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

Wonder Thread
Wonder Thread!

Thread of royal beauty bright!

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

Seriously, change that shit.

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

some

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

That rolled from 2011 to 2014, I believe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am struggling with this sentence.

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ha, exactly.

Think I started a thread about that once.

When Author X was Compared to Author Y by Author Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does anyone do this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Qualia Redux (@QualiaRedux) April 15, 2021

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

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

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

Jess Nevins - Horror Needs No Passport

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

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

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

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

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

No cover credit for Utagawa Kuniyoshi.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Didn't mean to drop the g, sorry.

Or jump the gun on :

will jump gun for dinosaur

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

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

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

re: the recent KSR opening scene

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

— Christopher Flavelle (@cflav) May 3, 2021

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

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

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

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

Computer use (augmented by pen and paper for reasons of security and sometimes elitism) is a given in this early 80s yarn, with no waving toward Cyberpunk---also just kind of in there are elements of queerness, though Lynn is cited by SF Encyclopedia as up-front rainbow pioneer in fantasy and science fiction--- though most of the sex, explicit and otherwise (fuel for happy talk and arguments etc.) is het, and plausibly presented---though Zed only victimizes guys; then again, having sex with a woman can make him happy, but that doesn't cut into his need for victimizing guys, but how much of that counts as a kind of gayness/a kind of sadism, and how much and how does the proportionality matter:just a big ol' world that goes round and round several days after I read it, along with the set-ups and boom-boom.

looking for a short story with Machine in the title to round out the month i found this by (surprisingly) E M Forster

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/72890/pg72890-images.html

which contains a short story called The Machine Stops. it's like that story about the planet-wide city, and also Silo / Wool. can't see helena bonham carter doing this one, in her frocks.

That story is pretty famous

it's the only one in the book that gets a separate Wikipedia page. and was chosen to be included in some roundup anthology.

As you can see from this isfdb page, The Machine Stops has been very very heavily anthologised, as is often the case with rare SF/Fantasy forays by literary names:

https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?41186

^this

He wrote fantasy too; Clute picks "The Celestial Omnibus" as the best of that, but has a lot more, incl. some spoilers, to say about "The Machine Stops":

"The Machine Stops" directly attacks, as many critics noted and as Forster himself acknowledged, the rational World State that Wells had promulgated four years earlier in A Modern Utopia (1905)...n any study of the relation of Dystopia to Utopia, the story is of vital interest. [JC]

Even though he pans most of the fantasies in that entry, Clute's descriptions over in ye olde (no more updates) Encyclopedia of Fantasy are more detailed and appealing:
https://sf-encyclopedia.com/fe/forster_e_m

I've read all the Forster novels, perhaps time I tackle the short stories.

outside of the Machine Stops the others in that collection have been... strange. and not in a good way. and not specifically sf. at least they are short. (i've two more to read, they might improve)

Penguin Twentieth Century Classics published 2 Forster short story collections in the 1990s that are very good. SELECTED STORIES is mostly his 'fantastic' stuff, in the literal sense, including The Machine Stops, while 'The Life to Come' is mostly his gay-themed stories. Both excellent collections, as I said.
Re THE MACHINE STOPS, I tweeted this in vast anger earlier this year.

https://x.com/Unwise_Trousers/status/1777950756370550799

https://twitter.com/Unwise_Trousers/status/1777950756370550799

Ah, fuck, I have no idea what I'm doing.

the collected short stories of Arthur c Clarke are 99p today on Amazon in the UK, about a 10th of a pence per page.

(also something called How to Start a Civil War. happy US election Day everybody...)

The Most Iconic Speculative Fiction Books of the 21st Century:

https://reactormag.com/the-most-iconic-speculative-fiction-books-of-the-21st-century/?fbclid=IwY2xjawGau8NleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHdHWw9AakXjYq1-OrR40VoJB87L5c6s2r2T9FgXDFNA3IFqQiTcCCkiBTw_aem_PWuIBg1sPw_8jATVK98F7A

Just read Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke courtesy of my local library and thought it was great, especially the audiobook.

I read the Jemisin BROKEN EARTH trilogy and the first book was really very good but sadly books 2 and 3 really didn't do much for me. Lots of plot holes where the ludicrously overpowered protagonists don't do stuff that would be really easy for them to do so that the story can go where the author forces it to. Was quite weary of it all by the end.

It was overstuffed and over-the-top and a long haul but i was committed. I just ended up really admiring her imagination. And i liked being in that world. It was fucked up in a cool way to me. And, you know, a page-turner. i couldn't read her previous trilogy though. I read the first book of that and I was done. So, I feel you in a way.
All these people who write these long-ass things really need an actual editor. There is always so much you could cut.

Piranesi was so wonderful and haunting.

For all my complaints, I did like that vols 2 and 3 were SHORTER than vol 1, rather than suffering the usual bloat.

there's a lot of trilogy-pressure for ideas that may or may not warrant it iirc. i still enjoyed it, but (without checking the competition) three straight hugos is overkill when baru cormorant, among others, exists

piranesi was wonderful, although i do continue to wonder if the final chapter was for the best

I tried Baru Cormorant but the almost complete inability of the author to physically describe anything made me stop after book one. The writing was actually pretty good for the most part, but the whole world it was set in may as well have been the set of Dogville for all the visual imagination put into it.

Basically I am not in sympathy with much modern fantasy, which I wish was not the case.

the lack of description goes way beyond fantasy now. a lot of modern fiction could be set in blank white boxes for all we know. sci-fi has always been guilty of this. it takes time to build characters and settings physically and with sci-fi it was always more of a hurry up approach to writing. they were trying to write as fast as they could because they weren't getting paid shit for a novel or story. i don't know what the excuse is for modern literary fiction. people can't be bothered i guess. it would only get in the way of their brilliant observations on modern life. (this is why the exceptions now in any genre really stand out. someone took their time with this! this is sturdy and built from the ground up! maybe i just olds though.)
(i'm guessing with fantasy people feel the pressure to keep their name out there. quick, another trilogy!)

I apologize to treefell that I forgot to take MAUL with me when I was packing for that trip and consequently still haven't re-read it.

BROKEN EARTH was so difficult for me to get into, stay in, and to figure out what the author was trying to signify. I have a lot of love for her earlier series that Scott hated :D

oh i didn't really hate that trilogy. i just knew that i didn't want to keep going. with that story and those characters. i can't love everything. the broken earth just sucked me in. i was in the mood at the time. i have no desire to read her living city thing either. one look at that and i know its not for me. more of a china mieville kinda vibe.

kinda like how i got sucked in to area x and really dug it but have no desire to read anything he has put out since.

Piranesi was so wonderful and haunting.

xposts - no worries about Maul. I'd still love to hear what you think when you do get round to reading it

I remember finding PIRANESI affecting as I was reading it but in retrospect I'm a bit "That was it? The whole thing was just about this conceit?" and feeling vaguely annoyed.

Yeah thought Piranesi was a bit slight. Strange & Norrell is much more elaborate, it has way more than two characters for a start.

if you liked Piranesi can I recommend https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13456414-a-short-stay-in-hell? much more of a downer but I feel like it has more to say on similar themes, while also being short.

can't be doing with ye victorian magick stuff generally, but the NYT profile of her has me considering it https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/25/books/susanna-clarke-strange-norrell-sequel-interview.html.

lol I never even put together that they were written by the same person. I mean I read it almost 20 years ago.

The BBC adaptation was really good.

much more of a downer

he is not kidding

_Piranesi was so wonderful and haunting._

Trying to decide whether to read the previous one. Seems quite a bit longer.

That Dogville comparison is great, always a disappointment when that happens because the power of the imagery is just so much of the appeal for me in SFF

Makes me wonder about writers literally unable to visualize things in their head though, I've heard some writers create maps and visual aids to help them write

Maybe that's why sometimes people say a book is begging for a screen adaptation: so we can actually see what things look like

I think as a kid that's why I loved SF paperback covers; they gave you a glimpse of the world but just enough to kick off your own imagination. Of course, half the time the covers weren't even painted for the specific book, but nevertheless.

The current conventional wisdom in fiction afaict is that you don't need to describe what things look like. Just describe the action, what people do and say, and the reader has access to a million images of everything all the time so they can easily imagine what anybody in any milieu looks like. Like, oh in Tolstoy's day photographs were rare and always formal and no one really knew what things looked like so you needed to describe people in detail, the shape of their moustaches and the furrow between their eyebrows, and what peasants looked like, nobody had any reference images of peasants, so the descriptions were like scientific documentation in a way etc. ditto Herman Melville, he had been to places no camera had been so of course he needs to describe it. But now there's no need. I of course think this is bullshit. Description is luxurious. Put me there. Let me wallow in it. I can walk and chew gum at the same time. Let me know what's happening AND what it looks like, sounds like, smells like.

That makes some sense to me Tracer... But isnt the thing sbout sci fi /fantasy/ speculative fiction is that these are often worlds or technologies or species etc that dont exist, or don't exist yet. Hence the need for descriptive world building.

Yes! That's one of reasons I love it! idk why a SF writer wouldn't want to describe things.

well, like i said, with SF in the past, people wrote REALLY fast. so they gave up density of description and gave you fast-moving plot/action and some cool ideas. that's why so many 50s and 60s pulp SF was mostly tough guy narration. you can move things along quickly. I think hard SF of the recent past and present has gone the other way and tried to give people a more accurate reporting of landscape/human and non-human features. and those are the books to sink into. i like someone like Jack McDevitt for that.
it could be that phones/computers just do away with people's ability to describe what they are seeing. accurately. evocatively. which makes me sad a little. but there are certainly still lots of very talented writers who know how to world-build so i won't get too sad.

I think most of the pulp era horror I've read is highly descriptive

they were still following poe's lead. and gothic-era novelists in general.