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

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

wtf another one? (cf. yoon ha lee above.)

i jumped on the bandwagon and read 'the affirmation'. it was pretty good i guess but a bit annoying, especially towards the end, as the main guy was such a jerk. yes ok he clearly had severe mental problems but i don't feel too bad calling him a jerk as he's not real.

just did a search for Tade Thompson seeing as i'm currently blowing through 'Far From The Light Of Heaven' but nothing... some mentions of Rosewater.

experience tells me that me reading something in 3 days means it's either good or kinda bad. see the Martian and/or Ready Player One. (this is only just 200-odd pages which helps)

(30 or so pages from the end. it's catastrophe after catastrophe so far, perhaps hilariously so)

I have read that. Very violent iirc and character motivations somewhat questionable.

not seeing much violence other than the 30 sliced up bodies. does violence done by a machine count as violence? actually, they've just jetisoned the 1000 passengers, probably leading to their deaths, with very little fanfare

previous to this was Wyndham's Stowaway To Mars which was very early, 1935, and, well, it was no Kim Stanley Robinson.

oh, Reynolds' Eversion in the middle there too. reminded me of rogue moon or Diamond Dogs or that bit in Pushing Ice, multiple attempts at doing a thing. better than the previous few.

i think i mentioned that upthread, nice idea in theory maybe but reading the same story four times in a row didn't do it for me.

yeah, the entire first half of the book was taken up with it. but i was kinda sad when it ended, liked how it evolved and would've liked to know the next couple of steps.

I've just found out there are two published John Wyndham novels I've never read - Foul Play Suspected, a detective thing, and Plan for Chaos, only published in 2009. Looks like there's a whole bunch of short stories outside of the ones in the two collections I have or had.

Plan for Chaos is in my _todo shelf, which means it must've been cheap on amazon sometime. i have been warned, forget who by, to not expect much.

that fadedpage link at the bottom of wyndham's wikipedia looks handy, if not entirely legal in the uk (canadian public domain rules are more lax than the uk)

oh yeah - most of them are up at the open library (archive.org) too. i'm not too bothered about not paying royalties to dead authors.

Do they have his Jizzle?

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/iQYAAOSwl0dkpEvw/s-l500.jpg

They do have his jizzle but fadedpage has his third vibrator.

aren't we all, in some way, a servant of the wankh

https://i.imgur.com/qlHHRI7.jpg

in more inadvertant ledge catchup*: have just started Sea of Tranquility

(my spellchecker insisted that i use two l's last night when updating my xls, firefox doesn't seem to care)

*i think there's a big overlap in what we read, he tends to be more up to date

i skipped The Left Hand Of Darkness - read a dozen pages and it wasn't grabbing me

seems like a fairly hasty decision on one of the greatest sf works of all time but ok! I think I'll re-read it soon.

it's only the 19th and the Mandel is quite short, maybe there'll be time for it before the end of the month. it looks a lot like it's a f*****y novel though, with all the names and i can't be doing with that.

Le Guin's style seems kind of dry at first but once you get into the rhythm of it you really get sucked in, I find.

finished Sea of Tranquility and largely enjoyed it, but it wrapped up perhaps a bit too quickly and it just made me think la jetee / twelve monkeys

One of the most satisfying reads in the YA trade pb Unnatural Creatures ("Stories Selected by Neil Gaiman With Maria Dahvana Headley, Illustrated by Briony Morrow-Cribbs", is Nalo Hopkinson's "The Smile on the Face," which immediately zooms in on the mutabilty of early teens, with enormous changes coming anyway, often very quickly, with supernatural shit just adding to the noize, 'til it demonstrates the right to challenge that "just." Lots of levels coming at the peers in an unsupervised party, though assigned school reading is part of it.
Genius genesis liminal evocations of the same, among younger and fewer kids, seem to be via "The Manticore, The Mermaid, and Me, by choreographer-dancer Megan Kurashige, must try to find more by her ("Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Sybil's Garage, Strange Horizons, and Electric Velocopede," but no other books, by according to this one, published in 2013.)
There's also more to be read into 19th century magazine mainstay Frank R. Stockton's "The Griffin and The Minor Canon" than Gaiman's simple-minded introductory comments indicate, and I'll have to look up more by him too. Seems like "The Lady or the Tiger?" was kinda-boring gimmicky, though I prob read it when I was ten or so.
Another fave: "The Cockatoucan; Or, Great Aunt Willoughby, by E. Nesbit (1858-1924), the great writer for and to children: Matilda, in scratchy underthings and under spirit-crushing attention of her nanny. is bound for a visit with her grim Great-Aunt, but they take a wrong turn to a beautiful place where the nanny immediately gets turned into a vending machine, still dispensing admonitions, but at least they're silent. succinct (to fit on the cards), and you don't have to put coins in. The King gets turned into a sad villa, the Prime Minister into an unamused but still comic opera, and the Army into German sausages, but worse when a needy Sunday School, waaah!
However, Matilda gets brighter, temporarily (I like to think of this as a pre-parody of "Flowers For Algernon").
Saki's "Gabriel-Ernest" has an aunt-oppressed male, who seems prematurely middle-aged, dealing with a feral teen male, seemingly cluelessly fostered by said aunt. Very Saki elements, though this time kind of going through the dark motions (Saki set the bar where he set it)(said as a middle school Saki junkie).
Anthony Boucher's "The Compleat Werewolf" is a good, justifiably lengthy lope through mostly nocturnal Berkeley, and briefly elsewhere, during B-movie WWII. The first story I can recall reading by him. although his anthologies, incl. from his founding-editorial era at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, made him one of my childhood heroes (Notes on Contributors here add that "He was also the first English translator of Jorge Luis Borges.")
Elegantly eerie, rather relentless finale, "Come Lady Death, " is sustained by Peter S/ Beagle.
Some other good stuff in here, along with ones I find a bit tiresome, and Samuel Delaney's "Prismatica" seems the most disappointing, because Delaney, although it's ok.

saki's irl aunts may have been awful but his misogyny is vile.

This one is more habitual than compulsive, and seems---defeatist? An odd choice, if one were going to choose any of his----

This is nonfiction about time travel theory but what a cover
https://farm3.staticflickr.com/2907/14659189051_7f724d20a4_z.jpg

haven't purchased it because i am unemployed but this is now out and looks awesome: https://www.abramsbooks.com/product/worlds-beyond-time_9781419748691

so after Sea Of Tranquility i read Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? for the first time in 3 decades? and it was ok. (although the bits about Fordism i remembered weren't actually in there)

(finished off the month with a couple of JGBallard shorts from the huge two volume set and a couple of Aldis short stories from the first one of his)

(although the bits about Fordism i remembered weren't actually in there)

where were they? what were they?

I'm reading to sleep in a sea of stars by christopher paolini and so far there's a place called weyland, a character called henriksen and a 'ship mind' called bishop. ok then. (and an alien of course but non biological.)

The thing I always tell people about The Left Hand of Darkness is that the first half and the second half are very different. The first half is more dry and has a lot of worldbuilding but is essential to set up the second half, which is faster-paced and very much a story about people. If you are not super into politics and worldbuilding (as I am not), I strongly advise persevering with the book because you will probably feel very differently about the second half.

fordism, religion based on Henry ford and his manufacturing techniques. they worship a T (as in model t) instead of a cross.

(which sounds a lot like it should belong in a brave New world, maybe that's where i got it from)

yeah, BNW - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordism

I just finished The Lathe of Heaven and found it a very satisfying read both thematically and stylistically. The Left Hand of Darkness is on the list.

Oh, and hooray for Joanna Russ coming back into print.

Patti Perret - Faces Of Fantasy

Roughly a decade after Faces Of Science Fiction, this time with UK and Irish writers added to Americans, a great deal more women authors but even more light skinned. I think fantasy was at its peak of going into European history more rigorously, the peak of the renaissance fair-hey nonny nonny-celtic-horsegirl- aesthetics. Terri Windling writes a fairly comprehensive introduction to the genre and I think she was a very influential editor at this time.

Both Nancy Springer and Judith Tarr are pictured with their horses. Storm Constantine and Patricia Kennealy-Morrison look like rock stars (both of them did work in the music business). The general settings are more grassy and leafy, more of the writers look like they're trying to dress and live in places like their characters.

There's way more surprises in this book, more writers I had never seen before and many I'm just hearing about for the first time. Poppy Z Brite seems to be the only author best known for horror and I wonder why such a gritty and punky writer was chosen? J. P. Donleavy, Steve Stern and Joyce Carol Oates are here. There's a lot of famous children's authors who I imagine never hung out at fantasy conventions much. Evangeline Walton and Edward Whittemore appearing shortly before they passed away (Whittemore never got to submit a statement).

I'm not sure if this was as good a read as the previous book, maybe it eventually just got repetitive for me but I think a lot of the surprise appearances kind of make up for that and the photos are overall nicer. I'm a little sad Tanith Lee didn't make an appearance but I imagine they tried to get her.

I kept thinking it would be nice to have a new book like this but the geographic expansion would make this really difficult and social media has made this kind of book arguably redundant. Now you can see as much of your favourite authors' pets as you like.