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

What do you mean by 'aesthetic quality' - and how is it present in Asimov's writing?

If you're looking for coherence in Smith - or consider that to be an essential quality in fiction - then you're going to be frustrated by this collection. It's just a pleasure to luxuriate in his wild imagination; to go 'out there' with him. Story isn't everything.

OTM. Also, you really should have just started with “Scanners Live in Vain.”

Comparing Cordwainer Smith to Asimov is pretty much fightin’ words.

I didn't say that aesthetic quality (assuming it exists or can be defined) is present is Asimov's writing.

FWIW I think Asimov is one of the least aesthetically accomplished important writers I've ever read.

Insofar as I have compared Smith to Asimov it is to say that both are ambitious in their history-building; no more and no less.

I have started with a particular book that came to hand. I didn't have, or especially desire, a guide to tell me what book to start with. I started at the beginning of the book.

Hope you will get more into his thing as you proceed.

Pretty sure an ilxor's recommendation got me to read The Stars My Destination, thanks for that.

[Guy who is obsessed with Roger Zelazny] I'm getting real Roger Zelazny vibes here

(he did pick up an unfinished manuscript by Bester so)

Kind of regret getting this edition because it was cheaper, so I have Asimov staring out from the cover

https://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/1/1a/MLO1904.jpg

While convalescing, I semi-randomly grabbed 'The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: Volume 7' (2012) from the library, and I'm going to pinefox it. Halfway through so far:

Christopher Rowe, 'The Contrary Gardener' - it's ok, not exactly a banger for an opener. Kinda interesting concept about growing tools and ammunition as agriculture and being enlisted to use them against municipal robots that are becoming self-aware, but it's a bit muddled.

Eleanor Arnason, 'The Woman Who Fooled Death Five Times' - Fantastic traditional folk tale, I'm a total sucker for this mode (especially if it involves Death). Apparently it's a folk tale by aliens? Might have to check out her books.

Andy Duncan, 'Close Encounters' - I bailed. I'm feeling kind of allergic to hardscrabble rural Southern settings right now, it felt forced and I skipped it. Spoiler, there are aliens.

Peter S. Beagle, 'Great-Grandmother in the Cellar' - Loved it. It's a magical setting but very much reads like a folk tale. Dude wrote The Last Unicorn!

Nalo Hopkinson, 'The Easthound' - Post-apocalyptic story about some plague/virus that turns people into rabid zombie beasts once they hit puberty. So gangs of kids are surviving and scavenging but have to kick members out once they start to get too old. Good stuff.

Caitlin Kiernan, 'GOGGLES' - Post-apocalyptic story also about kids, living together in a bunker with a strict headmistress and sent out to scavenge among packs of wild superdogs. Not as good as the previous story, weird that these were set next to each other.

Gwyneth Jones, 'Bricks, Sticks, Straw' - Fussy and elaborate sci-fi story about A.I. software clones of people who are out on the moons of Jupiter doing research or something. Couldn't get into it, I bailed.

Molly Gloss, 'The Grinnell Method' - Long and incredibly boring, I bailed after a number of pages about bird-watching and landscape descriptions in the 1930s.

Theodora Goss, 'Beautiful Boys' - Pretty good one, basically positing hot mimbos as aliens programmed to deposit their semen and then split.

Ellen Klages, 'The Education of a Witch' - Very good, about a little girl who's obsessed with the witch in Sleeping Beauty (original Disney version) and is discouraged by the adults around her, and you can imagine where it goes.

Paul McAuley, 'Macy Minnot's Last Christmas on Dione, Ring Racing, Fiddler's Green, The Potter's Garden' - Couldn't get into the writing, I bailed.

Adam Roberts, 'What Did Tessimond Tell You?' - A perfect short story, by FAR the gem in this collection so far. It's sort of a theoretical physics mystery/thriller about a team who's about to win the Nobel prize, but whose members keep dropping out after talking to a particular individual. I don't want to say more but it's worth seeking out, and also has a perfect ending. Will have to check out his other work.

Neil Gaiman, 'Adventure Story' - a very short and nothing-y story, included only to put his name on the cover I'm sure.

Robert Reed, 'Katabasis' - The longest story here so far and very odd, and I ended up being really into it. It's essentially about hardcore high-gravity hiking, done by humans who are immortal, bored, and bioengineered to have instant healing (and are constantly falling down and breaking bones, which is only a minor inconvenience). And their alien porters. Surreal but cool.

Peter Dickinson - Troll Blood - Norwegian meta-folk tale, I liked it.

(to be continued when I finish the second half of the collection)

https://imgur.com/a/jxkbGx6

Pinefox's post got me to dig out the Cordwainer Smith volumes I inherited from Martin Skidmore - complete with a review slip, always like to see those. 'Scanners are in vain' is in The Rediscovery of Man volume. Neither collection has 'On the storm planet', my favourite Smith story - as genuinely strange as the best of PKD. In his introduction to The Instrumentality of Mankind, Frederik Pohl writes that: "Every important work of fiction is written partly in code" and that's a point I wanted to make about Smith's writing - it's extremely coded/symbolic, as befits an expert on psychological warfare (as the 'real' Smith apparently was).

I also love the fact that John Slack's Smith parody (found in his The Steam-Driven Boy collection) is called 'One Damned Thing After Another' - so accurate!

Apologies, I'm experimenting with imgur, let's see if this one works:

https://imgur.com/perWNuz

Bollocks.

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

Ha, I just reread Sladek’s Asimov parody the other day.

Congrats on not having Sladek fucking autocorrected to Slack, also.

“Broot Force,” by ICLICK AS-I-MOVE

xpost
'Broot Force'? Killer opening line - "Suddenly Idjit Carlson felt chagrin."

It had been building up all day, and now it fell on him like a ton of assorted meteorites.

Is Sladek the same person who wrote 'Solar Shoe Salesman'? (Which I have only heard of, not read.)

re INSTRUMENTALITY, I am currently unsure whether those '14 stories' are all connected, as several of them are presented as 'Others' - outside the mythos / future history etc, perhaps.

Yes

Think the parodies originally appeared in F&SF and now can be found in The Steam-Driven Boy.

It seems to me that there is potentially a lot to be dug up or deciphered about the relation between Smith's writing and his real-world concerns. Pohl states that an archive MS exists that explains references directly. As I mentioned earlier, it's curious in a way that when he posits a far future he then populates it with ... people from Nazi Germany, and their descendants.

Another aspect of his fiction that I don't yet understand is the racial / species hierarchies, which definitely involve some kind of talking animals. This reminds me of Empson's comments on talking animals in ALICE, and of DR MOREAU, and of Lethem's GUN with its evolved animals.

Unclear as yet to me how this all fits together, if at all.

Thrilled to see poster Jordan invoke the name of the pinefox to describe their excellent account of a volume of stories.

From his asterisked names, it appears that Sladek had Beerbohm in mind as precursor.

Good parody is a tremendous form.

Hopefully you will come to appreciate Cordwainer Smith, one of the great originals of SF, despite superficial galactic-spread similarities with Isaac Asimov and obvious Wellsian borrowings.

I like Asimov - especially the robots.

Pleasingly, my copy of The Stream-Driven Boy sits right next to my copy of ... Norstrilia by Cordwainer Smith:

https://i.imgur.com/z27MByR.jpg

Still need to read Norstrilia.

Feel like I now want to call you P’fox as if you were a Cordwainer Smith character yourself.
(xp obv)

Did you curate that photo to impress people?

Interesting notes Jordan.

It's nice that the comprehensive collection of Cordwainer has been through a lot of printings. Makes his work much easier to collect.

xpost
No I just have a lot of SF paperbacks!

I have (though not read nearly all of)

The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Fiction of Cordwainer Smith (Framingham, Massachusetts: The NESFA Press, 1993)

I also haven't read my Kindle ebook of Atomsk, as by Carmichael Smith, an early Cold War thriller set in a Siberian "science city," which he probably knew a lot about, being US military intelligence agent/civilian researcher Paul M.A. Linebarger, who, as Ward mentions upthread, literally wrote the book:

Psychological Warfare was first published in 1948, and it became the authoritative text on the subject for decades. Even today, it explains the basic principles of propaganda and psychological warfare (both white and black), from organization and planning to analysis and response. Examples are drawn from military history, with an emphasis on tactics by both the Allies and Axis during World War II. This is a fascinating subject, with greater relevance to everyday business and politics than may be immediately recognized.

This is a good intro to the life and especially the science fiction work (with "Scanners..." cited as his first published and one of his best SF stories, also well-described):
https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/smith_cordwainer

Lotz of other good Cordwainer posts on ILX over the light years.

There was also this weird thing about him - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordwainer_Smith#Case_history_debate

Linebarger is long rumored to have been "Kirk Allen", the fantasy-haunted subject of "The Jet-Propelled Couch," a chapter in psychologist Robert M. Lindner's best-selling 1954 collection The Fifty-Minute Hour.[2][9] According to Cordwainer Smith scholar Alan C. Elms,[10] this speculation first reached print in Brian Aldiss's 1973 history of science fiction, Billion Year Spree; Aldiss, in turn, claimed to have received the information from science fiction fan and scholar Leon Stover.[11] More recently, both Elms and librarian Lee Weinstein[12] have gathered circumstantial evidence to support the case for Linebarger's being Allen, but both concede there is no direct proof that Linebarger was ever a patient of Lindner's or that he suffered from a disorder similar to that of Kirk Allen.[13]

Time to repost the cover to my edition of Norstrilia, SF book design doesn't get much worse than this

https://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/4/41/BKTG16711.jpg

Lol.

The cover of the ebook I have is kind of simplistic but definitely an improvment:
https://cdn.kobo.com/book-images/9a8c4336-4865-4a9f-99b2-a87b51c7f2a6/1200/1200/False/norstrilia-4.jpg

Hmm. It's kind of growing on me, just like Stroon is growing all over that sheep.

His daughter's webpage about him still works: http://www.cordwainer-smith.com/

I agree with her that Dad seems at least a plausible basis for Kirk Allen in "The Jet Propelled Couch," which you can read prob in under an hour, so no re-check from the Internet Archive required, unless you then wish to grok The 50-Minute Hour as a white collar early 50s pulpadelic whole:
https://archive.org/details/fiftyminutehourclind

I saw the Playhouse 90 teleplay of "TJPC" on early YouTube, but have never found it since:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jet_Propelled_Couch_(Playhouse_90)

Also: http://www.sondheim.com/shows/the_jet_propelled_couch/

started reading ben aaronovitch's 'rivers of london' series

they're essentially police procedurals but with magic occasionally involved

can't vouch for the whole thing but the first few, featuring in first person detective constable peter grant, the mixed-race only child of jazz legend 'lord' grant, are clever and well-written and fun

if you know london (i do not) they may be extra interesting

(tbf i have *been* to london and am a bit surprised that our protagonists can find parking places as easily as they seem to)

I was never a car owner in london but afaik there's nothing quite as insane as the new york street sweeper parking shuffle that i learned about the other day from 'how to with john wilson'.

Adam Roberts, 'What Did Tessimond Tell You?' - A perfect short story, by FAR the gem in this collection so far. It's sort of a theoretical physics mystery/thriller about a team who's about to win the Nobel prize, but whose members keep dropping out after talking to a particular individual. I don't want to say more but it's worth seeking out, and also has a perfect ending. Will have to check out his other work.

I found this in a cheap ebook collection - solaris rising 1.5 - and yep really good. The P-O-R joke was a bit overdone but a fantastic central idea. I'll read the rest of the stories in the collection after I've got through Ian R. Macleod's Song of Time.

Was that collection Solaris Rising 1.5?

Oh, sorry, you already said that.

Okay, just jumped on the bandwagon and read it in Solaris Rising 1.5, where it originally appeared. It's in an Adam Roberts collection called Saint Rebor as well. Tessimond was also the last name of a poet named Arthur Saint John Tessimond.

Hope I didn't hype up that story too much, but in comparison to the others in the collection I'm reading it was a standout.

I grabbed a few of his novels & short story collections since the ebooks are pretty cheap, they sound interesting, especially 'The Thing Itself' (!).

No, you didn’t overhype. Reminded me of at least one Ted Chiang story tbh. I have The Thing Itself but haven’t read yet.

I've read it twice because I forgot I read it once, as detailed upthread. Would read more by him.

I liked whatever History of SF stuff I've read by him.

I've reached the point in The Song of Time where the incredibly talented violinist is having her first major concert accompanied by her even more talented pianist lover:

As the swirling dance of the third movement commenced, I sensed the whole audience give a startled jump. I wanted to show them. I wanted them to laugh and weep. I wanted them to know. We all did - the whole orchestra. The strings were percussively sharp. I took the melody. I twisted it around, threw it back at them. Then we were together, and I didn't want this to stop. Not ever. The basses growled as I floated by them. Then the threads were gathered as I made staccato interventions and the great musical beast against which I'd been pitting myself, which was by now something more than merely an orchestra or even Claude Vaudin, roared, then collapsed and died, impaled on my last high C.

Do people really enjoy reading stuff like that? It won an award! I might have to give up even though I'm half way through.

Most people seem to have pretty low standards of what they will read, apart from the people on this thread, apart from the people on this borad. There are others too of course, but in general…

a not particularly complimentary review by adam roberts! http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/song-of-time-by-ian-r-macleod/ - it does use the 'd about a' phrase which hoary though it is obviously crossed my mind but i thought 'puking about tiddlywinks' might be more fitting.