rolling fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction &c. thread

cheezburger network really isn't 'youth zeitgeist' at this point

i am still reading tad williams! the third one is, so far, a lot better than the second

at the end of the first novel the central character has escaped some form of peril and wound up with the eskimo dwarf dudes who inform him "you may leave but your companions will stay FOREVER". they resolve this. they then find out they have to go to The Stone Of Farewell, which is the title of the novel. in another chapter the secondary main character finds out his bunch of people also have to go to the title of the novel. it dawns on the reader that they are going to take 800 pages just to go to point a from point b.

so the main character and companions resolve things with eskimo dwarf types. on the way they burn a hundred pages by finding brief sanctuary with some woman w/r/t which i. tad williams really starts letting his woman-hating creep show through at this point (and he'd been doing okay!) as ii. she starts with the "you are such a pretty thing why don't you stay FOREVER"

anyway blah blah action escape, main character wanders around lost in the woods for a bit, calls for help from elves, is taken to elf city by happening sexy young elves, only to find the elf elders react to this by saying "you are the first human to be allowed into the elf city in aeons and now you will stay FOREVER"

f u tad williams

cheezburger network really isn't 'youth zeitgeist' at this point

Agreed. Which is why a sentence like that has no place in any novel anywhere, particularly when it is used by a character who is supposed to be a trendy meme-wise internet scammer.

That sounds like the kind of thing that will be amazingly dated in a couple of years time.

Yep. There are all these horrible moments when they end up in various nightclubs and listen to made-up musical genres and artists. At another point these kids are playing Grand Theft Auto 5: Zootopia and it is just eugh, shut up, shut up, shut up.

Speculation on short-term pop cultural trends never, ever, works in SF. Ever. (Please recommend me something that proves me wrong though).

pattern recognition wasn't awful iirc

there was a charles stross novel about mmorpgs which had some potential but then wet itself

ok so had the person been killed by an anthropomorphic cat-person or

thomp: Williams' Otherland >>>>>>>>>>>>> his fantasy trilogy; also from what I remember there is a distinct lack of woman-hating in it

reading The R-Master by Gordon R. Dickson. a page-turner! don't know if i've ever actually read one of his novels before.

got some great hardcover SF the other day. and lots of paperbacks too. hardcover stuff i want to get to:

poul anderson - 7 conquests (story collection)

a bunch of terry carr Universe collections

poul anderson - mirkieim

a bunch of damon knight Orbit collections

john brunner - the jagged orbit

c.j. cherryh - the faded sun: kesrith (can't remember if i'm a fan or not of cherryh? kinda thinking what i've read reminded me of le guin and all the characters in her books have names like tsi'mri and shon'ai.)

the best of henry kuttner (don't think i even know who henry kuttner is. old-school dude. intro by bradbury.)

james blish - cities in flight

clifford d. simak - ring around the sun

gordon r. dickson - time storm (think i started this once and never finished it.)

burt cole - the funco file (don't even know if this is strictly SF. looks pynchonian actually. from 1969.)

poul anderson - twilight world

john brunner - total eclipse

poul anderson - the day of their return

burt cole - the funco file

I've never known anyone else who's read that.

is it good? it looks cool.

It's been a long time. It was inconsistent in being lighthearted and funny, with sudden unexpected chunks of emotional intensity and violence. Pynchon or the more whimsical Vonnegut may have been his model, but it was as if a serious-as-your-life James Jones took over the narration at intervals. I also remember that it didn't really end, just stopped. It gave a peculiar sort of pleasure. I filed it away as a curiosity. My suggestion is to read it on summer days.

Apparently the author's real name was Thomas Dixon, and he was born in 1930. I always want to write such people letters if they are still around.

They're making a movie based on Beyond Apollo!

the best of henry kuttner (don't think i even know who henry kuttner is. old-school dude. intro by bradbury.)

Does it have 'Fury' in it? That's the only Kuttner I've read. Surprisingly effective one-track-mind story about a guy determined to wipe out an alien species

I finally got round to reading issue 23 of Apex Magazine yesterday http://www.apexbookcompany.com/apex-online/ . Good mixture of dark fantasy, horror, fairy tale, slipstream, magic realism type stuff. I particularly enjoyed "Biba Jibun" by Eugie Foster, a modern fairy tale set in Japan, and "Button Bin" by Mike Allen, a very dark Ligotti-ish horror story.

I've been a subscriber for a few months (12 issues for $10, although I think you can read most if not all of the issues online if you wait a month) and I've enjoyed most of the issues so far, even if it is sometimes a little slight and I'm not really into the speculative poetry. Generally, it's 3 short stories and 2 pieces of speculative poetry.

Online subscription magazines are one of the reasons I got my Kindle and they seem to suit the format pretty well. Does anyone else have any recommendations as far as short fiction magazines go (online or print), particularly ones that are more straight-up science fiction?

Print-wise as I'm in the UK, I'm already very familiar with Interzone (keep meaning to get a subscription), but I would be interested to hear thoughts on the big US ones like Analog (if it is it still called this?), if any are worth reading these days.

As far as online mags go, Lightspeed Magazine has tempted me: anyone read this? Thoughts?

Forgot to add in the link to Lightspeed: http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/

IMBanks' Surface Detail is out in paperback. amazon says tomorrow but i saw it in smiths this morning.

I just started reading A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. I read Rainbow's End a few years ago and loved it, so I'm pretty excited. I'm already fascinated/obsessed with the Tines.

I remember practically nothing about A Fire Upon the Deep other than I read it in college and absolutely loved it.

Evil supercomputer and Medieval dog civilization.

The dogs are the only thing i remember. They were cool though.

It's got dogs in? Damn I'm there.

dan i can't tell if i would like otherland or not, it looks like it could be a fun romp i guess? but if it's as slapdash in construction as ms&t is it will probably annoy me

it seems like he has tried to write a trilogy three times, and each time it has ended up four books. that is not encouraging in terms of whether his others will be less of a mess.

anyway i think i'm done with this sort of thing for a bit maybe? & if not i have steven erikson's 4th & 5th hanging around and i should read them so i can get rid of them before i move house, i think

tbh Otherland is the polar opposite of a "fun romp"; that is part of what makes it so great

i think otherland generally shares the same structural problems that ms&t & his shadow/e series suffer from it has an interesting premise & strong, mostly well drawn characters but meanders a bit too much in the middle stages. i remember feeling like he was stalling w/ a couple of the middle books either because he wasnt quite sure how to end it or he just had too many ideas for worlds he didnt want to throw out but he def ran a couple of the plotlines too long

I don't disagree with that, but I do think he is better working in a SF milieu rather than fantasy; the core idea is much stronger in Otherland and that carried me through the lulls much easier than what was going on in MS&T and Shadow*

yeah otherland feels more prescient the more time passes but its also a p big commitment

I warmed to Foundation and Empire by the time it ended... I liked some of the SFnal touches and found the Mule character interesting, even if the closing twist was something that I could see coming a mile off (partly because Asimov prefigures it heavily).

finished 'to green angel tower: storm' earlier. i think i read about 600 pages of it today. at one point my gf started reading it over my shoulder and went "my god, this is tripe"

"baby you're not here to think"

ew

the sentence that led to that opinion was something like "The Thrithings-woman lay back, her hair a shining black curtain upon the pillow"

was a little sad to note tad's prose go downhill throughout. not massively + not like he had a huge height to fall but. the first volume is free of elegant variation, and mostly avoids melodramatic FEELINGS stuff. they go downhill

the third was pretty well plotted though. a lot of the pieces that fell into place at the end it was obvious that they were going to but obvious in a chunky and satisfying way. not that there wasn't a lot of slack. i mean he somehow thought it was necessary to feature the series' third and fourth chapters of 'someone walks around in the dark'. but it wasn't a whole novel of slack. also i was worried there were going to be ~400 pages of simon and miriamele walking about and being pissy and there weren't; those bits were pretty painful but he got through them quickly enough.

what i remember most about the last book was that simon's climb up the sorceror's tower was in turns genuinely unsettling & the 'color' for a really cool ad&d adventure for characters level 12-15

reading one of those Orbit collections (this one from 1972) and it is waaaaay uneven as far as talent goes and more then half the writers in the book i've never heard of, and so far what this collection has done is make me want to seek out more gene wolfe and more frederik pohl. so that's a good thing. i'm still a relative newbie when it comes to sci-fi and i'm definitely more interested in the 50s/60s/70s roots rock then stuff being written now. but i'll get to now later. i promise.

Yeah, aside from a few quality collections like the Aldiss omnibus, the strike rate of yer basic anthology is very poor.

the novelty of the universe and orbit yearly collections was that nothing was a reprint. all original material.

i've read some really great best of the year collections though. there were some really great years! with other collections it does depend on the editor/compiler. aldiss was good at it.

i read a recent-ish - for me anyway. it probably came out in the 90's. - collection of space opera/adventure yarns that was REALLY good. completely entertaining. and a lot of the writers were new to me. i should try and find it. i can't remember the title. almost every story was a hoot. and the stories were newer too. not old old stuff.

The Gardner Dozois-edited yearly collections are usually pretty good: I find them to be at least half full of great stuff, and if you buy the el-cheapo UK editions that's pretty good value for money

I only have #3 of James Gunn's "Road to Science Fiction" anthology series, but it's so good I'd like to find the others.

Yeah that looks like a decent selection, albeit with a few old perennials on the anthology circuit. Will look out for Gardner Dozois, and for Scott's, if he remembers the name :)

Oh, "The New Space Opera" I got recently, that was Gardner Dozois, and yeah it was prety decent.

The Gardner Dozois-edited yearly collections are usually pretty good: I find them to be at least half full of great stuff, and if you buy the el-cheapo UK editions that's pretty good value for money

Yeah, I've asked for the latest Mammoth Book of Best New SF for the past few birthdays/Christmases and have been fairly pleased with them: always fairly solid at least, and usually a couple of stories that set me tracking down more by the authors.

(And usually at least one story so horrible and unnecessary that I swear off the author for life, but hey, that's a useful service too, and maybe you'll love the ones I hate.)

My only peeve is that I once came close to picking up one I already had in a charity shop because it had a different cover, but I can only find one cover for that volume on the internet, so unless it was a trade edition I'm beginning to think I imagined it.

No, I think you didn't imagine it: a number of them were repackaged with "classic" style artwork (ie bug-eyed monsters, retro rocketships, etc) and given slightly different titles (ie the Mammoth Book of Amazing SF, etc) and flogged off on the overseas remainder market--I've got a few of them, and they don't show up on Amazon, etc.

found it. and it is one of the dozois volumes. there are two volumes. the good old stuff and the good new stuff. i've only read the new one:

http://www.amazon.com/Good-New-Stuff-Adventure-Tradition/dp/0312198906/ref=pd_sim_b_1

did i already talk about how much i loved *four ways to forgiveness* by Le Guin on here? i might have. i still think about that book. i never wanted it to end. gotta read more of her hainish books.

reading steven erikson's fourth novel, 'house of chains'. this one i feel like i can't even risk reading in the same room as the gf to be honest

She struggled, then her head snapped back, eyes suddenly wild.

Karsa laughed, throwing her down on the bed.

Animal sounds came from her mouth, her long-fingered hands snatching up at him as he moved over her.

The female clawed at him, her back arching in desperate need.

She was unconscious before he was done, and when he drew away there was blood between them. She would live, he knew. Blood-oil was impatient with broken flesh.

Jesus Christ.

Referring to women as "females" like that is one of my biggest literary pet peeves.

I had considered spelling out what would count as "horrible and unnecessary" in my previous post about short story collections, but now I don't need to, because that is exactly the sort of thing I meant.

i was confused and thought you were talking about steve erickson the american writer but i googled and i'm okay now. the canadian guy's real name according to wiki is STEVE RUNE LUNDIN and i don't get why he didn't keep that for his books cuz it kinda has an epic flair. and its funny that stephen r. donaldson is such a big fan of the canadian guy cuz i was just looking at some of the old covenant paperbacks the other day and marveling that i actually read them when i was a kid. (i don't read too much fantasy stuff)

Jesus Christ.

Referring to women as "females" like that is one of my biggest literary pet peeves.

anyway, i'm reading this now. did you know that me and rich corben share a birthday?

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_zNw9VE7Y3Hc/TBFIxXBT1MI/AAAAAAAADW4/X4PJp77QOIw/s1600/fredricBrown.jpg