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

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.

Alistair Rennie - BleakWarrior

I didn't like the cover much (although it isn't a bad evocation of parts of the book) and the title seemed a bit self-parodic (after reading the book, the parody might have been intended) but I remember some genuine excitement when this book came out that went beyond the routine plaudits.

Two of the chapters originally appeared in the Vandermeer's New Weird anthology and the Ann Vandermeer era of Weird Tales. Rennie credits them with getting the novel started.

Most reviewers have been reaching for tons of comparisons and I think Ross Lockhart gets it right with Jack Vance meets Mortal Kombat. It has Vance's fondness for odd societies and the humorous eloquent back and forth dialogue. But here the deliberately overcomplicated dialogue sometimes has a similar effect to really creative cockney rhyming slang delivered with a dour face. Immortan Joe from Mad Max 4 would envy the speeches of Lord Brawl. In an audio interview Rennie said the animated version of Go Nagai's Violence Jack was an initial influence and the Scottish highland moors were the basis for some settings (you see this in his photography) but more of the book is urban.
Much of the book is Meta-Warriors stalking each other and getting into death matches, their ways of life and sense of purpose explained inbetween. I'm not sure how much of the sex was supposed to be sexy, some of it seemed like part of a general commitment to excess.

Anna Tambour hinted this could be the start of a series and she mentioned characters I don't remember in the novel (Smart Brutality and The Piper Who Calls The Tune are great names), maybe she read parts of an intended sequel? Or maybe they were introduced and killed so quickly that I forgotten them. I'm going to have to track down Rennie's short stories to see if any of them are set in this world and for the pleasure of more Rennie too. He hasn't written a huge amount and seems to have mostly focused on music since the novel (5 dark ambient albums under the name Ruptured World).
Several characters are left with their stories feeling unfinished so I hope there will be more. I really enjoyed Big Sister and Little Sister's speech patterns and how the existential ideas were developed (some of it whooshed over my head and I'm not sure all of it was supposed to make sense) and hope to see that continued too.

It's a really nice evolution of sword and sorcery but I'm sure half of the fans of that genre will hate this but that's a pity for them. I'd like to see more talk about this book and maybe it could influence new directions for other writers.

In The Gate to Women's Country towards the end there's a big reveal, a secret that the women have been keeping, and it becomes clear that it's been hinted at throughout the book, hints that I didn't pick up on. Then one of the characters says "We put clues here and there, for those with the wits to see them."

Me: *sucks teeth*

This from Valancourt

We're putting together a companion volume to World Horror Stories 1 & 2, which will feature horror stories from endangered languages.

UNESCO estimates that of the 6500 languages in the world today, half will vanish in the next century. What do we lose when a language dies out? Well, great horror stories, for one thing!

From the Friulian language comes Raffaele Serafini's "Anaxum", a folk horror tale about a young man's encounter with something weird and ancient in the forest, while Low Saxon author Chris Canter contributes "Moenen", in which a babysitter takes on the wrong gig, looking after a creepy child with a creepier doll. In Frisian writer Willem Schoorstra's "For Sale", a woman finds her dream house, which seems too good to be true (until she finds out what's living inside it!), and Scots skriever Stephen Pacitti's "Dunnottar" takes us on a bone-chilling journey to a Scottish castle haunted by the ghosts of the past. The volume will also include stories from Occitan, Basque, Romansh, and others, and has an anticipated release date of late 2022.

Yeah, Tepper was a homophobe. Still a great novel tho imo.

Lucius Shepard's super angry review of the first X-Men film
https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2000/ls0012.htm

Yeah, Tepper was a homophobe. Still a great novel tho imo.

It's also highly gender essentialist, but undercuts its own message that men are violent by nature by having them brought up from the age of 5 in a male only militaristic environment. Still a worthwhile read (could have done without the Iphigenia at Ilium parts though) and an interesting thought experiment, but not the one the author intended.

> Iphigenia at Ilium

see, you've made me more interested now

anyway, halfway through the second of the Spider planet books (Children of Time / Ruin) and it's now spiders and octopi in space.

It's also highly gender essentialist, but undercuts its own message that men are violent by nature by having them brought up from the age of 5 in a male only militaristic environment.

I think when I read it I assumed that was the point - that men are violent because of their socialization.

maybe that's what tepper intended but it's odd that the women who are in all other respects preternaturally far-seeing and successful in their plans are blind to this glaringly obvious flaw.

preternaturally far-seeing

i mean even without the benefit of their telepathic pals.

I've read A Voyage To Arcturus and a few other (anthologized) things by weirdo Lindsay, but hadn't heard of this:
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2021
A Centenary of The Haunted Woman by David Lindsay
After David Lindsay's first novel, A Voyage to Arcturus, was published in 1920, his next novel was serialized in The Daily News newspaper of London from the 30th of August 1921, through the 23rd of September. Thus today marks the centenary of the completed serialized publication of The Haunted Woman.

An extensive analysis of "The Haunted Woman in The Daily News" appears at The Violet Apple.org. (Direct link here.) https://www.violetapple.org.uk/hw/serial.php#f_ref_7

A brief announcement of the serial, together with a photograph of Lindsay and his baby daughter, appeared in the newspaper on 29th August. Considering the take on gyny in AVTA, his having a daughter is scary.
The newspaper clip is in here, also mentioning their previous serial, The Red House Mystery, by A.A. Milne, of Winnie The Pooh fame, says that Lindsay's is *also* special---no doubt; I'd like to take a look at it.
http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2021/09/a-centenary-of-haunted-woman-by-david.html

I don't think I ever knew it was serialized but I heard the first edition only sold under 50 copies and that was a real blow to Lindsay's confidence.

To this day I don't know what's keeping most of his novels from seeing print, they are super rare.

https://www.nyrsf.com/2016/07/brian-stableford-nightmares-of-a-utopian-the-science-fiction-of-r%C3%A9gis-messac.html

Author’s note: The English translations of the various Messac works indicated and cited in the above essay do exist, and their publication was scheduled by Black Coat Press for 2016. Even though the works are all in the public domain, the author having been dead for seventy years, that publication was blocked by the threat of legal action by his grandson, Olivier Messac, which BCP could not afford to defend no matter how certain the eventual victory might be. Evidently, Olivier Messac feels that the best way to conserve his grandfather’s legacy is to extend the inaccessibility of his work in the English language for as long as humanly possible. We can, of course, only speculate as to what the fervently anti-capitalist utopian Régis Messac might have thought of copyright trolls, although we do know that the Nazis murdered him in order to prevent him communicating his ideas to his fellow human beings, not because he posed any kind of military threat to them.

Finishing the first book in Julian May's Saga of Pliocene Exile. I could probably do worse than to keep checking used bookstores for SF/F books blurbed by Zelazny.

At the bottom of this page there is a bunch of his blurbs
https://www.fantasticfiction.com/z/roger-zelazny/

He wrote blurbs for a surprising number of books by women.

that series is *fantastic* imo (if slightly homophobic)

Yeah it's great imaginative stuff, a lot of balls kept in the air. Just bought book 2.

Interesting. Maybe will check out, if I ever regain my ability to read again.

But also came to the Thread of Wonder to wonder if anyone has actually read the books from which came The Expanse.

i read the first expanse book despite certain vows regarding authors with multiple middle initials. it was fine.

that julian may series is better

I’ve been somewhat curious about those Julian May books for a long time. Will grab.

I believe Jane Lindskold lived with Zelazny in his last years, but they collaborated a few times, she was interviewed recently on Geek's Guide To The Galaxy.

Oh wow I want to listen to that. She also wrote a biography of him (I discovered yesterday, listening to a different podcast)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkbPnhnWzJU

Bought the guy's book, will report back.

er, same podcast

There is a beloved but rare (in english) collection called Mirror In The Mirror by Michael Ende (Neverending Story), one of his books for adults and surrealist too. It has been reprinted recently as a print on demand version with a new translation, but a review says they taken out the paintings by his father Edgar Ende (presumably the rights weren't available?), which inspired the stories, so some would say it's not a proper reprint. I ordered it because the alternatives are too expensive (hundreds).

omg---as Science Fiction Encyclopedia says ov May:

n the 1980s May turned her attention once again to sf, making an immediate and very substantial impact with her Saga of Pliocene Exile, which serves as an extensive prelude to the Galactic Milieu sequence: The Many-Colored Land (1981), which won a 1982 Locus Award, and The Golden Torc (1982), both assembled as The Many-Colored Land & The Golden Torc (omni 1982); plus The Nonborn King (1983) and The Adversary (1984), both assembled as The Nonborn King & The Adversary (omni 1984); and supplemented by The Pliocene Companion (1984; vt A Pliocene Companion: A Guide to the Saga of Pliocene Exile 1985). The Galactic Milieu sequence begins with a transitional volume – Intervention (1987; vt in two vols The Surveillance 1988 and The Metaconcert 1988) – and continues with Jack the Bodiless (1992), Diamond Mask (1994) and Magnificat (1996). (I've got these last three, seem promising in random read.) Underlying the increasingly complicated storyline of this four-volume prelude is what might be described as a Planetary Romance set on Earth: the protagonists have left a Utopian twenty-second century society from which they have felt estranged, via one-way Time Travel six million years into deep prehistory (see Prehistoric SF), where they discover not only that the Pliocene is rich in potential but that two apparently Alien species are in a state of deadly conflict over the young world and over the humans who have already arrived there. Much additional material – from archetypes out of Celtic myths (see Mythology) to the introductions of various Psi Powers to intimations of Hard SF – is fed into this vision, leavened intermittently by a Trickster protagonist or two. The effect is at times reminiscent of the Planetary-Romance Baroque of Roger Zelazny.

With Intervention the overall sequence moves into an Alternate History version of contemporary times which segues into the Galactic Milieu tales, where the family romance of the Remillard clan intersects with explanatory narratives set deep into the past, and with the melodramatic course of the assessing of humanity's potential role (if any) in the Galactic Milieu (see Galactic Empires) itself. The narrative is increasingly charged with metaphysical intonations, linked to a sustaining concern with the attractive theme of psychic Evolution; in the end, Zelazny seems at times less clearly evoked than Doris Lessing. But wait, there's more!
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/may_julian

Yeah, 8 books.

Finished the much celebrated Light by M John Harrison, after three chapters I thought I was going to love it but my enthusiasm dwindled - it was too sordid, the technology too magical, the antagonist too vague (till the very end), too much of a sense of words put on the page because they sound cool and for no other reason.

Still I preferred it to Joan Slonczewski's A Door into Ocean, almost its exact opposite.

read 'a matter of oaths' by helen s. wright -- solid space opera that i thought packed quite a bit into its short one volume

particularly notable for having been written in 1988, when that sort of thing was unfashionable, and for being remarkably diverse, in the modern parlance: the main character is non-white, the kickass commander is a woman, there is gay sex, etc.

this no doubt explains why it fell out of print and was recently republished with a forward by becky chambers (#hopepunk). pretty weird how the brief author's note mentions that she, who still lives in the uk, 'never married' though!

anyway i liked it, it was worthwhile!

(i will simply never not reference hopepunk because come on)

https://www.tor.com/2019/04/18/quiltbag-speculative-classics-a-matter-of-oaths-by-helen-s-wright/

I must have seen it in this article (quite a good article series by Bogi Takacs) and on the Cherryh blurb list but I don't recall it. I can't find any biographical info, even on her personal site. Only one book then done, but it seems to have quite a strong fanbase considering that.

I don't have a very good handle on how publishers and readers treated gay sex back then. I was quite surprised by how much there was in Somtow's early 80s books in what are pretty much mainstream novels, maybe that's part of why Inquestor wasn't the hit I think it should have been.

Fun interview, he speaks so fast
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hplcp-fragments-ep-05-interview-with-nick-mamatas/id1508892873?i=1000501553249

That guy is good.

I just (very) belatedly discovered Ursula Le Guin -- read Wizard of Earthsea and Tombs of Atuan in quick succession — they are so incredible!

My problem with most SF/fantasy is the bad sentence writing, so she’s obviously like the diametric opposite of that — but she’s so good at the “ripping yarn” part too. Especially in the first book, I love that dissonance between the subdued elegance of her prose and the extreme metalness of whatever’s going on in the story.

Also love that feeling when you read a great author for the first time and realise you have a whole new catalogue to explore.

Yeah I rediscovered A Wizard of Earthsea a couple years ago, hadn't really appreciated it at 12.

I was pretty stunned. AWoE >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Just to give one example, just before the final confrontation in the book, there's a cozy, funny, relaxed domestic scene. It's such a striking shift of tone, so unexpected, and yet it works.

Yes, I was grateful for that moment, like Le Guin was saying "just in case you were concerned - I can do people and dialogue too". The relationship between Ged and Tenar in the 2nd book is very convincing too

My problem with most SF/fantasy is the bad sentence writing, so she’s obviously like the diametric opposite of that — but she’s so good at the “ripping yarn” part too. Especially in the first book, I love that dissonance between the subdued elegance of her prose and the extreme metalness of whatever’s going on in the story. Struck by how otm this is also re last night's bedtime reading, Joanna Russ's "My Dear Emily": an Emerson-reading collegian, who's made prim-and-proper her eyes-lowered hot-cool style, obediently returns to old San Francisco and encounters the vampiric sole survivor of one the city's really olde families---with his aristocratic, Old Worldly male triumphalizm suitably enhanced, let him show her how---the erotic spiral of exhilaration and damage, incl. acting out, is jolting, esp. with slightly "disjointed" sentence momentum, clear as a cracked bell can be (real clear, turns out).
This from a Best of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, copyrights 1961-62-63---must have caused a stir back then---what else should I read by her---?

Should say it really is mostly about Emily; he just starts her up...

read 'the praxis' (millennia-old multi-species galactic empire falls apart when its ruling race dies out) by walter jon williams

military sf is not my thing -- stopped reading the mazalan book of stuff early on because i do not want to have to know who is commanding the 47th brigade of strike force nine or whatever -- but this one was recommended by jo walton, whom i like

anyway, it was pretty good -- akin, perhaps, to 'the expanse' minus the protomolecule? maybe a little too much of ships and missiles trying to maintain delta-v, etc. etc. but the two main characters (one male, one female) are interesting and not cardboard. it has sequels that i might read sometime

The Best Ghost Stories Of Algernon Blackwood

There's only one or two Blackwood stories I've read that aren't on this so I can hardly be an authority, but despite his expertise I think E.F. Bleiler probably left off a lot of highly deserving stories (the ones I've heard mentioned often, such as "The Man Whom The Trees Loved") that tend to get on the other Best Ofs. I can't tell you if there is a better collection of Blackwood, the huge Centipede Press editions are too rare/expensive for most people to consider but I have a feeling there are other better introductions.

I slightly prefer "The Wendigo" to "The Willows" (his two biggest classics), I find the setting and particular creepiness of the former a bit more enchanting but they're both great. "The Glamour Of The Snow" is a little beauty. "The Empty House" is more chilling than the garden variety murder of the story would suggest. "Ancient Sorceries" is spoiled slightly with the too insistent reminders of how shy the main character is and the revealed Satanism is underwhelming.
I was struck by "The Transfer" because of how it describes an unwittingly oppressive man having an effect on people that sounds strikingly like how people today describe oppressive systems of power; and I like the line "It seemed a few hours had passed, but really they were seconds, for time is measured by the quality and not the quantity of sensations it contains".

I think in terms of prose, Blackwood is head and shoulders above most of the other classic horror writers, he's so deft with delicate details and nuances of moments in a way that makes a scene come alive in a way M.R. James and Lovecraft couldn't pull off as well. But sometimes like in "Max Hensig", he explains the details in such a longwinded manner that the effectiveness is lost. I hear his novels can be more challenging for this reason. He's not without his prejudices but there's something refreshing about how outgoing and positive he is compared to the writers he is often mentioned beside. I'd only consider a few of these stories essential though.

Crime vet tries her hand at folk horror crossover:
The Devil at Saxon Wall (1935) by Gladys Mitchell draws on the tradition of the Victorian inheritance mystery, but with added folklore and witchcraft thrown in. Three babies were born in the remote village of Saxon Wall, one to the family of the local manor, another to a woman reputed to be a witch, and another to a woman regarded as a simpleton. Only two of the children survived: but which two?

Hannibal Jones, a writer of sentimental novels, comes to the village to convalesce from nervous trouble and becomes unwillingly involved in its affairs, which include stories of changelings and impersonations and missing heirs. The pub, the Long Thin Man, is named after a local spirit connected with a tumulus on the downs above. There are spells, potions, the evil eye, and propitiation rites to bring much-needed rain.

A full cast of characters, as well as the witch and the supposed simpleton, includes a couple of Ivy Compton-Burnett-esque sister spinsters with brisk, brittle dialogue (we could have done with even more of them), a volatile vicar with a Japanese valet, and of course Mitchell’s reptilian psychiatrist-detective, Dame Beatrice Adela Lestrange. These vivid characters and the deft twists in the plot are the novel’s main strengths.

Gladys Mitchell was the author of over sixty crime novels, and they are uneven in quality, as she herself admitted. At her best her books are vigorous, eventful, sly, full of rich colour and eccentric characters. But even Mitchell experts seem divided about this book...
---from Mark V.'s latest post:
http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-devil-at-saxon-wall-gladys-mitchell.html

interesting looking afro-futurism(?) set in Kindle daily deals today, but all only 20-40 pages long.

https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/amazon-black-stars-chimamanda-ngzoi-adichie-excerpt

(would probably fit in nicely with this month's reading but the size makes them expensive)

https://www.polskieradio.pl/395/7791/Artykul/2789010,British-writer-unveils-his-gnome-in-Poland%e2%80%99s-Wroclaw
Graham Masterton once said his sex guides were so successful in Poland that strangers approached him in the street to thank him. I'm pretty sure the creature coming out the book is Manitou, from his horror series. I wonder who else has a gnome?

Bought Andy Weir's 'Project Hail Mary' as it was on offer, this may have been a mistake. (I have not read The Martian.) 500 pages ffs, does no-one write short books any more?

Just finished that. Quite enjoyed it but it's basically The Martian in new clothes: (very mild spoiler) character all alone has to solve lots of science problems in order to survive

i also bought that (on saturday when it was cheap). and this is meant to be a return to form after the (slight) artemis. but we shall see.

(martian was similarly long but a very quick read fwiw, i think you'd enjoy it. it reminded me of a.c.clarke in that it was physics-led storytelling)

(i think the martian may've suffered from having only been seen as 'popular' (read 'hyped') because the film was good, but the book was good enough in itself)