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

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

thx!

Those two I mentioned by Mary Doria Russell: Doc and natural historical follow-up Epitaph, which follows the Earps to Hollywood---in Mrs. E's case, as far as the 1950s, even. Author prob learned from Oakley Hall's example, but seems like a natural mostly-historical storyteller, providing her own dialogue and other incisive particulars when it's right, also ripe.

Also, I came here to ask: of you familiar with two omnibi in the library shop, Paul J. McAuley's Confluence and Jo Clayton's The Soul Drinker? I try to avoid trilogies and beyond, but SFEncyclopedia favorably mentions the McAuley, and dead sister The Encyclopedia of Fantasy's online afterlife approves comparisons of Clayton to Tanith Lee, at least in this case.

*any* of you familiar

xps would second warlock and lonesome dove

i started jo clayton's skeen's leap a few years ago, but for some reason wasn't into it. she seems to feature badass female protagonists (which is *not* why i quit)

I'm struggling with a Clayton book right now. Hope to finish it soon. I have that Soul Drinker omnibus too.

How did everyone feel about the dialogue in Sparrow? I had intended to read it (and the sequel, which some people say is better) but a few reviewers I follow said it had the most excruciatingly annoying dialogue ever.

Speaking of modern westerns, also the library shop, that's where I recently got Charles Portis's True Grit, which the Coen brothers said was the direct basis of their version, never mind John Wayne's---so I'm thinking it should be effective, if it's anything like as good as the Coens' movie. I'm not that much of a Portis head---didn't even get into Dog of the South---but this is obviously different than his usual (eccentric Southerners of the mid-late 20th Century drive on and on).

just finished "Theory of Bastards" by Audrey Schulman, which was recommended somewhere in this thread or the previous one years ago, which made me put it on my kobo wishlist and sometime last year I got a notification that it was on sale and then eventually got to reading it. Really good stuff, a lot of which seems not as far off as it would have been back when it was first published. The thing that happens about midway in the book is something I've been think about from time to time for a while now. And with the hints throughout the first half that the whole thing was caused by AI run amock, it seems oddly prescient.

Loved that book, been meaning to read some more from her but haven't gotten around to it.

Like Dolphin House, iirc

i just gave (i refuse to say gifted) that book to someone last month! it's good

Glad you are still fighting the good fight wrt "gifted" creep.

ty but that is as nothing compared to 'X-year anniversary'

unless we're junior-high kids celebrating going steady for a certain number of months

jo walton asks here 'why is sharon shinn so underrated?'

and i don't know; haven't read any of her books yet, although she's been writing for quite a while. ann leckie and especially martha wells were famously around forever but only recently became hits. why/how?

as a former physical bookseller i think their covers are slightly more universally appealing than those of shinn's . . . but tbf i'm a 54yo man and my tastes have nothing to do with what sells in this millennium.

so why *is* sharon shinn (or whomever) underrated, and what would you suggest to make a SFF author less so? (besides labeling them 'cozy' or 'romantasy' or 'sapphic')

(i am not against any of those qualities per se but reactor mag is definitely pushing them each and every month)

(i *want* to hate 'cozy' but tbf i don't want to read novels about bloodthirsty demons/200 schoolchildren being casually murdered with no repercussions either, so 'cozy' will do)

My advice to publishers would be: pay for genuinely good cover art, stop comparing all your books to pop culture hits (it's frequently insulting to everyone involved and misrepresents the books), don't put all your eggs in the current trend baskets, series are popular but they also alienate a lot of readers (people tend to grow out of them).

I think the idea of a genre with minimal or zero conflict sounds pretty avant garde and I'm all for it in theory, but the general aesthetics of the current cozy books put me off and just like with hopepunk I see critiques of the books having unintended troubling aspects.

Having said that, some people are maybe so reflexively opposed to hopepunk and cozy that I'm sure that some reviewers are just determined to find moral failings in them.

Kelly Robson's Gods, Monsters And The Lucky Peach is the only one of these I actually want to read.

I've heard of cozy catastrophe and of drawing room mysteries being described as cozy but this is the first time I've heard it used like this. It makes sense I guess.

Oh interesting. I was obsessed with Sharon Shinn in the late 90s, the archangel series. Not sure if they would all hold up to, say, The Blue Sword standards but those along with Robin Hobb and what was coming out in cyberpunk at the time are the obsessions I remember.

I've half-mindedly noticed that Shinn went on to write a whole series of astrological sign-themed books? Which is really not my jam. And the cover of that Shifter & Shadow book screams self-published which...definitely not. I blame the editor.

I can't dredge up a lot of interest for the "tea and crumpets" kind of cosy fantasy that Amazon Unlimited and my local library are absolutely suffocating me with rn but I thought the Tea Princess Chronicles by Casey Blair were okay. I would recommend to someone who was looking for a better version of that kind of thing. Likewise the book The House Witch by the dubiously named Delemhach and the subsequent related books, idk if they qualify as a series or whatever. And The Teller of Small Fortunes was actually very tender and worthwhile independently of being tea-related.

There's probably a distinction that can be made between "cozy" tea house related novelettes and, like mookie said, thoughtful and tender stories about people finding their own truths. What was that one with the person who traveled with their wagon and met a robot? I put that in this category too.

losing steam on hyperion a bit, the first story was great but the next couple are kind of gross. i've got the stars my destination in at the library which i'm excited to read.

going back to the western tangent, i am a big-time portis head and i will say "eccentric Southerners of the mid-late 20th Century drive on and on" really only describes two of his five novels (dog of the south and norwood), though they are all road books in different ways. true grit is amazing but i'd also recommend masters of atlantis if you're not into DOTS or norwood (gringos is easily his worst novel but still pretty good)

wait the one where the guy is tortured and electrocuted to death on an alien tree for seven years is *not* kind of gross?

tortured and electrocuted to death *and then reincarnated* on an alien tree for seven years i

i guess i meant more icky than gross? weird sex stuff and the poet only being able to speak in scatological curse words. i'm not really offended, it's just not what i was expecting.

The only Portis I've read is Dog of the South; I'll try some more when I come across them (the library shop True Grit might be next, after I finish Berlin Alexanderplatz, or maybe that McKillip I recently mentioned)

xp i think it's very much worth reading the first two hyperion books. (i also liked the latter two, but they're a lil different)

yeah same for me about dog of the south; it was okay, but it did not make me a . . . portishead

lol

Hey, I did that first, TH!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002spmt

Report on an Unidentified Space Station by JG Ballard (15 minutes)

i'm not sure he stuck the ending here, but the first 14 minutes were ok

read jitterbug by gareth l. powell

not unpleasant to read, but also pretty bad. bargain-basement the expanse (it's honestly way too similar) plus a little bit of three-body problem. and the romance was risible. but at least it was a single relatively short book rather than a trilogy

hyperion was good, i think it's just inevitable with those novels that are actually a bunch of short stories that you're going to vibe with some of the stories more than others. but i'll check out the sequel eventually.

I think the first two novels were actually supposed to be the same novel but he was convinced to split it. Same with Ada Palmer's first novel.

fwiw the second hyperion book is *not* a canterbury tales thing -- and also rather more disastrous

(complimentary)

I enjoyed Hyperion and second book, though blanking on the title, along with almost everything else in both of those, except a womanboss who stepped between worlds (four portals?), and somebody else got folded into a little cube and smushed (right?)
Just now I had Dan Simmons confused with Dan O'Bannon, who wrote the screenplay for Aliens, and co-wrote Dark Star with its director, John Carpenter. One of those studenty notions that actually worked, in a lo-budget way---do yall know it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Star_(film)

(Did not know that there are more Hyperions.)

i watched dark star a long time ago, didn't really get it - maybe I was not stoned enough or not american enough.

Dark Star is a lot of fun. Red Dwarf vibes.

^

Stephen Jones (editor) Dancing With The Dark

This is a book of supposedly real experiences of the strange and inexplicable kind, written by an impressive array of horror and fantasy authors (there's even a sprinkling of hard science fiction writers). Many of the writers say they wish they had seen a ghost, many of them are really stretching themselves fit the anthology, I found a few of the writers surprisingly credulous but I suspect several of them preferred outright lying and telling a tall tale instead of turning down a sale.

My favorites were A. E. Coppard talking about walking home through the woods("the horridly silent swoop of the owls"), Charles de Lint staying in an empty house without permission, Terry Lamsley wandering around towns and Michael Mashall Smith talking about his dying cat. There's not much particularly thrilling or memorable in here but there's enough people writing interestingly about their own lives.

I'm reading Slow Gods by Claire North now, it's interesting

read Where the Axe is Buried by ray nayler

it's about omni-surveillance and political oppression and the technological globalization of the gulag archipelago and has pretty obvious 1984 vibes (how could it not?)

i think he wrote it as an incentive to fight these trends, but i mostly found it deeply dispiriting

did you read the mountain in the sea? i liked that one a lot. i have where the axe is buried lined up to read soon.

i've been reading the stars my destination, which is a lot of fun. it's pretty wacky. i assume this is where using "jaunt" as a term for teleporting came from (ie i'm guessing stephen king got "the jaunt" from)

oh duh: The term "Jaunting" is stated within the short story to be an homage to The Stars My Destination, a science fiction novel by Alfred Bester.

na, I kill you filthy

https://ansible.uk/writing/sfxbc01.html

did you read the mountain in the sea?

i did! it was good

Looooved The Stars My Destination. There's an early bit (the rape scene) that caused me to almost put the book down, Bester does something interesting with it later, I can't remember any other emotional beat like that in science fiction.