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

Douglas A. Anderson (Tales before Tolkien) posts on Wormwoodiana:

"The Shining Pyramid" Centenary

The Shining Pyramid, by Arthur Machen, edited from Machen’s previously uncollected journalism by Vincent Starrett and published in May 1923 in Chicago by Covici-McGee, is a landmark book, both for good and bad reasons. Of the good reasons, it was important in the development of Machen’s popularity in America. Of the bad reasons, it precipitated the end of the friendship between the author and the editor. And as a title, it is easily confused with Machen’s own selection titled The Shining Pyramid and published by Martin Secker of London in 1925, which has very different contents, as is discussed below.
...But what of the contents of the book itself? The Shining Pyramid consists of some twenty-two tales and essays, several of which date from late 1880s and early 1890s, and a few come from the late 1910s. Thirteen essays come from 1907-08, when Machen wrote regularly for The Academy, then edited by Lord Alfred Douglas. One essay (“The Capital Levy”) was even unpublished—it was printed from a manuscript that Machen gave to Starrett. Wallace Smith contributed an interior illustration.

The short stories and fiction are probably the most significant items. These include “The Shining Pyramid” (1895), “Out of the Earth” (1915), “The Lost Club” (1890), “The Wonderful Woman” (1890), and three pieces (1907-08) —“In Convertendo,” “The Hidden Mysery” and “The Martyr” — all being salvaged from the original ending of The Secret Glory (published in 1922 but written in 1907) and not used in the published book (Machen described such pieces as “wreckage”).

Starrett’s second volume, The Glorious Mystery, contains twenty-eight pieces...Only two items are fiction: “The Iron Maid,” an 1890 version of what became a section in some editions of The Three Imposters (1895), notably omitted from the 1923 U.S. edition; and “The Rose Garden,” a stray 1908 publication collected in Ornaments in Jade (1924), Four essays come from periodicals from 1910-1920, but the bulk of the essays, some twenty in total, come from The Academy, 1907-08, as described above.

After Starrett’s second compilation was published, Machen made a one-volume selection published by Martin Secker in London under the title The Shining Pyramid, confusing things bibliographically. It was published in an edition limited to 250 signed copies in December 1924, and in a trade edition in February 1925. (A U.S. edition, made from sheets printed in Great Britain, published in April 1925 by Alfred A. Knopf of New York further confuses bibliographical matters.) Machen’s selection amounts to only eight items from Starrett’s two books. The fiction includes “The Shining Pyramid”; “Out of the Earth”; “The Happy Children”; and two of the three pieces aborted from the original ending of The Secret Glory (“In Convertendo” and “The Martyr” but not “The Hidden Mystery”). “The Secret of the Sangraal” is expanded from the version in The Glorious Mystery (itself reprinted from The Academy, 1907). “The Mystic Speech” is a retitling of “A Secret Language” in The Glorious Mystery. The final item (“Educated and the Uneducated”) came from The Shining Pyramid...

Cool titles---good stories?

I think I've read three of them and they're good but I'm not as big a Machen head as so many people I know

read THE FERRYMAN by justin cronin

overblown in places, and owes a great deal to christopher priest, but pretty decent imo. the plot doesn't bear too much close inspection but it's intriguing and paced like a thriller -- i pretty much read it in one sitting

Cool, will check library for that.
Fixing to check in one that I just finished: The Fair Folk, 2005 Science Fiction Book Club anthology of new stories by big names, edited by Marvin Kaye. The Folk are presented as just comprehensible enough in human character terms for a glimpse, a lingering taste: sympathetic enough at some points, along with the capacity for danger, for assholery, omg and wtf, partially teachable moments sliding by.
Tanith Lee's strong opener evokes sleekness maybe under a kind of curse, left/created as beautiful and hollow, hard to fill: human narrator stars as a modern Cinderella, finally blurting "THREE WISHES!" Not specifying, so local Lord of the Enchanted Wood takes the opp to declare that she she must grant him three wishes, since he and his kind have done the other way around for so long---thus the title, "UOUS." (Not "IOU."). His first two wishes are just for show, the sorts of things that the powerful, human and his kind, are supposed to care about, or have to show their power, but the third is what he does want, Narrator;s voice is brittle, but lots comes through the cracks.
"Grace Notes," by Megan Lindholm (AKA Robin Hobbs), is the most low-key immersive, as a seldom-glimpsed brownie changes the everyday life of a young working man (he's messy and monotonous; she's into Martha Stewart). Also there's a human young woman who figures out what's going on, tries to help him deal with it. She's got a degree in folklore, he's got a more practical tech one, but they're both working grub jobs vs. student loans, along with the brownie's own striving.
Kim Newman's "The Gypsies In The Wood" is good but marbled with cuet Britishy Late Victorian/Edwardian nudge-nudge, albeit with a more modern(more audibly humming along) network of manipulations, in which human and other characters bravely do their best and worst. All these stories are long; this one seems long-ass, but I got used to skimming the involved wallpaper.
Patricia A. McKillip's "The Kelpie" has some of the same knick-knacks, unexpectedly, and getting past them wasn't really worth it, especially considering how high she's set the bar in other stories (although I haven't read that many, mainly some others in anthologies and her novel Winter Rose)
Craig Shaw Gardner's "An Embarrassment of Elves" is also kinda Britishy, an extended joek ov expertise, relaxed and well-timed.
Killer finale is Jane Yolden and Midori Snyder's "Except The Queen," presented as correspondence, mainly between two Folk sisters, exiled to humanity for pranking the bitch Queen---maybe the authors kicked letters back and forth without warning, topping each other, with some seamless edits later; it's very cohesively complex after all (leaving me with just a few questions, which seems right). Novella deserving a stand-alone edition (prob is or will be an e-book, I suspect).

https://www.blackgate.com/2023/05/21/in-memory-of-a-legendary-collector-denny-lien-september-26-1945-april-15-2023/

Utterly vast collection, seems like a lot of it will be binned

this month's and next month's reading will be catching up on the 10 250-ish-page sff things clogging up my kobo.

so far, Rendezvous With Rama (reread), very easy reading, took 3 days without even pushing it.

now reading Robot by Adam Wisniewski-Snerg, which is much more of a chore. reminds me of the underground bits of Tiger Tiger so far.

recently:

THE POSSIBILITY OF LIFE by Jaime Green: short, breezy popular science about whether extraterrestrial life exists and what it might be like . . . but the author is a total sci-fi nerd and leans on it a lot for metaphors

WITCH KING by Martha Wells: full-length non-murderbot fantasy novel with a terrible title. solid, as usual. the (must i say it?) 'world-building' was extensive enough to support sequels

INK BLOOD SISTER SCRIBE by Emma Törzs: i know there are thousands of 'global conspiracy involving magical books' novels published each month (off the top of my head, MR. PENUMBRA'S 24-HOUR BOOKSTORE was lightweight fine, THE CARTOGRAPHERS by Peng Shepherd sucked ass, FOULCAULT'S PENDULUM is cool, was Dan Brown like this? haven't read it). anyway this one was pretty decent and at least well-written

TITANIUM NOIR by Nick Harkaway: i like this dude although i could have done without the steampunkish influences in some of his earlier books. this one is, well, noir + very specific and interesting SF effects. he does it very well. kinda hated the ending but pretty sure i was supposed to

THE MOUNTAIN IN THE SEA by Ray Nayler: this one i'm not sure i *liked* so much as i was massively impressed by it. dude's first novel, kind of a techno-thriller in the background (or is it?) but mostly about language and communication and what it means to be sentient. this one i would perhaps recommend to user caek (and be mortally embarrassed if he hates it)

Mark Valetine posts:

One of the more unusual volumes in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy paperback series in the 1960s and 70s was Orlando Furioso Volume 1, sub-titled The Ring of Angelica. This was published fifty years ago: the US edition was in January 1973, and the UK Pan Ballantine edition in September 1973. It was translated by Richard Hodgens, and introduced by the series’ Editorial Consultant, Lin Carter. The dramatic cover art was by David Johnston.
It was the start of a version of Ariosto’s Italian Renaissance epic revolving around the court of Charlemagne and his knights. This work was roughly the equivalent of Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur or the Medieval Welsh tales in The Mabinogion, and like them plays brazenly with history, topography, time and magic.

The Ariosto poem, itself a continuation of another hand’s earlier work, is a massive work of heroic fantasy, complete with kings, barons, questing knights, vigorous heroines, witches, wizards, monsters, strange landscapes, feuds, intrigues, and tumultuous plotting. Carter, no doubt with an eye to the market, described it as ‘in the great tradition of imaginary world fantasy, a direct ancestor of The Well at the World’s End, The Worm Ouroboros and The Lord of the Rings.’ The problem for a modern audience, however, is its form: it is a very, very long, closely-rhymed poem.
...The great virtue of Hodgens’ prose version is that it is clear, brisk and succinct. It makes no attempt to emulate the style of the original or its poetic form, but instead focuses on the narrative. His interest is in the romantic, chivalric and mythic content and to some extent in the worldly, sophisticated tone. He also avoids the sham-archaic approach used in some historical fiction (‘godwottery’ or ‘gadzookery’, as it is sometimes called), in favour of a more direct, lucid prose. The reader can therefore appreciate the story Ariosto told, even if the full literary intricacies of the work are not conveyed...

Mark *Valentine*

now onto Octavia Butler's 'Kindred' which is 1% science fiction and 99% life on a plantation.

Time travel continues, more than 1% in effect on characters.

I am starting Kindred as well! Just finished Babel 17 by Delaney which was absolutely wonderful and touching and thought provoking.

i and halfway through kindred and did realise this morning that the next logical step is rufus being dragged into the present, or 1976 anyway. i look forward to being proved right.

(am enjoying it well enough, just wasn't what i expected, especially compared to the dick-alike I've just finished)

TITANIUM NOIR by Nick Harkaway: i like this dude although i could have done without the steampunkish influences in some of his earlier books. this one is, well, noir + very specific and interesting SF effects. he does it very well. kinda hated the ending but pretty sure i was supposed to

I liked this, can't resist a tight sci-fi noir.

Patti perret - The Faces Of Science Fiction

From 1984, this book has 82 photos of American science fiction authors plus a statement from each. Some writers talk about their genre, writing in general or even life in general. A few do this in the form of a poem. As you might imagine, a lot of the statements are quite defensive.

It's from a point in time when A. E. Van Vogt, C. L. Moore, Alfred Bester and James Tiptree were still around to participate. Heinlein and Ellison aren't here but most of the writers you would expect are featured.
Oddly this book gave me some of the strongest nostalgia for pre-internet life and it must be seeing all the writers homes and imagining how peaceful it might have been.

Tiptree writes something really interesting about peoples uneasiness around being unable to confirm someone's gender. Alan Dean Foster looks very wealthy. The reflection of Thomas Disch is seen on his toaster. S. P. Somtow says something very strange about eastern and western ways of thinking. Larry Niven thinks it's a sin to waste a reader's time and I agree. Ian Wallace has a painting of himself as a muscular hero. Karl Edward Wagner has pictures of Diana Rigg on his wall.

This is a hugely charming book, most of the statements are very thoughtful and it got me curious about the few writers I didn't know. I also have the 1996 sequel The Faces Of Fantasy which has American, British and Irish writers, many returning faces and even more surprises. I strongly recommend both books.

Can’t stop thinking that says Peter Perrett.

Another Girl, Another Planetary Romance

read THE FERRYMAN by justin cronin

overblown in places, and owes a great deal to christopher priest, but pretty decent imo. the plot doesn't bear too much close inspection but it's intriguing and paced like a thriller -- i pretty much read it in one sitting

I didn't love this book, but any particular Christopher Priest?

‘the affirmation’ imo

Yes to that

Haven’t read any of the last several, but pretty much everything through THE ADJACENT was very high quality.

reading the dispossessed for the second time, first time was 20 odd years ago. i don't remember anything about it - what happens, what could happen, what kind of book it is.

Apologies, of course I meant the dispossed https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/134991320-the-dispossed

(i'm getting a lot of 404s from individual book pages on goodreads lately. like that one)

A highlight from Faces Of Science Fiction I forgotten to mention is David Gerrold saying he loves killing people he knows in his stories and that he has lost count of the number of times he has killed his dog. The photo has Gerrold sitting in the house while his dog watches him from outside.

Thanks for the Christopher Priest recommendations - I've only read Inverted World and The Evidence, will get on to The Affirmation soon.

INVERTED WORLD is some kind of ILB classic at this point, unless the worm recently turned. THE EVIDENCE is one of the recent ones I have been ignoring thus far.

the one i read was very mathsy and if you want mathsy then Greg Egan is your man.

re: faces of sf, archive.org has it up:
https://archive.org/details/The.Faces.Of.Science.Fiction.1984/

you weren't kidding about Disch and the toaster!
https://ia600800.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages.php?zip=/34/items/The.Faces.Of.Science.Fiction.1984/The.Faces.Of.Science.Fiction.1984_jp2.zip&file=The.Faces.Of.Science.Fiction.1984_jp2/The.Faces.Of.Science.Fiction.1984_0150.jp2&id=The.Faces.Of.Science.Fiction.1984&scale=8&rotate=0

Welp:

The Brave Little Toaster is a 1987 American independent[4] animated musical film directed by Jerry Rees.[5] It is based on the 1980 novella of the same name by Thomas M. Disch.[6]...It is set in a world where domestic appliances and other consumer electronics come to life, pretending to be lifeless in the presence of humans. The story focuses on five anthropomorphic household appliances, which include a toaster, a lamp stand, a blanket, a radio and a vacuum cleaner, who go on a quest to search for their owner.[7]
...The Brave Little Toaster received positive reviews and was popular on home video. It was followed by two sequels, The Brave Little Toaster to the Rescue in 1997 and The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars in 1998.[9]

disch is so great

read THE LAST POLICEMAN by ben h. winters, as suggested by our own daft kid james morrison

first of a trilogy, basically a police procedural, except . . . in six months an enormous asteroid will collide with the earth. so, you know, like, what's the point?

anyway i'm gonna keep reading and if they all don't die fiery deaths i will be disappointed. which seems rude, but so it goes

The Dispossessed - well it's scarcely worth saying, a stone cold unimpeachable bona fide 5 star classic - though also not too hard to see why I may not have quite seen that first time around. It's doubtless trivial compared to the political themes but I liked how the structure mirrored the ideas of simultaneity (the interleaving of the anarres and urras chapters means the separate events seem to occur at the same time), sequence (of course you read it sequentially, duh) and circles/cycles (the events of the last chapter immediately precede those of the first).

Great points!

My maiden voyage back into Aldiss? In living memory at least, spurred also a look-up on one of the previous Rolling Speculative threads:

Reading Brian Aldiss' The Long Afternoon of Earth. It's not, so far, very good. But the ideas - the entire continent the story takes place on is filled with one giant banyan tree, the earth is tidally locked to the sun, vegetable creatures have replaced most animals, humans are about a foot and a half tall and green, there are giant (one mile long), vegetable-based spiders who travel through space and have spun webs around the earth and the moon are so crazy I kind of want to see where this goes.

Also read Galaxies Like Grains of Sand recently, which was a collection of loosely connected shorts from magazines; some ahead-of-his-time ideas (a kind of universal language that allows magic-like manipulation of reality, a massive cancerous blob that devours living organisms and becomes a kind of hive-mind, and, uh, a nuclear race war that drives whitey to the moon) but, again, flawed execution.

So Barefoot in the Head is next to check out by him.

― jimmy falloff (GOTT PUNCH II HAWKWINDZ), Sunday, September 27, 2015 4:11 AM (seven years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Oh and "Out of Reach" in Galaxies has a proto-Matrix thing with people locked into dream-machines. 1957!

― jimmy falloff (GOTT PUNCH II HAWKWINDZ), Sunday, September 27, 2015 4:14 AM (seven years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Is The Long Afternoon of Earth a different version to Hothouse? It's definitely the Aldiss I'd like to read first.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Sunday, September 27, 2015 6:42 AM (seven years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Apparently Long Afternoon is an abridged version of Hothouse. Which is a shame because I don't know if I'll be bothered to read it again, unabridged, in the next forty years.

― jimmy falloff (GOTT PUNCH II HAWKWINDZ), Sunday, September 27, 2015
Barefoot is definitely next. Helliconia looks insane, but I haven't read it.

Don I somehow missed the cover art - I'm reading the same one you posted an image of; it's really easy to suck me in with some psychedelic bullshit cover art like that. The Hothouse cover's cool too, though.

SPOILERS GUYS

I've gotten to the bit where a symbiotic, morel-like fungus that grows on living things is part of the plot and it's kind of grossing me out a lot.

― jimmy falloff (GOTT PUNCH II HAWKWINDZ), Sunday, September 27, 2015

The moment-to-moment pace, with selective speed-ups/overviews:"Subequently, for a season" etc, is narrated by a helpful, encouraging almost down-to-earth voice, as in a good old nature doc we might have seen in a classroom, albeit with the occasional exclamation point, also never quite know what kind of word choice to expect, from one step to the next.

Any of yall read the apparently unabridged version, Hot House ? Any significant differences? I want it anyway, and whatever else comes to hand, prob via library loan. Should Barefoot in the Head be next?

'The Affirmation' was great, thanks to everyone who suggested it.

Glad you liked it.

inverted world is 99p on Amazon Kindle uk this month btw

Right, and that’s usually the first Christopher Priest book recommendation around these parts.

neil gaiman was after my time as a kid SF enthusiast and then, for better or worse i was put off by the whole amanda palmer thing

anyway i finally read 'american gods'

it was pretty good, but also not at all unlike a lesser stephen king novel with slightly less cringy dialogue from the black characters

This book: https://dharlanwilson.com/books/stars🕸/

Click on the link if only to see an incredible pull quote from none other than Barry N. Malzberg.

This book: https://dharlanwilson.com/books/stars🕸/

Click on the link if only to see an incredible pull quote from none other than Barry N. Malzberg.

I heard they pay brisk money for crap memory.

yeah subprime memory stocks for low value commodity functions where the service level agreements are poor but hey look who’s buying are where it’s at.

either that or there’s a black market unauthorised drain on my cognitive function.

i started reading “hard to be a god” with my son but it’s a little heavy going for him (this is somebody who could get with moby dick) so i think i’m going to have to continue alone. it’s terrific obv

An incandescent stylist with a dark sense of humor and a provocative feminist edge, Joanna Russ upended every genre she worked in. The essential novels and stories gathered in this Library of America edition reveal her as not only an astonishing writer of speculative fiction, but, in the words of Samuel Delany, “one of the finest—and most necessary—writers of American fiction” period. Here is her classic novel The Female Man (1975), a multi-voiced, multidimensional voyage that continues to alter readers’ sense of gender and reality; We Who Are About To . . . (1977), an allegorical thriller that challenges the era’s conventional expectations about the progress of civilization; and her incisive, ultimately joyous final novel exploring LGTBQIA+ and feminist themes, On Strike Against God (1980). The volume also restores to print Russ’s complete Alyx stories, which reinvent the sword-and-sorcery genre for a postmodern era, and includes her unforgettable, award-winning tales “When It Changed” and “Souls.”

The majority of books by Charles Platt are available again and a new autobiography but I think Amazon deleted some of his adult books

read 'the long price quartet' by daniel abraham, who subsequently became half of the duo that wrote 'the expanse'

it's fantasy. also the best of such i've read since at least baru cormorant*

the 'good guys' don't do everything right; the 'bad guys' honestly have a point, basically everything gets so massively out of control that everyone's just trying to do whatever they can. it's good, and the Thing That Differentiates It From Other Fantasy Series is actually pretty interesting imo

*(fucking love baru cormorant but it's gotten so convoluted that i'm not sure any sort of resolution is even possible)

also, for the ann leckie fans, everyone is suspiciously into tea