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

The 2025 Hugo Awards: Thoughts on the Final Results

As always, I end my Hugo posts for the year with my takes on what won. Although, this year they haven't released the full stats yet, so it's possible I'll do another once we get the nominating data, and I can tell to what extent deserving finalists were robbed... or to what extent we were spared even worse finalists! I have also been thinking of bringing back my post on "No Award" that I did a couple times. We'll see!

Last year, I wrote that "[n]ext year's Worldcon is the U.S., so an evening ceremony will actually be in the evening, making it a lot easier for me to tune in." What I had forgotten about is that Worldcon would be in Seattle, so an 8:30 ceremony would be at 11:30. I didn't make it! I did, however, wake up at 5:00am because one of my kids crawled into bed with me and I couldn't get back to sleep, so I immediately checked my phone for the results, and texted my friend who was a finalist... not thinking about the fact that for him it was 2:00am at that point... and it had probably been a very long night! I did pull up the livestream that day, but I just jumped around until I found the bit where Jordan gave his speech.

So what did I think of the results? How did they compared to my own votes? I will say, I did really like the fancy graphs they included in the stats packet to demonstrate how the instant runoff works in ranked choice voting. They haven't released, however, the runs for placements lower than first yet, so I don't know how anything I ranked first ultimately fared.

EDIT on 12 SEPT. 2025: I added in the final rankings for each thing I ranked first, and occasionally some commentary. 

Category	What Won	Where I Ranked It	What I Ranked #1	Where It Placed
Best Novel	The Tainted Cup	2nd	The Ministry of Time	6th
I ranked this second, and actually predicted it would win: "my guess is Tainted Cup, which I think was a very solid book and thus the kind of book a lot of people might rank in second, allowing it to win on transfers." Well, I was right that it won, but if you look at the data, it had a commanding lead from the beginning, which it held onto throughout, so I was wrong about what the reason would be. My beloved Ministry of Time got the fifth-most amount of first-round votes... but it's hardly surprising. What did surprise me is there wasn't more of a direct relationship between the two finalists by Adrian Tchaikovsky; when his Service Model was eliminated, the votes did not all transfer to Alien Clay. In a real crime against literature, Ministry of Time finished in last. It received more first-place votes than Service Model, but did quite poorly on transfers. Clearly a polarizing work!
Best Novella	The Tusks of Extinction	1st	The Tusks of Extinction	1st
Sometimes I am pleasantly surprised by the Hugo electorate. My prediction was that "something I ranked below 'No Award' will win Best Novella"! The Tusks of Extinction, though, had a small lead from the first round that it continually built upon via transfers, even though usually some other work got more transfers every time something was eliminated. Particularly, it picked up a lot of transfers from The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain (this makes sense, because that was the other actually good finalist). In the last round, the elimination of The Butcher of the Forest gave more transfers to What Feasts at Night than Tusks, but this wasn't enough to put What Feasts over the edge.
Best Novelette	"The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea"	3rd	"The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video"	5th
I found Best Novelette weak this year, and I predicted "Kritzer or Pinsker will win Best Novelette, with an outside chance that it's Leckie"... and yes, it was Kritzer! (With Leckie in second Pinsker in third.) Thus I'm not too disappointed even though these creepypasta-style stories by Kritzer and Pinsker that keep getting nominated aren't really my bag.
Best Short Story	"Stitched to Skin Like Family Is"	6th	"Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole"	2nd
Oof. Interestingly, both "Stitched to Skin" and "Omelas Hole" got 279 first-place votes in the first round... but as lower-ranked finalists were eliminated, "Omelas Hole" picked up noticeably fewer transfers almost every time. Evidently it was quite polarizing! It wasn't that polarizing, though, because it still managed to finish in second. Kowal's "Marginalia" received the third-most amount of first-place votes, but was eliminated sooner than you might expect; it ended up placing in fourth, so also a little polarizing. Alas, "Three Faces of a Beheading," which I put in second, finished in sixth.
Best Graphic Story or Comic	Star Trek: Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way	1st	Star Trek: Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way	1st
Finally, a work of actual quality wins Best Graphic Story! This basically crushed it, with a commanding lead it never lost. The Deep Dark was eliminated last, so clearly the voters had some sense this year; it ultimately finished third.
Best Related Work	Speculative Whiteness	1st	Speculative Whiteness	1st
I did not imagine this! I predicted my friend Jordan would lose to one of the works about the Hugo Awards themselves, but instead he won!! I'm thanked in the Acknowledgements to this book, so it's basically like I won a Hugo, of course. (Where's my rocket???) If you look at the stats, Speculative Whiteness actually starts with the third-most votes in the first round, and indeed, one of the works about the Hugos themselves is in second (and briefly in first, during round two). But when the other "actually a book" finalist (Track Changes) is eliminated, Speculative Whiteness slides into the lead; "actually a book" voters for Best Related Work, unite! I didn't expect the YouTube video about the Star Wars hotel to do so well, though.
Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)	Dune, Part Two	5th	Flow	2nd
At least it wasn't Mad Max, I guess. My prediction that part two of Dune would not have the same oomph as part one was totally wrong. I will predict now that Dune, Part Three will win in 2027. Flow was robbed! (Actually, it did quite well, finishing in second.) Alas, I Saw the TV Glow came in last, but I'm not surprised.
Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)	Star Trek: Lower Decks: "The New Next Generation"	4th	Doctor Who: "Dot and Bubble"	6th
Last year, I wrote that, "Someday Star Trek will win again!" but I didn't think it would be this year. This felt more like a win for the cumulative quality of Lower Decks rather than its somewhat mediocre finale per se. I will need to update my post about the history of Star Trek at the Hugo Awards now! It's a bit nuts to me that the Fallout finale beat out "Dot and Bubble" by four votes.
Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book	Sheine Lende	2nd	Heavenly Tyrant	3rd
My top two choices were the top two finalists! Nice! Interestingly, Heavenly Tyrant had more first-round votes than any other finalist, but picked up very little on transfers as other finalists were eliminated. It was in a very tight race with Sheine Lende until the very end! It ended up placing third, beat out by Maid and Crocodile, which I didn't even read.

As always, I had a good time even when reading bad books, and am thankful for the exposure to good work I otherwise would not have come across: this year that's Agatha All Along, "The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video," The Deep Dark, Flow, I Saw the TV Glow, The Ministry of Time, The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, The Tainted Cup, "Three Faces of a Beheading," Track Changes, and The Tusks of Extinction. Some of these works I had heard of but probably never gotten around to; many I had never even heard of! In particular, I look forward to reading the sequel to The Tainted Cup when it hits paperback, and to reading more short fiction from Thomas Ha, Isabel J. Kim, and Arkady Martine.

Look forward to more posts about the 2025 awards, I think, once more data is available, and an update to my Star Trek and the Hugos post. But this is it for now!

Hugos 1967: The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein

Every year after I vote in the Hugo Awards, I read the oldest Hugo-winning novel I haven't previously read. This year, that brings me to the winner for 1967, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which I picked up some five years ago (after really enjoying Heinlein's previous winner, Double Star) but never got around to.

If you're a fan of classic print sf, this book probably doesn't need a lot of introduction; it's set in the twenty-first century, when Earth's moon is a penal colony. The inhabitants of the moon decide to declare independence, and the novel follows the course of this revolution, told from the first-person perspective of Mannie, a maintenance worker who has a special relationship with the computer that runs the moon, which he nicknames Mike.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein

Originally published: 1966
Acquired: June 2020
Read: July 2025

I haven't read as much Heinlein as some, but I've read enough to know he was very much interested in what the obligations of government were to the people, what the obligations of people were to the government, and what the obligations of people were to each other; that's the key question in his earlier Hugo winners, Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land (neither of which I read as part of this project because I read them in high school), for example. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress reads as the ultimate extension of this line of thought, its most thorough explanation. I know enough about Heinlein to know he doesn't necessarily endorse every idea promulgated here, but more that he liked to explore a question and come at it from different angles. In The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein, Farah Mendlesohn says that the book reflects "both the degree to which Heinlein believed in the community..." (which certainly sets him apart from most would-be libertarians!) "...and the degree to which he was beginning to despair of the ability of Americans as individuals to understand their role in creating that community."

Like any Heinlein book, it's highly readable. Mannie is an affable narrator, and the characters are fun (so long as you can filter Wyoh through Heinlein's ideas about women, which admittedly not every reader is going to be able to do; I also enjoyed the role of Hazel, so I know I will get to read more about in The Rolling Stones, which I plan to read next). The lunar society is well thought out, which interesting worldbuilding, and I enjoyed the mechanics of the revolution being front and center. I once thought about doing a study of revolutionary violence in science fiction (I'm doubtful I ever will do this now), and this surely would have been front and center if I had.

Unfortunately, as the novel goes on, I found it gets duller. It struck me about halfway through that The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was a variant of a novel I'd read before—or rather, a novel I'd read before was a variant on it—Ursula K. Le Guin's The Disposessed, which is also about an anarchist revolution on a resource-deprived lunar colony of a largely capitalist planet. Not in the sense that Le Guin ripped off Heinlein or anything, but in the sense that it seems to me Le Guin was clearly in dialogue with Heinlein. (I'm not the first person to make this connection, of course; there's a 1994 SFS article by Donna Glee Williams with the great line, "The similarities are impressive. Why then does Heinlein's book inspire some readers to run out, buy a gun, and vote Republican, while Le Guin's book opposes it (non-violently, of course) on every point?") The most noteworthy comparison to me was that, in Le Guin's book, everything is hard. Hard because of the realities of life on a hardscrabble satellite of course (and Le Guin even makes things easier for her anarchists by giving Anarres a breathable atmosphere), but also hard because taking political ideals and putting them into practice is never easy for any number of reasons: faults of logic, contingency, aspects of human nature.

In MIHM, though, nothing is hard, because you have Mike, the supercomputer who always knows the answer. Though some would argue the role is also distributed to the professor, Mike is probably the most extreme example I can imagine of Heinlein's "competent man," the person who can figure out anything and make it happen. You are never in doubt the revolution will succeed, because you soon come to realize that Mike will have the solution to every problem. To me, it feels like an admission that making a new society is very difficult, but instead of making that the topic of the novel, as Le Guin did, Heinlein elides it by having Mike solve every problem. So though MIHM remains readable throughout, because Heinlein is a strong writer, the book kind of got boring as it progressed.

Heinlein won the Best Novel Hugo Award four times, and this was the last of them. He would be a finalist three more times, though, in 1974 (Time Enough for Love), 1983 (Friday), and 1985 (Job). Of those, I've read Friday, and while it just predates when I took up book-blogging, so I have no review of it, I remember finding it overly long, aimless, and self-indulgent; Mendlesohn says that Moon is a Harsh Mistress is "short, sharp and punchy, the very last of Heinlein's novels to be so." In a phenomenon we continue to see in the present day, once a writer gets onto the Hugo ballot a few times, they often continue to recur on it even once they've passed the point where they're doing anything Hugo-worthy.

I read an old winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel every year, plus other Hugo-related books that interest me. Next up in sequence: The Rolling Stones by Robert A. Heinlein

JLA: Year One by Mark Waid, Brian Augustyn, Barry Kitson, et al.

JLA: Year One: The Deluxe Edition

Collection published: 2017
Contents originally published: 1998-99
Acquired and read: July 2025

Writers: Mark Waid & Brian Augustyn

Penciller: Barry Kitson

Inkers: Michael Bair, Barry Kitson, Mark Propst, John Stokes

Colorist: Pat Garrahy

Letterers: Ken Lopez

Like the previous installment of this series (see below), this one covers a story that is arguably pretty tangential to the Blackhawks. But I couldn't see how I wouldn't like this book, so I really wanted an excuse to buy it and read it sooner rather than later.

This book comes from a (somewhat odd, in retrospect) period of DC history where Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman were not founding members of the Justice League, thanks to various changes in continuity introduced following Crisis on Infinite Earths. Thus, the main characters are the Flash (Barry Allen), Green Lantern (Hal Jordan), Black Canary (Dinah Laurel Lance), Aquaman, and the Martian Manhunter. The story chronicles the first year of the JLA, picking up from them fighting off an alien invasion. They organize as a group, face various crises, discover that the alien invasion they fought off is not quite over, try (and fail) to recruit Superman, and learn about each other and themselves and how to work as a team.

I loved it. This is, as far as I am concerned, perfect superhero comics. This should be of little surprise to anyone familiar with the other work of the creative team; Mark Waid is, in my opinion, one of the all-time greats, able to unite continuity with characterization in really compelling ways. I haven't read much by his frequent collaborator Brian Augustyn, but Waid sings his praises in the intro, so clearly they are simpatico. Definitely also simpatico is Barry Kitson; Kitson came out of the UK comics scene (specifically, of course, Transformers), but really won himself over to me with his amazing five-year run on L.E.G.I.O.N., where he went from pencilling the title to plotting it and then scripting it. That was, I believe, where he first worked with Waid, who scripted the title for a year. After JLA: Year One, the two would work together on the excellent Legion of Super-Heroes "threeboot".

I understand why Batman and Wonder Woman couldn't be founding members of the JLA in the post-Crisis continuity—Batman was supposedly an "urban legend" in the post–Batman: Year One comics, which would hardly be true if he was giving Justice League press conferences, and George Pérez's Wonder Woman reboot moved her origins up to the present day—and I can also see why the editors of the Superman titles might not want him in the JLA in the present day—presumably they didn't want his actions in that book to constrain what they were doing in theirs—but it's not clear to me why Superman couldn't have been a past member of the JLA. But I guess it worked out; I don't think this story would have been anywhere near as good if these five characters were outclassed by a hero of Superman's power and narrative significance.
from JLA: Year One #7 (art by Barry Kitson & Michael Bair)

When I was a young comics fan, I used to make fun of Aquaman. This book made me feel bad for that.
from JLA: Year One #3 (art by Barry Kitson)

All of this is to say, I think this creative team was entirely on the same page, and what was on that page is beautiful. I like my superhero comics to be character-driven and fun, and this is undoubtedly both. One of the benefits of this odd team is that they have a lot of good hooks for characterization, especially early in their superheroic careers. Aquaman is trying to adjust to living on the surface world, where he feels like an alien of sorts; I liked the idea that he mumbles compared to people from the surface because of how sound propagates more loudly underwater. 

I think Hal is probably the one who gets the fewest character moments, actually, but he's fine, even if the playboy thing is laid on a bit thick. (I do, however, think the decision to call Tom Kalmaku "Pie" was not really any better than "Pieface" surely.)

Black Canary is a real highlight of the book, which as a Dinah Laurel Lance stan I very much appreciated. Post-Crisis, Black Canary was split into two characters: Dinah Drake (later Dinah Drake Lance), who was the Justice Society's Black Canary, and Dinah Laurel Lance, her daughter. But in most of the comics I've read, this is a fact of backstory, not something dealt with in the narrative; one of the benefits of going back to Black Canary's origin is actually seeing how she relates to her mother. The elder Dinah wants to mold the younger into her own image, but the younger Dinah must find her own path. There is a lot of good JSA stuff in the book; Dinah is often comparing her new colleagues to the heroes she grew up alongside, but also she discovers that those heroes weren't so perfect, as Waid and Augustyn make good use of the revelation from Starman that the elder Dinah had an affair with Ted Knight, the original Starman.

Honestly, I was a bit skeptical about going back over this ground, but the story did a great job with it.
from JLA: Year One #4 (art by Barry Kitson & Michael Bair)

I think Barry Allen's thread is less involved than either Black Canary's or Martian Manhunter's, but Waid and Augustyn and Kitson do well by him. (Which I guess makes sense, as they cowrote an acclaimed and long run on The Flash, even if it was about Wally West.)

Reading this book made me think I really must get around to reading some actual Martian Manhunter comics someday.
from JLA: Year One #1 (art by Barry Kitson)

The other real highlight is Martian Manhunter, even more of an outsider than Aquaman, but also able to pass thanks to his shapeshifting and telepathy. His discomfort at seeing the way his teammates treat the aliens they fight, his need to better understand them that goes places that violate their privacy, his belief that they and humanity can do better, they're all very well done.

What really makes the characterization sing, though, is the interactions. There are lots of moments between them all: John and Aquaman, Hal and Barry, Barry and Dinah, and so on, all the permutations you can think of, perfectly rendered. This is a team of people, in their highs and their lows; you understand why the team (briefly) turns on Martian Manhunter, but the moment where he needs to tune himself telepathically into an alien device, and the whole team comes together to help him do it is a genuine punch-the-air moment, I loved it.

Awww...
from JLA: Year One #12 (art by Barry Kitson & Michael Bair)

Beyond that, the book is just fun and inventive, taking those old Silver Age stories and filtering them through a modern perspective without being either overly nostalgic or cynical. (Weird to think, actually, that this book is now thirty years old, which is about how old the original Justice League stuff was when this was written.) We see Vandal Savage, we see the Doom Patrol, we see Snapper Carr, we get cameos from Oliver Queen and Maxwell Lord. At the end of the book, the invading aliens trap every superhero on Earth in a prison, which gives the JLA its chance to shine—but also means that once the JLA liberates the others, we get glimpses of all the superheroes of the Earth at this time. (In some cases, I suspect the continuity timing doesn't add up, but who cares.) I found that each issue of this series just flew by, perfect superhero comics. 

Lots of characters in this image who should be dead!
from JLA: Year One #2 (art by Barry Kitson)

As for the Blackhawks? Well, I'm saving a discussion of their post-Crisis continuity for a future post, but this story very much doesn't seem to care about it, nor does it even sit very well with their Silver Age continuity. Their role in the story is small but significant. In an early issue, we see them in their 1970s red-and-green uniforms, and Blackhawk suggests they need to update with the times. But then in a later issue, they're all in their superhero gear from the "Junk-Heap Heroes" era (see item #6 in the list below), and they decide they all look ridiculous and go back to how they were. Additionally, Blackhawk Island is the site of the prison where the aliens put the Earth's superheroes.

You might see this as massaging how their superheroic career could fit into their new post-Crisis history... except that all the characters who got killed off during the Rick Burchett run (see #10 and 11) are there! Additionally, so is Lady Blackhawk, but we were told in Guy Gardner (see #12) that she was plucked out of time at some point in the past and brought to the present thanks to the Crisis in Time. But this isn't a complaint or anything, just observations. The joke about how they look terrible as superheroes is probably worth everything else! (It is shooting fish in a barrel, though.)

Chuck's face just screams, "Blackhawk, you promised me this outfit looked cool."
from JLA: Year One #8 (art by Barry Kitson & Michael Bair)

This is the thirteenth in a series of posts about the Blackhawks. The next installment covers Guns of the Dragon. Previous installments are listed below:

1. The Blackhawk Archives, Volume 1 (1941-42)
2. Military Comics #18-43 / Modern Comics #44-46 / Blackhawk #9 & 50 (1943-52)
3. Showcase Presents Blackhawk, Volume One (1957-58) 
4. Blackhawk vol. 1 #151-95 (1960-64) 
5. Blackhawk vol. 1 #196-227 (1964-66)
6. Blackhawk vol. 1 #228-43 (1967-68)
7. Blackhawk vol. 1 #244-50 / The Brave and the Bold #167 (1976-80)
8. Blackhawk (1982) 
9. Blackhawk vol. 1 #251-73 / DC Comics Presents #69 (1982-84) 
• Pre-Crisis Continuity 
10. Blackhawk: Blood & Iron (1987-89)
11. Blackhawk vol. 3 (1989-92) 
12. Guy Gardner: Warrior #24, 29, 36, 38-43 / Annual #1 (1994-96)

DC Animated Universe Hybrid Chronological Viewing Order

My seven-year-old is a fiend for DC Comics, and it's been making me nostalgic for the way I was introduced to a lot of DC characters, the DC Animated Universe. So I started thinking about trying to get them to watch it with me... which of course meant I wanted to work out a proper order!

Lots of people have made timelines, of course, but the problem with timelines is that there were two series set in the future compared to the others, but watching those at the end doesn't make sense; the assumption of the series is that when Terry from Batman Beyond pops up in Justice League or Static Shock, you know who the character is because you've already seen Batman Beyond. I suppose one could watch in a strict broadcast order, then, but that seemed to have its own downsides; I wanted something that captured more of a chronological flow, where you were moving back and forth between shows that happened simultaneously instead of watching in big chunks as seasons aired.

So here's my attempt:

The first tab shows the broad-strokes organization; the second gives you an episode-by-episode breakdown. Similarly, I'll give a broad-stroke explanation here, and then drill down into the details.

Broad-Strokes Organization 

The episodes of Batman: The Animated Series are notoriously confusingly ordered, either as produced or as broadcast. I used this Reddit thread as a guide to a totally new order, with some small tweaks based on the comments. I timed Superman: The Animated Series relative to it and The New Batman Adventures, such that the two crossovers between the two characters ("World's Finest" and "The Demon Reborn") lined up correctly. 

Once both shows come to an end, they are replaced by Batman Beyond, Justice League (later Justice League Unlimited), and Static Shock, so at the same time you are following the Justice League and Static in the present, you are following the new Batman in the future; thus when he pops up in both shows, you know who he is. Finally, there's the other DCAU future-set show, the Batman Beyond spin-off The Zeta Project; I timed this to start when Zeta first appears on Batman Beyond and wrap up around the same time JLU ends.

There are obviously some times when there are big gaps between when things aired: for example, B:TAS finished airing Nov. 1994, while New Batman Adventures didn't start until Sept. 1997. Similarly, there was a big gap between when NBA and S:TAS ended (Jan. 1999 and Feb. 2000, respectively) and when Justice League started (Nov. 2001), where just Batman Beyond and Static Shock aired. But in all of these cases, I just had things carry through as continuously as I could.

Detailed Organization

Batman: The Animated Series and The New Batman Adventures 

I used Batman: The Animated Series and The New Batman Adventures as the organizing spine of the first half of the timeline. I added in the Batman-adjacent DCAU movies based on the Reddit thread above:

• Mask of the Phantasm between "Prophecy of Doom" and "Night of the Ninja"
• SubZero between B:TAS and NBA
• Mystery of the Batwoman after "Sins of the Father"

This gave me 105 installments of Batman, which I numbered sequentially. (I did accidentally leave out "Two-Face, Part II," so it got added in as 15.50. I hope I didn't miss out anything else!)

Justice League and Justice League Unlimited

The two Justice League–focused shows ran the longest of everything that came after B:TAS and NBA, so I used them as the organizing spine of what was left. The regular stories were thus numbered 106 to 167 on my list. Then, at the end we got:

• 168. Justice League vs. the Fatal Five: released years later, supposedly in continuity with the DCAU, after the end of JLU
• 169. "Epilogue": the season two finale of JLU, but entirely set in the future timeline of Batman Beyond and designed to function as a coda to the whole DCAU

There's also a Batman & Harley Quinn movie that takes place between seasons of JLU, so I numbered it 154.50. 

Superman: The Animated Series

This began during the gap between B:TAS and NBA, and continued in parallel with NBA. S:TAS and NBA crossed over in the S:TAS story "World's Finest," which is set before "Sins of the Father" (80.00), the first episode of NBA. I thus numbered "World's Finest" as 80.50. I decided that prior to that, I'd like it if the shows just pretty much alternated, so I numbered all the preceding stories of S:TAS backwards from there: the one immediately before "World's Finest" ("Father's Day") would be 79.50, the one before that ("Ghost in the Machine") 78.50, and so on. Working backwards, this gets you to the series premiere, "The Last Son of Krypton," as 56.50, so basically, fifty-six B:TAS stories in, you begin alternating the two shows up until you get to the crossover.

The next key story was "The Demon Reborn," which is another crossover with NBA. This story sees Batman and Superman teaming up, and so many place it simultaneously with the NBA episode "Girls' Night Out" (97.00), where Superman and Batman are away on a mission. So I numbered "The Demon Reborn" as 97.50. In between "World's Finest" and "The Demon Reborn," I just distributed stories evenly, which came out to intervals of 0.89. So mostly alternating between NBA and S:TAS, but sometimes you'd get two S:TAS stories between stories of NBA.

That left just one S:TAS episode, the series finale "Legacy." I decided to make both NBA and S:TAS wrap up at about the same time, and thus numbered it 104.50, placing it before the last episode of NBA, "Mad Love" (105.00). This creates a decent gap between the last two S:TAS episodes, but that actually reflects how they were broadcast, months apart.

Static Shock

Static Shock started out totally standalone, but ended up crossing over with the wider DCAU a few times. The first of these is "The Big Leagues," a crossover with NBA, which probably goes after the end of that show according to the fine folks on Reddit.

There are then two Justice League crossovers, "A League of Their Own" and "Fallen Heroes." These both need to go before the Justice League episode "Starcrossed" (130.00), before the league was reorganized as the Justice League Unlimited. So I numbered "Fallen Heroes" as 129.50.

I then decided that I'd like Static Shock to pretty much just start when S:TAS came to an end, so that there wouldn't be a point after the end of S:TAS before the debuts of the other shows where you were only watching NBA. Thus I numbered its first episode, "Shock to the System" as 98.50, picking up right off from S:TAS's "The Demon Reborn" at 97.50.

I then distributed the Static Shock stories between those two episodes evenly, which meant they occurred at intervals of 0.76. So between NBA stories (and later, Justice League stories), you'd typically have one or two episodes of Static Shock. Doing this gave "The Big Leagues" a placement of 108.33, so after the NBA finale (105.00), which was right, and "A League of Their Own" a placement of 120.43, so again, in the right spot.

After Static Shock came to an end, the character appeared in the JLU story "The Once and Future Thing" (142.00). So I set the last episode of Static Shock ("Power Outage") as 141.50, and distributed all the episodes between "Fallen Heroes" and "Power Outage" evenly at intervals of 1.33.

Batman Beyond

In terms of broadcast sequence, Batman Beyond picked right up from the end of NBA, so I set its first episode, "Rebirth," shortly after NBA's final episode (105.00) at 106.50. Batman Beyond had forty-nine stories, plus a movie, Return of the Joker. There is a Static Shock episode where he travels to the future and meets the future Batman, "Future Shock" (127.23). The DCAU wiki suggests that Return of the Joker must take place before "Future Shock," so I numbered Return of the Joker as 126.85.

That meant I simply distributed all Batman Beyond stories evenly between those two points, at intervals of 0.42. So you are watching quite a lot of Batman Beyond in between episodes of the Justice League and Static Shock.

The Zeta Project

The last thing to place was the other DCAU future-set show, The Zeta Project. Zeta first appeared in the Batman Beyond episode "Zeta" (117.30). There actually was a decent-sized broadcast gap between Zeta's first appearance in Batman Beyond and their own show debuting, but I decided it was more satisfying to pick up right away, and thus set the first episode of Zeta Project ("The Accomplice") at 117.51. Zeta Project crossed over with Batman Beyond again in the episode "Shadows," which the DCAU wiki says occurs after the Batman Beyond episode "Countdown" (126.44), so I set "Shadows" as 126.65. I then distributed the intervening episodes at even intervals of 1.31. 

Lastly, I decided it would make sense to wrap up Zeta Project before the future-set episode of JLU, "Epilogue" (169.00), so I set its series finale ("The Wrong Morph") to 167.50. I then distributed the episodes in between "Shadows" and "The Wrong Morph" evenly at intervals of 2.40.

Epilogue 

I think that's everything! In practice, this gets you the following periods:

1. fifty-six sequential stories from Batman: The Animated Series
2. alternating stories from Batman: The Animated Series and Superman: The Animated Series
3. (roughly) alternating stories from New Batman Adventures and Superman: The Animated Series
4. (roughly) alternating stories from New Batman Adventures and Static Shock
5. lots of Batman Beyond, with interspersed stories from Static Shock and Justice League
6. lots of Batman Beyond, with interspersed stories from Static Shock and Justice League and the occasional episode of Zeta Project (four shows at once!)
7. (roughly) alternating stories from Static Shock and Justice League Unlimited, with occasional episodes of Zeta Project
8. Justice League Unlimited, with occasional episodes of Zeta Project

The caveat here is, of course, I haven't watched it this way! And it's been a long time since I've watched any of this; if you have any advice or corrections, I'd love to hear them.

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Available Light

late 2386
It's so... big! This is the first Destiny-era book to come out after quite a long hiatus, the previous one being almost a year and a half prior (Titan: Fortune of War). Goodbye mass market paperbacks, hello trades! I think this is also the first to make references to Discovery; Georgiou is included among a list of famous explorers. It's also an important last—this is the last-ever use of the (not my favorite) Rotis Serif TNG logo. (Thank goodness.)

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Available Light
by Dayton Ward

Published: 2019
Acquired: February 2025
Read: July 2025

Other than that, though, it half feels like business as usual. This book essentially has two totally separate plotlines. One is very familiar; this is our fourth Dayton Ward–penned exploring-the-Odyssean-Pass-after-The Fall novel, and so you'll know the vibe by now. The Enterprise comes across an interesting situation, there's some conflict, T'Ryssa Chen is in it a lot, Taurik is there. Ward is good at coming up with premises that feel like lost TNG episodes; in this one, the Enterprise and a group of scavengers come upon a derelict spaceship that seems like it ought to have a lot of people aboard... but where are they? There are some clever concepts here and interesting spins on Star Trek technology.

As I have with almost all of these books, I found myself thinking about how I would adapt it to serve as a Star Trek Adventures scenario, which is always a good sign. (I say this a lot, but if my current campaign gets a third season, I think I will actually do it.)

I don't think there's anything bad about these four books per se, but they have felt a bit... stasis-y. Like, all the characters are present and correct, but there's not the vibe you got back at the height of the Deep Space Nine relaunch or in the early days of New Frontier and Titan, that you were watching these characters evolve and grow. It almost reads like a tie-in to a tv show that doesn't exist, like all the characters have to be maintained as they are. Worf does Worf things, La Forge does La Forge things, T'Ryssa Chen does T'Ryssa Chen things, Joanna Faur continues to exist, Beverly isn't in it except as Picard's wife. I don't think I would say I disliked any of the post-Fall TNG novels on their own merits, but unfortunately I do feel like the best one was the first, Armageddon's Arrow; it had a sense that we were moving forward and going somewhere that ended up missing from Headlong Flight, Hearts and Minds, and this book.

The other half of the book is the fallout from Section 31: Control, which is really the fallout from A Time to Heal, a book that came out fifteen years prior! Section 31's existence is now public, but along with this, so is Picard's role in the coup that deposed President Min Zife. This half has its own two halves. In one, we see what's going on back on Earth: how are the politicians and the people dealing with all the revelations about S31, particularly that everything that everything the Federation has ever accomplished in its utopia-building was really the result of unsanctioned black ops? Mostly this is told from the perspective of Philippa Louvois (of "Measure of a Man" fame), now Federation Attorney General, as she begins carrying out investigations and prosecutions. It's fine; I did have the feeling that maybe the revelations of Control were a bit too big to realistically be accommodated into a tie-in book series at all, much less as a B-plot. The Federation has had yet another existential shock but I just don't think you can adequately deal with that and maintain the status quo needed for this to also be a series of books about people having fun space adventures. At this point, is it even realistic that the Federation continues to function? Akaar gives like five different speeches about how human choices do matter but they all feel a bit hollow.

I'm not sure about a couple choices here, like one where a trained Starfleet officer turns into a cold-blooded killer trying to get Admiral Ross because her husband died due to a Section 31 op. Also what's up with all the characters' insistence that Ross was a key player in S31? To the extent that an organization like S31 has formal members, I never had the sense that he was one; I certainly didn't feel like he was guiding policy. He was more just a guy the real players knew they could count on to throw things their way when needed.

The other half of this half is the personal fallout for Picard himself. This I found profoundly disappointing. What is the reaction of every key character finding out that Picard had a role in the illegal takedown of a democratically elected leader. Basically everyone shrugs and says, "oh well sometimes you just have to do a coup i guess." I could buy this of some characters (I can certainly imagine it of Worf, a man who previously killed a democratically elected leader)... but everyone? No one is upset to learn that the principled Jean-Luc Picard totally abandoned his principles? Not Beverly, not La Forge, not T'Ryssa, not Will Riker? I found this disappointing because 1) so much for Federation ideals, and 2) it seems a bizarre dramatic choice. This thing happens that could totally upend your characters' relationships, and you basically just ignore it?

The book ends with Picard deciding to be accountable for his decision and return to Earth, which I appreciate, but it feels pretty random; I wish it had been a natural outgrowth of the way something from this storyline intersected with the A-plot.

Continuity Notes:

• We get a little recap of Phillipa Louvois's career on p. 43 that tells us she left Starfleet after "Measure of a Man," then came back later, than left again. Is this a reference to something? I don't see any likely candidates on Memory Beta, but it seems like a pretty random detail otherwise.

Other Notes:

• I didn't totally buy that Nechayev would go on the run. She comes across as principled to me, not self-serving—they're just not great principles!
• Ward does this thing I'm of two minds about, which is he's always diligently establishing members of the Enterprise-E crew. I like that the book does this thing that's hard to do on tv, make it clear that the crew consists of people who aren't main characters. But on the other hand, most of them are just names on the page; they don't have personalities or anything, just names (always human, which is a little boring, though I'm guessing they're mostly Tuckerizations) and jobs. Sometimes, though, he's a little too diligent about it; it'll be like, "so-and-so was being covered by the beta shift Engineering supervisor so-and-so, but she was on the away team, so she was being covered by the gamma shift supervisor." (At one point, Šmrhová leaves the bridge to get a rest, but she comes back before as soon as something interesting happens but we're still told who covers for her while she's gone.) It's like that bit from Parks and Rec about NPR hosts all substituting for each other.
• Gratuitous Recap Watch: We get a recap of "Paradise Lost" (pp. 51-2), which I can see the relevance of, but goes into an awful lot of detail for some reason, with characters wondering whatever happened to Admiral Leyton, but I don't know why. Also recapped for seemingly little purpose: "The Best of Both Worlds" (p. 213) and Headlong Flight (p. 287).

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: The Next Generation: Collateral Damage by David Mack

The Pelican History of England #9: The World Wars and Beyond (1914–79)

The final volume of the Pelican History of England was published in 1965, covering 1914 to 1963; I read that edition many years ago. In 1981, it was updated to cover through 1979, but since author David Thomson died in 1970, one of his former students, Geoffrey Warner, did the update. According to his preface, Warner didn't update Thomson's text very much; instead, he just added two chapters to the end to cover the last fifteen years. The result is somewhat odd, because it takes what was already one of the longest Pelican Histories and makes it even longer—even though it covers the shortest span of time!

I'll say more about the overall design of the series in a future post, but I did think this book had more detail than earlier ones... which wasn't always warranted. Whereas previous volumes would not really go into detail about the movement of foreign wars, this one does. I think probably this is partially because it has the space to do, but also because its author lived through the events in question (Thomson would have been in his thirties during World War II), so they seemed important to him. Additionally, there's more blow-by-blow detail on the politicking and the parties; again, I suspect the dual reason of 1) available space, and 2) recency bias. To me, though, this made the book less effective; the best Pelican Histories (such as Thomson's own volume 8) have given a bird's-eye view of the era in question, but here I felt a bit bogged down in the identities of specific cabinet ministers. (The other consequence of recency is that he's more likely to assume readers already know what something is than other contributors to the series, which I guess is fair enough, but I would have appreciated an explanation of what the "coupon election" was!)

The Pelican History of England: 9. England in the Twentieth Century (1914-79)
by David Thomson with Geoffrey Warner

Second edition published: 1981
Originally published: 1965
First edition previously read: August 2013
Acquired and reread: July 2025

The other thing that makes this volume unusual is that it's the only one to be written by a repeat author. Thus, unsurprisingly, Thomson continues the emphasis of his previous volume, focusing on how the government became increasingly invested in the management of society through a variety of means. Though as I said above I did think we got a bit too much detail about specific ministries, Thomson does ably show how the two major political parties, and the succession of prime ministers, attempted to regulate the economy and elevate the welfare of the citizenry in ways that were sometimes surprisingly similar and sometimes very different. By the 1950s, "British society now presupposed full employment, economic growth, mass consumption, and therefore mass advertising" but "[u]like the Welfare State, it cared little about inequalities of wealth" (260).

For example, he points out that what used to be called "departments," "boards," and "offices" largely became "ministries" after the Great War: "The change implied a new theory of government, in which politicians and their 'departments' of expert administrators jointly shaped and pursued policies" (64). The world wars were also significant in that the pyramid-shaped power structures introduced during wartime became a guiding principle for the organization of government after (219). Of particular importance was the growth of education, which expanded significantly across successive generations in the first half of the century: "The national system of education kept pace with – though perhaps several paces behind – the development of modern Britain: its advance helped, in turn, to make possible the next phase of growth" (189).

Fun fact I learned from this book: H. G. Wells was supposedly the first person to ever use the term "leftism" in print (116). Unfortunately, Thomson gives a date for this (1927)... but not a citation! I think this may have been in his lecture Democracy under Revision, which was published that year by the Hogarth Press, but in a quick online search, it seems like the text isn't available online. Alas, a Google Books search for "leftism" with the date filter set to terminate at 1926 brings up a number of hits, mostly from communist periodicals, so it seems to be untrue. One gets the feeling that Thomson himself is a liberal if not a leftist, but often disappointed with the actual execution of leftist policies in practice. There is a funny bit where he cites a book read at the first meeting of the Left Book Club in 1936: "Describing future possibilities of artificial insemination, the author exclaimed: 'How many women, in an enlightened community devoid of superstitious taboos and of sex slavery, would be eager and proud to bear and rear a child of Lenin or of Darwin!' Fortunately some of its successors were more realistic" (163). I'll have to see if I can work that into my book chapter on left-wing use of Darwinism somewhere. 

I was struck by how Thomson described prime ministers Ramsey MacDonald and Stanley Baldwin in the 1930s: "Like a sedate and leisurely firm of comfortable family solicitors, they conducted the business affairs of Great Britain and the Commonwealth with mild, unhurried manners, facing no issue until it was claimant, seeking no decision until it was overdue. [...] History may come, more and more, to see them as Tweedledum and Tweedledee – presiding jointly over British national life in one of its peculiarly unheroic periods" (141). I don't know enough about the reception of British prime ministers to know if this actually came about!

There is a little but not a lot of discussion of the changing social mores of the twentieth century, though I found what there was to be quite interestingly framed; I sort of sensed a young person sneering at how his elders saw as controversial things he had not seen as controversial at all: "one marvels at how restricted they were in their modernity, how lacking in robust dissipations. Even there wildness was brittle, their cult of self-indulgence as synthetic as the cocktails at their interminable parties, or the jazz played in the night-clubs. [...] It was not long before they got tired of themselves" (87). C'mon, David, just how boring were your parents, really?

We see a combination of Thomson's critique of the left and his issues with twentieth-century social mores when he claims that "[t]o all those who, before the war, had held the materialist view that crime was caused largely by slums, poverty, and bad economic conditions, it was disconcerting to discover that the Welfare State brought a steep rise in crime," especially among teenagers, whose incomes had risen the most! (276) "The conclusion seemed to be that crime is determined not by material conditions alone, but by the whole social environment, including such intangible factors as the ethical standards and values prevalent in society as a whole, the personal and collective anxieties to which men were subjected, and even the effectiveness of humanistic or religious teaching about human relationships" (276-7). If Thomson mentions him, I didn't catch it, but it seems very much not a coincidence that Thomson supports this point by citing statistics from 1959-61 and that Anthony Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange in 1962. 

In volume 8, Thomson discussed the monarchy a bit; surprisingly, there's less discussion of the abdication crisis than you might expect, but I found what Thomson said about Edward VIII's father, George VI, charming: "He had perhaps, as his successor remarked, waged 'a private war with the twentieth century', but his very old-fashionedness had been his strength" (151).

I wonder if I would have registered it if I hadn't been cued by the preface, but Geoffrey Warner's two chapters at the end are noticeably different, and I'm not just talking about the fact he breaks them up into fewer but longer sections than Thomson. While Warner maintains Thomson's focus on specific ministries and politicians and parties, he largely moves away from Thomson's focus on the "social state"; we get a lot more detail here about Britain's foreign policy during the era in question, especially issues surrounding decolonization and the Commonwealth. This is interesting but didn't really seem to be of a piece with the book I'd just read.