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

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.

Alasdair Reynolds' Eversion: a bit of a change for him, and I think he was successful at what he was trying to do, but what he was trying to doesn't work as a 300 page novel. Essentially it's the same story told in five different ways so doesn't have any more depth or complexity than a 60 page short story. People on goodreads love it though.

I also read emily st john mandell's sea of tranquility, which was fine, idk, nice idea connecting ancient and modern sf ideas of time travel and simulation but overall, despite reaching for weighty themes, felt even more ephemeral than station eleven.

Micaiah Johnson's A Space Between Worlds is an effective multi-verse thriller: got me up every morning, 7-7:30, to read for an hour, with or w/o caffeine, producing a buzz/afterbuzz that lasted quite awhile. Characterization developing much more via action (and vice-versa) than by extended monologues of the taut, first person narration. Not "breezy," but moves along, with continuity and (also of) multi- and intra-verse shifts. Narrator Cara is "a walker of worlds," to quote one of her more appreciative observers, but also something of a dysfuntional detective, though whodunnit is mainly a bridge to whut now (manipulating factions, though less for the sake of a plague-on-all-your-houses/revenge than a gamble on rough justice)(She's from Ashtown.)

taut, first person, and pretty much *present-tense* narration, though with quick flashbacks/loops to clarify and remind of currently most relevant backstory elements.

(if no rough justice, then revenge would suffice.)

yeah i liked that one too

Today Fresh Air re-ran most of Terry Gross's good if brief 1993 Octavia Butler interview, incl. the author's reading from the then recently published Parable of the Sower, set in 2024, with some of it sounding more likely all the time, esp. since Trump's ascendancy (and now DeSantis competing from his right). It's preceded by John Powers' mixed review of the Kindred adaptation: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/14/1142768079/pioneering-writer-octavia-butler-on-writing-black-people-and-women-into-sci-fi
Here's the whole interview, about three minutes longer:
https://freshairarchive.org/segments/science-fiction-writer-octavia-butler

https://www.blackgate.com/2022/12/10/valancourt-books/
Granta too

Adrian Tchaikovsy's Shards of Earth. I dunno, has all the trappings of good modern space opera - inscrutable aliens, interplanetary politics, ftl via future physics space-time grappling, giant excession type planet destroying entities - it all seems so joyless though. I long for the playfulness of Iain M Banks.

any spiders?

i am lost with tchaikovsy, he seems to write faster than i can read

no spiders. the spider booked seemed a little more fun than this one - and the elder race novella definitely was.

booked

have read the first two Children Of books, which is enough. and the ironclads thing which was a bit aliens2. he needs to stop using Noun Of Noun as book title though because it confuses me. Shards Of Earth, Cage Of Souls, Dogs Of War, Doors Of Eden...

(on the plus side, there's always something of his for 99p from amazon)

read TRIPLANITARY! by E.E. 'DOC' SMITH! first book of (or perhaps more of a prequel to) the LENSMAN SERIES!

it was quite imaginative, horribly written, and featured dialogue that could have been better written by one of the aliens involved. no wonder heinlein loved the guy

“Of course,” she said again, as steadily, thrilled this time to the depths of her being by the sheer manhood of him who had thus simply voiced his Code; a man of such fiber that neither love of life nor his infinitely greater love for her could make him lower its high standard. “We are going through. Forget that I am a woman. We are three human beings, fighting a world full of monsters. I am simply one of us three. I will steer your ship, fire your projectors, or throw your bombs. What can I do best?”

have to give him credit, however, in that the 'girl' didn't constantly faint, and that the hero fucked neither her nor everyone else in sight as poul anderson would have done 20 years later

my bad: TRIPLANETARY!

appreciated that the bad guy is named roger, tho

Jessica Amanda Salmonson - The Dark Tales

These stories are from the 70s and 80s and in the intro note it's made clear they're in the mode of the Weird Tales circle, leaning more towards CASmith, with Dunsany and William Morris also in the mix.

"Hode Of The High Place" is about a boy running away from home to live in an abandoned ruin that his village is scared of. This stands up pretty well next to CASmith and even appeared in a Zothique anthology.
"The Revelations And Pursuits Of Timith, Son Of Timith" is by far the longest story, I loved how it has so many phases and changes of perceived circumstances (constant changes towards the end), the eerie sea adventure had the makings of a great ghost story but it goes in completely different directions after that. Wild and bleak, it should be in sword and sorcery anthologies because it's far too hard to find right now.
"Wrath Of The Ebon Knights" is another good action story. "Meadow Silence" is about an intersex person, so I guess it might be considered ahead of it's time (I'm not sure I understood the ending but I liked it). "The Ravaging In The Dell" is another story with a harsher edge than Weird Tales would have allowed.

The rest of the stories are fairly solid horror and fantasy. I've never been able to articulate my problem with some of the storytelling characteristics that fairy tales, fables and legends evoking distant centuries often have but I find it in early Dunsany and in some of these. But it's a minor complaint I can barely explain.
Salmonson's story notes are very enjoyable, especially concerning her evolving feelings about "Timith".

This is an early Sarob Press book, only 277 copies exist and they will likely cost an uncomfortable amount and it's a very short collection. Ideally this would get a cheap reprint with the lovely Lara Bandilla wraparound cover intact but somebody really needs to at least reprint "Timith", "Hode" and "Wrath".

Thanks for the info, didn't know about Salmonson.
New post by Douglas A. Anderson, editor of excellent Tales Before Tolkien:

Here are a couple of offtrail new books that I want to call attention to.
First, is the doorstop-sized anthology, Bruin's Midnight Reader (2022), the uncredited editor being Jonathan Eeds of Bruin Books. Over 760 pages, this anthology contains a host of worthy older materials plus a goodly amount of licensed and still copyrighted items. Similarly there are illustrations by classic artists and new ones made for this volume. One highlight is the 1924 version of The Thing in the Woods, a novel by Margery Williams (author of The Velveteen Rabbit), published as by Harper Williams. (The complicated differences between the original 1913 edition and the 1924 revision are described in a previous Wormwoodiana post, here: http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-two-versions-of-thing-in-woods.html )

...Besides familiar classic authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Ralph Adams Cram, M.R. James, Algernon Blackwood, Walter de la Mare, and Clark Ashton Smith, the more modern writers include Brian Aldiss, Theodore Sturgeon, Stanley Ellin, T.S. Eliot, Reggie Oliver and Paul Theroux. There is also a story by the editor, and a recent translation of a Hanns Heinz Ewers story too. All in all a nice amount of reading material for the price (US$ 22; ISBN 9781737210610).

The other one that Anderson covers in this post is, he says, described pretty well by publisher:

The Eunuch is a laugh-out-loud funny narrative that begins as an effort to extirpate the lies of the hagiographic official history of Babylon, becomes a story of a very peculiar love triangle between a King with mental health issues, an alluring and manipulative concubine, and an obsessive eunuch slave-scribe, and then ends by describing the fall of an empire.

For more comments, info, and illustrations from the books, here's the whole post:
http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2022/12/recent-offtrail-releases.html

I posted some Salmonson interviews and non-fiction upthread somewhere. She written more kinds of things and was an editor, scholar and anthologist too.

read LAST EXIT by max gladstone

deeeeeeeeply indebted to stephen king. dude writes a+ portentous filler prose that doesn't necessarily lead anywhere but certainly establishes the mood of everything falling apart. also writes good prose about intense relationships falling apart, although it's difficult to take everyone blaming themselves for everything seriously when they're at the same time being attacked by horrific supernatural forces

anyway i liked it -- v. fast-paced -- even though it never really made sense at all

https://pariedolia.weebly.com/nimh/oldhammer-lit-101

This Stephen Baxter article about Warhammer books is kind of fascinating, they seemed to approach a large chunk of the notable british fantasy authors of the late 80s/early 90s and David Pringle worked on a lot of them while he was editing Interzone, which is why there were so many surprising quality authors on there you'd never expect to find

Never knew any of that, thanks!

Mark Valentine on English almanacs:

...The most popular printed items outside devotional works were almanacs. They sold in their thousands. The wise almanac-makers gave their products an air of piety by including saints’ days and church festivals in their calendars, and an air of utility by offering practical hints on agriculture and medicine. But what their readers most wanted was their prognostications. It was the astrology that sold. Further, the stormier this was the better.

Nobody seemed to care very much whether the cryptically-couched forecasts came true or not: what mattered was that they were vivid and vigorous reading. Mysterious wording was an advantage to the drafter, as it left room to manoeuvre: but it was also relished by the reader who could see in it what they wanted, as in an obsidian mirror. Almanacs appealed to the perennial lust for wonder and weirdness in the world. They were the fantastic literature of the day.

As Bernard Capp describes, in his engrossing study Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs 1500-1800 (1979), from the early 17th century onwards, almanacs poured from the press. There were occasional skirmishes: some of the more incautious or belligerent prophets and printers got themselves into trouble; sometimes the Stationers or the Archbishop’s Chaplain would stir. But among cobblers and hatters, and pedlars and signwriters, and blacksmiths and wheelwrights, prevalent among the artisans and the independent trades, there was a strong appetite for this sort of literature and it had to be appeased.

This literature was by its very nature subversive. It provided an alternative form of knowledge and speculation to the church. The person who was obliged to sit in a pew on Sundays and listen to scripture readings and sermons could in their own home or workshop or at the inn peruse an entirely different way of looking at and interpreting the world.

It was one in which the stars had influence on earthly affairs, comets and meteors portended great things, dragons could be seen in clouds, prodigies might at any moment appear, rulers (usually, though not invariably, abroad) might be overthrown, and there were rumours about the Sultan of Baghdad, the Czar of Muscovy and the Emperor of Cathay. It would be too much to call astrology and prophecy a rival religion, but it was certainly a rival spirit.

And it was hard to contain. The church could hardly condemn astrology outright without implicating the Magi of the nativity story, who had become popular saints, with their shrine at Cologne a fervent focus for pilgrimage. It had to content itself with a fitful petulance about its privileges which the cannier astrologer and printer could easily avoid disturbing.

The upsurge in this sort of prognostickatory and apocalyptic literature grew even higher in the Civil War period. The War itself prompted many more effusions, both political and religious. But it also meant that both the monopoly and the censorship were ragged. They could not be enforced where the King’s writ and the church’s influence no longer ran.

It is true an alternative authority issuing from the puritan divines and military commanders of the Roundheads might sometimes exert itself, but they were busy with the war. Further, this side was itself an uneasy alliance of several different persuasions, and could not afford yet to separate the sheep from the goats: that could come later. Thus, from about 1640 to 1650 there is a marvellous eruption of eccentric publications from all sorts of prophets and visionaries.

Once unleashed, the almanac and the prophetic work could not easily be suppressed, and they continued to be produced in numbers after the Restoration and beyond. The first dedicated scholar of the subject, the splendidly-named Ernest Fulcrand Bosanquet, wrote in 1917: ‘For three and a half centuries the Almanack has been the most popular book in the English language; and together with the Bible has been the basis of practically every household library in this country; in fact in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries these two books were probably the entire library of many families.’

The work of visionary writers such as Christopher Smart and William Blake may be better appreciated when understood within the context of this world of both the Bible and the Almanac. The symbolism of astrology, as perpetuated by the almanacs, infuses Yeats’ poetry (and practice), and also the work of other modernists such as T S Eliot, Edith Sitwell and Joseph Macleod...