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

Who knew?

Found out that Stephen E. Andrews has a youtube channel, he wrote the bulk of 100 Must Read Science Fiction Novels and 100 Must Read Fantasy Novels (I loved them both) and I've been watching tons of his videos, he's a bookseller too. He has interviews with Christopher Priest, Nina Allan, Chris Beckett and multiple with Tom Toner.
I just bought a Tom Toner book the other day after seeing Andrews hype him up, but I had wanted it before because Paul Di Filippo and Adam Roberts loved it too.
Andrews talks a great deal about authors being increasingly pressured into series novels, fantasy in particular, bloating the books and the late 1970s Tolkien clone boom. I can't recall if it was him or his friend Scott Bradfield (who also has a youtube channel) but one of them made a case that lots more authors used to have a career of SFF singletons that had wildly different concepts. Seems like Silvia Moreno-Garcia is one of the very few major publisher authors today who habitually writes a different kind of novel from the previous.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2KSv800IgY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDa1Wfi1qbY

Sounds good, thanks for posting.

I'm slowly reading the C.M. Kornbluth stories. Strongest so far is 'The Little Black Bag'. A future doctor accidentally sends his 'black bag' into the past via a time travel mechanism. It's picked up by a drunken former doctor in the 1940s, who discovers that it contains, by current standards, miraculous cures. Quite a good reflection on the history of medicine. The one thing the story does *not* do, that time travel stories always do, is suppose that altering the past alters the present, and worry about that.

Robert Silverberg included 'The Little Black Bag' in his anthology Worlds of Wonder, an excellent selection of classic SF short stories with good introductory/autobiographical essays about each one:

Four in One (1953) novelette by Damon Knight
Fondly Fahrenheit (1954) novelette by Alfred Bester
No Woman Born (1944) novelette by C.L. Moore
Home Is the Hunter (1953) story by Henry Kuttner & C.L. Moore
The Monsters (1953) story by Robert Sheckley
Common Time (1953) novelette by James Blish
Scanners Live in Vain (1950) story by Cordwainer Smith
Hothouse (1961) novelette by Brian W. Aldiss
The New Prime (1951) novelette by Jack Vance
Colony (1953) novelette by Philip K. Dick
The Little Black Bag (1950) novelette by C.M. Kornbluth
Light of Other Days (1966) story by Bob Shaw
Day Million (1966) story by Frederik Pohl

^yes! This book is really well donez

Done even

It’s got some alternate title as well, Science Fiction 101 or something like that

The only one I remember scratching my head over was the Kuttner, which was fine but I didn’t find it as good as some of his other stuff. Maybe the PKD as well. But every thing else was ace double.

Maybe I just need to read “Home is the Hunter” one more time to see.

James Redd, my local 2nd-hand shop had an influx of Ace Doubles! Tempting.

Heh. The fancy word for that type of book is apparently tête-bêche.

Silverberg gives a long explanation of why he chose that particular Kuttner story and not something better known,

Pinefox i hoped you grabbed some of those Vance you saw there. When i got into him around 1990 it was so easy to harvest almost everything for normal used pb prices but now I almost never see used Vances

God that was a fun time

I hope you got a bunch of those Ballantine/Del Rey Best Ofs. Those were my jams in Junior High School.

Currently reading Sirens of Titan and so far (now on Mars) finding it to be much less of a smirkfest and much more dedicated yarnspinning to occasionally poignant storytelling than expected: late 50s genre-and-other appeal, was/is one for the PKD, Vance fanz.

Amazon monthly deals UK has the second and third parts of the Revelation Space trilogy and the third part of the Blue Ant trilogy which I've had wishlist for a while now, so that's good. means i can burn my hardbacks for warmth.

roadside picnic also there, midwich cuckoos, nothing else really jumped out at me

Early Vonnegut - good choice I reckon.

I saw someone at the shop buying a Vance today. I told him that someone [actually an ILX poster, actually many people on this thread] had highly recommended Vance.

Finished first reading of xpost The Sirens of Titan, and yes, this continues to be true all the way through:much more dedicated yarnspinning to occasionally poignant storytelling than expected, also different timescales, down to: dedicated moment by moment, almost still by still, like Chris Marker's classic science fiction film La Jetée--though that came out in 1962, and this in 1959----and omg the depictions, incl. scenes, conversations, of pathos, tragedy, sympathy, even compassion of the crowd?! fellow-feeling even when involuntary, squeezed out: all of this shot through dry-points of caustic humor and evolutionary wonder (the harmoniums of Mercury, the bluebirds of Titan! And their eventual long-time companions).
I don't have time for for his deep-dive wiki just now, but def. get this in the book, where his world-building timescaling etc. can be very exacting, and effectively so, re: storytelling:

...enlisted in the US Army. As part of his training, he studied mechanical engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and the University of Tennessee.

I've found his previous (first) novel, Player Piano, in my Collier Brothers pile---how is the next one after Sirens, Mother Night? Library has most of the others.

That reminds me that there was this really cool looking storefront in a building near my old office and one day I found out it was an small publisher and then I found out that someone I knew worked there. One day he invited me to stop by so I did. There was someone really cool posters on one wall (some imaginary book cover layouts) which I asked him about and he said “oh that’s by Chris Marker,” then there was some other interesting squiggles on another wall and he said “oh, that’s from when Kurt Vonnegut was here and he drew all the possible plot lines.” There were somewhere between seven to a dozen of these, the only one I can recall at all is “Man in Hole.”

I may even have said “that reminds me of Chris Marker” and he said “that IS by Chris Marker.”

Thanks! You've got me thinking of a certain feature incl. interview in Film Comment---looking for it,should have known there might be all this---better save For Further Study: https://www.google.com/search?q=Chris+Marker+Film+Comment&oq=Chris+Marker+Film+Comment&aqs=chrome..69i57j33i160l2.709936j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#ip=1

hopepunk

— New New York Times (@NYT_first_said) February 3, 2023

James Redd, I once went to a comic shop - was it in Oslo? - and in the basement on the wall and ceiling different comic artists had drawn their characters. NEMI was one of them, I recall now.

Vonnegut used to sketch his plot lines in lectures - I saw him do this in London once, maybe at the Barbican or Queen Elizabeth Hall.

Poster Dow, I read MOTHER NIGHT a very long time ago - same time as the above - and I would still say it's an effective novel, about war, Nazism, agency, unintended consequences, irony. I recall now that the main character's name is partly a nod to SF editor John Campbell Jr. If you're thinking of eventually reading it then certainly do. A film of it also appeared in about 1996. Vonnegut has a tiny cameo.

there was a report this morning on the radio about scientists modifying ice in some way. Fortunately it doesn't sound anything like Ice 9!

I put in a library request for Mother Night (they have almost all of his other novels,plus several fiction and nonfiction collections, which somebody must be reading: this library is pretty diligent about pruning), and started Player Piano last night.

Really liked bot Mother NIght and Player Piano way back when.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2019/bbc-sounds-announces-winner-of-hopepunk-podcast-drama-commission

^^ just sayin

So, Player Piano, published in 1952, immediately brings to mind movies of that era about upper-echelon white collar strivers: Executive Suite would be the most contemporaneous, but going back as far as The Hucksters, forward to The Man in The Grey Flannel Suit and The Rat Race, though never as sordid per se as The Apartment---the suite life in this book is that basically compromised, though, and more: the corporate managers and engineers of Vonnegut's Illium, NY, comprise a node, a brain trust tumor ov utopia-dystopia, augmenting and serving the machines that saved the American way of life in the War and now run the peace: onward and upward through profitable progress, with the evolution of efficiency balanced by cradle-to-grave benefits and antisabotage laws.

The Horror of it all is not entirely convincing/more nuanced and thus more of a maze for inhabitants, informed at all times by Vonnegut's shrewdness, also probably fed by observations made while writing PR for General Electric in Schenectady.
Nevertheless, some of it goes off, often, into tangential set pieces, whenever he has to vent via colorful motormouth characters, wisecracking, reminiscing, lecturing, breaking in from other kinds of movies and books. You got the allure of life in Proletown, like 1984, yet seemingly headed in the direction of Atlas Shrugged---for a while (this is apprentice *Vonnegut*, for sure).

(Probably, although I haven't read it, relevant nonfiction: The Organization Man [1956]---with KV '52 already indicating how a man from one organization might fit into one advertised as its complete opposite.)

Executive Suite was just on TCM. Incredibly dense dialogue-wise. It’s depiction of the rat race reminded me of that one Twilight Zone episode with Tyne Daly’s father.

Yeah, and you're reminding me of this

Patterns, also known as Patterns of Power,[2] is a 1956 American "boardroom drama" film starring Van Heflin, Everett Sloane, and Ed Begley; and directed by Fielder Cook. The screenplay was by Rod Serling, who adapted it from his teleplay of the same name, which was originally broadcast January 12, 1955 on the Kraft Television Theatre with Sloane, Begley and Richard Kiley.[1]

There is a detectable, inferable note of hope TPP's ending: not *too* potentially subversive/ambiguous for publisher to leave in, maybe because it's that weirdo downbeat literary science fiction stuff, not meant for big mainstream marketing campaign.

Internet echo chamber sez that the episode in question, which is of course "A Stop at Willoughby," was Serling's favorite first season episode, which I am inclined to believe, even if I can't find a real source.

Dow, SF about white-collar strivers also includes Pohl & Kornbluth's classic THE SPACE MERCHANTS.

Thanks for the reminder---I may make that my next library request, after Mother Night comes in.

just read "wrong place wrong time" by gillian mcallister, which is v middlebrow speculative fiction. kind of a groundhog day/memento premise. potentially interesting setting/twist related to recent UK news, but this is not pursued enough imo (no spoilers). it wasn't terrible, good holiday reading, but it was a cut below something like emily st john mandel or david mitchell.

Inter-library loan came through w xpost Mother Night pretty quickly, and I read it all in one evening, which never happens. It's pretty tight alright, so hard to describe w/o spoilers, but not really science fiction or fantasy, despite some unmistakably KV instances of yarnspinning, the more effective for colorful contrast with overcast WWII Germany-to-Cold War cold water NYC, as narrated from an Israeli prison cell, where Howard Campbell Jr. looks back on his twisted life, a la Humbert Humbert near the end.
Most of the characters, including several Nazis, also more common citizens of Germany and America, inhabit and maintain dual (if not more) identities, shifting gears in a practiced way, sometimes automatically, or not, but with filtered self-awareness, for the most part. Maybe a little too nudge-nudge with the ironies and plot-twists at times.
The intro succinctly and vividly recounts his experience of being bombed in the Allies' nonmilitary target of Dresden, then, still held prisoner, forced to pull bodies of civilians from shelters.
Tough act to follow, and the novel does pretty well, considering, but can see why he'd want to use the Science Fiction part of his brain for the WWII aspects ov Slaughter-House-Five, which I've yet to read.

Should say that the emotional core or layer of this, as w his other books I've mentioned, is always evident enough, in observational intensity, whether it seems insightful, or prematurely old man yells at cloud, or occasionally too mannered (nervous-compulsively hammering the keys energy in that choice).

Hazards and alibis of first-person narration, esp. writer in cell.

Good summary of that novel. I like 'Cold Water cold water'.

*Cold War !!

Updike, talking about Vonnegut's earlier bread-and-butter sales to the slick magazines, and what came after---he starts out talking about the stories in Welcome To The Monkey House, and says that re-reading them in the mid-70s

is a lesson in what slickness, Fifties vintage, was: a verbal mechanism that raised the specter of pain and then too easily delivered us from it. Yet the pain in Vonnegut was always real. Through the transpositions of science fiction he found a way, instead of turning pain aside, to vaporize it, to scatter it on the plains of the cosmic and comic. His terse flat sentences, jumpy chapters, interleaved placards, collages of stray texts and messages, and nervous grim refrains like "So it goes" and "Hi ho" are a new way of stacking pain, as his fictional ice-nine is a new way of stacking molecules of water. Such an invention looks easy only in retrospect.
If any slickness remains, it is in a certain intellectual haste. Introducing his collected non-fiction, Vonnegut says he is impressed by the "insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to tell the truth."

But I did enjoy all three novels, each in their own way, always his way.

Have we had a discussion of when exactly Vonnegut, um, jumped the shark?

Learned from Outlaw Bookseller's youtube that Nicholas Royle (british writer of the uncanny) is often confused with Nicholas Royle (british writer of the uncanny), but what he didn't say is that they have toyed with collaborating
http://wordsandfixtures.blogspot.com/2011/02/nicholas-royle-vs-nicholas-royle-like.html

On the aforementioned youtube channel, the Christopher Priest interview is worth a watch, I knew he could be a harsh critic but I was still surprised by his low assessment of some writers.

Not surprised myself.

That he is longterm friends with Moorcock but completely dismisses his writing taken me aback

Also not that surprising to me.

I like Updike's generous statement.

Yes. Feel like most of early Vonnegut is really good, it was only later when the stylistic tics started to overwhelm.