Marvel Action: Black Panther is a six-issue miniseries; I think the idea of the "Marvel Action" line is that it's made up of continuity-light stories aimed at younger readers.(I previously read a Marvel Action story featuring Elsa Bloodstone.)The League of Comic Geeks website tells me it's set on "Earth-18157," though most of the details (particularly its depiction of Shuri) seemed pretty consistent with the main Marvel universe as of The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda, aside from the fact that T'Challa isn't in space; I wonder if it could fit in somewhere after that storyline is resolved.
from Marvel Action: Black Panther #3
Anyway, this is really two separate three-issue stories. The first, by Kyle Baker and Juan Samu, is about T'Challa and Shuri dealing with increasing amounts of bad weather around Wakanda. I found it a little too light to be interesting, and not very much tapping into the things that make Black Panther comics interesting; it mostly focuses on generic superheroics. Some things happen fairly quickly in a way that I found frustrating, and the villain seemed to gain too much ground too quickly to be plausible. (It must be hard to write stories where someone can plausibly take on a king on a regular basis, to be fair.) I found the humor pretty cheeseball and forced.
from Marvel Action: Black Panther #4
The second story, by Vita Ayala (who wrote a two-issue fill-in on Shuri) and Arianna Florean (who I predominantly know as a colorist on Titan's Doctor Who comics, but who also drewthe diary extracts forthe tenth Doctor's companion Gabby), is more three one-shots with some gentle links; as T'Challa and Shuri prepare for a scientific conference in Wakanda (nicely tying into what Nnedi Okorafor was doing inShuri), T'Challa must first undergo a Wakandan tradition where he lives as a laborer for a day, and then Shuri learns a lesson about traditional Wakandan folkways versus science, before the story culminates in the conference itself.
The stories do a good job of being rooted in ideas specific to Black Panther and Wakanda: what makes for a good king, how to accommodate tradition alongside new discoveries, why it's important to share your success with others. T'Challa having to work as a common laborer and deciding to single-handedly take on corruption was great; so was Shuri teaming up with a warthog to collect traditional medicines. The humor is light but effective; I particularly felt like Ayala and Florean had a good handle on Shuri. I'd gladly see more Black Panther work from them.
Marvel Action: Black Panther originally appeared in six issues (Apr.-June 2019). The stories were written by Kyle Baker (#1-3) and Vita Ayala (#4-6), illustrated by Juan Samu (#1-3) and Arianna Florean with Mario Del Pennino (#4-6), colored by David Garcia Cruz (#1-3) and Mattia Iacono with Sara Martinelli (#4-6), lettered by Tom B. Long (#1-2, 4) and Shawn Lee (#3, 5-6), and edited by Denton J. Tipton.
"The Gravity of the Crime" is a standalone Star Trek Adventures scenario that you can buy as a PDF; I got it in one of the various STA Humble Bundles. It's a combination of murder mystery and Prime Directive scenario; basically, your players have to solve an apparent murder on a prewarp planet because one of the murder victims was a Starfleet officer doing covert observation—but you both need to work with local law enforcement without revealing to them that you're from space!
I've long thought it sounded interesting, and it seemed particularly suited to the build of one of my players, Austin, who plays Frector, who was the ship's Ferengi chief of security last season and is now its Intelligence analyst. If I had been able to run five adventures last summer, it would have been the fifth; failing that, I knew I wanted to do it this summer. I ended up slotting it in as our third episode.
As usual, I'll break my episode discussion up into two parts, first how I set it up, and second how it went; I added a B-plot, but that was pretty separate from the A-plot, so I'll discuss that on its own in a third section.
"Captain’s Log, Stardate 53955.2. We have been ordered to assist a Federation observation team on the planet Kalmur, a pre-contact world whose inhabitants are in the early stages of developing warp drive. One member of the observation team is missing, presumed dead after a fatal accident in the research facility. Our mission is to investigate the accident and aid in recovering any identifiable alien remains. As always, our highest priority will be to preserve the Prime Directive and ensure our presence on Kalmur does not disrupt its culture’s natural development. "Starfleet observation teams understand the stakes better than anyone – which is what makes the presence of an observer at the site of a fatal accident so troubling. Was it merely a coincidence – or something more?"
Planning the Mission
generic Kalmuri
Overall, this is an episode where I made few changes; mostly I just took the PDF and tried to break it up in my own notes in a way that I would find more intuitive. The structure of the opening act is pretty set: the away team beams down to where the Starfleet observation team is based, and talks to them to get the details on the accident/possible murder. Then they go to the laboratory where the accident happened and meet some of the characters involved. The act ends with a Kalmuri police detective, Inspector Lanox, turning up and figuring out that the away team must basically be from space and confronting them. The players must then figure out how to work with her without violating the Prime Directive.
Since it's a murder mystery, though, the middle of the episode has a lot of possibilities, and there's not really an order it needs to be done: the players can scan stuff, talk to suspects, get attacked by mobsters, and so on. So I tried to structure my notes to make all this information easier to keep track of.
The one thing I would say is odd about the mission as written is that it's very light on suggested Tasks! So I added a few. First, before the away team beamed down, I added Tasks for the ship's doctor to do the surgery to make them look like Kalmuri, as well as a Task for everyone to undertake a psychological adjustment to changing species; failing this would cause them to trip up in some later scene.
Doctor Sifa Jezen
Second I took the stuff the away team figures out by interrogating the suspects, and broke it up into information that:
they would get for free, without having to ask questions.
they would get easily, doing Difficulty 1 or 2 Tasks.
they would have to really work for, with D4 or 5 Tasks.
My default assumption was these would mostly be Security + Presence Tasks, but I was prepared to countenance counterarguments from the players—if someone was trying to physically intimidate a witness, for example, it could be Security + Fitness, or if using medical or psychological knowledge, Medicine + Presence, or so on. I found this really helpful, so that I didn't have to be generating Task ideas on the fly.
The other thing is, this episode has a lot of NPCs. Which makes sense, it's a murder mystery, and you can't have a murder mystery without a lot of suspects, and without a bunch of tangled relationships. Aside from Inspector Lanox, there are five significant living NPCs (three Kalmuri, two Federation anthropologists), and three dead ones of significance. Experience has taught me that the players do better if they have images to associate with NPCs, to visually prompt their memories, so I used ChatGPT to make some images of the Kalmuri and other NPCs. (I only did the living characters, not the dead ones.) I've included those throughout this post.
Inspector Lanox
Finally, I of course changed the episode title to be more pretentious (I think it has a good "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid" vibe).
Playing the Mission
I
have seven regular players, plus one who steps in if we're below six. Of our three sessions, the first was just a half (the first half was the ending of the previous episode). This is how
it broke down:
Ryan as Rucot, captain (sessions 2-3)
Debi as T'Cant, first officer/science officer (1, 3)
Kenyon as Nevan Jones, engineer (2-3)
Claire as Mooria Salmang, pilot (3)
Cari as Jor Lena, security officer (1-2)
Austin as Frector, Intelligence analyst (1, 3)
Andy as Gurg bim Vurg, medical officer (1-2)
Toren as Tronnen, counselor (2)
I only just noticed that this was an episode where literally none of my players were present for the whole thing! I kept Rucot, Nevan, and Mooria on the ship for the B-plot, so the planetside characters were T'Cant, Jor, Frector, Gurg, and Tronnen.
Director Maklet
In the first session, Frector, Jor, Gurg, and T'Cant beamed down to the planet to investigate. Unfortuantely, Frector failed the roll to psychologically acclimate. The first couple scenes went basically as stated in the mission, with them talking to outpost team and then heading to the Kalmuri research institute, where they begin to get a sense of what is going on. Sometimes, though, my players are a bit too perceptive: a key part of the mystery is that when the "gravity torus" experiment is being run in the Kalmuri gravity lab, the experiment of another investigator (an antigravity plate) is leaning against the wall... but if the players think things through, they will realize it ought to have been sucked into the gravity torus. I think both Debi and Austin noticed this right away, which could very much give the whole game away pretty quickly!
I had Inspector Lanox turn up in the lab; she asks the players to accompany her to her office. The mission as written suggests you then jump ahead to her office and establish the players failed to convince her they really were from another country in between scenes. This seemed a bit railroady, so I played it out, having her ask them how they liked their tea, and how people from their country liked their rice. They complained about this, but I maintained that no matter how well briefed they were, they didn't really have the time to know everything cultural she might ask them.
The players didn't admit they were from space, but also gave up denying they weren't, and decided to work with her without really making any clear statements about who they were. That was where the first session ended. Unfortunately I was in the awkward position that the two characters in the lab/Lanox's office were Frector and T'Cant... and Debi and Austin were both gone the next week! Narratively I covered this by having Frector have a panic attack on seeing their Kalmuri reflection in a mirror, and T'Cant mind-melding with her to stabilize her. The two returned to the ship, with Tronnen beaming down to replace them, and passing Lannox on to Jor and Gurg and Tronnen instead.
Meni Nelorn
For the second session, I gave my players cards with all the NPCs on them and bullet points of what they'd learned so far, with space for them to write more notes. This seemed to help a bit.
Jor, Gurg, and Tronnen carried out the investigation, and kind of thankfully, did not seem to remember the significance of the gravity plate. Jor doesn't have great Presence + Security, but they did all right at uncovering information for the most part, especially with a couple key Determination spends. They tended to use up the Momentum pool a lot, but thankfully the players in the B-plot kept refilling it with their great rolls. They did some scans, interrogated the Kalmuri at the research facility, talk to the outpost scientists, and began to put a lot of pieces together.
One key aspect of the story is that the graduate student working at the lab, Meni Nelorn, has been sexually harassed by her advisor. (This gives her motive and opportunity to commit the crime, and also casts some suspicion on one of the Starfleet observers, Ensign T'Zheen.) I was worried about this plot point, but no one in my group wrote this on their "lines and veils" sheet from the beginning of the campaign, so I included it as written, but kept it very vague. It seemed to go over fine, thankfully, though as half of my players are science Ph.D.s, prompted some discussion of shitty advisors they had had. The players were very into the bit where T'Zheen intimidated Meni's harasser, and also really loved to hate the institute's director, who knew about the abuse but did nothing and had a gambling problem.
Ensign T'Zheen
The players had all of the information they needed, but struggled to make the last leap they needed to put it all together and identify the killer. They knew one of the murder victims, Lieutenant Li, was probably still alive, but fixated on the idea that he had escaped himself and was lying low, and so did things like crack open his personal logs and scan his quarters. I tried to nudge them in the right direction by having them find in his logs that he thought the actual murderer's experiment probably did work, and also giving them a clue that the prosthetic disguises decay over time, leaving a distinct chemical trail that they found in Li's quarters. (This was a slightly altered version of something from the book.) Unfortunately, when they divided the city up into thirds to search for the chemical trail, two of them failed, and the chemicals were not found in the tertile of the player who succeeded!
Finally, they went back to the lab and scanned the gravity plate, discovering the tetryons that showed it had been activated. By now they had all the pieces but still weren't sure what to do with them... but the second session was at an end.
Awkwardly, all three planetside players from session two were out for session three. Narratively, I said that Frector had made a full recovery, and so the captain sent Frector and T'Cant back to the planet, but asked the others to return, trying to minimize the number of people on the planet at a time. Frector's player decided to see if they could get the murderer to confess, hitting on a line very close to what's in the book, that she would want recognition for her device working, but could only get it if she confessed; he intimated the directorship of the institute was up for grabs now. This worked, and they wrapped up the case, rescuing Lieutenant Li and remanding the murderer to Kalmuri justice. Lanox ended by giving a nice speech that the players applauded for its hardboiled vibe.
Doctor Gur*
The last part of the story is that the players have to decide to report T'Zheen for what was technically a Prime Directive violation. They didn't want to see someone stopping sexual harassment get in trouble for it, but also Rucot is very careful these days to adhere to Starfleet regulations! (Ryan: "I don't want the next episode to be 'The Second Trial of Rucot.'") They settled on describing what she had done, and commending her morality, without mentioning that it was a possible Prime Directive issue either way.
Overall, the players seemed to enjoy the scenario, even if they also struggled with the number of characters and conflicting motivations—this may have been easier if we had longer sessions and/or a more consistent player line-up for those three weeks! They seemed to particularly like Inspector Lanox, who I performed with (an attempt at) a kind of laconic Southern accent. One of the downfalls of a scenario like this, I think, is that Lanox makes a bit impression in Act I, but does little in Act II because, even though she's present for the interrogations, you as GM don't want her to say too much because you want the players to drive the narrative there. But I think her last couple scenes in Act III made up for it. It's a fun, clever scenario, with a lot to offer. Like I said, we got it done in 2½ sessions, but that included the B-plot, so without that, I bet an experienced group could get it done in about six hours.
The B-Plot
I knew going into this mission that there probably wasn't enough to do planetside for more than three or four players, and thus I would need something I'd never done before in STA: the totally disconnected A/B-plot structure that dominated the 1990s shows. I spent some time brainstorming what this might be, with all sorts of ideas. One I got pretty far in on before deciding it was probably too comedic, and thus 1) redundant with doing a Lower Decks–style episode immediately prior, and 2) probably too much at odds with the tone of the A-plot.
Professor Orven Jadrel
I was thinking about the season finale, which would be the next episode, and deal with the mysterious Haradin my players are always encountering (see particularly episodes #1, 3, and 5 below in particular). It occurred to me that some aspects of finale would probably be simpler if the players were not simultaneously trying to understand the Haradin and trying to do what they would be doing in that episode.
So I came up with the idea that the B-plot in this episode would be the players rescuing a Haradin both friendlier and more well-informed than some of the others they'd met, and thus able to fill in any gaps in their knowledge. I came up with the premise of a Haradin history professor on his way back from an academic conference whose ship failed; when the players investigated, they would discover it had been sabotaged, giving them some insight into the dangerous political situation in Harad. Plus, as a group where five of them are professors based in Florida (and the other two are married to professors), I knew they would be super invested in the conflict of a professor under political threat for teaching the truth!
The B-plot began in session two, and things went well, as the Diversitas rescued the professor's ship; we alternated between Nevan fixing it and Rucot chatting with the professor, Orven Jadrel. Ryan as Rucot has been burning with questions about the Haradin, and peppered the poor guy with questions... but thankfully I had already worked out a lot about the Haradin in order to do the fourth episode! (I'll do a future post just about this, I think.) It went so well, my players got a little suspicious. Why was this guy popping up and answering all their questions?
"Return to Harad" campaign poster
I decided the best way to deal with this as GM was to twist the knife, to make them pay a price for his help. At the end of the second session, they offered Jadrel asylum; in the third, he had two conversations. First he went to the two players who grew up in the Federation, Mooria and Nevan, and asked them what that was like. They told him the benefits of growing up in a world where you could pursue knowledge without interference. He then asked how the Federation got there, especially how it got past those who (as Claire put it) see themselves as succeeding only if they are winning over others. They admitted it hadn't been easy, but they needed to fight. Jadrel then went to Rucot, a Cardassian trying to help his own world escape authoritarianism, and Rucot told him that it was indeed a struggle... but all he could do was keep fighting the fight. Jadrel then quoted the players' words back to them as he turned down their offer of asylum, saying he needed to go back to Harad and fight himself if Harad were to get any better.
I ripped off an Ursula Le Guin speech and put it in his mouth:
If I simply flee my clan-ship, leave Harad, then I am letting Zotabia and all those like him win. If there is a better world to come for the Haradin, it can only come if I am willing to fight for it. I will report the accident when I return my shuttle to the university, and we will see what follows after that. Perhaps I will be left to carry out my teaching and scholarship in peace… but I am not very hopeful. I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of those who can see alternatives to how we live now, who can see through our fear-stricken society. We will need those who can envision freedom. You have helped me do so.
And then I had him flying back home... possibly to his death! They did give him a communications device he could use to signal for help, and offered to put him in contact with political experts from the Federation who could give him advice on avoiding a society's slide into authoritarianism. Will that be enough? Well, they'll find out in the next episode. But I ended up feeling pretty good about the B-plot, it felt very genuinely Star Trek to me.
* Doctor Gur (who I renamed "Doctor Vor," since one of my player characters is a doctor named Gurg) is a Catullan. There's only one canonical appearance by a Catullan in Star Trek, but they look ridiculous! I toned her down a little bit, but did keep the grape tattoo on her forehead, even though I think Tongo Rad had one probably because he was a space hippie, not because he was a Catullan, because without that, there wasn't much distinctive about them if you got rid of the vibrant hair. On seeing my first attempt, my wife suggested I replace the grape with an orange, and I thought that was funny, so I rolled with it. I did try a variation where her hair was orange to match, but decided it was probably too much.
In order to read The Rolling Stones (1952), I picked up To the Stars, one of four hardcover volumes from the Science Fiction Book Club collecting the Heinlein juveniles (they have not really been kept in print). Of course, this meant that I then went on to read the other three books collected in the volume: Between Planets (1951), Starman Jones (1953), and The Star Beast (1954).
To the Stars: Between Planets / The Rolling Stones / Starman Jones / The Star Beast by Robert A. Heinlein
I was glad I did, because in particular, I really enjoyed Between Planets and Starman Jones. I like a good bildungsroman, and these are indeed good ones. Between Planets is about a young man named Don Harvey who is born in space to scientist parents from Earth and Venus; he spent some time on Venus as a child, and is now attending boarding school on Earth while his parents do scientific work on Mars, but he feels no particular allegiance to any planet. (Hence, one of the meanings of the book's title.) The book begins when war is about to break out between Earth and Venus, and Don must get off Earth before his Venus-born status makes too much trouble for him; his goal is to join his parents on Mars, but he is thwarted at every turn, and finds himself not really belonging anywhere.
After the light, episodic nature of The Rolling Stones, I wasn't expecting how heavy this one could get. In an early chapter, before leaving Earth, Don meets up with a friend of his parents who can't speak freely but indicates something is up; they both get taken in by the Earth police, and when he asks to go back to his friend, the police grimly inform him that, alas, the friend died of a "heart attack" while in police custody! I didn't see that one coming! Unable to commit himself to any side, Don does his best to remain above it all while focusing on his goal of reuniting with his parents even while being sent to Venus. There are a number of excellent scenes as he struggles to stay afloat in the midst of all the political (and, later, military) chaos around him.
A bildungsroman is all about growth, about a protagonist who figures out how society works and how to place himself in it. That's definitely what we get here from Don, and Heinlein keeps it pretty nuanced. Don's virtue is that he doesn't get swept up in the fervor of either side, Earth or Venus, even when he enlists in the Venus military... but always being "between planets" isn't a virtue either. Don must learn to believe in something, otherwise, what's the point? The last couple chapters are perhaps a bit of an anticlimax, but the final decision that Don must make leading up to them is very well done. I liked this book a lot, and sped right through it in a way that wasn't true of The Rolling Stones.
So too did I enjoy and speed through Starman Jones. Like Between Planets, the book has a rougher edge that was missing from The Rolling Stones; its main character, Max, lives with his stepmother on a farm. His father is dead, and he's keeping his promise to take care of his stepmother and the farm... but what he really yearns for is space. When his stepmother remarries to a lout who intends to sell the farm. Max runs away from home, hoping to take his late uncle's place in the guild of astronavigators. Unable to do so, he falls in with a con artist who helps him join a spaceship crew under false pretenses.
Like Between Planets, it's a novel of growth, and like Between Planets, it's surprisingly nuanced. It would be easy, I think, to write a book where Max had to renounce the lies he had told; it would also be easy, I think, to write a novel where Max never did. What Heinlein does in Starman Jones, though, is to weave a middle course, where Max has to learn when a man must lie and when a man must tell the truth in order to do right by both himself and others around him. It's got a bit of a Rudyard Kipling Captains Courageous vibe to it, which I very much appreciated, though here it's not so much that shipborn service makes you into a better person, as it reveals the better person you were always meant to be.
Both books are solid 1950s science fiction: we have space dragons, telepathic speech, weird life-forms, lots of details about FTL methods that require people to do math in their heads (computer? what's a computer?), future space politics, and so on. Heinlein is good at this kind of thing, and I think the worldbuilding holds up in the sense that these futures (plausibly the same future, actually) feel lived and complete, even if we know a lot of elements of it would no longer come to pass now; I can imagine handing these books off to my own children in a few years.
Compared to these two, I found The Star Beast a disappointment. Between Planets and Starman Jones are both bildungsromans... but if Star Beast is supposed to be one, then Heinlein did a very bad job of it. Johnnie has an alien space pet that the local community finds to be a menace, and the government wants to get hold of, but he doesn't really make any interesting decisions or grow in any kind of way; he just obstinately refuses to let anyone have his pet, Lummie. It's his girl friend (and later, girlfriend) who makes all the smart decisions on his behalf, and it's a middle-aged Earth bureaucrat who otherwise does all of the book's problem solving. I liked Mr. Kiku, the bureaucrat, a lot... but I feel like you've messed up if the best character in your juvenile novel is a middle-aged bureaucrat! When Johnnie gets rewarded at the end, it's almost nonsensical, because he didn't do anything to deserve it, like Don or Max did, he hasn't grown in any kind of way. And his reward is so disproportionate compared to theirs, too! I really struggled with this one, to be honest, the worst of the four in the volume.
Quite possibly, my reading of classic Hugo winners and related works is long and complicated enough (current estimated date of completion: 2052, current number of installments remaining: 93)... but based on how much I enjoyed To the Stars, I've decided to add the three other SFBC omnibuses of Heinlein juveniles to it, though it might be a couple years before I work them in.
The second half of the Shuri series continues the story of what Shuri is up to on Earth, acting as Black Panther while T'Challa is missing in space. First there's a two-issue fill-in by Vita Ayala and Paul Davidson about Shuri going to New York City tracking down black holes, where she ends up working alongside the Miles Morales Spider-Man and Ms. Marvel. I was a little skeptical of this going in, to be honest, but I ended up enjoying it a fair amount. Ayala (mostly) has a good command of Ms. Marvel, and the story does some interesting, nuanced things that stop it from being just another generic superhero punch-up. (I did find it weird that Kamala said she was a science person, though.)
from Shuri #9
The last three issues bring back series writer Nnedi Okorafor, alongside a new artist, Rachael Stott, to wrap up the series's various ongoing threads. Stott was one of the regular artists on Titan's Doctor Who work, where she did great stuff particularly on their twelfth Doctor series, and I was glad to see her making the jump to one of the "Big Two" publishers here.
I did think that the three issues here struggled a bit to get everything together; in particular, Shuri's friendship with the mysterious anonymous hacker Muti ultimately seems pretty underdeveloped. Yes, Muti plays a role in wrapping up the ongoing crisis with the music-loving black-hole-generating space bug that threatens to eat Wakanda's memories, but I felt like there was more to do here in terms of characterization with the idea that Shuri's only real friend was someone she never saw or met! In the end, it feels like Okorafor bit off slightly more ideas than than she could chew in a ten-issue miniseries; Wakanda's growing connection to other African nations is just a random bit of flavor rather than something dealt with substantively.
from Shuri #7
It does have some good touches; I liked the inclusion of a made-up piece of Wakandan dance music, and I was pleasantly surprised that the story ended with Shuri still having access to the powers of ancient Wakanda memory, since I figured the point of the series was to remove them to more closely align the comics version of the character with the film version.
So ultimately I found the first half of this series stronger than the second... but it is definitely the best showing from Okorafor on a Black Panther-adjacent comic and, other than Rise of the Black Panther, probably the best Black Panther comic of the whole "Coates era."
Issues #6-10 of Shuri originally
appeared from May to September 2019. The stories were written by Vita Ayala (#6-7) and Nnedi Okorafor (#8-10), illustrated by Paul Davidson (#6-7) and Rachael Stott (#8-10), colored by Triona Farrell (#6-7) and Carlos Lopez (#8-10),
lettered by Joe Sabino, and edited by Wil Moss.
My randomizer brings me and my seven-year-old to our next apocryphal Oz book—Paradox in Oz. I know I read this before at some point, but I didn't own it until my sister bought it for me as a present a couple years ago (along with the sequel, The Living House of Oz), and it doesn't appear on my my reading list, which goes back to September 2003, so I must have borrowed it from the library when I was in high school.
Paradox in Oz by Edward Einhorn illustrated by Eric Shanower
Originally published: 1999 Previously read: early 2000s? Acquired: July 2023 Read aloud: July–August 2025
The big selling point of Paradox in Oz is that it promises to reconcile disparate elements of Oz continuity. This is a good selling point, sure, but the thing that makes it a good book is that this isn't really the focus. The focus is on fun Oz adventures... but ones of a different sort than you've read before.
One of the things that's interested me about rereading the Oz books as an adult is that there are a lot of elements in them that respond very directly to the historical forces and pop culture of the time they were written... but if you read them as a kid, this is largely invisible to you, because the books are a fantasy world and/or vaguely old-fashioned. For example, L. Frank Baum wrote twodifferent novels about demagogues stirring up previously peaceful groups on a warlike footing during World War I. As a kid, that connection would have never occurred to me. Along similar but not identical lines, Ruth Plumly Thompson's novels often take contemporary pop culture as a jumping-off point; she has twodifferent novels that riff on Hitchcock thrillers, for example. I think not only is this invisible to Oz readers, but it's also often invisible to Oz writers. Many of the post–Famous Forty pastiche writers focus, I think, on recapturing Oz as it was written c. 1900-20, seemingly not realizing that if Baum (or Thompson, or whomever) had continued writing Oz novels up to the 1990s that wouldn't just been doing the same thing over and over again, essentially pastiching themselves, but continually refracting what was going on around them through an Oz lens.
All of this is leading up to me saying that if someone wrote an Oz book now, it would incorporate contemporary culture just as Baum and Thompson did, and in the 2020s, that would be complicated stories of time travel and the multiverse... and in 1999, Edward Einhorn did just that. In Paradox in Oz, the anti-aging enchantment ceases working, and Ozma must travel back in time in order to figure out what the issue is, only she inadvertently changes history, resulting in a new timeline where Oz is a dystopia ruled by a tyrannical Wizard. The book has stuff in it like Ozma doubling back on herself again and again, and Ozma seeing into the cracks in the "Ozziverse" as it starts to collapse around her. For my kids, they know this stuff so well from pop culture that the seven-year-old was predicting turns of events! Einhorn threads the needle of doing something new and fun, while still keeping it recognizable Ozzy. There are no other Oz books about time travel... but he perfectly nails how to write one.
My kids and I particularly enjoyed Tempus, the titular "parrot-ox," who can only do impossible things. (These include being born; they are half-parrot, half-ox, but there are no parrots in Oz!) He says lots of crazy stuff which makes a weird sort of sense. (My favorite paradox, though, was probably the barber who can't cut his own hair nor let anyone else cut it.) The trip to the "dark Oz" is good without going too far; the only complaint I have about it is that it 1) it kinds of peters out, Ozma just leaves, and 2) it seems to me to be a bit more exciting than the trip to Absurd City that follows it. Not that the trip to Absurd City is bad, but dark Oz is more interesting; this means the book has the same problem as Star Trek III or Doctor Who's "The Runaway Bride," in that the most exciting part of the story is done with only halfway in, meaning everything that follows is mildly anticlimactic even when it's well done. The encounter with Tip and Mombi in the past is also interesting, and delves into an area many Oz writers have not done a lot with. I liked Dr. Majestico, and I wish we had seen more of him. (I gather there's a short story Einhorn wrote with him; I'll have to seek it out.)
As for the continuity issues—Paradox both does and does not explain them. Early in the book, Ozma summons a parrot-ox by thinking of a paradox; in this case, that in Marvelous Land she knew what a horse looked like but in Dorothy and the Wizard, a horse came to Oz for the first time. The book doesn't explain this so much as just draw attention to the fact that this kind of thing happens in Oz a lot: is the Munchkin Country in the East or the West? do people in Oz use money or not? You get different answers to these questions depending on when you ask them. But the novel also indicates that 1) Oz history is changing all the time, and 2) there are many other Ozzes. So any continuity error you think of might be answered in any one of these ways. The book also provides an explanation for why people don't age or die in Oz, when this didn't seem to be the case in early books. (It's somewhat complicated, and has to work around how come the Tin Woodman didn't die when he chopped himself up; it also doesn't totally fit with some evidence here and there that would indicate aging stopped quite some time ago... but the great thing about the book is that it provides for itself an explanation for why its explanations aren't totally consistent!) In some cases, Einhorn doesn't explain so much as just poke fun at, such as when Ozma thinks about what a stupid name "Wantowin Battles" is.
Eric Shanower's illustrations are, of course, as great as always. Tempus is great, and so are all the images we see of the dark Oz. I did think he somewhat fell short capturing the visual anarchy of Absurd City; Einhorn does his best to render a bunch of visual paradoxes in prose, but I wanted the pictures to give us more of these than it did. (It was interesting to realize my kids' understanding of perspective isn't far enough along for them to understand why an M. C. Escher illustration doesn't make any sense.)
Probably the thing that makes Paradox work more than anything else is that, like the other good writers of Oz continuations, Einhorn is an author who happens to be writing an Oz book (e.g., Eloise McGraw, Sherwood Smith), rather than someone who's just writing an Oz book (e.g., Dick Martin, Gina Wickwar). The book is lively and thoughtful and well-constructed.
If I read and enjoy a Hugo-winning novel, I like to follow that up with related books by the same author. Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1967, but it was actually a prequel of sorts to one of his earlier juveniles, The Rolling Stones (1952), a novel my wife actually remembers reading and enjoying as a kid. The Rolling Stones is about a family taking a trip around the solar system in their own spaceship: fifteen-year-old twins Castor and Pollux, their parents Roger (a writer) and Edith (a doctor), their older sister Meade, their baby brother Lowell, and their grandmother Hazel. We're told Hazel was a key figure in the revolution for Lunar independence, even helping write the constitution—and she appears as a minor character in exactly that role in MIHM.
To the Stars: Between Planets / The Rolling Stones / Starman Jones / The Star Beast by Robert A. Heinlein
It's a fun book but not as sharp, I think, as some of the other Heinlein bildungsromans I have read (a category that would include his juveniles, but also books like Double Star and Starship Troopers, I would argue)... although actually, it's not clear to me that Heinlein is really going for a bildungsroman here the way he is in some other juveniles. Castor and Pollux are bright kids who want to do adult things, overestimating their own abilities; they want to go out on their own in a spaceship. Their parents aren't into this, but decide to go on a whole trip as a family. Basically the format of the book is that the family goes some place, there's some kind of scrape, they then extricate from it and move on. These include helping a nearby passenger liner deal with space plague, getting bicycles through customs on Mars, dealing with trade duties in the asteroid belt, and so on. While Castor and Pollux often overestimate their abilities (particularly at the end of the novel, where they very nearly kill their grandmother and kid sibling), the novel mostly seems to come at them from the outside, without the kind of emphasis on their interiority that you get in Heinlein bildungsomans like Double Star or Between Planets or Starman Jones. It's more focused on dialogue and action than personality.
To be fair, I don't think Heinlein was going for this. I could be wrong, of course, but the tone of it seems much lighter than his other books that I've read, and probably also the target audience younger. But that did mean there wasn't quite as much here to sustain my interest. I found it quite readable, but at his best, Heinlein is readable and deep. Still, the world is—as usual for Heinlein—well thought out. He makes the tax implications of importing bicycles both plausible and interesting! The family interactions are fun, and of course I enjoyed Hazel; I don't see how anyone couldn't. As a complaining dad myself, I definitely vibed with Roger (though I would have even before becoming a dad). To be honest, that's probably the book's problem, in that I think all the adult family members are more interesting than Castor and Pollux. Is that really what you want in a "juvenile"? It's certainly not what you want in a bildungsroman!
One of the subplots here is that Roger writes a weekly radio serial (later, Hazel takes it over); it make me think that the episodic, dialogue-heavy nature of this very book would make it work well as a radio drama. Adapt it as a podcast, someone!
Other thoughts:
I had known that, notoriously, Star Trek's tribbles were a rip-off of Heinlein's flat cats. I had not realized quite how much of a rip-off! I guess I had assumed that flat cats (because of the name) were more catlike, but no, they are physically exactly like tribbles... or rather, the other way around. The way the twins end up with a flat cat is basically exactly how it goes down in "The Trouble with Tribbles" too.
I found the treatment of the twins' older sister, Meade, quite weird. At the end of the book, we're told she's of "marrying height"! James David Nicoll sums up the issues well in his review.
When I got to the section set in the asteroid belt, I was like, "Surely James S.A. Corey read this." Not that The Expanse is ripping it off or anything, but the world of Corey's Belters feels like a natural extrapolation from it... and of course, the Expanse books have that same interest in orbital mechanics you see here. (I can't find a lot of specific stuff about Heinlein's influence on them, but it is occasionally mentioned.)
I will say my whole reason for reading this book now was kind of a lie. The backstory given for Hazel here is largely incompatible with the one that we actually see in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress! According to Rolling Stones, Hazel was a single mother on Earth, working as an engineer when she ran into a glass ceiling, less competent men being promoted above her, such that she made more money working in a casino; she emigrated to the Moon to get better opportunities for her and her son Roger. But in MIHM, she is a teenager when she gets swept up in the revolution, no abortive engineering career or kid she's raising on her own anywhere in sight!
(One thing I've noticed through this project of reading 1950s and '60s sf is the authors were clearly less hung up on "continuity" than contemporary ones. Authors were happy to reuse elements between stories without it meaning that all their books were set in the same "universe"; you see much the same thing in Philip K. Dick, whose works often have common worldbuilding elements but rarely line up in the details.)
I obtained my copy as part of an omnibus from the Science Fiction Book Club; from 2002 to 2006, the SFBC released all of Heinlein's juveniles in a series of four hardcover volumes. It's an attractive volume, and I'm going to pick up the lot of them now. Before then, though, I'll read the other three novels collected in this one.
I read an old winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel every year, plus
other Hugo-related books that interest me. Next up in sequence: Between Planets / Starman Jones / The Star Beast by Robert A. Heinlein
2387 This is pretty much an impossible book to review on its own merits. The
first, most obvious, reason it's that it's the first part of a trilogy,
and it's not one of those trilogies that tells three stories; we've very
much only read a third of a story here. So as to how good the story
told here is, we can't say until we get through Coda, Book III.
Star Trek: Coda, Book I: Moments Asunder by Dayton Ward
Meanwhile, a tedious amount of detail is spent on the death of Ducane, captain of the Federation timeship Relativity (from the Voyager
episode of the same name). This guy isn't interesting, spending tons of
pages on him doesn't make me feel bad when he dies. I feel like I would
have started the book with the (apparent) death of Wesley Crusher,
that's the point where I sat up and paid attention. The book is
obviously trying to do that comic book thing (more on that later) where
we see glimpses of a universal crisis by showing us characters all over
the place, but I'm not convinced the Relativity was the way to do
this. Nor am I even sure that what works in comics, where you can do a
couple quick pages on a side character, even works in the medium of
novelistic prose!
The second reason is that though this is the first part of a trilogy,
that trilogy came out almost four years ago, and thus a sense of how the
series goes has already percolated to me. Perhaps I am mistaken in the
specifics, but my understanding is that Coda ends with the entire
timeline of the "novelverse" being eradicated. Given that, once people
start dying here, it feels a bit meaningless. You know that everyone
is going to die, so when people do die, it doesn't land with any kind
of significance. If book III is going to kill everyone, then why should I
feel anything in particular at the death of T'Ryssa Chen? When everyone can die, then, I would argue, the deaths of anyone don't really matter. (This is the problem I see in "shock" deaths in alternate-universe comic stories like Marvel Zombies; the whole premise fails because it's suffused with a sense that it doesn't matter.)
The obvious touchstone for this book is Crisis on Infinite Earths.
That's not to say Dayton Ward was consciously thinking of it when he
wrote the book, but that is, as far as I know, the progenitor of this
kind of story, the epic of the doom of a franchise universe where you
get these glimpses across different times and places of various
preexisting characters, many of whom die in order to prove the situation
is serious. I have read a lot of superhero comics at this point in my
life, and I have found that Crisis is often imitated, rarely equaled. Many of its imitators have a... clear and obvious cynicism to them. In the original Crisis,
you felt like the deaths of Supergirl and the Flash meant something,
because those were key characters in the pre-Crisis DC universe. Even
the deaths of the Earth-Three Crime Syndicate mattered, because you'd
read so many other stories with them. (Or, even if you hadn't, which was
true of me the first time I read Crisis, you could still feel the narrative weight. I feel like the destruction of the alternate Enterprise-D from Headlong Flight
is an attempt to capture this kind of narrative energy but it didn't
really work for me, probably because of what I'll discuss below.)
But in a lot of these kind of stories, there are two kinds of deaths: ones you know will be reversed (if Batman dies in Final Crisis,
you can feel reasonably sure he'll be back) and ones you know are only
allowed because the character doesn't matter. When the Rick Tyler
Hourman is killed off, you know it's because no one cares about the Rick
Tyler Hourman, and thus it has the opposite effect than intended; it
doesn't make you think anyone can die, because, well, it's just a
character who last did something anyone cared about in 1988.
What's going here isn't quite that, but it does still feel cynical. We
can kill these characters off because they don't matter anymore, because
this is a dead end. Mostly who dies here are novelverse-original
characters, or characters significantly developed by the novels:
T'Ryssa, Rennan Konya, Dina Elfiki, Taurik. The deaths are cruel but I
didn't really feel anything at them because you know they don't matter. I
liked T'Ryssa, but the book is undermined too by the beigeness of a lot
of the original TNG characters. Konya was okay but not someone I
was attached to; Elfiki never took off for me at all. The only death of
a significant screen character is that of Ezri Dax, but killing her off
in a book she's barely contributed to feels cynical again, a cheap way
to raise the stakes. (Though it does seem like something is up with her
death, so I'll reserve final judgement here.) On top of all that, the
novel's prose just doesn't do much to make you care about these deaths.
They happen, the end.
The third is something that feels like that old canard of negative reviews—it's not how I
would have done it. Well, but I think I can put that better. To be more
precise, I don't think this is what I wanted out of a novelverse
wrapup. But I'll hold off on my thoughts there until I read book III.
The Devidians did make a return appearance in the comics, but I didn't notice any mention of that here, even though the novels have used the same comics' designation of "Aegis" as the organization Gary Seven works for. That said, I think maybe that whole comic story got erased from the timeline (it's been a while), so perhaps there's nothing that could be referenced!
Continuity Notes:
There's a real attempt to throw in a reference to everything. For example, a lot of DTI characters pop up (though apparently the appearance of one is a continuity error; I don't remember Shield of the Gods well enough to have caught it myself), and we even get a random reference to Captain Adams of the Prometheus. (Worf is offered a job as his replacement.)
On p. 183, we're told the DTI monitors the
Devidians, but on p. 220, it seems like no one knows their planet got
hit by an asteroid ten years ago! Good job monitoring, people.
In Armageddon's Arrow, Taurik accidentally got some future knowledge, which has been a small subplot in subsequent TNG novels; here, we finally find out what that was about, but I doubt this was the original intent.
Other Notes:
There is a subplot about various TNG
characters having offers to move on in their careers; most of these have
resonance with things we know from elsewhere. For example, La Forge is
offered a job designing starships, which would fit with him designing
the Jellyfish from Star Trek 2009 (as indicated in some of the tie-ins); Chen is offered a job doing "second contacts," so presumably a California-class
ship. I felt like this was a little... cheap. Like, no one is going to
take these jobs, so they're just there to generate pathos, like claiming
a cop in your action movie is one day from retirement.
I spent the first half of this year reading the Pelican History of England, a series of nine paperback books chronicling the history of England from the Roman conquest up to the 1970s. The first eight were originally released in the 1950s, joined by a ninth in the 1960s. They were reissued, as far as I can tell, fairly consistently until the 1990s when Penguin finally let them go out of print. Some were reprinted as is, but others went into multiple editions—volume 4 had eight! In some cases, the differences between editions were apparently pretty small, but others were almost wholly rewritten. In one case (volume 6), the book was replaced by one written by a different author in the 1970s.
One thing that fascinated me reading the books was how much history had to be squeezed into these slim volumes. Volume 2, for example, goes from A.D. 449 to 1066, covering 617 years in 237 pages, meaning each page has to cover 2.6 years! But also as the series went on, each volume got a narrower year range... and some of the later volumes were thicker than the early ones, too.
(You could argue volume 1's start date should be A.D. 43, since its overview of pre-Roman Britain is pretty quick; that would change its years covered to 406, and its pages per year to 0.47. Also, yes, volumes 4 and 5 do overlap for some reason. It's volume 4 that's at fault, actually; the series was released out of order, and volume 5 was published first.)
As you can see, the volume covering the twentieth century far and away gets the most detail. Partially this is because it is somehow the longest volume despite having the least amount of time to cover! I was surprised to realized the series peaked, though, with volumes 5 and 6, which were a bit chunkier than the subsequent volumes.
Lastly, here's a picture of my eclectic set of editions:
The blue-spine ones are 1970s printings. These I picked up at a used bookstore, and are what launched me on this project to collect them all. The white-spine ones are 1980s printings. Volume 8 I found in a box of free books in grad school.
When buying the other volumes to plug the gaps for this project, I stuck to 1990s printings in order to have the most recent editions of each book; these are the ones with orange spines. You can't always trust online booksellers, though; I am pretty sure the copy I bought of volume 5 was listed as a 1990s one but I received a 1980s one instead.
The picture demonstrates how, even within a decade, Penguin did not do a good job of maintaining consistency. Why does my 1982 printing of volume 5 have a different spine design than my 1986 printing of volume 8? Why was the 1990s printing of volume 1 taller than all the other volumes? (I'm guessing it's related to the fact that the 1990s printing of volume 1 was a new edition, whereas all of these other stopped getting new editions in the 1980s at the latest.) Why are the book title and author name in black on volume 6 when they are white on all other 1990s printings? Why does the spine of volume 7 call it the Penguin History of England instead of the Pelican? (An attempt to rebrand the series that didn't last? Or an honest mistake?)
These are the questions that keep me up at night.
The third edition of volume 1 was released in 1995; this was the first significant change to the series since the second edition of volume 6 came out in 1985. Weirdly, just a year later, Penguin began superseding the series with its new effort, the Penguin History of Britain; the first release of that series, volume 6 (covering 1603-1714) came out in 1996. It would take two decades to publish them all; the last was volume 8 (covering 1800-1906) in 2017. (Except that volume 7, covering 1707-1815, never came out at all!) These are, I understand, a bit different in approach than the Pelican Histories: hardcovers without a uniform design or branding.
I do intend to read them too, but that will be a project for 2026... I need a break!
The Gathering of My Name is the second of four parts of The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda; Ta-Nehisi Coates continues as writer, of course, but Kev Walker takes over as illustrator; I know him best for his work on the surprisingly good Elsa Bloodstone tie-in to Battleworld. (He would go one, I believe, to do some acclaimed work on Marvel's Star Wars comics.) I found book 1 of Intergalactic Empire a bit inscrutable at times, and I think partially that was on purpose—Coates was clearly doing one of those stories where you start in a new context with no explanation—but not entirely so—I found it hard to keep track of all the characters, and Daniel Acuña's art was sometimes hard to follow.
from Black Panther vol. 7 #9
The basic premise was that T'Challa was a former slave in a space version of Wakanda, working with a group of rebels called the "maroons" to bring down the empire. Though many characters had familiar names but were not the familiar characters, it seemed like T'Challa was—but if so, he did not remember it. Stories in book 1 jumped around a lot, each focusing on some incident or battle for T'Challa and the maroons in their struggle against the empire.
Book 2 of Intergalactic Empire is easier to follow, for a number of reasons. Partially because, well, we read book 1 and so we have built up some context. Partially because the text pages at the ends of issues (in both books 1 and 2) have filled in some gaps for us. Partially because the last couple issues feature T'Challa regaining access to his memories, and thus fill in some key backstory for us. Partially because I think Coates lets us follow things more; it seemed to me that the plots of these issues were laid out more directly than those in book 1, Coates perhaps realizing you can only test an audience's patience for so long in an ongoing comic book. Partially because Walker has a more straightforward style and approach to the artwork than Acuña did.
The first two issues here are one-part stories, showing different missions of T'Challa and his rebel gang. These were the two that I enjoyed the most. The first is decent; the maroons decide to try to get hold of a guy who designs technology for the empire, and carry out an operation to abduct him from a pleasure cruiser.
from Black Panther vol. 7 #8
The second was my favorite of all six parts of book 2. In this one, the rebels hit an imperial freighter for its cargo of raw vibranium only to discover that its cargo is also frozen prisoners—but the prisoners haven't had their memories removed yet. T'Challa, of course, wants to save the prisoners, but the rebel leadership wants him to focus on the mission. As T'Challa helps the prisoners, he bonds with a kid who is also a king. It's perhaps straightforward and cute stuff, but it's effectively done, exactly what you might want from a story about a former king trying to take down an intergalactic empire.
Overall, I have to say that I continue to enjoy The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda more than anything in Coates's run on Black Panthervolume 6/volume 1. I do hope the end of this book represents a turning point, though. We are halfway through the story now, and I think it's time to move from "laying out a mystery" and even "solving a mystery" into "dealing with the interesting ideas." A story where T'Challa has to take down a Wakandan empire raises some interesting questions about power and violence; hopefully the story does something interesting with those questions in its thirteen remaining issues.
"The Gravity of the Crime" is a standalone Star Trek Adventures scenario that 
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