275 pages
Published 2016
Read from November 21 to November 24
Rating: 3 out of 5
Yet another book I learned about thanks to the Prehistoric Pulps blog. This one is a trio of novellas connected only by their setting: a weird western world of witchcraft, where alchemical tampering has opened rifts and allowed Cretaceous dinosaurs — and sea levels — to pour out all over the planet.
The Long Past is a fine small press outing, one of the better works of dinosaur fiction I’ve come across. Unfortunately, it hails from what I've dubbed the Wake of Vultures era: when we well-meaning white progressives appointed ourselves the voice for the disenfranchised global majority in the fight against racism. White progressives absolutely must address racism in our fiction. But volunteering to tell a more marginalized group’s experiences with racism has so many ways it could go wrong: lack of nuance, unconsciously utilizing stereotypes, white saviorism, crowding out titles from writers of color. It isn’t up to me to say whether Hale avoided these pitfalls.
The titular novella is the tale of Grover, a trapper in coastal Colorado, who gets drawn into a magical conflict with global stakes when Lawrence, his former friend and lover who happens to be an elemental mage, reappears. At almost 150 pages, one could argue that “The Long Past” is actually a short novel. My favorite bits were Hale’s descriptions of how the Cretaceous ecology has interwoven with the West: stray Tenontosaurus graze in buffalo herds, Quetzalcoatlus hunts mountain goats, magnolia infiltrates groves of aspen. Hale makes an effort (not fully consistent, but appreciated nonetheless) to make her prehistoric fauna identifiable without employing names scientists invented after 1864. Grover, for example, rides a big “ridingbird” he raised from a chick. It’s a nice, plausible folk name for an ornithomimid (though the rationale gets fuzzy when Lawrence marvels that no one else had thought to tame and ride one before).
“The Long Past” also benefits from having a sweeter, more erotic, and more believable relationship at its heart than, say, “The Virgin and the Dinosaur” did.
The much shorter middle novella, “The Hollow History of Professor Perfectus,” moves the scene almost thirty years later, after free magic has been banned throughout most of the United States. The magic necessary for modern living is conducted by captive mages held in electric collars. Our narrator Ashni is an underground mage who makes her living in Chicago with a fake magic show, which she performs via an automaton dubbed Professor Perfectus. If you think that all sounds a long way away from dinosaurs, you’d be correct. “History” is all about misogyny, magic lobotomies, steampunk police drones, and the horrors concocted by the American white supremacist Christian patriarchy in every timeline. The story also touches on how white feminists mostly want to look after themselves, and make unreliable allies at best to women of the global majority.
Worthy material and a solid story, shocking and memorable on its own, but perhaps not the clearest follow-up to “The Long Past.” Lack of dinosaurs aside, though, “History” might be the strongest story in this collection.
We wrap things up with “Get Lucky,” which features more dinosaurs than “History,” but not by much. Our hero faces more danger from a jellyfish than from any dino. “Lucky” is a serviceable yarn about a young man (named Lucky) who happens to rescue the man who’d once promised to run away with him before disappearing three years before. A borax fortune is involved. The two of them must escape the clutches of the patrician Swaim brothers along the shores of Illinois’ Inland Sea.
After the previous stories, it was something of a shock that Hale made one of her “Lucky” protagonists a Pinkerton agent. A heroic Pinkerton agent, no less. That wasn’t very social justice-y of her; it cooled a lot of my enthusiasm for the story.
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