2024 read #112: A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder by James De Mille.

A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder by James De Mille

Illustrated by Gilbert Gaul

291 pages

Published 1888

Read from September 14 to September 16

Rating: 1 out of 5

Published posthumously, perhaps a decade or two after it was written, this is a Victorian social satire dressed in a guise of antipodean adventure. It’s chiefly notable as an early example of a prehistoric lost world novel, written long before the publication of Doyle’s own The Lost World.

Sadly, instead of dinosaurs, Manuscript’s primary focus is its clumsy satire, depicting a topsy-turvy land where Victorian mores are turned on their head. Poverty is esteemed! People compete to give their riches away! Death is joyously sought after! Darkness is embraced and light is shunned! To be cannibalized is an honor! Women can do things!

It’s never a question of whether an old adventure novel will be horribly racist, but of how horribly racist. A Strange Manuscript is pretty damn racist. Maybe not The Land that Time Forgot levels of racist, but still bad. Our narrator dwells at length on the horror and revulsion he feels upon meeting some brown people in Antarctica. He flees from them, and finds himself among the Kosekin, a vaguely Mesopotamian civilization at the South Pole. Yet even there, in the midst of bird-drawn carriages, tree-fern-lined streets, and majestic pyramids, he’s magnetized by a random white girl he meets in a cave. De Mille proceeds to heap up vile Victorian antisemitism in his profile of the Kosekin.

As for the prehistoric aspect of De Mille’s lost world — the sole reason I read this antiquated volume — it’s incidental at best, a mere curiosity to add flavor to the setting. (To be fair, when this book was written, even scientists weren’t acquainted with many dinosaurs, and even those were fragmentary beasts, poorly understood.) There are a couple ceremonial saurian hunts, one at sea, one on land, which serve only to demonstrate the Kosekin’s eagerness to die.

There is a cool scene where our hero rides on a giant pterodactyl under the light of the aurora australis, which, while it doesn’t erase any of the book’s bigotry, at least makes for a memorable moment. Manuscript has long since been in the public domain, so maybe James Gurney could repurpose the scene for another Dinotopia book.

2024 read #111: This World Is Not Yours by Kemi Ashing-Giwa.

This World Is Not Yours by Kemi Ashing-Giwa

167 pages

Published 2024

Read from September 12 to September 13

Rating: 4 out of 5

An astonishing story of planetary colonization in a hostile universe.

This World uses the backdrop of social frailty in a precarious settlement to build an allegory of how uncertain times lead to social and sexual authoritarianism, the total disregard for individual autonomy. It also serves as a cutting indictment of capitalism, examining how poorly suited the profit motive is to make decisions affecting human lives. In short, it's about how women always become livestock in any social structure oriented toward profit and control, and how rapidly social liberties can erode when not everyone is invested in maintaining the liberal social contract.

For all its allegorical heft, This World is, first and foremost, a brilliantly written human-scale story of relationships, codependency, jealousy, insecurity, heartbreak, and rage. Rage at the social structures that switch to authoritarian control the second it becomes convenient, the second it becomes profitable. Rage at those who go along with it because it seems the safer or easier option.

The planet is beautiful in a classic sci-fi way. I would've liked more pages to encounter its flora and fauna, but that's not how books this size get constructed.

A major plot point on the jacket summary, how the world exudes a substance to clean itself of ecological threats, plays a central role in This World's marketing, so I think it's safe to say it isn't a spoiler. Ashing-Giwa pulls an adept horror novel pacing trick by getting you so invested in the characters, and the horrors they face in the colony, that you almost forget about the Gray until it abruptly insinuates itself into the meat of the story. 

2024 read #110: Witch Hat Atelier: Volume 12 by Kamome Shirahama.

Witch Hat Atelier: Volume 12 by Kamome Shirahama

Translated by Stephen Kohler

179 pages

Published 2023 (English translation published 2024)

Read September 11

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

This is it. I’m now caught up with the current English language tankōbon run of Witch Hat Atelier, with no more until January. Hard to believe I hadn’t even heard of this series when I googled for manga to sate my Delicious in Dungeon hunger this spring.

And what a stunning volume this is. After two fairly quiet, understated books, Shirahama unleashes magical violence in intricate panels, jaw-dropping splash pages, and adroit compositions. Action shots and moments of introspection are staged with equal finesse.

In the midst of the action, all the character development of the last two volumes amply pays off. Characters have climactic moments of trust, of doubt, of rising to the occasion. Tears sprang to my eyes more than once.

Witch Hat has dominated my summer the way few, if any, series ever have. I could have used these books when I was a kid, yet Shirahama is the rare author who pulls together a story just as compelling and comforting for adults as it is for younger readers. I’m sad to part from Atelier these next few months, but I’m so happy it’s become part of my life.

2024 read #109: Witch Hat Atelier: Volume 11 by Kamome Shirahama.

Witch Hat Atelier: Volume 11 by Kamome Shirahama

Translated by Stephen Kohler

158 pages

Published 2022 (English translation published 2023)

Read September 11

Rating: 4 out of 5

Creative block, and the pressures of deadlines, are significant themes in this volume. Which feels particularly apt this time around.

Much like Volume 10, this tankōbon largely feels like a plateau in between major plot movements, setting the pieces for what's to come. The Silver Eve procession is delightful, and this volume sees significant growth for Agott, the character I relate to the most. But, aside from a handful of flashy panels, and of course the gorgeous, monstrous menace of the cliffhanger sequence, the art and storytelling are muted, utilitarian. I assume Shirahama was pacing herself, saving her energies for more intricate pieces to come.

That's part of the manga business, or so I assume. I cannot imagine the pressures, the workload, the stress of deadlines involved in authoring an ongoing serial like this. I'd happily wait longer for volumes if it meant the artist is less stressed and has more time. But clearly, I'm not a capitalist.

2024 read #108: Gathering the Tribes by Carolyn Forché.

Gathering the Tribes by Carolyn Forché

Foreword by Stanley Kunitz

63 pages

Published 1976

Read September 11

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

My main exposure to poetry is contemporary (published within the last ten years or so), with a definite lean toward SFF poetry. I want to expand my poetry education, so when someone I follow shared a poem from this book, it was a quick purchase.

I don’t have the education, or the vocabulary, to pinpoint the differences between 2020s poetry and 1970s poetry. Forché returns again and again to evergreen topics: family, ethnic heritage, displacement, childhood, trauma, loss, sexuality, the intimacy of food, the land. She unspools gorgeous images, and breathes out heartbreak like frost on a Michigan morning. Her poems are often lovely, delicate things, grounded unshakably in the Midwestern earth. Yet something about her cadence, perhaps, or her word choice, feels unfamiliar, the dialect of the past.

Inevitably, I’m reminded of the only other 1970s poetry collection I’ve read, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Wild Angels — not that they have much in common, otherwise, beyond a similar ineffable resonance with their decade, and how they demand a slower reading pace, sounding out connections between lines: “Seventeen years of solitude is seventeen / years. Quiet.”

Another difference: in our age of poetry-as-memoir, of confessional CNF with line breaks, Forché’s well of third-person character studies feels oddly uncomfortable. There’s an edge of concern for a modern reader, a wincing Wait, you’re construing someone else’s story? Forché gravitates toward portraits of impoverished Indigenous folks, which adds an extra frisson of possible exploitation. Perhaps it isn’t necessarily unethical, no more so than writing fiction based on the people you meet, but it’s an adjustment.

The book finishes strong with the section titled “The Place That Is Feared I Inhabit,” especially the poem “Kalaloch.”

2024 read #107: Red Moon and Black Mountain by Joy Chant.

Red Moon and Black Mountain by Joy Chant

244 pages

Published 1970

Read from September 8 to September 11

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I don’t know if I’ve ever read anything that so perfectly distills the early 1970s “adult fantasy” movement as this book. Three English children, lured off the path in the Essex countryside, find themselves transported to a world of swords and sorcery, noble mounted warriors and antiquated gender norms, martial eagles and a war of darkness against light. It’s Narnia meets the Hyborian Age.

The best part of this book is Chant’s prose, which would still be solid for a fantasy novel today, and would’ve seemed astonishing in 1970. In Chant’s hands, the rote phrases typical of Seventies fantasy — your “grim sable crags,” your “shimmering silver aureole,” and so forth — mostly add charm rather than gumming up the works. It’s a tricky balancing act, one not even Patricia A. McKillip landed on her first try. I’m impressed.

Charming in a different way, the worldbuilding, which Chant refined over the years from a childhood game of make-believe, feels like true outsider art, a dash of Henry Darger to season the mash of Tolkien and Howard. The world of Vanderei feels lived in, its corners well-thumbed, despite its reliance on archetypes. There’s even a very 1970 attempt to ground the setting’s gratuitous misogyny in something like anthropology, which — while I didn’t care much for it — is very in keeping with the spirit of the enterprise.

The plot is less interesting. It’s the kind of book where one of the siblings is already proclaimed the Chosen One by page 38. Generously, one could say it’s the junior reader prototype of the Fionavar Tapestry, complete with climactic human sacrifice. If it had been published ten years earlier, or ten years later, it would have been marketed as juvenile fiction, but Ballantine was determined to create “adult fantasy” as a genre, and if the main characters are kids who’ve gone through a portal into a fantasy world to meet princesses and unicorns, well, that’s just what adult fantasy is in 1970, and it’s all very grown up, thank you.

Altogether, I felt this was more of a curiosity than a lost classic. And as the story went on, Chant’s female characters — even the badass princess skilled in star magic, who gives up her powers for her man — became much too meek and submissive. Still, if you’re interested in the evolution of modern fantasy as a genre, this one’s worth a read.

2024 read #106: Desert Creatures by Kay Chronister.

Desert Creatures by Kay Chronister

272 pages

Published 2022

Read from September 4 to September 8

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

A long time ago, back when I ran a little online sci-fi magazine called Scareship, I published a short story by Kay Chronister. Now that she's "made it," to an extent, I feel weirdly proud to have been adjacent to an early step, however tiny, of her career.

This book is a lush, violent, inventive, repulsive, irresistible eco-horror, set generations into an apocalypse of poison rain and strange, ambling chimeras. Time and perspective alike are elastic; everyone has their own story of the collapse, whether visited upon the world by gods or the inevitable outcome of the hungry greed of capitalism. Las Vegas is a holy city, its saints marketed by a dispossessed upper class who, bored of mere survival, want the poor to lavish them with luxury again. Salvation itself is a con.

The parasitism of the upper classes, and the readiness with which men sell out girls and women in order to find community with each other, are the true horrors underlying this desert of beasts and madness. Chronister relays atrocities and monstrosities with prose of hallucinatory clarity, unflinching yet never pitiless, spilling mirages truer than anything shouted from a pulpit.

2024 read #105: Mexicans on the Moon by Pedro Iniguez.

Mexicans on the Moon: Speculative Poetry from a Possible Future by Pedro Iniguez

75 pages

Published 2024

Read September 4

Rating: 4 out of 5

A delicate and powerful collection of science fiction poetry, at turns funny and heartbreaking, inspiring and grim, rich with hope and community and connection in spite of the exploitation of white-supremacist capitalism destroying the world around us.

Imbalances of power shape the poetry of this collection. Class, race, ethnicity, age -- Iniguez uses sci-fi and poetry to explore these present marginizations, future hopes, and repeating patterns of exploitation. Topics range from Iniguez's classic poem "The Epidemic of Shrink-Ray-Gun Violence in Our Schools Must End" to the Latine generation ship in "Forever Elusive," which, having learned hard lessons from colonizers, avoid repeating their iniquities.

Unrelated, I highly recommend reading poetry in a tent in the morning sun while the birds sing.

2024 read #104: Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 6 by Ryoko Kui.

Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 6 by Ryoko Kui

Translated by Taylor Engel

207 pages

Published 2018 (English translation published 2018)

Read from September 1 to September 2

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Extensive spoilers ahead. Don't read if you aren't familiar with Delicious in Dungeon's storylines after the red dragon encounter.

An outstanding volume, this one packs in so many all-time highlights. There's the stunningly drawn and laid out fight against the Falin-chimera. There's the emotional heartbreak of Shuro's fight with Laios, and Shuro releasing his pent-up frustrations about our boy Laios's autistic social miscues. As a bit of an emotional breather, there's the delightful switcheroo with the shapeshifter, and the resulting cookoff competition. Then we get the full introduction of Izutsumi, one of my favorite characters from the anime.

I'm trying to pace my purchases; the plan is to hold off on any further Dungeon tankōbon until October. That's going to be tough, after I inhaled these two volumes so early in the month. At least I have two volumes of Witch Hat Atelier! 

2024 read #103: Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 5 by Ryoko Kui.

Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 5 by Ryoko Kui

Translated by Taylor Engel

199 pages

Published 2017 (English translation published 2018)

Read September 1

Rating: 4 out of 5

A new month, a new batch of manga to enjoy! This time, I’m hoping to limit myself to just a couple tankōbon each from Delicious in Dungeon and Witch Hat Atelier; my bank account has not been enjoying this new-to-me medium as much as I have.

I don’t know whether it’s because I’m already familiar with the story thanks to watching the anime, or if it’s because the manga is genuinely better at pacing and character development than the anime was, but I feel drawn in so much more to even the secondary and tertiary characters here. It took me a while to warm up to Kabru and his party in the anime. At least at first, I felt impatient whenever they were onscreen, like they were a distraction from the main story. In the manga, they already feel more fleshed out, and their role in the overarching narrative seems more significant.

Anime and manga alike, one of my favorite aspects of Dungeon is how Kui puts so much thought and effort into the ecology of different monsters, and how the dungeon functions as a cohesive ecosystem. Fuck magic systems — this is the kind of fantasy worldbuilding that gets me hooked.