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

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).

I have a copy of Two Worlds And In Between on hold at the library. Any particular stories you recommend I start with?

"Onion" or "Andromeda among the Stones" would probably be the best introduction to her work. I like many of the early stories in part 1 of the collection (1993-1999), especially "Estate" and "Salmagundi", but I might not begin with them: Kiernan's work starts out by being very bleak and floridly written and gradually grows less florid.

What's that a lyric from? Two worlds and in between?

Ha xpost. Lucretia, my reflection...

Ha, I'd forgotten that that was a Sisters of Mercy lyric, but her early fiction is pretty steeped in 80s/90s goth signifiers.

http://greygirlbeast.livejournal.com/1151526.html

Yesterday, I received my comp copies of the new edition of A is for Alien, which has been published by PS Publishing's Drugstore Indian Press imprint. It's a very handsome trade paperback, with a new cover by Richard Kirk. Note that the second edition has been expanded to include four stories not in the original, "The Steam Dancer (1896)," "Tidal Forces," "Galápagos," and "Hydrarguros." Each story is accompanied by a Vince Locke illustration. DIP will also be releasing new trade paperback editions of The Ammonite Violin & Others, To Charles Fort, With Love, and Tales of Pain and Wonder.

I finished two 2015 sf books recently.

Stephenson - Seveneves. Moon blows up, almost everyone dies. First two thirds are quite good. Final third tries to be connected -- I see how a lot of it was set up, how many things are a reflection of things that have happened before -- but it doesn't work. For starters, the final third is founded on current pop science bullshit readings of epigenetics and DNA manipulation, which gets around one paragraph in the first 2/3rds. Then there's the amount of time spent on describing tech that's mostly far-future fantasy. The first 2/3rds also spend a lot of time describing tech, but I found that more interesting since it was grounded in things that actually exist today.

Also it ends in a big action scene which Stephenson seems to have a thing for. Hated the one in Snow Crash and this one doesn't work either.

Novik - Uprooted. A wizard takes a teenage girl for 10 years, they fight the evil forest. I didn't expect so many YA tropes in a Nebula winner. The opening chapters spend a lot of space on how clumsy the main character is, but also how skilled at deadly magic. There's even a pointless Sorting Hat equivalent that doesn't work on the hero. Highlights are a musical magic system and a mage war battle scene. Low point is a city section around 2/3rds in that feels rushed, like half of it has been edited out.

Also, Uprooted has a nice propulsive narrative. A few times I thought I knew what the book would be doing for its "second act", then that resolved around 20 pages later and it went on to something more interesting.

Been a long time, but I thought Stephenson's The Diamond Agebecame struggle between cyberpunk-libertarian-skatr-gloss reflex and something more searching, call it a sense of artistic integrity: mixed results, but fairly engrossing. Was glad I read it.
Read Uprooted fairly soon after McKillip's Winter Rose, which is a tough act to follow, but Novik gets that the well-tymed build to rush of realization-imagery-sensation ("O shit!" x new clues already swirling), can't be blurred, out of character or rehashed, despite, as you say, "so many YA tropes", indeed. Propulsive, right, and a wider scope than Winter Rose, before bringing it all back home to thee forest.

Just checked and the Kiernan reissues out so far are A Is For Alien and Tales Of Pain And Wonder

http://www.pspublishing.co.uk/a-is-for-alien-trade-paperback-by-caitlin-r-kiernan-2623-p.asp

http://www.pspublishing.co.uk/tales-of-pain-and-wonder-trade-paperback-by-caitlin-r-kiernan-3962-p.asp