Star Trek: Return to the Taurus Reach: Vanguard, Books 4 & 5

I am quite behind on my book reviews, so my original plan was to review the first three Star Trek: Vanguard books here on my blog when I reread them because I had never reviewed them before (they predate my bookbloogging; I do feel like I reviewed book one on the TrekBBS when it came out, but if so, I can't find the post). However, I reviewed books four and five on my old LiveJournal back in the day, so I figured I would repost those reviews here as a way of quickly catching up on my reviews...

...but then when it came time to do that, I found that I just had too many thoughts! So I will repost those old reviews, but also I am going to expand those thoughts. Just as I felt the first three books worked as a single unit, so do books four and five: between them, they tie off a number of the character and plot threads set up in the first two books, especially as regards Reyes, T'Prynn, Pennington, and Quinn.

Of book four, Open Secrets, I originally wrote this:

The Vanguard series continues from the cliffhanger at the end of Reap the Whirlwind, and that plotline was probably my favorite of the many strands running throughout this book. Though Commodore Reyes seemed less than active in his own defense, I feel that despite (or because of) that we learned more about him in this one book than in the previous three. The other plotlines continue to chug along, perturbed by the events of the Federation-Klingon War (as seen in "Errand of Mercy") but otherwise not incredibly remarkable, with the exception of the Pennington/T'Prynn story, which added another interesting layer to my favorite journalist. I'm never quite sure what to think of Vanguard, but I'll certainly be continuing along to Precipice. 

Rereading it over fifteen years later, I feel differently about the Reyes plotline; I think this is because the events of books one through three are fresh in my memory, since I read them months instead of years prior. When I reread the first three books, particularly book one, Harbinger, it was very clear to me that these books were commenting on the post-9/11 security state through a science fiction lens much in the same way that, say, the Battlestar Galactica reboot did. Here, Reyes goes on trial for what he's done... but in a nice twist, not for the unethical things he did, but for the one ethical thing he did, allow Pennington to reveal the truth. I like this idea, but in the end, I feel like—just as was true of the earlier books—we don't get much insight into why Reyes ultimately did what he did, what made these decisions feel compelling to him to begin with. Why was he willing to sacrifice innocent lives and civil rights on the altar of Federation security and state secrets? I honestly still don't really know after reading four books about this guy. (I do finally know why T'Prynn was willing to do this, but we'll discuss that when I get to book five.)

Star Trek: Vanguard: Open Secrets
by Dayton Ward

Published: 2009
Acquired: May 2009
Previously read: June 2009
Reread: April 2026

Outside of the trial, I unfortunately found the book pretty dramatically inert. The book begins with a flash-forward to what was happening on Vanguard during the events of the original series episode "Errand of Mercy"—the Klingons are approaching Vanguard, but as seen in that episode, suddenly both sides' controls get too hot to use and the Organians unliterally end the war. This scene is set in 2267, and then we jump back a year and fill in what got us up to this point. This does the exact opposite of open the book with an exciting tease, unfortunately, as whenever the Klingons are up to something in the rest of the book, the reader knows it's ultimately going to go nowhere because of something that happened in an episode from 1967. I mean, the reader might know this anyway, but we don't need to remind them!

Similar choices dog other aspects of the station narrative. Reyes is replaced as commander of Vanguard Station by Admiral Nogura. Nogura was only mentioned on screen twice, in Star Trek: The Motion Picture where he's Kirk's superior, but to fans of a certain age, he's a well-known figure, thanks to his presence in the 1980s novels. Especially in J. M. Dillard's The Lost Years, where he's called "the Old Man," a revered figure known for how hard he was; he comes out of retirement to take over Starfleet and clean it up following a series of scandals in the novels Dreadnought! and Battlestations! When it was announced that Nogura was going to be in this book I was quite excited... but he doesn't do anything for the entire book. He makes no interesting choices. I know he's not one of the series's ostensible leads... but it also seems weird to me that when Reyes is in command of Vanguard, there are lots of hard choices that constantly need to be made, but as soon as he's not in command, basically this all dries up and Nogura spends him time sitting around in staff meetings. Why bother to use this potentially interesting character if you're not going to do anything interesting with him?

The other major station subplots are about the scientific research happening, and they are similarly devoid of interesting moments. A Tholian defects and joins the scientific operation at Vanguard, giving them valuable information on the Shedai... but the novel only considers this from the angle of the scientific plot. How does Ming Xiong feel about working alongside a representative of the people responsible for the death of a bunch of his friends back in book one? Apparently just fine. Are the station crew curious about the mysterious Tholians? I guess not. The Tholian is there to deliver exposition about the Shedai, and beyond that, no thought has been put into their role in the narrative. Also, Ming gets assigned a boss who relieves him as leader of the science investigations on the station (The Wrath of Khan's Carol Marcus), but he's just fine with it and they get along great. In the long run we'll realize that this happens for "lore" reasons (what Carol learns about the Taurus meta-genome here influences her later work on the Genesis Project), but again, it isn't really thought through in any other way. (Also I have a hard time believing that from the way her son David talks about Kirk in the movie that he actually grew up on a Starfleet base!)

Lastly, I also found the T'Prynn/Pennington subplot a damp squib, contra my comments of fifteen years ago. Basically, Pennington and M'Benga take T'Prynn back to Vulcan. Exactly why Pennington is willing to do this is pretty vague, but mostly all the characters just do nothing while a Vulcan mystic works. T'Prynn herself is fairly absent from her own plotline.

Small niggle: while in all previous books (and future books, as far as I know), Ambassador Jetanien was a Rigellian "Chelon," in this one he suddenly becomes a "Chel" for some reason.

Precipice is the fifth Vanguard novel, and the last that I kept up with as the series was released. From this point on, all the books will be new to me. At the time I originally read it, this is what I wrote:

This novel covers almost a full year in the saga of Star Trek: Vanguard, but it feels like it artificially stretches events out in order to do that; it would have been better off with a time-frame of a couple months. I'm not a big fan of the fragmented plotlines either; hopefully the next volume sees a more central focus. It's nice to see Cervantes Quinn get some solid time, even if he did inexplicably turn from Harry Mudd into Butch Coolidge.

You can see me trying to be diplomatic there, I think. This was during my brief period as a writer of Star Trek fiction, and it didn't seem the done thing to be going around slating my fellow authors' work. (I think it was shortly after this that I stopped reviewing new Star Trek books online, actually; I only resumed doing so once it was clear to me I was not going to be writing any Star Trek books ever again.)

Star Trek: Vanguard: Precipice
by David Mack

Published: 2009
Acquired: January 2010
Previously read: March 2010
Reread: May 2026

Anyway, much like Open Secrets, I think some aspects of Precipice are dramatically inert. As I noted in my old review, the book, like Open Secrets, takes place over a whole year. This is done by having lots of things take lots of time to happen in ways I didn't find very convincing. Like, in the Pennington/T'Prynn plot, they have to hike somewhere, which takes forever, then they have to take a shuttle where they want to be, which takes forever, then they have to wait a long time for something to happen, which takes forever. Similarly, Ambassador Jetanien leaves the station to seek discussion with his Klingon and Romulan counterparts; though the Klingon turns up promptly, they wait almost all year for the Romulan. Does he really have nothing better to do? I just don't believe in it. There seem to be no internal reasons for all this, it's just so that the Vanguard series as a whole can fulfill its conceptual mandate of paralleling the original show.

Just as Open Secrets tied up the Reyes arc begun in book one, Precipice seemingly ties up the arcs for T'Prynn, Pennington, and Quinn. I found the T'Prynn arc wrapup particularly bad. First, the book's answer to the question of "why do people do terrible things in service to the security state?" is "mental illness"! The reason T'Prynn made all these awful choices in book one was because ongoing trauma from her failed mating bond and the presence of her deceased lover's katra (p. 240). It's about the least interesting answer I could have imagined. On top of that, there's this whole weird thing about how when T'Prynn is cured following the events of book four, she finds out Reyes is dead and decides to hunt down his killer. (Reyes isn't actually dead, but she doesn't know that yet.) Whose killer does she not decide to hunt down, or even think about? Her lover's! No, she's gotta deal with the death of her Man. Such a weird choice, like the author forgot the very thing that put her into a coma to begin with.

The wrapups for Pennington and Quinn are also quite bad. Pennington was introduced in book one as a good, if kind of cynical and obnoxious, journalist, but a bad person, having an extramarital affair. He's then sent to his lowest point thanks to T'Prynn's machinations; unbeknownst to him, his soon-to-be only friend, Quinn, helped her. In this book he delivers a speech explaining his personality defects that lead him to having this affair and now he's all better (pp. 238-9). It's very pat and it comes out of nowhere; how and when did he learn all this about himself? Certainly not in the intervening three books. I think you can do some interesting stuff with infidelity in fiction, but this series has not. Also, Pennington learning that his friend betrayed and lied to him also goes nowhere. Quinn's plotline here is even weirder; suddenly he has a previously unmentioned backstory as a principled mercenary and he's a badass commando operative. Like, where did this come from?

Continuity grumble: This book goes to great pains to work in the events of the 1980s novels The Vulcan Academy Murders and The IDIC Epidemic into its continuity. I don't know why, because I wouldn't have any expectation that those books were "in continuity" with these ones. But it does so in a way that makes absolutely no sense, setting them both before the television episode "Journey to Babel." But Vulcan Academy Murders is a sequel to "Journey to Babel," which entirely depends on the Enterprise characters' familiarity with Spock's parents, who they only met in "Babel." Weird choice.

Hugo Awards 2026: Ballots for Best Novella, Best Novelette, and Best Short Story

Since June, I have been writing up reviews for 2026 Hugo Award finalists that I have purchased; my usual practice is to do this for every Best Novel finalist and any finalist in other categories by authors who particularly interest me. Today, I begin posting my complete ballots with the short fiction categories: Best Novella, Novelette, and Short Story. 

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Best Novella

7. Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

The good news was that contracts were like anyone else: with a few shadowy exceptions, they wanted to survive.

This novella is about a bunch of robots in a future California that has seceded from the U.S. and given AIs citizenship, albeit with more limited rights than human beings. They end up deciding to open a noodle bar.

Many commenters have described this book as "cozy" (combine all the variants together, and it's the book's most popular tag on LibraryThing other than "science fiction," "fiction," "novella," and "2025"); others have objected that a book where the main characters all have past traumas (many of them were military robots) and are discriminated against can hardly be described as "cozy." To me, this indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of the genre of cozy fiction (as it currently exists), which I think primarily has two components. The first is that though there may be some kind of traumatic backstory, all conflicts in the present day of the story are resolved with breezy ease. Oh, are you being review bombed? Well, it was trivially easy to get the website to take them down, and besides, you don't even need that website anyway. Is it after a complete environmental disaster? Well sure but people still eat out at fancy restaurants. The second is that there must be some kind of "found family"... and because even writers trying to imagine alternatives to capitalism can't escape the constraints of our contemporary consumerist culture, the only place you can find family or gain meaning in life is in the workplace. As you might intuit from all of this commentary, this book was bad in all the ways that the current seed of the genre, Legends & Lattes, is also bad.

It's also bad in new and different ways. I acknowledge that science fiction has a long and productive history of using robots as stand-ins to metaphorically explore issues of discrimination and personhood; there are a bunch of Next Generation episodes that do this with Data, for example. Automatic Noodle is very obviously doing this—the robots are sort of trans people and immigrants. But the thing about science fiction is that it works on two levels: the metaphorical and the literal. And on the literal level, this is a book about AIs literally taking over what is a human artistic activity! Like, man, I don't need to read this in 2026. Who would ever want to? There is a subplot, as I mentioned above, about robophobia, but the robophobic people are depicted as right-wing trolls secretly funded by the capitalist U.S. government. Oh yeah, it's definitely the capitalist right wing who are worried about AI and employment. I thought this take on the dynamics of AI, artistic expression, and employment was boneheadedly dumb. I can't believe Newitz wrote it, and I can't believe Tordotcom published it. This book about AIs being trained to do human jobs literally has a note in it saying the text of the book can't be used to train AIs! The AIs of the book are, of course, nothing like contemporary LLMs... but that's the problem, it doesn't work on a literal level at all, because in the year 2026, this isn't how anyone thinks about AI. They are no longer cute friends, they're a tool of capitalists who want to extract all the value they can from human intellectual endeavor. I very much do not need to read a book that renders that into something "cute"!

6. No Award

Reader, I hated it.

5. The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar

"Ysabel," she said quietly, "do you... fancy that man?"
     She shrugged. "He's not so bad."
     "Bel, he's like a bit of bread that's been dropped in a pond!"

I barely remember what this was about even though I just read it a couple weeks ago (as of when I am writing this up). It's some kind of fairytale thing about two sisters. I don't really care about fairytale things usually (though I do remember liking El-Mohtar's "Seasons of Glass and Iron"), but at least it's not actively offensive like Automatic Noodle. (If you own the ebook edition, note that fully a third of its supposed 130 pages is really a preview for a short story collection by El-Mohtar.)

4. Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite

"There's no call to go embarrassing a fellow by telling his aunt his actual feelings."

I really wanted to like this: it's an sf murder mystery set on a generation ship where inhabitants can reload their memories from backups when they die... and even transfer between bodies. Neat premise, and the main detective seems like a fun character. Unfortunately, I found the actual mystery pretty confusing; it felt to me like Dorothy wandered around a bit and then suddenly had the whole thing solved.

3. What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher 

Ursula Vernon's third "Sword Soldier" novella (as my linked review notes) is better than the second, but not as good as the first. I don't think I would have nominated this... but even so, it has a level of fun and competence of premise that is lacking from Murder by Memory, so here it goes in the middle tier of this year's finalists.

2. The Summer War by Naomi Novik

My full review is also linked to above. Like a lot of fiction on the ballot this year (see also: The River Has Roots, Cinder House, The Everlasting), it self-consciously uses fairy tale tropes to make a broader point about the way that stories can serve as straitjackets on how we imagine ourselves as people. It's an idea I'm broadly sympathetic to and interested in, but feel like I am encountering a bit too much... which isn't really any one author's fault, but still. Given that, though, I found this an enjoyable read that I would gladly see win—clearly in a tier above Murder by Memory et al. Like Cinder House, I felt like the end of The Summer War got convoluted in its use fairy tale strictures and magic rules, and Novik is the better writer, but I found Cinder House's premise more immediately engaging, so I gave it a very slight edge here.

1. Cinder House by Freya Marske

[S]he sensed it for the first time: the downhill road between a house with a ghost and a true haunted house.
     A house was made to have people in it. It wanted them there, even if it hated them.

This was the fourth novella I read, but the first I actually enjoyed. It's a Cinderella riff, but the idea here is that when the evil stepmother kills Ella's father, Ella dies too, so she becomes a ghost haunting the house—one obligated to do work for the house's inhabitants. It makes so much sense you'd almost think it was designed that way! From that premise, the story goes off in some interesting directions, some expected (Ella gets a fairy to help her attend a ball with the prince), some less so (did not really expect a lot of what actually happened with the prince). I feel like the magic got a bit convoluted, but overall I thought this was a good story about belonging and expectations.

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Best Novelette

7. "Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy: A Murderbot Diaries Story" by Martha Wells

“My sense of security is always false.”

(Yes, that's how the title is rendered on the title page.) This story is set in the world of The Murderbot Diaries, which I assume is why it got nominated, because otherwise there is absolutely nothing interesting or noteworthy about it. It's about the crew of Perihelion going on a mission; I dimly recollected that Perihelion is the real name of "Asshole Research Transport" from the novellas. Murderbot themself is not actually in this story. The rescue mission is a side thing, though, the story is actually about Peri's crew recognizing that it's kind of crotchety and then finding out that's because it's in a new relationship. That's it, that's the story. Way too long compared to what of significance actually happens here.

 

6. No Award

 

I'm being crotchety here. Sue me. But seriously, I agree with the redditor who said of "Rapport," "I suspect everyone who nominated it of not otherwise reading short stories."

 

5. "Kaiju Agonistes" by Scott Lynch

“Comrade Minister of Medium Machine Building, if these were the bad old days, now would be the point at which I note that Siberia is lovely at this time of your life. Fortunately we have all recently stumbled into a more forgiving world.” 

This is an alternate history story about kaiju; basically, the idea seems to be "what would the political ramifications be if Godzilla was real?" But also it's supposed to be funny. I guess it is moderately so, but it goes on way too long, and the longer it goes on, the more implausible I found it. Fine, but sort of a baffling thing to consider one of the six best novelettes of the year. Still, clearly more enjoyable than "Rapport" but not trying to do anything as interesting as anything else on the ballot.

 

4. "The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For" by Cameron Reed

She really fell in love.

I don’t know why she would do something so stupid.  

This is a kind of complicated story, about a woman who was supposed to be the recipient of her mother's brain, now being raised alongside the woman who her mother will transfer her brain into instead, but then they fall in love, and then the compound they live in is attacked. I thought there was a lot going here, probably a tad too much, but it was decent.

3. "When He Calls Your Name" by Catherynne M. Valente

“Anybody in that village could’ve ended up Johnny, because everybody’s Johnny when they want more than they got. And everyone wants more than they’ve got.”

Except when she's in "twee" mode, I always enjoy how Catherynne Valente writes, and this story is no exception. It's about a woman whose husband gets involved with a seductive vampire, and the vampire comes to her house, and she has to defend this husband who had an affair against this woman who doesn't really want him for any reason other than self-interest. As she often does, Valente plunges into the depths of how humans think and their best and their worst.

2. "The Millay Illusion" by Sarah Pinsker

“Nobody is born to play a single role. Nobody is meant to do the same act forever.”

A female illusionist in an early-century travel show meets another one who yearns for bigger things, but can't obtain them because of her gender. For most of the story, I thought this was fairly middling Pinsker—magic as metaphor for our attempts to build ourselves in a hostile world, ground she's covered before in "The Court Magician" and "A Better Way of Saying"—though middling Pinsker still ranks among the best of contemporary short sf&f. But then the ending came along and she paid it all off beautifully and unsettlingly. So more than middling Pinsker for sure.

1. "Never Eaten Vegetables" by H. H. Pak

Their species has lasted for hundreds of thousands of years; surely they must have solved such conundrums from unbirth to birth.

I have never read anything by H. H. Pak before, but to me, this was the clear and obvious standout in this category, a weird but fascinating sf story about a sentient spaceship carrying a bunch of embryos to a prospective colony planet, but a malfunction causes the embryos to be born ahead of schedule, and the spaceship must care for them itself; the story alternates between these events and one of the babies, now an adult, trying to reconstruct what happened. I wasn't totally convinced by the resolution to the latter plotline, but overall, I thought this was well written, dark and plausible, with some weird but well thought through worldbuilding.

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Best Short Story

7. "Laser Eyes Ain't Everything" by Effie Seiberg

They still hadn’t built a ramp, and meetings were in-person, so I joined the union meeting by video. The HR rep made a big deal about making a “special exception” for me since I “didn’t really need this accommodation” because “someone could always carry me in like before.” I managed to keep my smile plastered on my face.

A superhero who used a wheelchair discovers that even when you are "super-abled" you can still experience ableism. I'm sure this was satisfying to write, and I'm sure everything in it accurately reflects the lived experience of people with disabilities, but what was going on was very obvious from the first page, and nothing ever complicates it, and a lot of the dialogue didn't read like real human beings.

6. "Six People to Revise You" by J. R. Dawson

“Everyone changes through life, even if they don’t have a revision.”

This has a very interesting premise, and is well told. People can undergo a process called "revision" where they are literally remade into better people—"better" here is based on collecting forms from friends, family, and acquaintances where they describe what would improve you. The story is mostly the protagonist talking to people as she collects the forms. I thought there was some really interesting stuff to explore here... but the outcome of the story is the protagonist decides not to do it because of bunch of characters we've never seen before write her notes about how she's great as she is. All the interesting questions raised are answered in the least interesting way possible. Bleh.

5. No Award

This is going to be mean, but when I read both "Laser Eyes" and "Six People," I couldn't shake the feeling that these were therapy sessions, not stories... and surely there's nothing less interesting than someone else's therapy session? Keep it to yourself, don't publish it, and certainly don't give it an award.

4. "10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days" by Samantha Mills

It’s the elderly couple from next door, Marilyn and Ted. They remember the country’s last stretch of eldritch horror, when the doomsday cultists first unmasked themselves and their century-long search for a hellgate, and they have a plan for neighborhood defense.

At the time I am writing this part of the post, this is the sixth short fiction finalist I am writing up, and the fifth published in Uncanny, and the fourth of those by someone who has previously been a Hugo finalist for short fiction. Wow, don't work too hard on casting a wide net, guys. Despite that, I enjoyed this; it's about a bunch of different timelines where the apocalypse is happening (or not). It's funny and hopeful and pessimistic all at once. The title and the first couple vignettes made me think it was going to be twee (it may have been the apocalypse, but at least we all found community!) but Mills is a better writer than that.

3. "In My Country" by Thomas Ha

The problem with ambiguity is that it demands interpretation. The demand for interpretation welcomes a different magnitude of contemplation and unanticipated dispute. 

This is a horror-tinged sf&f story about a country where art critical of the the regime is permitted... but art containing ambiguity is not. Interesting premise, very well written, very well done overall. I would gladly see it win; I gave the edge to "Missing Helen" mostly based on my overall preference for clear sf over stuff that's less clearly so. 

2. "Missing Helen" by Tia Tashiro

“We all have baggage,” I say. “I think he’s just more comfortable with mine.” 

Okay, just above this, I complained about there being too many Uncanny stories, but on the other hand, there are four Clarkesworld stories on the short fiction ballots this year... and all four are better than everything else in their categories, so there's no such thing as too many Clarkesworld stories. I enjoyed this a lot: a woman discovers that after her divorce, her ex-husband began dating her clone! Truly what I love in sf: a weird concept that works both literally and metaphorically, and strong, character-based writing.

1. "Wire Mother" by Isabel J. Kim

Like most neurodivergences, it was only diagnosed when the condition became aggravating to those around her, which, in Cassie’s case, was when she stopped listening to her mother and began saying that she wasn’t real.

This story takes place in a future where AI companionship has become ubiquitous: why marry a real woman, when you can marry an AI one who will be more obliging and never age? The protagonist is a young woman who has a neurodiverse condition that causes her to be unable to see these AIs as people—and thus she begins to despise her AI mother. Like every Isabel J. Kim story I've read, it's very well-observed, but it also makes some astute commentary on our contemporary society. I would love to teach it. As soon as I read it, it was hard for me to imagine I would read a better piece of short fiction in any Hugo category. I was right.

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Overall Thoughts

Another year, another bunch of complaints about the lack of finalist diversity. Best Novella is all but one Tor; in the other categories, it's all all Tor, Clarkesworld, and Uncanny with one exception. Though even though Clarkesworld takes up four of those twelve slots, I ranked them above any non-Clarkesworld finalists in all categories, and the one story from outside the usual suspects, I ranked below No Award! So perhaps "finalist diversity" is a red herring and the real complaint is "many Hugo nominators do not value what I value in short fiction." I am pretty bummed to once again see a shutout for Asimov's, as I think that's usually much more to my taste. I hope that Neil Clarke's Best Science Fiction of the Year anthologies get going again, so I can see what good sf I have missed from these years!

I'm not very plugged into the discourse this year, and I'm in general pretty bad at predicting winners in the short fiction categories, so I'm not going to try. (The r/Fantasy posters largely agree with me... but I don't think they are very representative!) I dread to think that Automatic Noodle will probably win, though.

Hugo Awards 2026: Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky

People seem to really like Adrian Tchaikovsky. And I think if you described what he was doing to me, it sounds very appealing. Almost all of the Tchaikovsky I've read involves conflicts between different ways of thinking, which is one of my favorite things in fiction. And all of the Tchaikovsky I've read comes highly recommended: Elder Race, Ogres, Alien Clay, and Service Model were all Hugo finalists, and thus supposedly the best of what the genre has to offer; my other Tchaikovsky was Children of Time, which came highly recommended by the friend who loaned it to me, and is a perennial favorite on r/printSF.

Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Originally published: 2025
Acquired: May 2026
Read: July 2026

But when I actually read them... something about them just doesn't work. I think Tchaikovsky is a perfectly good writer on the sentence level. But almost all of these books have left me cold at best, induced hatred at worse. I find that in particular Children of Time, Alien Clay, and Shroud share some features. In all these books, you have humans from some kind of dystopian society who come to a planet with a new kind of alien intelligence. But the human characters... kind of don't matter? Children of Time is the least worst on this score; in both Alien Clay and Shroud, I feel like Tchaikovsky sets up characters who are interesting at the beginning, but then ultimately they don't amount to anything, they're just there to carry us through the alien consciousness. But hundred of pages of learning facts about how an alien consciousness works... that just doesn't appeal to me, especially when I find both Shroud and Alien Clay really heavy-handed about it: ooh, have humans overestimated their own superiority to other ways of thinking? Yes, they have. I feel like Tchaikovsky has interesting premises but nothing interesting to say about them.

The Maze Agency, Volume 1 by Mike W. Barr, Adam Hughes, et al.

The Maze Agency was a comic book series that originally ran from 1988 to 1991, with brief revivals in 1997, 2005, and 2024. It was emphatically not a superhero series; it was about the owner of a private detective agency, Jennifer Mays, and her boyfriend, the freelance crime writer Gabriel Webb, as they solved crimes together. The series was the brainchild of Mike W. Barr, a comics writer known for his detective-focused take on Batman—and, if you're a Star Trek fan, his exemplary run on the movie-era comics. I first learned about it, I think, from an appreciation post on the late, lamented comics blog Comics Alliance, which was surely the high point of Internet comics journalism. (This might sound sarcastic, but it's absolutely not; my consumption of contemporary comics went way down when I no longer had CA to point me towards stuff aligned with my tastes.)

Since I just don't have enough comics series to work my way through around here, with this post I'm embarking on a journey through the history of The Maze Agency. Thankfully, though, there's a lot less of it than, say, Blackhawk! 

The Maze Agency, Volume 1

Collection published: 2005
Contents originally published: 1988-90
Acquired and read: March 2026

Writer/Creator: Mike W. Barr
Pencillers: Alan Davis, Adam Hughes
Inks: Alan Davis, Rick Magyar, Al Vey
Letterers: Todd Klein, Deborah Marks, Bob Pinaha
Colorist: Julia Lacquement

The only issues of The Maze Agency to ever have been reprinted are the first five; there was a black-and-white trade paperback of the first four in 1990 from Innovation,* but in 2005, IDW rereleased the first five (plus some other stuff, which I'll come to) in color, as a companion to their revival of the series. (No further trades were ever released, not even of IDW's own material, so it must not have been a big seller, even though some sleuthing leads me to think that ISBNs were assigned to future collections.)

This is one of those comic books that's kind of hard to review, in the sense that what The Maze Agency does isn't genius... but it is perfect, if you take my meaning. That is to say, this is a comic that has an objective and it fulfills that objective with precision and professionalism. Mike Barr is an underrated writer, in my opinion; he knows (knew? I don't think he's had any new comics work released since 2024's one-issue Maze Agency revival, but I could be wrong) exactly how to put a comic book together. These issues have to pack in a lot, because each one is a single story: they need to introduce a mystery and a cast of supporting characters to go along with it to serve as victim(s) and suspects and witnesses, and provide clues and red herrings, and they also need to give Jennifer and Gabe interesting things to do. That's a lot to pack into twenty pages, but Barr manages it every time with an economy of storytelling that really impressed me. It's just pleasurable to read on a panel-to-panel basis. There is nothing flashy here, but it's efficient in the way that only a solid comics pro of the 1980s could be, in my opinion.

Aw, poor Gabe.
from The Maze Agency vol. 1 #1 (art by Adam Hughes & Rick Magyar)

The steady, experienced hand of Barr as writer is aided by the then new, upcoming hand (that's a weird metaphor, isn't it?) of Adam Hughes as artist. Hughes would go on to become a superstar of the comics industry, but this was among his first comics work if not, I think, the first. Hughes's skill rests in his ability to both draw attractive people and communicate character with facial expressions; it's little wonder he was later poached from this series to illustrate Justice League America, a series equally suited to his talents. (Fun fact: Hughes drew the Maze Agency characters in a cameo in JLA #34, and when Barr found out, he got DC to let him write some dialogue for their appearance!)

Or maybe, Poor Jen!
from The Maze Agency vol. 1 #3 (art by Adam Hughes & Rick Magyar)

Like I said, this volume collects five regular issues of the series. In these five, Jen and Gabe deal with murders in the contexts of an art gallery heist, the discovery of lost sitcom episodes, a facility for testing experimental cars, a group of Jack the Ripper enthusiasts, and an Alcor-like cryonics facility. I found them all enjoyable, solid, well-constructed mysteries. Like any mystery series, though, it's not just about the murders, but also the detectives. The other pleasure of the series is the developing relationship between the leads, as well as their interaction with the supporting cast. We're not told exactly how Jen and Gabe met or got involved with each other, but their relationship is clearly quite recently established when the series begins, and Gabe is eager while Jen is hesitant. They're fun characters, and using Adam Hughes as artist is key to the series's success here: just as a solid mystery tv show is elevated by the chemistry of its cast, so is this comic elevated by Hughes's ability to depict character through his art.

Awwwww...
from The Maze Agency vol. 1 #4 (art by Adam Hughes & Rick Magyar)

When trying to figure out what issues of this series I needed to buy in addition to the TPB, I was stymied by finding contradictory information about this collected edition. Some references said it contained the first five issues plus Maze Agency Annual #1, others said it contained the first five issues plus Maze Agency Special #1. I had to wait for my copy to arrive to solve this mystery. So which was it? Well, it was both and neither. The IDW trade paperback contains one story from annual #1 and one story from special #1... but both of those issues contained other stories as well, so if you want the complete Maze Agency, you'll have to buy both of those issues even if you already own this collection.

In a text piece in the full Maze Agency Special, Mike Barr says it was Alan Davis who gave Jen her little forelock, and he was initially opposed to it but came to like it in the end.
from The Maze Agency Special #1 (art by Alan Davis)

The story from 1990's special #1 is "The Mile-High Corpse!" (here listed as being from Maze Agency #0, which isn't quite accurate). This story was written by Barr with illustrations by comics legend Alan Davis, and though it wasn't printed until much later, it was completed first—Barr used it to try to convince potential publishers to try to get on board with publishing the series. It's just six pages long, so the mystery can't be very complicated, but it gives you a very brief understanding of the premise, and of course it's always a pleasure to see some Alan Davis art.

This actually goes on to be a significant recurring gag in the comic.
from The Maze Agency Annual #1 (art by Adam T. Hughes & Rick Magyar)

The story from annual #1 is even shorter, just three pages. "Murder in Mint Condition" is about Jen and Gabe very quickly solving a mystery at a comics convention... because the first two pages were given away for free at a comics convention in 1988. You could submit your solution; the last page, with the actual solution, was later printed in the Comics Buyer's Guide. The complete story was eventually reprinted in both the annual for 1990 and the original trade paperback. Not really a satisfying mystery but a nice curio.

This is the first in a series of posts about Mike W. Barr's The Maze Agency. The next covers issues #6-23 of volume 1.

* According to Mike Barr's text page in The Maze Agency vol. 2 #1, Caliber also put out a trade of the first four issues in 1997, but I can't find any evidence this actually happened: it's not on the GCD, it's not listed for sale anywhere, or ever having been for sale.

Star Trek: Return to the Taurus Reach: Vanguard, Books 1–3

Star Trek: Vanguard was a series of original novels (plus some novellas) from Pocket Books, released from 2005 to 2012. I read the first five novels (roughly) as they came out... but when the sixth book came out in 2011, my progress through my reading list had gotten quite bogged down, and as of 2026, I still haven't read it! I've been slowly digging my way out recently, though, and am at last ready to tackle it... only at this point the last time I read a Vanguard book was in 2010, over fifteen years ago. I am hardly ready to jump straight into book six in the tightly serialized saga.

Star Trek: Vanguard: Harbinger
by David Mack

Published: 2005
Acquired: July 2005
Previously read: September 2005
Reread: March 2026

So, before moving onto book six, I am rereading the first five Vanguard novels. The first three predate my bookblogging, so I have no written reviews for them. Thus, in this post I'm going to (briefly?) cover all three at once.

Vanguard is a sort of parallel to the original Star Trek television series. The first book starts shortly after the second pilot, "Where No Man Has Gone Before"; I think that the final book takes place around five years later, when the five-year mission is about to come to an end. At the time the series was announced, many fans wondered if it would a "Deep Space Nine in the 23rd century": just as DS9 took place simultaneously to Next Generation and Voyager, but was set in one place, aboard a space station, Vanguard was set in one place, aboard a space station. No traveling across space, with a new planet every week; instead, every installment is set in the same region of space. Vanguard Station (a.k.a. Starbase 47) is located in the Taurus Reach, a newly opened region of space at the fringes of Federation, Klingon, and Tholian space.

The creators of the series, editor Marco Palmieri and writer David Mack, pushed back against that conception. Rereading the series, it seems to me that everyone back then was comparing it to the wrong tv show: this isn't Deep Space Nine in the 23rd century, it's Breaking Bad in the 23rd century. Well, of course no one in 2005 could have said such a thing because Breaking Bad wouldn't debut for another three years. But Vanguard seems to me to be along those lines: one of those "prestige" television shows were we watch characters (usually white men) make difficult choices, many of them morally dubious, where the stories are willing to show the seedy underbelly of the universe and its inhabitants. I suppose more chronologically appropriate would be The Sopranos (1999–2007) or The Wire (2002–08). Really, a lot of those series came along after Vanguard, so I suppose Mack and Palmieri were ahead of the curve!

That said, shows like Breaking Bad and Sopranos and Mad Men did this to explore American conceptions of masculinity—that's not what Vanguard is doing. (Though, perhaps, it would be nice if it did; there's an emphasis on sexual dynamics here, but the books are in general more interested in reproducing them than examining them. There seems to be a mandatory "man she looks good in a miniskirt!" scene once per book. Similarly, self-descriptions like "[t]he slender, leggy young woman" populate the supposedly close third-person narration of the female characters!) Instead, it's exploring the dynamics of post-9/11 security state. When have people gone too far in pursuit of their political objectives? So, perhaps, what the books really are in the end is "Battlestar Galactica in the 23rd century." 

If that was meant to be the case, though, I find the books frustrating. The narrative arc of the first three books seems to be taking Commodore Diego Reyes to a point where he feels like he's gone too far. In the first book, David Mack's Harbinger, he authorizes some heinous stuff done to Tim Pennington, a journalist seeking to uncover the truth about what Starfleet is doing in the Taurus Reach. Throughout all three of the first three books, he coordinates the Federation's ongoing colonization efforts in the Taurus Reach, knowing that this is just to provide cover for the Federation's attempts to obtain the Taurus meta-genome, which places those colonists in grave danger. At the end of book three, Mack's Reap the Whirlwind, this plotline culminates in Reyes's ex-wife and her entire planet dying, and Reyes thus permitting Pennington to publish a story that reveals what should have remained classified, resulting in Reyes's arrest. His court-martial is covered in book four, Open Secrets, so I'll cover that later, but I found this arc unsatisfying. The problem is, as I see it, is that we don't really go into Reyes's head as he makes these decisions; we don't really know how he justifies them to himself or how he ended up in this position. If this is a commentary on the post-9/11 security state, we don't get to see the logic that causes people to make these kind of decisions to begin with. In Reap the Whirlwind and Open Secrets, we're told Reyes has lived much of his life carrying secrets for Starfleet, but why does he believe this is the right thing to do? I'm not sure. Without that justification, the reversal at the end of book three falls flat.

Star Trek: Vanguard: Summon the Thunder
by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore

Published: 2006
Acquired: June 2006
Previously read: May 2007
Reread: April 2026

Indeed, I would say that the main thing that stops me from getting invested in Vanguard is the characterization. I think in principle, the ideas are fine. I do very much appreciate that (as was later done on screen in Discovery) that "main cast" is not necessarily the senior staff, but the set of characters who are influencing and influenced by events. In addition to Reyes, that's: Rena Desai, the JAG officer assigned to the station; Ming Xiong, the scientific lead assigned to Project Vanguard; Jetanien, the ambassador posted on Starbase 47; T'Prynn, the Starfleet Intelligence officer posted there; Cervantes Quinn, a smuggler operating out of the base; Tim Pennington, a journalist based on Vanguard; Ganz, an Orion smuggler whose ship is docked at the station; Ezekiel Fisher, the chief medical officer; and Anna Sandjeso, a Federation attaché who is secretly a Klingon spy. (There are lots of other characters, and not all of these characters play as big of roles as others, but these are the ones we get bios for at the end of book one, so they seem to be the ones Mack and Palmieri considered the leads.)

My issues with the characters, as of book three anyway (I'll have more thoughts on this in my writeup of book five, Precipice) is twofold. The first is that Harbinger seems to be trying to set up that these are more complicated, conflict-prone characters than you might be used to from Star Trek, especially the original series era. Unfortunately, it accomplishes this somewhat ham-handedly, in that the early parts of Harbinger are mostly about character walking around thinking about how much they don't like all the people they meet: Ming doesn't like his roommate on the USS Bombay, Reyes and Jetanien spend meeting scenes grumbling about what the other characters say, and so on. It makes everyone seem passive-aggressive and unpleasant.

My other issue is that there are just too many characters. There are the eight "main" characters, that would be fine... but there are tons of other point-of-view characters sprinkled in here, too. Random crewmembers on the Bombay in Harbinger (presumably to make us sad and surprised when they die), a whole bunch of USS Endeavour crew in book two, Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore's Summon the Thunder. Why do I care about, say, the Endeavour's chief medical officer? We also get the addition of the S.C.E. characters on the USS Lovell. Too many of these characters are generic Starfleet types, without any interesting hooks, the precise kind of thing it seems to me the series's main cast was designed to move away from. I would have liked to have spent more time with our supposed actual leads, instead of cutting away to all these random people all the time.

Also, maybe I wasn't reading carefully enough, but was there a discontinuity between Harbinger and Summon the Thunder when it came to the relationship between T'Prynn and Sandjeso? Near the end of Harbinger, we find out they're sleeping with each other other—the Intelligence agent and the Klingon spy—but there's no indication that T'Prynn knows Anna's true identity. Suddenly in Summon the Thunder, T'Prynn not only knows but has turned Anna into a double agent at some point in the past. Weird transition, and also weird undermining of the premise's potential drama. (Also the tone in Harbinger was very much convenient-sex-buddies, and then in the Reap the Whirlwind they're apparently actually in love?)

My original reason for doing these three in one go was that they were simply the three I hadn't reviewed before, but I actually think they work pretty well as a complete unit, a trilogy with beginning, middle, and end, as it ends with the "secrecy" arc that began Harbinger being blown wide open. Similarly, books four and five seem to work as a duology as the series shifts its focus—more on that next time.

Star Trek: Vanguard: Reap the Whirlwind
by David Mack

Published: 2007
Acquired and previously read: August 2007
Reread: April 2026

Other Thoughts:

The cover to Harbinger is solid, giving us a nice view of the setting of the series, and I appreciate the inclusion of diagrams of the station in the book. I also like the cover to Summon the Thunder well enough. But the cover to Reap the Whirlwind is excellent, a work of art. Rarely has a "ships in space" cover to a Star Trek book been so dynamic and striking; never has a D7 battlecruiser looked more formidable. Unfortunately, I felt like after this point, the series's covers became pretty generic and mediocre, almost always just a picture of Vanguard with a Constitution-class starship somewhere. (Presumably so your casual bookstore punter would go, "oh, the Enterprise!")

I did not reread the prequel to the series, the crossover with S.C.E., a novella called Distant Early Warning (collected in Corps of Engineers: What's Past*). What is funny to me is the novella came out between books one and two, but takes place before book one... thus in book two everyone starts going on about the "Jinoteur carrier wave," a thing they for some reason never brought up in book one! 

My copies of Harbinger and Summon the Thunder are both signed by the authors; in Summon the Thunder, Kevin Dilmore wrote what is definitely my favorite thing an author has ever inscribed to me: "M-O-L-L-M-A-N-N... see I can spell it!"

Reap the Whirlwind contains a "minipedia" with entries for all the characters and places of the series thus far. I appreciate the assistance in trying to ground the reader in this sprawling saga... but unfortunately you can't use it as reference while reading the book because it contains spoilers for it! Weird call.

* This is in fact the reason I didn't reread it... I don't own it in a form where it's a complete "book" and thus I wouldn't count it as a book read on my reading list! Gotta keep those numbers up, can't waste time on reading that won't contribute.

(re)Reading Ozma of Oz Aloud to My Kids

Back when I read this aloud to Kid One, then three years old, I concluded it was one of the better Oz books. Now I've read it aloud again to Kids One and Two, now eight and five, and I stand by that assessment.

Ozma of Oz: A Record of Her Adventures with Dorothy Gale of Kansas, the Yellow Hen, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, Tiktok, the Cowardly Lion and the Hungry Tiger; Besides Other Good People too Numerous to Mention Faithfully Recorded Herein by L. Frank Baum
illustrated by John R. Neill

Originally published: 1906
Acquired and previously read: August 2021
Read aloud: May–June 2026

As I prepped this review, I skimmed some of the reviews on LibraryThing, and I was struck by one that noted, "As much I enjoy the story... at no point in the story do I ever worry about Dorothy, because she never worries.... [C]onsidering the almost continuous stream of dicey situations she gets into, she remains zen and mostly unbothered at all times, which really renders her rather dull. It takes away a lot of the excitement that should be building... I guess this is because it is a children's adventure, and Baum didn't want his readers getting upset, but I always liked a book that could make you cry as well as make you laugh." 

One of the interesting things about reading books aloud to kids is that you become aware of how kids process literature differently to how adults process literature, something you must of course have known at some point in your life, because you were once a kid yourself, but which you've clearly forgotten in the past thirty years. I agree that Baum usually has a very even-keeled tone: note very matter-of-fact way that things like the mutilation of the Tin Woodman or the attack of the wolves are communicated in Wonderful Wizard, something especially revealed by the contrasting choices made in some adaptations. A more modern writer, I suspect, would write sequences like Dorothy floating on the chicken coop in the ocean by telling you how scared Dorothy was, or crank up the suspense of the part where the Oz characters are trying to find the transformed Royal Family of Ev in the Nome King's palace and becoming transformed themselves.

But what I realized from reading this book aloud to a five-year-old is that a five-year-old doesn't need the prose to indicate how scary something is to be scared by it. Poor little guy was snuggling up to me for comfort when Dorothy was floating around on that chicken coop; poor little kid really did not like it when all the members of Ozma's party were being transformed, and I had to reassure him by reminding him that we had read later-set Oz books where Ozma was just fine! Kids, it seems, have an innate ability to just imagine themselves in a situation that adults lack. Kid Two doesn't need Baum to tell him Dorothy is scared because he imagines himself on a chicken coop in a storm in the Pacific Ocean and that is scary!

Kids also appreciate the moments of triumph: the kids loved when Billina hid herself and found out the Nome King's secret, and when she made her guesses—big whoops of delight.

Kid Two is apparently a Jack Pumpkinhead stan; near the end of the book, he complained that he hadn't turned up, and then was quite ecstatic when he appeared in the (what will be obligatory from this point on) end-of-book celebration scene. This was a fun one to read aloud again.

Continuity note: My kids did not remember that Glinda met the Nome King, and he acquired his Magic Belt, in Ages of Oz, even though we only read it five months ago! Oh well.

Hugo Awards 2026: Wonder Woman: The Last Amazon by Kelly Thompson, Hayden Sherman, Mattia De Iulis, et al.

Absolute Wonder Woman, Vol. 1: The Last Amazon

Collection published: 2026
Contents published: 2024-25
Acquired: April 2026
Read: July 2026

Writer: Kelly Thompson
Artists: Hayden Sherman, Mattia De Iulis, Dustin Nguyen
Colorist: Jordie Bellaire
Letterer: Becca Carey

This is my first experience with DC's confusingly named "Absolute Universe" (can't wait until we get the Absolute Editions, so this book will be republished as Absolute Absolute Wonder Woman), which is a sort of modern reboot of key DC characters. In this version, Diana is the last of Amazons, who were massacred by the gods; she is sent to the underworld to be raised by the sorcerer Circe. The gods keep sending creatures to kill her, so she is raised in violence—but also in hope. This is particularly emphasized when Steve Trevor washes up in the underworld, and she must help him get home; eventually, she follows him to the mortal world in order to defend it.

The first story here, written by Kelly Thompson and illustrated by Hayden Sherman, alternates between Diana's youth in the underworld and the present day, where she's fighting monsters and re-meeting Steve Trevor. I had read some rapturous reviews of this series going into it, so I think I was set up to be somewhat disappointed. This is strong, solid superhero fare... but it's not the best the genre has to offer. I mean, I think it does what this kind of story should do, and it does it very well. The art and writing work together excellently; Sherman is totally simpatico with what Thompson is doing on writing. Both depict Diana as someone feminine and hopeful but still powerful and determined. There are some clever superheroics here; the threat isn't just defeated through Diana punching or slicing up a monster, but by her using magic and thinking about the powers the monster possesses. But was I wowed by it? No, not really. You've see similar stories—compare the last Wonder Woman comic to be a Hugo finalist, which was up to more interesting things.

from Absolute Wonder Woman #1 (art by Hayden Sherman)

I also thought this was let down a bit by the second story, illustrated by Mattia De Iulis. De Iulis is not as good an artist as Sherman, with a generic, glossy superhero style, and in particular, was not capable of the subtle character work Thompson's tale required.

from Absolute Wonder Woman #7 (art by Mattia De Iulis)

Still, it's good stuff, and I would read more of it. I can see how the solid setup here could evolve into greatness given time (there's an interesting supporting cast, for example); hopefully DC gives Thompson that time, and hopefully Sherman returns as artist for future arcs.