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.

Some real faves on there, thank you! I'll take that as a TBR list tbh.

I unironically really enjoy Bujold. I've read through the Vorkosigan series at least 2-3 times and the Penric series probably twice.
The Aaronovitch I'm afraid has kind of stagnated for me. I did really like the first 4-5 books but maybe it's ceased to feel like enough is at stake?

I plowed through Out of the Drowning Deep by A.C. Wise yesterday. I wish it were much, much longer. I liked that it starts very much in the middle of things and doesn't explain, you just have to go with it.

Have we discussed Sara A. Mueller's The Bone Orchard?? Delectable. I closed the book and immediately started it again to relax into the details and make sure I hadn't missed anything. That one REALLY makes you go along with the little bits that you're being told.

the cover of 'out of the drowning deep' is v. proginosketic!

more from the end-of-year lists (amazing how much you can read if you can't sleep yet also remain in bed all day):

'the last hour between worlds', melissa caruso: two months after giving birth to her daughter, single mom and dogged investigator kembral is all that stands between world destruction as a new-year's-eve party crashes through ever-deeper levels of unreality (not wholly unlike approaching zelazny's courts of chaos). features sassy repartee between protagonist and frenemy, two misuses of 'begging the question', and one quip so nice i didn't even mind the author actually writing that 'the crowd went wild'

'the scholar and the last faerie door', h.g. parry: despite the hackiness of its base components -- a school for magicians! a nerdy/needy outsider makes sophisticated friends at university! faeries are getting loose and wreaking havoc! a completely unimaginative title! -- this was okay. possibly because i'm a sucker for a world war i angle

i've read the first* few miles vork* books and enjoyed them; i have no reason to think that LMB suddenly sucks now

glanced at the penric book covers, tho: the early ones look like painted backdrops of andoria stolen from 'star trek enterprise' and the recent ones look like knockoffs of 1979's D&D 'keep on the borderlands' module. i.e. they look like generic garbage to me

i know i shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but i totally do! there are a lot of books; why would i select one whose cover depresses me with its ugliness or half-assedness?

but also i am old and cis and straight and male and am no doubt not the target market for these covers. so i must ask: what do modern target audiences want from their speculative fiction book covers?

I want them not to look self-published.

Quite a lot of those Penric books are from Subterranean and cost $45, the first Baen cover is surprisingly nice.

really shouldn't judge fantasy and esp. sf book by covers; some of the best I've read have dismal/arbitrary "art." Took a glance into latest Penric collection before library shut down for repairs: looked promising---as a lot of books don't, when subjected to my totally unfair Random Read Test (aw), though I'm another who has only read her Miles V books.

Also: don't recall the Vorkosigan covers being a great deal nicer

even more from the end-of-year lists before the dawn of time

HOW TO BECOME THE DARK LORD AND DIE TRYING by django wexler: sassy-as-hell human woman davi has been caught in a time-loop (in which she is hailed as the Chosen One to Save the Fantasy Kingdom but is inevitably painfully killed over and over again) for at least 1000 cumulative years. so now she's decided to ignore said losing prophecy and instead become the inevitably victorious Dark Lord.

so it's very meta and 'humorous' and it tries *so very hard* at these things in the beginning that i nearly quit. but it gets much better and does an admirable job of both wallowing in and satirizing fantasy tropes imo. also there are a ton of pretty graphic sex jokes

THE WATER OUTLAWS by s.l. huang: 'a genderspun retelling of the Chinese classic novel WATER MARGIN, in which antiheroic bandits rise up against a tyrannical government on behalf of the people'. also a hyper-violent revenge fantasy in which every male character is some combination of evil/corrupt/maniacal and every female/trans character (even the admitted cold-blooded murderers and cannibals) save one is a hero. EXCEPT there's one character with a bit of depth who is forced to navigate an impossible path between idealism and coercion AND there are certain subtle hints that bloodthirsty bandits should not necessarily be in charge of anything. mostly disliked it but a+ cover

read the first penric novella -- pretty standard fantasy fare but quite enjoyable

Yeah it's just a little lark but it has some fresh elements and a wry sense of humor.

I've heard that Curse Of Chalion is especially good and the Penric series is related to it somehow

Ha, "Not The Year in SF": some he likes, some he really doesn't. Good salute to RIP Vernor Vinge, though I disagree that "His writing was often clunky..." Maybe occasionally, but not that often.
https://bookandfilmglobe.com/fiction/not-the-year-in-sf/

I plowed through Out of the Drowning Deep by A.C. Wise yesterday

i found this quite imaginative but legitimately bad : /

Guess maybe Malzberg really did pass. RIP.

he was cool. you know what i would totally read? barry malzberg's violent crime series.

https://i0.wp.com/lh3.ggpht.com/-Na1bz1e144k/T9HtiTYs-HI/AAAAAAAAYmA/Av01CtXlXWY/photo.JPG

barry definitely in that "people you didn't know were alive..." category for me.

i've also never read any of the books he wrote under his O'Donnell name but i know that i own this paperback.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71fpOhJCeRL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg

https://starkhousepress.com/malzberg.php
have a good look at some current titles, I guess there might be more soon?

He had enough Kathe Koja collaborations for a whole book, so I'm wondering if that will ever happen, they aren't in Collaborative Capers

jeet heer appreciation posted by Fizzles on the 2024 obituary thread is good!

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/barry-malzberg-obituary-science-fiction/

Trifecta trip: G. Connor Salter on William Lindsay Gresham on Charles Williams: doors within doors within rooms and doors, and I still gotta read WLG's own books---I only know the noir classick film ov Nightmare Alley---and I used to avoid righteous pulp Charles Williams novels at library, thought they looked the rong creepy, but now that they're gone I'm told what I've missed:

Gresham opens his review saying that Williams “could do something that almost no one else can do: he could make a spiritual idea come alive in the flesh-and-blood world of fiction.”

...Gresham has done his homework. When he discusses how sex is God in Williams’s theology, he refers to The Descent of the Dove, an “extraordinarily illuminating history of the holy spirit in Christianity.” He compares the novel to four other Williams novels (War in Heaven, Many Dimensions, All Hallows Eve, The Greater Trumps), arguing that “The Place of the Lion is the most profound metaphysically” of these novels for how it makes readers “come to grips with the very nature of reality itself.”
... He sees Williams as more fantasist than thriller novelist, which is probably correct... he also says that Williams transgresses conventional fantasy literature: what if magic is reality, not an exception to reality?

ALLIANCE UNBOUND, c.j. cherryh & (her wife) jane s. fancher

i don't need balls-to-the-wall plotting and might well be fine with reading about the politics and economics of building a merchant cartel union if this weren't so phenomenally repetitive and bloated. a typical series of chapters:

1) captain sits in his quarters thinking about the situation. he mulls the motives of various players like the earth company, alpha station, cyteen, pell station, etc. he wishes that the time dilation of space travel didn't leave him ignorant of certain far-flung entities' current actions

2) captain meets with his staff, goes through all of this again; a subordinate may urge caution

3) captain meets with a possible ally, tells them all this stuff *again* (we just want freedom to trade and own our own ships!); possible ally warily agrees to everything

4) captain debriefs his crew with results of meeting, underlining the entire galactic scenario once more (the earth company doesn't understand spacer culture! they just want control!)

this book is 416 pages in hardcover, yet almost nothing happens. they travel to a star system (causing their trainee navigator to freak out because he can mysteriously 'feel' the star's gravity fluctuate), they talk to someone who agrees with them, they go to a different star system. there is a lot of dumping velocity. you could cut half the text with no problem whatsoever -- there's more action and character development in a murderbot novella at 25% the length

also, in those 416 pages, some form of 'damn' or 'dammit' appears 322 times. i am not joking

i didn't even finish this and i can't remember being as pissed off about a book since reading peter hamilton's night's dawn series

O shit I have a copy of the CYTEEN omnibus, I forgot about that book. Should I re-read it?

That's not really a question for the thread nor for you, mp. I just have this kind of random assortment of days-gone-by SF/F hardcovers and omnibus editions from my LB/Orbit days. Some of them have been completely forgotten, it often seems. I'm very fond of SOLITAIRE by Kelley Eskridge, but it got a terrible review from Kirkus at the time, I now see, which makes me think the reviewer missed the point of the book entirely.

i fully support re-reading the almost-certainly-crappy mass-market SF of our youth!

(except for piers anthony)

I've been doing a bunch of SF rereadings over the past year, and a good amount of it has stood up well.

this from Reddit, via the work chat:

Fiction set in the year 2025

There are some minimalist listings out there (including wikipedia) but I didn't really see a good list/description of novels (or graphic novels etc, for that matter) set in the year 2025 that might be good for a timely read this year.

Here's what I was looking at:

\- 334 by Thomas M Disch, overpopulation in New York City

\- The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell, a lengthy 6 section, 5 person fantasy of 'metafictional shenanigans'

\- The Lake at the End of the World by Aussie/Kiwi Caroline Macdonald, a post nuclear holocaust YA.

\- Titan by John Varley, a Big Dumb Object around Saturn

\- A Friend of the Earth by TC Boyle, cli-fi in the USA

\- Twilight's Last Gleaming by John Michael Greer, oil reserves spark war between China and the USA

\- The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, cli-fi looking at halting climate change starting in 2025

\- Orbital Resonance by John Barnes, an adolescent grows up on an asteroid against a ravaged earth

\- The Listeners by James Gunn, the 1972 novel of receiving a message from aliens, beginning in 2025.

\- Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge. AR and ubiquitous computing in 2025.

\- The Running Man, Stephen King. People are hunted and killed for a gameshow.

The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, cli-fi looking at halting climate change starting in 2025

I read this when it was new and might go back to it again; some parts were really good, but the "crypto/blockchain will save us" parts are a little less convincing.

i stopped reading it. i didn't like his editorials. save it for your book of editorials, KSR!

Yeah I was feeling the actual dystopian disaster stuff but the dialogue and the pontificating… blech…

You rang?

<3

A year ago, Mark Valentine posted on Wormwoodia about an elusive novel, the basis of a film with niche of believers:

Chris Massie (1880-1964) was the author of Corridor of Mirrors (1941), adapted for a gloriously bizarre film of the same title (1948) which has achieved a certain cult repute. A wealthy connoisseur, obsessed by an Italian Renaissance portrait of a beautiful woman, thinks he meets her at a London night club, The Toad's Eye, and decides they are reincarnated lovers.

He invites her to his ornate mansion, where a Venetian masquerade is to be held. At first, all is wonderfully strange and charming, but there are shadows beyond the candlelight: tragedy is to follow. The film is notable for its particularly lush décor, the work of Terence Verity and Serge Piménoff.

After Corridor, he published The Green Orb (1943), retitled The Green Circle in the USA. The publisher, Faber, said: ‘We described Mr Chris Massie’s last novel, Corridor of Mirrors, as “one of the strangest novels we have ever published” . . . but when we made that statement we were not prepared for Mr Massie to provide us with a much stranger work. The Green Orb falls into no category. It is a romance, it is a fantasy, it is a study in psycho-pathology, and at the same time an essay in literary technique of a very unusual kind.’ It concerns the interplay of truth and fiction in the life and imagination of a troubled scholar, Egan Borthwick, who has a secret in his past.

One more---have any of you read Richard Marsh, Robert Aickman's grandfather?

An inventor, a statesman, a private detective, a society beauty, a homeless drifter, and miscellaneous Bedouins are among the characters caught in the clutches of a mysterious sex-changing shape-shifting villain...

Richard Heidmann (1857-1915) began his career at age 12, writing serials for boys' magazines. He published more than 60 novels, usually under the name Richard Marsh. The Beetle is his most popular work, remaining in print until 1960. Heidmann's grandson was...Robert Aickman...

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/1718 - Richard Marsh books on Project Gutenberg

The Beetle opens wonderfully but after the first couple of chapters it just goes on and on and on getting more and more simultaneously preposterous and dull, for what feels like forever.

I did in fact pull out my copy of the Robinson and got about 1/3 of the way through it before giving up. Now I'm back to reading about actual real-world terrorism.

F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre

I haven't read him and never will, but from what I can gather, he put more effort into the fiction of himself than into anything he wrote. He wasn't so much a writer of fiction as an enemy of facts (and he polluted a database on early film with made-up facts).

Dangerous Visions is cheap on Kindle daily deals today, 800 pages of the usual suspects. worth a punt? or have i seen it all before?

not on offer on kobo but it is only £5, I've been meaning to give it a go for a while though I expect lots of it will be dated or even bad for the time blowhard stuff.

https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?264656 deets

Looking at the contents for DV, I don’t remember too many out and out duds, although I couldn’t get through Farmer’s Joyce pastiche, the Ballard entry is not him at his best or most ‘dangerous’ and I suspect Sturgeon’s incest apologia has not aged v well. Ellison’s own contribution is among the weakest stories and I’m not even a major Harlan hater. Some of the old guard, like canny old Fred Pohl, really rise to the occasion, and the Dick, Lafferty, Emshwiller and Spinrad are among their very best shorter works. Plus the book contains two outstanding David R Bunch Moderan tales and ends with a contender for the greatest SF short story of all time, Delany’s Aye and Gomorrah.

Again Dangerous Visions is much more of a mixed bag, and suffers more from awkward 70s sexy stuff, but again there are some genuine standouts (Joanna Russ and James Tiptree, just off the top of my head).

a contender for the greatest SF short story of all time

Poll! I'd like to see some nominations at least, I certainly have a few.

I’m constantly considering my own dream science fiction anthology, would definitely vote in a poll!

I'll start a thread tomorrow, see if we get more than half a dozen players.

would be well suited for a ballot poll instead of one-choice button poll

for sure. if nothing else should get a good reading list out of it.

Nominations for a potential BEST SFF SHORT FICTION ballot poll