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

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.

Pohl is a strange one - when he's on his game - Gateway, Man Plus, some of the short stories like 'Tunnel under the world' and 'The Midas plague' - he's definitely top tier, and certainly a more pleasing stylist than someone like Asimov. But there are long stretches in his career where he writes almost nothing of note, ie most of the sixties and pretty much everything after Jem in 1979 (he wrote close to twenty novels from 1980 until his death, but none of them seem to be very highly regarded). I guess like so many SF authors he wrote too much, too carelessly.

Was going to mention "The Tunnel Under the World," which is indeed classic. Shakey stanned for Man Plus iirc.

Daniel - I haven't read any of them but I've heard good things about Guy Haley, Kim Newman, Dan Abnett and Stableford (as Brian Craig) in the Warhammer universe.

Still making my way through Clark Ashton Smith. After a few science fiction stories that seemed half-hearted he really indulges in Maze Of The Enchanter and a sequel to Vathek. It wasn't unusual for him to get rejections like "too sophisticated for our readers". Admittedly you do need a very good dictionary handy. The ending to Maze was a letdown for me but I liked it otherwise. Might read Vathek before this sequel.

Some people romanticize the pulps but it seems like a really crap time to have been writing, but until internet times it seems like there was only room for a few things unless you were content with the small press magazines that started in the 70s.

Room for a few things = a narrow selection genres and approaches.

Oh cool, didn't know Kim Newman wrote for them!

Some people romanticize the pulps but it seems like a really crap time to have been writing

This is surely part of the romance, as with comics, classic Hollywood studio system, 60's Pop, etc.? Artists maudits cranking out work at an insane pace, viewing it as a job not a calling (but deep down they know it's a calling!), ignored by the world at large. Sucks to have actually lived through it but for fans it gives the era extra pathos.

I think part of it is that very few people actually go back and read Weird Tales issue by issue. Nevins and Joshi give the impression it was actually a really low quality magazine, but its best writers changed the world.

Newman's Warhammer omnibus
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?828433

Reading about their individual story rejections tells you a lot about the magazines.

Newman's Warhammer novels were originally published under his pseudonym, Jack Yeovil, btw

I'm quite annoyed they resold them individually after the first omnibus came out. I bought Silver Bullets assuming it was the omnibus but somehow I didn't consider how slim it is.

micaiah johnson, the space between worlds

the multiverse is real, and certain people can travel between realities -- but only to those in which their local counterparts are dead.

this was pretty grebt imo

It didn't work for me, I couldn't really warm to the protagonist or get a decent handle on her life situation - I file that on the 'it's not you it's me' shelf of criticism though. It's certainly not as bad as the violent teenage revenge fantasy of Nophek Gloss that I suffered through recently.

Hmm. I usually trust the two of you so... I hope some tiebreaker will weigh in.

Try it, you have nothing to lose but your precious minutes!

I bought them all but they'll be sitting unread for the foreseeable future, I have all the ones he did for Apex too

Still Vingeing--as I mentioned about the Realtime stories and The Witling, he likes to set two groups at each others' throats along w backstabbing and conniving, preferably with shot-down hostages from space as magical-seeming (beyond medieval tech) prizes)---in A Fire Upon The Deep, each side has a hostage, a boy and a girl, siblings.The girl has a working educational computer, for toddlers up through advanced secondary students, ideal for ignorant Aliens. The boy has a working sort of interstellar text link to a far-off, damaged, yet incoming craft with a few refugee-rescuers on board.
The Aliens, each group led by its breeder (one more benevolent or mild-mannered than the other, also that one is the breeder of the other), are seen by the offworld kids as dogpeople, in packs of packs: each dogperson character is a pack, in neurological synch, so eyes can see in all directions etc., but they can't get close to each other most of the time, or any other packs almost all the time, because of true cognitive dissonance, feedback etc.
If that seems too claustrophic, we also get why the refugee/rescuers are coming, updates as well as backstories, and all of that/this in a much wider perspective, the Zones of Thought---as sf-encyclopedia puts it, mostly paraphrasing one of the humans, as she explains it to a remixed hero-of-sorts, on the way to first bedding:

The galaxy as a whole is divided into four concentric Zones of Thought, as defined and circumscribed by the varying limitations (and liberations) of Physics: the Unthinking Depths of the galaxy's core, where even Intelligence cannot exist, are surrounded by the Slow Zone (Earth's location; see Fermi Paradox) which allows only limited AI and is generally bound by the speed restrictions of Relativity; further out, in the vast circumambiating expanses of the Beyond, AIs can be superhuman and Faster Than Light travel is easy (here flourish almost innumerable civilizations); at its remotest distance from the Unthinking Depths, the High Beyond merges into the unknowable Transcend (see Transcendence) where intelligence tends towards the godlike. The information webs which convey near-infinities of information among the myriad worlds of the venue amusingly reflect the telephone-linked computer nets of the 1980s and early 1990s (see Internet).

I found something really cool in a little free library today: The Compleat Dying Earth, Science Fiction Book Club edition, in hardcover. There's a sick poster of the Gerald Brom cover painting inside. I may have to get that framed.

Picture here: https://imgur.com/rCCMZvx

Don't recall seeing that edition before.

I got the smaller edition of Dian Hanson/Taschen's Masterpieces Of Fantast Art and it seems to be considerably abridged, I couldn't see any note of this in the product descriptions

I bought that and I don't know if it's abridged but it is surprisingly dull. Not a single unexpected selection.

finally read 'the saint of bright doors'

it is lovely and imaginative in a way completely foreign to the standard fantasy trilogy

that said i did not quite connect with it? it was somehow always a struggle to return to it. also the ending was less an ending than simply a stopping point. but any SF reader is no doubt used to that.

I bought that and I don't know if it's abridged but it is surprisingly dull. Not a single unexpected selection.

― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Friday, September 13, 2024 3:50 AM (yesterday)

I seen a longer contents listing with much more obscure artists, but probably a lot less space for them. Still missing a few of my favorites but summing up the art of all of fantasy is no easy task.

Very true. I was just a bit disappointed.

I liked this

https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/mcmahan_06_24/

If you want to see what we're missing from the larger Taschen book, look at page 486 onwards
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?836049

There's plenty of good choices in there and a bunch I don't know. Most of my top tier artists aren't there: Stephen Fabian, Mick Van Houten, Noriyoshi Ohrai, Karel Thole, Helmut Wenske, Paul Lehr and Yoshitaka Amano would have been at the top of my wishlist if I were making this; Santiago Caruso, Denis Forkas Kostromitin and the Balbusso sisters if I was allowed something newer. But I have to respect such a bold choice as prioritizing the oiled up bodybuilder side of fantasy art (Boris Vallejo, Julie Bell and Rowena Morrill, which many people find terribly cheesy and one Guardian writer said Rowena's art found in Saddam Hussein's collection was for people who were barely sentient. I think Clyde Caldwell and Larry Elmore are sort of in this category too.

I've never been into the typical body builder look but the recent body building explosion, the body building enthusiasts I know on social media, my preferring martial arts films where they show off as much skin as possible and looking back at the 90s comics I used to like has made me look at all this stuff a bit differently. And a lot of people look back at some of the cheesier fantasy artists as pretty damn good now because hardly any publishers are willing to pay good artists anymore.

We used to complain about Clyde Caldwell but he looks godly next to this
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51D9jhfifmL.jpg

and there was a recent announcement that Dungeons & Dragons was going to be using AI extensively. I've never liked many of the Dungeons & Dragons artists, but I could respect that most of them were lovingly meticulous and I wonder how many table top gaming fans would accept AI dominated games.

recently on Fantasy Novels thread, posted cover of omnibus Riddlemaster Trilogy was strikingly weak, maybe even subtypical for its time, aimed at kids, who might well have passed it by, missing out on McKillip of all authors---but Winter Rose and a wide array of fantasy and other genres/subgenres v. (pleasingly) eyecatching at my local library now, in YA and regular Fantasy & SF sections---even if cover art in itself not that hot, overall design is effective, as far as I've noticed.
Came here to say I just finished Children of The Sky, sequel to xpost Of A Fire On The Deep, and, despite eventually passing through a long. sometimes minute-by-minute, trek-slog through wilderness-boondocks, down on the space opera-planetary-romance ground, it pays off, blossoms beautifully in character and plot development.
Since it is a sequel, picking up two years after the battle on Starship Hill, then jumping a decade, but still pretty tight, I can't say too much specifically w/o spoilers, but even more than in his previous novels, all contending points of view are almost equally plausible, even sympathetic, up to a point---even the one character who is just plain bad has some insight, has too, as a manipulator, and for inst sees a righteously self-justifying young rebel leader as a born predator who hasn't yet grown into self-awareness.
Vinge's last novel, almost his last publication, and already I miss these humans and other critters.