Review: Doctor Who: Remembrance of the Daleks by Ben Aaronovitch

The past day or so has seen three Doctor Who: Short Trips reviews by me appear on USF: Lucie Miller and the Eighth Doctor in "The Curse of the Fugue"; Steven Taylor, Dodo, and the First Doctor in "This Sporting Life"; and the Meddling Monk, Liz Shaw, and the Third Doctor in "The Blame Game."

Trade paperback, 211 pages
Published 2013 (originally 1990)

Acquired February 2016
Read March 2016

Doctor Who: Remembrance of the Daleks
by Ben Aaronovitch

Remembrance of the Daleks is often held up as one of the best Target novelizations, and a forerunner of the broader and deeper style of The New Doctor Who Adventures, so I decided to read it before plunging into The New Adventures properly. But, alas, I didn't find this book to be all that. It's a perfectly competent novelization-- Ben Aaronovitch does a better job with his own scripts than I suspect Terrance Dicks would have-- but it doesn't really capture what I love about Remembrance, which is the television story that pushed me from "maybe this television program has something going for it..." to "I'm going to buy this on DVD and watch it forever." On screen with Andrew Morgan's direction, Remembrance is full of energy and verve; in Aaronovitch's prose, it feels much more normal than it did on screen. There are some neat details added here and there, but I was surprised to realize how much the characters of the Intrusion Counter Measures Group owe to the performances, as there's not much to them on the page. And that's just one example.

Here's a bit of trivia for you: the infamous (and awesome) Special Weapons Dalek gets a scene from its own perspective, where it reflects on its status in the Dalek hierarchy, where it, alone among Daleks, has a name, "the Abomination." This is actually a pretty great scene, as we learn it has a sense of selfhood no other Dalek posseses, for which its fellows want it exterminated. Only the will of the Emperor (i.e., Davros) permits its continued existence. Its exploits are recounted: "Pa Jass-Gutrik, the war of vengeance against the Movellans; Pa Jaski-Thal, the liquidation war against the Thals; and Pa-Jass Vortan, the time campaign -- the war to end all wars." A veteran of the Time War!? If I ever get to write for a Doctor Who tie-in, I'll have to slip in a reference to the Daleks calling the Time War the "Pa-Jass Vortan."

In Two Weeks: The New Adventures finally begin properly, when the Doctor and Ace meet the Timewyrm for the first time in Genesys!

H. G. Wells at 150: The History of Mr Polly

Corks! Over at Unreality SF, Jago and Litefoot meet the Master, in my review of Series 11 of Jago & Litefoot, Investigators of Infernal Incidents.

Trade paperback, 227 pages
Published 2005 (originally 1910)

Acquired June 2016
Read July 2016

The History of Mr Polly by H. G. Wells

Mr Polly had been drinking at the poisoned fountains of English literature, fountains so unsuited to the needs of a decent clerk or shopman, fountains charged with the dangerous suggestion that it becomes a man of gaiety and spirit to make love gallantly and rather carelessly. (75-6)

This late H. G. Wells novel, like all his literary fictions, bears traces of Wells's own life. Mr Polly, like a young Mr Wells, is a draper's assistant and poorly suited to it. Unlike Mr Wells, Mr Polly never moves beyond this profession to which he is unsuited, eventually marrying one of his cousins because of his tendency to be a little too liberal in his lovemaking (all three of his female cousins are convinced that he loves and is going to marry them), and setting up a shop of his own. The narrator tells us that all Mr Polly gets out of fifteen years' work at the shop is £60-70 of debt because he is entirely unsuited to being a shopkeeper, and indeed, there probably shouldn't be so many shopkeepers to begin with. Like many members of the lower middle class, they do nothing for the functioning of society.

Wells being Wells, the solution to this all is social planning. There's a brief aside where we get to hear the thoughts of "a certain high-browed gentleman living at Highbury, wearing a golden pince-nez" (121), whose views are based on H. G. Wells's. This gentleman argues that when a society advances rapidly without conscious design, it's like "a man who takes no thought of dietary or regimen [...]. It accumulates useless and aimless lives, as a man accumulates fat and morbid products in his blood" (122). But this is, thankfully, a very small component of the book, which is much more interested in the particular than the general. The solution to the general problem might be the World State, but the solution to the particular problem is that Mr Polly tries to take his own life and burn down his house so his wife will get the insurance money. But in the excitement of it all, he forgets to slit his throat, and, well, his life can only get better from there.

John Sutherland's introduction calls The History of Mr Polly "a superbly funny novel" (xxvii), and I wouldn't go that far, but it does have a decent number of comic situations, and it elicited the occasional laugh for sure. Along with the opening chapters of The War in the Air, this is one of Wells's more humorous works. It's not deep, and I don't think Wells holds up as well as a writer of this sort of thing as some of his contemporaries, but it's diverting enough.

There's apparently a couple screen versions; I'll have to seek them out, as I feel like there's some good potential for visual comedy here, especially in the last quarter or so of the book.

I'm Never Going to Get What I Want out of Marvel Shows on Netflix

My wife and I just finished watching Season Two of Daredevil last week. (I'm not very good at binge-watching; I prefer a more measured pace of media consumption.) I found it the weakest season of Marvel-on-Netflix to date, which for me would be ranked something like 1) Daredevil Season One, 2) Jessica Jones Season One, 3) Daredevil Season Two. So each season of Marvel-on-Netflix is worse than the one before it, I guess.

There were a few things I didn't like about Season Two of Daredevil. The first was that the ninjas were deadly dull enemies. Season One works so well because Wilson Fisk was as compelling a character as Daredevil; the season was as much about his rise (and fall) as it was about Matt Murdock's. The first few episodes of Season Two were pretty promising, with their focus on Frank Castle as the Punisher, and I really liked Elodie Yung as Elektra. But as enemies the Hand were just deadly dull, and one finishes the season without actually understanding most of what was going on with them and their vague plans for malevolent evil. Also I didn't really care for Stick in Season One, and there was a ton of him this time around.

But really what I think I didn't like about it is that it veers too sharply away from what, for me at least, is the core premise of Daredevil. (I should note I've never read a Daredevil comic, I think.) That core premise is Matt Murdock, blind lawyer, protecting his hometown outside of the law when he can't do it from the inside, along with friends Foggy Nelson and Karen Page. The first season did a good job of this: the three of them worked together as a team to take down Fisk in their various ways.

Happier days.

The second season does not do a good job of this. Matt repeatedly makes terrible decisions as a lawyer and a friend, causing Foggy to land in hot water again and again, where Foggy has to bail himself out with no help from his supposed friend. Halfway through the season, I just wanted Matt to get killed by a ninja or something, and Foggy to form his own law firm, because Foggy was the character who I felt was doing his best to do the right thing. Now, this isn't necessarily bad writing in the sense that the show's creators didn't accomplish their goals: I think they want to break down the Matt/Foggy relationship in order to build it back up in Season Three (or, I guess, The Defenders). Only it's been broken down so much at this point that it would be impossible for me to believe that Foggy would invite Matt back into his life without me seeing Foggy as an overly dependent victim of emotional abuse.

But what appeals to me about Daredevil is that basic set-up. It's what John Seavey calls a "storytelling engine": a reasonably uncomplicated premise that generates potential stories pretty much endlessly. But Daredevil the television show basically never uses its storytelling engine.* There is exactly one point in the thirteen episodes of Season Two that revolves around someone coming to Nelson and Murdock with a case that gets Daredevil involved in some crimefighting, and the later points where the law firm angle is invoked are usually contrived. I like this set-up, yet the show is basically constantly abandoning it to tell giant, uninteresting stories about ninja death cults from the dawn of time, which is so far outside the premise of the storytelling engine as to be absurd. And, for me, uninteresting. I want to see Matt Murdock take down the thugs threatening his neighborhood. I want Foggy Nelson being a good friend and a great lawyer who helps his buddy out.† That's what's in the premise. That's how you got to me to show up; why are you giving me something that has nothing to do with it?

More ninjas? I'M SO SURPRISED.

The problem here, the reason I will never get what I want, is that Daredevil is serialized. And not lightly serialized like Deep Space Nine was (or Veronica Mars or, I dunno, Wonderfalls), where a light arc runs through the background that rears up periodically. Each episode of Daredevil is just one-thirteenth of a larger story. (In the case of Season Two, a sloppily-constructed larger story.) Daredevil is too tightly serialized to permit a case-of-the-week approach-- but a case of the week is precisely what its storytelling engine has set up! The stories need to be big enough to fill thirteen episodes (that's like six movies!), and so the somewhat small premise of someone turning up at Nelson and Murdock with a problem that escalates until it needs superheroics gets left behind and forgotten in the face of NINJAS DOOMING THE EARTH. And the idea that Matt and Foggy and Karen are friend who work together gets left behind in the need to give each something very dramatic to do in the overarching plotline running through the whole season, such that the three characters barely seemed to interact in Season Two. (Except for bits where they needed to escalate Matt to a new level of jerkdom.)

This will never happen.

So, as much as I did enjoy Season One of Jessica Jones, I suspect I will never get out of it what I really want, which is a procedural exploring the people on the fringes of the superhero world who can never quite enter into it all the way. That was the premise of the Alias comics that the show is based on, and which I loved, but the first season set that all aside in favor of a big story about Jessica's past with Killgrave, which was pretty good and so I was fine with it. But the second season, I suspect, will be no more procedural than the first, given the hints dropped near the end of the second. I want to see Jessica solving crimes involving runaway mutants,‡ meeting people pretending to be the Hulk's sidekick, and finding out what happened to D-list superheroes like D-Man. But that won't happen: it'll be about some government conspiracy that will dominate the whole season, and maybe one person will show up at her office door with a case, but if they do, it'll just tie into that big arc they're running. Season Two of Jessica Jones might be excellent, but the storytelling engine of Jessica Jones will go unused.

I will never get what I want.

* You can read Seavey's take on the specific storytelling engine of the Daredevil comics themselves here.
† Seriously, Foggy is the greatest. He's good at his job, he's got a soft heart, he just wants to help people in a terrible world, and he's always trying to scam free food. What's not to like?
‡ Though, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe they'd have to be Inhumams, and Inhumans are the "fetch" of Marvel Comics, so never mind then.

H. G. Wells at 150: Ann Veronica

My celebration of Wells's 150th continues with this, one of his many semiautobiographical reworkings of his own life:

Trade paperback, 313 pages
Published 2005 (originally 1909)

Acquired and read January 2013

Ann Veronica by H. G. Wells

Ann Veronica is an interesting novel, mixing the way Wells met his second wife with the reaction to one of his first mistresses, Amber Reeves. It's about a young woman, Ann Veronica Stanley, who falls in love with her married biology demonstrator at Central Imperial College, G. Capes. (Weirdly, Capes never receives a first name, though in Wells's later novel Marriage, he is finally forenamed "Godwin.") As someone who has read more Victorian scientist novels than you can shake a test tube at, the differences from those are striking. The first is that one can take a science degree-- most Victorian scientists are self-taught, with medical degrees or the like. The second is that Ann Veronica is female-- there are very, very few fictional female scientists in the nineteenth century. Both of these changes can be attributed, I suspect, to the increasing professionalization of science. Now it's a thing you can take a degree in like any other thing, thus it's easier for women to enter into it because they don't have to teach it to themselves with their extra time and money.

Like many writers of scientist novels, Wells examines the relationship between science and morality, but as always, Wells charts his own path. Ann Veronica does not justify science's moral claims by showing how they replicate traditional moral strictures, nor does it denigrate science's moral claims by showing how they contradict traditional morality. Rather, Wells shows how science can be the basis of a new morality, though he is also careful to show that this is sometime a post facto rationalization, a way of justifying a behavior one has already decided to undertake.

That Ann Veronica and Capes possess an unconventional morality is most clearly demonstrated by their decision to become lovers even though Capes is married and Ann Veronica is much younger than him. When Capes objects that even their meeting together is against the rules, as he is her teacher, Ann Veronica replies that "This is something above all rules" (243). Later, she expands on this assertion, when Capes supposes that she will rationalize the story of his affair during his first marriage:

‘If I told you the facts […] you’d explain the whole business as being very fine and honourable for me – the Higher Morality, or something of that sort…. It wasn’t.’
     ‘I don’t deal very much,’ said Ann Veronica, ‘in the Higher Morality, or the Higher Truth, or any of those things.’
     ‘Perhaps you don’t. But a human being who is young and clean, as you are, is apt to ennoble – or to explain away.’
     ‘I’ve had a biological training. I’m a hard young woman.’ (245)

This passage attributes Ann Veronica's refusal to be bounded by the strictures of traditional Edwardian morality to her training as a scientist. Seeing like a scientist has enabled her to see events with a clarity that others lack. Her vision is not mystified by Christianity, but rather she understands the biological imperatives that underlie human interactions in the area of love. Capes cheated on his first wife because she could not satisfy him sexually, and Capes asks her how she classifies sexual relations:

     ‘Do you think of these things – these matters – as belonging to our Higher Nature or our Lower?’
     ‘I don’t deal in Higher Things, I tell you,’ said Ann Veronica, ‘or lower, for the matter of that. I don’t classify.’ She hesitated. ‘Flesh and flowers are all alike to me.’ (246)

Ann Veronica's scientific training hasn’t taught her that sex is all that matters, nor that love doesn't exist. Rather, it has caused her to classify sex and love on the same level, or even as the same thing. She sees nothing improper in sex because it is biological imperative of the flesh, and she sees nothing wrong with her love for Capes because it is tied up in that imperative. Her and Capes's love for one another is no different from her and Capes's sexual desire for one another.

But while it is possible for Ann Veronica to see this aspect of morality outside traditional thinking, it is not possible for her to do so with society more broadly. There is one passage that hints she has a larger capacity; as she learns more about biology, she begins to see that

the influence of the science radiated far beyond its own special field – beyond those beautiful but highly technical problems with which we do not propose for a moment to trouble the naturally terrified reader. Biology is an extraordinarily digestive science.[…] [N]ot only did these tentacular generalizations gather all the facts of natural history and comparative anatomy together, but they always seemed stretching out further and further into a world of interests that lay altogether outside their legitimate bounds.
     It came to Ann Veronica one night[…] that this slowly elaborating biological scheme had something more than an academic interest for herself. And not only so, but that it was, after all, a more systematic and particular method of examining just the same questions that underlay the discussions of the Fabian Society, the West Central Arts Club, the chatter of the studios and the deep[…]. It was the same Bios whose nature and drift and ways and methods and aspects engaged them all. (134-35)

That said, the narrator claims this revelation "was but a momentary gleam of personal application" that she never follows up (135). She is in the process of learning to apply scientific vision to human affairs, but in the end, she is only able to do so for her personal affairs. When self-interest is no longer at stake, she doesn't have the drive to procede.

And besides, society won't let her. Capes and Ann Veronica both have to give up their scientific careers as a result of their running off with one another. They spend some time on the continent, they eventually do get married and return to England, Capes becomes a playwright (they are allowed to be more unconventional than biology demonstrators), and Ann Veronica is about to become a mother when the novel closes. They reappear in Wells's Marriage, which I haven't read, but I'd like to, because Ann Veronica seems to me to have a somewhat bleak ending: what acceptance society has given them seems to derive from the fact that they have conformed more to its expectations. I'd be curious to know if Wells had a more optimistic vision for the unconventional than Ann Veronica indicates.

* Capes is pretty clearly based on Wells himself: Wells was a married biology demonstrator who ran off with and later married one of his students, Amy Catherine Robbins. Capes studied under the fictional biologist Russell, who played a significant role in the Darwinian controversies; Wells studied under Huxley, who played a significant role in the Darwinian controversies. Only instead of working at a university, Wells worked for a test preparation service!

Faster than a DC Bullet: Gotham Central, Part Ø: Batman: Gordon of Gotham

Before plunging into my next comics project, I want to cycle back to some old ones and read some books related to them that have come out since then. The first of these is Gotham Central, which I read over five years ago now.

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2014 (contents: 1996-98)
Borrowed from the library
Read March 2016

Batman: Gordon of Gotham

Writers: Chuck Dixon, Dennis O'Neil
Artists: Klaus Janson, Jim Aparo, Bill Sienkiewicz, Dick Giordano
Colorists: Kevin Somers, Ian Laughlin, Pam Rambo, Jamison

Letterers: John Costanza, Clem Robins

This book collects three four-issue miniseries that feature Commissioner Gordon and/or the Gotham City Police Department; it's a precursor of sorts to Gotham Central, though I am pretty sure that the only main character here who is also a main character there is the ubiquitous Renee Montoya. Each of the stories here has a slightly different focus.

"Gordon's Law" is pretty squarely focused on Commissioner Gordon himself, as he discovers that there's possibly some corruption in the GCPD, which means he can't trust anyone on the force-- and to make things worse, he only wants cops to go after cops, which means he rejects Batman's offer of assistance as well. The story is kinda complicated; there are a lot of characters, and most of them were new to me (if not new to everyone), and though I really like the gritty tone established by Klaus Janson's artwork, he didn't always make it easy to remember who was who. Its biggest weakness is probably that it's one of those stories where tons of "old friends" we've never seen before turn up, and the narrative expects us to be surprised when an "old friend" we've never seen before turns out to not be altogether trustworthy. And that's not the only obvious twist, but there were some good ones as well. Overall, it's an okay tale: some good crime fiction influences, but it doesn't really have anything to say about Gordon, about the GCPD, or about Batman.

I love how sleazy/creepy the face of this guy (he's an informant) looks.
from Batman: Gordon's Law #1 (script by Chuck Dixon, art by Klaus Janson)

"GCPD" is the most like Gotham Central of all the stories here; the commissioner is just a minor part of a sprawling, ensemble tale of various members of the GCPD pursuing various cases. Harvey Bullock struggled with anger management, a new partner, and a serial killer; Renee Montoya goes undercover as a diplomat's wife to help catch an assassin; two cops named Kitch (a trained lawyer) and Cav (a grizzled old vet) track down art thieves and an insurance same; an administrator named Hendricks tries to figure out who's stealing stationery. As you might imagine, some of these stories are better than others: I always enjoy a Montoya tale, but Chuck Dixon doesn't really her very unique, and the circumstance she ends up in seems incredibly contrived to say the least. (Do local cops really handle assassination plots against foreign officials? Would there really be no plan for cancelling the operation when it all goes wrong and the diplomat deliberately endangers Montoya's life?) On the other hand, I did enjoy the Harvey Bullock plot. This was my first real exposure to the character (he was retired during Gotham Central), and he gets to do some good old-fashioned investigating that shows off his intelligence as well as his human side, and I liked his contentious relationship with his new partner.

Jim Aparo just can't resist giving Gordon that dandyesque mustache curl, though.
from Batman: GCPD #3 (script by Chuck Dixon, art by Jim Aparo & Bill Sienkiewicz)

The Kitch/Cav plot had its moments, but some of its beats were very familiar. Is the lawyer-turned-cop who is mocked for his education by the cops and for his slumming it by the lawyers, and flirts with going back to law only to be reminded that lawyers are corrupt, a thing? I am pretty sure I read this exact story last year in Fort Freak. I liked Cav, though. The best character of all, however, was Hendricks: of course a desk officer grimly determined to catch an office supplies thief in the fact of mockery from his colleagues was my fave. The law begins and ends with him! I've previously struggled with Jim Aparo art on stories of the "gritty" type, but to my surprise, he paired really well with Bill Sienkiewicz on inks: Aparo does great figures and great storytelling, but Sienkiewicz's rough inks add the right tone for an urban cop story. Best art in the book.

CHILL OUT JIM!
from Batman: Gordon of Gotham #1 (script by Dennis O'Neil, art by Dick Giordano & Klaus Janson)

"Gordon of Gotham" is even less about the GCPD than "Gordon's Law," as it's mostly a present-day Gordon telling Batman about his last year as a Chicago cop, leading into the events of Batman: Year One. As anyone who read my review of that story would know, I love Jim Gordon, and Dennis O'Neil really captures what it is that I like about him. Gordon is just a man trying to do the right thing in a world that will never reward him for it, because it is a world that needs Batman. Gordon argues with his wife (there's a callback to his struggle with domestic violence from Night Cries, another quality Jim Gordon tale), but ends up stopping a diner holdup almost by accident, then decides to go after corruption, but the world itself is corrupt, and he quickly gets in deeply over his head and ends up making choices that violate his moral core... or so he had thought. O'Neil piles on the twists and the action in a compelling way, and I really liked how this set us up for the  Gordon on Year One, down to his decision to grow a mustache. The only real weakness is the frame; I wonder why they didn't just do this story in pure flashback.

I didn't quite buy that everyone would recognize a "hero cop" so readily, but I guess more people watched local tv news back in the 1980s.
from Batman: Gordon of Gotham #1 (script by Dennis O'Neil, art by Dick Giordano & Klaus Janson)

Next Week: And now I'll be catching up on the expanded universe of The Sandman, beginning with the long-delayed collected edition of The Children's Crusade, Free Country!

Review: Bernice Summerfield: Missing Adventures edited by Rebecca Levene

Two days in a row of USF reviews! Check out my account of The Avengers: Steed and Mrs Peel: The Comic Strip Adaptations, Volume One.

Hardcover, 246 pages
Published 2007

Acquired June 2013
Read November 2015

Bernice Summerfield XI: Missing Adventures
edited by Rebecca Levene

After Genius Loci and the general quality of Big Finish's Bernice Summerfield anthologies, I really wanted to like Missing Adventures. Unfortunately, I found most of the stories somewhere between frustrating and pedestrian. These stories range across Benny's early life, from her childhood in boarding school up to the day before she met the Doctor in Love and War. I wanted a sense of Benny's development as a person, but I didn't really get that-- in most of these stories, she's just kind of generic goofy action Benny, not the well-rounded character she is when at her best. Unfortunately, given Genius Loci, Ben Aaronovitch's "The Evacuation of Bernice Summerfield Considered as a Short Film by Terry Gillam" is one of the most inexplicable of the lot. Beyond that, I don't really have strong impressions of anything here, except for the last story, Eddie Robson's "Thirty Love," a cute story about Benny's 30th birthday that brings back a lot of characters and concepts from Benny's original introduction in Love and War.

Next Week: One last prequel book before I dive into The New Adventures proper-- the Doctor meets up with the Daleks for the final time in Remembrance of the Daleks!

H. G. Wells at 150: The Time Machine

Speaking of the 1890s, I wrote a review of the Big Finish Classics version of Dracula this weekend. You should read it; it's interesting.

Trade paperback, 104 pages
Published 2005 (originally 1895)

Acquired and previously read March 2016
Reread July 2016

The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

My celebration of H. G. Wells's 150th birthday continues with a rereading of The Time Machine-- just four months after I last reread it! So why am I reading it again so soon? Because my reread of a couple months ago inspired me to teach it this summer in a class I taught on apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction. What really rose to the forefront in teaching it was the book's scale: my students were really fascinated by a future narrative that went 800,000 years into the future, rather than a couple centuries like your Star Treks or whatever. And then of course the Time Traveller goes some 30 million years into the future and beyond, eventually ending up in a time where there's nothing but silence and darkness.

It's a bit staggering, and Wells does a good job of portraying just how staggering it all is. (Imagine how much more staggering it would be if you hadn't spent your whole life being educated that the Earth is millions of years old!) There's a lot of playing with scale: the crumbling museum the Time Traveller finds shows that the Victorian age is just a blip in the history of humankind. The differentiation of the Eloi and the Morlocks shows that civilization is just a blip in the history of humans. The strange beach inhabited by crabs shows that humanity is just a blip in the history of life. The empty beach shows that life is just a blip in the history of the Earth. And the coming darkness and silence show that the Earth is just a blip in the history of the universe. Wow.

It's enough to turn you into a nihilist. But when I asked my students if The Time Machine was a nihilistic book, they said they didn't think so, or at least they thought the Time Traveller wasn't. Otherwise, why would he care about Weena's flowers? His very ideals about societal and biological progress may have been shattered, but he still believes in something.

Reading Roundup Wrapup: August 2016

Pick of the month: Mrs. Miniver by Jan Struther. Like most months in which I read a lot of books, this was tough: I think you could make compelling arguments for Adam Strange: Planet Heist (everything I want out of space-based superheroes), either volume of Top 10 (I never wanted anything out of superhero police procedurals, but I got something great anyway), and A Very Dangerous Woman (a pretty strong biography of a very interesting person). But Mrs. Miniver has a difficult-to-replicate charm-- as an accidental novel, I don't think the things it does well could be replicated deliberately. So to it my pick goes.

All books read:
1. The Transformers: All Hail Megatron, Volume 3 by Shane McCarthy with Josh van Reyk, Shawn Knowler, and Andy Schmidt
2. The World of Flashpoint featuring Batman by Brian Azzarello, J. T. Krul, Jimmy Palmiotti, and Peter Milligan
3. Y: The Last Man: One Small Step by Brian K. Vaughan
4. Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology by Adelene Buckland
5. The Transformers: All Hail Megatron, Volume 4: Coda by Mike Costa with Simon Furman, Shane McCarthy, Andy Schmidt, Nick Roche, Denton J. Tipton, and Zander Cannon
6. Empire of the Sun by J. G. Ballard
7. From Russia with Love by Ian Fleming
8. Advice for a Young Investigator by Santiago Ramón y Cajal
9. Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes: The Quest For Cosmic Boy by Tony Bedard
10. Star Trek: The Prisoner of Vega by Sharon Lerner and Christopher Cerf
11. When It Changed: Science into Fiction edited by Geoff Ryman
12. The World of Flashpoint featuring Green Lantern by Adam Schlagman and Jeff Lemire with Pornsak Pichetshote
13. Adam Strange: Planet Heist by Andy Diggle
14. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
15. Top 10: Collected Edition, Book 1 by Alan Moore
16. The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley by David Marshall
17. The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West
18. Mrs. Miniver by Jan Struther
19. Top 10: Collected Edition, Book 2 by Alan Moore
20. Legion of Super-Heroes: Enemy Rising by Jim Shooter
21. Kidding Ourselves: The Hidden Power of Self-Deception by Joseph T. Hallinan
22. The Sorceress of the Strand and Other Stories by L. T. Meade
23. Time, Unincorporated: The Doctor Who Fanzine Archives, Vol. 2: Writings on the Classic Series edited by Graeme Burk and Robert Smith?
24. The Transformers, Volume 1: For All Mankind by Mike Costa
25. Vision, Science and Literature, 1870-1920: Ocular Horizons by Martin Willis
26. A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia’s Most Seductive Spy by Deborah McDonald and Jeremy Dronfield

It's my best month since January 2013! I don't really know why. Good way to go out, though (my "reading year" is September through August).

All books acquired:
1. From Russia with Love by Ian Fleming
2. Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes: The Quest For Cosmic Boy by Tony Bedard
3. Adam Strange: Planet Heist by Andy Diggle
4. The Transformers: Last Stand of the Wreckers by James Roberts & Nick Roche
5. The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West
6. Top 10: Collected Edition, Book 2 by Alan Moore
7. Legion of Super-Heroes: Enemy Rising by Jim Shooter

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 631 (down 5)
Books remaining on "To review" list: 76 (down 3)

H. G. Wells at 150: The Island of Doctor Moreau

Quick note before we get started: I've written a review of UNIT: Shutdown for USF.

H. G. Wells was born in September 1866-- meaning he turns 150 this year! I'd have loved to have been at this year's conference of the H. G. Wells Society, but lacking that, I'll be celebrating H. G. Wells here on the blog by doubling down on my tendency to post about H. G. Wells anyway by writing essays about him, reviewing autobiographical writings and other books relevant to his life, and posting reviews of Wells books in my enormous review backlog. So, I kick it all off on today, the first day of the month, with a review of The Island of Doctor Moreau. (The usual beginning-of-month reading roundup wrapup will appear tomorrow.)

Trade paperback, 139 pages
Published 2005 (originally 1896)

Acquired and read January 2013

The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells

As a novel about a Victorian scientist, of course I had to read this. Moreau is second only to Frankenstein in the mad scientist rankings of the nineteenth century, and second in the rankings of fictional scientists generally. (Because who remembers the sane ones?) Moreau is a "wantonly" cruel vivisectionist, exiled from the scientific community, so there's a different sort of flavor to him to Frankenstein: Frankenstein pursues knowledge into areas man was not meant to know, but his goals are amoral at worst. Moreau, on the other hand, is immoral. Suffering is not an incidental byproduct of his researches, but their goal. (This was a common critique of vivisectors in the Victorian period; I've seen it in Wilkie Collins's Heart and Science, Sarah Grand's The Beth Book, and Florence Fenwick Miller's Lynton Abbott's Children.)

Moreau's rationalizations of his own research are probably the most interesting part of this horrific book (early Wells was so good at evoking sensation), as he argues that his lack of sympathy for those in pain makes him superior: "So long as visible or audible pain turns you sick, so long as your own pains drive you, so long as pain underlies your propositions about sin, so long, I tell you, you are an animal, thinking a little less obscurely what an animal feels" (73). The human being, Moreau argues, is distinguished by his ability to choose not to feel, because when you are more intelligent, you can see after your own welfare without the need of the pain stimulus. Moreau argues that he is after knowledge only, that his only passions are intellectual: "You cannot imagine the strange colourless delight of these intellectual desires. The thing before you is no longer an animal, a fellow-creature, but a problem to be solved" (75). I'm interested in the vision of the scientist, but The Island is more about the feelings of the scientist, so there's not as much here for me as I might have imagined-- though the two do cross over occasionally, as in the preceding quote, where Moreau's lack of "sympathetic pain" means he sees animals differently than other humans.

In traditional Wells fashion, The Island also uses its set-up to do some doubling: like how in Frankenstein the creature's plight is also the plight of all humans, so too do some of the narrator's comments about the abandoned animal experiments resonate with the human condition: "they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence began in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau -- and for what?" (95). Substitute "God" or any other source of law/morality for "Moreau," and I'm not so sure we're much better off. And I know Wells thought we weren't.

Faster than a DC Bullet: Prose Fiction #11: Project Crisis!, Part LIII: Final Crisis [novelization]

Trade paperback, 305 pages
Published 2010
Borrowed from the library
Read February 2016

Final Crisis by Greg Cox

I think I'm going to have to give up on these novelizations of comic stories, because for the most part, they're too limited by their medium. Marv Wolfman's Crisis on Infinite Earths novelization was great because he played to the strengths of his medium by transforming the multiverse-shattering epic into a personal story. But Cox's novelizations of Infinite Crisis, 52, Countdown, and now Final Crisis have not really done this; instead they mostly transcribe the dialogue and the action. But Cox captures none of the feeling of the stories he's novelizing: I may not have known what to make of Final Crisis, but there's not denying that it's epic and overwhelming and in turns despairing and triumphant. In Cox's telling, all of this is flat, just events without emotional resonance. There's no added depth here; his insights into the characters tend to repeat what they already communicate in dialogue. While Wolfman communicated something new with his novelization of his own story in the original Crisis, and Denny O'Neil's novelization of Knightfall was an adequate substitute for a set of comics I'll probably never get to, reading an outside author's take on comics I've already read hasn't really done much for me thus far.

Next Week: Time to start playing catch-up, first with Gotham cops in Gordon of Gotham!