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

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.

The Various Light is a thoughtful, distinctive novel. There are not the dramatic incursions often a feature of fantastic and supernatural literature, so some readers may find the book a bit subdued. It is measured in its pace and careful in the development of its theme. Unusually, it depicts the otherworldly through human relationships, and it does so subtly. Its flawed characters are well-realised and some have an original savour. The overlapping of the unearthly into this world is handled with finesse. I think it is a book that repays our attention. Unfortunately, there are not that many copies about.

(Mark Valentine)

I’m currently enjoying Therapeutic Tales by “R Ostermeier” published by a local small press called Broodcomb. It’s a strange venture - all of their authors appear to be fictional characters, writing about the same, unnamed ‘peninsula’ with a mixture of Aickmanesque ‘English unease’, folk horror in the vein of Machen and experimental fiction influences. It’s not clear how many people are responsible (one seems unlikely), but it has a very coherent vision.

https://broodcomb.co.uk/

reading 'house of binding thorns' by aliette de bodard and it is fundamentally meh at best. (iirc i liked a novella on a space station that she wrote)

but there is one secondary character who wears a perfume/cologne that smells of 'orange blossoms and bergamot' and she has to mention it every single time he appears. honestly 'bergamot' appears 18 times in the text, what the fuck? not even robert jordan packed his cliches so tightly

I've enjoyed some of her short fiction on Clarkesworld and elsewhere.

ShariVari - I have seen people speculate O. Jamie Walsh has been writing all their books.

If so, he’s an extraordinary talent.

I finally finished that Best Science Fiction and Fantasy vol. 7 (2013) collection. Here are my much-anticipated reviews!

Ted Kosmatka, ‘The Color Least Used by Nature’ - a realist story about a shipbuilder in Hawaii during the first stirrings of encroaching colonialism. Only the tiniest dusting of magical elements (a few references to walking trees that are used for the boats), but very well done.

Rachel Pollack, ‘Jack Shade in the Forest of Souls’ - I was worried at first that it would be about a cool magic dude playing poker, but the rest was about a cool magic dude trying to release a soul from a purgatorial state. I got big Sandman vibes, but it was much better than I thought it would be from the intro.

Kelly Link, ‘Two Houses’ - I had already read this in one of her collections. Astronauts on an interstellar journey waking up from stasis and telling ghost stories. Love her writing, although this one seems like it could have been the basis for a novel, or at least been longer.

Jeffrey Ford, ‘Blood Drive’ - realist right-wing dystopia where gun ownership becomes compulsory, and all school kids and teachers have to be armed from junior high onwards. Predictably ends in bloodshed.

Kij Johnson, ‘Mantis Wives’ - short and very fucked up and disturbing story about mantis mating, where just biting the male’s head off becomes passe, and the females create ever more baroque ways of torturing and killing their mates (who are kind of into it, but no one’s really sure?).

Aliette de Bodard, ‘Immersion’ - Everyone has a immerser device that gives you augmented reality help with your surroundings and personal/cultural interactions, lets you appear as an avatar to others with the device, translates languages, etc., but becomes addictive / destroys your personality / eventually becomes impossible to take off. Created by a colonizer society who only use it intermittently because they don’t really need it, but has deleterious effects on the Chinese-esque colonized planet who has to interact with the tourists. I get it, but didn’t think it was executed particularly well.

Pat Murphy, ‘About Fairies’ - Sort of scattered bits about a woman who gets hired to design a children’s toy and app involving fairies, her dying father, and Peter Pan. Not great but I did learn a lot about the original Peter Pan books.

KJ Parker - ‘Let Maps to Others’ - Another winner! Starts with a rivalry between academic historians who are both obsessed with a long-dead explorer, who in turn stumbled across a mythical island and never divulged the its location. One historian finds the missing scroll that confirms the other’s research and burns it just to spite him, and there are some good turns from there. Loved this one.

Karin Tidbeck - ‘Reindeer Mountain’ - I had already read this in her collection ‘Jagannath’, but it’s a nice Swedish family portrait x (literal) fairy tale, nice enough to read again.

Steve Rasnic Tem & Melanie Tem - ‘Domestic Magic’ - About a young man whose mom is chaotic, possibly bipolar, possibly abusive, but probably/actually a witch who puts her daughter in jeopardy to encourage her son to develop his inherited abilities. Not bad, maybe a little too close to home for me.

Meghan McCarron - ‘Swift, Brutal Retaliation’ - Two young girls dealing with the ghost of their brother who recently died from cancer, and who primarily appears when they pull mean pranks on each other. Thought this was well-written and the household was vividly depicted, but it sort of stops rather than ends.

Linda Nagata - ‘Nahiku West’ - Hard sci-fi that does a lot of world-building for a short story, involving a cop who polices the illegal use of body mods/genetic enhancement tech (“quirks”), which is punishable by death. Also has an element of the whole city being fined for the crimes of an individual, making everyone serfs in debt to some larger system and unable to leave the city. This was a good one.

Catherynne M. Valente - ‘Fade to White’ - Alternate history where the cold war resulted in nuclear war and McCarthy is president in the post-apocalyptic USA, where ‘50s puritanical values rule and young teens are placed in arranged trad marriages. Shot through with random interjections from an advertising editor giving notes on various dystopian commercials. It’s ok, basically all scene-setting without adding up to much.

Margo Lanagan - ‘Significant Dust’ - A young girl has left home and moved somewhere in rural Australia where she’s waiting tables in a diner amid frequent UFO sightings. The flashbacks to why she left (after semi-accidentally pushing her sister off a wall at the beach, leading to her neck-down paralysis) are very sharply observed & striking, but everything else around them are kinda whatever.

Ken Liu - ‘Mono No Aware’ - The protagonist is on the only ship to leave Earth before it was destroyed by a giant asteroid, with reflections on what it means to be Japanese (he’s also the only remaining Japanese person in the universe) and self-sacrifice. It’s ok.

Are all these stories from 2013? Or is that just when the book was published?

Published in 2013, I think they're mostly from 2012?

Suck air and grab clusters.

Is the editor Strahan, Horton or someone else?

That one is Strahan (who I'm not otherwise familiar with tbh).

Yeah, he's done several of those, will check library for that one. Thanks, Jordan. I've thought about hiring a student to type out all my bookmarked faves from anthologies---I usually come away with at most about five keepers per volume---since they're often too unwieldy for the scanner and I'm too lazy.

Finishing up my first read of Pat Cadigan's Patterns(1989). Dense and intense, with some re-reading already required before I get to the end. Some of it seems like high-level apprentice fiction, with maybe one or two so far coming off more like ideas for stories, but there's always an emotional core, even when I could use a little more character development in the plotdrive---but those are mostly the really early ones; later she credits Ellen Datlow with helping her to get it together, and I can see why.

Always, she delves into new/adaptive forms ov exploitation, with the exploited ones adapting as well, frequently in disconcerting ways---leaving me to say "Good luck with all that!" while jumping out of the way.

Currently reading Recursion by Blake Crouch, a sort of corny thriller with a decent enough SF premise. Basic escapism, it's keeping me turning the pages anyway.

And my feeling on finishing was, well at least I never have to read another blake crouch novel - a quick look into his other works suggests they are quite formulaic. His ultra short paragraph style was not my cup of tea, though easy to skim over when I just wanted to get to the end.

Yeah. I've read a few of his books and they're all pretty similar. Wayward Pines ones probably the best and they're not great.

Struggling a bit with that Adam Roberts novel 'The Thing Itself'. Maybe the short story is really his medium. There are parts that are compelling, but I just skipped a very long chapter written in faux Middle English (something I almost never do, but it felt great).

Speaking of Adam Roberts:
https://medium.com/adams-notebook/larkin-bowling-04f4552446cf

Just finished re-reading Stephen King's nonfiction Danse Macabre--first time was soon after publication, in 1981, when he was thirty-three. Maybe blame it on his youth, but here be some digressions, as he yips about before another hard-breather. (He acknowledges this tendency in his fiction as well, which isn't mentioned too often and which he isn't defensive about yet, although frequently blowing drive-by gas at crits in general).

Although I had to get used to him all over again, King can now refresh and extend my memories of being led herein to or toward various horror objects: the ones I watched or read were mostly good-to-excellent, especially the books. Still a lot of the latter to check, since I'm more inclined to science fiction and fantasy than horror specifically (and got off the King bus altogether after Pet Sementary

So, especially considering the age of this book maybe, a lot of it might be old news to a real horror fan, but I didn't recall and hadn't otherwise come across a number of TV series and movies he talks about. I knew or knew about more of the books, also especially enjoyed the (mostly forgotten) grand finale, where he follows his overviews on favorite authors with quotes from replies to his questions about their books, picking one each as focal point.
for Peter Straub, it's Ghost Story.

Jack Finney, The Body Snatchers.

Richard Matheson, The Shrinking Man (a fave rave of King's and mine).

Harlan Ellison, Strange Wine (the only collection of short stories in here)

Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes (another huge thing for King,apparently re-reading it yet again, reliving that experience, while recognizing Bradbury's limitations, but saying that here they're mostly transcended---also, some of the older authors are fairly detached about these early works, but Bradbury tells here, as he has elsewhere, of re-reading his own books in the middle of the night, and weeping over passages in SWTWC that made him realize he'd put his own father into it, and/or an ideal of his father, wishes, dreams.)

Ramsey Campbell, The Doll Who Ate His Mother (King says The Parasite is better, but this is the one that gets him going).

James Herbert, The Fog.

Anne Rivers Siddons, The House Next Door.

Shirley Jackson left the castle in 1965, but he aptly quotes her "Experience and Fiction' re the writing of The Haunting of Hill House.

Ends w populous appendices of films and books (I should live and die so along).

Bradbury had mentioned elsewhere that he sometimes re-read his own books in the middle of the night, but this is the first mention I've seen of his doing that with Something...---maybe after getting King's letter? It seems as raw as a recent memory might be, but that could well be its nature anyway, considering the subject.

Danse Macabre was pretty much my teenage reading list, i should have a look to see what else i can tick off the list in the last 30 years

also need to read the semi-sequel, On Writing

I ended up liking The Thing Itself in the end, don't feel bad about skimming those two chapters though.

Adam Roberts posted an interesting thing about MJH’s Viriconium books yesterday.

He describes the first book as being like a “better-written Moorcock.”

Found out that Stephen E. Andrews has a youtube channel, he wrote the bulk of 100 Must Read Science Fiction Novels and 100 Must Read Fantasy Novels (I loved them both) and I've been watching tons of his videos, he's a bookseller too. He has interviews with Christopher Priest, Nina Allan, Chris Beckett and multiple with Tom Toner.
I just bought a Tom Toner book the other day after seeing Andrews hype him up, but I had wanted it before because Paul Di Filippo and Adam Roberts loved it too.
Andrews talks a great deal about authors being increasingly pressured into series novels, fantasy in particular, bloating the books and the late 1970s Tolkien clone boom. I can't recall if it was him or his friend Scott Bradfield (who also has a youtube channel) but one of them made a case that lots more authors used to have a career of SFF singletons that had wildly different concepts. Seems like Silvia Moreno-Garcia is one of the very few major publisher authors today who habitually writes a different kind of novel from the previous.
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He just made a very nice video about "mainstream" books by SF authors, quite long but enjoyable

Noticed that but haven’t watched yet.

Book collectors go a-roving:

n a damp late-November morning we went on pilgrimage to the Dark Tower, the three of us, Valentine, Howard and Gale, keen book-collectors all. We went from our digs in Abbey Dore, hard by the Abbey itself, through the Golden Valley until we came to Peterchurch, whose church has a slim, needle-point spire in pale stone, an aerial of elegance.

From here, a narrow, steeply climbing road is the way to Urishay. As we neared the summit, making way for an approaching vehicle, our wheels slithered in the roadside slime, as if to impose upon us a slow, respectful approach. Through the autumnal trees, the last vestiges of gold glowing on their gaunt branches, we could see the high ruinous towers. Here, a Norman baronial stronghold had become over the centuries a ramshackle farmhouse, until finally its owners had been obliged to give up the struggle to keep it intact: its once roaring fireplaces now stood exposed in their walls, dank hollows.

Before its desolation, a traveller, seeking gratefully its lights through a storm, arrived one night, and asked for shelter, and was welcomed by its eccentric castellan: they talked long together by one of those fireplaces, in the marvellously evocative opening scene of Francis Brett Young’s The Dark Tower (1915). In a preface to a later edition, the author says: ‘this early, imperfect book has a deeper claim on my own affections than any other I have written.’

It was bound up with his discovery of ‘that mass of Old Red Sandstone called the Black Mountain, whose sombrely suggestive name and bold outline, filmed by distance’ had haunted him for years. When Brett Young had visited ‘the lonely outpost’ it was ‘still inhabited, through the declining storms of centuries, by the family whose forebears had first held it: a race named Delahay. Now, at last, the Delahays are gone and Urishay a stark ruin . . .’

It had been ‘his romantic privilege in those days to know the last of them: a young man, half-squire, half small farmer, who clung to its stones like the last leaf of a dying oak’, and the story of his lineage and the story of the place, had enthralled him. Moreover, he had written the book as a relief from his work as a local doctor, himself convalescent, during the fiercely busy days of an influenza epidemic in 1914: ‘The composition of The Dark Tower, an urgent spiritual necessity, was the only escape a harassed mind and ailing body found at that time’.

There's a rarebookscore too.

https://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2023/12/rip-mark-samuels.html?m=1

Quite shocked to see this, I hadn't seen him online in a while but his friends seem surprised by the news too

I managed to forget The Glamour at my friend's over the weekend when I had 50 pages left and could feel how Priest was preparing to resolve the story with another twist. It was actually a very old recommendation and my first since reading Inverted World. I will probably go on to read another (I saw recs upthread).

Right now I switched to Ramuz, probably our most famous Swiss-French author, with a novella about the Earth crashing into the sun, told from the perspective of calm quiet agricultural Switzerland. I didn't know he had written stuff like that. Shamefully my first.

Loved The Glamour. Maybe one day I will read it again.

Maybe I should get around to reading The Gradual one of these days.

If not The Islanders.

find someone who loves you as much as christopher priest loves titling his books 'the [vague noun (or occasionally adjective)]'

https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/politics/scottish-politics/4838504/altany-craik-author-fife-labour-candidate/

yes this is the correct thread, he wrote books about a badass priest investigating a scary sex cult. I'm curious but I don't think I'll bother

I perused a page or two on Amazon Kindle previews, er let's say I've read better. Is all self-published writing this bad?

Of course not.

find someone who loves you as much as christopher priest loves titling his books 'the [vague noun (or occasionally adjective)]'

It’s like all the “Adverb Adjective Noun” Dylan song titles.

Not to be confused with Mr. Bob Dorough, that was his birthday yesterday.

Ramsey Campbell uses titles like that a lot, but then occasionally something really striking like The Face That Must Die or The Doll Who Ate His Mother

can anyone speak to lois mcmaster bujold? she's won awards, i've seen her praised, but

a) apparently no one agrees on where to start
b) really just the worst cover art imaginable

The only one of hers I've read is Memory, a turning point for apparently heretofore somewhat crazy-brilliant Miles Vorkosigan, Imperial son and rep in space, but also mercenary leader: the central protagonist in what could be called the Vorkosigan Saga, after Miles and his family. It's space opera with unusual range, incl. some depth of characterization at times. Here he's mostly back on his home world, mostly immersed in family and gov politics, intrigue, also some romance and obligatory socializing---all of which can be read on the sly side, but omg outburst of violence-crisis too, and clear enough depictions of previous activities, and I'd like to go back (and fwd) to space adventures, but this one's pretty satisfying, even though I guess mid-series.