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

Why?

the book seems to revel to an unnecessary degree in repulsive characters (pedophiles, misogynists, etc.). felt like tarantino without a sense of humour at times.

the best bits reminded me of annihalation, and the premise was great

That's odd because he's really funny in interviews

Oh hi, I created this thread for centralized convenience:
COUNTERPART: Alternate History w/ Creepy Cold War Vibe

blackfish city, sam j. miller: cool vibe and some nice images but doesn't really hold together and a lot of things are glossed over. (ah, nanites.) overall kind of meh, imo

author is a community organizer in NYC and fucking *hates* landlords, though -- i will definitely give him that

lol i just saw a book referred to as cli-fi

(i am probably years late on this but still)

Hate that term even more than hopepunk

This year's purchases so far

Albert Power - Azerbaijan Tales
Ilana C Meyer - Last Song Before Night
Brian Stableford - The Blind Worm
Gretchen Felker-Martin - Ego Homini Lupus
James Worrad - The Scalpel
Jennifer Giesbrecht - The Monster of Elendhaven
Rjurik Davidson - Unwrapped Sky
Cassandra Khaw - Hammers On Bone
Yeatts & Phillips (ed) - Nasty: Fetish Fights Back (mostly SFF authors)
Seth Dickinson - The Traitor
Susann Cokal - Mermaid Moon
SP Somtow - Starship & Haiku
SP Somtow - Jasmine Nights
Jeffrey E Barlough - Dark Sleeper
PC Hodgell - The Godstalker Chronicles
Ricardo Pinto - The Masters
Lianyu Tan - Captive In The Underworld
Sterling E Lanier - Hiero Desteen
Fitzpatrick (ed) -Salacious Tales
Lilith Lorraine - Time Grows Thin
Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Return Of The Sorceress
Richard Grant - Saraband Of Lost Time
Bullington & Tanzer (ed) - Swords V Cthulhu

rabbits, terry miles: there is a vast conspiracy underlying reality, if you can believe it. it takes the form of a game in which one follows discrepancies -- suddenly everyone is calling sandy kaufax the yankees' greatest-ever pitcher, but you're pretty sure he actually played for the dodgers? -- and clues toward some never-quite-defined goal. but now the game -- and maybe reality? -- is falling apart!

this was silly and didn't really make sense and no story of this sort can possibly end adequately, but i enjoyed it as a summer beach thriller type of thing. fast-paced and decently written on a sentence level for a first-timer

not unlike ian banks' the business -- another 'vast conspiracy' novel -- this book likes to namedrop musical artists/songs. neither author is anywhere near as cool as he'd like to think, but those bits were at least better deployed here than in 'the business', which sucked

Did you ever read the Lewis Shiner novel about great unfinished rock albums? Also not as cool as it wanted to be but memorable

hmm, i will check it out. thanks!

surely we need a novel in which the plot is presaged by fall lyrics

blackfish city, sam j. miller

― mookieproof, Sunday, August 1, 2021 10:56 PM

I was interested because someone said it has really cool animal stuff. Somebody riding a dolphin or polar bear or something?

surely we need a novel in which the plot is presaged by fall lyrics

An archive of an acclaimed radio show
https://archive.org/details/MindWebs_201410/026Test-TheodoreThomas_and_theNineBillionNamesOfGod-ArthurC.Clarke.wav

Ooh, Best Of Greg Egan is on there now, don't have to bother with the expensive hardcover edition now
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SF_Masterworks#Softcover_editions_(2010%E2%80%93present)

The current Dunsany, I knew he was a filmmaker but all the rest is new to me
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/07/people-think-youre-an-idiot-death-metal-irish-baron-rewilds-his-estate

I read that but didn't make the connection with Lord Dunsany till you posted it here - perhaps because sensibly they call him Plunkett not Dunsany.

This is quite ranty, I was thinking recently how some publishers are putting far too much priority into debut authors. Depressing talk about the situation of foreign writers over the decades. Tidhar can make sweeping statements sometimes but it's kind of refreshing to hear writers talk this way. He says Ekaterina Sedia gave up writing from frustration with the industry, aside from an essay a few years ago I think her last fiction was 2016
https://jonathanstrahan.podbean.com/e/episode-556-lavie-tidhar-and-a-world-of-science-fiction/

interesting episode! thanks.

http://www.newconpress.co.uk/info/books.asp?offers=yes

Clearance sale

Pat Cadigan
@Cadigan
For the record: The forthcoming novelisation of William Gibson’s unproduced Aliens 3 film script is based on a different version of his script than the graphic novel from Dark Horse. The novelisation isn’t just the graphic novel w/o the graphics. So you should own both ;-)

And probably everything else by Pat Cadigan---whose writing is almost always much better than Gibson's usual, in my experience.

(I'm trying not to outright say that she left him in the dust long ago, but that's probably accurate.)

Just bought 'tea from an empty cup'.

Hugh B Cave - Bitter/Sweet

A small pamphlet of two stories. One is about a therapist who records people's dreams and watches them, it had a decent enough setup but didn't do much with it.
The other is about the writers of The Gospels teaming up with the ghosts of canonical writers to stop crude DJs, heavy metal bands and horror writers from writing and promoting leering stories and songs about raping and killing. They assure each other that this isn't censorship and even say that anyone who persists in trying to write this kind of thing will live in a special quarantine together and the canonical writers are all very smug about what they're doing. Why is Cave so sure that Stevenson, the Brontes and Homer would approve of all this?
Makes me wonder if Cave felt guilty about writing those nasty women-in-peril pulp stories, they weren't great but they were better than this.

In the very unlikely chance this is the first thing you read by Cave, don't write him off, he written cool vampire stories like "Murgunstrumm" and "Stragella". I've got a few more books by him and I hope they aren't like Bitter/Sweet.

Mark Valentine:
The Twelve Maidens by Stewart Farrar (1974) is a very mid-Seventies cauldron of Cold War technology, ESP, sociology, black magic and white magic, experimental science and standing stones, secret radar and satanic rituals, whirring aerials and wild moors: a seething potion of Wyndham and Wheatley.
It now has the added pleasure of being very much of its long-haired, flared-trousered, large-collared time, a genuine creation of the period both celebrated and mildly parodied by the Ghost Box record label, The Haunted Generation blog and the fields of folk horror and hauntology...http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-twelve-maidens-stewart-farrar.html

Started last night on the 2020 novel Heap by Sean Adams, about transient laborers digging for salvage in the rubble of a collapsed vertical city. So far (first ~25 pages) it's a bit light on the world-building, but interesting enough when I can suspend my disbelief. There's an unexpected contemporary emotional resonance, too, in the way that the protagonist has regular but distant contact with his brother, a radio DJ who magically survived the collapse and continues to broadcast while trapped somewhere amid the ruins.

Did not get on with Tea from an Empty Cup. Maybe cyberpunk just ain't my thing, but she seemed to put an awful lot of effort into creating a world that was barely comprehensible to the protagonists or the reader. And a VR where you can do anything and be anything but most people choose to spend their time in a gritty and violent post apocalyptic nyc seems rather poor. As for the plot, in the whodunnit bit the cop makes literally no progress for 7/8 of the book then suddenly gets the answer handed to her on a plate; the other plot strand was incomprehensible.

solid thread

A TIMELINE OF THE [fantasy world]
- The Founding
- war
- war
- war
- something happened with magic?
- war
- The Event (you know the one)
- post-Event war

— Monkey's Paw Games (@monkeyspawgames) August 26, 2021

Thee littlest orphan in Merde Galaxy becomes Emperor Ov 20 Universes in First Decalogue, and then---

i have pretty much given up on alastair reynolds but the new one is back to the Revelation Space universe of his first few novels and i'm tempted. but the quandary is do i buy a physical copy or a digital copy? this, after 10 years, would be my first full-price ebook purchase and I'm a bit wary of spending money on bytes but i do prefer reading on the kobo.

I'll probably leave it a couple of months, see if it gets discounted.

currently just started the 3rd of the Three Body Problem books

Has anyone here read Brightness Falls From the Air by James Tiptree Jr. and did they think the 'kid porn' elements were sketchy to say the least? Doesn't seem to be any discussion/acknowledgement in any reviews I can find. I haven't finished it yet so maybe there'll be some grand accounting at the end.

Ringworld? worth reading (99p in kindle daily deal today. but what's with that shovelware cover?)

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51d7TuzknhL.jpg

read 'piranesi' in one night, as suggested by user caek, and it was good! the feel of it reminded me of 'the invention of morel'.

that said, there was no good explanation for why people lost their memories in said situation. and i'm not sure whether the final chapter added or subtracted from the story

also been reading some tiptree short stories and christ they are scathing -- along the lines of 'woman on the edge of time' and then some. can't even imagine that reviewer who swore tiptree was a big dick-swinging man

(unless he thought tiptree was poul anderson because lol)

i hate to be one of those people who complains about "endings". it seems only slightly better than complaining about "unlikable characters". but agreed, it wasn't a great ending!

xps ringworld is sort of goofy fun, probably worth it if you're a big fan of megastructures or just want to tick off a big name novel.

yeah, was only a quid and it's not like I'm spending money on much else these days. kobo only had the graphic novel version and some of the 15 spin offs.

am enjoying 3 body problem pt 3. mass evacuations, lightspeed travel, 4d spaces. 350 pages to go.

but he's spent absolutely 0 time explaining what happened in the previous books, expecting us to remember despite having read 40 things in the meantime.

Gretchen Felker-Martin - Ego Homini Lupus

I try not to look at online speculative fiction controversies too much but I've undeniably found a lot of promising authors from doing so. I really enjoyed Felker-Martin's opinions and found her insights really refreshing, touching on some things I've not heard many people talk about.

Tom Horstmann's cover art grabbed me, one of my favorite cover arts I've seen in recent years. This is the first time I've read a digital book of any real length, usually physical books take my priority but so far a digital copy on Gumroad is the only option.

I guess this is folk horror (in 12th-century Northumbria). It goes through different modes of horror: grueling traumatic real life horror (in the home and on the battlefield), extreme gore/body horror and supernatural horror, much of it on a small scale, sometimes eerie in a down to earth way but several scenes take it to the level of a very grand Zdzisław Beksiński painting. You get a good feel for the main setting because there's so much richly textured description of Joan's daily work.
The characters and structure are brilliant. There were a few scenes that really stopped me in my tracks when I realized what was happening, usually something harrowing or deeply sad or both; one or two scenes got my eyes filling up, on the edge of crying.
I had to look up a lot of period terminology and it even got me looking up how high chickens can fly.

Even some of the really glowing reviews are underselling how good this is, I'm sorry I'm underselling it, but it's already among my favorite horror stories and I think it should be looked back on as a classic of its time, I hope that even horror fans not used to this level of sex and violence will not be dismissive. Publishers should be fighting to get the first paper version of it (hopefully with the original cover, it won't be easily topped), get in there!

Looking forward to her other books.

https://melmoththewanderer.gumroad.com/l/rnidm

I read Ringworld fairly recently, and found it a colossal hard SF bore. Bob Shaw's Orbitsville, covering similar ground, is much more entertaining.

Valancourt books said this "We've been trying to contact Jane Gaskell for years. Her agent can't locate her and she's not responded to family members from what I understand. A couple of others in publishing have been trying too. :("

lool

The opening chapter of the original paperback edition of Ringworld featured Louis Wu teleporting eastward around the Earth in order to extend his birthday. Moving in this direction would, in fact, make local time later rather than earlier, so that Wu would soon arrive in the early morning of the next calendar day. Niven was "endlessly teased" about this error, which he corrected in subsequent printings to show Wu teleporting westward.

That is pretty funny; the other errors about the ringworld not actually orbiting its star, the seas filling up with gunk, and the breeding for luck and pak stuff just generally flying in the face of science, not so much.

More Plunkett/Dunsany rewilding news
https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/irish-baron-offers-home-at-his-castle-to-animals-released-from-wildlife-hospital-1182651.html

I've always kinda meant to check out James Branch Cabell---big stash now digitally accessible via Virginia Commonweath University.

Where Should You Start? incl. several thread-relevant suggestions (lotta links in here):
...the Neil Gaiman Presents audiobook collection (available for purchase) includes three of Cabell’s fantasies: Figures of Earth, Jurgen and The High Place.
...If you enjoy science fiction, you should know that a number of science fiction writers read Cabell and admired his use of science fiction tropes and narrative devices. Robert Heinlein’s Job: A Comedy of Justice gives explicit homage to Cabell, taking its subtitle from Jurgen. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series contains a library of “novels their authors never wrote or never finished, except in dreams” including a Cabell title, Poictesme Babylon. Larry Nivens wrote a hard sf/horror story “Night on Mispec Moor” (a reference to Cabell’s Something About Eve) and A World Out of Time in which the character “Jerome Branch Corbell” is cryogenically frozen, then revived years later by an oppressive totalitarian government.

dust jacket Something About Eve with naked eve and man in 18th century costume
Something About Eve, first English printing, 1927
Image: Thorne and Lloyd, An Illustrated Bibliography of Works By and About James Branch Cabell
If you’re interested in weird fiction, sword and sorcery fantasy or pulp fiction, that can also be a way into Cabell. Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, read and admired Cabell’s books, once writing a review of Cabell’s Something About Eve in which he called Cabell the ablest writer of the present age. Howard also mentioned Cabell in several letters.

If you’re a Led Zeppelin fan, you might want to visit VCU Libraries Special Collections and Archives to read Aleister Crowley’s letters to Cabell, and see the adaptation of a Crowley illustration on the cover of Kalki: Studies in James Branch Cabell, vol. IV, no.1 (Winter 1969). Chapter XXII of Jurgen is said to contain elements drawn from Crowley’s Gnostic Mass. Crowley called Jurgen one of the “epoch-making masterpieces of philosophy."
More: https://jamesbranchcabell.library.vcu.edu/cabells-writing/getting-started/
Press release mentions:
The site pays special attention to the censorship drama surrounding Cabell’s most famous novel, “Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice.” In 1920, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice seized the printing plates and copies of the book, and its publishers were charged with obscenity on the grounds that “Jurgen” was “offensive, lewd, lascivious and indecent.”

A section on “Speaking Cabell” offers a glossary of literary terms Cabell employed in his writing, but that might be unfamiliar to many readers. It explains terms such as “demiurge” (an artisan-like figure responsible for fashioning and maintaining the physical universe), “domnei” (an Old Provençal term meaning the attitude of chivalrous devotion of a knight to his lady, and “rondelet” (a French poetic form with seven lines, of which three are refrains).

It features several maps of Poictesme (pronounced “pwa-tem”), the fictional medieval French province that serves as the setting for several of Cabell’s works known collectively as “Biography of the Life of Manuel.”

For visitors seeking research material on Cabell, the site links to archival collections, including those held by VCU Libraries’ Special Collections and Archives. These include the James Branch Cabell collection, which contains letters Cabell received from American and British authors, some original writings, and items the author placed in the volumes of his personal library; and the Margaret Freeman Cabell papers, which include correspondence between Cabell’s second wife, Margaret Waller Freeman Cabell, James Branch Cabell, and their friends, colleagues and business associates.

“We look forward to working with a new influx of researchers, fans and creators excited about Cabell and welcome anyone from the VCU community and beyond to reach out to us about accessing our unique collections,” said Yuki Hibben, interim head and curator of books and art for Special Collections and Archives.

I read that REHoward review once. I have Nightmare Has Triplets in my unread pile but it's maybe not the ideal place to start since it's a trilogy.

flann o'brien also a cabell fan i seem to recall. have only read jurgen & found it all a bit overly whimsical.

reading sheri s tepper, the gate to women's country:

Even in preconvulsion times it had been known that the so-called “gay syndrome” was caused by aberrant hormone levels during pregnancy. The women doctors now identified the condition as “hormonal reproductive maladaptation” and corrected it before birth. There were very few actual HNRMs – called HenRams – either male or female, born in Women’s Country, though there was still the occasional unsexed person or the omnisexed who would, so the instructors said, mate with a grasshopper if it would hold still long enough.

hmmm

I've heard there's some strange views in her books and some say her dissatisfaction with readers not getting her intentions made her write messages clearer and clearer to the detriment of the books.