Black Panther: Dark Reign / Prelude to Doomwar by Reginald Hudlin, Ken Lashley, Paul Neary, et al.

After Black Panther volume 4 came to an end in 2008, it was almost immediately followed by volume 5. This was a twelve-issue series; I don't know anything about the behind-the-scenes of the era, so I don't know if it was planned as a maxiseries, or if it was supposed to be an ongoing that got curtailed or what. Maybe it was even planned as a six-issue miniseries and expanded?

from Black Panther vol. 5 #4

It has two distinct halves. The first six issues are a Dark Reign tie-in (I don't remember what Dark Reign was even though I have the Young Avengers installment) called The Deadliest of the Species that focuses—in theory, anyway—on Shuri becoming the Black Panther. The series opens with T'Challa injured and missing; in flashbacks, we find out he had encounters with both Namor and Doctor Doom. In the present, T'Challa has abandoned his responsibilities because of his injuries, meaning his mother and wife have to step in as rulers of Wakanda while his sister Shuri has to assume the mantle of the Black Panther. Of course, there's some kind of threat to Wakanda, some kind of ancient mythical bad guy.

To be honest, I never figure out what the bad guy was or why I should care. The story is supposedly about Shuri but I didn't feel we learned anything interesting about her, and the beats of the story are kind of tired. She's too cocky and has to learn to dial it down to be worthy... this seems to me to be the kind of thing that is more often associated with female superheroes than male ones. Has T'Challa ever been rejected by the panther god for his confidence? The charming character of the films has yet to emerge in the comics... if, indeed, she ever will. The rest of the story is pretty forgettable stuff, super-terrible bad guys defeated in super-terrible fights.

from Black Panther vol. 5 #2

The Deadliest of the Species was written by the same writer as volume 4, Reginald Hudlin; Hudlin cowrites the first issue of the second story, Power, with Jonathan Maberry, who then takes over as writer for the remainder of the series. Power jumps ahead a bit, with Shuri now installed as ruler of Wakanda, on a diplomatic mission to the United States, where she's also investigating a threat to Wakanda, particularly whatever injured T'Challa. Meanwhile, there's economic and agricultural failures in Wakanda, and a resurgent nationalist movement that will be familiar to anyone who's paid attention to politics over the last decade. The last three issues of Power are branded as a "Prelude to Doomwar" tie-in, Doomwar being a crossover miniseries that apparently picks up right from the end of Black Panther vol. 5. (It's the thing I will read next in this sequence.)

Anyway, I found this muddled and hard to care about. Maberry gives Shuri a team of advisors, but it's a lot of characters who I didn't really care about, and I don't see why she needs this kind of supporting cast when T'Challa didn't. It takes the characters far too long to figure out that Doctor Doom is responsible, given the readers learned this way back back in issue #2. And I am tired of stories where the people of Wakanda rise up against their rulers for seemingly stupid reasons. (Though I guess this is realistic! And to be fair to Maberry, though this is a story that seems to happen a lot in Black Panther comics, I think it had actually been a fair amount of time since it was last done when he wrote this in 2008. Did it happen during Priest's? If not, then it hadn't happened since the 1990s.)

from Black Panther vol. 5 #11

But really I didn't find a lot to grab onto here as a reader. Probably my favorite part were the two talking heads from Wakandan media that we cut to occasionally. One of the really interesting things Don McGregor set up way back when was the conflict between traditional Wakandan values and the modernizing influences T'Challa was importing, and most subsequent writers haven't done a ton with this.

The majority of the art for this series is done by penciler Ken Lashley and inker Paul Neary. I am a fan of Neary from his Marvel UK days, but here he's just inking over pretty standard 2000s superhero pencils from Lashley. That said, I found them better than Will Conrad, who does the rest of the series and whose art is kind of confusing and does a bad job of depicting Shuri in particular.

The Deadliest of the Species originally appeared in issues #1-6 of Black Panther vol. 5 (Apr.-Sept. 2009). The story was written by Reginald Hudlin, penciled by Ken Lashley, inked by Paul Neary, colored by Paul Mounts, lettered by Cory Petit, and edited by Axel Alonso.

Power originally appeared in issues #7-12 of Black Panther vol. 5 (Oct. 2009–Mar. 2010). The story was written by Jonathan Maberry (#7-12) & Reginald Hudlin (#7), illustrated by Will Conrad (#7-10, 12) and Ken Lashley & Paul Neary (#11), colored by Pete Pantazis, lettered by Cory Petit (#7-10, 12) and Clayton Cowles (#11), and edited by Axel Alonso.

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Prey: The Hall of Heroes

April 2386
Well, if you've been following my reviews of the Prey trilogy thus far, you'll know it hasn't set my world alight. Me on book 1: "But I wanted Picard, Riker, La Forge, and so on to do something interesting and clever, to figure something out. Hopefully that's what books 2 and 3 are for." On book 2: "This book feels like it's treading water for the people in it, even as the plot is always getting more complicated... Miller writes in a way that's fun and easy to read, I never dreaded this book or anything, but it doesn't feel like it has enough of a point to be three novels."

Star Trek: Prey, Book 3: The Hall of Heroes
by John Jackson Miller

Published: 2016
Acquired: July 2023
Read: September 2024

Well, unfortunately, a hundred pages into book 3 and I was dreading it. A hundred pages into this book and it seemed like almost nothing had happened. In the Enterprise plot, the crew scrutinizes a series of astronomical bodies looking for hidden ships; you know you're in trouble when Picard is complaining about how boring this is. Meanwhile, Worf and Kahless seem like they keep having the same conversation with the Unsung again and again; meanwhile meanwhile the Unsung themselves are just sitting in canyons hiding; meanwhile meanwhile meanwhile we keep cutting to what the very one-note Korgh is up to. It was tedious and very little sense of forward momentum.

Eventually the Kinshaya invade, but by this point I was too disengaged to care. And to be honest, whether the Kinshaya invade the Klingon Empire, whether they fall subject to Breen manipulations, I found it difficult to care about. It's all pretty political and pretty abstract in terms of stakes. As I repeatedly commented about the first two books, it never really feels like anything is at stake here for the characters. Why do these events matter to Picard, to Riker, even to Worf? I very rarely felt as if they did. Over one thousand pages is ultimately a lot of time and space to devote to something with no there there.

The shame of it is I felt like there could have been something really substantial to this, especially for Worf. Worf was discommendated himself on screen but I don't think he ever hit the point of actually questining the discommendation system, even if he himself was done an injustice. I think an arc about Worf at first thinking what was done to the Unsung was just, and then coming to reflect on what was done to him, and the limits of Klingon honor, could have been very interesting. But that's not here; even if the book ends with Worf proposing some changes to the system, it doesn't feel like the book does much to lead up to it. Or a book about Worf struggling to convince Kahless of this—now that sounds like an epic struggle. But mostly Worf just seems to chill out with Kahless and the Unsung, and then it all climaxes and ends.

I find it hard to say much about this series. Until this volume, which got pretty boring, I would have said it was competently written. As I've said before, Miller captures the voices of the preexisting characters well, but doesn't really give them interesting, characterful choices to make; his original characters could be interesting (I thought Shift had real potential), but are in practice fairly one note. It's weird, this is a thousand-page story in an era where Star Trek books can in theory do whatever they want... but it feels like the trilogy was written back in the late 1990s, with the goal of making sure all the characters and all the politics had to be end up back where they began so as not to upset anything the tv show might do.

a Kinshaya, from the old FASA Star Trek RPG
via Memory Beta

Continuity Notes:

• There are a lot of callbacks here to Typhon Pact: The Struggle Within, which I don't think had ever been referenced in any other books before. I did appreciate Miller folding the political upheaval in those books into a broader narrative about the Kinshaya, though I don't think most Star Trek writers have been capable of handling the Kinshayan theocracy in an interesting or compelling way, and Miller is no exception.
• One of the High Council members here was also in the Prometheus trilogy, a very minor sliver of continuity that connects those books to the English-language Destiny-era novels. It is very minor, though; I had to ask the author on the TrekBBS what the connection was, because I had read there was one but had not noticed it at all!
  

Other Notes:

• There's this whole exchange about the term "Unsung" on pp. 128-29 that makes no sense to me. Kahless asks if in Klingonese "Unsung" is rendered as lilIjpu' bomwI'pu' or ghe'naQDaj qonta' pagh, and then Worf tells him it was actually Hew HutlhwI'pu'. But... how are they having this conversation, if not in Klingon? Like, in what language is Kahless actually saying the word "Unsung"? How can he not know how the Unsung referred to themselves in Klingon if he must be talking to them all in Klingon? Did I miss some kind of reference indicating the Unsung are all speaking some other language? But even if they are, surely Kahless is speaking Klingon and communicating with them via the universal translator?
• As I did after reading Typhon Pact: Zero Sum Game, I continue to think that the Breen are an incredibly neat worldbuilding idea—solving continuity conundrums and creating cool story hooks—that books have never really done anything clever with, but this book comes the closest so far.
• The last scene where Riker hunts Korgh down is genuinely clever in its final line.
• I think Doug Drexler is very good at what he usually does... but cover art featuring characters is not what he usually does. What is going on with Worf's hair?

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: The Next Generation: Headlong Flight by Dayton Ward

Reading Roundup Wrapup: October 2024

Pick of the month: Sheine Lende by Darcie Little Badger. I didn't read much this month, but this was clearly the best of what was otherwise a mediocre bunch. 

All books read:

1. Sheine Lende: A Prequel to Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger
   
2. The Ozmapolitan of Oz by Dick Martin
3. Storm by Eric Jerome Dickey et al.
4. The Neurodiversiverse: Alien Encounters: A Science Fiction Anthology of Stories, Poetry, and Art edited by Anthony Francis and Liza Olmsted
5. The Ascent of John Tyndall: Victorian Scientist, Mountaineer, and Public Intellectual by Roland Jackson [unfinished]
   

This was a tough month. There was, for example, a hurricane; that and other things conspired to knock me off my groove, and I only got back into my regular reading routine in the last few days of the month, just in time to finish The Neurodiversiverse. This was my worst month since February 2022, when I read three books. Hopefully next month is better!

All books acquired:

NONE!

Currently reading:

• Star Trek: The Next Generation: Headlong Flight by Dayton Ward
• The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8 edited by Neil Clarke
• Black Sun Rising: The Complete Doctor Who Back-Up Tales, Volume 2 by Mick Austin, Vincent Danks, Dave Gibbons, Alan McKenzie, Mick McMahon, Steve Moore, Paul Neary, Steve Parkhouse, John Peel, Gary Russell, Geoff Senior, John Stokes, et al.
• Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
• Brothers in Arms by Lois McMaster Bujold

Up next in my rotations:

1. Star Trek: Titan: Fortune of War by David Mack
   
2. The Pelican History of England: 3. English Society in the Early Middle Ages (1066-1307) by Doris Mary Stenton
3. The End of the World: Classic Tales of Apocalyptic Science Fiction compiled by Michael Kelahan 
4. Victorians and the Prehistoric: Tracks to a Lost World by Michael Freeman

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 663 (down 1)

Unfinished: The Ascent of John Tyndall by Roland Jackson

In my eternally-in-progress book project about scientists in characters in Victorian literature, I often refer to real men of science as reference for the way science was really developing in the era. There are probably three I refer back to more than any others: Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, and John Tyndall. Darwin and Huxley are perhaps obvious touchstones; the most significant Victorian scientist of them all and then the man who professionalized science. Each has an excellent biography, which I read back when I was preparing for my Ph.D. examinations: Janet Browne's two volumes Voyaging (1995) and The Power of Place (2002) for Darwin and Adrian Desmond's From Devil's Disciple to Evolution's High Priest (1994) for Huxley. There are some good scholarly studies of Tyndall—particularly the book that turned me on to him to begin with, Ursula DeYoung's A Vision of Modern Science (2011)—there has never been a systematic biography of Tyndall.

The Ascent of John Tyndall: Victorian Scientist, Mountaineer, and Public Intellectual
by Roland Jackson

Published: 2018
Half-read: June–October 2024

But in their own era, Tydnall was the equal of the other men. He was a prominent physicist, figuring out why the sky was blue; he also did a lot of work on heat and glaciers. He used to get in scraps with John Ruskin about whether glaciers moved. Ruskin trusted the results of his own eyes (he'd never seen a glacier move, and neither did anyone he talked to), while Tyndall made a model glacier out of ice cream. Tyndall gave a notorious speech called the Belfast Address, where he advocated for scientific materialism, and like Huxley he was one of proponents of the professionalization of science. His star has faded in a way the others' haven't, perhaps because he's not associated with a single big paradigm shift like evolution. And I guess because of this, there's hasn't been a biography of him. But he certainly deserves one, and as someone who I'm guessing has thought about Tyndall more than almost anyone else alive, I am squarely in the target audience for one.

So I was excited when last year I discovered that back in 2018, Cambridge University Press had finally published one. I finally picked it up this June, intending to read it along with a few other scholarly books I'd been meaning to around to before finalizing my book manuscript.

Four months later, the summer long over, I finally gave up on it. I normally don't count unfinished books for my statistics or review them on my blog, but I read 369 pages of it, which 1) is longer than many books I give myself credit for because I read all of them, and 2) seems like more than enough to make a fair impression of, given the book is 576 pages long including front- and backmatter.

A good biography doesn't just give you a chronological telling of a person's life, it gives you a sense of them as a person, as a personality; both Browne's Darwin and Desmon's Huxley are good examples of this, particularly the latter, a book I refer back to a lot in my own writing. Unfortunately, the only sense of Tyndall one gets here is of as a dull plod. Is this because he was a dull plod? There is perhaps necessarily something of the dull plod to all scientists, and Tyndall himself wrote as a young man in the 1850s that after three years of scientific study, "I lack the warm aspirations which I once felt, and I believe this is a necessary consequence of my pursuits: / Love is exiled from the heart / When knowledge enters in" (qtd. in Jackson 69). But I don't feel like the man who delivered the Belfast Address could have been a dull plod... right?

So, I suspect it's down to the writing of Roland Jackson that's the dull plod, not John Tyndall. We move from fact to fact to fact, all of which are extensively documented. Kudos to Jackson, and I mean it; he very clearly did the work to assemble everything Tyndall did. But one drowns in details here with little sense of the actual man who did all of these things. What were his passions, his conflicts, his drives? One doesn't really know... and this is the thing I really wanted out of the book, particularly a sense of how his radicalism in some senses—the Belfast Address, his promotion of scientific education—conflicted with his conservatism in others. Notoriously, Tyndall backed Governor Eyre's horrific actions in putting down the Morant Bay Rebellion. As Sarah Winter says, 

Tyndall advocated that clear racial distinctions should be applied to reach an appropriate understanding of which categories of British subjects were entitled to due process protections: “We do not hold an Englishman and a Jamaica negro to be convertible terms, nor do we think that the cause of human liberty will be promoted by any attempt to make them so.” Tyndall implies not only that the races are separate species, but also that Eyre’s violent suppression of the Morant Bay uprising was legitimate on that basis, as long as such impositions of martial law are restricted to Jamaica, and, by implication, other imperial territories with white minority populations. [...] In Huxley’s terms, Tyndall reveals his deepest political commitment to a social order based in human inequality, defined according to racial differences.

In Sarah's take, anyway, it seems to me there ought to be a lot packed in this incident that would give us insight into Tyndall. It strikes me, for example, that the scientific impulse to classify, to sort has led Tyndall to make some morally reprehensible choices... and indeed, Stephen Jay Gould has shown how the scientific project often reinforced white supremacy even at the cost of the careful observation that is supposedly the cornerstone of the scientific method! On top of this, Tyndall spent a lot of time in America, where it seems to be he no doubt must have made a lot of observations about people of color (which I'm guessing he didn't often encounter in Britain).

But even though there's a whole chapter called "Eyre Affair and Death of Faraday," all the insight Jackson gives us into this moment is that Jackson wasn't as liberal as Huxley (who supported the investigation into Governor Eyre, and also supported the North during the American Civil War, while Tyndall sympathized with the South). That's it? Other big moments like the Belfast Address seem similarly buried in a slew of facts about who Tyndall ate dinner with and what hikes he went on in the Alps. There's just too much detail here, and no sense of narrative.

As I said above, I'm basically the target audience for a Tyndall biography... but by September I had pretty much stalled out completely on this book, somewhere in the middle of chapter 13. It's got its nuggets of insights, and I think there are a few bits I will end up making use of in my book. But I also don't think it's worth my time trying to get through to the end. The magisterial biography of John Tyndall, alas, remains to be written.

Reading The Ozmapolitan of Oz Aloud to My Kid

After illustrating several Oz books by others—two by the McGraws and two by Ruth Plumly Thompson—Oz superfan Dick Martin illustrated his own Oz book for the International Wizard of Oz Club, The Ozmapolitan of Oz. The book takes its title from a "newspaper" sometimes produced by Reilly & Lee to promote the Oz books; here, for the first time, it is established within an actual Oz book, depicted as being founded by the Wizard back when he was the ruler of the Emerald City. The protagonist is Septimius "Tim" Septentrion, a copyboy for the paper who thinks it could be something great instead of the lazy operation it is. With Dorothy, Eureka the Pink Kitten, and a Mifkit named Jinx (possible the Mifket from Scalawagons), he sets out on an expedition to promote the newspaper and obtain interesting stories.

The Ozmapolitan of Oz by Dick Martin

Originally published: 1986
Acquired: December 2023
Read aloud: September–October 2024

The newspaper angle ends up being incredibly unimportant in the end; Tim and company don't travel around doing journalism or anything like that, it's just the usual Oz hijinks of bumping into random people and places and moving on. Indeed, the book is definitely on the low end for incident, because usually the protagonists just meet someone, talk to them, and go somewhere else, and their overarching goal is honestly pretty hard to care about. They have no particular destination, they have no particular problem they are trying to solve. Nor do they really solve any particular problems, and most of the places they go are not really very interesting. It's like a weak Thompson novel but without Thompson's manic energy or commitment to excruciating puns. You're just left with... not much of anything, to be honest.

Martin tries to add in some kind of suspense, I guess, with a mysterious crow following the adventuring party about, and a mystery involving Tim. The details are so slight, however, there's little to glom onto; I think my six-year-old didn't even remember there had been a crow in the book before when it showed up for the second time. It turns out Tim is a prince trying to prove himself—the fun twist here is that he is trying to prove he can accomplish things because in his country royalty are not supposed to accomplish things. It's sort of an inversion of Thompson's Purple Prince of Oz. But unfortunately we don't even know he's trying to prove himself until we're told what the twist is, so it all falls flat, and my six-year-old didn't really follow it at all. I think it could have added some suspense, but not if it's all dumped on you in the second-last chapter.

On top of all this, Tim is a pretty dull protagonist, Dick Martin is one of those writers who doesn't remember how plucky Baum actually made Dorothy, and you could take Jinx the Mifket out of the book without affecting a thing. Only Eureka shows an ounce of characterization or energy. If you read Oz books for the interactions between interesting characters (and I do), there's none of it here. Sometimes Jinx and Eureka snipe a bit but that's about it.

Plus, weirdly, it seems like Dick Martin is as uninterested in providing visuals of his own ideas as he was those of the McGraws and Thompson. The pictures are scanty and often dull.

Anyway, I guess it has a few moments of charm (I like the bit where Eureka tricks a dinosaur with grammatical terms) but overall I found this had little going for it, and it seemed to leave little impression on my kid.

Next up in sequence: The Hidden Prince of Oz