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

The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner

282 pages

Published 1996

Read from August 17 to August 23

Rating: 3 out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

The Dead Hours of Night: Stories by Lisa Tuttle

Introduction by Lisa Kröger

233 pages

Published 2021

Read from July 1 to July 10

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

2026 read #10: In Lands That Never Were, edited by Gordon Van Gelder.

In Lands That Never Were: Tales of Swords and Sorcery from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, edited by Gordon Van Gelder

395 pages

Published 2004

Read from February 15 to February 22

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Much like Colin Meloy’s Wildwood, I repeatedly checked this book out of the library in the early years of this blog, but never actually read it. It’s an anthology of sword & sorcery tales first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Back in those days, when I still had an unreasonably starstruck idea of the magazine, that seemed like an irresistible intersection of my interests.

Why didn’t I read it back then? Well, Van Gelder’s slapdash introduction, which doesn’t have much to say and isn’t properly formatted for printing (utilizing hyphens in place of em dashes, for instance), didn’t help lure me in. And the book’s formatting—12 point Times New Roman, copy-and-pasted without regard for the finer details of typesetting—was weirdly off-putting. Which is a shame; my first real introduction to sword & sorcery came instead from Lin Carter’s Year’s Best anthologies, which I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

I want to make a point in the coming months of reading as much S&S, classic and new. (I have my reasons.) So now’s a good time to push through and finally check this one off.

—

“The Hall of the Dead” by Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague de Camp (1967). I have longstanding issues with Howard, but at least the dude knew how to create impeccable atmosphere. This imitation, built by de Camp from Howard’s brief outline, is fine, but lacks the gallop and fire of classic Conan. It feels plotted by rote, checking off boxes, a product rather than a story. That said, I do enjoy a giant slug patrolling a cursed, ruined city, and that’s just the prelude to a fun dungeon crawl. C

“A Hedge Against Alchemy” by John Morressy (1981). First of the Kedrigern stories, which I’ve never particularly cared for. “Fantasy cliches, but played for laughs” is iffy terrain for me, and this one is no different. I suppose this first run feels a tiny bit fresher than Morressey’s subsequent iterations on the same theme. C-?

“Ill-Met in Lankhmar” by Fritz Leiber (1970). My first exposure to Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser was “Scylla’s Daughter” (read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Fantasy). I found it corny but entertaining. Each subsequent encounter with them has led to diminishing returns. This entry is no exception. The tale of how the twain first met already feels like the leering self-parody that defines their stories from the 1970s. It isn’t as bad as, say, “Under the Thumbs of the Gods” (read and reviewed in The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories: 2), but it reinforces my general disinterest in further Fafhrd and Grey Mouser outings. And it’s inordinately long. D-?

“Counting the Shapes” by Yoon Ha Lee (2001). It’s strange how Yoon Ha Lee’s early career trajectory matches what I once hoped for my own. Three years older than me, Lee got his first story published in F&SF in 1999, the same year I got my first personalized rejection from Van Gelder. If only I’d been able to study more short fiction and apply myself to my writing, I could have been Lee’s close contemporary, instead of still struggling to make inroads against the current state of the market. Ah well. The point is, I should read more of Lee’s writing. This one is a particularly good start, weaving poetry, magic, and math into remorseless, heartbreaking logic. I would almost call this epic fantasy instead of Sword & Sorcery, flush as it is with politics and worldbuilding deepened with subtle details. A-

“Firebird” by R. Garcia y Robertson (2001). Long ago, my first exposure to Garcia y Robertson was the novel / fixup version of Firebird. Not familiar with his, ah, idiom, I was intrigued by its Eastern European setting: novel to me then, still somewhat rare in fantasy to this day. I even liked it for the first half or so. But Garcia y Robertson is who he is, which is a relentlessly horny straight guy who never stops asking, “Why don’t we have naively naked virgins in sci-fi anymore?” (and is adamant that lesbian sex doesn’t count against virginity). I have not been looking forward to this revisit. Fortunately, this novella is the strongest part of Firebird, rich with natural and cultural detail, and only somewhat leering. Plus, there’s a witch who lives in a hut made of mammoth bones, which will always win points from me. B-

“Dragon’s Gate” by Pat Murphy (2003). This story exudes atmosphere, expertly interweaving a tremendous sense of place with an analysis of how men use their power to control and take advantage of women. Outstanding. A-

“After the Gaud Chrysalis” by Charles Coleman Finlay (2004). This is my first time reading a story from Finlay, who would, of course, go on to succeed Van Gelder as F&SF’s editor, sending me encouraging rejections when I finally got back into submitting in the mid-2010s. I’m intrigued by the idea of what Finlay called “New Pulp,” and I like the depth of worldbuilding here, which crams a trilogy’s worth of factions and backstory into one novella. The dialogue, though, is too YA-adjacent for my tastes, packed with enough quips and nods and shrugs to make a 2010s-YA-boom fan feel right at home. And if I’m being honest, that very density of worldbuilding can make the pacing feel choppy at times. Still, all in all it’s a solid adventure, and the first story here I’d unhesitatingly label sword & sorcery since “Lankhmar.” B-

 

“The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death” by Ellen Kushner (1991). Even though it’s been years and years since I last read one of Kushner’s Riverside books, this story was like returning to a warm, familiar second home. The story itself is scarcely an anecdote, and it has absolutely no business being in a sword & sorcery collection. (A secondary world fantasy centering swords is not automatically S&S.) But I enjoyed it. B

“The Island in the Lake” by Phyllis Eisenstein (1998). I keep meaning to read more of Eisenstein’s Alaric stories. The first I ever read was 1977’s “The Land of Sorrow” (read and reviewed here); the most recent was 2019’s “The City of Lost Desire” (here). This one falls right in the middle of that extensive span. Like Alaric himself, Eisenstein’s stories are gentle, soft-spoken, and full of heart. This one (while once again having nothing to do with sword & sorcery; it’s courtly low fantasy with an implication of Pern-style space colonization) is charming, start to finish. A-

“Darkrose and Diamond” by Ursula K. Le Guin (1999). We return to Earthsea for a typically Le Guinian tale: sensitive, empathetic, emotionally deft, beautifully written, and emphatically not sword & sorcery. I loved it, of course. A-

“King Rainjoy’s Tears” by Chris Willrich (2002). Potentially fascinating spin on the “two rogues” template: Persimmon Gaunt and Imago Bone go through a series of encounters in order to kidnap three beings made from the tears of a king. The story has a solid opening, but the narrative tends toward the scattershot, and too much of its emotional background relies on having read the previous Persimmon and Imago story, which I have not. Still, it’s closer to sword & sorcery than most of the stories in this book. C+

“The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant” by Jeffrey Ford (2000). Turn of the millennium metafiction satirizing the excesses of 1970s grognard fantasy (or, rather, the cultural impression that 1970s grognard fantasy left on wider culture). The story grew from an unpromising beginning; Jeffrey Ford is a sure hand. But humorous fantasy will never be my favorite. C+

—

Some excellent stories I’m happy to have finally read, mixed with some disappointments. And a whole lot of tales that had nothing to do with sword & sorcery as I understand it. Expanding the subgenre is fine; watering down the definition to include something like “Darkrose and Diamond” renders the term meaningless.

2026 read #7: Dinotopia Lost by Alan Dean Foster.*

Dinotopia Lost by Alan Dean Foster*

319 pages

Published 1996

Read from February 5 to February 10

Rating: 2 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

Such is the sad state of dinosaur fiction that Alan Dean Foster, mercenary page-filler and franchise novelist, treats us to better prose here than we find in most novels I’ve put under that tag. Which isn’t to say it’s good prose. It’s workmanlike at best, often belaboring us with over-description. It’s the sort of storytelling that gives adverbs and introductory clauses a bad rep. Yet Dinotopia Lost’s prose still comes out ahead of Cretaceous Dawn, The Sky People, and especially Triassic. (But then, I’ve read Facebook comment sections better written than Triassic. Less misogynistic, too.)

I read Dinotopia Lost sometime around 2002, and don’t recall a single thing about it. To be fair to my past self, there just isn’t much to remember here. The Prehistoric Pulp blog describes it as “Treasure Island [thrown together with] a lighthearted Jurassic Park,” but I have to disagree; that sounds so much more interesting than what we get here. It is, in fact, astoundingly dull.

The actual plot is “What if some meanies came to utopia?” But the pirates, and the narrative, get distracted by other matters before the idea can be explored. The characters, despite pages of physical description, never develop greater depth than a cardboard standee. And bereft of James Gurney’s iconic artwork, it turns out that talking dinosaurs don’t interest me all that much. The one exception, a Deinonychus ascetic who studied martial arts and wishes to meditate his way out of samsara, arrives too late to make much difference. (It also illustrates the broad stereotypes Foster traffics in.)

Still, I’ve read so many worse things. Especially where dinosaurs are concerned. At least the dream of the nineties is alive in Dinotopia.

2026 read #3: China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh.

China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh

312 pages

Published 1992

Read from January 4 to January 10

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 (would be higher but it aged badly)

CW: fictional sexual assault, anti-queer violence

This Hugo- and Nebula-nominated novel dates from the heyday of white authors appropriating other cultures to make their writing seem more interesting. I’ve wanted to read it for a long time, only to bounce off casual anti-Chinese slurs on the first page. Because this was also the era of equating bigotry with gritty realism. Bad times!

Unfortunately, I already spent $9 on a paperback copy from eBay, so I felt obligated to finish it.

Zhang is one of the foundational queer sci-fi texts. Its queerness, like its Chinese background, was appropriated. McHugh handles it more respectfully than, say, Frederik Pohl did in Gateway, but it’s still broadly stereotyped: Zhang cruises Coney Island, and has a penchant for blond white guys. McHugh also tours queer trauma and state violence in ways that may have been adventurous in 1992’s mainstream, but verge on feeling exploitative from a straight author nowadays (and probably did at the time, too).

Structurally, Zhang is more like a loosely linked series of short stories and novelettes than a cohesive novel. Classic first novel stuff. We follow Zhang himself from Brooklyn to Baffin Island to China. But we also get chapters from other perspectives, filling out the world: an extreme sports kite racer; a goat farmer in a Martian dome; a sheltered young New York woman who alters her face to fit beauty standards and promptly gets raped. 

One unifying thread, the central character of the whole book, is the setting McHugh has created. Another unifying thread, the book’s emotional motif, is that you can never go far enough to escape yourself, that you have to find your own reason for continuing despite the seeming futility of it all.

McHugh is an excellent writer; her POVs pulse with interiority, and the universe is vividly realized, full of life and texture. However, her future New York, despite the intervention of centuries and Maoist revolution, isn’t far removed from the New York of the 1990s imagination. Homosexuality is still frowned upon outside gay clubs. Gay men are still described as “bent.” It’s a strange mix of future extrapolation and not being able to imagine certain things ever changing.

2025 read #92: The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell.

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

408 pages

Published 1996

Read from November 23 to December 4

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I first heard of The Sparrow as a teenager, sometime in the late ’90s. My domineering father rarely permitted books newer than the Edwardian era, but I did read newspapers, which is where I happened upon rumors that a novel about a Jesuit in space was being made into a movie starring Antonio Banderas. That was a tantalizing sequence of words to someone just beginning to encounter the literary, overtly philosophical bent of late ’90s sci-fi in magazines like Asimov’s. Back then, like now, it was rare that high-concept science fiction ever made the jump to theaters. It was rare enough that it stuck in my memory.

The movie, of course, was never made. (Later, Brad Pitt of all people wanted to star as Father Emilio Sandoz. It’s for the best that a movie never came of it, really.) And somehow, in the decades of adult life that followed, when I was free to read whatever I liked, I never took the time to track down the book.

Finally reading it, I’m disappointed by its vibe. This isn’t the ethereal, elevated novel I’d constructed in my teenage imagination. It’s far closer in tone to Crichton’s technothrillers (though, obviously, better written). Rather than a literary masterpiece, it’s pop intellectualism plastered around the framework of an airport novel. Doria Russell builds her plot news-magazine style, hopping from one underdeveloped POV to the next to dole out information. There’s even a Crichtonesque subplot about Japanese business interests buying out Arecibo to automate its technicians out of a job (though Doria Russell out-Crichtons Crichton by having her Japan casually conquer Asia by the 2010s). It’s jarring when you anticipated a character-focused drama.

The 1990s were just a weird time in sci-fi, when bold new ideas jostled against garbage that should have been abandoned in decades past. The Sparrow makes good use of the harrowing nitty-gritty of space travel: radiation poisoning, isolation, the slow death of the human body without the nutrients it evolved to absorb. Doria Russell cleverly applies relativistic effects to a dual narrative timeline. She also embraces lazy, wince-inducing stereotypes; national ancestry determines characterization. Japanese businessmen contemplate seppuku; Muslim terrorists plant bombs; Italians have links to organized crime; a character of Jewish heritage tells herself Arbeit macht frei. Yikes.

In a clumsy way, beneath the stereotyped characters and the requisite Nineties gestures at theological profundity, Doria Russell attempts to examine sexuality, gender, and their attendant power dynamics. After belaboring the spiritual motif (and physical realities) of Sandoz’s celibacy, the narrative slowly unravels the mystery of how he, the final survivor of the Jesuit mission to Rakhat, was found living as a prostitute on the alien planet. The hierarchical society of Rakhat’s inhabitants, and their own restrictions on reproductive autonomy, feeds into this commentary, which makes up a little bit for how prosaic, how thoroughly not-alien, they feel. I’ve read Star Wars books with more alien aliens. (Doria Russell’s decision to give her caste-divided aliens vaguely subcontinental phonemes doesn’t help, either with originality or with beating the stereotype allegations.)

The book as a whole is ambitious but flawed. A relic of its decade, which can often seem more distant and dated than the 1980s.

2025 read #82: Asimov’s Science Fiction, October/November 1999 issue.

Asimov’s Science Fiction, October/November 1999 issue (23:10)

Edited by Gardner Dozois

240 pages

Published 1999

Read from October 30 to November 3

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

That’s it, time for dinosaur fuckin’.

This issue contains Michael Swanwick’s classic “Riding the Giganotosaur,” which may or may not have been the origin of the present day’s dinosaur erotica trend, but was certainly my teenage self’s first exposure to the concept.

We’ll get to it. But first, what other lost Nineties wonders does this issue contain? The TOC is stacked with a who’s-who of late ’90s writers, so I’m moderately intrigued.

—

“A Martian Romance” by Kim Stanley Robinson. I haven’t read any of Robinson’s Mars cycle. So why not begin at the tail end, as the terraforming project spirals into ice and abandonment? Robinson is enough of a professional that I don’t feel I lacked any information to enjoy this story. It helps that there’s remarkably little of what might be called “plot.” Eileen and Roger, along with some friends old and new, take an iceboat around the frozen seas of Mars. Along the way they chat about what the sudden freeze means for the future of terraforming, Eileen thinks about their past, and they learn a lesson about taking the long view of progress. That’s about it. The story is carried by the relationships of the characters and its pensive mood. I liked it — though, as ever, I have to note how absurdly optimistic these old Nineties futures tended to be, with people living 250 years and resources being thrown at terraforming just because they could. We’ll be lucky to live to 60 as serfs in a dying society on an overheated world. B-

A poem comes next: “When an Alien Is Inhabiting Your Body” by Laurel Winter. You can see the roots of what would become our contemporary speculative poetry scene here in the convergence of quotidian and cosmic, though “Alien” reveals its decade of origin at the end with a Lettermanesque groaner about suing McDonald’s.

“The Winds of Marble Arch” by Connie Willis. Leisurely novella about a conference-goer puzzled by a strange blast of wind in a Tube station. As with the enjoyable but plotless story from Robinson, I had a good time with this one, but couldn’t help but feel that the magazine was being extra indulgent for the sake of printing a Big Name. No mere up-and-comer would get away with thirty-five meandering pages of upper middle class mundanity in Asimov’s, now or in the ’90s. Willis, too, is a professional; the story works, aside from some repetitive passages as our protagonist goes back and forth through different Tube lines. She subtly builds a picture of an aging generation turning small and conservative and maddeningly complacent, repeating that everything’s “gone to hell” as they withdraw within ever-narrowing horizons to avoid their encroaching mortality. Too slow to be a personal favorite, but solid nonetheless. B-

Another poem: “The Dream Wave of John Scott Russell” by Howard V. Hendrix. It throws together dreams, wave states, fractals, and its namesake historic scientist in an extremely of-its-time brew, but it works quite well.

“Hothouse Flowers” by Mike Resnick. They loved stories of longevity science in the latter part of the ’90s, didn’t they? Aside from the mildly clever allegory attached to the title, this is a pretty standard gerontology number, nothing all that interesting except as a museum piece of last century’s optimism. (Also, this superficial and quite capitalist philosophy of “Without quality of life, what’s the point of being alive?” threw open the doors to the horrifying clusterfuck that is Canada’s MAID laws.) C-

A poem follows: “Down in Your Bones Only You Alone Know” by Bruce Boston. Rhymes. Kind of forgettable.

“A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows” by Gardner Dozois. Between Kristine Kathryn Rusch at F&SF and Dozois at Asimov’s, this was the golden age of editors putting their own fiction in their own magazines. I can’t even be mad about it, because at the end of the day, Rusch and Dozois both were solid authors. This piece pulls you in immediately, sinking you into precise sensory details of imagery and mood. It can get lost in the weeds of its own future history, but it remains mostly effective, serving almost like an endcap to all the go-to topics of late 20th century science fiction. Sentient AI, virtual reality, uploaded consciousness, nuclear war, genetic engineering, interstellar colonization, and the reaction against accelerating change—all get tossed into one big pile. Even quantum observation and wave collapse get name-checked. The classic 1990s Throw Everything into the Pot approach, but with a faint premonition that this would be the last hurrah for these naive, optimistic concerns. (Though that’s probably the benefit of hindsight talking.) Maybe B-

“In from the Commons” by Tony Daniel. Surreal piece about a single consciousness divided into discrete personas for space reasons. It could have been interesting if it weren’t both ickily heterosexual (the one female persona exists “for intimacy,” her raison d’être to be a fuck buddy for the male personas) and casually eugenicist (a repeated motif draws a parallel with how smart and well-mannered dogs get preferentially neutered by well-meaning owners, which… doesn’t even become relevant to the story, in my opinion). D-

Another Bruce Boston poem: “Beware the Werecanary!” It reads like an inferior imitation of Shel Silverstein.

“Green Tea” by Richard Wadholm. Had I read this story while flipping through this issue when it was on newsstands, it would have inspired my teenage self to write a welter of imitations. It’s a tale of deep space smugglers, illicit materials-science, exotic physics, and refined vengeance, set in a multicultural future of roughnecks and rough men. Reading it now, it’s enjoyable, albeit faintly ridiculous. (Exotic physics stories read like wizards casting big spells at each other, and are just as plausible.) Sometimes I miss that teenage impressionability. B-

“Proof of the Pudding” by Nelson Bond. Deliberately old-fashioned humor piece about an eccentric millionaire who tunnels through the Earth’s crust. Mildly amusing. C

“Riding the Giganotosaur” by Michael Swanwick. The only story I read when I found this issue on newsstands way back in the day. Twenty-six years later, it’s still the main event. It may not be the first “repulsive man’s brain gets transplanted into a giant theropod” story (“Just Like Old Times” by Robert Sawyer predates it by six years), but so far as I’m aware, it’s the best. Swanwick leavens an otherwise basic plot with lush sensory depictions of Cretaceous Patagonia. (Other dino fic writers so rarely make the effort.) And of course, who could forget the climactic mating scene? Truly, Swanwick walked so Chuck Tingle could run. B+

Yet another Bruce Boston poem: “Another Short Horror Story.” It’s another shrug.

“Argonautica” by Walter Jon Williams. A lengthy novella (62 pages!) retelling the tale of Jason and the Argonauts, set in an alternate history version of the American Civil War. There are so many ways this could go wrong. And sure enough, right from the start, it goes wrong in the most fundamental way: Jase Miller and his crew are Confederates. It’s well-written and well-paced, but I’m never going to abide unreformed Reb protagonists (or a white author’s main character throwing around the N-word). Sure, he’s more or less a mercenary, only out for himself, a morally dubious character who declaims any interest in the question of slavery. But I also don’t have to like it. D-

One last Bruce Boston poem: “Curse of the Reaper’s Wife.” Another shrug for the road.

—

And that’s it for this issue! Confederate argonauts aside, it was quite solid. That novella makes up such a chunk of this issue, though, that it lends a stink to the whole business.

2025 read #63: The Sorceress and the Cygnet by Patricia A. McKillip.

The Sorceress and the Cygnet by Patricia A. McKillip

231 pages

Published 1991

Read from June 17 to September 6

Rating: 4 out of 5

I began reading this one in the middle of my couldn’t-focus-on-anything phase early this summer, hoping to squeeze it in before hosting my teenager for his school break. I made it roughly seventeen pages in before abandoning it on my nightstand for the following three months.

Part of the reason for that is McKillip’s prose. She was always a groundbreaker when it came to making fantasy fiction a thing of beauty. At her best, she was like a less-horny Tanith Lee. McKillip’s prose in this book is especially lush, often so dreamlike that the only way forward sometimes is to stop trying to make sense of it and just let it carry you along. That’s hard to do when you have an energetic teen at home with you for the summer (and a world that’s burning down around you).

It’s September now, and I’m happy I decided to persevere.

A wandering wagon-dweller is marked with white hair from his mysterious, mystical ancestry, which links him to strange powers. He stumbles into a quest in order to free his people, and his love, from dreamlike wanderings in an unreal place. From such tired, conventional materials, McKillip crafts tales within tales, stories recorded in the stars, in the wings of swans, in centuries of magic moving through the wood. It isn’t a perfect book, but it is spellbinding.

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.