2026 read #23: Boy, with Accidental Dinosaur by Ian McDonald.

Boy, with Accidental Dinosaur by Ian McDonald

117 pages

Published 2026

Read from April 6 to April 15

Rating: 4 out of 5

We might have something of a holy grail here: an inventive, book-length dinosaur story written with panache. In tersely evocative prose, McDonald presents snatches of a colorful, dilapidated near-future of dinosaur rodeos and masked militia checkpoints, an America fragmented by bush war and technofascism and evangelical warlords, where circuses ride what’s left of the highways.

All in all, it’s dishearteningly similar to the dinosaur apocalypse novel I’ve been working on for well over a year. What’s worse: I think it’s better than my book, in a lot of ways. Whereas mine is a mix of 1990s flashback and an altered approximation of the present, McDonald goes full near-future sci-fi with his setting, giving us glimpses of weird tech and weirder social conventions. Boy gives us something all too rare in dinosaur fiction, perhaps even rarer than good prose: solid worldbuilding.

The Tatterdemalion Circus invites inevitable comparisons to the early chapters of Greg Bear’s Dinosaur Summer (which would only have benefitted from more dinosaur circus screentime). But with Silver Clowns and the Dust Tarot, both left to the reader’s devices to expand upon, McDonald populates an alien future, vaster and stranger than local warlords and fundamentalist turf wars.

McDonald’s terseness, and the book’s brevity, can sometimes work against Boy. It is somehow dense and diaphanous simultaneously, wisps of intense clarity air-gapped by narrative leaps. Also taking leaps: McDonald’s grasp of dinosaur biology, which turns hadrosaurs into carnivores and gives alvarezsaurs big sharp teeth. But the dinosaurs he gets right are some of fiction’s most vivid individual dino presences since Dinosaur Summer.

2026 read #11: New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine, Fall 2022 issue.

New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine, Fall 2022 issue (0)

Edited by Oliver Brackenbury

79 pages

Published 2022

Read from February 22 to February 25

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

I’ve loved this magazine for a long time, without reading any of its issues. Not the first time I’ve done that; I was devoted to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction for twenty years before I finally got around to reading a full issue. As so often happens, some combination of ADHD and demand avoidance kept me from sitting down with this issue and just starting. (Also, if I’m being honest, the magazine’s full size format and triple columns of small text are barriers to entry. I know it keeps costs down and deliberately evokes Weird Tales, but I don’t have to enjoy it.)

This issue was the original proof-of-concept for NESS, put together by volunteer writers and distributed cheaply as an entry point for curious readers. Hence, “issue zero.” I’ve had it since sometime in 2023, which makes it even more embarrassing that I haven’t read it.

Incidentally, I’m actually going to read the interviews and essays that accompany the fiction (matters I habitually ignore in other magazines). I want to become more versed in the history, criticism, and analysis of my chosen genre. I might even read critical essays now whenever I find them in Asimov’s or F&SF. But this seems like a good place to begin.

—

“The Curse of the Horsetail Banner” by Dariel R. A. Quiogue. A rip-roaring steppe adventure which sees Orhan Timur, once the khan of khans before he was betrayed by his sworn brother, on the trail of those who violated the barrow of the first Khan of Khans and filched the legendary horsetail banner of Toktengri. It’s everything you could want from a modern update of the sword & sorcery formula, crafted by a terrific pulp storyteller.

“The Ember Inside” by Remco van Straten & Angeline B. Adams. The previous story gave me an optimistic idea of the level of polish I could expect in this issue (which, again, was a volunteer effort to produce a proof of concept for NESS). There are hints of greatness buried in this piece, but it’s uneven and unfocused. It has a metafictional element of “scribes” writing stories, reminiscent of Jeffrey Ford’s “The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant” (reviewed here). Revisiting that vibe with shakier prose didn’t do it for me, though to its credit, “Ember” has different things to say.

“Old Moon Over Irukad” by David C. Smith. Swords fighting sorcery. Serviceable, though rather stripped down to the chassis. Didn’t hold my interest.

“The Beast of the Shadow Gum Trees” by T. K. Rex. I’m a fan of T. K. Rex, and I had high expectations for this piece. Those expectations were met, and exceeded, by this weird and lovely fantasy. Rex literalizes concepts of ecology and invasive species, and puts together one of the most completely up-my-alley stories I’ve ever read. There’s even a toothed bird with four wings, which technically makes this a dinosaur story. An instant classic.

“Vapors of Zinai” by J.M. Clarke. This is another elemental S&S tale: a larger than life warrior, magical enemies, a determined priestess, a demon to slay. But “Zinai” bursts with imagery and flavor. At one point our hero rides a foe skateboard-style down a rocky slope. A delight.

“The Grief-Note of Vultures” by Bryn Hammond. Finishing the fiction section strong with another flavorful, well-written Central Asian pastiche. This story is also blessed with weird birds, always a welcome touch. Quite good.

—

The editorial and critical matters form the back third of this issue. Reading them feels a bit like eating my vegetables, but I want to become more informed!

We get musings from the late Howard Andrew Jones on the origin of the term “New Edge” (which, despite being in the NESS Discord for over a year, I’m just now learning is a genre label dating back two decades, analogous to sci-fi’s New Wave, and not merely the name of the magazine).

Next, there’s a solid essay from Cora Buhlert on C. L. Moore and Jirel of Joiry.

The longest editorial matter is an interview editor Brackenbury did with Milton Davis (whom I’ve only encountered in The Long Walk). It’s interesting.

A brief essay by Brian Murphy mostly serves to provide examples of its title: “The Outsider in Sword & Sorcery.”

Nicole Emmelhainz’s essay “Gender Performativity in Howard’s ‘Sword Woman’” is fascinating, and makes me miss the social sciences. I do wish I’d read the REH story in question beforehand.

Robin Marx reviews a self-published story collection, The Obanaax by Kirk A. Johnson. I’m intrigued.

Lastly, editor Brackenbury gives a statement of intent in “What is New Edge Sword & Sorcery?” It’s actually rather inspiring.

—

And that’s it for Issue 0! Surprisingly solid overall, for a volunteer effort. So much love and reverence went into putting it together. I’m excited to speed ahead into the “official” NESS run!

2026 read #9: Allosaurus in Wonderland by Jennifer Lee Rossman.

Allosaurus in Wonderland and Other Tales of Avalonia by Jennifer Lee Rossman

151 pages

Published 2025

Read from February 13 to February 15

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

I’ve been so excited to read this collection. I preordered it months ago, and have had my copy since November. But as so often happens with ADHD, I’ve had it all this time and just haven’t cracked it open until now.

Rossman is our finest contemporary author of dinosaur short fiction. (Michael Swanwick would be in the same conversation, except I don’t think he’s published any dinosaur stories in the last two decades.) I may be a little bit biased; after all, I put together the Mesozoic Reader anthology, and Rossman’s “Don’t Cry for Me Argentinosaurus” is one of my favorite stories from that book. Likewise, their “Joan of Archaeopteryx” is one of the only worthwhile entries of the otherwise disposable Apex: World of Dinosaurs anthology. Even if the stories are humorous, Rossman takes storytelling seriously, somehow turning punning titles and pop culture references into affecting, empowering fiction.

—

“Allosaurus in Wonderland” is as delightful an Alice pastiche as the title suggests, though it’s brief, mostly serving to introduce Avalonia, a realm where all periods of history and prehistory have mishmashed together thanks to random creatures (and little girls) who came stumbling through wormholes. There isn’t much to the story, but I enjoyed it.

“Baryonyx and Clyde” is the brilliant combination of dinosaurs and 1930s crime pulp that Katharine Metcalf Roof’s “A Million Years After” (reviewed here) teased but didn’t deliver. It even centers on purloining a dinosaur egg. Lindy and Campbell are time crooks, taking advantage of the Avalonian portals to loot old shops for antiques to sell in the future. I can’t say more without spoiling it, but I fucking loved this story.

“The Good, the Bad, and the Utahraptor” (original version published 2018) is the tale of Rosita, who longs to escape her dying little town and make it in a Wild West show. Her plan? Tame and ride one of the big raptors that have been killing cattle and depopulating Hell Creek. The story ends before achieving the emotional resonance of “Baryonyx,” but it was enjoyable nonetheless.

“A Tale of Two Citipati” extends Rosita’s story into the founding and naming of Avalonia, as misfits from Hell Creek cross over and meet, by chance, modern Ren Faire goers who hopped into a shimmery portal and got stuck. This is less of a standalone story than it is exposition for the setting as a whole, looping Lindy and Campbell back into the mix along with Rosita and Marcus from the Ren Faire, and setting in motion a generations-long conflict.

“Pirates of the Cambrian” sees Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan stranded on the wrong side of a wormhole, where they meet Anne Bonny and her pirate crew. With that setup, I had high expectations for this piece, but the brevity of all these stories works against it. I assume it’s here to set up later appearances from Earhart and Bonny.

“A Connecticut Yangchuanosaurus in King Arthur’s Court” likewise sees D.B. Cooper plummet through a wormhole in order to set up his presence in Camelops, medieval LARP kingdom and repressive regime. While I prefer more standalone stories, I suppose there’s nothing wrong with moving pieces into place.

Allosaurus is turning out to be something of a short novel told in vignettes rather than a conventional collection.

“Tinker Tailor Soldier Spinosaurus” introduces us to Enid, former knight of Camelops, who agrees to defect to New Hell Creek in hopes of someday liberating her home from its repression. The first half was quite strong, movingly depicting Enid and her life and her conflicted loyalties. I think the structure of this collection, each story more like a chapter than a standalone piece, makes the ending less satisfying, bending it into a preordained shape.

“Pterodactyl We Meet Again” has perhaps this collection’s most strained pun for its title. Fitting for the story that leans most into absurd humor. In a book crammed full of Jurassic Park franchise references, this story takes the extra step and brings us to “an island off the coast of Costa Rica,” where cryptid-sighting blogger (and bumbling goofus) Josh investigates reports of prehistoric creatures emerging from a wormhole. The humor gets laid on a bit thickly for my personal taste (there’s even the old chestnut about “the P is silent”), but I still had a good time.

“Joan of Archaeopteryx” (original version published 2021) was a bright spot in the bleak Apex: World of Dinosaurs anthology, and it more than holds its own here. It might be my favorite story in the book: a blend of comic and deeply personal, deeply moving but also a hell of a good time.

“Polter-Gastonia” shifts gears a little bit, bringing us back to the conventional world, where Rosalinda, descendant of the old Hell Creekers who stayed behind to guard the wormhole, has to get creative to defeat industrial development threatening the portal. Fun story!

“Don’t Cry for Me Argentinosaurus” (original version published 2021) is another one of my favorite stories here, and not just because I picked it for The Mesozoic Reader. It’s a fun wrinkle on the time portal formula: Veronica returns to the modern world after an extensive stay in Avalonia, only to be marketed as a pinup cavegirl. A sweet story of homesickness and feeling lost in time, and also about how capitalism destroys everything.

“Prehistoric in Pink” jumps us a few decades into the future, after the events of the previous story revealed the existence of Avalonia to the people of Earth. It is a world of discreet time tourism via stable wormholes, slightly reminiscent of Swanwick’s Bones of the Earth. The story itself is a teenage slice of life centering (naturally) on prom (and ecoterrorism). It also has the most audaciously bad dad-joke in the book. I quite liked it.

“Iguanodon Quixote” might be my favorite punning title of all time. The story itself is a courtroom scene interspersed with what led to the narrator participating in the act of ecoterrorism that delayed the industrial exploitation of Avalonia. A bit scattershot, but in the end, satisfying.

“Allosaurus through the Looking Glass” wraps things up by bringing back the narrator of the first “Allosaurus” story, older and wiser and more aware of the importance of stories, pulling threads together in the background of history, packing a lot of Whovian timeline manipulation into a tidy package. It was unexpectedly moving, a fitting culmination of this uneven but undeniably brilliant collection.

Undoubtedly the best dinosaur fiction book of this millennium.

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.

2025 read #91: Mislaid in Parts Half-Known by Seanan McGuire.

Mislaid in Parts Half-Known by Seanan McGuire

146 pages

Published 2023

Read December 1

Rating: 3 out of 5 (maybe 3.5?)

Way back in the day (which, thanks to the speed with which consensus reality has crumbled, here means 2022 or so), the fantasy fiction side of Twitter went into a tizzy over the cover of this installment of the Wayward Children series. A Doorway to dinosaurs! McGuire cautioned readers that dinosaurs really weren’t the focus of the story, but I’ve been excited about this entry ever since. Its cover is the entire reason I resumed reading through the series after a lapse of nearly seven years.

Mislaid continues the storylines of Lost in the Moment and Found (with Antsy now attending Eleanor West’s school, conscientiously if naively applying her talent for finding lost things) and Where the Drowned Girls Go (with Cora back at school with new friends, all of them escapees from the Whitethorn Institute). I tend to find the main School-based storyline less interesting than the more or less standalone books that establish each new character’s backstory. Lost in particular was a highpoint for the series; Mislaid feels even more like a step down in comparison.

It doesn’t help that Mislaid (and Antsy) is tasked with doling out a bunch of exposition about Doors, Worlds, and the ways they work. As a worldbuilding author myself, I’m not convinced any of this is strictly necessary. I found it interesting, but would’ve preferred a more emotionally charged storyline to the nuts and bolts of what is, essentially, how the Looking Glass operates.

And McGuire was right to caution her fans against thinking Mislaid is a dinosaur novel. I mean, it is enough of one for my purposes. But we don’t reach the dinosaur world until page 100, and we pop right out of it again just two chapters later. It’s a charming interlude, and well worth reading the series to get there. If only we’d gotten a full novel of it (instead of more banter between half a dozen main characters).

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 #81: Triassic by Julian Michael Carver.

Triassic: A Prehistoric Novel by Julian Michael Carver

215 pages

Published 2020

Read from October 29 to October 30

Rating: 0 out of 5

How in the hell does a book like this have hundreds of glowing reviews? As of October 29, it has 221 ratings on Goodreads (averaging 3.9 stars) and 366 on Amazon (4.2 stars). For comparison, another indie press dinosaur novel, Raptoriva, has 50 and 4 ratings, respectively. And Triassic is so, so much worse than Raptoriva.

Hell, Dinosaur Summer, one of the best dinosaur novels published in our lifetime, only has 184 Amazon ratings, for an average of 4.1 stars. Rated worse than Triassic??

Something’s fishy here. Bots? Astroturfing? A positive review bomb by ideologically aligned Redditors? Or is this actually what straight white men like to read?

I have a personal rule not to badmouth indie press books, but Triassic is a special case: it sucks. It physically pained me how awful this book is. From the first page, I wanted to toss it in the garbage and never think about it again. (Donating it would mean inflicting it on others.) I only persevered because my own long-brewing Deep Time universe has some incidental elements in common with Carver’s setting, and I never want anyone to say I borrowed a single thing from this trash heap.

The book begins with two pages of small type laying out the most trite, paint-by-numbers exposition you can imagine. (It even takes the time to specify that bots is short for robots, in case anybody in the audience hasn’t encountered pop culture since the Eisenhower administration.) We don’t get the first hint of a character until near the bottom of the second page. The first character you could consider a point-of-view doesn’t show up until page eight. That’s seven whole pages (dense pages! of small type!) you could have cut from the opening alone, without losing a thing. The rest of the volume isn’t any better.

Triassic’s only distinguishing feature is its titular setting. You just don’t see the Triassic period that often in dino fiction. The only other story I’ve read that visits it is de Camp’s “Crocamander Quest” (which I read and reviewed here). In keeping with the tenor of the book, only a token effort is made to ground Triassic in the actual Triassic period. Coelophysis trails our heroes in movie-monster packs led by an “alpha male.” Grass somehow shows up some 140 million years before its origin. Postosuchus, perhaps the most cinematic adversary the Triassic has to offer, is nowhere to be found.

In terms of story and characters, Carver presents us with bottom-of-the-barrel military sci-fi, scraped from the dregs of a 1960s issue of Analog. There’s an unmistakable stink of, shall we say, a John Campbellian worldview here, a drably masculine fantasy of hard, muscular, interchangeable men solving problems with big guns.

Carver nods to his sophisticated 21st century audience by giving us a straight man’s idea of a woman as well. Yes, one solitary woman. One of her first actions is to catch her own reflection and smile because hypersleep has kept her youthful. She keeps thinking about how young and attractive she is as she explores the ruins of the spaceship that contained the last survivors of the human race (“Still 32 and a knock-out!”), because women be vain, am I right, fellas? And don’t worry, she won’t be emasculating any important male characters, because she has a smaller gun. Inevitably, she becomes a damsel in distress, abducted by a rival male for her reproductive faculties.

I’m not exaggerating in the slightest when I say that the time travel epics I scribbled in my early teens would, with just a touch of editing, be better written and more engaging than this book. Certainly my character work and dialogue was already at a higher level than this.

I could have done anything else with my life rather than read Triassic. At least you won’t have to make the same mistake.

2025 read #74: Dinosaur Sanctuary: Volume 7 by Itaru Kinoshita.

Dinosaur Sanctuary: Volume 7 by Itaru Kinoshita

Research consultant: Shin-ichi Fujiwara

Translated by John Neal

193 pages

Published 2025 (English translation published 2025)

Read September 30

Rating: 3 out of 5

Goddamn, but it’s been a tumultuous six months since I read the previous volume of Dinosaur Sanctuary.

This time around, I’m keeping my expectations low. Sanctuary is light workplace drama first, dinosaur fiction a distant second. That’s as true as ever in this installment. Still, we do get some good dino zookeeper interactions, like when Suzume has difficulties feeding a blind Deinonychus named Trom, or when she has an unexpectedly busy day in the Psittacosaurus petting zoo.

I haven’t quite located the sense of charm I felt in the early volumes, but odds are that’s the fault of the world we live in right now. I had a nice time reading it all the same.

2025 read #71: Raptoriva by Victoria Rivera.

Raptoriva by Victoria Rivera

472 pages

Published 2024

Read from September 23 to September 25

Rating: 2 out of 5

Years ago, after Jurassic World nudged a modest new dino fad back into the mainstream, I wondered: Where are the YA dinosaur novels? Sure, we got The Evolution of Claire. But where were the plucky, misunderstood teen heroines who shoot arrows into raptors and fret about which boy to kiss while they overthrow the tyrannical (or perhaps tyrannosaurical) government?

A couple months ago, I got a TikTok by this author promoting this book, and my questions were answered: Self-publishing. That’s where the YA dinosaurs went.

You know I just had to read it, out of professional courtesy (as a future self-publisher of dinosaur fiction) if nothing else.

As I’ve said before, I’m not in the habit of trashing self-published and indie press books. Honestly, as self-pub books go, Raptoriva is solid. There’s the occasional typo and malapropism, but Rivera’s prose is standard for YA romantasy, neither better nor worse than you’d expect. YA romantasy isn’t my genre, though, and my biggest dissatisfaction with this book—that it’s a drip-feed of tropes and archetypes instead of a novel—is the fault of a highly commercialized genre’s increasingly formulaic expectations. Blame capitalism, as with so many other ills in life.

Raptoriva is The Hunger Games meets Dinotopia. Misunderstood teen archer (Qora) and teen fighter with a secret princely past (Ninan) both volunteer for the Venture, a deadly ritual gauntlet with a significant prize at the end. Even though the setting lacks electronic technology, competitors are still expected to have reality TV-grade storylines. The Venture’s twists and turns are broadcast back to audiences in Runaqa’s cities via sketch artists and heralds. There’s even a tryouts scene where entrants have to prove themselves with a special talent.

I liked the Andean flavor Rivera gives her setting, but the extinct animals, jumbled together from all time periods and every region of the globe, are mostly just Latin names checked off in the background, rarely charismatic presences in their own right. Most of the action involves fighting with other contestants. The characters even have magic rocks that keep dinosaurs away. You could do a search-and-replace for most species, swapping them for horses and drakes and griffins and the like, and change basically nothing about the story.

The one dinosaur that has any screen time, a giant Spinosaurus, is straight out of Jurassic Park III. No research on the animal’s potential ecology or behavior, no updated depiction to follow more recent hypotheses, just pure unreconstructed movie monster from a quarter-century ago.

Still, I enjoyed Raptoriva enough that I’m open to keeping up with the series. We can only hope dinosaurs figure more into the sequels, as something more than their names.

2025 read #68: Weird Tales, October 1934 issue.

Weird Tales: A Magazine of the Bizarre and Unusual, October 1934 issue (24:4)

Edited by Farnsworth Wright

132 pages

Published 1934

Read from September 17 to September 18

Rating: 2 out of 5

I want to write better sword & sorcery, which means I want to read a lot more of it, both contemporary and classic. C. L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry series is foundational to S&S. This issue of Weird Tales features the first Jirel story, as well as entries from Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard. Could be a fun issue!

—

“The Black God’s Kiss” by C. L. Moore. This story fucking rules, in a “throwing the horns while playing D&D in the basement” kind of way. Her castle conquered by the grinning Guillaume, Jirel escapes only to delve into the extradimensional dungeon beneath, braving a realm worse than hell in order to gain a weapon of vengeance. It is a story of a woman’s agency at a startlingly early date, but above all, this is classic weird fiction at its finest, crossing gritty Dark Ages warrior fantasy with alien world cosmic horror. By 1934 standards, this gets an A!

“The Seven Geases” by Clark Ashton Smith. First an unearthly idol, now geases and strange gods—this one issue seems to have been a major source for D&D all on its own. This is a Hyperborean tale of a cocky hunter trespassing in a sorcerer’s mountain fastness. Smith throws as much weirdness as possible at the wall; some of it even sticks. Being me, I was particularly taken with the references to dinosaur leather, extra-planar allosaurs, and the fact that the sorcerer’s familiar is an Archaeopteryx, which is just enough to add it to my list of dinosaur fiction. Maybe B-?

“Old Sledge” by Paul Ernst. After two extravagantly imaginative cosmic fantasy pieces, we’re brought back down with this ho-hum eccentric inventor story. Cantankerous old man Sledge invents a machine that enables him to see any point in the coming five hundred years. He attempts to gain the help of our narrator, a fellow-boarder who happens to be a writer, to write the history of the future. An unremarkable story. C-

“The Sleeper” by H. Bedford-Jones. Crossover in the Orientalist cinematic universe. Mystical powers of bodily control attributed to India share a facile storyline with an Egyptian sarcophagus. The best I can say for it is, it’s not as racist as something with these trappings could be expected to be in 1934? Maybe D+

“The Pistol” by S. Gordon Gurwit. Interminable ghost romance set in an Old Southern mansion, sprinkled with all the casual racism that implies. Tedious. F

A poem, “The Hill Woman” by Frances Elliott, is pretty good for its time.

The next story is part four of a seven(!) part serial, “The Trail of the Cloven Hoof” by Alrton Eadie. Rather than beginning in the middle, I decided to read the first part instead, which was published in the July 1934 issue of Weird Tales. Young new doctor Hugh Trenchard, walking on a misty night in wild Exmoor, hears gunshots and runs to help. He stumbles into what I’m supposing is a rustic Island of Doctor Moreau scenario, though one given an occult gloss appropriate to the 1930s. Purple, pulpy, and prone to tedious quips, but mildly entertaining. Rather reminiscent of old black and white movie serials, with that same geography of fresh twists rising from a sea of padding. Who knows, I might try to read the rest soon (though how are there six more installments?). Maybe C-?

Another poem: “Children of the Moon (The Moths)” by A. Leslie. It’s kind of cheesy, but amusing.

“Supper for Thirteen” by Julius Long. An eccentric host holds a macabre dinner party, himself and his twelve guests strapped into electric chairs. This has the vibe of a Weird Tales clip show, as the guests recount a variety of murder tales but fail to entertain their host, who relishes the idea of murder for murder’s sake. You’ll never guess what happens next! Yawn. D-

Another poem: “Old House” by Marvin Luter Hill. Rhyming poetry about ghastly ghosts in a house. Fully in keeping with the magazine it’s in, but reads like children’s Halloween verse now. Imagine a mid-’80s Tim Curry, paying his rent in a made-for-TV warlock costume, is reading it to you.

Another installment of a serial follows: part two of three of Robert E. Howard’s “The People of the Black Circle.” We turn instead to the September 1934 issue to read part one. Conan gets tangled in court politics and sorcerous betrayals at the foot of the “Himelian” mountains. The setting is a jumble of vaguely subcontinental names and Orientalist vibes, but the first installment, at any rate, lacks the grotesque full-bore racism I’ve come to expect from Howard. A solid start; I certainly want to read the rest at some point. B-

“At the Bend of the Trail” by Manly Wade Wellman. Botanical horror besets white explorers in generic Africa. Quite predictably racist in a colonial cliché sort of way; not much else to it. F

“The White Prince” by Ronal Kayser. Set in the Great War, apparently based on (credulous) contemporary reports. Serbs hurl ethnic and religious invective at Turks occupying a castle on the high ground, until an ethereal folk hero appears to lead the charge. Nationalist drivel, and not well-written. F

“Fioraccio” by Giovanni Magherini-Graziani (1886). A translation of an Italian tale of a fencer of stolen goods who lives a blasphemous life and dies, but won’t stay buried. I think I’m impatient to finish this issue; this didn’t charm me. F+

—

And that’s it for another issue of Weird Tales! It started out strong, only to peter out at the end. Still, surprisingly solid overall.

2025 read #41: The Greatest Adventure by John Taine.

The Greatest Adventure by John Taine

256 pages

Published 1929

Read from May 2 to May 5

Rating: 1ish out of 5

The period between 1912 (when Doyle’s The Lost World was published) and somewhere around the end of WWII (when the subgenre appears to have been discarded in the postwar reshuffle of sci-fi) was the heyday of the lost world story. They ranged from the horribly written and horribly racist (The Land that Time Forgot) to the still racist but at least somewhat interesting (The Face in the Abyss). The ’20s and ’30s, in particular, seem to have been rife with lost worlds now forgotten.

The unpromisingly titled The Greatest Adventure is one such novel, a book (and author) I’d never heard of until I happened upon a pulp reprint from the 1960s. With its simple, direct prose, bubblegum-wrapper approximations of humor, and telling-not-showing exposition, it reminds me of a 1930s boy’s adventure novel I read a long time ago.

I’m not wholly convinced that Adventure was intended for an adult audience, though I acknowledge that boy’s-life and man’s-life adventure stories had considerable overlap at the time. An odd beast, the book has neither the just-like-you sidekick of a boy’s-life, nor the horniness and cynicism I’ve come to expect of a man’s-life.

Regardless of its intended audience, this book is not that good. The same character beats / punchlines keep repeating, failing to enliven a rote adventure narrative. (If you took a drink every time Ole Hansen says “I have a theory,” you’d be dead.)

The “dinosaurs” here are some of the least interesting I’ve ever encountered in fiction. It’s as if Taine overheard someone in another room say the word “dinosaur,” and he winged it from there. The monstrous saurians that populate his Antarctic are torpid masses of armored flesh “three hundred feet long.” We’re a long way from Doyle’s active (and relatively well-researched) dinosaurs, which leapt off the page a mere seventeen years earlier.

The discrepancy does get explained in the text (spoilers: they aren’t really dinosaurs). I suppose it’s interesting enough on a history-of-sci-fi level that this is more of a prototype of a genetic engineering story, but I’d have much preferred another retread of The Lost World over what we get here. If anything, with its climactic twist, Adventure turns out to be closer to The Andromeda Strain than to Jurassic Park.

The book’s sole redeeming feature is Edith, a modern young woman who learns to fly airplanes and stabs a pseudo-dinosaur in the eye.

2025 read #27: Dinosaur Sanctuary: Volume 6 by Itaru Kinoshita.

Dinosaur Sanctuary: Volume 6 by Itaru Kinoshita

Research consultant: Shin-ichi Fujiwara

Translated by John Neal

194 pages

Published 2024 (English translation published 2025)

Read from March 18 to March 19

Rating: 3 out of 5

Last time we visited Enoshima Dinoland, I was dealing with a family crisis, and was too depressed and demoralized to appreciate dinosaur theme park escapism. Since then, my country has lurched its way into full-blown fascism, and I’m probably too depressed and demoralized now to properly enjoy dinosaur theme park escapism.

In all honesty, I think the Dinosaur Sanctuary formula might be running out of juice, six volumes in. Which is impressive, considering the Jurassic Park franchise went downhill by book/movie number two. The mix of prehistoric zookeeping and light workplace drama remains charming, but each book is just more of the same, and at this point, even I, a lifelong dinosaur fanatic, am starting to feel satiated with this particular blend.

Part of my issue is with the characters. Even with the occasional dollop of backstory, the cast remains vaguely pleasant archetypes. I don’t feel more than a superficial connection to anyone beyond, perhaps, Suzume, our reader surrogate. It’s hard to invest in workplace drama without that attachment. And this volume felt especially light on dinosaurs, which only emphasizes how shallow the characters feel without them.

2025 read #6: In the Morning of Time by Charles G. D. Roberts.

In the Morning of Time by Charles G. D. Roberts 

311 pages

Published 1922

Read from January 18 to January 19

Rating: 1 out of 5

I’d never heard about this novel until I browsed through the digital holdings of the Merril Collection, attached to the Toronto Public Library. Another excellent resource to bookmark! Too bad I chose this book as my first download, because yikes.

Morning is one of those “pageantry of life through time” confabulations that seemed to peak around the ’20s through ’50s. It opens with an amphibious sauropod observing Jurassic slaughter from the relative safety of an estuary. It’s all downhill from there, bearing us down through epochs of bullshit to a 1920s conception of Man. Specifically, White Man.

Along the way, we get red-in-tooth-and-claw vignettes of dubious scientific accuracy; chapter two brings us a Cretaceous Triceratops battling an Eocene Dinoceras, their fight witnessed by both a Jurassic Archaeopteryx and a Pliocene hominid, compressing about 145 million years into one moment. After that, the bulk of the narrative focuses on Grôm, a strangely Caucasian caveman who masters fire, figures out the bow and arrow, and invents love. True to the tastes of its readers, Grôm’s primary foe is miscegenation.

Everything is suffused with masculine rage and violence (and copious racist coding). This, inevitably, becomes tedious, trite, and ridiculous. The ape-man’s bride and child get fridged by some ceratopsians, for instance, which motivates him to single-handedly hasten the dinosaurs’ extinction in revenge. This accomplished, he goes off into the woods, desiring a new mate to bear him sons. Because daughters, even back in Missing Link days, lack inquisitiveness and resourcefulness, you see.

If that weren’t grotesque enough, you can only imagine the racism and patronizing misogyny simmering through the subsequent Grôm chapters. There’s a stink of The Birth of a Nation to the battle that opens the chapter “The Finding of Fire.” It’s fucking vile.

I’m only giving this garbage a full star because at least it’s better written than The Land that Time Forgot. That’s an extremely generous metric, and more than Morning deserves. But hey, I suppose the first chapter, the one without any people, is okay, at least by the standards of 1920s sci-fi, and later on Grôm and his pals have a pulpy encounter with giant dragonflies that feels moderately creative. Not worth slogging through the rest of it, though, by any means.

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.

—

“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+

—

“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

—

“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

—

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

—

“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-

—

“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

—

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 #124: Hexagon Speculative Fiction Magazine, Fall 2024 issue.

Hexagon Speculative Fiction Magazine, Fall 2024 issue (18)

Edited by JW Stebner

47 pages

Published 2024

Read October 25

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

We live in a golden age of speculative short fiction. Short form sci-fi and fantasy are the best they’ve ever been, full stop. Diversity, depth of character, quality prose, an unparalleled range of styles and subgenres—SFF is unmatched right now. Random token-pay webzines will consistently publish better stories than The Big 3 did forty years ago; the occasional story will surpass most things The Big 3 published twenty years ago. Yet there’s less monetary support than ever, at all levels of the field.

I’m trying to do a better job at keeping up with the market, including spending more time with those amazing indie magazines. Today, I’m returning to Hexagon to read the current issue, my second in a row from them.

—

“A Death Rattle’s Chime” by Adialyz Del Valle Berríos. When I say that fiction in token-pay markets today is superior to mainstream newsstand fiction from forty (or even twenty) years ago, I have stories like this in mind. It’s a bleakly atmospheric eco-fantasy set on an island that disappears a little bit more each full moon, where our narrator processes fish from a decaying sea. A haunting, exquisite story. Somehow this is the author’s first published story. An amazing start!

“A Thousand Steps Up Godwich Road” by Michael M. Jones. Urban legend piece with a twist ending. Nothing remarkable, but nothing to complain about.

“Gusher” by EC Dorgan. A pleasing petroleumpunk tale that could have come straight out of the 1990s, all about mall rats and “oil vamps” in a Saskatchewan boomtown, with the unexpected bonus of dinosaurs. One of the most creative takes on vampire lore I’ve ever read. Excellent (and I’m only slightly biased here because of the momentary dinosaurs).

Next comes a one-page comic: “Craftsman No. 1: ‘Already Cut and Fitted’” written by Jimmy Stamp, illustrated by Xavier Saxon. I felt indifferent about its reheated cosmic horror, aside from the role of the craftsman kit home, which I appreciated.

“The Gold Coast: At One with the Fun!” by Aggie Novak. A mutated amusement park needs to be fed, and Soph has the ill luck of shuttling an Aquaduck full of tourists to their imminent doom. Fascinating and enjoyable blur of genres. Quite good.

—

And that’s it for this issue! A solid read, well worth your time, especially “Chime,” “Gusher,” and “Gold Coast.”

2024 read #115: Dinosaur Sanctuary: Volume 5 by Itaru Kinoshita.

Dinosaur Sanctuary: Volume 5 by Itaru Kinoshita

Research consultant: Shin-ichi Fujiwara

Translated by John Neal

194 pages

Published 2023 (English translation published 2024)

Read from September 27 to September 28

Rating: 3 out of 5 (maybe 3.5?)

I read Dinosaur Sanctuary: Volume 4 in the midst of packing up to move to New York. That was less than six months ago, yet it feels like years have passed. There was the move itself, and adjusting to our new home and our new region, then I caught COVID for (probably) the first time, then we had a lovely summer, and then… everything that’s happened just this month, which has felt like a year on its own.

Thankfully, I get to spend some time in my own home this week, a brief respite from the month or so of Long Island exile still hanging over me. As a nice bonus, my preorder of this book was waiting for me when I got home. A comfort read for a comfort break.

Dinosaur Sanctuary has always presented a mix of dinosaurs with light human drama, but I think this installment skewed too far in the direction of office drama, and skimped on the dinos. The series' main weakness — the fact that its characters are broad stereotypes (the excitable new hire, her sisterly friend, the serious hard-working supervisor, the misanthropic stickler), and none of them get any development — is especially apparent here, without as much gorgeous dinosaur art or as many interesting zookeeping dilemmas to give the manga heft. The main dino storyline, a saga of two ceratopsians that the zookeepers want to mate, seems like it drags on forever.

That said — and I say this every time I review one of these — it’s a manga about a dinosaur zoo. It’s everything we ever wanted from Jurassic World, etc. I don’t think I could ever fully get bored of this series. And this tankōbon has Sanctuary’s most interesting flashback chapter to date, giving us a glimpse of a dinosaur safari park in Australia, and the poaching problems that beset it. So that was pretty cool.

2024 read #112: A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder by James De Mille.

A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder by James De Mille

Illustrated by Gilbert Gaul

291 pages

Published 1888

Read from September 14 to September 16

Rating: 1 out of 5

Published posthumously, perhaps a decade or two after it was written, this is a Victorian social satire dressed in a guise of antipodean adventure. It’s chiefly notable as an early example of a prehistoric lost world novel, written long before the publication of Doyle’s own The Lost World.

Sadly, instead of dinosaurs, Manuscript’s primary focus is its clumsy satire, depicting a topsy-turvy land where Victorian mores are turned on their head. Poverty is esteemed! People compete to give their riches away! Death is joyously sought after! Darkness is embraced and light is shunned! To be cannibalized is an honor! Women can do things!

It’s never a question of whether an old adventure novel will be horribly racist, but of how horribly racist. A Strange Manuscript is pretty damn racist. Maybe not The Land that Time Forgot levels of racist, but still bad. Our narrator dwells at length on the horror and revulsion he feels upon meeting some brown people in Antarctica. He flees from them, and finds himself among the Kosekin, a vaguely Mesopotamian civilization at the South Pole. Yet even there, in the midst of bird-drawn carriages, tree-fern-lined streets, and majestic pyramids, he’s magnetized by a random white girl he meets in a cave. De Mille proceeds to heap up vile Victorian antisemitism in his profile of the Kosekin.

As for the prehistoric aspect of De Mille’s lost world — the sole reason I read this antiquated volume — it’s incidental at best, a mere curiosity to add flavor to the setting. (To be fair, when this book was written, even scientists weren’t acquainted with many dinosaurs, and even those were fragmentary beasts, poorly understood.) There are a couple ceremonial saurian hunts, one at sea, one on land, which serve only to demonstrate the Kosekin’s eagerness to die.

There is a cool scene where our hero rides on a giant pterodactyl under the light of the aurora australis, which, while it doesn’t erase any of the book’s bigotry, at least makes for a memorable moment. Manuscript has long since been in the public domain, so maybe James Gurney could repurpose the scene for another Dinotopia book.

2024 read #102: Worlds of IF, December 1964 issue.

Worlds of IF Science Fiction, December 1964 issue (14:7)

Edited by Frederik Pohl

130 pages

Published 1964

Read from August 30 to August 31

Rating: 1 out of 5

Back at it again with a PDF of an old magazine with some dinosaurs on the cover! What do the Sixties have in store? All male authors, all the time. Sigh. Let’s get this over with.

—

“When Time Was New” by Robert F. Young. This has the best opening line of any pre-1980 dinosaur story I’ve ever encountered: “The stegosaurus standing beneath the ginkgo tree didn’t surprise Carpenter, but the two kids sitting in the branches did.” Of course, it immediately squanders that good will by placing the stegosaur in the Upper Cretaceous. (There’s more time between Stegosaurus and the Upper Cretaceous than there is between the Upper Cretaceous and us, so technically the kids should be less surprising to Carpenter.)

The rest of the novella is in keeping with that pulpy, research-be-damned ethos. Carpenter, a time agent, drives a triceratank, with three horn-howitzers ready for defense. The kids are blue-eyed, pale-skinned Cretaceous Martians; somehow, their gender roles exactly conform to the expectations of early 1960s Americans. They got kidnapped, escaped, and are now pursued by the kidnappers in jet-propelled pteranodons. Fun as that last bit sounds, the story abounds with cringey Manly 1960s Sci-Fi Man bullshit: Martian society is an efficient utopia because they desentimentalize their kids’ brains! The girl child happily makes Carpenter a sandwich while her brother gets to hang out in the cockpit with him!

Which isn’t to say “Time” was entirely awful, at least not at first. More stories should have Cretaceous campouts with frankfurters over the fire. That said, there’s barely any dinosaur action here. Instead, the vast majority of the story is about Carpenter regretting that he made it to his 30s as a measly time traveling action hero in a dinosaur tank, instead of settling down and being a dad. (And not even a cool, 2020s-style dad who, like, participates in being a parent. We’re talking the 1960s idea of a dad.) That’s a flimsy scaffold on which to hang such a long, long, long story.

And then we get to the twist ending. Let’s just say Sixties gender norms should never be mixed with time travel. Perhaps D- before the twist, but all in all, an F

—

“The Coldest Place” by Larry Niven. The end of “Time” soured me on this whole issue, and seeing Larry Niven’s name did nothing to revive my enthusiasm. This forgettable “hard science” bauble exists only to set up the punchline that “the coldest place in the solar system” is the dark side of Mercury. Literally, that’s it. F+

—

“At the Top of the World” by J. T. McIntosh. If you ever wanted to read a prototype of Fallout, but wanted it dull and poorly written, we got you covered. A society of tunnel-dwellers, whose oral history tells them to dig upwards after two hundred years, finally reach the surface. Most of “World” is told in that faux news-magazine style that was so common in midcentury fiction. It goes on at numbing length, straining to draw some parallel between the tunnel teens and contemporary youth culture. It ends (predictably) with a “humanity never changes” punchline. F+?

—

“Pig in a Pokey” by R. A. Lafferty. To me, Lafferty is one of the all time overrated sci-fi authors. This “humorous” affair about a porcine alien who loves to collect trophy heads, and has an inability to understand humans’ hangups about death, doesn’t dispel that opinion. Somehow, though, it’s the least-awful story so far — which isn’t saying much. Maybe D-

—

“The Hounds of Hell” (conclusion) by Keith Laumer. Naturally, we close with the final installment of some serial or other. I’m noticing a pattern with serials: no matter what decade they were published in, they’re attain their length by throwing together a convoluted mishmash of every currently popular trope. This one is a stew of posthumanist body replacement, psionic powers (Project Ozma gets name-checked), secret societies dating back to Ben Franklin running geopolitics behind the scenes, aliens in disguise infiltrating governments. The “hounds” are demonic dog monsters pursuing our hero. Our hero fails to solve Earth’s problems with his metal-reinforced fists, and wakes up a disembodied consciousness piloting an alien war machine. It could almost be interesting, if 80% of the length and 100% of the 1960s pulp conventions were trimmed away. As it is, it’s still marginally more interesting than any other story in the magazine. Still, it’s so much longer than it needs to be, so I can’t imagine giving it more than D-

—

And that’s it for this issue! That was rough. More like Worlds of F, am I right?

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 #97: Weird Tales, November 1930 issue.

Weird Tales: A Magazine of the Bizarre and Unusual, November 1930 issue (16:5)

Edited by Farnsworth Wright

148 pages

Published 1930

Read from August 24 to August 25

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

Thanks to online PDF archives, I have a phone full of weird old pulp magazines, most of them with one common denominator: dinosaur stories. I’ve even read one or two of them, to my lasting disappointment. Yet I can’t seem to stop tracking down — and downloading — more.

I had a moderately okay time reading the Women of Weird Tales collection last year. Even a book curated for modern tastes, though, had more than its share of offputting or just plain boring stories. I don’t have high hopes for this issue, which will be my first read of a full Weird Tales magazine. Let’s get into it, I guess!

—

We start off with an unpromising poem, “Teotíhuacán” by Alice l’Anson. It’s a rote, morbidly modernist fantasy of “pagan rites” and human sacrifice. The line art that accompanies it is far better than the poem.

What’s next is the sole reason I’m reading this issue:

“A Million Years After” by Katharine Metcalf Roof. Two masked bandits hold up a museum truck and make off with a box valued at a hundred grand. To their dismay, the box contains only a large egg, which they bury to keep the heat off them after the heist. Soon, moonshiners and deacons alike come face to face with a reptile the size of a house, with a serpentine neck and deadly claws. There’s a kernel of an entertaining story here, mixing Prohibition-era crime pulp with a predatory dinosaur loose upon the countryside, but Roof’s mediocre prose, lacking any point of view, makes it less entertaining than it should be. It ends anticlimactically. I’m in a generous mood, so maybe, in consideration for when it was published, I’ll give it a C-

“Tales of the Werewolf Clan: 1: The Master Strikes” and “Tales of the Werewolf Clan: 2: Hau! Hau! Huguenots!” by H. Warner Munn. A pair of amateurish outings thoroughly impressed with themselves, these linked historical fantasies stumble along through a checklist of 16th century clichés, mostly involving casual cruelty. Munn encumbers his tales with needless lore, and with dialogue like this: “The cat, witches’ familiar, mysterious and too-knowing night animal, sharing the secrets of midnight with the bat and the ghouls that ride the wind, had been but the messenger of the Evil One to bid the corpses rise and come to do his bidding!” I’m pretty sure lore posts on LiveJournal role-playing communities were better written and more interesting than this. F

“The Uncharted Isle” by Clark Ashton Smith. I only know Clark Ashton Smith through posthumous mock-ups that Lin Carter “found in a trunk” and published in his Year’s Best Fantasy series. (Earlier this year, I tried to read The Star-Treader, but didn’t get far.) This story is a standard “shipwrecked mariner lands on a primeval lost shore” number, mixing in the lost continent tropes so beloved by Smith and his contemporary fantasists (and by Lin Carter). There isn’t much else to it. The prose is purple, but more fluent than anything so far in this issue. Racist vibes permeate the descriptions of the people our hero encounters, the persistent low-level background racism of how facial features are described and so forth. It also brings this issue’s human sacrifice count to two. Maybe D

“Kings of the Night” by Robert E. Howard. Right out of the gate, we’ve got human sacrifice number three. Clearly, this was something of a preoccupation at the time. A Pictish king named Bran wears a red jewel given to his ancestor by some dude from Atlantis. Our POV is Cormac, Bran’s Hibernian ally in the fight against Rome. This is Howard we’re dealing with, so we get plenty of weird bigotry to go around, with graduated “orders” of “civilization” within the Celtic umbrella. (For example, the Picts, with the exception of the kingly Bran, are apparently primeval, ape-like relics of the Stone Age, who are also degenerated refugees from Atlantis? I guess?) It’s all a lot of bullshit about masculinity and natural kingship and racial hierarchy; JD Vance would love it. As if that weren’t bad enough, it’s way too fucking long. F

“The Cosmic Cloud” by Edmond Hamilton. A rote space opera that feels like it could have been repeated with little variation in the early 1960s, which isn’t so much a compliment to this story as commentary on how stagnant the subgenre became after its blueprint was developed. The diverse men of the Interstellar Patrol (because even on worlds of tree people and crab people, it must always be men) stand between the peoples of the galactic federation and anything that might threaten them. Today, they’re finally getting around to investigating this strange cloud of ether that has reached out and drawn in thousands of ships over the last several days. This piece, for all its formulaic plotting and antique stiffness, has a certain musty charm, like something you’d see riffed on MST3K. Maybe C- (at least by the standards of 1930)

“Stealthy Death” by Seabury Quinn. You know, I had thought this issue (Howard’s tale aside) featured remarkably little racism for 1930, but this tedious murder mystery supplies enough for a dozen magazines. Otherwise, it’s mainly notable for featuring a broad stereotype of an Irish police sergeant who’s mysteriously named Costello. Absolutely sucks. F

A poem: “Great Ashtoreth” by Frank Belknap Long, Jr. It’s mediocre at best.

“The Portal to Power” by Greye La Spina. This one is a serial, broken up across four issues. This issue features part two of four, but because I’m not in the mood to start with the second part of a serial, I went ahead and downloaded the October 1930 issue to read part one instead. Like seemingly most pulp serials I’ve encountered, the plot is a convoluted mishmash of whatever was trendy at the time. Part one begins with a witch, hoping to foil the devil who deceived her, handing off a talisman of great power to a small town doctor, enjoining him to take it to the Circle of Light in San Francisco. In the wrong hands, she warns him, the talisman can open the door to the return of the Old Gods — meaning, inevitably, Pan, whose priest comes in on a motorcycle and gets handed a dummy talisman. Then an airship magnate enters the story to help the doctor. The magnate has a niece, who in turn has scarlet lips and a pet marmoset. It’s all modestly charming until a Black cook character straight out of a minstrel show gets introduced. That threw some ice water over my enthusiasm. I feel no need to read part two. D-

A poem from H. P. Lovecraft’s “Fungi from Yuggoth” sequence is next: “4. Antarktos.” It’s fine.

“The Debt” by Eric A. Leyland. “Share my room because I’m scared of ghosts” seems to have been the 1930s equivalent of the “there was only one bed” trope. At least, this is the second story I’ve read from this era that uses it as a plot device. This story feels distinctively queer, between the haunted man carrying a photo of another man, and the narrator dwelling on how very handsome the man in the photograph is, especially after meeting the man’s ghost: “It was his smile, however, that was so charming. When he smiled, his whole aspect changed remarkably.” That elevates an otherwise forgettable story to a solid C

“A Message from Mars” by Derek Ironside. A bully named Bullivant flies a rocket to Mars, and sends a television broadcast back to Earth, just as the ant-like Martians retaliate for his violence. Hokey, but not terrible. Maybe C-

“Siesta” by Alexander L. Kielland (1880). A translation of a Norwegian original. A Parisian dinner party, its guests collected by a rich Portuguese man, wends through its various personalities, until an Irishman puts on a bravura performance with a piano and, uh, makes them spiritually uncomfortable? I guess? D?

One last poem: “The Cypress-Bog” by Donald Wandrei. At least it’s atmospheric.

—

And that’s it! My favorite thing about this magazine was the variety of subgenres we visited. There may not have been much depth to anything, but we got the full spread of what 1930s SFFH could offer. Which was mostly racism. But still.

My second favorite thing about this issue is the ad on the back cover, promising an “Astonishing Electrical Invention” that is “Startling” and “Uncanny.” “This unquestionably is the queerest, most incredible invention since the first discoveries of radio!” What is this prodigy of modern science?? It’s a car alarm.