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

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.

Am I deluded in thinking that "The Screwfly Solution" and "VIntage Season" are two of the best stories ever? Did I just drink the hivemind Kool-Aid? How long have I been reading and posting on these threads? Has any sf writer done the all question mark writing experiment yet?

recently read APPLESEED by matt bell; not certain that i *liked* it but it was weird and v. ambitious and probably worthwhile

exhausted by the whole orpheus/eurydice thing tho. *possible* exception for russell hoban

also read MORE THAN HUMAN by theodore sturgeon, which was pretty great. the three parts didn't really, um, blesh -- he originally wrote the middle section as a novella, then added parts one and three for the novel -- and the ending was pat, if better than most SF endings. but it was thoughtful. points off for racist language, but i think his heart was in the right place especially for 1953

Thought you were going to say APPLESEED, by John Clute.

https://res.cloudinary.com/crunchbase-production/image/upload/c_lpad,h_256,w_256,f_auto,q_auto:eco,dpr_1/v1509748492/vail6lsp5medgsnnn1y8.png

Lol!

The Screwfly Solution pisses all over 99.9% of other SF stories from a great height. Don't think I've read Vintage Season, will seek it out - and some of those other anthologies, I have Women of Wonder (and maybe More Women of Wonder).

Don’t be surprised if “Vintage Season” seems familiar to you, since it appears you have already read it, at least according to the archives.

lol ok, I had a look at the start of the plot summary but it rang no bells - ah it's in The Time Traveler's Almanac.

Believe you said it was a keeper though, so hopefully you will enjoy the reread.

More time-tourizm on the Rolling Speculative threads!

More relevant to this thread than expected: most of the best of Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories For Late At Night. Mind you, the best is not the most of these stories, though most of the failures are gratifyingly ambitious, pushing through or against early-to-middle-ish respectable magazine slickness, to something thumping you and darting away--but ultimately suffering from unity of effect, for lack of a better phrase ( dun yeah, I didn't get some of 'em). Margaret Ronan's "Finger, Finger!" did very discreetly point me toward an off-page resolution/justification of the ending, via an unobtrusive and early clue, riskily recalled (hard to do this right; even Gene Wolfe
Nevertheless, I did get Jerome Bixby's "It's A Good Life", a little different than the Twilight Zone version, but just as great. Funky country fun can also be had in William Hope Hodgson's "The Whistling Room" and M.R. James's "The Ash Tree."
George Langelaan's "The Fly" is sweet, sober, tragic and low-key audacious, minus the camp of the first screen version or the awesome thump and dart and thump some more of Cronenberg's re-make.
The one that really grabbed me: "Vintage Season," a novelette by C.L. Moore, better known by me for collaborations with Henry Kuttner. This is a tale of an innocent 20th Century lad encountering kinky time travelers, eventually including or followed by a composer of metamorphic works...first published in a 1946 issue of Astounding, the last place I would have guessed (can be taken as a female writer's critique of Astounding's axiomatic white male earthlings uber alles, though can also imagine Campbell and crew getting turned on by i)(I kinda was).
Also, though not really thread-revelant, the volume ends with more unsettling gender scrutiny via "The Iron Gates", a WWII-era novel by Margaret Millar, wife of Ken Millar/Ross Macdonald, where women (oh yeah, some men too) are keeping the homefires burning and the merry-go-round turning, with madness and murder finding their seats, of course. A little too b-movie talky at times, or creatively overwritten at others, but the zingers can go deep (enough to distract me from obvious clues).

― dow, Thursday, July 18, 2013 12:58 PM (eight years ago) bookmarkflaglink

One more from the Hitchthology: "Evening Primrose", by John Collier: a poet forsakes this cruel world and stumbles into a subculture of people living among posh Manhattan department store mannikins. Light touch flicks momentum, through eerie elegance, tawdriness and plain dust: the poet's a fule, but his streaky point of view is increasingly hard to dismiss, as he veers into a romance a bit more tragic than comic. This is prob the most Hitchcockian story in the whole thing.

― dow, Sunday, July 21, 2013 7:59 PM (eight years ago) bookmarkflaglink

There's a great John Collier collection put out by NYRB

― ornamental cabbage (James Morrison), Sunday, July 21, 2013

read GALAXIES by barry n. malzberg, which, as he points out again and again, is *not* a sci-fi novel but merely notes for a *possible* sci-fi novel

it's interesting enough because he's a legitimately good writer, but overwhelmed by his incredible bitterness. at various points he challenges the Big Writers of the century -- hemingway, dos passos, lewis, oates -- but notably does *not* call out philip roth lol

apparently he entirely quit writing sci-fi soon after writing this (in 1975), which was just as well

Right. Think we have discussed before the Malzberg/Silverberg - Malz/Silver? - dichotomy where after his own crack-up Silverberg eventually came back into the fold and started doing fan service like Lord Valentine’s Castle.

The Malz Age of Science Fiction is 75.

in GALAXIES he literally points out the spots where an author could pad this novel out or even create a series

but that was too much for him, even if writing crime novels or porn was the alternative. is that better than fan service?