2023 read #126: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1975 issue.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1975 issue (49:4)

162 pages

Published 1975

Read October 30

Rating: 2 out of 5

My F&SF collection extends patchily into the 1960s and '70s, but until now, the December 1982 issue had been the earliest I’d read. Time to change that!

I picked this one more or less randomly — no significant dates here. Though there is a Poul Anderson Time Patrol story here that tipped the scales in its favor, even though it likely sucks and I read it before as a kid, in the 1991 collection The Time Patrol.

Onward, into the '70s!

“The Custodians” by Richard Cowper. An unexpected treat: Cowper’s F&SF debut! His tale “What Did the Deazies Do?” was the sole highlight of the dismal December 1982 issue, and in another lifetime I appreciated his The Road to Corlay. This sprawling novelette centers on Spindrift, a World War I vet and historian of medieval philosophy, who has followed a meager document trail left by one Meister Sternwärts, 13th century Gnostic and magister of arcane arts. Spindrift feels like Sternwärts has been guiding him to the monastery of Hautaire, where the meister spent his final years writing his Praemonitiones — a text of astonishingly accurate prophecies. Soon Spindrift learns that fresh prophecies continue to be written at Hautaire, with a “horizon” of about fifty years — and he’s been destined to come to Hautaire to continue the work. Some fifty years later, Spindrift meets his own successor: a faddish young woman named Judy Harland. “Custodians” is firmly of its time, but it’s quite good for all that, deliberately paced and atmospheric, depicting generational trauma’s role in ushering in nuclear annihilation. B

“Senior Citizen” by Clifford D. Simak. My only exposure to Simak was the dire Mastodonia, so I had slim hopes for this tale of an old man’s retirement to “a leisure cubicle in space.” Sure enough, by the third paragraph our surly Mr. Lee is already fuming at the feminine voice in his capsule: “Women, he thought — bitches, all of them.” The story manages to literalize the horror of how age can strip memory and self from you, so it succeeds at what it sets out to do. But the best part is how brief it is. D+

“Down to a Sunless Sea” by Cordwainer Smith. A posthumous publication, “completed by [Smith’s] wife after his death” — though she’s otherwise uncredited. Like the only other Smith story I’ve read, “Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons” (which I reviewed here), this one is an early galactic-baroque excursion. The sunless pleasure planet Xanadu welcomes Space Lord Kemal bin Permaiswari, a Lord of the Instrumentality, a psychic superman and war hero, wounded when he saved humanity in the battle of Styron IV. There are rideable cats; fear machines; “underpeople” genetically engineered from animals; illegal telepathy barriers; pitchers divided to pour both blissful drinks and deadly poisons; and of course devious scheming. There's also a bird-man named Mr.-Stokely-from-Boston. Clearly written sometime in the early ’60s, “Sea” is like a weirder, scruffier prototype of Dune, though it lacks Dune’s anti-authority streak. Like “Kittons,” “Sea” piles on the weird until it topples into silly, especially toward the end, but nonetheless I enjoyed it. Somewhere around C+

“The Pearcey Boy” by R. Bretnor. Distasteful, boring, and dreadfully overlong, this tale of a “defective” boy annoying and unsettling other lodgers in a 1928 boarding house didn’t even arrive at its coy revelation of its fantastical element (such as it was) until the last page. Utter dreck. F

“Gibraltar Falls” by Poul Anderson. I love how the Messinian salinity crisis (the drying out of the Mediterranean basin), and the subsequent titanic waterfall that refilled the sea through Gibraltar, had such a hold on the sci-fi imagination during the 1970s. See also: The Many-Colored Land. This one is a formulaic Time Patrol piece that I read once in a collection as a tween. Tom Nomura, natural scientist recruited for the Time Patrol from 1972, is in love with Feliz a Rach, an artist from a matriarchal society some two millennia after his birth. From him she learns the value of a man. “Gibraltar” offers no surprises, and I certainly won’t give it points for plot, but at least it has more atmosphere and scenic description than, say, most Reginald Rivers stories. I’ll be indulgent and offer it a C-

“Counterkill” by Jack Williamson. Skimmed past this one the moment it became clear that this (white) author thought he was being cheeky with how close he could come to the N-word without using the N-word. The dark planet’s name, the name of its dark-skinned people — yeah, you weren’t slick, Jack. Especially since the story is about a young man named Blacklantern hoping to enlist the aid of alien “Benefactors” to “civilize” his “primitive” world before it’s destroyed. Fuck this. A big old F

“The Mother Trip” by Frederick Pohl. Less a story and more of a series of variations on the theme of first contact. In one, police in Jackson, Mississippi stop and frisk the first visitor to our world, and cause automatic planetary annihilation. In another, humanity bands together in historic cooperation to nuke the alien mothership. In another, the aliens watch enough TV — and enough warfare — to declare that humans have a “death-wish.” Pretty standard stuff for the time. Nothing terrible, but also not terribly interesting. C-

And that’s it for my first issue from the ’70s! A mix of surprisingly tolerable stories alternating in precise rhythm with some of the worst shit you’ve ever seen. Reminiscent of the ’80s incarnation of the magazine, except this issue, at any rate, might be a slight improvement over any ’80s issues I’ve read so far.

Except for the Bretnor story. And the Williamson story. Goddamn.

Also, would it have killed them to put anyone who wasn’t a white man on the TOC?

2023 read #125: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November 1989.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November 1989 issue (77:5)

Edited by Edward L. Ferman

162 pages 

Published 1989

Read from October 28 to October 29

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

Much like the December 1982 issue, I’ve chosen to read this one because it marks a date of personal importance. I’ve read an unusual number issues from around this time: the regrettable September 1989, the slightly worse December 1989, the slightly more promising March 1990, and the worst issue I’ve ever read, August 1990. My expectations for this issue are correspondingly low.

“Icicle Music” by Michael Bishop. Within a couple years of this tale, Bishop wrote my tweenage self's favorite short story: “Herding with the Hadrosaurs,” in The Ultimate Dinosaur. It didn’t age that well, perhaps, but in comparison to most of the other stories in that book, it was a masterpiece. So I thought maybe this one wouldn’t be so bad. “Icicle Music” is adequate enough. The first half is an atmospheric, 1957-set tale of Christmas Eve and a deadbeat dad who comes down the chimney. I think it’s meant to be grimly funny. If we’d left it there, with (spoilers!) 12 year old Danny butchering a reindeer named Blitzen while his mother burns his dad’s body in the dump, I think it would have been a more cohesive story. Instead, we flash forward to 1987 and find that Danny, now dying, is telling the yarn of how his father’s ghost sought revenge every tenth Christmas since that night. (Bishop plays coy about it, but I think the implication is that Danny is gay and he’s dying of AIDS.) The second half isn’t bad, but I think the switch from third-person limited to conversational tell-all makes the whole thing feel imbalanced, like a framing device with only the back half of the frame. C+

Content warning for fictional SA in the next story.

“The Extra Ancestor” by Donald Barr. This one begins with a one-two punch. First, the editorial introduction tells us author Barr was appointed by Reagan to a national council on education (shudder). Next, the story opens with a professor casually blackmailing his female grad student so he can impregnate her via in vitro and perform genetics experiments by way of reproductive coercion. Yeah, fuck this story. As if that weren’t bad enough, it’s about splicing dog genes into human embryos to make, uh… telepaths. Instead, young Eddy inherits nothing more than an excellent sense of smell, and the rest of the story is — I kid you not — an extended rumination on how girls are stinky. (Speaking of dog-human hybridization, Olaf Stapledon did it better in 1944, and somehow made it less skeevy in a book with romantic bestiality. At least that was consensual.) I literally expected nothing better from a Reagan appointee, but goddamn. F

“Divergence” by Jennifer Swift. There's nowhere to go but up after that last story, but I strained to find interest in this tale of Jewel, the daughter of a media-savvy Creationist, inadvertently discovering a new branch of bacterial evolution. It's ably written, and draws neat parallels between RNA transcription and theological interpretation. Plus it does that thing I like where the title refers to several things: lifeforms diverging over time; the bacterium diverging from the rest of known life; Jewel diverging from the faith of her father. But it’s overlong, and frankly I felt apathetic about the subject matter. It ends with that wishy-washy “maybe science and religion are just different ways of understanding what God made” bullshit. (Spoiler alert: feel-good liberal attempts to understand and coddle Christian extremists have done nothing but amplify Christofascism over these last few decades.) Maybe C+

“The Name of the Demon” by Patricia Anthony. Pretty standard ’80s horror number about a couple of drug-running Texas lowlifes double-crossing a demonologist (who, because it was the ’80s, was moonlighting in the coke business). Nothing special. I think a setup like that could have had potential, but instead the story just kind of ends. D+

“Tikina-Londi” by Peni R. Griffin. Texas-flavored fairy tale about a new mother struggling to keep her child inside her house and away from Death. Mostly enjoyable, aside from some stray ’80s shittiness (the mother calls the hired girl “you little slut” when the boy makes his way out of the house under her watch). C-

“On the Wings of Imagination, Fly” by Gary Wright. Stories of truck driving have been oddly frequent in the issues of F&SF I’ve read. There was Andrew Crowley’s “Night Haul” in the September / October 2023 issue; T. R. Napper’s “Highway Requiem” in the May / June 2023 issue; further back in time, there was Russell Griffin’s “The Road King” in the February 1986 issue. That may not seem like a lot, but this issue is the sixteenth I’ve reviewed for this blog, and this is the fourth story centered on trucking, which means a truck driver story has appeared in 25% of all F&SF issues I’ve read to date. (That’s not even counting Thomas A. Easton’s “Down on the Truck Farm” in the March 1990 issue, which ends with our troubled teen protagonist apprenticing to drive a genetically engineered truck-dog.) Our trucker today is a mediocre white guy who knows he’s special but no one gives him a break, damn ’em, so he hauls low-paying payloads and hopes to write a song that’ll make it big someday. Just wait ’til you learn what he thinks about his wife! He’ll tell ya, because I’m not repeating any of it here. This story feels numbingly long, even though it isn’t, and possesses no redeeming qualities. F

“Bad Luck” by Vance Aandahl. This is a western bauble, stuck in that awkward stage where westerns had become gritty and ugly and ironic, but hadn’t yet evolved beyond investing white ex-cavalrymen as the unquestioned heroes of the genre, and Mexican banditos still exclaimed “Ay chihuahua!” (In this instance, I’m pretty sure some element of humor is involved, at least in theory.) Like, for what it is, it’s fine? But I don’t like what it is. Maybe I’ll be overly generous and say D-

“A Can of Worms” by Ben Bova. In other hands, there could be a kernel of an interesting story here. Elverda Apacheta is an indigenous sculptor from the Andes who tells a tale about when she lived on an asteroid and carved the history of her people on its surface. However, because it’s the '80s, some rich white dude shows up in his spaceship, the Adam Smith, and our Quechua sculptor is immediately smitten with his "uniqueness," and inevitably falls in love with him. (I've never read Bova before, but this whole deal fits his vibe, you know?) Anyway, "Worms" is professionally written and all that, but can't overcome the triple threat of fetishization, white saviorism, and capitalism. Also, there's a recurring motif of fatphobia, because why not. D-

And that's it for another dip into the world of '80s sci-fi and fantasy. No real highlights, a bunch of shit best left forgotten, but maybe it's slightly better than other near-contemporary issues. Which is no great praise.

2023 read #124: These Fleeting Shadows by Kate Alice Marshall.

These Fleeting Shadows by Kate Alice Marshall

359 pages

Published 2022

Read from October 24 to October 27

Rating: 3 out of 5

This is a crisp and efficient mashup of Gothic and eldritch horror, polished to a glossy YA sheen.

Our narrator, Helen Vaughan, has unexpectedly been named heir to Harrowstone Hall, a labyrinthine manor house guarding cosmic secrets. Her ancestor Nicholas Vaughan had it built to trap something he should never have meddled with. The Hall exerts a strange pull over heirs of the Vaughan family. Helen stumbles through its extradimensional mysteries and social interactions with equal awkwardness. Unfortunately for her, plenty of people in her extended family don’t think she should be the heir.

I think one reason this didn’t quite click for me is the disconnect between the gravity of Helen’s encounters with otherworldly horrors, dark gods, and murderous relatives, and the breezy just-like-you narration. It feels like the cast of a teen rom-com got dragooned into a Gothic horror novel. (It makes sense in the end, but that’s still about 300 pages of tonal mismatch to get through.)

The members of the extended Vaughan family get introduced all in a bunch in an early scene; none of them ever quite establish themselves as distinct characters. Rumors of a folkloric figure called the Harrow Witch reach Helen, and then the Witch immediately gets revealed to be Bryony, the teenage daughter of the de facto groundskeeper. The result is a flattened story, something that could be quite cool and interesting but instead mostly goes through the motions and gives its protagonists neither dimension nor danger.

It's as if Shadows takes a checklist for how to structure your YA novel, and proceeds through it sharply and professionally, but never deviates from it. You have your troubled teen with a mysterious past. She gets pulled into an even more mysterious and dangerous situation. An unknown enemy doesn't want her there, but she also meets a new friend who is fast with a quip. She meets an intriguing wildcard character who doesn't like her at first, but gradually softens and gives her a pet nickname. There’s a race to uncover dangerous family secrets. Helen herself is more than she seems. And so on and so forth.

Which isn’t to say that it’s bad, by any means. As an awkward and plausibly autistic person who’s always struggled with social dynamics, I found Helen appealing enough as a protagonist. The use of bones, too, was a nice narrative and thematic continuity, creative and creepy. The second half, once the mountain of table-setting had been done, is so much better than the first. The denouement outright kicks ass.

But much like with The Hazel Wood, I think I’m just not the target audience here, and that’s okay. I don’t think you have to be an actual teen to appreciate Shadows, but it would help if you were a bigger fan of YA.

2023 read #123: Under Another Sky by Charlotte Higgins.

Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain by Charlotte Higgins

257 pages

Published 2013

Read from October 23 to October 24

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Recently, a meme of sorts has been circulating, exposing just how much your average cis-het white guy thinks about the Roman Empire on a daily basis. The underlying cause, like so much else in this modern hellscape, is a careful system of fascist indoctrination. Empires and conquest are masculine. Discipline and obedience to order are masculine. Marching into new lands and holding an eagle banner aloft are masculine. You don’t wanna be a fem, right, buddy?

I’ve always been a history girl, and here in America, Romans are always propagandistically positioned as our spiritual and political forebears. Athens had a (severely circumscribed) “democracy,” sure, but Romans? They had a republic. Landed men of breeding and prestige ruling over a rabble of mindless plebeians, as God and George Washington intended. A lost golden age for mediocre white dudes. And when Julius Caesar marched in like a main character and turned that republic into a dictatorship — well, sure it was a shame, but wasn’t it full of glory? So yeah. It isn’t any surprise to me that white American men think a lot about the Romans. Just look at how they vote.

It sucks how much the Romans are used as a tool of rightwing propaganda, because I find the Roman era fascinating for entirely different reasons: culture contact spanning parts of three continents, the movements of people and trade goods, people from all corners of the empire winding up in every other corner of the empire. Villas in Yorkshire, mystery cults in London, garum unloaded along the Thames, Iraqis and Algerians manning Hadrian’s Wall — that’s what interests me. Fuck empire, fuck emperors, fuck the legions. Tell me about the day-to-day.

Naturally I picked up this book the moment I saw it in a used book store. But it was equally natural that I should avoid reading it, given our current descent into fascism. (Recall the etymology of fascist.) I felt a sort of shame at the current associations of Rome, even though no one else really reads my reviews. Plus, with an era so heavily propagandized, you never know if an author is going to hit you with some rightwing bullshit. I’d just rather not, you know?

Under Another Sky is less about recovering a sense of what Roman Britain was like and more about the cultural process of interpretation, investigating the ways various eras have construed the Roman period as a reflection of their own mores and outlooks — “manifestations of the historical imaginations of those who described them,” as Higgins puts it in her introduction. She expands: “‘Britain’ was an idea for the Romans. For us, ‘Roman Britain’ is also an idea….”

Higgins’ narrative is constructed from her own travels, by foot and by VW camper van, across Roman Britain. The result is thoroughly readable but somewhat journalistic, full of colorful locals who pop in for two paragraphs to help Higgins make a point, followed by an equally brief anecdote of a rain-thwarted picnic to add atmosphere. Long segments are dedicated to pocket biographies of 19th century antiquarians and 20th century archaeologists, and how their personal biases shaped their interpretations. Pretty standard stuff for contemporary non-fiction, but it doesn’t give a sense of depth, either to history or to Higgins’ journeys.

At times, though, Higgins’ prose and imagery are quite beautiful. The chapter in which she walks around the surviving traces of Londinium is particularly good. Another Sky is far from an information-dense tome, but it works perfectly well for what it is.

2023 read #122: Out of Time’s Abyss by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Out of Time’s Abyss: The Tale of Bradley by Edgar Rice Burroughs

88 pages

Published 1918

Read from October 22 to October 23

Rating: 0.5 out of 5

Back in Caspak one last time, finally wrapping up the shitty trilogy that began with The Land that Time Forgot and The People that Time Forgot. No surprise, today our generic pulp hero is some dude named Bradley — so generic that he’s never given any other name. Lieutenant Bradley is little more than a military robot, crisp and efficient, “indifferent” to danger. The men under his command blend into one another. The switch to third person narration makes their characterization feel somehow even shallower than what we saw in the previous two books. I didn’t know that was possible. (Can a character have zero dimensions? If he's written by Burroughs, he can!)

This concluding novella is a rote retread of the standard bullshit we’ve seen before: racism, life-is-cheap violence, ownership-kink misogyny, colonialist might-makes-right moral nihilism. The big new gimmick here is the Wieroo, winged man-things mentioned in People but centered here for the first time. As pulp adversaries, the Wieroo (and their village of piled human skulls) bring a sort of proto-sword and sorcery vibe that I think pairs well with pulpy dinosaurs and sabertooth cats. There's even a dungeon-crawl of sorts beheath the Wieroo city. But of course Burroughs sucks, and his execution of the winged-man concept leaves much to be desired.

Abyss is a slog. Bradley is desperately uninteresting as a character, and the Wieroo wear out their novelty in record time. The only reason I read it at all was because the three novellas were printed in one volume, and I was fool enough to buy a copy.

2023 read #121: The People that Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

The People that Time Forgot: The Adventures of Thomas Billings by Edgar Rice Burroughs

92 pages

Published 1918

Read from October 21 to October 22

Rating: 1 out of 5

The only reason to read this book, aside from a stubborn desire to complete the story begun in The Land that Time Forgot, comes at the start of chapter two. Our new paragon of white American masculinity, Tom Billings, has launched his “hydro-aeroplane” to search for his friend Bowen Tyler, lost in the mysterious land of Caspak. Almost immediately Tom finds his biplane attacked by an enormous “pterodactyl,” and engages his machine guns to dogfight it. There — I spared you the need to ever read the rest.

People has the sense to plop us right into Caspak instead of farting around with some convoluted sequence involving multiple sunken ships and multiple takeovers of a U-Boat. It is better-paced and, in general, far closer to what I had expected this series to be — full of prehistoric adventure, narrow escapes, nocturnal confrontations with cave bears, and so on. It never becomes as fun or engaging as Doyle’s The Lost World, but at least it reaches a benchmark of readability that eluded The Land that Time Forgot.

On the other hand, this is a vile, racist book. Its plot is structured around shitty early 20th century “race theory,” with individual people evolving Pokémon-style through the “stages” of human evolution from ape to white guy. (This has less to do with Darwinism and more to do with the Christian white supremacist “Great Chain of Being” ideology that appropriated Darwinism to justify itself.) Plus there’s the proto-Gorean “this she is mine” bullshit, a pulp power fantasy of sexual ownership. Then there’s Tom’s internalized revulsion at his miscegenation with the redoubtable Ajor. On top of that, all of Caspak wallows in a drearily modernist “kill or be killed” philosophy. There isn’t anything you can do to save or excuse a book like this. (Though it does contextualize “Maureen Birnbaum at the Earth’s Core.”)

2023 read #120: The Land that Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

The Land that Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs

91 pages

Published 1918

Read from October 20 to October 21

Rating: 0.5 out of 5

Somehow I’ve gotten to age 40 without reading any Edgar Rice Burroughs. I suppose it isn’t difficult; I haven’t read anything by Lovecraft, either, and don’t feel like either one has been a great loss to me. But Burroughs fit so precisely into the “boys’ adventure” pigeonhole — basically all that my abusive, controlling father permitted me to read as a kid — that I’m mildly surprised I never read him before. Particularly this trilogy, his attempt to emulate and cash in on Doyle’s The Lost World.

I did try to read The Land that Time Forgot in that same dino-obsessed period when I first read The Lost World; I found a copy in a library when I was 12 or 13. But there’s so much unnecessary crap to wade through just to get the story started. A man on a Geeenland rest-cure finds a Thermos bottle with a narrative inside; it relates how some dude named Bowen Tyler survived a U-Boat attack with a young woman named Lys La Rue, how they were rescued, were sunk again, wound up in a U-Boat with Lys’ German fiancée, blundered their way into the South Pacific, and so on and so forth. It’s all deadly dull. We don’t even reach Caspak until almost halfway through. It defeated my interest, and not just as a kid — I tried to read this several times as an adult before now.

(I’ll take this moment to note that I had some confusion about whether the Caspak series was three novellas, as it was originally published, or one novel, as it was later printed. I’m going with three novellas in my bookkeeping here, because they seem — from a casual glance — to have different narrators and represent separate adventures.)

Contrasting this slim but tedious book with Doyle’s The Lost World serves only to make me wonder why Burroughs was ever popular. Where Doyle’s brisk storytelling wove an engrossing adventure with lively characters, atmosphere, and memorable incidents, Burroughs pens a plodding, forgettable affair, full of flimsy plot contrivances and banal fistfights. Like, how do you make pulp boring? Burroughs found a way.

Once we get to Caspak, this trend continues. Contrast Doyle’s evocative Maple White Land, with its then-current scientific depictions of iguanodonts, stegosaurs, and allosaurs, with Burroughs’ slavering multitudes of indistinguishable saurians. We rarely get descriptions more exact than “huge thing.” Even worse, the shitty racism of the time is even more front and center here than it is in the (already very racist) book by Doyle. “Each race of proto-man evolves toward the white man” was the detail that made me give this book a worse rating than anything I’ve actually finished for this blog.

In short, I found nothing whatsoever to recommend The Land that Time Forgot. And I still have two more Caspak novellas to go. I’m just stubborn enough that I think I’ll finish them just so I can check them off and never think about them again.

2023 read #119: Mastodonia by Clifford D. Simak.

Mastodonia by Clifford D. Simak

213 pages

Published 1978

Read October 20

Rating: 1 out of 5

I’m deep in the weeds searching for new-to-me dinosaur fiction.

My expectations were less than zero for this tale of a red-blooded American man turning entrepreneur when his dog discovers “time roads” in his backyard. Hell, I had a copy of this book once before, during the same era that I first read Dinosaur Planet. I couldn’t even finish it back then. Not an encouraging sign.

Unsurprisingly, Mastodonia is not good. The prose is flat, and characterization next to nonexistent. The dialogue is stiff and improbable; every character launches into exposition, or their life story, after a single swig of beer. Asa Steele, our narrator, was an academic archaeologist but now putters around a farm in Willow Bend, Wisconsin, drawn here by the belief that an ancient crashed spaceship lurks in the neighborhood. Rila Elliot, with whom he shared a fieldwork fling twenty years ago, has gotten into the import-export business, meaning she sells dubiously obtained fossils and artifacts. Rila just happens to show up back in Asa’s life when his dog starts bringing back fresh dinosaur bones and Folsom spears. (If you expected some kind of angle behind Rila’s arrival, or any kind of interpersonal conflict that arises between them in the third act, you overestimated the level of plotting that went into this book.) A local “simpleton” named Hiram, a stock character straight out of a Stephen King novel, right on down to his magical ability to communicate with animals and aliens, also gets involved. It’s very much 1970s_sci_fi.txt.

As you’d expect from such an intensely mediocre novel from such a mediocre time, the narrative expresses admiration for the “pioneer attitude.” Much of the book is the investment capital prologue to “A Gun for Dinosaur” that no one asked for. You expected a time travel adventure book? Surprise! It’s all about capitalism. All too many pages are spent talking about the pecuniary benefits of having a local time-warp outside a small town. Noble-hearted lawyers want to protect our heroes from the perfidious IRS; the Mastodonia of the title originates as a primordial tax-shelter. It’s rather tiresome.

Presaging “In the Upper Cretaceous with the Summerfire Brigade,” there’s even a subplot about deporting the nation’s poor and hungry into Deep Time. Unlike “Summerfire” author Ian Watson, Simak doesn’t specify which ethnic groups should get chucked into the Miocene, but he does depersonalize them by referring to “the ghettos.” Asa and Rila vow to scuttle their entire operation rather than open Mastodonia up to “those mobs.” The ending is the nadir of the individualism fetish in 20th century sci-fi: rather than share a pristine Pleistocene world with inner-city poor, our country boy hero Asa taps into his masculine specialness and finds he has the ability to open up new time roads all on his own. (You could probably sense my eyes rolling all the way from the Cretaceous.)

There are nice little touches here and there — the hepatica flowers Asa notices when he first walks into the Pleistocene; the general vibe of the mobile home they set up in Mastodonia, with its whippoorwills and flowering crab-apples and resident mastodon bull hungry for carrots. Such moments are far too few, however, to make up for the dull boilerplate of the rest of the book.

2023 read #118: Dungeon Critters by Natalie Riess & Sara Goetter.

Dungeon Critters by Natalie Riess & Sara Goetter

249 pages

Published 2020

Read October 13

Rating: 4 out of 5

This is an incredibly sweet and wholesome middle grade graphic novel about a band of adventurers in a realm populated by various animal people. The adventuring party is as archetypal as they come: a socially anxious and nerdy dog who’s a plant-wizard; a dapper spellcaster cat with a mild case of pyromania; a strong and level-headed snake-with-legs who wields an axe; a frog prince who fences and sneaks and has a reputation for stealing from her friends. The art is charming and full of details that add to the story. The story itself is unexpectedly rich, earning its twists by setting them up discreetly early on. Wholeheartedly recommend.

2023 read #117: Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero.

Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero

324 pages

Published 2017

Read from October 11 to October 13

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

If you had hoped a book with a title and cover like this one would actually be about meddling kids, solving mysteries from their bikes or from a groovy van, the first pages quickly disabuse you of that notion. This is about the traumatized adults those kids grow into, their lives beset with nightmares, drugs, therapists, suicide, and the eldritch horrors lurking behind the men in the rubber masks.

I knew going into it what this would be, but I gotta admit, at this point in my life, I want kids-on-bikes novels more than I want novels of depressed and traumatized adults going back to face what really happened. I’m a depressed and traumatized adult, beset by daily horrors and corruption! If I wanted more of that, I could just be present in my body!

Anyway. The prose isn’t my favorite, affecting a purplish modern pulp cadence that tries way too hard to be cheeky and punchy and cynical, full of pop culture similes and fourth-wall-breaking camera angles. The narrative voice fits neither the gravitas of the eldritch PTSD narrative nor the childhood suspicions buried beneath the meddling-kids hijinks. (Or maybe, at any rate, it just didn’t click for me.) Cantero’s prose most closely reminded me of movie novelizations from mercenary writers in the late 1970s and early ’80s, William Kotzwinkle’s E.T. in particular.

Aside from that, the story is fine. It’s 1990; thirteen years ago, the Blyton Summer Detective Club — four tweens and their faithful Weimaraner Sean — cracked their last case, capturing an old drifter who had dressed up like a lake monster in order to steal hidden treasure from an island on Sleepy Lake. Except that isn’t what happened. The truth has drawn the surviving Summer Detectives (and Sean’s descendant, Tim) back to Sleepy Lake and its half-forgotten horrors. If you’ve seen the cover, or made it through the prologue, you’ll know exactly what awaits them: eldritch business straight out of Lovecraft, complete with the Necronomicon. The book does what it says on the label, no real surprises.

Keep in mind that, the way I use ratings here, 2.5 stars is “pretty good, about average, worth a read,” and not what 2.5 stars would mean on Goodreads.

2023 read #116: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December 1982.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December 1982 issue (63:6)

Edited by Edward L. Ferman

162 pages

Published 1982

Read from October 10 to October 12

Rating: 1 out of 5

Over the years I’ve collected an unruly amount of F&SF issues, and I don’t have a plan for how I want to read them all.

At one point I thought I might alternate between my oldest unread and my newest unread, reading forward and backward until I closed the gap, but that would take years of sticking to a plan — a plan that would be thrown out of whack every time I collected an issue from a time I’d already covered. Then I thought I might read an issue at a time from random decades, picking whatever looked most appealing from the six decades my collection covers: one from the 1960s here, then one from the 2000s, and so forth. I might do that at some point.

None of that really matters. For now, I’m picking issues more or less at random. Here’s one from a calendar month that has personal significance to me. It isn’t the oldest in my collection, but it’ll be the oldest issue I’ve read to date. I’ve read some amazing fantasy from this era, but I don’t have high hopes! (Too many eighties men on the TOC.)

“Condemned, A Kiss, and Sleep” by Wayne Wightman. I haven’t had much luck with the Wayne Wightman stories I’ve encountered. This one — his very first in F&SF — does not offer encouragement. It begins with our narrator, Rodan Samsara, inflicting his sci-fi trainwreck of a name upon us, then describing how sexy the Oracle of Delphi is, even though their relationship is just business. The story is a tedious piece about a pleasure planet with an inevitable dark side, rattled out in a pulpy man’s-man voice. There are fist fights and “handweapons.” For some reason, there are space hillbillies named Earl and Cleetus. The pleasure planet’s illusions provide the tale with passing interest here and there, but it doesn't last, and the story is about twice as long as it needs to be. I’ll be generous and say D

“Promises” by Lewis Shiner. Barely a blip of a story, in the midcentury Body Snatchers vein. Already old-fashioned even in 1982. A shrug. C-

“The Man Who Ate Himself” by Rudy Rucker. Another throwback piece that feels like it should have been printed no later than 1967. A pair of immature geniuses have been hired by a dying billionaire to blast him into space and keep him there, away from any planet or star, for the duration of the universe — but time is circular, wouldn’t you know, and everything comes back to where it started from. I think it’s supposed to be funny? It’s hard to tell, because it isn’t funny. Not much else here to redeem the piece besides its contempt for billionaires, which bumps its grade up just a little. F+

“The Corsican Box” by Mike Conner. God, I abhor the cis-het male perspective, especially in anything written before 2010 (and most things written after 2010). Even when the POV isn’t being outright lecherous, it always feels slimy. For instance, maybe it’ll emphasize how the Female is being weird, grumpy, withdrawn, etc., and how quickly our hero gives up on making sense of the Female. Your whole world doesn’t revolve around my happiness? Must be female troubles. This time around, Perri’s troubles are divorce, threats of a custody battle, and a jealous ex-husband who doesn’t appreciate that our hero Russ is sleeping with her. And our hero Russ sympathizes with him: “I could understand how Perri frustrated him.” God, what a shit-stain. Aside from that, this is a rote “antiques dealer finds a cursed box” number; it’s sluggishly paced, much too long, and the reveal, when it finally comes, isn’t that interesting. (It’s a vendetta curse from those uncivilized Corsicans! It makes Russ successful in business but also hot-headed and violent!) The climactic fist-fight at an amusement park is unintentionally absurd. F

“Coming Back” by Damien Broderick. This one was a struggle to read, a mix of gross and boring, and it wasn’t worth the effort. We open with typical Horny Man musings about our hero’s coworker, then immediately move on to a gruff senator threatening the funding of the technobabble factory where our hero works. (The senator bridges the conceptual gap by sexually harassing said coworker.) They’ve invented a limited form of time-reversal, our protagonist gets caught in it and time comes unglued, blah blah blah. Our hero uses his time loop situation to attempt to sexually assault his coworker. Then another time loop brings her back to him, this time impressed by his masculine competence. Absolute garbage. F

“What Did the Deazies Do?” by Richard Cowper. After that unparalleled string of dogshit stories, I’m shocked — actually shocked! — to find a competently written, atmospheric, and not overtly horrible contemporary fantasy piece. Young Jim, relocated to rural East Anglia before the Blitz, meets local wise-woman Miss Sarah Deazie, who shows him strange physics-defying clockworks made by her ancestor. The clockworks offer passage between here and “the other side.” Later, during the war, an American major learns of Miss Deazie, and sniffs after the devices she owns. His ancestors — like hers — came from “the other side,” and he tries to press a claim to the clockworks. Maybe it’s the shock of finding an actually good story here, but I’ll give this a full B

“The Day the Martels Got the Cable” by Pat Cadigan. I’ve been looking forward to this one ever since I looked at the TOC. Cyberpunk stalwart Cadigan penning a speculative story about cable TV? Talk about a forgotten retrofuture! It begins with the most benign glimpse of heterosexuality we’ve seen in this issue: Lydia and David are a young professional couple, and even though Lydia does all the organizational labor, David is game to have her call him in sick to work so he can wait for the cable guy. “Hell, he didn’t even feel funny about her making more money than he did.” (The fact that this would still be considered progressive four decades later is depressing.) It ends with a “the feminists are taking over!” gag that, I assume, was fully tongue-in-cheek. Maybe B-?

“The Way Down the Hill” by Tim Powers. A clan of immortals who periodically adopt new bodies, new sexes, new genders. Sounds like it could be cool, queer, gender-expansive stuff, right? Alas, this author adopts an attitude of gender-determinism: “It always upset me to consider how thoroughly even the keenest-edged minds are at the mercy of hormones and such biological baggage,” narrator Saul fumes, after discovering his bygone bearded drinking companion Marcus is now a woman, “Doubtless in a snit.” This story had been mildly intriguing up to that point, but it can fuck right off. The rest of the story involves Saul making difficult choices to “save” a fetus he fathered, as if that would fucking matter to an immortal body-hopping parasite. Maybe this features enough storytelling competence to merit an F+

Well, this issue was a fiasco! Even though I hadn’t expected much, I had hoped for a better showing than that. I still think the August 1990 issue is worse, but that’s only because few things could top the audacious shittiness of that issue.

2023 read #115: Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen.

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Afterword by Elizabeth Hardwick

221 pages

Published 1818

Read from October 9 to October 10

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I’ve barely read anything in the romantic classics vein. My experience begins and ends with Jane Eyre. It was just last month that I learned what “sensibility” meant in the context of Sense and Sensibility. So naturally I should begin with a satirical send-up of the genre, right?

Right from the start, the narrative voice is delightful, commiserating over young Catherine’s disadvantages as a Gothic heroine: her mother is alive; her neighborhood lacks a suitable rakish heir or mysterious foundling to court her; her carriage arrives at Bath safely without any upsets or dramatic robberies. The first young gentleman she meets exclaims over her failure to keep a journal, and goes on at length about quality muslin. But Catherine soon has her hands full with arcane social protocols, competing suitors, manipulative friends, and tangled knots of social pressures and civilities, afflictions enough for any tear-drenched heroine.

The central conceit, of course, is that Catherine filters the prosaic afflictions and limitations of her bourgeois life through the expectations of a Gothic novel. Existing as a woman in this era (or any other era) is full of horrors all on its own, so for the most part, it works. Courtesy masks the deepest cruelty; truth is delivered only through irony; money and title override everything. Much is made of the young woman’s choice to refuse, only for social pressures to remove her ability to choose. There are times when the banal detestability of the Thorpes makes the narrative drag. Honestly, when Henry Tilney gets into his “Oh, you silly women” speeches, he’s just as bad — even before the narrative brings us to the titular Abbey and the scheming general.

Like every other book of its time, Abbey brims with the bigotry and mores of its culture, which makes it impossible to enjoy wholeheartedly, even with Austen’s wry commentary.

2023 read #114: Drowned Country by Emily Tesh.

Drowned Country by Emily Tesh

157 pages

Published 2020

Read from October 8 to October 9

Rating: 3 out of 5

This is a follow-up to Tesh’s Silver in the Wood, a book I certainly read and enjoyed. But that was almost a year ago, and well over a hundred books ago; I barely remember any of it. I vaguely recall that it was a sweet achillean tale, brushed with green magic, but what transpired or how it ended are lost to me. Which was not the ideal way to begin this book. It assumes you have at least some familiarity with how things shook out in Wood.

So, I gave in and flipped through my copy. Spoilers for Silver in the Wood: Mrs. Silver hunts supernatural threats; her son Henry has followed her into the family business, but has a research bent. Henry buys Greenhollow Hall and meets Tobias, an ancient and canny woodsman who has a deep connection to something monstrous in the wood, something that desires to draw Henry into itself and consume him. When the primordial wickedness is defeated, Tobias goes off with Mrs. Silver to help hunt monsters, while Henry lingers at Greenhollow, now the magic steward of the ancient wood. The lovers part, but Tobias vows to return to Greenhollow someday, to rekindle the people side of himself after all this time.

Now the opening pages of Country make far more sense. Some early spoilers: We open on Henry, two or so years into his forest demigodhood, languishing on the floor of Greenhollow Hall, which rots and grows mushrooms around him. Apparently he and Tobias quarreled at some point and parted on bad terms. Mrs. Silver arrives unexpectedly with crisp commands for Henry to cease sulking and assist her and Tobias on a case. And just like that we’re in Rothport, a gloomy town straggling up a coastal cliff. Henry can feel the memory of his greenwood down below the flooded sea. Tobias, meanwhile, has shaved, and now looks “every inch the well-set-up modern man.” There isn’t time for a proper reunion, because it appears they have a vampire to hunt.

While Drowned Country is solid enough, it feels like the genre has shifted into paranormal procedural; it’s less of a sequel and more like the next installment of, say, a detective serial. Tobias has deflated from an archetypal Green Man, ages old and mysterious, to just another vaguely Victorian monster hunter. With the translation into the new subgenre, some of the sweet magic of Wood has dulled. The result is perfectly serviceable, at times even atmospheric and strange. I enjoyed the character of Maud Lindhurst; I was quite taken with the idea of the drowned country itself. The ending was sweet. But it’s all a step down from what I remember of the original.

2023 read #113: Siren Queen by Nghi Vo.

Siren Queen by Nghi Vo

282 pages

Published 2022

Read from October 6 to October 8

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Right from the first paragraph, I was in love with this book. It might be one of the best contemporary fantasy novels I’ve ever read, brilliantly mingling the dark glamours of studio system Hollywood with the treacherous rules of fae magic. It’s seamlessly woven, creatively rich, evocatively written. In the heady rush of scene-setting, I had to put it down once a page to catch my breath.

The movie set is fairyland, a realm where the colors are sharper and the air is richer; studio lots turn to earthworks and stone circles if you walk too far in the dark. Cameras are starving beasts, apt to leach color from your skin, to swallow your voice for keeps. Silver bracelets keep you bonded to your contract. Upcoming actors must surrender their names to the studios, stamped with new names to seal their oaths and turn them malleable to the studios’ whim. Child actors are swapped for changelings. The crews are protected by union rules, their real names kept hidden. The studio heads are avatars of older, more voracious predators.

It’s Radiance spun through fae rules. It’s luscious and dangerous and seductively queer, chilled and tempered with the realities of racism, bigotry, and patriarchal cruelty, the risks and bargains taken to survive.

2023 read #112: Lost Time by Tas Mukanik.

Lost Time by Tas Mukanik

With inks by Winter Jay Kiakas

240 pages

Published 2023

Read October 5

Rating: 4 out of 5

In one of the last recorded instances of Twitter being useful to anyone, I happened upon Tas Mukanik tweeting about this book just the other day, and promptly lined up my pre-order.

For a few years now I've felt we're overdue for another dinosaur fiction renaissance. Maybe not to the same degree we saw in the 1990s, and maybe not in adult fiction, but absolutely in YA and middle-grade. Every so often I check out the YA section of the chain bookseller and I'm surprised that there aren't any love triangle trilogies set in a technomagical royal court banished to the Late Cretaceous. (Or at least more books than one spun off from Jurassic World.) Do I have to do everything around here myself??

So Lost Time was quite the welcome find. It’s the heartwarming tale of Evie, an accidental time castaway, who raises Ada, an azhdarchid pterosaur, from an egg. It hits some of my favorite “lost in the Cretaceous” story beats: surviving by trial and error, making tools and traps, dealing with the climate, learning how to ride a tame beastie, an interlude amongst some giant trees. It’s also sweet and wholesome and quite lovely. If you ever wanted an array of Cretaceous fauna depicted in a post-Steven Universe CalArts-esque style, this is the book for you. It’s right up there with the first Dinosaur Sanctuary as one of my new favorite pieces of dino fiction.

2023 read #111: The Women of Weird Tales.

The Women of Weird Tales: Stories by Everil Worrell, Eli Colter, Mary Elizabeth Counselman, and Greye La Spina

Introduction by Melanie R. Anderson

278 pages

Published 2020

Read from October 2 to October 5

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I picked this one up from the same specialty bookshop where I got the Weird Woods anthology. This volume collects stories from four women who contributed to Weird Tales magazine. I’ve long been drawn to this 1920s through 1940s era of fantasy — it’s a fascinating, sometimes awkward time of growth and evolution in the genre, one often overlooked or at best summed up with a reprint or two from Unknown. I’m always hoping to read more, fully expecting that it won’t be very good, just interesting. Plus, the selections in this volume (so the introduction says) seem to trend toward weird pulpy horror, which fits the October vibe I want to cultivate.

“The Remorse of Professor Panebianco” by Greye La Spina (1925). Lurid stuff straight out of an early talkie mad-science thriller. Passionately Italian Professor Filippo Panebianco plots to trap a dying human’s soul in a crystal bell — for science! — while his passionately Italian bride Elena yearns for his approval (and his kisses). Elena harbors jealousy at the thought that anyone else’s soul could get trapped in Filippo’s precious crystal bell. You’ll never guess what happens next! Unintentionally amusing, in an MST3K sort of way, but otherwise meh.

“Leonora” by Everil Worrell (1927). I love when early automobiles are featured in genre pieces. (I know dieselpunk is already a thing, but I want to figure out how to make flivverpunk into its own thing.) This is a nicely atmospheric study in which teen girl Leonora meets a mysterious man in his beautiful silent car at the moonlit crossroads. The spell was broken for me when it was revealed what the stranger’s car looked like, but otherwise — for its time — this worked well enough.

“The Dead-Wagon” by Greye La Spina (1927). Virile American Kenneth has come to England all the way from New York because a girl smiled at him. Wanting to woo Arline, he hobnobs with her father, Lord Melverson. But there’s a curse over Melverson Abbey, and a spectral plague-cart that trundles up in the dead of night for the curse’s victims. Years later, married, with a firstborn of his own to save from the curse, Kenneth hears the dreaded wheels of the cart once more as midnight draws near. Picturesque gothic number, turgid and overwrought pulp — whichever way you want to phrase it, it’s exactly what I expected from this collection.

“The Canal” by Everil Worrell (1927). Aloof, morbid modern man Morton, numb to fear and love alike, enjoys long walks along the canal at midnight. He encounters an ethereal, heart-faced woman living on a decrepit old canal boat and immediately falls in love; inevitably, he also learns the meaning of fear when he figures out why his beloved can’t cross the flowing water of the canal. There are interesting hints of self-destructive eroticism here, amid the usual overheated fluff of this era.

“The Curse of a Song” by Eli Colter (1928). While the preceding stories have been goofy, lurid fun, this one is just kind of flat, narrated implausibly over after-dinner tobacco in a rusty turn-of-the-century style. The tale of Uncle Thad’s vengeful ghost punishing his young niece Rose to the tune of an old popular song is overlong, notable mainly for its Portland, Oregon setting, with a weekend roadster excursion up to Mount Hood and its summer cabins, and other little glimpses into bygone things. It does have some gothic charm toward the end, especially the climactic piano battle against the forces of darkness Uncle Thad.

“Vulture Crag” by Everil Worrell (1928). That title primed me to anticipate a weird western. Instead we start with a nicely atmospheric excursion to Maryland’s Eastern Shore, as the mysterious Count Zolani drives his roadster through piney backroads to the titular crag — which Zolani proposes to convert into a lab for his theories of ethereal vibration and space travel. The end goal is to literally vibe across the cosmos, because that’s the era of science fiction we’re dealing with here. (One is reminded of Olaf Stapledon’s “I traveled through space and time with the power of imagination!”) Manly POV Donald gets roped in by Zolani to supply the bankroll; Donald’s concerned love-interest Dorothy doesn’t understand all these big manly words, but fakes a romantic attachment to Zolani to get the Count to let her accompany her man. And oh dear, Zolani is unhappy about this! This story feels more dated than the others, in terms of shitty little touches of racism and sexism; the plot is a mix of appealingly hokey and eye-rollingly obvious, shading into just plain distasteful at the end. After all that buildup, we don’t even get to mind-trip across the universe. Disappointing.

“The Rays of the Moon” by Everil Worrell (1928). Here we reach the full sleaziness of 1920s pulp: our narrator, yet another Morton, is a callous, morphine-addicted medical student stealing fresh cadavers to further his reanimation experiments. It’s like a prototype of grimy 1980s horror. “Rays” reminds you that it’s very much of its time, however, when Morton — and the whole cemetery’s worth of bodies — gets “magnetized” upward by the full moon. He comes to, in fact, on the dusty, bone-white surface of the moon, and realizes he is a ghost. Was it possible that audiences ever took this pulpy stuff seriously, or was it always intended as campy and ridiculous entertainment? This story is basically Frankenstein meets A Christmas Carol in space. It might be the most gloriously absurd pulp mishmash I’ve ever read. Which isn’t to say that it’s good, of course, merely that this is exactly what I came here to read.

“The Gray Killer” by Everil Worrell (1929). Medical horror in which our narrator, Miss Wheaton, hospitalized for blood poisoning as a result of a nail through her foot, receives a nocturnal visit from a gray being who calls himself Dr. Zingler, who offers to take away her pain. Any patient who accepts his treatment is found brutally murdered, or else disappears. And the other doctors seem to be in cahoots with the sinister gray killer, gaslighting and sedating Miss Wheaton. There’s a subplot with another doctor trying to flirt with her, because of course there is. Way overlong for what it is, a tedious buildup to a bit of throwaway eldritch horror, without enough interest to sustain its length.

“The Black Stone Statue” by Mary Elizabeth Counselman (1937). Between the title and the first three paragraphs, I had this one pretty much sussed out: unscrupulous sculptor, tired of penury, finds some nefarious means to turn human beings into stone statues. The middle portion, which relates the experience of the cracked-up aviator who finds a petrified black forest in Brazil, and a large alien amoeba at its heart, is some fine pulp weirdness. It was more interesting than the venal sculptor’s predictable side of the tale. Still, for its time, this is a solid, self-contained little story.

“The Web of Silence” by Mary Elizabeth Counselman (1939). Mad scientist Dr. Ubique demands a ransom from the mayor of Blankville; ignored, he deadens all sound in the town (or does he??). A corny supervillainy caper (or is it??) related in quasi-journalistic style, this was mildly amusing but outlasted its welcome. The ending was silly.

“The Deadly Theory” by Greye La Spina (1942). Alchemy is worked in the Maine woods as a bereaved mystic uncle attempts to bring his niece back to life from her ashes. This one also didn’t grab me as a story, though I do like the idea of alchemical fantasy in the modern day.

“Great Pan Is Here” by Greye La Spina (1943). Early fantasists just loved Pan, didn’t they? This one begins memorably (and modernly) enough, with our narrator, driving five cocktails deep, spotting a set of seven-reed pipes on the side of the suburban road. Like any rich white man of the era, Craig wants time alone with his lovely cousin Cecily, but his new fixation on the Pan-pipes (which no one else saw) leads to exchange of words and a solitary evening for him, with only a cigarette and a couple highballs for company. But what is that shadowy figure playing the pipes in his garden? The rest of the story proceeds much like you’d expect a Pan story to go when you have a cast of bored young socialites suddenly awakened to the appetites of “nature.” Craig was an annoying narrator, and the story ends somewhat abruptly, as if a more graphic ending were edited away; otherwise it worked well enough.

“The Antimacassar” by Greye La Spina (1949). Bucks County gothic, with young lodger Lucy discovering what became of her disappeared colleague who vacationed at a Pennsylvania Dutch farmhouse. Spoilers: the landlady’s daughter is a hungry hungry vampire, and the only thing protecting Lucy is a vase of fresh honeysuckle. This one was stiffly written in comparison to most of the other La Spina pieces here, cramming exposition in with overheard conversations and awkward amateur detective work. But I enjoyed the element of loom-weaving; the hidden message in the antimacassar was an interesting touch that deserved a better story.

That’s it! I’ve discovered an appetite for old Weird Tales stories thanks to this collection, and have been pricing other best-of volumes. (You can even buy reprints of individual issues, which is pretty cool.) However, given the preponderance of male writers, I’m not certain I’d enjoy them nearly as much.

2023 read #110: Zone One by Colson Whitehead.

Zone One by Colson Whitehead

322 pages

Published 2011

Read from September 30 to October 4

Rating: 4 out of 5

I detest the artificial distinction between mundane “literary” fiction and speculative, fantastical elements. Fantasy, sci-fi, horror — these are just different tools in the storytelling toolkit. Incorporating them into highbrow fiction is no stranger, no less literary, than utilizing romance, mystery, suspense, or fancy prose in your literary book. Yet the publishing industry (and book critics) shun anything that smacks of “genre.” Except when a mainstream highbrow writer dabbles in it, of course.

I haven’t read much of Whitehead’s work — just The Intuitionist so far — but from what I’ve seen, he never shies away from genre elements. (What are The Intuitionist and The Underground Railroad if not contemporary fabulism?) Yet the critic blurbs at the front of Zone One grab your sleeve to exclaim that it “is not the work of a serious novelist slumming it with some genre-novel cash-in…” Note the disdain, the monocle-shifting assumption that no one serious would sully their hands with genre work. Also the odd implication that SFFH somehow makes more money than mainstream mundane fiction.

It’s attitudes like this that cause lit critics to fall over themselves praising the originality of any literary author who uses a genre trope that’s been a cliché for fifty years. (I loved Never Let Me Go, but let’s be real here.) 

Anyway. Zone One is excellent, despite centering on a genre trope — zombies — that’s been a cliché for well over fifty years. Like so many others, I got burnt out on zombies back in the ’00s. I read World War Z, played lots of Left 4 Dead, and felt that Shaun of the Dead put a nice little bow on the subject. As expected, Whitehead is talented enough to find life left in the subgenre (pun intended). “We ignore the monstrous surrounding us in modern life” isn't the freshest take (again, see Shaun of the Dead), but what Whitehead does with it feels worthwhile.

If the zombie fad was borne of white Americans processing 9/11 and their vulnerability in the face of the Other, Zone One is a satire of how George W. Bush encouraged everyone to go shopping to defeat the terrorists. Survivor camps sell their own branded merchandise. Various corporate conglomerates offer “sponsorships” to survivors, permitting them to loot their brands, so long as the items cost less than $30. In exchange, the companies get hush-hush boons from the provisional government. Apocalypse celebrities — those whose exploits evading the living dead exuded true Final Girl energy — get appointed to cabinet positions.

While there are bursts of action, of grisly tableaux, ambushes of concise heartbreak, and the final seeping weight of tragedy, the bulk of the narrative spirals in desultory rounds musing about the suburban past and the hypothetical future. Our viewpoint character Mark Spitz, like so many other survivors, is distinguished by his mediocrity, his inconspicuous ability to fail upward. “A part of him thrived on the end of the world. How else to explain it: He had a knack for apocalypse.”

If Station Eleven was my personal harbinger of our current plague, painting December 2019 and January 2020 with prescient anxiety, Zone One feels like a suitable companion piece to the pandemic’s current stage, its ongoing horror and dislocation, its unaddressed traumas all conveniently punted out of sight in order for us to get on with tendering our bodies to capitalism, our cynicism seasoned with almost four years of officially acceptable cataclysm. Whitehead coins Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder, a concept we need to grapple with here in the shambles of our world: “In the new reckoning, a hundred percent of the world was mad. Seemed about right.”

2023 read #109: Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder, edited by David G. Hartwell.

Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder, edited by David G. Hartwell with the assistance of Kathryn Cramer

660 pages

Published 1989

Read from June 29 to October 1

Rating: 3 out of 5

It took me seven and a half years to persevere through Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment, the preceding volume in this anthology series. Hopefully this one won’t take me quite so long, though I do intend to read it piecemeal over the summer, likely into autumn. [Edit: Definitely into autumn.]

Everything about these two volumes is emblematic of the 1980s “adult fantasy” boom. You have the New Romantic cover art by Thomas Canty. You have the disdain for contemporary trilogies of Tolkien pastiches marketed in “bright colors.” You have the insistence (correct, but perhaps sounding a little desperate) that fantasy is and has always been an integral aspect of the world’s important literature, extending beyond the handful of tropes that happened to get thrown together under the commercial fantasy label in the 1970s. You can feel their urgency to legitimize the genre. This is art, you guys! It’s meaningful!

The introduction to 1988’s The Year’s Best Fantasy: First Annual Collection hits almost identical talking points. Clearly the genre’s luminaries were in a mood to be taken seriously at the end of the ’80s.

Onward to the stories!

“Green Is the Color” by John M. Ford (1987). I had been excited for this one until I realized that I was thinking of Jeffrey Ford, 21st century darling of short fantasy fiction. John M. Ford, by contrast, has Star Trek novels on his CV. Surprisingly, this is a solid (albeit sprawling) tale, interweaving a languid mystery of magical deaths with the story of a healer who is just trying to find a cure for her young charge’s nightmares. The character of Quard Toymaker — catty, queer-coded, all-knowing yet deliberately unhelpful until he decides to do exactly what needs to be done — is memorable, one of my new favorite characters from ’80s fantasy (or at least he is before his inevitable destiny catches up with him). Not everything works here, but it earns my appreciation.

“Wooden Tony” by Lucy Clifford (1892). This falls securely into what TikTok might term the “Oh no, little German boy!” school of fabulism, even though our particular little German boy here is actually Swiss. Spoilers: Tony, who reads to modern ears like a kid with autism and ADHD, dreams through his days and sings a song he possibly learned from the clouds; he no longer participates in his village’s tourism-based economy. For this he is scorned as “Wooden-head!” When a trader comes and offers to take Tony to Geneva and send his song out to all the world, his song is (as is the way of “Oh no, little German boy!” stories) extracted from him; Tony, now tiny with distance and fully wooden, is mounted into a musical cuckoo clock alongside one of his father’s carvings. One could read into this tale a critique of extractive capitalism. For what it is, and when it was written, it’s pretty good.

“Lest Levitation Come Upon Us” by Suzette Haden Elgin (1982). If I had a nickel for every time I read a feminist parable by Suzette Haden Elgin in which a woman inadvertently worked miracles, only for the miracles to be twisted and disregarded by the patriarchal powers of the world, I’d have two nickels! (See “Lo, How an Oak E’er Blooming” in the February 1986 issue of F&SF.) Not that there’s anything wrong with a writer having a niche. This is a cutting satire of how patriarchal power forces women into conformity — the rewards of being number two in the hierarchy, after all, are the prerogatives of cis, het, white, Christian women who fall in line — and how unwilling such a woman might be, in the end, to abandon the power of conformity.

“Prince Bull: A Fairy Tale” by Charles Dickens (1855). A tiresome imperialist allegory about noble Prince Bull getting hampered and ensnared by his perfidious fairy godmother Red Tape, and how Prince Bull’s innumerable children and his ungrateful servants look the other way instead of supporting his war against Prince Bear. Basically, it’s saying: “That damn bureaucracy and those mediocre ministers made a mess of our gallant and just Crimean War!” There’s nothing to recommend in this story.

“The Triumph of Vice: A Fairy Tale” by W. S. Gilbert (1867). Before his iconic pairing with Sullivan, Gilbert was a dramatist who sometimes wrote fairy tales for adults. Two things raise this one above the level of Dickens’ fairy tale: it isn’t an allegory on behalf of imperialism, and the repartee between Count von Krappentrapp, romantically thwarted by the towering Bertha, and Prince Pooh, a shifty gnome who hires the Count to woo him up a wife, is mildly amusing. Placing this above “Prince Bull,” however, is faint praise indeed. It deserves little else.

Entering August now, for those keeping track of my pace. (It’s me. I’m the one curious about my pace.)

“Turandina” by Fyodor Sologub (1912, English translation 1915). This is a drily tongue-in-cheek satire about a promising young lawyer who, despite his skill at subverting justice and his regular stipend from his father, finds himself unhappy, affecting the Modern malaise of cynical ennui. Peter Antònovitch dramatically longs for a fairy tale to come along and disrupt the overly ordered cause-and-effect of modern life. When Turandina, a forest enchantress seeking shelter in the mortal world, manifests at the very climax of Peter’s longing, he — modern man that he is — doesn’t believe her, and the police demand to see her passport. A fine effort, though (as with so many stories of this time) it peters out at the end, no pun intended.

“The Princess and the Frog” by Robin McKinley (1981). Little surprise that this one is excellent. It's been a while since I've read McKinley, but I would expect nothing less from the author of Deerskin. This is an atmospheric courtly fantasy retelling that expands the standard fairy tale and offers an insight: enchantment and manipulation are the same litany in different registers.

“Darkness Box” by Ursula K. Le Guin (1963). Le Guin’s greatness as a storyteller — her quietly assured prose, her careful skill with character, her vivid scene-setting — elevates what seems at first to be merely an archetypal narrative into something ethereal, something vast, a melancholy and (literally) timeless meditation on holding the world still for fear of loss and change. Le Guin was writing twenty years ahead of her time in this one, as she so often did.

“Jack and the Beanstalk” by Osbert Sitwell (1959). Hard to believe this was published a mere four years before Le Guin’s effort above — they seem to date from different centuries. Sitwell draws out an essentially capitalist narrative in his “Beanstalk” retelling, meta-referencing Jack as “a sort of magical Sir Thomas Lipton.” Armed only with the pat aphorisms of the mercantile class, our Jack heads up the beanstalk and quickly learns to be an adept colonialist. Mostly a standard retread up until the cynical humor of Jack's post-beanstalk career.

Three chapters from The Little White Bird by J. M. Barrie (1902). Peter Pan made his first appearance in these chapters; the character’s popularity inspired the subsequent stage show and then his own book. Raised by television as I was, Peter Pan was always one of my personal icons, a rejection of the abusive adults in my life, but I hadn’t yet read anything Barrie wrote before now. The Peter mythos in these chapters is far different, and far stranger, than anything that made its way into an afternoon cartoon. Babies are hatched as birds and fly away to their human parents; Peter simply doesn’t realize he’s a boy, and flies back to Kensington Gardens. Birds raise him on an island there, where he learns his tragic fate as a Betwixt-and-Between, neither boy nor bird. As if all this weren’t enough to inspire a chapbook full of gender poetry, he escapes the island again with the assistance of a £5 bank note from Percy Bysshe Shelley. Good stuff.

“The Mouse Festival” by Johannes Bobrowski (1965, English translation 1989). I’m uncomfortable with the fact that Bobrowski was a German soldier in World War II. This delicate wisp of a tale addresses the German invasion of Poland from the mystic, moonlit perspective of a Jewish shopkeeper who shares a moment with a young German invader, watching mice celebrating a crust of bread in his shop. It is a thing of frail beauty, but I’m not happy that a German veteran is the one writing it.

“A Proper Santa Claus” by Anne McCaffrey (1973). Six year old Jeremy can paint and sculpt things into being, but his parents and his teacher don’t understand him, and the small neglects, disappointments, and adult expectations accumulate against the primitive magic of childhood. The ending feels inevitable. Not a classic, but not bad either. Hard to believe this is the same author who cranked out the dismal Dinosaur Planet.

It’s hard to read during the summer. It’s September now! Late September, in fact. I back-burnered this collection for a while.

“Inside Out” by Rudy Rucker (1987). This story is part of the reason I didn’t prioritize this book for the last month. I got stuck here for a bit, discouraged by Rucker’s opening depiction of suburban mediocrity rendered in all its damp, Pizza Hut-scented grotesquery. A potentially interesting tale of fractal pattern-people and nested possession gets gummed up by “take my wife — please!” heteronormativity. The strange vertiginous math-fantasy of multiple dimensions in string theory was good, the domestic disdain and sexual resentment was not.

“The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut” by Mark Twain (1876). Our narrator inadvertently renders his conscience perceptible, and proceeds to grill it about the whys and wherefores of the conscience business. Standard Twainian stuff, witty platitudes about human nature and so on from start to finish. It’s fine. Doesn’t live up to its excellent title. 

“The Woman Who Thought She Could Read” by Avram Davidson (1959). An urban fable about an Eastern European immigrant who was taught to read the future in beans. The story is a nice mix of pre-war small-city childhood vibes with a touch of eeriness and tragedy, reminiscent of Ray Bradbury (though not quite on Bradbury’s level of artistry). Solid.

“The Third Level” by Jack Finney (1950). I read and reviewed this story way back in 2014. Since it’s been a while, and my own tastes and perceptions have changed considerably since then, I decided to reread it instead of copying out what I wrote nine years ago. I’ve come to an appreciation for the use of urban spaces in fantasy, the sense that anything could be hidden away in an unfamiliar neighborhood, or at the end of the sidewalk — or, here, on a mysterious gaslit level of Grand Central Station. “Sometimes I think Grand Central is growing like a tree, pushing out new corridors and staircases like roots” — that’s a chef's-kiss image right there. Since I first read “The Third Level,” I’ve grown much more skeptical of this particular brand of “the old days were better” wistfulness, but the story still works, regardless.

“The Griffin and the Minor Canon” by Frank R. Stockton (1885). An otherwise satisfying fable that carries the stink of fear-based authoritarianism in its moral. A griffin, last of his kind, journeys to a town that features an excellent likeness of a griffin on its church. The only citizen brave enough to talk with him is the church’s minor canon; the griffin takes a liking to him, and follows him around the town on his daily labors. Seeing this, the cowardly citizens send the canon away into the wilds. Enraged at their cowardice, the griffin performs the charity work and teaching that had been done by the canon, and the fear of him makes the poor take up jobs and the “bad” children apply themselves to their lessons. That’s the part I didn’t like. But yeah, other than that, this tale works well enough.

“The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles” by Margaret St. Clair (1951). The first Masterpieces volume introduced me to St. Clair with her lovely vignette “The Goddess on the Street Corner.” Since then, I’ve read two of her novels — Message from the Eocene and The Games of Neith — neither of which lived up to that initial promise. This little tale is a perfectly serviceable darkly humorous fantasy about a thoroughly modern salesman who ventures to the edge of Terra Cognita to, well, sell rope to gnoles. (Lord Dunsany's gnoles, not modern D&D gnoles; the title has a touch of “selling coals to Newcastle” about it, what with the tentacles and all.) A fine fancy, though it doesn’t equal “Goddess.”

“The Dragons” by Murilo Rubião (original publication date unclear, English translation published 1965). A slim magical realism piece that draws an allegory for colonialism, displacement, and culture clash from its simple tale of dragons drifting into town. Lingers in the mind longer than its brevity would suggest.

“On the Downhill Side” by Harlan Ellison (1972). A typically solid and assured outing from Ellison, but also — typically — freighted with that “I’m just depicting the casual bigotries of my characters” vibe beloved by late 20th century white male authors. When your characters are ghosts — the ghost of a needy American architect, venting about his “shrike” of a bygone mother-in-law to the ghost of a nineteenth century New Orleans society girl — a lot of casual bigotry crops up. I did quite like this story, though. Even if I didn’t care for the people, the unicorn wrecked me. Ellison’s prose is, as always, evocative. It has a certain weighted inevitability that makes the “twist” obvious, but also makes it less of a twist and more of a fated outcome.

“The Parrot” by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1965, English translation published 1966). Vivid and immersive tale of a village horse dealer, the parrot he loves, and the grinding inexorable tragedy that lands him in prison. I haven’t read much literature from Eastern Europe, but this seems like a classic example of it.

“The Gray Wolf” by George MacDonald (1864). Fluently written for the time period, but ultimately this one is a by-the-numbers Victorian fable about a young man of the leisure class letting himself get beguiled by a toothy young woman in the wilds of the Shetlands.

“The Harrowing of the Dragon of Hoarsbreath” by Patricia A. McKillip (1982). Somehow I’ve never read any of McKillip’s short fiction, even though I picked up a collection of her stories, titled after this selfsame tale, and have had it sitting on a shelf for a couple years or so. “Harrowing” is a magnificent introduction to her short work, expertly sketching out a strange, lived-in world, and with deft details defining its two leads, a marvel of language and efficiency. Peka is one of my favorite point-of-view characters from McKillip now, a tough, no-nonsense girl who mines gold and makes wormspoor booze and loves her home. Ryd, who has returned to Hoarsbreath determined to harrow away the ice dragon that keeps the land frozen twelve out of the thirteen months of the year, is a sharply written foil for her: infuriatingly convinced, like any tech bro, that he knows what’s best for everyone, even though no one asked, even if it means disrupting the traditions and livelihoods (and very existence) of his homeland. This is the sort of story I read these old collections and magazines to find. My favorite story here so far.

“The Last of the Dragons” by Edith Nesbit (publication date uncertain, possibly 1899). This one is an unexpected delight, a precociously proto-feminist tale of a princess who refuses to let a prince fight the last dragon for her, wanting to tame (or fight, if it came down to it) the dragon herself. “The Prince drew his sword, and the Princess drew hers — the beautiful silver-handled one that the prince had brought in his motor-car.” I wish more fiction from this era were like this. (Though the class politics of it sucks.)

Halfway through this book, by page count! Only twelve more stories remain, though. Clearly this collection is back-loaded with longer pieces.

“Lila the Werewolf” by Peter S. Beagle (1969). This one is a flawed masterpiece, marred by its midcentury approximation (you can’t call it understanding) of gender and sexuality. Imagine an artsy and acclaimed end-of-the-'60s movie about New York City bohemians getting tangled up in an ill-fated liaison, full of trendy folk-revival music and sophisticated camerawork, but the girl is a werewolf. It has all the brilliance you’d expect, brimming with Beagle's sharply observed detail and the palpable energy of the ’60s city, but a lot of it hasn't aged well, particularly toward the end; Beagle's own afterword, presumably added in the '80s, admits as much.

“The Drowned Giant” by J. G. Ballard (1964). An exquisite exercise in tone, this description of a colossal corpse that washes ashore, and its steady putrefication, defilement, and dismemberment, is disturbingly clinical. Even the narrator, the only person in the city who seems to appreciate the scale and strangeness of its arrival, is bereft of any sense of wonder. What Ballard has to say about human nature is there between the lines, and it isn’t pretty. I do not recommend reading this while eating cold pizza, as I did.

“The Enchanted Buffalo” by L. Frank Baum (1905). The main point of interest here is watching the rote 1980s epic fantasy formula — the old king is slain by an evil interloper with powers granted by an evil magic-wielder, but the old king’s son vows to defeat the interloper and reclaim the throne — play out in a turn-of-the-century children’s story about bison. Yeah, yeah, it’s the Campbellian monomyth and all that, I get it. The Lion King does it too. But it shows how unsophisticated all those fantasy trilogies built from the mononyth really were all along.

“Narrow Valley” by R. A. Lafferty (1966). An oddly ubiquitous fixture of these SFF retrospectives, “Narrow Valley” has appeared twice before in collections I’ve read (this is the third), and popped up in the contents of several other anthologies I haven’t read (but plan to). I first read and reviewed it here. Rereading it now, I must echo my initial assessment — this story is pretty silly. It’s a topological fantasy, much like “Inside Out” earlier in this volume, crammed with cringy midcentury “humor” about contemporary would-be settlers vs. Indigenous people. I truly don’t get why it kept getting anthologized.

“Beyond the Dead Reef” by James Tiptree, Jr. (1983). Not quite of the revelatory quality I’ve come to expect from Tiptree, with some colonialist bits that haven’t aged well at all. Nonetheless this was a moderately entertaining ecological horror yarn, all about reef degradation and the sea’s revenge.

“The King’s Bride: A Fairy Tale After Nature” by E. T. A. Hoffman (1819, English translation published 1963). Here’s part of the reason the back half of the book has so much bulk but so few stories: this one alone is nearly 50 pages long. Despite its length, and its antiquity, this one passes relatively painlessly. (Perhaps we have the 1960s translation to thank? It’s certainly much more concise than a lot of English stories from this time period.) It’s standard German fairy tale stuff, faintly comic rather than murderous, toying with various stock characters: the father up in the tower playing at mysticism in his wizard hat, the earthly daughter who loves her vegetables, the betrothed young man who has become ethereal with poetry while away at university. I’m much less enthused about the “sly, malicious” gnome king, knowing the antisemitic influences underlying Germanic gnome folklore. It all wraps up in a predictable but still amusing fashion, involving pots and pans and bad poetry.

“Under the Garden” by Graham Greene (1963). This one is even longer, somehow. It begins as a lovely, melancholy meditation on mortality, on memory, on the lost wonder and possibilities and expanses of childhood. Dying man William Wilditch returns to the country house where he spent his childhood summers, with all their hidden magic, to find its estate is now cut up into council houses. “Now the dreaming child was dying of the same disease as the man. He was so different from the child that it was odd to think the child would not outlive him and go on to quite a different destiny.” The childhood adventure, or dream, that draws Wilditch back to Winton Hall is something like Lewis Carroll by way of John Waters, a grubby, subterranean realm where an old man with a nicotine-stained beard sits on a lavatory and demands young William read to him from old newspapers, has him piss in a chamber pot of gold, and shows him softcore pinup mags. Dream or not, it’s an unsettling but unique read, so I suppose Greene accomplished what he set out to do. A mix of creativity and rancidness that could only have come from the 1960s.

“The Things That Are Gods” by John Brunner (1979). I read and reviewed this one back in 2015. While not quite as lengthy as the previous two, it’s long enough. Brunner’s storytelling wallows in the decadent convolution of '70s fantasy. This time around, I felt that I understood far more of the story as it unfurled. The first time, I hadn't known that this was the last in a series of tales about the traveler; knowing it now, with a better grounding in the fantasy traditions of the '70s than I had eight years ago, I have a firmer handle on Brunner's layers of asides and flashbacks and the allusions to unseen events. (Maybe my reading comprehension is better than it used to be?) Essentially, the traveler is an ageless being who has existed since before time, bound by fate to grant the wishes of those around him. As the universe becomes more ordered, and the energies of chaos less pronounced (thanks in no small part to these granted wishes), the scope of wishes he can grant becomes circumscribed by what he's done before. The traveler grows disquieted at the way recent wishes have backfired, their ends unjust. All the while, he can't rid his thoughts of a distant town called Stanguray. For all its old-school fantasy worldbuilding and scale, “Things” is more humorous and tongue-in-cheek than I remembered. Overall, a bit sprawling and self-induglent, but a solid story for its time.

“The King of Nodland and His Dwarf” by Fitz-James O’Brien (1852). Boo. Another lengthy one. Another nineteenth century political satire. Another instance of an evil and deformed little person. It’s written in a sprightly enough manner for its time period, but has little else to recommend it. A tedious read, especially so near the end of the collection.

“The Seventeen Virgins” by Jack Vance (1974). I read and reviewed this tale of Cugel the Clever back in 2014. Cugel is basically a Bugs Bunny figure roaming a Dying Earth; he passes pebbles off as opals, outwits officious bureaucrats, expresses skepticism at social institutions, runs a side-hustle telling fortunes with the aid of a local lad, and skips town via caravan in the company of said virgins. We all know the fate of virgins in stories written by dudes; this one is no exception. Skeevy, like most ’70s male-gaze fantasy, but mildly entertaining.

“The Bagful of Dreams” by Jack Vance (1978). Two tales back to back might be a surfeit of Cugel the Clever. It’s more of the same: Cugel continues his travels through various misadventures, gets his way by flattering provincial egos, and relieves unhelpful strangers of their riches. It’s fine, but I had a distinct sense of diminishing returns.

“The Hollow Land” by William Morris (1856). Here we are on the first day of October, facing an overlong William Morris joint to conclude this volume. As with “Lindenborg Pool” (reviewed here), we find ourselves in a pseudo-medieval land, but this time we have a romance replete with perfidious ladies, mysterious maidens, kingly sons, bloody vengeance, and everyone out slewing this and that. It’s somewhat interesting as an ancient prototype of sword and sorcery (though one stuffy with biblical allusion). Plus it doesn’t have the whiff of antisemitism that marked “Lindenborg Pool.” Faint praise to end on, but here we are!

And that’s it! It took a mere three-ish months this time. In fact, I read the bulk of it (two-thirds of it by page count) in about eleven days.

All in all, I’m giving this volume a slight edge over the first. The best stories here (by McKinley, Le Guin, McKillip) are simply outstanding; while the worst stories (by Dickens, Gilbert, O’Brien) are bad, the overall quality of even the middling tales finds a higher baseline than in the first Masterpieces.

I’m sad that the series ended with this book. I crave more wide-ranging surveys of my favorite genre, collecting centuries of stories under one cover.