2025 read #52: Land Beyond the Map by Kenneth Bulmer.

Land Beyond the Map by Kenneth Bulmer

136 pages

Published 1965

Read from July 23 to July 24

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

Knowing nothing else about this book, I picked it up from a used bookstore a few months back on the basis of its cover. Beneath towering pulp letters, a flivver (perhaps a Model T) putters through a wasteland of broken, flaming ruins. For more than a decade—ever since I read this book, in fact—I’ve wanted speculative fiction featuring old-timey cars. That was enough for me to fork out $3 on a dusty Ace Double.

Unfortunately, nothing about this novella lives up to its pulpy cover. That’s common enough in this era, but it’s worse here than usual.

Wealthy scion Roland Crane dabbles in archaeology and collects maps. He is haunted by childhood recollections of a family roadtrip steered awry by a strange map. Young reporter Polly Gould approaches Crane about her cousin, who similarly disappeared “off the map” five years prior. The two go hunting for the mysterious map, only to find that another man (who might be more than what he seems) is determined to get his hands on it at any price.

Land Beyond the Map is almost remarkable in how inessential it is. It relies on broad stereotypes (all of Ireland is “fey”) and employs the sort of midcentury dialogue-writing shortcuts where people say “Check” and “Search me,” which will always remind me of lazy movie novelizations from the 1970s. (Did people ever really talk like that?) Because the book is a product of its time, the forceful competence of Polly makes Crane fantasize about “tanning her stern.” It’s gross and utterly clichéd.

The narrative doesn’t even arrive at the “Map Country” until page 70. We spend most of the book faffing about the Irish countryside, drawing out a banal hunt for the map instead of doing anything interesting. The Map Country itself holds a smidgeon of interest; tooling along the one road across a shapeshifting landscape filled with clanking robot tanks feels like something from the Pertwee era of Doctor Who. Much like that era, though, Land Beyond pads out maybe a short story’s worth of narrative into an unnecessary novel.

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

The Star Pit by Samuel R. Delany

82 pages

Published 1967

Read from June 5 to June 6

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

Patience & Sarah by Isabel Miller

192 pages

Published 1969

Read from May 29 to May 31

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

The Towers of Toron by Samuel R. Delany

140 pages

Published 1964

Read from April 29 to May 1

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

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

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

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

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

Empire Star by Samuel R. Delany

92 pages

Published 1966

Read from December 17 to December 18

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

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

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

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

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

Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany

219 pages

Published 1966

Read from December 11 to December 15

Rating: 4 out of 5

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

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

2024 read #122: Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury.*

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury*

294 pages

Published 1962

Read from October 21 to October 24

Rating: 4 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

I first read this book about twenty years ago, freshly stamped into adulthood, wearied with the anchors of childhood trauma. Even in my premature old age, I don’t think I caught the fact that this book is about getting older, not then. That it’s about the end of childhood, the tangible bruises of maturity, the price so many would pay to go back. Rereading it here in 2024, a long track indeed into the wrong future, when my knees and ankles ache and fascism once more slithers openly in the halls of power, it hits particularly hard.

Bradbury’s greatest strength as a writer is his earnestness, the breathlessness with which his words tumble over themselves to press hot poker emblems of sensation and longing into your skin. No adjectives, no arabesques, no multi-jointed similes are enough for Bradbury’s sentences. His words carry this book, jabbing elbows and uppercuts until you get out of its way, a clattertrap locomotive shedding sparks and trailing fume. The more mixed the metaphor, the better.

Beneath all that, Something Wicked is very much a novel of its time, a nocturnal book of fathers and sons, where mothers sleep serene in their own lack of interiority. Bradbury reserves his vision for white men and boys who have no need to consult elsewhere, because the answers are theirs and theirs alone. It’s a stifling perspective, a claustrophobic mirror maze that reflects its own concerns back to it. A worthy classic, yes, but riven with the rust of its age.

2024 read #114: Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural, edited by Marvin Kaye.

Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural: A Treasury of Spellbinding Tales Old & New, edited by Marvin Kaye

629 pages

Published 1985

Read from August 13 to September 26

Rating: 2 out of 5

As far as I'm concerned, the prime selling-point for these 1980s Masterpieces anthologies is the spread of stories from two or more centuries of the genre. I had assumed Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment and Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder had been the full series, but somehow I just learned about this one here, which pre-dates both of them. Its contents sample so many decades that I ran out of blog tags struggling to mark them all.

I’m a bit wary of this book, having read more than enough shitty horror short stories from the 1980s for one lifetime. Clearly, it wasn’t the decade I’d pick for its taste in horror fiction, a concern underlined by the fact that, out of all these stories, only four were written by women. But maybe it will be worthwhile, who knows?

—

“Dracula’s Guest” by Bram Stoker (1914). A prologue to the original Dracula that got left on the editorial floor, then subsequently published in a posthumous Stoker collection. Cutting it was the right decision. This anecdote, which follows our oblivious himbo Jonathan Harker as he ignores his German coachman in order to wander through an abandoned vampire village, in a blizzard, on Walpurgis Nacht, is remarkably inessential, a jerky string of events rather than a story, yet not without a certain silly charm. Harker’s obstinate English cluelessness wobbles between annoying and inadvertently hilarious. Maybe D+

“The Professor’s Teddy Bear” by Theodore Sturgeon (1948). Fuzzy is a sadistic teddy bear who feeds by showing the boy Jeremy his future, then egging Jeremy on to cause accidents and deaths for Fuzzy’s delectation. What’s most remarkable about this story is how perfectly it prefigures the horror of the early 1980s at such an early date. So many of the stock shock elements of the eighties are there: the child laughing at the harm he creates, the demonic toy, the pleasure the narrative takes in harming women. I’m impressed by how ahead of its time this story is, without particularly liking what it does. D

“Bubnoff and the Devil” by Ivan Turgenev (1842; translated 1975). I should read more Russian stories. This tale of a second lieutenant who meets the Devil (and the Devil’s Grandma, and the Devil’s Granddaughter) feels fresher and more modern than just about anything I’ve read from such an early date. (Perhaps it’s all in the translation.) Considering that this story is from the 1840s, I think I’ll give it a solid B

“The Quest for Blank Claveringi” by Patricia Highsmith (1967). The plot reads like a satire of 1930s weird-adventure fiction: Professor Clavering, desperate to inscribe his name in the annals of binomial nomenclature, sets out to document giant man-eating snails on a remote Polynesian island. It’s slight and silly, yet oddly charming. A respectable B-

A translation of a poem by Johann Wolfgang Von Goëthe, “The Erl-King” (1782), wavers between nicely eerie imagery and silly early modern morbidity.

“The Bottle Imp” by Robert Louis Stevenson (1891). A Scottish colonialist gives us a South Seas-flavored retelling of a German folktale. More of a just-so story than a horror narrative. Starts off briskly enough, but it’s overlong for what it is, and full of the moralizing, and the shitty gender norms, of its day. D

“A Malady of Magicks” by Craig Shaw Gardner (1978). I first read this in Lin Carter’s The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories: 5. In that review, I opined, “Nothing to complain of here — a perfectly enjoyable, funny romp with a has-been wizard and his hapless apprentice.” Perhaps it scintillated against the backdrop of a Lin Carter anthology; I found it distinctly lackluster this time around. D?

Entering September now, after a long but rewarding summer. Hoping to finish this sometime in October, even though I haven’t reached the 100 page mark yet. 

“Lan Lung” by M. Lucie Chin (1980). A sprawling, absorbing, magnificent tale of a modern ghost adrift in ancient China, one of the best 1980s fantasies I've ever read. It reads like a couple chapters from a much longer work, as if it began a hundred pages before and could enthrall you for two hundred pages to come, yet it's perfectly self-contained. Outstanding, memorable, and seemingly well ahead of its time. A

Next is a poem that, as far as I can tell, was originally published in this book: “The Dragon Over Hackensack” by Richard L. Wexelblat (1985). It’s a pretty standard eighties urban fantasy piece, mixing an archetypal dragon with the banality of New Jersey and calling in the Air National Guard. It's more like chopped up prose than poetry. It's fine.

“The Transformation” by Mary W. Shelley (1831). Byron really did a number on poor Mary Shelley. Years after his death, here she is processing his domineering nature in a fable of a dissolute young man, consumed with pride, who agrees to swap his body with that of a demonic being. A solid enough story for its day. C+

“The Faceless Thing” by Edward D. Hoch (1963). Unobjectionable mood piece about childhood fears, aging, and letting go of survivor’s guilt. C

“The Anchor” by Jack Snow (1947). A shrug of a ghost story, horny in the Forties fashion, set on a supernally lovely lake. D+

“When the Clock Strikes” by Tanith Lee (1980). It's a lush, glossy retelling of "Cinderella" by Tanith Lee in her prime. Of course it's got vengeance and dark witchcraft and Satan-worship. No surprises, just a solid entry. B

“Oshidori” by Lafcadio Hearn (1904). Hearn, a British ex-pat, adapted or translated this tiny tale of a cruelly widowed duck, and didn't do a great job of it. D?

“Carmilla” by Sheridan Le Fanu (1872). I read and reviewed Carmilla as a standalone novella last year. Including it here in its entirety seems excessive. I didn't feel impelled to read it again.

Entering a new, unhappy phase here in the middle of September, feeling impossibly distant from the joys of summer. Family emergency stuff has unexpectedly brought me back to Long Island, a place where I’d hoped never to linger again. Things are strange and sad and anxious — and that isn’t even mentioning the dangerous election, and its associated right-wing terrorism, hanging over our heads.

“Eumenides in the Fourth Floor Lavatory” by Orson Scott Card (1979). One shouldn’t judge a writer for writing a piece of shit main character. Unless it’s a writer like Orson Scott Card, whom one should always judge, harshly, for any reason. I had little taste for this character study of a narcissistic, casually cruel office misogynist who gets afflicted by what he has done. It is firmly in the blood-shit-pus-and-exploitation school of early 1980s SFFH, that “look at what boundaries we can push!” white male self-indulgence that ultimately has little to say beyond the shock. I don’t mind a revolting horror piece, but I prefer more contemporary uses of the palette, using it to explore structures of power from the other side. Back in 1979, writers like Card were content to say “People do bad things — pretty shocking, right?” Thankfully, the genre has evolved since then. Maybe F+

“Lenore” by Gottfried August Bürger (1774; English adaptation by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ca. 1844). Influential, and thus academically interesting, old poem about a bereaved young woman, and the manner in which her sweet William comes back from war when she dares impugn Heaven. You can see the resemblance of its rhyme scheme to Poe’s “Raven,” and it shares certain phrases in common with old broadsides. I enjoyed it.

“The Black Wedding” by Isaac Bashevis Singer (ca. 1940s or 1950s; English translation 1958). An examination of the demonic horrors of heterosexual marriage and pregnancy that, sadly, verges on a list of the tortures inflicted upon a young woman. Another early entry in the “men writing about harming women” school of horror. Interesting from a cultural standpoint, but it will never be a favorite. D+

“Hop-Frog” by Edgar Allen Poe (1849). Thoroughly of its time, this is an ugly fable of a crippled court jester and his vengeance upon the king and his councilors. It did little to entertain me. Maybe D

“Sardonicus” by Ray Russell (1961). A solid pastiche of the Gothic genre. Russell does an admirable job capturing the rhythms and extravagance of Victorian prose, while retaining the fluency of a mid-century literary style. A bit long for what it is, and it could have benefitted from more Victorian reticence in place of its Swinging Sixties shock, but a good effort nonetheless. C+

“Graveyard Shift” by Richard Matheson (1960). Another Sixties shocker, and another tale (like “The Professor’s Teddy Bear”) that anticipates the direction of Eighties horror. Through a series of letters, we learn of how a widow in a remote cabin came to be murdered, and how her son came to be a broken, terrified thing. Unsurprising spoiler: This is the blueprint for all the “Mommy is the real monster” flicks of the coming decades. Maybe C

“Wake Not the Dead” by Ernst Raupach (1822; English translation 1823). Thoroughly morbid fluff about a dramatic man named Walter, who, though he’s happily remarried, insists that a sorcerer resurrect his first beloved. Spoilers: The undead Brunhilda is now a vampire! Oops! With that early translation date, it’s no wonder this is so overwrought and overwritten. Yet there are glints of pure Romantic excess that are delightful in their cheesiness, such as when part of the resurrection ritual requires the sorcerer to pour blood into the grave from a human skull. Iconic. Incidentally, this is the first piece from the 1820s I’ve ever reviewed on this blog, after almost twelve full years of reading. It’s alright. C

“Night and Silence” by Maurice Level (1906; English translation 1922). A blind man, and his deaf and mute brother, sit vigil for their dead sister. An able-bodied conception of the “terrors” of sensory disability. Meh. D

“Flies” by Isaac Asimov (1953). Apparently the ultimate horror is being able to see through people's polite social pretenses and recognize the somatic patterns of their deeper emotions, in which case, I live in a horror novel. Meh. D+

“The Night Wire” by H. F. Arnold (1926). This bauble is notable for centering its action on an outmoded technology I'd never thought about before: news-wire offices. It adds a modernist crispness to an eerie tale of fog and cosmic lights overwhelming a town. Brief but interesting. C+

“Last Respects” by Dick Baldwin (1975). Brief, fairly pointless narration of two orderlies removing a dead body from a hospital bed, ending with the equivalent of yelling "Boo!" after a campfire tale. D-

“The Pool of the Stone God” by A. Merritt (1923). If I had a nickel for every time I read a weirdly racist A. Merritt pulp tale of a South Seas island with megalithic ruins clustered around an otherworldly pool, I would have two nickels. This one is much briefer than "The Moon Pool" (which I read and reviewed in a different Masterpieces anthology), so slight as to be forgettable. Maybe D-

“A Tale of the Thirteenth Floor” by Ogden Nash (1955) is an oddly charming narrative poem, mixing metered rhyme with annals of noirish murder. Quite enjoyable.

“The Tree” by Dylan Thomas (1939). It’s funny that, after all Robert Macfarlane did to promote him and talk him up, my first exposure to Dylan Thomas should be a prose piece in a horror anthology. It isn’t strictly horror so much as an achingly lucid mood piece of a country child’s first pagan understanding of the world, and the tree at its center: “At last he came to the illuminated tree at the long gravel end, older even than the marvel of light, with the woodlice asleep under the bark, with the boughs standing out from the body like the frozen arms of a woman.” It’s fascinating to see that the trope of “the Savior was just a homeless madman who went where fate took him,” which feels so thoroughly 1960s to me, reached apotheosis this early. Outstanding. A-

“Stroke of Mercy” by Parke Godwin (1981). Somehow, this overheated period piece feels more dated than the Republican France it emulates. It may have come early in the decade, but this positively screams Eighties. Godwin attempts to mix an unstuck-in-time tour of the horrors of modern war and the death of God with a tale of a young student dueling for the honor of a Parisian actress, but the two elements don’t really congeal into a new whole, despite Godwin’s attempts to tie it all into a “dueling for honor was the last individual expression of violence before slaughter became mechanized and impersonal” bow. There’s potential here, somewhere, but Godwin’s prose felt stiff and difficult to get invested in. D+

“Lazarus” by Leonid Andreyev (1906). Miracles are prime grounds for existential horror, yet I’ve rarely encountered the religious horror genre — largely because so much of it is, well, religious. (At least until recently, with the surge of queer horror that pulls from religious imagery, but I haven’t read much of that, at least not yet.) “Lazarus” takes the familiar gospel tale and uncovers a uniquely cosmic vision of undeath, achieving a distinctive disquiet, all the more remarkable for how long ago it was published. B

“The Waxwork” by A. M. Burrage (1931). A down-on-his-luck reporter spends the night in a waxwork museum's exhibit of murderers, hoping to sell a sensation article. Little does he know what awaits him! This feels more suited for 1891 than 1931. It begins a section of stories that promise to be all in the characters' minds, truly my least favorite story trope. Meh. D

“The Silent Couple” by Pierre Courtois (1826; English translation 1985). A brief character study, little of interest to note beyond certain updates made in the translation (such as giving the wealthy woman a motor car, which would have been unusual in 1826). D-

“Moon-Face” by Jack London (1902). Editor Kaye’s introduction calls this story “a kind of rural ‘Cask of Amontillado,’” which is accurate enough, but wrongly implies there’s some sort of interesting story here. D-

“Death in the School-Room (A Fact)” by Walt Whitman (1841). Rustic Americana about a proud but sickly orphan boy who refuses to tell his abusive tyrant of a teacher what he was doing at a neighbor’s fence in the middle of the night, even upon threat of a beating. A morbid little shrug. D-

“The Upturned Face” by Stephen Crane (1900). A vignette about burying a body in the midst of war. Fleeting impressions and not much else. D+

“One Summer Night” by Ambrose Bierce (1906). A vignette about a man buried alive, and the grave robbers who quickly correct that error. Not loving this section of the anthology. D

“The Easter Egg” by H. H. Munro (Saki) (1930). Forgettable little tale of a coward’s instincts almost (but not quite) preventing an assassination. We’ve gotten quite far from any notions of “terror” or “supernatural” — or “masterpiece” for that matter. There isn’t even enough story here for me to truly dislike it. D

“The House in Goblin Wood” by John Dickson Carr (1947). The trend continues with this limp social comedy that morphs into something of a locked-room whodunnit. Not my kind of thing, but I could see it being enjoyable to someone else, which is more than I can say about a lot of these. D

“The Vengeance of Nitocris” by Tennessee Williams (1928). Tennessee Williams’ first publication, written when he was 16 and printed in Weird Tales. It certainly reads like something a 1920s teenager would have written for Weird Tales. Cribbing its substance from Herodotus, it’s a formulaic number about a pharaoh who profanes a temple, the priests who goad the public to attack him, and the vengeance the next pharaoh, his sister, exacts upon the people. At least it’s marginally more interesting (and significantly more lurid) than anything else in this section. D+

“The Informal Execution of Soupbone Pew” by Damon Runyon (1911). I have a weakness for good pulpy patter, and got drawn into this slangy old yarn about criminals, hobos, and railway men almost in spite of myself. This feels like it could have come from the febrile heyday of Prohibition mobster pulp, which is remarkable when you look at the publication date. Some brief but shitty racism brings it down to a C-

“His Unconquerable Enemy” by W. C. Morrow (1889). Orientalist garbage. Weird how the English tutted about “Eastern cruelty,” while writing outright torture porn for the delectation of their English audience. F

“Rizpah” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1880). Narrative poem that, in full Victorian fashion, takes the biblical imagery of Rizpah and applies it to a mother mourning her son, who had been hanged as a highwayman. I felt indifferent about it.

“The Question” by Stanley Ellin (1962). I parse this one as a biting satire on the cruelty and sadism innate within political and social conservatism. More likely, though, the author intended his narrator to be the ideal red-blooded American, and meant for the story to speak to the cruelty and sadism innate within even the most upstanding citizens. Still, how little has truly changed these last sixty years, aside from the mask of civility sipping away. What I liked best about this character study was that it was the final story in this slog of a section. C-

“The Flayed Hand” by Guy de Maupassant (1875; English translation 1904). We begin the anthology’s final section with an archetypal “preserved hand of a murderer kills again” fluff, nothing special. The translation isn’t especially fluent, which knocks it down a peg. D+

“The Hospice” by Robert Aickman (1975). This one starts slow, and is considerably overlong, but it proves to be a wonderfully surreal (and ineffably British) experience. Our protagonist gets lost driving through sprawling old housing estate, and winds up in what he initially imagines to be a dining hotel, but turns out to be a suffocatingly genteel, heavily upholstered limbo, where the hosts are unfailingly polite, solicitous, and patronizing, and are most concerned that he finish his food. The closest comparisons I can draw, in my admittedly limited experience, are music videos satirizing the English middle class, or perhaps indie horror games of the YouTube playthrough era. I adore the fact that nothing is actually explained; the Hospice just is, and the rest is vibes. Weird and effective. B

“The Christmas Banquet” by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1843). Torpid and overlong blather about a holiday banquet set up, by bequest, to bring together the most miserable characters the executors can find. Absolutely nothing of interest here, yet it just keeps going. (It’s only 15 pages long, but it feels so much longer.) F

“The Hungry House” by Robert Bloch (1951). I was prepared to like (or at least not complain about) this straightforward “the house has a sinister presence” story; it has a neat motif of mirrors and things half-seen in reflections, and Bloch has a talent for building anxiety beneath a veneer of rationalization. Unfortunately, a midcentury writer with a mirror motif on his hands has to draw some weirdly gendered bullshit out of it: unlike sensible men, women spend their lives looking in mirrors, etc, etc. This could have been so much better. Oh well. C-

“The Demon of the Gibbet” by Fitz-James O’Brien (1881) is a perfectly serviceable poem about riding past a gallows tree. 

“The Owl” by Anatole Le Braz (1897). This story is nothing much, but it’s a fascinating glimpse at the old folk beliefs and traditions long since submerged under Christianity in Western Europe. Maybe C-

“No. 252 Rue M. Le Prince” by Ralph Adams Cram (1895). Mostly dull piece, going through the motions, with some gentlemen spending the night in a haunted and / or accursed house. Ends in goop, which was a nice swerve, but overall, just plain forgettable. D+

“The Music of Erich Zann” by H. P. Lovecraft (1922). I’m no fan of Lovecraft, but this brief entry is tolerable enough. No outright racism that I could see, though one wonders if his fevered imagination concocted this tale of menacing otherworldly music after hearing the Hungarian dance tune mentioned in the text. C

“Riddles in the Dark” by J. R. R. Tolkien (1938). The original Gollum chapter, edited out of subsequent editions of The Hobbit to better align with The Lord of the Rings. It’s a classic, of course, but I feel that the edited version — ever so slightly darkened by the malice of the One Ring — is better. B

—

Unexpectedly, I find myself at the end of this collection, and it isn’t even October yet. The last couple weeks have felt like several months, but nonetheless, this is a surprise.

All in all, while the selections in this book were often better than I had feared, they just weren’t on the same level as the stories in the two Hartwell-helmed Masterpieces. Still, a good handful of stories (“Lan Lung” prominently among them) were absolutely delightful, and made the whole thing worthwhile.

2024 read #102: Worlds of IF, December 1964 issue.

Worlds of IF Science Fiction, December 1964 issue (14:7)

Edited by Frederik Pohl

130 pages

Published 1964

Read from August 30 to August 31

Rating: 1 out of 5

Back at it again with a PDF of an old magazine with some dinosaurs on the cover! What do the Sixties have in store? All male authors, all the time. Sigh. Let’s get this over with.

—

“When Time Was New” by Robert F. Young. This has the best opening line of any pre-1980 dinosaur story I’ve ever encountered: “The stegosaurus standing beneath the ginkgo tree didn’t surprise Carpenter, but the two kids sitting in the branches did.” Of course, it immediately squanders that good will by placing the stegosaur in the Upper Cretaceous. (There’s more time between Stegosaurus and the Upper Cretaceous than there is between the Upper Cretaceous and us, so technically the kids should be less surprising to Carpenter.)

The rest of the novella is in keeping with that pulpy, research-be-damned ethos. Carpenter, a time agent, drives a triceratank, with three horn-howitzers ready for defense. The kids are blue-eyed, pale-skinned Cretaceous Martians; somehow, their gender roles exactly conform to the expectations of early 1960s Americans. They got kidnapped, escaped, and are now pursued by the kidnappers in jet-propelled pteranodons. Fun as that last bit sounds, the story abounds with cringey Manly 1960s Sci-Fi Man bullshit: Martian society is an efficient utopia because they desentimentalize their kids’ brains! The girl child happily makes Carpenter a sandwich while her brother gets to hang out in the cockpit with him!

Which isn’t to say “Time” was entirely awful, at least not at first. More stories should have Cretaceous campouts with frankfurters over the fire. That said, there’s barely any dinosaur action here. Instead, the vast majority of the story is about Carpenter regretting that he made it to his 30s as a measly time traveling action hero in a dinosaur tank, instead of settling down and being a dad. (And not even a cool, 2020s-style dad who, like, participates in being a parent. We’re talking the 1960s idea of a dad.) That’s a flimsy scaffold on which to hang such a long, long, long story.

And then we get to the twist ending. Let’s just say Sixties gender norms should never be mixed with time travel. Perhaps D- before the twist, but all in all, an F

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“The Coldest Place” by Larry Niven. The end of “Time” soured me on this whole issue, and seeing Larry Niven’s name did nothing to revive my enthusiasm. This forgettable “hard science” bauble exists only to set up the punchline that “the coldest place in the solar system” is the dark side of Mercury. Literally, that’s it. F+

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“At the Top of the World” by J. T. McIntosh. If you ever wanted to read a prototype of Fallout, but wanted it dull and poorly written, we got you covered. A society of tunnel-dwellers, whose oral history tells them to dig upwards after two hundred years, finally reach the surface. Most of “World” is told in that faux news-magazine style that was so common in midcentury fiction. It goes on at numbing length, straining to draw some parallel between the tunnel teens and contemporary youth culture. It ends (predictably) with a “humanity never changes” punchline. F+?

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“Pig in a Pokey” by R. A. Lafferty. To me, Lafferty is one of the all time overrated sci-fi authors. This “humorous” affair about a porcine alien who loves to collect trophy heads, and has an inability to understand humans’ hangups about death, doesn’t dispel that opinion. Somehow, though, it’s the least-awful story so far — which isn’t saying much. Maybe D-

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“The Hounds of Hell” (conclusion) by Keith Laumer. Naturally, we close with the final installment of some serial or other. I’m noticing a pattern with serials: no matter what decade they were published in, they’re attain their length by throwing together a convoluted mishmash of every currently popular trope. This one is a stew of posthumanist body replacement, psionic powers (Project Ozma gets name-checked), secret societies dating back to Ben Franklin running geopolitics behind the scenes, aliens in disguise infiltrating governments. The “hounds” are demonic dog monsters pursuing our hero. Our hero fails to solve Earth’s problems with his metal-reinforced fists, and wakes up a disembodied consciousness piloting an alien war machine. It could almost be interesting, if 80% of the length and 100% of the 1960s pulp conventions were trimmed away. As it is, it’s still marginally more interesting than any other story in the magazine. Still, it’s so much longer than it needs to be, so I can’t imagine giving it more than D-

—

And that’s it for this issue! That was rough. More like Worlds of F, am I right?

2024 read #86: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 1968 issue.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 1968 issue (34:5)

Edited by Edward L. Ferman

130 pages

Published 1968

Read from July 21 to July 24

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

Continuing my project to hop through all the decades of F&SF.

The online PDF archives seem to end at the dawn of the 1960s, so I have to turn to my own collection now, which doesn’t leave me with many sixties issues to choose from. This issue has a novella (a “short novel” in the magazine’s parlance at the time) by Samuel R. Delany, which is a compelling enough reason to pick it. Unfortunately, it’s also all male. The small gains made by women writers in the 1950s F&SF scene clearly got discarded before we reached here.

Halfway through, I belatedly realized that this issue means I have read at least one full issue from every decade of F&SF’s existence! Next goal: one from each year? I’ll have to obtain a lot more physical copies to accomplish that.

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“Lines of Power” by Samuel R. Delany. A unique (in my experience) dystopian novella about Global Power, which trundles its massive cables and machines around the globe, and the various hyper-individualistic nonconformists (today, it’s the biker-gang coded “Angels” who ride jet-powered broomsticks) who withdraw to the last unpowered pockets of wilderness to avoid them. The concept feels halfway between Logan's Run and something I could picture getting published in Asimov’s in the mid 1980s. There's some racial, sexual, and gendered stuff that no doubt was radical in 1968 but hasn't aged so well; much of the plot concerns postures of masculinity. Delany’s style has, by this point, evolved into the denser, more elliptical phrasing he would continue to elaborate into the 1970s. Not my favorite Delany piece, but it's vivid and memorable, and interesting for its place in his evolution as a writer. Maybe C+?

“The Wilis” by Baird Searles. A ballet dancer fantasy by an ex-professional dancer? Not an item I expected to find in this era. The prose and storytelling are thoroughly competent, albeit uninspiring (and a tad predictable). The ending, especially, felt a bit out of place in this decade, like something that could have been published in the early 1950s. C-

“Gifts from the Universe” by Leonard Tushnet. Routine “mysterious shop in a rundown back alley” tale, with a Venusian twist straight out of the ’50s. An inordinate percentage of its word count is the narrator charting out his efforts to find full-silver quarters to pay the mysterious (and ailing) Mr. Tolliver. A shrug. D

“Beyond the Game” by Vance Aandahl. This would-be surrealist little number about a grade school boy escaping the horrors of dodgeball feels thoroughly sixties (in a derogatory sense). It has less to say than it thinks it does. Not much to it. D

“Dry Run” by Larry Niven. This tale, by contrast, feels thoroughly eighties (in a derogatory sense). It’s one of those “shitty man dies on his way to kill his soon to be ex-wife, gets judged by the heavenly Powers That Be based on what he would have done had he survived” tales. (Spoiler: It’s okay! He only murders her dog, doesn’t tell her, and it works out between them!) Fuck this. F

“A Quiet Kind of Madness” by David Redd. A proto-feminist fantasy written by a man, published in 1968? I’m gonna be skeptical of that. Especially since it has a guy roaming around trying to sweet talk our protagonist into giving him another chance after he tried to assault her six months before… and she actually finds herself gaslit into considering it. Yeah, this isn’t any feminism I would recognize. I did enjoy the vaguely post-apocalyptic Finnish vibe of the setting, but the rest of the story was on thin ice. (Heh.) F+

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And that’s my first issue of F&SF from the ’60s! It started out so interesting, but quickly settled into another Ferman-curated disaster.

2024 read #84: The Ballad of Beta 2 by Samuel R. Delany.

The Ballad of Beta 2 by Samuel R. Delany

124 pages

Published 1965

Read from July 18 to July 20

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

This book opens with field recordings of folk music from an interstellar generation ship. That’s one of the coolest hooks to begin a sci-fi novel I’ve ever seen. Like… how is this from 1965 and not 1985? Once again, I must refer to my thesis that SF writers of the global majority (and queer writers, and otherwise marginalized writers) have always been a creative generation ahead (on average) of their more societally privileged contemporaries.

Delany does quick, efficient work at worldbuilding, sketching in not only the culture and language of the generation ships, but also the chrono-drive colonists who leaped over them and beat them by several centuries to the stars.

Reluctant student Joneny picks through the generation ships for clues to the meaning of the folk ballad, uncovering a culture puritanically obsessed with “the Norm,” liquidating those who violate it — whether they deviate by biting their nails, growing moles, or studying history. The narrative isn’t the most gripping, but even by the standards of 1965 sci-fi, the allegory is hard to miss. Conservatism and conformity stifle any chance for the generation-ship culture to adapt and innovate. 

2024 read #74: Dinosaur Tales by Ray Bradbury.

Dinosaur Tales by Ray Bradbury

144 pages

Published 1983

Read June 27

Rating: 2 out of 5

The main draw of this book for me is the lovely illustrations from turn-of-the-1980s fantasy artists, including William Stout and Moebius. It feels like a black & white prototype of The Ultimate Dinosaur; Byron Priess was involved in publishing both books, so my feeling isn't far from the truth. I've read almost all the stories here, even reviewed half of them already on this blog. Bradbury’s dino poetry looks like a shrug. The illustrations, though, make Dinosaur Tales a keeper.

Clearly this book was put together to cash in on the Dinosaur Renaissance, which spawned a bubble of dino fic at the tail end of the 1970s and the early '80s. The full explosion of dinomania wouldn't hit until Jurassic Park and the early 1990s, but I for one assume Michael Crichton wouldn't have written Park if it hadn't been for the original wave, earlier in the '80s.

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“Besides a Dinosaur, Whatta Ya Wanna Be When You Grow Up?” (1983, illustrated by David Wiesner). I read and reviewed this one last year in The Ultimate Dinosaur. To quote that review: “It’s exactly as Bradburyan as you’d expect: Midwestern fabulism rooted in an idyll of white middle class 20th century childhood, full of the tender-sweet bruises of loss and that childhood summer night feeling that nothing is in your control.” B+

“A Sound of Thunder” (1952, illustrated by William Stout). I last read this one a long time ago, possibly during my teens. I was somewhat surprised to find I hadn’t read it at any point during the span of this blog. Bradbury’s main strength, I feel, is his prose: the mythic exuberance of it, the breathless repetition that makes everything the biggest and sharpest and most towering sensation experienced anywhere. Tyrannosaurus rex is an evil god just vast enough to pull down the moon. Bradbury’s prose carries this midcentury classic. The plot, which hinges on one man’s cowardice and another man’s need to punish his lapse of masculinity, certainly isn’t enough to sustain the story otherwise. B-

“Lo, the Dear, Daft Dinosaurs!” (1983, illustrated by Overton Loyd). This poem, with its lumpily humorous illustrations, feels like a children’s picture book squeezed into the middle of this volume. It’s fine, I guess, once you adjust to the shift in tone. Kind of like a mediocre Shel Silverstein number.

“The Fog Horn” (1951, illustrated by Steranko). I read and reviewed this one in Martin H. Greenberg’s Dinosaurs anthology. It’s just as forgettable now as it was then, a banal midcentury creature feature about a lonesome plesiosaur-sauropod pastiche drawn to the horn of a lighthouse. The drawings accompanying this time it were pretty cool, though. D+

“What If I Said: The Dinosaur’s Not Dead?” (1983, illustrated by Gahan Wilson). Another eh attempt at kid-lit poetry. I prefer it, slightly, over “Lo, the Dear, Daft Dinosaurs.”

“Tyrannosaurus Rex” (1962, originally published as “The Prehistoric Producer,” illustrated  by Moebius). Twenty-odd years before Tim Sullivan’s “Stop Motion” (which I read and reviewed in the August 1986 Asimov’s), we have a story of a stop-motion animator with a dinosaur sizzle reel getting stiffed by a greedy producer. Sullivan’s tale feels less original now that I’ve read this one, but I think it’s better than Bradbury’s humorous effort, which feels perfunctory at best. Even the artwork feels like a waste of Moebius’ talents. D

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Somehow, that’s it! Worthwhile as the illustrations are, they really pad out the length of this teeny little collection.

2024 read #60: Nova by Samuel R. Delany.

Nova by Samuel R. Delany

279 pages

Published 1968

Read from May 24 to May 31

Rating: 4 out of 5

There is an article of faith among the muskier demographics of sci-fi fans that asserts the genre was “better” before it got all woke. It would take just a handful of 1960s Ace Doubles, or one issue of John W. Campbell’s Analog, to cure any reasonable reader of this notion. Who wants to read stilted boilerplate about another steely-eyed, emotionless white man punching his way to Mars and sexually harassing the one woman he finds there? How much of that did the world need? Maybe one or two books. Certainly not unremitting decades of it.

Which isn’t to say that there wasn’t any good speculative fiction from the era. Some of the very best happened to be written by a queer Black man. Sci-fi, you see, has been “woke” from the beginning.

Nova stuns from the first page, a whirlwind of sensory impressions, reality-bending ideas, and dazzling prose. It plays with the vocabulary of pulp sci-fi to spin something gargantuan, gorgeous, and strange. An obsessed captain named Von Ray is racing against other spacefaring capitalists to fill a cargo hold with fabulous elements from a star gone nova. The Mouse is a Romani musician as well as a “cyborg stud”: his spine modified with a socket to plug himself into an interstellar ship and help guide its vanes as if they were his own limbs. Von Ray’s ship requires six such studs on its perilous voyage to the heart of the nova. But the radiance of a nova has ghastly effects, as Von Ray (and his previous crew) knows from experience. 

The narrative thrums through time and space and perspective, navigating economics, class, privilege, and industrial empire in deft weaves between characters’ backstories. Cities on Earth and around the galaxy are rich with movement and texture, environments filled with vivid and clever sci-fi touches (such as 3-D tarot cards, space yacht regattas, and boats that scull on ionized fog). The planets are as technicolor as anything in Star Wars; the City of Dreadful Night is one of the most memorable locales I’ve encountered in space opera. Delany’s descriptive powers are precise and poetic, leagues ahead of his already better-than-his-contemporaries prose in The Jewels of Aptor.

Not everything has aged well. Delany’s portrayal of the Romani, in particular, while sympathetic, leans into stereotypes. But I simply cannot imagine clinging to the worst midcentury dreck instead of seeking out the good stuff. 

2024 read #47: Picnic on Paradise by Joanna Russ.

Picnic on Paradise by Joanna Russ

157 pages

Published 1968

Read from April 19 to April 20

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Ancient Greek warrior Alyx, formerly a rogue from a Bronze Age sword & sorcery city, is a Trans-Temporal Agent assigned to escort a group of rich tourists through the mountains of a vacation planet turned war zone. Thanks to the combatants’ futuristic sensors, she can’t employ metal or strike a fire. She has to wield synthetic daggers and crossbows, and babysit spoiled future folk utterly alien to her: people bereft of curiosity and imagination, people who’ve never had to just survive before, people who only want to talk about themselves and their issues with self-esteem.

The gist of Alyx’s conflict — comfort and civilization and self-help psychology have made everyone big and dumb and soft, unsuited for the hard tasks of survival, forcing her to bully and tyrannize them for their own good — is standard twentieth century sci-fi, nothing I haven’t read in one form or another most of my life.

What Russ brings to Picnic is the literary verve of her prose, the dexterity with which she sketches the clashing personalities, and (revolutionary for sci-fi in 1968) a focus on emotional intelligence. One of the future tourists’ collective weaknesses is inability to face their emotions. Crying is an essential survival tool, the first step in facing facts and moving forward. When one tourist dies, Alyx spends hours comforting her daughter, despite the urgency of their escape. I can’t imagine any masculine sci-fi story from this era (or any era prior to, say, the 1990s) letting its characters mourn on the page.

Of course, it has to be said that the central conflict is exacerbated by Alyx’s brutal methods of bringing her “picnickers” to their senses. Carefully beating her clients to snap them out of a spiral happens more than once. The juxtaposition between the drug-numbed future folk and Alyx’s Bronze Age belligerence is deliberate, a storytelling choice underlined when Alyx is faced with her own grief. 

2024 read #34: Smith of Wootton Major by J. R. R. Tolkien.

Smith of Wootton Major by J. R. R. Tolkien

Illustrations by Pauline Diana Baynes

59 pages

Published 1967

Read March 6

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Is this a Christ allegory? Is it about philology? Or is it plain old faery fantasy? Wikipedia doesn’t know! Personally, I read it as a meditation on growing old, mortality, and entrusting the next generation.

This is a brief and fairly conventional midcentury fantasy, largely pleasant and unremarkable. A cook, full of unearned confidence, chucks a fay-star into a special cake for the children. The fay-star gets swallowed by a boy (later named Smith), and attaches itself to his forehead, permitting him long walks into Faery and blessing his skill at the forge.

Unsurprisingly, the best parts of this morsel were Tolkien’s thumbnail descriptions of the wonders of Faery, such as the Vale of Evermorn. The worst part of it is how it ends with a prolonged fat joke, equating the old cook’s negative qualities with his fatness. You could have ended this tale ten pages early and not lost anything of substance, which is a lot in a story this brief.

2024 read #16: The Jewels of Aptor by Samuel R. Delany.

The Jewels of Aptor by Samuel R. Delany

156 pages

Published 1962

Read from January 29 to January 30

Rating: 3 out of 5

My first attempt to read Delany was Dhalgren, which I purchased when I was 19. I held onto it for seventeen years before I gave it away. In that time, I never once made it past page two.

The allusive density of Delany’s mature prose never clicked with me, until I persevered through “The Tale of Dragons and Dreamers,” which I read last year in Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment. By that time, my used paperback copies of Babel-17 and Tales of Neverÿon had gone the way of Dhalgren, given away unread. Bummer. Unlike the works of most of his contemporaries, Delany’s old pulps aren’t cheap on eBay, so it isn’t easy to get my hands on any replacements, either.

Why The Jewels of Aptor? It’s the sole Delany title available on Project Gutenberg!

It’s difficult to picture Aptor as it was originally published, as an Ace Double. For one thing, this book is actually pretty good. Delany’s prose doesn’t approach his later artistry, but it is crisp and it crackles with momentum, falling closer to something like Riddle-Master of Hed from the late ’70s than to, say, an Ace title like The Games of Neith from 1960. For another, Aptor is queer as fuck. Three of the main characters are: a poetic twink named Geo; a big bear of a man literally named Urson, who is Geo’s sworn “friend”; and the high priestess of the Goddess Argo, who is treated with immediate respect by the male characters and who never turns subservient. Urson playfully reaches around Geo’s waist for his coin purse. The priestess reminds Geo that he knows the spell for calming “the bear.” Later, the men get into a playful splashing match in a stream. I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed gay-coding this blatant in midcentury pulp.

The characters fit into what would become classic D&D templates: Geo is the knowledgeable bard, Urson is the muscle, a four-armed mutant boy named Snake is the rogue, and the priestess is the cleric-sorceress with inscrutable aims. (Another man, Iimmi, doesn’t fit as neatly into D&D classes, but maybe he could be an investigator.) There are three magic jewels caught up in a conflict between Leptar, where our heroes hail from, and the sinister land of Aptor. There are betrayals and red herrings. The same gods have multiple, conflicting factions and avatars. Geo isn’t sure who he can trust.

The setting is sword & sorcery with a post-apocalyptic sheen. Our heroes hunt in the jungle ruins of crumbled barracks buildings and crashed airplanes. A radio tower is agony to the psychic Snake. A living mass of goop clothes skeletons to pursue our heroes along an elevated highway. There’s even a gargantuan statue of a god that has a jewel in its head, waiting to be pilfered.

The plot does begin to sputter on its own fumes halfway through, but overall, the experience was a fun introduction to book-length Delany, at long last.

2024 read #13: Analog Science Fact & Fiction, February 1961 issue.

Analog Science Fact & Fiction, February 1961 issue (66:6)

Edited by John W. Campbell

180 pages

Published 1961

Read from January 25 to January 26

Rating: 1 out of 5 (which is more than it deserves)

It’s one thing to hear about the rightwing fanaticism of John W. Campbell, who helped bend the trajectory of 20th century science fiction in favor of manly white supermen solving the problems of lesser beings thanks to the power of prodigious brains, steely nerves, and the absence of sentimentality, with buxom blondes as the prize. It’s quite another to track down the pdf scan of this issue, drawn in by its proto-Dino-Riders cover art, and run face-first into an editorial: “ON THE SELECTIVE BREEDING OF HUMAN BEINGS,” which proposes that all the grand project of eugenics needs is a thousand generations, not the mere thousand year reich of “Herr Hitler.” Campbell further speculates (without any testable basis whatsoever) that modern humans (and you know exactly who he means by this) are the result of the instinctive eugenics of our ancestors. 

Jesus Fucking Christ. And this is the era of sci-fi that our current self-appointed captains of industry yearn for with their whole breeding-fetish hearts, disdaining all the contemporary authors who actually have important things to say.

Right from the start I despise this issue, and this whole era of the magazine. But, on the other hand, I’ve put myself through some terrible fiction for the sake of dinosaurs. How bad will this one be? Let’s find out!

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“The Weakling” by Everett B. Cole. This could have been interesting. It weirdly prefigures Julian May’s The Many-Colored Land, with powerful flying psychics, a colonized prehistoric world, extinct beasts of burden, humanoid aliens, and a motif of gold jewelry and its effects on psionic powers. Sadly, as anyone could have foreseen, this is an insipid, overlong eye-roller built on a foundation of racial hierarchy. Those with psionic powers are considered “men,” those without are “pseudomen,” and in between them are half-powered “halfmen.” (Women are scarcely considered.) War with the “Fifth Planet” has left swirling, storm-like “nulls” on the Earth’s surface. Nulls negate psionic powers and upend the racial hierarchy, much to the annoyance of the ruling castes — particularly because men keep pseudomen as slaves, and those damn pseudomen keep escaping their masters to go live free in the nulls.

The “weakling” of the title is Leuwan, an uptight little martinet who needs a cap of heavy crystals to amplify his psionic power over his slaves, and gets defensive about it. The plot is a tiresome dick-measuring conflict, a rote pulp scenario in which Leuwan’s whiny insecurity is challenged by the commanding masculinity of Naran Makun, who arrives to investigate the disappearance of his brother’s sauropod caravan.

The best thing about this story is the artwork, both the cover art and the line art accompanying the text. I mean, look at this:

But that’s the extent of its redeeming features. The dinosaurs are mere set dressing. The prose reminds you that Analog’s target audience was literarily unsophisticated. There’s so much worldbuilding that goes nowhere, adding nothing to the story. (I wonder if there were prior stories in this setting; the Fifth Planet business means nothing otherwise.) Now if only we’d actually gotten a story about sauropod caravans striding out across the great open forests and plains. Sigh. F

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“The Plague” by Teddy Keller. The first of many military sci-fi slogs. Those dang Commies seem to have released a mystery pathogen that only seems to affect Americans. Specifically, authors, artists, and secretaries in small offices. No-nonsense Sergeant Andy McCloud finds himself the ranking member of the Pentagon’s anti-germ warfare office, but he still has the time to admire the trim figure of a female corporal beneath him in the chain of command. The story is supposed to be a medical puzzler, but the solution was silly. (It’s stamps. Licking the sticky stuff on stamps. That’s it.) There is literally nothing of interest here, besides maybe a stale old chestnut about how many envelopes poets send out to publications. F

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“Freedom” by Mack Reynolds. This time our ranking POV is one Colonel Ilya Simonov: field agent, “hatchetman,” an expert at dismantling anti-Soviet dissent. It is a time of rocket liners and floating cars. The Cold War is over; the grand Soviet experiment has succeeded, and the bloc has the highest standard of living in the world. Yet people are discontent. They gather in secret to discuss proscribed literature and counter-revolutionary ideas. Ilya is sent to Prague to investigate the automobile industry’s role in spreading subversion. The story is entirely propagandistic in intent, of course. But I was pleasantly surprised that some of its critiques of the Soviet system came from the perspective of (simplified, but sympathetic) Marxism. The Party and its authoritarian State directly contradict the statelessness of theoretical socialism. Secret policeman Ilya even muses that the Soviet system might be dubbed State-Capitalism. That unexpected even-handedness, plus a slightly higher standard of prose, makes this story a standout in the wastelands of this issue. Perhaps D+

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“The Outbreak of Peace” by H. B. Fyfe. We’re in space this time, on Pollux V, yet we cannot escape white men in uniform. Our POV this time is Space Marshal Wilbur Hennings, who never develops anything resembling a personality trait. This trifle is dry, dull, and thankfully brief, existing only to set up the PoliSci 101 observation that the real hostilities are waged by the politicians after the fighting stops. Once more, nothing of interest. F

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“The Ghost Fleet” by Christopher Anvil. Our stoic military man of the hour here is one Colonel William Beller. At least with Beller, we’re treated to a single morsel of characterization: he’s disliked in his service, and on the verge of court-martial, because he ordered a retreat at Little Orion. Don’t fret, dear midcentury reader: Beller made that choice to save his space fleet from destruction, so he’s still a paragon of honorable masculinity. To no one’s surprise, Beller is offered a suicide mission to atone for his “cowardice” — commanding a single antiquated ship, scrounged from a museum, to bluff an attack against the space enemy, his museum piece bolstered only by a simulated fleet. (Is his ship crewed with criminals? No — they’re geriatric janitors from the museum. Who apparently get thrown into suicide missions here in space?) It sounds like something from the Star Wars Expanded Universe, but without any of the genre trappings that made those books interesting. Still, this is the closest we’ve come to actual character-driven storytelling in this entire issue. Maybe D?

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“Occasion for Disaster” (part 4 of 4) by Mark Phillips. I thought about just skipping this one, the last installment of a serial novel, but reading out of context fragments of a serial is crucial to the full sci-fi magazine experience. Our hero this time is “FBI Agent extraordinary,” Kenneth J. Malone, who’s investigating a plot of psionic sabotage that feels like something straight out of a 1930s cinematic serial. (Which turns out to be dreary stuff without the help of MST3K.) Kenneth J. Malone is such a brilliant G-Man that he checks into his hotel as Kenneth J. Malone, perfectly ordinary businessman. The story has gangsters, assassinations, a psychic who thinks she’s Queen Elizabeth the First. Our hero Malone learns how to teleport himself around at will. Peyote is, briefly, a plot point. And yet it all manages to be deeply uninteresting, tremendously silly, and numbingly overlong. Turns out a well-known department of psychic research is a front for a secret network of telepaths who have infiltrated every nation and every level of society. They use their powers of suggestion to cause chaos and break down civil order. But then it turns out they did it to stop someone from launching nuclear Armageddon! I feel like that’s enough plot to fill maybe 15 pages, tops, even with the requisite romance subplot. Yet here we are. A full novel of Kenneth J. Malone spinning his wheels. Generously, perhaps F+

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And that's it for what is (so far) my oldest  complete issue of a genre magazine. It won't be the earliest for long, not with all the pdf scans available. But damn, 1960s Analog was some rough stuff. Let’s hope that, say, early F&SF or Unknown won’t be quite so bad. (And yes, I know, Campbell edited Unknown as well.)

2023 read #109: Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder, edited by David G. Hartwell.

Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder, edited by David G. Hartwell with the assistance of Kathryn Cramer

660 pages

Published 1989

Read from June 29 to October 1

Rating: 3 out of 5

It took me seven and a half years to persevere through Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment, the preceding volume in this anthology series. Hopefully this one won’t take me quite so long, though I do intend to read it piecemeal over the summer, likely into autumn. [Edit: Definitely into autumn.]

Everything about these two volumes is emblematic of the 1980s “adult fantasy” boom. You have the New Romantic cover art by Thomas Canty. You have the disdain for contemporary trilogies of Tolkien pastiches marketed in “bright colors.” You have the insistence (correct, but perhaps sounding a little desperate) that fantasy is and has always been an integral aspect of the world’s important literature, extending beyond the handful of tropes that happened to get thrown together under the commercial fantasy label in the 1970s. You can feel their urgency to legitimize the genre. This is art, you guys! It’s meaningful!

The introduction to 1988’s The Year’s Best Fantasy: First Annual Collection hits almost identical talking points. Clearly the genre’s luminaries were in a mood to be taken seriously at the end of the ’80s.

Onward to the stories!

“Green Is the Color” by John M. Ford (1987). I had been excited for this one until I realized that I was thinking of Jeffrey Ford, 21st century darling of short fantasy fiction. John M. Ford, by contrast, has Star Trek novels on his CV. Surprisingly, this is a solid (albeit sprawling) tale, interweaving a languid mystery of magical deaths with the story of a healer who is just trying to find a cure for her young charge’s nightmares. The character of Quard Toymaker — catty, queer-coded, all-knowing yet deliberately unhelpful until he decides to do exactly what needs to be done — is memorable, one of my new favorite characters from ’80s fantasy (or at least he is before his inevitable destiny catches up with him). Not everything works here, but it earns my appreciation.

“Wooden Tony” by Lucy Clifford (1892). This falls securely into what TikTok might term the “Oh no, little German boy!” school of fabulism, even though our particular little German boy here is actually Swiss. Spoilers: Tony, who reads to modern ears like a kid with autism and ADHD, dreams through his days and sings a song he possibly learned from the clouds; he no longer participates in his village’s tourism-based economy. For this he is scorned as “Wooden-head!” When a trader comes and offers to take Tony to Geneva and send his song out to all the world, his song is (as is the way of “Oh no, little German boy!” stories) extracted from him; Tony, now tiny with distance and fully wooden, is mounted into a musical cuckoo clock alongside one of his father’s carvings. One could read into this tale a critique of extractive capitalism. For what it is, and when it was written, it’s pretty good.

“Lest Levitation Come Upon Us” by Suzette Haden Elgin (1982). If I had a nickel for every time I read a feminist parable by Suzette Haden Elgin in which a woman inadvertently worked miracles, only for the miracles to be twisted and disregarded by the patriarchal powers of the world, I’d have two nickels! (See “Lo, How an Oak E’er Blooming” in the February 1986 issue of F&SF.) Not that there’s anything wrong with a writer having a niche. This is a cutting satire of how patriarchal power forces women into conformity — the rewards of being number two in the hierarchy, after all, are the prerogatives of cis, het, white, Christian women who fall in line — and how unwilling such a woman might be, in the end, to abandon the power of conformity.

“Prince Bull: A Fairy Tale” by Charles Dickens (1855). A tiresome imperialist allegory about noble Prince Bull getting hampered and ensnared by his perfidious fairy godmother Red Tape, and how Prince Bull’s innumerable children and his ungrateful servants look the other way instead of supporting his war against Prince Bear. Basically, it’s saying: “That damn bureaucracy and those mediocre ministers made a mess of our gallant and just Crimean War!” There’s nothing to recommend in this story.

“The Triumph of Vice: A Fairy Tale” by W. S. Gilbert (1867). Before his iconic pairing with Sullivan, Gilbert was a dramatist who sometimes wrote fairy tales for adults. Two things raise this one above the level of Dickens’ fairy tale: it isn’t an allegory on behalf of imperialism, and the repartee between Count von Krappentrapp, romantically thwarted by the towering Bertha, and Prince Pooh, a shifty gnome who hires the Count to woo him up a wife, is mildly amusing. Placing this above “Prince Bull,” however, is faint praise indeed. It deserves little else.

Entering August now, for those keeping track of my pace. (It’s me. I’m the one curious about my pace.)

“Turandina” by Fyodor Sologub (1912, English translation 1915). This is a drily tongue-in-cheek satire about a promising young lawyer who, despite his skill at subverting justice and his regular stipend from his father, finds himself unhappy, affecting the Modern malaise of cynical ennui. Peter Antònovitch dramatically longs for a fairy tale to come along and disrupt the overly ordered cause-and-effect of modern life. When Turandina, a forest enchantress seeking shelter in the mortal world, manifests at the very climax of Peter’s longing, he — modern man that he is — doesn’t believe her, and the police demand to see her passport. A fine effort, though (as with so many stories of this time) it peters out at the end, no pun intended.

“The Princess and the Frog” by Robin McKinley (1981). Little surprise that this one is excellent. It's been a while since I've read McKinley, but I would expect nothing less from the author of Deerskin. This is an atmospheric courtly fantasy retelling that expands the standard fairy tale and offers an insight: enchantment and manipulation are the same litany in different registers.

“Darkness Box” by Ursula K. Le Guin (1963). Le Guin’s greatness as a storyteller — her quietly assured prose, her careful skill with character, her vivid scene-setting — elevates what seems at first to be merely an archetypal narrative into something ethereal, something vast, a melancholy and (literally) timeless meditation on holding the world still for fear of loss and change. Le Guin was writing twenty years ahead of her time in this one, as she so often did.

“Jack and the Beanstalk” by Osbert Sitwell (1959). Hard to believe this was published a mere four years before Le Guin’s effort above — they seem to date from different centuries. Sitwell draws out an essentially capitalist narrative in his “Beanstalk” retelling, meta-referencing Jack as “a sort of magical Sir Thomas Lipton.” Armed only with the pat aphorisms of the mercantile class, our Jack heads up the beanstalk and quickly learns to be an adept colonialist. Mostly a standard retread up until the cynical humor of Jack's post-beanstalk career.

Three chapters from The Little White Bird by J. M. Barrie (1902). Peter Pan made his first appearance in these chapters; the character’s popularity inspired the subsequent stage show and then his own book. Raised by television as I was, Peter Pan was always one of my personal icons, a rejection of the abusive adults in my life, but I hadn’t yet read anything Barrie wrote before now. The Peter mythos in these chapters is far different, and far stranger, than anything that made its way into an afternoon cartoon. Babies are hatched as birds and fly away to their human parents; Peter simply doesn’t realize he’s a boy, and flies back to Kensington Gardens. Birds raise him on an island there, where he learns his tragic fate as a Betwixt-and-Between, neither boy nor bird. As if all this weren’t enough to inspire a chapbook full of gender poetry, he escapes the island again with the assistance of a £5 bank note from Percy Bysshe Shelley. Good stuff.

“The Mouse Festival” by Johannes Bobrowski (1965, English translation 1989). I’m uncomfortable with the fact that Bobrowski was a German soldier in World War II. This delicate wisp of a tale addresses the German invasion of Poland from the mystic, moonlit perspective of a Jewish shopkeeper who shares a moment with a young German invader, watching mice celebrating a crust of bread in his shop. It is a thing of frail beauty, but I’m not happy that a German veteran is the one writing it.

“A Proper Santa Claus” by Anne McCaffrey (1973). Six year old Jeremy can paint and sculpt things into being, but his parents and his teacher don’t understand him, and the small neglects, disappointments, and adult expectations accumulate against the primitive magic of childhood. The ending feels inevitable. Not a classic, but not bad either. Hard to believe this is the same author who cranked out the dismal Dinosaur Planet.

It’s hard to read during the summer. It’s September now! Late September, in fact. I back-burnered this collection for a while.

“Inside Out” by Rudy Rucker (1987). This story is part of the reason I didn’t prioritize this book for the last month. I got stuck here for a bit, discouraged by Rucker’s opening depiction of suburban mediocrity rendered in all its damp, Pizza Hut-scented grotesquery. A potentially interesting tale of fractal pattern-people and nested possession gets gummed up by “take my wife — please!” heteronormativity. The strange vertiginous math-fantasy of multiple dimensions in string theory was good, the domestic disdain and sexual resentment was not.

“The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut” by Mark Twain (1876). Our narrator inadvertently renders his conscience perceptible, and proceeds to grill it about the whys and wherefores of the conscience business. Standard Twainian stuff, witty platitudes about human nature and so on from start to finish. It’s fine. Doesn’t live up to its excellent title. 

“The Woman Who Thought She Could Read” by Avram Davidson (1959). An urban fable about an Eastern European immigrant who was taught to read the future in beans. The story is a nice mix of pre-war small-city childhood vibes with a touch of eeriness and tragedy, reminiscent of Ray Bradbury (though not quite on Bradbury’s level of artistry). Solid.

“The Third Level” by Jack Finney (1950). I read and reviewed this story way back in 2014. Since it’s been a while, and my own tastes and perceptions have changed considerably since then, I decided to reread it instead of copying out what I wrote nine years ago. I’ve come to an appreciation for the use of urban spaces in fantasy, the sense that anything could be hidden away in an unfamiliar neighborhood, or at the end of the sidewalk — or, here, on a mysterious gaslit level of Grand Central Station. “Sometimes I think Grand Central is growing like a tree, pushing out new corridors and staircases like roots” — that’s a chef's-kiss image right there. Since I first read “The Third Level,” I’ve grown much more skeptical of this particular brand of “the old days were better” wistfulness, but the story still works, regardless.

“The Griffin and the Minor Canon” by Frank R. Stockton (1885). An otherwise satisfying fable that carries the stink of fear-based authoritarianism in its moral. A griffin, last of his kind, journeys to a town that features an excellent likeness of a griffin on its church. The only citizen brave enough to talk with him is the church’s minor canon; the griffin takes a liking to him, and follows him around the town on his daily labors. Seeing this, the cowardly citizens send the canon away into the wilds. Enraged at their cowardice, the griffin performs the charity work and teaching that had been done by the canon, and the fear of him makes the poor take up jobs and the “bad” children apply themselves to their lessons. That’s the part I didn’t like. But yeah, other than that, this tale works well enough.

“The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles” by Margaret St. Clair (1951). The first Masterpieces volume introduced me to St. Clair with her lovely vignette “The Goddess on the Street Corner.” Since then, I’ve read two of her novels — Message from the Eocene and The Games of Neith — neither of which lived up to that initial promise. This little tale is a perfectly serviceable darkly humorous fantasy about a thoroughly modern salesman who ventures to the edge of Terra Cognita to, well, sell rope to gnoles. (Lord Dunsany's gnoles, not modern D&D gnoles; the title has a touch of “selling coals to Newcastle” about it, what with the tentacles and all.) A fine fancy, though it doesn’t equal “Goddess.”

“The Dragons” by Murilo Rubião (original publication date unclear, English translation published 1965). A slim magical realism piece that draws an allegory for colonialism, displacement, and culture clash from its simple tale of dragons drifting into town. Lingers in the mind longer than its brevity would suggest.

“On the Downhill Side” by Harlan Ellison (1972). A typically solid and assured outing from Ellison, but also — typically — freighted with that “I’m just depicting the casual bigotries of my characters” vibe beloved by late 20th century white male authors. When your characters are ghosts — the ghost of a needy American architect, venting about his “shrike” of a bygone mother-in-law to the ghost of a nineteenth century New Orleans society girl — a lot of casual bigotry crops up. I did quite like this story, though. Even if I didn’t care for the people, the unicorn wrecked me. Ellison’s prose is, as always, evocative. It has a certain weighted inevitability that makes the “twist” obvious, but also makes it less of a twist and more of a fated outcome.

“The Parrot” by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1965, English translation published 1966). Vivid and immersive tale of a village horse dealer, the parrot he loves, and the grinding inexorable tragedy that lands him in prison. I haven’t read much literature from Eastern Europe, but this seems like a classic example of it.

“The Gray Wolf” by George MacDonald (1864). Fluently written for the time period, but ultimately this one is a by-the-numbers Victorian fable about a young man of the leisure class letting himself get beguiled by a toothy young woman in the wilds of the Shetlands.

“The Harrowing of the Dragon of Hoarsbreath” by Patricia A. McKillip (1982). Somehow I’ve never read any of McKillip’s short fiction, even though I picked up a collection of her stories, titled after this selfsame tale, and have had it sitting on a shelf for a couple years or so. “Harrowing” is a magnificent introduction to her short work, expertly sketching out a strange, lived-in world, and with deft details defining its two leads, a marvel of language and efficiency. Peka is one of my favorite point-of-view characters from McKillip now, a tough, no-nonsense girl who mines gold and makes wormspoor booze and loves her home. Ryd, who has returned to Hoarsbreath determined to harrow away the ice dragon that keeps the land frozen twelve out of the thirteen months of the year, is a sharply written foil for her: infuriatingly convinced, like any tech bro, that he knows what’s best for everyone, even though no one asked, even if it means disrupting the traditions and livelihoods (and very existence) of his homeland. This is the sort of story I read these old collections and magazines to find. My favorite story here so far.

“The Last of the Dragons” by Edith Nesbit (publication date uncertain, possibly 1899). This one is an unexpected delight, a precociously proto-feminist tale of a princess who refuses to let a prince fight the last dragon for her, wanting to tame (or fight, if it came down to it) the dragon herself. “The Prince drew his sword, and the Princess drew hers — the beautiful silver-handled one that the prince had brought in his motor-car.” I wish more fiction from this era were like this. (Though the class politics of it sucks.)

Halfway through this book, by page count! Only twelve more stories remain, though. Clearly this collection is back-loaded with longer pieces.

“Lila the Werewolf” by Peter S. Beagle (1969). This one is a flawed masterpiece, marred by its midcentury approximation (you can’t call it understanding) of gender and sexuality. Imagine an artsy and acclaimed end-of-the-'60s movie about New York City bohemians getting tangled up in an ill-fated liaison, full of trendy folk-revival music and sophisticated camerawork, but the girl is a werewolf. It has all the brilliance you’d expect, brimming with Beagle's sharply observed detail and the palpable energy of the ’60s city, but a lot of it hasn't aged well, particularly toward the end; Beagle's own afterword, presumably added in the '80s, admits as much.

“The Drowned Giant” by J. G. Ballard (1964). An exquisite exercise in tone, this description of a colossal corpse that washes ashore, and its steady putrefication, defilement, and dismemberment, is disturbingly clinical. Even the narrator, the only person in the city who seems to appreciate the scale and strangeness of its arrival, is bereft of any sense of wonder. What Ballard has to say about human nature is there between the lines, and it isn’t pretty. I do not recommend reading this while eating cold pizza, as I did.

“The Enchanted Buffalo” by L. Frank Baum (1905). The main point of interest here is watching the rote 1980s epic fantasy formula — the old king is slain by an evil interloper with powers granted by an evil magic-wielder, but the old king’s son vows to defeat the interloper and reclaim the throne — play out in a turn-of-the-century children’s story about bison. Yeah, yeah, it’s the Campbellian monomyth and all that, I get it. The Lion King does it too. But it shows how unsophisticated all those fantasy trilogies built from the mononyth really were all along.

“Narrow Valley” by R. A. Lafferty (1966). An oddly ubiquitous fixture of these SFF retrospectives, “Narrow Valley” has appeared twice before in collections I’ve read (this is the third), and popped up in the contents of several other anthologies I haven’t read (but plan to). I first read and reviewed it here. Rereading it now, I must echo my initial assessment — this story is pretty silly. It’s a topological fantasy, much like “Inside Out” earlier in this volume, crammed with cringy midcentury “humor” about contemporary would-be settlers vs. Indigenous people. I truly don’t get why it kept getting anthologized.

“Beyond the Dead Reef” by James Tiptree, Jr. (1983). Not quite of the revelatory quality I’ve come to expect from Tiptree, with some colonialist bits that haven’t aged well at all. Nonetheless this was a moderately entertaining ecological horror yarn, all about reef degradation and the sea’s revenge.

“The King’s Bride: A Fairy Tale After Nature” by E. T. A. Hoffman (1819, English translation published 1963). Here’s part of the reason the back half of the book has so much bulk but so few stories: this one alone is nearly 50 pages long. Despite its length, and its antiquity, this one passes relatively painlessly. (Perhaps we have the 1960s translation to thank? It’s certainly much more concise than a lot of English stories from this time period.) It’s standard German fairy tale stuff, faintly comic rather than murderous, toying with various stock characters: the father up in the tower playing at mysticism in his wizard hat, the earthly daughter who loves her vegetables, the betrothed young man who has become ethereal with poetry while away at university. I’m much less enthused about the “sly, malicious” gnome king, knowing the antisemitic influences underlying Germanic gnome folklore. It all wraps up in a predictable but still amusing fashion, involving pots and pans and bad poetry.

“Under the Garden” by Graham Greene (1963). This one is even longer, somehow. It begins as a lovely, melancholy meditation on mortality, on memory, on the lost wonder and possibilities and expanses of childhood. Dying man William Wilditch returns to the country house where he spent his childhood summers, with all their hidden magic, to find its estate is now cut up into council houses. “Now the dreaming child was dying of the same disease as the man. He was so different from the child that it was odd to think the child would not outlive him and go on to quite a different destiny.” The childhood adventure, or dream, that draws Wilditch back to Winton Hall is something like Lewis Carroll by way of John Waters, a grubby, subterranean realm where an old man with a nicotine-stained beard sits on a lavatory and demands young William read to him from old newspapers, has him piss in a chamber pot of gold, and shows him softcore pinup mags. Dream or not, it’s an unsettling but unique read, so I suppose Greene accomplished what he set out to do. A mix of creativity and rancidness that could only have come from the 1960s.

“The Things That Are Gods” by John Brunner (1979). I read and reviewed this one back in 2015. While not quite as lengthy as the previous two, it’s long enough. Brunner’s storytelling wallows in the decadent convolution of '70s fantasy. This time around, I felt that I understood far more of the story as it unfurled. The first time, I hadn't known that this was the last in a series of tales about the traveler; knowing it now, with a better grounding in the fantasy traditions of the '70s than I had eight years ago, I have a firmer handle on Brunner's layers of asides and flashbacks and the allusions to unseen events. (Maybe my reading comprehension is better than it used to be?) Essentially, the traveler is an ageless being who has existed since before time, bound by fate to grant the wishes of those around him. As the universe becomes more ordered, and the energies of chaos less pronounced (thanks in no small part to these granted wishes), the scope of wishes he can grant becomes circumscribed by what he's done before. The traveler grows disquieted at the way recent wishes have backfired, their ends unjust. All the while, he can't rid his thoughts of a distant town called Stanguray. For all its old-school fantasy worldbuilding and scale, “Things” is more humorous and tongue-in-cheek than I remembered. Overall, a bit sprawling and self-induglent, but a solid story for its time.

“The King of Nodland and His Dwarf” by Fitz-James O’Brien (1852). Boo. Another lengthy one. Another nineteenth century political satire. Another instance of an evil and deformed little person. It’s written in a sprightly enough manner for its time period, but has little else to recommend it. A tedious read, especially so near the end of the collection.

“The Seventeen Virgins” by Jack Vance (1974). I read and reviewed this tale of Cugel the Clever back in 2014. Cugel is basically a Bugs Bunny figure roaming a Dying Earth; he passes pebbles off as opals, outwits officious bureaucrats, expresses skepticism at social institutions, runs a side-hustle telling fortunes with the aid of a local lad, and skips town via caravan in the company of said virgins. We all know the fate of virgins in stories written by dudes; this one is no exception. Skeevy, like most ’70s male-gaze fantasy, but mildly entertaining.

“The Bagful of Dreams” by Jack Vance (1978). Two tales back to back might be a surfeit of Cugel the Clever. It’s more of the same: Cugel continues his travels through various misadventures, gets his way by flattering provincial egos, and relieves unhelpful strangers of their riches. It’s fine, but I had a distinct sense of diminishing returns.

“The Hollow Land” by William Morris (1856). Here we are on the first day of October, facing an overlong William Morris joint to conclude this volume. As with “Lindenborg Pool” (reviewed here), we find ourselves in a pseudo-medieval land, but this time we have a romance replete with perfidious ladies, mysterious maidens, kingly sons, bloody vengeance, and everyone out slewing this and that. It’s somewhat interesting as an ancient prototype of sword and sorcery (though one stuffy with biblical allusion). Plus it doesn’t have the whiff of antisemitism that marked “Lindenborg Pool.” Faint praise to end on, but here we are!

And that’s it! It took a mere three-ish months this time. In fact, I read the bulk of it (two-thirds of it by page count) in about eleven days.

All in all, I’m giving this volume a slight edge over the first. The best stories here (by McKinley, Le Guin, McKillip) are simply outstanding; while the worst stories (by Dickens, Gilbert, O’Brien) are bad, the overall quality of even the middling tales finds a higher baseline than in the first Masterpieces.

I’m sad that the series ended with this book. I crave more wide-ranging surveys of my favorite genre, collecting centuries of stories under one cover.