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

Oh you.

I've been trying to pin it down. The narrator has a chronic pain condition which is managed with a sort of exoskeleton and advanced neurological tinkering, it's very much a defining feature of her personality and she goes on about it endlessly. Complaining about this might make me sound like an arsehole but it's somewhat hard to take seriously when the rest of the story is so far fetched. She's very much concerned with doing the right thing, and whether other people are doing or not doing the right thing, and she's sort of hyper aware of but averse to fixing some personality issues ("yes I don't trust people or let them get close, but hey that's me" (not an actual quote)). The combination of all these things just seems exhausting.

Found quite a few appealing mentions of stories in Hartwell's Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder, but only a couple in his also ace xpost The Science Fiction Century:

Recent time travel story I enjoyed was "The King and The Dollmaker" by Wolfgang Jeschke, which can be found in David G. Hartwell's Science Fiction Century, a gaslight melodrama featuring secretive scientists, a regal succession struggle and eighteenth century automata. Rave reviews from Franz Rottensteiner. Not much of the guy's stuff is translated into English, may check out The Cusanus Game.

― Erdős Number 9 Dream (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, August 2, 2014 8:31 AM

This morning before breakfast (trying to beat the heat, hit the library early), I read Tiptree's "Beam Me Up," killer opener of Hartwell's The Science Fiction Century You'll guess the basic plot from the title, and it's early, even has an old-timey tacked-on ending, but the damage is already done: nobody but JTJR, leaving her calling card and a dark buzz for the rest of this glorious suburban summer day, like many days in the story.

― dow, Friday, August 22, 2014 1:51 PM

Those are from
rolling fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction &c. thread

Which begat ThReads Must Roll: the new, improved rolling fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction &c. thread

Recently got Grossman's anthology Sense Of Wonder and it is one of the biggest heaviest books I own, so I'm surprised I never see it mentioned among landmark anthologies. It's quite expensive but difficult to say there isn't enough bang for buck. Type is a little small so I may read all the stories I can from other books.

It has some essays in there and I was quite fascinated by Betsy Wollheim writing about her dad Donald (who I've always found intriguing). She talks about how difficult he was but still lovable and that many authors taken their frustrations with him out on her and then acted as if nothing was wrong when they met him afterwards.
She said that CJ Cherryh was like a second daughter to him and that they spent a long time talking in the office together. How common was that for a publisher to spend that amount of time with an author? (admittedly one of the DAW star authors)

That book is good, but I still haven’t finished it;) I have an ecopy and there used to be something wrong with the font, think it’s been fixed. I recall Frederik Pohl giving it a very positive review.

the kindle edition has a "Print length" of "5645 pages" (probably reflecting the type size, given the paperback is about 1000pp)

list of contents here: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?354562

I love the extra essays in that book like the one you mentioned. I once started a thread and a little while later found an essay in that book on exactly the same time. Also just looked at that Betsy Wollheim essay and holy smokes at

Betsy Wollheim is the President and Publisher of DAW Books. She lives with her husband, musician Peter Stampfel, and their family in New York City.

Leigh Ronald Grossman. Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (Kindle Locations 60080-60081). Wildside Press LLC. Kindle Edition.

Oh yeah. One of my fave xgau features ever takes us to their loft life in '99--the most thread-relevant passage:

Peter Stampfel and Betsy Wollheim got their corner loft in Soho because Betsy's dad needed a place to store his books.

now a coop but originally a bargain rental. Its $10,000 key money was advanced by Wollheim père with an eye to his science fiction library, the third largest in the world, as well as the cartons of discontinued titles that constituted his backlist. Donald A. Wollheim was the first person to edit a collection designated "Science-Fiction"--the hyphenated cover is framed on their wall. He conceived Ace Books, home of Burroughs's Junkie and Philip K. Dick and mountains of crap, including the gothics that preceded romances--he is credited with discovering that a light in one window of the house on the cover gooses sales. Eventually he founded his own company, DAW, which his daughter took over in 1985. A division of Penguin these days, DAW puts out 40 new fantasy and science fiction titles and 40 reissues a year. Peter works there full-time as an associate editor, doing first readings and correspondence. Betsy, the president, goes to the office three days; often she edits manuscripts at home till five in the morning.

speaking of xgau, and threads of wonder, 'the only ones' by his wife carola dibbell is pretty pretty good and . . . somewhat more immediately relevant in the seven years since she wrote it

I’ve been meaning to read that for …seven years I guess? Also wondering what her nephew is up to.

Julian's still around, in his way(s). I corresponded with him a little bit, long ago (snail mail, even). Nice guy.
he's around Twitter and has an updated (to 2010 or so) self-named site.

That is the second unexpected stampfel connection i have learned in the past week (the other one: he worked at the Brill Building at the desk next to Roger McGuinn)

I saw something about Roger McGuinn being in the Brill Building- working for Bobby Darin, I think - but nothing about Stampfel.

Welp, speaking of Donald A. Wollheim, I fairly recently read his (and Arthur W. Saha's) The 1981 Annual World's Best SF (a DAW hardback! Maybe because Book Club Edition, and sturdy, with no page age, cover art drolly indifferent)
Here's the Big Four, the ones that made the most lasting impression, from several months ago:

John Varley, "Beatnik Bayou": that's where the kids go to hang out, in this little shack they've built, to play like beatniks or whatever--but one day their reverie is interrupted by a crazy lady, who is totally stressed out about her toddler's life being ruined by being passed over for a chance at the right schooling---and she zeros in on Trigger, a 7-year-old girl, the gang's leader/group's teacher, who until recently was a thirtysomething man, currently going back to roots and trying to rekindle romance with narrator, who is 13 and was a girl (boy before that). Trigger, under duress, admits to having a Peter Pan problem, but that's not why in trouble.
It's because of way group dealt with this lady, who brings charges, and each member is interviewed and judged by a very empathetic entity, one-on-one and simultaneously, though penalties for assault cases, which this is, can go all the way to death.
So this sublunar, post-Earth, All-Ages Sex Change On Demand, Capital Punishment Nanny State seems like it might be based on the Singapore of that era, which was getting publicity for surveillance cameras (one major thing lacking here!) resulting in penalties for not flushing urinals, jaywalking---SilverBob, taking over as Asimov's Mag resident gas giant opinionator after Isaac left our system, approved the widely publicized caning of an American teen, visiting along with his family, for graffiti.
The whole thing seems almost a little flat, under glass, but that's how they live, and I would still like to read some more of Varley's stories about this society, whenever I happen to come across them.
The narrator's mom, however, lives a very different kind of life, apparently: she's a working single parent, who got her kid into a good program, and supports a series of aspiring artists, live-in lovers, who leave, either becoming successful enough to go on to the next rung lady, or resenting her stability as a comment/insidious influence on their rebellious artistry's lack of success (what can rebellious artistry consist of, in such a society?) Would like to know more about this kind of thing.

My state legislator might find Sharon Webb's "Variation on a Theme From Beethoven" just as disturbing, in a YA way: Earth is a big ol' arts summer camp, where you go, if chosen, to choose whether to be a true artist, thus staying with your lifespan, or to find insight through self-disillusionment, and give up, go back, to be just another immortal, an artsy one, of course, if you care to---and what is life anyway, if it never ends? And what is life, anyway? This was a little awkward at first, but developed pretty well. Sharon Webb, like Varley, was popular then, still new to me.

Howard Waldrop's "Ugly Chickens" is one of the two I read previously: this was in Universe 10, Terry Carr's good old series. The scene that stayed with me since the 80s is the dodo doing its own kind of dance in the court of the king, several centuries ago: from the reverie of the narrator, a grad student who's gotten word of dodos surviving into the 80s, and in America! He's hot on the trail, and happily dispensing dodo knowledge, like Ishmael reveling in his Moby Dick discoveries, of whales in books, down through the ages. Otherwise, this is nobody-but-Howard. His stories, the ones I happened to come across, were always good, except one in Omni that ended up being too sentimental about flying saucers.

George RR Martin's "Nightflyers' is a novella, the longest yard by far, and earns it. An intriguing, quest-worthy scientific expedition sets off on a strange ship, with a strange captain, and it's mystery-horror in space, gore and zombies floating through more than Special EFX, as the story develops via the dynamics of a group whose members I can actually keep straight, they have that much personality, even when dead/"dead."

Michael G. Coney's "The Summer Sweet, The Winter Wild" is the other re-read, first encountered recently in Le Guin and Virginia Kidd's 1980 Interfaces (which is good-to-great, except for one Avram Davidson stinker). It's narrated by the group consciousness of an antelope herd, which finds itself in a post-apocalyptic season of no bearable pain, when the wolves, who already seemed neurotic, are starving because they can't bear to thin the herd, which now includes a lot of losers, who aren't heard from in this well-paced and otherwise well-shaded tale of anxiety: so is this truly a parable of needed herd purity, or meta, a comment on that kind of purist mentality? I take it as the latter, but nice read either way, lyrical and sneaky.

I don't recall any particular objection to the other selections (by Marion Zimmer Bradley, Spinrad, Lee Killough, Lisa Tuttlea few others), but don't recall anything else about them either.

the longest *yarn* by far

Use to love Varley, but ultimately felt his was too glib, like his hero Heinlein, then read some stuff again in recent years and sort of liked it. Think Disch detested him or at least one of his big stories. Believe "Beatnik Bayou" is based on Austin's Hippie Hollow, the title at least.

Martin Skidmore used to stan for Michael G. Coney. I read the first few chapters of one of the novels he recommended, liked it, but never got around to going further/pvmic.

I read Robert Sheckley's story 'Paradise II'. Quite chilling, really. Sheckley had a remarkable and clear imagination.

Also Sheckley's story 'The Accountant': a joke, but seems to anticipate Harry Potter by decades.

Sheckley knew what he was doing. Think he lost a lot of years due to substance abuse but I really liked that last Alternative Detective novel which takes place on Ibiza, Soma Blues, maybe one of the last things he wrote.

It actually takes place in a druggy milieu which with he has apparently pretty familiar. Really good use of his talents, no joke.

James Redd: in truth I haven't yet read any of his novels, though I own a few. I greatly admire his stories. Do other SF readers here?

I've read one Sheckley novel, Journey Beyond Tomorrow. It's a pretty entertaining 'comic odyssey' novel, not unlike very early Vonnegut. The only thing I really remember about it now is that at one point the main character successfully campaigns to abolish metal so that no more weapons can be manufactured. Society promptly collapses.

A lot of his stories seem to have the theme 'what if people were unutterably stupid'. Which was perhaps accidentally prescient.

Think perhaps you are confusing him with C.M. Kornbluth.

Think the one Ward Fowler mentions is supposed to be the best and also has an alternate title like Journey of Joenes, but I haven’t read it yet. Options is supposed to be the most out there. Ones I’ve read recently and enjoyed were Mindswap and Dramocles, also remember liking Crompton Divided.

I'm impressed, James Redd, by your reading of Sheckley.

Last night I read his short story 'All the things you are', in which almost everything about human beings proves unfortunately toxic to a friendly humanoid species. The space explorers have a translator which is like a lemur and sleeps 20 hours a day.

I really should, at last, read THE SPACE MERCHANTS (as Kornbluth was mentioned).

The Space Merchants still stands up, in a smartarse 1950s way. I wrote this quote down when I read it a few years ago, as it seemed to sum up the spirit of the whole novel:

"It was an appeal to reason, and they're always dangerous. You can't trust reason. We threw it out of the ad profession long ago and have never missed it."

Sneering at the stupid definitely a big theme in 1905s SF by Bester, Kornbluth, Pohl, Sheckley et al. The stupid = people who don't read science fiction, of course.

BTW, I read the Sheckley novel as part of my working through of this 100 Best list by David Pringle, which I still find to be a useful guide and reference point:

https://www.worldswithoutend.com/lists_pringle_sf.asp

Sneering at the stupid definitely a big theme in 1905s SF by Bester, Kornbluth, Pohl, Sheckley et al. The stupid = people who don't read science fiction, of course.

― Ward Fowler, Thursday, March 31, 2022 10:26 AM

I seen some people saying Scalzi's newest book has sneering at people who don't get nerd references. Makes it sound like it was written for Big Bang Theory fans.

Mark Valentine on a rare book:

Whether the eight poets continued to meet or ever corresponded after their Cambridge days, we do not know. Their work here does at least suggest a distinct interest among this coterie of Cambridge students in 1936 in the uncanny, macabre, pagan and mystical.

Quiller-Couch, in avuncular fashion, detects ‘the brooding so natural and constant to youth’. But we may also wonder about the lingering influence at Cambridge of M R James and his followers. And it is also possible that the mood of the poems stems from the same interwar occult milieu that led to what I have called the Rise of the Metaphysical Thriller. In this somewhat forlorn and faded relic of visionary youth, at least, an interlude of traffic with the dark fantastic is preserved.

I didn't know this is getting a sequel
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/710517/the-future-is-female-volume-two-the-1970s-more-classic-science-fiction-storie-s-by-women-by-lisa-yaszek-editor/

Looks good - how is the first one? I'm not crazy about that period but maybe that's partially because of the libertarian patriarchal bent of most of the stories I've read!

that period = 20s - 60s.

Hard not to include seminal stories like 'When it Changed', 'The Day Before the Revolution' or 'The Screwfly Solution', but they have already been anthologised to death.

Disappointed they didn't include a Doris Piserchia story discussed on a podcast, she's never had a shorts collection but that particular one was in an Orbit anthology. And they discussed not including a Lisa Tuttle story with extreme sexual violence but it has never been reprinted and I wonder if Tuttle herself didn't want it reprinted too?

Hard not to include seminal stories like 'When it Changed', 'The Day Before the Revolution' or 'The Screwfly Solution', but they have already been anthologised to death.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7W77EbjPaM

I posted several things about xpost the first The Future Is Female! on a previous Rolling Speculative:

Reminds me, this fairly recent Library of America anth is in local library and bookstore:

The Future Is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin
Edited by Lisa Yaszek
"

Space-opera heroines, gender-bending aliens, post-apocalyptic pregnancies, changeling children, interplanetary battles of the sexes, and much more: a groundbreaking new collection of classic American science fiction by women from the 1920s to the 1960s
"

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents
Contributors

Introduction by Lisa Yaszek

CLARE WINGER HARRIS: The Miracle of the Lily | 1928
LESLIE F. STONE: The Conquest of Gola | 1931
C. L. MOORE: The Black God’s Kiss | 1934
LESLIE PERRI: Space Episode | 1941
JUDITH MERRIL: That Only a Mother | 1948
WILMAR H. SHIRAS: In Hiding | 1948
KATHERINE MACLEAN: Contagion | 1950
MARGARET ST. CLAIR: The Inhabited Men | 1951
ZENNA HENDERSON: Ararat | 1952
ANDREW NORTH: All Cats Are Gray | 1953
ALICE ELEANOR JONES: Created He Them | 1955
MILDRED CLINGERMAN: Mr. Sakrison’s Halt | 1956
LEIGH BRACKETT: All the Colors of the Rainbow | 1957
CAROL EMSHWILLER: Pelt | 1958
ROSEL GEORGE BROWN: Car Pool | 1959
ELIZABETH MANN BORGESE: For Sale, Reasonable | 1959
DORIS PITKIN BUCK: Birth of a Gardener | 1961
ALICE GLASER: The Tunnel Ahead | 1961
KIT REED: The New You | 1962
JOHN JAY WELLS & MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY: Another Rib | 1963
SONYA DORMAN: When I Was Miss Dow | 1966
KATE WILHELM: Baby, You Were Great | 1967
JOANNA RUSS: The Barbarian | 1968
JAMES TIPTREE, JR.: The Last Flight of Dr. Ain | 1969
URSULA K. LE GUIN: Nine Lives | 1969

Biographical Notes
https://www.loa.org/books/583-the-future-is-female-25-classic-science-fiction-stories-by-women-from-pulp-pioneers-to-ursula-k-le-guin

When are they going to put "Vintage Season" in one of these, are does that not count because of the (perhaps) nominal co-author?

Speaking of CL, she does have this in TFoF!
C.L. Moore is maybe at her most pulpadelic, flexing the form and my head, spiraling sword and sorcery through Dark Ages scientific romance ov netherworld geometry and geography and trans-cosmological human and alien perceptual and emotional separation and convergence--also nonstop action. Joiry has fallen, and Jirel descends, willing to sell her soul rather than be sold into sexual slavery as prize ex-commander (spiritual adviser says she could be forgiven for the latter, never for the former, but she must have thee weapon).

― dow, Sunday, November 17, 2019

Oh, "Black God's Kiss."

Which it said in your other post.

I enjoyed just about every story in xpost The Future is Female---a few of the Messages didn't quite make it over the finish line w undiminished momentum, but all takes remained v readable, with editor's mostly astute and always expert delving into wide span of eras and approaches. My fave discoveries are Sonya Dorman (described by ed. as New Wave vanguard, got into the first Dangerous Visions). Here we get the affecting poetic compression of "When I Was Miss Dow," as oops upside the head to me as the relatively slo-mo, yet perfectly timed "Birth of a Gardener," by Doris Pitkin Buck (...her short story "Cacophony in Pink and Ochre" is...slated to appear in...The Last Dangerous Visions.") Dorman has several stories posted here and there, haven't had (even) as much luck with Buck yet, no collections of either, which makes me sad. Could always buy up quite a few back issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science, make my own bootleg anths, but I'm not that sad.

― dow, Tuesday, December 24, 2019
Also, Leigh Brackett has a sad tragic asskicker in there, characteristically enough, and there are Atom Age effects on gestation etc. you're not supposed to talk about etc.

The stories in here are pretty upfront about issues of sex and gender, pretty often---most startling in this regard is "Another Rib," by John Jay Wells (Juanita Coulson)& Marion Zimmer Bradley: gay and trans emergence while stranded on another astral body---published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1963(!) Frank exchanges among the characters, (incl. an alien), although the stressed-out cap'n is a bit comical (seems deliberate)(maybe also for some in readership to relate to, re their own feelings or those of uptight males they know too well)(as is mentioned re reception of several selections)

― dow, Tuesday, December 24, 2019

That is, John Jay Wells is/are actually Juanita Coulson and Marion Zimmer Bradley (the latter's much later sex crimes busts acknowledged by ed.)

Also posted on there about the 70s-90s Women of Wonder, still need to read 40s-70s:

Women of Wonder, the Contemporary Years: Science Fiction by Women from the 1970s to the 1990s is an anthology of short stories, novelettes, and novellas edited by Pamela Sargent. It was published in 1995,[1] along a companion volume, Women of Wonder, The Classic Years: Science Fiction by Women from the 1940s to the 1970s.[2]

That editor, Lisa Yascek, is a professor of science fiction, has published a lot of studies, and here's another anthology--stories, poetry, nonfiction:
https://www.weslpress.org/9780819576248/sisters-of-tomorrow/

and co-edited:https://smile.amazon.com/Rediscovery-Science-Fiction-Women-1953-1957/dp/1951320182/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1649812413&sr=1-6

Not an anth, but might be good:
Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women’s Science Fiction (also on Amazon, natch)

In this groundbreaking cultural history, Lisa Yaszek recovers a lost tradition of women’s science fiction that flourished after 1945. This new kind of science fiction was set in a place called galactic suburbia, a literary frontier that was home to nearly 300 women writers. These authors explored how women’s lives, loves, and work were being transformed by new sciences and technologies, thus establishing women’s place in the American future imaginary.Yaszek shows how the authors of galactic suburbia rewrote midcentury culture’s assumptions about women’s domestic, political, and scientific lives. Her case studies of luminaries such as Judith Merril, Carol Emshwiller, and Anne McCaffrey and lesser-known authors such as Alice Eleanor Jones, Mildred Clingerman, and Doris Pitkin Buck demonstrate how galactic suburbia is the world’s first literary tradition to explore the changing relations of gender, science, and society.Galactic Suburbia challenges conventional literary histories that posit men as the progenitors of modern science fiction and women as followers who turned to the genre only after the advent of the women’s liberation movement. As Yaszek demonstrates, stories written by women about women in galactic suburbia anticipated the development of both feminist science fiction and domestic science fiction written by men.