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

yeah, i gotta get that.

like the space she leaves, and the breadcrumbs--in this one, but the other one on thenewyorker, "Paranoia," is not that hot. Yeah, I'd like to check the collection. Both stories were linked below this short non-fiction, also in the collection:
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/memory-and-delusion?mbid=rss

Just watched Under The Skin, rec. to fans of Ballard, Roeg, and Cronenberg,though the long unblinking solemn alien gazes at toddlin' Scottish streetlife and wide open spaces give me time to nurture my own niggling degrees of detachment and doubts. A "distillation" of a much more elaborately spelled-out script, director Jonathan Glazer explains, and that does seem right, if a little generous with the flow---there's def no sense of being force-fed gobs of exposition and bright twirling objects while accountants time the whole thing, as with so many bigger-budgeted items (Wonder how the Michael Faber novel is.) Certainly committed to show-not-tell---though could have used more bursts of hellish imagery, the overall arc is no prob---and,since the alien gazer is Scarlett Johansson....
Not as good as Her, but they could make a satisfying SJ SF double feature (how's Lucy?)

Re: puppies/awards conversation, I think those words "badthink" and "wrongfun" are hilarious.

Eyes Of The Overworld (2/4 in Dying Earth sequence) by Jack Vance.

This is a huge improvement over the previous book, a better adventure and so much more happens.
It's not a continuation although one character from Dying Earth is mentioned a few times. Eyes Of The Overworld has humour as a major component whereas Dying Earth only had several funny moments. Dying Earth was partially linked short stories about different characters but this is just one long story following one man.

Cugel The Clever seems to me a clear replacement for Liane The Wayfarer (easily the most fun character in the previous book); initially I thought Cugel was an anti-hero but he's every bit the horrible villain Liane was; I was genuinely shocked at how nasty Cugel could be, especially when he murders someone for a harmless prank, and shows he's probably not above sexual harassment.
The main pleasure of the book for me was the showy conversations (it's hard not to want to talk like this and start referring to food as "viands") and Cugel's hilariously pompous indignation and claims to innocence when he is accused of crimes he has actually committed. He wrongs so many people in a spectacular fashion.

A couple of problems though:
(1) The scene in which Voynod assumes Cugel killed one of the pilgrims made no sense, and then immediately after Cugel unconvincingly succeeds in lying to Voynod that the salve he is trading is magic. It's a weak setup for later scenes to happen.
(2) Vance is well known for his impressive visual descriptions (particularly good at countryside and skies) but just like in the previous book, I found a lot of the descriptions confusing, awkward or ill fitting.
When the disembodied legs that support Derwe Coreme's boat are first mentioned, there is no mention of their arms, but when the arms grab at people they are jarringly introduced as if we already knew about them.
Cugel's rope climb down from the huge pillar was seemingly impossible to visualise correctly from the text.
Many of the clothes, furnishings, creatures and various other things are described in a frustratingly plain or unsatisfying manner when compared to the often lovely settings, sights and generally extravagant manner of the story. This is my biggest complaint.

But I generally had a good time with this book and the strengths outweigh my disappointments.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/books/review/ursula-k-le-guin-by-the-book.html?hpw&rref=books&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

"I tend to avoid fiction about dysfunctional urban middle-class people written in the present tense. This makes it hard to find a new novel, sometimes."

this right here is why started reading so much SF 8 or 9 years ago. got so sick of the writing workshop white people angst. no offense to white people. i have some friends who are white.

Otm. A pretty half-assed stab at the "my favourite things" game though. Either play it for fun or do a drew daniel 12 page essay on why it sucks, or don't play it.

http://bookriot.com/2015/07/22/9-diverse-fantasy-books-will-challenge-idea-fantasy-fiction/

A list of fantasy with diversity and fresh viewpoints.

yeah, i like when people just name a ton of random writers they enjoy or are enjoying currently. doesn't have to be the BEST or GOAT or anything. would love a reading list from her. already pretty familiar with jane austen and the like...

x-post

although she does mention some people i've never read/heard of: harry roberts, kij johnson, helen phillips, colin thubron.

incidentally i finished 'the lathe of heaven' recently. a fairly decent potboiler that read more like a k dick than a le guin, with its fractured realities and coded messages. wouldn't rank it amongst her best.

did you know that UKL and PKD went to high school together and were in the same class and they didn't even know each other at all? you can't make that stuff up.

JP: Were you thinking about Philip K. Dick while writing Lathe of Heaven?

UL: Oh yeah. It’s sort of an homage to him.

JP: Was it something you shared with him and discussed with him?

UL: We wrote letters back and forth some. We never met. I was rather scared of Phil. He was very heavily into drugs, and drugs do scare me. I had three kids at home, and was not enthusiastic about having a real—not a pothead but a heavy drug user around. Phil went off the rails periodically, and so I was not really looking to meet him. But we did correspond, very friendly, for some while. We seemed to respect each other’s writing, were interested in what each other was trying to do.

JP: I read you had gone to high school together. That’s not true?

UL: That is so weird. Yes, we were complete contemporaries at Berkeley High School, but he’s not in the yearbook. His name is in the yearbook, but there is no photograph. I think Phil dropped out before graduation.
I don’t know many people anymore that were at Berkeley High with me. When there were more of us alive we tried to find out anything about him. Nobody remembers him. Not one person in this group remembered him physically. He worked at a store where I bought records when I had the money, so I might have met him there. But what he looked like then, as a teenager? [Shrugs.] He is absolutely the invisible man at Berkeley High.

that is so wild

wow!

Yes, terrific.

Speaking of weird Berkeley connections, PKD at 19 also lived in a warehouse loft with Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan for a while: http://www.strangehorizons.com/2009/20090323/cheney-c.shtml

I read somewhere that moving from the rainy world of his native Berkeley to the artificial paradise of Southern Cali was a revelation, maybe even before Disneyland opened, and there he became fascinated with, for instance, families' familial concern when the Abraham Lincoln simulacrum started seeing a little off, like it wasn't feeling well. (Also wrote some stories as by as A. Lincoln-Simulacrum.)
The Bay Area seems not to have turned him on so much, although the acerbic non-SF Mary And The Giant is v. readable, and unmistakably young PKD.

"turned him on in so many ways" might be a better way of putting it; he copped some inspiration there, anyway. (Speaking of the record store, he owned or managed his own for a while, and even had his own radio show---classical, I think.)

Great piece, one way street! I'll have to check out more Spicer. The affinities of SF and Beat (-era) poetry, h'mmm....

That record store or something like it, fictionalized, figures prominently in Radio Free Albemuth, iirc. You should definitely check out Spicer! Even with the Spicer revival of the last several years (i.e. since the bulk of his poetry came back into print in 2008), he deserves to be read much more widely.

I'm obliged to link to his 1965 lectures on poetics, since his notion of composition as dictation from the Outside gets fairly Dickian: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/238196?page=1

It’s impossible for the source of energy to come to you in Martian or North Korean or Tamil or any language you don’t know. It’s impossible for the source of energy to use images you don’t have, or at least don’t have something of. It’s as if a Martian comes into a room with children’s blocks with A, B, C, D, E which are in English and he tries to convey a message. This is the way the source of energy goes. But the blocks, on the other hand, are always resisting it.

Delany would be another writer worth thinking about w/r/t convergences between SF and postwar poetry: he spends some time in The Motion of Light in Water on his early relationship to Auden and his poetry, and iirc Nova has shoutouts to the Bay poet Helen Adam and Spicer's sometime boyfriend Russell Fitzgerald, who apparently discussed Delany's use of Tarot elements while he was composing that novel.

(And, obviously, Delany's queer marriage to Marilyn Hacker is treated really extensively in Motion, where long sections of Delany's memoir take passages from Hacker's autobiographical poetry from the later 70s as their starting points.)

I also need to check out more Delany and Hacker, duh!
Dylan was rumored to use tarot in writing his 60s lyrics; think I read that at least some of The Man In The High Castle came from casting I Ching. Reminded of that while reading The Grapes of Wrath this week, as weather patterns and events began to provide guidance to everything else, on and off the page. It also made me think of Kim Stanley Robinson's early Western eco-themes, in xpost The Wild Shore, for instance.

Yeah, I still really need to read those Kim Stanley Robinson California novels (I need to read Robinson, period, actually).

none of you need to read that norman spinrad greenhouse summer book i finally finished. not great.

i actually started reading ready player one because it is my ten year old kid's favorite book and he really wanted me to read it. he's halfway through the new one by that dude.

That KSR California trilogy is so, so, so good.

that ukl,pkd connection is amazing. i had no idea

something faintly heartbreaking about a ten yo whose favorite book is that book. sorry scott. condolences.

Lord knows what shite I liked when I was ten, but I was ten for god's sake.

condolences thomp

What's the deal with The Martian then? Someone just recommended it to me - admittedly based on very little, their first question was "do you read fiction?"

apparently this is a representative passage

http://i.imgur.com/XPWON5w.png

make your own mind up

Well obviously that is appalling. (Massive cringe at 'pirate ninja'.)

It must have something for not just richard and judy but the wall st journal and the ab club to be gushing over it tho.

Av club

Hack-a-day was raving about other other day. And I like what he did with the later revisions - fixing holes in his knowledge with user comments.

Also this:

https://xkcd.com/1536/

Comedy gold.

There was funny description of it on Spring ILB Rolling thread, I believe.

Ok you guilt tripped me enough to leave the comfort and safety of zing to do a search. Not enough to cut and paste the results tho, including one dismissive post from jordan right here just a month ago.

"something faintly heartbreaking about a ten yo whose favorite book is that book. sorry scott. condolences."

i dunno, i'm enjoying it. it's entertaining. seems like something a kid would love. i was probably reading encyclopedia brown books when i was ten. also about a nerd who solves mysteries.

Ok you guilt tripped me enough to leave the comfort and safety of zing to do a search.

Moorcock interview covering the standard bases but also about his new book and I thought this bit was worth highlighting (had seen it highlighted on John Coulthart's blog.

How does he feel about the triumph of Tolkienism and, subsequently, the political sword-and-sorcery epic Game of Thrones, in making fantasy arguably bigger than it has ever been?

“To me, it’s simple,” he says. “Fantasy became as bland as everything else in entertainment. To be a bestseller, you’ve got to rub the corners off. The more you can predict the emotional arc of a book, the more successful it will become.

“I do understand that Game of Thrones is different. It has its political dimensions; I’m very fond of the dwarf and I’m very pleased that George [R R Martin], who’s a good friend, has had such a huge success. But ultimately it’s a soap opera. In order to have success on that scale, you have to obey certain rules. I’ve had conversations with fantasy writers who are ambitious for bestseller status and I’ve had to ask them, ‘Yes, but do you want to have to write those sorts of books in order to get there?’”

Yeah good piece

Though Moorcock says he was mostly misquoted: From the most recent Ansible... http://news.ansible.uk/a337.html

Michael Moorcock's profile/interview (New Statesman, 24 July) had a subhead saying he 'revolutionised science fiction with symbolism, sex and psychoactive drugs. Now, at 75, he has invented another genre.' Also included was the mandatory MM quotation 'I think Tolkien was a crypto-fascist'. Mike has since issued a disclaimer: 'He was a nice bloke and it's a generous, well-meant, piece but I'm afraid I read it saying "no I didn't" and "I never said that" so many times that it was a relief to get to the last, more accurate, para. My fault, maybe, for talking too fast and modifying too frequently. I've never claimed the authority of being working class! I'm from the class most artists come from, the hated petite bourgeoisie, though I had a variety of relatives who didn't. I have spent half my life saying that Jerry Cornelius is not a "secret agent". Feel like I've just taken a turn on the same old roundabout. But I'll do a lot for four good pork pies. / Oh, and I absolutely LOVE hobbits. I'm just looking for the best recipe.' (www.multiverse.org, 24 July)

Sorry I'm going to be a bit basic here -- I've been a comic book reader all my life, but I've never really been into scifi/fantasy in *book book* form, save the odd Dragonlance novel I picked up as a teenager. I read the first Game of Thrones a few years ago but didn't love it enogh to read the rest (they are long!) and am happy to settle for the TV show. Tried China Mieville and find him an apalling sentence writer.

Anyway, I picked up a Star Trek novel, Imzadi, while on a lazy holiday last month and absolutely *loved* it. Obvs it's not very representative of sci-fi at large, in style or quality, but I *really* appreciated its trashy-ripping-yarn-ness after a decade plus of mostly just reading literary fiction - and was wondering where to go next. The classics, I guess -- what about Dune -- is Dune actually good? I worry it's just Casteneda with a narrative backbeat, but the sentences are better than I thought they'd be.

(Also I read The Magicians, which was pretty mediocre, but did whet my appetite to read something similar but better.)

Tried China Mieville and find him an apalling sentence writer

otm

dune is not really a ripping yarn