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

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?

I think Pohl was a good guy, a nice person, based on what I've read and meeting him once, as well as being a good editor but yeah, his best work was Gateway and his stuff with CM Kornbluth. Shakey had some ability to slog through some of other things I didn't have the patience for.

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.