#sf literature

[nabs-bookish-thoughts]

I'm reading Little Mushroom, which is a sci-fi danmei novel by Shisi and it didn't really register to me that this is the first book in this specific genre I'm reading. Now I'm spiralling down an intellectualising rabbit hole where I have to read up more on speculative fiction, dystopian fiction, Chinese sci-fi, worldbuilding etc. Right now I do have thoughts, but they're just raw Thoughts without any context or intellectual analysis. Some might argue you don't need those to have opinions on a book but that's just how I am.

[rapha-reads]

Am I supposed to take advantage of the night to keep working on my thesis, of which I've barely completed 1/9th (discounting research, abstract, introduction, structure and bibliography)? Yes. Am I instead reading my second novel of the day? Yes. Should I go to bed instead because it's 4am? Yes.

Earlier today I read This is How You Lose the Time War, that I had been meaning to check ever since it was published, and it was gorgeous. Really beautiful, the letters, the descriptions of the multiple universes, times and planets visited, the ways Red and Blue work, the emotions... Pure joy.

Right now I'm reading The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, and it is fascinating. I love a good scifi book, especially a scifi book that really takes into consideration the vastness of space and how varied other species and planets could be. Also punching holes through subspace sounds like a pure adrenaline trip and I'm deeply interested and captivated.

Anyway. Thesis is not progressing, deadline is getting closer. I should stop reading and start writing at some point. Meh. Stress levels are still not optimal. Stars aren't aligned. Need more adrenaline.

[raiquen]

Book Review: The Father Thing, Philip K. Dick

My Review in a Tweet:

In retrospective, I felt like I read it more like a chore, trying to read all five volumes this year. It has some good stories that left me thinking about the implicancies, but it was mostly filled with basic or uninteresting science fiction stories.

Complete Commentary:

I'm back! I just finished the third volume of Philip K. Dick's short stories, "The Father-Thing". I have to say, from the get-go, that it was probably the weakest one so far, with lower lows and not so great highs.

The more frequent topics and themes on this anthology are:

Ideologies and their radical extremes: from absolute polarization of society to political opinions taken to their most extreme realization, the author critizices and explores different ideas of his time, some of them being direct comments on recent publications.

Humanity and evolution: what will it be of humans in the future? The fate Philip K Dick envisions for us is rather dark or depressive in most of his stories.

Technology and humanity as a trait: Our relationship with technology is an evergreen topic in science-fiction, but in this anthology, it has a withered quality.

Clash of civilizations and classes

I'll make a short commentary for every short story, already ranking them from the one I liked the most to the one I liked the least:

Upon the Dull Earth: I realized while ordering up the stories that this was the one I liked the most and not the next one on the list. It feels more like a fantasy short story, but the ending is closer to a (cosmic?) horror tale.

The Golden Man: fantastic pace, fantastic ending.

Shell Game: the absolute paranoia of this colony and the TWIST. Loved it.

Sales Pitch: PKD said many people didn't like this story's ending and that he agreed with them. I disagree with both, the ending is great, but maybe because we like more cynical stories nowadays.

The Hanging Stranger: I love the ending, more themes of paranoia.

The Last of the Masters: it's unusual to read about anarchy, but it was very interesting, specially on the efforts to preserve some kind of hierarchy and burocracy.

Foster, You're Dead!: amazing satire, still relevant today.

War Veteran: I would really like to see this story adapted in a movie or series, it has great potential as a political intrigue/thriller.

A World of Talent: I rank it this high because of how convoluted and complicated the mutants' powers were. The plot itself dragged a bit too much.

Strange Eden: I like the ethereal feel of the story and the kind of "cautious tale" of the ending.

To Serve the Master

Fair Game

Pay for the Printer: I feel like we are headed this way with automated production and the lack of appreciation for manual crafts.

The Turning Wheel

Tony and the Beetles: relevant in today's political landscape.

Exhibit Piece: I despise the nostalgic feeling present in science fiction stories that imagine such a disastrous future that anything is preferred than that present, even flawed pasts. Even then, it's well narrated.

Null-O.

The Chromium Fence: I liked this satire as a valid commentary on today's need to always "pick a side", how pointing out valid critics to either viewpoint is considered as expressing symphaty for the other one. I disliked the ending, it felt like an easy way out.

The Eyes Have It: I liked it because it was fun, but I put it lower on the list because it feels very out of place in this anthology.

The Father-Thing: I liked better the author's explanation of this story, not the story itself.

Psi-man Heal My Child!: after reading A World of Talent, it felt very repetitive and unnecessarily complicated.

The Crawlers: pretty uninteresting.

Overall, I would give this book a:

6/10.

My other 2023 readings.

[literary-illuminati]

How High We Go In The Dark seems, 90 pages in, to be best understood as a broadly pandemic-themed set of Twilight Zone episodes.

I just finished the chapter about forming a giant human pyramid in purgatory to throw a baby high enough that it floats back into the world, and started the one where growing human organs for transplant in pigs has resulted in one capable of speech.

Also one of the most emotionally heavy books I've read all year.

[spaceintruderdetector]

https://archive.org/details/the-1974-annual-worlds-best-sf-wollheim-donald-a.-ed/mode/2up

Cover by Victor Valla

"Introduction" (Donald A. Wollheim)

"A Supplicant in Space" (Robert Sheckley)

"Parthen" (R. A. Lafferty)

"Doomship" (Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson)

"Weed of Time" (Norman Spinrad) (Originally published in 1970)

"A Modest Genius" (translation of "Skromnyi Geniy", 1963) (Vadim Shefner)

"The Deathbird" (Harlan Ellison)

"Evane" (E. C. Tubb)

"Moby, Too" (Gordon Eklund)

"Death and Designation Among the Asadi" (Michael Bishop)

"Construction Shack" (Clifford D. Simak)

[zippocreed501]

AUTHOR EXTRAORDINAIRE

'Don't listen to people who tell you that very few people get published and you won't be one of them. Don't listen to your friend who says you are better that Tolkien and don't have to try any more. Keep writing, keep faith in the idea that you have unique stories to tell, and tell them. I meet far too many people who are going to be writers 'someday.' When they are out of high school, when they've finished college, after the wedding, when the kids are older, after I retire . . . That is such a trap You will never have any more free time than you do right now. So, whether you are 12 or 70, you should sit down today and start being a writer if that is what you want to do. You might have to write on a notebook while your kids are playing on the swings or write in your car on your coffee break. That's okay. I think we've all 'been there, done that.' It all starts with the writing.'

'Fantasy is my genre and my home in the writing world. I consider it the biggest writing room in all literature, where there are literally no boundaries at all.'

'Not intending to be funny: I sit at the keyboard, put my fingers on the keys and go. To me, it's the real secret of writing. Put yourself in front of the screen or the blank sheet of paper and get to work.'

'Fantasy encompasses a wide, wide spectrum of writing. We have beast fables, we have gothics, we have tales of vampires and werewolves, and we have sword and sorcery; we have epics from Homer, and there is just so much out there that we put under the umbrella of 'fantasy.''

Author Extraordinaire Margaret Lindholm Ogden/Robin Hobb/Megan Lindholm

[uwmspeccoll]

Staff Pick of the Week

First serialized in Pearson’s (UK) and Cosmopolitan (US) in 1897, H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds wasn’t the very first alien story ever told, but it is probably the most enduring and culturally significant of those early tales. Wells wasn’t just drawing on the nascent genre of science fiction but also the (earthly) invasion literature that was first popularized by George Tomkyns Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking ( Blackwood's Magazine, 1871). Wells later wrote that War of the Worlds was inspired by the genocidal treatment of Aboriginal Tasmanians by British colonizers.

The Limited Edition’s Club edition of H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds was published in 1964. It is illustrated with ten color lithographs, drawn directly on the plates by Joeseph Mugnaini, as well as a number of smaller line drawings by the artist. We posted a few years ago about the Limited Editions Club edition of The Time Machine, also illustrated by Mugnaini. These two books were originally issued together in an ochre-yellow slipcase that matches the end papers; the linen-weave book-cloth bindings are dyed in an opposite color scheme (black with a red spine label for The Time Machine and red with a black spine label for War of the Worlds). The boxed set was designed by Peter Oldenburg and printed on white wove paper from Curtis Paper Company by Abraham Colish at his press in Mt. Vernon, NY. The lithographs were pulled by master printer George C. Miller. 

I love how Mugnaini’s colorful illustrations manifest a sense of unease: the yellow and red skies backing the alien invaders, the extreme heat of blue streaked flames, the kaleidoscopic ruins of a building. Mugnaini was best known for his many collaborations with another Science Fiction heavyweight: Ray Bradbury, including cover art for the first paperback and hardback editions of Fahrenheit 451. A previous Staff Pick featured Mugnaini’s illustrations for the Limited Editions Club of Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles.

You can find more posts on the work of H. G. Wells here.

Check out more from illustrator Joe Mugnaini here.

And here you can find more from Limited Editions Club.

For more Staff Picks here. 

-Olivia, Special Collections Graduate Intern

[waywordsstudio]

3 Word Review: “Pattern Recognition” by William Gibson -

Gibson's worlds fascinate in their near plausibility: this story, though, fails to deliver a satisfying thrill or mystery, just characters who manage to discover something they didn't know.

[tenrose]

I finished the Broken Earth trilogy.

I was being a coward, pushing back reading the Stone Sky cause I knew it was gonna fuck me up so bad. And it did.

There is so much to say about this trilogy but I don't feel emotionally available enough to do so.

All I can say, every awards, and every good critic is deserved.

All I can say is how well it merges fiction and entertainment with actual important and harsh topics. We need more of engaged SFFF.

[nostalgia-tblr]

Thor: Ragnarok is the best Thor movie and you can tell because nobody ever tries to make a desperate claim for prestige and reflected quality by calling it "Shakespearean," they just say they enjoyed it and they liked the jokes.

[mokeymokey]

Mass Effect really has like a unique winning combination imo the hard and soft sci fi together it's like a sci fi creme brulee or somethng. When the sci fi has sexable aliens AND lagrange points. The dialectics of it all

[rapha-reads]

PARLONS SPACE-OPERA : The Wayfarers Saga, Becky Chambers - HUGO AWARDS 2019 (sans spoilers)

Salut à toi qui a sans doute aussi la tête dans les étoiles.

Petit retour sur la saga Wayfarers de Becky Chambers garanti sans spoilers !

- The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. - A Closed and Common Orbit. - Record of a Spaceborn Few. - The Galaxy, and the Ground Within.

Bon voyage !

[piedaterreincensorshipville]

Leigh Brackett's pulp SF stories are full of stuff like "hero & heroine flirt by giving each other facial scars" and planets whose dress code is "tits out always"

She also wrote the first draft of Empire Strikes Back.

imagine if Star Wars was allowed to be that horny. the hotness would make people's heads explode.

[theprinceandthewitch]

Nobody understands Professor Venomous like I do...

[spaceintruderdetector]

https://archive.org/details/english-collections-1/Flow%20My%20Tears%2C%20the%20Policeman%20Said%20-%20Philip%20K.%20Dick/

[zippocreed501]

AUTHOR EXTRAORDINAIRE

'Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever. You can go not only into the future, but into that wonderful place called other, which is simply another universe, another planet, another species.'

'When you combine something to say with the skill to say it properly, then you’ve got a good writer.'

'Writing is a communication.'

'I write a story as if it were a letter to someone and essentially, that's what you do.'

'You don't sit up in a cave and write the Great American Novel and know it is utterly superb, and then throw it page by page into the fire. You just don't do that. You send it out. You have to send it out.'

Author Extraordinaire Theodore Sturgeon