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

Robert Charles Wilson's Spin is pretty good

still making my way through Ramsey Campbell - The Darkest Part of the Woods. Really great, my first thing by him, I'm taking my time and savoring it.

At his best he's great, I love "The Brood" and "The Fit". There's a fairly clear consensus that his short stories are better but I haven't read any of his novels yet.

Never read a bad Ramsey Campbell story but there's quite a lot that didn't do much for me.

okay, the other bag of books i got from the sale. i actually got myself nice barely-read U.K. Mandarin paperbacks of the Gormenghast trilogy which i've never read. they are nice. will read!

robert j. sawyer - rollback, calculating god

leigh brackett - alpha centauri or die!, the nemesis from terra, the coming of the terrans

neal asher - gridlinked

zenna anderson - the anything box, holding wonder, the people: no different flesh, pilgrimage

roger zelazny - the last defender of camelot, isle of the dead

ace double: john rackham - treasure of tau ceti/k.m. o'donnell - final war and other fantasies

neal stephenson - snow crash

robert silverberg - the alien years

allen steele - lunar descent

jack williamson - seetee ship/seetee shock

ace double - lan wright - the pictures of pavanne/ellen wobig - the youth monopoly

nancy kress - yesterday's kin

Re Scott's haul pt 1:

greg bear - quantico : this is superior snear-future scf-gi crime/technothriller stuff: not winning any awards for prose (not that it's bad, just functional), but it does its thing with inventiveness and is pretty clever

robert charles wilson - spin, axis : these are excellent

jack mcdevitt - chindi, omega : these have some nice ideas, but dodgy prose, and dangers of space/intriguing alien life repeatedly undermined by inadvertent bathos

stephen baxter - moonseed : probably one of his better non-series books

have you ever heard of those zenna henderson books? i VERY MISTAKENLY wrote "Anderson" above. they look so cool. very much of their time. they've probably been in that store for years and i just never noticed them.

https://www.blackgate.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/The-People-No-Different-Flesh-Zenna-Henderson.jpg

http://ofearna.us/books/henderson/anything.jpg

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51ODVReKSiL._SX329_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

http://www.adherents.com/lit/images/aut_Hendeson_AboutAuthors.jpg

i haven't even read them and i already want to find the hardcovers...

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51q1tQlCJpL.jpg

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51zQUsn-e0L.jpg

Hmm. SF Encyclopedia gives her as a recommendation. plus we have a winner for least flattering author photo ever.

they made one of her People stories into a t.v. movie with william shatner that i vaguely remember.

list from January:

https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/5/13811144/sci-fi-fantasy-book-recommendations-2017

Those Zenna Henderson stories show up in some classy anthologies. Have yet to read one though.

hmm some interesting stuff there. along w the usual space opera and quest fantasy dross

xp

yeah, that list is a mixed bag.

is there one person making all the money with cover art like this or do people just rip off this style a lot.

https://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/w3bejbkhFL3x7SzeM_9qA-a1x24=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/7709363/C0DanoDWIAAlaDe.jpg

haha yeah so many shitty giant font designs, kind of a bummer

no i mean the art. it might just be one person.

okay, its a john harris thing. i didn't know his name. he did the cover for ender's game even. he's been around the block.

hmm some interesting stuff there. along w the usual space opera and quest fantasy dross

xp

anyway, people really dig his current style these days. i see it on a ton of books.

http://scalzi.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/cropped-ao-john-harris-hi-res-cover1.jpg

So many Tor jack Vance paperbacks with those generic fuckin spaceships on them

http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/rip-richard-dalby-1949-2017.html

Future people gotsta have some way to flee the Dying Earth, Jon not Jon

were you asking for which ones I thought were interesting or which ones I thought were generic dross

Tell us both.

Interesting

"Interesting" pile:
The Wanderers by Meg Howrey
New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson
Autonomous by Annalee Newitz

I'm not gonna spend any energy slagging off stuff I haven't read but generally anything involving a "special" protagonist resolving some sort of epic conflict tends to bore me.

I do wish Ted Chiang and Charles Yu were more prolific. So many of my favorite recent-ish authors publish so little. Pelevin cranks 'em out at least, but I have to wait around for translations.

standin' on the corner. some pelevin in your hand. just waiting for your man.

haha

he's v underrated imo

"Pelevin's prose is usually devoid of dialogue between the author and the reader, whether through plot, character development, literary form or narrative language. This corresponds to his philosophy (both stated[where?] and unstated) that, for the most part, it is the reader who infuses the text with meaning."

no way, buddy, that's your job, i already have a job.

he's probably too smart for me.

"Pelevin's prose is usually devoid of dialogue between the author and the reader

what does this even mean

I don't think he's "difficult" at all, not compared to, say, Cordwainer Smith or Bolano or idk Alasdair Gray. His actual prose is p simple, even though the plots are often hallucinatory or metaphysical or satirical. It's very Russian. Better than Bulgakov.

he is no longer on speaking terms with us.

i think that's what it means.

yeah, on the other hand, if i can read van vogt, i can read anybody.

I think it's just kind of a bitchy way to say "he's a Buddhist"

xp

i'm really used to reading the first 20 pages of an SF novel and not knowing what the hell is going on or what the hell people are talking about. that's a barrier to entry! its also why people don't like opera. do you guys study the maps at the beginning of SF books? i glance at them. i just figure yeah you're somewhere. you'll go somewhere else. i'll just ride in the back.

knowing yr tastes scott I'm not sure what you would make of him. I mean, he's definitely not in the American pulp tradition, and he's not really in the inscrutable/highbrow eastern european sf tradition (Strugatsky Bros, Lem etc.) either. But there are enough elements of the fantastic in his books - whether its werewolves or vampires or kafka-esque transformations or bee-worshipping cults or time travel - that he often seems to get slotted into the "speculative fiction" ghetto over here. Too weird/out there for the NYT Book Review crowd (who seem to prefer that way less interesting asshole Vladimir Sorkin) altho this piece is p good: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/books/review/Schillinger-t.html

Think that quote maybe means he is not "in dialogue" with the long-standing, long-running arguments/disputes/discussions so beloved by the sf community.

"In her guileful storytelling, the supervixen enfolds the precepts of Confucianism, Buddhism and Sikhism, along with the theories of Wittgen­stein, William of Occam, Freud, Foucault and, especially, Berkeley. (A Hu-Li’s lover’s idea of pillow talk: “Everything only exists by virtue of perception.”) While writing her own Internet pornography ad for whores.ru, A Hu-Li teasingly draws from the fairy tales of Aksakov, the poetry of Blok, the writings of Nabokov. To spice up a casual encounter, she daydreams of Suetonius — who inspires one of her especially sadistic group sex sessions."

This is definitely the right kind of thing for SOMEONE. maybe not me though.

Sounds pretty cool. Why is Sorkin an asshole? (I don't know who he is)

I'm not gonna spend any energy slagging off stuff I haven't read but generally anything involving a "special" protagonist resolving some sort of epic conflict tends to bore me.

― Οὖτις, Friday, 5 May 2017 19:27

Yeah these blurbs about a special person rising up to make things right sound awful but I try to ignore them because they can be as misleading as the cover art.

Probably part of the reason Princess Mononoke is a bit overrated.

This is definitely the right kind of thing for SOMEONE. maybe not me though.

haha that review does make it sound like a tiresome game of "spot the reference" but idk it didn't really come off that way to me. (That being said, I would rate the werewolf book as second tier Pelevin, nonetheless it seems like the one that got the biggest publicity push in the US)

Been so long since I read any of those finds but do recall Liverpudlian Ramsey Campbell's The Face That Must Die mainly for the perp twitching his way through grey Liverpool department stores all playing Beatles, and having anxiety attacks in the phone booth amid fogbound thunder and lightning (v. relatable).

Going back much, much, much further, came across Zenna Henderson People stories in science fiction mags (wanna say Amazing; she wasn't man enough for Analog* or cool enough for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction): pretty sure I read something that went pretty much like this: an endless fogbound bus ride, with various smells and coughing and baby cries and engine sounds all part of the drone, as she (always imagined as looking like that portrait of the author, though don't think I've seen it before) touches herself through her raincoat in the dark---"Tell yourself, It's only to help me sleep"(exact quote lodging in my middle school mind)---all part of the price paid and contrast with the lights of Revelation, for you are not alone. You are not a psi power witchy freak, never quite managing to keep it all hid.
*Although come to think of it I can imagine Dianetics-era John Campbell digging this

Also a Robert Charles Wilson novel about a Moral Majority etc utopia/dystopia, often on horseback (okay but got tired of the saddle), and a very good shorter one about an alt-u where the Civil War as we semi-know it never took place, but lots of over-the-border conflicts and all kinds of effects of sustained tensions, to put it mildly.

anyway, people really dig his current style these days. i see it on a ton of books.

I'm seeing some Paul Lehr influence in that one.