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The Four Vision Quests of Jesus by Steven Charleston

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

One good thing about taking classes is that it leads you to reading books it might not otherwise have occurred to you to try if you just saw it sitting on a bookstore shelf. Such is the case with this, in which Steven Charleston (a Choctaw Native American and an ordained Episcopal priest) writes about how, as a young man – faced with the possibility of having to choose between his Christian faith and his Choctaw heritage – sought a way to reconcile them. He found the answer in the traditional Native practice of the vision quest.

Put simply, a vision quest is a ritual in which a person goes through a physical ordeal of purification and fasting in order to receive spiritual advice in the form of a vision that results in a transformation. Charleston’s own vision quest led him to realise that (1) Jesus’ 40 days in the desert was a vision quest itself, (2) four stories in Matthew’s gospel can be interpreted from a Native American POV as vision quests, and (3) the incarnation of Jesus was God’s own vision quest to become a transformative reality for his children. Charleston’s thesis is that both Native American and Christian traditions invite us to the dynamic inner experience of relating with God and growing in our humanity.

I’m oversimplifying it due to lack of space – it’s a complex concept even before you get into the theological comparisons between Christianity and the Native American concept of God. But it’s a fascinating read – not only for the detailed descriptions of Native American culture and spirituality (as well as the suffering they endured at the hands of white colonialists), but also how these dovetail with and/or map onto the overall Gospel message and its underlying theology. As with all things theological, there are points of contention and plenty of room for misunderstandings of what Charleston is saying here – and obviously, for people of certain political persuasions, the whole book is probably woke heresy. For me, I got a lot out of it, both intellectually and spiritually.


The Telling by Ursula K. Le Guin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Published in 2000, this is the eighth and last instalment of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle novels, in which a young woman from Terra named Sutty is sent to the planet Aka on her first mission as an Observer for the Ekumen (the alliance of Hainish worlds). Aka’s corporate government has ambitions of its own to become a technological superpower, join the Ekumen and explore interstellar space. The thing is, the Ekumen believes you can only really know a society from its history and its cultural roots, but the Corporation has outlawed and suppressed all of Aka’s traditional customs and beliefs (to include its original language) in fear that these will prevent them from achieving their vision.

Sutty – who specialises in language and literature – is assigned by the Ekumen to learn about pre-Corporate Akan culture and history, but isn’t allowed outside of the capital of Dovra City where that info has been erased. She also finds it hard to be objective about the Corporation, as she grew up on Terra when it had become an oppressive and brutal religious theocracy. When the Corporation unexpectedly approves an Ekumen trip to the old provincial town Okzat-Ozkat, Sutty’s boss asks her to go, suspecting that knowledge of the old ways may still exist there in some form. Sutty reluctantly agrees to make the trip and try to uncover details of Aka’s secret history and culture – particularly its traditions of storytelling (a.k.a. "the Telling").

Reportedly, Le Guin used China’s Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution as a framework for Aka’s background, though of course it’s far more than just a rehash of that particular history. In any case, I found Sutty’s exploration of Akan culture compelling, not least because it illustrates not only why cultural history matters, but also how “banned” ideas and practices can still thrive in oppressive societies when they’re embedded in daily life to the point that it’s hard for authorities to pinpoint it as an illegal activity. Also interesting is Sutty’s struggle to maintain objectivity (given her own experience of religious and sexual oppression on Terra), especially as she immerses herself deeper into Okzat-Ozkat's "forbidden" culture under the nose of a govt Monitor assigned to keep an eye on her. Some readers may find it too slow, but I found myself engrossed by it. It may not be her best novel, but it’s possibly one of her more underrated.

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Stories I tell,

This is dF

Taking it up a few gears this month, thanks to pulp fiction. Go me!

A Bullet for Cinderella by John D. MacDonald

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I tried John D MacDonald for the first time last year with The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything, and while it was okay, it didn’t inspire me to seek out more of MacDonald’s stuff. But this 1955 novel fell into my lap by happenstance, and it seemed more like straightforward pulp crime, so I decided to give it a shot.

The premise is pretty classic noir – Tal Howard, shell-shocked from his time as a POW in the Korean War, shows up in the small town of Hillston with a mission: find $60,000 that his compatriot Timmy Warden (who was a fellow POW and died in the prison camp) had embezzled from his brother George and buried somewhere. His only lead is a woman named “Cindy”, who Timmy said would know where the money is. Howard arrives in Hillston to discover that another POW – a ruthless psycho named Fitzmartin – is after the same treasure.

It pretty much follows the private eye formula as Howard tries to find Cindy, and in the process meets a girl, gets sapped, annoys the police and finds dead bodies in incriminating places. It reads better that The Girl, The Gold Watch and Everything, and spends some time ruminating on what the POW experience can do to a guy. Even so, Howard isn’t that sympathetic a lead character, which makes the ending a little hard to swallow. Again, it’s okay for what it is, but I’ll probably need more happenstance to try MacDonald again.


The Scoreless Thai by Lawrence Block

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Continuing my revisit of Lawrence Block’s Evan Tanner series, this is the fourth instalment, which was titled Two For Tanner when I first read it – which was apparently the publisher’s idea, as they didn’t care for Block’s Title. Maybe they wanted something more identifiable with the series, or maybe they didn’t get the joke, as one of Tanner’s companions in the story is Dhang, a young Thai man who is also a virgin and desperate to get laid. Well.

This time, Tanner – who is incapable of sleeping and freelances for a super-secret agency that thinks he’s one of their agents – is off on a mission to rescue his latest girlfriend, Tuppence Ngawa, a Kenyan-American jazz singer whose band plays a gig for the King of Thailand, after which they are reportedly kidnapped by Communist rebels right around the same time the Royal Jewels are stolen. Given the novel starts with Tanner held prisoner by guerillas in a suspended bamboo cage in the middle of the Thai jungle, it’s obvious his mission isn’t going as planned. His only hope turns out to be Dhang, who is a member of the guerillas and will help Tanner escape ... if he can help him find a woman to boink.

And, well, you know. This one has aged even less well than the previous three, particularly the “Dhang needs women” angle, though I guess you can also say it’s a pretty accurate representation of how Americans viewed both sex and Southeast Asia in the late 60s. And Tanner is comparatively more enlightened than most of his contemporaries (to include one of his CIA shadowers in this story). Still, I did find myself wincing a little more than usual. This one is also a bit more grim, as Tanner really gets put through the ringer this time, and also has some critical thoughts on the Vietnam war that was happening at the time, so the tonal shifts can be a bit jarring. For all that, Block (as usual) tells the story well, so as page-turning adventures go, it’s still pretty good.


The Sex Life of The Gods by Michael Knerr

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Found on Project Gutenberg, this is an obscure relic from the days of pulp SF and pulp erotica – or in this case, both. Michael Knerr (a.k.a. M.E. Knerr, both of which may be pen names) wrote some erotic pulp thrillers in the 60s before moving on to non-fiction books in the 70s about stuff like Bigfoot and the Jim Jones Guyana suicides. As far as I can tell, this 1962 novel was his only attempt at SF – and it’s probably as well.

The premise: a man wakes up in the woods next to a plane crash with amnesia. His wallet tells him he’s Nick Danson, and that he’s married to a gorgeous sexpot of a woman named Beth. He seeks her out in hopes of getting his memory back, and finds he’s being tailed. He’s also having weird dreams about being a space soldier in an alien race of gods with a gorgeous sexpot of a girlfriend named Jela. But what if those aren’t dreams – and he’s not really Nick Danson?

What fun!

But of course, this ain’t Philip K. Dick. The actual SF part is poorly fleshed out (to say nothing of the distinction between humans and the alien ‘gods’), but then the target audience probably wasn’t reading this for the SF bits. As one might expect from the title alone, there’s a whole bunch of sex scenes with Nick and Beth, Nick and Jela and even Nick and random sexpot neighbour Janet, and while they’re tame by modern standards, Knerr really wants you to know that Beth, Jela and Janet had fantastic boobs. On the plus side, it’s readable and fast-paced. Best thing I can say about it is that if anyone had bothered to make a film version in the 60s, it would have made a great MST3K episode.


Zone One by Colson Whitehead

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve read and enjoyed two of Colson Whitehead’s novels to date (The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys), and when I found out he’d also done a zombie novel, I was keen to see what he would do with that particular genre, on the reasonable grounds that he would do something different with it. And so he did. The novel starts as the plague appears to be receding. The provisional American govt (now based in Buffalo, NY) has started a rebuilding campaign under its “American Phoenix” programme. To this end, they’ve kicked off an initiative to repopulate Manhattan Island as a testbed for urban repopulation elsewhere.

With the Marines having already killed the bulk of the zombie hordes in Zone One on the southern tip of the island, teams of sweepers are now being sent into the zone to clear buildings of “stragglers” (harmless zombies who generally stay in one place in a catatonic state), plus any flesh-eating monsters the Marines might have missed. The basic story follows three days in the life of a man nicknamed Mark Spitz, a member of Omega unit as they go through the routine of sweeping Zone One. That said, most of that time involves Spitz flashing back to the events that brought him from Last Night to this point, the people he left behind, the people who left him behind, and the various ways everyone is coping with PASD (Post Apocalyptic Stress Disorder).

Notably, his flashbacks are not in linear order, and Whitehead doesn’t neatly separate past and present, giving it an almost stream-of-consciousness-type vibe. A lot of readers have complained about this, having apparently expected a straightforward zombie action thriller, whereas Whitehead is more interested in exploring how people cope psychologically and emotionally with the end of life as they know it as they’re thrown into a nightmare survival trip. But then zombie action thrillers are a dime a dozen these days, so credit to Whitehead for doing something different. The jumbled flashback motif is admittedly a little exhausting to navigate (and it's one reason it took me three months to finish it), yet I found that it does give more emotional heft to a rather exciting final act, when Spitz finds out the true nature of their mission. Probably not for everyone, particularly hardcore zombie fans, but I liked it.

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In the zone,

This is dF

Well, I got bogged down with lots of end-of-year stuff, so I didn’t even finish any books in November, and only finished two for December. But hey, at least I beat my Goodreads Reading Challenge. Twice!

(To explain: I originally targeted 23 books this year, then when it was clear I would comfortably sail past that, I bumped it up to 25 books. I finished with 26. Isn’t that interesting?)

Anyway, here’s the last two books for 2025.

Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a reading assignment for a class, though I admit it comes with a pitch that appeals to me – this 1949 book is based on a series of lectures by Howard Thurman on what Jesus had to offer the “disinherited" (the oppressed), which for Thurman’s purposes means black people in America, though it can also apply to any oppressed group. And as legend has it, Martin Luther King Jr studied this book during the Montgomery bus boycott and would carry a copy around with him.

In essence, Thurman breaks down several key characteristics of oppressed people (fear, hate, and deception as survival tactic), how they’re experienced by black people, and how Jesus’ teachings address each of these to make the point that love is the most powerful response to oppression. To get there, Thurman focuses on the historical, human side of Jesus, which provides crucial context for understanding his teachings on these matters. Put simply, Jesus was a poor Jew living under an oppressive regime, which means his ministry was thus crafted and delivered in the context of living under oppression by the Romans. As such, his teachings can also be interpreted as non-violent survival techniques for resisting oppression as an alternative to armed resistance or giving up and joining the oppressors (or at least staying out of their way).

Despite Thurman’s pedigree as a pastor, he takes a strikingly secular approach to Jesus and his ministry, which seems to annoy many Christian readers who argue you can’t separate the human Jesus from the divine Jesus or his mission of salvation. I would agree in that Thurman is perhaps oversimplifying why Jesus said what he did, and this may have been because he was targeting secular audiences with these talks. Where I think the book really shines is Thurman’s description of the black experience in racist America, how fear, deception and hate manifest in that context, and what’s like to live in that particular state. I also agree that context is essential to understanding both Jesus’ ministry and how people of colour feel about systemic racism – especially now that America’s leaders are busy pushing the idea that DEI is racist against white people.


Candide by Voltaire

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

For whatever reason, despite it being an obvious favourite of a lot of music artists and authors that I like, I never bothered to read this or anything else by Voltaire on the general assumption that philosophical fiction by philosophers is heavy on philosophy and light on everything else. Recently, however, I started hearing people talking about how it’s satire (which I didn’t know) and still funny a couple of centuries later. So I finally decided to try it out. And it just goes to show how much I know about anything.

The book is basically intended as a rebuttal to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s philosophy of optimism, which insisted on God's benevolence despite all the terrible things that happen in the world. Candide, the illegitimate son of the sister of the Baron of Thunder-ten-Tronckh, lives a happy innocent life in the castle and is taught by his tutor, Professor Pangloss, that they live in the "best of all possible worlds" and that "all is for the best". Then Candide is literally kicked out of the castle after the Baron’s daughter, Lady Cunégonde, flirts with him, and finds himself gangpressed into the Bulgarian army. From there it’s one calamity after another as Candide travels the world and sees that it’s nothing like what Pangloss has described.

Which doesn’t sound very funny. But it’s how you tell it. Voltaire’s storytelling is playful and briskly paced, parodying classic adventure-romance tropes, while Candide maintains an oafish innocence for much of the novel as he tries to see the upside of all the bad things happening to him and his friends while he struggles to reunite with his beloved Cunégonde. As for Voltaire’s take on optimism and the problem of evil and suffering, there’s plenty to argue about, and people still argue about it to this day, so there's no need to assume Candide is the last word on the topic. Anyway, I get why it’s one of the most influential novels in literature.

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Candide camera,

This is dF

Slowing down again, but I’m ahead of schedule, so why not?

The Man Who Knew Too Much by G.K. Chesterton

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not to be confused with the Hitchcock films of the same name, which borrowed the title (and nothing else) from this 1922 collection of what are billed as detective stories, but are actually far more than that – they’re really commentaries on corruption and skullduggery among the upper class in the British govt at the time, and how they can literally get away with murder. While the stories are essentially standalone, they also form an interconnected narrative when bookended by the first and last stories.

The title character is Horne Fisher, a respected member of the upper class from a political family who is very well connected with top government officials – including the Prime Minister – and seems to know everybody and everything. That also means that while he is very adept at solving the murder mysteries that occur in these tales, he also believes that reporting his findings to the police will be not only futile, but also potentially damaging to the govt and the stability of the British Empire, or what’s left of it. Fisher’s cynical pessimism (some might say realism) contrasts to his sidekick, political journalist Harold March, whom he befriends in the first story.

Like Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, the mystery-solving bit is almost incidental to the scenarios in which they take place, with the crime usually happening mid-way through the story and Fisher solving the mystery quite quickly. For my money, I think that approach works better here than with the Father Brown mysteries, if only because Fisher comes across as a better defined character. What’s even more interesting is that Fisher is more of an anti-hero because of his complicity. He knows who’s guilty, yet is unwilling to turn them in – a point that March eventually calls him out on.

I will say that Chesterton probably assumed his audience would be informed of the big political issues of the day in early-1920s England – or at least the framework in which his fictional issues occur – so if you’re not up to speed on that, you may feel a bit lost, especially during the final story. Possibly more problematic for contemporary readers is the blatant anti-Semitism in one story, even if you take it as an accurate reflection of political sentiment at the time. (Chesterton himself has been accused of being anti-Semitic, though he always denied this and also denounced Hitler before it became popular.) Anyway, I found it strangely compelling.


Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I read a few selected Whitman poems in a poetry class in university, and of course I’ve heard quotations of and references to his work in Dead Poets Society and Ray Bradbury stories and whatnot. And I remember learning that Whitman was very controversial for his day, not just for disregarding metre and rhyme, but also for the sexual overtones of some of his poems, not all of which could be said to be exclusively heterosexual, if you see what I’m saying. So sure, I figured I’d dive in his sole collection of poems, which originally started with 12 poems and now contains over 400.

And, well ... I’m probably not the most qualified person to review it, not exactly being a connoisseur of poetry. Let’s just say everyone has their own taste in poetry, and I have mine, and for the most part, Whitman is not it. There are a few gems here, all of which are among his shorter poems. In fact, I got more out of the short ones, as Whitman’s style is so grandiose and (for lack of a better term) emo to the point of pretentiousness that it makes the longer poems a real slog. Put another way, Whitman makes Bill Shakespeare look like Bukowski. Points for going against the grain, ditching conventions and celebrating the natural world and all, and the good ones are certainly worthwhile, but man, I’m glad that’s over.

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Sheer bloody poetry,

This is dF

Well, that’s more like it, Bubba! Apparently it helps when you add a bunch of pulp fiction to your reading list.

The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything by John D. MacDonald

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’ve been aware of John D. MacDonald for ages, but I can’t remember ever reading any of his stuff, not even The Executioners, which was filmed twice as Cape Fear. I may have tried one of his Travis McGee novels decades ago, but I couldn’t swear to it. Anyway, I found out awhile back that he’d written a few science fiction novels during his long career, one of which is this 1962 novel. I came across a copy of it and thought, why not?

The premise: Kirby Winter is a mild-mannered maladroit ninny whose uncle, the mysteriously wealthy Omar Krepps, has just died. Winter inherits nothing but a pocket watch and a letter to be opened in a year’s time. Kirby’s life changes dramatically when (1) everyone from Krepps’ business partners and the IRS to international grifter Charla Maria Markopoulo O’Rourke thinks Kirby is sitting on a fortune in embezzled funds, as well as the secret to Krepps’ inexplicable wealth, (2) he has an accidental sexual tryst with exotic dancer Bonny Lee Beaumont, and (3) he discovers that the pocket watch can freeze time for everyone except the person holding it.

I should note that the time-freezing aspect is more fantasy plot device than anything remotely scientific – which is fine, and probably as well, since Kirby doesn’t discover the watch’s ability until halfway through the book. MacDonald has fun with the kinds of things you could do with that ability, even if some of them are cringey by modern standards. In fact, there’s a lot of cringe to go around – the book has not aged well in terms of how Kirby relates to women, especially as the plot revolves on his evolution from sexually hung-up zero to assertive hero with the help of Bonny Lee’s Manic Pixie Dream Girl character (though, to be fair, it’s relatively progressive by 1962 sex-comedy standards). That said, the dialogue is a bit clunky at times, and I didn’t find Kirby and Bonny Lee’s love affair all that convincing. Overall, it’s okay for what it is and fun at times, but it didn’t convince me to give JDM another go.

Cape Fear is great, though. (Both of them.)


The Thief Who Couldn't Sleep by Lawrence Block

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It was 40 years ago that I first started reading Lawrence Block, and his Evan Tanner series – which started in 1966 when lots of authors were diving into lucrative James Bond territory – was my entry point. I was immediately hooked, and the influence of Block and the Tanner novels on my own writing style cannot possibly be overstated. I loved the idea of a spy novel featuring a guy who is incapable of sleep due to a war injury, whose hobby is joining hundreds of international organisations with hopeless causes (like, say, returning the Stuart line to the throne of England), and ends up working for a secret agency so secret that he doesn’t know who they are and they don’t know he’s not actually one of their agents. Anyway, I recently decided to reread all eight books in the series to see how it holds up after all these years. And so here we are with the book that started it all.

As a permanent insomniac, Tanner spends his extra waking hours studying, learning languages, joining lost causes, and writing theses for college students. After being hired to write a thesis on the Turkish massacres in Armenia in the early 20th century, Tanner – who is a member of the League To Restore Cilician Armenia – just happens to meet Armenian belly dancer Kitty Bazerian, who grandmother tells him a tale of how, in 1922, all the gold in Smyrna (573lb) was stashed under the porch of her family’s house in Balikesir in case the Turks invaded, which they eventually did. Tanner figures there’s a good chance the gold is still there, and decides to go to Balikesir to find out and – if it is – steal it. To give you an idea of how that goes, the book opens with him in a Turkish jail cell, having been promptly arrested at immigration.

It gets somewhat freewheeling from there, as Tanner is forced to make it up as he goes, becoming an international fugitive in the process, and leveraging his contacts with various organisations (not all of whom can be trusted) to get from one point to the next. This being a Bond-adjacent genre book, he also manages to get laid several times (hey, it was the 60s – which, incidentally, is something to keep in mind for several passages in this book). Throughout it all, what makes it work is Block’s breezy writing style, sharp dialogue, steady pacing, dry humour and generally keeping it as realistic and believable as you can keep a story involving a lost-cause enthusiast who can’t sleep trying to steal a fortune in Armenian gold. Reading it again, I can see how this made me a Block fan for life, and as international men of mystery go, I’ll still take Tanner over Bond any day.


The Night of the Long Knives by Fritz Leiber

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I recently came across a trove of old SF novels, novellas and short stories at The Gutenberg Project, all scanned from Golden Age SF pulp magazines that are out of print and at least believed to be public domain at the time TGP scanned them. One of them is this, a post-apocalyptic novel by Fritz Leiber, who is most famous for his Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser series. I’ve never read those or anything else by Leiber, and who doesn’t like a good old-fashioned post-apocalyptic pulp novel? So I gave it a try.

The premise: after a nuclear war, the American continent is mostly a wasteland with pockets of civilization nearer the USA’s former borders. In the middle is the Deathlands, where humans have more or less been reduced to two basic instincts – fuck or kill (or possibly both). The narrator, Ray, encounters Alice – a tough woman with a hook for one hand. They go for the first option, after which they spot a hover plane that lands nearby. They kill the pilot, go aboard, are joined by an old man who happened to witness everything, and try to hijack the plane to get out of the Deathlands, upon which the old man, Pops, tells them he has started a movement to reject murder, and that they’re welcome to join.

Leiber has a stellar rep in pulp SFF circles, but this did not work for me at all. Apart from the trope of Ray spending pages and pages explaining what a bad-ass he has to be to be to survive in the Deathlands and justifying his murderous instincts, he also spends pages and pages laying out a lot of exposition for the overall setting. I gather that the story is partly meant to be a rumination on whether humanity can still be redeemed when fear and murder are the only characteristics it has left, but I didn’t find the transformation of Ray and Alice to be all that convincing – not after reading all those pages of Ray wallowing in his own hard-ass Deathlands philosophy.


Saint Francis by Nikos Kazantzakis (1-Jun-1963) Paperback by Nikos Kazantzakis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, I read Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ (while I was in Greece, no less – I picked up a second-hand copy of the book while I was there). I’d seen the Scorsese film and loved it, so I wanted to see what the book was like. I enjoyed it immensely, but never got around to read Kazantzakis again – until I came across a copy of this (in Tennessee, not Greece). While I knew very little about Saint Francis of Assisi, I was interested to see what Kazantzakis did with him, and what I’d make of it, as my spiritual outlook is far different now than it was 28 years ago. Admittedly it took a couple of tries, but eventually I found myself sucked into it.

As you might guess, this is a fictionalised bio of Francis, as narrated by Brother Leo, a seeker of God who accompanies Francis from his spiritual epiphany to his death. Kazantzakis weaves together fact and legend to create a portrait of Francis as a passionate fanatic preaching the “new madness” of God’s perfect love, which the people he encounters react to either by throwing things at him or joining him. Francis’ quest to imitate Christ as close as possible drives him to pursue Perfect Poverty (and all the suffering that goes with it) whilst also developing an affinity with God’s creation itself.

As I say, I don’t know enough about Francis to judge how much of Kazantzakis’ version is accurate and how much (if any) is blasphemy. And I can’t say how much I learned about the real Francis from this. But I can say it’s a bonkers novel that succeeds in exploring what it truly means to devote your life to imitating Jesus’ example at the expense of everything else in a world that either rejects you or seeks to exploit you. What made it work for me is that Francis is balanced by Brother Leo, who represents the true believers who don’t have nearly the willpower to be a Saint Francis, and gives a voice to those who believe that we don’t have to be a saint to be any closer to God than Francis is said to be.


Queen of the Martian Catacombs: Planet Stories, Summer '49 by Leigh Brackett

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Continuing my exploration of the works of Leigh Brackett, this is her first novella to feature Eric John Stark, her most famous series character who is equal parts Tarzan, Mowgli and John Carter – born on Earth, orphaned on Mercury, raised by a local indigenous tribe, now a mercenary on Mars. Awhile back I read the first two books of her Stark reboot in the 1970s (The Ginger Star and The Hounds of Skaith), and while the results were mixed, the character was interesting enough for me to want to see what Brackett did with him in the 1940s.

Stark’s debut sees him on the lam from the Earth Police Control for running guns on Mars. Simon Ashton – the man who rescued him from Mercury and, as it happens, an EPC officer – gives him a choice: do 20 years for gun-running, or help stop a civil war. Stark has already been hired by a man named Delgaun for what he thinks is a private war, but is in fact part of a plot by the barbarian leader Kynon – who claims to offer immortality by way of ancient cult magic – to start a rebellion against the ruling govt. Ashton wants Stark to join Delgaun’s army in order to stop Kynon and his queen, the luscious redhead Berild, who may have plans of her own.

And so. It’s classic “planetary romance” swords-and-sorcery stuff, and here it works for two main reasons: (1) Brackett really was good at writing this sort of thing, and IMO wrote it as good as (or arguably better than) Edgar Rice Burroughs did, and (2) Stark is a strangely compelling character – an anti-hero that embodies an uneasy mixture of savagery and civility with a soft spot for the oppressed. The story is alright as these kinds of stories go, although – typical of the genre – the love-interest angle is even less convincing than the idea that there is indigenous life on Mars, Venus and Mercury. Anyway, I liked it well enough.

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Cooler than Mars,

This is dF

It’s looking a bit grim, isn’t it?

My reading pace, I mean.

Ah well. At least I’m enjoying myself.

Can You Feel Anything When I Do This? by Robert Sheckley

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

After reading and enjoying two novels from Robert Sheckley, this is my first time trying out his short stories. This collection, published in 1971, illustrates clearly that while Sheckley was known mainly for science fiction, he also expanded his absurdist take into modern-day social satire and surrealist dream worlds.

This collection starts off with a woman being courted by an AI-powered vacuum cleaner and ends with a satire on two-fisted Golden Age SF in which veteran space Johnny Draxton is saddled with a green co-pilot. In between, we have a space explorer matching wits with a logical security robot, literal deals with the devil, a doctor creating hybrid monstrosities in his Mexico City apartment, a time traveller selling cures for a plague that hasn’t broken out yet and a Rashoman-style story of a regular customer in a failing Indonesian restaurant.

The main consistent thread is Sheckley’s penchant for the absurd, which he deploys to good effect through most of these. Like with most collections, a few don’t quite work for me, and some linger in the memory more than others, but at least I was entertained while I was there. I will say the story "Cordle to Onion to Carrot" – in which a guy tries to improve his life by becoming a complete asshole to everyone over the slightest inconvenience – is practically prophetic, given how things seem to be going in America in 2025.

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Feel me,

This is dF

Starting late on this year’s series, mainly because I spent most of January either moving or being sick with a headcold. Which is as well since I only managed to read one book that month anyway. Hopefully normal service resumes as of now.

Beyond a Binary God: A Theology for Trans* Allies by Tara K. Soughers

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was assigned reading for a class, and I’m glad it was, because I fully admit to being rather ignorant on the whole transgender topic to the point that I tend to stay out of debates about it. To be clear, I have always believed that trans people should be treated with love, dignity and respect – I mean, that’s just an obvious baseline to me. But a lot of the debate tends to focus either on the science of gender, the whole TERF thing, the supposed Biblical arguments against trans people, or the political trappings that these views tend to be wrapped in. I don’t know enough about it to argue on those levels, and I’m disinclined to debate about stuff I don’t know anything about. And while I’d like to educate myself, it’s hard to find reliable information or know what sources to trust, given the aforementioned political tropes and the general state of disinformation.

Anyway, Tara Soughers wrote this book after finding out that her 20-year-old daughter was actually a trans man. While Soughers understood transgenderism from an academic POV, she struggled how to process it as a parent, a trans ally and an Episcopal priest. The latter was especially tricky, as very few resources were available that looked at where trans people fit into from a theological stance, apart from conservative Christians who use existing theology to persecute everyone in the LGBTQIA+ community. So Soughers decided to write her own book to explore this issue.

Consequently, the book is less of a concrete theology and more of Soughers processing her own thoughts about her trans son, the transgender community and how they might reflect God’s image (as we all do) from a theological standpoint. I can’t say how successful she is in terms of the theology, but it’s a decent start, should anyone care to listen or follow up. I do think she makes a very strong argument that God’s creation is far too complex to be reduced to binary dualities, and that people who do not fit the binary are not problems to be solved, but gifts from God to help us gain a deeper understanding of Him and ourselves. I also learned a lot about transgender studies, so there’s that. To risk stating the obvious, what others make of this will depend on what political or theological baggage they bring to the table.


The Destroyer of Worlds by Matt Ruff

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I rather enjoyed Lovecraft Country, which juxtaposed Lovecraftian horror with the real-life horrors of Jim Crow America. Whereas that book employed the structure of a television series (separate self-contained stories comprising a broader story arc), The Destroyer of Worlds is more of a straightforward novel, although Ruff still juggles a number of different storylines that somehow merge by the third act.

The story kicks off with Atticus Turner and his father Horace traveling to the Swincegood plantation in North Carolina to celebrate the centenary of their ancestor Hecuba’s escape from the plantation where she was a slave (described in the prologue) by retracing her route to freedom. Things start to get weird, which may be due to Hecuba having had magical abilities.

Meanwhile, Atticus’ aunt Hippolyta is traveling to Las Vegas with teenage son Horace and her friend Letitia Dandridge to retrieve a magical item for the ghost of sorcerer Hiram Winthrop, who is currently haunting Letitia’s house. Hippolyta also intends to acquire a mystical transport unit that allows the user to travel to other planets, having done some planet hopping in the first book.

Meanwhile, her husband George – who, unbeknownst to her has been diagnosed with terminal cancer – recruits his Masonic lodge brothers to help him steal a corpse for Winthrop in exchange for a cure.

Meanwhile, Letitia’s sister Ruby, who is still using a magic potion to pass herself off as a young white woman, realises that her brother Marvin, who recently turned up on her doorstep in Chicago, may not be Marvin at all.

All of this somehow comes together in Part 3, and it more or less works, although the climax seems to come out of nowhere, as it relies on one of the story arcs that ended a third of the way through the book. Somehow it doesn’t quite match the intensity or weirdness of the first book, though that may simply be the product of The Destroyer of Worlds leveraging an established world and cast rather than building it from scratch. I also think Lovecraft Country’s episodic structure was a more effective way of juggling this many characters. Still, it’s a decent story with a solid and likeable collection of well-rounded characters, so while it may be a case of diminishing returns, it’s still entertaining.


Terminal Boredom: Stories by Izumi Suzuki

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Izumi Suzuki is a cult legend in Japan – a model and occasional actress in early 70s “pink” films who also wrote science fiction stories, and hanged herself at age 36. Her work was never translated into English until this volume was published in 2021, which is when I first heard of her. Between her bio and the fact that her SF was more in line with the western New Wave than the usual space operas and giant robots and whatnot, I was keen to give her a try.

The seven stories here cover a variety of scenarios: acts of rebellion in queer matriarchal utopias, cryogenic population control where the frozen can live in your dreams, aliens trying to live like Earthlings by referencing pop culture, relationship advice from talking furniture, rapidly ageing drug addicts, the strain of geo-planetary tensions on a human/alien couple, and teenagers that can’t distinguish television from reality. The common theme throughout the stories are anxiety, alienation and a general inability to relate to other people or society in general.

There’s a lot of neat ideas here, with varied execution, but pretty much all the characters are defined by a kind of extreme, hopeless nihilism that makes for rather bleak reading – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and Suzuki doesn’t wallow in it to the point of self-indulgence, but still, I probably would have liked this more when I was younger. Anyway, I found it interesting, but a little goes a long way, so I’m not sure how soon I’ll try her again.

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Chairman of the bored,

This is dF

Well, I am …

Earthlings by Sayaka Murata

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is my first time reading Sayaka Murata, and I picked it up because someone else had name-dropped it somewhere, and the pitch sounded right up my street: Natsuki is an 11-year-old girl who believes she has magic powers granted to her by her toy hedgehog, and later thinks she may be an alien waiting for a spaceship to come pick her up and take her home. I’ve felt that way many times in my life, and I figured, okay, quirky Japanese novel about not fitting in. Well, it’s quirky alright – but it’s also a horror story, and it’s one of the bleakest, disturbing and nastiest books I’ve read in a really long time.

Natsuki gets the idea of being an alien from her cousin Yuu, who lives with his family in a remote house in the mountains where her family goes once a year on holiday. Yuu thinks he’s an alien, and soon Natsuki thinks she might be one too. She’s also in love with Yuu, mainly because she has no one else she can trust – her parents are psychologically abusive to her, and her cram-school teacher is molesting her, and nobody believes her when she tries to tell them. Yuu and Natsuki make a vow that has consequences immediately, and then decades later when Natsuki returns to the mountain house with her husband, who also thinks he’s an alien.

On one level, the book is a well-paced and reasonably effective absurdist commentary on the cost of refusing (or being unable) to conform to society’s expectations, as well as the alienating effect of sexual abuse on victims who are blamed for what happened to them. However, for me the dark humor is offset by Murata’s disturbingly graphic depictions of violence, underage sex and child abuse as seen from the POV of the child, while the final act veers into a climax so depraved and gruesome that it cost me a night’s sleep. Maybe 20 years ago I would have liked this, but these days I don’t have the heart or stomach for this sort of thing. If you do, go for it. Just be advised: if trigger warnings are a thing for you, this book has pretty much all the triggers except cruelty to animals.


Shakespeare for Squirrels by Christopher Moore

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the third of Christopher Moore’s Shakespeare parodies/homages featuring court jester Pocket of Dog Snogging on Ouze. Whereas the first two books took on King Lear and The Merchant of Venice, this one tackles what’s said to be Shakespeare’s most-performed play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream – in this case, with an added murder mystery, lots of bawdy sex jokes and, of course, squirrels.

Moore keeps a lot of the basic elements, including the location of Athens, where Pocket, idiot apprentice Drool and hat-shagging monkey Jeff wash ashore after being set adrift by pirates. In short order, the trio encounter Nick Bottom and the mechanicals rehearsing a play for the wedding of Theseus (Duke of Athens) and Hippolyta (Amazon queen). They also meet fairy folk, including Cobweb, who helps them survive in the woods, and Robin Goodfellow (a.k.a. the Puck), who is abruptly murdered. Pocket and Drool are arrested, but Pocket ends up commissioned by Hippolyta and Theseus to find out who killed the Puck, and why.

To explain what any of this has to do with squirrels would ruin the surprise, but in any case, this is Moore once again retelling Shakespeare as a madcap sex comedy that’s easier to read and a lot funnier, whilst somehow managing to stay more or less true to the original characters despite taking a lot of comic liberties. While Moore’s sequels can be a mixed bag, I do think he’s managed to keep the quality level pretty consistent in the Pocket series. The story gets somewhat convoluted (although so was A Midsummer Night’s Dream, so fair enough), but it’s an awful lot of fun to read.

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The play’s the thing,

This is dF

Momentum arrested!

Ah well.

Impossible Things by Connie Willis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I generally enjoy Connie Willis’ novels, so when I came across this collection of novellas and short stories (all initially published between 1988 and 1992), I was keen to give it a go. And it’s a pretty diverse set of stories that cover a lot of the usual bases for Willis – bureaucratic chaos, science nerds, politically correct dystopias, Shakespeare conspiracy theories and comedy of errors and screwball comedies. Sometimes all in one story.

It would take more time and space than I have to go through each story, and in any case I enjoyed most of them. I will say the opener, “The Last Of The Winnebagos”, is the most difficult story in the bunch, and a daring one to put at the front – partly because of the depressing background premise (a plague has killed all the dogs), and partly because Willis opts to shift to flashbacks with no warning whatsoever, which keeps you on your toes but slows down what is otherwise very good and accessible prose.

If you can get through that, the rest of the collection is more or less a breeze. “Chance” (about a woman returning to her college alma mater and being haunted by her past) is perhaps the weakest and bleakest story here, and “Jack” (a vampire story set during the London Blitz) is a bit too predictable. And for some of these, it helps if you love gabby screwball comedy with lots of running gags as much as Willis does (which I do). Anyway, I enjoyed it, and will be reading more Willis in future.


Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I like Graham Greene’s novels more often than not, but despite this being one of his classic titles, I’ve tended to stay away from it, mainly because I had the impression it was about teenage gangs, which is a subgenre that doesn’t interest me as much as the spies, hit men and whiskey priests Greene often writes about. Still, I figured I’d read it one day, and it turns out the only teenage gangster in it is the sociopathic anti-hero, Pinkie Brown, who has just taken over a small gang in Brighton from his predecessor Kite, who was killed by a hitman after newspaper reporter Charles Hale exposed his illegal slot machine racket.

The story opens with Pinkie’s gang killing Hale, who is in Brighton distributing prize cards for a newspaper contest. While Hale’s death is ruled a heart attack at the inquest, Pinkie discovers that teenage waitress Rose unknowingly has information that can blow his alibi. Meanwhile, boisterous pub entertainer Ida – who was with Hale right before he disappeared – believes he was murdered and decides to investigate herself. The plot follows Pinkie’s increasingly paranoid attempts to cover up the murder (which includes pretending to romance Rose to prevent her from talking to the police), whilst also dealing with the fact that Colleoni, the boss of a rival gang (whose success Pinkie is jealous of) wants to take over all rackets in Brighton.

This was Greene’s first novel to explicitly explore themes related to his Catholic faith regarding the nature of sin and morality – both Pinkie and Rose are Catholics, although Pinkie mainly sees it as another system he can game. Their beliefs in the nature of Good vs Evil – and Pinkie’s cruel misanthropy – is pitted against Ida, who is driven by a more secular, humanistic and equally strong morality of Right vs Wrong. For me, the only real problem is why a gang of older, experienced mobsters would allow an unbalanced 17-year-old sociopath to run their gang in the first place. On the other hand, I love the twist of Ida being the “hero” of the story, which drives Pinkie nuts because he can’t for the life of him understand what she wants or how she fits into all this. Bits of it have certainly aged poorly, but overall it’s a solid entry in Greene’s work.

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So you wanna be a gangsta,

This is dF

Well, on the bright side, this completes my classroom reading assignments for the academic year, so I might be able to pick up the pace with books that don’t require as much brainpower to read. As opposed to:


The Hebrew Bible: Feminist and Intersectional Perspectives by Gale A. Yee

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is another textbook assigned to a class on the Old Testament I’ve been taking for the past academic year, but hey it counts, right? As the title implies, it’s essentially a short collection of essays that provide an overview to the basics of feminist and intersections perspectives. The introduction provides an overview of the field of feminist theology itself, while the four essays are essentially pro tips for freshman feminist theology students looking at specific sections of the OT (Pentateuch, Deuteronomy, the prophets, etc), highlighting kinds of issues raised by feminist interpretations of the text, starting points for further study, etc.

If, like me, you know next to nothing about feminist theology, even as a brief overview, there’s lots to chew on, given the obvious patriarchal perspective of the OT’s writers and editors, to say nothing of the patriarchal and highly sexist culture of ancient Israel and the Levant itself. Obviously, what readers make of it will depend greatly on their opinions about feminism in general (favorable or otherwise), their feelings about interpretations of Scripture that depart from established orthodoxy, and their tolerance for dry, intellectual academic prose. (I mean, it IS an academic textbook for university-level studies, meaning the target audience is students taking a class that covers this topic.)

So, my rating is more of a reflection of the fact that, as someone who has only ever encountered feminist theology in passing, I learned things I didn’t know before. So there you go.

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Women of the world take over,

This is dF