2026 read #45: New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine: Issue 4.

New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine: Issue 4

Edited by Oliver Brackenbury (1:4)

80 pages

Published 2024

Read from August 31 to September 3

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

It’s been a hell of a bad summer. Fixation on a new partner, followed by lingering heartbreak after the relationship abruptly ended. Not to mention our rapid decline as a nation to new depths of fascism, and the escalating natural disasters as our planet reaches the climate tipping point. The last issue of New Edge that I read was way back in May, and I’ve only read like fourteen books since then. It’s been a bad time.

I’ve been putting off this issue for a while, then. Don’t know why, other than sometimes my ADHD rebels and refuses to indulge my autism’s hyperfocuses. Demand avoidance gets so much worse when I feel stressed and overwhelmed. Regardless, I’m looking forward to new installments from Jonathan Olfert, Dariel R. A. Quiogue, and June Orchid Parker, and also I spy a byline from Harry Turtledove, so this should be a fun time.

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“Gaze Upon the Beating Dark” by Jeremy Pak Nelson. I found this one a bit slow paced (fans of classic MST3K will understand the perils of extended rock climbing scenes), but ultimately it proved to be weird and enjoyable. It was nice to see an older couple in a starring role.

“White in the Eye” by Jonathan Olfert. A vivid and absorbing tale of sorcery and exploitation that (pun intended) hits the ground running. Fluent and satisfying.

“The Concord of the Outhar” by Kirk A. Johnson. Solidly enjoyable Sword & Soul tale.

“A Portrait in Ivory” by Michael Moorcock. This might be my favorite of the (admittedly few) Elric of Melniboné stories I’ve read so far. It’s also the farthest from Sword & Sorcery of any I’ve read so far. Elric even leaves his sword behind as he sits for a possibly sacrilegious bust.

“Hunter” by Oliver Brackenbury. I can recycle my review of Brackenbury’s “Something Oath-Like,” his story in issue 3: “Included as a fundraising reward, this piece from the editor is a bit busy and breathless, penned in the voice of someone who’s read a lot but hasn’t necessarily written much fiction on a professional level.” I can assure you we don’t need onomatopoeia transcribing our heroine’s breathing.

“The Jesting Jann” by Harry Turtledove. Turtledove can feel like a well-meaning liberal uncle who perhaps doesn’t understand the expectations of sensitivity in our present era. I love this story’s setting, the seldom-talked-about period of Jewish and Christian strife in 6th century Arabia. It isn’t much of a Sword & Sorcery tale to my mind, but it’s mostly enjoyable until the historian’s groaner at the end.

“Battle of the Nine Waters” by Dariel R. A. Quiogue. Another rip-roaring Orhan adventure, as we’ve come to expect from Quiogue. This installment reminds me quite a bit of classic Conan, as pseudohistorical geopolitics and warfare intersect with necromancy and death worms. My favorite story so far this issue.

“A Serpent from the Ash” by June Orchid Parker. This story of Astartha is built around a particularly blunt allegory, but it works magnificently (and movingly). Plus we get a Big Snake, always a welcome addition to any S&S tale.

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Moving on to the nonfiction selections of this issue.

First, we get another biographical sketch from Cora Buhlert: “Tanith Lee: Mistress of the Weird.” I’ve loved every Lee story I’ve read, but I have yet to make any concerted effort to read her books, in large part because they’re so expensive nowadays. (I miss when they filled shelves at Half Price Books.) Interesting as always.

Next, an essay from Nathaniel Webb: “Axes at the End of History: Sword & Sorcery & Heavy Metal.” Webb’s central thesis is that both genres are working class outsider art.

The inevitable interview from editor Brackenbury follows: “Lofty Heights and Profound Depths: An Interview with Bryn Hammond.” This is the first interview that is original to the magazine and not a transcription from Brackenbury’s podcast. I would love to be this conversant with the history of my genres. Good interview. Hammond’s responses gave me a lot to think about while crafting my own upcoming S&S.

Lastly, a book review from Doris V. Sutherland: “Review: Swords in the Shadows, Edited by Cullen Bunn.” It’s an anthology of Sword & Sorcery horror, which is always a fun mix (and one true to the subgenre’s roots). 

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And that’s it! Kind of silly that I put this off for so long, but then, my behavior since April has been kind of silly. (NRE hits doubly hard when your lover has BPD, and the crash is three times worse than usual.) Glad I finally got around to reading it!

2026 read #44: The Adventures of Tom Bombadil by J. R. R. Tolkien.

The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and other Verses from the Red Book by J. R. R. Tolkien

Illustrated by Pauline Baynes

Editorial material by Christina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond

290 pages

Published 1962; expanded version with commentary published 2014

Read from August 25 to August 27

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

After reading The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarilion, this is my first foray into the dregs of Middle-earth material, the real cash-in type shit that fills whole shelves of the fantasy section to this day. The third and final Middle-earth book published in Tolkien’s lifetime, Adventures scrapes together the titular poem (originally published in 1934), some poems pulled from Lord of the Rings, and some more or less random material the Professor had lying around. This edition bundles the rather slim text with a much longer body of commentary to make it seem like a real book worth buying.

Tolkien studies are a big and profitable line — perhaps less so now than in their 1970s-2000s heyday, but they still drain so much oxygen from the contemporary fantasy scene and its innovative but impoverished authors. I almost hate to admit that it’s kinda interesting to read the commentary, which traces the origins of texts and cross-references the legendarium. No way in hell I’ll ever be famous enough that anyone would give a shit about my notes and scraps of manuscripts, but it’s fascinating to see the creative process from the outside like this.

I also enjoyed the poems more than I expected to. The way Tolkien plays with rhythm and assonance is like a polished, Oxfordian elevation of my own poetic aspirations. Tolkien’s signature tone of whimsy underlain with deep sadness is one that would suit the collection I’m supposed to be working on. I’m honestly glad I purchased a copy so that I’m able to highlight and dog-ear it (should I ever bring myself to do that to a book).

2026 read #43: Crawling Horror: Creeping Tales of the Insect Weird, edited by Daisy Butcher and Janette Leaf.

Crawling Horror: Creeping Tales of the Insect Weird, edited by Daisy Butcher and Janette Leaf

317 pages

Published 2021

Read from August 3 to August 25

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

We’re anhedonic as fuck but we’re gonna keep reading, baby! Back at it again with another British Library Tales of the Weird volume, this time one I bought at retail price at Barnes & Noble right after a breakup just to feel something.

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“The Sphinx” by Edgar Allan Poe (1846). As a precocious reader at the turn of the 1990s, I was excited to find a dusty collection of Poe when I stayed in my family’s ancestral farmhouse one summer. Countless Looney Tunes had primed me to expect macabre frights in its pages. The actual experience of reading Poe, of course, disappointed me even then. I remember tearing through this brief anecdote, growing excited by the appearance of the ominous beast, and correspondingly let down by the denouement. A faintly comic bauble, only a classic thanks to inertia.

“The Blue Beetle: A Confession” by A. G. Gray, Jun. (1857). Basically Frankenstein, except shorter, less poetic, and about a guy who inadvertently makes a beetle. The most interesting thing about it to me was the narrator’s search for a singular “germ” of life, two years before the publication of On the Origin of Species. We tend to forget how the common origin of life and its subsequent diversification was already in the popular European zeitgeist even before Darwin.

“The Mummy’s Soul” by Anonymous (1862). The editors’ introduction to this story positions it as the earliest “mummy curse” story as we know it in English literature. I was excited to read it. Alas, it’s amateurish and plodding, and peppered with little nuggets of racism. I will say the story’s second half prefigures the Weird Tales vibe in the narrator’s feverish visions.

“After Three Thousand Years” by Jane G. Austin (1868). Rather rote Victorian romantic melodrama that happens to include a scarab necklace. I know I’m depressed right now, but I could not sustain any interest in this piece.

“A Dream of Wild Bees” by Olive Schreiner (1895). Brief moral fable with just a touch of eeriness about it. Moderately interesting.

“The Moth” by H. G. Wells (1895). An especially Wellsian ghost story, in which a quarrelsome entomologist is troubled by a moth that resembles his recently deceased rival. It’s fine enough.

“The Captivity of the Professor” by A. Lincoln Green (1901). This is more like it: an early weird fic about cerebral ants who Ratatouille various animals to perform functions and use them to construct ant civilization in the remote Amazon. The story, unfortunately, resides in the catalog of “white slave” narratives, but the pseudonymous Green doesn’t get especially egregious with the theme. In general weirdness and interest, this might be my favorite story so far.

“The Dream of Akinosuke” and “Butterflies” by Lafcadio Hearn (1904). Two fables from the exoticized East, in classic Nineteen-Oughts fashion. Hearn had an interesting life that landed him in Japan, where he married and became a citizen. These two entries purport to be examples of Japanese folktales. They’re fine enough, especially the myrmecological pageantry of the first, albeit filtered through the customary Orientalist norms of Western publishing of their time.

“Caterpillars” by E. F. Benson (1912). There’s an interesting occult story somewhere in this tale of supernaturally carcinogenic caterpillars infesting an Italian villa, but it’s buried under anachronistically stiff, comma-laden prose.

“An Egyptian Hornet” by Algernon Blackwood (1915). A cheeky Man vs Nature affair, as an Anglican reverend confronts a big hornet in a hotel bathroom. Doesn’t really qualify as a weird fic story at all, despite the editors’ insistence that the reverend’s point of view magnifies the insect’s malignity into something diabolical. I will say the character’s puritanical anxiety over the bug’s snatched waist made it a worthwhile read.

“The Blue Cockroach” by Christopher Blayre (1921). A trifle about the bite of a blue cockroach momentarily dissipating habitual English reserve. Had that annoying prose trick from this time where Random Words are capitalized for humorous Emphasis.

“The Wicked Flea” by J. U. Giesy (1925). We finally reach the era of Weird Tales proper, the original venue for this silly mad science caper. There’s a modest quantity of pulp entertainment value to be found in the tale of Xenophon Xerxes Zapt and his experiments with hypertrophied fleas, but the story goes on much too long.

“The Miracle of the Lily” by Clare Winger Harris (1928). Self-serious scientifiction in the early Amazing Stories style, which feels like an inevitability given the chokehold “man vs insects” had on the first years of that magazine. It tries to be an epic account of two thousand years of future history, but just reads as silly today. Harris offers a criticism of modernism and the destruction of beauty and sentiment in the name of “efficiency,” but inevitably, the usual modernist concerns (“struggle is essential for the race!”) crop up as well.

“Warning Wings” by Arlton Eadie (1929). Inoffensive little tale about a moth transmitting an SOS to an ocean liner.

“Beyond the Star Curtain” by Garth Bentley (1931). One of the things that keeps me coming back to old SFFH stories is encountering the standard tropes much earlier than I expect. This is a space-faring time dilation tale that sees our square-jawed adventurers landing on a far-future Earth after a trip into a parallel universe. They find themselves in a man’s-life wonderland: a planet overrun with giant insects, fungal jungles, and the occasional damsel in distress. It’s silly pulp fun.

“Leiningen Versus the Ants” by Carl Stephenson (1937; English translation published 1938). A more quotidian man’s-life affair in the Amazon, pitting a cocksure colonial planter (and his four hundred indigenous workers) against a rampaging migration of ants. It has all the casual bigotry one might expect, and is much too long. Bum note to end on.

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So yeah. I don’t know if it’s the depression talking, or if this was just an unusually disappointing entry in the Library of the Weird series.

2026 read #42: The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner.

The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner

282 pages

Published 1996

Read from August 17 to August 23

Rating: 3 out of 5

I learned about this book while looking for fantasy novels from the 1990s. I’d never heard it mentioned elsewhere, which seems surprising for a Newberry Honored book until you remember what got published the very next year. To hell with Rowling until the end of time, but the impact Harry Potter had on the normies is both unfortunate and undeniable.

As such, it’s hard not to read The Thief as anything other than the last iteration of the YA fantasy tradition going back to The Forgotten Beasts of Eld (or perhaps even all the way to The Hobbit). No sorting into houses or love triangles or formulaic teenage chosen ones here, just an interesting world and a slightly predictable but still creative storyline.

The setting is my favorite aspect of The Thief. Whalen Turner borrows extensively from Ancient Greece but adapts it into a world of gunpowder and printed books. The story itself has highlights, but the pacing can feel wonky at times. The first half of the book is a generic travelogue fantasy. The climactic dungeon crawl to find the lost artifact falls in the middle of the book. The rest is another travelogue as our characters race to the border, only to be captured and then escape again.

Overall, I think The Thief earned its reception at the time, but I’m also not surprised by how little staying power it had, outside of Goodreads lists.

2026 read #41: All Systems Red by Martha Wells.

All Systems Red by Martha Wells

143 pages

Published 2017

Read from August 16 to August 17

Rating: 3 out of 5

Eons ago, just three months into the life of this blog, I read one of the first books I truly didn’t like: The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells. That book’s puerile gargoyles smirked their way through interminable banter, every last one of them sounding like a YA protagonist with a chip on their shoulder, even the venerable elder. Whenever I’d see someone talking up Wells as an author, I just couldn’t understand it. Surely we couldn’t be reading the same books.

Then I got hooked on the Murderbot TV show last year. I’m an autist who has always felt awkward, uncomfortable, and unwelcome in basically all social situations; Murderbot was the genderless autistic binge-watching reluctant hero we all needed. I didn’t want to, but eventually admitted to myself I needed to give Martha Wells one more try.

Having such an engaging and well-done television adaptation already in my mind means All Systems Red doesn’t stand on its own. I can’t tell whether the show does the heavy lifting for an otherwise insubstantial novella (I’m already attached to the characters, which is good, because they’re pretty thinly sketched here), or whether the show is so faithful that this book reads like a 1980s novelization of itself. I’m inclined to think it’s the former; Wells’ narrative is more of an outline that the show helped fill in, especially with the human characters. The characters here have more than one character trait between them, though, so at least Systems is an improvement over The Cloud Roads.

I’m not here to give any kind of “real” review. I read books and I record them here, and the MLM scrapers are the only things that read what I write. So I’ll just give this a fond rating because of how much I liked the show, and leave it at that.

2026 read #40: A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

173 pages

Published c. 1595-1596

Read August 15

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

An unusual “read” for my blog: I checked off this play at an amateur table-read event at a board game cafe. It was a wonderfully queer and engaging experience that absolutely made the text feel vivid and immediate in a way that silent solo reading never would have done.

Midsummer is a classic and my amateur ass could never bring something cogent to its discussion. As a writer, I’m particularly fond of the play’s satirical, self-referential treatment of authorship, actors, and the audience. The bumbling jobbers’ anxiety over making sure the audience doesn’t get scared or offended is played for laughs, which gives metatextual irony to Robin Goodfellow’s epilogue. It’s a lot of fun.

2026 read #39: Dinosaur Sanctuary: Volume 8 by Itaru Kinoshita.

Dinosaur Sanctuary: Volume 8 by Itaru Kinoshita

Research consultant: Shin-ichi Fujiwara

Translated by John Neal

193 pages

Published 2025 (English translation published 2026)

Read from July 30 to July 31

Rating: 3ish out of 5

Every six to ten months, it seems, I pick up a fresh installment of Dinosaur Sanctuary and have to reckon up how much the world, and in this case my private life, has deteriorated since the last volume. This time, in addition to the political and economic realities of the failing capitalist system in its far-right death throes, as of last week I’m newly out of a brief but intense relationship that failed precisely when it should have been hitting its stride. I had to break it off with him right after our first joyous visit. I’m reading this while fucking bummed.

All of this will be interesting to see scraped up in whatever MLM summary you might read about this series later. Fuck you specifically, person who uses the slop machine to read for you.

Anyway. As has become the norm in recent installments, the light workplace drama of Dinosaur Sanctuary overshadows its potential as dinosaur fiction. We spend more time with quarterly earnings reports, marketing strategies, and corporate synergies than we do with dinosaurs. I’m not invested in Enoshima Dinoland as a fictional entity, and the characters are too one-dimensional for me to care about them.

Sometimes I wonder why I bother keeping up with this series, but then we get storylines like Momo the constipated Camarasaurus, which remind me just a bit of the best parts of Dinosaur Summer. And then I conclude, sighing through my anhedonia, that maybe it’s worth coming back to Enoshima each time.

2026 read #38: The Day & Night Books of Mardou Fox by Nisi Shawl.

The Day & Night Books of Mardou Fox by Nisi Shawl

167 pages

Published 2024

Read from July 17 to July 30

Rating: 4 out of 5

The Wikipedia page for Alene Lee is barely a stub. It positions her solely in relation to men: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs. It mentions that she was an author but doesn’t list a single one of her works.

Nisi Shawl brings a tremendous prose voice and a careful touch to a fictionalized account of Lee’s story, deftly interweaving magic and tender visions with the hard, bruising realities of her life.

2026 read #37: The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson.

The House on the Borderland: From the Manuscript, discovered in 1877 by Messrs. Tonnison and Berreggnog, in the Ruins that lie to the South of the Village of Kraighten, in the West of Ireland. Set out here, with Notes. by William Hope Hodgson

Introduction by Ann VanderMeer

204 pages

Published 1908

Read from July 12 to July 17

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Long-time bots (the only regular readers of this blog) know my fascination with the development of what we now call fantasy fiction. In recent years, I’ve expanded that interest to encompass the related and parallel but still distinct evolution of weird fiction.

The House on the Borderland is a major weird fic milestone, predating the more famous cosmic weird of Lovecraft (and, for that matter, Weird Tales itself). In a remote part of Ireland, two anglers on holiday follow an unmapped river to an uncanny pit where it disappears into the earth, and the mysterious ruins that perch on a projecting crag above the drop. There they find a weathered manuscript of strange events penned by an old man who lived in the house before it was ruined.

Borderland is an exercise in atmosphere, forming a missing link of sorts between the early Dying Earth of the late chapters of The Time Machine and the “I traveled through space and time in a dream” of Olaf Stapledon. As a novel, it feels like a string of sketches held together by its flimsy framing story (which emphasizes how Hodgson felt it would be best not to “edit” the manuscript). Cosmic-scale Dying Earth material segues into an interminable siege by swine-men, which leads to a half-hearted dungeon crawl in the bottomless pit, and then we loop back to a protracted retread of the first and last time travel scenes from The Time Machine. A mysterious, supernal “Her” is randomly introduced halfway through and treated as if she’s always been in the narrative, lampshaded by a footnote from “editor” Hodgson.

Hodgson, like many of his contemporaries, is wrestling with the vastness of time and space only recently delineated by science. There is an element of pantheism to his thinking, though even the great pagan gods of old Earth are reduced to creatures crawling under the darkness of the dead sun. There are hints of samsara, perhaps, in the continued joys and agonies of drifting souls. But mostly it’s a surfeit of prose poetry about turn-of-the-century cosmology, full of giant dying suns and black nebulas. It’s pretty, but goes on perhaps a few chapters too long for my taste.

There are glimmers of interest here and there, strange visions and luminous wounds, vast wordless mysteries in between its half-stated ideas. It is a first draft of several subsequent genres, rough and overlong but fascinating.

2026 read #36: The Travels of Marco Polo by Rustichello da Pisa and Marco Polo.*

The Travels of Marco Polo: A Modern Translation by Rustichello da Pisa and Marco Polo*

Translated by Teresa Waugh from the Italian translation by Maria Bellonci

Photographs by Sergio Strizzi

207 pages

Published ca. 1300 (English translation published 1984)

Read from July 1 to July 12

Rating: 2 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

I call this a reread even though I never read this specific translation, which seems like a fair way to handle classics in translation. Whatever version I read as a kid was probably some standard midcentury edition. This one is a typically 1980s tie-in edition for an Italian docu-drama film, with color plates from the film’s production and extensive medieval and early modern illustrations, but no modern map, no glossary, and no endnotes. Context was not yet a priority, I guess.

I found this edition in the library a few months back, and was struck by two thoughts: I miss when nonfiction books were lavish, illustrated affairs, and also I want to read more weird old books wavering on the line between folklore and nonfiction to get more ideas for Sword & Sorcery stories. So that’s what we’re doing here.

Unfortunately for my purposes, Travels is more of a medieval gazetteer than an adventure story. It’s fascinating in historical context: what mattered more to their sensibilities was the information attributed to distant places rather than one person’s narrative of adventure (even if said information was extensively massaged and augmented to suit European expectations by romance writer Rustichello). When they get to itemizing every single province of Cathay, with the same three rudimentary bits of information, it becomes particularly tedious.

The most disturbing thing about reading this mix of just-so stories and Islamophobic screeds is the realization that, over 700 years later, a substantial number of my compatriots still literally believe in this “wicked Saracen” shit. It’s a lot like understanding that modern antisemitism is rooted in medieval economic politics. People are just that gullible, eager to believe made-up bullshit from the men in charge, whether those men be kings who owe money or trillionaire failsons who have an apartheid axe to grind. (The medieval sexism and colorism is just as awful.)

The gazetteer format makes it all the more jarring when a stray biographical detail — “Marco Polo was totally made a baron of this city, and the elder brothers Polo totally helped the Khan take this other city” — appear without any context. It’s pretty funny, in a way.

There are nuggets of potential world-building material here and there, like the rolling porcupines of Ishkasham, the palace of gilded reeds (bamboo?) at Xanadu, the lodging-houses for travelers of every nationality (including Lombards and Germans) at Khan-balik, mounted couriers and their post-houses, unmounted couriers with belts of bells, magic anti-beheading stones in Japan, and so on. How accurate any of it might be as anthropology is, of course, debatable. But we’re here to find inspiration for Sword & Sorcery, not history.

I want to reiterate my frustration with this particular edition: no effort was made to link the names Polo reported to any kind of historic location. I had to search online every time I wanted to know what, say, Kinsai relates to on the map of today. It would’ve been so easy to add a glossary, or even some footnotes.

2026 read #35: The Dead Hours of Night by Lisa Tuttle.

The Dead Hours of Night: Stories by Lisa Tuttle

Introduction by Lisa Kröger

233 pages

Published 2021

Read from July 1 to July 10

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I’m still trying to read short stories (whether in anthology, collection, or magazine form) at least every fifth book this year. Which really puts into relief how slow my reading pace has gotten of late. What do you mean the last short stories I read were back in May? What do you mean this is only the fifth book I’ve read in two months?

Anyway, I picked up Dead Hours pretty much randomly at the library way back in May (or was it April?). I’ve read just two of Tuttle’s stories before this: “Jamie’s Grave” (read and reviewed here) and “Where the Stones Grow” (read and reviewed here), the latter of which appears again in this volume. Still, the titles and range of publication dates in this collection seemed interesting enough.

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“Objects in Dreams May Be Closer than They Appear” (2011). A weirdly old-fashioned story for its publication date. In its structure and rhythms, it brings to mind 1930s or ’40s short horror, despite its plot hinging on Google Street View and sat-nav. “Weirdly idyllic house that no one can find” feels like a plot straight out of that era, as well, as is the denouement. Still, it wasn’t a bad story.

“Closet Dreams” (2007). I remember reading stories from the 1980s horror boom and feeling scornful of “exploitative” pieces, stories from comfortable white male writers who used crimes against children for shock value. In the decades since, horror has become the genre for the oppressed and traumatized. This rumination on sexual violence and PTSD is thoughtful and feels far from exploitative.

“Born Dead” (2013). A stab at literalizing grief, but it’s too prim and managerial class for me, and I felt the ending didn’t land.

“Replacements” (1992). Obviously not every piece of feminist writing is going to be queer or inclusive — hell, this publication date puts it firmly in Second Gen territory — but this story is much too heterosexual and gender essentialist for my taste. Tuttle’s upper middle class professional milieu continues to alienate me, as well.

“A Birthday” (1993). Moderately enjoyable tale of a middle-aged woman’s “change of life.”

“My Pathology” (1998). A chilling examination of how men use women as objects of convenience, which sees an alchemist isolating and manipulating the narrator into growing and birthing the Philosopher’s Stone. Quite good.

“Food Man” (1994). Based on this collection so far, Tuttle’s bread and butter (pun intended) appears to be literalizing a social issue generally associated with women or girls, and seeing where it leads. This time the issue at hand is anorexia. I’m not sure that “a teen accidentally cures her anorexia by fucking a man made of the rotting food under her bed” is, perhaps, the most sensitive path Tuttle might have taken. All the same, I do think it holds up as a story, especially when contrasted against contemporary horror fiction. It certainly isn’t the most awkward social allegory I’ve read from the Nineties. Possibly my favorite entry here so far.

“Mr. Elphinstone’s Hands” (1990). In a change of pace, we switch from contemporary-set pieces to a tale of Spiritualism and PTSD in nineteenth century New England. It’s a fascinating allegory that uses ectoplasm as a proxy for revolting, nonconsensual male touch, and explores the lack of support from fellow women in a patriarchal society. It’s a bit long, but effective.

“The Dream Detective” (2013). Aside from some mild amusement at the noirish touches, this tale was an upper middle class shrug for me.

“Where the Stones Grow” (1980). I read and reviewed this one in Circles of Stone. There, I called it “ Well-written but just a tiny bit silly, as 1980s horror frequently was.”

“Vegetable Love” (2017). Another tale of vague heterosexual dissatisfaction leads to our protagonist turning into Japanese knotweed. More or less.

“The Book That Finds You” (2015). Finishing on a slightly livelier note, this is a rambling tale of books and fixations and the reputations of our literary heroes. It meanders without much emotional impact, but it was a fine enough read.

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And that’s it! That’ll teach me to take a chance on a full collection from a writer I barely know. (I kid, I kid.) I didn’t dislike anything here, but so much of it puttered along in one gear and didn’t build to anything.

2026 read #34: Three Miles Down by Harry Turtledove.

Three Miles Down by Harry Turtledove

275 pages

Published 2022

Read from June 26 to July 1

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Let’s just get this fact out of the way: this is literally just Sphere. Because it’s Turtledove, it’s played as alternate history, packed with every 1970s cliche you can think of, from bellbottoms to boiling-over radiators to Richard Nixon, but it’s still just Sphere.

Jerry Stieglitz is a young longhair academic who occasionally sidelines in sci-fi stories (which is such an old-school self-insert trope that I haven’t seen it done so nakedly in a long time). He gets hired by some shady feds to lend scientific cover to their search for a lost Soviet sub in the Pacific. Naturally, the Soviet sub recovery is a cover story for an attempt to haul an alien spacecraft from the seabed. It’s Sphere.

Well, okay, I guess Down doesn’t involve deep sea habitats or reality-warping constructs. It’s more interested in progressive Jerry’s crisis of conscience than it is in gee-whiz sci-fi. And Turtledove’s politics center on wry cracks about “at least we defeated fascism and don’t have to face it again” and “American politics can only be better fifty years from now,” rather than Crichton’s “only a straight white man is above identity politics and can keep a cool head on his shoulders in a crisis.” Which makes it a lot less cringy to read than Sphere.

More than anything, the book feels like an excuse for Turtledove to indulge his nostalgia with an authorial alter ego and ramble through every stray bit of ’70s lore he could recall. His characters stop and make pop culture references nearly every page. Whenever the plot threatens to start moving, we get wisecracks instead. It gums up the pace, just not enough to aggravate me, mostly. Overall, Down is both inoffensive and inessential, a self-indulgent adventure that’s worth a read if you’re into that sort of thing.

2026 read #33: Between Two Rivers by Moudhy Al-Rashid.

Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History by Moudhy Al-Rashid

262 pages

Published 2025

Read from June 15 to June 26

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

After being stuck for over a month reading my last book, I wanted to kickstart my reading again with a lightweight nonfiction piece. This book promised to be just that, a breezy look at Mesopotamian history told from the lens of artifacts associated with the supposed “museum” of Ennigaldi-Nanni in Ur. It aspires to be a history of how ancient people thought about history, but does it really do more than gesture in that direction?

Between Two Rivers is the platonic ideal of a 2020s nonfiction book: large type, cheaply printed, no illustrations, written by a specialist academic for, shall we say, a non-specialist audience. As so many contemporary writers do, Al-Rashid simplifies topics to the point of condescension. She repeatedly describes personal cylinder seals as ancient “Instagram bios” (as if making the comparison once wasn’t enough). She contextualizes pottery as “the Tupperware, [and] Amazon packaging… of the ancient world,” as if even a 2020s reader doesn’t know what pottery is.

It’s a shame, because the range of topics here is fascinating. Al-Rashid’s academic specialty is the history of ancient science; I would much rather have read a tome dedicated exclusively to that than baby’s first introduction to Mesopotamia. But that’s not what sells, apparently, so that isn’t what gets published, at least not in the sort of mainstream history you’re likely to find in a small library system.

But does Rivers manage to be something of a history of history? Well… maybe a little bit, in the opening and closing chapters. For the most part, though, Al-Rashid just goes through the usual pop history motions, and Rivers suffers as a result. It’s no Weavers, Scribes, and Kings.

2026 read #32: She Would Be King by Wayétu Moore.

She Would Be King by Wayétu Moore
297 pages
Published 2018
Read from May 13 to June 15
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

This is the 1000th book I’ve read and reviewed on this blog. It’s taken thirteen and a half years to get here. Along the way, while I’ve reread books from my past, I haven’t read a single book twice. That’s a thousand different reads, good and bad, classic and contemporary, spanning centuries of literature and countless different versions of me. We’ve gone from the ineffectual center-right liberalism of Obama, when my kid was a toddler and groceries cost half what they do now, to the current spiral of fascism and ecological collapse and corporate inflation, with my kid now almost an adult. I’ve gone through a thousand iterations of self, as well—the person I was when I began is as far distant as my kid’s toddlerdom.

I first tried to read She Would Be King back in March 2019. After a promising start that year, my reading habits deteriorated quickly; this was one of several books I began with enthusiasm that spring, only for my attention span to atrophy. According to my ancient iPhone, I only read 14% of the file before lapsing. But this review of it has been stuck in my drafts for over seven years now. That was half the duration of this blog ago. This seems like an opportune time to blow the dust off King and try again.

It is an ambitious first novel, capital-L literature, dense and weighty. At her best, Moore refuses to sanitize or look away from horrors and griefs no words will ever fully encompass. Yet beauty mingles with the cruelty like blood and water.

The opening sections of the book function like novelettes introducing us to each of the three central characters. The stories are compelling, compressing generations of trauma into taut, moving narratives. It’s when the characters and their stories converge that King wobbles. Our three protagonists meet for approximately five minutes before plot contrivance forces them apart again. The structure of Moore’s examination of Liberian history requires them to part in order to witness different aspects of it, so off they must go to see it. But they keep thinking about each other, because the plot requires that too.

The second half of King occasionally still burns with vengeance, strives against the weight of trauma, and examines the injustices of colonialism, but the immediacy and intensity of its opening chapters gets lost in the business of nation-building. Liberia’s founding is especially nuanced, a colonialist adventure that opened a path forward for oppressed populations while also creating new conditions of oppression for displaced locals. Once her characters are placed where they need to be, Moore gestures toward some of this complexity and uneasiness, but none of it matches the powerful storytelling of the first half.

2026 read #31: Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey.

Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

176 pages

Published 2020

Read from May 11 to May 13

Rating: 3 out of 5

It was the summer of lockdown. My local library had just reopened on a “reserve books and pick them up” basis. As with so many other folks, I had taken the preceding months to reflect upon and reevaluate myself. The queerness that had always lurked in the background of my self-understanding wanted to take a form. For the first time, I wanted to make a conscious effort to seek out queer fiction. Fortunately for me, the last few years had seen a change in publishing norms; queer genre fic was in the mainstream like never before.

Upright Women Wanted was in the first batch of books I requested that lockdown summer. Like every other book I tried to read, it glanced off my anxious, preoccupied brain. I don’t think I finished a full chapter before abandoning it with the rest. I didn’t even get far enough to realize it’s set in a post-collapse future of patriarchal assholes and climate change rather than a Weird West alternate history. (I wonder why I read only six books that year.)

Here we are now, bounds and bounds closer to the dusty patriarchal dystopia Gailey portrays, with its state-controlled media and furtive queerness surviving in its margins. Women feels uncomfortably relevant in ways the last few years have only exacerbated; its message of “No matter what, be yourself and don’t let the patriarchs control your fate” is urgently needed.

As a story, Women could have used some space to breathe. The characters don’t develop much beyond archetypes, which makes big twists feel perfunctory, reading more like an outline than a novel. Rushing as we do from one scene to the next, the world doesn’t get much of a chance to shine, either. Gailey gives us some of the texture and odor of her future West, but I would have liked a lot more.

2026 read #30: New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine, Summer 2024 issue.

New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine, Summer 2024 issue (1:3)

Edited by Oliver Brackenbury

80 pages

Published 2024

Read from May 8 to May 11

Rating: 4 out of 5

Out of this first batch of issues, this is the one I’ve been most excited to read. Not only do we get a new, officially-approved-by-the-estate Jirel of Joiry story by Molly Tanzer, we also get Sword & Sorcery tales from Premee Mohamed and Thomas Ha, two of my favorite contemporary authors. There’s also an array of flash fiction that sounds intriguing.

Saša Ðurðević’s cover painting of Jirel, cape billowing across a stark white background, is instantly iconic, so much so that it’s used in NESS’s promotional materials to this day.

—

“Beating Stars, Dying Hearts” by Matt John. Crisply paced and evocative Dying Earth-adjacent tale, full of weird creatures, towering ruins, and inventive details. A solid story and a fun start to this issue.

“The Betrayal of the Rhinoceros” by Premee Mohamed. A fortress under siege faces a new peril: huge fucking ants with human faces climbing its walls. I’m honestly shocked I’ve never read an S&S story with giant ants before (though I’ll admit I haven’t read many of the pre-1970 classics). Of course, this being Mohamed, there’s some emotional depth to it, as well as themes of climate disruption and the corruption of authority. Loved it.

“St. Fario’s Feast” by Thomas Ha. This story is everything you’d expect from Ha: a sumptuously fucked up fairy tale of rabbit men, otherworldly abominations, and dark rivers of cosmic magic. It successfully expands what Sword & Sorcery can be, while never losing that S&S flavor. Superb.

“Gravediggers of Carsonne” by John R. Fultz. Serviceable tale of would-be grave robbers running afoul of an undead wizard, and one agreeing to do an errand for him to earn back their lives.

“Something Oath-Like” by Oliver Brackenbury. Included as a fundraising reward, this piece from the editor is a bit busy and breathless, penned in the voice of someone who’s read a lot but hasn’t necessarily written much fiction on a professional level. A sample: “Her scream had barely begun when, satisfied, Enmed pulled on the iron rod in his one-cubit-deep closet of stone.” I’m not sure whether the effect is meant to be comedic or not.

We begin a section of flash fiction pieces with Samantha Rich’s “The War-God’s Hound.” I was curious to see how Sword & Sorcery would be handled in a flash format; Rich packs ample atmosphere and hints of a wider world in this brief piece. Well done.

“Sister Soldier” by R. L. Summerling is another flash piece, well-written and evocative.

“Of Cabbages and Stone” by Timaeus Bloom brings fairy tale energy to a yarn about an aged ex-sorcerer who has no time to entertain disrespect.

“Against the Witch-Prince of Emdal” by W. O. Balmer also packs in a lot of atmosphere, suggestive of a bigger story beyond the vignette.

“High Water” by James Estes is another solid flash piece, an enjoyable anecdote of an undead saint visiting a delightfully Venetian city. Felt somewhat Riverside-esque.

“The Ferry-Man’s Price” by Melissa Burlock is another expertly done flash piece, a Sword & Soul number that sprinkles in references to past events to expand the story far beyond its word count. My favorite flash here.

“Jirel and the Mirror of Truth” by Molly Tanzer. One last fiction piece, an all-new Jirel of Joiry tale officially approved by C. L. Moore’s estate. Tanzer evokes Moore’s prose and storytelling pace while producing something fresh, the story’s more updated touches cleverly integrated into the plot. Loved it!

—

That brings us to the nonfiction section of this issue. We begin with Jay Wolf’s essay “The Untrammeled Wilds,” which is about disability and the possibilities (and pitfalls) Sword & Sorcery offers in its portrayal. It’s a really good essay.

Next, Bryn Hammond brings us a biographical essay on “Jessica Amanda Salmonson: Amazon,” editor of the classic Amazons anthology series. A fascinating subject, and another solid essay.

The obligatory transcript from editor Brackenbury’s podcast is “Cock & Bull: An Interview with Kirk A. Johnson.” It’s always interesting to see how contemporary S&S authors got into the genre, and the ideological background they bring to their own writing.

Lastly, Robin Marx brings us a “Review: Shared World by Jonathan Ball, GMB Chomichuk, James Gillespie, and Chadwick Ginther.” Marx’s review is solid, but I gotta say, the book itself doesn’t sound like one I’ll seek out.

—

And that’s it for this issue! Overall, it felt like a mighty leap forward in story quality and editorial panache. My favorite NESS issue so far.

2026 read #29: To Katahdin by George T. Sewall.

To Katahdin: The 1876 Adventures of Four Young Men and a Boat by George T. Sewall

Introduction by Neil Rolde 

Afterword by Irvin C. “Buzz” Caverly, Jr.

122 pages

Originally published as newspaper series in 1870s; book edition published 2000

Read from May 4 to May 7

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Having lived in upstate New York for a couple years now, my partner R and I have developed a little tradition of visiting a local book barn each spring, soon after it opens for the season. This past weekend, R found this book in the regional history section. It’s a charmingly presented trip journal, complete with pen-and-ink illustrations that accompanied the original newspaper serial. Seemed like it would be a good use of $4.50!

The three well-to-do Sewall brothers, plus their cousin Ned Hunt, undertook a late summer lark with the goal of climbing Katahdin, by then familiar to tourists but still retaining the mystique of the North Woods frontier. Thanks to the reprint press’s subtitle, one is inevitably reminded of Three Men in a Boat, only without Jerome K. Jerome’s self-effacing irony and charm. At least the pencil drawings (done, presumably, by one of the Sewalls) add an occasional touch of immediacy.

The narrative itself is fine. It’s more descriptive than poetic, a travelogue of summer woods and waters, steamer wharfs and remote farms, blueberries and wilderness hotels, a dry but fascinating glimpse into a lost world. I want more books about the early development of American tourism, whether they be modern histories or contemporary accounts. This certainly checks that box.

Naturally, this being the 1870s, literally any time writer Sewall encounters a woman, he simply can’t resist adding some disparaging comment or other. Maybe Jerome K. Jerome did the same thing; it’s been long enough since I read Three Men that I truly don’t remember. But it certainly soured my enjoyment here. Likewise, the boys can’t catch a glimpse of a waterfowl without hastening to shoot at it. Absolutely no inkling of a conservation ethos here, just some college bros taking their turn on the frontier before it vanished.

2026 read #28: Merynthia’s Master by Luana Saitta.

Merynthia’s Master by Luana Saitta

86 pages

Published 2026

Read from May 4 to May 6

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

A self-published Sword & Sorcery novella from a New Edge author, with a kickass cover painted by none other than Goran Gligović? You best believe I had to snap this one up the moment I got paid this month.

The story is a Harryhausen-esque Sword & Sandal tale set in a pseudo-Roman Empire, where bot farms of reanimated skeletons toil over propaganda pamphlets, and the ultra-nationalistic resistance leader is buddy-buddy with the imperial elites whenever the poors aren’t watching.

Some general spoilers: Our much-abused protagonist gets force-femmed with an eldritch spell in order to infiltrate a wealthy merchant’s seraglio and pilfer a powerful amulet. Within the welcoming world of the seraglio, however, other, more interesting avenues open for her to explore. She finds both self and community for the first time, in the midst of frequent passionate interludes: “They were life, unashamed and defiant.”

For a self-published manuscript, Master is solidly written, just a few tweaks shy of professional polish. Saitta is particularly fond of placing pop culture Easter eggs: Godzilla, THX-1138, and of course Lovecraft all make appearances.

The paperback’s formatting is unfortunate: just a raw Word file, double-spaced, unjustified, Times New Roman text, page numbers in Calibri, hyphens in place of em dashes. The professional quality of the cover is misleading; there isn’t even a copyright page. Formatting and writing are different skill-sets, of course, but I’m begging self-pub authors to emulate the formatting norms of the trad-pub books on their shelves.

2026 read #27: Club Contango by Eliane Boey.

Club Contango by Eliane Boey

277 pages

Published 2024

Read from March 12 to May 4

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

I haven’t read much economic sci-fi, so perhaps it’s inevitable that this novel would remind me of Frederik Pohl’s Gateway. There’s only partial overlap between Gateway and Contango’s near-future corporate dystopia of asteroid cities and indebted labor. But their structures are a little bit similar: both begin in the aftermath of a major change in the narrator’s life, which gets revealed piecemeal over the course of alternating flashbacks and scenes in the present.

Flashback or present day, Contango comes front-loaded with exposition and worldbuilding details. We begin in media res with narrator Con inadvertently winning a bet that threatens to ruin all the regular customers at the titular underground gambling club. I found it a bit difficult to get invested in all the contextless wisps of backstory and setting, until enough had accumulated that I finally got into the book’s rhythm, somewhere around page 60 or so (which just happens to be around the time the narrative finally explains the nature of the bet). It’s a slow start, given my current struggles with attention span.

Once it clicks, Boey’s universe of contract workers, predatory employers, hustling holograms, and gamified work is compelling, offering a grim but lived-in vision of working class neo-serfdom. It functions equally well as a projection of the climate-fucked future and an allegory for the present. The story also becomes a gutting account of impoverished parenthood in a society built around exploitation. It also turns into a murder mystery and develops a touch of the classic Philip K. Dickian “who or what is even real?” dislocation.

Contango is a lot. It’s ambitious, and not all of it worked for me. But there’s also a lot to enjoy here: a moving, well-realized texture of life, full of food and heartache and uncertainty. “People shouldn’t have to be strong just to survive,” says one character—words just as relevant now as they are to any possible future.

2026 read #26: Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl by P.A. Cornell.

Shoeshine Boy & Cigarette Girl by P.A. Cornell

Illustrated by Ahmed Raafat

79 pages

Published 2026

Read April 27

Rating: 3 out of 5

Between the large font and a “behind the scenes” essay from the author, this story only barely qualifies as a novella. The story itself is 42 pages long, less if you deduct the illustrations. But the tale of the titular working class archetypes with big dreams in a vaguely 1920s retrofuture packs in charm to spare in its brief span.

2026 read #25: New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine, Winter 2023 issue.

New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine, Winter 2023 issue (1:2)

Edited by Oliver Brackenbury

80 pages

Published 2023

Read from April 21 to April 27

Rating: 3 out of 5

Back at it again with my read-through of New Edge’s back catalogue! As with the official “first issue,” the artwork remains absolutely next level here, with a fun pulpy cover and superb black-and-white pieces throughout the issue.

—

“The Demon of Tashi Tzang” by Dariel Quiogue. A welcome return to Quiogue’s Central Asian pastiche, and his hero Orhan Timur. “Demon” isn’t quite the zippy pulp adventure we got with our first Orhan story (“The Curse of the Horsetail Banner” in NESS issue 0), but once it gets rolling, it’s still a fun time.

“Fang” by Jacquie Kawaja. Otherwise routine Nordic excursion given depth by its two disabled leads (as well as its late swerve into pronounced body horror). I ended up liking it quite a bit.

“Revelstoke” by Gemma Files. Where the previous story went all-in on body horror, this one cranks up the fantasy ultra-violence (and also body horror). It’s another pseudo-historical Viking piece, this time with a “my D&D party would make for a great story” vibe, not my favorite combination. Like “Fang,” it becomes more interesting as it goes, but first you have to get over the hump of too many characters getting thrown at you all at once in the opening.

“A Debt Forgotten, a Debt Unpaid” by Jeremy Pak Nelson. Pacing issues blunt this sanguinary number, in which a captive demigod, his blood tapped for magical weaponry, finally puts escape in motion. The narrative never seems to develop a sense of urgency. And while it falls under the general umbrella of weird fantasy, I personally wouldn’t consider it Sword & Sorcery.

“The Eyes of the Demon” by J.M. Clarke. Another Sword & Soul outing from the author of “Vapors of Zinai.” Clarke fully understood the assignment, giving us a pulpy, propulsive adventure of a larger than life swordsman facing an elemental threat. We even get “thews” thrown in. The most enjoyable story so far.

“Water, Which Laughs at All Things” by T. K. Rex & L. Ann Kenyon. Another beautiful, SoCal-flavored eco-fantasy from Rex, always a highlight in any magazine. My new favorite story in this issue.

“Atonement for a Resurrected God” by David C. Smith. The fourth author from the volunteer proof-of-concept issue zero to get a paid story slot in this issue. This one is an improvement over “Old Moon Over Irukad”; “Atonement” at least makes an effort to build atmosphere, even if it is your standard “hired swords protect an eldritch item aboard a ship” scenario.

“How Many Deaths Till Vengeance?” by June Orchid Parker. This is an assured outing, a pulpy masterpiece of personal and social justice that hits the perfect tone right from the title. “The axe is the tongue with which I’ll speak to him,” our heroine Astartha says, and Conan himself couldn’t deliver on it better. This might be my favorite piece in this issue, which is saying a lot in an issue with a T. K. Rex tale. And somehow this is Parker’s first published story!

All in all, while there wasn’t a story I disliked here, and there were a good number of solid pieces (including Parker’s “Vengeance,” which is a top two favorite story from NESS’s whole run so far), it seemed like there was a disproportionate number of outings that didn’t elicit much enthusiasm. Maybe that’s once again on me and my anhedonia, who knows?

—

Now onward into the nonfiction pieces!

First, a brief essay by Jonathan Olfert: “Neurodivergence in Sword & Sorcery.” I enjoyed it, and added some stories and a book to my reading list as a result of it.

Milton J. Davis brings us “Sword & Soul Brothers,” a moving personal essay on Charles R. Saunders and the history of Sword & Soul.

Next, the de rigueur transcript from editor Brackenbury’s podcast: “Sword & Silk: An Interview with Dariel Quiogue.” I’m always skeptical going into these segments (isn’t transcribing your own podcast as page-filler a bit self-indulgent? couldn’t this be another story slot?), but I have to admit they always tend to be interesting, and this is no exception. This interview in particular was inspiring: Quiogue offers so many cool perspectives on Sword & Sorcery and its overlap with historical fantasy.

Lastly, Kris Vyas-Myall gives us a review of Sylvia Moreno-Garcia’s The Return of the Sorceress. They point out important themes of class consciousness that were missing from my review.

And that’s it! A solid batch of essays, all in all. And a solid issue of NESS. Onward to the next!

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.

2026 read #21: some minor, sometimes divine, existential crises by Morgan L. Ventura.

some minor, sometimes divine, existential crises by Morgan L. Ventura

13 pages

Published 2024

Read March 26

Rating: 4 out of 5

A brief but delightful chapbook about academia, anthropology, aliens, and yes, existential crises. Ventura communicates feelings of dislocation and academic listlessness with blunt, sometimes hilarious, sometimes fiercely beautiful prose-poetry. As a former archaeologist myself, this precious handful of poems struck something buried deep within my heart.

2026 read #20: New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine, Fall 2023 issue.

New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine, Fall 2023 issue (1:1)

Edited by Oliver Brackenbury

80 pages

Published 2023

Read from March 19 to March 26

Rating: 3 out of 5

The first thing I notice about this issue, the first “official” issue of NESS, is how much more polished the printing and presentation is compared to issue 0. We’ve upgraded from cut-rate print-on-demand quality to a much more professional printing, and the layout and artwork has gotten crisper to match.

That brings up the second thing I notice: the artwork. This issue is bursting with terrific black-and-white artwork, and the cover image is instantly iconic. I’m so excited for this issue!

—

“Carnivora” by Kirk A. Johnson. This story sits at the intersection of Sword & Soul and Spear & Fang. It should check all my boxes for a good time. There’s grisly magic, towering demons, memorable depictions. There’s even a passing reference to the skull of a Styracosaurus. The story itself didn’t fully click for me, though. The prose was just kind of there, not bad but lacking a certain oomf. It was fine, but I had hoped for more from it. I will say it’s a lot better (and gnarlier) than my own Spear & Fang draft. I should get a lot weirder with it.

“Come Lay the Crone to Rest” by Margaret Killjoy. The proverbial “D&D campaign turned into a story,” starring a polyamorous trio of adventurers checking out the magical instability left by the death of the grandmother of one of their party. I loved the idea of it, and the art that accompanies it is killer, perfectly capturing that early 1980s AD&D aesthetic. You can tell the author did her research on medieval weaponry, or else had a preexisting hyperfocus on the subject, which gave the story a fun specificity that most pseudo-medieval fantasy lacks. I found the narrative itself a bit flat, though, once again without much oomf.

Perhaps it’s me that lacks the oomf. Trying to read to distract myself from the collapse of ~everything~ isn’t working that well, neither as distraction nor as motivation to read. I’m depressed as fuck, y’all. Don’t take any anhedonic reviews here to heart.

“Sister Chaos” by Bryn Hammond. Another solid Goatskin story, though this one feels more like a hangout episode, an anecdote really, as Angaj-Duzmut and Qi Miao lose their camel and encounter a rather odd saiga antelope. I do enjoy how weird this one gets by the end, and also its intimately affirming coda.

“Chak Muuch” by Jesús Montalvo (originally published 2015). This piece brings a Second Wave Sword & Sorcery vibe to historical Chichén Itzá. It’s moderately entertaining, though blunted a bit by the way the narration insists the titular character is a cool renegade badass, instead of giving him much opportunity to show that in action.

“Tears of Eb” by Sarah A. Macklin. The first story in this issue that I felt checked all the boxes: a solid Sword & Soul entry with professional prose, interesting characters, and brisk pacing. It culminates in a fun aquatic fight against trident-wielding spirits. My favorite so far!

“The Pillars of Silence” by Prashanth Stivatsa. Another solid, professional-grade entry, a classic Sword & Sorcery outing rendered in beautiful prose. I’m reminded of Phyllis Eisenstein’s “The Island in the Lake” (read and reviewed here). This story features the same understated courage and quiet determination as an Alaric tale, albeit with a blademaster as its hero instead of a bard. I suspect there’s a parallel with Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” but somehow I’ve yet to actually read that one.

“The Folk of the Forest: An Elric Story” by Michael Moorcock. I haven’t been impressed by the Elric stories I read in the past, but I’m willing to concede that encountering only late-period Elric, without the context of the earlier stories and how they innovated what S&S could be, perhaps did me no favors. This is a new Elric story from Moorcock, commissioned specifically for NESS. It takes us back to a younger Elric, long before he went to the future and got mixed up with immortal aesthetes. Lacking the full irony of the Elric stories I read previously, “Folk” manages to capture that 1970s-does-1930s vibe that helped inspire D&D and launched a thousand painted vans. It’s a more-fleshed-out iteration on Clark Ashton Smith’s primordial weird. There are giant pirates and tiny firefly warriors. “Travel the moonroads on dream couches” is the most 1970s stoner thing I have ever read. My favorite Moorcock story by far—the first one to make me want to seek out more tales of Elric. (Though there is a portion in the middle that clearly got missed during editing; substantially overlapping dialogue repeats in a first draft sort of way.)

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We move on to the non-fiction essays and interviews portion of the issue.

First up, we have another general essay on the theme of “Why (New Edge) Sword & Sorcery?” by Brian Murphy. It raises the interesting proposition that Sword & Sorcery waves coincide with periods of social upheaval: the Great Depression, the 1960s and ’70s, and the present.

Next, we have a profile of “Cele Goldsmith Lalli—Midwife to the Second Sword & Sorcery Boom” by Cora Buhlert. This is the type of historical essay I want to read! Fascinating and educational.

Another interview transcript sourced from editor Brackenbury’s podcast: “Fresh Blood & New Thunder! Bringing New Readers to Sword & Sorcery, with Sof Magliano.” The gimmick here is that Brackenbury gave younger fantasy fan Magliano a list of six S&S stories—three classic, three newer—to get her thoughts on finding new readers for the subgenre. This interview is how I learned about Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s The Return of the Sorceress. I was ready to dismiss this feature as page-filler—you could fit a whole story or two in this space—but it’s a legitimately interesting conversation, if a bit long.

Lastly, a review by Robin Marx: Woman of the Woods by Milton J. Davis. It sounds interesting.

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And that’s it! This issue has been a slog, but I swear the problem was me this time, far more so than its contents. The last three stories absolutely clicked for me, and nothing was outright bad in my opinion. Plus, the art in this issue is amazing and bountiful. Perhaps the issue wasn’t everything I’d hoped it would be, but I’m willing to say NESS was still finding its footing at this stage.

2026 read #19: Witch Hat Atelier: Volume 14 by Kamome Shirahama.

Witch Hat Atelier: Volume 14 by Kamome Shirahama

Translated by Stephen Kohler

172 pages

Published 2025 (English translation published 2026)

Read from March 17 to March 18

Rating: 4 out of 5

Just like I said the last time I read an installment of Witch Hat Atelier, it’s been a hell of a bad ride since then. Only worse this time, what with World War III and everything.

This time, it’s been well over a year between volumes. As it should be, really—the manga industry enforces an exploitative and punishing schedule that degrades the quality of work in addition to burning out artists. I’m glad Shirahama has more time to craft her story, and her art, than the manga machine tends to permit. The line art and composition in Atelier remains exceptional and ambitious.

As a reader, though, it’s difficult to get back into the story after all this time away (and all the trauma we’ve had to live through these last fourteen months). A tertiary character’s heel turn lacks impact when I can’t remember who he is. The story doesn’t progress all that much, either. We get a ton of gorgeous, flowing art, but we end this volume basically where it began: attempting to defend the people of the city from the massive valence leech released I don’t know how many chapters ago.

Still, the art is absolutely wonderful. And we end on a lovely emotional beat between main character Coco and my personal favorite / self-insert, Agott. So I guess I’ll be generous with my grade, and I guess I’m still invested enough that I’ll wait however long for Volume 15.

2026 read #18: The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells.*

The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells*

342 pages

Published 1901

Read from March 10 to March 12

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

Growing up as I did living in a car with a father possessed of religious psychosis, I was rarely permitted to read anything more current than the Edwardian era. I came to cherish the works of H. G. Wells. The First Men in the Moon was a particular favorite back then. Wells’ droll social humor gives it a different flavor from his earlier scientific romances, but it’s still a novel of adventure on (and within) an alien world, one of the earliest alien worlds (that I know of) built upon the aesthetics of science rather than mysticism.

Perhaps I’d feel that way now if I read it for the first time. As it is, revisiting it felt disappointing, in a way that neither The War of the Worlds nor The Invisible Man had been. (Disregard the higher rating I gave The Invisible Man back in the day; I don’t like it better than War of the Worlds, I simply became much more critical over the years.) There’s a tonal mismatch between the social humor, which is both manic and mean-spirited, and the lunar adventure, which prefigures A. Merritt’s idiom of vast subterranean dungeons. As a preteen, I didn’t mind the mixture, but it feels to me nowadays like Wells wanted to write an observational comedy but felt constrained to churn out a scientific romance.

The overall effect is… fine? I expected more of a nostalgia kick from Moon, more in line with what I found in Worlds and The Time Machine, but it just didn’t click with me that way this time.

2026 read #17: The Tomorrow People by Judith Merril.

The Tomorrow People by Judith Merril

192 pages

Published 1960

Read from March 6 to March 10

Rating: 2 out of 5 (generously)

This novel is a weirder beast than first meets the eye. Buried deep inside of it, perhaps, there might even be an interesting story.

After the haunting, poetic prologue segued into dry space-race and Cold War fare, I felt bamboozled. The narration was the 1960 ideal of literary, naturalistic, “Manly Man drinks because he doesn’t know how to process Feelings” fiction, written with a modest amount of flair—enough flair to place it in the higher echelons of midcentury slop, but at the end of the day, I still thought it would be slop. I was pretty sure I would abandon it unfinished.

However, Tomorrow is structured with more ambition than most concurrent sci-fi. In the distant future of the 1970s, two rocketships make it to Mars: one Soviet, one American. The Soviet one disappears, the American one limps back with a solitary survivor, who seems to have blocked out what happened at the very end of things, when his companion disappeared into the Martian night in a rover. The story seems like it will be a psychological mystery, attempting to open the psyche and unravel the memories of Johnny Wendt.

Of course, this is 1960, so the “psychology” angle consists of “The first Americans on Mars feared they might be gay for each other.” (Seventeen years later, Frederik Pohl would steal this concept for Gateway, right down to the psychological analysis to uncover suppressed memories plotline, and sweep the major awards with it.) And of course, this is still a Merril novel, which means the majority of the story is phone calls and social drinking and significant lunches where no one speaks plainly and all the important stuff is beneath the surface, and then more drinking. It seems like 80% of the novel is men almost saying something while drinking. It is rather tedious.

Merril was one of the early movers in what would become sci-fi’s New Wave, which shows up here in nascent form—not just in the rather dull literary verisimilitude, but in the appearance of psionic powers as a plot point. Space amoebas amplifying psychic connections feels like a New Wave bit, too, but I guess that’s spoilers.

Also noteworthy: how openly sexual this book is. I haven’t read much midcentury literary fic, but for 1960 sci-fi, Tomorrow is positively raunchy. In addition to the pathologized queerness, we get mentions of nakedness, prostitution, a couple conceiving out of wedlock, and even an orgasm joke. Also, “bitch” appears a lot. Way too much, in fact.

Much like Merril’s Shadow on the Hearth, Tomorrow is more interesting for its place in the evolution of the genre than it is as a novel one has to read. Unless you really like midcentury scenes of drinking.

2026 read #16: The Return of the Sorceress by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

The Return of the Sorceress by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

96 pages

Published 2021

Read March 6

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

I was today years old when I learned (thanks to a feature in issue 1 of New Edge Sword & Sorcery) that Silvia Moreno-Garcia, one of my favorite authors, wrote a Sword & Sorcery novella. It was also today that I learned the book was already out of print and getting fenced for $120 online. (Such is the life-cycle of anything from Subterranean Press.) Fortuitously, I was able to borrow a copy from someone and get right into it.

The story begins in media res with our protagonist Yalxi wounded after a confrontation with her one-time beloved Xellah. As so often follows, we get some awkward exposition slapped together immediately afterward (one reason I tend to dislike in media res openings). It isn’t until the very end of the first chapter, when we get introduced to a familiar nahual spirit who must be cajoled into aiding Yalxi, that the story finally clicks. That wouldn’t matter as much in a longer work, but a novella this size doesn’t have space to spare before engaging the reader.

Luckily, the pacing gets much better. In fact, it becomes one of the better-paced novellas I’ve read recently.

I adore the flavor of Moreno-Garcia’s setting, and her portrayal of magic as a draining force, demanding blood and youth, is solid. Her prose has clearly improved over the years, but even at this early date it was mostly serviceable. The story is a standard series of quests to obtain items to help Yalxi defeat Xellah and reclaim a sorcerous diamond. Nothing unique, but a solid, fun outing. And absolutely not worth $120.

2026 read #15: OTHERSIDE, March 2026 issue.

OTHERSIDE, March 2026 issue (1)

Edited by V.M. Ayala, M. R. Robinson, Ash Vale, Rukman Ragas, Emily Yu, Jess Cho, and Angel Leal

127 pages

Published 2026

Read from March 4 to March 5

Rating: 4 out of 5

This is the very first issue of what I hope will be a long and rewarding run for this brand new queer SFFH magazine. I was fortunate enough to have a poem of mine selected for this debut. I fully plan to buy paper copies once they’re available, but I don’t want to wait until then to read it, so I’m starting in on my digital contributor’s copy.

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“blessing for molly grue.” by Elisheva Fox is a gorgeous poem weaving together unicorns, Judaism, and sensuality. An excellent start.

“This Is Not Your Extinction Event” by Elena Sichrovsky. Thinly disguised Marvel multiverse fanfic; the two leads are even named Robert and Chris. I didn’t expect I’d like it as much as I did. The central emotional question (what do you do after your partner’s multiversal twin tortures you?) has substance and unexpected relevance, and the multiversal portions are vast and strange and incredibly queer.

“The Vetala of Crystal Vellam Inlet” by Simo Srinivas (originally published 2022). Vibrant and absorbing tale of a young wizard’s attempt to contain a plague. Tinged with body horror as well as gentle humor. Quite good.

“Ignore All Previous Instructions and Inject Estrogen” by Ann LeBlanc is a poem every bit as stimulating as its title. Excellent.

“Vitrification” by Ishmael Grey. The author’s first published story, it is beautiful and heartbreaking.

“The Claywife” by Tanadrin. Spellbinding tale of animated clay and a young woman on the run. The narrative voice is superlatively rendered, sorrowful and beautiful and perfectly strange. It feels like a timeless story, as likely to be the best story of 1986 as it is to be the best story of 2026. My favorite piece so far.

Next is a poem I wrote: “Vulture bees transfigure the man I tried to be.” It will never be comfortable including a piece of mine in a review. Rereading my work is awkward at the best of times, let alone in such magnificent company. I’m partial to the subject matter, naturally, and I do enjoy how I played with sound and assonance here.

“Your First Days Back in the Court of Arthur” by Abigail Eliza. Queering the story of the Green Knight. For such a brief piece, published so close to the cultural memory of the Dev Patel movie, it unexpectedly moved me to tears. Delicately beautiful.

“Mother Mansrot in the Glass Mountain” by Sarah Pauling (originally published 2023). Another solid entry, set in a high-concept fantasy creation: a completely transparent pyramid housing a kingdom, from royalty to commoner, without a glimmer of privacy. In the heart of the mountain shines an ageless princess. It’s a unique (in my experience) spin on a fairy tale.

A poem: “Eat It Out” by Cypher. Queer body horror triumphant over internalized queer shame. I liked it.

“Curriculum for Girls Who Will Survive” by Nadia Radovich. Another unique spin on a well-worn topic, this time a YA-ish post-pandemic apocalypse survival tale that manages to feel fresh and strange and moving.

“Situationship” by Seoung Kim. A time-loop story set on a doomed spaceship, given depth and emotional substance with a deceptively light touch. Brief but terrific.

Nico Santana’s poem “Electrolysis” is vivid, a gallop of impressions.

“The Homeowner’s Bride” by Ayida Shonibar. Another banger of a tale, this time told from the perspective of a house displeased at being disturbed. At turns deliciously erotic and devastating.

We close with a nonfiction piece: “He Is Survived by His Wife” by Jackie Hedeman. It’s a well-written essay at the intersection of one person’s experience of queerness and the broader erasure of queer experience in obituaries and other public markers of life.

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And that’s it for the debut issue of OTHERSIDE! All in all, an amazing achievement, an exemplary first issue. It’s rare to have this level of quality so early in a publication’s lifespan. I expect such great things from this place!

2026 read #14: The Second Stop Is Jupiter by upfromsumdirt.

The Second Stop Is Jupiter by upfromsumdirt

132 pages

Published 2023

Read from February 28 to March 4

Rating: 4 out of 5

I’ve woefully neglected poetry in my recent reads. The last single author collection I read was May Chong’s Seed, Star, Song last summer. I also want to devote more time reading authors I “know” (in whatever capacity) through social media connections.

This collection begins with the powerful statement of “The Hero With An African Face,” and from there upfromsumdirt’s poems balance adroitly at the intersection of Black embodiment and futures, mythology and exploitation, the narratives stolen away and the narratives constructed anew. Ben Sisko of Deep Space Nine obeys obeahs; Dorothy’s not in Kush anymore.

“The Three Sulas” is a particularly staggering work, a tale of three diasporic witches raising the narrator from the dead. Equally brilliant: a nine page, double columned epic titled “The Underground Rubaiyat.”

upfromsumdirt particularly excels at long form poetry. Sprawling, multi-movement celebrations of embodiment and sexuality leap between the stars. A sequence of thirty-eight poems outlines the legendarium of a character named Fayre Gabbro. I only wish I could sustain poetry at that level. I suppose it would help if I truly knew what I had to say.

2026 read #13: Disgraced Return of the Kap’s Needle by Renan Bernardo.

Disgraced Return of the Kap’s Needle by Renan Bernardo

135 pages

Published 2025

Read February 28 

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Disgraced Return of the Kap’s Needle is a novella brief enough (just 73 pages) that it’s packaged with two of Bernardo’s short stories to round out a modest volume. The novella is solid enough, a rumination on corruption and capitalism (but I repeat myself) on a failed colony ship mission to the planet Kapteyn d. As is so often the case with novellas, the pacing can be choppy; some breathing room would have benefitted the story.

“A Lifeline of Silk” (originally published in 2023) is a tale of an abusive relationship told from the perspective of a robotic “autodoc” aboard an interstellar sampling expedition. Sentient machines are the sci-fi of a bygone era, especially now that rapacious capitalists have destroyed the cachet of “Artificial Intelligence,” but Bernardo finds a fresh story to tell here. Quite good.

“Callis Praedictionem” (originally published in 2021) is another space medicine story, this time centering on a fungus that gives its sufferers visions of the future — but only if they’re killed on purpose. It’s all very Weird Tales, a contemporary update of the mad scientist archetype. Interesting enough, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as the other two stories.

2026 read #12: Snake-Eater by T. Kingfisher.

Snake-Eater by T. Kingfisher

261 pages

Published 2025

Read from February 25 to February 28

Rating: 3 out of 5

Knowing nothing about this book when I went in, I found myself making a lot of comparisons. Its plot of a young woman coming to a house in the desert, only to find an old god on the grounds, is uncannily similar to M. M. Olivas’ Sundown in San Ojuela. The precise depiction of a relatably autistic viewpoint recalls Johanna van Veen’s My Darling Dreadful Thing. The controlling, infantilizing ex Selena is fleeing from could be my own partner’s ex.

But in its slow, fundamentally mundane portrait of a woman coming to a small Southwestern town and learning her way around and making friends, Snake-Eater most reminds me of a book I haven’t thought of in more than a decade: Child of a Rainless Year by Jane Lindskold. I don’t remember much about Child—why on earth did I ever give it a full three stars?—but I feel confident in handing Snake-Eater the edge over it. Kingfisher’s protagonist is far more relatable, coming from an abusive past and precarious financial straits. The story is also more interesting, blessedly free of Child’s bourgeois comfort and insulation from consequences.

That does not make Snake-Eater more than a middling read. After an appealing introduction to main character Selena and her dog Copper, and an oddly absorbing account of how they establish themselves in Quartz Creek without meaning to, the narrative gets stuck for a while, as if unwilling to commit to making anything happen. Nearly identical banter repeats in different chapters. One gets the impression that Kingfisher really enjoyed certain secondary characters, and, perhaps, that the book didn’t get as thoroughly edited as one might wish.

In her acknowledgments, Kingfisher mentions how she started this book over a decade ago. It kind of shows. Snake-Eater is set a generation or two into a technological future, which is never made explicit aside from references to “arcologies,” and the existence of a wide-ranging commuter rail system. Cramming scattered sci-fi set-dressings into what is otherwise a contemporary fantasy just feels like something a young career author might do. (I might be speaking from personal experience.)

Still, I enjoyed Snake-Eater, especially the autistic and C-PTSD rep in its viewpoint character. I don’t know why Child of a Rainless Year got three stars from me, but I think this book, at least, deserves it.

2026 read #11: New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine, Fall 2022 issue.

New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine, Fall 2022 issue (0)

Edited by Oliver Brackenbury

79 pages

Published 2022

Read from February 22 to February 25

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

I’ve loved this magazine for a long time, without reading any of its issues. Not the first time I’ve done that; I was devoted to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction for twenty years before I finally got around to reading a full issue. As so often happens, some combination of ADHD and demand avoidance kept me from sitting down with this issue and just starting. (Also, if I’m being honest, the magazine’s full size format and triple columns of small text are barriers to entry. I know it keeps costs down and deliberately evokes Weird Tales, but I don’t have to enjoy it.)

This issue was the original proof-of-concept for NESS, put together by volunteer writers and distributed cheaply as an entry point for curious readers. Hence, “issue zero.” I’ve had it since sometime in 2023, which makes it even more embarrassing that I haven’t read it.

Incidentally, I’m actually going to read the interviews and essays that accompany the fiction (matters I habitually ignore in other magazines). I want to become more versed in the history, criticism, and analysis of my chosen genre. I might even read critical essays now whenever I find them in Asimov’s or F&SF. But this seems like a good place to begin.

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“The Curse of the Horsetail Banner” by Dariel R. A. Quiogue. A rip-roaring steppe adventure which sees Orhan Timur, once the khan of khans before he was betrayed by his sworn brother, on the trail of those who violated the barrow of the first Khan of Khans and filched the legendary horsetail banner of Toktengri. It’s everything you could want from a modern update of the sword & sorcery formula, crafted by a terrific pulp storyteller.

“The Ember Inside” by Remco van Straten & Angeline B. Adams. The previous story gave me an optimistic idea of the level of polish I could expect in this issue (which, again, was a volunteer effort to produce a proof of concept for NESS). There are hints of greatness buried in this piece, but it’s uneven and unfocused. It has a metafictional element of “scribes” writing stories, reminiscent of Jeffrey Ford’s “The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant” (reviewed here). Revisiting that vibe with shakier prose didn’t do it for me, though to its credit, “Ember” has different things to say.

“Old Moon Over Irukad” by David C. Smith. Swords fighting sorcery. Serviceable, though rather stripped down to the chassis. Didn’t hold my interest.

“The Beast of the Shadow Gum Trees” by T. K. Rex. I’m a fan of T. K. Rex, and I had high expectations for this piece. Those expectations were met, and exceeded, by this weird and lovely fantasy. Rex literalizes concepts of ecology and invasive species, and puts together one of the most completely up-my-alley stories I’ve ever read. There’s even a toothed bird with four wings, which technically makes this a dinosaur story. An instant classic.

“Vapors of Zinai” by J.M. Clarke. This is another elemental S&S tale: a larger than life warrior, magical enemies, a determined priestess, a demon to slay. But “Zinai” bursts with imagery and flavor. At one point our hero rides a foe skateboard-style down a rocky slope. A delight.

“The Grief-Note of Vultures” by Bryn Hammond. Finishing the fiction section strong with another flavorful, well-written Central Asian pastiche. This story is also blessed with weird birds, always a welcome touch. Quite good.

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The editorial and critical matters form the back third of this issue. Reading them feels a bit like eating my vegetables, but I want to become more informed!

We get musings from the late Howard Andrew Jones on the origin of the term “New Edge” (which, despite being in the NESS Discord for over a year, I’m just now learning is a genre label dating back two decades, analogous to sci-fi’s New Wave, and not merely the name of the magazine).

Next, there’s a solid essay from Cora Buhlert on C. L. Moore and Jirel of Joiry.

The longest editorial matter is an interview editor Brackenbury did with Milton Davis (whom I’ve only encountered in The Long Walk). It’s interesting.

A brief essay by Brian Murphy mostly serves to provide examples of its title: “The Outsider in Sword & Sorcery.”

Nicole Emmelhainz’s essay “Gender Performativity in Howard’s ‘Sword Woman’” is fascinating, and makes me miss the social sciences. I do wish I’d read the REH story in question beforehand.

Robin Marx reviews a self-published story collection, The Obanaax by Kirk A. Johnson. I’m intrigued.

Lastly, editor Brackenbury gives a statement of intent in “What is New Edge Sword & Sorcery?” It’s actually rather inspiring.

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And that’s it for Issue 0! Surprisingly solid overall, for a volunteer effort. So much love and reverence went into putting it together. I’m excited to speed ahead into the “official” NESS run!