Reading Roundup Wrapup: August 2021

Pick of the month: We Are Satellites by Sarah Pinsker. I read a lot of award-finalist science fiction books this month. This just came out this year, so it's not on any ballots yet—but it will absolutely be on my ballot for the 2022 Hugo Awards. Pinsker is a skilled short story writer, and We Are Satellites shows her transferring those skills to long fiction with great effect. This book hit me hard.

All books read:
1. Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire
2. Beowulf: A New Translation by Maria Dahvana Headley
3. Doctor Who: EarthWorld by Jacqueline Rayner
4. The Marvelous Land of Oz: Being an account of the further adventures of the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman and also the strange experiences of the Highly Magnified Woggle-Bug, Jack Pumpkinhead, the Animated Saw-Horse, and the Gump; the story being A Sequel to The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, pictured by John R. Neill
5. The Good Soldier: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine by Andrew Cartmel, Mike Collins, Dan Abnett, Lee Sullivan, Paul Cornell, et al.
6. The Terminal Experiment by Robert J. Sawyer
7. We Are Satellites by Sarah Pinsker
8. The Murderbot Diaries: Exit Strategy by Martha Wells
9. Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama by Alison Bechdel
10. The Great Cities Trilogy, Book One: The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin
11. Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory by Martha Wells
12. Spider-Ghost: Dog Days Are Over by Seanan McGuire, Takeshi Miyazawa, Rosi Kämpe, et al.
13. Ozma of Oz: A Record of Her Adventures with Dorothy Gale of Kansas, the Yellow Hen, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, Tiktok, the Cowardly Lion and the Hungry Tiger; Besides Other Good People too Numerous to Mention Faithfully Recorded Herein by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill
14. Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas
15. The Murderbot Diaries: Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells 

All books acquired:
1. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Ascendance by David R. George III
2. Ozma of Oz: A Record of Her Adventures with Dorothy Gale of Kansas, the Yellow Hen, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, Tiktok, the Cowardly Lion and the Hungry Tiger; Besides Other Good People too Numerous to Mention Faithfully Recorded Herein by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill
3. Network Effect: A Murderbot Novel by Martha Wells
4. The Great Cities Trilogy, Book One: The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin
5. Star Trek: Picard: Rogue Elements by John Jackson Miller

All books remaining on "To be read" list: 669 (down 2)

Though my increases are usually small these days, that's my first decrease since February.

Review: The Immortal Doctor Fate by Martin Pasko, Keith Giffen, et al.

This is again a series that wasn't originally on my list, but I learned about from reading the lettercol in an earlier Earth-Two comic; Roy Thomas shilled for it at some point during All-Star Squadron. At first I was not interested-- and certainly in the future I will not be incorporating each and every Doctor Fate comic into my JSA read-through-- but 1) I liked Roy's Doctor Fate origin in All-Star Squadron #47, and 2) I am a sucker for the 1980s reprint miniseries where they took some archival material and reprinted it ad-free on high-quality paper with new covers. (I also have the IronWolf one-shot, the Green Lantern/Green Arrow one, and some other I cannot bring to mind.)

Mostly this series focuses on the Doctor Fate work of Martin Pasko, Keith Giffen, and Larry Mahlstedt; issues #2 and 3 each reprint a four-issue story originally published as a backup in The Flash in 1982. Issue #1 provides some context by including a Fate origin by Paul Levitz and Joe Staton from DC Special #10 (1978), a one-off by Martin Pasko and Walter Simonson from 1st Issue Special #9 (1975), and a six-page Golden Age story by Gardner Fox and Howard Sherman. (I assume the latter is included to bring the page count up, because it very much doesn't fit otherwise. It's also pretty nonsensical, even by Golden Age standards.)

from The Immortal Doctor Fate #1
(script by Martin Pasko, art by Walt Simonson)

I'm of two minds about this. One the one hand, I appreciate the artistry involved. The layouts-- especially those by Simonson and Giffen-- are explosive and energetic, communicating the apocalyptic tone, and unlike the kind of stuff you would have seen elsewhere in the late 1970s and early 1980s. There are disturbing, twisted, magical images here, and they feel unique to Doctor Fate. So too does the writing, which avoids the trap of being generic superheroics with a veneer of magic. I also like the "domestics" of Fate's set-up, his relationship with Inza and such. And Inza herself is pretty awesome.

from The Immortal Doctor Fate #2
(script by Martin Pasko, art by Keith Giffen & Larry Mahlstedt)

But something just never grabs me about Fate stories, even ones I can recognize as well done. I think it's because the magic can often be the fantasy equivalent of technobabble, what I often call "thaumababble." It feels like anything can happen, which is sometimes cool, but also means it's hard to grasp the logic of the world. Or maybe more accurately, I don't need to grasp the logic of fantasy stories (sometimes that removes the magic), but I do need to feel like there is a logic I could grasp. Le Guin treads this line well. It feels churlish to complain that Martin Pasko isn't Ursula K. Le Guin, but well, there you go. Worth tracking down (it took mildly more effort than 1980s comics usually do) and reading but I probably wouldn't reread them.

The Immortal Doctor Fate was published in three issues (Jan.-Mar. 1985). The original stories were published in various comics from 1940 to 1982, and were written by Paul Levitz, Gardner Fox, Martin Pasko, and Steve Gerber; pencilled by Joe Staton, Hal Sherman, Walt Simonson, and Keith Giffen; inked by Mike Nasser, Hal Sherman, Walt Simonson, and Larry Mahlstedt; lettered by Shelly Leferman, John Costanza, Ben Oda, and Adam Kubert; colored by Adrienne Roy, Anthony Tollin, and Tatjana Wood; and edited by Gerry Conway, Mike W. Barr, and Len Wein. The reprints were edited by Nicola Cuti.

 

This post is nineteenth in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers Justice Society of America: The Demise of Justice. 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) [reading order]
11. Last Days of the Justice Society of America (1986-88)
12. All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant (1999)
13. Steel, the Indestructible Man (1978)
14. Superman vs. Wonder Woman: An Untold Epic of World War Two (1977)
• Wonder Woman: Earth-Two (1977-78)
15. Secret Origins of the Golden Age (1986-89)
16. The Young All-Stars (1987-89)
17. Gladiator (1930)
18. The Crimson Avenger: The Dark Cross Conspiracy (1981-88)
    

Reading The Wizard of Oz Aloud to My Son

Published: 2000
Annotated edition originally published: 1973
Acquired: November 2011
Previously read: April 2013
Read aloud: July 2021

The Annotated Wizard of Oz: Centennial Edition

by L. Frank Baum, pictures by W. W. Denslow, annotated by Michael Patrick Hearn

My eldest son has long been interested in The Wizard of Oz; one of the books a friend gave us when he was born was the improbably titled Little Master Baum: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: A Colors Primer: A BabyLit Book, which rearranges the story into a set of color-coded two-page spreads of objects. At some point—I don't remember how these days—he discovered my actual copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and I must have "read" it to him a million time by just summarizing the story with reference to the pictures. (I have a nice Books of Wonder facsimile edition of the original 1900 edition.) He was into it enough that my mother bought him a set of Wizard of Oz dolls for Christmas. I began to wonder if he might want to read the actual novel, word by word, but an article I read suggested age 3 was more likely. As we neared his third birthday, I realized he was sitting through whole issues of My Little Pony in one sitting (something he hadn't been able to do a couple months prior), and he was also down for some long, text-dense picture books. So I offered to read him the whole thing in its entirety and he agreed.

At first I think he was a bit baffled—Dorothy used to get out of Kansas in thirty seconds, now it took ten minutes!—but he quickly became an enthusiastic devotee. We would do one chapter a day, often two or more, though I quickly worked out that more than two chapters in one sitting was not compatible with his attention span. Knowing the outline of the whole story from having read it in summary form before definitely helped him keep track of things, and fit with the advice that article gave me.

It's a fun book to read aloud, with lots of room for good voices. For Dorothy I just used my normal voice. For the Munchkins and Emerald City residents, I did my normal voice, but pitched upward at the end of sentences; I matched this with the Scarecrow but made it a bit hoarse. I was surprised by how the Tin Woodman ended up with an English accent, but it seemed to fit the character perfectly. The Cowardly Lion was of course very deep. One criticism people lob at the book is that it's episodic, but when you are reading it out loud a chapter at a time, that kind of thing doesn't really register—the Dainty China Country's is today's episode, rather than an irrelevant diversion. (Though I suspect it's one he won't really remember.)

On this reread—who knows how many times I've read it now—I was struck by how the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and Cowardly Lion already possess their desire qualities before they are gifted by the Wizard (something lost from the MGM film): the Scarecrow comes up with the best plans, the Woodman always acts with compassion, the Lion is always brave. But also that they actually kind of lose them once they receive them; they are kind of stupid and uncompassionate when visiting the Dainty China Country, and the Lion's means of killing the giant spider isn't exactly an act of bravery. I'm curious to see how this plays out going forward.

The novel's violence was also interesting, and somewhat jarring compared to modern children's literature sensibilities. But surely a child of 1900 would have much more contact with death than my own son—and the book is always so matter of fact about it that it cannot disturb.

I couldn't find my Books of Wonder facsimile, so I had to read him my Norton annotated edition. This has the complete text and illustrations, though the color plates are all in one spot, so every chapter we had to check there for any relevant pictures. The main problem it represented is that I would often get distracted from reading aloud by reading footnotes!

When I was in high school, I babysat a couple of kids—I think they would have been around six and seven at the time?—and at the suggestion my English teacher, I read them the Harry Potter books aloud, a chapter at a time. I think the first three were out when we started, and the fourth came out while I was babysitting them still. They loved it, and I loved it, and ever since them I've wanted to read something aloud to my own children someday. I am glad to finally have the opportunity. He's liked it enough that at the time I write this we've already plowed on through Marvelous Land and we are a few chapters away from finishing Ozma of Oz. Baum's original fourteen or fifteen will keep us some time... and then I guess there's always the rest of the Famous Forty!

Review: The Crimson Avenger: The Dark Cross Conspiracy by Roy & Dann Thomas, Greg Brooks, and Mike Gustovich

I think I already had this on my planned reading list before reading Secret Origins (I have been curious about the Crimson Avenger ever since he crossed paths with the Sandman in The Mist and The Phantom of the Fair), but even if I hadn't, reading the Crimson Avenger's Secret Origin would have sealed the deal; it was an atmosphere, period-driven slice of distinctive comics, and critical response to it directly lead to this story, still the Crimson Avenger's only ever self-titled comic in the eighty-plus years since his debut... even though he was DC's first masked hero!

Like his Secret Origins story, this is set in 1938; Lee Travis is a former playboy, now a hardworking newspaper publisher, and one of the only people in America pushing for war with Germany. At night, he and his chauffeur Wing How battle crime as the Crimson Avengers and, er, Wing. In this story, they uncover a complicated plot involving Russian dancers, Chinese lady fighter pilots, corpses, and washed up Hollywood actors, and I'll be honest, I did not understand it all terribly well. But I am always pretty bad at these noir-type things... and I enjoy them nonetheless, because to me the point isn't the specifics of the mystery, but a hero muddling his way through a world of darkness.

from The Crimson Avenger #2

As far as that goes, Roy & Dann Thomas deliver beautifully. (This is one of those stories where, like Jonni Thunder and Infinity, Inc., I believe I detect a stronger hand from Dann. But I always say that when I like a Roy Thomas story!) Greg Brooks, joined by Mike Gustovich on later issues, does a great job on art, too; you can see that just from his covers. He exactly captures the vibe the writing is going for. I did feel, however, that his use of blacks would have been more successful if this had been printed on high-quality paper like Infinity, Inc. and some other contemporary DC titles.

I doubt there is a market for it, but Secret Origins #5 and these four issues would make a great trade paperback. Maybe if the Crimson makes it big on one of DC's eight million tv shows. (Wikipedia tells me he appeared in a photo in Stargirl, so he is clearly well on his way to becoming a breakout character.)

from DC Comics Presents #38

If that did happen, DC could do worse than to chuck the final Crimson Avenger story from DC Comics Presents #38 in the back. It's a short eight-page story established how the Crimson died, decades after he stopped being a regular feature. Nothing groundbreaking, but nice to have, and I was happy I hunted it down and read it as a coda to The Dark Cross Conspiracy.

The Dark Cross Conspiracy originally appeared in issues #1-4 of The Crimson Avenger (June-Sept. 1988). The story was written by Roy & Dann Thomas; illustrated by Greg Brooks (#1-4) and Mike Gustovich (#3-4); colored by Bill Wray (#1, 3-4) and Carl Gafford (#2); and lettered by Helen Vesik (#1-3), Jean Simek (#2), and David Cody Weiss (#4).

"Whatever Happened to... the Crimson Avenger?" originally appeared in issue #38 of DC Comics Presents (Oct. 1981). The story was written by Len Wein, illustrated by Alex Saviuk & Dennis Jensen, lettered by John Costanza, colored by Gene D'Angelo, and edited by Julius Schwartz.

 

This post is eighteenth in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers The Immortal Doctor Fate. 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) [reading order]
11. Last Days of the Justice Society of America (1986-88)
12. All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant (1999)
13. Steel, the Indestructible Man (1978)
14. Superman vs. Wonder Woman: An Untold Epic of World War Two (1977)
• Wonder Woman: Earth-Two (1977-78)
15. Secret Origins of the Golden Age (1986-89)
16. The Young All-Stars (1987-89)
17. Gladiator (1930)
    

Review: Gladiator by Philip Wylie

Now I am swinging around to catching up on another set of reviews: those of my ongoing read-through of DC's post-Golden Age JSA-centric comic books. That begins with this, a story which somehow belongs in the DC universe despite predating it...

Originally published: 1930
Read: March 2021

Gladiator by Philip Wylie

In The Young All-Stars, Roy and Dann Thomas created the character of Arn "Iron Munro" Munro, who was eventually revealed to be the son of Hugo Danner. Danner is the protagonist of Philip Wylie's 1930 sf novel Gladiator, seen by some as forerunner of Superman. We don't know that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster read Gladiator or anything, but there are some resonances between their novel and the earlier conceptions of Superman. The Thomases literalized this possible debt in-universe by making the character of Hugo Danner a forerunner and progenitor of the superheroes of the 1930s and '40s. Gladiator is in the public domain and thus on Project Gutenberg, so I figured I would read it upon finishing Young All-Stars.

I'll be honest, though, I was curious but did not have high expectations. The Hugo Danner stuff was some of my least favorite material in Young All-Stars, and the only thing I knew Philip Wylie from was that he co-wrote the novel When Worlds Collide, which I haven't read... but I have seen the absolutely awful 1951 film.

But it was really good! Wylie charts the life of Hugo Danner in exhaustive detail, from outsider childhood to college football star to war hero and beyond. Wylie gets how to write good science fiction, which is that he simultaneously shows you something new and cool and it's a metaphor for something old. This is a pretty grounded and realistic take on what it would be like to be a "superman," I think; it almost reads like a riff on superheroes except it came before them! It reminds me of some of those 1990s/2000s comics about what it "really" be like to have superpowers, except not needlessly brutal as those sometimes were.

Yet it's also something we can all empathize with: not fitting in. Hugo struggles to find his place in the world from boyhood on, and constantly realizes that the connections he does have turn out to be more superficial than he thought. The story of his time at college, especially his summer vacation, was one of my favorite parts, and the description of his involvement in the futility of World War I is probably the book's best part. There's a lot of quiet and thoughtful characterization here in what was a quick and energetic read.

Indeed, I ended the whole experience thinking that Roy Thomas had really done Hugo Danner dirty in The Young All-Stars. The adaptation of this story in Young All-Stars #10-11 communicates none of its power. Danner deserved better than becoming a mediocre villain in a mediocre storyline.

(Thomas had actually previously adapted Gladiator in a different comic back in 1976, which I'll circle back to read now that I've finally written up Gladiator. I am curious to see what I think of that take.)

This post is seventeenth in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers The Crimson Avenger: The Dark Cross Conspiracy. 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) [reading order]
11. Last Days of the Justice Society of America (1986-88)
12. All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant (1999)
13. Steel, the Indestructible Man (1978)
14. Superman vs. Wonder Woman: An Untold Epic of World War Two (1977)
• Wonder Woman: Earth-Two (1977-78)
15. Secret Origins of the Golden Age (1986-89)
16. The Young All-Stars (1987-89)
    

Review: My Little Pony/Transformers: The Magic of Cybertron by James Asmus et al.

I guess the first Transformers/My Little Pony crossover must have sold well, because just five months after it came to an end, another one began-- and the end has hints for a third! While the first featured Queen Chrysalis bringing the Transformers to Equestria, this one has Megatron bringing the ponies to Cybertron, inadvertently releasing King Sombra in the process. Sombra promptly mind controls a group of ponies, Decepticons, and Autobots, and its up to the remaining ponies and Transformers on both sides to figure out a way to stop him from conquering two worlds.

IDW does a lot of these weird mash-ups: Transformers/G.I. Joe, Star Trek/Transformers, Star Trek / Legion of Super-Heroes, and so on. Part of what can make them less effective, I think, is that in your head, you can imagine six million different fun things that can happen... but if it's a four-issue miniseries telling a single story, there probably isn't room for most of those, and the resulting story is a bit more plodding. (The sheer insanity of Transformers vs. G.I. Joe is of course an exception to this.) Thus, I like the format of these MLP/TF crossovers. Each of the four issues contains two ten-page stories; in between the opener and the finale, we get can get six quick stories against the broad framework of "what would ponies do on Cybertron?" This lets the writers indulge whatever weird team-ups they like, without having to worry about how it all goes together. (Indeed, in some cases, they clearly haven't worried about how it fits together at all!)

from My Little Pony/Transformers #1
(script by Sam Maggs, art by Casey W. Coller)

So, in the six middle stories we get:

• a team-up between two lesbian parent couples (MLP's Holiday and Loftie, aunts/guardians of Scootaloo, and TF's Arcie and Greenlight, guardians of Gauge)
• a team-up between flying teams (MLP's Wonderbolts and TF's Seekers)
• a showdown between "Western" characters (MLP's Applejack and TF's Wildwheel)
• a team-up between musical characters (MLP's Vinyl Scratch and Octavia Melody and TF's Soundwave)
• a team-up between characters who are into beauty (MLP's Rarity, a fashion designer, and TF's Knock Out, a cosmetic surgeon)
• a team-up between reptiles (MLP's Spike and Smolder, both dragons, and TF's Dinobots)

MLP continuity seem to be pretty firmly rooted in the tv show's season 9, but the TF continuity-- as is usually the case for a lot of these crossovers-- seems to be based on the 1980s cartoon in its general precepts, but freely pulls characters and concepts from other continuities. (Arcie and Greenlight are from IDW's 2019-present ongoing, Wildwheel is from the 2018-present Cyberverse cartoon, Knock Out is from IDW's old 2005-18 continuity.)

from My Little Pony/Transformers #2
(script by Ian Flynn, art by Priscilla Tramontano)

They're all by different creative teams, and I liked some better than others, but I think literally every story had one great moment. The opener had an excellent Unicron gag; I loved Scootaloo zooming in on a Transformer scooter with a bunch of "kid" Autobots; the bit where Starscream expects everyone to cheer for him but instead they cheer for Rainbow Dash was perfectly done; Knock Out insisting that Rarity needed to see the beauty of Cybertron was a surprisingly good grace note, and Knock Out's speech about his love for fellow Decepticon Breakdown was pretty cute; and who wouldn't love Vinyl Scratch using Soundwave as her own sound system? Last time the finale was pretty perfunctory, but this time it has some good gags, too: the Mane Six are given exo-suits that let them transform, and Pinkie Pie's wondering what she'll turn into is fun, as is her delight at what she does become (yielded by Megatron, no less!). Starscream's last line is perfect.

I had two particular favorites. One was "One-Trick Pony" (from issue #2, by Sam Maggs and Trish Forstner), the Western-styled showdown between Applejack and Wildwheel. I didn't know Wildwheel (I've never seen Cyberverse), but this was a perfect Western pastiche, and it read brilliantly.

from My Little Pony/Transformers #4
(script by Ian Flynn, art by Casey W. Coller)

The other was, like last time, the Spike/Dinobot team-up (from issue #4, by Ian Flynn and Casey W. Coller). This just had a lot of good jokes, as Grimlock and Spike struggle to explain to the other Dinobots what makes Spike so cool. "Friend-Spike can fly, too!" "I'm... still learning, to be honest." "Him learning to fly! Him dragon! Breath fire, too!" "M-mostly to send correspondence..." "Telecomm fire!" But of course Spike comes through with the magic of friendship when they have to battle a combiner.

Are these comics great art? Well, I don't know, but they're certainly great comics. Like, what else could you want from them? I will definitely be here for any third volume. (That said, I think Transformation Is Magic would have been a much better subtitle.)

The Magic of Cybertron was originally published in issues #1-4 of My Little Pony/Transformers (Apr.-July 2021). The story was written by James Asmus (#1, 3-4), Sam Maggs (#1-2), Ian Flynn (#2, 4), and Tony Fleecs (#3); illustrated by Jack Lawrence (#1, 4), Casey W. Coller (#1, 4), Priscilla Tramontano (#2-3), Trish Forstner (#2), and Tony Fleecs (#3); colored by Luis Antonio Delgado (#1-4),  Joana Lafuente (#1-2, 4), and Tony Fleecs (#3), with flats by Lauren Perry (#3); lettered by Jake M. Wood and Neil Uyetake; and edited by Megan Brown.

Review: Doctor Who: War of Gods by Nick Abadzis, James Peaty, Giorgia Sposito, Warren Pleece, et al.

With this, I am finally caught up on reviewing my Titan Doctor Who comics, so finally I can review something else! Until I read some more, anyway...

Collection published: 2017
Contents originally published: 2016-17
Read: May 2021

Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor, Vol 7: War of Gods

Writers: Nick Abadzis, James Peaty
Artists: Giorgia Sposito, Warren Pleece with Arianna Florean
Colorists: Arianna Florean, Adele Matera
Letterers: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

To be honest, this is wretched. A series that began by emulating Russell T Davies's "domestic" style has ended up embracing the "planet Zog" style of Doctor Who he used to rail against. The Osirians are doing some kind of evil space thing, and all space itself is under threat. Who cares? I found the dimensions of the threat murky and confusing (I swear three different issues ended with Sutekh being released from captivity), I don't care about Anubis or the actress lady, and the personal hook of Gabby and Cindy is pretty much nonexistent. Bad and dull. Giorgia Sposito is fine as an artist, but she's no Elena Casagrande or Eleonora Carlini. I wanted to jump off the book at this point, but some people claim Year Three is a return to form, and my library has it all via Hoopla, so I guess I'll give it a shot.

There's also a one-issue story set during vol 6, about Gabby going to London for the first time. I didn't find the idea that the Doctor would be all mopey about London because Rose, Martha, and Donna were from there very convincing (it seems to me that he has a lot more London memories from across 900 years of life, and we've never seen him react to a place like that before), and I don't think Warren Pleece's art is a good match for the tenth Doctor (loved him on The Eleventh Doctor, though), but aside from that it was a fine enough insubstantial story.

I read an issue of Titan's Doctor Who comic every day (except when I have hard-copy comics to read). Next up in sequence: The Third Doctor: Heralds of Destruction

Book Revision Progress Report

Back at the beginning of summer, I posted about working on my book. My book has a planned seven chapters about scientists in nineteenth-century British fiction. These cover:

1. Frankenstein
2. Wives and Daughters
3. medical reform novels
4. domestic fiction
5. air-war novels
6. novels of biocracy
7. professionalized scientists

Plus there's an introduction, and I think I might do a coda.

I have materials drafted for every chapter, because it's based on my dissertation. I've been rewriting for a depressingly long time now, longer than I wrote it to begin with! My original plan was to start with the chapters that needed the most work and work my way down. This didn't quite happen because I wanted to have good sample chapters to send to publishers-- and then this thing always happens where I sit down to work on a chapter and decide it needs even more work than I imagined, and so revising it takes ages. But so far this is where I am at and where I am going:

CHAPTER 2
I did this one first because I knew it needed the least amount of work, and I wanted to use it in any samples. I did this so long ago I don't even remember when. Finished Summer 2019.

CHAPTER 4
This is one I thought wouldn't require a lot of work... and then it did! Part of the problem is that it contained some material I wrote as a second-year M.A. student... it just was not up to standard. It took me a long time to figure out the chapter's trajectory, too; I kept reorganizing it. Also I adapted part of it into an article, and then when I put the material from the article back into the chapter, I had to update everything else to match. And then I added a whole novel to it! So it was a lot of work, but I would say it paid off. Finished Summer 2019.

CHAPTER 3
This one I knew would be a lot of work, and it was a lot of work. One issue is that it was long; it is my chapter that takes in Middlemarch, and it is hard to write anything short about Middlemarch. Another was that I didn't have a solid sense of argument, and so there was a lot of back-and-forth and reorganizing as I worked my way into one. (My mode of writing is typically to write something, reverse outline it, reorganize it, and then add what is missing in its new trajectory.) Again, I ended up really happy with it; I think I managed to say something interesting about a novel a lot of people have written about. That said, I didn't cut as much as I hoped, but I am saying more than I was. Finished Summer 2020.

CHAPTER 6
This is the one I have been working on this summer. Again, it was one I knew would be a lot of work. I dropped one novel and replaced it with another; my dissertation version had almost no secondary sources, so I had to do a lot of research. But just this Tuesday I have a complete draft in its new form. Again, it has a focused argument that it didn't have before, and it draws attention to some obscure novels that I think are really worth discussing. I have some small things to add, and I need to sit down and read it all at once to make sure it coheres, but finishing it up should take no more than a couple days. (Almost) Finished Summer 2021.

CHAPTER 1
This one will be my last "lot of work" chapters. The main issues, as I recall, are that I am drawing a connection between Frankenstein and a book I haven't actually read much of, so I will need to do that, and that I didn't really come to grips with the vast, vast amount of work out there on Frankenstein. I actually tried to omit Frankenstein from my dissertation but one of my committee members told me no one could write a book about nineteenth-century scientists in literature and skip Frankenstein! And yes, she is right, and I do have something to say about it. But boy I am not looking forward to it.

CHAPTER 5
This one I don't think should be much work. It's largely based on preexisting, published material, about which I feel pretty good... I think! My opinion always changes once I sit down and reread in order to rewrite.

CHAPTER 7
This one may be slightly more work than 5, so I might switch it around if I still believe "amount-of-work" is the sequence for this. The main thing is that I don't think I had strong engagement with secondary sources on professionalization. But I now know of a couple things I could cite and work with, building on work I did in Chapter 4. The other issue is I think each of the three novels it discusses was originally discussed in a different chapter (two in 4, and one in 5/6) so it probably doesn't have a consistent throughline.

INTRODUCTION
This clearly gets written last, because it has to set up everything I went on to do. But I remember being pretty happy with the conceit of the intro, so hopefully it is smooth sailing.

CODA
Does anyone actually read the codas to academic monographs? Doubtful, so I may give this a miss.

As you can see, I am working steadily but not quickly. I complete a good chapter revision every summer... but if that continues to be my m.o., I will not finish this until Summer 2025! And okay, I have been working with this as a book since 2018, and as a dissertation since 2013, and as a thing I was writing about in coursework since 2010! So it would be nice to be rid of it all, and work on something else. I don't think I have the loathing for my project I sometimes hear people describe, but I am ready to move on emotionally.

So my goal for the coming year is to actually work on my project while teaching, which will definitely be an easy thing to do while teaching four comp classes per semester and raising two kids.

Review: Spirits Abroad by Zen Cho

Collection published: 2021
Contents originally published: 2011-20
Acquired: May 2021
Read: July 2021

Spirits Abroad: Stories by Zen Cho

I really enjoyed Zen Cho's Hugo-winning novelette "If At First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again," about an imugi trying to become a dragon but instead falling in love with a grad student, so I was delighted when I obtained an advance copy of Spirits Abroad, a collection of her short fiction from the past ten years. (There was an earlier edition a few years ago, but this one adds a few stories.) Cho is a Malaysian-British writer of fantasy, and the stories here are organized into three sections.

The first, Here, is made up of stories set in Malaysia. Many, if not all of them, simply take Malaysian folklore beliefs seriously, and tell stories about them in the modern world. I really enjoyed almost all of them; we have stories about an emigrant to America coming home for her grandmother's funeral (but she's a witch), about someone who does smell magic and befriends a cat, about a young girl who gets wishes from a fish pond, about a young vampire. Many are about not fitting in and not meeting expectations because you emigrated, because you're a lesbian, because you can't do as well on tests as your parents would like. They have a certain appeal to the sf&f reader in that the Malaysian "worldbuilding" is pretty immersive, with little explanation of a bunch of terms that I, at least, did not know. But I like that kind of thing in my sf, so why wouldn't I like it when reading about a real culture that is "alien" to me?

The second, There, are stories set in the "West," mostly the UK, but just one in the US, but still largely drawing on Malaysian mythology. "If At First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again" is in this section. Other highlights included a story about an awkward girl trying to save her college roommate from a bizarre stalker (who might be a mythological creature) and "Prudence and the Dragon," which is about a dragon coming to London for a sacrifice of a beautiful maiden... but he falls in love with someone who hasn't even noticed he's there. (This story takes place, I think, in the world of Cho's Sorcerer to the Crown novels.) Again, there's a lot of good stuff here; clever twists on mythology, and nice observation of culture clash. I don't think I bounced off a single story in this section.

Lastly comes Elsewhere, stories set in other worlds. This section is the only one where I really bounced off any stories; I didn't care for one told entirely in a sort of mythological register. I like sf&f... which is not quite the same thing as myth, even if they are related. But there are a couple good ones, "The Earth Spirit's Favorite Anecdote" and "The Terra-cotta Bride"-- the latter is about automata in hell! My favorite was "The Four Generations of Chang E," the book's sole science fiction story, about lunar colonists and the way we have expectations for future generations and neglect the lessons of past ones.

I think I can claim this is the best single-author short story collection I've read in the last year (it edges out Exhalation for me), and I wish the short fiction Hugo Award finalists I'm currently working my way through were as consistently good as this is.

Review: Doctor Who: Official Secrets by Cavan Scott, Adriana Melo, and Cris Bolson

Collection published: 2017
Contents originally published: 2016-17
Acquired: March 2020
Read: May 2021

Doctor Who: The Ninth Doctor, Vol 3: Official Secrets

Writer: Cavan Scott
Artists: Adriana Melo & Cris Bolson

Colorist: Marco Lesko
Letters: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

This is better than previous volumes of The Ninth Doctor, though I still don't get what this comic is going for. I mean, there's no reason it needs to evoke Saturday tea-time 2005 per se, but plunging the ninth Doctor, Rose, and Captain Jack into a 1970s UNIT adventure doesn't strike me as particularly interesting, either-- or rather, what writer Cavan Scott does with it isn't interesting. DWM did something neat with a post-Time War tenth Doctor meeting the Brigadier way back in the day. What was it like for the Doctor himself to finally be an old soldier, meeting the man he'd always denigrated for his military mindset? But the ninth Doctor here doesn't really act much different than any Doctor would. Harry Sullivan is a focal character, but I don't know why, and he doesn't always ring true as being very Harry-y.

The second story, about the TARDIS team in Brazil during the era of Portuguese slavers, struggles with length, feeling both too long and too short. Too short in that a lot of its ideas get short shrift: it's about the Doctor confronting slavers, and about alien refugees, and about Rose discovering some of Captain Jack's secrets from his Time Agency days, and about new companion Tara's first trip in the TARDIS. Most of this is rushed and/or underexplored. The conclusion has the Doctor happily mentally subjugating some aliens to another group of aliens, seemingly just because finding a better solution would take more pages than the comic has. But it's also too long in that not much actually seems to happen; it mostly feels like two long scenes, one of Rose and Captain Jack looking at a computer, and one of the Doctor and Tara wandering around the jungle. The more I read of The Ninth Doctor, the more I feel like Cavan Scott doesn't get how to tell a comics story, but he seems to be quite experienced, having written dozens of Star Wars comics for IDW, so I dunno. That might have mostly been after this, though?

I read an issue of Titan's Doctor Who comic every day (except when I have hard-copy comics to read). Next up in sequence: The Tenth Doctor: War of Gods