Review: Mizora by Mary E. Bradley Lane

Hardcover, 147 pages
Published 1999 (originally 1880-81)

Borrowed from the library

Read April 2013

Mizora: A World of Women

by Mary E. Bradley Lane

This is one of the earliest female utopian stories. Like a lot of utopian stories, there's no kind of plot or anything, more a tour of things the author thinks is interesting about the world they've created. (When and why did we readers turn on this at a literary form? Clearly people in the nineteenth century ate this kind of stuff up.) Interestingly, contrasted with the way some strands of feminism approach science in the present day, this feminist utopia is founded on science; even the cooking is done by chemists, who don't smell or stir their food, just measure it quantifiably. The women of Mizora have majestic, imaginative brains, observing the secrets of Nature and adopting them for their own use. They work as Nature does, they claim, and science is impartial-- it helps anyone willing to work. Not a place I'd want to live, even if I was a woman (the women were vengeful and cruel toward the men when they took over back in the past... and now there are none), I suspect, but a very fascinating book, a way into how scientific thinking was perceived in 1880s America.

Faster than a DC Bullet: Project Crisis!, Part LXVII: Convergence: Crisis, Book 2

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2015 (contents: 2015)
Borrowed from the library
Read May 2017

Convergence: Crisis, Book 2

Writers: Larry Hama, Len Wein, Fabian Nicieza, Marv Wolfman, and Dan Abnett

Art: Joshua Middleton, Aaron Lopresti & Matt Banning, Kelley Jones, ChrisCross, Nicola Scott & Marc Deering, and Federico Dallocchio
Color: Joshua Middleton, Tanya & Richard Horie, Michelle Madsen, Jeromy Cox, and Veronica Gandini
Lettering: Sal Cipriano, Tom Napolitano, Rob Leigh, and Carlos M. Mangual

This volume of Convergence mostly concerns more pre-Crisis Earth-1 heroes, none of them being characters I particularly care about. Well, with the exception of the greatest DC character of them all, Elongated Man.

The continuity doesn't always add up, and I suspect that the format for Convergence sometimes works against the ideas here. For example, the Wonder Woman of this era was (as far as I know) pretty undistinctive; my guess is that they wanted the 1968-73 powerless version of the character, but since all these characters come from the time of the Crisis on Infinite Earths, that version of the character was long gone and can only be approximated. It does seem a bit contrived that there's a point where all the characters from the first two volumes of this series would be chilling in Gotham. Most of the writers don't even bother to explain it, but when Len Wein does explain it in the Swamp Thing story, it's even more out of place, because he explains that Swamp Thing came to Gotham to ask Batman about the mysterious red skies, meaning these characters weren't just plucked out of time near the original Crisis, but during it-- yet no one other than Swamp Thing brings this up. There are also a lot of differences on how the interurban conflicts start; in some stories people are told who to fight, in some they are teleported to the fight, and in some they just fly to another city and start breaking stuff. For a series that's by design only going to appeal to continuity nerds, there's a weird lack of continuity.

Hang on, does this mean all the cities are going to get put back? Otherwise how could these characters go on to participate in Crisis on Infinite Earths?
from Convergence: Swamp Thing #1 (script by Len Wein, art by Kelley Jones)

Also isn't it kind of weird that in nine stories about something bad happening to Gotham, Batman never does anything of significance? The most he gets up to is having a lunch date with the Flash.

No one draws pretty people (of either gender) quite like Nicola Scott.
from Convergence: New Teen Titans #1 (script by Marv Wolfman, art by Nicola Scott & Marc Deering)

Nothing here is as good as the Legion or Green Lantern stories from book 1. Kelley Jones on Swamp Thing is of course a match made in heaven, and the return of Len Wein to the character he originated is nice too, but the story itself (Swamp Thing vs. vampires) is merely okay. If I had any nostalgia for the New Teen Titans, I'm sure it'd be nice to see Marv Wolfman write for them one last time, but I don't, and so it's not, though Nicola Scott's heroic stylings are a good artistic fit for Wolfman's classic scripting. I feel like she hasn't been up to much post-Birds of Prey, so it's good to see her here. I did like how Dan Abnett wrong-footed me in the Flash story with a seeming anachronistic reference by Barry Allen to the Speed Force.

Maybe the reason this story didn't do it for me is the creepy facial expressions.
from Convergence: Justice League of America #1 (script by Fabian Nicieza, art by ChrisCross)

I wanted to be more excited by the Justice League Detroit tale. Ralph and Sue Dibny have been favorite characters of mine ever since Justice League Europe, but this is only an okay showing for them-- probably because Fabian Nicieza is an okay writer on his best days. There's nothing wrong with it, and it tries to have heart concerning a Justice League team for whom very few people are nostalgic, but this story ultimately didn't do much for me, leaning a little bit too hard on the perception that this version of the League was made up of losers. Just tell a good tale about them, don't tell a story about how you're telling a good tale about them, it comes across as defensive and undermines your point.

Next Week: Power Girl, the Huntress, the Justice Society of America, Infinity Inc., and the Seven Soldiers of Victory battle for their lives in Convergence: Infinite Earths, Book 1!

Hugos 2017 [Prelude]: The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu

Trade paperback, 512 pages
Published 2015 (originally 2008)
Acquired May 2017
Read June 2017

The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu

It took me longer to get into this book than it did the first Remembrance of Earth's Past novel-- no character here was ever as arresting as Ye Wenjie in The Three-Body Problem. What really carries you through the first two-thirds or so are the ideas: how would Earth react to an inevitable alien invasion centuries in the future, especially if Earth has entered a period of technological stagnation thanks to alien intervention, and if the aliens can monitor almost all electronic communications? The book answers these questions in a variety of ways, most of them interesting: I liked, for example, the Wallfacer Project, where certain men are granted the power to do anything necessary for Earth's defense, without explanation.

As one of them (Luo Ji, an astronomer and sociologist who seems to know very little about either astronomy or sociology) finds out, this can be a curse and a blessing. You can't not be a Wallfacer (because people will assume everything you do is part of the plan, including saying you have no plan) but you can also do whatever you want (because people will assume everything you do is part of the plan, though eventually they will get suspicious if you just buy a lot of fine wine). The social implications about how to plan a mass evacuation and such are also pretty interesting, and the various Wallfacer plans for Earth defense pretty epic. Unfortunately, Luo Ji isn't a great character, and outside of him, there are so many other characters that I struggled to keep track of them all. There's especially this weird, long subplot about a really weird romance Luo Ji has that had some pretty questionable aspects.

The last third of the novel, which jumps ahead two centuries (several main characters use suspended animation) really picks up, especially once the first alien probe arrives, and I found myself engrossed once more. There are multiple events that made perfect sense that I did not see coming, and the idea of the "dark forest" and the way it is used by Luo Ji is pretty interesting and clever. Not as good as The Three-Body Problem, but it contains the scientific and social inventiveness of the best epic hard sf.

Excitingly, this is the last Hugo "prelude" book I have to read: everything from here on out will be a finalist! Finally, my rankings will come together. (This is being posted on July 11, four days before the Hugo deadline, but I actually wrote it on June 10.) Five books to go!

Next Week: Now that the Wayfarer has arrived, it's time to settle into A Closed and Common Orbit!

Review: R.E.B.E.L.S.: The Coming of Starro by Tony Bedard, Andy Clarke, Claude St. Aubin, and Scott Hanna

Over the past week, my reviews of Big Finish's final two novel-to-audio Doctor Who adaptations appeared at Unreality SF: Original Sin and Cold Fusion, both featuring the seventh Doctor, Chris, and Roz, and the latter adding in the fifth Doctor, Adric, Nyssa, and Tegan for good measure.

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2010 (contents: 2009) 
Acquired April 2010
Previously read June 2010
Reread September 2016

R.E.B.E.L.S.: The Coming of Starro

​

Writer: Tony Bedard

Artists: Andy Clarke, Claude St. Aubin & Scott Hanna
Colorist: Jose Villarrubia
Letterers: Travis Lanham, Steve Wands

I read this book over six years ago; it would have been, like, my fifth DC universe space comic. Now I'm rereading it in preparation for finally reading the three follow-up volumes, and these days I've read twice that many space trade paperbacks, plus tons of uncollected space comics like The Omega Men, L.E.G.I.O.N., the original R.E.B.E.L.S., and more. I really enjoyed it the first time around, when it was part of my introduction to the larger world of DC space; I still really enjoyed it now that it I'm familiar with that larger world. There's even a tie-in to Tony Bedard's run on Legion of Super-Heroes, which I coincidentally read shortly before this reread, so I got more out of that this time, too.*

The only thing better than one Brainiac is two Brainiacs. Later in the series, they'll get up to three Brainiacs at once; sadly, they never bring in all four at once. (Or five? Who is Brainiac 4, anyway?)
from R.E.B.E.L.S. #2 (art by Andy Clarke)

Obviously this follows up on the events of L.E.G.I.O.N. and R.E.B.E.L.S. from the 1980s and '90s, as well as more recent space series. Adam Strange: Planet Heist and Omega Men showed that Vril Dox had reassumed command of a computer-controlled L.E.G.I.O.N.; now that computer has been taken over by Starro, L.E.G.I.O.N. robots are turning on their client worlds, and Vril Dox is on the run and has to build a team to reassert control over L.E.G.I.O.N. and defeat Starro. So far, the team includes old L.E.G.I.O.N. favorites Strata and Amon Hakk, plus some new characters too. Bedard has Vril Dox's voice pegged perfectly: he is the superintelligent master manipulator of old, even when he's on the run.

I miss Strata, but I also miss when Strata wasn't so whiny (i.e., when Strata wasn't yet married).
from R.E.B.E.L.S. #3 (art by Andy Clarke)

The art is great, too: both art teams have realistic styles that provide details facial expressions, which is good for adding to the character in a team-based book like this. The book moves quickly, operates on a great cosmic scale (we see Maltus, the Dominators, Earth, Cairn, and the Vega system), and has some fun action-- this is everything a space-based superhero comic should be, if you ask me.

The only thing that makes a jerk worse is the jerk being right.
from R.E.B.E.L.S. #6 (art by Claude St. Aubin & Scott Hanna)

* Brainac 5 suggests his ancestor recruit a team based on the 31st-century Legion of Super-Heroes in order to take back L.E.G.I.O.N. Weirdly, this causes Vril Dox to recruit a new team member patterned on Dawnstar... who never appeared in the threeboot Legion that Brainiac 5 hails from!

Steve and Hayley Watch Farscape: Season 1, Episodes 13-16

1x13: “The Flax”

• HAYLEY: While out teaching John how to fly one of Moya’s bio-mechanoid transport pods, Aeryn and him get trapped in an invisible net that pirates have set up to catch wayward spaceships, called “the flax.” The opening scene is the first time we see an interior of a transport pod. I couldn’t help but wonder-- is a transport pod also a living entity, or is it a detachable part of Moya herself?
• STEVE: Hm, I’m not sure. When Crichton installed bits of Leviathan technology in his pod in “Till the Blood Runs Clear,” did he say that was living?
• H: I don’t remember. Perhaps there can still be organic “parts” that aren’t technically living… or at least not sentient.
• S: Like the fingernails or hair of a spaceship? (Are fingernails living?)
• H: I was thinking more like meat grown in a lab. (No, they’re not. They’re just dead keratin, like hair.)
• S: Anyway, this episode ends up giving us three parallel plots: Crichton and Aeryn trying to stay alive on the transport pod as it’s stuck in space, D’Argo and a space rogue going in search of an old Luxan derelict, and Zhaan and Rygel trying to keep a space pirate off everyone’s back. Like a lot of Farscape episodes, it’s kind of all over the place.

• H: At first I quite liked Staanz, the former space pirate gone rogue. I say at first because there’s something a little problematic at the very end of the episode, which we have to talk about upfront because it determines Staanz’s pronouns. Staanz is played by a male actor and seems to present as masculine, but is in fact the female of her species. In some ways this is quite progressive genderbending (particularly for the 90s!), but the problematic bit comes in because this is used as a throwaway joke to kind of make D’Argo (as well as Staanz) look ridiculous.
• S: Hm. When watching the episode, my reaction here was mostly surprise/bafflement, but on reflection I can see some uncomfortable parallels to certain trans narratives. Like Staanz is not trans, but the “aha! surprise! I’m a different sex/gender than you thought!” reveal is one that comes up in stories about trans people.
• H: Exactly. The episode is nearly 20 years old, and there wasn’t as much awareness about trans issues back then, but I wanted to acknowledge the problematic bit before proceeding. So anyway, other than that, I did like Staanz. I liked her clothes and makeup design, and I like that she’s a “garbologist,” and her ship shows it. It is so cobbled together that it requires extreme physical exertion just to fly it! (Although how it could be powered by that little coal fire is beyond me.)
• S: Yeah, Staanz is a fun character in the Harry Mudd/Sabalom Glitz line, though there aspects to this subplot that didn’t seem adequately explained-- why couldn’t D’Argo rescue Crichton and Aeryn, and then look for his map? Why did Staanz need D’Argo’s help to raid the Luxan derelict, given she’d been on it before and taken stuff in the process?
• H: And why did D’Argo wait so long to change his mind? By the time he decided to go back to Aeryn and Crichton, it seems like he would only need like a minute or two more to grab his map and go! But at least that last one is addressed, when D’Argo is later ashamed of his indecisiveness.

• S: I did like his realization (prompted by Staanz) that he didn’t just want to find his son again, he wanted to still be a man his son could look up to. Anyway, I feel like we’re not addressing the most important aspect of this episode: the introduction of Unresolved Sexual Tension into the Farscape dynamic!
• H: The plot with Aeryn and Crichton has some tense moments, and I have to admit, I didn’t quite follow all of the this-will-kill-you-then-this-other-thing-will-bring-you-back logic as Aeryn had to vent the air of the pod while Crichton lacked a functioning space helmet. (Because who would ever think a spare helmet might just be useful to pack?) But it was effective at ramping up the situation, so by the time they think this is it and they’re about to die together, I totally buy that they start going at it and ripping off each other’s spacesuits.
• S: It was a little more intense than I expected. In Star Trek when people make out it’s always so sterile. I’m not sure what I think of it. I mean, I knew it was coming because of what I already know of the show, but it felt somewhat out-of-nowhere to me. They clearly have a deepening relationship, but I didn’t pick up a sexual vibe before now.
• H: I’m okay with it coming out of nowhere. I mean, they thought they only had a few minutes left alive, and they’re both lonely, so it seems like something real people might do. I’m a little concerned about where the show will take it from here, though; when they talked to each other after the fact, they were both super awkward and not at all handling it like mature adults.
• S: Well, Aeryn (for obvious reasons) doesn’t have a lot of emotional maturity. It is my suspicion that she has not been in a sexual relationship before (it seemed like she didn’t have a sex dream in “Rhapsody in Blue”). And Crichton isn’t exactly mature all the time either. But you gotta have that ongoing “UST”! (like in X-Files or Battlestar or what have you)
• H: I do think their responses are in character, but I am not sure unresolved sexual tension is something Farscape really needed. That’s where my concern comes in.

• S: Well, I guess we’ll see. Finally, I thought at first that the Rygel-plays-space-board-games plot was not up to much, but the way it ended was hilarious, so all was forgiven. Though like all space board games, it was dumb and had lights.
• H: It had flashing lights and electric shocks and holograms! If you’re gonna do a space board game, you might as well go all out.

1x14: “Jeremiah Crichton”

• STEVE: So apparently the referent of both the title and the plot is an old movie called Jeremiah Johnson, but this episode is definitely riffing on a stock sci-fi tv trope, where the main character “washes up” on a primitive planet and some native chick falls for him, leading to community strife. The original Star Trek had Kirk in “The Paradise Syndrome” and Stargate SG-1 gave us O’Neill in “A Hundred Days.” But this had some twists on the old formula, first among them that the problem is (almost) entirely caused by Crichton’s own petulance.
• HAYLEY: He differs from Kirk and O’Neill in that, although he (maybe) seems content to settle there, he doesn’t integrate into the community and isn’t interested in falling in love with anyone there.
• S: Exactly. In both Star Trek and SG-1, the crew gets there and rescues the main character near the episode’s end, so I was nicely surprised when Moya turned up on Polynesian World not even halfway through the episode-- and then Crichton told them to bug off! Also Crichton doesn’t get anyone pregnant.
• H: I don’t think Crichton is actually content to settle on the planet forever-- he is still holding out some hope that he will somehow find a way back to Earth. (Otherwise I think he would live in the village and fall for the girl.) But he definitely doesn’t want to go with D’Argo and Rygel when they turn up, because he’s still so mad at them for abandoning him (he thinks).

• S: I didn’t anticipate he would be mad, but it made perfect sense once it happened. And yeah, Crichton’s wanting the star map, and living next to his pod still, seem to indicate a lack of contentment. Regardless of some good twists on the formula, though, I still found this one somewhat rote, with the Jealous Cast-Aside Lover, for example.
• H: And don’t forget the second sci-fi trope: the primitives who believe someone who arrives on the planet is a god!
• S: Complete with overcomplicated rituals that will result in someone being sacrificed.
• H: I was almost actually okay with how this part of the plot played out. It does seem to make some sort of sense that, if these people’s ancestors knew that the Hynerians had trapped them on the planet and had the ability to one day arrive on the planet again and give them back the power to travel among the stars, that over the generations this could get twisted into a religion. Where it fell apart for me, though, was when it was revealed that the priests knew it was a lie and only maintained the religion for their own personal power!
• S: Why?
• H: That just… isn’t how religion works. I mean, I’m sure that there have been priests in history who don’t believe their own religion and are only there for the power. But I’m also sure they’re in the minority.

• S: Yeah, it’s a pretty cheap critique of religion. I was willing to forgive all weaknesses of this subplot on the basis that almost everything Rygel does in this episode is hilarious, from plodding across the beach when his chair’s batteries die, to his sheer satisfaction at finally being looked up to again, from his long nap, to his reaction to realizing these people adore him.
• H: It was a pretty amazing scene when he “rose up” in his levitating chair once the power drain was fixed, and waved at his devotees. There was some excellent puppetry happening with his expressions-- this is definitely another episode where you forget he’s not a real living being after all.
• S: Yeah, they clearly pushed the puppetry to the max in this one (which is maybe why Pilot appears in one scene the whole episode). I liked the distinction Rygel draws between being a sovereign and a god, and how uncomfortable he turns out to be as an object of religious worship. It would have been easy for him to ham it up and revel in it all, but they did something slightly more complicated.
• H: He’s no Meowth.

1x15: “Durka Returns”

• HAYLEY: As this episode began, I got to experience a rare event: knowing a little of what was to come when you didn’t!
• STEVE: What! How so?
• H: You didn’t remember who Durka was-- the Peacekeeper who had tortured Rygel back when he was first captured (as we saw in Rygel’s flashbacks in “PK Tech Girl.”) I remembered… maybe helped just a little by getting spoiled that he would be in more than one episode when I looked at his character page on the Farscape wiki back when we watched “PK Tech Girl.”
• S: I don’t see any reason I should remember the names of characters who never appeared on the show alive! And naming the episode after him seems a bit of a misnomer anyway, as I don’t think he’s the real villain of it, or the real focus.
• H: Good point. Durka comes aboard Moya along with two of the Nebari, Salis (who apparently redeemed Durka back in the day through brainwashing) and Chiana, who is a prisoner. Durka’s backstory is not really satisfactorily explained-- he apparently faked his own death? Leaving behind a pretty convincing corpse, wearing his own clothes and jewelry?

• S: In the middle of a pitched battle! Apparently. Yeah, the idea of bringing back Rygel’s torturer has merit, but the doing so requires no small contrivance. At first the focus of this one is on Durka, and if he’s really reformed (Rygel doesn’t think so and tries to kill him, not caring if Crichton gets in the way), but Salis always seems like the real villain, with his super-creepy affect, and the cruel way he treats Chiana.
• H: Not to mention the mysterious way that their race decimated the Zelbinion. Salis is pretty unsettling, but he dies about two-thirds of the way into the episode. Leaving Moya’s crew to deal with Chiana, the dangerous and unpredictable criminal who has escaped and is hiding somewhere on the ship, a completely un-reformed Durka, as well as the impending threat of more Nebari on their way while Moya is incapable of starbursting away.
• S: I basically thought this one was fine. The stuff with Rygel was probably the highlight, especially the way he insults Durka-- later claiming he did this to help Aeryn, but Aeryn points out he actually didn’t even remember she was there.

• H: Yeah, there were some good moments, but also some ridiculous ones. When Durka cuts his hair to go back to his evil buzzcut self, it’s pretty silly. No way could he give himself that haircut with that knife! It does get pretty tense, though, when he cuts off communications, and all the main characters are in different parts of the ship, acting in isolation.
• S: The most interesting thing is probably the fact that we have a new main character. Were you surprised? (As soon as I saw her, I knew what was happening, though I hadn’t realized she was added to the cast so early on.)
• H: I actually was suspicious that she might stay on right away, because I noticed your reaction when she first came on-screen. But then I kind of figured that maybe she would be a one-off character that ended up coming back later on as part of the main cast, because it didn’t seem like a typical part of a season to add a main character! I think it’s a good move, though, Chiana is pretty unsettling herself, and she definitely has the potential to add some more chaos to the mix, and clearly can have a good character arc from here.

• S: Though she was unjustly treated, it seems like she might have actually been justly imprisoned, which makes a change from all the other ex-prisoners on Moya.
• H: Well, Zhaan did murder someone...
• S: To save her planet!
• H: True. Chiana does seem like a much more ambiguous-verging-on-evil character. The final scene between her and Crichton is a good one. Crichton assures her that she has free will to either leave Moya when she chooses or stay and play by their rules. But he also asks her where she was when Salis died (since either she or Durka could have killed him), and she only smiles. And Gigi Edgley’s performance early in the episode is so strong, that even when no one can find Chiana and she doesn’t appear on-screen for a good while, you feel tense watching it because of the potential unpredictable threat she could be.
• S: Like Virginia Hey as Zhaan, she has a unique way of moving her body that makes her feel alien right away.
• H: I didn’t really follow the final scene, in which Durka is in his ship within Moya’s landing bay, and Crichton lobs a bomb at him and there’s stuff going on with the doors to the bay. It was a bit too fast and chaotic.
• S: I feel like this is true of a lot of scenes in the flight deck, I assume because they don’t have the budget to build the whole thing, which means there are never clear shots of where different parts of it are in relation to one another.
• H: The end result, of course, is that Durka gets away. (He’ll be back, I’m sure.)

1x16: “A Human Reaction”

• STEVE: In this episode, Crichton thinks he’s gone home to Earth… but he hasn’t. I feel like every “lost in space” show does one of these, or more than one of these, as a fakeout at some point. Voyager did, Stargate Atlantis did, Gilligan’s Island did, and if I’d watched Stargate Universe, I’m sure it did too.
• HAYLEY: Maybe it would have, if it hadn’t been cancelled after only two seasons.
• S: But I definitely knew it was a fakeout: not only is is the third of the six episodes on the Best of Season One DVD, but even the first time I saw it, I realized partway in that my college roommate James had actually told me the twist a couple years prior.
• H: I did not know that it was a fakeout, and was pretty surprised at first to see John end up back on Earth so soon. However, as soon as Rygel ends up dead and splayed open on a dissecting table, I knew that there was going to be some twist. I didn’t know at first that it was an illusion constructed from Crichton’s memories, though; my first thought was that there’d be some rewind button (which would have been pretty unsatisfying).

• S: Yeah, what is satisfying (and what I’d forgotten until the end) is that though Earth and the people on it were fake, Moya’s crew really did experience those events-- so we’re not watching an imaginary version of how they would react, but how they actually did react. Down to Crichton and Aeryn having sex, which was the thing that made me think it was definitely all a dream!
• H: I was surprised that Rygel (when he was alive, at least), D’Argo, and Aeryn were really there. This has major implications for that Unresolved Sexual Tension! Is it somewhat resolved now that they’ve had that night? That was a good sequence of scenes of them together on the run, by the way, from Aeryn tasting the rain to their kiss in the safehouse.

• S: Like the whole episode, that sequence was really well shot: the scene of Crichton sitting dejectedly on the bed in the safehouse, then him looking out the window at cloudy Sydney-- you really felt his isolation and despair. Similarly, the scene where he first appears on the beach was really good too, as was the kind of surreal scene where he discovers the aliens’ true form. And yeah, Aeryn’s delight over rain was great. (I also liked how Claudia Black played her up until that point, really morose and subdued and full of complicated emotions over the difficult choice of staying behind or going with Crichton.)
• H: I also liked the direction of the scenes where it cut back and forth between Crichton’s perspective-- with the aliens’ languages perfectly translated-- and anyone else’s perspective, with their weird sounding tongues. Each of the alien languages had its own rhythm and sounds, and I especially liked the click-like vocalizations present in Aeryn’s speech. The languages sounded very natural, and the transitions between them making sense and nonsense were smooth.
• S: But yeah, Crichton and Aeryn had sex for real, which I did not expect-- which I guess is one of my favorite things about Farscape so far, how it takes some of the cliches of sci-fi television and twists or ignores them. I guess we will have to wait to see the consequences of it. Overall, I really liked this one’s off-putting tone and feeling, though once Rygel died, before John and Aeryn went on the run, I felt the tension deflated a little.

• H: I agree. It’s definitely one of the strongest episodes so far, and I was at the edge of my seat for a lot of it, but I wonder if it would have been even better if Rygel didn’t die or if his death came later on in the episode (although I’m not sure what the stimulus for going on the run would be if not Rygel’s death, so I’m not even sure that could have worked). Still, even though it was clear to us that it wasn’t Earth, the moment that John finally catches on that something is up is a very interesting scene, and the tension only seems to rise from there. (You already mentioned how surreal the shots get once John is interacting with the aliens.)
• S: The only major flaw I can think of is that, now that we’ve seen more of him, I don’t think Kent McCord is a very good “tv dad.” Like, he’s not bad, but he lacks the paternal warmth of, say, Keith Mars or General Hammond-- and I think he’s supposed to have it.
• H: Yeah, like, he throws his bugged lapel pin in the water so that he and John can talk freely, but he still seems somewhat stiff. My only other complaint (which is not a flaw, really) is that now that we’ve got Chiana as a new main character, in the very next episode her only appearance is a two-second throwaway scene in the prologue!
• S: It oozes last-minute-cast-addition-means-minimal-changes-to-scripts-already-in-production. She’s still credited as a guest star!

All screencaps courtesy FarscapeCaps.com.

Review: Novel Science by Adelene Buckland

Hardcover, 377 pages
Published 2013

Borrowed from the library

Read August 2016

Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology
by Adelene Buckland

This fits comfortably into the "x and literature" model of Victorian literary criticism, where x is a scientific discipline: geology, in this case. Buckland explores how geology itself is a narrative, arguing, "there can be no meaningful distinction between science and literature, since writing can be (though it is not restricted to being) a mode of scientific practice" (26). I think that's overstating the case a bit, but Buckland's mission is, in my view, to show how literary narratives appear in geology, and how geological narratives appear in literature.

It's not the easiest read, even for literary criticism it's dense and obscure. I liked Buckland's discussions of the influence of Sir Walter Scott on nineteenth-century geology, and I really appreciated her clear delineation of what Charles Lyell and his colleagues actually believed (she argues the "catastrophist"/"uniformitarian" divide was exaggerated).

In these kind of books, I'm always much more interested in the literature than the science, and I much appreciated a thorough discussion of Charles Kingsley, moreso than I can remember seeing anywhere else. Everyone loves to talk about The Water-Babies, but (like me) Buckland recognizes his other writing has a lot to offer those interested in science, and provides extended readings of Glaucus, Alton Locke, Yeast, and Two Years Ago. I'm very familiar with the last of those; now I must get around to the first three. I'm also very curious about the scientist romance Wooers and Winners by Isabella Banks that she discusses.

I found her interpretations of Charlotte Brontë and Dickens less interesting, because I think the novels she discusses are less obviously about geology than the ones by Kingsley, and thus she's more doing the "but novel y is secretly about science x!" move that I'm a bit skeptical of. She kind of admits that, though, when she says Dickens knew science through its showmen: thus his science was visual, not textual.

A decent book if you like this kind of approach to literature and science.

Faster than a DC Bullet: Project Crisis!, Part LXVI: Convergence: Crisis, Book 1

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2015 (contents: 2015)
Borrowed from the library
Read April 2017

Convergence: Crisis, Book 1

Writers: Stuart Moore, David Gallaher, Marc Andreyko, Marv Wolfman, and Jeff Parker

Art: Gus Storms/Peter Gross & Mark Farmer, Steve Ellis & Ande Parks, Carlos D'Anda, Roberto Viacava & Andy Owens, and Tim Truman & Enrique Alcatena
Colors: John Rauch, Gabe Eltaeb, and Jon Kalisz
Letters: Pat Brosseau, Dave Sharpe, Steve Wands, and Rob Leigh

The basic premise of Convergence is that some as-yet-unknown foe has plucked cities out of time from all across the multiverse. Not out of the multiverse just explicated by Grant Morrison in The Multiversity, but from the continuities of bygone days. The series thus becomes a way to visit characters and premises that don't fit even within Morrison's meticulously mapped multiverse of 52 Earths. I actually picked up some of these stories in single issues as they came out: ones I had particular affection for, like the Legion of Super-Heroes, the Connor Hawke Green Arrow, the Justice League International, Oracle, the Renee Montoya Question, and the Ted Kord Blue Beetle.

Yes it did mean something. Just let it go, Marv!
from Convergence: Adventures of Superman #1 (script by Marv Wolfman, art by Roberto Viacava & Andy Owens)

This volume, for example, features characters from shortly before Crisis on Infinite Earths trapped in two different cities: the Giffen/Levitz-era Legion of Super-Heroes are in 30th-century Metropolis, while three different Green Lanterns, Batman and the Outsiders, Superman and Supergirl, and Hawkman and Hawkgirl are all trapped in Gotham. The stories are somewhat formulaic: the first issue establishes what the status quo has been beneath the dome (usually it has made folks mopey), then the dome comes down and the heroes have to fight it out with the denizens of another city, only one of which can survive. As a result, some of these tales prove forgettable-- I don't give a shit about the Outsiders or the Hawks, and the Superman/Supergirl story is only interesting as yet another attempt by Marv Wolfman to atone for the sins of Crisis on Infinite Earths.

Was this building on a preexisting ship, or was this original to Convergence?
from Convergence: Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes #1 (script by Stuart Moore, art by Gus Storms & Mark Farmer)

But the best writers really make something of this. Like I said, I'd bought the Legion tale here, so it was a reread, but I was still surprised by how much I liked it. It starts a little on the mopey side, but as the Legion is forced into a battle with the Atomic Knights, from DC's postapocalyptic setting of the Great Disaster, there's a nice little affirmation of both groups' commitments to peace, and how difficult that can be in trying circumstances, yet it is no less important. Brainiac 5 gets some good jokes, and I like how the story discusses the transition of Superboy to Superman. The only thing to not like is that the artwork, especially that in the first issue by Gus Storms and Mark Farmer, is jarringly unlike the actual art of the era this story is replicating, too light and airy.

The ideal Guy Gardner story: ridiculous and fun. As opposed to most 1990s Guy Gardner stories, ridiculous and dumb.
from Convergence: Green Lantern Corps #2 (script by David Gallaher, art by Steve Ellis & Ande Parks)

The other story I really liked was the Green Lantern one, which focuses on Guy Gardner, but also co-stars Hal Jordan and John Stewart. When Gotham was plucked out of time, Guy was in a coma; he woke up, but powerless like all the other residents of the dome-- and discovered that while he was asleep, Hal had tried to marry his fiancée! Guy is often a joke character, but Dave Gallaher and Steve Ellis take him completely seriously here, which makes him all the more awesome. He's a hothead, but that's because he's raging at the rough hand life has dealt him: here we see his nurturing side (he's working in athletics at an elementary school) and his attempts to heal (he's visiting Leslie Thompkins for regular therapy sessions). Sometimes he's too impulsive for his own good, but he means well, and all three Lanterns overcome their differences here to save the city from a dangerous adversary. It's a fun, well-executed comic that pays unexpected dividends of enjoyment and depth.

Next Week: Wonder Woman, Swamp Thing, the Flash, the New Teen Titans, and Justice League Detroit battle for their lives in Convergence: Crisis, Book 2!

Reading Roundup Wrapup: June 2017

Pick of the month: This Census-Taker by China Miéville. Obviously I read a lot of books this month, and since many of them were Hugo finalists, many of them were good books. So this was a tough decision to make, and I could have picked a lot of other books, probably, and felt okay with my choice. But I did find Miéville's novella really evocative, and really interesting, and as I write this it has the top spot on my Hugo ballot for Best Novella, though I have two more of the novellas yet to read.

All books read:
1. Women’s Suffrage Literature, Volume VI: The Call by Edith Ayrton Zangwill
2. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
3. Alien Stripper Boned from Behind by the T-Rex by Stix Hiscock
4. The Jewel and Her Lapidary by Fran Wilde
5. New & Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era by Mary Kaldor
6. The Geek Feminist Revolution by Kameron Hurley
7. Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Volume 4 by Jerry Siegel, Edmond Hamilton, and Otto Binder
8. Marriage by H. G. Wells
9. The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu
10. This Census-Taker by China Miéville
11. Doctor Who: Cinderella and the Magic Box by Justin Richards
12. Science in Victorian Manchester: Enterprise and Expertise by Robert H. Kargon
13. Monstress, Volume One: Awakening by Marjorie Liu
14. A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
15. Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire
16. Convergence: Infinite Earths, Book 2 by Jeff Parker, Scott Lobdell, Dan Jurgens, Brian Buccellato, and Simon Oliver
17. Convergence: Zero Hour, Book 1 by Justin Gray, Christy Marx, Ron Marz, Frank Tieri, and Fabian Nicieza
18. Star Trek Cats by Jenny Parks
19. Star Trek: The Original Series: From History’s Shadow by Dayton Ward
20. Glaucus; or, The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley
21. Goldfinger by Ian Fleming
22. All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
23. The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle
24. The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher
25. The Serpentine Wall by Jim DeBrosse
26. The Science of Empire: Scientific Knowledge, Civilization, and Colonial Rule in India by Zaheer Baber

You know, I think I average around 16-17 reviews per month with my M/T/W/R review posting system, so though I am keeping up with writing the reviews, the posting of them recedes ever more distant into the future.

All books acquired:
1. Gingerbread Gems of Willimantic, Connecticut by Michele Palmer
2. Willimantic Industry and Community: The Rise and Decline of a Connecticut Textile City by Thomas R. Beardsley
3. Glaucus; or, The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley
4. Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby by Charles Hatfield
5. Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes, Volume One by Gerry Conway and Paul Levitz with Jack C. Harris, Paul Kupperberg, and Jim Starlin
6. Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Volume 4: Stratagem by Yoshiki Tanaka
7. Monstress, Volume One: Awakening by Marjorie Liu

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 652 (up 2)
Books remaining on "To review" list: 20 (down 15!)

In other news: Two reviews up at Unreality SF last week, of two recent Doctor Who: Short Trips, both by Jonathan Barnes: Liv Chenka (and the eighth Doctor) in "The World beyond the Trees" and Jago and Litefoot (and the tenth Doctor!) in "The Jago & Litefoot Revival."

A Spectrum of Beverages, A Spectrum of Guilt

Certainly every family has its idiosyncratic foodways, and of course we're part of them ourselves-- they don't arrive despite us. Possibly I belong to the only family where people ate mashed potatoes for dinner, with a side of meat (chicken, cube steak, meatload, whatever) because my sheer love of mashed potatoes meant I would demand that for dinner, and then whatever else my mother wanted to make with it.

When I think about forbidden food, I think about "junk juice." It's apparently called "Little Hug," that juice you get in a barrel:

I still remember being in a grocery store with my mother and seeing pallets of the stuff by the checkout lane and asking for it. "Oh you don't want that," my mom said, "that's junk juice." So in the way you do at that age, I was convinced it was actually called junk juice for years, maybe not until high school did I learn that wasn't the case, and I still think of it being called that. I did tell my wife about this a few years ago, and she bought some for me, and I learned that despite my pining for this forbidden pleasure all these years, it actually really wasn't very good. Also I kind of felt guilty.

Speaking of guilt, if there was one unbreakable rule in my family, it was that you didn't buy pop in a restaurant. As far as my parents were concerned, it was a straight line from buying pop to a life of poverty. (And maybe, if you have a family of five being supported on one income, that's true.) No combo meals in our family: you bought a couple things off the dollar menu and got a cup of water. Of course we chafed under this for years, but my father was resolute, reminding us that for the cost of a glass of Coke in a restaurant you get get a whole two-liter of Big K Cola.

This I internalized too, to the extent that in high school I'd go out with my friends to White Castle or whatever and be unable to order pop, just thinking of the disapproval radiating from my father. I just couldn't bring myself to do it. I guess we do all become our parents, whether we like it or not.

Well, maybe not. One thing we had without fail as children with dinner was a glass of milk. Specifically skim milk. Now people tell me that skim milk is the most terrible form of milk, but having been raised on it, my main conclusion is that it makes you hate all milk. Skim milk itself is no fun to drink, but having been raised on skim, all other forms of milk are cloyingly thick. (On those rare occasions we would buy chocolate milk, we would mix it 50/50 with skim milk to thin it out.)

When I moved out on my own, I dutifully bought a half-gallon of skim milk and drank a glass of it with dinner every night. I still wasn't enjoying the experience anymore than I had for the previous twenty-three years of my life. After about a month, I think, it dawned on me: No one is making me do this anymore. So I stopped drinking milk, stopped feeling guilty, and I've been much happier ever since. Will I inflict it upon my own children? I guess I will cross that bridge when I come to it.

It wasn't all bad when it came to beverages in my family, though. Sometimes my father would treat us to vanilla milk, a mysterious beverage only he could make, consisting of milk, vanilla, sugar, and a "secret ingredient" that meant we could never make it on our own. Now that stuff is delicious, but because my father has never revealed the secret, I can't make it for myself.

#554: What messages about food and eating have you learned from your family?

Review: Simians, Cyborgs, and Women by Donna Haraway

Hardcover, 287 pages
Published 1991 (contents: 1978-89)

Borrowed from the library

Read January 2013

Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
by Donna J. Haraway

This volume collects revised versions of ten essays by Donna Haraway: most famous, of course, is the “Cyborg Manifesto," on which I have no doubt I could spend this entire review and only begin to scratch the surface. I, however, found “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” to be the most interesting of the essays here. Analysing scientific objectivity, Haraway begins by claiming that academics and feminists discussing objectivity “have used a lot of toxic ink and trees processed into paper decrying what they have meant and how it hurts us. The imagined ‘they’ constitute a kind of invisible conspiracy of masculinist scientists and philosophers replete with grants and laboratories; and the imagined ‘we’ are the embodied others… a few thousand readers composed mostly of science haters” (183). (There’s definitely some resonance here with the Victorian critiques of science I study; see, for example, Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science.) Haraway goes on, however, to claim that when this perspective is “lurking underneath” her own work, it consists of “paranoid fantasies and academic resentments” (183).

After discussing various forms of feminist response to claims of scientific objectivity, Haraway posits, “So, I think my problem and ‘our’ problem is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own ‘semiotic technologies’ for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a ‘real’ world” (187). Science must acknowledge the existence of other knowledges that cannot be considered objectively while at the same time still being able to make claims about the functioning of the universe that apply to more than one person. Haraway wants her female successor to science to have “a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a ‘real’ world” even if they do not lean on scientific means of understanding per se.

Haraway’s essay—almost a manifesto for feminist objectivity—provides a strong framework for analyzing gender in science. Haraway’s description of the gender dynamics of scientific vision says that women can possess scientific detachment, but only if the old fantasy of “disembodied vision” is discarded: “The eyes have been used to signify a perverse capacity – honed to perfection in the history of science tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and male supremacy – to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything in the interests of unfettered power” (188). This happens, Haraway claims, because the gaze possesses the “unmarked positions of Man and White” (188).

Her description of the disembodied eye is attention-grabbing: “Vision in this technological feast becomes unregulated gluttony; all perspective gives way to infinitely mobile vision, which no longer seems just mythically about the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere, but to have put the myth into ordinary practice. And like the god-trick, this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters” (189). Though Haraway does not directly mention women as victims in this instance, the claim that the disembodied eye rapes the world certainly creates that impression

Finally Haraway’s analysis gives way to presenting an alternative form of feminine science. She claims that “our insisting metaphorically on the particularity and embodiment of all vision… and not giving in to the tempting myths of vision as route to disembodiment and second-birthing, allows us to construct a usable, but not an innocent, doctrine of objectivity” (189). Haraway calls for a new form of vision where the theoretical is connected to the physical and embodied practices of sight. Her final vision is of “the joining of partial views and halting voices into a collective subject position that promises a means of ongoing finite embodiment, of living within limits and contradictions, i.e., of views from somewhere” (196).

Of course I like Haraway, because I think she calls for what the best of the nineteenth-century scientist novels were calling for. Her distillation of the stereotypical feminist response to science reminds me of Heart and Science, and Heart and Science is terrible. But her own position reminds me of Middlemarch, and Middlemarch is magnificent.