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

Alasdair Reynolds' Eversion: a bit of a change for him, and I think he was successful at what he was trying to do, but what he was trying to doesn't work as a 300 page novel. Essentially it's the same story told in five different ways so doesn't have any more depth or complexity than a 60 page short story. People on goodreads love it though.

I also read emily st john mandell's sea of tranquility, which was fine, idk, nice idea connecting ancient and modern sf ideas of time travel and simulation but overall, despite reaching for weighty themes, felt even more ephemeral than station eleven.

Micaiah Johnson's A Space Between Worlds is an effective multi-verse thriller: got me up every morning, 7-7:30, to read for an hour, with or w/o caffeine, producing a buzz/afterbuzz that lasted quite awhile. Characterization developing much more via action (and vice-versa) than by extended monologues of the taut, first person narration. Not "breezy," but moves along, with continuity and (also of) multi- and intra-verse shifts. Narrator Cara is "a walker of worlds," to quote one of her more appreciative observers, but also something of a dysfuntional detective, though whodunnit is mainly a bridge to whut now (manipulating factions, though less for the sake of a plague-on-all-your-houses/revenge than a gamble on rough justice)(She's from Ashtown.)

taut, first person, and pretty much *present-tense* narration, though with quick flashbacks/loops to clarify and remind of currently most relevant backstory elements.

(if no rough justice, then revenge would suffice.)

yeah i liked that one too

Today Fresh Air re-ran most of Terry Gross's good if brief 1993 Octavia Butler interview, incl. the author's reading from the then recently published Parable of the Sower, set in 2024, with some of it sounding more likely all the time, esp. since Trump's ascendancy (and now DeSantis competing from his right). It's preceded by John Powers' mixed review of the Kindred adaptation: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/14/1142768079/pioneering-writer-octavia-butler-on-writing-black-people-and-women-into-sci-fi
Here's the whole interview, about three minutes longer:
https://freshairarchive.org/segments/science-fiction-writer-octavia-butler

https://www.blackgate.com/2022/12/10/valancourt-books/
Granta too

Adrian Tchaikovsy's Shards of Earth. I dunno, has all the trappings of good modern space opera - inscrutable aliens, interplanetary politics, ftl via future physics space-time grappling, giant excession type planet destroying entities - it all seems so joyless though. I long for the playfulness of Iain M Banks.

any spiders?

i am lost with tchaikovsy, he seems to write faster than i can read

no spiders. the spider booked seemed a little more fun than this one - and the elder race novella definitely was.

booked

have read the first two Children Of books, which is enough. and the ironclads thing which was a bit aliens2. he needs to stop using Noun Of Noun as book title though because it confuses me. Shards Of Earth, Cage Of Souls, Dogs Of War, Doors Of Eden...

(on the plus side, there's always something of his for 99p from amazon)

read TRIPLANITARY! by E.E. 'DOC' SMITH! first book of (or perhaps more of a prequel to) the LENSMAN SERIES!

it was quite imaginative, horribly written, and featured dialogue that could have been better written by one of the aliens involved. no wonder heinlein loved the guy

“Of course,” she said again, as steadily, thrilled this time to the depths of her being by the sheer manhood of him who had thus simply voiced his Code; a man of such fiber that neither love of life nor his infinitely greater love for her could make him lower its high standard. “We are going through. Forget that I am a woman. We are three human beings, fighting a world full of monsters. I am simply one of us three. I will steer your ship, fire your projectors, or throw your bombs. What can I do best?”

have to give him credit, however, in that the 'girl' didn't constantly faint, and that the hero fucked neither her nor everyone else in sight as poul anderson would have done 20 years later

my bad: TRIPLANETARY!

appreciated that the bad guy is named roger, tho

Jessica Amanda Salmonson - The Dark Tales

These stories are from the 70s and 80s and in the intro note it's made clear they're in the mode of the Weird Tales circle, leaning more towards CASmith, with Dunsany and William Morris also in the mix.

"Hode Of The High Place" is about a boy running away from home to live in an abandoned ruin that his village is scared of. This stands up pretty well next to CASmith and even appeared in a Zothique anthology.
"The Revelations And Pursuits Of Timith, Son Of Timith" is by far the longest story, I loved how it has so many phases and changes of perceived circumstances (constant changes towards the end), the eerie sea adventure had the makings of a great ghost story but it goes in completely different directions after that. Wild and bleak, it should be in sword and sorcery anthologies because it's far too hard to find right now.
"Wrath Of The Ebon Knights" is another good action story. "Meadow Silence" is about an intersex person, so I guess it might be considered ahead of it's time (I'm not sure I understood the ending but I liked it). "The Ravaging In The Dell" is another story with a harsher edge than Weird Tales would have allowed.

The rest of the stories are fairly solid horror and fantasy. I've never been able to articulate my problem with some of the storytelling characteristics that fairy tales, fables and legends evoking distant centuries often have but I find it in early Dunsany and in some of these. But it's a minor complaint I can barely explain.
Salmonson's story notes are very enjoyable, especially concerning her evolving feelings about "Timith".

This is an early Sarob Press book, only 277 copies exist and they will likely cost an uncomfortable amount and it's a very short collection. Ideally this would get a cheap reprint with the lovely Lara Bandilla wraparound cover intact but somebody really needs to at least reprint "Timith", "Hode" and "Wrath".

Thanks for the info, didn't know about Salmonson.
New post by Douglas A. Anderson, editor of excellent Tales Before Tolkien:

Here are a couple of offtrail new books that I want to call attention to.
First, is the doorstop-sized anthology, Bruin's Midnight Reader (2022), the uncredited editor being Jonathan Eeds of Bruin Books. Over 760 pages, this anthology contains a host of worthy older materials plus a goodly amount of licensed and still copyrighted items. Similarly there are illustrations by classic artists and new ones made for this volume. One highlight is the 1924 version of The Thing in the Woods, a novel by Margery Williams (author of The Velveteen Rabbit), published as by Harper Williams. (The complicated differences between the original 1913 edition and the 1924 revision are described in a previous Wormwoodiana post, here: http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-two-versions-of-thing-in-woods.html )

...Besides familiar classic authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Ralph Adams Cram, M.R. James, Algernon Blackwood, Walter de la Mare, and Clark Ashton Smith, the more modern writers include Brian Aldiss, Theodore Sturgeon, Stanley Ellin, T.S. Eliot, Reggie Oliver and Paul Theroux. There is also a story by the editor, and a recent translation of a Hanns Heinz Ewers story too. All in all a nice amount of reading material for the price (US$ 22; ISBN 9781737210610).

The other one that Anderson covers in this post is, he says, described pretty well by publisher:

The Eunuch is a laugh-out-loud funny narrative that begins as an effort to extirpate the lies of the hagiographic official history of Babylon, becomes a story of a very peculiar love triangle between a King with mental health issues, an alluring and manipulative concubine, and an obsessive eunuch slave-scribe, and then ends by describing the fall of an empire.

For more comments, info, and illustrations from the books, here's the whole post:
http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2022/12/recent-offtrail-releases.html

I posted some Salmonson interviews and non-fiction upthread somewhere. She written more kinds of things and was an editor, scholar and anthologist too.

read LAST EXIT by max gladstone

deeeeeeeeply indebted to stephen king. dude writes a+ portentous filler prose that doesn't necessarily lead anywhere but certainly establishes the mood of everything falling apart. also writes good prose about intense relationships falling apart, although it's difficult to take everyone blaming themselves for everything seriously when they're at the same time being attacked by horrific supernatural forces

anyway i liked it -- v. fast-paced -- even though it never really made sense at all

https://pariedolia.weebly.com/nimh/oldhammer-lit-101

This Stephen Baxter article about Warhammer books is kind of fascinating, they seemed to approach a large chunk of the notable british fantasy authors of the late 80s/early 90s and David Pringle worked on a lot of them while he was editing Interzone, which is why there were so many surprising quality authors on there you'd never expect to find

Never knew any of that, thanks!

Mark Valentine on English almanacs:

...The most popular printed items outside devotional works were almanacs. They sold in their thousands. The wise almanac-makers gave their products an air of piety by including saints’ days and church festivals in their calendars, and an air of utility by offering practical hints on agriculture and medicine. But what their readers most wanted was their prognostications. It was the astrology that sold. Further, the stormier this was the better.

Nobody seemed to care very much whether the cryptically-couched forecasts came true or not: what mattered was that they were vivid and vigorous reading. Mysterious wording was an advantage to the drafter, as it left room to manoeuvre: but it was also relished by the reader who could see in it what they wanted, as in an obsidian mirror. Almanacs appealed to the perennial lust for wonder and weirdness in the world. They were the fantastic literature of the day.

As Bernard Capp describes, in his engrossing study Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs 1500-1800 (1979), from the early 17th century onwards, almanacs poured from the press. There were occasional skirmishes: some of the more incautious or belligerent prophets and printers got themselves into trouble; sometimes the Stationers or the Archbishop’s Chaplain would stir. But among cobblers and hatters, and pedlars and signwriters, and blacksmiths and wheelwrights, prevalent among the artisans and the independent trades, there was a strong appetite for this sort of literature and it had to be appeased.

This literature was by its very nature subversive. It provided an alternative form of knowledge and speculation to the church. The person who was obliged to sit in a pew on Sundays and listen to scripture readings and sermons could in their own home or workshop or at the inn peruse an entirely different way of looking at and interpreting the world.

It was one in which the stars had influence on earthly affairs, comets and meteors portended great things, dragons could be seen in clouds, prodigies might at any moment appear, rulers (usually, though not invariably, abroad) might be overthrown, and there were rumours about the Sultan of Baghdad, the Czar of Muscovy and the Emperor of Cathay. It would be too much to call astrology and prophecy a rival religion, but it was certainly a rival spirit.

And it was hard to contain. The church could hardly condemn astrology outright without implicating the Magi of the nativity story, who had become popular saints, with their shrine at Cologne a fervent focus for pilgrimage. It had to content itself with a fitful petulance about its privileges which the cannier astrologer and printer could easily avoid disturbing.

The upsurge in this sort of prognostickatory and apocalyptic literature grew even higher in the Civil War period. The War itself prompted many more effusions, both political and religious. But it also meant that both the monopoly and the censorship were ragged. They could not be enforced where the King’s writ and the church’s influence no longer ran.

It is true an alternative authority issuing from the puritan divines and military commanders of the Roundheads might sometimes exert itself, but they were busy with the war. Further, this side was itself an uneasy alliance of several different persuasions, and could not afford yet to separate the sheep from the goats: that could come later. Thus, from about 1640 to 1650 there is a marvellous eruption of eccentric publications from all sorts of prophets and visionaries.

Once unleashed, the almanac and the prophetic work could not easily be suppressed, and they continued to be produced in numbers after the Restoration and beyond. The first dedicated scholar of the subject, the splendidly-named Ernest Fulcrand Bosanquet, wrote in 1917: ‘For three and a half centuries the Almanack has been the most popular book in the English language; and together with the Bible has been the basis of practically every household library in this country; in fact in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries these two books were probably the entire library of many families.’

The work of visionary writers such as Christopher Smart and William Blake may be better appreciated when understood within the context of this world of both the Bible and the Almanac. The symbolism of astrology, as perpetuated by the almanacs, infuses Yeats’ poetry (and practice), and also the work of other modernists such as T S Eliot, Edith Sitwell and Joseph Macleod...

started Inhibitor Phase but i'm not sure i'm enjoying it. all the old characters have been given different names and i'm not sure i remember them anyway, even without this extra level of obfuscation. and the set pieces seem just like that, set pieces. feels a lot like Consider Phlebus, complete with cannibal cult.

read BENEATH THE RISING, billed as 'cosmic horror' and approvingly blurbed by several people i've actually heard of

astonishingly and objectively terrible; possibly the worst book i've read in years

but also i sorta enjoyed it (probably because of insomnia)

More news from Wormwoodiana:

At The Endless Bookshelf, Henry Wessells explains why, a hundred years ago, 1923 was the year of 'Peak Machen', when he was 'at the height of his literary reputation on both sides of the Atlantic'. Publishers, book-collectors, young acolytes, all gave him an acclaim greater than any he had seen before, even in the Eighteen Nineties. Henry also places the Welsh mage in the context of other literary developments of the time,and recalls some of the choicest Machen items he has seen in his bookselling career.
(Mark Valentine)

finished Inhibitor Space. didn't really enjoy it.

come back to an old universe you haven't written about in years and which the reader can barely remember and then you give all the old barely remembered characters new names just to make it even harder. you then "kill" one of them off whilst people are in suspended animation, off screen basically.

and the main task had a string of previous tasks to be completed, some of them with interruptions. you get the required weapon 20 pages from the end of the book and then wrap it up in a letter home, the other 15 pages being acknowledgments and timeline and a reminder of the characters

yeah, starting the year catching up with vaguely new sci fi things i never got around to at the time

currently reading The Black Locomotive by Rian Hughes who is probably best known as an illustrator. liked XX and this cuts back on the graphical nature whilst still having a lot of illustrations in it. Crossrail tunneling unearths something...

but that's a real book and i can't read it at night without having the light on, so i also have Project Hail Mary on the go on the ereader. strangely familiar to a thread in the above book

My local 2nd-hand bookshop has turned up a ton of SF. Mostly cheap paperbacks from 1960s-1990s; also a load of old magazines including Galaxy, Analog, et al. Ace Double paperbacks also.

I was enthralled by the possibilities, and bought 3 Leigh Brackett novels on a friend's recommendation. I also bought 3 old Galaxy issues including the original 'The Fireman' (Ray Bradbury) and a couple of lesser known magazines.

I'm tempted to buy more but might just end up thinking I don't have the space. Tons of Jack Vance, Robert Silverberg, Clifford Simak, et al.

They also have a lot of BEST OF volumes of short stories by Del Rey press - including the best of Lester Del Rey! I bought the best of C.M. Kornbluth, edited by Frederik Pohl, which is apt. 330 pages, I could spend a long time getting through this. Wonder if anyone rates Kornbluth's short stories.

a lot of Galaxy and Astounding Stories are available on the web having fallen into some kind of copyright loophole

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/bookshelf/198
https://archive.org/details/galaxymagazine

here's the bradbury (nice cover!)
https://archive.org/details/galaxymagazine-1951-02

so far this month i have finished

reynolds - inhibitor space (didn't like)
rian hughes - black locomotive (felt a bit light)
andy weir - hail mary (fun, fast read)
and am now on
a c clarke - Against the Fall of Night (i've read the expanded version)

Yes, it's good and useful that GALAXY is available online. I like the idea of owning a few hard copies though.

That is indeed a good cover though surprising lacking in relevance to THE FIREMAN.

You (reader & writer) never knew what you were going to get with any given issue of Galaxy while H.L. Gold was editor---he could keep on making changes after the last conference with an author, putting in obviously fake happy endings, for instance. Nevertheless, in this https://sfmagazines.com/?p=1989 description of Galaxy Science Fiction v02n01, April 1951, William Tenn is quoted (from his contribution to a good anthology) as saying the process was worth it to him ("Betelgeuse Bridge" is his story in the issue discussed):

William Tenn contributes an excellent and very quotable memoir in Galaxy: Thirty Years of Innovative Science Fiction, edited by Frederik Pohl, Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander. I’ll limit myself to a specific quote about Betelgeuse Bridge:
I doubt that The Demolished Man or The Space Merchants or More Than Human would quite have come to pass without Galaxy. I know that I might never have written “Betelgeuse Bridge” if it had not been for the magazine and the milieu that Horace Gold created. It’s my kind of story and my kind of idea—it was the first conscious effort in what I call my “Here Comes Civilization” series—but it needed a context where it could fit comfortably. Horace gave me that. How, I still don’t quite know, with all of his damaging phone calls, compulsive over-editing, quixotic rejections, and prying and puttering into my work.
Before Galaxy I wrote science fiction. After Galaxy I wrote only my kind of science fiction. And for that, I must admit, the responsibility lies with one of the most irritating and aggravating men I’ve ever known. From deep within his editorial cave, Horace Gold somehow changed me. I believe he changed us all. p.37

He was drafted in 1944, although he was Canadian, flatfooted, overage and had a newborn child...As a result of trauma during his wartime experiences, he developed agoraphobia which became so severe that for more than two decades he was unable to leave his apartment.

History of the mag---didn't realize Pohl got so involved before being officially named as the ailing Gold's successor; maybe he improved working conditions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_Science_Fiction

They also have a lot of BEST OF volumes of short stories by Del Rey press - including the best of Lester Del Rey! I bought the best of C.M. Kornbluth, edited by Frederik Pohl, which is apt. 330 pages, I could spend a long time getting through this. Wonder if anyone rates Kornbluth's short stories.

― the pinefox, Monday, January 23, 2023 10:40 AM

If you see the Best Of John Brunner then maybe grab it because it's rare now. I just seen a booktuber the other day praising Kornbluth's short stories and they did sound good.

I think they did have the Best of Brunner!

I love the Gold / Galaxy / Pohl milieu that poster Dow cites. Pretty much my favourite area of SF.

Who knew?

Found out that Stephen E. Andrews has a youtube channel, he wrote the bulk of 100 Must Read Science Fiction Novels and 100 Must Read Fantasy Novels (I loved them both) and I've been watching tons of his videos, he's a bookseller too. He has interviews with Christopher Priest, Nina Allan, Chris Beckett and multiple with Tom Toner.
I just bought a Tom Toner book the other day after seeing Andrews hype him up, but I had wanted it before because Paul Di Filippo and Adam Roberts loved it too.
Andrews talks a great deal about authors being increasingly pressured into series novels, fantasy in particular, bloating the books and the late 1970s Tolkien clone boom. I can't recall if it was him or his friend Scott Bradfield (who also has a youtube channel) but one of them made a case that lots more authors used to have a career of SFF singletons that had wildly different concepts. Seems like Silvia Moreno-Garcia is one of the very few major publisher authors today who habitually writes a different kind of novel from the previous.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2KSv800IgY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDa1Wfi1qbY

Sounds good, thanks for posting.

I'm slowly reading the C.M. Kornbluth stories. Strongest so far is 'The Little Black Bag'. A future doctor accidentally sends his 'black bag' into the past via a time travel mechanism. It's picked up by a drunken former doctor in the 1940s, who discovers that it contains, by current standards, miraculous cures. Quite a good reflection on the history of medicine. The one thing the story does *not* do, that time travel stories always do, is suppose that altering the past alters the present, and worry about that.

Robert Silverberg included 'The Little Black Bag' in his anthology Worlds of Wonder, an excellent selection of classic SF short stories with good introductory/autobiographical essays about each one:

Four in One (1953) novelette by Damon Knight
Fondly Fahrenheit (1954) novelette by Alfred Bester
No Woman Born (1944) novelette by C.L. Moore
Home Is the Hunter (1953) story by Henry Kuttner & C.L. Moore
The Monsters (1953) story by Robert Sheckley
Common Time (1953) novelette by James Blish
Scanners Live in Vain (1950) story by Cordwainer Smith
Hothouse (1961) novelette by Brian W. Aldiss
The New Prime (1951) novelette by Jack Vance
Colony (1953) novelette by Philip K. Dick
The Little Black Bag (1950) novelette by C.M. Kornbluth
Light of Other Days (1966) story by Bob Shaw
Day Million (1966) story by Frederik Pohl

^yes! This book is really well donez

Done even

It’s got some alternate title as well, Science Fiction 101 or something like that

The only one I remember scratching my head over was the Kuttner, which was fine but I didn’t find it as good as some of his other stuff. Maybe the PKD as well. But every thing else was ace double.

Maybe I just need to read “Home is the Hunter” one more time to see.

James Redd, my local 2nd-hand shop had an influx of Ace Doubles! Tempting.

Heh. The fancy word for that type of book is apparently tête-bêche.

Silverberg gives a long explanation of why he chose that particular Kuttner story and not something better known,

Pinefox i hoped you grabbed some of those Vance you saw there. When i got into him around 1990 it was so easy to harvest almost everything for normal used pb prices but now I almost never see used Vances

God that was a fun time

I hope you got a bunch of those Ballantine/Del Rey Best Ofs. Those were my jams in Junior High School.

Currently reading Sirens of Titan and so far (now on Mars) finding it to be much less of a smirkfest and much more dedicated yarnspinning to occasionally poignant storytelling than expected: late 50s genre-and-other appeal, was/is one for the PKD, Vance fanz.