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

And guy behind Papa is Faulkner.

p sure I've read that Malzberg piece (which is not specifically about sci-fi writers, but about his time at the Scott Meredith publishing agency)

Asimov, Silverberg, Heinlein, Dave Marsh, Michael Palin...

palin = aldous huxley (i'm pretty sure)

Sounds reasonable.

Resisting temptation to spam other ILB picture threads with that cover.

never forget

http://subterraneanpress.com/uploads/9781596067820.jpg

Those books are great, put a paper bag around the damn thing and read IMO

Oh I def wanna read it (Blaylock!), but hope to find something more affordable than Subterranean's initial price (also it's now marked SOLD OUT).

Speaking of Subterranean writers, I like this essay by Roz Kaveney on Caitlin Kiernan's short stories in the latest Strange Horizons:

Kiernan is far bleaker than most writers partly because she takes the long view—she knows that this is a universe dominated by entropy and extinction and that human stupidity is helping universal death along. One of the reasons—it sometimes seems—why she sets so much of her work in the present or the past is that there probably is not much in the way of a future; the universe is a fool-killer to those beings who wreck their own nest. Lovecraftian beings can do nothing to us that we are not doing to ourselves anyway. And that is without the contingent personal tragedies that might strike us at any time . . .

What consolations are there in this vividly evoked bleak world? Moments of sexual fulfilment; the celebration of art and ecstasy; a revelling in metamorphosis for its own sake, changing towards the rich and strange, and sloughing off what is mundane and second-rate. Kiernan's slow progress from conventional elements and standard tropes, however well done, to meditation on what story is and what it is for and why we seek it out is one of the most radical things that is going on in the fiction of the fantastic right now.

http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2016/07/two_worlds_and_.shtml

‏@SFEncyclopedia 14 hours ago
Born on this day in 1904, Clifford D Simak: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/simak_clifford_d

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Co7MHL4WYAAHOmR.jpg:large

read a really good story ("The Night Copernicus Died") by Kathryn Kulpa in one of these random issues of Asimov's from 1999 that I found on the street. Never heard of her, doesn't seem like she's published much beyond short pieces here and there. Even so, this is the kind of discovery that makes me appreciate these kinds of genre periodicals, always some diamonds among the dross.

Seems like she's mostly a young adult and children's author. But that story is in her collection Pleasant Drugs.

Caitlin Kiernan's short stories in the latest Strange Horizons
The first volume of the collected short stories is out of print and asking very high prices for used copies, so much so that it belongs on the $900 Grandmothers thread.

Ohhhhhhhh - I only just got the pun re $900 Grandmothers threat title

Just came across this quote from a young Kingsley Amis (1960) on litwriters doing SF: "Only the hyper-sensitive could greet without warm emotion [...] an imagined invasion of Earth by Vegan vegetables from the pen of Miss Ivy Compton-Burnett."

I just read a review of that horror issue of Granta from several years ago. The review said that Bolano's story is just the synopsis of Return Of The Living Dead 3 without actually revealing which film.

Interview with Nancy Kress, she has a Best Of collection now
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jCic1Feb4k

Would like to check that out, thanks. I've only read her bold 80s-90s shorts in Asimov's and the equally rash novel Brain Rose.
New York Review Books Summer Sale incl. one prev. discussed SF, others I hadn't heard of:
http://www.nyrb.com/collections/science-speculative-fiction-masterworks

Oh, and this group is on sale too---we talked about The Rim of Morning on here, or was it the old thread:

http://www.nyrb.com/collections/horror

All the books in both those sets are well worth reading

finished Gene Wolfe's "A Borrowed Man" - v good, up to his usual standards. Not sure if he's ever done a noir before? SF noirs are well-travelled ground obviously but Wolfe brings his own unique skills to it, and I was glad that it avoided a lot of the more "grim n gritty" bullshit of a lot of 3rd generation cyberpunk writers trying desperately to evoke Hammett and Chandler. While it is set in the future and gets some mileage out of disorienting the reader accordingly, the structure and characters all hew closely to classic noir tropes - a murder mystery, a femme fatale, a mysterious rich old guy, threatening but ultimately clueless cops, wisecracking sidekicks, a romantic/cynical protagonist drawn into a web of intrigue - it's all there. Good stuff.

also has Wolfe's characteristic meta-shadings - protagonist/(and occasionally unreliable) narrator is a clone of a mystery writer that "lives" in a library (hence the title)

Had not even heard of that, now see wolfe has been really prolific recently. I need to finish the last Sun trilogy.

Yeah i never got around to that, i should check it out. Never read a bad book by him tbh. But he can be taxing (those soldier of sidon books got a little exhausting trying to keep track of references and what was really going on)

A list of philosophically inclined SF, if that floats anyone's boat. A few more interesting choices amongst the obvious.
http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/forty-new-philosophical-sf.html

Wait, here's a whole load more:
http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/SF-MasterList-150813-byrecommender.htm

(putting this on fantasy/science fiction/speculative thread and the 2016 race thread)

https://medium.com/fireside-fiction-company/blackspecfic-571c00033717
https://storify.com/Charley_Locke/n-k-jemisin-on?utm_campaign=website&utm_source=email&utm_medium=email

I've spent quite a lot of time this year reading about diversity and discrimination in speculative fiction, it's truly labyrinthine with all the blogs, social media lists and semi-regular shitstorms. I've been reading these articles for a few days now and I fear all the links are going to keep me reading for days more.

A list of philosophically inclined SF, if that floats anyone's boat. A few more interesting choices amongst the obvious.
http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/forty-new-philosophical-sf.html🔗

no problem with acknowledging the lack of diversity in the field (seems self-evident) but really not interested in half-assed statistical analyses (with tons of assumptions) of incomplete data

People were complaining about the stats, but I think the articles and links are still interesting, particularly about how editors and publishers should seek to fix things and some minority authors being so reluctant to even submit their work to certain publications.

Thanks for the lists---surprised at all the mentions of Greg Egan! Clearly I need to catch up. Ditto w Fredric Jameson's studies of SF, though don't think he's mentioned here (seems to be almost all fiction, except for inst. the shout-out to SF Encyclopedia On Line).

Still can't get into Greg Egan, although none other than the ever reliable James Morrison has recommended those same short stories in Axiomatic more than once.

was talking w a coworker about that adaptation of Chiang's "Story of Your Life" - still kinda believe it got made. Is being released as "Arrival" with a blurb that makes it sound like yr typical alien invasion silliness w/the world at stake etc. I've never seen any of Villeneuve's films so idk what to expect but seems like someone like Malick might've been better suited...?

still kinda CAN'T believe

I meant

Yeah. Chiang comes up with these killer premises then is somehow able to plumb their emotional depths with seeming to set a foot wrong, interesting to see what happens when someone else gets their hands on the material.

https://electricliterature.com/the-legendary-ted-chiang-on-seeing-his-stories-adapted-for-the-screen-and-the-ever-expanding-916a9530e598#.r9gy5ydtb
Good interview, he mentions Egan.

Nice. He mentions Edward Bryant too, a topic for further research.

Come to think of it, I do kind of like at least one Greg Egan story, that being "The Infinite Assassin," the first story in Axiomatic.

Which story and collection are both mentioned in one of those links ledge provided, as well as being recommended by James M.

Sorry that two of my recent posts say almost exactly the same thing- must have come from two different multiverse doppelgängers.

https://www.fantasticfiction.com/s/nancy-springer/prom-night.htm

Weirdest concept for an anthology I've ever seen.

http://greydogtales.com/blog/?p=2592

About five classic early fantasy books.

The Kai Lung stories I remember as fun--haven't read them in years.

http://raphordo.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/charles-saunders-and-imaro.html

A piece about the Imaro series by Charles Saunders

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/42004377?book_show_action=true&from_review_page=1

http://justinelarbalestier.com/books/battle/reviews/

Read a couple of novellas by Guy Haley, who usually seems to write Games Workshop spiky bits nonsense, but these novellas, 'The Emperor's Railroad' and 'The Ghoul king' were rather good science-fantasy (all rationalised, but not always in ways yet clear to the reader) adventure things set in a 1000+ years-into-the-future post-disaster balkanised Virginia ruled over by mysterious tech-suppressing "angels". Not making any vast claims for them, other than that they were well-written and thoroughly enjoyable. Warning, they also contain zombies, so your own tolerance for that may not be high.

Regarding RAG's post above, this was a good anthology: https://www.amazon.com/Feminine-Future-Science-Fiction-Editions/dp/0486790231

Mike Ashley has done quite a lot of women speculative fiction anthologies. Richard Dalby has done a bunch too but with ghost stories only.

Also there's Pamela Sargent's Women Of Wonder series.

Caitlin Kiernan's short stories in the latest Strange Horizons
The first volume of the collected short stories is out of print and asking very high prices for used copies, so much so that it belongs on the $900 Grandmothers thread.

― Dharmagideon Time (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, August 4, 2016 3:52 AM (three weeks ago)

A lot of her short fiction floats in and out of print on small presses, which is frustrating because she probably works best in short forms, but most of her novels are relatively easy to find (including The Red Tree and The Drowning Girl, imo her most memorable novels).