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

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?

Even or especially PKD, sometimes living on speed and visions of the Dark Haired Girl, pizza deliverer with the Christian fish symbol earring, told Malz to suck it up or go home, so maybe that's why he went.

(also bravely living on cat food when couldn't afford Earthly pizza deliverance)

Never heard that before about PKD’s advice to BNM. Where did you come across it?

Did just learn some stuff from his Wikipedia page.

Like this.

Or this, two weeks and a day late.

Looks like there's quite a lot of SF on Malzberg's CV after the 70s, a good chunk of it is collaborations and he's still doing it.

I'm quite pleased about the variety of new things Somtow is doing, serials including weird high school romance, regency romance with SF, a religious series and a historical novel about Sporus; maybe restarting Vampire Junction. Really hope he finishes his new Inquestor series because I adore that (haven't got to the new parts though). Don't know what's happening to Dragonstones, I should ask him.

Wow, Screen even got a fancy audiobook treatment.

Maybe I will finally read Herovit’s World if not The Falling Astronauts.

Have you read any other Malzberg, mookie, or do you plan to?

Malzberg has a habit of trudging grimly through almost the entire length of the work, and then powering up on the last page. He does that in Galaxies, Herovit's World, and a number of other things I've read.

Herovit’s World starts out pretty strong, I think, but I have only read the first few chapters.

Didn't know Ben Burgis is the brother of Stephanie Burgis. Admittedly not something a lot of people talk about

Mark Valentine on Wormwoodiana:

Ghosts in the Machine is an exhibition of black & white images hosted by Bower Ashton Library, Bristol, for World Book Night 2022. Contributors were invited to create an image responding to the theme and also to name a favourite ghost story.

These included stories by M. R. James, Shirley Jackson, John Ajvide Lindqvist, Pierre de Ronsard, Fritz Lieber, Toni Morrison, Jan Pienkowski, Pu Songling, Astrid Lindgren, Aoko Matsuda, Stanisław Herman Lem and Daphne du Maurier.

There were 93 spectral contributions from participants in Australia, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, Sweden, Taiwan, UK, and the USA.

My own contribution, ‘Phantoms’, is one of a series of manipulated pages from The English Catalogue of Books for 1937, edited by James D. Stewart (London: The Publishers’ Circular, Limited, 1938). I nominated Flower Phantoms by Ronald Fraser.

The exhibition runs from Weds 13th April – Weds 29th June 2022 and the complete set of images is available as a free PDF (scroll down the Ghosts in the Machine page for the link.

I just finished Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth. I knew going in that it was lesbian astronaut necromancers, but I didn't know it was also a closed circle murder mystery. Great stuff. It got mentioned on Jeopardy last week so I guess it's a popular book.

i also liked that a lot

Daily Mail and Kiwifarms and some other news sites have been going after Gretchen Felker-Martin (apparently Manhunt kills JK Rowling in an amusing fashion) and I hope this all turns out well for her. As far as I can tell most of this notoriety has come from her being opinionated about pop culture on twitter and her tv reviews because there's lots of outrageous horror writers who never get any attention regardless of how skilled they are.

Well, mostly it comes from her being a trans woman and the right wing press taking any chance they can get to attack a trans woman and cast JKR as the victim.

read KSM's 2312. i don't think these comments are actually spoilers, but just in case

humanity has colonized nearly every vaguely habitable rock/ball of ice between mercury and saturn, mars is fully terraformed, venus is in the process, plans are bandied about for the larger moons of jupiter and saturn. humans in space are doing very well; theirs is even referred to as a 'post-scarcity society'.

earth, however, is a hot mess, with 11 billion people, nearly 500 sovereign states, and a fried environment. it is reliant on spacers for a significant quantity of its food (???) as well as minerals and such.

the titular year is presented as a crisis point that may decide the future of humanity. big questions are raised: if earth collapses into full-on chaos, can the colonies survive? can its biome be healed? are our artificial intelligences becoming sentient?

these are mostly hand-waved away. most of the book seems like an excuse for the main characters to flit about the solar system (mercury to saturn is a 16-day trip, and apparently does not require money?) doing neato things like surfing the rings of saturn or dancing just ahead of the approaching sunrise -- which will boil you in moments -- on mercury.

of course it's well-written. there are classic KSM set pieces and some interesting and detailed sciencey bits, but other sciencey bits either bear little scrutiny or are simply stated as facts no matter how unpersuasive. and the ~portentiousness~ of it all is ultimately unearned. so i liked it but also found it disappointing.

Sounds like what I had reservations about in Green Earth, which I posted about on one of the previous Rolling Speculatives: main idea was, climate disruption is really going to suck for a lot of people, but with some surprising perks, at least early on: flooding of DC results in Fed Parks squatters trading Thoreau passages on DIY localnet (so green neo-cyberpunk to that extent). But he's an outdoorsman enough to provide some wonderful New England coastal and California mountain visits, along with thriller-y elements and a maybe-mystical situation involving eco-refugee monks: seems too gimmicky sometimes,and maybe he should not have lost detail by mixing trilogy down into this one novel---but if you like him at all, and are ready for some disappointments, it's worth checking out; I learned some stuff without feeling lectured.

audio interview
http://www.scottedelman.com/2022/01/21/usman-t-malik/

Yet another sequel anthology of women authors but oddly this one goes even further back in time
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?888549

Stan at his best is the best. Stan phoning it in is, as you say, portentous.

Which of his do people think are the best ones? He’s written so many.

I was introduced to him through his Three Californias Trilogy, and that's still my favorite.