Ta-Nehisi Coates: Black Panther - A Nation Under Our Feet, Vol II

Just a few pages into the second volume of collected Black Panther comics, I start mentally screaming at the page, “No, T’Challa, please don’t go there.” If it is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ intention to show us a man trying to figure out how to govern a troubled, even a broken nation, then T’Challa seems to be trying all the wrong things. I’m fascinated by the exploration of what it is to be a leader, of what are the key issues in governance and in building (or rebuilding) a nation, but I am finding it very hard to like this protagonist.

He doesn’t understand his people, he doesn’t listen to them, he doesn’t allow himself, as any good leader should, to be taught what must be done by the needs and hopes of his people, rather than by his own goals. It’s his job to take the best of what his people imagine and figure out out how to make it happen. But T’Challa is as broken as his country, and he is getting everything so wrong.

Not that the leaders of the rebellion are doing much better. I see them getting drawn away from good intentions, of losing their idealism. Power does corrupt, and one important part of figuring out how to lead, is how to put that natural process in check.

So, Volume II of A Nation under Our Feet leaves me very concerned about the future of Wakanda. But then, with a title like that, it’s almost a warning that governance will be an issue through to the end. That there is a road to a better understanding is clear, never so much as in one vignette, a part of the story of T’Challa’s sister Shuri. In a dreamquest if sorts, she experiences a fight practice between her mother and herself. The image of the Queen tells the story of how the early forerunners to the Wakandan nation resisted the first white imperialist interlopers. At the ends, she says “The point is power, and in that practice, either you are a nation or you are nothing.” T’Challa has forgotten, if he ever knew, that to lead, he must be the nation, and thus, in his struggles to lead alone, he has so far achieved nothing.

But I’m keeping faith with Coates, because I believe he has a longer view here, and intends to give us, in the end, a superhero/king who is flawed and human, but still represents a force for good, for his own people and for the world. He will be the nation, because he has let the nation become him.

Short fiction: January 5, 2018

J. D. Popham, “Museum Piece”; Compelling Science Fiction, Winter 2017
http://compellingsciencefiction.com/stories/museum-piece.html

The creator of the robots is dead, and the only surviving humaniform robot is on the run, following his last instructions from his maker. Interesting but I found a serious disconnect between why the robot is being hunted, and what he is trying to do. It seemed there was some information left out along the way, and things like that bother me.


Ahmed Khan, “Crystals of the Ebony Tower”; Another Realm, January 2018
http://www.anotherealm.com/2018/ar010118.php

An interesting fable, marred in my opinion by too much specificity at the end. Without that, it would have been more widely applicable to the human quest for achieving one’s dreams, eschewing the easy way out. With it, it seems a touch too judgmental about which goals and dreams are worthy, and which are not.


Kai Ashante Wilson, “The Lamentations of Their Women”; tor.com, August 24, 2017
https://www.tor.com/2017/08/24/the-lamentation-of-their-women/

“How to be evil without doing bad? There’s a problem for you, huh?”

The title of Wilson’s novelette evokes the hero stories of Robert Howard, the creator of Conan the (white) barbarian, who rambles through a fantasy prehistoric world dealing rough justice with any number of enchanted weapons. In Wilson’s world, the world in our own, the world of Trump and the carceral state and extrajudicial murders of black men, and the heroes who find the enchanted weapons calling them to vengeance are two black New Yorkers, Tanisha and Anhel, who make a pact with darkness and set out on a murderous mission, to make those who oppress them pay. It’s violent, and angry, and it’s a warning.


Ellen Klages, “Caligo Lane”; originally published by Subterranean Press in 2014, reprinted by tor.com
https://www.tor.com/2017/05/12/reprints-caligo-lane-ellen-klages/

Franny Travers has a magical gift; she can make maps that turn into doorways, if she is careful and thorough and detailed enough. As long as she has two endpoints, she can make a bridge between them, a bridge big enough for a few people to pass from one point to another. One more important thing. Franny lives in San Francisco, but she is a Polish Jew, and this story is set during WWII.


Sunny Moraine, “eyes I dare not meet in dreams”; tor.com, June 14, 2017
https://www.tor.com/2017/06/14/eyes-i-dare-not-meet-in-dreams/

This is a story about the day when all the dead girls in refrigerators came back, still dead, but looking at the world with cold, clear eyes, and refused to go quietly back into the night. Chilling, and powerful, and somehow victorious.


Lucy Taylor, “Sweetlings”; tor.com, May 3, 2017
https://www.tor.com/2017/05/03/sweetlings/

In this post-ecopocalyptic world, the remnants of humanity struggle to survive, as evolution switches into high gear. Old species are reappearing, existing species modifying to take advantage of the inundated world. Taylor’s novelette hovers somewhere at the interface of science fiction and horror, telling a bleak take about the end of the world as we know it.


A. C. Wise, “Scenes from a Film (1942 - 1987); tor.com, March 31, 2017
https://www.tor.com/2017/03/21/excerpts-from-a-film-1942-1987/

Wise’s novelette is a disquieting examination of the media’s fetish for the deaths, preferably gruesome, of beautiful young women. Embedded in the standard Hollywood trope of the ingenue who comes to tinseltown to become a starlet, and that producer who discovers, creates and seduces her, is a litany of eroticisation of female fear, pain and death, using the death of Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, as a touchstone of sorts linking all the murdered girls, all the serial killer narratives, all the films that make pain like theirs eternal.


Max Gladstone, “The Scholast in the Low Waters Kingdom”; tor.com, March 29, 2017
https://www.tor.com/2017/03/29/the-scholast-in-the-low-waters-kingdom/

Once there were doorways between the worlds and the knowledge and power to build planets, but the doorways failed and the knowledge lost. This is a story about a time when the doorways began to work again, and how some used them for conquest and plunder, and others used them to make peace where they found, and try to restore what was lost.