2023 read #43: Linghun by Ai Jiang.

Linghun by Ai Jiang

172 pages

Published 2023

Read April 26

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

HOME is a neighborhood where almost every house — all but one — is susceptible to haunting, where people brawl for the mere chance to bid on a home, just to cling to the souls of their departed loved ones for a little while longer. Linghun is a novella of quiet beauty and wasting grief, in which our ghosts only manifest as much as our memories permit, and in which the living fade away and become ghostly themselves. We are haunted by grief, by homelands now remote and changed and unrecognizable, living but forgotten by those who cannot let go of the dead. It is a tremendous and sensitively wrought work, and a fantastic read.

This printing also includes two of Ai’s short stories, both of them extensions of the theme of extending one’s time and what one might do to evade death:

“Yôngshí” (originally published 2021). This is a brief, delicate meditation on mortality and the all-too-human hunger for more time. It captures the tragic inevitability of a folktale in its ritualistic rhythms. Quite lovely. 

“Teeter Totter” (first published in this volume). A witch is taken by Death to the underworld, but she isn’t ready to give up on the humble life she had made with her husband among the living. Sweetly heartbreaking.

2023 read #42: End of an Era by Robert J. Sawyer.*

End of an Era by Robert J. Sawyer*

248 pages

Published 1994 (revised edition published 2001)

Read April 25

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

The first problem with this book is its aggressively casual "I'm just a regular guy" narration. Early on, in fact, our narrator Brandon literally tells us "I'm just a regular guy," and then immediately goes on to describe his dislike of and hostility toward Klicks, his fellow time-traveler: "Not that it matters, but I'm white and he's black." Yikes. The “1990s white author tries to write ‘realistic’ race relations” vibes only get worse from there. I won’t quote any of it.

So, I read the original 1994 version of this novel (I think) sometime in my teens. I recall that I disliked it because (spoilers) it abandons its let’s-go-to-the-Cretaceous plot hook and mutates into an alien encounter book. I didn’t remember any of the awkward suburban drama that infests the opening chapters. Turns out Klicks is dating Brandon’s ex-wife back in the Holocene, which seems like the sort of interpersonal problem that should have taken one or both of these men off the first human time-travel mission (but just the sort of dramatic grist for the kind of airport thriller this book wanted to be). May the best man win, Brandon thinks snarkily; that clichéd heterosexual pissing contest energy suffuses Era (along with that casually recursive “our white narrator is subconsciously racist because that’s realistic” racism).

And then, earlier than you’d ever expect, we get aliens. Specifically, psionic blue slime from Mars. At least you get to see some good dinosaur action beforehand, right? Well, not really. It’s all macho bickering and outdated infodumping and meaningless technobabble, and then boom, blue slime Martians by page 56. And on top of everything, we get an alternate timeline with neither time-travel nor a divorce for our Brandon. And we learn that Cretaceous gravity is somehow different. And the aliens control all the dinosaurs. And the Martians destroyed the former planet in the asteroid belt. And viruses and cancer are the modern descendants of the blue slime aliens…

This book goes batshit with remarkable speed, without giving us really any moment to enjoy the Cretaceous for what it is. (We do get a few perfunctory scenes of Klicks and Brandy studying dinosaurs in the field, but they come right after the big Martian reveal and feel implausibly shoehorned in.) It goes full Love in the Time of Dinosaurs without the honesty to let you know that’s where it’s headed. I won’t say that it’s worse than Love in the Time of Dinosaurs, necessarily, but at least that book told you exactly what it was on the cover.

I have to say, Era was so much worse than I remembered. Not my kind of thing whatsoever.

2023 read #41: Weavers, Scribes, and Kings by Amanda H. Podany.

Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East by Amanda H. Podany

557 pages

Published 2022

Read from April 13 to April 25

Rating: 4 out of 5

A vast survey of Mesopotamian history, constrained only to the times and places that gave us records inscribed in cuneiform, this book promised it would pay particular attention to the traces of common people normally ignored in such historical surveys: slaves, brewers, artisans, merchants, priestesses, the titular weavers. That’s an irresistible selling line. I went back and forth about whether to invest all that money on buying a tome, but in the end I have no regrets.

I might take issue with this book’s execution — Podany spends much (maybe even most) of the book in the company of kings instead of weavers. But all the kings-and-wars bullshit is sadly necessary to relate the rest of this volume to the standard histories we might be taught, a grounding context of empires and conquest that Americans certainly expect from their history books. (Also unfortunate but expected: tying the later chapters in with Biblical “history.”) We could have done with a lot fewer kings here, but it could have been a lot worse.

The fact that Podany spends as much time as she does with common folk and merchants and scribes elevates Weavers far above the likes of, say, Susan Wise Bauer’s The History of the Ancient World, which was all Great Men all the time (and was all the worse for it). Any history book that at least attempts to get away from Great Men narratives deserves accolades.

2023 read #40: A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers.

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers

152 pages

Published 2022

Read from April 21 to April 22

Rating: 4 out of 5

It’s been just over a month since I read A Psalm for the Wild-Built. Even in such a short amount of time, I’ve lost so much of my already meager optimism for the future.

Things were already so bad, three years into an ongoing pandemic and some fifty years into a meticulously planned extreme-right takeover of our institutions, but somehow they keep getting worse at an accelerating rate. Christofascists in dozens of state legislatures have been working around the clock to genocide trans and genderqueer people, to exclude and further marginalize already marginalized groups of every description, to mandate their own hateful and poisonous worldview.

I know that instilling hopelessness is one of the psychological weapons in the fascist arsenal, and I know that our strength as caring and humane humans lies in community and solidarity against those who would dominate us, but some days it overwhelms me. I don’t know if it will be safe for me and my queer siblings anywhere in this country next year, next decade, next month.

All of which makes A Prayer for the Crown-Shy hit different. As a follow-up to Wild-Built, Prayer feels less like a cohesive story and more like a string of vignettes that accumulate softly and beautifully but never fully add up to more. The end result is sweet — gently melancholy, aching with a very human sense of longing for things and senses unknown. Although the ongoing pandemic only shows its face in the acknowledgments, its visage can be glimpsed in Dex and Mosscap’s questions: even in a world where our basic needs are met, beautifully and sustainably, humans and robots alike need something, and we don’t know what it is, only that we can help each other, even if we don’t know the right words right now.

If dreams of a better world were what I got from Wild-Built, a reminder of the need for community and support is what Crown-Shy taught me.

2023 read #39: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March/April 2023.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March/April 2023 issue (144:3-4)

Edited by Sheree Renée Thomas

258 pages

Published 2023

Read from April 18 to April 19

Rating: 4 out of 5

I haven't read an issue of F&SF while it was still current since the January / February 2019 issue. However, I want to turn that around. I want to keep up with the issues as they come out. And what better time to start than with this issue, which features my own F&SF publication debut?

F&SF has been at the top of my list of dream publications since I was a teenager in the late 1990s. After over two decades of rejections, one of my stories was selected for this issue, and here it is, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Peter S. Beagle, Lavie Tidhar, and Marie Vibbert. "Overwhelmed" is an understatement. I have feelings of unworthiness, of impostor syndrome, which help explain why I've avoided actually reading this issue for the last month and a half.

Unrelated fun fact: this happens to be the 600th read I've done since I began this blog at the start of 2013. Yay reading!

“The Sweet in the Empty” by Tade Thompson. An enthralling mix of historical fiction and lingering magic set in fifth century Arabia. Thompson makes the work of establishing setting, character, and history seem effortless, immersing us immediately in a lived-in world. Middle-aged Axumite knight Jember jumps off the page, so worn-in and comfortable in Thompson's narrative voice that he feels like the hero of a '70s low-magic serial, familiar from countless iconic adventures, but with a depth to him all such heroes lacked. A stunning and moving story.

“The Station Master” by Lavie Tidhar. On a partly-terraformed Mars of dusty dome towns, icy comets, sentient trains, and a religious order whose adherents modify their bodies in ways that recall the never-were glories of Barsoom, the manager of Yaniv Town’s little train station meets and converses with various people and a robot. Another marvelous document of efficient worldbuilding, full of crisp character sketches and delightful details. Slight but utterly winsome.

“Spookman” by Jonathan Louis Duckworth. Ghosts drift through the woods and mires of post-apocalyptic far-future Belgium, under the light of the sundered halves of the moon. Spookman Rood Farook helps guide the ghosts to their choice of wrath or rest. An avaricious lord hires Rood for a most unusual job: to locate and return his living boy. This is another banger of a story, mixing Dying Earth with dreamlike fairy tale deep dark woods vibes — two flavors I never knew I needed mingled until now. Woodlings, painted wolves, wild failed prophets all inhabit an intoxicating phantasmagoria. Outstanding.

“The Weremouse of Millicent Bradley Middle School” by Peter S. Beagle. A solid, enjoyable tale with an all-time-great title. Our narrator Graham’s sister Lucia is a math prodigy and someone with real principles. When their shared math teacher (who happens to be a witch) picks on another student, Lucia calls her out — only to be cursed with the mousy equivalent of lycanthropy (musanthropy?) for her effrontery. Excellent as it is, this story feels like vintage 1990s short fantasy. That isn’t a put-down — there were plenty of amazing short fantasy stories in that era, and this one would have numbered among the best — but I can’t help but feel that this could have come from that decade, except for one or two token mentions of texting and going “viral.” Beagle’s middle schoolers feel closer to the bygone Millennial l’esprit du temps than to Gen Alpha’s current vibe, and the vaguely arcane homeless folks who help Graham plant this firmly in the ’90s tradition. (Look, I know Wizard of the Pigeons was published in 1986, but shush.)

“Piggyback Girl” by M. H. Ayinde. This, by contrast, feels like a thoroughly ’00s near-future sci-fi piece. Amber Phoenix, an influencer on the fading end of her career, receives an implant that allows her followers to experience her personal sensory reality. I’ll be honest, I was fully prepared to not really care for this story, because this “ripped from tomorrow’s headlines” subgenre isn’t usually my thing. But Ayinde surprised me. “Piggyback” is well-written, with creative and sharply observed details of fan chats, horrifying invasions, fetishistic demands. The second-person narration is an inspired choice that works perfectly with the needs of the story.

“Mnemonic Longings” by Marlon Ortiz. Millennia after a devastatingly Pyrrhic war against alien invaders, after Earth was destroyed and the rest of humanity annihilated, the last sentient AI ship comes back online, and reconstitutes the last human clone soldier. A solid story of finding purpose, companionship, and meaning after everything, of mortality and clinging on, and of discovering acceptance. Plus there’s a cozy cabin in a verdant habitat dome beneath the surface of Venus, which is always a top-notch touch. Good stuff.

“Moonlight, Wing-Wake in Fog” by… me. This story is my F&SF debut. I went back and forth about whether I wanted to reread it here — I last read it when going over the magazine proofs, and normally I can’t stand to reread my words more than necessary — but at last I decided I wanted to see how it held up against the brilliance of this issue. While it might be slight as stories go, perhaps lacking the emotional heft of “The Sweet in the Empty,” nonetheless… I don’t hate it?? I still can’t believe it’s really in the pages of my lifelong dream publication, but maybe it isn’t a fluke? Maybe it’s okay?? Also, speaking as a reader who always reads magazines and anthologies in order, as the editor intended, I love how this was positioned in the issue.

“The Madding” by Nuzo Onoh. Sumptuous with description and detail, heavy with tragic inevitability, this is a gorgeous and sharp-toothed tale of witches, a greedy man, and a cursed hamlet. Vivid and horrific.

“Mr. Catt” by Eleanor Arnason. A charming tale in which one Mr. Catt, a six foot tall talking cat with a trust fund, pursues his whim to buy a dragon — just a small one, thank you, and it’s fine if it doesn’t breathe fire. Along the way he inadvertently earns the ire of some cartoony toughs called the Cheese Boys. A lighthearted and breezy throwback to middle-grade fantasy of the ’70s and ’80s (which I mean here in a complimentary way).

“Escape Velocity” by Amanda Dier. Efficient character sketch of a would-be ship’s commander who, when a degenerative disease threatens to leave her grounded Earthside, elects instead to become the disembodied brain of the ship’s computer. Slight but not without its charms.

“Pantoum on a Generation Ship” by Lauren Bajek. I’ve been looking forward to this one ever since the table of contents for this issue was released back in February. I love pantoums, and I’m in awe of the very idea of converting the poetry form into prose. This piece doesn’t disappoint. Bajek wields the pantoum’s repetition with power and surety, spinning a deep and impactful story within a bewilderingly small space. Despite the brilliance of the stories earlier in this issue, this might be my favorite piece so far — an all-time classic. If this doesn’t win some kind of award, there is no justice in sci-fi.

Here I want to single out “One generation after the last flower” by Marisca Pichette as a stunning, moving poem, possibly the best poem in this issue.

“The Subway Algorithm Is Half-Constructed” by Marie Vibbert. I was initially skeptical of this story — nothing sounds duller to me in our AI-choked Wild West of 2023 than a story about grad students programming machine-learning bots — but Vibbert is an exceptional author, and this little tale surprised me by being a fragile, sweet exploration of social anxiety, queer friendship, and betrayal.

“Solar Boy” by K. C. Ahia. Another immersive tale with a rich, lived-in setting, this time a class-conscious story of deckhands and engineers on a solar-sail ship. It reads like if you took a 1960s “solving space problems with chemistry and math” story and made it queer and proletarian. I love it!

“Ouroboros” by Mathew Lebowitz. This story feels like a throwback to the Ferman era of F&SF — a late 1980s-flavored mishmash of virtual reality headsets, hallucinogenic serums, heterosexuality, and genius inventors so constrained by the demands of society that they must run off to Belize to do their solitary genius work. Naturally, our genius inventor has figured out how to “nudge” reality, so of course the “self-generated virtual reality” of the headset is something more, something ever so cosmic and multiversal — or is it?? This subgenre hasn’t been my cup of tea since I was a teenager in the midst of my inevitable many-worlds fixation; this particular story never won me over. Oh well!

“The Five Lazy Sisters” by Kathleen Jennings. I’d just been thinking about how SF-heavy this issue of F&SF has been. This is a beguilingly original fairy tale of five sisters who, despite their lazy reputations, will go to great lengths to build a bridge so they don’t have to take over from their aging grandmother as ferrywomen. Jennings perfectly captures the rhythms of myth-making and the strange deep woods. Delightful, and not least because of all the creative geological insults the sisters employ against a particular stone.

“Remembered Salt” by E. Catherine Tobler. A witch’s house comes to consciousness after the departure of her witch. Alone, she empties her contents, crosses prairies, mountains, and forests on her chicken-legged way toward the salt scent of the sea. A marvelous end to a marvelous issue.

2023 read #38: Rivers in Your Skin, Sirens in Your Hair by Marisca Pichette.

Rivers in Your Skin, Sirens in Your Hair by Marisca Pichette

119 pages

Published 2023

Read April 18

Rating: 4 out of 5

Another entry in what is quickly becoming my favorite micro-genre: collections of folkloric fantastic poetry rich with hints of macabre in its deep dark wood.

Miracles and acts of consumption bridge the fictive gap between humanity and the rest of nature. Fairy tales and the wreckage of the Anthropocene collide, entangle in broken remnants, climb in tendrils across each other. We celebrate the forest that grew from the city. We metamorphose from heartbroken beings into rivers; we carve our hearts from trees; trees metamorphose into folkloric beings and into heartbroken people, back into ourselves. Hair and hyphae are inseparable, indistinguishable. Cobweb brides wear veils of moss; bones “too heavy to float” build up reefs. Chalk and childhood intertwine, each scoring meaning upon the other in the pastel rituals of summertime.

in chalk you drew a line

between the Wilderness

and our childhood 

spent in gardens we thought 

were wild, walls we imagined 

(from “Kitchen Garden”)

Informal list of favorites:

“the size of your fist”

“Her ribs are apple wood”

“Kitchen Garden”

“In the Unlocking Room”

“They grow between foundation stones”

“What do you remember about the earth?”

“Maid Stone”

“While Alice sleeps in Wonderland”

“Paper boats”

“Iron, Glass, Slipper”

“Mothers become stepmothers in fairy tales”

“For this meal we thank her”

“The Art of Betraying Others for Food”

“the glaciers made her deep”

“vigil”

2023 read #37: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 1990.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 1990 issue (78:3)

Edited by Edward L. Ferman

162 pages

Published 1990

Read April 15

Rating: 2 out of 5

I haven't had much luck at all with F&SF issues from the 1980s. February 1986, September 1989, December 1989 — all of them were terrible issues, with maybe one halfway decent story per issue if you were lucky. But at some point between the turn of the 1990s and its end, F&SF must have improved. Even though this issue is only a few months removed from the 1980s — only three issues after December 1989, in fact — I liked the look of the table of contents. Plus, the cover is spectacularly weird. Perhaps this is a good place to try again?

"Shore Leave Blacks" by Nancy Etchemendy. Vibes and trends can change so fast. Astonishingly, here in the first story we have arrived already at what I would consider classic 1990s sci-fi. This is an emotionally fraught tale of relativistic time dilation, as Annie Moffat, a “lightbucker” employed on interstellar runs, reluctantly returns to Earth to face Adam, the son she birthed and left behind some 47 of his subjective years ago. In another ’90s signature touch, Annie takes drugs to cope with the anxieties of her return, breathing illicit "bliss" to shrug off the culture shock, the memories of loss, and the panic of facing Adam and other people she used to know in her dusty desert hometown. The story is well-paced, teasing its revelation about Adam's line of work at just the right moment. A solid story that deserves at least a B

"Down on the Truck Farm" by Thomas A. Easton. The story that goes with this issue's delightfully what-the-fuck cover art (which, if you don't want to Google it, features a guy driving a giant wheeled dog in front of a farm silo). Also going all-in on the classic tropes of the 1990s, this one is a tale of genetic engineering and the "organic future" that was the current vogue in sci-fi. Giant pumpkins are repurposed as houses; chalets perch on beanstalks; our disaffected young adult hero Jimmy sneaks addictively euphoric sips from honeysuckle flowers the size of a wineglass. (There’s that ’90s “put drugs into everything” vibe again.) The genetic fairy tale aesthetic is impeccable, but Easton's prose is mechanical, and the plot — Jimmy’s parents ship him off to a bulldog-truck farm before he can become just another dissipated honey-bum — is barely there. It all works better as a way to show off Easton’s worldbuilding than it does as a story. I’ll give it points for creativity, though. C

“The Bat-Winged Knight” by Catherine Cooke. After the two Totally Kickin’ Rad ’90s stories that began this issue, this one feels particularly antique. With its omniscient roving narration, archetypal lords and ladies, cave-dwelling vampires and changeling babes left in the wood, it could well have come from the ’70s. The occasionally stiff and awkward prose feels like ’70s fantasy, as does the overall vibe of melodrama sprinkled with a hint of skeeviness. You could have slipped this into one of Lin Carter’s annual anthologies and I’d never have known the difference. There isn’t even any drug use! I don’t necessarily dislike ’70s fantasy, and I don’t necessarily dislike this story. It’s overlong for what it is, but it wasn’t, like, actively repulsive, which in my experience is high praise for Ferman-era F&SF. Maybe C-?

“Zürich” by Kim Stanley Robinson. Faintly humorous slice-of-life satire of the Swiss and their uptight habits of cleanliness that escalates into fantastical, fanatical absurdity. C-

“What the EPA Don’t Know Won’t Hurt Them” by Suzette Haden Elgin. There’s no getting around the fact that this story, down to its very conceit, otherizes hillbillies. All my ancestors were hillbillies, along just about any branch you look: Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio. Elgin, meanwhile, drew on her own Ozark hill country heritage for this story. I think I’m fine with it; I feel it’s probably okay. But still, you can’t really ignore it. So, big spoilers: turns out we hillfolk are aliens. And our notorious junkyards, far from being a hoard against poverty, are an arcane array that, once completed and activated, will get us back to our ships. Literal alienation aside, this is a good story: imaginative, well-written, well-paced, with decent (if clichéd) characterization. B?

“Cool Cat” by Edward Wellen. Tediously overlong tale of an aging Elvis figure (eye-roll) who gets turned into a “Haitian zombie” (eye-roll) and cryogenically preserved (eye-roll) by his greedy manager (eye-roll) who also happens to want to put the moves on not-Elvis’s much younger wife (barf). The only redeeming quality of this story was the prose, which was crisp and professional. F+

“Shatterwrack at Breaklight” by Terry Dowling. Loose play at future noir, with a holographic femme fatale playing coy with a sand-ship sailor in a vaguely Middle Eastern tourist dive. Altogether too masculine and heteronormative for my tastes. It’s well-written and makes good use of noir’s laconic style, but the belly-flop of its denouement doesn’t justify the set-up. D-

“Every Trembling Blossom, Every Singing Bird” by Ronald Anthony Cross. I’d hoped we could finish strong with this one — that is an A+ banger of a title. Alas! This is a tale of a mediocre white guy inspired to persevere in life because an angel showed him what he thinks is a potential future of him falling in love with a cute girl somewhere down South. What slight charm this could have possessed is obliterated when the author blows the dust off a broad Twainian dialect for a Black character. The ending is fine, I guess, but what a waste of a title. D-

So, despite a surprisingly strong start, this issue ended up only a modest improvement over the issues from the ’80s. Still, that’s progress, right?

2023 read #36: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 1986.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 1986 issue (70:2)

Edited by Edward L. Ferman

162 pages

Published 1986

Read April 14

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

After the dismal September 1989 and December 1989 issues, I have every right to feel dubious about another Ferman-era F&SF. But I went on a small collecting spree over the winter, and this issue, with its lecherous but amazingly pulp cover art of Maureen Birnbaum exiting the subway with a barbarian sword, just needed to be read. It isn't my oldest issue (that would be January 1986), but this one promises to be memorable, for better or for worse.

"Maureen Birnbaum at the Earth's Core (as told to Bitsy Spiegelman)" by George Alec Effinger. Between that all-time-great title and the spectacular cover art, I figured this one would go one of two ways: either it would be the most horrendously dated, casually bigoted thing I'd ever read, or it would be the most delightfully bawdy satirical pulp frolic. It turned out somewhere in between. Maureen Birnbaum herself emerges as a private-school preppy, a daughter of society wealth from Long Island, rather than the scrappy street-wise Brooklynite I had pictured. She doesn’t even get a good stab in with her barbarian sword. Overall, a product of its time that largely squanders its potential, but still an amusing bauble. B-

“The Metaphysical Gun” by Wayne Wightman. The editorial introduction promises this story “delves into the future pornography industry, mind control, and a man’s beliefs in how things should work in a crumbling world…” If that isn’t just the least appetizing string of descriptors for a mid-1980s story — cishet-normative masculinity as unrestrained id, Mad Max but make it non-consensual smut. It also happens to be the longest story in this issue by several pages, wallowing in grotesque misery and exploitation solely for its own sake. There are mumbles of “what does it mean to be human,” of course — some pretense that the misery porn is in service to some higher insight — but that was de rigueur during this era of sci-fi, and didn’t make it special. This could be touted as a primitive example of crustpunk, I suppose, but for me, this novelette wasn’t worth the newsprint it was printed on. Look away now if you don’t want to be subjected to a sample: “We wouldn’t want her to go to Snuff City, would we? Not with a set of knockers like that. It would be a terrible waste.” F

“Memories of Gwynneth” by Jennifer Black. A nearly affectless tale of implanted memories (and the experience of someone else’s love) on the rustic planet Cymru. It’s All Creatures Great and Small meets the Trill from Star Trek, which could be promising, but it’s told in flat prose that doesn’t leave much of an impression and stirs zero emotional response. Something about the vagueness of Black’s bio makes me suspect she’s some other author under a pseudonym, most likely a hetero man based on how our narrator Jilly is driven by the memories of the late Gwynneth’s old boyfriends, but “Jennifer Black fantasy author” isn’t especially productive to google. D-

“We Call Them Flowers” by Lynn Marron. This one reads like pure soap opera, full of tearful “if you really loved me, Adam” scenes of heteronormativity, but set among socialites on the moon and centered on illegal cosmetic implants that may or may not be alien parasites: “flowers” grafted into our heroine’s nervous system. It could be a good story, but it isn’t. Marron’s otherwise unremarkable prose is peppered with implausible future-slang; nouveau riche has somehow transmogrified into “nouveau creditpersons.” It’s a lot, and not all that much of it is worthwhile. Meh use of a solid title. D-

“Me and My Shadow” by Larry Eisenberg. Tepid send-up of midcentury “great minds in labcoats” sci-fi. It even has that hoary old chestnut, “You’ve been reading too many science fiction stories.” Something about psychological modeling and projecting a 3D simulacrum of the person under assessment— a simulacrum that then proves to be better at their job than the original person. Insubstantial and forgettable. D

CW for the next entry: mention of real life childhood SA.

“The Wandering Lute” by Marion Zimmer Bradley. It wouldn’t be a 1980s genre magazine without at least one notorious child molester, would it? I skimmed through this novelette because I hate giving my time to sex offenders. Outside of that context, it’s fine, I guess? Standard magic and minstrel stuff, several installments deep into a fantasy serial (or so it would seem). Our protagonist is Lythande, the Pilgrim Adept of the Blue Star, a mercenary-magician who also happens to be a bard. This is the kind of tale that likes to repeat whenever the Blue Star shines, burns, and prickles on Lythande’s brow. MZB carefully avoids Lythande’s pronouns for most of the story, setting up the shocking reveal that Lythande is a woman. (Genre fiction was unbelievably dire before 2000 or so.) But that’s enough words for this child molester. Begone forever, MZB. F

“Lo, How an Oak E’er Blooming” by Suzette Haden Elgin. The run of stories that came after “Maureen Birnbaum” have bummed me the fuck out. Will this one be any better? It features an amazing title, and the conceit — a feminist, exhausted from trying to get non-feminist women to listen to her, inadvertently causes a miracle — is interesting. The narration is of that facile “and the reporters and the clergymen came” variety, though, a just-so story. It holds any meaningful engagement at arm’s-length, which (I felt) hampered my enjoyment. It works well enough as social commentary: the clergymen spurned by Willow Severty’s atheism, the experts soon mull using a nuclear warhead to destroy the miraculously blooming feminist oak, but instead the men in power decide to tell the press that the tree is releasing carcinogens, and is a result of evil witchcraft. And so on. All in all, especially in contrast with everything that came before, I’d say it deserves at least a C+

“Observations on Sirenian Singing” by Jerrie W. Hurd. Mostly adequate space opera piece, using that term a bit more literally than usual. A human linguist gets interrogated about her report regarding the unique singing language of the newly discovered Sirenians. The galactic federation desires the rare minerals on Sirenia, but first contact has been delayed because of the Sirenians’ singing and its effect on the multispecies study teams. The denouement offers few surprises to anyone who read the title (telepathy and the musical communication of emotion both play a role), but this piece is fine regardless. Maybe a C

“The Road King” by Russell Griffin. Closing out this highly mixed and mostly mediocre issue with a silly and excessively long “the EPA crushed free enterprise and those commies banned the automobile!” piece. Hawthorne, a model-semitruck enthusiast with big Divorced Dad energy, gets recruited into an underground network of internal combustion renegades, all of them fetishists of the “good old days” of freeways, capitalism, and CB radio. Hell, forget Hawthorne — this whole story reeks of Divorced Dad energy. Imagine Demolition Man with McMartinis and tractor-trailers instead of Taco Bell and simulation sex. Goofy-ass reactionary bullshit, or a fine parody of it? Who knows. Who cares. D-

2023 read #35: The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle.

The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle

151 pages

Published 2016

Read from April 12 to April 13

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Years and years ago, before I read Pym by Mat Johnson, I felt I needed to read the racist old novel that Pym retold. This time around, I felt no such need for homework. I'm free to read modern antiracist retellings of Lovecraft without the requirement to read the racist originals.

The Ballad of Black Tom works well on its own. The novella gives you enough detail that you can more or less piece together the shape of Lovecraft's original. The first half, told from the perspective of Charles Thomas Tester before he became Lovecraft's "Black Tom," is a standout of modern cosmic horror in a historical fiction milieu, sensitive, perceptive, awash with looming otherworldly peril but grounded in the historical horrors of racism and police violence. The second half, from the vantage of NYPD detective Malone, is adequate but far less revelatory. I wish the entire book had been told from Tommy Tester's point of view.

2023 read #34: Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick.*

Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick*

336 pages

Published 2002

Read from April 11 to April 12

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

When I was a teenager in the late 1990s, I saw Michael Swanwick as my professional nemesis.

See, I had sent out my first short story submissions to the likes of Asimov’s Science Fiction in 1998 or thereabouts; my earliest submissions were mostly dinosaur stories, featuring either time-traveling humans or “nature red in tooth and claw” pieces from a saurian perspective. All of them, justifiably, were rejected. But in 1999 Asimov’s published a cover story by one Michael Swanwick, “Scherzo with Tyrannosaur,” and I (with all my neophyte main character syndrome) was half convinced that Asimov’s had stolen my ideas, given them to Swanwick to polish, and published them to widespread acclaim.

After I had the chance to read “Scherzo with Tyrannosaur” (and particularly its follow-up, “Riding the Giganotosaur”), I was sensible enough to realize that nothing had been stolen or reworked from my amateurish teen fiction. Swanwick produced excellent stories, rich with imaginative twists and conceits. My stories were lukewarm fanfic. But for years afterward I both admired and resented Swanwick’s facility with the dinosaur short story. Swanwick’s short stories were pretty much the only reliably good dinosaur fic I’d ever read, right up until discovering Jennifer Lee Rossman’s wonderful time vortex stories in the last few years. Most other dino stories don’t come close (my own included, until maybe recently).

Bones of the Earth was built up from the basic outline of “Scherzo,” complete with one of its central characters. (And “Scherzo” itself shows up here, partially intact, as chapter six.) Bones was one of the first purchases I snapped up when I was 19 and newly had access to spending cash. I know that I read it in 2002, but I don’t recall much else about it, beyond a vague sense of disappointment.

Rereading it now, I don’t think it compares with Swanwick’s better novels, such as Stations of the Tide or The Iron Dragon’s Daughter. It doesn’t live up to the tidy little premise of “Scherzo,” despite copying that story’s conceit of a time travel bureaucrat who works with and resents his older self (and resents the cold-blooded way the older self preserves the timeline).

Much of it doesn't hold up as a dinosaur novel, either. Most of the book takes place in conference rooms and offices in the near future; dinosaurs and Deep Time add occasional flavor, at best. Even The Evolution of Claire featured almost as much dinosaur action by page count. A chunk of the plot revolves around fundamentalist Christian terrorists, which is painfully timely as we lurch through Swanwick’s then-near-future, but isn’t my first choice for the focus of a dinosaur novel. The overall vibe is bureaucratic technothriller without many thrills. Think Crichton but with better prose, slightly rounder characters, and less cinematic pizazz.

Also, it needs to be said: After all the lovely queer fiction I’ve been reading lately, Swanwick’s hetero boomer vibes were a bit off-putting and antiquated.

On the whole, this book is fine, a solid C or C+. Despite all my above quibbles, a scatter of occasional brilliant moments elevates Bones: possibly the best description of a tyrannosaur I've ever read; one of the better "castaways in time" sequences in fiction; the discovery of an Anthropocene geological horizon ("metamorphic macadam, a roadbed that had been squeezed and twisted by the millions-years-long collision of Africa into Europe") by a time-traveling geologist 50 million years into the future. I do think I liked it more this time around. Not quite level with Swanwick’s best, but amply enjoyable. If only there had been more creative brilliance and fewer conference room scenes.