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

Time to launch another lifeboat to the stars. Previously: ThReads Must Roll: the new, improved rolling fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction &c. thread

All aboard the Strato-Cruiser!

DO U SEE, I’m a stranger here myself.

Singing thread title to the tune of the Theme from Underdog

Thread of Wonder
5000 posts

Wonder Thread
Wonder Thread!

Thread of royal beauty bright!

Cool, except PLEASE change "Sci-Fi" to "Science Fiction"; true headz will respect it more.

Seriously, change that shit.

If a mod wants to a mod can, now to read some skiffy some I can make a real contribution to the thread.

some

In thee beginning (not really, butt a big ol goodun, where I came in)
rolling fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction &c. thread

That rolled from 2011 to 2014, I believe.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/P/B08F9XYGVQ.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_SX500_.jpg

Kindle daily deal today. seems odd that it doesn't mention Gagarin by name.

also listed, a Tchaikovsky book, Doors of Eden. anyone? i liked the one about the spiders, i didn't like ironclads.

just finished The Ministry For the Future. almost comically unsubtle and didactic in its politcs. the last hundred pages or so were "scouring of the shire" bad. first half is excellent.

started that -- the first scene is harrowing, but i instantly lost all interest when things shifted to the ministry itself. i suppose no one dramatizes vast bureaucratic processes better than KSR but it's a low bar, and i'm not really up for doom right now

read 'hench', which has a jokey premise -- underemployed young woman seeks placement as a villain's henchman through a temp service -- but turned out to be fierce as well as funny

started jo walton's 'the just city'; it's a little precious but i'm liking it a lot so far

as everyone says about recent KSR, it's actually very optimistic. the first scene though good grief.

Yeah, if the future is remotely like that KSR projects I'd be a hell of a lot more hopeful than I am now.

the last hundred pages or so were "scouring of the shire" bad.

I am struggling with this sentence.

Yeah.

ha! do you mean you're struggling with it syntactically or morally?

Uh, aesthetically? The scouring of the shire is a highlight!

I'm more bothered by the lack of a comma in 5,000 than I am abt sci-fi tbh

Commas are only for numbers of five figures and up as far as I'm concerned

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbNlMtqrYS0
x10

Almost posted that embed 10x ina old-school JW Noizeborad style.

I'm sure I talked about some of this in the previous thread about hanging out with horror people mostly then SFF people and then when you go back to horrorland, most people in SFF land start seeming really uptight and conversations have so many restricted areas and I have to respect what people aren't willing to discuss but I find it occasionally frustrating. And then there's this area of horror which is like the children of Dennis Cooper and it's lovely how relaxed they are and talking about what drugs they're taking all the time.

https://amphetaminesulphate.bigcartel.com/
https://www.clashbooks.com/
https://expatpress.com/shop/
https://www.apocalypse-party.com/books.html
https://www.infinitylandpress.com/books

I generally like SFF fans but I do feel like a lot of them (even a lot of the progressive ones) still want stories that are easy to swallow and are probably afraid to look at their dog's anus.

Only thing is, the blurbs for some of these authors can be completely ridiculous and leave you hanging, not knowing what it's like or about. "Britney Spears singing love songs to you while Baudelaire gives you an enema" or some nonsense like that.

Ha, exactly.

Think I started a thread about that once.

When Author X was Compared to Author Y by Author Z

nothing more riveting than people talking about their drug regimens, very transgressive

I'm a complete teetolaler and I'm not even into drug talk but my point is it's nice to hear writers talking in a more carefree way. It's probably significant that the horror genre largely escaped the culture war and there's less people out to get each other.

Like this crap is still going on in SFF land
https://dorisvsutherland.com/2021/04/06/baens-bar-the-utterly-incompetent-case-for-the-defence/

i haven't the patience to delve into what you consider 'culture war' 'crap' that's 'easy to swallow'

tbh i've seen way too much of my cat's anus, but nor have i considered cramming something up there and calling it art

honestly you are fucking creepy as hell; maybe you should stick to to 'open-minded' horror boards where you can discuss what you want to do to your waifus with no judgment

but nor have i considered cramming something up there and calling it art

Does anyone do this?

Old Lunch was asking maybe two years ago about problems with reactionary horror people but as far as the fiction/poetry side goes it's really minimal compared to SFF, it's been said they're more easy going and get on better together.
The drawback is maybe the low brow attitude, too much easy amusement with juxtaposing high and low culture and the shit eating grins (see lots of horror author photos) and it does annoy me when people feel they have to present dark or gross subject matter in a jokey way, I'm regularly guilty of it too and it's often my first instinct to joke about some of these things. I think people do this because if they keep a straight face about it, they're worried people will think they're crazy.
But I think sometimes humor and punky attitude doesn't let people process things as well, I'd rather the subject matters weren't considered so transgressive or frightening, it makes peoples lives more difficult. So it's nice when people are just more at ease with it all, but the transgression is undeniably part of the appeal of some of these writers.

There's been a lot of good buzz about this one
https://www.apocalypse-party.com/negativespace.html

Going to be weird hearing “George R.R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into the Sun, Or: The 2020 Hugo Awards Ceremony (Rageblog Edition)” read out at a ceremony.
https://www.tor.com/2021/04/13/announcing-the-2021-hugo-award-finalists/

https://www.tor.com/2021/04/13/a-brief-guide-to-the-extraordinary-fiction-of-vonda-n-mcintyre/

http://file770.com/discon-iii-declines-to-comment-on-code-of-conduct-issue-about-hugo-finalist/

A little bit heartbreaking how many SFF authors despise each other and the awards nominations intensifying it all.

How many people nominated for a Hugo alongside Isabel Fall this year celebrated the removal of her story or contributed to the harassment campaign against her?

I think I count 3 so far. I really hope she wins.

— Experiencing A Significant Poggers Shortfall (@mechanicalkurt) April 13, 2021

The entire SF/F community came out and said "if you don't write about being trans in the way we think you should, we will attempt to harm you."

This is especially angering because it was an open secret that literally all of Chuck Wendig's writer friends were sex pests.

— Qualia Redux (@QualiaRedux) April 15, 2021

and some nice animals. What's weirder than the giant bunny in the first picture, is the way that guy is holding the pilot's head

One great sub-genre of retro sci-fi art: Confusingly Placed Animals pic.twitter.com/P0rmh9WG7I

— 70s Sci-Fi Art (@70sscifi) April 15, 2021

Jess Nevins - Horror Needs No Passport

This starts with Nevins explaining his frustration that there has been very little survey or study of international horror fiction and that he did this book because nobody else had. It sticks to the 20th century (with occasional background and influential writers from further back), skips USA, UK and a few other english speaking countries but there is still a bunch of english fiction included from other countries. Nevins doesn't say which writers he has actually read himself, he quotes other scholars evaluations quite a lot but I did get the impression he was voicing his own opinions about most of the japanese writers (who are surprisingly well represented in english translation) and these were some of the most enjoyable parts.

It might have been inevitable that many of the writers end up sounding very similar and my eyes often glazed over the descriptions of their approaches (what subgenres, where the horror effects are coming from). But every once in a while there's really tantalizing or unusual sounding stories about Africa, Indonesian martial arts horror, a story about a shepherd, Tarzan starring in Israeli horror adventures, italian extreme horror and amazing sounding gothics from all around the world.

It notes a handful of comic artists, Suehiro Maruo is oddly absent but I was pleased to discover Daijiro Morohoshi who I might have seen a little of but most of what I found on search was new to me.

The political/cultural background for every country is detailed, if horror was frowned upon or even outlawed (often in soviet countries, Germany and Japan censored under post-war occupation, some people writing horror only in exile), whether what each writer was doing was considered high art or trash from the gutter. It seemed like quite a lot of the South American writers were politicians.
A few times Nevins writes about authors not pursuing just "mere fear" and it seemed as if it was his own opinion (?), I don't understand why someone so devoted to horror would feel that being scary for it's own sake wasn't enough, given how that approach can be as intense and memorable as anything else when it's done well.

It is mentioned that Ewers was a Nazi but not Strobl, somehow.

No cover credit for Utagawa Kuniyoshi.

I do wish there was some sort of guide about the availability in english of these books. Perhaps Nevins was concerned it would date the book too much and that people might not bother searching for newer books if they weren't already in an english list? I spent a while checking isfdb and amazon for many of the writers but I didn't have the patience to research every writer that sounded promising. A few were indeed published after this book.
Sad that I probably won't hear about most of these authors again. If a particular writer has sufficiently high status, there's a good chance Penguin or some other classics publisher has them in english, a good deal of this stuff goes unnoticed by most horror fans and I can't blame them too much for not catching them all.

This could and should be an important building block for the future of horror. It's pretty great and I bought Nevins' Horror Fiction In The 20th Century, which can be considered a companion to this.

I can't remember who the writer was but one of the unique ideas I came across in the above book was from a writer in exile from a dictatorship who wrote a novel in which even gods are powerless against the goverment, which just seems like a horribly depressing idea. Quite a few south american stories were mentioned in which all the characters are completely fucked and have nothing but terrifyingly bad choices available.

I didn't know that books aimed at railway travelers was such a big thing in India. Which makes me wonder about "airport novels", do publishers and even writers really spend a lot of time thinking about what people want to read at an airport?

https://locusmag.com/2021/02/paul-di-filippo-reviews-the-society-of-time-by-john-brunner/

I like the idea of Brunner but haven’t really been able to read.

Brunner’s supporting cast, including the Jesuit time-travel expert, Father Ramon

Another one for my 'Catholics in spaaaaaace!' list.

Never read any Brunner meself, sounds intriguing but this (re: Stand on Zanzibar) puts me off: Some examples of slang include "codder" (man), "shiggy" (woman), "whereinole" (where in hell?), "prowlie" (an armoured police car), "offyourass" (possessing an attitude), "bivving" (bisexuality, from "ambivalent") and "mucker" (a person running amok).

Elizabeth Moon's Remnant population: emo sf in the Le Guin mould. Good aliens and bad humans, though the humans aren't all that bad, and the dice are stacked rather heavily in favour of the aliens - not that Le Guin didn't indulge in a bit of dice stacking herself. Enjoyable but somewhat cosy and convenient.

Also for fans of (at least) 5000 posts, this Rollin Speculative looks like the first, b. 2011, and is where I came in: (hey thomp, get back here):
rolling fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction &c. thread

Didn't mean to drop the g, sorry.

read The Last Contract of Isako by fonda lee

yes there's a samurai and yes she totally rules, but the book is about a lost colony on a shitty and barely habitable planet that survives via The Company, which is run by extremely rich and vaguely immortal people while peons are sent outside to die when no longer useful.

so it's . . . more or less SILO? except that the key protagonists survive and nothing actually changes at all?

see also ARCHANGELSK by Elizabeth H. Bonesteel

read the sparrow by mary doria russell - really good, though some of the dialogue was cringey. but i did appreciate how it started out as a fairly optimistic book and then got darker and darker
now i'm reading katabasis by rf kuang, which i picked up just because it was in a little free library and was compared to susannah clarke. it's not as good as clarke and for some reason it's not really hooking me. but there's nothing particularly bad about it and i am curious to see where it's going so i will finish it

i found a new but cheap edition of fall of hyperion so i'll read that sometime. i've got a few other modern classic sci-fi books coming from the library - genocides by thomas m. disch, stand on zanzibar, ancillary justice, and non-stop by brian aldiss.

I want to read The Sparrow, though I know from this thread that it may be uneven, despite the awards etc. Her westerns re Doc Holiday and all the Earps deftly tweaked layers of history; she didn't have to make up too much, and the results fit w the sophisticated bang-bang of Oakley Hall, who may have invented this approach (his Warlock being a fave of Cornell roomies T. Pychon and R. Farina).
James's mention of Heilein and friends, along with na's of Stand On Z., are reminding me of a talk that Brunner gave, about WWII veterans going to college on gov. benefits,college being mostly for at least relative elites before that: they tended to be practical-minded
engineers vs. weird-to-dangerous scientists----like, thanks for the A-bomb to end the War, but still---finding (sometimes paranoid) problem-solving patriotic science fiction very appealing.

Non-Stop is great, still have yet to read the other two you mention.

Fun fact, Jean-Luc Godard was planning to adapt Non-Stop for the big screen but then he realized he didn't have the budget for such a project iirc so instead he went with a project he originally called Tarzan vs. IBM which eventually became Alphaville.

Alphaville sure shoulda been econo, in that it just seemed like a buncha speeches when I saw it in the 70s. JLG was more true-to-himself idealistic via the stylistic uplift/verve of more "negative" Breathless, Bande a Parte, and other New Wave classicks, even some of his minor minings of that vein.
But what the heck, this spoilerfest does make me kinda wanta (not quite wanna) see it again, yeah-ish:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphaville_(film)

I used to want it to have something to do with "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard."

John (Stand on Zanzibar) Brunner gave Alphaville a bad review in - irony! - New Worlds.

Lol

Seems like everyone was published in New Worlds, but no one likes to be too closely associated with it.

Chris felt doubtful–almost until the end–about the wisdom of including in this volume his essay on the 1960s New Wave. He had been doubtful about writing it in the first place. In spite of having been the first to apply the epithet “New Wave” to the upstart literary innovators who gathered around Michael Moorcock and New Worlds magazine, Chris always insisted that he was something of an outsider to the group, that he had nothing to say that had not been said already. I argued that his perspective was unique, precisely because he was an outsider, and that it should be recorded.

Not sci fi at all, but I recently read a Lemmy Caution novel and then watched its film adaptation, it's no surprise Alphaville has outlasted their fame tbf.

Yeah, it did have some of the JLG visual style and self-assurance, and, in that sense, also the rhetorical tendency, was maybe more of a forerunner of Blade Runner than was 1968's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, since B R doesn't retain much of the novel's storyline, though they share the central character, setting, and vibe.

Posting this here to go along with my reading of Alec Nevala-Lee's Astounding book along with s reread of I, Robot:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160303233942/http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/2010/01/isaac/

Frederik Pohl's long blog article about Asimov.

Weird to think I met both of them.

did asimov grab your ass

Heh, no. He completely ignored me. He managed to sign my autograph book without looking at me at all.

reading Egan's Quarantine. it's very hard boiled detective so far and, oh yeah, massive dysonsphere enveloping the galaxy, but that doesn't seem too important right now...

Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time. Oddly refreshing to read a time travel story in which there is almost no time travel. It didn't all work but I enjoyed the slow burn and the attempt to find hundreds of original metaphors, mostly for the weather. I suspect some people would find the weird Franklin's Lost Expedition fan fic idea, and the romance plot, offputting.

Anyone read and Jacek Dukaj (Polish SF author much lauded in Poland)? I downloaded Ice why bcz it look interstin and it was cheap but on my kobo it was > 2000 pages aaargh.

My slightly less complimentary Goodreads one liner review for The Ministry of Time after some reflection - contains a spoiler: I enjoyed it until the humping.

(i don't seem to get ledge's or anyone else's goodreads emails any more, did i opt out one too many things?)

This is exactly the kind of writing I want to see about SFF, I was looking for overviews on Swann a few years ago.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/thomas-burnett-swann-fantasy-sf-queer-romance-wolfwinter/
this is his novel ranking
https://seanguynes.com/2026/04/19/reader-intro-to-swann/

Has this been posted before? Can't recall.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XN_rJ27HfCw

Book fan inexplicably expects readers to enjoy watching hour long video.

I read some of the transcript, bought one (Europe in Autumn).

The error-ridden transcript, I should say.

I found the list on another site, looked pretty good.

i quite liked the ministry of time but the ending was a total cop-out

About to read it myself so I will avoid the spoiler, thanks for hiding

Came to say that when I skimmed to the end of Nevala-Lee's Astounding book it gave me a link to a free ebook so I got a copy of Hartwell's Age of Wonders

Outlaw Bookseller list is here:
https://csfquery.com/cworks?cid=482&sortby=2

Or here:
https://www.listchallenges.com/outlaw-booksellers-top-25-science-fiction

Book fan inexplicably expects readers to enjoy watching hour long video.

Things start making more sense when you realise a lot of youtube videos are best enjoyed as audio only.

If people are putting effort into monetizing their videos, they tend to go long and I tend to stop watching them so much. But a lot of booktubers including this one, have a lot of cover art to show you.

My favorite stuff by him is the author overview videos.

Reread of I, Robot was more enjoyable than expected.

Also went looking for this essay since some links to it were broken:
https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/columns/scores-37/

That one also appears to be broken

Not for me

Only some photoes missing

Truism: Heinlein was born and matured in a period when a more natural fit seemed to obtain between advocacy and a body politic that could be shaped, so that his work—certainly in the first decade of his published career—seemed congenial with its task.

not that I can put words together any better, "meant to mean" ffs.

Something something about post-Great Depression WWII-era optimism I assumed.

Thing I never knew until a few days ago: apparently Asimov died of AIDS contracted via a blood transfusion.

ledge otm

Good thing I have you two geniuses to tell me what a bad writer Clute is

u r welcome

During heart bypass surgery, iirc.

Yes, a triple bypass.

Heinlein's wife had worried about the same thing happening to him a few years earlier.