ThReads Must Roll: the new, improved rolling fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction &c. thread

if i saw that in a store it would an instant avoid. even for a dollar. looks like wild wild west fanfic.

Lol

I really don't get the appeal of steampunk/how it is such a big subculture

I mean I like some HG Wells/Jules Verne stuff and am fine with homages to that period but it's weird to me that it's so huge.

JK Potter is frequently awkward but I'm a fan and he's amazing at his best.

Some examples..
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41tAUeNsOYL.jpg
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/1597800007.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg
http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/7/79/VNSPRSRVD2005.jpg
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0972948511.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg
http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/b/b7/THMPRRFDRM2002.jpg
http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/6e/2d/fe9192c008a0946bde1c2010.L.jpg
http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/b/bc/SMKNDMRRRS2001.jpg
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41BiMdpn7tL.jpg
http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/a/aa/JKPTTRFNTS1995.jpg
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51346YtzT7L.jpg
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/087054165X.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg
http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/9/90/THYRRSXV341989.jpg
http://www.philsp.com/data/images/w/weird_tales_1989fal.jpg
http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/6/62/NNTKT1989.jpg
http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/5/58/SCSMVSMGCL1988.jpg
http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/a/ab/BKTG04646.jpg
http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/00/87/6f4b228348a087410ebb7110.L.jpg
http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/a/a1/TLSFTHWRWL1979.jpg
http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/f/f2/RDDRMS0A1984.jpg
http://www.philsp.com/data/images/n/night_cry_1986win.jpg

Another Blaylock
http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/a/a4/LRDKLVNS1992.jpg

This one genuinely creeps me out
http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/7/76/THFCTHTMST1983.jpg

Super odd one
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61dOcoEXVuL.jpg

NSFW
http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/c/c7/BKTG02824.jpg

This page incl. fairly concise comments on a lot of books, followed by an extremely rare Machen piece:

http://www.fanac.org/fanzines/IGOTS/igotsnew1.htm

I've been reading about harassment, prejudice and political controversies in the speculative fiction community for the past 3 weeks. The shitstorms seem to keep getting bigger and its annoyingly addictive to read about.

Here's Brandon Sanderson on the current Hugos
http://brandonsanderson.com/hugo-awards-2016/

Alyssa Wong on dealing with racist trolls
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lightspeedmagazine/people-of-colour-destroy-science-fiction/posts/1468533
http://crashwong.net/post/143533874133/toe-the-line-on-being-a-2016-john-w-campbell

M Sereno on her experience of bullying that was going on years ago
http://awitin.likhain.net/2015/04/out-of-fracture/
Some of the context will be fuzzy for this unless you already know but it's a good piece regardless and it has a bunch of recommendations linked to the actual works.
The situation she was a part of is difficult to summarize. I've read several long pieces on it (all of which seemed quite flawed to me but covering the clusterfuck accurately seems impossible) and there's just so many sides to it, vanished and inaccessible evidence that it's impossible to know who did exactly what and precisely how bad it was.

Another rare 'un: the author of this piece found a novel by Algernon Blackwood (I didn't know he wrote any, did yall?)

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-z3WvGRAdqho/Vyo_CagCjLI/AAAAAAAAA3U/jnxNdpFsdnUh6DzjuKUyLLv-Mvg_1hNUwCLcB/s1600/Julius%2BLe%2BVallon.jpg

http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2016/05/julius-le-vallon-centenary.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Wormwoodiana+%28Wormwoodiana%29

He wrote a good few but I haven't read any of them. Centaur is quite celebrated.

I only knew his short stories. Naked mountain climber there looks about ready to impale himself on that spire.

Very occasionally one of the lower freeview channels will show a bfi film of Algernon Blackwood telling one of his short stories. They might be on the BFI website if you look. They are TERRIBLE though, both in terms of story and his presentation, real Rowley Birkin stuff.

I just now went to the library and read "The Empty House," in The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories, where it's sandwiched between MR James and Oliver Onions (heavies like Henry James in there too). I'd tell him to lose the first two or three grafs, excising their key points for later mentions on the way to the house. Also lose the few spoilerette bits indicating that the principals aren't actually gonna die of fright etc., but he knows that the whole thing depends on their individual and mutual reactions, incl. decision-making. Not so scary, but it held my attention pretty well, despite the competition on this collection.

(Mind you, I'm sated by having just finished the big new story Lucia Berlin collection, so maybe more tolerant than usual.)

Gave up on The Three Body Problem. It was just too...oblique? I want to read Uprooted basically forever.

xpost er, lose "story" in that

Uprooted is by who again--?

oh Naomi Novik yeah, that looks good!

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/clark-ashton-smith-the-emperor-of-dreams#/

The crowd funding for a Clark Ashton Smith documentary began recently.

http://thebooksmugglers.com/2015/05/sff-in-conversation-on-diversity-round-table-with-m-sereno-aliette-de-bodard-zen-cho-bogi-takacs-and-jy-yang.html

This is a good group interview about Diversity, the positive intentions and drawbacks of the term; the expectations placed on marginalized writers; translation; harassment; creating more communities and decentralizing the west.
Two things I find particularly interesting is that there are more writers whose primary language is not English but they are primarily writing for an English/western market and that there are many foreign forms of English that are perfectly legitimate.

Those things are particularly interesting, thanks.
Also: would like to go to this, ditto M.R. James events----posted on Wormwoodia:

https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-yP-kBKIxo_E/VzIPMdegVuI/AAAAAAAAA3k/ibyra2q9WSYu3cO-CFKY0HJvP0WvW1BFACLcB/s1600/novel%2Bof%2Bthe%2Bwhite%2Bpowder.jpg

Reading The White Powder

Arthur Machen enthusiasts within easy reach of London or Cambridge may like to know of a rehearsed reading of 'The Novel of the White Powder' performed by celebrated M R James actor Robert Lloyd Parry, whose story narration is always superb. Details below:

"The Novel of the White Powder by Arthur Machen will be presented at
The Cambridge Brewhouse, Cambridge on Sunday 29th May, at 8pm.
The Deveruex, nr Temple Tube, London on Friday 10th June, at 8pm.

'The Novel of the White Powder' is a short horror story, which according to H P Lovecraft, "approaches the absolute culmination of loathsome fright." If you want to test this claim for yourself then just email roblloydparry[at]hotmail[dot]com stating which performance you'd like to attend, and how many tickets you'd like. Then it's pay-what-you-like at the end."
Posted by Mark V at 12:44 PM

not his best

so connie willis is p bad

If you got rid of the terrible comedy of the grotesque and the weird & badly researched anglophilia and the even weirder obsession with 'mufflers' then The Doomsday Book could be a half decent bit of mediaeval time travel. Fire Watch, which iirc was in the Vandermeer time travel anthology, is just bad (also muffler-obsessed).

Some people seem to think her stuff is funny, but yeah, not my cuppa.

haha ledge i was going to make the same complaint re mufflers

apparently her newish 1100 pageish extension of 'fire watch' has ppl paying for stuff in 40s London in cents

i liked the part of doomsday book that was actually in mediaeval times, but yeah her writing is unbearably precious

plus i really hate the whole genre of 'if only the protagonist had called five minutes later/taken a different cab/worn a muffler that day, it all would have turned out fine'

What is a muffler? Surely the people aren't wearing vehicle parts?

#steampunk

http://i.ebayimg.com/images/i/310914778944-0-1/s-l1000.jpg

So it's just a really long multicolored scarf?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarf

Oh I thought you had typed "mufti."

I had put the domesday book aside for a minute and having picked it up again I encountered, on p89, the third muffler of the book. I don't know how I'm going to keep them all distinct.

About a year ago I posted upthread, asking for recommendations for a scifi/fantasy newbie - thanks again! - and then I basically disliked everything I tried, and forgot about it.

I couldn't get into Glen Cook, Iain Banks or Erikson at all - perhaps they're more advanced level reading? But mostly I couldn't hack like their sentence-writing style - I kept struggling to visualise what was actually happening. Erikson especially. That shit is crazy. People read ten volumes of that?

Dune and Anubis Gates I liked a lot, at least the opening chapters, and I've banked them as future beach holiday reads. M John Harrison's Light was good, too, but I'm waiting for a secondhand copy to turn up.

The one I really liked was Name of the Wind, which I'm a hundred pages into right now. Please tell me it's worth the effort? It's less trope-y than I was expecting. And he's a solid writer - kind of reminds me of Peter David, actually.

I admit, I kind of enjoyed the setup with the ZOMBIE SPIDERS more than the autobiographical chapters, which might not bode well. And it is really fucking long. But so far so good.

M. John Harrison writes beautiful sentences

never read Banks Cook or Erikson myself

Yeah, Harrison was good. Had a sort of "coldly efficient" kind of Kubrick vibe

I haven't read his Viriconium stuff, and his pre-80s novels aren't quite up to par, but all the Kefahuchi Tract books (Light, Nova Swing, and Empty Space) are great. Some good short fiction too.

Erikson sucks for real. What makes an awesome rpg campaign does not necessarily make an awesome fantasy novel. Glen cook is miles better than him.

I love Banks, but it's fucking hard to read. Feel like I need to read all of them again to really grok all of the details. I love the universe he created, though.

couple days late to this but wanted to defend the erikson series. i thought not only did he make a really compelling world, he created a sense of time and history for it that was vivid and substantial and populated the world with the legend/archaeology of it in a way that was total catnip to me. i guess the first book was written a long time before the rest and it shows but the series gets strong quickly before getting a little bogged down right at the end. it is a lot of pages to get that far tho.

also, banks does not need defending but he is awesome and while his non-genre stuff did go off the boil pretty badly his middle initial books were amazing to the end.

accidentally posted this in the old thread:

I'm probably going to get ripped to shreds for this but... did anyone else find The Dispossessed a bit of a slog? I've been forcing myself to finish it (it's not even a very long book) and it just feels endless. Love the premise and the overall idea, but there's something about the deployment of language that isn't working out for me. I'd have thought that by now I'd have a clearer idea of the various characters, but the majority of them feel like empty vessels fulfilling roles. Even Shevek - I mean, I get that maybe the Anarresti are supposed to be a stoic, no-nonsense bunch - but he seems to have very little personality. The only characters who I seem to have any sort of interesting faculties are secondary roles like Sabul and Vea. The distinct lack of action would be fine. I don't need space battles in my sci-fi, but the Dispossessed reads to me like a very thinly-veiled allegory and not much more.

I really liked the Dispossessed but yes it is v dry and heavy-handed w the allegories, it's more of an exercise than a novel

i still have never read the Culture books. i kinda want to get nice copies of all of them before i do. so, might take me a while. still have only read wasp factory/walking on glass/the bridge/complicity. liked all those except complicity. wasp factory one of those bombshells i read in the 80's.

Erikson especially. That shit is crazy. People read ten volumes of that?

i don't really want to have to know the numbers and nicknames of military units in my fiction, and that goes for cook too

the only banks i've read was 'the business', which was legit awful. is his straight-up sci-fi actually good?

i would also like to defend erikson, to some extent -- i also had the feeling, reading the first one, that i'd be better off reading the sourcebook. but a couple books in he figures out how forward motion works in this hyuuge narrative he's doing, and he's probably the best subcreator in the modern fantasy biz? like, coherent systems worked out in detail presented not too schematically and w/sufficient ellipsis that (after that first book ...) the reader's not being led around too much by the nose, nor left completely adrift

otoh his sentences never really improved (though his banter does, a little) and i'm not sure he doesn't hate women

Re banks, all his mainstream fiction from complicity on is pretty much going through the motions; his heart stayed in his sf for much longer

http://greydogtales.com/blog/?p=1891

An enjoyable list of fantasy books from 70s-80s.

I like this guy's blog. Way too much to read on it but I dip in occasionally. Quite charming with all the pictures and articles about his dogs.

Looks very helpful, thanks! Hadn't heard of Patricia Wrightson, will def. check out her use of Aboriginal elements. And, among many others here, I still need to read McKillip's Riddlemaster trilogy (carried on about herWinter Rose upthread).

makes me curious about the non-kid stuff by wrightson. a lot of it probably didn't make it here from down under.

i have those dark is rising books at home. will get to them eventually. i think i started to read one to my youngest kid and he wasn't into it.