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

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

That's sad. Once her friend Pat Cadigan said she stays away from the internet noise and I hope that wont leave her increasingly unknown but I guess she was successful enough she didn't have to self-promote much?

It's interesting, she seems like an important figure, but hardly any news sites are picking this up.

I looked around twitter and there are plenty of mourners, in spanish and japanese too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIjGgC9qBP4

This book has been in the making for a very long time, so I hope there will be a cheaper edition eventually
http://www.centipedepress.com/horror/feestersinthelake.html

I'm reading Beyond the Hallowed Sky by Ken Macleod, good fun but decidedly un-hard SF. They often get mentioned in the same sentence but it does feel very much like Iain Banks - bit of politics, bit of espionage, bit of handwavy implausible technology, maybe a bit less sarcasm. It's set in the 2070s after global political upheavals and the invention of AI but you don't get the sense that either of those things has particularly changed the world, the first is just background and the second just part of the plot - a plot which is often very conveniently advanced, e.g. the AI can predict things except when it doesn't, manual overrides are implausibly but helpfully available just at the right moment. Still it's pretty much fulfilling my periodic need for some sensawunda and thrill-power.

Before that, Notes from the Burning Age by Claire North, fantasy tinged post apoc spy thriller which plays out as a battle and a conversation between eco hippies and disaster capitalists, i read it quickly enough but didn't fully buy into it for some reason, maybe it was lacking in shades of grey, maybe the main bad dude wasn't convincing, a james bond villain masquerading as an éminence grise.

Looked through local library SF shelves, took out Asimov's THE CAVES OF STEEL. Looking forward to making time for this.

read BRAKING DAY by adam oyebanji

entertaining take on a colony ship as it, after ~130 years, approaches its destination . . . and not everyone is happy about it

respect to the author for living in pittsburgh; thorough disrespect for having characters order 'pittsburgh lite' beers

hardly groundbreaking but a nice lil sf mystery type thing

Beyond the Hallowed Sky is part 1 of a series, ends on a cliffhanger, part 2 hasn't been written yet :(

he does churn them out though (and it sort of shows tbh)

inspired by the pinefox i also read THE WAY THE FUTURE WAS. it was great, but i wanted more dirty details, like exactly how much of an asshole harlan ellison was, or was heinlein truly a fascist. pohl's pretty complimentary of everyone except l ron hubbard -- which is just as well, i suppose, because he spent another 40 years running into them everywhere

also curious if pohl had any issues in the '50s as a former card-carrying member of the communist party; if so, he didn't mention it

also struck by how incestuous his group of writers was -- everyone seemed to be constantly marrying each others' exes. pohl himself got married four times between 1940 and 1953; wives 1 and 3 were also SF writers

Because no one else wanted to hang out with them back then, maybe, unless it was at Horace Gold’s poker game.

a valid point. pohl did apparently hang out with john cage tho!

Yes, at that poker game! Although I now see something that Cage sometimes babysat for the Pohls - on some poker nights! Whether it was Horace's game is not specified.

https://resolutereader.blogspot.com/2021/11/carol-frederik-pohl-science-fiction.html

Guessing Martin Gardner didn't want to do it and turned them down.

I just managed to dredge up one more memory from the SF convention at the LaGuardia hotel where Frederik Pohl signed my copy of The Space Merchants which I may post here even though it is but a sliver of a fragment, discovered in the lining around the mummy's corpse.

But if I do tell you I'm afraid the portal will close up on me and I might never be able to gather in the hall of the planets again.

Please post it.

I'm loving this discussion. Thought I was the only person who had THE WAY THE FUTURE WAS !

It's true, you would think a former actual Communist would be suspect in the US 1950s.

I wonder if anyone is gathering his blog entries for publication, because that's wayback machine work but they were popular and he was writing them up until death I think. They basically continued the book.

I found it in the wayback machine. I went to Nov 27, 2015. So two years after he died but they were still keeping it up.

Just remembered Damon Knight’s The Futurians is available as an ebook, for further reading. Pohl and Asimov are on the cover, among others.

Didn’t know/remember that Damon Knight had been married to Lester del Rey’s ex!

Before Kate Wilhelm of course.

Del Rey’s second wife, not the first one who died in a car crash and not the fourth, Judy-Lynn.

A whole book called THE FUTURIANS ??

Meanwhile, this last post relates to something confusing in Pohl's book: he writes of del Rey marrying his, Pohl's, secretary?, later says that del Rey's wife died in a car crash, but these can't be the same person.