2023 read #141: Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti.

Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti

Illustrated by Laurence Hausman (1890 edition)

51 pages

Published 1862

Read November 30

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

I found this narrative poem tucked in at the end of a hefty collection of Victorian fantasy titled Beyond the Looking Glass (1973). I’d never heard of it before. My partner R, however, tells me that Goblin Market was the inspiration for Tori Bovalino’s Not Good for Maidens, which they enjoyed.

The 1973 introduction sums it up, in questionable '70s fashion, as "probably the most extreme and most beautifully elaborated example of repressed eroticism in children's literature." There's nothing explicit in here, of course, but it isn't subtle, either:

She sucked and sucked and sucked the more

Fruits which that unknown orchard bore;

She sucked until her lips were sore;

Then flung the empty rinds away

But gathered up one kernal-stone,

And knew not was it night or day

I'm skeptical that Market was actually intended for children. Much the way that contemporary fantasy by feminine writers (especially feminine writers of the global majority) is cordoned off into YA, my hunch is that any fantastical writing from a woman would have been packed off for the nursery by Victorian publishers. It seems, instead, that this narrative of frugivorous temptation was inspired by Rossetti's own experiences with erotic entanglement, and by her sister's support through the heartbreak. She wrote a "children's" poem, I think, because that was the market open to her.

I haven't much read much poetry from before the current century; rhyming couplets often feel too trite or precious. But Rossetti's language is unexpectedly hypnotic, breathing strange and perilous rhythms of sound throughout her tale.

Also mesmerizing: Laurence Hausman's art nouveau woodcuts that illustrate this edition. Fantastic stuff.

2023 read #140: A History of Plants in Fifty Fossils by Paul Kenrick.

A History of Plants in Fifty Fossils by Paul Kenrick

160 pages

Published 2020

Read November 29

Rating: 3 out of 5

This is a coffee table book comprising photographs of plant fossils, each with a page or two of descriptive text linking it to some wider topic in botany, evolutionary history, and ecology. Make no mistake: I read this to inflate my book numbers. With a month left in the year, I’m pushing myself to read 150 books in 2023. Maybe even 153, which would break my adult record for most books in one year. (My all-time record, 183, which I hit as a teen in 1996 or 1997, is well beyond my present attention span.)

All that aside, this is a perfectly unremarkable introductory text for the reader who might be curious enough to visit a museum and actually read the placards, but hasn’t had a science class since high school. To illustrate the level of information in this book, the introduction begins: “It’s not easy being a plant.” It’s no Otherlands, but then again, it never set out to be.

The photographs, of course, are the main attraction. They’re frequently stunning, as fossils so regularly are. And this is a whole book of them. Can’t go wrong with that.

2023 read #139: The Face in the Abyss by A. Merritt.

The Face in the Abyss by A. Merritt

278 pages

Published 1931

Read from November 27 to November 29

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

Who’s ready for a colonialist old dungeon crawl adventure from the early days of dark fantasy pulp? We got your ivory-skinned Atlantean princess, we got your winged serpents, we got your lizard people and your snake people and your spider people. We got your ancient evil giving orders and weeping gold through a stone face in a cavern. We got your shitty, all-pervasive racism and sexism. There’s even an evil garden! And mixed up in all of it, we got your standard interchangeable white dude, all effortless confidence and fisticuffs, trampling through the lost world, hoping to get the girl as a literal reward.

Today’s special boy is a lump of masculinity named Graydon, an American mining engineer recruited by adventurers to help steal hidden Incan gold. The group speed-runs The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in record time, with Graydon punching out professional adventurer Starrett by page 4, and the others drawing guns on Graydon by page 14. Graydon alienates his companions by rescuing the ivory-skinned Suanna from their clutches. Suanna, in turn, guides the adventurers into her Atlantean lost world, a hidden valley high in the Andes. Her people call themselves Yu-Atlanchi, but come on — it’s Atlantis.

In a pleasant surprise, the land of Yu-Atlanchi has dinosaurs! They aren’t scientifically rigorous dinosaurs by any means — even by the 1930s, only a pulp writer would amalgamate iguanodonts and theropods into one toothy, pointy-thumbed beast — but an elf-coded Atlantean in green, out hunting on dinosaur-back with a pack of dinosaurian game-hounds, was a pleasure I wasn’t expecting when I picked up this book. We’re also treated to a high-speed dinosaur race and a gladiator fight against a small theropod. Dinos don’t fill many pages here, but the mix of genres and vibes is exquisitely D&D-esque.

And really, the pulpy roots of D&D are what draw me to books like this. Wizards of the Coast alienated everyone with its shady business practices, its AI art, and its misplaced loyalty to racist old tropes. D&D was a huge part of my life for a number of years, though, and I’ll always be fond of the vibe. The titular Face itself could be a direct inspiration for the eidolon of Moloch, which graced the player’s handbook in the first edition of AD&D.

Merritt tosses so many elements into his pulp stew that sometimes it can’t help but be entertaining. It helps that his prose, while conventionally forgettable, is miles better than Edgar Rice Burroughs’. Ultimately, though, Face is predictably mired in the mores of its time, in its vile racial theory and foul gender norms. Fun it may be in spots, but that’s impossible to overlook.

2023 read #138: I Never Liked You Anyway by Jordan Kurella.

I Never Liked You Anyway, or: The Tale of Eurydice & Orpheus as Told by One God and One Musician by Jordan Kurella

165 pages

Published 2022

Read from November 25 to November 27

Rating: 4 out of 5

Small press releases are wildly uneven. My most frequent complaint is that many indie books could use more polish, whether that means an editorial once-over for prose that doesn’t flow, or a substantial restructuring to let the narrative breathe. Which is why it’s particularly delightful to read an indie fantasy novel written with this much verve and style.

I Never Liked You Anyway is, as you might have guessed, a postmodern interpretation of the story of Eurydice and Orpheus. We meet them as thoroughly modern college students, orbiting each other in the music department, but their contemporary vibe is augmented by gods and fate and ghosts. Hades can’t get enough of the hot dogs Persephone brings down for him. Orpheus is the most popular student in the department because he carries the favor of Apollo. Eurydice is young and starstruck and gets manipulated by the budding wunderkind, kept under his thumb, her music co-opted. And then she is killed, and her real journey begins, because even the Afterlife is a college of sorts.

Kurella’s prose skill goes far beyond many mainstream fantasists I could name, and his adaptation of Greek mythology is as inventive and fluent as any retelling I’ve read from an author outside of Greece. (Contemporary Greek authors, of course, are doing astounding things with their own myths and folklore.) The story is vibrant and angry and propulsive. Even if you’re skeptical of small press offerings, this one is a must-read.

2023 read #137: Forest Walking by Peter Wohlleben and Jane Billinghurst.

Forest Walking: Discovering the Trees and Woodlands of North America by Peter Wohlleben and Jane Billinghurst

206 pages

Published 2022 (some portions originally published as Gebrauchsanweisung für den Wald in 2017, translated by Jane Billinghurst)

Read from November 24 to November 25

Rating: 3 out of 5

I received this book from my partner R for Yule last year, and it's been migrating up and down my to-read stack ever since. It’s the perfect time of year for a read like this, though. Late November is when the forest winds down for the year. Even when atmospheric carbon makes for 80⁰F days, the leaves are mostly gone, the few that remain plinko-ing down bare branches. It's a time to think of spring, to meditate on the life that we (as a species) have not yet managed to eradicate.

This book is shallower than I’d hoped, but charming nonetheless. It rambles through sensory experience, brief anecdote, and science tidbit, very much like a gentle walk through the woods. It’s clearly directed at a general audience, the sort of readers who maybe have a vague fondness for nature but haven't spent much time in forest themselves. The “In Closing” section summarizes Walking as an “appetizer.”

I can’t tell whether it’s because of this intended audience, because of translation, or because most of the book is written in second person, but at times Walking’s voice is reminiscent of 1950s primers for young readers. Here’s a sample line: “Does it sound odd to you that tree roots breathe?” There’s just a smidgen of “kindly uncle welcoming the nieces and nephews to the family cabin” condescension in there. (I recently got a copy of my childhood staple, The Stars by H. A. Rey, so perhaps that’s why the 1950s association is so vivid right now.) The result isn’t as informative as one might hope from the subtitle, but makes a nice way to wile away the dim hours after November sunset.

2023 read #136: The Long Past & Other Stories by Ginn Hale.

The Long Past & Other Stories by Ginn Hale

275 pages

Published 2016

Read from November 21 to November 24

Rating: 3 out of 5

Yet another book I learned about thanks to the Prehistoric Pulps blog. This one is a trio of novellas connected only by their setting: a weird western world of witchcraft, where alchemical tampering has opened rifts and allowed Cretaceous dinosaurs — and sea levels — to pour out all over the planet.

The Long Past is a fine small press outing, one of the better works of dinosaur fiction I’ve come across. Unfortunately, it hails from what I've dubbed the Wake of Vultures era: when we well-meaning white progressives appointed ourselves the voice for the disenfranchised global majority in the fight against racism. White progressives absolutely must address racism in our fiction. But volunteering to tell a more marginalized group’s experiences with racism has so many ways it could go wrong: lack of nuance, unconsciously utilizing stereotypes, white saviorism, crowding out titles from writers of color. It isn’t up to me to say whether Hale avoided these pitfalls.

The titular novella is the tale of Grover, a trapper in coastal Colorado, who gets drawn into a magical conflict with global stakes when Lawrence, his former friend and lover who happens to be an elemental mage, reappears. At almost 150 pages, one could argue that “The Long Past” is actually a short novel. My favorite bits were Hale’s descriptions of how the Cretaceous ecology has interwoven with the West: stray Tenontosaurus graze in buffalo herds, Quetzalcoatlus hunts mountain goats, magnolia infiltrates groves of aspen. Hale makes an effort (not fully consistent, but appreciated nonetheless) to make her prehistoric fauna identifiable without employing names scientists invented after 1864. Grover, for example, rides a big “ridingbird” he raised from a chick. It’s a nice, plausible folk name for an ornithomimid (though the rationale gets fuzzy when Lawrence marvels that no one else had thought to tame and ride one before).

“The Long Past” also benefits from having a sweeter, more erotic, and more believable relationship at its heart than, say, “The Virgin and the Dinosaur” did.

The much shorter middle novella, “The Hollow History of Professor Perfectus,” moves the scene almost thirty years later, after free magic has been banned throughout most of the United States. The magic necessary for modern living is conducted by captive mages held in electric collars. Our narrator Ashni is an underground mage who makes her living in Chicago with a fake magic show, which she performs via an automaton dubbed Professor Perfectus. If you think that all sounds a long way away from dinosaurs, you’d be correct. “History” is all about misogyny, magic lobotomies, steampunk police drones, and the horrors concocted by the American white supremacist Christian patriarchy in every timeline. The story also touches on how white feminists mostly want to look after themselves, and make unreliable allies at best to women of the global majority.

Worthy material and a solid story, shocking and memorable on its own, but perhaps not the clearest follow-up to “The Long Past.” Lack of dinosaurs aside, though, “History” might be the strongest story in this collection.

We wrap things up with “Get Lucky,” which features more dinosaurs than “History,” but not by much. Our hero faces more danger from a jellyfish than from any dino. “Lucky” is a serviceable yarn about a young man (named Lucky) who happens to rescue the man who’d once promised to run away with him before disappearing three years before. A borax fortune is involved. The two of them must escape the clutches of the patrician Swaim brothers along the shores of Illinois’ Inland Sea.

After the previous stories, it was something of a shock that Hale made one of her “Lucky” protagonists a Pinkerton agent. A heroic Pinkerton agent, no less. That wasn’t very social justice-y of her; it cooled a lot of my enthusiasm for the story.

2023 read #135: The Sky People by S. M. Stirling.

The Sky People by S. M. Stirling

301 pages

Published 2006

Read from November 15 to November 21

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

I remember seeing this book on display at Borders shortly after its release. Dinosaurs! Right there on the cover! And in hardback, no less. (Hardback sci-fi imparted a cachet of quality to my naive younger self. Thirteen years of mass market paperbacks will do that to a budding sci-fi fan.) When I flipped through the prologue, though, I got discouraged by Stirling’s Burroughsian pastiche, and never picked it up again. Soon enough, I forgot it even existed.

Once again I have the Prehistoric Pulps blog to thank for bringing this book to my attention. Their review warns that this is a “by-the-numbers” Old Venus adventure novel, and that dinosaurs are mere “window dressing” without any substantial role. But I’ve been scraping the bottom of the barrel for more dinosaur fiction, and in the years since I first spotted The Sky People in the wild, I’ve come to a much finer appreciation for modern takes on Old Venus and Old Mars. (Hell, I even published one.) How does People suit my current sensibilities?

It’s… not great? Stirling is a journeyman sci-fi writer who tends to throw away the promise of his pulpy setups with forgettable storytelling. He hits that elusive note of mediocrity that’s so hard to push through (or care about); somehow he makes a perilous airship journey through skies beset with predatory pterosaurs feel flat and uninteresting. Marauding Neanderthals armed with AK-47s are somehow monotonous. The dinosaurs, moreover, feel more like big, dumb, lumbering, lethargic beasts here than they did in Time Safari, which was published 24 years before.

On top of that, Stirling has that white-guy-who-came-up-in-the-’90s attitude toward his characters’ race. He’ll make a Black woman one of his main characters, and act like he’s being progressive, but then have her spend the book constantly thinking about or referencing how dark-skinned she is. “I’m not equipped to blanch, but consider it done,” says our Cynthia. This could also serve as an example of Stirling’s skills with witty and naturalistic dialogue. Later, we learn the indigenous Venusians have christened her “Night Face.” This tendency in Stirling’s work is pretty glaring.

The main problem with updating a Burroughsian pulp vibe without deconstructing the Burroughsian pulp vibe is, your narrative can feel laden with a 1900s colonialist mentality. In the author’s note to some other book he wrote, Stirling chided his readers not to conflate what a character thinks with what the author thinks, which is a fine philosophy, but doesn’t justify choosing to write a square-jawed protagonist who advises his protégés to gun down “threatening” locals without compunction.