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

Charles Platt - An Accidental Life volume 4

This book stops at 1990 and I don't think he will write any more because his involvement with science fiction is much smaller after that point (to be honest I'm not sure how much I'd enjoy a book about his time at Wired magazine, even though they seem to be some of his happiest years, but I would try to read it if he eventually does write it, I'd like to know about his prehistoric novels he written as Charlotte Prentiss).
This is my favorite book in the series. Platt gets addicted to computers, involved with cryonics and there's a lot about his meetings with most of the famous cyberpunks, especially his friendship with Bruce Sterling.
Harlan Ellison, Susan Wood, Jerry Pournelle and Arthur Byron Cover get violent. Platt writes his favorite novels and tries to write a Warhammer book. Lots of fun little stories about people in science fiction, nice photos of them hanging out.

A big part of my reason for reading this series is trying to figure Platt out. I still don't understand a lot of his opinions. He criticizes a lot of SF for having a lack of rigor/explanation but praises Ballard for not explaining much and he likes Marvel superheroes! He doesn't like horror but he loves Stephen King and has quite a morbid imagination. He offers very little reasoning for disliking french people so much. Why did he make his porn videogame sound so controversial? It looks pretty standard, there's hundreds of games like that today and it even looked quite classy by comparison, especially for a game in the 80s (looked like Uno Moralez!)
I think I understand Andre Norton's complaints about how Platt was portraying her in the early drafts of their interview, perhaps she didn't want to look like a nice cozy granny next to younger, more radical writers.

I don't know how defensible it was but I thought his prank on Lewis Shiner and Bruce Sterling was brilliant and funny.

I want to read his Patchin Review collection and then Silicon Man and Free Zone when I can, probably some others too.

Wondering if I should try Shadrach in the Furnace

Did we ever discuss this historical dictionary of sf?
https://sfdictionary.com/view/1090/pocket-universe

Kuttner had eight firsts!
https://sfdictionary.com/author/452/henry-kuttner?firstquotes=1

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)