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 (maybe 3.5?)

* 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.

2022 read #14: Dinosaur Beach by Keith Laumer.

Dinosaur Beach by Keith Laumer

151 pages

Published 1971

Read from April 26 to April 27

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

In my review of The Evolution of Claire, I talked about my tweenage / teenage project of reading every dinosaur book I could get my hands on. Thinking about all those books motivated me to obtain and read The Dechronization of Sam Magruder. It also inspired a vague urge to track down and read all the dinosaur books that I missed as a youth.

This yellowing pulp paperback has been on my shelf for a while. I have no idea when I bought it or how long I've held onto it, unread. I love the aesthetic of pulp paperbacks, namely the delightfully cheesy art on their covers, but I've learned through experience that the stories within them are poorly written, ridiculously plotted, and filled to the brim with the laughable machismo of 20th century culture. Whenever someone, say for example a libertarian man-child who inherited wealth from an Apartheid-era emerald fortune, says they wish science-fiction could be "about" the science-fiction again, this is exactly the sort of book they mean: an absolute trash read without a single recognizable emotion behind it.

The first disappointment: Dinosaur Beach barely involves dinosaurs. Like, at all. I'd never classify it as a dinosaur book.

I kind of expected as much, based on the description on the back cover. At first I thought it would be something akin to Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series, with our broad-chested hero leaping from the Jurassic to ancient Sumeria or something to track down a rogue timesweeper. It begins almost promisingly, with that classic mechanical over-description of small details that back in those days was considered fine spec-fic prose. It was at least readable.

But then there are more disappointments: A villainous time-robot is gay-coded for absolutely no reason at all, our hero's narration dripping with sardonic disdain -- because it's the 1970s, baby! And then our man gets stuck in the Mesozoic with a woman and their only way out is to fuck each other, because what midcentury pulp book is complete without a quick visit to the author's grody wank-bank?

Instead of a fun time-caper, the rest of this slim book gets lost up its own ass with technobabble worthy of Star Trek: Voyager, the technobabbly-est of all Star Treks. The last 30 pages are a hilarious, Dragonball-esque escalation of time-factions. It turns out our manly man isn't an operative from the Fourth Era of timesweeping, as he initially says. Nor is he from the Fifth or Sixth. Our hero turns out to be a machine sent back from a cosmic computer overmind representing the Eighth era of timesweeping, as if that means a single goddamn thing. (So that whole "We must fuck to escape the Jurassic!" bit becomes a whole lot grodier and assault-ier in retrospect.)

If anything, I'm being far too generous with this book's rating. It was mildly entertaining, but the cover art is better by far than the story we got. I'd much rather read about the buxom babe with the laser rifle and her shared glance of longing with the theropod in the background. Oh well.

2022 read #13: The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hall.

The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hall

359 pages

Published 2020

Read from April 19 to April 26

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Gay pirates are having a bit of a cultural moment. Over the last few weeks I've been privileged to observe the emergence of the Our Flag Means Death fandom in real time. I get the vibe that a bunch of other queer pirate media has been released in recent years, too, but alas, I haven't been reading much in recent years. I can say that the best segment of The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue involved pirates, and one of my favorite stories in Queer Blades, the LGBTQIA2+ fantasy adventure anthology I edited, involves sapphic pirates.

So I really wanted to like this book. I think the basic outline of its plot holds promise. The two main characters are interesting. The world -- while only thinly sketched -- has potential.

But overall, it was disappointing and under-baked. Tokuda-Hall's prose rarely rises above utilitarian. Outside of Flora/Florian and Evelyn, most of the characters feel like stick-figures, barely sketched in, lacking motivation or substance. The plot reads like an outline, with the characters forced into making the choices they make because the outline demanded it, not because the choices make sense in-character. Given the way the book ends (and this is a tiny spoiler), the entire witchcraft subplot feels completely superfluous, something left over from a previous draft. 

I won't say I dislike this book by any means. In my completely arbitrary rating system, 2.5 is essentially neutral -- an average book, not one I'd recommend but not one I regret reading. But I do feel like The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea could have been so much more. Especially given the caliber of some of the names Tokuda-Hall drops as early readers in her acknowledgements.

2022 read #12: The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee.

The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee

520 pages

Published 2017

Read from April 10 to April 18

Rating: 3 out of 5

Some people enjoy stories about rakish aristocrats behaving badly. I'm certainly not against the general idea, but our narrator and protagonist here is up to his ears in petulance and privilege. Monty is appallingly obtuse, feeling sorry for himself -- and justifiably so, given his shitty abusive father -- but never stopping to think that others might have it worse. I believe it's meant to be a critique of performative allyship, of swooping in to save the day without stopping to ask what others less privileged might want. But Monty is an unrelenting disaster, consistently making the worst (and most dramatic) choice whenever he is presented with one.

This book is entertaining, with a fun narrative voice and a plot that careens from one scrape into the next: a horrible social disaster at the French court! highwaymen! intrigue! prison! pirates! Thanks to our hero Monty's terrible decisions, it all becomes a bit exhausting, especially in the middle going. Long past the point where you'd think he'd start learning and growing, he sends it all crashing down once more in a fit of pique because, once again, he didn't stop to ask anyone else what they needed but barreled on ahead.

2022 read #11: The Dechronization of Sam Magruder by George Gaylord Simpson.*

The Dechronization of Sam Magruder by George Gaylord Simpson*

104 pages

Published 1996

Read April 8

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

When I read The Evolution of Claire, I got to thinking about all the dinosaur books I had read as a tween and teen during the height of 1990s dinomania. In particular, I mused on how those books influenced my writing during those years, and how those influences persist as I near 40.

Much of my early writing centered on dinosaurs, and much of it was more or less copied from books and stories I read during those formative years. One of my very first short stories was a "sequel" to Jurassic Park. One of my earliest "original" stories borrowed heavily from Michael Bishop's short story "Herding with the Hadrosaurs." The first story I ever submitted to a sci-fi magazine was, essentially, Raptor Red fanfic.

Last year, I rediscovered a forgotten writing project: Time Castaway, a fictional LiveJournal I maintained sporadically from 2002 through 2005. It wasn't until I was writing my review for The Evolution of Claire that I connected the dots and realized that Time Castaway was my attempt to rewrite The Dechronization of Sam Magruder to my own satisfaction. I doubt I fully realized that even at the time.

Dechronization was a novella about a Cretaceous castaway that George Gaylord Simpson, renowned evolutionary biologist, wrote sometime before his death in 1984. Based on the rhythm of its language and the framing story (lifted wholesale from H. G. Wells' The Time Machine), I would hazard a guess that it was written in the 1960s. However, a snooty dismissal of the theory of endothermic dinosaurs would place it no earlier than the mid-1970s.

It was this dismissal, and Simpson's portrayal of dumb, sluggish, reptilian dinosaurs, that kept teenage me from fully embracing this book. (I was a warm-blooded dinosaur partisan, and I took that shit seriously. Whenever I read Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, with its outdated 1910s dinosaurs, I always had to chase it with a palate cleanser, like Raptor Red or Michael Crichton's The Lost World.) I wasn't permitted to get many books in those days, so I reread Dechronization at least a few times (however begrudgingly) and probably never admitted to myself that it wasn't a favorite of mine. And it's clear from Time Castaway that its influence lingered in my imagination.

Rereading it for the first time in about 25 years, I have to admit I find Dechronization a tad underwhelming. The framing device, no doubt meant as a cheeky nod to Wells, feels hokey; the dinosaur science was woefully outdated even when it was written; the story and characters are flimsy. It's doubtful that it ever would have been published if it hadn't been for the frenzy for anything Mesozoic back in the 1990s.

There is some philosophical content at its heart, however: musings on loneliness and why human beings -- aware of death -- bother to keep living. Ironically, it's apt material for the 2020s. Perhaps Dechronization, a book itself lost in time, is due for a revival.

2022 read #10: Cute Mutants, Vol. 1: Mutant Pride by SJ Whitby.

Cute Mutants, Vol. 1: Mutant Pride by SJ Whitby

409 pages

Published 2020

Read from April 2 to April 8

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Expect to see a lot more queer small-press books reviewed here as I get my hands on them. This one is basically the tale of a neurodivergent teen and X-Men superfan who finds herself with mutant powers -- and finds friendship with others at her school after a tumultuous journey of self-discovery. The narrative voice is as Gen Z (or possibly late Millennial cusp) as anything I've read in fiction, sprinkling text shorthand, emojis, and group chats throughout the story. It's also avowedly, wonderfully queer. <3

In much the same way that The Evolution of Claire made me itch to write my own take on Jurassic Park, Cute Mutants has me feeling the queer superhero vibe. I feel a bit like a poser, though. This book aside, I only know superheroes through movies, one or two graphic novels, and cartoons from the 1990s. And I guess V. E. Schwab's Vicious. And Catherynne M. Valente's Refrigerator Monologues. And the current Harley Quinn cartoon. Okay, maybe I have more superhero exposure than I realize. But still.

I'm new to seeking out queer books. Now that I've gotten a taste in recent months, I can't get enough. I've ordered a handful as my checking account permits, but I always want more. I can't imagine enjoying or connecting to anything cishetnormative quite this much ever again.