Reading Roundup Wrapup: December 2019

Pick of the month: Shadows Beneath, edited by Peter Ahlstrom. Better than Middlemarch!? Well, no, but Middlemarch has already received this highly coveted honor once before. I did really enjoy this, though: great stories, and a great insight into the writing process of several accomplished professionals and Howard Tayler.

All books read:
1. Shadows Beneath: The Writing Excuses Anthology edited by Peter Ahlstrom
2. Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor, Vol 2: The Weeping Angels of Mons by Robbie Morrison
3. The Walking Dead: Compendium Four by Robert Kirkman
4. Thud!: A Novel of Discworld by Terry Pratchett
5. Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor, Vol 2: Serve You by Al Ewing & Rob Williams
6. Once Upon a Parsec: The Book of Alien Fairy Tales edited by David Gullen
7. Middlemarch by George Eliot
8. Doctor Who: The Ninth Doctor, Vol 1: Weapons of Past Destruction by Cavan Scott
9. Doctor Who: Twice Upon A Time by Paul Cornell

All books acquired:
1. Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the Twentieth Century by Sarah Cole
2. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
3. Star Trek: Discovery: Dead Endless by Dave Galanter
4. Doctor Who: Twice Upon a Time by Paul Cornell
5. H G Wells: A Literary Life by Adam Roberts
6. Thor: The Mighty Avenger by Roger Langridge
7. Thor by Kieron Gillen: The Complete Collection by Kieron Gillen
8. Running from the Devil: A Memoir of a Boy Possessed by Steve Kissing + Charles Santino
9. The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition by Ursula K. Le Guin
10. Collected Multi-Doctor Comic Strips, Volume 2: The Clockwise War: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine by Scott Gray, Alan Barnes, Tim Quinn, Paul Cornell, and Gary Gillatt
11. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
12. The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu

As you might imagine, a fair few of these were Christmas presents, specifically #6-12. #11-12 were specifically from LibraryThing's gift exchange, SantaThing.

Books on "To be read" list: 657 (up 6)
Books on "To review" list: 14 (no change)

Review: Doctor Who: Revolutions of Terror by Nick Abadzis, Elena Casagrande, et al.

Comic PDF eBook, n.pag.
Published 2015 (contents: 2014)
Acquired September 2018
Read November 2019

Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor, Vol 1: Revolutions of Terror

Writer: Nick Abadzis

Artist: Elena Casagrande with Michele Pasta
Colorist: Arianna Florean with Claudia Sg, Rabiola Ienne, Valentina Cuomo, Azzurra Florean
Letters: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

A couple years ago, I read through all of IDW's Doctor Who comics thanks to a Humble Bundle. In 2014, Titan took over the Doctor Who comics license from IDW, and in 2018, they put together their own Humble Bundle of a bunch of their earlier stuff. So here I am, reading it all. Unlike IDW, which usually just published an ongoing featuring the current Doctor and TARDIS team, Titan publishes multiple ongoings, plus miniseries, featuring the current Doctor and past ones. Rather than read this all in chronological order, though, I'm sticking to publication order to get the most out of Titan's crossovers.

from Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor #2
(art by Elena Casagrande)

So it all launches with this, Revolutions of Terror, featuring the tenth Doctor and a new companion, the American would-be art student Gabby Gonzalez. This collection contains two stories; the first, "Revolutions of Terror," is a very effective pastiche of a Russell T Davies new-companion episode (e.g., "Rose," "Smith and Jones"), telling the story of alien parasites in New York City on the Day of the Dead from the perspective of Gabby and her family. Nick Abadzis's writing is decent, but the real star is Elena Casagrande's artwork, which really brings the whole family and their environment and the Doctor and the monsters to life. This was a fun, nostalgic tie-in: you won't be bowled over by this, but if you enjoyed Doctor Who from 2005 to 2009, you'll probably like this take on it. I found the rules of the parasites overly fiddly (I think Russell himself could have handled it more elegantly), but otherwise, it was on point.

The second story, "The Arts in Space," was less effective. Clearly also pastiching an RTD genre, the throw-the-companion-into-the-crazy-future one (e.g., "The End of the World," "Gridlock"), but I got lost amidst all the stuff about block transfer computation, and the actions of the villain didn't ring true emotionally. I did really love the bits drawn to look like Gabby's own drawings, as she writes about her journeys to her friend Cindy. But otherwise, I struggled with this one. It's just two issues compared to "Revolutions"'s four, so maybe Abadzis's stories need more time to breathe.

Elena Casagrande used to do a lot of fill-in work on IDW's Star Trek titles, often hired to imitate the work of David Messina, so I was really gratified to see her get to soar in her own style here.

Review: Discworld: Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett

Mass market paperback, 420 pages
Published 2013 (originally 1993)
Borrowed from my wife
Read August 2019

Men at Arms: A Novel of Discworld by Terry Pratchett

The U.S. Harper edition of the first City Watch novel gave away something important on its back cover; this one does in its cover image, I reckon, letting me put some clues together more quickly than I reckon Pratchett intended. But it's hard to not look at the front cover!

Despite that, this was another enjoyable book. The Night Watch is expanding, and for affirmative action reasons, that means nonhumans are being recruited: dwarves, trolls, werewolves. Meanwhile, Captain Vimes is getting married and will have to step down as head of the Watch (it's too plebeian a position for one about to join the patrician classes).

It's funny, but it's also touching. There's a lot of good jokes about trolls, but also an unexpected death. There's also some pointed stuff about the seductive power of violence. I think this was less focused plot-wise than Guards! Guards! but also more honed character- and theme-wise; Pratchett was converging toward what he really wanted to do with this series, step by step.

Bring Back Firefly (No, Please Don't)

I was running an errand the other day when the announcer lady on our local NPR station (WUSF) had to read a sponsorship during All Things Considered. Apparently, it was sponsored by the revival of Mad about You... on Spectrum Originals!?

One. This show did not need to come back. Two. There doesn't need to be a special streaming service from Spectrum.

Are there hordes of people signing up for Spectrum because they want to see what the Mad about You characters are up to twenty years on? It seems unlikely that people pick their cable on the basis of streaming programming, and even if they did... Mad about You doesn't exactly have the draw of The Mandalorian, does it?

I was at a holiday party a couple weeks ago, just after the debut of Disney Plus. Was I, I was asked many times, watching The Mandalorian.

No, I said, I'm over it.

Over what?

Over serialized streaming versions of things I liked when I was a kid. As far as I can tell they're all that exist. Revivals, continuations, sequels, prequels, adaptations. The Mandalorian, His Dark Materials, Mystery Science Theatre 3000, Veronica Mars, Anne with an "E", The Magic School Bus, Animaniacs, Watchmen, Carmen Sandiego, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Girl Meets World, Battlestar Galactica, apparently twenty-seven different Marvel streaming shows for Disney Plus, and, of course, Star Trek.

And then you add on the revivals of things I could have been into but wasn't: Voltron, Samurai Jack, DuckTales, Queer Eye, Twin Peaks, Riverdale, The Tick, Gilmore Girls, Charmed, Roswell, Lost in Space, The X-Files, The Dark Crystal, Young Justice, The Clone Wars, Dune, Gremlins, Lizze McGuire...

Some of these are reboots, of course, but so many of them are revivals: shows that pick up years later with the same characters.

Why!? Well, obviously, nostalgia. And obviously it works. I couldn't move for people asking me about The Mandalorian. And obviously it works on me. There are exactly two tv shows I'm able to keep up with on a regular basis these days: Doctor Who and Star Trek, and the second of those is entirely a nostalgia-driven revival of something I liked when I was a kid... and is only about to get moreso, with the imminent release of Picard. What has Picard been up to since he last sailed into the unknown in 2003's Nemesis? I'm ready to find out, of course. So I might be opposed to this kind of thing in principle, but get the right show in practice, and I'll sign up for your dumb proprietary streaming service and watch it. The number of people I know who complain about the proliferation of unnecessary streaming services... and then turned around and picked up Disney Plus seems to indicate everyone has their weakness.

Why I don't I like these things? I guess it comes down to a feeling that, well, the moment has passed. I really, really liked Veronica Mars. But even by season two, it was clear the format was strained... and if you revive it twelve years later, is it even really the same show? Part of the enjoyment of the original was that it was about a high school girl who dared to investigate murders in her drama-ridden social circle... is a show about a 30-something P.I. the same show, even if it fills my desire to find out what happened to its main character When She Grew Up?* (I just read this spoiler-ridden article which makes it clear: no, it never can be.)

This was driven home when I posted a similar complaint on facebook a couple months ago. People popped up in the comments with what shows they wanted revived. The Middleman, Firefly, Community, Malcolm in the Middle (I think this is actually happening now), Gargoyles, Dead Like Me... Some of these, sure, whatever... but Firefly? C'mon, Joss Whedon, you had your chance, it didn't work, you had another chance with a whole movie, IT'S OVER. I can't even imagine that a Firefly revival would be very good. Everyone's seventeen years older and fatter (except for Morena Baccarin, who doesn't age), and what that show was trying to do is now done all over the place all the time. And could it even be as good as the show all the Browncoats have been imagining in their heads all this time? Of course not. The same friend is the one who suggested Community, though, so obviously his judgement is suspect.

I think these revivals also annoy me because there's less room for something dynamic and interesting. Adaptations can put very new spins on old material: the world would be a lesser place without, say, Battlestar Galactica. But revivals are by their nature backward-looking. This isn't reinventing an old story for a new age, but prolonging an old story in spite of a new age.

You might say, Steve, just don't watch these shows if they don't interest you. And, sure, yeah, I will probably never watch The Mandalorian or WandaVision, and I will certainly never watch Mad about You. But I think a lot about this thing that a friend of mine said:

Like, yes, I can not watch them... but even the few I do watch suck my personal bandwidth away from other, more original things-- and worse, culturally, I feel like our bandwidth is sucked up by them. If everyone is talking about Baby Yoda and the Skeksis, how will I know about what new original shows exist? How will they even get made?

All of this is to say: they can bring back Wonderfalls. That's a show cut down in its prime that utterly deserves five more seasons of brilliance.

But that's it. No more. Especially not Mad about You; maybe I just hallucinated Lisa Peakes saying that, and we're all safe.

#297: What old television shows would you bring back?

* Alternate title for this post, but I decided it didn't quite work: "A long time ago we used to be viewers, but I haven't watched you lately at all."

Review: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

Trade paperback, 422 pages
Published 2013

Acquired December 2016
Previously read May 2017
Reread November 2019

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

I used to say Ancillary Justice was the best sf novel of the last five years... until I realized it was over six years old. Oh well. But as soon as I was assigned an sf creative writing course, I knew this would be the novel I would teach. I really like the way it handles worldbuilding, and the way it makes something new of old sf tropes. For example, in an essay on John Scalzi's Whatever, Leckie points out that the idea of an evil empire reusing corpses of conquered people as soldiers is an sf staple... but the story of Justice of Toren is an interesting twist, because once "liberated," her body doesn't have any desire to go back to who she was, because she doesn't remember being that person. She is Justice of Toren.

I also like the way she handles exposition. We talked about Jo Walton's concept of "incluing" a lot in my class; Leckie argues in an essay of her own that the infodump has its place, and sometime it is better to tell than show. On the one hand, the first few pages of Ancillary Justice throw a lot of stuff at you, to my students' consternation. What's a Radchaai? A segment? How can the narrator be a "piece of equipment"? On the other hand, come chapter 2, we get some clear-cut explanations: "Nineteen years, three months, and one week before [...], I was a troop carrier orbiting the planet Shis'urna" (9). And then the narrator just spells out a lot of stuff for us. What's a troop carrier? What's Shis'urna? How do the ships communicate? All just told, because we need to know.

But she keeps dropping in little details she doesn't entirely explains; at one point, she mention "gates" and I asked my students what this meant. To my surprise none of them knew! Leckie is, of course, banking that you have enough previous knowledge of sf to know that one from context. But it's also not important on p. 9, and when it becomes important (when Justice of Toren enters gate space on p. 217), the narrator just tells us what a gate is and how it works. The notorious gender stuff is largely done through incluing, on the other hand, maybe meant to indicate just how much it's second (or first?) nature to our viewpoint characters. I also really liked the quick switching of viewpoints in ch. 2 to explore how the ancillaries work, though this requires some effort from the reader (as Walton discusses in her examination of incluing); if you don't pay close attention, you'll be more confused, not more elucidated by the time this part is over. Leckie is really good at this kind of thing. (Except when it comes to the structure of the Radchaai military vessels, which confused my students, and confused me when I tried to explain it; I had to pull up a chart from the Internet to get it all straight.)

It's always been interesting to me that the story's play with gender-- which got all of the press when it came out-- is actually sort of irrelevant. Compare The Left Hand of Darkness, which is largely about Genly Ai's discomfort with the unusual form of gender he encounters on Gethen. But you could delete the lack of gender in Radchaai civilization from Ancillary Justice, and in terms of plot and character, I think it would basically be the same novel. The "Big Idea" of the novel is about colonization and the ways other cultures are absorbed and assimilated and disposed of.

We did explore how readers react to the lack of explicit gender information on the characters. Most, like myself, filled in information based on guesswork and, to be honest, stereotypes. I imagined Awn as female (because she seems young and innocent), Skaaiat as male (because she is a bit of a "player" with Awn), Dariet as male (because she's in a position of authority and commanding), Isaaia as female (because she's snobby and reads as "bitchy"). On the other hand, I always perceive Seivarden as female even though we're explicitly told he's male! I think it's because of the snobbishness? I'm not sure. Most of my students did similar categorization; others had different reasons. One said she liked imagining all of Anaander Mianaai's bodies as female just because women evil overlords are so rare in science fiction. Some students didn't categorize at all: one just took all the female pronouns at face value and thought of everyone as a woman. I said I wished I could do the same, but some things were too ingrained and you can't entirely control your imagination.

So why is this aspect of the novel there? This is what I demanded my students tell me, but there are a couple reasons I had in mind. One is that the Radchaai can't be entirely about the Big Idea, because then they become one-note. All the tea stuff, though fun, creates a parallel to the British Empire, reinforcing the imperialist critique running through the novel. The gender system is largely orthogonal to the issues of colonialism and classism in the novel, thus making the Radchaai a more complex, fleshed out society. Utterly evil in some senses, but highly progressive in others.

The second is that it does reinforce the novel's themes. In a large part, this is a novel about judging people not by who they are, but by how they act. Anaander Mianaai misjudges Justice of Toren; Seivarden misjudges Breq; Breq misjudges Seivarden; the Radch misjudges entire civilizations. It's about how you need to take the action that is most good, not the action that is expected. The reader doesn't make these misjudgements because the reader doesn't have Radchaai classism culturally ingrained. But the reader does make a whole different series of misjudgements because they have an entirely different system of gender culturally ingrained. To read Ancillary Justice successfully, you have to learn to overcome your own preconceptions about how the world works-- just as the characters did.

(Oddly, this did expose to me that the character who most learns the central lesson of the novel isn't the protagonist; Breq occasionally misjudges, but usually reserves judgement until she sees people act. Breq already knows all this. It's Seivarden who learns this lesson, and Seivarden who thus changes the most across the course of the novel. Which is probably why Seivarden is my favorite character in the trilogy.)

Review: Doctor Who: The Novel of the Film by Gary Russell

Mass market paperback, 223 pages
Published 1996

Acquired September 2019
Read October 2019

Doctor Who by Gary Russell

I've finished reading the seventh Doctor New Adventures I own, but I have several eighth Doctor books I've never read, and those were the spiritual and literal successors to the NAs, so I'm going to do those next. Before I begin, though, I picked up a book I've always been curious about but have never read: the novelization of the 1996 tv movie starring Paul McGann. It's often called "Doctor Who: The Novel of the Film" (including on the spine), but the title page clearly gives the title as just "Doctor Who," a move that I'm sure has led to absolutely no confusion.

It's by Gary Russell, so it's as workmanlike as you'd expect. Russell fleshes out a lot of background bits. Some work (the prologue with the seventh Doctor is nice, and he almost makes the ending work), but some fall flat (there are bits of the film that are just there to look cool, but fall apart if you think about them, and I would argue that explaining them just makes it worse). I think its biggest problem is that the film succeeds in two areas: visual style and Paul McGann's performance. But those are largely uncaptured on the page; the cool moments don't come across, and the Doctor fades into the background without McGann's charisma.

But hey, if you want a 200-page diversion about the best Doctor, it will do nicely, and I suspect it works well as a transition between the NAs and the EDAs. I guess I'll find out when I read Vampire Science! (Of course, as soon as I track this down used, it's announced that they're re-releasing it as a Target novel with added material. Bah.)

Next Week: The tenth Doctor returns in Revolutions of Terror, as I begin to explore Titan's Doctor Who comics!

Review: Once Upon a Parsec edited by David Gullen

Kindle eBook, n.pag.
Published 2019
Acquired October 2019
Read December 2019

Once Upon a Parsec: The Book of Alien Fairy Tales
edited by David Gullen

This science fiction anthology has a fairy tale theme: some of the stories are in the form of fairy tales, others are about the telling of tales. Some are both! The title uses the word "alien" but sometimes it means humans on alien planets-- though many others are alien creatures on alien worlds with no acknowledged connections to humanity at all. Like any anthology outside of a really good "best of," the stories are hit and miss; I found the ones that just were fairy tales (but for alien cultures) to be on the weaker side, often too weird and inscrutable-- or too straightforward. The ones more about the telling of tales were usually better, in my opinion, going beyond the frame to say something about why we tell fairy tales.

Along those lines, it's probably bad for the book that one of its best stories is its first, "The Little People" by Una McCormack. It's about human settlers on a distant world, alternating between a second-person narrative about the child of settlers telling themselves the story of colonization and the third-person narrative of the actual colonization. Like all sf, it reflects back on our own world... in this case, quite damningly... but it is (as always for Una) beautifully told. I also liked Liz Williams's "Starfish," which takes as its subject the difficulty of doing something like translating a story from an alien culture to a human one.

That said, Chris Beckett's "The Land of Grunts and Squeaks" was a very good example of what you can do with a "straight" alien fairy tale. It's a tale from the culture of insect species that's in telepathic communion, and it's about a curse: the curse of having that taken away! "Children were left alone with fears which no one else could see. Lovers could no longer feel each other's love. A woman would look at her life's companion and think, 'I'm sorry about those angry feelings I had earlier on. I truly love you with all my heart', but her friend would have no idea she'd had that thought. Tender caresses lost their meaning, becoming no more than one skin touching another." Imagine such a terrible world! It works because it communicates an alien value system and sensibility at the same time it tells a pretty simple story; the weaker examples just tell a system but don't communicate a worldview. Other good stories of this type included "The Tale of Suyenye the Wise, the Ay, and the People of the Shining Land" by Gaie Sebold and "Pale Sister" by Jaine Fenn. There were, perhaps, a few too many like these, though, and after a while, the book got a little monotonous. I want to say that the best stories were up front, but maybe it's just that I got used to most of the themes contained within.

Review: The Great Ten by Tony Bedard, Scott McDaniel, and Andy Owens

I've long had a thing for non-American superhero teams. There's just something about seeing the inherently American sensibilities of the superhero genre filtered through another culture's ideologies. (Even if it's often for an American publisher, by an American writer!) Did you know that the first two comic books I ever collected were Alpha Flight (Canada's premier superhero team) and Justice League Europe?

So as soon as it was announced, I wanted to read The Great Ten, a miniseries chronicling China's superhero team. It is a testament to the very long list of uncollected comic books I want to buy that I am now finally reading it, almost exactly a decade after it began release.

The Great Ten was created by Grant Morrison and J. G. Jones, and originally appeared in 52. They then appeared here and there before finally getting their own series written by Tony Bedard and drawn by Scott McDaniel (whose work on Green Arrow was so-so). The Great Ten are not "superheroes" technically, but "super-functionaries"-- government bureaucrats with powers. Each member of the Great Ten gets their own spotlight issue... except that if look at the covers, you'll see that the numbering goes "6 of 10"... "7 of 10"... "8 of 9"... "9 of 9"... Whoops. One assumes that the sales just weren't there to support a ten-issue miniseries. Bedard deals with this by having issue #9 focus on two of them, and justifies that choice by putting them in a relationship.

The problem with The Great Ten is that it's serving too many masters. As set up by Bedard, each issue has to do three things: 1) give a flashback origin story for its focal character, 2) give its focal character an adventure in the present day, and 3) advance an ongoing storyline about the old gods returning to China to destroy communism. I think you could do two of these things in an issue, but not three; they jockey for space. We do get potted biographies of each of the Great Ten... but their present-day adventures are rarely character-ful, and we barely get to see how the members of the team interact with each other-- surely one of the primary joys of team books! (And Bedard should know, as someone who did a good job on three different team books I've read: R.E.B.E.L.S., the post-Simone Birds of Prey, and the Legion of Super-Heroes threeboot. Though, on the other hand, he also co-wrote Team 7.)

Sometimes the overarching story gets crowded out by the characters. It feels like the initial attack of the gods goes on for five or six issues, but nothing actually happens. The political turns that come later in the story are confusing and rushed. (Part of the issue might be that McDaniel's politicians all look the same.)

On the other hand, the characters often get short shrift because they can't play key roles in issues that don't focus on them. Celestial Archer defects to help the gods in #2, but switches back basically off-panel. Many of the characters get neat stuff to do in their own focal issues, but there's no room for them to do anything but stand there in the other ones, like Accomplished Perfect Physician, Thundermind (here given a Clark/Lois-esque relationship with a fellow teacher), and Ghost Fox Killer.* Others have backstories that could be interesting, but there's no room for the characters to do much in the present, so they don't leave much of an impression: the Immortal Man-in-Darkness, Seven Deadly Brothers, and Shaolin Robot. I wonder if the book would have been better off a series of done-in-one stories balancing origin flashbacks with present-day escapades.

This is, I think, Morrison and Jones's fault, not Bedard's, but the gender make-up of the team is pretty bad, with just two out of the Great Ten being women. This is exacerbated by Mother of Champion's power being super-reproduction! Whenever there's a crisis, she has sex with a man, and gives birth to twenty-five superpowered babies that age ten years every day: a quickly formed, disposable fighting force. Um, wow. It's actually kind of interesting, perhaps, but squicky given the history of weird pregnancies in superhero comics and sci-fi in general... and c'mon, 20% women and half of their power is reproducing!

I actually didn't mind Scott McDaniel's art. I have often struggled with his faces in the past, but found them mostly improved here, and he has a good sense of storytelling. Maybe he had more time on this book than he did, say, Countdown: Arena?

The final issue, despite its rushed nature, is kind of neat, in that we get substantive interactions between two different characters, Socialist Red Guardsman and Mother of Champions, and a bit of an emotional arc. Plus there's a very unconventional ending. I don't know if it passes the smell test, but Bedard is clearly trying to imagine how a different country would treat superpowers, and the final issue in particular hinges on the rejection of American-style individualism in favor of communalism in a way that's hard to imagine of a more traditional DC book.

I liked that, and kind of wished the book had done more of it. But also, as a non-Chinese person reading a book entirely by non-Chinese people, I wondered how much The Great Ten was really capturing Chinese values, and how much of it was caricature. (DC would later hire a Chinese-American writer for its next China-focused superhero story, New Super-Man, which I hope to read someday.)

Frustratingly, though I don't think The Great Ten quite worked on its own, it's a very good piece of set-up. I think you could run years of adventures off the hooks Bedard came up with for this volume! But because of the book's (probable) poor sales, those were never to be.

The Great Ten was originally published in nine issues (Jan.-Sept. 2010). The story was written by Tony Bedard, pencilled by Scott McDaniel, inked by Andy Owens, colored by the Hories, lettered by Steve Wands, and edited by Michael Siglain.

* A ghost that kills foxes? A ghost fox that kills? A killer of ghost foxes?

Review: Shadows Beneath by Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler

Hardcover, 366 pages
Published 2014

Acquired October 2019
Read December 2019

Shadows Beneath: The Writing Excuses Anthology
edited by Peter Ahlstrom

When I was teaching my science fiction creative writing class this fall, I found myself skimming the transcripts of the podcast Writing Excuses for writing exercises to do in class, or just insights. I still haven't really listened to the podcast, but I found it interesting enough to see if they'd done a textbook: there's definitely a market for a good sf writing textbook as far as I can tell. They haven't exactly, but they have published this, and I was intrigued enough to pick up Shadows Beneath.

Shadows Beneath contains one short story apiece by each of the podcast's four co-hosts. In addition to all the stories, though, each is usually accompanied by:

• transcripts of brainstorming sessions (from Writing Excuses episodes)
• early drafts
• transcripts of critique group sessions (also from WX episodes)
• "Track Changes" versions between the first full draft and the final draft
• essays about the process of writing the stories

It's great stuff. It made me wish I had assigned this as a textbook, and if I ever get to teach the class again, I might just. The strength of the book is that it lets you see experienced writers get at some of the more ineffable parts of the writing process. How do you go from an idea to a story? How do you decide what's important in the revision process? It made me think we ought to have spent more time on brainstorming and revision in class.

It's also of benefit that these are just four very solid stories. Of Kowal, I expected that on the basis of other work I've read by her, but I'd never read anything by Brandon Sanderson or Dan Wells before, and the only thing by Howard Tayler I've ever read (Schlock Mercenary) is awful.

Kowal's "A Fire in the Heavens" is neat, but hard to discuss without spoiling what I think ought to remain unspoiled. But suffice it to say, it's a good example of a "first contact" story. The revision is really neat: there's a lot of small alterations that improve the story (things like having the main characters pick a port from a map, rather than just blunder into the closest one), but also a big chunk added into the middle of the story (that it's impossible to imagine not being there, but it worked pretty good without it).

Wells's "I.E.Demon" was my favorite, a fun story about a group of soldiers in Afghanistan who discover that their new I.E.D.-neutralizing device actually runs off demonology... when it malfunctions. Quick and breezy and delightful in the way it thinks through the implications of it all. The revisions are useful, too: there's an abandoned first draft that takes way too long to get to the point, demonstrating how important it is to get a short story to its crisis point quickly. (It also shows the importance of voice, going from third to first person.)

Tayler's "An Honest Death" was pretty good, though I found the ending a little rushed. A company making immortality drugs finds itself being shook down by Death! The story's told from the perspective of the CEO's security guy, as he tries to figure out if that's really what's going on. Like "I.E.Demon," it has strong use of voice and character; I believed in this guy. The concept is neat, even if it took me a couple reads to get the ending. Again, the revisions were instructive.

Sanderson's "Sixth of the Dusk" was my least favorite; I more admired it than enjoyed it, though that might have just been the headspace I was in. Reading the revisions substantially improved my opinion of it, however, as it was interesting to see how Sanderson made the piece much more thematically rich through revision with just a few alterations to most of the story-- and completely redid the ending to bring things full circle in a much more compelling way. The alien biology concepts were really cool.

Incidentally, I think you can classify all four stories here as science fiction, even if they seem fantasy-ish in some ways. There's no magic in "A Fire in the Heavens"; it just takes place on another world with different astronomical principles. "I.E.Demon" has a demon in it, yes, but beyond that it functions like one of those old sf "problem stories" proceeding from the premise that demons are real; a competent man has to be clever to get out of a dangerous situation. "An Honest Death"'s ending makes it clear that we're not looking at Death Death per se, but a more sfnal take on the idea. And thought "Sixth of the Dusk" apparently takes place in Sanderson's Cosmere fantasy universe, on its own, it seems to be science fiction: everything can be explained by weird alien biology and extraterrestrial technology.

And the title is aptly chosen. It's a phrase from Sanderson's story, but it applies fairly literally and also metaphorically to all four. There's literally dangerous things below the surface in the stories by Wells (the demon), Tayler (Death), and Sanderson (sea creatures), and all four stories are about something that was simple but turns out to be much more complicated.

But the title also describes the book's insight into the writing process: as per the cover, we normally just see the poised little boat on the surface, sailing perfectly, and miss the shadows beneath: the false starts, the bad ideas, the arguments, the self-doubt. I've published over 150,000 words of fiction, but I still felt like I learned something from reading this book about how writers write, and I suspect you will too.

Joe Casey's Adventures of Superman #617-20: Superfiction, Part 2

"Rather, Rinse, Repeat" / "Four on the Floor, Break Stuff" / "Prestidigitation Nation" / "Martyr Party People"

The Adventures of Superman vol. 1 #617-20 (Aug.-Nov. 2003)

Writer: Joe Casey
Artists: Charlie Adlard and Derec Aucoin
Colors: Tanya & Rich Horie
Assoc. Editors: Tom Palmer jr and Lysa Hawkins
Editor: Eddie Berganza 

Now that Superman is an avowed pacifist (except when punching General Zod, I guess) Casey can't write a series of issues of where big bad guys punch their way into Metropolis, and Superman has to punch them back out again (not that he ever really did, anyway). So the last few issues of Casey's run on Adventures of Superman have to be more inventive in the kind of threats they pose, so that Superman can be more inventive in the kind of solutions he comes up with. (Good thing, I suppose, that Doomsday didn't pop by to menace the city during this phase.)

from The Adventures of Superman vol. 1 #618 (art by Charlie Adlard)

This chunk of Superfiction consists of two two-issue stories. The first one (#617-18) is about two encyclopedia salespeople who come to Metropolis, hawking the Encyclopedia Universal. Their previous attempts to get people to buy it haven't gone well; we get a montage of flashbacks of them traveling around the world, talking to different leaders. Then, more flashbacks of them traveling even further afield, which poke fun at DC Comics itself: the Guardians on Oa ("What year is this...?" moans one), the ruling council of Thanagar ("Which reality is this...?"), and the Legion of Super-Heroes ("What is this? Some sort of delinquent youth center...?"). Their attempt to sell it to Perry White renders him comatose, so Superman tackles them, only to fall afoul of their nigh-omnipotent powers himself... and realize that they're a guise for his old foe Mxyzptlk.

Wait, what? I have no idea how Superman put that together. Like, okay, they've got lots of powers and like to be annoying... but surely if you're a superhero, that's the kind of person you meet on the regular? If there was some kind of other clue, I missed it completely.

from The Adventures of Superman vol. 1 #618 (art by Charlie Adlard)

The sibling salespeople fight back by removing Earth's gravity, so we get some high-concept sci-fi as Superman needs to figure out a way to hold the Earth together while he takes care of the villains; with the help of the Atom and the JLA, he places a miniature white dwarf star in the Earth's core! So that's cool.

But that's eighteen pages of the second issue; in the last three pages, he just buys a set of encyclopedias after all, Mxyzptlk makes a speech about how they're going to be more evil these days ("you'll know what we're capable of. [...] No more games. No more saying our name backwards to get rid of us. We're in the mood to be a real super-villain... and next time, we won't hit the reset button."), and then that's it, it's over. I mean, it's slightly clever action, but it's still one big action sequence, and one that's heavily dependent on made-up super-science. The first issue sets them up as fun villains with a weird plan, but once it's revealed that they're not really salespeople, just Mxyzptlk in disguise, it all kind of fizzles out.

It's fun enough, though, like I said. There's a sub-plot about a S.T.A.R. Labs spaceship in Earth orbit; it's staffed by people who Charlie Adlard draws with uniforms like the Imperial Navy's in Star Wars for some reason. (In a brief aside in #617, they help Superman defeat "the ghost of a dead parallel Earth [...] invad[ing] our galaxy!") There's also a bit in #618 where it's finally explained where the Persuader got his powers from in #610:

DOLORIS: I know! Let's do a ret-con!
DALE: Oh, excellent! [...] What should we do...? So many inconsistencies to choose from...! [...] Does the name "Cole Parker" ring a bell? He was a social anarchist who attacked the Daily Planet and got thrown into Stryker's Island... while he was inside, he hooked up with a mysterious stranger who used his powers to transform Parker into the Persuader. Who was that mysterious stranger...?
DOLORIS: Don't tell me, he was us...?
DALE: He is now. Kinda wraps thing up neat and tidy, eh?

from The Adventures of Superman vol. 1 #620
(art by Derec Aucoin)

I admire the sheer brazenness of it. One imagines Casey had plans for the mysterious stranger, but decided to never follow them up, and tied off the dangling thread with the most lampshaded of retcons!

The other two issues are about a new candidate for president, set to oppose Luthor in the upcoming election. He's known only as "the Candidate," his campaign promises are vague: "We can achieve." Later he says, "America is ready for change! Well, guess what, America...? I am change!" Reading in 2019, it's impossible not to see something of Obama's 2008 "hope and change" in him and some of Trump's 2016 populist rhetoric as well. Coastal elite Lois Lane sniffs about how people tailgate at the Candidate's rallies. The Candidate-- like Obama and Trump after him-- shows disdain for the press, preferring to speak directly to the people. He's the big hero who will single-handedly save America. But of course, Casey was just extrapolating from what was already happening in 2003: "Show biz politics. Perfect for modern voters. They don't have to think..."

The Candidate won't give interviews; when Lois and Clark bicker over who should get the assignment to obtain one, Perry White gives it to both of them: "You two engage in the strangest foreplay..." What follows is pretty fun, as the two compete; Clark promises no superpowers, but is hampered by his need to keep flying over the world taking care of random crises. Lois, in the meanwhile, dons a catsuit to do some infiltration. Previously in Casey's run, the status quo of Lois and Clark has been in flux. Not because of his writing, but because of what was happening in the other titles: for a while they were separated as Lois traveled the world; later, Clark was suspended from the Daily Planet. But here they are, together, and both reporters, and it's great stuff, showing their competitive streak, and their love for each other. Derec Aucoin is great at this stuff by now; their love comes through even in their body language.

from The Adventures of Superman vol. 1 #619
(art by Derec Aucoin)

While Superman is distracted by a "cannibal planet" that eats the sun's heat, dooming the Earth, an alien assassin attacks the Candidate, only for Lois to intervene and save him. The Candidate is not pleased: "...martyrdom is the final act of political legend, social action through social trauma... The object of government is to prey on the ignorance of the masses... They want it simple...heroes who will die for them...and now it's all gone...who'd vote for me now...?" It's a weird ending to a weird issue, almost an anticlimax, but I enjoyed it anyway.

I think there must have been some kind of directive from editorial that even if Superman was a pacifist, there had to be some big action anyway, because every issue here has a big sequence, even if it's not plot-related. #617 has the dead parallel Earth, like I said; #618 the dwarf star business; #619 has a few panels where we see Superman in Cairo defeating Osiris, god of the dead, because "Superman is the personification of life"; and in #620, there's Superman's big fight with the cannibal planet (though we eventually learn the alien bounty hunter brought it in as a distraction!). These are usually careful to maintain Superman's pacifism, so he's never punching these enemies to death, but I guess you can't sell a Superman comic where people just talk it out.

I would like to see Casey try to write one, though.

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