2022 read #50: Kiki's Delivery Service by Eiko Kadono.

Kiki's Delivery Service by Eiko Kadono

Translated by Emily Balistrieri

194 pages

Published 1985; translation published 2020

Read from December 21 to December 26

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

On one hand, it's hard to feel anything but warm and fuzzy toward this book. It was the basis for one of my favorite movies, and besides, my partner R surprised me with this copy a few days before Christmas, which is a lovely association to make.

On the other hand, it's a middle-grade book from a few decades back, and those tend to be indifferent reads at best. The reading level is pitched toward younger grades. And while the skeleton of the Studio Ghibli story is here, the changes made for the movie were entirely for the better. Here, Kiki flies from one random encounter to the next; there are hardly any thematic callbacks or returning characters, aside from Osono and Tombo, who barely receive any characterization. Mostly Kiki seems to meet tired moms who immediately tell her how exhausting motherhood is. The movie's magical interlude with the free-spirited artist in the woods cottage is barely hinted at in this text.

Ah well, it's a sweet little book all the same. It was a nice way to linger in the world of the movie for a little while, at the very least.

2022 read #49: Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh.

Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh

109 pages

Published 2019

Read from December 24 to December 25

Rating: 4 out of 5

My partner R and I are putting together our own holiday traditions here in our third December living together. Christmas Eve books to swap and read? Yes please!

This is a lovely little novella about the Green Man, the ancient wood, and the shy breath of human connection. It's been in my "cheap treats to buy for myself when I can" list for most of the year, and R just happened to obtain it for our nascent holiday tradition. As with almost every novella I've read this year, it probably could have been longer; more time to linger with the characters in the deep heart of the wood would have been welcome. It's a gorgeous little book all the same, sweet and hinting at deeper wilds in its heart.

2022 read #48: London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd.

London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd

775 pages

Published 2000

Read from approximately January 15, 2021 to December 21, 2022

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

After reading so much during the month of October, my attention span got redirected to other hyperfocuses for a while. (I played Fable II start to finish for the first time since 2012 or so, and then followed it up with Fable III.) Books slipped through the cracks. Part of the problem was, nothing seemed to hold my interest. Books I'd have devoured in a day back in October I could only read a page or two at a time before giving up.

Fortuitously, "a page or two at a time" happens to be an excellent way to read London: The Biography.

I first tried to read this book back in 2013 or 2014. At one point I called it "My favorite book that I never finished." It consists of chapter after chapter -- some seventy-nine altogether -- each of them a rambly assemblage of anecdotes drawn from primary and secondary sources loosely grouped around a theme (e.g., alcohol, theater, sound, the crowd, Clerkenwell, the children of the city, the Underground, etc.). It's a fine book to have on hand and maybe read whatever random chapter appeals to you that day, but it's a bear to read cover to cover. I gave up maybe halfway through. I picked it up again last year while sort of casting about for anything to distract me in the wake of some traumatic life changes. Again, I only got about halfway in before setting it aside.

So last month, when I found myself in the mood to peck my way through a book that didn't require sustained attention, I turned once again to London. This time I resumed where I'd left off. I wouldn't remember much of the book, but I wouldn't need to.

Ackroyd spends the bulk of London reiterating what, at this point in his writings, seems to have been his major theme: Certain places in England keep attracting the same sort of personalities, events, and vibes through the centuries. In essentially every chapter he provides a litany of mildly curious coincidences and historical parallels -- for example, the long history of revolutionary thought in Clerkenwell -- and is content to call it "the spirit of London" or attribute it to a given neighborhood's "genius loci." More rigorous sociological explanations receive little attention. The same motif animates Ackroyd's Albion and Thames: The Biography. That's a lot of words for such a slender thesis. Ackroyd's vision of egalitarian London also seems a bit optimistic twenty-two years and one Brexit later.

After considering London "my favorite book I never finished" for so long, closing the cover this final time felt anticlimactic. Perhaps that can be attributed to the general listlessness and anhedonia as we head into year four of a global pandemic and also continue to endure all the ills of modern capitalism.

Perhaps Ackroyd's chapter on the Blitz captured the current mood best: "The intended victims [of the V1 firebombings] became depersonalised.... The general mood was one of 'strain, weariness, fear and despondency.' 'Let me get out of this' was the unspoken wish visible upon every tired and anxious face, while at the same time the inhabitants of London carried on with their customary work and duties. The mechanism continued to operate, but now in a much more impersonal manner; the whole world had turned into a machine, either of destruction or of weary survival."

2022 read #47: Robbergirl by S. T. Gibson.

Robbergirl by S. T. Gibson

191 pages

Published 2019

Read from October 25 to October 28

Rating: 4 out of 5

An exquisitely realized sapphic retelling of the folktale of the Snow Queen, brittle with winter chill and thrumming with heart-deep warmth. The sense of place is perhaps less precisely realized than in The Bear and the Nightingale, but Gibson makes up for that with the aching realness of her central characters' loss, fear, and desire.

I can't tell if this book was self-published or went through an extremely tiny press. Either way, it's one of the finest self-pubbed or small-press novels I've read so far. It has its share of typos and typesetting errors, especially in the later chapters, but that comes with the territory; I note that more for my own reference than anything, something to be mindful of when I go forward with my own self-publishing adventures.

2022 read #46: Apex: World of Dinosaurs Anthology, edited by Jonathan M. Thompson and Alana Joli Abbott.

Apex: World of Dinosaurs Anthology, edited by Jonathan M. Thompson and Alana Joli Abbott

289 pages

Published 2020

Read from October 20 to October 25

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

I'm jonesing so hard for new-to-me dinosaur fiction. Hell, I'm on the verge of tracking down some paperback copies of Crichton's Jurassic Park and The Lost World -- both of which I read dozens of times as a youth, and last reread in 2011 -- just to try to scratch that dino itch.

Luckily, I found this anthology, in part because one of my favorite up-and-coming sci-fi writers, Jennifer Lee Rossman, has a story in it. (One of their other stories, set in the same universe as "Joan of Archaeopteryx," is featured in my own anthology, The Mesozoic Reader. Please get a copy!) I'm not sure what to expect from the other stories here, but I guess we'll find out!

(Also, when I bought it, I had assumed Apex: World of Dinosaurs Anthology was associated with Apex Magazine, seeing as both involve short sci-fi stories. But no, it's tied into some sort of game company and a dino deck-building game.)

"Smile" by LaShawn M. Wanak. Writers, I've noticed, tend to struggle with making good stories out of dinosaurs. I like my dinosaur fiction to fit one of two very broad categories: either the dinosaurs are just an ordinary fact of life in the setting (such as in Dinotopia, Raptor Red, or many of my own stories), or the dinosaurs fit into the role of movie monsters, albeit constrained to a rough approximation of "realistic" behaviors (such as in the first three Jurassic Park movies, which stop just short of giving raptors mustache-twirling-villain intelligence but still present them as animals, something that could conceivably have evolved on Earth). Some stories, like Dinosaur Summer, excel by combining a bit of both. My least favorite dinosaur trope involves turning them into unconstrained movie monsters, unstoppable creatures with absurd, biologically impossible powers. (Jurassic World comes to mind.) This tale crosses Jurassic World with Octavia E. Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy, presenting us with raptors that can sample DNA from other creatures and utilize those traits for their adaptive advantages. At that point, why make it about raptors at all? It's an alien invasion trope given a dinosaurian coat of paint. The story ends with the reveal that a humanoid raptor is telling us how the ascendency of the raptor over the human world came to be. D-

"Just Like Old Times" by Robert J. Sawyer. I originally read this story (first published in 1993) when it was reprinted in Martin H. Greenberg's Dinosaurs anthology. In that review, I griped: "Transferring the consciousness of a human observer into a gigantic theropod -- Michael Swanwick did it best in 'Riding the Giganotosaur' in 1999. This being the early '90s, however, the transferred consciousness is of course going to be that of a serial killer. The innate silliness and datedness of the premise sinks this story." I don't feel the need to revisit it here. D-

"The Day" by August Hahn. Speaking of dinosaurs as movie monsters, this story takes all the raptor pack-hunter tropes hammered into pop culture via Jurassic Park and cranks them up to 11, giving us a "nature red in tooth and claw" scenario from a raptor's-eye view. The very first story I ever submitted to a magazine, back in 1998, was a piece of Raptor Red fan-fiction; I wrote from the perspective of giant raptors roaming the Maastrichtian in search of new territory. Both my ancient tale and Hahn's story here could have benefitted from a bit more ethological science and a bit less of the pop culture killer-claw cliché. Like, I'd be 100% down to read a dino's-perspective tale about an ordinary day where we all laze in the sunshine and take care of our hatchlings and no one has to fight a rex. I feel indifferently about this one. D+?

"Rebuttal" by Andrew J. Lucas. "[By 2135], the gradual effects of climate change reached a crescendo; sweeping forest fires [had destroyed the forests of western Canada]." Oh, you sweet naïve thing. If only we'd been that lucky. Anyway, in the climate-ravaged future, ancient DNA is a valuable resource utilized to rebuild ecosystems resistant to the plagues unleashed by the thawing permafrost. Herds of ankylosaurs graze the hot desolate plains of Alberta, taking the place of beef cattle. Those dastardly Russians cobble together a weaponized Yutyrannus with a mishmash of cloning and 3D printing and unleash it upon the poor Canadian rangers. Like the cyborg Yutyrannus, this story is a mishmash that doesn't quite cohere. It's an interesting revamp of the classic "dinosaurs in the Old West" trope plus a dash of Dino-Riders, but there's no substance to the story. D+

"High Wire: A Horizon Alpha Story" by D. W. Vogel. Military sci-fi in which a batch of blankly interchangeable soldiers, officers, and kids land on a new planet after something went wrong in their ark ship. The planet is populated with vaguely dinosaurian wildlife. There's simply no characterization to be found here, not even a trace. That's almost impressive in its own way. Worse, literally every named character is male. Every single one. No redeeming value to this story whatsoever. Somehow, this is a reprint; it was previously published in a sci-fi anthology back in 2016. F

"A Boy and His Dog: A 'Dinosaur Protocol' Story" by Jonathan M. Thompson. One of the editors of this volume has graced us with a story set in one of the game settings the book was meant to promote. It's a clunky piece, written stiffly and clearly never proofread. (A young Triceratops is described as weighing "13,000 tons.") A deep-time colony, presumably from our far future, suddenly receives a bunch of soldiers displaced from something approximating the modern day. There's an EMP, soldiers fanning out with M4s, and a kerraaazy misunderstanding between the two groups! This story reminds me of "The Cretaceous Colony," a story I wrote when I was 11. That is not a compliment. If anything, "The Cretaceous Colony" featured a deeper plot and richer characterization than this dud. F

"Joan of Archaeopteryx" by Jennifer Lee Rossman. Oh, thank god. It's such a cliché to say this, but I genuinely mean it: this story is like a breath of fresh air after the last... well, after every single story in the anthology before this one. Laugh-out-loud funny, refreshingly queer, written with verve and personality -- literally everything the foregoing stories haven't been. Rossman's setting is superb: for millions of years random portals have opened between our world and a parallel dimension, which now hosts a mix of dinosaurs, Renaissance knights, gay cowboys, and D.B. Cooper. The repressive knights want to conquer the gay cowboys and force them into their medieval social strictures. Our hero Joan, brain crammed full of 21st century pop culture, is taken through the portal to fulfil a prophecy and save the gay cowboy dinosaur land utopia. It's a delight, and the best story here by a long mile. A-

"A Time Beyond Sunset: An Apex Island Adventure" by Alana Joli Abbott. At this point I've given up on anything in this book living up to Jennifer Lee Rossman's piece, or indeed on anything in this book being good besides "Joan of Archaeopteryx." There's vague potential buried deep in this story -- the "teens volunteer at a dinosaur island during World War II" plot borrows heavily from Dinosaur Summer by way of Dinotopia -- but the writing struggles to make anything good out of it. For a story set on a dinosaur island, we spend an inordinate amount of time in New Haven, or repairing a truck, or talking to random soldiers or people in the infirmary. When we do meet dinosaurs, it turns out they speak impeccable English thanks to a rogue Nazi scientist who invented tin-foil hats. The story crams in some mostly unnecessary backstory about the Nazi scientist (whom we never actually meet) and ends abruptly when one of the teens successfully absconds with a crystal tablet the Nazis were using. Clearly, this was written backwards from the Apex game setting rather than as a standalone story. I'll be generous and award this an F+.

"When the Sky Was Starless and the Ocean Flat" by Gwendolyn N. Nix. An undercooked tale of pterosaur riders watching their world collapse along the Western Inland Sea. There's a nice amount of potential here, and as it stands, it's worlds better than almost everything else in this book, but I feel it could have used a few more rounds of editing to bring out the magic. C-

"We Are Emily" by Lee F. Szczepanik, Jr. A distasteful throwback to the "murderous mentally ill" days of the 1980s and '90s, built around a Hollywoodized misunderstanding of dissociative identity disorder. Derrick, Bobby, and Melissa are a "family" -- a DID system inhabiting a body together, trading off consciousness with each other but communicating freely amongst themselves. They vote in a new member, Emily, who is a raptor from a video game called Cretaceous Wars. Somehow, cyberpunk clichés of "hacking the A.I." are also involved. And wouldn't you know it, as soon as Emily becomes part of the family, she takes control and goes on a wild bloody murder spree! It's equal parts silly, sophomoric, and exploitative. I had to check to make sure this wasn't originally published in 1989. This one gets a big ol' F.

"Party Crashers" by J.A. Cummings. A boy wishes for a pet Compsognathus for his seventh birthday. He helps the wish along with some tricks he learned from YouTube. Magic! Two squirrels turn into compies and promptly cause chaos at the party. That's literally all there is to this tale. But it isn't actively offensive or badly written, so maybe I'll give it a D+.

"Starfall" by Darren W. Pearce. A garbled mess of writing that feels like it's trying to squeeze in every "badass bounty hunter who can psychically talk to dinosaurs in a postapocalyptic wasteland" cliché at the same time. Our hero is a blank slate except for her snark, and her raptor companion can only chuckle and crack wise about how tasty their quarry is. It could not end fast enough. F

"Forever" by Robert J. Sawyer. Bog-standard "intelligent dinosaurs achieve civilization right before the Chicxulub impact" story, first published in 1997. Nothing special. nothing objectionable, nothing new. Somehow that still makes it one of the better stories in this anthology. C-

"To Mega Therion" by Markisan Naso. This wasn't badly written, per se, but the prose veers to the amateurish side with its excessive commas and clunky descriptions. Every bit character is introduced with a name, a couple adjectives, and a genus: "His second-in-command, Sotiris, stretched his long, tan opisthocoelicaudia neck..." With so much of the story devoted to descriptions of hand-to-hand combat, this awkward prose is a major liability. That aside, I enjoyed the general vibe of anthropomorphic dinosaurs wielding swords, fighting duels, and erecting heroic statues in a Cretaceous kingdom. This story even has a sauropod using a spiked helmet to turn himself into a giant morningstar. So, it's a bit of a mixed bag. Maybe I'll give it a tolerable C-.

"Droma Station" by Alexandra Pitchford. Derivative sci-fi action piece. Maybe you wouldn't call "secret experimental facility on an asteroid breeds cyborg raptors" derivative, but I certainly would. Like all too many of the stories in this volume, this reads like the writer has never been exposed to any form of fiction more advanced than SyFy Originals and tabletop gaming supplements. All the characters are the shallowest of archetypes, the action is paint-by-numbers, and there's nothing here deeper than a coat of paint. I'll be supremely generous and offer it an F+.

"What Came First" by Kimberly Pauley. A big ol' shrug of a closing number. The kind of pop sci-fi written by someone whose only experience with scientists is in the pages of pop sci-fi. This story is notable mainly for a section which details a domestic chicken's brief adventures in time-travel. Maybe D-?

And that's it. Finally. I cannot express the depths of my disappointment in this anthology.

2022 read #45: HELL IS REAL: A Midwest Gothic Anthology, edited by Jack Apollo Hartley.

HELL IS REAL: A Midwest Gothic Anthology, edited by Jack Apollo Hartley

180 pages

Published 2022

Read October 20

Rating: N/A (I liked it a lot!)

It feels weird to review an anthology one of my pieces is in, an anthology edited by a friend of mine and dotted with poems and stories from writers I know. An anthology where I'm mentioned in the acknowledgements. Weird, maybe even borderline unethical. But it's not like anyone reads this blog on the regular.

HELL IS REAL began when I tweeted something along the lines of "Someone who isn't me should put together a Midwest Gothic anthology." Jack, an amazing writer in his own right, was taken with the idea, and put in an immense amount of labor reading through submissions and compiling this book. There are a grand total of seventy poems, flash fics, and short stories in here, too many to review one by one.

There are some repeating themes and motifs: Driving and roadsides. Urban decay and rot in the cornfields. Deer. Not-deer. Blood. Burial. Childhood trauma. Religious trauma. Apostacy writ in biblical imagery. Queerness. And as with so much stuff getting published in the indie lit press these days, a great number of these pieces are astoundingly good -- all-time bangers, even.

A running list of some of my favorites:

"When Me and the Other Ex-Mormons Get to Outer Darkness" by K.A. Nielsen

"Postcard from Bluegrass" by Elizabeth Walztoni

"Storm Day" by MP Armstrong

"Welcoming Remarks from Tim Busch, Pillar of the Community" by Amanda Minkkinen

"Cowboy Killers & Corn Fields & Coming Home" by Camille Ferguson

"Poachers" by Andrew McSorley

"We Have All Come from the Earth and in the Earth Is Where We Will Go" by Rowan Bagley

"Kerosene" by Lucy Frost

"The Angel at Harvest Church" by Freydís Moon

"Tornadoland" by Hattie Jean Hayes

"Without Protest" by Cassie E. Brown

"Shelter / Decay" by Andrea Lianne Grabowski

"Local Woman Discovers Remains of Two Girls, 10 and 6, Missing Since 1977" by Kimberly Glanzman

"Blood and Beatitude in the Buckeye State" by Alana Greene

"When the Anthropocene Ends in the Rust Belt, or When the Gods Decide to Repent" by John E.K. Carter

"Seek" by Pippa Russell

"65" by Audrey Hollis

Despite singling out all those poems and stories, I can say that I liked or loved every piece in this book, and I'm only slightly biased.

2022 read #44: The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte.

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of Their Lost World by Steve Brusatte

398 pages

Published 2018

Read from October 18 to October 20

Rating: 3 out of 5

Ah, 2018. Now that's a lost world. I remember strolling around Barnes & Noble, blissfully unaware of the potential civilization-killing pandemic then barely more than a year away, and stopping dead in my tracks when I saw this book on display. It had been a long time since the big Dinomania boom of the 1990s. Not many pop-science dinosaur books had been published since then, let alone aggressively promoted into bestsellerdom. I couldn't afford retail price books back then (and I really can't now, though I have enough wiggle room these days to go on the occasional discounted or used book splurge), but I came close to springing for this one.

I didn't, of course. And it's probably for the best that I didn't. I liked this book fine enough, I suppose, but I'm not its intended audience, and that dulled my enjoyment. Unlike later books that publishers snatched up to cash in on success of Rise and Fall -- titles like Beasts Before Us and Otherlands, two books I enjoyed tremendously -- this book doesn't trust its readers with grasping its subject. Rise is explicitly, perhaps even cynically, written for mass consumption, its ideal audience the sort of blandly curious reader who has somehow never touched a book on geology or evolution (or dinosaurs) since middle school. As popular science books go, it feels like a naked grab at bestsellerdom. And apparently it worked.

Like so many popular science titles these days, Rise spends much of its time giving pocket biographies of the cool characters of modern paleontology, all of whom happen to be great buddies of Brusatte's. Publishers love that "human interest" element, I suppose. The presentation of the actual science is hopelessly glib, employing banalities like "This was the real Jurassic Park" and shortening foraminafera to "forams" without ever giving the accepted (and not even that difficult) name. In a book already choked for space thanks to all the bios of Brusatte's rad buddies, there's an entire chapter on Tyrannosaurus rex. If you came for a new history of the dinosaurs' lost world, as I did, you'd be disappointed. If you were a casual reader who didn't know a thing about dinosaurs beyond the name T. rex, this would be the book for you.

More than anything, it feels like Brusatte used this book to position himself as our generation's go-to media paleontologist. The Millennial equivalent of Bob Bakker or John Horner: that one guy the newspapers know the name of and call up whenever they need a flavor quote, or that one guy who's the token expert in any documentary. If that was his goal, it seems to have succeeded admirably.

2022 read #43: Salvation Spring by TC Parker.

Salvation Spring by TC Parker

133 pages

Published 2021

Read from October 13 to October 14

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Some spoilers ahead.

There are bits and pieces of a brilliant story here. A lone drifter comes to a remote desert town, drawn irresistibly by fragments of memories that haunt her. A doctor lives alone outside of town, bringing her patients back to life with a kiss. Bodies turn up in the hills nearby, bloated with spiders, rotting into fungus. Strange white-skinned beings lurk in the desert. When the drifter regains her memories, we learn she is in fact over three hundred years old, a survivor from a place once called California. In short, the vibes are immaculate.

Unfortunately, the Weird Western vibes get buried under a mess of way too much exposition. This brief novella crams in a little bit of everything: Egyptian mythology, a 1930s socialite in search of immortality, medical experiments, a river of the dead, a bone plague that ended the world we know. It doesn't really cohere into a whole; none of the backstory really adds to my initial enjoyment. I think a lighter touch, an air of mysteries never explained, would have carried this story far. As it is, it's a jumble, fragments of unrealized brilliance buried in a busy matrix.

2022 read #42: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March/April 2022.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March/April 2022 issue (142:3-4)

Edited by Sheree Renée Thomas

258 pages

Published 2022

Read from October 9 to October 13

Rating: 4 out of 5

When I originally bought this issue, I was excited because it was the first time someone I knew (a writer who is a Twitter mutual of mine) had been published in F&SF while I knew them. Since then, three more of this issue's contributors have become my Twitter mutuals; it's a bit dizzying, really, that I know four people featured in this one issue, at the very least on a parasocial level.

I haven't read this issue before now, despite my excitement, because ADHD made picking it up and reading it through feel impossible. With a couple back issues (terrible, terrible back issues) under my belt, I feel less overwhelmed. Time to read!

"Dancing Little Marionettes" by Megan Beadle. After all the sweaty, unsavory writing I read in my old F&SFs, it's such a joy to read a story like this. This is exactly what my old idea of the magazine had been like: a mix of melancholy and whimsy, a small-scale personal drama steeped in atmosphere, a tender and deeply personal examination of grief. 

"Void" by Rajeev Prasad. Amare, a doctor, works in a space station orbiting Mars, saving soldiers and POWs wounded in the war below -- or, when necessary, chucking them into the void of space for a quick merciful end. The colonialist powers exploiting Mars order Amare to void two POWs from the Martian Resistance. Caught between his desire for vengeance and his moral obligations as a doctor, Amare must make a choice.

"The Mule" by Matthew Hughes. My favorite aspect of this novelette is its setting. It's a pastiche of Early Modern Europe steeped in John Dee-esque occultism and planar sorcery, a lovely mix featuring a handful of my own historical and fantastical hyperfocuses. I've been working on my own Early Modern Magical setting for several years, so encountering this one was a delight. The story itself has a touch of the 1970s fantasy serial about it. I have no idea if there are other stories in this setting, but there are hints of other adventures before and after this one. One could imagine it sitting comfortably in an anthology with Phyllis Eisenstein's Alaric stories or something from Avram Davidson's Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania milieu. The characterizations were a little skimpy, but overall it was an absorbing story and an entertaining romp.

"These Brilliant Forms" by Phoenix Alexander. This one hooked me right from the first page. A tale of deep space salvagers and bioengineered "vacuumorphs" inspired by Dougal Dixon's Man After Man, all of it lovingly queer and proletarian, all of it rendered in bewitching prose. This story checks so many boxes for me. I crave more.

"Done in the Mire" by Adriana C. Grigore. Rumors of treasure lure generations of thieves and fortune-seekers to a boggy island, where a being called the Morasser deals with them by throwing them into a well. A young woman suffers this fate, but survives for fifty years on the well's healing waters, counting the stones and rattling the bones of those who perish. This is a marvelous tale, delectably weird, languid, dreamy with fairy tale logic.

"From This Side of the Rock" by Yvette Lisa Ndlovu. Having fled a homeland that became a graveyard, Rasika has waited long for the naturalization ceremony in the land on the other side of the rock. But the naturalization priests always take something away from you, the price always more, always crueler than you can imagine. An elegantly-structured work of devastating beauty.

"Lilith" by Ethan Smestad. After the last few bombshell stories, this one arrives as a brief shrug. Standard "Lilith and Adam are the last two humans on a terraforming Mars" bit. Could it be that Lilith is not who she appears to be?? Gasp!

"Maker of Chains" by Sarah A. Macklin. Another all-time great story, this one in a magic post-apocalypse setting brimming with place and character. Mr. Ezekiel must retrieve jewelry from a thief who occupies a lair in a former office building. But it's no ordinary thief, and no ordinary jewelry. And Mr. Ezekiel is no ordinary jeweler. A superb little tale.

"Where God Grows Wild" by Frank Oreto. The best part of this story is its setting: a laconic, vaguely New England-ish community of farmers and congregants, in a world where all animals -- chickens, cows, humans -- rely on plants to produce young for them. I liked the restraint in the worldbuilding; it's never explained how or why any of this came about, and the story is all the better for it. The Goddess plants birth out Cabbage Patch children, the old folks bliss out on orgy pollen until they become mulch, and that's just the way it is. A solid effort.

Of the three poems that follow -- all of them quite lovely -- my favorite was "We Feed on Stone and Light" by Deborah L. Davitt. It's very close to my own poetry aesthetic!

"Woven" by Amanda Dier. A sweetly sad tale of a neglected, abused boy and the injured boggle he befriends. In any of the F&SF back issues I read recently, it would been a standout, but in the brilliance and magic of this modern iteration of the magazine, it's just a tiny bit overshadowed. A solid entry nonetheless.

"The Epic of Qu Shittu" by Tobi Ogundrian. Speaking of magic and brilliance, this novelette crackles with both. Ogundrian makes worldbuilding, characterization, and description seem effortless here, each flowing naturally into the next. Within the first few pages I had been drawn deeper in this world than some novels ever bring me. An intrepid (or foolish) bard sneaks about the ship of a notorious sorcerer, and the plot unfurls with wonderful clarity and efficiency from there. Wonderful story.

"Nana" by Carl Walmsley. A maudlin tale of grief, holographic replicas of loved ones, and having to learn how to let go. Fine enough, I guess, but not my favorite sort of thing in a general way. The twist ending felt too calculated, too manipulative.

"Spirit to Spirit, Dust to Dust" by Anna Zumbro. A brief little story of rusalkas, the Dust Bowl, and ecological debts that need to be paid. Slight but charming.

"The Living Furniture" by Yefim Zozulya (translated by Alex Shvartsman). A translation of a Russian allegorical story over a century old, in which the wealthy and powerful use human beings -- regardless of their other skills or aptitudes -- as living furniture, wheel spokes, living books, and wallpaper. Pretty good as allegories go, and all too applicable to the horrors of modern capitalism.

And that's it! All in all, that was the best issue of a spec-fic magazine I've read in my adult life. (I remember being similarly blown away by issues of Asimov's and Analog as a teen, but I hadn't read much short fiction back then, and was easier to impress.) The bravura energy and verve in modern sci-fi and especially fantasy is like nothing else the genres have seen, and this issue is a gorgeous microcosm of the new SFF.

2022 read #41: So This Is Ever After by F.T. Lukens.

So This Is Ever After by F.T. Lukens

345 pages

Published 2022

Read from October 9 to October 11

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

This one is a high fantasy rom-com in which, after defeating the Big Bad Evil Guy and fulfilling the prophecy, the Chosen One and his band of adventurers settle in to rule the kingdom they accidentally inherited -- and also the Chosen One needs to find true love or he'll die. It's a charming set-up for a book and I had high hopes for it. Further, the cover is absolutely lovely.

Alas, Ever After eschews any real tension (romantic, humorous, or otherwise) regarding who Arek's soulmate is going to be. We know who it's going to be from the first chapter. That's not so bad in and of itself. This could have been a charming novella, a comedy of courtly manners as one complication after another impedes the course of True Love. What sours the book for me is how it stretches out a straightforward premise and places the burden of that extra length on our two romantic leads being absolutely oblivious idiots who can't communicate to (literally) save a life. That's a tried and true rom-com scenario, of course, but it long outlasted its welcome for me.

Beyond our two romantic leads, the main band of adventurers is a delightful cast. I'd happily read novels about Bethany's lusty adventures, about Sionna learning to loosen up and have fun, or Rion being the kingdom's sweetest himbo paladin. And I have to admit, when our two numbskull leads finally make things right at the end, I cried at how sweet and winsome it all was. The journey to get there could have been considerably shorter, though. Or maybe the focus could have been spread more evenly across the cast.

2022 read #40: Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

304 pages

Published 2020

Read from October 6 to October 9

Rating: 4 out of 5

I haven't dabbled much in the Gothic category before now. There was The Secret Skin, which was lovely and gay, a love-letter to the genre that refused its misogynistic roots. Before that there was Dunleary, which was godawful, seriously one of the worst books I've ever read. And long ago I read Jane Eyre (though none of the other foundational Gothic texts). I like the general aesthetic of the business, but haven't ever sought it out, unlike my partner R, who has a shelf full of tawdry old "woman stumbling away from a house" paperbacks and has begun to collect modern queer revisions of the genre as well.

Mexican Gothic is one of the best books I could add to this meagre list. It unfurls a world of decadence and decay, delightfully unsettling and fantastically rendered. The descriptions of place, the rotting edges of reality coming undone in a remote colonialist's manorhouse deep in the mountains, linger in the mind and the lungs. The buried family secrets, a requisite of the genre, are wonderfully morbid and imaginative.

2022 read #39: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December 1989.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December 1989 (77:6)

Edited by Edward L. Ferman

162 pages

Published 1989

Read October 7

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

Here we are, back at it again with another entry in my F&SF collection. I've been wavering between reading my back issues in chronological order and simply skipping to the more current publications. For now, my plan is to alternate between older issues and current ones (within the last calendar year) until I either read through my entire F&SF shelf or I get bored of the enterprise.

Last time, the September 1989 issue was a dire affair. The one good story, Ray Aldridge's "Steel Dogs," was essentially "Westworld but make it fairy tale fantasy." The rest wouldn't be making anybody's best-of lists, unless you specifically wanted a list of stories by racist sex criminals. Looking at the table of contents here, I feel some trepidation, especially for the Esther M. Friesner and Mike Resnick stories. Wish me luck.

"The Old School" by Ramsey Campbell. The name sounded familiar, so I searched to find what I'd read from him before. There were two stories: "The Other Side," collected in 1988's The Year's Best Fantasy, which was insipid shock horror; and "The Changer of Names," reprinted in 1978's The Year's Best Fantasy Stories, which was a slightly satirical sword & sorcery piece. Today's tale is a disjointed attempt at boarding school horror, as our hero -- a modern, more enlightened school teacher -- follows ephemeral children through the woods to the ruins of a particularly abusive boys' school, where the residue of children's fear remains as a palpable thing haunting the classrooms. There's a vague idea of generational trauma here; mean old people who only want to see kids-these-days properly punished make an appearance, offering a blatant echo of "The Other Side." But honestly there isn't much of substance here. And worse, this is the 1980s, so no male author was capable of describing an 11 year old girl without mentioning her "budding breasts." A sour start to this issue. I'll give it a D-.

"Misbegotten" by Michael P. Kube-McDowell. What I've always loved about F&SF is the wealth of different SFF subgenres coexisting in the same magazine. Kube-McDowell is a workmanlike writer, the sort of writer with several Star Wars Expanded Universe novels to his name; this story is a workmanlike effort as well, a modestly entertaining xenobiology piece that wouldn't have been out of place in Analog. Coming as it does immediately after the British boarding school horror of the previous story, it feels fresher, somehow, the contrast accentuating the mild pleasures of the alien ecosystem, the laboratory airship studying it from above, and the parasite that worms its way into our hero Eric Kimura. The characters are interchangeable, the plot nothing new, but nonetheless, I found it enjoyable. Maybe a C+.

"Where Have All the Graveyards Gone?" by Dean Wesley Smith. The year is 1991. Society collapses in the immediate aftermath of a "limited" nuclear exchange. Abandoned as their caretakers leave to look after their own families, the residents of a nursing home must fend for themselves. This story feels especially bleak here and now, after the countless COVID horrors in nursing homes, as nuclear tensions rise, as the collapse of society seems inevitable, whether next month or twenty years from now thanks to climate change. This story was competently written and did what it set out to do, but it's a fucking bummer. C.

"Poe White Trash" by Esther M. Friesner. The editorial blurb above this story promises "the funniest story we've read in many months." The best thing I can say about it is that it's brief. It's an eyeroll-worthy retelling of "The Cask of Amontillado" populated with the broadest hillfolk stereotypes this side of Hee Haw. I'll be generous and say F+.

"Little Worker" by Paul Di Filippo. A bioengineered bodyguard who's part human, part wolverine, and entirely into jelly and toast, Little Worker protects the Prime Minister of North America, but also has her own troubles to solve -- namely, anyone who gets in between her and the Prime Minister of North America. The editorial blurb above this story says, somewhat leeringly, that this is "one different and disturbing story." I found it to be a bit of a shrug; the vibe of "childlike bioengineered killer who is altogether too obsessed with her charge" was oily and somewhat putrid in its 1980s-ness. Maybe a D.

"The Cheval Glass" by Reginald Bretnor. Here's a challenge for all cishet male authors, especially those in the 1980s: Write a story involving a tween girl without using descriptors like "unripened" and without some mention of growing breasts. Clearly, this challenge is impossible. This is, overall, a mild tale of a girl growing up with neglectful parents and an emotionally abusive mom, a story of a girl who uses a magic mirror to find her heart's desire. But the author just couldn't help getting sweaty over his 12 year old protagonist, and it's gross. D.

"The Wound That Would Not Be Healed" by Eric Carl Wolf. This issue seems to have a loose theme of sorts, or at least there is an abnormal number of stories that center on either kids or old folks. This one is a vaguely spiritual urban fantasy, or vaguely Christian "inspirational" tale, whichever way you'd like to phrase it. Drawing a rather vacuous allegory with the wounds of Christ, our tale finds an old woman wasting away in a hospital, the abscess on her hip a constant source of pain, never getting any better. Until [makes magical whooshy hand motions] the wound takes away her pain, glows with an inner light, gives her a lovingly merciful death, and makes a few small miracles happen on her way out. Not my cup of tea, but at least it isn't actively offensive on any level. Maybe I'll give it a D+ (the plus added solely because there are no budding breasts).

"Freezer Madness" by Patricia Ferrara. I know about child abuse. I was abused all through childhood; it's been a recurring motif in some of my own stories. The way it was employed as a plot device throughout the 1980s, though, feels skeevy, exploitative, a cheap way to wring pathos and horror from the audience, much like the use of homeless or mentally ill people as a plot device during the same period. That's how this one feels. It's a child's-eye horror story about a mom who drinks too much, a kid who remembers things he shouldn't, and a Gramma who's been in the freezer a bit too long. It's well-written, but left me with a freezer-burned aftertaste. [ba-dum-tiss] Maybe a C-.

"For I Have Touched the Sky" by Mike Resnick. I've been dreading this one. Apparently, Resnick, a white guy from Chicago, made an early name for himself with a series of stories "inspired" by (read: appropriated from) "African backgrounds." This story is set on a planet terraformed to resemble Kenya, a slice of Afrofuturism that would delight me in the hands of any number of actually African or Black authors who could handle it with the sensitivity and authority it deserves. Instead, we have a white American author wrestling with questions of Kikuyu cultural identity, cultural reclamation, and whether or not old traditions are worth preserving, which just feels unsavory. (Additionally, continuing one of the unpalatable themes of this issue, a young girl character is introduced, and immediately the narrator comments on how she's "not yet of circumcision age," which feels culturally stereotyping as well as predatory.) Overall, this is one of the better-written and well-structured pieces in this issue, and I'm sure at the time it must have struck F&SF's (white, American) audience as brilliant, innovative, and thought-provoking. But I can't say it aged well at all. I'll give it another F+.

There were some doozies in this issue, and I don't mean that in a complimentary way. I think my high esteem for F&SF in the 1980s may have been mistaken. It was cultivated through best-of anthologies, after all, which wouldn't be a representative sample of what its month to month issues were like. 

2022 read #38: Flowers for the Sea by Zin E. Rocklyn.

Flowers for the Sea by Zin E. Rocklyn

107 pages

Published 2021

Read from October 5 to October 6

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

It's been a bit since I read what might be termed artsier, more literary prose. This novella begins dense, making you navigate a wall of backstory that vanishes in wisps of abstruse prose the moment you try to find a fingerhold. I struggled with it, but that's on me as a reader, out of practice as I am; Rocklyn's way with words is considerable. When we finally settle into the immediate perspective of our narrator, the prose becomes fiercely, almost frightfully embodied, a subcutaneous experience of muscle, salt, urine, breath, and heaving bone.

As with so many novellas I've read recently, I think Flowers could have benefitted from an additional 20-30 pages, particularly to help pace out and expand upon the whirlwind beginning. Even so, there is no denying the magnificence that Rocklyn achieves even in this brief space.

2022 read #37: Perception Check by Astrid Knight.

Perception Check by Astrid Knight

479 pages

Published 2022

Read from October 2 to October 5

Rating: 3 out of 5

This is a self-published New Adult fantasy about a deeply traumatized college student setting out into a Legally Distinct From Dungeons & Dragons world to rescue her friend and confront the evil mage who snatched her away from Michigan one fateful night ten years before. I like the idea of supporting self-published titles; someday I'll likely take the self-pub route with my own novellas, maybe even my own novels. It's hard to discover self-pub titles that I'll actually read, though. I've bought a handful of self-published books over the last year, and just haven't been able to power through and finish them; the prose has always been too iffy for my snobbish tastes. (One exception worth mentioning: Cute Mutants.)

Knight's prose is decent, as good as anything you'd find in most modern YA fantasy (though if I never read the words "sneer" and "smirk" again, it will be too soon). The story is absorbing and does exactly what it says on the label, plunging our heroes into fights with goblins, into dingy taverns with bad food, brushes with the royal guard, and an epic quest to retrieve a Maguffin and save their friend while saving the world. It was perfectly satisfactory in that regard.

I did find it a bit off-putting that every human, elf, and halfling character is coded as white -- most of them with blue eyes; some of them singled out as "pale white" -- except for one guy coded as Japanese, who (spoilers!) turns out to be morally suspect. I'm guessing it was an unconscious oversight, or perhaps a conscious effort to avoid appropriation. (One might position Check as the diametric opposite of Wake of Vultures, another fantasy written by a white woman, and an example of well-intentioned but perhaps dubious "I'll take it upon myself to write diverse characters" saviorism.) I'm in favor of avoiding appropriation, but making every character white -- humans from a fantasy world setting as well as humans from a city in Michigan -- swings way too far in the opposite direction.

2022 read #36: The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune.

The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune

398 pages

Published 2020

Read from September 30 to October 2

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Refreshingly sweet, maybe even saccharine -- but it's saccharine in an aching and beautiful way that more than earns the right to be sugary. Gently heartwarming, bustling with wonderful characters you can't help but sweep into your arms and defend at all costs.

I knew little about the plot or vibe before I plunged into this book, beyond a general idea that it was lovely, queer, and feel-good, and I'm glad I knew so little about it. The heart of the book is its conviction that love and understanding can bring light and hope to even the grayest, most bigoted of worlds, that change begins with ordinary people opening up from their bubbles of habit, rule-following, and prejudice. Perhaps it lacks the revolutionary fervor of Confessions of the Fox; it certainly slips into the Disney Liberal trap when the sole Black character spends much of the book in animal form. Despite its flaws, though, there's so much room for this earnest joy and found family love on my bookshelf. More of this, please.

2022 read #35: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 1989.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 1989 issue (77:3)

Edited by Edward L. Ferman

162 pages

Published 1989

Read from September 29 to September 30

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

I've been collecting issues of Fantasy & Science Fiction for years. Not that long ago, I used to collect other magazines too: Asimov's, an occasional Analog, a 1990s fantasy magazine called Adventures in Sword & Sorcery, random fanzines from the 1970s. But life has put forth many upheavals in the last few years (to say the least). Now I'm down to one shelf of F&SF, which ranges from this issue to the current one.

I haven't read any of these issues yet, which is a situation I've wanted to fix for as many years as I've been collecting them. The last time I read a full issue of F&SF was back in February 2019, which we can all agree was a long ass time ago. Some recent issues have stories written by people I know personally, and it's been my #1 dream market since 1999 or so, so it's all the more embarrassing that I haven't gotten around to them. Perhaps I'll read one of those issues next.

September 1989 is my oldest issue, but otherwise it doesn't seem to have any distinguishing characteristics. None of the stories are considered classics, as far as I know; David Brin is the only name I recognize on the TOC. It is noteworthy that every single one of these stories seems to have been written by a dude. Even in 1989, that had to have seemed a bit fishy.

"Steel Dogs" by Ray Aldridge. The cover story, "Dogs" has 1989 written all over it. In a star-faring far future, a theme park modeled after fae and fantasy tales was built around a central AI brain on a pleasure planet, its sumptuous castle and forest populated with android trolls, elves, huntsmen, and sporting dogs. The androids were "filled" with the revenant consciousnesses of criminals, the hunting dogs with canine revenants; even the dungeon rats are robotic, animated by the ghosts of dead rats. Seven hundred years have passed; the pleasure planet has fallen out of fashion, and for centuries the revenant murderers and pirates have acted out their roles without guests to entertain. A growing population of marooned human survivors lives on the planet's scattered islands. Our tale begins as Aandred, the revenant consciousness of a galactic pirate uploaded into the body of a grinning metal Huntsman, bounds out with his hounds to capture a trespasser and bring her back to Droam, the AI at the heart of the castle. The story has potential; it is structured efficiently, securing the reader's interest, smoothly doling out each and every character and plot device as needed. There are iffy moments, like when Aandred takes a long moment to take stock of his captive Sundee while she's naked and unconscious, but overall it isn't as dubious to modern eyes as it could've been. A solid effort, though not a forgotten classic.

"How Hamster Loved the Actroid with Garbo's Eyes" by Chet Williamson. It's fascinating to see early sci-fi speculations around what would become modern-day technological norms. This is a loose hacker-fi retelling of Galatea and Pygmalion rooted in a technology that we would recognize today as deep fake CGI. It isn't a good sci-fi retelling; the narrative voice is sweaty and casual in a too-forced way, reminding me altogether too much of the standard voice used in old cishet Usenet erotica. The R-slur is dropped casually at one point. As far as the story itself goes, I find it funny that the futuristic "Synthecin" is produced by a solitary genius "hacking" (i.e., programming) rather than by a dedicated and overworked team of animators. The public at large goes gaga over new John Wayne and Greta Garbo films for no reason other than the plot needs them to (and because the author was, presumably, a fan of the classics). Both white male main characters are effortlessly brilliant and rich because that's the kind of story this is. Overall, I give it a shrug.

So, uh, for this next one, prepare yourself for some heavy content warnings. Real life SA, SA of children, exploitation, racism. It's rough.

"Where Do We Go When We Sleep?" by Roger Robert Lovin. My ick-sense immediately tingled with this one, possibly because the very first line begins "The cocoa-colored young man..." So I googled this guy and... fucking yikes. A Christian pastor associated with the Discordian movement, this fucker was a sexual predator who especially went after girls. He was arrested for this in 1979, but his friend circle managed to bribe his way out of any real repercussions. He fled to Belize in order to continue his sexual predations on children in a colonized land where he would be untouchable. And it was from there that he wrote and sent in this story, which happens to be about a white man coming to solve a metaphysical mystery in a colonized land. Lovin may or may not have faked his death in 1991. I learned all this on an increasingly horrified google dive before I read any farther into this story. I do not owe any sexual predator the time it takes to actually read their shit. I gave it a shot anyway, and gave up within a few pages as the ick factor and casual racism (complete with phonetically rendered dialogue straight out of Mark Twain) piled on. Fuck this guy and fuck this story.

"Uneasy Street" by Marc Laidlaw. After the last two tales, I'm not in the most optimistic frame of mind for this one. And it didn't do anything to change my mind. It's grim and grimy near-future street drug stuff, rote and uninteresting, and badly written at that. (The main character helpfully doles out exposition: "Easy? That new drug, you mean?") Except for the first story, this issue has been dire so far.

"Somewhere Dreamers Wake" by Wayne Wightman. This feels like a 1960s High Concept Sci-Fi piece slathered with a veneer of aren't-I-so-clever 1980s irony, and I mean neither descriptor in a complimentary way. Faceless technocrats sketch out the parameters of religion and race in committee before sending down pod people (all "defective" personality types from the universe's penal system) to populate a synthetic biome on an experimental planet. And suddenly a young man named Wayne comes to consciousness in his high school in the year 1964 and wouldn't you know it, it was Earth all along! Even the editorial intro to this one describes it as a "basic theme in SF," and that's putting it generously. This stuff would have been dusty even in the heyday of The Twilight Zone.

"The Third Effect" by Edward F. Shaver. A tale of white-collar mediocrity crossing paths with the mathematically ineffable underpinnings of the cosmos. Investment analyst David (whose sex life is fantastic, thank you for asking!) notices that the seventh elevator at his firm's office tower never comes for him. He tallies the probabilities of this and finds they're a trillion to one. But other people see only six elevators, so David must confront the reality of the seventh elevator -- and the trillion-to-one "miracle" he mathematically believes to be awaiting him, for good or ill. When the seventh elevator finally arrives, he takes it -- and [randomly rolls some dice] becomes a vampire! Oops. A modestly entertaining story, nothing especially memorable, not enough to redeem the last four.

"Privacy" by David Brin. A testosterone-soaked "teen gangs mouthing slang and seeking outlets for violence in a tech dystopia" story, pretty standard stuff. This one is improved by the somewhat prescient wrinkle that the old folks in this society are hooked on spying, recording, and reporting any teen mischief in their vicinity, forming a distributed network surveillance state. Still, all in all I can't relate to all this masculist bullshit about how young men intrinsically need violence and honor and boy, weren't things so much better when having a boyfriend was a girl's only source of social status and security? Blech. Well-written but not my kind of thing.

And that's that. I finally read another entry in my magazine collection. And just like the January/February 2019 issue, this one is getting donated somewhere. I've read plenty of excellent F&SF content from the Ferman era, and I've read plenty of excellent sci-fi and fantasy from the late '80s, so I have no idea why this issue was so abhorrent. Absolutely not worth keeping.

2022 read #34: Uncommon Charm by Emily Bergslien and Kat Weaver.

Uncommon Charm by Emily Bergslien and Kat Weaver

93 pages

Published 2022

Read from September 28 to September 29

Rating: 4 out of 5

A sprightly novella set in and around the margins of an upper crust family in 1920s London, Charm weaves magic, Jewish philosophy, Roaring 20s parties, and dark family secrets together into a beguiling story. Shorter even than many Neon Hemlock novellas, Charm could perhaps have benefitted from 20-30 additional pages to let the narrative breathe and the numerous ancillary characters take on a shine. The tangle of family secrets and magical nets would certainly have benefitted from some extra room. Additionally, I could have spent many pages exploring the half-seen dynamics between our narrator Julia and her school crush Charlotte, or with shy magician Simon and his particular friend Max. That said, this little book is a delight.

2022 read #33: Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo.

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

411 pages

Published 2021

Read from September 14 to September 28

Rating: 4 out of 5

I adore this book.

It draws you in like the soft cushions of a couch at a home where you first learn who you really are, among people who love the way you do. I adore Lily and Kath, our main characters, who brave ostracism and jail in search of their truest, best selves, and discover love along the way. I adore how precisely and poignantly Lo describes the way first love feels, the unfamiliar ache and vulnerable need, the protective tenderness. I adore how her 1954 San Francisco feels tangible, its fog and its drifting aromas and its busy streets tenderly realized.

This month has been an unexpected struggle, with a flooded apartment on top of the general unending stress of the last three years. My attention span has struggled as well. Telegraph Club's prose is smoothly beautiful, never flashy but always wrapping you up in its story. Nonetheless I found myself almost having to relearn (for the third or fourth time this year) how to pay attention to a narrative and stick with it instead of picking up my phone for a quick spin of dopamine roulette. None of which reflects on the book, which is a treasure. But it does make it even harder to compose any kind of cogent thoughts in this review.

2022 read #32: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

443 pages

Published 2014

Read from September 9 to September 13

Rating: 4 out of 5

I've wanted to read this book for years, ever since I saw it on the library shelf not too long after it was first published. Over the years I probably checked it out from the library four or five times. As is so often the case with ADHD, the intent was there, but actually opening up the book and reading it was on the other side of an insurmountable hump.

After all those years loosely orbiting this book, it's funny that my introduction to queer space opera instead came from Joyce Chng's Water into Wine. The two aren't especially comparable, aside from the shared working-class, found-family, making-a-home-for-ourselves-where-we-can vibes. Where Wine takes place on the dirt, The Long Way is a tale of spacers, following our colorful hodgepodge tunneling crew as they hop from world to world and spend long stretches in space.

From the title, I had pictured something a bit grander, a long-form meditation on cramped quarters and the deep dark of space. Instead The Long Way is a series of vignettes: the new crew member comes aboard; the shopping trip at the interplanetary bazaar; the pit stop at the dusty outpost planet to pick up spare parts from cyberpunkish modders. It was a cozy, comfortable ramble rather than the epic journey I expected. And that was certainly okay by me. I think having a bit more of the deep dark vastness of space would have added something to the book, but in the end, it's the characters and their relationships that matter most here, and those were lovingly rendered and delightful.

Now, though, I'm jonesing to write my own queer working-class space opera.

2022 read #31: This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

201 pages

Published 2019

Read from June 20 to July 3

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

We've been having a rough time of it here in reality, haven't we? An unelected council of robed wizards declaring that fascism must be the law of the land (at least here in the United States); the relentless loss of liberties and personal autonomy; an incipient genocide against LGBTQIA+ folks gathering momentum everywhere from megachurch pulpits to the opinion page of The New York Times; sacrificing the future of human civilization (and most of the biosphere) to a couple more years of capitalist profiteering -- 2022 has been a bad fucking time.

Lucky thing the gay spec-fic has been so brilliant.

This Is How You Lose the Time War is the book Dinosaur Beach didn't even know it could wish itself to be, but far weirder, queerer, and incomparably better, a poetic manifesto burning in a fist of revolution. It's a document of beauty, a transcendent evocation of love and hunger and grief so fierce it can unmake the future and weave something greater in its stead. With my own thoughts so steeped in the necessity of unmaking the fascism and ecological collapse of our present, I needed this book at this particular stipple in time. I can only quote Amal El-Mohtar from the acknowledgements: "Books are letters in bottles, cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another."

This is how we win.

2022 read #30: The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water by Zen Cho.

The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water by Zen Cho

159 pages

Published 2020

Read June 19

Rating: 4 out of 5

A thoroughly enjoyable slice of queer adventure fantasy. Bandits displaced by war try to make a living in a land where colonialist outsiders have gained the ascendancy. Nuns with metaphysical powers pick through the rubble of abbeys destroyed by the warring factions. Sacred relics spill into the black market. It has that delightful queer D&D vibe I’ve been craving ever since Legends & Lattes, but efficiently builds around it a fascinating setting I'd be happy to explore further someday.

2022 read #29: Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg.

Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg

330 pages

Published 2018

Read from June 9 to June 19

Rating: 5 out of 5

I can feel it within the whorls and innermost arrangement of my being: this book has changed me.

I’ve wanted to write something like this book for a very long time. For at least a decade now I’ve been planning, however desultorily, a low fantasy novel about a gender-expansive rogue (most likely a trans man, or a person we might assign to that category within our current taxonomy of gender) whose heists and contacts within the underbelly of a London-esque city bring him to the forefront of a proletariat revolution against the aristocrats and capitalists of an early modern England analogue.

From a nearly identical starting point, Rosenberg, using Jack Sheppard and Edgeworth Bess as our entry into historical 18th Century London, has produced a work of revolutionary reality and queer intensity that I could never dream of matching, a metafictional masterpiece all the more urgent as our modern forces of fascism and vulture capitalism slouch toward genocide and the destruction of our biosphere. It is a radical document of liberation, an illustration of the historical roots and modern-day reach of the Western commodification of person and existence.

By our very queerness, we reject and disrupt the capitalist commodification forced upon our bodies. I don’t have the grounding in academic thought that Rosenberg lavished upon this novel, but this is a truth I feel within my mitochondria.

2022 read #28: Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses by Robin Wall Kimmerer

165 pages

Published 2003

Read from June 7 to June 9

Rating: 4 out of 5

Like Ellen Meloy's The Anthropology of Turquoise, this book is a collection of personal essays on a series of related topics, and not so much the didactic natural history book implied in the title. Wall Kimmerer's moss-linked essays are informative and personal in equal measure, using the personal to illuminate the scientific in deft ways. At times, like when Wall Kimmerer draws a link between the resiliency of mosses and the rhythms of human life, it's brilliantly moving; at others, like when she describes the efforts of some rich asshole to rip up an Appalachian hillside to create an artificial facsimile of an Appalachian hillside, it's perfectly infuriating.

There's a certain melancholy to reading books of natural history written so long ago. Unlike many books of this time (and especially books from the 1990s and '80s), Moss doesn't end with a coda of hopefulness. There's no inspiring epilogue to rouse us to fix the ruin capitalism has wrought on our biosphere. Instead, Wall Kimmerer offers two bleak ruminations on the destruction of the Pacific Northwest rain forest, which linger in the mind even as she caps off the book with a glimpse of the strange, hidden glimmer of Goblin Gold moss, making the most of its specialization for low-light environments. It's sad to think that our imperialist impact on the environment has only worsened in the last two horrific decades. But the magic of Goblin Gold seems like a fitting coda for our bleak times, a bit of light to cling to.

2022 read #27: The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo.

The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo

121 pages

Published 2020

Read from June 6 to June 7

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

The very best short stories are delicate constructs that say more with a handful of deftly-rendered scenes than some novels manage to express in their entirety. This novella is a dazzling puzzlebox that folds over itself in intricate short story intimacy for its entire length. At a wordcount where some fantasy tomes are just barely finding their footing, Empress builds a breathing, hauntingly familiar yet bewilderingly magical world, populates two generations of memorable characters, strikes an ideological sword into the heart of monarchy, and does so with brilliant aplomb. Nghi Vo makes it all feel effortless. An amazing work.

2022 read #26: The Secret Skin by Wendy N. Wagner.

The Secret Skin by Wendy N. Wagner

99 pages

Published 2021

Read from June 5 to June 6

Rating: 4 out of 5

As far as I know, the only gothic novel of any sort I've read before this was Monica Heath's Dunleary, a trashy and deeply misogynistic morality tale that did nothing to encourage me to seek out more of its ilk. My partner R has the same soft spot for "women running away from a house" books that I harbor toward crappy midcentury pulp, however, and slowly I've grown more intrigued about the genre. When I learned that a certain indie press had published a modern queering of gothic horror, I just had to give it a try.

Wagner's prose atmospherically unfurls a gothic tale that fits comfortably within the expected parameters of "woman running away from the house" horror: buried family secrets, repressed memories, half-forgotten tragedies, all breathing malevolent life into a once-magnificent manor house in a remote corner of 1920s Oregon. Wagner doesn't shy away from the racist underbelly of Oregon's white elites. Slight spoilers: The forbidden love that awakens between our narrator and her brother's new bride is stirring and far more believable than the so-called romance at the center of Dunleary. Everything is better when it's gay.

2022 read #25: Beasts Before Us by Elsa Panciroli.

Beasts Before Us: The Untold Story of Mammal Origins and Evolution by Elsa Panciroli

300 pages

Published 2021

Read from June 2 to June 5

Rating: 4 out of 5

Continuing my informal read-through of the current boom in pop paleontology books with a fun entry chronicling the evolution of synapsids. From their Carboniferous origins to the Anthropocene extinction crisis instigated by one synapsid species in particular (ourselves), Beasts delivers a light and readable rundown of major milestones and interesting details. It marks the first time I've seen the term "chonky boi" utilized in a scientific context. It also delineated the definition of our ancestral synapsid group (and demonstrated why the term "mammal-like reptile" is a misnomer) better than any material had ever done for me before. (In short, mammals didn't evolve from reptiles; synapsids and diapsids both diverged from a shared amniote ancestor, so calling synapsids "mammal-like reptiles" is inaccurate in several ways.)

At times Panciroli treads closer than I'd like to scientific biography, but even this is important because it led to the spectacle of multiple negative Amazon reviews from fragile white men crying about how "political" Panciroli is. Panciroli dares to acknowledge how Western science arose from the exploitation of colonialism, and further dares to be honest about how vile certain prominent white male scientists were. To the delicate sensibilities of these white male reviewers, being honest and truthful about history is unwarranted and (horrors!) political, with the implication that quietly burying and ignoring the continuing realities of colonialism (to the benefit of no one but themselves) is merely proper and objective writing. These Amazon reviews encapsulate a microcosm of fascist brain-rot, and for that I'm happy Panciroli took the time to explore the lives of past scientists.

Overall, I'd say Beasts Before Us tantalized me about mammal origins more than it taught me, but that's to be expected -- it's a pop science book, after all. I'm jonesing for a fuller (and more lavishly illustrated) tome. Alas, this is one of vanishingly few books I've ever seen devoted to synapsid evolution. I'm not sure where to get my fix from here.

2022 read #24: Gearbreakers by Zoe Hana Mikuta.

Gearbreakers by Zoe Hana Mikuta

405 pages

Published 2021

Read from May 16 to June 1

Rating: 3 out of 5

A tale of sapphic love and giant robots and swordfighting! What's not to love? I didn't expect this book to become an enduring favorite of mine, but the cover art is amazing and that summary is hard to resist, even if giant mechas are about as far from my personal special interests as you can get and still be in SFF territory.

As with many YA books I've read over the years, my primary dissatisfaction with Gearbreakers is the plain fact that I'm not its intended audience. Every single character is an angry, aggressive goblin of pure chaos energy. One or even two characters like that would be plenty for me, but it was literally everyone on both sides of the conflict, whether they were the totalitarian city-state's highly trained "Windup" pilots or the scrappy titular Gearbreakers who bring down mechas from the inside with superpowered energy gloves. There are worthwhile themes of trauma and how battling against monsters can, through incessant violence, turn us into monsters, but it was hard to tell apart any of the secondary characters. Everyone roughhouses everyone else, everyone insults each other and chases others around for insulting them, and every single character pauses in the midst of battle to offer some dry quip or snarky remark. Classic YA fare.

Gearbreakers picks up considerably once our two leads finally meet up. It took me two weeks to get through the first half of this book, but only a couple days to finish it from there. Part of this had to do with going on a weeklong roadtrip and camping adventure, which led directly into a weeklong process of moving apartments with my partner R, all of which left precious little time for reading. But still.

2022 read #23: Otherlands by Thomas Halliday.

Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds by Thomas Halliday

319 pages

Published 2022

Read from May 14 to May 15

Rating: 4 out of 5

We're in the midst of a small boom of pop paleontology. Major documentaries are coming out; more nonfiction books on prehistory have been coming out in recent years than I've seen since the 1990s. While, regrettably, this nonfiction wave has yet to be matched with a corresponding surge of dinosaur novels, I've been depleting my meager checking account in my delight at the new nonfiction offerings; perhaps it's better for my bills if there aren't novels to match.

I couldn't ask for a better premise than Otherlands'. Halliday spends each chapter depicting, as experientially as our current science allows, the living, breathing ecosystem preserved at certain iconic palentological sites, counting backward from the Pleistocene all the way back to the under-appreciated weirdness of the Ediacaran. It reminds me to a large extent of Steven Mithen's After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000-5,000 BC, which made a huge impression on me as an archaeology student in my undergrad years. Halliday sticks closer to the known facts than Mithen, who edges into outright historical fiction at times. It's a tricky balance to sustain. I simultaneously wished for more speculative "stories" in each chapter and more rigorous and detailed descriptions of the actual fossils and formations at their heart. Overall, though, I find myself more than satisfied.

Halliday's prose hews close to the modern greats of British nature writing. In particular, at times I caught a distinct flavor of Robert Macfarlane in the best of Halliday's turns of phrase. Almost every chapter has at least one indelibly brilliant bit of poetry: "Nature forswears nostalgia." "A count of winters endured." "Countrysides made of skeletons." 

2022 read #22: Stone and Steel by Eboni Dunbar.

Stone and Steel by Eboni Dunbar

92 pages

Published 2020

Read May 13

Rating: 4 out of 5

A gorgeous and assured sword-and-sorcery novella. Former street kid Aaliyah, now a renowned general, had helped her childhood companion and current lover Odessa, a mage who wields power over stone, overthrow the corrupt Iron King five years ago. Now, returning in glory from conquest, Aaliyah sees her city suffering under her lover's control, the promises she had made to better their people's lives unfulfilled. The tale is relatively straightforward, but the characters and setting hum with life and glitter with magic. I'm learning to appreciate the novella as a self-contained form with its own strengths and its own pace, but I really can't help but wish that this book were longer, that we could have gotten more time to let everything breathe.

2022 read #21: Hawksbill Station by Robert Silverberg.*

Hawksbill Station by Robert Silverberg*

186 pages

Published 1968

Read May 12

Rating: 2 out of 5

* Denotes a reread

I read a novella-length version of this book as a teen in an ancient best sci-fi of the year anthology. It's an early example of the time-prison concept, one later explored in Julian May's The Many-Colored Land and many other places. In the not-so-distant future of 2019, a totalitarian America sends political prisoners, dissidents, and failed revolutionaries on a one-way trip to the Cambrian, where they waste away and slowly lose their faculties on a barren rock shelf and fish the shallow seas for trilobites. Our hero Jim, whose physical size somehow endows him with natural leadership qualities, is the "king" of the titular station. When a mysterious newcomer materializes, Jim's not ready for where his revelations might lead.

Like many sci-fi books published between the 1940s and the 1970s, Hawksbill Station began as a short-form story originally published in a genre litmag (Galaxy, in this case). So far as I can tell, the novel contains the full text of the novella, but adds several chapters detailing Jim's career as a revolutionary. These chapters interrupt the flow of the Cambrian end of the narrative, and contribute little except for a broader canvas for Silverberg to employ grotesque mid-century bigotry, in particular a loathsome vein of misogyny. (The sole named woman character is a young revolutionary who Jim passive-aggressively manipulates until she loses weight and starts wearing a bra.)

As a story, Hawksbill Station is a vast improvement over Dinosaur Beach. It's amazing to me that Beach was published after Station; Station very much fits into the mold of New Wave sci-fi, built on character exploration rather than gee-whiz science, whereas Beach is pulpier, with a distinct Silver Age vibe. Both are very much products of their time, with manly-man protagonists bending women to their wills and being casually bigoted toward anyone who differs from them. Both are getting chucked into the donation bin after this.

2022 read #20: The Gilded Ones by Namina Forna.

The Gilded Ones by Namina Forna

418 pages

Published 2021

Read from May 5 to May 12

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I had high hopes for this book. I mean, its cover art is absolutely impeccable! It began promisingly, establishing a central premise that remains all too relevant as regressive misogyny continues to strip half of our society of their fundamental human rights and autonomy. Women, in this book's secondary world as much as in our own, are considered inferior and subservient beings, needing the control of men backed up by a religious hierarchy that just happens to align with the interest of a misogynist ruling class. Certain women are cursed with "demonic" golden blood that reveals itself in their teens; this heritage gives them superhuman strength and, to an extent, allows them to shrug off death. Therefore all teen girls are tested for this "impurity," and those with golden blood are killed repeatedly until their "final" death is found.  Certain girls get recruited to fight on behalf of the emperor, using their superior strength and knack for survival to fight off an encroaching horde of monstrous beings called "deathshrieks," their differences shunned unless they prove themselves useful to the power structure.

Sadly, this sort of metaphor is just as applicable today as it would have been in the 1970s or '80s.

The Gilded Ones begins to drag in its middle third, succumbing to YA stylistic tics that don't gel with my tastes. Every character interaction is punctuated with smirks, scoffs, snarls, shrugs. The action scenes are perfunctory, lacking any real tension or cohesion -- which would be fine, except they keep happening, especially once our main character Deka begins going on campaign against the deathshrieks. The final revelation of Deka's true nature and purpose was visible a long way off, which made this stretch feel particularly repetitive. Like, we all know where this is going, just get us there!

It's a shame that the flowering of diversity and fresh perspectives that has graced YA fantasy hasn't yet fully extended to adult fantasy. Most of what I didn't like about this book might have been fixed had it been pitched toward a different, older audience.

The setting has promise, and I'm interested to see where the series can go from here, since (slight spoilers) this book seems to end with Deka's main purpose in life already resolved. 

2022 read #19: Water into Wine by Joyce Chng.

Water into Wine by Joyce Chng

139 pages

Published 2017

Read from May 4 to May 5

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

For a long while, from childhood into my early twenties, space opera was my SFF subgenre of choice. I grew up on Star Trek: The Next Generation. The 1997 reissue of the Star Wars trilogy (my first time back in a movie theater since Short Circuit 2 disappointed me as a tiny child) led to an obsession. I filled up notebooks with plans for Star Wars novels before I turned to plotting more "serious" space opera set in a universe of my own design. Books like Hyperion and Dune were staples of my early adulthood. For that matter, the very first book I read and reviewed for this blog -- Memory by Linda Nagata -- could be considered space opera.

As I entered my thirties, our dimming prospects for an optimistic future -- and the grim realism that crept into sci-fi as a consequence -- helped turn me into a fantasy reader. The corporate vacuity of The Rise of Skywalker and The Book of Boba Fett chilled my lifelong love of Star Wars. I can't think of the last standalone space opera I read. Going through my reviews, it looks like the last short story was "Blue as Blood" by Leah Cypress (reviewed here in 2019), while the last novel was Jack Vance's The Star King (which I read in 2016).

It's, uh... it's been a while.

Water into Wine is a minimalist but moving tale of a gender-nonconforming person who inherits a vineyard on a distant planet and must figure out how to make a life there, while an interplanetary war sows chaos and death all around. A ground-level space opera of ordinary people trying to make do in the midst of armored patrolmen and dropships and space battles is something I never knew I needed in my life. I could read a dozen books with this basic setup before I tired of it -- not necessarily in this story's universe, which is barely sketched in, but certainly with this vibe of determination and loss.

2022 read #18: The Moomins and the Great Flood by Tove Jansson.

The Moomins and the Great Flood by Tove Jansson

Translated by David McDuff

59 pages

Published 1945 (English translation published 2012)

Read May 4

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

We're watching our rights as human beings crumble in real time, not just here in the United States but also in every other country (such as the United Kingdom) that is currently sliding into fascism.

Since the first of May I'd been trying to read a bad fantasy romance from the early 1980s. It was stuffed with gross clichés of the time, racial and sexual, and after the last couple days, I just couldn't stand to read it any longer.

So I dropped that losing bet and picked up the lightest and fluffiest bit of innocent escapism I had available: The Moomins and the Great Flood!

The first Moomin book, Great Flood presents Moomintroll, Moominmamma, and Moomin Valley in primordial form, a mostly blank canvas for an idle sketch of childhood adventure and a shaggy-dog narrative. There isn't much substance here, but then, I wasn't seeking any. Jansson's gorgeous illustrations are more compelling than the prose, which lacks the subtle ache of The Summer Book. In her 1991 preface, Jansson concludes, "Anyhow, here was my first happy ending!" That captures the vibe nicely. It was just what I needed today.

2022 read #17: & This is How to Stay Alive by Shingai Njeri Kagunda.

& This is How to Stay Alive by Shingai Njeri Kagunda

100 pages

Published 2021

Read April 30

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

A dizzying novella on grief, loss, intergenerational trauma, and the act of storytelling. The prose interweaves with poetry in movements delicate and crushing, as hard to define as the scents of those we love. One of the finest pieces of genre literature I've read in some time.

2022 read #16: Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake.

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake

229 pages

Published 2020

Read from April 27 to April 29

Rating: 4 out of 5

In the last year and a half, I've spent a lot of time on poetry Twitter. Twitter may be a horrible toxic site run by fascist apologists who let violent right-wing extremists spread disinformation and make threats with impunity, but it also has a way of forming algorithm-linked little communities that, most of the time, remain largely free of the horrors of the surrounding site. Writers and small press lit-mag editors share a delightful corner of Twitter, and it's been a treat to count myself among them.

On the specialized niche of poetry Twitter inhabited by nature poets, Entangled Life and Robert Macfarlane's Underland share an outsize reputation as books of mind-opening wonder. There have been entire issues of poetry journals dedicated to Deep Time poems inspired by Underland. I believe there may have been mycological issues inspired by Entangled Life, though I'm less certain about that.

In some ways I feel let down that I haven't felt the same depth of astonishment for either book. In other ways, I think my reaction was muffled because neither of these concepts -- Deep Time in Underland, the hidden mycelium world in Entangled Life -- are new to me. I've swum through the old ways and the hidden realms nearly my whole life. Which is not to say I'm adept at transforming any of it into poetry, sadly. Just that these books couldn't split my mind open to the wonders of Earth because I already enjoyed intimacy with these ideas.

Entangled Life is a lovely work of pop science mixed with a dash of fungal philosophy. I'm happy it has become the cultural force that it is. I'm a little jealous of how strongly other readers have reacted to it.

2022 read #15: Dinosaur Summer by Greg Bear.*

Dinosaur Summer by Greg Bear*

Illustrated by Tony DiTerlizzi

325 pages

Published 1998

Read April 27

Rating: 3 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

Like The Dechronization of Sam Magruder, this is another fixture of my teen years. Unlike Magruder, it was one of my favorite books, once upon a time.

Dinosaur Summer is a revisionist sequel to Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, updated with then-current dinosaur science, published right at the tail end of the 1990s dinomania. Its first half is perhaps one of the best stretches of writing to come out of the post-Jurassic Park cash-in period, exploring a post-war world where the public has grown bored of dinosaur circuses and Hollywood bigwigs finance the return of the last circus dinosaurs to the Lost World. At the time, I thought this book was the height of speculative literature, mixing personal turmoil and drama with prehistoric action. The circus dinosaurs become characters in their own right, their smells and care needs and personalities delightfully vivid. I was the same age as its teen protagonist when I first read it; while Peter's father Anthony was worlds better than my own, I could relate to Peter's coming-of-age struggles with Anthony's alcoholism and overbearing personality. 

Summer lags in its second half, once our protagonists (small but obvious spoiler here) get stranded on Kahu Hidi, the Grand Tepui. Whereas the circus dinosaurs are lovingly rendered and palpable on the page, Bear seems to lose all interest in "conventional" dinosaurs once we arrive on the Lost World. Bear's prose is more descriptive than fluent, flinging our heroes pell-mell through rock mazes and nighttime forests and into the hive of communal dinosaurs resembling giant mole rats. There's also more than a whiff of well-meaning but misguided 1990s white mysticism: our white hero Peter experiences the spirit-dream that Billie, an Indigenous character, has sought after. Billie aside, basically every main character is a white man.

It's been a while since I've been able to read a book this long in a single day. I think Summer hit a personal sweet spot: it's familiar enough to be a quick read, but enough time has elapsed since I last read it (at least 20 years) that it wasn't familiar enough to be boring.