Faster than a DC Bullet: Project Crisis!, Part XXII: Villains United

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2005 (contents: 2005)
Borrowed from the library
Read April 2014

Villains United

Writer: Gail Simone

Pencillers: Dale Eaglesham, Val Semeiks
Inkers: Wade Von Grawbadger, Prentis Rollins
Letterers: Jared K. Fletcher, Pat Brosseau

As Lex Luthor unites the villains of the world into a new Secret Society, only six villains remain outside of his organization: Catman (who I remember from Green Arrow where he got eaten by an alien portal or something), Cheshire (a recurrent enemy in Birds of Prey), Ragdoll (son of the villain from Starman), Scandal (daughter of Vandal), Deadshot (I think he's a Batman villain?), and Parademon (a parademon from Apokolips). Like the old Secret Six, they're working for a mysterious Mockingbird whose true identity and agenda remain an enigma to them.

Simone, as anyone who read Birds of Prey knows, is good at writing teams, and it is in the character dynamics that this book shines. There's a lot of fun to be had in this group of people: shame about Parademon, actually, and I was surprised by the extent to which I immediately came to like Scandal. Someday, I suppose, I'll read the Secret Six spin-off and find it's as good as everyone says it is.

Where this book becomes less interesting is in the machinations that tie more directly into the impending Infinite Crisis: half of the Secret Society's leadership is actually comprised of lame villains (I am opposed to every story which tries to convince me Deathstroke the Terminator is legit, but this group throws in "Doctor Psycho" too whose power is I think being short), and then there's some stuff about Firestorm that's not really clear; I guess I am supposed to be reading his book. (I don't know why Firestorm always has a key role in these big crossovers, but it's a tradition that has roots going all the way back to 1982's "Crisis on Earth-Prime!" See also Crisis on Infinite Earths, Legends, Millennium, and Identity Crisis. He died in that last one, and he's still back for this one! I look forward to seeing him in Final Crisis.) I must admit, though, that the Mockingbird revelation is really quite neat. I wish I hadn't known about it ahead of time.

Return of the New Jedi Order, Episode XIV: Conquest by Greg Keyes

Mass market paperback, 291 pages
Published 2001
Acquired 2001(?)
Reread May 2014

Star Wars: The New Jedi Order: Edge of Victory I: Conquest
by Greg Keyes

Year Two of the Invasion (Month 2)
This book gets off to another rough start, where the man who blew up the Death Star tries to convince you that taking action against aggressors could somehow lead to the Dark Side. But roll your eyes and get on to the next scene, because after that this book is brilliant. Seriously, Top 5 Star Wars books, easy. Greg Keyes completely inhabits and understands Star Wars in a way the previous New Jedi Order writers haven't. No, I'm not saying he knows his continuity (though he does and I'll get to that in a minute), I'm saying he knows what makes Star Wars work and he's able to replicate it without making a slavish copy of the original films. (We should note that this is a skill that even George Lucas lost sometime after 1983. Probably the only other writers to possess it are Matt Stover and John Jackson Miller.) This book gives us a young man, uncertain about his place in the universe, and plunges him into a desperate adventure with group of unlikely comrades. Okay, that seems obvious, you say, but if that's obvious then why do most Star Wars writers insist on giving us "political" "thrillers"?

Young Anakin Solo disobeys Master Luke Skywalker's order to go to the Jedi Academy on Yavin 4 because he insists it's under threat from the Yuuzahn Vong. A couple of awesome action sequences later, and he's crashed in the forest with a criminal, a crazy former TIE pilot, and two kids for company, trying to rescue someone important to him. Along the way he demonstrates his basic goodness, learns some valuable moral lessons, meets more awesome characters (some of whom die), listens to mystical prophecies, and saves the day with style. It does not get any better than this!

Extra points should be given for the fact that this is the first book where the Yuuzhan Vong feel like a real civilization. A lot of this is due to Vua Rapuung, the former warrior who befriends Anakin, and is poignant, hardcore, and hilariously deadpan all at once. But there's also the various Shamed Ones and our glimpses into the mind of Nen Yim, the young heretic shaper. This book transforms the war against an unstoppable aggressor into something more meaningful and difficult.

This is the first book in the series to make me care about Anakin Solo as a character. Keyes does this partly through just being better at writing than Salvatore, Stackpole, Luceno, and Tyers, but also he's obviously the only NJO writer to actually have read the Junior Jedi Knights books. Keyes threads Conquest with characters from this series, giving Anakin's life an emotional depth-- but just like the original Star Wars works if you haven't met Luke and his adoptive parents before, so too does Conquest (I only read the first JJK book). Is Master Ikrit the greatest Jedi Master of all time? Signs point to yes. Is Anakin/Tahiri one of the few ships I could ever admit to having? Um... I guess so. (I don't think the book quite succeeds in rationalizing why we haven't seen Tahiri and Ikrit since the NJO began, though-- Anakin has been back to Yavin 4 multiple times since the death of Chewbacca, yet he's never talked to Tahiri about it? We've never even seen him avoiding her? But that's more a critique of the other NJO novels than this one; it's amazing how this book reveals the extent to which Anakin was a blank cipher in the other books.)

I remember being this the point, seven books in, where The New Jedi Order finally clicked for me, the point where it started to work and cemented itself as something worth reading. Though I am enjoying my experiment in rereading the series with all the ancillary material included, it does exacerbate the early difficulties of the NJO-- this is the fourteenth installment! If Conquest hadn't been as good as I remembered, I might have given up here, but thankfully it was excellent, and for the first time in this reread, I am avidly anticipating going onwards.

Let's close by quoting this adorable but keenly insightful bit where Anakin is watching Tahiri as she falls asleep, reflecting on the fact that he's not seen his best friend in a year and something... something is different:

By the faint orange light of the gas giant outside, he could make out traces of her features, so familiar and yet somehow different. It was as if, below the girl's face he had always known, something else was pushing up, like mountains rising, driven by the deep internal heat of a planet.
     Something you couldn't stop even if you wanted to. It made him want to hang on and run away at the same time, and in a mild epiphany he realized he had felt that way for some time.
     As children they had been best friends. But neither of them was a child anymore, not exactly.
     His arm had gone numb from her weight, but he couldn't bring himself to shift, for fear of waking her.

Awwww...

Return of the New Jedi Order, Episode XIII: Recovery by Troy Denning

Kindle eBook, n.pag.
Published 2001
Acquired April 2014
Reread May 2014

Star Wars: The New Jedi Order: Recovery
by Troy Denning

Year One of the Invasion (Month 12)
I read this supplementary eBook at some point in the past (it's collected in the paperback of Star by Star, and I think I borrowed it off someone) but not where it falls in the chronological sequence of The New Jedi Order, shortly after the events of Balance Point. This book reminded me of how Troy Denning is one of my favorite Star Wars authors, and why-- because he can write fun. Han and Leia are trying to make their way from Duro back to Coruscant, only all sorts of unsavory types are after them following Balance Point. There's fun stuff here: Han trying to con bounty hunters into thinking he's a doctor, a mysterious passenger on the Falcon, a new subfaction of Jedi, complicated plans and deceptions, and best of all, Han and Leia's rapprochement. This is good, fun, real Star Wars in a way that The New Jedi Order has lacked up until now.

Return of the New Jedi Order, Episode XII: Balance Point by Kathy Tyers

Hardcover, 333 pages
Published 2000
Acquired 2000(?)
Reread May 2014

Star Wars: The New Jedi Order: Balance Point
by Kathy Tyers

Year One of the Invasion (Months 11-12)
I didn't have particularly fond memories of this book, but to my surprise, it turned out to be the best installment of The New Jedi Order (barring the third volume of Invasion) since Vector Prime. Tyers's book is much more focused than Stackpole and Luceno's duologies, and all the better for it: most of the actions take place on Duro, where Leia is coordinating the refugee crisis and Han is running a resettlement camp-- except communication is so bad that they're unaware of each others' presence. The Solo kids are there, too, Jacen and Anakin dealing with the fallout of Jedi Eclipse and Jaina recovering from injuries received with Rogue Squadron. The book has a strong, central plot, but even better, it has characters: in a lot of major and minor ways, Tyers really focuses on them as people, especially in their interactions with one another. It feels like damning with faint praise to say something like this, but after two volumes of the non-writing of James Luceno, Balance Point really feels like a breath of fresh air. The Han/Leia relationship is probably the centerpiece of the book, and Tyers nails that one especially perfectly.

Return of the New Jedi Order, Episode XI: Jedi Eclipse by James Luceno

Mass market paperback, 348 pages
Published 2000
Acquired 2000(?)
Reread May 2014

Star Wars: The New Jedi Order: Agents of Chaos II: Jedi Eclipse
by James Luceno

Year One of the Invasion (Month 9)
Like in Luceno last's New Jedi Order tedium-fest, there's some potential here: Han and Droma trying to find Droma's family in the midst of the galaxy's refugee crisis. This plot is actually a lot of fun, with the usual hijinks you expect Han Solo to get into. Unfortunately, the rest of this novel consists of military and political posturing with absolutely no character hook to hang on-- it's just people with titles talking to/about other people with titles.

Even when there is potential for more in the politics, it is squandered: Leia goes to Hapes to convince them to join the fight on the side of the New Republic, but then just stands around while male characters fight over her. (Somehow, women can be marginalized even in the matriarchal society of Hapes.) Then, she has a vague vision of badness again and again, but does nothing about it... then something bad happens! Man, riveting. And, for the two people out there who considered the Corellian Trilogy the high point of Star Wars fiction, Luceno peppers the book with characters from that series so you don't have to miss them anymore.

Review: Darwin's Plots by Gillian Beer

Trade paperback, 294 pages
Published 2009 (originally 1983)

Previously read January 2010

Acquired and reread December 2012

Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction
by Gillian Beer

Early in my graduate school career I read the first edition of this; now I read the third for my generals. (There are no differences of substance, just a new preface for the second edition and a bonus essay for the third.) It's an excellent (dare I say seminal?) piece of literary criticism, forming a triumvirate with the works of Levine and Shuttleworth (though it's perhaps the one of three least directly relevant to my own research). The thing Beer does really well and importantly is treat Darwin's own writings as something worthy of literary study, not just historical documents.

Review: Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists by Srdjan Smajić

Hardcover, 262 pages
Published 2010

Borrowed from the library

Read December 2012

Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science
by Srdjan Smajić

Smajić traces connections between ghost-seers in fact and fiction in the Victorian age. I had a vague memory that I struggled with the book, but reviewing my notes (eighteen months old; I am very behind on writing up my reviews!), I see that I took extensive notes on the fifth chapter, "Visual learning: sight and Victorian epistemology," about the ways that our sight can be interfered with and the ways it can interfere with our other senses. In contrast to earlier periods, the problem with sight in Victorian philosophy and fiction is usually not the visual organ itself, but the ways we draw inferences from our optics-- Watson sees the same things as Holmes, but Holmes understands them better. There's some connections be drawn with the story Daston and Galison tell of scientific objectivity, how scientist moved from fearing that the world would overwhelm their observations to fearing they would overwhelm their own observations. I found some of the discussion of occult fiction less interesting that that of detective fiction, but it became useful when Smajić traced the intersection of the two in occult detective fiction.

Review: Dead Romance by Lawrence Miles

Trade paperback, 321 pages
Published 2004 (contents: 1999-2001)

Previously read May 2005

Reread May 2014

Dead Romance
by Lawrence Miles

For this Bernice Summerfield novel, I have the 2004 reprint, not the original 1999 publication. It's the third book in the "Gods" arc, and the first to offer real explanations (or at least hypotheses) as to who the Gods are and what they want. The scale of their threat is reinforced a lot here; back in Where Angels Fear, the Time Lords recalled Braxiatel's TARDIS, but here we see them sending Chris Cwej to negotiate treaties with the Daleks and the People, allowing them to possess the technology of time travel. Things are getting serious.

Bernice, of course, is not in this novel-- the main character is Christine Summerfield, a young woman from the 1970 London of a bottle universe. There are some who hail this as the greatest Doctor Who novel, but I don't see it. It's a decent novel, with amazing ideas and an intense apocalyptic mood but nothing much seems to actually happen, and what does happen is a distraction. It stands out from its surroundings, sure, but being better than The Medusa Effect or Dry Pilgrimage is not enough to trumpet, exactly. I remember enjoying it when I first read it, but the subsequent nine years of trumpeting by Miles fandom led me to expect more than I found on this reread. (The back cover proclaims it as "novelist Lawrence Miles' greatest work," as if that is somehow significant.)

The Gods arc really has given the New Adventures some energy and focus, but I look forward to seeing that actually imparted to Bernice, as this is the second novel she's been (largely) absent from. Hopefully she's more of a presence in Tears of the Oracle.

Review: The Frozen Deep by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins

Hardcover, 173 pages
Published 1966 (contents: 1857)

Acquired November 2012

Read December 2012

Under the Management of Mr. Charles Dickens: his production of "The Frozen Deep"
by Wilkie Collins, edited by Robert Louis Brannan

Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens worked together on an "amateur" theatrical called The Frozen Deep in 1857, later turned by Collins into a novella. This is the only accessible printing of the script that I could find, an edition which does not mention Collins as the writer on the cover or title page, even though he was the solely credited writer on the original playbill! Did people just not care about Collins as much as they did Dickens when this edition was published in the 1960s?

Anyway, this is about a group of stranded Arctic explorers. I can see the potential in such a premise for gripping drama, but on the page at least, there's nothing engaging to be found. Pretty forgettable, even if Queen Victoria was moved to tears.

Review: Doctor Who in Time and Space edited by Gillian I. Leitch

Trade paperback, 289 pages
Published 2013

Acquired July 2013

Read May 2014

Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy, 39: Doctor Who in Time and Space: Essays on Themes, Characters, History and Fandom, 1963-2012
edited by Gillian I. Leitch

Back in the day, I read and reviewed Time And Relative Dissertations In Space, which was (I think) the first critical anthology on Doctor Who. Seven years later, you can't move for the glut of them. TARDIS's weak point was, in retrospect, its lack of focus: topics covered all twenty-six years of the old show, plus some of the tie-ins. The full title of Doctor Who in Time and Space should make its biggest weakness very apparent: there's absolutely no cohesion or throughline to the sixteen essays in this volume, beyond Doctor Who itself. Around half of the essays are about the 2005+ revival, which means the ones on 1963-89 are particularly scattershot.

1. "Event TV: Fan Consumption of Televised Doctor Who in Britain (1963-Present)" by Andrew O'Day
This article covers the way Doctor Who has been watched as an "event"-- the most interesting aspect of this for me was the big viewings of Doctor Who stories at conventions, back in the days when there were no home video productions for folks to watch. I wish O'Day had more to say about these events, though; this didn't have the level of argument I'd expect from an academic piece.

2. "Social Spaces: British Fandom to the Present" by Andrew O'Day
Rather capaciously, this essay attempts to provide a history of all aspects of Doctor Who fandom in fifteen pages. As you might imagine, there's just not the space to do the job. It uses its offered space weirdly-- there's page upon page about post-2005 fanzines, surely far past the point at which fanzines ceased to be relevant, while I don't think Tumblr and/or Pinterest even rate a mention. Also, for some reason O'Day feels compelled to inform the reader that social media is having a huge impact, "even though there are harmful uses of such sites such as the presence of pedophiles" (30). Huh the what now?

3. "Don't Call It a Comeback" by Aaron Gulyas
Guylas tries to characterize fan reaction both to the 1996 telemovie and the 2005 revival, largely based on Internet forum postings. One thing I found amusing: the day before I read this chapter, I was reading about the proper use of sic and how it's usually needless pedantry. So I enjoyed it when after using "[sic]" repeatedly to indicate misspellings in forum postings, Guylas's interpolated brackets introduced their own errors, such as that venerable Doctor Who writer, Terrence Dicks (52). Maybe he should take care of the splinter in his own eye first?

4. "Whose Doctor?" by J. M. Frey
This essay attempts to claim that Doctor Who is prejudiced against Canadians, despite the key role that Canadians played in its creation. (Sydney Newman was Canadian, for example, and the early seasons of the 2005 revival were co-funded by the CBC.) It's hard to take seriously, with poorly applied postcolonial theory (I don't know of any that would count the white settlers of Canada as the colonized) and comments such as that "Owen Harper metaphorically rapes a pair of subalterns" (73) in the pilot episode of Torchwood (such a broadening of the term "subaltern" as to render it meaningless).

5. "In and Out of Time" by Kieran Tranter
Confusing essay that tries to link Doctor Who to some philosophical conceptions of time. Bafflingly implies that Scotland is not part of the British Isles: "while the Doctor was allowed to leave BBC enunciation behind with McCoy, subsequent Doctors [...] have kept the accent located within the British Isles" (87).

6. "Effecting the Cause: Time Travel Narratives" by Paul Booth
I think this essay is trying to argue that the more fragmented use of time in the 2005 revival is indicative of our more fragment postmodern condition?

7. "Narrative Conflict and the Portrayal of the Media, Public Relations and Marketing in the New Doctor Who" by Racheline Maltese
I enjoyed this essay-- it's a nice look at the way the media, especially the news media, has been depicted since the 2005 revival, where it's played a pretty big role in a number of stories.

8. "Nostalgia for Empire, 1963-1974" by Maura Grady and Cassie Hemstrom
A decent rendering of the role of imperialism in the early classic series, though one feels the argument could have been drawn out a little better.

9. "A Needle Through the Heart: Violence and Tragedy as a Narrative Device" by Lindsay Coleman
I feel like this one is arguing that violent things happen in Doctor Who a lot. Surely it's saying something more than that?

10. "Everything Dies: The Message of Mortality in the Eccleston and Tennant Years" by Kristine Larsen
This one irritated me right from the title. I get why a fan might say "Tennant years," but an academic has no excuse or reason. Fan discourse often ignores or downplays the creators of stories, but an academic should be diligent in this kind of thing. (One of the things I like about Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood's About Time books is the way they group by production, so the last Tom Baker season is in the same book as the Peter Davison ones.) It's the Russell T Davies years-- he's the one who wrote most of the scripts and edited all the others; if there's a common theme, it's because of him, not the actors in the role of the Doctor! Like many essays, the writers and directors of the episodes are never mentioned. This is even more annoying when novels are cited-- do you know what David Tennant had to do with SnowGlobe 7? Well, his picture was on the cover.

Also at one point she refers to the Master's plan in The End of Time as "a rather ingenious yet obviously immoral way [...] to in effect commit mass genocide" (164). Are there moral ways?

11. "'Ready to outsit eternity': Human Responses to the Apocalypse" by Andrew Crome
I wanted to like this more than I did, but Crome spends too little time theorizing what this all means; he doesn't really make anything of it.

12. "A Country Made from Metal? The 'Britishness' of Human-Machine Marriage in Series 31" by Kate Flynn
First off, "series 31" is one of the worst kinds of useless pedantry, second only to insisting the third Doctor Who story was called Inside the Spaceship. But this is a weird essay aside from that, trying to set up a dichotomy between Amy's Scottishness and Rory's Britishness without ever really defining them, and then trying to connect in Rory's "cyborg" nature. Yeah, I don't know.

13. "'Whatever you do, don't blink!': Gothic Horror and the Weeping Angels Trilogy" by David Whitt
In the crowded competition for worst essay, this is the foremost contender: it spends two pages explaining what Gothic horror is and then over six synopsizing "Blink," "The Time of Angels," and "Flesh and Stone before just four on "discussion," which basically concludes, "Well, these stories sure are Gothic!" No implications at all, just observation. Identifying motifs does not an argument make!

14. "Doctor Who's Women and His Little Blue Box: Time Travel as a Heroic Journey of Self-Discovery for Rose Tyler, Martha Jones and Donna Noble" by Antoinette F. Winstead
Decent explication of the "heroine's journey" of our female protagonists, but again, too much time matching up tropes and motifs.

15. "Spoiled for Another Life: Sarah Jane Smith's Adventures With and Without Doctor Who" by Sherry Ginn
Just explains how Sarah Jane is a great example of an idea from developmental psychology. C'mon, so what!?

16. "Chasing Amy: The Evolution of the Doctor's Female Companion in the New Who" by Lynette Porter
Could be an okay essay, I think, but it suffers from the fact that it was clearly written in 2010, before the character of Amy was even halfway through her time on the show.


I found, too, that many of the essays were riddled with typos and misprints, especially in the names of production personnel and stories. There were also some baffling citation practices-- the text will mention something happened in "Nightmare of Eden," there'll be an endnote, you'll flip to and read just "Nightmare of Eden." Such helpful information! Another essay, for some reason, puts the three-digit story number after each title (i.e., "The Aztecs" (006)). But only that one.

There's just no sense of argument to this book, either in its individual essays or in its holistic self. What does Gillian Leitch want you to take away about Doctor Who? With no consistency of topic or approach, I have no way to tell you. Seven years after Time And Relative Dimensions In Space, not to mention books like Triumph of a Time Lord, we can do better than this.