2025 read #50: In an Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire.

In an Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire

204 pages

Published 2019

Read from June 11 to June 17

Rating: 4 out of 5

The last of McGuire’s Wayward Children series I read was Beneath the Sugar Sky, way back in 2018. Back then, I found the books solid but perhaps just a tiny bit unsatisfying. Enough years have passed that my reading tastes have shifted; is it time for a revisit?

Like Tori Bovalino’s Not Good for Maidens, Dream is a modern riff on Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market. Young Katherine Lundy loves books, rules, logic, and staying inconspicuous. When she happens upon a doorway to the strange and rule-ordered Market, where every exchange demands a “fair price,” she finds herself increasingly at home, even if accruing too much debt means turning into a bird.

The Wayward Children books (particularly the first one) fit within the 2010s fad for telling what happens to the heroes after the story ends. This comes through in Dream, with McGuire eliding through the big adventures against the Wasp Queen and the Bone Wraiths in favor of seeing the effect the trauma and loss have on young Lundy afterward.

Either this volume clicked with my current sensibilities, or I’ve simply become less nitpicky with middle age. From the standard fantasy trope of fair bargains, McGuire opens doors onto complicated questions of what we as people owe each other, what love and belonging can offer us, and the cost they extract.

2025 read #49: Feed Them Silence by Lee Mandelo.

Feed Them Silence by Lee Mandelo

105 pages

Published 2023

Read from June 7 to June 11

Rating: 4 out of 5

Combing through my library for quick reads, I happened upon this near-future sci-fi novella from the author of The Woods All Black. The plot feels like something from turn-of-the-millennium Asimov’s: Scientist Sean gets tech bro capitalist funding to implant a neurological interface between herself and a gray wolf. She argues conservation would benefit from affective understanding, but deep down she questions whether she sold out her own anti-corporate principles in order to make her lifelong dreams of becoming a wolf come true. That’s certainly what her wife Riya thinks.

Mandelo brings queer messiness and climate-change-is-now pathos to the concept, grief for the world already gone beyond our power to save. Silence is a story about connection and alienation in the world capitalism and unchecked colonial destruction have left to us, rendered beautifully in Mandelo’s expert prose.

2025 read #48: The Star Pit by Samuel R. Delany.

The Star Pit by Samuel R. Delany

82 pages

Published 1967

Read from June 5 to June 6

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

An especially brief novella I found reprinted in a line of doubles Tor ran in the 1980s. It doesn’t even appear as a novel on Delany’s Wikipedia bibliography; it’s listed as a short story. Nonetheless, it deserves a slow, appreciative reading.

Delany’s careful poetry shapes a picture of space dreadful and vast and tragic and beautiful, seen from a blue collar perspective that’s become common only in recent years. It also features normalized pansexual group marriage.

I enjoyed the story’s worldbuilding conceit that reality breaks down in the empty space beyond the galaxy, inflicting psychological damage on brains exposed to it; it makes the cosmos strange and threatening in a way rarely seen in classic sci-fi.

The story’s second worldbuilding prop, the golden, are people too sociopathic or unthinking to be affected by the shift in reality. Presaging Gateway ten years later, the economy of humanity is reliant on what the golden bring back from beyond the galaxy. Sociopaths and dumbasses lording over everyone else, controlling new technology and the economy, having free rein to travel where they will, while working class folk get stuck in dead-end spirals on hell-hole industrial worlds? It feels oddly prescient here in 2025.

2025 read #47: Sunbathers by Lindz McLeod.

Sunbathers by Lindz McLeod

100 pages

Published 2024

Read from June 4 to June 5

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

By inverting just one expectation of the usual Bram Stoker mythos — the not-quite-vampires here crave sunlight and hate the dark — McLeod delivers an incisive queer allegory of hiding in the shadows while predators prowl in daylight. She develops the allegory brilliantly for our age of pandemic and authoritarian reaction.

Years ago, “Sunbathers” rejected the scientific warnings that kept everyone else huddled inside; not content with their own transformation, they physically pulled people from their homes to die or transform with them. Tanning beds replace coffins. Puritanism, heteronormativity, and conformity delineate these sunny carnivores, rather than Victorian fears of queerness and death.

Without spoiling too much (no more than the summary on the back cover does, anyhow) our narrator Soph extends the allegory into closeting oneself to purchase safety and acceptance, only to find that a life of empty beige perfection isn’t worth the trade. The Sunbathers’ superstraight utopia is simultaneously hilarious and horrifying. 

2025 read #46: Patience & Sarah by Isabel Miller.

Patience & Sarah by Isabel Miller

192 pages

Published 1969

Read from May 29 to May 31

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

A classic of queer literature, an intimate and insightful love story set in the early nineteenth century. Miller’s descriptions of the small daily intoxications of love and desire are among the best I’ve ever read. Her prose is at the pinnacle of the mid-century style, simple sturdy phrases that get to the innermost heart of emotions and human connection.

Miller balances her story of queer love with incisive critiques of patriarchal power and heterosexual norms. At one point, Patience’s brother says,

These are the passions marriage is meant to discourage and then extinguish. At first we imagine and hope, but in marriage we learn we are not wanted.

This contrasts with the all-encompassing technicolor love of the two women at the center of our story, in all its possessiveness, eroticism, and need.

2025 read #45: The Harp of Imach Thyssel by Patricia C. Wrede.

The Harp of Imach Thyssel by Patricia C. Wrede

235 pages

Published 1985

Read from May 27 to May 29

Rating: 2 out of 5 (generously)

I bought this book on accident years ago, mistaking it for an entry in the Riddle-Master of Hed series. In my defense, its cover uses the exact same font as the contemporary paperback edition of McKillip’s series, and features similar artwork. A sense that this book desperately wishes to be mistaken for something better pretty much sums up the experience. It isn’t bad, per se, but it’s preeminently forgettable.

You know the stereotype of mediocre 1980s fantasy novels that read like someone else’s D&D campaign? I think the stereotype is overstated, but Harp, at any rate, embodies it. There are generic kingdoms and warring factions and spellworkers around every corner. Backstory gets plopped in with all the subtlety of a successful history check. Puns stand in for clever dialogue. It’s a D&D novel with the trademarks sanded off.

We begin with a bard named Emereck and his companion Flindaran, who is an undercover aristocrat playing at adventurer. They ride into a sleepy town and immediately go to the inn. Flindaran wants to flirt with the mysterious innkeeper, but doesn’t wish for the ire of the redoubtable Cilhar monopolizing her time. But then the inn is attacked by disguised soldiers who are after the mysterious Cilhar. In the aftermath, Emereck and Flindaran stumble upon the titular magic harp, which confers immense power, but at immense cost.

Harp functions okay as a vehicle for empty fantasy cliches. The ending, however, crowds together too many reveals and sudden betrayals by characters we’d never been given a reason to care about. The clunky action is outdone only by the awkward exposition.

2025 read #44: The Star-Treader and Other Poems by Clark Ashton Smith.

The Star-Treader and Other Poems by Clark Ashton Smith

100 pages

Published 1912

Read from May 21 to May 24

Rating: 2 out of 5

I made a couple prior attempts to read this collection, and always found my interest waning by the third or fourth page of the opening number, “Nero.” Poetry nowadays is gorgeous but lean, scything through layers of meaning and confessional trauma with precisely keyed phrases. Antique poetry (and this stuff was a deliberate throwback even by the standards of 1912) tends to feel pompous to my modern tastes. You have to be in a particular frame of mind to appreciate a line like “This Rome… / Is made my darkling dream’s effulgency…”

But I want to become conversant with a broader range of poetry, and this was free to download, so here we are again. If you’re reading this review, I finally made it to the end.

Opening with plodding classical pretensions does Star-Treader a disservice, at least to modern readers. It’s really not as bad as that first poem would suggest. While we do slog through plenty of dusty odes to butterflies and pine trees, Smith is at his best when he (quite literally) reaches for the stars.

The titular poem is pretty good, a versification of the typical contemporary “I traveled through space and time in a dream of my past lives” contrivance. It’s a nice mix of sidereal Romanticism with early science fiction. “Medusa” is equally acceptable, a gothic landscape portrayed in words, bridging from Greek myth to a prototype of the Dying Earth.

Other poems expand on the theme of stars and the vastness of space, written at a time when the immensities of time and emptiness were first becoming understood. At the very least, Star-Treader is interesting as a document of these frightening new vistas and how they shook up anglophone conceptions of the universe and humanity’s place within it. This is demonstrated quite literally in “Ode to the Abyss”: “[God’s] might were impotent to conquer thee, / O invisible infinity!”

Perhaps Smith’s poetry is best appreciated as a vibe, with the occasional outstanding line. Later on in “Ode to the Abyss,” we get this banger: “Dark as the final lull of suns.” That carries more desolate cosmic weirdness than entire novels from later writers. Alas, there just isn’t enough of that to make up for all the rest.

2025 read #43: The Pressure of All That Light by Holly Painter.

The Pressure of All That Light by Holly Painter

71 pages

Published 2022

Read May 21

Rating: 4 out of 5

I tend to orbit the same few topics in the poetry I read, as well as what I write: queerness, nature, childhood trauma, and the American Midwest, plus speculative elements that expand upon or elucidate those themes. This collection checks all of my boxes except for the speculative elements. Naturally, I adore it.

Painter excels at the mythological primacy that shapes childhood, in all its petty glories and vast heartbreaks. “We slice a worm with a spade / and the dead fall out / but we are small gods: / we’ve made another worm,” she writes in “Lone Pine Cemetery.” She also has a deft hand with the confusion of new adulthood, spinning archetypal images of queer college life with its questions and experiments gone wrong.

2025 read #42: Come and Admire Him by Joe Koch.

Come and Admire Him by Joe Koch

15 pages

Published 2024

Read May 21

Rating: 4 out of 5

This is a one-story chapbook, an erotic horror short “in conversation” with the 1981 film Possession. I’d wanted to see the movie before I read this, but I desperately need something quick to get my reading back on track before it becomes an all-out slump, so here we go.

In our contemporary era of prudery and Puritanism, it’s a delight to read a tale this filthy. The poetry of rot and bodily fluids, of murder and dismemberment to feed the birth of divine hunger, is the spine and substance of this story. It is an exercise in decadent description, and Koch succeeds marvelously.

2025 read #41: The Greatest Adventure by John Taine.

The Greatest Adventure by John Taine

256 pages

Published 1929

Read from May 2 to May 5

Rating: 1ish out of 5

The period between 1912 (when Doyle’s The Lost World was published) and somewhere around the end of WWII (when the subgenre appears to have been discarded in the postwar reshuffle of sci-fi) was the heyday of the lost world story. They ranged from the horribly written and horribly racist (The Land that Time Forgot) to the still racist but at least somewhat interesting (The Face in the Abyss). The ’20s and ’30s, in particular, seem to have been rife with lost worlds now forgotten.

The unpromisingly titled The Greatest Adventure is one such novel, a book (and author) I’d never heard of until I happened upon a pulp reprint from the 1960s. With its simple, direct prose, bubblegum-wrapper approximations of humor, and telling-not-showing exposition, it reminds me of a 1930s boy’s adventure novel I read a long time ago.

I’m not wholly convinced that Adventure was intended for an adult audience, though I acknowledge that boy’s-life and man’s-life adventure stories had considerable overlap at the time. An odd beast, the book has neither the just-like-you sidekick of a boy’s-life, nor the horniness and cynicism I’ve come to expect of a man’s-life.

Regardless of its intended audience, this book is not that good. The same character beats / punchlines keep repeating, failing to enliven a rote adventure narrative. (If you took a drink every time Ole Hansen says “I have a theory,” you’d be dead.)

The “dinosaurs” here are some of the least interesting I’ve ever encountered in fiction. It’s as if Taine overheard someone in another room say the word “dinosaur,” and he winged it from there. The monstrous saurians that populate his Antarctic are torpid masses of armored flesh “three hundred feet long.” We’re a long way from Doyle’s active (and relatively well-researched) dinosaurs, which leapt off the page a mere seventeen years earlier.

The discrepancy does get explained in the text (spoilers: they aren’t really dinosaurs). I suppose it’s interesting enough on a history-of-sci-fi level that this is more of a prototype of a genetic engineering story, but I’d have much preferred another retread of The Lost World over what we get here. If anything, with its climactic twist, Adventure turns out to be closer to The Andromeda Strain than to Jurassic Park.

The book’s sole redeeming feature is Edith, a modern young woman who learns to fly airplanes and stabs a pseudo-dinosaur in the eye.

2025 read #40: The Towers of Toron by Samuel R. Delany.

The Towers of Toron by Samuel R. Delany

140 pages

Published 1964

Read from April 29 to May 1

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

One of the local book barns had its season opening recently. For once, they had a pile of old pulpy sci-fi novels, including a few boxes of Ace Doubles. No way I could pass up a Delany novel in an Ace Double for $2, even if it is a Delany novel I’ve literally never heard of. On researching it, I learned that it’s a sequel to another Ace Double book, Captives of the Flame, which explains the density of world-building and backstory in its early pages.

Fifteen hundred years in the future, on an irradiated Earth largely inimical to human life outside certain oases protected by radiation barriers, an isolated kingdom develops teleportation technology. They use this to wage war on the other surviving terrestrial enclaves, but they also discover that the universe is home to two other teleporting races, both of them psychic collective consciousnesses, one benevolent, one amoral. The story also features telepathic giants and neo-Neanderthals. A bunch of characters can turn invisible when the lighting is right. There are lightsabers and a circus and a man with a half-mechanical face.

At its heart, Toron is about war and how the powerful utilize it as a tool for distraction and control. At times, the book gets lost in the weeds of Delany’s worldbuilding; I probably should have waited to get my hands on Captives and read that first, but I’m not convinced it would have helped. That said, even in its half-baked condition, this is undeniably a Delany novel. Its richness of creativity, its dissection of propaganda and the dehumanization of colonialism, the occasional breathtaking prose (including the most poetic description of someone’s death by disintegration I’ve ever read), all of it is solidly Delany, even if the book as a whole feels somewhat lacking. The ending alone makes it worth the read.

2025 read #39: Gateway by Frederik Pohl.

Gateway by Frederik Pohl

313 pages

Published 1977

Read from April 21 to April 29

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Does it get any more standard-issue masculine sci-fi than this? Robinette “Bob” Broadhead, a man with psychological issues he can’t bring himself to discuss with a therapy-bot, has longed his whole life to become a prospector, manfully manning his way through space to win manly riches with his masculine prowess. Luckily for him, a new frontier opens through the titular Gateway, a hollowed-out asteroid full of ancient alien spacecraft aimed at the universe, permitting manly colonialist-minded men the opportunity to make men of themselves manhandling the cosmos for fun and profit.

There’s deliberate irony to this, though, because so much of the story hinges on Bob’s cowardice and self-scorn. That said, it’s sometimes hard to tell what’s satire and what’s just 1970s masculinity. I feel I’m on safer footing when I parse the brutal, environmentally catastrophic corporatism of Pohl’s setting as a burlesque of contemporary capitalism, akin to his earlier The Space Merchants.

I only read Gateway for two reasons: I want to return to my old habit of reading classic SFF novels, and I happened to have a copy on hand from a used bookstore I visited years ago. My copy has, in fact, been sitting on my immediate to-read pile for an embarrassing length of time (since at least last summer).

The opening, which features our narrator refusing to open up to his Jungian therapy-bot, put me off reading it several times before now; the recurring therapy chapters of the book remain, to my eyes, its least essential aspect, tacked on to add some semblance of narrative complexity and emotional heft to a genre that had only just begun thinking about such things.

Recalling With the Night Mail, supplementary in-universe materials—classifieds, trip reports, extracts from lectures—are used to flesh out the setting and its perils and peccadillos.

Gateway is noteworthy for how normalized queerness is in its future society. Our narrator, however, is an unreconstructed homophobe, to the point where he (cw: partner violence) tries to kill his girlfriend for sleeping with a bi man, and later masturbates thinking about said bi man, which feels extremely 1970s. It rather blunts any modern appreciation for the setting.

Also extremely 1970s is the obsession with Freud. Pop psychosexuality pretending to be gritty depth: that’s what Gateway means to me.

2025 read #38: Shattered Spear by Otava Heikkilä.

Shattered Spear by Otava Heikkilä

55 pages

Published 2019

Read April 18

Rating: 4 out of 5

Back when I was lining up a future as an archaeologist, I planned to specialize in the Epipaleolithic and Neolithic in Southwest Asia. For a little while, at least, I lived and breathed the Natufian, the PPNA, and the PPNB. It’s a world that will always fascinate me.

This is a short standalone graphic novel that I learned about thanks to a sword & sorcery Discord server. It’s set in the Jordan River valley during Neolithic, and follows two women who encounter each other and form an attachment. The artwork is gorgeous, capturing the beauty and vastness of its setting as well as the character of its two leads. The storytelling is marvelously efficient, relating so much in such a brief space.

Absolutely worth a read.

2025 read #37: Children of the Whales: Volume 8 by Abi Umeda.

Children of the Whales: Volume 8 by Abi Umeda

Translated by JN Productions

194 pages

Published 2016 (English translation 2019)

Read from April 14 to April 15

Rating: 3 out of 5

Here we are at my library’s last volume of Children of the Whales. Mostly I’ve read this series to shamelessly bulk up my book numbers, which is something I had said I would avoid doing this year. Ah well. At least it’s been enjoyable, even if it didn’t grab me the way Delicious in Dungeon or Witch Hat Atelier did.

When Umeda’s writing hits, it’s stunning. Emotional vulnerability, the importance of community, sacrifice to preserve said community, guilt and absolution, all powerful themes.

But a lot of that graceful mood of grief gets lost under the weight of Umeda’s worldbuilding. I’m just not invested enough for flashbacks to two or three generations previously. And every volume introduces new terms and concepts. It gets to feel like noise after a while. (Though I’m sure a lot of my attitude is modern day anhedonia. I mean, just look outside. The monsters are winning.)

2025 read #36: Children of the Whales: Volume 7 by Abi Umeda.

Children of the Whales: Volume 7 by Abi Umeda

Translated by JN Productions

194 pages

Published 2016 (English translation 2018)

Read from April 12 to April 14

Rating: 3 out of 5

It’s difficult to write reviews of long-running manga when I read them back to back like this. I’m still interested enough to read through this series (or at least what my library has of it), but it’s starting to feel like background noise. (Most of that feeling is due to the state of my country, though, to be fair.)

This volume has a grab-bag quality. Each chapter is its own little standalone story, all of them contributing to an ever more elaborate tower of worldbuilding and backstory. Which is fine, I suppose, but it’s a lot of worldbuilding and backstory, so very much. The last chapter is a short story, published by itself years before, that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Children of the Whales aside from commentary on authoritarianism and Umeda’s fixation on jesters and large women.

In case you had any doubts about the series’ overarching point of view, we hop back to the original generation of exiles on Fálaina, who prove to be rebels against the totalitarian control of a government that sucks away its people’s emotions. Said government is the ancestor of the Apátheia pursuing the Mud Whale in the story’s present day.

Maybe that’s why I keep reading this series: it serves as a gentle, emotional refutation of the sociopathy of authoritarianism.

2025 read #35: Children of the Whales: Volume 6 by Abi Umeda.

Children of the Whales: Volume 6 by Abi Umeda

Translated by JN Productions

192 pages

Published 2015 (English translation 2018)

Read April 12

Rating: 3 out of 5

After it is revealed that the nous of the Mud Whale consumes the lifespans of the marked in order to sustain itself on the sand sea, the unmarked decide to maintain the secret and steer the island toward a distant land, where perhaps they can abandon the Whale and extend the lives of those touched by magic. Along the way, this volume proceeds as a series of self-contained chapters, exploring strange locales and incidents of the voyage. But discontent brews among other factions on the island.

I should take a moment to praise the sumptuously detailed artwork Umeda uses to portray the use of magic or the empathic visions her characters experience. It’s absolutely gorgeous.

2025 read #34: Children of the Whales: Volume 5 by Abi Umeda.

Children of the Whales: Volume 5 by Abi Umeda

Translated by JN Productions

194 pages

Published 2015 (English translation 2018)

Read from April 11 to April 12

Rating: 3 out of 5

After the bloodshed, grief, and pathos of Volume 4, Volume 5 opens with a wacky episode of comic relief, as Sir Rochalízo, the first non-hostile outsider the people of the Mud Whale have ever seen, happens to arrive at bath time, and the mayor greets him in the buff. It’s giving beach episode.

Rochalízo ends up being a colonial-minded dickhead. But his presence inadvertently creates a significant change for the inhabitants of Fálaina, as the Mud Whale reveals the ability to steer itself. We also learn why the Whale’s marked — the people able to use the magic called thymia— die so young.

After the chaotic action of the last installment, it was nice to have more of a low-stakes hangout vibe. I still don’t know how deep I will read into the series, but for now, it’s an enjoyable way to pad out my book numbers.

2025 read #33: Children of the Whales: Volume 4 by Abi Umeda.

Children of the Whales: Volume 4 by Abi Umeda

Translated by JN Productions

193 pages

Published 2015 (English translation 2018)

Read April 11

Rating: 3 out of 5

It’s been about a month since I read Volume 3. Clearly that was enough time to leave me almost entirely lost when I picked up this installment. Umeda swerves between perspectives in a bloody action sequence as the apátheia, or harlequin soldiers, continue to raid the Mud Whale. Exposition gets doled out mid-battle. It’s difficult to make sense of it all.

The main vibe is one of intense, sometimes melodramatic emotion. Pretty much every character either dies in horrific, pointless violence, or survives to weep about them in the aftermath. It makes sense thematically. The central conflict is between the residents of the Mud Whale, who are free to feel their emotions, and the emotionally-drained apátheia, who view them with mingled disdain and disgust. The heightened emotional stakes are thus central to the story being told.

One could read any number of allegorical interpretations into this; in the contemporary world, it’s tempting to see it as empathetic, compassionate people hounded to the ends of the earth by the sociopathic adherents of patriarchal capitalism.

I think I’ll enjoy this series more if I read them closer together, and can keep better track of who any of these people are. I have four more volumes checked out from the library that I’ll likely use to pad out my reading numbers for this month. After that, our library doesn’t stock any of them, and I’m not sure if I’ll continue the series. It’s long, much longer than any other manga I’ve read.

2025 read #32: Lioness Rampant by Tamora Pierce.

Lioness Rampant by Tamora Pierce

363 pages

Published 1988

Read from March 31 to April 11

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

After habitually taking three or more years between installments, I decided to switch it up and read the last volume of the Lioness Quartet immediately after I finished The Woman Who Rides Like a Man.

Perhaps I should have waited at least a little bit longer. This is the bulkiest book in the quartet, stuffed with a couple books’ worth of plotlines, the convenient return of more than one previously defeated enemy, and a lot of introducing one friend group to another friend group. Focused on my own writing this month, for the first time since 2022, I found I didn’t have much attention to spare, especially for the chapters away from Alanna. In particular, a forty page chapter cramming together all the political scheming that’s been happening in the capital in Alanna’s absence took me days to get through.

Rampant suffers, I think, from the need to give everyone and everything resolution. The result is an unevenly paced finale that’s less satisfying than it should have been.

2025 read #31: The Woman Who Rides Like a Man by Tamora Pierce.

The Woman Who Rides Like a Man by Tamora Pierce

269 pages

Published 1986

Read from March 29 to March 31

Rating: 3 out of 5

I read the first book in this series, appropriately enough titled Alanna: The First Adventure, in 2018. It wasn’t until three years later that I read the second, In the Hand of the Goddess. Somehow even more time has elapsed between reading the second and third book, which I’m only just now getting around to, almost three and a half years later. Truth be told, though, 2018 feels much farther from 2021 than 2021 does from now. Pandemic time has never made sense, and the pre-pandemic world feels like a different lifetime compared to the eternal present of the 2020s.

More so than when I read the first two books, something clicked with this series; I think I finally get it now. It is, quite simply and gloriously, wish fulfillment for 1980s horsegirls. Alanna is a badass young knight with violet eyes, a magic cat, a sword named Lightning, and a horse named Moonlight. This installment features a series of incidents rather than a plot, but it works. As a hyperlexic child, I would have eaten it up.

Unfortunately, Woman has its share of 1980s yikes: noble desert tribes, a hook-nosed villain, white imperialism, a prophecy that the Northern King must rule the tribes to bring peace. There’s also a dubious age-gap relationship.

On the other side of that coin, the Overton window has shifted so sharply to the right over the last four decades that Pierce’s starter-kit feminism — Alanna has sex outside of marriage! Alanna uses magic birth control! Alanna seeks her own path in life! — would somehow be more controversial today than it was in 1986. If this were somehow published for the first time today, it would soon be banned in fifteen states, and not because of the age gap.

2025 read #30: The Quarry Wood by Nan Shepherd.

The Quarry Wood by Nan Shepherd

213 pages

Published 1928

Read from March 19 to March 24

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Nan Shepherd came to my awareness thanks to the writings of Robert Macfarlane. I read the book Macfarlane positioned as her outdoorsy opus, The Living Mountain, and enjoyed it enough to look into her novels, beginning with The Quarry Wood. It stymied me for a long time, however; that early 20th century approximation of Scots English dialect takes some adjustment.

But what really kept me from getting into this book for so long, I have to confess, is a worsening aversion to literary fiction. The last mundane novel I read was back in December; before that, last April. The contemporary dystopia we have to deal with makes it difficult to get invested in a story that consists of “Look at these eccentric characters!” Give me some dinosaurs or magic or something, sheesh. I’m trying to survive fascism out here.

In my own writing, though, I still struggle with characterization, so I should probably make more of an effort to see how literary authors sketch it in. It’s always good practice to read as widely as possible if you wish to pursue writing.

The Quarry Wood is a coming-of-age novel following Martha as she grows from solemn, wide-eyed girl in rural Scotland, to young woman pushing against social norms and parental resistance to attend university. There, she develops a crush on her foster-sister’s husband, which turns into something of an obsession. The book, sadly, is less about Martha going to university when such a thing was rarely done, and more about her mooning after some married dude. (Repeat the evergreen TikTok audio with me here: “He’s just a guy! Hit him with your car!”)

This skeletal framework of a story is padded out with character sketches, rambling for a page or two at a time to illustrate the peculiarities of a secondary character’s husband or sister, usually someone who isn’t even in the scene. Shepherd’s prose is solid, and even sparkles at times — her descriptions of nature (which Macfarlane especially praised) can be magnificent. But these brilliancies occur too sparsely to light up the rest of the novel.

2025 read #29: With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling.

With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with Extracts from the Contemporary Magazine in Which It Appeared) by Rudyard Kipling

Illustrated by Frank X. Leyendecker and H. Reuterdahl

87 pages

Published 1909 (first serialized 1905)

Read March 20

Rating: 3 out of 5

This year, I’d hoped to shift my reading habits away from “log as many books as possible” and toward “read what I actually want to read.” I’d been doing pretty well on that account until February 13. In the month between then and March 14, I finished just three books. It’s been difficult to fend off the instinct to make up for lost time since then. Hence a bunch of manga and poetry books, which I certainly don’t regret reading, but I also can’t deny I read them mostly to shore up my numbers.

This odd little book falls into the category of “a quick read that I’ll forget in a day or two,” yes, but it’s both an early example of science fiction and an early attempt at in-universe fictional documentation.

In the year 2000, the brave men of the GPO ferry mail across oceans and continents via dirigible. Kipling pioneers the technobabble-forward style still recognizable today in Analog; his narrator drops acronyms and specs with little concern for anyone who isn’t versed in the technology of the distant year 2000. While our narrator gets a tour (and we get an overview of the workings of the airship), the captain emphatically condemns the shoddiness of German manufacturing, proving the limits of British imagination.

For all its dry technicality, Night Mail surprises with occasional poetry of description, matter-of-fact snapshots of life in the airlanes:

She falls stern first, our beam upon her; slides like a lost soul down that pitiless ladder of light, and the Atlantic takes her.

I enjoyed the vibe of this brief piece, which I would describe as something like early space opera before it went to space: taut, skillful captains from all “Internationalities” piloting the dark beneath the stars, with the stalwarts of the Aërial Board of Control on hand to direct and rescue shipping.

It isn’t much of a story, beyond the vibes. But what makes the novella particularly interesting to me is the supplemental material “extracted” from the in-universe magazine that supposedly “published” the tale: shipping bulletins, book reviews, reader correspondence, advertisements. It’s a charming conceit that adds to the story’s universe.

2025 read #28: Paris: A Poem by Hope Mirrlees.

Paris: A Poem by Hope Mirrlees

23 pages

Published 1920

Read March 19

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

According to Wikipedia, which I had to consult before reading this 600 line poem, Paris is a “lost masterpiece of modernism” depicting a walk through the post-war city. Mirrlees, whom I know as the author of Lud-in-the-Mist, employs concrete poetry, overheard fragments of conversation, advertisements, musical notes, and a cacophony of imagery to submerge the reader in a sensorium, bursting with sound and startling glimmers of texture:

Little boys in black overalls whose hands, sticky with play, are like the newly furled leaves of the horse-chestnuts ride round and round on wooden horses till their heads turn.

Not everything holds up, and some of the contemporary terms used are regrettable. (Seriously, you couldn’t go 600 lines without dropping the N-word?) Dated elements aside, for a poem written in 1919 and published in 1920, it was impressive, or at least worth a read.

2025 read #27: Dinosaur Sanctuary: Volume 6 by Itaru Kinoshita.

Dinosaur Sanctuary: Volume 6 by Itaru Kinoshita

Research consultant: Shin-ichi Fujiwara

Translated by John Neal

194 pages

Published 2024 (English translation published 2025)

Read from March 18 to March 19

Rating: 3 out of 5

Last time we visited Enoshima Dinoland, I was dealing with a family crisis, and was too depressed and demoralized to appreciate dinosaur theme park escapism. Since then, my country has lurched its way into full-blown fascism, and I’m probably too depressed and demoralized now to properly enjoy dinosaur theme park escapism.

In all honesty, I think the Dinosaur Sanctuary formula might be running out of juice, six volumes in. Which is impressive, considering the Jurassic Park franchise went downhill by book/movie number two. The mix of prehistoric zookeeping and light workplace drama remains charming, but each book is just more of the same, and at this point, even I, a lifelong dinosaur fanatic, am starting to feel satiated with this particular blend.

Part of my issue is with the characters. Even with the occasional dollop of backstory, the cast remains vaguely pleasant archetypes. I don’t feel more than a superficial connection to anyone beyond, perhaps, Suzume, our reader surrogate. It’s hard to invest in workplace drama without that attachment. And this volume felt especially light on dinosaurs, which only emphasizes how shallow the characters feel without them.

2025 read #26: Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin

Illustrated by Eric Beddows

247 pages

Published 2003

Read from March 15 to March 18

Rating: 3 out of 5

I’ve read more books by Le Guin than by any other single author — nineteen as of So Far So Good. (This one makes twenty.) I’ve read all of her major fantasy novels, all but one of her major sci-fi novels, and two collections of her poetry. Yet somehow I’ve avoided all of her short story collections, even though I often adore her short fiction and I’ve owned a copy of Tales from Earthsea for years.

Someone on a Discord channel mentioned this book the other day, and by coincidence it was one of the handful of Le Guin titles at my library, so I decided to give it a go. I’m going in knowing nothing about it.

—

“Sita Dulip’s Method” (2003). Half thesis statement for the collection, half humorous fictional essay reminiscent of newspaper columnists of yore, this throwaway piece was (Le Guin assures us) written before 9/11, when the main airport concerns were boredom and bad food. A shrug.

“Porridge on Islac” (2003). More of the same here, as our narrator arrives on a plane where genetic engineering became an irresponsible fad, the effects of which still trouble society. You can just tell this was written around the turn of the millennium.

“The Silence of the Asonu” (1998). A more explicitly anthropological yarn, not so much a story as a report on a culture wherein the adults speak only rarely. I enjoyed it, though I confess I didn’t clock whatever allegorical through-line Le Guin intended here. I do, however, begin to grasp something of the conceit of this collection, belatedly: anthropological notes from across the multiverse, each entry keyed into a Le Guinian allegory for life or society.

“Feeling at Home with the Hennebet” (2003). I quite liked this one, in which our narrator (who seems to be Le Guin herself) visits a plane where everyone is a lot like her, except for their conception of self and the universe. Perhaps a reader grounded in Taoist philosophy would be better able to unpack it. As it is, I appreciated that the way the Hennebet perceive themselves was never fully explained.

“The Ire of Veksi” (2003). Another anthropological report instead of a story, this one explores a violent yet somehow largely cooperative culture. An interesting line of thought. Not to be a shallow dork about it, but this could be a good starting point for a barbarian PC’s backstory 

“Seasons of the Ansarac” (2002). Quite lovely piece of writing, documenting a culture inspired by migratory ospreys on a world of years-long seasons. Evocative and charming. I liked it.

“Social Dreaming of the Frin” (2003). A fun look at a culture with communal dreaming, and the various ways the inhabitants adapt to, avoid, or avail themselves of the implications. 

“The Royals of Hegn” (2000). I read and reviewed this entry along with the issue of Asimov’s where it was originally published. There I wrote: “It’s a droll, satirical affair set in an island kingdom where the population is so small, and so interrelated, that almost everyone is an aristocrat or king in some way. All of these royals are obsessed with the doings of the single family of inbred commoners.” I gotta say, “Hegn” makes way more sense in the context of this collection than by itself in a magazine.

“Woeful Tales from Mahigul” (2003). Right in the middle of this themed collection of stories is a story that’s a themed collection of micro fiction, a string of thoughtful fables on tyranny, genocide, and war. Stays with you.

“Great Joy” (2003). A satire on the empty consumerism of the Dubya Bush era, as well as the predatory colonialism underpinning tourism. Having begun my own journey toward political awareness around this time, it’s frustrating how the fundamental soullessness of American Christian conservatism was so clearly evident way back when, and has only gotten worse since then. I liked the understated viciousness of the satire, though the faintly paternalistic ending — in which the plane gets liberated by outside authorities — feels particularly dated.

“Wake Island” (2003). A takedown of the turn-of-the-millennium fad for ascribing genius to people who don’t sleep. It could apply equally well to our contemporary fad for eugenicist Silicon Valley assholes, a parallel which isn’t a result of Le Guin’s gift of prophecy but rather due to how predictable and rote the tech entrepreneur “We’re intrinsically better than you” mentality has always been. My quibble with this story is the way it reads like a news-magazine investigative tell-all, never my favorite storytelling voice. We could always use more anti-eugenics writing, though.

“The Nna Mmoy Language” (2003). What begins as a fascinating conceptual piece on linguistic anthropology evolves into a cautionary tale of industrial destruction. I liked it.

“The Building” (2002). Another anthropological piece, this time documenting an ecologically devastated world where two sentient species have evolved a culture of avoiding each other, except for the strange, mysterious work on the Building: the largest single edifice known from any world. Fascinating stuff. (The Building itself would be an amazing artifact to adapt to a Dying Earth story or TTRPG.)

“The Fliers of Gy” (2000). In a world of feathered people, only some few develop wings late in adolescence. I parsed this entry as a sympathetic allegory for neurodivergence, perhaps schizophrenia or something along those lines. Whether I was on the mark or not, it’s an interesting concept, tenderly depicted.

“The Island of the Immortals” (1998). One of the more surreal and haunting pieces I’ve read from Le Guin, in which immortality is a virus spread by a biting fly. I won’t spoil what the effects of immortality are, but this is a solid and memorable story.

“Confusions of Uñi” (2003). As a sort of closing catch-all, this surreal number sees our narrator flit her way across a thoroughly changeable plane. This could have been horribly precious and self-indulgent in less skilled hands, but it was okay here. For all its dream logic, it is perhaps more autobiographical than anything else in this collection.

—

And that’s it! Having gone in with no notion of what these stories would be, I was thrown at first by the lack of conventional storytelling — character development, plotting, and so forth. But once the vibe clicked, I mostly enjoyed the anthropological approach. Planes has me excited to read Always Coming Home, the last of Le Guin’s major SFF novels that I’ve yet to read.

2025 read #25: Children of the Whales: Volume 3 by Abi Umeda.

Children of the Whales: Volume 3 by Abi Umeda

Translated by JN Productions

192 pages

Published 2014 (English translation published 2018)

Read March 14

Rating: 3 out of 5

Back at it again with Volume 3. (Hey, I checked out the first three tankōbon from my library, might as well speed right through them.) The Mud Whale safe for now from tampering, its residents spend this installment prepping and training against the return of the apátheia, or harlequin soldiers.

As so often seems to happen in these manga series (I’m looking at you, Frieren), Whales loosens up its tone and gravitas to indulge in more generic teen tropes, such as Lykos getting mobbed by some cool-girls we’ve never seen before in order to give her a makeover. It all absolutely makes sense in context, a sort of community bonding calm-before-the-storm to establish the characters and their home more fully.

All too soon comes the renewed attack from the enemy battleship Skyros. Much of this volume’s final third comprises battle sequences. Umeda’s artistic skill carries these sections. And of course the book ends in a cliffhanger, so I guess I’ll be off to the library at some point for the next few installments.

2025 read #24: Children of the Whales: Volume 2 by Abi Umeda.

Children of the Whales: Volume 2 by Abi Umeda

Translated by JN Productions

192 pages

Published 2014 (English translation published 2018)

Read March 14

Rating: 3 out of 5

Rolling right along into Volume 2. The first tankōbon ended with a sudden massacre at the hands of some sociopathic harlequin soldiers, which certainly is a vibe. The sentimental melancholy of the first couple chapters still shows through from time to time, especially in some lovely artwork in Chapter 7, “This World Is Beautiful Because…” However, much of this volume was action, as our heroes realize the elders would rather sink the Whale than face a return of the harlequins, and must gather allies and fight there way into the bowels of the island to stop the elders.

A theme has emerged of embracing and understanding one’s own emotions, in opposition to the emotionless husks warring across the outside world. This, plus the artwork, has kept me sufficiently interested to keep going.

2025 read #23: Children of the Whales: Volume 1 by Abi Umeda.

Children of the Whales: Volume 1 by Abi Umeda

Translated by JN Productions

193 pages

Published 2013 (English translation published 2017)

Read March 14

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Still struggling to find manga that fills the Delicious in Dungeon / Witch Hat Atelier-shaped absence in my life, I happened upon this series in my library’s collection, and decided to give it a try.

Teenage Chakuro is the archivist for the people of the Mud Whale. Their entire society of some five hundred people scrounges a living on the back of the floating (possibly living) city, drifting through a seemingly boundless sea of sand that swallows anything else on its surface. Chakuro and his fellow Marked — users of emotion-fueled magic — live brief lives, rarely living beyond 30. The longer-lived Unmarked, who cannot wield magic, comprise the society’s leaders despite being much fewer in number. But the elders know more than they let on about the world beyond the Whale.

The worldbuilding is complex, and the pacing feels a bit off as a result, though Umeda never lets the exposition completely overwhelm the story. A melancholy urgency, an awareness of short lives and sudden death, suffuses Chakuro’s narration. Umeda’s artwork is gorgeous, particularly the establishing shots of the Mud Whale and the larger world around it.

Whales is no replacement for Delicious or Atelier, but it’s intriguing enough as its own thing. 

2025 read #22: Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong.

Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong

89 pages

Published 2016

Read March 14

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

For someone who has published poetry and occasionally flirts with calling myself a poet, I’ve read embarrassingly little. I read a fair bit of verse online, in tiny press publications and on social media, but even there, I don’t read as much as I did back in ’21 or ’22.

Ocean Vuong is one of our major contemporary poets, and someone I’ve never read before. I picked this collection because it’s the one my library had. The topics here are those expected of major contemporary poets: grief, identity, violence, trauma, eroticism, the elemental vastness of one’s parents. I say this without disparagement; these are paramount matters, and Vuong handles them with skill. He raises an archetype without ever feeling anodyne: “He moves like any / other fracture, revealing the briefest doors.” (From “Trojan.”)

2025 read #21: Countess by Suzan Palumbo.

Countess by Suzan Palumbo

164 pages

Published 2024

Read from March 8 to March 14

Rating: 4 out of 5

Virika Sameroo’s family sacrifices much to escape the poverty and drudgery of life on colonized Orinoco. Believing the stories of order and a better life, Virika grows up to become the first captain of Antillean descent in the empire’s merchant marine fleet. But that only makes her a target for the racist colonial government, who brand her a traitor and send her to rot on a prison planet.

This is a beautifully queer and fiercely anticolonialist space opera, a richly realized and quick-moving novella of complicated loyalties and revolutionary spirit. It would be a vital and rewarding read at any time, but is particularly so in the world of 2025. As Virika says, “The people want change, and one day, led by you or not, it will happen.”

2025 read #20: Sorcery and Cecelia by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer.

Sorcery and Cecelia, or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot: being the correspondence of two Young Ladies of Quality regarding various Magical Scandals in London and the Country by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer

320 pages

Published 1988

Read from March 2 to March 8

Rating: 3 out of 5

My reading habits have wilted into nothing. Good thing I’d already decided I wouldn’t try for record book numbers this year. It’s hard enough just surviving day to day with the fashy bullshit coming at us faster than we could possibly process it.

This is an airy morsel of an epistolic novel set in 1817. Two young ladies — Kate on her London debut, her cousin Cecy envious and stuck in rural Essex — correspond about their adventures at balls and picnics, and their brushes with the affairs of English wizards (as well as a certain Mysterious Marquis).

Sorcery is calculated to appeal to anyone who grew up reading Austen or the Brontë sisters. The characters are likable, and the prose seems like a good match for the period, at least to this non-expert. The way magic is lightly sprinkled over a historical fiction setting is reminiscent of Stevermer’s later A College of Magics. I found the overall effect charming but not compelling (though that likely derives from the general anhedonia of having to survive another Trump era).

2025 read #19: A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark.

A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark

432 pages

Published 2021

Read from December 24, 2024 to February 24

Rating: 4 out of 5

My partner R picked this book out for me for our annual Jólabókaflóðið exchange. I happily read the first 50 or so pages that day, then just kind of… wandered off to read other things. After that, I got weirdly avoidant about it. I didn’t pick it up again until February 13.

In 1912 Cairo, where magic proliferates on the streets and clockwork trams crisscross the sky, Fatma is a suave, well-dressed agent for the ministry tasked with the supernatural. She gets pulled into a case of murder that has roots in the origins of magic in the mortal sphere, a case that threatens global catastrophe.

Mysteries will never be my chosen genre. As paperback blurbs used to say, though, Djinn is compulsively readable. The setting is top-notch, living and breathing with vibrant detail. Clark expertly weaves examinations of wealth inequality, colonialism, injustice, and bigotry into his narrative. This is a book with something to say, inextricable from the story being told.

Also included in this volume is a long novelette: “A Dead Djinn in Cairo,” originally published in 2016. I kind of wish I’d read it first, as it comes before A Master of Djinn; much of the plot gets spoiled in the novel, as Fatma thinks back on the prior case. Still, it’s quite well done, balancing character and worldbuilding with its mystery plot.

2025 read #18: The Road to Oz by L. Frank Baum.

The Road to Oz by L. Frank Baum

Illustrated by John R. Neill

159 pages

Published 1909

Read from February 12 to February 13

Rating: 2 out of 5

I figured I’d knock this one out real quick, since it’s the last Oz book included in my library’s omnibus volume. (Well, I guess it isn’t an omnibus if it’s only the first five books, but still.) My country is accelerating into fascism and I can’t spend all my time spiraling about it.

This time, Dorothy trustingly accompanies a drifter dubbed the shaggy man. They reach an enchanted crossroads, pick the seventh road, and inevitably bumble through a series of silly adventures in different parts of fairyland. Many of the lands and creatures this time around skew closer to Aesop than to Baum’s usual blend of rustic and clockwork aesthetics. Soon enough, though, Road reaches the typical Oz fare: checking in with every single companion from the previous four books, because that’s why we simply begged that Mama and Papa must get the new storybook! Also, Santa Claus shows up for a birthday party, because why not.

I have no idea if I’ll continue on with the next nine Oz books from Baum. These five have been a pleasant distraction, but aside from Ozma of Oz, and the ending of The Marvelous Land of Oz, they haven’t done much to distinguish themselves. I suppose if my library gets any of the later volumes, I might consider it.

2025 read #17: Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz by L. Frank Baum.

Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz by L. Frank Baum

Illustrated by John R. Neill

128 pages

Published 1908

Read February 12

Rating: 2 out of 5

Back at it again with the fourth Oz book. This time Dorothy falls into a vegetable kingdom deep inside the Earth, where she happens to meet the Wizard of Oz, out being a humbug as usual. Together with their new companions — Zeb the human boy, Jim the horse, and Eureka the kitten — they adventure through a series of subterranean realms.

It’s a step down from Ozma of Oz, at least to my modern adult tastes. The episodic bedtime story structure is back, sending our friends pell-mell through tunnels and caverns, meeting strange new folks, then moving on. When they happen to reach the Land of Oz, the narrative sputters away into a hangout sesh. But it wasn’t actively unpleasant or anything.

2025 read #16: Asimov’s Science Fiction, January/February 2025 issue.

Asimov’s Science Fiction, January/February 2025 issue

Edited by Sheila Williams

208 pages

Published 2024

Read from February 6 to February 12

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

As with the most recent issue of Analog, I’m making a belated effort to read the current issue Asimov’s for as long as I maintain my subscription (which, considering the massive economic downturn very likely on its way, might not be for much longer). I’ve had a subscription to Asimov’s since last spring, and I’m only now doing more than page through an issue to see who’s in it. Well, at least now I have a back catalogue to keep me company as our household’s discretionary spending goes out the window.

It’s weird how I haven’t read a full issue of Asimov’s newer than 2000. Maybe that’s why my stories and poems never seem to stand a chance with the editorial staff. Time to fix that!

—

As we so often do, we open this issue of Asimov’s with a poem from Robert Frazier: “Your Clone Can Always Look Herselves Up.” It’s pretty good.

Buried amid all the critical writing that front-ends this issue, we find a second poem: “Einstein to Newton” by Gary Sterling. Kind of an ode to science and scientists.

Maybe I should start reading the essays in Asimov’s, but today is not that day.

“In the Splinterlands the Crows Fly Blind” by Siobhan Carroll. Our first story, and right away I can tell that the market difference between Asimov’s and Analog persists after all these years. Asimov’s is more character-forward and imaginatively weird, as opposed to concept-forward and more realistically grounded. In the aftermath of a multiversal cataclysm, Charlie and his brother Gabe live on an alternate Earth where a crow hivemind is the dominant species. “Splinterlands” addresses many of the same apocalyptic anxieties we encountered in the current issue of Analog, but relishes the freedom to explore them more allegorically. An excellent novelette. As it turns out, my favorite story in this issue.

“Five Hundred KPH Toward Heaven” by Matthew Kressel. At a corporate party to mark the decommission of a space elevator, three captains swap tales from their days lifting passengers into orbit. As a story, it’s an enjoyable hangout, but there isn’t much to it; it feels like it could have been published a quarter-century ago. (I noticed that trend with Analog too. I don’t fault the writers so much as I blame our own contemporary inability to imagine anything new, crushed as we are beneath the weight of the dystopia around us.)

A little poem is next: “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” by Kenton K. Yee. It’s cute.

“Shadow of Shadows” by Frank Ward. Twenty years after the death of his young son, physicist Sebastian goes through the motions of his life, until the multiverse intrudes upon his dead-end career and stale grief. Quiet and workmanlike, this story mostly does what it sets out to do.

“What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain” by Beston Barnett. Grim tale of artificial intelligence escaping its bounds and interrogating its creators. It avoids the Roko’s basilisk bullshit that real life tech bros find so compelling, in favor of a human perspective of horror. A well-structured and thoughtful story.

“Through the Pinhole, or, The Origin of a Holostory” by Nikki Braziel. A divorced holonovelist gets stranded in 16th century Malta, and gets his groove back. Corny and a bit choppy, but adequately entertaining.

A poem from Jane Yolen: “Fantastic!” It’s about the feelings of community attached to a sci-fi convention. Shrug.

“A Girl from Hong Kong” by Robert Reed. A typically solid, rambling, slightly opaque entry in Reed’s “Great Ship” sequence, giving us bits of backstory for Quee Lee and the setting at large. Big and baroque in the old 1990s tradition.

“Jilly in Right: A Thought Experiment” by Rick Wilber. “Washed-up dude has his life flash before his eyes while he spins out on the highway, with a sprinkle of alternate timelines” feels rather antiquated as a story structure. I’m not even sure what decade to pin it to: 1970s, maybe? I just couldn’t get into it.

“My Biggest Fan” by Faith Merino. Surreal stalker-horror, employing suburban anomie, late capitalist dislocation, and Ford Pintos to memorable effect.

Another poem: “Too Far Away” by Jenny Blackford. I quite liked it.

“Completely Normal” by Jendayi Brooks-Flemister. Delightfully odd flash fic on the topic of soup and being a third culture kid.

“Moon and Mars” by James Patrick Kelly. Overlong novella about space colonists and space politics. It’s a slog. The prose is jargon-heavy like something from Analog. Blank characters fire repartee off one another. We spend much of the first fifteen pages rehashing events from the two prior stories in this series. On top of all that, any sci-fi that includes “making babies is everyone’s duty” in its ideological assumptions gives me the ick. Since this one story sprawls across over one-third of the fiction pages in this issue, it single-handedly brings down my (fully arbitrary) rating.

Lastly, one more poem: “unfolding origami: a haiku” by Kendall Evans. Eh.

—

And that’s it! Asimov's has always been more to my taste than Analog, and that certainly holds true with this pair of issues — with some obvious exceptions, of course.

Glad I finally read an issue while it was current!

2025 read #15: Ozma of Oz by L. Frank Baum.

Ozma of Oz by L. Frank Baum

Illustrated by John R. Neill

153 pages

Published 1907

Read from February 9 to February 10

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I liked this installment, which largely discards the “new adventure every chapter” storybook structure of the first two Oz tales in favor of a simpler but more cohesive storyline. Dorothy is back in “fairyland” after another weather-related mishap, this time in the company of a pugnacious hen named Bill and, eventually, our good friend Ozma. The quest to locate and restore the royal family of Ev isn’t as iconic as defeating a Wicked Witch or gender-bending into a princess, but for early 20th century kidlit, Ozma of Oz is solid.

2025 read #14: The City in Glass by Nghi Vo.

The City in Glass by Nghi Vo

216 pages

Published 2024

Read from February 7 to February 9

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

“Fuck the road you walked on, the sky you fell out of, the clouds that shielded you from rain, and anyone who gave you a moment of peace or comfort. Fuck everything that brought you here to stand in front of me without knowing what shame is, and when I dance on the wind, I will turn the names that were given to you to mud—”

I knew I would love this book. Vo is one of my favorite authors, consistently turning out future classics. But that was the moment I knew this was the book I needed in my life at this point in time.

Vitrine is a demon who has claimed the city of Azril as her own, nurturing its potential and fomenting chaos, caretaker and troublemaker, through the generations. When angels come and destroy her city, she is left to grieve, but her curse lodges in one of the angels, who cannot be free of the piece of her lodged within him. Over the ensuing years, Vitrine cleans and hopes to rebuild, while the angel lingers, unable to return to his cosmic home.

City is a novel of grief and healing, of creation and joy and life, of rage against uncaring holiness. It is, beautifully and passionately, a novel of our times.

2025 read #13: The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate by Ted Chiang.

The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate by Ted Chiang

Illustrated by Jacob McMurray

61 pages

Published 2007

Read February 7

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

A slight but fun novella about time travel and the predestination paradox in medieval Baghdad, complemented with lovely collage artwork. Structured as a series of vignettes. Not much to it, though I did enjoy it.

These old Subterranean Press hardback editions were such a fixture of my old library back on Long Island; I used to pad out my reading totals with them, way back when, in the early days of this blog. Hell, this book would’ve been just six years old when I started writing these reviews. Speaking of time travel, what I wouldn’t give to go back to the Obama years…

2025 read #12: Analog Science Fiction & Fact, January/February 2025 issue.

Analog Science Fiction and Fact, January/February 2025 issue

Edited by Trevor Quachri

208 pages

Published 2024

Read from January 31 to February 6

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I’ve had subscriptions to both Analog and Asimov’s ever since we moved last spring. I wanted to support both magazines, while keeping abreast of what they’re looking for in fiction these days.

Sadly, I haven’t read any of the issues I’ve gotten. Both magazines are printed by a newsstand puzzle game publisher, making the physical experience of holding and leafing through them especially unpleasant. The ink on my copy’s cover smeared on my hands within minutes of holding it, before I even began reading it. By the time I finished the first story, the spine had begun to peel apart.

The start of a new year of issues seems like a good, round spot to begin, though.

—

“Our Lady of the Gyre” by Doug Franklin. Despite the passage of decades, and turnover in the editor’s chair, the “house style” of Analog seemingly hasn’t changed all that much since the late 1990s. This piece opens with a traumatic flashback in italics, then throws you in at the deep end with a bunch of in-universe jargon — lilies, observing Eyes, a mysterious Her. Classic Analog.

The ensuing paragraphs are loaded with perhaps a touch more exposition than strictly necessary, over-compensating for the initial opacity. The general gist: our narrator drifts with geoengineering “lilies” around a gyre in the Pacific, harvesting fish while the diatoms in the gyre sink carbon dioxide into the deeps.

There’s a whole bit about “generative AI exacerbated the carbon crisis, but it also gave us the tools to start fixing it,” which feels pulled directly from some tech oligarch’s PR department. I suppose reading the “hard sci-fi” magazine means encountering a rather more, erm, credulous attitude toward Big Tech than I’m used to here in 2025.

Once “Gyre” stops tripping over its own worldbuilding, a perfectly adequate human-scale story emerges, only to end almost as soon as it settles into its groove.

—

“Strange Events at Fletcher and Front!” by Tom R. Pike. This tale of time travel and solar technology in the nineteen-oughts confirms the Analog “house style” is still going strong. (One story, see, could have been a fluke.) I mean this without a trace of aspersion: this feels like it could have been printed in 1999. I enjoyed it; telling a story of time travel intervention from the perspective of the person whose life was changed, who then spends years trying to figure out why, is an interesting angle.

 —

“Second Chance” by Sakinah Hofler. Brief but compelling examination of race and uploaded consciousness. Excellent.

—

“Upgrade” by Mark W. Tiedemann. Highly topical yet rather flat story about installing a neural augment in order to stay competitive in an increasingly automated job market. The characters all felt generic, even before anything got installed in their heads.

—

“Rejuve Blues” by John Shirley. Didn’t care for this one. There’s an interesting kernel in the idea of what rejuvenation would entail for someone turning young again, psychologically and hormonally. But it gets lost in this story. So much expository dialogue, not much to hold my interest, and it felt much too long for what little story there was.

—

“Fixative” by Jonathan Olfert. Another dense, jargon-forward piece, but this one drops us into a fascinatingly constructed future of corporate drugs and psychological manipulation, where certain hereditary anxiety disorders are harnessed to turn people into walking starship maintenance machines. The best aspects of sci-fi’s New Wave collide with the bleak corporate futurity of the current age. Quite good.

—

“Notes from Your Descendants” by Lorraine Alden. This flash fic was another blast from the 1990s past, all about designer genetics, as if genetics hold more power over us than how we’re nurtured and what our environment does to us. That’s a pet peeve of mine. If that isn’t an issue for you (and I suspect it was used as a tongue-in-cheek plot device more than anything else), “Descendants” is effective enough. Does what it sets out to do.

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“The Only God Is Us” by Sarah Day. It’s telling of what our future has been reduced to that so much contemporary sci-fi is about attempts to salvage our biosphere and ameliorate the carbon crisis. (Thanks, billionaires! May you all have the future you deserve!) This story features bioengineered strains of algae, meant to eat waste and sink carbon dioxide, instead going rogue and dissolving industrial civilization. Excellent entry, affecting and well-written.

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“As Ordinary Things Often Do” by Kelly Lagor. I was going to remark that this was only the second story in this issue that involves neither climate catastrophe nor corporate serfdom, but no: a casual line of dialogue makes sure we know Earth is “going to shit.” Oof. Sometimes realism is a curse. This is a human-scale tale of a researcher readying herself for humanity’s first interstellar voyage. Nothing groundbreaking, but it’s sweet and solid.

—

“Go Your Own Way” by Chris Barnham. A young man learns how to walk the Way between parallel realities, and finds a timeline where he’s happy — until another version of himself comes along.

None of our contemporary problems with futurity here, right? Well, I’d argue that the multiverse became such a staple of 2020s science fiction as an escape from those selfsame issues. It’s that “our timeline took a wrong turn” feeling we all remember from November 2016, and March 2020, and November 2024. And sure enough, in one of the realities Ferdinand visits, the mistakes of internal combustion were pointedly avoided, making for a clean-air utopia with rapid trains. Secretly on-theme after all.

This story held no surprises, and was (to my tastes) excessively heterosexual, ending with two versions of the man arguing over which of them is “better” for their dream girl, rather than giving her a say in her own life. But it was pretty good overall.

I do want to note, for history-of-the-genre enthusiasts, that another world Ferdinand visits is directly lifted from Keith Roberts’ Pavane. Like, almost down to the letter.

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A poem: “Beyond the Standard Model” by Ursula Whitcher. It’s quite lovely.

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“Prince of Spirals” by Sean McMullen. This one is a boiled-down sci-thriller involving remote archaeology, forensics, and the Boys in the Tower. If you’d shown me this story when I was a 16 year old Michael Crichton fan, I would have loved it. I still think it’s an adequate example of its genre, though one with few surprises up its sleeve. I’m just not into the genre anymore.

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“Flight 454” by Virgo Kevonté. Speaking of sci-thriller vibes, this one is a spacecraft-crash mystery set on corporate Ganymede. Not of much interest to me.

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“Vigil” by James Van Pelt. A sweetly intimate flash fic about memories on board a generation ship.

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“Battle Buddy” by Stephen Raab. Military sci-fi with robots can be a beautiful work of art, as with “Tactical Infantry Bot 37 Dreams of Trochees” by Marie Vibbert, in the January / February 2019 issue F&SF. Or it can be flat and procedural, as with this piece.

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“The Spill” by M. T. Reiten. Humorous micro about nanotech gray goo.

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“Prime Purpose” by Steve Rasnic Tem. Geriatric care robot assists his declining patient and thinks about purpose, the self, and the loss of both. Well-executed rendition of a recurring plot. Feels very 2000-ish.

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“Gut Check” by Robert E. Hampson. Forget the house style of 1990s Analog. We’re going all the way back to the 1960s for this medical emergency in space piece. It is of such vintage that it unironically puts the phrase “steely-eyed missileman” back into print, perhaps the first time in decades. And characterization? Never heard of her. Ends with a Boomer-standard joke.

—

“Quest of the Sette Comuni” by Paul Di Filippo. Mashing together high fantasy with technobabble, this one sees a neon satyr and her helpful little robot go on a quest in 23rd century Italy. Clunky exposition blunted my enthusiasm for this piece, which is a shame; if I ever get into Analog myself, I could see it being thanks to a story like this. I think it was mildly entertaining overall, in a pulpy kind of way, perhaps because I wanted to like it.

—

“Apartment Wars” by Vera Brook. A marvelous novella grounded in character, place, and emotion. The science-fictiony topic of quantum topology is blended skillfully with widowed Helena’s precarious position in 1970s Poland, and it’s beautifully written besides. Maybe my favorite story in the issue.

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Lastly, a poem: “‘Oumuamua” by Geoffrey A. Landis. Pretty standard rhyming science poetry. Nothing objectionable.

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And that’s it! An uneven issue overall, with excellent highlights equal to the best of what 2020s SF has to offer, but an equal amount of what felt to me like filler (but what the old Analog heads probably enjoy). 

2025 read #11: The Green Ages by Annette Kehnel.

The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability by Annette Kehnel

Translated by Gesche Ipsen

281 pages

Published 2021 (English translation published 2024)

Read from January 29 to January 31

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I expected this to be a book about social ecology and its evolution through the centuries. The lovely cover, the title, and even the jacket flap copy certainly suggest an examination of crop rotation, coppicing, and common land, and how those traditional lifeways might be integrated with renewable energy for a wholesome solarpunk future. The book touches on some of that, but it isn’t Kehnel’s main focus.

Instead, Green Ages is mostly concerned with economics: communal abbeys, beguinages, microfinance, circular economies, and so on. Important things to think about, just not what I anticipated. And Kehnel does little more than introduce some ideas; she rarely digs deeper. A typical topic line: “Diogenes and the origins of the ‘tiny house’ movement.”

Like other academics with competent but uninspired prose, Kehnel writes in a faintly patronizing, “let’s learn about this together” voice directly out of a freshman textbook. (Or perhaps that’s just the style common to translations from German; I recall that Forest Walking had a remarkably similar vibe.) A typical sentence: “They were medieval influencers with a high impact factor.”

Overall, Green Ages was worthwhile, but didn’t quite deliver on the vibe of its packaging. I’m really not an economics girlie, so I can’t say for certain, but I feel like this book doesn’t offer much there beyond broad generalizations. Perhaps I’m merely disgruntled. Now, though, I want a book that actually documents the ecology of medieval lifeways.

2025 read #10: The Marvelous Land of Oz by L. Frank Baum.

The Marvelous Land of Oz by L. Frank Baum

Illustrated by John R. Neill 

145 pages

Published 1904

Read from January 28 to January 29

Rating: 2 out of 5

Perhaps because this second installment lacks the nostalgic familiarity of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, I didn’t appreciate it as much. Or perhaps it’s because it’s hard to find the joy in life when an illegitimate fascist government employs shock doctrine to demoralize and dismantle your country.

It’s hard to separate Wizard from its movie, so it’s difficult to say which book is better. For most of Land, Tip is a less engaging protagonist than (the movie version of) Dorothy. Pumpkinhead has a promising introduction, but the eventual adventuring crew of the Scarcrow, the Tin Man, the Saw-Horse, the Wobble-Bug, and so forth feels much less entertaining than (the movie version of) Wizard’s cast. Their scenes are full of bickering, and puns, and bickering over puns. For a depressed adult in the twenty-first century, it grows tiresome.

Without beloved cinematic plot beats to carry it, Land is a bit of a trudge to this modern reader, the frenetic bedtime story pace giving very little to latch onto. Even its proto-feminist message of “girls get to sit at the table too” gets lost in its “girls want jewelry and bon-bons” antics.

That said, the final gender-bent twist is delightful, especially for a book this old. It elevates my final opinion of Land quite a bit, and reassures me that the rest of the Oz books might be worth reading.

2025 read #9: The Middle Kingdoms by Martyn Rady.

The Middle Kingdoms: A New History of Central Europe by Martyn Rady

520 pages

Published 2023

Read from January 4 to January 27

Rating: 3 out of 5

I’ve become more cautious, and more skeptical, of history books over the years. You never can tell when some (usually white, usually male) author will cherry-pick or outright misrepresent historical context in order to push some right wing bullshit. (Looking at you, Simon Winchester and Dan Jones.) I hesitate to take a chance on any author I haven’t encountered before.

But I want to read more history, both for personal interest as well as inspiration for future writing and worldbuilding. My library has woefully few books written by and about peoples of the global majority, so for now, I’m settling for a history of a part of Europe I don’t know much about.

Right from the start, Rady betrays a weakness for limited, almost Victorian interpretations of history. He still employs the suspect term “civilization” in place of culture (as in, “the vulnerability of [Central Europe’s] civilization” to invaders from the steppe). He has a passion for big men and their battles, and treats “peoples” as if they were solid game pieces being moved around a map by the big men, and not as complex social units with complex interactions. I don’t get the sense that Rady means anything nefarious or RETVRN-like with it, just that he’s an older scholar and perhaps hasn’t deconstructed a lot of the bad old assumptions from the bad old days. Plus, simplistic big man history is much easier to write at this vast scale.

Still, a historian who opines “[S]erfdom was not all bad” has earned a healthy dose of skepticism, a sense not fully dispelled until his relatively even-handed treatment of post-Soviet neoliberalism and its failures.

The scope of The Middle Kingdoms — covering a considerable portion of a continent, from the time of Ovid to the present — is both central to its appeal and its main stumbling block. I always love the sound of a history of a vast region, over an extensive span of time, but inevitably, it ends up superficial, breezing through decades in a paragraph.

However simplistic its big man approach to history may be, Middle Kingdoms was an interesting introduction to a region of the world that doesn’t get a lot of attention in the anglophone press.

2025 read #8: Normal Women by Philippa Gregory.

Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History by Philippa Gregory

580 pages

Published 2023

Read from January 4 to January 22

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Everything in any given society is the result of a choice. The choice may have been deliberate, something coded into law to achieve a stated purpose on a documented date, or it may have been a gradual drift from a former attitude, but it was a choice either way. It’s endlessly frustrating that a significant political faction is either ignorant of this basic fact, or choosing to obfuscate it to ground their appeals to “traditional values” in some myth of “it’s always been this way, it’s natural.” In human culture, nothing is natural; nothing is a default. To pretend otherwise is to attempt to enforce your own preferred choices on others.

This book is a vast documentation of the choices that have been made in England regarding the roles, liberties, limitations, and expectations placed upon women since 1066. Gregory’s dexterous prose turns a potentially dry recitation of people and places into a compulsively readable narrative, equal parts inspiring and enraging. From the imposition of oppressive Norman laws, to the wholesale invention biblical misogyny in William Tynsdale’s translation, to the creation of binary sexes by elite men of the Enlightenment, to the cultural vilification of single mothers in the 1970s, Gregory traces the step-by-step creation of today’s gender hierarchy, drawn up in imaginary lists of differences between women and men, and enforced through courts, the pulpit, and the university.

Hand in hand with the laws and social movements meant to demonize and marginalize women went acts by the elite to create an enclosed, landowning, cash-driven society. The loss of connection to the land, and the prosecution of those who formerly could make a living off the common, created the conditions for colonialism, extractive capitalism, and the carceral state. I’ve often said the English aristocrats first colonized their own working classes; Normal Women documents the sociopolitical connections between classism, misogyny, and the invention of modern inequality:

The tradition that women work for their families without payment, and that men dedicate themselves to wage earning, became established by the enclosures of common land in the seventeenth century — long before the rhetoric of a ‘breadwinner wage’ was invented.

In an era when the worst impulses of the elites — grasping for absolute power, artificially inflating prices for necessities while stripping the working population of livable wages — are racing toward fruition, the history of these cultural choices is a bracing, infuriating, necessary read.

2025 read #7: A Mystery of the Campagna by Von Degen.

A Mystery of the Campagna by Von Degen (pseudonym for Ann Crawford, Baroness von Rabe)

88 pages

Published 1887

Read January 19

Rating: 2 out of 5

When you’ve gotten into the habit of reading as many books as possible for over two years, it’s difficult to pump the brakes and switch to a slower, more deliberate reading pace. The last couple weeks, I’ve been working my way through three large books, hoping to redevelop my old attention span. But it hasn’t been easy; progress has been slow. And finding a new digitized source of weird old books in the Merril Collection, it’s tempting to knock out a quick Victorian vampire novella once in a while.

This is not the best writing I’ve read, even by the standards of its time. Von Degen has some ability at quickly establishing character, but this asset gets lost in a muddle of amateurish prose (and repeated allusions to how rural Italians look like murderers). Her most vivid passages heap scorn upon rustic food that, honestly, sounds delicious to me:

There came to light pecorino cheese made from ewe's milk, black bread of the consistency of a stone, a great bowl of salad apparently composed of weeds, and a sausage which filled the room with a strong smell of garlic. Then he disappeared and came back with a dish full of ragged-looking goat's flesh cooked together with a mass of smoking polenta, and I am not sure that there was not oil in it…. It was a terrible meal, but I had to eat it….

Oh no, it’s flavor! An English aristocrat’s natural enemy!

Aside from all that, Campagna isn’t bad; it’s a brief, relatively painless curiosity, an early example of the English vampire genre. As a little bonus, the nurses (particularly Sœur Claudius) are the most collected, competent female characters I’ve ever encountered from this time period.

2025 read #6: In the Morning of Time by Charles G. D. Roberts.

In the Morning of Time by Charles G. D. Roberts 

311 pages

Published 1922

Read from January 18 to January 19

Rating: 1 out of 5

I’d never heard about this novel until I browsed through the digital holdings of the Merril Collection, attached to the Toronto Public Library. Another excellent resource to bookmark! Too bad I chose this book as my first download, because yikes.

Morning is one of those “pageantry of life through time” confabulations that seemed to peak around the ’20s through ’50s. It opens with an amphibious sauropod observing Jurassic slaughter from the relative safety of an estuary. It’s all downhill from there, bearing us down through epochs of bullshit to a 1920s conception of Man. Specifically, White Man.

Along the way, we get red-in-tooth-and-claw vignettes of dubious scientific accuracy; chapter two brings us a Cretaceous Triceratops battling an Eocene Dinoceras, their fight witnessed by both a Jurassic Archaeopteryx and a Pliocene hominid, compressing about 145 million years into one moment. After that, the bulk of the narrative focuses on Grôm, a strangely Caucasian caveman who masters fire, figures out the bow and arrow, and invents love. True to the tastes of its readers, Grôm’s primary foe is miscegenation.

Everything is suffused with masculine rage and violence (and copious racist coding). This, inevitably, becomes tedious, trite, and ridiculous. The ape-man’s bride and child get fridged by some ceratopsians, for instance, which motivates him to single-handedly hasten the dinosaurs’ extinction in revenge. This accomplished, he goes off into the woods, desiring a new mate to bear him sons. Because daughters, even back in Missing Link days, lack inquisitiveness and resourcefulness, you see.

If that weren’t grotesque enough, you can only imagine the racism and patronizing misogyny simmering through the subsequent Grôm chapters. There’s a stink of The Birth of a Nation to the battle that opens the chapter “The Finding of Fire.” It’s fucking vile.

I’m only giving this garbage a full star because at least it’s better written than The Land that Time Forgot. That’s an extremely generous metric, and more than Morning deserves. But hey, I suppose the first chapter, the one without any people, is okay, at least by the standards of 1920s sci-fi, and later on Grôm and his pals have a pulpy encounter with giant dragonflies that feels moderately creative. Not worth slogging through the rest of it, though, by any means.