2024 read #27: Analog Science Fiction and Fact, November 1992 issue.

Analog Science Fiction and Fact, November 1992 issue (112:13)

Edited by Stanley Schmidt

176 pages

Published 1992

Read from February 28 to February 29

Rating: 1 out of 5

The first full issue of a science fiction magazine that I ever read was the June 1999 Analog. Maybe it was in that issue that I saw the iconic cover of this issue for the first time, with its tyrannosaur stalking two astronauts — one human, one blobby and alien — through a canyon. Maybe it featured prominently on an offer for back issues, or perhaps it was on one of those subscription cards that tumble out of magazines. Regardless, I’m excited to finally have the chance to read it!

—

“Embracing the Alien” by Geoffrey A. Landis. Our narrator is a plantlike being sent to study the strange creatures known as humans. The being uses the designation Torri for the humans’ benefit. Torri has been assigned to a human FTL ship, which pauses to investigate a black hole. But the black hole hosts an unknown electromagnetic life form, which pulls them into the event horizon and sends them back in time to the terminal Cretaceous on Earth. There, the travelers meet a younger version of the energy being, who asks them to vote on whether the human future should be wiped away to usher in a utopian dinosaur timeline.

If you’ve read a story in the ’90s Analog style, you know the formula: sci-fi adventure, lightly seasoned with human drama, but predominantly focused on the genre elements. This one goes through its relevant character beats like a checklist. It works adequately (if perfunctorily) as a story, but lacks emotional depth. Colonialism is woven inextricably throughout its premise: humanity (read: white people) spread disruption and war wherever they went, but they also taught other races technology and new ways of thinking, so they should be thanked! It’s impossible not to recognize that line for what it is, nowadays, even if it was wholly subconscious when written. Also, there just aren’t enough dinosaurs. I’m sure I would have loved “Alien” when I was younger, though. C

—

“Steelcollar Worker” by Vonda N. McIntyre. Jannine and Neko are workers in a VR factory, finessing molecules into proprietary compounds for various drugs or fertilizers. Neko has misgivings about the secret new compound they’ve been making, but Jannine is more worried about the threat of being promoted. This story tries to be a blue collar viewpoint on a cyberpunk future, but like most predicted futures from 30 years back, it wasn't nearly pessimistic enough about what a working class life would be like. The story itself is fine, nothing especially memorable. It peters out into nothing. C-?

—

“Naught Again” by John E. Stith. Nick Naught is a PI with a car that has a mind of its own. We open with Nick trying desperately to talk his Flashfire out of street-racing another AI car. There’s even a joke about the DMV on the first page. That pretty much gives you the flavor of this “humorous” novelette. Extremely uninteresting. D

—

I don’t know whether I’d count the Probability Zero feature as a story or not. (Seriously, what was with ’90s Analog and ’80s Asimov’s and their ongoing “humorous” columns?) Anyway, “C-Change” by Charles Sheffield was certainly something that was printed, on paper even. Shrug?

—

“P. C. Software” by G. David Nordley. As you could guess from the title, this tedious number roots its “humor” in that timeless fear of mediocre men everywhere: political correctness run amok! An “elephantine” feminist rages at a magazine editor about the content he publishes, so he buys software to replace every word with paragraphs of euphemisms. It’s a timely reminder of how those with power have always pushed to infantilize and mock any who challenge their accepted hierarchy. White dudes are still out here parroting this same joke more than three decades later, and acting like they just aced the assignment. Terminally dull and uncreative. F

—

“High on Life” by Greg Costikyan. Oh boy, even more humorous social commentary from a privileged point of view! Jason is a man bold enough to be cheerful in a time of nanny-state overreach, risking mace and possible accusations of harassment in order to have a nice “morally wrong” flirt with the office ladies (who are all secretly in love with him for his boldness). Those nanny-state liberals want to make enjoying life a crime, lads! F

—

“Assemblers of Infinity” by Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason (part 3 of 4). Another Analog, another serialized novel midway through its run. I’ve never read anything I enjoyed by Kevin J. Anderson, and this does nothing to change that. The synopsis of the first two installments takes the time to assure us that female characters are “trim” and “attractive.” Once we get through the synopsis, we’re stuck with some 45 pages of boilerplate technothriller, populated with uninteresting characters and petty little dramas, all while knowing the conclusion is nowhere in sight. Not nearly enough actually happens to justify the page count. The gist is that alien nanobots are building something mysterious on the far side of the moon. The terrestrial powers-that-be assemble a team (which includes an architect who is also an astronaut, for some reason) and send them to check it out. An attractive young female scientist negligently infects herself and the crew with nanobots. The architect-astronaut is going through a divorce; trapped on the moon with him, the young scientist notes he doesn’t seem that much older…. Yeah, it’s that kind of story. Maybe F+

—

Fulfilling a longstanding Analog tradition, the best part of this issue was, yet again, the cover art. The first couple stories were almost promising, but we sped downhill from there. Goddamn, that was some bleak reading. 

2024 read #26: Wild Angels by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Wild Angels by Ursula K. Le Guin

52 pages

Published 1975

Read February 20

Rating: 4 out of 5

Sometimes, browsing online archives of dubious provenance, you stumble upon lost curiosities. This is a chapbook released by Capra Press, a highbrow indie press that seemingly specialized in limited edition books from startlingly famous authors. (They also released titles by Anaïs Nin and Raymond Carver, among others.) I never expected to read a chapbook of poetry from Le Guin, but I’d never be able to pass up the opportunity after learning of it.

It’s strange encountering Le Guin’s poetry after reading so much of her long-form prose work. It’s also strange, having read almost exclusively poetry from the last five years (plus a sprinkling of Romantic and Victorian pieces), reading poetry from nearly fifty years ago. Wild Angels is neither as formally antiquated as Goblin Market, nor as pulsing and gristly as The Thirteen Scorned Wives of La Nuit.

In the extensive narrative of “Coming of Age,” Le Guin writes:

Call to me here and I will come,

knowing my name and the game's rules

and all the rest I've learnt.

But I will not call their names

nor name them to you, those,

the children playing in the ruined fort,

the little falcons, the inheritors.

It’s good, a compelling poem full of meaning, but it shows a touch of midcentury stiffness, of reserve packed into all those commas. Or rather, the rhythm is just something I’m not used to. Clearly, I need to expand my poetry readings beyond the contemporary vibes. Poetry, more so than other formats, demands effort from its readers to open its inner timelessness.

This chapbook, once I adjust my expectations to the meter of ’70s poetry, feels consummately Le Guinian. She glides without apparent effort from the inaccessibility of nostalgia to  how women are used by society to the easy answers of bigotry, from the smallness of childhood to the limitations of adult wisdom to an atheist’s conversation with God, all within the same poem.

The rest of the poems, while briefer than the sprawling “Coming of Age,” circle around the same motifs and build upon its imagery, revisiting falcons and oat grass, what culture consigns to femininity and everything in the world that gets neglected by God. But Le Guin’s interests gyre wider, into creation, into dreams, into myth. Death looms everywhere; birth is a fate little better.

2024 read #25: Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, August 1986 issue.

Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, August 1986 issue (10:8)

Edited by Gardner Dozois

192 pages

Published 1986

Read from February 19 to February 20

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Another issue of Asimov’s that promises a story at least tangentially related to dinosaurs, though this one — “Stop-Motion” by Tim Sullivan — likely offers far less prehistoric action than its splash art suggests. And, unfortunately, we have to wade through an Orson Scott Card novelette to get there. Well, let’s get into it.

—

We begin with a poem by Robert Frazier: “A Worker in the Ruins of Ganymede.” Pretty good; an evocative sketch of archaeology in the outer solar system.

—

“Hatrack River” by Orson Scott Card. It’s truly unfortunate that noted bigot Card was one of the few authors (after Manly Wade Wellman) who dabbled in Appalachian fantasy prior to the turn of the millennium. When I was a brand new adult, long before Card’s bigotry became common knowledge (and long before I began unpacking my own white privileges in a society built upon institutional racism), I adored the idea of his “frontier magic” series. Though even then, I found Seventh Son lackluster enough that I never continued past it. Just now, I looked up the summary of the series on Wikipedia, and it’s, um, rather more racist than I realized back then. I wasn’t particularly thrilled to have this story between me and the one story I came here to read.

Plus, “River” was incorporated as the prologue to Seventh Son. (I don’t know if authors still do this, but certainly in the ’80s and ’90s, if you were famous enough, it was common practice for the big SFF mags to publish chapters from your upcoming novels as standalone “stories.”) So on top of everything else, I’ve read this damn thing before.

On its own, “River” offers little more than broad frontier vibes and child abuse, with a sprinkle of casual racism for seasoning. It’s way too long for what it is. You could watch the 1983 movie Eyes of Fire to get a similar ambience, and have a much better time. Card was a decent enough prose author for his era, but that isn’t enough to recommend this story. D+

—

cw for the following story: graphic dog death.

“Stop-Motion” by Tim Sullivan. Having read (and paged through) a lot of Asimov’s issues from the mid-’80s, I’ve discovered a curious trend from the time: lots of stories that invoke dinosaurs, or use them as a thematic motif, without being about dinosaurs. The Dinosaur Revolution had brought dinos back into pop culture in a big way, but pre-Jurassic Park, it seems like dinosaur stories were still considered old fashioned and hokey, burdened with all the pulp schlock that accumulated around them from the 1910s through the 1960s. So you got a bunch of stories that siphoned trendiness from dinosaurs without entrusting them with any starring roles.

This story slots into this oddly specific micro-trend. Eighteen year old Kevin, who dabbles in stop-motion filmmaking with his model dinosaurs, accidentally runs over a dog one night. We’re treated to pages of gory description as the dog slowly bleeds to death in Kevin’s car and in his mom’s basement, where Kevin spells out the story’s load-bearing leitmotif: “His hands had brought these creatures to life — on celluloid, at least — and here they all were, silently watching as the life ran out of this real, flesh-and-blood creature….”

Naturally, Kevin — who is grieving his father’s untimely death by being a real dickhead to his mother — gets this superstitious idea that he “sacrificed” the dog’s soul to his model tyrannosaur. When a film producer steals some of Kevin’s stop-motion work without attribution, Kevin follows the possessed-doll chain of logic and leaves the model in the producer’s office to wreak vengeance upon him. The aftermath happens off-screen, so we never “know” whether the rex did his dirty work or if it was all in Kevin’s head, blah blah blah.

Calling this story “Pet Sematary meets Ray Harryhausen” makes it sound much cooler than it really is. It’s extremely ’80s-short-horror in conception and tone: aggrieved young white man lashing out with the power of blood magic against one who has wronged him. Not my bag. It could have been worse, though. It incorporates dinosaurs into its narrative in a way I’ve never encountered before, which is rare. (Though compare and contrast with the tiny dinosaurs in David Gerrold’s “Rex,” anthologized in Dinosaur Fantastic.) I did enjoy the detail that Kevin’s rex had scraggly fur. Maybe that’s enough to bump it up to C-?

—

“Strange Eruptions” by Harry Turtledove. Unsurprisingly for Turtledove, this is an alternative history piece. Thankfully it has nothing to do with either Hitler or the Civil War. “Eruptions” centers on Argyros, a magistrianos in imperial Constantinople. He’s overwhelmed by a desk full of papyrus-work, in classic 1980s cop movie style. But then smallpox sweeps through the city. Argyros’ wife Helen gets sick; he invents a baby bottle for their son, wrestles with questions of doubt and faith, and (spoilers) inadvertently discovers cowpox inoculation. While it is unexpectedly moving at times, the main draw of this story is its pseudo-historical Byzantium, which is vividly and lovingly depicted. Not a lost classic, but solid. B

—

“The Dragon’s Head” by Karen Joy Fowler. It would be predictable to call this Bradburyan, but hey, it’s a child’s-eye perspective on strange, mystical, enigmatic things happening in a small town in the 1950s, so what can you do? Young Penny, who can do anything a boy can do, gets dared to trick-or-treat at the home of Mrs. McLaughlin, the neighborhood witch archetype. Mrs. McLaughlin invites her to come back for tea, where she gives Penny a kitten and tells her of the dragon, whose twin heads breathe fire and fog. The story then peters out; its mysteries never build into anything bigger than an opaque parable. Sometimes, though, a mood — a suggestion of magic — is enough. B

—

A poem by Hope Athearn, “Elegy for an Alien,” is quite lovely, domestic and intimate and welcoming.

—

“Aymara” by Lucius Shepard. A overlong novelette about Central American mercenaries from Lucius Shepard? What a shocker! (Sarcasm.) This one is not his best work. It reminds me of old pulp adventures, likely deliberately, and not in good ways. The prose is stiff and dated, as if Shepard had been channeling the tastes of the era. A Black character is given a thick dialect to speak.

The touches that root “Aymara” firmly in the ’80s aren’t any better. The titular Aymara is reputed to be a quasi-immortal sorceress who’s lived in a cave since the 1640s, but in reality she turns out to be a time traveler. She’s on a mission to ensure that mercenary Lee Christmas helps United Fruit take over Honduras, or else the future will suffer: “Sometimes you gotta do the wrong thing to ’chieve the right result.” Bad things need to happen so that worse things don’t happen is such a de rigueur eighties take; this story goes further, into outright accelerationism. (After everything that’s happened since 2016, I can’t abide accelerationism.)

Structurally, though, this story works as a particularly solid paradoxes vs predestination piece, and even on an off day, Shepard is a good enough author to suck me into the story. The ending, in particular, was strange and evocative in a way I wasn’t expecting. Perhaps, as a compromise, I’ll give it a middling C

—

One more Robert Frazier poem for the road: “A Starpilot Muses on the Universal Tide Pool.” You can get a taste of it from the title alone. Solid stuff.

—

Believe it or not, that’s it for this issue! In addition to the usual overburden of editorials, fan letters, book reviews, and logic puzzles, there’s also an extended essay by Michael Swanwick, “A User’s Guide to the Postmoderns,” which I might read at some point (or I might not). I should probably read more literary criticism instead of solely fiction on its own, but right now, I don’t wanna.

2024 read #24: The Thirteen Scorned Wives of La Nuit by Avra Margariti.

The Thirteen Scorned Wives of La Nuit by Avra Margariti

25 pages

Published 2024

Read February 19

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

A digital chapbook from the author of The Saint of Witches, The Thirteen Scorned Wives of La Nuit takes the contemporary poetry in-joke — we’re all in love with the moon, who is a beautiful lesbian! — and pares through it with knives. These are poems of self-dissection, of opium and absinthe, of calcified hearts, of bones caught in the throat. We straddle dragons despite (or because of) the burns they leave on our thighs. The moon is an apathetic mistress: Now, Avra writes in “ii - Celeste,” everything drips silver / And suffocating.

This is a stunning gleam of a book, over almost before you can process its first words. Each poem swoons, half asphyxiated, into the next, a sprawling tapestry of injury sewn in exquisite and unexpected detail: Squeezing pomegranate pulp / Out of hollow bones (“v - Harriet”).

2024 read #23: Cossmass Infinities Science Fiction and Fantasy, May 2020 issue.

Cossmass Infinities Science Fiction and Fantasy, May 2020 issue (2)

Edited by Paul Campbell

199 pages

Published 2020

Read from February 17 to February 19

Rating: 3 out of 5

Cossmass Infinities is, like so many genre magazines that came before it, now sadly defunct. I read and enjoyed the occasional standalone story during its run, and at one point, one of my stories made it to the second tier of its editorial review process, but this is the first time I’ve sat down to read a full issue. I bought a paperback copy of this issue for the sake of Nemma Wollenfang’s “Mesozoic” story below, which I discovered via the expedient of searching for “Mesozoic” on the Internet Science Fiction Database.

The editorial (written April 1, 2020) has the obligatory paragraph about lockdown, fear, and the “different world” we found ourselves in that northern spring. I miss the lockdown era. I miss that naive optimism I felt in the midst of the global uncertainties. It was a better time by far than our current regime of pretending everything is back to normal while thousands die of the selfsame virus each week, and thousands more become permanently disabled. (As I review this, my ex-spouse is sick with COVID for at least the second time, and isn't sure how to prevent our kid from catching it from her, also for the second time. I’m sad and upset at how normalized this has become.)

Anyway, moving on to the stories.

—

“Chains of Mud and Salt” by Evan Dicken. Atmospheric and sea-girt tale of loss, colonialism, and rebellion. Our narrator’s mother died years ago in a failed action against the distant oligarchic League, but there is more than one means of rebellion, just as there is more than one method of colonization. I quite enjoyed this story, with all its rich detail and hints of a sprawling world, both within and beyond the salt marshes.

“Rag and Bone, Scrap and Sinew” by Jonathan Laidlow. A haunting and beautiful fable of the collapse of industrial civilization, as seen from the perspective of Tatter, a rag-and-bone-man who takes care of her city as its power fails and its residents trickle away. Excellent, and perfectly strange, following the logic of the best fairy tales.

“The Djinn of Titan’s Dunes” by Deborah L. Davitt. In bare outline, a “realistic” sci-fi piece about prospectors accidentally finding evidence of life on a hydrocarbon-rich moon in the outer solar system isn’t that special. It’s something of a subgenre all its own, dating back at least to the 1990s, and likely much earlier. But there are just enough unique touches — the elderly volunteers sent on the theory that they’d die anyway before the radiation killed them, the folkloric flavor of Kahina’s maybe-hallucinations — to elevate this entry. Pretty good.

“The Hard Quarry” by Caleb Huitt. I didn’t find much of interest in this tale of a generic dude out mining an asteroid and the pirates who dogfight his ship in space. The vibe just never clicked for me. There’s no depth or complexity to it. Ah well.

“We’re Alone in This Together” by Donald Norum. A depressed dude starts corresponding with his younger self, whose hopes and dreams spur him to work out, learn poetry, and ask out his old school crush, to help make up for wasting the last ten years. Slightly interesting premise, but the flat, interchangeable narrator didn’t do it for me.

“A Study of the Mesozoic ‘Schistostoma’ of the Late Cretaceous Period and their Abundance in Large Theropods” by Nemma Wollenfang. This, by contrast, is delightful. Our narrator, an undergrad, is assigned a shitty project by her time travel professor: collecting dinosaur fecal samples to assess the presence of gut parasites. The mix of put-upon collegiate humor and unglamorous Cretaceous turd-hunting was a fresh spin on old time travel tropes. In the long, unsatisfying history of dinosaur fiction, this story is a nice standout. My only complaint is that I wish we’d gotten to see more of the Cretaceous.

Two reprints follow, both originally published in 2017:

“Batteries For Your Doombot5000 Are Not Included” by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor. This is a sweet, sentimental, humorous tale of a retired supervillain buying some of her old doombots at an estate sale, and hoping to find in them some trace of the woman she… liked a lot. Charming.

“Illicit Alchemy” by Eric Lewis. Disgraced when her mentor joined the rebellion, apprentice alchemist Emony has to take any job she can get — which lands her at a black market alchemy “startup.” Interesting premise, but this story doesn’t do much with it, and the dialogue feels ripped from a YA novel. It’s fine?

—

And that’s it! Not bad for a second issue of a semipro magazine. Worth it for Wollenfang’s story, but the Dicken and Laidlow pieces were standouts.

2024 read #22: Lumberjanes To the Max Edition Volume 1.

Lumberjanes To the Max Edition Volume 1

Created by Shannon Watters, Grace Ellis, Noelle Stevenson & Brooke Allen

271 pages

Comics originally published 2014

Read February 17

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

One of my holiday presents from my partner R, this lovely hardback omnibus collects the first eight chapters of the Lumberjanes series, which I’ve wanted to read for years, plus an additional short: “A Girl and Her Raptor.” What could be more up my alley? It’s the perfect way to get out of this reading slump I’ve found myself in the last week or so.

Surprising no one, I love Lumberjanes. The characters (and their designs) are vibrant and endearing. The writing is quick-moving, the story unexpectedly moving, the setting instantly iconic. It’s as close in spirit to Gravity Falls as you can get while still being its own wholly distinct thing, with the added bonus of its scout camp vibe. Summer camp and eldritch adventures are two flavors that should get combined far more often.

I never got to experience anything like summer camp. I get the sense that the reality falls far short of its portrayal in pop culture, even without all the added dungeon crawls and strange mystical creatures you find here. But I’ve been jonesing to write summer camp stories — and really, anything that falls under the broader “kids on bikes” umbrella — for a while now. No doubt it’s an escapism thing, given how shit our actual timeline is. It’s also about reclaiming the childhood I never got to have. So it’s no wonder I love this book.

Plus: dinosaurs! Raptors and summer camp also pair exceptionally well. While the raptor interlude is brief, and certainly not a match for Lost Time, it packs in a lot of fun (and friendship bracelets). And honestly, having such a prominent comic book do a “dinosaurs in the summer camp” arc only encourages me to work on my own “summer camp among the dinosaurs” story (which is fully distinct from Camp Cretaceous, thank you very much).

2024 read #21: Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, 21 December 1981 issue.

Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, 21 December 1981 issue (5:13)

Edited by George H. Scithers

182 pages

Read from February 6 to February 8

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Following a couple years behind the October 1979 issue, we have our second Asimov’s with a prehistoric animal (…kinda) on the cover. The interior splash art for “The Time-Warp Trauma” is more promising, with a feisty Archaeopteryx menacing a schlub in a checked suit. I love me some paravian line art. It was enough to sell me on this issue, even if the tenor of the drawing suggests a humorous story to follow. Let’s give it a go!

—

“The Time-Warp Trauma” by J.O. Jeppson. A social club for psychoanalysts — “Pshrinks Anonymous” — meets in a hotel’s sub-basement dining room. The Oldest Member is perplexed by a case: Mr. Y, a retiree who is nervous about living in New York City. When Mr. Y finally makes a breakthrough, he decides to walk to his appointment through Central Park, and accidentally falls asleep in a time-warp, waking up to an Archaeopteryx in a tree. On his way to the next appointment a week later, Mr. Y experiences a La Brea tar pit scene, with an elephant and sabertooth cats. The story is mildly fun, an inoffensively humorous postmodern take on the time-warp trope, using the sci-fi concept to examine anxieties of old age and retirement. (Apparently people from previous generations who were financially and socially privileged to be able to retire felt anxiety about it? Cannot relate.) “Trauma” is far more interested in light satire of psychoanalytics than it is in its time-warp; I spent more time looking at the splash art than the story spent in its putative prehistory. Still, I will begrudgingly admit that it qualifies as dinosaur fiction. Barely. A solid enough C+

“The Gongs of Ganymede” by Martin Gardner. Damn, early Asimov’s was a weird place. I assumed this was a mediocre story about a space cult; turns out it’s a two page setup for a brain teaser math problem. Moving along.

“The Santa Clone Interview” by Valdis Augstkalns. Another humorous piece, this one constructed as an exposé interview with the Big Guy at the North Pole, who’s doing damage control after his mall Santas are revealed to be clones. It’s the kind of joke that feels like a hoary old chestnut even when you hear it for the first time. It’s fine, I guess? Except the author couldn’t resist making a crack about Medicare. Oh, the eighties. I’ll be generous and say C-

“The Jarabon” by Lee Killough. This is a moderately fun hyperspace heist caper. Kele owes everything to Sperrow, the man who recognized her thieving skills and took her off the streets. But when he sends her to steal a jarabon, an exquisitely carved jewel from an extinct civilization, and the only way to pinch it is to “ride the timewind” — staying awake during hyperspace travel, risking madness — Kele wonders if it’s worth it any longer. C+

A poem follows: “IMPROBABLE BESTIARY: The Thing in the Jar” by F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre. From browsing the tables of contents of other Asimov’s from this time, I know it’s part of a series. For a rhyming poem about a carnival “freak show” (not a promising premise), it’s pretty good. The lines have a nice singalong rhythm.

“Wrong Number” by F.M. Busby. Entry in a humorous serial about a dude with the ability to alter events after they happen. Feels awfully similar to Isaac Asimov’s Azazel series — though this installment, at any rate, is free of Asimov’s signature misogyny and grossness. Still not my cup of tea, though relatively painless. C-?

“Packing Up” by P. J. MacQuarrie. In the sanitized, minimalist future, live-in psych workers are in high demand. Bart is one such domestic, padding around the halls of his employers, the industrialist Mellewin family, making sure everyone sleeps well, keeping their neuroses under control. But Bart is approaching burnout. He fills the blank halls with his fantasies of a life and love of his own, daydreams of vacation, which get smothered by the weight of the Mellewins’ worries. It builds to Bart wondering if maybe a little anxiety, the occasional sleepless night, might be good for people. There isn’t much to this story. Its most interesting aspect is how it translates Gilded Age class norms into a soft sci-fi future. Bart isn’t a real doctor, just a specialized and trained addition to “the help.” The story’s concern with too much psychological intervention leading to coddled people who don’t know how to handle their own problems might make sense from a class-based lens. (It certainly isn’t an issue in our own society, unless you make north of six figures.) But ultimately, it feels like yet another quasi-libertarian “care makes humans too soft!” propaganda piece. Still, I didn’t dislike it. Maybe C-

“End Game” by Brian Aldiss. A palindromic story is impressive. However, between this, “The Gongs of Ganymede,” and all the humor pieces, this issue feels more like a Big Book of Puzzles & Activities than a sci-fi magazine. All gimmicks and games, not much literature. 

“A Thief in Ni-Moya” by Robert Silverberg. I forget how long ago it was — maybe 2004, 2005? — but once, I was fixated on Silverberg’s Majipoor books. I read the first three volumes as quickly as I could track them down in used bookstores. Which is how I first encountered this novella: it was collected in The Majipoor Chronicles. Revisiting it all these years later, I’m struck by how much this series informed my later tastes in cozy fantasy. The setting is richly detailed, immense, as evocative with its rain-filled bathing troughs and tooled leather pouches as it is with its teeming continents and thirty-mile-high mountains. It sucked me back in right away. Some light spoilers for the story itself: Inyanna, a young shopkeeper in a remote town, gets suckered into giving up her life savings in Majipoor’s equivalent of the old “deed to the Brooklyn Bridge” scam. She travels thousands of miles to the inconceivably vast metropolis of Ni-Moya to claim her inheritance, and falls in with helpful young thief Liloyve, who invites her into the underworld of thieves. It’s a simple, well-worn tale of a rogue’s origin, one of the most Dungeons & Dragons things I’ve ever read, but told so atmospherically that I have nothing to complain about. B

—

And that’s it! I feel a tiny bit bamboozled by this issue, between the time-warp barely playing a role in “The Time-Warp Trauma,” and half the rest of the issue falling closer to brain teasers than to stories. (I exaggerate, but still.) Nonetheless, it was nice to revisit Majipoor. After almost two decades of barely thinking about it, I’m considering running through that series again.

2024 read #20: Dinotopia: The World Beneath by James Gurney.

Dinotopia: The World Beneath, written and illustrated by James Gurney

160 pages

Published 1995

Read February 6

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 (though the paintings deserve higher)

I thought I had read this once before, back during my read-everything-Dinotopia era in the early 2000s, but now I'm pretty sure I skipped directly to First Flight.

The World Beneath is a definite downgrade from the original. Gone is the insistence that “Dinosaurs aren’t just for kids!” World Beneath admits defeat and, almost sheepishly, reads like a picture book. The text is simplified and aged down, scarcely more than captions to the art.

Gurney's art is, of course, exemplary, some of the finest paleo-art of its era. We don't get any big, memorable tableaux that equal Treetown in the first book, though the picnic excursion to Slumberland Valley comes close.

World Beneath takes a while to find its footing. Once the central adventure starts — Arthur’s trip into the ancient caves beneath Dinotopia — it’s a pleasant enough dungeon crawl, complete with a seedy tavern, cavernous temples, strange gemstones, golden statues, and a fleet of mechanical dinosaurs. The abbreviated text makes it feel more hectic and haphazard than it should, especially the climax.

2024 read #19: Action Stories, December 1940 issue.

Action Stories, December 1940 issue (16:1)

Edited by Malcolm Reiss 

132 pages

Published 1940

Read February 5

Rating: 1 out of 5

I’m reading this for one reason and one reason only: the cover art for “Exiles of the Dawn World.” I have no illusions that anything here will live up to the pure pulp silliness promised by that cover. You can pretty much guarantee that the cover will be the best part of a magazine like this, anyway.

—

“Ghost-Brand Maverick” by Jay Karth. The title is the best thing about this paint-by-numbers western, which has nothing to do with ghosts. Our hero, Ed Flane, has “opaque” blue eyes and no personality beyond stoic manliness. He arrives in town, supposedly fresh out of prison on a governor’s pardon; Ed had been locked up for killing his own father, but was let go on “insufficient evidence.” Naturally, the moment he sets foot in town, manly honor demands he fistfight a dude named Rick, who promptly dies. Ed Flane knows it’s a setup by local bigwigs hoping to take over his ranch and cover up who actually killed Ed’s dad (and not, like, Ed’s responsibility whatsoever for fighting Rick or anything). There’s also a gray-eyed waif who’s in love with Ed, but her father wants to shoot him; then her father ends up dead, etc. There’s even a twist reveal of lookalikes, assumed identities, and a second Ed Flane. It feels like a pressed and shaped chicken patty of a story, a product squirted out for rapid consumption and immediate digestion. I suppose it could have been worse? If I had to say something positive about it, “Maverick” does a decent job at escalation, adding fresh complications to Ed Flane’s situation. D

“Exiles of the Dawn World” by Nelson S. Bond. Stage magician and sometime ghost-exorcist Jeff thinks he’s investigating a standard haunted house in upstate New York; city reporter Beth thinks she’s exposing Jeff as the con he is. Instead, through a hidden passageway in a bookshelf, they discover Dr. Franz von Torp and his secret time-travel laboratory. Von Torp, to preserve his secrets, orders them into his time-machine; in the struggle, all three end up “a million years ago,” which turns out to be a pulpy mishmash of cavemen times and dinosaur swamps. Jeff’s magician coat comes in handy when befriending the local Cro-Magnons. Most of the fauna is a smattering of Cenozoic beasties — Dinoceras and Coryphodon get name-checked — but dinosaurs finally appear in the climax, specifically tyrannosaurs ridden by war bands of Neanderthals under the mad scientist’s command. Like “Maverick” above, this story is a checklist of pulp tropes run through with abandon. Weirdly, “Exiles” shows its age worse than the western does, particularly in its general attitude toward women. Still, it has cavemen fighting tyrannosaurs with fire arrows, which is exactly what I came here for. D-

Content warning for two next stories: sui ideation.

“Boothill Bait” by Tom J. Hopkins. Back in the saddle with another western, this time following Joe Fergus, a steely, stoic man with an actual character trait: he wants to die, but can’t seem to make it happen, not even in shootouts with bandits. When Fergus finds a town, nicknamed The Graveyard, where marshaling is a sure ticket to six feet under, he rushes to volunteer. That’s the only interesting wrinkle to this dud. Despite that setup, Fergus lights out for an even deadlier town down in Mexico the moment someone tells him about it, chasing another man who just wants to die. “Boothill” is trying so hard to be brooding and fatalistic, but it’s just silly. (And ultimately racist.) F

“The Devil’s Sink Hole” by Albert Richard Wetjen. I was premature when I said a suicidal hero was an interesting wrinkle, because we got another one: Stinger Seave, a former South Seas “trader” who has gone back to ruthless adventuring in his old age, after a bank collapse erases most of his colonialist wealth. Seave is frail, his mustache white, and he’s clean out of fucks to give. So the governor of colonial New Guinea offers to make him a magistrate on the frontier. Stinger could have been an interesting character, but this story is an exercise in colonialist bullshit. It’s just an especially vile western with palm trees. F

Clearly we peaked with the first two stories. We’ve long since  reached the point of diminishing returns.

“The Rider of Lost Range” by Bart Cassidy. Another western. Two bygone “pards,” Buck and Rooney, grew up and got ranches next to each other, but now they suspect each other of rustling their calves, because it’s manlier to stew in unfounded suspicion than to have an open and honest communication. You’d never guess, but a third man is behind it all, putting them against each another while he steals their cattle! (I sussed out the twist by page two.) The one redeeming feature of this tale is its depiction of high park and mountain scenery. There’s also a secret cave behind a thundering waterfall, leading to a grassy range open to the air, which is implausible but fun. Maybe F+

“Murder Sands” by John Starr. A tale of two men in the French Foreign Legion: a standup American sergeant, and a vicious bully of a Dutch lieutenant. The American noncom punches the Dutch officer, gets only light punishment due to past heroism, and now the Dutchman plots vengeance. Consistently uninteresting tale from the desert frontiers of colonialism. F

“Tejano!” by Harry F. Olmsted. All about some “loco” white dudes cow-punching in the Big Bend country. Murders and rustling and revenge get rattled off at breakneck pace, with all the standard racist western tropes. I almost wonder if this was some awkward attempt at a satire of pulpy westerns. No thanks, either way. F

“Fate Fans a .45” by Walt Coburn. Jack Badger, cowpoke turned investigator, traipses down to Mexico about a train robbery, following a hunch it was set up by someone on the inside. (Turns out Jack’s dad was killed in the robbery. It’s a vengeance story, because of course it is.) Insipid stuff, and excessively long, to boot. Didn’t expect much from this one, but what a flat way to end this issue. F

—

For a moment there at the start, I had thought this magazine might have been more than meets the eye — only a little, maybe 5%, but still, more interesting than it would seem. But no, they merely front-loaded it with the best stories, and even those two were marginal at best. The rest was pure pulp filler. Not surprising, just disappointing.

2024 read #18: I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times by Taylor Byas.

I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times by Taylor Byas

109 pages

Published 2023

Read February 5

Rating: 5 out of 5

Taylor Byas is one of our greatest contemporary poets. Whenever I read her poems — which always find the flow and grace in even the most rigid forms, always mix wry observation with devastating revelation — it’s like a classroom. Her words communicate in ways that make me wonder if I ever said anything real in my life. Where my own poetry obscures my trauma and fears under sedimentary layers of jargon, Byas reveals truths in sideways glances, in moments of shattering clarity.

I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times is an exploration of growing up. Growing up on the South Side of Chicago, growing up the child of an alcoholic father, growing up groomed for childbearing, growing up in a society that doesn’t consider your body to be whole in and of itself. It is an exploration of a society that dehumanizes and demonizes Blackness.

It is also an exploration of religion and technicolor eroticism, of possession and loss, of navigating sexuality and relationships with men who also learned to view your body as theirs. It is an exploration of what gets taken away.

A running list of particular favorites:

The “South Side” sequence

“Blackberrying”

“The Early Teachings”

“You from ‘Chiraq’?”

“Jeopardy! (The Category Is Birthright)”

“Yes, the Trees Sing”

“The Gathering Place — Grandma’s House”

“Wreckage”

“A Diagram with Hands”

“Cloud Watching”

“Dream in Which You Cuff Me to the Bed”

“Men Really Be Menning: On Dating”

“The Mercy Hour: A Burning Haibun”

“If I Could Love Life into Him”

“mother”

“Drunken Monologue from an Alcoholic Father’s Oldest Daughter”

“I Spy”

“The Way a Chicago Summer Comes”

2024 read #17: Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, October 1979 issue.

Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, October 1979 issue (3:10)

Edited by George H. Scithers

192 pages

Published 1979

Read February 1

Rating: 2 out of 5

Of all the modern sci-fi magazines still on newsstands, Asimov’s has always seemed the least ashamed to put dinosaurs on its covers. They featured a tyrannosaur as recently as the September 2012 issue, long after every other mainstream magazine had put dinos away in the box of ’90s embarrassment, alongside their pastel windbreakers and whimsigoth bedspreads. Like pastel windbreakers and whimsigoth bedspreads, dinosaur fiction never stopped being cool in my opinion, so I appreciate that in a publication.

This issue here, on the other end of the spectrum — released in the magazine’s third calendar year — was Asimov’s first dino cover. Super-intelligent space-faring theropods returning to Earth in dapper little spacesuits, in 1979?? You know I gotta read that. But first, we have a whole lot of dubious ’70s sci-fi to get through.

—

“Mandalay” by John M. Ford. I was unexpectedly impressed with Ford’s “Green Is the Color,” which I read and reviewed in Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder. Likewise, I was initially skeptical of “Mandalay,” a military march through alternate timelines, but the worldbuilding, at any rate, proved an unexpected delight.

Alternities Corporation offered people the opportunity to adventure, fight, and fornicate across different realities, but then came the Fracture, severing their gates from “Homeline.” Charlie Brunner, once a security guard for Alternities, assumes leadership over the surviving men (because of course they’re almost all men); only Charlie Brunner has the Key that can open the sealed gates. He leads the survivors on a years-long march through the tube ring connecting the various physical gates, each gate a hundred kilometers from the last. Sometimes they collect fresh survivors, sometimes they lose men who decide to stay in a particular “alternity.” Sometimes men die. The setting is one part WestWorld, one part Greg Bear’s Eon, with just a touch of rail-shooter video game mechanics. (Each section of tube has convenient packs of food and medicine.) The survivors march in a mix of period costumes and futuristic gear. Ford’s prose is crisp, better than what you’d expect for 1979.

Now for the negatives: It’s inevitable at this point in time (or really, any era of sci-fi between the 1960s and the early 2000s) that the characters would include Nazi and Confederate sympathizers who came to vacation in timelines where their kind won. That shit doesn’t add anything to the story beyond “gritty realism.” None of the characters are deeper than the motley items they wear. And despite its bravura setup — with its promise of endless alternate histories contaminating one another in the Fracture, and the survivors visiting them in their mismatched costumes afterward to find home — we don’t get that much out of it. Just one Barsoom-esque encounter, and one almost-but-not-quite Colorado. Feels like squandered potential.

Still, between the concept, the prose, and a solid ending, I’d say that “Mandalay” earns an adequate C+

 —

“A Day in Mallworld” by Somtow Sucharitkul. S. P. Somtow’s first story in Asimov’s, and the beginning of his popular Mallworld series. Like any hip and edgy male sci-fi writer between the years of 1975 and 2000, Somtow has his adolescent narrator mention 1) her virginity and 2) her “budding little breasts” on the first page. Combine that with the splash page art depicting her all but naked, and you can imagine my reluctance to proceed.

Conceptually, the setting was brilliant: The alien Selespridar have locked down the solar system until humanity might prove itself worthy. Mallworld, an outer space shopping center sprawling across thirty kilometers of habitats, is the one place humans might run into visiting Selespridar, the one place a runaway teen from the asteroidal Bible Belt might conceivably get away. It’s a clever way to literalize teen wanderlust, the romance of the mall, the need to get out of this small town scaled up to humanity as a species.

The plot of “A Day” does not live up to its setting. Our narrator Zoe, naive runaway that she is, runs into a high-ranking Selespridar, Zhangif, who’s on a quest to discover the meaning of life. She shows him Earthly religion, but it doesn’t satisfy him, so he tries acid, which almost poisons him. Then (spoilers) she discovers that the aliens can’t read, so she gets a dictionary at a decrepit bookstore and reads him the definition of “life.” It’s very silly. At least they don’t fuck (though it’s a close call). D+

—

A poem by Peter Payack, “The Mover,” is a humorous science-meets-religion piece about a mover who does both local furniture moves and galactic jobs. The central conceit is that Jesus (“The Prime Mover was his ‘Old Man’”) is recontextualized as an outer space trucker. Otherwise this one is forgettable.

—

“Through Time & Space with Ferdinand Feghoot!!!!!” by Grendel Briarton. As you might have guessed, “Grendel Briarton” is a pseudonym. This flash fic is actually by Reginald Bretnor, who wrote two actively distasteful stories I’ve had the misfortune to read in F&SF. It’s an elaborate setup (involving the wandering Children of Israel and a time traveling robot named Yewtoo Artoo) for an awkward pun on ferrous oxide. Bleh. How would one even rate this? Maybe F+

—

“Iron Man, Plastic Ships” by L. E. Modesitt, Jr. Not my cup of tea. Where “Mandalay” felt like a precursor to ’90s sci-fi, this military spacer reads like a throwback to the early ’60s. The prose is stiff and uninteresting. We have a no-nonsense space captain, also stiff and uninteresting, who refuses to sign off on some sketchy space tugs, and sets out to test them all personally. We get terms like flexiplast and chewball. The author seems to have a particular axe to grind with plastic. (Here in the era of universal microplastic contamination, I can’t say I disagree.) Maybe D-?

—

A limerick by Stephanie K. Lang, “Rebuttal to $tar War$,” is squeezed in at the bottom of a page. It critiques Princess Leia’s lack of characterization, ending with “She triumphs by being a shrew.” Meh.

—

“Degraded!” by Jean S. Moore. This tale of a 22nd century professor straining to teach Joyce’s Ulysses to a particular know-it-all manchild succeeded at infuriating me against the student, and also made me more intrigued to attempt Joyce than anything else has. So I suppose it works on those levels. The rest of it — a thinking-computer assigns a distributed network of humans to analyze one word apiece from Ulysses, a twenty-one-year global effort culminating in an easy-to-digest comic book — is almost charmingly 1970s, like something from Tom Baker’s era of Doctor Who. I’d probably appreciate it more if I’d read Ulysses at any point. Still, a solid enough C

—

A couple limericks pad out the rest of this page: “Blasterfight at the P.U. Corral” by Barry B. Longyear, which is a snooty protest at the bad writing of the original Battlestar Galactica; and “Where a Star Is a Ship or When Is a Micron a Parsec? or When Is TV Going to Start Hiring Science Fiction Writers?” by Tol E. Rant (which is a pen name for, uh, Barry B. Longyear), which is also a snooty protest at the bad writing of the original Battlestar Galactica.

Clearly, there was a call for writers to submit limericks attacking TV and movie sci-fi for this issue. And Barry B. Longyear was personally affronted by Battlestar Galactica.

—

“Homecoming” by Barry B. Longyear. Finally, the main attraction! Hundreds of ships full of intelligent dinosaurs have been waiting in suspended animation for 70 million years, but at last the time has come for them to return to Nitola, the homeworld. Unfortunately for everyone involved, Nitola is now Earth, the homeworld of humanity. The American Air Force selects Captain Baxter, a pilot with PR credentials, to head to space to meet with them. But the Russians want to send up their own man, and warn the Nitolans not to listen to Captain Baxter. Likewise, the dinosaurs have divided opinions on how to handle the humans.

The sections from the dinosaurs’ perspective are quite good. Maybe not as alien as they could be, but Longyear does a fair job of making them seem just alien enough. Plus, just look at these handsome fellows:

They’re never referred to as “dromaeosaurs” or “deinonychuses” or anything like that, but I think the Nitolans predate even Time Safari as the earliest appearance of “raptor” dinosaurs in fiction. At least in what I’ve read.

Unfortunately for us, most of “Homecoming” is told from the human perspective, specifically Baxter's. His sections have a banal military sci-fi vibe that doesn’t do it for me. Plus, Longyear somehow manages to squeeze in some weird racism in the brief time before Baxter leaves Earth. It wouldn’t be the 1970s without it.

In the end, I’d say “Homecoming” works in more ways than it doesn’t, and is more interesting than it is off-putting. It probably gets a C+

—

Lastly, one more limerick to pad out a page: “How True,” by Henry Clark, which is a metacommentary on using limericks as fillers at the bottom of a page.

—

And that’s it! All in all, it could have been much worse.