2024 read #34: Smith of Wootton Major by J. R. R. Tolkien.

Smith of Wootton Major by J. R. R. Tolkien

Illustrations by Pauline Diana Baynes

59 pages

Published 1967

Read March 6

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Is this a Christ allegory? Is it about philology? Or is it plain old faery fantasy? Wikipedia doesn’t know! Personally, I read it as a meditation on growing old, mortality, and entrusting the next generation.

This is a brief and fairly conventional midcentury fantasy, largely pleasant and unremarkable. A cook, full of unearned confidence, chucks a fay-star into a special cake for the children. The fay-star gets swallowed by a boy (later named Smith), and attaches itself to his forehead, permitting him long walks into Faery and blessing his skill at the forge.

Unsurprisingly, the best parts of this morsel were Tolkien’s thumbnail descriptions of the wonders of Faery, such as the Vale of Evermorn. The worst part of it is how it ends with a prolonged fat joke, equating the old cook’s negative qualities with his fatness. You could have ended this tale ten pages early and not lost anything of substance, which is a lot in a story this brief.

2024 read #33: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

308 pages

Published 2016

Read from March 4 to March 6

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

At one point, early in Cora’s escape from enslavement, an underground station agent tells her: “Look outside as you speed through, and you’ll find the true face of America.” Cora follows his advice, but “There was only darkness, mile after mile.” That’s a concise thesis statement for this novel as a whole.

Much of The Underground Railroad’s marketing emphasizes how Whitehead literalized its namesake network. Physical trains chuff through physical tunnels, connecting vignettes to illustrate the Black experience in America. Enslavement, torture, medical exploitation and experimentation, sterilization, eugenic schemes, cadaver theft, lynching, genocide, rape, evangelism — all of them central to the American project, all of them linked by white Americans’ apostolic frenzy to dehumanize and subjugate Black folks. Stolen land worked by stolen bodies: the sickness and rot at the heart of everything this country has ever been.

Railroad’s vignettes are powerful, appalling, gripping, linked by the conceit its literal underground tunnels, at first a streamlining artifice of storytelling and metaphor that reaches its full brilliance at the end of the book. Regardless of marketing, Railroad is as magnificent, and as devastating, as you’d expect.

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 #31: What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher.

What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher

151 pages

Published 2024

Read from March 2 to March 3

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Following up on Kingfisher's magnificent What Moves the Dead, What Feasts at Night finds sworn soldier Alex Easton returning to kan family's meager estate in Gallacia. There's a noticeable genre switch between the two volumes (though nothing as drastic as the switch between Emily Tesh’s Silver in the Wood and its follow-up, Drowned Country). Where Dead luxuriated in Gothic fungal horror, Night is cozy folkloric horror. It settles in with familiar characters and gives them space to hang out and make humorous asides before any of them encounter the shapeshifting, breath-stealing moroi. For long stretches, Night reads more like a light Ruritanian fantasy than a horror novel.

Regardless of genre, Night is quite enjoyable, a briskly told tale that feels much bigger than its margins. It takes a while, but we eventually do get some body-shuddering horror worthy of Dead’s legacy. I’m satisfied.

2024 read #30: The Time Machine by H.G. Wells.*

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells*

216 pages

Published 1895

Read March 2

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 (maybe 3 for nostalgia)

* Denotes a reread.

Tim Sullivan’s story “Dinosaur on a Bicycle” (which I read and reviewed in the March 1987 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction) was an effective and affectionate pastiche of Wells’ The Time Machine, so much so that I decided to revisit that classic novel immediately after wrapping up that review. It was a childhood favorite of mine, which I first read not long after The War of the Worlds. It’s a short and vivid book that left an outsize impression on my adolescent imagination. I know it won’t hold up to modern standards, but I haven’t reread it as an adult, so why not check it out again? At least it's a quick read.

Seemingly every entry-level commentary on The Time Machine picks up on Wells’ socialist class conflict narrative. What interests me more nowadays, as a would-be student of the evolution of science fiction and its ideological underpinnings, is how central a role the Victorian conceit of social evolution plays here. “Struggle improves the race” was the Victorian aristocracy’s way of incorporating Darwinian theory without upsetting their own social myths of racial, gender, and religious superiority. Even socialist Wells was unable to conceptualize that humanity evolved intelligence hand in hand with social systems and cooperation, enmeshed as he was in the mores of empire.

What’s most remarkable about this self-serving ideological gloss is not that it appeared this early — the entire rickety structure has Victorian roots, after all — but that it persisted so late. It pervades the Campbellian sci-fi of the 20th century, and was taken as accepted wisdom well into the 1990s. Hell, you’ll still find “comfort leads to decadence” ideology lurking around corners of SFF to this day. Clearly, it survived so long because science fiction’s primary audience (comfortably well-off heterosexual white men) was still served by it. (It’s the ideology of empire and hierarchy, after all.)

On its own merits, The Time Machine is a crisp adventure tale, efficiently structured, doling out each piece of the puzzle of 802,701 AD exactly when it’s needed. It’s better written and more effectively plotted than most scientific romances or tales of scientifiction would manage to be well into the 1940s. (Wells himself only wrote a handful of novels as good as this one, for that matter.) It isn’t particularly deep fiction, unless you’re reading it at 10 years old, but it’s entertaining and manages to do exactly what it sets out to do. If only more stories from the ensuing fifty years of pulp could say the same.

2024 read #29: Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, March 1987 issue.

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

Edited by Gardner Dozois

192 pages

Published 1987

Read from March 1 to March 2

Rating: 2 out of 5

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

—

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

—

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

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

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

—

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

—

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

—

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

—

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

—

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

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

2024 read #28: An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon.

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

350 pages

Published 2017

Read from February 3 to March 1

Rating: 4 out of 5

White supremacy and American evangelical Christianity are interwoven, inseparable, inextricable. You can have white supremacy without religion, but you cannot have American evangelicalism without white supremacy. Evangelicalism positions a hierarchy with the abusive heavenly dad at its summit; rankings in the earthly hierarchy just happen to map onto the racial, sexual, gendered, and financial power structures of America’s horrific past (and all too plausible future). White supremacy is a rite of greater significance to the religion than the teachings or sacrifice of the biblical Jesus. American evangelicalism shouldn’t be called Christianity at all — nothing about it reflects the pre-Constantine faith. But then, which modern sect of Christianity does?

The setting of this novel literalizes this ideological knot to reflect the cruel heart of the American project back on itself. The Matilda is a generation ship. It left Earth — the Great Lifehouse, now a dead world — hundreds of years before, heading out to a Promised Land in the stars. Dark-skinned people, restricted to the lower decks, are brutalized and forced to labor to feed and maintain the pale-skinned aristocracy of the upper decks. The religious Sovereignty no longer controls the direction of the ship, but they maintain their horrific grip upon the generations of people trapped on board, even as power outages and other troubles plague the lower decks.

The world Solomon describes within the Matilda is palpable, tactile, vivid in its horrors and its secret touches of community. In part because it took me so long to read Ghosts, its setting lingers in my mind, burning like the nuclear reactor at the ship’s heart.

Our main viewpoint character is Aster, whom we might describe as queer, intersex, and autistic. She is a scientist, an alchemicalist, a healer, the child of a brilliant woman who disappeared when she was born. Her viewpoint is unflinching, detailing assaults and sexual violence and daily abuse, a careful record of the murderous rage she keeps tamped down in order to survive. In a world (or a ship) built with such calculated cruelty, the only rational response is to burn it all down.