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

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.

Yes, you might as well read The Futurians also while you’re hot. Del Rey was married four times. Assuming the secretary may have been the third wife.

Apparently Del Rey's first wife who died in the Ballardian crash was Evelyn Harrison, who had previously been married to- wait for it- Harry Harrison.

Seems like there might be more info in Sam Moskowitz's Seekers of Tomorrow.

Guess it's del Rey, not Del Rey.

Picked up Chana Porter's The Seep today, never heard of the author somehow but lots of praise plastering it from some big names

We go back, way way back...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kauc0baboz4
Not just about Wolfe

in my further parroting of the pinefox, i read THE CAVES OF STEEL. basically a mystery in a sci-fi setting. better-written than (iirc) FOUNDATION. protagonist was kind of a dick, as was perhaps fashion at the time (or maybe the authors were oblivious?)

also read pohl's MAN PLUS, which was essentially a trial run for JEM. tbf i liked this better than JEM, which i sort of hated when i read it a few years ago. both are pitch-black and sexist as hell (happily pohl largely laid off that aspect in his memoir, although i *do* wonder if certain aspects of MAN PLUS were influenced by the dissolution of his fourth marriage, which seemingly happened around the same time.)

anyway they definitely both have aspects worth reading even if i didn't fully enjoy them

I'm touched by ILB poster Mookieproof following up one or two of my interests! :D

Adam Roberts highlights THE CAVES OF THE STEEL as one of Asimov's best.

teh stainless steel pinefox

for fans of large ebooks, Amazon UK has The Great Dune Trilogy and The Books Of Earthsea for 99p today (Dune also cheap on kobo.com but not the uklg)

Just thinking that even though some of us may have made a break with RAH, there is still something charming about the LunarSpeak in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress that is reminiscent of certain posting styles.

Great episode about it just dropped, lots of interesting stuff raised, was quite surprised about the trajectory of depictions of AI that Yaszek outlines
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw9I4ALg5zs

https://jonathanstrahan.podbean.com/e/episode-579-remembering-patricia-a-mckillip/