2024 read #50: Lego Space: 1978-1992 by Tim Johnson.

Lego Space: 1978-1992 by Tim Johnson

200 pages

Published 2023

Read from April 23 to April 24

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Lego sets — Lego Space sets in particular — were central to my childhood. I grew up poor, but whenever my Grandma would take me on a bus ride to the mall or to the Elder-Beerman store downtown, I would usually manage to whine or wheedle or wail a small set out of her. I hardly ever got anything larger than what would be considered a poly-bag impulse purchase set today, but I nickel-and-dimed a moonbase's worth of space guys between 1987 and the last dregs of my childhood in 1995.

Along the lines of Art & Arcana — a coffee table chronicle of the artwork behind Dungeons & Dragons — Lego Space is lovely nostalgia-bait, full of gorgeous artwork from the heyday of Lego’s Space line, with self-congratulatory corporate text masquerading as history.

Hired author Tim Johnson takes the unusual step of bulking up the profile of each set with a paragraph of fan-fiction, a miniature in-universe narrative of exploration, refueling, space rescues, and so on. Perhaps a handful of these interludes would have been charming, but they get included for each and every set, all 150-ish of them. Clearly this book was never meant for a consecutive read.

Still, the pictures are awesome, and there's an interesting section on how the box art and catalog spreads were photographed, which is pretty cool (though too brief).

2024 read #49: The Wild Irish Girl by Sydney Owenson.

The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale by Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan

Introduction and notes by Kathryn Kirkpatrick

290 pages

Published 1806

Read from April 22 to April 24

Rating: 1 out of 5

I read this for the sole purpose of scrounging up another title for my list of 1800s reads. (Eighteen-oughts, that is — not eighteen hundreds.) That’s a form of historical interest all on its own, naturally, but it isn’t the most satisfying reason to read a book. It certainly didn’t help me stay engaged with the tedious, allusive, grandiloquent style of the era, or help me through the book’s desultory, epistolary structure (I can’t call it plot).

As a document of historical attitudes and advocacy, The Wild Irish Girl is interesting, availing itself of the unsophisticated political philosophy of its day to lay out a nationalist mythology opposed to English colonialism (hence the subtitle). Owenson responds to the 1800 dissolution of the Irish parliament by taking the broad, otherizing stereotypes the English consigned to the Irish people, and turning them into positive attributes. The usual English propaganda of uncouth, uncivilized barbarians across the Irish Sea is recast into a Rousseauean state of “wild,” “natural” grace, suffused with “primeval simplicity and primeval virtue.”

Many pages are spent enumerating fanciful mythologies meant to link the Irish to Phoenician exiles, the sort of nationalistic bridge between the Classical Mediterranean and Atlantic Europe so beloved by early Moderns, Victorian diffusionists, Thor Heyerdahl, and Twitter’s white nationalists. At one point, even the way women fold their scarves is underlined as a cultural link to Egypt. If you’re researching the history of how folklore gets spun to foment nationalism, this is a book for you.

The story itself isn’t worth a read. Horatio, our viewpoint letter-writer, is a woeful and apathetic wastrel, banished by his aristocrat father to western Ireland to rethink his ways. He’s prejudiced against the Irish people, buying into every negative English stereotype against them. Bored after just a few days, Horatio prowls around his father’s estate, where he learns the tragic history of an Inismore prince whose ancestor was killed and dispossessed by Horatio's own ancestor. Horatio, feeling the first pangs of conscience an Englishman ever felt over the depravity of conquest, decides to attend church and gawk at the prince and his family. Once there, he promptly obsesses over Lady Glorvina, the prince's daughter. He breaks his arm while stalking her, wakes up in her care, assumes a false identity to stay with her, pretends to be an art tutor to get near her, etc. Then he has the gall to get upset that she might be deceiving him. I couldn’t be done with Horatio fast enough.

Here in Turtle Island, we often forget that England’s second colonial venture was perpetrated in Éire. (Their first colonial venture, as even fewer people recall, was against their own lower classes.) It’s a depressing reminder of how vile colonialism has always been that the English literate classes needed to be informed by a half-English author that the Irish were human. The Wild Irish Girl takes that thesis and stretches a book out of it. Horatio lists out an English prejudice on one page, only to be shocked by the kindness and generosity of the Irish on the next. Again and again. For some 250 pages of modern typesetting. And such is the way of colonialist empire that this was considered too radical to publish by several presses at the time.

2024 read #48: The Moth Keeper by K. O’Neill.

The Moth Keeper by K. O’Neill

265 pages

Published 2023

Read from April 21 to April 22

Rating: 4 out of 5

This middle-grade graphic novel is indisputably lovely. O’Neill’s art style is warm, soft, and comforting, welcoming us into the cozy community and magical world of the story. O’Neill tells much of the story through their art, laying out wordless pages with confidence.

I’m not the target audience for this book, of course, so it doesn’t matter much that I found the story itself a touch thin. However slight it might seem, The Moth Keeper is genuine and moving. More stories (especially stories for younger readers) should be about the importance of community, about loneliness and interconnection, about how everything and everyone is part of everything and everyone else. That, with the beauty of the art, is enough to satisfy me.

2024 read #47: Picnic on Paradise by Joanna Russ.

Picnic on Paradise by Joanna Russ

157 pages

Published 1968

Read from April 19 to April 20

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Ancient Greek warrior Alyx, formerly a rogue from a Bronze Age sword & sorcery city, is a Trans-Temporal Agent assigned to escort a group of rich tourists through the mountains of a vacation planet turned war zone. Thanks to the combatants’ futuristic sensors, she can’t employ metal or strike a fire. She has to wield synthetic daggers and crossbows, and babysit spoiled future folk utterly alien to her: people bereft of curiosity and imagination, people who’ve never had to just survive before, people who only want to talk about themselves and their issues with self-esteem.

The gist of Alyx’s conflict — comfort and civilization and self-help psychology have made everyone big and dumb and soft, unsuited for the hard tasks of survival, forcing her to bully and tyrannize them for their own good — is standard twentieth century sci-fi, nothing I haven’t read in one form or another most of my life.

What Russ brings to Picnic is the literary verve of her prose, the dexterity with which she sketches the clashing personalities, and (revolutionary for sci-fi in 1968) a focus on emotional intelligence. One of the future tourists’ collective weaknesses is inability to face their emotions. Crying is an essential survival tool, the first step in facing facts and moving forward. When one tourist dies, Alyx spends hours comforting her daughter, despite the urgency of their escape. I can’t imagine any masculine sci-fi story from this era (or any era prior to, say, the 1990s) letting its characters mourn on the page.

Of course, it has to be said that the central conflict is exacerbated by Alyx’s brutal methods of bringing her “picnickers” to their senses. Carefully beating her clients to snap them out of a spiral happens more than once. The juxtaposition between the drug-numbed future folk and Alyx’s Bronze Age belligerence is deliberate, a storytelling choice underlined when Alyx is faced with her own grief. 

2024 read #46: The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells.*

The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells*

249 pages

Published 1896

Read from April 18 to April 19

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

Like The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau was another tweenage favorite, read during the years when I lived in a car with my paranoid, abusive father (who seldom let me read anything more recent than the Edwardian era). I’ve been drawn to reread it ever since I read Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s excellent The Daughter of Doctor Moreau. Lacking access to my home library thanks to the move, and not yet having settled in enough to get a proper library card, I felt this was as good a time as any to give it a go.

Making the comparisons with Daughter is pretty much the only reason to read the original. Right from its conception, Wells’ Island is rancid with Victorian race theory, that bastard progeny of white supremacist theology and an early approximation of natural selection. The proverbial road from “beast” to “man” interested Victorians extremely, not least because the Christian conceit of the Great Chain of Being, dating back to medieval Neoplatonism, could be draped over their tentative glimpses of the evolutionary past, thus creating an ideological Frankenstein, a cobbled-together abomination to uphold their preconceived notions of superiority, with the Englishman just a couple steps below God. Even atheists of the day were enmeshed in this worldview, despite its theological origins. It was the foundation for late Victorian thought.

More succinctly, Island reeks of racism. Just absolutely foul with it. Racist imagery and racist implications cut through every depiction of Moreau’s creations; all the standard Victorian racial descriptors are in play.

Wells’ proto-technothriller style is far from its best here, burdened with clumsy description and awkward action. I will admit to some lingering wry fondness for Wells’ theological satire — God is a white-haired vivisectionist, indifferent to the pain and fear of his subjects — but even that is little more than a baby step toward religious deconstruction. The ending cribs more or less wholesale from Gulliver’s departure from the Houyhnhnms.

The few bits of the story worth salvaging found fresh life in Moreno-Garcia’s reimagining, so really, there just isn’t much point in revisiting Island, unless you plan to reinterpret and recontextualize it your own way.

2024 read #45: Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 1 by Ryoko Kui.

Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 1 by Ryoko Kui

Translated by Taylor Engel

191 pages

Published 2015 (English translation 2017)

Read April 18

Rating: 4 out of 5

It often feels like I’m the last person to stumble my way into a fandom. For example, I’m only now in the process of watching my way through contemporary Doctor Who, a good ten or fifteen years after the Tumblr heyday of SuperWhoLock. The Delicious in Dungeon anime is one of the few shows I’ve gotten into during its first season. (Our Flag Means Death is the only other show I got into so early in its nascent popularity.) It’s been a rare pleasure to watch the fandom develop in real time.

Wanting some easy comfort reads during our move (and also while waiting for our boxed-up library to arrive in the moving container next week), I treated myself to this copy of the Dungeon Meshi manga. This is my first time reading a manga after watching the anime. I’m more accustomed to adaptations that take a looser ramble from page to screen. Practically every beat of the manga’s story was depicted in the anime, scene for scene, often line by line. This made the manga feel almost superfluous after watching the cartoon.

Still, it’s a delightful story with charming characters, winning design, and a fetching blend of humor, action, and clever twists on dungeon ecology. It’s no fault of the manga that the anime was adapted perhaps a bit too faithfully.

2024 read #44: Earth’s Last Citadel by C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner.

Earth’s Last Citadel by C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner

128 pages

Published 1943

Read from April 11 to April 17

Rating: 1 out of 5

American intelligence officer Alan Drake has been sent to Tunisia to keep Sir Colin, a scientist important to the war effort, safe from the Nazis. Two Nazi agents, femme fatale Karen and American muscle Mike, stand in Alan’s way. But then all four of them enter a sphere that takes them far into the future, where they find a dying Earth, wormlike monsters, and an immense spire like gossamer glass. They run afoul of an immortal being named Flande, who isn’t too happy to have them on his doorstep. And Alan unknowingly plays host to an alien intelligence that wants to feed on what’s left of humanity.

After reading Kuttner’s own Dying Earth-esque novel, The Dark World, and knowing of Moore’s contributions to classic sword & sorcery thanks to the reputation of her Jirel of Joiry stories, I had moderately high hopes for this book. Sadly, Citadel doesn’t have much of interest to offer. It’s a standard ’40s pulper with a blue-eyed hero who applies his gun and his fists to the problems of space and time, and immediately makes out with the first future babe he finds. This iteration adds nothing to the formula.

My impression was (perhaps) soured by the fact that my partner and I performed an arduous 700 mile move this week. Rarely have I been this comprehensively exhausted. I had hoped this book would be a light and colorful trifle to read whenever I had a spare moment, but it just never clicked. Maybe it was me.

Or maybe it was the way Citadel has Nazi collaborators help blonde barbarians steal the life-source of a race of effete and decadent spire-dwellers in order to establish a new human homeland. Maybe that was it.

2024 read #43: Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott.

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott

Introduction by Banesh Hoffman 

91 pages

Published 1884

Read April 11

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

If you're like me, you spent much time in your formative years in used bookstores. Should you have happened to browse the science fiction and fantasy shelves at any point in the 1990s, perchance alphabetically, you would have encountered Flatland in abundance. I never went to high school (or took any other classes where this book might have been assigned), so I always assumed it was from the 1970s, a contemporary of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It seemed, at least from the jacket summary, to fit that same cultural ethos, a cheeky genre-crossing commentary on social mores. I never felt any real pull to read Flatland until I was skimming lists of brief classic reads and learned that it was from the 1880s.

I was better off uninterested.

Math fantasy has maintained a modest but persistent seat at the fantasy table, most notably in my experience R.A. Lafferty’s “Narrow Valley” and Rudy Rucker’s “Inside Out,” both of which I happened to read and review here. I don't know if any math fantasy stories predate Flatland, but it is perhaps the most famous example.

Abbott employs his world of geometrical hierarchy to satirize the ranks of Victorian society. The Flatlanders — or at least their circular aristocracy — perceive polygons and circles as the most intelligent and noble shapes, and encourage a eugenics program to turn the “barbarous” masses of narrow triangles into equilateral triangles, and thence into “superior” shapes. Women, meanwhile, are considered simply straight lines: lacking a dimension, devoid of intelligence, a deadly danger to the men around them. Abbott pursues this vicious satire so acutely (heh) that he had to include a preface to the second printing, hinting that perhaps the satire had been misread as mere women-hating.

I’ll be honest: Without the preface, and without access to Wikipedia, I probably would have made the same mistake. One is reminded of those white dudes in the 1980s who were so keen to portray the gritty realities of racism that they sprinkled racial violence and the N-word throughout their stories.

Beyond this satire of social perceptions, there isn’t much depth (heh) to Flatland. Where Gulliver’s Travels also manages to tell a strange and memorable adventure tale, Flatland pretty much exhausts Abbott’s geometric satire with chapter after chapter of social mores in the first half of the book, then contrasts Flatland to Lineland and Spaceland in the second half, by way of dialogues in geometry.

If you haven’t read Flatland, I’ll spare you the trouble and give you its best line. Our narrator, a Square, is addressed by a Sphere from Spaceland, who attempts to demonstrate the reality of the third dimension. His conception of the universe attacked, the Square responds:

“Monster,” I shrieked, “be thou juggler, enchanter, dream, or devil, no more will I endure thy mockeries. Either thou or I must perish.”

That’s fully worthy of a Tumblr shitpost.

2024 read #42: Dinosaur Sanctuary: Volume 4 by Itaru Kinoshita.

Dinosaur Sanctuary: Volume 4 by Itaru Kinoshita

Research consultant: Shin-ichi Fujiwara

Translated by John Neal

196 pages

Published 2023 (English translation published 2024)

Read April 11

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

After volumes 1, 2, and 3 of Dinosaur Sanctuary, I expected more or less the same substance here: a shallow but entertaining tale of dinosaur-keepers running a zoo full of prehistoric animals, a well-researched and excellently drawn manga with few surprises but plenty of dinosaurs. And that’s largely what we get from this volume.

However, we open with a flashback chapter that centers on a secondary character but doesn’t add much substance to him. For me, at least, that threw off this volume’s rhythm, and it never quite recovered. I enjoyed the tale of Suma and Kaidou helping to capture an escaped Velociraptor, but the rest of the chapters felt a little flat. Even the art felt a little bit more rushed this time around, with fewer splash pages and less attention to detail.

Perhaps I’m the problem this time around. My partner R and I are in the middle of a complicated process of home-buying, packing, and planning for a move halfway up the Eastern Seaboard, so I’m in my distracted era. Or perhaps the infamous pressures of manga production are catching up with Itaru Kinoshita.

Still, it’s a lovely book about an operational dinosaur park, which puts it well above all but the first of the Jurassic Park movies (and most of the dinosaur fiction I’ve read).

2024 read #41: New to Liberty by DeMisty D. Bellinger.

New to Liberty by DeMisty D. Bellinger

197 pages

Published 2022

Read from April 1 to April 10

Rating: 4 out of 5

A haunting, beautiful, tragic, aching literary novel, New to Liberty introduces us to three women navigating societally forbidden relationships in rural Kansas. Isolation and prejudice loom through each story: mixed-race Sissily traveling through with an older white man in 1966; Nella secretly rendezvousing with a disabled white man in 1947; Greta finding momentary love with a woman in 1933. Each of them are united by the themes of powerlessness in society, of being manipulated by the men in around them, of straining to find any scrap of control over their lives. Threads of old tragedies and past mistakes weave through each of the narratives, tightening them into a cohesive whole.

Bellinger’s prose hums with place and character, bringing dust-blown summers and horrific attacks to life with equal clarity. Her command of characterization is outstanding. The emotional weight of each of the three stories balances delicately between what is said and what isn’t, a boulder poised on the head of a pin. There are no easy answers, no pat fixes, no neat resolutions. Female solidarity — across racial lines, across lines of sexuality, across generations — is the only solid handhold any of the characters are offered:

We could do nothing…. I stood and swayed with her…. It was horrible, but nice. It was like being in church. It was all three of us throwing all hope to something outside of ourselves, hopefully greater than us three. Hopefully benevolent.