Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things (2014)

I received this book for Christmas from LibraryThing's Secret Santa program and, as is my usual practice with such books, tried to go into it with as little foreknowledge as possible; in this case, all I knew about The Book of Strange New Things was that it was science fiction.

The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber

Originally published: 2014
Acquired: December 2025
Read: April 2026

This is definitely one of those sf books written by a "literary" author, as opposed to a "genre" author, yet it also seemed to me that it was in dialogue with the genre of science fiction, specifically that subgenre of science fiction about missionaries going to alien planets: James Blish's A Case of Conscience (1958), Dan Simmons's Hyperion (1989), and Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow (1996). Unlike those, though, the protagonist of this book, Peter Leigh, is not Catholic—he's a convert to Protestantism and a married one at that. I thought this was interesting, because all of those predecessor books I can think of are not only about Catholics, but specifically Jesuits, one of the most intellectual of the Catholic traditions. Peter comes at his faith from a very different direction, with the emotional fervency of the late-life convert (very much not, in my experience, a Catholic trope). His love for Jesus is bound up in his love for his wife. It's a different perspective on faith than I'm used to (as an atheist that grew up Catholic), and I found it interesting—sometimes Peter and his wife are so damn earnest I found them annoying, but never not real.

Like a lot of fiction, it's also about what Elaine Scarry calls "the difficulty of imagining other people": Peter struggles to empathize with his wife, and his wife struggles to empathize with him, over such a long distance, and in such different contexts. And this difficulty is also what's driving a social collapse on Earth, which felt all too real. 

I found the book kind of nerve-wracking, in that everything in it is vaguely off-putting—the environment Peter finds himself in, the actions of the people on the settlement, the enthusiasm of the aliens for Christ, Peter's own decision-making. You know bad things are coming, but are completely sucked along in it. The final reveal about what the aliens are interested in is very well done.

Reading Roundup Wrapup: August 2026

Pick of the month: Crucible of Gold by Naomi Novik. It was a little bit of a struggle to pick a winner this month, because I don't think I really read any standout books, and indeed, a number of the books I read were not very good at all, alas. But Crucible of Gold is another solid installment in the Temeraire series, with some excellent parts.

All books read:

1. Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill
2. Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction by Paul Kincaid
3. The Struggle for Mastery: Britain 1066–1284 by David Carpenter
4. Star Trek: Vanguard: Declassified by Dayton Ward, Kevin Dilmore, Marco Palmieri, and David Mack
5. Sex, Lies and Private Eyes edited by Joe Gentile and Richard Dean Starr
6. Victoria’s Secret: Her Life by Lida Bell Lunt
7. Young Avengers by Heinberg & Cheung by Allan Heinberg, Jim Cheung, et al. 
8. Doctor Who and the Space War by Malcolm Hulke
9. The Road to Oz by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill
10. Crucible of Gold: Book Seven of Temeraire by Naomi Novik
11. Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Volume 8 by Jim Shooter et al.

All books acquired:

1. Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold
2. JSA, Vol 3: Year One by Jeff Lemire and Gavin Guidry
3. DC Finest: Events: Crisis on Infinite Earths, Part Two by Marv Wolfman, Roy Thomas, Alan Moore, George Pérez, et al. 
4. Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny 

 Currently reading:

• Again, Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison
• Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold
• Star Trek: Vanguard: What Judgments Come by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore 
• DC Finest: Events: Crisis on Infinite Earths, Part Two by Marv Wolfman, Roy Thomas, Alan Moore, George Pérez, et al.
• Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
• The Hollow Crown: A History of Britain in the Late Middle Ages by Miri Rubin

Up next in my rotations:

1. Star Trek: Vanguard: Storming Heaven by David Mack
2. The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois
3. The Poe Clan Vol. 1 by Moto Hagio 
4. On Progress in Physics and Subjectivity Theory: An Amateur’s Meanderings as Inspiration for Actual Physicists by N. Otre Le Vant 

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 675 (down 1)

Steady progress! 

 

 

Vincent Shandor, Carpatho-Ukraine in the Twentieth Century (1997)

Carpatho-Ukraine is a region bordering Poland, Ukraine, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania, populated by members of all those ethnicities, not to mention the Ruthenians. Over the years, it has been annexed and abandoned by various powers. I forget how I first heard about it, but back in 2013, I got interested in it and read Republic for a Day, a book by a British journalist who was present during its short-lived status as its own nation: after Czechoslovakia broke up in 1939, it declared itself an independent republic, but only days later, it was annexed by Nazi-backed Hungary. Several years later, I read The Lost Embassy, a novel that fictionalizes these events.

Carpatho-Ukraine in the Twentieth Century: A Political and Legal History by Vincent Shandor

Published: 1997
Read: March 2026

Carpatho-Ukraine in the Twentieth Century is a more serious work than both of those, the work of a leading scholar of Carpatho-Ukraine who was a key figure in local politics during the 1930s. The book is published by Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute, and thus very much aimed at scholars—if you're looking at a book providing a general, accessible history of the region, this is not it, nor does it intend to be it. Shandor assumes you know a lot! Unfortunately, an accessible history of Carpatho-Ukraine has never been written in English as far as I can tell, so this is what you've got to work with.

I found that Shandor is one of those scholars who gives you a lot of details, but it's sometimes hard to extract the narrative. Occasionally, he's obviously trying to settle scores against other people from the time of the events he chronicles—still, this clearly comes from a place of deep passion for the region and its people, and that resonates through its pages.

This gives the kind of context and scope you just don't get from Republic for a Day. I finished the book with a much clearer understanding of how Carpatho-Ukraine related to the other countries around it, and how it got tangled up in their political games and false promises.

Note that the book's title claims to cover "the twentieth century," but it really pretty much stops at 1945, I think because that's when Carpatho-Ukraine was absorbed into the USSR, and Shandor (I am pretty sure) was never able to go back after that. The book was published in 1997, but he lived until 2003; I hope he was able to reconnect with his homeland. 

The Internet Is Dying

You may be familiar with "Dead Internet Theory," which states that "activity and content on the internet, including social media accounts, are predominantly being created and automated by artificial intelligence agents" and that "[m]any of the accounts that engage with such content also appear to be managed by artificial intelligence agents."

I don't know if the Internet actually is dead yet, but it certainly seems to be dying. Facebook is always pushing pages on me when I just want to see what my friends are up to; a lot of those are clearly AI-written prose. But even some of my friends who should know better often share AI-written posts!

image courtesy Stackery

Reddit, however, is even worse. So many subs have, of late, been taken over by bots that post LLM-generated content. The problem I have run into is that many posters don't seem to recognize this—these posts often get a ton of engagement and upvotes. I am pretty good at recognizing it, because of course I read hundred of pages of LLM-generated prose every semester. But a stranger on the Internet only has my word for it. Though one of the things I am coming to learn from all of this is that I think people who are bad at reading don't understand that other people can actually be good at it.

I wouldn't say I am perfect at it, but I am pretty well calibrated. I usually check by using Pangram; Pangram claims to have a false-positive rate below 1%. Of course they're incentivized to say that, but if you poke around on Google Scholar, the trend of independent analyses of Pangram seems to put the false-positive rate below 3%. But even if you link people to the Pangram result, they'll still be all, "But how do you know?" There are some bad LLM detectors out there which have given the good ones a bad rap. (And, in any case, I suspect most of the Ai DeTeCtOrS aRe So UnReLiAbLe people are probably the ones themselves using LLMs to write.)

It's infuriating to me that I have to deal with this on Reddit, because if I want to read crappy LLM-generated prose, I can just do it at work! Reddit is supposedly where I go to relax and have fun. On the other hand, there is a bit of satisfaction I get from getting a post deleted—I am certainly the number one bot hunter on a couple of subs.

I am getting better at making my case, though. The key is often to be able to link to a pattern of behavior—and this is also the key to understand what's going on, because that's probably the question I get the most. What is a bot's incentive to post a heartwarming parenting story on Daddit or a broadly worded book recommendation request on r/printSF? As the Conversation article I linked to above says, "This creates a vicious cycle of artificial engagement, one that has no clear agenda and no longer involves humans at all." That article discusses propaganda, but there are other reasons at play when it comes to the Dead Internet.

At least when it comes to Reddit, it's about slipping in product recommendations. Take this user, for example. Aside from all being LLM-generated the posts are pretty innocuous, but read every single one of them, and a pattern begins to emerge:

• A post in r/PostConcussion is supposedly about memory issues but links to an online concussion test they took.
• A post in r/eldercare is about their parent getting scammed by AI, and includes a link to a for-profit service that helps people get their money back. 
• A post in r/Entrepreneurs is supposedly about getting recommendations on how to fight fake reviews, and links to one specific service that will help. 
• A post in r/PaintByNumbers asks if other posters have painted places they want to go to, but slips in a mention of a specific kit from a specific company. 
• A post in r/family supposedly asks for advice about telling her sister she could have bought her engagement ring for $6,000 less online, and makes sure to mention the site. 

Note that of these five, three include a link, though two do not. 

(These bots make it tricky by hiding their posting history, but you can usually find the posts via Google, or the very helpful Arctic Shift tool. Arctic Shift reveals another one by this poster that got deleted on r/OldHomeRepair, where the poster asks about a quote they got for modernization.)

Obviously links help SEO, but what's up with the nonlinked posts? And some are even critical of the services mentioned, like the one on r/OldHomeRepair?

The answer turns out to be... other LLMs! There's a good 404 Media article on it (here's a link to an archived version, because it's paywalled). Lots of people ask LLMs for product recommendations these days. What's the best place for people to get production recommendations? Well, Reddit, because it is of course a compilation of real human experiences! Reddit posts get scraped and searched by LLMs and absorbed into their training data. So if you ask ChatGPT to recommend good paint-by-number kits, it's going to recommend one that lots of people on Reddit mentioned that they liked!

The posts that don't mention products, in between them, are to build up karma—hence heartwarming and/or ragebait stories on Daddit, for example. In fact, I've observed a pattern: often the bots build up comment karma with short, random comments in popular subs, then move on to making posts to farm karma, then move on to product recs.

Of course there's a tragedy-of-the-commons problem here. If everyone markets their products on Reddit via bots, then Reddit will cease to be the repository of real human recommendations that made the bots want to post there to begin with.

Although... I'm becoming increasingly skeptical that real human experience is what people want, anyway. Isn't it just easier to talk to bots? Maybe it's not the Internet that's dying, but the whole human social experience. 

Daniel Mason, North Woods (2023)

North Woods by Daniel Mason

Published: 2023
Acquired: June 2025
Read: June 2026

Last summer, I participated in our local library's summer reading program; I got a pick of several books as a prize for participating, and I semi-arbitrarily picked this one knowing nothing about it.

North Woods chronicles the happenings in a forest in New England, from the time of the Puritans up to the present day. It's more of a story cycle than a novel, alternating stories told by a narrator and ones that are found documents like diaries or magazine articles. Over time, you realize there are links between the stories.

It's the kind of book I find more intellectually admirable than emotionally enjoyable. Well written, but in an austere, this-guy-went-to-an-MFA-program kind of way (I have no idea if he did or not, by the way). Some strong individual stories, some forgettable ones. Unfortunately, I think one wants a story cycle to be greater than the sum of its parts and this one is probably less. I don't have any real complaints about it, but I struggle to imagine myself recommending it to someone either.

Steven L. Peck, A Short Stay in Hell (2012)

I presented at a conference back in March about my idea of the "epistemic crisis" in science fiction. Specifically, I focused on stories where your understanding of how the world works is doubly upended, such as (though it's not actually sf) Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

Afterwards, a member of the audience came up to me (I do not remember his name, alas) and suggested that I read a novella, Steven Peck's A Short Stay in Hell. He said it was an example of what I call an epistemic crisis happening not just once or twice, but repeatedly throughout the book. When I got home, I requested it from my local library.

I was quite surprised to realize that even though the book is over a decade old, it was in heavy demand. The library had just two physical copies, but I was fifteenth in line for them; the library had eight e-copies... but I was forty-fifth in line for them! This is the kind of demand typically reserved for brand-new books by popular authors. Why would this be happening to a book that came back in 2012?

The answer turns out to be that, I guess, it became "BookTok" and "BookTube" famous, receiving lots of positive interest there. Probably this is how my conference interlocutor came across it himself. Take a look at the book's popularity curve on LibraryThing:

Most books, of course, have an initial burst of interest when they are released and then go down over time. A Short Stay in Hell, on the other hand, began to take off in 2023 and has only continued to get more popular since! That I even got the book as quickly as I did (it took two months for my hold to come in) was because the library ordered three more copies.

A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck

Published: 2012
Read: June 2026

Anyway, what is the book actually about? It's a riff on Borges's "The Library of Babel," a story I have not actually read, about a library that contains every possible book, in the sense that the library is filled with books that contain every possible combination of random characters. So the vast majority of the books in the library are random nonsense, but through the vagaries of randomness, every book that exists in the real world is going to appear exactly once... along with books that are quite close to them but slightly different, and book that are mostly nonsense but contain a couple lucid sentences.

The narrator of A Short Stay is a devout Mormon who dies of cancer... and discovers that actually Zoroastianism is the one true religion. Whoops. Thus, he is (like most people) condemned to Hell. But Hell isn't an eternal punishment, you can redeem yourself and go to Heaven. For him and many others (it's indicated Hell can be different for different people), Hell is the library of Borges's story. The key to getting out is finding the book of your life story and inserting it into a slot.

I disagree with my conference interlocutor: I don't think this is an example of repeated epistemic crises. Once you have this basic premise explained to you, everything flows quite logically from it, and it is never upended. But that makes it, in fact, an example of a different but related phenomenon that interests me in sf: the fantasy story that starts from a logical impossibility but then thinks through all of its implications as logically as possible. If you could have a library like this, how big would it be? And, thus, what would the people trapped in it do? This is what Peck works out, through the vehicle of this story.

There's a pleasure to this, which China Miéville calls "rationalized alienation." It's the joy of a certain kind of fantasy. I reckon that Ann Leckie is a very good example of how to do this, in her stories from the world of Raven Tower, but also you see it in places like Ted Chiang's "Tower of Babylon," T. H. White's Mistress Masham's Repose, and even L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It's just enjoyable to follow along with the author as they extrapolate from their basic premise... even if, as it is in A Short Stay, quite horrific!

This is a short book, and it's mostly given over to thinking through different aspects of what such a "Hell" might look like. What would the people in such an environment do, what kind of societies would spring up, what kind of implications would the sheer size of such a structure have? We get lots of cool stuff like the protagonist throwing himself off the structure and falling for an interminably long time—but then how would he stop himself?

The end of the book indicates he exists for billions of years in the library... but if you go back to the beginning, it's mentioned that the book you are reading is one he finds within the library, so if he inserts it into the slot, he'll finally get out and go to Heaven.

Except... we're told the book of your life story has to be free of typos, and I found at least two: on pp. 6 and 10, questions in dialogue are followed by capital letters when they should be lowercase ("One of the women whispered hoarsely" and "He said looking..."). So is he doomed to keep looking for the error-free version of his story for billions more years?

One last thing: the narrator is Mormon, like author Steven Peck. But so too are the two people who provide back cover blurbs: science fiction author Dan Wells and Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings. Is there a Mormon book-blurb-providing exchange?

Reading The Nome King's Shadow in Oz Aloud to My Kids

My kids and I have been rereading Baum's original Oz books, but interspersing chronologically appropriate stories that were written later: we read The Speckled Rose of Oz between Wonderful Wizard and Marvelous Land, and "Ozma Sees Herself" between Marvelous Land and Ozma. For the gap between Ozma and Dorothy and the Wizard, we read one of the apocryphal Oz books I've had since I was a kid, The Nome King's Shadow in Oz. This was written by Gilbert M. Sprague, author of the mediocre Patchwork Bride, and illustrated by Donald Abbott, writer/artist of Speckled Rose.

The Nome King's Shadow in Oz by Gilbert M. Sprague
illustrated by Donald Abbott

Published: 1992
Acquired and previously read: late 1990s
Read aloud: July 2026

The beginning of the story overlaps with the end of Ozma: when Ruggedo, the Nome King, is struck with Billina's egg, he falls apart. He pulls himself back together, but doesn't notice his shadow is missing. (Kid One objected that this isn't consistent with how the same scene is depicted in Ozma, and they are right.) The book then follows the shadow, who acquires his own independent existence as "Shady" and decides to travel to Oz to revenge himself upon Billina and the other inhabitants of the Emerald City.

It's a slight story, but it is undoubtedly better than either Patchwork Bride or Speckled Rose. The idea of "shadow hooks," where a shadow connects itself to its host, is a good one; Shady figures out how to use them to detach people's shadows and control them. It's the kind of magical-but-though-through thing that one could imagine L. Frank Baum himself coming up with; the darker tone of the concept with the kind of thing Baum was doing in later Oz books like Magic of Oz. Abbott is a pretty good illustrator who, as in Speckled Rose, is doing a W. W. Denslow pastiche; the highlight is probably seeing him render a bunch of John R. Neill–designed characters in Denslow's style. I particularly liked how he drew Billina... though my kids complained she didn't look like Billina!

Like a lot of Emerald City Press Oz books, it's short, and probably its biggest downfall is that Shady's schemes are pretty pedestrian (messing up the palace laundry and kitchens) and that the resolution of it all is pretty arbitrary and fairly easy. Certainly there are worse apocryphal Oz books, but there are much better Oz books in general. Probably my kids' favorite thing was learning about Billina's kids... but that's something Baum himself came up with, we just haven't got there yet! (I think we will learn about them in Dorothy and the Wizard.)

All that said, I did ask Kid Two who his favorite Oz character was... and he said Shady! So who knows. 

Hugo Awards 2026: A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett

A Drop of Corruption is the sequel to last year's winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel, The Tainted Cup, a novel that I enjoyed enough that I would have picked up the sequel even if it had not been a Hugo finalist. It's the second in a series of fantasy mysteries about speculative detective Ana and Din, who investigate crimes on the behalf of an imperial "Iudex." Massive creatures called leviathans affect their world; the empire defends people against them, but also extracts from them biological compounds that can be grafted onto humans to enhance them in various ways. Din, for example, has perfect recall, which he uses to aid Ana in her investigations.

A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett

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

The pleasure of these books is twofold. First, Ana and Din themselves are strong, fun characters. Ana is clearly derived from Sherlock Holmes, but distinct enough to be tremendous fun regardless; Din isn't really a Watson substitute, though, rather a young man with his own strong sense of justice and personal demons. I enjoyed this book's one-off third investigator, Malo, a lot as well, and I hope a place is indeed found for her in future books. The other pleasure is the richly evocative world, one of empires and grotesque experiments, of people who have been modified to be as bizarre as the world they inhabit. I really enjoy seeing all this, and as in more naturalistic settings, the detective's ability to move across the classes of society means we get to see a lot of different aspects of this world, both inside and outside the empire.

Bennett seems to be up to some interesting stuff with the complexities of empire here, whose mental and cultural effects are paralleled to the biological modifications its subjects undergo; when Din thinks, "We built this... We have built this unnatural thing, and it has built us in turn" (342), supposedly he is thinking of the Shroud,* the empire's living research facility for grafts. But later, when he sees the Shroud in all its glory, he calls it "a construction vast enough to split any wave and seek any shore" (454). Surely that's what empire itself is—and thus surely also his earlier line is really about how empire shapes people, shapes our thinking and our abilities. It's a good example of how sf can take something metaphorical and make it literal; over in Seth Dickinson's Baru Cormorant novels, we see how empire reshapes the thinking of the main character to make her into its tool, here the empire's savants have had their thinking quite literally altered.

It's weird, then, that Bennett seems to think this book is up to something totally different! As I usually do, I read the author's note at the end sometime during the book (this is not always a good idea; it definitely spoiled something when I did it with What Stalks the Deep); there, Bennett discusses how the novel was meant as a critique of autocracy: "perhaps our fascination with kings and autocracies is more innate. As Sir Terry Pratchett once put it, it's as if even the most intelligent person has this little blank spot in their heads where someone's written: 'Kings. What a good idea'" (457). By a total coincidence, I happen to be co-writing an essay right now about the City Watch strand of Prachett's Discworld, which, like this book, uses the police procedural to interrogate ideas about fantasy kingship. There are two issues I see here. One, is that, to be honest, I don't think A Drop of Corruption is a good criticism of autocracy. While Pratchett makes what he's doing very obvious, especially in the first three City Watch novels, which are all about the Watch stopping people from putting a traditional fantasy king on the throne of Ankh-Morpork... I don't think anyone would ever read A Drop of Corruption and conclude it's an attack on autocracy. Though it has a king in it, the appeal of kings isn't really explored in any way, shape, or form as it is by Pratchett; yes, the plot turns on (in part) the succession of kingship, but this could just as easily have been the succession to a dynastic family or the inheritance of a large corporation. If he hadn't said the book was an attack on autocracy, then it would have been fine, but I feel like once he's told you it is, you'll come away disappointed.

The other issue as, as Chris Winkle has also pointed out, is that the people set up in opposition to kingship work for an empire with an unelected, immortal emperor! Now, to be fair, this is also a problem with the City Watch novels, whose systemic problems are usually resolved by an unelected autocrat... just one who happens to be nice. It's interesting that both Bennett and Pratchett use a police procedural format to critique the power of kings. Many scholars have criticized how the police procedural as a format normalizes the state's use of violence, but I do wonder if they overstate the case a bit, or at least haven't fully considered how putting violence in the hands of the police is better than putting it in the hands of a king! At least in our world, the police are in theory a democratic institution, in that ultimately their mandate derives from the people, and is designed to prevent corruption with the society it develops, something Ana highlights a couple times in A Drop of Corruption. She tells Din, "Yet this job is perhaps the most important [...], for without it, well... the Empire would come to look much like Yarrow [the novel's autocracy], where the powerful and the cruel prevail without check" (350). Later, she reminds Din that the empire has granted some of its people "[b]lessings of the flesh, the mind, the spirit. Any of these blessings might lead one to imagine that they are of regal element. And that is why we must have a watchman among us, to ensure that these folk never forget the truth. [...] That though a person's mind may be shaped differently, their hearts and souls are all too human" (452). The idea that society needs a watchman and the police are it is straight out of the City Watch books... it's just weird that in both of these books, the watchmen are not actually answerable to the people in any meaningful sense as they would be in a democratic institution. The people are thus entirely dependent on that fact that Ana, like Vimes, is a good person who would not misuse her power. Which is, you know, the myth of kingship! Like Pratchett, Bennett is maybe not capable of totally moving beyond fantasy's love of kings.

Yet, I am unpersuaded that "Bennett obviously loves Khanum and its emperor." This is only the second book, after all. Just because the character in this installment do not see the contradiction between criticizing the kingship of another country and serving an empire doesn't mean Bennett does not. After all, they have built this unnatural thing, and it has built them in turn. How can they see beyond it? The book is filled with people whose alterations allow them to see some things very well but cause them to totally miss other ones. Is Bennett actually not capable of totally moving beyond fantasy's love of kings? Or is he playing a long game.

I do think Pratchett was playing a long game; I kind of wonder if the City Watch book's patrician was being set up as a transitional figure, if at some point he would step down and allow the people to rule themselves, having carried out the necessary violence to effect the transition. (A trope seen, as Peter Paik identifies, in texts like Watchmen.†) Unfortunately, as Eugenia Pietralunga Biavati points out (in her forthcoming essay on the City Watch books for the special issue of Studies in the Fantastic I am co-editing about speculative detectives), even though the books feature a "continued interrogation of heroic fantasy violence... [the] undercurrent of dramatic tension [about fantasy violence] ... was never resolved because Pratchett died after writing the eighth City Watch novel." I would add the even the last two City Watch novels move away from this concept, I suspect because as his Alzheimer's got worse, Pratchett avoided some of the more complicated things he'd done in earlier City Watch novels. If Bennett, like Pratchett, is playing a long game with our love of autocrats, hopefully he is able to pay it off in future installments.

* It's presumably one of those weird synchronicities of culture that dog awards that is responsible for the fact that two of this year's Hugo finalists are about oppressive human institutions exploiting weird biological phenomena they have named "Shroud."

† My reading of Paik predates this blog, so I can't link you to a direct explanation of this idea, but I do have a post discussing his idea of the "shrug" in my review of the Legion of Super-Heroes threeboot. 

The Maze Agency: "A Beautiful Crime" and Other Stories by Mike W. Barr, Ariel Padilla, Ernest Jocson, et al.

Almost a decade after its first revival (see item #3 on the list below), Mike W. Barr's The Maze Agency was revived again, for a second three-issue miniseries, this time from IDW. (The revival was accompanied by a new collection of volume 1's first five issues, see item #1 below; I have also seen some evidence that ISBNs were assigned for more collections, but none of those were ever published.)

I found these three issues more of a mixed bag than the previous revival from Caliber. I think there were two reasons: one avoidable, and one perhaps unavoidable.

First, the avoidable one. I didn't find any of the stories among these three as well put together as the ones in the previous two runs of The Maze Agency. Maze Agency stories were always complicated, sure—I imagine there's very rarely a fair-play whodunit that isn't—but these usually verged into overcomplicated. The reader might very often lose track of things... but probably the one thing that should never happen in a whodunit is that the reader loses track of the suspects. But in all of these stories, especially the first and the third, I found that was exactly was what happened. Two many characters, and when the murderer was revealed, I wasn't quite sure I remembered who they were.

Probably part of the problem there is not the writing, but the art: the IDW stories are all penciled by Ariel Padilla, and I didn't think he had the command of making unique faces necessary to pulling off the complex character work of a murder mystery. Sure, not everyone can be Adam Hughes, but almost all of his many replacements in the original run still managed to do it. The glossy mid-2000s coloring techniques probably don't help either. In particular, issues #2 and 3 have lots of characters—beauty pageant participants and two distinct Japanese families, respectively—and if you can't tell them all apart, you'll very quickly be lost. I wish a stronger artist had been found to bring back The Maze Agency.

from The Maze Agency vol. 3 #2

The other reason, though, was probably unavoidable. The pleasure of the original Maze Agency wasn't just the whodunits, it was being with Jen and Gabe as their relationship evolved and developed. The series moved forward in real time; its two years of comics covered two years of their lives.

Volume 3 of The Maze Agency was published fifteen years after the last issue of volume 1...  yet the characters have clearly not aged fifteen years. Nor, however, are we picking up shortly after where we left off; these are not early 1990s period pieces, either. In true "comic book time" fashion, the fashions and the technology indicate this is the mid-2000s, but Jen and Gabe are where we left them. Or, even worse, regressed a little: one of the stories indicates Gabe has his own apartment, but he actually moved in with Jen during the original run. There probably was not a good solution to this dilemma, but I find it disappointing nonetheless. (I think, though, I would have done what Sue Grafton did in the Kinsey Millhone books partway though, and transformed them into period pieces. For one thing, the fashions of the late 1980s and early 1990s are much better than the generic mid-2000s stuff Jen is wearing here. She even lost her forelock!)

from The Maze Agency vol. 3 #3

What I think of as the "modern" revival of The Maze Agency actually isn't all that modern—depressingly, it's closer to the series's original run than it is to the present! However, there was one last Maze Agency revival just a couple years ago, from Scout Comics... which lasted just one issue! I was able to find a press release about the Scout revival but no interviews or anything; certainly, the fanfare with which it was announced seems to indicate it wasn't planned as a one-shot, but no further issues were solicited or anything.

Anyway, it's fine. The twists of the mystery are interesting enough, and there are some good bits of humor in it. Unfortunately, it's let down by the art: all of Silvano Beltramo's women basically have the same face, and he's also the colorist, and occasionally gives Jen reddish-blond hair (matching one of the suspects) instead of blond, so I often had to reread dialogue to figure out which woman was Jen! I do appreciate they got Alan Davis back to do one of the covers; I think it was originally a 1:5 incentive cover, but it wasn't any more expensive than the regular cover online.

from The Maze Agency vol. 4 #1

The Scout Comics one-shot seems to be it for The Maze Agency; I believe it was Mike Barr's last-ever published comics work, and he's now having health problems, alas. If you liked the core series, these later revivals don't quite recapture its glory days, but are still worth tracking down.

Volume 3 of The Maze Agency originally appeared in three issues, from Nov. 2005 to Jan. 2006. The stories were written by Mike W. Barr, penciled by Ariel Padilla, inked by Ernest Jocson (#1-2) and Michael Jason Paz (#3), lettered by Tom B. Long, colored by Rainier Beredo (#1, 3) and Romulo Fajardo Jr. (#2), and edited by Dan Taylor.

"Shriek: The Sequel!" originally appeared in issue #1 of The Maze Agency vol. 4 (Dec. 2023). The story was written by Mike W. Barr, illustrated and colored by Silvano Beltramo, lettered by Tyler Smith, and edited by Andrea Lorenzo Molinari.

This is the penultimate in a series of posts about Mike W. Barr's The Maze Agency. The next covers the short stories. Previous installments are listed below:

1. The Maze Agency vol. 1 #1-5 (1988-90)
2. The Maze Agency vol. 1 #6-23 (1989-91)
3. The Maze Agency vol. 2 #1-3 (1997-98)

Batgirl: Year One by Scott Beatty & Chuck Dixon, Marcos Martin, and Alvaro Lopez

Batgirl: Year One: The Deluxe Edition

Collection published: 2019
Contents originally published: 2003
Acquired: July 2025 
Read: March 2026

Writers: Scott Beatty & Chuck Dixon
Penciller: Marcos Martin
Inker: Alvaro Lopez
Colorist: Javier Rodriguez
Letterer: Willie Schubert

Maybe I've been spending too much time on Reddit's "Omnibus Collectors" sub, but recently I've been tracking down nice deluxe editions of classic DC storylines. On a very flimsy pretext, I purchased JLA: Year One; I also added a couple others to my wishlist, and I received this as a birthday present, the deluxe edition of Batgirl: Year One, which I borrowed from the library over a decade ago.

The original "Year One" was of course Batman: Year One, justly a classic, which established a "post-Crisis" origin for Batman. DC returned to this concept many different times and ways over the years; for example, in 1995, every DCU title's annual was a "Year One" story. One briefly common approach was the "Year One" miniseries: there were a whole spate of these in the 2000s, giving post-Crisis origins for characters like Robin, Green Arrow, Metamorpho, and the Huntress. I haven't enjoyed every one that I've read, but when they work, they really work: usually DC handed the reigns over to a high-profile creative team and got them to do good work in a timeless tale that stands alone. (And, of course, the post-Crisis pre-Flashpoint iteration of the DC universe is the best one, i.e., it's the one that was in effect when I got into superhero comics.)  

There's a nicely done subplot about how Commissioner Gordon knows Barbara is Batgirl... but just can't admit it to himself.
from Batgirl: Year One #9

Batgirl: Year One is no exception to this. Chuck Dixon isn't my favorite scripter, but he was everywhere on the Batman books in the 2000s, including Birds of Prey, so he was a good choice for Barbara Gordon's origin; outside of Robin and Nightwing: Year One, I'm less familiar with co-writer Scott Beatty's work, but he has done some very solid, very fun Batman-adjacent standalones, like the team-up with Elongated Man in Gotham Knights. And the quality work of Marcos Martin and Alvaro Lopez on this book is indisputable; they both seem like the kinds of illustrators who ought to have done more comics than they have. Their work here is slick and bold and stylized, full of energy that perfectly communicates the attitude of Barbara Gordon at this point in her life and superheroic career. The colors of Javier Rodriguez are excellent, too, bright and energetic.

Maybe I shouldn't be wasting one of my two images from Batgirl: Year One on a totally different character, but I can never say no to Dinah Laurel Lance.
from Batgirl: Year One #7

I don't think this is a great work of art. To be honest, I think the plot is unnecessarily confusing, and parts of it are a bit belabored. But what better "Year One" story could there be for Barbara Gordon? This is perfect bubblegum comics.