2023 read #59: The Past Is Red by Catherynne M. Valente.

The Past Is Red by Catherynne M. Valente

151 pages

Published 2021 (contains "The Future Is Blue," originally published 2016)

Read from May 28 to May 31

Rating: 4 out of 5

Catherynne M. Valente was one of the first new favorite authors I found for myself after I began this blog. I first encountered her in short story form in The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012 Edition; went on to be impressed by Six-Gun Snow White and Deathless; read the entirety of the uneven but memorable Fairyland series; was floored by Radiance; was let down by Speak Easy; and so on and so forth. The last book of hers I read was The Refrigerator Monologues, which of course is a modern classic. All told, this is the thirteenth Valente book I've had the pleasure of reading, placing her behind only a handful of authors on my most-read list. (Still a ways to go to the top, where Ursula K. Le Guin sits alone at seventeen.)

At first, The Past Is Red didn't quite click with me. The first chunk of the book is a novelette, "The Future Is Blue," which drifts between present-day scenes of our narrator, Tetley Abednego, enduring the torment and abuse of her neighbors with characteristic optimism, and flashback scenes of Tetley's childhood in Garbagetown, a fairy tale logic version of the Pacific Garbage Patch where floating mountains of refuse have been sorted and piled into neighborhoods like Candle Hole, Mattressex, and Far Boozeaway. This narrative structure quickly became monotonous. We'd get a page of grown-up Tetley's neighbors beating her before flashing back once again to her life story, before looping back once more. It felt like the story was spinning its wheels for the bulk of "Blue," before an almost perfunctory reveal of what Tetley had done that resulted in all this torture.

The rest of this short novel is "The Past Is Red," a much more satisfying exploration of Tetley's life a few years later, when she is roped into the orbit of would-be King Xanax and receives clandestine visits from a young stranger she names Big Red. Here Valente's uncanny ability to pull your heart from your chest with a gentle observation before stabbing through it with a gut-punch of insight finds its full expression. Every couple pages Valente pulls together paragraphs of the most heart-breaking sincerity and human fragility and rage at the loss of what we, in our modern culture, are busily burning down. It is terrifying and tragic, empathetic and full of yearning desperation. The story itself may be slight, but any book freighted with this clarity, this simultaneously cynical and wistful remembrance of the modern state of things, deserves to be read and remembered... for however long such things have left to be remembered.

2023 read #58: Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark.

Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark

185 pages

Published 2020

Read from May 27 to May 28

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Maryse, Sadie, and Chef hunt the Ku Klux Klan. Specifically, the monstrous otherworldly creatures that Klansmen allow themselves to become when their hate opens them up to evil magic brought back into this world with the release of The Birth of a Nation. That would be enough of a tag line to make me snatch up this book at the earliest opportunity. But Ring Shout, despite its modest length, is so much more than that. It is lyrical and revolutionary, a gorgeous and wounding document of trauma and righteous rage in the face of hundreds of years of hate, violence, and cruelty.

I loved how the story was constructed, vividly setting up our central trio and the twisted menace of the Ku Kluxes before expanding out to introduce Nana Jean, Uncle Will, and others on the righteous side of the fight. The world expands, new characters appear, and new information emerges chapter by chapter, paced with effortless skill and efficiency on the part of P. Djèlí Clark. The story is hopeful and heartbreaking, beautiful and horrifying. It is magnificent.

2023 read #57: The Riddle-Master of Hed by Patricia A. Mckillip.

The Riddle-Master of Hed by Patricia A. McKillip

229 pages

Published 1976

Read from May 21 to May 23

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

This is one of those shaggy old fantasy classics from the era when seemingly no one knew how to write fantasy. It begins with a clear and concise image: “Morgon of Hed met the High One’s harpist one autumn day when the trade ships docked at Tol….” That gives us an intriguing atmosphere, with the promise that we’ll learn who these people and what these places are in due time, right? Instead, we backtrack to witness an argument between Prince Morgon and his two siblings and various farmers and retainers in our rustic little princedom, all of them introduced bickering back and forth over things we haven’t learned to care about yet. From the way no one permits anyone to finish a sentence and no one explains anything, you’d think this was a teen fantasy from the 2010s. It all culminates in the prince’s brother tackling him into the mud, and their sister dumping a bucket of milk over their heads.

Twice before now, that opening thwarted my attempts to get invested enough to continue. We don’t even meet the damn harpist until page 14.

When you manage to persist through that first scene, you quickly discover why a 220 page book needs six pages of glossary for its places and people. Without it, imagine having to keep track of An and Aum and Awn, Uon and Oen, Re and Rhu and Rood, Morgon and the Morgol. (No one, however, could forget the redoubtable Snog Nutt.)

The story as a whole is a 1970s lords-with-swords number, full of the prophesied paint-by-numbers destiny of its reluctant chosen one. Yet it carries promises of McKillip’s future talents: glimpses of delicate description, atmosphere, and character beneath the heroic fantasy slop. For much of the book Morgon is appealingly in over his head, his grasp of reality eroding into dreams, his mind swept in and out of magical fugues, pulled back and forth by forces larger than his understanding. He tries to nope out from his great destiny more often than he tries to face it (which, for the time this was written, was a pretty fresh twist). But the riddle of his own destiny keeps pulling him back in.

So, we need to talk about riddles. The word riddle does a lot of heavy lifting in this book. In case you were wondering, yes, McKillip does pull from The Hobbit to have our hero win a high-stakes riddle game by asking an unanswerable question: the mystery of his own destiny, and of the three stars on his brow. Which would make it not so much a riddle as a prophecy. But you see, in this setting, “riddles” are actually didactic anecdotes, little snippets of history with an approved moral attached, and not actually anything we would call riddles.

McKillip uses these riddles just like any other heroic fantasy novelist would use prophecies: plot devices to motivate the action. The bad guys want to kill our hero because of his three stars; the hero is driven to the ends of the earth to discover his fate so he can keep living. This was a training-wheels era for the genre, though, so we can’t expect much more sophistication than that.

That lack of storytelling sophistication, predictably, extends to Morgon effortlessly picking up every magical skill he needs, from riddle-mastery to mind-reading, shape-changing to the Great Shout. Standard chosen one stuff. And as with so many classic fantasy trilogies, Hed ends abruptly, half the story untold, Nonetheless, the quiet beauty of McKillip’s prose elevates this book and makes it worth spending time in this world.

2023 read #56: The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction: Fifteenth Series, edited by Edward L. Ferman.

The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction: Fifteenth Series, edited by Edward L. Ferman

249 pages

Published 1966

Read May 19

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

The editors of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, until recently, made a regular habit out of anthologizing the “best” stories from the magazine. This culminated in two volumes of The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction (1, 2), both of them excellent reads. But the anthology market is different now, and I guess no one is clamoring for a current best-of-F&SF series. Which is a shame, because the issues from the Sheree Renée Thomas era are the best issues of the magazine’s history, consistently.

In decades past, though? The editors of F&SF were happy to crank out a new best-of anthology every year or two, and evidently the market was able to support this. It’s unfortunate how sci-fi and fantasy today don’t have the monetary support they did in the 20th century, back when 98% of it was garbage. Where’s that support now that the genres are the best they’ve ever been?

I got this volume from a used bookstore. It’s an ex-library copy from Randleman, North Carolina. It’s falling apart and moderately stained. The pages smell of dust and a sun-warmed attic. It isn’t the first in its series, I doubt it’s anything special — it’s merely the one I have.

This volume anthologizes stories from 1965, the tail end of the Avram Davidson era and the beginning of the Edward L. Ferman era.

“The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth” by Roger Zelazny. Short sci-fi of the 1960s, in my limited experience, often has this characteristic style: half tryhard manly cynicism, half impenetrable technobabble that may or may not get explained later. A sample:

“Carl,” he finally observed, poker playing, “they’re shaping Tensquare.”

I could have hit him. I might have refilled his glass with sulfuric acid and looked on with glee as his lips blackened and cracked. Instead, I grunted a noncommittal.

That’s the flavor of the whole piece. It’s a man-vs-nature-in-space affair, a Venusian Hemingway pastiche in which our narrator Carl has an emasculated score to settle with leviathan. Carl is a “baitman” hired by Miss Luharich, a spoiled rich cosmetics queen, to help her fish for “Ichthyform Leviosaurus Levianthus,” a gargantuan sea beastie that has never been landed by any of the solar system’s finest sportsmen, Carl included. Any hope that this novelette might live up to its exquisite title is dashed when Carl, unhappy with his hireling position in the hierarchy, snarks that Miss Luharich “wasn’t blonde” when he knew her years ago. Because she’s also his “neo-ex,” you see. It’s that kind of story.

Carl helpfully underlines the point for us: “Fish are a very ancient masculinity symbol, you know.” And again: “I stood and looked down at her, because that usually makes me feel superior to women.” Pretty sure that was meant with humorous self-deprecation from the narrator, but still, we’re just laying it all out here, aren’t we? Hemingway did this with more subtlety. If you embrace the testosterone-addled pulp of it all, I could see giving this a C

“Love Letter from Mars” by John Ciardi. Mostly forgettable Old Mars poem with one quite lovely phrase: “This gravity / works through me.”

“Rake” by Ron Goulart. Begins in media res with a chaotic bar fight, then immediately doubles back to lay out how our hero, Ben Jolson of the Chameleon Corps, arrived at Taragon University. Jolson has been sent on assignment from the interplanetary powers-that-be on Barnum to meet and impersonate a ne’er-do-well son of an ambassador, blah blah blah. Giant, intelligent bacteria that march and drill in formation somehow get involved. “I’m against spies,” our shapeshifting spy protagonist proclaims, in the midst of his spy work. And get this: when the story finally loops back around to the opening scene, the two scenes don’t even match! “Rake” is a disconnected sequence of cartoon-logic hijinks that are likely meant to be funny, but none of it succeeds. If Zelazny’s piece above had flavor, this one is a chewed up wad of Austin Powers-flavored gum. It’s almost impressively bad. No surprise this guy went on to ghost-write TekWar. F

“The History of Doctor Frost” by Roderic C. Hodgins. Dr. Frost, present-day mathematician and physicist, is visited in the night by Azuriel, a devil who desires to nurture Dr. Frost’s intellect in exchange for devouring the information in the mathematician’s mind once his natural lifespan has ended. It could have been an interesting spin on the standard Faustian theme. Some of its social commentary is solid — working in nuclear physics because that’s where the military funds are is rather like selling your soul, is it not? — but much of the rest hasn’t aged so well, or just isn’t that stimulating. The level of insight is that of an edgelord libertarian in freshman philosophy: the priest, the psychologist, and the infatuated woman all want the same thing Azuriel wants from our brilliant lone wolf Dr. Frost, but at least the devil is honest about it. The misogyny, in particular, soured me on this one. D

“Four Ghosts in Hamlet” by Fritz Leiber. A ghost (maybe) afflicts a touring company of Shakespearean actors; 1960s misogyny (definitely) afflicts a Fritz Leiber story. This one is altogether too long, rambling along for ages while it establishes the company and their little personalities (which never amount to anything like full characters) before it gets close to anything interesting. And in the end it tries to pull the “maybe it all had a mundane explanation” trick, at least to some degree. C-

“Treat” by Walter H. Kerr. Perfectly functional little poem about those who don’t need to wear masks on Halloween, probably more suited to children’s poetry than anything else. Nothing special.

“Keep Them Happy” by Robert Rohrer. Ugh. Sixties concepts of “what a woman really wants” were fucking disgusting, weren’t they? Couple that with a regressive satire about keeping prisoners “happy” for humanitarian(?) reasons and you get this dreck. Abysmal. F

“A Murkle for Jesse” by Gary Jennings. “Jet age” leprechaun fantasy in which a young boy befriends one of the wee folk, who crashed in his corner of Vermont on a wayward airliner. Overall it has potential. In places it could be a pleasant throwback to the Big Apple urban fantasy of Unknown in the 1930s (what little I’ve read of that). But the weird cishet sex and gender norms of the era make for awkward reading, as the 400 year old fae lass gets, erm, proprietary toward our 7 year old protagonist, sizing Jesse up as a future husband and getting jealous of his concern over a girl missing from the crash site. Nonetheless, this is the best story so far (or at least it hasn’t aged as badly as the others have). “I’ve found an owl who knows the way to New York City” might be one of the best lines in fantasy from the entire decade; the leprechaun is the least misogynistic portrayal of a woman in this collection so far. Which isn’t saying much, but still. B-

“Eyes Do More Than See” by Isaac Asimov. Absolutely killer opening line: “After hundreds of billions of years, he suddenly thought of himself as Ames.” I haven’t read much Asimov — a novel he coauthored, a collection of his short stories I read in my teens. My general sense is that his reputation rests on two strengths: his skill as a science communicator, and his craft with short story structure. It certainly isn’t in characterization. Ames and Brock, energy-wave beings a trillion years old, sound just like two estranged lovers in a suburban melodrama. Even a trillion years as an energy being aren’t enough to separate the once-woman Brock from an emotional convulsion once she is reminded that she is a woman, a woman who once knew love. It’s a bleakly misogynistic perspective, alas, and one that sours this tidy little trifle for me. D-

“The House the Blakeneys Built” by Avram Davidson. Six hundred years after a handful of polygamist fugitives survived a spaceship crash, their severely inbred descendants play the role of cultish inbred hicks when they encounter a new handful of survivors. Texas Chainsaw Massacre meets space opera. The result is grotesque and feels somewhat unsavory, but aside from the thinness of its characters, it works well as a story. C+

“The Eight Billion” by Richard Wilson. Science fiction was long used to pushed the narrative of “overpopulation.” It’s a staple plot in ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s sci-fi, and probably later. Overpopulation is such an entrenched narrative, thanks in large part to sci-fi, that it wasn’t until maybe a decade ago that I stopped taking it for granted. The real world problem, of course, is not there are too many people. The problem is the rich, the billionaires and the investor class, using up more resources than the rest of humanity put together. All that makes it extra difficult to appreciate this piece, which takes the overpopulation of Manhattan to absurd conclusions. It’s kind of an exercise in silliness all on its own, with thousands of courtiers crowded cheek to jowl around the King of New York, the lot of them fed via sprinkler system. Things don’t go as planned when the King invites the public to accompany him to the great dig downtown, the one meant to open up new lands underground for the population to enjoy. D+

“Something Else” by Robert J. Tilley. This one was a pleasant surprise. Despite its antique, fully 1960s prose, the general plot — Dr. Williams, a cultural historian specializing in old jazz music, is the sole survivor of a spaceship crash on a wild planet, but at least he has access to his cherished records — feels startlingly fresh, something I could easily imagine coming out of the ’80s. The giant, lemon-scented cerise alien that responds to the impromptu Duke Ellington broadcast is, of course, purestrain ’60s, bringing an inevitable sort of “Purple People Eater” vibe to the piece. But it’s a delightful story regardless. B-

“Aunt Millicent at the Races” by Len Guttridge. Dear dowdy Aunt Millicent turns into a horse thanks to an encounter with fairy fruit, and greedy Father puts her in the races. This could have been a charming domestic fantasy with a touch of humor, but of course, this being the 1960s, there's a distasteful undertone of "women are basically just livestock anyway," which is hard to ignore. C-

“Sea Bright” by Hal R. Moore. Honestly, for the time period, this one is pretty solid, a good subtle contemporary horror-adjacent fantasy. Eleven year old Kellie instinctively yanks away an exotic shell her friend found on the beach. She can't explain why, only stick stubbornly to her story that she had to do it, and can't say anything more. A local creep comes along while Kellie attempts to throw the shell back into the ocean, and vaguely eldritch things happen when the creep succeeds in putting it to his ear. B-

“From Two Universes…” by Doris Pitkin Buck. For its time this was probably a nifty little poem. I enjoyed it! It's charming! But nowadays you have to do more with a poem than merely couple the concepts of Univacs and unicorns, which makes this one, like “Treat” above, feel a tad unsophisticated to modern sensibilities.

“Hog-Belly Honey” by R. A. Lafferty. Another wacky number in which a smug prick of a tech bro (or the 1960s equivalent of a tech bro) talks fast and slaps shoulders and helps invent a philosophical machine, a "nullifier" which can make its own moral and ethical decisions and, well, nullify "junk" out of existence. This story is... here, I guess? It exists on the paper, certainly. It didn't do anything for me. D+

“No Different Flesh” by Zenna Henderson. A quietly domestic tale of alien encounter, in which grieving parents find a young child fluttering through the trees. The child is, of course, not quite what she seems. I dislike the trope of "grieving mother finds replacement baby to care for," and of course the standard 1960s cishet gender norms are at play, as well as some cloying religious overtones, as well as a random parenthetical bit of eugenics from a visiting doctor. But once you get past all that, this might be the best story here. Naturally it's the only story here by a woman. Maybe I'll be a bit generous and give it a full-fledged B

2023 read #55: A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers.

A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

367 pages

Published 2016

Read from May 17 to May 18

Rating: 4 out of 5

The first follow-up to The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, Orbit follows Sidra, a ship’s AI newly housed in an illegal “kit” that gives her a human-passing body, and Pepper, a tech-modder who helps Sidra on her journey to become her own self, whatever that might mean. That story is neatly paralleled by flashbacks to Pepper’s past, as her younger self escapes from a child-slave factory at 10, and is helped by a crashed ship’s AI (named Owl) while she becomes her own self, whatever that might mean.

I hesitated before reading this installment, largely because it doesn’t involve Rosemary, Sissix, Ashby, or any other main character from Planet. But as someone newly exploring my own queerness, neurodivergence, and full human identity, after a childhood of abuse and trauma and neglect and an adulthood of comp-het and just trying to fit in, I quickly got wrapped up in Sidra and Pepper. Their parallel stories of constructing senses of self after extensive programming (cultural for Pepper, literal for Sidra) were rich, meaningful, heartbreakingly relatable. “You are more than what they programmed you to be,” one character tells Sidra. It’s something all of us need to hear.

I kept tearing up in the flashback chapters after Owl was introduced. Minor spoilers, but I really could have used that kind of gentle, supportive parenting at any point in my life. Also, this might be the first time I’ve ever seen a space opera story involve a child-education sim, which is an amazing touch. I totally get Pepper’s lifelong obsession with the Big Bug Crew.

This focus on what it means to embody yourself in the way that best makes sense to you, I’m learning, seems to be Chambers’ signature vibe. Building from the found-family baseline established in Planet, Orbit explores the spectrum of experiences we pursue in order to understand our selves: relationships sexual or familial, community, accommodations to sensory needs, tattoos, trying new food, parties, futuristic body-mods, learning, finding purpose and passion, perhaps even (spoilers!) a little museum heist.

2023 read #54: The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle.*

The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle*

163 pages

Published 1912

Read May 16

Rating: 2 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

I used to read and reread this book obsessively as a tween and teen. It was a foundational adventure novel for me at a highly impressionable age. Who could ever forget the canoe passage up the hidden river, the first iguanodonts in the glade, the moonlit megalosaur chase? But unlike Jurassic Park, which I reread as recently as 2011, or Dinosaur Summer, which I revisited just last year, I haven’t returned to Doyle’s Lost World since my youth.

Its virulent racism certainly played a part in my unwillingness to check it out again. It is, straight up, an imperialist adventure; imperialist shittiness is drawn in bold lines throughout its blueprint. (Revisiting it now, I also discovered a deep reservoir of Edwardian misogyny, which I hadn’t picked up on in the past.) There’s also the general mustiness of a hundred-and-eleven year old boys' adventure novel, especially one that short-changes us on the dinosaur action we came here to read. Like so many novelists after him, Doyle quickly gets bored of his ancient saurians. After taking half the book to bring us to Maple White Land, we get just a couple memorable scenes of early dino encounters before they're shunted off to the background; almost immediately Doyle tangents our heroes off into a colonialist intervention between “ape-men” and indigenous humans on the plateau. The book would have been better with more iguanodonts and stegosaurs, and fewer white saviors.

As an adventure novel, though, The Lost World has the gift of sprightly pacing and plenty of dry Edwardian humor, much of which went over my head when I read it as a youth. The way Professor Challenger is built up as this larger-than-life figure for two chapters before we even meet him is a splendid example of character-driven exposition, one of Doyle’s strengths as a pop fiction author. I love the cattiness of the rivalry between Challenger and Summerlee, almost — but not quite — enough to make me want to write my own stories of Edwardian scientist rivals-to-lovers.

This book doesn’t come close to the charms of its semi-sequel Dinosaur Summer, but it’s a fine enough boy’s-life adventure for its time. Just expect a ton of racism along your way.

(And yes, I know the Edwardian era technically ended in 1910. But much the same way that the cultural 1990s lasted until 9/11, I think it’s fair to lump the pre-war 1910s in with that Edwardian vibe.)

2023 read #53: Oak and Ash and Thorn by Peter Fiennes.

Oak and Ash and Thorn: The Ancient Woods and New Forests of Britain by Peter Fiennes

280 pages

Published 2017

Read from May 15 to May 16

Rating: 4 out of 5

By the close of the ’00s, at the latest, it had become depressing to read ecological books from the 1990s and earlier. After a litany of losses and dire warnings for the future, such books would always close on a note of optimism — there’s still time! The worst has not yet come to pass! We just need to act now!

Living in a time when worse things have (and continued to) come to pass, we know all those optimistic codas added up to an exercise in comforting self-delusion. Capitalism would never be diverted from its consumption, its heedless self-absorption, its global destruction. No one with any real power ever acted to help. We’re all going down with the ship.

The pace of destruction, in fact, has worsened to the point that, today, even a book from 2017 feels hopelessly dated and woefully optimistic. Fiennes withholds no contempt from Britain’s Conservative government, and yet within the space of six years from this publication the Tories would unleash fresh ecological devastation and capitalistic horrors beyond anything documented here. They’re close to axing all environmental protections. Every day ancient woodlands fall, and now sewage is getting released untreated into Britain’s waterways, because deregulation, because Brexit, because capitalism. We’ve regressed to the days of industrial barons exploiting and poisoning the people and the countryside without any pretense of public safeguards. It’s a jarring reminder of the accelerating growth of fascism here in the “find out” phase of capitalism’s fuck around history.

Fascism is always the last bulwark of defense for capitalist systems in decline; now the entire world is in decline. “The authorities don’t like forests,” Fiennes writes in a chapter that began with Robin Hood, “because they don’t like places where people can hide.” Yet another layer in the long history of authoritarianism and its antipathy toward the world. Is it any wonder that capital never stepped up to curb the devastation it wreaked?

I’ve wanted to read this book since I first heard of it late in 2018. Since then, so much has changed… so much in the world has broken. I cried a few times reading this, wondering how much of the already impoverished and paved-over island ecosystem Fiennes described has been further destroyed. The very ash trees of the title, already dying when he wrote, are nearly gone.

Fiennes’ writing is often more conversational than poetic, rambling almost stream-of-consciousness through locations, literary quotations, concepts, asides. It’s no match for Helen Macdonald or Robert Macfarlane at their best, but whose prose is? I don’t want to give the wrong impression, though: this book is not lacking for beauty. The chapter where he condenses 7018 years of woodland history into 3509 words — two years for every word — is a marvel of wordcraft and structuring, offering evocative yet concise descriptions of the bygone wildwood, “a kingdom of trees” where people are outnumbered by wolves as recently as the Neolithic, and its accelerating diminution and destruction. Fiennes also excels at conveying details of atmosphere and at character sketches, the places and people from childhood rendered with a palpable sense of what has been lost, both natural and personal.

Really, this is a book of mourning more than it is a celebration of what remains or a sermon for its preservation. A note of “it’s too late, enjoy what life you can” pervades just beneath its pages. And perhaps that’s more honest, less willfully naïve, than the ecological optimism that came before it. If the powers-that-be are heedless, well… we’ll have to make them heed, any way we can, or else we all perish.