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

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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 :)

Heh, hadn’t known the second, don’t think.

top shelf is also where the oversized books go in certain shops

I stopped reading and writing fanfic mostly because it's now nothing more than a farm team for the YA industrial complex.

:(

TS: YASF vs. TSLF

Pretty sure that a lot of those Prometheus Award writers are not libertarians. Would be surprised if Older and Stross were libertarian. But honestly it doesn't bother me much, I really want to read Donald Kingsbury and Wil McCarthy someday

Yeah the award is for anything they class as "libertarian science fiction" not the authors themselves.

Libertarian science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction that focuses on the politics and social order implied by right-libertarian philosophies with an emphasis on individualism and private ownership of the means of production—and in some cases, no state whatsoever.

Le Guin is a nominee so I think they are, unsurprisingly, somewhat confused.

Libertarians love to co-opt anarchists.

If you'd enjoy hearing somebody gush about Barbara Hambly for an hour
https://soundcloud.com/user-733327042/dragonsbane

Some intriguing reviews here:

Mills Of Silence by Charles Wilkinson, Egaeus Press / Through A Looking Glass Darkly by Jake Fior, AliceLooking Books http://panreview.blogspot.com/2021/05/mills-of-silence-by-charles-wilkinson.html

The Death Spancel & Others by Katharine Tynan, Swan River Press / Beatific Vermin by D.P. Watt, (Keynote Edition VII) Egaeus Press / Glamour Ghoul – The Passions And Pain Of The Real Vampira, Maila Nurmi, by Sandra Niemi, Feral House http://panreview.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-death-spancel-others-by-katharine.html

Double Heart by Marcel Schwob, translated by Brian Stableford, Snuggly Books / Circles Of Dread by Jean Ray, translated by Scott Nicolay, Wakefield Press http://panreview.blogspot.com/2021/02/double-heart-by-marcel-schwob.html

The Ballet Of Dr. Caligari & Madder Mysteries by Reggie Oliver, Tartarus Press / Six Ghost Stories by Montague Summers (with an Introduction by Daniel Corrick), Snuggly Books
http://panreview.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-ballet-of-dr-caligari-madder.html

Be sure to scroll all the way down to the bottom of each page to get the brief mentions of more books.

Speaking of that "Through The Looking Glass Darkly," recently on Alice In Wonderland:
https://4columns.org/sinker-mark/alice-curiouser-and-curiouser
covers looking glass also (which as a child i preferred, perhaps bcz i am a massive NERD)

― mark s, Thursday, June 17, 2021 9:36 AM

And much discussion ensued, incl. of Alice on TV and film, and a link to another Mark piece on same in Sight And Sound (also pix)

Horace Walpole - The Castle Of Otranto

I had mainly heard this referred to as a dull piece of homework for horror fans, literary historical context. But was really surprised to find it's quite fun, brisk, and the writing is often really beautiful (I seem to be a minority on this one). An audio version with the right actors could be great.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about how to take the drama, is it all really comedy? One of my least favorite aspects was the absurd outpourings about family duties, morals and honor but they're taken to such an extreme that it must be intentionally absurd how forgiving and unquestioningly loyal so many of the characters are to Manfred. And what one of the characters says when they are stabbed to death.

I am a little sad that Walpole is more interested in action than atmosphere and that the imagery of the giant knight wasn't exploited more but there's plenty of other gothic castle books going for atmosphere and Castlevania taken the giant knight.

This really isn't a chore, it has more energy than most horror stories today.

Mills Of Silence by Charles Wilkinson, Egaeus Press

― dow, Sunday, June 27, 2021 10:44 PM

Got that one recently in the mail.

Also got Terry Dowling's 3 volume Complete Rynosseros in the mail today and it looks fantastic.

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22543858/isabel-fall-attack-helicopter

I do wish this essay held certain people’s feet to the fire—I feel like some folks have gotten off super-easy re: this nightmare and that frustrates the hell out of me. But I am glad to hear Isabel’s own words.

— Carmen Maria Machado 👻 (@carmenmmachado) June 30, 2021

Meaning Jemisin and Yang and probably others who talk a good deal about bullying and gatekeeping yet act the very same way

That's an upsetting read. Curious about this distinction between paranoid and reparative readings; just from the description in the article they seem to me kind of two sides of the same coin of wanting fiction to be socially empowering on some level, just with a glass half empty/glass half full perspective change?

yeah i did not know about that whole affair and it's damn dispiriting

i changed phones a couple of months ago and still haven't reinstalled twitter on my new one and probably never will tbh

The ludicrous thing about that whole shitshow was that the story was printed in Clarkesworld, which is one of (if not THE) most respected short fiction publishers in the SF world. The idea that Neil Clarke would have been taken in by some bad actor is nonsensical, and anyone who convinced themselves it was the case (and then felt the need to pontificate about it on Twitter) needs to take a long hard look at themselves. Not that I'd actually say this on Twitter itself, as the place is a haven for bullies and careerists and who needs to stick their head above that particular parapet?

The other ludicrous thing about it is the very idea that a transphobic crypto-fascist would choose to express their transphobia through a complex, challenging SF short story. Right-wing memes are one-liners for a reason.

This is all terribly sad to read about. That poor woman.

I think it was "rumoured" to be a Sad/Rabid Puppy type. Then again none of those people can write for toffee, so it was probably one of those rumours that generates itself organically during histrionic tweetstorms.

Some apologies are coming in but so far they've been bad

https://t.co/B4mWRiA74u pic.twitter.com/ljtmO6Il1t

— Tweet Y'Self Fitter (@WokeSexPest) July 1, 2021

But I'm glad more people are taking a stand about this and against the idea that writers are responsible for the worst reactions readers can have.

I think this is possibly of more consequence than any of the puppygate stuff because there's surely going to be a lot more discomfort and writers looking askance at each other at conventions.