Hugos 2025: What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher

Ursula Vernon (who usually writes for adults or even YA audiences as "T. Kingfisher") has been one of my favorite discoveries from my reading of Hugo Award finalists. Since I began in 2017, I think there hasn't been a single year where she hasn't been on the ballot in at least one category. I have very much come to appreciate her humor, her sensitivity, her focus on the forgotten and unseen. A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking is particularly excellent.

What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher

Originally published: 2024
Acquired: April 2025
Read: May 2025

One of this year's Best Novella finalists is What Feasts at Night, a sequel to What Moves the Dead, her Best Novella finalist from 2023. I ranked it first, but it bafflingly finished in fourth. What Moves the Dead was about a soldier from a Ruritanian country travelling to another small European country, where they encountered evil alien fungus. I found it funny and cleverly done. It seems like fantasy horror at first, but it eventually becomes clear the book is actually science fiction.

But... did it need a sequel? Did the sequel need to be a Hugo finalist? I enjoyed going back to these characters, but unfortunately the story here is up to much less than in the first book. Someone is getting sick, and Alex very slowly investigates. It's a bit too obvious what's going on. While in the first book you might have some inkling, I think there that worked to generated dread—here it mostly drags on. What you think is going in is exactly what is going on, and unlike in What Moves the Dead, there's no clever explanation; it's just a mythical creature. I found it pretty disappointing.

But still! Kingfisher is engaging enough a writer that you still enjoy a lot of it. Lots of humor, and the narrator has a great voice, and the side characters are vivid, almost Dickensian sorts. I enjoyed most of the ride, even if I wasn't really sure why I was on it or if it was even going anywhere. I'm not really sure why this book exists, in that I think Kingfisher ought to have waited until she had a stronger premise for a second book in this sequence, and I'm really not sure why it's a Hugo finalist... but I certainly had a much less pleasant time reading some other inexplicable Hugo finalists.

Reading Roundup Wrapup: May 2025

Pick of the month: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. I have been reading Hugo finalists this month, so you might hope I have been reading a lot of good books. Of the Best Novel finalists I've read thus far, this is definitely the best; I have two to go but feel certain it will win my ballot regardless. Very well told, neat concepts, acutely observed.

All books read:

1. What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher
2. Trouble Under Oz by Sherwood Smith, illustrated by William Stout
3. Navigational Entanglements by Aliette de Bodard
4. Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky
5. Memory’s Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection by James S.A. Corey
6. Declarative Language Handbook: Using a Thoughtful Language Style to Help Kids with Social Learning Challenges Feel Competent, Connected, and Understood by Linda K. Murphy
7. Blackhawk: Blood & Iron by Howard Chaykin, Martin Pasko, Rick Burchett, Mike Grell, et al.
8. Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right by Jordan S. Carroll
9. The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
10. The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett
11. We Called Them Giants by Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans

All books acquired:

1. Legion of Super-Heroes: The More Things Change by Paul Levitz, Steve Lightle, et al.
2. Star Trek: Boldly Go, Volume 2 by Mike Johnson, Ryan Parrott, Megan Levens, and Tony Shasteen
3. Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Currently reading:

• My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book Two by Emil Ferris
• The Martian Contingency by Mary Robinette Kowal
• The End of the World: Classic Tales of Apocalyptic Science Fiction compiled by Michael Kelahan
• The Penguin History of England: 7. England in the Eighteenth Century by J. H. Plumb
• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Toward the Night by James Swallow
• Shadows of Self: A Mistborn Novel by Brandon Sanderson
• Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Volume 2 by Edmond Hamilton, John Forte, et al.

Hugo reading is getting me a bit backed up on other stuff, but I have been able to keep squeezing it in in little bits. 

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: 670 (up 1)

Teaching the Medical Humanities: Short Science Fiction

Previously I posted about designing my "Medical Humanties" course, which was themed around science fiction stories focusing on the future of medicine. Today, I want to talk about the sf stories I taught and what I did with them.

• 
  Daniel Keyes, "Flowers for Algeron" (1959). When I was prepping the class last summer, I also happened to read the 1966 novel Flowers for Algernon, which made me remember the original short story from 1959. About a low-IQ adult who goes through an experimental surgery to elevate his IQ, it is quite obviously all about the ethics of medicine! My first time teaching the class, I used it in my genetic engineering unit as a sort of metaphor for the issues of consent and identity raised by genetic engineering. But when I later read the papers by students who wrote about it, I felt I had really done the story a disservice by not actually meaningfully discussing disability! So I created a disability unit the following semester, and used the medical, social, and human rights models of disability as a way of discussing the story.
• 
  Sarah Pinsker, "Pay Attention" (2015). Expanding the disability unit meant I needed a second example of disability-focused piece of sf, otherwise I didn't have much of a unit! One thing I toyed with going from my first semester to my second was dropping Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith as my novel and replacing it with Sarah Pinsker's We Are Satellites (2021). This novel is about a brain implant called the "Pilot" that people can get to help them multitask more effectively; I decided not to make the change (I already had a bunch of Arrowsmith lesson plans, of course), but it did cause me to remember that Pinsker also wrote a couple short stories set in the world of We Are Satellites. "Pay Attention" is about a young woman with a mental disability whose Pilot enables her to obtain a military and medical career... but then one day it stops working. Like most of Pinsker's work, a great little story, and it let us talk about different aspects of disability than "Flowers."
• 
  Nancy Kress, "Invisible People" (2020). Moving "Flowers for Algernon" out of the genetic engineering unit meant I needed a second genetic engineering story as well. Looking backward through old blog posts, I found one I made about this story by Nancy Kress, where some parents who used a surrogate discover that their daughter was actually a victim of illegal genetic engineering. I think Kress's story is super clever, raising some interesting issues about less obvious uses of genetic engineering than "would you create a super-genius?", and focusing on some issues of identity and consent that were central to our class. The story ends in a debate that translated well to the classroom, and the story is thematically quite clever.
• Manjula Padmanabhan, "Essence of Gandhi" (1997). As soon as I knew I was doing genetic engineering, I knew I wanted to do this story, which is about Western corporations exploiting the DNA of colonized peoples—I had, after all, published an article on it! Neither semester did my students enjoy it; even though it's just four pages, they found it confusing and alienating. Their loss, I guess. I still think it's clever! (Probably they didn't like it because the story is almost totally unmentioned on the Internet, and thus ChatGPT can't summarize it.)
• 
  Channing Ren, "Resurrection" (2020). I will admit to cheating: this is the first of four short stories I recycled from my life-extension class. Hey, it gave me over a week's worth of lesson plans! What is technological immortality, arguably, other than medicine taken to its utmost? In my second iteration of the course, I moved this to be the first one we read, as it's a useful story for discussing the project of science fiction (it's very easy to get), and it has the most kneejerk negative depiction of immortality.
• Vanessa Fogg, "Traces of Us" (2018). This makes a good second immortality story, because like "Resurrection" it's about consciousness uploading, but it's much more positive, so it works against your assumptions. I will probably import this resequencing back into my immortality course. It also let me discuss "hard sf," of which I would argue it's the only example I taught in this course.
• Will McIntosh, "Bridesicle" (2009). This story is about issues relating to a different technology of immortality, cryonics. Students this semester got very into my explanation of what's really going on with cryonics.
• Paolo Bacigalupi, "Pop Squad" (2006). Lastly, we did genetic life extension. This semester, thanks to an episode of Radiolab I had coincidentally heard a week before teaching it, I leaned into some real issues of population explosion and decline; again, I'd like to import these concepts back into my immortality class. They really illuminated for me what I think Bacigalupi is up to in this story; it's about be estranged from the natural process of reproduction.
• Sarah Pinsker, "Escape from Caring Seasons" (2018). The first time I taught the class, a couple students brought up AI as the technology they were most interesting in when it comes to the future of medicine, which made me belatedly think of this story from Pinsker's book Lost Places, where algorithms supercede doctors in a nursing home... not because AI has gone horribly wrong, though, but because it's working exactly as intended. I added the story to my syllabus the second time around. Pinsker thus became my only repeat author.
• Cory Doctorow, "Radicalized" (2019). Right around the time I finished teaching the class for the first time, Luigi Mangione shot a health insurance executive; this caused someone to post on the printSF subreddit that "Cory Doctorow's story from Radicalized has come true," alerting me to the existence of this story, about how men whose loved ones have died because of denied insurance claims get radicalized in online forums and begin executing health insurance executives. I added it to the course pretty belatedly (after I had ordered my course packet!) for my second go run. It's a clever story, and let me talk about some important issues affecting American healthcare; students of course had lots of opinions about Luigi, so it taught well. Doctorow's blog post about the story is good reading.
• Samantha Mills, "Rabbit Test" (2022). This Hugo Award–winning story is about medical implants being used by the state to monitor if women are pregnant. Popular with my students, especially the women, and I like Mills's point that any technology that allows you to better understand your own body also allows others to better control your own body. She powerfully links her future technology to the history of birth control and abortion. I taught it as a good example of China Miéville's dictum that sf isn't really about the future but the present.
• Meg Elison, "The Pill" (2020). This is a disturbing novelette about a pill that makes you skinny... but has a 10% chance of killing you! Good for discussing if people's aversion to fatness is really about health; I paired it with concepts and background from Joan Jacobs Brumberg's The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls and Jeffrey Sobal's "The Medicalization and Demedicalization of Obesity" to discuss how obesity is viewed as either a medical issue one or an ethical one. (Thanks to my friend Christiana for her help.)

That's it! It was a fun class. I make the students take a survey ranking the stories, but thus far I've been too lazy to actually work up the data, so I'll be interested to see what they liked best when I get around to it all.

The Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold, Part 8: Borders of Infinity

From 1987 to 1989, Lois McMaster Bujold published three novellas featuring Miles Vorkosigan. May 1989's "The Mountains of Mourning" (originally published in Analog) is set between the first two Miles books, The Warrior's Apprentice and The Vor Game. The other two, both published in 1987, are "Labyrinth" (also from Analog) and "The Borders of Infinity" (originally published in the anthology Free Lancers), and they are both set prior to Brothers in Arms. Later in 1989, they were collected in a volume confusingly called Borders of Infinity, linked together by a slight frame story set after Brothers in Arms, so that's where I read it.

"The Mountains of Mourning" features no interplanetary adventure at all; it's set entirely on Miles's home planet of Barrayar, while Miles is hanging out on his family's country estate. Miles is roped into investigating an apparent infanticide among the country folk; the mother of the newborn baby suspects the father is responsible.

Borders of Infinity by Lois McMaster Bujold

Collection originally published: 1989
Contents originally published: 1987-89
Acquired: May 2024
Read: April 2025

In a sense, it's a simple mystery story: Miles investigates a crime, talks to witnesses, runs afoul of local prejudices and mysterious attacks. But this is Bujold, with her immaculate attention to characterization and detail, and so it's a highly effective mystery. Moreover, it does what good mysteries do (in my opinion) and expose some kind of wound in the world. In this case, it's all about the way Barrayaran society deals with disability, the thing Miles has struggled with his entire life, not just in other people, but himself. Excellently done, my favorite story in the book. (Others agree as to its excellence; it won the 1990 Hugo Award for Best Novella.)

"Labyrinth" continues this theme. The novella is set when Miles is serving in his "Admiral Naismith" persona as commander of the Dendarii Mercenaries. The mercenaries travel to a space station to extract a scientist for Miles's master back on Barrayar, but of course things get a lot more complicated. Again, the story focused on disability, especially marked physical difference and the way we dehumanize other. Miles has a "hermaphordite" officer serving under him (I imagine Bujold would use different terminology in the 2020s), there's a "quaddie" (a genetically altered four-armed variant of humans from Bujold's earlier Falling Free, which I haven't got to yet), and an experimental subject kept in captivity. What we see in the story is how physical difference and setbacks can make it easy to ignore someone's essential humanity, to lie to ourselves and say someone might be better off dead than disabled. Plus, it's Bujold, so it's an exciting, fun, well-done caper story.

(As a Star Wars "Expanded Universe" fan, I did find it very disconcerting that there was a character named "Baron Fell." Baron Fel first appeared in a Star Wars story almost ten years later, and Mike Stackpole does seem like the kind of guy who might read Vorkosigan, so I wonder if the name was lodged in his subconscious somewhere. I googled a bit, but apparently I am the only person to ever read both X-Wing comics and Vorkosigan novellas and comment about it on the Internet.)

Lastly, there's the title story, "The Borders of Infinity," about Miles going to a particularly nasty space prison. Miles, of course, organizes the prisoners from nothing. Great stuff of course, but more action-adventure focused than the other two, with less thematic depth, and thus the weakest story in the volume. But in most other authors' hands, this would be one of their best!

The frame story is pretty slight; basically Miles's superior in Barrayar military intelligence, Illyan, demands to know what Miles has been spending so much money on while leading the Dendarii, which leads into each of the three stories in turn. It's fine, I guess, but I kind of wish it wasn't there, because I think the stories themselves would read better prior to Brothers in Arms, but the frame necessitates (even if just slightly) reading the volume after it.

Every five months I read a book in the Vorkosigan saga. Next up in sequence: Mirror Dance

Hugos 2025: Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Adrian Tchaikovsky has his devoted fans— 2015's Children of Time, which I read for the first time last year, has many adherents!—but it's taken a while for him to break through into the Worldcon sphere and become a Hugo finalist. In 2022, he was a finalist for Best Novella, and in both 2023 and 2024 for Best Series. (In fact, he won Best Series in 2024, but disavowed his win once the issues with the Chengdu Hugo Awards came out.) 

Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Originally published: 2024
Acquired: April 2025
Read: May 2025

This year, he's finally broken through to the big one... not once, but twice, as both Alien Clay and his novel Service Model are finalists. The first of the two I read was Alien Clay, a first-person novel about a biologist exiled to a labor camp on a recently discovered alien planet by an oppressive government. He must navigate the politics and personalities of his new environment, while also trying to understand the strangeness of this bizarre ecosystem.

I thought the novel opened very strongly, with an arrestingly written description of the pods carrying the political prisoners down to the planet. I liked the depiction of the prison colony a lot, and the discussion of the politics seemed pretty well done, especially the tension in how an oppressive government might see the value of science... but only if science affirms how it wants to see itself. It's a tension, all to unfortunately, that we've been seeing in the United States in 2025. I particularly liked the character of the prison warden, a man who sees himself as an intellectual but is still the instrument of a brutal, repressive regime. The biology is, I assume, well thought out, but well thought out biology doesn't interest me for its own sake.

Unfortunately, as it went on, I got less interested in it. I don't think protagonists have to have "character development" per se (surely an overrated idea among amateur critics if there ever was one), but I do think there needs to be some kind of interesting push-and-pull to them, a feeling of things being in tension that the narrative explores. I never really felt this with the narrator, who kind of just does his thing until the book ends. I wanted to feel like more was at stake for him. Specifically, he seems to be a guy with a bit of an ego (he is a scientist with a successful career, after all), but he's also part of a movement and undergoes a transformation that both seem like they involve denying the self somewhat, and I never really had a sense of conflict here—and surely that would be relevant to the novel's themes about how we need to learn to not see ourselves and our assumptions in what we study. (It is, to be honest, a bit Solaris-y, but Tchaikovsky goes in a very different direction to Lem or Tarkovsky, so I don't mind; sf is full of variations on themes.) By the end, despite the strong opening, I was a little bored, feeling like Tchaikovsky didn't totally deliver on the interesting ideas he set up at the beginning.

Blackhawk: Blood & Iron by Howard Chaykin, Martin Pasko, Rick Burchett, Mike Grell, et al.

Blackhawk: Blood & Iron

Collection published: 2020
Contents originally published: 1987-89
Acquired: April 2025
Read: May 2025

Writers: Howard Chaykin, Martin Pasko, Mike Grell, Mark Verheiden

Pencillers: Howard Chaykin, Rick Burchett, Grant Miehm, Eduardo Barreto, Terry Beatty

Inkers: Howard Chaykin, Rick Burchett, Pablo Marcos, Terry Beatty, John Nyberg

Colorists: Steve Oliff, Tom Ziuko, Helen Vesik

Letterers: Ken Bruzenak, Steve Haynie, Carrie Spiegle, Janice Chiang

In the late 1980s, it came time to reinvent Blackhawk for the post-Crisis DC universe. This didn't just mean rethinking the continuity, but also rethinking the tone and style. Blackhawk had been a bloody and jingoistic war comic, a goofy sci-fi comic, a superhero comic, a nuanced war comic. What would it be in the 1980s?

The vehicle for this reinvention was a format I really enjoy, and have chronicled a lot on this blog: the three-double-length-issue miniseries. Previous examples include Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters (1987), Black Orchid (1989), Hawkworld (1989), Adam Strange: The Man of Two Worlds (1990), and Twilight (1990-91). These comics tend to be creator-driven, giving a somewhat old-fashioned concept over to a high-profile creator (or creative team), who uses it to tell a single story with more mature themes. In many cases, they became springboards for ongoing series (of the above examples, that's true of all of them except Adam Strange and Twilight), but they weren't necessarily designed to be. I tend to really like these, and I wonder if there's any I've failed to track down at this point.

Blackhawk was given over to Howard Chaykin, who wrote and illustrated the story. (Blackhawk vol. 2 #1 was, in fact, Blackhawk's first #1, fact fans, because the original Blackhawk run confusingly began with issue #9; see item #2 below.) Other than the premature existence of an atomic bomb (a common occurrence for the Blackhawks, I guess; see item #9 below), the series is devoid of fantastic elements; it's an espionage thriller set during World War II.

They didn't have scenes like this back when Dick Dillin was drawing Blackhawk!
from Blackhawk vol. 2 #1 (script & art by Howard Chaykin)

The major continuity change is that Chaykin reinvents Blackhawk himself: instead of "Bart Hawk," he's now "Janos Prohaska," thank God. (However, as a Star Trek fan, I find the name kind of jarring.) We just get glimpses of his backstory, but we do learn that he's a former Communist, he flew with some private outfits early in the war, and he established the Blachkawks as an independent but Allies-funded fighting force. (I'll do a post on Blackhawk's post-Crisis continuity once I've read all of the relevant stories, but Chris Miller at The Unauthorized Chronology of the DC Universe suggests that the Mark Evanier–Dan Spiegle run could have largely happened as written prior to this miniseries; that run was set in 1940, compared to this series's 1943.) He's more of a 1980s character in terms of personality, though, sleeping with random women; you can definitely see why Chaykin might have written this series and worked on James Bond.

Seemingly the problem with modern takes on "Chop-Chop" is that every one has to have a moment where they explain that he's not called "Chop-Chop."
from Blackhawk vol. 2 #2 (script & art by Howard Chaykin)

In terms of continuity, there are a couple other significant changes. One is that, for the first time, all the members of the squadron get last names! Olaf becomes Olaf Friedricksen (and he is relocated from Sweden to Denmark), Stanislaus is Stanislaus Drozdowski, Hendricksen is Ritter Hendricksen (he's from Holland here, which was true in some previous stories, I think, but in others, he was from Germany), Chuck is Carlo Sirianni, Andre is Andre Blanc-Dumont, and "Chop-Chop" keeps the name he was given by Evanier (he's Chinese-American here, not Chinese), Weng Chan (though Blackhawk still calls him "Chop-Chop," unlike in Evanier's series). The other members of the squadron aren't really focused on very much, though, and Stanislaus is killed off in issue #2 to prove the situation is serious.*

Beautiful, deadly, and believes in the people owning the means of production. The perfect woman?
from Blackhawk vol. 2 #1 (script & art by Howard Chaykin)

The other big change is the introduction of Natalie Reed nee Gurdin. Natalie is someone that Jan knew early in the war, from his Communist days, but instead of leaving the party like he did, she fully embraced it, moving to Russia in a pretty high-profile "defection" of sorts; she reenters his life here, proving herself a bit of a technical wizard by helping the Blackhawks out with their planes and other technologies. In one sequence, she exclaims, "I didn't build these planes so you could run off and get all the glory--I'm coming with you--I'm Lady Blackhawk--case closed..." So much for Zinda Blake?†

There are an awful lot of scenes of these people.
from Blackhawk vol. 2 #2 (script & art by Howard Chaykin)

Anyway, obviously I could talk about the continuity all day... but how's the actual story? I found it a decent but not outstanding example of the format. Like a lot of 1980s prestige comics, it's hard work. Not in a bad way, I'm just saying that there's a lot of different strands to the story here, and Chaykin moves back and forth between them pretty freely, leaving the reader to do a lot of work to put it all together. There's a big Nazi conspiracy whose members include an old comrade of Jan's, a former English movie actor who now leads a Nazi counterpart to the Blackhawk Squadron, the White Lions, and a U.S. senator who has Jan barred from the country on the basis that he's a Communist and Reba McMahon, a woman who's sexually involved with both Blackhawk and Lord Death. To be honest, it seemed like at times that Chaykin was more interested in all these other characters more than Blackhawk himself, who feels a bit lost in the middle of all of it. I did like Natalie Reed a lot; she seems like a character with a lot of potential that's not totally delivered on here, though I did enjoy her back-and-forth with Jan.

It looks great, of course; Chaykin is one of the medium's best, and in the 1980s, he was arguably at his height, aided by some excellent colors from Steve Oliff.

Can't believe they got rid of the perfectly good Polish names "Jack" and "Connie" for Blackhawk's siblings!
from Secret Origins vol. 2 #45 (script by Martin Pasko, art by Grant Miehm & Terry Beatty)

I read the miniseries collected in a 2020 hardcover called Blood & Iron after the series's first issue. The hardcover also collects a few other 1980s appearances of the post-Crisis Blackhawks. Chaykin didn't have anything to do with these stories, which are written and illustrated by other creators. The first of them is a Secret Origins issue that gives us the origin Chaykin only hinted at; it's basically the familiar pre-Crisis story but with the new elements of Prohaska's 1980's backstory, given a frame story set shortly after the miniseries. It does establish that the squadron also included character named "Boris" and "Zeg" at one point, but that they were dead by the time of Chaykin's story. (These are character names used as one-offs in early Blackhawk stories from Military Comics. Boris briefly reappeared during Steve Skeates's run; see item #7 below.)

The bulk of the second half of the book comprises Blackhawk's appearances in Action Comics, during that title's brief run as a weekly anthology title. There are two eight-part stories and one six-part story, each part being eight pages longs. All three stories are illustrated by Rick Burchett; the first is written by Mike Grell, and the other two Martin Pasko (who would go on to write the Blackhawk ongoing). I had actually read all of these before, when I collected Action Comics Weekly many years ago, but at the time I lacked the context of any other Blackhawk adventures.

You eventually find out she's a nun!
from Action Comics Weekly #603 (script by Mike Grell, art by Rick Burchett & Pablo Marcos)

These move the new Blackhawks into the postwar era; taking their cues from Chaykin's miniseries, they're all gritty espionage thrillers. Grell's initial story, "Another Fine War," only really features Blackhawk himself, at loose ends after the war, persuaded into helping a woman run down some treasure in the Pacific. I want to note that I've seen people complain Chaykin turned Blackhawk into a lech, but I think that's more Grell than Blackhawk; Chaykin had him sleeping with multiple women, but it's Grell who makes him into a sleeze.

Natalie has a surprising number of color-coordinated eye patches.
from Action Comics Weekly #615 (script by Martin Pasko, art by Rick Burchett)

Pasko's two stories bring back the other members of the squadron, including Natalie Reed, as the Blackhawks reconstitute as a supposed courier service (Blackhawk Express) whose real purpose is doing dirty jobs for the newly formed CIA. They're all fun enough, but also hint at bigger and darker concerns, especially with Natalie, who has a child... but one she can't raise herself, since her Communist affiliations mean she can't get back into the U.S. in the era of the Red Scare. Natalie is also a victim of domestic abuse to the extent that she lost an eye; we don't learn anything about the guy in question, but I did find a bit where Jan briefly thinks Olaf to be responsible fairly contrived. I think Pasko is clearly very interested in Natalie (in a way that I don't think Chaykin or Grell were), and I look forward to seeing what he does with the character in the subsequent Blackhawk ongoing.

I haven't said anything about colorist Tom Ziuko in this review, but actually, he's great. A big reason why Burchett's art works as well as it does.
from Action Comics Weekly #622 (script by Martin Pasko, art by Rick Burchett)

Burchett's style is certainly cartoonier than Chaykin's, but overall I found that it worked for these quick, action-focused stories, and he's got a strong sense of facial expressions. When the situation gets serious, Burchett does a good job shifting the art to match; there are a number of strong action sequences here. I think like a lot of Action Comcis Weekly creators, Pasko and Burchett struggle a bit with their small canvas, but they probably do better than most.

Like, he's CEO and it's been forty years and people still call him that just once in every appearance!
from Action Comics Weekly #635 (script by Mark Verheiden, art by Eduardo Barreto & John Nyberg)

Lastly, the book contains "The Crash of 88," a story that crossed over a number of Action Comics Weekly's ongoing features: Green Lantern, Black Canary, Superman... and Blackhawk!? It's set in the present day; the Blackhawk presence is Weng Chan, who is now running Blackhawk Express. His plane crashes in a South American dictatorship, and the superheroes eventually turn up to rescue him. 

The inclusion of Black Canary in the story is pretty random, to be honest, but I'm never going to say no to a chance to see Dinah Laurel Lance, in either of her guises. (I do kind of miss how she used to have short black hair in her civilian attire.)
from Action Comics Weekly #635 (script by Mark Verheiden, art by Eduardo Barreto & John Nyberg)

I'm glad it's in this book for completion's sake, but it does read very weirdly after all the much less fantastic material that makes up the rest of the volume! In the letter page to Blackhawk vol. 3 #1, editor Mike Gold promises more "Blackhawk Express" stories set in the present as an ongoing feature, but I don't believe this ever eventuated, though Weng Chan did make a number of appearances during John Ostrander's run on Hawkworld (also edited by Gold).

Overall, I'm very glad this collected edition exists, and impressed at how comprehensive it is. It would have been easy for DC to have collected just the Chaykin material and called it a day! The rest of the volume isn't as distinctive, to be honest, but it is competent, and it's nice to have it more readily available than back issues of Action Comics Weekly. A similarly sized second volume would fit the entire Blackhawk volume 3 ongoing, I think, and would make a great companion to this one... but without a high-profile creator like Howard Chaykin, it probably is unlikely to ever appear. Maybe it can get a DC Finest edition sometime? But more on that next time...

from Who's Who Update '87 #3
(art by Brian Bolland)

This is the tenth in a series of posts about the Blackhawks. The next installment covers volume 3 of Blackhawk. Previous installments are listed below:

1. The Blackhawk Archives, Volume 1 (1941-42)
2. Military Comics #18-43 / Modern Comics #44-46 / Blackhawk #9 & 50 (1943-52)
3. Showcase Presents Blackhawk, Volume One (1957-58) 
4. Blackhawk vol. 1 #151-95 (1960-64) 
5. Blackhawk vol. 1 #196-227 (1964-66)
6. Blackhawk vol. 1 #228-43 (1967-68)
7. Blackhawk vol. 1 #244-50 / The Brave and the Bold #167 (1976-80)
8. Blackhawk (1982) 
9. Blackhawk vol. 1 #251-73 / DC Comics Presents #69 (1982-84) 
• Pre-Crisis Continuity 

* The DC wiki notes that Stanislaus does go on to appear in some later postwar Blackhawk stories, very much alive, and ascribes the change to the Crisis in Time.

† Except that, as a reader of Birds of Prey, I know she also continues to appear post-Crisis. I guess I shall see what explanation, if any, is offered for this. Blood & Iron does include all of the Blackhawk Who's Who pages, which include both one about the Blackhawk Squadron with Natalie on it and another about Zinda (complete with a beautiful Brian Bolland illustration), with no noting of the apparent contradiction.

My Kid and the Silver Age of Comics

My older kid turned six this past summer; that's also when their ability to read on their own really took off, as they began to read through simple chapter books. Pokémon novelizations were a key entry point; they'd gotten a bunch for Christmas, but we'd said we weren't going to read them, they would need to learn how to read them themself! (My wife and I enjoy reading aloud to our kids a lot, but I don't believe that anyone enjoys reading Pokémon novelizations aloud.)

Once they mastered all the Pokémon novels, we needed to find enough for them to read. We began picking up books at our local library, easy chapter books and kid graphic novels.

At a certain point—I forget exactly when this happened, but I want to say September, they declared they would only read graphic novels. No more prose fiction! They haven't totally stuck to this, but they have pretty much done so. As an English professor, I might kind of be disappointed, but as someone who grew up reading media tie-ins, I know there's actually nothing wrong with it!

The problem with this, though, is that many children's graphic novels are very easy reads. We'd get them a whole stack of books, and it seemed like they'd zip through it in less than an hour! We were getting all sorts of stuff: Dog Man, The Lunch Lady, Max and the Midknights, The First Cat in Space, and they were just blowing through it. 

Mostly my wife picked out this stuff. I did request some kids and YA superhero graphic novels, which they seemed into: Dear Justice League, Diana: Princess of the Amazons, Green Lantern: Legacy. I also picked a lot of stuff based on the various tv series, figuring if it tied into the various kid-appropriate tv shows, it was probably kid-appropriate itself, stuff based on Batman: The Brave and the Bold and Justice League Unlimited and Teen Titans Go and the old Batman/Superman cartoons. The problem with venturing outside of either of these spheres, though, is that most contemporary superhero comics are very much not appropriate for a six-year-old, with too much sex and gruesome violence. Imagine your kid reading a Geoff Johns comic where Black Adam punches someone's head off!

After reading some JLU comics, they asked me for more Justice League stuff; searching the library catalogue, I realized our system owned several volumes of Justice League: The Silver Age, collections of the original run of Justice League of America back in the 1960s. I figured it was worth a shot.

It very much was! The nice thing about Silver Age comics is that they are totally appropriate for a six-year-old, because back then comics were actually aimed at kids! Not only that, but many of the things an adult reader now finds goofy turn out to be great, because those old Silver Age writers knew their audience. As an adult, I roll my eyes at Snapper Carr—my kid is psyched that the JLA hangs out with a kid like them! As an adult, you roll your eyes at those stories where suddenly Superman is being bad for some contrived reason—my kid is like, Dad, why is Superman going around breaking things!?

And, here's the real upside to reading 1960s comics: they used to have so many words back then! My kid has to positively labor to get through these. They're enjoying it, but boy does it take time. 

They ended up requesting I get every "Silver Age" collection our library owned; in addition to reading JLA, they've also read or are reading World's Finest, Teen Titans, Green Lantern, and Suicide Squad. In some cases, our library doesn't own all of them, so we've had to ILL missing volumes. In some cases, they've exhausted what DC has reprinted in the "Silver Age" collections (which seem to have come to an end, alas), so we've switched to Showcase Presents for World's Finest and Teen Titans; at first they were opposed to the books being black and white, but eventually they came around. 

Unfortunately, a lot of this Silver Age material is only reprinted in big hardcover omnibus volumes, which aren't really good for a six-year-old! I'm a bit surprised, to be honest; hopefully DC Finest plugs some of these gaps. I know DC keeps pumping out graphic novels for current kids, but clearly the stuff from the 1960s and '70s appeals to current kids, too, and I don't see why it's not more readily available.

And maybe like all children of the 2020s, they're a total sucker for all the multiverse stuff; now that they've read all the Justice League: The Silver Age volumes (as well as a one-off collection of stories from Denny O'Neil's "satellite era"), I'm trying to track down the Crisis on Multiple Earths collections for them.

Along the way, they've read a few comics from my collection: some of Walter Simonson's The Mighty Thor, an issue of Lee and Kirby's The Fantastic Four. Just today they asked me about The Legion of Super-Heroes (of which I own eleven of the thirteen archive editions). But mostly we keep these in reserve, for when they've run out of library books!

Black Panther: Many Thousands Gone by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Daniel Acuña, et al.

After Avengers of the New World came to an end, Marvel did that thing that Marvel likes to do, which is that they started Black Panther over with a new #1... even though there was no gap in publication at all, and it was the work of the same writer! Ta-Nehisi Coates continues on, though the main artist of this new arc is Daniel Acuña, who is new to the character (other than a short story in Black Panther Annual vol. 1 #1).

from Black Panther vol. 7 #5

The first six issues of Black Panther volume 7 comprise a story called Many Thousands Gone, itself the first "book" of The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda, a massive story arc that runs through all twenty-five issues of this volume of Black Panther. It seems to me that Coates must have taken some of the comments on his first couple story arcs to heart (though clearly not the one about how long his story arcs are!), because while A Nation under Our Feet in particular had lots of dialogue and seemingly little action at times, Many Thousands Gone has lots of action and little dialogue, and especially little exposition. 

from Black Panther vol. 7 #3

We're dumped into a new status quo in medias res: there's some kind of Wakandan intergalactic empire (you can tell Coates isn't a science person because he doesn't seem to know the difference between "galaxy" and "star system," much like Terry Nation), which is evil; there are a group of slaves, some of which become rebels, one of whom seems to be T'Challa. Many of the other characters share names with familiar Black Panther ones, but don't seem to be the same ones. Lots of time passes between some of the issues here—years, I think—and T'Challa is sometimes referred to as some kind of distant, historical, legendary figure, but also the T'Challa in the story dreams of Storm, indicating he's the regular T'Challa.

I appreciate the attempt to do something different and unusual—I appreciate it a lot. There's a very standard type of Black Panther story that's emerged ever since Don McGregor first wrote the character, and this is very much not it... but one can see how it might let Coates and his collaborators explore some issues that are often intrinsic to the character.

from Black Panther vol. 7 #2

On the other hand, I found this a bit too inscrutable at times: exactly who these characters were is so opaque, and the jumps between issues so large, that even though there's a lot of action, I didn't know why what the characters were trying to do mattered, and thus it was hard to glom onto.

By the end of these six issues, we don't know a lot about what's actually going on. Coates is clearly playing the long game here. He also did this on his previous two story arcs, but unlike on those... I kind of think it can work? A Nation under Our Feet didn't play any better with foreknowledge of where it was going, but I can imagine rereading this and getting it. Maybe I'm being naïve, but I have faith!

Unlike the editors of this run, I suspect. Each issue begins with a page that lays out some of the backstory, information that six issues in hasn't been otherwise revealed to the reader. It reads like someone chickened out of the in medias res approach to the series after it was written and illustrated and insisted this be stuck on the front. But it's not even that helpful, I was still confused! I wish they hadn't bothered, I felt like it showed a lack of confidence.

The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda, Book 1: Many Thousands Gone originally appeared in issues #1-6 of Black Panther vol. 7 (July 2018–Jan. 2019). The story was written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, illustrated by Daniel Acuña (#1-5) and Jen Bartel (#6), with layouts by Paul Reinwald (#6), colored by Triona Farrell (#6), lettered by Joe Sabino, and edited by Wil Moss.

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE

Hugos 2025: Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell

This was the first finalist I read for the Hugo Award for Best Novel. It's a fantasy novel about a monster who lives in the woods in a fantasy kingdom, and a family comes to kill it to rid itself of a curse. The monster kills people (and other animals) to keep itself alive, absorbing body parts it needs into itself. Only the novel is told from the perspective of the monster, who finds herself falling in love with one of the members of the family that comes to kill it!

Someone you can Build a Nest in by John Wiswell

Published: 2024
Acquired and read: April 2025

Obviously this worked for a lot of people, or it wouldn't be a Hugo finalist. It didn't work for me. I can even imagine that it could work for me, it's a fun premise that could also be a disturbing one. I haven't seen other people online make this comparison, but I very much got Legends & Lattes vibes off the whole thing: despite the grossness of some of the material here, it ultimately feels rather anodyne and twee. Does this count as "cozy fantasy"?

Unfortunately, it probably does. The two characters fall in love, congrats, that's it. Why do they do this? I dunno, I guess they're nice? I found most of the characters one-note, and the worldbuilding shallow. I think fundamentally the premise is a good one, but having come up with it, it seemed like Wiswell was done; I think a good premise is a jumping-off point for complexity but this book takes its premise as an end point. What's the point of horror tropes if there's never a sense of real danger or jeopardy?

I will say that the book did manage to wrongfoot me with how the prophecy was resolved; that was mildly clever. Indeed, "mildly clever" might be the damning cover blurb for this novel. It might work for you, whoever you are, but it certainly didn't for me.

The Expanse: Memory's Legion by James S.A. Corey

As I have chronicled here in the past, The Expanse novels were accompanied by a series of short stories and novellas fleshing out the world and characters of the main series of nine novels. These were all released in electronic format originally, and I read them in between the novels, reviewing them on this blog. Once the series was complete, the stories were collected in a single hardcover edition, and I picked that up so I'd have a volume to match the rest of the series even though I'd read them before; over the past few weeks I read the volume, picking up stories in between Hugo finalists.

The stories were:

1. "Drive" (2012): about the often-mentioned inventor of the Epstein drive
2. "The Butcher of Anderson Station" (2011): how Fred Johnson went from hunter of Belter terrorists to advocate for their cause
3. "Gods of Risk" (2012): about a cousin of Bobbie Draper's after the events of book two
4. "The Churn" (2014): the backstory of Amos on Earth 
5. "The Vital Abyss" (2015): a side story about a group of kidnapped scientists working on the protomolecule
6. "Strange Dogs" (2017): kids growing up on a Laconian subject world 
7. "Auberon" (2019): the governor of a Laconian subject world discovers maintaining order is harder than he thought
8. "The Sins of Our Fathers" (2022): follows up a loose strand about Naomi's terrorist child, long after the events of the rest of the series

If you want my thoughts on individual stories, you can get them above. As I mentioned in my review of Ann Leckie's Lake of Souls, one of the benefits of a reading a single-author collection is it allows you to really triangulate an author's interests, figure out what kind of themes and ideas drive them.

Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection by James S.A. Corey

Collection published: 2022
Contents originally published: 2011-22
Acquired: July 2024
Read: May 2025

It would be easy, I think, to dismiss James S.A. Corey as a pulp writer, someone who write competent action-adventure but not more than that, a sort of John Scalzi figure, the kind of writer with little to say. But to do that would be unfair to Corey, who I think—if this doesn't sound too weird—is honestly a better and more thoughtful writer than they need to be. Reading this volume shows how much Corey is engaged in a bigger project than political thrillers and spaceship combat.

Of particular note to me, I think, is how interested Corey is in empathy: who do we connect to, and how our ability to build connections enables or disables our ability to commit violence. You can find traces of this in all of these stories, but in particular it runs through "The Butcher of Anderson Station," "The Churn," "The Vital Abyss," and "Auberon." "Butcher" is about a man who commits an unjustified act of violence, and whose ability to empathize leads him to switch sides as a result. Both "The Churn" and "The Vital Abyss" are about people without empathy, but opposite sides of the same coin: "The Churn" explores a man who cannot empathize but desperately wants to, and so seeks out others who can help guide his violence appropriately; "Vital Abyss" focuses on a man who did have the ability to empathize, and purposefully got rid of it so that he could commit violent acts. (This is a very real phenomenon that Elana Gomel discusses quite compellingly in her monograph Bloodscripts: how do we convince ourselves that other human beings are sufficiently different from us that we are okay with hurting them?) "Auberon" comes at this idea from a different direction, showing us how a Laconian governor's empathy compromises him—his love for his wife stops him from carrying out his duty, even as he also has the ability to kill his own subordinates to further the Laconian cause! Meanwhile, his enemies understand him well enough to manipulate and control him.

Outside of violence, other stories consider other consequences of empathy: "Gods of Risk," for example, follows how a teenage boy's seeming feelings for a girl lead him in dangerous directions, while "The Sins of Our Fathers" focuses on how one character regains his ability to work with groups after a lifetime of isolation. Perhaps the most potent story in this regard, though, is "Strange Dogs": in their author's note on the story, Corey argues it's about immigration, about how children of immigrants do things their parents just don't understand because what seems normal to them is alien to their parent. And I think that's true—but you might also have called it "Strange Empathy," as what distinguishes the children from their parents is their ability to empathize with the alien... even when that alien is deeply disturbing to your parents.

There's a lot about childhood here, actually: being a child trying to escape the burdens imposed on you by your parents is the point of (in varying degrees) "Gods of Risk," "The Churn," "Vital Abyss," "Strange Dogs," and "Sins of Our Fathers." As a character in that last story says, "our parents can lay burdens on us, all without meaning to, that we'll have to carry around for the rest of our lives and there's nothing we can do about that. But you and I still get to decided how we carry those burdens." Broaden the idea of "parent" and you get, I would argue, the whole thesis of The Expanse. Those who have come before us have set the stage for us: they've given us politics and violence and economics and religion and all these other systems that have shaped our lives. We can't escape those influences, but we get to decide what we do with them.

The universe is, after all, a place where anything can happen: a wide open expanse.