2024 read #16: The Jewels of Aptor by Samuel R. Delany.

The Jewels of Aptor by Samuel R. Delany

156 pages

Published 1962

Read from January 29 to January 30

Rating: 3 out of 5

My first attempt to read Delany was Dhalgren, which I purchased when I was 19. I held onto it for seventeen years before I gave it away. In that time, I never once made it past page two.

The allusive density of Delany’s mature prose never clicked with me, until I persevered through “The Tale of Dragons and Dreamers,” which I read last year in Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment. By that time, my used paperback copies of Babel-17 and Tales of Neverÿon had gone the way of Dhalgren, given away unread. Bummer. Unlike the works of most of his contemporaries, Delany’s old pulps aren’t cheap on eBay, so it isn’t easy to get my hands on any replacements, either.

Why The Jewels of Aptor? It’s the sole Delany title available on Project Gutenberg!

It’s difficult to picture Aptor as it was originally published, as an Ace Double. For one thing, this book is actually pretty good. Delany’s prose doesn’t approach his later artistry, but it is crisp and it crackles with momentum, falling closer to something like Riddle-Master of Hed from the late ’70s than to, say, an Ace title like The Games of Neith from 1960. For another, Aptor is queer as fuck. Three of the main characters are: a poetic twink named Geo; a big bear of a man literally named Urson, who is Geo’s sworn “friend”; and the high priestess of the Goddess Argo, who is treated with immediate respect by the male characters and who never turns subservient. Urson playfully reaches around Geo’s waist for his coin purse. The priestess reminds Geo that he knows the spell for calming “the bear.” Later, the men get into a playful splashing match in a stream. I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed gay-coding this blatant in midcentury pulp.

The characters fit into what would become classic D&D templates: Geo is the knowledgeable bard, Urson is the muscle, a four-armed mutant boy named Snake is the rogue, and the priestess is the cleric-sorceress with inscrutable aims. (Another man, Iimmi, doesn’t fit as neatly into D&D classes, but maybe he could be an investigator.) There are three magic jewels caught up in a conflict between Leptar, where our heroes hail from, and the sinister land of Aptor. There are betrayals and red herrings. The same gods have multiple, conflicting factions and avatars. Geo isn’t sure who he can trust.

The setting is sword & sorcery with a post-apocalyptic sheen. Our heroes hunt in the jungle ruins of crumbled barracks buildings and crashed airplanes. A radio tower is agony to the psychic Snake. A living mass of goop clothes skeletons to pursue our heroes along an elevated highway. There’s even a gargantuan statue of a god that has a jewel in its head, waiting to be pilfered.

The plot does begin to sputter on its own fumes halfway through, but overall, the experience was a fun introduction to book-length Delany, at long last.

2024 read #15: The Magazine of Fantasy, Fall 1949 issue.

The Magazine of Fantasy, Fall 1949 issue (1:1)

Edited by Anthony Boucher & J. Francis McComas

128 pages

Published 1949

Read from January 28 to January 29

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

It’s the 75th anniversary year for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Despite recent troubles and controversies, it’s still my favorite fiction magazine. Under the editorship of Sheree Renée Thomas, F&SF has been the best it’s ever been, consistently brilliant and innovative.

I’d hoped to continue reading each new issue when it comes out, as I did for most of 2023. To my knowledge, though, the January / February 2024 issue still hasn’t gone to press, which suggests concerning developments on the business and publishing end of the magazine. Fingers crossed it’s able to weather the current problems and endure into whatever future we face.

Thanks once again to online archives, I was able to read this: the very first issue of what would become our beloved F&SF. Founded purely as a fantasy magazine, this, like many periodicals of its era, padded its pages with reprints, and at least one story penned pseudonymously by an editor. Also, horror was lumped in with fantasy in this era; much of this issue is horror or horror-adjacent. 

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“Bells on His Toes” by Cleve Cartmill. Fairly standard humorous 1940s urban fantasy number. A cop checks up on Dr. Swaam, a would-be guru, to make sure he isn’t defrauding people, and discovers that the good doctor’s “believe it and make it real” self-actualization works a bit too well. The story is unremarkable. It’s fine. C-

“Thurnley Abbey” by Perceval Landon (1907). Even in 1907 this would have been a touch old fashioned. Our framing device narrator goes through the trouble of familiarizing us with his Continental routine before introducing our actual narrator, Colvin, a stranger on the train who begs to sleep in the first narrator’s cabin so he doesn’t have to sleep alone. To explain why, Colvin slogs through an implausibly detailed and rigidly chronological account of a cadaverous night he spent at his friend’s manor house. The skeletal being that Colvin encounters is depicted vividly, but the tale peters out and then just… ends, feeling half finished. What there is of it feels like a C

“Private — Keep Out!” by Philip MacDonald. This existential horror piece reads more hokey than horrific nowadays, but it’s an interesting variation on the classic forbidden knowledge trope, one grounded in the quotidian routines of Hollywood. As a reader, I think my expectations for a story are higher, thanks to the depth and imagination of modern day fantasy; I kept expecting “Keep Out!” to have something more, a deeper element, an unexpected twist that would feel like a revelation, perhaps a Siren Queen-esque connection to Hollywood myth. But no, once you figure it out, that’s pretty much all there is to it. C

“The Lost Room” by Fitz-James O’Brien (1858). This one is little more than a mood piece. It goes like this: Our narrator looks around his lodging room on a sweltering evening and recalls all the objects in it, with a paragraph or two of how each came into his possession. When his cigar burns down, he flings it out the window, and he decides he’ll go sit in the garden where it’s cooler. He proceeds to describe the vast and gloomy house around his room, then the cypress-grown garden. There he meets a strange little man in the dark, who tells him his fellow lodgers are enchanters, ghouls, and cannibals, before disappearing. Our narrator rushes back to his room and finds everything changed into a bacchanalian chamber, and all his familiar belongings transformed into exotica. Six lascivious strangers lounge around a table laden with delicacies; he must gamble with them for the use of his room. The story is slightly less boring than it sounds — O’Brien sustains a note of doomed melancholy that is moderately engrossing — but inevitably, there’s more than a little bit of Orientalism in the decadence of the transformed room. (There’s plenty of anti-Black racism, too.) It’s hard to rate a story so far removed from my own contemporary standards of storytelling, but the racism does it in. Maybe F+

“The Hurkle Is a Happy Beast” by Theodore Sturgeon. This one is a thoroughly 1940s science fantasy, of the sort that tosses in terms and names like gwik and Hvov before admitting that none of it matters. It’s supposed to be cheeky, playing with the expectations of early sci-fi worldbuilding, but it feels clumsy and lazy nowadays. (Like, you know you can just write your horny fable in an interesting way instead, right?) Anyway, a hurkle is a blue, six-legged alien kitten. One blunders its adorable way into a teleporter and shows up on Earth, which it finds as alien as we would find Lihrt. The first man to see it sprays it with DDT. If I’m parsing the ending correctly, the hurkle then gives birth to 200 female kittens, which in turn breed with humans and end up pacifying Earth (or at least male humans) with their happy sexual purrs. A weird horny twist condensed in vague, can’t-offend-the-censors language — how very 1940s. Maybe D+?

“Review Copy” by H. H. Holmes. The ever helpful ISFDB (Internet Science-Fiction Database) informs me that this was written by editor Anthony Boucher, which makes it odder that he chose a prolific real life serial killer for his supernatural murder-mystery pen name. (A cynical ploy for name recognition, presumably.) Here we find a vengeful writer, his book killed by a bad review, enlisting the services of a Black Magic user to kill the reviewer. The weapon? A book sent for review to the newspaper office. The story never rises above its banal “writers vs reviewers, am I right?” underpinnings. D

“Men of Iron” by Guy Endore (1940). A fable of automation and redundancy that’s still all too relevant in our current era of capitalist bullshit. (I typed out a whole rant about “AI” and the coordinated tech bro attack on labor, but we all know about it and it wasn’t necessary to include in this review.) The continued applicability is this story’s main point of interest; “Men” is forgettable, aside from its ending, in which (spoilers!) the newly automated machine lathe places a tarpaulin over its former operator and goes home to his wife. D+

“A Bride for the Devil” by Stuart Palmer. This one opens with several paragraphs describing the “full breasts” and “ample femininity” of its doomed heroine, with her youth treatments and multiple divorces and knack for spending the money of whichever husband is current. It would be a feat for any story to recover from such a beginning, and “Bride” doesn’t make the effort. Rote “occultists getting more than they bargained for” fluff, built on an unshakable foundation of misogyny. F

“Rooum” by Oliver Onions (1910). In much the way that “Bride” was built on misogyny, “Rooum” is built on racism, its opening paragraphs belaboring the fact that there was something not quite white about the titular character. Rooum’s tale of an invisible “Runner” catching up with him and running through him, the supernatural osmosis more painful each time, was interesting in a strange and half-formed way, but that wasn’t enough to redeem this story. F

“Perseus Had a Helmet” by Richard Sale (1938). Homicide procedural meets a touch of Greek legend. That makes this pulpy number sound way more interesting than it actually is. An office dweeb named Perseus loves an office dame named Ruby, but she’s playing him off the office Bluto, who beats Perseus up to keep him off her. Perseus subsequently acquires a helmet that, as in his namesake’s mythology, gives him powers of invisibility. He immediately launches into a life of crime, culminating in offing his rival. Clearly, “weenie becomes a tyrant when he gets a little taste of power” was a popular pulp trope; I was reminded of “The Weakling” in the February 1961 Analog. Maybe D-?

“In the Days of Our Fathers” by Winona McClintic. Imagine having your first published story printed in the first issue of what would become F&SF. Obviously no one knew what this little magazine would become, or how long it would last, or what masterpieces would appear in its pages. But in retrospect, it seems like quite an achievement. The story is a pretty standard midcentury affair: a child in the heavily regularized and perfected far future sneaks into the attic and, after reading a book penned by her uncle, discovers the “unsane atavism” called poetry, stirring feelings long since smoothed out of society. Unremarkable overall, but McClintic’s writing had actual character to it, which makes it a standout here. C+

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And that’s it for the first issue of what would become F&SF! Somewhat disappointing, though unsurprising. Still, it’s better than many issues I’ve read from the 1980s and ’90s.

2024 read #14: The Big Jump by Leigh Brackett.

The Big Jump by Leigh Brackett

128 pages

Published 1955 (magazine version published 1953)

Read from January 27 to January 28

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

My partner R and I are moving to another state sometime this spring. Between us, we have somewhere around a thousand books. (Not an exaggeration.) I’d planned to read as many of my unread novels as I could before the move, so we could sell them back to the used bookstore and not have to pack them, but then I got distracted. The Luminist Archive, where I was able to read the February 1961 issue of Analog, has so many books. Thousands of them, ranging from weird arcane texts from the 1600s to 20th century sci-fi, all free in PDF. Not to mention all the pulp magazines. I want to read them all. (Or at least the ones relevant to my interests.)

I bookmarked a number of them to read later, but today I’m reading my first Leigh Brackett novel since the fine-but-not-impressive The Secret of Sinharat and People of the Talisman. I wasn’t expecting anything as good as her masterpiece, The Long Tomorrow, but I was a little bit disappointed.

For the majority of its run, The Big Jump is middling midcentury sci-fi, with just enough unexpected touches to keep it from being uninteresting. It’s a corporate space novel, almost like a working class perspective on The Space Merchants. A handful of megacorporations control space flight throughout the solar system. They’re competing to make “the Big Jump” to interstellar flight. A ship limps back to Pluto after successfully tripping to Barnard’s Star; Ballantyne, its sole survivor, is comatose when he isn’t raving about transuranics and desolation and darkness. Our POV Comyn bluffs his way into the Cochrane Company’s facility on Mars to discover the fate of his friend on the expedition, and ends up hearing Ballantyne’s seemingly final words. But the dead Ballantyne still moves, and even the powerful Cochranes are alarmed.

Some unlikely pulp plotting — a quick application of fists and the inexplicable interest of a Cochrane family femme fatale — wins Comyn a seat on the next ship to Barnard’s Star, hoping to learn the fate of his friend whatever it takes. But someone in the Cochrane family wants him dead, and the strange physics of the star drive are enough to drive anyone mad.

It’s when Comyn arrives on Barnard II that The Big Jump truly shines. Spoilers: Brackett shifts genres to something far more wondrous and strange, somewhat reminiscent of the 1930s Pan trope. The way I read it, the climax offers wry commentary on how modern capitalist man will reject Eden itself because it lacks “meaning” without manly effort. It isn’t enough to turn Jump into a classic, but it certainly made this slim little novel worth reading.

2024 read #13: Analog Science Fact & Fiction, February 1961 issue.

Analog Science Fact & Fiction, February 1961 issue (66:6)

Edited by John W. Campbell

180 pages

Published 1961

Read from January 25 to January 26

Rating: 1 out of 5 (which is more than it deserves)

It’s one thing to hear about the rightwing fanaticism of John W. Campbell, who helped bend the trajectory of 20th century science fiction in favor of manly white supermen solving the problems of lesser beings thanks to the power of prodigious brains, steely nerves, and the absence of sentimentality, with buxom blondes as the prize. It’s quite another to track down the pdf scan of this issue, drawn in by its proto-Dino-Riders cover art, and run face-first into an editorial: “ON THE SELECTIVE BREEDING OF HUMAN BEINGS,” which proposes that all the grand project of eugenics needs is a thousand generations, not the mere thousand year reich of “Herr Hitler.” Campbell further speculates (without any testable basis whatsoever) that modern humans (and you know exactly who he means by this) are the result of the instinctive eugenics of our ancestors. 

Jesus Fucking Christ. And this is the era of sci-fi that our current self-appointed captains of industry yearn for with their whole breeding-fetish hearts, disdaining all the contemporary authors who actually have important things to say.

Right from the start I despise this issue, and this whole era of the magazine. But, on the other hand, I’ve put myself through some terrible fiction for the sake of dinosaurs. How bad will this one be? Let’s find out!

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“The Weakling” by Everett B. Cole. This could have been interesting. It weirdly prefigures Julian May’s The Many-Colored Land, with powerful flying psychics, a colonized prehistoric world, extinct beasts of burden, humanoid aliens, and a motif of gold jewelry and its effects on psionic powers. Sadly, as anyone could have foreseen, this is an insipid, overlong eye-roller built on a foundation of racial hierarchy. Those with psionic powers are considered “men,” those without are “pseudomen,” and in between them are half-powered “halfmen.” (Women are scarcely considered.) War with the “Fifth Planet” has left swirling, storm-like “nulls” on the Earth’s surface. Nulls negate psionic powers and upend the racial hierarchy, much to the annoyance of the ruling castes — particularly because men keep pseudomen as slaves, and those damn pseudomen keep escaping their masters to go live free in the nulls.

The “weakling” of the title is Leuwan, an uptight little martinet who needs a cap of heavy crystals to amplify his psionic power over his slaves, and gets defensive about it. The plot is a tiresome dick-measuring conflict, a rote pulp scenario in which Leuwan’s whiny insecurity is challenged by the commanding masculinity of Naran Makun, who arrives to investigate the disappearance of his brother’s sauropod caravan.

The best thing about this story is the artwork, both the cover art and the line art accompanying the text. I mean, look at this:

But that’s the extent of its redeeming features. The dinosaurs are mere set dressing. The prose reminds you that Analog’s target audience was literarily unsophisticated. There’s so much worldbuilding that goes nowhere, adding nothing to the story. (I wonder if there were prior stories in this setting; the Fifth Planet business means nothing otherwise.) Now if only we’d actually gotten a story about sauropod caravans striding out across the great open forests and plains. Sigh. F

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“The Plague” by Teddy Keller. The first of many military sci-fi slogs. Those dang Commies seem to have released a mystery pathogen that only seems to affect Americans. Specifically, authors, artists, and secretaries in small offices. No-nonsense Sergeant Andy McCloud finds himself the ranking member of the Pentagon’s anti-germ warfare office, but he still has the time to admire the trim figure of a female corporal beneath him in the chain of command. The story is supposed to be a medical puzzler, but the solution was silly. (It’s stamps. Licking the sticky stuff on stamps. That’s it.) There is literally nothing of interest here, besides maybe a stale old chestnut about how many envelopes poets send out to publications. F

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“Freedom” by Mack Reynolds. This time our ranking POV is one Colonel Ilya Simonov: field agent, “hatchetman,” an expert at dismantling anti-Soviet dissent. It is a time of rocket liners and floating cars. The Cold War is over; the grand Soviet experiment has succeeded, and the bloc has the highest standard of living in the world. Yet people are discontent. They gather in secret to discuss proscribed literature and counter-revolutionary ideas. Ilya is sent to Prague to investigate the automobile industry’s role in spreading subversion. The story is entirely propagandistic in intent, of course. But I was pleasantly surprised that some of its critiques of the Soviet system came from the perspective of (simplified, but sympathetic) Marxism. The Party and its authoritarian State directly contradict the statelessness of theoretical socialism. Secret policeman Ilya even muses that the Soviet system might be dubbed State-Capitalism. That unexpected even-handedness, plus a slightly higher standard of prose, makes this story a standout in the wastelands of this issue. Perhaps D+

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“The Outbreak of Peace” by H. B. Fyfe. We’re in space this time, on Pollux V, yet we cannot escape white men in uniform. Our POV this time is Space Marshal Wilbur Hennings, who never develops anything resembling a personality trait. This trifle is dry, dull, and thankfully brief, existing only to set up the PoliSci 101 observation that the real hostilities are waged by the politicians after the fighting stops. Once more, nothing of interest. F

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“The Ghost Fleet” by Christopher Anvil. Our stoic military man of the hour here is one Colonel William Beller. At least with Beller, we’re treated to a single morsel of characterization: he’s disliked in his service, and on the verge of court-martial, because he ordered a retreat at Little Orion. Don’t fret, dear midcentury reader: Beller made that choice to save his space fleet from destruction, so he’s still a paragon of honorable masculinity. To no one’s surprise, Beller is offered a suicide mission to atone for his “cowardice” — commanding a single antiquated ship, scrounged from a museum, to bluff an attack against the space enemy, his museum piece bolstered only by a simulated fleet. (Is his ship crewed with criminals? No — they’re geriatric janitors from the museum. Who apparently get thrown into suicide missions here in space?) It sounds like something from the Star Wars Expanded Universe, but without any of the genre trappings that made those books interesting. Still, this is the closest we’ve come to actual character-driven storytelling in this entire issue. Maybe D?

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“Occasion for Disaster” (part 4 of 4) by Mark Phillips. I thought about just skipping this one, the last installment of a serial novel, but reading out of context fragments of a serial is crucial to the full sci-fi magazine experience. Our hero this time is “FBI Agent extraordinary,” Kenneth J. Malone, who’s investigating a plot of psionic sabotage that feels like something straight out of a 1930s cinematic serial. (Which turns out to be dreary stuff without the help of MST3K.) Kenneth J. Malone is such a brilliant G-Man that he checks into his hotel as Kenneth J. Malone, perfectly ordinary businessman. The story has gangsters, assassinations, a psychic who thinks she’s Queen Elizabeth the First. Our hero Malone learns how to teleport himself around at will. Peyote is, briefly, a plot point. And yet it all manages to be deeply uninteresting, tremendously silly, and numbingly overlong. Turns out a well-known department of psychic research is a front for a secret network of telepaths who have infiltrated every nation and every level of society. They use their powers of suggestion to cause chaos and break down civil order. But then it turns out they did it to stop someone from launching nuclear Armageddon! I feel like that’s enough plot to fill maybe 15 pages, tops, even with the requisite romance subplot. Yet here we are. A full novel of Kenneth J. Malone spinning his wheels. Generously, perhaps F+

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And that's it for what is (so far) my oldest  complete issue of a genre magazine. It won't be the earliest for long, not with all the pdf scans available. But damn, 1960s Analog was some rough stuff. Let’s hope that, say, early F&SF or Unknown won’t be quite so bad. (And yes, I know, Campbell edited Unknown as well.)

2024 read #12: Swamplandia! by Karen Russell.

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

400 pages

Published 2010

Read from January 22 to January 26

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Much like Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child, Swamplandia! is a Pulitzer Prize finalist from the early 2010s that stakes much of its critical reputation on the artful use of fantasy fiction elements, which ultimately prove to be mundane events filtered through the traumas and griefs of its viewpoint characters. Oh, and both were set in remote corners of the United States. Clearly this was something of a vibe at the time. (“It’s weird that it happened twice,” etc.) Both books would appear to be literary fantasies if you rooted your expectations in the cover blurb copy. Both prove to be contemporary realism long before the end.

In my review of The Snow Child, I went on a tear about how the literary establishment denigrates fantasy fiction, all while simultaneously scavenging through its storytelling vocabulary for the immaculate vibes. Go read that rant if you like. Today, I’m less bothered by it than I had been five years ago.

It helps that Swamplandia! largely lives up to its hype. It is luminous and strange, buoyed like an alligator between worlds, between sun and silt, between death and starlight, between its eponymous island theme park and the outside world the Bigtree children must confront for the first time. Russell’s descriptions are elastic and unexpected figures of beauty. Surprising metaphors add pop throughout the novel. The gravity of inevitability haunts its heart. If any “mundane” novel makes full use of the possibilities of fantasy, it’s this one.

As a white trash child raised in isolation myself, I related intensely to the Bigtree children. Ava’s perspective perfectly captured the magical thinking of being thirteen, the tensile eagerness of self-delusion. Her attempts to gain early entry to the world of competitive gator wrestling were reminiscent of my own naive confidence in my teenage authorship. At one point Ava narrates: “I was a fairy-minded kid, a comic book kid, and I had a bad habit of looking for augurs and protectors where there were none.” Which, same. Meanwhile, Kiwi’s rough introduction to mainland capitalism and social mores was instantly recognizable to someone who went from living in a car to working at a convenience store at 18. I identified with his anthropological notebook most of all.

(Unrelated to anything else, Kiwi’s chapters made me realize that the writers of Jurassic World could have given us a trilogy of dinosaur horror from the perspective of stoned teens working below minimum wage summer jobs at the park, and now I’m disappointed we never got that.)

Russell does the typical “first novel from an acclaimed short story author” thing: interweaving the Bigtree family’s tale with self-contained interludes, such as the brief emancipation and early death of Louis Thanksgiving (or, for that matter, the chapters from Kiwi's perspective). It works beautifully, though at times it tested my attention span.

2024 read #11: Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 1999 issue.*

Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 1999 issue (23:7)*

Edited by Gardner Dozois

144 pages

Published 1999

Read from January 19 to January 20

Rating: 3 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

In the summer of 1999, I aspired to be a science fiction wunderkind.

I had submitted stories as early as 1998. One of my earliest subs had been a tale called “The Dinosaur Man.” It involved a misanthropic physicist building himself a house in the Cretaceous, and one of his old college friends (now a paleontologist) tracking him down after finding a human femur at a Cretaceous dig. I submitted it to Asimov’s, with unsurprising results.

When I saw this issue on the newsstand several months later — with its cover art of a Tyrannosaurus looming behind some partygoers — my first thought was that the editors of Asimov’s had stolen the idea for “The Dinosaur Man” and gotten this Michael Swanwick guy to rewrite it for publication. (What can I say? I was 16 and lived in a car. I had literally zero experience with the outside world.) Reading it proved two things: 1) no one, of course, had stolen my ideas, and 2) I was nowhere near Asimov’s league as a writer.

I read and reread this issue obsessively. Almost every story and poem here left an outsized impression upon my teenage imagination, as only your first issue of a sci-fi magazine can. (I might have read the June 1999 issue of Analog a few weeks before this one, but you get what I mean.) Traces of this issue’s creative DNA filled my notebooks for years. After reading it, I bent over my word processor with renewed energy and invigorated creativity. I wouldn’t get published for another thirteen years, and wouldn’t get published on a professional level until 2022, but at least I succeeded in getting my first positive personal rejection from F&SF later in 1999, which is something.

How has this issue aged?

“Scherzo with Tyrannosaur” by Michael Swanwick. Much (though not all) of this story was recycled into Swanwick’s Bones of the Earth, but I want to take a moment to appreciate it as a standalone tale. It was my first realization that you could combine high quality literary sci-fi with dinosaurs — a formula I’ve been trying to approximate (with minimal success) ever since. It particularly impressed young me because it was my first encounter with an ambiguous ending: the story is left hanging, on the verge of a choice that could go either way. Rereading it now, with the benefit of decades more reading behind me, it’s a standard tangle of time travel, double lives, double timelines, and unexpected paternity. It’s tidy and elegant and written with Swanwick’s signature verve — a solid story, though it didn’t shake the earth like it did when I was 16. But in the mediocre world of dinosaur fiction, that still places “Scherzo” among the best. B

“Another Branch of the Family Tree” by Brian Stableford. This story, in contrast to so many others in this issue, left little impression on my teenage imagination. Rereading it now, I’m not surprised: it’s a forgettable bioengineering number, mixing “bureaucracy, am I right?”-level humor with an attempt at near-future pathos. After a court orders its destruction, geneticist Beth Galton fights to save the tree she genetically grafted in memory of her twin sister. The story isn’t bad, exactly, but it was extremely au courant — 1999 sci-fi in paint-by-numbers format — which makes it feel dated today. It also has that weird tonal mismatch that comes from envisioning a bleak future through the optimism of privilege. You’re telling me water is scarce, most trees are dead, plague wars figure in recent memory, yet somehow “most” people live into their 120s thanks to the power of biotech? Like, please, my guy, develop some class consciousness: maybe that’s what awaits the rich fucks, but the rest of us likely won’t reach the age our parents are now. C-

Content warning for fictional SA in the next story.

“By Non-Hatred Only” by W.M. Shockley. This one insinuated itself deep into my teenage storytelling. “Should this be a ‘By Non-Hatred Only’ type plot?” I noted, rhetorically, on more than one outline. What I imagined that plot to be is lost to time. What’s certain is that my teenage self didn’t understand much of anything about this story. It’s a deeply ’90s spacer revenge tale about Navram, a spiritual counselor with a buried past, serving aboard the starship Koipu Laru. Shockley strains to channel Dune, giving us psychospiritual technologies, sexual spies, cryptic inner monologues, verbal fencing, paranoia about what others might know and what one’s reactions might reveal to them, a cultural abhorrence of sharing one’s “deep-meaning.” It partially works. But it’s also distastefully ’90s in a particularly Asimov’s Science Fiction way: at least a third of the story centers on Navram getting sexually assaulted by one of his clients, which triggers traumatic memories of his planet getting destroyed. I think the ending is meant to be elegant, pulling together all the different threads through Navram’s quiet manipulations, but it comes across as accidentally slapstick. D

“Evolution Never Sleeps” by Elisabeth Malartre. This one joins Stableford’s in the bin of stories that didn’t have much of an impact on me back in 1999. It's a “hard biology” piece about chipmunks turning into pack hunters: “Land piranhas,” in one character’s words. Fun concept for a story! Malartre, unfortunately, seems to have drawn her fiction-writing inspiration from airport thrillers. The characters are interchangeable. The dialogue is stiff with exposition. The whole thing reads like the early chapters of Jurassic Park (which is not a compliment). D+

A Michael Bishop poem, “Secrets of the Alien Reliquary,” may have been my very first exposure to sci-fi poetry. And what a horny first exposure it is! Reading it again, with plenty of queer alien sexuality poetry of my own out there, I think it still holds up.

“Angels of Ashes” by Alastair Reynolds. I can't remember if I originally “got” that the title was a play on Angela’s Ashes, which had been a recent mega-bestseller when this was written. This is another story that fueled my teenage imagination, to the point where a substantial percentage of an early setting was pilfered from it, with only the lightest cosmetic changes. (Don’t worry, I never tried to publish it.) Human priest Sergio is ordained in a religious order that reveres the teachings of the Kiwidinok, alien robots who briefly visited the solar system. Most of the order is android in nature; most liturgical power is in android hands, giving them considerable political power as well. Sergio is summoned to hear the final words of Ivan, the man who, long ago, had been selected to absorb the wisdom of the Kiwidinok. Naturally, there’s more to Ivan’s story than the official creed admits, and the androids aren’t happy with the revelations. The setting is baroque and strange and beautiful, mingling religion with asymmetric physics, terraforming, brain function, supernovas, the anthropic principle, and, of course, quantum superpositioning — a throw-everything-in-the-pot approach that is just so ineffably ’90s. (I mean that positively, for once.) Of the two tales in this issue that center on monastic vows, in the form of bionic implants, complicating the pursuit of political action in space, I prefer this one over “By Non-Hatred Only.” It’s kind of strange that two stories with such specific overlaps were in the same issue, but I suppose that’s how trends work in sci-fi and fantasy. B+

“Interview with an Artist” by Geoffrey A. Landis. For such a slight story with such a well-thumbed premise — time traveler alters the timeline so that Hitler becomes a modestly successful artist, then discovers that “Nasfi” atrocities had been even worse in the resulting future — this one made a big impact on me when I was young. Probably because it was my first time reading anything like it. (An example of how “Artist” influenced me: At 17, I drafted a shock-value comedy titled “Time Cannibals!” based quite loosely around this story’s Hitler vs time travelers vibe. The opening line went: “I ate Adolf Hitler.” Thank goodness I never subbed it anywhere.) Rereading this now, I think it still works fine for what it is. C+

“Baby’s Fire” by Robert Reed. This novella solves a mystery of what the fuck did I read that’s been in the back of my mind for a good two decades. See, long ago, I had read what appeared to be the middle section of a serialized novel: it picked up smack in the middle of the action and ended with a cliffhanger. Had it been in Analog? That sounded right, because it was a sprawling cosmic godhood yarn involving an incomprehensibly privileged stable of humans turning themselves into technologically augmented gods. There was a galactic chase; shapeshifting disguises on various planets; bodies made of arcane math and dark matter; black holes; wormholes; an attempt to birth a new universe. Millions of years transpired. It was vast and rococo in a way I’d never seen before. And here it is! What kept me from finding it earlier was the impression that it was part of a serialized novel. “Baby’s Fire” literally begins mid-word — a pretentious touch that thoroughly impressed my teenage self. Instead, it is part of a cycle dubbed the Sister Alice stories, published sporadically over much of a decade. Now I’m curious to track more of them down, because this entry is delightfully entertaining. And of course, to keep with the theme of this review, I recognize so many elements in this story that I subconsciously pilfered for later worldbuilding, in particular the concept of posthumanist Families with the powers of gods, which found its way into my Timeworlds setting (though that aspect is now, thankfully, backgrounded). “Fire” is crusted with its share of ’90s cultural barnacles — one character talks about how the talent for terraforming lies in the Chamberlain Family’s genes, which really isn’t how genetics works — but still, it earns at least a B+

And that’s it! It was humbling to rediscover the origins of so many of my early settings and projects — purloined, one and all, from the stories here. All writers borrow; creativity is in how you rework what you stole, and I think I’ve grown more skilled at that in the last couple decades. But I had forgotten just how blatant my teenage thefts had been.

2024 read #10: The Land of Mist by Arthur Conan Doyle.*

The Land of Mist by Arthur Conan Doyle*

172 pages

Published 1926

Read from January 18 to January 19

Rating: 1 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

Keeping with this month's theme (at first accidental, now a bit deliberate), The Land of Mist is the third book in its series, coming after The Lost World and The Poison Belt. It is a shameless document of religious proselytizing, taking Doyle's beloved characters Professor Challenger, Lord John Roxton, and so forth, and pressing them into the service of Spiritualism. I never thought I'd read it again. But it's bundled in the same volume with the other Challenger stories, and I felt a certain resigned momentum after I finished The Poison Belt.

I was maybe 12 years old when I first got my hands on the collected Challenger stories. Naturally, I wanted the volume for The Lost World, but I didn't have access to many books growing up, so I was almost as eager for the other stories packaged alongside it. The title of The Land of Mist intrigued me. With all the brooding angst of a '90s adolescent, I imagined it would be a darker, more serious followup to The Lost World (which ends, after all, with hunter Roxton and narrator Edward Malone planning a return visit to the plateau). Would our friends get trapped in a remote realm of ensorcelled weather patterns? Or would London itself become mired in an apocalyptic miasma?

Instead, we get an evangelical Doyle in full-on “Ghosts are totally real, you guys, as was proven to me by my very good friends, the mediums, who only took a little of my money for the privilege” mode. Every Spiritualist character is noble, self-sacrificing, and decent, if not an outright martyr; everyone against them is a discount Dickensian villain, squalid and evil. There’s a protracted subplot about a saintly medium who has a villainous brother who thinks it’s all a trick for money; we get extended sequences of this brother abusing his wife and children after getting warned out of the fake medium business. Because that’s the kind of book this is.

I lost count of the number of times that a character’s phrenology was used to attest to their “solidity” or “honesty.” Perhaps that’s how Doyle, major league racist, was duped into Spiritualist belief in his own life. His racism certainly shows up here. To modern readers, many of the séance scenes read like goddamn minstrel shows. Blackface, Redface, Yellowface, you name it — Doyle’s mediums do it all.

Doyle’s usual ability to spin a good yarn is lost, crushed by the heavy-handedness of his evangelism. He even retcons Challenger with wild abandon. His daughter Enid has been here all this time! The Lost World and The Poison Belt, the only reasons we'd ever cared about Challenger, were fictions from a “daring” author! It feels like Doyle was assassinating his own characters, dangling them to get eyeballs on his religious shit while also downplaying their fantastic prior adventures to make sure everyone knew Spiritualism was totally grounded and legit. Maybe he knew people would riot if he wrote a novel where Sherlock Holmes deduces that psychic research is the one true path. (Maybe there was a story like that, actually, late in the canon. I haven’t read Holmes since I was a teen.)

Not everything was terrible. I enjoyed the character of Enid Challenger — smart modern girl in a flapper dress, writing articles for Fleet Street, all the while a latent medium — but she only appears in 25% of the story. The chapter in which Malone and Roxton investigate a malevolent haunting was mildly entertaining. But it wasn’t enough to bump up my opinion of the book.

On an abstract level, it’s interesting to compare Mist’s postwar preoccupation with spiritual evolution with New Wave sci-fi’s obsession with drugs and psychic powers: both seem to grow from modernist anxieties of scientific progress and spiritual decay. Just another way that the 1920s seemed to prefigure the 1960s. That’s grounds for an essay, if anyone wanted to get into it.

The Land of Mist itself, though? Not worth the time.

2024 read #9: Into the Riverlands by Nghi Vo.

Into the Riverlands by Nghi Vo

100 pages

Published 2022

Read January 17

Rating: 4 out of 5

This is the third book in the Singing Hills series, after The Empress of Salt and Fortune and When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain. (Unrelated to anything, but this is the third time I’ve read the third installment in a series so far this month.)

We find historian cleric Chih and their hoopoe companion Almost Brilliant entering the riverlands, a region famed for its martial artistry. The two fall in with two pairs of fellow-travelers after an altercation, and Chih, naturally, collects the stories they all have to tell. Some of the tales are about a bygone bandit band, the Hollow Hand, who once counted necromantic sorcerers among their ranks. But perhaps the Hollow Hand isn’t finished in the Riverlands, after all. And of course Chih’s new companions are more than they seem.

Like every installment of the Singing Hills cycle so far, Riverlands is sumptuous and evocative, well worth savoring. I am continually impressed by Vo’s skill at establishing setting and character, creating vivid sketches of new characters and making it look effortless. The world feels simultaneously vast and intimate, every thread hitched together as if the stories could go on forever. 

2024 read #8: And What Can We Offer You Tonight by Premee Mohamed.

And What Can We Offer You Tonight by Premee Mohamed

78 pages

Published 2021

Read from January 15 to January 16

Rating: 5 out of 5

Even by the standards of Neon Hemlock Press, this is a slim novella. Brief as it is, though, What Can We Offer You stuns from the first page, from its first line, opening a torrent of grief and rage upon the ashes of everything we’ve lost (and continue to lose) to the insatiable, dehumanizing pit of capitalism.

In a floodwater future coming all too soon, when only the rich have anything and only their carnal appetites offer an opportunity for the necessities of life, courtesans compete to work in the prestigious Houses. But even in the House of Bicchieri, which serves the elite of the elite, courtesans are never fully safe. (Never mind that the courtesans are owned, that they must pay the House for their own food, for their own beds, for their showers. Never mind that the rich regard them as mere animals, much like they regard us in our own time.)

When Winfield is murdered by a client, it's a tragic but normal event; her friends hold a secret funeral for her, and life should go on. Instead, Winfield comes back to life, animated by vengeance, reanimated to hunt the monster, the ultrawealthy predator who killed her. Narrator Jewel is afraid of what this vengeance might mean, what it might bring, how it might destroy the House's slender illusions of survival and patronage.

Like the best science fiction, What Can We Offer You is, of course, about today, about the world our own capitalist monsters are building for themselves day by day, law by law, election by election:

In any other world we would call him a monster and do what you do to monsters, which is kill him; but because he is who he is, we protect and revere him, we fawn at his feet, we forgive him his rampaging and ravaging, we go so far as to maybe kill those who would kill him.

Mohamed's prose is sinuous, trembling on the verge of panic, navigating the edge of collapse with precision and clarity. It may be short, but this might be my favorite Neon Hemlock novella so far.

2024 read #7: In the Land of Giants by Max Adams.

In the Land of Giants: A Journey through the Dark Ages by Max Adams

446 pages

Published 2016

Read from January 10 to January 15

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Regardless of any intent (or lack of it) from the respective publishers, I feel this book functions as a spiritual sequel to Charlotte Higgins' Under Another Sky. Where Higgins traveled Britain in search of its Roman history, Adams paces around the archipelago to encounter its early medieval history. Adam even begins his narrative at Hadrian’s Wall, a fittingly literal symbol for the end of Roman Britain.

The “Dark Ages” — locally defined as the five centuries between the end of Roman Britain and the death of Alfred the Great — are dubbed such because of the lack of contemporary written sources and readily dateable artifacts (such as coins or inscriptions), which makes it impossible to draw together any real narrative account. In Giants, Adams leans instead into an experiential approach, journeying on foot, by boat, and sometimes by motorbike through historically laden landscapes:

What counts, on this sort of journey, is the sense of place, the passing of time. There is no better way to insinuate oneself into the Dark Age mind than to camp close to the ramparts of an ancient fort on the edge of the limitless sea and ponder the spiritual and secular worlds of those who built it.

Adams presents a nice mix of historical reference and walking adventures, the latter more diligently detailed than some Appalachian Trail memoirs I could name. It is, in many ways, reminiscent of Robert Macfarlane’s travelogues, such as The Old Ways, though Adams’ prose (while solid enough) never reaches the poetic strata of Macfarlane’s finest. However, the chapters where Adams describes riding his motorcycle instead of hiking are much less interesting.

Landscape archaeology fascinates me. It aligns with my own interests in nature and how human societies integrate themselves into (or else bludgeon their way through) ecological systems and geological constraints. I particularly enjoyed how Adams underlined the usefulness of place-names in reconstructing histories of settlement and land management. Sadly, landscape archaeology was barely touched upon during my undergraduate career, amounting to maybe a single slide during an intro course, likely a single paper during a theory class. I’d love to read more about it, especially something that grounds it in testable hypotheses rather Adams’ penchant for vibes. (Though to be fair to him, it would be impossible in our capitalist world to get the funds and workforce needed to excavate or even survey a fraction of the sites we would need to study from this book alone.)

Giants’ historical content is of the space-saving school that assumes you’re already familiar with the outlines of the period (or, perhaps, might be motivated to look up various kings and kingdoms on your own time). At least there’s a chronology appended to the end, though it could use more detail, especially with a time period so dimly known even to those who study it.

2024 read #6: Dinotopia by James Gurney.*

Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time, written and illustrated by James Gurney*

159 pages

Published 1992

Read January 10

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

1992 was a signal year for dinosaur fiction, wasn’t it? Between Dinotopia and The Ultimate Dinosaur, you had two big, lush, beautifully illustrated volumes that mingled fiction and paleo art in a way I don’t think I’ve seen before or since. The artwork in both books is spectacular. Both incorporated some variation on “Dinosaurs aren’t just for kids anymore!” in their respective introductions. The fiction in Ultimate Dinosaur hasn’t aged so well; how about Dinotopia?

I didn’t encounter Dinotopia until 2001 or so, when I was first living on my own and scraping together enough income to treat myself to some books. At the time, I thought it was brilliant. “Breathe deep, seek peace” became my go-to email signature for a short while. Treetown and Waterfall City took root deep in my imagination, cropping up in various guises in my own writing and my D&D campaigns. I don’t think I’ve read it again since those early oughts days, though.

Dinotopia is steeped in a classically nineties hippie vibe. Our protagonists, Arthur Denison and his son Will, are rescued from a shipwreck by helpful dolphins, who tow them to the lost world, where people of all races live in harmony with extinct animals from various eras, mingling their cultures and creeds into a peaceful and prosperous ecological utopia. It’s a little hokey, but charming in a way that reminds us, sadly, of how far to the right the Overton window has shifted over the last three decades. Imagine how the fragile Nazi crybabies would bewail its wokeness were it to be published today.

Of course, as a can’t-we-all-get-along nineties utopia from a white man, Dinotopia includes a remarkably large population of European descent, and barely anyone Black. I kept track: including a careful census of the large crowd scenes, I counted a grand total of four people clearly portrayed as of African ancestry. The only named Black character, Tok Timbu, has blue eyes (and is named as a phonetic anagram for Timbuktu).

The story is slight, little more than a travelogue that serves only to take us from one corner of Dinotopia to the next. The real star — and the only reason to get the book — is Gurney’s artwork. It’s dated but relentlessly delightful, especially the wider compositions that mix dinosaurs into quaint scenes of fantastic architecture and human pageantry. I also love the interior scenes that incorporate details like sauropod marionettes and Lambeosaurocycles. Honestly, the paintings of Treetown alone bump up my rating by half a star.

2024 read #5: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.*

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley*

282 pages

Published 1818 (text from the 1831 edition)

Read from January 8 to January 10

Rating: 3 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

I first read this book sometime in my tweens, maybe a year or so after I first read The War of the Worlds. My copy was one of those fifty cent paperbacks that Wal-Mart used to sell in the 1990s, the kind that you sometimes still find in used bookstores (though they try to charge three bucks for them now). Naturally, child me expected a big green monster with bolts on his neck, lurching around aggressively, arms outstretched. Instead, the book likely introduced me to the early modern practice of framing devices: it drops us into the letters of Captain Walton, laying out his quest for the North Pole, his childhood, etc., long before we meet the mysterious figure of Victor Frankenstein, who in turn regales us with his parents’ life stories long before he gets to his own. Still, when it came to books, I was an adaptable child, and Frankenstein quickly became a core memory.

Somewhere in the last year or so, I became fixated on the idea of rereading it, something I hadn’t yet done as an adult. Maybe it was when I added decade tags to my reviews here, and began searching for books to bulk up my early 19th century entries. I toyed with the idea of reading Frankenstein on Project Gutenberg, or even purchasing a copy. Thankfully, the library spared me from either of those extremes.

For its time, Frankenstein is remarkably fluent, and it remains an entertaining novel. It’s amusing how we spend 65 pages with Walton’s letters and with Victor’s childhood, and then in a matter of two pages we make the leap from “I discovered the secret of bestowing life” to “I’m gonna build an eight foot tall man.” The Being’s quickening immediately thereafter is anticlimactic, presented in a summary statement without any of its later cinematic beats (the lightning, the table, and so on). When the Being tells his story, you finally discover where many of the cinematic trappings come from — his early inability to speak, angry villagers, and so on.

It startled me to rediscover how much my younger self — quite likely autistic, very much abused, living in a car, studying humanity in hopes of joining it someday — identified with the Being’s observations of the De Lacey family in their cottage. I remember fantasizing about my hypothetical adult life in similar terms, approaching other humans for the first time:

I formed in my imagination a thousand pictures of presenting myself to them, and their reception of me. I imagined that they would be disgusted, until, by my gentle demeanour and conciliating words, I should first win their favour, and afterwards their love.

As you’d expect from a book this old, large parts of Frankenstein haven’t aged well. (“Fix me by building me a wife!” will never sit right in the age of incels.) But it retains an almost medieval grandeur of purpose in its examination of the cruelty of an imperfect creator, and it remains a solid and engrossing novel.

2024 read #4: Binti: The Night Masquerade by Nnedi Okorafor.

Binti: The Night Masquerade by Nnedi Okorafor

208 pages

Published 2017

Read from January 6 to January 8

Rating: 3 out of 5

Much like the volume of Moomin comic strips I just read, this is another third book in a series I began last year.

Night Masquerade wraps up the trilogy that began with Binti and Binti: Home. Perhaps I’ve grown used to Okorafor’s style, or perhaps some of the rougher, first draft adjacent prose got smoothed out in this volume. Either way, I felt the prose was more to my liking here.

The story itself, which follows Binti’s efforts to make peace and control the fallout after the reckless Khoush people attack her Himba homeland while trying to assassinate her visiting Meduse friend Okwu, also feels like an improvement. The worldbuilding is fuller, richer, more grounded in its Afrofuturist cultures; the Himba homeland feels substantive and vital in a way that Oomza University never did for me.

2024 read #3: Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip Volume Three by Tove Jansson.

Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip Volume Three by Tove Jansson

108 pages

Collection published 2008; original comic strips published 1956 and 1957

Read January 5

Rating: 4 out of 5

Thanks to a lovely holiday gift from my partner R, I’m continuing my read-through of Tove Jansson's collected Moomin comic strips. Those began, naturally, with Volume One and Volume Two.

This time the reprinted stories include:

“Moomin in Love,” another Janssonian burlesque of midcentury heteroromantic norms, in which the most sensible character is (as she so often is) Little My;

“Moominvalley Turns Jungle,” in which a heatwave allows a crate full of tropical seeds to proliferate, and Stinky sets the residents of a zoo free in the valley;

“Moomin and the Martians,” in which various hijinks ensue when the Moomins find a machine from a crashed flying saucer;

“Moomin and the Sea,” in which Moominpappa pursues his ambition to be a lighthouse keeper, and the family meets a ghostly new friend;

and lastly, “Club Life in Moominvalley,” which sees Moominmamma — excluded from Moominpappa’s Rebel Fathers Club — joining both a criminal syndicate and a volunteer constabulary with Moomin.

I loved how “Jungle” gave Jansson so many opportunities to show off her outsider art style with all the plants and animals, and I adored the ACAB energy that pervaded “Martians.” Overall, this was another solid volume. Too bad this book was, essentially, the last batch of strips written solely by Tove.

2024 read #2: Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao.

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

397 pages

Published 2021

Read from December 17, 2023 to January 5

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

I hit a small reading slump in the middle of December — understandable, what with hosting my teen for the holidays — and I’m having difficulty getting back to the books. Which is a shame, since I received a bunch of amazing titles from my partner R, and can’t wait to read them.

Iron Widow is not one of those newly gifted books. I’ve had it for a while; I had been meaning to read it any day now for most of last year. I’ve heard nothing but good things about it: a queer feminist burn-down-the-patriarchy novel with giant robots, loosely (and we mean loosely) based on the historical Wu Zetian. A cover blurb calls it “A primal scream of a book”; beneath its glossy YA veneer, Widow pulses with fury, frustration, and vengeance. It confronts the systems of oppression and examines how even those most crushed under the system’s heel will be manipulated into supporting it. It pulses with compassion for those too ground down to resist. It also brims with the burn-it-all-down energy we need in our own time. 

It’s difficult to resist comparisons with Gearbreakers; clearly, teens piloting giant fighting mechs was a YA flavor of the month back in 2021. Of the two, Widow is my favorite, if only because it seems to have more to say. Its YA stylings — forgettable prose, sarcastic teen dialogue, shallow characterization — are drawbacks, but I suppose that’s what the market wants.

2024 read #1: The Animals of My Earth School by Mildred Kiconco Barya.

The Animals of My Earth School by Mildred Kiconco Barya

81 pages

Published 2023

Read from January 1 to January 2

Rating: 4 out of 5

A rich and wondrous book of ecopoetics, The Animals of My Earth School weaves and lingers to listen to animals both delicate and vast. Ants are as important as gazelles, and both have much to impart if we cared to be quiet long enough to hear them — lessons on sex and loneliness, society and control, birth and nurturing, persuasion and predation. Human existence feels ungainly in comparison, an essential something left behind, perhaps, when we lost our tails.

Animals bring color and sound into our lives, a vitality human technology cannot match. “Do they have any cares,” Barya asks in “Why I Wake Early,” “or is this / what it means to belong to the Universe?”

A running list of particular favorites:

“Giant Stag Beetles”

“The World Is Necessary, Even for Little Ants”

“Locusts”

“Heads Are Unnecessary for Copulation”

“Moon Dog”

“City of Antelope”

“The Heart, the Heart, the Hunger”

“The Lost Bull”

“The Human-headed Lion Seduces Three Lambs”

“Falling in Love”

“Little Wren”

“Factors”

“Dream of Lizard Solidarity”

“The Hyena”