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

ysi?

links for the available ones

https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/how-to-raise-a-kraken-in-your-bathtub/

https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-mausoleums-children/

https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/the-sound-of-children-screaming/

https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer_05_23/ - the app one

Reading Tales of Earthsea, it's remarkable how Le Guin can seamlessly re-enter and develop the world thirty years after writing the first one. I'm enjoying her late "only include the words that matter" style - I admire the commitment to cutting it down to the bone without turning into James Elllroy or something offputting like that.

Reading a recent Stephen Baxter and I think he’s actually getting worse.

Was he ever good?

Asking for a friend.

Ha, last time he was mentioned in this thread I brought this up

"The Big Book of Cyberpunk Vol2" is cheap on kindle daily deal today (£1.99) (and kobo). Vol1 was on offer earlier in the week and i swear i sent a similar message then but i can't find it.

He (Baxter) was never great but he could do interesting ideas with fairly efficient flat style. Now his prose is flabby as fuck.

Ah

Earlier this evening I was just discussing how a certain kind of flat style can totally work in SF if the ideas are good.

As in a flat style but not actually a terrible style, although sometimes there is the danger of one lapsing into the other as you say.

Thinking of Ballard and Christopher Priest in particular, although some might disagree I think, based on recent posting, as opposed to someone like M. John Harrison who can really write, or someone like Michael Moorcock for the opposite extreme.

You're not suggesting Ballard can't "really write"?

Didn’t say that, dude.

Maybe I could have phrased it better.

More like Mike Harrison writes in more a controlled, elevated “beautiful” style, whereas Ballard is often using an easily parodied cliched style as a kind of Duchamp readymade in order to subvert it

Travers sat on the balcony resecting his bangers and mash as he stared over the balcony through the gymnosperms at the dying rays of the Etc.

lol ok

Ballard sat on the flight line in Moose Jaw, leafing through a copy of Galaxy in search of the latest Robert Sheckley as he awaited his turn etc

I’ve never been able to get through P J Farmer’s Joyce pastiche in DV, or Richard Lupoff’s similar in ADV.

Hardly a Ballard expert, but he's really wired, and not "Damn the torpedos, but bring the torpedos, and all manner of other details, and the whole fractal family, full speed ahead!"throughout recently read xxetcpostChronopols , though he does pace himself, sometimes w effort that can be felt: "must_adjust_speed_againe"--but that's all part of the art pulp clatter ov matter-well, he does get deadpan all through (w intentionally satirical results, if you care to read it that way; nothing joeky) "The Drowned Giant" (originally published as "Souvenir" in Playboy, ca. '65; the others are all from pulp or bargain paper genre mags,mosty early 60s---was there a Playboy SF anthology from this era, or any other? Pretty sure I've read some Disch stories originally in Playboy)
He takes a lot of chances, doesn't always work, but as I said before,

the lesser stories, liberated from cold print, would make awesome basis for 60s-early 70s anthology TV (there are also several classics/killers).

Thinking that Ballard’s nonfiction style is unequivocally great, love reading any and all of it.

I seem to remember someone on this borad saying when the Complete Stories came out “Now we don’t need to read any of his novels anymore,” which is not quite true but sort of funny.

Speaking of Ballard At The Movies, it turns out these exist!

https://letterboxd.com/film/low-flying-aircraft/
https://letterboxd.com/film/the-atrocity-exhibition/

i wrote elsewhere on the peculiar feeling of reading Ballard:

My admiration for or, better, the kick I get out of Ballard comes from the way he defamiliarises human behaviour so that it becomes alien. His works do not rely on common sense (eg for believability, character, motive, social interactions). Common sense denies the presence of its intrinsic unspoken component ideologies and habituated mannerisms. Ballard removes the glue of common sense and replaces it with a simplified psychosocial schema, which surfaces the artificiality of those ideologies and habituated mannerisms.

There is no history in Ballard (Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women excepted). There will sometimes be a singular event precipitating the conditions of the story. Modern(ish) psychoanalytical and anthropological theory are the predominant forces. This isn’t just a theoretical or conceptual switching out; it makes his societies think, speak and behave in slightly but noticeably odd and frictionless ways, which gives much of the unique feeling of his books. The reader feels an uneasy sense of alienation.

and a bit later how that authorial flatness is representative of a sort of unresisting annihilation in the cast. the thing you get in the novels, with their extended voyage from more or less normal to complete transformations at a limbic level is I think a reader complicity, created by the flat, authorial prose, and easy, partly willed, slipping of the anchor from what we might consider normal or the firmness of our day to day life and its moral framework.

i think we'd all probably agree the flatness has a purpose, but i think it has a distinct aesthetic feeling as well, distinct from just... instruction manual or journalistic pabulum for instance, absolutely characteristic of a voice. i like it.

there’s a great interview in the Paris Review where he says

I would say that I quite consciously rely on my obsessions in all my work, that I deliberately set up an obsessional frame of mind. In a paradoxical way, this leaves one free of the subject of the obsession. It’s like picking up an ashtray and staring so hard at it that one becomes obsessed by its contours, angles, texture, et cetera, and forgets that it is an ashtray—a glass dish for stubbing out cigarettes.

isn't there a short story by him where the main character gets obsessed with sitting on his porch and staring at the world until it becomes a blur of lines and colours that he gets lost in? been a while since I read it but I still think about that story every time I sit on a porch.

Booming post, Fizzles!

The part about Michael Redgrave in that interview was great.

Do other people have the Selected Nonfiction?

i wrote elsewhere on the peculiar feeling of reading Ballard:

_My admiration for or, better, the kick I get out of Ballard comes from the way he defamiliarises human behaviour so that it becomes alien. His works do not rely on common sense (eg for believability, character, motive, social interactions). Common sense denies the presence of its intrinsic unspoken component ideologies and habituated mannerisms. Ballard removes the glue of common sense and replaces it with a simplified psychosocial schema, which surfaces the artificiality of those ideologies and habituated mannerisms.

There is no history in Ballard (Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women excepted). There will sometimes be a singular event precipitating the conditions of the story. Modern(ish) psychoanalytical and anthropological theory are the predominant forces. This isn’t just a theoretical or conceptual switching out; it makes his societies think, speak and behave in slightly but noticeably odd and frictionless ways, which gives much of the unique feeling of his books. The reader feels an uneasy sense of alienation. _

and a bit later how that authorial flatness is representative of a sort of unresisting annihilation in the cast. the thing you get in the novels, with their extended voyage from more or less normal to complete transformations at a limbic level is I think a reader complicity, created by the flat, authorial prose, and easy, partly willed, slipping of the anchor from what we might consider normal or the firmness of our day to day life and its moral framework.

i think we'd all probably agree the flatness has a purpose, but i think it has a distinct aesthetic feeling as well, distinct from just... instruction manual or journalistic pabulum for instance, absolutely characteristic of a voice. i like it.

There is a tribute anthology out idk if it’s been discussed upthread. Funny idea to give him the lovecraft mythos treatment (& maybe not inapt) but can it be any good

longwinded

Wasn’t longwinded and wasn’t saying prose was “creamy” as I read it.

oh no. i have a tremendous habit of going on at great length which i happily indulge so i was mocking myself rather than wins, who is a prince among posters, who himself i think - being also a truly terrible person as well as a prince - was just taking the piss a bit. all good.

Nobody with any sense would describe Ballards prose as creamy is the joke, it’s a ref to Martin amis doing just that (I bring this up all the time cause “the marvellous creaminess of his prose” is not just obviously hilariously inapt but also thudding & inelegant in a way I find p typical of master stylist MA (from what I have read which is not much and not going to be much))

Ha, sorry, I had forgotten that meme, and had read some other things he wrote about Ballard which seemed more on target, had to Google that one.

I know Amis is out of fashion these days no doubt for good reason but still feel that some things he wrote will hold up, MONEY mostly, and I’d rather consider rereading him than, say, Philip Roth.

oh god i too had somehow forgotten that MA line. jesus.

It’s not a meme is why, it’s just me trying to make fetch happen

Martin Amis: fire away!

Wonder what people will think about this sentence of his: "Further paradoxes include the fact that despite his acuity and wit, his deep ironies, Ballard remains an essentially humourless writer. Humour is available to the man, but it is denied access to the page."

I get what he is saying and used to agree but now I think that there is some kind of poker-faced Adam West-styled humor going on there.

Great descriptions by Fizzles and the man JG himself---though also, the protagonists of Chronopolis want the ashtray to be an ashtray again/still; their own obsessions include reacting to change, planting a flag of WHAT'S RIGHT on/in the roiling sands and waves ov Time, and of course the resistance to change is part of change (often sucks for them, strange fun for us, strenuous for all, incl. author, seems like).

Came back to say that Ballard is funny in the way the last scene of PSYCHO where Simon Oakland explains what just happened is funny

xpost And come to think of it, thiis (resistance to/more creative friction of Time etc) is the basic situation of yhe xxxxxpost Across Realtime sequence, especially in the volume I just read, Marooned In Realtime: time travel, voluntary or otherwise, is via spheres of stasis, which can be very large, and you come out in what feels like no time, with 21st Century baggage arriving in Century 200 or whatever--and there are are accruals from other stops: which, as the process gets improved, can last a few seconds, hours, days, as well as years. However long or short it is, you can't go back .
The characters we travel with, a well-drawn 30 out of 300,the last known/assembled of humanity,thought they were coming to a new improved Future, but find only ruins: what some call the Singularity has evidently happened also of course a guy says that Jesus has come and gone, but will come one more time; another detects evidence that mankind was murdered by Aliens, and guards against that kind of return, also has his eye on some admittedly strange humans back from Space).
Electric social dynamics here, but could get too claustrophobic without the novel-within-the-novel, actually the reassembled diary of a co-founder of the last stand/rebirth project, who was left behind on a wilderness Earth of the new-distant past, a lone woman, sometimes with critter companions,trying to get across reconfigured continents to sites where her colleagues will one day re-emerge---she does that for forty years---and it gets to be almost a thing in itself, an adventurous set piece, if a set piece can be maybe 100 pages total (the investigator of her marooning, himself a cop bumped into stasis travel by a perp, goes back into reading the diary compulsively, periodically, when the current realtime gets to be too much and too little)
(the penultimate and ending not so hot, but momentum of all that has gone before not cancelled)
Across Realtie is like RIYL
The Wild Shore, the first of Kim Stanley Robinson's Three Californias.

Sorry for all the typos: meant "the now-distant past" etc.

https://dragondaze6.webnode.co.uk/galleries/
guy who did some of the best McCaffrey covers also did Olias Of Sunhillow

speaking of covers, michael whelan is pretty active on bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/michaelwhelan.bsky.social