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

Lem's Memoirs of a Space Traveller was brilliant, somewhere between the hard (ish) sciencey speculation of the Adam Roberts story discussed upthread and the more whimsical approach in Lem's Cyberiad. One story in particular, about someone who invents an immortal soul, was genuinely horrifying. I've read four books by Lem and they've all been excellent, I need to read more.

I recently finished Cordwainer Smith's THE INSTRUMENTALITY OF MANKIND (1979), the first book by him I had read.

Frederik Pohl's introduction is characteristically clear, humane, interesting. Pohl was very good at this form: talking about SF and narrating its history and personnel.

The book contains a timeline indicating Smith's projected future, to 16000 AD. Nine of the stories in the book are from this future plan. Five more are apparently not but are rather free-standing.

From the first set:

'No, No, Not Rogov!' depicts Soviet scientists setting up telepathic science in the Cold War era. It's rather unusual in being set near the present and featuring actual people like Stalin. It may be politically significant in suggesting that much of the high tech of Smith's future, especially involving telepathy or psychic powers, derive from the Cold War and specifically from the Soviet side. Smith was a deeply political person so this must have meant something to him.

'War No. 81-Q' is a very short piece first published in 1928 (!!). It depicts a future war between the US and Mongolia. The war is fought in proxy fashion, at a distance, with pilots controlling craft remotely, under conditions set by the 'Universal War Board'. This story seems very perceptive for 1928, in seriously imagining a different way that war could be conducted in the future.

'Mark Elf' (1957) takes us to a further future Earth in which telepathy is prevalent. A young woman, Carlotta, lands in a spacecraft that had been fired out in the Nazi period as WWII was ending; she has been cryogenically preserved. Oddly then the story is rooted in real 1940s history, yet also an alternate history, as the Nazis did no such thing. The world in which this girl lands is odd, hard to fathom. It features talking animals (a bit like those of Wells' DR MOREAU or Lethem's GUN).

'The Queen of the Afternoon' (1978) is a direct sequel to this story, featuring another German girl, Juli, who does just the same the first one. She lands amid talking dogs who can read her thoughts, in a world full of strange things like 'Fighting Trees'. It's not very easy for the reader to orient amid all this. Eventually the girl is taken on as a replacement wife by the ageless husband of Carlotta. At the end a third German girl, Karla, is landing. It is bizarre how Smith has constructed a whole sequence of future events around cryogenically preserved survivors from Nazi Germany landing. His world here combines something dangerously close to home - Nazism, WWII - with a future that is very strange and hard to understand.

At this point I am rather struggling with Smith, not finding much reward for the effort he takes.

In 'When The People Fell' (1959) a journalist is interviewing a space pilot about his past, and the pilot recollects an event on Venus. He describes its colonisation, I think, by a body called 'the Goonhogo', a not very memorable or suggestive name for a future political entity which seems to correspond to China: 'a sort of separate Chineseian government. Seventeen billion of them all crowded in one small part of Earth' (73). This Goonhgo invades Venus by landing 82 million people who work to smother the local fauna called 'loudies'. Many sacrifice themselves. The story thus presents an image of a state (like China) using its population as dispensable raw material to gain land.

'Think Blue, Count Two' (1962) describes a long-distance space voyage where people are frozen and asleep for the duration. But they can wake up, and technological contingencies are prepared to stop them doing bad things if this happens. The technology is obscure and hard to understand. Here it involves something about a mouse brain that is encoded with positive messages that will affect any assailants of a girl. Writing that, no, I don't understand it. The girl does indeed get awoken on the voyage, along with two males, one of whom prepares to torture and kill his companions, until she activates the mouse brain defence. This produces apparitions who are not real but who, because they are wired to the people's psyches, can affect them and damage them. This intervention enables them to reach their destination successfully. One feature of the story is that the bad passenger is partly motivated by misogyny, a desire for revenge against women who he thinks manipulate males. This is unpleasant, but he later disavows it.

'The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-at-All' was I think previously unpublished. It somewhat resembles another story, 'Drunkboat'. It describes the return of a character, one Colonel Harkening, from a new form of space travel which 'sought to compress living, material bodies into a two-dimensional frame while skipping the living body and its material adjuncts through two dimensions only to some inconceivably remote point in space' (120). Smith is interested in such things: imagined science that allows movement through space to be faster and more efficient, via other dimensions, yet which then takes a physical toll on humans. He describes the after-effects quite a lot. (A slight parallel with the 'jumping' of Bester's THE STARS MY DESTINATION.) The Colonel is brought back to life by a 'secondary telepath', a young woman who talks in archaic fashion: 'I am thy sister under the love of God' (125). The other scientists also have to join in a technical experiment using helmets to get into the Colonel's mind. 'We felt that we had been made the toys or the pets of some gigantic form of life immensely beyond the limits of human imagiantion, and that that life in looking at the four of us [...] had seen us and the colonel and had realized that the colonel needed to go back to his own kind' (128). It works. So here Smith comes close to religion.

'From Gustible's Planet' (1962) describes the arrival on Earth, shortly after 'the four thousandth anniversary of the opening of space', of an alien race, the Apicians, who look like ducks. They have the ability to freeze people through telepathy. They love food above all, and spend their time on Earth eating it. Eventually human beings start cooking and eating the Apicians. Conveniently their ability to freeze people is cancelled when people are 'animated by a mad hunger' (135). The story is basically zanily comic. I'm not sure it can be called satire as it may not have a target.

'Drunkboat' (1963) reprises the scenario mentioned above: an individual has returned from what I think is called 'planoform' through distant space. He is in hospital and the scientists seek to revive him. This time the story has more complications. One is that the man is called Artyr Rambo, so the whole story is somehow an elaborate reference to Rimbaud and 'The Drunken Boat'. This Rambo is also fixated on one Eliabeth. It seems that his journey was arranged by one Lord Crudelta, a senior figure in the Instrumentality, which is some kind of galactic government. Thi Lord lands on Earth and starts a battle at the hospital, then is put on trial. Why? I don't recall. I'm afraid that this quite long story is not very clear to me. At the trial, Rambo describes his space-hopping experience in a way that is genuinely notable:

'I went down rivers which did not exist. I felt people around me though I could not see them, red people shooting arrows at live bodies [...] In the wintertime where there is no summer [...] Where crazy lanterns stared with idiot eyes. Where the waves washed back and forth with the dead of all the ages. Where the stars became a pool and I swam in it.' (169)

What this reminds me of is Bob Dylan's 'A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall', c.1963 - the same year as the story's publication.

That concludes the stories that are part of Smith's elaborate future plan. The others are more free-standing. They tend to be closer to the present.

'Western Science is So Wonderful' (1958) depicts a Martian who can change shape, who is in China. He meets US, Soviet and Maoist troops, then departs from CT. I suppose the main idea is the Martian's cheery fascination with minor human technologies like cigarette lighters.

'Nancy' (1959) is another tale about new forms of space travel. One Gordon Greene is sent into space. Alone, he encounters a young woman, Nancy, who is 'every girl that you ever wanted. I am the illusion that you always wanted but I am you because I am in the depths of you' (195). The concept is about encountering your ideal as if it's real. After returning to Earth, Greene is told that Nancy isn't real, but he won't believe it. In italicised passages, a weeping Greene also later talks to a cousin: 'A man has got to be fearfully drunk to tell about a real life that he had and a good one, and a beautiful one and let it go, doesn't he?' (195). In some way he never gives up the illusion of the love of this woman. I think that Smith may be getting at something large and serious here, about belief, feelings, hope, though he can make his themes hard to get at through the tech paraphernalia.

'The Fife of Bodidharma' (1959) describes an ancient instrument that can bring utopia or disaster depending how it's played. The story ends on a cliffhanger as we don't know whether the fife's playing is about to bring disaster to the world. The story shares with others Smith's interest in ancient Eastern mysticism and in Nazi soldiers.

'Angerhelm' (1959) is set in the Cold War, and describes intrigues between the US and USSR over a secret message that has been discerned amid a tape of static. The message leads to the home of one Nelson Angerhelem in Minnesota. He can hear onthe tape what others cannot: a message from his late brother, speaking from purgatory or even a private 'hell' full of regret. He dictates it to the officials. The story might recall, say, PKD's Ubik, in which characters communicate beyond death.

'The Good Friends' (1963) is a short story describing, once again, a man who has returned from space and is being treated by medics. This is clearly a recurring trope, with all its implications. The spaceman describes how his last cruise came back with all his pals having a great time. The doctor then tells him that these pals are imaginary: 'You were alone in a one-man craft [...] You were starved, dehydrated and nine-tenths dead. The boat had a freeze unit and you were fed by the emergency kit [...] You didn't have any friends with you. They came out of your own mind' (238).

This is cold, but it isn't as bad as it might be, or as some other stories are. The fellow has survived, he was enabled by a pleasant illusion. But I do now see patterns. Smith has a fascination with extreme forms of space travel and their effect on body and mind. He's interested in versions of telepathy, which are crucial to his scientific future. He often uses medics and scientists as characters, who are dealing with damaged people and trying to revive them. The theme of telepathy often crosses with a theme of delusion - in 'The Good Friends', 'Nancy', perhaps 'Drunkboat' - illusions that make people happier or keep them going.

The book improves somewhat as it goes. I still can't make much sense of those early ones about Germans landing in the far future and meeting talking animals. The stories outside the 'Intrumentality' canon are, on the whole, easier for me to manage than the ones in it.

Oh that book. I think what happened is that Ballantine/del Rey put all the really good stories in a Best of and then the book you just read is a Rest of. There was another pair of collections from Baen called We the Underpeople and When the People Fell that pretty much covered everything but which was then superseded by the NESFA Presses publication of The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith and Nostrilia along with a concordance.

I was thinking I didn't recognise many of those descriptions! I have "The Best of Cordwainer Smith", which I think is really the best stories and highly recommended. I read somewhere that a major theme in his writing was his Catholicism, and the idea that the characters are all in some way 'fallen'. Possibly he makes more sense when viewed through this lens?

Given that he worked in the psychological warfare department of the US military, it makes me wonder if they were all as barmy as he clearly was? Might explain a lot.

There is even a pretty good audiobook of the Best of.

I am very much enjoying this non fiction audiobook - Edward Parnell "Ghostland - in search of a haunted country"

For fans of classic horror, folk horror and weird fiction, but also things like WG Sebald's Rings Of Saturn. I'm actually chuffed with how many stories he references that I've read and loved

https://www.waterstones.com/book/ghostland/edward-parnell/9780008271992

That Kubrick article was wild and very funny, thanks to the person that posted it.

You're welcome.

'No, No, Not Rogov!' depicts Soviet scientists setting up telepathic science in the Cold War era. It's rather unusual in being set near the present and featuring actual people like Stalin. It may be politically significant in suggesting that much of the high tech of Smith's future, especially involving telepathy or psychic powers, derive from the Cold War and specifically from the Soviet side. Smith was a deeply political person so this must have meant something to him.

As for China, xpost SFEncyclopedia says:

A polyglot, he spent much of his early life before 1931 in Europe, Japan and China, his father, Paul Myron Wentworth Linebarger (1871-1939), being a peripatetic sinologist, author, and propagandist for Sun Yat-sen. His interest in China was profound – he had studied there, and edited his father's The Gospel of Chung Shan According to Paul Linebarger (1932) and The Ocean Men: An Allegory of the Sun Yat-Sen Revolutions (1937 chap), the latter being an allegorical play in a quasi-Chinese manner; the style of some of his later stories reflects his attempts to translate a Chinese narrative and structural style into his sf writing, not perhaps with complete success, as the fabulist's voice he assumed (see Fabulation) could verge upon the garrulous when opened out into English prose.

"verge"

Clute, eh?

Verges on the verge of being garrulous

Quite.

But I still haven't tried to read through a subset of stories in xpost The Complete, I just take the occasional, usually refreshingly different plunge into that, as when I used to encounter him in olde mags and anths: he's still not that much like anybody else, which is good.

Feel like reading the second tier stories all in a row the way the P’Fox just did would surely planoform one directly into a drunkboat-level hangover

This table of contents is pretty striking
https://file770.com/big-book-of-cyberpunk-toc-released/

http://www.dedalusbooks.com/our-books/book.php?id=00000081
http://www.dedalusbooks.com/our-books/book.php?id=00000376
I think that's Meyrink short fiction complete (?) for the first time in English

Looks great, thanks.
Yall may recall that way upthread I described a good SF anthology edited by Donald A. Wollheim, and later we were talking about his handing DAW over to daughter Betsy, who has her hubbie Peter Stampfel readng some manuscripts, and recently she and DAW Himself turned up in an American Experience documentary Casa Sussana, about a place in the 50s-60s Catskills where, as the program description reads, for some

the house provided a safe place to express their true selves and live for a few days as they had always dreamed—dressed as and living as women without fear of being incarcerated or institutionalized for their self-expression. Told through the memories of those who visited the house,

Meanwhile, you can watch this one here---its own kind of Rolling Speculative Thread of Wonder way of life:https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/casa-susanna/

Probability Moon was - adequate. It was like an exact splicing of classic space opera and le guin style anthropo sf -o n the one hand, a war against inscrutable aliens and a mysterious deadly artefact left behind by an elder race, on the other an anthropological team visit a planet where the near-human non-industrial natives have many peculiar cultural practices and a mysterious shared perception. All done with the classic interleaved chapters structure. But the space opera didn't really have that much sensawunda and the anthropo part didn't have le guin's genius of empathy and compassion.

Haven't heard of Gustav Meyrink - Kafka comparisons are ten a penny but they always sucker me in.

omg i read probability moon eleven years ago. literally not one faint echo of a memory.

Is there an omnibus version of the Elric saga? The currently available versions are individual hardbacks with about three words per page.

What I really want are the 80s paperbacks in the sliver covers I used to gaze at in Waldenbooks, but they are $$$.

Purchased the following over the pandemic for less than $20 apiece (sometimes much less) through a combination of biblio.com and bookshop.org orders. These are the 80s paperback editions you reference:
Elric of Melnibone (Book One of the Elric Saga) - Berkeley Books, 1983; ISBN 0-425-06044-6
The Sailor on the Seas of Fate (Book Two of the Elric Saga) - Berkeley Books, 1983; ISBN 0-425-06158-2
The Weird of the White Wolf (Book Three of the Elric Saga) - Berkeley Books, 1983; ISBN 0-441-88805-4
The Vanishing Tower (Book Four of the Elric Saga) - Berkeley Books, 1983; ISBN 0-425-06406-9
The Bane of the Black Sword (Book Five of the Elric Saga) - Berkeley Books, 1984; ISBN 0-425-08503-1
Stormbringer (Book Six of the Elric Saga) - Berkeley Books, 1984; ISBN 0-425-08459-0

I've been reading the Gallery/Saga Press editions put out in 2022. So far I have the two collections covering all of the books above, about $9 each on ebook.

I read them in internal chronological order (skipping only The Revenge of the Rose), which I'm not sure I'd necessarily advise since I don't think I really 'got' it until Stormbringer. Publication order might have been a better approach.

Thanks, Shakes! Those Robert Gould covers always seemed so otherworldly and perverse to me as a kid.

Haven't heard of Gustav Meyrink - Kafka comparisons are ten a penny but they always sucker me in.

― crutch of england (ledge), Thursday, 7 September 2023 10:24

Best known for The Golem, maybe unfair to compare him to Kafka because he made quite a big impact in his time.

https://kriswrites.com/2023/09/06/business-musings-my-magazine-my-voice-my-rules/

btw hi shakey! i have missed you

from the guardian's sf roundup, this sounded more intriguing when i misread it as 'tomatoes' / 'tomato':

Once in a generation, a horde of deadly sentient tornadoes attacks a small, isolated midwestern town. The inhabitants’ only hope of survival lies in the hands of the teenage boy known as the Tornado Killer.

This seems to have just come out too, let's hope no-one confuses them

https://www.amazon.com/Attack-Killer-Tomatoes-Jeff-Strand-ebook/dp/B0BMXSQDSN

https://pictures.abebooks.com/isbn/9781959205678-us.jpg

Piers Anthony - Macroscope

(i) Why I'm reading Piers Anthony books:
Because people's responses tend to his work fall roughly within three categories:

(A) Most people know him mainly for the Xanth series, many recoil at their past fondness for it and the compulsive but not very smart wordplay and sexualized depictions of sometimes very young girls. He's usually seen as someone you can make fun of without hurting anyone's feelings because it seems like his phenomenal success in the 80s and 90s is fading away quickly (?)

(B) Some will stand up for his 60s and 70s books, especially Macroscope, Tarot, Of Man And Manta, Battle Circle, Steppe, Cththon series, Cluster series and maybe a few others (a couple of these nominated for big awards).

There must be at least 30 people who I'm inclined to trust that fall into this group. I recently seen an interview with Ian Watson from the late 1970s in which he called Anthony an appalling but consistently interesting writer.
Some say that at best Anthony has a wild uninhibited freewheeling energy, inventive and very strange. These are things I'm always looking for.
Some of these readers will say Piers Anthony sold out and became a very different writer in the 80s.

(C) A much smaller group will say that on occasion Anthony still written interesting stuff into the 80s, 90s and maybe still today?

For better or worse I'm attracted to authors like Anthony, Jack L Chalker, (Andre Norton and Poul Anderson to a lesser extent) partly because their reputation is so mixed, their body of work so large and critically un-mapped. Despite their popularity it seems like uncharted territory full of landmines. I'm especially attracted to the idea of hidden treasure which was once selling very well but nobody seems to talk about it anymore.

I think Anthony would rather be best known for different books (though he never stopped writing Xanth) and it's probably better for everyone if an artist is best known for their best works. He'd probably be more celebrated if he was a film director because flawed books are so much harder to deal with than flawed films.

I kind of want to figure Piers out too, he's an odd, unpredictable person and I enjoy reading his journals sometimes.

(ii) The actual novel:
I really liked the idea of the alien signal which is a potentially fatal cognitive puzzle (I think there was another signal described as something like a huge library you could explore?), the titular Macroscope that can see across the universe was interesting and I admire how it floated so easily between a surprising variety of subjects (astrology, Sidney Lanier, split personalities, education systems, types of intelligence, prejudices, games), but the slow pace and sheer volume of hard science and lengthy explanations of so many subjects left me so bruised that I couldn't get further than halfway.

There was some unconvincing situations with Afra (her asking everyone to check her body, the trial and punishment) but the exhausting explanations of everything are what defeated me. I skimmed around the remainder and I had a tough time letting go because there's more adventure in the second half but I couldn't make myself finish. I prefer not to review books I can't finish but I had too much to say. Better readers than me have enjoyed the book more but be warned that all the science, history and astrology lectures far outweigh the space opera action/adventure.

Note: the Sphere edition is heavily abridged and apparently makes a lot less sense.

The worst thing about wanting to read all the SFF is that most books are potboilers and I'm so bad at coping with boredom. I'll never be John Clute but it annoys me so much that there's probably so much exciting SFF hidden away.

a friend of mine once estimated that he'd read 70-80 piers anthony books. he's a nice guy, tho

piers has certainly had a lot of ideas and you can't fault his work ethic. but he's also a seriously creepy mf in ways that play even worse now than they did 40 years ago

Themes of Pedophilia in the Works of Piers Anthony

Revisiting the sad, misogynistic fantasy of Xanth

That's part of what I want to figure out, in Firefly people say he defends paedophilia but in a later interview he said that behaviour was abusive. Did he change his mind or was he just feeling the heat?

There must be at least 30 people who I'm inclined to trust that fall into this group.

You've reached your limit, don't trust anyone over 30!

The Golden Age of … ah, forget it, Jake, it’s Dying Earth Town.

Among those 30 people is Charles Platt, who wrote sequels to Chthon

I admire your attitude to excavating the past RAG but Piers Anthony (whom I've never crossed paths with in my reading life, and now certainly never will) sounds like a right cunt.

In a lot of ways excavating the present is a lot more daunting. Insane quantities of fiction, fiction websites die all the time and smallpress/self-published books are regularly deleted, and its hard to find honest reviews of small press writers.

Rare books from the 70s are often more findable than some p-o-d books that just got deleted.
I'm a bit less impulsive with buying books recently and I've come back to that bad feeling when I buy lots of books I'm not particularly excited about (but still seem very worthwhile) but it still really bothers me that huge bodies of work can vanish so easily.

Does anyone here fit short fiction magazines in their regular reading habits? I haven't been able to get into the habit but I have a small stack of print on demand magazines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-4_JpY8Jc0

Just South of the Unicorns
A teenager runs away from home to move in with someone he's never met, his idol, the person he respects most of all — a fantasy writer named Piers Anthony. Logan Hill reports. (32 minutes)

Thanks, that's interesting.

Can anyone explain or can anyone give a link explaining why some print on demand books take months sometimes? I ordered something in July that promises a delivery between November-Feburary, the most extreme case I've had but I decided I could wait. Some p-o-d books are promised for months when it seems likely nothing will materialize.

I have had cases where a p-o-d book is promises for four months before they tell you they can't send anything (title is probably deleted or there's some glitch). There is a book I ordered in April that keeps getting promised without any date but I'm sure it won't come.

some years back, iirc, it was not economical to print individual copies on demand, so they would wait for a number of orders to come in and print them all at once. i would have thought that technology had since solved that problem, but maybe not

I'm guessing that violent writer Rusch was referring to in her blog was William Sanders, the dates and the Shetterly article seem to line up
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sanders_(writer)

read 'the iron dragon's daughter' by michael swanwick. weird, surreal, sometimes quite off-putting. but worthwhile imo

its vibes made me think of lanark

(nb i am not at all suggesting that if you liked lanark you should read this)

although i think it's time for me to reread lanark

always thought about reading that and loved Lanark so…

should you or any of your SFF force be caught or killed, the secretary will disavow all knowledge of your actions

good luck ken

I just read Damon Knight’s “Four In One”. Tremendous