2026 read #24: Questland by Carrie Vaughn.

Questland by Carrie Vaughn

296 pages

Published 2021

Read from April 15 to April 20

Rating: 2 out of 5

Browsing the library the other day, I found this on the shelf and was like: This is just Westworld, right? This is just D&D Westworld. A fantasy trope spin on an immersive animatronic theme park had, of course, been done at least as far back as Ray Aldridge’s “Steel Dogs” in 1989, and in a much weirder package than this could ever hope to match. Still, there are worse hooks than “D&D Westworld.”

It’s clear that this book rode the “cash in on D&D’s sudden popularity” wave that also gave us Astrid Knight’s Perception Check. Unfortunately, where Check was an isekai fantasy told with obvious love for its inspiration, Questland takes the technothriller / “amusement park gone out of control” route. I’m no longer that keen on the technothriller bandwidth of the sci-fi spectrum. It’s hard to discern if any love went into Questland, because its formula feels so… formulaic. Vaughn’s acknowledgments cite a deep personal history with TTRPGs, but none of that shows up on the page, aside from rote references to rolling for initiative and never splitting the party.

Questland’s own premise undermines its effect: by design, building a “biomechanical” sci-fi theme park out of fantasy tropes for a neo-feudal billionaire literally sucks the magic out of fantasy. The narrator will complain about how a sphinx should have a tangible smell in one paragraph, then gush about how she would happily take a lifelong pass to the park the next. She never coheres into an organic character; instead, she reads like the barfed up id of a ThinkGeek store circa 2017.

Worse, “eccentric tech guru with a private island” already has vastly different connotations than it did a mere five years ago, back when evil billionaire CEOs still had to pretend like they were interested in things like carbon sequestration. Billionaires have always been the bad guys, but nowadays? Having a Jobs / Musk figure in the John Hammond role is actively revolting. The narrative hints at the vileness of its CEO, mentioning his plan to reinstate feudalism in his private enclave, but it gets lost in our narrator’s continuing starry-eyed enchantment with Generic Nerd Tropes Island.

“I should never have come here to Mirabilis,” she muses. “But it was all worth it, to spend five minutes with a dragon.” This same character, of course, is also tempted to get back with her own shitty tech bro ex who’s been helping the billionaire CEO build Neo-Feudalism Island. It’s icky.

On its own merits, the book is… fine? I didn’t hate it, but I wouldn’t say I liked it, either. I’d much rather be reading another D&D isekai, like the much-delayed next book in Astrid Knight’s series. As it is, Questland felt like a half-hearted, rather repetitive clone of Jurassic Park, with a D20 thrown in.

2026 read #23: Boy, with Accidental Dinosaur by Ian McDonald.

Boy, with Accidental Dinosaur by Ian McDonald

117 pages

Published 2026

Read from April 6 to April 15

Rating: 4 out of 5

We might have something of a holy grail here: an inventive, book-length dinosaur story written with panache. In tersely evocative prose, McDonald presents snatches of a colorful, dilapidated near-future of dinosaur rodeos and masked militia checkpoints, an America fragmented by bush war and technofascism and evangelical warlords, where circuses ride what’s left of the highways.

All in all, it’s dishearteningly similar to the dinosaur apocalypse novel I’ve been working on for well over a year. What’s worse: I think it’s better than my book, in a lot of ways. Whereas mine is a mix of 1990s flashback and an altered approximation of the present, McDonald goes full near-future sci-fi with his setting, giving us glimpses of weird tech and weirder social conventions. Boy gives us something all too rare in dinosaur fiction, perhaps even rarer than good prose: solid worldbuilding.

The Tatterdemalion Circus invites inevitable comparisons to the early chapters of Greg Bear’s Dinosaur Summer (which would only have benefitted from more dinosaur circus screentime). But with Silver Clowns and the Dust Tarot, both left to the reader’s devices to expand upon, McDonald populates an alien future, vaster and stranger than local warlords and fundamentalist turf wars.

McDonald’s terseness, and the book’s brevity, can sometimes work against Boy. It is somehow dense and diaphanous simultaneously, wisps of intense clarity air-gapped by narrative leaps. Also taking leaps: McDonald’s grasp of dinosaur biology, which turns hadrosaurs into carnivores and gives alvarezsaurs big sharp teeth. But the dinosaurs he gets right are some of fiction’s most vivid individual dino presences since Dinosaur Summer.

2026 read #22: The Far Edges of the Known World by Owen Rees.

The Far Edges of the Known World: Life Beyond the Borders of Ancient Civilizations by Owen Rees

314 pages

Published 2025

Read from April 1 to April 6

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

I began the reading year strong, but in the last few weeks, my attention span has petered out for one reason and another. (The shadow of a mad king with his thumbs on the nuclear buttons has a lot to do with it.) Whenever my reading falters, I find it helps to get my hands on an interesting but breezy non-fiction book, shaking up my typical diet of fantasy. That’s particularly apropos this year; this is the first work of non-fiction I’ve picked up in all of 2026.

Histories of cultural exchange are one of my big hyperfocuses. I love histories that concern themselves less with kings and wars and more with actual humans. All our cultural myths of “peoples” and “races,” assembled in the early modern era of nation states, fall apart against the reality of how much people, and culture, have always mixed and intermingled. Modern day fash might love the Romans because of their martial misogyny and oppressive hierarchy; I love Roman history because of how people moved all over the empire, from Syria and Mauritania to Britain and Dacia. Despotic elites, not immigrants, caused Rome to fall. There are lessons to learn there.

The Far Edges is right up my alley, offering quick examinations of places at the edges of empire, from ancient cattle herders at Lake Turkana to the city of Co Loa in what is now Vietnam. Rees writes a popularly accessible history in competent, unremarkable prose. Each chapter offers an appetizer of a much vaster, richer story, leaving me wanting more. Honestly, I’d read a book-length examination of any of the sites Rees describes. And that, as always, is the takeaway from books like this: I wish there were more to it.