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

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.
📹
📹

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.

Also maybe SFE could help you, though it's got a spoiler re Memory:
https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/bujold_lois_mcmaster

Paul Di Filippo recommends Cordelia's Honor (an omnibus) as the best starting place. Thankfully there is a series of omnibuses but they don't cover the entire saga

She gives her own take on the order here:

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/22803928-bujold-reading-order-guide-2022-update

I quite enjoyed the Vorkosigan Saga. A fun mix of politics and space opera romp

Shards of Honor and Barrayar. The first two books in the series proper, they detail the adventures of Cordelia Naismith of Beta Colony and Aral Vorkosigan of Barrayar. Shards was my very first novel ever; Barrayar was actually my eighth, but continues the tale the next day after the end of Shards. For readers who want to be sure of beginning at the beginning, or who are very spoiler-sensitive, start with these two.

Both of these are in Cordelia's Honor. I normally go for publication order, but when a series is this long and not a strict sequence, I'll make an exception.

huh

https://www.tor.com/2023/12/14/apple-tv-to-adapt-martha-wells-murderbot-alexander-skarsgard-set-to-star

feels like there are an incredible number of novels (particularly recently) about generation ships nearing their destinations and being sabotaged?

thank god we have becky chambers to make everyone rational and humane

Lol

i just read “Liane The Wayfarer” by Jack Vance and am completely blown away. next level

read 'exadelic' by jon evans

more of a techno-thriller, i suppose, than sci-fi exactly -- although robert heinlein makes a cameo appearance

hella fast-paced, covers a fantastic amount of ground, pretty decent imo

honestly the worst thing about it is that the author photo is deeply in the uncanny valley

modern SF 'about the author' entries are . . . well, cringe

female SF author is six feet tall and lives in los angeles

male SF author lives in the midwest with his family and a tarantula named rosie

c'mon ppl

Two new Broodcomb Press titles at the end of Jan.

https://broodcomb.co.uk/?page_id=84

Having read all the ones still in print, I am not sure there’s anything comparable in the folk horror / English unease canon. They’re an extraordinary achievement.

From What Did You Read in 2023?

Patrick Nielsen Hayden ((ed.): Starlight 2
(science fiction x fantasy:prestige express, but often gives out of steam
—exceptions: Susanna Clarke, *“Mrs. Mabb,” Jonathan Letham, *”Access Fantasy,” Martha Soukoup,*”The House of Expectations”)

'Piranesi' is excellent (haven't read/heard/seen Jonathan Strange).

I really liked Piranesi, it was a model of concise weirdness.