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

Ah cool, have heard good things about him, thanks.
Departure delayed, so while cooling heels, and in honor of Hallows' Eve, a few from my village library. Haven't yet read any of these collections straight through, but for instance, Dark Descent opens with "The Reach" by Stephen King, which is pretty good for Stephen King. It's another Hartwell, so begging some questions like why "A Rose For Emily" and others almost as well known. Also why does King keep coming back (o why do I think). Anyway, looks promising overall, and I don't really remember most of the familiar titles all that well:
The Dark Descentedited by David G/ Hartwell, huge paperback ed. first pub. '97, I think
Contents:
pt. 1.
The color of evil. The reach / Stephen King --
Evening primrose / John Collier --
The ash-tree / M. R. James --
The new mother / Lucy Clifford --
There's a long, long trail a-winding / Russell Kirk --
The call of Cthulhu / H. P. Lovecraft --
The summer people / Shirley Jackson --
The whimper of whipped dogs / Harlan Ellison --
Young Goodman Brown / Nathaniel Hawthorne --
Mr. Justice Harbottle --
J. Sheridan Le Fanu --
The crowd / Ray Bradbury --
The autopsy / Michael Shea --
John Charrington's wedding / E. Nesbit --
Sticks / Karl Edward Wagner --
Larger than oneself / Robert Aickman --
Belsen Express / Fritz Leiber --
Yours truly, Jack the Ripper / Robert Bloch --
If Damon comes / Charles L. Grant --
Vandy, Vandy / Manly Wade Wellman --
pt. 2.
The Medusa in the shield. The swords / Robert Aickman --
The roaches / Thomas M. Disch --
Bright segment / Theodore Sturgeon --
Dread / Clive Barker --
The fall of the house of Usher / Edgar Allen Poe --
The monkey / Stephen King --
Within the walls of Tyre / Michael Bishop --
The rats in the walls / H. P. Lovecraft --
Schalken the painter / J. Sheridan Le Fanu --
The yellow wallpaper / Charlotte Perkins Gilman --
A rose for Emily / William Faulkner --
How love came to Professor Guildea / Robert Hichens --
Born of man and woman / Richard Matheson --
My dear Emily / Joanna Russ --
You can go now / Dennis Etchison --
The rocking-horse winner / D. H. Lawrence --
Three days / Tanith Lee --
Good country people / Flannery O'Connor --
Mackintosh Willy / Ramsey Campbell --
The jolly corner / Henry James --
pt. 3.
A fabulous formless darkness. Smoke ghost / Fritz Leiber --
Seven American nights / Gene Wolfe --
The signal-man / Charles Dickens --
Crouch End / Stephen King --
Night-side / Joyce Carol Oates --
Seaton's aunt / Walter de la Mare --
Clara Militch / Ivan Turgenev --
The repairer of reputations / Robert W. Chambers --
The beckoning fair one / Oliver Onions --
What was it? / Fitz-James O'Brien --
The beautiful stranger / Shirley Jackson --
The damned thing / Ambrose Bierce --
Afterward / Edith Wharton --
The willows / Algernon Blackwood --
The Asian shore / Thomas M. Disch --
The hospice / Robert Aickman --
A little something for us tempunauts / Philip K. Dick. (less)

Also from local library:
The Mammoth Book of Short Horror Novels, edited by Mike Ashley, 1988.

The monkey / Stephen King
The parasite / Arthur Conan Doyle
There's a long, long trail a-winding / Russell Kirk
The damned / Algernon Blackwood
Fengriffen / David Case
The uttermost farthing / A.C. Benson
The rope in the rafters / Oliver Onions
Nadelman's God / T.E.D. Klein
The feasting dead / John Metcalfe
How the wind spoke at Madaket / Lucius Shepard.

Otto Penzler! The Mystery Book Store guy does some delving: didn't know proto-modern Southern novelist Ellen Glasgow wrote supernatural, but here she characteristically skewers the abusive perks of NYC medical high priests as well, in "The Shadowy Third"--which you can also read here:
http://www.tor.com/stories/2012/10/the-shadowy-third

[The Big Book of Ghost Stories (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Original edited by Otto Penzler, 2012

BUT I’M NOT DEAD YET
Conrad Aiken: Mr. Arcularis
William Fryer Harvey: August Heat

I’LL LOVE YOU—FOREVER (OR MAYBE NOT)
Ellen Glasgow: The Shadowy Third
Ellen Glasgow: The Past
David Morrell: But At My Back I Always Hear
O. Henry: The Furnished Room
Paul Ernst: Death’s Warm Fireside
Andrew Klavan: The Advent Reunion
R. Murray Gilchrist: The Return
Rudyard Kipling: The Phantom Rickshaw
Ambrose Bierce: The Moonlit Road
Lafcadio Hearn: The Story of Ming-Y
Lafcadio Hearn: Yuki-Onna

THIS OLD HOUSE
Amyas Northcote: Brickett Bottom
E. F. Benson: How Fear Departed from the Long Gallery
G. G. Pendarves: Thing of Darkness
Edward Lucas White: The House of the Nightmare
Hector Bolitho: The House on Half Moon Street
Dick Donovan: A Night of Horror
Vincent O’sullivan: The Burned House

KIDS WILL BE KIDS
Rosemary Timperley: Harry
Michael Reaves: Make-Believe
A. M. Burrage: Playmates
Ramsey Campbell: Just Behind You
A. E. Coppard: Adam And Eve and Pinch Me
Steve Friedman: The Lost Boy of the Ozarks

THERE’S SOMETHING FUNNY AROUND HERE
Mark Twain: A Ghost’s Story
Donald E. Westlake: In At The Death
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Ghost of Dr. Harris
“Ingulphus”: The Everlasting Club
Isaac Asimov and James Maccreigh: Legal Rites
Albert E. Cowdrey: Death Must Die
Frank Stockton: The Transferred Ghost
Oscar Wilde: The Canterville Ghost

A NEGATIVE TRAIN OF THOUGHT
August Derleth: Pacific 421
Robert Weinberg: The Midnight El

STOP—YOU’RE SCARING ME
Frederick Cowles: Punch and Judy
Henry S. Whitehead: The Fireplace
H. F. Arnold: The Night Wire 400
Fritz Leiber: Smoke Ghost 406
Wyatt Blassingame: Song of the Dead

I MUST BE DREAMING
Wilkie Collins: The Dream Woman 437
Washington Irving: The Adventure of the German Student

A SÉANCE, YOU SAY?
Joseph Shearing: They Found My Grave
Edgar Jepson: Mrs. Morrel’s Last Séance
Joyce Carol Oates: Night-Side

CLASSICS
M. R. James: “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come To You My Lad”
W. W. Jacobs: The Monkey’s Paw
W. W. Jacobs: The Toll-House
Edith Wharton: Afterward
Willa Cather: Consequences
Cynthia Asquith: The Follower
Cynthia Asquith: The Corner Shop
H. P. Lovecraft: The Terrible Old Man
Erckmann-Chatrian: The Murderer’s Violin
Saki: The Open Window
Saki: Laura
Fitz-James O’Brien: What Was It?
Alexander Woollcott: Full Fathom Five
H. R. Wakefield: He Cometh and He Passeth By
Perceval Landon: Thurnley Abbey

THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES
Algernon Blackwood: The Woman’s Ghost Story
Victor Rousseau: The Angel of the Marne
Olivia Howard Dunbar: The Shell of Sense
Marjorie Bowen: The Avenging of Ann Leete

BEATEN TO A PULP
Greye La Spina: The Dead-Wagon
Urann Thayer: A Soul with Two Bodies
Arthur J. Burks: The Ghosts of Steamboat Coulee
Thorp Mcclusky: The Considerate Hosts
Cyril Mand: The Fifth Candle
August Derleth and Mark Schorer: The Return of Andrew Bentley
M. L. Humphreys: The Floor Above
Manly Wade Wellman: School for the Unspeakable
A. V. Milyer: Mordecai’s Pipe
Julius Long: He Walked by Day
Dale Clark: Behind the Screen

MODERN MASTERS
M. Rickert: Journey into the Kingdom
H. R. F. Keating: Mr. Saul
Chet Williamson: Coventry Carol
1
Categories for this book
Fiction - Horror
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horror (7)

Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!
23 Hours
The Vampire Archives
32 Fangs
The Devil in Silver
COFFINS
Interview with the Vampire
Frankenstein: Lost Souls
Brother Odd
Frankenstein: Dead and Alive

I finished Dark Descent early last year and I found it quite disappointing. I think a big part of it was to show how varied horror could be and it certainly succeeded in that respect, but I think the quality is extremely uneven. I thought Stephen King's "The Monkey" was far too weak to be included.

I understand promoting Aickman with 3 tales but King really didn't need three. Some other authors had two tales but I found all multiple authors but Aickman hard to justify when you don't have essentials like Machen, CA Smith and Hodgson.

For a long time it seemed like Aickman was never going to get mainstream prestige treatment but this year this nice line came out..
http://www.faber.co.uk/catalogsearch/result/index/order/date_of_publication/dir/desc/q/Robert+Aickman/
Even Fangoria (or was it Rue Morgue magazine?) did a cover feature on him.

Poe, Lovecraft, MR James, Le Fanu, Blackwood, Onions, CP Gillman, RW Chambers, Bierce and several other obvious ones were good but you expect that because they are always in anthologies. Tanith Lee, Lucy Clifford and John Collier were the highlights for me because their names aren't so big.
Michael Shea was good but I'd heard a lot about him but after his recent death it seems he was more neglected than I thought.

I got Ashley's Mammoth Short Horror Novels and Penzler's Vampire Archives.

Those Villiers ebooks are on the nook store too, yay. I have 5$ credit and now I'm torn between The Scaffold and The Vampire Soul.

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pubseries.cgi?2451

They're part of an interesting series: Black Coat French Horror. I've got Gaspard de La Nuit by Aloysius Bertrand.

Is that a graphic novel adaptation???

(I'm familiar with Bertrand's piece in its guise as the inspiration for Ravel's piano suite, but I thought it was a relatively short set of prose poems)

Not a graphic novel but it includes artwork by Bertrand and essays by other people. Cover art by Gahan Wilson.

Yeah I got a lotta doubts about Dark Descent, but will prob read more of it anyway, eventually. Nice on backstory and enduring appeal of A Canticle For Leibowitz:
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/science-fiction-classic-still-smolders

It occurred to me that one dude who def owes a debt to kuttner/moore is gene wolfe, specifically his short fiction

many xxxp

Really? idgi

New Michael Faber book gets backhanded nod from NYTimes reviewer
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/29/books/the-book-of-strange-new-things-by-michel-faber.html
but rave from M. John Harrison
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/23/the-book-of-strange-new-things-michel-faber-review

don, here is something about Canticle from another slick, relinked from Hugo award winners part 1 (53-79)
http://harpers.org/blog/2008/11/girded-loins/

Oh yeah, Faber got rave from David Mitchell too.

Thanks. I don't remember Canticle very well, but interesting what it meant to readers, incl. budding writers; I'll have to re-read it. New issue of Clarkesworld looks promising, though only read the Cadigan story so far. Somebody want to explain the beginning(stuff that just happens to be on TV), and the ending (looping in those last two sentences from the first section)?
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/cadigan_11_14_reprint/

canticle is incredibld

incredible, even

Used to think -surprise!-that Canticle came from outside the SF ghetto, but in fact it was a fixup of three stories originally published in F&SF, I believe. Miller also published in Galaxy, won the 1955 Hugo for best novelette with "The Darfsteller", published in Astounding.

Current edition of Canticle has preface by one Mary Doria Russell, author of The Sparrow, a tale of space-faring Jesuits which I have not read.

I have, it's mostly ridiculous. Or go digging for the overlong and more positive post I wrote at the time.

Found it upthread: rolling fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction &c. thread

This thread is getting too long to access. It's like the old guy in the tower in the south of Viriconium who starts forgetting all the wisdom he had held on to for so long in The Pastel City by the end of A Storm of Wings.

There is some kind weird thing were Gardner Dozois edited a bunch of books with the nomenclature Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year Seventh Annual Collection
http://bestsf.net/best-science-fiction-stories-of-the-year-seventh-annual-collection-ed-dozois/
But then there are bunch of ebooks from a decade or two later called The Year's Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Years-Best-Science-Fiction-ebook/dp/B009LRWWR2/

I mean I guess they are different titles but still.

And the dozois books are published in the uk/Australia etc as The Mammoth Book of SF 32, with the number not matching the US edition. Could these buggers not just put the year in the title?

Ha, yes, exactly!

From one amazon review of The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 22

WARNING: The thirty stories in this collection are exactly the same 30 stories found in The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection. In fact, these two books seem to be the same except for different titles and covers. Don't buy both expecting them to be separate books.

We should start a new rolling annual thread

Via the new issue of http://news.ansible.uk/a328.html, Raymond Chandler dashes off good microparody of SF, with a prophetic Search handle even:
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/06/they-pay-brisk-money-for-this-crap.html

Recently read the Malzberg story based on that

Started The Dark Desccent antho a couple of days ago (in PDF). Am on the 2nd story - John Collier - and enormously impressed with him. Should have read this guy ages ago.

Yes, he's very funny. Wonderful description of ghosts and I love that bit where the man consoles the girl by saying they'll talk about birds on twigs, or something like that.

Really love "New Mother" by Lucy Clifford. It has an emotional power because of the naive sweet childlike language and worldview.
I think I'll buy her collection this week, it's supposed to be very good and somewhat unique.

The sweetness is also a set-up for suckerpunch (no anesthetics please, we're Victorian)

It's bizarre and kind of scary that she written them for (her own?) children.

Philosopher's SF recommendations. Lot of worthy stuff in there, sadly lacking in links to free shit. Makes me think I should buy some Ted Chiang.

http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/SF-MasterList-141103-byauthor.htm

You haven't get on the Ted Chiang bandwagon yet?

That list is kind of ho-hum. Nary a deep cut, really, until the "Recommended by One" rubric.

True, but it's good to be reminded about shallow cuts from time to time. Like Chiang, think I've read a couple of his and liked them but failed to follow up.

The most recommended directors / TV shows were:

Recommended by 7:

Star Trek: The Next Generation

Recommended by 5:

Christopher Nolan (Memento, The Prestige, Batman: The Dark Knight, Inception)

Recommended by 4:

Ridley Scott (Blade Runner)

lol

i've never read Greg Egan.

i do want to read the Culture books someday. i have to buy them all first though.

jesus, are there really 10 Culture books?

children get your culture

It's ok you can skip at least three of them.

I listened again to a bit of that Jack Vance radio interview I mentioned earlier. With his agitated contrarian streak.

He said on returning to his old favourite romantic poets he found them absurdly flowery and over the top but still enjoyed the more restrained William Blake. Which is odd because I thought Vance never lost his flowery over the topness.

He scoffed at the idea of doing a book about the horror of war. He said it has gone past the point of kicking a dead horse to kicking a burger that used to be a horse.

I file Jack Vance next to John "Jack" Ford. I don't look to the person, I just stick to the art.

I just find him funny and interesting enough to read and listen to the very few times he spoken as himself. And as we discussed earlier, he seems to never completely reveal his true views. But I'm willing to believe he likes Ravel, Vivaldi and Jimmy Shand.

Reading creepy Polish "psychofantasist" Stefan Brabinski (1877-1936) short fiction collection The Dark Domain--lots of good stuff.

http://thirdeyecinema.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/the_dark_domain.jpg

Yeah, I haven't read Grabinski yet but he is slowly becoming an important figure.

Recent purchases I blew probably more money on than I should have and probably won't read for some time...

Mary Elizabeth Braddon - Face In The Glass
Algernon Blackwood - Wolves Of God
Francis Stevens aka Gertrude Barrows Bennett - Citadel Of Fear
Francis Stevens aka Gertrude Barrows Bennett - The Nightmare And Other Tales Of Dark Fantasy
Stephen Jones (editor) - Fearie Tales
Stephen Jones (editor) - Mammoth Best New Horror 25
James Branch Cabell - Nightmare Has Triplets (3 volumes: Smirt, Smith and Smire)
Richard Gavin - At Fear's Altar
Tanith Lee - Hunting The Shadows
Lord Dunsany - Fifty-One Tales
Lord Dunsany - In The Land Of Time And Other Fantasy Tales (Penguin Classics)
James Blish - SF Gateway Omnibus: Black Easter/The Day After Judgement/The Seedling Stars
Robert Silverberg - SF Gateway Omnibus: Nightwings/A Time of Changes/Lord Valentine's Castle
Robert Silverberg - Son Of Man
Paula Guran (editor) - Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2014
Jean Ray - Malpertuis
Ellen Datlow (editor) - Best Horror Of The Year 6
Abraham Merritt - Metal Monster
Lucy Clifford - Anyhow Stories
Charles Nodier - Smarra/Trilby

Rottensteiner - Fantasy Book: An Illustrated History

I just happened to see a new edition of Red As Blood by Tanith Lee.

Previous covers
http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/70/65/598e828fd7a0075987a84110.L.jpg
http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/6/67/RDSBLDRTLS1983.jpg

New cover
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51zZ%2BGAPRKL.jpg

But the new version has an extra new tale. If only the cover wasn't so bad.

Single volume version of xpost Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy out Nov. 18, worth getting? Info and first pages here: http://fsgworkinprogress.com/southernreachtrilogy/areax.html

Just finished Ramona Ausubel's No One Is Here Except All of Us, which probably gets compared a lot to One Hundred Years of Solitude, with its central, very isolated village, but also drew me back into SF Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia of Fantasy's link-maps of keeps, pocket universes, and polders. It was settled by a far-flung, tiny remnant of the Diaspora, on a tiny bit of land barely connected to the Carpathians, in the bend of a river. The villagers are very adaptable by nature, very stubborn too, so, when they first become aware of the advance of Axis powers, they decide to block out the rest of the world, and start their own.
Yadda yadda, the narrator, who at one point is pegged by another character as always generating the next chapter, proceeds, like her friends, neighbors, and relatives (incl. two sets of parents, both living; starting your world over ain't always pretty) through a profusion of imagery and tiny, unstoppable movements with a logic that's usually pretty clear: she's got a program, a world-building one inside, wherever she goes; ditto the other survivors, each in their own ways.
Not that any of this is easy, but the urgency of the narrator never gets too hectic (even though I'm pretty much sick of first-person narration, esp. the meta-inclined). The poetry of it does get too aphoristic at times, but that's in character, as is the tendency to cute spacey earthy folky imagery, though the author manages to keep most of it in check.
The plotting does depend somewhat on the kindness of strangers, although there are some resident strangers in various parts of the book (even a resident advisor stranger), and the way the characters make themselves useful to each other and themselves can get pretty dicey at any point, in the push and pull of themes, like the worlds and counter-worlds within and without.

The narrator has to make sense of everything that's happened to her and the ones she cares about, also everything they've done; that's what keeps it from seeming too meta, at least for me.