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

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.

And an Ed Emshwiller cover.

Forgot about Knight’s famed Van Vogt takedown.

All of those Galaxy Project books have intros by Maltzberg or Silverbob. And usually Ed Emschwiller covers.

Ahem. Emshwiller.

Been a while, will take another look if I come across it again (will check lib'), but remember my impression that the endlessly inventive The Iron Dragon's Daughter seemed too diffuse in its effects, or really FX draining rivulets from sense of narrative momentum and human or posthuman or alien interest, also narrative period---although, moment by moment, it was v. readable: yet another item I would have enjoyed more if still doing drugz (maybe)

From a tyme when Swanwick was publishing tons of stories and novels, in a brainstorm ov invention it seemed.

might anyone here like to explain/defend michael moorcock?

i've only recently dipped into it -- but i feel like its general inaccessibility, and the fact that forever no one knew where to start, and the magical phrase 'the eternal champion' are providing ~depth~ for a series of pretty average stories?

Sinkah to thread!

ooh looking forward to this

Sinkah doesn’t like him iirc

Have a look here: Michael Moorcock: "a man who excels at saga-making in a timeless magic world" or like the movie Yellow Submarine w/o any of the good bits

ty!

to expand on my whitehot critical judgments of 22 years ago, it is fair (to moorcock) to point out that even shakey -- who robustly defends his work and mocks those who demur (me) -- doesn't have that much time for the various fantasy trilogies (CORUM) and sextets (HAWKMOON) and lol dodekalogies (fkn ELRIC); i was happily giving a kicking to the worst of his work.

those were the titles i imbibed and came exhaustedly to dislike as a teen -- enough so that i simply never bothered starting any of the books others admire. i think i only read the very first ELRIC and got bored with familiar-trope overload and bailed. the CORUM trilogy is silly as per that thread; the HAWKMOON series i took against for some reason related (as i now dimly think) to the nastiness of its sexual politics? but it was 50 years ago and i was a kid -- i can't be bothered to reread to confirm but i don't remember enough to rest weight on this judgment any more. as a concept the ETERNAL CHAMPION roaming the MULTIVERSE was more about drawing in readers who prefer to buy fiction in potential box sets -- i don't recall MM putting in the interesting work such a notion might generate (as for example DOCTOR WHO has done now and then) but as i say i maybe bailed before i reached it

MM famously wrote an essay on tolkien which ppl occasionally bring up to say "so correct!" about -- but i don't actually think it's very good. it affirms that he basically despises fantasy as a genre and readers of fantasy too, and this comes across in all the above: he just didn't care that much and these speed-churned books reflect it. (he was, as the thread notes, shovelling out crappy pulp to give himself an income while he helmed NEW WORLDS into a deserved place in new wave SF history, while also now and then touring with HAWKWIND, which can't have been restful.)

i chucked out almost all the MM books i owned when i went off to college, except the corum books -- the silliest but also the easiest to reread. i have reread them now and then (last time prior to starting that thread); there are a handful of vivid images that stick with me -- viz a desert plain of dried blood ending in a bottomless chasm, a vast god's castle shaped like corum's naked girlfriend, the death-cavern that god's eye-and-hand beckon the recently offed to do battle with corum's foes -- but i wouldn't start with them and i never read any of the books ppl say *are* good to start with…

i definitely liked bob haberfield's corum cover design (much more than his hawkmoon cover design):

https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-aMwe40B8C0o/Ta8FJxxnQOI/AAAAAAAACc0/heP9ThyTjbI/w1200-h630-p-k-no-nu/Moorcock_Corum.jpg

Moorcock a good stand-in for Kilgore Trout.

You sure you don’t mean Philip José Farmer?

Maybe it taken a while but I got the impression he likes fantasy more, he's talked at length about the importance of romanticism. Loves Mervyn Peake of course, early fantasy Poul Anderson, Fritz Leiber and a conflicted fondness for most of the founders like Dunsany, CASmith. I don't think his interest in science fiction endured quite the same or his style of SF was maybe too out of step? He said something about not being so interested in outer space.

I was thinking more along the lines of Vonnegut's original description of Trout. His prose was frightful; only his ideas were any good.

I've read a variety of good shorter fiction; maybe he's just better at that, like a lot of writers, though it doesn't pay as well, of course.
For instance, "The Lost Canal" was a good Red Desert under the stars corporate warfare asskicker (well, as wiki specifies: an adventure about a man in search of a bomb he needs to disarm.[2]) commissioned by George RR Martin & Gardner Dozois for Old Mars(2013).
More recently, in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (blanking on its title, but) he started with what seemed like and awkward battleground situation---maybe he was self-conscious about the responsibilities of handling serious historical materials, since this was set in 21st Century Middle East---but when the leading man got to ancient city of personal historical connotations, where he's greeted by a still-alluring old flame now with (still having?) sinister connections---that's where he should have started, that part worked.

Hey, look at all this Praise for Michael Moorcock

“The greatest writer of post-Tolkien British fantasy.”
―Michael Chabon

“Moorcock’s writing is intricate, fabulous, and mellifluous.”
―Walter Mosley

“Moorcock weaves history, myth, and alternate realities into a seamless whole.”
―Publishers Weekly

“He is a giant. If you are at all interested in fantastic fiction, you must read Michael Moorcock.”
―Tad Williams

“A major novelist of enormous ambition.”
―Washington Post

“He is the master storyteller of our time.”
―Angela Carter

“The 20th century’s central fantasist.”
―John Clute

“No one at the moment in England is doing more to break down the artificial divisions that have grown up in novel writing―realism, surrealism, science fiction, historical fiction, social satire, the poetic novel―than Michael Moorcock.”
―Angus Wilson

Anyone read "Behold the Man" recently, I wonder.

It's been a while since I read that Tolkien essay but I think that to say he despises fantasy, hmm, I think it very much depends on how you define the genre? Which is probably a thornier question with fantasy than, say, sci-fi; the history feels a lot more fragmented. But also "contempt for the genre and its readers" ain't the worst premise for any artist to start from, I love a lot of stuff that comes from that place.

Anyone read "Behold the Man" recently, I wonder.

no but thx for the display name inspiration

Behold The Man is a nice short read.

I don't think someone who hates fantasy could write Wizardry And Wild Romance, it contains that essay knocking Tolkien, CS Lewis and Richard Adams but it contains a lot of praise for many fantasy writers (sometimes mixed with negatives) but I've read his summations of mainstream writers before and he was trashing a lot of them. He's recently done a new fantasy story to a new small press magazine.

Totally confused that he gave a blurb of praise to an early Brandon Sanderson novel, who a lot of people consider a very formulaic fantasy novelist.