The Scientist in Victorian Literature: Hypatia, Mathematician (Hypatia, 1853)

Hardcover, 438 pages
Published 1968 (originally 1852-53)
Acquired and read January 2019

Hypatia by Charles Kingsley

"Have I not an intellect, a taste, a reason? I could appreciate what she said.—Why should not my faculties be educated? Why am I only to be shut out from knowledge? There is a Christian Gnosis as well as a heathen one. [...] Is not my very craving for knowledge a sign that I am capable of it?" (131)

Hypatia, the late Roman-era Alexandrian mathematician, is often called an early female scientist, so it seemed like it behooved me to read the novel about her by Charles Kingsley, a man who did write two proper "scientist novels" (Two Years Ago and The Water-Babies). In terms of my project on Victorian scientists, I needn't've bothered. Hypatia as Kingsley tells it might be a mathematician and a philosopher, but she is no scientist-- she is never shown observing the world or engaging in experiment. Mostly the focus is (as in the above quotation, from a young Christian monk who wants to study under her) on her moral instruction.

In terms of reading a good book, I needn't've bothered, either. It was supposedly Queen Victoria's favorite Kingsley novel, which surely correlates to why I dislike it: it's boring and rambly and Kingsley never really makes anyone who doesn't care about hating Catholics care about what's going on. There are a couple good jokes (I don't know why he threw a gang of murderous Vikings into the mix, but I love it), but on the whole, it's one of those books where masses of pages go by and you don't know what's printed on them because you don't care to. This could be the material for a good novel, but alas, it is not.

Review: Star Wars: Dark Times: Blue Harvest by Randy Stradley and Douglas Wheatley

Comic trade paperback, 134 pages
Published 2010 (contents: 2009-10)
Acquired November 2012
Read January 2019

Star Wars: Dark Times, Volume Four: Blue Harvest

Script: Mick Harrison

Art: Douglas Wheatley

Colors: Dave McCaig, Chris Chuckry, Dan Jackson
Lettering: Michael Heisler

With this volume of Dark Times, I hit the point where I fell behind as the series was coming out, so everything from here onwards is new to me. Blue Harvest shifts the focus away from the crew of the Uhumele and Darth Vader (who both appear for just a couple pages), back to ex-Jedi Dass Jennir, who we last saw in volume one. It's okay stuff, but predictable, reminding me a little bit of a western, a little bit of noir.

Jennir is asked by a woman to help clear her town of gangs; of course it's a set-up (though not one I entirely understood), but also of course he manages it anyway. It doesn't have the painful darkness that made some of the earlier volumes of Dark Times work. You don't feel that Jennir is being pushed to the limit of his morality as he has been in the past. Still, I enjoyed it; it has nice touches, like Jennir inheriting the droid of a man he killed, so the droid is always grumbling at him about it, and the local fisherman named simply "Fish" who loyally aids Jennir. I'm over halfway through Dark Times now, so hopefully the series ends on a high note.

However: is it called "Blue Harvest" just because Jennir meets two different groups of blue aliens? And what's the "harvest"? That's a pretty far reach for a reference.

Star Trek: The Destiny Era Prelude: Allegiance in Exile

Mass market paperback, 375 pages
Published 2013
Acquired January 2017
Read August 2017

Star Trek: The Original Series: Allegiance in Exile

by David R. George III

2269
David R. George III is/was one my favorite Star Trek novelists. The 34th Rule was a strong debut, and I also enjoyed works such as Twilight, McCoy: Provenance of Shadows, and Serpents Among the Ruins. But I didn't get much out of Kirk: The Star to Every Wandering, which maybe should have thrown up some flags before proceeding into another Kirk-focused story. The thing is, that George can write very character-driven stories, but he has a sort of pattern he uses a lot, which is someone morosely obsessed with some singular event in their backstory. This works perfectly with Deep Space Nine, where basically every character has some traumatic backstory event that informs their present day actions. It even worked for the original series in Provenance of Shadows because McCoy is the one classic Star Trek character to have that kind of backstory.

It just doesn't work for James T. Kirk. I'm not saying Kirk isn't introspective (I think he's very introspective), and that he doesn't occasionally brood over the past. But Kirk usually presses his doubts into actions, he keeps moving forward. He doesn't (in what is a bit of a George writing tic) fall into a reverie in the middle of a scene where he rues over three pages of backstory between two lines of dialogue. I definitely buy that Kirk would begin to feel uncertain as he nears the end of the five-year mission. I don't buy that it would be this kind of uncertain. George kind of piles on the uncertainties, too. When the novel opens, Kirk ruminates over a lot of random old mistakes; later in the book, a seemingly routine mission goes horribly wrong so that Kirk can obsess over that for the rest of the book.

Other than Kirk, the book's big focus is Sulu, who goes through a whole whirlwind of events here. He falls in love (with a woman who has a deep trauma in her backstory she's morosely obsessed with), she gets horribly injured, he gets mad at Captain Kirk and transfers to another ship, he comes back to the Enterprise. Again, I didn't buy it. Sulu is sort of relentlessly cheerful and optimistic, and it was hard for me to imagine him reacting toward Kirk the way he did here. Which isn't to say he ought to be Mr. Cheerful all the time, especially in the kind of circumstances we see in this book, but he comes across as petulant in a way that's hard to believe of a trained officer. A Sulu who throws himself into his hobbies as a means of distraction I could buy; ditto a Sulu who's friendly to everyone but lets no one get close. A Sulu who sits in his quarters all night every night is less plausible. I also don't think George adequately sold the relationship between Sulu and Trinh, so how angry he was over it wasn't quite believable.

The first third or so of the book was the best part. The exploration of the abandoned colony on the planet the Enterprise crew nicknames Ağdam was well done and creepy (it reminded me of, um, A Choice of Catastrophes), and the way those events climaxed was harrowing. But the novel lost its energy and focus after that; I'd've liked to have seen the Enterprise actively investigate the powers behind Ağdam rather than stumble into them repeatedly. I also don't get the purpose of the Lori Ciana subplot-- George doesn't sell the flirtation, and it doesn't resonate with the themes elsewhere in the book.

So it'll be interesting to see if the 24th-century books pick up on this book's revelations, though there's not much to them (more on that in a second), but on its own, I didn't get a whole lot out of this.

Continuity Notes:

• As alluded to above, Kirk meet Vice Admiral Lori Ciana for the first time. In Roddenberry's Motion Picture novelization, she's Kirk's ex-wife who dies in the transporter accident at the beginning of the film. (With whom he split up amicably, as I recall; in Roddenberry's book but not really elsewhere in Star Trek, people can enter into short-term marriage contracts. The Lost Years tetralogy expanded on a lot of this backstory. It's been too long since I've read those for me to know if The Lost Years is consistent with Allegiance in Exile.)
• The Enterprise makes first contact with the Bajorans. Is it too small universe for Captain Kirk to make this significant first contact? It does make you think that Kira ought to have known who Captain Kirk was a little bit more than she did in "Crossover." I was a bit bummed these colonists didn't call themselves the "Bajora"; if they had, then Picard's use of the old-fashioned collective noun could have had a subtle explanation. The Ascendants also play a role, but not a huge one, and not one that tells us much about them beyond that they don't like Bajorans. (To be honest, I don't really remember anything about the Ascendants at this point, given it's been over a decade since the relevant Deep Space Nine relaunch novels.) It's kind of neat but ultimately pointless.
• Is Wesley returning to Starfleet after his time as a planetary governor in "One of Our Planet Is Missing" a pre-established thing? The whole conversation Kirk and Wesley have about how Wesley became a governor as part of a Starfleet Intelligence plot seemed very random.

Other Notes:

• This book is the first time I can remember seeing the word "olio" (a reliable feature of the LA Times crossword puzzle) used in the wild. I might have squealed.
• Now that I have a doctorate, whenever I encounter a character in fiction with two doctorates (used as a shorthand to show someone is so smart), I just roll my eyes. Getting a second doctorate is about the dumbest thing I can imagine doing with my life.
• Despite the best efforts of some folks on the TrekBBS, I have no idea what the title is meant to mean.

Hugos 1955: The Forever Machine by Mark Clifton & Frank Riley

Mass market paperback, 250 pages
Published 1992 (contents: 1953-54)
Acquired and read August 2018

The Forever Machine by Mark Clifton & Frank Riley

If you're going to read The Forever Machine a.k.a. They'd Rather Be Right, I highly recommend picking up the 1992 "Masters of Science Fiction" edition from Caroll & Graf. The original 1954 serial novel was actually a sequel to two short stories, "Crazy Joey" and "Hide! Hide! Witch!" by Mark Clifton & Alex Apostolides, and they're incorporated into the text here as Part I, "Crazy Joey" (though Apostolides is uncredited). The two provide somewhat helpful backstory, but more importantly, the original "Crazy Joey" is actually the best part of the book. Joey is a telepathic kid whose weirdnesses make him the object of hate of both his classmates and his father. His mother takes him to a psychiatrist, who figures out he's telepathic, but Joey picks this up and so begins downplaying his abilities, and there's a neat sort of cat-and-mouse game between Joey and the psychiatrist as Joey tries to not do what the psychiatrist wants him to do, and the psychiatrist tries to let mentally slip what Joey ought to do. It's kind of affecting, and kind of neat.

The rest of the book (the second half of Part I, which was originally "Hide! Hide! Witch!", and Part II, the original 1954 novel They'd Rather Be Right, called "'Bossy'" in this edition) is about how Joe's powers are used to construct a telepathic supercomputer at the behest of a totalitarian government. Joe and company dismantle the computer and go on the run; the computer is then reassembled and it grants a burnt-out old prostitute eternal youth. It's one of those books that goes on a bit, but when you think back you're not sure why, because surely the characters couldn't have just sat in a warehouse and talked about nothing for a hundred pages, yet clearly, somehow, they did. I feel like any description I can make of it doesn't do it justice, in that it's somehow more boring than it sounds. It's one of those sf books that seems to miss the interesting aspect of its novum; I like the idea that immortality requires one to abandon one's preconceptions of the universe, so there are some people who cannot become immortal because, well, they'd rather be right. So a billionaire industrialist can't become immortal, because he has a high level of certainty about how he thinks the world works, and cannot admit to being wrong about that. But the book doesn't really explore this idea; it just offers it to you and in the meantime you read about uninteresting people doing uninteresting things. So if you're going to read it, read this edition, but probably don't actually read it.

I note that this book shares with its predecessor as Hugo Award for Best Novel winner The Demolished Man an interest in the power of marketing. In both novels, marketing can do incredible things in the way it shapes public opinion. I guess this is a thing people were just becoming aware of in the 1950s, and thus 1950s sf was extrapolating it into the future. (A quick spot of Wikipedia research seems to indicate marketing really took off as a thing in the 1930s, so that makes sense.)

Black Orchid: Origin Issues

Over seven years ago now, I read Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's Black Orchid miniseries, which reinvented the character of the Black Orchid for 1980s. As often happens when I read updates of DC characters, it made me want to read the original version, and I eventually acquired all the major pre-Crisis appearances of the Black Orchid, mostly in Adventure Comics and The Phantom Stranger. (Adventure Comics vol. 1 #428 might be the most expensive single issue I have ever purchased.)

As originally conceived by writer Sheldon Mayer and artist Tony de Zuñiga, the Black Orchid has an interesting, unusual conceit. Her first three stories in Adventure Comics follow similar formats: someone is plotting something dastardly, but he gets warned off by the mysterious superhero Black Orchid who has the powers of flight, superstrength, and invulnerability. He realizes Black Orchid must a woman privy to his plans, and acts on his suspicions, but it turns out she was a woman he overlooked because she disguised herself as someone close to him. Rinse, repeat. The reader never learns Black Orchid's civilian identity; the viewpoint character is always the criminal.

Pair this with the lush artwork of de Zuñiga, and you have something special. (I always liked his work on DC's horror comics from around this same time period.) My favorite of the original three stories was the last one, "The Anger of the Black Orchid" in Adventure #430, where she takes on a skeevy nightclub owner running an extortion racket-- dark city streets, beautiful women, and unscrupulous men make the perfect venue for the Black Orchid's retribution. Like a lot of DC features of the time, it's pretty clear that these stories do not take place in the "DC universe"; people are amazed at the Black Orchid's powers, saying it's like something out of comic books. This definitely isn't a world where the Justice League is buzzing around!

After her brief run of fourteen-page lead features in Adventure (July/Aug.-Nov./Dec. 1973), the Black Orchid was transferred to Phantom Stranger vol. 2, where her eight-page back-up feature appeared eight times across issues #31 to #41 (June/July 1974–Feb./Mar. 1976). Some are written by Mayer, but the rest are by Michael Fleisher (with Russell Carley on "script continuity"); de Zuñiga draws the first one, with Nestor Redondo and Fred Carrillo doing the rest. These stories, even the ones Mayer or de Zuñiga worked on, show a lack of understanding of the Black Orchid character. Suddenly she's a well-known public figure that criminals impersonate convincingly in two different stories; suddenly she has the power to hack computers with X-rays and to assemble androids to help in her counter-crime plots.

The very first one, "Island of Fear!", was decent, though it suffered for its shorter length, but all the ones after that I found disappointing or misjudged. The Black Orchid ends up folded into the DC universe as well. No DC characters appear, but they are acknowledged; in #41, for example, Black Orchid jokes about showing off her super-strength because it will attract the Justice League's attention.

That was it for the character as a regular feature until Neil Gaiman; Phantom Stranger was cancelled with #41. I enjoyed the run in the way I enjoy a lot of the more standalone DC stuff from the 1970s; I don't think reading a ton of it one go would hold up, and I'm not sure a series about a character we're always on the outside of would be sustainable in the long run. But reading it in small amounts is an enjoyable dose of something different from the normal superheroics, especially at the hand of master illustrators like de Zuñiga and Redondo.

The character did have two significant pre-Crisis guest appearances, which I also tracked down, in The Super Friends #31 (Apr. 1980) and Blue Devil Annual #1 (1985). There wasn't much continuity within the original set of Black Orchid stories, so I was pretty surprised when her appearance in Super Friends turned out to be a direct sequel to her final storyline in Phantom Stranger #38-41; the same villain comes back for another crack at Black Orchid, but inadvertently attracts the attention of the entire Justice League. It seems strange for a cartoon tie-in series aimed at kids to draw so directly on a story that appeared four years prior, but it is by continuity nut E. Nelson Bridwell, so there you go. It floats but discards the idea that the Black Orchid is a Kryptonian, and I thought her flying into space with Superman was going a bit too far with what the original run had implied about her superpowers.

On the other hand, I did enjoy the Blue Devil Annual story a lot; I really should read that series someday (I have previously only read its crossover with The Omega Men). Her role is small, but fun, in a story of several DC mystic characters teaming up to fight Felix Faust. Both Madame Xanadu and the Phantom Stranger promise they have given the real origin of the Black Orchid, one ripping off Daredevil ("struck across the face with a tumbling bouquet of orchids [...] [that] had been saturated with fallout from a bomb test") and the other Spider-Man ("a bouquet of orchids was accidentally irradiated! [...] Paula stumbled-- and accidentally pricked her fingers on the thorns of those selfsame stems!"*). It pokes fun at every character concerned, which I gather was the modus operandi of Blue Devil in general.

Gaiman and McKean, of course, used their series to kill off the Black Orchid, give her an origin, and resurrect her in a new body; she was said to be a plant-human hybrid, and after their story, there was an ongoing series about the more obviously plant-like new incarnation's adventures. I liked Gaiman and McKean's story on its own merits, but I'm wondering if I would have found it as satisfying if I had read the original adventures of the character first. Her charm is her femme fataleesque mystery, I think, and making her a bizarre sci-fi creation kind of takes away from that. I'm glad I tracked these stories down to find out how she originally was, even if there weren't any real answers to be found.

* I instantly objected that orchids don't have thorns... and one panel later, so does Madame Xanadu.

Review: Septimus by William J. Locke

Hardcover, 315 pages
Published 1909 (originally 1908-09)
Borrowed from the library
Read January 2019

Septimus by William J. Locke

"Here we are in the middle of a Fairy Tale. What are the Powers of Darkness in your case, Sir Red Cross Knight?"
     "Jebusa Jones's Cuticle Remedy," said Sypher savagely. (54)

I read this novel as part of my project to read all the remaining Victorian scientist novels. It's not Victorian, though, and Septimus Dix is an inventor, not a scientist. There's no indication of scientific training or scientific research; he designs things (mostly weapons, but occasionally other things, though only the guns are practical). He is certainly an absent-minded inventor, seemingly even a savant, as it seems like the gun designs just kind of come to him, but he doesn't view the world differently because of his scientific perspective. (He definitely views it differently, though. He's a very odd duck.)

Still, I'm glad I read it because it was delightful. Serialized in American Magazine from May 1908 to June 1909 under the title Simple Septimus, the novel follows four people: the inventor Septimus, the patent medicine hawker Clem Sypher, the would-be actress Emmy Oldrieve, and the Zora Middlemist, the imposing young widow who ties them all together. Zora is Emmy's sister, Clem's muse, and Septimus's idol; her husband died just six weeks into their marriage because he was an alcoholic, and she swore off men and marriage only to draw into her orbit two of the oddest men who had ever been.

The book is aimless at times, but usually fun, and occasionally insightful and heartfelt. Septimus and Clem are perfectly ridiculous characters. Septimus, for example, hired a burglar as butler, but doesn't worry because one can't burgle a place if one lives in it, so he has nothing to fear; Septimus spends most of the year away from home, though, because he's afraid he gets on the butler's nerves, and he hates causing offense. Clem sells patent medicine, but unlike Edward Ponderevo in Wells's Tono-Bungay (serialized at almost exactly the same time), Clem earnestly believes in his medicine, and considers himself a Friend of Humanity for hawking it incessantly.

Septimus falls in love with Zora, Clem thinks Zora is his muse, Emmy gets in trouble by way of an extramarital affair, and basically this constellation of characters interact back and forth for 300 pages in increasingly weird circumstances. Over the course of the novel, they all grow up a little bit, thanks to the influence of the others; four people who had each removed themselves from humanity in some kind of way end up discovering the salvation than can only come from contact with other humans.

The one-volume publication was one of the ten bestselling books of 1909 in the United States (Locke himself was a British colonial), but as far as I know, it has mostly been forgotten in the present day and age, so I'm glad my incessant search for scientists in British literature brought me to it, and I'm sad I have to remove it from my list of them.

Review: Star Wars: Dark Times: Parallels by Randy Stradley, Dave Ross, and Luis Antonio

Comic trade paperback, 118 pages
Published 2008 (contents: 2007-08)
Acquired August 2008
Previously read September 2008
Reread December 2018

Star Wars: Dark Times, Volume Two: Parallels

Script: Mick Harrison

Art: Dave Ross, Luis Antonio

Colors: Alex Wald
Lettering: Michael Heisler

Here's my original review of this volume from October 2008:

After reading the first volume of Dark Times, I was a little tepid-- another Jedi on the run dealing with the Dark Side? Quinlan Vos, Ferus Olin, and many others have been there and done that. Fortunately, the second volume has confounded my expectations-- said Jedi is not even a character even more! Instead we get Bomo Greenbark and the crew of the Uhumele, just trying to make their way in the strange new world that is the Galactic Empire. The best thing about this book is the sense that somewhere, somehow the world has gone horribly wrong, and our poor heroes can't do a thing about it but try to make it until the next day. Greenbark rocks, and the rest of the Uhumele's crew is growing on me, especially Crys and Ratty. (The ship has a few too many crewmembers, but Harrison seems to have recognized that, as this story kills several of them off!) There's also a side story about K'Kruhk. It's always nice to see his sweet hat, but it's otherwise pretty forgettable.

This is not too dissimilar from my thoughts on rereading. I perhaps liked it slightly less than my old review indicates, as the story is more action-y and less atmospheric than would be optimal. Probably this is partially due to the replacement of Douglas Wheatley on art by Dave Ross and Luis Antonio. I don't know which of the two draw which parts, but one of them is more cheesecake-y when it comes to the main cast's lone human woman. On the other hand, I liked the K'Kruhk side story more; it felt tense in that I genuinely didn't know (and didn't remember) if the kids he was trying to protect would survive. (The previous volume had a kid get eaten, and in Revenge of the Sith kids get murdered, so clearly nothing is off limits for Star Wars at this point.) I do like Bomo a lot.

Star Trek: The Destiny Era Prelude: From History's Shadow

So, at a certain point I started to fall behind when it came to Star Trek novels. While I used to read them avidly as they came out, I slipped further and further behind, especially when it came to what I've come to think of the "Destiny Era" books, those novels set after Nemesis, the chronologically final part of the canon. Though I have read almost a hundred Star Trek books over the past seven years, the last Destiny Era novel I read was Titan: Synthesis by James Swallow, way back in February 2010! I've been keeping a list, of course, and now I'm nearly fifty books behind. I've read the set-up of the Typhon Pact in Destiny: A Singular Destiny, but never actually read the Typhon Pact novels themselves; I basically left off just before they got started.

Now, finally, I'm going to start tackling that list. I said I'd be starting with the Typhon Pact novels, but that's not quite true. There are some books set before Typhon Pact: Rough Beasts of Empire that I think will provide some context and set-up and otherwise tie into the Destiny Era stuff, so I'll start with them, beginning with:

Mass market paperback, 388 pages
Published 2013
Acquired December 2016
Read June 2017

Star Trek: The Original Series: From History's Shadow
by Dayton Ward

1947-96, 2268
There are certain subgenres of Star Trek episodes: the studied-by-omnipotent-aliens story, the planet-of-the-hats story, the estranged father story. One I'd never really given much thought to before picking up From History's Shadow is the "secret history" subgenre of Star Trek: Vulcans giving us vel-kroh (Enterprise's "Carbon Creek"), aliens guiding us through the 20th-century Cold War (the original's "Assignment: Earth"), 29th-century technology giving us the microprocessor (Voyager's "Future's End"), and so on. From History's Shadow, like its literary predecessor The Eugenics Wars by Greg Cox, expands on those episodes to present a whole story of 20th-century secret history. For James Wainwright, this novel begins just after the events of Deep Space Nine's "Little Green Men" in 1947 and ends with the events of the original's "Tomorrow is Yesterday" in 1969 (plus a 1996 coda based around "Future's End"), threading its events into episodes like "Carbon Creek" and "Assignment: Earth" in between. It's not all references, though, as Dayton Ward works in a new alien race, the Certoss Ajahlan, who are combatants in the Temporal Cold War working to rewrite Earth's history in order to prevent their own destruction.

On the one hand, it's clever and fan-pleasing how From History's Shadow weaves all these references together, emulating what The Eugenics Wars did with the later parts of the 20th century. I appreciated the return of Mestral ("Carbon Creek" is one of the better Enterprise episodes) and I've always loved Roberta Lincoln andvI find the Aegis tantalizing. And the intricacies of the Temporal Cold War always have a certain appeal as well. Ward comes up with a compelling, seemingly unified history. Also interestingly, this book almost creates a secret history's secret history, revealing that behind-the-scenes there was more going on in "Assignment: Earth" than we were told on screen.

But I found that the story often lacked energy. Big chunks of time periodically pass, and I don't think they always do so in elegant ways; there are a number of scenes where Wainwright sits around thinking about things that have happened, things which sound more interesting than the things that are happening. The rise and fall of his department seems key to this story, but it's glossed over more than it's explored. I particularly wanted more of Wainwright himself. This is a man who's dedicated himself to a cause for over twenty years that's wrecked his personal life, but up until the very end, I had little sense of his own inner drive. His emotions and motivation always seem muted. A determination to discover the truth could have provided the unity that this kind of transhistorical epic needs. But the novel lacked cohesion, coming across more as a series of disparate incidents. I did really like Wainwright's last two scenes; his confrontation with Captain Christopher and his recognizing Voyager on the television give us a window into a man obsessed and pushed around too long, but up until then there'd been little hint of what made him go.

I'm also uncertain about the 23rd-century interstices on the Enterprise. I get why they're there, but at the beginning of the book they lack incident (it's a lot of Kirk and Spock talking to people) and dissipate momentum of the main story. They also give away some of its revelations: it's okay for a reader to be ahead of a character, but information from the frame story puts the reader too far ahead of the characters on some occasions. If we knew as little as Wainwright did, this might have made his investigations a bit more compelling. I did like how the Enterprise segments wrapped up, but it took too long to get there.

Continuity Notes:

• Some post-foreshadowing here: Kirk and Spock mention a mysterious Commodore Antonio Delgado in connection with the Temporal Cold War. I assume we will hear more about this man in time travel stories going forward.
• Probably some savvy fellow could put or has put together a Gary Seven/Roberta Lincoln timeline. This novel predates Roberta's trip to the 23rd century in Assignment: Eternity, but here she seems a little more au fait with the Aegis agent lifestyle than I remember from Eternity.

Other Notes:

• Much of the action in this novel takes place at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, which is just over an hour from where I grew up. I have fond memories of the airplane displays there, which I saw many times as a child. I never noticed any Ferengi shuttles or Vulcan probes, however. There's not really any local color beyond names, though. (Does Jim Wainright like Skyline chili? Or is he more of a Gold Star man? Does he root for the Reds? Or does he stick to the more local Dayton Dragons?)

Review: Exploring Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

In a completely unrelated bit, my review of the most recent UNIT set is up: Revisitations. I reckon it's the best one yet in this often inconsistent series. Plus also I take on The Seventh Doctor: The New Adventures, Volume One.

Comic trade paperback, 151 pages
Published 2015

Borrowed from the library

Read August 2018

Exploring Calvin and Hobbes: An Exhibition Catalogue by Bill Watterson

Finally, my attempt to read every Calvin and Hobbes book comes to an end; like Sunday Pages, this is a collection based around an exhibition at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at Ohio State University. A lot of it is original artwork for the strip, which I'm sure is cool to see in person, but in book form is not much different to seeing the finished art in the regular books. There isn't much commentary on the strips, though it is nice to see oldies and goodies again.

What does make the book interesting is the interview and the non-Calvin and Hobbes strips. The book opens with a 35-page interview with Watterson, which digs into some stuff I hadn't seen covered before-- biographical details, mostly, like thoughts about his youth, and a particularly harrowing story of the time he ran out his buffer of completed strips, and how he had to be disciplined enough to build it back up again. In some ways it seems like the ten years of Calvin and Hobbes was a particularly miserable time in his life, in that it left him with no time to do anything but create the strip. I also liked seeing the non-C&H art, which is a combination of strips that influenced Watterson (with his commentary) and Watterson's early, pre-C&H work. I would have liked even more of this, to be honest, but the couple pages we got was neat: editorial cartoons, pitches for other comic strips, and ur-forms of C&H itself. Also as a Cincinnatian, I was pleased to see Jim Borgman included as one of Watterson's influences (they overlapped at Kenyon) and to see Watterson discuss his Cincinnati Post days a little.

So, a decent book with some new stuff. I'd say about a third of its 150 pages will reveal something new to the Calvin and Hobbes aficionado.

Reading Roundup Wrapup: January 2019

Pick of the month: Beat to Quarters by C. S. Forester. I'm currently on the fifth book of a Horatio Hornblower (re)read, and so far the original one is still the one to beat. What a triumph of naval fiction, an utter delight in a world so alien to our own, completely embodied here, with some of the most fantastic action sequences in all literature. Sometimes this choice is hard; this month it is easy.

All books read:
1. Star Trek: The Next Generation: Indistinguishable from Magic by David A. McIntee
2. Tono-Bungay by H. G. Wells
3. Star Wars: Dark Times, Volume Four: Blue Harvest by Mick Harrison
4. The Last Days of New Paris by China Miéville
5. Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations: Forgotten History by Christopher L. Bennett
6. The Professor by Charlotte Brontë
7. Stella and An Unfinished Communication: Studies of the Unseen by C. H. Hinton
8. Star Wars: Dark Times, Volume Five: Out of the Wilderness by Randy Stradley
9. Star Trek: Typhon Pact: Plagues of Night by David R. George III
10. Star Trek: Discovery: The Way to the Stars by Una McCormack
11. Jezebel’s Daughter by Wilkie Collins
12. Doctor Who: The Story of Doctor Who edited by Marcus Hearn
13. Beat to Quarters by C. S. Forester
14. Septimus by William J. Locke
15. Ship of the Line by C. S. Forester
16. Hypatia by Charles Kingsley
17. Flying Colours by C. S. Forester
18. Commodore Hornblower: Number Eight in the Hornblower Saga, The greatest naval adventures of all time! by C. S. Forester
19. The Azrael of Anarchy by Gustave Linbach
20. Star Wars: Dark Times, Volume Six: Fire Carrier by Randy Stradley

All books acquired:
1. Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume One: Rocannon's World / Planet of Exile / City of Illusions / The Left Hand of Darkness / The Dispossessed / Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin
2. Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume Two: The Word for World Is Forest / Stories / Five Ways to Forgiveness / The Telling by Ursula K. Le Guin
3. Star Wars: The Last Jedi by Michael Reaves and Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff
4. Star Wars: X-Wing: Mercy Kill by Aaron Allston
5. Kipps by H. G. Wells
6. The Investigation by Stanislaw Lem
7. Hypatia by Charles Kingsley
8. The End of the World: Classic Tales of Apocalyptic Science Fiction selected by Michael Kelahan
9. Jezebel's Daughter by Wilkie Collins
10. Star Wars: Discovery: The Way to the Stars by Una McCormack
11. Cities in Flight, Volume 1 by James Blish
12. Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet: An Autobiography by Charles Kingsley
13. The Egoist by George Meredith

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 656 (no change)
Books remaining on "To review" list: 21 (up 6)

Obviously I acquired a lot of books this month, but I've been reading enough to compensate for that. But reading a lot means I've fallen behind in writing up my reviews.