2023 read #108: The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains by Neil Gaiman.

The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains by Neil Gaiman

Illustrated by Eddie Campbell

Original novelette published 2010; illustrated version published 2014

75 pages

Read September 28

Rating: 3 out of 5

This is a collaborative volume, a novelette by Neil Gaiman illustrated by Eddie Campbell. The result is almost a picture book for grownups. It doesn’t quite find the evocative synergy of Simon Stalenhåg’s work (of which I’ve only read The Electric State). Campbell’s art clearly draws from Gaiman’s narrative, added after the fact, rather than the words and art feeding into one another. At times — such as with certain exchanges of dialogue — the format even becomes a distraction. While striking, the art does little to deepen the story. The result is lovely, and certainly worth taking the time to read and admire, but less than I had been hoping for.

The story on its own works well enough. The plot involves cursed gold on an island that is not always there; talk of funding the exiled Stuarts inevitably reminds me of Kidnapped. Gaiman’s descriptions evoke misty Scottish isles, a curse that saps joy and drains conscience, vengeance old and withered to bone.

2023 read #107: The Black God’s Drums by P. Djèlí Clark.

The Black God’s Drums by P. Djèlí Clark

111 pages

Published 2018

Read from September 27 to September 28

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

It is 1884 in New Orleans, a free and nonaligned city in a land still divided between Union and Confederate. Creeper is a teenage street kid blessed by Oya, goddess of storms, life, and rebirth. She overhears CSA officers plotting to obtain a supernatural weapon that helped free Haiti: the Black God’s Drums, also called Shango’s Thunder. No one in their right mind wants that kind of power in the Rebs’ hands, but Creeper also wants to get something back from exchanging the information. Enter the captain of the airship Midnight Robber. The trade Creeper asks of her: letting Creeper join her crew.

Another solid outing from Clark, who has unmatched skill at spinning vivid, immersive alternate histories. This one mingles airships and divine magic with dangerous repercussions. Echoes of Haiti's use of Shango's Thunder linger as tempêtes noires, which "turn the skies into night for a whole week." The mix is unique and engrossing, as always brought to life by Clark's quick prose.

2023 read #106: The Necessity of Stars by E. Catherine Tobler.

The Necessity of Stars by E. Catherine Tobler

71 pages

Published 2021

Read September 27

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

“Memory is a form of fiction — a story that keeps the days threaded together in proper order.” Memory is the central motif in The Necessity of Stars. It’s a quiet novella of layered beauty, the sea-level rise of tragedy and loss.

Bréone is an aging diplomat in a climate-ravaged future, one where capitalist interests and authoritarian governments maintain the fiction that humans didn’t cause climate change, that there was nothing poor little humanity could have done on such a vast scale, even as the Earth burns and floods and ecosystems collapse. Delphine, once a science advisor, ekes out her days alongside Bréone, both of them occupying the Normandy garden estate of Irislands. Bréone narrates, “Why fight for a thing that is falling apart, she asks. Because it is falling apart, I say each and every time.” Words slip from Bréone, lost one by one.

And then Bréone finds an alien in the garden. Tura is one of the last of their kind, a species exploited nearly to extinction, hiding away on Earth because they thought it was already a dead world.

The thematic parallels — aging and ecocide, the loss of faculties and species — are elegantly understated, welling up through Tobler’s magnificent prose. “Humans are often foolish, when it comes to squandering a heart, or a planet.” This brief book feels expansive, freighted with the grief of our species, personal and vast.

2023 read #105: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September/October 2023.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September / October 2023 issue (145:3-4)

Edited by Sheree Renée Thomas

258 pages

Published 2023

Read from September 25 to September 26

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

As I hinted at in my review of the January / February 2023 issue, I’m continuing to stay current with new issues of F&SF as a gesture of support for Sheree Renée Thomas, the finest editor in the magazine’s nearly 75 year history. I may be deeply skeptical of the institutional structure of the magazine now, but Thomas is putting together an unparalleled run at the editorial helm, and needs more readers behind her.

“Shining Shores” by Max Firehammer. Slow-burn eldritch horror in a coastal resort town. It’s a promising story, full of creepy imagery: colossal sea gods, gouged eyes, joints popping out of socket, a shotgun battle in the back of a cop car. You know, the classics. It escalates into one of the goriest pieces I’ve ever read in F&SF. To my personal taste, while the bones of the story are quite good, “Shores” has too much of the developing author tendency to transcribe every action of the narrator’s progress instead of trusting the reader to fill in the blanks. (Sample: “I had the name of Paul’s hotel punched into my phone, and before long, I was there.”) It’s something I struggle with in my own writing, but still, I found it harder to slip into the rhythm of the story as a result.

“Bayanihan” by Maricar Macario. Atmospheric and absorbing tale of culture, immigration, and family bonds across two worlds. It is heavy with the loss of language, the loss of place, the dislocations inflicted by colonialism and its influence. Our second-person narrator’s childhood in what little global warming has left of the Philippines leads to an alienating teenhood on cosmopolitan Mars, where a galaxy of beings intermingle with humans — but the rich and privileged, alas, are still the ones in charge of everything; the world with money culturally colonizes the world that lacks it. Great story, vulnerable and moving. One of the best Mars colony stories I’ve ever read.

“Sort Code” by Chris Barnham. I’m tired of men who slip “bitch” into their stories — and damn, they just love finding ways to jimmy it in. This one checks it off the basic male lit to-do list on the first page. (What is this, 1990?) It predisposed me against this story right from the get-go. “Code” is competent enough, a standard tale of dying and finding oneself unstuck in time with a manic pixie dream girl, but it didn’t rouse sufficient interest to overcome the odor of Dude Writing 101. Any story along these lines is going to have to distinguish itself against Kim Stanley Robinson’s “A Short, Sharp Shock” (reviewed here), so it had an uphill battle even without that “bitch.”

“What We Found in the Forest” by Phoebe Wood. This one is gorgeous, a spore-clouded journey of self-discovery and love that feels much vaster and more immersive than its mere three pages would suggest. Outstanding!

“Three Sisters Syzygy” by Christopher Mark Rose. Ordinarily, I appreciate a good thematic through-line in a magazine issue. However, presenting another “I’m in a different timeline and I don’t quite know who these people are or what I’m doing here” story so quickly after “Sort Code” was a touch monotonous, at first. This tale of reality-hopping astronauts finding themselves among the sisters they had always wanted, the three of them exploring Earth’s three moons during their rare alignment, is far superior to “Code.” In fact, it’s quite good: technicolor, strange, moving, thematically interesting. It’s threaded with old pulp imagery — rocketships! moon banquets! robots! space pirates! Plus, syzygy was one of my favorite words growing up, so I’m pleased to find it in a title. As far as the “what universe am I in?” repetition goes, I suppose it’s understandable. We’ve all felt dislocated to an alternate universe since early 2020; multiversal stories touch a deep, collective trauma in our lives, and they’ll keep popping up until our culture finds new ways to approach and process that trauma.

“Mixtapes from Neptune” by Karter Mycroft. Another brief but evocative piece that feels more substantial than its length would suggest. Hard science fiction that feels as sentimental and dreamy as the best fantasy.

“To Pluck a Twisted String” by Anne Leonard. Another solid though short piece, a sharp-edged domestic fantasy of parenthood, loss, and the pressures of the world.

“My Embroidery Stitches Are Me” by A Humphrey Lanham. A lyrical flash fabulist piece that examines generational trauma, abuse, and learning to separate ourselves from what our parents have pressed upon us. Heartbreaking and beautiful, a three-page story that left me weeping. F&SF has truly come into its own as a market for transcendent flash fic.

“Upstairs” by Tessa Yang. This is an excellent piece that thrums with the tension and tragedy of our stratified future. Our narrator Sadie has “won” the housing lottery — i.e., her wife Eileen was recruited by Recyclon, a vast capitalist conglomerate, so their family just happened to get selected to move into the climate-controlled habitats of Upper Michy, towering above the concrete and pollution of old Lower Michy. Yang draws domestic details with an emotional precision that heightens the uneasiness, winding us into Sadie’s misgivings, her suspicions that the elevated world will get pulled out from under her family, her need to whatever it takes — even selling out — to keep them all up there. Small spoilers: The “organized criminals smuggling meat into a vegan dystopia” plot feels like it should be silly, a throwback to the “EPA is out to get us!” libertarian strain of late ’80s sci-fi, yet the emotional groundwork is established with such care that it all has real stakes. (Pun only partially intended.) 1980s dystopian writers could never put together anything this nuanced.

“Teatro Anatomico” by Getty Hesse. This is half of an excellent story. Hesse presents this macabre mood piece in a somewhat archaic cadence, most reminiscent of 1920s modernists approximating a florid Victorian style. It works well with its scene, an Early Modern anatomical theater exhibiting a dissection during Carnival, when the dead don’t truly die. I’m a sucker for fantasy with an Early Modern setting. This tale was doing so well up until some male-gaze pseudo-incestuous BDSM creeps into the narrative. It feels like it would be right at home in a 1990 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Oh well.

“Night Haul” by Andrew Crowley. This one, meanwhile, feels like it could have come from a 1989 issue of F&SF. (Or else maybe a tossed-off tale from Stephen King's cocaine days.) It’s the voyage of the Demeter but make it a big rig, complete with CB radio. It's moderately entertaining.

“On the Matter of Homo sapiens” by Kel Coleman. A wonderfully sweet little tale about two robot friends who go geocaching together. An unexpected tearjerker.

“Sugar Steak” by Jenny Kiefer. Absolutely revolting (but ghoulishly entertaining) piece of dental horror. The strength of this story is in the specificity of the descriptions. Made me dry-heave a few times, in a fun way!

“Growths” by Nina Kiriki Hoffman. A sharply described story of growing up different, learning that you can't always rely on your parents, and refusing to make things easier for yourself by giving in and blending with everyone else.

Two poems by Alexandra Elizabeth Honigsberg: “Expedition” and “Shapeshifter.” Of the two, I like the latter best.

“If I Should Fall Behind” by Douglas Smith. Some spoilers: Tumble has the power to jump between branching multiverses of possibility; Piph has been tagging along with him, on the run for six years, ever since he saved her from a boat accident at the summer-camp they shared as foster kids. They're being chased because, unbeknownst to either of them, Tumble's probability jumps are destabilizing the multiverse. This story feels like an artifact of late '60s or early '70s sci-fi, not quite New Wave but clearly inspired by it, moving in an artsier direction with its prose but still telling stories of steely supermen (and the babes who love them) eluding enemy toughs in something approximating the modern day. Not a bad story, but it isn't my favorite thing, either, particularly once Piph's life becomes a plot device. 

We close out this issue with “Crossing the Universe,” a poem by Vanessa Taal. Some nice imagery.

This issue was more of a mixed bag than most from the Thomas era. Several amazing stories, some all-time favorites, but also quite a few tales that felt stale, dated, like leftovers from another time.

2023 read #104: The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark.

The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark

131 pages

Published 2019

Read September 24

Rating: 4 out of 5

It is 1912 in Cairo. The release of djinn and other spirits, and the harnessing of magic, has made Egypt a world power. Cairo is a vast, modern metropolis, populated with diverse people and “boilerplate eunuchs,” crisscrossed by djinn-made aerial trams. Agent Hamed of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities is accustomed to working alone, but has been assigned a rookie partner, Agent Onsi. They’ve been given a particularly difficult case: the haunting, or possession, of Tram Car 015. Meanwhile, the women of Egypt campaign for the vote, and some machine-people are discovering their own identities.

This is another outstanding, atmospheric outing from the author of Ring Shout. Clark finds new life and fresh energy in his steampunkish world. Haunting itself is brilliantly constructed, laying out the characters, the setting, the situation, and its complications with exemplary and efficient pacing. While many books this length (long novella? short novel?) feel compressed or hurried, Haunting has the rare distinction of feeling like it’s exactly the length it should be. No wasted paragraphs, but also nothing squeezed to fit. The different plot threads all pull together in the end. Wonderful!

2023 read #103: The Long Walk by Milton J. Davis.

The Long Walk by Milton J. Davis

145 pages

Published 2019

Read September 22

Rating: 3 out of 5

You never know what you’ll get with self-published (and, to an extent, small press) books. Sometimes you’ll get a fully polished and professional-grade novel like Robbergirl. Sometimes you’ll get something full of potential, but needing just a tad more editorial nurturing, like The Worm and His Kings. Sometimes, yes, you’ll get something borderline unreadable. I always DNF those and never review them, because I’m not in the business of tearing down anyone just trying to make a buck from their words. (Capitalism does enough of that for everyone.)

The Long Walk falls around the middle of the self-pubbed spectrum, a bracing story and a fascinating world relayed in flat prose. The writing isn’t bad, by any means, but it serves merely to pull us from A to B. We rarely get the chance to linger, to experience, to feel. Even character deaths pass by in a blink.

Twelve year old Patience de Verteuil leaves Trinidad in the company of her father, Maurice, a scholar and a soldier in a supernatural war. They’ve been summoned to Nicodemus, the Black-founded town in Kansas, at the behest of Harriet Tubman. But things quickly go wrong, and Patience finds herself in the company of other fighters, forced to wield her family’s ancestral bois in the fight against a vast evil. With her new companions, Patience must fight her way across the Reconstruction-era South, pursued by hell hounds, a ghoulish hunter named Cain, and a sinister figure called Jedediah Green.

The story feels a bit like a quest fantasy, with an adventuring party composed of a bard, a healer, and a dance-fighter, and a bit like a superhero narrative, all of it suffused with the righteous fury of history. I think if this were to be remade as a graphic novel, it would be outstanding.

2023 read #102: Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, February 1992.

Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, February 1992 issue (16:2)

Edited by Gardner Dozois

176 pages

Published 1992

Read from September 20 to September 21

Rating: 2 out of 5

Much like the November 1988 and November 1990 issues of IASFM, I sought this one on eBay solely because it has dinosaurs on the cover. I don’t hold high hopes for this month’s cover story, for… reasons. However, IASFM from this era — in my quite limited experience — seemed to feature at least one or two stories that make each issue worthwhile. Fingers crossed for more of those!

Best of all: there's no story from Isaac Asimov in this issue!

Tucked between letters to the editor and a full-page ad, I almost missed the poem that begins this issue: “From: A Child’s Garden of Grammar: Adverbs” by Tom Disch. It reads like a cheap imitation of Shel Silverstein. Kinda hokey but not, like, bad. Though I’m confused why it’s in a sci-fi magazine.

“Sugar’s Blues” by Allen Steele. When last we met Steele, he treated us to the mediocre cloned dinosaur technothriller “Trembling Earth” in the November 1990 IASFM. “Sugar’s Blues” is apparently the third and final tale in a series centered on Diamondback Jacks, a Merritt Island dive bar down the road from Kennedy Space Center. It’s the sort of gator country booze shack where “spacers” go to drink pitchers of Budweiser, play pool, and get into brawls in the distant future of 2023. Steele strains toward a pulp voice befitting his industrial roughnecks-in-space milieu, despite the fact that our narrator is a reporter. Our narrator intervenes in a bar fight, and gets rewarded with an explosive scoop about high-level coverups, the manufacture of memory-enhancing drugs, and general skullduggery in orbit. It’s a competently conveyed story but nothing I found interesting; it’s just manly men in a manly men’s world. The closest thing to a female character is the Vargas pinup painted tits-out on the fuselage of a privatized space shuttle. It’s the sort of sci-fi that Elon Musk’s fanboys read while they touch themselves at night, dreaming of libertarian space exploitation and boundless testosterone. C-

Another Tom Disch poem follows: “From: A Child’s Garden of Grammar: Quotation Marks.” This one ends with a punchline about kids these days and their Walkmens.

“Pickman’s Modem” by Lawrence Watt-Evans. “The title [for this tale] originated during a real-time chat on a computer network,” marvels the editorial introduction. The story begins: “I hadn’t seen Pickman on-line for some time; I thought he’d given up on the computer nets…. The nets will eat you alive if you let them.” Ah, 1992. As someone who first encountered the internet via an orange-on-black monochrome monitor in 1993, this humorous trifle about a Lovecraftian modem stirring a flame-war has a musty, nostalgic charm for me that outshines its other modest qualities. C

“Overlays” by Joel Richards. Another trip to the well of memory-enhancing drugs — clearly this was the sci-fi topic du jour in 1992. This is an atmospheric story set on the Danish island of Fanø, narrated by an aging British biologist who’s summered there for decades. Her first husband, love of her life, was downed in his Hurricane near Farø; she thinks he’s the reason she feels a connection to the cemetery and its monuments to the dead of war. This story nicely pairs the titular “overlays” of invasions and sea level changes that shaped Denmark with the “overlays” of genetic “past-life memory” putatively discovered by a visiting American neurophysiologist. (I always appreciate a title that means more than one thing.) The sci-fi element is a bit silly for the wind-swept mood of the piece; likely it would work better as contemporary fantasy, without all the set-dressings of neuropeptides and newly discovered receptors. Still, the story works well enough as it is. A respectable B

“Gate Crashing” by Jennifer Evans. Oh look, it's a near-future consumer electronics piece. (I almost always detest these.) In a world where interpersonal communication is mediated by customizable “gatekeeper” avatars, our point of view is some shitty dude named Jackson, who’s being a whiny brat because he has to talk to some gatekeepers in his quest to find some girl he saw (but never talked to) at last night's party. As Jackson pines over this hypothetical soulmate, he frets, “What if she turns out to be an absolute bitch[?]” He flips out and punches things when the girl's gatekeeper turns out to be a replica of herself, then somehow gets a date with her anyway. Tedious stuff. F

“Kingdoms in the Sky” by S.P. Somtow. A whole lot of grody tropes get wrapped up together in this one. Antonio, part-Incan son of a Chicago crime boss, gets taken down to Peru for a “business trip.” Unbeknownst to Antonio, his father made a deal with the gods to protect his coca fields, and Antonio himself is to be offered up as a mountaintop sacrifice. Antonio’s mute brother Matt has magical-autistic powers, à la Stephen King, and talks to Antonio in his dreams. It's an overlong story, and on top of everything else, it’s written in an annoying approximation of a young teen’s voice. F+

One last Tom Disch poem, “From: A Child’s Garden of Grammar: Not.” More of that same quasi-Silverstein vibe. Though it makes even less sense that this one is in Asimov’s.

“The Heaven Tree” by Jamil Nasir. This would be some solid ’90s sci-fi, immersive and atmospheric and melancholy, exploring a world where a sexually transmitted virus reverses your aging and turns you into an elfin waif with the mind of a child. Of course, this being the ’90s, we can’t have a good story without some heinous shit going on, and it isn’t hard to guess which direction this one goes. The story performs an uneasy balancing act between that requisite ’90s shock value and the much more interesting meditation on aging, fear, and death at its core. Maybe B-?

“The Virgin and the Dinosaur” by R. Garcia y Robertson. At last, here’s the reason I bought this issue. I don’t trust any story from Garcia y Robertson, who (in my admittedly limited experience) is one of the horniest SFF writers of his generation. He brings a certain Heinleinian smarm to his writing that I don’t enjoy, the vibe that he’s constantly writing one-handed. And with a title like that, I don’t expect good things. Sure enough, the story opens with our point-of-view character Jake watching a tall young redhead slink naked through the Cretaceous greenery. Glad we established our expectations for this one ahead of time, because at its heart, “Virgin” is a novella-length exploration of Jake’s quest to manipulate his uninterested coworker Peg into sex. I’m not a prude by any means, but hetero horniness is so predictable, you know? So rote and unoriginal, so eager to ignore boundaries. Oh, and Peg is still a “virgin,” according to the narrative, because she’s only ever been sexual with women before. Which — what the fuck? It’s a shame, because how often do you get an airship tour of the Late Cretaceous? This could have been a quality story in someone else’s hands — perhaps a 2020s queer author. Once again I have to shake my head at the bad luck that made dinosaur fiction’s peak coincide with the grody 1990s. Can we get a new dinosaur renaissance, pretty please? I’ll be munificent and give this one a D

And that’s it for this issue. No real surprises, just some disappointment that there weren’t more salvageable stories to counter that ’90s stink.