The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen

I think I read this back in the day, but my memory is fuzzy. I used to be in pretty regular touch with Colin Smythe, Terry Pratchett's indefatigable agent, in my job as Senior Editor of the SFBC, and Colin would pitch the odder Discworld books to us - after, I'm sure, the more traditional trade outlets for such books had already turned him down. (I could kid Colin, but he was a good agent for Pratchett, relentlessly positive but also, I think, with an underlying understanding of the vast difference in Pratchett's market profile in the US and UK.[1])

I know I read the first Science of Discworld book, and liked it. I thought I bought it for the club, but I'm not seeing a SFBC edition on ISFDB, or any edition in the US earlier than the trade-paperback series starting in 2014, so perhaps my memory is faulty. I also read the second one, and thought it was not quite as strong, and I think got to this one around UK publication in 2005 (thanks to Colin) and had a similar reaction.

There was a fourth book; I'm pretty sure I've never seen that one.

All of the Science of Discworld books are hybrid things. There's a fairly slim Discworld fictional story by Pratchett - about the creation by the wizards of Unseen University of what they call "Roundworld" (our universe) and their subsequent investigations and adventures there. In alternating chapters, scientists and science writers [2] Ian Stewart (math) and Jack Cohen (biology) explain the real science behind the goofy stuff the wizards get up to. I expect the three plotted out the whole thing together and then edited each other for consistency; it's a bit of an odd combination but it generally works on both a comic-fiction and a pop-science level.

So the first book saw the Roundworld created. The second one had the wizards needing to save it from an infestation of Discworld elves, mostly related to Shakespeare for sufficiently-good reasons.

And this third book, The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch, came out in 2005 in the UK but not until a decade later in the US. It's the one about evolution, so I'm afraid Stewart and Cohen need to talk about the kind of anti-evolutionists they characterize as Christian fundamentalists from the Southern USA. (Not inappropriately, of course, and entirely honestly. But it might have been yet one more thing to give US publishers pause.)

Once again, outside forces - it's not revealed until late in the book, so I won't say who, but it's another Pratchett villain - are interfering with the Roundworld's timeline, causing humanity to go extinct before it can lead a space exodus to colonize the larger Roundworld universe as of course humanity is destined to do. (Science of Discworld is more old-fashioned than some readers might expect.) This time, it's all connected to Charles Darwin, who is being channeled to instead write The Theology of Species rather than The Origin and to stay a good Anglican curate and not be so strident about the whole evolution thing.

The pop-science chapters are an odd mix of evolutionary biology (not quite as much as you might expect) and QED-derived alternate-world physics theorizing circa the early 2000s (because the changes to Darwin's timeline creates many different options, in none of which he wrote Origin). There's some other, even further afield science topics as well, but those are the two central ones: the ways species change and diverge over time, and the ways timelines might conceivably do the same. (They are connected, at least conceptually, but they come across as mostly-separate discussions.)

The short Pratchett chapters feature wizards - mostly Mustrum Ridcully, Ponder Stibbons, and of course Rincewind - having somewhat amusing experiences either watching Roundworld or traveling to it to interfere with its timeline, and talking about the science implications. Then the longer Steward/Cohen chapters go into more depth, non-fictionally, about those implications. It's all amusing, mostly light, and easy to follow: it's a fine pop-science book, if possibly slightly outdated now, twenty years later.

There's enough Discworld that you could read nothing else for quite a long time if you wanted to, and I suppose this series means that those who do - I'm fairly sure there are some anorak-wearing chaps named Kevin who come close, at least - get some actual science knowledge included into their humanistic humorous fiction. I found this one less focused than I'd hoped, but all of the pieces are solid, and they form an essentially coherent whole, so I'm mostly quibbling.

[1] This is complicated and changed over time. But, very generally, in the '80s and '90s, Pratchett was not just the biggest fantasy author in the UK, he was one of the top five or so authors of any kind in the UK, and a measurable fraction of all books sold had his name on them. That profile declined only slightly post-Rowling; I think he still sold basically as well, but others sold at similar or nearly-similar levels, too. Because of that, he could write or commission the kind of oddball line-extension books that were just not commercially feasible for almost anyone else: a cookbook, a long series of annual desk diaries, multiple actual printed-on-heavy-stock maps, an encyclopedic compendium in several editions.

In the US, by contrast, Pratchett sold like a decent upper-mid-level fantasy writer (comparing it to personal income, in the US Pratchett was like the well-respected name partner of a major law firm and in the UK he was Bill Gates) and was beloved in the SFF community. It was absolutely a solid level of success that most writers would be thrilled with, but Pratchett (and, more centrally, I think, Colin) saw the UK sales and thought "why can't we replicate that in the much larger and more lucrative USA?"

There's also the question of how well he was published in the US. I don't want to cast aspersions, but he was with Roc/New American Library at first, who perhaps didn't have the market muscle (or the desire to use it for Pratchett) to replicate the UK success. In the early '90s, he moved to Harper, which went through a confusing period - Pratchett was very prolific at that point, and Roc had gotten behind - where the books were not published in the same order in the US and there were some interesting cover designs in attempts to widen the audience. So, at the point where he was at his absolute peak of market power in the UK - say the late '90s - he was rising in the US after Harper got good at publishing his books but was still very much a genre author rather than a general-audience one. That has stayed true in the US since then.

And, frankly, Pratchett is deeply British in a lot of ways. There's no reason to believe he would be a general-audience author anywhere that doesn't have a solid British cultural identity.

[2] And science-fiction novelists; I read and bought their Wheelers - not for nepotistic reasons related to the title, I think - for the SFBC.

Usagi Yojimbo, Book 11: Seasons by Stan Sakai

It can be easy to discount craft and consistency and clear storytelling, particularly at scale. Stan Sakai has been telling Usagi Yojimbo stories for forty years now; I've been reading them for two years, and I've only gotten through about the first decade.

(I may have been inspired to start reading this series by realizing that, after being vaguely aware of it the whole time, that the entire forty-some book series was available through my library's app. Actually, I'm not 100% sure that absolutely everything is available, but I'm now eleven books in and dozens stretch ahead of me, so it's darn close if nothing else.)

I have quibbled about some things about these Edo-period anthropomorphic-animal stories, mostly related to the fact that this is explicitly an all-ages series - and, in practice, that means that there's nothing in it that would be upsetting to a ten-year-old. It's a valid choice, and I think aligns closely with the way Sakai wants to tell stories anyway, but a vast amount of life is inherently upsetting to a ten-year-old, which means all of that is off-limits. Sex in more than the most vaguely implied sense, of course, but also a lot of the consequences of the violence that is central to a samurai epic. Usagi Yojimbo is a clean, somewhat sanitized view of a historical world, with a main character who is always true and honest and brave and on the side of right, where violence consistently solves problems and only occasionally leads to tragic ends, and where new humans appear somewhat mysteriously and relations between the sexes are either on the dynastic-connection level or a vague adolescent longing.

All that is still true of Usagi Yojimbo, Book 11: Seasons, which collects seven issues (including one originally in color; here presented in black-and-white just like the rest) and a few previously scattered stories, all from the mid-90s. It's eleven stories in total; this book was published in this format in 1999 and is still available digitally, though finding a dead-tree edition might be more difficult. (There's a newer reprint series, with fatter - but possibly smaller-format; that seems to be the way these things go - and fewer volumes, which may be easier to find.)

By this point, Sakai had a large recurring cast; two of the semi-loves of Usagi turn back up in this book, plus the inevitable roguish ronin Gen. (I didn't remember the exact detail of the two women, which were somewhat important, but the stories themselves inclue the reader enough.) Geography, though, is not a focus - Usagi does explicitly return to places in this volume that he'd been before, but those places don't get named or placed anywhere specific in Japan.

The stories are mostly miscellaneous; there's no central plot and it doesn't advance any larger overall motion of the story. (I don't think there is a central uberplot to Usagi to begin with; he has enemies and a tragic backstory but the Lone Wolf and Cub parallels don't go any further than that.) Each story is a well-told moment: a couple are vaguely sad, but mostly see Usagi setting something-or-other right or helping out someone in danger.

Sakai is a fine storyteller, with a clean line and exceptionally expressive faces. His pages are impeccably designed and his fight scenes vivid, easy to follow, and as visceral as they can be while staying ten-year-old-friendly. This is a fine series for what it is, and a lot of people would enjoy what it is.

The Once and Future Riot by Joe Sacco

I'm not really sure how Joe Sacco works. I suspect he has more than one project going at a time, particularly since his projects often take years to turn into books. But I don't know if he works on everything on and off, all the time, or if he goes through bursts on separate things, or some other organizational principle I'm not even thinking of.

For example, his new book last year was The Once and Future Riot. It's about a specific set of events in India's Uttar Pradesh state during August and September of 2013 - or, more precisely, the record of Sacco's investigations into those events a few months later. About midway between those investigations and this book's publication, Sacco had an entirely separate book, Paying the Land, about Indigenous people in Canada. I have no idea if Riot stalled on Sacco, so he researched, wrote and drew Land in the middle, or if Land was chugging along in the background during his trip to India.

It doesn't really matter, but I do wonder. Book-length comics take a while to make, which somewhat fights against the impulse for journalism to be quick and timely. And Riot is a book about a riot that comes a decade later. I haven't kept close track of Indian politics and Hindu/Muslim tensions, but I have to assume there have been other riots and (I hope, vastly more, and more productive) less violent movements since then: Modi is still in power, but there was an apparently-successful major youth protest over the past few weeks as I write this.

Which is to say: I don't think things have gotten better in Uttar Pradesh since 2013. They may well have gotten worse. Sacco's book isn't about long-term trends, though he does try to provide background: it's about this event, and primarily about his and his journalistic colleagues' efforts to untangle the statements from various officials and victims and local leaders to find the truth. (Spoiler: the local leaders, in Sacco's estimate, were mostly bullshitting at best, and Sacco all but accuses several of them of being leaders of violence in their villages.)

The spine of the book is Sacco's time in Uttar Pradesh: he's a character on most of his pages (as in his other books), but a viewpoint and an interrogator rather than a main character. Sacco and his colleagues - a translator/fellow journalist, mostly - are trying to dig into what happened on those days in September. Much of the book, like Sacco's other work, is made up of interviews, of refugees and community leaders and other witnesses, about what happened.

It's a complex situation: Muslims are a minority in Uttar Pradesh, but a fairly large one, and had traditionally been the swing voters that defined winning administrations. Muslims are also not uniform: there are two very different groups, one of very poor farm-workers, living alongside the Hindu Jats in villages, and another group of better-off homeowners and butchers and other more skilled trades, who tended to live in their own towns. The latter were the focus of the political power, obviously, and the former were the ones hit hardest by the riot.

But who started the riot? That's not clear, and there possibly was no one single "start" anyway. Tensions had been rising - fomented primarily by a group of Hindu nationalist politicians, in Sacco's telling, and using a crude but effective "they're seducing our young women to fuel plans to replace us" lie campaign.

Also, and under everything: India (or maybe Uttar Pradesh specifically) seems to be a deeply corrupt society on many levels. The police will respond to immediate large-scale problems - such as the riot of the title - but getting them to investigate day-to-day crimes requires either the payment of bribes or use of political influence from above the local police-station level. Sacco implies that the higher-level police leaders may not be personally corrupt in the way the local station leaders and cops are, but some of them are political creatures, tied to specific parties and with an interest in certain narratives and thus in investigating crimes to make them fit those narratives.

And, of course, if the local people - both Muslims and the Jat subsect of Hindus who are dominant in this region - don't think the government and police and other officials are honest and will investigate to find actual facts, they will be looking for other outlets for their anger and fear and hatred.

When two distinct groups live side-by-side, they don't necessarily conflict. But when political leaders see gain in that conflict, or have an aim to eliminate the other group, they absolutely will.

Riot is a book about an overdetermined outburst of violence. Sacco points out, several times, that this was not a huge violent upheaval. It ended in a day or so. Only a few score people died; only a few hundred were turned into refugees. On a global scale, that's small. (India may have seen worse since then; they certainly saw vastly worse, along the same ethnic/religious lines, during partition, and occasionally later.)

But it's a riot that came about because of longer-term trends, that was fed by leaders who do seem to be looking forward to larger bloodshed or expulsions (Jat mobs are said to have chanted "Pakistan or the grave" at Muslims during the riot), and that have not been solved or cured or made right. Those are riots that can recur, that can get bigger, that can expand. And, again, Sacco talked to a few people in the course of this book that seem to be hoping and working for that end. Hence the "future" of the title. It hasn't happened on that scale yet. It might still be avoided.

This is not a story about only India, of course. It's applicable to groups that are not Jat or Muslim. Supremacists who make up lies about a minority to foment anger and try to get them thrown out of the country are common in many places. The future riot could be much closer to home - wherever your home is.

Abandoned Books: A History of Love & Hate in 21 Statues by Peter Hughes

It's been a few years, but I had to punt on a book again. I don't have to love a book to finish it, but I think if I find myself talking to the author, in my head: "Jesus Christ, Hughes, read the fucking room," then the book has lost an essential connection to me as a reader and I shouldn't try to make larger statements about it.

A History of Love & Hate in 21 Statues has a neat idea, and a strong pedigree. Peter Hughes is, his biography in this book tells us, both a philosopher and a psychologist with a PhD in the former and a membership in the British Psychological Society. He seems to be less of an academic and more of a talking head (which reinforces some feelings I have about this book) - I did a quick search now and found his site.

The book has, as you might guess, twenty-one chapters, each telling the story of one statue, which was created by someone at one point and destroyed by someone else at a later date. It is, I think, roughly organized by the date of the creation of the statues, though does not tightly fit that timeline.

I read about half of it. I was getting an impression in my head over the first half of the book, and I wanted to make it to the chapter on The Confederate Monument of Portsmouth, Virginia - eleventh, right at the mid-point - to see if my concerns continued to be borne out.

In the middle of the chapter on the Confederate Monument - one of the hundreds put up, mostly in the American South, around the turn of the 20th century to reinforce white supremacy and uphold the ahistorical "lost cause" myth - Hughes mentions another statue, which is like his chapter's subject but even more so. Called "The Good Darky," it was erected in 1927 in Natchitoches, seems to be just as horrible as you might be imagining, and was damaged and then removed in 1968.

Hughes chooses not to focus on that statue because, I think, it doesn't fit the overall point he's trying to make. And that overall point is what I was objecting to in the first half of this book. I don't want to mischaracterize his argument, but I will note this book was published in 2021, seems to have been written in 2020, and has many references to BLM protests as (roughly his repeated language) "protests after the death of George Floyd that led to calls to tear down statues."

Now, Hughes is writing a book about statues, so I don't mind him for focusing on his topic. But I found his framing more and more disingenuous as I went along, and I finally couldn't keep going. As far as I read, Hughes seemed to be saying that the biggest threat to civil society in the modern world are "fanatics," whom he tends to characterize in terms leaning to the left (authoritarians, references to communism, and so forth).

There's a version of this argument in many of the chapters; this one is from early in the book, about a head of Athena:

To be merciful and forgiving requires us to see the world from the point of view of another person. This leads to understanding and when we understand other people, we humanize them, we look for common ground and a way to build bridges. When, on the other hand, we need to be absolutely certain we are right, that our beliefs are the only true ones, then it becomes impossible to fins a common humanity with people who do not share our beliefs. As our world-view narrows and our frame of reference shrinks, we become desperate to justify our increasingly fragile identity. The result is violence and bloodshed.

That argument superficially seems even-handed and unobjectionable. But Hughes drops into these arguments at specific times, and with reference to particular actions - and not to others. Also note the word "identity," which I detect Hughes using repeatedly in a left-coded way. He isn't quite all the way to "abolish DEI," but he seems to be somewhere on that spectrum.

In particular, the Confederate Monument chapter does mention that it was put up in an era of repression and even gets a bit into how common lynching was in the era. But he uses the word "Black" never, "Negro" once, and never gets anywhere near "white supremacy." The generous view is that Hughes wants to avoid writing about specific ideologies, and keep his focus on being open and loving and merciful and forgiving.

The less generous view is that one side gets the benefit of that doubt over and over and over again, while the other other side is the reference for all of the aspersions and fear-mongering. In particular, Hughes, I am morally certain, is quite familiar with Popper's Paradox of Tolerance - he has a Philosophy PhD, let us remember - but he neglects to mention it at any point, even when it would be massively relevant.

Again, I only read half the book. Hughes may have turned the whole thing around in the back end and explicitly called out rising fascism worldwide. But I really doubt it. So I stopped reading.

All of This and Nothing: Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap

"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

I was a boy in the 1970s; of course I liked AC/DC.

But I was more of a punk/new wave kid as a teen - more or less, and a few years late, since I lived way the hell out in dull suburbia - so it's specifically the Bon Scott era of AC/DC I connected to. A short window of time in the late '70s, sure, but loud and raucous and quintessentially Australian in a way that was very appealing to an American not sure of any of that stuff.

I only bothered to buy one AC/DC record in the CD era. (The enthusiasms of our youth might not always embarrass us, but it's the way to bet.) This is the one. I still like some of the other songs - Big Balls is a hoot, even in my fifties - but the title song is the one AC/DC song I'd save from the wreckage of civilization if given the choice.

It's always Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.

No fancy interpretations here: this is a song from the point of view of a "fixer" whose main business seems to be killing people. There's also, in best AC/DC fashion, a lot of double entendres that have confused several generations of listeners into thinking the service provided must be fucking, not killing.  [1] If you want to take it all that way, I don't think the band would care. Just bang your head along to the beat, and it'll all be fine.

It is obvious; it is cartoony; it is a lot of fun, especially if you first heard it at an impressionable age. I did.

[1] To be pedantic about it: verse two is clearly fucking; verse three is clearly killing; verse one is vaguer but pretty solidly killing. And the outro is all murder methods. I think the evidence is clear.

Books Read: August 2026

It's been another month, so time for one of these vaguely-index-like posts. As always, I'll add links later, once the posts go live. This is what I read this past month:

Pierre-Henry Gomont, Brain Drain, Part 2 (digital, 8/1)

Joshua Barkman, Ew, It's Beautiful (digital, 8/2)

Kenneth Fearing, The Big Clock (in Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s, 8/2)

Alejandro Jodorowski & Mœbius, The Incal, Vol. 5: The Fifth Essence - The Dreaming Galaxy (digital, 8/8)

P.G. Wodehouse, Nothing Serious (8/8)

Gus Gordon, Into the Bewilderness (digital, 8/9)

Zidrou & Jordi Lefebre, Glorious Summers, Vol. 3: Little Miss Esterel (digital, 8/14)

Bob DeGroot & Turk, Leonardo the Genius (digital, 8/15)

Walter Mosley, Blonde Faith (8/15)

Benoit Feroumont, The Kingdom, Vol. 1: Anne (digital, 8/16)

Lewis Trondheim & Manu Larcenet, Cosmonauts of the Future, Vol. 3: Resurrection (digital, 8/22)

Joshua Kendall, Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography (8/22)

Juan Berrio, Seven Places Without You (digital, 8/23)

Kay Sohini, This Beautiful, Ridiculous City (8/29)

Donald E. Westlake, The Hot Rock (8/29)

Hope Larson, All My Friends (8/30)

Xavier Dorison & Ralph Meyer, The Undertaker, Vol. 3: The Ogre of Camp Sutter (digital, 8/31)

John Hodgman, Medallion Status (8/31)

I plan to keep reading books in the coming months, too.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 5, 2026

I ordered a big batch of used books recently, from multiple sellers. (I'm using Alibris these days, as the one not owned yet by a giant hegemonic behemoth.) About half of them have come in as I type this, so that seems like enough to throw into a post. These are mostly from authors I have "reading projects" about - which means I'm reading a series, or their whole body of work, either in order or over time as I get to it.

Projects can be fun things!

Anyway, here's what's reached me so far, and which I will read at some point (if I don't get hit by a bus).

I read Jimmy the Kid, somewhat puckishly, as part of my Starktober project - reading the whole works of Richard Stark - a decade ago. You see, Jimmy is a book by Donald E. Westlake, in the Dormunder funny-caper-novel series, that is inspired by a book that does not actually exist, Child Heist by Richard Stark. (Donald Westlake also wrote under the name Richard Stark, to make the connection clearer.) I got that one from the library, I think, since I didn't have a copy of the book in the house and I used an old hardcover image for the Jimmy post. (I try to use the cover of the actual edition I read, for pernickety personal reasons.) I'm now planning to read all of the Dortmunder books in order, so I need to have this third book available.

I've been reading P.G. Wodehouse in the "Collector's Wodehouse" series from Overlook Press for ages - I started before my 2011 flood, but, since then, I'm only counting the ones I've read since then and have on a specific shelf. (It gives me an excuse to buy and read books again, especially since I don't have any records or a good memory of what I had pre-2011.) I got two of them in this batch of books.

First up is Ring for Jeeves, a 1953 novel - based on a play, I think - that is the only Jeeves story not narrated by or featuring Bertie Wooster at all. I probably read this when I read all of the Jeeves books in the '90s, but I don't remember ever hitting a Jeeves book not in Bertie's voice, so I dunno.

The other Wodehouse book is Blandings Castle, which I do remember reading - I got to the Blandings books right after Jeeves, I think largely on the recommendation of my former boss Ellen Asher. (She thought Jeeves was OK, but Blandings was sublime. These days, I don't disagree but I really love the Bertie Wooster voice, and also might make a dark-horse recommendation for Uncle Fred.) This isn't (I think) the first time Blandings appeared, but it's pretty early - it's a 1935 collection of stories that's about one-third Blandings and two-thirds "Elsewhere." And from right in the middle of Wodehouse's best period, too, which is a bonus.

I'm also reading through Ross Macdonald's mystery novels about detective Lew Archer - I hit the first one, The Moving Target, this summer, and will probably continue roughly quarterly until I get through them all. But I was missing a few, so I just got:

The 1952 novel The Ivory Grin. I read this one, way back when I was getting into mysteries as a youngster, and I couldn't tell you anything at all about the specifics of this one. I have a vague soup of Lew Archer in my head, and it will be interesting to see what came from which book and what was my own confusion in my teen years. (The only one I have any specific memory of is The Underground Man, which I still think of as the peak of the series.)

The other Macdonald was the 1961 novel The Wycherly Woman, for which all of the random blather above is also true. Blogger wants each image to have enough text to wrap around it to keep it away from the next paragraph, so I'm just typing a bit here to reduce the amount of unsightly white space below. (Probably not enough blathering, though. Never is.)

And last is a Library of America book: Writings by S.J. Perelman. I've spent years grumping about the LoA's tendency to do "good parts" versions of writers I wish they'd do "complete editions" of - Lovecraft is worth keeping in multiple volumes; that old fraud Henry James is not - but I'm clearly an outlier. And I guess I've mellowed a bit over time. I still wish they'd do official omnibuses, because I like to read "books" that I can make posts about here and put down in my reading notebook and count as metrics in a pointless, silly exercise. But a nearly 600-page collection of Perelman - wait, only 600? my old Franklin book is twice that size! - is still a good thing, despite my grumbling. Anyway, Perelman is one of the great funny New Yorker writers, and I think the most distinctive and odd of that crew. I haven't read a big chunk of Perelman for a long time, and I lost my shelf of his individual books in the 2011 flood, so this is a nice thing to have.

Next week, I expect there will be a very similar post, with different titles by many of the same writers, as the other books from this order trickle in. Come back to see if I manage to say anything different - or interesting!

Quote of the Week: Vanishing Passengers

Most men, having started out in a car with a lady friend and discovered at journey's end that she was no longer there, would have felt a certain surprise at this shortage and probably asked a lot of tedious questions. To Lord Emsworth, woken with a respectful prod in the ribs by Albert Voules at the door of Blandings Castle and finding himself alone, it never occurred to wonder about what had become of Maudie en route. He seldom worried about things like that. If women vanished out of cars, they vanished. There was nothing you could do about it, and no doubt all would be explained in God's good time.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Pigs Have Wings, p.167

The Werewolf at Dusk and Other Stories by David Small

My first thoughts are trivial, distracting: how long do werewolves live, anyway?

I mean what we might call the Metric Standard Werewolf, beloved from folklore, and not any modern author's bespoke version, for greatest applicability.

Because The Werewolf at Dusk and Other Stories is a collection of three stories largely about being old, and I have a nagging sense that werewolves don't get old.

Of course, in traditional werewolf stories, they don't get old because they are abominations before God who must be destroyed as soon as they are discovered - but I thought they would live a long time if they could. Or am I conflating them with other Universal Monsters? Vampires are clearly immortal, and mummies generally are, too. Reanimated corpses are already dead - I guess this covers both zombies and Frankensteinian creations - and so presumably don't continue to age in their second life.

This time-wasting activity has not brought me a comprehensive answer, sadly. Mister Google is happy to tell me the details of specific fictional universes - his new shiny AI buddy will synopsize a bunch of them for me - and give vague pointers for continuing research. But the answer seems to be...yes, maybe, no, it depends?

Werewolves can be very old if the story needs that: in some traditions, it's even common. Old and decrepit, not as often - but it's a big folkloric world, and it's rare we can say "that's just not allowed."

I did say my initial thoughts were distracting.

Werewolf at Dusk has three illustrated stories by David Small, author of the graphic memoir Stitches most relevantly, and also a long-time illustrator, mostly of books for younger readers. (He has a Caldecott and several other awards; he's kind of a big deal in that world.) The three stories were created for this book, and they're similar to a comics format but not quite the same: Small's text is set in type on the pages, more like narrative than captions, and his art sits borderlessly on the pages, often just one image per page. But there are comics-style panel transitions between pages, and on pages with multiple images - large parts of this book do read like comics. But it also looks a lot like an illustrated story, of the kind most commonly seen for young readers.

The three stories are: "The Werewolf at Dusk," from a flash fiction written and performed by Lincoln Michel; "A Walk in the Old City," somewhat modified from a dream Small had; and "The Tiger in Vogue," from a 1948 story in French by Jean Ferry and presumably translated by Small here.

The first story is about, as you might have guessed, an old man who is a werewolf - a tired, weak one, with mangy fur and aching joints, after a long life of spending the full moons attacking and killing people. Now, sadly, he can barely tackle "an injured squirrel."

The second story has been transmuted a bit, but still retains that dreamlike feeling: an old man, a psychiatrist who suspects he's starting to go senile, is prone to wandering strange districts of his home city, and has gotten lost. He meets another old man, who at first seems helpless, and encounters some very symbolic elements that make him analyze the dream while still inside it - but he has misunderstood some essential aspects of the situation.

The third story features another old man, but the situation - from a surrealist story set in early 1920s Berlin - is more important than the man himself. He attends a music hall, hoping to avoid one particular act he has come to hate and fear - but that act inevitably plays, every time. A tiger, somehow mesmerized and standing upright in a human-style tailored suit, is led by a redheaded woman through a burlesque of the audience experience in that very theater, sitting in a prominent box, using opera glasses, and so on and so forth. Meanwhile, a "little man with tired skin and pale eyes" in the next box - who Small unsubtly draws as Hitler, in case any reader his missed the metaphor - is the real controller of the tiger, sweating and mentally straining to keep him in control. Every night, the act finishes as planned, and the tiger is gotten offstage before he reverts to his animalistic nature and is shoved back into a cage by stagehands. He never actually eats the baby he inevitably is given to hold and coo over.

Again, the Ferry story was published in 1948, with the benefit of hindsight. Small's version has another near-century of hindsight. I don't think the metaphor entirely makes sense, but that's surrealism for you: it is ominous and creepy and feels significant.

The three stories have somewhat different concerns, but all circle old age in one way or another; they work pretty well as a themed collection. I suspect this book might have been bought by a lot of youth librarians going on Small's reputation - and the reps at the publisher, Liveright, might not have tried too hard to dissuade them - but that actual young readers might not have strongly loved this book about age and infirmity and regrets and the impending horrors of WWII.

Then again, I could be wrong. Perhaps the children yearn for stories of old werewolves and ominous tigers. Stranger things have happened.

The Hidden Dominion of Geordie James by Mike Dawson

Like many cartoonists who like to eat and live indoors, Mike Dawson has made books for younger readers. It's a big audience that buys a lot of books - both personally and by proxy through schools and libraries - and that is really happy to have a creator come and do an event at their school, especially when the creator can stand on stage and make drawings on a pad of paper.

For those of us who are adults, we can sometimes miss those books, or notice them but think "maybe that one's not for me." So I've read a bunch of Dawson's comics, but not his middle-grade Fifth Quarter series, for example - and those two books look to be his major output (and probably major income source) of the first half of this decade.

But Dawson had a new middle-grade GN this year, and maybe it looked more appealing to me as a no-longer-tween, or maybe I thought it was time I actually paid attention to Dawson's middle-grade work, or maybe something else.

The book is The Hidden Dominion of Geordie James; it came out in January of 2026.

Geordie James is the viewpoint character, a sixth-grader who spends most of his time in a MMORPG called Dominion, a fictionalized Minecraft or Roblox. He's not good at talking to other kids his age and mostly wants to be left alone to do Dominion and hang out with his dog Crackerjack. He has an older sister - slightly annoying as older siblings always are, but not a major character - and a Scottish architect father who clearly means well but is not very plugged in to what his son is going through. There's no sign of a mother in the current day; she does show up in flashbacks. (Yes, that will be important. No, I won't spoil it.)

Geordie is failing science. His teacher Mr. Fritts gathers him and four other students failing the class - abrasive jock A.C., probably enby Taylor, possibly ADHD Alex, and potential-Geordie-friend Samesh - and tells them they have one chance to turn their grades around. They have to do a group project together for the science fair - the whole class will participate, but these five have to work together - on the topic "our place in the world."

All five of the kids hate this idea for obvious reasons - who likes group projects? - but it's their only chance, so they start meeting...and mostly devolve into playing Dominion together. This at least makes them friendlier to each other, but does not get much work done.

Meanwhile, on the news is a story about a piglet escaping (from what the book carefully does not call a slaughterhouse) and running through nearby towns. Geordie becomes obsessed with the piglet: researches animal husbandry, decides his whole family should go vegetarian, makes his new passion the focus of his work on the group project, and even blows up at A.C. over it.

Things go on from there: Geordie's father tries to ground him from Dominion and schedules "playdates" with Samesh, neither of which goes quite according to plan. The project moves forward in fits and starts. Geordie starts spending a lot of his afternoons and evenings out in a wooded area nearby - something of a waste ground, used as a dump for Christmas trees and other random detritus - where he makes a fort out of what he finds there. Oddly, the Wifi signal is very strong there, and he advances quickly in Dominion there and even shows Samesh the fort he built.

But then there's a plan to redevelop that wooded area - into a park for kids, among other things, so most people think it sounds great - and Geordie's fort is destroyed. He lashes out, smashes a lot of the group project's work to date, and runs off into an ominous and dramatically-timed storm.

This is a book for middle-graders, so nothing Geordie does is irrecoverable or final. We learn what happened to his mother, and the group does manage to finish its project and pass the class. No one ever finds the piglet, but Geordie is sure it's still out there, somewhere.

Dawson gets in little character moments for the other kids and for Geordie's dad - none of them take over the story, but we get glimpses of what their stories might be, if this were a different book. There's a part of me that wants to characterize those as loose threads that Dawson could have tied off more cleverly at the end, but that's too dismissive: this is a book about one character, but he's not the only person in his world. Hidden Dominion is Geordie's story, but it knows others have their own stories.

It's a colorful, cartoony book with a lot of visual appeal: Dawson contrasts the real world with the more saturated world of Dominion and light blue-toned flashbacks to keep the reader visually oriented in space and time. And Geordie is an intriguingly flawed character: he's angry for reasons we'd don't know at first, not good at expressing his emotions, and just plain twelve years old, which is never easy. It is all pitched in a tone and style appropriate for other sixth-graders, which an older reader needs to align to, but it tells a strong story well and Geordie is an interestingly flawed kid hero with elements that many of us may find familiar from our own youths.

Witch King by Martha Wells

It's weird to say this, but I think this is the first time I've read a Martha Wells fantasy novel when I wasn't being paid by the Doubleday Book & Music Clubs (or successor organizations) to do so. I was the first reader there for her debut novel The Element of Fire, and I think I acquired all of her '90s novels for the club (Element, City of Bones, Wheel of the Infinite and The Death of the Necromancer - all excellent, by the way, and well-worth digging back into; I'd recommend Necromancer if you only have time for one). But my plans to do an omnibus of the "Fall of Ile-Rien" trilogy floundered, and then I got laid off...and I haven't been reading at the same pace for the past twenty years.

(Was there also some burnout after several subsequent years of applying to SFnal editorial jobs and not getting anywhere? Could be.)

More happily, Wells has been in the middle of a fabulously successful and award-winning SF series for the past decade - the Murderbot books; you may have heard of them - which I have been reading.

So Witch King was her first fantasy novel in six years when it came out in 2023, and I'm only slightly late in getting to it. (It's the first of what is either a trilogy or duology - the second book, Queen Demon, came out last fall, but I'm not sure if that's the end.) 

It's a complex novel set in a big, complicated world: there's a useful map in the front matter that covers what I think is the entire "Rising World," but does not include a continent further to the south from which the world-conquerors in the backstory emerged. There are at least four types of magic, with some similarities but big differences. It's a world mostly of humans - mortals, Wells's characters tend to call them - but several of those magic-using groups are immortal or very long-lived or can change bodies or some other permutation.

So the opening sets the tone: our third-person viewpoint character, Kaiisteron, Prince of the Fourth House of the underearth, wakes up. He's dead, his former body in a tomb on a small island, just emerging from being submerged in water. Some enemy is going to try to turn him into a familiar, to control his power and possibly destroy his memory. That will not go well for the enemy.

I won't explain all the details of the magic systems - such as the Immortal Blessed, with their sometimes technology-powered devices and their not-always clear hierarchy of Immortal Marshalls and Lesser Blessed; the Hierarchs, those invaders from the south whose expositors derive power from death and burn cities to get power to burn more cities - but I do need to get into demons and witches. (Those are in the titles, after all.)

Demons come from a parallel world - most people think it's under the ground; that doesn't seem to be exactly true - and are a different, serpentine, sapient race. There was some kind of war, centuries ago, between the demons and the humans of the nomadic Saredi people. A peace was brokered in which one Saredi woman, called Grandmother these days, went to the demon world, presumably to marry some demon leader: she has an extensive multi-generational set of offspring now. Since then, demons are a valued part of Saredi society, their souls moving into the bodies of Saredi who died young and unexpectedly (presumably mostly from sickness, not physical trauma). Demons can move their souls from body to body at least that much, bouncing back and forth from the underearth to the mortal world.

Witches are the offspring of demons and mortals - they have somewhat different magical powers than demons do, but the two groups are generally allied to each other. They do not have any direct connection to the underearth mentioned in this novel. Witches seem to have spread across several regions of this world, and are not limited to Saredi lands. Demons, though, do seem to be entirely limited to the Saredi, so it's a bit of a open question where all the witches came from and how they spread so much relatively quickly.

Kai is a demon. He was one of the leaders of the successful resistance to the Hierarchs, after they had conquered most of this northern continent, sixty or eighty years ago. Those leaders formed first an alliance of forces to fight back, then a more durable political coalition (the Rising World of the series title) that formed a continent-wide political structure called an Empire but relying on periodic approval from the individual nations. Kai is the demon who discovered that demons can jump from one mortal body to another, killing the host and taking over. And he developed what seems to be an idiosyncratic, individual magic system based on the Hierarchs' but fueled by his own pain rather than that of others.

Witch King has two plotlines: close to two-thirds of the book is set "now," starting with Kai's awakening in that tomb, defeating the expositor who tried to enslave him, and freeing his long-time friend and ally Ziede Daiyahah, who was also captured in that tomb. The other plotline is set in "The Past," with a few short chapters of Kai's life with the Saredi and then the story of the beginning of that resistance, in a Hierarch regional capital. In large part, the past plotline explains the relationships among the main characters - Kai; Ziede; Ziede's wife Tahren Stargard; Bashasa, who I think became the first Emperor; and a few others.

The past plotline is simpler and starker, once it gets to that Hierarch city: Bashasa leads a group of plotters in what he expects will be a doomed attempt to kill a few Hierarchs and, at best, inspire others to similarly fight back and spark a successful rebellion. The early stages go more successfully than expected, largely because of Kai, and the plotters unexpectedly survive and flee to build that larger rebellion themselves.

(We know the rebellion succeeded from the beginning of the book, or else none of these people would be alive in the "now" timeline.)

In the present day, first Kai and Ziede need to survive and get out of the tomb, then figure out what has happened. A political conference to "renew" the Empire is underway, and they are pretty sure they were shoved out of the way to interfere with that - but in which direction, and exactly what the plotters intend to do next, is unclear. Also, they quickly learn that Tahren is also missing, and finding her becomes their main aim.

This is the first of a series, so the wider issue is not resolved at the end. But the core this-book problem in both timelines - surviving the initial revolt and getting away in the past, finding Tahren in the present - are resolved, to give a satisfying ending. And the joys, as usual with Wells, is the deep characterization and insight into behavior, coupled with magnificent action sequences and a compelling narrative voice - this book is less snarky than the Murderbot books, but Wells is always crisp, focused, and precise in her writing.

Emanon, Vol. 1 by Shinji Kajio & Kenji Tsuruta

One of the core tensions in science fiction is between the pull of a neat idea and the need to actually do something with that idea. It was most stark in the early days, when many SF writers were fumbling fans who could iterate on each other's thoughts but not necessarily turn them into actual compelling stories. But you do still see fans and writers talk about "sensawunda" or arguing that just having a cool new take on some standard trope is good enough.

I think the Emanon series, originally prose stories by Japanese writer Shinji Kajio, might suffer a bit from that syndrome. I've just read the manga adaptation of the first of those stories, "Memories of Emanon," by illustrator Kenji Tsuruta; there are at least three more volumes, so I gather more implications or complications are worked out later.

I'm going to give some spoilers - first general ones that the back-cover copy mentions, and that you'd be hard-pressed to avoid in any case, but later I'm most interested in one particular implication. I thought of it before it came up in the book; I think most SF readers will get there fairly quickly. But I'll warn the more spoiler-averse of you before I mention it.

Emanon, Vol.1: Memories of Emanon is a 2008 manga volume based on the original 1983 story of the same name by Kajio - I've seen references to that story both as a "novel" and as a "short story," so I suspect it's a shortish novella that might have been published standalone at least once - which was translated by Dana Lewis for 2019 English-language publication.

The main character is a young man (explicitly a SF fan, reading a bunch of classic mostly-American SF novels on this trip), traveling on a long-distance ferry in Japan on February 24, 1967. He meets a young woman, somewhat rescuing her from an overbearing drunk, and they start talking - they end up spending most of the day-long journey together. He doesn't get a name in the story; she tells him to call her "Emanon," which means "No Name."

And then she tells him her big secret: she's the once-in-a-generation repository of a vaguely Jungian collective memory. She remembers, absolutely perfectly, the lives of all of her ancestors - it seems to be only direct female-line ancestors, but explicitly back to single-celled creatures that don't have memory to begin with.

The rest of the book is vague philosophizing about that, combined with our unnamed dude yearning for this hot "hippie chick" who is several billions of years older than him. The plot, such as it is, is these two characters talking on this boat over the course of eighteen hours or so.

More spoilers might come in from here, since I'll be talking about how this "immortality" works. Feel free to drop out if you're allergic.

Emanon basically has the memories of being young millions of times, and none of being old [1]: the accumulated memories "transfer" to each woman's firstborn (always female) child. Anyone who has looked at historical records will find such an unbroken strand incredibly unlikely, to put it mildly. (Perhaps there used to be more people like Emanon, but the female lines were all severed? That might come up in later stories.)

Also, what memories do the "former" Emanons have? Do they remember that they used to be able to remember? Surely they don't become amnesiacs at the moment they give birth. Do they never talk about this overwhelming, unique thing with their own daughters and mothers? 

(I suspect Kajio is more interested in what his main character thinks of the hot girl with memories of eternity, not what it's like to be that girl.)

All in all, Emanon comes across as that very hoary SF thing, the "check out this cool idea" story. It's a moody, ruminative piece, focused tightly on this one male gaze at the title character.

I don't blame her for ghosting him when the boat approaches port.

Personally, I find the idea oddly flawed in multiple ways: I don't believe in this one singular unbroken line, I expect there would be a much stronger mother-daughter connection Kajio completely ignores, and the "I remember being a paramecium" stuff is utter bunk. But it does have an interesting idea, and engages it with seriously, which makes it solidly SFnal and worth thinking through. I would not agree with reviewers that call it unique or particularly deep - it's that standard SF thing, a sophomore bull-session put onto the page - but it has an idea and explores that idea with at least some pretense of rigor.

[1] If I were being cruel, I'd point out this is clearly what attracted Tsuruta to the material: a woman he can draw, in any era or place, as exactly his thin freckle-faced model, because she is always young and slim and hot, or else she's not Emanon anymore. He can even draw her half-naked in some ancillary material, even if that doesn't fit into the story at all. Good thing I'm not cruel.

All of This and Nothing: What's a Devil to Do?

"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

I blogged about this band once before - but I should note that I'd gotten a mislabeled copy of this song and thought of it under the wrong title for a few months. And all of this is Obscure enough that my confusion made it even worse.

The band is Harley Poe, which I think was a specific project/style for a while in the Aughts, not a long-running band. And my favorite song of theirs - among a lot of competition - is What's a Devil to Do?

I don't think Harley Poe was a joke band, but they were a focused one: they did songs on horror-movie topics (vampires, zombies, cannibals) in a low-fi acoustic style that sounded to me very much like early-period Violent Femmes. (But I didn't see anything from Harley Poe to explain the sound; they might have had a different touchpoint or explanation.)

This song is from the point of view of an evil man - given the grand guignol of so many of their other songs, I tend to assume he's the Antichrist, but the song itself never quite says that outright.

I was created down below
And if it's evil that you're planting
Then it's evil that will grow

Like most of the Harley Poe songs I've heard, it's over the top - but lovingly so, in a way that completely commits to the bit, in the same way that a blues song can be about the singer taming a tornado. And that low-fi sound rocks hard, especially here.

Now Jesus died for them, it's true
But what's a devil to do?

Reviewing the Mail: Week of August 29, 2026

I'm on vacation this last week of American summer, so I gathered books from all directions - mostly in time for the actual vacation. This post will list everything I got from the library, which I will definitely read this week. Next week will be a post about all of the used books that are still trickling in - mostly for longer-term reading projects, so probably not for right now anyway.

The third (and, so far, last) book in the graphic-novel series by Hope Larson about young musicians is All My Friends. (The first two books in the series are All Summer Long and All Together Now.) It came out in 2021, and I knew it was coming - I'd mentioned it when I wrote about Together - but it took me five years to remember to get it into my hands. This one seems to be more serious-business than the first two; Bina's interest in making music has led to actual professional opportunities, which is a lot for a thirteen-year-old.

John Hodgman would be the first person to tell you he's had a weird career - in fact, his later career seems to be largely commentary about how weird his initial public-facing career was, which fits solidly in the capacious "memoir" category but is pretty quirky. Medallion Status claims to be the book about what it is like to be John Hodgman, in the years after he was no longer on TV as often as he was initially. (It may be about something slightly different; I grumped a bit about Vacationland, his previous book, because the publishers tried to push it as "it's just really funny; don't worry about the topic" when it actually had a solid hook they could have used.)

On vacation towards the beginning of the summer, I read Martha Wells's recent fantasy novel Witch King.  (No link yet; my post goes live on Wednesday and let's see if I remember to go back and add it.) That book had a sequel last year, Queen Demon, which I think ends the series. I don't think I've gotten to two books in a series that quickly in several years, but it's the plan this time.

I probably saw a review of Kay Sohini's graphic-novel memoir This Beautiful, Ridiculous City somewhere, but I have no idea where that would have been. It came out last year, and is about how she moved to New York (from India - so kind of a big deal), what drove her to that move and what she found there. I'm being vague because my knowledge of the book is vague; I'm going to have to read it to find out what it's really about, which is the best way to read, I think.

And last is Black Arms to Hold You Up, a newish book (also last year) from firebrand graphic-novelist Ben Passmore (author of, most recently I think, Sports Is Hell). I tend to think Passmore goes too far, but, then again, I am exactly the kind of guy (white, middle-aged, suburban, comfortable) who would think someone like Passmore goes too far. So I keep reading his books. This one is subtitled "A History of Black Resistance," as in violent resistance to state oppression, but I think there are two caveats to that: first, that it's all in an American context. And, second, that there's some level of fictionalized frame story, involving a version of Passmore, that tells the historical sections. 

Quote of the Week: A Night in Hollywood

In the Hollywood Roosevelt bar she complained of the air and said she felt wretched and old. Nonsense, I told her, but we moved to the Zebra Room. She had shifted to Irish whisky, which she drank straight. In the Zebra Room she accused a man at the next table of looking at her contemptuously. I suggested more air. She drove down Wilshire as if she was trying to break through into another dimension. I had to park the Buick for her at the Ambassador. I'd left my car at Swift's.

 - Ross Macdonald, The Moving Target, p.53