Teaching the Medical Humanities: General Course Design

This is the first in a series of (probably) two posts about a class I taught last semester and this. This one covers my general approach to the course.

My university has recently implemented a new general education program; faculty members design and propose courses in various areas that students can take to fulfill distribution requirements. For obvious reasons, here in the Department of English and Writing, we offer a lot of courses that fulfill the "text-based humanities" requirement. My colleague Claire proposed one called "Global Medical Stories," where the idea was that students would read different kinds of medical narratives, engaging in the "medical humanities." Classes in our gen ed program have to be able to be taught by a variety of faculty—they can't be classes just one person can teach—so I was asked if I was interested in the class when it was under development, and my name put down on the application. This mean that when a section came open in Fall 2024, I was asked if I wanted to teach it, and I said sure; I then taught another section in Spring 2025. 

Going in I was a bit worried. I'd said "yes" on the basis that a lot of my scholarship ends up discussing medical issues, particularly my work on vivisection, public health, and biocracy. But was I going to teach Wilkie Collins's Heart and Science or Charles Kingsley's Two Years Ago or Fergus Hume's The Year of Miracle in a 200-level gen-ed class? It seemed unlikely. So what would I teach?

Eventually I decided I could probably find a bunch of medical science fiction. That would allow me to discuss interesting issues but also play to my strengths. I will always have plenty to say in a class on sf!

I plotted out a bunch of short stories (more on that in post #2), but felt like I was coming up short of enough to fill up a whole semester; in an act of desperation, I asked the bookstore to order Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith. I'd taught it a decade ago and it had worked well, and now, post-COVID, it was even more relevant.

Arrowsmith got me thinking about some episodes of Radiolab I had enjoyed, particularly "Every Day Is Ignaz Semmelweis Day" and "The Great Vaccinator," both of which I thought really explicated some issues the novel raised in a more nonfictional way. When I looked at my colleagues' syllabus, she had a lot of nonfiction about medical topics, but that's not an era I know a lot about... but Radiolab podcasts... now there I'm an expert! (And podcasts are obviously not fiction, but they are stories about medicine, so they fit the class anyway.) I decided to pair a number of course texts with podcasts as a way of showing that the issues in the science fiction stories were issues in the real world as well. Some I was able to come up with myself; a request for suggestions on r/Radiolab also jogged some others in my memory.

Here are the podcasts I ended up doing, organized by what unit I used them in:

1. Public Health
• "The Great Vaccinator": the development of the mumps vaccine
• "Every Day Is Ignaz Semmelweis Day": the invention of handwashing
• "Playing God": ethical issues around who to prioritize when medical resources are scarce 
2. Disability
• "Unfit": people with low IQs and sterilization
3. Genetic Engineering
• "CRISPR": what CRISPR is and how it works
• "Seeking Patterns": how a medication changed someone's whole identity
4. Life Extension
• "The Bitter End": what lengths doctors would not go to to save their own lives

So, I had a class. Open with Arrowsmith, taking breaks for podcasts, and then do sf in the second half of the course, also with some podcasts. I think the first semester went pretty well, but I refined my approach for the second semester, which I think went even better.

The class requires three "Signature Assignments": two papers and a presentation. It was pretty obvious to make the first paper about Arrowsmith and the second about the sf. The first time, I had the students do video presentations about the topic of their second paper. I don't really enjoy watching video presentations, to be honest, and this seemed to add a lot of work for both me and the students in the last couple weeks of the course. 

Inspired by what my colleague Nicole was doing for presentations in her text-based humanities course, the biggest change I made going into the second semester was to the presentations. This time, I had them pick a podcast I hadn't assigned (Radiolab episodes I hadn't taught, but also some others I knew as well as suggestions solicited on Facebook). I had students present on whatever one they chose, providing a summary of key points and a connection to a text from the class. (Students were allowed to present on ones not on the list as long as they got preapproval from me, but no one did.) I don't know what the students though, but I found them fun and interesting, though I think my prompt needs some slight refinement.

Like many classes, I think the first time went okay and the second time went quite well; I think the exams and papers reflect much more this time out that students are thinking about the kind of things I want them to think. But more when I wrap up my thoughts next time!

Rise of the Black Panther by Evan Narcisse, Javier Pina, et al.

The "Coates era" of Black Panther comics has seen a lot of a releases so far: twenty-five issues of the main series, plus three six-issue miniseries and assorted other stories. And, as I have chronicled here in detail, most of it has done little for me. I found Ta-Nehisi Coates's main series overly long and dull; I have found most of the miniseries fairly pointless.

from Rise of the Black Panther #2

So it was nice to find myself enjoying Rise of the Black Panther. This was an origin retelling for T'Challa, somewhat surprisingly the first one of them we've ever gotten since the character debuted way back in the day. Coates is credited as "consultant"; I am not sure what that means, nor why he should get first billing on the covers of a series he did not actually write. (Based on reading his Black Panther work so far, he's the one who needs a consultant on how to write comics!) The series is scripted by a new-to-me author, Evan Narcisse, and largely illustrated by Javier Pina, who did some good work for DC on Manhunter and Birds of Prey in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Of particular note are the beautiful colors of Stéphane Paitreau.

Narcisse does what a good retroactive origin story does in my opinion, which is take a lot of existing disparate threads and weave them all together into something coherent—something that works on its own even if you haven't read the stories that are being referenced. Over the years, we've learned a lot about T'Challa's youth, and Narcisse unites it all: we see T'Challa's birth mother (for the first time, I think), we see how his adoptive mother Ramonda (from McGregor's run) came into his life, we get bits of backstory from Captain America / Black Panther, we have Shuri (from Hudlin's run) woven into the texture of T'Challa's youth. Various comics have other the years given us a lot of different pieces of T'Challa's family; here we get to see T'Challa's Uncle S'Yan (from Hudlin's run) incorporated alongside T'Challa's half-brother Jakarra—a character from Kirby's run I had forgotten about and would have guessed most writers had too!

from Rise of the Black Panther #1

Perhaps because it had a lot of ground to cover, there's a lot more going on in these six issues than has been standard in the overly decompressed comics of this era. If the series has a downside, it's that the first issue is the very best one, leaving the later parts of the series feeling a little disappointing. Not that they're bad, but there's just not as much going on as in the first. The first mostly focuses on T'Challa's father, T'Chaka, and his relationship with the legacy of his father, as well as the son who sees him die. The issue is narrated by T'Challa's mothers; using a first-person narrator isn't something any of the series's later issues do, but it adds a lot of depth to what's going on, and I wish Narcisse had used this device more later on; imagine S'Yan or Shuri as the narrator of T'Challa's life, I think it could have been very effective.

But that shouldn't be taken as a strike against this comic. Unlike some other material of the "Coates era," I found that this series maintained a strong character focus. This is the story of how T'Challa chose in involve both himself and Wakanda in the outside world, and Narcisse effectively follows that thread through T'Challa's interactions with Namor, with S.H.I.E.L.D., with Killmonger. Plus, Javier Pina is a strong artist, with clear action and good character work; I found he blended fairly well with Paul Renaud, who also draws a couple issues. And, like I said above, Paitreau does some beautiful coloring here that really adds to the atmosphere and coherence of the story.

from Rise of the Black Panther #3

Overall, this works really well as an introduction to T'Challa and his world, as well as a standalone Black Panther comic. I'd imagine Marvel made it to make sure there was an origin on the shelves at the time the film came out, but I suspect it's likely to be an evergreen one. Solid work from a good creative team, and I'd particularly be interested in seeing more from Narcisse in the future.

Rise of the Black Panther originally appeared in six issues (Mar.-Aug. 2018). The story was written by Evan Narcisse, with consultant Ta-Nehisi Coates; illustrated by Paul Renaud (#1, 3), Javier Pina (#2, 4-6), and Edgar Salazar & Keith Champagne (#5); colored by Stéphane Paitreau (#1-6), with Morry Hollowell (#6); lettered by Joe Sabino; and edited by Wil Moss.

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE

Hugos 2025: Star Trek: Warp Your Own Way by Ryan North and Chris Fenoglio

Star Trek: Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way

Published: 2024
Acquired: December 2024
Read: April 2025

Written by Ryan North
Art by Chris Fenoglio

Colors by Charlie Kirchoff
Letters by Jeff Eckleberry

I received this book as a Christmas gift from my wife and kids, but was given a bump to actually read it when it was selected as a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story—the first Hugo finalist I'll be writing up on this blog. It's a choose-your-own-adventure-style comic book set in the world of Star Trek: Lower Decks, where you play as Ensign Beckett Mariner. (This makes it the first Star Trek tie-in to be a Hugo finalist; I really must update my Star Trek at the Hugos post.) Writer Ryan North is the perfect man for this project, as both a longtime comics writer who knows how to work within constraining forms and wrote a choose-your-own-adventure version of Hamlet.

It's very cleverly done, much more cleverly than it needs to be, to be honest. I'm going to spoil the whole thing here, so if that bothers you, don't read the rest of this post.

The book begins with you waking up; you can elect to bother Tendi and Rutherford in Engineering, Boimler who's off-duty, or your mom on the bridge. Depending on what you do, different bad things happen: a Borg attack, a tribble infestation, and so on. I ended up in the various paths around the Borg attack initially, and quickly came to realize they all ended with everyone dying... except that if you had only known the Cerritos's prefix code, you could have (for some reason) saved the ship. Eventually I went down one path where there were a pair of voices talking after you died about obtaining the prefix code, and about how you only ever went for a very limited range of choices.

Eventually, I exhausted all the paths, but skimming through it, I could see there was a lot of the book I hadn't gained access to yet. I started just flipping through, and eventually I found a page where instead of being able to pick between coffee and raktajino for breakfast (which is how the book begins), you were also able to pick tea. With a little bit of detective work, I was able to figure out how you ought to be able to get there" the mysterious voices say at one point that they can't introduce new choices but it is possible to add existing choices. If you add together the coffee page number with the raktajino page number, you get to the tea page—and that unlocks a whole new network of choices.

What you start to figure out is this is all a holodeck simulation, explaining why different bad things happen if you make different choices. There's Star Trek explanations for the whole structure and format of the book, justifying the form in terms of the content. It's very cleverly done! You as the reader also begin to participate in book, talking to Mariner about what she's doing and why. You have to help Mariner figure out a way out of this situation, which begins to turn even more grim than you might have imagined. There's another bit where you have to do math to make a jump from one part of the book to another, this one cleverly done, where on one bad ending, Mariner gives you half of a math problem, and you have to play out another bad ending to get the other half of the math problem, so that you can put both those things together and finally get to a path that allows you to play out a good ending.

So yeah, it's put together incredibly well (see my diagram of it on the right), using Star Trek tropes to explain a lot of choose-your-own-adventure tropes, and pushing the form into interesting, unusual directions. The ending is even kind of moving, as you save the Cerritos, but the crew of the ship don't really understand what actually happened. This was my first Best Graphic Story finalist, and I wouldn't have guessed it going in, but upon finishing it, it immediately felt like the one to beat!

I do have one very pedantic complaint: for a book where page numbers are essential, they are printed annoyingly small! It's harder than it needs to be to flip through this book, and you need to flip through it a lot.

The Pelican History of England #5: The Tudor Period (1485–1603)

My copy of the fifth "Pelican History of England," Tudor England, is a 1982 printing of a 1950 publication; unlike the other books in this series (which ranged from two to eight editions by the 1990s), it doesn't ever seem to have gone into a later edition. Also oddly, it actually overlaps with the previous volume in the series, England in the Late Middle Ages. That book's final section covered up through 1536, whereas this one jumps back to 1485. Though actually, as the books were published out of order, it's England in the Late Middle Ages (1952) that's the anomaly; Tudor England came out first.

The Pelican History of England: 5. Tudor England
by S. T. Bindoff

Originally published: 1950
Acquired and read: March 2025

Tudor England opens with King Henry VII's victory at the Battle of Bosworth Field, and it's central approach to the era is to consider how the monarchs of England attempted to stabilize what had been a pretty unstable era politically. As Bindoff says in his introduction, "A Crown which had become a football was ceasing to be a referee, and a game which begins... without a referee runs a risk of finishing without a ball" (8). So while it might be odd that there's a fifty-year overlap between this and the previous volume, I appreciated it because I found Bindoff's approach to the era much more focused and clear than Myers's. Unsurprisingly, Bindoff is very interested in the Protestant Reformation and how it took place, and how it was kept in position.

Like Myers, though, one of the thing Bindoff considers is how quick and easy the breach with Rome was under Henry VIII. Bindoff's take is that "[t]he air of inevitability which hangs about the great events of these years is the inevitability, not of gradualness, but of breakneck speed; and the fact that they took place so quickly goes far to explain why they took place at all... Something must be ascribed to the forcefulness of the royal personality which inspired it. Henry VIII is not, to most people, an attractive figure... [b]ut he was beyond question a masterful one" (95-6). Even when people rebelled against the Reformation, Bindoff argues that it wasn't really about the religion but governmental power; discussing one set of demands, he says of the protestors, "[t]hey made no attempt to argue the theological issues, and it is doubtful whether even the priests among the rebels would have been much interested in or conversant with these. What had stirred them and their flocks to anger was the sudden and, to them, unwarranted suppression by a remote government of the rites and symbols which made up so large a part of their religion" (156).

Bindoff argues that once done, rolling back the Reformation was a tricky business. Sure, England once again received a Catholic queen when Mary came to the throne... but "[i]f the Mann was now legally restored, it was because parliament had restored it; and if Mary were no accounted legitimate, it was because parliament had declared her to be so. What a statute had taken away, only a statute could restore.... In grounding his Reformation upon parliamentary authority Henry VIII had invested parliament with a competence in matters spiritual which not even the most Catholic of his successors could take away" (169). When Queen Elizabeth came along, Bindoff argues she basically didn't care about all this religious stuff, and kept her theological opinions private. "But was not a ruler whose only real belief was belief in herself, and whose only real devotion was devotion to her people, the ideal restorative for a country which had just undergone the drastic purge of the Marian Persecution?" (189)

If the crown had been a football, as Bindoff claimed at the beginning, it was Elizabeth who finally stabilized things after a long period of instability, and her ability to move beyond religious sectarianism seems to have been a major factor in that. Near the very end of her reign (1601), Bindoff remarks on a speech she gave: "Not many present could remember the time when she had not been Queen, and those who could did not cherish the memory.... [E]ven those who were already looking forward to the exciting novelty of a King could not deny the majesty of this Queen's leave-taking" (306).

Overall, I found this one of the more effective volumes of this series, certainly aided by the fact it only has to cover just over a century in its 309 pages, but also by Bindoff's clear focus. Many of the earlier volumes tried to take in the whole social picture of England, but by emphasizing how the monarchy led up to, carried out, and dealt with the repercussions of the Reformation, Bindoff provides a direction to this volume that keeps everything in context, even if there's less emphasis on broader social trends than there were in some previous volumes.

One bit that caused me to raise my eyebrows a bit, though, was Bindoff's take on the end of Queen Mary's reign; he says she "sank into a melancholia bordering on insanity"... partially because she couldn't have any kids (181). Would Bindoff speak this way of a male sovereign? Would any historian write about a woman sovereign this way now? I'm guessing "no" in both cases, and it made me want to read a more modern, more sympathetic take on her.

Reading The Emerald Wand of Oz Aloud to My Kid

In 2005, a major publisher released an Oz book, one consistent with the Famous Forty (or, at least, the original fourteen by Baum)—I am pretty sure this was an unprecedented event, as any major post-FF Oz book has been a "noncanonical" take like Wicked or Dorothy Must Die, and any canon-consistent book has been a small-press release from a publisher like Hungry Tiger Press or Books of Wonder or the Oz Club. But through book packager Byron Preiss, HarperCollins obtained the rights to brand their new Oz book as licensed by the Baum Family Trust.

To be honest, it's not totally clear to me what everyone involved got out of this. Everything in Baum's original books is in the public domain now, so what did HarperCollins need from the Baum Family Trust? Was it just a marketing hook? If so, it's hard for me to imagine it was really that much of a draw. The book was written by a legitimate fantasy author, Sherwood Smith, who had written dozens of fantasy novels before Emerald Wand, unlike most canon-consistent post-FF authors, who are Oz fans first and writers second. Two more would follow; the first two were illustrated by William Stout, who I guess is famous but I can't claim to have heard of.

Anyway, I've long been curious about it, so when my six-year-old kid and I finished all the other somewhat "official" Oz books written by Royal Historians and/or released, we continued on to these. The books feel less calibrated for reading aloud, though, than Baum and his imitators; the chapters have no titles, the chapter lengths are variable, and the illustration density is particularly low, not even one per chapter. I think there's a one-hundred-page stretch here with no pictures at all! It seemed to me this was more aimed at a middle-grade audience reading on their own. (Which certainly is an audience of a traditional Oz novel, but not the only one.)

The Emerald Wand of Oz by Sherwood Smith
illustrated by William Stout

Published: 2005
Acquired: July 2022
Read aloud: February–March 2025

Aside from a confusing opening chapter (more on that later), the book focuses on Em and Dori, two sisters from modern Kansas, supposedly related to Dorothy Gale. They are children of recently divorced parents, and Dori has dealt with this by retreating into fantasy and imagination; she's a big fan of the Oz books, and sends her toy ponies on adventures. Em has dealt with this by treating everything factually and rationally; she keeps her toy ponies in pristine condition on the shelf. The two are magically whisked to Oz during a tornado, where they end up in a country ruled by unicorns attended to by doting children. (I thought that the geography is right for this to be Unicorners from Ruth Plumly Thompson's Ojo in Oz, but double-checking, it looks like Unicorners is in the Munchkin country, and the valley here is in the Quadling.) Initially Dori is thrilled and Em is not, but both girls come to agree that it's an unpleasant place and attempt to make their escape, which takes some doing, including assistance from a friendly mermaid and a mysterious vagabond boy named Rik.

After this, the girls plus Rik travel to Glinda's palace to seek her help in getting home, only to discover that Glinda has become vapid; a wicked witch named Bastina (the niece of the Wicked Witch of the West) has cast a spell on Ozma, rendering her and all loyal to her empty-headed and impressionable, though this doesn't affect magically animated beings. Thus, the girls must work together with the Scarecrow, Scraps, Jack Pumpkinhead, and the Glass Cat to travel to Bastinda's castle and undo her enchantment, all the while trying to see how much they can trust Rik... who turns out to be Nome! (Specifically, the son of the original-but-deposed Nome King, Ruggedo f.k.a. Roquat. By this point, I think Ruggedo's a cactus according to Handy Mandy, but I don't believe these books ever specify his whereabouts.)

As always, my six-year-old seemed to have a good time; I think they particularly enjoyed the shenanigans involved in the battle against Bastinda and her dimwitted gecko guards. 

I found the book a bit frustrating because it promises something it doesn't quite deliver. The opening of the book really hinges on character conflict between Em and Dori, Em's logic versus Dori's imagination. One imagines, then, that the book ought to resolve this conflict... but it doesn't, not really. At a certain point, the girls are just getting along and everything is fine. It's frustrating, because it seems like the ingredients are all there: obviously Dori turns out to be right, when Oz is real, but surely Em should also turn out to be right, and I feel like the obvious moment for this is when the girls are in Unicorn Valley. Like, Dori's love of fantasy should have her seduced by the glamor of the unicorns in a way that Em is able to see through, and the girls learn to pool their strengths. But this doesn't quite happen; by the end, Em has just come around to Dori's side and they get along, but there's not really any moment or moments that push them there. It's frustrating because the book is so close on that score.

Smith's Oz feels a bit less whimsical than Baum's; she includes his whimsical characters, but her own additions to the mythos feel like very familiar ones to a twentieth-century children's fantasy fan: unicorns and mermaids and hints of dragons. It feels like Oz for the My Little Pony generation. (This was before Friendship is Magic, so I guess I mean the OG MLP generation; Smith would have been in her thirties when that came out.) There's nothing like the Dainty China Country or the Wheelers or what-have-you here. Some of the emphasis on using magic to perform mundane tasks (like doing dishes or washing clothes) feels a bit Harry Potter, which I suppose is right; this came out at the same time as the sixth novel, at the height of Pottermania. It feels like a more "conventional" fantasy realm than the one Baum gave us. I think the result of this is, unfortunately, that Smith's Oz doesn't feel like as "fun" a place for its main characters to travel through as Baum's. There's a joy in crossing (most of) Baum's landscapes that's largely lacking here.

I was intrigued by Smith's hints about the wider Oz world; Bastinda apparently went to some kind of magical school, but this isn't spelled out. Again, this is probably a Harry Potter–inspired thing, but Ruth Plumly Thompson did allude to a school for wicked magic-users in one of her books! I wanted to know more about the origins and motivations of Bastinda than we got here.

Perhaps we will, or perhaps Smith intended to, anyway. There are indications here of a larger story arc; Dorothy is missing, and Glinda and Ozma are unable to locate her with the Magic Picture or the Great Book of Records. There's also a mysterious cloud with evil faces in it that occasionally bedevils our heroes. Rik, too, is set up to return—he is a focal character in Smith's next book, Trouble Under Oz in fact. I enjoyed Rik, and Smith does a good job pacing out the clues as to Rik's true nature; my six-year-old picked up on it immediately before it was revealed. On the other hand, as alluded to above, I found the opening chapter frustrating. It contains an overwhelming amount of exposition about a magic crystal ball in Dori's possession, and I'm not sure why, as this all needs to be reexplained to Dori later on. My six-year-old—usually quite good with this kind of thing!—got confused pretty easily. Why not have us find out this stuff as Dori does? Feels like something an editor misguidedly demanded Smith add to the book.

The illustrations by Stout are pretty stately, usually portraits instead of scenes. I can certainly see their technical competence, but they feel devoid of the Ozzian whimsy that suffuses the work of Denslow, Shanower, and especially Neill.

Next up in sequence: Trouble Under Oz

Reading Roundup Wrapup: April 2025

Pick of the month: The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler. A bit of a squeaker on this one; I finished this book late afternoon on the last day of the month, but I instantly knew it was the best thing I'd read all month. More when I get around to writing up my Hugo finalists, I guess, but a beautiful piece of science fiction writing that packs a lot into its one hundred pages. Up until I read it, Warp Your Own Way was my runner-up, a funny but well-assembled piece of comics. I also really enjoyed "The Mountains of Mourning" in Borders of Infinity; if the whole collection had been as good, it probably would have been my top choice instead.

All books read:

1. Raising Kids with Big, Baffling Behaviors: Brain-Body-Sensory Strategies That Really Work by Robyn Gobbel
2. The Pelican History of England: 6. Stuart England by J. P. Kenyon
3. Someone you can Build a Nest in by John Wiswell
4. Star Trek: Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way by Ryan North and Chris Fenoglio
5. The Hunger and the Dusk, Volume 1 by G. Willow Wilson and Chris Wildgoose
6. So Let Them Burn by Kamilah Cole
7. Borders of Infinity by Lois McMaster Bujold
8. The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler

All books acquired:

1. The Martian Contingency by Mary Robinette Kowal
2. Star Trek: The Next Generation: Collateral Damage by David Mack
3. Someone you can Build a Nest in by John Wiswell
   
4. The Ministry of Time by Kailane Bradley
5. What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher
6. Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky
7. The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett
8. The Penguin History of England: 7: England in the Eighteenth Century by J. H. Plumb
9. Blackhawk: Blood & Iron by Howard Chaykin, Martin Pasko, Rick Burchett, Mike Grell, et al.
10. Star Trek: Starfleet Academy by Mike Johnson, Ryan Parrott, and Derek Charm
11. Doctor Who: The Evil of the Daleks by Frazer Hines with Mike Tucker & Steve Cole
12. A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher
13. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Toward the Night by James Swallow

The Hugo finalists were announced this month, which meant I picked up a bunch of books! Specifically, #3-7 and 12. Would have been an above-average month even without that, I guess. 

Currently reading:

• Memory’s Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection by James S.A. Corey
• The End of the World: Classic Tales of Apocalyptic Science Fiction compiled by Michael Kelahan
• Declarative Language Handbook: Using a Thoughtful Language Style to Help Kids with Social Learning Challenges Feel Competent, Connected, and Understood by Linda K. Murphy
• The Martian Contingency by Mary Robinette Kowal
• The Penguin History of England: 7. England in the Eighteenth Century by J. H. Plumb
• Blackhawk: Blood & Iron by Howard Chaykin, Martin Pasko, Rick Burchett, Mike Grell, et al.
• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Toward the Night by James Swallow

Up next in my rotations:

1. Victorians and the Prehistoric: Tracks to a Lost World by Michael Freeman
2. Star Trek: The Next Generation: Available Light by Dayton Ward
3. American Gods by Neil Gaiman 
4. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 669 (no change)

Black Panther: Long Live the King by Nnedi Okorafor, André Lima Araújo, et al.

Long Live the King is another miniseries that ran alongside Ta-Nehisi Coates's main Black Panther ongoing; similar to World of Wakanda, it tells smaller stories, though T'Challa is the protagonist in most of these, unlike the ones in World. I had actually read it before, as it was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story back in 2019.

from Black Panther: Long Live the King #2

There are three stories here; the first, by Nnedi Okorafor and André Lima Araújo, appears in issues #1, 2, and, oddly, 5, and is about T'Challa investigating a monster that's causing earthquakes in Wakanda. It didn't really hang together for me; everyone acts like T'Challa is crazy when he says he can see a monster but no one else can. Like, c'mon, you guys live in the Marvel universe, stuff like this happens all the time! The story tries to explore a subgroups of Wakandans who live without technology, but doesn't really go anywhere interesting with that, and I found making a new character an old childhood friend of T'Challa was not actually an effective way to get me to care. I also don't care for how recent Black Panther comics have watered down Christopher Priest's Hatute Zeraze from feared Wakandan secret police to generic guards. (I feel like the rough edges of his conception of Wakanda are being sanded off.) I often find Okorador's dialogue stilted in her novels, and that's true of her comics as well. Araújo's artwork is technically competent but rarely interesting to look at.

from Black Panther: Long Live the King #3

The second story, by Aaron Covington and Mario Del Pennino, appears in issues #3-4. I just reread my notes on it and I still don't remember what it's about, except it once again depends on a previously unmentioned childhood friend of T'Challa's to generate drama, so... 

The last story, by Nnedi Okorafor and Tana Ford, I remember confused me when I read it originally because it takes place in an alternate universe, but the trade paperback it was collected in completely failed to mention that. Thankfully, reading in single issues, you get an explanatory text page that does give some context for why the Black Panther is suddenly a wheelchair-using Nigerian woman bonded to the Venom symbiote... but not why anyone might think this worth telling stories about. 

Back when I read these for the Hugos, I ranked them below No Award. I stand by that. This is generic superhero stuff, not the best of the genre or the character. Presumably churned out to make sure there was lots of Black Panther content on the shelves when the film was released.

from Black Panther: The Sound and the Fury #1

That's probably also true of Black Panther: The Sound and the Fury, a one-shot about T'Challa battling Klaw. It's written by Ralph Macchio, who previously wrote Black Panther way back in 1982... and if you told me this was an inventory script hanging out in his drawer since 1982, I would believe you. Macchio was a prolific comics writer back in the 1980s, and his style doesn't seem to have moved on since then. Overly wordy, very simple characterization. Actually, that's not fair to the actual comics of the 1980s, which were usually better than this. If this was a new story put out to tie into the film, I'm not sure what anyone involved was thinking.

Black Panther: Long Live the King originally appeared in six issues (Feb.-Apr. 2018). The stories were written by Nnedi Okorafor (#1-2, 5-6) and Aaron Covington (#3-4); illustrated by André Lima Araújo (#1-2, 5), Mario Del Pennino (#3-4), and Tana Ford (#6); inked by Terry Pallot & Scott Hanna (#6); colored by Chris O'Halloran (#1-5) and Ian Herring & Irma Kniivila (#6); lettered by Richard Starkings (#4) and Jimmy Betancourt (#1-6); and edited by Devin Lewis.

"The Sound and the Fury!" originally appeared in issue #1 of Black Panther: The Sound and the Fury (Apr. 2018). The story was written by Ralph Macchio, illustrated by Andrea Di Vito, colored by Laura Villari, lettered by Travis Lanham, and edited by Mark Basso.

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The Fourth Doctor Novelisations: Warriors' Gate (1982, rev. 2019)

The last of my Tom Baker renovelisations—and indeed, my Tom Baker novelisations full stop—is Warriors' Gate. Stephen Gallagher, writing under the name John Lydecker, novelised his own scripts back in 1982, but apparently (I haven't read the original novelisation) producer John Nathan-Turner demanded at the eleventh hour that the novel be more like the tv version, forcing Gallagher to literally cut up his own manuscript. In 2019, however, Gallagher restored the original version for audio; in 2023, the restored version saw print along with two sequel short stories, "The Kairos Ring" (originally released on audio in 2021) and "The Little Book of Fate" (original to this volume), under the title Warriors' Gate and Beyond.

Of all the television stories in this sequence, Warriors' Gate is probably my favorite, and certainly the one I've seen the most. I was captivated by it when I saw it go out late nights on PBS in high school, and I quickly picked up the E-Space Trilogy VHS box set so I could watch it again; when the trilogy hit DVD, I purchased it again. Clever ideas, good jokes, beautiful visuals. That said, it has probably been around a decade since I last watched it!

This means that I can't be too specific about ways the novel differs from the tv story, but I can say I enjoyed the experience. Gallagher adds a prologue showing how the privateer spaceship came to be trapped in the void, but the thing I noticed the most was a thread about Romana's need to figure out what she's going to do if she's not going back to Gallifrey, to strike out on her own. There are some good jokes here about the privateer crew, particularly the captain, even if they are different than how they play out on tv. Some of the striking visuals of the tv version aren't here—but of course we are reading a book, and it will have different strengths of medium it wants to play to. It didn't really bother me. Like most Targets, it's a quick, easy read, but I also found it an absorbing one, Gallagher doing a great job capturing a mood and a tone on the page. I am sure it played very well being read by Jon Culshaw on audio.

Doctor Who: Warriors' Gate and Beyond
by Stephen Gallagher

Collection published: 2023
Contents originally published: 2019-23
Acquired: February 2025
Read: March 2025

The sequel stories aren't must-haves, but they are nice to have. I appreciated that Gallagher continued developing the trend of Romana's independence by giving us two stories about her post-Doctor life, as she travels the universe, making her own allies and forming her own organization. "The Kairos Ring" is well told, mostly focusing on the perspective of an American Civil War soldier caught up in Romana's attempt to defend the universe alongside the Tharils; "The Little Book of Fate" is very short but nice enough. I was interested enough in what was going on here that I now intend to pick up the Gallagher-penned Gods and Monsters comic focusing on the Tharils.

One change you may have picked up from my comments above is that, while on tv it seems that Romana (and K-9) stay behind in E-Space to help the Tharils, that's very much not the case in the novel, where the Tharils and the slavers both clearly come from N-Space. This means Romana and K-9 are in our universe. I don't mind this—what would be the point of these books if they were the same as the tv versions? and why should Gallagher be beholden to things Paul Cornell established about Romana in the VNAs?—but I don't really understand what it means for K-9 to be trapped on the other side of the mirrors if her can just freely jaunt around our universe?*

One last comment, or complaint rather. The cover is nice enough... but can you really publish a story called "Warriors' Gate" that's all about a gate but not put the gate on the cover!?

Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Short Trips: Destination Prague

* I was interested to learn from Gallagher's web site that the fate of K-9 on tv was inspired by what happened to Mon-El in The Legion of Super-Heroes!

Five Very Good Albums from When I Was in College

A couple months ago, a colleague mentioned "millennial walks" to me. This is apparently a TikTok thing, where millennials go on walks listening to "our" music, thinking of a better time when democracy wasn't collapsing and it felt like maybe someday you could afford to retire.

I can't claim that I've adopted this habit per se, but the last six months have seen me listening to a lot more music than I have in a long time. After Kid One was born, my at-home music got a lot more curtailed because it felt like we were always trying to get someone to nap; later, Kid One would often complain whenever I played music. But things are better on those fronts these days and I find myself hooking up my iPod to its speakers (that's how you know I'm a millennial!) and playing music at home, or bringing my iPod along in the car.

This does mean that I haven't really developed any new musical tastes since my older kid was born in 2018... but let's be fair, I was in my mid-thirties by then, I wasn't developing new musical tastes anyway. Mostly I've been relistening to stuff I got into during grad school, and catching up on new albums by artists I was into back then.

For this post, I want to talk about five albums from my college years, my own "millennial walk" playlist of sorts... which is funny because I actually didn't listen to music until after I graduated from college. But this is the music from that era I've been reconnecting to.

The Decemberists, Picaresque (2005)

My grad school friend Andrew Grubb got me into the Decemberists, who were (I think) the first band I ever saw in concert; the first album I ever picked up by them was Picaresque, which for me remains their best in its sheer concentration of high-quality works: I think "16 Military Wives" was the one he gave me that hooked me, but I also love "The Infanta," "The Bagman's Gambit," "The Mariner's Revenge Song," and "Of Angels and Angles." It's also one of those albums that's perfectly sequenced, each track leading into the next in such a way that it's greater than the sum of its parts.

My favorite song, though, is "The Sporting Life" about a kid who's an eternal disappointment to everyone around him—at least in his own mind—rendered in an ironic upbeat style. If you want to understand what it is to be Steve Mollmann, you could do worse than to listen to this song on repeat: "There's my father looking on, / And there's my girlfriend arm in arm / With the captain of the other team, / And all of this is clear to me, / They condescend to fix on me and frown."

The Weepies, Say I Am You (2005)

I think it was my mom who introduced me to the acoustic rock strains of the Weepies, a husband-and-wife duo. One of the interesting things of getting back into music I enjoyed when I was in my mid-twenties is finding out that, somehow, all my favorite cute young quirky singer-songwriters are middle-aged and have children. How did they get old!? Perhaps most depressing of all was to realize there never will be any more Weepies albums because they got divorced. They tell you there's a point in your life where everyone gets married, they tell you there's a point in your life where everyone has kids, but no one tells you there's going to be a point in your life where everyone gets divorced!

But we can pretend these kind of things don't happen if we listen to a twenty-year-old Weepies album. It has a lot of good tracks, but "Slow Pony Home" is one of my favorites:

I need to seek out some of Deb Talan's solo work, but I haven't got there yet.

Regina Spektor, Begin To Hope (2006)

I want to say I discovered Regina Spektor thanks to Pandora back when I was in grad school, but who knows. All her albums are great, and I particularly enjoy Soviet Kitsch (2003) and Far (2009), but if we're looking for one that came out when I was squarely in college, that would be Begin To Hope. Like most of her albums, it has a lot of quirky, up-tempo energetic music despite its often dark topics. Just today, I listened to "That Time," which segues from her discussion of different kinds of cigarettes she likes:

Hey, remember that time when I would only smoke Parliaments?
Hey, remember that time when I would only smoke Marlboros?
Hey, remember that time when I would only smoke Camels?
Hey, remember that time when I was broke?
I didn't care; I just bummed from my friends.

...into a discussion of when her friend overdosed:

Hey, remember that time when you OD'ed?
Hey, remember that other time when you OD'ed for the second time?
Well, in the waiting room while waiting for news of you,
I hallucinated I could read your mind,
And I was on a lot of shit too, but what I saw, man, I tell you it was freaky.

Remember that time the world was simpler? Not sure I could explain why this song does but it does.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Show Your Bones (2006)

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are a punk band, another my friend Andrew got me into during grad school. My favorite album by them is 2009's It's Blitz!, but their album that actually came out when I was in college was Show Your Bones. My favorite track from this one is probably "Cheated Hearts":

Cheated by the opposite of love,
Held on high from up up up above,
Kept my high from the second one,
Kept my eye on the first one.

Now take these rings and stow them safe away,
I'll wear them on another rainy day.
Take these rings and stow them safe away,
I'll wear them on another rainy day.

Is the lyrics website I just looked at right? I always thought it was "stow them safely." Anyway, I very rarely feel like I know what any Yeah Yeah Yeahs song is actually about but I always enjoy the vibe.

Goldfish, Caught in the Loop (2006)

I got into Goldfish a bit later than all the other entries on this list. They're a South African electronica group; when my wife spent her summers doing field work in South Africa, the South Africans in her group like to blare them while working, and I ended up hooked too. There's a lot of good music here to blast, but my favorite from this album is "The Four Forty Five Blues."

Chill but you can also jam out to it I guess? Good music to grade by or do the dishes to; as a middle-aged millennial, these are my most common activities while listening to music.

Black Panther: Avengers of the New World: Klaw Stands Supreme by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Leonard Kirk, et al.

All in all, Ta-Nehisi Coates's second Black Panther story, Avengers of the New World, runs thirteen issues. Here, I am reviewing the second half of the story (which appeared in Black Panther #166-72, even though the first half appeared in Black Panther #13-18... comics, everybody!). The first three installments are called "Klaw Stands Supreme" on the cover, but inside are still titled "Avengers of the New World." I am rapidly coming to the unfortunate conclusion that of all the extended runs on Black Panther I've read, Coates's might be the worst. I loved Priest's run for the most part, Don McGregor never fails to be interesting, Kirby's is nuts but it's still Jack Kirby, and though I never really clicked with Reggie Hudlin's, it was never boring.

This is. 

from Black Panther vol. 1 #166
(script by Ta-Nehisi Coates, art by Leonard Kirk & Marc Deering)

How is this story thirteen issues? Either characters are having long, boring conversations, or they are having long boring action scenes. Coates doesn't seem to know how to integrate these two things, and especially doesn't seem to know how to use either to reveal character in interesting ways. Again and again, creatures come through a gate to another dimension. There is a whole group of villains here, of which Klaw is just one, but I don't know why because mostly they just stand around. Does anything noteworthy come out of T'Challa confronting the man who killed his father? Not really, when they finally meet up it's all over in a second.

Then we learn someone called the "Adversary" is responsible for it all. Who's the Adversary? Don't worry, the book literally never tells you. Not what his powers are, not what he wants, not why you should care. If you want to know any of that, you need to go read an X-Men comic! For real! There's just a footnote, but the book acts like you should be excited when this guy I literally never heard of pops up. Wasn't this book drawing in new Marvel readers who were intrigued by Coates as scripter and/or what they saw in the then-recently released film? It's a baffling creative decision that undermines what little of interest was going on in this story.

Plus Queen Divine Justice is in this, but she could literally be anyone for all it matters; none of her personality carries over.

I guess Coates was trying to say something about godhood? I don't really know but at the end Black Panther and everyone else suddenly becomes their own gods and then they win??? Why??????

I got all these comics for free so I will continue to read them but man, I am dreading that there are twenty-five more issues of Coates's run to go. They keep pairing him with good artists, but it doesn't do any good to hire Leonard Kirk if you don't give him something worth drawing.

from Black Panther Annual vol. 1 #1
(script by Don McGregor, art by Daniel Acuña)

The book invites comparison to those previous runs because it was during this span that there was also Black Panther Annual #1, which had three short stories written by Priest, McGregor, and Hudlin. Priest tells a story of Everett K. Ross, of course, who despite being promoted out of field work finds himself drawn into a new escapade with T'Challa, with hilarious results of course. It's abbreviated but fun, and I enjoyed that Priest poked a bit of fun at what later writers did with his concepts; Ross is very confused that the Dora Milaje can speak to people who aren't T'Challa, in English.

McGregor's story is set in a world where T'Challa and Monica Lynne never split up... and she dies of cancer. I appreciated how well McGregor could still evoke his old style, twenty-five years after he last worked on the character; it's a perfect pastiche of his own work. I didn't know he was even still writing comics! It was neat to see all the old characters rendered in the old style once again. The Hudlin one continues a story from the previous Black Panther Annual #1 (comics, everybody!) set in a dystopian future where Wakanda conquered the world. It's mostly just exposition. But I was much happier to read this than whatever it is Coates is up to.

Lastly, one issue has a three-page origin recap for the Black Panther. It's fine.

Parts 7-13 of Avengers of the New World originally appeared in issues #166-72 of Black Panther vol. 1 (Dec. 2017–June 2018). The story was written by Ta-Nehisi Coates; penciled by Leonard Kirk (#166-67, 169-72) and Chris Sprouse (#168); inked by Leonard Kirk (#166, 169-71), Marc Deering (#166-67, 172), and Karl Story (#168), with Walden Wong (#168, 172); colored by Laura Martin (#166-67, 169-72) and Matt Milla (#167-68, 172), with Chris Sotomayor (#168); lettered by Joe Sabino; and edited by Wil Moss.

Marvel Legacy: "The Black Panther" originally appeared in issue #166 of Black Panther vol. 1 (Dec. 2017). The story was written by Robbie Thompson, illustrated by Wilfredo Torres, colored by Dan Brown, lettered by Joe Sabino, and edited by Darren Shan.

Black Panther Annual vol. 1 originally appeared in one issue (Apr. 2018). The stories were written by Priest, Don McGregor, and Reggie Hudlin; illustrated by Mike Perkins, Daniel Acuña, and Ken Lashley; colored by Andy Troy and Matt Milla; lettered by Joe Sabino; and edited by Wil Moss.

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