2025 read #65: Quag Keep by Andre Norton.

Quag Keep by Andre Norton

192 pages

Published 1978

Read from September 12 to September 13

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

I learned about this book the other day in a fantasy-themed chat channel. It has the distinction of being what appears to be the very first Dungeons & Dragons novel ever published, so early in the evolution of D&D (and the TTRPG genre) that Norton describes it as a “war game” throughout the book.

We begin with a scene to remind us that dorks have been dorks for at least fifty years: Eckstern, the war game’s “referee,” dramatically unboxes a painted miniature, much to the fascination of his friends. Norton attempts to introduce the then-esoteric concepts of miniature gaming and collecting to the normies, while also not talking down to aficionados. She fails at both. It’s an awkward way to open a novel.

If you guessed that perhaps the weirdly detailed miniatures might enchant our everyday dweebs into the strange realm of Greyhawk, you win, uh. Not much. Because it’s pretty obvious. If you guessed that mystical dice would be built into the costumes of the characters the lads inhabit, that’s a weirder choice, so good job foreseeing that. (“They are like gamers’ dice,” our warrior helpfully explains, “save that there are too many shapes among them to be ordinary.”)

I think the way Norton consistently shoves game-manual concepts into her story is both a bad storytelling choice and a fascinating look into how fantasy and gaming, two musty old subcultures on the precipice of terrific evolution over the ensuing decades, overlapped and fed into each other at this early juncture. Witness this totally natural bit of exposition from page 14:

He had no fear of the berserker even though the huge man might well be deliberately working himself into one of those rages that transcended intelligence and made such a fighter impervious to weapons and some spells.

It’s the “some spells” that sets it over the edge for me.

Quag Keep is the original and archetypal “I turned my campaign into a novel” book, and perhaps it just wouldn’t have been the same without magical dice bracelets and two warriors compelled to chat when they meet in a shady tavern. Contrast it with a much more recent D&D isekai, Perception Check by Astrid Knight, which has decades of genre familiarity behind it and doesn’t need to integrate game mechanics into its descriptions (and is much better as a result).

While this would probably work better as someone’s meta game campaign than as a novel, and nothing here is particularly good, it isn’t wholly unenjoyable, in a masticated, regurgitated pulp sort of way. A fight against undead in a dust-swallowed ship would be a solid D&D encounter to this day. However, this being Norton, we cannot escape without some “women are as alien as the thoughts of a dragon” bullshit. 

2025 read #64: Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire.

Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire

174 pages

Published 2020

Read from September 6 to September 12

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Another standalone entry in the Wayward Girls series, this one introduces us to Regan, a young girl who is desperate to conform and to correctly perform femininity, and the Doorway to the Hooflands, an equine realm of centaurs, kelpies, and unicorns.

I had wondered why this entry’s Goodreads rating was noticeably lower than the other books in the series. Spoilers: The answer arrives when Regan learns from her parents that she’s intersex, with XY chromosomes and androgen insensitivity. Representing any of humanity’s vast biological diversity in your book will inevitably result in review bombing. Some people have nothing better to do.

I doubt the folks wetting their pants about epigenetic representation even got far enough in the book to pick up on its themes of racism, conformity, and how putting ourselves into neat little boxes merely perpetuates a cycle of generational trauma. Spoilers again: At one point a group of shopkeepers kidnap Regan from her loving, accepting adopted family. One of the kidnappers tells Regan, “Surely a little slice of your freedom is a fair price to pay for knowing our families will never go hungry.” I’m sure the Goodreads crowd would be furious about that, if they got that far (and understood the rather blunt metaphor).

Do I think Fields is as good as the high point of the series, In an Absent Dream? Of course not; that’s the high point for a reason. But Fields is every bit as insightful and meaningful as the rest of the Wayward Girls, and rating it noticeably lower than the others says a lot about people who probably don’t even get the books in the first place.

2025 read #63: The Sorceress and the Cygnet by Patricia A. McKillip.

The Sorceress and the Cygnet by Patricia A. McKillip

231 pages

Published 1991

Read from June 17 to September 6

Rating: 4 out of 5

I began reading this one in the middle of my couldn’t-focus-on-anything phase early this summer, hoping to squeeze it in before hosting my teenager for his school break. I made it roughly seventeen pages in before abandoning it on my nightstand for the following three months.

Part of the reason for that is McKillip’s prose. She was always a groundbreaker when it came to making fantasy fiction a thing of beauty. At her best, she was like a less-horny Tanith Lee. McKillip’s prose in this book is especially lush, often so dreamlike that the only way forward sometimes is to stop trying to make sense of it and just let it carry you along. That’s hard to do when you have an energetic teen at home with you for the summer (and a world that’s burning down around you).

It’s September now, and I’m happy I decided to persevere.

A wandering wagon-dweller is marked with white hair from his mysterious, mystical ancestry, which links him to strange powers. He stumbles into a quest in order to free his people, and his love, from dreamlike wanderings in an unreal place. From such tired, conventional materials, McKillip crafts tales within tales, stories recorded in the stars, in the wings of swans, in centuries of magic moving through the wood. It isn’t a perfect book, but it is spellbinding.

2025 read #62: Seed & Bone by Hatteras Mange.

Seed & Bone by Hatteras Mange

84 pages

Published 2021

Read September 3

Rating: 2ish out of 5

I’m not in the business of ripping down self-published books. If I don’t like one, I’ll opt to DNF it rather than post a review (since the whole point of this blog, from its inception, is to record every book I read).

That’s exactly what I did with this little book (really more of a novelette than a novella) a few years back. But its plot of corporate time travel in the near future is just close enough to one of my own long-simmering WIPs that I decided I had to give it an official go, just to make sure I don’t unconsciously crib anything from it.

Dr. Yvette Coradi is a fastidious young paleobotanist in a future where that means experimenting with paleoflora brought back by Quantum Travel expeditions for new pharmaceutical compounds. She gets recruited for one such expedition to the early Pliocene of Ethiopia. Unfortunately, a corporate stooge from Bionext comes along with a pharmaceutical team of his own, and gets up to secretive things in the prehistoric woods.

Many of the issues with self-publication are present here. But honestly, just a tiny bit of polish would bridge the gap between this and the airport technothriller bestsellers that it emulates. I think a big part of my initial frustration with this story was that I wanted something more from this premise, instead of a somewhat bland confetti of Timeline, Congo, and Almost Adam.

2025 read #61: In the Presence of Dinosaurs by John Colagrande and Larry Felder.

In the Presence of Dinosaurs by John Colagrande and Larry Felder

Illustrated by Larry Felder

Foreword by Jack Horner

189 pages

Published 2000

Read from August 30 to September 3

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

One tiny blessing of being born when I was: my teenage years coincided with history’s biggest boom of dinosaur books. There were novels, most of them bad. Short stories in magazines, some of them good. And then there were the big, glossy, full-color illustrated books for adults. I spent substantial portions of the late 1990s reading through some outsize coffee-table book or other (Hunting Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs:A Global View, The Ultimate Dinosaur). Those were glorious times.

One of the very last tomes of that particular wave (that I’m aware of) was this one, which came out during my painful transition into adulthood. I picked up a copy at some point in the early 2000s, possibly back when my then-spouse and I would hang out at Borders every weekend, blowing untold amounts of money on stacks of books we would scarcely look afterward. I got rid of that copy in a subsequent move. It wasn’t until this summer that I found a cheap (if slightly battered) replacement.

Presence is organized into chapters by specific environments: rain forest, plains, coastline, and so on. Grounding dinosaurs into ecological context is something I’m interested in, both as a would-be scientist and as a novelist. So some twenty-ish years later, I’m finally taking the time to read it.

Felder’s artwork is outstanding. Finely detailed, almost photographically sharp, with the occasional startling chiaroscuro. In addition, this might be one of the earliest glossy art books to normalize feathered dinosaurs, which gives it some historical interest.

The written portions of the book are considerably less edifying. The text lacks flow, and is frequently repetitive, resulting in a dull read — even though not all that much information is presented. Clearly the art was expected to be the main draw.

Presence puts into perspective how much dinosaur paleontology has changed in the last quarter century. When I read a confident declaration that “Dinosaurs descended from partially aquatic ancestors,” it’s a reminder of just how long ago Y2K was, and also a prompt to take everything else here with a grain of salt. Perhaps not the most useful research I could be doing for my own books.

Also inspiring caution: fundamental errors, like dating the Morrison Formation to 220-200 million years ago, instead of its actual range of 156-146 million years ago. What do you mean that got through editors and typesetters without getting caught?

Still, the book’s focus on climate and cohesive ecosystems (rather than charismatic megafauna roving through a greenscreen void) is welcome, and perhaps a bit ahead of its time. And I can’t deny that it’s a little bit inspiring. Do I now want to write stories set in Late Triassic Arizona, Early Jurassic Connecticut, and Late Cretaceous Interior Seaway barrier islands? Absolutely!

2025 read #60: Six-Gun Melody by William Colt MacDonald.

Six-Gun Melody by William Colt MacDonald

128 pages

Published 1933

Read August 30

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

I had absolutely zero cause to read this book, other than getting unexpectedly drawn into it while browsing a pulp novel PDF archive. It’s a paint-by-numbers western about a fair and lanky cowpoke solving problems and seeking vengeance with his six-guns. There’s the usual bullshit of the time where all the unsavory characters are swarthy. It isn’t good by any stretch of the imagination. But MacDonald hit upon the formula for zippy prose that gets out of its own way, making for much more readable pulp than most of what I’ve read from this era.

2025 read #59: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Summer 1950 issue.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Summer 1950 issue (1:3)

Edited by Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas

128 pages

Published 1950

Read August 29

Rating: 2 out of 5

To commemorate F&SF possibly resuming publication in the coming weeks, why not get back into my sporadic project of reading my way through the magazine’s back catalogue? I doubt I’ll ever have the patience (or the access) to read every issue, but I’ve read the first two, so let’s move on to issue number three.

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“Friday, the Nineteenth” by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding. A chronicle of bitter suburban heterosexuality that turns into something much more interesting. (If you care about seventy-five year old spoilers, look away now: It’s a time-loop story, quite reminiscent of Groundhog Day.) I truly didn’t expect to enjoy this piece as much as I did. Maybe B-

“Huge Beast” by Cleve Cartmill. Ably written but (to modern eyes) rather formulaic story of suspiciously cuddly alien contact. No doubt it was more groundbreaking in 1950. A respectable enough C+

“The Hat in the Hall” by Jack Iams. A suburban ghost story, mildly amusing. C-

“The War Against the Moon” by André Maurois (1927; English translation 1928). Purporting to be a chapter from a history book of 1992, this satire has some fascinatingly prescient touches, such as the rich buying up newspapers to control public opinion (and thus subvert democracy). Of course, this backroom dictatorship of the billionaires is depicted as a net good that the restive public ignores at its peril. Ah well. Straining to find a cause to unite a bored world and avert war, newspaper owners collude to pull a Watchmen, concocting a lunar invasion (which echoes uncomfortably with how right-wing media invented the trans panic, and the gay panic before that, and the Muslim panic before that, and the Satanic panic before that, and the urban crime panic before that, and…). Not my favorite kind of story, but historical interest and perceptive prognostication merits at least a C

“Dumb Supper” by Henderson Starke. This is actually by Kris Neville, writing not just under a pseudonym but also as a character: a supposed elderly folklorist in the Ozarks. If this is based on actual folklore, it’s modestly interesting, I suppose. C-?

“Ounce of Prevention” by Philip Carter. An extremely 1950s piece, which features global nuclear annihilation, a mission to Mars, a helpful Martian, and time travel. Ends with a typical 1950s twist. Maybe D+

An excerpt from the poem “Death’s Jest Book” by Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1850). It’s fine. Too abbreviated to make much of it.

“The Case of Summerfield” by W. H. Rhodes (1871). Originally published as a newspaper hoax in the Sacramento Union, this proves to be an ancient prototype of the “mad scientist threatens to destroy the world unless his demands are met” trope. Like Dr. Evil himself, Mr. Summerfield even demands the sum of one million dollars. While dense and slow-paced in accordance with the tastes of the time, and continuing well after the logical end of the story, it’s astonishingly creative in Summerfield’s central threat. C

“Divine Right” by Betsy Curtis. A fascinating blend of aesthetics, mixing suburban paperboys on bikes with space colonization and telepaths with greedy royalty. It’s almost like a whisper of Samuel R. Delany’s later working-class space stories. It’s a bit clumsy as a story, but the aesthetic carries it far. B-

“Born of Man and Woman” by Richard Matheson. Matheson’s very first published story. Pretty typical midcentury “freak kept chained in the cellar” material, little more than a character study, but effective. B-

“Professor Pownall’s Oversight” by H. R. Wakefield (1928). An early prototype of the “evil genius obsessed with his brilliant and charming classmate” trope. The editors’ introduction refers to this as a “chess fantasy,” but it’s really a ghost story centering around chess. Surprisingly enjoyable. B-

“Haunt” by A. Bertram Chandler. Brief but rambling anecdote about a seance with a ghost from the future. The punning twist ending must have felt terribly clever in 1950. C-

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So now I’ve read the first three issues of F&SF, in addition to the most recent eight and a scattering of others in between. This is the first halfway okay issue you reach reading forward. Nowhere near what it would become in more recent years, but still enjoyable.