2026 read #27: Club Contango by Eliane Boey.

Club Contango by Eliane Boey

277 pages

Published 2024

Read from March 12 to May 4

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

I haven’t read much economic sci-fi, so perhaps it’s inevitable that this novel would remind me of Frederik Pohl’s Gateway. There’s only partial overlap between Gateway and Contango’s near-future corporate dystopia of asteroid cities and indebted labor. But their structures are a little bit similar: both begin in the aftermath of a major change in the narrator’s life, which gets revealed piecemeal over the course of alternating flashbacks and scenes in the present.

Flashback or present day, Contango comes front-loaded with exposition and worldbuilding details. We begin in media res with narrator Con inadvertently winning a bet that threatens to ruin all the regular customers at the titular underground gambling club. I found it a bit difficult to get invested in all the contextless wisps of backstory and setting, until enough had accumulated that I finally got into the book’s rhythm, somewhere around page 60 or so (which just happens to be around the time the narrative finally explains the nature of the bet). It’s a slow start, given my current struggles with attention span.

Once it clicks, Boey’s universe of contract workers, predatory employers, hustling holograms, and gamified work is compelling, offering a grim but lived-in vision of working class neo-serfdom. It functions equally well as a projection of the climate-fucked future and an allegory for the present. The story also becomes a gutting account of impoverished parenthood in a society built around exploitation. It also turns into a murder mystery and develops a touch of the classic Philip K. Dickian “who or what is even real?” dislocation.

Contango is a lot. It’s ambitious, and not all of it worked for me. But there’s also a lot to enjoy here, a moving, well-realized texture of life, full of food and heartache and uncertainty. “People shouldn’t have to be strong just to survive,” says one character—words just as relevant now as they are to any possible future.

2026 read #26: Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl by P.A. Cornell.

Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl by P.A. Cornell

Illustrated by Ahmed Raafat

79 pages

Published 2026

Read April 27

Rating: 3 out of 5

Between the large font and a “behind the scenes” essay from the author, this story only barely qualifies as a novella. The story itself is 42 pages long, less if you deduct the illustrations. But the tale of the titular working class archetypes with big dreams in a vaguely 1920s retrofuture packs in charm to spare in its brief span.

2026 read #25: New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine, Winter 2023 issue.

New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine, Winter 2023 issue (1:2)

Edited by Oliver Brackenbury

80 pages

Published 2023

Read from April 21 to April 27

Rating: 3 out of 5

Back at it again with my read-through of New Edge’s back catalogue! As with the official “first issue,” the artwork remains absolutely next level here, with a fun pulpy cover and superb black-and-white pieces throughout the issue.

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“The Demon of Tashi Tzang” by Dariel Quiogue. A welcome return to Quiogue’s Central Asian pastiche, and his hero Orhan Timur. “Demon” isn’t quite the zippy pulp adventure we got with our first Orhan story (“The Curse of the Horsetail Banner” in NESS issue 0), but once it gets rolling, it’s still a fun time.

“Fang” by Jacquie Kawaja. Otherwise routine Nordic excursion given depth by its two disabled leads (as well as its late swerve into pronounced body horror). I ended up liking it quite a bit.

“Revelstoke” by Gemma Files. Where the previous story went all-in on body horror, this one cranks up the fantasy ultra-violence (and also body horror). It’s another pseudo-historical Viking piece, this time with a “my D&D party would make for a great story” vibe, not my favorite combination. Like “Fang,” it becomes more interesting as it goes, but first you have to get over the hump of too many characters getting thrown at you all at once in the opening.

“A Debt Forgotten, a Debt Unpaid” by Jeremy Pak Nelson. Pacing issues blunt this sanguinary number, in which a captive demigod, his blood tapped for magical weaponry, finally puts escape in motion. The narrative never seems to develop a sense of urgency. And while it falls under the general umbrella of weird fantasy, I personally wouldn’t consider it Sword & Sorcery.

“The Eyes of the Demon” by J.M. Clarke. Another Sword & Soul outing from the author of “Vapors of Zinai.” Clarke fully understood the assignment, giving us a pulpy, propulsive adventure of a larger than life swordsman facing an elemental threat. We even get “thews” thrown in. The most enjoyable story so far.

“Water, Which Laughs at All Things” by T. K. Rex & L. Ann Kenyon. Another beautiful, SoCal-flavored eco-fantasy from Rex, always a highlight in any magazine. My new favorite story in this issue.

“Atonement for a Resurrected God” by David C. Smith. The fourth author from the volunteer proof-of-concept issue zero to get a paid story slot in this issue. This one is an improvement over “Old Moon Over Irukad”; “Atonement” at least makes an effort to build atmosphere, even if it is your standard “hired swords protect an eldritch item aboard a ship” scenario.

“How Many Deaths Till Vengeance?” by June Orchid Parker. This is an assured outing, a pulpy masterpiece of personal and social justice that hits the perfect tone right from the title. “The axe is the tongue with which I’ll speak to him,” our heroine Astartha says, and Conan himself couldn’t deliver on it better. This might be my favorite piece in this issue, which is saying a lot in an issue with a T. K. Rex tale. And somehow this is Parker’s first published story!

All in all, while there wasn’t a story I disliked here, and there were a good number of solid pieces (including Parker’s “Vengeance,” which is a top two favorite story from NESS’s whole run so far), it seemed like there was a disproportionate number of outings that didn’t elicit much enthusiasm. Maybe that’s once again on me and my anhedonia, who knows?

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Now onward into the nonfiction pieces!

First, a brief essay by Jonathan Olfert: “Neurodivergence in Sword & Sorcery.” I enjoyed it, and added some stories and a book to my reading list as a result of it.

Milton J. Davis brings us “Sword & Soul Brothers,” a moving personal essay on Charles R. Saunders and the history of Sword & Soul.

Next, the de rigueur transcript from editor Brackenbury’s podcast: “Sword & Silk: An Interview with Dariel Quiogue.” I’m always skeptical going into these segments (isn’t transcribing your own podcast as page-filler a bit self-indulgent? couldn’t this be another story slot?), but I have to admit they always tend to be interesting, and this is no exception. This interview in particular was inspiring: Quiogue offers so many cool perspectives on Sword & Sorcery and its overlap with historical fantasy.

Lastly, Kris Vyas-Myall gives us a review of Sylvia Moreno-Garcia’s The Return of the Sorceress. They point out important themes of class consciousness that were missing from my review.

And that’s it! A solid batch of essays, all in all. And a solid issue of NESS. Onward to the next!

2026 read #24: Questland by Carrie Vaughn.

Questland by Carrie Vaughn

296 pages

Published 2021

Read from April 15 to April 20

Rating: 2 out of 5

Browsing the library the other day, I found this on the shelf and was like: This is just Westworld, right? This is just D&D Westworld. A fantasy trope spin on an immersive animatronic theme park had, of course, been done at least as far back as Ray Aldridge’s “Steel Dogs” in 1989, and in a much weirder package than this could ever hope to match. Still, there are worse hooks than “D&D Westworld.”

It’s clear that this book rode the “cash in on D&D’s sudden popularity” wave that also gave us Astrid Knight’s Perception Check. Unfortunately, where Check was an isekai fantasy told with obvious love for its inspiration, Questland takes the technothriller / “amusement park gone out of control” route. I’m no longer that keen on the technothriller bandwidth of the sci-fi spectrum. It’s hard to discern if any love went into Questland, because its formula feels so… formulaic. Vaughn’s acknowledgments cite a deep personal history with TTRPGs, but none of that shows up on the page, aside from rote references to rolling for initiative and never splitting the party.

Questland’s own premise undermines its effect: by design, building a “biomechanical” sci-fi theme park out of fantasy tropes for a neo-feudal billionaire literally sucks the magic out of fantasy. The narrator will complain about how a sphinx should have a tangible smell in one paragraph, then gush about how she would happily take a lifelong pass to the park the next. She never coheres into an organic character; instead, she reads like the barfed up id of a ThinkGeek store circa 2017.

Worse, “eccentric tech guru with a private island” already has vastly different connotations than it did a mere five years ago, back when evil billionaire CEOs still had to pretend like they were interested in things like carbon sequestration. Billionaires have always been the bad guys, but nowadays? Having a Jobs / Musk figure in the John Hammond role is actively revolting. The narrative hints at the vileness of its CEO, mentioning his plan to reinstate feudalism in his private enclave, but it gets lost in our narrator’s continuing starry-eyed enchantment with Generic Nerd Tropes Island.

“I should never have come here to Mirabilis,” she muses. “But it was all worth it, to spend five minutes with a dragon.” This same character, of course, is also tempted to get back with her own shitty tech bro ex who’s been helping the billionaire CEO build Neo-Feudalism Island. It’s icky.

On its own merits, the book is… fine? I didn’t hate it, but I wouldn’t say I liked it, either. I’d much rather be reading another D&D isekai, like the much-delayed next book in Astrid Knight’s series. As it is, Questland felt like a half-hearted, rather repetitive clone of Jurassic Park, with a D20 thrown in.

2026 read #23: Boy, with Accidental Dinosaur by Ian McDonald.

Boy, with Accidental Dinosaur by Ian McDonald

117 pages

Published 2026

Read from April 6 to April 15

Rating: 4 out of 5

We might have something of a holy grail here: an inventive, book-length dinosaur story written with panache. In tersely evocative prose, McDonald presents snatches of a colorful, dilapidated near-future of dinosaur rodeos and masked militia checkpoints, an America fragmented by bush war and technofascism and evangelical warlords, where circuses ride what’s left of the highways.

All in all, it’s dishearteningly similar to the dinosaur apocalypse novel I’ve been working on for well over a year. What’s worse: I think it’s better than my book, in a lot of ways. Whereas mine is a mix of 1990s flashback and an altered approximation of the present, McDonald goes full near-future sci-fi with his setting, giving us glimpses of weird tech and weirder social conventions. Boy gives us something all too rare in dinosaur fiction, perhaps even rarer than good prose: solid worldbuilding.

The Tatterdemalion Circus invites inevitable comparisons to the early chapters of Greg Bear’s Dinosaur Summer (which would only have benefitted from more dinosaur circus screentime). But with Silver Clowns and the Dust Tarot, both left to the reader’s devices to expand upon, McDonald populates an alien future, vaster and stranger than local warlords and fundamentalist turf wars.

McDonald’s terseness, and the book’s brevity, can sometimes work against Boy. It is somehow dense and diaphanous simultaneously, wisps of intense clarity air-gapped by narrative leaps. Also taking leaps: McDonald’s grasp of dinosaur biology, which turns hadrosaurs into carnivores and gives alvarezsaurs big sharp teeth. But the dinosaurs he gets right are some of fiction’s most vivid individual dino presences since Dinosaur Summer.

2026 read #22: The Far Edges of the Known World by Owen Rees.

The Far Edges of the Known World: Life Beyond the Borders of Ancient Civilizations by Owen Rees

314 pages

Published 2025

Read from April 1 to April 6

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

I began the reading year strong, but in the last few weeks, my attention span has petered out for one reason and another. (The shadow of a mad king with his thumbs on the nuclear buttons has a lot to do with it.) Whenever my reading falters, I find it helps to get my hands on an interesting but breezy non-fiction book, shaking up my typical diet of fantasy. That’s particularly apropos this year; this is the first work of non-fiction I’ve picked up in all of 2026.

Histories of cultural exchange are one of my big hyperfocuses. I love histories that concern themselves less with kings and wars and more with actual humans. All our cultural myths of “peoples” and “races,” assembled in the early modern era of nation states, fall apart against the reality of how much people, and culture, have always mixed and intermingled. Modern day fash might love the Romans because of their martial misogyny and oppressive hierarchy; I love Roman history because of how people moved all over the empire, from Syria and Mauritania to Britain and Dacia. Despotic elites, not immigrants, caused Rome to fall. There are lessons to learn there.

The Far Edges is right up my alley, offering quick examinations of places at the edges of empire, from ancient cattle herders at Lake Turkana to the city of Co Loa in what is now Vietnam. Rees writes a popularly accessible history in competent, unremarkable prose. Each chapter offers an appetizer of a much vaster, richer story, leaving me wanting more. Honestly, I’d read a book-length examination of any of the sites Rees describes. And that, as always, is the takeaway from books like this: I wish there were more to it.

2026 read #21: some minor, sometimes divine, existential crises by Morgan L. Ventura.

some minor, sometimes divine, existential crises by Morgan L. Ventura

13 pages

Published 2024

Read March 26

Rating: 4 out of 5

A brief but delightful chapbook about academia, anthropology, aliens, and yes, existential crises. Ventura communicates feelings of dislocation and academic listlessness with blunt, sometimes hilarious, sometimes fiercely beautiful prose-poetry. As a former archaeologist myself, this precious handful of poems struck something buried deep within my heart.