Reading Roundup Wrapup: October 2020

Pick of the month: That Was Then, This Is Now by S. E. Hinton. Sometime I find determining these things easy; sometimes, I have to dump everything into Preference Revealer and see what emerges after a series of one-on-one match-ups. This was one of the latter months, with Thor: The Mighty Avenger, The Lifted Veil, Brother Jacob, and Passing all vying for the top spot, and plus I read some really solid stuff, like The Stuff of Dreams and Persepolis Rising. But That Was Then, This Is Now won out, and I can't complain about that: simpler than The Outsiders in some ways, but again nuanced in its depiction of what it means to grow up, and surprisingly dark in spots. And it's not like The Outsiders is cheerful!

All books read:
1. Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Stuff of Dreams by James Swallow
2. Hothouse by Brian Aldiss
3. Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations: Shield of the Gods by Christopher L. Bennett
4. Thor: The Mighty Avenger by Roger Langridge and Chris Samnee
5. Fauna by Christiane Vadnais
6. Persepolis Rising: Book Seven of The Expanse by James S.A. Corey
7. Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor, Vol 3: The Fountains of Forever by Nick Abadzis, Elena Casagrande, Eleonora Carlini, Rachael Stott & Leonardo Romero
8. Star Trek: The Next Generation: Q Are Cordially Uninvited… by Rudy Josephs
9. Passing by Nella Larsen
10. Doctor Who: The Twelfth Doctor, Vol 3: Hyperion by Robbie Morrison, George Mann, Daniel Indro, Mariano Laclaustra, and Ronilson Freire
11. The Lifted Veil, Brother Jacob by George Eliot
12. That Was Then, This Is Now by S. E. Hinton
13. Poor Yorick: a chooseable-path adventure by Ryan North, William Shakespeare, and YOU 

All books acquired:
1. Fauna by Christiane Vadnais
2. Persepolis Rising: Book Seven of The Expanse by James S.A. Corey
3. Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio by Derf Backderf
4. The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 5 edited by Neil Clarke
5. Star Trek: The Fall: A Ceremony of Losses by David Mack
6. Star Trek: The Fall: The Poisoned Chalice by James Swallow
7. Star Trek: The Fall: Peaceable Kingdoms by Dayton Ward

A pretty productive month. I was worried by some big and/or slow books early on (Hothouse and Persepolis Rising), but near the end of the month, I zipped through five books in as many days, making up for it. And many of them were actually on my reading list!

All books on "To be read" list: 661 (down 2)

Infinity, Inc. Reading Order

Infinity, Inc. is one of those comics that has a lot of crossovers with other comics, and where other comics benefit you in the reading experience. Not so many that it gets overwhelming, or makes it feel like the important stuff is always happening elsewhere (as in The Darkstars)-- I think you could stick to the core title and be fine-- but it's nice to get the full picture.

This reading order covers Infinity, Inc. itself, obviously. It also works in:

• Crossovers with All-Star Squadron, Justice League of America, The Outsiders, The New Teen Titans, and The Young All-Stars. [Updated to include the latter on 19 Jan. 2021. I should note that while without the JLA, Outsiders, and Teen Titans issues you'd be getting only half a story in each case, the Infinc issues of the two YA-S crossovers stand on their own just fine, since YA-S was set nearly fifty years earlier; the YA-S issues mostly provide historical context.]
  
• Other stories set on Earth-Two during the time of Infinity, Inc., since their events were usually referenced in Infinity, Inc. I placed America vs. the Justice Society and Last Days of the Justice Society where they go chronologically; I put Jonni Thunder at the latest available story gap prior to her appearance in Infinity, Inc. #22.
• Issues of Secret Origins about Infinity, Inc. characters (e.g., Skyman in #9) or ones that had present-day frame stories (e.g., the Golden Age Fury in #12) or ones that tied into the ongoing story of Infinity, Inc. (e.g., Hawkman in #11). If they had a frame, I placed them by when the frame took place; if not, I placed it at the point I felt it was most useful to read the origin. There are a bunch of other issues collected in the Last Days trade paperback (Sandman in #7, Flash in #9, Johnny Thunder in #13, the Spectre in #15, Green Lantern in #18, Dr. Mid-Nite in #20, Dr. Fate in #24, the Atom in #25, the JSA itself in #31); read these wherever you want, if you want.
  
• The two issues of Convergence: Infinity, Inc. Convergence was a 2015 crossover event where DC characters from old continuities were plucked out of time and abducted to an alien planet. I placed these two issues at the point where the characters seem to originate. They are completely nonessential, but interesting; Infinity, Inc. co-creator Jerry Ordway wrote them, and uses the opportunity to retcon in revelations about the characters from the 2000s.

Here is the complete list. Crossover titles are noted in bold:

• The Generations Saga
• Infinity, Inc. vol. 1 #1-2
• All-Star Squadron #25-26
• All-Star Squadron Annual #1
• Infinity, Inc. vol. 1 #3-10
• Infinity, Inc. vol. 1 #11-12
• America vs. the Justice Society #1-4
• Infinity, Inc. vol. 1 #13-15
• Jonni Thunder #1-4
• Infinity, Inc. vol. 1 #16-17
• Special Crisis Cross-overs
• Infinity, Inc. vol. 1 #18
• The Last JLA–Justice Society Team Up!
• Infinity, Inc. vol. 1 #19
• Justice League of America vol. 1 #244 
• Infinity, Inc. vol. 1 #20
• Infinity, Inc. Annual #1
• Infinity, Inc. vol. 1 #21-24 
• Convergence: Infinity, Inc. #1-2
• Infinity, Inc. vol. 1 #25-29
• Last Days of the Justice Society of America Special #1
• Infinity, Inc. vol. 1 #30-31
• Secret Origins vol. 2 #9 [Star-Spangled Kid story]
• Infinity, Inc. vol. 1 #32-35
• Secret Origins vol. 2 #12 [Fury story]
  
• Infinity, Inc. vol. 1 #36
• Secret Origins vol. 2 #11 [Hawkman story]
  
• Infinity, Inc. vol. 1 #37-39
• Secret Origins vol. 2 #16 [Hourman story]
  
• Infinity, Inc. vol. 1 #40-41
• Comicdom's Epic Crossover!*
• The Outsiders Special #1
• Infinity, Inc. Special #1
• Infinity, Inc. vol. 1 #42-44
  
• Clusters
• The New Teen Titans vol. 2 #38
• Infinity, Inc. vol. 1 #45
• Millennium
• Secret Origins vol. 2 #22
• The Young All-Stars #8
• Infinity, Inc. vol. 1 #46
• The Young All-Stars #9
• Infinity, Inc. vol. 1 #47
  
• Infinity, Inc. vol. 1 #48-50
• The Mekanique-Degaton Paradox
  
• The Young All-Stars Annual #1
  
• Infinity, Inc. Annual #2
• Infinity, Inc. vol. 1 #51-53

* A note in Infinity, Inc. Special #1 says this story takes place between Infinity, Inc. #42 and 43, but in fact its events are referred to in #42 as being "a couple of weeks back."

This post is a supplement to a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers Last Days of the Justice Society of America. Previous installments are listed below:

1. All Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever (1976-79)
2. The Huntress: Origins (1977-82)
3. All-Star Squadron (1981-87)
4. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume One (1983-84)
5. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume Two (1984-85)
6. Showcase Presents... Power Girl (1978)
7. America vs. the Justice Society (1985)
8. Jonni Thunder, a.k.a. Thunderbolt (1985)
9. Crisis on Multiple Earths, Volume 7 (1983-85)
10. Infinity, Inc. #11-53 (1985-88)
    

"They are the sons—the daughters—the protegees—of the legendary Justice Society of America. They are the new generation of Earth-Two super-heroes. They are—INFINITY, INC."

One of the things that originally spurred my interest in reading the Earth-Two/Justice Society comics from DC was that idea of legacy that grew to dominate their depictions in the 1990s onward: series like Starman leveraged the long histories of these heroes in powerful ways, and I liked that a lot, and wanted to experience more of it. But the other thing that made me want to read all this was that Lyta Hall is actually my third-favorite Sandman character, and I wanted to see where she originated: Infinity, Inc.

It actually kind of amuses me that Neil Gaiman's Sandman, read by so many people who are otherwise unaware of DC continuity, has a major storyline rooted in an overcomplicated Roy Thomas retcon from the 1980s that is now in many ways forgotten and irrelevant. Yet while Infinity, Inc. has never really been collected, Lyta has recently been played by Laurel Lefkow in Audible's high-profile adaptation of The Sandman! The character lives on, even if detached from her past.

But let's go back to the beginning. I've previously discussed the first ten issues of Infinity, Inc., the "Generations Saga" (see below), but the series ran up to 53 issues in total, plus two annuals and a special. Infinity, Inc. was a super-team created by Sylvester Pemberton (the Star-Spangled Kid, later Skyman), mostly made up of heroes with relations to Golden Age characters, set on Earth-Two. So there was Skyman himself (a kid hero in the 1940s, propelled forward through time to the 1970s), Fury (the daughter of Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor), the Silver Scarab (the son of Hawkman and Hawkgirl), Nuklon (son of the Atom's goddaughter), Northwind (a mentee of Hawkman), Obsidian and Jade (children of the Green Lantern), Brainwave (son of JSA foe the Brain Wave), Wildcat (mentee of Wildcat), Doctor Midnight (mentee of Doctor Mid-Nite), and Hourman (son of Hourman). Rejected from membership in the Justice Society, they struck out on their own.

I liked the Generations Saga, but after that, I found the book hard to get into. Todd McFarlane takes over as regular artist with issue #14. I know he would later become one of the superstar artists of the 1990s and creator of Spawn, but I found his over-complicated layouts made for tough reading and distracted from the storytelling. Plus a lot of those early issues are that kind of team book I am not a huge fan of, where the fights just come on top of fights, and one feels that if people weren't always shooting off hot-headed and/or not having conversations, three-issue subplots could be over in one. The book suffered, too, during Crisis on Infinite Earths (#18-24), as it had to connect into the big story, but not actually do anything important.

I know a lot of people (including, I think, co-creator Roy Thomas himself) think the Crisis ruined this book, but it was at that point where it really took off. McFarlane is penciller up until issue #37, but learns how to balance his layouts with clear storytelling, and Roy's wife Dann goes from co-plotter to full-fledged co-writer. The characters begin to pop more, the team has clearer interactions and connections, and the ongoing subplots start to get underway. I really do love ensemble books, and Infinity, Inc. has the interplay of personalities required to make a good one. I came to pretty fond of all the characters: overbearing but well-meaning Skyman, earnest Midwesterner would-be starlet Jade, angry Obsidian, doofy Nuklon, feisty Wildcat, and so on. I don't think the Thomases always used them all to their utmost-- there was a Jade/Fury resentment that never went anywhere, and Northwind was underused-- but all-in-all the effect was charming, and I was always happy to spend time with this bunch.

Highlights for me included the debut of Helix, a group of genetic experiments gone wrong. I had this vague notion that Director Bones, who I know from Marc Andreyko's Manhunter, had been a supervillain at some point; I hadn't know he was an Infinity, Inc. character who originally spoke in rhyme! Mr. Bones, as he was then, is paroled under Skyman's care after Helix helps Infinity, Inc. He only behaves to protect his "siblings" in Helix... but by the end of the run, he's a well-meaning member of the team (and the final story arc actually has a very neat storyline where he is framed for murder and has to prove himself innocent). I liked the use of Solomon Grundy; after Jade (daughter of his old enemy) saves his life, he declares allegiance to her. This is one of those comics where even weaker storylines are elevated by the cast: I was always up for some Nuklon/Wildcat flirting, or a cameo from Stripesy, or what have you.

The Crisis, of course, complicated everything, as did the killing off of the Justice Society (more on that in a future post). But both of those things produced some of the series's strongest issues, "Memories" (#27), where we get a flashback to the JSA brats as kids, and "What Private Griefs..."  (#30), where each Infinity, Inc. member must deal with the loss of the JSA in their own way. Suddenly Infinity, Inc. was folded into the same DC universe as the Justice League and everyone else-- but to be honest, I thought this almost always worked just fine. The only time it didn't work was "The Degaton Paradox" (Annual #2) which took itself to explain how the events of America vs. the Justice Society played out in this new timeline... a question I never had, given an overcomplicated answer.

And what of Fury? Lyta Trevor was the daughter of the Earth-Two Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor, who were wiped from existence by the Crisis. Roy Thomas clearly originally thought he could make this work by just never mentioning it, so Brainwave wipes Lyta's memories of her parents. This was kind of a dark move the series never really reckoned with, and later moved away from because it doesn't actually make any sense: Lyta would have to have parents in this new timeline, after all. So we slowly learn that she's the adopted daughter of one Admiral Trevor (no relation to Steve, I guess) and the Golden Age heroine Miss America (who in the new history took Wonder Woman's place in the JSA), but also the biological daughter of the (retroactive) Golden Age heroine Fury. I thought the new backstory was interesting, and worked in terms of making her a legacy-- which seems to me was really the point of all the Infinity, Inc. characters. You can work around the specifics of whose legacies they are. The original Fury is given an origin in Secret Origins #12, and I am given to understand that she plays a key role in The Young All-Stars, which I will read in the course of time.

In a very complicated plotline, her fiancé the Silver Scarab (Hector) deserts her after she becomes pregnant, but that's because he's under the mental influence of an ancient Hawkman villain. He ends up dying-- but then it turns out he's not dead, as he has become the replacement for the short-lived 1970s Jack Kirby version of the Sandman. Why Roy Thomas decided to pick up this character concept, I have no idea, except that he is always compelled to chase down loose continuity ends. Lyta goes off to the Dream Dimension to live with Hector-- and the series is promptly cancelled, leaving the two of them free to be used by Neil Gaiman when he starts publishing The Sandman just five months later. (I have a theory that Gaiman really wanted to use the actual Kirby Sandman, but had to deal with revelations and changes Thomas made to him in Wonder Woman #300 and Infinity, Inc. If so, I think it worked out for Gaiman in the long run given how important Lyta became to the climax of The Sandman.)

Outside of the continuity issues, I still did like Fury a lot. She's a daughter of money and privilege, and good looking (one imagines that these days, she'd be showing off on Instagram), but she's strong, physically and mentally, and heroic. There's a harder edge to her in her post-Infinc appearances, for obvious reasons, but you can see how that's nascent here. I don't think she's a great character yet, but you can see the potential for greatness-- and that's what I love about shared universe superhero comics anyway.

Vince Argondezzi later takes over for McFarlane on pencils, and he's pretty good-- both are aided well by Tony DeZuniga, an old favorite of mine, on inks. Near the end of the run, Michael Bair becomes the regular penciller, and though I like his work on some of the Roy Thomas-penned Secret Origins I've read, his slightly macabre style doesn't really fit Infinity, Inc., and he is way too obsessed with working in panty shots and sideboob for the female characters. (Comics, everybody!) But despite this, I enjoyed the series up to its end, and wish it had run longer and done more, because I think it had a lot of potential. As I keep bouncing around DC's Earth-Two-adjacent material, I look forward to seeing what other writers do with these characters.

One last continuity note: I had previously read it, but I reread Convergence: Infinity, Inc. at the point I think it takes place, between issues #24 and 25. Published in 2015, Convergence was about characters being plucked out of old continuities to live on an alien planet for a year and then fight; Infinity, Inc. and the Justice Society were taken from during the Crisis itself. So we get appearances from the whole original gang. (I think? Now that I think about it, is Northwind in it?) The issues were written by Jerry Ordway, who co-created the series with Roy Thomas and Mike Machlan, and who pencilled issues #1-10 and part of Annual #2. Ordway emphasizes some aspects of the characters that had been forgotten at that point (Jade's desire to be an actress, for example), but he also incorporates post-Infinc revelations about the Infinitors. Most notably, I had completely forgotten that Todd "Obsidian" Rice was revealed to be gay in Andreyko's Manhunter! Ordway plays that up here. Reading subsequent issues of Infinity, Inc. through that lens actually really works: there are some comments, when Todd dates Marcie and when Todd meets Raven of the New Teen Titans, that I actually found hard to interpret any other way than hinting at him being gay! He has a dark secret, and I feel like he doesn't perform well sexually-- but his girlfriend Marcie is actually a Manhunter using him for evil purposes, so she has incentive to play along. Fortuitous, and I'm glad Ordway was willing to take on retcons to his co-creation.

This post is the tenth in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment will be a supplement covering a reading order for Infinity, Inc. Previous installments are listed below:

1. All Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever (1976-79)
2. The Huntress: Origins (1977-82)
3. All-Star Squadron (1981-87)
4. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume One (1983-84)
5. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume Two (1984-85)
6. Showcase Presents... Power Girl (1978)
7. America vs. the Justice Society (1985)
8. Jonni Thunder, a.k.a. Thunderbolt (1985)
9. Crisis on Multiple Earths, Volume 7 (1983-85)
   

Hugos Side-Step: Changewar by Fritz Leiber

Collection published: 1983
Contents originally published: 1958-65
Acquired and read: September 2020

Changewar by Fritz Leiber

The Big Time was the only novel in Leiber's "Change War" series, about a vast cosmic time war between implacable enemies, but he published a number of short works in the same milieu, and I liked The Big Time enough to track them down. There's no one collection that reprints all of them, as far as I can tell, so I picked up the most recent collection with most of them... which is from over 35 years ago! (I'm learning that outside of the Lankhmar stories, Leiber isn't kept in print very well.*) Changewar contains seven Change War stories (the space must have been a victim of a timeline revision), some of which revisit characters from The Big Time, but most of which look at different aspects of the conflict.

Of the seven, I would say I liked about half of them. "Try and Change the Past" is a pretty prototypical sf premise at this point: no matter what you do, history will correct itself it. But it's well told and enjoyable, and it introduces the Change War concept pretty well, so it makes for a good opener. I also really liked "The Oldest Soldier," about a guy who really likes soldiers but has never fought himself being inadvertently drawn into the weirdest rear guard action imaginable. "No Great Magic" was neat, too, about an amnesiac in a New York City theatre: only something much more complicated than she can imagine is happening. This is the longest story in the book, but I wanted it to be longer, actually! It ends with her figuring out what is going on, and I would have gladly read about what happened next had Leiber decided to expand it. I think the premise is great, and he doesn't fully exploit its possibilities within this short space.

Others, like a lot of sf, had a good idea not much was done with. "Knight to Move" has some cool concepts in it, and a strong narrative voice, but isn't much of a story; "When the Change-Winds Blow" is evocatively told, but its connections to the actual Change War concept seem pretty scant.

"A Deskful of Girls" was the only one I really didn't like. One of those sf stories where what is going on isn't very clear, but when you can glimpse it, it isn't very interesting either. Like "When the Change-Winds Blow," its connection to the Change War seemed minimal, as well.

As I said in my review of The Big Time, Leiber apparently did not invent the idea of a "time war" but he did popularize it. One might imagine that someone writing forty years before Doctor Who spent decades exploring this concept would read as old hat, but I found that Leiber did a lot of cool, interesting stuff with the concept, and I wish he had done more.

I read an old winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel every year, plus other Hugo-related books that interest me. Next up in sequence: Hothouse by Brian W. Aldiss

* The two missing stories are "Black Corridor," last reprinted in 1988 (in English, anyway), and "The Haunted Future," last reprinted in 1990.

COVID Positivity Rates at My University

Every Friday, my university updates its COVID case tracker. They list how many students had a positive test in the past week; this can come from either testing positive in the campus health center, or from a student obtaining a positive test result off campus. Of course, this means the total number of infected students is probably higher. Unlike some other schools (my grad school alma mater, UConn, for example), UT does not do random testing, and some students test positive at off-campus venues and don't report it to UT. On top of that, students have told me that if you go to the health center and ask for a test, they try to discourage you from getting one if you're not symptomatic.

The chart is somewhat striking:

We had an initial steep rise, things backed off somewhat, and in the past couple weeks have bounced back up.

Now, I should say I am not terribly worried about my personal safety. While 550 students have reported positive cases since the semester began, only 5 faculty and staff have-- and the Dean informed us at this week's college meeting that contact tracing indicates all those faculty and staff were infected off campus, not in pursuit of their college duties. So it seems the things we're doing in the classroom to mitigate transmission (limited class sizes, masks, and so on) are working. Students are getting infected in their social interactions, in the dorms, and at parties and clubs and so on.

(That said, we were told to make seating charts for contact tracing... and never given anywhere to submit those seating charts, and no one has ever contacted me to do contact tracing when any of my students have become infected.)

I know from talking to my students, that some students take it very seriously, and some students absolutely do not take it seriously at all. An old student I chatted to this week who is playing it totally safe-- they and their suitemates do no go out, and do not interact-- told me they thought it was probably around 45/55 don't take it seriously / do take it seriously.

The Tampa Bay Times has a weekly feature where they round up all the COVID statistics from local schools: K-12 and higher education. If you read this column, what will strike you is that the number of students infected at the University of South Florida is usually about the same as the number infected at UT:

Until the past couple weeks, at least, when USF's kept level but UT's swung back up. (The Times first reported the total number of infected USF students in its 5 Sept. column.)

But of course USF is a big state school, and UT is a mid-sized private one. So yesterday I sat down and worked out the positive tests as a percentage of total population. UT has 9,605 students enrolled this fall, though that includes students taking classes remotely and (I think) on-line. USF's three campuses had 50,927 students enrolled as of the 2019-20 school year (I couldn't find this year's numbers), though that includes things like the graduate program and the medical school (but I think the positive case numbers do too). The numbers might not be exactly comparable, but the ballpark idea that there are five times as many USF students than UT ones ought to be valid. If you graph as a percentage of total population, the differences are stark:

USF has never even broken 0.2% of students testing positive in a single week. I also looked at the cumulative cases thus far. (This is not quite accurate, because I think if you report multiple positive tests you would get counted again each week that happens, but it gives a sense of how many students overall have been infected at some point.)

At this point, over 5% of UT's population has had a positive COVID test at some point, while not even 1% of USF's has!

Quite why this should be, I don't know. Does USF have fewer in-person students? (UT made it difficult for students to go fully remote.) Do they actually enforce their penalties for partying? Are they just even worse at testing than UT? Is it about the location? (UT is downtown, USF is out in Temple Terrace.) Do UT students just like to party more than USF students?

I don't know what the cause is but it seems to speak poorly of either the behavior of students or administration (or both) at UT.

Review: The Tyrant Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson

Published: 2020
Acquired: August 2020
Read: September 2020

The Tyrant Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson

If The Traitor Baru Cormorant was a razor blade-- sharp and focused and incisive-- then the middle duology of this trilogy, The Monster Baru Cormorant and The Tyrant Baru Cormorant, is a Swiss army knife-- still sharp but full of bits that I don't understand why they're there. I reserved judgment on Monster until I finished Tyrant, but now that I've read both, I have to admit... I don't get it.

Let's start with the end. So, um, some spoilers, though I'll try to keep them light. The book ends with Baru-- an agent of the Imperial Throne, but secretly dedicated to overthrowing it-- establishing a trading concern. The ostensible purpose of the trading concern is to enable the Masquerade's exploitation of a new country; the real purpose is for Baru to ultimately destabilize and overthrow the Masquerade, replacing it with something better. The climax of the book is Baru's machinations pulling this off. But the climax sits awkwardly on the rest of the book, because the trading concern is largely a background element, and it comes together mostly offscreen. The actual plot of the book is Baru first trying to escape from the Cancrioth (a weird group of people who pass memories over generations via tumors) and then trying to contain their threat. We spend the first two hundred pages just with Baru trying to get off a boat! The climax feels like it comes from a totally different novel. You can write a book about someone trying to fight an enemy, but then the climax needs to be about that! Or you can write a book that climaxes with an economic coup de grâce, but then the book really needed to be about economics (as the first Baru Cormorant book was) throughout. It feels like Dickinson had an ending in mind, but didn't know how to get there, or like he had a plot in mind, but his editor told him he couldn't write an 1,100-page story about economics. I don't know that either of these is true, but that's what it feels like, and the result is an unearned ending.

The result is also an uninteresting book. The beginning especially piles complication upon complication, but if Dickinson was going for one of those situations where things keep escalating, it instead just feels messy. Person after person after person shows up, and Baru keeps getting jerked around, but it goes on so long, it loses all sense of urgency. Even once Baru gets off the boat, the book still kind of limps along. Supposedly a deadly plague ship is coming... but Baru has the time to attend a fancy masked ball and flirt, which really drains the book of the feeling that there's any kind of imminent danger. The periodic insertions of flashback chapters does so too; yes they kind of end up plot relevant, but there are too many of them, and they go on too much, and tell us too little of interest. Ultimately, I'm not really sure why the cancer people are even in the book. They feel like a neat idea that belongs in a different story that is actually about them; there is an attempt to analogize them to imperialism, but I didn't think the analogy really took off or did anything interesting. I came here for a book about Baru taking down an evil empire from within and getting corrupted in the process... instead I got a book about her trying to get off a boat and stop a plague ship. Obviously authors shouldn't do exactly what you expect of them, but I feel like the end of Traitor made a promise that Monster and Tyrant failed to keep.

Aside from the plot, a big point of contention for me is Baru herself. Supposedly Baru is a super-competent agent-- but this is undermined by two things. One is that she far too often blurts out naïve or revealing questions or statements. The other is that so many people turn up who can tell what she really thinks... far more than ones who seem to be fooled by her! When one character states that surely Baru must have yet another selfish, out-for-herself plan, I was like... what? why? Almost nothing Baru does in this book or the previous one would lead me to believe she's fooling anyone; everyone seems to know she's really out to destroy the Masquerade on behalf of her dead lover.

But like I said, the book is sharp at times. The bit where Baru goes home is good; I liked Baru's relationship with the Clarified woman; the ideas are often interesting; the worldbuilding is strong; the book raises (though sometimes too obviously) questions about complicity and resistance with authoritarian regimes. And the series still has a lot of goodwill from me on the basis of Traitor. I think I will still be there for a fourth book, so I can see it through to the end, though the author's afterword makes it seem as though he might not be there for it! It looks like it will be a long time before book 4, if ever.

Review: Fauna by Christiane Vadnais

Translation published: 2020
Originally published: 2018
Acquired and read: October 2020

Fauna by Christiane Vadnais

translated by Pablo Strauss

This is a series of linked short stories, published in French in 2018, and just now translated into English. The stories all take place in and near a town called Shivering Heights, where something strange is happening: the people have attributes of animals, some have voracious appetites, and a parasite is changing the local ecosystem. The stories mostly center on a biologist from outside the community who comes to investigate it, but there are other ones about its residents: a young man who falls in love with her, a group of people staying together in a cabin as their numbers dwindle, an HR administrator visiting a spa.

There are some great visuals and metaphors here, but none of the individual stories came together for me. Strange things happen, and some I get, but many just seemed strange for the sake of strange. Which can work-- I don't think this is the kind of sf that trades on explanations-- but then something else needs to carry you through the story-world, and I didn't think the characters interesting enough or the themes complex enough to do it. Why can't Laura's lover find her when she leaves, and why does everyone else act like they've never even heard of her? What does the opening story about the spa have to do with anything?

I did like "In Vivo," where Laura (the biologist) comes to term with her own infection, and her apparent pregnancy. This one felt like it had something to say, about how we get supplanted, as individuals by our progeny, and as species by whatever can succeed better as the ecology of the world changes. I wish more of them had been like this, sharp sets of observations focused on a compelling idea.

Pandemic Pedagogy: Week Eight

Somehow it's the eighth week of the semester already, meaning we're over halfway through. (Here at UT this semester at least, we're running fourteen weeks of instruction, though the last week is just the two days of Thanksgiving week.)

This is the point where you begin to get a feel, I think, for what works and what doesn't-- but it's also the point where I feel locked in no matter what. I know other instructors pride themselves on their ability to be adaptable on the fly, but I hate make any substantive changes to class during the semester; I'd much rather be locked into a bad plan than try to come up with a new plan and implement it midstream.

As I've said here before, we're "hybrid." Administration wants as many students in the classroom as can happen with social distancing, and they want things to be as synchronous as possible. I can accommodate eleven students in the classroom at a time. But we also have to work with students who are fully remote (I have one student in Turkey and another in Peru), and students who can't come to class any given week because they tested positive for coronavirus or their roommate did. I don't like the idea of livestreaming the classroom experience (sounds awful), so I do it like this:

• MONDAY: All students attend class over Zoom (I teach from home).
• They usually have "prework" for the Monday Zoom sessions.
  
• WEDNESDAY: Half of the students attend class in person.
• There is prework for this.
• FRIDAY: The other half of students attend class; I reteach the same material I taught Wednesday.
• SATURDAY: They have "weekly work" due; this is often meant to take the place of the "missing" day.
• Additionally, if they didn't attend Wednesday/Friday, they have some kind of "alternative" replacement assignment that is due, too.

It's okay but it could be better. Making the work due on Saturdays was meant to give them maximum flexibility in deciding when to get it done. But I think this results in them doing a lot of work at the last minute on Saturday (or not at all). It also gives me too much temptation to introduce stuff in a Friday class that I intend them to use in an assignment due on Saturday, which means my encouragements to work ahead within a given week are kind of meaningless!

We've got the same format in the spring, so I will have to tweak it to make it work. I think I will go back to a more traditional M/W/F format for homework like we're in a "normal" semester. Something like:

• MONDAY: All students attend class over Zoom.
• Homework is due by the time of class.
• WEDNESDAY: Half of students attend class in person.
• Homework for all students is due by the time of class.
• FRIDAY: Other half of students attend class in person.
• The work for the "missing day" is due-- perhaps at 11:59pm since it won't be tied to a particular class session.

I suspect this will be a little confusing, but I also suspect that anything I do in the current circumstances will be a little confusing. I need to figure out a way to make the class Blackboard site more navigable; right now I do folders for each week, with a subfolder for each day. This works well if you are keeping up, I think, but becomes a nightmare if you fall behind. You can see in "My Grades" you haven't done the Quiz on Paraphrasing, but in what folder and subfolder is the Quiz on Paraphrasing? I'm not sure what the best way to handle this is, though, because it seems to me that having all assignments in one kind of common area would be overwhelming, too.

The other thing is that my "weekly work" has been kind of minimal. This was by design: I know from last semester that you have to be less ambitious in what you cover when it is being covered outside of class. Activities that move quickly in class with you there take students forever when you are not. But I think I swerved too much in the other direction, and there is content I just don't have the time to deliver! I am grading annotated bibliographies right now, and though I will say that is always a tricky assignment for my students, the quality this semester is much lower than in the past. (Not for everyone, but definitely for the students who are less able to handle work that is more self-directed.)

The spring will be strange, though, because we will have no spring break. Instead there will be four reading days across the course of the semester, and three of them are on Fridays, meaning I will have to work around that in my attempt to impose some kind of regular pattern on the class!

Review: Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain by David Gerard

Published: 2017
Read: September 2020

Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum and Smart Contracts

by David Gerard

Like me, David Gerard is a poster to the subreddit known as "Sneer Club," dedicated to dunking on Internet "rationalists," that weird subculture that believes in granting intellectual charity to all ideologies including Nazis and white nationalists but not feminists and "SJWs," though Gerard is much more prolific (and posts under his real name). Gerard's book is a guide to bitcoin, a thing I have never understood despite no matter how many explanations of it I have heard/read, and it sounded interesting enough to ask my local library to buy it. Well, I still don't entirely get it, but I don't know if I could come any closer to understanding than this given my level of technical know-how. Gerard is a tech guy himself and skewers a lot of the assumptions around bitcoin and the blockchain, pointing out it has immense technical and logistical challenges it will basically never overcome, thus preventing it from ever really taking off in the way its adherents claim. So anyone proselytizing it is either trying to dupe you, or is themself a dupe.

It's a fun book: a lot of the stuff here is pretty ridiculous, and he doesn't shy away from saying so. The bitcoin exchanges run by literal teenagers on security-free PHP was pretty mind-boggling! As a Tampa Bay resident, I of course was interested in the very short-lived Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl. The tales of how hard it is to actually spend bitcoin are interesting, and I was fascinating by the story of how when the Mozilla Foundation trialed putting a "donate in bitcoin" button their donations page, their total donations actually went down, so little do people trust bitcoin. A lot of ransomware folks take payment only in bitcoin, and so they actually have customer service teams dedicated to helping you acquire it, or they would never get paid. The mysterious inventor of bitcoin-- and those who have pretended to be him-- was also interesting, and so were all the tales of bitcoin hucksters, including the guy who kept a list of his crimes on his computer in a .txt file, and then later tried to claim it was someones else's work.

This is a quick read; if you're already skeptical of the technology (as I was), you will have your biases confirmed. I don't know if it would win over an adherent, but it seems pretty obvious to me that bitcoin can just not be what its proponents promise or hope for.

"a sweet distraction for an hour or two": Octopussy

"Octopussy" is a short story, and not a very cinematic one at that, so going into the film I had little idea how they would adapt it, especially as one element of the story-- that Bond was essentially raised by an Alpine ski instructor after his parents died (is that why Bond movies always involve ski chases?)-- was one of the ingredients of Spectre, making me thing it must not have been used in a previous film.

The film at first actually owes more to "The Property of a Lady," another of the short stories in the Octopussy & The Living Daylights collection. In the short story, the Russians pay off a spy in the Secret Service by arranging for her to "inherit" a Fabergé egg from a supposed distant relative, which she then has auctioned off. The story is pretty simple stuff; Bond goes to the auction to see if the Russians have planted anyone to drive up the price so that their agent gets more money. They have, and he nabs them. The plot of Octopussy is considerably more complicated; the Russians are making fake Fabergé eggs (among other jewelry) but auctioning off real ones in the UK. Another 00 agent steals one of these duplicates from a circus in Berlin, so the Russians need to get the real one back when it's auctioned off. Okay, but why are they doing this? My wife and I paused the film a number of times trying to figure out the plot, and never really did. The last act is all about a crazed Russian general using the jewelry smugglers to plant a nuclear bomb in a circus performing at an American military base in West Berlin; it will look like an American bomb went off by mistake, meaning Western calls for unilateral disarmament will be successful, allowing Soviet tanks to sweep in and conquer western Europe. But why are they duplicating and smuggling jewelry? Just as a lucrative side hustle? I guess so.

 
I mean, I get that Bond villains often have overcomplicated plots, but no one in the movie even stops to act like this one makes sense.

The plot of the short story "Octopussy" actually does come into play. Bond, investigating the smuggling, goes to India to look into an exiled Afghan prince; while there, he meets "Octopussy," who has repurposed an ancient octopus cult as a smuggling concern that manages circuses too. In the story, Bond finds out a former British army officer killed a ski instructor and stole some gold; he goes to arrest him, but gives him twenty-four hours to turn himself in, during which the man commits suicide. (In the story, it is suicide by his pet octopus, "Octopussy.") In the film, this happened many years ago, and Octopussy is the daughter of the man. I'm not really sure why the plot of the short story is wedged into the film like this-- Octopussy rattles all this backstory off in a quick speech, and then none of it is ever relevant to anything.

Anyway, outside of all that, this is a pretty typical lower-tier Roger Moore Bond film. At their best, the Moore Bond films have these sublimely ridiculous vehicle moments, and Octopussy has a few of those: a plane hidden in a horse van in the teaser sequence, a chase through an Indian bazaar in three-wheeled taxis, a crocodile submersible for aquatic infiltrations, Bond's car shredding its tires but then sliding onto a railroad track and chasing a train(!), a hot-air balloon with a Union Jack on it. But none of these quite approach the sublimity of similar moments in For Your Eyes Only or The Spy Who Loved Me.

The Bond girls are perfunctory, too. Maud Adams didn't really win me over as Octopussy; for the leader of an international smuggling ring, she comes across as pretty wimpy. Kristina Wayborn seemed unnatural as Magda. As always, Roger Moore's flirtation is so perfunctory it's hard to imagine anyone could actually be charmed by him, though he's not as smarmy and boorish as he would be in his next and final film, A View to a Kill.

At the beginning of the film, 009 appears briefly; he's dressed as a clown. I thought to myself, "I bet 007 never has to do anything as undignified as that." At the end of the film,  Bond dresses first as a gorilla... and then, well:

 
His big heroic moment comes when he's dressed as a clown! Do you think they will make Daniel Craig do this in No Time to Die? It was all a bit ridiculous in the worst way. (Moore's comedy chops really come through in the awesome sequence where he hides inside the gorilla costume, though.)

I think there was promise here. India looks great, and there are lots of neat ideas. But the whole thing feels aimless and sloppy, like it was made up as they went along.

Other Notes:

• The film introduces an assistant for Miss Moneypenny, Penelope Smallbone. I'm not sure why, because she is only in one scene, has nothing to do with anything, and never appears in another Bond film. Was she designed as a potential replacement for Lois Maxwell that was never used? (When she did eventually leave the role, they would just recast.)
• This is the fifth Bond film I've seen with General Gogol in it; he was antagonistic to Bond in some of the earlier ones, but here, despite being head of the KGB, he is a figure of reason, opposing the plan of the villain.
• Speaking of which, Bond doesn't even get to take out the main villain himself; Gogol has him gunned down as he tries to cross the border from East to West Berlin.
• One small role is Vijay Amritraj as, um, Vijay, a Section I agent who helps Bond out in India. The actor and character are immensely likable-- which means, of course, that he is utterly doomed.
  
• Gary Russell-- who would go on to write a number of very bad Doctor Who novels and to mastermind Big Finish's Doctor Who range during its first seven years-- briefly appears in the film as one of a group of joyriding teenagers who don't give Bond a lift.
  

 Film Rankings (So Far):

1. Casino Royale
2. Dr. No
3. From Russia with Love
4. For Your Eyes Only 
5. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
6. Thunderball
7. Spectre
8. You Only Live Twice
9. Goldfinger
10. The Spy Who Loved Me
11. Moonraker
12. Octopussy
    
13. Never Say Never Again
14. A View to a Kill
15. Live and Let Die 
16. Diamonds Are Forever