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

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

Oh yeah. Good one.

I have it in one those Galaxy one-offs.

One of those. With a forward by Silverbob.