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

Only other KSR I've read is Aurora, which was great, guess I'll add all these others to the long-term list. (I bought the collected Mars trilogy but I'm not going to get straight into it.)

Re: Chinese SF authors again. I was listening to some interviews with them recently and one guy referenced the film K-Pax in among all these SF classics!

Hope I'm getting past all Edgar Alan Poe's worst stuff. There was more hoax stories about the most boring stuff like cross atlantic balloon travel and criminals creating gold. There's a story about mesmerism which has interesting concepts but I could barely read most of these few, they were so technical and dry.
Currently getting back into the better stuff, a humorous story about Scheherazade and Sinbad. I'm starting to get why people think Poe is unfunny but I'll always like his description "Mr. Crab first opened his eyes, and then his mouth, to quite a remarkable extent; causing his personal appearance to resemble that of a highly-agitated elderly duck in the act of quacking".

Really liked a Tanith Lee piece about a world weary soldier regretting a lifetime of killing.

https://www.tor.com/2018/03/31/2018-hugo-award-finalists-announced/

novella, novelette, and short story nominations almost 100% women! actually, all women and one trans writer. wow. talk about the future of SF! that is so huge.

I sometimes think much more women write speculative fiction than men but the amount of nominated women could also be their increased participation after the gamergate style attacks on the Hugos. My more cynical side thinks the nominations have a lot to do with who is coolest on twitter.

I recently ordered a Martha Wells (she got two nominations) book in the Raksura series, I hope it's good. Sword and Sorcery with flying lizard people sounds cool.

Hard for writers or any arts/media pros to be outstandingly cool on twitter, when they mainly present themselves as pros---it's usually "here's a link" and/or promotional like millions of other tweets. Although what I see from Nalo Hopkinson is almost always uniquely enticing food porn I mean pix. She's not presenting herself as a great chef or gourmet or even foodie, just "Hey lookit this package of bread somebody gave me at the campground!"

While persistently reminding me, in effect, that I still mean to read her Brown Girl In The Ring, so promotional enough.

Good book eh?

I meant cool in a social justice/cultivator of the genre way.

shit

i read the dark forest and it's basically an entire novel about the logistics of preparing for an alien invasion. its narrative propulsion comprises, effectively, waiting. the content really seems to be modelling the situation and then seeing how it plays out and so extends where the 3BP tailed off. but about halfway through i started finding this compelling, though this may have been a literary form of stockholm syndrome. for those who've read it, I quite enjoyed all the wallfacer/wallbreaker stuff. And I'm a sucker for the idea of starting an entire epochal science fiction series and maintaining a clear link of provenance to the cultural revolution.

the obvious influence only occurred to me when it's explicitly mentioned in the text, which is Asimov's Foundation stuff. one of the characters gives a kindly-faced Osama bin-Laden proxy a copy in a cave :/

I guess i will read the third this weekend, as I've got a long flight.

While there's probably no influence on the DF trilogy, Zebrowski & Pellegrino forward the same resolution to the Fermi paradox in The Killing Star, just with plausible (to current knowledge) physics.

I tried The Killing Star recently, but found the mind-boggling physics far more believable than the characters, and gave up.

Ho-ho, but what if this is a Baaad sign?

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-space-blackholes/at-the-center-of-our-galaxy-theres-a-black-hole-party-idUSKCN1HC2JS?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=Social

My understanding is, not really. We can place an upper bound on how often black holes collide in the entire universe from results of the LIGO experiment, and when they do, only weak gravity waves escape. There's probably a similar number of white dwarfs circling the drain, and when they collide in a type Ia supernova, we probably won't even notice in visible light given the heavy dust/gas clouds in the galactic plane.

Apparently there is a bbc adaptation of china mieville's the city and the city showing on the bbc right now. I'm not too fussed especially given average reviews of the first ep but might be of interest to someone here.

Wonder if the narrator sounds like Triumph The Insult Comic Dog Puppet, as he came across at times in the book (accent based on that of Triumph creator Robert Smigel's elderly East Euro etc. immigrant relatives). A fairly uneven book, but the best parts were imaginative and carefully worked out, wouldn't mind seeing this (being vulnerable to offbeat procedurals of Dick, Chabon, Scalzi to a lesser extent, hell the library's got Asimov's Robots and Murder yesss)

I liked the first episode! One interesting stylistic choice is that all the street signs and such are in English, but with a bunch of random accents added to make it look Hungarian-esque.

Take away the setting though and you just have a bunch of noir clichés, in the book as in the series. I liked the sprawling stream of ideas of Perdido Street Station much better.

B-but you can't take away the setting, that's the main character! Buried city is strong contender. Haven't read the other one so can't compare, but if stream of ideas will check.

I spent a ridiculous amount of time making this for Twitter, so I'm going to inflict it all on you as well.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Daj0mN8VMAE0kpW.jpg

Lol

Ha! That just came up on my feed

That or Lovecraft interrogation pieces or mythos stories "improved" with all the shite from the KingSpielbergAbramsWhedonTarantinoSorkin age.

However, I do sympathize with writers who are just writing in the spirit of the big Weird Tales writers and some people coming to this stuff fresh will be expecting it to be purposefully weird all the time.

Currently reading Karin Tidbeck, who was championed by the Vandermeers, Le Guin, Mieville, Liz Hand and more. She was in the Ann Vandermeer version of Weird Tales and her stories are pretty weird and unreal in a non-classic way, very gross and uses Scandinavian folklore and I'm not sure when she's making up her own legends.

recently read the city (pretty low-key), the stars my destination (pretty breathless), and ice (i can see christopher priest's birthplace from here)

all were worthwhile, probably enjoyed the bester the . . . best

Thanks for the tip on Karen tidbeck- gonna check her out.

I still haven't finished the last story, I don't think her collection lives up to all the hype, but it gets much better as it goes on and it's definitely good.

I shelled out a bit too much for the original Cheeky Frawg version not realizing that it wouldn't be that long before the Vintage version would come out (it came in febuary). Vintage also brought out her novel recently.

She's definitely one to watch.

as an aside, the start of this twitter thread reads a lot like some weird fiction thing

I saw this on an OS map and couldn't not investigate. A place of worship symbol in the middle of bloody nowhere on the edge of a wood. It was a foggy, atmospheric day up on the North Downs, so I decided to walk three sides of a square through the wood to reach it. pic.twitter.com/R47CTs9Mg2

— gawanmac (@gawanmac) April 13, 2018

Lol

(Some lovely photos)

wd be ‘five sides of a square’ surely

I ordered the second of the liu novels. i am weak.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DaIaQ56XkAEY27G.jpg:large

Chris Clarke @chrisgclarke1
Apr 6
Happy 101st birthday to the great Leonora Carrington, born April 6, 1917. Looking forward to reading the two new volumes of her work that are waiting for me when we get back stateside, courtesy of @DorothyProject and @nyrbclassics.

John Crowley on his newest book Ka. He talks about crows, utopias and his fondness for Paul Park.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSWZ1lakcNY

I still haven't read his work but I enjoyed washing dishes to this.

I ordered the second of the liu novels. i am weak.

Maybe this is kind of/is and is not where Mieville got the idea for The City and The City (borders not borders that is, not all street signs in English as noted above):

Then I glanced at a street sign, and I knew. I had unknowingly crossed the Röstigraben, the amusing term for the invisible line separating German- and French-speaking Switzerland.

http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180325-switzerlands-invisible-linguistic-borders

Still enjoying that show btw. Though I do have that feeling I get so often watching literary adaptations, of having a checklist in my head and crossing off what they've kept from the original. Pedantry not the best attitude to engage with anything.

My goodreads review of Aliya Whiteley's The Beauty-

A fungal infection that kills off all women gives birth to a new type of women. I really liked this, I liked standing around with a bunch of slightly hippie-ish men in the countryside (probably wearing bright waterproof jackets) contemplating these new women.
Near future science fiction with a lot of body horror and a bit of body wonder.

My one criticism is how Nate's fear of beauty seems to come entirely from his mother's feelings of inadequacy in the face of her glossy magazines. I know that children can form strange fears around their parents reactions to things but this just didnt seem like enough of an explanation for a general fear of beauty.

Le Fanu's "Squire Toby's Will" is really good. Everything and everyone is so worn out and I wish I could speak convincingly in the same rough manner as these people. Le Fanu always seems so fresh to me.

Hodgson's "Voice In The Night" is good too.

https://denniscooperblog.com/the-neo-decadents-present-drowning-in-beauty-a-neo-decadence-day/

quite a bunch of people from Ligotti forum in this anthology, so I'm very interested. Not all of it unrealistic stories but they are all writers who have written in that area I think.

Also from Snuggly Books
Decadence and Symbolism: A Showcase Anthology, edited by Brian Stableford. – Release date: May 2018

Am reading Planetfall by Emma Newman, so far so Prometheus (religious scientists go in search of their maker, find mysterious city...), narrator is pretty annoying, it turns out (spoiler!) she is a pathological hoarder. Interesting choice.

Sisyphean by Dempow Torishima. It's pretty congested and stylistically immature, and I doubt I'll finish it, but it's playing in a japanese SF space I don't know much about so I'll probably persist for a bit longer than i would otherwise. Also picked up some Japanese titanic mecha SF (United States of Japan), which I might give a shot as well.

Bum. I just got Sisyphean after reading a rave review, but that does not sound promising.

i’m interested to hear what you think - i’ve only just started so may find i settle in. immediate observation is that his method of writing with the assumption the reader is from that world and time is not as clever as he thinks it is. it makes the tone and descriptions stiff and arch.

from that interview it sounds like translation is likely to miss a *lot* so i guess that may also be an issue.

i gotta say, it sounds like exactly my sort of thing

liu is definitely waiting until i finish reading hilary mantel's french revolution novel

i just read three sentences excerpted somewhere and my desire to read it dropped by about nine-tenths

Just wrote reviews of six new books that fit with this thread:

The Redwood Revenger, Book One, by Johannes Johns
Noir by Christopher Moore
Bandwidth (An Analog Novel, Book 1) by Eliot Peper
The Hazel Wood, by Melissa Albert
Bone Music (The Burning Girl Series, Book 1), by Christopher Rice
Children of Blood and Bone (Legacy of Orïsha #1), by Tomi Adeyemi

http://fastnbulbous.com/first-quarter-book-review-roundup-2018/

I think I’ve been to the eight-foot-wide, four-stories-tall jook house described in Noir, though I hope my dish did not include snake venom. Your real-life impressions of this place, please!

It was quite a while ago, 1996. I sat at a counter on a stool with a bunch of old Chinese men and had a bowl for lunch, and was unceremoniously hurried along when finished. I inhaled it because I was hungry from walking all over San Francisco that day up and down hills, but can't remember details about the food other than it was delicious.

Was trying to imagine being in a space of those dimensions, also w other people and food, but mainly being there at all---guess you got used to it?