2025 read #60: Six-Gun Melody by William Colt MacDonald.

Six-Gun Melody by William Colt MacDonald

128 pages

Published 1933

Read August 30

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

I had absolutely zero cause to read this book, other than getting unexpectedly drawn into it while browsing a pulp novel PDF archive. It’s a paint-by-numbers western about a fair and lanky cowpoke solving problems and seeking vengeance with his six-guns. There’s the usual bullshit of the time where all the unsavory characters are swarthy. It isn’t good by any stretch of the imagination. But MacDonald hit upon the formula for zippy prose that gets out of its own way, making for much more readable pulp than most of what I’ve read from this era.

2025 read #59: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Summer 1950 issue.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Summer 1950 issue (1:3)

Edited by Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas

128 pages

Published 1950

Read August 29

Rating: 2 out of 5

To commemorate F&SF possibly resuming publication in the coming weeks, why not get back into my sporadic project of reading my way through the magazine’s back catalogue? I doubt I’ll ever have the patience (or the access) to read every issue, but I’ve read the first two, so let’s move on to issue number three.

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“Friday, the Nineteenth” by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding. A chronicle of bitter suburban heterosexuality that turns into something much more interesting. (If you care about seventy-five year old spoilers, look away now: It’s a time-loop story, quite reminiscent of Groundhog Day.) I truly didn’t expect to enjoy this piece as much as I did. Maybe B-

“Huge Beast” by Cleve Cartmill. Ably written but (to modern eyes) rather formulaic story of suspiciously cuddly alien contact. No doubt it was more groundbreaking in 1950. A respectable enough C+

“The Hat in the Hall” by Jack Iams. A suburban ghost story, mildly amusing. C-

“The War Against the Moon” by André Maurois (1927; English translation 1928). Purporting to be a chapter from a history book of 1992, this satire has some fascinatingly prescient touches, such as the rich buying up newspapers to control public opinion (and thus subvert democracy). Of course, this backroom dictatorship of the billionaires is depicted as a net good that the restive public ignores at its peril. Ah well. Straining to find a cause to unite a bored world and avert war, newspaper owners collude to pull a Watchmen, concocting a lunar invasion (which echoes uncomfortably with how right-wing media invented the trans panic, and the gay panic before that, and the Muslim panic before that, and the Satanic panic before that, and the urban crime panic before that, and…). Not my favorite kind of story, but historical interest and perceptive prognostication merits at least a C

“Dumb Supper” by Henderson Starke. This is actually by Kris Neville, writing not just under a pseudonym but also as a character: a supposed elderly folklorist in the Ozarks. If this is based on actual folklore, it’s modestly interesting, I suppose. C-?

“Ounce of Prevention” by Philip Carter. An extremely 1950s piece, which features global nuclear annihilation, a mission to Mars, a helpful Martian, and time travel. Ends with a typical 1950s twist. Maybe D+

An excerpt from the poem “Death’s Jest Book” by Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1850). It’s fine. Too abbreviated to make much of it.

“The Case of Summerfield” by W. H. Rhodes (1871). Originally published as a newspaper hoax in the Sacramento Union, this proves to be an ancient prototype of the “mad scientist threatens to destroy the world unless his demands are met” trope. Like Dr. Evil himself, Mr. Summerfield even demands the sum of one million dollars. While dense and slow-paced in accordance with the tastes of the time, and continuing well after the logical end of the story, it’s astonishingly creative in Summerfield’s central threat. C

“Divine Right” by Betsy Curtis. A fascinating blend of aesthetics, mixing suburban paperboys on bikes with space colonization and telepaths with greedy royalty. It’s almost like a whisper of Samuel R. Delany’s later working-class space stories. It’s a bit clumsy as a story, but the aesthetic carries it far. B-

“Born of Man and Woman” by Richard Matheson. Matheson’s very first published story. Pretty typical midcentury “freak kept chained in the cellar” material, little more than a character study, but effective. B-

“Professor Pownall’s Oversight” by H. R. Wakefield (1928). An early prototype of the “evil genius obsessed with his brilliant and charming classmate” trope. The editors’ introduction refers to this as a “chess fantasy,” but it’s really a ghost story centering around chess. Surprisingly enjoyable. B-

“Haunt” by A. Bertram Chandler. Brief but rambling anecdote about a seance with a ghost from the future. The punning twist ending must have felt terribly clever in 1950. C-

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So now I’ve read the first three issues of F&SF, in addition to the most recent eight and a scattering of others in between. This is the first halfway okay issue you reach reading forward. Nowhere near what it would become in more recent years, but still enjoyable.

2025 read #58: More Voices from the Radium Age, edited by Joshua Glenn.

More Voices from the Radium Age, edited and introduced by Joshua Glenn

239 pages

Published 2023

Read from August 27 to August 29

Rating: 3 out of 5

In the bookstore, I was more interested in this volume’s table of contents, but I couldn’t just skip the first book. (One reason that trip was so expensive!) Hopefully this installment lives up to the (mostly) excellent selections of the original Voices. Editor Glenn’s introduction states this volume is a look at the varied genres that fed into the soup of what would become SF. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s somewhat more hit-or-miss than the first.

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“The Last Days of Earth: Being the Story of the Launching of the ‘Red Sphere’” by George C. Wallis (1901). It is thirteen million years from now. The sun’s heat wanes and the Earth enters its final frozen age. And yet we cannot escape Edwardian gender norms. Ah well. It’s fascinating how social change has always been harder for white male authors to imagine than technological or even astronomical change. Also interesting: the way the last humans’ “spacecraft that’s a sphere of unknown red metal” prefigures Jack London’s “The Red One” in 1918 (reviewed here). The story itself is a collection of memorable images conveyed in juiceless prose and “As you know…” exposition. It’s fine? C-

“The Land Ironclads” by H. G. Wells (1903). Wartime sci-fi written before the Great War. Parts of it were prescient (technocracy making slaughter impersonal) and parts of it were almost incomprehensible relics of a pre-war worldview (the dichotomy between the rugged, manly, “uncivilized” regular army and the over-civilized army of button-pushing clerks fielded by the opponent). There’s also a touch of eugenics in the final “degradation” of the victorious army of clerks. An interesting historical artifact that somehow gave us a prototype of drone pilots in 1903. C+

“The Republic of the Southern Cross” by Valery Bryusov (1907; translated 1918). Barely a story, this social satire adopts the form of a historical description of an efficient utopian city at the South Pole, the authoritarian control hidden just under its surface, and the outbreak of “contradiction” that brings its downfall. Interesting as a snapshot of 1907’s concerns about modern life. C?

“The Third Drug” by E. Nesbit (1908). A story in the mad scientist tradition. A Paris doctor patches up a man who comes to his door, but gives him a sequence of three drugs intended to turn him into a superman. Well-written as far as these things go; mildly diverting. C

“A Victim of Higher Space” by Algernon Blackwood (1914). I was gonna make a comment about this era’s quaint overlap between mysticism and higher mathematics, but then I realized the conflation never went away; modern woo dresses itself in theoretical physics to this day. In this story, psychic investigator Dr. Silence takes the case of a man who has fallen victim to multidimensional misfortune. Interesting in a way that Flatland never managed to be. C+

“The People of the Pit” by A. Merritt (1918). I always feel a mix of emotions seeing A. Merritt’s name on a TOC. Excitement, because he wrote some of the strangest, most lurid weird adventure fiction I’ve ever encountered, obviously a direct inspiration for many core D&D vibes. Disgust, because he almost invariably would force in some of the most heinous racism I’ve ever read. This tale takes us deep into Alaska to the mysterious Hand Mountain, where gold flows like putty and luminescent “devils” reign. Miraculously, “Pit” packs in the weird but goes light on the bigotry. It was an unexpected pleasure. More Merritt should’ve been like this. B

“The Thing from—‘Outside’” by George Allen England (1923). I knew that the movie The Thing was based on Campbell’s story “Who Goes There?” However, I hadn’t known (until this collection) that “Who Goes There?” was inspired by this even earlier story, which sees a band of five bickering explorers troubled in the Canadian wilderness by a preternatural “Thing” from “outside the universe.” The character work is stiff, but not every story from this era even bothers with details like “character,” so it’s better than it could be. The plot is a slow, inevitable creep into disorienting horror. A solid B-

“The Finding of the Absolute” by May Sinclair (1923). Well-written afterlife fantasy heavily daubed with philosophy and mathematical mysticism. You can imagine it as a missing link situated halfway between Mark Twain’s “Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven” and The Good Place. It didn’t have the grounding in sympathetic character that the better afterlife fantasies from present day authors give you, but all in all it was surprisingly solid. B-

“The Veiled Feminists of Atlantis” by Booth Tarkington (1927). Satirical take on women’s suffrage in which the rule of women leads to the destruction of Atlantis. I’ll go with Joanna Russ’ assessment, as quoted in Glenn’s introduction, and say that this stinks of smug misogyny. D

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And that’s it! All in all, a much more mediocre volume than the first, but it still had some delightful stories to enjoy.

2025 read #57: Voices from the Radium Age, edited by Joshua Glenn.

Voices from the Radium Age, edited and introduced by Joshua Glenn

213 pages

Published 2022

Read from August 26 to August 27

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

You ever go to a bookstore in a new city and feel the inhibitions of penury lift enough that you spend way more than you should on shiny new books? That’s what happened when my partner R and I took a roadtrip to Rhode Island last weekend. Part of that overspend: this volume and its follow-up, two anthologies devoted to the forgotten period of sci-fi, the era between the scientific romances and the start of the “golden age,” which editor Glenn dubs the Radium Age.

Spoiled by the contextualization provided by the British Library Tales of the Weird series, I was pleasantly surprised by the historical and biographical detail in Glenn’s introduction. More historical anthologies should make the effort.

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“Sultana’s Dream” by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1905). Bengali feminist Hossain pens the utopia of Ladyland, where women walk freely in the city while men are shut away and secluded for the public good. Ladyland’s other benefits include solar power, flying cars, and a two hour workday, all thanks to the efforts of its lady scientists. As with most classical utopias, the story is little more than a guided tour of Ladyland and its wonders, with some words about how it originated. Still, it was a pleasant read. B-

“The Voice in the Night” by William Hope Hodgson (1907). When I picked up this book, I was excited for another Hodgson story, but alas, I forgot I’d already read and reviewed this one in the British Library’s Evil Roots anthology. There, I called it “Deliciously creepy.”

“The Machine Stops” by E. M. Forster (1909). A hugely influential story about a distant future where everyone lives in identical hexagonal compartments, having their needs met and their social interactions mediated through the Machine. It’s an early example of “ease makes the race weak” sci-fi, which is unfortunate, but it also seems to have eerily prefigured aspects of our current era. The Machine doesn’t display video when people call each other, it displays a “good enough for practical purposes” simulacrum. Likewise, food and other necessities rendered by the Machine are “good enough.” Given the way countless contemporary people have settled for allowing GenAI — an elaborate, wasteful version of autocomplete fed by theft — do their fact-finding, their socializing, their writing, even their thinking for them, and don’t seem to understand why that’s bad, “Machine” has an uncomfortable resonance today. It’s also an especially apt metaphor for life under technofeudalist capitalism: “The Machine develops — but not on our lines. The Machine proceeds — but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die.” B+

“The Horror of the Heights” by Arthur Conan Doyle (1913). Bearing in mind his many faults, I have to admit that Doyle was a consummate yarn-spinner. In his hands, even a “These are the facts of the case”-style framing device somehow works. I was immediately absorbed by this airborne thriller, in which a daring pilot becomes convinced that an invisible menace inhabits the unexplored “jungles” of the upper atmosphere, and sets out to confront it. Entertaining! B

“The Red One” by Jack London (1918). Archetypal man’s-life weird adventure pulp, unfortunately with all the horrific racism and sexism that comes with it. Fever-crazed Bennett, fleeing across Guadalcanal from cannibals, chases a distant unearthly sound. Would’ve been a much cooler story if London had been able to contain his throbbing bigotry-boner for even a moment. If I had to guess, I’d say this was a major inspiration for Sphere. F+

“The Comet” by W. E. B. Du Bois (1920). A Black bank messenger appears to be the only survivor after Earth passes through the tail of a comet. Superb use of science fiction as social commentary. Grim and beautiful. A-

“The Jameson Satellite” by Neil R. Jones (1931). The namesake Jameson, hoping to preserve his mortal remains for the lifetime of the Earth, designs an orbiting satellite as his coffin. Forty million years later, a shipful of robots, their metal bodies controlled by organic brains, happens upon the Jameson Satellite and revives Jameson, placing his brain inside a machine. The quaint early sci-fi conceit comes out half-baked thanks to dull writing and stiff dialogue. Maybe C-?

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And that’s it! All in all, one of the better anthologies of old stories I’ve ever encountered. I’m excited to read the next volume!

2025 read #56: Circles of Stone: Weird Tales of Pagan Sites and Ancient Rites, edited by Katy Soar.

Circles of Stone: Weird Tales of Pagan Sites and Ancient Rites, edited by Katy Soar

238 pages

Published 2023

Read from August 24 to August 26

Rating: 3 out of 5

This is the first British Library Tales of the Weird anthology I’ve picked up since Polar Horrors last October. My partner R gifted me Circles of Stone during the holidays; I’ve intended to read it this whole time, even having it in my perennial to-read stack since December. But do you ever have books sit in your TBR pile so long that you start to feel avoidant of them? No? Just me?

Anyway, now that my teen is back with his other parent for the school year, I’m excited to get back into reading with more regularity. And Circles’ table of contents looks like it could be a lot of fun.

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Extract from Ringstones by Sarban (1951). Excerpting this from a novella, editor Soar deploys it almost as an extension of her introduction, singling out a brief lecture from one character on the folkloric associations of standing stones. Well-written enough, but not really reviewable as a story.

“The Temple” by E. F. Benson (1924). This predictable but competent piece about two friends who rent a cottage near a ring of standing stones in Cornwall is invigorated by crisp prose and evocative descriptions. The ending is the weakest part. A solid start all the same. B-

“The Spirit of Stonehenge” by Jasper John (1930). Brief anecdote about a young archaeologist becoming possessed by the Druidic evil of Stonehenge. Painless, but not much to it. C

“The First Sheaf” by H. R. Wakefield (1940). Soar’s editorial introduction cites this tale of an isolated Essex village as “an early example of folk horror.” The inbred villagers here certainly return to propitiating the Old Gods in order to alleviate a drought the Christian God won’t break. The story is interesting as a prototype, but otherwise I found it middling. C

“The Tarn of Sacrifice” by Algernon Blackwood (1921). John Holt is a hiker on holiday, haunted by physical and emotional wounds from the War to End All Wars. Repulsed by modern man’s hypocrisy, and unable to shake the realization that he enjoyed killing on the battlefield, he finds himself drawn to the (imagined) manly simplicity and stoicism of the ancient pagan Romans. At the titular tarn, he meets a young woman and her father, who quickly convince him he’s the reincarnation of her lover from Roman times. Maybe it’s because I read this story perched on a rock shelf above a lake, but I quite enjoyed it. Reminded me of a gentrified take on Robert E. Howard’s masculinity-fetish tales. B

“The Shadow on the Moor” by Stuart Strauss (1928). This belongs in the category of “an amateur author lucked into a Weird Tales publication.” A dude trying to write horror stories at a Cornwall inn is chilled to see the shadow of a woman walking all alone on the midnight moors — no woman, just her shadow — and inevitably he must follow it to a sinister ring of stones. This is conveyed in correct but lifeless prose: “It was uncanny. Impossible. Yet his eyes told him that the impossible was fact.” The first dud of this collection, which is rather impressive for stories of this era. D

“Lisheen” by Frederick Cowles (1948). Another one not to my taste, affecting a faux-historical style that offers only the driest outline of a folk horror story. A girl is born of the devil (and/or Pan) in a Cornwall village; the vicar entrusted with her care soon loses his faith for lust of her. You could imagine a low budget 1970s flick built from that skeleton, full of latex and nudity, but the text at hand doesn’t amount to much. D?

“The Ceremony” by Arthur Machen (1897). An evocative vignette centering a stone still venerated in the wood. Brief but vivid. B-

“The Dark Land” by Mary Williams (1975). An unexpectedly late variation on the Edwardian formula of “narrator’s artist friends have an uncanny experience on the moors, here related at secondhand.” There’s potential here, but the narrative distance (and the primly Christian ending) works against it. C-

“The Man Who Could Talk with the Birds: A Tale Told by the Fireside” by J. H. Pearce (1893). Ah, the chokehold that phonetic dialect had on the nineteenth century. This brief number is related entirely in a roughly transcribed Cornish accent. It was fine otherwise, I suppose. C-

“The Stone that Liked Company” by A. L. Rowse (1945). Another tale told by fireside, this one is more substantial and interesting, with the dean of a college rambling out a yarn about an over-excitable young man fixating on a standing stone during a Cornwall rest-cure. A solid enough C+

“Minuke” by Nigel Kneale (1949). A house in a new ribbon development is afflicted with preternatural activity in an anecdote related by a letting agent. Nothing especially interesting in itself (was it supposed to feel more slapstick than scary?); nonetheless I enjoyed it as a glimpse of suburban history, something that seldom crops up in stories older than this. Maybe C

“New Corner” by L. T. C. Rolt (1937). One of the best qualities of this particular volume has been its diversity of subjects. Sure, there’s been a surfeit of Cornish standing stones luring the innocent to devilish doom, but there’s also been items like this one, which brings us to the world of 1930s auto racing. As a story, it doesn’t offer much, and at times feels patronizing in a boy’s-own magazine sort of way, but it’s a fascinating glimpse into a bygone subculture. C-?

“Where the Stones Grow” by Lisa Tuttle (1980). A thoroughly 1980s spin on the subject, in which a man wrestles with traumatic childhood memories of seeing his father crushed by standing stones. Well-written but just a tiny bit silly, as 1980s horror frequently was. C

“The Suppell Stone” by Elsa Wallace (2018). Well-written, as befits so recent a story, but disappointingly bland. I suppose I’ll give it a C

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And that’s it! The second half didn’t hit as well as the first, but overall, I’d say this was the most satisfying British Library Tales of the Weird volume I’ve read so far.

2025 read #55: Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire.

Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire

206 pages

Published 2019

Read from August 19 to August 24

Rating: 3 out of 5

After some standalone entries, McGuire’s fifth Wayward Children book continues the tale of Jack and Jill from Down Among the Sticks and Bones and Every Heart a Doorway.

It’s a bit of a step backward from the delicately crafted tragedy of In an Absent Dream. We’re back at the Home for Wayward Children, which means a crowd of YA protagonists squeezing into each scene to trade quippy dialogue and gum up the pacing. (There are three iterations of “You died!” / “I got better” punchlines.) Still, Down is an occasionally lovely book full of heart, compassion, and memorable imagery.

Reading a book from the first flush of contemporary queer liberation is a heavy reminder of how far backward we’ve slid in a mere six years. I miss the world of 2019, the impression that the arc of history would bend toward justice and freedom. I miss the way fantasy authors had begun to pepper their stories with progressive messages and wise asides. A perceptive line about how some would be eager to immiserate children in order to ensure the world never changes hits different now that such ghouls have gained control over so much of the world, and plan to entomb us all in a nightmare built from antebellum fantasies. 

2025 read #54: When the Earth Was Green by Riley Black.

When the Earth Was Green: Plants, Animals, and Evolution’s Greatest Romance by Riley Black

Illustrated by Kory Bing

281 pages

Published 2025

Read from August 2 to August 19

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

We need more paleobotany and paleoecology books. I’m in the process of writing a novel set partially in the Cretaceous, and there are so few avenues for learning what ancient environments would have been like. A particular textbook sells for $500 on eBay. Wikipedia has a couple useful pages, but even a ubiquitous Upper Cretaceous tree like Dryophyllum lacks its own entry. In fact, the most thorough online source of information about Dryophyllum that I can find appears to be a fandom wiki for a video game.

Heading into this book, I’d hoped for more in the vein of the closing chapters of Riley Black’s The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, which linked the Earth’s past with our own contemporary fights for personal autonomy and queer liberation. There are bits of that here and there; the introduction, in particular, can be quite lovely in its musings on life’s interconnectedness and interdependence. Certain chapters, such as the one on fall color in the Pliocene, are beautiful and evocative. The conclusion is, once again, especially impactful, a much-needed reflection of human diversity and possibility.

For the most part, though, Green offers more of the Raptor Red-adjacent pop science that characterized most of Last Days. It’s enjoyable, and Black covers many topics not often seen by the public at large, which is always welcome. This book is a nice first step for introducing the reading public to the plants of the past, but it’s only that — a first step. Let’s hope it starts a paleobotanical revival and leads to more in-depth books gaining publication.

2025 read #53: Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior by David Hone.

Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior: What They Did and How We Know by David Hone

Illustrated by Gabriel Ugueto

176 pages

Published 2024

Read from July 28 to August 2

Rating: 4 out of 5

Circa 1998, I was as up to date on dinosaur science as it was possible for a semi-homeless teenager with no formal education to be. There were comprehensive popular overviews and specialist encyclopedias in every library. Those were good times for amateur dinosaur aficionados.

In 2025, we’re in the midst of a much smaller dinosaur renaissance. There are quite lovely new books that do innovative, edifying, expressive things with the topic. But none are the lavish, comprehensive pop-science tomes you used to get in the ’90s. So I’m not scientifically “up to date” the same way, and it’s unlikely I ever will be.

This book is a step toward catching up at least a little bit, though. In particular, Behavior provides a solid foundation for considering non-avian dinosaurs as once-living animals with complex behaviors and interactions with their environment. A lot of recent work in dinosaur science has been, shall we say, excessively optimistic about what behaviors can be recovered from the fossil record. Hone’s approach lays out the diverse possibilities of dinosaur behavior, while cautioning against conclusions drawn from sparse fossil data: “[M]uch of the scientific literature tends toward a confidence in interpreting dinosaur behaviors that probably should not be there….”

I would love a greatly expanded version of this book. Its main weakness, to my taste, is its summary nature. Fascinating glimpses of dinosaur behavior are reduced to a single sentence plus a reference to a paper that I lack access to. I’d prefer a book two or three times longer, giving proper paragraphs (if not subheadings) to more case studies. But even as it stands, Behavior helps break down the movie myths of dinosaurs we all absorbed in the 1990s. A useful starting point for anyone who might want to write more realistic dino fic in the near future.