The Pelican History of England #7: The Long Eighteenth Century (1714–1815)

As I get to the end of my project to read all the Pelican Histories of England, I've reached the point where I've read them before—back in 2012/13, I read the ones covering the eighteenth through twentieth centuries in parallel to my Ph.D. exam reading covering the same era. My copy of volume seven, however, I got from the library at the time, so for this reread, I bought my own copy. My new one is a 1990 printing (unlike some other volumes of the series, this one never went into new editions), and it does something I haven't seen in any of my other volumes of the series... it renames it! According to the cover and the spine, this isn't the Pelican History of England, but the Penguin! I don't know why they would rename the series, especially why they would only do this on one of the 1990s editions I have. Was it just a mistake? The interior list of other books in the series still calls it the "Pelican History" after all.

The Penguin History of England: 7. England in the Eighteenth Century
by J. H. Plumb

Originally published: 1950
Previously read: August 2012
Acquired: April 2025
Reread: June 2025

J. H. Plumb takes a similar approach to A. R. Myers in volume four, dividing his era into three sub-eras, in this case by three Prime Ministers: Walpole (1714-42), Chatham a.k.a. "Pitt the Elder" (1742-84), and Pitt a.k.a. "Pitt the Younger" (1784-1815). Unlike Myers, though, who carried out a strictly parallel construction in each of those three sections, Plumb has a bunch of different chapters that covers a lot of topics very quickly, though there is usually one on literature in each section. He's also fond of giving a quick biography of a key figure in a single chapter, such as John Wesley (founder of Methodism), John Wilkes (a reform journalist), and each of the three prime ministers. I think this probably has the most chapters of any Pelican History, with twenty-five in total. (Some of the earlier volumes had just five!) Like some of the earlier volumes, though, Plumb focuses less on giving you a blow-by-blow.

Anyway, like I said, I read this before, and my old review indicates I was not a big fan: "Plumb seemed to assume a level of general knowledge with the era's politics that I simply did not possess, as the whole book was organized around three principal prime ministers who were referred to as though I was already an expert." As another reviewer on LibraryThing says, "this is an introduction to the period for educated people. So names are used as if you should know who they are. I think when it was written that would have been alright, today it isn't, sadly." I'm not sure that Plumb ever explicitly says that Chatham and Pitt the Elder are the same person! But I did find it a bit easier to follow this time, no doubt thanks to having read the preceding six volumes and thus having a grounding in the time and era.

One thing I've been tracking across this project is not just how each writer structures their volumes, but also what kind of thesis they give about their era. Plumb's volume is diminished, I think, by not having one. Across the twenty-five chapters, he tries to cover a lot: politics, empire (the loss of America and the acquisition of India both happen here), religion (like I said, Wesley gets a chapter), the Napoleonic Wars, moves toward full democracy. It's hard to say that one thing dominates the book. I can see why Plumb might take this approach, wanting to give a broad view of a time period, but it does mean that I finished the book having felt I received a lot of glimpses of interesting bits but not a coherent panorama of the entire time. The problem is he does kind of give a thesis at the end, but he's been so all over the place in terms of details up until that point, that it doesn't feel very supported: "To thinking men the horizon was dark and foreboding.... [I]n 1815, at the end of long endurance, there was fear, and envy, and greed, but little hope" (214). Why?

The potted biographies of the prime ministers are particularly interesting and frustrating; Plumb hints at a lot but explains little. Apparently Pitt the Elder was insane? And sick every year of his life, both mentally and physically? But somehow a great prime minister anyway? How does this all add up? Once again, I find myself wanting to do some outside reading; I guess I will be tracking down a full-length biography of him at some point. Similarly, when talking about Pitt the Younger, he calls him an "enigma," "narrowly rational, and frequently mistaken," "atrociously bad in all questions of strategy," and "a drunkard" (208)! So what was he good at?

To the extend that Plumb does have a focus, however, it seems to be trade. He shows how trade both drove England's prosperity during this time, and also failed to transfer all of that prosperity to members of the working classes: "There were more families of middling wealth than ever before, but the vast bulk of the population fell within the contemporary category of 'labouring poor'.... [T]he poorest working men today would have found the lives of their ancestors almost unbearable.... [T]he human animal broke down under the burden..." (150). This is the time where England's economic prosperity takes off, leading us into the Victorian period (but more on that next time). 

Trade policy is the major area of focus he discusses with the three prime ministers. Plus, trade was also the impetus for empire, of course, in both India and Ireland, and the crippling of trade was a key outcome of the American Revolution. Trade so much drove the empire that, in the 1780s, we wouldn't really recognize imperialist rhetoric in India: "They were traders, proud of their race, determined to make money as fast as they could, but they were wholly free from the sense that manifest destiny had called them to rule the native people" (171). By the end of the century, there was a very different attitude: "Distasteful as it was for the Englishman to live in India, the provision of good government was an obligation which he could not avoid. It was his destiny" (178). Plumb himself, though, is a bit of an imperialist, suggesting "the British Raj was more just, and less extortionate, than its native counterpart" (178). Doubt you would see that in a 2020s history book!

Other things of interest: Like I said, he focuses on the slow transition toward wider democratic enfranchisement; I found his discussion of the reformers' own view of history fascinating: "they helped to foster the strange national mythology of the Victorians. They believed... that Saxon England was the golden age of political democracy. This was destroyed by the Normans and a monarchical tyranny imposed. A long struggle ensued. The first triumph was the Magna Carta... but final success was jeopardized by the corruption of George III's government.... Misleading, yet simple..." (136). If you've read the earlier volumes of this series, particularly three and six, you'll know just how wrong this is!

Anyway, I still found this one of the weaker volumes of the series but on the other hand, I got more out of it than I did on my previous pass. Lots of interesting tidbits even if not much of a coherent whole.

Hugos 2025: The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

One of my goals in reading Hugo finalists is to gain more exposure to contemporary writers of great sf&f—otherwise, I am perpetually behind. Robert Jackson Bennett is one of those writers I have been interested in but never gotten around to; his "Divine Cities" sequence sounded interesting when it was a finalist for the Best Series Hugo (a category I do not read for). So I was gratified when his most recent novel, The Tainted Cup, was a finalist for Best Novel this year.

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

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

This is a speculative detective novel—appropriately enough!—that's clearly inspired by Sherlock Holmes somewhat. We have an autistic coded detective, and their junior partner; the detective, Ana, is so perceptive that, just like Holmes, she can even make better observations than her junior partner of scenes where she is not present. Din, the junior partner, has a magically-enhanced memory, and he goes to the crime scenes while she does not, and he when he recounts the details to her, she puts together the significance of things that (to use Holmes's formulation) Din saw but did not observe. Ana is autistic-coded, but Din also has a learning disability, as he struggles to understand written text.

The novel takes place in a fantastic empire, one beset from without by massive leviathans and from within by crime and corruption. It opens with Ana and Din investigating the murder of an engineer responsible for the massive sea walls that protect the empire from the leviathans, but they soon discover (of course) a vast conspiracy. It's not the kind of mystery that follows the classic W. H. Auden formulation ("a murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies") where the reader solves the mystery alongside the detectives, but rather the kind of a procedural thriller where you slowly move through a world, uncovering details that allow the characters to unlock what's going on. 

It's a pleasure to read. The characters are strongly drawn and interesting, and Bennett is strong on tone and atmosphere. Beyond that, Bennett gets that the pleasure of a speculative novel is that (as Jo Walton says, oft-quoted by me) the world itself is a mystery that the reader gets to uncover. This is a rich, immersive world, and much of the pleasure of the book is in that it feels real with what seems to to be minimal effort on Bennett's part. I enjoyed reading this a lot; once I'm done with reading this year's Hugo finalists, I will definitely be picking up the second book, which is already out, and I'm happy to see that a third is already in the works. It feels like the kind of premise that could keep chugging along for a while quite effectively. Both these characters and this world have a lot more mystery for the reader to uncover.

"this peace, like any other, was a temporary thing" (Blackhawk, 1989–92)

The third and final (so far, anyway*) volume of Blackhawk comprised sixteen issues in 1989 and 1990, plus a 1989 annual and a belated 1992 special. It picked up from what artist Rick Burchett and writer Martin Pasko had been doing with Blackhawk in Action Comics (see item #10 below); Burchett would illustrate all sixteen regular issues of the title (occasionally with various assists), while Pasko would write the first eleven, with Grant Miehm taking over at the end.

Back when I began this series of posts, I said the question I was interested in was how various creators made use of the Blackhawks outside of their original context. Can a premise and set of characters originally anchored to a very specific time and place have any viability outside of it? The last couple incarnations of the Blackhawks have seemed to indicate "no": both Mark Evanier (see #9 below) and Chaykin returned the Blackhawks to World War II. 

Somewhat cleverly, Mike Grell and Martin Pasko followed on from Chaykin by making the viability of the Blackhawks outside of World War II the very topic of their stories. At the end of the Action Comics run, Pasko set up that the Blackhawks would be operating at the behest of U.S. intelligence, their cover story being that they were a charter air service. These warriors need a new war to fight, even if it's one they don't totally agree with themselves.

Glamorous even with one eye.
from Blackhawk Annual #1
(script by Martin Pasko, art by Rick Burchett & Bill Wray)

This is the topic of the first three issues and the annual, which see the Blackhawks go on missions like distributing anticommunist leaflets to influence elections overseas, but of course they get into fights and scrapes, and of course Janos himself gets into shenanigans with local women. There's lots of moral ambiguity here; it's a strong follow-up to what Pasko and Burchett were doing in Action Comics.

In that run, Pasko had also set up that Natalie Reed (the so-called "Lady Blackhawk") had a child she was unable to reenter the U.S. to see, thanks to increased anticommunist sentiments postwar. This is the main spine of those first four issues; from Mexico, Natalie is writing comics stories about the Blackhawks and sending them to a publisher in the U.S., who illustrates them with her name under a pseudonym. But the fact that Reed is a former communist means a right-wing member of the publisher staff informs on her, and soon the Blackhawks are battling enemies at home, not just abroad. I really enjoyed this subplot, particularly some of the revelations about who the father of Natalie's baby was, and what happens to him.

I agree, Janos.
from Blackhawk vol. 3 #1 (script by Martin Pasko, art by Rick Burchett)

(If you want, this subplot can also be used to kind of maintain previous versions of Blackhawk in continuity. Pasko and Burchett include interpolated bits based on the original Military Comics run [see item #1] and Chaykin's miniseries [item #10]. Any story you want to keep can be an in-universe fictionalized comics based on on actual adventure!)

After this, though, the comic moves into an ongoing plotline that runs from issue #4 to 12. This takes the conspiracy thriller tone of the whole thing to a new level: the government decides they want to the Blackhawks to go to China and stop them from developing an atomic bomb... so they kidnap them and make it seem like they're dead? Meanwhile, other members of the Blackhawks are being abducted and put in suspended animation. I can enjoy conspiracy thrillers, but one that bugs me is when the antagonists are so powerful in the way they manipulate the protagonists that it doesn't really make sense that they need the protagonists to do anything to begin with. If the government can force the Blackhawks to do all this, why can't they just do it themselves directly?

As the story goes on, it gets increasingly convoluted, with the villains trying to (I think) copy the Blackhawks' memories into other people's bodies for... reasons, I guess? I don't really know, and that's despite two different issues where the plot stops so that people can explain to each other what's going on! And like I said, this plotline dominates nine issues of the title! It's pretty bad, and feels like it must be the reason the title ended up cancelled.

Martin Pasko doesn't even see it all the way through; issue #12 is actually written by Doug Moench, who wraps everything up implausibly quickly. Oh, did the Blackhawks go through the most traumatic events of their lives? That's fine, they're back to work... for the same people who did all this to them to begin with! Natalie goes through some particularly twisted shit, and he writes her out rather than deal with it. On the one hand, I'm frustrated to lose one of the new Blackhawks' best characters, but on the other hand, I'm not sure what Moench could actually do with her given how much Pasko screwed up the character that he had made so interesting!

After that, Moench quickly moves onto a four-part storyline about the Blackhawks flying experimental planes... and possibly also there are UFOs? To be honest, I found this disjointed, confusing, and pointless. Again, it's not very clear what the conspiracy is or why the conspirators want the Blackhawks; there are several different parts to the story that don't go together. A disappointing conclusion to a series that had a very strong start.

Other stuff: The series contains a couple "Blackhawk Express" stories set in the present day of the DC universe (following on from "The Crash of 88" in Action Comics) starring Weng Chan. These have good writers (Elliot S. Maggin and John Ostrander) but unfortunately a terrible artist in Dick Rockwell, and to be honest, neither writer ever does anything with the premise that convinces me it was worthwhile. Finally, 1992's Blackhawk Special (script by John Ostrander, art by Mike Vosburg) chronicles 1963 to '68 for the Blackhawks (the main body of the ongoing covered 1948 to '50), mostly focusing on the Blackhawks getting involved in a conspiracy surrounding the deaths of JFK and RFK. It's decent enough but a bit too jumpy to be engaging; I feel like Ostrander was trying to do too much even if he had 57 pages to work with.

This is the eleventh in a series of posts about the Blackhawks. The next installment covers Lady Blackhawk in Guy Gardner: Warrior. 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 
10. Blackhawk: Blood & Iron (1987-89) 

* There was a short-lived ongoing series that ran 2011–12, but it was called Blackhawks.

Star Trek Adventures: "The Word for Word Is Word": A Fan-Written 1E Adventure!

One of the benefits of the Star Trek Adventures format is that it accommodates absences easily. "Oh, he didn't beam down this week." "Oh, she's away at a space conference." "Oh, they've got the anatid space flu." And then next week they can be back! Much more flexible than D&D, where you need to explain why the guy who was in the dungeon with you last week suddenly isn't this week. (Or, more likely, he's suddenly not there.) So mostly I don't worry about absences and my group plays every week unless I can't make it, and people's characters pop in and out, but we can work it in easily.

But my group is in the middle of a mission that actually touches on all their characters pretty substantially, and a couple players were going to miss the last session of the episode. It felt weird to play it without them. So I decided to pause and do a side story. Originally, based on who was going to be present, I was going to make it a flashback, but then I realized someone was going to play who hadn't played last summer, meaning it had to be a flash-forward. Hopefully the current episode (more on this in a future post) ends as expected.

Anyway, this means that I needed a one-session mission. All published missions run three or possibly two sessions in my experience... so I was going to have to write it myself!

"Captain’s Log, Stardate 53912.6. I have left the Diversitas under the command of Chief Engineer Nevan Jones while it studies a previously unknown magnetar. I am currently travelling via runabout with a subset of my senior staff to a colony on the planet Maxia Beta VIII. There, we will assist in setting up a Federation medical aid program. The journey will take several days, but after our recent intense missions, I am looking forward to some time relaxing with my crew…"

Planning the Mission

archaeological research transport at warp

In my two previous STA campaigns, I have never written my own episodes—I relied exclusively on published modules, even if I substantially modified them sometimes. This summer, I find myself having to write my own for the first time in four years of running STA! But I have kept a file on my computer of ideas for adventures, many of them ripped off from books I have read. One that has stayed prominent in my memory for a long time is the idea of an AI-piloted research vessel kidnapping the player characters so that they would rescue its missing crew. This was inspired by the premise of the Murderbot novel Network Effect by Martha Wells; in fact, when I just went back to my original review of the novel, I see that I wrote that I "liked the hook of how Asshole Research Transport returned; indeed, I liked it so much that I think I will steal it for the Star Trek RPG I am DMing." It took some time, but I finally did it!

Clearly it would begin with a runabout being kidnapped... but what else? Bits of it fell into place pretty quickly once I began thinking about it: there'd have to be some kind of journey to where the vanished crew were. This would have to be inside a mountain to explain why the research transport couldn't just beam its crew back. Mountain journeys mean caves, and caves mean having to escape a collapsing tunnel. All good.

But the other thing I wanted was some kind of open-ended dilemma at the end. I realized I could get this if the players discovered that 1) the transport's lost crew was dead, and 2) they had been for some time—so the players were not its first kidnap victims. What to do about this seemingly sentient menace? They can't just leave it roaming around the galaxy kidnapping people!

This would give me a nice three-scene structure: 1) get kidnapped / explore transport, 2) move through caves, and 3) face dilemma, which seemed doable in a three-hour session. 

archaeological research transport interior

Lastly, I wanted an episode title from a They Might Be Giants song (don't ask), and I decided to go with "The Word for Word Is Word," a lyric from "Thinking Machine"—the song title seemed quite appropriate! But why would this episode title make sense? (I don't know why this bothered me; no one has ever asked me why, say, "Patagon in Parallax" was called that.) I decided to have this phrase be something the transport's AI displayed on a screen when it decoded Federation Standard, and thus to use adapted versions of the song's other nonsense lyrics as messages the players would find on the ship.

So here it is! This is a slightly cleaned up post-play version, adding some things based on what came up in action, and removing the specific references to characters and ship from my current campaign. Anyone who wants to run or adapt it is welcome to do so. And let me know if you do!

Playing the Mission

For this episode, I had four of my regulars, plus our pinchhitter, who joins us whenever we're below the full six:

• Ryan as Rucot, captain
• Debi as T'Cant, science officer
• Claire as Mooria Salmang, pilot
• Andy as Gurg bim Vurg, chief medical officer
• Toren as Tronnen, counselor 

Overall, it went good... despite some historically bad rolls! Debi, unfortunately, rolled a 19 and a 20 on some pretty simple Task early one, one I had intended to generate Momentum. She used Determination to reroll and failed again, still netting a Complication. She got her Determination back with her Veteran Talent, and attempted one more time. This wouldn't be the first bad roll. But overall, the players investigated why their runabout was inoperative effectively; I had written a suggested technical solution in my notes, but Toren came up with their own, which was rewiring equipment to bypass the transtator. I said they couldn't do this to the whole runabout (it would take hours) but did let them do it with a tricorder, and later a comm badge.

dangerous cave

I displayed the messages from the transport AI on my laptop, using PowerPoint to make them appear one letter at a time in a glowing green computer font. What I hadn't realized (but should have) is that the players would attach a lot of significance to these messages! I had intended them as interesting flavor, but they were trying to decode them, taking notes, and so on. As a result, they didn't do a lot of exploration of the vessel... but that was fine, one of my paths to making contact with the AI was speeding up the process of language assimilation.

They of course decided to help the AI, even if they were a bit apprehensive about the way they were being manhandled and manipulated by it. 

As always, it took slightly longer than I anticipated; instead of lasting about an hour, the first scene was more like seventy-five minutes. So I decided to keep the focus of the second scene strictly on the cave crawling sequence, avoiding any other dangers I had contemplated. Claire failed on the roll to find an efficient path through the mountain, so I added one Zone to my Extended Consequence challenge of getting through a collapsing cave. 

This seemed to go pretty well: good Fitness scores were what the players needed... and good Fitness scores are what only one of them had. They contemplated various options, but ended up decided to go with Gurg giving everyone an adrenaline shot. I treated this mechanically by letting everyone roll three d20s on Fitness Tasks (I think this is how the Talent Augmented Ability works, but I didn't actually look it up), but increasing the complication range to 18-20. Tronnen made it across the tunnel pretty quickly, and thanks to some very lucky rolling, Rucot wasn't far behind. Gurg and T'Cant, unfortunately, were. When the players rolled Complications, I added an extra challenge die to my five at the end of the round.

a member of the People, a coleopteran alien species

Lucky for the players, I rolled kind of badly on my first couple goes. I did have a big Threat pool... but I was conscious of the fact that we might run out of time if I made it too challenging! They ended up making it through by the end of the fourth round. Overall, I think it was an effective challenge, and I wish I'd spent some more Threat to knock some of them out.

The discovery that the archaeologists had been dead for a year was met with suitable surprise, though they were torn as to whether it was translation error or some kind of weird time phenomenon. (I didn't anticipate the latter but surely should have.) They contemplated going into the ruined city to find what killed the archaeologists, but ended up decided against it. Phew! In other circumstances I might have been okay with it... but I only had twenty minutes left!

They were nervous about telling the AI what had happened, and tried to document it as well as possible, taking detailed scans, bringing some data slates they found, and even lugging one People body back to prove that they really were killed by wild animals.

The dilemma was maybe less of a dilemma than I had hoped, but then again, we had little time left. Someone did suggest destroying the transport with microtorpedoes, but what I hadn't anticipated is that my usually utilitarian Cardassian captain, Rucot, is trying to be more thoughtful thanks to the events underway in the episode we has paused to play this one! So he played it safe. The characters decided on covertly beaming a beacon aboard the transport to track its movements, staying at the planet to see if it came back, and informing Starfleet.

ruins of a People city, deep within a mountain

I did ask what they might recommend to Starfleet once they had a larger ship at their disposal. (The Diversitas could surely abandon its magnetar mission to assist.) They suggested disabling its engines, and then sending an expedition back to its Home to tell them what had happened. Again, if I wasn't doing a one-session one-shot, I think playing out the Diversitas versus the transport would have been interesting. I felt kind of sad for the AI!

But overall I really like how it went, and I think I might run it again as an introductory adventure for another group this summer. 

The images in this post were all generated by ChatGPT following my prompts, and you are welcome to use them if you run this adventure.

Star Trek: Ekumene:

1. "Patagon in Parallax"
2. "A Terrible Autonomy"
3. "Stinks of Slumber and Disaster"
4. "Angels in Your Angles"
5. "A Thousand Miles from Day or Night" 

Specials:

1. "Hear All the Bombs Fade Away"
2. "The Word for Word Is Word" 

The Lady Astronaut by Mary Robinette Kowal, Book 4: The Martian Contingency

The fourth "Lady Astronaut" novel returns us to the series's original protagonist, Elma York. By now, Mary Robinette Kowal's alternative twentienth-century history has humanity with a small settlement on Mars; Elma and her husband are members of the Second Expedition recently arrived on Mars, with Elma stepping into the position of deputy base administrator. But is someone trying to sabotage the settlement? And what secret are the members of the First Expedition hiding?

The Martian Contingency by Mary Robinette Kowal

Published: 2025
Acquired: April 2025
Read: June 2025

Unfortunately, this is my least favorite of the four Lady Astronaut books thus far. I thought the first one was great and the third one tense and gripping after a slow start. The second had its moments but often plodded—and this one pretty much plods all the way through. None of the conflicts here ever really rise to the level of intensity needed to drive a novel: the mystery of what happened on the First Expedition, the need to rearrange the settlement so the women are in space, the idea that there might be a saboteur somewhere, Elma taking command of a spaceship... they're all fruitful ground for a novel sure, but as written here, none of them really feel like they have stakes, and they don't climax; most of them just seem to fizzle out or never get used. There's nothing as intense as the first book's meteor strike, or the second book's space survival sequences, or the third's desperate attempt to save the lunar colony. There's no drive, no energy here. 

It's more like spending a cozy year hanging out with Elma in space. Which I guess might work for some but never really clicked for me. I don't know if there will be a fifth novel,* but I hope that if so, like the third, it moves away from Elma's story—I feel like her story might be done.

* Kowal did crowdfund a collection of Lady Astronaut short stories last year, which totally passed me by. It comes out this year, I think; hopefully there's a way to get hold of even if you didn't participate in the original Kickstarter, because I would pick it up if so.

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.