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

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.

Thanks. What about The Green Earth Trilogy?

I haven't read that one, although it appears to be on his preachy side. The Mars Trilogy was solid.

The Green Earth I mentioned---maybe first volume of a trilogy now? Can't keep up with this guy---is itself a mixdown of the Science in the Capital Trilogy: Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, and Sixty Days and Counting: supposedly tighter (he said he was inspired by the way Peter Matthiessen turned his Watson Legend Everglades Trilogy into Shadow Country, but seemed too all over the place for me, too spacey and glib and impulsive---not that I didn't enjoy it in those terms, and sympathize with him and his characters pushing against the patience of eco-decline by working hard, also playing hard, which some of them def made time for---which is why I wondered if the original books may have had more grounding, though he seems well aware of his rep for going on and on in very great detail, like the hard science fiction overlords of yore----anyway my favorite was The Wild Shore, as far as I got in the Three Californias, alas

Also, I first knew of him as a writer of short stories, believe it or not, in Asimov's. Well, and novellas---if interested, try the 1992 collection Down and Out in The Year 2000 (gotta dig up my copy).

The central character of Green Earth started out as a dour, tightassed researcher, but soon seemed like he, man of the present century and not that old, had grown up smoking pages of his parents' or grandparents' Whole Earth Catalogs, which was odd, but pulled oldie me along, and reminds me there's a Stewart Brand bio just out.

I really liked Aurora, a sceptical take on the generation ship tale.

Back to SF with Isaac Asimov: FOUNDATION & EMPIRE (1952).

Pinefox, you mentioned on WAYR? that his Foundation Trilogy has no robots, but they do show up in some much later Foundation books; I won't tell you which ones.

read LESSER KNOWN MONSTERS OF THE 21ST CENTURY by kim fu

short stories; riyl kelly link

I didn't mean to say that this trilogy had no robots - my main point was that so far, it didn't contain aliens (but no spoilers if they appear later).

So far it rather oddly doesn't seem to contain robots; oddly because he had written key works about robots over the previous decade!

One thing that everyone says about Asimov is "he later wrote loads of books to connect his various sagas up", so yes, I think I knew that somehow he connected robot stories with the Foundation ones, which I believe resumed c.1982. I think I will finish the trilogy but then not read the later ones; it seems more worthwhile to go on with other SF.

iirc the later ones are better-written but perhaps unnecessarily muddy the waters

Some interesting stuff in here, the Malinda Lo book in particular (didn't catch the title) and the scarcity of old gay books
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgmJmdXldKU

FY50 challenge: fully incorporate women into the species

One thing that everyone says about Asimov is "he later wrote loads of books to connect his various sagas up”

rip patricia mckillip

https://www.tor.com/2022/05/11/patricia-a-mckillip-1948-2022