Thread of Wonder, the next 5000 posts: science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction 2021 and beyond

Time to launch another lifeboat to the stars. Previously: ThReads Must Roll: the new, improved rolling fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction &c. thread

All aboard the Strato-Cruiser!

DO U SEE, I’m a stranger here myself.

Singing thread title to the tune of the Theme from Underdog

Thread of Wonder
5000 posts

Wonder Thread
Wonder Thread!

Thread of royal beauty bright!

Cool, except PLEASE change "Sci-Fi" to "Science Fiction"; true headz will respect it more.

Seriously, change that shit.

If a mod wants to a mod can, now to read some skiffy some I can make a real contribution to the thread.

some

In thee beginning (not really, butt a big ol goodun, where I came in)
rolling fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction &c. thread

That rolled from 2011 to 2014, I believe.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/P/B08F9XYGVQ.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_SX500_.jpg

Kindle daily deal today. seems odd that it doesn't mention Gagarin by name.

also listed, a Tchaikovsky book, Doors of Eden. anyone? i liked the one about the spiders, i didn't like ironclads.

just finished The Ministry For the Future. almost comically unsubtle and didactic in its politcs. the last hundred pages or so were "scouring of the shire" bad. first half is excellent.

started that -- the first scene is harrowing, but i instantly lost all interest when things shifted to the ministry itself. i suppose no one dramatizes vast bureaucratic processes better than KSR but it's a low bar, and i'm not really up for doom right now

read 'hench', which has a jokey premise -- underemployed young woman seeks placement as a villain's henchman through a temp service -- but turned out to be fierce as well as funny

started jo walton's 'the just city'; it's a little precious but i'm liking it a lot so far

as everyone says about recent KSR, it's actually very optimistic. the first scene though good grief.

Yeah, if the future is remotely like that KSR projects I'd be a hell of a lot more hopeful than I am now.

the last hundred pages or so were "scouring of the shire" bad.

I am struggling with this sentence.

Yeah.

ha! do you mean you're struggling with it syntactically or morally?

Uh, aesthetically? The scouring of the shire is a highlight!

I'm more bothered by the lack of a comma in 5,000 than I am abt sci-fi tbh

Commas are only for numbers of five figures and up as far as I'm concerned

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbNlMtqrYS0
x10

Almost posted that embed 10x ina old-school JW Noizeborad style.

I'm sure I talked about some of this in the previous thread about hanging out with horror people mostly then SFF people and then when you go back to horrorland, most people in SFF land start seeming really uptight and conversations have so many restricted areas and I have to respect what people aren't willing to discuss but I find it occasionally frustrating. And then there's this area of horror which is like the children of Dennis Cooper and it's lovely how relaxed they are and talking about what drugs they're taking all the time.

https://amphetaminesulphate.bigcartel.com/
https://www.clashbooks.com/
https://expatpress.com/shop/
https://www.apocalypse-party.com/books.html
https://www.infinitylandpress.com/books

I generally like SFF fans but I do feel like a lot of them (even a lot of the progressive ones) still want stories that are easy to swallow and are probably afraid to look at their dog's anus.

Only thing is, the blurbs for some of these authors can be completely ridiculous and leave you hanging, not knowing what it's like or about. "Britney Spears singing love songs to you while Baudelaire gives you an enema" or some nonsense like that.

Ha, exactly.

Think I started a thread about that once.

When Author X was Compared to Author Y by Author Z

nothing more riveting than people talking about their drug regimens, very transgressive

I'm a complete teetolaler and I'm not even into drug talk but my point is it's nice to hear writers talking in a more carefree way. It's probably significant that the horror genre largely escaped the culture war and there's less people out to get each other.

Like this crap is still going on in SFF land
https://dorisvsutherland.com/2021/04/06/baens-bar-the-utterly-incompetent-case-for-the-defence/

i haven't the patience to delve into what you consider 'culture war' 'crap' that's 'easy to swallow'

tbh i've seen way too much of my cat's anus, but nor have i considered cramming something up there and calling it art

honestly you are fucking creepy as hell; maybe you should stick to to 'open-minded' horror boards where you can discuss what you want to do to your waifus with no judgment

but nor have i considered cramming something up there and calling it art

Does anyone do this?

Old Lunch was asking maybe two years ago about problems with reactionary horror people but as far as the fiction/poetry side goes it's really minimal compared to SFF, it's been said they're more easy going and get on better together.
The drawback is maybe the low brow attitude, too much easy amusement with juxtaposing high and low culture and the shit eating grins (see lots of horror author photos) and it does annoy me when people feel they have to present dark or gross subject matter in a jokey way, I'm regularly guilty of it too and it's often my first instinct to joke about some of these things. I think people do this because if they keep a straight face about it, they're worried people will think they're crazy.
But I think sometimes humor and punky attitude doesn't let people process things as well, I'd rather the subject matters weren't considered so transgressive or frightening, it makes peoples lives more difficult. So it's nice when people are just more at ease with it all, but the transgression is undeniably part of the appeal of some of these writers.

There's been a lot of good buzz about this one
https://www.apocalypse-party.com/negativespace.html

Going to be weird hearing “George R.R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into the Sun, Or: The 2020 Hugo Awards Ceremony (Rageblog Edition)” read out at a ceremony.
https://www.tor.com/2021/04/13/announcing-the-2021-hugo-award-finalists/

https://www.tor.com/2021/04/13/a-brief-guide-to-the-extraordinary-fiction-of-vonda-n-mcintyre/

http://file770.com/discon-iii-declines-to-comment-on-code-of-conduct-issue-about-hugo-finalist/

A little bit heartbreaking how many SFF authors despise each other and the awards nominations intensifying it all.

How many people nominated for a Hugo alongside Isabel Fall this year celebrated the removal of her story or contributed to the harassment campaign against her?

I think I count 3 so far. I really hope she wins.

— Experiencing A Significant Poggers Shortfall (@mechanicalkurt) April 13, 2021

The entire SF/F community came out and said "if you don't write about being trans in the way we think you should, we will attempt to harm you."

This is especially angering because it was an open secret that literally all of Chuck Wendig's writer friends were sex pests.

— Qualia Redux (@QualiaRedux) April 15, 2021

and some nice animals. What's weirder than the giant bunny in the first picture, is the way that guy is holding the pilot's head

One great sub-genre of retro sci-fi art: Confusingly Placed Animals pic.twitter.com/P0rmh9WG7I

— 70s Sci-Fi Art (@70sscifi) April 15, 2021

Jess Nevins - Horror Needs No Passport

This starts with Nevins explaining his frustration that there has been very little survey or study of international horror fiction and that he did this book because nobody else had. It sticks to the 20th century (with occasional background and influential writers from further back), skips USA, UK and a few other english speaking countries but there is still a bunch of english fiction included from other countries. Nevins doesn't say which writers he has actually read himself, he quotes other scholars evaluations quite a lot but I did get the impression he was voicing his own opinions about most of the japanese writers (who are surprisingly well represented in english translation) and these were some of the most enjoyable parts.

It might have been inevitable that many of the writers end up sounding very similar and my eyes often glazed over the descriptions of their approaches (what subgenres, where the horror effects are coming from). But every once in a while there's really tantalizing or unusual sounding stories about Africa, Indonesian martial arts horror, a story about a shepherd, Tarzan starring in Israeli horror adventures, italian extreme horror and amazing sounding gothics from all around the world.

It notes a handful of comic artists, Suehiro Maruo is oddly absent but I was pleased to discover Daijiro Morohoshi who I might have seen a little of but most of what I found on search was new to me.

The political/cultural background for every country is detailed, if horror was frowned upon or even outlawed (often in soviet countries, Germany and Japan censored under post-war occupation, some people writing horror only in exile), whether what each writer was doing was considered high art or trash from the gutter. It seemed like quite a lot of the South American writers were politicians.
A few times Nevins writes about authors not pursuing just "mere fear" and it seemed as if it was his own opinion (?), I don't understand why someone so devoted to horror would feel that being scary for it's own sake wasn't enough, given how that approach can be as intense and memorable as anything else when it's done well.

It is mentioned that Ewers was a Nazi but not Strobl, somehow.

No cover credit for Utagawa Kuniyoshi.

I do wish there was some sort of guide about the availability in english of these books. Perhaps Nevins was concerned it would date the book too much and that people might not bother searching for newer books if they weren't already in an english list? I spent a while checking isfdb and amazon for many of the writers but I didn't have the patience to research every writer that sounded promising. A few were indeed published after this book.
Sad that I probably won't hear about most of these authors again. If a particular writer has sufficiently high status, there's a good chance Penguin or some other classics publisher has them in english, a good deal of this stuff goes unnoticed by most horror fans and I can't blame them too much for not catching them all.

This could and should be an important building block for the future of horror. It's pretty great and I bought Nevins' Horror Fiction In The 20th Century, which can be considered a companion to this.

I can't remember who the writer was but one of the unique ideas I came across in the above book was from a writer in exile from a dictatorship who wrote a novel in which even gods are powerless against the goverment, which just seems like a horribly depressing idea. Quite a few south american stories were mentioned in which all the characters are completely fucked and have nothing but terrifyingly bad choices available.

I didn't know that books aimed at railway travelers was such a big thing in India. Which makes me wonder about "airport novels", do publishers and even writers really spend a lot of time thinking about what people want to read at an airport?

https://locusmag.com/2021/02/paul-di-filippo-reviews-the-society-of-time-by-john-brunner/

I like the idea of Brunner but haven’t really been able to read.

Brunner’s supporting cast, including the Jesuit time-travel expert, Father Ramon

Another one for my 'Catholics in spaaaaaace!' list.

Never read any Brunner meself, sounds intriguing but this (re: Stand on Zanzibar) puts me off: Some examples of slang include "codder" (man), "shiggy" (woman), "whereinole" (where in hell?), "prowlie" (an armoured police car), "offyourass" (possessing an attitude), "bivving" (bisexuality, from "ambivalent") and "mucker" (a person running amok).

Elizabeth Moon's Remnant population: emo sf in the Le Guin mould. Good aliens and bad humans, though the humans aren't all that bad, and the dice are stacked rather heavily in favour of the aliens - not that Le Guin didn't indulge in a bit of dice stacking herself. Enjoyable but somewhat cosy and convenient.

Also for fans of (at least) 5000 posts, this Rollin Speculative looks like the first, b. 2011, and is where I came in: (hey thomp, get back here):
rolling fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction &c. thread

Didn't mean to drop the g, sorry.

Or jump the gun on :

will jump gun for dinosaur

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fb8IN53dfBQ

Good Ray Bradbury rundown and intro to new exhibit at Chicago's American Writer's Museum.

There's a free talk by his autobiographer tonight:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/sam-weller-telling-bradburys-story-tickets-149947169019?aff=CCSamWellerProgram

re: the recent KSR opening scene

The risk of a heat wave and blackout striking a major U.S. city simultaneously is growing -- and it "may be the deadliest climate-related event we can imagine."https://t.co/Iw5COIAizQ

— Christopher Flavelle (@cflav) May 3, 2021

To say something slightly more substantial about many SFF readers wanting simplistic and easy to swallow stories, see some of the commentary on hopepunk. Noblebright (another dumb genre name) is the conservative version but I don't know if there is any actual writers who call themselves that. But many people have found hopepunk stories to be deeply conservative. Katherine Addison's Goblin Emperor in particular.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1268544277

Some people accused Becky Chambers of racial stereotyping in her hopepunk space operas.

Peter Watts has been very supportive of Kelly Robson but he still ridiculed the hopepunk genre because he found the idea of hope being subversive to be laughable. Hope is the default he says.

As much as I enjoy this kind of mockery, I do actually want to enjoy Goblin Emperor and Chambers if and when I read them because a lot of people genuinely loved them, so I'm kind of hyped.

Don't know about racial stereotyping but the one becky chambers thing I tried to read was so pollyanna-ish I couldn't finish it.

Peppy protagonist: hey evil space pirates, don't rape and murder us and steal all our supplies, it makes more sense for you to just take what you need and leave us in peace!
Evil space pirates: Ok sure!

I hate hate hate the -punk construction, yes even cyberpunk and steampunk. Basically if you haven't been in the pit at Agnostic Front or, er, The Exploited don't call yourself punk, whippersnappers. Hopepunk is the worst yet, although noblepunk would beat it if anyone had been mad enough to moniker the 'genre' thus.

Yes Hopepunk is particularly gross.

If you want racial stereotyping I can(not) recommend Hellspark by Janet Kagan. Not that she stereotypes any existing races or cultures, but in her humanoid diaspora every planet confirms to extremely rigid and laboured stereotypes (one lot carry knives which they obsessively polish while thinking; one lot shake bangles to make a point; one lot approach from the right to appear submissive, obviously another lot approach from the right to appear dominant!) and it's only one interplanetary traveller who helps them see that hey man underneath we're all the same!

I'll accept cyberpunk and splatterpunk but I feel that if there is no punk aesthetic at all, then I'd rather call it something else. So steampunk is steamtech to me. Dieselpunk is dieseltech, solarpunk is solar SF, mannerpunk is fantasy-of-manners, hopepunk is uuuhhhh, I dunno.

Somebody mocking it called it Copepunk.

Adding punk to everything makes the genre naming so boring too. I also find it dumb in music when someone highly individual and/or untutored like Captain Beefheart gets called punk, I don't think it makes a lot of sense.

Jess Nevins - Horror Fiction In The 20th Century

This book is a huge undertaking and it was impossible this was going to please everyone. It covers more areas of horror fiction than most surveys care to or even would consider looking at, but it's under 300 pages and Nevins is just here by himself. In addition to the expected anglosphere writers and the parts cut and paste from Horror Needs No Passport (I did wonder if there were some new entries in these parts, because there were profiles I didn't remember), there's sections on horror for children and young adults, horror written by (and largely for?) African Americans, Latinx, Native Americans, Australian Aboriginals, Gays and Lesbians that mostly never had much of an audience outside their own communities.

I had some of the same problems with this as I did with Horror Needs No Passport (profiles on writers often blur together through similarities, authors who write primarily to scare seem to be considered less worthy) but this is often a more fun read.
The parts I enjoyed the most are when Nevins makes arguments and gets opinionated. I have never heard so much about the various trends going on in the ghost story and pulp eras and the claim that women ghost story authors made advancements that unfortunately weren't built on for a long time. There's some authors profiled who seem to have been a big deal in their time who I don't recall hearing about (Harriet Prescott Spofford and John Burke). I hadn't ever heard that James Herbert, Bentley Little and Benchley's Jaws novel all had a leftist outlook. Very few authors get a bad review but I was pleased the entries on Tanith Lee and SP Somtow were so positive; oddly the opinion in Horror Needs No Passport that Koji Suzuki is a bad writer saved by great ideas is not included here. Was Rosemary Timperley really more popular than Daphne Du Maurier? Timperley is fairly obscure these days and much of her short stories are impossible to find, even hard enough to find her novels.

I wish Nevins had made it clearer which authors he had himself read extensively and which he was going more on other scholars' research. We are often told a writer uses certain subjects and approaches "to terrify the reader" and I'm generally guessing this is more the intent of the authors rather than the actual effect on most of its readers? But it's not clear. How often is anything expected to terrify an experienced horror reader?

At the end he lists a lot of authors he would like to have covered but didn't have the time to. Some were big enough to surprise me (Graham Masterton). I'm surprised he didn't mention Jessica Amanda Salmonson here because he admires her as a scholar and cites her often. Nevins given Fantastic Victoriana an enormous update so maybe this will receive some expansion years down the line too?

This book could have used another proofreading, the typos are generally minor but there's a few bigger mistakes like Julian Gracq being called "Jean Gracq", Basil Copper is called "Basil Cooper" a few times.

Some further complaints and more minor quibbles.
- Brian Eno is wrongly listed as the producer of Velvet Underground's debut album (a comparison is made about the relatively low sales of Weird Tales despite its enormous influence to what Eno said about Velvet Undergound's debut).
- Hugh B Cave's comeback is not mentioned, only his pulp era.
- Marion Zimmer Bradley is mentioned in the context of 40s ghost stories. Bradley did start publishing in the late 40s but I doubt this is who Nevins meant.
- Datlow's part of Year's Best Fantasy & Horror is mentioned but I thought it was worth mentioning how many editors came before in this type of anthology.
- I was pleased to see the section on 60s/70s paperback era gothic romances but it seems to only scratch the surface, given the enormous number of book covers I've seen from this particular era.
- The RPG section doesn't mention Worlds Of Darkness.
- Some novels are included for sheer misery and I kept expecting to see Samuel Delany's Hogg but it wasn't there.
- I wanted some elaboration on why the 80s were a golden age and why the 90s were a slump. Is this purely about sales? Nevins says (noting a rare agreement with Joshi) that the slump allowed more artistic writers to cater to a more sophisticated readership. But couldn't this still have happened within the genre if sales had been better?
- I would have liked much more opinions rather than the encyclopedia approach it takes most of the time.

Despite all this, it's a very good book, not as vital as Horror Needs No Passport but still an achievement.

3/4 of the way through a book that was recommended by both James Morrison and ledge and it is not disappointing. Can’t wait to see what will happen after the dust storm ends.

― We Jam von Economo (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 23 January 2020 01:17 (one year ago) link

So far seems to be shaping up to be an instant ILB sf classic, a worthy successor to Inverted World.

― We Jam von Economo (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 23 January 2020 01:23 (one year ago) link

Which?

― change display name (Jordan), Thursday, 23 January 2020 01:24 (one year ago) link

Theory of Bastards, by Audrey Schulman.

― We Jam von Economo (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 23 January 2020 01:29 (one year ago) link

So, this was one of the last books I bought in-person pre-pandemic, and I've just now gotten around to reading it. I'm halfway through, and I'm loving it so far!

(Also in a truly bizarre coincidence, I started reading it the day after my mom called to tell me about a Genius-grant-recipient former colleague and friend of hers, whom I met once many years ago, being written up in the New York Times for her work on endometriosis!)

> a worthy successor to Inverted World.

IW is currently 99p on kindle in the uk

Cool. Maybe the handful of stragglers here who haven’t read it can catch up. Or maybe it has already been relegated to Olde ILX/Olde SF Thread and has fallen out of favor.

> the handful of stragglers here who haven’t read it

*SOBS*

i miss shakey big-upping silverbob

Totally

Jeff VanderMeer - Hummingbird Salamander

I had only read his Area X books before. Does he write all of his books like this? It spends page after page saying how significant the hummingbird and the salamander are, but it takes ages to explain why. (Supposedly because of events in the narrator's life, but this turns out to be untrue, despite her supposedly writing the book down after she has learned that it's untrue.) Most of the novel has the form of a Dan Brown quest but the clues are obviously nonsense, and lead to another clue anyway, despite it all ending up to be irrelevant in the final pages. My least favorite piece of fiction that I've read in quite a while.

frederik pohl - 'the world at the end of time'

conventional human ark-ship colonization story + 'tau zero'-ish time dilation interspersed with the ramblings of a plasma-based superbeing roughly as old as the universe.

unfortunately the main human character is an annoying prick, and it's unclear why anyone else cares about him. at one point he's reunited with someone he thought long dead, which should have been monumental but is passed over quickly because him having truly missed them isn't believable and the returning character has no depth whatsoever.

there's some awkward sex stuff, although tbf it's not as bad as that of most of his old-school sci-fi colleagues. the superbeing, despite having every other chapter devoted to it, has no role to play other than inadvertently causing the time dilation. not only does it not actually encounter our humans, it only becomes dimly aware of them in the final pages.

not v. good. only other thing i've read by him is the first heechee book; iirc that was better

Wolfbane is a ride for sure, he was at his best in collaboration with CM Kornbluth imo

I know this is very much scraping the bottom of the barrel, but: I have a lot of affection for the Warhammer and (to a lesser degree) Warhammer 40k universes. Anyone know of any novelizations or audio dramas set in those worlds that are good?

I think Pohl was a good guy, a nice person, based on what I've read and meeting him once, as well as being a good editor but yeah, his best work was Gateway and his stuff with CM Kornbluth. Shakey had some ability to slog through some of other things I didn't have the patience for.

Pohl is a strange one - when he's on his game - Gateway, Man Plus, some of the short stories like 'Tunnel under the world' and 'The Midas plague' - he's definitely top tier, and certainly a more pleasing stylist than someone like Asimov. But there are long stretches in his career where he writes almost nothing of note, ie most of the sixties and pretty much everything after Jem in 1979 (he wrote close to twenty novels from 1980 until his death, but none of them seem to be very highly regarded). I guess like so many SF authors he wrote too much, too carelessly.

Was going to mention "The Tunnel Under the World," which is indeed classic. Shakey stanned for Man Plus iirc.

Daniel - I haven't read any of them but I've heard good things about Guy Haley, Kim Newman, Dan Abnett and Stableford (as Brian Craig) in the Warhammer universe.

Still making my way through Clark Ashton Smith. After a few science fiction stories that seemed half-hearted he really indulges in Maze Of The Enchanter and a sequel to Vathek. It wasn't unusual for him to get rejections like "too sophisticated for our readers". Admittedly you do need a very good dictionary handy. The ending to Maze was a letdown for me but I liked it otherwise. Might read Vathek before this sequel.

Some people romanticize the pulps but it seems like a really crap time to have been writing, but until internet times it seems like there was only room for a few things unless you were content with the small press magazines that started in the 70s.

Room for a few things = a narrow selection genres and approaches.

Oh cool, didn't know Kim Newman wrote for them!

Some people romanticize the pulps but it seems like a really crap time to have been writing

This is surely part of the romance, as with comics, classic Hollywood studio system, 60's Pop, etc.? Artists maudits cranking out work at an insane pace, viewing it as a job not a calling (but deep down they know it's a calling!), ignored by the world at large. Sucks to have actually lived through it but for fans it gives the era extra pathos.

I think part of it is that very few people actually go back and read Weird Tales issue by issue. Nevins and Joshi give the impression it was actually a really low quality magazine, but its best writers changed the world.

Newman's Warhammer omnibus
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?828433

Reading about their individual story rejections tells you a lot about the magazines.

Newman's Warhammer novels were originally published under his pseudonym, Jack Yeovil, btw

I'm quite annoyed they resold them individually after the first omnibus came out. I bought Silver Bullets assuming it was the omnibus but somehow I didn't consider how slim it is.

micaiah johnson, the space between worlds

the multiverse is real, and certain people can travel between realities -- but only to those in which their local counterparts are dead.

this was pretty grebt imo

It didn't work for me, I couldn't really warm to the protagonist or get a decent handle on her life situation - I file that on the 'it's not you it's me' shelf of criticism though. It's certainly not as bad as the violent teenage revenge fantasy of Nophek Gloss that I suffered through recently.

Hmm. I usually trust the two of you so... I hope some tiebreaker will weigh in.

Try it, you have nothing to lose but your precious minutes!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhSbcIlvcEA

Read the sample. Found the world/worlds/worldbuilding really intriguing. There is something about the writing style that is interesting but a little cryptic to me, can’t tell how I will feel if I pony up. The road to the New Maps of Hell is littered with unread ebook purchases. James Morrison to thread!

Just picked up a cheap paperback of Hyperion. Dear lord the sex writing.

I picked up on the recommendation of a trusted friend. Thoughts? My impression is that it’s pretty good, sex excepted, even if the author is a peak SF shithead.

Haven't listened to this one yet but I always enjoy the legacy episodes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkbPnhnWzJU

https://wizardstowerpress.com/books-2/chaz-brenchley/three-twins-at-the-crater-school/

This looks pretty cool

documentary on afro futurism on bbc4 tomorrow

Cool. The book mookie recently mentioned is relevant to that.

Reminding me: did yall see this on the Samuel Delany thread:

Delany posted yesterday (FB) about choosing clothes for a New Yorker photo shoot. Fingers crossed for a full profile.

― In my house are many Manchins (WmC), Tuesday, May 18, 2021 1:08 PM (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Hope so! They published an astute take on the work of Octavia Butler in March, guess the rest is behind paywall (I happened to see the print edition), but here's the opening: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/15/how-octavia-e-butler-reimagines-sex-and-survival

― dow, Wednesday, May 19, 2021 7:03 PM (three days ago)
The link hots it up, no prob but be it known the print is more precise:
Stranger Communities
Octavia E. Butler's vision of struggle and symbiosis
By Julian Lucas
Will have to find some more by Lucas.

Zelazny podcast was nice, (as always with the legacy episodes) it's promoting a study of the writer, this one contesting the idea that Zelazny became a hack rather than live up to his promise, although it seems the Amber series was prolonged a bit for money.

Really wish there were less novels or at least less pressure to write them but recently I've found myself reading them more often and hoping the payoff will be worth it.

on the Rolling Speculative slipstream or other trans-subgene side of things, Wormwoodia's Mark Valentine says:

Hy Brasil is an island in the Atlantic, somewhere over the horizon from Ireland, Iceland and the Azores, that has been sighted several times since the Middle Ages and has given rise to many legends. Said to have towns with towers of gold, thought to be often shrouded in mist, it has been identified with the Fortunate Isles that the Celts believed lay in the sunset regions to the West, and with the fierce, fair and free lands that Viking voyagers discovered.

It continued on nautical maps and atlases into the late 19th century, but was eventually removed, along with other islands that had once been seen and plotted but now cannot be found. This is a very beguiling subject and there are a small number of books on the theme, including Raymond Ramsay's No Longer On the Map (1972), Henry Stommel's Lost Islands: The Story of Islands That Have Vanished from Nautical Charts (1984) and Donald S Johnson's Phantom Islands of the Atlantic (1994). Who could resist such alluring titles?

Scottish author Margaret Elphinstone published one of the best modern novels with an island setting in her splendidly-imagined novel set on Hy Brasil and its smaller sister islands. In her Hy Brasil (2002), she creates a many-dimensioned version of the realm, with its mixed heritage from all the lands of the North Atlantic littoral, its obscure, half-mythic origins, its colonial pride yet independent spirit, and its modern dilemmas as a new nation.
A skillful story-teller, she brings in many relishable themes; spying, smuggling, conspiracy, a volcano, rebellion, exile, roads taken and not taken. Through the travel notes of a self-aware, but still learning, young woman, the charmingly-named Sidony Redruth, we discover the eminently convincing history, legends and culture of the island: but we are also drawn to understand the human qualities and foibles of the island characters.
More here, incl. a Hy Brasil postage stamp, and link to interview w Margaret E.:
http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2021/05/hy-brasil-margaret-elphinstone.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Wormwoodiana+%28Wormwoodiana%29

also re: missing islands is Sarah Tolmie’s The Fourth Island

(i haven't read it tho)

Starting on Le Guin's The Telling, the last of the Hainish cycle. Excellent so far. After that I'll be getting into completist territory - a couple of early novels and collections, Lavinia, the Annals of the Western Shore trilogy - anyone read that?

Lavinia is fantastic.

Good to hear, how much Aeneid knowledge is required though?

I have zero...

tau zero?

Finished The Telling, Classic Le Guin, it slipped down like a '78 amontillado. Not overly sophisticated politically perhaps, but anthropologically rich, and with the usual lasting top note of compassion.

https://ansible.uk/sfx/sfx073.html

I couldn't get into Lavinia for some reason; I tried but something about the voice/style didn't work for me. I can't remember why, though, so maybe I'll try again.

RFI: what’s the sf term for the bodily equivalent of terraforming, sort of, when some being is genetically or surgically altered to better survive in a different environment?

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bioforming

Thanks!

From the Wormwoodiana blog:
Saturday, May 29, 2021
Northern Earth

Northern Earth, edited by John Billingsley, is one of the longest-running independent journals devoted to ancient mysteries (or 'earth mysteries' as they were called in the 1970s and 80s). It is interested in 'megalthic sites, alignments, sacred landscapes, psychogeography and deep topography, folklore and tradition, esoteric traditions, strange phenomena . . .' and more.

The latest issue , no 164, celebrates the moment coming up to one hundred years ago, on June 30 1921, when the Herefordshire antiquarian Alfred Watkins had his vision of a network of ancient trackways which he called 'leys': 'a fairy chain stretched from mountain to mountain peak.'

Watkins' idea was rediscovered and revitalised in the counter-culture of the 1960s as part of an upsurge of interest in ancient sacred sites and a new curiosity about landscape and its associated folklore, in a similar spirit to that which had inspired the work of Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Mary Butts and others.

The Ley Hunter magazine was launched in April 1965 by Philip Heselton, then still a schoolboy: it was part of a Ley Hunters' Club he had launched with school-friend Jimmy Goddard. Both are still active in similar circles: Philip has researched and written widely on the origins of modern paganism, while Jimmy edits a newsletter, Touchstone.

Three former editors of The Ley Hunter have written articles for
Northern Earth 164 about their involvement – Philip Heselton and his successors, Paul Screeton and Paul Devereux. All three essays are reflective about those times but not merely nostalgic: they also discuss the development of their thinking since.

Also included is my essay 'A Landscape Detective of the 1930s'. This is a piece of literary archaeology about Donald Maxwell, a writer and artist who compiled a series of books, illustrated with his own sketches, about his wanderings looking into ancient monuments and folklore. These are highly evocative of their time, full of his engaging enthusiasm, and sometimes even redolent of John Buchan as he and his companions dash off through the countryside in search of clues to the various mysteries he is investigating.

I discovered Maxwell's work when visiting the quayside second-hand bookshop at Gloucester. There was an album-sized book in faded blue called Adventures Among Churches, perhaps an unlikely-sounding title. But I noticed it in particular because it was published by The Faith Press, who also issued Arthur Machen's Holy Grail novel The Great Return. And indeed Maxwell's book, though non-fiction, has something of the same spirit, with enticing chapter titles such as 'The Chapel of the Green Lagoons' and 'The Black Belfry of Brookland'.

Maxwell was one of the first writers outside Watkins' Herefordshire circle to take his ley theory seriously and in two of his books he introduces it and is at once off off in hot pursuit, developing his own ideas and refinements on the way. His approach is open-minded and exploratory, sharing his discoveries whether they support the theory or not, and with much fascinating incidental detail.

Northern Earth 164 (or a subscription) can be obtained direct from John Billingsley: editor[at]northernearth[dot]co[dot]uk, replacing the word in brackets with symbols.

(Mark Valentine)

I really enjoyed The Fourth Island fwiw, really nicely balanced between being genuinely heartwarming and unsettling, and structured in a way that constantly kept me a little off-balance.

Sorry to plug something here, but one of my closest friends, whom I’ve known since freshman year of high school, just had her first published novel reviewed by NYT:

Elly Bangs’s UNITY (Tachyon, 289 pp., paper, $16.95) flings us hundreds of years into a future that has weathered multiple apocalypses and is on the brink of an extinction-level war between political powers that operate from metropolises beneath the much-warmed Pacific. Danae’s been living in self-imposed underwater exile for five years — from the wrecked surface world and its dangers, but also from the vast, aggregated consciousness of which she’s a small embodied part. But as tensions between the war’s belligerents, Epak and Norpak, reach a boiling point, Danae and her lover, Naoto, decide to risk heading for the blasted, inhospitable remnants of Arizona in search of the power and absolution of her whole, multiplied self. They employ the reluctant services of a haunted ex-mercenary named Alexei to get them there — but someone is hunting Danae and the larger consciousness she represents, and will stop at nothing to get to her.

“Unity” is an astonishing debut, twisty and startling, demonstrating both the disciplined development of a long-gestated project and the raw, dynamic flashes of an author’s early work. It shows intense interest in the distance between conversation and communion, the many overlapping and opposite meanings “unity” can contain: Is unity a harmony of differences balanced together, or a pure homogeneity? How can those differences be maintained, and what happens when they’re not? The book’s core concepts aren’t so much high as deep; it takes a few pages to get oriented within the premise, world-building and points of view, but it very quickly becomes an absorbing, thrilling ride.

If anyone tells you The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell is SF, don't believe them, it's just yer standard multi generational saga (Victorian to present day) with an entirely superfluous dusting of near future tech sprinkled on towards the end.

Now reading The Fourth Island.

Agreed about The Old Drift but I still thought it was very good.

Some of the writing was lovely but I thought it was overlong and the structure was not helpful - multiple helpings of 'who the fuck are these people again' after reading a 100 page chapter about some entirely different people, and I ended up not really caring about any of them.

read UNITY by JoeStork’s friend. i enjoyed it and will totally look out for her next book but i guess i didn’t super love it

read THE KINGDOMS by natasha pulley. alternate history isn't at all my thing, but this had a little extra sauce. and while a couple plot points don't hold up to close scrutiny, i thought it was extremely well-done and -written

Not your thing? What about the other recent read? Oh wait, that was the multiverse, sorry.

the multiverse one was set in a future where anything(s) could happen, but . . . yeah sorta

https://tvline.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/3x04-remedial-chaos-theory.jpg?w=620

not books, but 3 suits currently taking about sf films on sky arts. am enjoying the clips.

The Last Day by Andrew Hunter Murray - Book club read. No Such Thing As A Fish guy does dystopian sci-fi; currently 69 pages in, which is nice, but the novel so far isn't. Very generic stuff, earth has stopped rotating around the Sun, half of the world plunged into darkness, half on fire, the UK is in what the book calls the "Goldilocks zone". Author makes it obvious the nationalistic govt is Bad and of course Write What You Know and all that, but I still get a whiff of British exceptionalism from this. Also kinda weird to read about a fictional catastrophe set in the v near future that negates the current one? Aside from that, soldiers and scientists and evil government conspiracies that remind me too much of every other fucking video game. To be fair maybe book clubs aren't for me, having a book that I have to read does make me ornery.

That's basically why I quit my last (and only) book club.

I was in one book club for a long time- we only read one book! - which was a lot of fun since we read it aloud, page by page. We read another book the same way when we finished that one then tried a third and ended it. I joined another, regular book club at some point, but that I didn't like. It seemed like a lot of people didn't show up and them that did hadn't necessarily read the book.

I joined more to make new friends than for the book discussion itself. It's good for that but yeah my already endless reading list getting interrupted by books that some other person thought looked good is a nuisance.

Yeah, no worries. I just touched base with friends from my book group on Wednesday since that was a significant day in the book week we were reading.

Provenance by Ann Leckie. Every time I read recent mainstream SF now I think about caek's post decrying all of it as 'adequate YA fiction'. I like Ann Leckie and her strain of social/political SF, it mostly works, it's not as juvenile as some other things I've read. But it's hard to pin down exactly where it might lie along a line from kids books to serious SF for serious people. It's definitely not up there with Le Guin (whose maturity shines though even in her overtly YA stuff) or Lem or Butler - but is it any worse than Iain M Banks? Or even Clarke or Asimov? I'm not sure there's anything particularly grown-up about Rendezvous with Rama or the Foundation series (I know there's little love lost here for the latter anyway).

No idea if it's "better" than Iain M. Banks but I do think the latter cannot possibly be described as YA, think any young adult would feel overwhelmed and/or bored p soon reading him.

'The latter' Being banks? Asimov? I'm sure plenty of young adults do and have read both of those.

Banks. I dunno man I read Matter and that shit was hella complex.

That's the one that in my memory could most fairly be described as a 'romp'! I daresay that does it a huge disservice and it's as complex as you say, I should - will - reread it. Still I'd hazard that there's plenty for the young 'uns, bless 'em, to appreciate and enjoy.

Where would you say that LOTR fits on the spectrum?

> a 'romp'!

Phlebus is very much an action movie imo (the others are better)

(currently rereading them all at a rate of about 1 a year, will get around to Matter in about 2027)

Matter was a finalist for the 2009 Prometheus Award.

Oh look I just found a list of books to not read:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_Award

Where would you say that LOTR fits on the spectrum?

I think LOTR is complex in way that teen boys specifically are very happy to engage with - long lists and chronologies - while Matter struck me as complex more from a philosophical, political angle (also re sexual politics but ver kids are probably all in for that).

It's a can of worms, not least because Young Adult me was reading all sorts of stuff that's not YA, but I guess I kinda associate the term with a certain simplicity, stronger focus on storytelling, world building as decoration rather than philosophical treatise?

It is a can of worms and one perhaps I'm not qualified to open since I try in general to avoid anything overtly YA, or anything recent anyway.

I can barely read these days so not sure if I should comment, but I am allergic to the kind of generic writing style implied by YA. I mean of course plenty of other genre fiction, including the Greatest Genre of All, Top Shelf Literary Fiction, has this problem but YA is a particular marker.

Would that be definition 1 or 2 here? https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/top-shelf :)

Heh, hadn’t known the second, don’t think.

top shelf is also where the oversized books go in certain shops

I stopped reading and writing fanfic mostly because it's now nothing more than a farm team for the YA industrial complex.

:(

TS: YASF vs. TSLF

Pretty sure that a lot of those Prometheus Award writers are not libertarians. Would be surprised if Older and Stross were libertarian. But honestly it doesn't bother me much, I really want to read Donald Kingsbury and Wil McCarthy someday

Yeah the award is for anything they class as "libertarian science fiction" not the authors themselves.

Libertarian science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction that focuses on the politics and social order implied by right-libertarian philosophies with an emphasis on individualism and private ownership of the means of production—and in some cases, no state whatsoever.

Le Guin is a nominee so I think they are, unsurprisingly, somewhat confused.

Libertarians love to co-opt anarchists.

If you'd enjoy hearing somebody gush about Barbara Hambly for an hour
https://soundcloud.com/user-733327042/dragonsbane

Some intriguing reviews here:

Mills Of Silence by Charles Wilkinson, Egaeus Press / Through A Looking Glass Darkly by Jake Fior, AliceLooking Books http://panreview.blogspot.com/2021/05/mills-of-silence-by-charles-wilkinson.html

The Death Spancel & Others by Katharine Tynan, Swan River Press / Beatific Vermin by D.P. Watt, (Keynote Edition VII) Egaeus Press / Glamour Ghoul – The Passions And Pain Of The Real Vampira, Maila Nurmi, by Sandra Niemi, Feral House http://panreview.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-death-spancel-others-by-katharine.html

Double Heart by Marcel Schwob, translated by Brian Stableford, Snuggly Books / Circles Of Dread by Jean Ray, translated by Scott Nicolay, Wakefield Press http://panreview.blogspot.com/2021/02/double-heart-by-marcel-schwob.html

The Ballet Of Dr. Caligari & Madder Mysteries by Reggie Oliver, Tartarus Press / Six Ghost Stories by Montague Summers (with an Introduction by Daniel Corrick), Snuggly Books
http://panreview.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-ballet-of-dr-caligari-madder.html

Be sure to scroll all the way down to the bottom of each page to get the brief mentions of more books.

Speaking of that "Through The Looking Glass Darkly," recently on Alice In Wonderland:
https://4columns.org/sinker-mark/alice-curiouser-and-curiouser
covers looking glass also (which as a child i preferred, perhaps bcz i am a massive NERD)

― mark s, Thursday, June 17, 2021 9:36 AM

And much discussion ensued, incl. of Alice on TV and film, and a link to another Mark piece on same in Sight And Sound (also pix)

Horace Walpole - The Castle Of Otranto

I had mainly heard this referred to as a dull piece of homework for horror fans, literary historical context. But was really surprised to find it's quite fun, brisk, and the writing is often really beautiful (I seem to be a minority on this one). An audio version with the right actors could be great.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about how to take the drama, is it all really comedy? One of my least favorite aspects was the absurd outpourings about family duties, morals and honor but they're taken to such an extreme that it must be intentionally absurd how forgiving and unquestioningly loyal so many of the characters are to Manfred. And what one of the characters says when they are stabbed to death.

I am a little sad that Walpole is more interested in action than atmosphere and that the imagery of the giant knight wasn't exploited more but there's plenty of other gothic castle books going for atmosphere and Castlevania taken the giant knight.

This really isn't a chore, it has more energy than most horror stories today.

Mills Of Silence by Charles Wilkinson, Egaeus Press

― dow, Sunday, June 27, 2021 10:44 PM

Got that one recently in the mail.

Also got Terry Dowling's 3 volume Complete Rynosseros in the mail today and it looks fantastic.

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22543858/isabel-fall-attack-helicopter

I do wish this essay held certain people’s feet to the fire—I feel like some folks have gotten off super-easy re: this nightmare and that frustrates the hell out of me. But I am glad to hear Isabel’s own words.

— Carmen Maria Machado 👻 (@carmenmmachado) June 30, 2021

Meaning Jemisin and Yang and probably others who talk a good deal about bullying and gatekeeping yet act the very same way

That's an upsetting read. Curious about this distinction between paranoid and reparative readings; just from the description in the article they seem to me kind of two sides of the same coin of wanting fiction to be socially empowering on some level, just with a glass half empty/glass half full perspective change?

yeah i did not know about that whole affair and it's damn dispiriting

i changed phones a couple of months ago and still haven't reinstalled twitter on my new one and probably never will tbh

The ludicrous thing about that whole shitshow was that the story was printed in Clarkesworld, which is one of (if not THE) most respected short fiction publishers in the SF world. The idea that Neil Clarke would have been taken in by some bad actor is nonsensical, and anyone who convinced themselves it was the case (and then felt the need to pontificate about it on Twitter) needs to take a long hard look at themselves. Not that I'd actually say this on Twitter itself, as the place is a haven for bullies and careerists and who needs to stick their head above that particular parapet?

The other ludicrous thing about it is the very idea that a transphobic crypto-fascist would choose to express their transphobia through a complex, challenging SF short story. Right-wing memes are one-liners for a reason.

This is all terribly sad to read about. That poor woman.

I think it was "rumoured" to be a Sad/Rabid Puppy type. Then again none of those people can write for toffee, so it was probably one of those rumours that generates itself organically during histrionic tweetstorms.

Some apologies are coming in but so far they've been bad

https://t.co/B4mWRiA74u pic.twitter.com/ljtmO6Il1t

— Tweet Y'Self Fitter (@WokeSexPest) July 1, 2021

But I'm glad more people are taking a stand about this and against the idea that writers are responsible for the worst reactions readers can have.

I think this is possibly of more consequence than any of the puppygate stuff because there's surely going to be a lot more discomfort and writers looking askance at each other at conventions.

The number of people shocked and appalled at what happened to Isabel Fall while implying that they reserve the right to do the same to any author whom they perceive as less vulnerable or marginalized is a sight to behold.

— Nick Disband the Police Mamatas 🤼‍♂️🏴 (@NMamatas) July 2, 2021

https://www.tor.com/2021/06/29/the-history-and-politics-of-wuxia/

Really great article, mostly focuses on a few examples. I wonder if Ng will write her own wuxia.

Fun interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Um_2Vf2BAE

Leonora Carrington - The Debutante And Other Stories

Was quite pleased and surprised to find that Carrington, Leonor Fini and Remedios Varo have written as well as painted. I found this okay, the things I liked best were what reminded me of her paintings, unusual looking characters, some images crowded with strange details. The stories are funny sometimes, there's a nice disregard for convention but much of it didn't stick for me or make any lasting impression. I wish they had the thicker atmosphere of her paintings.

I'll read Hearing Trumpet someday and Stone Door if I can find it.

Forgot to mention one of the stories has something just like garmonbozia from Twin Peaks

Fun, this is really stuffed full
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gbr_TstnNeM

Started watching Counterpart, as mentioned on this thread and on I come in peace... three times a night -- FOR ALL MANKIND (Apple TV Plus) by VG and others. Seems to be just what the doctor ordered.

read two of the three 'imperium' books by keith laumer -- alternate history, via the multiverse, from the 60s

they're garbage, but i guess i was briefly in the mood for that

A corollary of Clarke's famous law is that any SF novel featuring sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magical realism. That certainly applies to Hannu Rajaniemi's The Quantum Thief, not that it wasn't enjoyable. If I have any gripes it's that the number of terms and concepts that are introduced but not explained till the third or fourth time they're used, and the structure of parallel narrators with flashback interludes, means that it's only every going to make complete sense, if at all, on a re-read. I'll probably never do that, but I will read the sequels.

giving starfish by peter watts a try. ok so far. any thoughts on his stuff?

i read that hannu rajaniemi series last winter -- about all i can remember is that i liked it but was not convinced that it actually made sense. so, cosign

feel like peter watts has been discussed, perhaps on previous threads? among the hardest of scifis, iirc. i've only read blindsight, which was weird and good but had one kind of outlandish plot point that i don't think was strictly necessary

Yeah, people loved Blindsight, which I never could quite get into.

Don’t know if I should have added /pvmic to that, figured mookie would if need be.

Also started and couldn't get into Blindsight

Tried another one or two as well, but I couldn’t quite get into his style.

The Freeze-Frame Revolution

among the hardest of scifis, iirc plus vampires

Yes, exactly

yeah, that was the outlandishness

William Beckford - Vathek

Like Walpole's Otranto, this is nothing like what I expected and it sits even more oddly as a foundational gothic novel. It's wild and comedic more often than gloomy. One of the main characters is kicked around like a soccer ball by a crowd of people at one point, Vathek can kill people with an angry stare, he and his mother Carathis drive people to death and misery everywhere they go.

The style is odd, most of the time everything is moving so quickly across different locations that you rarely get a clear image of any place and it has the odd effect of everything seeming to blend together, places that are miles away somehow almost overlap. I was a little disappointed that we didn't get clearer and richer visions of all the extravagant places, but it is at its best when it refuses to settle anywhere for long.

Although the punishment in hell is one of the best parts of the book, the comeuppance seemed to me like a cop-out or compromise, I think Vathek and Carathis should have kept destroying everything around them, undaunted by hell. Beckford didn't use his own name on the first publication but I wonder if this was some case of ass covering?

I can't say exactly what else gave me problems (I went in knowing this is really racist, Beckford inherited his father's slave plantation), maybe the slower parts, maybe the travelling back and forth gets tiring, maybe it needed a bit more variety. There's a lot of parts I glazed over and just wouldn't sink in. I would have liked more of Carathis's formidable camel.

I read this in preparation for reading Clark Ashton Smith's sequel and it's clear how big an influence Vathek was on him, although there's some huge differences in style.

Definitely worth reading at least once for the chaos, extravagance and silliness.

_among the hardest of scifis, iirc_ plus vampires

finished the peter watts and did not like it. he seems like a creep.

Why?

the book seems to revel to an unnecessary degree in repulsive characters (pedophiles, misogynists, etc.). felt like tarantino without a sense of humour at times.

the best bits reminded me of annihalation, and the premise was great

That's odd because he's really funny in interviews

Oh hi, I created this thread for centralized convenience:
COUNTERPART: Alternate History w/ Creepy Cold War Vibe

blackfish city, sam j. miller: cool vibe and some nice images but doesn't really hold together and a lot of things are glossed over. (ah, nanites.) overall kind of meh, imo

author is a community organizer in NYC and fucking *hates* landlords, though -- i will definitely give him that

lol i just saw a book referred to as cli-fi

(i am probably years late on this but still)

Hate that term even more than hopepunk

This year's purchases so far

Albert Power - Azerbaijan Tales
Ilana C Meyer - Last Song Before Night
Brian Stableford - The Blind Worm
Gretchen Felker-Martin - Ego Homini Lupus
James Worrad - The Scalpel
Jennifer Giesbrecht - The Monster of Elendhaven
Rjurik Davidson - Unwrapped Sky
Cassandra Khaw - Hammers On Bone
Yeatts & Phillips (ed) - Nasty: Fetish Fights Back (mostly SFF authors)
Seth Dickinson - The Traitor
Susann Cokal - Mermaid Moon
SP Somtow - Starship & Haiku
SP Somtow - Jasmine Nights
Jeffrey E Barlough - Dark Sleeper
PC Hodgell - The Godstalker Chronicles
Ricardo Pinto - The Masters
Lianyu Tan - Captive In The Underworld
Sterling E Lanier - Hiero Desteen
Fitzpatrick (ed) -Salacious Tales
Lilith Lorraine - Time Grows Thin
Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Return Of The Sorceress
Richard Grant - Saraband Of Lost Time
Bullington & Tanzer (ed) - Swords V Cthulhu

rabbits, terry miles: there is a vast conspiracy underlying reality, if you can believe it. it takes the form of a game in which one follows discrepancies -- suddenly everyone is calling sandy kaufax the yankees' greatest-ever pitcher, but you're pretty sure he actually played for the dodgers? -- and clues toward some never-quite-defined goal. but now the game -- and maybe reality? -- is falling apart!

this was silly and didn't really make sense and no story of this sort can possibly end adequately, but i enjoyed it as a summer beach thriller type of thing. fast-paced and decently written on a sentence level for a first-timer

not unlike ian banks' the business -- another 'vast conspiracy' novel -- this book likes to namedrop musical artists/songs. neither author is anywhere near as cool as he'd like to think, but those bits were at least better deployed here than in 'the business', which sucked

Did you ever read the Lewis Shiner novel about great unfinished rock albums? Also not as cool as it wanted to be but memorable

hmm, i will check it out. thanks!

surely we need a novel in which the plot is presaged by fall lyrics

blackfish city, sam j. miller

― mookieproof, Sunday, August 1, 2021 10:56 PM

I was interested because someone said it has really cool animal stuff. Somebody riding a dolphin or polar bear or something?

surely we need a novel in which the plot is presaged by fall lyrics

An archive of an acclaimed radio show
https://archive.org/details/MindWebs_201410/026Test-TheodoreThomas_and_theNineBillionNamesOfGod-ArthurC.Clarke.wav

Ooh, Best Of Greg Egan is on there now, don't have to bother with the expensive hardcover edition now
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SF_Masterworks#Softcover_editions_(2010%E2%80%93present)

The current Dunsany, I knew he was a filmmaker but all the rest is new to me
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/07/people-think-youre-an-idiot-death-metal-irish-baron-rewilds-his-estate

I read that but didn't make the connection with Lord Dunsany till you posted it here - perhaps because sensibly they call him Plunkett not Dunsany.

This is quite ranty, I was thinking recently how some publishers are putting far too much priority into debut authors. Depressing talk about the situation of foreign writers over the decades. Tidhar can make sweeping statements sometimes but it's kind of refreshing to hear writers talk this way. He says Ekaterina Sedia gave up writing from frustration with the industry, aside from an essay a few years ago I think her last fiction was 2016
https://jonathanstrahan.podbean.com/e/episode-556-lavie-tidhar-and-a-world-of-science-fiction/

interesting episode! thanks.

http://www.newconpress.co.uk/info/books.asp?offers=yes

Clearance sale

Pat Cadigan
@Cadigan
For the record: The forthcoming novelisation of William Gibson’s unproduced Aliens 3 film script is based on a different version of his script than the graphic novel from Dark Horse. The novelisation isn’t just the graphic novel w/o the graphics. So you should own both ;-)

And probably everything else by Pat Cadigan---whose writing is almost always much better than Gibson's usual, in my experience.

(I'm trying not to outright say that she left him in the dust long ago, but that's probably accurate.)

Just bought 'tea from an empty cup'.

Hugh B Cave - Bitter/Sweet

A small pamphlet of two stories. One is about a therapist who records people's dreams and watches them, it had a decent enough setup but didn't do much with it.
The other is about the writers of The Gospels teaming up with the ghosts of canonical writers to stop crude DJs, heavy metal bands and horror writers from writing and promoting leering stories and songs about raping and killing. They assure each other that this isn't censorship and even say that anyone who persists in trying to write this kind of thing will live in a special quarantine together and the canonical writers are all very smug about what they're doing. Why is Cave so sure that Stevenson, the Brontes and Homer would approve of all this?
Makes me wonder if Cave felt guilty about writing those nasty women-in-peril pulp stories, they weren't great but they were better than this.

In the very unlikely chance this is the first thing you read by Cave, don't write him off, he written cool vampire stories like "Murgunstrumm" and "Stragella". I've got a few more books by him and I hope they aren't like Bitter/Sweet.

Mark Valentine:
The Twelve Maidens by Stewart Farrar (1974) is a very mid-Seventies cauldron of Cold War technology, ESP, sociology, black magic and white magic, experimental science and standing stones, secret radar and satanic rituals, whirring aerials and wild moors: a seething potion of Wyndham and Wheatley.
It now has the added pleasure of being very much of its long-haired, flared-trousered, large-collared time, a genuine creation of the period both celebrated and mildly parodied by the Ghost Box record label, The Haunted Generation blog and the fields of folk horror and hauntology...http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-twelve-maidens-stewart-farrar.html

Started last night on the 2020 novel Heap by Sean Adams, about transient laborers digging for salvage in the rubble of a collapsed vertical city. So far (first ~25 pages) it's a bit light on the world-building, but interesting enough when I can suspend my disbelief. There's an unexpected contemporary emotional resonance, too, in the way that the protagonist has regular but distant contact with his brother, a radio DJ who magically survived the collapse and continues to broadcast while trapped somewhere amid the ruins.

Did not get on with Tea from an Empty Cup. Maybe cyberpunk just ain't my thing, but she seemed to put an awful lot of effort into creating a world that was barely comprehensible to the protagonists or the reader. And a VR where you can do anything and be anything but most people choose to spend their time in a gritty and violent post apocalyptic nyc seems rather poor. As for the plot, in the whodunnit bit the cop makes literally no progress for 7/8 of the book then suddenly gets the answer handed to her on a plate; the other plot strand was incomprehensible.

solid thread

A TIMELINE OF THE [fantasy world]
- The Founding
- war
- war
- war
- something happened with magic?
- war
- The Event (you know the one)
- post-Event war

— Monkey's Paw Games (@monkeyspawgames) August 26, 2021

Thee littlest orphan in Merde Galaxy becomes Emperor Ov 20 Universes in First Decalogue, and then---

i have pretty much given up on alastair reynolds but the new one is back to the Revelation Space universe of his first few novels and i'm tempted. but the quandary is do i buy a physical copy or a digital copy? this, after 10 years, would be my first full-price ebook purchase and I'm a bit wary of spending money on bytes but i do prefer reading on the kobo.

I'll probably leave it a couple of months, see if it gets discounted.

currently just started the 3rd of the Three Body Problem books

Has anyone here read Brightness Falls From the Air by James Tiptree Jr. and did they think the 'kid porn' elements were sketchy to say the least? Doesn't seem to be any discussion/acknowledgement in any reviews I can find. I haven't finished it yet so maybe there'll be some grand accounting at the end.

Ringworld? worth reading (99p in kindle daily deal today. but what's with that shovelware cover?)

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51d7TuzknhL.jpg

read 'piranesi' in one night, as suggested by user caek, and it was good! the feel of it reminded me of 'the invention of morel'.

that said, there was no good explanation for why people lost their memories in said situation. and i'm not sure whether the final chapter added or subtracted from the story

also been reading some tiptree short stories and christ they are scathing -- along the lines of 'woman on the edge of time' and then some. can't even imagine that reviewer who swore tiptree was a big dick-swinging man

(unless he thought tiptree was poul anderson because lol)

i hate to be one of those people who complains about "endings". it seems only slightly better than complaining about "unlikable characters". but agreed, it wasn't a great ending!

xps ringworld is sort of goofy fun, probably worth it if you're a big fan of megastructures or just want to tick off a big name novel.

yeah, was only a quid and it's not like I'm spending money on much else these days. kobo only had the graphic novel version and some of the 15 spin offs.

am enjoying 3 body problem pt 3. mass evacuations, lightspeed travel, 4d spaces. 350 pages to go.

but he's spent absolutely 0 time explaining what happened in the previous books, expecting us to remember despite having read 40 things in the meantime.

Gretchen Felker-Martin - Ego Homini Lupus

I try not to look at online speculative fiction controversies too much but I've undeniably found a lot of promising authors from doing so. I really enjoyed Felker-Martin's opinions and found her insights really refreshing, touching on some things I've not heard many people talk about.

Tom Horstmann's cover art grabbed me, one of my favorite cover arts I've seen in recent years. This is the first time I've read a digital book of any real length, usually physical books take my priority but so far a digital copy on Gumroad is the only option.

I guess this is folk horror (in 12th-century Northumbria). It goes through different modes of horror: grueling traumatic real life horror (in the home and on the battlefield), extreme gore/body horror and supernatural horror, much of it on a small scale, sometimes eerie in a down to earth way but several scenes take it to the level of a very grand Zdzisław Beksiński painting. You get a good feel for the main setting because there's so much richly textured description of Joan's daily work.
The characters and structure are brilliant. There were a few scenes that really stopped me in my tracks when I realized what was happening, usually something harrowing or deeply sad or both; one or two scenes got my eyes filling up, on the edge of crying.
I had to look up a lot of period terminology and it even got me looking up how high chickens can fly.

Even some of the really glowing reviews are underselling how good this is, I'm sorry I'm underselling it, but it's already among my favorite horror stories and I think it should be looked back on as a classic of its time, I hope that even horror fans not used to this level of sex and violence will not be dismissive. Publishers should be fighting to get the first paper version of it (hopefully with the original cover, it won't be easily topped), get in there!

Looking forward to her other books.

https://melmoththewanderer.gumroad.com/l/rnidm

I read Ringworld fairly recently, and found it a colossal hard SF bore. Bob Shaw's Orbitsville, covering similar ground, is much more entertaining.

Valancourt books said this "We've been trying to contact Jane Gaskell for years. Her agent can't locate her and she's not responded to family members from what I understand. A couple of others in publishing have been trying too. :("

lool

The opening chapter of the original paperback edition of Ringworld featured Louis Wu teleporting eastward around the Earth in order to extend his birthday. Moving in this direction would, in fact, make local time later rather than earlier, so that Wu would soon arrive in the early morning of the next calendar day. Niven was "endlessly teased" about this error, which he corrected in subsequent printings to show Wu teleporting westward.

That is pretty funny; the other errors about the ringworld not actually orbiting its star, the seas filling up with gunk, and the breeding for luck and pak stuff just generally flying in the face of science, not so much.

More Plunkett/Dunsany rewilding news
https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/irish-baron-offers-home-at-his-castle-to-animals-released-from-wildlife-hospital-1182651.html

I've always kinda meant to check out James Branch Cabell---big stash now digitally accessible via Virginia Commonweath University.

Where Should You Start? incl. several thread-relevant suggestions (lotta links in here):
...the Neil Gaiman Presents audiobook collection (available for purchase) includes three of Cabell’s fantasies: Figures of Earth, Jurgen and The High Place.
...If you enjoy science fiction, you should know that a number of science fiction writers read Cabell and admired his use of science fiction tropes and narrative devices. Robert Heinlein’s Job: A Comedy of Justice gives explicit homage to Cabell, taking its subtitle from Jurgen. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series contains a library of “novels their authors never wrote or never finished, except in dreams” including a Cabell title, Poictesme Babylon. Larry Nivens wrote a hard sf/horror story “Night on Mispec Moor” (a reference to Cabell’s Something About Eve) and A World Out of Time in which the character “Jerome Branch Corbell” is cryogenically frozen, then revived years later by an oppressive totalitarian government.

dust jacket Something About Eve with naked eve and man in 18th century costume
Something About Eve, first English printing, 1927
Image: Thorne and Lloyd, An Illustrated Bibliography of Works By and About James Branch Cabell
If you’re interested in weird fiction, sword and sorcery fantasy or pulp fiction, that can also be a way into Cabell. Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, read and admired Cabell’s books, once writing a review of Cabell’s Something About Eve in which he called Cabell the ablest writer of the present age. Howard also mentioned Cabell in several letters.

If you’re a Led Zeppelin fan, you might want to visit VCU Libraries Special Collections and Archives to read Aleister Crowley’s letters to Cabell, and see the adaptation of a Crowley illustration on the cover of Kalki: Studies in James Branch Cabell, vol. IV, no.1 (Winter 1969). Chapter XXII of Jurgen is said to contain elements drawn from Crowley’s Gnostic Mass. Crowley called Jurgen one of the “epoch-making masterpieces of philosophy."
More: https://jamesbranchcabell.library.vcu.edu/cabells-writing/getting-started/
Press release mentions:
The site pays special attention to the censorship drama surrounding Cabell’s most famous novel, “Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice.” In 1920, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice seized the printing plates and copies of the book, and its publishers were charged with obscenity on the grounds that “Jurgen” was “offensive, lewd, lascivious and indecent.”

A section on “Speaking Cabell” offers a glossary of literary terms Cabell employed in his writing, but that might be unfamiliar to many readers. It explains terms such as “demiurge” (an artisan-like figure responsible for fashioning and maintaining the physical universe), “domnei” (an Old Provençal term meaning the attitude of chivalrous devotion of a knight to his lady, and “rondelet” (a French poetic form with seven lines, of which three are refrains).

It features several maps of Poictesme (pronounced “pwa-tem”), the fictional medieval French province that serves as the setting for several of Cabell’s works known collectively as “Biography of the Life of Manuel.”

For visitors seeking research material on Cabell, the site links to archival collections, including those held by VCU Libraries’ Special Collections and Archives. These include the James Branch Cabell collection, which contains letters Cabell received from American and British authors, some original writings, and items the author placed in the volumes of his personal library; and the Margaret Freeman Cabell papers, which include correspondence between Cabell’s second wife, Margaret Waller Freeman Cabell, James Branch Cabell, and their friends, colleagues and business associates.

“We look forward to working with a new influx of researchers, fans and creators excited about Cabell and welcome anyone from the VCU community and beyond to reach out to us about accessing our unique collections,” said Yuki Hibben, interim head and curator of books and art for Special Collections and Archives.

I read that REHoward review once. I have Nightmare Has Triplets in my unread pile but it's maybe not the ideal place to start since it's a trilogy.

flann o'brien also a cabell fan i seem to recall. have only read jurgen & found it all a bit overly whimsical.

reading sheri s tepper, the gate to women's country:

Even in preconvulsion times it had been known that the so-called “gay syndrome” was caused by aberrant hormone levels during pregnancy. The women doctors now identified the condition as “hormonal reproductive maladaptation” and corrected it before birth. There were very few actual HNRMs – called HenRams – either male or female, born in Women’s Country, though there was still the occasional unsexed person or the omnisexed who would, so the instructors said, mate with a grasshopper if it would hold still long enough.

hmmm

I've heard there's some strange views in her books and some say her dissatisfaction with readers not getting her intentions made her write messages clearer and clearer to the detriment of the books.

Alistair Rennie - BleakWarrior

I didn't like the cover much (although it isn't a bad evocation of parts of the book) and the title seemed a bit self-parodic (after reading the book, the parody might have been intended) but I remember some genuine excitement when this book came out that went beyond the routine plaudits.

Two of the chapters originally appeared in the Vandermeer's New Weird anthology and the Ann Vandermeer era of Weird Tales. Rennie credits them with getting the novel started.

Most reviewers have been reaching for tons of comparisons and I think Ross Lockhart gets it right with Jack Vance meets Mortal Kombat. It has Vance's fondness for odd societies and the humorous eloquent back and forth dialogue. But here the deliberately overcomplicated dialogue sometimes has a similar effect to really creative cockney rhyming slang delivered with a dour face. Immortan Joe from Mad Max 4 would envy the speeches of Lord Brawl. In an audio interview Rennie said the animated version of Go Nagai's Violence Jack was an initial influence and the Scottish highland moors were the basis for some settings (you see this in his photography) but more of the book is urban.
Much of the book is Meta-Warriors stalking each other and getting into death matches, their ways of life and sense of purpose explained inbetween. I'm not sure how much of the sex was supposed to be sexy, some of it seemed like part of a general commitment to excess.

Anna Tambour hinted this could be the start of a series and she mentioned characters I don't remember in the novel (Smart Brutality and The Piper Who Calls The Tune are great names), maybe she read parts of an intended sequel? Or maybe they were introduced and killed so quickly that I forgotten them. I'm going to have to track down Rennie's short stories to see if any of them are set in this world and for the pleasure of more Rennie too. He hasn't written a huge amount and seems to have mostly focused on music since the novel (5 dark ambient albums under the name Ruptured World).
Several characters are left with their stories feeling unfinished so I hope there will be more. I really enjoyed Big Sister and Little Sister's speech patterns and how the existential ideas were developed (some of it whooshed over my head and I'm not sure all of it was supposed to make sense) and hope to see that continued too.

It's a really nice evolution of sword and sorcery but I'm sure half of the fans of that genre will hate this but that's a pity for them. I'd like to see more talk about this book and maybe it could influence new directions for other writers.

In The Gate to Women's Country towards the end there's a big reveal, a secret that the women have been keeping, and it becomes clear that it's been hinted at throughout the book, hints that I didn't pick up on. Then one of the characters says "We put clues here and there, for those with the wits to see them."

Me: *sucks teeth*

This from Valancourt

We're putting together a companion volume to World Horror Stories 1 & 2, which will feature horror stories from endangered languages.

UNESCO estimates that of the 6500 languages in the world today, half will vanish in the next century. What do we lose when a language dies out? Well, great horror stories, for one thing!

From the Friulian language comes Raffaele Serafini's "Anaxum", a folk horror tale about a young man's encounter with something weird and ancient in the forest, while Low Saxon author Chris Canter contributes "Moenen", in which a babysitter takes on the wrong gig, looking after a creepy child with a creepier doll. In Frisian writer Willem Schoorstra's "For Sale", a woman finds her dream house, which seems too good to be true (until she finds out what's living inside it!), and Scots skriever Stephen Pacitti's "Dunnottar" takes us on a bone-chilling journey to a Scottish castle haunted by the ghosts of the past. The volume will also include stories from Occitan, Basque, Romansh, and others, and has an anticipated release date of late 2022.

Yeah, Tepper was a homophobe. Still a great novel tho imo.

Lucius Shepard's super angry review of the first X-Men film
https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2000/ls0012.htm

Yeah, Tepper was a homophobe. Still a great novel tho imo.

It's also highly gender essentialist, but undercuts its own message that men are violent by nature by having them brought up from the age of 5 in a male only militaristic environment. Still a worthwhile read (could have done without the Iphigenia at Ilium parts though) and an interesting thought experiment, but not the one the author intended.

> Iphigenia at Ilium

see, you've made me more interested now

anyway, halfway through the second of the Spider planet books (Children of Time / Ruin) and it's now spiders and octopi in space.

It's also highly gender essentialist, but undercuts its own message that men are violent by nature by having them brought up from the age of 5 in a male only militaristic environment.

I think when I read it I assumed that was the point - that men are violent because of their socialization.

maybe that's what tepper intended but it's odd that the women who are in all other respects preternaturally far-seeing and successful in their plans are blind to this glaringly obvious flaw.

preternaturally far-seeing

i mean even without the benefit of their telepathic pals.

I've read A Voyage To Arcturus and a few other (anthologized) things by weirdo Lindsay, but hadn't heard of this:
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2021
A Centenary of The Haunted Woman by David Lindsay
After David Lindsay's first novel, A Voyage to Arcturus, was published in 1920, his next novel was serialized in The Daily News newspaper of London from the 30th of August 1921, through the 23rd of September. Thus today marks the centenary of the completed serialized publication of The Haunted Woman.

An extensive analysis of "The Haunted Woman in The Daily News" appears at The Violet Apple.org. (Direct link here.) https://www.violetapple.org.uk/hw/serial.php#f_ref_7

A brief announcement of the serial, together with a photograph of Lindsay and his baby daughter, appeared in the newspaper on 29th August. Considering the take on gyny in AVTA, his having a daughter is scary.
The newspaper clip is in here, also mentioning their previous serial, The Red House Mystery, by A.A. Milne, of Winnie The Pooh fame, says that Lindsay's is *also* special---no doubt; I'd like to take a look at it.
http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2021/09/a-centenary-of-haunted-woman-by-david.html

I don't think I ever knew it was serialized but I heard the first edition only sold under 50 copies and that was a real blow to Lindsay's confidence.

To this day I don't know what's keeping most of his novels from seeing print, they are super rare.

https://www.nyrsf.com/2016/07/brian-stableford-nightmares-of-a-utopian-the-science-fiction-of-r%C3%A9gis-messac.html

Author’s note: The English translations of the various Messac works indicated and cited in the above essay do exist, and their publication was scheduled by Black Coat Press for 2016. Even though the works are all in the public domain, the author having been dead for seventy years, that publication was blocked by the threat of legal action by his grandson, Olivier Messac, which BCP could not afford to defend no matter how certain the eventual victory might be. Evidently, Olivier Messac feels that the best way to conserve his grandfather’s legacy is to extend the inaccessibility of his work in the English language for as long as humanly possible. We can, of course, only speculate as to what the fervently anti-capitalist utopian Régis Messac might have thought of copyright trolls, although we do know that the Nazis murdered him in order to prevent him communicating his ideas to his fellow human beings, not because he posed any kind of military threat to them.

Finishing the first book in Julian May's Saga of Pliocene Exile. I could probably do worse than to keep checking used bookstores for SF/F books blurbed by Zelazny.

At the bottom of this page there is a bunch of his blurbs
https://www.fantasticfiction.com/z/roger-zelazny/

He wrote blurbs for a surprising number of books by women.

that series is *fantastic* imo (if slightly homophobic)

Yeah it's great imaginative stuff, a lot of balls kept in the air. Just bought book 2.

Interesting. Maybe will check out, if I ever regain my ability to read again.

But also came to the Thread of Wonder to wonder if anyone has actually read the books from which came The Expanse.

i read the first expanse book despite certain vows regarding authors with multiple middle initials. it was fine.

that julian may series is better

I’ve been somewhat curious about those Julian May books for a long time. Will grab.

I believe Jane Lindskold lived with Zelazny in his last years, but they collaborated a few times, she was interviewed recently on Geek's Guide To The Galaxy.

Oh wow I want to listen to that. She also wrote a biography of him (I discovered yesterday, listening to a different podcast)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkbPnhnWzJU

Bought the guy's book, will report back.

er, same podcast

There is a beloved but rare (in english) collection called Mirror In The Mirror by Michael Ende (Neverending Story), one of his books for adults and surrealist too. It has been reprinted recently as a print on demand version with a new translation, but a review says they taken out the paintings by his father Edgar Ende (presumably the rights weren't available?), which inspired the stories, so some would say it's not a proper reprint. I ordered it because the alternatives are too expensive (hundreds).

omg---as Science Fiction Encyclopedia says ov May:

n the 1980s May turned her attention once again to sf, making an immediate and very substantial impact with her Saga of Pliocene Exile, which serves as an extensive prelude to the Galactic Milieu sequence: The Many-Colored Land (1981), which won a 1982 Locus Award, and The Golden Torc (1982), both assembled as The Many-Colored Land & The Golden Torc (omni 1982); plus The Nonborn King (1983) and The Adversary (1984), both assembled as The Nonborn King & The Adversary (omni 1984); and supplemented by The Pliocene Companion (1984; vt A Pliocene Companion: A Guide to the Saga of Pliocene Exile 1985). The Galactic Milieu sequence begins with a transitional volume – Intervention (1987; vt in two vols The Surveillance 1988 and The Metaconcert 1988) – and continues with Jack the Bodiless (1992), Diamond Mask (1994) and Magnificat (1996). (I've got these last three, seem promising in random read.) Underlying the increasingly complicated storyline of this four-volume prelude is what might be described as a Planetary Romance set on Earth: the protagonists have left a Utopian twenty-second century society from which they have felt estranged, via one-way Time Travel six million years into deep prehistory (see Prehistoric SF), where they discover not only that the Pliocene is rich in potential but that two apparently Alien species are in a state of deadly conflict over the young world and over the humans who have already arrived there. Much additional material – from archetypes out of Celtic myths (see Mythology) to the introductions of various Psi Powers to intimations of Hard SF – is fed into this vision, leavened intermittently by a Trickster protagonist or two. The effect is at times reminiscent of the Planetary-Romance Baroque of Roger Zelazny.

With Intervention the overall sequence moves into an Alternate History version of contemporary times which segues into the Galactic Milieu tales, where the family romance of the Remillard clan intersects with explanatory narratives set deep into the past, and with the melodramatic course of the assessing of humanity's potential role (if any) in the Galactic Milieu (see Galactic Empires) itself. The narrative is increasingly charged with metaphysical intonations, linked to a sustaining concern with the attractive theme of psychic Evolution; in the end, Zelazny seems at times less clearly evoked than Doris Lessing. But wait, there's more!
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/may_julian

Yeah, 8 books.

Finished the much celebrated Light by M John Harrison, after three chapters I thought I was going to love it but my enthusiasm dwindled - it was too sordid, the technology too magical, the antagonist too vague (till the very end), too much of a sense of words put on the page because they sound cool and for no other reason.

Still I preferred it to Joan Slonczewski's A Door into Ocean, almost its exact opposite.

read 'a matter of oaths' by helen s. wright -- solid space opera that i thought packed quite a bit into its short one volume

particularly notable for having been written in 1988, when that sort of thing was unfashionable, and for being remarkably diverse, in the modern parlance: the main character is non-white, the kickass commander is a woman, there is gay sex, etc.

this no doubt explains why it fell out of print and was recently republished with a forward by becky chambers (#hopepunk). pretty weird how the brief author's note mentions that she, who still lives in the uk, 'never married' though!

anyway i liked it, it was worthwhile!

(i will simply never not reference hopepunk because come on)

https://www.tor.com/2019/04/18/quiltbag-speculative-classics-a-matter-of-oaths-by-helen-s-wright/

I must have seen it in this article (quite a good article series by Bogi Takacs) and on the Cherryh blurb list but I don't recall it. I can't find any biographical info, even on her personal site. Only one book then done, but it seems to have quite a strong fanbase considering that.

I don't have a very good handle on how publishers and readers treated gay sex back then. I was quite surprised by how much there was in Somtow's early 80s books in what are pretty much mainstream novels, maybe that's part of why Inquestor wasn't the hit I think it should have been.

Fun interview, he speaks so fast
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hplcp-fragments-ep-05-interview-with-nick-mamatas/id1508892873?i=1000501553249

That guy is good.

I just (very) belatedly discovered Ursula Le Guin -- read Wizard of Earthsea and Tombs of Atuan in quick succession — they are so incredible!

My problem with most SF/fantasy is the bad sentence writing, so she’s obviously like the diametric opposite of that — but she’s so good at the “ripping yarn” part too. Especially in the first book, I love that dissonance between the subdued elegance of her prose and the extreme metalness of whatever’s going on in the story.

Also love that feeling when you read a great author for the first time and realise you have a whole new catalogue to explore.

Yeah I rediscovered A Wizard of Earthsea a couple years ago, hadn't really appreciated it at 12.

I was pretty stunned. AWoE >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Just to give one example, just before the final confrontation in the book, there's a cozy, funny, relaxed domestic scene. It's such a striking shift of tone, so unexpected, and yet it works.

Yes, I was grateful for that moment, like Le Guin was saying "just in case you were concerned - I can do people and dialogue too". The relationship between Ged and Tenar in the 2nd book is very convincing too

My problem with most SF/fantasy is the bad sentence writing, so she’s obviously like the diametric opposite of that — but she’s so good at the “ripping yarn” part too. Especially in the first book, I love that dissonance between the subdued elegance of her prose and the extreme metalness of whatever’s going on in the story. Struck by how otm this is also re last night's bedtime reading, Joanna Russ's "My Dear Emily": an Emerson-reading collegian, who's made prim-and-proper her eyes-lowered hot-cool style, obediently returns to old San Francisco and encounters the vampiric sole survivor of one the city's really olde families---with his aristocratic, Old Worldly male triumphalizm suitably enhanced, let him show her how---the erotic spiral of exhilaration and damage, incl. acting out, is jolting, esp. with slightly "disjointed" sentence momentum, clear as a cracked bell can be (real clear, turns out).
This from a Best of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, copyrights 1961-62-63---must have caused a stir back then---what else should I read by her---?

Should say it really is mostly about Emily; he just starts her up...

read 'the praxis' (millennia-old multi-species galactic empire falls apart when its ruling race dies out) by walter jon williams

military sf is not my thing -- stopped reading the mazalan book of stuff early on because i do not want to have to know who is commanding the 47th brigade of strike force nine or whatever -- but this one was recommended by jo walton, whom i like

anyway, it was pretty good -- akin, perhaps, to 'the expanse' minus the protomolecule? maybe a little too much of ships and missiles trying to maintain delta-v, etc. etc. but the two main characters (one male, one female) are interesting and not cardboard. it has sequels that i might read sometime

The Best Ghost Stories Of Algernon Blackwood

There's only one or two Blackwood stories I've read that aren't on this so I can hardly be an authority, but despite his expertise I think E.F. Bleiler probably left off a lot of highly deserving stories (the ones I've heard mentioned often, such as "The Man Whom The Trees Loved") that tend to get on the other Best Ofs. I can't tell you if there is a better collection of Blackwood, the huge Centipede Press editions are too rare/expensive for most people to consider but I have a feeling there are other better introductions.

I slightly prefer "The Wendigo" to "The Willows" (his two biggest classics), I find the setting and particular creepiness of the former a bit more enchanting but they're both great. "The Glamour Of The Snow" is a little beauty. "The Empty House" is more chilling than the garden variety murder of the story would suggest. "Ancient Sorceries" is spoiled slightly with the too insistent reminders of how shy the main character is and the revealed Satanism is underwhelming.
I was struck by "The Transfer" because of how it describes an unwittingly oppressive man having an effect on people that sounds strikingly like how people today describe oppressive systems of power; and I like the line "It seemed a few hours had passed, but really they were seconds, for time is measured by the quality and not the quantity of sensations it contains".

I think in terms of prose, Blackwood is head and shoulders above most of the other classic horror writers, he's so deft with delicate details and nuances of moments in a way that makes a scene come alive in a way M.R. James and Lovecraft couldn't pull off as well. But sometimes like in "Max Hensig", he explains the details in such a longwinded manner that the effectiveness is lost. I hear his novels can be more challenging for this reason. He's not without his prejudices but there's something refreshing about how outgoing and positive he is compared to the writers he is often mentioned beside. I'd only consider a few of these stories essential though.

Crime vet tries her hand at folk horror crossover:
The Devil at Saxon Wall (1935) by Gladys Mitchell draws on the tradition of the Victorian inheritance mystery, but with added folklore and witchcraft thrown in. Three babies were born in the remote village of Saxon Wall, one to the family of the local manor, another to a woman reputed to be a witch, and another to a woman regarded as a simpleton. Only two of the children survived: but which two?

Hannibal Jones, a writer of sentimental novels, comes to the village to convalesce from nervous trouble and becomes unwillingly involved in its affairs, which include stories of changelings and impersonations and missing heirs. The pub, the Long Thin Man, is named after a local spirit connected with a tumulus on the downs above. There are spells, potions, the evil eye, and propitiation rites to bring much-needed rain.

A full cast of characters, as well as the witch and the supposed simpleton, includes a couple of Ivy Compton-Burnett-esque sister spinsters with brisk, brittle dialogue (we could have done with even more of them), a volatile vicar with a Japanese valet, and of course Mitchell’s reptilian psychiatrist-detective, Dame Beatrice Adela Lestrange. These vivid characters and the deft twists in the plot are the novel’s main strengths.

Gladys Mitchell was the author of over sixty crime novels, and they are uneven in quality, as she herself admitted. At her best her books are vigorous, eventful, sly, full of rich colour and eccentric characters. But even Mitchell experts seem divided about this book...
---from Mark V.'s latest post:
http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-devil-at-saxon-wall-gladys-mitchell.html

interesting looking afro-futurism(?) set in Kindle daily deals today, but all only 20-40 pages long.

https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/amazon-black-stars-chimamanda-ngzoi-adichie-excerpt

(would probably fit in nicely with this month's reading but the size makes them expensive)

https://www.polskieradio.pl/395/7791/Artykul/2789010,British-writer-unveils-his-gnome-in-Poland%e2%80%99s-Wroclaw
Graham Masterton once said his sex guides were so successful in Poland that strangers approached him in the street to thank him. I'm pretty sure the creature coming out the book is Manitou, from his horror series. I wonder who else has a gnome?

Bought Andy Weir's 'Project Hail Mary' as it was on offer, this may have been a mistake. (I have not read The Martian.) 500 pages ffs, does no-one write short books any more?

Just finished that. Quite enjoyed it but it's basically The Martian in new clothes: (very mild spoiler) character all alone has to solve lots of science problems in order to survive

i also bought that (on saturday when it was cheap). and this is meant to be a return to form after the (slight) artemis. but we shall see.

(martian was similarly long but a very quick read fwiw, i think you'd enjoy it. it reminded me of a.c.clarke in that it was physics-led storytelling)

(i think the martian may've suffered from having only been seen as 'popular' (read 'hyped') because the film was good, but the book was good enough in itself)

i liked the martian and project hail mary, but the martian was better. that's my review.

(the martian was 300 pages, and read in a weekend)

yeah i read the martian in like 4 hours. PHM is arguably overlong.

500 pages ffs, does no-one write short books any more?

― namaste darkness my old friend (ledge), Monday, October 18, 2021 10:39 AM

I don't think all of these are in paper form, but some of the ones labelled as ebooks are actually available in paper. Some of them have become hits.
https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/tor-novellas

Small press novels tend to be shorter though.

i would be interested to know what fraction of readers of something like PHM listened to the audiobook. has to be a lot.

it's a thing though, isn't it - big selling book followed up by a larger book - editors less likely to tell them to cut it down.

(thinking of harry potter here, and the dark tower books)

But isn't it usually the publisher that demands bigger books? Small press (usually with minimal editing) and self-published books are not known for being longer, big publishers want big books and King is just a long book writing guy.

ha, maybe. i wonder where the profit / effort maximum is?

king literally refuses to be edited iirc? although i don’t know when exactly he became big enough to get his way on that

einstein on receiving his (only) referee's report

"We (Mr. Rosen and I) had sent you our manuscript for publication and had not authorised you to show it to specialists before it is printed. I see no reason to address the – in any case erroneous – comments of your anonymous expert. On the basis of this incident I prefer to publish the paper elsewhere."

xps thanks Robert, I'll ake a look at those - have read the first two, 2/5 and 3/5.

Alastair Reynolds was on radio 4 this morning after the 08:10 interview talking about the new Dune film.

... that he hasn't seen yet.

All the better to allow him to have an unbiased response.

i saw footage from the leicester square thing earlier this week (er, yesterday)

but yes, most of it was background - the book, the previous film and mini-series.

Enjoyed this oral history of the Marvel comics adaptation of the Lynch movie:

https://www.tcj.com/marvel-comics-1984-dune-movie-adaptation-an-oral-history/

Forgot about that! Lots of infotaining discussions here though: DUNE: c/d and of course some threads on ILE, my fave being the one about Jodorowsky's Dune, w artwork I hope is still on there.

I just finished my latest self-prescribed 1 story-per-night bedtime reading, the aforementioned Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction, Twelfth Series, (Avram Davidson ed., Doubleday, 1963): xpost "My Dear Emily" still the winner, but also James Blish's "Who's In Charge Here?" has the pre-Steely Dan Effect via withheld information x streetscape characters, Ron Goulart's "Please Stand By," Will Stanton's "The Gum Drop King," and Sasha Gilien's "Two's A Crowd" tight and bright w the wit, and undercurrents too, v. pleasing to middle-school minds, as recalled.
(Now I see that RG's investigation of a were-elephant on national holidays also incl. a couple known for paintings of "bug-eyed children" (as in Any Adams' fact-based Big Eyes(2014) and they've both taken the name Eando, from their initials (Eando Binder is a good olde science fiction pseudonym :https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/binder_eando). Stanton's shortie is kinda poignant, Gillien's kinda scary. Ditto deft ending of "Hop-Friend," by 24-yr.-old Terry Carr, otherwise known to my only as editor of the good old Universe series of anths.
(Vance Aaandahl, author of striking-to-ok "When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloomed," was 19, and already had several stories published---SFE says he's done 30 in all, but never collected them.)
Edgar Pangborn's "Davy" kicks off a series about a somewhut twisted postnuclear "frontier" America, kind of an ancestor to Robinson's The Wild Shore, with the narrator being a bond servant who gets around, a pubescent Huck Finn, with even more ethical conundrums, incl. those resulting from conditioning and maybe nature (raised for instance to kill a "mue," a mutant, on sight, but also what id he himself is a brain mue, seemingly normal, 'til his true nature comes out.)
"A Kind of Artistry," by Aldiss, is like a Clarke story I read with mission to a convincingly developed situation in space, plus situation behind the assignment, but then spoiled by sour notes of misogyny and trick ending, like some others in here.
JG Ballard's "The Garden of Time" is a bit sentimental, unique in my non-expert knowledge of his work, but he earns it here.
A few other offerings are meh or a littlw worse.

Don’t know where to put this so:
https://roulette.org/event/scott-robinsons-higher-powers-a-richard-m-powers-centennial-concert/

finally found a copy of Mary Staton’s from the legend of biel. Had been looking for it ever since seeing it on this list which I think was linked to itt: https://lithub.com/10-great-reads-from-the-feminist-lesbian-sci-fi-boom-of-the-1970s

But the ultimate test was if we’d read From the Legend of Biel. It is an odd, obscure, not easily (or ever) understood novel that resonated with all of us hardcore fans. If there was a copy on your shelf, you were automatically way cool. I hope that still works.

Great list---where did you find Staton's book?!

this place in fullerton, California: https://hobrf.com/

Ah cool, thanks.

Sounds a little disappointing but I'd still like to check it out
https://thebedlamfiles.com/fiction/hellstroms-hive/

Project Hail Mary was probably the daftest 'hard' sf I've read, but quite fun. I can see how the endless 'problem! problem solved!' story style might work better in a slightly more realistic setting but I won't be rushing to read the martian as I don't think I can take a few more hundred pages of that narrator. (Though I understand the martian narrator is much swearier, this one limits himself to 'gosh darn' and 'dang' which is quite tiresome but i did lol (in a wtf sort of way) when someone follows another 'gosh darn it' with 'language!') Something very pollyanna and mary-sue (are there no derogatory terms for male protagonists?) about the belief, and its vindication in the story, that every problem can be solved with a little bit of thinking.

It's pretty handy how he manages to learn the language of a species with a completely different sensory modality with just a vocab primer, no worries about grammar, and he learns perfect pitch into the bargain. Lem would be spinning in his grave. And I'm not entirely clear how a species with apparently no knowledge of electromagnetic waves managed to detect the astrophages or navigate to another star. And one more thing... how did the taumoebi who burrowed into the xenonite then breed so that their adaptation could proliferate?

(on the plus side, you were worried about the size and yet it took you a week)

yeah, in the martian he was only ever talking to himself and all the problems were ones of survival and rooted in physics - "what if i take this laptop outside?" "how long can i live eating only potatoes?"

Something very pollyanna and mary-sue (are there no derogatory terms for male protagonists?)

― namaste darkness my old friend (ledge), Monday, October 25, 2021 9:17 AM

Gary Stu is the male equivalent that people use but I think there should be a better one. It mostly gets used for Wil Wheaton's character in Star Trek

Horace Walpole - The Castle Of Otranto

just started this (is ~90 pages and it's approaching hallowe'en and it was mentioned here recently, oh, by R.A.G.) except... it's not the gothic horror i had it pegged as, the castle is more like the setting of a fairy tale - young prince gets killed by [thing], evil king sees [thing], young princess escapes by [action]... (am at end of chapter 1, things might change, but the only creepy thing so far is the father's change of marriage plans)

I can see how the endless 'problem! problem solved!' story style might work better in a slightly more realistic setting but I won't be rushing to read the martian as I don't think I can take a few more hundred pages of that narrator.

the martian is much better for that reason, and it's also shorter. not saying you should prioritize it, but it's a fun few hours if you're stuck in a reading rut.

https://www.wordcraftoforegon.com/misha_redspiderwhiteweb.html

Wish I could get this but it only mails to american buyers

are you in the uk? can't promise it will be quick at this time of year i can forward if you can cover my costs by transfer to my old uk bank account.

I am but I've bought too much stuff recently. Thanks for the offer though

sure. let me know if you change your mind. i have to mail stuff to the uk every few weeks anyway so no bother.

Thankyou. I will keep it in mind

spent a month reading ada palmer's 'terra ignota' series

the only person to whom i could fully recommend it without caveats is our beloved max read, who loves political economy

nevertheless i really liked it

I am two thirds of the way into Shadow of the Torturer and I am suddenly VERY CONFUSED

I'm really eager for Palmer's series. She gives really great interviews and I like her so much it will be a big comedown if I don't like her books.

(The Martian on film4 at 18:15 tonight btw)

Jack Vance - Tales Of The Dying Earth

I had a Gollancz edition but some of the first printing had the text sinking towards the spine and made it difficult to read, so I bought the Orb edition, which has a spaceship which really poorly sells the contents, there are flying ships and space travel but no spaceships like this, a completely different aesthetic. This series is far more fantasy than science fiction.
Note that the first 3 novels have different titles in Vance's preferred Spatterlight editions.

The Dying Earth is made of loosely connected stories (this was a minor controversy when it came to awards categorization) following different characters who sometimes appear in each other's stories. It establishes an atmosphere for the series nicely and there's some beautiful scenery but I'll never understand why some people like this book best from the series or even from Vance's entire oeuvre. I wasn't immediately aware that this book was supposed to be be funny. Liane The Wayfarer is the best character.

The Eyes Of The Overworld makes an important shift in the series: the comedy is increased, the destination becomes less important than the journey, typical action/adventure is dialed down in favor of farce and now we have main characters we follow all the way. Cugel seems like a recycled but less sinister version of Liane, much of the comedy comes from his regular displays of outrage as he dishonestly tries to paint himself as the victim of wrongdoing in any situation he tries to take advantage of.

I thought Cugel's Saga retconned a bit of the previous novel's ending, it's the longest book in the series and by the end of it I was glad for a new bunch of characters in Rhialto The Marvellous. There's a scene in one of the earlier novels with wizards showing off to each other and I was happy that this has more of that; it's about a pompous group of wizards who are prone to backstabbing each other and the dialogue is more flamboyant than ever. It's even more questionable for the classification of novel than the first book, this is a collection of three stories and one is much longer than the other two.

I've got mixed feelings about the series, it did make me a Vance fan and I plan to read many more of his books but I found this really uneven at times, I lost interest in a lot of the situations eventually; the imagery is sometimes really lush but often uses generic fantasy imagery and there's too many gaping voids through lack of description, many of the creatures are left completely blank. Later on there's quite a lot of made up words that I didn't get the gist of. The spell names are wonderful, I love the long dialogue exchanges and the idea that one of the wizards has disturbingly expressive feet. All in all I don't think I can give it less than 4 stars.
I think Eyes Of The Overworld is probably the best of them but I maybe liked Rhialto The Marvellous just as much because it increased most of the best qualities of the series and Vance excels with arrogant characters.

After reading other reviews I'm amazed that some people don't seem to realize that Cugel, Rhialto and friends are supposed to be very unpleasant people.

The modern reader has a ton of trouble with the concept of the asshole protagonist

Dying Earth is not my favorite Vance (Vance is possibly my favorite writer) but I do love it and it will always loom large as the place where he staked out his territory and the secret soul of much early D&D

read 'the moon moth & other stories' by him gradually over the past year or two and thought they were great

“The New Moth” itself and “The New Prime” are both grebt. Been meaning to read the rest but, um, well…

Jon- which Dying Earth book do you think is the best? I think Rhialto The Marvellous is really underrated and it might have been the best if the overall shape of the stories was more satisfying. Eyes Of The Overworld is better structured and Cugel is probably the favorite character, so ultimately it wins.

I love it in the 3rd book when Cugel says "you may remove my shoes"

Probably Cugel’s Saga but in a very me type move I still haven’t read Rhialto! I’ve been “saving it for the right time” for about twenty years

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/dlnw.htm

Speaking again ov xpost David Lindsay, here's a new post by Tolkien etc scholar Douglas A. Anderson:

Of the small number of books ever written on David Lindsay (1876-1945), author of A Voyage to Arcturus (1920), I wrote about the first one in Wormwood no. 36 (Spring 2021), "David Lindsay: The Forging of a Literary Reputation." This covers the multi-authored volume The Strange Genius of David Lindsay (1970), by Colin Wilson, E.H. Visiak and J.B. Pick.
The next important appraisal of Lindsay came out in 1981, The Life & Works of David Lindsay (Cambridge University Press), by Bernard Sellin, translated from the French by Kenneth Gunnell. This was a reworking of Sellin's thesis at the Sorbonne, David Lindsay (1878 [sic]-1945): sa vie, son oeuvre (1977). I learned of Sellin's book via a review by Humphrey Carpenter in the TLS of 19 June 1981. I was then in regular correspondence with Humphrey, and mentioned my interest in Lindsay in my next letter to him. By transatlantic return mail, came his review copy of the book (with a short presentation inscription, "Doug-- hope it's of interest! Humphrey"), and I was very grateful. If not the foundation of my forty-plus years of David Lindsay obsession, it was certainly a milestone, a bedrock book with lots of new information on Lindsay's life (and a rare photograph of Lindsay on the dust-wrapper), and an extensive analysis of his writings. In 1981, the book was priced £17.50, which seemed exorbitant, but it quickly went out of print and became a sought-after item in the rare books trade. Finally, in February 2007, a print-on-demand trade paperback facsimile (also priced high at £25.99) was made available.

I had some contact with Professor Sellin, beginning in 2005, when he had heard about the publication of Lindsay's "A Christmas Play" in my anthology Tales Before Tolkien* (2003), and wrote to me asking for details. We swapped books and articles over the next few months. Sadly, I just learned that he passed away in August of this year, so I post this as a small memorial to him for his work on Lindsay.
Posted by Douglas A. Andersonat 1:00 AM
graphics etc.:http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2021/11/bernard-sellin-and-david-lindsay.html
*excellent anthology!

Also:
Wormwood 37 has just been announced. This issue includes:

John Howard on the many dimensions of Fritz Leiber

Tom Sparrow on Henry Mercer, author of antiquarian ghost stories

Oliver Kerkdijk on Dutch fantasist Henri van Booven

Colin Insole on the modern ghost stories of Robert Westall

Adrian Eckerseley with a new view of Machen’s The Hill of Dreams

Mark Valentine on the figure of Arthur in the 1970s

In our review columns, Reggie Oliver discusses books where the past haunts the present, and John Howard looks at books with settings ranging from Atlantis to Zurich.
More info, links: http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2021/11/wormwood-37.html

Just now noticed that local library has Cixin Liu's (The adults are dying. In one year, the children will be all that's left of humanity. And so begins the...) Supernova Era, translated by Joel Martinsen, who did the same for CL's Dark Forest---are they good??

I've read the trilogy and even at 500+ pages each they had almost too many ideas in them. maybe in the standalone novels he'll have calmed down and investigate a single idea more.

anyway, 1st December which means another Amazon (uk) kindle monthly deal list to wade through and this month's scifi list seems to be full of bangers. easily about a dozen things I'd buy if i didn't already have copies (and probably 5 i will buy / rebuy digital copies of)

specifically:

Neuromancer
Revelation Space
Wool
The Dispossessed
Rendezvous With Rama
The Forever War
Roadside Picnic
Doomsday Book
Inverted World
A Scanner Darkly
Mockingbird
and all the short afro futurism things i mentioned previously.

Doomsday Book and Mockingbird are Sci Fi Masterworks which i've not read. anyone?

Half of Doomsday book involves a time traveller struggling to survive during the black death and is quite moving, half of it is a farce set in a (not very) futuristic Oxford and is absolutely dreadful. If you want a taste of her style and her strange obsession with 'mufflers' try this, set in the same universe as Doomsday Book: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/firewatch.htm

i've just seem how long that book is and am no longer interested 8)

ledge deeply otm

I'm halfway through Termination Shock and I've gotta say, so far it's mostly what I want from Neal Stephenson... in the vein of Cryptonomicon or the first half of Seveneves, a nerdy fun propulsive story with the dumb libertarian bullshit kept to reasonable levels.

Lavie Tidhar and Silvia Moreno-Garcia's choices
https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/11/18/best-science-fiction-fantasy-horror-novels/

A whole load of people, but as you might expect, Tor's own books often get a lot of attention
https://www.tor.com/2021/12/07/tor-com-reviewers-choice-the-best-books-of-2021/

http://chomupress.com/uncategorized/farewell-from-and-to-chomu-press/

Not all of their books are still available (Cisco, Tem and Pulver), but they're all gone in two months. I bought 14.

Khlopenko & Hofer (ed) Best Of Three Crows: Year One

This magazine seems open to most kinds of speculative fiction, leaning darker than most that aren't exclusively horror magazines. I recently saw Khlopenko on social media complaining about the seeming non-existence of truly experimental speculative fiction these days, so I guess he wants submissions like that.
Every story had something of interest, some were pretty strong, but a few felt underdeveloped or like a chapter from a longer story.

Anna Smith Spark's "Stones" is the most satisfying, she has a knack for writing miserable old men. A selkie story.

Gerard Mullan's "The Necromancer's Garden" is a comeuppance story and I've seen too many of those (probably from so many horror comics and martial arts films) but I liked the style, it's like a goth tinged pre-raphaelite aesthetic. This seems to be Mullan's only story and I hope he gets more published.

One story is missing from the table of contents, but it is in the book.

I'll probably buy the second annual.

someone just snagged tau zero off me on slsk; felt compelled to tell them that it sucks

I like some Poul Anderson here and there. Don’t really remember liking that one from long ago but tried to read again because I thought maybe there was some cool trippy stuff as they approached the speed of light but I just couldn’t make a dent in it.

Lol the Hugo awards were sponsored by Raytheon this year and Twitter is filled with small time authors of dystopian science fiction taking about how it’s important to acknowledge the shades of gray in the arms trade. pic.twitter.com/jo6wAXXozT

— isi baehr-breen (its pronounced ‘izzy’) (@isaiah_bb) December 19, 2021

What gets me about that screengrab is it's not "they did some horrible things but also saved lots of lives" or anything of the like, it's they did terrible things and also helped put a man on the moon. I know it's a sci-fi writer but how does that make matters grey??

I think the full story behind all this haven't been revealed yet but it's been a big one.

Patricia A. McKillip - The Riddle-Master's Game

I'm not sure how much of a good idea it is to guess why a book was written but I have a feeling the original publisher wanted this trilogy more than McKillip. It was the late 70s when the trend of fantasy trilogies really started booming, far too intent on following the success of Lord Of The Rings. McKillip says in the introduction that it was inspired by Tolkien but thankfully there's not many overt similarities beyond enlisting the help of an army of the dead.
I looked at the Locus polls from decades ago and it seems like this was considered one of the all-time greats for several years at least. It's still one of her best known books but I think that maybe her biggest fans rate much later books like Ombria In Shadow higher. The Gollancz reprint series (the Gateway Omnibuses in particular) tend to focus on her later books.

I loved the whole land ruler concept, the way the rulers are connected to their lands; the story is really mysterious for a long time but by a certain point I didn't find most of the plot and the journeying that interesting at all. The saving grace was the atmospherics, the way the magic of transformation, wind and fire are described. There's an incredible magic fight near the start of the third book that was just far more impressive than anything before that point, the way the magic powers are working against each other was the highlight of the book for me, some of the coolest wizard stuff I've ever seen. And oddly the quality of writing in the third book is head and shoulders above the previous two. Even though I was wanting to be done with the book, there's so many beautiful moments in the last third.

I'm a bit relieved that after this trilogy she never did anything longer than a duology and I'll probably be going for Ombria In Shadow and Changeling Sea next. Some people speak of Mckillip as being at the very top heights of the fantasy genre but I don't think Riddle-Master is quite there.

I was a bit disappointed the riddles don't rhyme but I didn't hold that against it.

Is Riddle-Master's Game a new omnibus title for the three books?

I've only read her stories in anths, other than Winter Rose, which won Locus and Nebula (didn't know until just now about the sequel). Some people speak of Mckillip as being at the very top heights of the fantasy genre : Seems plausible! Appealing post on the trilogy, thanks.

The omnibus has had quite a few titles, this one is from 2001

She's one of the few big sff writers who has no social media presence at all. Her writing is so green, quiet and whispery that I not surprised she's evaded all that noise

Sweet, hope she has!

'I don't recall if I saw my first gunman in my childhood nightmares or on my childhood streets. There were plenty in both and they looked very much like each other.'
The Ghost Sequences by A.C. Wise, Undertow Publications / The Black Dreams: Strange Stories From Northern Ireland, Edited by Reggie Chamberlain-King, Blackstaff Press / Albertine's Wooers:http://panreview.blogspot.com/2021/12/the-ghost-sequences-by-ac-wise-undertow.html

Short history of Russian SF
https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/shvartsman_05_21/

Nicola Lombardi - The Gypsy Spiders And Other Italian Tales Of Horror

This starts with the titular novella, set in Italy at World War 2, big spiders are coming through mirrors and there's a whole family crisis a soldier is returning to. The other best stories "Professor Aligi's Puppets" and "Striges" have some memorably ghastly moments. The writing is very careful and thorough (maybe sometimes too thorough?) and Lombardi makes some really good observations. The stories are bleak and there's usually some naïve character (often children) wandering into a horrible trap they probably can't escape. It's a strong collection, sometimes a bit more set in realism than I would have liked but the introspection and most horrific moments won me over. I'm a little sad that the sex worker with the spider in her eye never reappeared but it was a good moment.

This is among the nicer looking books I own and I'm glad Tartarus are trying to increase their translated output.

Sounds tempting, I'll never spend £40 on a book but £5 ebook is good value.

The Employees by Olga Ravn is a pretty good experimental-ish short novel, a series of interview statements by the titular employees, some human some maybe not, on board a spaceship and working with alien 'objects' that provoke unusual emotional reactions. There's a narrative of sorts but it's more of a mood piece, it was in the guardian's best of 2021 though outside their (and my) usual more traditional remit, would happily read more like it.

Speaking of Russian SF, this is from the first Rolling Speculative etc:

Latest thrift store scores:
Path Into The Unknown--The Best of Soviet Science Fiction. No creds for ed or trans. Dell PB '68, orig MacGibbon & Kee Ltd, UK '66. Reputable? Intro by Judith Merril, which I've just skimmed because I don't want to be prejudiced (she's v. opinionated). She mentions some are late Stalin-era, compares them to the post-(most of 'em, I think). Is sometimes frustrated by translations, but cites several pushing their way through, especially "Wanderers and Travellers," by Arkady Strugatsky. He and brother Boris wrote "An Emergency Case." Plus, two by Ilya Varshavsky, one each by Vladislav Krapiivin, Sever Gansovsky, G. Gor, and Anatoly Dneprov. Didn't Sturgeon edit (or get his name on) an another collection of Soviet S.F.? What other Soviet of post-Soviet antholgies should I check?

― dow, Saturday, 19 May 2012
...Speaking of the 80s, I read the Strugatsky brothers' Roadside Picnic and Hard To Be A God back then, both very festive.

― dow, Saturday, 19 May 2012
Checking Path Into The Unknown: The Best of Soviet Science Fiction, from the mid-60s. No ed or translator credits, though intro by Judith Merrill. She's frustrated by some of the translations, but so far so good, with no text in/ knowledge of Russian for comparison anyway (had more trouble w The City..., which maybe was supposed to seem "translated" from tough-guy East Eurosky)Translation may have added to the effect of a key passage in one of the Russian stories, Ilya Varshavsky's "The Conflict": a robot housekeeper reduces the lady of the house to tears, and hubbie requires an explanation. Cybella the robotess recounts:
"I caught a glimpse (of "two essential errors"or in the wife's thesis). It would have been stupid of me not to tell Martha about it. I simply wanted to help her. "
"And what happened?"
"She started crying and said she was a live human being, and that to have a machine lecturing her all the time was just as repulsive to her as kissing a 'fridge.' "
"You, of course, answered back?"
"Yes, I said, that if she could gratify her progenitive instinct with the help of a fridge, she would probably see nothing reprehensible in kissing it." O snap! But she just means in the most helpful fashion, "Pray wake up and smell the coffee, Mistress, you got your hard drive too/ " But if that weren't bad enough, Martha might be taking it like, "yeah you'd kiss a fridge if your p-drive was strong enough--but it's not! You're more frigid than the fridge!" This being the era, at least in neurotic Amerikan suds fiction and too much "nonfiction", when women might be labeled frigid. But this is worse than for those broads, cos I take it "progenitive" means having progeny, not just sex for sex's sake. But that's not the end of "The Conflict."

― dow, Tuesday, 3 July 2012 01:50 (nine years ago) link

It's close to it though. Unless my edition is missing some pages. I prefer the next story, 'Robby', it's excellently droll although the actual punchline, if intended as such, is weak.

― ledge, Tuesday, 3 July 2012 22:41 (nine years ago) link

The Odessa joke loses something in the translation, perhaps.

― ledge, Tuesday, 3 July 2012 22:42 (nine years ago) link

You're right, the fridge incident is close to the end, but not the end. I'll have to look at the Odessa bit again, but reading the one about "my brother" now, in between pesky other activities.

― dow, Wednesday, 4 July 2012 00:38 (nine years ago) link

"Meeting My Brother"--another from xpost Path Into The Unknown, The Best of Science Fiction, no ed listed, intro by Judith Merril, US pb '68. Russian as hell, a moment-by-moment track of several time lines, topographies, can pratically hear Borodin or Shostokovich for that matter. Good oontrast of contemplation and acerbic exchanges. As usual, Merril's somewhat frustrated by the translation, but also says this story is " a romance<" pretty sure she means in the late 19th/early 20th Century sense of "a scientific romance, " as Wells tagged his. Also, "The central emotional problem involves elements which did more to shake my own preconceptions (especially about the regimentation of private life in the U.S.S.R) than anything I have read in a long time." Well,this is from the mid-60s apparently (anybody ever read the Soviet-era SJ mag Novy Mir? Is it still around?) Stalin was considered really really dead enough by then, that many years after Khrushchev's speech, acknowledging Stalin's "mistakes."

― dow, Saturday, 11 August 2012 14:58 (nine years ago) link

It's a great story. The idea of the real life impact of time dilation is a simple but powerful one. What are her problems with the translation though? There's no intro in my edition.

― kmfdotm (ledge), Monday, 13 August 2012 21:46 (nine years ago) link

Sorry ledge, she didn't find fault with the translation of "Meeting My Brother" (by Vladislav Krapivin, have to look up some more by him). She was was talking about the two stories I prev mentioned, "The Conflict" and "Robby", both by Ilya Varshavsky--the ones preceding "Meeting"-- and the one that comes after it, "A Day of Wrath, " by Sever Gansovsky. Haven't read that one yet, but don't see what her prob was w the Varshavsky translations. She doesn't indicate actually knowing Russian, but maybe the anonymous translator's English irritated her editorial eye. No editorial credit for anybody in my edition, but I mainly know her as an editor, the earliest I've found to mix contemporary (50s/60s)genre and non-genre,just whatever seems to work.

― dow, Tuesday, 14 August 2012
Any of you read Sturgeon's anthology of Soviet science fiction? What's it like?

Chairman of the Commission: You can read in several languages, are acquainted with higher mathematics, and can carry out certain kinds of work. Do you consider this makes a man of you?
Other: Certainly. Are people capable of anything else?
In "A Day of Wrath" (by Sever Gansovsky, another from Path Into The Unknown--The Best of Soviet Science Fiction), manimals have busted out of their Island of Dr. Moreau-type confines, having eaten one of their creators, reportedly also sometimes eat each other, and take over remote, densely wooded areas, where peasants (oops, ex-peasants) may collaborate them out of a pervasive climate of fear, of terror. The Govt. is nowhere to be seen, the manimals don't care and mostly don't bother to be seen, a popular reporter comes looking for a bit of morning edition sensation, with a quietly intelligent, all-too-expert guide ( talkin bloody, hard-won expertise). Shadowy yet blythe spirits of menance, vs. rational self-defense and somewhat capricious self-risk: traces of Orwell and Matheson. The guide/hunter is methodical like a Matheson hold-out, the high I.Q. critteroids strut around like O'Brien in 1984; might be some correspondences to Animal Farm as well. Those fuckers really are scary, but when they call, "Hey journalist, have you come to kill us? Come out and talk to us", I find myself wanting to second that--yeah, you're stuck there anyway, might as well ask a few questions. Might flatter the manimals enough to get back to your desk, and the guide could toss them a few copies of the published results. Also, I'd like to read the beasties' answers. Can see how they might lure/lull old school (our kind of) humans. Everyday dread can have its own droning. perversely attractive undercurrent--it's a system, the way these competent monsters generate it.

― dow, Saturday, 20 October 2012
http://retrobookshop.com/images/products/detail/105176.jpg

― dow, Saturday, 20 October 2012 14:48 (nine years ago) link

Direct from Russia today! Crazy person dancing on shoulder of party robot!

― ledge, Saturday, 20 October 2012 16:28 (nine years ago) link

Da!

― dow, Saturday, 20 October 2012

I think Sturgeon only wrote introductions to a series of soviet books. There's loads of soviet anthologies, maybe as many as 20 but I haven't dug into any yet.

xpost That cover image is long gone, alas, but koogs linked a later one w info etc.:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5290556-path-into-the-unknown

Glad to know there are at least 19 more, thanks!

"They put on their vacuum suits directly on top of the protective suits. Then they made their way back to the chartroom through the long gloomy tunnel with black walls which used to be the corridor. The walls of the tunnel were undulating slightly." Yes, because the walls, like the rest of the ship, incl the light fixtures, are covered with black eight-legged flies, stowaways from a recently visited planet. That's the Strugatsky Bros' "Ab Emergency CaseP", another one from xpost Path Into The Unknown. You can see the advantages and disadvantages of the translation here. I like how the walls undulate, but just slightly, quite enough. You also get to consider whether the biologist is more enlightened than his shipmates (very pragmatic they are, though one's sardonic as hell, another is spacey, if helpful). Seems like some 60s ambiguity re progress etc. sneaks through what Merrill's intro calls "s typical mid-Forties Astounding -type puzzle story and a 'pamphleteering' message against xenophobia."

― dow, Wednesday, 31 October 2012 15:27 (nine years ago) link

Weird--"An Emergency Case", that is.

― dow, Wednesday, 31 October 2012 15:28 (nine years ago) link

The translation's awkwardness mainly comes through towards the beginning of this story, ditto in some others.

― dow, Wednesday, 31 October 2012

rereading the bridge trilogy and the second one is not set on the bridge and only includes two people from the first one. have just paid full price (well 5 quid) for a digital copy of the third part, and will leave the hardback on the shelf.

funny what he imagines and what he doesn't. virtual reality / metaverse stuff, nano builders, deep fake revenge porn. but no mobile phones - they go to a love hotel for the internet connection...

This is really shit. I've been seeing this increasingly and I used to hold off buying print-on-demand stuff, assuming it would be there forever
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/s0phie/publishing_news_amazon_shuts_down_account_of/

Lulu tends to keep things up thankfully, but you never know.

Absolutely racist bullshit from Amazon, and daylight theft of their customers' royalties into the bargain.
More here: http://file770.com/oghenechovwe-donald-ekpeki-calls-out-amazon-kdp-for-shutting-down-his-account/

https://kittysneezes.com/a-guide-to-squeecore/
I've not read a great deal of the current core of the genre so I don't know how accurate this is but it definitely backs up things I've seen in the discourse and makes me think of the increasingly disneyfied art and YA aesthetics gaining greater dominance. Feels like there's been a culmination of criticisms that have been around for at least a decade, intensified in the last two years.
This caused quite a stir back when it came out...
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-widening-gyre-2012-best-of-the-year-anthologies/#!
...and now there's been no slowing down of writers riffing on classic stories, hugo speeches and blogs about hugo ceremonies get hugo nominations now. Things that are short and get retweeted a lot have a huge advantage and some are saying it has really damaged the quality of the nominated short stories, seemingly reminiscent of oscar-bait?
I think the podcast might mention Clarion workshops but it doesn't go into it much. But there's been criticism of how it gives wealthy people too much of an advantage and that workshops like these are possibly damaging to even the quality of writing.

finished Gibson's bridge trilogy which was perhaps better in my memory.

annoying that all ebooks now seem to be the American version whereas my copies of the original trilogy, certainly, were English with different spelling and punctuation.

and ocr errors as well. the central character is Rei Toei but is reduced to Rci Toci in at least one place. left single quotes instead of apostrophes about half the time.

http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/2021-in-review-part-one/
http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/2021-in-review-part-two/
http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/2021-in-review-part-three/

Absolutely racist bullshit from Amazon, and daylight theft of their customers' royalties into the bargain.
More here: http://file770.com/oghenechovwe-donald-ekpeki-calls-out-amazon-kdp-for-shutting-down-his-account/

― the great replacement bus service (Matt #2), Monday, 10 January 2022 22:44 (one week ago) link

Oy, this is really awful. Even if he had opened the multiple accounts, just randomly impounding someone's royalties is huge corporate thuggery

https://intermultiversal.net/athena-andreadis-desert-island-space-operas

Really dreadful story

Thread time. Well, the cat's out of the bag and I've been getting questions about this, so I guess it's time to break cover. As many of you know, for 3+ years I've been the all-consuming obsession of a small but dedicated cyberstalking group. 1/

— Patrick S. Tomlinson (@stealthygeek) January 24, 2022

Christ

Not sure if I should click or not.

https://intermultiversal.net/athena-andreadis-desert-island-space-operas

'space operas' in the link piqued my interest but i guess i'm just not in the mood for this combination of chandler style world building and desperate eco worthiness:

The youngster, eyes as smoky as her mother’s, felt unrepentant. She already knew starfire – they spent many nights on the foam. She knew of the landers, too. They had not been here long, said the Elders. They could not understand the People’s singing – yet they trod as lightly as the whisper of a calm sea. Many came to rest in her people’s domain, bearing the gifts of their kin. She longed to catch more glimpses of them. She wanted to encompass the whole world, sea and land, for her lays.

I don't know what Chandler style worldbuilding is but I think I get what you mean otherwise. Haven't read Athena's fiction yet but I've found her blogging interesting at times. I think I'd have some major disagreements but that's the usual. I happened to buy Kingsbury's Courtship Rite a bit before I read that interview.

I've been casually following the "squeecore" eruptions, which are amusing; essentially arguments about parochialism while firmly embedded in it. Anglophone SFF in all media has always leaned heavily towards YA/hero's journey w/ its associated attributes. #fantasy #sciencefiction

— Dr. Athena Andreadis (@AthenaHelivoy) January 15, 2022

Another writer, critique of techno-optimism
https://bloodknife.com/inadequacy-of-inspirational-scifi/

I don't know what Chandler style worldbuilding

https://chrisroutledge.co.uk/2006/06/28/raymond-chandler/

it's an old chestnut and an easy target but, well, it's funny because it's true.

(maybe you already know about that letter, i wasn't exactly transparent in my description)

I kind of like that stuff sometimes when it has a kind of jargon poetry, because really technical stuff is going to fly over my head. I did recently read a story about a submarine that was a bit like that and just pretty dull

had a quick look at the squeecore podcast, definitely think they've picked up on an aesthetic that we've noticed here before, more problematic when they talk about the politics and the intentions behind it.

holy shit on that Chandler thing being from 1953

https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/s5mtre/whats_up_with_squeecore_and_superversive/hsyoqgn/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
This person does a pretty good job of summing up the major points. I think the podcast is doing a sequel because there's been a lot of response. There's a writer called Simon McNeil who had a lot of interesting points but I think his hopepunk piece suffered from a lack of fiction examples, he just focuses on manifestos
https://simonmcneil.com/2022/01/15/notes-on-squeecore/
https://simonmcneil.com/2021/12/30/hopepunk-a-genealogical-sketch/

Something I find really strange is how people (including Athena several years ago) talk about this trend and much of YA fiction having an aversion to a lot of deeper emotions. Aren't fans of this stuff all about "all the feels"?

I've never read Wendig but when people complain about him it sounds like a similar but different set of problems. I can't think of another SFF writer who gets dunked on for their style so much.

I listened to that podcast ep too, do wish they'd paid a bit more attention to the ahem craft of podcasting, yeah lag happens s but that's why you edit!

Initially thought there was a bit of a disconnect between the argument that SFF has become professionalised and that economics have made it so only financially secure ppl can write it but depressingly the more I think about the idea that well off ppl would nonetheless gravitate towards the kind of writing that makes them billionaires the more plausible it seems.

Whatever the faults of the argument tho the backlash certainly seems to have validated their critiques, a lot of "I guess you hate diversity" strawmanning at an argument put froth by a woman of colour and "I'm not gonna dignify that with a response" dissimulating.

A tweet thread

I have no idea if there is such a thing as squeecore as an overriding genre, but I do know most of the books that get pushed at me (I write for the Washington Post) tend to come with PR letters that emphasize fanfic terminology (shippable, etc), often position books in comparison

— Silvia Moreno-Garcia (@silviamg) January 18, 2022

Although this stuff might not always be the most successful in the wider world, it is in some of the online short fiction markets. I kept on thinking "there's more than 50 short fiction magazines and lots of variety between them", I keep discovering new ones, amazing how many have been going for years, but most of them probably have a very small audience. And it seems people who like fanfiction and YA most have become influential in the organized core of the genre. So Benedict got put on an industry predators list by the SFF Codex group for making fun of fan fiction and I think that's the most damning things about all this. Apparently there were even therapy sessions for people upset by what she said but she never got any apologies after she suffered a week of death threats and hacking attempts.

holy shit on that Chandler thing being from 1953

Just happened to pick up Jeff Vandermeer's nonfiction collection Monstrous Creatures today (I read it a decade ago and surprised by how much I've forgotten) and found this article in a slightly different version
https://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2007/10/16/the-triumph-of-competence/
Yet another piece about recently discussed complaints from years ago. There's links and many comments that are going to take me down rabbit holes.

xpost it's what ledge posted above: https://chrisroutledge.co.uk/2006/06/28/raymond-chandler/

Thanks. I saw it later. It’s the same thing, but it’s missing the punchline!

Barry N. Malzberg wrote a story called “Playback” with the whole letter at the front and then repeating the narrative part as the beginning of his own story.

You know, that IS a great punchline ...

There is also this.

What a line up for the two day @CityLightsBooks symposium, DANGEROUS VISIONS & NEW WORLDS: RADICAL SCIENCE FICTION, 1950-1985. Online & free to attend. Full agenda (which may be subject to change) & registration details here: https://t.co/JIxpseJGwF pic.twitter.com/G7KanCeTN9

— Andrew Nette (@Pulpcurry) January 29, 2022

Cool. I liked what I've read from Nick Mamatas. Assuming it's the same Mike Stax as Ugly Things MIke Stax.

read Tevis' Mockingbird. can't think what it reminded me of but was a pleasant (and shortish) read. maybe Asimov's robot stories. felt kind of 50s even though it was 1980.

same bloke more famous for writing The Hustler, The Colour Of Money, The Man Who Fell To Earth and, lately, Queen's Gambit, but I'd not heard of him before this.

Machen’s great friend A E Waite, scholar of the esoteric, was to present his theory in The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal (1909). Machen’s own idea, however, was that the Grail represented a tradition of a lost ritual in the independent Celtic church, suppressed but still remembered when the Roman church became dominant. He was influenced in this by the traditions of healing cups (and other relics) associated with Celtic saints in Wales, Cornwall and Cumbria (the latter was originally the Welsh-speaking Old North).
From Mark Valentine's "Centenary--'The Secret Glory' by Arthur Machen":
http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2022/02/centenary-secret-glory-by-arthur-machen.html

https://themagnet.substack.com/p/the-mystery-of-the-jet-propelled

Yeah---it was a PlayHouse 90 adaptation too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jet_Propelled_Couch_(Playhouse_90)
This has links to Disney+ and Paramount+ for streaming the ep, supposedly---might be elsewhere for free: https://simkl.com/tv/2629/playhouse-90/season-2/episode-10/

Also an unfinished Sondheim project.

if we're gonna be mentioning television on this ILB thread then Talking Pictures TV in the UK is showing old Outer Limits episodes on fridays at 8.

(Donald Pleasance last week, David McCallum this week, Martin Landau next week)

Sorry,I just glanced at the Magnet piece, didn't notice mention of the Playhouse 90 adaptation or the abandoned Sondheim project (also now see that movies have been proposed). Had never read the article linked in there, with some plausible arguments for Kirk Allen being based, at least in part, on CS/PL, although if Lindner ever did out his patient, would be unethical, wouldn't it? But the author goes past the shilly-shallying Stovall's claims and denials about what Lindner told him that he remembers/doesn't remember/is sure he was told etc.
Anyway, I've had that same paperback eidtion on the shelf for many many years, finally just now read "The Jet-Propelled Couch" (will have to read the rest of the collection), and it's a hell of a story--- a bit neat, as noted by referenced skeptics, and so much on the nose dialogue too, though I suppose his defense for that would be that his records and recollection of the sessions are reworked as part of the balancing act, of revelation and identity protection---so it's creative nonfiction, proto-new journalism, meta-science fiction too. Not the best writing, but like a scenario or "treatment" for a film or other adaptation indeed. Hope somebody else takes a shot at it.

Shilly-shallying Stover not Stovall. The Fifty-Minute Hour is available as a “1 Hour Borrow” at The Internet Archive’s Open Library. That’s enough to read the “Jet-Propelled Couch” chapter. I guess it took me about an hour, yeah. Also worth a shot.

RIP Angelica Gorodischer and Richard L Tierney

I've started Adrian Tchaikovsky's Elder Race, a novella with a fairly neat trick. It has a highly advanced society (represented by a single character) and a primitive one who see the former character as a wizard and his technology as magic. Not an original idea, this story even borrows the outpost/watcher set up from a TNG episode; what makes it neat is that (so far) the chapters are narrated in turn by the 'wizard' and one of the primitives, so it alternates between SF and fantasy. I started his Children of Time a couple of years ago but abandoned it, can't really remember why; if this one turns out well I might go back to it or try something else of his.

> can't really remember why

arachnophobia?

he's another one who seems to always have something in the ebook monthly deals, Dragonfly Falling this month, but half of them are parts of series and half of them are fantasy so...

(which is book 2 of 10 and 700+ pages long!)

a short stay in hell by steven peck

novella about eternity and hell (my favorites!) based on borges's library of babel. very good! unbelievably bleak!

"Unbelievably bleak" has my attention already!

Right, sounds like a must read

It fucked me right up I’ll be honest with you. Like a sad Ted chiang.

It's got a rave review from Ken Jennings!

Really dig settings like this, lots of suggestions in the comments too
https://www.tor.com/2022/02/18/five-fantasy-worlds-that-arent-just-magical-versions-of-earth/

Zachary Jernigan offering free copies of his new novella to united states goodreads users (I don't know if he can be contacted anywhere else)
https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/22248234-free-copies-of-a-history-of-the-defeated

Reissue of a rare book split into two
https://blackcoatpress.com/forthcoming-the-handbook-of-french-science-fiction-fantasy.html
https://blackcoatpress.com/forthcoming-the-handbook-of-french-horror.html

This is of interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_geological_features_on_Charon

enjoying the murderbot series

brisk, short, action-packed, often funny, solid milieu

Murderbot is great. Also enjoyed her Raksura series

News from Wormwoodia blog:
Editor, author and Wormwood stalwart Jim Rockhill will be giving an illustrated Zoom talk on J Sheridan Le Fanu, Irish Master of Mystery on 28 August 2022 at 2000-2130 BST.

It is in association with The Viktor Wynd Museum and the Last Tuesday Society. Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland, will host the event.

The announcement reminds us that M R James was a great enthusiast of Le Fanu:

' In the “Prologue” to Madam Crowl’s Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery (1925), his invaluable gathering of Le Fanu’s hitherto uncollected stories, no less a practitioner of the form than M. R. James pronounced: “Le Fanu stands absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories. That is my deliberate verdict, after reading all the supernatural tales I have been able to get hold of. Nobody sets the scene better than he, nobody touches in the effective detail more deftly.” '

Jim is a deep scholar of Le Fanu who has edited collections of his supernatural stories and of essays on the Irish visionary, and (with Brian J Showers) an anthology of stories inspired by him, among many other important editions.

Please follow the link for full details and to book.

(Mark Valentine)
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/j-sheridan-le-fanu-irish-master-of-mystery-a-zoom-talk-by-jim-rockhill-tickets-275053180467?fbclid=IwAR3enCxc5YjOyAg4vk6TIqGRp3QHCQzeI8RpjqXsyRj_Rrw17eMpz-lMHA0

a short stay in hell by steven peck

jesus you were not kidding about the bleakness

haha ikr

This is ridiculous. Literally, I KNOW editors and agents who ask for Whedonesque plots and dialogue. Apparently everybody knows what squeecore is when it's time to sell a book, but not when it's being critiqued.

— Qualia Redux (@QualiaRedux) March 4, 2022

Has anyone encountered this in your SFF reading? I've never got around to any of this stuff, but I've never been interested in Scalzi, Wendig but maybe T. Kingfisher (although she said she dislikes Whedon) someday

So is it sort of a snarky cozy? I've only read Scalzi's Lock In, having an attraction to SF prodecurals---as has been mentioned by some reviewers, this one (with at least one sequel, and a backstory novella) can be seen as an extension of Asimov's robot detective stories, except snarky, also there's some near-future political commentary, in the form of anti-Haden/Threep MAGA-type aholes on DC streets---Wiki tells it right:
plot summary
The world is exposed to a highly contagious virus. Most who get sick experience nothing worse than flu-like symptoms. For 1%, the virus causes the victims to be fully awake, but unable to move or respond to stimulus. This is known as "Lock In", and resembles the real condition known as locked-in syndrome. The illness comes to be known as "Haden's Syndrome" with its victims called "Hadens". Humanoid robotic personal transport units controlled by a Haden's brain (nicknamed "Threeps" after C-3PO from Star Wars) are developed as the primary way for a Haden to interact with the outside world.

Twenty five years after the initial virus exposure, FBI agents Chris Shane (who is a Haden) and Leslie Vann are assigned to a Haden-related murder, with a suspect who is an "Integrator" – someone who can let a Haden use their bodies. If the Integrator was carrying a Haden, then finding the suspect for the murder is complicated. Further Integrator-Haden related murders occur, making the case larger than expected, and as Shane and Vann dig deeper, they uncover a plot to completely shake up the Haden economy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock_In

Moves right along, though gets a little too TV series joeky at times, later in the story.
Liked it for light reading, but haven't felt urge to read anything else by him, although O may. Just not into that kind of light these days.

He was really upset about being labelled squeecore. Charlie Stross was compared (also recalling Christopher Priest saying Stross writes like an "internet puppy", this being before the whole sad puppy thing, so it wasn't political) but Stross seems a great deal more ambitious.

Attanasio's twitter posts remind me of Jon Anderson

Oracle Bones 2011-08-20 GMT 0 All bones touch! Fix the omen! Replace the work of time with the labors of consciousness. Act alone. Act now.

— A. A. Attanasio (@AAAttanasio) August 20, 2011

Lol.

Came to (re)post this link to Painwise in Space: The Psychology of Isolation in Cordwainer Smith and James Tiptree, Jr., by Alan C. Elms.

Think the third or fourth time is the charm so I will leave it at that.

http://future-sf.com/blog/a-list-of-ukrainian-born-sf-f-authors-whose-fiction-is-available-in-english/

read THE (viral sensation? i hadn't known) ATLAS SIX

the premise is really hackneyed: earth has magic and magicians, there is a millennia-old secret society, every ten years they invite six bright young things to study with them, after a year five of them will be offered membership

but . . . it's very well done. point of view rotates among the six, the characters are adult and have depth, and there are some interesting outside factors thrown in. would recommend if you're not utterly exhausted by the magician-school trope

Another one from Wormwoodia---remember the paste, way upthread, about imaginary islands?

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgp6SLxH_zrGpI3IxJ04v6Fc_Msbp_ZXPAGxTxYooX4HRnjlXkv55tcAtmYdvoLSOxjmBakIWK7I-uEPMk2WQsOzHs2_jfQDYJl7QC5gQ3A3mohW4s13UfuH0WJK9GDVxq68NERaWFkWq1nHHfoI4SmjdaHOQooe4XJf05p6sYrcZd45kGLe7ziatGr=s1440

Philip and the Dictator: A Romantic Story (1938) by Terence Greenidge is another in the sub-genre of fantasies involving imaginary North Atlantic islands, such as The King of Lamrock by V Y Hewson, The Dark Island by Vita Sackville-West and Hy Brasil by Margaret Elphinstone. Others, such as The Master by T H White and the Princes of Sandastre fantasies of Antony Swithin are set on the real, but greatly elaborated, island of Rockall.

In Greenidge’s novel, a young man, Philip, working in the newsreel industry, cutting and splicing footage, steps out of his Wardour Street workplace for a smoke and is transported through a drain cover to a different plane. He finds himself on a train in St Michael’s Isle, which lies in the mid-Atlantic between Britain and America. It is a former British colony that has achieved independence but retained its own king: the reigning monarch was a schoolfriend of Philip, in England.

Greenidge’s hero (modelled on the author) soon finds himself embroiled in the politics of the island, and a romance with the English-born queen: an influence is clearly Antony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), though with a less swashbuckling panache. The Dictator of the title is a General who leads the dominant party on the island and has autocratic tendencies: a poker-faced note at the start of the book assures us he is not based on Franco.

The idea of the mid-Atlantic island is well-realised, with a plausible sense of how such a territory might develop, and the switches from Philip’s London life to this fantasy realm (he goes to and fro several times) are achieved briskly and without tiresome explanation. The novel has a languid charm, not taking itself too seriously, and the satire on contemporary times is also fairly lightly-worn.

In asides, the author takes the opportunity to praise other books he likes, including Moonfleet by J. Meade Falkner and A Glastonbury Romance by John Cowper Powys.

Lots more about Greenidge and his other books (he was part of Evelyn Waugh’s aesthetical, camp and louche circle of Oxford friends, somewhat in the Brideshead mode., also big on riding trains around England and writing about it):

http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2022/03/greenidge-dream-time.html

I've searched but can't find any discussion on here about the Books of Babel, by Josiah Bancroft. I picked up the first book, Senlin Ascends, as a bargain on Kobo a few years back and it really captured me. I don't think Bancroft has written anything before this series, which is almost indescribable--it's sort of steampunk, but in the most oblique way. If his work reminds me of anyone, it's someone like Carla Speed McNeil. The final book came out not long ago, and honestly it's been a bit of a struggle to read it. Not sure why, other than my usual hesitation about final books, which too often fall flat (see, e.g., Donaldson, Stephen R.; Erikson, Steven).

That said, I think this is a series that scratches a lot of the itches under discussion in this thread.

Oho---which itches---?

It's got the same sort of weirdness that I, at least, find in works like the last one you posted from the Wormwoodiana blog.

50 Best Fantasy Books of All Time (according to Esquire):

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/g39385874/best-fantasy-books/

Fantasy is the oldest genre of literature, but its best release ever landed just six years ago.

I'm losing confidence already

Fantasy is the oldest genre of literature, but the best of all time are these recent books that will reliably generate revenue through Amazon links

Kidna funny that they didn't incluce Rowling though

seems like an interesting list had it been titled ‘here are 50 books i liked’; going with ‘best of all time’ is silly

I'm actually reading #19 at the moment and losing the will to live.

If this is "the most exciting and innovative" of the series I think I'm out

lol

It's a pretty idiosyncratic list, given that it's pure affiliate-link-bait

The capsule writeups are some of the worst I've ever read, though ("The author of Never Let Me Go has only written one fantasy novel, but he knocked it out of the park!")

I've never heard of Kalpa Imperial, sounds interesting?

Books of Babel, by Josiah Bancroft.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Monday, March 14, 2022 3:27 AM (fifteen hours ago)

It's a self-publishing success that got picked up by a big publisher.

Misread the last name for a minute and gave a start.

You thought shakey mo was branching out from playing guitar?

Can someone post the unadorned top 50 list so I can lol/sob without bestowing clikz

it's a single page, easy to parse...

50 The City of Brass, by S. A. Chakraborty
49 The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern
48 The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro
47 The Library at Mount Char, by Scott Hawkins
46 Ring Shout, by P. Djèlí Clark
45 The Other City, by Michal Ajvaz
44 The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, by Kai Ashante Wilson
43 The Unfinished World, by Amber Sparks
42 Witchmark, by C.L. Polk
41 Tales of Falling and Flying, by Ben Loory
40 What Should Be Wild, by Julia Fine
39 A Darker Shade of Magic, by V.E. Schwab
38 The Vorrh, by Brian Catling
37 Tigana, by Guy Gavriel Kay
36 The Black Tides of Heaven, by Neon Yang
35 A Game of Thrones, by George R. R. Martin
34 The Subtle Knife, by Philip Pullman
33 Queen of the Conquered, by Kacen Callender
32 Kalpa Imperial, by Angélica Gorodischer
31 Stardust, by Neil Gaiman
30 The Blue Fox, by Sjón
29 Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, by Grace Lin
28 Get in Trouble, by Kelly Link
27 Redemption in Indigo, by Karen Lord
26 Foundryside, by Robert Jackson Bennett
25 Moon Witch, Spider King
24 The Drowned Life, by Jeffrey Ford
23 Uprooted, by Naomi Novik
22 The Bird King, by G. Willow Wilson
21 The Changeling, by Victor LaValle
20 The Way of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson
19 The Shadow Rising, by Robert Jordan
18 Ozma of Oz, by L. Frank Baum
17 Once and Forever, by Kenji Miyazawa, translated by John Bester
16 The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by C.S. Lewis
15 The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by Amos Tutuola
14 Latro in the Mist, by Gene Wolfe
13 The Bloody Chamber, by Angela Carter
12 Kindred, by Octavia E. Butler
11 Children of Blood and Bone, by Tomi Adeyemi
10 Myst: The Book of Atrus, by Rand Miller, Robyn Miller and David Wingrove
9 Circe, by Madeline Miller
8 A Stranger in Olondria, by Sofia Samatar
7 Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke
6 A Hero Born, by Jin Yong, translated by Anna Holmwood
5 Who Fears Death, by Nnedi Okorafor
4 The Grace of Kings, by Ken Liu
3 A Wizard Of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin
2 The Fellowship Of The Ring, by J.R.R. Tolkien
1 The Fifth Season, by N.K. Jemisin

Has anyone read that Myst book? Used to love the games and had no idea there was a novel (or that it would rank so highly in a list like this)

I weirdly got the Myst book as a Christmas gift sometime in the 90s. I don't really remember much about it. I guess I enjoyed it enough to keep myself interested till the end. Definitely not anything I would have ever expected to show up on anybody's best fantasy novels of all time list.

No McKillip, no Leiber, no Vance? No (since Best of All Time) authors incl. in Tales Before Tolkein?
Haven't read most of these, but will vouch for:
28 Get in Trouble, by Kelly Link
23 Uprooted, by Naomi Novik
12 Kindred, by Octavia E. Butler
2 The Fellowship Of The Ring, by J.R.R. Tolkien

Not Earthsea?

Fraid not; I don't read much fantasy. But maybe I'll get to that one, which has been on the eye-level elf shelf for many years.

But yeah seems like you can't go wrong with anything by McKillip, most things by Leiber and Vance, and several anthologies: Tales Before Tolkien, edited by Wormwoodiana contributor Douglas A. Anderson, incl. stories by authors praised by T, others he probably knew about, some he probably didn't, but who fit.
Ditto Hartwell's Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder, 19th and well-into-20th Century stories.
Several cross-genre/subgenre collections, with rich fantasy elements, of new fiction commissioned by George RR Martin & Gardner Dozois: the ones i've read are Down These Strange Streets, Dangerous Women--those are my faves, but also like Rogues, and the retro SF-planetary-romance-canal-desert-sailpunk-etcTales of Old Mars
Ellen Datlow's Naked City: urban fantasy, incl. some of Martin & D's contributors, such as Patricia Briggs and Jim Butcher.

Ditto Hartwell's Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder, 19th and well-into-20th Century stories.

Hey, I just bought a copy of that last week. Really looking forward to digging in.

I'm also in love with Vance right now, though I've still only read the first Dying Earth volume. He is an absolutely amazing imagist.

Anyone ever come across this show? http://fantasybedtimehour.com/

The premise is: "Two girls in bed ill equipped to handle fantasy concepts... discuss Lord Foul's Bane"

I've watched a few episodes, and it's basically a goofy low-budget public access show ostensibly devoted to reading and reenacting Lord Foul's Bane, but where the hosts pretend to have no idea what's going on. Donaldson apparently shows up at some point.

god help me i am honestly kind of intrigued

I was too for a nanosecond but now I think I’ll just let mookie go first.

I'm also in love with Vance right now, though I've still only read the first Dying Earth volume. He is an absolutely amazing imagist. The Compleat Dying Earth is still v. affordable in paperback and Kindle. I've never read a whole book, but always enjoy anthology encounters, and somewhere still have ancient paperback JV collection, Dust of Far Suns, which I never finished, but was always good to take around for quick breaks while waiting in line etc: soothingly sardonic, dusty, vivid.

For those who e-read, the entire Vance corpus is available at his estate’s own website (Spatterlight) all derived from the definitive Vance Integral Edition texts and very reasonably priced per book. Happy to recommend starting points

Well okay, what are some good starting points??

moon moth and other stories iirc

Yup

I’ll write up my top 5 singletons/top 3 series later today
(Taking as given that everyone already knows about dying earth quartet and moon moth antho)

Look forward to seeing yr expert recs, JnJ. My favourite Vance short story is 'The Miracle Workers which I first read in this p much all killer no filler (apart from Poul Anderson) anthol:

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?84151

Somebody should make a list of the good Poul Anderson stories because it turns out there are a few of those despite some of his tendencies.

I remember his 'Queen of Air and Darkness' being quite a clever fantasy/SF mash-up, and the early Time Patrol stories are entertaining enough (Kingsley Amis was a big fan of them) but otherwise I'm drawing a blank ...

"The Man Who Came Early" and "Call Me Joe" are good.

Forgot "The Longest Voyage." That's mostly what I got, although I have heard a few other things are good.

He really was insanely prolific, for a long, long period of time, there's bound to be at least a decent anthology's worth of stories out there. And I know Moorcock and others rep for his early straight fantasy novels. But even putting the politics aside, I find most of his stuff to be just so much boilerplate SF sludge - his default prose is one of the closest to Chandler's SF parody.

Oh, and I read Tau Zero but the physics flew waaay over my head so all I was left with was very cardboard characters rattling through space for 200 pages.