Technologies of Immortality: Team Teaching

I've mentioned it a few times around here, but this semester I've been team-teaching an Honors course. Our Honors program made some big changes over the last few years; one of them was that Honors students would take classes called "Dialectics," where professors from three different colleges would teach a course on a common topic; these could be called "Where Did We Come From?", "Where Are We Now?", and "Where Are We Going?"

I applied to become an Honors fellow back in Spring 2020; the Honors program then arranged a big Zoom meeting where accepted faculty gave quick verbal indications of what they might be interested in. I was interested in science fiction, of course; my argument was that I could basically pair with any science professor, because no matter what science you talk about, there are science fiction stories about it.

I ended up paired with Ryan Cragun, a professor of sociology, and Kenyon Evans-Nguyen, a professor of forensic science who specializes in neurochemistry. We kibbitzed and eventually came up with a class about what I came to call "technologies of immortality": attempts to lengthen the human lifespan. Our three big examples were consciousness uploading, cryonics, and genetic life extension. I could talk about how such technologies had been depicted in sf, Cragun could talk about the real people trying to do this and the sociological implications of doing it, and Kenyon could talk about the actual science of it.

Like I said, this was Spring 2020... we ended up being scheduled to teach the class in Spring 2024, so I had quite a lot of time to prepare! I've chronicled some of that process here on my blog. In next week's post, I'll talk about my specific stories, but here I wanted to talk about the big picture of how we organized the course.

We bookended the course with the science fiction; the first three weeks were largely mine. Aside from the syllabus day, we began with the story "Bridesicle" by Will McIntosh, as a way of capturing students' attention with the course topic; the story features both cryonics and consciousness uploading. We then did one day on real attempts to extend life, to show this was something really happening, and then went back into the sf.

After that, we shifted to the sociology and the science. The students started learning about how neurons actually worked from Kenyon and about the sociological issues from Cragun. These Dialectics classes have sixty students, and you can't really take sixty students into the lab. So what we would sometimes do is split the class up into thirds: one third would go into the lab, one third would attend a sociology lecture, and one third would conference with me about papers. Across a M/W/F week, students would rotate through all three.

In the lab, they did things like:

• measure electrical activity in crickets
• drug crickets and see how that affected their electrical activity
• measure electrical activity in worms
  
• cool worms and see how that affected their electrical activity
• freeze onion slices in liquid nitrogen

"Dad, why are you a scientist?" asked my five-year-old.

I didn't always get to go (sometimes I had to conference), but I did do three of the labs.

We did a week on HeLa cells, where we had students watch The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and then Cragun talked about the racial issues, Kenyon talked about using HeLa cells during his postdoc (before the book came out, so he didn't know the significance), and I assigned an sf short story that riffed on them.

We also had them read a bit of Gregory Benford's cryonics thriller Chiller, specifically the afterword, where he discusses if he thinks cryonics will work, and we had them research and present on his assumptions.

Finally, at the end of the semester, we circled back to science fiction with two final weeks.

Some Dialectics faculty have the student do common assignments; we broke the grade into four categories, each worth 25%:

• Literature Assignments. I assigned a four-page literary analysis paper near the beginning of the semester, and a 1½-page "reflective" paper near the end, where they had to connect the sf to something from the sociology or science portions of the course.
• Lab Assignments. Kenyon assigned five lab write-ups to go with his five labs.
• Sociology Assignments. Cragun assigned a cumulative sociology research project, where they gathered survey data about attitudes toward immortality, and contextualized it in terms of a literature review they did.
  
• Quizzes and Presentations. I did random reading quizzes, and Kenyon assigned pre-lab quizzes.

I'll talk more about some of this in a future post, too.

---

Overall, I liked it a lot. If nothing else, Honors students are engaged and thoughtful, and I got to discuss literature as literature, not as a thing to write about in an AWR course.

Plus, it's fun to learn things! I wouldn't be in this job if I didn't believe that, and for a few weeks, I got to be a student again, learning about neurons and macromolecules and the history of religion and income inequality. I made some neat connections between my work and their work.

But I also really liked working with both Ryan Cragun and Kenyon Evans-Nguyen; I think we have similar dispositions and worked well as co-teachers. They are, like me, nerdy middle-aged dads! I am trying to convince them both to join my Star Trek Adventures campaign. I can imagine there would be some people you would be miserable team teaching with, but I really enjoyed working with the two of them. (Which is good, because we will do it two more times!)

Reading Roundup Wrapup: April 2024

Pick of the month: To Shape a Dragon's Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose. This was a Hugo (well, Lodestar (not a Hugo)) finalist, and so far, it definitely feels like the one to beat in its category. YA fantasy about a dragonriding school, but with some genuinely original twists on the genre and solid worldbuilding.

All books read:

1. Apocalypse Still: Stories by Leah Nicole Whitcomb
2. John Dough and the Cherub: A Whimsical Wonder-Story in which is Described the Marvelous Creation of John Dough, the Gingerbread Man; his meeting with the Incubator Baby called Chick the Cherub: their Adventures in the Isle of Phreex, the Land of Mifkets, Pirate Island and Hiland and Loland by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill
3. Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons by Kelly Sue DeConnick, Phil Jimenez, Gene Ha, and Nicola Scott
4. The Witches of World War II by Paul Cornell and Valeria Burzo
5. The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older
6. Abeni’s Song by P. Djèlí Clark
7. To Shape a Dragon’s Breath: The First Book of Nampeshiweisit by Moniquill Blackgoose
8. A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith 

I feel like I did a lot of good reading this month but I guess it's not reflected in my numbers. A lot of long books, I suppose. All but the first two were Hugo reads!

All books acquired:

1. Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons by Kelly Sue DeConnick, Phil Jimenez, Gene Ha, and Nicola Scott
2. The Witches of World War II by Paul Cornell and Valeria Burzo
3. Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh 
4. Unraveller by Frances Hardinge
5. Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher
6. The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty
7. Web of Angels by John M. Ford

#1-6 are all Hugo finalists, of course; I have a few more yet to arrive.

Currently reading:

• Showcase Presents Blackhawk, Volume One by Dick Dillin, Charles Cuidera, et al.
  
• Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Gamma: Original Sin by David R. George III
• Collected Poems by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Legion of Super-Heroes: Five Years Later Omnibus, Volume 2 by Tom & Mary Bierbaum, Tom McCraw, Stuart Immonen, Chris Sprouse, et al. 

Up next in my rotations:

1. The Pelican History of England: 3. English Society in the Early Middle Ages (1066-1307) by Doris Mary Stenton 
2. The Periodic Table by Primo Levi 
3. The Dispossessed by Szilárd Borbély
4. Star Trek: Prey, Book 3: The Hall of Heroes by John Jackson Miller

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 660 (down 1)

Library of America: The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth

American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1953-1956: The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth / More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon / The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett / The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson
edited by Gary K. Wolfe

At a certain point, I realized that I owned every Library of America science fiction release... except two. One, Five Classics Novels 1956-1958, contained five books that I already owned four of, so that seemed fair to skip, but the other had four new-to-me works, so I put it on my wish list and my wife got it for me for my birthday last year.

Collection published: 2012
Novel originally published: 1952
Acquired: July 2023
Read: March 2024

The first is The Space Merchants (1952), a novel that has long stuck in my head because Isaac Asimov briefly mentions it in his introduction to More Soviet Science Fiction under its alternate title of "Gravy Planet," which is, to be honest, a bit of a daft title, but certainly an evocative one. It is not about a planet of literal gravy, alas. It's also not about merchants flying through space, which is what I had imagined before reading it; it's about the people trying to sell the public on going to space, the people merchanting space.

Asimov cites it as an example of what he calls the "Stage Three-C" anti-utopian science fiction story: "It deals with a dreadfully overpopulated world in which advertising techniques have been made the only acceptable guide to human behavior. Its gambits are: 'If the population explosion goes on—' and 'If the theory that anything that is good for business is morally correct goes on—'" The former gambit has dated itself a bit, but the latter has held up, and if anything probably seems even more likely than it did back in 1952. Senators literally represent corporate interests, no form of advertising or corporate skulduggery is illegal—except where corporations infringe on each other, they can do whatever they like to people. The main character is an advertising executive put in charge of selling Venus to the American people, who suddenly finds himself on the outs when he had been on the top.

The actual story is what it is; I don't think it's terrible or anything, but it's not why you're reading the book. It's one of those sf books you read for the world. Pohl and Kornbluth have that 1950s sf obsession with advertising-as-science, which also appears in Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man (1952), Mark Clifton and Frank Riley's They'd Rather Be Right (1954), and Philip K. Dick's Ubik (1969), this belief that with the right combination of triggers, anyone can be sold anything. The advertising satire is one of the best parts of the book; the book definitely performs a Stage Three-C gambit with the ubiquity of advertising, and it's hard to imagine that Dick hadn't read The Space Merchants. The leap that Pohl and Kornbluth don't quite make (but are so close on) is that, as John Berger would highlight in Ways of Seeing (1972), advertising doesn't just sell you a product, it sells you the entire idea that the way to improve your life is through the purchase of product. What the novel does delve into, though, is how there's an invisible class divide when it comes to marketing—well, invisible to those on the top, anyway. Some people aren't even worth selling to!

It's a quick read and a fun one; Pohl and Kornbluth have an easy style and the protagonist has a strong narrative voice. This would be fun to teach in a class on early science fiction, or one in a class on advertising in sf.

I am only a little bit into the second novel, More Than Human, and so far it is a very different book! But more on that in a future post.

The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley

The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley

I received this book, whose author I had never even heard of, from LibraryThing's secret Santa book exchange. I only briefly skimmed the blurb (just enough to figure out which genre tag to put on it), because on those rare occasions where it's possible, I like to go into a book blind.

Originally published: 2021
Acquired: December 2023
Read: February 2024

The Kingdoms is about a man who suddenly wakes up without a memory, in the late nineteenth century in a world that we slowly discover is one where the French won the Napoleonic Wars and thus conquered England (though not Scotland). The book benefits from a nice sense of double wrongness: Joe has no memory, so everything is new to him, but there's a different way in which everything is new to us, as we slowly uncover how this history differs from the one we as readers know. I like to say (I think I stole this from Jo Walton) that sf is a mystery genre, where the world itself is the mystery, and The Kingdoms captures that very well. I liked Joe a lot as a protagonist, in his slow, methodical nature, and I liked how that was mirrored by the slow, methodical way in which the story unspooled. Joe is sent to man a remote lighthouse whose operators have disappeared, but also one that seems to have some kind of connection to his mysterious past; the people he meets are strange and unsettling.

The book makes some major shifts after this point, and though they worked for me in the abstract—like, if you described them to me, I certainly wouldn't object to a novel in general, or even this novel in particular, going this route—I found that in their actuality, they kind of lost me. The clear throughline of the first part of the novel ends up dissipating, with a lot of embedded narratives, and the singular character focus of the first part is lost in favor of an expanding cast, many of whom never grabbed me as much as Joe did. In the end, I got a bit lost in the plot mechanics too—and I usually do pretty well by these things! Perhaps I was not giving the book the focus it deserved, but though I enjoyed it for much of its run, by its end it didn't seem that the attributes that made it initially appeal to me were still around very much. It may work very well for someone else, but not so much for me.

Service to the Profession

When I was in grad school, I did a lot of what academics call "service" and in general found it fairly satisfying. Most prominently, I was a senator in our Graduate Student Senate, then parliamentarian, then vice president; later I did a little bit of work for the Graduate Employee Union as the "guide" for the local. I also spent five semesters at one of two assistant directors for the Freshman English Program. Beyond those things, I served on a lot of committees, and so on. (I've previously talked about these experiences here and here.)

* * *

I was reminded of the former last week because it's actually the tenth anniversary of when the UConn GEU was certified. I wasn't terribly involved in this process, but I was present throughout it. I was incoming vice president of the GSS when our health insurance was unilaterally changed by UConn HR; basically, they had ended up in an untenable financial situation, but their solution was to take it all out on us. When it was presented to the Senate, they span it so it looked like an upgrade, and it was really only once the new plan went into effect that summer that we began to realize just how awful it was. I actually had a dentist call me wanting to know why we had made such a terrible switch!

The GSS worked on solutions through its official avenues, but we were pretty limited in our power; meanwhile, outraged graduate students were kicking off the process of setting up a union. As long as I had been at UConn and involved in the GSS, people would come to meetings wondering if we were going to unionize... but it had never gone anywhere because to be honest, we had it pretty good. UConn paid above average for stipend and had great health insurance. The only people who wanted to unionize were the "true believers," those committed socialists who just love forming unions, and they had no ability to win over your average graduate assistant. The health insurance switcheroo showed everyone, though, that no matter how good you had it, the boss could always make it terrible at their discretion.

My big memory of this all was a meeting where the Dean of the Graduate School (who I did really like, and I think was pushed into an awful position by a bunch of other people's decisions) came to the GSS to tell us that the GA health plan was still losing money, and thus needed to be made even worse—and he was going to let us advise him on how to make it worse. We saw this as an attempt to gain our "approval" for whatever change was imposed; a group of people involved with the union introduced a motion rejecting the false binary and demanding UConn recognize our right to collectively bargain.

A year later, we had the fastest union card drive in higher ed history (something like that anyway) and whatever UConn saved by pushing us onto crappy health insurance was more than cancelled out by the kind of gains the GEU was able to make in collective bargaining.

So in honor of the tenth anniversary of that, the GEU invited a number of us from the early days to come and speak (mostly via Zoom) at a membership meeting. It was fun to see some people I had not thought about in a long time, and hear about some of those successes we had had. It was a reminder to me that with committed people on your side, you can really accomplish something.

* * *

I was also reminded of the latter, working in the Freshman English office. Here at UT, our Director of Academic Writing recently left the university, so the department and the Dean have ended up restructuring the position somewhat; it's been split into a Director and an Assistant Director, which are voted on by the department. (The old Director had the position as part of his contract; it never changed.) A number of people asked me if I was going to run, so I did; I thought other people might run, but in the end, I was unopposed. The Academic Writing Committee recommended me to the department, and at our last department meeting of the academic year, I was elected to the position.

I posted about it on facebook, and a friend sent me a congratulatory text, asking if it came with "with more money and security," I think envisioning it as a sort of promotion. The answer is, of course, no; I get a course release, so I'm down to a 3/3 load. Other than that, I am doing the exact same job I was doing!

But I am excited about it. The split of the old position into two works in a way that I think benefits both the assistant director and the program. The director deals with all the administrative bullshit, while I get to work on mentoring faculty and developing program pedagogy. I think (we'll see what I think in a year) that this means I get to do the fun stuff, while also it ensures this kind of important work isn't neglected by the director because of his focus on scheduling and putting out administrative fires.

* * *

At the GEU Zoom meeting, someone talked about how as a graduate student, you get thrust into leadership positions quickly because there's such churn among grad students. This is true but I hadn't really thought about it before; I was Assistant Director of Freshman English in my fourth year (second year of Ph.D.) and I was GSS vice president in my sixth (fourth of my Ph.D.). Here at UT, I am in my seventh year as faculty, but just now reaching the point where you start to get tapped to do significant leadership in service.

For me this is a real boon; it has allowed me to stretch myself and find more pleasure in a job that can sometimes feel thankless. I enjoyed doing service in grad school, and think I am finally getting to do so again here.

X-Men / Black Panther: Wild Kingdom by Peter Milligan, Reginald Hudlin, Salvador Larroca, David Yardin, Jay Leisten, et al.

from Black Panther vol. 4 #9

After its opening story arc, Black Panther vol. 4 was immediately involved in a crossover with X-Men. In this project, I've mostly stayed away from crossovers—but in the comiXology sale where I got all these Black Panther issues to begin with, they considerately put the relevant X-Men issues on sale as well. 

Wild Kingdom sees Black Panther and the X-Men responding to the same crisis in the African nation of Niganda. After Niganda's abortive attempt to invade Wakanda, a number of genetically altered animals end up on the loose, attracting the attention of Black Panther because of the danger to Wakanda and the X-Men because they show up on Cerebro (in this story called "Cerebra" for some reason). Some third-rate supervillains called Dr. Paine and the Red Ghost are trying to use enhanced primates to take over Niganda... and then, of course, the world!

from Black Panther vol. 4 #8

I like a few of the X-Men movies (i.e., X-Men, X2, First Class), but I don't think I've ever actually enjoyed an X-Men comic, and this didn't change my mind. There's not much for them in this story, just people with phonetically rendered accents bickering a bit. The only exception is Storm, as Wild Kingdom's purpose mostly seems to be to delve a bit into the T'Challa/Ororo relationship. Coming off the back of Priest's run (which is where we first learned they had a thing), I didn't find this totally convincing; I don't think Priest's Black Panther was incapable of being awkward, but I do think he would be much better at confining and controlling his awkwardness than this stammering schoolboy.

I do think David Yardin and Jay Leisten did some solid work art-wise on the two Black Panther issues; hopefully they do more work on the series. But the story here is pretty goofy on the whole, and it feels weird to go from the entire history and an invasion of Wakanda being told in six issues to this mediocre threat being stretched out to four. I'll be curious to see how Hudlin's Black Panther develops when he just gets to do his own thing.

from Marvel Adventures: Fantastic Four #10

I also read "Law of the Jungle," a one-part story from Marvel Adventures: Fantastic Four, which retells the story of the FF's first meeting with Black Panther. In this version, Reed Richards and the Fantastic Four are taking receipt of a shipment of vibranium for science purposes—but what they don't know is that this isn't a legitimate export, but smuggled out of Wakanda. Black Panther attacks them, but the FF soon realizes what's up and travels to Wakanda to make amends and help defeat the smugglers. I haven't read much of Jeff Parker's comics work, but I always enjoy what I read; this has a good sense of fun to it, lots of little touches in terms of characterization and comedy that really elevate it. (My favorite is the Thing and the Human Torch playing good cop/bad cop.) My main complaint would be that it's very much a Fantastic Four comic, not a Black Panther one; the trip to Wakanda and battle there is over pretty quickly. But this isn't really a complaint about the story, more a complaint about the decision to reprint it in Marvel-Verse: Black Panther. (But I guess it makes sense; it's a nice one-issue version of the FF/Black Panther meeting, as opposed to the original 2½-issue one.)

Wild Kingdom originally appeared in X-Men vol. 2 #175-76 and Black Panther vol. 4 #8-9 (Nov.-Dec. 2005). The story was written by Peter Milligan (#175-76) and Reginald Hudlin (#8-9); penciled by Salvador Larroca (#175-76) and David Yardin (#8-9); inked by Danny Miki & Allen Martinez (#175-76) and Jay Leisten (#8-9); colored by Cory Petit (#175-76), Dean White (#8-9), and Matt Milla (#9); lettered by Randy Gentile (#8-9); and edited by Mike Marts (#175-75) and Axel Alonso (#8-9).

"Law of the Jungle" originally appeared in Marvel Adventures: Fantastic Four #10 (May 2006). The story was written by Jeff Parker, penciled by Manuel Garcia, inked by Scott Koblish, colored by A. Crossley, lettered by Dave Sharpe, and edited by Mark Paniccia. It was reprinted in Marvel-Verse: Black Panther (2020), which was edited by Jennifer Grünwald.

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker

This historical intrusion fantasy is about a golem without a master created in the form of a woman and a jinni imprisoned in human form both ending up in New York City in the early twentieth century. Their lives intersect and overlap as they each struggle with the freedom and confinement of their new ways of being. For a golem, this is more freedom than she could imagine—or know what to do with. But for a jinni, this is a life of horrifying captivity... even though he can do as much, if not more, than what any human can do.

Originally published: 2013
Acquired: December 2022
Read: November 2023

I enjoyed the book but did not love it, though I can see why many others may have loved it. Where it really work is in Wecker's depiction of the immigrant communities of gaslight-era New York, and in the two central characters. There are a lot of great observations, both large and small, of the people and their world. Good character moments, good complications, interesting interactions.

But I did find that at times the backstory of the jinni was delved into more than I was actually interested in, threatening to overwhelm the present-day material that had actually hooked me on the story. The core idea of the title sometimes felt a bit lost in at all.

Reading L. Frank Baum's John Dough and the Cherub Aloud to My Kid

John Dough and the Cherub: A Whimsical Wonder-Story in which is Described the Marvelous Creation of John Dough, the Gingerbread Man; his meeting with the Incubator Baby called Chick the Cherub: their Adventures in the Isle of Phreex, the Land of Mifkets, Pirate Island and Hiland and Loland
by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill

My child and I used to slide the Nonestica "borderlands" novels (those books by L. Frank Baum about countries adjacent to Oz) in between Ruth Plumly Thompson "Famous Forty" installments when I had a delay in sourcing one. However, we have the whole Famous Forty now, so we haven't done that in quite some time; furthermore, we had just one left, John Dough and the Cherub, the only one I did not own when I myself was a kid.

Originally published: 1906
Acquired: July 2023
Read aloud: March–April 2024

But I realized that our next Famous Forty book, The Shaggy Man of Oz, includes a character Baum first introduced in this book; furthermore, we'd recently read The Scalawagons of Oz and will soon read The Ozmapolitan of Oz, both of which feature Mifkets, who made their debut here as well. So I decided we'd take a break from Jack Snow and read John Dough first. My kid was fascinated by John Dough the living gingerbread man back when he cameoed in The Road to Oz, but as that was over two years ago, of course they don't remember that anymore.

On the one hand, it's nice to be back with L. Frank Baum again. As much as I enjoy a lot of the later contributors to the Oz novels, there's something about Baum's particular mix of groundedness and whimsy that no one else quite gets right. Yes, fanciful things can happen in an L. Frank Baum novel, but one always feels they are happening in a real world, even if not your real world, there's something about them that feels carefully thought through and rational even at their most bizarre. Whereas at times it felt like Thompson or John R. Neill were willing to bring anything to life at the drop of a hat, Baum works hard to lay the foundation for why John Dough would come to life, and then explore how horrifying it would be to be a piece of living confectionery in a world of hungry humans. My kid is often sensitive to things or people being damaged or broken, so I expected them to not like all these threats of being eaten, but they took it with surprising equanimity most of the time.

After this, though, the book changes tack; J. L. Bell argues in the introduction that Baum probably wrote the early chapters a few years before the rest. In chapter five, John Dough is abruptly sent to a fantastic realm, the kind Baum had become famous for writing about, and encounters a child co-protagonist, Chick the Cherub, the genderless incubator baby. (On the rare occasion Baum uses pronouns for Chick, he uses "it," but I substituted the more modern singular "they.") Chick is surprisingly underexplained; I guess people in 1906 just knew what an incubator baby was, and would be willing to buy Baum's apparent assumption that a human child born to a genderless machine would itself be without gender? Chick is a fun concept the book does little with, but perhaps that's the point; my five-year-old child who sometimes insists they are both a boy and a girl was all too ready to accept a genderless child in an Oz book, and Chick's lack of gender goes almost entirely without comment. Chick is also a fun character, pushing against the often recalcitrant John Dough.

John Dough, Chick, and later Para Bruin the rubber bear travel from the Isle of Phreex to the Palace of Romance to the Isle of the Mifkets to Pirate Island to Hiland and Loland, all of them typical oddball Baum locales, with his usual vividly imagined characters... though by the time we get to the last two locations, it does kind of feel like we're running on empty, with little time spent and little fun to be had. Still, even the weaker locations are the kind that a kid can still find captivating.

The book also demonstrates the weaker aspects of Baum as a writer; it's very much one of his books where the characters go to a place, do a thing, go to another place, and so on. The pursuit of John Dough by "the Arab," Ali Dubh, who wants to eat him so that he can access the Elixir of Life John was baked with, provides some unity... but John himself almost never makes any interesting choices or comes up with any clever ideas. Basically, he and Chick just run away again and again and again until they end up in a place whose residents go, "Well, you're king now." The Palace of Romance incident probably displays the most initiative on the part of John and Chick, and all they do there is delay a bit and then run away! (I did like that incident, though; it's a bit darker than Baum's usual.)

My kid did not like a bit, late in the book, where John actually gets tied up and has a finger bitten off! On the other hand, they did advocate for the Princess of Mifket Island being allowed to eat a bit of John in order to restore her health, a dilemma on John's part that is curiously one-sided. Should John really be obligated to give a piece of himself to all worthy comers?

Overall, it's not one of Baum's best, but it is one of Baum's most fanciful—and kids like fancy. Even my three-year-old is starting to get in on the act, remembering characters and concepts from day to day. When we finished, I pulled out Road and we read the section where John Dough, Chick, and Para Bruin reappear there. Already a continuity fiend, my child demanded to know why we hadn't read John Dough first in its proper order! They asked if we couldn't reread all of Road now, but I demurred; we still have over a dozen Oz books to read before we start rereading any!

Next up in sequence: The Shaggy Man of Oz

Elsa Bloodstone: Bequest by Cath Lauria

 Elsa Bloodstone: Bequest
by Cath Lauria

This is a prose novel about Elsa Bloodstone, part of a line of YA tie-in books about female Marvel characters. I read it to cap off my runthrough of Marvel's Bloodstone content. It seems to take place in the regular Marvel comics universe, if somewhat genericized.

Published: 2021
Read: February 2024

I was a bit surprised, then, at how deeply this book dove into Bloodstone lore. Most post-Nextwave takes on Elsa and her father haven't really used the details of the characters established in their original stories. Sure, we're always told Ulysses Bloodstone is an immortal monster hunter with a bloodstone shard embedded in his chest, but none of the other elements of the very complicated backstory John Wagner gave him in the 1970s (see item #1 below) ever come up; the 2001 miniseries (#2 below) gave us Elsa herself, but every other aspect of her from that series has pretty much been ignored.

But Bequest has multiple callbacks to the 1970s series, revisiting some of its locations as well as a forgotten member of its supporting cast, the journalist Samantha Eden. It also very much considers the 2001 miniseries to be in continuity, bringing back Adam, the Frankenstein caretaker of Bloodstone Manor (which is back in Boston for this story) and the vampire lawyer, as well as a genie's lamp that Elsa used to travel the world in that story. (There is no mention here of the "Mordred's Causeway" Elsa used to get around in Monsters Unleashed!) But as you can see on the cover, this is clearly the post-Nextwave Elsa, a hardcore redheaded monster killer (who was trained by her father, as we saw in flashbacks in Nextwave and Marvel Zombies: Battleworld), not a naïve blond one (who didn't even know her father, as we saw in the 2001 miniseries). Lauria doesn't spend a lot of time reconciling these discrepancies, but she does have Elsa briefly think to herself that she's not sure if her memories of her father training her are real or not! I appreciated the book's inclusive approach to continuity (though I imagine there wasn't much alternative, as if you jettison the 1970s stuff and the 2001 miniseries, the character ceases to have much of a history), and I liked this vague attempt to make it all stick together. Lauria says, it all counts, don't worry about the details.

Okay, okay, that's great to know about the continuity, but what about the book!? Well, I would describe it as... aggressively okay. It seems to me that the book has two main problems. The first is that the plot is very repetitive and very simple. Elsa discovers someone is out there ransacking old haunts of Ulysses Bloodstone, trying to collect bloodstone fragments, and she teams up with her newly discovered half-sister to find out who is doing this. (This is a totally different newly discovered half-sister to the one subsequently introduced in The Death of Doctor Strange.) So Elsa and the sister go to a place, fight some monsters, go to another place, fight some more monsters, and so on. There's no sense of advancement, they never learn anything in one particular place, they never accomplish anything. They just keep doing the same thing until at the very last place they found out who did it. (It is a very underwhelming reveal.)

The other issue is that nothing really seems to be a stake personally for Elsa. The power of a prose novel over comics is that it ought to be able to let you dive into interiority more, giving more depth to a character. But I don't think Elsa has a lot of depth here, and honestly she has less depth than in stories like Marvel Zombies and Death of Doctor Strange. Sure, she has a sister... but this doesn't seem to meaningfully change her conception of herself or her father or anything, there's no development of the character arc just like there was no development of the plot arc. In a secondary issue, Elsa very much comes across as a Brit-written-by-an-American rather than an actual Brit. A few too many "blokes," especially in the early parts of the novel. I'm sure I could not do better, but why not hire a UK author to write the book if it's going to be a first-person narrative? The Elsa stories by Warren Ellis, Simon Spurrier, and Tini Howard have been among the most successful ones for this obvious reason.

Outside of all that, it is a quick, easy, action-packed read; it's hard for me to imagine any reader wouldn't blaze through it as quickly as I did. Plus it does have some good jokes. So, worth you time because it won't take a lot of your time!

* * *

And that brings me to the end of my Elsa Bloodstone project! (At seven installments across four months, that was definitely a lot faster than my JSA one.) What did I think overall? Well, I think she is a fun character who has a weird continuity—but having a weird continuity is the kind of thing that makes a character intriguing to me! I feel that's she's been robbed. I know she recently turned up in (an animated Disney Plus film that's part of) the MCU, but it's surprising to me that she's mostly had guest appearances in her time since 2001; her only starring roles have been in Legion of Monsters and Marvel Zombies. Where's her ongoing? Or, at least, a miniseries solidly focused on her? C'mon, Marvel, give her a real chance at a real run!

My next project will be a big one again... Blackhawk!

This is the last post in a series about Elsa Bloodstone. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Bloodstone & the Legion of Monsters (1975-2012)
2. Bloodstone (2001-06) 
3. Nextwave, Agents of H.A.T.E. (2006-07)
4. Marvel Zombies: Battleworld (2006-15)
5. Monsters Unleashed! (2017-18)
6. Marvel Action: Chillers / The Death of Doctor Strange: Bloodstone (2020-22)
   

Hugos 2024: Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons by Kelly Sue DeConnick, Phil Jimenez, Gene Ha, and Nicola Scott

Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons

Collection published: 2023
Contents originally published: 2022-23
Acquired and read: April 2024

Writer: Kelly Sue DeConnick

Artists: Phil Jimenez, Gene Ha, Nicola Scott

Colorists: Arif Prianto, Romulo Fajardo Jr., Wesley Wong, Annette Kwok

Letterer: Clayton Cowles

This is a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story—my first, and indeed, my first Hugo finalist this year full stop. (I usually start with a Best Novel finalist, but none made it into my first batch of arrivals.)

It's branded as a Wonder Woman comic, but Wonder Woman does not appear here. It goes back to the origins of the Amazons, exploring how the tribe of warrior women that ultimately gave birth to Wonder Woman came into existence. Skimming a timeline of DC history, I can see this ties together and dramatizes some preexisting material, but it totally stands on its own, and doesn't feel like a continuity patch or origin story. Indeed, the greatest thing you can say about it (and I speak this as someone who reads a lot of tie-in and franchise fiction) is that it transcends its origins as a tie-in comic. I would feel comfortable handing this to someone who doesn't enjoy superhero comics but does like graphic novels and wants to read a bold, dynamic take on Greek mythology, because that's what this is. It's not a rewriting of George Pérez (or whomever), it's a new myth designed to take its place among old ones.

The story starts with the Greek goddesses, who reach their breaking point with the ways men treat women, but find the gods unwilling to do anything about it, and so take things into their own hands. It then follows the doings of the gods, especially Hera, who refuses to overtly move against her husband's will, in parallel with the rise of the Amazon tribes, and a would-be human midwife who ends up encountering the Amazons as they travel across the world slaughtering men who hurt women, and then into a war where the gods attempt to eliminate the Amazons. It's an epic story, but the presence of Hippolyta, the midwife, keeps it grounded; I enjoyed her trajectory very much.

More importantly, though, writer Kelly Sue DeConnick has three top-notch artistic collaborators here. Phil Jimenez's work I honestly don't know that well (aside from event comics like Infinite Crisis and Dark Cybertron, which rarely showcase an artist at their best), but he had a well-regarded run as a writer and artist on Wonder Woman; here, he turns in some brilliant and beautiful two-page spreads, one of jars(!), but in particular, a few depicting Hippolyta's desperate pursuit of a lost infant. Gorgeous, heartbreaking stuff. Gene Ha I've liked since his Top Ten days, but this is probably career best work for him, his attention to character really capturing the struggle and emotions of Hippolyta as she seeks to become an Amazon. And Nicola Scott I've thought a solid artist since her debut on Birds of Prey; here, she knocks it out of the park with the war between the Amazons and the gods. For all three artists, the art is beautifully colored, and the deluxe hardcover collection really shows it off to its utmost; I don't always buy Hugo finalists outside of the category of Best Novel, but I am so glad I'm not reading this comic on my Kindle Fire.

If I had a complaint, it would be that I found the parameters of Hippolyta's key choice in the last issue kind of confusing and rushed, but I'm sure on a reread (this is a tough book to read, but not in a bad way; sometimes it's just nice to read a comic that makes you work a little harder than normal) it would hold up fine. The backmatter tease two more sets of three chapters, but even if we don't get a trilogy of trilogies for Wonder Woman Historia, this will hold up as a tremendous work about what men do to women, and what women do to get away from it.