Star Trek Adventures: Playing "Entropy's Demise" from These Are the Voyages

It's summer, which means it's time for me to get my Star Trek Adventures group back together! I reached out to everyone who participated last summer, and they were all willing to play again this summer. It's a really solid group of players at this point, so I was very happy to hear this.

I have seven players, which I know is a lot, but it's not very often that all seven are at the table, because we play weekly whether everyone can make it or not. Something I was keen to do this summer was push the role-playing element a bit more. My players aren't the kind for protracted in-character dialogue, but it did seem to me that I could be putting more pressure on Values in interesting ways. In the final episode of last summer's mini-campaign (see episode #8 in the list below), for example, the players were kind of pushed to perhaps do something undemocratic in the short term in order to help democracy in the long term... they did not, and everything worked out. What I am a bit curious about is putting the players in situations were sticking to their Values might either 1) cause inter-character conflict, or 2) cause conflict with Mission Directives.

To this end, one thing I wanted to do was split them up more. Last summer, I added a B-plot to the prewritten mission "The Gravity of the Crime" (see #7). I think this helped energize things a bit: two or three characters on the ship doing their own thing meant all the players got more to do. It also seemed to me that putting two characters off on their own could let them focus on their interactions a bit more as a duo, and let me find ways to put interesting pressures on them.

Outside of the character dynamics, I also wanted to continue our ongoing plotline about the Haradin and their growing nativist movement. I have an idea about where this might go by the end of the season, but we'll see. The players dealt a blow to that movement in the finale to last season, but the real world has shown us that this doesn't always mean something! So the idea I had was to explore some of the consequences the movement might have for the wider Haradin society. Specifically, inspired by some of the USAID stuff, I had the idea that the Haradin clan-ships might cut funding to planetborn Haradin, as this might have become politically unpopular. 

This dovetailed nicely with a prewritten mission I've long had on my list of potentials to run, "Entropy's Demise" by Anthony Jennings from the first STA mission compendium, These Are the Voyages. That's about a Federation wine colony that needs help, but what if it was a Haradin wine colony... whose requests for help from the ship-clan had gone ignored? It also has a role for the Romulans, and one of my players had requested more familiar Star Trek aliens in the campaign. (And I could see how I could build on this to have more Romulans going forward.)

So I decided to do that one, adding a B-plot. I'll go through the A-plot first here and then the B-plot. 

“Chief Engineer’s Log, Stardate 54910.9. Doctor Gurg and I are returning to the Diversitas via runabout after spending a week supervising the construction of a new hospital on Maxia Beta VIII. However, we have been asked to divert to Deep Space 10 by Lieutenant Commander Mazio Sanna of Starfleet Intelligence...”

Planning the Mission 

Morghanek's Hope (image generated by ChatGPT)

The basic premise of "Entropy's Demise" is that the player ship is sent to Morgan's Hope on Carina VII, a colony growing grapes and producing wine. The colony is beset by mysterious temporal anomalies: a kid who should be six months old looks six years, grapes are going through their entire life-cycles in days, buildings only built recently are collapsing overnight. This turns out to be due to a century-old Federation starship, the USS Hamilton, which was testing a temporal weapon using tachyons; the abandoned ship is orbiting Carina X. The three acts are 1) the players investigate the colony, 2) the players discover the Romulans are observing the colony in secret and clear out their base, and 3) the players go to the Hamilton and deactivate the weapon while competing with the Romulans who want it themselves.

My main changes were, first, making the colonists into Haradin, which mostly involved changing names.

• Morgan's Hope → Morghanek's Hope
• Syreeta Sebastian → Siretha Sebanil 
• Mackley family → Maklen family
• Wesley → Weslar
• Aurelia → Aureneh
• Efren → Efrevi
• Zane Knoll → Zanil K'nor

Se'irrah's estate (image generated by ChatGPT)

There was one existing colonist with an alien name, whose species I don't think is ever established, Se'irrah, so I kept that name as is.

The other main change I made was altering the backstory of the USS Hamilton a bit. In the mission as written, it's a Constitution-class starship testing a weapon; I made it a Crossfield-class starship testing an experimental drive system, a sister ship to the Discovery from the same program. I felt like 1) "Burnham's War" seemed like a plausible source of Starfleet desperation (this wasn't really accounted for the mission as written), and 2) a tachyon drive seemed a much more likely thing than Starfleet making a tachyon superweapon! Plus, I have a nice Eaglemoss model of the Discovery.

Thanks to this friendly redditor for making a map of the Romulan outpost I could print out. Very useful! (And, as always, I made the title more pretentious.)

Playing the Mission 

warehouse on Carina VII (image generated by ChatGPT)

These are the players I had:

• Ryan as Rukot, captain (sessions 1-3)
• Debi as T'Cant, first officer/science officer (1-3)
• Kenyon as Nevan Jones, engineer (1-3)
• Claire as Mooria Salmang, pilot (1-2)
• Cari as Jor Lena, security officer (1-3) 
• Austin as Frector, Intelligence analyst (1-3)
• Andy as Gurg bim Vurg, medical officer (1-2)

Kenyon and Andy were who I siphoned off into the B-plot, so more about them later. I was able to keep things to one session per act. (Technically our sessions are three hours, but we usually socialize and eat for the first thirty minutes.)

Act I: Trouble on Carina VII 

secret Romulan outpost (image generated by ChatGPT)

At the first session of the summer, I asked the players to reflect on what their characters had been up to in the months of narrative time since we had last played. Cari had the idea that Jor had become disgruntled about how poorly most of the crew had done in some recent Fitness challenges, and thus was imposing a strict workout regimen on the crew; Andy built on this by Gurg being tired of treating workout-related injuries and thus being willing to write crewmembers frivolous medical excuses for getting out of workouts. This was leading to tension between the two once-tight friends. I had the players reflect on who would adhere to Jor's regimen and who would not; Ryan and Debi said their characters would, but Claire said Mooria would only participate in "fun" workouts, while Austin said Frector (who, as a Ferengi female, just can't keep up no matter how much she wants to) would have started engaged but gotten discouraged. We began the episode with a scene of Jor confronting Mooria about participating more, which was interrupted by the distress call from Carina VII.

The players surprised me by contacting Matriarch M'Syrolath of Clan Marvek while en route to Carina VII and informing her about what was going on, but this worked well, because it let me foreground the  ship-clan's abandonment of the colony. The players were very cautious on arriving at the planet, sending a probe at first rather than getting close. This meant they detected interference, so they used their ship's "Modular Laboratories" Talent to set up a sort of isolation laboratory that would screen out any environmental influences. Instead of beaming down to talk to the governor, they talked to her over comms; instead of going to the Maklen family home to see their prematurely aged child, they beamed the Maklens up into the modular laboratory!

I did eventually get them to understand they needed to go to the planet, so while T'Cant studied Efrevi Maklen and Rukot tried to isolate the interference, Jor took Mooris and Frector to the surface. This part of the mission as written turned out to be kind of redundant and repetitive. Your players talk to some characters and find out something weird is going on, repeat again and again. They don't get much new information out of each iteration of this, and I don't know that the colony needs all these NPCs who ultimately don't contribute much. I ended up skipping through some stuff in the interests of time and tedium. The characters don't get to do much detective work; basically, they scan a bunch of stuff, then someone shows up and says it's Romulans and it is Romulans. If I were to run it again, I think I'd add more clues throughout and let them piece together the Romulan observers themselves.

There was a bit of shenigans because investigating the planet is mostly Tasks in Medicine, Science, and Engineering... but T'Cant was on the ship, and Gurg and Nevan were somewhere else entirely! The remaining characters were not exactly well-suited to this. 

Act II: The Outpost 

USS Hamilton near Carina X
(image found on Facebook; I think it's from Star Trek Online?)

We had some fun roleplay stuff on the way to the Romulan outpost: I suggested to Cari that Jor might carry out an impromptu fitness challenge as they made their way down the path. This ended up being an Opposed Task: could Frector and Mooria match Jor's roll? Austin was like, "Well, there goes my Determination for the session already": he felt Frector's Value of "Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better" would cause her to do this to try to keep up. Claire also spent Mooria's Determination. Mooria did keep up, but even with Determination, Frector failed the roll! But I rewarded Austin with another point of Determination for this in-character decision.

The mission as written shows, in my opinion, some signs of being ineffectively edited down from a longer version. Act I ends with a note saying the players can't find the outpost, but Act II begins with the players just going into it! But I easily fleshed this out by giving them some Tasks to find their way in. Similarly, the mission as written just begins a scene with, "If the Player Characters interrogate D’Tok, they learn that he and his team of scientists recently arrived at the Romulan Outpost after the discovery of the tachyon emissions," without explaining who D'Tok is or where the players might find him! Everything in the base was pretty straightforward, however. There's a Difficulty 2 Task to disarm a bomb the Romulans plant; I dumped some Threat to make it D5, but T'Cant succeeded anyway. Frector and Jor got the jump on the Romulans setting the bomb and knocked them out before they could even react.

I think that in the mission as written, the interference is supposed to come from the tachyons, but Ryan wanted Rukot to study it; I hadn't planned on this, but I decided the Advantage from Modular Laboratories could let him do this, and so let him isolate the interference as something generated by the Romulan outpost to make them harder to discover.

Act III: The Lost Starship 

Subcommander Taleria and her soldiers aboard the Hamilton
(art from These Are the Voyages mission compendium)

The mission as written suggests the players will research the USS Hamilton once they find it's the source of the tachyons... mine did not! However, once they got to it, they wanted to use its command codes (like with the Reliant in Star Trek II) to run it remotely; I had them find the ship was classified once they attempted to do this, and they acquired the Hamilton's logs. The mission as written has no explanation for how Starfleet could have final logs from the Hamilton. If Starfleet knew it was in the Carina system, why did they never recover it? I established that the logs were jettisoned in a recorder buoy Starfleet recovered a century after they were recorded, and the logs only indicated the Hamilton was lost in "an unknown solar system in the uncharted Ekumene sector," so Starfleet didn't know where to look for the ship. (Maybe the mission as written is thinking the crew evacuated, then the ship vanished to the Carina system? I don't know.)

My players dithered a bit in approaching the Hamilton (they had a long debate about sending a message to the Romulans), so they didn't have a ton of time in the final session, so I made things a bit simpler on the fly. Still, they did good. They convinced the Romulan subcommander, Taleria, to work with them, nicely setting her up for a return appearance. The final fight is supposed to be on the Hamilton's bridge, trying to knock out all the Romulans before their commander can download the plans for the tachyon device. Austin had the idea that instead of shooting the Romulans, they should just shoot the console they were using. The Romulans missed on their opening turn (I should have spent more Threat!), and then Frector and Jor each hit the console (I made it D1 instead of the usual D2 for a phaser shot, since it seems to me shooting a console can't be that hard), blowing it up and knocking out the Romulans. In the whole episode, the players only shot two Romulans and never were successfully hit by one!

"Entropy's Demise" is fine on the whole, but it feels like more of a D&D adventure than an STA one: go to a village, then go through two "dungeons" essentially. There's no Star Trek–style moral dilemmas or allegories, nor does most of the stuff in Act I really matter to Act III. But it worked nicely for my purposes: I ended with a hook into the ongoing Haradin plot, and Subcommander Taleria will come back in our very next episode! 

The B-Plot 

Esha Vortan (image generated by ChatGPT)

With the B-plot, I wanted to pick up on our Christmas episode. In several episodes, the players have bumped into a Haradin character named Esha Vortan. Esha was one of the Haradin pirates they captured and handed over to the Klingons in episode #3 (though he wasn't seen in that one, this was established later). He first appeared in episode #5, where they got the Haradin prisoners back from the Klingons; he was keen and young, and offered to mind-meld with T'Cant to try to help the crew to understand the Haradin. (T'Cant couldn't mind-meld with him because of his implant, but he didn't know this.) Esha let Gurg study his implant. When they Haradin pirates were released (mentioned in episode #7), he returned in episode #8, now part of General Zotabia's paramilitary forces trying to prevent "election interference." He was nice and genuinely thought the Diveristas crew would be impressed by this. He then popped up in episode #9, now a pirate again, and was part of the pirates the crew helped capture.

So what would happen to this guy? I wanted to explore some ideas of how someone becomes radicalized—and how they might be deradicalized. I also wanted, like I said, some potential character conflict, and to use our recurring setting of Deep Space 10 with its NPCs a bit. Nevan and Gurg seemed like an interesting pairing for such a subplot. Gurg likes to debate; Nevan likes to solve puzzles. But Gurg likes sharing information, while Starfleet Intelligence hoards it, which seemed to have good potential for conflict. Plus, Nevan's romantic interest, Chief Susu Webb, is stationed on DS10! 

(image generated by ChatGPT)

I had Nevan and Gurg diverted to DS10 after a mission and summoned to the office of Lieutenant Commander Mazio Sanna, the director of Starfleet Intelligence operations in the Ekumene sector. (He appeared in episodes #5 and 8 before, and as Frector's boss, has been mentioned in several others.) Mazio told them that SI was really happy with how Frector had acquired the coordinates to Zotabia's pirate base in episode #9, but they also wanted a PR coup: firm proof that General Zotabia had returned to piracy. However, none of the pirates were willing to name Zotabia... could Nevan and Gurg get Esha to spill the beans via Esha's bond with the Diversitas crew?

Nevan and Gurg secured a temporary release from the DS10 security stockade for Esha by talking to Captain Morox, DS10's JAG officer, and were able to talk to him in the station bar. They found out that Esha had initially received comfort from the Haradin transmitter network when Zotabia had reactivated it, but since he'd been locked up on DS10, it had gone dead. Esha had assumed Starfleet was blocking it, but they were able to prove to him that wasn't the case—having failed Zotabia's movement, the pirates had been abandoned by it. They were thus able to persuade Esha to give the testimony required.

But this was the twist: when they went back to Mazio, he told them this probably wasn't good enough to secure Esha's release. Anyone could say Zotabia was in charge of the pirates. Wouldn't it be better to release Esha, let him go back to Zotabia's base, and get a recording of him? Nevan and Gurg were pretty dubious that Esha would even survive this!

Consul Vrossaan
(image generated by ChatGPT,
based on a cosplay photo)

I think this played out nicely. Neither Gurg nor Nevan are characters built for social conflict, so they had to stretch themselves to work their way through this tangled web of mayhem and intrigue. Eventually, Nevan was able to get Consul Vrossaan, the Diplomatic Corps's envoy on DS10, to back him up and negotiate diplomatic immunity for Esha in exchange for Esha entrapping Zotabia on a comm channel, a deception Nevan had to help facilitate, thus turning a diplomatic problem into a technical one. And Nevan and Gurg were able to give Esha the sense of purpose he had lost: SI gave him an impounded pirate vessel so Esha could start a new life as an independent space merchant. Plus we got some incremental advance on the Nevan/Susu romance!

Star Trek: Ekumene:

1. "Patagon in Parallax"
2. "A Terrible Autonomy"
3. "Stinks of Slumber and Disaster"
4. "Angels in Your Angles"
5. "A Thousand Miles from Day or Night" 
6. "When I Get through This Part…"
7. "Only Trying to Do Right in This Wicked World" 
8. "No Place in the Processional"
9. "Legend Grew about Their Daring" 
10. "On the Edge of Nobody's Empire"
11. "Nobody Here" 

Specials:

1. "Hear All the Bombs Fade Away"
2. "The Word for Word Is Word"

Hugo Awards 2026: The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson

Antonia Hodgson is an author who is new to the Hugo Awards, and thus new to me; in fact, my understanding is that she's new to sf&f altogether, her previous work all being (I believe) historical mysteries. I'm extremely appreciative of this; some years, it feel like the finalists for Best Novel are all by writers you've come to expect in series you've come to grow used to. You wouldn't know she's new to the genre, though; The Raven Scholar has some excellent craft supporting it, both in terms of prose and how the world is unspooled for the reader.

The Raven Scholar: Book One of the Eternal Path Trilogy
by Antonia Hodgson

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

This is an immersive secondary world fantasy, the kind of thing that can demand a lot of work from a reader, but Hodgson does a good job supporting that work. I appreciated how well the story was told; I think many writers of immersive fantasy in particular don't really see the narrator as a character worth thinking about, except as a supposedly transparent lens into the third-person thoughts of your protagonists. But Hodgson's narrator has personality and verve. Exactly where its perspective comes from is slowly revealed across the course of the book in a way I found interesting. The novel even seems to be some kind of in-universe document, as it contains footnotes and commentary. (Exactly  where this text originates from wasn't clear to me, though I suppose there are two more books to go.)

Me being me, I'm of course constantly thinking about everything I read in terms of its genre: where is it positioned relative to other constituents of the field? I read a comment on Reddit that even though none of the characters were young adults, the book felt YA, and I was like, "Hm, why would that be?" I don't know that I agree that I felt YA, but I could see how someone else would feel that way. And I decided that it was that it's all a bit Harry Potter / Hunger Games, in two ways. First, there's that classic YA trope, that the entire society can be divided into x number of groups. This isn't always a YA thing, but we commonly see it in YA: the four houses in Harry Potter are the most obvious example. Here, the Empire is divided into eight different orders: the Ravens of the title are the scholars, the Foxes are the spies and assassins, and so on. (I, obviously, would be an Ox.) Has any real society ever broken down so neatly? There are exactly eight kinds of people!

The other very YA thing is that there's a "trial" of some kind. The Empire chooses its leader through a competition, where each of the eight orders fields a representative; they compete in both combat- and noncombat-based events across the course of a week. It all felt a bit "Triwizard Tournament" to me, especially the aspect that even though there's been a murder, the trials must still go ahead, and so the main character has to investigate the murder and participate in the trials, which is the kind of stuff I feel like Dumbledore is always inexplicably making Harry Potter do. Yes, someone's been murdered, but we can't postpone our games, so you must compete in them and be a detective!

I told a friend this, and she said it was weird that I specifically associated it with Harry Potter, because she says it's basically ubiquitous across contemporary fantasy. I would assume this mostly people who grew up on Harry Potter and thus absorbed it into their conception of how the genre works—though perhaps the even bigger influence here is Divergent, which features both a set of groups and a big competition. As my friend said, it "really cemented the 'classified groups' thing beyond the school story context." I was thus surprised to discover that author Antonia Hodgson is about ten years older than me; she is not part of the Harry Potter generation, surprisingly enough, and so I wouldn't think would have this in her default conception of how fantasy realms operate. But here it is, and I think it's why the redditor in question found The Raven Scholar to be on the YA end, because it's coming from a YA fantasy conception of how the universe works.

I find the the "people classify themselves" thing a little silly, but tolerable; I do find the system of trials for choosing a leader unbelievable, especially when we find out it's been a place for over a thousand years. Does any institution function so consistently for so long? Especially one this weird?

Anyway, if you're able to accept all of this (and I was), it's a highly enjoyable read. Great characters, decent jokes, good twists, strong prose. Though over six hundred pages is probably honestly more than any book not by George Eliot needs to be. I'm not much of a fantasy person, but this solidly scratches my itch of what I enjoy in the genre when I do read it.

The Legend of Korra: Patterns in Time by Michael Dante DiMartino et al.

The Legend of Korra: Patterns in Time

Collection published: 2022
Contents originally published: 2016-22
Read: January 2026

Written by Michael Dante DiMartino, Rachel Silverstein, Blue Delliquanti, Jen Xu & K. Rhodes, Victoria Ying, Kiki Hughes, Delilah Dawson
Illustrated by Heather Campbell, Sam Beck, Blue Delliquanti, Jayd Aït-Kaci, Jen Xu & K. Rhodes, Victoria Ying, Alexandria Monik*
Colored by Killian Ng, Sam Beck, Lynette Wong, Alexandria Monik
Lettered by Michael Heisler, Richard Starkings & Jimmy Betancourt, Blue Delliquanti, Nate Piekos, Jen Xu & K. Rhodes

When my family watched The Last Airbender, my continuity-oriented seven-year-old interspersed the episodes of the show with the relevant comics. When the family moved onto The Legend of Korra, I realized we had never actually picked up the collection of during-the-show comics! So I bought it for my kid, and then eventually got around to reading it myself.

I was surprised that there are so many fewer Korra comics than Last Airbender ones. I mean, I know ultimately Last Airbender was the more popular show, but surely going into the series, no one would have known that and they would have wanted to maximize the number of tie-ins produced? (Note that, by way of comparison, Korra got an artbook for each season while Last Airbender just got one for the whole show.) But there are only eight stories collected here, and some are very short—one is only two pages!

Anyway, nothing here is a work of genius, but it's fun enough. The similar Last Airbender collections very much benefit from the fact that Last Airbender has a better ensemble, and the comics capture their interactions very well. On the other hand, not only does Korra have a weaker ensemble, but some of its members are totally unrepresented here: there are no stories including Mako or Bolin! A number of the stories are prequels: we get two featuring young Korra, one with young Asami, one about an ancient airbender mentioned in the show, and a story where Tenzin tells his kids about his youth. Of these, my favorite was definitely the Tenzin prequel ("Clearing the Air" by Kiki Hughes and Sam Beck)... but then, Tenzin is probably my favorite Korra character! The two-page one, "Wisdom" by Blue Delliquanti, is actually very well done, good mystical vibe. The ones where they are kids are fine; my favorite of these was the Asami one ("Skyscrapers" by Rachel Silverstein and Sam Beck), since I don't remember learning much about her parents on the show.

Of the others, set during the timeframe of the show, my favorite was the one where Korra sends Meelo on a mission to find some lost pets, called, well, "Lost Pets" (by show co-creator Michael Dante DiMartino, with Jayd Aït-Kaci). Meelo can easily be a mere comic relief character, so it's nice to see him get some genuine character stuff.

Overall, this isn't as strong as the similar Last Airbender collections (nothing here approaches the comic heights of Sokka pretending to be a Fire Nation recruit) but it's a decent and quick read. 

* The collection's title page also lists Michelle Wong, who illustrated the Korra comic Ruins of the Empire, but I can't figure out why, because she's not credited on any of the individual stories. 

Marvel's The Transformers Year Two, Part VI: Resurrection! (US #23 / UK #93-104)

Finally we come to the end of the the first Til All Are One Compendium! Its pages aren't numbered, but the PDF copy included with the Kickstarter runs 1,234 pages including covers and stuff. I started reading it back in January, so it took me just about five months. If that rate continues, I guess I can expect to finish the whole Marvel run sometime in the middle of 2027. But for now, it's on to volume two!

I did read "The Gift" (UK issue #93) after "Decepticon Graffiti!" (UK issues #94-95), which is  out of publication sequence, because this is where the compendium places it. It doesn't really make a difference, as "The Gift" and "Decepticon Graffiti!" have no characters in common and thus can take place simultaneously. (Well, except that "Decepticon Graffiti!" has a summer setting. Oops! But "The Gift" definitely goes here, because it refers to the events of "Heavy Traffic!" as being recent.)

Like many of the stories from the annuals, "The Return of the Transformers" isn't (according to the fine folks at the Transformers wiki, anyway) a perfect fit for continuity, and thus placed in compendium four. However, I read it in, essentially, publication order, right after the 1986 UK Christmas story (since the annuals were given as Christmas presents). This worked well. Like "The Gift," it has a winter setting; also like "The Gift," it focuses on Jetfire and his anxieties. "The Return of the Transformers" is actually a sequel to a previous annual story, "Missing in Action" (see item #5 in the list below), and it also smooths out a continuity error: in the UK story Crisis of Command! (see #4 below), Optimus decided he wouldn't use the Creation Matrix to make special Autobots on Earth, but in Second Generation! (see #6 below) and "Aerialbots over America!" (see #8 below) he went ahead and did that anyway! "The Return of the Transformers" retroactively explains why. So it's clear that even if there are errors, writer James Hill saw it and its predecessor as being part of the regular comics continuity.

from The Transformers US #23

"Decepticon Graffiti!" / "The Gift", from The Transformers US #23 (Dec. 1986) / The Transformers UK #93-95 (27 Dec. 1986.–10 Jan. 1987), reprinted in The Transformers: Til All Are One Compendium One (2025)

written by Bob Budiansky and James Hill, penciled by Don Perlin and Martin Griffiths, inked by Ian Akin & Brian Garvey and Tim Perkins, lettered by Janice Chiang and Robin Riggs, colored by Nel Yomtov and Steve White

When I think of "bad late period Bob Budiansky stories," "Decepticon Graffiti!" is exactly what springs to mind; when I reviewed these stories before, I wrote, "This isn't great comics; it's not even great hokum." Yet... I kind of liked them this time? There's a certain charm to the idea that a pair of newly arrived Decepticons on Earth, ordered by Megatron to deliver a message to Optimus Prime, decide instead to follow a random human family around writing insults on U.S. monuments. And the stuff here with Circuit Breaker and Robot Master is probably the best either character has ever been. This was cute. Give me more Runabout and Runamuck, please.

 

"The Gift" is this year's Christmas story. Buster helps Jetfire deal with a crisis of confidence. It's fine. Martin Griffiths draws Buster as so jacked; maybe this explains what Jesse sees in him.

 

from The Transformers Annual [1986]

"The Return of the Transformers", from The Transformers Annual [1986], reprinted in The Transformers: Til All Are One Compendium Four (2025)

written by James Hill, art by John Stokes

This story brings back Danny, the kid who also appeared in the previous year's annual, in "Missing in Action." Here he's become obsessed with the Transformers, and his grades and slipping and his relationship with his mother is falling apart. Meanwhile, Optimus Prime is worried about the Aerialbots' performance, so he puts them under the command of Jetfire. They perform poorly in battle, even worse when they combine into Superion—but they can't admit this to Optimus. The story ends with everyone dispirited, disconnected, and depressed. Wow! Probably the best thing James Hill ever wrote for Transformers.

Prey! / "...the Harder They Die!" / "Under Fire!" / "Distant Thunder!" / Fallen Angel / Resurrection!, from The Transformers UK #96-104 (17 Jan.–14 Mar. 1987), reprinted in The Transformers: Til All Are One Compendium Two (2025)

scripts by Simon Furman; pencils by Will Simpson, Jeff Anderson, and Geoff Senior; inks by Tim Perkins, Jeff Anderson, Geoff Senior, and Will Simpson; letters by Annie Halfacree; colour by Steve White

Here we have a solid nine-issue run of UK stories, set between US issues #23 and 24. In these, worried about how the Autobots performed when they thought he was dead during Target: 2006, Optimus elects to... fake his death and see how they do? I am not sure why he thinks this is a good plan; he already knows how they did, they did badly. Surely he should do some training or something to enable them to perform better and then fake his death? 

 

from The Transformers UK #96

In any case, Optimus battles Megatron only for the two to accidentally cross the Decepticon spacebridge to Cybertron. On Cybertron, Megatron puts out rumors that the Decepticons are trying to infiltrate the Autobots in the form of Optimus, so when Optimus meets up with Ultra Magnus and the Wreckers, he gets attacked by them, and only Outback believes him. I really liked all this stuff: Outback is a great character, no hero, but determined to do the right thing anyway. The flashback to what Optimus was up to in the void during Target: 2006 is kind of random and unneeded, but the end of this strand, where Optimus finally proves himself to the Cybertron Autobots by sticking by Outback (who nearly dies for his belief in Optimus) is great stuff, probably the best the character has ever been written. I think Will Simpson is probably my least favorite UK penciler, but thankfully there's some Geoff Senior art in this arc, and Jeff Anderson is decent enough. We also get a return for Galvatron and Ultra Magnus on Earth, but those are more setups for future stories than stories in themselves, so we'll see where it goes. Man, I love Ultra Magnus, though.

 

This is the ninth in a series of posts about Marvel's The Transformers. The next covers US issues #24-25 and UK issues #105-8 & 265-76. Previous installments are listed below:

1. US #1-3 & 33-34 / UK #1-6 & 9-17 (1984-85)
2. US #4-8 / UK #7-8 & 18-30 (1984-85) 
3. US #9-12 / UK #31-41 (1985-86) 
4. US #13-14 / UK #42-54 (1985-86) 
5. US #15-16 / UK #54-63 (1985-86)
6. US #17-20 / UK #64-74 (1986)
7. UK #75-84 (1986-87) 
• Budianskian vs. Furmanist 
8. US #21-22 / UK #85-92 (1986-87) 

Harvey Pekar, Best of American Splendor (2005)

The title of this volume of American Splendor implies some kind of "best-of" volume to my mind, one that curates the best material from previously published volumes of Harvey Pekar's autobiographical comic. In fact, it's exactly the opposite; this volume seems intended to scoop up all American Splendor stories that had come out since 1991's The New American Splendor Anthology, but had not made their way into 2004's Our Movie Year. If anything in here had been reprinted in a volume I'd read before, I didn't recognize it. This means that the stories reprinted here cover quite a span of time, from 1991 (so before even 1994's Our Cancer Year, which is mentioned in some stories as something Harvey and his wife Joyce are working on) up to 2004, though they mostly seem to be concentrated in the mid- to late 1990s. If you're reading the American Splendor collected editions in publication order (as I mostly am) this has the odd effect that a lot of what's collected here precedes what was reprinted in the previous one, Our Movie Year, which covered 2000 to 2004; I don't think there's a single story in here where the American Splendor film is an actual done deal! In a lot of them, Harvey goes on about how he needs the money from a movie to make up the income he will lose when he retires from his job as a hospital file clerk.

The sequencing within the volume is also weird. In the beginning of the book, there are a couple stories where Harvey references his recent hip surgery; near the end, there are a bunch where he is dealing with his bum hip because he hasn't had the surgery yet. I don't understand why they weren't put into an order  that would read more clearly. There's even a point where there's three back-to-back stories set at San Diego Comic-Con and obviously the one that happens last is placed before the other two. Why?

(Maybe someday a publisher like Fantagraphics will do some kind of definitive reprinting in order? That would be nice, and I would buy it, since most of my American Splendor volumes were borrowed from the library.) 

Best of American Splendor

Collection published: 2005
Contents originally published: 1991-2004
Read: March 2026

Stories by Harvey Pekar [with Colin Warneford and Joyce Brabner*]
Art by Dean Haspiel, Josh Neufeld, Joe Sacco, Frank Stack, David Collier, Gerry Shamray, Sam Hurt, Joe Zabel, Gary Dumm, Colin Warneford, Paul Mavrides, Alex Wald, J. R. Stats, Jim Woodring, Carole Sobocinski, Spain [Rodriguez], Scott A. Gilbert

Anyway, how is the actual content?

I think the other reason the sequencing of the book didn't totally work for me is that it begins with some weaker material: stories that are short but not punchy, ones where Pekar recaps the life of someone who did jazz, retellings of things we already know from other Pekar books. At first, I started to worry that the reason some of this material had been uncollected so long was that it wasn't very good! 

The first story to really click for me was almost a hundred pages in, "TransAtlantic Comics" (illustrated by Frank Stack) where Harvey has a bad encounter in a parking lot that causes him to freak out, but then in the middle of his bad weekend he receives a package from England, containing the work of an autistic autobiographical cartoonist named Colin Warneford, whose comic is included in the narrative. You can definitely tell how Colin is influenced by Pekar and his artistic collaborators, but his story does a good job of illuminating his own worldview and is actually kind of moving. (It doesn't seem like Warneford has ever published any other work, alas.) Then we go back to Harvey's bad weekend.

I like that they changed the name of the book to American Splendour for this issue, though it did momentarily make me freak out that I'd been misspelling the name of the comic for years before I figured out what was going on.
from American Splendour: Transatlantic Comics (script & art by Colin Warneford)

After this, I felt the book picked up and became more consistent, nailing that telling of quotidian stories through the comics medium that Pekar is so good at. I liked "Veterans' Rights" (illustrated by Stack), which is all the kind of turf-war bullshit familiar to anyone who works in a large bureaucratic organization: different people squabbling over who will do what when. I also liked "Flight to Chicago" (art by Joe Zabel and Gary Dumm), about the tribulations of trying to fly from Cleveland to Chicago when you have a bad hip, and "Windfall Gained" (art by Stack), where Harvey gets in a minor traffic accident, but actually ends up coming out ahead financially when he finds a guy willing the do the work incredibly cheaply. Harvey is a guy with a lot of neuroses, and I appreciate how much he's willing to demonstrate these to the reader; "Candor" (art by Joe Sacco) is all about an incredibly overcomplicated freakout he has over thinking he lost something he didn't actually lose, which ultimately results in him locking himself out of the house at 6am for an hour in pouring down rain.

I love how this captures the anger of the crowd.
from American Splendor: Windfall #1 (script by Harvey Pekar, art by Joe Zabel & Gary Dumm)

from American Splendor: Windfall #1
(script by Harvey Pekar, art by Josh '95)

As I said earlier, there are a number of stories about Harvey's hip; "A Decision" (art by Josh Neufeld) caps that whole run off with a tale of how he finally makes the decision to get it replaced. It has a good moment of indignation that I found very funny. I also liked the sequel-of-sorts to "Windfall Gained," "Windfall Lost" (art by Stack), which has a funny bit where when Harvey shares his driver's license with someone he hit in an accident, the guy immediately goes, "You gonna write a story about this?" Again, this one really shows of Harvey's almost neurotic nature, plus his cheapness, to good effect.

All three Comic-Con stories are quite strong; two are a type of American Splendor story Pekar does from time to time, where he tells you someone else's story. In this case, it's about a guy who became a phone salesman... but was almost too good at it and began losing himself in it. (He quit to become a cartoonist, hence Harvey bumping into him at Comic-Con.) There's also a funny one where Harvey meets Matt Groening: "See, I noticed a list of yours in a magazine of the 100 greatest people, and I was only number ninety-six on it. You meet a few more people that impress ya, and I'll fall completely off it. So I was trying t'impress ya, to at least solidify my position, and maybe move a few notches up." He then threatens to take out Lynda Barry:

I'm guessing Lynda Barry ultimately won.
from American Splendor: Comic-Con Comics (script by Harvey Pekar, art by Scott A. Gilbert)

(A cameo I did not expect: Mike Richardson, who I know as the writer of Star Wars: Crimson Empire, but who was the publisher of Dark Horse, who published American Splendor in the 1990s and 2000s.) 

It would be easy to see Harvey as a crank, and that's often how he depicts himself, but one of my favorite stories here shows off his empathetic side. "Interviewing the Interviewer" (art by Stack) is about Pekar being interviewed by a reporter, but then he keeps calling her up because he wants to know how she's doing. It's simple but effective. There's even a story by Harvey's wife Joyce here, "Be Careful Not to Pull Too Hard on Loose Ends" (art by Neufeld), about the writing of Our Cancer Year, and Joyce's own neuroses about the possible return of the cancer. I liked this one a lot too.

I was into this lady's story enough that I actually googled her a bit to see if I could figure out what happened to her in the twenty-five years since this came out.
from American Splendor: Bedtime Stories (script by Harvey Pekar, art by Frank Stack)

It's been around three years since I read my previous American Splendor volume; hopefully it's less than three years before I get to my next one. I have only two to go! 

Next up in sequence: American Splendor: Another Day

* They are both credited on the individual stories they write but not the collection's title page. 

Reading The Speckled Rose of Oz Aloud to My Kids

"The Early Days of Oz" was a series of books from Books of Wonder back in the 1990s, all written and illustrated by Donald Abbott, chronicling, well, what it says in the title. There were six, two of them being prequels to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and the other four set in the gap between Wonderful Wizard and Marvelous Land, when the Scarecrow ruled the Emerald City. I assume this was all mostly because Abbott's illustrative style (at least in these books) is very imitative of W. W. Denslow. As a kid, I owned the two prequels, but just one of the interquels, The Speckled Rose of Oz. I am not motivated to pick up the other interquels (Magic Chest, Father Goose, and Amber Flute), but I was willing to read the one I already owned to my kids in the gap where it takes place.

The Speckled Rose of Oz
by Donald Abbott

Published: 1995
Acquired and previously read: late 1990s
Read aloud: April 2026

Rereading it, I feel validated in this decision because it is, quite frankly, awful. There are probably some ingredients here for a good Oz adventure, but the plot is terribly constructed. At its beginning, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion are judging a flower competition. (Abbott always calls the latter simply "Lion" because he's no longer "cowardly," which I guess makes sense, but is not really consistent with any of the following books.) One of the entrants is Sir Gyle, who turns out to be the brother of the Wicked Witches of East and West out for revenge, and who attempts to assassinate the Scarecrow wirh a fire-breathing flower. Then all the flowers of Oz begin to disappear, because of an evil living tree called Poison Oak. You might think these two things are linked... but no, it's a complete coincidence! The three friends of Dorothy travel to stop Poison Oak, secretly being harassed by Sir Gyle. On their way, they bump into Lady Minerva Moonstruck, the daughter of the Old Man in the Moon, who is searching for her missing husband. When they find Poison Oak, they defeat him quite easily, but then his pet spider turns out to be Lady Minerva's husband, who also wants to take over Oz... but don't worry, they don't need to do anything interesting or clever, because she turns up and recaptures her errant husband. The threesome then has to go back and defeat Sir Gyle.

None of it is interesting or clever. I did like the idea of Sir Gyle (I'm always down for peeks into the lore of the wicked witches), but reading it right after Wonderful Wizard, where this trio is clever, kind, and brave when they have to do things, the contrast here is stark, given they mostly bumble their way around and accomplish everything either by accident or with the assistance of Glinda. Abbott is a very sloppy plotter; there's a particularly bad bit where the Lion falls into a chasm, the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman go on without him, and the Lion catches up to them a bit later, and we learn that in the same amount of time they walked to Poison Oak's cottage, he landed in an underground river, was carried away by it for miles until it flowed to the surface, and then somehow tracked the other two to the cottage.

At least it's short, and at least the pictures are nice. My kids were, as always I suppose, entertained well enough, but I'm pretty sure a couple days after we'd finished it, had already forgotten its insubstantial happenings.

Continuity note:

At the beginning, Gayelette is mentioned as one of the participants in the flower competition. Gayelette is the sorceress mentioned in Wonderful Wizard as binding the Winged Monkeys to the Golden Cap. She was never mentioned again the Famous Forty, so it's weird to me to imagine her as someone still alive in the present day of Oz, as opposed to being a distant historical figure.

Hugo Awards 2026: The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow

Every year, I vote in the Hugo Awards, reading as many of the finalists in the categories I care about as I can prior to the deadline—indeed, I don't think I've ever missed a finalist except deliberately. I buy all the finalists in Best Novel and review them in detail, along with other finalists by authors that particularly interest me; everything else I include in a series of ranking posts I do at the end of the process.

This year, the first finalist I'm writing up (though it's not the first I've read) is The Everlasting by Alix Harrow, a finalist for Best Novel. Harrow has placed regularly on the ballot since 2019, when she won Best Short Story for "A Witch's Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies." That's her only win so far, but she had short fiction on the ballot in 2020, 2022, and 2023, and her debut novel, The Ten Thousand Doors of January, was a finalist in 2020.

Harrow has a recurrent interest in storytelling, and how the possibilities of stories can be literalized through sfnal devices like alternate universes. The Ten Thousand Doors of January represents portal fantasies as places that can be accessed through, well, portals; her two "Fractured Fables" novellas made alternate versions of fairy tales into alternate universes her main characters could jump between, Everything Everywhere All at Once–style.

The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow

Published: 2025
Acquired and read: May 2026

Instead of alternate universes, The Everlasting explores storytelling through the device of time travel. (Note that I experienced this book largely knowing nothing about it, but I'm going to give away some aspects of the premise here that I discovered as a reader myself.) One of the two main characters is Owen Mallory, a scholar who specializes in legends of Sir Una Everlasting, a mythical figure from the history of his country of Dominion, a figure who resonates with the Arthur mythos from our world. (She's sort of King Arthur and his knights all in one.) Thanks to time travel, he's able to back to when Sir Una was alive, but what he discovers is that her story has been edited over time through time travel, adjusted to fit the needs of the present. In his time, Dominion has recently concluded a war, and Una serves as an inspiration to the populace and the soldiers—including Owen himself.

I found this a cracker of a premise. I'm very much interested in stories about stories, about the ways that the stories can change people and society. And I'm very much a sucker for stories that take a metaphor and literalize it through some kind of sfnal premise. In The Everlasting, stories aren't just being tweaked over time in the telling to suit the needs of the present-day society, they're actually being tweaked via time travel. The historian actually goes back in time in order to alter the story to make it work out the way it needs to!

There are definitely shades of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States here; imagine if people could go back in time and make Columbus into the hero history needed him to be! I was reminded also of David Mattingly's history of Britain under Rome that I recently read, where he makes the point that when Britain had an empire in the nineteenth century, that was the point where the British told stories about how Britain being part of the Roman Empire was a good thing, actually, that helped the British. Me being me, I was also spending my reading triangulating the book in terms of the contemporary genre, and I think it would appeal to fans of Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh and The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. Those aren't two books that it occurred to me to put together until now, but all three are about time travel, nationalism, and storytelling; Ministry of Time and The Everlasting are very different books in execution, but both are about someone who falls in love with their object of historical study while their government uses time travel for nefarious purposes!

I liked the main characters, Una and Owen, a lot, though I perhaps liked the side characters of Owen's father and professor even more; every return appearance by them was gold. On a prose level, Harrow is a strong writer, as I just really enjoyed reading it. Sometimes stories in this area can be a bit "twee" or "precious" in my opinion (see: oh-so-many Tordotcom novellas), but Harrow isn't that at all.

At the two-thirds mark, I thought this book was the one to beat. Unfortunately, the last third or so moves the book in a different direction than the one I've laid out here, which I found less interesting. It's not bad, but the book previously had been working on two registers: the social commentary of the time travel/storytelling idea, and the personal level of Owen and Una's story. But near the end, 1) the focus of the novel squarely becomes on Owen and Una escaping from the time travel trap, and 2) a lot of that is done via the character of Vivian, who is the novel's villain. But making it all about Owen and Una and Vivian and their personal struggles means that the political/social stuff about the power and importance of stories kind of drops away in favor of time travel mechanics and romance. Which are both interesting, sure, but I found the book more interesting when it was doing all three at once. 

 Basically the social stuff totally vanishes from the narrative, and I found that disappointing compared to how big of a role it played in the beginning, especially considering it was the clever thing that drew me into the book to begin with. Especially given that ultimately pinning everything on Vivian (and she literally turns out to be responsible for everything bad in Dominion history) really undercuts the book's commentary on the way this kind of thing does happen in the real world. The book does gesture at pointing out it's not all down to Vivian near the end:

The poor downtrodden folk of Dominion, Vivian had called them, but they didn't strike me a victims. I had seen them send their sons cheerfully to war; I had seen them beaten bloody for protesting it. They had put a medal around my neck for something I hadn't done, and spit on my boots simply for being born. And they hadn't been tricked or forced into any of it—they had chosen, over and over, cruelly or kindly, selfishly or bravely. (254)

It's a good bit, but it feels tacked on because 1) narratively, the focus of the ending is all on stopping Vivian, and 2) we never really get a sense of what a history of Dominion without Una would be like. I especially wondered what a version of Dominion history where the good aspects of Una's story were emphasized without the bad ones could be like—if such a thing is even possible. Without that, I feel like the book has the depressing conclusion of pointing at a vast social problem, and then just saying that there's no way of fixing it, so all you can do is get out with your loved ones.

This may seem like a lot of criticism, but ultimately I very much enjoyed the book. It did a lot of interesting things. I just wish it could have carried those things through to the end more consistently.

The Cosmere by Brandon Sanderson: Mistborn: The Bands of Mourning

The third Mistborn novel in the "Wax and Wayne" subseries, The Bands of Mourning, is very different from the other two, in that our protagonists leave Elendel for the first time, travelling to the city-state of New Seran in pursuit of Wax's sister, who was abducted by Wax's uncle back in the first Wax and Wayne book. (I guess; I honestly did not remember this subplot, though I did remember Wax's uncle was evil.)

It's impossible to read a Cosmere novel (impossible for me, anyway) without thinking about "magic systems." Sanderson is praised for his "hard magic," where everything is meticulously thought through. This just doesn't work for me at all. I actually recently had the privilege of getting to briefly chat with Ann Leckie, author of Raven Tower, and I asked her if she could explain her approach to fantasy, and she said she approached it like a science fiction writer. And I was like, "Aha, that's why I like it!" She takes a fantastic premise but then thinks it through completely logically. It's a good example of what China Miéville calls "rationalized alienation": the difference from our world (what Darko Suvin would call the novum) is thought about in a methodical way. Compare the Harry Potter novels, with their "soft" magic system, which seems to have little organizing structure other than what J. K. Rowling thought would be good at the time she wrote a particular book.

Why, then, do I not like Brandon Sanderson, with his methodical magic systems? At least part of it is that for all their methodical nature, they still feel quite arbitrary. In Leckie's novel, there's an initial fantastic premise (anything a god says comes true, but this requires energy, which the god can acquire through worship), but that's it, everything flows logically from that simple initial conceit. Sanderson's metals, on the other hand, do not have a simple initial fantastic conceit. In the Mistborn novels, for example, there's three different "metallic arts" (allomancy, feruchemy, and hemalurgy), each of which has its own rules; there are sixteen different metals that can be used in these arts, meaning there's forty-eight different powers people can have. And each metal's use in each power feels arbitrary: why should zinc enflame emotions in allomancy but store mental speed in feruchemy? why should iron pull on metal in allomancy, but store physical weight in feruchemy? And that's without getting into when different powers interact; it all comes across as arbitrary. There's a system, I guess, to the extent that anything you can stick into a table (there's six pages of explanation in the back of the book) is a system, but there's no clear organizing principle to it all. The system doesn't feel "rational" or "logical."

My other issue is that it feels like there's nothing to it other than the system. Miéville says that the thing about rationalized alienation is that it's also something you can read metaphorically. Harry Potter's magic may be unsatisfying from a logical standpoint, but it's all about self-actualization, which makes sense in a YA series about teen protagonists. Ursula K. Le Guin is probably the queen of this; her magic is powerful because it lines up with the character's understanding of the universe. In being able to Name things, Ged says something about us as readers too. But what's the metaphorical resonance of burning nicrosil? You've got me. I like to quote Jo Walton's essay about "SF Reading Protocols" a lot, but I recently noticed something Jeff VanderMeer says in the comments on it:

I’m having some difficulty with this idea–as I read it–of the literal *versus* the metaphorical, since metaphor has so much to do with the subtext of a story. If you don’t have subtext, you have a pretty flat story–it doesn’t resonate. Metaphorical interpretation is key, on some subconscious level in a reader, between a text that is alive and one that, after a first reading, is dead. Some SF writers write “flat” in this regard and some do not–some resonate.

Is VanderMeer talking about Sanderson? Not that I know of. Has he ever read Sanderson? I've no idea, but he certainly could be. So when people in this book start to talk about what happens if someone invents this or that allomantic power, or combines this, or does whatever with their feruchemy, I tune out, because it's all meaningless magical jibber-jabber (what I sometimes call "thaumababble," the fantasy equivalent of technobabble).

My other issue with Sanderson is that for as much as the magic systems are (supposedly) deep, the worldbuilding often feels shallow. This was a particular problem with the first Mistborn trilogy, which were all about liberating an oppressed people from an enslaving empire, but where absolutely no thought seemed to have been put into the oppressed people, or even what it's like to live under oppression; one was sort of left thinking Sanderson didn't know anything about imperialism or colonialism beyond what he had read in other similarly shallow fantasy novels. (Like everything in a Brandon Sanderson novel, there's ultimately a magical explanation for this, but it still feels shallow when you're reading it.) Sanderson and his fans like to criticize Harry Potter for its not-very-thought-through magic systems and worldbuilding, but honestly, Mistborn feels fairly similar to Harry Potter to me in that it often feels like things other than the magic system are made up when we need them, and no sooner. I never really believed there was a whole world outside of Elendel in "Era 2" until this book actually sent us into it; even having done so, one feels like there's exactly the bits of New Seran we need to support Wax and Wayne's story, and no more.

The Bands of Mourning: A Mistborn Novel by Brandon Sanderson

Originally published: 2016
Read: March 2026

Okay, this has become more of an essay about Brandon Sanderson and the Cosmere in general than an actual review of The Bands of Mourning, and one that probably reveals more about my own interests and obsessions than the actual book. So how is the book?

Well, actually, it's pretty good. If you can put all that stuff I just complained about aside (and there's a degree to which you can't—though it's even more likely that you, the person who is reading this review, don't care about any of this at all), it's probably the Mistborn book I've found the most interesting and the most successful. That is to say, I did find The Alloy of Law good fun but honestly it also felt to me like The Alloy of Law wasn't really trying to do very much other than tell a basic crime caper. Bands of Mourning, as I said, takes Wax and Wayne outside of Elendel... but it also brings outsiders into Elendel, as we get our first hint that there are people on this planet outside of a small region, with their own society and their own agenda. If you think what's interesting about speculative fiction is the creation of "epistemic crisis" (this is my take, at least), then this is a decent example of it, and it's probably the thing I'm most interested in seeing future Mistborn novels develop.

On top of that, I found this book had the most interesting depictions of the characters thus far. I find Wax himself a little one-note, but Wayne is always good fun with his sideways but strangely logical way of looking at the world, and this book has a lot Steris, a character who (to be honest) I did not even remember from previous books, who Wax is marrying for financial and social reasons, not love. There is a little bit of a tendency for us to be told Steris acts a certain way as opposed to seeing her act this way, but once the story gets underway, we do get to see her do a lot of stuff in her own way, and I found it enjoyable. I also like Marasi, though I feel like she doesn't get as much interesting stuff to do as the other three characters. Sanderson's end note says Marasi, Wax, and Wayne will return in the next book, but I hope the lack of Steris is just an omission as opposed to an indication she won't play a central role in the fourth and final book of this sequence.

As always, the use of the allomantic powers is probably the thing I am least interested in here, as well as the greater mythology. Wax actually dies for a bit, and talks to God(!) about suffering; this actually reminded me a lot of a similar discussion in Orson Scott Card's The Worthing Chronicle, which I reread recently, and I found the points here similarly unconvincing. (Is this because both Card and Sanderson are Mormons?) But put all that aside, and look for a book about some decent characters doing interesting things, and this is the best Mistborn novel thus far.

Every nine months I read another novel of the Cosmere. Next up in sequence: Mistborn: The Lost Metal