2022 read #14: Dinosaur Beach by Keith Laumer.

Dinosaur Beach by Keith Laumer

151 pages

Published 1971

Read from April 26 to April 27

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

In my review of The Evolution of Claire, I talked about my tweenage / teenage project of reading every dinosaur book I could get my hands on. Thinking about all those books motivated me to obtain and read The Dechronization of Sam Magruder. It also inspired a vague urge to track down and read all the dinosaur books that I missed as a youth.

This yellowing pulp paperback has been on my shelf for a while. I have no idea when I bought it or how long I've held onto it, unread. I love the aesthetic of pulp paperbacks, namely the delightfully cheesy art on their covers, but I've learned through experience that the stories within them are poorly written, ridiculously plotted, and filled to the brim with the laughable machismo of 20th century culture. Whenever someone, say for example a libertarian man-child who inherited wealth from an Apartheid-era emerald fortune, says they wish science-fiction could be "about" the science-fiction again, this is exactly the sort of book they mean: an absolute trash read without a single recognizable emotion behind it.

The first disappointment: Dinosaur Beach barely involves dinosaurs. Like, at all. I'd never classify it as a dinosaur book.

I kind of expected as much, based on the description on the back cover. At first I thought it would be something akin to Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series, with our broad-chested hero leaping from the Jurassic to ancient Sumeria or something to track down a rogue timesweeper. It begins almost promisingly, with that classic mechanical over-description of small details that back in those days was considered fine spec-fic prose. It was at least readable.

But then there are more disappointments: A villainous time-robot is gay-coded for absolutely no reason at all, our hero's narration dripping with sardonic disdain -- because it's the 1970s, baby! And then our man gets stuck in the Mesozoic with a woman and their only way out is to fuck each other, because what midcentury pulp book is complete without a quick visit to the author's grody wank-bank?

Instead of a fun time-caper, the rest of this slim book gets lost up its own ass with technobabble worthy of Star Trek: Voyager, the technobabbly-est of all Star Treks. The last 30 pages are a hilarious, Dragonball-esque escalation of time-factions. It turns out our manly man isn't an operative from the Fourth Era of timesweeping, as he initially says. Nor is he from the Fifth or Sixth. Our hero turns out to be a machine sent back from a cosmic computer overmind representing the Eighth era of timesweeping, as if that means a single goddamn thing. (So that whole "We must fuck to escape the Jurassic!" bit becomes a whole lot grodier and assault-ier in retrospect.)

If anything, I'm being far too generous with this book's rating. It was mildly entertaining, but the cover art is better by far than the story we got. I'd much rather read about the buxom babe with the laser rifle and her shared glance of longing with the theropod in the background. Oh well.

2022 read #13: The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hall.

The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hall

359 pages

Published 2020

Read from April 19 to April 26

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Gay pirates are having a bit of a cultural moment. Over the last few weeks I've been privileged to observe the emergence of the Our Flag Means Death fandom in real time. I get the vibe that a bunch of other queer pirate media has been released in recent years, too, but alas, I haven't been reading much in recent years. I can say that the best segment of The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue involved pirates, and one of my favorite stories in Queer Blades, the LGBTQIA2+ fantasy adventure anthology I edited, involves sapphic pirates.

So I really wanted to like this book. I think the basic outline of its plot holds promise. The two main characters are interesting. The world -- while only thinly sketched -- has potential.

But overall, it was disappointing and under-baked. Tokuda-Hall's prose rarely rises above utilitarian. Outside of Flora/Florian and Evelyn, most of the characters feel like stick-figures, barely sketched in, lacking motivation or substance. The plot reads like an outline, with the characters forced into making the choices they make because the outline demanded it, not because the choices make sense in-character. Given the way the book ends (and this is a tiny spoiler), the entire witchcraft subplot feels completely superfluous, something left over from a previous draft. 

I won't say I dislike this book by any means. In my completely arbitrary rating system, 2.5 is essentially neutral -- an average book, not one I'd recommend but not one I regret reading. But I do feel like The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea could have been so much more. Especially given the caliber of some of the names Tokuda-Hall drops as early readers in her acknowledgements.

2022 read #12: The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee.

The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee

520 pages

Published 2017

Read from April 10 to April 18

Rating: 3 out of 5

Some people enjoy stories about rakish aristocrats behaving badly. I'm certainly not against the general idea, but our narrator and protagonist here is up to his ears in petulance and privilege. Monty is appallingly obtuse, feeling sorry for himself -- and justifiably so, given his shitty abusive father -- but never stopping to think that others might have it worse. I believe it's meant to be a critique of performative allyship, of swooping in to save the day without stopping to ask what others less privileged might want. But Monty is an unrelenting disaster, consistently making the worst (and most dramatic) choice whenever he is presented with one.

This book is entertaining, with a fun narrative voice and a plot that careens from one scrape into the next: a horrible social disaster at the French court! highwaymen! intrigue! prison! pirates! Thanks to our hero Monty's terrible decisions, it all becomes a bit exhausting, especially in the middle going. Long past the point where you'd think he'd start learning and growing, he sends it all crashing down once more in a fit of pique because, once again, he didn't stop to ask anyone else what they needed but barreled on ahead.

2022 read #11: The Dechronization of Sam Magruder by George Gaylord Simpson.*

The Dechronization of Sam Magruder by George Gaylord Simpson*

104 pages

Published 1996

Read April 8

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

When I read The Evolution of Claire, I got to thinking about all the dinosaur books I had read as a tween and teen during the height of 1990s dinomania. In particular, I mused on how those books influenced my writing during those years, and how those influences persist as I near 40.

Much of my early writing centered on dinosaurs, and much of it was more or less copied from books and stories I read during those formative years. One of my very first short stories was a "sequel" to Jurassic Park. One of my earliest "original" stories borrowed heavily from Michael Bishop's short story "Herding with the Hadrosaurs." The first story I ever submitted to a sci-fi magazine was, essentially, Raptor Red fanfic.

Last year, I rediscovered a forgotten writing project: Time Castaway, a fictional LiveJournal I maintained sporadically from 2002 through 2005. It wasn't until I was writing my review for The Evolution of Claire that I connected the dots and realized that Time Castaway was my attempt to rewrite The Dechronization of Sam Magruder to my own satisfaction. I doubt I fully realized that even at the time.

Dechronization was a novella about a Cretaceous castaway that George Gaylord Simpson, renowned evolutionary biologist, wrote sometime before his death in 1984. Based on the rhythm of its language and the framing story (lifted wholesale from H. G. Wells' The Time Machine), I would hazard a guess that it was written in the 1960s. However, a snooty dismissal of the theory of endothermic dinosaurs would place it no earlier than the mid-1970s.

It was this dismissal, and Simpson's portrayal of dumb, sluggish, reptilian dinosaurs, that kept teenage me from fully embracing this book. (I was a warm-blooded dinosaur partisan, and I took that shit seriously. Whenever I read Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, with its outdated 1910s dinosaurs, I always had to chase it with a palate cleanser, like Raptor Red or Michael Crichton's The Lost World.) I wasn't permitted to get many books in those days, so I reread Dechronization at least a few times (however begrudgingly) and probably never admitted to myself that it wasn't a favorite of mine. And it's clear from Time Castaway that its influence lingered in my imagination.

Rereading it for the first time in about 25 years, I have to admit I find Dechronization a tad underwhelming. The framing device, no doubt meant as a cheeky nod to Wells, feels hokey; the dinosaur science was woefully outdated even when it was written; the story and characters are flimsy. It's doubtful that it ever would have been published if it hadn't been for the frenzy for anything Mesozoic back in the 1990s.

There is some philosophical content at its heart, however: musings on loneliness and why human beings -- aware of death -- bother to keep living. Ironically, it's apt material for the 2020s. Perhaps Dechronization, a book itself lost in time, is due for a revival.

2022 read #10: Cute Mutants, Vol. 1: Mutant Pride by SJ Whitby.

Cute Mutants, Vol. 1: Mutant Pride by SJ Whitby

409 pages

Published 2020

Read from April 2 to April 8

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Expect to see a lot more queer small-press books reviewed here as I get my hands on them. This one is basically the tale of a neurodivergent teen and X-Men superfan who finds herself with mutant powers -- and finds friendship with others at her school after a tumultuous journey of self-discovery. The narrative voice is as Gen Z (or possibly late Millennial cusp) as anything I've read in fiction, sprinkling text shorthand, emojis, and group chats throughout the story. It's also avowedly, wonderfully queer. <3

In much the same way that The Evolution of Claire made me itch to write my own take on Jurassic Park, Cute Mutants has me feeling the queer superhero vibe. I feel a bit like a poser, though. This book aside, I only know superheroes through movies, one or two graphic novels, and cartoons from the 1990s. And I guess V. E. Schwab's Vicious. And Catherynne M. Valente's Refrigerator Monologues. And the current Harley Quinn cartoon. Okay, maybe I have more superhero exposure than I realize. But still.

I'm new to seeking out queer books. Now that I've gotten a taste in recent months, I can't get enough. I've ordered a handful as my checking account permits, but I always want more. I can't imagine enjoying or connecting to anything cishetnormative quite this much ever again.

2022 read #9: The Evolution of Claire by Tess Sharpe.

The Evolution of Claire by Tess Sharpe

392 pages

Published 2018

Read from March 29 to March 31

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

I came of age as a reader in the aftermath of Jurassic Park. It was the second "grownup" book I ever read. Picture me getting my hands on a fresh paperback copy -- a rarity in my impoverished childhood -- as a dinosaur-obsessed 10 year old in the months before the movie's release. As soon as I finished reading it, I would flip back to the start and begin it all over again. Jurassic Park was my favorite book for an embarrassingly long time.

The countless imitators and cash-ins it spawned, both nonfiction pop-science and hastily thrown-together novels, filled my tween and teen reading. At one point in my teens I made an effort to read every dinosaur novel I could get my hands on. There were classics, like Arthur Conan Doyle's horribly racist The Lost World. There was Crichton's own follow-up The Lost World. There were books I thoroughly enjoyed at the time, such as Greg Bear's Dinosaur Summer, George Gaylord Simpson's iconic The Dechronization of Sam Magruder, and Robert T. Bakker's unwitting furry-bait Raptor Red. There were lesser-known clunkers like James F. David's Footprints of Thunder; books that promised dinosaurs but segued into something else entirely, such as Robert J. Sawyer's End of an Era; and books that are all-but-forgotten now, like Kurt R. A. Giambastiani's The Year the Cloud Fell.

This endeavor continued into my early twenties, when I finally got my hands on the Dinotopia series and Michael Swanwick's Bones of the Earth, and I still picked up the occasional mediocre latecomer, like Lisa M. Graziano and Michael S. A. Graziano's Cretaceous Dawn. But there's a problem with dinosaur novels: the vast majority of them aren't any good. Most writers just don't know how to make dinosaurs interesting in a fictional setting. After the 1990s explosion of dinomania, perhaps dinosaur books were seen as passé, déclassé, a low-brow cash-in. The only high-profile dinosaur novels in recent years were penned by some right-wing hack, and I refuse to read them.

I miss dinosaur books, though. I've spent much of my life writing them, scrapping them, planning to write more. And sometimes I feel the urge to go back to my roots, to dig up and read all the dinosaur novels in the English language, no matter how terrible they might be.

The Evolution of Claire is a corporate YA tie-in novel of the sort that has become de rigueur in the last decade. I can't imagine who, aside from the Universal flunkeys who placed the order for this tie-in, would have clamored for a Jurassic World prequel. Jurassic World itself is so bland, so designed by focus-group, that I wouldn't have been able to tell you the names of any of its characters, even though I just rewatched it last summer. Telling the story of Claire Dearing's summer internship makes as much sense as anything else, I suppose. I certainly never would have picked up a book about whatever character was played by The Worst Chris, and I'm not fully convinced any of the other characters on-screen were given names, or personalities, or anything of the sort.

This book, already a soulless exercise in corporate synergy, is infused with corporate Girl Boss feminism, the sort of suburban white woman's empowerment that celebrates whenever a woman becomes a CEO rather than demanding capitalism's destruction. Claire is our viewpoint, and none of the other characters become anything other than placeholders for plot developments. Said plot covers ground remarkably similar to the first couple seasons of Netflix's Camp Cretaceous, a kids' cartoon that handles the whole "I committed corporate espionage because I was blackmailed into saving my family!" storyline with considerably more verve and characterization.

This book's worst sin: there isn't even that much focus on the dinosaurs. You better believe that if I were contracted to write Jurassic fanfic, I'd devote as much time to actual dinosaurs as to the ins and outs of the internship. No such luck here.

I will say one positive thing: The Evolution of Claire makes me want to write my own stories in the Jurassic universe. Or, perhaps, in a similar setting with all trademarked names filed off. I hate to say it, but there's potential in the idea of Jurassic prequels and follow-ups, just not in the direction that Universal has taken the franchise.

2022 read #8: The Summer Book by Tove Jansson.

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson

Translated by Thomas Teal

Introduction by Kathryn Davis

176 pages

Published 1972

Read from March 28 to March 29

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

I introduced my ex to Moomintroll. Long before he turned emotionally and financially abusive, long before he gaslit me for months and put me through the most painful breakup of my life, we collected Moomin family figurines and spent the last weeks of pre-pandemic normalcy putting together a vast Moomin Valley puzzle on cozy nights. I bought him one of Tove Jansson's prose books that last Christmas together. I've been trying to reclaim Moomin, to separate Jansson's sad and sweet oeuvre from my ex's memory, but like with so much else in the 2020s, it hasn't been easy.

But it has been worth it.

I first learned of Jansson through Moomintroll, in particular via the newspaper comic strips now sequenced on archival websites. Jansson's artistic and storytelling sensibilities are there in the sharply observed small details of life and nature, the sunny cottagecore whimsy rooted in bedrock-deep loneliness and pathos. But Jansson's deft comic strip work didn't prepare me for the sparse beauty and lingering heartache of her prose work.

The Summer Book is a sequence of vignettes surrounding an aging Grandmother, mourning her own approaching mortality and her narrowing horizons, and her granddaughter Sophie, newly motherless and struggling to process emotions too big for her world. The vignettes hint and skirt around these topics, revealing lonely truths in the negative spaces between the words. Few authors that I've encountered have so perfectly understood the irrational logic and helpless anger of an isolated childhood quite so well as Jansson portrays it here. The thematic union with the Grandmother's fading summers is breathtaking, wounding and healing and deepening under the northern moonlight.

I'm eager to read more Jansson. I'm not sure when my heart will be able to take it, though.