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

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/

Reading ASTOUNDING, recommended by poster Ward Fowler. Very readable, brisk, enjoyable, also full of details from letters.

L. Ron Hubbard comes across very badly, a fantasist and liar. John W. Campbell is more substantial and it's interesting that a big part of his role was producing ideas for stories and giving them to writers, who then wrote them. Compare this to a lot of editors - within modernism, for instance - and it's a contrast, a strong form of collaborative creation.

Robert Heinlein is said to have had an early history as ... a leftist activist!? That surprised me. He and Campbell quickly develop a scarily passionate friendship. Their wives are closely involved also.

Asimov seems the youngest and also comes across as nervous, clumsy, earnest, like a young Professor Pnin, say.

The author is very opinionated particular stories, often saying "It was one of the greatest stories in the history of SF", etc.

What struck me tonight is: has anyone written a novel about The Futurians? I know there are one or two books, that I should read. But how about fiction? It could be like, say, Egan's MANHATTAN BEACH, a period piece full of Asimov's family candy store, egg creams at Coney Island, Communist rallies in Union Square, rattling subways to Campbell's office.

Maybe I should try to become a (not very good) novelist myself.

Almost finished with Rachel Pollack's Unquenchable Fire - perhaps not really sci-fi? Fantasy, magic realism? Well, it's in the SF Masterworks series anyway. Often reads like a Vertigo comic, and Pollack did indeed do a stint on Doom Patrol, following Grant Morrison. Its USA is I guess supposed to be somewhere in the future, as despite ppl living in a society based around belief in myths and magics there are plenty moments of modern Americana - including very 1989 ones like xerox, the WTC, Trump Tower being mentioned without a reference to its owner's political career. It is a satire of the US, its theocratic tendencies and suburban hypocrisy. It also turns out to be very a propos for the current moment, as the protagonist is mystically impregnated and much of the book deals with her trying to get rid of the child. Still not entirely sure how that will play out, but pretty confident the author's coming from a pro choice perspective. There's also frequent excerpts of religious stories from this world, which are ok on their own in a Clark Ashton Smith kinda way but stop the narrative in its tracks and though I'm too pedantic to actually skip past them I would like to.

Robert Heinlein is said to have had an early history as ... a leftist activist!?

One of the saddest details I remember from the book is that at one point (I think the late 1940s), Fritz Lang approached Heinlein about collaborating on a film together. Heinlein didn't pursue the project because he mistrusted Lang's 'left-wing politics'.

Re; novels about the Futurians. The nearest thing I know of is Zombies of the Gene Pool by Sharyn McCrumb, which is a murder mystery set among a group of legendary SF fans/writers (although she switches the group's heyday to the 1950s).

And Chris Ware's ACME Novelty Library 19 also plays games with SF history and fandom, as in this blurb:

The penultimate teen issue of the ACME Novelty Library appears this autumn with a new chapter from the electrifying experimental narrative “Rusty Brown,” which examines the life, work, and teaching techniques of one of its central real-life protagonists, W. K. Brown. A previously marginal figure in the world of speculative fiction, Brown’s widely anthologized first story, “The Seeing Eye Dogs of Mars,” garnered him instant acclaim and the coveted White Dwarf Award for Best New Writer when it first appeared in the pages of Nebulous in the late 1950s, but his star was quickly eclipsed by the rise of such talents as Anton Jones, J. Sterling Imbroglio, and others of the so-called psychovisionary movement. (Modern scholarship concedes, however, that they now owe a not inconsequential aesthetic debt to Brown.) New surprises and discoveries concerning the now legendarily reclusive and increasingly influential writer mark this nineteenth number of the ACME Novelty Library, itself a regular award-winning periodical, lauded for its clear lettering and agreeable coloring, which, as any cultured reader knows, are cornerstones of any genuinely serious literary effort.

Interesting about Lang (I'll get to that part eventually), as I watched more of his films last year than anyone else's.

I recall that the first SF World Con in NYC is reported here as screening METROPOLIS.

Robert Heinlein is said to have had an early history as ... a leftist activist!? That surprised me.

― the pinefox, Tuesday, June 28, 2022 11:00 PM (yesterday)

I've even heard that Niven and Pournelle were young marxists

Wait, someone who was some kind of leftie as a youth later turned libertarian/hard sf right? Do tell!

I’ll take People Who Like Ideologies Over Reality for the Next 5000 Posts, Thread of Wonder.

Sorry, probably sounding like one of those guys myself.

Like Asimov, who stayed leftie, but was still a problem in other ways.