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

"Any hints on how the third compares?"

the first is best by far but if you like that world/characters the 2nd and 3rd are entertaining enough.

But does anything happen in the third? Nothing does in the second!

yeah, stuff happens. more happens actually. it's more space opera-ish.

Discovering SF with LOTS of neologisms doesn't translate well to audiobook format: not being able to see the words on the page means you often have no idea what the funky made-up words even are, let alone what their derivation might be.

Just started reading The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016, so far really good. John Joseph Adams (who does the foreword) is the series editor, Karen Joy Fowler (intro) is guest editor:

Foreword ix
Introduction xvi
sofia samatar. Meet Me in Iram 1
from Meet Me in Iram/Those Are Pearls

kelly link. The Game of Smash and Recovery 10
from Strange Horizons

adam johnson. Interesting Facts 25
from Harper’s Magazine

catherynne m. valente. Planet Lion 46
from Uncanny Magazine

kij johnson. The Apartment Dweller’s Bestiary 63
from Clarkesworld Magazine

s. l. huang. By Degrees and Dilatory Time 75
from Strange Horizons

liz ziemska. The Mushroom Queen 87
from Tin House

dexter palmer. The Daydreamer by Proxy 101
from The Bestiary

rachel swirsky. Tea Time 107
from Lightspeed Magazine

julian mortimer smith. Headshot 122
from Terraform

salman rushdie. The Duniazát 127
from The New Yorker

nick wolven. No Placeholder for You, My Love 137
from Asimov’s Science Fiction

maria dahvana headley. The Thirteen Mercies 158
from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

dale bailey. Lightning Jack’s Last Ride 174
from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

will kaufman. Things You Can Buy for a Penny 196
from Lightspeed Magazine

charlie jane anders. Rat Catcher’s Yellows 207
from Press Start to Play

sam j. miller. The Heat of Us: Notes Toward an Oral History 219
from Uncanny Magazine

seth dickinson. Three Bodies at Mitanni 234
from Analog Science Fiction and Fact

vandana singh. Ambiguity Machines: An Examination 254
from Tor.com

ted chiang. The Great Silence 273
from e-flux journal

Contributors’ Notes 279
Notable Science Fiction and Notable Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories of 2015 291

Interesting. Have see that on the shelf at the library but so far resisted borrowing.

really dig *Up The Walls Of The World* by James Tiptree. it's a swirling crystal ship of a book. she leaves so much up to the imagination as far as the non-earth stuff goes and everyone who reads the book is going to have a completely different interpretation of what things might look like.

finished my second shakey recommendation and agree that 'downward to the earth' is very good and that the final revelation is indeed not a surprise (although maybe it was moreso when he wrote it?). naming that character kurtz is heavy-handed though.

liked this one better than my other shakey recommendation, 'jem'.

the silverberg is wonderfully written and helps salvage 1970 from the brutality of 'tau zero'

Tau zero is all-time fuiud

Fuiud? Is that good or bad?

I read that and, I think, Forever War, back to back and they were very similar.

Ted Chiang anthology currently 1.29 of your English pounds on Amazon UK btw

Have always avoided Poul Anderson because of his rightwingness

Wish there were more fans of him here so I could create a thread called Poll Anderson: the Poul Anderson Poll.

Heard he was pretty homophobic but he seems interesting because Moorcock was insistent that Broken Sword was like Lord Of The Rings but better and Anderson was said to have brought in some aspects of realism into fantasy (he complained that other writers treat horses as if they were motorbikes) and a lot of his fantasy books do sound cool.

Another right wing arsehole eh, oh well. I wasn't planning on reading anything else by him but tau zero is a great piece of bonkers hard sf *turned up to eleven*, when by the end (spoiler alert) they're just tooling around in null space at infinity kph waiting for the next universe to be born i wanted to smoke what he was smoking. Wondered if there was a slight nod to it at the end of ksr's aurora.

In other news, John Crowley's Little, Big: holy shit so outta here.

lol what does that mean?

I bumped the John Crowley thread with a less opaque post.

i didn't even know we had one. it's a wonderful book.

tau zero's plot is cool and i can only imagine it was better in the original short story but dear god the writing and the barely one-dimensional characters and the rugged protagonist taking charge and fucking all the ladies sequentially . . . it verges on parody

i was thinking about rereading little, big. i remember liking it but all i remember is barbarossa and magical unibrowed ppl

really dig *Up The Walls Of The World* by James Tiptree. it's a swirling crystal ship of a book. she leaves so much up to the imagination as far as the non-earth stuff goes and everyone who reads the book is going to have a completely different interpretation of what things might look like.

― scott seward Yeah she's one of the best. Some think better at short stories, but I'll take it all. Still need to get the collection Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.

huh never heard of tau zero before. glad you liked Downward to the Earth mookie! Yeah I didn't think the ending revelation was particularly surprising either, but I liked how it was handled. Silverbob was good with those transformative psychedelic experiences sequences (which also pop up in Son of Man and, my personal favorite, the World Inside)

I would bet money that ledge bought tau zero in fopp, because it's a staple there.

(Not much money)

huh never heard of tau zero before

I have fond memories of tau zero and his fantasy books. No memories of fucking in tau zero, so it may have improved in memory

You know what i mean

say no more

In the Pringle book, the entry for Tau Zero includes this quote from Barry Malzberg: "Tau Zero has long struck me as the only work published after 1955 or so that can elicit from me some of the same responses I had toward Science Fiction in my adolescence - a sense of timelessness, human eternity, and the order of the cosmos as reflected in the individual fate of every person who would try to measure himself against these qualities... The novel builds to an overpowering climax, yet has a decent sense of humility... Tau Zero suggested to me that it was not my own sense of wonder but that of the Science Fiction field itself that had flagged within the last twenty years." Makes me want to read it now!

Haha ok yeah i'm sold

You should keep in mind that it does indeed have all the aforementioned problems.

Really enjoyed The Dry Salvages, by Caitlín R. Kiernan, pessimistic hard sf along with some weird elements, which reminded me of Gateway and Carter Scholz's Gypsy.

Here is blog post she wrote about it: http://greygirlbeast.livejournal.com/739057.html

That sounds good. Never read her, somehow assumed she was a fantasy writer, think i am confusing her with cathrynn m valente.

..who i HAVE read, and liked on the sentence level, but whose stories overall did not come together fir me

Ok, i cannot type proper on ipad

I think she writes more dark fantasy than anything.

Enjoyed "Planet Lion", the Valente story in the anthology I recently mentioned upthread (The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016): hers is basically hard antiwar dystopian military SF, with poetic touches depending on/appropriate to POV, but all of her titles in my village library's online card catalog do look like they might be fantasy.

That sounds good. Never read her, somehow assumed she was a fantasy writer, think i am confusing her with cathrynn m valente.

That sounds good. Never read her, somehow assumed she was a fantasy writer, think i am confusing her with cathrynn m valente.

I want to read it! It looks hard to find, sadly--printed only in an OOP expensive Subterranean Press hardback. All her easily available stuff looks significantly less promising.

I think it is actually printed in two OOP expensive Subterranean Press hardbacks, one a standalone and one an anthology.

Is there any other genre than SF that has so much of its stuff published in really expensive/hard-to-get books from small presses? It's a bit self-defeating.

I mean, there are plenty of lit-fic small presses, but you can usually buy them easily and they don't try to gouge you. Sylph Editions possibly excepted.

Weird Fiction for sure. It's 85% on small presses and a lot of them are book as object fetishist publishers like Zagava/Ex Occidente, Egaeus Press, Centipede and Tartarus. Even most mainstream (by sensibility) horror and extreme horror is very expensive and in small print runs. But I could imagine collecting surrealist writing is even tougher.

MacMillan's got Kiernan and a bunch of others "starting at $2.99"---all ebooks in this ad, though prob have at lease some of 'em in other formats as well; seems to be the thing for a lot of F&SF publishers, judging by Amazon: http://view.mail.macmillan.com/?j=fe5c17767c650c797510&m=feee1c737d6c02&ls=fdc71576716401747712747567&l=fe5f15777d63047c7413&s=fe1d1674746c0d74721579&jb=ffcf14&ju=fe2711707267007a721370&r=0

I've downloaded a few cheapo ebooks via MyKindle to read on my laptop, but one reason for reading books is to get away from screens, so...

Ticked Madeleine l'engle's A Wrinkle in Time off the list. I'm not 12 any more but if I were I think I'd still be disappointed, it's very childish and pandering. Wasn't expecting the auld god fella to get dragged in either.

I see if I'd scrolled upthread I could have forewarned myself about the g man.

Now I'm debating whether to binge on the rest of John Crowley or savour it at a much slower pace.

Is L'Engle any worse than CS Lewis in that respect? I read A Wrinkle in Time in fifth grade and didn't feel beaten over the head by the Jesusisms, but maybe I'd feel differently if I revisited it today. I have this idea of L'Engle as a tolerant liberal Christian, mostly due to her association with the Trees Community (a '70s hippie cult / musical collective)

one of my favorite sff novels is The Book of the Dun Cow (and its follow-up, The Book of Sorrows) by the Lutheran pastor Walter Wangerin. he uses a standard 'talking farm animals band together to slay the cockatrice' narrative to work through his issues of crippling self-doubt as a minister. it's funny but kinda disturbing with all its metaphorical handwringing about cutting off your hand or poking out your eyes if they offend Christ. I can imagine being awed/traumatized by it if I read it as a kid. a religious sff thread might be interesting but I don't know if I should be the one to start it.

I like CS Lewis' space trilogy a lot (with some quibbles over theology here and there), never been able to make it through a L'Engle book. Maybe Lewis is just a better/weirder writer.