2023 read #59: The Past Is Red by Catherynne M. Valente.

The Past Is Red by Catherynne M. Valente

151 pages

Published 2021 (contains "The Future Is Blue," originally published 2016)

Read from May 28 to May 31

Rating: 4 out of 5

Catherynne M. Valente was one of the first new favorite authors I found for myself after I began this blog. I first encountered her in short story form in The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012 Edition; went on to be impressed by Six-Gun Snow White and Deathless; read the entirety of the uneven but memorable Fairyland series; was floored by Radiance; was let down by Speak Easy; and so on and so forth. The last book of hers I read was The Refrigerator Monologues, which of course is a modern classic. All told, this is the thirteenth Valente book I've had the pleasure of reading, placing her behind only a handful of authors on my most-read list. (Still a ways to go to the top, where Ursula K. Le Guin sits alone at seventeen.)

At first, The Past Is Red didn't quite click with me. The first chunk of the book is a novelette, "The Future Is Blue," which drifts between present-day scenes of our narrator, Tetley Abednego, enduring the torment and abuse of her neighbors with characteristic optimism, and flashback scenes of Tetley's childhood in Garbagetown, a fairy tale logic version of the Pacific Garbage Patch where floating mountains of refuse have been sorted and piled into neighborhoods like Candle Hole, Mattressex, and Far Boozeaway. This narrative structure quickly became monotonous. We'd get a page of grown-up Tetley's neighbors beating her before flashing back once again to her life story, before looping back once more. It felt like the story was spinning its wheels for the bulk of "Blue," before an almost perfunctory reveal of what Tetley had done that resulted in all this torture.

The rest of this short novel is "The Past Is Red," a much more satisfying exploration of Tetley's life a few years later, when she is roped into the orbit of would-be King Xanax and receives clandestine visits from a young stranger she names Big Red. Here Valente's uncanny ability to pull your heart from your chest with a gentle observation before stabbing through it with a gut-punch of insight finds its full expression. Every couple pages Valente pulls together paragraphs of the most heart-breaking sincerity and human fragility and rage at the loss of what we, in our modern culture, are busily burning down. It is terrifying and tragic, empathetic and full of yearning desperation. The story itself may be slight, but any book freighted with this clarity, this simultaneously cynical and wistful remembrance of the modern state of things, deserves to be read and remembered... for however long such things have left to be remembered.

2023 read #58: Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark.

Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark

185 pages

Published 2020

Read from May 27 to May 28

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Maryse, Sadie, and Chef hunt the Ku Klux Klan. Specifically, the monstrous otherworldly creatures that Klansmen allow themselves to become when their hate opens them up to evil magic brought back into this world with the release of The Birth of a Nation. That would be enough of a tag line to make me snatch up this book at the earliest opportunity. But Ring Shout, despite its modest length, is so much more than that. It is lyrical and revolutionary, a gorgeous and wounding document of trauma and righteous rage in the face of hundreds of years of hate, violence, and cruelty.

I loved how the story was constructed, vividly setting up our central trio and the twisted menace of the Ku Kluxes before expanding out to introduce Nana Jean, Uncle Will, and others on the righteous side of the fight. The world expands, new characters appear, and new information emerges chapter by chapter, paced with effortless skill and efficiency on the part of P. Djèlí Clark. The story is hopeful and heartbreaking, beautiful and horrifying. It is magnificent.

2023 read #57: The Riddle-Master of Hed by Patricia A. Mckillip.

The Riddle-Master of Hed by Patricia A. McKillip

229 pages

Published 1976

Read from May 21 to May 23

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

This is one of those shaggy old fantasy classics from the era when seemingly no one knew how to write fantasy. It begins with a clear and concise image: “Morgon of Hed met the High One’s harpist one autumn day when the trade ships docked at Tol….” That gives us an intriguing atmosphere, with the promise that we’ll learn who these people and what these places are in due time, right? Instead, we backtrack to witness an argument between Prince Morgon and his two siblings and various farmers and retainers in our rustic little princedom, all of them introduced bickering back and forth over things we haven’t learned to care about yet. From the way no one permits anyone to finish a sentence and no one explains anything, you’d think this was a teen fantasy from the 2010s. It all culminates in the prince’s brother tackling him into the mud, and their sister dumping a bucket of milk over their heads.

Twice before now, that opening thwarted my attempts to get invested enough to continue. We don’t even meet the damn harpist until page 14.

When you manage to persist through that first scene, you quickly discover why a 220 page book needs six pages of glossary for its places and people. Without it, imagine having to keep track of An and Aum and Awn, Uon and Oen, Re and Rhu and Rood, Morgon and the Morgol. (No one, however, could forget the redoubtable Snog Nutt.)

The story as a whole is a 1970s lords-with-swords number, full of the prophesied paint-by-numbers destiny of its reluctant chosen one. Yet it carries promises of McKillip’s future talents: glimpses of delicate description, atmosphere, and character beneath the heroic fantasy slop. For much of the book Morgon is appealingly in over his head, his grasp of reality eroding into dreams, his mind swept in and out of magical fugues, pulled back and forth by forces larger than his understanding. He tries to nope out from his great destiny more often than he tries to face it (which, for the time this was written, was a pretty fresh twist). But the riddle of his own destiny keeps pulling him back in.

So, we need to talk about riddles. The word riddle does a lot of heavy lifting in this book. In case you were wondering, yes, McKillip does pull from The Hobbit to have our hero win a high-stakes riddle game by asking an unanswerable question: the mystery of his own destiny, and of the three stars on his brow. Which would make it not so much a riddle as a prophecy. But you see, in this setting, “riddles” are actually didactic anecdotes, little snippets of history with an approved moral attached, and not actually anything we would call riddles.

McKillip uses these riddles just like any other heroic fantasy novelist would use prophecies: plot devices to motivate the action. The bad guys want to kill our hero because of his three stars; the hero is driven to the ends of the earth to discover his fate so he can keep living. This was a training-wheels era for the genre, though, so we can’t expect much more sophistication than that.

That lack of storytelling sophistication, predictably, extends to Morgon effortlessly picking up every magical skill he needs, from riddle-mastery to mind-reading, shape-changing to the Great Shout. Standard chosen one stuff. And as with so many classic fantasy trilogies, Hed ends abruptly, half the story untold, Nonetheless, the quiet beauty of McKillip’s prose elevates this book and makes it worth spending time in this world.

2023 read #56: The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction: Fifteenth Series, edited by Edward L. Ferman.

The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction: Fifteenth Series, edited by Edward L. Ferman

249 pages

Published 1966

Read May 19

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

The editors of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, until recently, made a regular habit out of anthologizing the “best” stories from the magazine. This culminated in two volumes of The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction (1, 2), both of them excellent reads. But the anthology market is different now, and I guess no one is clamoring for a current best-of-F&SF series. Which is a shame, because the issues from the Sheree Renée Thomas era are the best issues of the magazine’s history, consistently.

In decades past, though? The editors of F&SF were happy to crank out a new best-of anthology every year or two, and evidently the market was able to support this. It’s unfortunate how sci-fi and fantasy today don’t have the monetary support they did in the 20th century, back when 98% of it was garbage. Where’s that support now that the genres are the best they’ve ever been?

I got this volume from a used bookstore. It’s an ex-library copy from Randleman, North Carolina. It’s falling apart and moderately stained. The pages smell of dust and a sun-warmed attic. It isn’t the first in its series, I doubt it’s anything special — it’s merely the one I have.

This volume anthologizes stories from 1965, the tail end of the Avram Davidson era and the beginning of the Edward L. Ferman era.

“The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth” by Roger Zelazny. Short sci-fi of the 1960s, in my limited experience, often has this characteristic style: half tryhard manly cynicism, half impenetrable technobabble that may or may not get explained later. A sample:

“Carl,” he finally observed, poker playing, “they’re shaping Tensquare.”

I could have hit him. I might have refilled his glass with sulfuric acid and looked on with glee as his lips blackened and cracked. Instead, I grunted a noncommittal.

That’s the flavor of the whole piece. It’s a man-vs-nature-in-space affair, a Venusian Hemingway pastiche in which our narrator Carl has an emasculated score to settle with leviathan. Carl is a “baitman” hired by Miss Luharich, a spoiled rich cosmetics queen, to help her fish for “Ichthyform Leviosaurus Levianthus,” a gargantuan sea beastie that has never been landed by any of the solar system’s finest sportsmen, Carl included. Any hope that this novelette might live up to its exquisite title is dashed when Carl, unhappy with his hireling position in the hierarchy, snarks that Miss Luharich “wasn’t blonde” when he knew her years ago. Because she’s also his “neo-ex,” you see. It’s that kind of story.

Carl helpfully underlines the point for us: “Fish are a very ancient masculinity symbol, you know.” And again: “I stood and looked down at her, because that usually makes me feel superior to women.” Pretty sure that was meant with humorous self-deprecation from the narrator, but still, we’re just laying it all out here, aren’t we? Hemingway did this with more subtlety. If you embrace the testosterone-addled pulp of it all, I could see giving this a C

“Love Letter from Mars” by John Ciardi. Mostly forgettable Old Mars poem with one quite lovely phrase: “This gravity / works through me.”

“Rake” by Ron Goulart. Begins in media res with a chaotic bar fight, then immediately doubles back to lay out how our hero, Ben Jolson of the Chameleon Corps, arrived at Taragon University. Jolson has been sent on assignment from the interplanetary powers-that-be on Barnum to meet and impersonate a ne’er-do-well son of an ambassador, blah blah blah. Giant, intelligent bacteria that march and drill in formation somehow get involved. “I’m against spies,” our shapeshifting spy protagonist proclaims, in the midst of his spy work. And get this: when the story finally loops back around to the opening scene, the two scenes don’t even match! “Rake” is a disconnected sequence of cartoon-logic hijinks that are likely meant to be funny, but none of it succeeds. If Zelazny’s piece above had flavor, this one is a chewed up wad of Austin Powers-flavored gum. It’s almost impressively bad. No surprise this guy went on to ghost-write TekWar. F

“The History of Doctor Frost” by Roderic C. Hodgins. Dr. Frost, present-day mathematician and physicist, is visited in the night by Azuriel, a devil who desires to nurture Dr. Frost’s intellect in exchange for devouring the information in the mathematician’s mind once his natural lifespan has ended. It could have been an interesting spin on the standard Faustian theme. Some of its social commentary is solid — working in nuclear physics because that’s where the military funds are is rather like selling your soul, is it not? — but much of the rest hasn’t aged so well, or just isn’t that stimulating. The level of insight is that of an edgelord libertarian in freshman philosophy: the priest, the psychologist, and the infatuated woman all want the same thing Azuriel wants from our brilliant lone wolf Dr. Frost, but at least the devil is honest about it. The misogyny, in particular, soured me on this one. D

“Four Ghosts in Hamlet” by Fritz Leiber. A ghost (maybe) afflicts a touring company of Shakespearean actors; 1960s misogyny (definitely) afflicts a Fritz Leiber story. This one is altogether too long, rambling along for ages while it establishes the company and their little personalities (which never amount to anything like full characters) before it gets close to anything interesting. And in the end it tries to pull the “maybe it all had a mundane explanation” trick, at least to some degree. C-

“Treat” by Walter H. Kerr. Perfectly functional little poem about those who don’t need to wear masks on Halloween, probably more suited to children’s poetry than anything else. Nothing special.

“Keep Them Happy” by Robert Rohrer. Ugh. Sixties concepts of “what a woman really wants” were fucking disgusting, weren’t they? Couple that with a regressive satire about keeping prisoners “happy” for humanitarian(?) reasons and you get this dreck. Abysmal. F

“A Murkle for Jesse” by Gary Jennings. “Jet age” leprechaun fantasy in which a young boy befriends one of the wee folk, who crashed in his corner of Vermont on a wayward airliner. Overall it has potential. In places it could be a pleasant throwback to the Big Apple urban fantasy of Unknown in the 1930s (what little I’ve read of that). But the weird cishet sex and gender norms of the era make for awkward reading, as the 400 year old fae lass gets, erm, proprietary toward our 7 year old protagonist, sizing Jesse up as a future husband and getting jealous of his concern over a girl missing from the crash site. Nonetheless, this is the best story so far (or at least it hasn’t aged as badly as the others have). “I’ve found an owl who knows the way to New York City” might be one of the best lines in fantasy from the entire decade; the leprechaun is the least misogynistic portrayal of a woman in this collection so far. Which isn’t saying much, but still. B-

“Eyes Do More Than See” by Isaac Asimov. Absolutely killer opening line: “After hundreds of billions of years, he suddenly thought of himself as Ames.” I haven’t read much Asimov — a novel he coauthored, a collection of his short stories I read in my teens. My general sense is that his reputation rests on two strengths: his skill as a science communicator, and his craft with short story structure. It certainly isn’t in characterization. Ames and Brock, energy-wave beings a trillion years old, sound just like two estranged lovers in a suburban melodrama. Even a trillion years as an energy being aren’t enough to separate the once-woman Brock from an emotional convulsion once she is reminded that she is a woman, a woman who once knew love. It’s a bleakly misogynistic perspective, alas, and one that sours this tidy little trifle for me. D-

“The House the Blakeneys Built” by Avram Davidson. Six hundred years after a handful of polygamist fugitives survived a spaceship crash, their severely inbred descendants play the role of cultish inbred hicks when they encounter a new handful of survivors. Texas Chainsaw Massacre meets space opera. The result is grotesque and feels somewhat unsavory, but aside from the thinness of its characters, it works well as a story. C+

“The Eight Billion” by Richard Wilson. Science fiction was long used to pushed the narrative of “overpopulation.” It’s a staple plot in ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s sci-fi, and probably later. Overpopulation is such an entrenched narrative, thanks in large part to sci-fi, that it wasn’t until maybe a decade ago that I stopped taking it for granted. The real world problem, of course, is not there are too many people. The problem is the rich, the billionaires and the investor class, using up more resources than the rest of humanity put together. All that makes it extra difficult to appreciate this piece, which takes the overpopulation of Manhattan to absurd conclusions. It’s kind of an exercise in silliness all on its own, with thousands of courtiers crowded cheek to jowl around the King of New York, the lot of them fed via sprinkler system. Things don’t go as planned when the King invites the public to accompany him to the great dig downtown, the one meant to open up new lands underground for the population to enjoy. D+

“Something Else” by Robert J. Tilley. This one was a pleasant surprise. Despite its antique, fully 1960s prose, the general plot — Dr. Williams, a cultural historian specializing in old jazz music, is the sole survivor of a spaceship crash on a wild planet, but at least he has access to his cherished records — feels startlingly fresh, something I could easily imagine coming out of the ’80s. The giant, lemon-scented cerise alien that responds to the impromptu Duke Ellington broadcast is, of course, purestrain ’60s, bringing an inevitable sort of “Purple People Eater” vibe to the piece. But it’s a delightful story regardless. B-

“Aunt Millicent at the Races” by Len Guttridge. Dear dowdy Aunt Millicent turns into a horse thanks to an encounter with fairy fruit, and greedy Father puts her in the races. This could have been a charming domestic fantasy with a touch of humor, but of course, this being the 1960s, there's a distasteful undertone of "women are basically just livestock anyway," which is hard to ignore. C-

“Sea Bright” by Hal R. Moore. Honestly, for the time period, this one is pretty solid, a good subtle contemporary horror-adjacent fantasy. Eleven year old Kellie instinctively yanks away an exotic shell her friend found on the beach. She can't explain why, only stick stubbornly to her story that she had to do it, and can't say anything more. A local creep comes along while Kellie attempts to throw the shell back into the ocean, and vaguely eldritch things happen when the creep succeeds in putting it to his ear. B-

“From Two Universes…” by Doris Pitkin Buck. For its time this was probably a nifty little poem. I enjoyed it! It's charming! But nowadays you have to do more with a poem than merely couple the concepts of Univacs and unicorns, which makes this one, like “Treat” above, feel a tad unsophisticated to modern sensibilities.

“Hog-Belly Honey” by R. A. Lafferty. Another wacky number in which a smug prick of a tech bro (or the 1960s equivalent of a tech bro) talks fast and slaps shoulders and helps invent a philosophical machine, a "nullifier" which can make its own moral and ethical decisions and, well, nullify "junk" out of existence. This story is... here, I guess? It exists on the paper, certainly. It didn't do anything for me. D+

“No Different Flesh” by Zenna Henderson. A quietly domestic tale of alien encounter, in which grieving parents find a young child fluttering through the trees. The child is, of course, not quite what she seems. I dislike the trope of "grieving mother finds replacement baby to care for," and of course the standard 1960s cishet gender norms are at play, as well as some cloying religious overtones, as well as a random parenthetical bit of eugenics from a visiting doctor. But once you get past all that, this might be the best story here. Naturally it's the only story here by a woman. Maybe I'll be a bit generous and give it a full-fledged B

2023 read #55: A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers.

A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

367 pages

Published 2016

Read from May 17 to May 18

Rating: 4 out of 5

The first follow-up to The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, Orbit follows Sidra, a ship’s AI newly housed in an illegal “kit” that gives her a human-passing body, and Pepper, a tech-modder who helps Sidra on her journey to become her own self, whatever that might mean. That story is neatly paralleled by flashbacks to Pepper’s past, as her younger self escapes from a child-slave factory at 10, and is helped by a crashed ship’s AI (named Owl) while she becomes her own self, whatever that might mean.

I hesitated before reading this installment, largely because it doesn’t involve Rosemary, Sissix, Ashby, or any other main character from Planet. But as someone newly exploring my own queerness, neurodivergence, and full human identity, after a childhood of abuse and trauma and neglect and an adulthood of comp-het and just trying to fit in, I quickly got wrapped up in Sidra and Pepper. Their parallel stories of constructing senses of self after extensive programming (cultural for Pepper, literal for Sidra) were rich, meaningful, heartbreakingly relatable. “You are more than what they programmed you to be,” one character tells Sidra. It’s something all of us need to hear.

I kept tearing up in the flashback chapters after Owl was introduced. Minor spoilers, but I really could have used that kind of gentle, supportive parenting at any point in my life. Also, this might be the first time I’ve ever seen a space opera story involve a child-education sim, which is an amazing touch. I totally get Pepper’s lifelong obsession with the Big Bug Crew.

This focus on what it means to embody yourself in the way that best makes sense to you, I’m learning, seems to be Chambers’ signature vibe. Building from the found-family baseline established in Planet, Orbit explores the spectrum of experiences we pursue in order to understand our selves: relationships sexual or familial, community, accommodations to sensory needs, tattoos, trying new food, parties, futuristic body-mods, learning, finding purpose and passion, perhaps even (spoilers!) a little museum heist.

2023 read #54: The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle.*

The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle*

163 pages

Published 1912

Read May 16

Rating: 2 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

I used to read and reread this book obsessively as a tween and teen. It was a foundational adventure novel for me at a highly impressionable age. Who could ever forget the canoe passage up the hidden river, the first iguanodonts in the glade, the moonlit megalosaur chase? But unlike Jurassic Park, which I reread as recently as 2011, or Dinosaur Summer, which I revisited just last year, I haven’t returned to Doyle’s Lost World since my youth.

Its virulent racism certainly played a part in my unwillingness to check it out again. It is, straight up, an imperialist adventure; imperialist shittiness is drawn in bold lines throughout its blueprint. (Revisiting it now, I also discovered a deep reservoir of Edwardian misogyny, which I hadn’t picked up on in the past.) There’s also the general mustiness of a hundred-and-eleven year old boys' adventure novel, especially one that short-changes us on the dinosaur action we came here to read. Like so many novelists after him, Doyle quickly gets bored of his ancient saurians. After taking half the book to bring us to Maple White Land, we get just a couple memorable scenes of early dino encounters before they're shunted off to the background; almost immediately Doyle tangents our heroes off into a colonialist intervention between “ape-men” and indigenous humans on the plateau. The book would have been better with more iguanodonts and stegosaurs, and fewer white saviors.

As an adventure novel, though, The Lost World has the gift of sprightly pacing and plenty of dry Edwardian humor, much of which went over my head when I read it as a youth. The way Professor Challenger is built up as this larger-than-life figure for two chapters before we even meet him is a splendid example of character-driven exposition, one of Doyle’s strengths as a pop fiction author. I love the cattiness of the rivalry between Challenger and Summerlee, almost — but not quite — enough to make me want to write my own stories of Edwardian scientist rivals-to-lovers.

This book doesn’t come close to the charms of its semi-sequel Dinosaur Summer, but it’s a fine enough boy’s-life adventure for its time. Just expect a ton of racism along your way.

(And yes, I know the Edwardian era technically ended in 1910. But much the same way that the cultural 1990s lasted until 9/11, I think it’s fair to lump the pre-war 1910s in with that Edwardian vibe.)

2023 read #53: Oak and Ash and Thorn by Peter Fiennes.

Oak and Ash and Thorn: The Ancient Woods and New Forests of Britain by Peter Fiennes

280 pages

Published 2017

Read from May 15 to May 16

Rating: 4 out of 5

By the close of the ’00s, at the latest, it had become depressing to read ecological books from the 1990s and earlier. After a litany of losses and dire warnings for the future, such books would always close on a note of optimism — there’s still time! The worst has not yet come to pass! We just need to act now!

Living in a time when worse things have (and continued to) come to pass, we know all those optimistic codas added up to an exercise in comforting self-delusion. Capitalism would never be diverted from its consumption, its heedless self-absorption, its global destruction. No one with any real power ever acted to help. We’re all going down with the ship.

The pace of destruction, in fact, has worsened to the point that, today, even a book from 2017 feels hopelessly dated and woefully optimistic. Fiennes withholds no contempt from Britain’s Conservative government, and yet within the space of six years from this publication the Tories would unleash fresh ecological devastation and capitalistic horrors beyond anything documented here. They’re close to axing all environmental protections. Every day ancient woodlands fall, and now sewage is getting released untreated into Britain’s waterways, because deregulation, because Brexit, because capitalism. We’ve regressed to the days of industrial barons exploiting and poisoning the people and the countryside without any pretense of public safeguards. It’s a jarring reminder of the accelerating growth of fascism here in the “find out” phase of capitalism’s fuck around history.

Fascism is always the last bulwark of defense for capitalist systems in decline; now the entire world is in decline. “The authorities don’t like forests,” Fiennes writes in a chapter that began with Robin Hood, “because they don’t like places where people can hide.” Yet another layer in the long history of authoritarianism and its antipathy toward the world. Is it any wonder that capital never stepped up to curb the devastation it wreaked?

I’ve wanted to read this book since I first heard of it late in 2018. Since then, so much has changed… so much in the world has broken. I cried a few times reading this, wondering how much of the already impoverished and paved-over island ecosystem Fiennes described has been further destroyed. The very ash trees of the title, already dying when he wrote, are nearly gone.

Fiennes’ writing is often more conversational than poetic, rambling almost stream-of-consciousness through locations, literary quotations, concepts, asides. It’s no match for Helen Macdonald or Robert Macfarlane at their best, but whose prose is? I don’t want to give the wrong impression, though: this book is not lacking for beauty. The chapter where he condenses 7018 years of woodland history into 3509 words — two years for every word — is a marvel of wordcraft and structuring, offering evocative yet concise descriptions of the bygone wildwood, “a kingdom of trees” where people are outnumbered by wolves as recently as the Neolithic, and its accelerating diminution and destruction. Fiennes also excels at conveying details of atmosphere and at character sketches, the places and people from childhood rendered with a palpable sense of what has been lost, both natural and personal.

Really, this is a book of mourning more than it is a celebration of what remains or a sermon for its preservation. A note of “it’s too late, enjoy what life you can” pervades just beneath its pages. And perhaps that’s more honest, less willfully naïve, than the ecological optimism that came before it. If the powers-that-be are heedless, well… we’ll have to make them heed, any way we can, or else we all perish.

2023 read #52: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May/June 2016.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May/June 2016 issue (130:5-6)

Edited by C. C. Finlay

258 pages

Published 2016

Read from May 12 to May 14

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

After I read the March 2000 issue of F&SF (an issue I leafed through but didn’t buy from the bookstore as a teen), I simply had to find out when I actually bought my first current F&SF from the newsstand.

I’ve gotten many used copies from the relevant time frame from places like Half Price Books, which confused the issue, no pun intended. However, I believe this one is it. I distinctly remember how the combination of pulpy barbarian-diving-at-rock-creature cover art and the inclusion of a Ted Chiang story sold me on it. I never got around to reading this issue until now, though, despite carting it with me through five moves, the rise of American fascism, an ongoing pandemic, and a few life-altering personal crises.

Ah, to reminisce about the early days of 2016, before everything — and I mean everything — went wrong…

“More Heat than Light” by Charlotte Ashley. The editorial description of this novelette was an instant yes from me: “[A] new adventure set in a parallel world where the French Revolution comes to Quebec and revolutionaries take up arms against the English in the monster-ridden wilderness.” The tale itself proved to be a solid pseudo-historical military fantasy, with fewer monsters and less wilderness than could be desired, but it’s a narrative that explores an interesting intersection of prejudice and power: the ideal of the universal people’s republic against the reality of entrenched social hierarchies of gender, class, and race, and how much struggle it takes to dismantle those hierarchies. B

“Last of the Sharkspeakers” by Brian Trent. This novelette reads like a late 1980s piece, throwing you in at the deep end of its elaborate far-future worldbuilding. It's full of hollowed asteroid cities, scrappy tribal mutants, scheduled rainstorms, flying cargo sharks, and silly future lingo like truespeech and brainsmall. The Tower People use painwands to punish and assert control over our low-grav adapted “beltbugs,” then recruit them for their war against the icari, a branch of humanity who dare to claim Earth even though they have adapted and evolved from all their generations in deep space. Yet, despite living so deep in the future that humans have diverged into different adaptations for space life, the Tower People have names like Carol and Frank and watch news broadcasts and soap operas. “Sharkspeakers” isn't bad per se — in fact I appreciated the way it played with the religious refusal to adapt and evolve, the insular sense of superiority it confers, and the disgust and dehumanization that such people direct at the rest of us out here just living our lives — but the story is a bit of a mess. The climax and coda are especially awkward, shoehorning us into the banal military sci-fi of Trent’s broader “War Hero” universe. The whole story likely could have done more with half the length. I’ll be generous: C-

“The Nostalgia Calculator” by Rich Larson. That title is pure 2010s sci-fi, in a good way. This story, however, is pure 2010s sci-fi, in a derogatory sense. It has a smarmy, privileged, “nothing really matters because our POV is an extremely white nepo baby” vibe. It feels like the linear descendant of turn-of-the-millennium netizen cyberpunk, but gone full sleazy and cynical with age, full of tech-bro asides like the hand-job app developed by a former Ivy League classmate (“Wendee [the liberal scold girlfriend currently on a tech cleanse in Tibet] would never have to know”). The underlying conceit, that a big tech firm tracks and manipulates cycles of nostalgia, which have gone from decades in length to months, reminds me of kids-on-my-lawn memes that circulated on Facebook around this time. The story’s optimism that simply leaking the truth about corporate skullduggery would change anything is a heartbreaking relic of a naive, pre-Panama Papers, pre-Trump Cult world. I’m not the right audience for this one, and that’s okay. I did find some faint amusement in it here and there. D+

“Coyote Song” by Pat MacEwen. Yet another long-form story, a novella this time. This issue seems particularly loaded with long-forms: a novella, five novelettes, and only five short stories. Three of the first four stories are long-form. It makes the issue feel unbalanced. This one (for about half its length) is a contemporary crime scene procedural, which excites exactly zero interest. I suppose it delivers on what it sets out to do; the first half felt exactly like watching an investigation procedural show, one with a writing room both more talented and more skeptical of cops than usual, with hour long episodes and an emphasis on dark magic cases. But because I don’t care about any of that (aside from maybe the dark magic), that first half was a slog for me. Even when the story shifted gears halfway through, and became more definitively magical, I was too soured by everything that had gone before. C-

“The Great Silence” by Allora & Calzadilla and Ted Chiang. This has to be one of the more esoteric ways I’ve seen a story wind up in F&SF: This is technically a reprint of a story that was displayed on a screen as part of a video art installation by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla. It’s a spare yet haunting piece on the colonial ecocide of Earth, drawing a parallel between humanity’s search for intelligent life at Arecibo with industrial humanity’s disregard for the other intelligent species able to communicate with us right here on Earth. It’s just a wisp of a story, more essay than story really, yet it conveys a delicate heartbreak that shatters to the core. A

“Caribou: Documentary Fragments” by Joseph Tomaras. I think sci-fi, like all genres of writing, should feel free to draw from the worst of human behavior; we need to make uncomfortable art, even painful art, art that screams against our cultural complacency. I can’t tell if “Caribou” is good art, though. It is unpleasant near-future sci-fi drawn from the cultural rot and horrors of our military occupations in Central and Southwest Asia. The story itself is framed as a transcript of a documentary on bioengineered memory modification and the always-evil machinations of DARPA. It’s a sterile (sometimes literally redacted) presentation of sexual torture and obscene crimes as a matter of national policy. On the sci-fi end of things, it draws a metaphor between the normalization of fascist values during recent decades and the (literal) viral propagation of trauma, which is conceptually apt. I recognize that some ambition went into telling this story in this way, and it’s necessary to examine and contextualize the horrors of our colonialism, but something about the disconnect between subject and format here was especially alienating (likely on purpose). I did, however, appreciate the line, “Once Americans knew, for the most part, they didn’t care.” If that doesn’t describe the 21st century so far… C

It’s a good reminder to my personal nostalgia that all was not hunky-dory in the first half of 2016. The roots of modern American fascism run deep.

“Steamboat Gothic” by Albert E. Cowdrey. This novelette could have been an enjoyable yarn about a locked room mystery, a devilish intruder, and a Victorian Gothic mansion. The writing is zippy and assured. However, its central character is an openly corrupt Louisiana sheriff, who has his palms greased via financial interests in every business venture in the parish, and at one point “rents” the labor of a prisoner from a work-release program. In other words, a tame and sanitized version of what actually happens in Louisiana. Nothing wrong with having a detestable protagonist, of course, but a protagonist who's a cop? Now that’s a bridge too far. Plus it all ends in a Boomer-y punchline about rap music. C-

“Ash” by Susan Palwick. A sweetly domestic fabulist piece examining memories, mementos, and the temptations of not letting go. It's directly inspired by the contemporaneous tiny house and minimalism movements, which of course I could critique as bourgeois affectations, ways to colonize even poverty. But this story is too earnest for all that, too tender. B

“The Secret Mirror of Moriyama House” by Yukimi Ogawa. Another gorgeously sweet and sad domestic fantasy, this one about an old woman who knits patch jobs to close the wounds of the dead and make them more presentable, and the quietly grieving young woman who becomes her assistant. B

“The Long Fall Up” by William Ledbetter. The first of two novelettes that close out this issue. This one is a hard sci-fi “realistic spaceships” piece centered on an operative launched from Jīnshān Station (at Lagrange point five) to intercept, and terminate, Veronica Perez, a woman who illegally impregnated herself in space  with the intent of gestating a child fully in zero-G. Given the author’s ethnicity, and the modern-day geopolitics of the American/Chinese economic rivalry, this makes me uncomfortable — cultural Sinophobia permeates just about everything in how this one was set up. Like, did the “kill the pregnant woman in space while we lie to the world about our intentions in order to protect our space monopoly” corporate baddies have to be Chinese, William? Plenty of American businessmen would be likelier candidates for that role. Maybe you went in this direction because of your career in the American aerospace sector, William. All that, plus my general discomfort with a cis-man writing a story centered on a woman’s reproductive autonomy, and the man who rides in to save the day, made me unhappy with this one. It’s a solid story, but laden with baggage. D+

“The Stone War” by Ted Kosmatka. The final story, and the cover story at last! It's pure ’70s sword and sorcery, though better written (and more meaningful) than almost anything in that category. The story is vast, spanning from the Paleolithic to the age of kings; the vibes are immaculate, trippy, mythical, soaked with blood and quiet pathos. Under its swords and sinews, “The Stone War” offers a critique of the destructive cycles of violent performances of masculinity and their use as a tool of patriarchal power; society flourishes in their absence. B

And that’s it! It only took seven years, but I’ve finally read the very first F&SF I bought new from the newsstand. Only 53 more issues before I’ve read every F&SF in my collection!

2023 read #51: The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

308 pages

Published 2022

Read from May 9 to May 12

Rating: 4 out of 5

I haven’t read Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau since my teens. I’ve retained the book’s overall vibe and a vague recollection of its story beats, that’s about it. Unlike The War of the Worlds, Island wasn’t a formative book I read way too young and way too often. I enjoyed it, of course. It was merely another late Victorian novel that I read largely because my controlling father wouldn’t let me read much of anything newer than that.

I’m almost curious now to reread it, because Moreno-Garcia’s recontextualized retelling seamlessly makes use of the original’s characters and story beats, creating a cohesive new story that feels both a sharp commentary on Wells’ colonialist concerns of “racial degeneration,” and its own whole, unique fiction. Moreno-Garcia takes one of Wells’ plot points, the religion Dr. Moreau pushes on his hybrids, and turns it into an examination of how religion is employed to keep women meek and submissive, to keep poor laborers subservient, to keep the racial castes imposed upon society intact. Interweaving Wells’ outline with her own tale is a difficult balance that Moreno-Garcia makes look effortless.

As in Mexican Gothic, Moreno-Garcia excels at evoking and sustaining atmosphere, this time in the limestone flats and cenotes of the Yucatán during the 1870s. Personally, I preferred the misty mountains of Gothic, which I felt to be a more absorbing book in general. But the difference isn’t enough to give Daughter a lower rating (all my ratings are utterly arbitrary and meaningless anyhow).

2023 read #50: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 2000.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 2000 issue (98:3)

Edited by Gordon Van Gelder

162 pages

Published 2000

Read from May 8 to May 9

Rating: 2 out of 5

CW: My introductory paragraphs discuss real life trauma from my teens, including homelessness, a house fire, and the death of a dear relative.

Like much of my pre-2010 F&SF collection, I got this one through a bulk buy of back issues on eBay. It wasn’t until I began reading “Loyal Puppies,” the first story, that I realized this wasn’t the first time I’d run into this issue.

In March 2000, a few months after F&SF editor Gordon Van Gelder had given me my first positive personalized rejection, I decided to follow the evergreen advice and actually read the magazine to which I was sending submissions. At the Barnes & Noble near the Dayton Mall, I leafed through this very issue. The first couple pages of “Loyal Puppies” were burned into my memory — not only were they the first bit of an F&SF I ever read, they would be the last for a long time to come, because of what happened later in March 2000.

That’s when my grandmother’s house, where I lived when I wasn’t living in my father’s car, was burned down. I escaped, as did my grandmother, though she died of a heart attack just a couple days later. I wouldn’t escape my father for well over a year, only to have to fend for myself without social skills or good emotional regulation in the nightmare of Dubya Bush-era capitalism. I was unable to find the energy to write through most of my twenties. I wouldn’t buy an issue of F&SF for myself until 2016 or so (though by that point I’d been reading F&SF stories in various collections).

Unexpected trauma trigger, this issue! So now I’m heading into this issue with a specific mindset: it’s almost a glimpse of an alternate future I could have had, one where maybe I could have focused on writing earlier on and maybe a little bit less on mere survival. (Though who knows, the poverty, neglect, and homelessness were always part of my childhood; my twenties were probably doomed regardless.)

“Loyal Puppies” by Rick Heller. The best part about this one is Van Gelder’s wonderfully dated introduction: “Here’s a story that takes the current cell phone craze a bit farther…” This story combines two of my least favorite things: “ripped from tomorrow’s headlines” consumer tech sci-fi, and a grown cis dude author writing from the POV of a shallow, boy- and weight-obsessed teen girl. It’s a tale as old as time: chip-implant cellphones, awkward future-teen slang, accidentally overheard conversations, a Hollywood heartthrob, drug dealing, and murder. It’s the kind of story where our narrator, on the run from a kidnapping, takes a moment to worry about her weight. I remember reading the first few pages of this at 17, there in the Barnes & Noble, and finding myself incredulous that this had gotten published in such a prestigious market while my stories had been rejected. Reading it now, in full and with much greater perspective, I can understand why my teenage writing wasn’t published, and can grudgingly admit that this story is at least readable, competently structured, and probably even enjoyable to someone who likes this sort of thing (none of which could be said about my teenage fiction). Since I don’t like this sort of thing, I’ll give it a D

“The Eye in the Heart” by Tanith Lee (from an idea by John Kaiine). A brief but chilling piece about a young woman’s joy in her marriage — and her Sect’s particular practice for young married women. A solid entry in the canon of “Actually this horrifying patriarchal cult is good for us oh-so-flawed women!” allegories, all too relevant here and now. B

“Crux” by Albert E. Cowdrey. Overstuffed and overlong, this sprawling novella (nearly the length of every other story in this issue put together) has a bit too much of everything. Three hundred years have elapsed since all-out nuclear war annihilated most of Earth’s population! Massive domes seal off the radioactive remnants of the old cities! Ninety percent of the Earth is a nature reserve thanks to an eco-conscious dictator! But humanity has spread to other planets and stars, so this story is also kind of a space opera! But also there’s time travel! A stolen wormholer! A rumpled private eye is on the case, doing the dirty work of the galactic empire! And the underground network that stole the wormholer wants to change the past and undo the nuclear war even though it means they won’t exist! Cowdrey’s Worldcity wallows in that problematic pan-Asian medley so beloved by white dudes in this time period, complete with a greedy “Confucian scholar” stereotype straight out of yellowface Hollywood; much of the story revolves around a red light district called Clouds and Rain. I probably would have been in awe of this story and wanted to imitate it when I was 17, but now? I don’t care for it. It’s much less than the sum of its parts. D-

“The Madness of Gordon Van Gelder” by Michael Swanwick. A chummy, humorous bit of yarn featuring the author of this story, the editor of this magazine, and the pandemonium that ensues from the phrase “I’ll buy that for a dollar!” A nice palate cleanser after that last story. As far as industry in-jokes turned into flash-fic go, this one deserves a solid B

“Rossetti Song” by Alexander C. Irvine. “Some people have always wanted to be President, or a baseball player, or a movie star, or a business tycoon. Me, I’ve always wanted to own a bar.” Standard red-blooded American masculine something or other revolving around a widower who runs the neighborhood bar of his dreams but needs ghostly intervention from a dusty old folk record to help him learn what it means to mourn. Not my kind of story, but it’s ably written; aside from taking a smidge too long to get past the mundane setup, it’s briskly constructed and does what it set out to do. And as a fan of dusty old folk music, I can at least buy into that aspect of the story. I suppose that deserves at least a B-?

“The Museum” by Henry Slesar. I grew up devouring Sherlock Holmes stories, yet mysteries are probably my second least favorite genre. At first this one didn’t excite my interest. A private art detective who retired to run a gallery, Mason Graves gets pulled into one last case when a Cellini sculpture goes missing in Vienna. Suddenly a rash of art thefts and missing artwork plagues museums around Europe and America. Fortunately, this one is another brisk, professional piece and was a painless read. And the final twist, while I probably should have seen it coming, was a surprise gut punch. B

“Conhoon and the Fairy Dancer” by John Morressy. Middling humorous fantasy with an early 1980s flavor. It plays with the usual tropes of broad-chested hero, crotchety wizard, fair princess, and tricksy fairies. To give you an idea of the vibe here, the main fairy our heroes pursue is named “Twisty Mike,” and on their quest our heroes spend a night with Mother McCrone. I can’t get worked up to feel one way or another about this. Maybe C-

And that’s it! I had originally meant to read this issue as an introduction to the Gordon Van Gelder era of F&SF, before I got sidetracked by traumatic memories. It’s a definite improvement over what I’ve read from the Ferman years, but — so far — it’s an incremental rather than a categorical improvement.

2023 read #49: Spear by Nicola Griffith.

Spear by Nicola Griffith

Interior art by Rovina Cai

184 pages

Published 2022

Read from May 5 to May 7

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

I’d heard so many good things about this book — it’s a finalist for the Nebula for best novel, after all — but hesitated to read it because Arthuriana doesn’t really appeal to me. (The one-word title, reminiscent of so many paint-by-numbers YA retreads, didn’t encourage my interest.) But finally I took a chance on it, and I’m so happy I did.

This book is magnificent, a beautiful and queer and bloody love letter to the complicated multicultural realities of Early Medieval Britain. Griffith’s prose is enrapturing, pulling us in with delicately observed details of nature and intimate magic, before flooring us with human feeling. I’m in love with the setting, which mingles archaeological knowledge of post-Roman Britain’s culture and diversity with the fae bewilderment of the Tuath Dé. This is a book I’ve wanted to read (without knowing it) my whole adult life.

2023 read #48: Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu.

Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu

109 pages

Published 1872

Read May 5

Rating: 2 out of 5

My partner R and I went through a phase this past fall and winter in which we watched a glut of old horror films: Hammer vampire joints, folk horror classics, random seedy B-movies. Coupled with R’s abiding interest in queer history and old queer literature, it was inevitable that we would watch Carmilla’s 1970 sexploitation adaptation The Vampire Lovers. And after watching that, it was inevitable that I’d want to give Carmilla itself a try.

Carmilla is about what you’d expect: a turgid melodrama, full of tumultuous sighing and weird bits of racism that tumble out when you least expect them. In classic Victorian style, it teases coy eroticism under layers of moralistic protestations. It holds few surprises if you’ve already seen The Vampire Lovers; if anything, Carmilla is flat and anticlimactic in comparison to the B-movie. However, I appreciated Carmilla’s languorous atmosphere, and any queer representation from such an early date — despite the prurient motivations of its author and original audience — is fascinating.

2023 read #47: The Honey Month by Amal El-Mohtar.

The Honey Month by Amal El-Mohtar

Introduction by Danielle Sucher

Artwork by Oliver Hunter

75 pages

Published 2010

Read May 4

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

“Every honey has its story,” Danielle Sucher writes in the introduction, a description caught in the hazy half-light between longing and warning. Sucher provided the thirty or so vials of honey that inspired El-Mohtar’s month of honey-tasting and “literary synesthesia.” The Honey Month is the result: a series of sweetly dreamlike fables, delicate brushes with fae strangeness, snowy glimpses of childhood sorrow and wonder, and swooningly erotic poetry spun like sugar from the sensory experience of each successive honey.

The pure truth and wonder of this book is in El-Mohtar’s sensory perception, her precision with imagery and taste, her unfailingly luminous descriptions, the lingering savor of a tongue tenuous between sense and word.

It would be terribly predictable to call this writing delicious, but few words are more apt.

A running list of favorite pieces (though every one of them is magnificent and not to be missed):

“Day 1 — Fireweed Honey”

“Day 2 — Peach Creamed Honey”

“Day 5 — Cranberry Creamed Honey”

“Day 7 — Thistle Honey”

“Day 11 — Blackberry Honey”

“Day 12 — Red Gum Honey”

“Day 15 — Hungarian Forest Honey”

“Day 17 — Ugandan Honey”

“Day 21 — Bamboo Honey”

“Day 24 — Apricot Creamed Honey”

“Day 27 — Leatherwood Honey”

“Day 28 — French Chestnut Honey”

2023 read #46: Can You Sign My Tentacle? by Brandon O’Brien.

Can You Sign My Tentacle? by Brandon O’Brien

83 pages

Published 2021

Read from May 3 to May 4

Rating: 4 out of 5

This book thunders and glides with impeccable grace and gravity. A collection of poetry at the intersections of eldritch horror and Black magnitude, of hip-hop and the cosmic, of white violence and the radical significance of Blackness, Tentacle hooks you in from the cover and never lets up, never lets go. In a cruel universe of horrors, “We are here,” as O’Brien writes in his author’s note, “because we have made an effort to remain, and to value what remains, as we must.”

It’s impossible to choose any particular favorite poems here; basically every piece has lines of multifaceted beauty and power, every stanza has a weight of importance. That said, I always like to single out particular poems:

“Hastur Asks for Donald Glover’s Autograph”

“because who she is matters more than her words”

“the repossession of skin”

“Lovecraft Thesis #1”

“postcard 20xx, where there are no dirges”

“Birth, Place”

“Young Poet Just Misses Getting MF DOOM’s Autograph”

“The Metaphysics of a Wine, in Theory and Practice”

“time, and time again”

“That Business They Call Utopia, Part One”

“drop some amens”

2023 read #45: The Dark World by Henry Kuttner.

The Dark World by Henry Kuttner

126 pages

Published 1946

Read May 3

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I want to get back into my old habit of reading an eclectic mix of books new and old, classic and forgotten, pulpy and literary. I've been reading a ton of books from the 2020s, and the books have been excellent—fantasy fiction, in particular, is better now than it ever has been. But weird old pulps sometimes scratch an itch.

This book is more entertaining than it should be. Edward Bond, a veteran and pilot from Indiana, has felt strange ever since he blacked out and crashed in Sumatra in the waning days of World War II. The Batak healer who treated him after the crash warns him to stay away from magic: “All your life you must hide. Something is searching for you.” Soon, despite himself, Ed gets pulled into an alternate Earth called the Dark World, where trees move, mutated vampires and werewolves prowl, and sorcerers rule under a huge red sun.

Goodreads cited this as an early Dying Earth-style story, which I suppose it could be, though the vibe is closer to Andre Norton than Jack Vance. What’s surprising to someone reading nearly eighty years later is the prominence and relative competence of Kuttner’s female characters. Perhaps it’s because he was writing in the immediate aftermath of the war, with its broader feminist gains still fresh, and not in the ’50s and ’60s, when the modern American concepts of the (white) nuclear family and the (white) housewife had been manufactured for the propaganda war against international socialism. Whatever the reason, The Dark World features a whopping four women as major named characters, all of them leaders in their respective factions, plus an unnamed but indomitable female fighter-scout. Kuttner still does the manly pulp thing and has his hero forcefully kiss two of them, but The Dark World feels way more progressive with its gender norms than Witch World did seventeen years later.

Unfortunately, Kuttner’s prose is of its time, which means it has a pulpy comic book quality (and more em dashes than modern poets could even dare to dream of). It does the story no favors. The story itself, though, is surprisingly ahead of its time.

Spoilers here for the central twist: Our narrator, who at first believes himself to be Edward Bond, is in fact Lord Ganelon, an evil and ruthless sorcerer who rules with his Coven over this corner of the Dark World. Ed and Ganelon are each other’s multiversal doppelgängers, switched by the powerful Valkyrie Freydis (who is huge and completely fucking jacked, by the way) to give her people a chance to overthrow the sinister Coven. Ganelon’s return sends the real Ed back to Earth, right in the middle of Ed’s own plan to overthrow the Coven. As Lord Ganelon’s own memories gradually displace Ed’s implanted memories, he uses Ed’s connection to the rebellion to use the freedom fighters for his own ends. It’s the flipside of the expected narrative, the evil mirror image of the standard portal fantasy. It’s a bit startling for 1940s sci-fi.

Despite its myriad problems, I found The Dark World fairly enjoyable.

2023 read #44: Heart, Haunt, Havoc by Freydís Moon.

Heart, Haunt, Havoc by Freydís Moon

152 pages

Published 2023

Read from April 29 to May 2

Rating: 4 out of 5

This is Freydís Moon’s earliest long-form work, though chronologically it was published after their Exodus 20:3, With a Vengeance, and Three Kings, all of which are on my to-read list. Heart has a touch of first-novel unevenness, a certain lack of polish that might also be correlated with its indie-press presentation. I went back and forth about how I wanted to rate this novella; even though my ratings are wholly arbitrary anyway, I couldn’t decide whether I should give it the 4 out of 5 I wanted to give it, or whether the first-book bumpy prose would bump it down to 3.5. In the end I decided I liked this story, and that’s enough.

Heart is a slim but affecting story of possession and possessiveness, of spiritual appropriation and delayed grief, of calling an exorcist (who’s rather more of a specialist, really) to help you move on from a particularly controlling past entanglement. At its best, Moon’s prose is bone-bending and blood-letting in its effectiveness (though their earnestness occasionally gets in the way of the flow). Our main characters, Colin and Bishop, are relatably scarred, layered, cautious to show their true selves. There might be a bit too much Catholicism for my tastes, but overall Heart is gorgeous and vulnerable and well worth the read.