2025 read #26: Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin

Illustrated by Eric Beddows

247 pages

Published 2003

Read from March 15 to March 18

Rating: 3 out of 5

I’ve read more books by Le Guin than by any other single author — nineteen as of So Far So Good. (This one makes twenty.) I’ve read all of her major fantasy novels, all but one of her major sci-fi novels, and two collections of her poetry. Yet somehow I’ve avoided all of her short story collections, even though I often adore her short fiction and I’ve owned a copy of Tales from Earthsea for years.

Someone on a Discord channel mentioned this book the other day, and by coincidence it was one of the handful of Le Guin titles at my library, so I decided to give it a go. I’m going in knowing nothing about it.

—

“Sita Dulip’s Method” (2003). Half thesis statement for the collection, half humorous fictional essay reminiscent of newspaper columnists of yore, this throwaway piece was (Le Guin assures us) written before 9/11, when the main airport concerns were boredom and bad food. A shrug.

“Porridge on Islac” (2003). More of the same here, as our narrator arrives on a plane where genetic engineering became an irresponsible fad, the effects of which still trouble society. You can just tell this was written around the turn of the millennium.

“The Silence of the Asonu” (1998). A more explicitly anthropological yarn, not so much a story as a report on a culture wherein the adults speak only rarely. I enjoyed it, though I confess I didn’t clock whatever allegorical through-line Le Guin intended here. I do, however, begin to grasp something of the conceit of this collection, belatedly: anthropological notes from across the multiverse, each entry keyed into a Le Guinian allegory for life or society.

“Feeling at Home with the Hennebet” (2003). I quite liked this one, in which our narrator (who seems to be Le Guin herself) visits a plane where everyone is a lot like her, except for their conception of self and the universe. Perhaps a reader grounded in Taoist philosophy would be better able to unpack it. As it is, I appreciated that the way the Hennebet perceive themselves was never fully explained.

“The Ire of Veksi” (2003). Another anthropological report instead of a story, this one explores a violent yet somehow largely cooperative culture. An interesting line of thought. Not to be a shallow dork about it, but this could be a good starting point for a barbarian PC’s backstory 

“Seasons of the Ansarac” (2002). Quite lovely piece of writing, documenting a culture inspired by migratory ospreys on a world of years-long seasons. Evocative and charming. I liked it.

“Social Dreaming of the Frin” (2003). A fun look at a culture with communal dreaming, and the various ways the inhabitants adapt to, avoid, or avail themselves of the implications. 

“The Royals of Hegn” (2000). I read and reviewed this entry along with the issue of Asimov’s where it was originally published. There I wrote: “It’s a droll, satirical affair set in an island kingdom where the population is so small, and so interrelated, that almost everyone is an aristocrat or king in some way. All of these royals are obsessed with the doings of the single family of inbred commoners.” I gotta say, “Hegn” makes way more sense in the context of this collection than by itself in a magazine.

“Woeful Tales from Mahigul” (2003). Right in the middle of this themed collection of stories is a story that’s a themed collection of micro fiction, a string of thoughtful fables on tyranny, genocide, and war. Stays with you.

“Great Joy” (2003). A satire on the empty consumerism of the Dubya Bush era, as well as the predatory colonialism underpinning tourism. Having begun my own journey toward political awareness around this time, it’s frustrating how the fundamental soullessness of American Christian conservatism was so clearly evident way back when, and has only gotten worse since then. I liked the understated viciousness of the satire, though the faintly paternalistic ending — in which the plane gets liberated by outside authorities — feels particularly dated.

“Wake Island” (2003). A takedown of the turn-of-the-millennium fad for ascribing genius to people who don’t sleep. It could apply equally well to our contemporary fad for eugenicist Silicon Valley assholes, a parallel which isn’t a result of Le Guin’s gift of prophecy but rather due to how predictable and rote the tech entrepreneur “We’re intrinsically better than you” mentality has always been. My quibble with this story is the way it reads like a news-magazine investigative tell-all, never my favorite storytelling voice. We could always use more anti-eugenics writing, though.

“The Nna Mmoy Language” (2003). What begins as a fascinating conceptual piece on linguistic anthropology evolves into a cautionary tale of industrial destruction. I liked it.

“The Building” (2002). Another anthropological piece, this time documenting an ecologically devastated world where two sentient species have evolved a culture of avoiding each other, except for the strange, mysterious work on the Building: the largest single edifice known from any world. Fascinating stuff. (The Building itself would be an amazing artifact to adapt to a Dying Earth story or TTRPG.)

“The Fliers of Gy” (2000). In a world of feathered people, only some few develop wings late in adolescence. I parsed this entry as a sympathetic allegory for neurodivergence, perhaps schizophrenia or something along those lines. Whether I was on the mark or not, it’s an interesting concept, tenderly depicted.

“The Island of the Immortals” (1998). One of the more surreal and haunting pieces I’ve read from Le Guin, in which immortality is a virus spread by a biting fly. I won’t spoil what the effects of immortality are, but this is a solid and memorable story.

“Confusions of Uñi” (2003). As a sort of closing catch-all, this surreal number sees our narrator flit her way across a thoroughly changeable plane. This could have been horribly precious and self-indulgent in less skilled hands, but it was okay here. For all its dream logic, it is perhaps more autobiographical than anything else in this collection.

—

And that’s it! Having gone in with no notion of what these stories would be, I was thrown at first by the lack of conventional storytelling — character development, plotting, and so forth. But once the vibe clicked, I mostly enjoyed the anthropological approach. Planes has me excited to read Always Coming Home, the last of Le Guin’s major SFF novels that I’ve yet to read.

2024 read #129: Timeline by Michael Crichton.*

Timeline by Michael Crichton*

496 pages

Published 1999

Read from October 30 to October 31

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

This feels like the end of an era. If Kamala Harris wins, she's positioned herself too far to the right to inspire confidence in any lasting progressive change, but at least the MAGA parasite throttling American politics could be finished (barring some episodic violence here and there). If Trump wins — or, more likely, gets appointed against the will of the electorate by a corrupt Supreme Court and Speaker of the House — America as an idea is over.

Though I didn't know it at the time, Michael Crichton's Timeline also marked the end of an era. It was the last present my grandmother bought me before she died. Less poignantly, it also represents a strain of technological optimism that withered away sometime after the turn of the Millennium, its death hastened by conservative politics and 9/11 and Forever War.

Crichton, in his own small way, helped kill the optimistic future: He would soon abandon his career-long shtick of “thrillers that make normies think they learned something” in favor of conspiracy pap and brainrot. State of Fear, one of the origins of the “Humans can't alter the climate, so evil scientists built a weather machine!” bullshit that reached mainstream audiences after Hurricane Heléne, was published just five years after Timeline. So this book was the end of an era for him, as well.

I remember reading Crichton’s introduction here, which in characteristic fashion spoke of the promise, and the dangers, of the coming quantum technology. A teenager at the time, I imagined a future of quantum miracles: teleportation, multiverses, space exploration, potentially even my personal holy grail, travel into Deep Time. Instead, the last twenty-five years have erected a second Gilded Age, with corporations and Big Tech racing to deregulate, stagnate, profit off consumers, and siphon free money from the government. Instead of anything useful or groundbreaking, they've given us drone strikes, social media, private equity, and rockets that blow up. Perhaps the extremely wealthy might know a future of quantum promise, but we peons certainly won't.

I've avoided rereading Timeline as an adult, in large part because it’s not that good. Crichton wrote exactly one and a half okay books in his long career, and this isn't one of them. Perhaps recognizing this, Crichton conspicuously emulates the plot beats of Jurassic Park, even opening with a middle aged man worried about getting lost on vacation as his wife gives insufficient directions. Crichton then follows the JP blueprint through some medical procedural chapters and some boardroom scenes, and brings us to a dig site funded by the nefarious corporation. Knights perform the role of Velociraptors. Even the end goal is the same: a theme park. It’s basically Jurassic Park from Temu.

Those early portions, spackled over the old Jurassic Park framework, are almost okay, at least by technothriller standards. Once the crack team of grad students is inserted into the multiversal Middle Ages, Crichton’s thriller instincts flail about in self-parody. The medieval times ultraviolence overshoots “thriller” and lands in inadvertent slapstick. There’s a sequence with a pine tree and a cliff face straight out of a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. The action is soundless, weightless, going through the motions. The plot contrivance that inevitably strands the students in 1357 is particularly silly, as well.

Overall, Timeline is somewhat better than I remembered — and inspired way more of my own fictional time travel mechanics than I realized. It’s still a late period Crichton, though, and about a hundred pages too long, at that.

2024 read #85: Songs for Ophelia by Theodora Goss.

Songs for Ophelia by Theodora Goss

Introduction by Catherynne M. Valente

134 pages

Published 2014

Read from July 20 to July 21

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

I’ve been in a writing drought. Since late 2022, I’ve written maybe three short stories and a handful of poems. That’s productive compared to, say, my average writing output between 2002 and 2020, but nowhere near where I want to be as a writer.

In particular, I’ve been wanting to write more fantasy poetry. I’ve been stuck partway through writing two separate full-length collections I hope to self-publish. Inspiration is needed. But it turns out there aren’t many lists recommending “must-read fantasy poetry collections,” even though I know plenty of titles have to be out there.

This book appeared on one of the few lists I managed to find, and I’m quite glad I was able to get a copy. These poems span from 1993 to 2012, and range from tightly ordered rhyme schemes to free verse. I don’t often rhyme in my poetry; I’m clumsy at it. More often than not, Goss makes it seem effortless, as if she merely retrieved songs that had drifted through the wood and along the stream since before the days of broadsides.

Dancers beckon from the oak wood; starlit phantoms bring temptation into bedrooms. Pale creatures lurk in secret pools and wait outside windows, all soft curves and coy glances until their teeth finally show. Arrogant young lords ignore warnings and ride to their doom. It’s all classic stuff, courtly imagery that would make Patricia A. McKillip proud, but told with gleams of malice that add a charm all Goss’s own.

2024 read #40: A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson.*

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson*

277 pages

Published 1998

Read from March 29 to March 31

Rating: 2 out of 5

* Denotes a reread. 

When I read this book at 16, way back in 1999, I was already fixated on hiking the Appalachian Trail. I had grown up living in the woods — or, more precisely, I had grown up on the road, which by age 12 had devolved into sleeping in the car in various parks and forests from the Adirondacks to the Cascades, from the Mogollon Rim to the Black Hills.

My father had, in his saner days, indulged in the Rocky Mountain High vibe of the ’70s. He harbored a glimmer of that even as he turned paranoid and violent with age, one dim spark of humanity lingering as he devolved into a monster. At one point in my tweens, he thrifted the February 1987 issue of National Geographic, which had the article “Appalachian Trail: A Tunnel Through Time.” I pored through it again and again, examining every photograph, imagining myself at this particular shelter, navigating that specific piece of trail, finding this certain wildflower. When I fantasized about leaving my father behind in my impending adulthood, it was natural that I couldn’t conceptualize anything beyond walking away into the woods. (I certainly couldn’t imagine integrating into human society.)

All of which is more depressing and confessional than what I meant to say, which is merely that, as an outdoor hipster, I was well acquainted with the Appalachian Trail long before I encountered this book on the Wal-Mart bestseller rack. For the public at large, though, I understand that A Walk in the Woods was a moment of discovery. It is often cited as one of the main reasons the AT became over-popularized, setting in motion what would ultimately become the “walking frat party” of the yearly thru-hiker bubble. (Browsing the shelves of used bookstores, where, to this day, 80% of the outdoor recreation section will be stacks of this book, lends its anecdotal support to this idea.) Like any treasured place, the AT was better loved when it was less famous.

All of that, of course, still lay in the future. A quarter-century ago, avoiding my father as best as I could from the passenger seat, I read and reread A Walk in the Woods with all the intensity of a religious text, a meditation. So much so that, like childhood staples The War of the Worlds and Jurassic Park, every word and every line is familiar to this day, which I wasn’t expecting when I picked it up again for this revisit. I had truly forgotten how much this book had meant to me, once upon a time.

That nostalgia gloss is an awkward reading companion today. Turns out I don’t really like Woods anymore. Living in a car, I didn’t pick up on Bryson’s casual misogyny. Most women who cross his path get lampooned: desperate, unattractive, fat, unintelligent, prattling, oblivious. The only men he caricatures with equal gusto are the Appalachian rural poor, because of course this book is classist as hell, too.

In general, Bryson’s humor feels stale and mean-spirited to me nowadays, reading like an uncomplicated normie sitcom from the ’90s: Everybody Loves Raymond, maybe, or The King of Queens, something with a lot of fat jokes and a scolding wife, with the character Katz as the larger-than-life neighbor who gets cheers from the studio audience. Sometimes Bryson indulges in moments of almost enjoying himself, but then it’s right back to whole chapters of complaining about fat people, hostels, mice, maps, gizmos, rain, rain gear, or the National Park Service. It’s exhausting far more often than it is charming. (In retrospect, it explains why On the Beaten Path would be published so quickly thereafter. Clearly, the publishers thought “cranky misanthrope on the Appalachian Trail” was a license to print money.)

2024 read #27: Analog Science Fiction and Fact, November 1992 issue.

Analog Science Fiction and Fact, November 1992 issue (112:13)

Edited by Stanley Schmidt

176 pages

Published 1992

Read from February 28 to February 29

Rating: 1 out of 5

The first full issue of a science fiction magazine that I ever read was the June 1999 Analog. Maybe it was in that issue that I saw the iconic cover of this issue for the first time, with its tyrannosaur stalking two astronauts — one human, one blobby and alien — through a canyon. Maybe it featured prominently on an offer for back issues, or perhaps it was on one of those subscription cards that tumble out of magazines. Regardless, I’m excited to finally have the chance to read it!

—

“Embracing the Alien” by Geoffrey A. Landis. Our narrator is a plantlike being sent to study the strange creatures known as humans. The being uses the designation Torri for the humans’ benefit. Torri has been assigned to a human FTL ship, which pauses to investigate a black hole. But the black hole hosts an unknown electromagnetic life form, which pulls them into the event horizon and sends them back in time to the terminal Cretaceous on Earth. There, the travelers meet a younger version of the energy being, who asks them to vote on whether the human future should be wiped away to usher in a utopian dinosaur timeline.

If you’ve read a story in the ’90s Analog style, you know the formula: sci-fi adventure, lightly seasoned with human drama, but predominantly focused on the genre elements. This one goes through its relevant character beats like a checklist. It works adequately (if perfunctorily) as a story, but lacks emotional depth. Colonialism is woven inextricably throughout its premise: humanity (read: white people) spread disruption and war wherever they went, but they also taught other races technology and new ways of thinking, so they should be thanked! It’s impossible not to recognize that line for what it is, nowadays, even if it was wholly subconscious when written. Also, there just aren’t enough dinosaurs. I’m sure I would have loved “Alien” when I was younger, though. C

—

“Steelcollar Worker” by Vonda N. McIntyre. Jannine and Neko are workers in a VR factory, finessing molecules into proprietary compounds for various drugs or fertilizers. Neko has misgivings about the secret new compound they’ve been making, but Jannine is more worried about the threat of being promoted. This story tries to be a blue collar viewpoint on a cyberpunk future, but like most predicted futures from 30 years back, it wasn't nearly pessimistic enough about what a working class life would be like. The story itself is fine, nothing especially memorable. It peters out into nothing. C-?

—

“Naught Again” by John E. Stith. Nick Naught is a PI with a car that has a mind of its own. We open with Nick trying desperately to talk his Flashfire out of street-racing another AI car. There’s even a joke about the DMV on the first page. That pretty much gives you the flavor of this “humorous” novelette. Extremely uninteresting. D

—

I don’t know whether I’d count the Probability Zero feature as a story or not. (Seriously, what was with ’90s Analog and ’80s Asimov’s and their ongoing “humorous” columns?) Anyway, “C-Change” by Charles Sheffield was certainly something that was printed, on paper even. Shrug?

—

“P. C. Software” by G. David Nordley. As you could guess from the title, this tedious number roots its “humor” in that timeless fear of mediocre men everywhere: political correctness run amok! An “elephantine” feminist rages at a magazine editor about the content he publishes, so he buys software to replace every word with paragraphs of euphemisms. It’s a timely reminder of how those with power have always pushed to infantilize and mock any who challenge their accepted hierarchy. White dudes are still out here parroting this same joke more than three decades later, and acting like they just aced the assignment. Terminally dull and uncreative. F

—

“High on Life” by Greg Costikyan. Oh boy, even more humorous social commentary from a privileged point of view! Jason is a man bold enough to be cheerful in a time of nanny-state overreach, risking mace and possible accusations of harassment in order to have a nice “morally wrong” flirt with the office ladies (who are all secretly in love with him for his boldness). Those nanny-state liberals want to make enjoying life a crime, lads! F

—

“Assemblers of Infinity” by Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason (part 3 of 4). Another Analog, another serialized novel midway through its run. I’ve never read anything I enjoyed by Kevin J. Anderson, and this does nothing to change that. The synopsis of the first two installments takes the time to assure us that female characters are “trim” and “attractive.” Once we get through the synopsis, we’re stuck with some 45 pages of boilerplate technothriller, populated with uninteresting characters and petty little dramas, all while knowing the conclusion is nowhere in sight. Not nearly enough actually happens to justify the page count. The gist is that alien nanobots are building something mysterious on the far side of the moon. The terrestrial powers-that-be assemble a team (which includes an architect who is also an astronaut, for some reason) and send them to check it out. An attractive young female scientist negligently infects herself and the crew with nanobots. The architect-astronaut is going through a divorce; trapped on the moon with him, the young scientist notes he doesn’t seem that much older…. Yeah, it’s that kind of story. Maybe F+

—

Fulfilling a longstanding Analog tradition, the best part of this issue was, yet again, the cover art. The first couple stories were almost promising, but we sped downhill from there. Goddamn, that was some bleak reading. 

2024 read #20: Dinotopia: The World Beneath by James Gurney.

Dinotopia: The World Beneath, written and illustrated by James Gurney

160 pages

Published 1995

Read February 6

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 (though the paintings deserve higher)

I thought I had read this once before, back during my read-everything-Dinotopia era in the early 2000s, but now I'm pretty sure I skipped directly to First Flight.

The World Beneath is a definite downgrade from the original. Gone is the insistence that “Dinosaurs aren’t just for kids!” World Beneath admits defeat and, almost sheepishly, reads like a picture book. The text is simplified and aged down, scarcely more than captions to the art.

Gurney's art is, of course, exemplary, some of the finest paleo-art of its era. We don't get any big, memorable tableaux that equal Treetown in the first book, though the picnic excursion to Slumberland Valley comes close.

World Beneath takes a while to find its footing. Once the central adventure starts — Arthur’s trip into the ancient caves beneath Dinotopia — it’s a pleasant enough dungeon crawl, complete with a seedy tavern, cavernous temples, strange gemstones, golden statues, and a fleet of mechanical dinosaurs. The abbreviated text makes it feel more hectic and haphazard than it should, especially the climax.

2024 read #11: Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 1999 issue.*

Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 1999 issue (23:7)*

Edited by Gardner Dozois

144 pages

Published 1999

Read from January 19 to January 20

Rating: 3 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

In the summer of 1999, I aspired to be a science fiction wunderkind.

I had submitted stories as early as 1998. One of my earliest subs had been a tale called “The Dinosaur Man.” It involved a misanthropic physicist building himself a house in the Cretaceous, and one of his old college friends (now a paleontologist) tracking him down after finding a human femur at a Cretaceous dig. I submitted it to Asimov’s, with unsurprising results.

When I saw this issue on the newsstand several months later — with its cover art of a Tyrannosaurus looming behind some partygoers — my first thought was that the editors of Asimov’s had stolen the idea for “The Dinosaur Man” and gotten this Michael Swanwick guy to rewrite it for publication. (What can I say? I was 16 and lived in a car. I had literally zero experience with the outside world.) Reading it proved two things: 1) no one, of course, had stolen my ideas, and 2) I was nowhere near Asimov’s league as a writer.

I read and reread this issue obsessively. Almost every story and poem here left an outsized impression upon my teenage imagination, as only your first issue of a sci-fi magazine can. (I might have read the June 1999 issue of Analog a few weeks before this one, but you get what I mean.) Traces of this issue’s creative DNA filled my notebooks for years. After reading it, I bent over my word processor with renewed energy and invigorated creativity. I wouldn’t get published for another thirteen years, and wouldn’t get published on a professional level until 2022, but at least I succeeded in getting my first positive personal rejection from F&SF later in 1999, which is something.

How has this issue aged?

“Scherzo with Tyrannosaur” by Michael Swanwick. Much (though not all) of this story was recycled into Swanwick’s Bones of the Earth, but I want to take a moment to appreciate it as a standalone tale. It was my first realization that you could combine high quality literary sci-fi with dinosaurs — a formula I’ve been trying to approximate (with minimal success) ever since. It particularly impressed young me because it was my first encounter with an ambiguous ending: the story is left hanging, on the verge of a choice that could go either way. Rereading it now, with the benefit of decades more reading behind me, it’s a standard tangle of time travel, double lives, double timelines, and unexpected paternity. It’s tidy and elegant and written with Swanwick’s signature verve — a solid story, though it didn’t shake the earth like it did when I was 16. But in the mediocre world of dinosaur fiction, that still places “Scherzo” among the best. B

“Another Branch of the Family Tree” by Brian Stableford. This story, in contrast to so many others in this issue, left little impression on my teenage imagination. Rereading it now, I’m not surprised: it’s a forgettable bioengineering number, mixing “bureaucracy, am I right?”-level humor with an attempt at near-future pathos. After a court orders its destruction, geneticist Beth Galton fights to save the tree she genetically grafted in memory of her twin sister. The story isn’t bad, exactly, but it was extremely au courant — 1999 sci-fi in paint-by-numbers format — which makes it feel dated today. It also has that weird tonal mismatch that comes from envisioning a bleak future through the optimism of privilege. You’re telling me water is scarce, most trees are dead, plague wars figure in recent memory, yet somehow “most” people live into their 120s thanks to the power of biotech? Like, please, my guy, develop some class consciousness: maybe that’s what awaits the rich fucks, but the rest of us likely won’t reach the age our parents are now. C-

Content warning for fictional SA in the next story.

“By Non-Hatred Only” by W.M. Shockley. This one insinuated itself deep into my teenage storytelling. “Should this be a ‘By Non-Hatred Only’ type plot?” I noted, rhetorically, on more than one outline. What I imagined that plot to be is lost to time. What’s certain is that my teenage self didn’t understand much of anything about this story. It’s a deeply ’90s spacer revenge tale about Navram, a spiritual counselor with a buried past, serving aboard the starship Koipu Laru. Shockley strains to channel Dune, giving us psychospiritual technologies, sexual spies, cryptic inner monologues, verbal fencing, paranoia about what others might know and what one’s reactions might reveal to them, a cultural abhorrence of sharing one’s “deep-meaning.” It partially works. But it’s also distastefully ’90s in a particularly Asimov’s Science Fiction way: at least a third of the story centers on Navram getting sexually assaulted by one of his clients, which triggers traumatic memories of his planet getting destroyed. I think the ending is meant to be elegant, pulling together all the different threads through Navram’s quiet manipulations, but it comes across as accidentally slapstick. D

“Evolution Never Sleeps” by Elisabeth Malartre. This one joins Stableford’s in the bin of stories that didn’t have much of an impact on me back in 1999. It's a “hard biology” piece about chipmunks turning into pack hunters: “Land piranhas,” in one character’s words. Fun concept for a story! Malartre, unfortunately, seems to have drawn her fiction-writing inspiration from airport thrillers. The characters are interchangeable. The dialogue is stiff with exposition. The whole thing reads like the early chapters of Jurassic Park (which is not a compliment). D+

A Michael Bishop poem, “Secrets of the Alien Reliquary,” may have been my very first exposure to sci-fi poetry. And what a horny first exposure it is! Reading it again, with plenty of queer alien sexuality poetry of my own out there, I think it still holds up.

“Angels of Ashes” by Alastair Reynolds. I can't remember if I originally “got” that the title was a play on Angela’s Ashes, which had been a recent mega-bestseller when this was written. This is another story that fueled my teenage imagination, to the point where a substantial percentage of an early setting was pilfered from it, with only the lightest cosmetic changes. (Don’t worry, I never tried to publish it.) Human priest Sergio is ordained in a religious order that reveres the teachings of the Kiwidinok, alien robots who briefly visited the solar system. Most of the order is android in nature; most liturgical power is in android hands, giving them considerable political power as well. Sergio is summoned to hear the final words of Ivan, the man who, long ago, had been selected to absorb the wisdom of the Kiwidinok. Naturally, there’s more to Ivan’s story than the official creed admits, and the androids aren’t happy with the revelations. The setting is baroque and strange and beautiful, mingling religion with asymmetric physics, terraforming, brain function, supernovas, the anthropic principle, and, of course, quantum superpositioning — a throw-everything-in-the-pot approach that is just so ineffably ’90s. (I mean that positively, for once.) Of the two tales in this issue that center on monastic vows, in the form of bionic implants, complicating the pursuit of political action in space, I prefer this one over “By Non-Hatred Only.” It’s kind of strange that two stories with such specific overlaps were in the same issue, but I suppose that’s how trends work in sci-fi and fantasy. B+

“Interview with an Artist” by Geoffrey A. Landis. For such a slight story with such a well-thumbed premise — time traveler alters the timeline so that Hitler becomes a modestly successful artist, then discovers that “Nasfi” atrocities had been even worse in the resulting future — this one made a big impact on me when I was young. Probably because it was my first time reading anything like it. (An example of how “Artist” influenced me: At 17, I drafted a shock-value comedy titled “Time Cannibals!” based quite loosely around this story’s Hitler vs time travelers vibe. The opening line went: “I ate Adolf Hitler.” Thank goodness I never subbed it anywhere.) Rereading this now, I think it still works fine for what it is. C+

“Baby’s Fire” by Robert Reed. This novella solves a mystery of what the fuck did I read that’s been in the back of my mind for a good two decades. See, long ago, I had read what appeared to be the middle section of a serialized novel: it picked up smack in the middle of the action and ended with a cliffhanger. Had it been in Analog? That sounded right, because it was a sprawling cosmic godhood yarn involving an incomprehensibly privileged stable of humans turning themselves into technologically augmented gods. There was a galactic chase; shapeshifting disguises on various planets; bodies made of arcane math and dark matter; black holes; wormholes; an attempt to birth a new universe. Millions of years transpired. It was vast and rococo in a way I’d never seen before. And here it is! What kept me from finding it earlier was the impression that it was part of a serialized novel. “Baby’s Fire” literally begins mid-word — a pretentious touch that thoroughly impressed my teenage self. Instead, it is part of a cycle dubbed the Sister Alice stories, published sporadically over much of a decade. Now I’m curious to track more of them down, because this entry is delightfully entertaining. And of course, to keep with the theme of this review, I recognize so many elements in this story that I subconsciously pilfered for later worldbuilding, in particular the concept of posthumanist Families with the powers of gods, which found its way into my Timeworlds setting (though that aspect is now, thankfully, backgrounded). “Fire” is crusted with its share of ’90s cultural barnacles — one character talks about how the talent for terraforming lies in the Chamberlain Family’s genes, which really isn’t how genetics works — but still, it earns at least a B+

And that’s it! It was humbling to rediscover the origins of so many of my early settings and projects — purloined, one and all, from the stories here. All writers borrow; creativity is in how you rework what you stole, and I think I’ve grown more skilled at that in the last couple decades. But I had forgotten just how blatant my teenage thefts had been.

2024 read #6: Dinotopia by James Gurney.*

Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time, written and illustrated by James Gurney*

159 pages

Published 1992

Read January 10

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

1992 was a signal year for dinosaur fiction, wasn’t it? Between Dinotopia and The Ultimate Dinosaur, you had two big, lush, beautifully illustrated volumes that mingled fiction and paleo art in a way I don’t think I’ve seen before or since. The artwork in both books is spectacular. Both incorporated some variation on “Dinosaurs aren’t just for kids anymore!” in their respective introductions. The fiction in Ultimate Dinosaur hasn’t aged so well; how about Dinotopia?

I didn’t encounter Dinotopia until 2001 or so, when I was first living on my own and scraping together enough income to treat myself to some books. At the time, I thought it was brilliant. “Breathe deep, seek peace” became my go-to email signature for a short while. Treetown and Waterfall City took root deep in my imagination, cropping up in various guises in my own writing and my D&D campaigns. I don’t think I’ve read it again since those early oughts days, though.

Dinotopia is steeped in a classically nineties hippie vibe. Our protagonists, Arthur Denison and his son Will, are rescued from a shipwreck by helpful dolphins, who tow them to the lost world, where people of all races live in harmony with extinct animals from various eras, mingling their cultures and creeds into a peaceful and prosperous ecological utopia. It’s a little hokey, but charming in a way that reminds us, sadly, of how far to the right the Overton window has shifted over the last three decades. Imagine how the fragile Nazi crybabies would bewail its wokeness were it to be published today.

Of course, as a can’t-we-all-get-along nineties utopia from a white man, Dinotopia includes a remarkably large population of European descent, and barely anyone Black. I kept track: including a careful census of the large crowd scenes, I counted a grand total of four people clearly portrayed as of African ancestry. The only named Black character, Tok Timbu, has blue eyes (and is named as a phonetic anagram for Timbuktu).

The story is slight, little more than a travelogue that serves only to take us from one corner of Dinotopia to the next. The real star — and the only reason to get the book — is Gurney’s artwork. It’s dated but relentlessly delightful, especially the wider compositions that mix dinosaurs into quaint scenes of fantastic architecture and human pageantry. I also love the interior scenes that incorporate details like sauropod marionettes and Lambeosaurocycles. Honestly, the paintings of Treetown alone bump up my rating by half a star.

2023 read #154: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 1996 issue.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 1996 issue (90:1)

Edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

162 pages

Published 1996

Read from December 14 to December 15

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Rusch was an unfairly ignored editor in the history of F&SF. I hadn’t even been aware of her ’90s tenure in the editorial chair until I was reading through a Wikipedia article earlier this year. I’ve wanted to read some of her issues ever since, but always got sidetracked one way or another.

This issue is my introduction to Rusch as an editor. I picked this one because 1) it has great cover art, and 2) the table of contents looks interesting, without any obvious red flags. (None obvious to me, anyway. Goodness knows there could have been all kinds of ’90s writer scandals that got hushed up or forgotten.)

“Here We Come A-Wandering” by Nina Kiriki Hoffman. I was nervous about this one — it’s a magical homeless drifter story from the ’90s. Thankfully, it turns out to be a lovely, delicate, inventive tale, in which the vertiginous strangeness of men stepping out from walls, and cars sharing insight into the psychology of their drivers, feels like a natural part of our world, just around the corners of things. The story itself was maybe a bit pat, with Matt breaking through the walls of her PTSD to find human companionship on Christmas, but still, it was quite good. B

“The Mall” by Dale Bailey. Early next year, a story of mine will be published in an anthology of shopping mall horror, so it was interesting to compare and contrast it with this tale from 28 years before. Bailey and I approached mall horror from opposite perspectives — me, an elder Millennial who grew up around and found shelter in malls; Bailey, writing with Boomer suspicion of malls and their hypnotic pull on those Millennial kids — but both of us gravitated toward the idea of malls as extradimensional spaces inhabited by hungry beings. I felt the ending of “The Mall” fell a little flat, but it was surprisingly palatable overall. B-

“The Plight Before Christmas” by Jerry Oltion. A bland tale of yuppie white male mediocrity. Our hero is an advertising man, prone to hissy-fit outbursts, who endlessly edits his day with a household time travel appliance. He can't figure out why sales are down, nor can he figure out what to buy his girlfriend for Christmas. First meh story of this issue, though even this one elicits some mild interest with the social ramifications of casual time editing. C-

“Annie’s Shelter” by Bonita Kale. Didn’t like this one, not one bit. It’s a dreary number about Annie, a developmentally disabled young woman who, thanks to a new job, can support herself in an apartment, and Ziv, a homeless drifter (another one!) who cons his way into her apartment by telling her he’s an alien studying human culture. We get front row seats to Ziv sexually exploiting Annie, because we’re in the rancid meat of the ’90s. Of course Annie gets pregnant and Ziv kicks her out of her own apartment. (And yes, Ziv’s POV keeps referring to Annie with the usual slur.) I know fiction that makes readers uncomfortable is important, but it didn’t feel like this piece had anything to say beyond being a slimy little soap opera. There isn’t even any speculative element, besides Ziv’s lies. F

“In the Shade of the Slowboat Man” by Dean Wesley Smith. A vampire visits her one-time husband, who’s dying in a nursing home, and reminisces about how they met on a paddle-wheel “slowboat” on the Mississippi. It’s a sweet trifle. B-

“Javier, Dying in the Land of Flowers” by Deborah Wheeler. Seeing this title on the table of contents, I imagined an atmospheric reinterpretation of a medieval French lai. Weirdly specific idea, and sadly wrong. Instead, it’s a near-future piece about a migrant worker landing a job on Tierra Flores, an artificial island resort where rich Anglos lead sparkling lives far away from the drugs, violence, and cartels — the usual feverish stuff Anglo-Americans imagine when they peep over the southern border. Every Anglo stereotype about Mexico, in fact, pops up in this story: wailing babies and swarming rats, nightly cartel gun fights and mariachi bands at the mercado, ingrained misogyny and swaggering machismo. The Angla tourists also apparently come to the island with a race-play fetish. Though the story is written well enough, I don’t think any Anglo authors can be trusted with any of this. F

“Go Toward the Light” by Harlan Ellison. Rankled by sanctimonious comments from an orthodox coworker, professional time-traveler Matty Simon trips back to witness (and hopefully debunk) the miracle of Chanukah. But somewhere along the way Matty decides the miracle needs a little help. This compact yarn is Ellison in fine form. B

“Bulldog Drummond and the Grim Reaper” by Michael Coney. The title, and the excellent cover art, sadly oversell the promise of this closing novelette. The “Grim Reaper” of the title is a nickname for a dungeon scenario that “proximation” players experience through a robotic avatar, a mix of video game and escape room. “Bulldog” Drummond is the pulpy adventure hero of the dungeon narrative, battling through every peril to foil the diabolical Carl Peterson. But our actual story is the friction between Bobbie, founder of the proximation company, and her ex-slash-business-rival Bill, whose technology connects users to implants in various animals, letting them experience the adventures of their pets, lions on the hunt, and so forth. Naturally, Bill uses his tech to spy on Bobbie via a raccoon named McArthur. Inevitably, Bobbie runs out of robots partway through recording the Grim Reaper scenario, and ventures into the dungeon to finish the proximation herself. Predictably, Bill must send his implanted animals into the Grim Reaper to save her. I didn’t hate the story, but McArthur was the only character I cared about. And as you might imagine from my hectic summary, the pacing is a bit awkward. C-

And that’s it! A couple ’90s stinkers, but overall, not bad! A significant improvement over Rusch’s predecessor, certainly. I’m intrigued to read more.

2023 read #133: Dinosaur Fantastic, edited by Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg.

Dinosaur Fantastic, edited by Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg

331 pages

Published 1993

Read from November 11 to November 13

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

In the introduction, editor Resnick claims this is the first anthology devoted to all-new dinosaur fiction, which I suppose could be technically correct — The Ultimate Dinosaur came out the year before, but featured a single reprinted story (and was 50% essays, besides).

Four of these stories would be reprinted three years later in Greenberg’s Dinosaurs anthology. None of the four was especially good, or so I thought when I read that book, so I’ve been iffy about the chances of the rest. But I’m on a dino roll, so let’s try it out!

“Just Like Old Times” by Robert J. Sawyer. Not only did this piece reappear in Greenberg’s Dinosaurs, it also got recycled into the Apex: World of Dinosaurs anthology. For a story that is nothing more than 1990s psycho-killer pap, it’s gotten a lot of mileage for Sawyer. I’ve read and reviewed it too many times already. I’ll say this about it: meh. C-

“Disquisitions on the Dinosaur” by Robert Sheckley. This is a “humorous” yarn about Emperor Nero being forced to host an anachronistic infestation of dinosaurs. It tries really hard to channel Mel Brooks and instead just falls flat on its face somewhere in the vicinity of S. P. Somtow’s godawful Aquiliad stories. Worth no one’s time. F

This anthology is already starting to feel like a slog.

“Dino Trend” by Pat Cadigan. Another one that would get reprinted in Greenberg’s Dinosaurs. As you’d expect from Cadigan, it’s a bauble about urban hipsters in a nanotech future, who play out the ending scenes of their relationship while cosmetic creams that turn you into a dinosaur hit the market. It’s fine. C

“The Greatest Dying” by Frank M. Robinson. A forgettable post-Jurassic Park pandemic piece. What if amber, instead of preserving dino DNA, preserved a virus that had killed off the dinosaurs? Spends too much of its runtime sketching a summary of the asteroid extinction theory instead of, you know, establishing its characters or telling its own story. Maybe D+

“Revenants” by Judith Tarr. A mother brings her four-year-old to the extinct animal petting zoo. This is her one day this month with her daughter, who lives with her father in an Atavist preserve, cosplaying the Ice Age. A few clever details are sprinkled here and there in the story: “She was wearing pants I’d bought for her, and a shirt with a hologram on it, one of the Lascaux cave paintings.” It would be a more enjoyable story if it weren’t, at its heart, a snide satire against family services “overreach.” (As an abused kid ignored by the system in the ’90s, I can only roll my eyes.) I’d much rather read an inverted version of this story, with a single mother hunting bear in an Ice Age preserve, having to host her city-girl daughter for a weekend. C+

“One Giant Step” by John E. Stith. This rote little tale of saurian time travelers arriving 65 million years before modern civilization, only for one of them to trigger a mass extinction in order to give a worthier lineage the opportunity to evolve (and to not poison the Earth in the future), feels very 1960s to me. It has a sort of white people nihilism at its foundation, a conceit that any intelligent species is going to be ecologically destructive and bigoted (even though only white people have made those activities the centerpieces of our culture). D

“Last Rights” by Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon. This is, somehow, my first exposure to Lackey. Unfortunately, it’s a lazy satire about bleeding heart liberals turned animal liberationists, who take it upon themselves to liberate dinosaurs from a genetic engineering facility. Watch the silly little liberals get picked off one by one! I’ll pass. F

“After the Comet” by Bill Fawcett. A herd of psychic Triceratops tries to survive in the aftermath of the Chicxulub impact. This is an overlong retread of a standard theme; its only innovation — psychic dinosaur herd — is just goofy. D-

“Rex Tremandae Majestatis” by Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg. Out of everything on the table of contents, I was most curious about this one. Malzberg, of course, wrote “Major League Triceratops” in The Ultimate Dinosaur, a story which utilized elliptical literary prose to disguise the fact that it had nothing to say. My only prior exposure to Koja was “La Reine d’Enfer,” one of the more stylish and interesting stories in Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells. Apparently the two authors were frequent collaborators. This piece, sadly, hews closer to Malzberg’s “Major League” than to Koja’s “Reine.” We begin with a heterosexual encounter so tawdry and unsatisfying that Leona, our POV, imagines the guy as a stegosaur. Leona’s ex-husband writes out in LA for a cartoon called Dino Dudes. Dinosaurs and extinction run through the piece as metaphors for divorce, entropy, a death-wish, the ennui and malaise of modern suburbia. Like, it’s fine enough. But also kind of an elaborate literary shrug. Of the two tales so far that use dinosaurs as symbols of divorce and single motherhood, I preferred “Revenants” by a hair. C+

“The Skull’s Tale” by Katharine Kerr. Rare is the story of sentient dinosaurs that feels as alien as it should. This brief number manages to distinguish itself with its cadence and its sensory emphasis on smell. Though, like all too many stories here, it’s clear that no actual research went into its portrayal of the Mesozoic. C+

“Cutting Down Fred” by Dean Wesley Smith. This one is bizarre, but sadly not in any entertaining way. An acorn marinated in spunk from a used condom grows into a majestic oak named Fred, who can telepathically communicate with those who linger beneath it. When our narrator tries to indulge his girlfriend’s exhibitionist inclinations beneath Fred, Fred beams raunchy limericks into their brains. Girlfriend promptly breaks up with narrator, narrator hopes to prove Fred is to blame, but the city plans to cut Fred down, etc. Then we swerve into Fred telling our narrator that oaks have ancestral memories, and would he like to experience the Cretaceous? The Cretaceous incident, scarcely more than a paragraph, is almost certainly a throwaway addition to get “Fred” on theme and help Smith sell a trunk story, a story that would've been close to unsellable even in the swingin’ ’90s. I cannot over-emphasize how little that interlude has to do with the rest of “Fred.” Well, I guess you can’t spell Fred without F

“Shadow of a Change” by Michelle M. Sagara. Another story that I first read reprinted in Greenberg’s Dinosaurs. Another story that, like the Koja and Malzberg joint, uses dinosaurs as a metaphor for modern discontent, of having no control over what happens to you in the workaday world. It isn’t bad. C+

“Wise One’s Tale” by Josepha Sherman. Wise One, a venerable pterosaur, tells young ones the tale of Quick Trickster, the hero who won pterosaurs their wings from Fire Being. A standard (albeit perfunctory) fable of three challenges overcome through trickery. C

“Curren’s Song” by Laura Resnick. Curren is a special boy, nephew of the king. Curren is also cursed with visions of the future, which his people don't appreciate. When a stranger named Columba arrives to preach Christianity, Curren flees. But naturally a girl his age appreciates him, and she hangs out with him to hear his visions. Even she, however, is disturbed by the "song" he hears from the ancient beings who swim in Loch Ness. As a story, it's a bit flimsy, little more than an extended mood piece. It's fine? C

“Whilst Slept the Sauropod” by Nicholas A. DiChario. The town of Sleepy Mountain flourishes at the foot of a mountain-size sauropod, until the sauropod leaves one day and inadvertently leads the town to discovering the modern world. It's an engaging setup (“The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule,” but make it a brontosaur) for what turns out to be a boilerplate fable about how hustle and bustle corrupt paradise, and how honest hard work is what the hip people are into these days. C+

“Rex” by David Gerrold. We begin with a charming new spin on Jurassic Park — the Filltree family’s basement holds the finest miniature dinosaur zoo in Westchester, or at least it did before they added the two-foot-high T. rex to the terrarium — but the charm is lost because our POV Jonathan is a manly suburbanite who resents his spoiled daughter Jill and nagging wife Joyce. The story revolves around his resentments, which creep into violent fantasies. Caging the miscreant rex on the porch upsets Jill, for example, and Jonathan “wondered if he’d locked up the right animal.” It’s all more or less in that vein. It ends with Jonathan tacitly deciding to murder his family via miniature tyrannosaur. The straights really aren’t okay, huh? Oh well. This story really could have been something. F

“The Pangaean Principle” by Jack Nimersheim. Amateurish character work and implausible dialogue dominate this forgettable piece about a Russian geneticist getting lost in his dino DNA, and alienating his precious daughter in the process. I suppose the fact that this father doesn’t decide to murder his kid is a step up from the previous story, but still, there just wasn’t much to salvage here. F+

“On Tiptoe” by Beth Meacham. A peep at the unappealing mediocrity of heteronormativity from the other direction. Our narrator’s old college roommate, Alice, arrives in New York City for a visit. With her camera, Alice inadvertently discovers dinosaurs with chameleon abilities (or so she believes) hiding all over Manhattan. Instead of having any kind of reaction to this news, our narrator gets jealous when Alice partners up with mildly attractive museum researcher Matt. Our narrator suspects that Matt is just humoring Alice to get into Alice’s pants. And instead of communicating any of this, our narrator gets excited about helping Matt get over Alice. Truly bizarre stuff. F+

“Betrayal” by Susan Casper. As a youth, Eldon encountered a magical liopleurodon mosasaur in a sea cave, and for a while afterward, he seemed to lead a charmed life. But he blames the magical liopleurodon mosasaur when things go wrong, and betrays her by revealing her to the world. When he doesn’t get the fame and notoriety he believes is his due, he breaks into the aquarium the state has built around her, and shoots her. As with “Cutting Down Fred,” I have a hunch that this was a trunk story, almost certainly about a mermaid, which Casper fudged into a mosasaur for this anthology. (Mosasaurs don’t leap to mind on the list of magical mythical beings, after all. Not like liopleurodons.) At least this story has a decent level of prose skill, so I’ll give it a D-

“’Saur Spot” by Kevin O’Donnell, Jr. Sci-fi writers in the ’80s and ’90s really fantasized that the big bad government was gonna regulate them to death, didn’t they? “Damn the EPA!” one character bewails here. In a dystopian future where boric acid requires a permit, and books are read on an electronic tablet, Gideon Cope is an old man who wants a tiny pet dinosaur to help manage his roach problem. That’s pretty much the whole story. D-

“Pteri” by Lea Hernandez. Out of nowhere, we have a premise that’s actually interesting: Gelesse is a witch whose familiar is a pterosaur named Pret. The setting is interesting too, a contemporary fantasy where one can get a degree in the Craft from a state university. Gelesse tells us the tale of how she Called her familiar after several failed attempts. The story is slight, and could very well have been about any other kind of animal — a crow would have made as much sense as a pterosaur — but I appreciate it after the last few garbage tales. At least a C+

“Chameleon” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. The last of the stories that I first encountered in Greenberg’s Dinosaurs. This one was the best of that bunch, a tale of a grade schooler bullied for being a crybaby and a witch, who discovers that museum dinosaurs are the repositories of the hopes, wishes, and fears that children project onto them. She gains some measure of self-determination from this, imagining herself as a big green dinosaur. It doesn’t have much at all to do with dinos in the end, but it’s a competent story. B-

“Fellow Passengers” by Barbara Delaplace. An artifact from the 1990s: our narrator is a reporter for a Weekly World News-style tabloid. The narration is a pastiche of 1940s hardboiled reporter patter, which is mildly amusing given the context. She’s sent on assignment to check out rumors of strange livestock deaths, and discovers that some kind of theropod is on the loose. It’s a featherweight story, but not awful, which counts for a lot in a book like this. When the Deinonychus is captured, and our reporter watches it in the zoo, it just might be the most vivid dinosaur in the entire anthology. But of course we must endure another ’90s artifact: the return of naive animal liberationists. All the same, this story wasn’t bad. C+

“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Dinosaur” by Gregory Feeley. As if ashamed to commit to writing a story about dinosaurs, Feeley couches several potential stories in an essay of sorts, attempting to wring some idea of why dinosaurs are popular in the public imagination from various dino story tropes. A couple of the ideas could have made for interesting stories — more interesting than most of what we got in this book — but Feeley would rather skip the storytelling to offer facile assertions like “It is preadolescent boys who like dinosaurs, just as preadolescent girls may develop an interest in horses…. Girls want to ride horses, but boys want to be dinosaurs.” And again: “Perhaps the dinosaur’s popularity derives from its power as a symbol of boisterous male energies in a post-chauvinist society.” I suppose we could test that assertion if we ever attained a post-chauvinist society, maybe? Presumably a post-chauvinist society could begin once we admit that social expectations pressure children to like what is “appropriate” for their assigned gender, instead of assuming “boys like this, girls like that” is somehow meaningful. Much like this anthology in miniature, “Thirteen Ways” is a gallery of wasted potential. D

“Evolving Conspiracy” by Roger MacBride Allen. One last 1990s classic for the road: conspiracy theories! A conspiracy by the devil to make people believe in evolution, no less. It’s supposed to be funny. I didn’t really care. Thirty years later, we have enough problems with broken-brained Q cultists imagining the devil is leading child sacrifices in pizza parlor basements. The paranoid style of American politics rises triumphant. It just isn’t that funny anymore. F

And that’s it! Damn, that was a slog.

It’s funny that all these authors took such pains to avoid the “A Gun for Dinosaur” / Jurassic Park cliché — modern human beings encountering realistic dinosaurs in a survival narrative — that the effort to avoid it feels like a new cliché itself. We had five or six stories of people turning into dinos; six more stories of sentient dinos; three stories of miniature dino pets; two stories that use dinosaurs as a direct metaphor for the pressure and disconnect of modern urban civilization. Some of these stories were even adequately entertaining. But when 90% of what you want from a dino story is human characters encountering, surviving, running from, dying from, or befriending well-researched dinosaurs, this book is a tremendous (though unsurprising) disappointment.

2023 read #131: Raptor Red by Robert T. Bakker.*

Raptor Red by Robert T. Bakker*

260 pages

Published 1995

Read from November 8 to November 9

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 (maybe 3 for nostalgia)

* Denotes a reread.

For an embarrassingly long time — from late 1996 until maybe the close of 1998, which felt like a geological era to a teen living in a car — this was my favorite book.

I first read it in stolen chapters, a 13 year old engrossed in the paperback aisle at Kroger or Meijer. It had a chokehold on my adolescent imagination. Bakker was already a childhood hero of mine; Raptor Red made me fantasize about collaborating with him on sequels, spin-offs, an extended dino fic universe. The very first story I sent to a professional sci-fi magazine, which I mailed with SASE to Asimov’s Science Fiction in the summer of 1998, was original-character fanfic of Raptor Red. Even when I was 18, long after Dinosaur Summer and other books had supplanted Raptor Red as my official “favorite,” I was active in Raptor Red roleplay groups on Yahoo. (For that matter, my Yahoo email address — which I used for everything email related until I was 25 or so — was a reference to this book.)

I don’t think I’ve reread it since I was 16 or 17. My tastes changed; I grew up. I always carried fondness for Red, but I likely always suspected a revisit could never live up to the memory. I’ve tried to get into it a handful of times over the last couple years, but the first chapter — awkward, amateurish, preciously titled “Raptor Attack!” — always made me cringe and put the book aside.

As befits a novel written by a scientist, Raptor Red doesn’t know what it wants to be. The prose would be at home in a children's chapter book, but the story is soaked in gore and revolves around mating; the book was marketed under an adult imprint to cash in on Jurassic mania. Parts of it read like Bakker was channeling a nature documentary, others like he was penning anthropomorphic action stars. His dinos tend to be more science fiction than science. Jurassic Park’s raptors were inspired by Bakker’s outspokenly “heretical” interpretation of theropods (with an assist from Gregory Paul, who lumped Deinonychus into the genus Velociraptor), so it’s no surprise that Red and her kin are implausibly brainy, slasher-flick-efficient pack hunters.

It’s a reminder that, even as a scientist, Bakker’s main skill has always been capturing the imagination of the public. The narrative, especially in the early going, constantly teeters between Red's adventures and Bakker's pocket sketches of then-current scientific concepts. The text is crammed with Discovery Channel-ready sound bites: “Darwinian blitzkrieg,” “Ginsu-knife claws,” “claws like Gurkha daggers,” “Darwinian Lizzie Bordens.”

And then there is the onomatopoeia. My god, so much onomatopoeia: “Ghurk-snurg-GULP.” “Sssnnnrrhht!” “GrrrrRRRRRRRRR — OOOP!” “HsssscreeeeEEEEEEECH!!!!”

Ah, the 1990s. Truly, this book would never have seen the light of day in any other decade.

Once I persevered through the opening cringe, the mix of childish and grisly became more endearing. Or, at any rate, my nostalgia neurons muffled my inner critic with vague fondness. I don’t think anyone would ever say, in retrospect, that this book is good. But we’ll probably never get a better-informed dinosaur novel. Bakker’s Early Cretaceous is evocative and detailed, even if the descriptions get a bit clunky. The chapters along the beach and in the snowy mountains, in particular, have been lodged in my imagination for almost three decades, percolating through my own dino stories. I'm happy I finally revisited Red and her pack.

2023 read #102: Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, February 1992.

Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, February 1992 issue (16:2)

Edited by Gardner Dozois

176 pages

Published 1992

Read from September 20 to September 21

Rating: 2 out of 5

Much like the November 1988 and November 1990 issues of IASFM, I sought this one on eBay solely because it has dinosaurs on the cover. I don’t hold high hopes for this month’s cover story, for… reasons. However, IASFM from this era — in my quite limited experience — seemed to feature at least one or two stories that make each issue worthwhile. Fingers crossed for more of those!

Best of all: there's no story from Isaac Asimov in this issue!

Tucked between letters to the editor and a full-page ad, I almost missed the poem that begins this issue: “From: A Child’s Garden of Grammar: Adverbs” by Tom Disch. It reads like a cheap imitation of Shel Silverstein. Kinda hokey but not, like, bad. Though I’m confused why it’s in a sci-fi magazine.

“Sugar’s Blues” by Allen Steele. When last we met Steele, he treated us to the mediocre cloned dinosaur technothriller “Trembling Earth” in the November 1990 IASFM. “Sugar’s Blues” is apparently the third and final tale in a series centered on Diamondback Jacks, a Merritt Island dive bar down the road from Kennedy Space Center. It’s the sort of gator country booze shack where “spacers” go to drink pitchers of Budweiser, play pool, and get into brawls in the distant future of 2023. Steele strains toward a pulp voice befitting his industrial roughnecks-in-space milieu, despite the fact that our narrator is a reporter. Our narrator intervenes in a bar fight, and gets rewarded with an explosive scoop about high-level coverups, the manufacture of memory-enhancing drugs, and general skullduggery in orbit. It’s a competently conveyed story but nothing I found interesting; it’s just manly men in a manly men’s world. The closest thing to a female character is the Vargas pinup painted tits-out on the fuselage of a privatized space shuttle. It’s the sort of sci-fi that Elon Musk’s fanboys read while they touch themselves at night, dreaming of libertarian space exploitation and boundless testosterone. C-

Another Tom Disch poem follows: “From: A Child’s Garden of Grammar: Quotation Marks.” This one ends with a punchline about kids these days and their Walkmens.

“Pickman’s Modem” by Lawrence Watt-Evans. “The title [for this tale] originated during a real-time chat on a computer network,” marvels the editorial introduction. The story begins: “I hadn’t seen Pickman on-line for some time; I thought he’d given up on the computer nets…. The nets will eat you alive if you let them.” Ah, 1992. As someone who first encountered the internet via an orange-on-black monochrome monitor in 1993, this humorous trifle about a Lovecraftian modem stirring a flame-war has a musty, nostalgic charm for me that outshines its other modest qualities. C

“Overlays” by Joel Richards. Another trip to the well of memory-enhancing drugs — clearly this was the sci-fi topic du jour in 1992. This is an atmospheric story set on the Danish island of Fanø, narrated by an aging British biologist who’s summered there for decades. Her first husband, love of her life, was downed in his Hurricane near Farø; she thinks he’s the reason she feels a connection to the cemetery and its monuments to the dead of war. This story nicely pairs the titular “overlays” of invasions and sea level changes that shaped Denmark with the “overlays” of genetic “past-life memory” putatively discovered by a visiting American neurophysiologist. (I always appreciate a title that means more than one thing.) The sci-fi element is a bit silly for the wind-swept mood of the piece; likely it would work better as contemporary fantasy, without all the set-dressings of neuropeptides and newly discovered receptors. Still, the story works well enough as it is. A respectable B

“Gate Crashing” by Jennifer Evans. Oh look, it's a near-future consumer electronics piece. (I almost always detest these.) In a world where interpersonal communication is mediated by customizable “gatekeeper” avatars, our point of view is some shitty dude named Jackson, who’s being a whiny brat because he has to talk to some gatekeepers in his quest to find some girl he saw (but never talked to) at last night's party. As Jackson pines over this hypothetical soulmate, he frets, “What if she turns out to be an absolute bitch[?]” He flips out and punches things when the girl's gatekeeper turns out to be a replica of herself, then somehow gets a date with her anyway. Tedious stuff. F

“Kingdoms in the Sky” by S.P. Somtow. A whole lot of grody tropes get wrapped up together in this one. Antonio, part-Incan son of a Chicago crime boss, gets taken down to Peru for a “business trip.” Unbeknownst to Antonio, his father made a deal with the gods to protect his coca fields, and Antonio himself is to be offered up as a mountaintop sacrifice. Antonio’s mute brother Matt has magical-autistic powers, à la Stephen King, and talks to Antonio in his dreams. It's an overlong story, and on top of everything else, it’s written in an annoying approximation of a young teen’s voice. F+

One last Tom Disch poem, “From: A Child’s Garden of Grammar: Not.” More of that same quasi-Silverstein vibe. Though it makes even less sense that this one is in Asimov’s.

“The Heaven Tree” by Jamil Nasir. This would be some solid ’90s sci-fi, immersive and atmospheric and melancholy, exploring a world where a sexually transmitted virus reverses your aging and turns you into an elfin waif with the mind of a child. Of course, this being the ’90s, we can’t have a good story without some heinous shit going on, and it isn’t hard to guess which direction this one goes. The story performs an uneasy balancing act between that requisite ’90s shock value and the much more interesting meditation on aging, fear, and death at its core. Maybe B-?

“The Virgin and the Dinosaur” by R. Garcia y Robertson. At last, here’s the reason I bought this issue. I don’t trust any story from Garcia y Robertson, who (in my admittedly limited experience) is one of the horniest SFF writers of his generation. He brings a certain Heinleinian smarm to his writing that I don’t enjoy, the vibe that he’s constantly writing one-handed. And with a title like that, I don’t expect good things. Sure enough, the story opens with our point-of-view character Jake watching a tall young redhead slink naked through the Cretaceous greenery. Glad we established our expectations for this one ahead of time, because at its heart, “Virgin” is a novella-length exploration of Jake’s quest to manipulate his uninterested coworker Peg into sex. I’m not a prude by any means, but hetero horniness is so predictable, you know? So rote and unoriginal, so eager to ignore boundaries. Oh, and Peg is still a “virgin,” according to the narrative, because she’s only ever been sexual with women before. Which — what the fuck? It’s a shame, because how often do you get an airship tour of the Late Cretaceous? This could have been a quality story in someone else’s hands — perhaps a 2020s queer author. Once again I have to shake my head at the bad luck that made dinosaur fiction’s peak coincide with the grody 1990s. Can we get a new dinosaur renaissance, pretty please? I’ll be munificent and give this one a D

And that’s it for this issue. No real surprises, just some disappointment that there weren’t more salvageable stories to counter that ’90s stink.

2023 read #95: The Ultimate Dinosaur, edited by Byron Preiss and Robert Silverberg.*

The Ultimate Dinosaur: Past • Present • Future, edited by Byron Preiss and Robert Silverberg*

343 pages

Published 1992

Read from September 7 to September 9

Rating: 2 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

It’s impossible to imagine a book like this getting published any time but the early 1990s.

It’s a hefty coffee-table tome that mixes pop science essays on aspects of dinosaur paleontology with short stories from many of the top names in 1980s sci-fi. You’ll find an entire generation of Discovery Channel-famous paleontologists — Philip Currie, Sankar Chatterjee, Catherine Forster — cheek by jowl with the likes of Harry Harrison, Connie Willis, and Ray Bradbury. There are also sumptuous illustrations (though not enough) from Doug Henderson, William G. Stout, and Wayne D. Barlowe, among others. 

The result is both a coffee-table book too sparsely illustrated to make a good coffee-table book, and an anthology too unwieldy to read with any comfort. But there was money behind this project, that’s for sure. Bantam Books expected to make bank off of it. Retail price was $35 — in 1992 money. I doubt we’ll ever see its like again.

Which is a shame. Why’d the heyday of dinosaur fiction have to happen in the nineties? It truly was one of the grodier eras of sci-fi.

The essays here are predictably dated. I’ll be honest, I only skimmed most of them. As expected, Sankar Chatterjee trots out his usual “birds secretly evolved from crocodylomorphs in the Triassic, I swear” routine. There’s an entire chapter dedicated to Marsh and Cope’s Bone Wars. Other chapters offer little beyond beginner stuff, like “bird-hipped vs. lizard-hipped” and so on. Paleontology has undergone several revolutions since the early ’90s, and it doesn’t seem like much of the nonfiction end of this book is worth revisiting.

The stories in this book, however, had as much influence on my early writing as Jurassic Park and Raptor Red combined. I first encountered The Ultimate Dinosaur sometime around 1993, as a 10 year old prowling unsupervised through the stacks of the Amarillo Public Library. I read most of them far too young to understand half of what was going on. But rereading them now, the first time I’ve read these stories all in sequence, has been a process of rediscovering ancient core memories. As a 17 year old in the Y2K era, I titled a story “Surrey @ Midnight” in clumsy, unconscious tribute to “Siren Song at Midnight.” At 19, one of my first attempts at non-linear storytelling was almost identical in structure to “Major League Triceratops.” And of course “Herding with the Hadrosaurs,” via nearly three decades of convoluted evolution, is the distant origin of my own Timeworld setting (see my story “Across Gondwana’s Heart” in HyphenPunk).

However, as an adult, I’ve found that dinosaur stories are seldom good. Have any of the yarns here held up?

“Crocamander Quest” by L. Sprague de Camp. I read and reviewed this one recently, in de Camp’s time-hunter collection Rivers of Time. (That book, bad as it is, was what inspired me to reread this tome at long last.) In that review, I said, “On one hand, I always had a soft spot for this story because it’s one of the few time-tourist narratives that takes us before the classic ‘Age of Dinosaurs’: Reggie [Rivers] and Chandra Aiyar bring their charges to the Triassic…. On the other hand, this is the tale of their firm’s first and only time safari with a ‘mixed’ company of women and men, which reads just about as badly as you might guess.” I’ll be generous and say C-

“The Feynman Saltation” by Charles Sheffield. This one is a serviceable near-future medical sci-fi piece about a dying artist who gets an experimental cancer treatment and begins to dream scenes from the geological past. There's also a subplot about his doctor beginning to date his sister — which is a bit weird, right? For its time, this is perfectly adequate, though it has little to do with dinosaurs in the end. Maybe C+

“Siren Song at Midnight” by Dave Wolverton. Ah, our first foray into paleo-DNA. In the over-exploited Earth of the nearish future, vast fleets trawl plankton from the sea while, in the deeps below, genetically-engineered “Sirens” fight to keep themselves from starving. It's the kind of intensely nineties future that's full of thumbed commlinks, holo-broadcasts, jacking into the computer network, mem-set, and a capitalized Alliance. BYU alum Wolverton, straining toward his own ideas of Cartagena atmosphere, makes sure to let you know that a Colombian orderly smells of “sweat and beans.” So why is this story in The Ultimate Dinosaur? Our narrator Josephina Elegante has a pet Euparkeria, but otherwise paleo-DNA doesn't play much of a role in this story beyond vibes. Today this reads like reheated leftovers; maybe it seemed better fresh? D

“Rhea’s Time” by Paul Preuss. This story is narrated in the form of a medical case history; the neurologist-cum-hypnotist narrating it can’t help but emphasize the “striking” beauty of Rhea K., as well as the fact that she isn’t wearing a bra in a mountain climbing photo. That feels accurate to male doctors in any era, I suppose. The big twist was pretty obvious to me early on, but in case you don’t want spoilers from a 30+ year old short story, look away: Rhea’s ski accident scrambled her brain waves into recreating the tectonic history of the Earth over the course of twelve months. I imagine Preuss saw the standard “geological history condensed into a calendar year” comparison and thought, “What if this were a hot comatose redhead in a hospital?” The concept is mildly interesting, and there are bits of poetry to be found in the juxtaposition, but the good is outweighed by the narrative choices. D

“Shakers of the Earth” by Gregory Benford. We’ve had two “technobabble in the brain creates subjective experiences of Deep Time” stories, so of course it’s time for our second paleo-DNA story! (Writers in the ’90s had such a limited palette of tropes, didn’t they?) For the maximum ’90s experience, this one gives us a viewpoint from a young Japanese woman playing it cool despite the way some gruff American paleontologist “quickened her body.” I debated whether I should stick an eye-roll emoji here and be done with it. The second half of the story, set five decades later, with cloned Seismosaurus giving rides across Kansas Sauropod Park, is fine, but overall this story is just… there. D+

“Hunters in the Forest” by Robert Silverberg. Desperately conventional “23rd century society has eliminated risk, so a man must travel back in time to Feel Something” bullshit, paired with one of the earliest manic pixie dream girl characters I ever happened to read. I loved this story when I was 10. I’m pretty sure you’d have to be 10 to appreciate it. D

“In the Late Cretaceous” by Connie Willis. Out of every genre writer active in 1992, you’d expect Willis to deliver a solid, well-researched time travel yarn, wouldn’t you? Alas, that is not what we have here. Instead, we get a mildly amusing burlesque of academia, and a still-relevant satire of buzzword-spewing “consultants” hired to slash departments and destroy higher education. Willis manages to maintain loose allegorical parallels to dinosaurs, mainly through the names of the characters (such as the sharp-toothed consultant Dr. King) and recurring motifs of extinction, predation, and evolution. This went far over my head as a tween. Rereading it now, I find it adequately entertaining and fully Willisian, albeit well outside the scope of what I’d expect to read in a dino anthology. B-

“Major League Triceratops” by Barry N. Malzberg. God, I thought this story was the artsiest shit ever when I was a tween. I didn’t understand half of it at the time, but I fully recycled its nonlinear structure (and the Dollar General Cormac McCarthy affectation of leaving out the quotation marks) in my late teen years. Rereading it now, you get slimed by ’90s excess from the very first page. We open with a grody hetero age-gap relationship and the au courant fetishization of a part-Japanese woman, who knows the man doesn’t listen to her. To better condescend to her, he shapes his words into haikus. And then she asks that they go home to fuck. Beyond that, this story tries really hard to be literary, spitting stream of consciousness couplings that sometimes even work, but more often trip over themselves into grandiloquent yammering about some white dude feeling unfulfilled ennui even in the latest Cretaceous. Every man here is serious and existential, every woman air-headed and horny. (One of the women is actually named Muffy.) This was what pretended to be high sci-fi literature at the time, I suppose. Glints of promising prose aren’t enough to save this from its utter lack of having anything interesting to say. All those years I spent emulating this style were built on nothing but muck. D-

“Herding with the Hadrosaurs” by Michael Bishop. More than anything else, this story (and its accompanying artwork) has dominated my writing subconscious for the last thirty years. This isn’t to say it was good. I was absolutely overwhelmed by this story as a wee tween; I spent an inordinate amount of time poring over the painting of a bow hunter, gone mountain-man in the Cretaceous, smoking a pipe atop a dead Corythosaurus. My Timeworld setting has passed through countless permutations over the decades, but ultimately it all goes back to this story and that image. More so than any other story here, I’ve revisited this one over the years; I knew ahead of time that it doesn’t stand up under the weight of nostalgia and adolescent fixation. It feels tossed off on a deadline. Our narrator’s parents are named Pierce and Eulogy in the first paragraph; in the next he writes that their loss “pierces me yet,” and that this story serves as their “eulogy.” That’s some first draft placeholder shit, you know? But that didn’t matter to my younger self. I saw myself and my brother, itinerant and often living in a car, in the siblings at the center of this story, orphaned when their dad drives their New Studebaker wagon through the time-slip into the Late Cretaceous. I yearned to escape our father and follow corythosaurs on their migrations. And honestly, out of all the fiction here (with the exception of Connie Willis’ story above), “Hardosaurs” has aged with the most dignity. Though maybe that’s my nostalgia talking; it certainly has its share of iffy business. B-

“Besides a Dinosaur, Whatta Ya Wanna Be When You Grow Up?” by Ray Bradbury. Bradbury, of course, was a big name to score for any anthology — big enough that he skated into The Ultimate Dinosaur with its only reprint, a story originally published in 1983. 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+

“Unnatural Enemy” by Poul Anderson. Rote “nature red in tooth and claw” stuff, nothing especially interesting. In typically Andersonian fashion, this story grunts and throbs with masculine fantasies of mating season, of battling other males, the victor rutting as he pleases. (Even here in the Late Cretaceous seas, every named character is male.) It could almost be one of Anderson’s turgid Viking fantasies. I will note that this was my first exposure to fiction told from the perspective of prehistoric animals, pre-dating my first read of Raptor Red by a couple years. Raptor Red is a feminist masterpiece in comparison. D-

“Dawn of the Endless Night” by Harry Harrison. Standard stuff about intelligent, society-building reptiles struck down by the terminal Cretaceous asteroid. Nothing much to note beyond that, aside from my distaste for the old trope of “this alien society was biologically engineered into its hierarchy.” At least it’s a step up from the previous story. C-

“The Green Buffalo” by Harry Turtledove. Closing out with the de rigueur tale of a living dinosaur in the Wild West. Of course Cope and Marsh are involved. More indirectly than they were in Sharon N. Farber’s “The Last Thunder Horse West of the Mississippi” (read and reviewed here), but still, this is basically the same story, retreading the same plot with less panache four years later. The way Joe and the other hunters pass from dusty 19th century Wyoming into the verdant Cretaceous found its way into a lot of my teenage time-slip writing, though. C

And that’s it for the stories! Overall, about what I expected. I’ve carted this copy with me through many moves over the last two decades — it still has the sticker from the used bookstore where I purchased it in 2003. It feels weird to have revisited it at long last. Nostalgic, of course, but also the usual icky feeling stirred by so much of ’90s sci-fi. I’m definitely carting it along with me in future moves, too, though who knows if I’ll ever read it again. Maybe I’ll revisit “Herding with the Hadrosaurs” again in a few years.

2023 read #94: Rivers of Time by L. Sprague de Camp.

Rivers of Time by L. Sprague de Camp

259 pages

Published 1993

Read from September 7 to September 8

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

This is a sequence of stories narrated by Reginald Rivers, time-traveling big game hunter and guide, a character best known from “A Gun for Dinosaur.” The series was revived at the start of the ’90s thanks to the anthology / coffee table book combo The Ultimate Dinosaur, a strange beast that I’ll be reviewing soon.

Rivers begins with a poem de Camp published in 1968, “Faunas.” It’s possibly a sonnet, definitely rhyming, and about what you’d expect from 1960s sci-fi poetry. I can’t tell if it’s meant as epigraph or part of this collection, but I’ll treat it as part of the collection.

“A Gun for Dinosaur” (1956, revised version published 1993). One of the classic dinosaur safari tales, which I read and reviewed a geological era ago in the Martin H. Greenberg Dinosaurs anthology. Because it’s been almost a decade since I last read it, I went ahead and read it afresh. It’s fine, I guess? All the casual sexism and low-key racism you’d expect from a midcentury de Camp joint. There are more thorough descriptions of guns than of the Cretaceous fauna. But it’s crisply written and goes down with minimal fuss. That's de Camp's main selling-point as an aithor: his baseline is reliably readable and (usually) mildly entertaining.

“The Cayuse” (1993). Almost four decades after writing the original Reginald Rivers tale, de Camp comes back with somehow even more casual racism and sexism, which immediately soured me on this one. The “Cayuse” of the title is a new off-road vehicle (appropriating the name of the people) that Rivers’ new client, an automobile magnate, insists they bring with them into the Cretaceous, resulting in predictable mishaps. Aside from that, and a Parasaurolophus phallus, this story is more of the same, even returning to the same time period as “A Gun for Dinosaur.” Kind of blurs together with the first one. Shrug?

“Crocamander Quest” (1992). I first read this story about three decades ago, in the previously mentioned Ultimate Dinosaur book. On one hand, I always had a soft spot for this story because it’s one of the few time-tourist narratives that takes us before the classic “Age of Dinosaurs”: Reggie and Chandra Aiyar bring their charges to the Triassic, when early dinos were just one burgeoning group of archosaurs among many. On the other hand, this is the tale of their firm’s first and only time safari with a “mixed” company of women and men, which reads just about as badly as you might guess.

“Miocene Romance” (1993). To follow up on that note, here we have a young woman who’s an “animal rights fanatic” stowing away to be a nuisance on a hunt. She ends up seducing the son of the Texas oil magnate bankrolling the trip. I’d had high hopes for this one — how often do you ever read a Cenozoic time safari? — but it was my least favorite so far. So many lecherous comments, so much oozy misogyny, and at one point the n-word gets tossed into the mix. Blech all around.

“The Synthetic Barbarian” (1992). That last piece disgruntled me, and this one — in which Rivers takes two well-heeled ignoramuses to trophy-hunt in the Oligocene — does nothing to improve the vibe. Both clients are quietly racist, and one wants to live his “Viking barbarian” fantasies by bow-hunting brontothere. De Camp adds a pinch of homophobia, because why wouldn’t he? 

“The Satanic Illusion” (1992). A smug pair of fundamentalists pay Rivers to hop them through time to help them “disprove” evolution; as is the way of fundies, they refuse to see what’s in front of them and continue to insist on their particular interpretation of Genesis. This story is a slight improvement, in that I’m mad at the characters and not at de Camp. Still, I’d rather just read fun time adventures with neither fundies nor musty weird 20th century bigotry. Is that too much to ask here?

“The Big Splash” (1992). A coterie of scientists hires our guides to take them to the end of the Cretaceous to settle the extinction debate once and for all. This could have been a step up for this book — the terminal Cretaceous extinction is rote material for fiction, but at least it’s straightforward enough to discourage de Camp’s casual bigotry — but of course we can’t have nice things. (The time safari’s head camp boss, a Black man named — wait for it — Beauregard Black, refuses to accompany them on this mission, and de Camp burdens him with an especially Twainian dialect. Ugh.) I’m just speeding through these at this point to get to the end and be done.

“The Mislaid Mastodon” (1993). An indigenous non-profit wants to repopulate modern times with Pleistocene megafauna, and hires Rivers to help capture a mastodon. De Camp gives us the usual ’90s white author treatment of an indigenous character, naming him Norman Blackelk and repeatedly emphasizing the color of his skin at every opportunity. Inevitably, Blackelk gets talked into performing a “ghost dance” in a last-ditch effort to bring a suitable mastodon close to the time chamber. Otherwise this is another unremarkable tale in a book of quite repetitive stories.

“The Honeymoon Dragon” (1993). Oh, hey, with that title, wanna bet which ethnicity de Camp broadly pantomimes in this story? I expected Japanese, but de Camp keeps us on our toes by introducing an indigenous Australian scientist. (If you wondered if Dr. Algernon Mulgaru would bring along a hand-whittled boomerang, he does, because what else would a white author have him do?) This time Rivers and his wife Brenda are the tourists, popping into the Australian Pleistocene via the time chamber newly opened down under. I appreciate some good Diprotodon and Megalania action, but like all too many stories in this collection, the narration barely gives us any immersion in Deep Time.

And that’s that. Overall, disappointing but not especially surprising. Somehow the story published in the 1950s was one of the least casually bigoted entries of the lot. 

2023 read #89: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1990.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1990 issue (79:2)

Edited by Edward L. Ferman

162 pages

Published 1990

Read from August 18 to August 20

Rating: 1 out of 5

Back at it again with another SFF magazine from the turn of the ’90s featuring dinosaurs on the cover. Previously, I read two issues of Asimov’s that fit this hyper-specific niche: November 1988 and November 1990. Not to be left out, F&SF boarded the ’90s dinomania train (literally!) with this issue. Sounds fun, right?

Well.

Content warning: discussions of racism, antisemitism, misogyny, and fictional genocide ahead.

“In the Upper Cretaceous with the Summerfire Brigade” by Ian Watson. Right out of the gate (sorry, that’ll be the last of the train puns), I have issues with this one. Our narrator is a failing writer who hasn’t informed his “whining,” “selfish” wife or his 16 year old kid about their precarious finances. He’s just about the most unappealing of narrators, yet this was the go-to “Everyman” of this era. He boards a train to London for a dicey meeting with his publisher; at the station he spends an inordinate amount of time checking out a 17 year old “brown-skinned girl” and trying to pinpoint her ethnic background. The train, of course, is a technological marvel: it zips through the Cretaceous as it speeds to London. The girl, of course, is a terrorist: part of a group hijacking the time-train to demand better treatment for Asian immigrants. The whole thing is distasteful on many levels, and also not especially well written. (Why would Anita, the teenage radical, be beguiled by Bernard, the washed-up, middle-aged, genteelly racist wanker who’s been making eyes at her and treating her with affable condescension?) There isn't even any dinosaur action, just some glimpses of scaly boys in the distance. It ends (spoilers?) with our narrator musing that resettling immigrants in the Miocene is an elegant, equitable solution that should work for everyone. (It’s still Britain, after all!) All in all, what a waste of a dynamite title. Imagine that title gracing a novella about a time traveling scout troop or a Campanian summer camp, or maybe a novel about firewatch volunteers in the Laramide foothills. Sigh... what could have been. F

I've shared this anecdote in other reviews, but it's particularly relevant here, so I'll tell it again: In 1999, I was a 16 year old sci-fi writer. I imagined myself a wunderkind, needing just a couple big breaks to become a bestselling novelist. I submitted a novella to F&SF that year, 25k words of Late Cretaceous time-tourism that earned me my very first positive personal rejection. Then-editor Gordon Van Gelder wrote, “The time for this sort of thing is past, alas.” That “alas” became a load-bearing girder of my self-worth; it told my teenage self that Van Gelder would have accepted my story if the dinosaur market hadn’t crashed since the early ’90s. And maybe he would have. Not to praise my teen writing (it was awful), but it was better than “Summerfire Brigade.” If I’d been 16 in 1989 instead of 1999, and writing at that same level, I bet I really could’ve been a sci-fi wunderkind.

In an odd coincidence, when I tried to rewrite that novella into a novel in the mid-2000s, I independently came up with the idea of time-trains. Just one more reason to be disappointed with “Summerfire Brigade.”

“Herself” by Katharine Newlin Burt. In an unexpected swerve, this is a reprint of a horror story first published in 1930. For a magazine that doesn’t consider unsolicited reprints, F&SF printed a fair share of them when they happened to feel like it. “Herself” is, for its time, a fairly explicit deconstruction of gender and social norms among the white and privileged. It follows our unnamed young heroine — chaste and “clean,” raised by a Mother who pretends that everything is pretty and that the socially accepted pretense built around “womanhood” is the prettiest of all — as well as Herself, an earthy, crude, bloody inversion of our heroine, well aware of the ugliness and cruelty of life. Herself has no illusions that women are ever protected the way society likes to pretend; Herself knows the sadism inherent in “virtuous,” authoritarian parenting, and relishes in it. Our heroine clings to the social script: “She knew at once that he was the right man because he matched with all the Pretty Things, with guardian angels and the Big Kind Man with Wings.” She’s scared of Herself but drawn to her in equal measure. The first couple pages are the story’s peak, a vertiginous masterpiece of modernism. But the rest of the story is still marvelously unnerving, pulling the polite gauze and secret skin away from the insidious, sickly horrors of “respectable” social norms. Inevitability, given its original publication date, certain aspects of “Herself” are dubious. But overall, I’m impressed. B

“The Three Wishes” by John Morressy. Much like Morressy’s “Conhoon and the Fairy Dancer” in the March 2000 F&SF, this is a middling humorous fantasy involving folkloric little people and boots that need mending. Clearly this was his idiom. This one does the whole “magical bureaucracy” bit that was popular at the time, nothing exciting, with a not-that-subtle allegory for the government’s treatment of veterans worked into it. C-

“We Were Butterflies” by Ray Aldridge. “[A] compelling and frightening extrapolation of the war against drugs,” promises the editorial introduction — I can imagine few sentences less appetizing in a mainstream publication in 1990. In the grim future of phosphate pits, death camps, and the Big Dry, an old man dying of lungrot somehow manages to tell our narrator long-winded tales about dope in bygone Denver. If you thought that was peak 1990, just wait until you read a sample: “I was sorta caught between being scared of the Battery Man, and wanting to stare at his girlfriend’s tits.” We hop back and forth between the dying man’s stories and our narrator — who had been chief aide to a tough-on-drugs politician, once upon a time. Our narrator, in turn, swings between 1990ish flashbacks and the Big Dry future. Said politician is acting-chief-executive for life, thanks to his dictatorial management of the “drug catastrophe”; the death camps are for drug offenders — which includes anyone who ever tried drugs, thanks to draconian Future Drug Test Technology. It’s grody Boomer bait, but what else would you expect? At least it’s honest about how the self-proclaimed “family values” fascists need a constant supply of scapegoats to maintain their power. D-

“His Spirit Wife” by Karen Haber. Another early ’90s bummer, jam-packed with internalized misogyny and weird racism. Newlywed blonde Sarah was “saved” from her stressful medical career by wealthy husband David. David’s long-term housekeeper Rosa — “small and brown” — attempts to trap poor blue-eyed Sarah’s soul with a “Gamberian Spirit Wife,” a “fetish doll” placed on the mantel, because… Rosa wants David for herself? I guess? Upper class cis-het white folks’ concerns are fucking weird. Irredeemable trash. F

While not exactly a story, a “Crossweird Puzzle” by Larry Tritton is listed as one in the table of contents. I’d gloss over it as a bit of frivolity, except some of the clues are… iffy as fuck. 21 down, for instance, is a shitty antisemitic “joke” about money. That’s a big yikes from me, buckaroos.

“In the Wheels” by Daryl Gregory. Long after nuclear winter and pandemic take out “Dead City,” country boys Zeke and Joey sneak into town to find a car they can race. It’s pretty standard stuff for the post-nuclear genre — polygamous bible cults, superstitions about “rads,” zombies — with a dollop of demons and stock-car racing thrown in. It was professionally put together, not blatantly racist, and only moderately horny (despite the polygamy). It isn’t anything spectacular, but it’s palatable, and that counts for plenty in this issue. B-

There’s, uh, been some questionable content in this issue so far. I mean, even more so than usual. Right? Oh, just you wait.

“Days of Miracles and Wonder” by Gregg Keizer. We wrap things up with a white Louisiana author who has something to say about Apartheid-era South Africa. How bad could it be? Who am I kidding — it’s fucking atrocious. There was a fashion during this time for privileged authors to Make a Point About Social Injustice by writing the most heinous, genocidal shit they could imagine about marginalized communities. (We white authors still do this to some extent, but it’s less fashionable now, or else I’m not reading books that have it.) So, massive trigger warnings here for fictional genocide, racism, and white saviorism. This story tries to Make You Think by depicting a future Afrikaner Free State that “turned this country into something God, and a white man, could be proud of” by firebombing millions of Bantu. Like, regardless of your intentions, are you sure this is making the statement you want it to make? Are you not simply dehumanizing the communities you “support” even further? It fucking ends with our protagonist Piet, now a ghost, being held and comforted by a Bantu ghost woman after he switches sides to the Pan-African ghost army and kills his genocidal cousin. Absolutely foul. I really need a grade below F

Well, shit. This was just about the most heinous issue of F&SF I’ve ever read. The most heinous issue of anything I've read, really. The two okay stories did nothing to ameliorate it. All this because it had dinosaurs on the cover.