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

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.

And the stories in The Dream Archipelago.

That was a Golden Age of SF for me, when I read all of those books one after the other.

Still wanna read The Prestige, The Islanders, A Dream of Wessex and maybe The Gradual.

Hadn’t known he was first married to Lisa Tuttle for six years.

The relatively recent collection Episodes looks good, featuring the classic Palely Loitering which is also in this fine collection
https://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/a/a7/NNFNTSMMR271979.jpg

This one he edited is good too:
https://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/7/74/NTCPTNSFVJ1978.jpg

i recommended 'inverted word' to someone literally one hour before his death was announced, so maybe it's my fault

.

At least he outlived his bête noire Martin Amis by a wee bit.

Hadn’t known he was first married to Lisa Tuttle for six years.

don't actually know paul kincaid, but this is lovely re: christopher priest

https://ttdlabyrinth.wordpress.com/2024/02/03/chris

Yeah, meant to link. Does that have the Cavern club story?

Have Adam Roberts and M. John Harrison weighed in yet?

Christopher Priest has died.https://t.co/OaH6Iwse4m

— Adam Roberts (@arrroberts) February 3, 2024

forgot the quote marks there, but anyway, a nice thread from Roberts

Ah I don’t use Twitter. I was hoping for a Medium post.

Okay, just created an account to see that, which somehow seems fitting.

Yeah, meant to link. Does that have the Cavern club story?

Priest lived on the island of Bute in recent years, and not long ago donated lots of books to this local charity bookshop:

https://friendsofwemyssbaystation.co.uk/bookshop-test/

On my last visit, I picked up a hardcover edition of Movie Magic: The Story of Special Effects in the Cinema (1974) by John Brosnan and found this inscription inside:

https://i.imgur.com/vJbxa08.jpg

Nice!

Somebody on social media (on that Cavern Club thread I think) posted a picture of a book he had bought of Priest’s with an inscription from Richard Cowper to him.

Thread is here

not much to it outside what I already told you though, but the inscription is cool.