2024 read #157: Emperor of Rome by Mary Beard.

Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World by Mary Beard

479 pages

Published 2023

Read from December 21 to December 25

Rating: 4 out of 5

The follow-up to Beard’s SPQR, Emperor is an examination of the office of Roman emperor, and the popular perceptions of the autocratic edifice, more than it is a biography of any particular caesar, or (worse still) a recitation of names and dates. This is Beard’s familiar approach, and a solid example why she’s one of the few popular historians I would trust to write a book on Rome. This is no “Big Man” history. As Beard writes in her prologue:

Working on the Roman empire for so long, I have come increasingly to detest autocracy as a political system, but to be more sympathetic, not just to its victims, but to all those caught up in it from bottom to top….

Accordingly, she works to populate the palace with glimpses of the women, slaves, laborers, functionaries, poets, doctors, diviners, entertainers, children, and the other essential-but-ignored foundations of the Roman state. The office of emperor is a lens, bending the apparatus of ancient society into our line of sight. Ancient propaganda regarding “good” and “bad” emperors is treated not as historical fact, but as a means of assessing attitudes and fears held by the elite (or, when we can access them, the ordinary people) toward the autocrats above them.

Beard’s thesis could be summed up with a line in chapter five: “Can we ever see a human being through the spin, the propaganda, the praise and denunciations?” It’s a salutary perspective, especially in our contemporary culture, where the loudest voices are paid shills for authority, and mediocre white men think about “the Roman Empire” multiple times a day.

Like the rest of us, Beard sounds more exhausted than she did in 2015. Emperor lacks some of the sparkle and dry wit of SPQR, but remains a thoroughly engrossing history, with something important to say about our own era of looming autocracy.

2024 read #156: Hexagon Speculative Fiction Magazine, Winter 2024 issue.

Hexagon Speculative Fiction Magazine, Winter 2024 issue (19)

Edited by JW Stebner 

49 pages

Published 2024

Read December 22

Rating: 3 out of 5

Rounding out the year with another current issue of Hexagon. This one is labor and workplace themed, which my socialist heart can appreciate in the abstract, but it doesn’t exactly excite me as a reader. If past issues of Hexagon are any guide, though, most of the stories should be solid enough.

“Let the Bright Woods Glow” by Colin O’ Mahoney. This one is a charming repudiation of white collar capitalism in favor of spilling blood for the Bright Witches of the Woods. Quite enjoyable.

“Incorporation” by Raina Joines. The current wave of capitalist-mandated “AI” — which usually turns out to be an energy-sucking, carbon-spewing autocomplete, augmented by underpaid and unacknowledged labor in the Global South — has nearly killed the classic AI subgenre of science fiction. This story is an exception, an optimistic tale of truly intelligent AI that emerges and evolves and surpasses its capitalist origins. I liked it.

“This Job Is Turning Me into Something I Don’t Like…” by J Wallace. The uncanny nature of the job turns a realtor into a vampire. It’s a clever enough conceit for a story, and a solid metaphor, using the tools of speculative fiction to say something about our society. Naturally enough I enjoyed the prolonged middle finger to developers and real estate speculators and the whole class-based hierarchy. Unfortunately, I felt the story itself was a bit flat. Not bad by any means, it just didn’t do much for me beyond its central allegory.

“Recruitment Drive” by Aurelien Gayet. This story applies delightfully dated cyberpunk tropes — our protagonist JSON goes into “virtual” to inject code into the cyberspace environment — to our own, much less sexy cyberpunk dystopia of AI-filtered job applications. Cheeky and fun, with a burn-it-all-down ethos that we all can appreciate.

“Paid Time Off” by L.M. Guay. Vividly written exploration of corporate dystopia, a satisfying arc full of grotesque allegorical detail. Excellent.

And that’s it! This is perhaps the most consistent issue of Hexagon I’ve read yet. Solid!

2024 read #155: And Chaos Died by Joanna Russ.

And Chaos Died by Joanna Russ

189 pages

Published 1970

Read from December 18 to December 20

Rating: 2-ish out of 5

This book is a strange, often off-putting experiment of a sophomore novel. What opens as a fairly standard space opera gets filtered through the literary affectations of the New Wave. The text revolves from impression to impression with all the logic of an acid trip. An old man eating plums in the moonlight leaps into somersaults at the lightest touch, flames at his heels. Russ’s prose is sweeping and ambitious, but even after I’ve read the whole thing, I’m still not sure whether it was supposed to make sense or not, or if it was meant as a suite of vibes.

I momentarily got excited when Russ revealed that main character Jai Vedh is gay — rarity of rarities in 1970 sci-fi! — but then on page 23 he muses, “I wish I knew what it feels like to be a man who loves a woman,” and by page 51 he’s dream-fucking one of the women from a putative “lost colony.” Later, “homosex” is lumped in with the “exports” of a decadent, sickly dystopia, while Jai ruts through various heterosexual encounters, many of dubious consent. All of which is in keeping with the mores of this era, but it feels like a particular letdown. (You mean to tell me this is the same Russ who would later publish We Who Are About to…?) There are also some deeply uncomfortable passages that I assume (or rather, that I hope) are a feminist critique of the pedophilia at the root of patriarchal heterosexuality.

If you persevere through Chaos’ deliberate opacity and its unfortunately antique construction of sexuality and gender, it turns out to be just another Social Statement sci-fi novel making a contrast between the “natural,” vaguely Taoist society of the colony’s outer space telepaths, and the polluted, listless, technocratic dystopia of future Earth. The book’s main effect was to make me wish I were rereading The Dispossessed instead. Every now and then, though, Russ turned a phrase that made me concede it was worth reading:

Evne, like a woman of salt, fled into the walls in metal crystalhood, where he followed her, turned into a bee (all eyes), a fountain (all mouth), wrapped herself around her own bones inside out, spread herself one molecule thick along all the lines in the ship: the two of them, pulsing miles across, breathing with the lungs of incurious strangers, seeing through other eyes, petrifying in flashes, pursuing each other in the shapes of walls, floors, volumes of contained air. He followed her.

2024 read #154: Empire Star by Samuel R. Delany.

Empire Star by Samuel R. Delany

92 pages

Published 1966

Read from December 17 to December 18

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

This novella is about perspectives, about growth and the understanding that there is no single point of view, but rather a plethora of perspectives on every action. This is brilliantly orchestrated right from the first page, a bravura introduction of character and POV. The rest of the novel is a somewhat picaresque Bildungsroman following the education — and, separately, the learning — of Comet Jo, a young farm worker from a backwater “simplex” community, as he leaves home and journeys across the wider universe.

Delany uses Jo’s credulous perspective to ironically explore institutions built upon slavery. A rich “multiplex” benefactor impresses Jo with the necessity of enslaving the Lll, the sacrifice required to own them, and the protections the Lll enjoy, while the narrative slowly builds a picture of how the galactic powers that be destroy any Lll who dare to defy their own “protection” in order to be free.

I love Delany’s blue collar space milieu from this era of his career, full of barefoot and mildly homoerotic “shuttlebums” and poets. Empire Star isn’t as compelling as its companion novel, Babel-17, possibly because of the novella’s brevity, possibly because its picaresque aspect didn’t click with me quite so well. But Star is a must-read all the same.

2024 read #153: Sphere by Michael Crichton.*

Sphere by Michael Crichton*

378 pages

Published 1987

Read from December 15 to December 16

Rating: 1.5 out of 5 (though it probably deserves 1)

* Denotes a reread.

I’m somewhat familiar with the writing habits of more literary authors, but I have no idea how an automatic bestseller conveyor belt like Crichton would have worked on his books. Sphere was the immediate predecessor to Jurassic Park; are their similarities the result of Crichton working on them at the same time, or is it because he had so little creative depth? On one hand, grumpy mathematician Harry Adams reads like a first draft of Ian Malcolm. On the other, Beth Halpern is just another iteration of Crichton’s standard Strong Female Character, which his limited imagination translates to “woman literally bulging with muscles.” And, unsurprisingly, Sphere is riddled with fulminations against some monolithic idea of “scientists” and their collective irresponsibility.

When I was a tween, Sphere was my third favorite Crichton novel, behind only Jurassic Park and The Lost World. It’s competently constructed for an airport thriller, dispensing with unnecessary setup and doling out technobabble as required. I don’t carry the same nostalgia for Sphere that I hold for Jurassic Park, but what little I found to recommend rereading it now is undoubtedly tinged with tweenage fondness.

The book hasn’t aged well. Our normative white dude POV — literally named Norman — withstands minority perspectives in the form of Harry (Black genius from the inner city slums) and Beth (man-hating feminist who longs to manipulate men), both of whom muck up the undersea situation for poor old sensible Norman. It’s that classic “senior white man explores social tensions from the clarity of his own neutrality” motif of the 1980s and ’90s, elevated to a central role in the plot.

Especially in its final third, the book becomes a flagrant example of the conservative truism: “There are two genders, male and political. There are two races, white and political.” It’s all rather vile, really. No surprise that this is the guy who would go on to write Disclosure, Rising Sun, and State of Fear.

2024 read #152: Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany.

Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany

219 pages

Published 1966

Read from December 11 to December 15

Rating: 4 out of 5

Once again, we have a Delany number that feels two decades ahead of its time. At its core, Babel-17 is entirely 1960s: a dramatization of the Sapir-Worf hypothesis set in space, centered on the titular language, which offers world-altering clarity to those who understand it. Yet the book’s sympathies and language, its perception and maturity, all feel far removed from its contemporaries.

Delany throws everything into the creative mix, from body-modded furries to discorporated ghost crew members, from clone assassins to polyamorous navigators. He plays with language, prose, and format in ways I wouldn't expect from sci-fi of this era. This is, in short, a novel that would have felt cutting-edge even in 1986. Or at least it does right up until the end, which climaxes with a scene of logical paradox that would have been right at home on the original Star Trek.

2024 read #151: High Times in the Low Parliament by Kelly Robson.

High Times in the Low Parliament by Kelly Robson

157 pages

Published 2022

Read from December 4 to December 11

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

In my little corner of the writing world, a lot of people have become besotted with the trope of disaster gays. The trend didn't begin with Lana Baker, scribe and protagonist of Low Parliament, but she could be cited as a prime specimen of this archetype. She's a drunk and a flirt who can be relied upon to make a foolish choice for a pretty face. She lets some kissing cloud her judgment and winds up exiled to Parliament, a sort of Doggerland EU chamber of human and fairy politics, where she faces drowning (along with the rest of people who reside there) should the politicians remain deadlocked.

High Times is a delightfully horny number that builds its world with an admirably light touch. Unfortunately, about halfway through, the narrative loses some of its initial momentum and gets lost (like its protagonist) in a repetitive series of rooms and botched liaisons that don't add much to the story. I expected the meat of the story to involve backroom talks and roguish scheming, as Lana figures out how to use her charisma to avert catastrophe. Instead, we get an unusual amount of what felt like filler for a book this short, only settling back into a solid groove again for the final third of the book. 

All in all, though, High Times is an enjoyable romp and a fine allegory of class solidarity in the face of supernatural Brexit.

2024 read #150: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 2008 issue.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 2008 issue (115:1)

Edited by Gordon Van Gelder

162 pages

Published 2008

Read December 4

Rating: 2 out of 5

Ah, the summer of 2008. A wonderful time in my life. When this issue was on newsstands, I was vacationing with my polycule in Florida, preparing to help one then-partner move to New Mexico for grad school. I was flourishing in undergrad, and looking forward to the election, when surely Obama would finally put an end to the fascist Bush regime and solve America once and for all. At least for me, it was a simpler time, before I really knew anything.

I wasn’t writing short fiction, wasting my time instead on a massive and unpublishable novel. I wasn’t really reading SFF magazines back then, either. I wish I had been; maybe I’d be a better writer today.

If I had picked up this issue at the time, I wonder if I would have been encouraged or jealous that someone else was getting a dinosaur story published by Gordon Van Gelder, the editor who had told me nine years previously that he didn’t really care for dinosaur stories.

—

“Fullbrim’s Finding” by Matthew Hughes. Hughes was a mainstay in this era of F&SF; it seems like half the ’00s and ’10s issues in my collection feature a story by him. The first one I actually read was “The Mule” in the March/April 2022 issue, which I praised for its early modern esoteric magic setting. Imagine my surprise to learn, via today’s story, that Hughes’ “discriminator” tales began in a technological Old Earth setting, chock-full of spaceships and quantum physics and wan attempts at sci-fi humor, which became the subsequent fantasy setting via cosmological “cycling” of the universe. It all has a 1970s fantasy serial vibe to it. I like fantasy serials in theory, but after a certain point, just write a standalone story in a standalone setting, you know? All that aside, this tale is mildly entertaining. C+

—

“Reader’s Guide” by Lisa Goldstein. So much has happened since this issue was printed, and so much in the culture has shifted, that it’s difficult to remember that 2008 wasn’t that long ago. I was startled to find a metafictional list story here, but I guess it isn’t that surprising, really; a lot of the threads that comprise contemporary genre fiction were gathering throughout the ’00s. “Reader’s Guide” is an interesting prototype of the list stories that have proliferated in our time. A fantasy story about the metaphysics of storytelling would have been well-trodden ground even in 1988, let alone 2008, but I liked it all the same. It’s charming. B

—

“The Roberts” by Michael Blumlein. The editorial introduction calls this novella “edgy,” and the story opens with the protagonist content in his mother’s womb. What masculine hell are we in for?

Sure enough, we’re treated to just about the most banal 20th century upper-middle class white boy checklist imaginable. Our hero Robert gets born, goes to college, has a fling with art, finds a first love, switches to architecture, has a first heartbreak, needs to work to “feel like a man,” loses an eye in a freak accident likened (what a surprise!) to castration, then finds another love, a professional contact whom he nags and wears down until she finally goes on a date with him. And that’s just by page three.

“The Roberts” compiles 55 pages of numbingly rote masculine concerns and (literal) objectification of women. A quote: “[Robert] needed a woman. In the past it had never been hard for him to meet women, and it wasn’t hard now. Women liked him, and what was not to like in a man so charming, so attractive, so victimized by circumstance and so willing — indeed so poised — to put it all behind and reestablish himself?” It only gets grodier from there; soon enough, Robert is employing a parthenogeneticist to engineer a woman for him.

Edgy, my ass — it’s the same color-by-numbers bullshit pampered male writers have been regurgitating for decades, for centuries, while congratulating themselves on their originality and their fine perceptions. It’s literally the cultural default. “The Roberts” could have been published in F&SF in 1978 and no one would have batted an eye.

One might even conclude this is all a vicious satire of how certain men view themselves as main characters and how they view women, categorically, as muses, helpmeets, accessories, mommy-maids, “miracle workers,” anything other than fully fledged and autonomous human beings with their own fully developed interiority. But if so, it’s one of those satires that cuts alarmingly close to seeming sincere. F

—

“Enfant Terrible” by Scott Dalrymple. After that mess, this slight sketch of a brain parasite run amok in a classroom is blessedly forgettable. C 

—

“Poison Victory” by Albert E. Cowdrey. An alternative history piece set in a world where the Nazis won and serfdom has been reestablished in Russia under a new German aristocracy. “Nazis won the war!” has always been an oversaturated theme, especially when in retrospect we realize the Nazis won the peace and have been entrenched in our power structures this whole time. “Victory” is well-written and atmospheric, a solid enough story of its type. B-

—

“The Dinosaur Train” by James L. Cambias. I’ve only read two dinosaur stories published in the pages of F&SF, and both of them involved trains. (“I’d have two nickels,” etc.) This one is much better than Ian Watson’s “In the Upper Cretaceous with the Summerfire Brigade” (published in the August 1990 issue), but that’s an incredibly low bar. Essentially, “Dinosaur Train” steals the idea of a traveling dinosaur circus from Dinosaur Summer (no shame there, I plan to do the same someday). Cambias even replicates Greg Bear’s pairing of old-timey filmmakers and the lost world. It’s unabashed Dinosaur Summer fanfic, which would have made my 2008 self especially jealous. Cambias’ story hits a pleasing mix of family drama and dinosaur zookeeping — nothing revolutionary, but solid enough to put it in the upper echelons of dinosaur fiction (which is also a very low bar). B

—

And that’s it! I’m happy to report that “The Dinosaur Train” — the sole reason I read this issue — was worth reading. “Reader’s Guide” was also quite good.

2024 read #149: The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

133 pages

Published 1927

Read from December 2 to December 3

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Growing up a white child in the 1980s and ’90s, one with a particularly controlling and paranoid parent at that, I subsisted on a steady diet of “canon” classics. The authors were comprehensively white and overwhelmingly male, though one Shelley did sneak in among the Wellses, Vernes, Twains, and Doyles. I also had a clear sense that there was another layer of “classics” awaiting me in adulthood, a stodgier and more respectable “canon” from the early twentieth century, books that might get referenced or parodied enough in cartoons for me to be aware of them, but with a vague sense that they weren’t “for” me.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey fits into this category. As a kid, I knew of it by name, but I had no inkling of its plot — or its length, which is one reason I decided to check it out — until I found it the other day while browsing the library. If you didn't know it either, Bridge is a series of interconnected character sketches that converge upon the titular footbridge and its fatal collapse. A Franciscan monk who happened to witness the collapse investigates the lives of the victims, seeking to prove the justice of his god in their fates.

The theological detective angle turns out to be little more than a framing device. The individual stories are about what you'd expect for a lauded 1920s literary outing, delicately teasing apart the victims' obsessions and unhealthy attachments, with a moderate amount of ethnic stereotyping (though less than one might expect). The prose is crisply modernist, detached and faintly ironic. On the whole, I’d say Bridge holds up pretty well. Unlike a certain bridge.

2024 read #148: The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar.

The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar

127 pages

Published 2024

Read from December 1 to December 2

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Sofia Samatar became one of my favorite authors thanks to exactly one book: A Stranger in Olondria. I’ve wanted to read The Winged Histories for years, but just haven’t done so, for various reasons. One of the reasons: It’s become increasingly difficult for me to focus, so the lush density of Samatar’s prose requires me to be in a certain headspace, which I just haven’t found that often lately. A novella is the perfect opportunity to savor her writing once more, as I slowly build back my attention span.

This is a beautiful yet harrowing examination of caste, class, captivity, exploitation, and community aboard a mining ship in endless orbit. It is a story about making sense of the conditions we’re born into, about ways of looking. It is about systems of control and patterns of resistance, patterns of survival, the cruel math of the pampered classes. It is a tale immense beyond its page count.

Having read so much sci-fi from the sixties and seventies, all those smug white men writing tales of white boy messiahs who bridge the cosmic links between ordinary people, it’s a revelation to read a story that actually does something meaningful with that framework, a story that finds the substance beyond the stale platitudes. 

2024 read #147: A History of Dinosaurs in 50 Fossils by Paul M. Barrett.

A History of Dinosaurs in 50 Fossils by Paul M. Barrett

160 pages

Published 2024

Read from November 30 to December 1

Rating: 3 out of 5

Much like A History of Plants in Fifty Fossils, this is a coffee table book illustrated with photographs of the namesake fifty fossils, presenting a brief, glossy overview of dinosaur science. Unlike Plants, I went into Dinosaurs knowing quite a lot about the subject matter. The state of science publishing is dire, however, so I’ll take what I can get at this point. And I’ve been out of the loop with dinosaur science long enough that I might learn things even from a pop science book.

Considering the limitations of its structure, A History of Dinosaurs does a fair job at doling out beginner information: what defines dinosaurs, their evolutionary origins, their diversity and adaptations, and so on. The illustrations include paleo-reconstruction artwork as well as fossil photos, which was nice. While I do wish popular science books would return to trusting their audience instead of spoon-feeding them printed listicles, this one wasn’t a bad effort.