This is the Wordsworth Classics edition of Antigone / Ἀντιγόνη, Oedipus the Tyrant / Οιδίπους Τύραννος and Oedipus at Colonus / Οἰδίπους ἐπὶ Κολωνῷ, all translated by Jamey Hecht. I took them fairly slowly, to let the blank verse translation sink gently into my mind.

I found Antigone / Ἀντιγόνη the most politically interesting of the three. The title character’s brother has died as a rebel against Creon, the king of Thebes; she wishes to give him decent burial, contrary to royal command. It’s quite a striking narrative of a woman demanding what we would now call human rights against the established political power (which claims moreover to have divine backing). Creon pushes his authority too far and suffers awful consequences.

I had read Oedipus the Tyrant / Οιδίπους Τύραννος previously in a different translation. I found it just as powerful here, with perhaps a better rendition of Oedipus’ increasing consternation and horror as the truth becomes clear to him. I did wonder if Sophocles’ audiences would have been in any suspense whatsoever as to what was going to happen; surely everyone going into the theatre would have been muttering “killed his father, married his mother” and just watching to see how well it was done?

Oedipus at Colonus / Οἰδίπους ἐπὶ Κολωνῷ seemed to me the weakest of the three, and I had to start it again after getting halfway through and realising I had missed most of the plot. Here the blind Oedipus has found refuge near Athens, but the factions in Thebes (his sons and Creon) have been told by an oracle that the resting place of his corpse will determine the victor in their struggle. Oedipus gets some good bitter speeches about how unfair life is in general, and his own in particular, but I found the play as a whole much more difficult to follow.

The decision to present the three plays in order of composition here did not work for me. For readers not passionately devoted to analysing how Sophocles’ writing style evolved over the decades of his career, it surely makes much better sense to order them by internal chronology, ie Oedipus the Tyrant / Οιδίπους Τύραννος first, then Oedipus at Colonus / Οἰδίπους ἐπὶ Κολωνῷ, then Antigone / Ἀντιγόνη last. This has the merit of explaining why Antigone’s brother was fighting Creon, and also puts the strongest plays first and last, which makes for a more satisfying experience as a reader.

The almost complete lack of stage direction offers a blank slate, but also a challenge, to anyone wanting to direct the plays today.

• Oh, (No) Canada!
  
  What if Newfoundland had become/remained independent?
  (tags: canada maps )
• Refused access: fighting for the right to travel on the buses
  
  London vs wheelchair user.
  (tags: disability )
• Ranked: Disney Princesses From Least To Most Feminist
  
  I think I have seen two of these films.
  (tags: films sexandgenderandsexuality )
• How to Kill a Troll
  
  Try love.
  (tags: internet )
• The woe that is in teaching English
  
  “It is an important step to move beyond nonsense about the decline of English and chin-wagging about the Young People, and to talk about the difficulty of mastering standard written English, which is no one’s native language.”
  (tags: linguistics )

…when you realise that your wallet is an hour away, at home, and you have invited someone for a business lunch at an expensive restaurant!

• Map of SNESteros
  
  Westeros meets Nintendo!
  (tags: sf )
• Crazy Ape, The Hunter of Bäckaskog, now known as “the Bäckaskog Woman”
  
  “the oldest and most famous skeleton found in Sweden”.
  (tags: archaeology )
• ‘Frankenstein’ Mummies From Bog Off Coast Of Scotland Show Mix Of Corpses
  
  It’s different in South Uist.
  (tags: archaeology )
• South Sudan: Celebrating One Year of Independence
  
  Quotes “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”.
  (tags: southsudan )

I’m really bad at getting to short stories – my middle-aged presbyopia makes reading magazines difficult, so I tend to catch up on this year’s short fiction by reading next year’s Hugo nominees (and occasionally Year’s Best anthologies). This is a set of ten short stories from PS Publishing’s PostScripts magazine sent to BSFA members three years ago, which I have only now got around to reading.

It wouldn’t really have moved me o take out a subscription. The clear majority of the stories in the anthology are horror rather than sf, and frankly gave me bad dreams last night. Only one of the ten is by a woman (Lisa Tuttle). Of the more sfnal stories, I had read Peter Hamilton’s “Footvote”, with his trademark misogyny and Europhobia, in a Dozois anthology; the only other one that made much of an impact on me was Stephen Baxter’s “Eagle Song”, which also has familiar themes from that author (grand sweeping historical montages, incomprehensible aliens) with some originality of format but ending the story only halfway through. Sorry if this sounds grumpy – this came for free, and sometimes you get what you pay for.

• We’re getting wildly differing assessments
  
  Getting the right news from the Supreme Court.
  (tags: blogging blog news ushealth )
• Well THAT didn’t end where I expected it to!
  
  Holly on the UK’s ludicrous “citizenship test”.
  (tags: ukpolitics migration )
• Stories, readers and authors on Jackanory 1966-70
  
  (tags: children television bbc )
• Stories, readers and authors on Jackanory, 1970-73
  
  (tags: television children bbc )
• Euro 2012 Story
  
  It’s a small world. (Especially if you’re talking about County Cork.)
  (tags: football ireland )

I noticed a couple of people linking to this article in the Telegraph, with the headline “Floods are judgment on society, say bishops”.

In fact the headline is rather misleading (or at least the plural noun at the end is). Most of the article is a quote from a leading evangelical bishop, who, amazingly for an evangelical, sees God as directly intervening in everything. Dog bites man, folks.

The other two bishops actually took a very different view from that implied by the headline. One said, “we are now reaping what we have sown. If we live in a profligate way then there are going to be consequences.” The other said, “Instead of living as if we owned the earth we need to recover a sense of being participants in a web of life with responsibilities to other life forms and to our children.”

The implication of both bishops’ statements is that the floods may well have been indirectly caused by human activity (though they are commendably cautious about specifying any direct link), and that in any case we should be careful about exploiting the environment.

I think that is a perfectly reasonable position, and it is instructive that the Telegraph chose to lump those statements together with the idea that the floods were caused by the debate about gay marriage. A cynic might suspect that the Telegraph wants its readers to mentally classify the concept of anthropogenic climate change in the same loony category as the idea of directly ordained meteorological divine vengeance.

Perhaps it is just that “Evangelical makes evangelical statements, two other bishops worry about climate change” isn’t as good a headline, though it would have been more accurate.

I actually can’t remember the last time I saw a story in the Telegraph that was worth reading. It is almost as bad as the Mail.

Edited to add: D’Oh! The article dates from 2007, as and point out in comments. Remind me not to bother responding to any future link to any article in the Telegraph.

Catching up here with several months' worth of the new Tom Baker / Louise Jameson audios, which are well worth investing in.

Wrath of the Iceni, by John Dorney, is the only Fourth Doctor story I can think of which is a pure historical – no sfnal elements at all apart from the Doctor and Leela, turning up in first-century Norfolk to encounter Boudica in the battle against the Romans. The story is a particularly good one for Leela, who becomes fascinated with the warrior queen (once it's been done, you realise that Boudica is the most obvious historical character for her to meet); and we get some twists on the "you can't rewrite history" theme. The first time I listened to it I was doing the family supermarket shoopping, and it seemed to me that the character development for Leela was too abrupt; listening to it again, while changing trains on a long journey through France (which I guess meant I was less distracted) it seemed to work much better. So a bit of a health warning that it depends on your frame of mind, but having read and listened to literally all the spinoff stories featuring Leela, I feel that this is one of the best ones for her in terms of character.

Energy of the Daleks was the first story Tom Baker recorded with Big Finish, but was released fourth in this sequence and also after the two Lost Stories. It has some good moments – notably the return of the Robomen – but some silly bits as well – at one point several characters teleport into someone's bed. Baker, Jameson, and particularly Nicholas Briggs as voice of the Daleks, author and director are clearly having tremendous fun, but I think it was wise to shift this one down the release order.

Alan Barnes has rarely disappointed me, and I'm glad to report that in his double story that ends this season, Trail of the White Worm/The Oseidon Adventure, he is on top form. Geoffrey Beevers returns as the Keeper of Traken Master, the idea being that he absorbed enough energy in The Deadly Assassin to become a bit less putrescent as the Doctor puts it. (There's nothing in The Keeper of Traken to contradict an earlier meeting between the Fourth Doctor and the Beevers Master.) In fact the standourt performance in Trail of the White Worm is Rachael Sterling, daughter of Diana Rigg who is to appear with her mother in a Mark Gatiss episode of the coming New Who season, playing a posh woman with more to her than meets the eye. The two stories are more separate than one normally gets in two-parters, though each still has both the Master (Beevers has good rapport with Baker, but isn't quite as evil as most Masters) and a wonderful demented colonel played by Michael Cochrane (who appeared twice in Old Who, as Charles Cranleigh in Black Orchid and Redvers Fenn-Cooper in Ghost Light). The Oseidon Adventure, not surprisingly given its title, is to a large extent a remake of The Android Invasion, with a lot of the same plot elements but doing it much better – particularly the confusion of identity of working out if you yourself may not unwittingly be your own android double.

I don't think any of these is really very penetrable for non-Who fans – perhaps the most accessible is Energy of the Daleks, which is also the least good. The others are all excellent news for those of us who are still in part in the Fourth Doctor era.

I had got hold of this book under the mistaken impression that it belonged on my list of science fiction and fantasy set in Ireland (which I need to update), but in fact there is no sfnal content at all, just a rather well-done story of three generations of women from an island off the Connemara coast; they go back and forth to America, the fall in love, they give birth to each other, one of them dies at the beginning of the book but we get flashbacks to her story throughout. Not what I expected, but not bad.

(, were you aware of this writer?)

A pretty short history of the Russian Orthodox Church from 988 to 1988, written of course just before the world changed; it's fasinating to remember the context of the Cold War and of those who attempted what we would now call Track Two diplomacy across the Iron Curtain.

The first half of the book is pre-revolutionary history, so a bit less controversial; House rather charmingly tries to draw parallels between Russian and English church history (it’s pretty clear that his audience is the liberal English churchgoer), such as the fact that Henry VIII and his contemporary Ivan the Terrible were married several times and reformed the church. Er, yes.

The second half of the book reflects House’s own experiences in outreach from the Anglican community and the World Council of Churches (for whom he worked) to the Soviet Union. He has to be a little guarded in what he says about those still living – who could know for sure what the outcome of перестройка would be? – but he is quite clear about the extent to which the Church was alternatively oppressed by and then forced into collusion with the Communist system.

It’s not a complete account, as House admits in the foreword; the Armenian, Georgian, Baltic, Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist stories of religion in the USSR would all be a bit different (not to mention the complexities of Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova). And like most of us he has no inkling of the revival of the Orthodox church in the 1990s, and its unsavoury links with nationalism and closeness to the new regime. But you can’t expect that from 130 pages written in 1988.

Karen Armstrong’s books about religion have not always worked for me, but this one did the trick – a fairly intense account of how we think the books of the Bible came to be written, and how they have then been used by Jewish and Christian believers over the centuries. Most of it was material with which I was already familiar, but presented in quite and intense and engaging format. I had not previously considered Wycliffe’s links with the scholastic philosophers (which perhaps shows how little I had previously thought about him at all). Not really a book for beginners but an interesting perspective for readers who already know a bit about the subject.

• Thank you for killing my novel
  
  The New York Times panned my book, then had to correct the review to fix all their errors. So why am I not angry?
  (tags: writing )
• Are the Black Jews Jewish?
  
  Indigenous Judaism in Africa.
  (tags: religion race )

As usual, I very much enjoyed this Torchwood novel by James Goss. Unusually, it has a very strong comedic element, not something that Torchwood always managed successfully and not something I’d seen Goss try at all. The beautiful concept is that Agnes Havisham, a stern and sarcastic Victorian lady, emerges from decades of suspended animation to do an official assessment of Torchwood, at the same moment as two separate alien threats emerge to torment the innocent citizens of Cardiff. Unlike his first book, Almost Perfect, we get a pretty satisfying exploration of Jack’s character from another perspective, and decent page time for Ianto, Gwen and Rhys too. Rhys gets a couple of particularly glorious moments. I felt the pacing of the plot a little uneven but the style very entertaining..

• Nathalie Rothschild: The Ironies Of An Orwellian Facebook Viral
  
  #fb The truth behind the Big Brother pic.
  (tags: internet books )
• Why I Won’t Be Blogging The Hugo Shortlist This Year
  
  Problems with PDFs.
  (tags: sf ebooks )
• DNSChanger Virus
  
  For once – a malware warning that is actually true!
  (tags: internet )

• That Would Be an Ecumenical Matter (4)
  
  Church and State see marriage in different ways; and Church and State are hopelessly tangled up.
  (tags: religion ukpolitics sexandgenderandsexuality )

• The Girl Who Fixed the Umlaut (by the late great Nora Ephron)
  
  ““I can’t really go on without an umlaut,” he said. “We’re in Sweden.”
  (tags: humour )
• Five in the Colonies: Enid Blyton’s Sri Lankan Adventures, Randy Boyagoda
  
  The classic children’s author.
  (tags: books race )
• Not bored, but Libored
  
  “British banking continues to be insufficiently dull.”
  (tags: ulsterbank banks )
• This Week In Threat-Mongering – The Iran Version – democracyarsenal.org
  
  “If Burns is correct that Iran is America’s number one adversary in the world then truly the United States has little to worry about. Iran is a second rate military power, lacks an active nuclear program, is deeply isolated in the Middle East, has a poorly performing economy and has few allies or friends.”
  (tags: uspolitics waronterror iran )
• That Would Be An Ecumenical Matter (2)
  
  “What would Jesus have said about gay marriage?

  I don’t know, and neither does anybody else.”
  (tags: religion sexandgenderandsexuality )

• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Interview (1927)
  
  The creator of Sherlock Holmes speaks.
  (tags: books )

• Media information note, 2nd July
  
  “Ulster Bank payments follow in sequence after those of NatWest and RBS. This … in no way reflects the priority we attach to our Ulster Bank customers.” Oh yeah?
  (tags: ulsterbank )
• Ulster Bank could become Ireland’s first efficient bank
  
  “We’ve always been efficient at taking your money… We’re just not conscientious about giving it back.”
  (tags: ulsterbank )
• Me, Ulster Bank, What they’re doing wrong, and what we can do
  
  “I have had no access to my account via my card for nearly 2 weeks now. “
  (tags: ulsterbank )

I'm not going to read the last of this year's nominated works in the Best Graphic Story category, because for the last three years I dutifully ploughed through that year's Schlock Mercenary volume, found it dull and crudely drawn, and ranked it last (as did the Hugo voters two years of those three); and I don't see any good reason to put myself through that again.

I also find it difficult to compare an entire run of a graphic story with single volumes from series with which I am familiar and also a single volume from a series that I don't know. Even if you try to restrict your judgement to the material listed on the ballot paper, the fact is that your enjoyment and understanding of the volume in question is massively informed by your knowledge of how and if it fits into the wider narrative of the series as a whole (or even the author's work as a whole).

My votes in this category therefore leave me feeling a little uneasy. But I will cast them none the less as follows:

1) Digger by Ursula Vernon
2) The Unwritten (Volume 4): Leviathan, by Mike Carey, illustrated by Peter Gross
3) Fables (Volume 15): Rose Red, by Bill Willingham and Mark Buckingham
4) Locke & Key (Volume 4): Keys to the Kingdom, by Joe Hill, illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez

[no vote] Schlock Mercenary: Force Multiplication, by Howard Tayler

See also: Best Novel | Best Novella | Best Novelette | Best Short Story | Best Related Work | Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) | Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) | Best Professional Artist | Best Fan Writer | Best Fan Artist | Best Fancast | The John W. Campbell Award (Not A Hugo)

A problem with the Hugo category of Best Graphic Story is that the nominees are often very diverse in form. Here, for instance, we have the fourth of a six-volume sequence, itself consisting of six individual issues of which the first three are relatively distinct from each other and the last three more closely linked; but there is a lot of background knowledge for the new reader to pick up. I found the fourth in the sequence, involving a young boy and a ghostly soldier, particularly effective, and there is an excellent twist at the end. But there are some pretty gory moments as well, and the plot is necessarily incomplete. I don’t think I’ll look out for more of this series as a priority.

(I note that the author’s father won a Hugo for non-fiction in 1982 but has never even been nominated in the fiction categories.)

For what this is – a short New Who book aimed at people who don’t read that much – it is rather good, a story of the Tenth Doctor on his own, reprising the Krillitane plot from School Reunion with some extra wrinkles and a one-off young male sidekick who is into computers but lacks social skills. The prolific Justin Richards on a good day (it can’t have taken terribly long to write).

The classic novel of 1749, whose prose style is in places a bit tedious but also in places very funny. The plot is a basic romantic comedy, but it is enlivened by the authorial asides which open each of the individual books within the novel, and by the author’s grasp of character which must have inspired Dickens. There are also a couple of passages which pastiche Homer, Vergil and I think the King James Bible, and there must have been others that I missed.

Some social points of the 1740s that I found interesting: women had few enough rights, but in Fielding’s account retained an absolute right to accept or refuse an offer of marriage. Presumably coercion was a ground for divorce or annulment, and there must have been enough cases for it to be a real issue. I was also interested that Sophia’s father is depicted as having much the thickest West Country accent of any of the characters, despite being the local squire. A hundred years later, I guess all gentlemen of his class would have been assimilated into poshness by public school; but in the 1740s you only needed to communicate with the locals in your rural fastness. Mr Western of course has no time for education or politics (his sister, who serves as comic relief, is also the most politically aware character in the book). I was also struck by the relative lack of animus to the Irish (cf Shakespeare, who scores rather badly there):

Sophia heaved a deep sigh, and answered, “Indeed, Harriet, I pity you from my soul!—-But what could you expect? Why, why, would you marry an Irishman?”

“Upon my word,” replied her cousin, “your censure is unjust. There are, among the Irish, men of as much worth and honour as any among the English: nay, to speak the truth, generosity of spirit is rather more common among them. I have known some examples there, too, of good husbands; and I believe these are not very plenty in England. Ask me, rather, what I could expect when I married a fool.”

It was a bit of a slog in places but I am glad to have read it.

Non-fiction 6 (YTD 28)
The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell
Jar Jar Binks Must Die, by Dan Kimmel
The Flowering of New England 1815-1865, by Van Wyck Brooks
The Steampunk Bible, by Jeff VanderMeer with S.J. Chambers et al.
The Young Elizabeth, by Alison Plowden
Danger to Elizabeth, by Alison Plowden

Fiction (non-sf) 3 (YTD 14)
Hard Times, by Charles Dickens
A Good Hanging and Other Stories, by Ian Rankin
Lust, Caution and Other Stories, by Eileen Chang

sf (non-Who) 7 (YTD 39)
Redemption in Indigo, by Karen Lord
The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, by Selma Lagerlöf
The Best Science Fiction of the Year #4, edited by Terry Carr
Sphere, by Michael Crichton
Waking the Moon, by Elizabeth Hand
Sauron Defeated, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Parable of the Talents, by Octavia E. Butler

Doctor Who 4 (YTD 37)
Autonomy, by Daniel Blythe
The House That Jack Built, by Guy Adams
Dying in the Sun, by Jon de Burgh Miller
Falls The Shadow, by Daniel O’Mahony

Comics 9 (YTD 12)
Habibi, by Craig Thompson
The Unwritten, vols 3-4, by Mike Carey and Peter Gross
Digger vols 1-6, by Ursula Vernon

Running totals:
~8,000 pages (YTD 38,800)
14/29 (YTD 39/130) by women (Chambers, Plowden x2, Chang, Lord, Lagerlöf, Hand, Butler, Vernon x6)
3/29 (YTD 5/130) by PoC (Chang, Lord, Butler) – an improvement in my diversity quotients which have been rather low of late.
Owned for more than a year: 9 (Parable of the Talents [reread], Best SF of the Year #4 [reread], The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, The Flowering of New England, Falls the Shadow, Waking the Moon, A Good Hanging, Dying in the Sun, Hard Times)
Other rereads: 0 for a total of 2 (YTD 9/130)

Big 2012 reading projects:
June 30 takes me to Book IX, Chapter XIV of War and Peace, and the end of the Book of Proverbs in the Bible.

Also started:
The Fall of Yquatine, by Nick Walters
Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding
Marriage with My Kingdom, by Alison Plowden

Coming next, perhaps:
Elizabeth Regina by Alison Plowden
The Bible: The Biography by Karen Armstrong
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself by Harriet Ann Jacobs
The Mermaids Singing by Lisa Carey
Russian Phoenix: The Story of Russian Christians, 988-1988 by Francis House
Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus The Tyrant, Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles
Postscripts (Special BSFA members Sampler Edition) edited by Peter Crowther
Dracula by Bram Stoker
The Stories of Colonel Twit, “As They Really Happened” by Will Powell
Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid
The Spring of the Ram by Dorothy Dunnett
Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon
The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser
Code of the Krillitanes by Justin Richards
Spectrum: A Science Fiction Anthology: No. 4 edited by Kingsley Amis
The Portable Greek Historians: The Essence of Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius edited by M. I. Finley
Watchman by Ian Rankin
Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn
Wonderland by Mark Chadbourn
Morgoth’s Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
Parasite by Jim Mortimore
Coldheart by Trevor Baxendale
The Public Prosecutor by Jef Geeraerts
The Reign of Elizabeth 1556-1603 by J. B. Black

It took me a while (and several long journeys) but eventually I managed to watch all four of the nominated films in this category, having seen the first series of Game of Thrones when it was broadcast last year. My votes are as follows:

No vote: Hugo. Don’t get me wrong – I absolutely loved this film, the story, the cinematography, the performances of the stars both young and older (Sacha Baron Cohen in not completely annoying shock! Not to mention Ben Kingsley, Christopher Lee, etc), the beautiful detail. But it is not really sf. It is about the earliest sf cinema, about technology, about art, (and about love) but the fantasy sequences are clearly delineated as dreams, and the machinery, though verging on steampunk, just about realistic for the era. I’m really glad that Hugo was nominated – I enjoyed it more than any of the other films discussed below – but I can’t vote for it.

5) Captain America: The First Avenger. A rather average action romp, lifted by Hugo Weaving as Nazi scientist who decides to become a supervillain. New Doctor Who companion Jenna-Louise Coleman makes an appearance as Second Girlfriend in an early scene.

4) No Award. As usual I have agonised a bit about this ranking, and might go up or down a notch depending on my mood.

3) Source Code. An intricate story of a special ops guy who has to relive the last minutes of someone else’s life over and over again until he is able to prevent a terrorist attack, though he himself is already doomed. I liked the basic plot but didn’t care for the political framing (life as a computer game…) and was not wholly convinced by the resolution.

2) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2. I enjoyed this much more than I had expected to. While Part 1 was basically about wandering around waiting for the plot to start happening, Part 2 gets you right into the final conflict, with everyone giving it their all, and a very pleasing closure to this incarnation of Rowling’s epic cycle. Radcliffe and Watson have particularly come on over the years; the special effects are great as well.

1) Game of Thrones, Series 1. I was an early advocate of nominating the series as a whole, and I remain an unabashed fanboy. This will be remembered when Captain America has been long forgotten. (Actually, hasn’t that happened already?)

See also: Best Novel | Best Novella | Best Novelette | Best Short Story | Best Related Work | Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) | Best Professional Artist | Best Fan Writer | Best Fan Artist | Best Fancast | The John W. Campbell Award (Not A Hugo)

As I worked through my Hugo Voter Packet, I eventually reached the file labelled “Digger_Optimized.pdf” and opened it. My heart sank as I realised that it is 830 pages in length – I think only A Dance With Dragons is longer, of this year’s book nominees – and then my eyebrows rose as I realised that the first edition of the first volume was published as long ago as 2005.

But I needn’t have worried. The sixth and final volume of Digger was published last year, making the whole thing eligible for this year’s Hugos, and it turns out to be a cracking good read: the tale of a witty wombat who finds herself emerging from the floor of a temple far from home and becoming embroiled in the local struggles of veiled warriors, hyena-people, a shrew pretending to be a troll, an oracular slug, a talking statue of an elephant god, and much else. It is brilliant, with humour, drama, pathos, and well-drawn characters in every sense. Tthose of you who haven’t dug that far into your Chicon downloads are strongly recommended to go look for it. (I might add that the combined cost of the six volumes is more than twice the price of a Chicon supporting membership which would get you the whole set of nominees.)

I have been a bit uncomfortable with the way the Hugo Awards’ inevitable focus on annual output doesn’t really fit the creative pace of comics writers, but the problem seems solved here. I think my first preference vote is decided.