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

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

some things i read recently:

too many 'books are magic' novels, the latest of which was gareth brown's 'the book of doors'. see also olivie blake, emma törzs, robin sload, peng shui etc. etc. (tbf the latter was the one that truly and deeply sucked)

micaiah johnson: those beyond the wall -- grebt. you probably need to read the first one ('the space between worlds') to really get it tho

john barnes: a million open doors -- weird story of two cultures that are advanced/regressive about opposite things meeting head-on. revels in the economic possibilities (which i don't mind); kinda naive about everything else

martin macinness: in ascension -- thought this was pretty great. even just on a sentence level

nina allan: conquest! -- really like her but wasn't too hot on this one. many useful opinions on certain recordings of bach, however

max barry: lexicon -- books aren't magic, but words are. decent thriller but don't really need another School for Mages-type thing

ann leckie: the raven tower -- . . . fine i guess? short, repetitive, awkward switches between first- and second-person, trans identity of the (sort-of) protagonist seems completely tacked-on

Hadn't heard about The Space Between Worlds follow-up, thanks!

Ye who have been to WorldCon,any Con, and/or who are going, please tell us Earthbounds about it!

Doris Piserchia - A Billion Days Of Earth

I've become quite worried at how often I find books kind of anonymous in style and subject matter, as if they're ignoring all the freedom you can have with words on paper in the hopes they'll get a hollywood screen adaptation. I want to go swimming, deep diving in the brains of writers with highly developed inner lives. I had heard Piserchia was a real oddball writer and this novel confirms it.

It's about an earth where humans have evolved into gods and rats have taken their place, now the rats live much like 20th century humans with similar bodies, all the same clothes, buildings, vehicles, etc and even have hair in all the places humans do (not like the cover art, which looks cooler). There's a shiny silver shapeshifting creature that is seducing people and animals into an ambiguous fate and it multiplies itself after it absorbs them. There's a dysfunctional rich family, dangerous creatures and gods in the background living a seemingly carefree existence.

Not a lot of other reviews I've seen have mentioned this but this is a really cartoony book, comedic but not to the extent that I'd call it SF comedy. Much of the dialogue is characters bickering with each other in a confused way and it's highly distinctive. The imagery is lightly sketched and the grotesque violence is the only thing that keeps it feeling like it was aimed at a younger audience.

I enjoyed this but didn't love it and I'm curious how much this style carries into her other work. I can't decide if some of the plot threads are underdeveloped or if it was fine to have several characters only briefly used. I liked the strangeness but I just wanted it to feel more real and immersive, but I think it was probably trying to be a cartoon in prose.

Just bought my ticket for Glasgow Worldcon 2024. Got a discount on my ticket because I’m resident in Scotland (a slightly better discount than the one for people who have never been to a Worldcon before, which I was also eligible for). Glad I don’t have to try and book accommodation, which seemed a convoluted process (the whole ticket buying process was fairly complex). Have been to loads of comic conventions but never an SF one before - not having a clue what it will be like is part of the appeal - plus it being on my doorstep, it really was now or never. Hope to run into other ilxors there.

Starting tomorrow, this! Ward wanna arrange a meeting?

Hi Daniel, it would be great to meet. Are you attending all five days? I'm going to register tomorrow, and then in the evening I'm going to see The Sons of the Desert showing some Laurel and Hardy films in the Glasgow Panopticon, where Stan performed back in the day (nothing to do with Worldcon, but these evenings are always a nice time if you're in the city).

Then I shall be going to Worldcon on Thursday-Monday. I have a bit of a 'free day' on Thursday as my friend Fiona, who is attending with me, doesn't arrive until the evening (when we plan to go for something to eat in the city). Got to say, I am seriously gobsmacked by the amount of programming there is at Worldcon, almost overwhelmingly so. So at the moment I don't know where or when I'm going to be most of the time - just like Billy Pilgrim - but once things get going I'm sure I'll have a better idea and can firm up a time/place for a meet.

The only other ILX adjacent person I know who is attending is my Facebook friend The Dirty Vicar/Ian M00r3, who used to post on this board many years ago, and seems to be quite involved with the programming side of things.

read kelly link's 'the book of love'

enjoyed it; she writes good sentences. but also it was much longer than it needed to be, and the length exposed how certain weird things might initially be cool, but not so much when they mean nothing particular. great characters tho

ilxmailed you, Ward

xpost agree w most of that---collection Get In Trouble and several stories since, prob in latest round-up---were masterful, but she really comes off like a novelistic noob here, length also incl. mostly who-cares older people and their backstories/cont. subplots (incl. fantasy figures from Ancient Tymes)---although the two teens from 16th (or 17th?) Century are pretty cool and do not engage in the ridic meme-speak (just as much like cheesy supernatural teen cable speak) of contemporary teens, though these are good when they're not talking,and omniscient narrator tells what they're thinking.
(Author thanks her kids for helping her with today's teen lingo, but seems like they pranked her, unless maybe they've been living on their phones since kindergarten, which could be too.)
Could have been an effective novella, though.

teen cable speak of 90s and 00s, that is.
But came here to report on reading another xpost Vinge:
The Witling(1979) A witling is a human (lately born some 30,000 years after humans left Old Earth for est. thousands of planets, with only hundreds in touch) with no inherent ability to teleport:considered a rare kind of cripple on the planet Giri, although some slaves are bred that way---but one such, notoriously so, is the Crown Prince of The Summer Kingdom, which iscomprised of regions north and south of the Equator, just as the Shadow Kingdom comes from the Poles, with civilization being teleportation-based
To keep from landing in pieces, this is done via transit pools, but the areas between have to be memorized, mostly by underlings who escort the quality. Blasts of air, even giant rocks from the moons can be teleported as weapons, the latter by the Guild (don't mess with them).
Two witlings from science outpost planet Novamerika come to visit, are shot down and captured. The witling Prince thinks the female Novamerikan is beeyoutiful, in an elvish way, though she's well aware that she was considered at best "cute" when she was six, and not even that since (or so she thinks). The old male Novamerikan, not attracted to her at all, urges her to make nice to the Prince, but she don't wanna, only in part because he is short, flat-featured, and gray, Pottery Barn reject (like all his fellow Giri-ans, evidently)
Anyway, there's lots of factions, intrigue, suspense, implications (a very "Faustian" member of the Guild, not a moontosser, wants to aid escape to Novamerika, where he can learn tech "magic" [and teach, as lab subject I'd say, the genetic key to faster-than-light teleportation)
Good character development to and rec to Bujold fans.

Alastair Reynolds, Aurora Rising (not the Aurora Rising sf novel that takes up the entire first page of google results if you search for the title). Detective fiction set in the revelation space universe. It's a pretty good blending of the two genres, has the usual strengths and weakness of reynolds (the weaknesses being occasionally clunky writing, the same old names popping up, characters motivated entirely by bitterness). It's set in the glitter band, supposedly a pinnacle of human civilisation, a jewel in the galaxy, a fully democratic utopia. This is where the book really rings false for me since it just seems like an awful place populated by egoists and massive weirdos (fully 0.1% of the population *choose* to 'live' in a persistent vegetative state (!), an even larger number voluntarily submit to tyranny), as a society where the exercise of one's democratic rights is of the ultimate importance it's nevertheless happy to allow non voluntary torture and execution. Technologically it's also inconsistent, everyone's plugged in to VR but they still mess around with physical installation of software upgrades - using disks! Obviously this is purely in service of the plot but seems like it could have been done better.

Still, after I'd finished I kind of missed the place, so as the sequel was on offer for <£1 I bought it.

is that the Prefect series? i kinda lost track when he renamed the first book.

Oh that IS the renamed first book of the series i'm thinking of. was originally 'The Prefect'.

there's a third now, Machine Vendetta, which is in my TODO list

I read all 3 Prefect books earlier this year! fun enough series if a bit daft at points. 2nd one feels plotted like a Iain M Banks book, who I'm a big stan of so got extra marks from me.
I'd read some Reynolds books over a decade ago and thought they were a bit ho hum, so kind of stopped looking for his books. what got me interested again was randomly coming across his book Eversion last year and giving it a go and absolutely loving it, just a really fun piece of speculative fiction.

finished the 3rd Hellonica book the other day, bit of a let down after the first two - the much less interesting scifi part became more of a focus, and there was some pretty gross rapey sex stuff throughout. still, the desciptive writing occasionally shone and the world building was still interesting, just not as much as before.

I didn't enjoy Eversion - I didn't appreciate reading the same story three or four times over - but I'm weirdly glad it worked for someone else!

I was thinking about starting Helliconia. I initially wanted to try Barefoot in the Head but it's not available as an ebook in the uk (why???)

Ledge, your description of the demonacracy in Aurora Rising looks plausible these days, and I'd like to read it, keeping in mind it's by Reynolds---not that I've read a lot by him, but seems to get mixed-at-best reviews on ilx. I'll keep an eye out at library, thanks.

Speaking of Aldiss, almost the only thing I've read by him is this:

The Long Afternoon of Earth (February-December 1961 F&SF; fixup 1962; exp vt Hothouse 1962) won him a 1962 Hugo award for its original appearance as a series of novelettes. It is one of his finest works. Set in the Far Future, when the Earth has ceased rotating, it portrays the last remnants (see Devolution) of humanity, who live in the branches of a giant, continent-spanning tree. Criticized for scientific implausibility (see Space Elevator) by James Blish and others, Hothouse (Aldiss's preferred title) demonstrates the ultimate inutility of such criticisms of a work like this title, which displays all of Aldiss's linguistic, comic and inventive talents, and dramatizes effectively a wide range of concerns: the conflict between fecundity and Entropy, between engorgement and chaos, between the rich variety of life and the silence of death.

Would rep v strongly for Aldiss’s Greybeard too, structurally similar to Le Gunn’s The Dispossessed and equally well written novel about a sterile, aging society, veers into folk horror at times.

I had a huge WTF moment at Worldcon today when Robert Silverberg nearly ran into me in his mobility scooter.

lool

i hope you blurted out 'silverbob!'

Ledge, your description of the demonacracy in Aurora Rising looks plausible these days

yes but most people don't consider that we're living in a golden age!