A Quest for Leslie Stone: Update 1

It's been about three months since I started on this odd little mission, so I figured it's a good time to pop in with an update.

My initial dive into the copyright renewal archives turned up just about as well as I had hoped: of the 20 short stories Leslie had published in the pulps, only one of them had ever been renewed -1937's "The Great Ones", which was also the only story published in Astounding Stories (later the famous Analog Science Fiction, which was generally a lot better at renewing copyright than Gernsbeck was.)

After figuring that out and plugging everything into a spreadsheet, I went and downloaded pdf scans of all the relevant magazine issues. UPenn's renewal archives were an invaluable tool here, as they not only listed which issues had been renewed and which ones hadn't, but included direct links to all the public domain periodicals that had been uploaded onto Internet Archive. Since Leslie was writing primarily in Weird Tales and the other Gernsbeck pulps, basically everything was up there already and all I had to do was download them. The one exception was "The Space Terror", which was published in a very small fanzine called Spaceways that I could only find thanks to the unsung heroes of preservation over at fanac.org.

After that, I ran everything through some OCR software and copied everything over into a big document. The rest is the heavy lifting of making sure everything is formatted correctly.

As of writing this, 10/19 stories have gotten their first pass. I'm focusing mostly on fixing spelling errors and re-adjusting the spacing and paragraph breaks at this stage; second pass is going to be the in-depth line-by-line to make sure everything is exact.

It's remarkably fun to just put a stream on the other monitor and vibe. I would say I wish I could do this for money, but work tends to suck the fun out of things and I like that this is actually fun. Educational, too; science fiction (and fiction, and writing in general) has changed a lot in 95 years.

Some observations: 

• Perhaps the biggest thing is the cumulative effect of all the small changes; shifts in spelling, grammar, word usage. Highlights include: "imbedded" for "embedded", "h'm" for "hm" or "hmm",  ellipses of four dots like this. . . . and using interclausal dashes like-this instead of like - this.
• There's a story where Character A is recounting something to Character B, normal frame narrative stuff, but most of that recounting is dialogue so nearly the entire story is in nested quotes.
• Rays! We love a ray. X-rays, Z-rays, T-rays, any kind of ray you can think of. No such thing as a plot that can't be jumpstarted with the right kind of ray.
• In some of the earlier stories, spaceships are usually called "space-fliers" or just "fliers", and in the very early ones they aren't even rocket shaped - they're spherical in a story from 1930. We're right in that sweet spot between "you can fly between planets with an airplane" and "everything is either a rocket or a saucer".
• Odd scare quotes show up a-plenty, ex. going "through" a portal. I assume this is because the concept was not as blase at the time as it is to readers now, but it has the side effect of making the dialogue sound stilted in a way I can only describe as a robot imitating lower-tier children's educational television with weirdly placed emphasis on key words. 
• Lots of italics for emphasis, too. 
• There are more footnotes than I expected, though I don't know if these were Leslie's or the editor's. Most of them are definitions of alien terminology, or clarifications about science and whatnot.
• Since I'm working off of magazine scans, all the ads are included. Weight loss regimens, get-rich quick classes in chemistry and radio repair, a guy promising the mystic secrets of the universe if you'll just buy his book. Some things never change.
• It's no surprise that there's a fair bit of colonialist fantasy going on in some of these stories, but what's truly wild, and perhaps most educational, is just how dedicated that particular genre trapping is to denying the reality of even the story it's found in. Prime example: the local aliens are continually described as primitive - only rudimentary language, fire but no metalworking - but then much of their part of the narrative is taken up by their elaborate social and religious hierarchy and their copious supply of worked metal goods. And this is in a story where the thesis is "the human prospectors who came to this planet are idiots who got themselves killed because they thought they could take advantage of the locals!" Which, I suppose, might indicate that it is an intentional subversion and this entire bullet point is moot in this particular circumstance. 
• I have finally learned what the HOME key does. 

During this whole process, it's given me a lot more appreciation for the pulps, beyond just a "this is where a lot of things started" level: they served the niche that fanzines played in the postwar decades and that webfiction and fanfic serve today. A place for amateur writers to get out there and just write shit and maybe make some money on the side. Does it mean that a lot of it's bad? Yeah, of course it does. But that's the point of amateur fiction; it's an environment where you can safely write stuff at low investment and both improve the craft in real time and build an audience (I learned more about writing from the SCP wiki and running this blog than I ever did in any of the classes I took in college.)

Anyway, the next update shall happen when it happens. Probably when I get all of Pass 1 done.

A Quest for Leslie Stone

A couple nights ago, as the Youtube algorithm flailed desperately in an attempt to parse my viewing history into something advertisers can understand, I was recommended a video with maybe 200 views about a pulp science fiction author named Leslie F. Stone. I'd never heard of her before, but "sci-fi author I have never heard of" + "public domain" is a guaranteed way to get my attention. So I brought up her Wikipedia page and started digging.

Leslie wrote from 1929 - 1940, all of them short stories published across the pulp magazine ecosystem (sans a compilation book published in 1967 and a short autobiographical essay in 1974). Quite a few of these stories are definitely public domain, and the rest are cozy in that grey area of "did it get renewed or not?"

But when I checked Gutenberg, she only had one story to her name - 1929's When the Sun Went Out.

There's a quote (that I can't remember the source of off the top of my head) that's something like this: the  history of women (or queer people, or people of color) in genre fiction has to constantly start over from 0, because they are consistently left out, forgotten, overwritten, sidelined, and ignored by the historical narrative. The same sort of narrative that leads to thinkpieces in whatever thinkpiece magazine du jour is announcing with self-satisfied triumph that science fiction is written by women, now - as if they hadn't been writing it from the beginning.

And once that got in my head, the next thought was "if not now, when?"

I haven't felt this fired up (positive) about something for a long, long while. Let's see if I can sustain it.

Here's Stone's bibliography, sorted according the year and copyright status. Would not have been able to do this without an extremely helpful Kirkus Reviews article which provided the magazine and month for each of her stories (which are left out of her Wikipedia page)

Already on Project Gutenberg

• When the Sun Went Out (1929)

Very Definitely in the Public Domain

• Out of the Void (Amazing Stories, Aug-Sep 1929)
• Men With Wings (Air Wonder Stories, Jul 1929)
• Women with Wings (Air Wonder Stories, May 1930)
• Through the Veil (Amazing Stories, May 1930)
  
• Letter of the 24th Century (Amazing Stories, Dec 1930)
  

Very Definitely Not in the Public Domain

• Out of the Void (1967 novel version)
• Day of the Pulps (1974) 

Possibly in the Public Domain

• Across the Void (Amazing Stories Apr-May-Jun 1931)
• The Conquest of Gola (Wonder Stories, Apr 1931)
• The Hell Planet (Wonder Stories, Jun 1932)
• The Man Who Fought a Fly (Amazing Stories, Oct 1932)
• Gulliver, 3000 A.D. Wonder Stories, May 1933)
• The Rape of the Solar System (Amazing Stories, Dec 1934)
• Cosmic Joke (Wonder Stories, Jan 1935)
• The Man With the Four-Dimensional Eyes (Wonder Stories, Aug 1935)
• When the Flame-Flowers Blossomed (Weird Tales, Nov 1935)
• The Fall of Mercury (Amazing Stories, Dec 1935)
• The Human Pets of Mars (Amazing Stories, Oct 1936)
• The Great Ones (Astounding Stories, Jul 1937)
• Death Dallies Awhile (Weird Tales, Jun 1938)
• The Space Terror (Wikipedia says 1939, Kirkus Reviews doesn't provide a magazine, but searching the name got me a zine called Spaceways, where it appears in Issue #7.)
• Gravity Off! (Future Fiction, Jul 1940)
  

A cursory search through the UPenn periodical copyright renewals database doesn't ping for any renewals of the stories, but since we're trying to prove a negative here I'm going to double-check with New York Public Library's renewals database.

Then once I have a list and find all the scans, I guess all that's left is to start transcribing. Somehow, after over 30 years on this planet, I only learned earlier today about Distributed Proofreaders. 

Who knows how it will go, but let's see where it ends up.

 

 

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.”

Some Thoughts About Xenolanguage and "Story of Your Life"

A while ago (timely as ever), I got to hang out with Layla and play a session of Xenolanguage. Here are some of my thoughts on the matter, in no particular order. (Her thoughts are over here)

Xenolanguage is a roleplaying game where you take on the roles of the research team sent to investigate the Mysterious Alien Vessel. It's Arrival the storygame. You make your characters, set up your relationships, and go around the table step by step drawing prompts from the deck and playing through the various encounters.

It's Arrival: the Game. It couldn't pretend to be anything else if it tried.

It's not a puzzle game, that should definitely be said up front. I didn't know what I was getting into with this besides the pitch, but I had thought that there would be some sort of puzzle element or decipherment going on: this is not the case at all. There's no meaning to the symbols for you to discover; what you get instead is some prompts to guide players towards "what do you feel that this symbol is?"

This was fine for a while, but by the end of the (~3.5 hour) game, it felt pretty hollow. Since you're stuck on the path set by the pre-ordained plot, there's only so much forward action you can take, and when on reaching the end it felt like it didn't really matter. My character ended up spearheading a theory that the alien ship was a damaged probe spitting back junk data without any meaning to it at all, because that's kinda how I felt towards the end of the game. Maybe that means it succeeded, I don't know.

Granted, I have a pretty particular way of engaging with these topics (hard science fan with enough knowledge of linguistics to be dangerous), but I do feel that playing things so close to Arrival (in all ways except the actual linguistics) hurt it overall. It's a game about aliens and language, technically, but it is really more of a game about 4-5 characters and their relationships: the aliens are entirely incidental.

It was still fun to hang out with friends, and it certainly worked well enough as a game about characters and their relationships for the most part, but I left it feeling "that was a nice afternoon" rather than "that was a good game."

-----

"Story of Your Life" is a short story by Ted Chiang, which I just finished reading (several months after writing the above segment). It is, as one likely already knows, the progenitor of Arrival, and thus the ancestor of Xenolanguage.

 

It seems appropriate that a story about language has got translation issues.

Villanueve did a great job with the visuals, and I prefer them in the film to the story. The story is better at delivering its themes, but ran into the issue of the delivery method not playing well with film as a medium. I am saddened that my copy of "Story of Your Life and Others" has ARRIVAL on the front cover, with your obligatory "now a major motion picture" slapped on it.

Now for whatever flubs the film committed in adaptation, Xenolanguage looks a whole lot worse in comparison to the segment I wrote a month and a half ago. It sacrificed having an actual central idea (the story is centered on figuring out how the Heptopods interpret time, and what that means for the character who can write in their language, interlaced with what that means for the narrator and her relationship with her daughter) for just evoking the aesthetics of the movie, and the end result is just empty. Not a revelation, I called it hollow just up the page, but in light of what was lost in the double translation of story to film to game it feels vaguely insulting and somewhat cynical. Loaded phrase but that's what my gut is calling it. Like the insides were scooped out, the chassis was put in a (much too big) box, and there wasn't any new substance added to the inside or out. Everything to make it work is put on the players, and maybe that works for the dedicated improv crowd, but in the practical world it needs more scaffolding than we got.

Bookpost 15

Bookpost Index

 

Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. LeGuin

A book that, as I was reading it, gave me a pronounced feeling of calm for not only the day I read it, but for a day or two afterwards. LeGuin had the magic touch. Very good book, made for a very enjoyable weekend. In lieu of a review, I will just leave with a quote that has stuck with me.

"Are there really people without resentment, without hate, she wondered. People who never go cross-grained to the universe? Who recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it? Of course there are. Countless, the living and the dead. Those who have returned in pure compassion to the wheel, those who follow the way that cannot be followed without knowing they follow it, the sharecropper's wife in Alabama and the lama in Tibet and the entomologist in Peru and the millworker in Odessa and the greengrocer in London and the goatherd in Nigeria and the old, old man sharpening a stick by a dry streambed somewhere in Australia, and all the others. There is not one of us who has not known them. There are enough of them, enough to keep us going. Perhaps.”

Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee

DNF 146/317

This is a weird fucking book. Only way to describe it. For a while it kept me hooked - it was so bizarrely unconcerned with explanations and so unrelentingly sociopathic that I had to keep going...for a bit. Then I put it down for a couple days and hoo boy that killed that trend stone dead.

This book is a content void. The plot has no discernible stakes, no tension - it's wheel spinning. There's a huge space battle that is neither exciting nor tense. The characters are so flat and lacking in internality that they are impossible to describe as people, and more are constantly being introduced. The setting is exceedingly loosely sketched: there's a space-fascist empire with a rigid caste system and an obsession with calendars for reasons I learned via spoilers which are the one neat idea (the word "calendar" is used to mean "civilization-scale social superstructures sustained by consensus reality that powers all the exotic technology") that does not justify the rest of the book. Nothing is explained, ever, at all, and this is a problem because the prose is so sparse that there are not nearly enough context clues to figure out what any of this shit means. So the spaceships are called moths. Okay, fine. Do they actually look like moths? You keep using the word calendar for something that is not a calendar and you're sure as shit not going to tell me what the damn spaceships look like. Spaceships that, mind you, are where the bulk of the story takes place, utterly severed from anything besides some jackboots in a few pressurized rooms. The prose is like a mouthful of flour straight from the bag. You really start to notice how words get repeated.

This book being an award darling is not surprising, merely more evidence that anyone who thinks awards mean a damn is not to be trusted.

Important: This is not a sci-fi book in anything but aesthetic. It is _aggressively_ fantasy, but not in a good or enjoyable way. It's people throwing energy blasts at each other in a featureless void for reasons we don't give a shit about.

Addendum: I also now, somehow, have two nickels in the "award darling sci-fi novel about a woman in a government job and no other meaningful defining traits in her life with the mind-imprint of an old curmudgeonly political maverick stuck in her brain through whose aid she will learn that empire is bad, actually" jar, which is fucking bizarre that it has happened twice.

 

Some Desperate Glory, Emily Tesh

Banger. Absolute banger. Aces. A+. Let's fucking GO. White-knuckle grip on the covers. Tesh is able to take what would normally be an extremely hum-drum premise (A young woman in a dystopian authoritarian society discovers that Things Are Bad) and makes it sing through some truly excellent character building and a commitment to never letting up on the gas. it never lingers longer than it ought, and it knows when to breathe. The tension at points got so high I had to take a proper break to come down from it all. At every point where other works might soften the blow or take the easy, this book goes for the gut punch. There's moral complexity! We get to see the horrible sausage of space fascism get made, and we get to see it through the eyes of Valkyr the true believer as the system she served takes off the mask and reveals she had been an object to be exploited in the eyes of command all along.

I can't overstate the quality of the character work: Valkyr gets most of it, but even minor characters get fleshed out so that I can remember and identify them easily. Valkyr's arc is immensely satisfying to experience as she goes from propaganda-spouting stooge through the long road of deradicalization and into becoming a more complete and better person.

My one minor complaint is that the ending is weak, and the book would have been better with the last 2 pages or so chopped off. But the mild letdown of "this isn't as good as the 300+ pages of solid gold that preceded it" is barely worth mentioning. Go read it.

Knights of Sidonia, vol 1-6, Tsutomu Nihei

It's got some great sci-fi concepts that it plays around with (ex: sudden acceleration changes on a giant colony ship kill thousands of unlucky people) but the characters are extremely flat, the plot just kinda there, and the action often difficult to follow. I liked BLAME! more, even when it had less in terms of characterization and plot.

 

The Songs of Distant Earth, Arthur C. Clarke

A book that has been rendered more or less obsolete by the novels that followed in its footsteps (I will limit myself to one mention of Children of Time, and use it here.) Clarke's inability to write about human beings, their culture, their relationships, or anything else involving people, is on full display here, and is somehow the focus. There are some interesting concepts here (colony ship from a destroyed solar system finds surprise colony, needs to refresh its ice shield before moving on), but there's hardly a plot to speak of. Some potential conflicts are introduced and then just...resolved neatly, or dropped entirely. There's a mutiny, but it doesn't really ever get off the ground. There are sapient sea scorpions, but nothing really happens with them.

But my god did Clarke not understand people. "This colony had no religious works in the original computers and so they have a utopia but very few swear words" is truly baffling. Not the "atheist has very inadequate idea of how religion develops, changes, or works in the lives of people" sense, that's par for the course; it's the fact that somehow this colony has one swear word, which is the name of the local volcano. Somehow people no longer piss and shit and fuck, I guess. They do fuck, in weird robotic, performative ways, but it's a step up from the absolutely bottom of barrel low expectations in that regard.

 

Moon of Crusted Snow, Waubesheg Rice

A story about an isolated reservation community of the Ojibwe nation in northern Canada trying to survive the winter as the rest of the world falls to an unspecified apocalypse (all the power went out, and that's all the info you're getting. Works in its favor.) The prose is straightforward, and gets the job done. There may be a few too many characters for a book without a character list, and the plot is more a meander, but in terms of realizing its core concept I think it delivers. The gut-dropping realization of just how bad things have gotten hits as hard as you would hope. 

 

Carrie, Stephen King

I have not struggled with a book this much in a very long time. "It's only 180 pages, you can push through, give it the old college try" I said to myself. If I hadn't, I would have quit on page 10. I don't know if the struggle was worth it.

King's raw and unfiltered stream of consciousness style is a pain - it works fine enough when you're used to it, but I found myself re-reading entire pages before I hit page 10 because I had no idea where characters were standing in relation to one another. The diegetic interludes - newspaper clippings, interviews and the like - had no formatting whatsoever to separate them from the rest of the text. If it was posted to the SCP wiki I'd leave a comment saying "Downvoted until you stick those excerpt sections in a quoteblock", which is certainly an indictment of my own hubris if it is nothing else. But nope, no quote blocks and no three center-aligned asterisks, except in two specific instances where the split between the narrative and the diegetic element took place at a page break. Bizarre.

When it falls into the groove (right around the beginning of Part 2) things are okay, but in order to get there I ended up with long stretches of reading a page or a paragraph or two and then staring out the window for reasons I can't adequately explain. I can recognize why people like it and what King is doing well, but I'm not feeling it. When King is on point, he is very on point. He's got a real good grasp of characters and their internality, but that grasp is extremely unreliable. He loves introducing new characters out of nowhere as if you had any idea who they were supposed to be. On and on.

TLDR back half was good, front half was a drag, King ain't for me.

 

Bookpost 14

Bookpost Index

 

The Wizard Knight, Gene Wolfe

DNF 524/909

It feels like something impossible has happened. But I guess they can't all be winners, and while it pains me to drop a book that I would in most respects consider better than Urth, the opening act of Wizard is an absolute slog.

The book has a lot to commend it: the world is fascinating, the quality of the prose is Wolfe-standard excellent, and there is certainly a lot of stuff I am ignorant of that can be dug into. Unfortunately, Alzabo Soup has not covered this book, so my main resource is of no aid and I haven't looked into finding another.

My main issue is Able. He's basically just boring Severian, and I mean that as the greatest insult I can muster. He's the same character except less engaging at every opportunity: he's a teenager from an abusive living situation, is sexually abused by an older woman, has a way of looking at the world utterly disjointed from reality, and will do whatever anyone tells him to do with absolutely no second thoughts. But he lacks the...entertainment value? that Severian has. Able is a cipher, and while I grok that yes, he's clearly a kid from a bad home life who has been transported to a world where he is rewarded for random acts of violence, it's not really fun to read. Severian is a dunderhead and we know how his background informs his fucked up behavior and you can have loads of fun catching him in lies or laughing at how dumb he can be about basic things. Able is amnesiac and tight-lipped about what he does remember, and so when he randomly beats a ship's captain into submission for the crime of doing his job or his bizarre cruelty to Uri and Baki I just tune out because there is no coherent reason for why that I can discern.

The opening of Wizard is terribly dull and terribly slow, and when Able finally re-appears we get a scene that boils down to:

"Do you, Baki, reject Setr? Specifically you, Baki, and not me, Able, who is still going to kill Kulili because Setr told me to, I don't have to reject Setr and I not only don't have to give anyone a reason, but there is no reason. There are no thoughts whatsoever in my head."

That's what killed it for me. It's such a bizarre episode of hypocrisy and I didn't have any faith that it's be resolved, let alone even addressed.

Delta-V, Daniel Suarez

DNF 34/340

A novel about the first asteroid mining mission, or more properly the lead-up to the first asteroid mining mission. Didn't care for the prose, didn't care for the pacing. Skipped ahead and saw that most of the novel takes place on Earth.

Sacred and Terrible Air, Robert Kurvitz

The prequel of sorts to Disco Elysium and absolutely incomprehensible without having played the game. Honestly it's barely comprehensible even having played the game. But that doesn't matter, because it is incomprehensible in the way of dreams, or of certain modes of poetry. It's experiential. It is wild and vivid and beautiful and bizarre and grotesque and when it clicks...it works. I can't properly recommend it to people unless they are in for the experience. But if you are in for the experience, it's a wild ride and once I came to grips with what it was offering it was incredibly engaging in the back third.

Goddess of Atvatabar, William Richard Bradshaw

DNF 35%

Public domain hollow earth novel from 1892. It's not a good novel by any standard we'd have today, not really, but it is charming in its absolute and utter sincerity at every step. Bradshaw was, to put it bluntly, extraordinarily ignorant of how the world worked (or very good at giving that impression), and yet somehow, in a book from 1892, this never manifested as virulent racism or sexism. Like still grading on a curve but getting a full third of the way through a book of this genre from this era without getting an eyeful of that is remarkable in the extreme. Sure it's more than a little orientalist but that seems to have manifested mostly in long descriptions of how pretty the buildings are.

In its place there's a sequence where, in spite of there being absolutely no evidence to support this whatsoever, a scientist boldly declares that the language of the Atvatabari is a letter substitution cipher of English, and he is 100% correct. It's so ridiculous that it goes right back around to being charming. Also the author was apparently chair of an anti-vivisection society so that's a gold star.

Shards of Earth, Adrian Tchaikovsky

DNF 125 / 548

Another bust from a favored author, what a bummer.

It's competently written and the setting is a nice, if played rather straight to the tropes modern space-opera. FTL, aliens you can talk to, space gods, all that good stuff. Nothing revolutionary but it does for a time scratch the itch. The prologue features more or less an exact description of one of my Celestials appearing to ruin everyone's day, it's very neat.

Unfortunately, I have reached the end of my ability to stomach rustbucket spaceships with found family crews full of gold heart-bearing rogues. I get the desire to go back to Bebop, but Bebop still exists. You can watch it right now! It's still good! It's still better than all the shows and books trying to capture its magic because, here's a secret, those shows and books are imitating Firefly, which is to Bebop as the shadows flickering on the demiurge's cave wall are to the numinous.

Tchaikovsky is not able to escape this. the way characters are presented as actors in the world, the way they talk to each other, there is a Whedonish tinge to it, which had been absent from Children of Time. CoT is also one hell of an act to follow so I can be understanding to an extent, but Shards of Earth is just...plain and kinda boring. All the components are there to be great, and Tchaikovsky is more than capable of it, but it just didn't work. I wonder how much Orbit editorial dictated the tone?

Scud: The Disposable Assassin, Rob Schrab

In progress

Hell yeah let's fucking GO! Great comic. Masterclass of motion and action. Positively dripping with style. Never lets up with the bonkers, keeps everything rolling with some very sleek "yes, and"-ing. It's great! There's a universe where a tv adaptation of this comic filled the niche of Invader Zim. There is one scene of a (mostly elided) sexual encounter that has definitely not aged well and it was a major swerve from the rest of the comic but besides that, aces.

Update 9/18: Reading further, there is a noteworthydrop in quality in both writing and art after volume 15. Sussudio bears the brunt of being a woman in late-90s early-aughts alt comics, and hoo boy has that aged like fine milk.

7 Grimoires and Lost Texts

Libri Pontificales

Latin, ~290 BCE

A record of the names, prayers, and sacrificial rites of every god known to republican-era Rome. This copy contains 2155 entries, many of which are written in shorthand and contain nothing beyond name(s), altar type, sacrifice, and holy day. Language is obtuse and archaic, with some older passages lapsing into Etruscan.

• Make Contact - Regardless of deity, the rituals follow the same transactional outline of sacrifice and request. The difficulty lies in deciphering the procedures, procuring the correct offering, and correctly identifying the subject.

Monster Manuela

English, 1977

A copy of the Monster Manual for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. "Happy 12th birthday, Manuella!" is written on the inside front cover in faded blue pen. Book contains copious marginal notes and annotations, most of which are the mundane but enthusiastic commentary of a teenage dungeon master.

• Door to the Roots of Zan - It works best on cellar doors, basement doors, on doors unused or long-locked. Doors to rooms that have no windows. The passage was always there, you just lacked the means to see it.

The Dzyan Dissection

English, ~1990s

A 3-ring binder containing several hundred pages of the writings of Helena Blavatsky; the text has been annotated with terse, matter-of-fact commentary pointing out every contradiction, inconsistancy, unsubstantiated claim, logical fallacy, historical untruth, and theological misconception in the text, leading to a commentary several times longer than the source text itself.

• Null - Fully laid bare by the anonymous redactor, the combined ontological weight of the source text's inaccuracy will dissipate any true occult workings it comes in close contact with. Rituals will fail, enchantments will fizzle out, the anomalous will be rendered mundane. Mild effects will occur within 3 meters, substantial effects at 1 meter, and total obliteration of the unnatural elements when touched.

Last Great Dangerous Visions

English, 2037 (alleged); 1985 (first documented copy)

Short story collection of trangressive science fiction. 28/47 authors are extant individuals, though none have any record or memory of writing the stories contained within. The remaining 19 authors are of unknown ontological status.

Only the copyright page, index, and titles are readable: the rest has been redacted. Still, those who have come into contact with the book or learned of its existence will vouch for the contents' status as haunting, grotesque, transgressive, taboo, and other such adjectives. When pressed about the contents, reponses will be vague; those that contain any meaningful description of the contents will bear no correlation with any other account. Reconstructions of the stories remains unlikely.

• Anomalous properties unknown. 

Book of the Waters

Ge'ez, ~1410s

Fragmentary apocryphal text regarding a vision delivered to an unnamed hermit, wherein an angel elaborates in great detail the spirits of the abyssal oceans. The hermit, not believing these claims, demands that the angel show him; the angel does so, again in great detail. Multiple sections of the text are repeated word-for-word. The hermit comes to deeply regret his descision, a repentence that the angel has no intention of acknowledging (not while there are yet more varieties of horrific snaggletoothed fish to catalogue)

• Abyssal Familiar - A spirit not entirely unlike a gulper eel is bound to the text. It will act as typical for a bound familiar, though its cunning and appetite are a measure more than most.

 

Itadakimasu, Kyoko-chan!

Japanese, 2019

A slice-of-life story about teenagers starting a cooking club which, upon close reading, contains detailed subtextual directions on the creation of a philosopher's stone. Only known copy is an omnibus edition of the first three volumes, leaving the remaining nine steps unknown.

• The Great Work (Partial) - The first three steps are sufficient to create a lesser homunculus. It can only follow basic commands, and will dissolve into a slurry of its component materials within hours, but it will suffice.

Meat and Honey

Akkadian, ~1600s BCE

Series of clay tablets containing an incomplete translation of the Homestuck epilogues. Creative liberties have been taken with the text, including a diatribe by Karkat about his negative experiences with the copper merchant Ea-Nasir and a lengthy aside describing an argument between scribes over Vriska's moral status, inserted in a section that did not contain the character in question.

• Anomalous properties unknown.