Deep Wizardry Diane Duane When I was five years old my mother read  The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe  to my four-year-old sister and me. On hearing the story I told my sister and my mother, "Aslan is Jesus". They thought I was just imagining it, but of course I was right  C.S. Lewis  fully intended  The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe  as a Christian allegory. I mention this because I had a similar reaction while reading  Diane Duane 's  Deep Wizardry . At the 67% mark, I made this note to myself, 'As Fook said in  HHGTTG : “I think this is getting needlessly messianic.”' I will not be more specific, because I don't want to spoil. Also, it turns out that  Duane  is much less overbearing than  Lewis  -- it didn't, in the end, bother me. Like the first  Young Wizards  novel,  So You Want to Be a Wizard ,  Deep Wizardry  turns out to be a much more serious work than it looks. If you look at the cover and read the publisher's blurbs you will expect bo

The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame Kenneth Grahame 's  The Wind in the Willows  will always be associated in my mind with  A.A. Milne 's  The World of Pooh . My family owned both books, and I read them at about the same age, probably when I was still in single digits. Furthermore, ours had obviously been published together. The binding was identical, except that  The World of Pooh  was bound in tan cloth approximately the same color as Pooh himself, while  The Wind in the Willows  was bound in green cloth. What's more, both were illustrated by  Ernest Shephard . (I will never be reconciled to the Disney versions of the Pooh characters.) This association is strange, because in fact they are quite different books.  The World of Pooh  is, intentionally, a childish work.  The Wind in the Willows  is a children's book, but it is not childish. The characters are ostensibly small wild animals -- Mole, Rat, Badger, Otter, and the infamous Toad-- living a civilized life on

Some Desperate Glory Emily Tesh Conventional, but GOOD conventional I picked up  Emily Tesh 's  Some Desperate Glory  because it is a finalist for the 2024 Best Novel Hugo. I am honestly a bit puzzled why. Don't misunderstand me -- it's good, and I am glad that I was induced to read it by the Hugo nomination. However, I usually expect award nominees to be standouts, by which I mean something new and different.  Some Desperate Glory  is not that. It felt very  Golden Age  space opera to me. This was a novel that  John W. Campbell Jr.  would have felt right at home with (except for the queer representation, which was not something a science fiction author could get away with in the 1930s). The title comes from  Wilfred Owen 's brutal  "Dulce et Decorum Est" . Although familiar with the poem, I had forgotten the last few lines My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie:  Dulce et decorum est Pro patr

Howl and Other Poems Allen Ginsberg There's a reason that Wikipedia says  "Howl" is considered to be one of the great works of American literature."  That reason is not exactly the reason I listened to it, but I agree with the judgment. I listened to  Howl and Other Poems  because I am taking a Poetry Writing course at the local community college. Our first reading assignment was  Kahlil Gibran 's  The Prophet , of which  I have a very low opinion . "Howl" was the second assignment, and it makes up for  The Prophet  with room to spare.  Allen Ginsberg 's  Howl and Other Poems  is one of those famous "slim volumes of poetry". Indeed, it is the slimmest I have yet encountered, which makes it better than all the rest, right? I was pleased to discover that it was available in audio format (59 min), read by  Ginsberg  himself. The audio edition is not exactly the same as the Kindle edition. For instance, it begins with "Europe, Europe"

The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles Malka Older The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles  is the second (and last, as of 26-May-2024) novella in  Malka Older 's  Mossa and Pleiti  series of science fiction mysteries. This one felt a bit more conventional but also a bit more intimate than the first,  The Mimicking of Known Successes . The overall structure is similar --we begin with a prolog from Mossa's point of view. Perhaps the most important thing we learn in the prolog is that, when she is alone, Mossa thinks of Pleiti. (In this prolog Mossa uses feminine pronouns in her thoughts of Pleiti -- this is, I believe, the only place in the two novellas in which Pleiti's gender is unambiguously revealed. So yes, it is indeed a Sapphic romance, as the advertising claims. But no, they are not really at all like Holmes and Watson.) The prolog is followed by thirty-one chapters told from Pleiti's first-person point of view. What Mossa is thinking about in the prolog is a mi

Ivy, Angelica, Bay C.L. Polk I picked up  C.L. Polk 's  Ivy, Angelica, Bay  because it is a finalist for the 2024 Best Novelette Hugo. For my money, the greatest service provided by awards like the Hugo and the Newbery is to point me at good stories I would otherwise have missed. This was such a case. It would not get my vote for the Best Novelette — that honor goes to  Nghi Vo ’s  On the Fox Roads , but it wins the silver. As the story begins our first-person narrator, Miss l’Abielle, whose mother has recently died, arrives home to find a waif on her doorstep. The story takes place in a world very like ours. Indeed, there is a reference to a new movie that is pretty obviously /The Empire Strikes Back/, which would place us in 1980. (However, Miss l’Abielle has a rotary dial phone at home — those were pretty much gone by 1980.) Miss l'Abielle, we quickly learn, is the magical protector of a neighborhood called Hurston Hill. And the appearance of this waif is the first sign of a

A House Like an Accordion Audrey Burges The very first sentence of  Audrey Burges 's  A House Like an Accordion  is I was brushing my teeth when my hand disappeared This from our first-person narrator, Keryth Miller. Keryth is startled -- myself less so. After all, I had an advantage. I, unlike Keryth, knew that she was a character in a fantasy novel. Disappearing limbs are all in a day's work. But I really sat up and took notice when, near the end of the first chapter, the following thoughts passed through Keryth's mind Two thoughts of equal volume, equal urgency, careened through my head at the same time. One: my father must be alive... Two: wherever he was, however he was drawing breath, Papa must also have been drawing me. So! Keryth knows, too. Keryth lives with her husband Max and their two daughters Ellory and Mindy in a glass mansion on the beach in Mailbu called The House on the Waves. (By the way, each chapter of  aHLaA  begins with a location -- always the name o

MAD About the 50's The Usual Gang of Idiots Slouching towards New York And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards New York to be born? MAD magazine was founded in 1952 by  Harvey Kurtzman  as a comic book.  Kurtzman  had experience in comics, being the author of several deeply researched military history comics. But these took so much work to produce that he needed something else to keep the wolf from the door, and thus was born MAD. (It only became a magazine a few years later when the heavy regulation of comic books forced a reclassification.) By all accounts  Kurtzman  was an extraordinarily creative writer and artist, and it was his vision that gave MAD its unique nature.  Kurtzman , however, was not a businessman or even the kind of author who can be relied on to hit deadlines, so that was a problem. In 1954 he (and all but one of the artists he had recruited to draw MAD) were lured by  Hugh Hefner  to a new comic book venture, called  Trump  (yes, rea

Uncanny Magazine Issue 55: November/December 2023 Naomi Kritzker I am reviewing only the story "The Year Without Sunshine” by  Naomi Kritzer . It has come to my attention that "cozy" is having a moment in speculative fiction. I picked up  Uncanny Magazine Issue 55: November/December 2023  because the story “The Year Without Sunshine” by  Naomi Kritzer  is a finalist for the 2024 Best Novelette Hugo Award. It's not my favorite of the finalists in this category (that would be  Nghi Vo 's  On the Fox Roads ), but I still enjoyed it. And it certainly had a cozy feel to me. A disaster has occurred that caused the ejection of large amounts of dust into the atmosphere. It is never explained what caused this, but there are many possibilities -- a big volcanic eruption, for instance. All that dust blocks sunlight -- not completely, but enough to be a problem for solar power and for growing crops. The loss of sunlight coincides with (or causes) a general breakdown of socie

The Mimicking of Known Successes Malka Older I picked up  The Mimicking of Known Successes  because it is a finalist for the 2024 Best Novella Hugo. So, yeah. It looks like we finally managed to do it -- wipe out life on Earth. After decamping to Mars for a while and trashing that, too, we are now camped out on Jupiter. We hope one day to fix Earth and go back, but I'd say the real question is whether anything will be left of Jupiter when we're done with it. Over a hundred years have passed since the abandonment of Earth. These are the main political divisions of the Jupiter colony. One political movement, the Classicists, works towards fixing, repairing, and returning to Earth. Their main political opposition is the Moderns, whose main goal is to make life livable on Jupiter. There are no political conservatives -- indeed, the word "Conservative" has become a slur. (I suspect that is a hint about  Malka Ann Older 's 2023 political inclinations, but that's jus

Marvel: What If...Loki Was Worthy? Madeleine Roux I became aware of Marvel's  What If...  series when an announcement swam past my eyes that the second book ( What If... Wanda Maximoff and Peter Parker Were Siblings? , due 9-Jul-2024) would be written by one of my favorite authors,  Seanan McGuire . Thus, although I had never heard of  Madeleine Roux , I grabbed the first book. If you're familiar with recent works in the Marvel Cinematic/Comic Universe (MCU), you will instantly get the premise of the  What If...  series. We live in a multiverse, in which there are hundreds and thousands of parallel universes. (As a mathematician and physics nerd these numbers seem small to me -- surely the number of parallel universes should be infinite -- the only real question is whether it is ℵ-0, the infinity of the integers, or C, the infinity of the continuum, or an even larger infinity.) In each of these parallel universes events play out differently. This is the best author's crutch

Lost Birds Anne Hillerman I count myself a hard-core fan of  Tony  and  Anne Hillerman 's  Leaphorn, Chee, and Manuelito  mystery series, now clocking in at 27 novels,  Lost Birds  being the latest, the ninth by  Anne Hillerman . It is difficult to keep a series going that long without becoming formulaic. I am sorry to say that  Hillerman  does not completely succeed. If you're like me, you're always happy to spend time with Joe, Chee, Bernie, and the Diné -- they're old friends, and you don't need them to have fresh new exciting things to tell you. In fact, they kind of do have new stuff going on -- too much so. We meet Kory, the son of Joe's squeeze Louisa. Joe and Louisa are a familiar presence, but if we have ever before heard that Louisa had a son, I missed it, and Kory is A LOT. Aside from the Kory subplot, we have two main mysteries, one having to do with a school custodian whose wife has vanished, and the second with a woman who was adopted as a child an

Crypt of the Moon Spider Nathan Ballingrud I am not a big fan of horror fiction. I think, however, that is because, as a general rule, it is so poorly done. I'm being unfair -- when I say "it is poorly done", what I mean is that it doesn't horrify me. I am not horrified by creepy-crawlies -- in fact, I spent more than 30 years of my life studying worms, so I think worms and bugs are kind of cool, very beautiful little machines, in fact. Blood and guts and gore also don't bother me. What I find really scary is psychological terror -- the fear of losing oneself. Nameless fears -- the "nameless" part is important. As a filmmaker once remarked, if you want to really be scary, never show the audience the monster. Leave it to their imaginations -- the monster they imagine is always scarier than anything you can put on the screen. As soon as you show the monster, as soon as you name the fear, it becomes a concrete problem to be solved, and that will never be as

Leaf by Niggle J.R.R. Tolkien John Rogers  famously wrote There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs. For me it, was the one with the orcs. I was still in elementary school when I read  The Lord of the Rings . I was completely blown away by it -- I read it so many times that I almost had it memorized. And after that I read everything I could find by  J.R.R. Tolkien . At that time there wasn't much. Aside from  The Hobbit , which I include as part of  LOTR , there were only two things I could find,  Leaf by Niggle  and  Farmer Giles of Ham .  The Silmarillion  would not be published for many years. There was also eventually a collection called  The Tolkien Reader  that included thes

The Prophet Khalil Gibran ...and this ain't it. The characters of  Herman Wouk 's  Inside, Outside  have opinions about  The Prophet “He’s so mature, so thoughtful, so wise, Izzy, and he gets all his philosophy from this one book.”... “What book, Bobbie?” “The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran,” she said. “It’s so deep, and he reads it aloud so beautifully.” I had never heard of The Prophet or Gibran, but said I would get hold of it. “Oh, do, Izzy. You’ll learn so much. You need that book... Next day I asked Peter Quat about Kahlil Gibran. Oh yes, he said, his doormat mistress had treasured The Prophet, and could reel off whole pages by heart. “What’s it all about?” “It’s utter horsepoop*,” Peter snapped... So I hunted up a copy and read it, and Peter was right on the mark. I first encountered  The Prophet  as a high-school student. We did a unit on poetry, and a few of  Gibran 's effusions were presented as "Prose Poems". I immediately decided it was utter horsepoop. My