Drunk on All Your Strange New Words by Eddie Robson
I consume a lot of tie-in fiction, but experience has taught me that there, to be honest, very few tie-in authors worth following out of the tie-in arena. Even people who are very good tie-in authors often struggle to write compelling original fiction. Their talents may lie in capturing characters and worlds created by others; ask them to write a book about a character not played by an actor, and they just can't do it. So in recent years I have become picky; from the Doctor Who world, it's mostly just Una McCormack, Paul Cornell, and Rob Shearman whose original work I am willing to grab.
Eddie Robson, though, is one of my favorite writers of Big Finish Doctor Who audio drama, with a keen eye for characterization, weird concept, and atmosphere that you can imagine working outside of the Doctor Who framework just fine. A couple years ago, I picked up his second novel, Hearts of Oak, which I liked to start but then kind of swerved into just being a Doctor Who story without the Doctor. But I liked it and him enough to keep looking for his work, and for my birthday I got from my mother a copy of his most recent novel, Drunk on All Your Strange New Words.
I really enjoyed it. Robson indeed applies his keen eye for character and worldbuilding here really well; there are lots of fun little details in the universe he builds up. He constructs a compelling mystery, with the protagonist following a series of clues. At one point, it began to feel a bit forced, but Robson pulls it all together fairly well in the end. It reads quickly and well, and like in his Doctor Who work, there are a lot of good jokes peppered in. I breezed through it, and was telling all kinds of people about what I was enjoying in it.
If I have a criticism, it's that it's a good book and not a great book. The central conceit is very interesting, but the book mostly explores it in an sfnal way; there are ideas of cultural imperalism being invoked here. How can ideas of art and language from outside your society change yours? Is that good or bad? There's a bit of the War of the Worlds conceit going on here: aliens are doing to the West what the West has done with the world. It reminded me a bit of where A Memory Called Empire went. But the novel mostly uses these ideas as part of its mystery, it doesn't really reflect on them or use them to reflect on the world that we all live in. Maybe this isn't the novel that Robson was interested in writing, in which case fair's fair, but I would have loved to see him go there and really knock it out of the park.
* Which is not, as I originally entered into LibraryThing, Drunk on All Your Strange New Worlds. It took me a couple days to realize my mistake.
"Convoy SE-119" is another installment of the "Living Campaign," a set of free Star Trek Adventuresgiven away on the Modiphius web site. When my first STA campaign fizzled out in the middle of "A Plague of Arias," I had planned on using it as our very next episode—in fact, I had gotten as far as writing the entire thing up!
So I was eager to actually get to use the work I had put into it. Additionally, I felt its combat focus would be a nice contrast to the more exploration- and science-heavy missions that made up the rest of the campaign. During our "session zero" my one player who carried over from my first campaign to my second, Claire, opined that one thing she hadn't liked about the first was that it took place in a region of space cut off from the Federation, and thus hadn't featured very many familiar Star Trek aliens like the Klingons. Well, "Convoy SE-119" had Klingons galore.
Thus it became the third episode of...
"Captain’s Log, Stardate 53897.6. After a month of routine charting of stellar formations, the Diversitas has finished a short refit at Deep Space 10. We haven’t been assigned our new mission yet, but we are scheduled to depart tomorrow. The crew is enjoying a day off before we receive our new orders…"
Planning the Mission
The premise of this mission as written is that the Klingons are setting up an outpost in the Shackleton Expanse, and the player ship joins a Klingon vessel in escorting a Klingon convoy carrying materials. This was an easy fit for my campaign. I had it so that the Klingons had abandoned an outpost in the Ekumene sector years ago so they could concentrate on the Klingon-Cardassian War; now that the Dominion War was over, the Klingons were looking to reactivate it. The convoy escort is needed because Orion pirates have been harassing shipping in the Shackleton Expanse.
I'm coming to like the Living Campaign missions because they're often a little less detailed and... I don't know, fussy, than some of the other prewritten STA missions. Thus, the work you do as the DM is more about fleshing out what's there than changing what's there. I don't think I changed a lot here.
the convoy travels through the Ekumene sector (unless otherwise specified, all art is from The Klingon Empire Core Rulebook)
My two big changes were probably this. One, I tied the mission into the ongoing campaign a bit. In the original, like I said, there are Orion pirates; I did my usual thing and made them into Haradin pirates. When I wrote this up for my original STA campaign, I had the idea that the reason the pirates had gotten more bold recently was because they had just been taken over by Tulana Vulko, the Orion pirate who served as the antagonist of "A Plague of Arias."
Here, I (almost at the last minute) had the idea that the pirates would now be under the command of General Zotabia, the Haradin villain of the campaign's first mission, "Hard Rock Catastrophe." Having escaped from prison, he was now organizing unaffiliated groups of Haradin into pirates... but why? I also wanted to highlight some worldbuilding ideas relating to the Haradin I'd had in my head since my first campaign but never had cause to use.
chaos on the bridge of the IKS MupwI'
Additionally, the mission as written features danger from gravimetric fluctuations; I knew my fourth episode was going to return to the black hole from the second ("Abyss Station"), which would be undergoing expansion; I set that up by making the gravimetric fluctuations be the consequences of what had happened in the second episode, rippling throughout the sector via subspace. (And thus leading to a nice cliffhanger where the crew receives a distress signal from Abyss Station.)
The other change was to add Extended Consequences to a sequence where the convoy is stranded and pirates are coming closer. This seemed like a natural fit (but the technique was added to STA after "Convoy SE-119" was written). I put them into turn-based mode (each player could undertake one Task or assist in a Task per round) with these parameters:
This is an Extended Consequences scene, with Work Track 20 and magnitude 4.
Four setbacks:
Setback #1: A Haradin pirate fleet is detected at extreme sensor range.
Setback #2: A gravimetric spear damages an additional transport in the convoy, which will need to be evacuated.
Setback #3: The pirate fleet detects the convoy and begins heading toward it.
Setback #4: The pirate fleet arrives.
Every failed Task or complication results in the rolling of 6 Challenge Dice. The GM can also opt to roll by paying 2 Threat to create a Complication. [Only do this if things seem to be going really well for the players, or if they are purposefully giving you Threat.]
The last change I made was more minor, and mostly dictated by practical logistics. I like to use my Eaglemoss models for things like space combat... and I only had two Eaglemoss models suitable for being unaffiliated pirate ships, since by and large I only collected Starfleet ships. So General Zotabia's ship became a "Merchantman" (seen most prominently in Star Trek III) and the other pirate ship an old Class-J freighter (seen in the original series episode "Mudd's Women" and mentioned in "The Menagerie"), purchased at surplus by the pirates.
And, of course, I changed the episode title to be more pretentious, to "Stinks of Slumber and Disaster." This meant the convoy name would probably not come up at all, so I made "SE-119" the name of the outpost the Klingons were going to reactivate. (It only occurs to me now that "SE" probably stands for "Shackleton Expanse"! Oh well.)
Playing the Mission
The mission ended up taking just two three-hour sessions to play, our shortest of the campaign. Illnesses and trips meant that its first installment featured just four players; I dealt with this narratively by saying half the senior staff was sick with the anatid space flu.
Ryan as Rucot, captain (sessions 1-2)
Debi as T'Cant, first officer (1-2)
Kenyon as Nevan Jones, engineer (1-2)
Claire as Mooria Loonin, pilot (2)
Austin as Frector, security chief (2)
Forest as Alita Faraday, medical officer (2)
Toren as Tronnen, counselor (1)
I was a bit worried about only having four players, but this ended up allowing more space for some good role-playing. As suggested in the mission as written, I had things begin in the bar on the space station. I asked my players who would likely to be spending their last night of freedom there, and that was Tronnen (the Klingon counselor) and T'Cant (the Vulcan XO). This was perfect, because I wanted the Klingons to get into a dispute with the Starfleet crew, and I was fairly certain Tronnen would rise to the bait. The Diversitas having a Cardassian captain (on exchange) was a great hook for conflict; the players overheard the Klingons ranting about how the Federation was acting as though it had lost the war, purposefully "subjugating" itself to the Cardassians. Despite admonitions from T'Cant, Tronnen told the Klingons to quiet down; the lead Klingon, Akul, ended up challenging Tronnen to a duel. To my delight, Toren decided his character would choose the form of a dance-off! Tronnen beat Akul (T'Cant's focus in Art being clutch on the assist), leading to humiliation, and Akul declaring, “You have not heard the last of Akul, son of Jartokk!”
The next scene began with Rucot and T'Cant attending a briefing with the CO of Deep Space 10, and their players did a good job of playing up the comedy of T'Cant telling Rucot what had happened in the bar the previous night. I really wanted to lean into the fact that Rucot is a Cardassian in this episode, which we hadn't really done, so I had the CO of DS10 commit a lot of microaggressions toward him. One of the real fun things about the episode became the way that Rucot and T'Cant would work together to manage Captain Akul's prejudice against the Cardassians.
engineering on a Klingon freighter
The other big character thing I layered into the episode was that the engineer, Nevan, is half-Betazoid—the product of a one-night stand, and thus he has no training in his empathic powers. Since he mostly sticks to his engines, he's not hit too hard by emotion... but here he had to repair a Klingon vessel and got hit by a wave of extreme emotions once he boarded it! I made all Tasks on a Klingon ship +1Difficulty for him until the issue was resolved. This made a nice character arc across the course of the episode. Eventually, he had the idea to mentally conceptualize the Klingon cacophony as a song, and thus integrate it into his own understanding of music (Nevan sings sea shanties to relax).
Overall, I would say this one played out pretty straightforwardly. In the Extended Consequences, they triggered the first three Setbacks with bad rolls; I purposefully dropped two Threat at the right point so that the first session ended with the arrival of the pirates.
In the second session, we did my first-ever space combat... I have been totally avoiding it in ten previous episodes as an STA GM! I tried to not go too deep into the complexities; I didn't give each individual Haradin fighters moves, telling the players, "If things are going well for you, assume they are going well for everyone; if things go badly for you, assume they are going badly for everyone." I also emphasized that the point of space combat in Star Trek is rarely pounding the other ship into submission, but coming up with some kind of clever solution.
the convoy in battle!
The players did great! With some trapped on a Klingon freighter, the rest (now recovered from the anatid space flu) came up with a plan. When I told them the one Haradin vessel was a surplus Federation ship, they suggested they use prefix codes against it. I didn't let them do this... but since it was a Federation ship, they were able to use its schematics to determine that its baffle plate was a weak point. Loonin at helm lined up a shot, Frector at weapons made it, and they disabled the engines of the Class-J freighter. Then they took it under their tractor beam; at that point, the Klingon battlecruiser finally joined the battle, and the other pirates fled to fight another day.
I did kind of lose track of the enemy ships during the battle; I think there was one round I forgot to give any of them actions! There's a lot to keep track of in this context. But I do think it was probably challenging enough as is, and next time I can do better.
The characters got to interrogate the pirates, which was good for Frector's player; Frector has a Talent that helps her in social conflict against people susceptible to bribery... but all their opponents in the first two episodes were fanatics, rock monsters, or robots! But she was able to find out a lot about the Haradin pirates... though much of what they discovered confused rather than clarified.
Overall, this was a fun one. I think the players enjoyed the different kinds of challenges it threw at them, and the stuff they did with the Klingons especially, the challenge of managing Akul's ego. I look forward to seeing if the stuff with the Haradin pirates has any repercussions down the line.
Outpost SE-119 (from Star Trek Online, via Memory Beta)
At the very end, they helped the Klingons settle into Outpost SE-119. The Klingons threw a party, and I asked what each character would do. Rucot learned that he had won the grudging respect of Captain Akul ("I used to think the only good Cardassian was a dead Cardassian, but perhaps there is one good one!"), and gave him a present: the captured Class-J freighter.
"What of its crew?" I asked.
"Oh, I hand them over, too."
"You give a bunch of prisoners to the Klingons!?"
"Well, I'm a Cardassian. They're guilty; they deserve to be punished."
Nothing makes a DM cackle internally like a player making a totally in-character choice that will have ramifications down the line...
Doctor Who: Galaxy Four: Number 104 in the Doctor Who Library by William Emms
My last first Doctor novelisation brings us to Galaxy Four and the 1980s. This is a third and final stage in the progression through novelisations I've been chronicling here. First we had the three that were books first and novelisations second, ones designed to just be Doctor Who in a world where the show could not be rewatched: The Daleks (1964), The Zarbi (1965), The Crusaders (1966). Then we had two from an era where the first Doctor was no longer the Doctor, but still ones designed to fill in significant parts of the show's history for viewers a decade later: The Tenth Planet (1976), The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1977). Now we're into the third and final stage: gap filling. Galaxy Four is not a major piece of Doctor Who lore or even a minor one; by 1985, it is simply a story that has not been novelised yet and thus needs to be. In publication order, the first Doctor novelisations that preceded and followed this were The Gunfighters and The Savages. Hardly Doctor Who's greatest hits.
But the value of this service cannot be understated. This is a story I have not seen, not the animation, not even the single existing episode, so the entirety of it was new to me (though I was familiar with the broad strokes of the plot from reading many reference guides over the years). Now I very rarely come to an novelisation having not seen the story, but in this case, my approach was much like that of the audience of 1985.
What we have here is a fairly solid read, if a bit creaky. It's a decent showing for the Doctor, Vicki, and Steven. Emms adds in a bunch of small introspective moments on the part of the Doctor (more on those later), most of which worked well for me. Neither Vicki nor Steven get big moments, but they do their bits well, Emms showcasing Vicki's curiosity and compassion, and Steven's determination and cleverness throughout the story.
The fundamental idea that the gross alien monsters turn out to be the good guys is a decent ones... but undermined by the fact that the Drahvins are so clearly baddies from the moment they first appear. And even by the standards of Doctor Who science, it doesn't seem like Emms has a very good grasp of, well, anything. Do planets blow up and take their stars with them? Why is the first chapter called "Four Hundred Dawns"? This number of dawns is at no point alluded to in the text. And, to be honest, I'm not convinced very much actually happens here. The characters move back and forth between two crashed spaceships a lot; the Doctor pumps some power into one of them; the end.
But like I said up top, this is the first first Doctor novelisation I've read (for this project) from the 1980s. By this time, fans and Doctor Who creators alike had a much deeper sense of Doctor Who as something with a continuity. While Terrance Dicks did some minor smoothing out in Dalek Invasion and Gerry Davis was willing to tweak the details of The Tenth Planet a bit, this is the first time I've seen a writer really take what was established later on and fold it back into the original Doctor's run. I'm sure some purists found these annoying, but I rather enjoyed them. Emms anticipates The Tenth Planet by depicting a Doctor who's aware that his body is running out of steam; he even draws on the Pertwee era in mentioning his multiple hearts. There are lots of little references to this being just one of many bodies the Doctor can have, and indeed, Emms anticipates "The Timeless Children" by making it clear this isn't his first body; there's a bit where the Doctor notes that he's never bothered to register how tall he is in this incarnation! Emms does a good bit of capturing the cosmic perspective of a Time Lord.
That's it; this catches me up on all the first Doctor novelisations I owned, plus ones that got modern reprints. In three months, I'll move on to the Doctor Who book I've owned the next longest without having read it, which is Doctor Who and the Ark in Space. Like I did here, I'll use that as an opportunity to read all the fourth Doctor novelisations I own or that have received modern publications. See you all in November!
Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster
Collection published: 2024 Contents originally published: 1990-2024 Acquired: May 2024 Read: August 2024
Writer: Neil Gaiman
Co-Writer & Artist: Mark Buckingham
Color Art: Jordie Bellaire, D'Israeli
Lettering: Todd Klein
This volume finally extends and continues the story of Miracleman from where Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckinham left off in the early 1990s; my understanding is that it contains a few issues they completed then (though with alterations to the art and coloring) and a few issues only published in the 2020s (mostly or entirely written in the 1990s, I think, but not illustrated until the 2020s). Even though Marvel began reprinting Miracleman back in 2014, it was only this year that they finally wrapped up Gaiman and Buckingham's second volume in single-issue format and thus finally released a collection—its release finally being my impetus to sit down and read all the Miracleman comics I'd been picking up.
While book one of the Gaiman/Buckingham run gave us a series of one-off snapshots of Miracleman's utopia, this volume consists of one continuous story. Or rather, half a story, as it ends with a declaration that the story is "TO BE CONTINUED IN THE DARK AGE." But given it took us ten years to get The Silver Age, which had largely already been written, I'm not optimistic that we'll get The Dark Age anytime soon. Maybe in the 2050s?
Anyway, as part of his project to bring the dead back to life, Miracleman revives Young Miracleman, who died before the events of Alan Moore's first book. Richard "Dicky" Dauntless is thus thrust from the world of the ordinary(-ish) 1950s straight into Miracleman's utopian 2003. The book covers his difficulty adjusting to this new time and place, as well as to his discoveries about his own history. How does someone with 1950s attitude toward gender, sexuality, and other social constructs fit into a benevolent libertarian dictatorship?
The story moves slowly but strongly, especially thanks to the work of the always dependable Mark Buckingham. While The Golden Age saw him working in a number of styles, this volume keeps him what I think of as his "default" style (as seen in works such as Dead Boy Detectives); he's good at capturing emotion and character, which works well for the highly contemplative tone of this volume. The best material, in my opinion, was Richard's trip to the mountains, where he seeks out a man who was given powers by Miracleman but voluntarily gave them up, and this causes him (as well as his traveling companions) to think about his place in this new world.
Moore's original run hinted that Young Miracleman was gay; Gaiman picks up on that here, but in a way that made me a bit uncomfortable with its implications. I'm curious to see where this goes in The Dark Age, however.
Overall, I found this interesting but unfinished. It very much depends on The Dark Age. It seems like it could have some interesting things to say, but it also seems like it might end up being a reactionary take on utopias, undermining what made Olympus and The Golden Age so interesting. Hopefully we find out before the 2050s.
Also, I have to complain that while the first four Miracleman volumes were originally released in hardcover, this one only came out in trade paperback. C'mon Marvel, what the hell is this? Your target audience for releases of long-lost 1990s comic books is also the exact kind of people who want their collected editions to go together and will pay for a hardcover! The release strategy of this whole series has left a lot to be desired... I fervently hope they don't end up doing a hardcover later, though; I don't want to have to fight off the temptation to rebuy this.
I first started tracking my reading when I went away to college in 2007. Thus, my "reading year" starts about the same time the school year does, turning over in September, and now it's time for my ever-popular annual stats post.
I read 132 books this year, just below last year's 134. COVID year aside, a very clear level is emerging for the amount of reading I can do as a parent:
Discounting 2019/20, I am averaging 136 books per year following the birth of my first child, a number I have never been more than ten away from.
* Comic books relating to series or authors that are predominantly not comics I don't count under my "Comics" category, but under the main designation. † Nonfiction about a particular author or series is included with that series, not the "Nonfiction" category.
The biggest fluctuations from last year is that media tie-ins were 33.6%, but down to 21.2%; I read about the same number of Doctor Who books as last year, but Star Trek books were down quite a bit (13.4% to 3.8%). On the other hand, I read my first Star Wars book since February 2019! The gap was mostly filled by comics, which went from being 17.2% of my reading last year to 28.0% this year. As always, I wish I read more nongenre fiction... but you can't read more of everything!
Here's how those categories have changed over time:
You can really see how my reading diet shifted around 2017, thanks to finishing grad school and starting to read for the Hugos every year.
Those are stats I crunch myself; here are ones I used LibraryThing to generate. I make different choices between how I enter books on LibraryThing vs. in my personal files, so the total number of books will be slightly different. Here's how my books break down by original publication date:
Here are their author breakdowns:
The two designated "Not a Person" are for duos; the pedants at LibraryThing maintain that a pair of people is not a person. (In both cases, both members of the pair are alive.)
I'm always surprised I haven't read more by female authors, but I guess the amount of contemporary sf&f written by women is counterbalanced by how few tie-ins and comic books are. Note that these charts are by author not books: 39.3% of the authors I read last year were women, but 33.6% of the books I read were by women, so apparently I had more repeat male authors. Both authors labeled "n/a" by LibraryThing were male/female duos.
A lot of different countries this year! Last year, US/UK authors made up 90% of my authors read, but this year they are down to 86%.
One statistic I enjoy a lot on LibraryThing is a breakdown of what you read by pages. This is imperfect: I only enter page counts for paginated books, and many comics and ebooks have no page numbers, and of course page numbers don't perfectly correspond to word counts. Also, multi-author books like anthologies and comic book collections can only be attributed to one person. But still, I find it interesting. Here's my top authors by pages read:
If we ignore Gary K. Wolfe (who edited two big anthologies I read, but did not actually write) and Tom & Mary Bierbaum (who received the primary credit on a comic book collection that actually had many writers), my number one author by pages was John R. Neill; I read four Oz books by him. It's also interesting to see who placed high with just one book, such as Charles Dickens, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Charlie Kaufman.
My tagging on books gives you a sense of genre and series and other attributes:
Last year, I read twice as much sf as fantasy; this year, fantasy just edges out sf. The series I read the most of by pages is, not surprisingly, "Nonestica," which is the overall designation I give L. Frank Baum's fantasy universe that includes Oz.
And, finally, here's the number of books on my "To be read" list:
It's not exactly shooting down, but you can see it really is decreasing slowly but steadily from its peak around August 2022.
Doctor Who: The Essential Terrance Dicks, Volume One by Terrance Dicks
Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth was the second first Doctor novelisation of the Target era, and the first by the venerable Terrance Dicks. Like The Tenth Planet (1976), it picks out a key moment from the series's history as yet unchronicled in prose, the return of the Daleks and the departure of Susan, an event mentioned but unseen in The Crusaders (1965).
People like to bandy about the word "workmanlike" when describing Terrance Dicks. I think Dalek Invasion shows the positives and negatives of that approach. He's not interested in making this a book book like the writers of those first three novelisations were... but on the other hand he's much better at writing a novelisation than Gerry Davis was with The Tenth Planet. (That said, he's got better source material to work with!) Terry Nation's original script features a lot of convoluted moving backward and forward across a devastated London and England, and Dicks captures that perfectly well, occasionally smoothing out some bits of the tv serial. (On screen, the Doctor says this preceded the events of The Daleks, but Dicks changes it to take place afterwards; there's one bit where Ian admits to himself that his plan doesn't make a lot of sense, which felt like a bit of a lampshade moment.)
My favorite part of the book was the first chapter or so, where the characters are exploring the deserted London. "Through the ruin of a city stalked the ruin of a man" is a fantastic opening line, one I knew before I even read the book. In fact, I once played a game called Liebrary with a number of friends where you get a card with the title, author, and synopsis of a famous book; each player then has to write down an imagined first line for the book (the genuine one is also included in the mix). If more people pick your line than any other, you score points. When Orwell's 1984 came up, in a moment of inspiration I wrote down "Through the ruin of a city stalked the ruin of a man" and won the round handily... even though most of my opponents were also English graduate students! Has Terrance ever written such a great line before or since?
The part that didn't quite work for me were the Daleks themselves. I think probably the Daleks are a bit tricky to capture on the page, but I don't know that Dicks even really tries; the famous cliffhanger where one comes up out of the Thames is curiously undramatic, and I don't think the book really sells you on their alien nature or their monstrousness. It seems to reckon (perhaps accurately) that you'll already know and care what a Dalek is because you've seen one on tv!
Pick of the month:Drunk on All Your Strange New Words by Eddie Robson. I read a lot of good stuff this month—Primo Levi, Miracleman, Alif the Unseen. But I decided this based on what was the book I was most likely to go around enthusiastically recommending to someone, which was this neat sf murder mystery.
Collection published: 2016 Contents originally published: 1989-91 Previously read: March 2012 Acquired: March 2016 Reread: August 2024
Story: Neil Gaiman
Art: Mark Buckingham
Color Art: D'Israeli
Selected Painted Art: Mark Buckingham
Lettering: Todd Klein
Back when I originally got into Miracleman, this is the one volume I was actually able to source via interlibrary loan, so this is the one volume I have read before, in a 1993 trade paperback published by Eclipse. But, of course that time I lacked the context of the preceding three volumes by Alan Moore.
What Alan Moore did in the final issue of Olympus was genre-shifting: take the premise of the superhero genre to its logical conclusion. If superheroes use violence to improve the world, isn't their ultimate goal to force a utopia? In his continuation, Neil Gaiman extrapolates from that, telling us stories of what that utopian world might actually look like. The Golden Age contains a number of short stories from around the world of Miracleman; these issues were originally published 1989 through 1991, though it was two issues after this that right issues would result in the series fizzling out, only to be continued decades later.
Rereading my original review, I have to saw, I largely agree with my past self. Each of the stories here examines some aspect of what it might be like to live in a perfect world—and who are the people who might not fit, what are the ways in which people might be left behind. The only story I didn't really rate in my old review was the spy one, about how Miracleman sets up an artificial city for spies to play out their dramas because there's nothing for them in the new world; I dismissed it as derivative of The Prisoner. And maybe that's true, but the twist isn't the point. The point here is that the spies are all of us. So many of us would rather exist in comfortable but destructive routines than embrace an uncomfortable but perhaps redemptive way of living. (It reminds me of that Jameson canard about the end of capitalism versus the end of the world.)
Perhaps it's a hot take, but Mark Buckingham is probably the best artist on Miracleman so far, a series that has been blessed by a succession of admittedly strong artists! His beautiful work is well suited to the utopian vibes of the post-Miracleman Earth, but I also really like how adaptive he is, with lots of varied artistic styles across the book's eight chapters, always choosing one suited to the particular story being told.
It's almost a shame the series was continued. At the point I write this review, I've already read The Silver Age, and I kind of agree with something I wrote back when I read The Golden Age on its own a decade ago:
It's a shame that we'll apparently never see more of this story to come, but in a way, I like that. The Golden Age
explores the sadness that comes with the passing of a way of life, but
if what comes next is a genuine utopia, it really would be impossible
for there to be a sustained series of stories. The Golden Age
really only succeeds at that by using Miracleman as a god, not a
character. Without Gaiman's planned next two volumes, we'll never see
the degeneration and corruption of Miracleman's utopia, and we'll be
able to forever stop on that image of the people of Earth floating away
on balloons. It makes The Golden Age a much more unconventional
work than it might otherwise have been, one that shows a utopia that
though it has cause for sadness, has much larger cause for joy and
wonder.
"Convoy SE-119" is another installment of the "Living Campaign," a set of free Star Trek Adventures 
