Hugos 2025: Ballots for Best Novella, Best Novelette, and Best Short Story

Here is the first post in my customary sequence describing my rankings for the Hugo Awards ballot. 

Hugo votes are due July 23, but before that was announced I worked out my reading schedule assuming a slightly tighter due date of July 16; after the announcement, I decided that was doable and so stuck with it. I typically read the finalists in a totally random order, but shuffle things around a little based on availability; this year, that meant saving three big books (Track Changes, A Sorceress Comes to Call, Service Model) until the end. And then, this year one finalist withdrew their book from contention after the ballot was announced, meaning I would actually finish all my reading by July 10 if I stuck with my original pace.

The net effect of these three things together was that I finished my reading for the short fiction categories quite early, on June 20. I don't know that I have ever been done with three categories* over a month before the deadline!

I'm trying to remember if I nominated anything in any of these categories. (Unfortunately, I didn't save my nominating ballot. Maybe I don't have one because I didn't nominate anything at all?) If I did nominate something, it was "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole" by Isabel J. Kim, and it did make the final ballot.

Anyway, here's my rankings and notes. As always, I've linked to longer reviews I've already done when relevant, or to the finalist itself when freely available online.

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Best Novella

7. The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo

"I'm only a silly girl," Nhung said gravely. "Aren't I a child until I get married, when I shall magically become the lady of the house?"

This is the fifth novella in the "Singing Hills" cycle, about a traveling monk collecting stories; it is the fourth to be a Hugo finalist. Having read four of these now, I wish I found them more interesting. The premises always seem good but there's something too languid about them, they never really get off the ground or engage. This has some interesting twists, but largely at a point where I'd stopped caring. I don't actually a have strong opinion about whether this is better or worse than Navigational Entanglements, I found them about equally dull, but I guess I'll give the edge to something that's not an installment in a series that's been nominated three times already.

6. Navigational Entanglements by Aliette de Bodard

No, she hated herself for allowing herself to hope. To believe that it could ever be different. [...] [T]hat she'd unlock the ever-shifting and incomprehensible set of rules that allowed her to make sense of other people.

In a science fiction world, navigating between star systems is dangerous because of carnivorous entities that feed on consciousness (akin to "The Game of Rat and Dragon" by Cordwainer Smith). One of those entities escapes into the real world, and so the clans that handle navigation need to assemble a team to hunt it down. They must overcome their differences and mistrust as well as a larger conspiracy in order to solve the problem. This is the sixth Hugo finalist by Aliette de Bodard I've read since 2017, and while obviously she has her fans, whatever she's doing just doesn't work for me. I felt there were too many characters who I didn't particularly care about, or even care to tell apart, and without that, the book just doesn't work. Like a lot of recent Tordotcom novellas, there's a sapphic romance, but like a lot of recent Tordotcom novellas it seems to happen instantaneously for not really much of a reason.

5. The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed

A monster who begat monsters, and I walk with them now; little tyrants. 

I felt this started quite promisingly: a tyrant loses his children in magical woods from which no one ever returns; he comes to the one woman who ever entered the woods and returned with whoever was lost and demands she recovers his children. At first it's spooky and weird, but—and it feels weird to say this about a novella—it's too long. There's some interesting stuff in here but not enough compared to the length of the book. There's only so much "bargaining with spooky tricky wood creatures" I can find interesting. Still, I was interested at first, so above Navigational Entanglements it goes.

4. What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher

If you read my full review of this, you'll see I was quite tepid about it—both in the sense I'm not sure What Moves the Dead needed a sequel, and in the sense that it doesn't seem very Hugo-worthy. So that I've placed it here is more a testament to the weakness of the rest of the novella shortlist than anything else. Even if I don't really see the reason for this, you can count on T. Kingfisher to be interesting and amusing all the way through.

3. No Award

Once again, we have a year of entirely Tor novellas, all specifically Tordotcom except What Moves at Night, which comes from a different Tor imprint, Nightfire. Are they all terrible or something? No, they're fine. But is this award doing what I want it do? Not really. People are always proposing new Hugo categories; maybe I'll submit a motion to the Worldcon Business Meeting to split the category into Best Tor Novella and Best Novella by Literally Anyone Else. Anyway, putting "No Award" here is more my protest at the lack of imagination demonstrated by the nominators than anything else; in my mind, there's a huge gap between What Feasts at Night and what comes next.

2. The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar 

Once, he said, on ancient Earth, there was a Horizon, and to gaze on it was to look neither up nor down. Look out...

This is an sf story (it is no coincidence that sf stories took up my top two spots) about a generation ship and the people on it who have never known anything else. Those are a dime a dozen in science fiction, of course, but Samatar focuses on the class divide in the ship, and academia's role in both upending and upholding systems of oppression—it's a unique angle on an old sf staple, and of course totally played to my own interests.

1. The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler

"[H]e was a man like you."
     "Like me?"
     "Yes. A man who thought he could pass the good on to his son without the bad."
     There was silence in the tent, for a moment.
     Then one of the other men said, "He's right, Mitya. All our fathers were the same."
     "Well, let's drink to our fathers then. They wanted the best, but it turned out the same as always."

This is going to be a bit mean, but this is so good it's hard to believe it's a Tordotcom novella. Unlike most of what they publish, it's not a fantasy story that feels like a pilot for a streaming show; this isn't aimed at people who watch a lot of tv and movies, but it's a clever, inventive piece of sf that wouldn't be out of place in Clarkesworld or Asimov's. The basic premise is that in the near future, elephants have gone extinct but woolly mammoths have been revived through cloning, so ivory poachers have turned to mammoths as a new source. It's beautifully written, full of interesting ideas, as a bunch of different plotlines intersect. Disorienting in the way the best sf is, with lots to say about the world we live in now and the world we will live in. The first novella I read for the Hugos, but I instantly knew it would be the one to beat.

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Best Novelette

6. "By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars" by Premee Mohamed

[S]he could also see that he was staring at something over her shoulder: the three framed certificates on the wall, busy with gilt and illumincation, B.Wiz, M.Wiz, Ph.W all in a row. Not in envy or awe, she thought, but a doorway, open, beckoning: Here is how you escape. Here is how you get away from them.

An old magician losing her powers takes on a new apprentice. I think this is probably good at what it does, but stories about old magicians taking on new apprentices are just never going to be my thing, to be honest. On a different day, I could be persuaded to move it up one place on my ballot; "Loneliness Universe" has higher aspirations but "By Salt" has better jokes.

5. "Loneliness Universe" by Eugenia Triantafyllou

The world was still filled with people, of course. Just people she knew nothing or very little about. 

This story seems quite potent: the narrator stops being able to see her friends and family, even though they're right where she is. It feels like it could be a potent metaphor for the isolation brought on by our modern condition, how you can be in the same room as someone but not connected to them because they're on their phone or whatever. But I didn't find the mechanics of how it worked very convincing, and the metaphor didn't really land, didn't feel like it told me anything interesting about how the world works. I feel bad ranking it this low, because I do think Triantafyllou is probably up to something a bit more interesting than Pinsker et al., but I don't think she really pulled off what she was attempting.

4. "Signs of Life" by Sarah Pinsker

Did you find happiness despite what I did to you?

Sarah Pinsker is my favorite contemporary writer of short sf, but this feels very much like one of her minor works to me. It's about a woman going to see her sister for the first time in a long while, but weird things are afoot. Pinsker has a couple different modes; I think she's at her best when she's doing science fiction (including near future) or fantasy work (especially where the magic is kind of a metaphor), but to me, she's less interesting when she's in what I think of as her "creepypasta" mode, of which this is very much an example. I find this kind of work well constructed but ultimately kind of hollow. This one in particular has a very rushed and unconvincing ending following the big reveal, and I'm not sure why, because it spent too much time building up to that moment, so there was definitely word count to spare.

3. "The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea" by Naomi Kritzer

I sighed. “Academic jobs are hard to find. My husband Stuart also has a PhD, and he landed a job in Minnesota. One thousand miles away from the nearest seals who aren’t in a zoo. And he’s got tenure. We’re only here because he’s on sabbatical.” 

Naomi Kritzer is a favorite of the Hugo electorate, and she also ends up in Neil Clarke's Best Science Fiction of the Year volumes pretty consistently, so I feel like I have read a lot of her work at this point. Based on that sampling, I would say she has two modes: near-future sf focusing on stuff like AI and algorithms, but also community and hope (e.g., the CatNet books, "The Dragon Project," Liberty's Daughter, "The Year Without Sunshine," "Better Living Through Algorithms") and spooky folk horror that is also kind of uplifting (e.g., "The Thing About Ghost Stories," "Little Free Library," "Monster"). This is not too dissimilar to Pinsker, actually, and like with Pinsker, I find Kritzer a lot more interesting in her near-future mode than her horror mode. Unfortunately, this is her in her horror mode... though horror isn't quite the right word for it. This story is well-observed (I am of course always into an accurate depiction of academia) and has some good ideas, but a lot like the Pinsker, actually, feel like too much of a slow burn compared to the length. I doubt it's bad, but it's not really what I am interested in. That said, I did like it more than "Signs of Life"; it felt like it had more of a real pay-off.

2. "Lake of Souls" by Ann Leckie

"No animal has a soul that I ever knew."

This sf novelette is included in Leckie's new short fiction collection of the same title; above, I've linked to my review of the complete volume. Like a lot of Leckie's work, it's a weird, disturbing story about the way our biology drives us. That said, it did feel like minor Leckie to me compared to her novels or even some of the other short fiction collected in the same book. But I think it was asking more interesting questions and doing more interesting things than "Signs of Life" and "Four Sisters," so in this case minor Leckie outranks minor Pinsker or minor Kritzer.

1. "The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video" by Thomas Ha

The biggest difference I noticed in the new electronic copy was the ending.

There was a shootout in Copper Hawk like before, yes. But instead of the loss and the blood and the shame of the rider, the iron-handed sheriff was the one to take a bullet. [...] I could almost sense the hand of audience-score maximizer programs in the plot. It could even have been a re-writer at my agency that oversaw the edition, for all I knew.

I felt better in some ways, having read the new, happier ending, but I forgot it promptly, like some garbled conversation I’d overheard on the subway, something that made me chuckle and then escaped my mind.

This is a weird near-future story about a world where there's basically no permanent media anymore: physical books and DVDs and such are all gone, and now all media is electronic—and thus all media can be perpetually altered, updated, tinkered with to suit the present moment. The media of the past no longer serves as a window into that past. I'd never heard of Thomas Ha, but he seems to be one to watch out for based on this. I really liked this, it's basically exactly my taste in short sf, and it easily acquired a high place on my ballot.

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Best Short Story

6. "Stitched to Skin Like Family Is" by Nghi Vo

“It was better before they put in the big road. The old road ran right by us, and we’d get people all the time. Now it’s just folks who already know we’re here. Or ones that get unlucky. It’s catch as catch can these days, I guess.”

I said above that I haven't really enjoyed Vo's Singing Hills novellas very much, but last year I did really like her novelette "On the Fox Roads," an historical fantasy, so I was looking forward to this. Unfortunately, I think this is probably a decent story that I just never figured out, a good example of me finding it easier to glom onto an sf premise than a fantasy one.

 

5. "Five Views of the Planet Tartarus" by Rachael K. Jones

The pilots do always try to hit as many as they can.

This is a piece of flash fiction about a prison planet. It's evocatively written, but I find flash fiction kind of tricky, especially in an sf context; this is more worldbuilding than a story.

 

4. "Marginalia" by Mary Robinette Kowal

“I have misjudged many things very badly and I ask your forgiveness.”

I thought this was perfectly okay. It's set in a fairy-tale world beset by giant snails; the main character is a working-class woman who helps the lord whose estate she lives on defeat one. But that's about it, I felt, except for an overly long epilogue about what happens to everyone later. I get what happened but I didn't think there was much of a hook here. Kowal is a competent writer, so it's well told, but so what? More to my taste than "Five Views," but I didn't think trying to do something as interesting as "We Will Teach You How to Read."†

3. "We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read" by Caroline M. Yoachim

This is our story, simplified: Life. Loss. Transformation. Love. Death. Iteration.

I thought this was very clever, but perhaps more clever than enjoyable to read. Its plays with form to communicate content, and it's about stories and the ways we tell them, and how that can change people.

2. "Three Faces of a Beheading" by Arkady Martine 

THEY ONLY CALL US USURPERS BECAUSE THEY KILLED ENOUGH OF US

Now this is one of those stories where I didn't totally understand what was going on, but I understood enough, and I found it absorbing regardless. Arkady Martine is the author of the Teixcalaan books (I particularly liked the first of those, A Memory Called Empire), and like those, this is a story about empire, but moreso it's about history, the way we interpret and reinterpret the past. I found it really sharply written and thought-provoking; on a different day, I think I gladly could have put it in first. (Am I just a sucker for stories that include excerpts from made-up works of scholarly writing with real citations? Probably but I guess everyone's got to have their thing.)

1. "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole" by Isabel J. Kim

This is the one story in this whole post that I had before the ballot was announced, and like I said at the top, if I nominated anything, I nominated this. You can read my full review at the link, but I really enjoyed this a lot; a clever engagement with sf criticism's eternal Omelas debates, and beautifully told in its own way. I kind of think this is the obvious candidate to win (fandom does love its self-referential stuff), so obviously so that maybe I should put "Three Faces" in first just to give it an edge in a potential upset, but oh well, this story is that good.

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Overall Thoughts

Last year, I was excited that Best Novella was actually kind of diverse... but this year we're back to the same-old same-old of Tor Tor Tor. I mean, I'm part of the problem here (I don't nominate anything because I don't keep up with novellas) but it does make me grumpy. And not only is it so much Tor, but three of them are written by writers who have been finalists multiple previous times: this is Nghi Vo's fourth nomination, de Bodard's fourth, and Kingfisher's third, and at least two of them are follow-ups to previous finalists. (I have read conflicting information on whether Navigational Entanglements takes place in the same "Xuya Universe" as de Bodard's The Tea Master and the Detective.) If the point of sf&f is to take the reader to new worlds, it's not really happening here.

Similar problems with nominee diversity afflict the other two categories: of the twelve finalists in Best Novelette and Short Story, nearly half from Uncanny, who I think benefit from being freely available online and soliciting stories from Internet favorites. Usually there are a couple that make the Uncanny dominance worthwhile (e.g., I really enjoyed Kritzer's "The Year Without Sunshine" in 2024) but not this year. Thankfully there is a little bit of diversity at the edges: in contrast to Uncanny appearing on the ballot in these two categories a cumulative thirty-five times since 2016, this is only the fourth appearance by a Strange Horizons story since 2007... too bad I didn't like it more. We also have an original story from a single-author collection (I don't think this happens much) and the first appearance of a story from the once-dominant Asimov's since 2018. (Asimov's, admittedly, was the Tor/Uncanny of 1986 to 2010!)‡

All that said, maybe my real problem isn't a lack of nominee diversity so much as that the tastes of Uncanny editors Lynne M. and Michael Damian Thomas just aren't my tastes, as my top spots in Best Novelette and Best Short Story both went to Clarkesworld, and Clarkesworld has had at least twenty stories in those two categories since 2010. But, well, I'm always gushing about how much I like editor Neil Clarke. I'm guessing that whenever volume ten of Clarke's The Best Science Fiction of the Year comes out, I will find a lot more to my taste there.

I'll wrap this up by making my predictions, with the caveat that I have not been very plugged into the discourse this year, beyond reading the threads about Hugo finalists on r/Fantasy and Nicholas Whyte's blog posts, neither of whom I think is very representative. I'm guessing:

• something I ranked below "No Award" will win Best Novella (I am always disappointed by this category)
• Kritzer or Pinsker will win Best Novelette, with an outside chance that it's Leckie (voters love them, and to be fair, they are all good writers)
• Isabel J. Kim will win Best Short Story (the story is so very online, and sort of a meta-take on fandom discourse... plus actually quite good!)

* Well, actually five, since I also finished my last Lodestar finalist on June 7 and my last Best Graphic Story one on June 11. But those are other posts.

† After I wrote up my rankings, I read the discussion thread for "Marginalia" on r/Fantasy, which was pretty savage, and made me like the story less. I was kind of tempted to downgrade it after that, but laziness won out; and anyway, fundamentally I don't have a strong opinion between the bottom three in this category.

‡ Hm, I am starting to feel a blog post with charts and graphs coming on... 

Star Trek: Toward the Night by James Swallow

The most recent tie-in novel to the best of the Paramount+ Star Trek shows comes from James Swallow, who is probably my second favorite of the current working Star Trek novelists. So this is a combination I was particularly looking forward to, especially as I very much enjoyed the previous SNW novel, Asylum.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Toward the Night
by James Swallow

Published: 2025
Acquired: April 2025
Read: June 2025

Toward the Night is set during the second season (there is a bizarrely specific "Historian's Note" explaining this) and focuses on the Enterprise tracking down a distress signal from a Starfleet vessel lost a century ago, from the Federation's early day. (There are a number of callbacks to Enterprise, but also Star Trek Beyond; the lost ship is Freedom-class, just like the USS Franklin the crashed ship from a century ago that the Enterprises finds in that story!)

There's a certain breed of tie-in novel, though, that I find frustratingly disappointing. Now, I think writing tie-ins can be tricky—and this is only made even moreso when you're trying into an television program that is still ongoing. But ideally, what makes a tie-in novel worth reading is that it can approach the characters novelistically, that it can give them a different kind of depth than a tv show can. Tv shows can give depth, of course, but the novel can carry you into the thoughts of someone in a way no visual representation ever can. I think the best tie-in novels leave you feeling like you learned something about a character you didn't already know. The obvious way is to do this via backstory—that's what McCormack did in Asylum—but it's not the only way. Ideally, the character is put in situations you haven't see and you get to see them react. John Jackson Miller did this to good effect in what is essentially the zeroth SNW novel, The Enterprise War, by showing us the Enterprise crew in a situation we hadn't seen them in before.

The trap that Toward the Night falls into—though I don't think "trap" is a terribly fair word for it, because this isn't remotely a bad book—is that Swallow does have a great handle on all the characters. In terms of voice and action, Swallow does a great job across the board, in small moments and big. Pike is recognizably Anson Mount, there are some good moments of apt humor from Spock; in particular Ortegas and (my favorite) La'an get some threads, and they are who they ought to be from the show. But though the book has the potential to tell us something new about these characters, I found it didn't really hit that point. We learn about about Ortegas's backstory, which I appreciate; one of the characters on the crashed ship is in her family, long thought dead of course. But I didn't think we learned much about her as a person, something about how she thinks or acts that we didn't already know, even though it seems like the potential was there, of course.

It's well put together, of course; like I said, Swallow is good at capturing character voices. The basic scenario is strong (I want to rip it off for an STA scenario, which is always a good sign), and the action is interesting and well done. (I did find the resolution to one dilemma particularly obvious, though.) But ultimately it's frustrating because I think the elements are here for a slightly better book than we got.

We Are Now Firmly in the ChatGPT Era of Academic Writing

It seems unlikely that if you teach college writing, that you haven't been dealing with the impact of ChatGPT and other LLMs. I of course have had students using this next technology since Spring 2023. But the impact it's had on me and and my teaching is probably most starkly represented by this chart:

According to my syllabus policies, as well as our program policies, use of ChatGPT or similar technology is prohibited. Though I guess I can see how it might be useful in other courses, I don't see how it's useful in a writing course; my class (I would argue) is trying to use writing as a mode of thinking. We don't write to record what we already know, we write to come into the knowing of something.

The thing about ChatGPT use is that it's difficult to "prove" in some kind of "objective" sense—and this is the kind of thing academic integrity panels supposedly want. But the whole reason I am a professor of academic writing is that I supposedly have some kind of expertise in academic writing, and I do. It's an expertise honed by reading student writing for years, almost decades. I first taught an academic writing course in Fall 2008. Without methodically counting it all up, I would estimate that in that time I've taught sixty-five sections of first-year writing course, which means I've read the work of approximately thirteen hundred students, each of whom ought to write at a minimum of ten pages per semester, if we're going to be conservative. That means I've read at least (and certainly much more than) thirteen thousand pages of college-student papers in my life.

image generated, of course, by ChatGPT

You read a genre that much, you get to know it. I know what college students write like. What I'm reading now isn't it. But frustratingly, I don't know how much the academic integrity panel goes for "it just doesn't sound right" as evidence. A colleague of mine has suggested we should file more charges on this basis, though, and see what happens. Another colleague of mine has suggested that how college students write may be shifting as a result of ChatGPT, in that even if they're not actually using it your class, they read its output so much that it's influencing how they write. Now that's scary.

But anyway, clearly lots of them are using it. (Though, admittedly, some are clearly not! I have a lot of fondness for the crappy C paper now.)

The thing you can actually prove, though, is the veracity of sources. That is the basis on which all of my charges were filed this semester. Of my fourteen cases, I think three were about sources that did not exist. This, for me, means failure of the course. If you don't see that a basic part of research writing is that the sources you cite have to actually exist, then I don't know that you really belong in my class at all. I can't teach you this. Sure, use ChatGPT to find sources (in my personal experiments I have not found it to be very good at this, but I am sure it could be), but then make sure they are real! And of course, if you're summarizing fabricated sources on, say, an annotated bibliography, you are lying, because how could you have read a source that doesn't exist?

All of my other charges were about fabricated quotations from real sources, students claiming that direct quotations existed that did not actually exist. My institution requires that all academic integrity filings be accompanied by a formal meeting that is witness by a neutral faculty member; to make up for all the colleagues that had to witness mine, I witness a lot of other people's. This was the thing most of them saw as well. Frustratingly, a lot of students had this weird defense: that they didn't know quotation marks were reserved for direct quotations. One might tempted to believe this, except that very few students were making this mistake over a year ago, and though I think that the teaching of writing at the pre-college level has probably got worse since I started teaching in 2008, I don't believe that just a couple years ago, teachers stopped explaining what quotations marks are for.

So, the only explanation is that they are using ChatGPT to "find quotations"... but again, not confirming the existence of the quotations. Some of my students have admitted this when confronted, others have come up with not very compelling explanations. I have seen this across the board, in both my research writing class and in my text-based humanities course. (I can see why students might think I might not know that they made up a quotation from a source they found that I've never read; I don't see why they don't realize I won't catch them when they make up quotes from stories we all read together!)

Thankfully (I guess) it doesn't matter. At my institution, fabricated quotations or sources fall under the category of Deception and misrepresentation; I don't have to prove the fabrications come from anywhere in particular, I just have to prove they don't exist.

In my research writing course, fabrications in the final paper mean failing the final paper. It seems to me there's a basic parameter of the assignment you've failed to reach. And failing the final paper means failing the course. It seems to me there's something this course was supposed to teach you that you just didn't learn, and thus you need to take it again, if you can't write at least a D-level research paper by the end of an entire semester. In the past, I haven't had to enforce this policy very much, but I did at least three or four times this semester.

On top of all this, one has to remember—these are just the students I caught fabricating. There are also all the students using LLMs that I recognized but couldn't "prove," and thus just dinged them on points (I have become fond of marking assignments with a "0" and writing, "This is so vague an AI could have written it"), and then all the students who are actually "good" at using LLMs to write and turning in work that seems human-written... even when it's not. 

Even though ChatGPT has been around a couple years, it's clear that something is shifting in the way students use it. You can see that even just last semester, I only filed one charge (though I didn't teach research writing that time.) Many of my colleagues had similar experiences this semester in particular (though I don't think anyone filed as many charges as I did). As one of my colleagues has said, it seems like there's a shared ethos we used to assume the existence of that just doesn't exist anymore. And how can you teach people if that's the case? I can't teach someone that they want to be ethical.

So anyway, it's been a depressing semester. I even had two students file appeals that persisted beyond the end of the semester (and another just not respond to my communication attempts, which is for some reason an automatic appeal), which meant that it didn't stop even when the semester was over! But finally about two weeks ago, I heard about my last outstanding appeal.

I can't just keep doing everything the same way, clearly. But more on that in another post. 

Hugos 2025: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

I try to approach Hugo finalists with as few expectations as possible. If I don't know anything about a book going in, I try to keep that the case, so that the book can surprise me (for good or for ill) purely on its own terms. This was mostly true with The Ministry of Time, but I didn't quite manage it. One, I knew that some people on r/printSF didn't like it for being frivolous or lightweight, and, two, the book's own paratext gives that impression, with blurbs that say things like "An outrageously fun comedy" and "A delightfully audacious screwball comedy." Not that I don't like fun books or comedy books, I love them in fact... but I typically very much have not loved books that Hugo nominators think are fun comedies (e.g., Space Opera, Legends & Lattes, anything by John Scalzi), unless they're by T. Kingfisher.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

Originally published: 2024
Acquired: April 2025
Read: May 2025

Well, the blurbs are all wrong because it's not a comedy, screwball or otherwise. Bizarrely wrong. Sure, there are some good jokes—indeed, there's one thoroughly excellent one that had be guffawing—but a book can have lots of jokes and still not be a comedy, and I certainly wouldn't read this if you were looking for one. In fact, if it owes anything to any genre outside of science fiction itself, it's clearly spy fiction; the title is a tip of the hat to Graham Greene. (I haven't actually got to The Ministry of Fear yet, but I have read a lot of his other stuff, and I've never read one I haven't liked.)

I don't want to say too much about the book here because I myself think I benefited from not knowing much about it, but the basic premise is that in the near future, the UK government has the technology to pull people out of the past, and they're testing it by pulling out people who are known to have died but their bodies weren't found, thus ensuring no timeline changes; the narrator is the "bridge" assigned to help polar explorer Graham Gore acclimate to the present day. (Gore is a real person, who died trying to find the Northwest Passage; so too did everyone else on his expedition.) The narrator used to work as a translator for the UK government, dealing with refugees, and is half-Cambodian herself.

It's a time-travel story, of course, but it's also a story about translation, about resettlement, told through an sfnal lens, about how we translate ourselves, about how we assimilate to other societies. It's about the past and how its attitudes are always with us—even into the future. I found it astutely observed, lots of great character-focused scenes that were beautifully told. At the time that I read it, I had three more finalist for Best Novel to read, but it was very clear to me this would be the one to beat. This is science fiction doing what only that genre can do, but doing it in a way that isn't generic at all. It's not a book everyone would love, I think, but it's a book I would love—it's not a big part of the book, but I loved how it interrogated our ideas about what it actually means to be "Victorian."

Two quibbles, one the author's fault, one not. No one in 1847 would ever use the phrase "career scientist" (p. 139). The term "scientist" was not yet widespread, and you certainly couldn't have a career as one, in fact you were much more likely to have the opposite! My second is that the note on p. 346 talks about the included illustrations, sketched by the actual Graham Gore... but my 2025 Sceptre paperback has no illustrations! I assume they were in the original hardcover edition. If you're gonna take them out, then make sure you also take out the note discussing them, guys.

Showcase Presents Wildcat by Eddie Berganza, Nick Gnazzo, and Ray Kryssing / Green Lantern / The Flash: Faster Friends by Ron Marz, Val Semeiks, Chip Wallace, et al.

From June 2020 to December 2023, I chronicled the history of the Justice Society in fifty installments. And then, at last, I was done!

Or was I? The nature of these projects I undertake is you can always discover there was some relevant comic you didn't know about at the time. Such was the case when a friendly commenter named Drew popped up to tell me that, after I'd bemoaned Geoff Johns forgetting about the brother of Yolanda "Wildcat" Montez, the character made an appearance in an issue of Showcase '94. Well, it looks like I have more comics to read, so this series is (much like the JSA itself) called back into action again after a long gap. Since December 2023, I've discovered a few different JSA-adjacent comics, so this will be the first of, I think, three new installments.

So, the second Wildcat, Yolanda, was created by Roy and Dann Thomas in Infinity, Inc. (see item #10 below), but like a lot of DC's legacy characters, basically went into limbo once the series was over. And then was brutally killed off to prove the situation was serious... in an issue of freakin' Eclipso! Gotta put that old white guy back into his rightful position, of course. 

from Showcase '94 #8

But as Drew told me, there was a follow-up to all this in an issue of Showcase, DC's anthology series. In this story, Ted Grant, the original Wildcat, goes to Yolanda's funeral... only to find out that her parents, desperate with mourning, have hired a witch doctor to bring their daughter back to life! It's a pretty simple story: you might not be surprised to find out that Yolanda comes back as a mindless monster, and Ted defeats it. It is, after all, just ten pages. I didn't much care for the art, but it was nice to see that Roy and Dann Thomas's original conception of Yolanda wasn't totally forgotten; her brother is in the story. (For some reason, Geoff Johns later makes up a cousin for Yolanda rather than just use the brother during his JSA run; see item #34 below.)

from Green Lantern/Flash: Faster Friends #1

I also read Faster Friends, a two-issue miniseries from 1997 about Green Lantern (then Kyle Rayner) teaming up with the Flash (then Wally West) in order to deal with the consequences of an early adventure of a different Green Lantern (then Alan Scott) and Flash (then Jay Garrick). We get some flashbacks to that original adventure, the first time Green Lantern and Flash ever teamed up, back in 1940, as the present-day characters work alongside their namesakes and each other.

I think the idea here is good but I also think there's too much going on for the story's ninety-six pages... or maybe there's too much action, which pushes out the stuff it seems to me the story should actually be about! The first issue in particular is a bit of a nothingburger; we have a flashback of Jay and Alan teaming up but it goes so quickly it doesn't really give us any insight into their personalities. In the present, I think we're supposed to see a sort of rivalry between Wally and Kyle, but it's more like something we're told happened in other stories than something we actually see in this one.

from Flash/Green Lantern: Faster Friends #2

The second issue has more potential but again is trying to do too much: Jay is terminally ill, and Kyle and Wally go through a teleporter that mixes them up a bit. But Jay's impending death is a bit too much to deal with in a story like this, and of course it's all resolved by the end of the story (albeit in a clever way). One might think that Wally and Kyle being scrambled up would yield some good drama or character insight, but basically all it means is that each is wearing the wrong costume and seems to know stuff the other should, and then it gets fixed. There's no meaningful character arc: one expects more from Mark Waid, to be honest.

As far as this project goes, it's always fun to see Jay and Alan... but this is from the period (see #23 below) when Alan was deaged and went by "Sentinel." Such things happen in superhero comics, I suppose, but one doesn't have to like them. Bad creative decision, though again, Waid and Augustyn do an interesting thing with it, at least. 

(I read the story collected in a DC Comics Presents issue from 2011, but I think it will end up being collected whenever DC does The Flash by Mark Waid Omnibus, Volume Three, which I will buy when it comes out, so that may have been pointless.) 

Wildcat: "Brujas Y Gatos" originally appeared in issue #8 of Showcase '94 (July 1994). The story was written by Eddie Berganza, pencilled by Nick Gnazzo, inked by Ray Kryssing, colored by Suzanne Bourdages, lettered by Bill Oakley, and edited by Neal Ponzer.  

 

Green Lantern/Flash: Faster Friends #1 and Flash/Green Lantern: Faster Friends #2 originally appeared in 1997. The story was written by Ron Marz (#1) and Mark Waid & Brian Augustyn (#2); pencilled by Bart Sears, Andy Smith, Jeff Johnson, Ron Lim, & Tom Grindberg (#1) and Val Semeiks (#2); inked by Mark Pennington & Bill Anderson (#1) and Chip Wallace (#2); colored by John Kalisz (#1) and Ian Laughlin (#2); lettered by Chris Eliopoulos (#1) and Albert DeGuzman (#2); and edited by Kevin Dooley (#1) and Paul Kupperberg (#2). It was reprinted in DC Comics Presents: Green Lantern / The Flash: Faster Friends #1 (Jan. 2011).

 

This post is the fifty-first in an improbably long series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers Impulse: Bart Saves the Universe. Previous installments are listed below:

Star Trek Adventures: Launching My New Mini-Campaign—and Writing My Own Episode for the First Time!

Previously on this blog, I've chronicled my Star Trek Adventures mini-campaign from summer 2024. Scroll to the bottom of this post to see the links. As discussed there, in episode 3, my player captain gave me a gift as GM. In that episode, the characters captured a Haradin pirate ship that had attacked a Klingon convoy they'd been assigned to escort. Throughout the episode, the captain, Rucot (played by Ryan) had faced prejudice from the Klingon captain, Akul, because he's a Cardassian (on an exchange program in Starfleet, to foster peace after the Dominion War); at the end of the episode, Rucot gifted the Klingons with the ship they captured. "What about the crew?" I asked. "Oh, I hand over them, too," he said. "You know how the Klingons treat their prisoners, right?" "I'm a Cardassian—they're all guilty."

This seemed like the kind of thing that could have interesting repercussions. I began episode 4 just with a quick comment from Rucot in the captain's log that "Starfleet Command has raised questions about my handling of the Haradin prisoners," but that that was to the side because of a crisis the ship was in. Then, at the end of the episode, once everything was resolved, I passed this note to Debi, who plays the executive officer, T'Cant: "You have received new orders from Starfleet Command—you are to relieve Rucot of command and take him back to Deep Space 10 for questioning over his handling of the Haradin prisoners."

A cliffhanger ending for the mini-campaign... and hopefully to entice people back for another one in 2025! 

Most of my players were indeed available to return for 2025:

• Ryan as Rucot, captain
• Debi as T'Cant, executive officer
• Kenyon as Nevan Jones, chief engineer
• Claire as Mooria Salmang, flight controller
• Austin as Frector, chief of security
• (plus our pinch hitter) Toren as Tronnen, counselor

To get us back up to seven, I reached out to two old players from my previous campaign, Cari and Andy. In my lower decks campaign, they had played Jor Lena from security and Gurg bim Vurg from medicine, and they had reprised those roles in my Christmas one-off. They were up to do so again. Andy as Gurg could step quite naturally into the vacant chief medical officer position... but now we had two security officers!

Deep Space 10
(image from the Shackleton Expanse Campaign Guide)

We discussed this at the new campaign's session zero, and what Cari and Austin ended up deciding is that Jor would come aboard as the Diversitas's new chief of security, while Frector would transfer into Starfleet Intelligence. (They had worked for SI during the Dominion War according to their backstory, so it would be natural enough.) 

Our other gap was thus science officer. Debi had struggled a bit with T'Cant in the previous season, having built her as a command character with no particular specialization... sort of okay at everything but great at nothing. I suggested that T'Cant could fulfill the position of acting science officer, and she could totally rebuild the character with that in mind, which she was into.

So all this meant I needed to open the new mini-campaign with an episode that 1) accounted for all this crew shuffling, and 2) followed up on the cliffhanger ending. Was there going to be a published mission that did this? Of course not! So, for the first time in four years of GMing STA, I was going to have to write my own episode!*

I've already shared my second attempt to do this (see "The Word for Word Is Word" at the bottom of this post), but in this case, I won't share the actual episode because it's so specific to the circumstances of my campaign and my crew it wouldn't really make sense for anyone else to use it. I ended up writing the episode's acts as I went along, so I'll write it up here session-by-session, instead of my usual "Planning the Mission"/"Playing the Mission" structure for STA posts. 

Act I: Suspicious of Where Your Loyalties Lay

"Acting Captain’s Log, Stardate 53853.4, Chief Engineer Nevan Jones reporting. Though we have been lauded for our handling of the black hole that threatened to devour the sector, there have been many changes since the Diversitas arrived at Deep Space 10 to offload the personnel we rescued from Abyss Station. Our medical officer and science officer have both been summoned to Starfleet Command to report on their unusual experiences with the advanced intelligences we found in the Dyson swarm. Commander T’Cant has been assigned to some kind of training seminar. 
     "Most significantly, Captain Rucot has been relieved of command and confined to quarters pending an official Starfleet inquiry.…"

Of my seven regulars, Debi was going to be out this week, but that was easy to work around—as the log entry above notes, I just said T'Cant was at the training to become acting science officer.

(a ChatGPT rendering of a painting from the
Command Division Supplmental Rulebook)

I began the episode with the players at Deep Space 10, meeting with Commodore August Hebert, the station's commanding officer;† they had visited the station and met him in episode 3, where I had established him as someone known to T'Cant (they had both previously served in Starfleet Intelligence), but also someone continually committing microaggressions against Rucot. In this episode, Hebert seemed eager to get Rucot—now relieved of command and confined to quarters—to an inquiry. To do that, he brought in an investigator: Lieutenant Jor Lena. I also established a set of other characters populating DS10, all potential lines of inquiry:

•  Lt. Commander Mazio Sanna, an Intelligence analyst
• Chief Susu Webb, head of communications
• Consul Vrossaan sh'Chiaqis, Federation Diplomatic Corps 
• Gregin Shrek, Yridian bartender and information trader

(Thanks much to B. C. Holmes's STA character creator, which did a lot to help me come up with these NPCs.) 

At our session zero, we'd discussed doing more character stuff, and more character conflict. So for our first scene, we had a big emphasis on that: how does Rucot think about what he did? what do the other characters think about it? what does Jor do to investigate? The players did a good job with this stuff; Cari as Jor told Rucot she'd be watching him, and even covertly bugged his communications. She also ran into Claire as Mooria in the station bar—the two being old friends from when they served together during my first STA campaign.

Meanwhile, I established that Gurg was assistant chief medical officer on DS10 but feeling unfulfilled. Processing the evacuees from Abyss Station the Diversitas had rescued in episode 4, he learned some hints about the Diversitas's encounter with the uploaded consciousnesses called the "Engineers"; Gurg has always had an interested in cyborgs, because he's obsessed with the pursuit and sharing of knowledge. Gurg talked to the evacuees, and learned enough to want to find his way on board the Diversitas. 

(image rendered by ChatGPT)

While Jor and Gurg did this, the Diversitas characters followed up their own leads. Specifically, they talked to both Mazio, the SI analyst, and Chief Webb, the comms technician; the latter gave them a hint that something suspicious was up, that originally investigators from the Starfleet JAG office had been called in, but then those orders had been cancelled and Jor Lena summoned instead. They were able to get Webb's cooperation by helping her lock down a fault she hadn't had time to handle, one that was on the outside of the station and required an EV walk, but she hadn't had time to do it. On doing this, Nevan discovered a chip had been implanted in the communications system, but it shorted out as soon as he touched it. (This is an idea I ripped off from the published STA module "A Plague of Arias," which my first campaign fizzled out in the middle of.) The chip turned out to be of SI manufacture—who had planted it?

Frector showed the chip to Mazio, who denied all knowledge of it; the two went to Shrek. Shrek handed over to Frector a letter:

During the Dominion War, the USS Diversitas participated in the Battle of Eldorado Omega. Hundreds of innocent civilian scientists died, their only crime being the location of their facility. The commander of the Dominion forces in that battle? Just one Gul Rucot. Has he ever mentioned this? 

Gregin Shrek's bar on Deep Space 10
(image rendered by Flux)

This was a reference to our Christmas flashback episode (see special #1 below), where I'd done a story about the Diversitas during the Dominion War, and in a stinger at the end, established that the commander of the Cardassian ships chasing them was Rucot. The note from Shrek was a bit misleadingly worded (Rucot commanded the ships chasing them down at the end, not the main force that tried to obliterate the station), but technically accurate. Nevan had been aboard the Diversitas at the time, and Kenyon did a good job role-playing it; Nevan was thrown by this reminder of his darkest day, and no longer was quite as full-blooded in his attempt to defend Rucot.

For this session, I imposed a real-time limitation: the preliminary inquest would be at the episode's end, and thus they players had a finite amount of real time to do their investigating. The inquest was the last thirty minutes or so of the episode, as Commodore Hebert was clearly determined to railroad Rucot. There were some good speeches, particularly from Jor—and thankfully the characters cottoned onto the fact that even though this whole inquiry was about the Haradin prisoners, no one actually knew how the prisoners were being treated! So Jor demanded that she be allowed to investigate the status of the prisoners on Outpost SE-119 firsthand. The session ended with the commodore reluctantly authorizing the Diversitas to go to SE-119—which is what I hoped for.

Gurg ran into his old friend Jor on DS10, and convinced her to appoint him deputy investigator so that he could get aboard the Diversitas to investigate the rumors he'd heard. ("You make a Cardassian captain, of course he's going to commit a war crime; I don't know what you're all so upset about.")

(image rendered by ChatGPT)

Claire and Austin were going to miss the second session, so at the end, I also had Mazio from SI recruit them to run an op, one whose full nature and purpose would be revealed in the subsequent session.

Act II: We're Not Worrying about the Optics

“Acting Captain’s Log, Stardate 53854.0, Commander T’Cant reporting. My days at the training seminar proved instructive. Apparently, staffing shortages mean the Diversitas cannot be supplied with a replacement science officer at present, and so I have been cross-trained to double as science officer.
    “Upon my return to Deep Space 10, I have discovered that Commodore Hebert has authorized the Diversitas to proceed to the Klingon station SE-119 to discover the disposition of the Haradin prisoners. I have been surprised by what the crew has told me of the past day on the station. The Hebert I knew from before the war was an efficient but fair officer…”

With two players out, we were joined by Ryan and Debi's son Toren, who plays the Diversitas's Klingon counselor. 

Not only was this the first time I wrote my own episode from scratch, but I also took the approach of just writing it out one session at a time; with a prewritten one, you are of course given the whole episode at once. I did have vague idea of where I thought it should all go, of course, but this also let me be more genuinely reactive to player choices.

Consul Vrossaan
(rendered by ChatGPT,
based on a cosplay photo)

Based on how some stuff in the first session went, I had the second open with Jor and (the recently returned) T'Cant meeting with Consul Vrossaan, the Federation diplomat they hadn't ever got around to in the first session. Vrossaan was able to deliver some exposition about the Haradin: they had been disunified, but were becoming more unified again, but in a way the Federation was worried around, and the treatment of the Haradin prisoners was becoming a cause celebre even among those not affiliated with the pirates. Vrossaan didn't just want to discover the status of the prisoners, but wanted them brought back if possible. She also iterated that Jor was responsible for the actions of Captain Rucot.

We had time for some good investigation and roleplaying while the Diversitas travelled to SE-119: talking about the note from Shrek, looking into the origins of the SI chip, investigating Hebert. They discovered that Hebert had left Intelligence after the war; during the war, his entire analysis unit had been overrun by the Obsidian Order despite being well behind the lines. The going theory was that Hebert was prejudiced against the Cardassians because of what happened to him during the war.

Once they got there, they had to persuade the Klingons to let them aboard; fortunately, the station was still suffering malfunctions due to the subspace anomalies they'd struggled with back in episode three, lingering aftereffects from the black hole they'd dealt with in #4. Thus, alongside the social conflict, there'd be some Engineering and Science stuff for Nevan and T'Cant to do. Most of the players beamed over (except Rucot, of course), including Tronnen... only Tronnen had a preexisting beef with Captain Akul, commander of SE-119 from when he defeated Akul at a dance challenge back in episode three. Akul challenged Tronnen and alas, Toren rolled really badly, including getting a Complication; Tronnen had to go back to the Diversitas, and the first couple social challenges were harder because the Klingons didn't trust the Federation for bringing Tronnen over.

Haradin prisoners on Outpost SE-119
(image rendered by ChatGPT)

But they did good at the Engineering Tasks, repairing the station, and thus gaining access to the prisoners in exchange. This is when a late Austin made it, and I established that Frector had actually been covertly inserted among the Haradin prisoners as part of a fact-finding mission:

• Frector has been surgically altered to resemble a Haradin and covertly beamed aboard Outpost SE-119 during a prisoner transfer. (Mooria did some amazing flying in a stealth shuttle!)
• Starfleet Intelligence wants her to figure out what she can about the Haradin:
• What is the “collapse” of Harad?
• Who “invaded” Harad?
• What even is “Harad” or how can it mean “universe”?

We didn't have a lot of time at this point, so some stuff I thought I might do with Frector insinuating herself into the Haradin, we didn't do. Instead, Austin had Frector contribute from their angle, helping warm up the "other" Haradin to Starfleet.

Esha Vortan, a friendly Haradin pirate
(image rendered by ChatGPT)

The Haradin were a low-key presence in our first campaign; episode one took place on one of their colonies, and the players battled some Haradin pirates in episode three. In that episode, they began to learn there was something weird about the Haradin, in that the Haradin insist that Harad was invaded—but also act baffled when Starfleet asks them where Harad is or who invaded it ("how can you not know?"). Thankfully, this concept seems to be engaging them, and here they asked some questions... but didn't get too far, except to learn that 1) the Haradin were surprisingly resistant to intimidation by the Klingons, and 2) they kept talking about their leader, General Zotabia. The Klingons were frustrated, but it turned out the worst that had happened to the Haradin was a little malnutrition and a few zaps with painsticks.

My players being prone to far-out plans, they decided to offer for T'Cant to mind-meld with a Haradin prisoner, and even managed to persuade one to do it. The mind-meld succeeded... but also failed as T'Cant was zapped, and the players discovered they have chips in their brains! But more on that next time.

Captain Beshlor, Haradin pirate
(image by ChatGPT)

At the end, the players had to go to Captain Akul to ask for the prisoners... but he only wanted to speak to Rucot. An idea I had been pushing across both episodes from a variety of perspective was if Rucot was genuinely remorseful about what he'd done, or just sorry he was in trouble. But if he was sorry he was in trouble, did that make sense? A Cardassian, after all, would know all who were accused by the state were guilty! To persuade Akul, Ryan played on his ego and his desire for honorable battle—but Akul wanted to know if Rucot was honorable. When Rucot argued regulations were the reason he needed to get the prisoners back, Akul sneered and said a man of honor acted out of principles: what were Rucot's? This forced Ryan to articulate—yes he did believe people had the right to a fair trial. Aha! A D5 Task, and Akul was willing to hand over the prisoners.

Act III: A Holiday for Secret Cops

“Acting Captain’s Log, Stardate 53855.5, Commander T’Cant reporting. The Diversitas is returning to Deep Space 10, the Haradin prisoners now in our custody. Our report to DS10 has received a formal acknowledgement, but that is it. Hopefully we are able to make some progress with our understanding of the Haradin…”

Going into the third session, I was worried. Was it too obvious that Hebert was a bad 'un? On the drive there, I contemplated making the villain either Mazio or Webb, either of whom I thought could plausibly be it. But I worried that I'd set things up a certain way, and fifteen minutes ahead of time was not the time to make the change!

We did some more Haradin stuff on the way back to DS10; the players learned some hints about the devices in their heads and about how the Haradin perceive outsiders. The meat of the episode, though, was the very long second scene—when the players arrived at DS10, Mazio arrested Rucot on suspicion of being an Obsidian Order agent!

(screencap from TNG: "Birthright, Part I," 
courtesy Memory Alpha)

His evidence? After the Diversitas left, Chief Webb went out to see the tampered panel for herself... and found that the SI chip had been replaced by one of Obsidian Order manufacture... complete with Rucot's DNA! Mazio, who'd I'd established as talented but also eager for promotion, had seized on this as his big break. He'd also been pretty complimentary to Frector, but now he was a bit condescending about how she'd missed that her CO was an Obsidian Order agent!

Now the players needed to investigate exactly how all this had happened, because Mazio certainly wasn't doing his due diligence. Frector went to confront Mazio, Nevan and Frector hit up Webb again and got some details, Jor talked to Commodore Hebert and got sneered at a bit (basically Hebert assumed she would do anything to get Rucot because she's a Bajoran), Jor and Frector teamed up to talk to Shrek in the station bar, Nevan and T'Cant scanned the station. Nevan and T'Cant found there was a Cardassian masking themselves on the station, while Frector and Jor learned it was a Cardassian who had given Shrek that damning note.

Jor and Frector managed to find an EV suit that had been hidden away... and within it, a mix of DNA traces: Cardassian and human, all muddled up. Specifically, Hebert's. Could the Obsidian Order have replaced him during the war?

(That some other Cardassians would have it out for Rucot was an idea I'd had from the beginning of thinking about this episode; the backstory Ryan wrote for Rucot indicated that he's the face of a movement of younger Cardassian devoted to peace. It seemed interesting to me to have this be an extra complicating factor in everything that was going on, but it took me a long time to hit on the idea of making Hebert an agent of the Obsidian Order, pulling everything together.)

Gurg whipped up a hypospray that would force a Cardassian in disguise to revert. They decided that for maximum drama, they should do this at the hearing... then saner heads prevailed, and they were like, "No, we should call Starfleet." But obviously maximum drama was desired! So I spent 2 Threat to establish that sudden, inexplicable ion storms made contacting Starfleet impossible.‡ Jor went back to Hebert and claimed she had damning evidence against Rucot; he scheduled the hearing for right away.

hearing room on Deep Space 10
(image rendered by Flux)

At the hearing, Hebert asked Jor for her evidence, and she began talking about the suit. A miscommunication between the players caused Cari to misjudge the plan; others had expected her to just hypo the commodore. He knew where this was going, so I spent 2 Threat to have him activate a preset program, beaming out.

This began what I had planned as the climax of the episode:

They will need to chase Hebert down: This is a Magnitude 6 Extended Task, with a base Difficulty of 6, Work Track 35. Each player can contribute only once (and can assist once), based on what they would do to hunt him down. 

They did some good plotting and planning, using their Talents and previously established Advantages, and Determination and such. T'Cant begin by using her Determination and her Focus in Computers to analyze the program, narrowing down Hebert's destination to the launch bay. With one breakthrough, it was now Difficulty 5. Then Frector spent her Determination to initiate station lockdown; she has the value "Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better," which worked nicely to show off to Mazio, who she'd out-thought; Austin also used one of Frector's Talents (Intelligence Agent) to decrease the Difficulty to 4.

Next, Nevan used a scan to pinpoint exactly where in the launch bay Hebert was, arguing an Advantage they'd set up earlier to scan for Cardassians would make this easier; I agreed. Nevan also has a Talent that gives him extra Work on Engineering Extended Tasks, so he rolled 11! Now it was Difficulty 3; Mooria used her Small Craft Focus to force open the shuttle that Hebert was in. Her success filled the Work track, so she scored two Breakthroughs. So now it was all down to Jor Lena to take down Hebert with a Fitness + Security Task.

Hebert unmasked!
(image rendered by ChatGPT...
which struggled with Cardassians)

I like Extended Tasks a lot, to me they're the signature mechanic of STA (and losing the Challenge dice from them is why I refuse to switch over to 2E) but one thing I do struggle with is that they get easier as they go, which can make succeeding on them kind of an anticlimax. But one thing that occurred to me when planning this one is that I could spend Threat to make a Complication and increase the Difficulty. I had seven Threat left, so I spent six to increase the Difficulty by three... back up to a D4 Task! A suitably difficult climax, but of course Jor succeeded. I was really happy with how this Extended Task played out, and I think the players enjoyed the intensity. They had a little wiggle room... but not a lot!

We were running out of time, so I did some quick exposition. Hebert had actually only been replaced a couple weeks prior, right after Rucot had done the thing with the prisoners. The Obsidian Order had seen the opportunity to use this to discredit the peace movement on Cardassia of which Rucot is a principal member. I think the players breathed a sigh of relief when Hebert actually did turn out to be a Cardassian.

Then a real JAG officer showed up for a legitimate inquiry. Rucot and Jor both gave speeches, and the JAG officer (Captain Morox) was suitably impressed... but... "What remains incontrovertible is, that despite however else everything turned out, Captain Rucot did violate Starfleet guidelines regarding the ethical treatment of prisoners when he transferred the alleged pirates to the Klingons."

General Zotabia
(image rendered by ChatGPT)

After that a few things happened, all obviously to set up future developments:

• Consul Vrossaan asked if she could introduce a new witness, who'd just arrived at the station under a flag of diplomatic immunity.
• This turned out to be the leader of the Haradin pirates, the villain of episodes one and three, GENERAL ZOTABIA! 
• “My dear Captain Rucot—I thank you so much for your assistance in liberating these prisoners. The Haradin people are eternally grateful to you. I trust that—in the interests of peace—the Federation will not be pursuing disciplinary action against you. We Haradin would hate to see the man who brought back our lost men and women put on trial.” 
• The players were suspicious: what did he really want?
• But Vrossaan talked to Morox, and he cancelled the inquiry.

In one last scene, Morox indicated the JAG office would be carefully watching Rucot from now on, and Mazio asked if Frector could transfer to Starfleet Intelligence and continue to investigate the Haradin; Frector agreed, on the basis that she could stay on the Diversitas. Morox then asked if Rucot had any ideas for a replacement security chief and medical officer... but of course he did.

(Austin had pitched to me a great idea for a scene, where Frector challenges Jor to darts to convince her to come aboard the Diveristas, but he demurred. It was after 10pm and he was jet-lagged!) 

Overall Thoughts

conference room on Deep Space 10
(image rendered by Flux)

So that was it! I very much enjoyed it, and making it up on the fly was a bit more nerve-wracking but also satisfying and responsive. Players seemed to enjoy this one a lot, particularly the twists about the letter and the Obsidian Order being behind it all. (I had seeded some clues about the latter, but the players missed them all!) I was a bit worried about all the NPCs, but it seemed to go okay. As you can see in this post, I try to provide a visual of each one to anchor them in the players' minds.

My players particularly loved that in every scene with Shrek, I was unable to maintain the accent I'd established, and so had a completely new one. (Irish, Indian, and Italian all appeared. I had originally been aiming for cockney! I do a lot of accents when reading aloud to my kids, but I have discovered it is hard to stabilize an accent and improvise dialogue!)

Still, though... no game of darts! Jor will never get to use her Focus. 

Star Trek: Ekumene:

1. "Patagon in Parallax"
2. "A Terrible Autonomy"
3. "Stinks of Slumber and Disaster"
4. "Angels in Your Angles"
5. "A Thousand Miles from Day or Night" 
6. "When I Get through This Part…"

Specials:

1. "Hear All the Bombs Fade Away"
2. "The Word for Word Is Word" 

* While technically I wrote this episode myself, I'm deeply indebted to the work of Christopher L. Bennett (whose module "Hard Rock Catastrophe" gave me General Zotabia and his nationalist movement) and Jim Johnson (whose module "Convoy SE-119" gave me Captain Akul and the pirates). This is a pretty close sequel to both stories, albeit through the filter of me replacing the original modules' Saurians and Orions (respectively) with the Haradin.

† Commodore August Hebert is my take on Admiral April Hebert, the commander of Narenda Station from STA's Living Campaign. I made the character the CO of a starbase the players would visit when I intended to run "A Plague of Arias" and "Convoy SE-119" in my first STA campaign, but didn't actually finish the first or do the second when the campaign fizzled out. I don't remember why I changed her gender anymore, but I kept the changes when I finally ran "Convoy SE-119" in my 2024 campaign.

‡ Later, I revealed this was really just jamming from an Obsidian Order relay satellite.