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

Alec Nevala-Lee’s Borges Test.

Ok I googled it. "The other approach is to emphasize qualities that can’t be summarized, like character, style, atmosphere, and suspense." - in other words, the other approach is to write a good book. Great advice cheers! Srsly though reading Galaxias did put me in mind of KSR, it seemed like Baxter was trying to do a similar thing of weaving a story not driven by a straightforward plot, but by politics, characters, climate, geology - he just couldn't pull it off.

true xp

Still a little dizzy from recently reading The Best of Margaret St. Clair: 1985 Academy Chicago paperback that might be considered "trade" in that it's a bit taller than the drugstore mass product, but still, so much tumult in what usually reads like so few pages---actually an average of 10, now that I look at table of contents, for 20 stories in all, with an introduction by the author, looking back and around "in my early 70s," characteristically dry, droll, not kidding (b. 1911--d. 1995). One of the bleakest, angriest, funniest---all of that with a few poignant notes struck off the deadpan, if you catch and take them that way; she don't jerk tears, jerks, or joeks, although you might get an afterimage of a Mardi Gras float, with beads having been tosses is from 1980, but pretty recognizably the same voice as in stories from the 1940s, when this one couldn't have been published because of climatic (in more ways than one) imagery at least, if not overall attitude about science and technology and problem-solving. But she succeeded in becoming an artful & entertaining naysaying mainstay of the pulps, which she regarded as "folk art," bringing the heady strange brew.
(And in that, she's right at home with other discontented early Cold War veterans in The Future Is Female, which we talked about way up this thread or the previous Rolling Spec.)
At first, she's like a junior high school bio teacher: "Now class, this is what happens when you put this sort of species with this one"---kinda scary, but not too, and she won't let anybody on the slideshow tour get lost for too long: lights on again, see? One species is always an Earthling, venturing confidently or bemusedly or desperately or just compulsively, as we go along through the ages: males first for sure, but sometimes with a female, like once a hot Martian, once a hot Mithran, both ginger-haired and hot as plot point, both more knowledgeable and sensible than Earthman, both with troubled connections to Rros and Agape (britannica:

Mithraism, the worship of Mithra, the Iranian god of the sun, justice, contract, and war in pre-Zoroastrian Iran. Known as Mithras in the Roman Empire during the 2nd and 3rd centuries ce, this deity was honoured as the patron of loyalty to the emperor.

Aft

beads having been tossed), that should read---and very eventually referring to what I should have given the title for, relative-clarity-wise: "Wryneck, Draw Me"(1980)(a title that I still have to think about, hoping to draw more overall understanding from its relation to the story)

And there are a number of stories where characters never leave Earth---she might say, "You can't leave it, even when you drive it away, or somebody does."

*Eros* and Agape, duh, sorry (eros under the rose, anyway)

Oh cool, thought Yaszek was gonna do a follow-up, and sure enough:

]The Future Is Female! Volume Two, The 1970s: More Classic Science Fiction Stories By Women: A Library of America Special Publication Hardcover – October 11, 2022
by Lisa Yaszek (Editor)

Here are twenty-three wild, witty, and wonderful classics that dramatize the liberating energies of the 1970s:

Sonya Dorman, “Bitching It” (1971)
Kate Wilhelm, “The Funeral” (1972)
Joanna Russ, “When It Changed” (1972) NEBULA AWARD
Miriam Allen deFord, “A Way Out”(1973)
Vonda N. McIntyre, “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand” (1973) NEBULA
James Tiptree, Jr., “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (1973) HUGO AWARD
Kathleen Sky, “Lament of the Keeku Bird” (1973)
Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Day Before the Revolution” (1974) NEBULA & LOCUS AWARD
Eleanor Arnason, “The Warlord of Saturn’s Moons” (1974)
Kathleen M. Sidney, “The Anthropologist” (1975)
Marta Randall, “A Scarab in the City of Time” (1975)
Elinor Busby, “A Time to Kill” (1977)
Raccoona Sheldon, “The Screwfly Solution” (1977) NEBULA AWARD
Pamela Sargent, “If Ever I Should Leave You” (1974)
Joan D. Vinge, “View from a Height” (1978)
M. Lucie Chin, “The Best Is Yet to Be” (1978)
Lisa Tuttle, “Wives” (1979)
Connie Willis, “Daisy, In the Sun” (1979)

Mark Valentine posts:

The Atlantis Bookshop at 49a Museum Street, London, WC1A 1LY, have announced:

'We are delighted to be able to host the author Nina Antonia this coming weekend, at 7pm on Saturday 13 August. Her book Dancing with Salome features a series of interlinking essays which take the reader on a journey to meet the Decadent demi-monde of the 1890’s with whom Wilde and Douglas mingled.

Whilst eroticism and mysticism were key themes of the Decadents, there was also a surge of interest in ritual magic, enabled by the flowering of the “Golden Dawn” – the most significant esoteric order in England’s history. Wilde’s wife, Constance, was a member, as was W.B. Yeats, alongside Aleister Crowley and Arthur Machen. All would play a part, directly or indirectly, in the drama of Oscar Wilde’s enchanted & accursed life'.

The bookshop is also offering inscribed copies for those unable to attend in person, if ordered through their website.

Strong 'graphic design is my passion' energy there.

read THE LOST TIME ACCIDENTS by john wray. published by FSG so, you know, not *really* genre fiction

in 1905 a czech pickler suggests that time travel is possible (before being immediately run down by a very slow car). his descendants spend the next century trying to prove or disprove that suggestion in various ways (one of which involves running a nazi extermination camp)

many reviews seem to compare it to 'slaughterhouse five' because there's time travel and ww2. i would also compare it to 'little, big' apart from the fact that the protagonist is named after a josef mengele stand-in and there are no fairies, just nazis

also while i'm very familiar with the endings of SF novels being let-downs, this one took for fucking ever to get to.

(iirc i did like 'THE RIGHT HAND OF SLEEP' by this guy, but that was long ago)

also there was a manic pixie dream girl ffs

Great revive

Mark Valentine in Mercurius Magazine:

What is a terrestrial zodiac? One good definition is from John Billingsley, editor of the long-running Northern Earth journal: “A coherent set of zodiacal or quasi-zodiacal symbols outlined by features of the landscape. Generally not thought to be human-made, their empirical existence is strongly questioned.”

He tells me: “Terrestrial zodiacs can be viewed as a kind of ‘attuned artwork’ emerging from the imagination of individuals finding a particular affinity with an area of landscape that lends itself to patterning, through an interaction of natural form and human impact.”

...Probably the earliest, and certainly the most renowned, example is the Glastonbury Zodiac, identified by the sculptor and mystic Katharine Maltwood in the 1920s. The inspiration for this was a rich nexus of myths and legends that had grown up around the Somerset town, connecting it to King Arthur, whose grave, with Guinevere, the Abbey once claimed to have: and the idea that Glastonbury was therefore the Isle of Avalon. She drew inspiration from the medieval High History of the Holy Graal and in one of her later books designated the zodiac as ‘King Arthur’s Round Table’.

fwiw i also strongly question their empirical existence

That Wray book sounds terrible. Strongly disklike that "what if historical Pynchon but bloke-lit" micro genre (although I can only think of Wray and Ned Beauman as examples), it's just Ready Player One in fancy clothes.

Ugh

Re: that scene in Vance's Dying Earth. It's on my bucket list to find the right moment to repeatedly shout "avaunt" at someone.

Finally - more Zelazny reprints lined up for 2022/2023 pic.twitter.com/ry4MBblAMW

— Balázs Farkas (@fbdbh) August 31, 2022

Wonderful article about Thomas Disch by Gregory Feeley
https://www.blackgate.com/2022/08/30/thomas-m-disch-love-and-nonexistence/

Looks good, thanks!

We are pleased to report the 2022 Hugo Award winners! https://t.co/z0AC8CXe1A

— Tor.com (@tordotcom) September 5, 2022

Afraid to click.

most of the winners published by tor

can somebody explain tor to me?

I knew at one point but that was in the time of the previous thread.

They are the biggest american publisher and their website (which mostly reports about franchise junk films/tv) is popular. But they deserve credit for being the only big publisher with some commitment to novellas. And they're voting demographic (which pays for participation) skews a certain way since puppygate.

their voting demographic

Also: recently learned that one puppygater went on a killing spree, murdering people who he fantasized about murdering in a novel he written

One of those adjacent-category Hugo nominees---was hoping for an anthology, but might be good essays etc.:

Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950 to 1985...contains over twenty chapters written by contemporary authors and critics, and hundreds of full-color cover images, including thirteen thematically organised cover selections. New perspectives on key novels and authors, such as Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, John Wyndham, Samuel Delany, J.G. Ballard, John Brunner, Judith Merril, Barry Malzberg, Joanna Russ, and many others are presented alongside excavations of topics, works, and writers who have been largely forgotten or undeservedly ignored.

Also: recently learned that one puppygater went on a killing spree, murdering people who he fantasized about murdering in a novel he written

what? really?

He was an extremely minor writer and I hadn't heard of him and there's a chance the others who were boosting him didn't even read his books, there used to be lots of them giving each other rave reviews who were ideologically opposed in many ways, but some of them really do despise each other. Doris is very good at covering right wing nutjobs in the scene

Since another "superversive" is doing the viral rounds, here's a reminder that the ranks of superversive-approved authors include an actual spree killer. pic.twitter.com/iRHbi2lNO5

— Doris V. Sutherland (@DorVSutherland) August 5, 2022

I just started Remnant Population (one chapter in), and the prose is kind of bad, or at the very least, awkward. Does its quality get better?

no imo

More from Mark V:

When I began exchanging zines, tapes, and mail art with an array of correspondents, one of those I chanced upon was Mark Pawson. A friend had said to me that my envelopes were a bit boring (whatever might be said for the inside contents): his were always festooned with weird stickers and stamps. Fortunately, Mark P had the answer. He produced trapezoidal envelopes... But that wasn’t all Mark Pawson produced: there were all kinds of strange, swirling paper objects, and he was amazingly prolific. You never quite knew what would fall out of the envelope.

The same Mark Pawson (it can only be he) at Disinfotainment is still offering a bewildering and bizarre array of publications and products. You can get, for example, Monsterama, a scrapbook of imagery from vintage SF and horror films and comics, now in its third issue. Recently announced are reprints of futuristic, apocalyptic graphic novels by cyberpunk artist Tetsunori Tawaraya.

For UK punters, I keep meaning to say that Fopp in Glasgow - and I'm guessing Fopps elsewhere - have some of those British Library SF anthologies in their 2 for 7 pounds deal. Three pounds fifty is about the right price for them - the ones I've sampled are a slightly creaky mix of much-anthologised classics eg ('A Martian Odyssey' by Stanley Weinbaum) and even older obscurities, handily out of copyright. Editor Mike Ashley (not the etc etc) is an old hand at these kind of things, and plainly knows his stuff, and the design is very nice.

https://shop.bl.uk/collections/science-fiction

I'm hoping that some of the British Library's supernatural series also turns up in Fopp.

read NONA THE NINTH by tamsyn muir, the third entry in her now-four-book locked tomb series

it was fine and i will absolutely read the fourth/final entry when it comes out next year (presumably)

but also i thought the first one (GIDEON THE NINTH) was fantastic, and these two sequels have not really measured up. (if you're gonna write a series, please try not to introduce an omnipotent character at the end of the first volume, because any subsequent conflict is totally contrived)

nevertheless i enjoy her writing -- she's also pretty funny -- and look forward to future things in which she hasn't painted herself into a corner

i put gideon the ninth down in the third chapter - i gotta pick it back up! i really liked it, not sure why i didn't keep on with it.

spent half my birthday reading SPIN by robert charles wilson

i've only read this and THE CHRONOLITHS from him, which . . . iirc isn't *wildly* different? also he seems to have written at least two novels in which some alien object lands in the northern central united states and is quarantined by the government before it inevitably gets out of control

that said, SPIN's main Thing is super interesting and the government intervention isn't nearly as annoying/nihilistic as it was in late 70s pohl

Today’s Caption This: pic.twitter.com/oJi58Xg11c

— Seán Ono Lennon (@seanonolennon) September 25, 2022

RIP Coolio, just 59. Many years ago, I spent a week with him for a magazine cover story (Details, March 1996). He grew up an asthmatic kid in Compton; as an adult, he was funny and sly and complicated. I hope he's riding dragons somewhere.

The opening of the article: pic.twitter.com/WfoqlkMpsz

— Gavin Edwards (@mrgavinedwards) September 29, 2022

I'm reading Purgatory Mount by Adam Roberts, who I've never heard of despite his having a 20 year award winning career. His prose is effervescent, seems like one of those writers who really loves language which seems rare in this genre(*), or at least in the books I pick.

(*) sturgeons' law applies obv.

I'm reading Purgatory Mount by Adam Roberts, who I've never heard of despite his having a 20 year award winning career. His prose is effervescent, seems like one of those writers who really loves language which seems rare in this genre(*), or at least in the books I pick.

(*) sturgeons' law applies obv.

That Coolio story is amazing.

B. Catling has passed away. I wondered how there could be 2 documentaries about him but he was in Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair's circle.

Really impressed that my friend now has a Zagava collection, he's made a bunch of graphic novels and his prose debut was at Tartarus so he's doing pretty great
https://zagava.de/shop/the-lights-and-other-stories?edition=19

I think you would like The Thing Itself.

that actually rings a bell, though not sure what kind of bell - maybe i added it to one my many 'to read' lists then forgot about it - but yes I think you might be right.

That one is in James Redd's Infinite Library of ebooks purchased but barely started and never finished.

The original cyberpunk anthology is online for free. I wish it was a pdf
https://www.rudyrucker.com/mirrorshades/

it'll be easy enough to convert to an epub and from there to anything i think. ilxmail me.

"Note that I do not grant you the right to convert, to republish or to sell the free ebooks or the contents of the free webpages."

so, er, don't ilxmail me.

although "html to pdf" turns up a heap of sites that'll do this for you

there also java, javascript, python and c# libraries that claim to do it if you have the coding chops.

I have the bottom left copy, can recall a few of the stories - gernsback, petra, m in m, all 4/5, though if they count as cyberpunk it's in form not content.