like an author's added details are often about smoothing out consistency issues; I kind of like that Gerry Davis just went around causing more problems!

Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth

Miracleman: Olympus by Alan Moore, John Totleben, et al.

Miracleman, Book Three: Olympus

Collection published: 2015
Contents originally published: 1987-2015
Acquired: April 2015
Read: August 2024

Story: The Original Writer with Grant Morrison & Peter Milligan

Art: John Totleben with Thomas Yeates, Joe Quesada & Mike Allred

Color Art: Steve Oliff with Richard Isanove & Laura Allred

Lettering: Joe Caramagna with Chris Eliopoulos & Travis Lanham

Alan Moore's final Miracleman volume explains the mystery running through the previous book (who was the mysterious woman?), ties things up with Michael Moran's wife and child, sends him into space to meet the Warpsmiths, and draws him into a final confrontation with Kid Miracleman.

Moore's comics can often be densely narrated, but usually he makes this work, achieving sympathy between word and art. I did not find that to be the case here. Though the stuff with Miraclewoman is fine if kind of predictable (the critique here is that female superheroes are sex fantasies), once the action moves into space, I struggled through the massive amount of ponderous text boxes, and I very much struggled to care. In here and in book one, the Warpsmiths are very much the weak link of the Miracleman saga. They are a necessary part of it, I suppose, but I never found reading about them very interesting.

Once we move back to Earth, the high point is definitely the stuff with Michael Moran's wife, showing us the human cost of utopia and perfection. 

The fight with Kid Miracleman is one of those things that would have been more shocking at the time, but after Watchmen, The Walking Dead, The Authority, and so on, it's hard to get excited about comics' ability to depict detailed and gruesome violence.

The other high point is the last issue. This to me was the truly revolutionary idea of Miracleman, and admittedly, the violence of the previous issue was a necessary step to get us there. The idea that superheros are fundamentally about using violence to reshape the world is baked into the origins of the genre; you can see it in the very first Superman stories. But most superhero stories pull back from this, not wanting to show violence, or not wanting to show big changes to the status quo. In Miracleman (as in Watchmen), Moore runs straight into that premise—now that the violence is over, Miracleman and Miraclewoman reshape the world into utopia. It's a staggering concept that few superhero comics would dare to embrace, and I loved the issue; it clearly makes the whole rest of the series worth it, and is probably the single best contribution Moore makes to the idea of the "realistic" superhero.

The volume has two stories by other writers, both published in 2015. One is by Grant Morrison, written in 1984 but not illustrated or published. I found this kind of half-baked, an interesting idea not well executed. The other is an adventure of the Miracleman Family at its peak, like the ones Moore sprinkled through the first two volumes, mostly worth it for the great Mike Allred art.

Don't be fooled by this volume's page count of 328; the actual story pages only go up to 147, and the Alan Moore stuff you are here for just 124. There's a lot of original art here, which to be honest I do not find very interesting. Marvel's three chunky collections of Miracleman are a lie; they are really three thin collections... and ought to have been one 300-page collection. (Marvel did later release a Miracleman Omnibus, but again, they padded it out with all these extras.) It feels like, having finally secured the rights to the character, Marvel wanted a return on its investment by padding the series out into as many purchases as they could, but in the long run, I think it harms the series's purchasability. It wasn't until 2023 that Marvel finally released a reasonably-sized volume of the whole series in one go than can stand alongside Moore's other 1980s works. I probably should have held out for that one.

Reading Yankee in Oz Aloud to My Kid

Yankee in Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson
illustrated by Dick Martin

In, I believe, the late 1950s, Ruth Plumly Thompson wrote an Oz book and offered it to Reilly & Lee (this would have been after Hidden Valley, before Merry Go Round), but they were uninterested. Over a decade later, the International Wizard of Oz Club offered to publish her manuscript (with permission from the official publisher) with illustrations by Dick Martin, making it the first of their so-called "quasi-canonical" Oz books. My kid and I read it after Merry Go Round, when it was finally published.

Originally published: 1973
Acquired: July 2024
Read aloud: July–August 2024

Before this, Ruth Plumly Thompson wrote nineteen Oz books, and I have read enough of them to know exactly what to expect. Thomas P. Terry, better known as "Tompy" is a band kid and football player swept by a hurricane right out of a Labor Day parade into Oz; there he meets Yankee, a test dog for a NASA moon orbit whose capsule crash-landed in Oz as well. As is pretty typical, Thompson devotes little time to justifying the adventure and just kind of gets on with it. Thompson always does well by animals, and the charming relationship between Tompy and Yankee, who quickly become devoted to each other, is the real highlight of the book. This lacks the frantic pacing of  some of her books; Tompy and Yankee travel from place to place and meet interesting people. The idea of people you can make by just adding water to a powder is a great Ozzy visual, and I really enjoyed the tone of the section about the Lanternese, who have paper lanterns for heads (and thus cannot speak).

Like a lot of Thompson books, there's also the ingredients for an interesting quest she doesn't quite deliver on. Tompy and Yankee are asked by the people of Wackajammy to rescue their lost princess, but they selfishly refuse. In a book by a different author, you might expect this would be a set-up for a moral lesson to the protagonists... but not so here! They refuse to be helpful, and accidentally bump into her and rescue her and are lauded as heroes for it. Wow. They do both get some good heroic moments, though, taking down the giant Badmannah, who has been kidnapping princesses for his cave. (On the other hand, there are two separate occasions where Tompy bangs his drumsticks on something for no reason and that ends up coincidentally being exactly what was needed to be done.) Badmannah escalates up to kidnapping an oddly powerless and resourceless Ozma (well, par for the course for Thompson, again), and Jinnicky, Tompy, and Yankee manage to save her. Sometimes Thompson protagonists contribute nothing, while convenient magicians show up, and there is a bit of that with Jinnicky the Red Jinn, but both characters have their own pivotal moments.

There's also a prophecy that seems like it should be important but goes nowhere, and Tompy and Yankee acquire a book that lets them read minds... which they never use to do anything significant! The careful plotting of Merry Go Round in Oz this is not; like a lot of Thompson's books, it reads like a first draft.

If she gets away with it, it's because of the aforementioned relationship between Yankee and Tompy. Unusually, the book has a whole chapter set back in America at the end. There's a real sense of sadness as it seems like they will have to give up their relationship because Yankee can't speak outside of Oz. This comes all right, of course, but I think my six-year-old was a bit tense, judging by how delighted he was when it all worked out. And there's a very fun bit where Tompy actually goes to a bookstore to buy a copy of Purple Prince to read to Yankee so he can know more about their friend Jinnicky. We've had a few Oz protagonists who have read Oz books, but this is the most specific reference thus far.

Dick Martin's illustrations are largely sparse and boring; whole chapters go by with no pictures, and lots are simple little images of Yankee. There are neat visuals and key characters that go wholly unillustrated. I guess he did it for free, but still.

Not one of Thompson's best, but not one of her worst, either. Pleasant but undemanding, which is sometimes what you want out of a trip to Oz, after all.

I bought print-on-demand copies of this book and Forbidden Fountain from Lulu, where they have been put by the Oz Club. The original 1970s edition was oversized, with lots of text on big pages; this was a hardcover at the same size as all the other Oz books. It had an unfortunate number of typos, though; very distracting. Picking up these two books finished off my collection of "quasi-canonical" novels, which you can see to the right. Lining them up, I was appreciative that Eric Shanower maintained a consistent visual design for the three he illustrated... even though they were released by three different publishers!

Next up in sequence: The Enchanted Island of Oz

The First Doctor Novelisations: The Crusaders (1966)

Doctor Who and the Crusaders by David Whitaker
illustrated by Henry Fox

Doctor Who and the Crusaders was the third Doctor Who novelisation, the last of the novels to appear during the 1960s, and thus also one of the three reprinted to launch the Target range in 1973. When I wrote my review of Doctor Who and the Zarbi (1965), I discussed how it seemingly worked to position itself as "the second Doctor Who book" in a world where the only other Doctor Who book was Doctor Who in an exciting adventure with the Daleks (1964).

Originally published: 1966
Acquired: May 2009
Read: July 2024

What's interesting about Doctor Who and the Crusaders is that it is also working to make itself "the second Doctor Who book" in a world where the only other Doctor Who book was Doctor Who in an exciting adventure with the Daleks (1964). Here, David Whitaker novelises his own scripts for The Crusade (though having read the book and not seen the serial for obvious reasons, I find myself thinking of the tv version as The Crusaders as well). On screen, The Crusade follows directly on from The Web Planet... but in print, The Crusaders follows directly on from Doctor Who and the Daleks.

Not in the sense that the characters have just left Skaro, but in the sense that the book is clearly designed to be read by someone who has previously read The Daleks. The book's prologue works to provide context for why Susan isn't there anymore, and mentions the Daleks—something which, I would argue, is pretty random if you think of this as one of many Doctor Who novelisations, but pretty essential if it's the second Doctor Who book but with a different main character to the first. (Incidentally, apparently in the Doctor Who book universe, David Cameron let a very different life to both the tv one and our own.) This prologue is, for what it's worth, probably my favorite bit of the book, containing some evocative, thoughtful writing that captures one of the best TARDIS crews (or, I guess I should say, "Tardis crews"), setting the stage for the adventure to follow with an interesting debate about history. For, while The Zarbi worked very hard to emulate The Daleks, The Crusaders is a very different style of Doctor Who story, and thus the book needs to ease you into it a bit. This is the first prose example of Doctor Who as an historical adventure series.

I love the way the Whitaker describes all the Doctor Who stories we haven't got to read. I am a bit surprised no writers of Missing Adventures, Past Doctor Adventures, or Big Finish stories have ever made us suffer through their take on "the talking stones of the tiny planet of Tyron, in the seventeenth galaxy," to be honest... but also quite grateful.

Anyway, how's the book? I ended up enjoying it a lot. I have seen episodes one and three of The Crusade, thanks to the Lost in Time box set, but that was a long time ago, and I find that stories I only see bits of don't really imprint themselves on my memory, so this was basically a new story as far as I am concerned. Like The Daleks, it's a bit grim, but instead of science fiction dangers, it's real dangers: physical assault, dying in a desert, and even sexual assault. But also Whitaker leavens it all with moments of humor, such as the Doctor's clothes-stealing antics, and the thief who Ian tussles with. It's great to see Ian and Barbara on the top of their form after their kind of nondescript run in The Zarbi, but like in The Zarbi, Vicki is again kind of just there.

I did find it a bit tough to get into the book after the prologue; there are a lot of historical figures thrown at you in King Richard's court. And, I also found the shifting emphases kind of off; the Doctor, Vicki, and most of the English characters basically disappear from the last third of the book or so, when it abruptly becomes Ian and Barbara's story. This is disappointing as the Doctor is a very much a highlight of the story! But overall, it was a quick, effective, enjoyable read. Whitaker wouldn't write any more Doctor Who novelisations, which is a bit disappointing.

I read a 1980 reprinting of the 1973 Target edition, which includes illustrations by Henry Fox. He has a good line in likenesses; I don't think the illustrations are essential, but they are nice to have.

I found my copy in a used bookstore in Storrs, Connecticut back in 2009. (Yes, it has taken me a while to get around to reading it.) It has a stamp in the front indicating when the bookstore acquired it—two in fact. It was sold to them in 1987, and apparently purchased, because it was resold to them in 2006. One of the book's previous owners wrote his name in front: Eric Sonstroem. It seems highly probable to me that this is the same Eric Sonstroem who is currently an English professor at the University of the Pacific. It's not a common name, and Sonstroem got his B.A. at Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1988, exactly the right time and place to be selling his Doctor Who books to the Paperback Trader in Storrs in 1987. Sonstroem's research interests include science fiction; he's even presented at Worldcon a couple times.

Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet

Miracleman: The Red King Syndrome by Alan Moore, Alan Davis, John Ridgway, Chuck Austen, Rick Veitch, et al.

Miracleman, Book Two: The Red King Syndrome

Collection published: 2014
Contents originally published: 1983-86
Acquired: November 2014
Read: July 2024

Story: The Original Writer with Cat Yronwode

Art: Alan Davis, John Ridgway, Chuck Austen & Rick Veitch with Rick Bryant

Color Art: Steve Oliff

Lettering: Joe Caramagna

The second volume of Miracleman is very attention-grabbing—it contains both gruesome violence and an extraordinarily detailed rendering of a birth, as Michael Moran's wife gives birth to their baby. In the post-Watchmen, post-Authority era of superhero comics, the violence isn't so striking, but I still can't think of any other superhero comic I've read in the following four decades where a baby's head emerges from a woman's vagina in close-up detail.

Outside of that, though, this feels like the weak link in the chain of the Miracleman saga. Not that it's bad, but in terms of story, what happens in the two volumes on either side of it are more significant and more interesting; in a classic middle-volume-of-trilogy situation, we need this volume to get from book one to book three, but it doesn't have as much to say on its own. We need the birth, we need to see Miracleman investigate his origin, and there's some important themes and resonances here, but they're not so interesting as what the other two books do.

Thankfully, given it's by Alan Moore and some talented artistic collaborators, how it says what it says is always interesting. Interesting writing as always (though some of what it does with race is very dated now), and Alan Davis and John Ridgway in particular are always great illustrators worth reading. (This might be the first time I've seen John Ridgway art with color and not felt it diminished by the coloring, so kudos to Steve Oliff.) Highlights include: Miracleman's conversation in the woods with a kid scared of nuclear war, the flashback chapters about Gargunza manipulating the dreams of the "Miracleman Family," and the way the malignant government agent ends up helping Miracleman in the end.

There are two extra stories here: one a kind-of-funny story about Young Miracleman trying to hit on a receptionist in 1957, and a frame story by Cat Yronwode to a set of Mick Anglo Marvelman reprints that had to be run in Miracleman #8 when a flood damaged the Eclipse offices, which I guess is nice to have for completeness's sake but pretty meaningless on its own.

Most of the extras in this volume are pages of uncolored original art, which is less interesting to me. Two things I find frustrating about the otherwise detailed archival presentation of these volumes are 1) there are no individual art credits (which chapters did Alan Davis draw? who knows) and 2) there is no original publication data given. Where did these stories originally appear? This is particularly frustrating as the extras will say things like "this is the cover of Warrior #16"... but you have no clear indication of which story originally appeared in Warrior #16!

The 2024 Hugo Awards: Thoughts on the Final Results

Well, this year the Hugo Awards certainly went smoother than last year. The Hugo Administrator indicates there were some issues—someone tried to buy a large number of votes for an unnamed finalist, resulting in the disqualification of a number of ballots. Apparently that finalist would have gotten first in its category without that disqualification! But the Hugo team handled it as transparently as possible, and there were no shenanigans like last year. Are the Hugos irrevocably tarnished? I suppose only time will tell that.

The results were announced this past Sunday. Had I been on top of things, I could have watched the ceremony mid-afternoon U.S. time. I am not sure I would have been able to make the time, but it didn't matter... since I totally forgot! I don't always love the ceremonies but I find watching the livestream a lot more interesting than quickly skimming over a web page. Next year's Worldcon is the U.S., so an evening ceremony will actually be in the evening, making it a lot easier for me to tune in.

So what did I think of the results? How did they compared to my own votes?

Category	What Won	Where I Ranked It	What I Ranked #1	Where It Placed
Best Novel	Some Desperate Glory	1st	Some Desperate Glory	1st
Two years in a row, now, my first place choice has actually ended up in first place for Best Novel. Excellent! When making my predictions, I wrote, "I think maybe Some Desperate Glory for Best Novel, but maybe that's just my own biases; it seems a bit polarizing." It seems I should have been more assertive, because I was right! Interestingly, Scalzi's Starter Villain got the second-highest number of nomination points but came in last on the final ballot.
Best Novella	Thornhedge	3rd	Rose/House	5th
Last year, T. Kingfisher did not win, and I thought it was an outrage because she clearly deserved it. This year, T. Kingfisher did win, and I think it is an outrage because someone else clearly deserved it. I can't believe that Rose/House—to me the best thing on the ballot by a wide margin—finished all the way down in fifth. My claim that "[i]f Kingfisher was going to win, I think it would have been for last year's What Moves the Dead; I don't think Thornhedge is strong enough to take it" was clearly off base! This category had two Chinese finalists; one, "Seeds of Mercury," actually got more first-place votes than any other finalist by a wide margin (881 vs. 593), but ended up not coming in first thanks to instant runoff voting, and finishing in 3rd. Presumably a large number of Chinese members voted for it in first, but many Anglophone members did not (I placed it in 5th myself).
Best Novelette	"The Year Without Sunshine"	2nd	"On the Fox Roads"	4th
I liked Kritzer's "Year Without Sunshine" a lot, so I am pretty happy with this. "On the Fox Roads" landing in 4th is a bit disappointing but not surprising. Sarah Pinsker's "Science Facts!", which I nominated, needed eight more votes to make the final ballot. Had it done so, I would have ranked it 3rd. Seventh in nominations is a pretty good showing for a piece of short fiction not available in a free venue, to be honest. (It was published in Pinsker's new collection.)
Best Short Story	"Better Living Through Algorithms"	1st	"Better Living Through Algorithms"	1st
Well clearly I'm pleased! I should note that I predicted Kritzer would win either Best Novelette or Best Short Story, but she ended up winning both, so good on her! I wonder if she had two different acceptance speeches prepared. Inexplicably, though, "How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathub" came in 2nd.
Best Graphic Story or Comic	Saga, Volume Eleven	5th	Shubeik Lubeik	5th [tie]
My takes on this category always widely disagree with the electorate, so I am not too surprised here. Indeed, I wrote, "god knows what for Graphic Story—the voters always manage to baffle me on that one even when the nominations are good." This is another category where a Chinese-language finalist (the Three-Body Problem graphic novel) had the most first-place votes, but ended up not winning thanks to IRV; it came in 4th. I am outraged that Shubeik Lubeik did so poorly, but interestingly, it actually had more first-place votes than any other finalist than Three-Body Problem. It just did very poorly on transfers. There is a small plurality of us who recognize quality!
Best Related Work	A City on Mars	2nd	All These Worlds	4th
I did write, "I doubt my personal favorite will win Related Work; I am kind of worried nostalgia will give it to Banks, but my suspicion is the Weinersmith will be everyone's second choice and thus it will win on transfers." And I was right! I am very glad some guy named "Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood" declined nomination for making some tweets; thanks god he had more sense than the people who nominated him. Patrick Stewart's autobiography was one vote away from making the final ballot! I wonder where I would have placed it had it made it? I am a bit surprised that "The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion" was all the way down in 15th, given how much Hugo voters love nominating works about Hugo voting for this category.
Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)	Dungeons & Dragons: Honor among Thieves	4th	Poor Things	5th
I am not surprised Poor Things did not win, but I am surprised that D&D did. I thought it would be Barbie! D&D was a solid film but not one I would give an award to; I wonder if it won out because it was basically everyone's second choice. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse got the most first-place votes. Given some of the voting patterns around Chinese finalists in other categories, I'm surprised The Wandering Earth II got the least number of first-place votes. Godzilla Minus One needed only one more vote to qualify for the final ballot; it would have replaced Poor Things.
Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)	The Last of Us: "Long, Long Time"	4th	Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: "Subspace Rhapsody"	5th
I was very weirdly calibrated in this one, my picks for 1st and 2nd coming in 5th and 6th respectively! I thought one of the Star Trek episodes would win, and "Those Old Scientists" at least landed in 2nd. There were two more Doctor Who episodes and two more Strange New Worlds episodes on the longlist. Someday Star Trek will win again!
Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book	To Shape a Dragon's Breath	1st	To Shape a Dragon's Breath	1st
I am always so off from other voters in this category, so I never expect much... thus I was pretty thrilled to see To Shape a Dragon's Breath take in a well-deserved win! And my second-place choice, Liberty's Daughter, came in 2nd! And and my bottom two choices came in at the bottom two places!! This never happens.

The other voters and I agreed in three categories this year; as I worked out earlier this year, we have overlapped in four categories on three occasions, and overlapped in one category on four occasions. Never before have I agreed in three! This year my average agreement score was 3.5 (that is to say, things I ranked 1st finished at 3.5 on average); my average of previous years' agreement scores was 3.4, so this was a perfectly average year for me. Adding this year's scores maintains Best Novella as the category where my choices do the worst, but moves the Lodestar from second-best to best for that metric.

Some thoughts on categories I don't give full write-ups to:

• Best Game or Interactive Work: My wife has been playing Tears of the Kingdom, but it came in 2nd, beat out by Baldur's Gate 3. (I didn't know they were still making Baldur's Gate games.)
• Best Editor (Short Form): A third win in a row for Neil Clarke! He's gone from being a finalist who never wins to dominating the category.
• Best Semiprozine: Speaking of always being a finalist but never winning, this was Strange Horizons's twelfth appearance on the ballot but first time winning. Well deserved.

As always I had a good time... can we please avoid drama next year, though?

Star Wars: The Essential Guide to Warfare by Jason Fry

Star Wars: The Essential Guide to Warfare
by Jason Fry with Paul R. Urquhart

This is a guide to "warfare" in the Star Wars universe. What this means in practice is that it's kind of a military history, a chronological telling but with a focus on military organization, weapons, starships and starfighters, strategies and philosophies, military politics, and military personalities.

Published: 2012
Read: August 2024

I would have put this on my list before it came out in 2012, which was a very different time for Star Wars, both in a broad sense (The Force Awakens would come along in 2015 and "decanonize" a lot of what is in this book) and for me personally (even before the new trilogy came along, a series of mediocre Expanded Universe releases was diminishing my interest). So when I first started reading this, I found it pretty hard going. There is a time, I guess, where I would have found reading about military conflicts set over five thousand years before the films interesting... but now my reaction was kind of bafflement: in terms of themes, characters, worldbuilding, &c., it could basically be anything, not really Star Wars. I am not reading Star Wars books because I care about the Tionese and the Rakatha! I'm reading them because I care about the Jedi and the Republic! So as I began the book, I was wondering if I even cared enough about Star Wars to enjoy it at all.

Thankfully, as I read on, it turned out the problem was the disconnect from the Star Wars I am familiar with, not my interest in Star Wars in general. Once it got up to around a millennium before the films, the era of the excellent comic Jedi vs. Sith, I found the book a lot more interesting and engaging, as it had a clear connection to actual stories I had seen or read. From then on, you can basically draw a straight line to the prequel films, and thence to the original trilogy, and so on. This stuff I found fascinating; it gets a bad rap (and makes for bad movies, to be honest), but I love the politics and minutiae of the prequel era, the details of the disintegration of the Republic. Author Jason Fry does what I think tie-in fiction does best, takes a bunch of disparate references and weaves them together into a coherent story. If you care about this kind of thing, there are lots of retcons here; if you don't, what's worthwhile is the retcons makes for a complex story that explains a lot of the stuff we see in the prequels: the lack of a Republic military, the creation of the Clone Army, the reluctance of the Jedi to get involved, and so on. I also really enjoyed the exploration of how the Rebellion was organized (something I had never given much thought to) and what tactics they used, and how the Empire chose to counter them. One of my favorite Star Wars eras is that of the Bantam novels, the early New Republic, and there's lots of crunchy detail there too, good drawing of connections between the X-Wing books and the Thrawn trilogy and Dark Empire and so on.

I found the discussion of The New Jedi Order kind of superficial, unfortunately, and once you get beyond that, you end up in an era where I don't care about the stories anymore, and thus I don't really care about what the books have to say; I hated Legacy of the Force and didn't even bother to read Fate of the Jedi. I did like the Legacy comics, but they feel so very disconnected from everything else.

The book mixes in-universe historical overviews, "found documents"–style interludes (a soldier's diary, a politician's speech, and so on), and call-out details on ships and weapons. I don't care about ships and weapons, so I tended to skim those sections, but the rest was pretty interesting. Sometimes the "found documents" would really work for me, like Wedge's account of Baron Fel, making interesting angles on familiar tales. Probably the real highlight of the book is the illustrations... but I read it on my Kindle via a library loan, so the impact of those was very much lost.

Anyway, I was honestly kind of dreading it at first, reading it only out of a sense of obligation to the me that put it on my list a third of my life ago, but I ended up enjoying the three days I spent on it. Sooner or later, I'll have to check The Essential Reader's Companion out of the library, too, the last of the "Essential Guides" that I was interested in but never got around to.

Hugos Side-Step: Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1960-1966: The High Crusade by Poul Anderson / Way Station by Clifford D. Simak / Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes / ...And Call Me Conrad [This Immortal] by Roger Zelazny
edited by Gary K. Wolfe

I picked up this Library of America volume because it contained two winners of the Hugo Award for Best Novel; I decided to read the other two books it contained as part of my project to read winners of the Hugo Award for Best Novel I haven't already read—plus side-steps into other relevant books that interest me. The second of these was the novel version of Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes.

Collection published: 2019
Novel originally published: 1966
Acquired: February 2022
Read: July 2024

"Flowers for Algernon" was originally a short story, which I have read at least twice before and remember really enjoying; it won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1960. Keyes later expanded it into a novel. The novel was a finalist for Best Novel in 1967, but lost out to Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. (It did tie with Delany's Babel-17 for the Nebula, however. The notes in this LOA edition mistakenly state the two tied for the Hugo.)

I am sure there are lots of people who complain the novel loses the elegant simplicity and thus the power of the short story. It has been over fifteen years since I read the short story, so it's hard for me to do a direct comparison. But even without that, I am sure they are right; it's hard for me to imagine it could be otherwise. A good short story is a thing of power, and the premise of "Flowers for Algernon" is perfectly calibrated to make it a great one. 

And yet, I don't think that invalidates the novel. The novel doesn't replace the short story, after all, but exists alongside it. Based on my vague memories of the short story, I think what the novel adds is the material about Charlie's family, his "escape" from the experiment, and his different encounters with women. Though like a lot of 1960s sf, it comes at sex from an angle a bit disconcerting to a modern reader (we are more prudish now, I think), I otherwise found a lot of this material highly effective, particularly the stuff about his family. The flashbacks to his family trying to—not very well—deal with their low-IQ child was very interesting. The climax of this subplot, where Charlie goes to see his father (who doesn't recognize him) and his mother (who does but ultimately rejects him) were great, tough scenes.

The last twenty pages or so of the novel are some of the most emotionally charged writing I've ever read. Keyes very expertly shows you the disintegration of Charlie's intelligence in a way that only prose can manage. Because the first-person perspective puts you in the mind of Charlie, you experience the backslide of his intelligence firsthand—you lose your intelligence. My eyes got misty reading it.

If there's one thing that doesn't work for me, it's that Keyes seems to be pushing some kind of idea of intelligence and empathy, that intelligence makes it harder to have empathy. We see this with the various scientists working on Charlie, who treat him as an object not a person, and also with Charlie himself. I'm not totally convinced; the novel tries to make you think that the suspicion of other people Charlies acquires is some kind of tragedy... but people were awful to him. It's totally justified! Something I'd like to chew on at more length if I ever give the book another read.

There's a lot to like here. I'll be curious to see next year if The Moon is a Harsh Mistress really does exceed it for me.

I read an old winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel every year, plus other Hugo-related books that interest me. Next up in sequence: The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume 3

Reading Merry Go Round in Oz Aloud to My Kid

Merry Go Round in Oz by Eloise Jarvis McGraw and Lauren McGraw
illustrated by Dick Martin

Another landmark Oz book for me and my kid—the last of the Famous Forty! This one was already in my collection, so I did own it as a kid... but it's the only installment in the Famous Forty to not appear on my c. 1997 list of all Oz books, so apparently I didn't know about it as of then. The only memory I have retained of it is the first chapter, where Oregon orphan Robin Brown grabs the brass ring on a merry-go-round and is transported to Oz; literally none of the rest of the book was even remotely familiar as I reread it. This is a shame because as an adult reader, I loved it. This was definitely my favorite post-Baum Oz novel, and to be honest, there's more than a few Baum novels I would say it exceeds too.

Originally published: 1963
Acquired: 1998?
Read aloud: July 2024

The plot owes more to Ruth Plumly Thompson's Oz than Baum's in some ways, reminding of Grampa in Oz in particular, but also Kabumpo in Oz or Purple Prince: the prince of an eccentric, vaguely fairly tale Oz kingdom must go on a quest to save his people. (Though unlike in those books, there's no romance element to the quest.) This isn't really the kind of thing Baum went in for, by and large. In this case, the jousting- and genealogy-obsessed Munchkin enclave of Halidom has lost three Golden Circlets that grant its inhabitants strength, intelligence, and skill in handicrafts. Prince Gules goes on a quest to reacquire them, though as he lacks both intelligence and strength, the quest is really being managed by the page Fess, who comes from the neighboring kingdom of Troth; they are accompanied by Fess's pet Flittermouse (half-mouse, half-bat), Gules's steed Fred (who ostentatiously styles himself Federigo, but is secretly descended from a plow-horse), and a fairy Unicorn (supposedly the only unicorn in Oz, but a footnote reminds us there are other unicorns in Oz that the people of Halidom don't know about; see Magic of Oz and Ojo).

Merry Go Round also merges in notes of Gnome King, Yellow Knight, or especially Speedy in its use of a boy American protagonist who gets to Oz in circumstances that are admittedly somewhat dubious and underexplained. Robin Brown is an orphan in foster care who grabs a magic brass ring on a merry-go-round, transporting him to Oz, but also (for reasons never explained) the merry-go-round horse he was riding, which comes to life. He dubs her "Merry Go Round," and he and Merry are of course swept up into a number of adventures as they try to get to the Emerald City, where hopefully Princess Ozma will be able to transport them home and make Merry into a Real Horse.

At first, we go back and forth between the two parties; eventually the book adds in Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion, who are (initially) setting out to see the Easter Bunny to order Easter eggs for an upcoming Easter party in the Emerald City. First Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion encounter the party from Halidom; then all three groups converge in the city of Roundabout, whose inhabitants think Robin is their prophesied king.

I don't think it's a coincidence that coauthor Eloise Jarvis McGraw is basically the only post-Baum "Royal Historian" to have had a career as a children's author outside of the Oz books; indeed, she was a Newbery Honor recipient three different times! More than any other Oz book, this one actually cares about the characters and development of its protagonists. Robin, who always feels passed over, must learn to speak up if he's to help Merry. Gules must learn how to act as a leader. Fess must manage a group of people without letting them know they're being managed. Flitter must learn to be brave. Fred must learn to not be so vain. Merry must learn what a "Real Horse" actually is. All of the McGraws' original characters have little arcs, and while Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion don't really change, she does well by them, too. While the McGraws are clearly imitating Thompson, this is a depth of characterization and theme that Thompson herself never achieved (except, perhaps, in Kabumpo). She's also a more subtle writer than some of her predecessors, with more stuff communicated through allusion at times; I would say the reading level is pitched slightly higher than most Famous Forty books.

It's a large set of characters, and I do think my kid found this a bit hard to keep track of at first; plus, there's a lot of exposition in the first Halidom chapter, and conversely, the lack of direct explanation at some points meant I had to spell things out. But unlike some other Oz books with large casts (e.g., Hidden Valley), the McGraws are very careful to give everyone something meaningful to do, both in terms of little bits of business throughout, also in that every character meaningfully contributes to the problem-solving multiple times. There's, for example, some good gags about the vegetarian food the Cowardly Lion is forced to eat in the Easter Bunny's kingdom, and the escape from the Land of Good Children is an excellent sequence, pure Oz problem solving combined with pure Oz whimsy.

I came to enjoy every single one of these characters, and it seems a shame that though McGraw made two returns to Oz, I don't think she ever followed up on any of these characters. I want to see Robin and Merry come into their own, or what Fess is like as he grows older! (I have a theory about him...) There were a lot of fun, distinct voices to do here. I of course particularly loved doing the over-the-top princely declamations of Prince Gules. The end of the book is good, too; things are wrapped up for everyone quite nicely.

I think it's a long book. (I looked around for a list of Oz book word counts but couldn't find one; some enterprising fan must have done this, though.) It runs the usual twenty-ish chapters, and several Oz books are longer in terms of page count, but I felt like the typeface was smaller and chapters often took almost thirty minutes to read aloud instead of the usual fifteen/twenty. Despite this, we read it less than three weeks (we usually average an Oz book a month) because my kid kept asking for extra chapters, so they must have been into it. They were very into the untangling of the books' two prophecies,* and the finding of the three circlets, and they very much liked the journey map contained in the front of book. I think it was slightly over their head in some spots, in a way no Oz book we've read has been for a while, but in a good way.(The only thing to not like in this regard is more an issue for the child reader than the adult one; by the time the key character of Sir Greves returned in the last couple chapters, I don't think my kid remembered him from the first couple chapters at all!)

Dick Martin illustrates, the first of several books by him we'll be reading. I didn't care for his take on Dorothy, and he's no John R. Neill, but his style is well-suited to the tone of the book. Like many of the late Famous Forty books, my big issue with the pictures is that there ought to be more of them!

Next up in sequence: Yankee in Oz

* Come to think of it, this is a bit of a Thompson trope too, but unlike Thompson, who often seemed to fudge them, the McGraws spend some time at the end of the book spelling out exactly how all the prophecies actually worked out. Thompson clearly made her books up as she went along, but this one is obviously carefully planned and plotted.

Miracleman: A Dream of Flying by Alan Moore, Garry Leach, Alan Davis, et al.

Miracleman, Book One: A Dream of Flying

Collection published: 2014
Contents originally published: 1982-89
Acquired: May 2014
Read: July 2024

Story: The Original Writer with Mick Anglo

Art: Garry Leach & Alan Davis with Don Lawrence, Steve Dillon & Paul Neary

Color Art: Steve Oliff

Lettering: Joe Caramagna and Chris Eliopoulos

Many years ago now, I got interested in Alan Moore's 1980s comic Miracleman (a.k.a. Marvelman) as part of a project about superheroes, violence, and utopia; analysis of the series by Peter Paik in his excellent monograph From Utopia to Apocalypse made it sound very relevant. Unfortunately, rights issues meant the book was long out-of-print, and copies of the collected editions so rare, I couldn't get any via interlibrary loan except for the Neil Gaiman–penned follow-up. But, some years later, Marvel acquired and sorted out the rights, eventually reprinting Moore's run in a series of three deluxe hardcovers (with new coloring and lettering) that I picked up as they came out, and some years after that, that I am finally getting around to reading.

Clearly one of the things Alan Moore did to the superhero genre that he came along and asked, "What if superheroes were real?" Now, he was not the first to do this, nor the last; I would argue that a great many important works of superhero fiction, at least as early as Amazing Fantasy #15, were premised on this question. But with his work on Watchmen, Moore was the one who asked this question for the 1980s. In the first book of Miracleman, A Dream of Flying, Moore asks the same question in a different way. While Watchmen looks at what kind of people would do something like become a superhero, and what real people would do with that kind of power, and what the real effects of using violence to change the world would be (a theme Moore comes back to a lot; see also V for Vendetta), A Dream of Flying comes at it from the opposite direction.

Instead of taking heroic figures and making them sordid and realistic, A Dream of Flying asks how could a heroic figure exist in a real world. Back in the 1950s and '60s, Mick Anglo wrote the adventures of Marvelman and his friends; Moore imagines that those stories sort of really happened—in the head of Michael Moran and his friends. Moran was abducted for an experiment as a child by a depraved scientist, who used alien technology to give Moran superpowers and held him in a dreamlike state, pumping crudely written superhero stories into his brain to develop him into the weapon he wanted. Eventually things went horribly wrong, Moran lost him memories, and by the 1980s was a fortysomething adult with no idea he had a superpowered alter ego. Miracleman is, both in story and in reality, based on Captain Marvel, and Moore manages to come up with reasonable science fiction explanations for a lot of what happens in Captain Marvel stories; I liked the explanation for body-swapping a lot.

A Dream of Flying begins with Michael's slow rediscovery of his true self, and then his discovery of how he was created and what happened to his friends. It's Alan Moore at the top of his craft, and he has strong artistic collaborators in Garry Leach and Alan Davis. The best parts usually center on Moore's appliance of grounded realism to the character, both in terms of psychology and in terms of sci-fi explanations. This kind of story has been told a lot since, but Moore is very good at it. I particularly liked the stuff about Michael's wife.

In addition to the eleven chapters of A Dream of Flying (most about seven pages), this volume includes a prologue retelling a real Mick Anglo Marvelman tale in Moore's idiom, a flashforward story (set during Book Three, I think) about Miracleman and the Warpsmiths of Phaidon doing some time travel, and two side stories about the Warpsmiths. The first of these is fun, and the flashforward is fine if a bit pointless. The Warpsmith stuff I found largely inscrutable, but I guess I'm glad its in here for completeness's sake. 

There's also about sixty pages of "behind-the-scenes" stuff to pad this book out to a marketable length. Most of it is pretty interesting: contemporary house ads, art try-outs, and the like. Original artwork and variant covers are less interesting, but I'm sure some people appreciate this stuff.

I would have, however, preferred a recoloring done in a more genuine 1980s style, rather than the contemporary approach Steve Oliff took.

Overall, this is an interesting start to the Miracleman saga, and highly recommended if you are interested in Alan Moore and/or the history of the superhero genre.

Hugos 2024: Adventures in Space: Short Stories by Chinese and English-language Science Fiction Writers

Adventures in Space: An Anthology of Short Stories by Chinese and English-language Science Fiction Writers

Patrick Parrinder, consultant editor

Yao Haijun, honorary editor

Adventures in Space is a science fiction anthology containing a mix of translated Chinese stories and English-language originals; the Chinese stories are all reprints, as are most of the English ones. I picked it up from the library because it contained three Hugo finalists, all Chinese stories that became eligible because they were contained in this anthology. The theme of the anthology is space exploration; all of the stories feature people on expeditions into space, either within our solar system or beyond. (Note that the title on the cover says "new short stories" but only two of the thirteen stories are new; the actual title on the book's title page makes no such promise. Also, given Patrick Parrinder and Yao Haijun are credited as just "consultant editor" and "honorary editor" respectively, I wonder how much they actually did to make this book.)

Anthology published: 2023
Contents originally published: 1995-2023
Read: July 2024

You can read my full reviews of the three Hugo finalists ("Answerless Journey" [1995] by Han Song, "Seeds of Mercury" [2002] by Wang Jinkang, "Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet" [2010] by He Xi) here. Once I was done with my other Hugo reading, I circled back to the book to read the rest of it. Here, I'll review those stories, first the Chinese stories, then all the English ones.

What I've learned from reading a lot of Chinese sf over the past couple years (either Hugo finalists or stories collected in Neil Clarke's anthologies) is that a lot of it comes across as old-fashioned to an Anglophone reader; lots of stories that are heavy on technical details and light on characterization. "Seeds of Mercury," "Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet," and Chen Zijun's "Shine" (2016) are all like this; they are all panoramic, big picture stories of space exploration... but all ones that gave me as a reader little-to-no reason to actually care about the story being told. "Shine" was particularly though; lots of bits where some kind of technical problem would be introduced (if we launch this rocket now, it will be hit by lightning) and then two paragraphs later someone would technobabble a solution (we can use our "li-fi" network to make laser lightning rods). This stuff could be technically sound or not, I have no way of knowing, but it's not interesting.

I did find more to like in the last two Chinese stories. Some aspects of Zhao Haihong's "The Darkness of Mirror Planet" (2003) are a bit cheesy, but overall it was a very interesting story. The main character comes from a very planned-out future; she is recruited to go on an expedition to a newly discovered planet, but finds something there that she did not expect... or does she? I also enjoyed "Doomsday Tour" (2013) by Bao Shu, which doesn't really fit the anthology's theme, but maybe that's for the best. Clearly inspired by 2012's Mayan apocalypse memes, it's about what happen when people think it's the end of the world, but it's actually not... on a cosmic scale. Fun and clever.

Also a lot of the Chinese stories have this very social Darwinist, it's us-or-them vibe: "Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet," "Shine," and "The Darkness of Mirror Planet" all have moments that hinge on the idea that we can't allow alien life to thrive because it innately poses a threat to us. In many of these cases, it's presented as the obvious conclusion to reach, even when the story seemingly disagrees with it. I find it kind of unsettling.

In my review of "Seeds of Mercury," I touched on some of translator Alex Woodend's odd choices; I am no student of Chinese, but surely the odd bit in "Shine" where someone says they will "be blown to the Western Paradise" is meant to be referring to "Heaven"?

It might be tempting to blame the mediocre quality here on the stories' Chinese origins, but I didn't find very many of the English ones very compelling either. I usually try to eschew spoilers in my reviews, especially of short fiction, but I find it impossible to discuss the twist held in common between several of these stories, so stop here if that bothers you.

The first is Alex Shvartsman's "The Race for Arcadia" (2015), which is about a dying professor recruited for a desperate attempt by the Russian government to be the first to land on a newly discovered exoplanet. The more stripped down the ship, the faster it can make the interstellar journey, so if they put him on a one-way trip, they can win. But the twist is that before the ship launches, the Russians upload his consciousness, so he only thinks he's physically on a ship... it turns out he's just an emulation. I didn't buy this at all; why would other nations consider landing an AI emulation of a person on an exoplanet any more meaningful than landing an automated probe?

The particular problem is that the next English story, "On the Ship" (2017) by Leah Cypess, has a similar twist. In this one, we are on a colony ship traveling from planet to planet looking for one where its passengers can settle, but it turns out that though they really are on such a ship, they're actually in suspended animation, and it's a trick to keep them wandering forever away from Earth. It might work okay (I didn't love it, but it was well told) if it didn't follow the previous story. The problem gets even worse in that the next English story, Eleanor R. Wood's "Her Glimmering Façade" (2016), is entirely dependent on the twist that the seemingly ordinary people in the story are actually in suspended animation on a spaceship living illusory lives. If you encountered the story in another context you might not see it coming, but given the story is in a book called "Adventures in Space" and having been primed by the previous two English stories, you basically work it out right away. This is, I suppose, a problem of the theme anthology—as an editor you need to balance coherence against repetition—but I am sure there must be other contemporary English takes on the idea of space exploration than "people have are secretly living in a computer simulation."

Thankfully the fourth English story, "Cylinders" (2017) by Ronald D. Ferguson, does not follow this line... but it is still told from the perspective of an uploaded consciousness! Alas, I still didn't enjoy it much; a bit long-winded and I didn't really buy the central concepts.

Fortunately, the last three English stories take totally different approaches, but unfortunately, I found two of them pretty cheesy; Allen Stroud's "The First" (2023) and Russell James's "The Emissary" (2023) both have kind of old-school premises about alien life. I did find "Minuet of Corpses" (2018) by Amdi Silvestri the best English story in the book, with some good unsettling imagery, but by this point, you might see that that's damning with faint praise.

The idea behind this anthology is neat enough—bringing together English and Chinese stories on a common topic—but it needed a stronger set of stories to actually work. I did something similar with the 2023 Hugo Awards, reading the anthology Galaxy Awards 1 because it contained one translation of a Chinese finalist, but that even though it was a mixed bags, it was a much stronger volume, containing four strong stories instead of just one.