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

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

Hodgson's The Raven Scholar was a little like Harry Potter for adults, but I really enjoyed it and am glad to read that it is part of a planned trilogy

Susanna Clarke's Piranesi and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell are both very memorable books and worth reading! I haven't yet read the second Strange/Norrell book, The Wood At Midwinter.

If you are into audiobooks, Piranesi is narrated beautifully by Chiwetel Ejiofor

I will look into the Megan Whalen Turner Attolia series

Thanks, and I'll take a first-hand look at the library's Addison, Whalen, and Clarke books, didn't know there was another Strange/Norrell.

Seconding Piranesi and its audiobook as well. Still haven’t read the other one. Also that one seems to have two different audiobook versions.

thirded, love both her novels

Raven Scholar 99p on Kobo today, will give it a shot.
Susanna Clarke has the same health problems I have so she's a total hero to me for the way she battled thru it to create Piranesi.
currently halfway thru the second of Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch books, it's OK but nothing special.

Good timing, kobo!

Yes to The Thief as first-in-series! I hope you enjoy them. I may be susceptible to the style of them just as a personal thing, I never know if I like something because it's "good" (what is "good"?) or because I'm conditioned to like it. But I've read that quartet (I think) over and over just to be back with those people.

Re Piranesi: I liked it well enough but it didn't change my life.

read 'the goblin emperor', which was good but . . . there are *so* many characters, and they all have titles (which are gendered and change if someone gets e.g. married or widowed), and first names, and family names, and a lot of the names are long and have similar letters (too many Cs and Vs!) and it was tough to keep track even though i read it quite quickly

the whole thing with everyone using the royal we except with close intimates was odd -- especially when the author had to point out whether someone saying 'you' was using it formally or plurally (or both) -- but i guess that's world-building

it definitely shared with 'the raven scholar' the bit where the main character has never had friends and supposedly doesn't know how to make them . . . but then it turns out that they're mysteriously quite good at it

Both the Raven Scholar and a book I saw recommended on Bluesky called The Outcast Mage are 99p on google play books today

fwiw i quite like the murderbot tv series. not sure it's actually *funny* but it's dry and enjoyable and when the 20 minutes is over i wish there was more

well if it's dry that's alright

fwiw that description suits the (very slender) books perfectly as well

late here but really liked piranesi. read it for the puzzle but it affected me way more than i expected

I'm now listening to the Murderbot Diaries novellas and books by Martha Wells. They are narrated by Kevin F. Free and I'm liking them a lot. A sci-fi fiction friend of mine thought that the narrator didn't get the sardonic humor and gender nonconformity right, but I think those aspects of it are both very apparent in the narration

ok murderbot e05 was extremely (dryly) funny, mostly because of anna konkle

Dry and also sometimes dizzy humor (they sure drink a lotta "tiny bowls" of tea, while some pray for decent coffee as well) among the contending/sometimes recombinant representatives in space of Translator's Gate, the only Leckie unpruned from local library (it's not the kind of series likely to hook a lot of readers, with so much competition) Long-ass book with a few characters' storylines overdeveloped, and lots of arguments, w/o intriguing turns and charms of principals, though they sure try to be engaging (think I'll go back to Bujold).
I did enjoy the two w YA appeal, although the overall pace, incl. of conversation, drags on them too, a bit. But yeah, the deadpan-to-dizzy teahead negotiator bits are good.

Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch books

since reading the radch (as it were) i've encountered a number of books that really lean into the tea

(possibly i notice this because i personally do not like coffee or tea)

happily the whole glove stuff seems limited to leckie

it's almost comical how cis male (etc!) scifi authors now lean into sapphicness (sapphicisity? sapphicallity?)

adrian tchaikovsky is the absolutely least sexy author ever -- he churns out hella plots which may or may not make sense at all -- but felt compelled to vaguely hint at the hot parthanogenically born female warrior possibly hooking up with the hot female lawyer/master knife duelist

it becomes pretty fucking obvious when the girls are getting it on and the boys are, for some reason, not!

e.g. i love murderbot, and the throuple is very much played for laughs because the guy is so earnest and hapless. but there would never ever be a throuple depicted with two dudes

I thought there were some male hookups mentioned in the Children of Time books?

tbh spiders are creepy af so i only read the first one

Robert Silverberg, Dying Inside: a little creep in his 40s groans and whines about his life-long mind-reading ability fading away, very gradually realizing and recounting how it's been years since he had a really good (no, that was kinda good, but this other one, not so hot---though better than) tap. Of course it's first-person, with no daylight for interest to grow between author and narrator. In the second half, however, he actually does worm his way into some good passages, even though these greatly involve female characters, formerly so tedious and insular as described, like most other things in this book (which does remind me of Roth's corrosive-corroded clarity, but not of the good Roth). Still! Damn if these parts of the second half didn't work, woke me up and pulled me along. Could have been a good novella, although that's what I tend to think of many novels (Ending goes along and along, though.)

Should have conceded that there eventually are a few third-person chapters, and that these sometimes improve the pace/lighting, or kinda.

(which does remind me of Roth's corrosive-corroded clarity, but not of the good Roth)

I read Dying Inside in 2011 after reading a review of it on what was then tor.com
I gave it a fairly positive review based on how well the lead character was drawn while noting how unpleasant that character is and how uncomfortable his attitudes and actions made me

I don't feel any urge to read it again

I've read Leckie's Radch trilogy a couple of times and liked it a lot. I think I'm going to pick up Translation State and Provenance (both stand-alone books set in the same universe).

provenance may be the weakest of the five but they're both worth it imo, translation state is very interesting on the transgender experience.

read 'the future' by naomi alderman

the two main characters had great stories and were engaging and even raised some interesting issues

the plot was more absurd than anything i can ever recall encountering

basically certain good guys, disgusted with how enormous tech companies were ruining the world, kidnapped the (utterly stereotypical) leaders of three of those companies, dropped them on a remote island and convinced them that more or less the rest of humanity had died in a plague. where they eventually died. and then the good guys took over their companies and made the world a lovely place.

i don't regret having read it, but good lord

As I said above, had very mixed experience w Translator's Gate, but may have been wrong one to start series with. I'm not big on series usually, but was curious about author, often praised in interesting terms.b Did appreciate the importance of individual rights, the contest for that principle, wanted to enjoy plot development more. As for comprehending the midst of series, back to Bujold soon, I hope (still making my way through stack of old paperbacks, from young Delany to Silverberg being old and experienced enough, after 70-odd novels by mid-1970s, to know better---to Pangborn's The Judgement of Eve, opening chapters of which have just left Dying Inside in the dust, even more than appropriately)

the contest

e.g. i love murderbot, and the throuple is very much played for laughs because the guy is so earnest and hapless. but there would never ever be a throuple depicted with two dudes

― mookieproof, Friday, June 13, 2025

I haven't seen the series, but am just about to start the seventh and latest book and I don't remember a throuple. As far as I have read the murderbot despises human sexuality, but it shows a curious interest in Art, the research transport bot it meets sometime in the middle of the story. The books are so funny and are worth reading

One of my best friends loved the books and is now watching the series. She recommends that I finish the books first because the series, as entertaining as it is, really changes a lot of the story

The books seem to be about an observation of humanity from the outside, which is fascinating, and despite the murderbot's dismissal of humans, the bot is clearly fascinated by them and is gradually becoming more human. The whole recurring subplot about it and Art wanting to watch the the different human tv shows together is very touching

I read The Raven Scholar. I don't want to trash talk it, it was entertaining and inventive, if rather long. But it wasn't very serious - I mean despite being set in an empire full of grown adults everyone behaved more like they were in high school (albeit a rather violent, murderous one). And the romantic sideplot was pretty cringey. It was fine as a bit of escapism but it pales in comparison next to Le Guin - even Gifts, which is only set in a small community in some barren farmlands, has way more political weight.

I tried reading Raven Scholar but it was too YA for me

impossibly rude for you to contradict me!

j/k, that's totally fine

Reading Proud Man by Katherine Burdekin, writing as Murray Constantine. It's a blast - written in 1934 it rails against sexism, war, privilege (the exact term) and all human flaws in general. Here's a flavour - I don't know if it will be this didactic all the way or if a story is going to develop. ('Human' refers to a future race who have achieved full consciousness, we are called 'sub human'):

The phallus was considered more holy and adorable than the womb. This to a human mind, appeared a little unjust, as in mammal reproduction the male plays a very small part. The live mammal, the whole mammal, lies in the womb; while when it is born the male animal cannot keep it alive. So, if mammal sexuality were to be worshipped at all, one would expect, under such a superstition, to find privilege heavily on the side of the females, who carry the children, bear the children, and feed the children. But it was not so, even under the fertility religions; and when these primitive superstitions gave way to the religions of Western civilization, the male dominance became still more marked, and the position of the females more subordinate. This new religion inclined to hatred of animal sexuality, and where before the males had not been willing to give the females their due as chief reproducers, now they were very willing to mete out punishment to them as chief offenders.

Where did you find that?!

it's published by the sf gateway, I heard about it on the backlisted podcast, sf special episode.

I have her Swastika Night in a Gollancz Masterworks edition:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika_Night

ledge's quote is incisive like an Anti-Moses, cutting her own damn tablets.

its chock full of stuff like that, though her ideas on homosexuality are less incisive, not unproblematic.

Welp I distantly remembered Edgar Pangborn as righteously rustic, ideal-wise---but The Judgement of Eve(1966) also turns out to be passionate and zingy and well-shaded, in a lapel-grabbing, with good pacing all the way through--as three guys, two younger and one older, find themselves compatibly disaffected from boring, righteous, dithering old Shelter Town, and set out to see what else they can find in the barely populated boondocks world left after the One Day's War (and subsequent plagues ect.) of several late 20th/early 21rst Century decades ago. They complain and argue and agree and so forth, eventually coming upon a farmhouse actually occupied, by the lovely Eve and her equally cool Mom, Mrs. Newman.
The guys are totally smitten, and Eve, who has never met a guy but has been told about them by Mom and Mom's books, directs the three acceptable suitors to go back out through the florid summer, come back in reflective autumn and tell her what they've learned, about what love is, and she will choose her life-long mate (she's a high roller, is our Eve).
So they go back out and split up, having adventures and learning stuff, no thanks to this leftover world, dang it. Narrator is putting together his version of these tattered legends, plus references to a curt log left by the old dude, and pushing back against dumb-ass maudlin 25th Century "experts." Pretty cool.

read m.r. carey's pandemonion duology

it was fine, and decently thriller-ish. i don't regret reading it!

fine, Pandominion

Finished Proud Man, absolutely wonderful. The last of the four chapters was the least enjoyable for obvious reasons, but a very brave choice to write it like that and I'm immensely grateful that the chekhov's gun towards the end did not, in fact, go off.

It reminded me of Doris Lessing's Shikasta - an angelic (in some way) figure visits our fallen earth - but I hated Shikasta, it's just a torrent of misery and her angels are condescending and useless pricks. The narrator here is fascinating and magnetic, the analyses she offers (such as the one above) are always interesting and amusing, even when they're not wholly convincing, and the other characters are not all doomed beyond redemption.

Would like to read that, thanks.
Reminds me a little, and also speaking of well-paced w unexpected shading: just finished DG Compton's The Missionaries (1972), in which four principal Earthlings have our First Encounter with four Visitors, with somewhat familiar class-gender elements getting less (or more carefully) typified than I expected, from moment to moment, while moving right along. It even made me wonder about what 1972 science fiction readers, probably teens, judging by characters, seedy dark, etc., might recognize as a gaming scenario---not that I know anything about any era of gaming, other than its early scripts as backstories of the great Wolf In White Van.
Too much of an exception to this careful characterization: the increasingly pulp-predictable Crowd, and especially local yokels, who are just that, with disappointing plotting results. Oh well, that's just on the page---as a B-movie, or made-for-TV movie (another '72 reference), it might be OK, maybe for the most part.

adrian tchaikovsky is the absolutely least sexy author ever -- he churns out hella plots which may or may not make sense at all -- but felt compelled to vaguely hint at the hot parthanogenically born female warrior possibly hooking up with the hot female lawyer/master knife duelist

it becomes pretty fucking obvious when the girls are getting it on and the boys are, for some reason, not!

I agree with AT's books being very unsexy, but I'm pretty sure I remember some male hookups in the Children of Time books being handled in an extremely matter-of-fact way.