Cora Buhlert's Blog, page 7

The 2023 Hugo Nomination Scandal Gets Worse

I already spent thousands of words writing about the 2023 Hugo nomination scandal and frankly I don’t want to deal with this anymore at all. For starters, this is the time when we should be talking about the 2024 Hugo nominations and not still be talking about last year’s longlist. Also, I have plenty of other problems right now and really no time for more Hugo drama.

However, the 2023 Hugo nomination scandal just got a lot worse and this bombshell is so big that it requires its own post.

One of the last bigger updates to my previous Hugo post apart from “Well, the numbers make even less sense now than before” stuff was that 2023 Best Fan Writer winner Chris M. Barkley actually got hold of 2023 Hugo administrator Dave McCarty at the 2024 Capricon convention in Chicago and managed to interview him. The result was 45 minutes of Dave McCarty making excuses and saying basically nothing. There’s also a transcript here, which is just much empty blathering as the audio recording.

However, it turns out that Dave McCarty wasn’t the only member of the 2023 Hugo committee that Chris talked to at Capricon. He also talked to Diane Lacey, another member of the 2023 Hugo committee, who was a lot more forthcoming than McCarty and provided Chris with several internal e-mails from the Hugo committee as well as a spreadsheet regarding elgibility checks, which clearly show that the western members of the Hugo committee pre-emptively flagged works and individuals that might be considered politically problematic in China.

Chris and 2023 Best Fan Writer finalist Jason Sanford analysed the e-mails and compiled this report, which you can read at File 770 or at Jason’s Genre Grapevine column. Head over there and read it and then come back. There’s also some interesting discussions in the comments, including comments from Chinese fans.

The e-mails leaked by Diane Lacey may be found here and the also leaked eligibility check spreadsheet may be found here.

Basically, Diane Lacey and Kat Jones (who, for full disclosure, was Hugo admin when I won in 2022, and with whom I’ve only had positive interactions so far) were in charge of researching the eligibility of potential Hugo finalists. This is nothing new and happens every year. Basically, the Hugo team tracks the top ten or so nominees and preemptively collects contact data and checks their eligibility, e.g. was the books or story actually published in the relevant year. This is the reason why Hugo finalists are normally contacted very quickly after nominations close, because the team already has the contact data and has done preliminary checks.

This year, however, the Hugo team members who check eligibility were also asked to check whether any of the works or individuals had been critical of China or – to quote Dave McCarty – “if the work focuses on China, Taiwan, Tibet or other topics that may be an issue in China”. McCarty also made it clear in that first e-mail that it may be necessary to pull some works and individuals from the ballot, because Chinese law demands it.

So rather than resign, that’s exactly what the Hugo team did – they highlighted potential issues with various nominees. Babel by R.F. Kuang was flagged as potentially problematic, even though the person doing the flagging hadn’t read the book, but only knew it was about China. The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia was also flagged for containing Chinese immigrant workers, but unlike Babel was eventually allowed to make the ballot.

The fan writer (and also fanzine, though we don’t have details there) category was flagged as full potentially problematic people, since several nominees had made remarks that might be construed as critical of China or had shared news stories about China or – shock and horror – reviewed books that dealt with Chinese topics. Several people were also flagged for agreeing with Jeannette Ng’s remarks about Hongkong back in 2019. Indeed, the only potential fan writer finalist deemed safe was O.Westin, who writes Twitter microfiction. Bitter Karella’s Twitter microfiction was flagged as potentially problematic. Paul Weimer, who was eventually disqualified, was flagged as having visited Tibet and having extensively shared photos of his visit. However, Paul never visited Tibet at all, but neighbouring Nepal. Meanwhile, Best Novel winner Ursula Vernon a.k.a. T. Kingfisher actually did visit Tibet, but this apparently escaped the notice of the censors.

For the Astounding Award, Xiran Jay Zhao, who was eventually disqualified, Naseem Jamnia, who was allowed to remain on the ballot, and Sue Lyn Tan (who does not appear in the final nomination data) were flagged as potentially problematic. Xiran Jay Zhao and Sue Lyn Tan were flagged for having written about Chinese history and mythology, while Naseem Jamnia was flagged for being non-binary, trans and outspoken about it.

We still don’t know what the problem with that Sandman episode was and why it was disqualified. At this point, it might have been something as simple as a character eating Chinese food in the episode. Because apparently, the only way you were safe from being flagged as a potential issue was never to have mentioned China at all and not to be LGBTQ+ and outspoken about it either.

This is absolutely horrifying and even worse than we thought. I should also probably link to Ada Palmer’s great post about censorship and self-censorship again, because that’s exactly what happened here. It wasn’t that some Chinese government censor waltzed in and struck works and individuals from the Hugo ballot. No, the Hugo team preeemptively identified works and individuals that might upset some hypothetical Chinese government censor. And they also compiled dossiers about potential Hugo finalists and combed their social media feeds for potentially problematic content, which reminds me far more of the Stasi than of a Hugo committee. Camestros Felapton shares his reaction to reading a dossier compiled about himself and his work here.

Worse, the Hugo committee weren’t even very good and consistent about it. Note that Paul was flagged for having visited Tibet, when he never actually did, whereas the Hugo finalist who actually did visit Tibet was not flagged. I freely admit that I haven’t read Babel, but what I’ve read by R.F. Kuang does not strike me as overly critical of China, rather the opposite. Also note that Babel was actually published in China, so actual Chinese government censors clearly don’t view the novel as problematic. And Xiran Jay Zhao is very outspoken politically (currently mostly about Gaza, but since I don’t follow them, I don’t know what they tweeted and tiktoked about in 2022/2023), but they were not flagged for that, but for the fact that their work is based on Chinese history. Meanwhile, the self-censors completely missed that S.B. Divya has been highly critical of China (and actually declined her nomination because of this). They also missed that  John Chu and Richard Man are both members of the Chinese diaspora and John Chu’s Hugo-nominated is a gay superhero story.

There are a couple of other landmines in the report, namely that several Chinese language works were apparently removed for alleged slating before they even made the longlist. Note that Dave McCarty was also the Hugo administrator in 2016, i.e. one of the Puppy years, where slating very definitely took place, and yet found himself unable to remove any of the slate finalists from the ballot. And while I have no idea what We Live in Nanjing by Tianrui Shuofu and the other Chinese novels which appear on the eligibility spreadsheet but not on the ballot, are about, they can’t possibly be worse than such literary gems as “If You Were an Award, My Love” by Juan Tabo and S. Harris or “Safe Space as Rape Room” by Daniel Eness, both of which Dave McCarty allowed to make the ballot in 2016.

Apparently, Dave McCarty also always planned to release the full nomination stats as late as possible, i.e. ninety days after the Hugo winners were announced, in  order to protect that Chinese members of the Hugo team from possible reprisals.

Also note that we still don’t know why the nominations stats that were released make no sense and are riddled with obvious and less obvious errors.

This is utterly infuriating. Everybody who has been following the Hugos and Worldcon for a while knows that there were concerns about the Chengdu Worldcon, including potential censorship issues, from the start. Since those genuine concerns were often also mixed with blatant xenophobia, they were easier to dismiss than they probably should have been. However, one thing that I and others kept pointing out that even if the Chinese members of the Hugo team might bow to political pressure (and note that I absolutely don’t blame any of them for what happened), we should have faith in the western members of the Hugo team to do what’s right, to not bow to political pressure and to refuse to have anything to do with censorship.

However, it turns out that’s exactly what they did. They happily went along with perceived political pressure (because we don’t know, if there was any actual pressure exerted on anybody) and preemptively vetted nominees for potential issues rather than resign in protest and sound the alarm. And yes, Kat Jones eventually did leave the 2023 Hugo team (and was not listed as a member on the Chengdu site) and Diana Lacey eventually sounded the alarm, but this should have happened much sooner. Meanwhile, Dave McCarty and Chengdu co-chair Ben Yalow happily went along with everything.

File 770 also shares these two statements by Kat Jones and Diane Lacey.

Finally, I also want to share this part from Chris and Jason’s report:

This report’s authors attempted to reach out to Chinese genre fans for comment, but did not receive any responses in time to include in this report.

An explanation for what might be happening came from Pablo Vazquez, a traveling genre fan and co-chair of the 12th North American Science Fiction Convention in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Vazquez is also well known for his connections with genre fans around the world.

When Vazquez was asked if he could help connect the authors with any fans in China who might comment for this report, he said “I’m sorry. They do not want to speak to the media even anonymously.”

As Vazquez stated in a follow-up comment, “I have a lot of love for Chinese fandom and my friendships and connections there run deep. That’s a real and vibrant fandom there that is, like us, wanting very little to do with their government being involved in their fandom. They definitely don’t think it’s their government and instead think its corporate interests or, even worse, a fan/pro organization. Honestly, they seem more scared by that than anything else which saddens me to see and despite multiple attempts to get them to share their story they seem really hesitant.”

He elaborated further: “They don’t seem to fear official reprisal (the CPC seems to want to find who’s responsible for embarrassing them on the world stage actually) but rather ostracization from their community or its outright destruction. If I were to hazard a guess, the way we blew up this affair in the international media has now put this fandom in very serious trouble. Previously, it was one of the few major avenues of free speech left in China. Now, after all this, the continuation of that freedom seems highly unlikely.”

Whether there actually was any active political pressure on the local or provincial level or not, it’s obvious that the Chinese Communist Party is clearly not happy that what was supposed to be a good-will propaganda event blew up in their faces and embarassed the country internationally. And while the Chinese government doesn’t particularly care about an SFF con in Chengdu, they clearly do care about being embarassed.

However, what’s most heartbreaking here is that the Chinese fans – who are not to blame for any of this and indeed are as angry as we are – are now at risk of losing SFF fandom as their safe space due to increased poltical attention. Because fandom is often a safe space for those who don’t quite fit into the mainstream, particularly in authoritarian countries. Not just in China, but also e.g. in Eastern Europe pre-1989. We’ve also had several cases in recent years of China cracking down on fandom spaces such as blocking AO3 or a general crackdown on celebrity fandom culture. It’s understandable that Chinese SFF fans now fear that they may be next and I really, really hope that this won’t happen.

This was supposed to be a Worldcon that would bring Chinese and western SFF fans together. But, largely due to the cowardice of several western SMOFs, it became a complete disaster that will harm not only the reputation of Worldcon and the Hugos, but may also harm Chinese SFF fandom who really don’t deserve any of this crap.

Return of the Son of the Bride of the Grimdark Debate

In the early days of this relaunched blog, I wrote several times about the debate about grimdark fantasy, then one of the hottest subgenres on the market, which also attracted its share of criticism both from the left for its sometimes rampant misogyny and violence against women and from the right for soiling the memory of Tolkien and the numinous sanctity of the fantasy genre or some such thing.

Fast forward eleven years and grimdark fantasy is still a thing, but not nearly as dominant as it once was, while cozy fantasy, romantasy, hopepunk and other subgenres are ascendent and we’re debating about other subjects. Yet the grimdark debate just lurched back into the room like the rotting undead corpse that it is.

The necromancer who revived the rotting corpse this time around is one Sebastian Milbank, executive editor at a conservative British magazine called The Critic. Amidst articles about Brexit, the war in Ukraine, why young people should join the Army, cancel culture, gender-critical feminists (a.k.a. TERFs) and other conservative talking points, Milbank wrote this essay complaining about grimdark fantasy, how it’s somehow all Michael Moorcock’s fault and how Tolkien is superior. Found via File 770.

The essay feels as if it time-traveled here from the early 2010s, probably because it did. The examples of grimdark fantasy Milbank gives are the same examples we talked about eleven years ago, namely Joe Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy, Mark Lawrence’s Broken Empire trilogy and George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and its TV adaptation Game of Thrones. A couple of other TV shows are mentioned as well – Breaking Bad, Boardwalk Empire and The Walking Dead – none of which are grimdark fantasy and two of which aren’t even fantasy at all. It’s also notable that all of the authors have long since moved on to other series and that all of the TV shows ended years ago, except for The Walking Dead, which still has new spin-offs coming out. Honestly, has Sebastian Milbank read a single novel or watched a single TV show that came out in the last five years?

In addition to the general grime, darkness and cycnicism, Milbank’s main issue with grimdark fantasy is not the prevalence of sexual violence and violence against women in general in some (and it was never all of them) grimdark works, which was a main point of criticism eleven years ago, but the fact that grimdark fantasy portrays religion negatively. And guess who’s to blame for this sorry state of affairs? Yes, the Left. Nevermind that grimdark fantasy was never a particularly left-leaning subgenre.

Sebastian Milbank then goes into the history of the fantasy genre or rather his idea of what the history of the fantasy genre is. Which unfortunately is completely and utterly wrong. Basically, Milbank assumes that the fantasy genre began with J.R.R. Tolkien. Which is a common misconception, but still wrong.

To be fair, Milbank does briefly go into pre-Tolkien fantasy and mentions E.R. Eddison, G.K. Chesterton (of course) and E. Nesbit, all of whom he classifies as “Edwardian neo-medieval romance”. He completely fails to mention Lord Dunsany who was a lot more influential than any of the writers he does mention, as well as Mervyn Peake, Hope Mirrless, Evangeline Walton and other early twentieth century British writers of what we would now call fantasy.

Milbank also completely ignores pre-WWII American fantasy writing, which flourished in the pages of Weird Tales, Unknown, Strange Stories, Black Cat and short-lived amateur magazines and the motley mix of gothic ghost stories, paranormal investigators, cosmic horror, historical fantasy, sword and sorcery, contemporary fantasy and haunted machinery horror found in their pages. There is no mention of Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber, C.L. Moore, Henry Kuttner, Manly Wade Wellman, Robert Bloch, Jack Williamson, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Poul Anderson, August Derleth, L. Sprague De Camp, Dorothy Quick, Allison W. Harding, Mary Elizabeth Counselman and many, many others, even though the influence of these works and their writers continues to be felt today. Conan is mentioned once, in the context of an actor dressed up as Conan and wielding Xena’s weapon at San Diego Comic Con.

Another thing that Milbank gets wrong is that Tolkien’s impact was immediate, when it was really much delayed. When The Hobbit came out in 1937, it was viewed as a children’s book. And when The Lord of the Rings came out in 1954/55, it did gain critical acclaim, but little notice among SFF fandom, because it was a pricey hardcover trilogy published in the UK in a field that was dominated by magazines and paperbacks. The reason why no volume of The Lord of the Rings was nominated for a Hugo is that way too few SFF fans even knew the books existed at the time.

It was only when Donald Wollheim (illegally) published The Lord of the Rings in paperback in the US in 1965 that the books found a new appreciative audience and gradually turned into the phenomenon they became. Together with Lancer reprinting Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories from the 1930s in paperback, the fantasy revival that had been simmering since the late 1950s suddenly burst into overdrive and in the next decade most pre-WWII fantasy, both British and American, was reprinted in paperback form after being out of print for thirty or more years and new fantasy novels inspired by older works started to appear.

Nor was the fantasy boom of the late 1960s and early 1970s overly Tolkien-inspired.  If anything, it was a lot more Robert E. Howard inspired, because it was the era of the big sword and sorcery revival as well as of more idiosyncratic works like A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin and The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle. Tolkien’s work was popular and beloved during this time, but he was just one writer and not yet the titan he would become. Nor was there a distinction between epic or high fantasy on the one hand and sword and sorcery on the other. Tolkien was mentioned in the same breath as Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber or Clark Ashton Smith and discussed a lot in the pages of Amra, the fanzine that served as the water cooler of the burgeoning sword and sorcery community.

Tolkienesque big fat quest fantasy didn’t become a thing until 1977, four years after Tolkien’s death, when The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks was published. And Sword of Shannara was just one book, a Tolkien clone in a sea of Clonans. It was only when it The Sword of Shannara and its sequels became a massive success and the changing economics of the publishing industry favoured longer books that vaguely Tolkienesque big fat quest fantasy started smothering all other strands of fantasy, including sword and sorcery, which had by now turned increasingly repetitive. We cannot blame J.R.R. Tolkien for this development, because he was dead when it happened. We can’t even blame Terry Brooks, because he was just one writer who inadvertedly started a trend. Maybe we can blame Lester and Judi-Lynn Del Rey who published big fat epic quest fantasy by the truckload, because that stuff sold like gangbusters. But they were just giving the public what it wanted at the time.

Big fat quest fantasy started to go stale around the turn of the millennium, as the Wheel of Time was idling on, though the first cracks were apparent as early as the late 1980s when contemporary fantasy, which had been dormant since the 1940s, made a tentative comeback, now renamed urban fantasy. This subgenre would explode in the early 2000s, around the same time as grimdark fantasy, though it attracted little notice at the time, because the writers and readers of urban fantasy were mostly women.

Even darker, grimmer takes on Tolkienesque fantasy were nothing new. Lord Foul’s Bane, the first book of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever by Stephen R. Donaldson, came out in 1977, the same year as Sword of Shannara, and already bore many of the hallmarks of what would eventually be called grimdark fantasy such as a cynical and nihilistic and morally dark grey protagonist and a graphic rape scene very early in the first book.

A Game of Thrones, the first volume of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, came out in 1996 and is often viewed as the start of the grimdark trend, though personally I consider it part of a completely different trend which went mostly unnoticed at the time because it played out across different genres and subgenres. Starting in the late 1980s, several multi-volume speculative sagas appeared, which often followed a large cast of characters, often with multiple POVs, over years and decades, focussed on political machinations and occasionally massive battles and featured more graphic sex and violence than was commonly found in SFF at the time. Other examples are the Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold, the Deathstalker series by Simon R. Green and the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon. You could probably throw The Expanse by James S.A. Corey in there as well, though that series also includes other influences. These books are normally not grouped together, because they are in different genres and subgenres, but they have a lot of similarities and were inspired in part by the massive historical sagas of writers like Dorothy Dunnett, Anne Golon, John Jakes (himself a participant in the 1960s fantasy revival) or James Mitchener as well as the so-called bodiceripper historical romances of the 1970s and 1980s, only with added SFF elements.

Anyway, by the turn of the millennium, just as the Lord of the Rings movies were breaking box office records, everybody was thoroughly sick of increasingly pale copies of The Sword of Shannara, which itself was a copy The Lord of the Rings. It was time for something new, so a couple of trends and subgenres emerged. First we had the New Weird, which quickly fizzled out. We had the urban fantasy and paranormal romance boom, which brought fantasy back into a modern day setting and harkened back to the paranormal investigators and contemporary fantasy of the 1930s and 1940s. And from approx. 2008 on, we had what would eventually be called grimdark fantasy, partially inspired by A Song of Ice and Fire and The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever and also the first and second sword and sorcery boom and taking its name from the Warhammer 40000 games, but its own thing altogether.

However, Sebastian Milbank does not blame A Song of Ice and Fire or The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever or Warhammer 40000, let alone the glut of extruded big fat fantasy product on bookstore shelves in the late 1990s for the rise of grimdark fantasy. No, he blames Michael Moorcock and Philip Pullman. Milbank writes:

An early foe was Michael Moorcock, whose own writings — full of bitter and murderous anti-heroes, doomed romances and bleak accounts of human nature — essentially set the template for much of the anti-Tolkien strain in fantasy writing.

That description matches Elric of Melniboné – now elgible again for the Hugo Award for Best Series due to the publication of the Elric story “The Folk of the Forest” in New Edge Sword and Sorcery No. 1 (hint, hint) – though Elric is not and never was the anti-Aragorn or anti-Frodo. He is the anti-Conan and the Elric stories and novels (as well as the Corum novels and many others) are sword and sorcery and seminal works of the second sword and sorcery boom at that. They’re not responses to Tolkien but to Robert E. Howard. And yes, Elric has left his mark on the fantasy genre, partly inspiring The Witcher stories and novels by Andrzej Sapkowski (which also heavily draw on East European literature and folklore) and the white-haired incestous Targaryens of A Song of Ice and Fire fame.

However, Milbank never mentions Moorcock’s best known character. Instead, he focusses on Moorcock’s 1978 essay “Epic Pooh”, which does criticise Tolkien along with C.S. Lewis, A.A. Milne and Richard Adams and a certain strain of English fantasy in general. He also focusses the 1966 novel Behold the Man, which heavily and heavy-handedly criticises Christianity and – to be fair – is very much a work of its time and doesn’t hold up very well. I remember that no one at Galactic Journey even wanted to cover that one. Finally, he mentions the Von Bek cycle of the 1980s. These works are of course a tiny fraction of Michael Moorcock’s massive output, but they match Milbank’s stereotypes. And claiming that the creator of Elric and editor of New Worlds was “vigorously chasing literary fashion” is just laughable.

As for Philip Pullman, not only does Pullman not write grimdark fantasy but YA fantasy, the His Dark Materials books are also a response to C.S. Lewis’ Narnia novels and not to Tolkien. Well, at least, he is responding to an Inkling, but the wrong one. I’m also pretty certain that the grimdark fantasy writers of the 2000s and 2010s were not inspired by His Dark Materials and Philip Pullman.

But the weirdest thing about Milbank’s essay are not the wearyingly familiar points he makes – “Fantasy needs more religion and morality. We need don’t need subversion” – but the timing. What on Earth possessed him to write that essay now, when grimdark fantasy is still chugging along, but no longer dominant, while the most exciting developments in fantasy are happening elsewhere? Is this an essay left over from the early 2010s, which he found on his harddrive and decided to publish? It’s certainly possible, especially since the newest works referenced are Captain America: Civil War from 2014 and the TV show The Boys from 2019. Neither of which are grimdark fantasy, but superhero stories or rather subversions thereof. And subversions of superhero tropes are no more new than grimdark fantasy. Alan Moore’s take on Miracleman/Marvelman came out in 1982, Watchmen in 1985.

If Milbank is looking for more hopeful and less cynical fantasy, there are plenty of options and he might enjoy the works of Travis Baldree (though there are lesbians and non-evil orcs), T. Kingfisher or Alix E. Harrow. If he wants religious fantasy, well, there was the Superversive movement which sprang up in the wake of the Sad and Rabid Puppies, though that mostly seems to have fizzled out.

The 2023 Hugo nomination statistics have finally been released – and we have questions

The long-awaited nomination statistics for the 2023 Hugo Awards have finally been published – at the last possible moment according to the WSFS constitution (and at a point when I really don’t have time for Hugo neepery). The voting statistics already came out sometimes in December and it turned out that several finalists won with very large majorities.

The full voting and nomination stats are here and there are several landmines in there, which makes me wonder whether “The Hugo admin was very busy with his day job” is the only reason the stats were delayed for so long.

So let’s delve right in:

The first landmine is lurking in Best Novel, because it turns out that Babel by R.F. Kuang, whose absence from the ballot was very notable, since pretty much everybody expected it to be nominated, started out with the third most nominations, but was knocked out by EPH on the final round (which it shouldn’t have been) and also declared ineligible. Babel was published in the US on September 1, 2022, it didn’t have any prior publication elsewhere and it’s obviously SFF, so how can it be ineligible?

The EPH data is also weird, because Babel doesn’t gain any points throughout, as the other nominees are eliminated, which is extremely unusual. Of course, most of the longlist is made up of Chinese novels, where there may be little overlap with western ballots, but I imagine that at least some of the 115 people who nominated The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler (another likely finalist conspicuous by its absence) or some of the 78 people who nominated A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys (which surprised me a little, though it’s a pleasant surprise) would have also nominated Babel. Also, it would be great if the stats listed at least the authors, because it’s annoying trying to google some of these works.

ETA: Several people have since come forward and stated that they voted for both Babel and The Mountain in the Sea or A Half-Built Garden or all three, so this should be visible in the EPH data.

Also notable by its absence from the longlist is The World We Make by N.K. Jemisin. Now N.K. Jemisin is not just a great writer, she’s also extremely popular with Hugo voters and I find it unlikely that The World We Make got fewer nominations than the more obscure A Half-Built Garden.

Personally, I’m happier with The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, the finalist which made the ballot instead of Babel, because I bounced off R.F. Kuang’s Poppy War trilogy really hard. But this does not change the fact that Babel was obviously eligible and should have made the ballot. And we really need an explanation why it was declared ineligible.

Another pattern that’s really notable and that we will find throughout the ballot is the sharp drop-off in nominations. The top seven nominees – i.e. the six finalists plus Babel – received between 831 and 767 nominations. This number is much higher than usual, but then we had an influx of Chinese nominators and therefore more nomination ballots. However, the eighth place nominee, a Chinese novel entitled Age of the Godmakers (I couldn’t find out the author or anything else about this one) only got 150 nominations, 617 less than The Daughter of Doctor Moreau. This is a massive drop-off and extremely unusual.

ETA: It’s also been pointed out that in Best Novel and several other categories, the EPH numbers totalled exceed the number of total ballots cast, which should not be possible.

In Best Novella, it turns out that Becky Chambers declined a nomination for A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, which was another likely finalist conspicuous by its absence. We also have the sharp drop-off in nominations between place 5, A Mirror Mended by Alix E. Harrow with 615 nominations, and place 6, What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher with 155 nominations. The longlist consists mainly of Chinese novellas as well as High Times in the Low Parliament by Kelly Robson and The Bruising of Qilwa by Naseem Jamnia.

In Best Novelette, the eventual winner “The Space Time Painter” got twice as many nominations as the second place finalist. It’s clear that “The Space Time Painter” is a story which really spoke to the Chinese fans nominating, especially since it also referred to a famous Chinese painting. We also have a Chinese novelette called “Color the World” declared ineligible, according to Neil Clarke, because it was published in the wrong year, i.e. it really is ineligible. We also have another case of a nomination declined for “Two Hands Wrapped in Gold” by S.B. Divya, who went public about declining the nomination for political reasons several months ago.

Another oddity is that a story named “Turing Food Court” by Wang Nuonuo, which appeared in English in this anthology of Chinese science fiction, is listed in both tenth and twelfth place on the longlist and would likely have made the ballot, if the nominations had been combined.

ETA: Apparently, the double placement of “Turing Food Court” was a copy and paste error and has been resolved.

In Best Short Story, “On the Razor’s Edge”, a story which I did not particularly care for, was actually leading in nominations, followed by “Rabbit Test” by Samatha Mills, a story which spoke very much to US voters due to the repeal of Roe vs. Wade. We have another story, “Fogong Temple Pagoda” by Hai Ya (also found in this anthology) declared ineligible, which may be another case of prior publication. Though apparently, it was a 2022 publication. “Destiny Delayed” by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki was knocked out by EPH in spite of 429 nominations and like Babel gained no points throughout. However, since the longlist is mostly comprised of Chinese stories, where the nominators were likelier to nominate other Chinese stories than a story by a Nigerian author that was published in Asimov’s, this is likelier than what happened with Babel.

In Best Series, we have no nominations declined nor anything declared ineligible, but we have the strongest example of the massive drop-off in nominations on the whole ballot. The six finalist ranks had between 925 and 816 nominations, whereas the seventh placed finalist The Nsibidi Scripts a.k.a. the Akata Trilogy by Nnedi Okorafor had only 52 nominations. I’m sorry, but this pattern is so unlikely to have occurred naturally that a meteor strike hitting the convention center during the Hugo ceremony is probably more likely.

I’m also thrilled to see Elric of Melniboné by Michael Moorcock, the longest running SFF series written by a single author (the first story came out in 1961, the last story in 2023, i.e. that’s a whopping 62 years) make the longlist in twelfth place, alas with only 27 nominations. I very much championed Elric, because there are few people alive who deserve a Hugo more the Michael Moorcock and yet never got one. Elric is eligible again in 2024 due to the publication of “The Folks in the Forest” in New Edge Sword and Sorcery No. 1 (in which I have an essay, so I got to share a TOC with Michael Moorcock, so let’s get Michael Moorcock and Elric that long overdue nomination in 2024.

In Best Graphic Story, it’s notable that the eventual winner, the IMO rather unremarkable videogame tie-in comic Cyberpunk 2077: Big City Dreams as well the Dune graphic novel also got the most nominations. These works were on a recommendation list by the Chinese magazine Science Fiction World and are also apparently very popular with Chinese fans. The graphic novel Across a Field of Starlight by Blue Deliquanti, which actually sounds fascinating and would almost certainly have been a better finalist than Cyberpunk 2077 or Dune – again, just missed the ballot.

In Best Related, we have two works declared ineligible. The first is History of Chinese Science Fiction in the 20th Century, which was declared ineligible, because one of the author was on the Hugo committee. This is an absolutely valid reason to declare what was likely a worthy finalist ineligible and also appears to be a first in Hugo history. Another finalist declared ineligible was The Art of Ghosts of Tsushima, a video game related art book, due to prior publication in English. Nothing questionable about this.

We also have the drop-off in this category, though it’s not as huge as elsewhere. But “The Ghosts of Workshops Past” got 176 votes, the next highest place finalist “The Buffalito World Outreach Project” got only 34. This repeated pattern is really very unusual.

Looking further down the longlist, it’s notable that almost every nominee is actually a non-fiction book or sufficiently booklike object such as the 2022 Black Spec Fic Report. I’m also thrilled to see four books I featured as part of my non-fiction spotlight, make the longlist. There will be more non-fiction as well as fanzine and fancast spotlights in the run-up to the 2024 Hugos BTW.

In Best Dramatic Presentation Long, we have more oddities: Seasons 1 of Andor and The Sandman were both declared ineligible, because individual episodes got more votes in short form. This is standard practice and has happened before. It also turns out that Prey, a movie which not only was unexpectedly good but also a likely finalist, would have easily made the ballot, but the team behind the film decline the nomination. As one of the people who nominated Prey, I really would like to know why they declined. Political reasons? But then, Hollywood is actively chasing the big Chinese market, so that’s rather unlikely. And though the Hugos don’t have a lot of clout in Hollywood, I still find it unlikely that filmmakers wouldn’t want one, especially since genre films and TV shows are regularly snubbed at the major film and TV awards, as this recent round of “Let’s shower Oppenheimer, The Holdovers, Killers of the Flower Moon, Succession, The Bear and Beef with awards” proves.

It’s also notable that the longlist has as many complete TV seasons (Ms. Marvel, The Peripheral and Our Flag Means Death, which I fully expected to make the ballot, considering how beloved it is) as movies. I’m also really happy to see Neptune Frost, an Afrofuturist film from Rwanda, for which I co-signed an eligibility extension, just sneak onto the longlist in 15th place.

In Best Dramatic Short, things get odd again, because it turns out that an episode of The Sandman called “The Sound of Her Wings” was declared ineligible. Now season 1 of The Sandman was also declared ineligible in Best Dramatic Presentation Long, because an individual episode got more votes. However, “The Sound of Her Wings” not only was absolutely eligible, since it came out on August 5, 2022, it also got more than enough votes to make the ballot.

We also have an episode of Severance declared ineligible, because the whole season made the ballot in Long Form as well as the music video The Deep declared ineligible due to prior publication. The sharp drop-off between the first three places and place four is also notable here.

In Best Editor Long Form, the first thing that’s striking is that what traditionally is a low nomination category actually got a lot of nominations this year. Lee Harris of Tordotcom got a whopping 433 nominations, which normally would be Best Novel or Best Dramatic Presentation territory. It’s also notable that Carl Engle-Laird of Tordotcom and Priyanka Krishnan of William Morrow were both knocked out by EPH in spite of getting almost a hundred nominations more than Yao Haijun.

There’s nothing overly notable in Best Editor Short except that Jonathan Strahan, Sheila Williams and Lynne and Michael Damian Thomas were all knocked out by EPH. However, this isn’t that unusual, since all three (as well as many of those who made the ballot) are likely to be nominated by the same people.

In Best Professional Artist, we have another nomination declined by Chinese Australian artist Guo Jian. There may be political reasons for this.

There’s nothing overly unusual in Best Semiprozine except that Clarkesworld is actually a prozine and has been for years now. I’m also happy to see my friends of Space Cowboy Books Presents: Simultaneous Times to just edge onto the longlist in 15th place.

In Best Fanzine, it’s notable that the top seven nominees (the six finalists plus Black Nerd Problems) are all very close to each other with more than 200 nominations each, then we get a sharp drop-off to The Full Lid with 55 nominations and then Speculative Fiction in Translation and Runalong the Shelves with 15 nominations each. I’m sorry, but these patterns are super unusual. The last time we saw something like this was during the puppy years and even then it wasn’t this extreme..

In Best Fancast, we also have the massive drop-off between Coode Street Podcast in fourth place with 100 votes to Worldbuilding for Masochists in fifth with 56 and Kalanadi in sixth place with 20. I’m also happy to see my friends of The Skiffy and Fanty Show and If This Goes On, Don’t Panic make the longlist.

Best Fan Writer has another massive landmine, because Paul Weimer had the third highest number of nominations and yet was declared ineligible. This is complete nonsense, because Paul did plenty of fanwriting in 2022 and was obviously eligible. In fact, there are at least three nominees further down the longlist, whose eligiblity would be more in question, since they almost exclusively write for professional publications. And even that doesn’t really matter, since we have seen quite a few fan writer finalists with almost exclusively professional publications in the past few years. Paul has also confirmed that he was never contacted to clarify his eligibility, he simply was declared ineligible. He’s also understandably furious.

Also notable is that my pal Camestros Felapton was knocked out by EPH and that the pen name of finalist Arthur Liu “HeavenDuke” is misspelled as “HeavenDule”.

There are no shocking or unusual developments in Best Fan Artist, which makes it the only not even remotely controversial category on the ballot.

For the Lodestar, In the Serpent’s Wake by Rachel Hartman is actually listed twice, in fifth and seventh place. However, unlike “Turing Food Court” in Best Novelette, Rachel Hartman made the ballot anyway. Nonetheless, after taking three months to prepare the data, how can there still be such errors?

For the Astounding Award finally, we have another finalist randomly declared ineligible, namely Xiran Jay Zhao, who was on their first year of eligibility in 2022, so they should absolutely still have been eligible in 2023. Sunyi Dean also got knocked out by EPH in spite of getting the fifth highest number of votes.

***

This is the most unusual Hugo longlist I’ve ever seen, including the puppy years, and we really, really need some answers here:

Why were Babel, Paul Weimer, Xiran Jay Zhao and that Sandman episode declared ineligible, when they absolutely should have been eligible? Most of the Chinese nominees declared ineligible likely actually were ineligible due to prior publication, at least according to Neil Clarke who recognised several of the titles and authors. Though “Fogong Temple Pagoda” appears to be a 2022 publication, i.e. eligible. We definitely need answers here.

And what’s the reason behind the very strange voting patterns and sharp drop-off between first and fifteenth place nominations? Normally, this sort of pattern indicates slating, but a) EPH was supposed to reduce the impact of slates, and b) we have seen no public evidence of slates apart from a recommendation list (which is not against the rules) by Science Fiction World. And the Science Fiction World list alone does not explain these patterns.

Finally, while occasionally a nominee will fall victim to EPH, we have had several nominees knocked out by EPH, which is extremely unusual. That said, this might be explained by the very different voting patterns of Chinese and Western fans.

Nonetheless, a lot of people are justifiably angry, because these stats are a mess and make no sense at all. The conspiracy theories are already flying fast and furious. Most people seem to suspect tampering in some form.

The seemingly random ineligiblity is believed to be due to the affected nominees being considered politically undesirable in China, especially since two of the affected nominees, R.F. Kuang and Xiran Jay Zhao, are American and Canadian Chinese respectively. However, nothing I have read by R.F. Kuang suggests that she would be overly likely to criticise the Chinese government. Plus, we have other Chinese diaspora finalists on the ballot who were not declared ineligible. Nor does this explain why Paul Weimer or The Sandman or “Fogong Temple Pagoda” were declared ineligible.

ETA: One of Xiran Jay Zhao’s books apparently has an Uyghur main character, which would explain why they might be considered undesirable.

The sharp drop-offs in nomination counts seem to suggest some kind of block voting or slating, except that the phenomenon wasn’t this notable even during the puppy years. Another, nastier theory is a whole swath of nominees were removed from the ballot and their votes redistributed in order to push finalists deemed more acceptable. This also explains the absence of works we would have expected to see on the longlist. However, if this was done, then why weren’t Babel, The Sandman, Paul Weimer and Xiran Jay Zhao removed in the same way?

Anyway, we need an explanation and we need it fast, lest the conspiracy theories get out of hand.

I didn’t vote for Chengdu, but I have been willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, even as inconsistencies and issues kept piling up, because the way the Chinese fans were treated by some western fans was disgusting.

However, if there was political influence on the Hugo ballot (and note that this is a big “if” at this moment) and if Dave McCarty or Ben Yalow allowed this to happen, then fuck them and fuck Chengdu! I don’t blame any of the Chinese organisers for going along with possible political pressure, because they have to live in China and face genuine risks. But McCarty, Yalow or any other western SMOFs involved should have sounded the alarm or at the very least resigned. The Chinese government has no power over them. So shame on them, if they went along with this. Also shame on them, if they thought that burying the data would mean people wouldn’t notice the problem.

Note that this is all just theory and conjecture at this point. We don’t know for sure what happened. And this is why we need answers and an explanation and we need it now. The people who were randomly declared ineligible needs answers and the finalists who made the ballot or won also need answers, because this is tainting their nominations and wins as well, if they don’t know if they really made the ballot or won organically.

Also, we need changes to the WSFS constitution that a) if a finalist is declared ineligible, an explanation needs to be given (which I assumed already was a requirement, but apparently not). Also finalists where the eligibility is in question should be contacted and given the chance to clarify their eligibility.

ETA: Camestros Felapton also muses about possible changes to the WSFS constitution.

Finally, while I am supportive of Worldcons outside the usual US/UK/Canada/Australia/maybe western Europe corridor, potential bidders need to accept that local politics, preferences and censorship should not influence the Hugo ballot. I don’t care if Uganda or Florida (or Hungary or Russia) get their knickers in a twist about LGBTQ finalists or if Israel gets their knickers in a twist over Palestinian finalists or if a Muslim majority country gets its knickers in a twist over Jewish finalists. Your country’s politics, whatever they are, should not influence the Hugo ballot. Any potential bidder needs to accept this or they can’t host a Worldcon. And yes, I feel sorry for countries with shitty politics and shitty governments (which includes western countries at times), but in this case, I care more about the integrity of the Hugo Awards.

Also, Chengdu has just made it a lot more unlikely for any future non-western or non-traditional bid (mainly Uganda at this point, since Egypt withdrew and the Tel Aviv bid seems to be dead for all intents and purposes) to ever win a Worldcon again. This is also a slap in the face for those of us who defended Chengdu, so thanks a lot.

For more analysis and spirited discussion, see Camestros Felapton’s analysis post and the comments at File 770. There’s also a post on File 770, addressing the many oddity on the longlist.

ETA: Camestros has also posted the questions he sent to the Hugo admin team and did another dive into the data, particularly the sharp drop-off in nominations seen in many categories.

ETA: Heather Rose Jones taks a deep dive into the Hugo nomination data and the unusual vote distribution patterns and compares 2023 to several earlier years.

Cheryl Morgan also weighs in and points out that putting out nomination data which clearly indicate shenangigans may be a way of protesting what happened by making it obvious that something happened. Because if someone falsified the data, they did so very clumsily.

Aidan Moher also weighs in on the Hugo statistics at the new home of Astrolabe.

ETA: Best Fan Writer finalist Arthur Liu weighs in on Twitter and points out several other issues with the nomination data that I hadn’t noticed, not being that familiar with Chinese SFF.

Arthur Liu is also unhappy to realise he made the ballot because Paul Weimer was disqualified. And this is why all this is so infuriating and unfair, not just towards those who were declared ineligible, but also towards those who made the ballot and now question their nominations. And this is something no Hugo finalist deserves.

Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre: “In Exile”

It’s time for another Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre photo story. The name “Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre” was coined by Kevin Beckett at the Whetstone Discord server.

One of the many shocking moments in Masters of the Universe Revelation happened at the end of episode 1 after He-Man has gotten himself (as well as Skeletor) killed, while saving Eternia and the entire universe. Just before getting himself killed, he also reverts to Adam in front of Teela’s eyes, so she finally learns the secret of He-Man’s identity in the worst possible way.

Back at the royal palace, it falls to Duncan to inform the King and Queen that He-Man is dead, because everybody else (Teela, Orko and Cringer) is much too traumatised to even get a word out.

To make matters worse, King Randor still has no idea that his son was He-Man, until Marlena pretty much screams the truth into his face. Whereupon Randor decides to take out his frustration – and the realisation that he was a bad father and that the last thing he said to Adam before he went out to sacrifice himself to protect Eternia and all of the universe was that he’s never been proud of Adam – on Duncan of all people.

So Randor cuts loose, strips Duncan of his rank, banishes him from the palace and threatens to have him executed, should he ever see him again. To twist the knife even further, Randor then orders Duncan’s daughter Teela to personally kick her father out of the palace. This is the moment where Teela snaps, yells at everybody, tears off her headband and quits her post. Duncan, meanwhile, just passively accepts everything with a resigned, “Yes, Your Majesty.”

It’s a shocking moment – and it comes on the heels of another massive shock, since we just saw Adam/He-Man being disintegrated – because Revelation really wants to punch us in the gut. For starters, Duncan isn’t just Randor’s right-hand man and general of the Eternian army. No, Randor and Duncan are friends and have been friends since they were teenagers. They’ve fought side by side and back to back, they share meals and eat at the same table. They’re more than friends, they’re family, something which is even spelled out in the dialogue at the beginning of the episode. So for Randor to lash out at his best friend is shocking, even if he is grieving the loss of his only son.

But Randor doesn’t just lash out at Duncan – which might be understandable, given the circumstances – no, there’s also a nasty streak of cruelty in what he does to Duncan. For starters, no one in Eternia has ever been threatened with execution, neither Skeletor, who is a truly horrible person and kills a shitload of people in Revelation, nor any of his Evil Warriors nor King Hiss and his Snake People nor Hordak (though to be fair, he spends most of his time on Etheria) nor lesser villains like Count Marzo. In fact, Eternia does not appear to have the death penalty, probably because Masters of the Universe was intended for children, so death penalty references would have been unsuitable and disturbing, though that sure as hell did not stop whoever wrote the live-action Disney movie about a heroic dog in which a random kidnapper is threatened with the electric chair “because of the Lindberg baby”, which prompted my kid self to ask my parents some very uncomfortable questions regarding what an electric chair is. After they explained to me what an electric chair was, I said, “But that must hurt terribly.”

Interestingly, there is one death penalty reference in an episode of the Filmation cartoon of all things, where we learn that in darker chapters of Eternia’s past, criminals were executed by exposing them to a fast-growing black monster fungus called the Creeping Horak, which overgrows everything and eventually suffocates its victims. Evil-Lyn manages to get her hands on a sample and throws it into the Royal Palace, almost killing Duncan, Teela, Orko, King Randor and Queen Marlena (as well as a bunch of guards, servants, etc…), until He-Man finds a way to stop it. The idea is very disturbing, particularly for a kids’ cartoon, and I’m surprised that writer Marc Scott Zicree got away with it. That said, it is made very clear that the Creeping Horak is something that was used in Eternia’s past and that modern day Eternians find the practice abhorrent. Now I don’t believe that Randor would actually have made true of his threat and that he would have had his lifelong friend Duncan executed, whether by Creeping Horak or more conventional means. But the threat is bad enough, especially considering it is never once hurled at Skeletor (he’s usually threatened with spending the rest of his life in the royal dungeon). Yet Randor would do that to Duncan of all people.

To make matters even worse, Randor not only strips Duncan off his rank and kicks him out of the palace (and orders Duncan’s own daughter to kick him out, except that Teela refuses), but also forbids him from building any weapons or as much as welding two pieces of metal together on pain of death. Considering Duncan is both a soldier and an inventor and has never been anything else, Randor has not just banished him but also taken away any means of making a living. He’s basically condemned Duncan to either poverty and working illegally or both. And since it’s implied, though never stated outright (except in the Netflix CGI series, where the characters are quite different from their usual versions) that Duncan does not come from a privileged background, but rose through the ranks due to his courage and his skills, this makes Randor’s actions still worse, because he’s basically telling Duncan, “I picked you up from the gutter and I can throw you back any time I feel like it.” Interestingly, Skeletor says something very similar to Evil-Lyn (who is a street kid in this version). He reminds her that he picked her up from the gutter and strongly implies that he can throw her back at any time. Honestly, what Randor does to Duncan, the man who was his best friend for decades, is so staggeringly cruel that I wonder whether Keldor got his cruel streak solely from his mother or whether King Miro contributed some of it.

Now Randor is never a particularly likeable character, because he’s not meant to be. Randor’s purpose in any version of Masters of the Universe is to be the distant and cold parent who doesn’t understand or even see his children for who they are. The portrayal of Randor varies quite a bit over the years. The Randor from the Netflix CGI series is the best father, whereas the Randor from the 2002 series is the best king (and probably the best Randor over all, since he isn’t that terrible of a father either). Meanwhile, Revelation Randor is the worst of the bunch by far.

But one thing that has remained constant is that Randor is always in conflict with Adam, that he is perpetually disappointed and cannot or will not see his son for who he is. This is something that a lot of people can relate to – and indeed part of the reason why Masters of the Universe is so enduringly popular is that we can relate to the characterss and their conflicts, even if we do not have a magical sword that will turn us into a superhero. So Randor’s role is that of the parent who doesn’t see or understand (and who occasionally learns better). Meanwhile, the role of the supportive parent is fulfilled by Duncan in most versions of the story (and by Cringer in the CGI series).

This is also the true reason why Randor lashes out at Duncan. Not because Duncan failed to protect Adam, since no one could have stopped Adam from doing what needed to be done anyway, but because Randor realises that not only was he a complete failure as a father, but that Duncan was more of a father to Adam than Randor ever was. Indeed, it’s notable that Randor lashes out at all the people (in the widest sense of the word) that Adam loved, namely Duncan, Orko and Cringer (and he probably would have turned his anger on Teela eventually, too), which is one hell of a way to honour his son’s memory. It also shows that Randor still doesn’t understand Adam, if he even remotely believes that this is something Adam would have wanted.

It’s also very telling that the usual aggrieved fanboys (and they’re all male) complain about Teela’s actions in Revelation, that she is rude and angry and quits her post in a huff, but that absolutely no one seems to have any problems with Randor’s utterly terrible behaviour. Also, most people seem to forget that Duncan was dealing with a massive amount of guilt himself. After all, he deeply cared about Adam and clearly blames himself for failing to protect him.

Masters of the Universe: Revelation never delves into what happened to Duncan after he was kicked out of the palace. The next time we see him is in episode 3, set several years later, where he is living in exile in a little cottage in the country with Orko (another victim of Randor’s rage) and Roboto and occasionally teaches the local punks some manners. However, I find it hard to believe that Duncan would just sit around in his cottage and occasionally beat up lowlives for several years, cause that’s not who he is. And indeed he sports an impressive arsenal, once Teela enlists his help on her quest.

Issue 2 of the Masterverse comic miniseries by Dark Horse does offer us a glimpse at what Duncan was doing in between episodes 1 and 3 of Masters of the Universe: Revelation. The comic is an anthology series, featuring many different versions of He-Man and his supporting cast, tied to together by a framing story of the Sorceress and Zodac gazing into the multiverse. One of these segments is called “Man-at-Arms For Hire”, written Tim Seeley with art by Victor Santos, and features a disgraced and depressed Duncan working as a hardboiled private detective in a noir style story. And Duncan’s assistant is none other than Evil-Lyn, who we know has a soft spot for him.

The story is very short, only 15 pages, but a lot of fun and I would love to see more of Duncan and Lyn working together, solving crimes. And who knows, maybe I will eventually do a toy photo story inspired by that comic.

But for now, enjoy this story of Duncan and his little found family receiving an unexpected visitor…

In Exile

In Duncan’s workshop in his cabin somewhere in the wilds of Eternia…

“And then I said, ‘With all due respect, Your Majesty – not that I think you’re due any – you can kiss my…”

“Malcolm, please tell me you didn’t tell the King to kiss your arse?”

“Oh, I was very polite. I said butt.”

“Sigh. Malcolm, you’re unbelievable.”

“Why? What’s Randor going to do to me? Kick me out? He’s barely got any Heroic Warriors and Royal Guards left, since almost everybody quit.”

“The King could do much worse than that.”

“What? Chop off my head? I’d like to see him try. I could take Randor when he was just a snot-nosed cadet and I can still take him now.”

“Well, if that isn’t my favourite disgraced weapons master… and his idiotic brother.”

“You didn’t tell me you were expecting a visitor, brother.”

“Because I wasn’t.”

“Malcolm, would you mind doing whatever it is you’re doing when you’re not bothering your brother and leave us alone?”

“Be seeing you, brother. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. Come on, Roboto.”

“But Father said…”

“Roboto, sometimes grown-ups want to be left alone to do grown-up things, no matter what they say.”

“Malcolm, Roboto, wait!”

“Why, Duncan, no hello and how are you for an old enemy?”

“What do you want, Lyn? And make it quick, cause I’m busy.”

“That’s so typical of you, Duncan. Always in a hurry, even though you no longer have a job. Won’t you at least offer a girl a drink? No? Then I’ll just take whatever Malcolm’s been having.”

“Come to the point, Lyn.”

“The point is Tri-Klops is up to something.”

“Tri-Klops is always up to something. He was trouble even before he joined up with Keldor.”

“This is different. Tri-Klops and Trap Jaw have taken over Snake Mountain and they’re assembling an army.”

“Not who I would have expected to come out on top in the power struggle to fill the vaccuum left by Skeletor’s… disappearance.”

“You can say ‘death’, you know? Skeletor is dead. Just like… well, you know who.”

“I’m actually surprised you didn’t take over Snake Mountain and what’s left of Skeletor’s army. Of all his lieutenants, you were always the most capable.”

“A compliment, Duncan? How sweet! But I never wanted Snake Mountain or Skeletor’s forces. Do you honestly think I liked being stuck in the dark hemisphere in that grisly old fortress with a bunch of idiots?”

“Then why do you care if Tri-Klops and Trap Jaw have taken it over?”

“If it were just Snake Mountain, I wouldn’t care. Tri-Klops is welcome to that old pile of rocks. But he and Trap Jaw are up to something. They’re gathering an army, they’re kidnapping peasants to bolster their ranks and Tri-Klops… well, I know it sounds weird, but he seems to have found religion and is now serving some kind of goddess called Motherboard. Also, he stole something that belongs to me”

“Again, Lyn, was does that have to do with me?”

“Ahem, Tri-Klops and Trap Jaw are kidnapping people and building up an army to do Horokoth knows what. Once upon a time, that would have been enough to spur you into action.”

“That time is past. Or have you forgotten that I’m banished by royal decree?”

“Once upon a time, that wouldn’t have stopped you. You would have gone out and done what needed to be done, Randor be damned.”

“I could be executed…”

“That never stopped you either. You’ve stared death in the face more times than I can count. And besides, we both know that Randor doesn’t have the guts.”

“Besides, you’ve been violating the King’s decree anyway and are building weapons again.”

“Lyn, I…”

“Don’t worry, Duncan, your secret is safe with me. I won’t rat you out to Randor, if only because I don’t fancy spending the rest of my life in the royal dungeon. So what are you building?”

“It’s a long range high intensity plasma cannon. It fires…”

“That’s a very big gun.”

“Lyn, that’s not…”

“That’s the only big gun I’m interested in right now, Duncan.”

“Lyn, no.”

“Why not? I know you want it, too.”

“It… it’s not right.”

“Why not? Skeletor is dead. He-Man is dead. Randor kicked you out of the palace. Teela has run off to Horokoth knows where. Grayskull, Snake Mountain, none of that matters anymore. What’s stopping us?”

“Man-at-Arms, Man-at-Arms, I tried to make rain to water the garden and it worked – well, sort of.”

“What the…?”

“Sigh. Saved at the last instant.”

“Uhm, am I interrupting anything?”

“Yes.”

“Uhm, hello Evil-Lyn. Long time no see.”

“What are you doing here, imbecile?”

“Ahem, I live here. What are you doing here? You weren’t attacking us, were you?”

“I was consulting Lyn on a matter of… ahem… magic.”

“And you didn’t ask me first? After all, I’m the royal court magician. Well, ex-royal court magician.”

“Well, if you’d rather spend your time with washed-up would-be mages than with me, then so be it. If you change your mind and want to experience some real magical fireworks, you know where to find me. Be seeing you, Duncan.”

“I’m sorry for interrupting you, Man-at-Arms. But I was so excited that my magic works again. Though I’m afraid I flooded the vegetable garden.”

“It’s all right, Orko. In fact, you just saved my life and my honour.”

“Yes, that Evil-Lyn is sure dangerous.”

“Trust me, Orko, you have no idea.”

“Well, Lyn sure left quickly, brother. I must say you used to have more stamina.”

“Father, the vegetable garden is flooded, even though there was no rain forecast.”

“Malcolm, never ever leave me alone with that woman again.”

“Why not, brother? Lyn likes you. She always has. And she has cut all ties with Snake Mountain. Yes, she’s still a thief, but then she’s never been anything else. And besides, what does it matter? You deserve some happiness.”

“Malcolm, just… shut up, please.”

“Blue balls are clearly making grumpy, brother. All the more reason to take up Lyn on her offer.”

“Malcolm…”

“Yes, I’ll shut up.”

“Uhm, Roboto, about the garden…”

***

That’s it for today, folks. I hope you enjoyed this Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre Photo Story, because there will be more. Especially since I not only got a bunch of new toys, but we also have the new Masters of the Universe: Revolution cartoon coming up (trailer here) soon with Lyn fighting on the side of the good guys and quite possibly more sparks flying between her and Duncan.

Disclaimer: I don’t own any of these characters, I just bought some toys, took photos of them and wrote little scenes to go with those photos. All characters are copyright and trademark their respective owners.

A handy guide to all SFF-related posts and works of 2023

I never felt particularly comfortable with eligibility posts, but I posted such an overview for the first time in 2016, when someone added my name to the Hugo Nominations Wiki. Eventually, it paid off, because I was a Hugo finalist for Best Fan Writer in 2020, 2021 and 2022 and won in 2022.

So if you’re interested in what I write, here is an overview of all SFF related blogposts of 2023, in chronological order, as well as a list of all the SFF and other fiction I published.

Because I did so many Fanzine/Fancast/Non-Fiction Spotlight interviews, I separated the Spotlights from the other blogposts. I also separated the Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre Toy Photo Stories from the rest of the blogposts.

That said, I have a shiny rocket on my shelf and there are many highly deserving fan writers who have never even been nominated, let alone won. Therefore, I’d like to ask folks to nominate some of those other great folks.

Finally, I know that there are people out there who don’t like me and don’t like what I have to say. That’s okay, no one has to like me and my work. But if you don’t like my work, just don’t read it. There’s no need to send harassment mobs my way.

And if you think you’re going to silence me, think again. Cause it’s not going to work.

At this blog:

The Mandalorian and Baby Grogu are back and have become “The Apostate”Some Comments on the 2022 Nebula Award FinalistsOscars Everywhere All At Once – Some Thoughts on the 2023 Academy Award WinnersRemembering John Jakes (1932 -2023)The Mandalorian and Baby Grogu Visit “The Mines of Mandalore”The Mandalorian and Baby Grogu step aside for “The Convert”The Mandalorian and Baby Grogu delve into the backstory of “The Foundling”The Mandalorian and Baby Grogu deal with “The Pirate”The Mandalorian and Baby Grogu solve a mystery in “Guns For Hire”The Mandalorian and Baby Grogu return to Mandalore and meet “The Spies”An Open Letter to the 2023 Hugo Finalists, Whoever They May BeThe Mandalorian and Baby Grogu Celebrate “The Return”Some Thoughts on the 2022 Nebula Award WinnersCora’s Adventures at Metropol Con in Berlin, Part 1: Pre-Con WanderingsCora’s Adventures at Metropol Con in Berlin, Part 2: The ConSame Old Debate, New Clothes: The Cozy Horror ControversyThe 2023 July Short Story Challenge – Day by DaySome Thoughts on the 2023 Hugo FinalistsFoundation Finds Itself “In the Seldon’s Shadow” at the Start of Season 2Foundation Gets “A Glimpse of Darkness” and Introduces Some Major PlayersFoundation meets “King and Commoner” and swears a lotThe 2023 Dragon Award Finalists: Mostly Good with a OdditiesFoundations Goes “Where the Stars Are Scattered Thinly” and largely treads waterFoundation meets “The Sighted and the Seen” and has nothing whatsoever to do with the booksFoundation explains “Why the Gods Made Wine” and still has next to nothing to do with the booksFoundation Experiences “A Necessary Death”Some Comments on the 2023 Dragon Award WinnersFoundation Discovers “The Last Empress”Foundation travels “Long Ago, Not Far Away” and blows up its own premiseMy Dad, Addy Buhlert (1938 – 2023)Foundation explores “Creation Myths” and ends season 2Some Comments on the 2023 Hugo WinnersA Bouquet of Mixed Links and Two Estranged BrothersThe 2023 Darth Vader Parenthood Award for Outstandingly Horrible Fictional ParentsThe 2023 Jonathan and Martha Kent Fictional Parent of the Year Awardas well as twelve regular editions and four holiday editions of Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month and Indie Crime Fiction of the Month

The Complete Fanzine/Fancast/Semiprozine/Non-Fiction Spotlights:

Semiprozine Spotlight: Wyngraf Magazine of Cozy FantasySemiprozine Spotlight: New Edge Sword and Sorcery MagazineFanzine Spotlight: SMOF NewsFanzine Spotlight: Remembrance of Things Past and FutureFancast Spotlight: ChrononautsSemiprozine Spotlight: Hexagon Speculative Fiction MagazineNon-Fiction Spotlight: Brian W. Aldiss and Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood: A Critical Companion by Paul KincaidNon-Fiction Spotlight: The Life and Art of Dave Cockrum by Glen CadiganNon-Fiction Spotlight: Fight, Magic, Items: The History of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and the Rise of Japanese RPGs in the West by Aidan MoherNon-Fiction Spotlight: Hither Came Conan, edited by Bob Byrne, Bill Ward, Howard Andrew Jones and Jason M. WaltzNon-Fiction Spotlight: D20 or Die!: Memories of Old School Role-Playing Games from Today’s Grown-Up Kids, edited by Jim Beard

The Complete Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre Toy Photo Stories:

Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre: “Wun-Dar and His Wonderful Dinosaur”Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre: “Held Hostage”.Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre: “Cat Fight”.Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre: “The Prisoner of Castle Grayskull”Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre Double Feature: “Precious” and “The Broken Sword”Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre: “The Story of Keldor (In His Own Words)”Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre: “Adam’s Day Out”Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre: “Playing for Dinner”Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre: “The Prisoner of Castle Grayskull Revisited”Two Links and a Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre Double Feature: “New Dad” and “Orko Interruptus”Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre Pride Month Special: “Ambush in the Mystic Mountains”Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre: “Artistic License”Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre: “The Uninvited Guest”Masters-of-the-Universe-Piece Theatre: “The Maiden and the Monster”

At Galactic Journey:

“The Return of the Dynamic Duo: The Swords of Lankhmar by Fritz Leiber” in Alyx and Company (January 1968 Galactoscope)“Buddha os a Spaceman: Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny” and “Looting the Pharaohs: Easy Go by John Lange” in In Distant Lands (March 1968 Galactoscope)In Unquiet Times: The Frankfurt Arson Attacks, the Shooting of Rudi Dutschke and Electronic Labyrinth THX-1138 4EBAdventures for a Dime: Science Fiction and Horror Dime Novels in West Germany“The Long Con: God Save the Mark by Donald E. Westlake” in Dangerous Visions (Not Those Dangerous Visions!) (September 1968 Galactoscope)The Further Adventures of the Cimmerian: Conan of the Isles by Lin Carter and L. Sprague De Camp and the Lancer Conan Series in General“A King on the Run: The Goblin Tower by L. Sprague De Camp” in Adventure and Eulogies (December Galactoscope)

Elsewhere:

“Between Cynism and Faith” in Asimov’s Foundation and Philosophy: Psychohistory and Its Discontents, edited by Joshua Heter and Josef Thomas Simpson“Cele Goldsmith Lalli – Midwife to the Second Sword and Sorcery Boom” in New Edge Sword and Sorcery Magazine No. 1: Fall 2023

Podcast appearances:

“Readalong: The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett” in SFFAudio Podcast #715“Readalong: Binary by Michael Crichton” in SFFAudio Podcast #717“Readalong: The Star King by Jack Vance” in SFFAudio Podcast #719“Readalong: Drug of Choice by Michael Crichton” in SFFAudio Podcast #723“Audiobook/Readalong: ‘The Isle of Pirate’s Doom’ by Robert E. Howard” in SFFAudio Podcast #726“A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine, featuring Cora Buhlert” in Hugos There #75“Readalong: Easy Go by Michael Crichton” in SFFAudio Podcast #730“Readalong: The Black Priestess of Varda by Erik Fennel” in SFFAudio Podcast #732“Audiobook/Readalong: ‘The Black Stranger’ by Robert E. Howard” in SFFAudio Podcast #734Season 3, episode 7 of Stars End: A Foundation Podcast“Audiobook/Readalong: ‘Shadows in Zamboula’ by Robert E. Howard” in SFFAudio Podcast #726“Audiobook/Readalong: Space Viking by H. Beam Piper” in SFFAudio Podcast #747“The Golden Age of Science Fiction with Cora Buhlert” in Seldon Crisis, Season 3, Episode 43“Readalong: The Venom Business by Michael Crichton” in SFFAudio Podcast #749“Audiobook/Readalong: Unseen—Unfeared by Francis Stevens” in SFFAudio Podcast #751“Audiobook/Readalong: Four-Day Planet by H. Beam Piper” in SFFAudio Podcast #754“Readalong: Odds On by Michael Crichton” in SFFAudio Podcast #757“A Conversation about The Beatles ‘Now and Then'” in Light On Light Through“Foundation 2nd Season: Cora Buhlert, Joel McKinnon, and Paul Levinson discuss” in Light On Light Through“Sci-Fi Hall of Fame Stories Discussion Panel #1: “Martian Odessey” by Stanley G. Weinbaum” in Postcards From a Dying World #127“Readalong: Logan’s Run by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson” in SFFAudio Podcast #764

Fiction (SFF):

“Homecoming Gift” in Wyngraf Magazine (flash fiction)“Astrocast Flashes: Bug-eyed Monsters and the Women Who Love Them” in Waystation Amateur Magazine of Space Opera (flash fiction, reprint)“Rest My Weary Bones” in Swords and Sorcery Magazine Issue 138, August 2023 (short story)“A Cry on the Battlefield” in The Little Cozy Book: A Cozy Fantasy Flash Fiction Anthology from Wyngraf (flash fiction, reprint)“We need to talk…” in Simultaneous Times Volume 3, edited by Jean-Paul L. Garnier (short story, reprint)

The 2023 Jonathan and Martha Kent Fictional Parent of the Year Award

While I have been awarding the Darth Vader Parenthood Award for Outstandingly Horrible Fictional Parents for 43 years now, the Jonathan and Martha Kent Fictional Parent of the Year Award is a new prize that I only introduced in 2020 as a companion piece to the Darth Vader Parenthood Award. The 2020 winner may be found here, the 2021 winner here and the 2022 winner here.

As for why I felt the need to introduce a companion award, depictions of parenthood in popular culture have been undergoing a paradigm shift in the past few years with more positive portrayals of supportive and loving parents and fewer utterly terrible parents. Personally, I believe that this shift is a very good thing, because the reason that I started the Darth Vader Parenthood Award in the first place is because I was annoyed by all the terrible parents in pop culture. For while most real world parents may not be perfect, at least they do their best. Maybe, the conditions that gave rise to the Darth Vader Parenthood Award will eventually cease to exist and we can permanently retire the award.

Warning: Spoilers for lots of things behind the cut!

Therefore, let’s give a big hand to all the good parents in pop culture that we have seen this year. As in the last two years, there were plenty of viable candidates, more than for the Darth Vader Parenthood Award, and selecting the winner was a difficult choice.

So let’s have a brief rundown of the candidates who did not quite make it:

A Marvel character won the 2023 Darth Vader Parenthood Award, but the Marvel Cinematic and TV Universe also continued to yield many positive portrayals of parenthood and indeed the claims that all Marvel heroes have daddy issues no longer hold true, if they ever were. Besides, as I explained yesterday, there is a reason why the Marvel Cinematic and TV Universe focusses so much on parents.

So let’s take a look at the good parents of Marvel.

For some reason, The Marvels is considered the biggest flop of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which is unfair, because it’s actually a pretty good film, better than several other recent Marvel offerings. However, The Marvels also marked the return of Kamala Khan’s Pakistani-American parents Yusuf and Muneeba Khan and her brother Aamir and they’re still as lovable and chaotic as ever. And yes, it’s always gratifying to see a positive portrayal of a Muslim family in pop culture, since way too many portrayals of Muslim families in pop culture still serve up the same old hoary clichés of abusive fathers and brothers imprisoning and controlling and sometimes honour-killing their daughters and sisters, while the mothers look on and tacitly approve. Even though we’ve all seen that film (and come to think of it, I’m surprised that the parents of Yasemin didn’t win the 1988 Darth Vader Parenthood Award, but then I clearly disliked Douglas Channing more), seen it several times in fact. Therefore, it’s always good to see loving families who just happen to be Muslim.

The Marvels also delved into the relationship between Carol Danvers and Monica Rambeau, since Carol initially was Monica’s honourary aunt and helped Maria parent her (whether there was anything more to the relationship between Carol and Maria remains unsaid) and then buggered off into outer space and only returned when Monica was already an adult and had lost her own mother to cancer. Also, at the end of The Marvels, Monica is reunited with an alternate universe version of her mother, because Multiverses are like that.

Another Marvel parent who debuted in Captain Marvel is the Skrull leader Talos and his daughter G’iah. Talos and G’hia returned in the little seen (and not very good) TV-series Secret Invasion, with the now grown-up G’iah played by Emilia Clarke and estranged from her father.  Their relationship is complicated and then cut short when Talos is killed.

The Ant-Man films have always been among the most family-focussed Marvel offerings. Sadly, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was less focussed on the family banter and interplay, which made the first two Ant-Man films so enjoyable, and more on the Quantum Realm and Kang the Conqueror, who was set to be Marvel‘s next Big Bad, until Kang actor Jonathan Majors was revealed to be a domestic abuser. The movie was also not very good, though it did give us some nice moments between Scott Lang and his now teenaged daughter Cassie as well as Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne and their daughter Hope, just not enough for an award.

Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 gave us the winner of the 2023 Darth Vader Parenthood Award, but it also gave us Drax and Nebula adopting the genetically modified children the High Evolutionary, undisputed winner of the 2023 Darth Vader Parenthood Award for Outstandingly Horrible Fictional Parents, created and was about to kill.

Over in the animated corner of the Marvel Multiverse, particularly the Spider-Verse, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse gave us police officer Jefferson Davis, the unfortunately named (honestly, what were they thinking?) but loving and protective father of Miles Morales.

Finally, in the comic corner of the Marvel Universe (yes, Marvel still published comics) we experienced the until now unheard of phenomenon of a former Darth Vader Parenthood Award winner throwing their hat in the ring for the Jonathan and Martha Kent Fictional Parent of the Year Award. Because fairly late in the year, the comic X-Men Blue Origins #1 retconned the parentage of Kurt Wagner a.k.a. Nigthcrawler yet again to reveal that he is the biological child of Raven Darkholme a.k.a. Mystique (which we’ve known since the early 1990s) and Irene Adler a.k.a. Destiny (and yes, it has since been confirmed that she is that Irene Adler, the one who made Sherlock Holmes fall for her, only that Mystique was posing as Holmes). Now the fact that Mystique is bisexual and has been in a longterm relationship with Destiny is not exactly news either, since it has been strongly implied since the 1980s that these two were a couple (and they even had an adopted kid in Rogue), only that the censorship standards of the time meant that the writers couldn’t straight up say it. After all, we knew that Northstar was gay long since before it was officially confirmed, too. Anyway, Kurt has two Mommies and Mystique is not just his mother but also his biological father, since she is a shapshifter after all, which is new. As for why Kurt takes after Mystique rather than Irene, well, Mystique wanted a baby who looks like her. Plus, Kurt and Mystique get along really well these days, which is a far cry from the shitty behaviour towards Kurt and Graydon Creed (remember him?) that earned her a Darth Vader Parenthood Award back in 1994.

As their names are called out, the various Marvel character around the auditorium cheer and stand up. Mystique and Kurt are present as well, sitting next to each other and clearly enjoying themselves. Kurt is wearing a tuxedo and Mystique is wearing a stunning white evening gown.

Yes, these are my nigh thirty years old ToyBiz figures. Never had the Marvel Legends version and they’re ridiculously expensive by now. Unfortunately, they don’t scale with any version of Keldor I have.

Keldor, who’s still here, since he got drunk with Tyrion Lannister after yesterday’s ceremony and hasn’t yet made it back to Eternia, leaves Tyrion to his ale and sits down next to Mystique and Kurt.

“Excuse me for interrupting, but up to now I had no idea that there were Gar on Earth.”

“Well, I have no idea what a Gar is. My son and I are mutants. Is that what they call people like us where you’re from?”

“A feared and hated minority, mistrusted for merely existing. ‘Gar’ is one of the nicer things they call us.”

“Oh, believe me, I know all about being a feared and hated and mistrusted minority on my world. And you and I, my new friend, should talk. In private, if you take my meaning…”

Mystique gives him a look that’s pure invitation. Keldor smiles in return and we’re pretty sure Evil-Lyn won’t like this. Neither does Kurt, since he tugs on Mystique’s gown.

“Listen, I’ve only just come to terms with the fact that you’re my mother as well as my father. I’ve accepted that you felt the need to give me away and abandon. I’ve accepted that you never felt the need to give Rogue away. Heavens, I’ve accepted that you’ve slept with half the people in this room…”

Mystique looks around the room. “Oh, my sweet summer child, it’s considerably more than that*.”

Kurt blushes furiously, though we have no idea how that’s even possible, considering he’s blue.

“And now go and play with your friends, Kurt, my dear, and let me and – excuse me, what was your name again?”

“Keldor of the House of Miro, soon to be High King of Eternia.”

“It’s a pleasure. I am Raven Darkholme, sometimes of the House of M and sometimes of the House of X, but mostly my own.”

They smile at each other and get up. Mystique waves at Kurt.

“Have fun, Kurt. Mommy will be busy for a few hours.”

As Mystique and Keldor leave together, Tyrion finally wakes from his slumber and notices that his drinking companion is gone. He waves at Kurt.

“Hey, blue fellow there, want to share a cup of ale with me?”

Kurt sighs. “I could sure use one. Parents…”

“Tell me about it, pal.”

***

After that unexpected interlude of cross-universe interaction, let’s take a look at the DC side of things. DC had several movies out this year as well, though most of them flopped and no one seems to have liked them much. That said, we did have some good parents figures in the DC Cinematic Universe.

Billy Batson and his loveable and chaotic foster family, all of them with superpowers of their own, returned in Shazam: Fury of the Gods, a movie that sadly sank without a trace. Another DC movie that sank without a trace, even less deserved than Shazam: Fury of the Gods, was Blue Beetle, which gave us Jaime Reyes delightful and loving family with parents Rocio and Alberto (who sadly does not survive the film – RIP), grandmother Nana and sister Milagro.

The Flash focussed a lot on Barry Allen breaking the Multiverse (yeah, he tends to do that) in order to save the life of his mother Nora and save his father Henry from being wrongfully imprisoned. Now I couldn’t be bothered to watch The Flash, but Henry and Nora are usually portrayed as loving parents.

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom reintroduced us to Jason Momoa’s take on Arthur Curry a.k.a. Aquaman who has married Mera and is now father of a little boy named Arthur Jr. The kidnapping of Arthur Jr. and Arthur Sr.’s quest to rescue his son are what sets the plot in motion.

Over in the animated corner of the DC Universe, My Adventures With Superman not only gave us a delightful fresh new take on Clark, Lois and Jimmy, but also reintroduced us to the very characters this award is named for, Jonathan and Martha Kent. And yes, they’re great parents as always. We also get an ambiguous take on General Sam Lane, who has a difficult relationship with his daughter Lois and makes Martha Kent angry, as well as a version of Jor-El who seems to be gunning for the Darth Vader Parenthood Award in a surprising development.

Let’s move away from the DC Universe and visit the Star Trek Universe. Star Trek Picard has featured on the longlist for the Jonathan and Martha Kent Fictional Parent of the Year Award since its inception, but 2023 was the year that Jean-Luc Picard finally became a father himself, when it was revealed that Beverly Crusher had born his son Jack twentysomething years before, something that Jean-Luc was utterly unaware of. Star Trek Picard turning into The Starfleet Captain’s Secret Baby was certainly unexpected, though in the end Jean-Luc Picard did not win the award against stiff competition.

Over in the Star Wars Universe, Ahsoka gave us the live action debut of Hera Syndulla, Rebellion/New Republic and loving single mom of Jacen, the result of a relationship with the Jedi knigth Kanan Jarrus. Yeah, we always knew Anakin wasn’t the only Jedi who ignored the celibacy oath.

Our inaugural winner in 2020, Din Djarin from The Mandalorian also returned in 2023 and not only continued to be a great Dad to Grogu, but also finally formally adopted Grogu to the Armourer’s exasperated “THIS is a the way”, so Din and Grogu are now officially a family as well.

Din is sitting in the front row in full beskar armour with Grogu on his lap. When their names are mentioned, Grogu waves to the audience.

And I would have been happy to award Din again, except that he already had his bite of the pie (quite literally) back in 2020 and there are so many other deserving parents that I don’t want to double dip.

Upon hearing that there will be no pie this year, Grogu’s ear droop.

Which brings us to the 2023 runner-up, a candidate who emerged very early in the year and remained in the lead for a long time. Indeed, it was a head to head race and a very narrow win. So the runner-up for the 2023 Jonathan and Martha Kent Fictional Parent of the Year Award is…

Drumroll

Joel Miller

Portrayed by Pedro Pascal in the TV series The Last of Us and Troy Baker in the eponymous video game, Joel is the single father of teenager Sarah, when an outbreak of the fungal cordyceps infection causes the zombie apocalypse and a nigh complete breakdown of civilisation. Sarah is killed during the initial outbreak, shot dead by a soldier who mistakes Joel and Sarah for infected, and Joel becomes an embittered survivor and smuggler in a brave and ugly new world.

Fast forward twenty years, when Joel, who has closed himself off against all emotions, suddenly finds himself in charge of ferrying teenager Ellie, who happens to be immune against cordyceps, across a post-apocalyptic America. Joel initially tries to keep his distance, but eventually bonds with Ellie and adopts her as his own. And when he finds out why the rebel group Fireflies really wants Ellie, well let’s just say it doesn’t end well for the Fireflies, because Joel will do everything to protect his girl.

That sort of paternal dedication in the face of the harshest circumstances imaginable deserves an award and therefore, I am proud to declare Joel Miller the runner-up for the 2023 Jonathan and Martha Kent Fictional Parent of the Year Award.

Applause

As applause erupts in auditorium, Ellie hugs Joel and jumps up and down in her seat, cheering. Joel is a little befuddled by events, until Ellie pushed him towards the stage.

So Joel mounts the stage, clad in jeans, boots, a flannel shirt and fur-lined leather jacket. Ellie is wearing jeans, a flannel shirt and a hoodie, because a post-apocalyptic world doesn’t offer too many options for clothes shopping.

As Joel ascends to the stage, Grogu starts pointing at him and yelling, “Da, da, da”, much to Din Djain’s confusion.

After being presented with Martha Kent’s famous apple pie, Joel delivers the following acceptance speech:

Uhm, thank you. I… I’m not quite sure what I’m even doing here.

Yes, I’m a Dad and I protect my kid, cause that’s what Dads do. I don’t think there’s anything special, let alone award-worthy about that. I’m just a Dad, doing what a Dad does.

And yes, I failed my Sarah and lost her. But then the universe sent me Ellie and gave me a second chance and for that I’m so grateful.

As for the Fireflies, FEDRA and anybody else who wants Ellie, if you want my girl, you have to go through me first, Cause if we have to sacrifice even one kid to save the world, then maybe the world is not worth saving.

Thank you.

Joel accepts the pie from Martha Kent and eyes it sceptically. “Are you sure there’s no cordyceps contamination in there, ma’am. Cause I have a kid and don’t want to endanger her.”

“Young man, I have no idea what a cordyceps is, but I can assure you that this pie is made only with the best purest wheat, eggs, butter, milk and apples from the Kent family farm in Kansas.”

At this moment, Ellie spots the pie and helps herself to a slice. “Mmm, pie.”

Joel sighs. “Well, never mind.”

At this point, Din Djarin and a very excited Grogu walk up to Joel, Ellie and Martha. Grogu is still exclaiming “Da, da, da”, while looking from Din to Joel and back again, very confused.

Din turns to Joel. “Do I know you from somewhere? Cause you look familiar.”

“I don’t know. Maybe from the Boston QZ. Or maybe from…” Joel looks over his shoulder. “…the Fireflies. Or did we meet back in Austin before the evacuation?”

“I have never been to any of those places”, Din says solemnly, “Have you ever been to Nevarro?”

“Is that in Texas? Cause I don’t think so. I like your armour by the way. I’m sure it offers excellent protection against zombie bites.”

“My people never take off their armour, cause this is the way.”

While their Dads are talking, Ellie is digging into the pie and Grogu is helping himself to a slice as well by levitating it into his mouth, which catches the attention of Ellie, who exclaims, “Aren’t you the cutest little thing? Can I hold him?”

Din nods. “Just don’t drop him.”

“And don’t let him bite you”, Joel adds.

Ellie cuddles Grogu, while Din turns to Joel. “So yours is a foundling, too. She seems like a good child.”

Joel nods. “Yes, I found her and kept her. She’s mine now.”

Din nods approvingly. “This is the way.”

***

After this heartwarming reuniong of loving father played by Pedro Pascal, let’s get on to the  main event, the winner of the 2023 Jonathan and Martha Kent Fictional Parent of the Year Award.

I have to say that this is one winner who utterly surprised, because if you would have told me last year that this particular character would win the 2023 Jonathan and Martha Kent Fictional Parent of the Year Award, I would have thought you were crazy.

But occasionally, a piece of pop culture really surprises you and a winner emerges from the left field.

Therefore, I am pleased to present the 2023 Jonathan and Martha Kent Fictional Parent of the Year Award to…

Drumroll

Master Splinter

As voiced by Jackie Chan in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem and by a succession of other voice actors before him, Splinter is a rat living a lonely and friendless life in the sewers of New York City.

One day, Splinter’s lonely existence is interrupted when he finds four baby turtles in the sewer. Since those baby turtles are the only beings who ever showed Splinter any affection, Splinter decides to adopt them. At the same time, Spinter and his kids also come into contact with mutagenic ooze, which anthropomorphises them.

Over the next fifteen years, Splinter becomes an affectionate father to his four sons whom he names Michelangelo, Leonardo, Donatello and Raphael. He raises them in his sewer home, teaches his boys martial arts and introduces them to the joys of pizza, while keeping them safe from a world that isn’t always too friendly inclined towards anthropomorphic mutant rats and turtles.

I have to admit that I never was a huge Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fan. The original cartoon came out just a little too late for me to be all into it, though I did watch it, and I never saw the comics at all. By the time, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon came out, I was a teenager myself and not onyl thought that funny animal cartoons were “for little kids”, but had also discovered the X-Men comics, which the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were created to parody.

So I spent the next 35 years ignoring the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as a franchise that exists, but that I have little interest in. Until I chanced to see the trailer for Mutant Mayhem and thought, “This actually looks really good.” And then I watched the actual film and found it a delightful fresh take on the characters.

Mutant Mayhem leans into the family aspect of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in a way that few versions of the story have done, at least not that I’m aware of. And Jackie Chan’s performance as the loving but grumpy Dad Splinter was a stand-out.

So to my own surprise, I’m thrilled to name Master Splinter the winner of the 2023 Jonathan and Martha Kent Fictional Parent of the Year Award.

Applause 

Splinter receives hugs from Leo, Ralph, Mickey and Donnie, before he mounts the stage, clad in his familiar pink vest and leaning on his sword cane.

He blinks at the audience from behind his thick glasses, sniffs and delivers the following speech.

Humans. There’s a lot of humans here tonight and I don’t like humans…

He squints and his gaze settles on 2022 runner-up Cringer of the Tiger Tribe.

There’s also a cat and I don’t like cats, cause cats and rats are natural enemies…

His gaze falls upon Grogu.

And then there’s that little green critter and I have no idea what that even is. And…

Splinter’s gaze falls on Kurt Wagner, who’s getting drunk with Tyrion Lannister, and on Keldor and Mystique, who are getting very cozy with each other.

…there are blue people, too, and I have no idea what those are either.

Anyway, that has been my life for as long as I can remember. Hiding in the sewers, far from the light and living on what the humans throw away. And humans throw away a lot of things, cause humans are stupid. They throw away art books, video tapes of the master Jackie Chan, pizza. But the very best thing that the humans ever threw away were my four boys, Leo, Donnie, Mickey and Ralph…

The four turtle brothers gaze adoringly at their Dad.

Humans did not want you, because humans are stupid. But the four of you are the best thing that ever happened to me. Before I found you, I was alone, but you completely me. Together, we became a family.

But there comes a time, when a father needs to let his sons swim or rather fly. You were curious about the world outside our sewer and eventually I knew I had to let you go and explore the world. I taught you all you need to survive up there, so go an thrive, my boys. Go and be heroes.

And humans, don’t you dare harm my boys or you’ll answer to me. Thank you.

Splinter is presented with a pie by Martha Kent and before he can as much as say “thank you”, Leo, Mickey, Ralph and Donnie storm the stage to hug him, but they are soon distracted by the pie.

“Wow, this is like… sweet pizza.”

They heartily dig into the pie and start to demolish it, while Splinter sighs.

Master Splinter and his boys and the pie.

The 2021 winner Duncan a.k.a. Man-at-Arms walks up to Splinter and says, “I recently had the honour to meet your boys and fight alongside them**. They’re very good lads. You must be very proud.”

Splinter squints at him from behind his glasses. “Ah yes, Duncan. The boys told me all about you. And about your daughter… Teela, isn’t it?  Mickey and Ralph were very impressed by her.”

Duncan smiles. “She does tend to have that effect.”

They are interrupted by Cringer – and note that this is the older, wiser Cringer from the CGI He-Man animated series – who nuzzles Duncan in the side and exclaims, “Duncan, is that really you?”

“Cringer?!”

“So that’s what you’ll grow up into. Impressive.”

“What do you mean, ‘will grow up into’? So you haven’t always known me as an adult?”

Cringer shakes his head. “No, in my universe, you’re sixteen years old.”

Duncan presses his palm against his forehead. “In that case, I sincerely apologise for everything.”

Both pies are gone by now, having fed Ellie, Grogu and four very hungry turtle brothers, so Martha Kent, clad in her Sunday Best, walks up to Splinter, Duncan, Cringer, Joel and Din with a spare pie.

“Young people are always so hungry. Just like my, Clarke. So here, gentlemen, have a spare pie to enjoy.”

Duncan takes a slice, followed by a slightly sceptical Splinter and Joel, while Din places a slice in his bag.

Meanwhile, Leo, Ralph, Donnie and Mickey have started chatting up Ellie and they clearly have a lot to talk about.

***

And that’s it for the 2023 Jonathan and Martha Kent Fictional Parent of the Year Award. Who’ll win next year? You’ll find out in this space.

Disclaimer: I don’t own any of these characters, I just gave them an award and wrote acceptance speeches for them. All characters and properties are copyright and trademark their respective owners.

*Yes, in my head Mystique is still the 1980s and 1990s version who slept with half the Marvel Universe of any gender. Live with it.

**In the Turtles of Grayskull crossover between Masters of the Universe and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

The 2023 Darth Vader Parenthood Award for Outstandingly Horrible Fictional Parents

It’s almost the end of the year, so it’s time to announce the winner of the coveted (not) 2022 Darth Vader Parenthood Award for Outstandingly Horrible Fictional Parents.

Let’s have a bit of background: I have been informally awarding the Darth Vader Parenthood Award since sometime in the 1980s with the earliest awards being retroactive. Over the years, the list of winners migrated from a handwritten page to various computer file formats, updated every year. Eventually, I decided to make the winners public on the Internet, because what’s an award without some publicity and a ceremony? The list of previous winners (in PDF format) up to 2017 may be found here, BTW, and the 2018 winner, the 2019 winner, the 2020 winner, the 2021 winner and the 2022 winner were announced right here on this blog.

Warning: Spoilers for several things behind the cut!

But before we get to the awards, let’s talk a bit about the portrayal of parents and parent figures in popular culture in general.

I started this award, because I noticed a pattern that there were a lot of terrible parents in popular culture and I started the companion award, the Jonathan and Martha Kent Fictional Parent of the Year Award (2023 winners to be announced tomorrow), because I noticed that there were also a lot of really good and examplary parents in popular culture.

Looking through the last of past winners, runners-up and honourable mentions for both awards, it’s notable that a lot of them originate in media that was originally aimed at young people, even if later spin-offs were not. Part of this is simply due to what I was watching and reading at the time, cause if I don’t know about a character’s existence, I can’t give them an award. But it’s also true that media aimed at young people features a lot more parent figures both good and bad, dead and alive, absent and present.

Of course, parents are far more important in the lives of young people than they are for older people, so it makes sense that we see more parent figures in media aimed at young people. These characters serve a multiple purpose. The bad, but not completely terrible parents show kids that they’re not the only ones who are having trouble with their parents, but that their heroes are facing the same issues. Okay, so your parents won’t see you for who you truly are, but are constantly disappointed that you are not what they want you to be. Guess what, He-Man has the same problem.

The cartoonishly evil parents, meanwhile, show kids that no matter how bad their relationship with their parents may be, at least their parents are not Darth Vader and don’t blow up entire star systems. But these characters also serve another purpose, namely to show kids that they need not be defined by who their parents are. They can be different, they can be more. Luke Skywalker could grow up to become a Jedi knight, even though his biological father did his utmost to exterminate them. Adora could overcome a lifetime of gaslighting to become She-Ra, the heroine she was always meant to be. Particularly to kids growing up in less than ideal circumstances, these are very powerful messages.

The good parents, meanwhile, serve as role models, to show what a good and loving parent looks like. Again, this is particularly important for kids who may not have a good parent or even any parent at all in their lives. But even for kids from happy families, seeing good parents in the media they consume reinforces and confirms what a good parent is.

That’s also why I always roles my eyes so very hard, whenever someone complains that Marvel movies or Star Wars films or whatever are just about characters with daddy issues. Well, considering the original target audience, that’s only to be expected. Also, if you never need to see a favourite character go through issues with their parents and come out stronger on the other side, good for you. Because there are many people who weren’t so lucky and who needed to see those stories, see them told over and over again.

Of course, particularly the Darth Vader Parenthood Award has also had several winners who originate from works that were never aimed at kids and young people in the first place, particularly the various soap opera characters who won several times during the early years. Interestingly enough, those characters – Blake Carrington, Hans Beimer, Dr. Ludwig Dressler, Chase Gioberti – were usually not supposed to be evil. In fact, the audience, a then middle-aged audience of so-called Boomers and the WWII generation, was probably supposed to sympathise with them. Viewers were supposed to sympathise with poor Blake Carrington whose son and heir had the gall to be gay and whose daughter was not willing to be married off to some guy, so Blake could get his oil wells. We were supposed to sympathise with Hans Beimer whose kids didn’t want to participate in his terrible holiday music sessions and whose daughter wanted to have an independent life and date whoever she pleases. We were supposed to sympathise with Dr. Ludwig Dressler who kicked his drug-addicted son out of the house – after treating him to terribly for years that he took to drugs in the first place. However, while these characters were not supposed to be villains, they sure as hell seemed like villains to me who was forced to watch that stuff, because my parents did. And coincidentally, Joachim Luger, the actor who played Hans Beimer, reported that he got a lot of blowback from viewers, particularly for a storyline where Hans dumped his wife and mother of his kids in order to start an affair with a neighbour and have even more kids with her.

But enough about parent figures in general and why they matter. Let’s get to the actual awards, starting with the  2023 Retro Darth Vader Parenthood Award for Outstandingly Horrible Fictional Parents. I originally created the Retro Darth Vader Parenthood Award as an anaologue to the Retro Hugos in 2020 to honour terrible parents who either did their villainous parenting before the award was a thing or who were overlooked in the past for unfathomable reasons.

Though the reason our 2023 Retro Darth Vader Parenthood Award winners was originally overlooked is that I simply wasn’t aware of the character or at least not of the fact that they were a bad parent at the time. This winner will probably also be a little controversial, for while he has usually been portrayed as a decent person, his parenting decisions and his tendency to favour one of his kids over the other also caused untold harm – not just to his family, but to an entire planet.

That sort of shitty parenting deserves an award, therefore I’m thrilled to announce that the winner of the 2023 Retro Darth Vader Parenthood Award for Outstandingly Horrible Fictional Parents is…

Drumroll

Miro of the House of Niros, High King of Eternia

Some of you may now be asking, “Who?”, while others may be wondering “Why?” Like I said, this winner will probably be a little controversial.

So who is King Miro? Well, he is the father of 2021 honourable mention King Randor of Eternia and grandfather of Adam and Adora. He first appeared in the He-Man episode “Search for the Past”, where we learn that King Miro went abruptly missing many years earlier. When Randor comes across a bracelet that used to belong to Miro, he goes in search of his father and finds him still alive, but imprisoned by a villainess called the Enchantress.

Miro appeared again in the She-Ra episode “King Miro’s Journey” where he and Adam travel to Etheria to meet Miro’s granddaughter Adora and lend a hand to the Great Rebellion.

The two Filmation episodes portray King Miro as a loving father and grandfather and indeed, the moral sements of both episodes stress the importance of family and grandparents. So how on Earth did King Miro manage to win himself a Retro Darth Vader Parenthood Award?

Well, for that we have to look at the 2002 He-Man series. Miro himself only appears in that series in a single episode in a flashback scene, rebranded as Captain Miro of the Royal Guard, and he only has a single line of dialogue, ordering his troops to attack. However, Miro wasn’t the only character to be rebranded for that show. The show also established that the villain Skeletor had once been Keldor, King Randor’s older half-brother and Miro’s first-born son. Which means that Skeletor not only has a very good reason for wanting to conquer Eternia, he’s also in the right, because he rather than Randor should have been king.

There are at least two versions of how Keldor came to be born. The most common one is that Miro crashlanded his Windraider on the island of Anwat Gar and was rescued by a local woman named Saryn (who has an interesting and murderous backstory of her own). Saryn nursed Miro back to health, one thing led to another and they had a child, Keldor. Eventually, Miro left Anwat Gar and left Saryn behind, though he took his son with him to raise him in the royal palace. Then Miro married a more acceptable human women (the blue-skinned Gar are not very well regarded on Eternia) and had Randor as well as at least two other children (we meet an uncle and three cousins of Adam’s in the Filmation cartoon).

The conflict started when Miro quite blatantly favoured Randor over his first-born Keldor and made it clear that Randor should be king and Keldor could serve as an advisor to his brother. Keldor was obviously not happy about this. Things came to a head when Miro vanished, Randor became king and Keldor wound up (supposedly accidentally) killing Randor’s mother and his stepmother, whereupon Randor banished Keldor from the royal palace and Keldor swore revenge, which culminated in a massive battle and in Keldor hurling a vial of acid at his brother, only for it to backfire and burning off Keldor’s face, turning him into the skull-faced villain we all know in love.

So in short, all the terrible things Skeletor did, including the shitload of characters both named and unnamed he murdered in Masters of the Universe: Revelation, are all down to King Miro, first because he could not keep his dick to himself and then because he would not stand by Saryn and Keldor, because – gasp – they were blue.

Such shitty parenting deserves an award and therefore King Miro is the winner of the 2023 Retro Darth Vader Parenthood Award for Outstandingly Horrible Fictional Parents.

Applause

Applause errupts around the auditorium. Only the actual 2002 winner Gloria DeLauter from Chesapeake Blue by Nora Roberts (always one of the weaker winners) as well as 1985 winner Hans Beimer boo. And honestly, we wonder why Hans Beimer keeps attending these ceremonies.

Unfortunately, King Miro was not able to accept his award in person – either due to being imprisoned in the tower of the Enchantress or being stuck in the hellish dimension of Despondos – so his son Prince Keldor accepted on his behalf. And yes, he showed up as Keldor, clad in his familiar armour and flowing cape, that shows off his light-blue Gar skin.

Keldor kissed Evil-Lyn, who’s sitting next to him, clad in a gorgeous purple gown. Then he mounted the stage and accepted the award, an ugly vase, and gave the following speech.

Prince Keldor accepts the Retro Darth Vader Parenthood Award on behalf of his father, King Miro.

Oh, were you expecting someone else? My shitty brother Randy perhaps? Well, I’ll have to disappoint you then, cause it’s just me, Keldor, the black or rather the blue sheep of the royal family.

Believe me, I’m so glad that someone finally realised what a shitty parent my father really was. Cause it’s always “King Miro the good, King Miro the kind, King Miro the gentle.”

But was he ever good or kind to me? No. For as long as I could remember, I was always the outcast, the other, the blueskin, the royal by-blow whose mother was not good enough to marry.

In the front row, Evil-Lyn rolls her eyes. “Oh please, not the lecture about the poor oppressed Gar again.”

My father and my brother Randor were always all about the laws of Eternia, fighting battle after battle to uphold them and to vanquish the likes of Prahvus or Count Marzo who’d flaunt our laws and tried to take the planet over for themselves. But guess which law they were always only too happy to ignore. Yes, the one that says the first-born son shall be king. First-born. That’s me, not Randor.

Could Father not at least have given me Dyperia, if he wouldn’t let me have Eternos? But no, he had to give Dyperia to my brother Stefen, who’s so bland and boring that Father forgets he exists half the time and so does everybody else.

What makes the whole thing even more aggravating is that Randor never even wanted to be king in the first place. He was perfectly happy being Captain of the Royal Guard and sleeping in the barracks with his men… – well, not that way, though it would explain a lot. And it’s not as if I would have kicked Randor out of the palace, because I am not him. He could have been my general, my Man-at-Arms and he probably would have been pretty good at it.

But no, Randor decided that he wanted it all. He took the crown and banished me, his own brother. And yes, there was that unfortunately thing about my stepmother, but as I told him, it was an accident. Why did that damned woman, who never had a kind word for me anyway, have to run into my swords?

Anyway, let me take this opportunity to say, Father, wherever you are, I hope it’s some form of hell, because you deserve no less. And Randor, don’t get to complacent, because I’, coming for you and I’m coming to take back what’s mine.

Keldor briefly frowns at the ugly vase.

Now what am I supposed to do with this… this thing?

“Target practice!” Tyrion Lannister yells in the front row, but no one pays him any heed. “It’s a joke, you know? Our parents were terrible people and in the end, all we get is an ugly vase or three.”

I guess I shall put it in my private chambers in Snake Mountain, as a daily reminded of what my dear father and dear brother did to me.

“Can I interest you in a vial of acid, perhaps? Guaranteed to take care of pesky younger brothers.”
“Keldor, I’m not sure about this…”
“Shut up, Lyn, and let the men talk.”

As he leaves the stage, the 2022 Retro Darth Vader Parenthood Award winner Hordak sidles up to him.

“Good speech, my former apprentice.”

“Get lost, Hordak. I got what I needed from you and I’m not going to help free you from Despondos. Say hello to my dear Dad, if you see him.”

“So you don’t want the perfect weapon to deal with your wayward brother once and for all? Cause here I have a vial of acid that melts the flesh of everything it touches, including Randor. If you want a demonstration, we could try it out on that Beimer fellow over there.”

Keldor’s interest is piqued.

“Really? And you’re just giving this to me out of the goodness of your heart, I guess.”

“Consider it a gift to the future ruler of Eternia. And now farewell, my former apprentice. We shall meet again.”

Excuse me, gentlemen, but there will be no villainy plotted at the awards ceremony. It’s one of the rules.

***

Anyway, now that the Retro Award is out of the way, let’s get to the main event, namely the 2023 Darth Vader Parenthood Award for Outstandingly Horrible Fictional Parents.

As I’ve noted in previous years, every year there seem to be fewer and fewer Darth Vader Parenthood Award candidates and more and more candidates for the Jonathan and Martha Kent Fictional Parent of the Year Award, which will be handed out tomorrow.

Another trend I’ve noticed last year is that we increasingly see fictional parents who are neither cartoonishly evil nor saintly good, but who are just people who clearly care for their kids and yet mess up anyway and drive them away.

One example of a fictional parent who is not good but not really evil either is Elora’s Danan’s absentee Dad from Reservation Dogs. Elora learned early in season 3 that her biological father was not dead, as she had believed, but still alive and also a white guy with the very white guy name Rick Miller. In the penultimate episode of the season, Elora finally meets her father and he turns out to be not really a bad person (plus, he’s played by Ethan Hawke), but just someone who was overwhelmed by the responsibility of caring for a kid and ran away. He tries to bond with Elora – who only wants him to sign some papers for her college application – and even introduces her to her three half-siblings. Rick Miller is certainly not a good father, but Darth Vader he’s not.

Another example of a someone who’s not a good parents, but also not terrible enough to win an award is Hera Caine from the comic mini-series Masters of the Universe: Forge of Destiny by Tim Seeley and Eddie Nunez (detailed review coming in the new year). Hera Caine is the leader of the reclusive Eternian island nation of Anwat Gar – yes, them again – and mother of a teenaged son called Dash Shel.  Dash and his mother don’t get along at all. Hera Caine basically wants to be left alone and keep her technologically advanced island enclave separate from the rest of Eternia. Dash, meanwhile, wants to connect with the rest of Eternia. Dash is also an artist, while Hera is an engineer – a conflict that many artistically inclined kids from non-artistic backgrounds can sympathise with.

So Dash decides to rebel by forming a minstral revival troupe with a couple of friends. Yes really, all the poor kid does is want to be an acrobat. Hera finds all this terribly embarassing and basically kicks Dash and friends out of her quarters. She also tells Dash that she wants an heir less embarassing than Prince Adam to present during her upcoming summit with King Randor. Which is just painful, especially since Adam is no more embarassing than Dash, they just happen to be different from their parents.

Hera’s rejection makes Dash vulnerable to manipulation by the Evil Forces of Skeletor. He lets himself be persuaded into stealing a magical element from the royal vaults with his friends to prove that they’re more than just circus freaks, only to find himself on the receiving end of the Evil Forces of Skeletor.

“I had absolutely nothing to do with this,” Evil-Lyn declares from the front row and we think she does protest a bit too much.

“Me neither”, Keldor adds and turns to Evil-Lyn. “Uhm, Lyn, what is she talking about?”

Dash’s friends are killed, Dash survives and is grievously injured. And due to more manipulation by the Evil Forces of Skeletor, Hera Caine is led to believe that Prince Adam is responsible for the attack on her son, so rather than maybe ask Randor what actually happened, which could have cleared up the whole thing, Hera Caine declares war on Eternos, sends her forces after Randor and Adam and scorches the villages of a completely innocent tribe of panther people in the process. Oh yes, and she forms an alliance with Skeletor, too.

“And you people wonder why no one likes the Gar,” Evil-Lyn whispers in the front row, “Maybe it’s because most of you are arseholes.” Keldor glares at her.

However, Hera Caine does not win the award this year, a) because she learns better, though she was still willing to start a war over something she pushed her son to get himself involved with, and b) there was someone a lot worse.

So let’s get to our 2023 winner of the Darth Vader Parenthood Award for Outstandingly Horrible Fictional Parents. This year, a clear frontrunner emerged early on and remained in the lead until the very end. So the winner of the 2022 Darth Vader Parenthood Award for Outstandingly Horrible Fictional Parents is none other than…

Drumroll

The High Evolutionary

As played by actor Chukwudi Iwuji in Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3, the High Evolutionary is obsessed with creating the perfect society via genetical engineering. His initial test subjects were several animals, including future Guardian Rocket Raccoon, as well as the otter Lylla, the rabbit Floor and the walrus Teefs.

The High Evolutionary’s experiments are extremely painful for his test subjects, which is bad enough (and yes, though otherwise light-hearted, Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 is at heart a film about terrible animal cruelty). However, when the results of his experiments don’t match whatever high-minded ideas of the perfect world he has, the High Evolultionary tends to kill them and bombs the Counter-Earth, where his genetically engineered creations live, too. He does this more than once.

If all this wasn’t terrible enough, the High Evolutionary also wanted to vivisect Rocket to harvest his brain, equipped Rocket with a kill switch and he murdered Rocket’s friends Lylla, Floor and Teefs. What is more, the High Evolutionary also murders his own henchbeings, when they mutiny against him.

By the time the Guardians of the Galaxy and the Ravagers finally shut down his operations, the High Evolutionary had graduated to experimenting on human children, all of whom as well as more genetically engineered animals were rescued and adopted by the Guardians and will hopefully have happy and productive lives far away from their abusive creator.

That sort of villainy deserves an award and therefore I name the High Evolutionary the winner of the 2023 Darth Vader Parenthood Award for Outstandingly Terrible Fictional Parents.

Applause

Amazing, the High Evolutionary actually survived Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3, since Rocket is a better person than his creator would ever be. Therefore, he was present to accept his award in person.

He ascended the stage, clad in his familiar purplish-blue armour, and delivered the following speech.

Thank you. It is so gratifying that my great work is finally being honoured.

Deoxyribonucleic acid. It’s so tiny and yet the stuff that all life is made of. And I can change and rewrite it like a composer, an artist. I can improve nature, make it better, make it perfect.

And I ask you, dear audience, what can be so wrong about the pursuit of perfection? Isn’t that what we all crave? Perfection?

Yes, occasionally my test subjects get hurt in the pursuit of perfection. And sometimes I am forced to euthanise them. But how does the saying go? You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs. And you can’t have perfection without wasting a few test subjects.

As for those accursed Guardians who interrupted my experiments, you can keep the children and the animals. I was going to destroy them anyway, because they were not perfect. But you cannot stop me in my eternal quest for perfection, the ultimate perfection.

Thank you very much.

The High Evolutionary descends the stage, blowing kisses to the audience, while clutching his ugly vase to his chest. As soon as he sits down again, the 2022 Darth Vader Parenthood Award winner Dr. Adam Soong sidles up to him.

“I hear you’re a geneticist and underappreciated genius. So am I. And I think, my friend, we need to talk. For together, we can create the genetically perfect human being. Or raccoon, if that’s what you prefer.”

“The raccoon was only an early test subject. Completely disposable, until he decided to run out on me and play at being a hero. So, where do you source your test subjects?”

“Daughters, my friend. I made 23 of them and the last one actually survived into adulthood, though that ungrateful bitch ran out on me and deleted my files, too. But let me tell you about my latest project, codenamed Khan…”

Okay, it seems there’s more villainous plotting going on there, so it’s time to call it quits for tonight.

***

And that’s it for the 2022 Darth Vader Parenthood Award. The companion prize, the Jonathan and Martha Kent Award for the Fictional Parent of the Year will be handed out tomorrow.

Who will win next year? You’ll find out in this space.

***

Disclaimer: I don’t own any of these characters, I just gave them an award and wrote an acceptance speech for them. All characters and properties are copyright and trademark their respective owners.

First Monday Free Fiction: Christmas Eve at the Purple Owl Café

Welcome to the December 2023 edition of First Monday Free Fiction. I forgot to post last month’s edition, because I had too much on my mind.

To recap, inspired by Kristine Kathryn Rusch who posts a free short story every week on her blog, I’ll post a free story on the first Monday of every month. At the end of the month, I’ll take the story down and post another.

December is dominated by the holiday season, so of course this month’s free story is a holiday story. The story in question, Christmas Eve at the Purple Owl Café, is actually one of my most popular stories ever and has sold more than six hundred copies as a standalone e-book (and even more in collection form). Not bad for a sweet little Christmas romance I wrote in only a few hours. And now you get to enjoy it for free.

So join Katie and Jess (and Herbert and Renate) as they celebrate…

Christmas Eve at the Purple Owl Café

Katie trudged through the wet, slushy snow, thoroughly pissed off.

It was December 24, Christmas Eve, shortly after seven o’clock and the streets were deserted. The Christmas services were over until midnight mass and all the good burghers were in their homes, eating roast goose or fondue or potato salad and sausages, whatever the respective family tradition dictated.

Katie would like to think that at least some of them were still at the tree admiring, carol singing, poem reciting and present unwrapping part of the evening. Though that would be naïve. For sometime in the past twenty-five years, the gift-giving part of Christmas had been moved forward from Christmas Eve after dark and after church was over, if your family was the religious type, or even after dinner, if your family had a sadistic streak, to the early afternoon, because it would be torture on young children to keep them waiting for too long. Oddly enough, no one had ever cared about that back when Katie was a kid and watched the Waiting for the Christ Child afternoon special on TV — the very same special with the very same seasonal cartoons every single year, too — on tenterhooks, just waiting for Santa to drop off his load of presents.

But these days, kids simply couldn’t be expected to be patient anymore and Waiting for the Christ Child hadn’t been on TV in ages. Instead, the radio stations began blaring out nothing but Christmas songs — and not the American ones that were a tad corny, but at least fun, but the dull and solemn German Christmas songs that sounded like funeral dirges — from two o’clock on Christmas Eve on in what Katie liked to call “the terror of festive contemplation”. Because obviously, dull Christmas music would put those hyperactive little rugrats to sleep early.

God, she was started to sound like one of those old crotchety “Back in my day” folks. Even tough it was precisely because of those old crotchety folks that Katie was out here in the cold with the wet snow gradually soaking through her boots instead of eating roast goose with her parents and extended family.

Flurries of snow were blowing into Katie’s eyes, so she pulled the hood of her coat deeper into her face. All in all it was a typical North German Christmas, windy and wet. Only that for once, the wet was snow rather than rain. Just her luck that tonight had to be the first white Christmas in ten years or so.

Up ahead, Katie could see the lights of the Purple Owl Café — a winking neon owl and a sign in slanted fifties script — through the driving snow, a lone beacon of warmth and friendliness and civilisation in a city that had gone dark this Christmas Eve. For the shops had already taken down their holiday lights, the Christmas market was closed and even the street lamps had gone dark, for why waste energy on street lamps when hardly anyone was driving anyway?

The Purple Owl Café had a lengthy and varied history. It had started out sometime in the fifties as a youth hangout, where you could hear that newfangled rock ’n roll music and even dance to it. In the sixties, it became a club for beat music fans. By 1970, it was a hippy club, complete with psychedelic black light paintings on the walls. By the mid seventies, it was a punk joint. Then it turned into a disco by 1978 and stayed that way throughout the eighties. By the early nineties, it had turned into a grunge club and alternative music venue. Finally, around the turn of the millennium, it became the premier lesbian joint in town.

But throughout its illustrious and chequered history, the Purple Owl Café had always been one thing, namely a sanctuary for all those who either had no family or couldn’t face another Christmas Eve with them at home.

The tradition of Christmas Eve parties at the Purple Owl Café had started sometime during the rock ’n roll or beat era, when absolutely nothing in the city was open and the streets on Christmas Eve were quieter than the world after a nuclear holocaust. There’d been opposition against the Christmas Eve parties back then, from the churches, the police and the good and upright burghers who simply couldn’t tolerate even the slightest hint of deviance from the way things had always been.

The opposition had faded over the decades, as had the Purple Owl Café’s reputation as the only place besides the railway mission where you could go for a hot drink and a bit of conversation and companionship on Christmas Eve. Now there were kebab houses and Chinese restaurants and Vietnamese noodle bars open on Christmas Eve and clubs offering dance nights to those still on their feet after their families had gone to bed.

But through it all, the Purple Owl Café remained stalwart, opened its doors to anybody — regardless of age, gender, religion, skin colour or sexual orientation — who had nowhere else to go on Christmas Eve.

Tonight, Katie was one of those who had nowhere else to go. It was a new sensation for her — after all, Katie had spent the previous twenty-three Christmas Eves with her parents and extended family, sitting around the tree, singing carols, reciting poems, exchanging presents and eating roast goose with potato dumplings and red cabbage.

And every single of those twenty-three years or at least the last ten or so, Katie had dreaded those holy night get-togethers with the whole family. She’d dreaded the poems and the carols and the presents she had neither asked for nor wanted and the goose — because truth to be told, she’d never liked goose — but most of all she’d dreaded the conversation with the extended family.

She’d dreaded the sexist jokes from uncles who seemed to be mentally stuck at a time when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, the complaints about “all those damn foreigners ruining the country” from great-aunts who’d once come as post-war refugees from Eastern Prussia and Silesia, the groping hands of aged lechers and the pitying looks of prim and proper aunts who kept asking why she wasn’t married and having babies yet. And most of all, she’d dreaded Uncle Günther who inevitably had to expound at great length on his political views, which were only slightly to the left of Hitler. And no one ever said anything to shut him up, even though his tirades made everybody uncomfortable.

Until this Christmas, her twenty-fourth, she’d decided she’d had enough. After all, she was twenty-four years old now. She had a graduate degree, her own flat and a good job. She was, finally, a real and proper adult. And she didn’t need to put up with relatives who annoyed her, relatives who made her uncomfortable, relatives who made her dread Christmas Eve itself, when it should’ve been the happiest night of the year.

So she’d told her parents in no uncertain terms, “No. I’m not going to put up with people who make me uncomfortable or outright hurt me anymore. Either make them stop or uninvite them or you can have your family Christmas Eve without me.”

Her Mom had first accused her of having PMS — because every genuine grievance or anger that a woman ever felt was obviously the result of PMS. Then she’d called Katie a hate-filled bitch who didn’t understand the value of family, while Dad had declared that one simply had to tolerate family, whether one actually liked them or not.

And when Katie had replied, “No, actually I don’t have to tolerate anybody,” her parents had told her she could either celebrate Christmas with the whole family like every year or all on her lonesome.

And this was how Katie had ended up orphaned or at least quasi-orphaned on Christmas Eve. So she did what everybody in the city did, when they found themselves alone and with nowhere else to go on Christmas Eve. She headed to the Purple Owl Café.

Katie had learned of the café’s reputation at university from one of the outspoken lesbians in her class, though she’d never actually been there herself. It was like that with all of the clubs in town with a shady or dodgy or glamorous reputation. Katie knew of them all, though she’d never visited a single one of them. She simply wasn’t the sort of person who went to that sort of place.

But apparently her new found resolve not to put up with relatives who annoyed her anymore had also turned her into a more adventurous person, the sort of person who’d go to a Christmas party in a joint known as a lesbian bar, though she had few inclinations of that direction herself.

Okay, so Katie had sometimes insisted that she was lesbian at university, mostly to get guys who wouldn’t take no for an answer to back off. Women usually did accept “No thanks” as an answer, so there had never been any burning need for Katie to insist she was straight.

As it was, she actually suspected she was bi — sort of — since hardly anybody was one hundred percent straight on the Kinsey scale.

But the full truth was that so far, she’d had very little interest in intimate relationships with either sex. Relationships were complicated and time consuming, plus you tended to get your heart broken. Besides, Katie had always been just fine on her own, pursuing first her degree and then her career.

Until she found herself all alone on Christmas Eve.

***

Like all the best clubs, the Purple Owl Café was a basement bar, its entrance nestled between a Chinese restaurant, closed, and a travel agency, also closed. A purple neon arrow pointed at the door.

There was a bouncer, a muscular woman with spiky platinum hair and a nose piercing. And all of a sudden, Katie realised just why — though she knew where all the cool clubs were — she hardly ever went there. It was because of the bouncers. There was something incredibly humiliating about the idea that even though you were willing to pay for the privilege of entering a club, you were still at the mercy of some overmuscled and underbrained jerk at the door who decided whether you got in or not, depending on whether your skirt was short enough or whether he just didn’t like your nose.

Restaurants didn’t need bouncers. Cinemas didn’t need bouncers. Theatres didn’t need bouncers. So why the hell did clubs think they did?

However, passing the bouncer — bouncerette? — of the Purple Owl Café was neither difficult nor humiliating. The woman simply nodded at Katie and said, “Merry Christmas. Have fun, sister.” Then she stared out at the falling snow again.

The staircase that led down to the club proper was steep and narrow and the linoleum apparently hadn’t been replaced since the time when the Café was a rock ’n roll joint back in the fifties. Katie smiled as she descended the staircase, imagining the look on the faces of her relatives back home, if they knew she was spending Christmas Eve in a lesbian bar.

The interior of the Purple Owl Café was pleasantly dim. The walls were black and covered with photos from the club’s illustrious sixty year history. Glittering stars studded the low ceiling and in a corner, there stood a Christmas tree, the only concessions to the season. There was a bar along one side of the club, a dance floor in the middle and a small stage at the other end of the room. On that stage, a girl with a guitar sat perched on a stool, singing a mix of seasonal and other songs in a voice that was so much better than anything heard in the talent shows on TV.

Katie looked around and then made a beeline straight for the bar. She needed a drink. A large drink.

A chalkboard behind the bar announced all sorts of holiday specials. Several varieties of mulled wine, eggnog, grog, cinnamon latte, hot apple punch, fancy Belgian Christmas beer. Katie studied it for a moment, then she decided on mulled blueberry wine. She wrapped her chilly hands around the warm mug, savouring the heat that spread through her body.

The crowd inside the Purple Owl Café covered an age range from barely twenty to seventy plus and was about seventy-five percent female, which was only to be expected. Though there were a couple of men around as well and not all of them seemed to be gay.

Katie ended up chatting with a well-manicured lady in her sixties named Renate. She was a widow, Renate said, from an upscale part of town. Her husband had died five months ago and since she dreaded spending Christmas alone, she’d headed for the Purple Owl Café because she remembered the place from what she termed “her wild youth”. Katie smiled and nodded politely, though truth to be told, Renate didn’t look as if she’d ever been wild in her whole life.

An old man named Herbert joined in. He’d been coming to the Purple Owl Café every Christmas Eve since 1959, he told them, and he’d been there through all the changes that had hit the place. Though the crowd here was always friendly and welcoming, he said, regardless of which subculture the Café was currently catering to.

“It’s my home away from home,” Herbert said.

Katie nodded. At any rate, the Purple Owl Café felt just like home, she thought. Here she was, spending Christmas Eve talking to old people, just like back at home.

Though to be fair, Herbert and Renate both seemed nice enough. And at least they hadn’t started ranting about “all those evil foreigners and asylum seekers” yet, which made for a pleasant change from home.

“Hi there,” a new voice said behind her.

Katie turned around and found herself face to face with a woman in her mid twenties. Her blonde hair was tied back in a ponytail. She wore jeans, a flannel shirt and no make-up.

“You’re new here, aren’t you?”

Katie nodded. “Is it that obvious?”

“Well, you’re looking a bit shy and besides, Herbert, the old lecher here, is hitting on you…”

She turned to Herbert. “No offence, Herb, you know we all love you.”

She turned back to Katie, ponytail flying. “…and he usually hits only on the new girls, cause he knows he’s wasting his breath on the rest of us. And besides…” She smiled, a warm and open smile. “…I’ve never seen you here before and I know I would’ve remembered an attractive woman like you.”

Looks like Herbert wasn’t the only one hitting on the new girls around here.

The woman held out her hand. “I’m Jess, by the way.”

Oh, what the heck…

“Katie.” She took the other woman’s hand and shook it. Jess had a good firm handshake, she noted.

“So…” Jess said, settling herself on the barstool next to Katie without waiting for permission. “…what brings you to the Purple Owl Café on this fine holy night.”

Katie shrugged. “Had a row with my family and didn’t want to spend Christmas alone in front of the TV, watching Helene Fischer or Stars in the Arena or whatever crap they’ve put on tonight. So I came here. You know how it is.”

“As a matter of fact I do,” Jess said, “So what’s the problem at home? Did you decide to come out to your family on Christmas and they couldn’t come to terms with the fact that there won’t be white weddings and grandkids anytime soon?”

“No, I…” Katie felt the blood rushing to her cheeks. “I’m not… Actually I’m bi.”

“No problem.” Jess grinned. “I’m not the jealous type.”

“And anyway, that’s… not it,” Katie said, though she didn’t even know why she felt the need to explain herself to a woman she barely knew, “It’s… well, my parents always invite the whole extended family over for Christmas…”

“And you had enough of holiday crowds?” Jess said, “Believe me, I sympathise.”

Katie shook her head. “There are a few relatives who are… well, problematic.”

“Let me guess,” Jess said and took a draft of beer straight from the bottle, “Uncles with roving hands, mothers, aunts and cousins who just can’t shut up about weddings and babies…”

“That, too,” Katie admitted, wondering how on Earth Jess could’ve known all that. “Still, those relatives are just annoying, but… well, there’s one uncle who’s a flat out Nazi. Always spouts racist crap about how foreigner and immigrants and Muslims are ruining the country and how someone ought to do something…”

“And you told Uncle Nazi where to stuff it?” Jess suggested, “Well done.”

“Not really,” Katie said, “I told Mom and Dad point blank that I didn’t want to put up with Uncle Nazi…”

That was actually a very good name for him.

“…and his racist bullshit anymore. I said that I’ll tolerate him as long as he keep talking about haemorrhoids or football or whatever. But as soon as he starts spewing racist crap, I’m going to tell him to shut up and keep his vile views to himself.”

“I guess that didn’t go down too well with your parents,” Jess said.

Katie shook her head. “I got told that one has to tolerate relatives and their repulsive views, because they are relatives. Oh yes, and you’re not supposed to call them on it either, because that would disrupt the holiday spirit.”

Jess rolled her eyes. “Whereas Uncle Nazi spewing forth racist shit obviously doesn’t disrupt the holiday spirit, because everybody just wants to hear racist diatribes with their Christmas cookies.”

Katie nodded. “Got it in one.”

Jess lifted the bottle to her mouth and took a draft. “That sort of thinking is endemic with that generation,” she said, “Our parents’ generation, I mean. Well, my parents’ generation, but I guess yours are about the same.”

“Mine are in their fifties and sixties,” Katie said.

“Mine, too. The sort of people who grew up surrounded by barely reformed ex-Nazis. And you couldn’t say anything against them, because they were everywhere, even in your own family. And so they never learned to stand up and say something…”

“Pah, Nazis,” Herbert piped in, “Never could stand them, not even way back when they wanted me to join their stupid club.”

Jess slammed the bottle down on the table. “With our parents’ generation, it’s all keep your head down and ignore the Nazi at the dinner table, hoping he’ll go away or shut the fuck up. Only that the Nazis at the dinner table never go away.”

Katie nodded in agreement. “Instead, they even become bolder, because they think everybody else agrees with them. Because no one ever has the courage to say anything.”

“And since no one ever stops them or shuts them up, those newly emboldened dinner table Nazis eventually take to the streets like those jerks in Dresden.” Jess shuddered.

“Dresden is such a beautiful city,” Renate said, “My husband and I went there on holiday a few times. The museums, the architecture, the opera…”

“Too bad it’s also got seventeen thousand jerks marching against a piddly half percent Muslims,” Jess added.

“A pity,” Renate agreed, “Such a beautiful city marred by hate.”

Herbert nodded. “Pretty city. Pity about the Nazis.” He took a gulp of beer. “Damn Nazis. Hate them.”

“I think we can all drink to that,” Jess said.

So they did. And Katie realised that she felt so much more comfortable here at the Purple Owl Café than she’d ever felt during those Christmas Eves with the family at home.

“What gets to me most…” she said quietly, “…is that when I gave my parents a choice between Uncle Nazi and me, they still chose the crotchety old racist over me.” Katie took a sip of mulled wine. “That makes me feel so valued.”

“Their loss,” Jess said and patted Katie on the back, “Our gain.”

They all drank to that, Jess and Katie and Herbert and Renate. Katie emptied her mulled wine and promptly ordered another cup. And if she got drunk, then so be it. After all, it was Christmas Eve and her parents preferred the company of a crotchety old racist to her own. What better excuse to get drunk?

Herbert and Renate eventually began sharing reminiscences of what they termed the “wild days of their youth”, while Jess and Katie chatted with each other. They talked about their jobs and their families and their favourite books and films and TV shows and discovered their shared love for Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and shared dislike for The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones.

Through it all, it was bleedingly obvious that Jess was flirting with her, but Katie didn’t mind. On the contrary, she felt rather flattered by the attention. She’d never understood why she was supposed to feel flattered by the attention of men, even if they were often overbearing and unwilling to take no for an answer, whereas the attention of women was supposed to be shocking, even though women were far less aggressive about it.

The singer on the stage took a break — only too understandable, considering she’d been playing all evening long — so someone popped a holiday CD into the player. Soon Christmas songs flooded the bar, all the good old corny tunes like “Rocking around the Christmas Tree” or “Driving home for Christmas” or “Do they know it’s Christmas time?” –  the original, not the revised Ebola edition.

Pairs of all possible gender combinations quickly took to the dancefloor, swinging to “Rocking around the Christmas Tree” with more enthusiasm than skill. And then “Last Christmas” came on, the one and only true version by Wham!, still as brilliant thirty years later as it had been back in 1984.

“Oh my God, I love that song,” Jess exclaimed, “I mean, I know it’s corny as hell, but I still love it.”

Katie nodded. “No, it’s all right,” she said, “I understand. I love that song, too. Even though it is corny as hell.”

Their eyes met for a long moment, then Jess held out her hand to Katie. “Do you wanna dance?”

Katie wasn’t much of a dancer, had never been. Oh, she quite liked dancing alone in her kitchen. But dancing with others, particularly men? Forget it! The men always insisted on leading, which meant you were tied to their lack of rhythm.

However, the leading issue wouldn’t be too much of a problem here, since Jess was no man. So why the hell shouldn’t Katie dance with her? Especially since it would so shock her family to see her dancing with another woman.

So Katie took Jess’ hand. “Sure, why not?”

So they danced to “Last Christmas” and the question who leads and who follows didn’t come up at all, because they found that they were both perfectly in tune. And if Jess wrapped her arms just a little tighter around Katie than strictly necessary, Katie found that she didn’t mind at all.

Then George Michael sang that this time, he’d give his heart to someone special, and Jess pulled Katie in even closer. Then, before Katie knew what was happening, Jess suddenly kissed her full frontal on the lips.

The kiss was tentative at first, then ever more enthusiastic. And though Katie was initially too stunned to react, she soon responded in kind. Hell, if Katy Perry could kiss a girl and like it, then so could Katie. And it would so shock her family. Besides, the kiss felt good, damned good, as good as a kiss could only feel on Christmas Eve or New Year’s Night or when you were kissing your one true love — not that Katie would know anything about that.

“Last Christmas” was already over and the next song — “Lonely this Christmas” — had started up, when their lips finally parted. They both stumbled to a halt, panting and out of breath.

“Sorry,” Jess said with a wink, “Mistletoe,” and pointed at the ceiling.

Katie looked up and indeed, there was a mistletoe, already somewhat dry and battered, hanging from the ceiling among all the glittering stars. And since they were still standing right underneath the mistletoe, Katie pulled Jess in for another kiss, while Elvis was still wailing about being lonely and cold this Christmas.

After that, Katie and Jess didn’t talk very much anymore, though they danced and kissed a lot. And after about three songs, they didn’t even need the mistletoe as an excuse any longer.

***

It was already after midnight, when the Purple Owl Café finally closed down. Katie and Jess spilled out of the club with the other remaining Christmas Eve revellers.

Outside, it was still snowing, though a thick white blanket already covered the streets, muting the world.

“Where are you headed?” Jess asked Katie.

“Central station,” Katie replied, “Looking for a taxi home.”

“Great,” Jess said, “I’m headed that way myself. I live near Osttor, you know?”

So they set off through the snow, arm in arm like a couple that had been together for a long time. Occasionally, they met others traipsing through the late night snow. People heading home after the midnight mass, mostly, though there were also a few fellow partygoers. But most of the time, Jess and Katie walked all alone through the deserted city, feeling as if they were the only two people left on Earth.

Soon the lights of the station shone up ahead, a bright beacon in an otherwise dark holy night. There were people there and taxis and trains and shops that were open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three-hundred sixty-five days of the year.

Jess and Katie both found that their steps slowed down, as they station approached. Almost as if they didn’t want to part just yet.

“You know what?” Jess said suddenly into the silent night, “I’m hungry. How about a midnight snack at the station?”

Katie nodded, for she suddenly realised that she was hungry as well. “Sure. If we find a place that’s still open.”

“It’s central station,” Jess said, “Something is always open.”

In the end, they found that three shops were still open and that they had the choice between kebab, Turkish pizza and Pho. After a bit of back and forth, they finally decided on Pho, because it was hot and comforting and the ideal midnight snack for a cold Christmas night.

And so Jess and Katie soon set perched on bar stools in a cheery bright interior of the Pho shop, looking into each other’s eyes over two bowls of steaming hot noodle soup.

They chatted over nothing of importance, while savouring the springy noodles, the fresh, crispy herbs and the broth itself, infused with cinnamon and cardamom and cloves and star anise.

“Just the same spices as in gingerbread,” Katie couldn’t help but point out.

Jess nodded. “The ideal midnight snack for Christmas Eve then.”

And as they sipped their Pho, they both looked into each other’s eyes some more and liked what they saw there.

“I… I don’t normally do this,” Katie finally said, “But I really like you. And I… well, I’d like to see you again. After Christmas, of course. Or maybe even after New Year’s Night.”

Jess listened patiently, the bowl of Pho poised perfectly at her lips. She waited for Katie to finish, then she set the bowl down.

“I like you, too,” she said, quite bluntly, “And yes, I’d like to see you again. But why wait until New Year’s Night or even longer? After all, I’ve got a flat near Osttor. It’s not a very big flat, but I’ve got a really nice and comfortable bed.” She paused. “So what do you say?”

Truth to be told, Katie didn’t quite know what to say and how to say it. So she said nothing, just nodded.

Ten minutes later, they both set off into the snowy night again, Pho warming their stomachs and mutual attraction warming their hearts.

And though the evening had started as a lonely Christmas for both of them, it did not end that way.

The End

***

That’s it for this month’s edition of First Monday Free Fiction. Check back next month, when a new free story will be posted.

And if you want even more holiday stories, I have a collection of all my holiday stories called The Christmas Collection available.

Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month for November 2023

It’s that time of the month again, time for “Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month”.

So what is “Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month”? It’s a round-up of speculative fiction by indie and small press authors newly published this month, though some October books I missed the last time around snuck in as well. The books are arranged in alphabetical order by author. So far, most links only go to Amazon.com, though I may add other retailers for future editions.

Once again, we have new releases covering the whole broad spectrum of speculative fiction. This month, we have epic fantasy, urban fantasy, sword and sorcery, paranormal mystery, paranormal thrillers, science fiction mystery, space opera, military science fiction, werewolves, vampires, shifters, half-dragons, starships, space marines, crime-busting witches, chases across the universe and much more.

Don’t forget that Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month is also crossposted to the Speculative Fiction Showcase, a group blog run by Jessica Rydill and myself, which features new release spotlights, guest posts, interviews and link round-ups regarding all things speculative fiction several times per week.

As always, I know the authors at least vaguely, but I haven’t read all of the books, so Caveat emptor.

And now on to the books without further ado:

The Butler Did It by Jerry Boyd:

The fleet manages to catch the Squirrel responsible for the horrible things they’ve seen recently. That should be a good thing, shouldn’t it? Turns out it’s only the beginning of their troubles, as their journey to collect a bounty on him turns into an adventure. Follow along, as Bob and the fleet get the best of the situation.

 

 

 

Federation Marine: Sergeant by Jonathan P. Brazee:

At last, Sergeant Ryck Lysander has found a home in the United Federation Marine Corps and has proven the temper of his steel in combat.

Stepping up as an NCO, however, is something different. It isn’t enough to be an effective warrior. He has to be able to lead his fellow Marines, all without doubting his own abilities.

Failing will not only lead to his own death, but to those under his command. The responsibility is heavy, and the cost of losing is high.

At the same time, an old ally becomes a new enemy, thrusting Ryck into a life and death situation where success or failure rides on his shoulders.

The question he must answer for himself is whether he has what it takes to lead. . . or if he should have stayed a recruit after all.

Marked by Magic by Lindsay Buroker:

Arwen Forester may be a socially awkward introvert, but she’s an expert tracker, archer, and forager who has a pickling recipe for every vegetable in the garden. Unfortunately, none of these skills earn her a lot of money. And when the taxes go up on her father’s farm, she’s not sure how to help him keep the property.

Then someone offers her a lucrative new gig:

Hunt down a haughty half-dragon criminal with the power to incinerate those who irritate him.

Normally, Arwen would reject such a suicidal mission, but with the farm at stake, she’s desperate. Besides, all she has to do is tag the half-dragon with a tracking device. How hard could it be?

Find out in Marked by Magic, Book 1 in the new Tracking Trouble urban fantasy series.

Bound by Blood by Lindsay Buroker:

Magically compelled by bad guys, Arwen Forester shot her half-dragon ally in the thigh. She longs to make amends to him, but she’s busy with a new quest:

Get rid of the tattoo that lets dark elves control her.

Unfortunately, such magical marks aren’t easily removed. When the troll tattoo artist she visits is killed, she’s framed for murder.

Soon, hired guns are after her, and the troll’s clan is trying to get Val Thorvald, the Ruin Bringer, to hunt her down.

Arwen could use the help of a powerful half-dragon, but will Azerdash Starblade forgive her after her previous betrayal?

Galaxy Under Siege by M.R. Forbes:

Caleb Card always knew that fighting back against overwhelming odds would be a thankless slog. And with Legion forces expanding across the galaxy, his opportunities to hit them where it hurts are fast running out. When a well-played hand and an unexpected betrayal nearly put a stop to both the rebellion and his life, all signs point to a quick and ugly end.

Only Caleb’s never quit anything before, and he isn’t about to start now. Not when he still has a few more aces up his sleeve…

…and with any luck, a Queen.

Whispers of the Dead by Elle Gray:

Storyville is a small town with world altering mysteries. Here the impossible is this town’s reality.

In the wake of her partner’s disappearance, FBI agent Cora Pratt calls for backup and accepts the aid of Sheriff Highsmith.

As the search for Nolan continues, Cora ventures deeper into the many mysteries in the supernatural small town.
When the hunt for answers leads her to a secret library within a library.
She is finally able to learn what lies behind some of the towns’ many secrets.

As Cora unravels her own tangled past connections to Storyville and the town’s secrets. Her dreams become far more jarring.

With dreams and reality converging and more truths finally found.

Cora must now follow the whispers from the past to save the future of Storyville and maybe even humanity itself…

Against the Witchy Tide by Lily Harper Hart:

Hali Waverly is gearing up for a big change. The hip surgery she’s been dreading is only two weeks out, and that means it’s time to get things in order before she’s down for the count to recuperate. She has a plan….and then the unthinkable happens.

When leaving the doctor after scheduling surgery, a bank robbery suspect crosses Hali’s path. When his mask is removed, her boyfriend Gray Hunter recognizes him as a fellow shifter, and the questions only grow from there.

It seems there are a lot of strange shifters hanging around St. Pete Beach, and they don’t belong to the same faction. The one spot they agree to meet is Hali’s tiki bar…and sparks—and fur—are about to fly.

Hali doesn’t want to get involved in pack politics, but she might not have a choice. For Gray, who turned his back on the pack years ago, the appearance of warring factions on his turf means bad things are about to happen. He has no choice but to stand up and fight, however.

Hali knows what she wants for her future. Unfortunately for her, she’s going to have to go to war to get it. This fight—so many claws and teeth to contend with—might be out of her reach.

That won’t stop her from fighting…even to the death.

Clashing Blades by Matt Hilton:

Monsters, magic, savage action and clashing blades.

Sword and sorcery and heroic fantasy tales in the tradition of Robert E. Howard’s Conan and Kull, Lin Carter’s Thongor, and Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane, featuring Matt Hilton’s Korvix the axe warrior and other mighty heroes.

 

 

White Witchmas by Amanda M. Lee:

Chestnuts are roasting. Jingle bells are rocking. The halls are about to be decked.

In other words, Christmas is about to hit Hemlock Cove. Hard.

There’s just one little problem…or maybe two. Okay, there are three big problems plaguing Bay Winchester before she can enjoy the holidays.

The first is that the warden who lost his job thanks to a prison break weeks before is determined to stalk Bay until she magically fixes his life. He keeps showing up in the oddest of places and making the sort of demands she can’t fulfill.

The second involves Aunt Tillie, who has decided to gift her nemesis Margaret Little a special spell rather than a lump of coal this holiday season. It involves her Christmas decorations taking on a life—and voice—of their own. The spell, however, isn’t nearly as contained as it was supposed to be.

When a body shows up at the local private school, that means it’s one problem too many for Bay. And she doesn’t know which problem to solve first.

The headmistress of the school was involved in a convoluted affair with father of one of her students. The list of suspects who wanted her dead was long and sundry, however.

All Bay wants is to surprise her husband with a dog for Christmas and to eat her weight in cookies. She has to save the day first, though.

Murder, mayhem, and mistletoe are on the menu.

Death might not be far behind.

Buckle up, because the Santa decorations are coming to town.

Ivy Nichols O’Reilly has grown up in a wealthy family full of magic, fantasy creatures, and emotional abuse—but when her narcissistic mother arranges an unwanted marriage for her, the young witch reaches her breaking point. She drops out of college, changes her name to Georgette, and flees across the country with her best friend, a Wood Nymph named Mei-Xing.

Georgette is determined to build a new identity and a new life. But her journey leads her to cross paths with a number of magical characters—a Werehyena searching for his kidnapped wife; a Vampire who runs a unique magical business; a curandero, a shamanistic practitioner of traditional medicine; and a Valkyrie who, along with her raven partner, wants to make a risky deal—who make it clear to her that the past is not so easily left behind. In order to grow into her new identity, help her new friends, and develop a healthy relationship with a man she’s beginning to care for, Georgette will have to confront the privileges that have shielded her from the pain and ugliness of the magic community in which she was raised—and find the strength to overcome the trauma of her childhood.

Scarper by Jenny Schwartz:

A fate-defying chase across the universe.

Fate is a tricky witch.

On the run across federation space, Cherry has stuffed far too many dangerous secrets into her scout ship. Now the Delphic Dame is the most hunted spaceship in the universe.

It may also be the only force in the universe capable of saving humanity.

Cherry just has to stay one step ahead of her enemies – and, maybe, of her allies.

Honor and Renown by Glynn Stewart:

A peacetime Navy has many roles.
Presence. Protection. Preparation.
Commerce. Sales.
Realpolitik.

A century before the Kenmiri ever touched humanity’s stars, Admiral Christopher Macleod commands the Extrasolar Squadron of the Commonwealth Space Force. His job, above all else, is to sell British military technology to the rest of humanity.

The Admiral has long ago accepted his role as the pony in the Commonwealth’s dog and pony sales show—but as war between the United States Colonial Administration and the Russian Novaya Imperiya twists ever closer to neutral stars, every nation must choose what neutral means for them.

And Admiral Macleod must choose what matters most to him: the Commonwealth’s neutrality—or the thousand-year-old traditions of Her Majesty’s Navy!

Indie Crime Fiction of the Month for November 2023

Welcome to the latest edition of “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”.

So what is “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”? It’s a round-up of crime fiction by indie authors newly published this month, though some October books I missed the last time around snuck in as well. The books are arranged in alphabetical order by author. So far, most links only go to Amazon.com, though I may add other retailers for future editions.

Our new releases cover the broad spectrum of crime fiction. We have cozy mysteries, holiday mysteries, historical mysteries, Jazz Age mysteries, paranormal mysteries, crime thrillers, psychological thrillers, legal thrillers, medical thrillers, adventure thrillers, revenge thrillers, romantic suspense, police officers, FBI agents, amateur sleuths, lawyers, vigilantes, stalkers, missing persons, serial killers, crime-busting witches, crime-busting socialites, murderous Santas, murder and mayhem in New York, London, Florida, Michigan, the Everglades, Outer Space and much more.

Don’t forget that Indie Crime Fiction of the Month is also crossposted to the Indie Crime Scene, a group blog which features new release spotlights, guest posts, interviews and link round-ups regarding all things crime fiction several times per week.

As always, I know the authors at least vaguely, but I haven’t read all of the books, so Caveat emptor.

And now on to the books without further ado:

Murder With Mirth by Blythe Baker:

Now that the murder of Miles’ late wife has been solved, Sylvia and Miles return to New York, intent on announcing their engagement. But disaster – and death – strike again, when least expected.

With a dead dinner guest and a long list of suspects, Sylvia and Miles will have to act quickly to outwit a vicious killer.

 

 

The Butler Did It by Jerry Boyd:

The fleet manages to catch the Squirrel responsible for the horrible things they’ve seen recently. That should be a good thing, shouldn’t it? Turns out it’s only the beginning of their troubles, as their journey to collect a bounty on him turns into an adventure. Follow along, as Bob and the fleet get the best of the situation.

 

 

 

A Murderous Little Christmas by Beth Byers:

It has been five years since Violet and her twin gathered up their friends and traveled to the aid of their aunt. Who they failed. Agatha Davies was murdered, their family faced many of its demons, and Violet met the love of her life.

A lot has happened since then, mostly of a murderous nature. This year, they’re determined to take back Christmas. Fate, it seems, has other things in store. Feeling like death is stalking them, Vi and friends set up for the holiday. When the bodies start appearing, it’s clear that death is stalking them and this time–they might not be as lucky as before.

Villain, Smiling Villain by Beth Byers:

Smith is back in London with a bustling family life and a busy work schedule. All is right with the world. Or, at least as right as it gets with Smith.

So no one is surprised when along comes a foe. This foe, however, is entirely unexpected. He’s not an old enemy. He’s not a current case. All things indicate that he is, in fact, entirely new.

For some reason, his focus is on Smith, Beatrice, and their daughters. Who is he? Why is he chasing Smith’s family? And just which of them will prove to be the greatest villain?

Behind the Lies by Maren Cooper:

Will Franklin—former academic geek, now recognized as a rare talent in the “fake it ’til you make it” biotech industry—is in the wings for his dream job as next CEO of a global powerhouse. Or so he thinks, until his boss, Chet, calls him into his office and angrily tells him he is going to be fired. Chet hints at impropriety, but won’t say more—and before Will can press him he falls so ill that he’s put on ventilator care.

Now, instead of losing his job, Will finds himself in the position of supporting Chet’s family through the hell of a dire illness. Just as suddenly, he finds his leadership ability tested by a crippling cyberattack that threatens the entire industry and leaves him with little time to untangle the mystery of whatever it is that Chet uncovered before he got sick.

Can Will clear his name before the ax falls—or his marriage collapses—due to his lapse in judgment? And does Bella, a young and beautiful rising star making waves with her own start-up company, have anything to do with this mess?

Undertow by Jana DeLeon:

When Jill Morgan left Tempest Island after high school, she didn’t know what she wanted to do the rest of her life. The only thing she’d ever loved was writing fiction, but that was a pursuit with no financial guarantees. So she did the responsible thing and got her college degree, then a job that provided a good living, and she wrote in her free time. She never expected to become a bestseller, but her books—written under a pseudonym—brought her millions of happy readers.

And a stalker.

When her identity is compromised, Jill decides to disappear until the cops can identify the man threatening her. Her first thought is returning to Tempest Island, one of the many places her father was stationed with the Navy, and the only one that had ever felt like home. Plus, she had connections there who could help her remain off radar. It was just a matter of time until the cops had her stalker in custody and Jill could get back to normal. But being on Tempest Island again brings back old memories and creates some new ones, forcing her to take a hard look at her carefully crafted life.

Can she build a new life for herself on Tempest Island? Or will the stalker end that journey before it even gets started?

Whispers of the Dead by Elle Gray:

Storyville is a small town with world altering mysteries. Here the impossible is this town’s reality.

In the wake of her partner’s disappearance, FBI agent Cora Pratt calls for backup and accepts the aid of Sheriff Highsmith.

As the search for Nolan continues, Cora ventures deeper into the many mysteries in the supernatural small town.
When the hunt for answers leads her to a secret library within a library.
She is finally able to learn what lies behind some of the towns’ many secrets.

As Cora unravels her own tangled past connections to Storyville and the town’s secrets. Her dreams become far more jarring.

With dreams and reality converging and more truths finally found.
Cora must now follow the whispers from the past to save the future of Storyville and maybe even humanity itself…

Watching Her by Elle Gray:

“Welcome home. We’re alone now, no one can hear you.”

Blake Wilder has captured many dangerous criminals over the years.
When a familiar case lands on her lap, she could have never imagined the horrors that would follow.

A serial killer with a chillingly familiar pattern resurfaces, and it will take all her wit and power to ensure that the culprit never sees the light of day again.
As the case and the body count mount, it becomes apparent that he’s not just a step ahead of Blake: he’s a shadow in the darkness, a relentless tormentor who’s watching her every move.

While the killer continues to elude and taunt Blake at every turn. It seems only a matter of time before she either captures the predator or becomes prey herself.

Think you’re alone? Think again…

Against the Witchy Tide by Lily Harper Hart:

Hali Waverly is gearing up for a big change. The hip surgery she’s been dreading is only two weeks out, and that means it’s time to get things in order before she’s down for the count to recuperate. She has a plan….and then the unthinkable happens.

When leaving the doctor after scheduling surgery, a bank robbery suspect crosses Hali’s path. When his mask is removed, her boyfriend Gray Hunter recognizes him as a fellow shifter, and the questions only grow from there.

It seems there are a lot of strange shifters hanging around St. Pete Beach, and they don’t belong to the same faction. The one spot they agree to meet is Hali’s tiki bar…and sparks—and fur—are about to fly.

Hali doesn’t want to get involved in pack politics, but she might not have a choice. For Gray, who turned his back on the pack years ago, the appearance of warring factions on his turf means bad things are about to happen. He has no choice but to stand up and fight, however.

Hali knows what she wants for her future. Unfortunately for her, she’s going to have to go to war to get it. This fight—so many claws and teeth to contend with—might be out of her reach.

That won’t stop her from fighting…even to the death.

Seasonable Doubt by Robin James:

It’s the week before Christmas and Santa is on trial for attempted murder…

Known to locals as the “Christmas Guy,” Nick Whittaker has delighted his neighbors with an elaborate holiday light show and his uncanny resemblance to Santa Claus. A bit of a loner, Nick has found his place and his calling as a mall Santa in the quaint Northern Michigan town of Helene. He’s the last person anyone would have suspected in the brutal beating of a local politician. But when the bloodied murder weapon turns up in his trash and surveillance video puts him at the crime scene, Nick finds himself on trial for his freedom.

Defense attorney Cass Leary has a soft spot for lost causes. When she crosses paths with Nick Whittaker on a trip up north, she realizes she’s his one shot at a fair trial. As a blizzard barrels down on Helene, Cass quickly learns the evidence against Nick may not be what it seems. Both he and the victim had enemies and secrets that could bury them and a courtroom bombshell throws everything into chaos. As Cass races against time to unravel the twisted threads of this mystery, whispers of intrigue and betrayal echo through the courthouse.

In the dead of winter, Cass Leary fights for justice in a town where even Christmas can’t thaw the icy grip of suspicion.

White Witchmas by Amanda M. Lee:

Chestnuts are roasting. Jingle bells are rocking. The halls are about to be decked.

In other words, Christmas is about to hit Hemlock Cove. Hard.

There’s just one little problem…or maybe two. Okay, there are three big problems plaguing Bay Winchester before she can enjoy the holidays.

The first is that the warden who lost his job thanks to a prison break weeks before is determined to stalk Bay until she magically fixes his life. He keeps showing up in the oddest of places and making the sort of demands she can’t fulfill.

The second involves Aunt Tillie, who has decided to gift her nemesis Margaret Little a special spell rather than a lump of coal this holiday season. It involves her Christmas decorations taking on a life—and voice—of their own. The spell, however, isn’t nearly as contained as it was supposed to be.

When a body shows up at the local private school, that means it’s one problem too many for Bay. And she doesn’t know which problem to solve first.

The headmistress of the school was involved in a convoluted affair with father of one of her students. The list of suspects who wanted her dead was long and sundry, however.

All Bay wants is to surprise her husband with a dog for Christmas and to eat her weight in cookies. She has to save the day first, though.

Murder, mayhem, and mistletoe are on the menu.

Death might not be far behind.

Buckle up, because the Santa decorations are coming to town.

Till Death Do Us Part by Willow Rose:

Death was the only way she could leave.

Rachel Baker, a devoted mother of three, disappeared one Monday morning after dropping off her children at daycare. Her car was found on the side of the road, but there’s no trace of her anywhere. Soon, the questions start piling up:

What happened to her?

Would she leave her children just like that?

Was the husband involved?

When they find out she was planning to leave her husband, the question arises whether he killed her because she wanted to leave or if her sister helped her disappear. Who tells the truth, and who hides an ugly secret?

FBI Agent Eva Rae Thomas is in the middle of renovating her house with her boyfriend, Detective Matt Miller, when she is called in to assist with this strange case.

She knows Rachel, as their children are best friends, and has no problem taking over, trying to find her friend and fellow mom.

But when Rachel’s body turns up in a storage unit, and Eva Rae digs deeper; she realizes this killer is especially vicious and determined not to be found.

Meanwhile, the husband and mother-in-law fight over the right to the children, and things soon turn ugly as secrets are gushing out of the closet on both sides, one darker than the next.

By Any Means by J.C. Ryan:

Jessie Bell’s last parole hearing was a disgrace.

One board member called her a witch and a harpy and said that, given the chance, he would have her put down like a rabid dog.

Ten years in prison for killing her sadistically abusive husband had turned Jessie Bell into a poisoned, embittered, and dangerous person. The parole hearing was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It was payback time.

An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth? No, not for Jessie Bell. Her version of justice wasn’t just about getting even. It was about taking back twice as much as had been taken from you. Two eyes for one. Justice meant redressing all the imbalances – and putting out only one eye didn’t compare to the loss of all the advantages of losing two eyes.

Fortunately, Jessie is offered the position of the late Pavo, Regan’s Uncle Paul, in the Organization.

And she accepted it.

“Justice,” she murmured. “Poetic justice. Justice that I can create myself.”

She balled up her fists on the table. “Yeah, there’s more than a few people I know who need some poetic justice right about now.”

A former Delta Force operative is serving a life sentence for killing an eight-year-old girl. He was found guilty just because he could have done it and people feared him? Who was the real killer?

It was like the whole world was turning crazy. A judge’s son murdered innocent kids, then had his kids, in turn, murdered. Dangerous chemicals killed hundreds, then spread into the water supply. The City turned into a permanent rush hour – a panicked slow crawl. Drug dealers and pimps were getting killed on the streets.

Karma? Jessie had always been a fan of ordinary human beings carrying out the work of karma.

There is only one person who could possibly stop the inevitable bloodbath that Jessie is about to unleash on the city – Judge Regan St. Clair – but to do so, she must cross the line she has sworn never to cross – join the Organization.

But maybe it is as Uncle Paul always said: “The end justifies the means.”

Weigh Anchor by Wayne Stinnett:

A lifelong friend finds something deep in the Everglades that is so very odd, that when he calls Jesse McDermitt, at first the semi-retired former special operator is in total disbelief. But he is also very intrigued, and the duo set out on another adventure reminiscent of their childhood days.

But their youthful quest had been all about fun and make-believe. This one was real, waiting nearly a century to be discovered.

There is another party interested in what Billy Rainwater stumbled upon. They have been searching for decades and will stop at nothing to recover what they believe to be not only their personal property, but their legacy. The Glades never gives up secrets readily.

Deep in the River of Grass, untold dangers lurk, waiting to snatch the unwary. It raises its ugly head in the backcountry of the Middle Keys, as well. But when it finds its way into the parking lot of Jesse’s favorite watering hole, a line in the sand has to be drawn once again.