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

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

Star Trek: Vanguard: Harbinger
by David Mack

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Star Trek: Vanguard: Reap the Whirlwind
by David Mack

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

Other Thoughts:

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

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

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

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

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

Manjula Padmanabhan, Getting There (2000)

For some time now, I have been working my way through the work of the Indian writer Manjula Padmanabhan. I came to her via science fiction, but Padmanabhan is a master of many genres: literary fictions, comics, and in this case, memoir.

Getting There by Manjula Padmanabhan

Originally published: 2000
Acquired: January 2011
Read: March 2026

Getting There is about her time in Bombay, the United States, and Holland in 1977 as a young woman, as she tries to figure out how to navigate the expectations her family has for her and the ones she has for herself. My Picador UK edition came out in 2002, and I feel like it's trying to position the book in "chicklit" genre of the era: Bridget Jones and Shopaholic and such. There are some resonances (well, so I'd guess I can't actually claim to have read any of those books... or even seen the films!), but overall I don't think it quite fits. It's a period piece, I don't really think it's about someone seeking romance despite having a sexual subplot, it's not overall a comedic book. I can see why the publishers tried to ride that trend, but I'm not convinced someone who enjoyed Bridget Jones would pick up Getting There and feel satisfied!

The first third of the book, set in India, was my favorite. Here, Manjula is a young woman trying to make it as an artist, while she struggles with weight loss. While I wouldn't say the book as a whole is comedic, the weight loss clinic subplot is quite hilarious. But I also enjoyed her interactions with her strange housemates and her tyrannical brother.

After this she goes to the U.S. This definitely has its moments; I of course particularly enjoyed her introduction to Star Trek... though I also of course feel compelled to point out that the mention of the Cardassians is anachronistic! 

I found the last section, set in Holland, the least interesting. Manjula has travelled there to be with a man she met in India, one she was cheating on her boyfriend with. In the end, I don't know that I ever totally grasped what point the story was trying to make here. Obviously Manjula is trying to fill some kind of a void in her life, but I found the character dynamics here were, in the end, not very interesting to me.

Still, it's a fun book. I understand that for the 2020 Hachette edition, Padmanabhan reinstated material cut from the original draft (I think material cut because of the publisher trying to make the book more chicklit) and also rewrote the ending. Unfortunately, I bought my copy in 2011, before this happened or was even an inkling, and I wasn't about to rebuy it before I'd even read it. Maybe someday... but I have a bunch of other Padmanabhan to read for the first time first!

Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870)

The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens

Originally published: 1870
Acquired: November 2016
Read: December 2025

Every year over my winter break, I read a Charles Dickens novel I haven't previously read. I've been reading them in order of descending popularity on LibraryThing: this perhaps has been a mistake, since it means the last few years I have been subjected to triumphs like Martin Chuzzlewit and Dombey and Son.

I was thus a bit apprehensive about this year, where I would be reading The Mystery of Edwin Drood. What if it was as bad as the last couple books I'd read? And, famously, incomplete? ("The food here is terrible. And such small portions!")

Well, it seems to me that as he lay dying, Charles Dickens must have gotten a bit of his mojo back, because Edwin Drood was shaping up to be solid mid-tier Dickens. Not necessarily great work, but there are decent characters here and interesting dynamics and some strong descriptive passages. I doubt it would have ended spectacularly (maybe I am wrong), and certainly, books like Dombey and Son show that Dickens can start strong but ultimately fizzle out, but I was into it thus far, read it fairly quickly, and disappointed when it all came to a stop.

Just one Dickens novel to go! 

I read a Charles Dickens novel every year. Next up in sequence: Barnaby Rudge

Doctor Who: Timelink by Jon Preddle

Timelink is a two-volume book from Doctor Who fan Jon Preddle, exploring the continuity of the series—at least as it existed circa 2010, when David Tennant regenerated into Matt Smith (it very briefly glosses Smith's first series). Obviously, as is typical for me, I came to it very late! The book has five parts across its two volumes, and I'll tackle each of them individually. Before the five parts, though, Preddle lays out his "rules," probably the most important of which is that he only cares about what's on screen, unlike Lance Parkin and Lars Pearson's Ahistory. He is also very into taking things literally: if a character says something happened a thousand years ago, they are very much not rounding.

Timelink: An Unofficial and Unauthorised Exploration of Doctor Who Continuity, Volume One
by Jon Preddle

Published: 2011
Acquired: January 2013
Read: March 2026

The first part, called "The N-Space Universe," lays out a bunch of "facts" we can discern about the Doctor Who universe: how does time work, can you change history, what kinds of time anomalies are there, what are the major places, who speaks English, and so on. There is a lot of detail here, and I skimmed much of it. I very much disagree with his conclusions about language; Preddle is the kind of guy who will not go for the interpretation that people speak English because this is tv; no, Gallifreyan and English must (somehow) be the same language. It ends with a 100-page timeline; this is just a list, and I much more appreciate the detailed footnotes of Ahistory. (That said, we do get rationales for these placements in the story entries in volume two.)

The next part provides a set of histories: what are the chronological sequence of Cyberman stories, Dalek stories, UNIT stories, the 2005-09 contemporary stories, British prime ministers, and the British space program. The real highlight of these is the meticulously thought through Cyberman and Dalek stories; I don't think I've ever read a better, more detailed take on how all their screen adventures fit together. If I were, say, writing a Cyberman or Dalek Big Finish adventure, I would definitely use this. On the other hand, I very much disagree with his take on UNIT dating, because he acts like there's only one possible conclusion from the data on screen, which is very much not the case!

The third part goes into the histories of the Doctor and Gallifrey. Though I don't think it would hold up with what we saw on screen from 2010 onward, and it definitely doesn't hold up with what the comics and novels and audios have done, he provides a very compelling take on how Gallifrey's timeline syncs up with the universe's, and thus how the Doctor's age fits into this, and what counts as the "future" and the "past" from a Time Lord perspective. (His claim is that Arc of Infinity sets the present of Gallifrey as 1983, and thus you can work out everything relative to that using the Doctor's age.) He makes it all work quite nicely; it's very satisfying!

Timelink: An Unofficial and Unauthorised Exploration of Doctor Who Continuity, Volume Two
by Jon Preddle

Published: 2011
Acquired: January 2013
Read: March 2026

From here, I recommend jumping ahead to part five, which makes up the entirety of volume two. It's clearly here so that the two volumes are roughly equal length, not because it would read best last. This is Preddle's story-by-story history of the whole show, from 100,000 BC to The End of Time. For each story, he gives you details on its chronological placement, an estimate of how much time passed within it, links to other stories, and so on. Surely my favorite part was the estimate of time passed; it's an aspect of chronology I feel like people rarely care about! I do think he makes some weird calls sometimes (the pith-helmet-wearing explorers with English names in Kinda are supposedly not humans from Earth!) but he always explains his logic. This isn't designed to be read word for word in order, I'm sure, but I did so as much as I could. It reads very quickly... well it did for me anyway. I would guess a number of people would find it quite dull.

Lastly, part four in volume one is the "appendices": recaps of other writers' thoughts on UNIT dating, a discussion of if the Doctor is half-human (here Preddle struggles a bit, having to willfully misread the TV movie... though there's not much you can do about this if you're insisting all of Doctor Who somehow does fit together), and then story-by-story histories of Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures. I particularly appreciated his meticulous approach to the chronology of Torchwood and SJA; someday maybe I'll rewatch those two shows along with the present-day episodes of the parent show following his order.

Overall, my guess is that you're either a certain kind of person who finds this kind of thing interesting or you're a kind of person who very much does not! To be honest, I think I am less the kind of person who finds this kind of thing interesting than I was thirteen years ago when I bought this book, but I still find it interesting enough. 

Legion of Super-Heroes: The Life and Death of Ferro Lad by Jim Shooter, Curt Swan, and George Klein

DC Comics Classics Library: The Legion of Super-Heroes: The Life and Death of Ferro Lad

Collection published: 2009
Contents originally published: 1966-67
Acquired: December 2024
Read: April 2026

Writer and Layouts: Jim Shooter
Penciller: Curt Swan
Inker: George Klein
Letterer: Milton Snapinn

DC Comics Classics Library was a short-lived reprint series from the late 2000s. Looking at its offerings, I'm not entirely sure what its focus was supposed to be: clearly Silver Age material, but beyond that it seems a pretty eclectic mix. Some of it was high-profile storylines, such as this volume and Superman: Kryptonite Nevermore, but there was also a comprehensive artist run (the complete George Peréz Justice League of America) and a bunch of Batman Annuals... why exactly? And some of them hadn't been collected before (like Kryptonite Nevermore), other volumes had been collected before—like this one, which reprints issues previously printed in volumes 5 and 6 of the Legion of Super-Heroes Archives.

Still, while my drive to collect all Legion collected editions usually draws the line at collecting the same material twice over (e.g., I have not and will not pick up the Silver Age omnibus volumes, nor any DC Finest collections with only already reprinted material), I thought this volume intriguing enough to pick up. And indeed, it's a nice package, a well-designed hardcover with sharp design and period-appropriate paper. And how often do you get a collected edition of the Silver Age Legion where every issue is from the same creative team?

This collects issues #346-47, 352-55, and 357 of Adventure Comics, which are all the issues by Jim Shooter, Curt Swan, and George Klein focused on Ferro Lad. All of these were rereads, but I hadn't read them in order, since I read volume 6 of the archive editions long before volume 5. The first story is "One of Us Is a Traitor!"/"The Traitor's Triumph!" This is the story where Ferro Lad joins the Legion. It's a solid story—but it's also the story where Karate Kid, Nemesis Kid, and Princess Projectra join the Legion, and it's very much focused on the first of those two; we get little sense of Ferro Lad.

Ferro Lad's big contribution.
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #347

The collection then jumps ahead to "The Fatal Five!"/"The Doomed Legionnaire!" (Ferro Lad only appeared in two of the intervening issues according to the GCD, and I'm assuming he was just one of the crowd.) This is a very famous story, it's what the title of the collection alludes to, and it both works and doesn't work.

What works is the introduction of the Fatal Five. I had forgotten they weren't really a supervillain team on their original appearance, but actually a media nickname for five of the Science Police's most wanted criminals. The Legion gets a briefing on them, but are interrupted when an entity known as the "Sun-Eater" (it does what it sounds like) enters the galaxy, advancing toward Earth. With all but five members of the Legion on a mission to another dimension, they ended up deciding to recruit the Fatal Five for assistance. This is all very well done: the Legion's desperation works, but in particular the Fatal Five really work; lots of comics writers struggle to come up with one good villain, but Shooter comes up with five in one got, with interesting personalities and powers, and Swan and Klein give them all great visual designs. I particularly like both the Emerald Empress (neat visual gimmick with the Emerald Eye, fun personality) and Validus (cool looking, sort of tragic). They bring a lot of spark to the story.

Somehow I feel like she would have gotten out of this even without Superboy's help.
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #352

The shift to the Legion and the Fatal Five working to attack the Sun-Eater is also great, with good use of everyone's powers and a real sense of desperation. Shooter is a smart writer, really thinking through ways to make his story dynamic and clever.

It wasn't until writing up this review that I realized his name was Validus, not Validius. I like my version better.
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #353

Unfortunately, after a great first three-quarters, it all falls apart in the last part. One, Ferro Lad's decision to sacrifice himself just isn't given enough weight; he does it, blam, he's dead, like Shooter ran out of pages after all that impressive buildup. Second, we barely know Ferro Lad! I know the fact that Shooter created him was also the reason he was allowed to kill him off, but he's just been a guy in crowd scenes aside from his initiation scene. I don't feel anything because I don't know this guy from Adam, unfortunately. One wishes Shooter had postponed his idea here, given Ferro Lad more to do in some other stories, then killed him off. Or... killed off someone else! (Sun Boy?) Either way, the story ends with a fizzle.

Doesn't Tenzil actually go into politics later on? Wait, earlier on?
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #354

Lastly, the collection contains two stories dealing with the aftereffects of Ferro Lad's death. One is the legendary "Adult Legion" story, where Superman visits the Legion, and thus it's about twenty years in the future of what we normally know. The villain here is Ferro Lad's twin brother, though he turns out to be the patsy of the Legion of Super-Villains. It's fine, I always find this story a bit silly. (All of the adult male Legionnaires have receding hairlines and smoke pipes.) The other is about the Legion behind haunted by the ghost of Ferro Lad. This one is slight but well done; I like the villain's plan and I like the bit about the actual ghost(???) helping Superboy, though my favorite part is that Shooter correctly identifies that the two Legionnaires least likely to believe in all this ghost malarkey are Brainiac 5 and Saturn Girl. I also really like how Swan and Klein draw the "ghost" of Ferro Lad.

Alas, cooler in death than he ever was in life.
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #357

So, a nice little collection. I want to hunt down some other of these DC Comics Classics Library editions now! On top of that, when I left it lying around, my seven-year-old picked it up; they'd tried to read volume 1 of the Legion Archives and bounced off it in the past, but they sped through this and expressed interest in reading more Legion comics, so mission accomplished! They also saw the ad for Kryptonite Nevermore in the back and were intrigued by the cover image—how could Superman break kryptonite chains!?!—so that's probably in our future as well.

I read a Legion of Super-Heroes collection every six months. Next up in sequence: Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Volume 8

The Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold, Part 10: "Dreamweaver's Dilemma" and Other Stories

Dreamweaver's Dilemma is a collection of stories and essays by Lois McMaster Bujold; it contains two Vorkosigan-universe stories, one of which was previously published, but the other of which can only be found in this collection. I chose to read the volume relative to where it was originally published; it came out in 1995, between Mirror Dance (1994) and Memory (1996).

Dreamweaver's Dilemma: Short Stories and Essays by Lois McMaster Bujold
edited by Suford Lewis

Collection published: 1995
Contents originally published: 1985-95
Acquired and read: February 2026

The title story, "Dreamweaver's Dilemma," is the Vorkosigan story original to this volume, though my understanding is that it was written very early on, possibly even first; it's set hundreds of years before the rest of the "saga" and thus its ties to it are fairly light. Like a lot of Bujold's short fiction, I am discovering, it is sort of a murder mystery; a woman who is a "dreamweaver" (someone who composes immersive psychic experiences) comes to realize one of hers may have been used for nefarious purposes and thus tries to figure out what's going on. I would say it's fine but not great; perhaps predictably, my favorite part was the joke about Cleveland!

What is great is "The Mountains of Mourning," which was a reread for me, as it was also collected in Borders of Infinity (1989). (The cover blurb trumpets this is as the story's first hardcover appearance.) Great story, one of my favorite Miles tales, and well worth the excuse of a reread even though I read it less than a year ago!

Other than those two, we have four other pieces of short fiction. One, "The Adventure of the Lady on the Embankment," is a passable piece of Sherlock Holmes pastiche; it's probably not a surprise that Bujold does an excellent Watson. The other three are similar in that they're all what Farah Mendlesohn would call "intrusion fantasies": all stories of the fantastic intruding in an ordinary domestic space. My favorite of these was "Barter," where an overworked stay-at-home mother makes a trade with an alien salesman for a device that makes her life at home much easier! A quick and cute story.

Finally, there are essays, both by and about Bujold. I found the ones giving insight into Bujold's life and process the most interesting; if you like good "behind-the-scenes" material about an author you enjoy, this material is solid. She is never not an entertaining writer!

Every five months I read a book in the Vorkosigan saga. Next up in sequence: Memory

Death of the Planet of the Apes by Andrew E.C. Gaska

Several years ago, I read Conspiracy of the Planet of the Apes, the first-ever original novel set in the continuity of the original Planet of the Apes films. I felt like it functioned as a novelization of the original film, the only one not to ever receive one.

Death of the Planet of the Apes by Andrew E.C. Gaska

Published: 2018
Read: April 2026

Seven years after Conspiracy, author Andrew Gaska wrote a sequel, Death of the Planet of the Apes. Even though the second POTA film, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, did receive a novelization, Death reads like a novelization of it much as Conspiracy did of the first film. And just like Conspiracy folded in details from the later films and explained continuity discrepancies between them, so too does Death bring in a lot of details from the later films and explain discrepancies between them. Specifically, we learn how Milo was able to rebuild the Liberty 1 ship from the first movie (as we found out in the third movie), and why he and Cornelius and Zira were aboard it in spacesuits (the third movie implies they were trying to get away from the destruction of Earth, but there was no reason they would know about this). It explains what happened to Cornelius and Zira's nephew, who was in the first movie but not the second, it explains when they got married, it explains why Doctor Zaius was more sympathetic in the second movie than the first, it explains how Cornelius didn't know how humanity used to be capable of speech in the first movie but by the third knows the true history of the apes. And there's still more things it explains that I noticed, and I'm sure even more beyond those that I didn't!

Beyond that... what's it about? is it any good? 

One of the weird things about the second movie is that it opens by showing you what Charlton Heston's Taylor is up to, and then he buggers off only to reappear at the climax of the movie—because Heston was not really that interested in doing the movie. The lead character for most of the second movie is the Temu Charlton Heston, Brent. Gaska very much cuts down Brent's scenes, but provides lots of Taylor—both what he is doing during the events of the movie, and giving us copious amount of backstory, from Taylor's days as a World War II fighter pilot up up through becoming an ANSA astronaut and his selection for the crew of Liberty 1. There was probably a bit too much of all of this, to be honest; I don't know that any Planet of the Apes novel really needs to be over 400 pages long! I think something tighter could have better highlighted the thread of Taylor's developing nihilism, which is intended to lead up to the decision he makes at the end of the film. It might also have made more clear the parallels between the societies of twentieth-century Earth and ape civilization: I think Gaska was going for commentary on the dangers of nationalism (the new ruler of Ape City proposes building an expensive border wall), but I also felt the thread wasn't as clear as it might be.

Overall, other than getting kind of bored at the length, I enjoyed it. It's not high art but it scratches the itch I want from a POTA tie-in. I found some interviews from Gaska where he talks about Conspiracy and Death as the first two books of a planned six-book sequence... but we're now at eight years since Death with no sign of book three, so I suppose that will never eventuate. I'm guessing each book would have been a side story to a film, so the next book would have retold the events of Escape from the Planet of the Apes, presumably folding in the stuff about ANSA and Earth history revealed in this volume and Conspiracy. Would the sixth have thus taken events beyond Conquest, completing the time loop leading into the original film? I guess we will never know.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tales (collection, 1987)

When I was in college, I read some Hawthorne short stories in an American literature class, and I enjoyed them much more than I had his novels.* So I resolved to read more of his shorts and over the years I've picked up a couple collections of them, the first of which I've finally gotten around to reading is this, a Norton Critical Edition collecting twenty-one stories, plus the usual NCE array of contextual and critical materials.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tales: Authoritative Texts, Backgrounds, Criticism
edited by James McIntosh

Collection published: 1987
Contents originally published: 1832-52
Acquired: December 2008
Read: February 2026

Well, maybe it was my mood, maybe I wasn't being patient enough (reading short story collections uses different muscles than novels), but I struggled with a number of these. "The Birthmark" and "Rappacini's Daughter" are both as good as ever, but I felt like most of the new-to-me stories didn't really click except for "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" and "The Celestial Raild-road." The former is a well-observed story of character; the latter is fun riff updating Pilgrim's Progress for the industrial era. But going back over the table of contents now, I struggle to recall any of the others.

I think my other Hawthorne book, Library of America's Tales and Sketches, is comprehensive and thus includes everything collected here; maybe I'll be in a better zone to enjoy these stories when I reread them there.

(I didn't read any of the supplemental material here, which runs almost two hundred pages. I'm not in grad school, you can't make me.) 

* It is funny to read that review of Blithedale Romance, which I wrote almost twenty years ago, before I even had gone off to grad school. Oh no, a book where it takes several pages for interesting things to happen! Clearly grad school levelled up my reading skills. Reading a bunch of George Eliot and Wilkie Collins will do that, I guess.

Star Trek: Encounters with the Unknown by Jeffrey Moy, W. C. Carani, et al.

Star Trek Classics #3: Encounters with the Unknown

Collection published: 2012
Contents originally published: 2000-01
Read: April 2026

Written by Nathan Archer, Janine Ellen Young & Doselle Young, Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning, Kristine Kathryn Rusch & Dean Wesley Smith

Pencils by Jeffrey Moy, David Roach, Robert Teranishi
Background Assists by Philip Moy

Inks by W. C. Carani, David Roach, Claude St. Aubin

Colors by Dan Brown (with Nick Bell)

Letters by Ryan Cline (with Jenna Garcia) & Naghmeh Zand

Like Enemy Unseen, this "Star Trek Classics" release on Hoopla from IDW takes a Wildstorm trade paperback from the 2000s and rebrands it. While Enemy Unseen collected several otherwise unrelated Next Generation stories, this one collects four Voyager stories, three double-length one-shots and one three-part miniseries. I was surprised that the obviously intentionally vague title Encounters with the Unknown is actually pretty applicable to all four stories even though it feels like it could be applied to almost any Star Trek story if you squinted hard enough!

The first story is "False Colors," whose basic premise is that Voyager encounters what seems to be a Borg ship, but turns out to be something else entirely, and then Seven, Chakotay, and Tuvok must infiltrate it in the guise of Borg drones... leading to Seven possibly starting her own little collective. Like Perchance to Dream from Enemy Unseen, it reads like it's written by someone who is new to the comics medium: lots of word balloons, few visually interesting things near the beginning, the kind of stuff that might make for a fine episode of the tv show but is dull on the comics page. When the interesting conceit of the story finally turns up—would it be ethical for Seven to establish a "collective" of her own if it helps protect Voyager? how would she feel if she did?—it's not really used in an interesting way, the characters don't seem to actually face a dilemma due to it.

I felt like the whole comic might have been constructed around the idea of the shocking cover image of Seven as a Borg—which to be fair, was similar to how several actual Voyager episodes were developed.
from Star Trek: Voyager: False Colors #1 (script by Nathan Archer, art by Jeffrey Moy & Philip Moy and W. C. Carani)

The second story in this volume is the one story I can say I've wholeheartedly enjoyed across both volumes of Star Trek Classics that I read. "Avalon Rising" is about the Doctor being sent to an alien planet to recover an artifact blocking transporters; the planet is in a medieval time period, and its knights and squires interpret the Doctor as a wizard from a distant land, a role he ends up leaning into. It's delightful stuff: visually interesting (artist David A. Roach proves every bit as adept with this Doctor as the one he normally illustrates) and the dialogue and character arc for Bob Picardo's Doctor are pitch perfect (the writing is by the unknown-to-me wife-and-husband team of Janine Ellen Young and Doselle Young). It's the kind of premise you could image them doing on screen, but they never did, reminiscent of some screen episodes (sort of a mix of "Heroes and Demons" and "Muse" and "Living Witness") without being derivative of them. Neat conceit as the Doctor retells stories of Voyager's adventures through a medieval lens, a nice heartwarming ending. Honestly, one of the best Star Trek comics I've ever read.

Unlike any other story in the volume, this one was clearly constructed around interesting visuals suited to the comics medium.
from Star Trek: Voyager: Avalon Rising #1 (script by Janine Ellen Young & Doselle Young, art by David Roach)

Next comes "Elite Force," which I guess must be an adaptation of the videogame of the same name. Despite writing by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, stalwarts of space adventures comics in general (e.g., Legion Lost) and Star Trek comics in particular (e.g., Early Voyages), I found this hard to grab onto; the "Hazard Team" characters just don't give us enough to care about. Plus (and this isn't their fault) two stories about derelict Borg and scavengers in one volume is too many!

This guy's entire personality is "dumb jock."
from Star Trek: Voyager: Elite Force #1 (script by Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning, art by Jeffrey Moy & W. C. Carani)

Lastly there's Planet Killer, a three-part miniseries about Voyager coming across another iteration of the same weapon as in "The Doomsday Machine" from the original series. The beginning is too slow and obvious considering the reader already knows what's up even if the characters don't; the second issue wastes half its pages on Harry Kim laboriously recapping "Doomsday Machine" for some reason; the third issue is very rushed, with a lot of stuff happening in reported speech or narration, instead of on the page. Like "False Colors," too talky for a comic, and despite some good efforts by artists Robert Teranishi (who I don't know) and Claude St. Aubin (who did strong work on DC's R.E.B.E.L.S. a few years after this), the action sequences lack the necessary intensity to make the premise work. The guest character feels like an afterthought (contrast them to Commodore Decker in the episode this story very closely mirrors).

Probably the best part of the art were all the ship-in-danger shots; very well done.
from Star Trek: Voyager: Planet Killer #3 (script by Dean Wesley Smith & Kristine Kathryn Rusch, art by Robert Teranishi & Claude St. Aubin)

So, on the whole, aside from "Avalon Rising," there's little here I'd call "classic." (Oh, also my Hoopla edition has a mistake where what's included as the first page of "False Colors" is actually the first page of "Elite Force." I think the first page of "False Colors" is missing as a result.)

Alan Scott: The Green Lantern by Tim Sheridan, Cian Tormey, et al.

Alan Scott: The Green Lantern

Collection published: 2024
Contents originally published: 2023-24
Acquired: January 2026
Read: February 2026

Writer: Tim Sheridan

Penciller: Cian Tormey
Inkers: Cian Tormey, Jordi Tarragona, Raúl Fernandez, John Livesay

Colorists: Matt Herms, Chris Sotomayor

Letterer: Lucas Gattoni

Part of the whole point of my long, long comics reading projects like this one is to see how a concept changes over time as the world changes around it. When the Justice Society originally debuted, it was of course set in the present; it was set during World War II because WWII was happening. When the JSA was revived in the 1960s and '70s, it became a vestige of the past: the debuts of the JSA heroes were kept rooted in WWII. This meant the JSA heroes could age and grow, unlike the new heroes of the Silver Age, who would always have their origins updated as time marched on. Roy Thomas exploited this to good effect in the 1980s, giving us both JSA as period piece (in All-Star Squadron; see item #3 in the list below) and JSA as a saga that had evolved in a way the JLA never could (in Infinity, Inc.; see items #4, 5, and 10). But as time went on, this became—if you were literal-minded—increasingly untenable. The JSA went from being the generation before the JLA to two generations before to even more. By the 2010s, did it make any sense that people who'd fought in World War II could still be active superheroes?

This is one of the reasons, I suspect, that in the "New 52," DC totally retooled the JSA, setting the series in the present but on an alternate Earth. They took the opportunity to update many of the characters; in particular relevance to this post, they made Alan Scott, the original Green Lantern, into a gay man. Later, this updating of the JSA got undone. I don't know the details of this (I largely stopped reading DC Comics after Convergence), but the JSA is back on the same Earth as the JLA and back to originating during World War II. But DC did not undo changes like making Alan Scott gay, so now the original Green Lantern was a gay man during a time where society was much less accepting of homosexuality. My understanding is that this was tackled briefly in a couple one-shots I haven't read yet, but the first full exploration of this is in Alan Scott: The Green Lantern, one of three "Dawn of DC" miniseries focusing on JSA members (see also #55 below). Framed by Alan talking to his son Todd (himself gay), the story delves into Alan's origin, but also the tale of his first love, including a stay in an asylum where Alan is subjected to conversion therapy.

We're here, we're queer?
from Alan Scott: The Green Lantern #6 (art by Cian Tormey)

Overall, I found this really effectively done; I don't know if writer Tim Sheridan is gay, but the details of what it would be like for Alan in this time overall rang true to me. The conversion therapy stuff is harrowing, the emphasis on learning to live as you are works well. I don't know if I like the idea the whole JSA was immediately accepting of Alan (seems anachronistic), but I suppose DC would never want to tackle making some of its heroes homophobic in a mainstream book in the 2020s. I found Cian Tormey's art strong overall, and the story has some good twists and turns. Although... why are the bad guys in this World War II story Russians, given they were our allies? Not that Russians couldn't have been up to some skulduggery, but literally no one even comments on the fact that they're supposed to all be on the same side! Not quite as strong as the nostalgic glow I got from Wesley Dodds: The Sandman, but it still shows off the strength and continuing relevance of these characters.

This post is the fifty-sixth in an improbably long series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers Jay Garrick: The Flash. Previous installments are listed below:

Star Wars: Jedi vs Sith by Darko Macan, Ramon F. Bachs, and Raul Fernandez

Star Wars: Jedi vs Sith

Collection published: 2002
Contents originally published: 2001-02
Acquired and previously read: ???
Reread: January 2026

Script: Darko Macan
Pencils: Ramon F. Bachs
Inks: Raul Fernandez
Colors: Chris Blythe
Letters: Steve Dutro

The Star Wars series Knight Errant, which I worked my way through earlier this year, is set during the timespan of the "New Sith Wars," a millennium of on-and-off conflict that came to an end a thousand years before The Phantom Menace. Reading Knight Errant made me think of what (I believe) is the only other piece of narrative Star Wars content to be set during this period, the 2001-02 comics miniseries Jedi vs Sith from Dark Horse—which I remembered as being really quite good, so I decided to give it a quick reread.

The title of the book is pretty cheesy, and I wouldn't be surprised if the title came first, if some enterprising editor didn't come up with "Jedi vs Sith" as highly marketable and then cast about for an appropriate time period to set such a book in. Similarly, the book itself is one of those continuity fix-up stories Star Wars tie-ins love to do: the Phantom Menace novelization established that a millennium earlier, a guy named Darth Bane established the Sith when everyone thought they were dead, and an earlier videogame (Jedi Knight, I think?) established that there had been a big battle where a bunch of Jedi and Sith had died, and what if those were the same thing? (See also The Shadows of Mindor, which has a similar genesis.)

You can't take another Jedi's lightsaber, kid!
from Star Wars: Jedi vs Sith #2

The end result of these two factors could be quite bad, I imagine, but rereading it confirmed my belief that it is surely the best miniseries Dark Horse ever published during its time with the Star Wars license. (As opposed to the best ongoing, which was surely Knights of the Old Republic.) It's a very different Star Wars, but successful nonetheless. There are two parallel stories here: ones about three kids with Force talent who end up essentially drafted by the Jedi for a last stand on the planet Ruusan; the other is about the Sith Lord Darth Bane returning to his fellow Sith after a failed assassination attempt and watching as they all fall, forming his own new ideas about how the Sith should operate as he does.

Lord Farfalla: great Jedi or greatest Jedi?
from Star Wars: Jedi vs Sith #4

The story about the kids is great. It's very dark; it's about the horrors of war, and the difference between being an idealized "great warrior" and the realities of being an actual soldier. There's lots of tragedy and I had forgotten how harsh it was. (I don't exactly know when I read it before, but it's not on my reading log, which begins in September 2003.) Darko Macan does an excellent job with the kids, making them sympathetic even as they make bad choices, and the ending especially is terrific.

No, don't tell him Rain!
from Star Wars: Jedi vs Sith #6

The Darth Bane plotline is more of a subplot, but Bane is great, a droll unstoppable killing machine, yet smarter than everyone around him. You can see how we would get from the many Sith of the Knight Errant period and this comic to Bane concluding there must only ever be two Sith. (Darth Bane would later star in a trilogy of novels picking up from the end of this comic, but they were quite terrible.) 

All Star Wars spaceships should be this awesome.
from Star Wars: Jedi vs Sith #4

Ramon F. Bachs and Raul Fernandez do a great job on art. Some Star Wars comics set in time periods away from the films struggle to make the aesthetics distinct (this problem plagued Knight Errant, for example), but they give a mythological tone to the whole thing, with a Jedi lord who looks like a centaur and spaceships that look like sailing ships. I love Lord Farfalla; he's probably my favorite single-appearance Star Wars tie-in character. Bachs has a cartoony style that I feel like caused him to later be pigeonholed as a YA comics artist (the other work of his I've read is all from teen-focused comics: Legion of Super-Heroes, Monsters Unleashed!, Squirrel Girl & Ms. Marvel, Legends: Black Panther), but it's surprisingly good at evoking the horrors of war here. Overall, this is a great little package, underrated and undeservedly forgotten.

Doctor Who: Prisoner of the Daleks by Trevor Baxendale

There is a sort of idea in Doctor Who discourse, of "guns vs. frocks." This idea was apparently coined by Gareth Roberts, but is pretty well explained by Kate Orman in this interview with fan and scholar Alan McKee:

I think it’s [Doctor Who novelist] Gareth Roberts who said that Doctor Who needs less guns and more frocks. And it became a very quick shorthand for two rough schools of writing in the Doctor Who novels: one of which was militaristic space opera books that were very serious, and took themselves very seriously; and then at completely the other end of the spectrum, very camp ones that did not take themselves seriously. (10)

(Also discussed here by another writer.) Like a lot of systems that break things down into exactly two categories, you're meant to favor one—I used to read Scott Alexander's Slate Star Codex, and a go-to move for him and his readership was, "There are exactly two ways of thinking, and I belong to the superior one." Guns vs. frocks doesn't hide this; it's right there in the original conception of it that Kate Orman paraphrases. As Elizabeth Sandifer points out, "this is a spectacularly loaded framing of a debate" when your main character abhors guns!

On the whole, I agree: I am much more likely to have a good time with "Flatline" than with "Time Heist." However, I can enjoy a good "gun" story: I am an unabashed fan of Resurrection of the Daleks, for example, and Earthshock and The Caves of Androzani are also in this space. (Well, I remember being a big fan of Resurrection, anyway; it's been a long time since I've seen it.)

One might argue, though, that the whole guns-vs.-frocks dichotomy isn't really applicable to Doctor Who as a whole so much as a very narrow slice of it, which is what Jacqueline Klieper says on this Tumblr post: "I’m generally kind of dubious about treating the gun/frock distinction as particularly meaningful outside of the fairly narrow parameters of the Virgin novels that the terms originated because of." It's not so much a term designed to describe Doctor Who in general as a way of describing two particular ways of making the New Doctor Who Adventures more "adult." You could take the Paul Cornell "frock" approach and embrace the weird camp elements of Doctor Who—sentient churches on the moon—or you could take the "gun" approach of macho space military people blowing things up—for me embodied by the particularly boring and tedious novel Shadowmind by Christopher Bulis. I tend to agree with Kliper; I struggle to map the guns-vs.-frocks dichotomy onto the 2005-22 revival, for example. (I very much struggled to come up an example before finally thinking of "Time Heist," to be honest. Klieper comes up with a couple of examples from the revival, but I'm not sure I really agree with them... though I may be falling victim to a common problem in genre distinctions: "any example I enjoy from a genre I generally don't enjoy must not count as a 'true' example of that genre.")

Doctor Who: Prisoner of the Daleks
by Trevor Baxendale

Published: 2009
Acquired: January 2010
Read: January 2026

But that doesn't mean it can't occasionally happen. Trevor Baxendale never wrote an NA, but Prisoner of the Daleks reads like his attempt at one. The Doctor lands in the era of the Dalek Wars, and the book is all about that without reprieve: soldiers and squads and massacres and secret plots and plans and it's all Very Serious Stuff. Nicholas Briggs could have written this in his sleep, of course, but with Nick there's a thematic depth, an attempt to make the Daleks mean something that's completely absent from this book where they're just the Horrible Monsters You Know from TV. The one clever thing this novel does is to make you think there's going to be a sympathetic female character of the week who functions as a pseudocompanion... and then kill her off pretty quickly. I didn't expect this, so well done, and it firmly established the book's "gun" bona fides: no one is safe! Unfortunately, having done this, the book is left with no interesting or sympathetic guest characters to speak of. I think "gun" Doctor Who is probably a particularly poor fit for David Tennant's Doctor, even on the page.

All of this is to say, I think this book perfectly achieves what it sets out to do. But what it sets out to do completely fails to be of interest to me. If you know about the guns-vs.-frocks dichotomy, then what you think about that way of conceptualizing Doctor Who will probably tell you pretty clearly what you will think about this book before you even read it. (I picked this up because it's one of the more widely praised "New Series Adventures"... but I guess I should have paid more attention to who was doing the praising!)

Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion

The Brave and the Bold: Help Wanted by Sholly Fisch, Rick Burchett, Dan Davis, et al.

The All New! Batman: The Brave and the Bold: Help Wanted

Collection published: 2012
Contents originally published: 2011
Read: February 2026

Writer: Sholly Fisch
Artists: Rick Burchett, Dan Davis, Dario Brizuela, Ethen Beavers

Colorists: Gabe Eltaeb, Guy Major 
Letterers: Dezi Sienty, Sal Cipriano

Back when my now-seven-year-old was getting into graphic novels, I got them this for Christmas with the intention of directing their interest toward DC Comics. It's based on the Brave and the Bold tv show than ran from 2008 to 2011, but my suspicion was that it would work just fine for someone who hadn't seen the show as a source of kid-friendly DC superhero adventures. And indeed, it worked out; my kid has become a big DC stan. This was Christmas 2024 and at a certain point it occurred to me there was a DC trade paperback in my house that I had never read! Certainly this could not be permitted.

The book features six stories: team-ups with the original Green Lantern (Alan Scott), Aquaman, Hawkman, Jonah Hex, and Zatanna, plus a more offbeat one I'll get to later. Writer Sholly Fisch, as any DC reader with discerning taste knows, is the king of fun superhero comics, and these stories are all solid adventures; in most, he's teamed with Rick Burchett and Dan Davis on art, two kings themselves. (Burchett is one of those artists who is impressively adaptable: he's done very adult stuff like the 1980s Blackhawk revival, classic superhero stuff like Justice Society and Justice League America in the 1990s, and kid-focused stuff like this; Dan Davis has done a lot of good work as well, most relevant is probably is run as inker on Stargirl.)

Of those five stories, my favorite was the first one, which is actually a flashback story to the early days of Batman's career: a retired Alan Scott takes an interest in this new superhero who's appeared in his home turf of Gotham. Fisch gets some good dynamics out of this team-up, with Batman seeking Green Lantern's approval, but Green Lantern disapproving of Batman's propensity for terror. An excellent done-in-one story of Batman's early days, and if you're willing to squint, I think it would fit just fine into the post-Crisis/pre-Flashpoint iteration of the DC universe. My other favorite was the Zatanna team-up, which makes good use of the classic House of Mystery characters Abel and Cain. The art is by Ethen Beavers; back in the day he illustrated a few installments of Dark Horse's Clone Wars Adventures, but my favorite stuff by him are his truly excellent illustrations for Little Golden Books' Star Trek tie-ins.

This bit made me laugh; my seven-year-old didn't get it.
from The All New! Batman: The Brave and the Bold #7 (art by Rick Burchett & Dan Davis)

The oddball story is the title story, "Help Wanted." This is told from the perspective of a perpetual henchman: he works for the Toyman, then the Clock King, then Ocean Master, and so on; each time, the supervillain he works for is defeated by a superhero teaming up with Batman. How can this guy get back on his feet? Does he deserve another chance? A really charming look at the flipside of superheroics, and my favorite story in the book. 

She is the world's most patient wife.
from Batman: The Brave and the Bold vol. 2 #10 (art by Rick Burchett & Dan Davis)

If you like DC not for its complicated continuity and endless events, but for its fun characters and interesting histories, this book is a perfect little slice of it. Highly recommended.