This is the debut novel of G. Willow Wilson, better known to me as the cocreator of Ms. Marvel. I've classified it as "fantasy" on LibraryThing (it's got a genie in it), but it arguably lies at the overlap of fantasy and science fiction, as advanced computer technology is also a key aspect of the plot. The book takes place in a generic Arab state during a sort of "Arab Spring"–like moment, fueled by social media. Wilson says in an afterword to my edition that she wrote the book to unite the three audiences for her previous work: sf&f fans, Muslims, and the kind of people who listen to NPR!
This combination of genres and approaches is the high point of the novel. To me, as a western reader of genre fiction, the book takes a lot of familiar ideas and presents them in an unfamiliar way, which I really enjoyed. Despite being over 400 pages long, it's a pretty quick read. It's largely undemanding, I would say, but occasionally has a really tough moment, highlighting the difficulty of the concepts it works through.
Two things of interest to me. One, I don't know how many readers of the book were in the market for Lawrence Durrell jokes, but I thought the book's comment about the Alexandria Quartet was laugh-out-loud hilarious. I was squarely in the target audience, anyway. Second, if you are a Marvel fan, you should note the book has a couple mentions of World of Battlecraft, the same fictional MMORPG that Kamala Khan plays in Wilson's Ms. Marvel comics.
"Nest in the Dark" is one of the standalone Star Trek Advnetures missions that you can buy direct from Modiphius as a PDF for a few dollars, though I am pretty sure I got my copy from a Humble Bundle. I've been intrigued by this one for a long time—it's about the player ship encountering a sort of cosmic megastructure—and had once thought it could make a good "season finale" for my previous campaign. That campaign had the players chasing down the origins of alien signals, and I thought the "Matryoshka Brain" here would be good for that. That campaign fizzled out before we got to that point, but when my new campaign started up, I knew I wanted a finale with an emphasis on science and exploration, one that might feature some moral dilemmas, and one that would explore ideas of nonhuman consciousness—my players include Ph.D.s in psychology and neurochemistry, and the former even gave her character an interest in cybernetics.
Thus it became the fourth episode of...
"Captain’s Log, Stardate 53876.0. Starfleet Command has raised questions about my handling of the Haradin prisoners we left at Outpost SE-119, but that issue will have to wait. The Diversitas has returned to the Omega Draconis system in response to a distress call from Abyss Station. The black hole at the heart of the system is destabilizing—threatening to swallow up the station. The gravimetric fluctuations are rendering it difficult to transport personnel off the station…"
Planning the Mission
The big change I made here was, of course, to tie the mission into our mini-campaign, so I'll lay that out clearly here. In the first episode, the players found that a Haradin terrorist they'd met was actually an android when it collapsed; their investigations in the second showed it had a highly complex brain but relatively simple physical construction as well as a powerful transmitter, now burnt it. The second episode also saw them find that an unknown element used in its construction was also used in the alien facility orbiting the black hole Omega Draconis A*. They discovered that facility had been designed by mysterious ancient aliens they dubbed the "Engineers" but they were not able to find any images of them or other details about them. In the third episode, they discovered the black hole was going haywire, negative impacts rippling across the sector.
So the idea was that the Engineers were a digital intelligence living in the Matryoshka Brain; a long time ago they had been responsible for building the Omega Draconis facility in order to calm the unstable black hole, but the players' unwitting actions in episode two meant the facility was no longer doing that—and they were going to need to track down the Engineers in order to get them to repair the facility. (In the mission as written, the Matryoshka is mobile and about to brush up against an inhabited system.) The Haradin android would turn out to be a member of the Engineer civilization on a mission of exploration, much like the players themselves, on a secret anthropological survey, as we've seen Starfleet itself do in episodes like "Who Watches the Watchers?"
My goal here was to do some Prime Directive stuff, but from the other side. What happens when the Federation is the one being "protected" from an advanced civilization? What happens when there's a disaster threatening the Federation, but those advanced civilizations could stop it... but won't? (as seen on screen in episodes like "Pen Pals" and "Homeward")
The big change, thus, was to rewrite the first act. I began with an in media res teaser, with the Diversitas evacuating Abyss Station, which was falling into the black hole:
Each round, there was first a Control + Conn Task D3 for the ship to maintain position amid the gravimetric distortions. (If they fell out of position, it would be a D4 Task to return.)
Transporting a batch of crew from the station was a Daring + Engineering Task D3. (They could transport more than once per round, but this would increase the difficulty.)
Complications would mean that a random player was injured by a gravimetric fluctuation, or that a piece of equipment would fail; I could induce them on purpose with 2 Threat if I wanted.
There were four groups of people to transport, and the players had four rounds to beam them all over.
I also added a new Act I, Scene 1 where the players would have to figure out some way to track down the Engineers.
Additionally, this was the first episode where my player Joel would be back after a six-week absence; his character Oliver Johnson had vanished into a time anomaly during the second episode. So I wrote in that he would reappear inside a spherical structure inside the Matryoshka Brain, having inadvertently been transmitted from the Omega Draconis facility to the Matryoshka Brain. This meant a scene where Oliver reappeared, and also I would have Joel play a support character until the players actually reconnected with him.
Other than that, I mostly followed the mission as written, just making the "Engineer" Mercury who the players meet be the same one who had been in the Haradin android. I also decided to play up on some stuff in the backstory of Alita, Forest's character; Alita has a brain injury she compensates for with a cybernetic implant of her own devising, and an interest in cybernetics as a character. So I decided I wanted something like Mercury ending up in Alita's body, with Alita either sharing it or herself downloaded into an android—that would of course depend on exactly what the players decided to do.
As always, I changed the episode title to make it more pretentious. "Angels in Your Angles" seemed like a nice one for summing up the idea of advanced beings residing in pure mathematics. There's been a pattern to these changes; if you know it, you might have the same taste in indie bands as me.
The mission took three sessions to play, basically one per act. It took a bit of scheduling, but I made sure all our regular players were there for final session. For the two absences, I once again invoked the anatid space flu.
Ryan as Rucot, captain (sessions 1, 3)
Debi as T'Cant, first officer (1-3)
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 (1-3) and Anthor, anthropologist (1-2)
Good turnout from the "main cast," though, mean that this was the only episode to feature no sessions involving our back-up recurring character, Toren as Tronnen, the ship's counselor.
The teaser I had planned turned out to be quite exciting. When they designed the ship back during our session 0, the players chose a lot of Talents that made it good at stuff involving sensors and science, but episodes 1 and 2 had largely taken place off the ship, so here they really got to make use of those Talents. On top of that, Kenyon's engineer character, Nevan, has a lot of engineering Talents that work best on the ship, but had done little on the ship, so again, he got to make use of that stuff. But as much as they did a good job, they also rolled a bunch of Complications, so I was exploding consoles and causing transporter shorts and all kinds of good stuff that kept the tension on.
My plan for Act I, Scene 2 was very vague, honestly one of the vaguest I had ever written:
Players will need to come up with some kind of plan, ideally one that pushes them in the direction of searching out the origin of the “Engineers.” They are the ones who might have the technology to re-stabilize the black hole.
The main benefit they would have is that the crew of Abyss Station has spent the last six weeks poring over what data they could retrieve from the remains of the alien facility. Crew can analyze this with the facilities on the Diversitas.
Other ideas: tracing where the alien transmitters feed to; talking to the Ithik, who might have some kind of lead.
Whatever they find, it points them toward the heart of the Ekuemene sector, an area with less stellar density than can be found elsewhere.
So I told the players, you need to figure something out, and then just leaned back to see what would happen.
They knocked it out of the park! I was so delighted. The players went through a bunch of different theories and ideas, weaving together a number of different strands and details from across the campaign. (One of the benefits of playing weekly, as opposed to monthly like in my old campaign, is that concepts sewn twelve sessions prior are much easier to keep in mind!) At one point, Debi actually totally put together exactly what was going on in terms of backstory—but I couldn't react, I had to let them figure it out for themselves, so they had no idea! It was just one of several theories proposed.
Eventually they decided there were three things they wanted to do:
Return to the alien facility and see if it had any data they could recover after all.
Study the black hole to see if there was any hint to collapsing it.
Get in touch with the Ithik.
My only real intervention was asking them who was going to do what. They decided that Nevan and Faraday would do task #1, T'Cant and Anthor #2, and Rucot #3; meanwhile, Loonin would have to get the Diversitas back into orbit and maintain it amid the gravitational fluctuations.
the alien facility in the Omega Draconis system (from a game called Planetary Annihilation)
It was just so fun to watch them spitball and theorize and plan, it was like watching a real conference room scene from TNG. My players have really embraced the STA system and how it works, and how to do problem solving within it, really thinking like a real Starfleer crew. It was so fun!
The actual tasks went pretty well, too, and I responded as GM by making sure each was able to pick up some useful information. On the alien facility, they were able to find traces of the deleted information, that with the help of what Rucot got from the Ithik, they were able to recover; by analyzing the black hole itself, they were able to discover that stopping this black hole was beyond the power of Federation science. Calling back to the Ithik, by the way, was so much fun. I established that they were just playing lots of games, infuriating the Federation bureaucrats really earnestly working on resettling them. The members of the Cult of the Deathbringer in particular were just excited to be allowed to finally have fun, and were getting drunk all the time. Rucot promised to send them some kanar for their help. If we play another campaign (more on that later), I'll have to see if I can work them back in somehow.
Act II of the episode takes the player ship to the actual Matryoshka Brain; the mission as written gives a Task the players can perform to figure out what it is, but Joel and Austin recognized it as a "Dyson swarm" just from their own knowledge, so I rolled with that. Similarly, there are a number of mathematical Tasks the characters can undertake... but hey, if you play at a table with a bunch of STEM Ph.D.s, including one actually in math, and they can recognize a sequence of prime numbers or the Fibonacci sequence perfectly fine, thank you!
In the mission as written, the players beam over to a duplicate of their own ship, and one of the crew gets trapped in a bubble as a final test. I tweaked this as a way of reintroducing Joel's character of Oliver to the proceedings; having vanished from time back in episode 2, he appeared inside a sphere here in episode 4 aboard the duplicate Diversitas... and he was almost out of air. This lead into an Extended Task to free him; basically the players have to solve a logic puzzle before the bubble runs out of oxygen.
Nevan has a Talent that makes him very good at Extended Tasks, and he rolled extremely well on his very first attempt, generating enough Work to almost complete the Extended Task on the first round! I hadn't spent very much Threat yet, so I dropped a ton of it at this point (I think five or six!), each point of Threat spent eliminating one point of Work.
This turned out to make things incredibly tough indeed, because at that point Nevan began rolling very poorly, as did other players when they tried to take over the Extended Task. Typically this have been super-easy for my players... but finally I created one they struggled to complete! They did get there in the end, but man, I think both they and I were pretty stressed. But finally, they did succeed.
Like I said above, I wanted a Complication where something happened with Alita's brain, and the players gave me exactly that. Alita attempted to use her cybernetic implant to help transmit the consciousness of "Mercury" (a member of the Engineers) from a plate constituting the Dyson swarm into the Haradin android, but what happened is Mercury ended up in her body and she ended up in the android! I think this threw Forest for a loop a bit, but ended up resulting in some fun stuff. Alita, who wanted to understand cybernetics better, was able to get some detailed scans of her own consciousness operating in an android body. Forest had made delicious cinnamon rolls for our last session, and so we ended up with a series of jokes about how Mercury in Alita's body kept eating all kinds of food, especially cinnamon rolls.
The third session mostly centered around the players first communicating with Mercury, convincing Mercury to let them talk to the "Consensus," and then convincing the spokesbeing of the Consensus, "Zeus," to intervene to stop Omega Draconis A*. I set this up as a sort of Prime Directive dilemma in reverse. Building the facility to calm Omega Draconis had prevented a natural disaster—in letting the station stop operating, the argument of the Engineers was that they were restoring the "natural" state of the Ekumene sector. The players had to convince them that they ought to intervene, and they did a good job of coming up with some powerful arguments—particularly Claire as Loonin, who gave a good speech about the responsibilities and obligations toward life.
the "Matryoshka Brain" (I can't figure out the original source of this image)
I particularly liked this, as my whole reason for calling the series (and thus the sector it takes place in) "Ekumene" is that it's ancient Greek for "the inhabited world," which gives us the modern word "ecumenical." But in a slightly less literal sense, it's the idea that the world is a unified place, that we all belong to and participate in. The action and the science is fun, but these are the ideas and ideals that make Star Trek work for me, and I was glad we got to focus on that in the last session.
I made this a Difficulty 6 Task... but I probably made it too easy in that I also let every single player contribute their own little piece to the Task, which meant they generated 10 Successes! I think I made it too easy; in retrospect I wonder if I should have let them succeed at the Difficulty 6 Task with only a normal number of assists, then spent Threat to introduce some kind of Complication, and then forced them to undergo a different incredibly difficult Task to finish. But these things are easy to think of later, and I am not always good at thinking in the moment.
The main situation resolved, the players swapped everyone back into the right body, and then the Diversitas left the influence of the Dyson swarm to discover 1) almost no time at all had passed, and 2) the black hole was totally normal and posed no threat. They also discovered, however, that Mercury had uploaded a copy of itself to the Diversitas computer—in a very fun moment, Nevan's player was finally able to use his Talent "I Know My Ship" to diagnose this, which he was always asking about but the circumstances were never right for the entire campaign!
So came the end of our last session and thus our campaign. But I would like to keep playing and I made sure to lay in some seeds for that. What's up with the Haradin has been a big ongoing thing, and the players had theorized there was some link between the Haradin and the Engineers; back in episode three, they had been flummoxed by the Haradin's confusion over how the players could not know where Harad was or why it had been invaded. Mercury, it turned out, had been an anthropologist studying the Haradin, so the Mercury program running on the Diversitas computers gave them this piece of information: "In their language, the word Harad means 'universe.'" Additionally, I think there's some good potential to see what happens with Alita's scans of the android. (The Engineers took the actual android body.)
And finally, like I said in my write-up of episode three, Captain Rucot made the somewhat dubious (in my mind, anyway) move of handing over a bunch prisoners to the Klingons. So I ended the episode and thus the whole mini-campaign by giving this on a slip of paper to T'Cant's player:
You have received new orders from Starfleet Command—you are to relieve Rucot of command and take him back to Deep Space 10 for questioning over his handling of the Haradin prisoners.
TO BE CONTINUED...
"You guys will all have to play again next summer to find out what happens next!" I declared.
Though I don't think I made perfect choices (in particular, I feel like the strand about Joel/Oliver ended up not mattering very much in either a character or plot sense), I enjoyed this final mission a lot. Good challenges, good focus on exploration, discovery, and diplomacy.
And I enjoyed the campaign a lot, too. I was a bit trepidatious about having a player captain (I did an NPC in my first campaign), but Ryan was great at playing the character appropriately. And all my players were great, really throwing themselves into the system, their characters, and the Star Trek ethos. Everyone brought something to the table, and even though we at times had seven(!) players, I don't think anyone was slighted. Overall, it was definitely one of the best gaming experiences I've had.
I meant to show this at the end... but I forgot!
At the end, when I suggested a campaign for next summer, Austin piped up—"maybe a quick set of sessions over winter break?" So I guess he liked it too!
The Father-Thing: The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume 3 by Philip K. Dick
The third volume of The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick collects shorts he wrote in 1953 and 1954, which were published from 1953 to 1959; my edition is called The Father-Thing but it has also been published under the titles Second Variety (also used as the title of the second volume, confusingly) and Upon the Dull Earth. I had been collecting the 1999 Gollancz editions of this series, but I wasn't able to find one of volume 3 for a reasonable price, so I settled for a 1990 Grafton edition instead—now my collection won't match!
Collection published: 1990 Contents originally published: 1953-59 Acquired: August 2024 Read: September 2024
I found this less interesting than I remember the first two volumes being. There are a lot of stories here about that bugaboo of 1950s science fiction, the "evolutionary throw-forward," the super-advanced human "evolving" in our midst. It's a theme that's largely vanished from contemporary sf, and I think it's pretty much evolutionary nonsense—at the very least, even if it could be plausible, that work is rarely done. To his credit, Dick often attempts to undermine this idea, as he lays out in his notes on "The Golden Man," and this one I did enjoy; like Wells's The Time Machine, it understands that evolution is not a teleology, that to be "more evolved" doesn't mean "more advanced" but only "more capable of reproducing within a particular niche." But so many of the other stories go with this theme in various ways, and I quickly came to find it tedious.
I have previously opined that the thing I find most interesting about Dick as a writer is the way he captures the alienation of modern life; unfortunately, there's not a lot of that in these tales of throw-forwards, time travel, and galactic war. My favorite stories were "The Hanging Stranger," "The Eyes Have It," "Sales Pitch," and "Foster, You're Dead." "The Hanging Stranger" really captures that classic Dick feeling of alienation, particularly in its early stages, when the main character realizes there's a dead body hanging in the town square... and no one thinks it's weird but him. What happened? Why? How did everyone around him suddenly become a terrible person? I wish this part had been drawn out more but it's still an effective story.
Both "Sales Pitch" and "Foster, You're Dead" hit the idea of consumerism gone horribly wrong that you get from a lot of Dick's best stuff. The surreal robot in "Sales Pitch" that goes around destroying the protagonists' home as a demonstration (and they still purchase one!) is great; I also really liked the premise of "Foster," where salesmen go around selling nuclear bomb shelters, and buying one is seen as a sign of great patriotism. If you can't afford to buy one and the war comes... well, too bad! Great satire on the military-industrial complex.
"The Eyes Have It" is a simple tale, but a good one—probably technically not sf at all, but commenting on the way that sf takes metaphorical language and literalizes it. It would be fun to teach, I think.
Overall, though, I'm hoping the next volume (which coincides with the part of Dick's career where his novel writing took off) contains more of what I like about his work.
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 Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
A grad school colleague, knowing of my interest in literature and science, recommended this book to me. I couple years later I bought it so I could scan a couple chapters and teach it in my "vision of science"–themed academic writing class. Based on a quick skim, I selected a couple that looked good to teach, but this did not happen; a couple weeks into the course, it became clear to me I had assigned too much reading, and I dropped the readings from the schedule, much to my students' relief. But of course I chucked the book onto my reading list, and some six years later I have finally gotten around to it.
The book consists of twenty-one chapters, each titled after an element of the periodic table. They cover Levi's life, from his childhood to his adulthood, with a particular emphasis on his career as an industrial chemist and some discussion of his time in a concentration camp (which he covered in more detail elsewhere), but also a number of embedded narratives about other people.
It's my first work by Levi, and an interesting one. Like a lot of collections, I did not glom onto every story but there were a number of good ones. A lot of the stuff about Levi's young attempt to get into chemistry are quite funny, especially his attempts at romance, and there's an interesting tale of his attempt to solve contamination at a chemical site.
But it is also, of course, a book about fascism and how it affects our lives. I found this passage from "Potassium" about the certainty of chemistry fascinating:
the Fascism around us did not have opponents. We had to begin from scratch, 'invent' our anti-Fascism, create it from the germ, from the roots, from our roots. We looked around us and traveled up roads that led not very far away. The Bible, Croce, geometry, and physics seemed to use sources of certainty. [...] Chemistry, for me, had stopped being such a source. It led to the heart of Matter, and Matter was our ally precisely because the Spirit, dear to Fascism, was our enemy; but having reached the fourth year of Pure Chemistry, I could no longer ignore that chemistry itself, or at least that which we were being administered, did not answer my questions. To prepare phenyl bromide or methyl violet... was amusing, even exhilarating, but... [w]hy in that particular way and not in another? After having been force fed in liceo [school] the truth revealed by Fascist Doctrine, all revealed, unproven truths either bored me stiff or aroused my suspicion. (43-4)
We may like to think of science as source of certainty in an uncertain world, but Levi argues that the truths of science are as arbitrary the truths of humans when you come down to it—there is nothing to be found in science that will let you resist fascism.
Or is there? Later, in "Chromium," he solves a bit of a scientific mystery and imparts to his coworkers a new process they have to follow to avoid contamination issues. Years later, he has long left that plant, but the process remains:
my report went the way of all flesh: but formulas are as holy as prayers, decree-laws, and dead languages, and not an iota in them can be changed. As so my ammonium chloride... by now completely useless and probably a bit harmful, is religiously ground into the chromate anti-rust paint on the shore of that lake, and nobody knows why anymore. (133)
There's an odd sort of hope in this, tinged with melancholy. The good you do can linger for a long time... albeit until it has become actively harmful in its own way! Humans cling on to revealed truths, for good or for ill—this is probably the lasting lesson of fascism, religion, science, and The Periodic Table.
The best story in the book is "Vanadium," where Levi bumps into a German chemist he knows from the concentration camp. Levi wants to find the man a monster against which to validate himself; the German chemist wants to use Levi to vindicate himself as someone who really was not that bad. Neither gets what he wants—it's a really touching meditation on complicity and blame. It ends kind of uncertainly, but how else could it?
The Enchanted Island of Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson illustrated by Dick Martin
After the success of Yankee in Oz, the Oz Club asked Ruth Plumly Thompson if she had any more manuscripts—and she did, an unpublished fantasy novel about a boy and his camel who go Somewhere. So Thompson rewrote it a little bit to take place in Oz, and the Club published it in 1976.
If Yankee was somewhat generic Thompson adventure but fun enough to get away with it, Enchanted Island is a somewhat generic Thompson adventure but largely not fun enough to get away with it. I liked Humpty the Camel well enough, and some of the stuff about Kapurta, the "enchanted island" of the title, is pretty fun, but aside from that, there wasn't much to this. David and Humpty go from place to place, go away, and so on. There's little cleverness, little sense of adventure. Like in a lot of Thompsons, everything is pretty much solved accidentally and with little input from our protagonists; ideas that are set up in the beginning (such as Humpty's longing for the king he was torn away from) are never returned to. There weren't a lot of pictures in Dick Martin's Yankee, but it seems to me that here there are even fewer ones. It's perfectly serviceable as an Oz book, and very quick, but you've read a lot of it before.
Despite that, I found myself wanting a sequel. There's a lot of interesting elements here that could make a great story; I'd love to see David return to Kapurta to be reunited with Humpty and King Rupert and go on some kind of quest involving the magic wishing buttons.
Still, my six-year-old seemed decently into it... but I'd also guess
that a week after we finished it, they'd struggle to tell you much about
it. Although, they were very much delighted by all the magic party
shenanigans in the last chapter involving the birthday button! (I edited
out the claim that the Cowardly Lion liked and would adopt the name
"Cowy"; c'mon now, no way.)
Back when I was adjuncting after graduate school, I got sent a complimentary copy of this book by the publisher, asking if I would consider teaching it. It's an English translation of a post-WWII Hungarian novel, so it is pretty unlikely to ever fit into any course I teach. But it looked interesting enough to read, so I bunged it onto my reading list, and almost eight years later, it finally popped up. (The book appears to be out of print in the U.S. now, so I couldn't assign it if I wanted to.) It's less a novel with a clear overarching trajectory and more a series of vignettes running two to four pages in most cases, chronicling a young boy growing up in Communist Hungary in an impoverished family constantly being pushed to the outside of its society, and forced to undergo a sequence of traumatic setbacks. There seems to be a roughly chronological order to it all, but the book definitely jumps around a lot timewise. A friend asked me about it, and I told her, "It starts depressing and gets worse." There are some striking individual vignettes, but it never really grabbed me. Too depressing? Too bitty? Too repetitive? Too little interiority? Probably a bit from all four columns, to be honest. I don't mind long depressing arcs (Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks is one of my faves), but this one didn't do it for me.
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!
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.
"Nest in the Dark" is one of the standalone Star Trek Advnetures missions that you can 
"Convoy SE-119" is another installment of the "Living Campaign," a set of free Star Trek Adventures 
