2025 read #53: Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior by David Hone.

Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior: What They Did and How We Know by David Hone

Illustrated by Gabriel Ugueto

176 pages

Published 2024

Read from July 28 to August 2

Rating: 4 out of 5

Circa 1998, I was as up to date on dinosaur science as it was possible for a semi-homeless teenager with no formal education to be. There were comprehensive popular overviews and specialist encyclopedias in every library. Those were good times for amateur dinosaur aficionados.

In 2025, we’re in the midst of a much smaller dinosaur renaissance. There are quite lovely new books that do innovative, edifying, expressive things with the topic. But none are the lavish, comprehensive pop-science tomes you used to get in the ’90s. So I’m not scientifically “up to date” the same way, and it’s unlikely I ever will be.

This book is a step toward catching up at least a little bit, though. In particular, Behavior provides a solid foundation for considering non-avian dinosaurs as once-living animals with complex behaviors and interactions with their environment. A lot of recent work in dinosaur science has been, shall we say, excessively optimistic about what behaviors can be recovered from the fossil record. Hone’s approach lays out the diverse possibilities of dinosaur behavior, while cautioning against conclusions drawn from sparse fossil data: “[M]uch of the scientific literature tends toward a confidence in interpreting dinosaur behaviors that probably should not be there….”

I would love a greatly expanded version of this book. Its main weakness, to my taste, is its summary nature. Fascinating glimpses of dinosaur behavior are reduced to a single sentence plus a reference to a paper that I lack access to. I’d prefer a book two or three times longer, giving proper paragraphs (if not subheadings) to more case studies. But even as it stands, Behavior helps break down the movie myths of dinosaurs we all absorbed in the 1990s. A useful starting point for anyone who might want to write more realistic dino fic in the near future.

2025 read #52: Land Beyond the Map by Kenneth Bulmer.

Land Beyond the Map by Kenneth Bulmer

136 pages

Published 1965

Read from July 23 to July 24

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

Knowing nothing else about this book, I picked it up from a used bookstore a few months back on the basis of its cover. Beneath towering pulp letters, a flivver (perhaps a Model T) putters through a wasteland of broken, flaming ruins. For more than a decade—ever since I read this book, in fact—I’ve wanted speculative fiction featuring old-timey cars. That was enough for me to fork out $3 on a dusty Ace Double.

Unfortunately, nothing about this novella lives up to its pulpy cover. That’s common enough in this era, but it’s worse here than usual.

Wealthy scion Roland Crane dabbles in archaeology and collects maps. He is haunted by childhood recollections of a family roadtrip steered awry by a strange map. Young reporter Polly Gould approaches Crane about her cousin, who similarly disappeared “off the map” five years prior. The two go hunting for the mysterious map, only to find that another man (who might be more than what he seems) is determined to get his hands on it at any price.

Land Beyond the Map is almost remarkable in how inessential it is. It relies on broad stereotypes (all of Ireland is “fey”) and employs the sort of midcentury dialogue-writing shortcuts where people say “Check” and “Search me,” which will always remind me of lazy movie novelizations from the 1970s. (Did people ever really talk like that?) Because the book is a product of its time, the forceful competence of Polly makes Crane fantasize about “tanning her stern.” It’s gross and utterly clichéd.

The narrative doesn’t even arrive at the “Map Country” until page 70. We spend most of the book faffing about the Irish countryside, drawing out a banal hunt for the map instead of doing anything interesting. The Map Country itself holds a smidgeon of interest; tooling along the one road across a shapeshifting landscape filled with clanking robot tanks feels like something from the Pertwee era of Doctor Who. Much like that era, though, Land Beyond pads out maybe a short story’s worth of narrative into an unnecessary novel.

2025 read #51: Seed, Star, Song by May Chong.

Seed, Star, Song by May Chong

13 pages

Published 2024

Read July 23

Rating: 4 out of 5

Between the state of the world and trying to be present while my teenager is here for the summer, I haven’t read a thing for over a month.

This micro-collection is a beautiful way to start over. Chong’s poems are vivid and vital, pulsing with a tangible sense of place. Birds and beetles anchor us to the world too many others would rather shut out of their doors or banish with a swift crushing blow. Absolutely gorgeous.

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.