The Neurodiversiverse: A Science Fiction Anthology of Stories, Poetry, and Art

The Neurodiversiverse is a new anthology of original sf; the subtitle "Alien Encounters" makes me think it might be the first in a series, but I'm not sure. The premise of the anthology, as the ungainly title indicates, is to look at neurodiversity in an sfnal context. The stories here are largely (entirely?) #ownvoices one, being written by neurodiverse people about situations where neurodiversity is an asset to encountering the alien. So there are stories about people with autism, OCD, ADHD, and so on. I received a free review copy from LibraryThing's EarlyReviewers program.

The Neurodiversiverse: Alien Encounters: A Science Fiction Anthology of Stories, Poetry, and Art edited by Anthony Francis and Liza Olmsted

Published: 2024
Acquired: September 2024
Read: October 2024

The problem with the book is that the basic premise sets up a basic formula that is hewed to pretty consistently without variation and without—on my part anyway—much of interest. A neurodiverse person applies to work with aliens or is contacted by aliens, and then it then turns out that their special way of seeing the universe is matched by the aliens and/or a boon for speaking with aliens. Unfortunately, many of the stories feel short: we meet our protagonist, the aliens reach out, boom done. We don't really get to explore the actual diversity of neurodiversity, the stories have little conflict. Now it may be that this all isn't for me, that the kind of people who are represented here would get more out of it, I don't know. I can only tell you how I reacted to it. But fundamentally, I felt like these stories were mostly superficial representations of both neurodiversity and alien intelligence, and they quickly grew repetitive. Too many of the stories also depict the alien encounters as kind of boringly utopian; our neurodivergent protagonist meets aliens, things are now great. I suspect fewer longer stories could have been more interesting.

There were two exceptions that worked much better for me than the rest of the volume. The first was "The Grand New York Welcome Tour" by Kay Hanifen, which is about a tour guide for aliens. The protagonist has OCD, and their job is to escort alien delegates around; the story benefits from taking place much later than first contact, from focusing on the actual interactions in detail, and from showing us diversity among the aliens. It's not super deep but I did enjoy it. The other is "The Pipefitter" by Tobias S. Buckell. This one seemed to me to ignore the anthology remit a bit (not much from the aliens) and was all the better for it, a problem-solving, action-adventure story about a maintenance worker on a giant colony ship during a crisis situation. It deftly employs one of my favorite tropes, the seemingly insignificant person who proves their importance when they come through while others don't. If the stories had all been this good, I would have enjoyed the book much more.

I also enjoyed Cat Rambo's story about superheroes, but its connection to the anthology premise seemed even more minimal than Buckell's. Well done take on realistic heroes, though.

Also there are some poems, if you're into that kind of thing. I can be, but I wasn't into these.

Two Prequels to Lodestar Award Finalists

The Left-Handed Booksellers of London by Garth Nix

Published: 2020
Read: September 2024

Whenever I finish voting in the Hugo Awards, I circle around to see what finalists from this or previous years have had follow-ups that I would like to read. So far this year, I've read two of them, both of them finalists for the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book; in each case I picked the book up from my local library.

The Sinister Booksellers of Bath by Garth Nix was a finalist this year, but it was second in a series, though it stood alone pretty reasonably. I looped back to pick up the first book, The Left-Handed Booksellers of London. I am glad I did, because it explained some aspects of the setting I hadn't picked up in Sinister Booksellers (I hadn't realized the books took place in an alternate timeline, for example. Nor did I realize that Merlin's body magically transformed; I just thought he was gender nonconforming. Honestly, that was kind of a disappointment.) I did end up feeling like my take on the first was pretty much confirmed, though. That the main characters are booksellers is kind of irrelevant, unfortunately; the book occasionally invokes other fantasy novels but it's all a bit tacked on, and the characters are all a bit thin because they're ultimately there in service to an action plot. I think a better book could have been written with this premise. A third installment is forthcoming; I probably won't bother to get it from the library.

Sheine Lende: A Prequel to Elatsoe
by Darcie Little Badger

Published: 2024
Read: October 2024

Elatsoe was a finalist in 2021, when I ranked it second; this was a fantasy set in an alternate magical United States about a mystery-solving girl with a ghost dog. 2024 saw the publication of the prequel Sheine Lende, about her grandmother when she was a mystery-solving girl with a ghost dog. Like the original, it's a solid, well-crafted book, with intriguing worldbuilding. What really stuck out to me about this one was the structure. Storytelling is central to the book, and the book contains a number of embedded stories, and sometimes even stories within stories, and will sometimes shift between events happening, and events being recounted later, and the recounting being recounted! Some things don't quite add up—as is, of course, true of all stories, fictional or not. Though I think probably Elatsoe has got my heart more, Sheine Lende feels like the more accomplished, skilled book on the whole, and I look forward to seeing what Little Badger comes up with next.

The Return of the Daleks (From Stockbridge to Beyond Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 53)

The Return of the Daleks: The Complete Doctor Who Back-Up Tales, Volume 1
by Steve Dillon, David Lloyd, Steve Moore, and Paul Neary

Collection published: 2024
Contents originally published: 1979-80
Acquired and read: July 2024

This is an exciting volume. Well, it should be. At long last, having (largely) collected the main strip, DWM is turning its attention to the (largely) Doctor-free back-up tales. The only problem is that, for some of these stories (the Abslom Daak and Kroton ones) it's my third time paying for them to be collected! This isn't so much a knock against this book, I suppose (it would probably be silly to do a volume containing all back-ups except those ones), as against the now utterly redundant Dalek and Cybermen "ultimate comic strip collections." Or, perhaps, a knock against me for buying them. But then, I kind of suspect that if those books hadn't sold well, this book probably wouldn't exist.

As always, I only read the new-to-me stories.

The Final Quest, from Doctor Who Weekly #8 (Dec. 1979)
written by Steve Moore, art by Paul Neary

A Sontaran warrior, shamed by his sole defeat (which he has kept hidden from all others), goes on a quest to find the ultimate weapon. If you've read any other Steve Moore story, you won't be surprised there's a dark comeuppance awaiting him. Decent enough, let down by the fact the the usually dependable Paul Neary seems to struggle to draw Sontarans.

The Stolen TARDIS: A Tale of the Time Lords, from Doctor Who Weekly #9-11 (Dec. 1979)
written by Steve Moore, art by Steve Dillon

Set on Gallifrey (seemingly in the distant past), this one begins badly: a traveling circus materializes, and the Time Lords are just like, "Wow, let's watch! This isn't suspicious at all!" It's very kiddie. But it soon becomes a cat-and-mouse time-travel game between Sillarc (an alien trying to steal a TARDIS) and the TARDIS technician Plutar (a failed Time Lord), with some clever four-dimensional thinking of the kind we never got on screen until The Curse of the Fatal Death. Fun stuff.

K-9's Finest Hour, from Doctor Who Weekly #12 (Jan. 1980)
written by Steve Moore, art by Paul Neary

The idea of a K-9-focused tale is a fun one; unfortunately, in this one, he saves the day thanks to the incompetence of his opponents more than anything else. I would have liked to have spent more time on him doing something, rather than being carried around!

Warlord of the Ogrons, from Doctor Who Weekly #13-14 (Jan. 1980)
written by Steve Moore, art by Steve Dillon

Despite the efforts of Doctor Who tie-in authors everywhere, nothing will ever be interesting about the Ogrons.

Twilight of the Silurians, from Doctor Who Weekly #21-22 (Mar. 1980)
written by Steve Moore, art by David Lloyd

This is a pretty decent story about the last days of the Silurians (or Eocenes). Another decent Steve Moore "dark comeuppance" story; its real strength is how David Lloyd draws the lithe, lizard-like bodies Silurians, without the restriction of having to fit a suit around a person.

The Outsider, from Doctor Who Weekly #25-26 (Apr. 1980)
written by Steve Moore, art by David Lloyd

I found this kind of dull, a story about an astrologer collaborating with an invading Sontaran to subjugate his own planet, who of course gets his comeuppance. David Lloyd, at least, draws better Sontarans than Paul Neary.

Stray Observations:

• Other included stories and what previous collections to find them in: (see below for links to my reviews)
• The Return of the Daleks (in Daleks: The Ultimate Comic Strip Collection, Volume 1)
• Throwback: The Soul of a Cyberman and Ship of Fools (in The Glorious Dead)
• Abslom Daak... Dalek-Killer and Star Tigers (in Nemesis of the Daleks)
  
• Most of the stories are narrated by Tom Baker's Doctor. In Throwback, he says the story comes from "this tape I found in the Time-Lords' records..." He seems to be speaking directly to the reader; in The Final Quest, he says, "You may remember my battles with a Sontaran called Lynx," and in Twlight of the Silurians, he mentions, "your own world, Earth." K-9's Finest Hour makes this clear, because he tells that story in response to people wondering why K-9 wasn't in the main strip! (The story doesn't really answer that question, though.)
• DWM's famous materialization sound effect, "VWORP VWORP" first appeared in issue #46's The Collector (Nov. 1980), but a predecessor, "VR-A-A-W-P! VR-A-A-A-W-P!", appears in part one of The Stolen TARDIS. Not quite as striking.
• I was surprised to learn from the commentary on The Outsider that the Sontarans weren't established as clones until The Invasion of Time. Is that really true? I had never noticed if so. Hard to imagine how such a bad showing for the Sontarans established such a now-definitive piece of lore.

This post is the fifty-third in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers Black Sun Rising. Previous installments are listed below:

The Cosmere by Brandon Sanderson: Mistborn: The Alloy of Law

The Alloy of Law: A Mistborn Novel by Brandon Sanderson

Published: 2011
Read: August 2024

Knowing what I know of Brandon Sanderson fans, I suspect this is a minority viewpoint, but this was my favorite Mistborn novel thus far. Set centuries after the original trilogy ("Era 1"), the fourth book takes place in a nineteenth-century kind of setting, with trains and industrialization. Shorn of the need to carefully establish all the rules of allomancy and feruchemy that I quite frankly do not care about and can never be made to care about, the book just gets on with having a fun adventure. 

This one doesn't dive deep into the "lore" of its world, it just focuses on two characters fighting crime together, and their interactions were for me the primary delight of the novel. The mystery itself is pretty so-so (there are basically no suspects, then they figure out who did it), but I always enjoyed reading about Wax and in particular Wayne and what they were up to. For a Sanderson novel, it's quite short (less than half the length of any previous Mistborn novel!) and quite focused. It still has some weird choices (it has rotating third-person narrators, but this isn't clear until about one third of the way in, which means our first jump to a new perspective is quite jarring), and I always feel like Sanderson puts more effort into the magic systems than making the politics and economics of his worlds convincing, but I had a good time here, and if its other books are like this, I will enjoy "Era 2" of Mistborn much more than I did Era 1.

Every nine months I read another novel of the Cosmere. Next up in sequence: Mistborn: Shadows of Self

Did the Wordlebot Make a Mistake? (Wordle No. 1214, 15 Oct. 2024)

No one needs me to explain what the Wordle is; I don't remember exactly when I picked it up, but I've been doing it since around the time it took off. (Unfortunately, I lost my stats in summer 2022 when my phone stopped working and I didn't have a New York Times account yet, so I only have a record of my last 833 games.)

And like many Wordle aficionados, I'm sure, I like to check out my scores against the Wordlebot. The Wordlebot, of course, plays with a 99 skill score, meaning it's in the 99th percentile for quality of guess. But when I went through the Wordlebot analysis of Wordle no. 1214, from Tuesday, October 15, 2024, I decided that its analysis of my guesses was wrong.

Here's my claim. Spoilers, of course, for a past Wordle.

So my initial guess was what has largely been my initial guess,* IRATE:

 

As you can see, the Wordlebot gives this a 94 skill score, though your opening word choice doesn't factor into your overall skill score.

Unless I get a whole lot of information from my first guess, I usually use LOCUS as my second:

It gives me three key consonants (L, C, and S) and the remaining two vowels. It's not always a great guess, but in this case it was; I got a 96 skill score off it and narrowed things down to just five words. 

With this information, my third guess was CODER:

 

Wordlebot gave me a 90 for this; I'm not very sure why COVER is considered the superior pick.

Anyway, it was clear to me that there were three options left, just as you can see in the above screenshot: CORER, COVER, and COWER. Probably, anyway. Sometimes I systematically go through all the possible letters but still miss an option. And I had three guesses left. I could of course just make each guess in turn, but 1) that meant a decent chance of scoring 6 guesses overall, and 2) what if I had indeed missed something and the answer was some other word I hadn't noticed?

So I decided to be a bit strategic and guess VOWED. This would eliminate COVER and COWER if they were the answer, leaving me free to guess CORER on my fifth guess, and thus giving me the space to guess one more word if it somehow wasn't the right answer.

As you can see, Wordlebot says, "Nice," but actually gives it a 51 skill score. It would have picked COVER. But had it picked COVER, it would have then picked, presumably, COWER, and then CORER, meaning with the information I had, it would have have taken the Wordlebot 6 guesses, whereas it took me 5.

Why is this? While the Wordlebot said CORER, COVER, and COWER were all possible, it actually didn't think CORER very probable. See this list:

You'll see it gives COVER a 99 skill score, COWER a 96 skill score... and CORER a 6 skill score! Ouch. And if you scroll down to the "Comparing our guesses" frame, you can see it assigns a very low probability score to CORER:

COVER is 51%, COWER is 48%... and CORER is 1%! 

Why is this? The Wordlebot's understanding of what makes for a probable word is derived from the NYT's own corpus. As per their explanation, "The bot's probabilities are estimated based on how common a word is, using the frequency of appearances in The Times since 2000 as a rough and imperfect proxy. This means the bot, just like humans, has to guess whether borderline words will wind up on the new (hidden) Wordle solution list." 

I do have to admit that CORER seemed somewhat less likely to COVER or COWER to me, but that COVER was fifty times as likely is not a ratio I would have come up with. But the NYT is a newspaper, and I guess newspapers probably talk about people covering and cowering a lot more than they talk about people using apple corers. But in day-to-day existence, while "corer" probably isn't used as much as the other two words, I don't think I would assign such a lopsided ratio.†

So while I can see why Wordlebot went with COVER, as it basically had a 50% chance of getting the solution in 4 according to its own metrics, it would have actually got it in 6, whereas I guaranteed getting it in 5 with my strategy. So I think I deserve a better skill score than 51 on VOWED, and a better skill score than 84 on the puzzle overall, neener neener.

* Once IRATE was the actual answer, I switched to a strategy I saw on the Wordle subreddit for switching things up, which was to use the previous day's answer as the next day's starting word. This was fun if tricky, and taught me to be a bit more strategic about my guesses. But as I neared exceeding a particularly long streak, I switched back to using IRATE in order to make things easier on myself.

† Interestingly, in the Google Books Ngram corpus for 2022, "cover" appears 150 times as often as "cower," and "cower" appears 10 times as often as "corer."