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

"The Holland of the Mind" is the next one.

Intro by Disch is really sweet

Hadn't known that she and John Clute dated back in the day.

Which is why the Clute library is in Telluride.

Posted all those Sturgeon links the other day, now feel like maybe I should (re)read some of his actual stuff

Obv candidates to start being Selected Stories and More Than Human.

i was skeptical of adrian tchaikovsky just bc of how prolific he is but children of time is undeniable. loved it.

then i tried to read blindsight, which i was excited about bc of the praise it gets everywhere, and i could just not get a handle on it. felt like a constant blast of oddball characters and impenetrable science with nothing to connect to. i kept pushing hoping it would click but eventually gave up on it. maybe i'll give it another shot someday. also i don't really get how watts has a "hard sci-fi" reputation when his most famous book has vampires in it. nothing against vampires in books, that's just not my understanding of what hard sci-fi is.

my teenage son has gotten obsessed with the aforementioned dungeon crawler carl books so now i'm reading the first one. so far, not really my thing, but moves quickly enough that i'll push myself through this one at least.

Really enjoyed this quiz, although afaik I was the only one of us who could who actually took it:
https://learnedleague.com/oneday.php?7761

what did you love about children of time?

i'm also sceptical of tchaikovsky, but i remember being sceptical of le guin at first, so lesson learned (not to compare the two).

i keep picking his books up in the shop and thinking, this story sounds intereresting, the basic-sentence writing is more than acceptable, then something's preventing me from actually reading one. maybe the length

the 500 pages is often just the first of 4 books 8)

Justin Isis is very talented and funny (his book most firmly in SF territory might be Welcome To The Arms Race), I find him a bit too contrarian at times but again, very funny...
https://neopasseism.substack.com/p/science-fiction
Also writing here are Siobhán M. La Grippe, Jayaprakash Satyamurthy, Damian Murphy, James G. Champagne, Ryan Pitchford, Colby Smith, Nurgul Jones, Carrion

Just finished The Ministry of Time and agree that it is well-done and enjoyable overall but the ending is a mess and there is a dip in quality when the, um, midpoint occurs.

honestly wonder if the ending was foisted upon her

also i wonder when, if ever, i last used 'foisted'

Dunno, but it is a reasonably popular word on ILX in general.

tbh I sort of gave up trying to follow all the twists and turns on the way to end so don't even recall exactly what happened and might have to go back and (re)read properly.

But perhaps I would rather read Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition, which is on sale for a few more hours, first

children of time is undeniable. loved it.

then i tried to read blindsight, which i was excited about bc of the praise it gets everywhere, and i could just not get a handle on it.

I also did not cares for the vampires in space book.

Children of time was good, second book great and by the 3rd i was sick of the “what if X animal was super intelligent?!” gimmick. Liked his writing style enough tho to pick up the Final Architects series and enjoyed all three.

no all the sf aspects were good and well done imo! i enjoyed it!

iirc it's just that that one character would never ever have forgiven that other character and suggesting such is both a betrayal and poor storytelling

imo

xp

The 3rd book wasn't really about the animals from what I remember (there were the crows, but they weren't the point)?

I'm halfway through the 4th book and it's buckling under the weight of incorporating all the previous elements a bit, but still enjoyable if you were on board for the others.

Every now and then he slips into that pseudo-jokey Andy Weir register for a moment, but it could be so much worse.

Interested in a podcast called Hugo History by historian Christine D. Baker.

And maybe another one called Hugos There.

tick-tock, seven o'clock, time to get up, time to get up, seven o'clock!

seven nine, breakfast time, seven nine!

eight-one, tick-tock, eight-one o'clock, off to school, off to work, run, run, eight-one.

Nine-fifteen, time to clean.

(Ray Bradbury's 'There Will Come Soft Rains' is set today)

read PAGANS by james alastair henry

which is basically a murder mystery in an alternate britain where the norman conquest never happened

britain is split into three parts: saxons in the south-east, immiserated celts (aka 'tribals') in wales and cornwall, and, above the Wall, the democratic republic of scotland, whose native picts are intertwined with the nordic economic union.

those three parts pretty much hate each other but then a kickass female saxon police chief (she named her car Roadfucker) gets saddled with a celtic detective while trying to solve the murder of one of 'his people' (yes there will be slurs)

i enjoyed it a lot

i think this came to my attention via james morrison, as so many things do

i read a couple of books by Barrington Bayley because I remember he had two of the better stories in the New Worlds omnibuses I used to own. The Soul of the Robot is an extended kind of Pinocchio tale which dallies with the problem of consciousness but ultimately opts for mysticism. The Knights of the Limits is a collection, some of the stories are standard "what if"/twist in the tale - people who live in a cavern in a universe of infinite solid rock - or do they? Some of the stories are thin excuses for rather pointless ruminations on cosmology or philosophy. All the stories, and the novel, are suffocatingly male, frequently sexist - the one single intelligent female character is described as having breasts straining against her lab coat - and there's one instance of gross misogyny and victim blaming.

Here's the line: "Alanie gave a deep sigh that strained her full breasts voluptuously against the fabric of her smock." - about 2 degrees from "she breasted boobily down the stairs".

name is familiar. i have Collision With Chronos, but remember nothing about it

I have a couple of 2-in-1s - The Fall of Chronopolis & Collision with Chronos and The Pillars of Eternity & The Garments of Caean. I remember them being pretty nuts in a 1960s manner, don't recall gross sexism but there probably is. There was another odd post-apocalyptic novel where at one point the protagonist chances upon an infinite football match being played by robots, the score had entered the thousands or possibly tens of thousands. The Grand Wheel? Maybe.

I've enjoyed some of his stuff, notably The Fall of Chronopolis and the one about Samuel Taylor Coleridge playing stoned chess with aliens which is called "Knights of the Limit" iirc

There's kind of a weird clunky Thunderbirds-in-written-form energy that I kind of like, despite the offenses ledge has mentioned, both now and earlier.

xp that one's called The Exploration of Space, I don't think it's actually Coleridge but certainly reminiscent of his Kubla Khan experience. I did like some of the stories, I would have been more complimentary but the gross misogyny was in the last one and left a really sour taste.

Oh right there is no title story in The Knights of the Limits.

There's a funny quote from Michael Moorcock on its Wikipedia page.

ha ha nope

Michael Shea - The Mines Of The Behemoth

The comedy is dialed up in this sequel, more in the vein of Vance's Cugel stories (Shea written two of his own Cugel stories), Nifft and Barnar are consumed with greed and they treat captured demons very cruelly. I think this made them seem less interesting and sometimes the comedy wore thin for me. It's another underground world, we have another young brat character, and I missed the variety of the first Nifft book... and yet it's still pretty amazing. The richly fussy detail, sense of scale and life growing everywhere endlessly is impressive as ever.
I feel the novel could have been tighter, not sure we needed to see as much of Nifft and Barnar's work and toil but it all comes together well in the end. Definitely seek this out if you crave enormous bugs on the rampage.

Can't remember if I posted that I found some Jack Vance novels and stories that were translated into Esperanto for whatever reason.

Also some Clark Ashton Smith and one beloved Clifford D. Simak novel.

Just read William Morris's "The World Beyond The Woods" (or maybe that should be in italics), and was struck by structural interplay of relative realism (enough for willing suspension of disbelief/who cares, go William go) with expectedly lacy olde elements, life's rich tapestry indeed.
Handsome young Walter is brooding about his beautiful wife: they've come to hate each other, and now she's up the spout by dognose which of her many bfs, when he sees three travelers making their way across the docks: a regal Beauty, obv. The Mistress, her little Maid, pretty cute and with an ankle bracelet, and a hideous Dwarf.

They go back to sailing thee mysterious ocean blue, and nothing for it but that landlubber Walter must do likewise, and somehow track them down. Which he does of course, having many adventures along the way, incl. "light loves of a young man," but never losing sense of purpose, and he abandons his companions and ignores bad signs and goes way inland, but long-ass trek becomes granular descriptions that I stayed with, because this is what he experienced here and then here and he found some water and he rested and the moon came up and he woke early or slept for three days or not at all: what ever's right for the latest circumstances.

So he gets to the land of the Mistress, where she's glad to see him and warn him not to displease her, and she and her latest boytoy, the King's Son, are sick of her and looking for a replacement, but also the King's Son, being spoiled by his background and her, is repulsed by Wlater for being so passive in the face of royal insults, but the Mistress is like, No he's practicing self-restraint, he's studying us, and Walter and the King's Son and the Mistress are hot for the Maid, who is a thrall, but also knows some magick and the Mistress knows this, and the Miad keeps updating Walter on what she's doing and why and

Ending is disappointing, but Morris works on it conscientiously, despite or maybe the more for having pulled it out of his butt. Oh and thicketss of archaisms nest just the right words often enough, like the Mistress is strolling in the moonlight, and that's all she's wearing, other than her bod, and she has long blonde curls that are also crisp---yes!

So then I re-read "The Folk of The Mountain Door" in Tales Before Toklien, and it was a drag: unpublished and even untitled in his lifetime, so maybe he agreed.

But def want to read this, as described in online Encyclopedia of Fantasy:

Morris's acknowledged masterpiece is The Well at the World's End (1896), presenting a unified fantasy geography (which is a clear forerunner of J R R Tolkien's kind of Secondary World) rather than conventionally setting a Dream- or magical land on unknown shores of the real world's sea. The lofty Diction has been smoothed nearer to transparency, minor characters possess personalities and motivations aside from their roles in the story, and the previous two books' flat backdrop becomes a functioning medieval society.

she and her latest boytoy, the King's Son, are sick of her

"Alanie gave a deep sigh that strained her full breasts voluptuously against the fabric of her smock."

i questioned whether that is an actual adverb and . . . possibly so, if only because of shit like this