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.

Er, did I miss the subtext? Oops. OK that is a bit mean. Stylistically though ..

As for Sladek, how I loved his writing in my early youth! Today, the opposite. He's a layer of immense cleverness around a core of nihilism. He loves narrative tricks and puzzles, but while he hates machines, he hates life more, and humans disgust him. I read most of what he wrote from The Reproductive System to Tik-Tok and I felt an increasing revulsion on his part.

Re parodies, how many people notice that the "Wonder-Journey" part of The Reproductive System (which is Sladek at full blast) is a parody of the middle part of Camp Concentration?

Interesting Sladek discussion. Came to say that TIL George Harrison was inspired to write "I, Me, Mine" after watching an adaption of Robert Sheckley's Immortality, Inc. on a BBC show called Out of the Unknown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_the_Unknown

The Expanse. A good enough page turner but some pretty embarrassing and sexist writing. A couple of examples, from memory: '"Of course you're confused by love, sex, and women, you were born with a cock"' and 'the moon turned slowly showing all her sides like a whore in a cheap brothel'.

Currently reading "Tetrasomy Two" by "Oscar Rossiter" (pen name of a Seattle doctor), his only published book. Its the type of science fiction novel where the science fictional aspects could be real or not, depending on whether the narrator is sane or not. It reads more like a mid-century noir, with the narrator a first-year resident psychiatrist at a state mental hospital who gets drawn into sinister events by letting his curiosity get the better of him. It's also got some pretty racy sex (the not-so-secret ingredient of lots of '60s and '70s sci-fi) and is genuinely funny (unusual for sci-fi of any period).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUi37vq1G_g
Still haven't read any of my Cody Goodfellow books yet but this new one sounds great, and he's always fun to listen to.

Leonardo Music Journal -- Awesome!!

https://mastodon.social/@vintagefantasyart/115237233212237866

Thread of wondering whether I need to read Harry Harrison! Harry Harrison! A Memoir.

becoming concerned that tamsyn muir (last book in 2022), arkady martine (2021) and seth dickinson (2020) simply have no idea how to conclude their series

Had forgotten about this site:
https://www.lexal.net/scifi/scifiction/archive.html

Does anyone here know if "Project Hail Mary" is any good?

It's like The Martin (hard sci technical descriptions of real world problem solving) with a more far-fetched premiss. It's sort of goofy fun.

Not sure exactly why, but i found it a lot more tolerable than The Martian (although Weir's style still grates at times)

only just noticed my hilarious typo. yeah the 'gee whizz' narrator/main character does get a little bit trying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfGmgJq3CcI
https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517920012/the-luminous-fairies-and-mothra/

https://bsky.app/profile/wallacepolsom.bsky.social/post/3m7se2qtcg22b
I love this cover so much
https://floggingbabel.blogspot.com/2025/12/john-varley-1947-2025.html
https://reactormag.com/looking-back-at-the-work-of-john-varley-1947-2025/
https://bsky.app/profile/wnwagner.bsky.social/post/3m7q6lhml422y

I was thinking "never heard of this guy but he sounds interesting", a few clicks later I find he wrote the award winning novella "The Persistence of Vision" which I used to like but has some issues... I'll give one of his novels a go.

RIP. I eventually took issue with his Heinleinian glibness but some of his stuff has stayed with me, particularly the story "Air Raid," which later became the novel and movie Millennium, neither of which I know much about, despite owning the novel.

I read many of his short stories back in the day, but never got around to the novels, although I have had my eye on both The Ophiuchi Hotline and Steel Beach.

I vaguely remember that "The Persistence of Vision" won all kinds of awards but it always seemed to me just a variant of the sf hippie hollow mini-genre of Stranger in a Strange Land and the Star Trek TOS episode "The Way to Eden."

Also recalling now that Thomas M. Disch heaped scorn upon it, but then Tommy hated everything.

Anyway just start with The John. Varley Reader or whatever other collection is at hand, like the guy in the link says.

Way upthread, I read and reported on "Beatnik Bayou," which takes place in a universe where it's real easy to get sex change on demand, over and over and over, from teenhood on, but also pretty easy to get capital punishment. Pretty impressive versebuilding, readable etc., but more recently came across a real bad one set in the same civilization, incl. a passage of anime-like porn*: gratuitous in the sense that it did fuckall to advance the plot---and this was in an Orbit anth, damaging my nearly life-long esteem for Damon Knight. Science Fiction Encyclopedia site thinks he wrote some other stuff that was good, though. I'll take a look if I come across any more.
*Also to be found in some Japanese SF.

three years ago i read and reported on the gaia trilogy, which did not inspire me to explore further. i can imagine that he had some decent stories tho

Heh, just clinked on this link in one of the predecessor threads and found a very interesting article by Samuel Delany which contains a good sort overview of Varley's career arc: https://archive.org/details/The_New_York_Review_Of_Science_Fiction_048_1992-08

Ha, good 'un! Thanks, James. Will compare it to the SFE trek. Also want to read that review by F33n3y, and not because I know a guy who says they were roommates in school.

Cory Doctorow loves John Varley.

I am reading Patricia McKillip's The Riddle Master of Hed, which I had never heard of until mookie referenced it as one of the greatest fantasy series ever here or in the fantasy maps thread. It took me most of the year to acquire all three books in the old Ballantine/Del Rey mass paperback editions. I would have been utterly enthralled had a I read this at age 12. Heck, I'm loving it now, especially the way McKillip references people, places, events, etc. without exposition or really explanation. Always a great trick when done right.

Winter Rose is another good'un, the only full-length McK. I've read.

Patricia McKillip was one of the discoveries of 2025 for me - I loved the Riddle-Master trilogy, but also adored Winter Rose and The Forgotten Beasts of Eld. I haven't ready anything else by her as yet, and I feel like I need to portion them out a bit, because I don't know anything else quite like these books.

I've come across a few disappointing later shorter things in anthologies---seemed like she was moving very quickly, maybe accruing a sense of her own mortality.

https://kpfa.org/area941/episode/the-probabilities-archive-tanith-lee-chelsea-quinn-yarbro-virtuosos-of-horror-fantasy-and-science-fiction/
really nice surprise discovery

Michael Shea - Nifft The Lean

For too long I held the misguided idea that I should read the foundational genre texts before the books built on them. I've had this book for maybe as long as 15 years and it was sitting on a very small shelf of books I was most eager to read, I really should have started reading it the day I bought it (I got the whole series at the right time, before they became collector's items). I first heard about this from Pringle's guide to the 100 best fantasy novels, and it sounded incredible, especially the comparison to Bosch paintings.

It lives up to it's reputation. It's a collection of 4 long stories, the only way in which they rely on each other is that some creatures are described fully in one story and not in another. So it doesn't feel like a mosaic novel, but it's such a balanced collection that it doesn't have any notable dips in quality. A bunch of reviewers like the 4th story a lot less but I admire it a great deal, I found some of the landscape/architecture descriptions confusing but it's amazing watching all this travelling, construction and destruction from such a distance, it's almost like the videogame Civilization but in the span of weeks or months.

Shea's writing is beautiful, a real visual artist who works in prose, the pages bustle with detail and invention. He surpasses most of the weird fiction he's building on, he never has any hackneyed language. My only problem with the book is there aren't enough paragraph breaks, I feel like I've been served my favorite meal but it's slightly exhausting to chew through because the chef hasn't chopped it up enough, I often decided to read something else because I didn't possess the energy to take everything in. I think this might be the reason it didn't stay in print for much longer? It won a World Fantasy Award, it's been highlighted in a few guide books and it is a cult classic but it deserved a much bigger audience. I hope the series is reprinted and if the unreleased 4th book is ready to go, it needs to happen sooner than later. A big publisher marketing it to Dark Souls fans would be a reasonable idea but so would a Penguin Classics edition. And I would buy a Michael Shea t-shirt.

Check out the original DAW cover art (Michael Whelan) and the Italian edition. A lot of the other covers sell it short.
https://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/5/50/NFFTTHLN881982.jpg
https://michaelsheaauthor.com/wp-content/gallery/covers/ital_niff.jpg

I got some art books by Ron Walotsky and Tim White. Shocking that there's never been a Paul Lehr book.

Michael Shea - Nifft The Lean

Looks sufficiently up my (damnation) alley that I'm considering the ridiculous used prices I'm seeing.

Michael Shea
Robert Shea
... I always get those two mixed up. Or used to, until I read M Shea's fantastically gloopy short story 'The Autopsy' in David Hartwell's superb anthology The Dark Descent: The Colour of Evil (I think there's a recentish TV version of 'The Autopsy'?)

I have the far less attractive UK paperback of Nifft the Lean:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https%3A%2F%2Fblackwells.co.uk%2Fbookshop%2Fproduct%2FNifft-the-Lean-by-Michael-Shea%2F9780586064993%3Fsrsltid%3DAfmBOormeuCG7bi-LQW8mXTLWm2RyvVfqC1JN0BCQ3OPNS4f-zkiJBWj&ved=0CBYQjRxqFwoTCIC2w-fxgZIDFQAAAAAdAAAAABAI&opi=89978449

Plus a UK paperback of A Quest for Simbilis, one of his Jack Vance/Dyling Earth novel, and Demiurge: The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales of Michael Shea (Dark Regions Press, 2017), editor S. T. Joshi.

https://blackwells.co.uk/jacket/l/9780586064993.webp

His wife is getting some stuff back in print (there has been 6 books in the last few years, which is not bad) and I think some writer friends were helping her out but I fear the outright fantasy stuff is having difficulty finding a new home.

https://pulpfest.com/2016/03/03/the-amazing-story-the-sixties-the-goose-flesh-factor/

^About Cele Goldsmith Lalli, her editorship at Amazing Stories and Fantastic and the generation of writers that she championed.

Great read, thanks so much! Amazing was a staple of my childhood, and I've still got some of the Cele issues he mentions, incl the one w "The Days of Perky Pat."

(PKD's comments, backstory: https://philipdick.com/mirror/websites/pkdweb/short_stories/The%20Days%20Of%20Perky%20Pat.htm#:~:text=With%20the%20title%20changed%20slightly%2C,short%20quote%20from%20the%20story.)

Here's something short: https://seattlein2025.org/2024/09/20/fantastic-fiction-the-amazing-and-fantastic-cele-goldsmith/

And something long: https://galacticjourney.org/september-26-1966-all-that-glitters-in-praise-of-cele-goldsmith-lalli/

I finished The Riddle-Master of Hed and absolutely loved it. That ending is a nice twist. I was bemoaning the lack of interest in Morgon's betrothed and then started the second book. Quite a switch-up.

Loving all the love for McKillip. There's really nothing else out there quite like it. To some extent all other books in my life have been an attempt to recapture reading the Riddlemaster trilogy as a kid. I'm incredibly grateful that they hold up (along with LeGuin). It was an era of greats.

The Forgotten Beasts of Eld is also a real smack upside the head. You think it's going to be a romance and then the romance plot kind of happens and there still so much story left. What a beautiful and deeply true book.

“I am his harpist.”

<3

^^^
She foreshadows that moment a few times and I still didn't see it coming.

lol

https://www.howtopronounce.com/ghisteslwchlohm