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.

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“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.

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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.

2025 read #13: The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate by Ted Chiang.

The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate by Ted Chiang

Illustrated by Jacob McMurray

61 pages

Published 2007

Read February 7

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

A slight but fun novella about time travel and the predestination paradox in medieval Baghdad, complemented with lovely collage artwork. Structured as a series of vignettes. Not much to it, though I did enjoy it.

These old Subterranean Press hardback editions were such a fixture of my old library back on Long Island; I used to pad out my reading totals with them, way back when, in the early days of this blog. Hell, this book would’ve been just six years old when I started writing these reviews. Speaking of time travel, what I wouldn’t give to go back to the Obama years…

2024 read #150: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 2008 issue.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 2008 issue (115:1)

Edited by Gordon Van Gelder

162 pages

Published 2008

Read December 4

Rating: 2 out of 5

Ah, the summer of 2008. A wonderful time in my life. When this issue was on newsstands, I was vacationing with my polycule in Florida, preparing to help one then-partner move to New Mexico for grad school. I was flourishing in undergrad, and looking forward to the election, when surely Obama would finally put an end to the fascist Bush regime and solve America once and for all. At least for me, it was a simpler time, before I really knew anything.

I wasn’t writing short fiction, wasting my time instead on a massive and unpublishable novel. I wasn’t really reading SFF magazines back then, either. I wish I had been; maybe I’d be a better writer today.

If I had picked up this issue at the time, I wonder if I would have been encouraged or jealous that someone else was getting a dinosaur story published by Gordon Van Gelder, the editor who had told me nine years previously that he didn’t really care for dinosaur stories.

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“Fullbrim’s Finding” by Matthew Hughes. Hughes was a mainstay in this era of F&SF; it seems like half the ’00s and ’10s issues in my collection feature a story by him. The first one I actually read was “The Mule” in the March/April 2022 issue, which I praised for its early modern esoteric magic setting. Imagine my surprise to learn, via today’s story, that Hughes’ “discriminator” tales began in a technological Old Earth setting, chock-full of spaceships and quantum physics and wan attempts at sci-fi humor, which became the subsequent fantasy setting via cosmological “cycling” of the universe. It all has a 1970s fantasy serial vibe to it. I like fantasy serials in theory, but after a certain point, just write a standalone story in a standalone setting, you know? All that aside, this tale is mildly entertaining. C+

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“Reader’s Guide” by Lisa Goldstein. So much has happened since this issue was printed, and so much in the culture has shifted, that it’s difficult to remember that 2008 wasn’t that long ago. I was startled to find a metafictional list story here, but I guess it isn’t that surprising, really; a lot of the threads that comprise contemporary genre fiction were gathering throughout the ’00s. “Reader’s Guide” is an interesting prototype of the list stories that have proliferated in our time. A fantasy story about the metaphysics of storytelling would have been well-trodden ground even in 1988, let alone 2008, but I liked it all the same. It’s charming. B

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“The Roberts” by Michael Blumlein. The editorial introduction calls this novella “edgy,” and the story opens with the protagonist content in his mother’s womb. What masculine hell are we in for?

Sure enough, we’re treated to just about the most banal 20th century upper-middle class white boy checklist imaginable. Our hero Robert gets born, goes to college, has a fling with art, finds a first love, switches to architecture, has a first heartbreak, needs to work to “feel like a man,” loses an eye in a freak accident likened (what a surprise!) to castration, then finds another love, a professional contact whom he nags and wears down until she finally goes on a date with him. And that’s just by page three.

“The Roberts” compiles 55 pages of numbingly rote masculine concerns and (literal) objectification of women. A quote: “[Robert] needed a woman. In the past it had never been hard for him to meet women, and it wasn’t hard now. Women liked him, and what was not to like in a man so charming, so attractive, so victimized by circumstance and so willing — indeed so poised — to put it all behind and reestablish himself?” It only gets grodier from there; soon enough, Robert is employing a parthenogeneticist to engineer a woman for him.

Edgy, my ass — it’s the same color-by-numbers bullshit pampered male writers have been regurgitating for decades, for centuries, while congratulating themselves on their originality and their fine perceptions. It’s literally the cultural default. “The Roberts” could have been published in F&SF in 1978 and no one would have batted an eye.

One might even conclude this is all a vicious satire of how certain men view themselves as main characters and how they view women, categorically, as muses, helpmeets, accessories, mommy-maids, “miracle workers,” anything other than fully fledged and autonomous human beings with their own fully developed interiority. But if so, it’s one of those satires that cuts alarmingly close to seeming sincere. F

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“Enfant Terrible” by Scott Dalrymple. After that mess, this slight sketch of a brain parasite run amok in a classroom is blessedly forgettable. C 

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“Poison Victory” by Albert E. Cowdrey. An alternative history piece set in a world where the Nazis won and serfdom has been reestablished in Russia under a new German aristocracy. “Nazis won the war!” has always been an oversaturated theme, especially when in retrospect we realize the Nazis won the peace and have been entrenched in our power structures this whole time. “Victory” is well-written and atmospheric, a solid enough story of its type. B-

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“The Dinosaur Train” by James L. Cambias. I’ve only read two dinosaur stories published in the pages of F&SF, and both of them involved trains. (“I’d have two nickels,” etc.) This one is much better than Ian Watson’s “In the Upper Cretaceous with the Summerfire Brigade” (published in the August 1990 issue), but that’s an incredibly low bar. Essentially, “Dinosaur Train” steals the idea of a traveling dinosaur circus from Dinosaur Summer (no shame there, I plan to do the same someday). Cambias even replicates Greg Bear’s pairing of old-timey filmmakers and the lost world. It’s unabashed Dinosaur Summer fanfic, which would have made my 2008 self especially jealous. Cambias’ story hits a pleasing mix of family drama and dinosaur zookeeping — nothing revolutionary, but solid enough to put it in the upper echelons of dinosaur fiction (which is also a very low bar). B

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And that’s it! I’m happy to report that “The Dinosaur Train” — the sole reason I read this issue — was worth reading. “Reader’s Guide” was also quite good.

2024 read #143: The Fires of Vesuvius by Mary Beard.

The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found by Mary Beard

337 pages

Published 2008

Read from November 21 to November 27

Rating: 4 out of 5

Remember a couple years ago, when there was that meme of asking young men how often they think about the Roman Empire? Rome has been a playground for the fascist imagination since, well, the invention of fascism. (It’s right there in the name!) What should be studied as an era of culture contact and movement of trade and peoples between continents is, instead, a minefield of shitty takes and the hard-ons of contemporary would-be authoritarians.

Mary Beard’s Roman histories are among the few that I would trust for this particular subject. Always no-nonsense, Beard’s prose is fluent and a touch wry, cutting through the later bullshit that often adheres to Roman history. She never romanticizes or fetishizes the Roman world, and doesn’t shy away from the heinous inequalities, vile sexism, appalling hierarchies, or autocratic tendencies of Roman society.

Vesuvius is splendidly constructed. Beard takes us step by step through life in Pompeii, beginning with the roads and taking us through personages, trades, government, religion, and so much more in between. 

2024 read #101: Cretaceous Dawn by L. M. Graziano and M. S. A. Graziano.

Cretaceous Dawn by L. M. Graziano and M. S. A. Graziano

303 pages

Published 2008

Read from August 29 to August 30

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

I thought I had read this book back when it was new. I certainly had a copy. Upon revisiting it, though, I don't think I made it more than a couple chapters into its sub-technothriller-grade character introductions and technobabble set-up. It just isn't a good book. But I want to power through all the dinosaur fiction I can stand, so let's do our best.

Some things I liked about Cretaceous Dawn: It treats the Late Cretaceous environment as a full ecosystem, with our castaway characters meeting shorebirds, beetles, mammals, and crocodiles long before they see a ground-running dinosaur, and they observe mating before they witness predation. That was neat. The Grazianos also make an effort (small, but appreciated nonetheless) to portray just how uncomfortably hot, humid, bug-ridden, and muddy the Cretaceous flatlands would have been. I love the Cretaceous, but I think mucking about in its coastal swamps would've been miserable. 

That said, the Cretaceous ecology the Grazianos portray feels weirdly depleted. I think most contemporary authors (and even a lot of paleontologists) cannot conceptualize the pre-industrial natural world, and the sheer vastness of the biomass our ancestors shared the world with not even four centuries ago. Modern people might see a squirrel, a sparrow, and an owl on a nature walk, and think that's what the world was like before cities and factory farms. The reality would've been closer to endless herds of bison carpeting the hills and flocks of passenger pigeons hiding the sun — the direct opposite of the Grazianos' insistence that you could walk for days without seeing a large animal.

This is a pet peeve of mine, informed by Paradise Found and other looks at pre-industrial ecology. I hope to alter this perception in my own novels, when I finally write them.

What I didn't like about Dawn makes for a much longer list.

The book is rancid with that post-9/11 worship of uniform. One of the marooned characters is a tough, no-nonsense ex-marine, apparently the only member of the group capable of thinking in terms of survival. Even worse, much of the narrative is a modern day police procedural starring a tough, no-nonsense cop who rose in the ranks solely due to her own grit and determination. The '00s loved fellating their goddamn cops and marines.

The cop plot doesn't even add anything to the book, except padding. You could have left it all on the editorial floor and lost nothing.

It would be generous to call the characters two dimensional. They are: Bland Man, Old Man, Tough Man, and Bland Woman. Bland Man is so horny for Bland Woman that part of him wishes they could stay marooned in the Cretaceous forever. When one of them dies, no one reacts much. Clearly, not even the book is that invested in these characters.

The prose improves (or at least gets less obtrusive) once our group lands in the Cretaceous, but it never develops beyond a reheated imitation of airport fiction.

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 #73: The Tower at Stony Wood by Patricia A. McKillip.

The Tower at Stony Wood by Patricia A. McKillip

294 pages

Published 2000

Read from June 19 to June 26

Rating: 4 out of 5

It’s a novel from McKillip in her courtly fantasy prime. Of course it has multiple ladies in multiple towers weaving multiple tapestries of magic. Of course it has knights stumbling through dreams, and dragons coiled around treasure. Story becomes reality and words are magic, in the manner of classic 1980s romantic fantasy. But all of it is illuminated with such grace and strangeness that it all feels new.

This book takes all the Victorian clichés of courtly fable and weaves of them a palimpsest of impressions, of ladies in their towers watching other ladies in other towers through enchanted mirrors, of the dead unraveling into the threads of their tapestries, of men sent on quests by cryptic bards only to find their own histories rewritten. All the hoary tropes of kingdoms and nobles and war are rendered into beautiful movements of poetic inevitability.

2024 read #63: Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara by James Gurney.

Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara written and illustrated by James Gurney

160 pages

Published 2007

Read June 3

Rating: 3 out of 5

After Dinotopia: The World Beneath, I didn’t even bother seeking out a copy of First Flight, which appears to share Beneath’s young reader picture book vibes. Chandara works quickly to establish that it’s more in line with the original Dinotopia. Gurney brings back the found-journal framing device as well as its more anthropological tone, dropping us once more into Arthur Denison’s narrative to show off inventive new locales and customs that arise where humans and sentient dinosaurs coexist.

However, I felt some of the zest is gone. The artwork is professionally superb, and is reason enough to enjoy this entry, but a lot of the new locations feel like half-hearted retreads of places we saw in the original book. Bilgewater is creative, a town built of upended ships, but it has little to do with dinosaurs; it could have been located in any fantasy setting. The new characters we meet have little life to them. I just finished the book, and I couldn’t tell you any of their names.

While Gurney made some strides toward including more characters of the global majority, white people still predominate in crowd scenes and character studies (which is odd for a land canonically settled by people of every region). It doesn’t help matters that the plot of Chandara sees Denison journeying into the mysterious, forbidden east on the invitation of an emperor named Khan.

2024 read #36: Michael Swanwick’s Field Guide to the Mesozoic Megafauna by Michael Swanwick.

Michael Swanwick’s Guide to the Mesozoic Megafauna by Michael Swanwick

Artwork by Stephanie Pui-Mun Law

32 pages

Published 2004

Read March 13

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

This chapbook — scarcely more than a pamphlet — collects two sequences of dinosaur-themed microfiction. The first, “Michael Swanwick’s Guide to the Mesozoic Megafauna,” was published in 2003 as a promotional tie-in for Swanwick’s Bones of the Earth. The second, “Five British Dinosaurs,” was originally published in Interzone in 2002. I spent $9 on a secondhand copy — that’s almost 30 cents per page.

“Guide” includes thirteen vignettes, each centered on a particular extinct genus or species. “The Thief of Time: Eoraptor: early Carnian” was an out-of-the-gate highlight. Most of the vignettes are delightful, but a few of them are dated by the kind of sweeping nationalist assumptions certain authors liked to include twenty-odd years ago.

Each fic is scarcely a morsel, a scene-setting plus a punchline. It’s a shame they were written to promote a book that took place mostly in boardrooms, because Bones of the Earth would have benefited immensely from some colorful interstitials along these lines, while these yarns would benefit from just a bit more room to breathe.

“Five British Dinosaurs” is a more focused sequence of, well, British punchlines: pixies inadvertently leading Mary Ann Mantell to the first Iguanodon teeth, a bone-headed pachycephalosaur sitting in Parliament, a Megalosaurus stopping by for tea, and so on. I’d love to see more stories along these lines, fleshed out and given more life than this tasting-menu format permits.

2024 read #35: Falling in Love with Hominids by Nalo Hopkinson.

Falling in Love with Hominids by Nalo Hopkinson

224 pages

Published 2015

Read from March 5 to March 11

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

I found this collection in a local used bookstore. I’ve had memorable experiences with Nalo Hopkinson’s novels in the past, and this book in particular has a cool, evocative cover, which was enough to make me buy it.

But reading Hopkinson’s foreword was what convinced me I’d likely love these stories. The collection’s title — a Cordwainer Smith quotation — is used here to describe Hopkinson’s growth from a depressed teenager, despising humanity, hopeless in the face of the world’s injustices, to a more confident and optimistic person, embraced and buoyed by community. Granted, 2015 was a wholly different world in many ways. Being optimistic was more plausible then than it is today. But I want to get back some sense of community, which I briefly gained after my own misanthropic teen years before I lost it again. So Hopkinson’s foreword was instantly relatable.

Plus, I’m intrigued by all the stories first published in now-forgotten themed anthologies: Girls Who Bite Back, Monstrous Affections, Queer Fear. They all sound so cool and interesting. I want to get into themed anthologies more going forward, both as a reader and as a writer.

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“The Easthound” (2012). Creative and atmospheric spin on werewolves. Warrens of children eke out survival after all the teens and adults “sprout” into furry carnivores, a pandemic of lycanthropy triggered by puberty. But all the survivors are getting older. A haunting story, expertly structured. Excellent.

“Soul Case” (2008). Brief but vivid account of the maroon nation of Chynchin, a fictional quilombo facing attack from colonialist soldiers on camels. I wish there had been more of this story. I’m assuming it forms a prologue / prequel / backstory to a longer body of work. (Some slight digging reveals that, yes, Chynchin appears in several of Hopkinson’s stories.)

“Message in a Bottle” (2005). Domestic near-future fiction is still all too rare, but it was even scarcer back in the '00s. This piece is as thoroughly '00s as it gets, though: narrator Greg watches young Kamla grow in her adoptive family, only to discover that Kamla (and many kids like her) are actually from the future, sent back in time in clone form in bodies designed to age slowly and live for centuries. It's a solid enough story, though the social and political changes since 2005 make the intergenerational research concerns here seem quaint.

“The Smile on the Face” (2005). Gilla is a teenage girl, pressured by social expectations to hate every aspect of herself: her hair, her size, her existence as a girl, her ability to talk to trees. But, as in the tale of St. Margaret she has to read for school — a Christian hagiography that sounds suspiciously like a woman abandoning the role foisted upon her by the faith and turning to old, feminine tree magic in her hour of need — Gilla learns to embrace her own power. Hopkinson ties these threads together so ably, she makes it look effortless.

“Left Foot, Right” (2014). A strange and beautiful contemporary fairy tale about grief, a car crash, crabs, and borrowed shoes. Quite good.

“Old Habits” (2011). Outstanding tale of ghosts stuck haunting a mall. Sweet, melancholy, and unexpectedly horrifying, all at once. Possibly my favorite story here so far.

“Emily Breakfast” (2010). This one begins so gently, and unfolds so slowly, I had no idea what to expect. It's an utterly charming slice-of-life tale, disarmingly intimate and queer and full of community, spiced with just the right amount of fantasy touches: cats with wings, chickens that breathe fire, messenger lizards. You know the standard SFF writing advice, that line that says genre elements should always be integral to the story and tie into its themes? This story ignores all that, and is all the better for it. It's so good! I aspire to write like this. Another favorite.

“Herbal” (2002). This zippy little fable literalizes the elephant in the room, and follows it through its logical outcome. Entertaining. 

“A Young Candy Daughter” (2004). Another charming little tale, this one about a young savior growing into her miracles.

“A Raggy Dog, a Shaggy Dog” (2006). A sharply detailed and absorbing character study of narrator Tammy Griggs, who keeps orchids, sets off sprinklers to water them in apartments, and drifts in the liminal space between biology and magic. There are also hybrid rats with wings. Mesmerizing.

“Shift” (2002). A contemporary reframing of The Tempest that examines intersections of color and sex, power and prejudice. It is spellbinding in its lyricism, in its magics of water and cream. 

“Delicious Monster” (2002). Another piece that expertly weaves together the domestic and the cosmic. Jerry grew up with a distant, angry, unhappy father, and is resentful now that his dad Carlos has become a better version of himself, happy with his partner Sudharshan in a way he had never been during Jerry’s childhood. But a solar eclipse marks the arrival of something new. Another outstanding piece.

“Snow Day” (2005). While out shoveling snow, our narrator meets a raccoon and discovers, to their mutual distaste, that they can get inside each other’s minds. But that’s only the beginning, as other animals converge upon the city and the minds of its people. And then spaceships land. Charming.

“Flying Lessons” (2015). A beautifully written fable that shields the horrifying trauma beneath. 

“Whose Upward Flight I Love” (2000). Marvelous imagery highlights this microfic of trees caged in the city, and the fall storms that sometimes set them free. Gorgeous and succinct.

“Blushing” (2009). A contemporary fairy tale with Gothic overtones. A new bride gets the keys to every room in the tastefully updated Victorian, except one. Naturally, I loved the meticulous geological details of where the stone façades and surfaces were sourced. I didn’t expect the twist ending. Brief but unsettling.

“Ours Is the Prettiest” (2011). Long ago, flush with the discovery of Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks, I attempted to read her novel Finder, set in the Borderland shared universe. It never clicked for me; I abandoned it a few pages in, and never tried to get into anything else from the setting afterward. This story comes from a much more recent Bordertown revival. Like anything from a shared universe, the backstory is somewhat opaque, but Hopkinson’s deft hand with exposition made it easy to sink into its rhythms. Pure ’90s urban fantasy, but updated and reinvigorated, “Prettiest” is vivid and queer and boisterous, once again mixing character drama with a rich and magical backdrop. I’m not necessarily intrigued to read more Borderland stories after this, but I’d love to read more like this from Nalo Hopkinson. Another new favorite.

“Men Sell Not Such in Any Town” (2015). It’s odd how I never heard of Goblin Market until last year, and now that I know about it and have read it, I keep noticing references to it in unexpected places. Hopkinson cites Market as the inspiration for her novel Sister Mine, but says this brief story takes only its title (and its tempting fruits) from the poem. Atmospheric like a hothouse, this little tale. Voluptuous and sensual.

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And that’s it for this collection! It was a delight start to finish, perhaps the most consistently excellent single-author collection I’ve read so far.

2023 read #153: Earth Before the Dinosaurs by Sebastien Steyer.

Earth Before the Dinosaurs by Sebastien Steyer

Translated by Chris Spence

Illustrated by Alain Bénéteau

Foreword by Carl Zimmer

181 pages

Published 2009 (English translation published 2012)

Read from December 11 to December 14

Rating: 3 out of 5

I always despair at the general apathy toward science. Public apathy flows into a feedback loop with publishers’ capitalist calculations: amateur interest in scientific primers is sporadic to nonexistent, thus few of them get published for a general audience, thus there’s no way for the public to learn basic science. Plus, with any introductory text in a fast-moving field like paleontology, there’s always the probability that it’ll be outdated within a few years.

I’ve long been interested in the tetrapods (and the ecosystems) that evolved before the dinosaurs, but outside of a few books like Beasts Before Us, there really aren’t any popular introductions. I don’t know enough to know what parts of Earth Before the Dinosaurs might already be outdated — though 2009 feels like a long time ago, in paleontology years, so the concern was hard to avoid as I read it.

Whether it’s because of the original author or because of translation, the text alternates between patronizing and densely technical. The book belabors the importance of using precisely defined terminology, instead of lazy pop science metaphors like “missing link” and “transitional fossil,” yet ironically throws around a ton of jargon without defining it. (I know what sarcopterygians and temnospondyls are, for example. but I’ve been obsessed with evolution and paleontology for thirty years or more.)

Steyer’s central topic is evolutionary relationships, so we get an entire chapter on embryology but not much at all about my primary interest, which is paleoecology. 

The best part of the book, by far, is the luscious artwork by Alain Bénéteau. It amply makes up for any deficiencies of the writing and structure of the book.

2023 read #135: The Sky People by S. M. Stirling.

The Sky People by S. M. Stirling

301 pages

Published 2006

Read from November 15 to November 21

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

I remember seeing this book on display at Borders shortly after its release. Dinosaurs! Right there on the cover! And in hardback, no less. (Hardback sci-fi imparted a cachet of quality to my naive younger self. Thirteen years of mass market paperbacks will do that to a budding sci-fi fan.) When I flipped through the prologue, though, I got discouraged by Stirling’s Burroughsian pastiche, and never picked it up again. Soon enough, I forgot it even existed.

Once again I have the Prehistoric Pulps blog to thank for bringing this book to my attention. Their review warns that this is a “by-the-numbers” Old Venus adventure novel, and that dinosaurs are mere “window dressing” without any substantial role. But I’ve been scraping the bottom of the barrel for more dinosaur fiction, and in the years since I first spotted The Sky People in the wild, I’ve come to a much finer appreciation for modern takes on Old Venus and Old Mars. (Hell, I even published one.) How does People suit my current sensibilities?

It’s… not great? Stirling is a journeyman sci-fi writer who tends to throw away the promise of his pulpy setups with forgettable storytelling. He hits that elusive note of mediocrity that’s so hard to push through (or care about); somehow he makes a perilous airship journey through skies beset with predatory pterosaurs feel flat and uninteresting. Marauding Neanderthals armed with AK-47s are somehow monotonous. The dinosaurs, moreover, feel more like big, dumb, lumbering, lethargic beasts here than they did in Time Safari, which was published 24 years before.

On top of that, Stirling has that white-guy-who-came-up-in-the-’90s attitude toward his characters’ race. He’ll make a Black woman one of his main characters, and act like he’s being progressive, but then have her spend the book constantly thinking about or referencing how dark-skinned she is. “I’m not equipped to blanch, but consider it done,” says our Cynthia. This could also serve as an example of Stirling’s skills with witty and naturalistic dialogue. Later, we learn the indigenous Venusians have christened her “Night Face.” This tendency in Stirling’s work is pretty glaring.

The main problem with updating a Burroughsian pulp vibe without deconstructing the Burroughsian pulp vibe is, your narrative can feel laden with a 1900s colonialist mentality. In the author’s note to some other book he wrote, Stirling chided his readers not to conflate what a character thinks with what the author thinks, which is a fine philosophy, but doesn’t justify choosing to write a square-jawed protagonist who advises his protégés to gun down “threatening” locals without compunction.

2023 read #129: Asimov’s Science Fiction, February 2000 issue.

Asimov’s Science Fiction, February 2000 issue (24:2)

Edited by Gardner Dozois

144 pages

Published 2000

Read from November 3 to November 4

Rating: 2 out of 5

As with the March 2000 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction, I read a fragment of this issue when it was on newsstands at my local Barnes & Noble. I was 17 and had a handful of story rejections to my name. Some had been rough; at least one had been sorta encouraging. Of the stories, about 75% had been about dinosaurs. I wanted to regroup: read what was getting published, see what professional short fiction looked like, improve my craft. Basically, scope out the competition and take notes.

This issue just happened to have a dinosaur story in it, so that was the story I read. All these years later, that dino story is the reason I tracked down a copy of this issue to read in full today.

“The Royals of Hegn” by Ursula K. Le Guin. It’s funny that at 17 I bypassed a Le Guin story to get to a dino fic, but as a teen I was rarely allowed to read anything more recent than the Edwardian era; I don’t believe I even recognized her name at the time. I wouldn’t read any of her books until I picked up The Left Hand of Darkness around ’07. If “Hegn” had been my first exposure to Le Guin, it’s possible my teenage self would not have been impressed. 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. (Keep in mind, for context, Princess Diana’s televised funeral would have been less than two years before this was penned.) Even an indifferent Le Guin will be worthwhile, and I always appreciate a middle finger to the institutions of power, but this was not her best effort. Maybe C+

A poem follows: “The Latest Literary Device” by Timons Esaias. It worked well enough, though it housed a better poem in its heart, blunted by its ironic “device.”

“How Josiah Taylor Lost His Soul” by L. Timmel Duchamp. One of my pet peeves as a reader and writer of SFFH is when mainstream literary authors swoop in, write a book rooted in a vintage SFFH premise, and get lauded for their originality. Don’t get me wrong — I loved Never Let Me Go. But here it is in miniature, five full years before Kazuo Ishiguro released it to acclaim, awards nominations, and movie deals. Josiah Taylor is a hardline Christian CEO who’s making the leap to a senate seat. He has at his disposal a small army of clones for whenever he needs, or wants, to replace a body part. Conveniently for Taylor’s theology, clones are considered “soulless” second-order creations. Our viewpoint is a clone designated Ezekiel, who strains to overcome his loyalty modifications to aid a plot to murder and replace Josiah. Okay, so it isn’t the same story as Never Let Me Go. This is less about the fragility and fleeting beauties of a life lived as spare parts for someone else, and more about dosed hormones, bloodlust, and inconvenient erections. No one would ever say it’s on the same stratum as Never Let Me Go. But it’s a solid enough take on an already thoroughly explored trope. C

A poem: “Technoghosts” by Ruth Berman. Can you imagine a more turn-of-the-millennium title? It’s a comedic little number about vengeful ghosts updating how they get in touch with you.

CW for the next story for sexualization of a child.

“Downriver” by James Sarafin. After a confrontation between Alaska Natives and the federal government leaves Anchorage (and 40% of Alaska’s population) destroyed, Ed, a hunting lodge proprietor, keeps his clients captive as menial labor, helping him survive out in the bush while martial law and secession movements cut them off from the outside world. What had been a mildly interesting premise collapses in a wave of ’80s-style grodiness when a derelict boat drifts by their camp, its only survivor an adolescent girl. You can guess how the rest goes. This story is competently written, but has no reason to exist other than a wish to be edgy. Maybe, generously, F+

“The Shunned Trailer” by Esther M. Friesner. Humorous and horny Lovecraft pastiche, written in a tongue-in-cheek antique style. Our hero, a fratty Harvard bro on spring break, wants to get drunk and get laid. After some hitchhiking misadventures, he winds up sheltering from a storm in a trailer park full of mutant hillbillies who worship the Elder Gods. It wasn’t terrible, but “Trailer” quickly wore out all two of its jokes and overstayed its welcome. It’s weird, though, how there have been two stories in this issue about trashy inbred freaks. C-

“Tyrannous and Strong” by O’Neil De Noux. Here at age 40, with well over ten years of deliberately wide-ranging reading behind me, it’s quaint to remember how impressionable I was in my teens. Every short story I read back then (and there were so few of them) inspired three or four copycat ideas. I only read this story once, standing there in the Barnes & Noble, but in my notebooks from that time, you’ll find several references: “set this on a ‘Tyrannous & Strong’ type world” and so forth. I also went through a brief fad for widowed main characters. Even our narrator MacIntyre’s talking household computer found its way into one of my earliest Timeworld stories. I’m aware now that De Noux’s world of Octavion — an alien planet with magenta trees, turquoise waters, remote livestock stations, and creatures that happen to be identical to dinosaurs — is a midcentury sci-fi trope, entertaining enough but not nearly as original as my teen self believed. I did enjoy the world De Noux built, though it’s really just dinos, a ranch, hot sun, and some trees of unusual color. The story is slight, little more than a would-be Hemingway’s “a man’s gotta kill the beast to protect what’s his” affair. The titular tyrannosaur is, in all essentials, the one from Jurassic Park. If this were about anything other than dinosaurs, “Tyrannous” would be a big shrug, little more than an extended action sequence. But it’s hard to find decent dino fiction, and of all the stories I’ve tracked down in magazines from this era, this one has aged the most gracefully. So I’ll give it a little boost in the ratings, as a treat. B-

“The Forest Between the Worlds” by G. David Nordley. Early on in this blog, I used to make more of a distinction between hard and soft science fiction, but I let that lapse as I read more sci-fi that couldn’t be cleanly sorted into either category. However, when a story comes with fuckin’ diagrams, I’ll go ahead and file it under hard sci-fi. I mean, look at this:

Ridiculous. Like, we get it, you Did The Math for your story. Goddamn.

Still, the setting is the most interesting aspect of this sprawling novella. Haze and Shadow are a double world, tidally locked, bridged by the titular column of forest, grappling them together in an unlikely but stable configuration. One is reminded of Pluto and Charon in Catherynne M. Valente’s Radiance. It’s a compelling science fictional concept from an era of compelling space opera worlds. It’s richly detailed and is a worthy addition to the Big Stuff in Space tradition.

The characters and outline of the story are less compelling. Sharada is a human anthropologist who’s been getting a bit too personal with the spiderlike Forest People — “going native,” in the colonial phrase. She fucks them because of course she postulates that they communicate information through fluid exchange. And because Haze and Shadow are hothouse worlds, she and all the other human scientists are naked most of the time. Akil, our viewpoint character, is sent up the Forest with fellow researcher Marianne to find Sharada and bring her back to base for a disciplinary hearing. But the spidery Forest People might be more interested in the humans than it seems.

And, of course, because it’s a dude writing sci-fi, I have to CW again for sexualization of a child.

Turns out Sharada has brought the 12 year old daughter of one of the higher-ups into the Forest — the Forest with the fuck-to-communicate aliens. Fucking ugh. I didn’t need to read that. There’s also some genes-are-destiny bullshit about how, before humans genetically modified themselves, women were just naturally more emotional and worse at math. Marianne’s sapphic nature is pointedly called “not an ancient human tradition,” and to get comfort from Akil, she switches to straight like it’s nothing.

Fucking ugh. None of that bullshit was necessary in the space forest novella, my dude. None of it. Violating a 12 year old character added precisely nothing to the story beyond shock value. “Women are so biologically bad at math we had to genetically modify our species” is spectacularly absurd. Pretending lesbianism is some newfangled kink is on that same level.

This story is a wildly mixed bag. Worldbuilding is a solid A. Story is an adequate C or C+. Extraneous “gender is genes” bullshit and child assault? Big old F. Eff eff eff. Maybe I’ll average it out to something around D-

Or hell, I’ll just go with F

Well, that was a wild ride. Good lord. At least the dino story was okay??

I was planning on a paragraph or two about my teenage writing journey and what I wish had gone differently, but I don't want my personal baggage associated with this issue anymore.

2023 read #50: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 2000.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 2000 issue (98:3)

Edited by Gordon Van Gelder

162 pages

Published 2000

Read from May 8 to May 9

Rating: 2 out of 5

CW: My introductory paragraphs discuss real life trauma from my teens, including homelessness, a house fire, and the death of a dear relative.

Like much of my pre-2010 F&SF collection, I got this one through a bulk buy of back issues on eBay. It wasn’t until I began reading “Loyal Puppies,” the first story, that I realized this wasn’t the first time I’d run into this issue.

In March 2000, a few months after F&SF editor Gordon Van Gelder had given me my first positive personalized rejection, I decided to follow the evergreen advice and actually read the magazine to which I was sending submissions. At the Barnes & Noble near the Dayton Mall, I leafed through this very issue. The first couple pages of “Loyal Puppies” were burned into my memory — not only were they the first bit of an F&SF I ever read, they would be the last for a long time to come, because of what happened later in March 2000.

That’s when my grandmother’s house, where I lived when I wasn’t living in my father’s car, was burned down. I escaped, as did my grandmother, though she died of a heart attack just a couple days later. I wouldn’t escape my father for well over a year, only to have to fend for myself without social skills or good emotional regulation in the nightmare of Dubya Bush-era capitalism. I was unable to find the energy to write through most of my twenties. I wouldn’t buy an issue of F&SF for myself until 2016 or so (though by that point I’d been reading F&SF stories in various collections).

Unexpected trauma trigger, this issue! So now I’m heading into this issue with a specific mindset: it’s almost a glimpse of an alternate future I could have had, one where maybe I could have focused on writing earlier on and maybe a little bit less on mere survival. (Though who knows, the poverty, neglect, and homelessness were always part of my childhood; my twenties were probably doomed regardless.)

“Loyal Puppies” by Rick Heller. The best part about this one is Van Gelder’s wonderfully dated introduction: “Here’s a story that takes the current cell phone craze a bit farther…” This story combines two of my least favorite things: “ripped from tomorrow’s headlines” consumer tech sci-fi, and a grown cis dude author writing from the POV of a shallow, boy- and weight-obsessed teen girl. It’s a tale as old as time: chip-implant cellphones, awkward future-teen slang, accidentally overheard conversations, a Hollywood heartthrob, drug dealing, and murder. It’s the kind of story where our narrator, on the run from a kidnapping, takes a moment to worry about her weight. I remember reading the first few pages of this at 17, there in the Barnes & Noble, and finding myself incredulous that this had gotten published in such a prestigious market while my stories had been rejected. Reading it now, in full and with much greater perspective, I can understand why my teenage writing wasn’t published, and can grudgingly admit that this story is at least readable, competently structured, and probably even enjoyable to someone who likes this sort of thing (none of which could be said about my teenage fiction). Since I don’t like this sort of thing, I’ll give it a D

“The Eye in the Heart” by Tanith Lee (from an idea by John Kaiine). A brief but chilling piece about a young woman’s joy in her marriage — and her Sect’s particular practice for young married women. A solid entry in the canon of “Actually this horrifying patriarchal cult is good for us oh-so-flawed women!” allegories, all too relevant here and now. B

“Crux” by Albert E. Cowdrey. Overstuffed and overlong, this sprawling novella (nearly the length of every other story in this issue put together) has a bit too much of everything. Three hundred years have elapsed since all-out nuclear war annihilated most of Earth’s population! Massive domes seal off the radioactive remnants of the old cities! Ninety percent of the Earth is a nature reserve thanks to an eco-conscious dictator! But humanity has spread to other planets and stars, so this story is also kind of a space opera! But also there’s time travel! A stolen wormholer! A rumpled private eye is on the case, doing the dirty work of the galactic empire! And the underground network that stole the wormholer wants to change the past and undo the nuclear war even though it means they won’t exist! Cowdrey’s Worldcity wallows in that problematic pan-Asian medley so beloved by white dudes in this time period, complete with a greedy “Confucian scholar” stereotype straight out of yellowface Hollywood; much of the story revolves around a red light district called Clouds and Rain. I probably would have been in awe of this story and wanted to imitate it when I was 17, but now? I don’t care for it. It’s much less than the sum of its parts. D-

“The Madness of Gordon Van Gelder” by Michael Swanwick. A chummy, humorous bit of yarn featuring the author of this story, the editor of this magazine, and the pandemonium that ensues from the phrase “I’ll buy that for a dollar!” A nice palate cleanser after that last story. As far as industry in-jokes turned into flash-fic go, this one deserves a solid B

“Rossetti Song” by Alexander C. Irvine. “Some people have always wanted to be President, or a baseball player, or a movie star, or a business tycoon. Me, I’ve always wanted to own a bar.” Standard red-blooded American masculine something or other revolving around a widower who runs the neighborhood bar of his dreams but needs ghostly intervention from a dusty old folk record to help him learn what it means to mourn. Not my kind of story, but it’s ably written; aside from taking a smidge too long to get past the mundane setup, it’s briskly constructed and does what it set out to do. And as a fan of dusty old folk music, I can at least buy into that aspect of the story. I suppose that deserves at least a B-?

“The Museum” by Henry Slesar. I grew up devouring Sherlock Holmes stories, yet mysteries are probably my second least favorite genre. At first this one didn’t excite my interest. A private art detective who retired to run a gallery, Mason Graves gets pulled into one last case when a Cellini sculpture goes missing in Vienna. Suddenly a rash of art thefts and missing artwork plagues museums around Europe and America. Fortunately, this one is another brisk, professional piece and was a painless read. And the final twist, while I probably should have seen it coming, was a surprise gut punch. B

“Conhoon and the Fairy Dancer” by John Morressy. Middling humorous fantasy with an early 1980s flavor. It plays with the usual tropes of broad-chested hero, crotchety wizard, fair princess, and tricksy fairies. To give you an idea of the vibe here, the main fairy our heroes pursue is named “Twisty Mike,” and on their quest our heroes spend a night with Mother McCrone. I can’t get worked up to feel one way or another about this. Maybe C-

And that’s it! I had originally meant to read this issue as an introduction to the Gordon Van Gelder era of F&SF, before I got sidetracked by traumatic memories. It’s a definite improvement over what I’ve read from the Ferman years, but — so far — it’s an incremental rather than a categorical improvement.

2023 read #34: Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick.*

Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick*

336 pages

Published 2002

Read from April 11 to April 12

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

When I was a teenager in the late 1990s, I saw Michael Swanwick as my professional nemesis.

See, I had sent out my first short story submissions to the likes of Asimov’s Science Fiction in 1998 or thereabouts; my earliest submissions were mostly dinosaur stories, featuring either time-traveling humans or “nature red in tooth and claw” pieces from a saurian perspective. All of them, justifiably, were rejected. But in 1999 Asimov’s published a cover story by one Michael Swanwick, “Scherzo with Tyrannosaur,” and I (with all my neophyte main character syndrome) was half convinced that Asimov’s had stolen my ideas, given them to Swanwick to polish, and published them to widespread acclaim.

After I had the chance to read “Scherzo with Tyrannosaur” (and particularly its follow-up, “Riding the Giganotosaur”), I was sensible enough to realize that nothing had been stolen or reworked from my amateurish teen fiction. Swanwick produced excellent stories, rich with imaginative twists and conceits. My stories were lukewarm fanfic. But for years afterward I both admired and resented Swanwick’s facility with the dinosaur short story. Swanwick’s short stories were pretty much the only reliably good dinosaur fic I’d ever read, right up until discovering Jennifer Lee Rossman’s wonderful time vortex stories in the last few years. Most other dino stories don’t come close (my own included, until maybe recently).

Bones of the Earth was built up from the basic outline of “Scherzo,” complete with one of its central characters. (And “Scherzo” itself shows up here, partially intact, as chapter six.) Bones was one of the first purchases I snapped up when I was 19 and newly had access to spending cash. I know that I read it in 2002, but I don’t recall much else about it, beyond a vague sense of disappointment.

Rereading it now, I don’t think it compares with Swanwick’s better novels, such as Stations of the Tide or The Iron Dragon’s Daughter. It doesn’t live up to the tidy little premise of “Scherzo,” despite copying that story’s conceit of a time travel bureaucrat who works with and resents his older self (and resents the cold-blooded way the older self preserves the timeline).

Much of it doesn't hold up as a dinosaur novel, either. Most of the book takes place in conference rooms and offices in the near future; dinosaurs and Deep Time add occasional flavor, at best. Even The Evolution of Claire featured almost as much dinosaur action by page count. A chunk of the plot revolves around fundamentalist Christian terrorists, which is painfully timely as we lurch through Swanwick’s then-near-future, but isn’t my first choice for the focus of a dinosaur novel. The overall vibe is bureaucratic technothriller without many thrills. Think Crichton but with better prose, slightly rounder characters, and less cinematic pizazz.

Also, it needs to be said: After all the lovely queer fiction I’ve been reading lately, Swanwick’s hetero boomer vibes were a bit off-putting and antiquated.

On the whole, this book is fine, a solid C or C+. Despite all my above quibbles, a scatter of occasional brilliant moments elevates Bones: possibly the best description of a tyrannosaur I've ever read; one of the better "castaways in time" sequences in fiction; the discovery of an Anthropocene geological horizon ("metamorphic macadam, a roadbed that had been squeezed and twisted by the millions-years-long collision of Africa into Europe") by a time-traveling geologist 50 million years into the future. I do think I liked it more this time around. Not quite level with Swanwick’s best, but amply enjoyable. If only there had been more creative brilliance and fewer conference room scenes. 

2023 read #20: Shakespeare: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd.

Shakespeare: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd

521 pages

Published 2004

Read from February 10 to February 24

Rating: 4 out of 5

I’ve rarely read historical biographies. Many years ago I attempted Peter Ackroyd’s hefty The Life of Thomas More, but it proved so dense and abstruse that I gave up less than halfway through.

Ackroyd’s characteristic style (which assumes the reader already has a full understanding of the subject, eschewing any overview before stringing together obscure anecdotes, achieving a vibe instead of laying out the foundations and building from them) suited me better here. Somehow I’ve gotten through 40 years having read exactly one piece of Shakespeare’s writing—Hamlet. But Will Shakespeare pervades anglophone pop culture and general awareness far more than Thomas More. With that preexisting scaffolding in place, I learned a lot about the shape and texture of Shakespeare’s life and work from this book. Even better, Ackroyd takes pains to place the writer in the context of his time and culture. I was particularly drawn to the fleeting images of his fellow actors and the ways Shakespeare likely created his characters to suit their abilities.

Ackroyd’s tendency to just vibe makes for some strange sources. Twice he references what phrenologists concluded about Shakespeare’s cranium, apparently in all seriousness. Not the route I’d go with a 21st century biography.

2022 read #48: London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd.

London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd

775 pages

Published 2000

Read from approximately January 15, 2021 to December 21, 2022

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

After reading so much during the month of October, my attention span got redirected to other hyperfocuses for a while. (I played Fable II start to finish for the first time since 2012 or so, and then followed it up with Fable III.) Books slipped through the cracks. Part of the problem was, nothing seemed to hold my interest. Books I'd have devoured in a day back in October I could only read a page or two at a time before giving up.

Fortuitously, "a page or two at a time" happens to be an excellent way to read London: The Biography.

I first tried to read this book back in 2013 or 2014. At one point I called it "My favorite book that I never finished." It consists of chapter after chapter -- some seventy-nine altogether -- each of them a rambly assemblage of anecdotes drawn from primary and secondary sources loosely grouped around a theme (e.g., alcohol, theater, sound, the crowd, Clerkenwell, the children of the city, the Underground, etc.). It's a fine book to have on hand and maybe read whatever random chapter appeals to you that day, but it's a bear to read cover to cover. I gave up maybe halfway through. I picked it up again last year while sort of casting about for anything to distract me in the wake of some traumatic life changes. Again, I only got about halfway in before setting it aside.

So last month, when I found myself in the mood to peck my way through a book that didn't require sustained attention, I turned once again to London. This time I resumed where I'd left off. I wouldn't remember much of the book, but I wouldn't need to.

Ackroyd spends the bulk of London reiterating what, at this point in his writings, seems to have been his major theme: Certain places in England keep attracting the same sort of personalities, events, and vibes through the centuries. In essentially every chapter he provides a litany of mildly curious coincidences and historical parallels -- for example, the long history of revolutionary thought in Clerkenwell -- and is content to call it "the spirit of London" or attribute it to a given neighborhood's "genius loci." More rigorous sociological explanations receive little attention. The same motif animates Ackroyd's Albion and Thames: The Biography. That's a lot of words for such a slender thesis. Ackroyd's vision of egalitarian London also seems a bit optimistic twenty-two years and one Brexit later.

After considering London "my favorite book I never finished" for so long, closing the cover this final time felt anticlimactic. Perhaps that can be attributed to the general listlessness and anhedonia as we head into year four of a global pandemic and also continue to endure all the ills of modern capitalism.

Perhaps Ackroyd's chapter on the Blitz captured the current mood best: "The intended victims [of the V1 firebombings] became depersonalised.... The general mood was one of 'strain, weariness, fear and despondency.' 'Let me get out of this' was the unspoken wish visible upon every tired and anxious face, while at the same time the inhabitants of London carried on with their customary work and duties. The mechanism continued to operate, but now in a much more impersonal manner; the whole world had turned into a machine, either of destruction or of weary survival."

2022 read #28: Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses by Robin Wall Kimmerer

165 pages

Published 2003

Read from June 7 to June 9

Rating: 4 out of 5

Like Ellen Meloy's The Anthropology of Turquoise, this book is a collection of personal essays on a series of related topics, and not so much the didactic natural history book implied in the title. Wall Kimmerer's moss-linked essays are informative and personal in equal measure, using the personal to illuminate the scientific in deft ways. At times, like when Wall Kimmerer draws a link between the resiliency of mosses and the rhythms of human life, it's brilliantly moving; at others, like when she describes the efforts of some rich asshole to rip up an Appalachian hillside to create an artificial facsimile of an Appalachian hillside, it's perfectly infuriating.

There's a certain melancholy to reading books of natural history written so long ago. Unlike many books of this time (and especially books from the 1990s and '80s), Moss doesn't end with a coda of hopefulness. There's no inspiring epilogue to rouse us to fix the ruin capitalism has wrought on our biosphere. Instead, Wall Kimmerer offers two bleak ruminations on the destruction of the Pacific Northwest rain forest, which linger in the mind even as she caps off the book with a glimpse of the strange, hidden glimmer of Goblin Gold moss, making the most of its specialization for low-light environments. It's sad to think that our imperialist impact on the environment has only worsened in the last two horrific decades. But the magic of Goblin Gold seems like a fitting coda for our bleak times, a bit of light to cling to.

2022 read #4: Alphabet of Thorn by Patricia A. McKillip.

Alphabet of Thorn by Patricia A. McKillip

314 pages

Published 2004

Read from March 1 to Match 10

Rating: 4 out of 5

I had hoped to read at least one book each calendar month this year, a feat I haven't managed since 2016, but alas. Life and mental health got in the way again. I had opportunities to read during February, but my ADHD insisted that none of the books I had -- not even the new ones I got for Christmas and my birthday -- sounded just right. I wasn't able to read more than a couple pages of anything all month.

I had enjoyed McKillip's Winter Rose last fall, so I figured this book would finally do the trick and pull me in. McKillip's prose is aesthetically deft and beguiling, though perhaps not so gorgeous as it was in Winter Rose. The plot incorporates language, romance, political tensions, magic, and time travel, but the narrative feels breezy and is well-paced.

The book shows its age in its early 2000s approach to female agency and empowerment. Spoilers ahead:

The most powerful sorceress in all of history erases her name and her very identity in order to be a magical helpmeet for her cousin-turned-lover, an Alexander-esque conqueror. All she asks for in return is to bear him a child. The sorceress travels across space and time and realizes that she cannot raise her child and be with her cousin-lover at the same time, so she abandons the baby girl at a library 3000 years in the future. But the baby isn't fully abandoned, oh no. The sorceress entrusts to a convoluted magic scheme involving a book written in the titular alphabet to unlock the magical ways through time when her daughter comes of age, permitting the sorceress and the conqueror to come to the child's time and conquer the world to be the youth's own queendom. When the girl rejects this plan at the end, the sorceress realizes she must choose between her cousin-love and her child, and chooses the girl.

Again, the most powerful magic-user in all of history erases herself in order to please a man, and only reasserts her identity when she realizes it's what her child would prefer. At no point does this sorceress exercise any agency for herself. She doesn't even really have any interest in her cousin-lover's conquests; she enables him because it's what he wants, conquering kingdoms across thousands of years because she's just that besotted with him.

I can't bring myself to dislike this book. McKillip's prose, settings, and characters (the ancient cousin pair aside) are too well-rendered for that. But it's fascinating how much more dated this feels than Winter Rose, a book published eight years prior.

2019 read #2: Notes from Walnut Tree Farm by Roger Deakin.

Notes from Walnut Tree Farm by Roger Deakin
Edited by Alison Hastie and Terrence Blacker
302 pages
Published 2008
Read from December 28, 2018 to January 15
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Roger Deakin is one of my all-time favorite authors, though in his lifetime he only published one book (Waterlog) and finished the manuscript for one other (Wildwood). Not long after I read Waterlog, I ordered a copy of Walnut Tree Farm, a collection of Deakin's journal entries from his later years, collated and compiled into a single "year" of entries—natural history observations, musings on pollarding and sustainable uses of common land, mixed together with rather more personal entries on Deakin's boyhood, his loneliness and horniness living alone at the namesake farm, his crabby misanthropy toward suburbanites and women out jogging who don't respond to his hellos.

I held off from reading Notes for all these years, possibly because I didn't want to read the last published words to come from his pen. Having finally read his journals, I'm left with a feeling of knowing a little bit too much about him—that maybe I didn't need my image of Deakin the sensitive and perceptive eccentric who soaked up woods and waters in all the forgotten little nooks of England to be replaced with a more grounded, less ethereal image of a cranky old goat alternating between lustful fantasies and "things will never be as good as they were when I was a boy" conservatism.

Notes is a strange document, a posthumous publication of diaries never intended to be made public. It's full of lovely observations of the natural world around Deakin's farm and the adjoining common, arranged in a seasonal cycle, ending in a lovely and sad moment of shooting stars, which could easily have been purpose-written to serve as a coda for Deakin's life. But in revealing so much of the man behind the words, Notes can only make him appear more human, more fragile and fallible.

Deakin's diaries often dwell on the topic of how people no longer appreciate the natural world and what it has to offer, contrasting the modern suburbanized state with his own idyllic recollections of childhood adventures along creeks and in copses. One might question just how attuned most English folks were to natural cycles of subsistence during Deakin's golden age, but we'll leave that aside. I find myself interested in the conservative roots of conservation. You can catch a whiff of nativism in a lot of these lovely works of English nature writing, this idea that "the old ways are the best" for conserving the health and vitality of the English natural world. "People these days" (meaning urbanized people, technocratic people, often the agents from a central government body, sometimes immigrant populations) just aren't in touch with the real life of the hedgerows and little waterways, just don't understand how to manage land in harmony with the plants and creatures that share it.

I'm reminded of how much our American, Muir-inspired "wilderness" ethos derives from the proto-fascist Rousseau, and erases millennia of Native history and land-use practices with the words "where Man himself is a visitor and does not remain."

It's a troubling ideological heritage for us to unpack. Our species and our culture need to do what we can to ameliorate the massive extinction event we're inflicting upon the world, but we have to do so together—not by excluding "people these days," however they might be coded.