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

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

I'm reading The Chronliths by Robert Charles Wilson. Seems very much like a deliberate attempt to write a modern day John Wyndham novel, which I am totally here for even if the ratio of "narrator's hard luck life story" to actual sf content is a little high for my liking.

^ this was pretty good, the ending was a bit disappointing - very strong accept the mystery vibes - and the narrator was just not that interesting a guy to spend so much time with. But some fun ideas and generally a good stab at a wydhamesque 'catastrophes and how people deal with them'. I'll read more by him for sure.

I had a mixed feeling about The Chronoliths (mostly influenced from reading it in one gulp while I was on a train in China) that felt almost colonialist? I wanted the main characters to lose.

^ is cheap in amazon monthly deal (uk) i notice (or maybe was last month)

(ok, it's this month and it's cheap, but not cheap-cheap)

xp lol OK copperhead.

I got it for £2 on kobo.

they've been going through the iain m banks novels, one a month, discounting them to £3, which is cheap enough for me to pick up e-copies despite already having all the p-copies. Surface Detail this month by the looks.

It seems like there's been a huge change in perception of old SFF artwork, everyone used to say it was godawful and now so many people say the 60s-90s was a great period. Is it partly because the covers of general/literary fiction look like candy megapacks? They're so stupid and ugly looking now, what happened? This can't all be blamed on youtube and tiktok visibility.

This table of contents is pretty striking
https://file770.com/big-book-of-cyberpunk-toc-released🕸/

It seems like there's been a huge change in perception of old SFF artwork, everyone used to say it was godawful and now so many people say the 60s-90s was a great period. Is it partly because the covers of general/literary fiction look like candy megapacks? They're so stupid and ugly looking now, what happened? This can't all be blamed on youtube and tiktok visibility.

Christopher Priest RIP
https://www.ninaallan.co.uk/?p=6855

rip indeed

Wha…? RIP :(

I thought he would live to be at least six hundred and fifty miles.

Sad to hear about Priest, didn't expect this one.

James - what do you mean about that table of contents?

I mean has anyone gotten that book and dipped into it yet?

I just saw it at my local library but didn’t borrow it…yet.

Still there on the NEW shelf, a few books down from Curepedia.

Christopher Priest RIP
https://www.ninaallan.co.uk/?p=6855🕸

Heh, they haven’t, but Paul Kincaid has, and they both liked Kincaid’s book about him so maybe I should take a look at that

Also saw tributes from Pat Cadigan, a Ballard fan club and, wait for it, a Harlan Ellison fan club! Clute and Langford, like Richard Hell, said it’s too early.

Never read anything apart from Inverted World but it blew my mind of course. Would love some testimonials on his other stuff

Lost track at some point but The Affirmation, The Glamour, The Extremes and The Separation are all really good.

Also The Adjacent, The Space Machine and The Quiet Woman.