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

A corollary of Clarke's famous law is that any SF novel featuring sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magical realism. That certainly applies to Hannu Rajaniemi's The Quantum Thief, not that it wasn't enjoyable. If I have any gripes it's that the number of terms and concepts that are introduced but not explained till the third or fourth time they're used, and the structure of parallel narrators with flashback interludes, means that it's only every going to make complete sense, if at all, on a re-read. I'll probably never do that, but I will read the sequels.

giving starfish by peter watts a try. ok so far. any thoughts on his stuff?

i read that hannu rajaniemi series last winter -- about all i can remember is that i liked it but was not convinced that it actually made sense. so, cosign

feel like peter watts has been discussed, perhaps on previous threads? among the hardest of scifis, iirc. i've only read blindsight, which was weird and good but had one kind of outlandish plot point that i don't think was strictly necessary

Yeah, people loved Blindsight, which I never could quite get into.

Don’t know if I should have added /pvmic to that, figured mookie would if need be.

Also started and couldn't get into Blindsight

Tried another one or two as well, but I couldn’t quite get into his style.

The Freeze-Frame Revolution

among the hardest of scifis, iirc plus vampires

Yes, exactly

yeah, that was the outlandishness

William Beckford - Vathek

Like Walpole's Otranto, this is nothing like what I expected and it sits even more oddly as a foundational gothic novel. It's wild and comedic more often than gloomy. One of the main characters is kicked around like a soccer ball by a crowd of people at one point, Vathek can kill people with an angry stare, he and his mother Carathis drive people to death and misery everywhere they go.

The style is odd, most of the time everything is moving so quickly across different locations that you rarely get a clear image of any place and it has the odd effect of everything seeming to blend together, places that are miles away somehow almost overlap. I was a little disappointed that we didn't get clearer and richer visions of all the extravagant places, but it is at its best when it refuses to settle anywhere for long.

Although the punishment in hell is one of the best parts of the book, the comeuppance seemed to me like a cop-out or compromise, I think Vathek and Carathis should have kept destroying everything around them, undaunted by hell. Beckford didn't use his own name on the first publication but I wonder if this was some case of ass covering?

I can't say exactly what else gave me problems (I went in knowing this is really racist, Beckford inherited his father's slave plantation), maybe the slower parts, maybe the travelling back and forth gets tiring, maybe it needed a bit more variety. There's a lot of parts I glazed over and just wouldn't sink in. I would have liked more of Carathis's formidable camel.

I read this in preparation for reading Clark Ashton Smith's sequel and it's clear how big an influence Vathek was on him, although there's some huge differences in style.

Definitely worth reading at least once for the chaos, extravagance and silliness.

_among the hardest of scifis, iirc_ plus vampires

finished the peter watts and did not like it. he seems like a creep.

Why?

the book seems to revel to an unnecessary degree in repulsive characters (pedophiles, misogynists, etc.). felt like tarantino without a sense of humour at times.

the best bits reminded me of annihalation, and the premise was great

That's odd because he's really funny in interviews

Oh hi, I created this thread for centralized convenience:
COUNTERPART: Alternate History w/ Creepy Cold War Vibe

blackfish city, sam j. miller: cool vibe and some nice images but doesn't really hold together and a lot of things are glossed over. (ah, nanites.) overall kind of meh, imo

author is a community organizer in NYC and fucking *hates* landlords, though -- i will definitely give him that

lol i just saw a book referred to as cli-fi

(i am probably years late on this but still)

Hate that term even more than hopepunk

This year's purchases so far

Albert Power - Azerbaijan Tales
Ilana C Meyer - Last Song Before Night
Brian Stableford - The Blind Worm
Gretchen Felker-Martin - Ego Homini Lupus
James Worrad - The Scalpel
Jennifer Giesbrecht - The Monster of Elendhaven
Rjurik Davidson - Unwrapped Sky
Cassandra Khaw - Hammers On Bone
Yeatts & Phillips (ed) - Nasty: Fetish Fights Back (mostly SFF authors)
Seth Dickinson - The Traitor
Susann Cokal - Mermaid Moon
SP Somtow - Starship & Haiku
SP Somtow - Jasmine Nights
Jeffrey E Barlough - Dark Sleeper
PC Hodgell - The Godstalker Chronicles
Ricardo Pinto - The Masters
Lianyu Tan - Captive In The Underworld
Sterling E Lanier - Hiero Desteen
Fitzpatrick (ed) -Salacious Tales
Lilith Lorraine - Time Grows Thin
Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Return Of The Sorceress
Richard Grant - Saraband Of Lost Time
Bullington & Tanzer (ed) - Swords V Cthulhu

rabbits, terry miles: there is a vast conspiracy underlying reality, if you can believe it. it takes the form of a game in which one follows discrepancies -- suddenly everyone is calling sandy kaufax the yankees' greatest-ever pitcher, but you're pretty sure he actually played for the dodgers? -- and clues toward some never-quite-defined goal. but now the game -- and maybe reality? -- is falling apart!

this was silly and didn't really make sense and no story of this sort can possibly end adequately, but i enjoyed it as a summer beach thriller type of thing. fast-paced and decently written on a sentence level for a first-timer

not unlike ian banks' the business -- another 'vast conspiracy' novel -- this book likes to namedrop musical artists/songs. neither author is anywhere near as cool as he'd like to think, but those bits were at least better deployed here than in 'the business', which sucked

Did you ever read the Lewis Shiner novel about great unfinished rock albums? Also not as cool as it wanted to be but memorable

hmm, i will check it out. thanks!

surely we need a novel in which the plot is presaged by fall lyrics

blackfish city, sam j. miller

― mookieproof, Sunday, August 1, 2021 10:56 PM

I was interested because someone said it has really cool animal stuff. Somebody riding a dolphin or polar bear or something?

surely we need a novel in which the plot is presaged by fall lyrics

An archive of an acclaimed radio show
https://archive.org/details/MindWebs_201410/026Test-TheodoreThomas_and_theNineBillionNamesOfGod-ArthurC.Clarke.wav

Ooh, Best Of Greg Egan is on there now, don't have to bother with the expensive hardcover edition now
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SF_Masterworks#Softcover_editions_(2010%E2%80%93present)

The current Dunsany, I knew he was a filmmaker but all the rest is new to me
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/07/people-think-youre-an-idiot-death-metal-irish-baron-rewilds-his-estate

I read that but didn't make the connection with Lord Dunsany till you posted it here - perhaps because sensibly they call him Plunkett not Dunsany.

This is quite ranty, I was thinking recently how some publishers are putting far too much priority into debut authors. Depressing talk about the situation of foreign writers over the decades. Tidhar can make sweeping statements sometimes but it's kind of refreshing to hear writers talk this way. He says Ekaterina Sedia gave up writing from frustration with the industry, aside from an essay a few years ago I think her last fiction was 2016
https://jonathanstrahan.podbean.com/e/episode-556-lavie-tidhar-and-a-world-of-science-fiction/

interesting episode! thanks.

http://www.newconpress.co.uk/info/books.asp?offers=yes

Clearance sale

Pat Cadigan
@Cadigan
For the record: The forthcoming novelisation of William Gibson’s unproduced Aliens 3 film script is based on a different version of his script than the graphic novel from Dark Horse. The novelisation isn’t just the graphic novel w/o the graphics. So you should own both ;-)

And probably everything else by Pat Cadigan---whose writing is almost always much better than Gibson's usual, in my experience.

(I'm trying not to outright say that she left him in the dust long ago, but that's probably accurate.)

Just bought 'tea from an empty cup'.

Hugh B Cave - Bitter/Sweet

A small pamphlet of two stories. One is about a therapist who records people's dreams and watches them, it had a decent enough setup but didn't do much with it.
The other is about the writers of The Gospels teaming up with the ghosts of canonical writers to stop crude DJs, heavy metal bands and horror writers from writing and promoting leering stories and songs about raping and killing. They assure each other that this isn't censorship and even say that anyone who persists in trying to write this kind of thing will live in a special quarantine together and the canonical writers are all very smug about what they're doing. Why is Cave so sure that Stevenson, the Brontes and Homer would approve of all this?
Makes me wonder if Cave felt guilty about writing those nasty women-in-peril pulp stories, they weren't great but they were better than this.

In the very unlikely chance this is the first thing you read by Cave, don't write him off, he written cool vampire stories like "Murgunstrumm" and "Stragella". I've got a few more books by him and I hope they aren't like Bitter/Sweet.

Mark Valentine:
The Twelve Maidens by Stewart Farrar (1974) is a very mid-Seventies cauldron of Cold War technology, ESP, sociology, black magic and white magic, experimental science and standing stones, secret radar and satanic rituals, whirring aerials and wild moors: a seething potion of Wyndham and Wheatley.
It now has the added pleasure of being very much of its long-haired, flared-trousered, large-collared time, a genuine creation of the period both celebrated and mildly parodied by the Ghost Box record label, The Haunted Generation blog and the fields of folk horror and hauntology...http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-twelve-maidens-stewart-farrar.html

Started last night on the 2020 novel Heap by Sean Adams, about transient laborers digging for salvage in the rubble of a collapsed vertical city. So far (first ~25 pages) it's a bit light on the world-building, but interesting enough when I can suspend my disbelief. There's an unexpected contemporary emotional resonance, too, in the way that the protagonist has regular but distant contact with his brother, a radio DJ who magically survived the collapse and continues to broadcast while trapped somewhere amid the ruins.

Did not get on with Tea from an Empty Cup. Maybe cyberpunk just ain't my thing, but she seemed to put an awful lot of effort into creating a world that was barely comprehensible to the protagonists or the reader. And a VR where you can do anything and be anything but most people choose to spend their time in a gritty and violent post apocalyptic nyc seems rather poor. As for the plot, in the whodunnit bit the cop makes literally no progress for 7/8 of the book then suddenly gets the answer handed to her on a plate; the other plot strand was incomprehensible.

solid thread

A TIMELINE OF THE [fantasy world]
- The Founding
- war
- war
- war
- something happened with magic?
- war
- The Event (you know the one)
- post-Event war

— Monkey's Paw Games (@monkeyspawgames) August 26, 2021

Thee littlest orphan in Merde Galaxy becomes Emperor Ov 20 Universes in First Decalogue, and then---

i have pretty much given up on alastair reynolds but the new one is back to the Revelation Space universe of his first few novels and i'm tempted. but the quandary is do i buy a physical copy or a digital copy? this, after 10 years, would be my first full-price ebook purchase and I'm a bit wary of spending money on bytes but i do prefer reading on the kobo.

I'll probably leave it a couple of months, see if it gets discounted.

currently just started the 3rd of the Three Body Problem books

Has anyone here read Brightness Falls From the Air by James Tiptree Jr. and did they think the 'kid porn' elements were sketchy to say the least? Doesn't seem to be any discussion/acknowledgement in any reviews I can find. I haven't finished it yet so maybe there'll be some grand accounting at the end.

Ringworld? worth reading (99p in kindle daily deal today. but what's with that shovelware cover?)

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51d7TuzknhL.jpg

read 'piranesi' in one night, as suggested by user caek, and it was good! the feel of it reminded me of 'the invention of morel'.

that said, there was no good explanation for why people lost their memories in said situation. and i'm not sure whether the final chapter added or subtracted from the story

also been reading some tiptree short stories and christ they are scathing -- along the lines of 'woman on the edge of time' and then some. can't even imagine that reviewer who swore tiptree was a big dick-swinging man

(unless he thought tiptree was poul anderson because lol)