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 Trader, 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.

2024 read #92: Cretaceous by Tadd Galusha.

Cretaceous by Tadd Galusha

160 pages

Published 2019

Read from August 8 to August 9

Rating; 3.5 out of 5

An entirely wordless graphic novel is new territory for this blog. I feel that graphic novels (even wordless ones!) count as reading; you’re animating a mental narrative from printed visual input, whether that’s words or artwork. Besides, it’s a dinosaur story, so I’d find a way to include it here no matter what.

Cretaceous is a typical “red in tooth and claw” interpretation of life at the tail end of its namesake period. There’s even a “circle of life” sequence that follows from a dying Triceratops to the flies that consume its flesh to the mammal that tries to eat the flies to the small theropod that eats the mammal to the Quetzalcoatlus that eats the theropod to the mosasaur that eats a quetzal chick, and so on.

The artwork is solid; Galusha has a talent for flow between panels, varying his layouts for maximum impact. The story itself isn’t deep. It weaves, nature documentary style, between a handful of recurring characters: a bereaved Tyrannosaurus seeking vengeance against a pack of albertosaurs, an orphaned rex chick surviving the dangerous wilds, a dromaeosaur pack trying to bite everybody, etc. It’s pretty to look at, but it still anthropomorphizes the animals (like any nature doc), while giving us less emotional attachment than Raptor Red.

Of course, it also gives us fewer cringey sound effects and juvenile phrases than Raptor Red, so it’s a net positive overall.

2024 read #83: The Dinosaurs by William Stout.

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

Text by William Service; edited by Byron Preiss

Introduction by Peter Dodson

160 pages

Published 1981

Read July 18

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

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

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

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

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

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

2024 read #74: Dinosaur Tales by Ray Bradbury.

Dinosaur Tales by Ray Bradbury

144 pages

Published 1983

Read June 27

Rating: 2 out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 #55: Lumberjanes To the Max Volume 2.

Lumberjanes To the Max Edition Volume 2

Created by Shannon Watters, Grace Ellis, Noelle Stevenson & Brooke Allen

255 pages

Comics originally published 2016

Read from May 11 to May 12

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Every bit as endearing and vibrant as Volume 1, Volume 2 suffers somewhat from its lack of a cohesive throughline. It seems clear that the runaway success of the first Lumberjanes storyline prompted a quick continuation to keep selling fresh issues. These story arcs, while delightful on their own, lack any overarching plot; they feel like a string of filler episodes after the brilliantly constructed miniseries of the first book.

Most of the characters get lost in group scenes, without the character moments and attention to detail that made the first collection so delightful. Some characters do get important moments, but the voices of the broader cast feel muted. (Or maybe I found it that way because I’m fog-headed from being sick for the first time in about five years.)

The storyline set in the dimension of lost things — which features spectacles-stealing dinosaurs — was of course a personal favorite. The bonus story, “Mixing It Up,” was another highlight, sweet and charming.

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

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

Edited by Edward L. Ferman

Published 1981

162 pages

Read from May 8 to May 11

Rating: 2 out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2024 read #52: Negalyod: The God Network by Vincent Perriot.

Negalyod: The God Network by Vincent Perriot

Translated by Montana Kane

208 pages

Published 2018 (English translation 2022)

Read May 7

Rating: 4 out of 5

Another bit of dinosaur fiction I learned about thanks to the Prehistoric Pulp blog. This one is a graphic novel, originally written in French. It’s got a post-apocalyptic cowboy named Jarri, who herds chasmosaurs when he isn’t being horny on dating apps. It’s got water pipelines and deserts littered with steampunk wreckage from past rebellions. The rich live in sky-cities which suck the world dry. There’s also a computer god called the Great Network.

The back cover blurb calls it “Dinotopia meets Mad Max,” which, sure. But also, it is the purest distillation of 1970s science-fantasy I’ve seen from a contemporary author. And there’s more than a trace of Studio Ghibli’s Nausicaä and Castle in the Sky in its world.

Perriot’s art, together with Florence Breton’s superlative color work, elevates Negalyod’s dour tale of dystopia and vengeance. Clever feats of dinosaur wrangling and breathtaking full-page spreads make almost every panel something to savor. And while Perriot’s story doesn’t quite nail its big twist regarding the Great Network and its purpose, it’s a fun ride to get there.

2024 read #42: Dinosaur Sanctuary: Volume 4 by Itaru Kinoshita.

Dinosaur Sanctuary: Volume 4 by Itaru Kinoshita

Research consultant: Shin-ichi Fujiwara

Translated by John Neal

196 pages

Published 2023 (English translation published 2024)

Read April 11

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

After volumes 1, 2, and 3 of Dinosaur Sanctuary, I expected more or less the same substance here: a shallow but entertaining tale of dinosaur-keepers running a zoo full of prehistoric animals, a well-researched and excellently drawn manga with few surprises but plenty of dinosaurs. And that’s largely what we get from this volume.

However, we open with a flashback chapter that centers on a secondary character but doesn’t add much substance to him. For me, at least, that threw off this volume’s rhythm, and it never quite recovered. I enjoyed the tale of Suma and Kaidou helping to capture an escaped Velociraptor, but the rest of the chapters felt a little flat. Even the art felt a little bit more rushed this time around, with fewer splash pages and less attention to detail.

Perhaps I’m the problem this time around. My partner R and I are in the middle of a complicated process of home-buying, packing, and planning for a move halfway up the Eastern Seaboard, so I’m in my distracted era. Or perhaps the infamous pressures of manga production are catching up with Itaru Kinoshita.

Still, it’s a lovely book about an operational dinosaur park, which puts it well above all but the first of the Jurassic Park movies (and most of the dinosaur fiction I’ve read).

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

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

Edited by Gardner Dozois

192 pages

Published 1987

Read from March 1 to March 2

Rating: 2 out of 5

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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