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.

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!

Now reading Ann Leckie's Translation State, which has her distinct "social mores in space!" style but also toys with body horror in parts.

body horror in parts.

picked up Elysium Fire, the book ledge mentioned, as it was cheap (replacing my paperback copy), and noticed the third part, Machine Vendetta, is also currently cheap

xp Which reminds me of my take on this anthologized treat:

George RR Martin's "Nightflyers' is a novella, the longest yard by far, and earns it. An intriguing, quest-worthy scientific expedition sets off on a strange ship, with a strange captain, and it's mystery-horror in space, gore and zombies floating through more than Special EFX, as the story develops via the dynamics of a group whose members I can actually keep straight, they have that much personality, even when dead/"dead."

God, I hated Nightflyers, just the worst writing and characterisation.

Tbf I think I’m just allergic to Martin’s writing, none of his stuff ever worked for me.

noticed the third part, Machine Vendetta, is also currently cheap

sorted! expect I'll be done with grungy sf for a while once I'm through with those.

xpost At least I got you to post--welcome back, James!

Where did he go?

Not here! Or any WAYR? that I've seen in quite a while.

ok, read xpost "True Names," cyberspace-before "cyberspace" (here it's called "The Other Plane") novella., and can see how it sets tropes, standards, but wouldn't work for me w/o that crucial Vingean conceptual x emotional resonance, here in use of fantasy imagery as analogues for tech, because of the way it suits cultural conditioning etc. and the motivations, sensibilities of all those who come to the Plane--also key is detecting difference between active realness behind avatars, vs. simulations left in place,. no matter how expert. and got Vinge momentum etc. too

Pour one out tonight for Thieves World and Heroes in Hell scribe Janet Morris, sword-and-sorcery faithful - according to her family, she has passed away. pic.twitter.com/uw7OmHyhgm

— BattlebornMag (@BattlebornMag) August 10, 2024

Ann Leckie's Translation State was something else. Her scrupulous and sensitive stories of social mores and political manoeuvering are so much more than just 'tea and gloves' (though there are tea and gloves in this one too, and I'm finally fully on board) - I mean I hope it's evidence of her intelligence, and not of my dullness, that I had to reread some parts several times in order to work out the full implications. But this one adds body horror (as mentioned above) and truly weird alien biology and behaviour. It's also very strongly concerned with gender identity - this review nails part of it: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/your-genes-arent-your-destiny-on-ann-leckies-translation-state/

In Ancillary Justice and its sequels, Leckie thoughtfully explores an agender society (the Imperial Radch) where reproductive biology has no bearing on categories of social identity. As I have argued elsewhere, however, the Radchaai agender norm is often imposed on other cultures with staggering imperial arrogance: Leckie uses “she” as the default Radchaai agender pronoun for everyone (rather than a neutral pronoun like “they”) (...) Translation State, by contrast, clarifies Leckie’s argument that misgendering others—refusing to honor their pronouns and gender identities—is always an act of violence.

It's not just about pronouns though, in some ways the whole book feels like an intriguingly imperfect analogy to the transgender experience (I say this with some hesitation, not being trans myself). I'm sure she intentionally chose a title with those first five letters.

If I have any reservations it's that as usual she does like to tie things up rather neatly and give everyone a happy ending, and though bad things happen I didn't get any real sense of danger or violence or of the true misanthrope's understanding of the awful things that people can do to each other and that you can find in plenty of stories e.g. by Le Guin. There's just a slight sense of that YA optimism, somewhat exacerbated by the fact that all three of the main characters, even the 56 year old woman, approach the world like wide-eyed innocents (though to different extents and for quite deliberate authorial reasons).

Tbf I think I’m just allergic to Martin’s writing, none of his stuff ever worked for me.

I love Sandkings and... that's it.

How was worldcon? Someone said there wasn't many good book dealers there?

Should say that sword and sorcery was just a part of what Janet Morris did, she wrote all sorts of SFF and historical fiction. A big promoter of non-lethal weapons in the military.

Has anyone checked out those Lavie Tidhar BEST OF WORLD SF anthologies?

I bought them all but they'll be sitting unread for the foreseeable future, I have all the ones he did for Apex too

Still Vingeing--as I mentioned about the Realtime stories and The Witling, he likes to set two groups at each others' throats along w backstabbing and conniving, preferably with shot-down hostages from space as magical-seeming (beyond medieval tech) prizes)---in A Fire Upon The Deep, each side has a hostage, a boy and a girl, siblings.The girl has a working educational computer, for toddlers up through advanced secondary students, ideal for ignorant Aliens. The boy has a working sort of interstellar text link to a far-off, damaged, yet incoming craft with a few refugee-rescuers on board.
The Aliens, each group led by its breeder (one more benevolent or mild-mannered than the other, also that one is the breeder of the other), are seen by the offworld kids as dogpeople, in packs of packs: each dogperson character is a pack, in neurological synch, so eyes can see in all directions etc., but they can't get close to each other most of the time, or any other packs almost all the time, because of true cognitive dissonance, feedback etc.
If that seems too claustrophic, we also get why the refugee/rescuers are coming, updates as well as backstories, and all of that/this in a much wider perspective, the Zones of Thought---as sf-encyclopedia puts it, mostly paraphrasing one of the humans, as she explains it to a remixed hero-of-sorts, on the way to first bedding:

The galaxy as a whole is divided into four concentric Zones of Thought, as defined and circumscribed by the varying limitations (and liberations) of Physics: the Unthinking Depths of the galaxy's core, where even Intelligence cannot exist, are surrounded by the Slow Zone (Earth's location; see Fermi Paradox) which allows only limited AI and is generally bound by the speed restrictions of Relativity; further out, in the vast circumambiating expanses of the Beyond, AIs can be superhuman and Faster Than Light travel is easy (here flourish almost innumerable civilizations); at its remotest distance from the Unthinking Depths, the High Beyond merges into the unknowable Transcend (see Transcendence) where intelligence tends towards the godlike. The information webs which convey near-infinities of information among the myriad worlds of the venue amusingly reflect the telephone-linked computer nets of the 1980s and early 1990s (see Internet).

I found something really cool in a little free library today: The Compleat Dying Earth, Science Fiction Book Club edition, in hardcover. There's a sick poster of the Gerald Brom cover painting inside. I may have to get that framed.

Picture here: https://imgur.com/rCCMZvx

Don't recall seeing that edition before.

I got the smaller edition of Dian Hanson/Taschen's Masterpieces Of Fantast Art and it seems to be considerably abridged, I couldn't see any note of this in the product descriptions