2025 read #50: In an Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire.

In an Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire

204 pages

Published 2019

Read from June 11 to June 17

Rating: 4 out of 5

The last of McGuire’s Wayward Children series I read was Beneath the Sugar Sky, way back in 2018. Back then, I found the books solid but perhaps just a tiny bit unsatisfying. Enough years have passed that my reading tastes have shifted; is it time for a revisit?

Like Tori Bovalino’s Not Good for Maidens, Dream is a modern riff on Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market. Young Katherine Lundy loves books, rules, logic, and staying inconspicuous. When she happens upon a doorway to the strange and rule-ordered Market, where every exchange demands a “fair price,” she finds herself increasingly at home, even if accruing too much debt means turning into a bird.

The Wayward Children books (particularly the first one) fit within the 2010s fad for telling what happens to the heroes after the story ends. This comes through in Dream, with McGuire eliding through the big adventures against the Wasp Queen and the Bone Wraiths in favor of seeing the effect the trauma and loss have on young Lundy afterward.

Either this volume clicked with my current sensibilities, or I’ve simply become less nitpicky with middle age. From the standard fantasy trope of fair bargains, McGuire opens doors onto complicated questions of what we as people owe each other, what love and belonging can offer us, and the cost they extract.

2025 read #49: Feed Them Silence by Lee Mandelo.

Feed Them Silence by Lee Mandelo

105 pages

Published 2023

Read from June 7 to June 11

Rating: 4 out of 5

Combing through my library for quick reads, I happened upon this near-future sci-fi novella from the author of The Woods All Black. The plot feels like something from turn-of-the-millennium Asimov’s: Scientist Sean gets tech bro capitalist funding to implant a neurological interface between herself and a gray wolf. She argues conservation would benefit from affective understanding, but deep down she questions whether she sold out her own anti-corporate principles in order to make her lifelong dreams of becoming a wolf come true. That’s certainly what her wife Riya thinks.

Mandelo brings queer messiness and climate-change-is-now pathos to the concept, grief for the world already gone beyond our power to save. Silence is a story about connection and alienation in the world capitalism and unchecked colonial destruction have left to us, rendered beautifully in Mandelo’s expert prose.

2025 read #48: The Star Pit by Samuel R. Delany.

The Star Pit by Samuel R. Delany

82 pages

Published 1967

Read from June 5 to June 6

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

An especially brief novella I found reprinted in a line of doubles Tor ran in the 1980s. It doesn’t even appear as a novel on Delany’s Wikipedia bibliography; it’s listed as a short story. Nonetheless, it deserves a slow, appreciative reading.

Delany’s careful poetry shapes a picture of space dreadful and vast and tragic and beautiful, seen from a blue collar perspective that’s become common only in recent years. It also features normalized pansexual group marriage.

I enjoyed the story’s worldbuilding conceit that reality breaks down in the empty space beyond the galaxy, inflicting psychological damage on brains exposed to it; it makes the cosmos strange and threatening in a way rarely seen in classic sci-fi.

The story’s second worldbuilding prop, the golden, are people too sociopathic or unthinking to be affected by the shift in reality. Presaging Gateway ten years later, the economy of humanity is reliant on what the golden bring back from beyond the galaxy. Sociopaths and dumbasses lording over everyone else, controlling new technology and the economy, having free rein to travel where they will, while working class folk get stuck in dead-end spirals on hell-hole industrial worlds? It feels oddly prescient here in 2025.

2025 read #47: Sunbathers by Lindz McLeod.

Sunbathers by Lindz McLeod

100 pages

Published 2024

Read from June 4 to June 5

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

By inverting just one expectation of the usual Bram Stoker mythos — the not-quite-vampires here crave sunlight and hate the dark — McLeod delivers an incisive queer allegory of hiding in the shadows while predators prowl in daylight. She develops the allegory brilliantly for our age of pandemic and authoritarian reaction.

Years ago, “Sunbathers” rejected the scientific warnings that kept everyone else huddled inside; not content with their own transformation, they physically pulled people from their homes to die or transform with them. Tanning beds replace coffins. Puritanism, heteronormativity, and conformity delineate these sunny carnivores, rather than Victorian fears of queerness and death.

Without spoiling too much (no more than the summary on the back cover does, anyhow) our narrator Soph extends the allegory into closeting oneself to purchase safety and acceptance, only to find that a life of empty beige perfection isn’t worth the trade. The Sunbathers’ superstraight utopia is simultaneously hilarious and horrifying. 

2025 read #46: Patience & Sarah by Isabel Miller.

Patience & Sarah by Isabel Miller

192 pages

Published 1969

Read from May 29 to May 31

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

A classic of queer literature, an intimate and insightful love story set in the early nineteenth century. Miller’s descriptions of the small daily intoxications of love and desire are among the best I’ve ever read. Her prose is at the pinnacle of the mid-century style, simple sturdy phrases that get to the innermost heart of emotions and human connection.

Miller balances her story of queer love with incisive critiques of patriarchal power and heterosexual norms. At one point, Patience’s brother says,

These are the passions marriage is meant to discourage and then extinguish. At first we imagine and hope, but in marriage we learn we are not wanted.

This contrasts with the all-encompassing technicolor love of the two women at the center of our story, in all its possessiveness, eroticism, and need.

2025 read #45: The Harp of Imach Thyssel by Patricia C. Wrede.

The Harp of Imach Thyssel by Patricia C. Wrede

235 pages

Published 1985

Read from May 27 to May 29

Rating: 2 out of 5 (generously)

I bought this book on accident years ago, mistaking it for an entry in the Riddle-Master of Hed series. In my defense, its cover uses the exact same font as the contemporary paperback edition of McKillip’s series, and features similar artwork. A sense that this book desperately wishes to be mistaken for something better pretty much sums up the experience. It isn’t bad, per se, but it’s preeminently forgettable.

You know the stereotype of mediocre 1980s fantasy novels that read like someone else’s D&D campaign? I think the stereotype is overstated, but Harp, at any rate, embodies it. There are generic kingdoms and warring factions and spellworkers around every corner. Backstory gets plopped in with all the subtlety of a successful history check. Puns stand in for clever dialogue. It’s a D&D novel with the trademarks sanded off.

We begin with a bard named Emereck and his companion Flindaran, who is an undercover aristocrat playing at adventurer. They ride into a sleepy town and immediately go to the inn. Flindaran wants to flirt with the mysterious innkeeper, but doesn’t wish for the ire of the redoubtable Cilhar monopolizing her time. But then the inn is attacked by disguised soldiers who are after the mysterious Cilhar. In the aftermath, Emereck and Flindaran stumble upon the titular magic harp, which confers immense power, but at immense cost.

Harp functions okay as a vehicle for empty fantasy cliches. The ending, however, crowds together too many reveals and sudden betrayals by characters we’d never been given a reason to care about. The clunky action is outdone only by the awkward exposition.

2025 read #44: The Star-Treader and Other Poems by Clark Ashton Smith.

The Star-Treader and Other Poems by Clark Ashton Smith

100 pages

Published 1912

Read from May 21 to May 24

Rating: 2 out of 5

I made a couple prior attempts to read this collection, and always found my interest waning by the third or fourth page of the opening number, “Nero.” Poetry nowadays is gorgeous but lean, scything through layers of meaning and confessional trauma with precisely keyed phrases. Antique poetry (and this stuff was a deliberate throwback even by the standards of 1912) tends to feel pompous to my modern tastes. You have to be in a particular frame of mind to appreciate a line like “This Rome… / Is made my darkling dream’s effulgency…”

But I want to become conversant with a broader range of poetry, and this was free to download, so here we are again. If you’re reading this review, I finally made it to the end.

Opening with plodding classical pretensions does Star-Treader a disservice, at least to modern readers. It’s really not as bad as that first poem would suggest. While we do slog through plenty of dusty odes to butterflies and pine trees, Smith is at his best when he (quite literally) reaches for the stars.

The titular poem is pretty good, a versification of the typical contemporary “I traveled through space and time in a dream of my past lives” contrivance. It’s a nice mix of sidereal Romanticism with early science fiction. “Medusa” is equally acceptable, a gothic landscape portrayed in words, bridging from Greek myth to a prototype of the Dying Earth.

Other poems expand on the theme of stars and the vastness of space, written at a time when the immensities of time and emptiness were first becoming understood. At the very least, Star-Treader is interesting as a document of these frightening new vistas and how they shook up anglophone conceptions of the universe and humanity’s place within it. This is demonstrated quite literally in “Ode to the Abyss”: “[God’s] might were impotent to conquer thee, / O invisible infinity!”

Perhaps Smith’s poetry is best appreciated as a vibe, with the occasional outstanding line. Later on in “Ode to the Abyss,” we get this banger: “Dark as the final lull of suns.” That carries more desolate cosmic weirdness than entire novels from later writers. Alas, there just isn’t enough of that to make up for all the rest.