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

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

So I was reading on Ian SAles's blog about his experiences of self-publishing, during which he com;lains of hardly selling any copies of his recent collection of short stories, a collection I had never heard of despite being a regular reader of his blog. Anyway, I got it -- 'Dreams of the Space Age' -- and it's very good indeed, short stories that fit alongside his Apollo Quartet. Best was probably one about the astronaut on an alternative-universe manned Voyager mission who has been on his own for 40 years and is about the exit the Solar System.

I have that book, thought I might have mentioned, maybe not. Liked what I read, particularly the one about the boxer, which read like a Rod Serling plot line, but didn't get around to finishing.

Interesting to read his blog post though.

Yes, the boxer taking the historical place of Laika. He has a number of other stories that seem as though they would have fit the collection too, not sure why he didn't include them.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CrSIBOnWcAY-G7S.jpg:small

Raymond Chandler owning all science fiction writers and casually inventing Google in a letter from 1953

That's better than some of his gumshoe twaddle, like the self-conscious b-movie cliches filling the middle of "Red Wind" (despite classic opening, strong finish)

Wish he'd written a whole SF story like that, looks like a SJ Perelman superparody!

Didn't he published a fantasy story in Unknown?

I've said it before but after years of looking at Baen book covers I'm still baffled by how bad they look.

Wish he'd written a whole SF story like that, looks like a SJ Perelman superparody!

Baen publish the ugliest shit

These aren't even nearly the worst examples but these are ones I want to read.

Compare this
http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/ae/a8/9221124128a05adeb1c9a010.L.jpg
To this
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51GxVFyox-L.jpg
Hodgell was unhappy about the latter.

Or this Whelan coolness
http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/35/99/e6009330dca0520524316010.L.jpg
To this boring thing
http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/b8/55/bb848bacd7a0bdaa5bc28110.L.jpg

And this wildly inappropriate one, though inguess she does pook cold
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/d4/fa/65/d4fa65812bdd5213f9dad9b84592f3ac.jpg

I guess she does look cold, i meant to type

looooool

Was feeling super smug about getting an advance copy of the final book in the Dave Hutchinson 'Europe' trilogy, but smugness faded when i found i had accidentally been given book two with the wrong cover on instead. :(

xpost one way street mentioned Kiernan's work "floating in and out of print"--here's a big new collection, though as always with Subterranean, I'll risk waiting for a nice-price not-too-used copy of the trade edition"

Announcing DEAR SWEET FILTHY WORLD by Caitlin R. Kiernan
We're pleased to announce Caitlin R. Kiernan's next major collection of stories, Dear Sweet Filthy World. As you'll see, even Caitlin's most ardent fans likely won't have read most of the nearly thirty stories in this collection.

Remember, the signed limited edition includes an extra volume (likely hardcover), The Aubergine Alphabet, available nowhere else.

About the Book:

What exactly is the difference between a love letter and a suicide note? Is there really any difference at all? These might be the questions posed by Dear Sweet Filthy World, Caitlín R. Kiernan's fourteenth collection of short fiction, comprised of twenty-eight uncollected and impossible-to-find stories.

Treading the grim places where desire and destruction, longing and horror intersect, the author rises once again to meet the high expectations she set with such celebrated collections as Tales of Pain and Wonder, To Charles Fort, With Love, and the World Fantasy Award-winning The Ape's Wife and Other Stories. In these pages you'll meet a dragon's lover, a drowned vampire cursed always to ride the tides, a wardrobe that grants wishes, and a lunatic artist's marriage of the Black Dahlia and the Beast of Gévaudan. You'll visit a ruined post-industrial Faerie, travel back to tropical Paleozoic seas and ahead to the far-flung future, and you'll meet a desperate writer forced to sell her memories for new ideas. Here are twenty-eight tales of apocalypse and rebirth, of miraculous transformation and utter annihilation. Here is the place where professing your undying devotion might be precisely the same thing as signing your own death warrant-or worse.

The stories in Dear Sweet Filthy World were first published in the subscription-only Sirenia Digest, run by Caitlín for her most devoted readers. This publication marks the first availability to the general public for most of these rare tales.

Limited: 600 signed numbered copies, bound in leather, with the bonus volume, The Aubergine Alphabet: $60

Trade: Fully cloth bound hardcover edition: $40

Table of Contents:

Werewolf Smile
Vicaria Draconis
Paleozoic Annunciation
Charcloth, Firesteel, and Flint
Shipwrecks Above
The Dissevered Hearts
Exuvium
Drawing from Life
The Eighth Veil
Three Months, Three Scenes, With Snow
Workprint
Tempest Witch
Fairy Tale of the Maritime
- 30 -
The Carnival is Dead and Gone
Scylla for Dummies
Figurehead
Down to Gehenna
The Granting Cabinet
Evensong
Latitude 41°21'45.89"N, Longitude 71°29'0.62"W
Another Tale of two Cities
Blast the Human Flower
Cammufare
Here Is No Why
Hauplatte/Gegenplatte
Sanderlings
Interstate Love Song (Murder Ballad No. 8)

O damn, just noticed the ltd. ed. incl. a volume "available nowhere else"---sweeet temptation---

hey, they found The Terror

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/12/hms-terror-wreck-found-arctic-nearly-170-years-northwest-passage-attempt

Vicaria Draconis
Paleozoic Annunciation
Charcloth, Firesteel, and Flint
Shipwrecks Above
The Dissevered Hearts
Exuvium
The Granting Cabinet
Blast the Human Flower

Kiernan titles very much in character

Thanks for the reference, dow; that collection sounds intriguing, though I'm probably going to have to wait to happen upon a library copy.

Kiernan has been blocking people on facebook who say negative things about Hillary Clinton.

Now reading Ann and Jeff Vandermeer's The Big Book of Science Fiction(info linked upthread). So far, starting w Wells' "The Star"(1897)", most of the stories deal with terrified reactions to the impersonally cataclysmic, the cosmic, in that sense: planet's gotta sideswipe your planet, oops sorry (sucks for you, but Martian astronomers are impressed by how well the Earth fares, in Wells' story). Martians need some of your water, somebody else needs your Sun (zooming by on their own cooled-down dark star, which is so far gone it's their home, after they tried to keep the homefires burning by feeding it every planet in their system, incl. their own world, so now they gotta reach out, in Edmond Hamilton's "The Star Stealers").
Mechanical, self-reproducing bunnies gotta infest Yourtown so their inventor can get the building etc. permits he needs, ccs business is business, and he's American, in a German story (he's broken with his greedy German employers). That's Karl Hans Stobel's "The Triumph of Mechanics" (seen and raised by Miguel de Unamuno's "Mechanopolis", where human presence is merely the duly noted "invasion" of a rando straggler; how quaint),
One group of very reasonable humans just kinda naturally moves in and over another, cornier group of humans in Yefim Zozulya's "The Doom of Principal City", which I'm tempted to say is a mock opera in a funhouse mirror, but it doesn't even distort that much of the charred dark carnival of all sociopolitical upheaval, esp. early 20th to early 21rst Cent. But presumptive, invasive males from Earth get much more than expected on a matriarchal world, in "The Conquest of Gola", a really up-front, fuck-off feminist story by Leslie F. Jones, really startling in the pulp context of Wonder Stories, 1931. Its no-nonsense style is refreshing vs. the clunky genre tread of "The Star Stealers" and Clare Winger Harris's award-winning "The Fate of the Poseidonia."
W.E.B. Du Bois's "The Comet" builds on the eerie, human-cosmic scale, austere grandeur of Wells' "The Star", as the Last Man and Last Woman find each other: he's black and she's white, and it's 1920. The lucid, well-timed surety of gothic urban revelations=truly poetic prose.
Now I'm reading Stanley Weinbaum's "The Martian Odyssey", in which the aliens are cute and earnestly helpful, cos we're all in this together (revelatory in pulp genre terms up to that point, vs. xenophobic and other dread of the Other etc.)
Oh yeah, and there's a dazzling excerpt from Jarry's Dr Faustroll. Up ahead: Borges, Ocampo, PKD, Tiptree, Cordwainer, Simak, many many many more (hope there's not too much more space opera per se).

(Some of these translations, incl. new ones, meant to be more accurate, seem a little stiff, a little twitchy, a little blurry here and there, but overall not too bad.)

You are reading that thing in order from beginning to end? The paper copy? More power to you! I am looking upon it as a reference work to be dipped into when needed. I read one story in my ebook copy and then went back to read the neglected copy of the gateway omnibus I bought by the author.

I don't know how far I'll get without having to take a break (especially if somebody else places a library hold between re-checks) and the huge floppy trade paper original is a strong argument for ebooks.

I can see how Weinbaum's "A Martian Odyssey" shook up the star trope troopers back in the day. The narrator--rescued by and telling a ripping yarn to his boys, spoiling the usual hard-breathing "suspense"---had an ongoing partnership of adaptation on the fly with his cute alien colleague of happenstance (if that's the true circumstance; I'm still reading)--adaptation to each other as well as the Martian outback (Critter Friday seems a stranger here himself). Linguistics, semiotics, biology, kinesiology, some other stuff: all necessarily closely observed, in a handy, working man's way, never into the weeds (no weeds).
They encounter something like crystalline floating tennis balls: break into one, get nothing but a bad smell. They follow gradually more continuous piles and then pyramids, made of silica bricks--worn down, which means they're very, very old, even in this thin atmosphere. The pyramids gradually get bigger--and then they finally come upon the latest one, being finished by its maker.
"The beast was silica! There must have been pure silicon in the sand, and it lived on that...Anyhow, there the thing was, alive and yet not alive, moving every ten minutes, and then only to remove a brick. Those bricks are its waste matter...and it builds itself in, and when it is covered, it moves to a fresh place to start over. No wonder it creaked! A living creature half a million years old!"
"But he reproduces, or tries to. Before the third brick came out, there was a little rustle and out popped a whole stream of those little crystal balls. They're his spores, or eggs, or seeds...I think the crystal shell of silica is no more than a protective covering, like an eggshell, and the active principal is the smell inside. It's some sort of gas that attracts silicon, and if the shell is broken near a supply of that element, some reaction starts that ultimately develops into a beast like that one."

"You should try! exclaimed the little Frenchman. "We must break one to see!"
"Yeah? Well I did. I smashed a couple against the sand. Would you like to come back in about ten thousand years to see if I planted some pyramid monsters? You'd most likely be able to tell by that time!" Jarvis paused and took a deep breath. "Lord! That queer creature! Do you picture it? Blind, deaf, nerveless, brainless---just a mechanism, and yet---immortal! Bound to go on making bricks, building pyramids, as long as silicon and oxygen exist, and even afterwards it'll just stop. it won't be dead. If the accidents of a million years bring its food again, there it'll be, ready to run again, while brains and civilizations are part of the past--yet I met a stranger one!"

That would the dream beast, for one stranger one: it appears in the guise of your most fervent desire (long before those stories by Bradbury and Lem, for instance).

Thanks for the tip. I've never read any weinbaum. Just downloaded a best-of.

(Past the aliens mentioned, some others really are Other as hell, though beyond xenophobia, or anything but "omg, wtf!?") Yeah, I def wanna read more of his, though says in the intro (based on entry in Science Fiction Encyclopedia Online, that the sequel to this particular story was "less successful"; dunno if that mainly means less popular, considered a relative letdown then, or if the Encyclopedist considers it not as good now. But W. wrote several more adventures of intense speculation before dying young in '35, and posthumous publications continued for at least the next 15 years.

As presented by tour guide Borges, the 11th volume of The Encyclopedia of Tlon, generated by worker bee worldbuilders, super-science fictionists, funded by a radical reactionary, who pledged all his possessions, incl. his slaves---slaveowners seeded several institutions of higher learning that endure to this day, after all---is much more attractive and repellent, much more of a fabulous idealist freak show than the antiquarian reactionary coterie utopia of the preceding selection, A. Merritt's (nevertheless entertaining)"The Last Poet and The Robots."
When the *forty* volumes are discovered or "discovered," with some of the less convenient features of the orig. Vol.11 smoothed over, it proves hugely popular. "Almost immediately, reality 'caved in.' The truth is, it wanted to cave in. Ten years ago, any symmetry, any system with an appearance of order---dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism--could spellbind and hypnotize mankind." Yadda-yadda, makes a lot of good points, and this way he gets to do his own worldbuilding while tsk-tsking its perilous appeal.

One example of Tlon's faithful pull on our(?) world: Tlon is built around time, more than space, or so its inhabitants mostly believe (the outre allure of materialism is gradually filtered in and normalized, to an extent), and the dominant language is built around verbs---"nouns" are "impersonal verbs, modified by monosyllabic prefixes or suffixes functioning as adverbs. For example...there is a verb which in English would be 'to moonate' or 'to enmoon.' 'The moon rose over the river' is...'Upward, behind the onstreaming, it mooned.'" Of course, as this world will have become the post-physical, the digital, "it journaled." "journalled"? Bastards!

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/one-of-the-earliest-science-fiction-books-was-written-in-the-1600s-by-a-duchess

so that's where Moore got it from

Did he reference her in one of his works?

Oof at that scientist society not allowing women for a few centuries after she attended.

"The Blazing World" in LOEG

yeah, they visit the Blazing World at the end of one of the text pieces, from memory

It appears in 3D in the Black Dossier

New Reynolds hardback out, Revenger. 50 pages in and it's like Revelation Space crossed with Treasure Island. Not an elephant in sight, which is good.

Reading hardbacks is a workout after my kobo mini.

Previous to that I read a couple more MRJames stories, the one with the haunted wardrobe and the one with the haunted curtains...

so that's where Moore got it from

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, September 20, 2016 3:09 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Did he reference her in one of his works?

Oof at that scientist society not allowing women for a few centuries after she attended.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Tuesday, September 20, 2016 3:18 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"The Blazing World" in LOEG

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, September 20, 2016 3:21 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, they visit the Blazing World at the end of one of the text pieces, from memory

― I hear from this arsehole again, he's going in the river (James Morrison)
I read the linked profile of Cavendish---great stuff, thanks---but who is Moore, whut is LOEG, which is text pieces etc.?

also Black Dossier?

Alan Moore, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Black Dossier:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_League_of_Extraordinary_Gentlemen:_Black_Dossier

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

Another one from xpost The Big Book of Science Fiction, following Simak's taut "Desertion", James Blish's "Surface Tension" is a longer, denser epochal tale of "pantrophy", the adaptation of species to alien environment, rather than terraforming (yo Kim Stanley Robinson). Lost explorers, a team of gifted, versatile scientists, of course, leave a modified genetic legacy and then some, on the mostly aquatic planet where they know they'll soon die. Generations/iterations of the same tiny human-descendant characters gradually become dominant in their universe under the sea, and, influenced by semi-deciphered, mysteriously indestructible texts (engraved plates) left by their creators, times their own human drives, natch, very eventually aspire to break on through to the other side of the sky (which is surface of the planet's ocean).
We get vivid, sometimes almost synesthetic layers of info-laden imagery, re lives under the sea, incl. periodic hibernation and its effects, also battles of humans and allies vs. predator rotifers, and beetle-browned problem-solving, the personal and group politics/relationships facilitating and resulting from all this, but psychological development, though carefully traced, does seem a bit simplified, a bit squeezed (and/or contrasted) by all the sophisticated, textured layers of hard science fiction (intro assures us that Blish's characters could be more "nuanced", and that, despite New Wave complaints, he could even get "avant garde"; I'd like to check some of that).
Between Simak and Blish is Ray Bradbury's "September 2005: The Martian", with pantrophy twisted and tortured and insatiably wished inside out.
Next: "Beyond Lies The Wub", PKD's first published story. Onward!

Simak's story introduces the use of pantrophy, that is.

I kept thinking "hibernation", but do the *characters* (just)think of it as "birth-rebirth", with memories of previous "generations" retained and accumulating, accruing, rather than (basically)the same guys waking up refreshed (albeit from a clearly arduous experience, which may well feel like death and birth)? Which would explain some of the simplified characterization, but still it's a bit tedious sometimes (in contrast, as I said).

Surface Tension is an incredible story, very vivid

"beetle-*browed* problem-solving", that is.

And yeah, it is incredible, no prob going back and re-reading passages during first read-through, parsing and marveling.