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.

not SF ok it does have aliens in. I've mostly forgotten about it.

Been a long time, but enjoyed Stugartsky bros.' Hard To Be A God as well.

Doomed City is great.

https://utampapress.org/product/the-voice-of-blood-by-gabriela-rabago-palafox

Halfway thought Doomed City and I'm bored - there's no forward progress, the characters are not that interesting, the setup has been fully laid out and explored already.

There absolutely is forward progress, narrator dude goes up the social chain.

alright. i just got to the third section, 'the editor', which seemed like it was going to be a repeat of the previous sections, albeit at a higher level up the social chain. i could be wrong about that. a quick glance at a plot summary shows that something does happen but i'm just not interested enough in the characters or the setting or the writing.

amazing/disturbing how many books neil gaiman has now written introductions for

(i've only read 'american gods', which is a clear ripoff of something stephen king threw away while drunk)

anyway it's great to know which books a violent sexual offender thinks are worthwhile

i don't know if it's part of a season or something but radio4x rebroadcast a version of There Will Come Soft Rains from 1962

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b007k2w1

and also 5 parts of a thing called Orbit One Zero from 1961, which i know less about

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/b08g4gvw

Cool, thanks.

(first episode of Orbit One Zero expires 1am Wendesday so you'll need to get a shift on to listen to that)

Orbit One Zero pretends to be the recordings of a scientist involved - reminded me of an ancient nabisco post about early novels and how before the form became established there'd be all these conceits like you're reading a letter or a document or a report. But then the play moves to different characters, dialogues the scientist would not have been able to witness. Also very common, a voiceover in a film leading in to the action, narration in a comic giving way to images of the story. But I guess since I listen to audio dramas less I find it more blatant.

^ just finished ep4 of this. The suspense is really well done, it benefits from the abscence of a conventional villain or threat, just this cylinder they found under the Hebrides, and the implications of that existing becoming scarier and scarier as the scientists do their research. Perhaps "cosmic horror" is a strech, but...it's certainly unnerving

I read Definitely Maybe by the Strugatsky Brothers, I think I have the measure of them now. Start with a high concept but don't bring it to a satisfying conclusion, instead use it as a frame to hang on a load of drunken anarcho-nihilistic philosophical / political aphorisms. I prefer Lem, who is similar in many ways but I think develops his concepts more fully - both the SF and the philosophical / political ones. And his characters are more sober.

I just pulled down a box of old mass markets and located one that has stayed with me for decades even though I never found the sequels and over time forgot the title and author. This is not the cover on my version, which came out in 2020-ish, but is probably better. Looking forward to seeing if it's as good/bad as I remember!

https://www.ricardopinto.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/big_V1c.jpg

That cover is very cool.

The whole aesthetic of this 7-volume series is very cool!!!

https://www.ricardopinto.com/books/

Tbh if I saw these covers without context on Libby I would assume they were self-published. The look feels very unpolished and non-commercial. But it's actually so rough and reads as "ugly" in certain ways that I enjoy the challenge of trying to see it with the right eyes?

Those covers are great. Enough to get me interested in reading.

He published them and they look mostly great. I think between the original 3 book version and the revised 7 book version, he spent about 15 years on it, so he was pretty serious about it. The 7 book version is actually shorter.

I'm excited to give the series another go since I only read Book 1 back in the day. Looks like Kindle Unlimited has a special for two months for $5 that I might go for, to read the whole series for free.

I read Definitely Maybe by the Strugatsky Brothers

can you confirm the strugatskys as influences on oasis tho

Well they needed something to read when the letters of Isaac Newton got too hard going.

?

Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants joke.

The Wilding by Ian MacDonald. Folk horror in modern Ireland, a rewilded peat bog produces mind boggling monsters. Didn't really click with it, had trouble picturing scenes and characters and it was too OTT for my liking.

On book 4 of that Pinto series and tbh it's kind of a slog and I can see several things coming a full novel-length away, it only remains to endure the suffering of reading through the bad things and find out which of several obvious choices it will be. Don't get too attached to anyone is all I can say. A bit of a fever dream, maybe if you're that kind of reader it wouldn't be as unsatisfying as I'm finding it.

Never meet your heroes or try to read books 2-7 apparently.

Lol

HI DERE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Galaxy_195510.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/Galaxy_195510.jpg

In 2025, Ley's ashes were found in a labeled crematorium tin in the basement of an apartment building on West 67th Street on Manhattan's Upper West Side. A New York Times article, published on April 21, 2025, stated that there was no record of "anyone named Ley ever having lived in the building." But one of the readers' comments (posted under the initials ″MMP″ beneath the web version of the article) shared the following, which might explain how the ashes ended up there: "Until my divorce from (Willy Ley's) daughter Xenia, he was my father-in-law: and the grandfather of my late daughter Christiana.... His wife Olga had an apartment in the building until her death." According to a New York Times obituary notice, Olga Ley died in 2001. Other sources confirm that Xenia's ex-husband indeed was named Martin Parker (perhaps as in ″MMP″).

I have given up on The Folded Sky by Elizabeth Bear. It has the YA protagonist problem - plucky, smart, prone to self doubt - but it wasn't just that. After reading two pages of in-depth bonsai care, also doing service as a laboured metaphor, and another two pages of her dream, clearly foreshadowing things to come, I realised: Bear gives a nod to Iain M Banks with her ship minds and long silly ship names, but Banks' books span the galaxy; I was going to be stuck in this one person's head for hundreds of pages.

that's part 3 of a trilogy. i think i've read the first and have the second in the queue

I thought I'd read the first, apparently I've read the first two! I don't remember being so annoyed by them. Or much else about them.

I'm about 1/2 way through The Goblin Emperor and it is like a Jane Austin novel, it is all about manners and propriety and speech and purity and marriage matches. I like it a lot, but it's not what I expected

Oooooh yes I do love court politics and governance. When it's bad it's like "betrayal! at the emperor's ball" blah blah but when it's good it's about people slowly revealing themselves to each other and building relationships and recognizing kinship. Which is also what I like irl so I'm nothing if not on brand.

Yall might like Bujold's Memory, in which Miles V. dutifully returns to his home planet, and gets involved in court politics and governance and the kind of Jane Austen stuff mentioned by Dan, also it c gets thrillery in the right place, and is exemplary in deep series mentions (tasty breadcrumbs) of What Has Gone Before: my first encounter w this Saga, and no prob.

I've never heard of Bujold, but I bought the audiobook of Falling Free (1988), thank you dow

You're welcome, and thanks for mentioning that one, which I hadn't heard of--just read the wiki on it, wow. Reviews quoted indicate that this was before her technique's primetime, but won the Nebula for 1988, and intriguingly described.

Im a big fan of the whole Vorkosigan cinematic universe!

When two male and two female supremely sensual, unspeakably cerebral humans find themselves under attack from aliens who want their awesome quantum breakthrough, they take to the skies—and zoom into the cosmos on a rocket roller coaster ride of adventure and danger, ecstasy and peril.

lol ok heinlein you randy fucker

supremely sensual, unspeakably cerebral

honestly, same

I only need 3 more Tanith Lee books and then I'll have everything, that's over 100 books I think. Might have to resort to ebooks if I can't find them in paper.
I think I've got 75 Brian Stableford books and 60something SP Somtow books, other tall bundles of Louise Cooper, David Zindell, Hugh Cook, Freda Warrington, Jack Vance, Maurice Magre, Moorcock and Storm Constantine.

Also: Jeffrey E. Barlough, Doris Piserchia, Mark E. Rogers, growing piles of Attanasio, Jo Clayton, Richard Calder, Janet Morris, Gene Wolfe, Michael Shea...

STORM CONSTANTINE thank you, I could see the cover art in my memory but not remember the name. I was going to search those up recently and now I can!

I've finished The Goblin Emperor (pretty good), and am listening to Falling Free now, and am liking it a lot

This sounds insane
https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/matsuo_yumi
"Most notable among her sf works is "Balloon Town no Satsujin" (March 1992 S-F Magazine; trans as "Murder in Balloon Town" in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, June 2002) which featured a Near Future setting in which most women opt for artificial uteruses to carry their children, although a hardline minority insist on the experience of natural childbirth (see also Women in SF). The titular town is a sector of Tokyo reserved for such naturalists (see Keep); the protagonist is herself a pregnant detective, investigating crimes against and by pregnant women. Conceived when the author was herself heavily pregnant, the story and its sequels reframe the state of pregnancy as a form of Pariah Elite, invisible to everyday society, with its own rules, customs, publications and concerns."

RIP Chelsea Quinn Yarbro