Bookpost 22

Index

Diaspora, Greg Egan

Greg Egan loves Big Ideas and theoretical physics and wants to tell everyone about it. He’s very much off doing his own thing with this book, and your response will be according to how willing you are to listen to a man describe theoretical physics.

This is a positive, on the whole. Egan’s a solid prose stylist and very good with pacing; the book flows well and is an easy breezy read if you let the physics just kinda wash over you. Short chapters and frequent section breaks means you won’t be stuck with a single topic for long, which makes the frequent conversations devoted to discussing the Conundrum du Jour a lot easier to handle. Push through a few pages more and you’ll get a reset and some space to catch your breath, or at least move on to a different topic. Some of the character moments, especially early on, are very well crafted.

I felt like the plot was lost around the time they found Swift 2/3  or so through the book), and towards the end my response was just nodding along “all right, Greg, cool, I don’t understand it but I’m glad it’s working out for you” - one of the eternal hazards with Big Idea sci fi is the ideas can get too big for the audience to meaningfully care about them. Even so, “the author is really into theoretical physics” is hardly the worst flaw a book can have.

Bowling with Corpses and Other Strange Tales from Lands Unknown, Mike Mignola

Mignola can do more in 4 pages than most authors can do in 400, and the decades he’s spent honing his craft are evident on each and every panel of this book. He’s tapping into the old magic with this one, and in doing so makes a series of hauntings, just-so stories, reversals of fortune and other folk motifs feel so much realer and stronger than any grand architecture can.

My favorite of the collection is a pair of stories about the creation of the world - one version provided by a saint, the other by the raven. Those pieces are familiar - a garden of paradise, a great dragon, the dark things of the world before, the spirits of the earth - but presented in such a way that if I close one eye I could see it existing as some forgotten lore of a real people somewhere in history. If I close the other eye it is clearly a construct, the pieces arranged to reflect the shape of the age of its making, but that makes it a construct in the same way the stories providing the pieces were constructed. Mignola is very deliberately in conversation with both old myths and the modern world when he writes that mankind did not start in paradise, but as one beast among many that the gods found when they went out into the world beyond the Garden.

It's just plain damn good.

Grunts, Mary Gentle

DNF pg. 1/4XX

Another 1-page DNF, this time for switching tenses between the first two sentences and following with a full page of clunky, stilted description. I could see it was going into straightforward Tolkienian/D&D parody right away, and that’s rarely a place I want to be.

Journey to the West, trans. Julia Lovell

At last: a text with the courage to ask “what if a monkey had a big stick?”

Not content with answering the most pressing comedic question of our age, the book includes not one but TWO other jokes:

1. “Bureaucracy is silly”
2. “Man this Tripitaka guy is a nerd and kind of a loser”

It’s a joy to read. Those jokes have survived across centuries and cultures because they work. What if a monkey had a big stick? Wouldn’t it be funny if so-and-so got their ass kicked by a monkey with a big stick? And wouldn’t it also be funny if someone could turn the tables on the monkey, just to shake things up?

I do it a disservice, but man does that monkey love hitting dudes with a big stick and I love reading about it.

Lovell’s translation is an abridged version of about 1/4 of the full work, which is just the right size for me. I do think I probably would have gotten bored if it ran longer and I didn’t break it up with something in the middle - even really good jokes will run out of steam eventually - but that’s minimally important. It’s the epitome of the episodic picaresque, you can come and go as you please and there’s plenty of things you can and should loot for ideas.

Other highlights include:

• Lovell translating titles of the heavenly bureaucracy as if they were modern corporate positions (Office of Immortal Resources, etc)
• The deft explanation of why a superpowered character can’t immediately solve the story (Monkey could finish the journey in an instant but Tripitaka’s the one who has to make it, and he not only has no powers but the others can’t help him cheat.)
• Granting the reader immunity to any discussion of if Goku can beat someone in a fight, because Sun Wukong’s power scaling is according to the law of comedy - the winner depends on how funny it is for the other guy to lose.
• The Buddha telling his disciples “I’ll be right back, make sure no one slacks on their yoga while I’m out”, which is possibly my favorite gag in the book.

Sight Tremendous and Abhorred, Ognyen Plamen

Found this one because I follow the cover artist Goran on bluesky and he’d been sharing it around. Thought “what the hell, it’s free”.

Good move. A perfectly-proportioned cyberpunk shoot-em-up that plays the hits at a breakneck pace. Mercenary takes job, job goes south, add a few hyperviolent complicating factors and you got a stew going. It’d make a solid movie, a kickass couple episodes of Stand Alone Complex, and is all around just a fun time.

Plague of Pythons, Frederick Pohl

You know how there’s a type of sci-fi that just takes one major world-state change and runs with it to the logical end? It’s one of those. For the last two years, the world has been stricken by an epidemic of demonic possessions; at any moment, anyone might fall under the sway of an external power and go on a rampage, and Pohl’s going to do a whole lot of exploring what that’s meant for the world.

There were multiple points in the story where I thought that maybe the plot would fall into a more predictable rhythm, and each time it got yanked in a different direction just to prove that genre expectations will not save anyone. It’s refreshingly misanthropic about it, and the rug pulls never felt like a cheap gotcha.

I will warn prospective readers that it does open with the main character Chandler on trial for the sexual assault of a teenager while under possession: that said, I thought Pohl handled it with a fairly even and matter-of-fact hand. I’ve read much much worse.

The book’s only 111 pages and is freely available on Standard Ebooks.

The Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith

DNF @ Nephi 1 Chap 2

I wanted to give it a fair(er) shot for public domain research purposes, but was handily defeated by the pseudo-Elizabethan word salad. Mark Twain wasn’t kidding when he said it was written chloroform, and I was reading the 1981 version with 150 years worth of edits.

It’s got that Ender’s Shadow smell about it from the beginning, desperately attempting to reassure the reader with “the main character was definitely there and he was super-important the entire time, you guys”. Knock it off, man, Vergil barely gets a pass on that and you definitely ain’t Vergil with this prose.

This is what no sex drugs and rock & roll does to a motherfucker, which is a very interesting contrast with Crowley who was nothing but sex drugs and rock & roll. I don’t know if they’d balance out into homeostatic equilibrium or cause antimatter annihilation if you combined them.

Legacy, James Schmitz

This one’s a hidden gem, don’t let the generic name put you off. Space opera adventure with a female lead from 1962, freely available on Project Gutenberg (no renewal).

I was repeatedly impressed with how well the book treats its main character, Trigger Ardee. There’s still some early-60s misogynistic background radiation throughout the book (mostly in men calling her “doll” or “girl”, and one unfortunate scene that pulls the “no you see her rejecting him means she likes him” bullshit), but I gave the book a lot more grace than most of its contemporaries would get for all the times it made the right choice. More than plenty of modern books.

Trigger’s competent and driven, but she’s also 24. When her plans go awry or she messes up, it's because she got blindsided by something outside her awareness, rather than her inexplicably making stupid choices. She takes a step back to assess high-emotion situations before she snaps to an assumption. She’s allowed by the narrative to get overwhelmed, cry a bit in frustration, and then push on to do what needs to be done of her own volition. And we’re not going to dwell on it like it’s some fundamental component of her character she needs to overcome, she’s just having a shitty day.

Probably the most impressive to me was a scene where Trigger is headed to a swanky dinner party with the local contingent of zillionaire wackos. While she’s prepping she has a conversation with herself whether or not she should wear the plain dress (fancy by her standards, distractingly low-class by the host’s) or the extremely risque one (effectively a couple vines and some tactically-placed fig leaves), and has a moment of basically “There’s no way I could pull this off… wait, hold on… can I pull this off? I think I can pull this off.”

And then the narration doesn’t ogle her for making that choice. It’s quite matter-of-fact about the entire thing and the following scene is focused on intelligence gathering at the dinner, to the point that you could easily forget that she’s wearing a couple vines and a few tactically-placed fig leaves.

The main issue with the book is a structural one; a whole lot of the story is people expositing things that happened off screen. Some of this is to be expected, since we’re with Trigger as the POV the whole way through and the story doesn’t contrive ways for her to be present at every major event (which is appreciated). But the plot is also a good deal more complex than a normal space opera adventure, and several major events did happen to Trigger but have been wiped from her memory thanks to Psychic Chicanery, so it’s in a weird middle space where it’d probably need to be a lot longer or a lot more formally experimental to make it all gel together without the exposition dumps. And it does feel kinda bad that Trigger doesn’t have more to do, because things are great when she’s an active agent in the plot.

Setting-eise, it’s interesting (to me) how four years before Star Trek the only piece of the genre that’s really missing is the rubber forehead aliens: you’ve got the postwar liberal space federation that’s superficially pretty nice but has plenty of internal conflict and skeletons in the closet both present and potential (the use and abuse of psychic powers are all over this book).

Trigger also pilots a mech suit at one point and that’s sick as hell.
 

Bookpost 21

Bookpost Index

The Author of the Acacia Leaves, Ursula K LeGuin

LeGuin writes about ant language for a few pages. It’s good, unsuprisingly.

Enchantress of Venus, Leigh Brackett

DNF 63%

Same series as Black Amazon of Mars, same issues. Prose and descriptions are decent, plot and characters are not. This is actually the second in the series, with Black Amazon being the third and last, so I'm reading them backwards. This doesn’t actually matter, because she was definitely phoning these in and their structures are identical: boring man bumbles around, encounters modestly more interesting woman who actually has a motivation and a plot, boring man helps out modestly more interesting woman.

Stark is a nothing character (picaresque novels are often in danger of this, but it’s especially present here) whose main trait seems to be randomly kissing women he has just met prior to any indication on the woman’s part that she was amenable to being kissed by him at that time. Only have 2 data points at the moment, but it’s happened twice. Sword-and-sorcery/planet authors write a male lead whose hobby isn’t serial assault challenge (impossible).

If you took the two female leads of the two Stark stories I've read and combined them, you’d have a solid main character. Doubtlessly the woman in the story that I haven’t read yet would round out the triad. Part of me wants to try and complete the experiment, but wanting to try’s never meant it’s a worthwhile effort and it would mean forcing myself through these.

The descriptions of sword-and-planet Venus are great, though. Oceans of red clouds thick enough to sail on but still gaseous enough to breathe in. 

Queen of the Martian Catacombs, Leigh Brackett

DNF 48%

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a man with minimal personality meets a modestly more interesting woman with an actual motivation. He gets dragged along in some scheme or another because he’s useful. Along the way the boring dude meets a teenage(?) girl who helps him and it’s the same story, it’s all the same goddamn story!  

Since this is the first of the trilogy, it’s got a little more setup and a slight bit more meat on the narrative (local warlord causing issues, Stark is brought on by the interplanetary peacekeeping forces to infiltrate warlord’s inner circle before he turns Mars into a generation-long bloodbath). But also we get the reveal that there’s yet another layer to the “Stark totally isn’t black, you guys!” thing - he was raised by aliens, you see.

Oof.

There is a good description of how the inhabited part of ancient city migrated down the crater as the water dried up. That'll stick with me.

The Book of the Law, Aleister Crowley

If I judge it purely as a work of fiction, I think it’s an evocative bit of mythopoeic word-salad. Crowley knew his way around a sentence, and he was unsurprisingly skilled at writing in the voice of a bloviating wizard of yore high on his own ecstatic farts whilst pondering his orb and plotting to cause problems on purpose. Neat to know this is where "The ending of the words is..." is from, hilarious that it's fucking abracadabra. This is the extent of the good things I have to say about it.

Under normal circumstances I could shrug off the odious philosophy and laughably charlatanistic premise with "yeah, that's 1904 for you", but the Book of the Law was written as a magical-religious text, rather than fiction in imitation of one. That extra context raises my hackles and unheimlichs my stomach, which is not helped that the odious philosophy element is "Aleister Crowley was a fascist". Or a sparkling authoritarian, if you prefer. A man who wouldn't be averse to having his boots spit-shined. A true blue prototype for the modern adolescent-edgelord-slash-upper-class-twit-of-the-year-to-reactionary-violence pipeline. By about a quarter of the way through chapter 2 I was rolling my eyes and thinking "oh fuck off mate we've got the Scarlet King at home." He's not particularly subtle about how his ideal arrangement of the universe involves the brutal oppression of the many by the few, he just swaps out the nation-state for re-seasoned Greco-Egyptian mystery religion and appropriated kabbalah.

Normally I would segue into "and here's how I have turned all of this on its head" at this part, since the man's long dead and this along with a lot of his other stuff is in the public domain - but unlike the polyvocalic mess of a long-established religious tradition the reader is left with few fruitful avenues of wiggling their way out of the mess by taking advantage of internal contradictions, and unlike your average pulp story there's no real narrative to transform or characters to shift focus to: there's just Crowley here, echoing in an empty room.

Mirrikh; or, a Woman from Mars, Francis Worcester Doughty
DNF chap 5/30

The story starts enjoyable enough; there’s a psychic man from Mars visiting Cambodia (as one does, as a psychic man from Mars) and a somewhat overly-leisurely unraveling of why (I'm certain that "he just wanted to visit Angkor Wat" is not the actual answer, unfortunately, but it’s nice to imagine. I'd visit Angkor Wat if I was a psychic man from Mars). It’s basic 1890s orientalism, though in the chapters I read the main problems were all the old spellings of city names (Panompin instead of Phnom Penh) and a section of “my guy you’ve spent how many years living here how are you still this wrong about Buddhism.” It’s tolerable up to that point.

Then all that comes to a screeching halt complete with fire and shattered glass because our narrator (who is not a psychic man from Mars) decides he’s just fallen head over heels in love with a young woman who has just been stripped half-naked and whipped by an angry mob of racist stereotypes. A woman he does not exchange a single word with, whose name he does not know, who is at best half his age, and whose age is a concerning string of question marks because she’s only ever described as “a girl”.

This character, mind you, introduces himself and the story by griping about how his wife left him and how that caused him to swear off women and romance for good.

Motherfucker your wife left you because you’re in the fucking emails. You went to the fucking island. Jesus fucking Christ. 

Armageddon 2419 A.D. Philip Francis Nowlan

The first Buck Rogers story. I was expecting it to be racist, but I was definitely not expecting it to be so racist that you could quite literally pull the twist of “they were actually Martians and the whole ‘Han’ thing is a psychic disguise where the observer’s fears and prejudices were reflected back at them” and it wouldn’t contradict anything. The story is so unwilling to humanize its antagonists that they’re physically on-screen for maybe 3, 4 pages max. Everything else is just the airships. You could replace them with automated drones and only lose the racism.

It’s also astoundingly boring. Barely 80 pages long and most of that is clunky exposition padding out the space between incidents of action. Any moment that might be given to internality or character relationships is skipped right over. This would be more tolerable if the action scenes were fun, but they’re boring too! There’s no tension: a threat emerges, and then it is immediately defeated with no lasting damage or consequences. What would normally be the climactic heist of the enemy citadel is actually the leadup to the actual climax, which is the total massacre of a heretofore unseen and barely-mentioned faction. And then it just ends. The whole thing reads like a parody of itself, and this is the first installment.

Good god I need to read something written this century.

The Blind Spot, Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

But not before I do one more PD book for the road. Significantly better than the previous two on the grounds that its greatest flaw is being structurally frustrating.

The material components are good: house with some sort of interdimensional portal in it, a magic ring that drains the life of its wearer, competing supernatural entities who are after it. That’s all good, it’s got the fun conceptual freedom that comes with writing sci-fi before the genre expectations are codified. I could turn the premise into a middling-to-decent SCP article with little effort and into a good one with only a little more.

The problem is that the stakes of the plot aren’t established until more or less the midpoint, which is also when we toss out basically everything that had come in the first half to focus on a character we have barely met up to this point, who then interrupts the flow of events to provide us with a story-within-a-story of his time on the other side of the portal for the next 45% of the book. And this happens right when things are ramping up and characters are becoming more active and finding more clues, and the new plot of the back half feels disjointed and loose, with the new material feeling unconnected even to itself. Stakes and actions and motivations don’t make sense under scrutiny: questions are asked that don’t really need to be, questions that should be asked aren’t asked, answers that could easily clear up what’s going on are brushed off with “I can’t tell you, you wouldn’t understand”. There’s a lot of wheel-spinning when it comes to how information is dealt out, lots of “what is the Blind Spot?” without any meaningful investigation (and a lot of wasting time asking the question) until the sudden burst of productivity at the midway point.. The ending is abrupt, and multiple threads and characters are abandoned, or just confusingly written to the point where I'm not sure what their point in the narrative was. 

Being written in 1921, it’s fully in the mode of scientific spiritualism, which I felt mostly neutral on. It’s just a different kind of technobabble, end of the day, though one I don't find very interesting. 

Added bonus: all of the main male characters save one have a name beginning with H, which makes it damn near impossible to differentiate between them, which is a problem when the first half jumps between multiple POVs.

I wouldn’t recommend it outside of historical curiosity, but I’m glad that I read it.

 

Bookpost 20

Hot damn, bookpost #20.

Bookpost Index 

 

A Comprehensive Introduction to Nostratic Comparative Linguistics With Special Reference to Indo-European 5th Edition, Allan Bomhard

A text that clearly represents a great deal of time, effort, and research on the part of the author; none of it is convincing evidence for the Nostratic hypothesis, and most of it is compelling evidence against. 

[Aside: The Nostratic Hypothesis is a proposed linguistic macrofamily containing most of the languages of Eurasia. As with basically all macrofamily theories, it exists well outside the mainstream of the field.]

I understand the appeal: it would be really cool if Nostratic was real, because it fires up the good ol' pattern recognition and puzzle solving parts of the brain and you know how much I love Recognizing Pattern. I wouldn't even rule out the possibility that something of its general shape could have existed at some point in the deep past, but I don’t think that this can ever be proven, barring sudden access to the Pnakotic Library. We simply cannot know the answer, and we are left with an empty space in which to daydream (and, let's be real here, project our own beliefs onto the past: with enough confidence and elbow grease you can make a convincing argument linking PIE to damn near anything, and they can't all be right.)

[Example: This isn't an exaggeration, here's what I can do just off the dome.]

["*gʷé̄n and be'nal both mean 'wife', which indicates that the original Proto-Indo-Euro-Klingon form was **gʷe'nal; PIE dropped the second syllable while the glottal stop vanished and lengthened the **e; in the more conservative Klingon branches **gʷ > b."]

If Nostratic did indeed exist, and it split into the families that this book claims it did, reconstructing it to any degree of accuracy would require hitting a jackpot a dozen times in a row. Every single proto-language included in the theory would have to be reconstructed accurately on its own, and then you would have to accurately place these reconstructions in relative chronology with each other in further second, third, fourth, and so on orders of reconstruction. For each of these layers, even if you had reconstructions of an outright miraculous level of accuracy, you'd still have to be factor in a margin of error for false positives, loan words, semantic drift, and information entropy. Nostratic isn’t just a second-order reconstruction: it’s five, six, seven orders or more, and each and every one of those would need to be damn near flawless in order to get a meaningful result. 

You who have read my posts on my failed-for-the-moment pre-PIE project will be familiar with difficult this is. The most thoroughly-studied language family on Earth has produced a reconstructive model held together with duct tape and a prayer, with holes you can drive a bus through. That's the best the field has produced: this book hinges on much weaker models, including two that have minimal evidence for their own existence on a good day (Altaic, Elamo-Dravidian) and one that is so loosey-goosey that no one can even agree on a core phonology (Afroasiatic). The comparisons made between the chosen language families are littered with vagaries, maybes, stretches of imagination, inadequate correspondence-based methodology, cherry-picking, extremely fuzzy semantics and flood-the-zone tactics, and rely wholly on the reader not pushing back against the claims that are being made.

[Example: This book draws a lot of material from the long-range macrofamily proposals of Russian linguist Sergei Starostin: Starostin's proto-language reconstructions are consistently characterized by extremely high consonant counts such that, with the right number of mergers and deletions, you can justify effectively any outcome if you are operating purely on correspondences. I think this is an extremely shaky methodology, given how often consonants change according to nearby vowels: did we start with a series of palatalized stops, or did some stops in some branches just get palatalized thanks to an adjacent front vowel that then shifted? Chicken-and-egg quandaries ahoy.]

If this was a creative effort of speculative conlanging, I'd be more positive on it. Quite positive, honestly, if this was reskinned as someone making an Atlantean language for a fantasy novel I would be all on board; filling gaps in the data and going on one’s merry way is perfectly acceptable in those circumstances. But this book isn't a purely creative work; this was written with sincere belief in the factual truth of its contents, and the end result is a projection into the blank canvas of prehistory that, while it clears the bar of "it doesn't take a hard right turn into bizarro linguistic nationalism", is still an argument in search of data built on a house of cards with a foundation of sand.

The one genuinely helpful thing it presents is that, in pursuit of a Grand Unified Theory, Bomhard cites and compares the theories of basically everyone who has ever published anything in the field of historical linguistics. (For better and worse, as many of them are questionable in their own right. Lookin' at you, Joseph Greenberg.)

Black Amazon of Mars, Leigh Brackett

[I had listened to this story in audiobook form via Librivox quite a long while ago, so this is technically a reread - eagle-eyed readers may remember that I swiped the "black amazon" name for the human servants of Orca in an equally long-ago post, though in hindsight that was probably not the best name.]

Sword and planet high adventure. Has some good imagery and the prose is solid. Also contains one of my least favorite tropes of all time: the cool masked warrior is revealed to be a woman and then immediately gets sidelined to a passive role so the inevitably less-interesting male main character can finish the plot. What a waste. The character was already doing cool things, just let her keep doing cool things!

Also contains potentially the weirdest example of pulp sci-fi racism I have ever encountered: the bending over backwards this series pulls to avoid having an actual black man as the protagonist - despite invoking all the signifiers of the colonialist imaginary - would have every chiropractor in the hemisphere breaking down the door to schedule an appointment. Our protagonist Stark has dark skin, excused as being from Mercury, and I could almost buy that as an interesting explanation were it not for the fact that his name in his youth was "Nchaka" (evoking sub-Saharan Africa by way of a prenasalized consonant; the only hit I can find on that name in a cursory search is a festival held by the Ogba of Nigeria which I doubt was the actual source) and much is made of his "wildness", "primal nature" or vaguely defined "instincts" (sigh). But he's definitely not black, guys!

Pull the other one, it's got bells on.

I don’t know if that was Brackett’s doing, the editor’s doing, or if it was Brackett trying to get around the editor through malicious compliance. Literally just stick a population of Bantu speakers on Mercury and give him an appropriate name, this isn’t difficult. 

The Lost Continent, C.J. Cutliffe Hyne

An unexpected treat. I had picked this on a whim and ended up with a thoroughly enjoyable rip-roaring adventure that repeatedly surprised me with how modern it felt. Took a full 50% of the book before the old-timey sexism reared its head, and I've read worse from much more recent books. It would take very little effort to make a modern adaptation

The premise is solid: Deucalion, career philosopher-soldier-priest and former governor of the Yucatan colony, is recalled to Atlantis by direct order of the empress Phorenice as part of a greater plan to bolster her rule in the midst of economic crisis and civil war. The kicker here is that Phorenice isn’t portrayed as stupid. This is a pulp novel from 1899 and the ambitious woman in power is portrayed as canny and competent. She’s blinded by hubris to the real dangers threatening Atlantis, but she’s not portrayed as the idiot running things into the ground where it was once already perfect - the rot was already there, Phorenice took advantage of it for her own benefit, and the narrative is very clear that this is the case. Her sins are the sins of the nobility. 

This isn’t even mentioning Nais, who I described to my partner as “a second baddie has entered the narrative” and honestly don’t want to spoil why. You’ll know it if you read it. She does, unfortunately, get hit with the “demoted to passive character” beam later on, but her arrival is fucking strong. Deucalion himself is more interesting than I expected because of what I think is a bit of intentional unreliability in his steady 1st person POV - he regularly says or thinks things that are at odds with what is being depicted on the page, and a whole lot that is clearly biased by his aristocratic-Stoic leanings.

I had wondered while reading if the author had socialist leanings, but couldn't find any real info - his descriptions of the excessive wealth of the Atlantean nobles, the squalid conditions of the common people, and the casual cruel indifference Deucalion, Phorenice, the priesthood, and aristocracy aim at the underclasses. This could all be me pulling an unintended reading from the text, but it feels intentional in a way that other works of the time would treat this state of affairs as just the way of things.

Also: I haven’t even mentioned the dinosaurs yet! We got antediluvian monstrosities left right and center! No science here, no sir. You’re going to have plesiosaurs attacking boats right off the bat. Somewhere along the line fantasy authors decided they were too cool for dinosaurs, and that's a fucking shame.

Omniligual, H. Beam Piper

Short story about a team of scientists cracking the Martian language during their excavations of one of their ruined cities. There are, of course, some serious handwaves underpinning the exercise just for the sake of practicality, but it holds up pretty well (and doesn't have to do with Sapir-Whorf, which is the only linguistics 99% of sci-fi authors have ever heard of). It's on Gutenberg, you can zip through it in an afternoon.

Qoholeth, Madison Scott-Clary

DNF 45%

I know the author on Discord, she had the series on sale and I grabbed this and its sequels in a bundle. They are, from the outset, a conjunction of elements normally outside my wheelhouse, but I figured it's good to go stretch the legs on new routes once in a while.

Premise: it’s the future, our main character is a furry who hangs out in VR and ends up comatose with their mind trapped in a simulation for reasons unknown.

The fundamental issue with the book, and what got me to DNF, is that it’s just kinda dull. 

There’s no real antagonist; the conflict is wholly based in the mystery of the people lost inside simulations, but there’s no urgency, no tension, no forward momentum. The three POV characters, at least by the point I stopped at, not only hadn’t interacted with each other but barely interact with anyone else:

• RJ / AwDae has one conversation with a friend, and then wanders aimlessly in a simulation with no one else around to interact with.
• The doctor, whose name I have forgotten by the time I write this, technically has her research team, but none of the members have any distinguishing features and they’re basically as interchangeable as the members of a Greek chorus. At the time I dropped the book, she was just beginning to investigate RJ / AwDae's case.
• Ioan, who is from a plotline set in the future of the other two but had not been connected by the time I DNF'd, only ever speaks to the character that hired them to do this investigation.

The short chapters feel like a hamster wheel after a while, moving speedily along to nowhere. The plotline with Ioan and Dear is especially hurt by this, as even the "why" any of this is happening is lost beneath cryptography, data structures, and Dear being immensely unhelpful in that “never ever give a direct answer” fairy chicanery sort of way (on top of being a story about What Art Means and What It Means to Be An Artist, a genre I have never been particularly fond of.)

By the time AwDae has 'eir first revelation wrt the simulation (pg 123 / 44%), the conclusion ("the call is coming from inside the house") is something that should have been top 3 potential options since 'ey got stuck in it seventy, eighty pages ago. The way 'ey realized it was neat (the contents of books in 'eir simulated childhood home reflecting 'eir memory rather than what they actually were), but the realization is so delayed that it paints AwDae as just kind of a dunce. It's not really a twist, it's a moment of "wait, why didn't you consider that"?

Additionally: for a book by and about people with animal-based alter egos, there’s a noteworthy and disappointing lack of variety when it comes to the virtual world at the center of the story. Nobody rolls up with a custom-built anomalocarid rig, or is chilling as an orangutan, or a manta ray, or a slime mold, or a colony of cordyceps-infested wasps, or a giant crab with a house on its back: your options are order Carnivora and nothing else. We’ve got a fennec fox, a skunk, and a cat. This restraint extends beyond the characters to the environment; the functioning simulations we’re shown are a London pub and an apartment, and the anomalous broken one is a high school and surrounding neighborhood. The fully-immersive VR tech that somehow avoided getting subsumed directly into the Torment Nexus is wholly unweird, in total opposition to the actual real-life examples of VR Chat and Second Life. (My bias towards overwhelming weird detail is in full effect here, so take that as you will.)

There are, I think, four sequels; I don't know how or if any of this changes with later installments.

Note: RJ / Aw Dae uses ey / em pronouns in the book, which makes the narrator in my head sound like The Fonz. This was extremely distracting while reading the book, but is an issue with the reader rather than the text. 

Three Imposters, Arthur Machen

A fixup novel of some otherwise unconnected short stories, and while I don’t know how much the frame narrative was doing for me, Machen’s got a richness to his language that I appreciate. It’s fun seeing where HPL picked up some of his bad habits, though saying that makes it seem like I had a worse time than I did. I think Machen is better than Lovecraft at just dropping a “man, look at this inexplicable fucked-up thing” (though there were some clunky ad-hoc explanations in these stories, don’t get me wrong), though he’s never met a paragraph he can’t extend for three to four pages. Much less concerned with building up any sort of world or setting. I didn’t have any strong feelings of “oh damn I want to write something with this”, but I also have a small sample size.

Oomphel in the Sky, H. Beam Piper

I have complicated feelings on this one. On the one hand, I generally have very little patience for “let’s use aliens as an obvious stand-in for indigenous peoples of Earth”; on the other hand, this story takes that and builds it to the lesson of “you know you should probably actually listen to people and meet them where they are.” Specifically in this case, the aliens believe that there’s an immanent apocalypse due to the orbital weirdness of their world mixed with contact with humans, society is beginning to break down in the mass hysteria, and it’s ultimately avoided by taking a bunch of cunning men up on a rocket so they can see things for themselves and then cook up an explanation for why it isn’t the end of the world that functions within their pre-existing worldview. 

Piper’s 60s libertarianism is very front and center with this one, and I feel similarly complicated feelings about that. The “practical rugged individualism solves everything” element (which was present in Little Fuzzy and Omnilingual, but is strongest here), is quite pronounced, and while he did get it right about liberalism’s shortcomings vis a vis “it’s all fun and games and kumbaya until you have to actually acknowledge complicated cultural differences that aren’t easily sanded down”, there’s a non-zero amount of complaining about strawmen (he’s got a stand-in university for Berkeley and starts sounding like Hannity every time it’s mentioned). Plus there's the elephant in the room of Piper’s 60s libertarianism playing a sizable role in his suicide. So yeah, complex feelings. 

The Sundering Flood, William Morris

DNF 5%

The first (c.1897) fantasy novel to include a map of the secondary world at the front, or so the summaries go. It might be a perfectly fine adventure story (William Morris seems like an interesting fella, old-timey socialist and proponent of the arts-and-crafts movement) but it’s written in some truly unbearable faux-archaic language. No amount of historical curiosity will make me think that “meseemeth” is an acceptable thing to inflict on a reader. The map’s nice, though.

 

Green Antarctica,  D'Valdron

DNF 6%

A novel alt-history / speculative evolution prompt (Antarctica never fully glaciates) undercut at every opportunity by the eye-rolling excesses of performative online edginess. I skipped all the way to the end and can confirm that the incessant torture, rape, cannibalism, bestiality, necrophilia, genocide and assorted other crimes against humanity does not even have the decency to end with “The Aristocrats!” 

Also worth mentioning is that this text leans very heavily on both Poe and HPL, and certainly honors the legacy of both by being outrageously racist in that very specific online way of skipping the slurs and going straight to “I've invented an elaborate rational justification for why these dark-skinned people eat babies, isn’t that shocking?”

Come off it, mate. Tsalal deserves better than this shit.

 

**

 

Gameable Content Bonus

The Gold Tiberius (City encounter, via Three Imposters)

While passing through an alley towards their destination, the party is startled by  the sudden appearance of a man sprinting down a perpendicular cross-alley and throwing a small object in their general direction.

The Gold Tiberius: A large golden coin, resting nearly on top of the bars of a sewer grate. 

• Face: head in profile of a famous emperor of antiquity. 

• Reverse: a faun with his euphemistic flute, splashing around in a reed-lined pool beneath the word VICTORIA. Pure gold and in perfect condition. 

• A bit of historical research (or just having a classically-trained wizard in the party) will identify this as a semi-legendary coin, the only survivor of coins cast to commemorate a grand orgy hosted by the emperor on its face. Vanished from its last known whereabouts over a century prior.

Should the players take the coin, they will soon encounter a young man with glasses while traveling to your intended destination. He's tall, thin, brown-haired, sideburned, and has a nervous look about him. This is an encounter at a distance, or maybe he bumps into a PC; it's something that characters will notice in the moment and forget immediately afterward, and they won't get a chance to speak to him. This is the Young Man With Spectacles that had startled the party in the alley - he is on the run from parties out to kill him for stealing the coin from them, and one of them will, perhaps a couple days later, approach the party trying to suss out the Young Man's whereabouts.

The Imposter will whip up a story about how they need to find the Young Man - a lost family member in trouble, an unexplained occurrence in his presence, financial matters that need resolved. They aren't going to mention the Tiberius at all, but they will cold read the players for all their worth.

From this point it's something that should be tailored to the game at hand, with the following constants:

• The Imposters will kill the Young Man if they find him, and without the PCs intervention they will find him within a week or so.
• The Imposters will not go after the PCs unless they are given reason to believe that the party has the coin; if so, they will try to social engineer it out of the party's hands before resorting to force.
• The Imposters have access to ritual magic
• The coin is worth holy shit GP; taking it to an official assessor will not go without notice and will put the Imposters on the party's trail. 

Bookpost 19

Bookpost Index

 

Tales From Failed Anatomies, Dennis Detwiler

The stories in this collection are all pretty solid. There are moments where I think the bleakness gets laid on too thick and I felt myself giving it a bit of an eye-roll and an “okay, boomer” in those moments (the opening and ending stories get hurt by this), but on the whole it's just a solid read of desperate people in way over their head, as DG ought to be.

It is interesting to read DG's canon fiction as an old SCP-head who fundamentally disagrees with the core premise of DG’s canon: Regardless of the circumstances, I think that eventually, inevitably, people will come to understand the basics of the Weird Shit. Sure, we don’t know why the statue shits blood and snaps your neck if you blink, but we know that it shits blood and snaps your neck if you blink. We can work with that. That’s enough to plan around. Limited understanding is safer than no understanding, and eventually, inevitably, you will end up with limited understanding.

DG’s dedication to maintaining the true Lovecraftian “the unnatural is always malicious and dangerous and can never be understood (please ignore the parts where I explain it)” is simultaneously DG’s biggest strength and weakness. When it hits it fucking hits, but it more or less only hits the same note. It’s a thematic cul-de-sac and if you spin your wheels there for too long you start to go “yeah, yeah, sure, deep ones; you can cut the theatrics mate, they’re just fish people.” There are even a couple moments where the stories come close to going "they're weird and looked fucked up, but they are ultimately people for good and for ill", and then backs down from that, which is disappointing.

Strange Authorities, John Scott Tynes

DNF 4% 

Dropped this one shortly after Fairfield showed up. That guy oozes “SCP author avatar character circa 2010” and I got my fill of that character type in 2010.

(That is, the archetype of "character who is super good at Doing the Thing and totally the coolest that has been put into an otherwise serious story where that sort of cartoonish antics should result in some natural consequences, but the consequences never actually emerge because they're a cartoon character and thus can be as big of a dangerous asshole as they want regardless of how little sense that makes in-universe.") 

Last and First Men, Olaf Stapledon

I don’t know if I’d rather have a long conversation with Stapledon over lunch, or punch him in the nose. Last and First Men is a book of expansive, grand ideas suffused with some of the dumbest bullshit I have ever seen put to page. It’s stuffed with kludgy, overwrought prose; the science is questionable at best; Stapledon repeatedly wastes time on the boring shit and then skips over the interesting parts. It takes a third of the book to get to the bonkers transhumanism that you’re promised by the back cover blurb.

The opening chapters on the First Men (that is, humans as we are now) is laughably and myopically focused on national character as the driver of history (this will be a recurring theme: Stapledon fully subscribes to the idea of civilizations possessing an ineffable spirit that dictates their fortune and character and it is so god damn tedious to read), and further myopically limits itself to a future that goes no farther than Europe, China, and the States. History, apparently, does not happen elsewhere in the world. And while he touches on the economic factors driving the major conflicts of the era, he keeps returning to the well of “one relatively minor international incident triggers a catastrophic war” - which makes sense coming off the heel of WW1 but come on man, we all know that Ferdinand’s assassination was just the excuse. I could see it happening once, but it is a repeated trend over and over and over again in a way that's tiresome instead of thematically meaningful.

There are moments where Stapledon is scarily prescient - a single paragraph describing how America’s early dominance in mass media led to the subsequent mass export of the worst parts of American culture to the rest of the world, or describing how the fervor of Soviet communism was ground down by the entropic millstone of time - but these are glimmers in a sea of being either comedically or exhaustingly off the mark.

When we do at last get to the bonkers transhumanism (a full third of the way through the book), it becomes a lot more fun, but you really REALLY get to see the limitations of scientific knowledge in 1930. Sometimes it’s fun, but a lot of the plot developments hinge on stuff that is just flat up nonsense. There is a very of-that-time condescension suffusing the entire exercise, like an obligatory part of science in 1930 was just total disdain for the things studied. 

The first handful of transhuman species (2 through 5) have solid concepts and plenty of neat stuff to swipe, but as the book progresses Stapledon's enthusiasm seems to flag, as he will gloss over millions of years and multiple descendant species with little or no detail at all despite introducing a fascinating premise (the bulk of the terraformed Neptunian biosphere being derived from humans is mentioned in passing and never explored, despite encompassing species 9-17). And, of course, there is always the obligatory disdain for those human species who are not quote-unquote civilized enough for Stapledon to consider them worthwhile.

Ultimately it’s a frustrating book, but it’s a frustrating book with vision. And it is officially public domain in the United States as of January 1st next year, so there’s nothing stopping anyone from making a better version.

(Also, in a perfect example of science surpassing projections, the book has humans discover antimatter power millions of years before rocketry.)

The Cruel Empire of Tsan-Chan, Christian Read

This is almost entirely a setting book, so I’m going to judge it as such instead of a dedicated game book. The included NPCs, adventure hooks, and one gameplay mechanic are perfunctory and not very interesting to me.

Tsan-Chan is a prime showcase of why, for all my love of Delta Green, I don’t give a shit about Call of Cthulhu: when handed a pristine blank canvas and an enormous box of Legos, the CoC impulse is to reach down and cut your own hamstrings to prevent you from doing anything remotely interesting or novel.

Now, I don’t think this is the author’s fault: I think they did an admirable job at expanding a single-line throwaway in Shadow Out of Time into an entire setting. The core elements - “there’s a big horrible fascist empire filled with deranged demigod nobles, with a stadium-size mutant empress who communes with the powers beyond, at constant war with the Deep Ones and the zoanthropes who had their sapience blasted out of their brains by Cthulhu’s waking” - that’s good! Like legitimately good as a baseline, and that baseline quality is probably why there haven’t been any large explorations of Tsan-Chan written since  it was published (or at least I haven’t found any beyond an occasional blogpost or shotgun scenario). 

But since this was part of Chaosium’s Miskatonic University Monograph series (a predecessor to the DM’s Guild and later Miskatonic Repository), it comes with the shackles of the Call of Cthulhu rpg branding.

In Tsan-Chan, we’re told that the empire worships Hastur. That’s it. They worship Hastur because Hastur doesn’t like Cthulhu. Does this meaningfully impact their culture at all?  No. Does this bring in any material from The King in Yellow? No. Is Carcosa even mentioned? No. Does it reveal anything new about Hastur or provide any novel interpretation? No and no. You could cut him out entirely, or replace him with Gorthomax the Skull-Fucker and lose nothing.

So it continues with most of its other Mythos and Mythos-adjacent elements; mentioned in passing, connected in a way to make you go “oh that could be a cool connection, I guess” (mentions of Zothique being a prime example), but never expounded. The only new territory is with the Empire itself, all the other elements remained locked in IP amber.

A minimal attempt to avoid the implicit Yellow Peril is made, but I don’t think it’s particularly successful - if you’re going to go “it’s not actually China, it’s just located there”, have a bit more cultural stuff to differentiate it (like maybe don’t have the main philosophy be ‘The Way’). 

Perhaps more successful is when the book gives a little nuance to the ordinary inhabitants of the empire: they aren’t all mindless drones in an impervious fascist machine, but it’s done in this whiplash way where it will humanize them in one section ("they're ordinary people who live in a perpetual state of extreme trauma") and jump back to “yeah they’re all basically insane” in the next. There’s repeated mention about revolutionary cells working away in the background, but they’re not detailed to any extent and are couched in “oh but if they actually succeeded wouldn’t the empire be at the mercy of its enemies?” - technically, yeah, but that also would mean that the Empire is providing an accurate assessment of its adversaries (a practice wholly unsupported by historical precedent). I wish there was more about these cells, because that is where the fun RPG material would live.

(DG cell getting shunted forward in time by the yithians to disrupt specific operations in the empire? Yes fucking please.)

The pieces are here to make something cool, the author just needed the freedom to actually make that cool thing. DG’s interpretation of Bast in God’s Teeth or the King in Yellow in Impossible Landscapes are best-in-genre precisely because there’s a willingness to push boundaries beyond what’s come before both from the writers and the editors (though this is unevenly distributed). 

CoC has been doing the same damn thing for seven editions and 40 years and that’s somehow more depressing than D&D’s infinite recursion.

Spelling and grammatical errors are very common throughout, as well. 

Avatars, Inc (Various)

DNF 5%

This one’s an anthology, so while I feel somewhat bad about tossing it after the first story (S.L. Huang’s Just Add Oil), I don’t feel that bad because Just Add Oil isn’t a good introduction, or really that great of a story in general. It’s a prime example of Tor house style, ‘new adult', squeecore, whatever string of phonemes describes this mode. Floaty, toothless first person present, treading a sentimental footpath so worn down it’s become a prison. Simplistic tropes, well-behaved and beige. It's a floppy-necked stuffed animal that's put in none of the work.

The collection was published March 13, 2020, which means the stories were written in the waning days of the Before Time, which explains why this story even entertains the idea that the US would even consider sending aid to protestors in Hong Kong and why the initial example we have of remote-operated android body is “going to visit grandma” instead of “they immediately hooked it up to the Torment Nexus”: desperate liberal optimism.

[Aside: S.L Huang has shown up twice before in this series; both stories were duds, and one of them was an "oh won't someone show some sympathy to the poor war criminal with family troubles?" story.]

Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo European, Adams & Mallory

After months of reading academic papers on the subject, it’s refreshing to read something that’s more descriptive and less theoretical. Mallory and Adams are focused on “here’s the evidence, here’s what we can reconstruct based on that, we’re not going to start making our own hypotheses”. It’s a very good way of making a book comprehensible to non-insane people, though it does mean that most of the book is lists of words (but if you’re reading it in the first place you are probably a fan of lists of words).

Compared to most other reconstructions I have seen, Mallory and Adams play things very skeptical and very conservative, which ultimately works in their favor. They call out questionable or tenuous cognates, they notate when words are geographically limited, point out the weak points in the theories about potential homelands and religious practices, and base their reconstruction on what can conclusively be proven instead of what reconstructioneers believe should be there.

There are also some surprisingly good jokes.

Highly Complex Syllable Structure, Shelece Easterday

Proving once again that I am immensely fun at parties, this is a linguistic survey to determine what the hell ‘highly complex syllable structure’  even is, and what traits are most commonly associated with it. It’s very academic and very inside baseball, but if I ever decided I wanted to sketch out Aklo, this would be my first source.

What Lies Beneath, Chris Scaffidi

A choose-your-own adventure dungeoncrawl novel with dice. Technically it’s a solo gamebook, but since it appears that I’m now adding RPG-related material to these posts it goes here. 

You wake up in a dungeon, with amnesia and a fucked-up arm covered in lesions and leathery tumors. From there you have to get out. The RPG mechanics are simple - your class determines your starting stats, & health, and occasionally some other factors. Each room gives you a series of choices to make, and you progress step by step. Get far enough along and you can reach a checkpoint, where you are encouraged to take a photo of your character sheet at that moment to reference if you die and reload later. When you die, unspent XP will carry over to your next character, allowing you to start with some improved stats.

There are three types of dice rolls in the game, to go with the three stats. Strength checks involve rolling dice = to your stat and trying to beat the target number, Wisdom checks involve forming a line of dice and using X number of moves / modifications to re-arrange them into sequence, and Dexterity checks involve trying to hit but not topple a 2-die tower from X distance away (helpfully marked out on your character sheet.

While I like the idea in principle, I’m less enthused in practice. It works fine when you’re sat down at your desk with physical dice, but makes it much more difficult to handle if not impossible when on the bus or using your phone. There is an alternative method for dex rolls that doesn’t use the dice tower, and one could probably just get away with applying the strength check rules for everything, but I feel like the latter of these solutions might upset the intended balance (since a difficulty 3 STR check is way easier to accomplish than a difficulty 3 DEX check)

Regardless, it is still a lot of fun and I want to read more game books like this. I’ve done two full runs and died horribly twice, and I’ve only seen a fraction of what the book contains. I’d play it a lot more if it had the public transit option, but so it goes I suppose.

Architect of Worlds, Jon Zeigler

A worldbuilding supplement for solar-system generation. Complex enough that I had to install a scientific calculator on my phone to handle the equations, but oddly meditative when you get into the flow. It’s more or less a solo RPG, since I wouldn’t call it useful as a game tool. Requires a whole lot of scratch paper and a very well-organized table of results (since you will refer back to them constantly), which makes it pretty unwieldy in the later stages.

I did end up working through the entire thing for a randomly-generated system, which netted me a red dwarf with a handful of tidally-locked venusian worlds, one barren mercurial, and a large water-world that did manage to evolve simple multicellular life down in the abyssal vents. The system works, but it ends when you have finished the broadest-scale details of the planet as a whole - life is a minimal focus, and human interaction none at all. If you want to actually use it as anything besides a novelty, you're going to need other resource.

Red Nails, R.E. Howard

Decided to try reading Conan again, and this time it worked. This story slaps. It’s all-pulp orange juice. There’s a lady with a sword! Conan fights a dinosaur! There’s some period-and-genre appropriate psychosexual content that someone smarter than me could write a very good essay on! It's not nearly as racist as it could have been!

Monstrome, Arnold Kemp

It's a testament to how fucking good Arnold is at writing rpg stuff that his unfinished draft document runs laps around basically every other monster book on the market. Every entry is dense with suggestions for tactics, modifications, encounters, behaviors, everything you could possibly want out of a monster. Even the lore presents connective tissue you can chain together into something interesting. Where Monster Overhaul was "here's good useable generalist material about a bunch of monsters", Monstrum is its "here's some extremely in-depth material about a few monsters".

The Epiphany of Gliese 581, Fernando Borretti

A brief, snappy, dreamlike sci-fi story in the vein and scale of Orion’s Arm or House of Suns. There’s not much of a plot, characters are brief wisps of personality, but  that doesn’t really matter. It’s evocative imagery, big ideas, and Vibes. Each chapter broken up into sub-sections, which are in turn built of paragraphs of only a few sentences each. It almost borders on poetry.

Etidorhpa (again), John Uri Lloyd

DNF (again) 52%

I, a known and certified fool, tried to give this one a second shot. For a brief moment it looked like I had fallen prey to dramatic irony, stopping my first attempt just pages before something happened, but the follow up to that momentary glimmer of something happening was many long pages of nothing fucking happening.

There is no plot. There are no characters beyond mouthpieces for interminable back and forth exposition. There is a monotonous procession of One Weird Thing to the next but no interaction, or explanation, or variance. It’s just the encounter for this area. Most of the time it’s not even an encounter, it’s just a novel bit of landscape. 

Not even the zany pseudoscience is fun, because it manages to be both unbearably long and interrupted by even longer and more unbearable interstitials explaining about how water can move higher than its source. Yes, that's interstitials plural. We spend FOUR CHAPTERS on middle-school science experiments, completely divorced from the already-tenuous plot.

Occasional interesting moments or striking images (aided by the art) exist, but are insufficient. 

Bookpost Index

Micro-reviews of everything I read that I can form an opinion on. 

Last updated  8/12/26  

**

Bookpost 1 (8/15/19)

• River of Teeth (Sarah Gailey)
• Quantum Thief, Fractal Prince, Causal Angel (Hannu Rajaneimi)
• Unsouled (Will Wight)
• Accelerando (Charles Stross)
• The Red Plague (Jack London)
• Of Sheep and Battle Chicken (Logical Premise)
• Star Maker (Olaf Stapledon)
• Worm (John McCrae)
• Foreigner (C.J. Cherryh)
• Dawn (Octavia Butler)
• Time and the Gods (Lord Dunsany)
• Luna: New Moon (Ian McDonald)
• The King in Yellow (Robert Chambers)
• Winter Tide (Ruthanna Emrys)

Bookpost 2 (9/10/19)

• Sabriel & Lirael (Garth Nix)
• The Collapsing Empire (John Scalzi)
• The Vela Episode 1 (SL Huang)
• The Black Tides of Heaven (Jy Yang)
• Annihilation (Jeff Vandermeer)
• The Silent Tower (Barbara Hambly)
• City of Saints and Madmen (Jeff Vandermeer)
• Seveneves (Neal Stephenson)
• Burn (James Patrick Kelly) 
• The Only Harmless Great Thing (Brooke Bolander)
• The Emperor's Blades (Brian Stavely)
• The Last Unicorn (Peter S. Beagle) 

Bookpost 3 (11/18/19)

• Who Fears Death, Binti (Nnedi Okorafor)
• Autonomous (Annalee Newitz)
• The Traitor Baru Cormorant (Seth Dickenson)
• Red Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
• The Murders of Molly Southbourne (Tade Thompson)
• Please Pass the Guilt (Rex Stout)
• Abhorsen (Garth Nix)
• The Interface Series (9Mother9Horse9Eyes9)
• The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov) 

Bookpost 4 (5/4/20)

• Gentlemen of the Road (Michael Chabon)
• The Yiddish Policeman's Union (Michael Chabon)
• Wild Cards 1 (ed. GRRM)
• All Systems Red (Martha Wells)
• Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Seanan McGuire)
• Do You Dream of Terra Two? (Temi Oh)
• Proxima, Ultima (Stephen Baxter)
• Plot it Yourself (Rex Stout)
• City of Brass (S.A. Charkaborty)
• From a Certain Point of View (various)
• Sisters of the Vast Black (Lina Rather)
• The Stars are Legion (Kameron Hurley)
• UNSONG (Scott Alexander)

Bookpost 5 (8/29/20)

• Silver in the Wood (Emily Tesh)
• The Calculating Stars (Mary Robinette Kowal)
• Strangest of All (ed. Julie Novakova)
• Gulliver of Mars (Edwin Lester Arnold)
• Herland (Charlotte Perkins Gilman)
• Jingo (Terry Pratchett)
• Galactic Derelict (Andre Alice Norton)
• Heretics of Dune (Frank Herbert)
• Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee, The Chinese Bell Murders (Robert Van Gulik) 

Bookpost 6 (12/18/20)

• Sorcerer of the Wilddeeps (Kai Ashante Wilson)
• The Secret Tomb (Maurice Leblanc)
• Night Watch (Terry Pratchett)
• Dangers Visions (ed. Harlan Ellison)
• Ventus (Karl Schroeder) 

Reread Post: Lord of the Rings (5/21/25) 

Bookpost 7 (12/18/21)

• Beowulf (trans. Thomas Meyer)
• Cordelia's Honor (Lois McMaster Bujold)
• Pandora's Star (Peter Hamilton)
• Invader, Inheritor (C.J. Cherryh)
• The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay (Michael Chabon)
• Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents (Octavia Butler)
• Dinosaur Summer (Greg Bear)
• The Fifth Head of Cerberus (Gene Wolfe) 

Bookpost 8 (4/22/22)

• The Sharing Knife, Parts 1 & 2 (Lois McMaster Bujold) 
• Tales of a Dark Continent (Morthoron)
• Gideon the Ninth (Tamsyn Muir)
• A History of What Comes Next (Sylvain Neuvel) 
• Circe (Madeline Miller)
• When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain (Nghi Vo)
• Hammers on Bone (Cassandra Khaw) 

Reread Post: Wizard of Earthsea 

Bookpost 9 (8/22/22)

• The Phoenix Empress (K. Arsenault Rivera) 
• Various Elric Stories (Michael Moorcock)
• Ring of Swords (Eleanor Arneson)
• Grace of Kings (Ken Liu)
• Lud-in-the-Mist (Hope Mirrlees)
• The Forever War (Joe Haldeman)
• Making Money (Terry Pratchett)
• Machine (Elizabeth Bear)
• The First Sister (Linden Lewis)

Reread Post: Book of the New Sun, part 1

Reread Post: Book of the New Sun, part 2 

Bookpost 10 (1/6/23)

• Urth of the New Sun (Gene Wolfe)
• Hegira (Greg Bear)
• Empress of Salt and Fortune (Nghi Vo)
• Forge of God (Greg Bear)
• A Memory Called Empire (Arkady Martine)
• Children of Time (Adrian Tchaikovsky)
• The Cherokee Syllabary (Ellen Cushman) 
• Elder Race (Adrian Tchaikovsky) 

Bookpost Special: Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart (2/11/23)

Bookpost 11 (4/13/23)

• Children of Ruin (Adrian Tchaikovsky)
• Something About Eve (James Branch Cabell)
• Monster, vol 1 (Naoki Urasawa)
• Uzumaki (Junji Ito)
• A Billion Wicked Thoughts (Ogi Odas and Sai Gaddam)
• Voyage to Arcturus (David Lindsay)
• Etidorhpa (John Uri Lloyd) 

Bookpost 12 (6/8/23)

• The Hall of the Mountain King (Judith Tarr)
• Children of Memory (Adrian Tchaikovsky)
• Always Coming Home (Ursula K. LeGuin)
• The Lady Who Picked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen's Window (Rachel Swirsky)
• Move Underground (Nick Mamatas)
• Because Internet (Gretchen McCulloch) 

Bookpost 13 (7/25/23)

• The Sparrow (Doria Russell)
• Border Keeper (Kerstin Hall)
• A Strange Manuscript Found Inside a Copper Cylinder (James de Mille)
• Medea: Harlan's World (Harlan Ellison et al)

Bookpost 14 (9/17/23)

• The Wizard Knight (Gene Wolfe)
• Delta-V (Daniel Suarez)
• Sacred and Terrible Air (Robert Kurvitz)
• Goddess of Atvatabar (William Richard Bradshaw)
• Shards of Earth (Adrian Tchaikovsky)
• Scud: The Disposable Assassin (Rob Schrab) 

Bookpost 15 (1/23/24)

• Lathe of Heaven (Ursula K. LeGuin)
• Ninefox Gambit (Yoon Ha Lee)
• Some Desperate Glory (Emily Tesh)
• Knights of Sidonia, vol 1-6 (Tsutomu Nihei)
• The Songs of Distant Earth (Arthur C. Clarke)
• Moon of Crusted Snow ( Waubesheg Rice)
• Carrie (Stephen King) 

Bookpost 16 (5/11/24)

• And What Can We Offer You Tonight (Premee Mohammed)
• These Prisoning Hills (Christopher Rowe)
• All the Horses of Iceland (Sarah Tolmie)
• A Stranger in Olondria (Sofia Samatar)
• Exordia (Seth Dickenson)
• There is No Antimemetics Division (qntm)
• The Prince of Milk (Exurb1a) 

Bookpost 17 (8/19/24)

• Story of Your Life and Others (Ted Chiang)
• Flatland (Edwin A. Abbot)
• The Madman (Kahlil Gibran)
• The Northern Caves (nostalgabraist)
• The Book of Japanese Folklore (Thersa Matsuura)
• The Complete Poems of Enheduana, the World's First Author (trans. Sophus Helle)
• Native Tongue (Suzette Haden Elgin) 
• House of Rust (Khadija Abdalla Bajaber)
• Burning Roses (S.L. Huang) 
• Gyo (Junji Ito)
• Golden Kamuy, vols 1~14 (Satoru Noda) 

Bookpost 18 (1/20/25)

• Books of the South (Glen Cook)
• Kabbalah: A Very Short Introduction (Joseph Dan)
• Echoes of Mist-Land (Aubertine Woodward Moore)
• Little Fuzzy (H. Beam Piper)
• House of Suns (Alastair Reynolds)
• Book of Imaginary Beings (Jorge Luis Borges)
• The Marigold (Andrew F. Sullivan)
•  Gods of the North (Robert E. Howard)
• The Door to Saturn (Clark Ashton Smith)
• The Unspoken Name (A.K. Larkwood) 

Bookpost Special: House of the Rain King (3/15/25) 

Bookpost 19 (8/9/25)

• Tales from Failed Anatomies (Dennis Detwiler)
• Strange Authorities (John Scott Tynes) 
• Last and First Men (Olaf Stapledon) 
• The Cruel Empire of Tsan-Chan (Christian Read)
• Avatars, Inc (Various)
• Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European (Mallory & Adams)
• Highly Complex Syllable Structure (Shelece Easterday)
• What Lies Beneath (Chris Scaffidi)
• Architect of Worlds (Jon Zeigler)
• Red Nails (R.E. Howard)
• Monstrum (Arnold Kemp)
• The Epiphany of Gliese 581 (Fernando Borretti)
• Etidorhpa (again) (John Uri Lloyd) 

Bookpost 20 (12/28/25)

• A Comprehensive Introduction to Nostratic Comparative Linguistics With Special Reference to Indo-European 5th Edition (Allan Bomhard)
• Black Amazon of Mars (Leigh Brackett) 
• The Lost Continent (C.J. Cutliffe Hyne) 
• Omniligual (H. Beam Piper) 
• Qoholeth (Madison Scott-Clary) 
• Three Imposters (Arthur Machen)
• Oomphel in the Sky (H. Beam Piper)
• The Sundering Flood (William Morris)
• Green Antarctica (D'Valdron) 

Bookpost 21 (3/17/26)

• The Author of the Acacia Leaves (Ursula K LeGuin)
• Enchantress of Venus (Leigh Brackett)
• Queen of the Martian Catacombs (Leigh Brackett)
• The Book of the Law (Aleister Crowley)
• Mirrikh; or, a Woman from Mars (Francis Worcester Doughty) 
• Armageddon 2419 A.D. (Philip Francis Nowlan)
• The Blind Spot (Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint) 

Bookpost 22 (8/12/26) 

• Diaspora (Greg Egan)
• Bowling with Corpses and Other Strange Tales from Lands Unknown (Mike Mignola)
• Grunts (Mary Gentle)
• Journey to the West (trans. Julia Lovell)
• Sight Tremendous and Abhorred (Ognyen Plamen)
• Plague of Pythons (Frederick Pohl)
• The Book of Mormon (Joseph Smith)
• Legacy (James Schmitz) 

Bookpost Special: House of the Rain King

 

(Disclosure: Author gave me an ARC and asked me to write a review.)

Bookpost Index

House of the Rain King is a good fucking book. That’s the short version. Book good. If you are reading this blog you are in the target audience and I feel confident that you will have a decent or better time.

The long version is more like this: House of the Rain King is a story about a secluded valley along the Tile river. Every century or so the Rain King returns to the valley, bringing a catastrophic flood with him. At the height of the flood he marries a saint of the birds, and when he departs the waters recede and people rebuild. The titular House is a monastery dedicated to the Rain King, and preparing for his return, and this is the lucky year when the Rain King shows up with a band of fairies (and the mercenary Sparrow Company) in tow. Things progress from there.

There is a sense of grubby realism pervading the book, a thematically appropriate muddiness that serves as its backbone. Nothing quite lives up to ideals. Shit happens for reasons no one could have predicted. People die in stupid ways. Some things never get resolved, or only manage to reach anticlimax. Characters make mistakes and bad decisions but they don't make them because they're suddenly, inexplicably stupid. People are somewhere between good and bad; mostly decent, but scuffed at the edges and bent and dent from transit through life.

It’s not grimdark, though I don’t know what I would call it instead. Probably nothing: genre designations are prisons, and House is good precisely because it isn’t playing to genre conventions. While the Sparrows are very much in the tradition of the Black Company and the Bridgeburners, they’re less heightened than the latter and less wallowing in the mud and blood and guts than the former.

The world is built with a light touch, and that’s what makes it all sing. The pieces work together in harmony: nothing is so alien as to require excess exposition, but the familiar is not treated with the contempt of tropes recited out of obligation. It’s focused on a single valley, the people who live there, their beliefs and history, and doesn’t wander down side roads. The only lore is localized, and that is a wonderful change of pace.

The characters are another highlight: they are well-fleshed out and enjoyable to read, but the thing I love most of all about them - and probably the book as a whole - is that the characters speak and act like real people. There’s a naturalism and a lack of performativity to the dialogue; characters having experience and knowledge is treated as a given. They react to things as would be appropriate to who they are: the teenager who has spent his entire life in the valley is familiar with its flora and fauna and hidden places. The veteran mercenaries are going to snap to attention and get to work when trouble shows up, because they’ve done it before.

We see this to great effect in the dungeon-delve section (there’s a dungeon-delve section, by the by, it’s very good) - the Sparrows have looted tombs before, and on encountering an unfamiliar enemy they jump right into revising their strategy as soon as they figure out what’s going on. No wasted time, no talking in circles, no waiting for the convenience of a plot beat to get them out of it. Right to business.

It’s extremely refreshing. You’ve all seen my complaints about YA-ified spec fic in my bookposts, House is a shining example of what can be accomplished when that trend is avoided.

Actually, thinking about it now, House of the Rain King feels like a pre-D&D fantasy novel. Which is a wild thing to say considering it is D&D as fuck. Straight up late G+ era OSR goodness, I could absolutely see Skerples writing up the central dungeon. But it’s D&D as fuck without being married to the trade dress of D&D, if that makes sense - like it feels like a book that a D&D adventure would be based on, rather than a book that is based on a D&D adventure.

 

Yeah, that's probably the best way to describe it.

 

Book good, go read it.

Bookpost 18

Bookpost Index

 

Books of the South, Glen Cook

DNF / on hold

I return to the Black Company for the first time in a decade, and find myself in a similar place as I was then. When Cook is in his groove, and when you’re able to match yourself to that groove, it’s a great read. If you’re not in the groove, or if you lose the groove, it’s a tough sell. 

Cook’s greatest strength remains his depiction of warfare as messy and uncertain and anticlimactic and senselessly violent. Bad shit just happens for no reason as often if not more so than things go your way. That part is as good as ever.

I find things faltering when he starts moving beyond that into the bigger picture, especially when it comes to antagonists: the Shadowmasters, appropriate to their name, may as well be cartoon characters. Elements of the first trilogy come back around in a pretty unimpressive way. The depiction of fantasy!India is…it could certainly be a lot better. I am beginning to think that trying to read all three in a row (because I have the omnibus version) was a mistake, and that I only have enough in me for one Cook book at a time.

Maybe I will come back to it in the future, though if I look at my track record with this review series I very rarely ever do that.

Kabbalah: A Very Short Introduction, Joseph Dan

It’s a very honest title. Does a solid job for its length of going through the stages of thought that kabbalah has passed through over the last 500 years.

Echoes of Mist-Land, Aubertine Woodward Moore

DNF 5%

A book which I list here purely to say that, even when grading on the curve of “the book is from the 1880s”, I think the Nibelungenlied might be one of the most tedious works of literature ever devised. Whoop dee fucking doo, Siegfried is just so special and perfect. He is the most perfect and special boy. Heaven forbid a character trait emerge.

Little Fuzzy, H. Beam Piper

A short, punchy novel that, through mechanisms I have yet to determine, resides blessedly within the public domain. Worth your time. It’s aged better than a lot of sci-fi from the era - not a shining example of progressivism by any means, but certainly a winner of the “not as bad as you could have been” award. The pacing is swift, it’s an easy read, there are some good turns of phrase and sci-fi concepts scattered throughout, and it’s free. I’ve had a much worse time with books I’ve paid for.

House of Suns, Alastair Reynolds

I was not a fan of Revelation Space when I read it…seven or eight years ago? But I saw this at Half Price and thought “why not give Reynolds another shot? This one’s a standalone.”

And I am fucking glad I did. This book is solid gold. I haven’t had one that keeps the beat-to-beat plot going this fast and this smooth since Some Desperate Glory. It might take 100 pages for the inciting incident to kickoff, but that doesn’t matter because every single chapter is going to introduce something new and interesting; some new element of the setting, or a revelation about a character, or a complicating event. And not in the way that some stories will take where they keep introducing things and then never deliver, either: threads get tied off or woven back into each other as new secrets are revealed. Characters’ motivations are obscured just enough for you to keep wondering about what their actual goal is, and when those motivations are revealed it always makes sense as the source of their previous actions.

Enormous additional accolades go to the book’s emphasis on the unimaginable enormity of space and time. No FTL here. Our POV characters are effectively immortal and have technology to mitigate a lot of the downtime, which leads to something I have never seen before in my life: a story that can maintain its tension and stakes even when anywhere from a few dozen to tens of thousands of years are being elided. It’s got some incredible sci-fi concepts to chew on, and several that will definitely be working their way into my standard repertoire (friendship ended with cryosleep, now abeyance is my best friend)

Go read it. 

Book of Imaginary Beings, Jorge Luis Borges

A bestiary in the classical sense; a work wholly unconcerned with ecological realism, historical accuracy, consistency, or internal logic. This isn’t a negative. It flows dreamlike, one entry to the next like a lazy river in book form. Some of the entries are undercooked, and I do find myself getting a bit irritated by the “which of these sources are even real”, but on the whole it’s a great read and you’re bound to get something out of it. Even if he does use the Wade-Giles romanization of Chinese. And does that horrible Orientalist thing of literally translating Japanese names instead of just writing the names.

The Marigold, Andrew F. Sullivan

DNF 55 / 349

The vibes should have been my thing (mold-based near future dystopic weirdness), and the writing is overall strong (character department in particular, from the part that I read), but upon realizing that there wasn’t really an overarching plot and that we were jumping to an entirely new character and an entirely new scenario every 6 pages or so, it lost me. I love me a cobbled together frame narrative out of fragments, but there’s gotta be something bigger underneath to provide scaffolding.

Gods of the North, Robert E. Howard

Had a long-languishing collection of his short stories on my kindle, and quickly realized why it is long-languishing: I fucking hate Howard’s writing. I hate it in that extremely unhelpful way where I want to rewrite it just to make a point, despite it being practically guaranteed as a waste of effort better put towards original works. I have a chronic case of “I can fix it” for the literary works of old dead racists.

This is an extremely short story, it doesn’t have Conan in it, and it is an absolute nothing of a story. A plotless exercise in psychopathic violence, plus a sexual assault. There’s no other content to be had.
HPL can potentially give you an interesting idea to chew on, hidden somewhere in the neurotic racism; REH doesn’t even bother with interesting ideas.

The Door To Saturn, Clark Ashton Smith

Changing gears drastically, I then read this story immediately after Gods of the North and had a blast. It fucking slaps. Smith, in a wild departure from his Weird Tales contemporaries, actually knows how to do setup and payoff. There are jokes in this story that are still funny, on top of just not letting up on the weird and evocative imagery. Definitely going to read the rest of his stuff now, this left an excellent first impression.

The Unspoken Name, A. K. Larkwood

DNF 4%

The opening, as far as I read, is Tombs of Atuan with balsa wood prose. Few things are more damning than hitting "I wish I was reading a better, different book" when you have barely moved past the prologue. If you're going to do trope-dominated genre fic, it needs prose to back it up. The one interesting thing it has going for it is the fact that the main characters have tusks, which I presume is to imply that they are orcs. As an aside, I think tusks on orcs is usually pretty silly - they're an aesthetic leftover from old school pig-headed orcs that are only there for repetition's sake and no one except the occasional absolute madman bothers to explore the ramifications of what happens to a human jaw when it has tusks.

 

Bookpost 17

Bookpost Index

Story of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang

A solid collection overall. Some weak ones, but mostly good. Tower of Babylon is an absolute banger and I am surprised that they chose Story of Your Life for the movie adaptation over it. Seventy-Two Names is my favorite and the one problem with it is that it is a short story and not a novel, because it is paced like a novel and I want more of this bizarro “what if outmoded Victorian scientific theories were actually true and also practical Kabbalah is involved”. Hell is the Absence of God really manages to hone in on the horror of the total arbitrariness of miracles. The only one that really flopped for me was the one about the guy who suddenly became superhumanly smart, that one was pretty dull except for the part where he invents not-Ithkuil.

 

Flatland, Edwin A. Abbot

When reading a suitably old book, you’re bound to run into some yikes moments. Flatland hits well above its weight class by delivered with some truly brutal satire that, as an anomaly in the genre, still works well over a century later. Our narrator the square does indeed praise the virtues of his iron-fisted eugenecist caste-system theofascist state with all the sexism, classism, and undifferentiated blind cruelty one would expect from a Victorian gentleman…and the book’s entire point is how he and the society he lives in are blind to greater reality and all of their oppression and repression is based on shit that doesn’t matter one bit in the grand scheme of things. It’s a short book, so saying more will dilute the effect, but I definitely recommend it. Easy read. Certainly telling that it was by book of choice while on 8-hour layover in Philly.

 

The Madman, Kahlil Gibran

This is a book that I do not have the ability, currently, to adequately describe in a shotgun review. I enjoyed it, it’s public domain, it’s 40-odd pages of prose-poetry, go read it.

 

The Northern Caves, nostagabraist

A wild bit of web fiction: a small cadre of nerds in the early 00s attempt to decipher the incomprehensible mysteries of a children’s fantasy series of questionable quality. Not an actual children’s fantasy series of questionable quality, a fictional one that contains some traits of extant children’s fantasy of questionable quality but is entirely its own thing.

Anyway, this contains both an incredibly accurate depiction of early 00s forums as well as one of the best examples of characters gaining Insight this side of Bloodborne. I recommend it if you want something with a very specific vision of weirdness that manages to deliver on it, though be warned that the ebook version I download borked the forum post interstitial chapters and didn’t display everything correctly.

The Book of Japanese Folklore, Thersa Matsuura

The Uncanny Japan podcast in book form. Definitely geared for a younger / more general audience, so it’s not a perfect fit for me personally, but the art is nice and it’s a breezy read. Good gift material.

The Complete Poems of Enheduana, the World’s First Author, trans. Sophus Helle

Last year, I read a terrible book about the writings of Enheduana and wrote at length about how bad it was. This book is the polar opposite of that one, and I couldn’t be happier with it. 

The translation is snappy and an easy read, and Helle does a very striking bit of design by limiting the lines to how they appear in the tablets: the lines are all in a narrow column, with about 2/3rds of a page left blank. Missing lines are represented with a row of asterisks (one of the poems is almost entirely dots because of this). 

This is all accompanied by a very thorough exploration of the historical context of Enheduana herself, the Babylonians who inherited her texts and used them as part of their classics curriculum, and how those texts were re-discovered in the 20th century. Every time there is a blank spot where we simply don’t have enough data, Helle will present the possibilities but never settle on one as definitive (an extremely welcome attribute). There are footnotes and endnotes galore, most of which are illuminated and several of which are very funny (To paraphrase some of the highlights -“We can translate this line but can’t figure out what it means, it’s probably a pun”; “This is probably a dick joke”; and “This is definitely a dick joke.”

 

Native Tongue, Suzette Haden Elgin

DNF 40/301

A book of feminist science fiction about linguistics, which has the unfortunate timing of being written in 1984 and thus aged like milk in the sun on all three accounts. This is on top of just stodgy, clunky prose, minimal plot, briefest whiffs of characterization, and no real care for the setting beyond what is necessary to justify the bunk linguistics (hard Sapir-Worf is apparently the only linguistics thing sci-fi authors have ever heard of, which is baffling in Elgin’s case because she was apparently an actual linguist. Come on, you’ve studied Navajo and you can’t think of anything better than “your language determines what thoughts you have”?)

The only reason this series is remembered is because there is a conlang attached, which is the only reason I picked it up. The conlang does not, in fact, actually occur in the book, despite the book being mostly about its creation and about how impossibly miraculous it is for someone to make up new words to describe concepts that don’t have dedicated terms (please note the sarcasm: this is the process that all languages are doing all the time, forever.)

 

House of Rust, Khadija Abdalla Bajaber

DNF 18/252

There is something about the prose in this one that just doesn’t work for me. It’s dense and obtuse, but not in a way that invites engagement. Weird tense shifts, pronouns with unclear antecedents, and other assorted rocky writing methods made it difficult from jump.

Burning Roses, S.L. Huang

A novella that is very well written and has some great character work about guilt, forgiveness, and generational trauma, which then undermines all of that in the last 20 pages by committing the cardinal sin of mixing “story about wrestling with familial drama” with “this guy committed some fucking war crimes”. This keeps happening, and I would like it to stop. But sure. Reward them with peaches of immortality because mother and son have forgiven each other and come to terms with their mutual failings. I’m sure the charred corpses of the hundreds of people killed by the giant magical firebirds will take great solace in the afterlife knowing that the little shit who gave the order finally got over his issues with his mother. Sure. Fucking wonderful. Fucking redemption arcs, not even once. Forgiveness is not a gatcha machine you can just put tokens in until you win the prize you want.

A Court of Thorns and Roses (+sequels), Sarah J. Maas

Didn’t actually read these, but my partner has been listening to the audiobooks and telling me about them. Everything I have is second hand summaries of the first 5 books. 

It’s kinda like observing antimatter from a safe distance, or an encounter with a logic wholly alien and orthogonal to the one I know.

I don’t know how my partner puts up with my constant “this all sounds miserable, why do they not simply destroy the aristocracy, when does the plot about destroying the aristocracy happen, why has no one hit Tamlin in the head with a heavy object, so is there an actual government with like, roads and taxes or something, would it be possible to just invent a gun, what do you mean they can’t do a C-section they have resurrected the dead twice” and so on. 

The one actually meaningful critique thing I can say is “fated mates and weird age gaps and magical bloodlines and the weird and kinda dehumanizing insistence on using male/female instead of man/woman make me want to crawl out of my skin and flee the premises, what the fuck.”

 Also I don’t understand how a series that keeps bringing up fantasy politics consistently doesn’t seem to care one bit about fantasy politics. (Actually, I do understand this: Maas is not a political materialist; the fantasy politics she writes about are not beholden to the logistical calculus of the flows of food, information, transit and violence.)

Gyo, Junji Ito

It’s Junji Ito; you’re going to get gross shit, horrible, absurd things happening, and a steady escalation in terrible horrible no good very bad shit. I sat down and binged it in a single day, and while I don’t like it as much as Uzumaki, it was effective with the creepiness and the grossout factor. Unfortunately the characters are paper-thin, which means that it is also pretty dang misogynist out of genre convention. It’s rough. I was hooked by “how is this going to escalate”, but if that’s not enough to keep you going, you’re probably not going to have a great time. 

Golden Kamuy, Satoru Noda

LET’S FUCKING GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Primo combination of Things I Love to See. Certified freaks: check. Dudes getting in over-the-top fights: check. In-depth asides about anthropology: there’s a fucking works cited at the back of every volume we are checked and ready for launch. By volume six we have seen at least three dudes get absolutely wrecked by bears. 

Sugimoto gets a surprising amount of surprisingly subtle characterization as a young man aged beyond his years by trauma, and that’s something you don’t see often in this conceptual space - especially not with as light a touch as you get here. And major props for nimbly dodging the magical indigenous person trope - Noda’s research into Ainu culture really shows, because he will take every opportunity he can to go “here is how the Ainu live in their environment and how their culture is materially informed by that environment.”