mixed habitat & densely vegetated hiding places

This is my second post about As the Earth Dreams, though these are the first stories in the book. I missed the book club meeting when they were discussed, so I'm afraid you'll only be getting my thoughts on them.

I also read the introduction and learned that it offers a one-sentence synopsis for each story, so I guess I can use those when I can't come up with a better one and/or don't understand a story's plot.


"Ravenous, Called Iffy" by Chimedum Ohaegbu

( A masseuse attends her mother's fourth funeral, a prelude to her latest resurrection, only to encounter family she's never met. )


"The Hole in the Middle of the World" by Chinelo Onwualu

( In a dystopian future, a refugee sells her memories. )


"A Fair Assessment" by Terese Mason Pierre

( An antiques appraiser summons spirits to learn more about the objects, and encounters her ancestor. )

A distant planet is home to two interdependent human colonies: the hierarchical City, founded by convicts exiled from Earth, and the egalitarian Town, founded by a group of pacifists. They have little in common besides having been removed from Earth because authorities there found them inconvenient, and they have very different visions for their shared planet's future. The City sees itself as the legitimate planetary government (they were there first and they perceive the Town as weak and worthy only of exploitation) while the Town sees itself as the City's equal and expects to resolve issues through nonviolent dialogue. Our protagonist is Luz, the daughter of a powerful City leader. As she learns more about the Town and her father's plans for it, Luz sees a deadly conflict brewing and finds herself caught in the middle.

Le Guin was quoted as saying that this book "might be" part of the Hainish Cycle. I'm not sure the timeline quite fits (not that she ever sweated the timeline) but the themes certainly do. My impression on re-reading is that this one does a lot of things that The Word for World Is Forest tried to do, but better—and it does some of the things that The Dispossessed already did, with less detail but with some insightful additional angles.

( cut for length )

I really like this book, and I definitely got more out of it as an adult, especially in the context of Le Guin's earlier work. I don't hear it mentioned very often when people talk about her, but I think there's more here to chew on than I first realized.

After the events of The Three-Body Problem and The Dark Forest, this conclusion to the trilogy expands the perspective on the Earth-Trisolaran conflict beyond our two petty solar systems to a galactic, interdimensional, and finally universal scale. (Yes, this is the sort of book where rather than wondering if your favorite character survives, you wonder instead if there will be a habitable universe for them to survive in by the last page.)

This book took me a long time to read, not only because it's 600 pages but also because I kept stopping due to real life distractions. I also don't have the book anymore because it had to go back to the library. So I'm afraid this post is going to be more vibes-based than going into a ton of detail, even though seventy million things happened in the book that would each be worthy of detailed discussion.

My ultimate impression of the book (and of the series as a whole) is that there are a lot of things that the author and I will just never see eye-to-eye on, but I don't mind setting that aside because I like the way he explores his ideas even if I disagree with their fundamental basis.

( cut for length )

This is part three of my book club notes on A Thousand Beginnings and Endings. [Part one, part two.]

Something I learned in this meeting that I did not previously realize is that a number of the authors in the collection are best known for YA. This does explain why it was shelved under YA in the library, which I have to admit I did not see as significant given that I also had to visit the YA section to find Dracula (because their copy is part of a series of "classic canon" repubs marketed to teens). I had noticed that some of the entries certainly are YA, which I don't consider a bad thing in itself, but in this batch of stories we did experience a disconnect between the marketed-to audience and ourselves.


"Nothing Into All" by Renée Ahdieh

( An embittered brother and a doormat sister run across goblins that can turn anything into gold. )


"Spear Carrier" by Naomi Kanakia

[Note: This book was published before Kanakia came out as trans, so it lists this story under her former name Rahul Kanakia.]

( A look at the Mahabharata from the POV of one of the five million soldiers in the climactic battle. )


"Code of Honor" by Melissa de la Cruz

( A Filipina vampire seeks belonging in New York City. )


"Bullet, Butterfly" by Elsie Chapman

( In a war-torn country, a boy disguises himself as a girl to infiltrate a munitions factory. )

This is a collection of short stories set in the fictional Central European country Orsinia. Most of the stories are new for the book, though a couple were published previously, and the invention of the country itself was one of Le Guin's first creative writing projects. It's basically an alt-history Czechia or Hungary, borrowing from real wars and political events; stories set in the Cold War era show Orsinia as a satellite state of the Soviet Union. Aside from the alternate history, the stories have no speculative elements.

I hadn't read this before because it didn't sound like it was up my alley. But it was next up in my chronological read of Le Guin's books, so I gave it a chance, and guess what? It wasn't up my alley!

I freely admit that a big part of the issue is that I'm the wrong audience for what she was trying to do here. A number of the stories are the sort of litfic where the entire plot is family/relationship drama and everyone is miserable, which is a genre that I find deadly dull even if Ursula Le Guin writes it. But I also don't think the prose is up to her usual standard. It's more reminiscent of her early work, and some of it openly is early work! But even the stories dated 1976 read like revisions of something pulled from the previous decade's drawer.

What surprised me the most is how generic I found the worldbuilding to be. It comes off like she wanted to write about Central Europe but didn't have the depth of knowledge to write about any specific country, so instead we have this Ruritanian stand-in that does not have any real weight to it or any distinctive qualities or culture. The stories I enjoyed the most were the ones set prior to the 20th century, which at least took me to an interesting time if not to an especially compelling place.

So yeah, this wasn't for me. Oh well, at least it was short.

Ten years ago, four young Blackfeet men went hunting on land that's meant to be reserved for elders, and accidentally shot a pregnant elk. Trying to make up for their transgression, they swore to use every bit of her meat and hide, with nothing going to waste. But years passed, and the last piece of meat lay in the back of someone's freezer, its significance long forgotten... until two months ago, when they finally threw it away. Now the four men find themselves stalked by an entity that's bent on vengeance, blood for blood.

Wowwww this book was so good. It's grounded deep in the realities of contemporary Indigenous life; the character studies alone would be worth the read. It vividly paints the ambivalence and complexity and frustration of feeling drawn to tradition but also disconnected from it—fumbling towards it, or trying to hold it at arm's length. It's a story about how the past comes back to haunt you, both the deep past of your ancestors and your own mistakes that can't be taken back.

The style is intense, visceral, and raw, moving quickly as the hunters are hunted down one by one. It's part creature horror and part revenge thriller, as you get the perspective of both the humans and the elk-entity. She's a fantastic villain, playing the humans against each other and driving them to madness, but also an empathetic hero of her own story as she metes out her own form of poetic justice for what was taken from her. The conclusion wasn't what I expected, but I found it very satisfying.

The book has graphic gory deaths of people and animals (including dogs) so I wouldn't recommend it to everyone. But I'm not much for gore myself, and I found the violence essential to the story and not gratuitous. I'll definitely look for more of Jones' work.

After taking the summer off from book club, I am rejoining for this collection of Asian folktale retellings by Asian authors. It was nice to see everybody again plus a couple of new faces!

Apparently nobody liked the book they read while I was gone, so I guess I dodged a bullet. Everyone seemed excited for the new one and liked that we finally found one with author's notes.


"Forbidden Fruit" by Roshani Chokshi

( The spirit of a mountain falls in love with a mortal. )


"Olivia's Table" by Alyssa Wong

( A second-generation 'exorcist' comes to a haunted town in Arizona to cook for the Hungry Ghost Festival. )


"Steel Skin" by Lori M. Lee

( After an android uprising, a girl believes her father is an android in disguise. )


"Still Star-Crossed" by Sona Charaipotra

( A young woman is stalked by the reincarnation of her mom's dead boyfriend. )

After a couple of failed attempts at Dracula Daily, I have successfully read Dracula for the first time! \o/

The book opens with newly qualified solitictor Jonathan Harker journeying to Transylvania to meet with a client who is planning to move to England. Count Dracula seems like a nice guy at first, only it's weird that he doesn't eat. Or go out during the day. Or have a reflection in the mirror. Uh-oh. Barely escaping with his life, Harker returns to England, but soon the Count arrives too and begins to stalk and drink the blood of women there, including Harker's wife Mina. Harker joins a nascent group of vampire hunters led by Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, and their attempts to outwit and destroy their foe are related in epistolary style through diaries, letters, news reports, and so on.

What surprised me the most about this book is how... cozy it is?? A lot of it is about a gang of loveable characters who all adore each other, bring out the best in one another, and never have conflicts that they can't resolve by just talking about it. They are constantly taking each other passionately by the hand and swearing bonds of eternal trust and devotion, and being moved to tears by how brave and strong and pure of heart everybody is.

This is not a criticism! I actually found it really charming! It just wasn't what I expected. I imagine Stoker's reasoning was that the plot is so scary that the reader would need unimpugnably gallant heroes to rely on or it would all be too stressful. But since it is unlikely that this plot would scare anybody today, you just have this endearing team of well-adjusted, hypercompetent, stoutly ethical people banding together to oppose an external threat that can't possibly break their bonds or their spirit. It's like the crew of Star Trek TNG fight a vampire.

( cut for length and some spoilers )

Also, Dracula is described as having a huge, magnificent moustache. I await the film adaptation courageous enough to be faithful to the book in this.

Dracula is in the public domain, so you can read it on Project Gutenberg if you like.

[Edited to correct Jonathan's job title, thank you raven!]

This young adult novella (also appearing under the title A Very Long Way From Anywhere Else) is one of Le Guin's few published pieces of non-speculative fiction. Set in the Pacific Northwest, it follows a friendship between two gifted high school students. Owen wants to study at MIT and go into science, but he feels pressured by his parents to be a "normal" guy who likes cars and girls and goes to State; Natalie is a musical prodigy, but feels constrained in her options due to her conservative father and the lack of opportunities for female composers.

The book is very short but densely packed with close observations about the pressure to conform, not only the overt pressure to conform to positive expectations, but also the covert pressure to conform to negative stereotypes and sexist narratives about how guys and girls interact. It's incisive in its portrayal of being very smart but very young and knowing basically nothing about the world outside your home town, and taking a first shaky step towards a broader perspective.

Owen and Natalie reflect a specific kind of gifted experience that wasn't the same as mine. They're aware that they're different from others, but able to play the part of a kid who's kind of an overachiever but basically normal, well enough that they can hide in plain sight. Not that that makes things easy—it's hard to choose to be yourself when the safety of conformity is a real option.

Many synopses of this book say that Owen and Natalie develop romantic feelings for each other, but that is emphatically not what happens in the book. What the book actually says is this: "I had decided that I was in love with Natalie. I hadn't fallen in love with her, please notice that I didn't say that; I had decided that I was in love with her." Owen is very clear that he tries to force himself to be in love with her and to be sexually attracted to her because he thinks it's what other people expect of him. You don't have to read Owen as aroace, but that is a possible reading and I see a lot of my aroace experiences in him.

But even if you don't read it that way, the point of the book is that their connection is about who they are as specific people, and when Owen tries to make it conform to a generic "he was a boy, she was a girl" heteronormative narrative, that connection is almost destroyed. Some of the ideas Owen has already absorbed about hetero relationships at 17 are a little scary, I think intentionally so. He's at a crossroads where he can go down the path of seeing Natalie and other girls as people, or as objects of male conquest. I think it's a good example of using a male POV to demonstrate why all of us need feminism.

The book is really good and I'm not sure why Le Guin didn't write any more like it. Maybe in between other projects she didn't have the time. But this book makes it easy to imagine an alternate timeline where this was the genre where she found success, and came to be best remembered as one of the standout contemporary YA writers of the 1970s alongside Judy Blume.

As I was cross-checking Le Guin's short stories to make sure I had access to all of them, I realized I was missing "Selection" which is a story written during the period covered by The Wind's Twelve Quarters but not included in it. The going assumption seems to be that Le Guin left it out because she didn't like it, but the editor of the monthly sci-fi magazine Amazing Stories liked it enough to print it in the August 1964 issue. You can buy a copy of this issue for about five US dollars, which happens to almost exactly track inflation from its cover price of 50 cents. So... I bought one! And since I bothered to do that, I figured I'd read the whole thing and report my findings.

( Notes on the issue and what's in it )

My comments on the stories contain spoilers.

"The HoneyEarthers" by Robert F. Young

A scuzzy rich space dude tries to horn in on his son's young wife... or does he??

Said rich space dude is Aaron Price, who owns a company that harvests water from Saturn's rings. His spoiled son Ronny leaves his wife Fleurette, and Aaron tries to manipulate him into not going through with the divorce by threatening to turn him in for tax evasion. Ronny flees the planet, and Aaron, who's been lusting after Fleurette for years, takes her to a romantic resort on the moon, where he finally reveals the truth: He is a time traveler, and Ronny isn't his son, but his younger self with "space fugue" amnesia brought on by a traumatic incident where he almost died working on the Saturn water-harvesting project. We don't get a super clear picture of Fleurette's reaction to this, but she basically runs like hell, which is the only part of the story that makes any sense.

I disliked this novelette so much it was hard to get through it. The SF elements are boringly infodumpy, the time travel plot is unnecessarily complicated and confusing (my synopsis simplifies it a LOT), the interpersonal drama plays like a bad soap opera, and the prose is so painfully overwrought and filled with clumsy metaphors that I occasionally wondered if it was satire. "The girlish dress she was wearing began below her shoulders, and the firelight had already fallen in love with her smooth clear skin. Meadow flowers grew around her, and her mouth had the redness of the wild raspberries that grew in the fields of his youth. Spring resided in the dew-brightness of her eyes; her cheeks held the hue of frost-kissed leaves." (This character is human, so I don't believe he meant her cheeks were green, though I don't know what he did mean.) I guess we're supposed to think Aaron's behavior towards Fleurette is okay in the end because it turns out he is secretly her husband, but for most of the story we see him as her father-in-law, so he comes off like a disgusting creep. The way the author chooses to constantly emphasize how young and girlish and naive Fleurette is made my skin crawl. I had never heard of this author before, and at the end of this story I was relieved to depart from his presence.

"Selection" by Ursula K. Le Guin

On a colony planet where a supercomputer matches everyone to their genetically and socially optimal spouse, a woman is displeased with her match.

Joan doesn't have any specific reason to dislike Harry, she just finds him annoying and is pretty pissed to be stuck with him, though he likes her well enough. One day they're out skiing and Harry gets in an accident and breaks his leg. Seeing him vulnerable changes Joan's perspective on him and they end up happy together after all. The punchline: We go back to the guy who runs the matchmaking program, and find out that the supercomputer is far too busy with mission-critical processes to actually match the colonists up, so when nobody's looking he just draws names out of a hat.

This story was amusing but pretty slight. I saw the ending coming a mile away since there wasn't really anywhere else it could go, at least not for a writer who obviously isn't going to come out in favor of eugenicist arranged marriages. The execution could be better, but the idea that there are no predestined perfect matches and that relationships are what you make of them is a sensible one that I broadly agree with. I don't see any obvious reason why Le Guin wanted to bury this story; the prose is a little rough (by her standards, mind you, not by the standards of, say, Robert F. Young) but I don't think the story is significantly worse than the weaker entries in The Wind's Twelve Quarters. But as a writer I do understand that sometimes you look back at particular pieces and cringe for reasons that may not make sense to anyone else.

"Valedictory" by Phyllis Gotlieb

A trainee in a time travel project visits herself as a child.

Her childhood was hard, but she doesn't say how, nor does she have a clear picture of what she hopes to accomplish. She imagines she might tell her younger self to hang on, that things will get better. But when she sees herself at recess, singing and playing in spite of everything, she realizes how deeply she'd underestimated her own resilience, and returns to her present without saying anything to herself at all.

This story hit me like a truck and left me in tears. You don't need to know exactly what the protagonist's struggles have been, because the author taps into a universal truth for those of us who went through a lot of shit when we were younger—no matter what happened, we survived it and we're still here. The prose is clear and evocative, and a light touch is used with the speculative premise so it doesn't overwhelm the character work.

This was by far the best story in the issue and I'd be interested to read more by the author. Has anyone read her stuff?

Essay: "Mort Weisinger: The Superman Behind Superman" by Sam Moskowitz

Moskowitz profiles the editor of Superman and related comics.

This pretty extensive biography details how Weisinger got his start in science fiction, writing stories and editing fan and pro zines, before becoming instrumental in the growth of the superhero genre. I'm not a comics person so this wasn't of strong interest to me, but in the pre-Wikipedia age I'm sure it was nice to have a well-researched piece on an important figure from the fandom.

I did enjoy the recounting of the time in 1933 when Weisinger's mentor and co-editor Allen Glasser sold a story to Amazing that turned out to be plagiarized, causing the magazine's then-editor to freak out and refuse to work with anyone associated with Glasser. In turn this led Weisinger to shun Glasser and start his own zine with blackjack and hookers other friends. The drama! (I also liked Moskowitz's description of Glasser as "a slightly older scientifictioneer." There's a word we should bring back.)

"Furnace of the Blue Flame" by Robert Rohrer

In a post-apocalyptic future, a hero battles a dictator who controls the people by suppressing knowledge.

The dictator claims to use magic, but the hero recognizes his powers as forgotten technology—the titular Furnace is a nuclear reactor which he uses to torture dissidents with radiation poisoning. The hero leverages forbidden scientific knowledge to sabotage it and break his control.

This was well-written, well-paced, and it held my attention. I appreciated that it didn't dance around pretending to be fantasy for longer than necessary. I thought it was interesting that the villain's stated motivation is to prevent a reignition of the wars that devastated civilization. He thinks if he can just terrify everyone into absolute obedience, war will never come again. I also thought it was smart to have the hero fully understand the risks of bringing technology back, believing that power must come with an ideology of mercy. The old fashioned sword-and-sorcery style of storytelling with a noble manly hero is played very straight, and that left me cold, but I'd say the piece is successful on its own terms even though it's not really to my taste.

"Zelerinda" by Gordon Walters

Two men, one with psychic powers, search for alien life on a planet with a weather system of liquid metal instead of water.

It's hard to write a synopsis of this novelette because nothing happens in it. Various plot elements are introduced and none of them go anywhere. The psychic guy is afraid of being found out and locked away in a psionics research lab, but that never happens and his abilities have no impact on the mission. His brother was investigating the planet before them and disappeared, but they never find him, dead or alive. They think they find a structure, but it's just a cave. They come up with different theories about how life could exist on this world, but they're all wrong. There are no aliens, it's just a dead world with weird weather. The end.

This story is so long and so pointless that when it ended I felt actively angry that my time had been wasted on it. It takes ages for them just to get to the planet—why did we need all those scenes of the psychic guy being woken up to come to an emergency meeting and their boss waffling on forever??—and when they get there the search for life is full of unnecessary detail and repetition. The writing style also grated on me, especially the overly verbose and self-consciously "clever" dialogue. All the characters sound the same (just like the narrative voice, in fact) and have no development or real conflicts. You could write "liquid metal weather" on a post-it and get as much out of it as I got from this story.

Review column: "The Spectroscope" by Robert Silverberg

Silverberg reviews Starswarm by Brian Aldiss, The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction, Ninth Series ed. Robert P. Mills, and Escape on Venus by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Starswarm takes previously published stories and retcons them into a connected narrative with some edits and linking commentaries. Silverberg finds this project "misguided and lamentable" and the commentary "sententious and ponderously coy" but he likes a few of the stories as stand-alones.

He gives a glowing review to the Fantasy and Science Fiction anthology, naming "Flowers for Algernon" first among the standout entries and calling the book "a must for a science fiction library."

Silverberg had apparently panned Burroughs' other works as "unmitigated trash" and "subliterate claptrap," so it is with some sheepishness that he admits to liking Escape on Venus for its more lighthearted comic tone. "Mitigated trash and literate claptrap, I suppose—but fun to read."