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

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

Read the sample. Found the world/worlds/worldbuilding really intriguing. There is something about the writing style that is interesting but a little cryptic to me, can’t tell how I will feel if I pony up. The road to the New Maps of Hell is littered with unread ebook purchases. James Morrison to thread!

Just picked up a cheap paperback of Hyperion. Dear lord the sex writing.

I picked up on the recommendation of a trusted friend. Thoughts? My impression is that it’s pretty good, sex excepted, even if the author is a peak SF shithead.

Haven't listened to this one yet but I always enjoy the legacy episodes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkbPnhnWzJU

https://wizardstowerpress.com/books-2/chaz-brenchley/three-twins-at-the-crater-school/

This looks pretty cool

documentary on afro futurism on bbc4 tomorrow

Cool. The book mookie recently mentioned is relevant to that.

Reminding me: did yall see this on the Samuel Delany thread:

Delany posted yesterday (FB) about choosing clothes for a New Yorker photo shoot. Fingers crossed for a full profile.

― In my house are many Manchins (WmC), Tuesday, May 18, 2021 1:08 PM (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Hope so! They published an astute take on the work of Octavia Butler in March, guess the rest is behind paywall (I happened to see the print edition), but here's the opening: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/15/how-octavia-e-butler-reimagines-sex-and-survival

― dow, Wednesday, May 19, 2021 7:03 PM (three days ago)
The link hots it up, no prob but be it known the print is more precise:
Stranger Communities
Octavia E. Butler's vision of struggle and symbiosis
By Julian Lucas
Will have to find some more by Lucas.

Zelazny podcast was nice, (as always with the legacy episodes) it's promoting a study of the writer, this one contesting the idea that Zelazny became a hack rather than live up to his promise, although it seems the Amber series was prolonged a bit for money.

Really wish there were less novels or at least less pressure to write them but recently I've found myself reading them more often and hoping the payoff will be worth it.

on the Rolling Speculative slipstream or other trans-subgene side of things, Wormwoodia's Mark Valentine says:

Hy Brasil is an island in the Atlantic, somewhere over the horizon from Ireland, Iceland and the Azores, that has been sighted several times since the Middle Ages and has given rise to many legends. Said to have towns with towers of gold, thought to be often shrouded in mist, it has been identified with the Fortunate Isles that the Celts believed lay in the sunset regions to the West, and with the fierce, fair and free lands that Viking voyagers discovered.

It continued on nautical maps and atlases into the late 19th century, but was eventually removed, along with other islands that had once been seen and plotted but now cannot be found. This is a very beguiling subject and there are a small number of books on the theme, including Raymond Ramsay's No Longer On the Map (1972), Henry Stommel's Lost Islands: The Story of Islands That Have Vanished from Nautical Charts (1984) and Donald S Johnson's Phantom Islands of the Atlantic (1994). Who could resist such alluring titles?

Scottish author Margaret Elphinstone published one of the best modern novels with an island setting in her splendidly-imagined novel set on Hy Brasil and its smaller sister islands. In her Hy Brasil (2002), she creates a many-dimensioned version of the realm, with its mixed heritage from all the lands of the North Atlantic littoral, its obscure, half-mythic origins, its colonial pride yet independent spirit, and its modern dilemmas as a new nation.
A skillful story-teller, she brings in many relishable themes; spying, smuggling, conspiracy, a volcano, rebellion, exile, roads taken and not taken. Through the travel notes of a self-aware, but still learning, young woman, the charmingly-named Sidony Redruth, we discover the eminently convincing history, legends and culture of the island: but we are also drawn to understand the human qualities and foibles of the island characters.
More here, incl. a Hy Brasil postage stamp, and link to interview w Margaret E.:
http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2021/05/hy-brasil-margaret-elphinstone.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Wormwoodiana+%28Wormwoodiana%29

also re: missing islands is Sarah Tolmie’s The Fourth Island

(i haven't read it tho)

Starting on Le Guin's The Telling, the last of the Hainish cycle. Excellent so far. After that I'll be getting into completist territory - a couple of early novels and collections, Lavinia, the Annals of the Western Shore trilogy - anyone read that?

Lavinia is fantastic.

Good to hear, how much Aeneid knowledge is required though?

I have zero...

tau zero?

Finished The Telling, Classic Le Guin, it slipped down like a '78 amontillado. Not overly sophisticated politically perhaps, but anthropologically rich, and with the usual lasting top note of compassion.

https://ansible.uk/sfx/sfx073.html

I couldn't get into Lavinia for some reason; I tried but something about the voice/style didn't work for me. I can't remember why, though, so maybe I'll try again.

RFI: what’s the sf term for the bodily equivalent of terraforming, sort of, when some being is genetically or surgically altered to better survive in a different environment?

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bioforming

Thanks!

From the Wormwoodiana blog:
Saturday, May 29, 2021
Northern Earth

Northern Earth, edited by John Billingsley, is one of the longest-running independent journals devoted to ancient mysteries (or 'earth mysteries' as they were called in the 1970s and 80s). It is interested in 'megalthic sites, alignments, sacred landscapes, psychogeography and deep topography, folklore and tradition, esoteric traditions, strange phenomena . . .' and more.

The latest issue , no 164, celebrates the moment coming up to one hundred years ago, on June 30 1921, when the Herefordshire antiquarian Alfred Watkins had his vision of a network of ancient trackways which he called 'leys': 'a fairy chain stretched from mountain to mountain peak.'

Watkins' idea was rediscovered and revitalised in the counter-culture of the 1960s as part of an upsurge of interest in ancient sacred sites and a new curiosity about landscape and its associated folklore, in a similar spirit to that which had inspired the work of Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Mary Butts and others.

The Ley Hunter magazine was launched in April 1965 by Philip Heselton, then still a schoolboy: it was part of a Ley Hunters' Club he had launched with school-friend Jimmy Goddard. Both are still active in similar circles: Philip has researched and written widely on the origins of modern paganism, while Jimmy edits a newsletter, Touchstone.

Three former editors of The Ley Hunter have written articles for
Northern Earth 164 about their involvement – Philip Heselton and his successors, Paul Screeton and Paul Devereux. All three essays are reflective about those times but not merely nostalgic: they also discuss the development of their thinking since.

Also included is my essay 'A Landscape Detective of the 1930s'. This is a piece of literary archaeology about Donald Maxwell, a writer and artist who compiled a series of books, illustrated with his own sketches, about his wanderings looking into ancient monuments and folklore. These are highly evocative of their time, full of his engaging enthusiasm, and sometimes even redolent of John Buchan as he and his companions dash off through the countryside in search of clues to the various mysteries he is investigating.

I discovered Maxwell's work when visiting the quayside second-hand bookshop at Gloucester. There was an album-sized book in faded blue called Adventures Among Churches, perhaps an unlikely-sounding title. But I noticed it in particular because it was published by The Faith Press, who also issued Arthur Machen's Holy Grail novel The Great Return. And indeed Maxwell's book, though non-fiction, has something of the same spirit, with enticing chapter titles such as 'The Chapel of the Green Lagoons' and 'The Black Belfry of Brookland'.

Maxwell was one of the first writers outside Watkins' Herefordshire circle to take his ley theory seriously and in two of his books he introduces it and is at once off off in hot pursuit, developing his own ideas and refinements on the way. His approach is open-minded and exploratory, sharing his discoveries whether they support the theory or not, and with much fascinating incidental detail.

Northern Earth 164 (or a subscription) can be obtained direct from John Billingsley: editor[at]northernearth[dot]co[dot]uk, replacing the word in brackets with symbols.

(Mark Valentine)

I really enjoyed The Fourth Island fwiw, really nicely balanced between being genuinely heartwarming and unsettling, and structured in a way that constantly kept me a little off-balance.

Sorry to plug something here, but one of my closest friends, whom I’ve known since freshman year of high school, just had her first published novel reviewed by NYT:

Elly Bangs’s UNITY (Tachyon, 289 pp., paper, $16.95) flings us hundreds of years into a future that has weathered multiple apocalypses and is on the brink of an extinction-level war between political powers that operate from metropolises beneath the much-warmed Pacific. Danae’s been living in self-imposed underwater exile for five years — from the wrecked surface world and its dangers, but also from the vast, aggregated consciousness of which she’s a small embodied part. But as tensions between the war’s belligerents, Epak and Norpak, reach a boiling point, Danae and her lover, Naoto, decide to risk heading for the blasted, inhospitable remnants of Arizona in search of the power and absolution of her whole, multiplied self. They employ the reluctant services of a haunted ex-mercenary named Alexei to get them there — but someone is hunting Danae and the larger consciousness she represents, and will stop at nothing to get to her.

“Unity” is an astonishing debut, twisty and startling, demonstrating both the disciplined development of a long-gestated project and the raw, dynamic flashes of an author’s early work. It shows intense interest in the distance between conversation and communion, the many overlapping and opposite meanings “unity” can contain: Is unity a harmony of differences balanced together, or a pure homogeneity? How can those differences be maintained, and what happens when they’re not? The book’s core concepts aren’t so much high as deep; it takes a few pages to get oriented within the premise, world-building and points of view, but it very quickly becomes an absorbing, thrilling ride.

If anyone tells you The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell is SF, don't believe them, it's just yer standard multi generational saga (Victorian to present day) with an entirely superfluous dusting of near future tech sprinkled on towards the end.

Now reading The Fourth Island.

Agreed about The Old Drift but I still thought it was very good.

Some of the writing was lovely but I thought it was overlong and the structure was not helpful - multiple helpings of 'who the fuck are these people again' after reading a 100 page chapter about some entirely different people, and I ended up not really caring about any of them.

read UNITY by JoeStork’s friend. i enjoyed it and will totally look out for her next book but i guess i didn’t super love it

read THE KINGDOMS by natasha pulley. alternate history isn't at all my thing, but this had a little extra sauce. and while a couple plot points don't hold up to close scrutiny, i thought it was extremely well-done and -written

Not your thing? What about the other recent read? Oh wait, that was the multiverse, sorry.

the multiverse one was set in a future where anything(s) could happen, but . . . yeah sorta

https://tvline.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/3x04-remedial-chaos-theory.jpg?w=620

not books, but 3 suits currently taking about sf films on sky arts. am enjoying the clips.

The Last Day by Andrew Hunter Murray - Book club read. No Such Thing As A Fish guy does dystopian sci-fi; currently 69 pages in, which is nice, but the novel so far isn't. Very generic stuff, earth has stopped rotating around the Sun, half of the world plunged into darkness, half on fire, the UK is in what the book calls the "Goldilocks zone". Author makes it obvious the nationalistic govt is Bad and of course Write What You Know and all that, but I still get a whiff of British exceptionalism from this. Also kinda weird to read about a fictional catastrophe set in the v near future that negates the current one? Aside from that, soldiers and scientists and evil government conspiracies that remind me too much of every other fucking video game. To be fair maybe book clubs aren't for me, having a book that I have to read does make me ornery.

That's basically why I quit my last (and only) book club.

I was in one book club for a long time- we only read one book! - which was a lot of fun since we read it aloud, page by page. We read another book the same way when we finished that one then tried a third and ended it. I joined another, regular book club at some point, but that I didn't like. It seemed like a lot of people didn't show up and them that did hadn't necessarily read the book.

I joined more to make new friends than for the book discussion itself. It's good for that but yeah my already endless reading list getting interrupted by books that some other person thought looked good is a nuisance.

Yeah, no worries. I just touched base with friends from my book group on Wednesday since that was a significant day in the book week we were reading.

Provenance by Ann Leckie. Every time I read recent mainstream SF now I think about caek's post decrying all of it as 'adequate YA fiction'. I like Ann Leckie and her strain of social/political SF, it mostly works, it's not as juvenile as some other things I've read. But it's hard to pin down exactly where it might lie along a line from kids books to serious SF for serious people. It's definitely not up there with Le Guin (whose maturity shines though even in her overtly YA stuff) or Lem or Butler - but is it any worse than Iain M Banks? Or even Clarke or Asimov? I'm not sure there's anything particularly grown-up about Rendezvous with Rama or the Foundation series (I know there's little love lost here for the latter anyway).

No idea if it's "better" than Iain M. Banks but I do think the latter cannot possibly be described as YA, think any young adult would feel overwhelmed and/or bored p soon reading him.

'The latter' Being banks? Asimov? I'm sure plenty of young adults do and have read both of those.

Banks. I dunno man I read Matter and that shit was hella complex.

That's the one that in my memory could most fairly be described as a 'romp'! I daresay that does it a huge disservice and it's as complex as you say, I should - will - reread it. Still I'd hazard that there's plenty for the young 'uns, bless 'em, to appreciate and enjoy.

Where would you say that LOTR fits on the spectrum?

> a 'romp'!

Phlebus is very much an action movie imo (the others are better)

(currently rereading them all at a rate of about 1 a year, will get around to Matter in about 2027)

Matter was a finalist for the 2009 Prometheus Award.

Oh look I just found a list of books to not read:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_Award

Where would you say that LOTR fits on the spectrum?

I think LOTR is complex in way that teen boys specifically are very happy to engage with - long lists and chronologies - while Matter struck me as complex more from a philosophical, political angle (also re sexual politics but ver kids are probably all in for that).

It's a can of worms, not least because Young Adult me was reading all sorts of stuff that's not YA, but I guess I kinda associate the term with a certain simplicity, stronger focus on storytelling, world building as decoration rather than philosophical treatise?

It is a can of worms and one perhaps I'm not qualified to open since I try in general to avoid anything overtly YA, or anything recent anyway.

I can barely read these days so not sure if I should comment, but I am allergic to the kind of generic writing style implied by YA. I mean of course plenty of other genre fiction, including the Greatest Genre of All, Top Shelf Literary Fiction, has this problem but YA is a particular marker.

Would that be definition 1 or 2 here? https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/top-shelf :)