2023 read #128: The Girl from the Sea by Molly Knox Ostertag.

The Girl from the Sea by Molly Knox Ostertag

252 pages

Published 2021

Read from November 2 to November 3

Rating: 4 out of 5

A bittersweet exploration of the loneliness of being a queer teen, projecting a false self to protect yourself even if it risks never finding happiness within your true self. Morgan, 16 and with no plans to come out of the closet until she’s in college and out of her small town, is rescued from the sea by Keltie, a selkie. Thinking it’s a romantic dream, Morgan kisses Keltie — but it was no hallucination. True love’s kiss allows Keltie to assume human form and walk on land, and aspects of her identity that Morgan wasn’t yet ready to address suddenly become urgent. “You’re the true shapeshifter,” Keltie tells Morgan.

The character design work here is utterly endearing. Keltie and Morgan are also endearing as characters, immediately pulling you into an emotional investment. Morgan herself doesn’t always make the right choices or respect Keltie’s emotional needs. It’s realistic but occasionally heartbreaking.

The coming-of-age story — already emotionally fraught — is complicated by Morgan’s friend group, her brother, and a monstrous harbor tour boat that is endangering Keltie’s seal friends. Things don’t effortlessly fall into place, at least not right away. “Sometimes you have to let your life get messy,” Morgan’s mom tells her at one point. “That’s how you get to the good parts.”

2023 read #127: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre by B. Traven.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre by B. Traven

309 pages

Published 1935

Read from October 31 to November 2

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I first got it into my head to read this book way back in the first year or so of this blog, when I was checking off all the high school lit classics that had escaped me before. The fact that no library in Suffolk County owned a copy, and the difficulty in tracking down a used copy for a reasonable price, lent it an unearned mystique in my overactive imagination. I conceptualized Treasure as a pulp masterpiece on the same level as The Ox-Bow Incident, an exercise in stoic poetry, of weather-worn men tortured by the social constraints of performative masculinity and the violence it entails.

Having finally found myself a used copy, I find the reality of Treasure deflates all those idle speculations. It’s closer in spirit to The Road to El Dorado than it is to Blood Meridian. It’s a rangy satire of pulp adventure fiction, poking fun at the easy glory and masculine mythology of pulp magazines. It’s also an extended meditation on the acidic grip of greed, both on the minds of individual people and on societies built on capitalism. Perhaps it was some garbled hearsay of this that sketched my imaginary understanding of Treasure.

Our heroes, Dobbs and Curtin, are two American men weathering the Great Depression and failing to make a quick buck down in Mexico. In the current parlance, the two of them share a single brain cell. The first section of the book follows their job-hunting misadventures in the oil fields and the jungles — bumming pesos, getting scammed by bosses, hiding in a tree from a beast that turns out to be a burro. Bold adventure this is not. Hell, after introducing Dobbs in the first two pages, the book spends the next ten pages delineating the shittiness of a particular flophouse. Atmospheric digressions seem to make up about half the book.

In the end, of course, there’s betrayal and murder, the descent into paranoia, but the characters stumble into it the way they’ve stumbled into everything else, through the power of suggestion and self-delusion. 

2023 read #126: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1975 issue.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1975 issue (49:4)

162 pages

Published 1975

Read October 30

Rating: 2 out of 5

My F&SF collection extends patchily into the 1960s and '70s, but until now, the December 1982 issue had been the earliest I’d read. Time to change that!

I picked this one more or less randomly — no significant dates here. Though there is a Poul Anderson Time Patrol story here that tipped the scales in its favor, even though it likely sucks and I read it before as a kid, in the 1991 collection The Time Patrol.

Onward, into the '70s!

“The Custodians” by Richard Cowper. An unexpected treat: Cowper’s F&SF debut! His tale “What Did the Deazies Do?” was the sole highlight of the dismal December 1982 issue, and in another lifetime I appreciated his The Road to Corlay. This sprawling novelette centers on Spindrift, a World War I vet and historian of medieval philosophy, who has followed a meager document trail left by one Meister Sternwärts, 13th century Gnostic and magister of arcane arts. Spindrift feels like Sternwärts has been guiding him to the monastery of Hautaire, where the meister spent his final years writing his Praemonitiones — a text of astonishingly accurate prophecies. Soon Spindrift learns that fresh prophecies continue to be written at Hautaire, with a “horizon” of about fifty years — and he’s been destined to come to Hautaire to continue the work. Some fifty years later, Spindrift meets his own successor: a faddish young woman named Judy Harland. “Custodians” is firmly of its time, but it’s quite good for all that, deliberately paced and atmospheric, depicting generational trauma’s role in ushering in nuclear annihilation. B

“Senior Citizen” by Clifford D. Simak. My only exposure to Simak was the dire Mastodonia, so I had slim hopes for this tale of an old man’s retirement to “a leisure cubicle in space.” Sure enough, by the third paragraph our surly Mr. Lee is already fuming at the feminine voice in his capsule: “Women, he thought — bitches, all of them.” The story manages to literalize the horror of how age can strip memory and self from you, so it succeeds at what it sets out to do. But the best part is how brief it is. D+

“Down to a Sunless Sea” by Cordwainer Smith. A posthumous publication, “completed by [Smith’s] wife after his death” — though she’s otherwise uncredited. Like the only other Smith story I’ve read, “Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons” (which I reviewed here), this one is an early galactic-baroque excursion. The sunless pleasure planet Xanadu welcomes Space Lord Kemal bin Permaiswari, a Lord of the Instrumentality, a psychic superman and war hero, wounded when he saved humanity in the battle of Styron IV. There are rideable cats; fear machines; “underpeople” genetically engineered from animals; illegal telepathy barriers; pitchers divided to pour both blissful drinks and deadly poisons; and of course devious scheming. There's also a bird-man named Mr.-Stokely-from-Boston. Clearly written sometime in the early ’60s, “Sea” is like a weirder, scruffier prototype of Dune, though it lacks Dune’s anti-authority streak. Like “Kittons,” “Sea” piles on the weird until it topples into silly, especially toward the end, but nonetheless I enjoyed it. Somewhere around C+

“The Pearcey Boy” by R. Bretnor. Distasteful, boring, and dreadfully overlong, this tale of a “defective” boy annoying and unsettling other lodgers in a 1928 boarding house didn’t even arrive at its coy revelation of its fantastical element (such as it was) until the last page. Utter dreck. F

“Gibraltar Falls” by Poul Anderson. I love how the Messinian salinity crisis (the drying out of the Mediterranean basin), and the subsequent titanic waterfall that refilled the sea through Gibraltar, had such a hold on the sci-fi imagination during the 1970s. See also: The Many-Colored Land. This one is a formulaic Time Patrol piece that I read once in a collection as a tween. Tom Nomura, natural scientist recruited for the Time Patrol from 1972, is in love with Feliz a Rach, an artist from a matriarchal society some two millennia after his birth. From him she learns the value of a man. “Gibraltar” offers no surprises, and I certainly won’t give it points for plot, but at least it has more atmosphere and scenic description than, say, most Reginald Rivers stories. I’ll be indulgent and offer it a C-

“Counterkill” by Jack Williamson. Skimmed past this one the moment it became clear that this (white) author thought he was being cheeky with how close he could come to the N-word without using the N-word. The dark planet’s name, the name of its dark-skinned people — yeah, you weren’t slick, Jack. Especially since the story is about a young man named Blacklantern hoping to enlist the aid of alien “Benefactors” to “civilize” his “primitive” world before it’s destroyed. Fuck this. A big old F

“The Mother Trip” by Frederick Pohl. Less a story and more of a series of variations on the theme of first contact. In one, police in Jackson, Mississippi stop and frisk the first visitor to our world, and cause automatic planetary annihilation. In another, humanity bands together in historic cooperation to nuke the alien mothership. In another, the aliens watch enough TV — and enough warfare — to declare that humans have a “death-wish.” Pretty standard stuff for the time. Nothing terrible, but also not terribly interesting. C-

And that’s it for my first issue from the ’70s! A mix of surprisingly tolerable stories alternating in precise rhythm with some of the worst shit you’ve ever seen. Reminiscent of the ’80s incarnation of the magazine, except this issue, at any rate, might be a slight improvement over any ’80s issues I’ve read so far.

Except for the Bretnor story. And the Williamson story. Goddamn.

Also, would it have killed them to put anyone who wasn’t a white man on the TOC?

2023 read #125: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November 1989.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November 1989 issue (77:5)

Edited by Edward L. Ferman

162 pages 

Published 1989

Read from October 28 to October 29

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

Much like the December 1982 issue, I’ve chosen to read this one because it marks a date of personal importance. I’ve read an unusual number issues from around this time: the regrettable September 1989, the slightly worse December 1989, the slightly more promising March 1990, and the worst issue I’ve ever read, August 1990. My expectations for this issue are correspondingly low.

“Icicle Music” by Michael Bishop. Within a couple years of this tale, Bishop wrote my tweenage self's favorite short story: “Herding with the Hadrosaurs,” in The Ultimate Dinosaur. It didn’t age that well, perhaps, but in comparison to most of the other stories in that book, it was a masterpiece. So I thought maybe this one wouldn’t be so bad. “Icicle Music” is adequate enough. The first half is an atmospheric, 1957-set tale of Christmas Eve and a deadbeat dad who comes down the chimney. I think it’s meant to be grimly funny. If we’d left it there, with (spoilers!) 12 year old Danny butchering a reindeer named Blitzen while his mother burns his dad’s body in the dump, I think it would have been a more cohesive story. Instead, we flash forward to 1987 and find that Danny, now dying, is telling the yarn of how his father’s ghost sought revenge every tenth Christmas since that night. (Bishop plays coy about it, but I think the implication is that Danny is gay and he’s dying of AIDS.) The second half isn’t bad, but I think the switch from third-person limited to conversational tell-all makes the whole thing feel imbalanced, like a framing device with only the back half of the frame. C+

Content warning for fictional SA in the next story.

“The Extra Ancestor” by Donald Barr. This one begins with a one-two punch. First, the editorial introduction tells us author Barr was appointed by Reagan to a national council on education (shudder). Next, the story opens with a professor casually blackmailing his female grad student so he can impregnate her via in vitro and perform genetics experiments by way of reproductive coercion. Yeah, fuck this story. As if that weren’t bad enough, it’s about splicing dog genes into human embryos to make, uh… telepaths. Instead, young Eddy inherits nothing more than an excellent sense of smell, and the rest of the story is — I kid you not — an extended rumination on how girls are stinky. (Speaking of dog-human hybridization, Olaf Stapledon did it better in 1944, and somehow made it less skeevy in a book with romantic bestiality. At least that was consensual.) I literally expected nothing better from a Reagan appointee, but goddamn. F

“Divergence” by Jennifer Swift. There's nowhere to go but up after that last story, but I strained to find interest in this tale of Jewel, the daughter of a media-savvy Creationist, inadvertently discovering a new branch of bacterial evolution. It's ably written, and draws neat parallels between RNA transcription and theological interpretation. Plus it does that thing I like where the title refers to several things: lifeforms diverging over time; the bacterium diverging from the rest of known life; Jewel diverging from the faith of her father. But it’s overlong, and frankly I felt apathetic about the subject matter. It ends with that wishy-washy “maybe science and religion are just different ways of understanding what God made” bullshit. (Spoiler alert: feel-good liberal attempts to understand and coddle Christian extremists have done nothing but amplify Christofascism over these last few decades.) Maybe C+

“The Name of the Demon” by Patricia Anthony. Pretty standard ’80s horror number about a couple of drug-running Texas lowlifes double-crossing a demonologist (who, because it was the ’80s, was moonlighting in the coke business). Nothing special. I think a setup like that could have had potential, but instead the story just kind of ends. D+

“Tikina-Londi” by Peni R. Griffin. Texas-flavored fairy tale about a new mother struggling to keep her child inside her house and away from Death. Mostly enjoyable, aside from some stray ’80s shittiness (the mother calls the hired girl “you little slut” when the boy makes his way out of the house under her watch). C-

“On the Wings of Imagination, Fly” by Gary Wright. Stories of truck driving have been oddly frequent in the issues of F&SF I’ve read. There was Andrew Crowley’s “Night Haul” in the September / October 2023 issue; T. R. Napper’s “Highway Requiem” in the May / June 2023 issue; further back in time, there was Russell Griffin’s “The Road King” in the February 1986 issue. That may not seem like a lot, but this issue is the sixteenth I’ve reviewed for this blog, and this is the fourth story centered on trucking, which means a truck driver story has appeared in 25% of all F&SF issues I’ve read to date. (That’s not even counting Thomas A. Easton’s “Down on the Truck Farm” in the March 1990 issue, which ends with our troubled teen protagonist apprenticing to drive a genetically engineered truck-dog.) Our trucker today is a mediocre white guy who knows he’s special but no one gives him a break, damn ’em, so he hauls low-paying payloads and hopes to write a song that’ll make it big someday. Just wait ’til you learn what he thinks about his wife! He’ll tell ya, because I’m not repeating any of it here. This story feels numbingly long, even though it isn’t, and possesses no redeeming qualities. F

“Bad Luck” by Vance Aandahl. This is a western bauble, stuck in that awkward stage where westerns had become gritty and ugly and ironic, but hadn’t yet evolved beyond investing white ex-cavalrymen as the unquestioned heroes of the genre, and Mexican banditos still exclaimed “Ay chihuahua!” (In this instance, I’m pretty sure some element of humor is involved, at least in theory.) Like, for what it is, it’s fine? But I don’t like what it is. Maybe I’ll be overly generous and say D-

“A Can of Worms” by Ben Bova. In other hands, there could be a kernel of an interesting story here. Elverda Apacheta is an indigenous sculptor from the Andes who tells a tale about when she lived on an asteroid and carved the history of her people on its surface. However, because it’s the '80s, some rich white dude shows up in his spaceship, the Adam Smith, and our Quechua sculptor is immediately smitten with his "uniqueness," and inevitably falls in love with him. (I've never read Bova before, but this whole deal fits his vibe, you know?) Anyway, "Worms" is professionally written and all that, but can't overcome the triple threat of fetishization, white saviorism, and capitalism. Also, there's a recurring motif of fatphobia, because why not. D-

And that's it for another dip into the world of '80s sci-fi and fantasy. No real highlights, a bunch of shit best left forgotten, but maybe it's slightly better than other near-contemporary issues. Which is no great praise.

2023 read #124: These Fleeting Shadows by Kate Alice Marshall.

These Fleeting Shadows by Kate Alice Marshall

359 pages

Published 2022

Read from October 24 to October 27

Rating: 3 out of 5

This is a crisp and efficient mashup of Gothic and eldritch horror, polished to a glossy YA sheen.

Our narrator, Helen Vaughan, has unexpectedly been named heir to Harrowstone Hall, a labyrinthine manor house guarding cosmic secrets. Her ancestor Nicholas Vaughan had it built to trap something he should never have meddled with. The Hall exerts a strange pull over heirs of the Vaughan family. Helen stumbles through its extradimensional mysteries and social interactions with equal awkwardness. Unfortunately for her, plenty of people in her extended family don’t think she should be the heir.

I think one reason this didn’t quite click for me is the disconnect between the gravity of Helen’s encounters with otherworldly horrors, dark gods, and murderous relatives, and the breezy just-like-you narration. It feels like the cast of a teen rom-com got dragooned into a Gothic horror novel. (It makes sense in the end, but that’s still about 300 pages of tonal mismatch to get through.)

The members of the extended Vaughan family get introduced all in a bunch in an early scene; none of them ever quite establish themselves as distinct characters. Rumors of a folkloric figure called the Harrow Witch reach Helen, and then the Witch immediately gets revealed to be Bryony, the teenage daughter of the de facto groundskeeper. The result is a flattened story, something that could be quite cool and interesting but instead mostly goes through the motions and gives its protagonists neither dimension nor danger.

It's as if Shadows takes a checklist for how to structure your YA novel, and proceeds through it sharply and professionally, but never deviates from it. You have your troubled teen with a mysterious past. She gets pulled into an even more mysterious and dangerous situation. An unknown enemy doesn't want her there, but she also meets a new friend who is fast with a quip. She meets an intriguing wildcard character who doesn't like her at first, but gradually softens and gives her a pet nickname. There’s a race to uncover dangerous family secrets. Helen herself is more than she seems. And so on and so forth.

Which isn’t to say that it’s bad, by any means. As an awkward and plausibly autistic person who’s always struggled with social dynamics, I found Helen appealing enough as a protagonist. The use of bones, too, was a nice narrative and thematic continuity, creative and creepy. The second half, once the mountain of table-setting had been done, is so much better than the first. The denouement outright kicks ass.

But much like with The Hazel Wood, I think I’m just not the target audience here, and that’s okay. I don’t think you have to be an actual teen to appreciate Shadows, but it would help if you were a bigger fan of YA.

2023 read #123: Under Another Sky by Charlotte Higgins.

Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain by Charlotte Higgins

257 pages

Published 2013

Read from October 23 to October 24

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Recently, a meme of sorts has been circulating, exposing just how much your average cis-het white guy thinks about the Roman Empire on a daily basis. The underlying cause, like so much else in this modern hellscape, is a careful system of fascist indoctrination. Empires and conquest are masculine. Discipline and obedience to order are masculine. Marching into new lands and holding an eagle banner aloft are masculine. You don’t wanna be a fem, right, buddy?

I’ve always been a history girl, and here in America, Romans are always propagandistically positioned as our spiritual and political forebears. Athens had a (severely circumscribed) “democracy,” sure, but Romans? They had a republic. Landed men of breeding and prestige ruling over a rabble of mindless plebeians, as God and George Washington intended. A lost golden age for mediocre white dudes. And when Julius Caesar marched in like a main character and turned that republic into a dictatorship — well, sure it was a shame, but wasn’t it full of glory? So yeah. It isn’t any surprise to me that white American men think a lot about the Romans. Just look at how they vote.

It sucks how much the Romans are used as a tool of rightwing propaganda, because I find the Roman era fascinating for entirely different reasons: culture contact spanning parts of three continents, the movements of people and trade goods, people from all corners of the empire winding up in every other corner of the empire. Villas in Yorkshire, mystery cults in London, garum unloaded along the Thames, Iraqis and Algerians manning Hadrian’s Wall — that’s what interests me. Fuck empire, fuck emperors, fuck the legions. Tell me about the day-to-day.

Naturally I picked up this book the moment I saw it in a used book store. But it was equally natural that I should avoid reading it, given our current descent into fascism. (Recall the etymology of fascist.) I felt a sort of shame at the current associations of Rome, even though no one else really reads my reviews. Plus, with an era so heavily propagandized, you never know if an author is going to hit you with some rightwing bullshit. I’d just rather not, you know?

Under Another Sky is less about recovering a sense of what Roman Britain was like and more about the cultural process of interpretation, investigating the ways various eras have construed the Roman period as a reflection of their own mores and outlooks — “manifestations of the historical imaginations of those who described them,” as Higgins puts it in her introduction. She expands: “‘Britain’ was an idea for the Romans. For us, ‘Roman Britain’ is also an idea….”

Higgins’ narrative is constructed from her own travels, by foot and by VW camper van, across Roman Britain. The result is thoroughly readable but somewhat journalistic, full of colorful locals who pop in for two paragraphs to help Higgins make a point, followed by an equally brief anecdote of a rain-thwarted picnic to add atmosphere. Long segments are dedicated to pocket biographies of 19th century antiquarians and 20th century archaeologists, and how their personal biases shaped their interpretations. Pretty standard stuff for contemporary non-fiction, but it doesn’t give a sense of depth, either to history or to Higgins’ journeys.

At times, though, Higgins’ prose and imagery are quite beautiful. The chapter in which she walks around the surviving traces of Londinium is particularly good. Another Sky is far from an information-dense tome, but it works perfectly well for what it is.

2023 read #122: Out of Time’s Abyss by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Out of Time’s Abyss: The Tale of Bradley by Edgar Rice Burroughs

88 pages

Published 1918

Read from October 22 to October 23

Rating: 0.5 out of 5

Back in Caspak one last time, finally wrapping up the shitty trilogy that began with The Land that Time Forgot and The People that Time Forgot. No surprise, today our generic pulp hero is some dude named Bradley — so generic that he’s never given any other name. Lieutenant Bradley is little more than a military robot, crisp and efficient, “indifferent” to danger. The men under his command blend into one another. The switch to third person narration makes their characterization feel somehow even shallower than what we saw in the previous two books. I didn’t know that was possible. (Can a character have zero dimensions? If he's written by Burroughs, he can!)

This concluding novella is a rote retread of the standard bullshit we’ve seen before: racism, life-is-cheap violence, ownership-kink misogyny, colonialist might-makes-right moral nihilism. The big new gimmick here is the Wieroo, winged man-things mentioned in People but centered here for the first time. As pulp adversaries, the Wieroo (and their village of piled human skulls) bring a sort of proto-sword and sorcery vibe that I think pairs well with pulpy dinosaurs and sabertooth cats. There's even a dungeon-crawl of sorts beheath the Wieroo city. But of course Burroughs sucks, and his execution of the winged-man concept leaves much to be desired.

Abyss is a slog. Bradley is desperately uninteresting as a character, and the Wieroo wear out their novelty in record time. The only reason I read it at all was because the three novellas were printed in one volume, and I was fool enough to buy a copy.