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 #45: The Harp of Imach Thyssel by Patricia C. Wrede.

The Harp of Imach Thyssel by Patricia C. Wrede

235 pages

Published 1985

Read from May 27 to May 29

Rating: 2 out of 5 (generously)

I bought this book on accident years ago, mistaking it for an entry in the Riddle-Master of Hed series. In my defense, its cover uses the exact same font as the contemporary paperback edition of McKillip’s series, and features similar artwork. A sense that this book desperately wishes to be mistaken for something better pretty much sums up the experience. It isn’t bad, per se, but it’s preeminently forgettable.

You know the stereotype of mediocre 1980s fantasy novels that read like someone else’s D&D campaign? I think the stereotype is overstated, but Harp, at any rate, embodies it. There are generic kingdoms and warring factions and spellworkers around every corner. Backstory gets plopped in with all the subtlety of a successful history check. Puns stand in for clever dialogue. It’s a D&D novel with the trademarks sanded off.

We begin with a bard named Emereck and his companion Flindaran, who is an undercover aristocrat playing at adventurer. They ride into a sleepy town and immediately go to the inn. Flindaran wants to flirt with the mysterious innkeeper, but doesn’t wish for the ire of the redoubtable Cilhar monopolizing her time. But then the inn is attacked by disguised soldiers who are after the mysterious Cilhar. In the aftermath, Emereck and Flindaran stumble upon the titular magic harp, which confers immense power, but at immense cost.

Harp functions okay as a vehicle for empty fantasy cliches. The ending, however, crowds together too many reveals and sudden betrayals by characters we’d never been given a reason to care about. The clunky action is outdone only by the awkward exposition.

2025 read #32: Lioness Rampant by Tamora Pierce.

Lioness Rampant by Tamora Pierce

363 pages

Published 1988

Read from March 31 to April 11

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

After habitually taking three or more years between installments, I decided to switch it up and read the last volume of the Lioness Quartet immediately after I finished The Woman Who Rides Like a Man.

Perhaps I should have waited at least a little bit longer. This is the bulkiest book in the quartet, stuffed with a couple books’ worth of plotlines, the convenient return of more than one previously defeated enemy, and a lot of introducing one friend group to another friend group. Focused on my own writing this month, for the first time since 2022, I found I didn’t have much attention to spare, especially for the chapters away from Alanna. In particular, a forty page chapter cramming together all the political scheming that’s been happening in the capital in Alanna’s absence took me days to get through.

Rampant suffers, I think, from the need to give everyone and everything resolution. The result is an unevenly paced finale that’s less satisfying than it should have been.

2025 read #31: The Woman Who Rides Like a Man by Tamora Pierce.

The Woman Who Rides Like a Man by Tamora Pierce

269 pages

Published 1986

Read from March 29 to March 31

Rating: 3 out of 5

I read the first book in this series, appropriately enough titled Alanna: The First Adventure, in 2018. It wasn’t until three years later that I read the second, In the Hand of the Goddess. Somehow even more time has elapsed between reading the second and third book, which I’m only just now getting around to, almost three and a half years later. Truth be told, though, 2018 feels much farther from 2021 than 2021 does from now. Pandemic time has never made sense, and the pre-pandemic world feels like a different lifetime compared to the eternal present of the 2020s.

More so than when I read the first two books, something clicked with this series; I think I finally get it now. It is, quite simply and gloriously, wish fulfillment for 1980s horsegirls. Alanna is a badass young knight with violet eyes, a magic cat, a sword named Lightning, and a horse named Moonlight. This installment features a series of incidents rather than a plot, but it works. As a hyperlexic child, I would have eaten it up.

Unfortunately, Woman has its share of 1980s yikes: noble desert tribes, a hook-nosed villain, white imperialism, a prophecy that the Northern King must rule the tribes to bring peace. There’s also a dubious age-gap relationship.

On the other side of that coin, the Overton window has shifted so sharply to the right over the last four decades that Pierce’s starter-kit feminism — Alanna has sex outside of marriage! Alanna uses magic birth control! Alanna seeks her own path in life! — would somehow be more controversial today than it was in 1986. If this were somehow published for the first time today, it would soon be banned in fifteen states, and not because of the age gap.

2025 read #20: Sorcery and Cecelia by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer.

Sorcery and Cecelia, or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot: being the correspondence of two Young Ladies of Quality regarding various Magical Scandals in London and the Country by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer

320 pages

Published 1988

Read from March 2 to March 8

Rating: 3 out of 5

My reading habits have wilted into nothing. Good thing I’d already decided I wouldn’t try for record book numbers this year. It’s hard enough just surviving day to day with the fashy bullshit coming at us faster than we could possibly process it.

This is an airy morsel of an epistolic novel set in 1817. Two young ladies — Kate on her London debut, her cousin Cecy envious and stuck in rural Essex — correspond about their adventures at balls and picnics, and their brushes with the affairs of English wizards (as well as a certain Mysterious Marquis).

Sorcery is calculated to appeal to anyone who grew up reading Austen or the Brontë sisters. The characters are likable, and the prose seems like a good match for the period, at least to this non-expert. The way magic is lightly sprinkled over a historical fiction setting is reminiscent of Stevermer’s later A College of Magics. I found the overall effect charming but not compelling (though that likely derives from the general anhedonia of having to survive another Trump era).

2024 read #153: Sphere by Michael Crichton.*

Sphere by Michael Crichton*

378 pages

Published 1987

Read from December 15 to December 16

Rating: 1.5 out of 5 (though it probably deserves 1)

* Denotes a reread.

I’m somewhat familiar with the writing habits of more literary authors, but I have no idea how an automatic bestseller conveyor belt like Crichton would have worked on his books. Sphere was the immediate predecessor to Jurassic Park; are their similarities the result of Crichton working on them at the same time, or is it because he had so little creative depth? On one hand, grumpy mathematician Harry Adams reads like a first draft of Ian Malcolm. On the other, Beth Halpern is just another iteration of Crichton’s standard Strong Female Character, which his limited imagination translates to “woman literally bulging with muscles.” And, unsurprisingly, Sphere is riddled with fulminations against some monolithic idea of “scientists” and their collective irresponsibility.

When I was a tween, Sphere was my third favorite Crichton novel, behind only Jurassic Park and The Lost World. It’s competently constructed for an airport thriller, dispensing with unnecessary setup and doling out technobabble as required. I don’t carry the same nostalgia for Sphere that I hold for Jurassic Park, but what little I found to recommend rereading it now is undoubtedly tinged with tweenage fondness.

The book hasn’t aged well. Our normative white dude POV — literally named Norman — withstands minority perspectives in the form of Harry (Black genius from the inner city slums) and Beth (man-hating feminist who longs to manipulate men), both of whom muck up the undersea situation for poor old sensible Norman. It’s that classic “senior white man explores social tensions from the clarity of his own neutrality” motif of the 1980s and ’90s, elevated to a central role in the plot.

Especially in its final third, the book becomes a flagrant example of the conservative truism: “There are two genders, male and political. There are two races, white and political.” It’s all rather vile, really. No surprise that this is the guy who would go on to write Disclosure, Rising Sun, and State of Fear.

2024 read #140: A Dream of Kinship by Richard Cowper.

A Dream of Kinship by Richard Cowper

239 pages

Published 1981

Read from November 9 to November 12

Rating: 2 out of 5

Eight long years ago — maybe three or four subjective lifetimes ago — I was reading the first book in this series, The Road to Corlay, on a fateful Tuesday in November.

I already owned A Dream of Kinship, but in half-conscious superstition, I avoided reading it afterward, packing it up in moving boxes as I spent the following eight years bouncing from New York to Ohio to North Carolina and back to New York. Now that the worst has happened again, and Trumpenfascism has thrown open the door to Christian Nationalism, I figured: Fuck it. Might as well go ahead and read the book I’d irrationally been avoiding this whole time.

In a future of melted ice caps, sea level rise, a militant church, and a return to feudal polities, the Kinsmen are a standard-issue love-and-brotherhood movement founded by a standard-issue white guy messiah in The Road to Corlay. Kinship picks up a few months after the death of Thomas the piper, with the church and its secular enforcers moving in to destroy the heretical Kinsmen, even as a child is born and grows up into another white guy messiah in his own right.

Sci-fi authors of this era couldn’t get enough of the idea that a very special white boy would convince the world that cosmic love held the universe together. The setting’s gender norms are straight out of the 1950s. Women characters who start out as fighters either die or live long enough to become madonnas. The faith of the Kinsmen is little more than hippy-ish Christianity, spiced with some far-out clairvoyance. Such powers are hereditary — meaning the messiah, whether the author consciously thought it through or not, has a stink of eugenics around him.

There’s also a through-line that the church’s officials are attracted to boys, which isn’t presented in the sense of “men in power like to abuse power,” but more in the gross old “haha, priests are gay” line of bullshit. 

Cowper’s prose was the highlight of The Road to Corlay, but even that was a disappointment here. Much of Kinship is couched as a historical review looking back on the events of the novel from the perspective of the religion they promulgated. That can be a fun narrative device, but it’s applied inconsistently here, and, in my opinion, not done well.

I don’t think I’ll bother to persevere into The Tapestry of Time. Well, probably not. Maybe four years from now, if I’m still around.

2024 read #136: E.T. the Extraterrestrial by William Kotzwinkle.*

E.T. the Extraterrestrial in His Adventure on Earth by William Kotzwinkle*

247 pages

Published 1982

Read from November 7 to November 8

Rating: 1-ish out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

This was not the world I expected to be living in when I reread this book.

E.T. was a staple of my youth. Not the movie — this novelization. I found it in a thrift store when I was like 11 or 12, and while it never approached Jurassic Park or War of the Worlds on my list of compulsively-reread novels, I read it quite a few times. I read it so often, in fact, that as an adult, I didn’t realize I had never seen the movie until my partner R and I watched it last year.

I found it again last month in a used bookstore, and thought it might be a nice winter season comfort read. I imagined a cozy winter in our little house, secure in the knowledge of incremental social and economic progress under the coming Harris administration. Instead, here we are, right back in the raging shit river of the Trumpenfascist timeline. Instead of gentle winter blues, I’m fucking devastated, crying over everything, scared for the future. I’m so very tired.

But we keep going, because we cannot stop.

Anyway. This book.

I was surprised to learn that E.T. was novelized by William Kotzwinkle. I haven’t read anything else of his, though when I briefly contemplated reading all the World Fantasy Award-winning novels, a few years ago, his name stuck in my head as the author of 1977 winner Doctor Rat. The writing definitely feels like a literary fantasy prose-smith (or at least the 1980s idea of a literary fantasy prose-smith) signing up to cash a check. 

A bit of personal trivia: This book was my first exposure to Dungeons & Dragons, which is portrayed in all its Satanic Panic glory as a gateway to teen hooliganism, drugs, and depravity. Divorced suburban mom Mary frets: "Have I raised my babies to be Dungeon Masters?" I don't think it was intended to be as absurd as it reads today. Though maybe it was a satire on Reaganite family values pearl-clutching, for all I know. 

The book is grotesquely Eighties in other ways. The movie, wisely, leaves out the subplot of E.T.'s attraction to Mary. An actual line from the book: “How ironic it was that the willow-creature, the lovely Mary, pined for her vanished husband while in a closet, close at hand, dwelt one of the finest minds in the cosmos.” The straights should never be allowed to write anything monster-fuckery.

The film is also free of Kotzwinkle's Eighties-man-writing-a-woman flourishes. Every other sentence from Mary’s POV may as well be: “I’m horny and I’m desperate and I’d fuck the first man who looked at me, and also I’m a terrible mother who can’t stick to a diet.” There are a lot of jokes about roving perverts for a novelization of a kids' movie.

It’s like what America proved to be on Tuesday: a lot worse than I remembered.

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 #83: The Dinosaurs by William Stout.

The Dinosaurs: A Fantastic New View of a Lost Era, illustrated by William Stout

Text by William Service; edited by Byron Preiss

Introduction by Peter Dodson

160 pages

Published 1981

Read July 18

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 (maybe 3 if I’m generous)

Can we take a moment to notice just how hard Byron Preiss pushed for illustrated dinosaur books for adults? Throughout the decade or so between the Dinosaur Renaissance and the Jurassic Park craze, his name recurs as editorial instigator for a particular sort of publication. We have The Ultimate Dinosaur, Bradbury’s Dinosaur Tales, and this book. Dude was committed to making pop culture dinos happen. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were even more I’ve yet to learn about (especially since he seems linked to Don Glut’s Dinosaur Society, which cashed in on the ’90s dinomania with its own titles).

I forget the context, but I first heard of this book recently from a fellow writer on social media. She grew up paging through William Stout’s artwork and William Service’s accompanying prose vignettes. The cover is absolutely stunning, an art nouveau Parasaurolophus in 1970s kitchen tones. Naturally I wanted it. I was able to find a cheap copy on eBay, and here we are.

Stout’s artwork, inevitably, is the major selling point here. To contemporary eyes, his dinosaurs look lumpy and veiny, perhaps reminiscent of Frank Frazetta’s shadowy barbarians, though the delightful art nouveau influence runs throughout the book. There is a stunning full-page spread of a Leptoceratops beneath a magnolia in full flower that I want framed on my wall. If the book were exclusively composed of Stout’s art, I’d rate it more highly.

Service’s vignettes are, at best, serviceable (heh), a dry run for the fictionalized approach to paleontology that would culminate in Raptor Red. The concepts Service explores, and the pop science terms he deploys, provide a fascinating glimpse of how deep the tropes of ’90s dinomania reach. For example, this is the earliest I’ve ever encountered the usage of “raptor” as a colloquial catch-all for small, fast, sharp-clawed theropods. Even the contemporaneous Time Safari called them dromaeosaurs. Oddly, Service is out of synch with Peter Dodson’s introduction, returning again and again to the trope of cold-blooded dinosaurs stymied by an errant chill.

Some of the vignettes depict speculative behaviors I don’t think I’ve seen touched elsewhere, such as a Styracosaurus instinctively munching tart bark to help purge toxins it had inadvertently eaten. (This is also the only description of dinosaur constipation I’ve ever read: “At times peristaltic waves of contraction passed down the colon; cloacas trembled and everted in vain.”) This treatment of dinos as living animals makes The Dinosaurs a rewarding read even now, with much of its science forty years out of date.

2024 read #74: Dinosaur Tales by Ray Bradbury.

Dinosaur Tales by Ray Bradbury

144 pages

Published 1983

Read June 27

Rating: 2 out of 5

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

2024 read #54: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 1981 issue.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 1981 issue (61:3)

Edited by Edward L. Ferman

Published 1981

162 pages

Read from May 8 to May 11

Rating: 2 out of 5

I had big plans for this month. After the hectic and exhausting move back in April, I had May penciled in for a lotta hiking (maybe I’ll crack 30 miles for the first time since 2020!), a lotta reading (maybe I’ll reach 20 books for the first time ever!), maybe even some writing! Instead (which should not have come as a surprise, given how my last move went), May has shaped itself into a recuperation month. I’m drained, not sleeping well, barely able to focus on anything. Plus I’m sick for the very first time since I began masking in public, four years ago. It sucks.

My attention span is a problem, especially when I’m not at 100%. Maybe short stories will help? (Spoiler: Not really.)

—

“Mythago Wood” by Robert Holdstock. I first read this tale in The Secret History of Fantasy anthology. It’s a rambling, atmospheric postwar piece about the ancient wildwood and the folklore we place at its heart. It takes a while to get rolling, laying out each piece of information with almost 1920s-ish deliberation: here’s the narrator’s father, his parental neglect, and his obsession with the oakwood; here’s the narrator’s reluctant return home after the war, his brother’s descent into something like their father’s madness, and so on, long before we get to the mythopoeic meat of the story. Would I have been so charmed by “Mythago” if I had read it for the first time today, and didn’t have fond associations with it already? I’m not sure; I might have been put off by how thoroughly Oedipal the sons-vs-the-father conflict turns out to be. As it is, I was already fond of “Mythago,” so it was like revisiting a comfortable old friend. At the very least, it’s a superb example of early 1980s contemporary fantasy (which had an unfortunate tendency toward the Oedipal). I feel motivated to track down a copy of the novel Holdstock built up from this story. B

“The Gifts of Conhoon” by John Morressy. After “Mythago,” there are only two items on the table of contents I’m looking forward to, and this is not one of them. I’m amused that, in my review of the first Conhoon story I read, in the February 2000 F&SF, I observed the “early 1980s flavor” of the piece. Turns out I was more perceptive than usual! Twenty-some years is a long time to milk the “fantasy tropes, but silly!” gag. This one adds the punchline (if you can call it that) of “Women are great until they talk too much.” It doesn’t do anything for me. D?

“Not Responsible! Park and Lock It!” by John Kessel. I spent most of my childhood in a car, driven aimlessly around the American West by my delusional father. So this piece about a child born on an infinite westbound highway hit me on a weirdly personal wavelength. I always wanted to write a story literalizing that period of my life, but never have. Only partly related to that, I also want to play around in the subgenres of flivverpunk and car fantasy. This story, obviously, is not the one I would have written, but it’s unexpectedly creative, filled with clever details of a universe of car dads speeding forever westward. Midcentury gender norms make for unpleasant reading, but “Not Responsible” was published in 1981, and written with an eye toward the summer road trips of Boomer childhood, so it’s about what you’d expect. C+

“One Way Ticket to Elsewhere” by Michael Ward. This is a snarky technocrat story, in the midcentury “ex-NASA buzzcuts run the facility with clipboards under their arms” style. But here, thematically echoing “Mythago Wood,” the research is on a weird-horror “Elsewhere” accessed through the human brain. I don’t like this genre of procedural action story, though the weird-fiction angle helps it out a bit. There’s some imagery worthy of 1970s sword & sorcery: a “junkyard” of body parts; ravenous tubes that erupt from the ground at the scent of blood. But the weirder bits struggle to elevate the flat prose, undeveloped characters, and boilerplate plotting. Maybe C-

“There the Lovelies Bleeding” by Barry N. Malzberg. A thoroughly Malzbergian trifle about a couple discussing flowers and the hope of progressive reform of the wholesale slaughter around them. Here in the Biden years, it’s hard not to interpret this as a satire of liberal “reforms” that only soften the optics of violent dystopian fascism instead of addressing its systemic evils. Maybe C

“Indigestion” by Thomas Wylde. This had a mildly amusing premise: our narrator is the bathroom attendant on an interstellar cruise liner, and makes a little extra on the side hawking the excretions of one species as the drugs of another. But alas. This issue had managed (mostly) to avoid the full-bore 1980s-white-male-writers level of misogyny until now, lulling me into a false sense of security, so naturally it all comes pouring out here. Flush it down. F

“Dinosaurs on Broadway” by Tony Sarowitz. A decade ahead of the trend, this story is a precocious entry in the “dinosaurs as metaphor for modern disaffection” subgenre. Yuppie couple Sylvia and Richard have moved to Manhattan for Richard’s job. Richard now communicates exclusively in corporate buzzwords, while Sylvia, dislocated from Eugene, Oregon, struggles to adapt to the stresses and expectations of the city, losing herself in fantasies of Mesozoic megafauna. Naturally, I had hoped for more from this story, but it works fine for what it is. C

“The Corridors of the Sea” by Jane Yolen. Speaking of high hopes: undersea sci-fi from Jane Yolen! Alas, it’s an instantly forgettable technocrat piece. Gabe Whitcomb, no-nonsense press liaison, is concerned at the changes occurring in his friend, Dr. Eddystone, after the latter gets implanted with gills. A considerable portion of the page count is devoted to a press conference. A disappointing yawn. The most interesting aspect of the story is the barely-there hint that Gabe and Eddystone might be more than friends (which, I admit, I could be inventing to suit my contemporary tastes). D+

—

All in all, a remarkably tolerable issue of F&SF from the 1980s. Contrast this one with, say, the December 1982 issue. This one is almost commendable in comparison.

2024 read #29: Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, March 1987 issue.

Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, March 1987 issue (11:3)

Edited by Gardner Dozois

192 pages

Published 1987

Read from March 1 to March 2

Rating: 2 out of 5

This issue feels like a direct-to-video sequel to IASF’s August 1986 issue. There’s an overlong Orson Scott Card story, a Basil Argyros novelette from Harry Turtledove, and an offbeat dinosaur story from Tim Sullivan (which is the reason I’m reading this one), plus the obligatory poems from Robert Frazier. SFF mags always had a tendency to favor flavor-of-the-month authors (as well as the buddies of their editors), but this degree of repetition is ridiculous.

—

“Images” by Harry Turtledove. It feels odd to take Basil Argyros, whom we last saw bereaved but finding faith at the lowest point in his life in “Strange Eruptions,” and turn him into an alternate history procedural detective, a sort of Byzantine Brother Cadfael. It cheapens the story arc of “Eruptuons,” in particular the character of Helen, who isn’t even mentioned in this story. On its own merits, “Images” feels desultory, lacking the emotional heart of “Eruptions.” It reads less like a story with stakes and a plot, and more like a treatise on one of Turtledove’s special interests. This time the trouble is iconoclasm, a theological position which kindles riots in the fiercely opinionated city. Basil stumbles through one such riot, and inevitably gets entangled in the ecumenical council called by the emperor to settle the topic. Befitting the genre shift to a private eye tale, there’s even a femme fatale involved in the dispute. The didactic value of “Images” is dubious; I certainly don’t know where actual Byzantine theology ends and Turtledove’s alternate history begins. I’ll admit “Images” is painless enough, which counts for something in this era of sci-fi. C-

—

“Dinosaur on a Bicycle” by Tim Sullivan. Once upon a time, one of my favorite t-shirts was one I bought around 2007 and kept in rotation for almost a decade (back when a t-shirt could reasonably be expected to last for a decade). It depicted a villainous Victorian Velociraptor on a velocipede, complete with handlebar mustache, monocle, and penny-farthing. It’s venerable enough as internet jokes go, but I was surprised to find it presaged in print here, twenty years before I got that shirt.

“Bicycle” is a standard “intelligent dinosaur travels back in time and encounters humans who also traveled here from a divergent timeline” piece, nothing particularly original (though maybe it predates the heyday of that particular trend by a few years). What sets it apart is its winsomely depicted saurian steampunk aesthetic, with our intrepid Harry pedaling a penny-farthing to power the chronokineticon, a clockwork mechanism straight out of The Time Machine. (More time travel narratives, regardless of species, need to feature a carnosaur chasing a penny-farthing bike.) The humans’ time machine, in turn, is a “clockwork Mock-Dinosaur,” camouflaged in the shape of a tyrannosaur.

All too quickly, the story collapses under the weight of its own absurdity, throwing in intelligent canines and felines in their own respective chrono-contraptions, who of course fight like cats and dogs, not to mention time-traveling whales and raccoons and cockroaches and thousands of others. But the story retains some charm nonetheless, and was worth the effort of tracking it down, which can’t be said for much dinosaur fiction. B-

—

A Robert Frazier poem follows: “Encased in the Amber of Probabilities.” It’s solid.

—

“Waves” by Andrew Weiner. This tale presents a far-fetched sci-fi scenario: an American government that addresses economic stagnation through a near-universal dole. Advances in genetic and computer technology have rendered most jobs obsolete, leading to widespread unemployment, which the government addresses through art grants and business stipends. Pure fantasy, right? Preposterous. Weiner’s fictional Pause reminds me of the best parts of lockdown: the stimulus cash, the dilettantism, the surge of weird creativity and genuine self-discovery. However, like so many ’80s retrofutures that approximated the current moment, “Waves” is absurdly optimistic. The story itself has big sci-fi ambitions grounded in its genteel day-to-day dramas, swerving into brain wave mysticism and dark matter, psychoactive states and Big Bang cycles — all concepts more plausible than an American government supporting its citizens. The cosmic stuff doesn't quite land, but it's still a solid enough preview of the kitchen-sink approach of 1990s sci-fi. B-

—

Another Robert Frazier poem: “Birds of the Mutant Rain Forest.” Also pretty good, with memorable imagery, though I prefer the first one.

—

“Ice Dreams” by Sharon N. Farber. This one attempts to mix a folksy, various-tenants-at-the-boarding-house-meet-a-strange-new-character vibe, straight out of midcentury nostalgia fantasy, with a Magical Mentally Ill, the-voices-in-my-head-were-right-about-you trope, which is pure-strain 1980s. Even allowing for its humorous intentions, this story of a psychic vampire feeding off of, and spoiling, the secret daydreams of his fellow-tenants doesn’t make it work. Which is a shame, because I love What We Do in the Shadows, and I don’t think I’ve encountered psychic vampires anywhere else. Maybe D?

—

“Eye for Eye” by Orson Scott Card. Oh boy, a novella-length tale about an angry, misunderstood young white man who can kill with his mind, from noted bigot Card. Taken on its own, it’s a fairly solid story, engrossing and atmospheric and well-written, grappling with the theological implications of the implacability of the biblical God. It also presents the terrifying specter of what it would be like if white Southern Baptists got superpowers. But (as was typical of white male writers of the time, but particularly suspect coming from Card) he has his side characters perform racial commentary, and just in general gums up the narration with icky eighties vibes. Like, truly, does your lone Jewish character need to quote antisemitic tropes in a self-deprecating farewell? Do we need your white narrator to say the N-word to emphasize how not-racist he is toward a Black character? Do we need said narrator to say the N-word again, later, and say it’s okay because the Black character said it first? Women as a whole are given similar treatment. Where Mick can kill with his mind, a woman he meets has the power to… make men horny. There’s something extremely Mormon about it all. The myriad subtle bigotries that were just accepted in this era feel even more insidious from a writer as legitimately (and regrettably) talented as Card was at his peak. D-?

—

And that’s it! For an issue that felt like reheated leftovers, this one had some minor highlights. I’m glad I tracked down “Dinosaur on a Bicycle,” and “Waves” was definitely worth the read as well.

2024 read #25: Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, August 1986 issue.

Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, August 1986 issue (10:8)

Edited by Gardner Dozois

192 pages

Published 1986

Read from February 19 to February 20

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Another issue of Asimov’s that promises a story at least tangentially related to dinosaurs, though this one — “Stop-Motion” by Tim Sullivan — likely offers far less prehistoric action than its splash art suggests. And, unfortunately, we have to wade through an Orson Scott Card novelette to get there. Well, let’s get into it.

—

We begin with a poem by Robert Frazier: “A Worker in the Ruins of Ganymede.” Pretty good; an evocative sketch of archaeology in the outer solar system.

—

“Hatrack River” by Orson Scott Card. It’s truly unfortunate that noted bigot Card was one of the few authors (after Manly Wade Wellman) who dabbled in Appalachian fantasy prior to the turn of the millennium. When I was a brand new adult, long before Card’s bigotry became common knowledge (and long before I began unpacking my own white privileges in a society built upon institutional racism), I adored the idea of his “frontier magic” series. Though even then, I found Seventh Son lackluster enough that I never continued past it. Just now, I looked up the summary of the series on Wikipedia, and it’s, um, rather more racist than I realized back then. I wasn’t particularly thrilled to have this story between me and the one story I came here to read.

Plus, “River” was incorporated as the prologue to Seventh Son. (I don’t know if authors still do this, but certainly in the ’80s and ’90s, if you were famous enough, it was common practice for the big SFF mags to publish chapters from your upcoming novels as standalone “stories.”) So on top of everything else, I’ve read this damn thing before.

On its own, “River” offers little more than broad frontier vibes and child abuse, with a sprinkle of casual racism for seasoning. It’s way too long for what it is. You could watch the 1983 movie Eyes of Fire to get a similar ambience, and have a much better time. Card was a decent enough prose author for his era, but that isn’t enough to recommend this story. D+

—

cw for the following story: graphic dog death.

“Stop-Motion” by Tim Sullivan. Having read (and paged through) a lot of Asimov’s issues from the mid-’80s, I’ve discovered a curious trend from the time: lots of stories that invoke dinosaurs, or use them as a thematic motif, without being about dinosaurs. The Dinosaur Revolution had brought dinos back into pop culture in a big way, but pre-Jurassic Park, it seems like dinosaur stories were still considered old fashioned and hokey, burdened with all the pulp schlock that accumulated around them from the 1910s through the 1960s. So you got a bunch of stories that siphoned trendiness from dinosaurs without entrusting them with any starring roles.

This story slots into this oddly specific micro-trend. Eighteen year old Kevin, who dabbles in stop-motion filmmaking with his model dinosaurs, accidentally runs over a dog one night. We’re treated to pages of gory description as the dog slowly bleeds to death in Kevin’s car and in his mom’s basement, where Kevin spells out the story’s load-bearing leitmotif: “His hands had brought these creatures to life — on celluloid, at least — and here they all were, silently watching as the life ran out of this real, flesh-and-blood creature….”

Naturally, Kevin — who is grieving his father’s untimely death by being a real dickhead to his mother — gets this superstitious idea that he “sacrificed” the dog’s soul to his model tyrannosaur. When a film producer steals some of Kevin’s stop-motion work without attribution, Kevin follows the possessed-doll chain of logic and leaves the model in the producer’s office to wreak vengeance upon him. The aftermath happens off-screen, so we never “know” whether the rex did his dirty work or if it was all in Kevin’s head, blah blah blah.

Calling this story “Pet Sematary meets Ray Harryhausen” makes it sound much cooler than it really is. It’s extremely ’80s-short-horror in conception and tone: aggrieved young white man lashing out with the power of blood magic against one who has wronged him. Not my bag. It could have been worse, though. It incorporates dinosaurs into its narrative in a way I’ve never encountered before, which is rare. (Though compare and contrast with the tiny dinosaurs in David Gerrold’s “Rex,” anthologized in Dinosaur Fantastic.) I did enjoy the detail that Kevin’s rex had scraggly fur. Maybe that’s enough to bump it up to C-?

—

“Strange Eruptions” by Harry Turtledove. Unsurprisingly for Turtledove, this is an alternative history piece. Thankfully it has nothing to do with either Hitler or the Civil War. “Eruptions” centers on Argyros, a magistrianos in imperial Constantinople. He’s overwhelmed by a desk full of papyrus-work, in classic 1980s cop movie style. But then smallpox sweeps through the city. Argyros’ wife Helen gets sick; he invents a baby bottle for their son, wrestles with questions of doubt and faith, and (spoilers) inadvertently discovers cowpox inoculation. While it is unexpectedly moving at times, the main draw of this story is its pseudo-historical Byzantium, which is vividly and lovingly depicted. Not a lost classic, but solid. B

—

“The Dragon’s Head” by Karen Joy Fowler. It would be predictable to call this Bradburyan, but hey, it’s a child’s-eye perspective on strange, mystical, enigmatic things happening in a small town in the 1950s, so what can you do? Young Penny, who can do anything a boy can do, gets dared to trick-or-treat at the home of Mrs. McLaughlin, the neighborhood witch archetype. Mrs. McLaughlin invites her to come back for tea, where she gives Penny a kitten and tells her of the dragon, whose twin heads breathe fire and fog. The story then peters out; its mysteries never build into anything bigger than an opaque parable. Sometimes, though, a mood — a suggestion of magic — is enough. B

—

A poem by Hope Athearn, “Elegy for an Alien,” is quite lovely, domestic and intimate and welcoming.

—

“Aymara” by Lucius Shepard. A overlong novelette about Central American mercenaries from Lucius Shepard? What a shocker! (Sarcasm.) This one is not his best work. It reminds me of old pulp adventures, likely deliberately, and not in good ways. The prose is stiff and dated, as if Shepard had been channeling the tastes of the era. A Black character is given a thick dialect to speak.

The touches that root “Aymara” firmly in the ’80s aren’t any better. The titular Aymara is reputed to be a quasi-immortal sorceress who’s lived in a cave since the 1640s, but in reality she turns out to be a time traveler. She’s on a mission to ensure that mercenary Lee Christmas helps United Fruit take over Honduras, or else the future will suffer: “Sometimes you gotta do the wrong thing to ’chieve the right result.” Bad things need to happen so that worse things don’t happen is such a de rigueur eighties take; this story goes further, into outright accelerationism. (After everything that’s happened since 2016, I can’t abide accelerationism.)

Structurally, though, this story works as a particularly solid paradoxes vs predestination piece, and even on an off day, Shepard is a good enough author to suck me into the story. The ending, in particular, was strange and evocative in a way I wasn’t expecting. Perhaps, as a compromise, I’ll give it a middling C

—

One more Robert Frazier poem for the road: “A Starpilot Muses on the Universal Tide Pool.” You can get a taste of it from the title alone. Solid stuff.

—

Believe it or not, that’s it for this issue! In addition to the usual overburden of editorials, fan letters, book reviews, and logic puzzles, there’s also an extended essay by Michael Swanwick, “A User’s Guide to the Postmoderns,” which I might read at some point (or I might not). I should probably read more literary criticism instead of solely fiction on its own, but right now, I don’t wanna.

2024 read #21: Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, 21 December 1981 issue.

Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, 21 December 1981 issue (5:13)

Edited by George H. Scithers

182 pages

Read from February 6 to February 8

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Following a couple years behind the October 1979 issue, we have our second Asimov’s with a prehistoric animal (…kinda) on the cover. The interior splash art for “The Time-Warp Trauma” is more promising, with a feisty Archaeopteryx menacing a schlub in a checked suit. I love me some paravian line art. It was enough to sell me on this issue, even if the tenor of the drawing suggests a humorous story to follow. Let’s give it a go!

—

“The Time-Warp Trauma” by J.O. Jeppson. A social club for psychoanalysts — “Pshrinks Anonymous” — meets in a hotel’s sub-basement dining room. The Oldest Member is perplexed by a case: Mr. Y, a retiree who is nervous about living in New York City. When Mr. Y finally makes a breakthrough, he decides to walk to his appointment through Central Park, and accidentally falls asleep in a time-warp, waking up to an Archaeopteryx in a tree. On his way to the next appointment a week later, Mr. Y experiences a La Brea tar pit scene, with an elephant and sabertooth cats. The story is mildly fun, an inoffensively humorous postmodern take on the time-warp trope, using the sci-fi concept to examine anxieties of old age and retirement. (Apparently people from previous generations who were financially and socially privileged to be able to retire felt anxiety about it? Cannot relate.) “Trauma” is far more interested in light satire of psychoanalytics than it is in its time-warp; I spent more time looking at the splash art than the story spent in its putative prehistory. Still, I will begrudgingly admit that it qualifies as dinosaur fiction. Barely. A solid enough C+

“The Gongs of Ganymede” by Martin Gardner. Damn, early Asimov’s was a weird place. I assumed this was a mediocre story about a space cult; turns out it’s a two page setup for a brain teaser math problem. Moving along.

“The Santa Clone Interview” by Valdis Augstkalns. Another humorous piece, this one constructed as an exposé interview with the Big Guy at the North Pole, who’s doing damage control after his mall Santas are revealed to be clones. It’s the kind of joke that feels like a hoary old chestnut even when you hear it for the first time. It’s fine, I guess? Except the author couldn’t resist making a crack about Medicare. Oh, the eighties. I’ll be generous and say C-

“The Jarabon” by Lee Killough. This is a moderately fun hyperspace heist caper. Kele owes everything to Sperrow, the man who recognized her thieving skills and took her off the streets. But when he sends her to steal a jarabon, an exquisitely carved jewel from an extinct civilization, and the only way to pinch it is to “ride the timewind” — staying awake during hyperspace travel, risking madness — Kele wonders if it’s worth it any longer. C+

A poem follows: “IMPROBABLE BESTIARY: The Thing in the Jar” by F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre. From browsing the tables of contents of other Asimov’s from this time, I know it’s part of a series. For a rhyming poem about a carnival “freak show” (not a promising premise), it’s pretty good. The lines have a nice singalong rhythm.

“Wrong Number” by F.M. Busby. Entry in a humorous serial about a dude with the ability to alter events after they happen. Feels awfully similar to Isaac Asimov’s Azazel series — though this installment, at any rate, is free of Asimov’s signature misogyny and grossness. Still not my cup of tea, though relatively painless. C-?

“Packing Up” by P. J. MacQuarrie. In the sanitized, minimalist future, live-in psych workers are in high demand. Bart is one such domestic, padding around the halls of his employers, the industrialist Mellewin family, making sure everyone sleeps well, keeping their neuroses under control. But Bart is approaching burnout. He fills the blank halls with his fantasies of a life and love of his own, daydreams of vacation, which get smothered by the weight of the Mellewins’ worries. It builds to Bart wondering if maybe a little anxiety, the occasional sleepless night, might be good for people. There isn’t much to this story. Its most interesting aspect is how it translates Gilded Age class norms into a soft sci-fi future. Bart isn’t a real doctor, just a specialized and trained addition to “the help.” The story’s concern with too much psychological intervention leading to coddled people who don’t know how to handle their own problems might make sense from a class-based lens. (It certainly isn’t an issue in our own society, unless you make north of six figures.) But ultimately, it feels like yet another quasi-libertarian “care makes humans too soft!” propaganda piece. Still, I didn’t dislike it. Maybe C-

“End Game” by Brian Aldiss. A palindromic story is impressive. However, between this, “The Gongs of Ganymede,” and all the humor pieces, this issue feels more like a Big Book of Puzzles & Activities than a sci-fi magazine. All gimmicks and games, not much literature. 

“A Thief in Ni-Moya” by Robert Silverberg. I forget how long ago it was — maybe 2004, 2005? — but once, I was fixated on Silverberg’s Majipoor books. I read the first three volumes as quickly as I could track them down in used bookstores. Which is how I first encountered this novella: it was collected in The Majipoor Chronicles. Revisiting it all these years later, I’m struck by how much this series informed my later tastes in cozy fantasy. The setting is richly detailed, immense, as evocative with its rain-filled bathing troughs and tooled leather pouches as it is with its teeming continents and thirty-mile-high mountains. It sucked me back in right away. Some light spoilers for the story itself: Inyanna, a young shopkeeper in a remote town, gets suckered into giving up her life savings in Majipoor’s equivalent of the old “deed to the Brooklyn Bridge” scam. She travels thousands of miles to the inconceivably vast metropolis of Ni-Moya to claim her inheritance, and falls in with helpful young thief Liloyve, who invites her into the underworld of thieves. It’s a simple, well-worn tale of a rogue’s origin, one of the most Dungeons & Dragons things I’ve ever read, but told so atmospherically that I have nothing to complain about. B

—

And that’s it! I feel a tiny bit bamboozled by this issue, between the time-warp barely playing a role in “The Time-Warp Trauma,” and half the rest of the issue falling closer to brain teasers than to stories. (I exaggerate, but still.) Nonetheless, it was nice to revisit Majipoor. After almost two decades of barely thinking about it, I’m considering running through that series again.

2023 read #134: Time Safari by David Drake.

Time Safari by David Drake

278 pages

Published 1982

Read from November 13 to November 15

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

I didn’t expect great things going into this pulpy fix-up. I learned about it through a review on the Prehistoric Pulp blog, which offered at least marginal encouragement, calling it “a fun little book.” But the tagline on the back cover — “Hot blooded dinosaurs and cold-blooded women don’t mix on Time Safari” — was unappetizing, to say the least.

Safari glues together three novellas: “Calibration Run,” which deposits our manly hunter Vickers with a small team in the Pliocene Levant; “Time Safari,” an expansion of a story originally published in 1981; and “Boundary Layer,” which inevitably brings our heroes to the end-Cretaceous extinction — or, rather, our heroes bring extinction to the Cretaceous. 

We make it seven pages into “Calibration” before Linda Weil, team paleontologist and medic, must politely discourage some sexual harassment from a married man in the time-camp. (Later, this married man calls her a slut. Because that’s the kind of book we’re dealing with here.) Somehow Drake’s narration is even more ammosexual than L. Sprague de Camp’s in “A Gun for Dinosaur,” which was Drake’s obvious inspiration. Guns and calibers receive more description than poor Linda Weil does.

“Calibration” is some silly melodrama about Linda Weil wanting to catch a hominid to take back to the modern era for study, and the clash of personalities within their team at the news. Drake's descriptions of the Pliocene are pretty good. The story has some nice little details, like the hominid group foraging honey from a hive. However, “Calibration” is loaded with antiquated assumptions of hominid behavior: the males are providing for everyone else, led by a single alpha male, etc. Modern woman Weil, by contrast, is depicted as willing to endanger their future timeline in her eagerness to prove herself. Conscious or not, the juxtaposition reveals something about the author’s attitudes.

The Late Cretaceous “Safari” maintains a similar mix of well-described paleo-environments and dubious old gender norms. It has a stock complement of characters for a dino-hunt tale: the arrogant rich guy; his dissatisfied wife, Adrienne, who makes eyes at the guides; the pair who only want to take photographs; and so forth. It’s nothing de Camp wouldn’t write five times over in the early ’90s.

At least the dinosaurs are interesting. This might be the earliest story I’ve ever read that featured a pack of sickle-clawed raptors (here referred to properly as dromaeosaurs, because Jurassic Park hadn’t popularized “raptors” yet). The rest of the Cretaceous fauna is consistent with the early years of the Dinosaur Renaissance. The smallest theropods even sport feathers! The dinos, alas, rarely get more than a moment to shine before Vickers and his crew blast them to smithereens. (Literally — someone brought a grenade launcher.)

If you thought the “Safari” would not end with Vickers and the newly widowed Adrienne fucking immediately after her husband and a bunch of other people died in the jaws of theropods, you don’t know what kind of book this is.

The final segment, “Boundary,” gets deep into the weeds with its geopolitics plot — Israel and the Arab states are on the brink of a nuclear war, a proxy front where the Cold War threatens to turn hot. At this distance, it’s hard to tease apart the mainstream 1982 American zeitgeist from specific antisemitic and Islamophobic attitudes the author might have held. Why is any of this in a book about manly men gunning down dinosaurs? Well, you see — I don’t care enough to type it out. The point is, I didn’t like the vibe of this part of the story. It reminded me too much of Dan Simmons’ Olympos. Was this just how Americans thought things stood in the balance at the time? Maybe. I wasn’t quite born yet, so I don't know.

It was around this part of the book that I realized: this is that David Drake. The Vietnam vet who squeezed a career out of military sci-fi and collaborated with John Ringo. Yikes.

The rationale for the Arab vs Israeli plot is to draw an obvious parallel between Mutually Assured Destruction and the extinction of the dinosaurs. (It was so obvious, I typed that sentence the moment nuclear weapons were mentioned, and never needed to edit it.) In their desperation to placate the asshole who’s currently the American Secretary of State, here on special invitation from the Israeli Prime Minister, Vickers and Adrienne inadvertently introduce the pathogen that destroys the dinosaurs. The connection is clumsy and doesn’t make for a satisfying story, but it’s there.

This book could have been so much better without the relentless slaughter and the ham-fisted attempts at geopolitical commentary. But since that’s like 85% of the book, there isn’t much to salvage.

2023 read #132: Dinosaur Planet Survivors by Anne McCaffrey.

Dinosaur Planet Survivors by Anne McCaffrey

295 pages

Published 1984

Read from November 10 to November 11

Rating: 1 out of 5

Somehow, six years elapsed between the publication of Dinosaur Planet and Dinosaur Planet Survivors. The first Planet ended halfway through its story, a cliffhanger which found our heroes entering cryogenic sleep to wait out the heavyworlder mutiny that had ended their survey of the mysterious world. Six years is a surprisingly long turnaround time, given how little care McCaffrey put into the original book (which, until I had the misfortune of reading The Land that Time Forgot, was the worst dinosaur novel I’d ever read). You’d think she could have tossed off a conclusion in six months if she wanted to. Does any sign of effort make its way into the belated sequel?

Forty-three years have elapsed since the heavyworlder mutiny. Our bland protagonists Varian and Kai are awakened from cold-sleep by a Federation alien whose only interest is recovering ancient survey equipment from millions of years ago. That secured, it abandons them again. Soon, the survivors learn that the heavyworlders have proliferated for two generations, building a violent and muscle-bound society of dinosaur hunters in loincloths. And the colony has extended an invitation to space pirates to come settle and bolster their gene pool.

Dinosaur hunters! Space pirates! Sounds like it should, at the very least, be some silly pulpy fun, right?

Nah.

Most of the same issues I had with Planet persist here. Varian, the supposed animal lover, wants her sacrifice to mean something — as in, she desperately wants the Federation to swoop in and stripmine the prehistoric planet, which the narrative somehow construes as virtuous, even while it disparages how the heavyworlders are “raping” the planet. Weird eugenicist vibes continue, but honestly that’s true of most sci-fi written by certain generations. Same with the “I can’t help but respect industrious colonists” shit.

Worst of all, there continues to be a dearth of dinosaurs on this planet. We don’t get any kind of dinosaur encounter until page 62, and even then our viewpoint Varian is flying around observing the action. Somehow that’s the closest engagement we get with dinosaurs in the entire duology. We spend more pages discussing the bad taste of a medicinal moss than we do encountering dinosaurs. Rather than the mineral prospecting that filled the first book, here the bulk of the narrative shifts to wrangling over which group has the “lawful” claim to the planet, which is exactly as riveting as it sounds. Survivors is relentlessly dull — which is quite an accomplishment for a book that promises a literal planet full of dinosaurs.

The best I can say is that McCaffrey’s prose might be like 5% better here than it was in Planet. Survivors still reads like a starships-and-jetpacks chapter book, or maybe one of the lesser Star Wars expanded universe novels; it would take just a few tweaks to turn this into Young Jedi Adventures: Marooned on Dagobah! (That hypothetical book probably would've been more entertaining, actually.) Overall, though, there’s less technobabble and fewer acronyms thrown in to make it sound science-fictiony. Not much of an improvement, but it was appreciated.

2023 read #125: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November 1989.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November 1989 issue (77:5)

Edited by Edward L. Ferman

162 pages 

Published 1989

Read from October 28 to October 29

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

Much like the December 1982 issue, I’ve chosen to read this one because it marks a date of personal importance. I’ve read an unusual number issues from around this time: the regrettable September 1989, the slightly worse December 1989, the slightly more promising March 1990, and the worst issue I’ve ever read, August 1990. My expectations for this issue are correspondingly low.

“Icicle Music” by Michael Bishop. Within a couple years of this tale, Bishop wrote my tweenage self's favorite short story: “Herding with the Hadrosaurs,” in The Ultimate Dinosaur. It didn’t age that well, perhaps, but in comparison to most of the other stories in that book, it was a masterpiece. So I thought maybe this one wouldn’t be so bad. “Icicle Music” is adequate enough. The first half is an atmospheric, 1957-set tale of Christmas Eve and a deadbeat dad who comes down the chimney. I think it’s meant to be grimly funny. If we’d left it there, with (spoilers!) 12 year old Danny butchering a reindeer named Blitzen while his mother burns his dad’s body in the dump, I think it would have been a more cohesive story. Instead, we flash forward to 1987 and find that Danny, now dying, is telling the yarn of how his father’s ghost sought revenge every tenth Christmas since that night. (Bishop plays coy about it, but I think the implication is that Danny is gay and he’s dying of AIDS.) The second half isn’t bad, but I think the switch from third-person limited to conversational tell-all makes the whole thing feel imbalanced, like a framing device with only the back half of the frame. C+

Content warning for fictional SA in the next story.

“The Extra Ancestor” by Donald Barr. This one begins with a one-two punch. First, the editorial introduction tells us author Barr was appointed by Reagan to a national council on education (shudder). Next, the story opens with a professor casually blackmailing his female grad student so he can impregnate her via in vitro and perform genetics experiments by way of reproductive coercion. Yeah, fuck this story. As if that weren’t bad enough, it’s about splicing dog genes into human embryos to make, uh… telepaths. Instead, young Eddy inherits nothing more than an excellent sense of smell, and the rest of the story is — I kid you not — an extended rumination on how girls are stinky. (Speaking of dog-human hybridization, Olaf Stapledon did it better in 1944, and somehow made it less skeevy in a book with romantic bestiality. At least that was consensual.) I literally expected nothing better from a Reagan appointee, but goddamn. F

“Divergence” by Jennifer Swift. There's nowhere to go but up after that last story, but I strained to find interest in this tale of Jewel, the daughter of a media-savvy Creationist, inadvertently discovering a new branch of bacterial evolution. It's ably written, and draws neat parallels between RNA transcription and theological interpretation. Plus it does that thing I like where the title refers to several things: lifeforms diverging over time; the bacterium diverging from the rest of known life; Jewel diverging from the faith of her father. But it’s overlong, and frankly I felt apathetic about the subject matter. It ends with that wishy-washy “maybe science and religion are just different ways of understanding what God made” bullshit. (Spoiler alert: feel-good liberal attempts to understand and coddle Christian extremists have done nothing but amplify Christofascism over these last few decades.) Maybe C+

“The Name of the Demon” by Patricia Anthony. Pretty standard ’80s horror number about a couple of drug-running Texas lowlifes double-crossing a demonologist (who, because it was the ’80s, was moonlighting in the coke business). Nothing special. I think a setup like that could have had potential, but instead the story just kind of ends. D+

“Tikina-Londi” by Peni R. Griffin. Texas-flavored fairy tale about a new mother struggling to keep her child inside her house and away from Death. Mostly enjoyable, aside from some stray ’80s shittiness (the mother calls the hired girl “you little slut” when the boy makes his way out of the house under her watch). C-

“On the Wings of Imagination, Fly” by Gary Wright. Stories of truck driving have been oddly frequent in the issues of F&SF I’ve read. There was Andrew Crowley’s “Night Haul” in the September / October 2023 issue; T. R. Napper’s “Highway Requiem” in the May / June 2023 issue; further back in time, there was Russell Griffin’s “The Road King” in the February 1986 issue. That may not seem like a lot, but this issue is the sixteenth I’ve reviewed for this blog, and this is the fourth story centered on trucking, which means a truck driver story has appeared in 25% of all F&SF issues I’ve read to date. (That’s not even counting Thomas A. Easton’s “Down on the Truck Farm” in the March 1990 issue, which ends with our troubled teen protagonist apprenticing to drive a genetically engineered truck-dog.) Our trucker today is a mediocre white guy who knows he’s special but no one gives him a break, damn ’em, so he hauls low-paying payloads and hopes to write a song that’ll make it big someday. Just wait ’til you learn what he thinks about his wife! He’ll tell ya, because I’m not repeating any of it here. This story feels numbingly long, even though it isn’t, and possesses no redeeming qualities. F

“Bad Luck” by Vance Aandahl. This is a western bauble, stuck in that awkward stage where westerns had become gritty and ugly and ironic, but hadn’t yet evolved beyond investing white ex-cavalrymen as the unquestioned heroes of the genre, and Mexican banditos still exclaimed “Ay chihuahua!” (In this instance, I’m pretty sure some element of humor is involved, at least in theory.) Like, for what it is, it’s fine? But I don’t like what it is. Maybe I’ll be overly generous and say D-

“A Can of Worms” by Ben Bova. In other hands, there could be a kernel of an interesting story here. Elverda Apacheta is an indigenous sculptor from the Andes who tells a tale about when she lived on an asteroid and carved the history of her people on its surface. However, because it’s the '80s, some rich white dude shows up in his spaceship, the Adam Smith, and our Quechua sculptor is immediately smitten with his "uniqueness," and inevitably falls in love with him. (I've never read Bova before, but this whole deal fits his vibe, you know?) Anyway, "Worms" is professionally written and all that, but can't overcome the triple threat of fetishization, white saviorism, and capitalism. Also, there's a recurring motif of fatphobia, because why not. D-

And that's it for another dip into the world of '80s sci-fi and fantasy. No real highlights, a bunch of shit best left forgotten, but maybe it's slightly better than other near-contemporary issues. Which is no great praise.