A collection of notes/impressions from titles where I didn’t find enough to necessitate a dedicated page. Usually short works of fiction.
Unknown Number
tells the story of a person who has gender dysphoria. In an alternate universe, they never transitioned but went on to become an established physicist who could communicate across parallel universes.
The Sin of America
There’s a woman outside of a town called Sheridan, where the sky is there to only witness, not to intervene… They all swarm hungrily over her, caring nothing for who she is or where she has been or where they will go when this is over. There are good God-fearing people outside of Sheridan and they are killing the sin of America, a place born with half a heart that demands to be made whole, year in and year out. They are crushing the sin of America into a paste. They are releasing themselves from it. They are ridding themselves of it forever. It’s not their fault. Nothing’s their fault. It never has been. It never will be. They are so innocent, innocent as the sky.
Set in modern times, ritualistic sacrifice is so gruesome, given that we’ve gone through The Age of Reason™. Sheridan’s residents seem deliberately ignorant that sacrificing one of their own doesn’t actually change things.
Proof by Induction
“Can he think creatively? In the, uh, simulation, I mean. Can he do math? Can he have insights?” “Again, that’s not your father in there. That’s a slice –” “Yes, I know, a snapshot of who he was in his last moments.
Harley Quinn: Breaking Glass
Failures of the criminal justice system showcased twice when Harley and a rich kid commit crimes, but Harley gets harsher treatment, e.g. Harley goes to jail, while the Kanes meet the $500k bail.
Sometimes the characters, e.g. Ivy, monologue about social justice in an unnatural way. The parts where social commentary was intrinsic to the plot were more impactful. Happens towards the second half of book.
The joker being a rich kid with anarchical fantasies was an unexpected twist. Though it made it easier to dislike the character. Harley is not yet evil at this point of the story.
Old Man Logan
[Hawkeye] Sometimes I feel insulted they didn’t kill me. Like I was so insignificant they didn’t need to worry. Thor and Cap and Tony Stark – they all got targeted and taken down inside the first few hours. But the bad guys basically ignored me.
[Hawkeye] I thought you came here to free everybody. [Ashley Barton] That’s because you’re stupid, Dad. I killed The Kingpin like he killed Magneto. Now it’s time to show these boys what their new boss is made of…
[Mysterio] Did you really think you could do this alone? Take down forty super-villains? Talk about delusions of grandeur. But for your friends. People who would hesitate. That’s a different matter entirely
Alternative universes are especially exciting because decisions carry weight; fewer deus ex machina’s, lower plot armor, etc.
The Man Who Fell to Earth
[Simonson Cap] And he didn’t. He didn’t do anything. He just sat there as Farnsworth read the files. For hours. I realised then that I’d never actually seen someone actually do nothing before. He didn’t read, or look around the room, or pick his nose. I suppose technically he was – he was sitting, and breathing, those sorts of things. But all of that seemed like he might forget to do it any second too. Like he was doing those things for the sake of appearances.
[Mr. Peters] It’s not so much that the technology was impossible. It wasn’t magic. It was more the case that the technology was unimaginable to our current way of thinking. It didn’t build off a foundation of chemical exposure, or even what we would now call digital technology. It wasn’t an improvement on what we and our other competitors made, but rather it was as if someone had arrived at the idea of a camera without ever having seen one.
[Mr. Peters] I think someone will come when they see what happened to him. Whether to rescue him or seek revenge… It doesn’t really matter. They’ll come, and they’ll bring more beautiful technology with them. Resources, Arthur, it’s all about resources… And we’ve wrung Mr. Newton dry.
Five Views of the Planet Tartarus
A whirring ten-limbed auto-judge pronounces their sentences in turn, omitting no words from the traditional declaration of guilt, because the Sibylline Empire believes in ceremony.
Nanobots pump into their blood, flooding their organs, cleaning off plaques, lengthening telomeres, repairing neurons. The last injection severs their voluntary motor pathways so nothing moves but their eyes. Before the final step, the prisoners feel young again, for a moment.
That is when the prisoners will see all the frozen white spacesuits, billions in orbit, their eyes aware and flickering behind well-made helmets, their blood pumped full of machines that won’t let them die, their bodies spinning around the planet forever and ever.
Marginalia
- Marginalia - Uncanny Magazine. Mary Robinette Kowal. www.uncannymagazine.com . Accessed Oct 19, 2025.
Over her shoulder, her mother croaked a reply but any words in it vanished beneath Margery’s own panicked breath.
On the long thin bones that must have been the wrists, was a metal vambrance that had survived the scorching of the acid burn. Not Hugh. The squire that had ridden out with his lordship. Somewhere a mother didn’t know that she should be grieving.
The sweeping spirals of its stone grey shell had the polish of fine granite shot through with striations of rose. Were it not terrifying, it would have been beautiful.
The dress of fine green linen was so beautiful and soft and impractical that she’d wrapped it in an old sheet and folded it into a chest until she could figure out what to do with it.
To someone who had not spent hours with her, all that would be apparent were the constant tremors and wiggles of her body. Margery turned back, ready to defend against the pity that she knew would be there.
Three Faces of a Beheading
The Soldier lifts her empty right hand. You lean forward, your elbows on your knees. You stop your breathing. She scrawls a message in the air, words falling out of her fingers the same grey-shot gold as the light she’s bathing in.
THEY ONLY CALL US USURPERS BECAUSE THEY KILLED ENOUGH OF US
HOW’S THIS FOR
LOYALTY
Then she grabs her ponytail, yanks her face up, and cuts off her own head with her sword.
Because in historiography the ‘past has a plot’, there is a gap between ‘events-which-happened’ and ‘events-as-conveyed’. The shape of this gap therefore results from the historian’s conscious selection, whether guided by practical considerations (what sources are available, the scope of the writing, etc.) or by a chosen narrative structure which produces a ‘plot’ that makes sense of the ‘events-which-happened’ for the reader/perceiver of the historiography.
The one that the Rose Seal instigated when the Emperor was young and weak from newness, instead of old and weak from people thinking about a future that didn’t have him in it.
I did say landholding aristocrats. I didn’t say noble lumpenproletariat or champions of democracy or anti-colonialist uprising. What kind of story did you think I was telling you?
Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole
So they (the first “they”) killed the kid again. […] So they (the “Nice Houses” they) got a third kid and stuck it in the hole. They felt weird about it, but they liked their Nice Houses, and also, they really did truly and wholeheartedly care about the well-being of Omelas and all of the citizens except for the kid in the hole.
Everyone (me, you, the newscasters, the janitors with the good PPE, the children who lived inside and outside Omelas) was performatively disgusted by the video. Everyone watched it anyway.
They pointed out that Omelas was a better place to live than most other places because at least you knew the load-bearing suffering child suffered for a reason, as opposed to all other kids who were suffering for no reason.
The kid was the drop of blood in the bowl of milk whose slight bitterness would make the sweetness of the rest of Omelas richer. Without the kid in the hole, Omelas was just paradise. With the load-bearing, suffering child, Omelas meant something.
“Why are we arguing so much when the kid is in the hole? The kid is in the hole, which means that shouldn’t have so much infighting. What is the point of the kid in the hole if we can’t even get our act together!” That had many philosophical implications on whether disagreements can exist in paradise…
References
- Wolverine Vol 3 #67. Old Man Logan: Part 2. Mark Millar; Steve McNiven. marvel.fandom.com . Jul 30, 2008. Accessed Dec 14, 2022.
- Wolverine Vol 3 #68. Old Man Logan: Part 3. Mark Millar; Steve McNiven. marvel.fandom.com . Aug 27, 2008. Accessed Dec 14, 2022.
- Ashley Barton (Earth-807128) | Marvel Database | Fandom. marvel.fandom.com . Accessed Dec 14, 2022.
- Wolverine Vol 3 #70. Old Man Logan: Part 3. Mark Millar; Steve McNiven. marvel.fandom.com . Jan 2, 2009. Accessed Dec 14, 2022.
- The Man Who Fell to Earth: The Making of a Classic. Stephen Dalton. titan-comics.com . www.hoopladigital.com . Oct 25, 2022. Accessed Feb 5, 2023.
- Invasion. www.apple.com . Oct 22, 2021. Accessed Feb 5, 2023.
- The Man Who Fell to Earth - Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org . Accessed Feb 5, 2023.
The use of text message screenshots (and corresponding alternative text) brings a modern feel to the piece.