Science's Less Accurate Grandmother

08 March 2023

The Eye of Torment (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 38)

The Eye of Torment: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Scott Gray, Martin Geraghty, Mike Collins, Jacqueline Rayner, and David A Roach

Collection published: 2015
Contents originally published: 2014-15
Acquired: December 2015
Read: December 2022

This is an era of the strip I actually remember fairly well from reading it in the magazine as it originally came out. Three of the four stories here I could have told you the premise of before cracking the book open, and the fourth (The Instruments of War) came back to me as soon as I got to the last page of Part One. I guess I was receiving and reading the magazine fairly regularly. We're into Peter Capaldi now, and as always the strip just keeps on trucking along; there's no attempt at anything like a story arc yet, just a series of individual stories as the new Doctor beds in. I will say that Capaldi's face seems a bit easier for the artists to capture than Matt Smith's was.

The Crystal Throne, from Doctor Who Magazine #475-76 (Aug.-Sept. 2014)
story by Scott Gray, layouts by Mike Collins, finished art by David A Roach, colour by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

In the gap between Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi on screen, the strip gave us this story featuring the so-called "Paternoster Gang." We've had a few Doctor-less main strips in our time (Darkness, Falling in #167, Conflict of Interests in #183, Unnatural Born Killers in #277, Character Assassin in #311, Me and My Shadow in #318, most recently Imaginary Enemies in #455), but this is the first time that one ever goes multiple installments, I believe. The Paternoster Gang does their thing in defeating a plot to replace the Queen with an insect Queen; shenanigans at the Crystal Palace are included. It's not high art, but it's good fun; Scott Gray of course has a good handle on the character voices, especially Strax. He manages to thread the needle of making Strax funny without making him dumb. I also appreciated the first-person narration from Madame Vastra.

Instead of pencils, Mike Collins supplies just layouts for David A Roach to ink over, and on some pages Roach does the layouts himself. (And he's not credited, but according to the backmatter, Scott Gray did the layouts on one page, too.) The story of how this one came together is perhaps more interesting than the actual story! I had a feeling photographs were traced for some of the Vastra images, and I was right, but all those scales sure would be pretty fiddly to draw!

from Doctor Who Magazine #480

The Eye of Torment, from Doctor Who Magazine #477-80 (Oct. 2014–Winter 2014/15)
story by Scott Gray, pencil art by Martin Geraghty, inks by David A Roach, colour by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

The twelfth Doctor makes his DWM debut in a very enjoyable story about a spaceship exploring the sun being attacked by creepy aliens. As is often the case with Gray/Geraghty/Roach stories it's not so much that the story does anything spectacularly innovative as that the story does everything spectacularly well. Great visuals (get a load of those panels of the sun, and there's an amazing one of the Doctor outside the ship in the final part), good dialogue especially for the Doctor, sharp guest characters, creepy aliens, fun wrinkles and complications, even the narration captions are perfect. The icing on the cake is that Scott Gray is always so good at characterization that he picks up on stuff only nascent in the show: the bit where Clara manipulates Rudy Zoom into going what could be his death is totally in keeping with where Clara goes in late series eight and series nine, but was just barely hinted at at this point in the show. Both writer and pencil artist express reservations about their capturing of Capaldi in the notes, but I didn't notice any issues at all.

from Doctor Who Magazine #483

The Instruments of War, from Doctor Who Magazine #481-83 (Jan.-Mar. 2015)
writing and art by Mike Collins, inks by David A Roach, colours by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

The Doctor and Clara team up with Rommel (!) and the Sontarans (!!) to stop the Rutans from destroying Earth with a Sontaran weapon; Mike Collins writes and draws, as he sometimes does. Not as good as last time he did this (The Futurists, also about fascists, strangely), but good stuff. Captures the voice of the Sontarans well. Kirby-style technological sublime on the North African front is a great visual juxtaposition. The musical motif (so to speak) is a good one.

Blood and Ice, from Doctor Who Magazine #485-88 (May-Aug. 2015)
story by Jacqueline Rayner, pencil art by Martin Geraghty, inks by David A Roach, colours by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

One thing I have found interesting about the Moffat era of the strip is how it picks up loose character threads from the show; this is something the strip had not previously really done when the show is on. That trend is continued here, with a story that actually looks at the idea of Clara's splinters, which was a mystery in series seven, but promptly forgotten about once it had been explained. What was it like for there to be thousands of you born across time and space for the purpose of saving one man? Jacqueline Rayner finally lets us find out as Clara bumps into one of her splinters in Antarctica. It's all very well done in terms of art, story, and character. So well done, in fact, that one wishes Jenna Coleman could have played this on screen. On the page, it's obvious that Winnie is only pretending to betray the Doctor and Clara... on screen, I reckon Coleman could have made us believe it for a moment!

Stray Observations:

Way back when reading stories collected in The Flood graphic novel, I complained that both the Doctor and Destrii make racist comments that they don't actually get called out on, the effect of this being pretty uncomfortable. Haha... racism? That happened again in Crystal Throne, where Strax makes fun of a Sikh's headgear. But in 2014 this kind of thing is seen differently than in 2004-5, and DWM got a letter complaining about it, and the offending dialogue was changed for the graphic novel.
The backmatter is always such good value. I enjoyed Gray's comments on the decline of third-person captions in comics, and his exploration of how to introduce a new Doctor. When he read the debut scripts for David Tennant and Matt Smith before actually seeing them in the role, he could only hear the voices of their predecessors... not so with Capaldi! Geraghty says he didn't like how the aliens in Eye of Torment weren't colored at first, but he came around to it in the end.
Gray and Geraghty "cast" Lenny Henry as self-aggrandizing amoral tech mogul Rudy Zero; Gray bemoans that he hadn't been used in the show yet. Lenny Henry eventually did turn up on the show in Jodie Whittaker's era... as a self-aggrandizing amoral tech mogul!
Capaldi's Doctor doesn't appear until the very last page of Part One of The Eye of Torment, in a really great moment. I guess this was because of release date constraints (the issue came out just before "Deep Breath," and they didn't want twelve pages of the twelfth Doctor running around before he had had a real adventure on screen), but it works very well on its own terms as a way to debut a new Doctor in the strip. It would be a good surprise for our hypothetical reader who doesn't follow the show!
With The Eye of Torment, Scott Gray brings an end to an astounding 39-strip run as the writer of the comic, beating out Steve Parkhouse's previous record of 32.
No, the strip didn't skip issue #484. That was a single-part story that was a last-minute add when Blood and Ice ran late, and I guess these new collections must be thirteen issues at all costs, so it got bumped to the next collection.

from Doctor Who Magazine #486

Blood and Ice was designed to work as a strip exit for Clara, since no one involved knew if "Last Christmas" was going to be her exit or not.
Revisiting the events of The Tenth Planet with Peter Capaldi's Doctor? As always, DWM beats the tv show to it.
In The Eye of Torment, the Doctor and Clara go to a frozen spaceship; in Instruments of War, they go to a frost fair; in Blood and Ice, they go to Antarctica. It's a very cold collection! Good December reading, I guess.
"JUST A TRACER" WATCH: Our man David A Roach gets cover credit yet again! Of course, this is again a volume where he is more than a "mere inker."

This post is the thirty-eighth in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers The Highgate Horror. Previous installments are listed below:

06 March 2023

Fantastic and Horrific Stories by Arthur Machen

Fantastic and Horrific Stories by Arthur Machen

Mint Editions is a print-on-demand imprint that sells hardcovers of classic (i.e., out-of-copyright) literature. They offered a number of recent releases through LibraryThing's EarlyReviewer program last fall, and I requested collections of late-nineteenth-century speculative fiction by H. P. Lovecraft, Bram Stoker, and George S. Schuyler. The one I ended up winning was by Arthur Machen (1863-1947), an early horror writer cited as an influence on Lovecraft.

Collection published: 2021
Contents originally published: 1894-1921
Acquired: September 2022
Read: October 2022

The book is visually attractive on the outside, but as a high-quality reprint edition, has little to offer. There is no critical or contextual material bar a half-page note about the author; the copyright page indicates the original publication of the materials spans 1894 to 1921, but the book does not give specific dates for specific texts. The table of contents is laid out kind of weird; I would think the titles of stories from collections would somehow be set off from the titles of the collections. These may seem like petty complaints, but these are all stories I can read for free on Project Gutenberg, whereas this edition goes for $26 on Amazon. If you are going to charge that much, I need more than a nice piece of stock art on the cover; Penguin Classics sells a paperback of some Machen stories for $18, and though I haven't seen it, it comes with a foreword, a critical introduction, and notes by a prominent scholar. Mint needs to offer more than it is offering to compete with that. My copy was free... but yours won't be.

As for the stories themselves, they are largely fine. Despite the fact that I am a Victorianist who works on science fiction and fantasy, Victorian horror is kind of hit-and-miss for me. I think Dracula, for example, really holds up. On the other hand, I have found Le Fanu's work pretty spotty. I can see why other people might enjoy it, but I found Machen toward the same end of the spectrum as Le Fanu's weaker work. Stories like "The Great God Pan" are very much a slow burn that communicate horror through implication... so much implication that I finished "The Great God Pan" not quite sure what its villainess had actually done except maybe have extramarital sex. "The Hill of Dreams" started well, with a distinctive narrator and some lush descriptions... but that's basically all one gets for over a hundred rambling pages. It felt to me like nothing actually happened, and I eventually lost interest.

I found "The Shining Pyramid" a bit more successful: a story with creepy signs that defy interpretation, like something out of Poe. "The Terror" was interesting to me, though I don't know if it would be to other people. I've spent some time researching pre–Great War future war fiction, the kind of stuff by George Griffith where people are worried about invading Europeans with dastardly weapons, and I felt like Machen was trying to merge that kind of story with his own sensibilities as a writer. The problem was that it was pretty boring.

There are people who swear up and down by Machen. I am sympathetic to them: I enjoy reading a lot of early speculative fiction. But this sampler of Machen's entirely failed to interest me as a source of pleasure reading or as a scholar of the period.

03 March 2023

Using a Text as a Lens

Back in January 2020, I had an idea: a series of blog posts about how I teach academic writing.

Well, given what happened next, you can guess how that went. That series of blog posts accumulated no further installments. But last week, I had a lesson go really well, and thought, man maybe I finally should write that up.

The Genesis of the Idea

The idea of a text as a lens was a common one in UConn's Freshman English Program, where I learned how to teach writing. Usually the way it was pushed was that literature could be a lens: you could use literature to write about ideas in the world. This idea was probably best articulated by my colleague Mary Isbell, who edited a textbook of pieces of literature that could be used as a lens and wrote the introduction.

The idea of literature as a lens—no offense to Mary—never really gelled with me but that idea of texts as as lens is one I think I first articulated in the way I'm going to discuss below when I taught a research class for Honors students, and I was trying to explain how to best make use of the sources they found. When I next returned to the Freshman English, I carried the idea there in a new form, and thence into the "basic writing" courses I taught, refining it each time of course. I based my job talk around it when applying to my current position at UT—and it's basically the way the UT Academic Writing Program conceptualizes its second unit, so it's little wonder I got hired.

So it's not my idea, and it's not even UConn's: the idea of a text as a lens is something that circulates in composition; I found it very well articulated, for example, in Rosenwasser and Stephen's Writing Analytically. Thanks to the anonymous UT adjunct who suggested that instead of calling it "lens and object" as I used to that "lens and focus" would be a better term.

How I Teach It

So the first unit here at UT focuses around textual analysis of a single text with no other source. In the second unit, I begin by introducing a "lens text," though I don't call it that right off the bat: some kind of piece of criticism that offers ideas the students can use, which fits into the theme of the course. This semester, in my science fiction–themed AWR 101 course, it's an essay by Isaac Asimov called "Social Science Fiction"; in my previous violence-themed course, I usually used the introduction to Elana Gomel's monograph Bloodscripts. At UConn, I used John Berger's Ways of Seeing or Roland Barthes's "Rhetoric of the Image." (One hiring committee once asked me why I assigned so much difficult stuff!) We spend a couple days working through this text: "coming to terms" with it, to use the concept of Joseph Harris.

Then we have a day where we go back to a "focal text": in my violence class, this was usually the Sebastian Junger podcast "War"; this semester, I used an sf story by Fonda Lee, "I (28M) Created a Deepfake Girlfriend and Now My Parents Think We're Getting Married." We discuss it briefly just for reactions, but I quickly segue into drawing a stick figure and a book on the board. What I say is something like this:

A metaphor I like to use for academic writing is one of sight. Analysis is all about what you see in the text. You see details in whatever your text is, be that "Mother Tongues" or "San Junipero." Sometimes I call this the "focal text" because you spend the whole paper focusing on it and telling your reader what you see.

But this isn't the only way to use a text in your paper.

Then I add a lens in between the stick figure and the book.

Believe it or not, I used this exact image in my job talk at UT and somehow got hired.

I call these other texts "lenses." A metaphor ought to illuminate something, and here's what I think this one does: you don't write about these other texts. You don't focus on them. Instead, you write through them. Just as a lens lets you see objects you might not otherwise see, a lens text lets you see things you might not otherwise see. But you are still the one doing the seeing. You notice things you might not have noticed before in your focal text. The lens gives you a new way of seeing, but it's you doing the seeing.

The key to making this actually happen, I reckon, is viewing the lens as a source of questions, not answers. So then I give out this handout: (It works better in landscape format.)

I carry them through the first row, which I've filled out for them. First, you pick an idea from the lens you think might speak to the focal text in some way. The thing I try to emphasize the most is the second column: transform that idea into how or why question specific to the focal text. Asimov tells us all social science fiction does a particular thing, so we can ask how our specific sf text does this thing. Then you turn to the focal text for an example of where this happens, and then you analyze that example—using all the same analysis skills practiced in the first unit.

Then, for the second row, I give them a lens text quotation, but make them work as a class to turn it into a question, come up with a relevant passage from the focus, and analyze it. Then for the third row, they work as a class to pick a lens text quotation and turn it into a question, but I make them all pick their own focal text quotations for the third column and analyze them themselves. If we have time, they do the whole fourth row themselves, but I find we rarely have that much time.

If you think of the lens text as a source of answers, it limits you. You can't say anything Asimov doesn't say, and all you really can say about "Deepfake Girlfriend" again and again is that it is a work of social science fiction. But if you think about it as a source of new questions, it opens the focal text up. You have new questions to ask that never would have occurred to you... but the answers are purely your own, based on your careful analysis of the focal text. You have learned to see it in a new way.

Some Final Thoughts

I've given this exercise at lot in my almost seven years here at UT. Like all teaching techniques, sometimes it works better than others: they have to be game that they can work with texts in this way they haven't before. But at it's best, it's amazing: I always remember this as the day in one of classes that a student named Jack, who had been doing fine but was somewhat quiet. Something just clicked as he seized onto Elana Gomel's idea of the "ellipsis" in violent narratives and realized it explained something in Sebastian Junger's "War" but also gave him new questions to ask about it; he wrote a strong paper I still use as an example.

Last Friday, it went fine in my first class. (That class is struggling with attendance; there were only six of eleven students present. I would say that accounting for that, it went well.) I felt it went really well in the second: they were doing the thing, working hard and thinking about these texts. I think it's one of my best lessons in theory, so it's always gratifying when it actually feels like the best in practice.

Hopefully the actual papers live up to it!

02 March 2023

Reading Roundup Wrapup: February 2023

Pick of the month: Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett. I think when you read a Pratchett novel, there's no other defensible choice you can make! All the best jokes, of course, but a real human core, too. Hopefully I continue to make good progress through my wife's Discworld novels, but also hopefully I get around to writing them up in more detail here!

All books read:

The Old Curiosity Shop: A Tale by Charles Dickens
Death’s Head: Clone Drive by Tini Howard, Kei Zama, et al.
Pirates in Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson, illustrated by John R. Neill
Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson
Marvel Masterworks Presents The Black Panther, Volume 1: Collecting Jungle Action Nos. 6-24 by Don McGregor, Rich Buckler, Billy Graham, et al.
Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett
JSA: Ragnarok by Paul Kupperberg
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Lust’s Latinum Lost (and Found) by Paula M. Block and Terry J. Erdmann
Doctor Who: Big Bang Generation by Gary Russell

I look at a list of nine novels and wish that it could be longer... then I look at it again and remind myself it contained one Charles Dickens novel and one Brando Sando! What else could I realistically accomplish?

All books acquired:

The Purple Prince of Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson, illustrated by John R. Neill
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: The High Country by John Jackson Miller
Transformers: Aspects of Evil! by Simon Furman, Andrew Wildman, Staz Johnson, et al.
Transformers: Fallen Star by Simon Furman, Simon Coleby, Stuart Johnson, et al.

Currently reading:

Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold
Mistress of Chaos: Collected comic strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine by Scott Gray, John Ross, Mike Collins, and David A Roach
Legion of Super-Heroes: Before the Darkness, Volume One by Gerry Conway, Paul Kupperberg, E. Nelson Bridwell, J. M. DeMatteis, Jim Janes, Steve Ditko, Jim Sherman, Frank Chiaramonte, Dave Hunt, et al.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: The High Country by John Jackson Miller
Doctor Who Magazine: Special Edition #59: The 2022 Yearbook edited by Marcus Hearn
Star Trek: Prometheus: The Root of All Rage by Bernd Perplies and Christian Humberg

Next up in my rotations:

Dragonsong: Volume One of the Harper Hall Trilogy by Anne McCaffrey
American Splendor: Our Movie Year by Harvey Pekar et al.
Twenty-First Century Science Fiction edited by David G. Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Missing by Una McCormack

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 677 (down 4)

Two sequential months of decrease... but can I make it to three? C'mon March!

01 March 2023

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: The Light Fantastic

Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Light Fantastic
by Jeffrey Lang

November 2385, plus copious flashbacks (including to September 2384, immediately after Cold Equations)

Published: 2014
Acquired: December 2020
Read: January 2023

When The Light Fantastic came out, Jeffrey Lang had been absent from Star Trek fiction for eight years, since his short story in Constellations (2006). By the mid-2010s, he was no longer in the Star Trek fiction "stable." But suddenly he was back: it feels like a bit of compensation. "Well, Jeff, we heavily mined your novel Immortal Coil for a trilogy, but of course you don't get anything for that. Would you like the chance to write a new novel at least?" If this is what happened, I don't mind the results, because I like Jeff Lang's writing, and the editors must not have minded either, because they would later invite him to do a DS9 novel as well.

Cold Equations brought Data back to life, of course, but one of my big complaints about that trilogy was that it actually didn't really do much with him as a character. Data was rarely a viewpoint character, and when he was, things were usually plot focused. It was hard for me to tally this coldly Lal-obsessed person with the inquisitive, friendly android we'd known before he died. I'm pleased to say that one of the big strengths of The Light Fantastic is how it joins the dots here and makes this work. Data has permanent emotions now, and he is still learning how to handle them, and not altogether certain about how to express them. The book really benefits from pairing him with Geordi La Forge, who as Data's best friend, can both empathize with him and call him out when he's going into dark places.

The main plot of the book is that Professor Moriarty, confined to the Daystrom Institute in a memory module with the Countess Regina, has figured out a way to reach out of his prison—and now he wants a real body so he can really explore the universe, as he was promised by Picard and Data. Since Cold Equations, Data and Lal have settled down on Orion Prime, where Data manages his father's casino (among other things) while Lal explores her newfound life. Moriarty kidnaps Lal to force Data to assist him, and so Data and La Forge travel the galaxy, looking both for clues as to where Moriarty is and for leads on what can give him a real body.

Like Immortal Coil, it loops in a number of previous Star Trek stories about AI: most notably this time, "I, Mudd," "The Most Toys," "What Are Little Girls Made Of?", and most notably "Elementary, Dear Data" and "Ship in a Bottle." Plus, it features appearances by Star Trek's two other most famous holograms, Voyager's Doctor and Deep Space Nine's Vic Fontaine. In the abstract, there's a real danger that this kind of thing could feel gratuitous, but I think the novel just about gets away with it. Each of the returns comes across as a natural extension of what we've seen so far, and serves to deepen the novel's exploration of what kind of rights one has to exist when one is "merely" a program. I liked the return of Kivas Fajo, for example, and Alice—one of the Mudd androids—is probably the novel's best original character. The one thing I would cut is that the conversations with Vic and the Doctor felt redundant; we probably could have done just fine with only one of them.

Lang's novel feels like an actual novel, not an ersatz tv episode; it jumps around in time and focuses on the characters and their thoughts, not the actions. I really enjoyed the story of Moriarty and his growing disillusionment with the universe. His is a tragic tale, and he ultimately makes a strong antagonist. The story of Alice and Mudd is good, as I said. The character of Albert Lee is a fun one, though I did have to look him up to see if he was from a TNG episode I'd missed! I enjoyed Data here, though I still occasionally found him off-puttingly strange. I like, for example, him posing as a fry cook and him struggling to work out parenthood, but his single-minded ruthlessness as a parent didn't always ring true. I get characters in the novels have to evolve beyond what we see on screen, but there's a balance to keep in that they also have to feel like those screen characters, and I think Lang got this most of the time, but not all. That said, La Forge calls him out on some of it near the end, and that helped me.

The weak point of the novel is the ending, which is abrupt. I didn't totally get where Moriarty was / where he had brought Lal and Alice to, and Data's deception of him seemed surprisingly easy. I did like, on the other hand, that Moriarty ultimately didn't suffer for his decision. I did not like the way the characters cavalierly treated Alice. Given the whole book focused on the consequences of how even Data could disregard the sentience of another AI, it seemed weird for them to repeat that mistake with Alice, in allowing her to become reenslaved to Harry Mudd.

There is some fun dialogue here, and some snappy cons and heists, which I always enjoy. Lang is good at small moments that show character and don't necessarily relate to the big plot while also not feeling gratuitously wodged in because the author suddenly realized their characters should be people, like Moriarty trying not to stare at Alice's legs, or Mudd thinking he can still con Uhura. The stuff about color in Moriarty's world is a nice detail, very evocative. Kivas Fajo becoming a Data fanboy was a logical development (not so keen with what his release implies about 24th-century mental health).

It's not as good as I remember Immortal Coil being... but then, I harbor a suspicion that Immortal Coil might not be as good as I remember Immortal Coil being! I am not convinced that what I valued in Star Trek fiction in 2002 still holds true today. On the whole, though, this is fun with some interesting moments, and I am happy to see the return of Jeff Lang's voice after an eight-year gap. Unfortunately, though this book sets Data up to be his own person and even gives him a new mystery to investigate, and though Data would turn up in some more novels, he was never a main character again as far as I know. I would have liked to see where he would have gone next.

Continuity Notes:

An engineer named "Lee" is mentioned, but does not appear in, "All Good Things..." during the 2363 flashbacks. I guess this must be Albert; the character is really named after Jeff Lang's dog!
There are multiple references to Indistinguishable from Magic here, a book that seemed kind of glossed over in earlier Destiny-era novels. Suddenly La Forge is in a relationship with Leah Brahms again; he thinks briefly about Tamala Harstad, but agrees with me that she's too boring to be bothered with. There's also a reference to the apparent death of Captain Scott in that novel, though Picard speculates he might return some day—as, indeed, we know he must from Engines of Destiny.
Interestingly, the book would seem to be incompatible with basically any post-"I, Mudd" stories we've ever seen, as it establishes Harry Mudd was trapped with the androids on their planet for decades. No Mudd in Your Eye, no "The Business, as Usual, during Altercations," even no "Mudd's Passion"! This idea would be invalidated by the Short Treks episode "The Escape Artist"... at least, if you buy my arguments about that story's chronological placement!
Vic says Miles was pretty busted up when Data died. But at that time, O'Brien would have been living on Cardassia Prime, and nowhere near Vic!
Sentences no one in this book ever utters: "The galaxy is on high alert for small, fast vessels thanks to a galactic terrorism crisis. Doesn't that make your ship a bit suspicious, Mr. Data?" Hmmmmm...

Other Notes:

There's a weird scene at the beginning of chapter 15. The scene is captioned "Aboard the Archeus" (that's Data's ship), where Data and La Forge are, and they are comm-linked to Lee back on Earth. All of Lee's dialogue is in italics, the Star Trek fiction convention for people who are speaking on a communicator. But the scene is told from Lee's perspective, describing his thoughts and actions throughout; nothing in the scene is actually narrated from the perspective of anyone on the Archeus! It's very odd and off-putting.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Deep Space Nine: Lust's Latinum Lost (and Found) by Paula M. Block and Terry J. Erdmann

27 February 2023

The Blood of Azrael (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 37)

The Blood of Azrael: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Scott Gray, Mike Collins, Adrian Salmon, and David A Roach

Collection published: 2015
Contents originally published: 2013-14
Acquired: August 2015
Read: December 2022

Here, we settle into what becomes the structure of the strip for the next several years: thirteen-strip arcs designed to fill out the new, smaller, graphic novel size. This one takes us up until the end of Matt Smith's run, and feels a bit like an appendix to the rest of it, picking up some characters and concepts from the previous volume, but not being as big as what had come before. Which, to be fair, is how Clara's tv run with the eleventh Doctor feels too!

Scott Gray, I think, keeps pushing himself here. It's interesting to read the backmatter, because he's always looking for opportunity to squeeze a bit more characterization; he notes, as I did as a viewer, that Clara feels like a bit of a nonentity during her first series, and so he tries to delve into her a bit more... coincidentally foreshadowing her transition into being a teacher that would come with "The Day of the Doctor"! He also zooms in on the eleventh Doctor's occasional bouts of mopiness, his relationship with the TARDIS as a character, and his self-doubts.

He also keeps on building up the DWM world. A lot of DWM fans say they like the comic's building up of its own world, but I think what they really mean is they like the way the comic did that when they were twelve: they like Maxwell Edison and Stockbridge and Dogbolter and the fact people say "mazumas" and the DWM version of Gallifrey. It would be easy for the strip to continuously go back to these things, as it did during the Izzy era. But Gray and his artistic collaborators (mostly Mike Collins here) keep pushing the DWM universe forward. Here, we get more about the Lakes from The Broken Man and Hunters of the Burning Stone, and more about Horatio Lynk and Cornucopia from The Cornucopia Caper, and we get the addition of Amy Johnson to the DWM recurring cast. It's great stuff, and I love that the strip keeps doing it instead of resting on the laurels of nostalgia. Cornucopia is a great setting.

from Doctor Who Magazine #464

A Wing and a Prayer, from Doctor Who Magazine #462-64 (Aug.-Oct. 2013)
story by Scott Gray, pencil art by Mike Collins, inks by David A Roach, colour by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

Like Rose and Martha, Clara is introduced into DWM with a fast-paced, lively story with some good moments for her character, illustrated by Mike Collins. It's the only way to do it, I guess! This is a good solid story that one expects from DWM at this point, which makes it easy to overlook how good it is. Good jokes, good characterization, neat concepts, and an excellent climax. An enjoyable take on the celebrity historical with a delightful ending. If they were all like this, we'd be in great hands.

from Doctor Who Magazine #465

Welcome to Tickle Town, from Doctor Who Magazine #465-66 (Nov.-Dec. 2013)
story by Scott Gray, art & colour by Adrian Salmon, lettering by Roger Langridge

Now, it pains me to say this, because normally I have nothing but praise for him (indeed, I own a piece of his original artwork, the only comics artist for whom that is true), but... I don't think Adrian Salmon was the right person to draw this story. Tickle Town is a Disneylandesque amusement park, only its inhabitants have been held captive for twenty years, kept in line by cartoon characters. Salmon of course draws great cartoon characters: the frog cowboy is a particular highlight. But it seems to me the power of the story visually comes from the contrast between the cartoons and the real people, but Salmon's style is sufficiently realist to make it work. Maybe with regular DWM colourist James Offredi it would have stood out more? But I can't help thinking there's a better version of this out there, where (say) Martin Geraghty draws all the human characters and Salmon the cartoons, and the contrast is striking.

But still, it's decent fun, particularly the song about the world being a nuclear wasteland set to the tune of "It's a Small World, After All."

from Doctor Who Magazine #467

John Smith and the Common Men, from Doctor Who Magazine #467 (Nov. 2013)
story by Scott Gray, art by David A Roach, colour by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

Back in the Paul McGann days, once senses Scott Gray tearing his hair out trying to come up with new premises for anniversary strips. In 2013, he had to come up with two! Hunters of the Burning Stone was a fiftieth-anniversary story, and now we have a one-off for the anniversary itself. I have fond memories of this one from back in 2013, a sort of sideways take on the concept: less about Doctor Who the show with its characters and aliens, and more about Doctor Who at its core: the values it promotes. John Smith is a government drudge who can't help anyone even when he wants to; the story depicts his slow awakening to something being wrong in the world and how he stops it. David A Roach excels on art, giving us an army of bow-tied bureaucrats, and an atmosphere of all-consuming drudgery. A clever idea for an anniversary story, not derivative at all, and well-executed.

from Doctor Who Magazine #470

Pay the Piper / The Blood of Azrael, from Doctor Who Magazine #468-74 (Jan.-July 2014)
story by Scott Gray, pencil art by Mike Collins, inks by David A Roach, colour by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

Pay the Piper is a short, seemingly standalone story that ends up leading into a bigger story to come. In the backmatter, Scott Gray calls Pay the Piper a "Utopia"... but of course DWM was doing this kind of thing long before the television programme was (e.g., Stars Fell on Stockbridge, Darkness, Falling, The Keep, Me and My Shadow). Pay the Piper is fun at first: the Doctor and Clara at an auction in cyberspace complete with comedy alien cab driver, then kind of horrifying when the Doctor gets "erased" and it turns out genocide and cannibalism are on the menu. Then it shifts again and you learn that two different guest characters are members of MI-6's "Wonderland" project from Hunters of the Burning Stone... and there's a hell of a cliffhanger when the Doctor accidentally sells the TARDIS!

This all leads into The Blood of Azrael, another Cornucopia-focused story that brings back Amy Johnson, Annabel Lake, and Horatio Lynk, all becoming firm favorites, and gives Matt Smith's Doctor some really interesting stuff to do when he's rich but TARDIS-less. Gray shows real insight into the character of the Doctor, and the story itself is a decent one, with some good twists and nice themes about xenophobia and money and amazing visuals from Mike Collins and David A Roach. The bit where Amy goes to her death is genuinely emotional! She does not die, but I did not remember that.

The complaint I have is a bit unfair: it's just not as good as Hunters of the Burning Stone! I think this is down to the characterization of the climax; the Doctor apologizes, and... that's it, the TARDIS accepts it. I kind of wanted more of a reckoning... but that's probably outside the scope of what the strip can actually do. The last page, with Matt Smith dancing is celebration, is excellent.

Sometimes DWM is superior to the television programme. That was not the case during the Christopher Eccleston or David Tennant eras, even at the strip's best. But I think we actually got pretty close to that again during this latter-era Matt Smith run. It might be dancing in show's shadow... but boy can it dance like no one else.

Stray Observations:

The relationship between Clara and Amy (not that one) had romantic/sexual chemistry in my opinion, Scott Gray picking up something that I don't think was really hinted at on screen until series eight!
I like Cornucopia as I said above. One of the benefits of evolving a setting in a comics medium is that every time the artist changes, the world expands. Dan McDaid's Cornucopia is not Martin Geraghty's is not Mike Collins's. But they all coexist. On the other hand, in retrospect it seems like Gray made a slight mistake in removing the "crime is legal" schtick from Corncuopia's first appearance. It's a bit less interesting without it! I like that we get a return from those of those crimelords here.
Yes, my dates above are correct. Like most magazines, DWM is usually cover-dated a month or two ahead of release, but the fiftieth-anniversary issue (for I guess obvious reasons) was cover-dated to the actual month of release.
Scott Gray notes he considered having Annabel disguise herself as Majenta Pryce in Pay the Piper. I see why he didn't, but what a twist it would have been!
Whoever wrote the Tardis wiki article on Amy Johnson didn't read all the way to the end of The Blood of Azrael, because it claims she dies!
"JUST A TRACER" WATCH: We have cover credit! Yes, for the first time, after eighty-eight previous artistic contributions to Doctor Who Magazine in ten previous graphic novels, David A Roach has finally got his name on the cover! Is it because inking has finally been recognized as a valid part of the comics experience? Well, no. It's because he pencils and inks one strip here. Pencilling one strip > inking eighty-eight. I'll be continuing to monitor this key facet of DWM.

This post is the thirty-seventh in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers The Eye of Torment. Previous installments are listed below:

24 February 2023

Reading L. Frank Baum's Dot and Tot of Merryland Aloud to My Son

Dot and Tot of Merryland by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by Donald Abbott

Once again, my four-year-old son and I ended up with a gap between finishing one Oz book and getting ahold of the next. After a streak of three Thompsons came to an end with Giant Horse of Oz, our copy of Jack Pumpkinhead was not even shipped. So I proposed that we read my very last "borderlands" book, Dot and Tot of Merryland.

Originally published: 1901
Read aloud: September 2022

Like many of Baum's early books, you can (retrospectively, at least) look back and see why Wonderful Wizard worked and this did not. "Dot" and "Tot" are two small children—she a child of privilege whose father buys a country estate just so she can get some fresh air, he the child of the estate's gardener—who fall asleep in a boat while exploring, which comes unmoored and drifts down an underground river into Merryland. Merryland is a country divided into seven valleys, which are home to, in turn, clowns, candy, babies, dolls, cats, wind-up animals, and lost things. Dot and Tot basically drift from valley to valley, interacting with each one's inhabitants and then moving on; there's no real quest here except for a vague sense they want to get home. It's nowhere near as purposeful as Dorothy's trip to Oz; it's much more akin to the seemingly purposeless wanderings in The Sea Fairies, The Enchanted Island of Yew, and The Master Key.

On the other hand, it lacks the violence of the latter two, and for a kid hearing a chapter every day, that kind of focus matters less. He had fun hearing about each strange place in turn, which is clearly what Baum wanted.

Baum's wild imagination is on display here; though some of the valleys aren't very interesting (cats, clowns), others are filled with neat ideas and evocative imagery, such as the Valley of Babies, where babies fall from the sky in giant blossoms, and are tended to by storks until they are ready to be carried to the outside world to be born. Mr. Split, the man who can split himself into two parts is a great concept, and the Valley of Lost Things is suitably creepy and forlorn. In the Valley of Dolls, Dot and Tot are joined by the Queen of Merryland, who goes to the remaining valleys with them, thus removing what modicum of danger there was. The idea that she kind of needs to force them to stay by adopting them is interesting, but at the end of the book, she just changes her mind and lets them leave anyway.

We read the 1990s Books of Wonder edition, which replaces the original illustrations by W. W. Denslow with new ones by Donald Abbott, which are clearly designed to emulate Denslow's as much as possible. They're nice enough.

(Worldbuilding implications: the book indicates that there are "real" clowns from the Valley of Clowns in Merryland, who go into the outside world to entertain children, and fake clowns, who are just humans putting on make-up. This means Notta Bit More from Cowardly Lion is a fake clown... which is, frankly, not too surprising. Does the Valley of Clowns have any connection to Oz's Play City, a settlement of pierrettes and pierrots in the Winkie Country from Grampa in Oz?)

We went to my son's Oz continent map to see where Merryland was... but it was one of the places he had elected not to draw. So he decided to draw his own map of Merryland. I don't think he really gets what a "valley" is, actually; he clearly conceptualized it as a series of islands. He carefully counted out the seven valleys, but having done that kept going and added three more: the Valley of Dogs, the Valley of Ducks, and the Valley of Cats, Dogs, and Ducks! Room for sequels, I guess!

(The official Oz Club map puts Merryland between the Deadly Desert and the Nonestic Ocean, even though Dot and Tot get there via an underground river from Massachusetts. Even if you argue that the river is magic or something, the placement is a bit tricky, since the clowns get to the outside world by rolling down the mountains that surround the country. Hopefully none of them roll into the Deadly Desert!)

I have seen some Oz marathons incorporate all of Baum's other "Nonestic" fantasies in publication order, but this creates the problem that he mostly published them early in his career, and thus it takes a long time to get to the actual Oz novels. Or you could chuck them all at the end, but that creates the problem that you end up reading a lot of quite honestly mediocre novels in a row. Thus, I've been pretty happy with how we've ended up pausing the Thompsons every few books to take in one of them, even if it was kind of an inadvertent plan. Baum actually wrote one more, John Dough and the Cherub, but I don't own it, as it wasn't in print when I was an Oz-obsessed child. Since then, though, there's been an edition from Hungry Tiger Press, so I imagine I will pick it up and we will give it a go sooner or later.

Next up in sequence: Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz

22 February 2023

In the Serpent's Wake by Rachel Hartman

In the Serpent's Wake by Rachel Hartman

If I particularly enjoy a book I read for the Hugo Awards, I make it a point of trying to pick up any sequels when they come out; part of the reason I started voting was, after all, to gain better exposure to contemporary sf&f. I read Rachel Hartman's Tess of the Road in 2019, when it was a finalist for the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, and I ranked it first. Tess was about a young woman named Tess learning to find her place in the world after a horrific event, and it ended with the promise of further adventure, with her signing aboard a sailing ship on a voyage of discovery. In 2022, the sequel was finally released, chronicling that sea voyage.

Published: 2022
Read: December 2022

Sequels are tricky business, and maybe especially in science fiction and fantasy. I feel like there is a tendency for a first book to be focused on a single point-of-view character and their adventures, and then the sequel opens up the world a bit, both by sending the protagonist into a different part of it, but also by adding new viewpoint characters. This happened in Arkady Martine's A Desolation Called Peace, the sequel to A Memory Called Empire, it happened in Seth Dickinson's The Monster Baru Cormorant, the sequel to The Traitor Baru Cormorant, and it happened here. In all three of these cases, alas, it did not work for me. While the first book in each of these series feels focused and gains power from its singular focus, I found myself uncertain in each follow up about what the book was trying to do.

In the Serpent's Wake follows not just Tess, but various other people, both on her ship and off, searching for the last Serpent. Tess finds conflict on the ship, and off it, as it visits various colonies of her home country, and she discovers that colonialism is a complicated force, even when you sympathize with the colonizers... and it turns out that the naturalist she is apprenticed to is actually married to her rapist! It's kind of a lot, and I felt like the book didn't have a lot of momentum as a result. Like, in theory we're on this big quest, but the characters don't really do much on the quest because they're always stopping places. I think this is all intended to add to Tess's character arc, but I felt like what this arc actually was was nebulous in a way that was not true of the clear arc of Tess of the Road.

There's a lot of good worldbuilding, but there's a lot of other stuff in it, and I didn't really know what it was all for. The book is trying to demonstrate Tess's growth, but also explore issues of imperialism, and these things didn't have a clear link. The return of the rapist really derailed the narrative, too; it seemed too consequential to really fit in here, like it should have changed the book more than it did. And then also Tess happens to bump into a different man who was awful to her! The book is trying to say something about masculinity and power and empire, but it was too muddled for me to follow the thread of it. I wish there had been a clearer focus on the ship characters, who at the beginning of the novel seem quite important but eventually fall by the wayside and thus the work spent setting them up comes across as wasted.

Also there's a bit where one of the characters paraphrases the Star Trek narration: “And who knows what new life we will find beneath the sea? What strange creatures and lost civilizations? We Ninysh shall go—dare I say boldly?—where no one has ever gone before.” I get what Hartman is doing, she's critiquing these colonialist narratives of exploration (someone always already lives where you are going) but it totally threw me out of the book.

So what worked for me about the first was just not present in the sequel. I don't think I can fault Hartman for this—sequels should also not slavishly reproduce the first book over again—but I was sadly disappointed in this book, given how much I enjoyed Tess of the Road. I wanted to love it again but it isn't what I loved before.

20 February 2023

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Titan: Absent Enemies

Star Trek: Titan: Absent Enemies
by John Jackson Miller

November 2385

Published: 2014
Acquired: November 2020
Read: January 2023

And we're back to the ebook novellas, a format I have come to appreciate: when they're good, they're fun, and when they're bad, they're short. Absent Enemies is... neither? The Star Trek prose fiction debut of the writer of my favorite Star Wars ongoing comic (and my wife's, in that it's the only one she has ever read) is a short Titan story picking up shortly after The Fall. The Fall gave us a new status quo for Titan: Riker is now an admiral with increased scope of responsibilities, though he seems to be plating his flag on Titan for now, and Vale is in command, but hasn't been permanently assigned as CO yet.

This seems like potentially fertile ground for a story, but Absent Enemies didn't make much use of it. With Riker leading a mission to a planet while Vale remains in command of the ship, you could imagine this playing out basically exactly the same way in the previous status quo.

The book is fun enough: Titan is set to a planet the Enterprise-D visited back in the day; the planet was initially settled by the Vulcans but abandoned and then claimed by two feuding groups of colonists. The Federation comes periodically to service the equipment but can never make any headway with negotiating a peace. The Enterprise's trip was right after "The Next Phase"... and the settlers filched La Forge's draft paper about interphase and in the past decade managed to work out how to do it themselves! Riker and Tuvok and company have to figure out how to deescalate a war, get the settlers to stop using this dangerous technology, and stop the Typhon Pact from taking advantage.

It's fun but it's all a bit, well, insubstantial. There's nothing really at stake for the characters. There are some good action sequences using interphase, but I feel like the idea of two civilizations existing on top of each other is one that could have more done with it, a sort of Star Trek science take on China Miéville's The City & The City (but see below). This isn't a bad ebook novella (e.g., Q Are Cordially Uninvited..., Shield of the Gods), but it's also not the format at its best (e.g., The Struggle Within, The Collectors). I hope future Titan novels explore the characters more, particularly what it means for Riker to be an admiral now.

Continuity Notes:

Sentences no one in this book ever utters: "Wow it's a shame that instead of helping deal with the galactic terrorism crisis where millions of people are being killed we're babysitting dilithium miners and dealing with whiny settlers." Hmmmmm...
Various commenters have pointed out that when this book was released, it contained a number of continuity errors: characters present who shouldn't have been, incorrect bits of backstory. One of the benefits of the ebook format is that the publisher can push a change out, so that the edition I read was fine!

Other Notes:

I think the book's attempts to play the enmity between the two groups of settlers as comic is belied by the fact that 90% of them died in their civil war. Like, that's a horrific humanitarian crisis, not a comedy inconvenience.
I did like the bit where Riker realizes he's become a bit pompous now that he's an admiral.
Full disclosure: I have never actually gotten around to The City & The City. But I have never read anything by Miéville that wasn't good and interesting, so I am sure it is good and interesting. I am working my way through winners of the Hugo Award for Best Novel; at my current rate I should get to The City & The City in 2052, so I'll report back then.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: The Next Generation: The Light Fantastic by Jeffrey Lang

17 February 2023

The Joy of Parenting

Two recent stories for you:

Son One, I presume like all four-year-olds, is a master of procrastination when it comes to bedtime. I don't think he even really means to do it. It's just that, if you say "get your toothbrush," why wouldn't it be more interesting to just lie on the floor of the bathroom singing?

Now that both kids share a bed, they go through bedtime together. Hayley and I trade off who is in charge, and that person reads two books in bed after they're ready; each boy gets to pick one. For some reason, Son One deeply deeply cares about whose book gets read first, so I came up with the idea that to incentivize him to move quickly, the rule would be whoever was in bed first got to pick which book was read first.

This kind of worked. Son One could be cajoled to move more quickly, but he wasn't really going through the routine quickly. Indeed, he started do this thing where he would, like, jog in place as he performed certain tasks because he was doing them "fast"... but if you are bouncing your whole body around while you wash your hands, it actually slows you down! So most nights "Son Two" was still ready before him.

One night he had a brilliant idea, though. Son Two was already in his pajamas and ready to brush teeth, but Son One of course hadn't even started getting dressed. So Son One ran to the bathroom and shut the door and locked it. Now Son Two wouldn't be able to brush his teeth and he would lose his head start over Son One!

Then he got even smarter... He locked the door to the bedroom so that Son Two wouldn't be able to get out of it.

The problem here is that we were all in the kids' bedroom... and the bedroom locks from the outside! This is how it was when we bought the house, and we have kept it that way (even though we replaced all the doorknobs) because we want to be able to lock the kids in the room for time outs and for enforcing sleep training.

It's one of those locks you can open from the other side with a small flathead screwdriver, or that small tool thingy that comes with the doorknob. We used to have one of those on the doorframe inside the room, but at some point it got put on the doorframe above the bathroom door instead. (I think because I used to get Son One out when he locked himself in.) So we were searching through the room for something we might use, while in the meantime Son One was getting crazier and crazier, delighting in what he had done.

Finally, we had to admit we had no way of unlocking the door. So, we would have to go out through the window. I wasn't really sure how to remove the screen, and I ended up breaking its frame in the process. (Maybe it can't be removed from the inside?) I boosted Hayley out the window, she went around the house to the garage door and came in that way and let us all out.

Son One did not get his book picked first; he didn't get it read at all.

At the time we were pretty angry, but a few hours later and I had to admit it was pretty clever.

It's also a good example of Goodhart's Law: once a measure becomes a target, people begin to manipulate the measure in such a way that it is no longer a good measure.

We've really been in for it with kid sickness these past few weeks. Son Two had a brief fever of some kind. Then Son One got sick, and was out of school from a Friday to a Tuesday. He was back on Wednesday... and then Friday, Son Two got a fever and was out of school Friday to Wednesday. He went back on Thursday, and I allowed myself to breath a sigh of relief. Both kids fevers went pretty high at various point, and Son Two even went to the pediatric urgent care.

I had student conferences on Friday, and as I lead them, I felt that my eye was a bit itchy. When finally I got a break at lunchtime, I looked in the mirror and realized they were totally read; as the afternoon went on, they got increasingly gunky. Clearly, I had pinkeye. But the kids hadn't had pinkeye, just fevers. How had I got it? (I've had pinkeye twice since becoming a parent, both times picking it up from a kid, and both times I treated it just by using their leftover eyedrops.)

I stopped by the minute clinic on the way home. The doctor said I was right, I had bacterial conjunctivitis, and asked if I lived with other people. I said I had kids, but they hadn't had it. She asked if they had been sick, and when I said yes, asked if they had slept in my bed. Son Two had indeed slept in our bed a couple times.

So, apparently, if your child had a bacterial infection and sleeps in your bed, they can get bacteria on your pillowcase, and then your face rubs on it all night. Gross! Obviously we should have washed the pillowcases and sheets, but this had never even occurred to me! It's the worst pinkeye I've had, my eyes were so gunky I couldn't focus them on my computer screen when grading, and I rapidly developed a headache.

After a day of antibiotic eyedrops, it was mostly back to normal, and I think the remaining irritation might be down to the eyedrops themselves, to be honest. I threw all the sheets in the house in the wash as soon as I got home.

I talked to a friend about it, also a parent, and she shared with me the fun fact that if you have two kids, there's a 50% chance you have a viral infection at any given time. This isn't to say you have symptoms, but you have a virus.

So! Parenting! Good stuff.