Review: Star Wars: Purge by John Ostrander, Alexander Freed, et al.

Comic trade paperback, 124 pages
Published 2013 (contents: 2005-13)
Acquired August 2014 
Read December 2018

Star Wars: Purge

Script: John Ostrander, Haden Blackman, Alexander Freed

Art: Douglas Wheatley, Jim Hall and Alex Lei & Mark McKenna, Chris Scalf, Marco Castiello & Andrea Chella

Colors: Ronda Pattison, Michael Atiyeh
Lettering: Michael David Thomas, Michael Heisler

The contents of this collection-- five issues published across seven years-- overlap chronologically with that of Dark Times, so I read it alongside it. It's okay, but not great, but I doubt it could be great: a series of one-shots about Darth Vader hunting down Jedi after Revenge of the Sith can pretty much only go one way again and again. In each story, some minor Jedi character challenges Vader. Usually, the character has appeared in two previous issues since 1999, or perhaps they've never appeared anywhere before at all. Guess what? They go down. Hard.

Obviously most of the stories are trying to give us emotional insight into Vader after his fall, but there's not a lot to give: Vader is angry, even more so than Palpatine wants. Well, sure. The best story in this regard is the third, "The Hidden Blade" by Haden Blackman and Chris Scalf, where Vader's anger actually causes some conflict, getting in the way of his mission. I also liked the final story, "The Tyrant's Fist" by Alexander Freed, Marco Castiello, and Andrea Chella, because a lot of it was told from the perspective of a young Imperial officer, using her to show how the galaxy is adapting to the lack of the Jedi, as they have to be eradicated not just physically, but from the hearts and minds of the people. So a couple decent stories, a couple okay ones. You could do worse, but most of the people involved in this have done better.

Review: Doctor Who: Jak and the Wormhole by Justin Richards

While I'm discussing Doctor Who, I am back in action at Unreality SF after a couple weeks off, with a review of the first four episodes of Torchwood series 6: God Among Us 1.

Hardcover, 37 pages
Published 2016 (originally 2015)
Acquired February 2017
Read July 2018

Doctor Who: Jak and the Wormhole
by Justin Richards
illustrated by David Wardle

I do like that in this BBC Books prestige product designed to lure in people who like Matt Smith there's a whole book that's just an adaptation of 1979-80's The Horns of Nimon, notoriously one of the worst Doctor Who stories ever made. This is actually a somewhat fun Jack and the Beanstalk riff, and sure, why not end the series with it? I enjoyed it more than most of the volumes.

Next Week: On to a new reading project: I catch up on the Star Trek fiction of the Destiny era!

Review: Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers

Trade paperback, 359 pages
Published 2018
Acquired July 2018
Read August 2018

Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers

The first Wayfarers/Galactic Commons novel, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, didn't do much for me, as it was aimless and conflict-free, but I did end up enjoying the emotional journey of the second, A Closed and Common Orbit, so I picked up the third, Record of a Spaceborn Few. It's a lot like Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140, in that we follow a group of disparate protagonists as a way into seeing a futuristic society. Unlike New York 2140, though, the connections between strands are slight. A couple of the characters briefly meet during the novel, but there's no unifying plot.

It wants to be a book about the conflict between tradition and modernization: in the future, humanity has abandoned Earth for the Exodus Fleet, but once humanity discovers the Galactic Commons, more and more humans are leaving the Fleet for a more grounded life. So what's the point of the Exodus Fleet and Exodan tradition? But this was closer to the Long Way end of the Becky Chambers spectrum. The individual stories mostly left me cold, though every now and again there'd be a striking scene or moment, such as the Exodan funeral ceremony. I just feel like the characters and the themes don't have the depth needed to make Chambers's slice-of-life style storytelling work. Probably this will be my last Galactic Commons novel unless future installments are Hugo finalists again.

The Mollmann Call

When I was in grad school, I used to workshop my creative writing with a group of fellow graduate students. I think it was when we were doing my novel about Doctor McCoy, that one of my friends observed, "Doctor McCoy is the quintessential Steve Mollmann protagonist: in love with the world, and in love with complaining about the world." Like so many things people say when critiquing your work, I immediately realized it was true even though I'd never thought of it before; many of the characters in my attempts at original sf could be described along similar lines.

I think this is the location the song was coined, St. Mary's Falls in Colorado.

This is something I picked up from my family. (Though I think maybe I'm more in love with the world than they are.) My mom once changed the lyrics of the camp classic "The Beaver Song" to be about the Mollmanns:

I'm a Mollmann,
You're a Mollmann,
We are Mollmanns all,
And when we get together
We do our Mollmann call:
Whine whine whine whine whine whine
Crab crab crab crab crab
Whine whine whine whine whine whine
Crab crab crab crab crab.

I'm not exactly sure what this can be blamed on. Like, I don't think my father is responsible; I think it used to frustrate him how much we call complained, which we did sort of as a default reaction, not necessarily meaning anything by it. So I guess that means my mother's to blame?

Sometimes I worry that happiness expressed via complaining is just, like much irony, a way of refraining from the danger of earnestness. If you don't directly say what you like, no one can attack you for it. As Augustine St. Clare says in Uncle Tom's Cabin, "I am one of the sort that lives by throwing stones at other people’s glass houses, but I never mean to put up one for them to stone." Sarcasm is, of course, often a defense mechanism, and I find I go overboard on it when I'm nervous about something, like when I first became a student manager at the dining hall, or when I went on a cross-country road trip with someone I'd only known for a couple months. I find that as I've gotten older I've engaged in it a lot less, and it's sometimes jarring to go back home and step into it all over again. I don't think I complain as much as I used to.

Once my brother texted me and asked if he and his fiancée could copy what me and Hayley did for wedding rings. I said, "Sure, but I reserve the right to complain that you copied us." He texted back: "Like a true Mollmann." But I was happy.

#32: What makes you happy?

The Scientist in Victorian Literature: Michael Graham, Philosopher ("Stella," 1895)

PDF eBook, 177 pages
Published 1895
Read January 2019

Stella and An Unfinished Communication: Studies of the Unseen
by C. H. Hinton

"But I thought, Stella, that the forbidden tree was the tree of knowledge."
     "That was Adam's tree, Hugh! There were two trees in the garden of Eden, a big one for Adam, and a smaller one near it for Eve. Her tree was the tree of being seen and known. When she ate that kind of fruit, she became visible, she was no longer as she was meant to be." (32)

This book contains two novellas by Charles Hinton, a mathematician who coined the word "tesseract." The first, "Stella," is the reason I read it, a story of scientific invisibility that predates H. G. Wells's The Invisible Man (1897). Michael Graham is our man of science, but it's kind of borderline as an inclusion in my project, because 1) we never actually see his point-of-view, as he's dead by the time the story begins, and 2) I don't think he's ever actually described as a scientist or a man of science.

Spoilers head, though this is one of those books you won't see much of a reason to read if you don't know some of them. Graham was actually a philosopher trying to figure out how to create altruistic people; he determined that adults cannot be adapted to new moral codes because their minds formed around old ones, and it's even difficult to raise children because the environment of society will impose itself on them (23). So he decided to raise a child in absolute secret. His theory became that he needed to find out what the soul did when the most fundamental self-regarding impulses were denied (48). For boys, that's taking things, but for girls, that's being seen. It's impossible to stop a boy from wanting things (because then he will die), but it is possible to stop a girl from being seen if you adjust her index of refraction! So he raised a girl named Stella from birth in a state of invisibility.

The book is narrated by Hugh "Steddy" Stedman Churton, a lawyer sent to wind up Graham's affairs. While staying in Graham's old house, he meets and falls in love with Stella; eventually, Stella is kidnapped by a medium looking to use her to enhance his bogus seances.

It's a strange book, but a very enjoyable one. There's a certain weird logic to Graham's ideas, and Hinton is surprisingly good at depicting the tension between different ideas; this isn't one of those Victorian books where someone expounds a theory and you're clearly meant to take their side. Graham's ideas are weird, of course, but Churton's insistence that Stella needs to be visible and marry him feels very small-minded. He's unwilling to open himself up to the strange possibilities that the universe has to offer beyond our dimension, and he clearly doesn't value women when he can't see how attractive they are. Additionally, though the novella is obviously exploring the way women need to be seen, I don't Churton ever recognizes his need to be seen, but he definitely has one too.

The novella is only 107 pages long, and I zipped through it in a couple sittings. I think it helps that Hinton clearly has a sense of humor and of adventure. The joke on p. 105 made me laugh aloud.

There are some other men of science in the book, too. Frank Cornish is Churton's friend and Graham's nephew who gets an M.D., but spends his time researching, not in medical practice; he helps Churton figure out some of the science behind Stella's invisibility. There's also "Professor C——", a chemist who helps Churton track down Stella. Churton gets Professor C—— to help him because of his love of experiments; Churton says, "he possessed in a marked degree that ardour for experiment which becomes a second nature with scientific men" (61). However, there's one point where Churton and Professor C—— probably could have rescued Stella earlier but C—— wastes time asking her questions about coefficients (65).

I don't think it will make it into my project, because the science is mostly, well, invisible, but it will make it onto my list. Thanks to Elizabeth L. Throesch's book on Hinton for alerting me to its existence.

Additionally, the book contains another novella by Hinton, "An Unfinished Communication," about a man who goes to see an "unlearner." It starts out funny, with some good jokes, but quickly becomes ponderous, and I stopped putting the work into figuring out what was going on.

Review: Star Wars: Dark Times: The Path to Nowhere by Randy Stradley and Douglas Wheatley

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2008 (contents: 2006-07)
Acquired and previously read January 2008
Reread November 2018

Star Wars: Dark Times, Volume One: The Path to Nowhere

Story: Welles Hartley
Script: Mick Harrison

Art: Douglas Wheatley

Colors: Ronda Pattison
Lettering: Michael David Thomas, Michael Heisler

I read the first three volumes of Dark Times-- which chronicles the separate adventures of a couple Jedi, a group of smugglers, and Darth Vader in the months after Revenge of the Sith-- as they came out in the late 2000s, but fell behind after that; the series lasted four more. I finally got to reading volume four, but decided I ought to reread the earlier volumes so I would have some context. (First, I actually reread a two-issue story in Clone Wars, Volume 9 that some of the Dark Times characters debuted in.) First, here's my original review of volume one from February 2008:

I expected to like this new series a lot, spinning off as it did from the very good last volume of the Clone Wars comics, Endgame. Unfortunately, this volume never clicked with me for some reason. There's nothing I can point to, really, but there is a feeling of seen-it-before, with a Jedi on the run in a rag-tag ship, in danger of falling to the dark side-- it's Knights of the Old Republic mixed with Quinlan Vos's arc in Clone Wars, except not as good as either. One review I read online said that the story Endgame set up-- a Jedi leading an army of former Separatists against the Empire-- was more interesting than the one we actually got, and I agree. Still, the art is very, very nice, and the twilight gloom that arrives with the coming of the Empire is well portrayed. I think I'll pick up the second volume and see how I like it then.

On reread, I actually liked it more than the above indicates, maybe because I knew to not have those expectations based on Endgame anymore, and maybe also because since I read it right after Endgame, the continuity of Dass Jennir's character arc was more obvious. Jennir isn't in danger of falling to the Dark Side, as I said above; it's more than in the era of the Empire, the ideals that sustained his entire life just ceased to be applicable. He's not choosing evil, but moving into a world where there is no opportunity to choose good. This is a very dark comic book (slavery and cannibalism are key features!), but it takes good advantage of its setting to tell a unique kind of Star Wars story, and it does so very well, in large part thanks to Douglas Wheatley's exceptional artwork.

(Since the original comic came out, it's been revealed that "Welles Hartley," credited writer of Endgame, and "Mick Harrison," credited writer of volumes 2-4 of Dark Times, are in fact both pen names for editor Randy Stradley, used I guess to disguise how much of Dark Horse's Star Wars output he wrote himself. But for some reason this book credits the story to one of those pseudonyms and the script to the other! In this interview from 2007, artist Wheatley even keeps up the subterfuge by saying it's the first project he's ever worked on with two writers, and it makes for lively conference calls. This has bothered me ever since the Hartley/Harrison revelation, and I want to know why it was done this way.)

Review: Doctor Who: The Twins in the Wood by Justin Richards

Hardcover, 36 pages
Published 2016 (originally 2015)
Acquired February 2017
Read July 2018

Doctor Who: The Twins in the Wood
by Justin Richards
illustrated by David Wardle

I would say this is the worst Time Lord fairy tale yet except I can't reject the possibility that there's a worse one I've purged from my memory. It's completely devoid of incident of interest. A pair of twins is framed by an evil uncle for killing their father, so they are exiled. But while they're gone, a nice guy fixes the problem for them. All they do is wait! They literally never make a single decision in the course of this story. Except, the woods they hide in are on Gallifrey for some reason. Why? Who knows, because it literally has no ramifications on the story. It does let David Wardle draw a nice picture of the Capitol in his woodcut style (as you can see on the cover), I suppose. But Jesus, what a waste of paper and time.

Next Week: It's all finally over! Jak and the Wormhole!

Review: Otherworld Barbara Vol. 1 by Moto Hagio

Comic hardcover, 378 pages
Published 2016 (contents: 2003)
Borrowed from the library
Read December 2017

Otherworld Barbara Vol. 1
by Moto Hagio
translation by Matt Thorn

I've been meandering through the translated oeuvre of shōjo manga master Moto Hagio for several years now; my latest read is the first half of Otherworld Barbara. It's interesting-- my introduction to her work was a series of short pieces collected in A Drunken Dream and Other Stories (1977-2008), and from there each book I've read has been longer than the last: A, A′ (1997) was four short stories, but they were linked; Heart of Thomas (1974) was a single 500-page story.* Otherworld Barbara will run over 700 by its end, I think.

I mention this not (just) because I love trivia, but because it's hard to judge Otherworld Barbara as a story on its first 378 pages. There's a lot going on here: a dreamworld where cannibalism is a normal practice that leads to immortality, a real world where people can dive into dreams, a father estranged from his son, an old woman pining for youth, a conference about the mysteries of Mars, a funeral, a line of robot dolls, an island that appears and disappears. It was a little tough to orient myself at first (not aided by the fact that I still struggle to recognize characters in manga consistently), but once I started to get a handle, I was drawn in. As always, Hagio's storytelling is prone to hugely dramatic emotions, gloomy tragedy, traumatic backstories... and goofy farce. I have no idea how it's all going to integrate, but I'm beginning to grasp the connections, and I'm on the edge of my seat to see how she pulls it off. Bring on vol. 2.

* You will note this is my progression through Hagio, not her progression, as I haven't been reading her work in its order of publication. Note also that I read her short story "They Were Eleven" (1975) between A, A′ and Heart of Thomas, which breaks my supposed pattern.

My Own Private Book Purge

Coincidentally, as Marie Kondo was inspiring a flurry of discussion about purging books, I was living it.

This past summer, my wife surprised me for my birthday by corralling a number of my friends to install five IKEA Billy bookshelves in my would-be study while I was gone at a conference (as well as assemble a couple shelves we already had). They even put as many books on the shelves as possible. Since then, I've installed three more myself and slowly been organizing them. Over six months later, and I'm not quite done, though I am pretty close. (I basically just have to do my comic books, but that will require at least one more Billy, I suspect.)

I have a lot of books. After the surprise shelving, one of my friends thanked me: "I used to worry I had too many books, but now I know I'll never have as many as you do." As of this writing, I own 2,663 according to my LibraryThing. Getting rid of books has been a major problem for me over the years. I basically refuse to do it. After all, I could reread them all someday! Even though it's pretty unlikely I'll ever want to reread, say, any of my Star Wars YA novels, or even The Silmarillion.

Partly it's a collector thing too. I have a complete run of Star Wars: Jedi Apprentice; I'm not going to just give that up! Sometimes people post on web forums I frequent: "I used to have a complete collection of The New Doctor Who Adventures, but I sold it off years ago to make room. Now I'm hunting them all down again." I view these kind of posts as horror stories, dark visions of my own future. What if I purge Jedi Apprentice but ten years from now am wracked with guilt and want to reassemble it?

Weirdly, it wasn't packing up my books that made me realize there were some I really could do without, but unpacking them. Packing had to go fast, but shelving has been-- as indicated-- a slow, often judicious process. I've had to track down stuff that ended up in different parts of the house, and for my nonfiction in particular, I had to come up with a good shelving system. This caused me wonder about individual books: did I really need each and every one?

There were two main categories of book I became skeptical of. One was duplicates: I have the edition of Nevil Shute's On the Beach I bought in a used bookstore, and I have the more recent edition I got as a desk copy when I taught it. I have The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, but I also have individual volumes of Hamlet, Macbeth, and some others. I have two different editions of The Mill on the Floss, both very beat up 1970s paperbacks (I think both were free). I decided I could bear to part with one of each of these duplicates when I had no compelling reason to hang on to both copies.

(You can see all of my remaining what LibraryThing calls "Work duplicates" here.* I usually held onto two copies when an older one had a sentimental value, but a newer one was useful in some way. Like, I kept the copy of I, Robot my dad gave me, but I have a newer one I used when teaching it.)

I also realized I didn't need so many textbooks. I actually had two I'd been lugging around since high school! I don't know why. I suspect because at first, I felt like I might look something up in them again. But at no point in the past fifteen years have I ever used my high school poetry textbook, and my high school writing handbook is surely woefully out of date. I also had a number from college, mostly education textbooks I hadn't sold back at the time for whatever reasons. But surely I was never going to use my speech textbook from the class I took on how to teach speech, much less my 2004 copy of the Ohio Department of Education's academic content standards for K-12 language arts education.

Also in my early grad school days, I went crazy at the annual "book fair," scooping up as many complimentary copies of textbooks as publishers would let me get away with. Eventually I realized that obtaining free copies of composition anthologies is a curse, not a blessing, because then you have a completely useless, terrible book that technically speaking you're obligated to not resell.

So I packed all these books, plus some other ones that I didn't want for whatever reason, into a box and I actually had about 35 of them. I wish I'd written down a list, or at least taken a picture. I know 35 doesn't sound like a lot-- it's just over 1% of my collection, but for me it was quite a number, surely the most books I've ever gotten rid of. So I've been pretty proud of myself, even though I know I am no Marie Kondo.

I even managed to sell some of them-- I got $15 for some of the non-textbooks at the truly excellent Mojo Books and Records, and $5 for a Broadview anthology I didn't even pay for at a used textbook store. The rest of the non-textbooks I donated to my local library, and the textbook store took my leftover textbooks for donation. (I asked "where do the donated books go?" and the cashier said, "good question." I am skeptical anyone wants even a free copy of The Essay Connection.)

Of course, store credit means you need to buy something, and I bought four books at Mojo (sf was buy 3, get 1 free, how could I not!). I also grabbed a free sf novel from a bin by the door on my way out of the textbook store. But it's still progress, I suppose.

* The list is a little misleading: some of those works are in other collections; I actually own zero copies of Batman: Year One for instance, but I've borrowed it from my friend James and the library, and thus catalogued it twice in my "Read but unowned" collection.

Review: The Professor by Charlotte Brontë

Trade paperback, 319 pages
Published 2003 (originally 1857)
Acquired December 2018
Read January 2019

The Professor by Charlotte Brontë

I said to myself, [...] 'Look at the sooty smoke in that hollow, and know that there is your post! There you cannot dream, you cannot speculate and theorize – there you shall out and work!' (48)

I read this novel as part of my project to read all the remaining Victorian scientist novels. I actually wasn't sure if the eponymous professor actually was a scientist; the article I had read had been vague and a quick search didn't turn up any specific answers, so I just went and bought the book and read it to find out.

William Crimsworth is at first a clerk (that's when he utters the above) and later in fact a professor of English in Belgium, so no scientist. He only gets the gig because any vaguely educated English-speaking person could do it. But the book is filled with that other thing I am obsessed with in literature: observation. Crimsworth's friend Hunsden the tradesman, in particular, is always watching Crimsworth and drawing conclusions, sometimes right, sometimes wrong. At one point, Crimsworth observes Hunsden observing him, though he gets it wrong (255); Hunsden is not as perceptive as Crimsworth had perceived. And as a teacher Crimsworth must observe his class, which only gets harder once he picks up a job at a girls' school, full of hot young teenagers.

I didn't think there was much of a story here to be honest. Crimsworth falls in love with a would-be governess sitting in on his classes; they marry and live highly successful lives. A couple temptations are thrown in Crimsworth's way, but he overcomes them all with ease, so there's not much in the way of compelling struggle. He does kind of start from misery, but his ascent out of it is relatively unbroken.

I mostly think the book is an excuse for Brontë (as in Villette) to practice her most annoying writing tic: dialogue in untranslated French. Thank God for the end notes, but sometimes I got too tired to flip to the end and read them. I don't think I missed much.