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

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.

Don't know about racial stereotyping but the one becky chambers thing I tried to read was so pollyanna-ish I couldn't finish it.

Peppy protagonist: hey evil space pirates, don't rape and murder us and steal all our supplies, it makes more sense for you to just take what you need and leave us in peace!
Evil space pirates: Ok sure!

I hate hate hate the -punk construction, yes even cyberpunk and steampunk. Basically if you haven't been in the pit at Agnostic Front or, er, The Exploited don't call yourself punk, whippersnappers. Hopepunk is the worst yet, although noblepunk would beat it if anyone had been mad enough to moniker the 'genre' thus.

Yes Hopepunk is particularly gross.

If you want racial stereotyping I can(not) recommend Hellspark by Janet Kagan. Not that she stereotypes any existing races or cultures, but in her humanoid diaspora every planet confirms to extremely rigid and laboured stereotypes (one lot carry knives which they obsessively polish while thinking; one lot shake bangles to make a point; one lot approach from the right to appear submissive, obviously another lot approach from the right to appear dominant!) and it's only one interplanetary traveller who helps them see that hey man underneath we're all the same!

I'll accept cyberpunk and splatterpunk but I feel that if there is no punk aesthetic at all, then I'd rather call it something else. So steampunk is steamtech to me. Dieselpunk is dieseltech, solarpunk is solar SF, mannerpunk is fantasy-of-manners, hopepunk is uuuhhhh, I dunno.

Somebody mocking it called it Copepunk.

Adding punk to everything makes the genre naming so boring too. I also find it dumb in music when someone highly individual and/or untutored like Captain Beefheart gets called punk, I don't think it makes a lot of sense.

Jess Nevins - Horror Fiction In The 20th Century

This book is a huge undertaking and it was impossible this was going to please everyone. It covers more areas of horror fiction than most surveys care to or even would consider looking at, but it's under 300 pages and Nevins is just here by himself. In addition to the expected anglosphere writers and the parts cut and paste from Horror Needs No Passport (I did wonder if there were some new entries in these parts, because there were profiles I didn't remember), there's sections on horror for children and young adults, horror written by (and largely for?) African Americans, Latinx, Native Americans, Australian Aboriginals, Gays and Lesbians that mostly never had much of an audience outside their own communities.

I had some of the same problems with this as I did with Horror Needs No Passport (profiles on writers often blur together through similarities, authors who write primarily to scare seem to be considered less worthy) but this is often a more fun read.
The parts I enjoyed the most are when Nevins makes arguments and gets opinionated. I have never heard so much about the various trends going on in the ghost story and pulp eras and the claim that women ghost story authors made advancements that unfortunately weren't built on for a long time. There's some authors profiled who seem to have been a big deal in their time who I don't recall hearing about (Harriet Prescott Spofford and John Burke). I hadn't ever heard that James Herbert, Bentley Little and Benchley's Jaws novel all had a leftist outlook. Very few authors get a bad review but I was pleased the entries on Tanith Lee and SP Somtow were so positive; oddly the opinion in Horror Needs No Passport that Koji Suzuki is a bad writer saved by great ideas is not included here. Was Rosemary Timperley really more popular than Daphne Du Maurier? Timperley is fairly obscure these days and much of her short stories are impossible to find, even hard enough to find her novels.

I wish Nevins had made it clearer which authors he had himself read extensively and which he was going more on other scholars' research. We are often told a writer uses certain subjects and approaches "to terrify the reader" and I'm generally guessing this is more the intent of the authors rather than the actual effect on most of its readers? But it's not clear. How often is anything expected to terrify an experienced horror reader?

At the end he lists a lot of authors he would like to have covered but didn't have the time to. Some were big enough to surprise me (Graham Masterton). I'm surprised he didn't mention Jessica Amanda Salmonson here because he admires her as a scholar and cites her often. Nevins given Fantastic Victoriana an enormous update so maybe this will receive some expansion years down the line too?

This book could have used another proofreading, the typos are generally minor but there's a few bigger mistakes like Julian Gracq being called "Jean Gracq", Basil Copper is called "Basil Cooper" a few times.

Some further complaints and more minor quibbles.
- Brian Eno is wrongly listed as the producer of Velvet Underground's debut album (a comparison is made about the relatively low sales of Weird Tales despite its enormous influence to what Eno said about Velvet Undergound's debut).
- Hugh B Cave's comeback is not mentioned, only his pulp era.
- Marion Zimmer Bradley is mentioned in the context of 40s ghost stories. Bradley did start publishing in the late 40s but I doubt this is who Nevins meant.
- Datlow's part of Year's Best Fantasy & Horror is mentioned but I thought it was worth mentioning how many editors came before in this type of anthology.
- I was pleased to see the section on 60s/70s paperback era gothic romances but it seems to only scratch the surface, given the enormous number of book covers I've seen from this particular era.
- The RPG section doesn't mention Worlds Of Darkness.
- Some novels are included for sheer misery and I kept expecting to see Samuel Delany's Hogg but it wasn't there.
- I wanted some elaboration on why the 80s were a golden age and why the 90s were a slump. Is this purely about sales? Nevins says (noting a rare agreement with Joshi) that the slump allowed more artistic writers to cater to a more sophisticated readership. But couldn't this still have happened within the genre if sales had been better?
- I would have liked much more opinions rather than the encyclopedia approach it takes most of the time.

Despite all this, it's a very good book, not as vital as Horror Needs No Passport but still an achievement.

3/4 of the way through a book that was recommended by both James Morrison and ledge and it is not disappointing. Can’t wait to see what will happen after the dust storm ends.

― We Jam von Economo (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 23 January 2020 01:17 (one year ago) link

So far seems to be shaping up to be an instant ILB sf classic, a worthy successor to Inverted World.

― We Jam von Economo (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 23 January 2020 01:23 (one year ago) link

Which?

― change display name (Jordan), Thursday, 23 January 2020 01:24 (one year ago) link

Theory of Bastards, by Audrey Schulman.

― We Jam von Economo (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 23 January 2020 01:29 (one year ago) link

So, this was one of the last books I bought in-person pre-pandemic, and I've just now gotten around to reading it. I'm halfway through, and I'm loving it so far!

(Also in a truly bizarre coincidence, I started reading it the day after my mom called to tell me about a Genius-grant-recipient former colleague and friend of hers, whom I met once many years ago, being written up in the New York Times for her work on endometriosis!)

> a worthy successor to Inverted World.

IW is currently 99p on kindle in the uk

Cool. Maybe the handful of stragglers here who haven’t read it can catch up. Or maybe it has already been relegated to Olde ILX/Olde SF Thread and has fallen out of favor.

> the handful of stragglers here who haven’t read it

*SOBS*

i miss shakey big-upping silverbob

Totally

Jeff VanderMeer - Hummingbird Salamander

I had only read his Area X books before. Does he write all of his books like this? It spends page after page saying how significant the hummingbird and the salamander are, but it takes ages to explain why. (Supposedly because of events in the narrator's life, but this turns out to be untrue, despite her supposedly writing the book down after she has learned that it's untrue.) Most of the novel has the form of a Dan Brown quest but the clues are obviously nonsense, and lead to another clue anyway, despite it all ending up to be irrelevant in the final pages. My least favorite piece of fiction that I've read in quite a while.

frederik pohl - 'the world at the end of time'

conventional human ark-ship colonization story + 'tau zero'-ish time dilation interspersed with the ramblings of a plasma-based superbeing roughly as old as the universe.

unfortunately the main human character is an annoying prick, and it's unclear why anyone else cares about him. at one point he's reunited with someone he thought long dead, which should have been monumental but is passed over quickly because him having truly missed them isn't believable and the returning character has no depth whatsoever.

there's some awkward sex stuff, although tbf it's not as bad as that of most of his old-school sci-fi colleagues. the superbeing, despite having every other chapter devoted to it, has no role to play other than inadvertently causing the time dilation. not only does it not actually encounter our humans, it only becomes dimly aware of them in the final pages.

not v. good. only other thing i've read by him is the first heechee book; iirc that was better

Wolfbane is a ride for sure, he was at his best in collaboration with CM Kornbluth imo

I know this is very much scraping the bottom of the barrel, but: I have a lot of affection for the Warhammer and (to a lesser degree) Warhammer 40k universes. Anyone know of any novelizations or audio dramas set in those worlds that are good?

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.

Yall know Fitz-James O'Brien? NYC writer, liked to party, though volunteered and died for Union cause in US Civil War, maybe not having reached literary maturity, or maybe this was as far as he would have gotten anyway: What Was It? And Others, with story in title being my first encounter, like it was for this reviewer---both of us came across it in Damon Knight's A Century of Science Fiction(1963)---I was a child, which no doubt helped, as usual. Haven't read all of these, but descriptions have appeal, without being too permissive:
http://suptales.blogspot.com/2025/06/what-was-it-and-others-by-fitz-james.html
fave take:

Mother of Pearl' is perhaps the strangest of the tales in this volume. It begins with a romance between two young Americans in India. They marry and have a daughter they name Pearl. The baby is narrowly saved from being eaten by a shark at one point. Then the action moves back to the USA, and Pearl's mother starts acting oddly.

feel like if you're gonna use a pen name then *use it*. not least if you choose one with multiple middle initials that mean nothing

looking at you, 'james s. a. corey', which you immediately admitted was actually written by 'daniel' and 'ty'

i mean if you think co-written books won't sell, then a) don't make up an absurd name, and b) don't admit to it right away

Pseudonyms frequently make no sense to me. I can see it when you're launching a new direction your existing fans might not like (I still find the practice disagreeable) but getting a new name because your previous books sunk seems like a bad strategy.