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

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.

People allude to Asimov's faults but over 1/3 through ASTOUNDING he's a nerdish, nervous, likeable character!

Which reminds me to say: having mentioned it but not had time to read it before, I'm finally reading Asimov's THE CAVES OF STEEL. Published 1954, I reflect that it's later than the first FOUNDATION trilogy and I, ROBOT. I wonder a bit if this is a more mature Asimov, or if it embeds ideas developed earlier - in the Robot stories at least.

It seems remarkably prescient and serious on the issue we call Automation and say is a massive issue of our century.

It's also a police procedural and I haven't yet gone far enough to experience the pleasures of detection.

Between these aspects and the future-city setting it seems in an obvious way a big BLADE RUNNER precursor that is rarely mentioned as such. Presumably Dick read it?

Good question.

xxxxxxpost:First read that as Heinlein and Fritz *Lieber*, got a little thrill (also from RAH and Lang), a little glimpse of something along the lines of Forbidden Planet, but possibly more political, given Heinlein's customizing, Cold War moderninzing of space opera elements, Lang's connection to Shakespeare and Jungian psychology (the shadow self. the id, pretty uch), also how that relates to conflicts and dynamic tension of animus (male aspect of the female mind), anima (female of the male), Heinlein not yet into conscious tapping of such themes, like he was in his 1960s work, but having (if they were to keep working together) to respond on some level, his own shadow self (as with his xpost bromance w Campbell) claims I've seen of his and wife's later "experiments"---this activity would be more the late 50s or 60s, with life supposedly catching up with his later fiction, and vice-versa: if he could have collaborated with Leiber then, oh my!
Wishful thinking--but Heinlein had his moments in the 60s, esp in Glory Road, where the swashbuckling American male has to get his mynd and other parts around intergalactic mores, and do you know what it's like to be Empress of the Twenty Universes, having to stay wise and stone just and young and beautiful while your loved ones wither and die again and again, well not all, but too many, or they may just give up and go away, stumble away.

Also--Jo Walton says:

The odd thing is that I never felt like the wrong kind of girl for Heinlein. I didn’t feel as if I was eavesdropping, I felt that I was being confided in. As a teenager I was very used to being the exception—I could force male company to take me seriously even though I was a girl. In my imagination, I’d make misogynists like C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton let me in by this rule. Oh, they’d say, girls suck, yes, well, but this is Jo. By sheer force of my natural Jo-ness, I’d make them take me seriously. I am now, at forty-five, rather weary of the effort required, of the ongoing necessity to assert this in order to be taken seriously. It gets awfully tiresome. Even at fifteen, I could see there was a problem with this… but if all the other girls in my world insisted on turning into typical teenage girls, what else could I do?

But with Heinlein I never felt my gender was an issue. Girls were not invisible to him. Girls existed, and could be on the moon. And I did want babies, not now, but when I was grown up. How else would we carry on the human race, after all? In most of what I read, you could ask what was missing from this picture—no women, no people who weren’t white, no families, no older people, no kids, no poor people. Heinlein had all that. Poor people. People with ethnic names. People with different skin color. Girls not just as love objects, but grandmothers. Not just boy scouts, but little bratty sisters. Not just Kip, but Pee Wee. I might have asked why the girls couldn’t have been front and centre (I didn’t like Podkayne either), but then he wrote Friday.

Heinlein told me that it was actually okay for women to like sex. I may be dim, but I’d never have figured that out from most of what I was reading. He told me they could be radio operators on space stations and the work would get done more efficiently. And the biography told me he really believed that, when he was recruiting for the lab where he was doing war work he went to women’s colleges to find engineering graduates. He told me I didn’t always have to crash my way through closed doors to get myself into the story. I believed in him because I felt he believed in me—the potential me, the one who would be an engineer, and know how to change diapers and plan invasions, the best me I could be.

Where I felt he wasn’t talking to me was where I was excluded for being insufficiently American.

Fritz Leiber, no, as in Leiber and Stoller? Go, Flat Cat, Go!

Speaking of Young and Beautiful.

Although that was an Aaron Schroeder composition. Mike Stoller played or mimed playing it in Jailhouse Rock in any case.

Chip Delany defends RAH too! But I dunno it’s a mix of attitude and tone -solipsism!- I find hard to take at this point.

See also Sladek parody, as mentioned on one or both of the previous threads.

Parodies. Of Heinlein, Asimov, Dick, Bradbury, Clarke and a few others I am missing. Cordwainer Smith too, I think!

In The Steam-Driven Boy. Those things are like pure, uncut STROON aka the santaclara drug. Don’t mess with me when I’m cranching, I’m only human!

ok so he may have messed up w this one, which I haven't read--re "transition" as cosplay in some SF:

That these stories had exactly nothing to do with Transgender issues as expressed in fiction may be rather more clear now than then; and late examples of the type, like Robert A Heinlein's I Will Fear No Evil (1970), tend to embarrass nowadays. In Heinlein's novel, for instance, to save his consciousness from death the brain of a rich old man is implanted in the body of his beautiful young secretary, allowing the author to play out an old man's fantasy of what life as a pretty girl must be like. But in any case brain transplants are a side issue, because the new gender identity is worn as a costume

But in 1958, he did manage "All You Zombies"

which explores a chicken-and-egg progenitor paradox through a time-traveling intersex protagonist.

In that ten-page story, a young man who writes women’s magazine confession stories under the name of The Unmarried Mother walks into Pop’s Bar in New York City, Time Zone 1970. When the Barkeep asks him how he knows “the women’s angle” so well in his stories, the young man says, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” He replies, “Bartenders and psychiatrists learn that nothing is stranger than truth. […] Nothing astonishes me.” The Unmarried Mother snorts and says, “Want to bet the rest of the bottle?” The Barkeep offers a full bottle on the bet, and so the young man begins, “When I was a little girl—”

Despite spoilers, read the whole take:

]Science fiction paradox and the transgender look: how time travel queers spectatorship in Predestination

by Jenée Wilde

As for Leiber's involvement with film, Conjure Wife was the basis of several b-movies, and I was thinking also maybe Rene Clare's classier I Married A Witch, but no that was from Thorne Smith.
He was an actor, though like his father--wiki sez:

He spent 1928 touring with his parents' Shakespeare company (Fritz Leiber & Co.)...He also appeared alongside his father in uncredited parts in George Cukor's Camille (1936), James Whale's The Great Garrick (1937), and William Dieterle's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939)... In the cult horror film Equinox (1970) directed by Dennis Muren and Jack Woods, Leiber has a cameo appearance as a geologist, Dr. Watermann. In the edited second version of the movie, Leiber has no spoken dialogue but appears in a few scenes. The original version of the movie has a longer appearance by Leiber recounting the ancient book and a brief speaking role; all were cut from the re-release. He also appears as Chavez in the 1979 Schick Sunn Classics documentary The Bermuda Triangle, based on the book by Charles Berlitz.

As the child of two Shakespearean actors, Leiber was fascinated with the stage, describing itinerant Shakespearean companies in stories like "No Great Magic" and "Four Ghosts in Hamlet", and creating an actor/producer protagonist for his novel A Specter is Haunting Texas.

Although his Change War novel, The Big Time, is about a war between two factions, the "Snakes" and the "Spiders", changing and rechanging history throughout the universe, all the action takes place in a small bubble of isolated space-time the size of a theatrical stage, and with only a handful of characters. Judith Merril (in the July 1969 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction) remarks on Leiber's acting skills when the writer won a science fiction convention costume ball. Leiber's costume consisted of a cardboard military collar over turned-up jacket lapels, cardboard insignia, an armband, and a spider pencilled large in black on his forehead, thus turning him into an officer of the Spiders, one of the combatants in his Change War stories. "The only other component," Merril writes, "was the Leiber instinct for theatre."

Poster James Redd, I'd like to see those parodies.

Get one copy of The Steam-Driven Boy, the pinefox!

I found it in a second hand shop recently

That's a good find.

Nearly 1/3 into THE SPACE MERCHANTS, appreciating it. One idea that Asimov develops is that the people of NYC live under a dome in very controlled conditions (like Mega City One in 2000AD?) but the people from the Outer Worlds ('Spacers') have a settlement beyond it that is actually open to nature. They see ordinary air as healthy and eat apples - which is bizarre to the regular Earth-dwellers. The Spacers also think of the Earth people as unhygenic and demand that they go through extensive showering before entering their sector. Asimov seems to be developing ideas about nature vs artificial life here in a way that is not particularly predictable and only emerges as you read.

He's also, again, good on people's fear of robots and what their superiority will do for the usefulness of humans.

The book is made more appealing by its police procedural element, though that hasn't entirely got into gear yet.

Are you sure you typed the correct title of what you are reading, the pinefox?

I apologise: I meant THE CAVES OF STEEL, of course. Was thinking again of THE SPACE MERCHANTS earlier and conflated them. Both are my kind of thing.

Mark Valentine:

And Other Stories have recently announced pre-orders for Fifty Forgotten Books by R B Russell, due out in September. The author recounts autobiographical episodes alongside discussing books that have been important to him, many of them not very well-known.

All enthusiasts of fantastic, supernatural and unusual literature will enjoy encountering the titles the author chooses, but the book also introduces us to a cast of decadents, bohemians, cult musicians, the odd (very odd) spy, shady publishers and backstreet booksellers, as well as the writers of the weird and wayward.

David Tibet calls it ‘A groovy and delicious and intimate jigsaw of memories and passions and books . . . Falling in love with books voraciously, whilst growing up ferociously, has never been so beautifully described.’

We asked R B Russell to join us for The Wormwood Interview. Here he has chosen some different titles to those in the book. Ray notes: ‘I have tried not to repeat myself in this interview for Wormwoodiana, and this time I discuss only well-known books!’

Really good interview with Jessica Amanda Salmonson from 2004
http://www.jitterbugfantasia.com/violet/index.html

of those books the first two are very english '70s and the last is newish

the ladybird books are what every schoolkid started reading with, 1a being the very first. i doubt that has more than one word per page. iirc there'd be 1a, 1b, 1c, 2a, b, c, up to 12. those covers will be very evocative to people my age.

Picked this up on the basis of the many many Vance namedrops here: is this a good representative collection, what’s a good one to start with?

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40895.Green_Magic

Seems pretty good. “The Moon Moth”!

I read Green Magic first, if only because it was the shortest — really enjoyed it and looking forward to reading more. Felt like one of those archetypal stories that’s always existed but somehow got summoned up and written down. It sort of reminded me of Mark Twain - but Twain had no discipline and could never have written something so concise.

Nearing the end of ASTOUNDING, I can entirely confirm poster Ward Fowler's previous observation that in other circumstances, Asimov's 'groping' behaviour would make him persona non grata but in this company, he seems the most sane and decent protagonist around.

Heinlein maintains integrity at times but is strangely credulous, especially about Hubbard, for a long time. Campbell is worse. This is meant to be what they now call 'the greatest generation', a time when men were men, they could land on an invasion beach, build a rocket, take no nonsense -- and yet these people tend to believe the most ridiculous baloney, as if they're children. They chuckle wryly about Hubbard's seaborne adventures, not knowing that he lied about all of them and everything else in his life. They say 'This is the greatest discovery in the history of mankind' when Hubbard invents a form of therapy.

The people who actually stay away from the nonsense or politely jibe at it, like Pohl, emerge better.

The book does confirm how close SF and science were. Nuclear energy and weapons, rocketry, and also ESP -- people seem to have taken ideas from fiction into actual science, or pseudoscience, and back again, constantly. And many SF writers seem to have been employed as scientists during WWII.

I think there's a couple of books about science fiction and fact interacting

Finished THE CAVES OF STEEL (1954). The sociological ideas here - about how mankind must leave Earth and, specifically, how the Spacers seek to encourage this - can be briskly dealt with and thus hard to grasp, despite Asimov's great clarity as a writer. But Asimov robot-world + police procedural was a pretty winning combination for me. It's all more to my taste than FOUNDATION.

The question arises: what is the full history of SF-detective genre crossovers? BLADE RUNNER (/ ANDROIDS) is just the most obvious. Asimov was doing this in the 1950s. Are there actually stories along these lines in 1930s magazines?

My local Oxfam has a nice old paperback of CoS, I’ll pick it up. Never read Asimov

In that case, I strongly recommend buying this novel.

I'm sure there are earlier examples, but Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man (1953) is a good SF mystery novel.

Who? also (algis budrys) maybe even Rogue Moon

but i think he wanted robots as well

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4d9IrslaOzQ/Tt_FNDTTDFI/AAAAAAAABSI/zD5dn1VXlgk/s1600/stainless+steel+rat.jpg

(although i think the robotic-sounding name may be misleading)

(oh, no, he says SF / detective, not specifically robots)

I'm not quite sure I ever read the RAT, though I have a Harrison novel on my shelf called TECHNICOLOR TIME MACHINE that I ought to read after all this time.

i enjoyed some of them (there are many) when i was in the sixth form, and the carlos esquerra illustrated run in 2000ad. long time ago now though.

I thought Harrison hit his peak with Make Room, Make Room.

^ soylent green, i have just learned

was looking for ebook versions and there's a stainless steel rat anthology (first 3 books) but it says "Available 31-12-2035" and i can't wait that long