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

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

238 pages

Published 2023

Read from August 24 to August 26

Rating: 3 out of 5

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

2025 read #39: Gateway by Frederik Pohl.

Gateway by Frederik Pohl

313 pages

Published 1977

Read from April 21 to April 29

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2024 read #155: And Chaos Died by Joanna Russ.

And Chaos Died by Joanna Russ

189 pages

Published 1970

Read from December 18 to December 20

Rating: 2-ish out of 5

This book is a strange, often off-putting experiment of a sophomore novel. What opens as a fairly standard space opera gets filtered through the literary affectations of the New Wave. The text revolves from impression to impression with all the logic of an acid trip. An old man eating plums in the moonlight leaps into somersaults at the lightest touch, flames at his heels. Russ’s prose is sweeping and ambitious, but even after I’ve read the whole thing, I’m still not sure whether it was supposed to make sense or not, or if it was meant as a suite of vibes.

I momentarily got excited when Russ revealed that main character Jai Vedh is gay — rarity of rarities in 1970 sci-fi! — but then on page 23 he muses, “I wish I knew what it feels like to be a man who loves a woman,” and by page 51 he’s dream-fucking one of the women from a putative “lost colony.” Later, “homosex” is lumped in with the “exports” of a decadent, sickly dystopia, while Jai ruts through various heterosexual encounters, many of dubious consent. All of which is in keeping with the mores of this era, but it feels like a particular letdown. (You mean to tell me this is the same Russ who would later publish We Who Are About to…?) There are also some deeply uncomfortable passages that I assume (or rather, that I hope) are a feminist critique of the pedophilia at the root of patriarchal heterosexuality.

If you persevere through Chaos’ deliberate opacity and its unfortunately antique construction of sexuality and gender, it turns out to be just another Social Statement sci-fi novel making a contrast between the “natural,” vaguely Taoist society of the colony’s outer space telepaths, and the polluted, listless, technocratic dystopia of future Earth. The book’s main effect was to make me wish I were rereading The Dispossessed instead. Every now and then, though, Russ turned a phrase that made me concede it was worth reading:

Evne, like a woman of salt, fled into the walls in metal crystalhood, where he followed her, turned into a bee (all eyes), a fountain (all mouth), wrapped herself around her own bones inside out, spread herself one molecule thick along all the lines in the ship: the two of them, pulsing miles across, breathing with the lungs of incurious strangers, seeing through other eyes, petrifying in flashes, pursuing each other in the shapes of walls, floors, volumes of contained air. He followed her.

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 #108: Gathering the Tribes by Carolyn Forché.

Gathering the Tribes by Carolyn Forché

Foreword by Stanley Kunitz

63 pages

Published 1976

Read September 11

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

My main exposure to poetry is contemporary (published within the last ten years or so), with a definite lean toward SFF poetry. I want to expand my poetry education, so when someone I follow shared a poem from this book, it was a quick purchase.

I don’t have the education, or the vocabulary, to pinpoint the differences between 2020s poetry and 1970s poetry. Forché returns again and again to evergreen topics: family, ethnic heritage, displacement, childhood, trauma, loss, sexuality, the intimacy of food, the land. She unspools gorgeous images, and breathes out heartbreak like frost on a Michigan morning. Her poems are often lovely, delicate things, grounded unshakably in the Midwestern earth. Yet something about her cadence, perhaps, or her word choice, feels unfamiliar, the dialect of the past.

Inevitably, I’m reminded of the only other 1970s poetry collection I’ve read, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Wild Angels — not that they have much in common, otherwise, beyond a similar ineffable resonance with their decade, and how they demand a slower reading pace, sounding out connections between lines: “Seventeen years of solitude is seventeen / years. Quiet.”

Another difference: in our age of poetry-as-memoir, of confessional CNF with line breaks, Forché’s well of third-person character studies feels oddly uncomfortable. There’s an edge of concern for a modern reader, a wincing Wait, you’re construing someone else’s story? Forché gravitates toward portraits of impoverished Indigenous folks, which adds an extra frisson of possible exploitation. Perhaps it isn’t necessarily unethical, no more so than writing fiction based on the people you meet, but it’s an adjustment.

The book finishes strong with the section titled “The Place That Is Feared I Inhabit,” especially the poem “Kalaloch.”

2024 read #107: Red Moon and Black Mountain by Joy Chant.

Red Moon and Black Mountain by Joy Chant

244 pages

Published 1970

Read from September 8 to September 11

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I don’t know if I’ve ever read anything that so perfectly distills the early 1970s “adult fantasy” movement as this book. Three English children, lured off the path in the Essex countryside, find themselves transported to a world of swords and sorcery, noble mounted warriors and antiquated gender norms, martial eagles and a war of darkness against light. It’s Narnia meets the Hyborian Age.

The best part of this book is Chant’s prose, which would still be solid for a fantasy novel today, and would’ve seemed astonishing in 1970. In Chant’s hands, the rote phrases typical of Seventies fantasy — your “grim sable crags,” your “shimmering silver aureole,” and so forth — mostly add charm rather than gumming up the works. It’s a tricky balancing act, one not even Patricia A. McKillip landed on her first try. I’m impressed.

Charming in a different way, the worldbuilding, which Chant refined over the years from a childhood game of make-believe, feels like true outsider art, a dash of Henry Darger to season the mash of Tolkien and Howard. The world of Vanderei feels lived in, its corners well-thumbed, despite its reliance on archetypes. There’s even a very 1970 attempt to ground the setting’s gratuitous misogyny in something like anthropology, which — while I didn’t care much for it — is very in keeping with the spirit of the enterprise.

The plot is less interesting. It’s the kind of book where one of the siblings is already proclaimed the Chosen One by page 38. Generously, one could say it’s the junior reader prototype of the Fionavar Tapestry, complete with climactic human sacrifice. If it had been published ten years earlier, or ten years later, it would have been marketed as juvenile fiction, but Ballantine was determined to create “adult fantasy” as a genre, and if the main characters are kids who’ve gone through a portal into a fantasy world to meet princesses and unicorns, well, that’s just what adult fantasy is in 1970, and it’s all very grown up, thank you.

Altogether, I felt this was more of a curiosity than a lost classic. And as the story went on, Chant’s female characters — even the badass princess skilled in star magic, who gives up her powers for her man — became much too meek and submissive. Still, if you’re interested in the evolution of modern fantasy as a genre, this one’s worth a read.

2024 read #58: We Who Are About to… by Joanna Russ.

We Who Are About to… by Joanna Russ

170 pages

Published 1977

Read from May 22 to May 24

Rating: 4 out of 5

CW: thoughts on death and sui 

What sold me on this book was a summary from Samuel R. Delany, quoted in its Wikipedia entry: “‘[We Who Are About to… is] a damningly fine analysis of the mechanics of political and social decay,’ offering the interpretation that ‘Russ suggests that the quality of life is the purpose of living, and reproduction only a reparative process to extend that quality—and not the point of life at all... only feudal societies can really believe wholly that reproduction... is life’s real point.’” Given today’s Christofascist social and political pressures to leverage their breeding kink into public policy, this is horrifically timely.

A subtle miscalculation has thrown an interstellar craft off course. It crashes on an unknown planet, ejecting a handful of survivors. Within a matter of days, the men begin to itemize the women as breeding stock, and employ their physical strength to reinvent the patriarchy, assaulting the women while claiming to protect them. 

Our narrator, who from the start has been pragmatic about the impossibility (and undesirability) of survival, watches with an angry cynicism so restrained it seems like detachment, arming herself with whatever small thing comes to hand. But dissenters, even dissenters who just want to be left alone, cannot be tolerated when people become obsessed with control: "anybody who doesn't agree has to be shut up somehow because it's too terrifying."

One is reminded of how little it took — a couple terrorist attacks, a touch of economic uncertainty, a pandemic — to turn the 21st century into a speed run of the 20th.

I've often thought about the supposed desire for survival that writers like to trot out, even in books as bleak as The Road. Looking at the future ahead of us — uncertain, but trending grimmer by the year — I've been skeptical of the conceit that survival is paramount. Faced with a Christofascist culture that wants to eradicate all human joy, even as capitalism speeds our civilization toward collapse and mass death, I have to wonder: How much of this do I want to live to see?

The narrator’s clear understanding of that choice made this book especially poignant. She doesn't want to die, but there are many things worse than death, and a return to patriarchal control is one of them. We Who is as important to read now as when it was first written. It is the lesbian godmother of our contemporary “burn the world down” queer fiction.

2024 read #38: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

280 pages

Published 1974

Read from March 13 to March 28

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Classics of nature writing are haunted by the outlines of everything we’ve destroyed.

In the fifty years since Pilgrim was published, we’ve lost uncountable numbers of birds; insect populations have been in free fall; amphibians have collapsed. The very soil has become sterile, quenched by herbicides and pesticides. Where Dillard pondered the vastness of divinity and the cruel beauty of nature under troublesome clouds of starlings, you might be lucky to see a scatter of sparrows today. Most of Tinker Creek itself, Dillard’s “one great giver,” today seems a ghost watershed, squeezed between the culs-de-sac and fulfillment centers that sprawl out from Roanoke and the I-81 corridor.

The spirit of intellectual Christianity lurking throughout this book is also pretty much extinct. At least it is in America, where the loudest elements of the faith champion a skin-deep literalism, fully commercialized and dead inside. Atheism and Christlike Christianity alike are capable of transcendence, the ecstatic revelations of humility before the infinite; the greatest exaltation an American evangelist can know is browbeating a waitress on a Sunday afternoon.

At its heart, Pilgrim is a book-length consideration of the cruelty within nature’s beauty, a rumination on how any conception of a creator god must incorporate the blood-spill as well as the birdsong, the parasite alongside the petals:

For if God is in one sense the igniter, a fireball that spins over the ground of continents, God is also the destroyer, lightning, blind power, impartial as the atmosphere. 

From an atheist’s point of view, of course, the matter is much clearer, though no less awe-making. We are intelligent animals reliant on our deeply enmeshed social bonds; beauty (or rather the appreciation of it) is the newcomer, yet vital to us nonetheless, as vital as the sometimes bloody workings of mere survival. We are part of nature, inseparable, and that is glory.

I can respect intellectual Christianity, but it has died back faster than the insects have, these last fifty years. In contrast to either atheism or intellectual Christianity, contemporary evangelicalism presents a pop-up picture book understanding of the world, a paper cutout universe merely six thousand years deep, reducing us all to children play-acting for our abusive sky-dad’s jollies. Animals, plants, nature as a whole — all of it recedes into the background art from a Dick & Jane book. I can only imagine how many contemporary Southern Baptists in Dillard’s western Virginia would decry her spiritual masterpiece as evolutionist sacrilege.

I’m pretty sure Robert Macfarlane name-dropped this book in one or more of his tributes to the titans of nature writing past. It’s more than worthy of such notice. Every line jolts or shimmers with the mystery of language, scintillating or concealing in intricate patterns like cloud-shadow tumbling ahead of the wind. At least once a page, this book takes my breath away:

Some trees sink taproots to rock; some spread wide mats of roots clutching at acres. They will not be blown. We run around under these obelisk-creatures, teetering on our soft, small feet. We are out on a jaunt, picnicking, fattening like puppies for our deaths. Shall I carve a name on this trunk? What if I fell in a forest: Would a tree hear?

Like the best nature writing, Pilgrim is about learning to see; and, having seen, sensing how much else exists beyond our awareness. The present is elusive, recursive, a revelation quickly lost in other stimulation. I’m reminded of The Anthropology of Turquoise or A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A magnificent book.

2024 read #26: Wild Angels by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Wild Angels by Ursula K. Le Guin

52 pages

Published 1975

Read February 20

Rating: 4 out of 5

Sometimes, browsing online archives of dubious provenance, you stumble upon lost curiosities. This is a chapbook released by Capra Press, a highbrow indie press that seemingly specialized in limited edition books from startlingly famous authors. (They also released titles by Anaïs Nin and Raymond Carver, among others.) I never expected to read a chapbook of poetry from Le Guin, but I’d never be able to pass up the opportunity after learning of it.

It’s strange encountering Le Guin’s poetry after reading so much of her long-form prose work. It’s also strange, having read almost exclusively poetry from the last five years (plus a sprinkling of Romantic and Victorian pieces), reading poetry from nearly fifty years ago. Wild Angels is neither as formally antiquated as Goblin Market, nor as pulsing and gristly as The Thirteen Scorned Wives of La Nuit.

In the extensive narrative of “Coming of Age,” Le Guin writes:

Call to me here and I will come,

knowing my name and the game's rules

and all the rest I've learnt.

But I will not call their names

nor name them to you, those,

the children playing in the ruined fort,

the little falcons, the inheritors.

It’s good, a compelling poem full of meaning, but it shows a touch of midcentury stiffness, of reserve packed into all those commas. Or rather, the rhythm is just something I’m not used to. Clearly, I need to expand my poetry readings beyond the contemporary vibes. Poetry, more so than other formats, demands effort from its readers to open its inner timelessness.

This chapbook, once I adjust my expectations to the meter of ’70s poetry, feels consummately Le Guinian. She glides without apparent effort from the inaccessibility of nostalgia to  how women are used by society to the easy answers of bigotry, from the smallness of childhood to the limitations of adult wisdom to an atheist’s conversation with God, all within the same poem.

The rest of the poems, while briefer than the sprawling “Coming of Age,” circle around the same motifs and build upon its imagery, revisiting falcons and oat grass, what culture consigns to femininity and everything in the world that gets neglected by God. But Le Guin’s interests gyre wider, into creation, into dreams, into myth. Death looms everywhere; birth is a fate little better.

2024 read #17: Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, October 1979 issue.

Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, October 1979 issue (3:10)

Edited by George H. Scithers

192 pages

Published 1979

Read February 1

Rating: 2 out of 5

Of all the modern sci-fi magazines still on newsstands, Asimov’s has always seemed the least ashamed to put dinosaurs on its covers. They featured a tyrannosaur as recently as the September 2012 issue, long after every other mainstream magazine had put dinos away in the box of ’90s embarrassment, alongside their pastel windbreakers and whimsigoth bedspreads. Like pastel windbreakers and whimsigoth bedspreads, dinosaur fiction never stopped being cool in my opinion, so I appreciate that in a publication.

This issue here, on the other end of the spectrum — released in the magazine’s third calendar year — was Asimov’s first dino cover. Super-intelligent space-faring theropods returning to Earth in dapper little spacesuits, in 1979?? You know I gotta read that. But first, we have a whole lot of dubious ’70s sci-fi to get through.

—

“Mandalay” by John M. Ford. I was unexpectedly impressed with Ford’s “Green Is the Color,” which I read and reviewed in Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder. Likewise, I was initially skeptical of “Mandalay,” a military march through alternate timelines, but the worldbuilding, at any rate, proved an unexpected delight.

Alternities Corporation offered people the opportunity to adventure, fight, and fornicate across different realities, but then came the Fracture, severing their gates from “Homeline.” Charlie Brunner, once a security guard for Alternities, assumes leadership over the surviving men (because of course they’re almost all men); only Charlie Brunner has the Key that can open the sealed gates. He leads the survivors on a years-long march through the tube ring connecting the various physical gates, each gate a hundred kilometers from the last. Sometimes they collect fresh survivors, sometimes they lose men who decide to stay in a particular “alternity.” Sometimes men die. The setting is one part WestWorld, one part Greg Bear’s Eon, with just a touch of rail-shooter video game mechanics. (Each section of tube has convenient packs of food and medicine.) The survivors march in a mix of period costumes and futuristic gear. Ford’s prose is crisp, better than what you’d expect for 1979.

Now for the negatives: It’s inevitable at this point in time (or really, any era of sci-fi between the 1960s and the early 2000s) that the characters would include Nazi and Confederate sympathizers who came to vacation in timelines where their kind won. That shit doesn’t add anything to the story beyond “gritty realism.” None of the characters are deeper than the motley items they wear. And despite its bravura setup — with its promise of endless alternate histories contaminating one another in the Fracture, and the survivors visiting them in their mismatched costumes afterward to find home — we don’t get that much out of it. Just one Barsoom-esque encounter, and one almost-but-not-quite Colorado. Feels like squandered potential.

Still, between the concept, the prose, and a solid ending, I’d say that “Mandalay” earns an adequate C+

 —

“A Day in Mallworld” by Somtow Sucharitkul. S. P. Somtow’s first story in Asimov’s, and the beginning of his popular Mallworld series. Like any hip and edgy male sci-fi writer between the years of 1975 and 2000, Somtow has his adolescent narrator mention 1) her virginity and 2) her “budding little breasts” on the first page. Combine that with the splash page art depicting her all but naked, and you can imagine my reluctance to proceed.

Conceptually, the setting was brilliant: The alien Selespridar have locked down the solar system until humanity might prove itself worthy. Mallworld, an outer space shopping center sprawling across thirty kilometers of habitats, is the one place humans might run into visiting Selespridar, the one place a runaway teen from the asteroidal Bible Belt might conceivably get away. It’s a clever way to literalize teen wanderlust, the romance of the mall, the need to get out of this small town scaled up to humanity as a species.

The plot of “A Day” does not live up to its setting. Our narrator Zoe, naive runaway that she is, runs into a high-ranking Selespridar, Zhangif, who’s on a quest to discover the meaning of life. She shows him Earthly religion, but it doesn’t satisfy him, so he tries acid, which almost poisons him. Then (spoilers) she discovers that the aliens can’t read, so she gets a dictionary at a decrepit bookstore and reads him the definition of “life.” It’s very silly. At least they don’t fuck (though it’s a close call). D+

—

A poem by Peter Payack, “The Mover,” is a humorous science-meets-religion piece about a mover who does both local furniture moves and galactic jobs. The central conceit is that Jesus (“The Prime Mover was his ‘Old Man’”) is recontextualized as an outer space trucker. Otherwise this one is forgettable.

—

“Through Time & Space with Ferdinand Feghoot!!!!!” by Grendel Briarton. As you might have guessed, “Grendel Briarton” is a pseudonym. This flash fic is actually by Reginald Bretnor, who wrote two actively distasteful stories I’ve had the misfortune to read in F&SF. It’s an elaborate setup (involving the wandering Children of Israel and a time traveling robot named Yewtoo Artoo) for an awkward pun on ferrous oxide. Bleh. How would one even rate this? Maybe F+

—

“Iron Man, Plastic Ships” by L. E. Modesitt, Jr. Not my cup of tea. Where “Mandalay” felt like a precursor to ’90s sci-fi, this military spacer reads like a throwback to the early ’60s. The prose is stiff and uninteresting. We have a no-nonsense space captain, also stiff and uninteresting, who refuses to sign off on some sketchy space tugs, and sets out to test them all personally. We get terms like flexiplast and chewball. The author seems to have a particular axe to grind with plastic. (Here in the era of universal microplastic contamination, I can’t say I disagree.) Maybe D-?

—

A limerick by Stephanie K. Lang, “Rebuttal to $tar War$,” is squeezed in at the bottom of a page. It critiques Princess Leia’s lack of characterization, ending with “She triumphs by being a shrew.” Meh.

—

“Degraded!” by Jean S. Moore. This tale of a 22nd century professor straining to teach Joyce’s Ulysses to a particular know-it-all manchild succeeded at infuriating me against the student, and also made me more intrigued to attempt Joyce than anything else has. So I suppose it works on those levels. The rest of it — a thinking-computer assigns a distributed network of humans to analyze one word apiece from Ulysses, a twenty-one-year global effort culminating in an easy-to-digest comic book — is almost charmingly 1970s, like something from Tom Baker’s era of Doctor Who. I’d probably appreciate it more if I’d read Ulysses at any point. Still, a solid enough C

—

A couple limericks pad out the rest of this page: “Blasterfight at the P.U. Corral” by Barry B. Longyear, which is a snooty protest at the bad writing of the original Battlestar Galactica; and “Where a Star Is a Ship or When Is a Micron a Parsec? or When Is TV Going to Start Hiring Science Fiction Writers?” by Tol E. Rant (which is a pen name for, uh, Barry B. Longyear), which is also a snooty protest at the bad writing of the original Battlestar Galactica.

Clearly, there was a call for writers to submit limericks attacking TV and movie sci-fi for this issue. And Barry B. Longyear was personally affronted by Battlestar Galactica.

—

“Homecoming” by Barry B. Longyear. Finally, the main attraction! Hundreds of ships full of intelligent dinosaurs have been waiting in suspended animation for 70 million years, but at last the time has come for them to return to Nitola, the homeworld. Unfortunately for everyone involved, Nitola is now Earth, the homeworld of humanity. The American Air Force selects Captain Baxter, a pilot with PR credentials, to head to space to meet with them. But the Russians want to send up their own man, and warn the Nitolans not to listen to Captain Baxter. Likewise, the dinosaurs have divided opinions on how to handle the humans.

The sections from the dinosaurs’ perspective are quite good. Maybe not as alien as they could be, but Longyear does a fair job of making them seem just alien enough. Plus, just look at these handsome fellows:

They’re never referred to as “dromaeosaurs” or “deinonychuses” or anything like that, but I think the Nitolans predate even Time Safari as the earliest appearance of “raptor” dinosaurs in fiction. At least in what I’ve read.

Unfortunately for us, most of “Homecoming” is told from the human perspective, specifically Baxter's. His sections have a banal military sci-fi vibe that doesn’t do it for me. Plus, Longyear somehow manages to squeeze in some weird racism in the brief time before Baxter leaves Earth. It wouldn’t be the 1970s without it.

In the end, I’d say “Homecoming” works in more ways than it doesn’t, and is more interesting than it is off-putting. It probably gets a C+

—

Lastly, one more limerick to pad out a page: “How True,” by Henry Clark, which is a metacommentary on using limericks as fillers at the bottom of a page.

—

And that’s it! All in all, it could have been much worse.

2023 read #152: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1979 issue.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1979 issue (57:2)

Edited by Edward L. Ferman

162 pages

Published 1979

Read from December 10 to December 11

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

I have about 95 unread issues of F&SF, ranging from 1968 to 2022. I also have about 40 unread issues of Asimov’s Science Fiction, most of them from the early 1990s and the early 2000s. Plus, we all have access to a plethora of free-to-read SFF magazines online. Out of this embarrassment of options, why choose this particular issue? Mostly just because. I liked the cover art, and Richard Cowper stories are usually a good time. That’s all.

“Out There Where the Big Ships Go” by Richard Cowper. That title stirred images of vast industrial starships, big interstellar freight haulers in the cold dark, planets and stars as fragile bubbles lost in the incomprehensible distance. And while it’s nothing at all like that, the backstory that gets doled out still has some potential: Pete Henderson was the commander of The Icarus, the last starship Earth sent into space. Two time-dilated centuries elapsed on Earth while Pete was out in his voyage. He returned to a broken and demoralized world that has given up on hope, a world primed to obsess about the game Kalire, which Henderson brought back from the stars — the “Game of Games,” mastery of which is a prerequisite for the galactic federation. Unfortunately, disregarding all that, this longish novelette turns out to be a crisply written but mundane coming-of-age tale set at a resort town in Latin America. Our POV is 12 year old boy Roger, who wiles away his hours at the resort while his mom socializes, plays in the Kalire tournament, and goes to the salon. Roger attracts an odd amount of interest from actress Anne Henderson, and Pete, her obviously much older husband. The result feels undercooked, disjointed, unsure whether it wants to be a spin-off of Star Trek or of Fantasy Island, with a soupçon of the musical Chess for good measure. C-

“A Sending of Serpents” by L. Sprague de Camp. Ineffectual “humorous” affair about a bank officer dealing with a rash of elderly customers withdrawing their savings to pay a cult leader, who promises reincarnation and contact with the stars. This being de Camp, he can’t resist throwing in an extended racist bit for the laughs. The story’s only redeeming feature is how it skewers Scientology. F

“The Whisper of Banshees” by Nicholas Yermakov. This is a pretty rote tale of wearable holographic “Auras,” remarkable only for how early such a cyberpunkish concept appeared. The point of view, however — an advertising VP hoping to spin a new marketing angle — is about as far from punk as you can get. D

“Love-Starved” by Charles L. Grant. Another equally privileged tale, this time with some well-to-do dude getting bored at his business and revving his convertible out into the countryside, where he falls in lust with a mixed-race woman (though Grant phrases it rather more predatorily than that). Turns out she’s a succubus! Which you really don’t want a dude from the ’70s writing about. You get both sides of the straight man coin here: dull and icky. F

“The Word Sweep” by George Zebrowski. An unusually creative and interesting setup: Sometime in the 1930s, words began to materialize as tangible objects, and could not be destroyed without creating toxic gases. Words are now rationed, carted off to the overflowing dump every morning; each neighborhood is patrolled to ensure no one buries the streets in word residue. I could imagine something along these lines getting written in the late 1990s. It’s still very much a ’70s piece despite that, but hey, points for effort! B-

“Standoff” by Raylyn Moore. Back to ’70s banality with this apocalyptic number, which seems to be trying out a stylistic flourish: refusing all proper nouns, dubbing our characters “the first man” and “the second man,” orienting our geography with terms like “the western city,” refusing to specify what’s leveling cities. The result is more muddle than flourish. It ends with a joke about… let me see… food packaging being difficult to open? Okay then. D-

“Playback” by Larry Tritten. A actor named Holt dies and winds up in Hell, where he learns that the sexual revolution has made the afterlife pretty hip, or at least more laidback on matters of sex. The demon who processes him stresses that any sex act between consenting adults is fine — but alas, this is the ’70s, so our hero is gonna have some trouble with the “consent” part. Spoilers: Holt is given a second chance, and ends up in Hell anyway. D-

“‘You’re Welcome,’ Said the Robot, and Turned to Watch the Snowflakes” by Alan Ryan. I love a good, wordy title, but this one almost sounds like it’s trying too hard for what turns out to be a standard Asimovian robot story. Our man Benny has worked at International Robots for fifteen years as a robot tutor, wired up to robot brains to train them on social interaction and feeling. Benny is grumpy and resentful because he’s fed up with his cushy, well-paying, secure job that he’s retiring from at the ripe old age of 38. (Weird how one generation’s white male angst sounds like an utterly unattainable dream forty-four years later.) Well, to be fair to this story, Benny is fed up because he’s realized International Robots recruits tutors for one skill: having no personality of their own. That’s a hard pill for a mediocre white guy to swallow. D

“The Angel of Death” by Michael Shea. Right at the doorstep of the ’80s, we’re treated to that most exhaustingly ’80s of tropes: the gleefully manic psycho killer! Engelmann is today’s standard issue psycho killer, calling random citizens to leave “tips” in doggerel rhyme before slaughtering “bitches” for the crime of having sex. But the city streets also play host to a shapeshifting alien sent to mingle with and investigate humanity. And what better way to investigate humanity than by smooth-talking an Earth babe into backseat sex? You’ll never guess what happens when Engelmann and the alien cross paths! F

And that’s it for yet another mediocre old issue! As was so often the case in these times, the cover was the best part of the issue.

2023 read #126: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1975 issue.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1975 issue (49:4)

162 pages

Published 1975

Read October 30

Rating: 2 out of 5

My F&SF collection extends patchily into the 1960s and '70s, but until now, the December 1982 issue had been the earliest I’d read. Time to change that!

I picked this one more or less randomly — no significant dates here. Though there is a Poul Anderson Time Patrol story here that tipped the scales in its favor, even though it likely sucks and I read it before as a kid, in the 1991 collection The Time Patrol.

Onward, into the '70s!

“The Custodians” by Richard Cowper. An unexpected treat: Cowper’s F&SF debut! His tale “What Did the Deazies Do?” was the sole highlight of the dismal December 1982 issue, and in another lifetime I appreciated his The Road to Corlay. This sprawling novelette centers on Spindrift, a World War I vet and historian of medieval philosophy, who has followed a meager document trail left by one Meister Sternwärts, 13th century Gnostic and magister of arcane arts. Spindrift feels like Sternwärts has been guiding him to the monastery of Hautaire, where the meister spent his final years writing his Praemonitiones — a text of astonishingly accurate prophecies. Soon Spindrift learns that fresh prophecies continue to be written at Hautaire, with a “horizon” of about fifty years — and he’s been destined to come to Hautaire to continue the work. Some fifty years later, Spindrift meets his own successor: a faddish young woman named Judy Harland. “Custodians” is firmly of its time, but it’s quite good for all that, deliberately paced and atmospheric, depicting generational trauma’s role in ushering in nuclear annihilation. B

“Senior Citizen” by Clifford D. Simak. My only exposure to Simak was the dire Mastodonia, so I had slim hopes for this tale of an old man’s retirement to “a leisure cubicle in space.” Sure enough, by the third paragraph our surly Mr. Lee is already fuming at the feminine voice in his capsule: “Women, he thought — bitches, all of them.” The story manages to literalize the horror of how age can strip memory and self from you, so it succeeds at what it sets out to do. But the best part is how brief it is. D+

“Down to a Sunless Sea” by Cordwainer Smith. A posthumous publication, “completed by [Smith’s] wife after his death” — though she’s otherwise uncredited. Like the only other Smith story I’ve read, “Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons” (which I reviewed here), this one is an early galactic-baroque excursion. The sunless pleasure planet Xanadu welcomes Space Lord Kemal bin Permaiswari, a Lord of the Instrumentality, a psychic superman and war hero, wounded when he saved humanity in the battle of Styron IV. There are rideable cats; fear machines; “underpeople” genetically engineered from animals; illegal telepathy barriers; pitchers divided to pour both blissful drinks and deadly poisons; and of course devious scheming. There's also a bird-man named Mr.-Stokely-from-Boston. Clearly written sometime in the early ’60s, “Sea” is like a weirder, scruffier prototype of Dune, though it lacks Dune’s anti-authority streak. Like “Kittons,” “Sea” piles on the weird until it topples into silly, especially toward the end, but nonetheless I enjoyed it. Somewhere around C+

“The Pearcey Boy” by R. Bretnor. Distasteful, boring, and dreadfully overlong, this tale of a “defective” boy annoying and unsettling other lodgers in a 1928 boarding house didn’t even arrive at its coy revelation of its fantastical element (such as it was) until the last page. Utter dreck. F

“Gibraltar Falls” by Poul Anderson. I love how the Messinian salinity crisis (the drying out of the Mediterranean basin), and the subsequent titanic waterfall that refilled the sea through Gibraltar, had such a hold on the sci-fi imagination during the 1970s. See also: The Many-Colored Land. This one is a formulaic Time Patrol piece that I read once in a collection as a tween. Tom Nomura, natural scientist recruited for the Time Patrol from 1972, is in love with Feliz a Rach, an artist from a matriarchal society some two millennia after his birth. From him she learns the value of a man. “Gibraltar” offers no surprises, and I certainly won’t give it points for plot, but at least it has more atmosphere and scenic description than, say, most Reginald Rivers stories. I’ll be indulgent and offer it a C-

“Counterkill” by Jack Williamson. Skimmed past this one the moment it became clear that this (white) author thought he was being cheeky with how close he could come to the N-word without using the N-word. The dark planet’s name, the name of its dark-skinned people — yeah, you weren’t slick, Jack. Especially since the story is about a young man named Blacklantern hoping to enlist the aid of alien “Benefactors” to “civilize” his “primitive” world before it’s destroyed. Fuck this. A big old F

“The Mother Trip” by Frederick Pohl. Less a story and more of a series of variations on the theme of first contact. In one, police in Jackson, Mississippi stop and frisk the first visitor to our world, and cause automatic planetary annihilation. In another, humanity bands together in historic cooperation to nuke the alien mothership. In another, the aliens watch enough TV — and enough warfare — to declare that humans have a “death-wish.” Pretty standard stuff for the time. Nothing terrible, but also not terribly interesting. C-

And that’s it for my first issue from the ’70s! A mix of surprisingly tolerable stories alternating in precise rhythm with some of the worst shit you’ve ever seen. Reminiscent of the ’80s incarnation of the magazine, except this issue, at any rate, might be a slight improvement over any ’80s issues I’ve read so far.

Except for the Bretnor story. And the Williamson story. Goddamn.

Also, would it have killed them to put anyone who wasn’t a white man on the TOC?

2023 read #119: Mastodonia by Clifford D. Simak.

Mastodonia by Clifford D. Simak

213 pages

Published 1978

Read October 20

Rating: 1 out of 5

I’m deep in the weeds searching for new-to-me dinosaur fiction.

My expectations were less than zero for this tale of a red-blooded American man turning entrepreneur when his dog discovers “time roads” in his backyard. Hell, I had a copy of this book once before, during the same era that I first read Dinosaur Planet. I couldn’t even finish it back then. Not an encouraging sign.

Unsurprisingly, Mastodonia is not good. The prose is flat, and characterization next to nonexistent. The dialogue is stiff and improbable; every character launches into exposition, or their life story, after a single swig of beer. Asa Steele, our narrator, was an academic archaeologist but now putters around a farm in Willow Bend, Wisconsin, drawn here by the belief that an ancient crashed spaceship lurks in the neighborhood. Rila Elliot, with whom he shared a fieldwork fling twenty years ago, has gotten into the import-export business, meaning she sells dubiously obtained fossils and artifacts. Rila just happens to show up back in Asa’s life when his dog starts bringing back fresh dinosaur bones and Folsom spears. (If you expected some kind of angle behind Rila’s arrival, or any kind of interpersonal conflict that arises between them in the third act, you overestimated the level of plotting that went into this book.) A local “simpleton” named Hiram, a stock character straight out of a Stephen King novel, right on down to his magical ability to communicate with animals and aliens, also gets involved. It’s very much 1970s_sci_fi.txt.

As you’d expect from such an intensely mediocre novel from such a mediocre time, the narrative expresses admiration for the “pioneer attitude.” Much of the book is the investment capital prologue to “A Gun for Dinosaur” that no one asked for. You expected a time travel adventure book? Surprise! It’s all about capitalism. All too many pages are spent talking about the pecuniary benefits of having a local time-warp outside a small town. Noble-hearted lawyers want to protect our heroes from the perfidious IRS; the Mastodonia of the title originates as a primordial tax-shelter. It’s rather tiresome.

Presaging “In the Upper Cretaceous with the Summerfire Brigade,” there’s even a subplot about deporting the nation’s poor and hungry into Deep Time. Unlike “Summerfire” author Ian Watson, Simak doesn’t specify which ethnic groups should get chucked into the Miocene, but he does depersonalize them by referring to “the ghettos.” Asa and Rila vow to scuttle their entire operation rather than open Mastodonia up to “those mobs.” The ending is the nadir of the individualism fetish in 20th century sci-fi: rather than share a pristine Pleistocene world with inner-city poor, our country boy hero Asa taps into his masculine specialness and finds he has the ability to open up new time roads all on his own. (You could probably sense my eyes rolling all the way from the Cretaceous.)

There are nice little touches here and there — the hepatica flowers Asa notices when he first walks into the Pleistocene; the general vibe of the mobile home they set up in Mastodonia, with its whippoorwills and flowering crab-apples and resident mastodon bull hungry for carrots. Such moments are far too few, however, to make up for the dull boilerplate of the rest of the book.

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.