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

Or maybe you are thinking of the one in the book. Will read and report back/pvmic

Mantis Wives

I could swear I've read/listened to at least one of Kij Johnson's stories in Clarkesworld. "The Privilege of a Happy Ending," maybe?

Think that must have been the one I was thinking of, “Spar.” A Nebula Award winner.

Kij Johnson kind of updates Tiptree via Ballard, or something.

https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/audio_10_09/

Actually there are more audio stories over there where that came from.

No, I know what it was: "The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe." IIRC, the Coode Street guys had that on one of their year-end lists.

Okay, thanks for clarifying.

Jordan, it took me awhile to see that you had reviewed that book in two posts. At first I thought you just overlooked some stuff you didn’t like.

http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/2023-in-review-part-one/
http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/2023-in-review-part-two/
http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/2023-in-review-part-three/

They're very fun & engaging so far, although they tend to feature male protagonists that are overly snarky and ultra-capable seems to definitely be k.j. parker's thing

he's really into how things work -- it's like, this is how we tried to build a trebuchet, and why it didn't work at first, and how we found the materials and how we raised the money to buy them rather than just 'we catapulted some shit at the enemy' or 'we used magic'

no doubt many readers won't care for that sort of thing -- in my mind i call it 'playing with encumbrance' -- but it's not at all as dry as it sounds (partially due to the snarkiness)

reading the last of the Silo (nee Wool) trilogy and it gives zero fucks to you having read the previous one 2 years or about 80 other books ago. i can't even remember the major plot points it references.

now onto third of the children of time trilogy. this one does do a two page recap so that's good. also send to be 200 pages shorter than my memory of the first two - another point in its favour

I read that recently, interested to see what someone else thought of it
halfway thru Infinity Gate. decent enough modern scifi if kinda unremarkable so far

first 50 pages of Children of Memory feels a lot like Dust detached, limited communities (silo / sleeper ship survivors), overly curious child with a book

Charles Platt - An Accidental Life volume 1

This series is slim and magazine sized, probably for the sake of the large number of photographs. I haven't read any of Platt's fiction yet but I needed more of what I enjoyed so much in his Dream Makers books.

Platt doesn't seem to have liked England in the 40s and 50s very much, even in his privileged upbringing he makes it sound like a terrible time to live in, until there was something that blown his mind, like Little Richard, Elvis, John W. Campbell's Astounding magazine and Sergeant Bilko (I'm 4 decades younger than Platt and I never imagined this television show could have so profound an effect on someone). He praises scientific advancements and writes little infodumps for the kind of technology owned by ordinary people.
He describes his teenaged self as a sociopath, he was stealing books and bicycles and by the time he gets in contact with Christopher Priest, Michael Moorcock, the British science fiction community and begins his involvement with New Worlds, it seems like that saved him from further petty crime (I'll see if that's true in the next volumes). It's incredible that he managed to capture his youth in so much detail and he goes deep into what was maybe wrong with him and everyone else.

This is a lot of fun and I've started the next one.

Children Of Time, 40% through

just past the attempted lynching

it's sci-fi as fairy story almost. and gethli / gothi are obviously modelled on hugin and munin, so a bit of norse myth in there too. is fun.

Time / Memory, whatever

Reading Hyperion and hope the infodumping ends at some point

Never read Terry Bisson. Fire on the Mountain looks good.

https://jasperbernes.substack.com/p/terry-bissons-fire-on-the-mountain

Charles Platt - An Accidental Life volume 2

This volume focuses on Platt initially designing New Worlds but then gradually taking more and more control of all aspects of the magazine. He goes into all the technical detail about typesetting and what the succession of different printers did. Also about his earliest novels, going to America, meeting various science fiction writers and writing what would have been one of the last Essex House novels.
It's very gritty and he shows that New Worlds was never a true success by their criteria and he has quite a bleak assessment of what the new wave really achieved. There's a few alarming scuffles (especially Moorcock chasing his close friend Barrington Bayley with a smashed bottle) and enough unpleasantness that I wonder what it was about his work at a fetish magazine was too embarrassing to write down. This is a great series.

Reading Hyperion and hope the infodumping ends at some point

It's worth reading the whole series. He stuck the landing about as well as anyone, ever.

Hyperion was one where the writing style and characters annoyed me but the actual story and world was interesting enough to make whole thing worth reading and overall still enjoyable

finished Children of Memory

would've liked it more if it was more linear rather than jumping backwards and forwards like it did, even though that's difficult given the multiple iterations of a simulation thing that was actually happening

ravens were the best bit. and Paul in his planetary state.

i wonder if Paul was named after Paul the psychic octopus?

yeh I loved the ravens and the way they act/think. the plot felt Star Trekkish to me, away team adventures
finished Infinity Gate. ok but I'm going to forget it all in six months

Totally. I really ended up enjoying Children of Memory, scared to try any of his books outside the trilogy because they sound kinda lame.

i didn't like the other one i read, ironclads. the architect series sounds ok but i don't want to commit to another 1500 page trilogy.

have since read Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow which is about games developers but not really sf. yesterday i started Klara and the Sun which might be more on topic.

read the two architects books and they are ok but nowhere near as good as the children ones
currently reading the Herzog autobiography and wondering how much is speculative lol

wow tchiakovsky is prolific. I've read children of time and the elder race novella, both pretty good - i guess i should carry on with the children series.

i read his 'echoes of the fall' fantasy series last year; it was decent imo but, like so many others before it, failed at the end

just finished the 'atlas _____' trilogy by olivie blake and . . .

the premise is hackneyed (students/magic/sentient library of alexandria) but the actual story is presented by alternating through the six students' POVs and none of them are reliable narrators, and they're all wounded, and they largely hate one another (for good reason).

it's well done, and she's a good writer, but there's far too much soap-operatic characters-trying-to-sort-out-relationships and too little other plot to sustain a trilogy. i still liked it, especially the first one, but i don't suppose i would *recommend* it

Not that this is news to anyone but Hard To Be A God is extraordinary on pretty much every level

finished Klara and the Sun.

doesn't the sun appear to go down in different places depending on the season? wouldn't you notice this if you'd been watching it for even as much as a month?

and i don't know who did the the covers for this new set of releases but they are mostly terrible.

I haven't noticed that, and I've been watching or being aware of its presence for at least a month, over a near-lifetime! Will check again. Perhaps narrator and device Klara's vision is limited, bug or feature.
I enjoyed the book, which had me cinematically, and in a good way----there was a penultimate "wtf, ki!" moment, but then oh yeah the ending worked out just like Klara said

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_path

(looking at the animations the moment is approx sinusoidal so there are parts of the year (mid-summer, mid-winter) where it approaches the limit slowly and then reverses away slowly so there won't be a lot of lateral movement for a period of time. and maybe it's a big barn...)

Just bought my ticket for Glasgow Worldcon 2024. Got a discount on my ticket because I’m resident in Scotland (a slightly better discount than the one for people who have never been to a Worldcon before, which I was also eligible for). Glad I don’t have to try and book accommodation, which seemed a convoluted process (the whole ticket buying process was fairly complex). Have been to loads of comic conventions but never an SF one before - not having a clue what it will be like is part of the appeal - plus it being on my doorstep, it really was now or never. Hope to run into other ilxors there.

I was originally wanting to go but the cost is probably too much, the awards don't have much interest for me anymore and I have no idea what kind of prices they'd have in the dealers rooms or what the other events would be like.
The last Glasgow worldcon was supposed to be a clusterfuck because it was free to enter.

I'm going!

Yay!

My ticket works out at £28 a day which isn't too bad for event entertainment these days.

Would any of you be interested in a dystopian sf novel written entirely in Scots?

I started one yesterday and so far it’s really good.

Started reading one, that is

deep wheel orcadia?

Heh not familiar with that I’m afraid

But n Ben A-Go-Go is what I’m talking about.

I'm not into realistic dystopias- my main use for sf these days is to escape the one we're already in. "deep wheel orcadia" won the Arthur c Clarke prize, is a "romance set on a space station" sez wikipedia, written in verse. don't know how much I'd be into that either.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q294mDqqgB0

I have about 29 Tanith Lee books (including omnibuses), only 65 more to get!

Had no idear so many! The stories I've read seemed v. fresh, no factory.

I'm going!

― Daniel_Rf, Monday, January 29, 2024 4:14 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Yay!

My ticket works out at £28 a day which isn't too bad for event entertainment these days.

― Ward Fowler, Monday

finished Beautiful Shining People or "Beautiful Shining People, the extraordinary, EPIC speculative masterpiece" as Goodreads insists on calling it. Tokyo 2050. boy meets girl, girl has no vagina...

he has obviously read William Gibson but it's more everyday and as such is more painful when he gets the hacking language wrong - Gibson would just invent a word or be vague about it

made a good companion to Klara though