2025 read #56: Circles of Stone: Weird Tales of Pagan Sites and Ancient Rites, edited by Katy Soar.

Circles of Stone: Weird Tales of Pagan Sites and Ancient Rites, edited by Katy Soar

238 pages

Published 2023

Read from August 24 to August 26

Rating: 3 out of 5

This is the first British Library Tales of the Weird anthology I’ve picked up since Polar Horrors last October. My partner R gifted me Circles of Stone during the holidays; I’ve intended to read it this whole time, even having it in my perennial to-read stack since December. But do you ever have books sit in your TBR pile so long that you start to feel avoidant of them? No? Just me?

Anyway, now that my teen is back with his other parent for the school year, I’m excited to get back into reading with more regularity. And Circles’ table of contents looks like it could be a lot of fun.

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Extract from Ringstones by Sarban (1951). Excerpting this from a novella, editor Soar deploys it almost as an extension of her introduction, singling out a brief lecture from one character on the folkloric associations of standing stones. Well-written enough, but not really reviewable as a story.

“The Temple” by E. F. Benson (1924). This predictable but competent piece about two friends who rent a cottage near a ring of standing stones in Cornwall is invigorated by crisp prose and evocative descriptions. The ending is the weakest part. A solid start all the same. B-

“The Spirit of Stonehenge” by Jasper John (1930). Brief anecdote about a young archaeologist becoming possessed by the Druidic evil of Stonehenge. Painless, but not much to it. C

“The First Sheaf” by H. R. Wakefield (1940). Soar’s editorial introduction cites this tale of an isolated Essex village as “an early example of folk horror.” The inbred villagers here certainly return to propitiating the Old Gods in order to alleviate a drought the Christian God won’t break. The story is interesting as a prototype, but otherwise I found it middling. C

“The Tarn of Sacrifice” by Algernon Blackwood (1921). John Holt is a hiker on holiday, haunted by physical and emotional wounds from the War to End All Wars. Repulsed by modern man’s hypocrisy, and unable to shake the realization that he enjoyed killing on the battlefield, he finds himself drawn to the (imagined) manly simplicity and stoicism of the ancient pagan Romans. At the titular tarn, he meets a young woman and her father, who quickly convince him he’s the reincarnation of her lover from Roman times. Maybe it’s because I read this story perched on a rock shelf above a lake, but I quite enjoyed it. Reminded me of a gentrified take on Robert E. Howard’s masculinity-fetish tales. B

“The Shadow on the Moor” by Stuart Strauss (1928). This belongs in the category of “an amateur author lucked into a Weird Tales publication.” A dude trying to write horror stories at a Cornwall inn is chilled to see the shadow of a woman walking all alone on the midnight moors — no woman, just her shadow — and inevitably he must follow it to a sinister ring of stones. This is conveyed in correct but lifeless prose: “It was uncanny. Impossible. Yet his eyes told him that the impossible was fact.” The first dud of this collection, which is rather impressive for stories of this era. D

“Lisheen” by Frederick Cowles (1948). Another one not to my taste, affecting a faux-historical style that offers only the driest outline of a folk horror story. A girl is born of the devil (and/or Pan) in a Cornwall village; the vicar entrusted with her care soon loses his faith for lust of her. You could imagine a low budget 1970s flick built from that skeleton, full of latex and nudity, but the text at hand doesn’t amount to much. D?

“The Ceremony” by Arthur Machen (1897). An evocative vignette centering a stone still venerated in the wood. Brief but vivid. B-

“The Dark Land” by Mary Williams (1975). An unexpectedly late variation on the Edwardian formula of “narrator’s artist friends have an uncanny experience on the moors, here related at secondhand.” There’s potential here, but the narrative distance (and the primly Christian ending) works against it. C-

“The Man Who Could Talk with the Birds: A Tale Told by the Fireside” by J. H. Pearce (1893). Ah, the chokehold that phonetic dialect had on the nineteenth century. This brief number is related entirely in a roughly transcribed Cornish accent. It was fine otherwise, I suppose. C-

“The Stone that Liked Company” by A. L. Rowse (1945). Another tale told by fireside, this one is more substantial and interesting, with the dean of a college rambling out a yarn about an over-excitable young man fixating on a standing stone during a Cornwall rest-cure. A solid enough C+

“Minuke” by Nigel Kneale (1949). A house in a new ribbon development is afflicted with preternatural activity in an anecdote related by a letting agent. Nothing especially interesting in itself (was it supposed to feel more slapstick than scary?); nonetheless I enjoyed it as a glimpse of suburban history, something that seldom crops up in stories older than this. Maybe C

“New Corner” by L. T. C. Rolt (1937). One of the best qualities of this particular volume has been its diversity of subjects. Sure, there’s been a surfeit of Cornish standing stones luring the innocent to devilish doom, but there’s also been items like this one, which brings us to the world of 1930s auto racing. As a story, it doesn’t offer much, and at times feels patronizing in a boy’s-own magazine sort of way, but it’s a fascinating glimpse into a bygone subculture. C-?

“Where the Stones Grow” by Lisa Tuttle (1980). A thoroughly 1980s spin on the subject, in which a man wrestles with traumatic childhood memories of seeing his father crushed by standing stones. Well-written but just a tiny bit silly, as 1980s horror frequently was. C

“The Suppell Stone” by Elsa Wallace (2018). Well-written, as befits so recent a story, but disappointingly bland. I suppose I’ll give it a C

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And that’s it! The second half didn’t hit as well as the first, but overall, I’d say this was the most satisfying British Library Tales of the Weird volume I’ve read so far.

2025 read #50: In an Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire.

In an Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire

204 pages

Published 2019

Read from June 11 to June 17

Rating: 4 out of 5

The last of McGuire’s Wayward Children series I read was Beneath the Sugar Sky, way back in 2018. Back then, I found the books solid but perhaps just a tiny bit unsatisfying. Enough years have passed that my reading tastes have shifted; is it time for a revisit?

Like Tori Bovalino’s Not Good for Maidens, Dream is a modern riff on Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market. Young Katherine Lundy loves books, rules, logic, and staying inconspicuous. When she happens upon a doorway to the strange and rule-ordered Market, where every exchange demands a “fair price,” she finds herself increasingly at home, even if accruing too much debt means turning into a bird.

The Wayward Children books (particularly the first one) fit within the 2010s fad for telling what happens to the heroes after the story ends. This comes through in Dream, with McGuire eliding through the big adventures against the Wasp Queen and the Bone Wraiths in favor of seeing the effect the trauma and loss have on young Lundy afterward.

Either this volume clicked with my current sensibilities, or I’ve simply become less nitpicky with middle age. From the standard fantasy trope of fair bargains, McGuire opens doors onto complicated questions of what we as people owe each other, what love and belonging can offer us, and the cost they extract.

2025 read #20: Sorcery and Cecelia by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer.

Sorcery and Cecelia, or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot: being the correspondence of two Young Ladies of Quality regarding various Magical Scandals in London and the Country by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer

320 pages

Published 1988

Read from March 2 to March 8

Rating: 3 out of 5

My reading habits have wilted into nothing. Good thing I’d already decided I wouldn’t try for record book numbers this year. It’s hard enough just surviving day to day with the fashy bullshit coming at us faster than we could possibly process it.

This is an airy morsel of an epistolic novel set in 1817. Two young ladies — Kate on her London debut, her cousin Cecy envious and stuck in rural Essex — correspond about their adventures at balls and picnics, and their brushes with the affairs of English wizards (as well as a certain Mysterious Marquis).

Sorcery is calculated to appeal to anyone who grew up reading Austen or the Brontë sisters. The characters are likable, and the prose seems like a good match for the period, at least to this non-expert. The way magic is lightly sprinkled over a historical fiction setting is reminiscent of Stevermer’s later A College of Magics. I found the overall effect charming but not compelling (though that likely derives from the general anhedonia of having to survive another Trump era).

2025 read #4: Kids on Bikes: 2nd Edition by Jonathan Gilmour & Doug Levandowski.

Kids on Bikes: Strange Adventures in Small Towns, 2nd Edition by Jonathan Gilmour & Doug Levandowski

Includes “The Horror in the House on Hook Hill,” written and designed by Sen Foong-Lim and Alara Cameron

180 pages

Published 2023

Read from December 25, 2024 to January 7

Rating: n/a

The only game system books I’d read in their entirety before this were the Dungeon Master’s Guide and Player’s Handbook from the 5th edition of D&D. With Wizards of the Coast doing everything in their power to alienate their audience and burn years of goodwill to the ground, it’s time to learn some new systems!

Thanks to my partner R for gifting me this one. <3

What I like about this book: The wealth of thought that went into its discussions of how to play a mutually respectful game with others. I feel like the DMG and years of being the forever-DM taught me less than this book offered about the topics of table safety, collaborative storytelling, prompting players, backpedaling when the story goes places it shouldn’t, and ways to make failing a roll both interesting and an opportunity to move the game forward. Whatever system I use in the future, I appreciate having these role-play tools at hand.

What could have been better: Just like the Player’s Handbook, Kids on Bikes buried the rules of play within some sub-optimal formatting. I like the choice to foreground ethical gaming, but perhaps the core rules could be highlighted with an edge color for easy reference. More pertinently, the book explains what to do with a particular game condition before it defines the game condition, e.g. we get told we can spend Adversity Tokens several pages before we learn what they are or how we get them. It felt slightly disorganized.

I’m excited to (someday, hopefully) be able to play a Kids on Bikes game. This book also joins E.T., Stranger Things, The Goonies, Now and Then, Super 8, and a general cultural awareness of IT (which I haven’t read, or watched in full) on my meager list of inspirations for the kids-on-bikes novel I began writing this week.

2024 read #128: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Summer 2024 issue.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Summer 2024 issue (146:3-4)

Edited by Sheree Renée Thomas

258 pages

Published 2024

Read from October 25 to October 29

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Here we are, practically in November, but only now do I have my hands on a copy of the Summer 2024 issue of F&SF. I could’ve read it a couple months ago, but I like to collect the physical copies, and didn’t want to spend extra to read the digital version. No new issues have come out since then, though, so my streak of reading the current issue (begun March/April 2023) continues.

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“What It Means to Drift” by Rajeev Prasad. Saraswathi volunteered to be a “merchant”: a human implanted with artificial remote organs to assist a Titan, a cyborg civil servant grafted around a human consciousness. Saraswathi’s job is to feel emotions, to sustain love and heartbreak for her Titan, Avni. But both Saraswathi and Avni are becoming unmoored, adrift in their respective roles. A solid sci-fi story.

“On My Way to Heaven” by Alberto Chimal (translated by Patrick Weill). This is a long novelette, one built around a topic (alien abduction) that has been considered passé in sci-fi publishing for decades. It also centers a trope that I generaly disdain: Did the speculative element “really” happen, or was it all in the mind of the character? Yet “Heaven” absorbed my attention from the first page, and kept it to the end. It’s written with assurance, pulling you into the complications of family, politics, protest, marginalization, mental illness, music, and UFOs with deceptive ease. Another all-time classic from this era of F&SF.

“Mister Yellow” by Christina Bauer.  Dr. Jordan invents a headset that permits her to interact with other dimensions overlaying her own. Mister Yellow is her contact in the sixth dimension. The government confines Dr. Jordan to maintain control over her invention, but various dimensions affect each other in ways she doesn’t expect.

“Water Baby” by Tonya R. Moore. A vivid and compelling story of rising waters, a disintegrating community, and a mystery from the sea.

“Metis in the Belly of the God” by Nina Kiriki Hoffman. Brief retelling from Greek mythology, as strange and excellent as you'd expect from Nina Kiriki Hoffman.

Next, a poem: “In Her Footsteps” by Suzanne J. Willis. It's all right, though its stated origin as background for a novel feels obvious; it doesn't feel complete in itself.

“She's a Rescue” by Marie Vibbert. The literature of kids/teens coming of age in single-family space freighters is small, but I’m always happy to see it grow. This one is a solid entry, expertly balancing its family drama with its blue collar spacer vibes.

“Snowdrop” by Raul Caner Cruz. A sweetly domestic retelling of “The Snow Child,” rich with a sense of place.

“Dog People” by Esther Friesner. Humorous contemporary fantasy mixing the undead with classical goddesses in upscale Manhattan. It felt like a throwback to the consciously cheesy humorous fantasy of the 20th century. Not really my kind of thing. 

“What You Leave Behind" by Ken Altabef. A magical realism-esque piece literalizing the grief and trauma of terrorism. Also not my kind of thing.

“Another Such Victory” by Albert Chu. Quite simply the best mecha pilot story I have ever read. It’s never been a subgenre that interested me, but this long novelette is stunning, immersive, vital, unremitting in its allegory against imperialism and systems of oppression. Another instant classic. I don’t subject contemporary short fiction to my arbitrary letter grades, but if I did, this one would be an A.

“Growth Rings of the Earth” by Xinwei Kong (originally published 2018). This almost-novella feels like the kind of grand, sprawling, consciously philosophical sci-fi you’d find in Asimov’s in the late 1990s, the kind of sci-fi that first fired my ambitions to become a literary SFF author instead of a mere pulp writer. In the moderately near future, most humans have abandoned their bodies to upload their consciousness to a digital “heaven.” Our narrator is the last human on Earth, raised by physical book enthusiasts who lived out their days in the Library of Congress. There’s a plot strand about the kind of artificial intelligence you used to find in a lot of sci-fi before, say, 2022, when planet-killing spellcheck software peddled by billionaires co-opted the term “AI.” True to the 1990s Asimov’s comparison, there’s also some iffy age-gap sex, which was unfortunate. I wish we could bring back the sprawling Big Idea sci-fi vibe of that era without its more questionable trappings. Still, aside from that, this is a worthwhile read.

After two longer stories, we’re treated to a couple poems. First: “I, Magician” by Julie Eliopoulos. I liked it.

Next: “City as Fairy Tale” by Richard Leis. Also solid.

“Jacob Street” by L. Marie Wood. GPS horror that saves itself from comparisons to a certain episode of The Office by unraveling into a delightfully feverish spiral. Pretty good.

“Red Ochre, Ivory Bone” by Deborah L. Davitt. Seeing that title on the table of contents, I didn’t expect a multi-species space opera piece. I think it’s a difficult vibe to capture in short form; at times, the story derailed to offer descriptions of the many species present at the station, which is a lot of information to throw at the reader. The plot itself draws from medical examiner procedural tropes. Yet Davitt pulls it all together into a satisfying story.

One last poem, one I’ve been looking forward to: “In a castle far from every prince” by Marisca Pichette. It is excellent, as always.

“The Glass Apple” by Ivy Grimes. A strange and beguiling original fairy tale. Quite good.

“Slickerthin” by Phoenix Alexander. An amazing endcap to this issue, delightfully visceral and goopy and queer, a take on Greek folklore like nothing else I’ve read. Excellent.

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And that’s it for this issue! Definitely not my favorite of the Thomas era, but still solid.

F&SF has been criticized for sitting on stories for unprofessional lengths of time; they’ve been closed to submissions for well over a year now, as Thomas works through the stockpile of material the magazine had already accepted. Perhaps I’m reading into things, but at times, this issue felt a little bit like the result of that process. Not the dregs, per se. Many stories were good, some even exceptional. But overall, this didn’t rank up there with what Thomas has been releasing during her tenure. (Or maybe I’m just too depressed to appreciate anything, with the election looming so near.)

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.

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

2024 read #122: Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury.*

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury*

294 pages

Published 1962

Read from October 21 to October 24

Rating: 4 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

I first read this book about twenty years ago, freshly stamped into adulthood, wearied with the anchors of childhood trauma. Even in my premature old age, I don’t think I caught the fact that this book is about getting older, not then. That it’s about the end of childhood, the tangible bruises of maturity, the price so many would pay to go back. Rereading it here in 2024, a long track indeed into the wrong future, when my knees and ankles ache and fascism once more slithers openly in the halls of power, it hits particularly hard.

Bradbury’s greatest strength as a writer is his earnestness, the breathlessness with which his words tumble over themselves to press hot poker emblems of sensation and longing into your skin. No adjectives, no arabesques, no multi-jointed similes are enough for Bradbury’s sentences. His words carry this book, jabbing elbows and uppercuts until you get out of its way, a clattertrap locomotive shedding sparks and trailing fume. The more mixed the metaphor, the better.

Beneath all that, Something Wicked is very much a novel of its time, a nocturnal book of fathers and sons, where mothers sleep serene in their own lack of interiority. Bradbury reserves his vision for white men and boys who have no need to consult elsewhere, because the answers are theirs and theirs alone. It’s a stifling perspective, a claustrophobic mirror maze that reflects its own concerns back to it. A worthy classic, yes, but riven with the rust of its age.

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!

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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 #93: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Winter-Spring 1950 issue.

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Winter-Spring 1950 issue (1:2)

Edited by Anthony Boucher & J. Francis McComas

128 pages

Published 1950

Read from August 10 to August 11

Rating: 1 out of 5

So, I had this plan to read an issue of F&SF from each decade of its existence, double back when I got to the 2020s, and do it again going the other way. I only made it as far as the 1960s before losing what little focus I had. Instead, today we’re hopping back to the 1950s for this, the second-ever issue of the magazine.

It would take me so many years to read through every single issue of F&SF, especially since I would need to buy hundreds more issues (some of them at collector’s prices) to make it happen. As much as I’ve thought about it, I probably won’t attempt it. But I might try to read through every issue I have access to, which happily includes its first full decade, thanks to online archives.

I don’t have high hopes for this issue. I’m choosing to read it because of the Ray Bradbury and Margaret St. Clair pieces, and also because the Coleridge reprint technically lets me add another item to my 1800s decade tag.

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“The Gnurrs Come From the Voodvork Out” by R. Bretnor. The vast majority of 1950s humor hasn’t aged well. I’ve also never been impressed with any of Bretnor’s efforts. The  editorial blurb above this story hyperventilates: “[A]ny mention of gnurrs tends to reduce both editors to a quivering state of helplessness which has been authoritatively diagnosed as hysteria bretnorica.” What exactly is so hysterical, you ask? We have a kook inventor named Papa Schimmelhorn, a hidebound military officer who still yearns for cavalry, a WAC secretary who’s miffed by the lack of sexual harassment from her commander, and the gnurrs, who swarm out of the wainscoting to eat everyone’s clothes. It reads like something finely tuned to the sensibilities of midcentury 10 year old boys — maybe like old Bugs Bunny cartoons, but not funny. F

“The Return of the Gods” by Robert M. Coates (1948). This reprint, a tale of Greek gods (and various associated creatures) appearing to unsuspecting WWII veterans throughout the Northeast, originally appeared in The New Yorker. The prose has an oddly antique cadence, with news-magazine “the facts of the case” narration. The story itself feels like a throwback, as well, hearkening back to the Pan fad of the 1890s through 1930s. Yet it also has a whisper of the midcentury apocalypse genre within it, perhaps the earliest such expression of atomic anxiety I’ve encountered. I didn’t dislike it, aside from a sprinkling of the typical “women love sexual harassment, actually” bullshit. C-?

“Every Work Into Judgment” by Kris Neville. Dull, bible-thumping drivel that’s thoroughly impressed with itself, this one is a would-be philosophical ramble about a building on a future college campus. The building slowly gains sentience and telekinesis, and gets religion. Neville’s prose strains to attain poetry and meaning, but only gets in its own way. Maybe F+

A Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem, “Time, Real and Imaginary” (1803), has been inserted to fill half a page. First ever poem in F&SF! It might also be my first exposure to Romantic poetry, at least for the purposes of this blog. I liked it, but probably wouldn’t want an entire book of it.

“A Rope for Lucifer” by Walt Sheldon. An early example of a fantasy western, unsurprisingly freighted with racist caricature. If you’re like me, you probably imagined some bronco-busting variation on “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” but no: our epistolary narrator is the one named Lucifer, and the tale centers on how he received a sacred rope from mysterious India. The story never develops any degree of pizazz. D?

“The Last Generation?” by Miriam Allen deFord (1946). Another postwar atomic anxiety tale, originally published in Collier’s, pre-dating Coates’ effort by two years (though it employs the same news-magazine format). This time a testing accident in New Mexico renders all mammals sterile, all over the globe. The outcomes deFord lays out are equal parts creative and hopelessly optimistic; universal infertility leads to world peace and cooperation, for example, while the world’s rich men are happy to have their now uninheritable wealth taxed for the greater good. However, even within a global utopia, deFord couldn’t resist casting the usual white writer’s aspersions on China, India, and Africa. Maybe D+

“Postpaid to Paradise” by Robert Arthur (1940). I can safely say this is my very first philatelist fantasy. Magic stamps that transport the recipient to El Dorado are a neat conceit. Since this was 1940, alas, the narrator has to emphasize that one of the stamps depicts a teenage girl, before he promptly leers at her. Meh. D-

“The Exiles” by Ray Bradbury (1949). It’s hard to describe this piece without spoiling it, so here are the spoilers: All the canonical literary fantasists of the past (Shakespeare, Poe, Dickens, Baum, Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, etc.), kept alive thanks to those who read their books, have exiled themselves to Mars to escape the relentless pragmatism of science and progress. With the first astronauts approaching Mars, the fantasists use the magic of their creations (the witches of Macbeth, etc.) to kill or frighten them away. But the astronauts have an unexpected weapon: the last copies of their books, banned long ago. It’s a shallow business, and very much in the thrall of the white man canon, but it’s cute. I could see this as a Doctor Who serial. C+

“My Astral Body” by Anthony Hope (1895). The “mystical East” meets Edwardian social comedy in this tale from the 1890s. An unnamed “rajah” teaches a well-to-do Oxford student how to project an astral body. The student promptly sends his astral body to attend church and to get trousers measured for him. All this casual employment gives the astral body big ideas, and soon our Oxford student has regrets. A shrug. D

“Gavagan’s Bar” by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt. Actually a pair of stories: “Elephas Frumenti,” which sees bar patrons discuss selectively breeding elephants down to whiskey-drinking house pets, and “The Gift of God,” in which a Christian poet doesn’t know what to do when a miracle happens to her. This pair of flash stories launched the long-running Gavagan’s Bar series, which proved popular for some years in F&SF. I don’t get the appeal. Maybe D?

“World of Arlesia” by Margaret St. Clair. This author is hit or miss, and unfortunately, this one falls in the miss category. The plot — an immersive movie is used to pull people into a Matrix-like work camp — is interesting, and the narration dabbles with second-person, but the pieces don’t quite gel together. D+

“The Volcanic Valve” by W. L. Alden (1897). A supposedly humorous yarn about a scientist who, hoping to perfect a means of controlling volcanoes for profit, inadvertently triggers the explosion of Krakatoa. Full of the horrid racism of contemporary English authors, the entire punchline seems to be “our plan blew up our Chinese workmen.” F

“Not with a Bang” by Damon Knight. A supposedly humorous last-man-on-Earth tale. The “humor” derives from the fact that last woman on Earth is a prim Protestant who can’t wrap her head around the changed circumstances and just give the man some kids already. Gross as fuck. Something worse than F

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Even with low expectations, this issue managed to disappoint me. The last two stories, in particular, were horrendous. I’ve read worse issues from the 1980s, but this one was a marked step down from the dubious charms of the first issue.

2024 read #88: The Woods All Black by Lee Mandelo.

The Woods All Black by Lee Mandelo

150 pages

Published 2024

Read from July 28 to August 4

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Lately, my partner R has gotten fixated on queer Appalachian fantasy and horror. I've been wanting to write in this niche myself, so from professional as well as personal interest, I should start familiarizing myself with it.

R recommended this slim novel as a good place to begin. Of course, no matter how slender the book is, it’s still summer as I try to read it, so I’m having my usual difficulties in finding opportunities to read (or the attention span to read when I do).

For its length, Woods is a slow burn, which didn’t help my focus. It centers on an "invert" named Leslie, a nurse with PTSD from World War I, who gets sent to an isolated community in the hills of eastern Kentucky in 1929. There he finds community hostility; an authoritarian brimstone preacher; a fellow trans man (as we might now consider him) who is being abused by the community; and something strange deep in the hills.

I felt that Mandelo does an excellent job at situating Woods in its time and place, conveying Leslie’s queerness and neurodivergence without resorting to couching them in modern terms. The peril of queerness in dangerous times makes for uneasy reading, and the loneliness of trying to model a form of queerness that doesn’t fit, at a time when few models were circulated even within the community, is heartbreaking. Humans (or at least Christofascists) are the true horror in Woods.

2024 read #86: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 1968 issue.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 1968 issue (34:5)

Edited by Edward L. Ferman

130 pages

Published 1968

Read from July 21 to July 24

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

Continuing my project to hop through all the decades of F&SF.

The online PDF archives seem to end at the dawn of the 1960s, so I have to turn to my own collection now, which doesn’t leave me with many sixties issues to choose from. This issue has a novella (a “short novel” in the magazine’s parlance at the time) by Samuel R. Delany, which is a compelling enough reason to pick it. Unfortunately, it’s also all male. The small gains made by women writers in the 1950s F&SF scene clearly got discarded before we reached here.

Halfway through, I belatedly realized that this issue means I have read at least one full issue from every decade of F&SF’s existence! Next goal: one from each year? I’ll have to obtain a lot more physical copies to accomplish that.

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“Lines of Power” by Samuel R. Delany. A unique (in my experience) dystopian novella about Global Power, which trundles its massive cables and machines around the globe, and the various hyper-individualistic nonconformists (today, it’s the biker-gang coded “Angels” who ride jet-powered broomsticks) who withdraw to the last unpowered pockets of wilderness to avoid them. The concept feels halfway between Logan's Run and something I could picture getting published in Asimov’s in the mid 1980s. There's some racial, sexual, and gendered stuff that no doubt was radical in 1968 but hasn't aged so well; much of the plot concerns postures of masculinity. Delany’s style has, by this point, evolved into the denser, more elliptical phrasing he would continue to elaborate into the 1970s. Not my favorite Delany piece, but it's vivid and memorable, and interesting for its place in his evolution as a writer. Maybe C+?

“The Wilis” by Baird Searles. A ballet dancer fantasy by an ex-professional dancer? Not an item I expected to find in this era. The prose and storytelling are thoroughly competent, albeit uninspiring (and a tad predictable). The ending, especially, felt a bit out of place in this decade, like something that could have been published in the early 1950s. C-

“Gifts from the Universe” by Leonard Tushnet. Routine “mysterious shop in a rundown back alley” tale, with a Venusian twist straight out of the ’50s. An inordinate percentage of its word count is the narrator charting out his efforts to find full-silver quarters to pay the mysterious (and ailing) Mr. Tolliver. A shrug. D

“Beyond the Game” by Vance Aandahl. This would-be surrealist little number about a grade school boy escaping the horrors of dodgeball feels thoroughly sixties (in a derogatory sense). It has less to say than it thinks it does. Not much to it. D

“Dry Run” by Larry Niven. This tale, by contrast, feels thoroughly eighties (in a derogatory sense). It’s one of those “shitty man dies on his way to kill his soon to be ex-wife, gets judged by the heavenly Powers That Be based on what he would have done had he survived” tales. (Spoiler: It’s okay! He only murders her dog, doesn’t tell her, and it works out between them!) Fuck this. F

“A Quiet Kind of Madness” by David Redd. A proto-feminist fantasy written by a man, published in 1968? I’m gonna be skeptical of that. Especially since it has a guy roaming around trying to sweet talk our protagonist into giving him another chance after he tried to assault her six months before… and she actually finds herself gaslit into considering it. Yeah, this isn’t any feminism I would recognize. I did enjoy the vaguely post-apocalyptic Finnish vibe of the setting, but the rest of the story was on thin ice. (Heh.) F+

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And that’s my first issue of F&SF from the ’60s! It started out so interesting, but quickly settled into another Ferman-curated disaster.

2024 read #77: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December 1951 issue.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December 1951 issue (2:6)

Edited by Anthony Boucher & J. Francis McComas

128 pages

Published 1951

Read July 2

Rating: 2 out of 5

As I mentioned in my review of its first issue, F&SF is in its 75th year. Under the editorial leadership of Sheree Renée Thomas, the magazine’s quality is better and more consistent than it’s ever been. Unfortunately, a number of missteps and accidents on the publishing end of things has left the venerable publication’s future uncertain. It’s July now, and F&SF has only published one issue so far in 2024. This lone issue seems have had a limited print run, perhaps solely for subscribers; rumors suggest the company’s printer broke, a major problem when cash flow is as sparse as it is for modern magazines. In any case, I still haven’t been able to get my hands on a copy, and I’m waiting to see if production issues get resolved before I splurge on a subscription.

My project to read each issue of F&SF as it’s current has been derailed. In its place, I’m proposing to read back and forth across the various decades of its existence. I’ve already finished the only issue from the 1940s, so it’s time to read my first full issue from the 1950s.

There’s nothing special about this issue. I picked it because the TOC offers what looks to be a nice mix of authors and titles. As was the magazine’s style at the time, the contents hop between new stories and selections from earlier publications. 

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“When the Last Gods Die” by Fritz Leiber. I’m not normally a fan of the “dispassionate, omniscient author records events from the outside with no emotional attachment” style of first-person perspective; it feels hackneyed at best. Yet Leiber mostly makes it work in this Dying Earth mood piece. In the far future, the titanic figures of pseudo-Greek gods recline motionless in the ruddy light of the aged sun, waiting for their end. A sentient Machine arrives to make one final plea for the gods to reconsider their own demise. Not bad at all. B-

“The Haunted Ticker” by Percival Wilde (1923). A thoroughly Twenties tale about a miser who works out a system to exactly predict the stock market in his last months of life, and then comes back as a ghost orchestrating purchases and sales over the stock ticker. Not exactly thrilling, and rather overlong, but certainly not like anything else I’ve read. C-

“O Ugly Bird!” by Manly Wade Wellman. The first tale of John the Balladeer. It’s a mildly diverting yarn about a holler plagued by a bully who always gets what he wants from his neighbors, and the big ugly bird who may or may not be his familiar. C+

“The Rats” by Arthur Porges. This story is a reprint, yet it was first published in 1951, the same year as this issue. Quick turnaround! Maybe it’s good, right? Alas, as you might guess from its original home in Man’s World, it’s amateurish, stiffly written pulp. A doomsday prepper hides out in the desert near an abandoned atomic testing facility, but the rats are learning and adapting to thwart his defensive measures. There’s some mileage in how banal the threat is; the rats aren’t ravenous mutants, just somewhat smarter than your average rodent. I’m reminded of Elisabeth Melartre’s “Evolution Never Sleeps,” in the July 1999 issue of Asimov’s. D?

“Built Down Logically” by Howard Schoenfeld. Hillburt Hooper Aspasia is an infant prodigy, a genius Harvard lecturer still in a baby buggy. That’s the starting point for this silly little number, which toys with logic and how you can logic away the facts in front of you. I’m reminded of “Hog-Belly Honey” by R. A. Lafferty, which I read and reviewed here. Like that humorous piece, this one doesn’t do anything for me, though I did enjoy its nasty cynicism about midcentury scientists and their role as decorated weapons manufacturers. D

“The Earlier Service” by Margaret Irwin (1935). An early example of a time-slip story, not quite folk horror but perhaps somewhere along the road to it, full of church gargoyles, grinning cherubs, and shadowy presences around the altar. Excellent atmosphere, though like most stories I’ve read from this era, more is hinted at than shown. Enjoyable. B-

“The Universe Broke Down” by Robert Arthur (1941). Humorous eccentric inventor piece, very much of its time. Jeremiah Jupiter uses strange matter found in a meteorite to invent a device that folds space. His reluctant friend, our narrator Lucius, is on hand to discover that the device works perhaps too well. Literal cats-and-dogs humor. A shrug. D+

“Come on, Wagon!” by Zenna Henderson. Henderson’s first adult story, a prototype of the standard “kids can do magic because they don’t know the limits of reality” trope. It doesn’t quite have the deep well of heart and precisely depicted feeling that her best later stories have, but it’s more emotionally authentic than most SFF of this era. B-

“The House in Arbor Lane” by James S. Hart. Spoilers for this one. It wouldn’t be my first choice, but I have to admit that it’s pretty clever — especially at this early date in the genre — to take a tale of a witch, her attempt to sacrifice her niece, and the witch’s defeat, and narrate it in the form of a murder trial in a small New England town. Maybe a shade overlong, but still a respectable C+

“Skiametric Morphology and Behaviorism of Ganymedeus Sapiens: A Summary of Neoteric Hypotheses” by Kenneth R. Deardorf. Now that’s a title ahead of its time! The story, if it can be called that, lives up to that promised postmodern slant, giving us a faux research paper examining cartoonish diagrams as observed through a multidimensional scanner. It’s cute, though I can’t really rate it as a story.

“The Hyperspherical Basketball” by H. Nearing, Jr. Overlong humor piece about a professor who invents a fourth-dimensional basketball. I gotta admit, my eyes kind of glazed through this one. Geometry and midcentury “clever” dialog joined forces to make me snooze. A flat note to end on. D?

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And that’s my first full issue of F&SF from the ’50s! It could have been a lot worse, that’s for sure.

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 #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.)

—

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

Falling in Love with Hominids by Nalo Hopkinson

224 pages

Published 2015

Read from March 5 to March 11

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2024 read #32: The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen.

The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen

156 pages

Published 1894

Read March 4

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

I don’t know why turn-of-the-century horror and fantasy authors became so fixated on Pan. Clearly it fit into the social reaction against the speed of technological change and social “progress” (we must use that term loosely for this era). There’s a distinct through-line of sexual anxiety as well, of fragile men losing their wits over the possibility of women having sexual agency. Modernism encompasses both the progress and the reaction against it, after all, balanced in uneasy tension. But why Pan?

My best guess is a lingering Victorian fetish for classical Greece, repudiating local British fae lore and nature spirits in favor of the “civilized” myths of a completely different culture.

(Which in turn brings us back to the ideological underpinnings of white supremacy, the myths of a great heritage of classical civilization that Western Europe invented for itself during the Medieval and Renaissance eras, myths which the English honed in the Victorian age. The cultural “heirs” of Greece and Rome — in as much as cultures can have “heirs,” which is a dubious proposition at best — were the Abbasid Caliphate and the Ottomans. Western Europe was always a cultural fringe and economic backwater, dressing up its indigenous systems of kin strife and feudal obligation with Roman trappings after the Western Empire collapsed and left behind a power vacuum. Victorians excelled at editing away actual history in favor of tidy hierarchies that always happened to place themselves at the top. But I digress.)

Whatever the reason, Pan was everywhere, from approximately the 1890s through the 1930s. One of the earliest manifestations of the Pan obsession, and certainly the most famous to this day, Machen’s The Great God Pan has been on my list for a few years now.

For such an influential story, Pan isn’t that good. Machen’s prose is stiff, almost amateurish to modern eyes. As in his story “N” (which I read and reviewed here), much of his narrative is laid out in smoking-room dialogue between gentlemen who witnessed different aspects of the story. After depicting a street-corner encounter in one chapter, he has one character summarize it all over again to another man in the next. At one point, two characters summarize the plot up to this point, then stop to look at the house of one Mrs. Beaumont, “an oddish sort of woman,” who just happens to serve a thousand-year-old vintage of claret to her guests; the two men make no connection between the two strands, and continue their walk. It’s almost comical.

Machen builds his novella’s horrors upon the unrestrained appetites of its femme fatale: “[T]hat woman, if I can call her woman, corrupted my soul.” Helen emerges from an event of horrible misogyny in the first chapter: her teenage mother Mary’s brain was operated upon by a man who regarded Mary as essentially his property, opening Mary’s mind to the horrors beyond human conception, and thence conceiving Helen through presumably metaphysical means (though this is never specified, so maybe I'm being naive). The book, in that light, could be understood as a violated woman’s vengeance upon the rich and titled men of London. I’d certainly love to see this retold as a queer revenge fantasy to highlight that element more. As it is, though, Machen’s story is far more interested in men putting a stop to Helen’s supernatural crimes that it is in her justification.

2024 read #15: The Magazine of Fantasy, Fall 1949 issue.

The Magazine of Fantasy, Fall 1949 issue (1:1)

Edited by Anthony Boucher & J. Francis McComas

128 pages

Published 1949

Read from January 28 to January 29

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

It’s the 75th anniversary year for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Despite recent troubles and controversies, it’s still my favorite fiction magazine. Under the editorship of Sheree Renée Thomas, F&SF has been the best it’s ever been, consistently brilliant and innovative.

I’d hoped to continue reading each new issue when it comes out, as I did for most of 2023. To my knowledge, though, the January / February 2024 issue still hasn’t gone to press, which suggests concerning developments on the business and publishing end of the magazine. Fingers crossed it’s able to weather the current problems and endure into whatever future we face.

Thanks once again to online archives, I was able to read this: the very first issue of what would become our beloved F&SF. Founded purely as a fantasy magazine, this, like many periodicals of its era, padded its pages with reprints, and at least one story penned pseudonymously by an editor. Also, horror was lumped in with fantasy in this era; much of this issue is horror or horror-adjacent. 

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“Bells on His Toes” by Cleve Cartmill. Fairly standard humorous 1940s urban fantasy number. A cop checks up on Dr. Swaam, a would-be guru, to make sure he isn’t defrauding people, and discovers that the good doctor’s “believe it and make it real” self-actualization works a bit too well. The story is unremarkable. It’s fine. C-

“Thurnley Abbey” by Perceval Landon (1907). Even in 1907 this would have been a touch old fashioned. Our framing device narrator goes through the trouble of familiarizing us with his Continental routine before introducing our actual narrator, Colvin, a stranger on the train who begs to sleep in the first narrator’s cabin so he doesn’t have to sleep alone. To explain why, Colvin slogs through an implausibly detailed and rigidly chronological account of a cadaverous night he spent at his friend’s manor house. The skeletal being that Colvin encounters is depicted vividly, but the tale peters out and then just… ends, feeling half finished. What there is of it feels like a C

“Private — Keep Out!” by Philip MacDonald. This existential horror piece reads more hokey than horrific nowadays, but it’s an interesting variation on the classic forbidden knowledge trope, one grounded in the quotidian routines of Hollywood. As a reader, I think my expectations for a story are higher, thanks to the depth and imagination of modern day fantasy; I kept expecting “Keep Out!” to have something more, a deeper element, an unexpected twist that would feel like a revelation, perhaps a Siren Queen-esque connection to Hollywood myth. But no, once you figure it out, that’s pretty much all there is to it. C

“The Lost Room” by Fitz-James O’Brien (1858). This one is little more than a mood piece. It goes like this: Our narrator looks around his lodging room on a sweltering evening and recalls all the objects in it, with a paragraph or two of how each came into his possession. When his cigar burns down, he flings it out the window, and he decides he’ll go sit in the garden where it’s cooler. He proceeds to describe the vast and gloomy house around his room, then the cypress-grown garden. There he meets a strange little man in the dark, who tells him his fellow lodgers are enchanters, ghouls, and cannibals, before disappearing. Our narrator rushes back to his room and finds everything changed into a bacchanalian chamber, and all his familiar belongings transformed into exotica. Six lascivious strangers lounge around a table laden with delicacies; he must gamble with them for the use of his room. The story is slightly less boring than it sounds — O’Brien sustains a note of doomed melancholy that is moderately engrossing — but inevitably, there’s more than a little bit of Orientalism in the decadence of the transformed room. (There’s plenty of anti-Black racism, too.) It’s hard to rate a story so far removed from my own contemporary standards of storytelling, but the racism does it in. Maybe F+

“The Hurkle Is a Happy Beast” by Theodore Sturgeon. This one is a thoroughly 1940s science fantasy, of the sort that tosses in terms and names like gwik and Hvov before admitting that none of it matters. It’s supposed to be cheeky, playing with the expectations of early sci-fi worldbuilding, but it feels clumsy and lazy nowadays. (Like, you know you can just write your horny fable in an interesting way instead, right?) Anyway, a hurkle is a blue, six-legged alien kitten. One blunders its adorable way into a teleporter and shows up on Earth, which it finds as alien as we would find Lihrt. The first man to see it sprays it with DDT. If I’m parsing the ending correctly, the hurkle then gives birth to 200 female kittens, which in turn breed with humans and end up pacifying Earth (or at least male humans) with their happy sexual purrs. A weird horny twist condensed in vague, can’t-offend-the-censors language — how very 1940s. Maybe D+?

“Review Copy” by H. H. Holmes. The ever helpful ISFDB (Internet Science-Fiction Database) informs me that this was written by editor Anthony Boucher, which makes it odder that he chose a prolific real life serial killer for his supernatural murder-mystery pen name. (A cynical ploy for name recognition, presumably.) Here we find a vengeful writer, his book killed by a bad review, enlisting the services of a Black Magic user to kill the reviewer. The weapon? A book sent for review to the newspaper office. The story never rises above its banal “writers vs reviewers, am I right?” underpinnings. D

“Men of Iron” by Guy Endore (1940). A fable of automation and redundancy that’s still all too relevant in our current era of capitalist bullshit. (I typed out a whole rant about “AI” and the coordinated tech bro attack on labor, but we all know about it and it wasn’t necessary to include in this review.) The continued applicability is this story’s main point of interest; “Men” is forgettable, aside from its ending, in which (spoilers!) the newly automated machine lathe places a tarpaulin over its former operator and goes home to his wife. D+

“A Bride for the Devil” by Stuart Palmer. This one opens with several paragraphs describing the “full breasts” and “ample femininity” of its doomed heroine, with her youth treatments and multiple divorces and knack for spending the money of whichever husband is current. It would be a feat for any story to recover from such a beginning, and “Bride” doesn’t make the effort. Rote “occultists getting more than they bargained for” fluff, built on an unshakable foundation of misogyny. F

“Rooum” by Oliver Onions (1910). In much the way that “Bride” was built on misogyny, “Rooum” is built on racism, its opening paragraphs belaboring the fact that there was something not quite white about the titular character. Rooum’s tale of an invisible “Runner” catching up with him and running through him, the supernatural osmosis more painful each time, was interesting in a strange and half-formed way, but that wasn’t enough to redeem this story. F

“Perseus Had a Helmet” by Richard Sale (1938). Homicide procedural meets a touch of Greek legend. That makes this pulpy number sound way more interesting than it actually is. An office dweeb named Perseus loves an office dame named Ruby, but she’s playing him off the office Bluto, who beats Perseus up to keep him off her. Perseus subsequently acquires a helmet that, as in his namesake’s mythology, gives him powers of invisibility. He immediately launches into a life of crime, culminating in offing his rival. Clearly, “weenie becomes a tyrant when he gets a little taste of power” was a popular pulp trope; I was reminded of “The Weakling” in the February 1961 Analog. Maybe D-?

“In the Days of Our Fathers” by Winona McClintic. Imagine having your first published story printed in the first issue of what would become F&SF. Obviously no one knew what this little magazine would become, or how long it would last, or what masterpieces would appear in its pages. But in retrospect, it seems like quite an achievement. The story is a pretty standard midcentury affair: a child in the heavily regularized and perfected far future sneaks into the attic and, after reading a book penned by her uncle, discovers the “unsane atavism” called poetry, stirring feelings long since smoothed out of society. Unremarkable overall, but McClintic’s writing had actual character to it, which makes it a standout here. C+

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And that’s it for the first issue of what would become F&SF! Somewhat disappointing, though unsurprising. Still, it’s better than many issues I’ve read from the 1980s and ’90s.

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

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

Edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

162 pages

Published 1996

Read from December 14 to December 15

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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