2025 read #75: Sundown in San Ojuela by M. M. Olivas.

Sundown in San Ojuela by M. M. Olivas

348 pages

Published 2024

Read from May 5 to October 6

Rating: 4 out of 5

As with Kay Chronister, author of Desert Creatures, I had the honor of publishing one of M. M. Olivas’ early short stories in my sporadic career as an indie press editor. Her “The Man Who Fed Dilophosaurs” is a standout in The Mesozoic Reader. If I had a nickel for every time I published early work from an up-and-coming genre author who would go on to write critically praised horror novels set in or around SoCal, I’d have two nickels, etc.

Sundown is an ambitious first novel, nonlinear prose-poetry layered with different perspectives. First person, second, third, flashbacks ranging from characters’ childhoods to the depredations of the conquistadors—we got a bit of everything. You never know, from one chapter to the next, what thread the story will follow. This can make for dense reading at times. (Especially when your attention span frays partway through, and you want to get back into it months later. Though that’s on me, not this book.)

In no surprise to me, Olivas’ prose is lushly sinister, making you taste and feel the desert wind as well as the hostility boiling out of racist assholes in town. Sundown pulses with magic bloody and beautiful. Hungry gods haunt the night, while ICE preys through the day. Sisters Liz and Mary are brought back to Casa Coyotl after the death of their Aunt Marisol, but San Ojuela’s secrets are deep, ancient, and full of bones; there is always more hurt, more trauma and betrayal, the further one digs. A hemisphere’s worth of injustice demanding redress.

2025 read #74: Dinosaur Sanctuary: Volume 7 by Itaru Kinoshita.

Dinosaur Sanctuary: Volume 7 by Itaru Kinoshita

Research consultant: Shin-ichi Fujiwara

Translated by John Neal

193 pages

Published 2025 (English translation published 2025)

Read September 30

Rating: 3 out of 5

Goddamn, but it’s been a tumultuous six months since I read the previous volume of Dinosaur Sanctuary.

This time around, I’m keeping my expectations low. Sanctuary is light workplace drama first, dinosaur fiction a distant second. That’s as true as ever in this installment. Still, we do get some good dino zookeeper interactions, like when Suzume has difficulties feeding a blind Deinonychus named Trom, or when she has an unexpectedly busy day in the Psittacosaurus petting zoo.

I haven’t quite located the sense of charm I felt in the early volumes, but odds are that’s the fault of the world we live in right now. I had a nice time reading it all the same.

2025 read #73: The Forest Primeval by Leo J. Hickey.

The Forest Primeval: The Geologic History of Wood and Petrified Forests by Leo J. Hickey

62 pages

Published 2003

Read September 29

Rating: 3 out of 5

Earlier this month, my partner R and I visited the Yale Peabody Museum. (It’s free!) I’m currently hyperfocusing on fossil plants and ancient ecosystems, partly because of the novels I’m writing, partly because it’s a dang cool topic. When I found this slim volume in the gift shop, I couldn’t pass it up.

It’s a scientist’s idea of a primer for non-specialists, which means we get thrown into a welter of terminology with only the barest effort to define it. I’m still shaky on the distinction between a wood section’s radial face and its transverse face. One shoddy diagram is considered sufficient explanation; the terms aren’t defined in the glossary. And because the book is over twenty years old, I can only surmise how much of it has been superseded by more recent lines of evidence.

Still, I love paleobotany, and this is a neat appetizer for the more technical books I’ve been pricing in recent weeks. If you ever happen to read my forthcoming paleo-fiction and find a reference to Cretaceous highland meadows of Ephedra plants, you can credit this book.

2025 read #72: The Skylark of Space by Edward E. “Doc” Smith.

The Skylark of Space by Edward E. “Doc” Smith

159 pages

Originally serialized 1928; first book publication 1946; revised 1958

Read from September 25 to September 26

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

A foundational text of what would become space opera, Skylark begins as an edisonade, with athletic, handsome, motorcycle-riding chemist Richard “Dick” Seaton discovering a stable transuranic metal with strange catalytic properties. “But wait, that’s basically Wells’ First Men in the Moon,” you might say. And you’d be right.

But “Doc” Smith takes us well beyond the moon. We accompany Dick into interstellar space, along with his fiancée, sensible and musically talented Dorothy “Dottie” Vaneman, and his best friend, wealthy explorer, archaeologist, sportsman, engineer, and confirmed bachelor M. Reynolds “Mart” Crane. They are dogged every step of the way by coldblooded, greedy, stick-at-nothing rival scientist Marc DuQuesne. He too has a nickname, but it feels next door to a slur here, given the swarthiness inevitably assigned to a 1920s villain. There’s also Margaret “Peggy” Spencer, secretary, who doesn’t really get any characterization beyond “kidnapped damsel.”

Skylark is, shall we say, not a sophisticated narrative.

It is plotted and paced exactly like a pulp film serial, the sort where we spend more time with kidnappings and private eyes and industrial sabotage than we do with spaceborne adventure. Hell, the first flight of the Skylark happens off-screen. I don’t know what floated readers’ boats in the Twenties, but I can assure you, I would rather read about adventures in space travel than about some millionaire heir commissioning out steelworks.

Once we do get into space, Skylark is a mixed bag. A desperate rescue from the orbit of a dead star is a thrilling read to this day. An encounter with a noncoporeal alien who takes the form of Dick and threatens to dematerialize our heroes, on the other hand, feels stale, a perfunctory first draft of some lesser Star Trek script. Speaking of Star Trek, we get some nearly naked green humanoids who traffic in slaves. This latter plotline is tedious enough to make me miss the terrestrial crime fiction (and is stuffed full of eugenics, besides).

Here’s where I say I’m glad I read it, history of the genre, and so on. Which is true. But sometimes I ask myself why I bother with books like this.

2025 read #71: Raptoriva by Victoria Rivera.

Raptoriva by Victoria Rivera

472 pages

Published 2024

Read from September 23 to September 25

Rating: 2 out of 5

Years ago, after Jurassic World nudged a modest new dino fad back into the mainstream, I wondered: Where are the YA dinosaur novels? Sure, we got The Evolution of Claire. But where were the plucky, misunderstood teen heroines who shoot arrows into raptors and fret about which boy to kiss while they overthrow the tyrannical (or perhaps tyrannosaurical) government?

A couple months ago, I got a TikTok by this author promoting this book, and my questions were answered: Self-publishing. That’s where the YA dinosaurs went.

You know I just had to read it, out of professional courtesy (as a future self-publisher of dinosaur fiction) if nothing else.

As I’ve said before, I’m not in the habit of trashing self-published and indie press books. Honestly, as self-pub books go, Raptoriva is solid. There’s the occasional typo and malapropism, but Rivera’s prose is standard for YA romantasy, neither better nor worse than you’d expect. YA romantasy isn’t my genre, though, and my biggest dissatisfaction with this book—that it’s a drip-feed of tropes and archetypes instead of a novel—is the fault of a highly commercialized genre’s increasingly formulaic expectations. Blame capitalism, as with so many other ills in life.

Raptoriva is The Hunger Games meets Dinotopia. Misunderstood teen archer (Qora) and teen fighter with a secret princely past (Ninan) both volunteer for the Venture, a deadly ritual gauntlet with a significant prize at the end. Even though the setting lacks electronic technology, competitors are still expected to have reality TV-grade storylines. The Venture’s twists and turns are broadcast back to audiences in Runaqa’s cities via sketch artists and heralds. There’s even a tryouts scene where entrants have to prove themselves with a special talent.

I liked the Andean flavor Rivera gives her setting, but the extinct animals, jumbled together from all time periods and every region of the globe, are mostly just Latin names checked off in the background, rarely charismatic presences in their own right. Most of the action involves fighting with other contestants. The characters even have magic rocks that keep dinosaurs away. You could do a search-and-replace for most species, swapping them for horses and drakes and griffins and the like, and change basically nothing about the story.

The one dinosaur that has any screen time, a giant Spinosaurus, is straight out of Jurassic Park III. No research on the animal’s potential ecology or behavior, no updated depiction to follow more recent hypotheses, just pure unreconstructed movie monster from a quarter-century ago.

Still, I enjoyed Raptoriva enough that I’m open to keeping up with the series. We can only hope dinosaurs figure more into the sequels, as something more than their names.

2025 read #70: The Coming of the Terrans by Leigh Brackett.

The Coming of the Terrans by Leigh Brackett

157 pages

Published 1967

Read from September 20 to September 23

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

My partner R and I went to a lovely book barn the other day, one with a better than usual selection of old pulp paperbacks. I’m not in a position to buy much these days, but I had to snag this one.

Terrans is a collection of five of Brackett’s Mars stories, published between 1948 and 1964. The last of Brackett’s Martian books I read, The People of the Talisman, was way back in 2016; at the time, I found it fairly middling. I’ve become much more interested in classic Sword & Planet stories since then, though, so now’s a good time to try again.

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“The Beast-Jewel of Mars” (1948). Grieving the presumed death of his girlfriend, Burk Winters has had it with the soulless greed of 1998. Paying exorbitantly for the privilege, he undergoes the Martian rite of Shanga, which, by means of mysterious rays, regresses him into a “primitive ape-man,” whom the Martian crowds promptly jeer and scourge through the streets. This story could’ve been a critique of colonial capitalism, but alas, we get the standard “We’re a young race and we’ve made mistakes, but we’re out here civilizing the solar system” line of bullshit instead. I’m not keen on Brackett’s of-the-time talk of “evolutionary levels,” nor her hero’s even more of-the-time casually domineering violence against a woman. A solid pulp story, but it hasn’t aged well. C+

“Mars Minus Bisha” (1948). In the distant future of 2016, Fraser is a doctor stationed in a Quonset research hut outside a dusty Martian village. He suddenly becomes a single dad when a Martian mother drops off her cursed child. Could’ve been cute, but because this was published in the ’40s, Fraser strikes young Bisha and calls her a little idiot. Plus, it all stinks of white saviorism. Still, the story explores an emotional dimension rare in sci-fi of this era. C?

“The Last Days of Shandakor” (1952). The most fascinating aspect of Brackett’s Mars is the way she takes the Schiaparellian trope of Mars as an ancient, dying world, and extends it to a logical sci-fi conclusion: Mars as a de facto “Dying Earth” setting, with the addition of cocky, fresh-faced off-worlders arriving by rocketship to experience it. Our narrator is a planetary anthropologist who happens to meet the scion of an unknown-to-Earthly-science type of Martian, the last survivor of a place called Shandakor. All the other Martians act like the survivor isn’t there. Hoping to make his name by mapping out more of the ancient tangle of Martian history, he pressures the stranger to take him to Shandakor. The answer to the mystery is disappointingly mundane after all that setup, and there’s a romance subplot that’s needlessly icky in the most midcentury way, but overall, it’s an entertaining story. C

“Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon” (1964). With a title like that, I wanted to like this more. But once again, it’s a lot of setup with minimal payoff. It’s another case of bureaucratic “civilization” not knowing how to process the Dying Earth strangeness of Martian life, this time a vast subterranean mystery that must be propitiated by human sacrifice. I would’ve liked to read more about the cave and its uncanny presence, but we barely get anything before the main character must decide which path to take. C-?

“The Road to Sinharat” (1962). Carey is a former tomb-robber turned bureaucrat. More in tune with Mars than most Earthmen, he’s been sabotaging a colonialist project meant to improve living standards on the Red Planet by destroying and uprooting its culture, all while Martian resentment builds against the newcomers and their New Culture. The powers of progress refuse to respect indigenous lifeways, so Carey must go on a quest to ancient Sinharat to find academic proof that natives know what they’re talking about. The story shows its age, but it scratches an “Indiana Jones on Mars” itch I didn’t know I had. B-

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I went into this collection expecting more Sword & Planet after the Eric John Stark pattern. Clearly, this book went for a different vibe altogether, one not necessarily critiquing but certainly in conversation with contemporary independence movements and the construction of extractive, World Bank-style capitalism out of imperial colonialism. Like with all such “aliens stand in for colonized peoples” narratives, you can’t escape the conclusion that the author is being just as patronizing as the busybody colonists.

Still, making Mars a “Dying Earth” setting, and having clueless tourists and scientists and bureaucrats drop into the middle of everything, is an inspired twist on the formula.

2025 read #69: The Changeling Sea by Patricia A. McKillip.

The Changeling Sea by Patricia A. McKillip

137 pages

Published 1988

Read from September 18 to September 19

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Unless you count The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, which was marketed as such, this is my first exposure to McKillip’s fiction for younger readers. Fifteen year old Peri has lost her father to the sea and her mother to grief. Her mentor, who taught her ineffectual hexes in a hut on the beach, has disappeared. Then a bedraggled prince and a sea-dragon on a golden chain show up in quick succession. Could there really be a strange country under the sea, like the one Peri’s mother daydreams about?

McKillip’s prose is perfect for a young adult novel from this era, communicating complex feelings with beautiful clarity, layers of loss and yearning and frustration, of having no world to return to. Peri and her island village are vivid presences from the first page.