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

Although I lurked on I Love Music for a long time, I didn't look beyond that sub and only recently joined ilxor.

I look forward to reading this thread, as well as those that preceded it.

Although it has been many years since I read Armor, I am surprised that a search of this website for John Steakley turned up zero results, as I enjoyed the book back then.

What was I missing?

never heard of it/him, but i am confident that james redd can weigh in

Thanks for the quick response!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armor_(novel)

I will try to weigh in on other favourites as well...

never heard of it/him, but i am confident that james redd can weigh in

Although I have never read it, as I am not a vampire fan, Steakley's other novel "Vampire$" was adapted into a movie starring James Woods...

Currently (re)reading the Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay. I'm in the middle of The Wandering Fire, which is the second book.

Although I had previously read Kay's Tigana and thoroughly enjoyed it, I was always more of a SciFi fan, and despite being Canadian, I was originally offput by the first novel being set in 1980s Toronto.
"
That said, this trilogy is a nice mix of Arthurian legend, high fantasy and "modern" day (80s) fiction.

A solid 8/10 for me.

i like the fionavar series a lot; there are Consequences

wouldn't say the first one is set in toronto any more than the first narnia book is set in england

Recently read my first K.W. Jeter, Mantis: rude, speedy hyperfocus of ov narrator who has just discovered the joy of typing on his first 1980s computer (green words on black screen, whirling away as he shuts it down, coming back when he does), hovering anxiously over the latest nightly escapes of his schizoid brain child (also has a daylight sperm-egg child and ex-wife who still cares about him, and vice-versa). These last provide welcome change, also the narrator has a downstairs neighbor somewhat like Jeter's buddy PKD, but mainly this mines a narrow vein among nerves, if w/o that 80s "splatter" horror effect---planty stanky though, in cold sweat way. Violence against certain women, the ones who supposedly seek it out. However, there's a twist at the end (with another implied).
Ugh, but it's usually not that hard to read, at least for (old male) me. Would like to see Jeter's talent and skill applied otherwise. May read his one Star Wars bounty hunter books that the local library still has

"books" got in there because was thinking of Jeter's Star Wars bounty hunter trilogy---may have been more, but that's what the library used to have (think he's also written at least one Star Trek tie-in)(and SF Encyclopedia says that he seems to have been the first to use "steampunk" in print, re what he and Blaylock etc. were doing).

Sharon Green died two years ago but her obituary only appeared recently in Locus because she must have been distant from the SFF scene

recently been looking at SF anthologies over the last 40 years -- mostly gardner dozois, but a few others as well

dozois took it upon himself, in the intros, to opine on the State of SF each year. i haven't fully read them -- they're extremely lengthy -- but based on the introductory paragraphs i'd break them down as such:

55% THIS WAS A TERRIBLE YEAR AND SCIENCE FICTION IS DOOMED
25% THIS WAS AN OKAY YEAR, BUT THERE ARE STORMS ON THE HORIZON
20% SCIENCE FICTION RULES AND ANYONE WHO DOUBTS ITS STAYING POWER IS A CLOWN

tbf he apparently felt that his core audience was SF Magazine Publishers, and they really were ultimately doomed

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

HE=AM!

This doesn't go into her speculative fiction much but it's a good article (Rachel Pollack makes an appearance too)
https://xtramagazine.com/power/activism/roz-kaveney-writer-activist-260077

just finished Feersum Endjinn and in still not sure what was going on, some people coming together to do something, others trying to stop them. it apparently worked but not really sure what or how.

if you've read it you'll know every 4th chapter is in dialect - eventyooly we came 2 a bit whare thi tunil wideind out & thi floar turnd from stoan 2 wood - which is enough of a struggle without the additional ocr errors the e-book introduces - 1nce, for instance was rendered as lnce and Ince in places

I thought the enjinn of the title enabled them to shift the orbit of earth but wp says it shifts the whole solar system.

much as I love the culture, in my memory this and against a dark background are the most intriguing and worthy of a re-read.

yeh need to revisit Endjinn, I remember it being good but hard work. Excession is my fav tho.

> 1nce, for instance was rendered as lnce and Ince in places

ha, that's small-L-nce and big-i-nce rather than digit-1-nce. depending on the font it's indistinguishable, BUT my original hardback uses a serif font so this shouldn't happen.

Lord Dunsany - Time And The Gods (omnibus)

I think Gollancz screwed up with this book title, it has the exact same name as the first book in this omnibus and I'm sure that has caused trouble with book orders. Time And The Gods And Other Collections or Six Early Collections would have been more fitting. It contains six collections and I'd argue two of them (Time And The Gods and Gods Of Pegana) could be seen as mosaic novels.

This is an extremely mixed bag, I seem to be cursed in that many of my favorite books are far more difficult than they needed to be yet rewarding enough that I have to persevere. I had my doubts about finishing this one because it was deadly dull much of the way but it surprised me often enough and it has that misty mountain mythopoeticism that I love. Sometimes the prose is indigestible and in ridiculously long paragraphs that would challenge any attention span (good thing most of the stories are very short) and then sometimes he writes beautifully flowing prose that makes me wonder why he didn't write like that more often.

In these early collections Dunsany usually defaults to a stately ceremonial mode with lots of repeated phrases and it can become wearying and grating. But every once in a while he does something completely different that has no resemblance to any other story in the omnibus. This made it easier to keep reading and curious about how far he stretched this in further books.

Dunsany is often called a foundational fantasy writer who helped normalize invented settings but reading Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith didn't prepare me for how different Dunsany is. The stories are almost always told from a great distance, they're often like landscape paintings and that's part of what I like about them, but when it gets to the characters they tend to be left extremely vague and ambiguous, leaving me to wonder if some of the gods have human form or not, or if they are shapeshifters. Time is described as a man with a sword who can do battle with humans by aging them. The first collection has gods leaping across the planet in an instant. One god is suggested to be like a cat and I didn't know how literally to take that. And we get sentient forces of nature, water, hills, mountains; one story has a stream and a road talking to each other. In one landscape description a goddess called Romance is briefly mentioned to be walking around the fields and never mentioned again, I liked the effect.
A lot of this felt quite fresh to me, there are a bunch of writers who have written pastiche of this stuff but I never felt like most of the approaches of these Dunsany stories have become widespread and certainly not done to death. Despite the tired mannerisms.

I wouldn't recommend this whole omnibus as an entry point but I feel that using excerpts from Time And The Gods and Gods Of Pegana in the Penguin Classics collection (In The Land Of Time And Other Fantasy Tales) probably wouldn't work well. The stories have a cumulative effect and I think Time And The Gods is by far the best book in the omnibus, it builds itself up and travels around the world, the descriptions of the forces of nature traveling in the later chapters is really beautiful and "The South Wind" is a nice little sad story.
At a page flipping glance, Gods Of Pegana looks like it will be a much easier read because the stories are shorter than ever and it has lots of short paragraphs but it was actually the most difficult to read and I guess that's why it was kept to the end (despite it being published first).

Other highlights:
- "The Doom Of La Traviata" is incredibly short but made quite a strong impression. It's about the christian god sending a sex worker to hell but the angels can't bear to punish her like that so they leave her outside the gates of hell and she becomes a beautiful flower that watches people going to hell but listens to and feels the breezes of heaven.
- "Thirteen At Table" with the fox hunter who stumbles on the man with ghosts for dinner guests.
- The dog at the start of Time And The Gods that stares people to death (even through shut eyelids).
- I can't remember which story or which collection it was but I loved the part with the god who sends some sort of movement through the mountains as if he's playing them like pipe organs, it was an amazing image, I should have written it down.
- The dreamy image of an old lady singing in her garden.

An extremely mixed bag, generally really dull and occasionally amazing and very fresh. Approach with caution. You're probably better starting with the Penguin collection or King Of Elflands Daughter. I've heard his plays are very good.

finished The Left Hand Of Darkness and it was ok but again plagued by ocr errors - literally every time he mentioned why he went by Genry rather than Genly the 'l' was rendered incorrectly, as an I or a 1. otherwise ok, but only ok.

before that The Diamond Age which felt like an excuse to write fairy tales (although the same thing can be said of a lot of sf)

and now The Factory which says it's sf but I'm 60% in and there's no real sign of it yet.

Great post RAG.

this month's Kindle deals are kind of ridiculous - 3 things from my wishlist and a couple of others

iain m banks - state of the art and hydrogen sonata (and the algebraist which i already have) all at 2.99

New Reynolds third Prefect novel 99p

neuromancer 99p

bone clocks (not sure of genre here tbh) 99p

(and a couple of other things that are definitely off topic)

Great post RAG

Second part of this PAN Review review is about more Dunsany:

..The man himself has now reappeared in rare form - in both meanings of the term - in a hand-stitched, mauve-covered, limited edition chapbook of Lost Tales, in what Michael Swanwick describes as being sourced "from microfiche copies of the magazines they were published in for the first and only time." In this case, between May 1909 and March 1915.

In the past I've made it clear that, in the field of fantasy, Dunsany's surface exotica has left me cold.His apparent influence, that spawned the sword 'n' sorcery epics of Le Guin, Tanith Lee, Tolkien, Moorcock, etc., ensured I'd be giving this particular sub-genre a wide berth. His non-SNS work (such as The Blessing of Pan and The Charwoman's Shadow) being more welcome but all too rare.
Lost Tales, however, is a revelation in the former field. Its beauty - swiftly apparent - is the distilled essence of what made his longer, more elaborate work charm so many for so long. Shorn of the interminable asides, musings and epic descriptions of sand-blown travel across vast oasis, what remains here is the poetry, wry wit and child-like wonder at their source.

Those Pegana Press editions are levels beyond what I'm willing to spend but I think Ghost In The Corner from Hippocampus might have some of that stuff.

https://bsky.app/profile/feastlastharlequin.bsky.social/post/3kujj2uam672l

don't really understand this situation but sounds interesting

David Pringle - The Ultimate Guide To Science Fiction (Second Edition)

Note: the first edition is from 1990 and the second from 1995, there was a third edition planned but it never happened. Pringle written several guides and encyclopedias so make sure you get the titles and editions right.

I really admired Pringle's books in the 100 Best Books series, and this is surprisingly fun for a book arranged like an encyclopedia. Pringle made it an A-Z by book titles because he thought (or maybe he knows?) that people are more likely to recall a book title than an author's name (the authors are indexed at the back). I wish he hadn't done this because a large chunk of the book is entries (for alternate titles, sequels and supposedly minor books) referring you to other entries with a proper overview. I wish he trusted readers to use an index for book titles and arranged the main text by author name, it would have been so much more streamlined. But still, it's surprisingly fun, though I might not recommend it to someone who doesn't know at least a quarter of the authors in the book.

The ratings go from no stars to four stars, if my memory serves me right, it seems like there was less than 40 books to get 4 stars. Pringle quotes other critics extensively, I tend not to like mocking reviews but David Langford, Christopher Priest and some others had a real talent for putdowns, I'm kind of amazed that back when the genre was smaller and everyone knew everyone it didn't stop them from writing these insults. I get the impression gore was a turnoff for Pringle.

Some minor disappointments: Jo Clayton is nowhere to be seen. No Dave Duncan (not to be confused with the earlier David Duncan who is in here), admittedly he written more fantasy at this time. Sharon Webb and Sharon Baker didn't have a huge following but I wish they had been in here too. I don't know why he gave Edgar Allan Poe's science fiction collection full marks, I consider a lot of that his worst work. David Drake gets rated lower than I expected. One of the major additions of the second edition is film/tv novelizations, the overwhelming majority seem to be the dull hackwork you would expect so I don't think this was a great use of space, I wish he had just featured the exceptional ones. I'm amazed by how many film adaptations I've never heard of.

I'm really dismayed by the frequent difference in contents between USA and UK short story collections, this is a collecting nightmare. Ian Watson's body of work sounds more fascinating than ever. George Alec Effinger comes off looking really well too. Larry Niven seems to be a much better short story writer than a novelist? Leo Szilard wrote science fiction! It's speculated that Stuart Gordon changed his name from Richard because he didn't want to be confused with another writer, but now he's overshadowed by a film director of the same name. Greg Bear's Queen Of Angels gets a rave review that suggests it's one of his best works (never heard of it before). Uncensored Man by Arthur Sellings and Web Of Angels by John M. Ford also sound great. I'm on the lookout for James Kahn too.

James Grazier's Runts Of 61 Cygni C is called "Hilariously bad, one of the prime contenders for the title of Worst SF Novel Ever Published". It seems to be about a garden of cyclops people having "endless games of sex" as the cover boasts. Hope I can find this one. Thankyou again to David Pringle.

And thank you for that informative review---one of the resluts of Googling Mr. Grazier's work: https://schlock-value.com/2017/10/08/runts-of-61-cygni-c/

cover https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/918VNeQ7hlL._SL1500_.jpg

Don't think I've read any Jo Clayton, is this review of diadem from the stars accurate?

The story is about a superhuman Mary Sue that travels around and everyone she meets wants to kill her or rape her, but she's got superpowers, so that she can pull off a deus ex machina each and every time and move on to the next encounter. Ah, and she also likes to bathe, and for whatever reason the author decided we needed to know every time that she was going to have a bath (but don't hope in any kind of titillatory material), even though it is of no consequence to the plot and adds no depth to the character. Luckily we don't get to know every time she pees.

I haven't got far enough in Diadem, I started reading it months ago and had to put it aside until I finished other things. I was enjoying it so far. There's some ebooks but it's a shame that none of her stuff was ever reprinted, she had a decent sized audience I think.

I can't recall the author or title but there was a 70s novel about britain being ruled by soccer hooligans, I'd probably never read it but just the idea is funny.

https://file770.com/last-dangerous-visions-table-of-contents/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Dangerous_Visions

This is such a huge disappointment. I'll likely get the book and I don't envy the task JMS had in seeing this through but a mere 13 of the original stories are in this new anthology and that still leaves about half of the stories in limbo, including around six writers who seem to have nothing published (admittedly these were probably the hardest writers to track down, maybe he tried) but he said he rejected some stories for being dated, which is just a terrible reason. Biggest surprise is the Bester story still absent. I would have liked to seen the Piserchia story (and everything else really).

About time I read the first two dangerous visions I guess.

Sheckley? And Cory Doctorow? Hmm

he said he rejected some stories for being dated, which is just a terrible reason.

the christoper priest piece on LAST is great.

The Book on the Edge of Forever?

Where did you read it?

https://web.archive.org/web/20000902203835/http://sf.www.lysator.liu.se/sf_archive/sf-texts/Ansible/Last_Deadloss_Visions,Chris_Priest

Called THE LAST DEADLOSS VISIONS there but (c) 1994 and the wikipedia page for tldv implies it's the same as The Book on the Edge of Forever.

I think the second version was expanded.

I wouldn't expect all these stories from the 70s to be masterpieces and so what if they're dated? If you're putting out something like this it feels like missing the appeal of why people want to read it.

I’ve never been able to get through P J Farmer’s Joyce pastiche in DV, or Richard Lupoff’s similar in ADV. OTOH, the Delany in the first collection and the Russ in the second are top five SF short stories for me - and there many others nearly as good. Whatever his failings as an editor and human being, you do get the sense that Ellison could inspire people to do their best work for him, and that compared to many other SF outlets, his was a more diverse and encouraging sale.

I haven't read these since, well not quite since they came out, but the late seventies, I think.

But a few of them have stayed with me all this time and some I read elsewhere later. Table of contents of the first one still looks really good today. Feel like I forced myself to finish that PJF story, but was a bigger fan of some of his other stuff.

I think of "dated" as being like confined, stamped, done, but agree that *somewhat* dated/pleasantly/pungently musty can have its own antique charm, even allure---like I recently finally read this aaancient pb of Ballard's Chronopolis I've had for maybe 20 years, from a thrift store, and the lesser stories, liberated from cold print, would make awesome basis for 60s-early 70s anthology TV (there are also several classics/killers).

“Dated” SF can often have a hauntological effect, if I may.

Read my second Robert Charles Wilson, Blind Lake. It was ok, definitely absolutely not at all hard SF despite the talk of bose-einstein condensates. Felt somehow less satisfying that The Chronoliths even though it didn't play the same trick of unasking all the questions set up at the beginning. Read a bit like an airport thriller in parts. Oh well I bought Spin as well so he's get one more go from me.

There was a good interview with him on Geek's Guide To The Galaxy this week

possibly this is due to my sources of info, but it is striking how almost every hyped SFF novel of this year has an LGBTQ+ angle or three

which is totally fine, some of my best friends, several of my recent favorites (baru cormorant, gideon the ninth, micaiah johnson) etc. etc.

but it is striking