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

Also want to say that I believe he came up with name "Beatnik Bayou" based on Hippie Hollow in Austin.

Ah okay, this goes way into his significance and the books that seemed disappointing as well--grab a coffee and be braced for a spoiler or two: https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/varley_john "Beatnik Bayou" is from his Eight Worlds series, about humans banished from Earth for bad behavior (wiki sez the Invaders hand it over to rightful caretakers, whales and dolphins). But for some reason they're allowed to spread through the Solar System, maybe because they're resolved to/compulsive about changing, becoming or maybe just trying to become something like posthuman, or betterhuman. The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977), in this series or thematic sequence, is mentioned as his first and maybe best novel; Irontown Blues (2018, his latest), is a return to the Eight Worlds, but there's also the Titan series and other stuff, incl a YA sequence this century.
Also in the Eight Worlds universe, here's an example of his Hard SF side:

Steel Beach (1992)...demonstrates through its very considerable length a virtuoso control of the Hard SF toolkit, presented through many of the kind of compulsive narrative hooks employed by Robert A Heinlein in his ruthless prime; but the story itself...lacks dramatic urgency, despite many cleverly conceived (but sidebar) episodes full of action. The title itself, however, deserves to have become established as a tag for the evolutionary impasse humanity may soon face: like a lungfish struggling to breathe on a Pacific beach, Varley suggests, humanity could soon find itself struggling for breath on the steel beach that is all the home that remains, after the final death of Nature. The difficulty with his presentation of the steel beach that may be our destiny lies, perhaps, in his underlying hopefulness that engineering solutions may pry us out of hell.

I seem to remember that in a lot of his stuff both sex changes and revivification after corporeal death using cloning and scanned memories were about as easy as dyeing one’s hair. This was okay when these technologies sort of helped drive the mystery of the stories but sometimes just seemed sort like, um, some other writer I can’t quite recall the name of right now who wrote about going back in time and siring himself, maybe being his own mother as well, that’s his grandmother over there etc.

I always thought the premise of the Eight Worlds was kind of cool, although I still haven’t read my copy of The Ophiuchi Hotline. Nor I have I read the novel-length version of “Air Raid,” Millennium, although I did read the table of contents and notice that all the chapter titles are also the titles of various sf classics. It was made into a movie called Millennium as well which I haven’t seen and is terrible according to Varley, despite the William Goldman screenplay.

Yeah I'd like to read those.
xpost it seems to be more about the compulsiveness ov change taking over/pulling at and through from idealism, guilt, fear--is what I got from "B.B." and sfencyclopedia's takes---but yes, physically, techonologically, it seems all too easy, which makes it more compulsive, of course (deliberate effect on author's part, also it seems that he wants to believe: see sfencyc's ending comment on Steel Beach above)

https://web.archive.org/web/20160509113332/http://www.strangehorizons.com/2002/20020218/both_and.shtml

thanks---also you're reminding me of our discussion upthread, with some references to https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/transgender_sf"> https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/transgender_sf and another one I can't paste now because wtf chrome but search for original post of the one I did manage to paste earlier in this sentence and you'll see what I mean: an article about a film re trans life, based on a Heinlein story.

Some good stuff in here, clearing up misconceptions but most of it wont be news to us oldsters, some interesting trivia I don't know
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tntj13Qgkf4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISG3DpAcrW4

Celtic Weird: Tales of Wicked Folklore and Dark Mythology, is a newly published anthology edited by Johnny Mains. It contains some twenty-one stories, divided into seven sections: Scotland, Ireland, Brittany, Isle of Mann, Wales, Cornwall, and Gaelic. Some of the authors are well-known, like Robert Aickman, Count Stenbock, Edith Wharton, Nigel Kneale, Arthur Machen, and Frank Baker, etc. Of course I immediately gravitated towards the authors unknown to me, and I'd like to discuss one of them here. The story is called "The Butterfly's Marriage" and it is by Eochann MacPhaidein.
Mains introduces the story as follows:

"I cannot find anything about Eachann (Hector) MacPhaidein apart from the fact that he wrote Pòsadh An Dealan-dè ("The Butterfly's Wedding") for Uirsgenlan Gaidhealach / Highland Tales (1905). The following story is, in my opinion, astonishing, I don't think I've ever read anything so out there and he distills the very essence of Gaelic folklore and outré imagination into every single word. This is one weird tale."
I think the editor oversells the story a bit, but it is an odd one, and I certainly wish we had more stories from this author.

CELTIC WEIRD looks good, thanks, doesn't seem to be available in the US.

What SF-Fantasy should I read?

I read Book of the New Sun last year and really liked it.

Things I'm thinking of:

1. I've never read any Michael Moorcock. Should I read Elric?
2. Stuff like Vance and Poul Anderson that influenced D&D?
3. Something else?

I guess the Conan stories fall under #2.

I really, really enjoyed The Malazan Book of the Fallen. The final, tenth volume misses a little bit, but it's a hard landing to stick and the series is still very much worth it.

I'm not nearly familiar with fantasy as with science fiction, but xpost Anderson's Tales Before Tolkien is a good, fun grounding: stories that T. commented on, others that he was known to have read, probably read, coulda read, couldn't have read for various reasons, but they all pertain to what he did/have some related appeal. Also the DG Hartwell-edited Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder, which goes from at least the 18th Century to the 1980s, to Le Guin, at least. Another good gateway for me was one of the anthologies that George RR Martin & Gardner Dozois commissioned from leading modern authors:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_These_Strange_Streets---it's tagged as "urban fantasy," but yes, some very strange streets, not nearly all of which go where I thought they might (likewise Ellen Datlow's Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy).
Martin & D's Dangerous Women is maybe even better, but/because it crosses genre and subgenre lines. Their Rogues is also good, but I miss Jack Vance's characters---all stories in these have to be new, and RIP Vance can't dance no more, being dead So maybe try his The Complete Dying Earth, or whatever you can find in the DE saga starring Cugel the Cunning (I don't know that much Vance otherwise).
I also liked this Fritz Leiber [series:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fafhrd_and_the_Gray_Mouser"> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fafhrd_and_the_Gray_Mouser
Patricia McKillip's Winter Rose and Naomi Novik's Uprooted are compatible, deep in forest worlds.

I read the first Elric trilogy too soon after five books of Dying Earth, should have taken a break from series; also, it seemed dry by comparison, but a lot of things would. Most of the Moorcock stories I've come across in antholgies were good (and non-series-related, far as I know).

Vance reminds of Philip K Dick (at least from what I’ve read of both) in the way his short stories take off into unexpected tangents. But Vance is a better sentence writer, more controlled, less chaotic (for better and worse)

PBKR - looking for D&D Appendix N style stories?
After New Sun you going for Urth, Long Sun and Short Sun?

I've been buying up Lavie Tidhar's World SF anthologies (including the Apex series) and Valancourt's World Horror anthologies and can't wait to start on them. Listened to another Lavie interview recently and he talked about some reviewers still baulking at names of foreign places as if everything should be set in new york and london. He met an editor like this too!

Thanks for the tip on Celtic Weird. Mains has been digging up things in recent anthologies.

Yes, Appendix N was what I was referencing without saying it. I've read Urth too, but don't know if I need to read further just yet.

Here's an anthology I've been wanting because David Madison stories are really difficult to find
http://strangeattractor.co.uk/shoppe/appendix-n/

As far as sword and sorcery these two seem good but a chunk of it is the expected characters
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1433129
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?603384

There's been quite a big (albeit small press) resurgence of sword and sorcery and sword and planet recently. I was hesitant to join a discord a while ago because the genre has a bit of a reputation for nostalgic reactionaries but I needn't have worried.

Love the Pyat covers
https://pmpress.org.uk/product-tag/michael-moorcock/

One of the elements in my story ‘Mad Lutanist’ (recently reprinted in The Ghost & Scholars Book of Follies and Grottoes edited by Rosemary Pardoe, from Sarob Press) is the aeolian harp, an ancient instrument which resonates with the wind to produce eerie music. It fascinated Coleridge, and his experiments and speculations are alluded to in the story.

I was therefore delighted to receive news of Aeolian Mixtape by Quinta, an album just released on the always-interesting Nonclassical label. Quinta is a London-based experimental composer who devised hand-made versions of the aeolian harp while she was living in Greece. Its strange soaring sounds are here combined with string instruments and electronics to convey a truly unearthly soundscape.

(Mark Valentine)

I'm reading Marge Piercy's He She and It and finding it tough going. Maybe I'm just not in the mood, it's clearly very rich and thoughtful, and very feminist, but I have no interest in the sexual hangups of the main character, or of reading the same story twice. (It's a retelling of the Golem of Prague set in a post collapse world, interleaved with a retelling of the same story in its original setting but modified to develop parallels with the other version.)

all my christmases sf library reservations have come at once, I need to finish marge piercy so I can get on with alistair reynolds' eversion (thankfully under 300 pages) and emily st john mandell's sea of tranquility.

i have lost touch of reynolds books, haven't even heard of that one.

description makes me think of Century Rain, which was a nice standalone thing he did way back when.

i was keeping up with Reynolds for awhile and also lost touch. he never really disappointed, though the first one i read ('house of suns') remains my favorite.

separately, my kid is very much into Tolkien and seems inclined to find more along those lines. so far, he's been digging into the redwall books pretty steadily. i also showed him the back-of-the-book description of 'the sword of shannara' (as a goof!) and he had a good laugh over its transparent thievery from lotr.

Maybe he'd like Kay's The Fionavar Tapestry? I just finished it last night (pretty sure I read the first volume as a Tolkien-obsessed kid), and it clearly has a large debt to Tolkien. Kay worked on The Silmarillion with Christopher Tolkien, and you can see a lot of the same mythical elements at play. I found it beautiful in some ways, but also ultimately unsatisfying - by the end there's probably 50+ characters, gods, demons, etc. vying for attention, and I don't think GGK really keeps control of all the different forces in the last volume. But it does give you a rich fantasy world, which is half the reason I read this kind of book.

He might like the old Dragonlance novels!

The Prydain books by Lloyd Alexander are good, especially if your kid is on the younger side.

those suggestions sound good! Like me he has a backlog of unread books he owns plus plenty of library books. It’s not an insurmountable problem to have though, he’s a fast reader.

Prydian? That’s Welsh for Britain, isn’t it.

Lloyd Alexander repurposes a bunch of Welsh myths for the series.

i read 'sword of shannara' well before lord of the rings; when i finally read the latter i was like holy shit brooks just . . . changed the directions on the map

would also recommend susan cooper's dark is rising series

lol same

Some time later, the last Druid Allanon arrives in Shady Vale. Allanon warns the Ohmsford brothers that the Warlock Lord has returned to the Skull Kingdom in the Northland and is coming for Shea. As the last descendant of Jerle Shannara, Shea is the only one capable of wielding the Sword of Shannara against the Warlock Lord.

Allanon departs, leaving Shea three Blue Elfstones for protection. He tells Shea to flee at the sign of the Skull. A few weeks later, a creature bearing a symbol of a skull shows up: a Skull Bearer, one of the Warlock Lord's "winged black destroyers",[3] has arrived to search for Shea. The brothers are forced to flee with the Skull Bearer on their heels. They take refuge in the nearby city of Leah where they find Shea's friend Menion, the son of the city's lord. Menion decides to accompany the two, and he travels with them to Culhaven, to meet with Allanon. While at Culhaven, they are joined by a prince of Callahorn, Balinor Buckhannah, two elven brothers, Durin and Dayel Elessedil, and the dwarf Hendel.

Hmm

What’s a good wynne jones book to start with?

Buying for a relative but also want to try one myself

What’s a good wynne jones book to start with?

Buying for a relative but also want to try one myself

(The relative being a 13 year old)

Golden Age + 1

Re: Dianne Wynne Jones, I've only read - as an adult - Howl's Moving Castle, which goes to a couple of different places from the film (less war, more adolescent angst), nevertheless it won't be too much of a surprise if you've seen the film; and - as a child - Archer's Goon, which I thought was fantastic, inventive, sui generis, mind expanding.

Archers is Neil Gaiman’s “favourite kids book he read as an adult” apparently!

Finally nabbed a cheap used copy of the Tales of the Dying Earth omnibus - one that I've been looking for in bookshops for months. I'm gonna pause my other reading to finish this series.

I love his dialogue in these stories. Every character has pretty much the same crisp, grammatical meticulousness and understated hostility. It's a bit like Wodehouse actually.

Good comparison.

> and emily st john mandell's sea of tranquility.

uk Kindle daily deal today (but not kobo)

Definitely valid to compare Vance and Wodehouse. Vance also name checked James branch cabell but I haven’t been able to get into him.

I find some of the same ornamental joy in Rex Stout as well - at least when Nero Wolfe is talking.

And some of Joyce Cary and Waugh

There's also this constant vibe of: the sun is dying, there's no getting away, affairs have to go on but we might as well treat them as a lark.

For anyone who's interested in Michael Shea: his work has been steadily coming back in print, including another collection titled The Autopsy (to take advantage of the recent Del Toro/Netflix adaptation). There's a fourth Nifft novel (!!!) but I don't know how ready it is for publication, but some posthumous works have come out. I'm glad I grabbed the Nifft novels when they were affordable because they're very expensive and sought after now and it's still unknown what publisher is going to reprint them. His wife revealed that he also written an urban fantasy novel under the name Lynn Cesar.

might someone kindly explain/suggest cj cherryh to me?

started 'downbelow station' once but wasn't really into it for one reason or another. also it kind of seems like her book covers are extra-terrible

would also recommend susan cooper's dark is rising series

The Clientele agree

i just ordered Greenwitch from the library. Remember it as the trippiest of the series, like a fever dream.

— The Clientele (@theclientele) December 5, 2022

Greenwitch is fantastic, puts the teenage girl Susan right at the centre of the story, with an intense focus on symbolic, folkloric aspects of womanhood.

There isn't any clear consensus best book by Cherryh. Cyteen has a similarly strong reputation but it's a big one and some people tend to prefer something like Chanur or Faded Sun trilogy or Angel With A Sword. I've only read the first two Morgaine books and they're solid but probably not her best.