Reading Paradox in Oz Aloud to My Kids

My randomizer brings me and my seven-year-old to our next apocryphal Oz book—Paradox in Oz. I know I read this before at some point, but I didn't own it until my sister bought it for me as a present a couple years ago (along with the sequel, The Living House of Oz), and it doesn't appear on my my reading list, which goes back to September 2003, so I must have borrowed it from the library when I was in high school.

Paradox in Oz by Edward Einhorn
illustrated by Eric Shanower

Originally published: 1999
Previously read: early 2000s?
Acquired: July 2023
Read aloud: July–August 2025

The big selling point of Paradox in Oz is that it promises to reconcile disparate elements of Oz continuity. This is a good selling point, sure, but the thing that makes it a good book is that this isn't really the focus. The focus is on fun Oz adventures... but ones of a different sort than you've read before.

One of the things that's interested me about rereading the Oz books as an adult is that there are a lot of elements in them that respond very directly to the historical forces and pop culture of the time they were written... but if you read them as a kid, this is largely invisible to you, because the books are a fantasy world and/or vaguely old-fashioned. For example, L. Frank Baum wrote two different novels about demagogues stirring up previously peaceful groups on a warlike footing during World War I. As a kid, that connection would have never occurred to me. Along similar but not identical lines, Ruth Plumly Thompson's novels often take contemporary pop culture as a jumping-off point; she has two different novels that riff on Hitchcock thrillers, for example. I think not only is this invisible to Oz readers, but it's also often invisible to Oz writers. Many of the post–Famous Forty pastiche writers focus, I think, on recapturing Oz as it was written c. 1900-20, seemingly not realizing that if Baum (or Thompson, or whomever) had continued writing Oz novels up to the 1990s that wouldn't just been doing the same thing over and over again, essentially pastiching themselves, but continually refracting what was going on around them through an Oz lens.

All of this is leading up to me saying that if someone wrote an Oz book now, it would incorporate contemporary culture just as Baum and Thompson did, and in the 2020s, that would be complicated stories of time travel and the multiverse... and in 1999, Edward Einhorn did just that. In Paradox in Oz, the anti-aging enchantment ceases working, and Ozma must travel back in time in order to figure out what the issue is, only she inadvertently changes history, resulting in a new timeline where Oz is a dystopia ruled by a tyrannical Wizard. The book has stuff in it like Ozma doubling back on herself again and again, and Ozma seeing into the cracks in the "Ozziverse" as it starts to collapse around her. For my kids, they know this stuff so well from pop culture that the seven-year-old was predicting turns of events! Einhorn threads the needle of doing something new and fun, while still keeping it recognizable Ozzy. There are no other Oz books about time travel... but he perfectly nails how to write one.

My kids and I particularly enjoyed Tempus, the titular "parrot-ox," who can only do impossible things. (These include being born; they are half-parrot, half-ox, but there are no parrots in Oz!) He says lots of crazy stuff which makes a weird sort of sense. (My favorite paradox, though, was probably the barber who can't cut his own hair nor let anyone else cut it.) The trip to the "dark Oz" is good without going too far; the only complaint I have about it is that it 1) it kinds of peters out, Ozma just leaves, and 2) it seems to me to be a bit more exciting than the trip to Absurd City that follows it. Not that the trip to Absurd City is bad, but dark Oz is more interesting; this means the book has the same problem as Star Trek III or Doctor Who's "The Runaway Bride," in that the most exciting part of the story is done with only halfway in, meaning everything that follows is mildly anticlimactic even when it's well done. The encounter with Tip and Mombi in the past is also interesting, and delves into an area many Oz writers have not done a lot with. I liked Dr. Majestico, and I wish we had seen more of him. (I gather there's a short story Einhorn wrote with him; I'll have to seek it out.)

As for the continuity issues—Paradox both does and does not explain them. Early in the book, Ozma summons a parrot-ox by thinking of a paradox; in this case, that in Marvelous Land she knew what a horse looked like but in Dorothy and the Wizard, a horse came to Oz for the first time. The book doesn't explain this so much as just draw attention to the fact that this kind of thing happens in Oz a lot: is the Munchkin Country in the East or the West? do people in Oz use money or not? You get different answers to these questions depending on when you ask them. But the novel also indicates that 1) Oz history is changing all the time, and 2) there are many other Ozzes. So any continuity error you think of might be answered in any one of these ways. The book also provides an explanation for why people don't age or die in Oz, when this didn't seem to be the case in early books. (It's somewhat complicated, and has to work around how come the Tin Woodman didn't die when he chopped himself up; it also doesn't totally fit with some evidence here and there that would indicate aging stopped quite some time ago... but the great thing about the book is that it provides for itself an explanation for why its explanations aren't totally consistent!) In some cases, Einhorn doesn't explain so much as just poke fun at, such as when Ozma thinks about what a stupid name "Wantowin Battles" is.

Eric Shanower's illustrations are, of course, as great as always. Tempus is great, and so are all the images we see of the dark Oz. I did think he somewhat fell short capturing the visual anarchy of Absurd City; Einhorn does his best to render a bunch of visual paradoxes in prose, but I wanted the pictures to give us more of these than it did. (It was interesting to realize my kids' understanding of perspective isn't far enough along for them to understand why an M. C. Escher illustration doesn't make any sense.)

Probably the thing that makes Paradox work more than anything else is that, like the other good writers of Oz continuations, Einhorn is an author who happens to be writing an Oz book (e.g., Eloise McGraw, Sherwood Smith), rather than someone who's just writing an Oz book (e.g., Dick Martin, Gina Wickwar). The book is lively and thoughtful and well-constructed.

Hugos Side-Step: The Rolling Stones by Robert A. Heinlein

If I read and enjoy a Hugo-winning novel, I like to follow that up with related books by the same author. Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1967, but it was actually a prequel of sorts to one of his earlier juveniles, The Rolling Stones (1952), a novel my wife actually remembers reading and enjoying as a kid. The Rolling Stones is about a family taking a trip around the solar system in their own spaceship: fifteen-year-old twins Castor and Pollux, their parents Roger (a writer) and Edith (a doctor), their older sister Meade, their baby brother Lowell, and their grandmother Hazel. We're told Hazel was a key figure in the revolution for Lunar independence, even helping write the constitution—and she appears as a minor character in exactly that role in MIHM.

To the Stars: Between Planets / The Rolling Stones / Starman Jones / The Star Beast
by Robert A. Heinlein

Collection published: 2004
Novel originally published: 1952
Acquired and read: August 2025

It's a fun book but not as sharp, I think, as some of the other Heinlein bildungsromans I have read (a category that would include his juveniles, but also books like Double Star and Starship Troopers, I would argue)... although actually, it's not clear to me that Heinlein is really going for a bildungsroman here the way he is in some other juveniles. Castor and Pollux are bright kids who want to do adult things, overestimating their own abilities; they want to go out on their own in a spaceship. Their parents aren't into this, but decide to go on a whole trip as a family. Basically the format of the book is that the family goes some place, there's some kind of scrape, they then extricate from it and move on. These include helping a nearby passenger liner deal with space plague, getting bicycles through customs on Mars, dealing with trade duties in the asteroid belt, and so on. While Castor and Pollux often overestimate their abilities (particularly at the end of the novel, where they very nearly kill their grandmother and kid sibling), the novel mostly seems to come at them from the outside, without the kind of emphasis on their interiority that you get in Heinlein bildungsomans like Double Star or Between Planets or Starman Jones. It's more focused on dialogue and action than personality.

To be fair, I don't think Heinlein was going for this. I could be wrong, of course, but the tone of it seems much lighter than his other books that I've read, and probably also the target audience younger. But that did mean there wasn't quite as much here to sustain my interest. I found it quite readable, but at his best, Heinlein is readable and deep. Still, the world is—as usual for Heinlein—well thought out. He makes the tax implications of importing bicycles both plausible and interesting! The family interactions are fun, and of course I enjoyed Hazel; I don't see how anyone couldn't. As a complaining dad myself, I definitely vibed with Roger (though I would have even before becoming a dad). To be honest, that's probably the book's problem, in that I think all the adult family members are more interesting than Castor and Pollux. Is that really what you want in a "juvenile"? It's certainly not what you want in a bildungsroman!

One of the subplots here is that Roger writes a weekly radio serial (later, Hazel takes it over); it make me think that the episodic, dialogue-heavy nature of this very book would make it work well as a radio drama. Adapt it as a podcast, someone!

Other thoughts:

• I had known that, notoriously, Star Trek's tribbles were a rip-off of Heinlein's flat cats. I had not realized quite how much of a rip-off! I guess I had assumed that flat cats (because of the name) were more catlike, but no, they are physically exactly like tribbles... or rather, the other way around. The way the twins end up with a flat cat is basically exactly how it goes down in "The Trouble with Tribbles" too.
• I found the treatment of the twins' older sister, Meade, quite weird. At the end of the book, we're told she's of "marrying height"! James David Nicoll sums up the issues well in his review.
• When I got to the section set in the asteroid belt, I was like, "Surely James S.A. Corey read this." Not that The Expanse is ripping it off or anything, but the world of Corey's Belters feels like a natural extrapolation from it... and of course, the Expanse books have that same interest in orbital mechanics you see here. (I can't find a lot of specific stuff about Heinlein's influence on them, but it is occasionally mentioned.)

I will say my whole reason for reading this book now was kind of a lie. The backstory given for Hazel here is largely incompatible with the one that we actually see in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress! According to Rolling Stones, Hazel was a single mother on Earth, working as an engineer when she ran into a glass ceiling, less competent men being promoted above her, such that she made more money working in a casino; she emigrated to the Moon to get better opportunities for her and her son Roger. But in MIHM, she is a teenager when she gets swept up in the revolution, no abortive engineering career or kid she's raising on her own anywhere in sight!

(One thing I've noticed through this project of reading 1950s and '60s sf is the authors were clearly less hung up on "continuity" than contemporary ones. Authors were happy to reuse elements between stories without it meaning that all their books were set in the same "universe"; you see much the same thing in Philip K. Dick, whose works often have common worldbuilding elements but rarely line up in the details.)

I obtained my copy as part of an omnibus from the Science Fiction Book Club; from 2002 to 2006, the SFBC released all of Heinlein's juveniles in a series of four hardcover volumes. It's an attractive volume, and I'm going to pick up the lot of them now. Before then, though, I'll read the other three novels collected in this one.

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: Between Planets / Starman Jones / The Star Beast by Robert A. Heinlein

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Coda: Moments Asunder

2387
This is pretty much an impossible book to review on its own merits. The first, most obvious, reason it's that it's the first part of a trilogy, and it's not one of those trilogies that tells three stories; we've very much only read a third of a story here. So as to how good the story told here is, we can't say until we get through Coda, Book III.

Star Trek: Coda, Book I: Moments Asunder
by Dayton Ward

Published: 2021
Acquired: September 2021
Read: August 2025

That said, I was struck by how... weirdly paced the book is. Considering it's the first part of an epic story that has to cram in so much stuff it had to be a trilogy, there is a very long chunk of the book where very little happens. By around page 100, all that has happened to the Enterprise-E characters is that Beverly has seen Wesley in a vision, René has had a bad day at school, and Worf has a bad dream.

Meanwhile, a tedious amount of detail is spent on the death of Ducane, captain of the Federation timeship Relativity (from the Voyager episode of the same name). This guy isn't interesting, spending tons of pages on him doesn't make me feel bad when he dies. I feel like I would have started the book with the (apparent) death of Wesley Crusher, that's the point where I sat up and paid attention. The book is obviously trying to do that comic book thing (more on that later) where we see glimpses of a universal crisis by showing us characters all over the place, but I'm not convinced the Relativity was the way to do this. Nor am I even sure that what works in comics, where you can do a couple quick pages on a side character, even works in the medium of novelistic prose!

The second reason is that though this is the first part of a trilogy, that trilogy came out almost four years ago, and thus a sense of how the series goes has already percolated to me. Perhaps I am mistaken in the specifics, but my understanding is that Coda ends with the entire timeline of the "novelverse" being eradicated. Given that, once people start dying here, it feels a bit meaningless. You know that everyone is going to die, so when people do die, it doesn't land with any kind of significance. If book III is going to kill everyone, then why should I feel anything in particular at the death of T'Ryssa Chen? When everyone can die, then, I would argue, the deaths of anyone don't really matter. (This is the problem I see in "shock" deaths in alternate-universe comic stories like Marvel Zombies; the whole premise fails because it's suffused with a sense that it doesn't matter.)

The obvious touchstone for this book is Crisis on Infinite Earths. That's not to say Dayton Ward was consciously thinking of it when he wrote the book, but that is, as far as I know, the progenitor of this kind of story, the epic of the doom of a franchise universe where you get these glimpses across different times and places of various preexisting characters, many of whom die in order to prove the situation is serious. I have read a lot of superhero comics at this point in my life, and I have found that Crisis is often imitated, rarely equaled. Many of its imitators have a... clear and obvious cynicism to them. In the original Crisis, you felt like the deaths of Supergirl and the Flash meant something, because those were key characters in the pre-Crisis DC universe. Even the deaths of the Earth-Three Crime Syndicate mattered, because you'd read so many other stories with them. (Or, even if you hadn't, which was true of me the first time I read Crisis, you could still feel the narrative weight. I feel like the destruction of the alternate Enterprise-D from Headlong Flight is an attempt to capture this kind of narrative energy but it didn't really work for me, probably because of what I'll discuss below.)

But in a lot of these kind of stories, there are two kinds of deaths: ones you know will be reversed (if Batman dies in Final Crisis, you can feel reasonably sure he'll be back) and ones you know are only allowed because the character doesn't matter. When the Rick Tyler Hourman is killed off, you know it's because no one cares about the Rick Tyler Hourman, and thus it has the opposite effect than intended; it doesn't make you think anyone can die, because, well, it's just a character who last did something anyone cared about in 1988.

What's going here isn't quite that, but it does still feel cynical. We can kill these characters off because they don't matter anymore, because this is a dead end. Mostly who dies here are novelverse-original characters, or characters significantly developed by the novels: T'Ryssa, Rennan Konya, Dina Elfiki, Taurik. The deaths are cruel but I didn't really feel anything at them because you know they don't matter. I liked T'Ryssa, but the book is undermined too by the beigeness of a lot of the original TNG characters. Konya was okay but not someone I was attached to; Elfiki never took off for me at all. The only death of a significant screen character is that of Ezri Dax, but killing her off in a book she's barely contributed to feels cynical again, a cheap way to raise the stakes. (Though it does seem like something is up with her death, so I'll reserve final judgement here.) On top of all that, the novel's prose just doesn't do much to make you care about these deaths. They happen, the end.

The third is something that feels like that old canard of negative reviews—it's not how I would have done it. Well, but I think I can put that better. To be more precise, I don't think this is what I wanted out of a novelverse wrapup. But I'll hold off on my thoughts there until I read book III.

The Devidians did make a return appearance in the comics, but I didn't notice any mention of that here, even though the novels have used the same comics' designation of "Aegis" as the organization Gary Seven works for. That said, I think maybe that whole comic story got erased from the timeline (it's been a while), so perhaps there's nothing that could be referenced!

Continuity Notes:

• There's a real attempt to throw in a reference to everything. For example, a lot of DTI characters pop up (though apparently the appearance of one is a continuity error; I don't remember Shield of the Gods well enough to have caught it myself), and we even get a random reference to Captain Adams of the Prometheus. (Worf is offered a job as his replacement.)
• The bit on p. 80 about how the Typhon Pact "began with great fanfare" but then "sputtered" felt like a metacommentary on how the Typhon Pact plotline was introduced with a four-book miniseries that turned into a nine-book one... and then just got dropped as a thing of significance to the novels.
• On p. 183, we're told the DTI monitors the Devidians, but on p. 220, it seems like no one knows their planet got hit by an asteroid ten years ago! Good job monitoring, people.
• In Armageddon's Arrow, Taurik accidentally got some future knowledge, which has been a small subplot in subsequent TNG novels; here, we finally find out what that was about, but I doubt this was the original intent.

Other Notes:

• There is a subplot about various TNG characters having offers to move on in their careers; most of these have resonance with things we know from elsewhere. For example, La Forge is offered a job designing starships, which would fit with him designing the Jellyfish from Star Trek 2009 (as indicated in some of the tie-ins); Chen is offered a job doing "second contacts," so presumably a California-class ship. I felt like this was a little... cheap. Like, no one is going to take these jobs, so they're just there to generate pathos, like claiming a cop in your action movie is one day from retirement.
• If ever a book ought to have used Rotis Serif for the "Star Trek" logo, it was surely this one! 

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Coda: The Ashes of Tomorrow by James Swallow

The Pelican History of England Retrospective

I spent the first half of this year reading the Pelican History of England, a series of nine paperback books chronicling the history of England from the Roman conquest up to the 1970s. The first eight were originally released in the 1950s, joined by a ninth in the 1960s. They were reissued, as far as I can tell, fairly consistently until the 1990s when Penguin finally let them go out of print. Some were reprinted as is, but others went into multiple editions—volume 4 had eight! In some cases, the differences between editions were apparently pretty small, but others were almost wholly rewritten. In one case (volume 6), the book was replaced by one written by a different author in the 1970s.

One thing that fascinated me reading the books was how much history had to be squeezed into these slim volumes. Volume 2, for example, goes from A.D. 449 to 1066, covering 617 years in 237 pages, meaning each page has to cover 2.6 years! But also as the series went on, each volume got a narrower year range... and some of the later volumes were thicker than the early ones, too.

Volume	Start	End	Years	Pages	Pages/Year
1	500 B.C.	449	949	189	0.20
2	449	1066	617	237	0.38
3	1066	1307	241	267	1.11
4	1307	1536	229	254	1.11
5	1485	1603	118	303	2.57
6	1603	1714	111	345	3.11
7	1714	1815	101	204	2.02
8	1815	1914	99	227	2.29
9	1914	1979	65	348	5.35

(You could argue volume 1's start date should be A.D. 43, since its overview of pre-Roman Britain is pretty quick; that would change its years covered to 406, and its pages per year to 0.47. Also, yes, volumes 4 and 5 do overlap for some reason. It's volume 4 that's at fault, actually; the series was released out of order, and volume 5 was published first.)

As you can see, the volume covering the twentieth century far and away gets the most detail. Partially this is because it is somehow the longest volume despite having the least amount of time to cover! I was surprised to realized the series peaked, though, with volumes 5 and 6, which were a bit chunkier than the subsequent volumes.

Lastly, here's a picture of my eclectic set of editions:

The blue-spine ones are 1970s printings. These I picked up at a used bookstore, and are what launched me on this project to collect them all. The white-spine ones are 1980s printings. Volume 8 I found in a box of free books in grad school.

When buying the other volumes to plug the gaps for this project, I stuck to 1990s printings in order to have the most recent editions of each book; these are the ones with orange spines. You can't always trust online booksellers, though; I am pretty sure the copy I bought of volume 5 was listed as a 1990s one but I received a 1980s one instead.

The picture demonstrates how, even within a decade, Penguin did not do a good job of maintaining consistency. Why does my 1982 printing of volume 5 have a different spine design than my 1986 printing of volume 8? Why was the 1990s printing of volume 1 taller than all the other volumes? (I'm guessing it's related to the fact that the 1990s printing of volume 1 was a new edition, whereas all of these other stopped getting new editions in the 1980s at the latest.) Why are the book title and author name in black on volume 6 when they are white on all other 1990s printings? Why does the spine of volume 7 call it the Penguin History of England instead of the Pelican? (An attempt to rebrand the series that didn't last? Or an honest mistake?)

These are the questions that keep me up at night. 

The third edition of volume 1 was released in 1995; this was the first significant change to the series since the second edition of volume 6 came out in 1985. Weirdly, just a year later, Penguin began superseding the series with its new effort, the Penguin History of Britain; the first release of that series, volume 6 (covering 1603-1714) came out in 1996. It would take two decades to publish them all; the last was volume 8 (covering 1800-1906) in 2017. (Except that volume 7, covering 1707-1815, never came out at all!) These are, I understand, a bit different in approach than the Pelican Histories: hardcovers without a uniform design or branding. 

I do intend to read them too, but that will be a project for 2026... I need a break!

Black Panther: The Gathering of My Name by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Kev Walker, et al.

The Gathering of My Name is the second of four parts of The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda; Ta-Nehisi Coates continues as writer, of course, but Kev Walker takes over as illustrator; I know him best for his work on the surprisingly good Elsa Bloodstone tie-in to Battleworld. (He would go one, I believe, to do some acclaimed work on Marvel's Star Wars comics.) I found book 1 of Intergalactic Empire a bit inscrutable at times, and I think partially that was on purpose—Coates was clearly doing one of those stories where you start in a new context with no explanation—but not entirely so—I found it hard to keep track of all the characters, and Daniel Acuña's art was sometimes hard to follow.

from Black Panther vol. 7 #9

The basic premise was that T'Challa was a former slave in a space version of Wakanda, working with a group of rebels called the "maroons" to bring down the empire. Though many characters had familiar names but were not the familiar characters, it seemed like T'Challa was—but if so, he did not remember it. Stories in book 1 jumped around a lot, each focusing on some incident or battle for T'Challa and the maroons in their struggle against the empire.

Book 2 of Intergalactic Empire is easier to follow, for a number of reasons. Partially because, well, we read book 1 and so we have built up some context. Partially because the text pages at the ends of issues (in both books 1 and 2) have filled in some gaps for us. Partially because the last couple issues feature T'Challa regaining access to his memories, and thus fill in some key backstory for us. Partially because I think Coates lets us follow things more; it seemed to me that the plots of these issues were laid out more directly than those in book 1, Coates perhaps realizing you can only test an audience's patience for so long in an ongoing comic book. Partially because Walker has a more straightforward style and approach to the artwork than Acuña did.

The first two issues here are one-part stories, showing different missions of T'Challa and his rebel gang. These were the two that I enjoyed the most. The first is decent; the maroons decide to try to get hold of a guy who designs technology for the empire, and carry out an operation to abduct him from a pleasure cruiser. 

from Black Panther vol. 7 #8

The second was my favorite of all six parts of book 2. In this one, the rebels hit an imperial freighter for its cargo of raw vibranium only to discover that its cargo is also frozen prisoners—but the prisoners haven't had their memories removed yet. T'Challa, of course, wants to save the prisoners, but the rebel leadership wants him to focus on the mission. As T'Challa helps the prisoners, he bonds with a kid who is also a king. It's perhaps straightforward and cute stuff, but it's effectively done, exactly what you might want from a story about a former king trying to take down an intergalactic empire.

The last four issues here are one big story about a rebel operation on the planet Agwé, with some complexity deriving from the fact that different rebel factions are turning on each other; the hero Manifold, who accompanied T'Challa into space (as we found out in Shuri) is working for the empire. I did find some aspects of this story confusing, particularly revolving around the emperor and his daughter, but on the other hand, we are getting some answers.

from Black Panther vol. 7 #11

Overall, I have to say that I continue to enjoy The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda more than anything in Coates's run on Black Panther volume 6/volume 1. I do hope the end of this book represents a turning point, though. We are halfway through the story now, and I think it's time to move from "laying out a mystery" and even "solving a mystery" into "dealing with the interesting ideas." A story where T'Challa has to take down a Wakandan empire raises some interesting questions about power and violence; hopefully the story does something interesting with those questions in its thirteen remaining issues.

The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda, Book 2: The Gathering of My Name originally appeared in issues #7-12 of Black Panther vol. 7 (Feb.-July 2019). The story was written by Ta-Nehisi Coates; illustrated by Kev Walker (#7-11) and Jen Bartel (#12), with layouts by Kris Anka (#12); inked by Marc Deering (#11); colored by Stéphane Paitreau (#7-10), Java Tartaglia (#10-11), and Tríona Farrell (#12); lettered by Joe Sabino; and edited by Wil Moss.

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE

Reading Roundup Wrapup: August 2025

Pick of the month: Enigma Tales by Una McCormack. Look, when Una McCormack writes a book, it's the best book I read that month. I don't make the rules. Sorry, Ted Chiang.

All books read:

1. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Enigma Tales by Una McCormack
2. Star Trek: Coda, Book I: Moments Asunder by Dayton Ward
3. Paradox in Oz by Edward Einhorn, illustrated by Eric Shanower
4. A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
5. Star Trek: Coda, Book II: The Ashes of Tomorrow by James Swallow
6. To the Stars: Between Planets / The Rolling Stones / Starman Jones / The Star Beast by Robert A. Heinlein
7. The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution by David Quammen
8. American Gods by Neil Gaiman
9. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
10. Star Trek: Coda, Book III: Oblivion’s Gate by David Mack
11. Arrival by Ted Chiang
12. The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert

All books acquired:

1. The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by Ken Liu
2. To the Stars: Between Planets / The Rolling Stones / Starman Jones / The Star Beast by Robert A. Heinlein 
3. Archie Varsity Edition, Vol. 1 by Mark Waid, Fiona Staples, Veronica Fish, Annie Wu, et al.
4. Four Frontiers: Rocket Ship Galileo / Space Cadet / Red Planet / Farmer in the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein
5. Infinite Possibilities: Tunnel in the Sky / Time for the Stars / Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert A. Heinlein
6. Outward Bound: Have Space Suit—Will Travel / Starship Troopers / Podkayne of Mars by Robert A. Heinlein
7. The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume Four: Minority Report by Philip K. Dick

On a bit of a Heinlein spree, I guess!

Currently reading:

• The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume Four: Minority Report by Philip K. Dick

Up next in my rotations:

1. From Cooperation to Complicity: Degussa in the Third Reich by Peter Hayes 
2. Doctor Who: The Coming of the Terraphiles; Or, Pirates of the Second Aether!! by Michael Moorcock
3. Formerly Known as the Justice League by Keith Giffen & J. M. DeMatteis, Kevin Maguire, and Joe Rubinstein
4. Rumble Fish by S. E. Hinton 

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 682 (down 4)

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Enigma Tales

late 2386, weeks after Section 31: Control (according to the Historian's Note) or late 2388, three years after The Fall (according to internal chronological clues)
Sometimes, one might find it easier to write a negative review than a positive one. To write a negative review, one can simply lapse into a catalogue of grievances, and there's a certain terrible joy in that, even if it doesn't necessarily make for a good review. A good negative review, I think, articulates what a book wanted to do and then analyzes how and why it fell short of that—or perhaps even explains why that wasn't a good thing to attempt in the first place.

Similarly, a positive review might simply say again and again, "well here's a good bit about the text." We could start, for example, by mentioning that Enigma Tales is just a joy to read on a word by word basis; there's none of the purposefully beige prose one finds in most Star Trek novels. In my review of Collateral Damage, I discussed the limitations of that third-person limited perspective that most Star Trek tie-ins are written in, and thankfully, McCormack sets out her stall almost immediately in this regard, with a touch of delightful third-person omniscient about Pulaski and Alden on pp. 7-8: "There was a pool on the ship (neither of them knew this) as to how soon she would make him the fourth Mr. Pulaski. There was also another pool (they perforce knew nothing about this either) as to how quickly she would divorce him."

But if you do this, at a certain point a kind of tedium sets in. Oh this was good and this was good and this was good, the end. A good positive review articulates what a book wanted to do and then analyzes how it accomplished that. I'm going to do my best here.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Enigma Tales
by Una McCormack

Published: 2017
Acquired: July 2025
Read: August 2025

What did this book want to do? Well, if you ever sit through one of my lectures about literature (3 stars on Rate My Professor), you'll know that in fiction, one of the most important things to pay attention to is when the book you're reading starts talking about books, because that's usually when the book is trying to tell you how to read it. (See my discussion of Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith for an example I use a lot.) Enigma Tales tells us how to read it quite early on, on pp. 11-12, when we get a discussion of, well, enigma tales from Natima Lang:

In the enigma tale as we have known it [...] we have evidence that literature—that art—encodes into itself, despite all attempts at extirpation, critiques of the world in which it is created. In the enigma tale, these authors tried to address—through the medium of the puzzle, the riddle—what we could not discuss in public: the nature of our guilt, its role in our past, and its impact on our future.
[...]
Literature such as this creates within its bounds a microcosm for society. In the country houses of the Second Republic, the mansions of Coranum, or [...] the lecture halls and committee rooms of the university, we see our world writ small. The crimes and misdemeanors of the wider world, the perpetrators and offenders, were concentrated and offered for our consideration.
[...]
[M]y question now is—what might the enigma tale look like under our new dispensation? We have seen how, in the past, the question was not which of the characters was guilty, but how were the characters each guilty? Is it possible that in the future an enigma tale might contain a character who is—I can hardly imagine it—innocent?

That's it, that's the book given to you in a nutshell right there! (The book comes back to this on pp. 53-4 and basically says it for a second time, so McCormack really doesn't want you to miss it.) This book uses the University of the Union as a microcosm of Cardassian society, exploring the way that guilt and innocence work. As we see here, the book consistently comes back to an idea from the Deep Space Nine episode "Distant Voices": "The problem with Cardassian enigma tales is that they all end the same way. All the suspects are always guilty." "Yes, but the challenge is determining exactly who is guilty of what." (This itself picked up from what we learned about the Cardassian legal system in "Tribunal.")

Okay, but so what? Part of the joy of science fiction is that it allows us to explore imaginary worlds, permits us to, as Isaac Asimov puts it in the introduction to More Soviet Science Fiction (1962), ask "what if—" and then build up a whole world:

The actual plot of the story, the suspense, the conflict, ought to arise—if this were a first-class story—out of the particular needs and frustrations of people in such a society. The author, while attending to the plot, may well find his chief amusement, however, in designing the little details (the filigree-work, if you like) of the society, even where they do not have any direct connection with the plot. (8)

Una is very good at this kind of filigree work; Cardassia always comes alive in her books, and this one is no exception, filled with little details about what life is like there in general, and how it's changed since the end of the Dominion War ten years prior. There's a compelling subplot, for example, about how some of the part-Bajoran descendants of the so-called "comfort women" raped by Cardassian soldiers are learning how to live with their inheritance in the open.

In that essay, however, Asimov goes on to say something I find completely wrongheaded: "such a story has no lesson to teach with respect to the advanced societies of the here and now" (8). Here, I must part ways with the grandmaster of science fiction and say that I am much more sympathetic to the claims of China Miéville in his introduction to H. G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon: "Science fiction is not, whatever its advocates may sometimes claim [...] 'about' the future. It is, like any worthwhile literature, 'about' now, using a technique of rationalized (rather than free-for-all) alienation from the everyday to structure its narratives and investigate the world" (xvii). So, if we believe Miéville, this filigree work (and everything in the novel) shouldn't be telling us stuff about the totally made up world of Cardassia, but also the world we live in.

Again, Una's book lays this out for us from the very beginning. Sure, we get the (confusing) Historian's Note telling us the book is set in late 2386, but the very next page of the book tells us that's not true, that Enigma Tales is "[a] novel about the past, the future, and everything in between"—i.e., the present. The book came out in July 2017, shortly after the election of Trump. I would guess the manuscript was probably entirely or at least mostly finished before that, but of course the book certainly was being written during the election campaign. Probably more relevant from the perspective of a UK author would be the Brexit referendum, in June 2016.

Just like Una's The Fall: The Crimson Shadow, it unfortunately feels like it is about the future, in that the book's discussion of nationalism and authoritarianism are even more relevant in 2025 than they were when the book was written. One suspects that Una probably feels like Emily Tesh, who said this of her novel Some Desperate Glory: "It still shakes me that so many people have picked up the book I started in 2017 based on the worst things I could see in contemporary politics, and responded: yes, this is what's happening right now. I would rather the book were an irrelevant historical curiosity. I hope it becomes so one day." Alas, that hasn't been the case. As an academic in Florida, it was pretty tough to read the discussion here of what happened at the University of the Union when Dukat and the Dominion took over: "Directives came down stating what could and could not be studied. Some teachers complained and were promptly suspended. The shelves in the library thinned once again. Outlandish topics such as [Elima's] were sidelined, with the grants and prizes going to more traditional accounts of great guls and battles won" (p. 70).

In Una's hands, "everyone is guilty" is not just a joke about how bad Cardassians are, though, but a commentary on what it's like to live under an authoritarian regime. In such a society, everyone is guilty, because there's no way to survive without doing something wrong. (Shades of the oft-repeated maxim "There is no ethical consumption under capitalism." Shades also of Audre Lorde's line, "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," which is slightly misquoted on p. 215.*) In the book, this appears primarily in a subplot about whether, when serving on a U of U appropriations committee during the old regime, peace activist Natima Lang approved some horrific experiments on children (p. 107). Did she? Even if she did, was it wrong? Lang is a little bit guilty because there is no way to not be a little bit guilty.

So, Enigma Tales is (as per what Natima Lang herself told us on pp. 11-12) is not just about the U of U and Cardassia, but "the crimes and misdemeanors of the wider world"—that is to say, our world. We all do things to protect ourselves and our loved ones. Unfortunately, in the world we live in, we will increasingly see this everyday. Even if Lang didn't do what she was accused of, she wasn't always the best she could be; she didn't return when the civilian government briefly took power on Cardassia (2372-73) because she was afraid.

But Enigma Tales offers us hope, too. At the beginning of the novel, Lang asks, "Is it possible that in the future an enigma tale might contain a character who is—I can hardly imagine it—innocent?" This enigma tale does. As comes out in a conversation late in the novel, we can't only focus on guilt. Everyone might be guilty to some degree... but this also means we're also innocent to some degree. This develops a line of thought McCormack began in The Crimson Shadow: all we can do in an unethically constructed world is attempt to act ethically ourselves. Of course, this is a sentiment baked into the detective novel, as highlighted by Raymond Chandler: "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean." Natima Lang may have been guilty. Garak may have been guilty. (He certainly was!) But also they were innocent, and they can be innocent. Even Garak can be innocent, as he reflects that for once, he was (pp. 343-4). Maybe it's hard to imagine you really can be innocent. But as Garak himself notes, that's why we read enigma tales, that why we read Enigma Tales: "Garak [...] savor[ed] [...] the joy of a fiction in which innocence was not only possible but brought reward" (p. 347).

It also offers us hope in the future. A recurrent theme throughout the novel is that rise of the new generation of Cardassians, who carry with them hard work and determination to not repeat the crimes of their ancestors. Garak will give way to Natima Lang someday, but Lang in turn will give way to people like Elima, who spent their childhood under the old regime but most of their adulthood under the new, and thus can see a way to make it better. Elima, in turn, will give way to her own children, who will never know a world where a part-Bajoran Cardassian couldn't openly wear a Bajoran earring. This, too, is the hope we see in our world, a hope that the future will be better because of those who come after us. This doesn't (as the book highlights) mean that we stop working, because our descendants will fix it, but that we have a reason to keep working, because we know that if we can leave our descendants a world better than we found it, they can make it even better than that.

It's a hard hope to believe in, at times. I've discussed here before that in my Star Trek Adventures RPG campaign, the players are contending with a friendly alien race sliding into authoritarianism. I think they will end up losing to the authoritarians, because in 2025, it's not very clear to me how one wins against them. Enigma Tales gives us hope, because the Cardassians, as the novel explicitly reminds us a couple times, are us: Garak, for example, points out that when he was ambassador to the Federation, they gave him a residence in Paris where Nazis used to live (p. 155); Garak writes to Bashir, "I loved Paris, Doctor, but I knew Berlin. I pass through a city like that every day" (p. 100); later Garak opines that probably only humans have as brutal a history as the Cardassians. If the Cardassians can do it, so can we.

But it's not a naïve hope. I have come to very much despise so-called "cozy" fantasy (two "good" examples: Legends & Lattes and Someone you can Build a Nest in), and an essay I recently read by Abigail Nussbaum did a great job of highlighting the issue I have with it:

the ongoing fashion for "cozy", "optimistic", "kind" science fiction [...] often seems to fail on its own terms. Too often, what these novels call kindness is actually the flattening of all difference, and what they call coziness is a refusal to acknowledge cruelty. This novel recognizes that kindness is hard, that well-intended people can have wildly diverging points of view that can lead them to abuse and dehumanize others, and that conflicts are not won by "destroying" your opponent with a killer argument, but by getting them to see you as someone worth compromising with—even if that means sitting across a table from someone who thinks you shouldn't be allowed to make your own decisions.

This book shows that though there is hope, it is also hard. Pulaski, Garak, Elima, Mhevet, Alden, Lang, even the anonymous Starfleet Intelligence spook Pulaski confronts near the end of the book, are all well-intentioned people "only trying to do right in this wicked world," but that still brings them into conflict with each other, in ways both small and big. I found particularly devastating a scene where Garak needles Peter Alden, who still has PTSD from his time as an SI agent among the Tzenkethi (pp. 202-3). It's very cruel, but it unfortunately rings true for Garak. Similarly, Garak and Mhevet are working to the same end, but they come into conflict regardless, partially because of Garak's long-standing inability to trust others (p. 244). Because it is hard, it is hope I can believe in.

There's a very powerful scene near the end of the novel, where Garak confronts Gul Telek, a member of the Cardassian military opposed to the investigations into what crimes Cardassian committed during the Occupation. Garak realizes that Telek is one of the children who was experimented on; the son of a Cardassian soldier and a Bajoran comfort woman, Telek was subjected to procedures to expunge his Bajoran DNA because his father wanted an heir. As Garak says, "you can't wipe away history like that. Something always breaks through" (p. 310). At first this almost seems like a repeat of the Alden scene, with Garak using his psychological insight to disable an opponent, but then Garak extends Telek the compassion no one else ever has. It's beautiful, and had me misting up a little. Similarly, Peter has to help out the rogue SI agent even though he'd rather not: "I can't escape my past, Kitty. Those experiences made me who I am. I can only live with the consequences" (p. 343).

I'm glad I positioned Enigma Tales where I did, as the last novel of the Destiny era before Coda. I don't think there was a better one. If there was, it could only have been a different one by Una. I loved this book, I tore through it in a day and a half, and I didn't want it to end. I think someday I'll just do a reread of all the Una/Cardassia stories from the relaunch era.

If there's a flaw to this book, it's that it made me imagine another book that we will never get. I think Una would write a brilliant campus murder mystery starring Kate Pulaski with Peter Alden as her hapless sidekick. Just imagine it! Pulaski comes to give a guest lecture somewhere, someone dies in mysterious circumstances, local authorities are baffled, Pulaski's keen eye for scientific detail and willingness to trammel over social niceties solves the case while Alden runs around apologizing for her and getting her out of scrapes. So good!! I'm sure we could contrive a way to make this fit into the Picard continuity, figure it out, Simon & Schuster.†

Continuity Notes:

• The doctor-loving soccer-playing Cardassian shop owner who helps Pulaski while she's on the run (pp. 172-4) is Rugal, right? It has been fifteen years since I read The Never-Ending Sacrifice but doesn't he open a shop in the country?

Other Notes:

• Lots of good lines. I like this bit from Elima about the Federation's presence on Cardassia during the reconstruction that really captures Star Trek utopianism in a very casual way: "I loved having you here. All your people—they were so young, so friendly. They laughed a lot, like there was something to laugh about, like they could see that the future was going to be okay. After a while it sort of rubbed off on you. You started to believe them when they said it would be okay. And one day it was" (p. 141).
• Lots of good moments of characterization, especially of Garak. Take this little internal aside from Gark about how he could charm even Bajorans: "Not Kira Nerys. Charm had not been key to winning over Kira. Killing other Cardassians had been necessary to prove himself to Kira" (pp.156-7). Or this bit, when Garak discusses how beneficial Bashir was to him during his exile. "'It was everything he represented. His capacity to see good—even in me—his capacity to strive, to seek to find and not to yield...' He could hear his voice catching. I am delivering a eulogy, he thought, for a man who is not yet dead" (p. 63).
• The book is also quite funny. I loved the bit where Pulaski has to use the comm but says she has no money and the Cardassian who might be Rugal grumbles, "You lot never do." Or when Pulaski goes on a Cardassian 'cast and causes a diplomatic incident. Pulaski is great throughout, as I've alluded to. Or the Or the bit where Pulaksi tells Alden she's been violating the Prime Directive since he was in diapers (p. 255). Or the bit where Mhevet goes "That bloody woman!" and Garak says that when he wrote Picard to ask about Pulaksi, he said the exact same thing (p. 273).
• McCormack has a Ph.D. in sociology, and worked as a professor in higher ed for many years. For that reason, the details of academia always ring true in a way I very much appreciated, such as the recounting of Elima's academic career thus far on pp. 20-21. She knows exactly the scope of a doctoral thesis, knows what kind of work early career academics do and how it gets recognized.
• I enjoyed the occasional comments about human literature Garak read and enjoyed, which includes Douglas Adams (p. 156). Garak even goes on to claim that if he needs to a new career, he'd like to be a book reviewer!
• The book is filled with unsent letters from Garak to Bashir, comatose since the events of Section 31: Control. (This is one of the details that makes the 2388 setting more compelling than the 2386 one; the way everyone talks about Bashir makes it seem like he's been unconscious for years, not months.) In the letters, Garak rues that he has finally gotten Bashir to Cardassia, and Cardassia is the most beautiful it's ever been... and Bashir can see none of it. I was originally a little grumpy that McCormack couldn't write, that no one could write, a story of Bashir and Garak together on postwar Cardassia because of the events of a novel I liked much less, but I came around on this because as much as we might want things to work out perfectly, of course they don't. I myself said it earlier; the book works because making a better world is difficult. The letters are beautiful and they're sad. I'm sure there's an perfectly serviceable audiobook of this novel read by Robert Petkoff, but it's a shame there's not one read by Andrew Robinson.
• The two scenes at the bedside of the comatose Bashir are quite moving: Pulaski's is (p. 298) but particularly Garak's (p. 346-7).

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Coda: Moments Asunder by Dayton Ward

* Surely this is the only Star Trek novel to quote Audre Lorde? I wish it weren't so.
† Wait, wait, I've got it! What if it was set between seasons one and two of Picard, when he's the chancellor of Starfleet Academy! "That bloody woman!" C'mon, it'd be brilliant!!

Reading The Patchwork Bride of Oz Aloud to My Kid—We Begin Our Journey into the Noncanonical!

As chronicled at length here on this blog, my kid and I spent several years reading all the "official" Oz books: the Famous Forty plus other books written by Royal Historians, published by the Oz Club, or authorized by the Baum Estate. This project took sixty-two books and four years.

What next? Well, it turns out my kids literally don't know of a world where you don't read a chapter of an Oz book every other day, so we're turning our attention to the so-called noncanonical Oz apocrypha. We (largely) read the official Oz books in publication order, but I decided to handle these differently. I made a list of all the noncanonical Oz books that either 1) I already owned, or 2) I didn't own but thought sounded interesting, and then used a random number generator to select one. In between them, we'll be reading stories by L. Frank Baum from the Oz Club collection of his complete short stories.

The Patchwork Bride of Oz by Gilbert M. Sprague
illustrated by Denis McFarling

Published: 1993
Acquired and previously read: 199?
Read aloud: July 2025

The first spin of the dice brings us to The Patchwork Bride of Oz, one of the many continuation novels released by Books of Wonder's Emerald City Press imprint in the 1990s. Though at the time I devoured them, in retrospect the quality was... inconsistent at best. This one is surely a case in point. A story of how the Scarecrow and Scraps the Patchwork Girl get married (their flirtation was established back in Scraps's original appearance, but little had been done with it since), it runs a mere three (unnumbered and untitled) chapters across 38 pages; the book is padded at the end with some pictures of Scraps and the Scarecrow by John R. Neill reproduced from other Oz books.

Reading it as an adult, it's pretty bad. Scraps and the Scarecrow only decide to get married because the Love Magnet makes them. Wow, what romance. My kid was pretty confused by this part, and expected it to be undone and/or explained, which is totally reasonable. It is not. They then do get married. The Wogglebug criticizes Scraps's choice of attire, and the Scarecrow can't decide what suit to wear, but otherwise there are no obstacles or plot. The characters live together a little, but then decide that they miss their old lives, so go back to them. The end. 

Like, why? What was the point of this? It reads like particularly bad fanfiction, by someone who doesn't know how stories are supposed to work. Why publish this? I have never read Oziana (the official short story magazine of the Oz Club) but surely it published better work than this.

Going into the "noncanonical" books, I warned my kid their unofficial status meant some might contain things that would go unreflected in others. Once we finished Patchwork Bride, I said there would be no other Oz book where Scraps and the Scarecrow were married. That was okay, they said... this book must just take place after all of those! Already a timeliner at heart.

Incidentally, I was trying to fill out Gilbert M. Sprague's LibraryThing author page and found very little to go on out there. I found obituaries for a couple different Gilbert M. Spragues, both the right age to have written this book, but in neither case was there any good evidence to link them to Oz. So if you know when he was born, when/if he died, where he lived, I'd be interested to hear it. I did find a brief but interesting mention of him on a blog about gay youth in the 1970s, though, where the writer calls him "my friend and sometimes lover Gilbert Sprague (who went on to write two books in the ongoing Oz series, along with editing the monthly Oz fanzine for Books of Wonder)."

Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (1980, rev. 2003)

My mother-in-law got me this book for my birthday. This tells U.S. history from the perspective of the "people," looking not at the doings of elites directly, but the way that people were exploited, and the way that they fought back. Zinn is particularly interested in labor and class, I would say, but also explores exploitation and resistance on the basis of race and gender.

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

Revised edition published: 2003
Originally published: 1980
Acquired: July 2025
Read: August 2025

The book starts with the coming of Columbus, and that's where Zinn sets out his stall, showing in unflinching detail the kind of thing many previous histories elide. His Columbus is no hero, but a ruthless purveyor of genocide. In a sense, Zinn is a victim of his own success; though I definitely learned the traditional pro-Columbus version of this story as a child in the early 1990s, it is much less commonly taught these days, and I suspect many readers will already be familiar with the "true" version he tells here. Still, I found there were a lot of details here, and story succinctly but effectively told. We then get the British colonization of the Americas told in the same style, with a focus on how the upper classes built their wealth by exploiting black slaves, brutally exterminating natives, and imposing harsh conditions on lower-class whites, and also setting up a matrix of race relations and laws that would ensure these exploited groups would never unite. From there, Zinn works his way forward, telling the story of the American Revolution, the early days of the U.S., the Indian genocide, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Great Depression, the World Wars, and so on.

I was familiar with the broad strokes of what was listed here, but found it effectively done. Zinn's basic thesis is that the U.S. has never really been what it claims to be, but a system designed to accumulate wealth for the governing classes, who provide just enough freedom and accommodation to head off rebellion, but never enough to carry out meaningful change. I did not know much about all the rebellions he chronicles here in particular, and I appreciated the meticulous detail on the brutal violence. I think it's easy to imagine that what seems like the increasing brutality of our past decade is an aberration, but it's not—it's just making visible something that has always been present in U.S. society.

Once you get to the 1960s or so, the book takes a bit of a turn. It gets more interested in the very specific actions of politicians. I think this is at least partially because we reach Zinn's own lifetime, and thus what he sees as significant is shaped by what he lived through. But I would say the second half of the book has a different project than the first. While the thesis of the first half of the book is "you were misled about American history, it was never about equality," the thesis of the latter parts of the book seem to be a critique of the Democratic Party, for being no different than the Republicans in any meaningful way despite its claims and aspirations. This I found less interesting to be honest, and more time dependent; a long chronicle of grievances against Bill Clinton was probably a lot more salient in 2003 than it is in 2025. In particular, the last two chapters are very clearly stuck on, as the book was quite obviously designed to end with chapter 23, "The Coming Revolt of the Guards." The other thing I found a little bit of a struggle in the last section, is Zinn often has this vibe of "and now the people are going to finally rise up"... but they never do. His chronicle of antiwar stuff in 2001 and '02 seems pretty naïve in retrospect; it wasn't the vanguard of anything meaningful.

That said, I was struck by how powerful the cultural movements of the 1960s and '70s seemed, and it made me wonder why the anti-Trump movement seems so anemic in comparison given the existential threat he poses. Why can't we muster anything better than social media posts? Where are the work stoppages? 

The flaw of the book is that there's a circle he doesn't quite square, which is that though he sometimes argues that the government fails to give the people what it wants (e.g., universal healthcare during the Clinton administration), there are other times the people very much do get what they want, it's just that what the people want isn't what Zinn's "the people" want. People want crime to be cracked down on, immigration to be restricted, welfare to be cut. If the people want this better world, why do they continually act as though they do not? Part of it is how the issues are framed by the "Establishment" (this is a term Zinn increasingly uses in the latter part of the book that I very much hated), but are we just saying that the people are saps who don't know what's good for them? If so, why? This gap between what the people supposedly want and what the people act as though they want isn't adequately explored, I would argue. 

My copy's text comes from 2003, but it has an interview with Zinn in the back that I think comes from 2005. Zinn died in 2010; I'd be curious to know what he thought of Obama, though I suspect he'd be pretty scathing. In chapter 23, he writes this:

We have known for some time that the poor and ignored were the nonvoters, alienated from a political system they felt didn't care about them, and about which they could do little. Now alienation has spread upward into families above the poverty line. These are white workers, neither rich nor poor, but angry over economic insecurity, unhappy with their work, worried about their neighborhoods, hostile to government—combining elements of racism with class consciousness, contempt for the lower classes along with distrust of the elite, and thus open to solutions from any direction, right or left. (636)

He then points out that similar circumstances existed in the 1920s, which were mobilized into the KKK at first, but later into unions. Unfortunately, reading this in 2025, you can see how here he was right in the worst possible way, as these are the exact groups that have given Donald Trump and the MAGA movement its power base, which is steadily rolling back what little good work has been done by the U.S. government. Obama and his successors in the Democratic Party failed to respond to very real issues, and now the U.S. is paying for it.

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Collateral Damage

January 2387
Being a consumer of tie-in fiction is weird, to be honest. If you are a "normal" reader, you read books that interest you... and well, you don't read ones that don't interest you. Why would you? Why would anyone spend time and effort reading and reviewing something you don't think you'll like? Yet you do! I consume Big Finish audio dramas, and I used to review them for Unreality SF. I often knew going into a release written by (for example) Matt Fitton or Nicholas Briggs knowing I wouldn't like it. I had learned I usually wouldn't like these writers' work, yet I would slog through it anyway.

The reason is, of course, that no offense to the writers, but you're not there for the writers. People largely don't consume tie-in fiction because they care about who writes it. They consume tie-in fiction because they like the characters from tv and want to know what happens to them next. I may feel fairly certain I might not enjoy the next Matt Fitton audio drama featuring the eighth Doctor... but if the eighth Doctor is my favorite Doctor, I'm hardly going to listen to all sixteen parts of Doom Coalition but not parts 1, 8, 10-11, and 14-15, am I? I want to know what happens to the Doctor and Liv and Helen, even if I have to listen to a bunch of scripts by a writer I don't like to do it.

Thus, what may be a bad thing from the perspective of the reader is actually a good thing from the perspective of the publisher and writer. Sure there are writers who's work I've learned I don't like... but I buy it anyway! I certainly don't do that for John Scalzi. But I need to know what happens next to Captain Picard, and I'm hardly going to skip over a book by a writer I don't like and thus miss a chunk of the story. If you were to go back through this series of posts, I think you would see that I have fairly consistently not enjoyed the work of David Mack. But, you know, I keep buying his books anyway (I own twenty-four of them according to LibraryThing, plus fourteen other books including contributions by him), so while I might be frustrated, he must be happy. (But no one worry, I am not going to read and review Picard: Firewall.)

That was sort of a long intro into what is the second-last Destiny-era David Mack novel I will ever read... but I think this is quite probably my favorite David Mack novel? Certainly it's the one I've enjoyed the most of all the ones I've read in this project. Let's break it down.

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Collateral Damage
by David Mack

Published: 2019
Acquired: April 2025
Read: July 2025

Like Available Light, Collateral Damage features two parallel plots, one focused on the Enterprise, and one focused on the Section 31 revelations from Control and Hearts and Minds, specifically about Captain Picard's role in the Min Zife coup. The difference here is that Picard is in the S31 plotline on Earth, instead of the Enterprise plot; thus, Worf is acting captain, and we also get a lot of focus on Aneta Šmrhová.

Thadiun Okona from "The Outrageous Okona" is doing an op with a Husnock weapon from Titan: Fortune of War that goes wrong, and the weapon ends up in the hands of a band of Nausicaan marauders, disenfranchised following the destruction of their home planet in Destiny. The Enterprise must try to recover the weapon while working alongside the obnoxious Okona, battling not just the Nausicaans, but Starfleet's own Intelligence apparatus, and also trying to save a research outpost called Stonekettle Station whose solar shield is failing.

It's quick, action-focused stuff, the kind of stuff that David Mack can do in his sleep, and which rarely works for me. And though I didn't love everything about it, I think there are two things that really did work for me here. The first is the decision to tell chunks of the story from the first-person perspective of Okona and Kinogar (the Nausicaan leader). Back when I read Mack's Cold Equations: The Persistence of Memory, I really enjoyed the section told in the first person from Noonien Soong's perspective there... these sections communicate character and tone in a way that I just don't see in Mack's use of the third person.

I discussed earlier how tie-in fiction kind of traps you as a reader, but I wonder if it hasn't trapped Mack as a writer too, forcing him to use a technique (the fairly affect-less third-person limited perspective of most Star Trek novels) that just doesn't play to his strengths. I found Okona and Kinogar sections lively and engaging, and I wish there had been more of them. (I did find the bit in the afterword where Mack explains his choices a bit insulting to the reader's intelligence, though. Let the work speak for itself! I do appreciate that the book doesn't label the sections, though.)

The other thing I liked about the Enterprise plotline is how it all wraps up. What one watches (and reads, and even plays) Star Trek for, I would argue, is clever problem solving, situations where characters do something unexpected that ties everything up. The Enteprise plot has this in its resolution, with Worf coming up with a way to stop the Nausicaans without resorting to violence... and yet in a way that is entirely in-character for Worf. I thought this was clever, and I really enjoyed the ending, and it made me sad that we've never really gotten any more "Captain Worf" stories.

The other plotline is necessary but ultimately kind of humdrum. Picard is kind of a passive observer to his own legal proceedings, which is probably fairly accurate but also not very dramatic; the solution to his problem comes from other characters. Overall this is fine... but I really did not like what we see of Philippa Louvois, Picard's prosecutor. In Available Light, she came across as principled and aghast at the violation of Federation values; here, she seems to be on a witchhunt, wanting to get Picard because she wants someone to pin the blame on. I feel like the book very much misses the mark here; I wish she had been portrayed as an antagonist, but not a villain, it seems to me that two people can be acting out of good principles but still come into conflict, and I think that would have been 1) more consistent with Available Light, and 2) much more interesting. Overall, I found the legal plotline a bit too twenty-first-century; one might have hoped the Federation's legal system might be more interested in actual truth.

My big complaint, though: anyone who thought the Šmrhová/Okona subplot was a good idea is bad and should feel bad. C'mon, really???

Scarlett Pomers, age 18
(but Naomi Wildman, age 12!?)

Continuity Notes:

• Does it make any sense that Naomi Wildman is already a lieutenant in Starfleet Intelligence? She's fifteen! Even accepting that Ktarians age faster, Voyager only got back to the Alpha Quadrant nine years before this book, and she didn't seem to be of Academy age in "Endgame," and she would have had to go through the whole program and become an experienced officer! I haven't read any of the Voyager relaunch following Full Circle; is this consistent with that?
• I was a bit surprised when there was a reference to Section 31: Rogue. Ranul Keru aside, I had totally forgotten about that book and that that was Picard's first interaction with S31.
• Given how in Picard we learned that Chateau Picard burned down but was rebuilt exactly the same way, it was interesting to see a very different approach taken here. There's also a whole thing here about the location of Chateau Picard which I think must be there to reconcile the location of the real vineyard of that name with the location of the fictional one.
• Dygan is usually (though not quite always) called "lieutenant" in this novel instead of his usual rank of "glinn."

Other Notes:

• I appreciate the idea of the cover, but don't actually like it in execution. Ugly colors.
• The characters in this book: Section 31's use of extralegal force is bad.
  Also the characters in this book: Starfleet Intelligence has a hidden black site where it imprisons Federation citizens without trial. I guess that's okay.
• It is a little disappointing that the Sarai subplot James Swallow introduced in the Titan novels gets wrapped up as a side thing in a completely different series... but I guess when this book was written, it was probably a reasonable expectation that there would never be a Titan novel again.
• It seems to me that David Mack has never known what to do with T'Ryssa Chen, to the extent of overlooking moments where a contact specialist would very obviously have something to contribute (e.g., Cold Equations: Silent Weapons). Here, she does a lot of generic science lab stuff, when it would have been nice to have her contribute to Worf's understanding of the Nausicaans.
• Intellectually, I understand that Naomi Wildman, the cute kid from Voyager, must someday become an adult and have all the drives and interests that adults have. But still I don't think I needed to read a Star Trek book where Naomi Wildman says, "A straight shot at the sweetest booty I've seen in years. Mm-yeah!"
• No one is ever going to make me believe that Geordi of all people can be in an open relationship with two attractive women. He is just not that smooth.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Deep Space Nine: Enigma Tales by Una McCormack