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

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.

SLAPSTICK (1976) isn't his best.

Right. Feel like almost everything after Slaughterhouse Five is bad, tbh.

So when a Staryk, whose forebears or present selves once raped and pillaged (leaving human descendants), later focused on taking gold from monasteries, churches, but somehow supposedly leaving an all-Jewish settlement intact (you know what that means: they're in league), comes to the door of a wimpy Jewish moneylender whose daughter is a stone-cold debt collector (and increasingly canny negotiator) in a Dark Ages-maybe Polish Christian village, and orders her to turn his coins of fairy silver into gold, what has the old world come to? To commerce of course, beyond transmutation, and she knows a guy. But what will the Staryk lord give her? He won't turn her to ice. But that's what he won't do, what will he do for her? He'll make her his queen, he replies in a derisively savage roar, sounding like he's maybe astonished himself with this reaction to the outrageous gall (of a girl who describes herself as "short, boney, sallow...with a hump in my nose," to boot).
Well. It's ridiculous, but he insists, now that he's said it. And women have to be married; there aren't even any sex workers, much less nannies, anywhere in sight so far, in Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver, the only free-standing NN, next to the excellent Uprooted. Her Temeraire Series is 9 volumes to date, Scholomance is a trilogy so far, and I got burnt out on series in the 80s, hoping not to get hooked again.
So far, so good with this, as I take a break from Vonnegut.

Day to day, night to night, material and emotional transactions make their own kind of train through the winter, not waiting for machines to be invented or implemented (though there are other implements).

"forebearers," I meant, but "forebears" is close enough for the giant white Staryk (whose steeds are stags with cloven hooves and teeth ov wolves).

Tree alternating narrators so far, gradually appearing: Miryem the younger moneylender,
Wanda, her bondswoman/assistant/acolyte, originally just working off some of her brutal peasant father's debt, rather than getting her ugly hardy intelligent self sold in marriage, likely to one of his kindl
and Irina, wallflower daughter of the Duke, who hangs her with jewelry made from the Staryk's fairy silver (not knowing or caring about the source), that she might catch the marrying eye of the young tsar, himself said to be the daughter of a witch, and Irina is among those who consider him supernatural: beautiful, but too Other for her (why?), so she actually tells him that she doesn't want to marry him---and that's what he finds uniquely, thrillingly magical, not all her fairy silver (which she loooves the touch of); he's getting unpleasantly excited, and that's as far as I've gotten.

A. A. Attanasio - Radix

Thanks to Gnosticangel for introducing Attanasio to me, I've been wanting to get around to this for a long time. It didn't quite live up to the hype, (this first novel and the 4th novel in the series have attained a cult classic status but never enough to be included in a classics line and it never gets in top100 lists, but I've seen a fair number of people say that the 1st or 4th book is their favorite book ever) but it is fascinating and I'm very eager to go further despite being quite disappointed.

It's about violent cosmic disruption that results in environmental chaos, a society of migrating alien consciousness, animal and plant mutation and a small group of people who transcend their previous lives.

Attanasio's style is very eccentric, his vocabulary is immense (he makes Clark Ashton Smith look like Homer Simpson forgetting the name for a spoon), grittiness and extreme violence alternates with ethereal/psychedelic/new age hippie passages about the forces that move the universe. I've seen Jodorowsky comparisons and they make a lot of sense.
He invents a lot of his own terminology, slang and there's lots of worldbuilding, I found this and the heaps of vague poetic paragraphs to be overcomplicated, wearying and needlessly obscure at times. The main story is easy to follow but there's so much beyond that, anyone who wants to understand this book exhaustively has a lot of work to do and I doubt even Attanasio understands every flight of scientific and philosophical poetry in here. The Appendixes are very helpful.

There's a lot of obvious brilliance and ambition in here but I missed the strangeness and tension of the first half of the book, the ending chapters feel almost like a drawn out action movie compared the more unpredictable weirdness early on. The descriptions of Sumner's youthful fatness might offend some readers. Despite feeling far too long and overcomplicated, I liked Radix more than disliked it, it's still a compelling story of transcendence with fascinating ideas and images and I'm looking forward to the slimmer sequels (different characters) and the more conceptually fascinating 4th book and his other writing. I hope readers who think he peaked with this first novel are wrong!

This book was revised and illustrated for the Phoenix Pick edition, I didn't buy that version because I didn't want to be interrupted by an artist's interpretation of the text but I'm very curious to know how much Attanasio revised and I might read that edition in the future.

Yeah, that was pretty much my take---several later books that I didn't know about are briefly, intriguingly described here:
https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/attanasio_a_a

More on Spinning Silver:Some magical thinking in the contemporary sense conjures/adds up to the bubble around and in and beyond life-changing decisions by increasingly radical risk-taker Miryam, balanced by comparatively cool-minded Irina, one of the other principal narrators: earned and unexpectedly bonus "happy endings" for them both are precarious enough, as previous tell now shows by accrual of implication: transactions go on and on, could see this as a video game. I don't care about those, but found it a mostly satisfying read, although the author is not above her own, intentionally ""magical" thinking, in terms of waving the wand for some speedy, convenient plot advancement, once in a while.
Which is why, so far, without much re-reading, or any comparative reading, I can't quite shake the notion that, fourth-quarter-wise, this character-driven, tightly plotted tale isn't quite as convincing/disbelief-suspending as her previous stand-alone, Nebula winner Uprooted.

Midway through an early 50s Richard Matheson collection, The Shores of Space: "Trespass" goes on alarmingly long, a tilting hallway, mostly domestic, to which a young geologist has returned after six months in South America, eagerly reuniting with his loving and lovely young wife, who discloses her pregnancy of six weeks, but she hasn't been with another man. And the pregnancy displays some anomalous symptoms, as their doctor agrees. The husband's best friend, her friend too, wants to help, solve the mystery, resolve the conflict, carefully-compulsively walks a thin line, as do all concerned, via everyday details continually challenged (seeming in that way a run-up to The Shrinking Man). Wife is only female character, so there's that,. and it's all early 50s as hell, even more than preceding stories.

Even more Mathesonian, for being more filed down: "The Test," which is something a mentally failing, defensive male citizen is struggling to cram for, lest he be euthanized. He's passed it twice before, at required five-year intervals, but now he's 80, and convincingly displays one of the more slowly torturing forms of dementia, though may have never been very/at all easy to live with (of course, at this point it's hard to imagine such a difference). His son, who has put in the required request for the test one more time, has very mixed emotions, though he and his wife are most afraid that Dad will pass again. Even if he doesn't, they'll all have to wait several weeks, maybe a month, for notice of the final appointment.

The Forever War, Joe Haldeman. Ticking another 'classic' off my list, but it didn't do much for me, I guess I'm just not into war fiction. The much vaunted time dilation theme just came across as a gimmick, at no point did I feel any great empathy for his situation. It was never clear why this guy with almost no real combat experience and behind the times by a few centuries would be not just kept on but promoted into command positions. Its roots as a serialised novel showed in places - springing on us after a few chapters into one section that oh btw everyone speaks english differently now and the protagonist can't understand them unless they speak his dialect which they've specifically learned. The mild homophobia could be written off as in character; the idea that to combat overpopulation the government makes everyone gay is a lol for sure. I'm not even sure it's any good as war fiction, there's no sense of the wider scale of the conflict in terms of goals or strategy, they just turn up to random planets and fight.

i got back into gideon the ninth and hmm well i was not expecting such a videogame-ish hogwarts-y direction tbh. the first couple of chapters are absolutely masterful imo and her descriptions of combat and of environment are terrific but gideon herself isn't, well, that interesting, and all the cutesy high school just kinda rubs me the wrong way

that said i am still reading it if only for the completely unsubtle gideon/harrow slash suggestions

Martin Macinnes, In Ascension. I've loved all of his books, but I think this one might be the best; it's a little less oblique (although I see some reviews complain that it's still too oblique) but I don't think it suffers from this. Nothing revolutionary in the subject matter but has a mood of its own that I guess reminds me a bit of Vandermeer's Annihilation (more for its effect on me than the actual content).

i read Forever War the same month as Tau Zero and they were very similar iirc, like 4 major plot points in common.

what i wrote at the time

the two sci-fi books were bought from fopp at the same time, 2 for £5. first features 50 scientists, 25 male, 25 female, trapped on a spaceship heading for another planet, lots of bed-hopping, lots of relativistic space travel. the second features 50 soldiers, 25 male, 25 female, trapped on a spaceship heading for another planet, lots of bed-hopping, lots of relativistic space travel. oddly similar. neither fantastic tbh. i would bet alan moore has read the second though (halo jones 3 very similar and it also mentions the planarian worms thing from one of his early swamp things)

Interesting!

That also reminds me of a story by Judith Merril (unless I'm misremembering that point), about a spaceship whose astronauts are only of one sex, and the big late twist is that they're all women.

lol!

I will forever fondly remember Tau Zero for its completely batshit ending.

For a less batshit treatment of time dilation, and much more moving than The Forever War, you can't beat Le Guin's short story Semley's Necklace, and her division of people in the hainish cycle into stabiles and mobiles (those who don't do near light travel vs those who do) is a neat idea.

In Ascension looks good, added to my to-read list.

New translations of major bulgarian SF author Lyuben Dilov, pay what you want ebooks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELt6HRcN17Y
https://www.dilovinenglish.com/

Speaking of Radix and obesity, the first I ever heard of the novel was in this intriguing description by Jim Trombetta in the old Too Cool book from 1991, where it was one of his SF picks, alongside Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand and Soldiers of Paradise:

“a fever dream of Earth bathed in the radiations of a rotating black hole. Here sometime fatso Sumner Kagan improves his muscle tone considerably as he confronts the killer android Befandi (created to look like Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars), the eerie voors (aliens in human bodies who have taken vodoun to new heights), and, in a bizarre continent that used to be South America, the artificial intelligence Rubeus, the nastiest sorcerer’s apprentice in history, past or future…”

I think one of the most interesting things that I maybe should have mentioned is how Sumner and Rubeus are destructive and protective manifestations from another character.