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

I bought loads of books again, not sure if it was a good idea.

3 romantic poetry anthologies (Penguin, Norton and a Dover one about German poets).
2 collections by Reggie Oliver (a recent-ish highly acclaimed writer of ghost stories)
2 collections by Quentin S Crisp (a weird fiction writer, note the "S" in the middle of his name)
A collection by Justin Isis
Jane by PF Jeffery
Dadaoism (an anthology of writers of the Chomu group)
2 Brendan Connell books (Life Of Polycrates and Miss Homicide Plays The Flute; I'm intrigued by all the praise, his work sounds bizzare)
Dark Domain by Grabinski
2 collections of Thomas Lovell Beddoes (a poet who CA Smith and Lovecraft greatly admired)
Strange Tale Of Panorama Island by Edogawa Ranpo
The Golem by Meyrink
North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud
Chateau D'Argol (Castle Of Argol) by Julien Gracq
Glass Coffin Girls by Paul Jessup
Kaiki: Uncanny Tales Of Japan 3
Against Nature by Huysmans
Portraits Of Ruin by Joseph Pulver
Gaki And Other Hungry Spirits by Stephen Mark Rainey
Klarkash-Ton Cycle by Clark Ashton Smith
Master Of The Day Of Judgement by Leo Perutz
Other Side Of The Mountain by Bernanos
Distorture by Rob Hardin

2 omnibuses (Lords of Darkness and Night's Daughter) collecting Tanith Lee's Flat Earth series. The series can be bought individually on e-book now but it really sucks that there hasn't been an omnibus since the 80s. Quite a few short tales in the mythos don't seem to have been collected and I've heard she is planning two more books in the series.
Seen an interview (which actually might have been quite a few years ago but I couldn't find a date) with her saying she is having trouble selling some of her books. Hope that lifetime achievement award comes in handy.

Encyclopedia Of Fantasy by David Pringle

Asian Horror Encyclopedia by Laurence Bush (supposed to be full of errors but still holds extensive information)

Wanted to buy some collections by Caitlin R Kiernan but most of them are pretty expensive. Wanted some DP Watt, RB Russell, Simon Stranzas, Laird Barron and a bunch of others but I should probably read their work in the anthologies I've got first.

Master Of The Day Of Judgement by Leo Perutz

Went on a big Perutz binge a couple of years ago--like him a lot. His 'Saint Peter's Snow' is also a good borderline SF/fantasy novel, based on a mind-altering drug developed from a white mould.

Cool, are a lot of his books in translation? I'm finding a lot of these writers only have a few books in translation and often the quality of translation is in question.

More Grabinski books are coming out. Passion just came out this week I think.

I really wanted some Marcel Bealu but old copies of Experience Of The Night are pricey. Water Spider is in an e-book anthology called Unstuck 2 but I'm still a bit reluctant to buy an e-book if I think a print version my come out. There are a bunch of his tales across the internet but I'm hoping a new collection will surface.

I think it's weird there's never been a complete short story collection for Angela Carter.

I thought Burning Your Boats had all of Carter's shorts? It's almost 600p long, in any case.

There are about 6 Perutzes in translation, though mostly out of print, i think. Harvill in the UK released them all in the 1990s.

Reminds me I need to check out more back-catalogues of the older writers in that huge vandermeer The Weird anthology.

Shit, you're right about Burning Your Boats, it includes all the collections and a bit more. Cool, I gotta have this.
But Wikipedia says a story called "The Bridegroom" hasn't been collected in any of her own books. Maybe there's a good reason for that.
But it's here in this anthology Lands Of Never
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?19927

I think for a lot of these European writers it's good to go through the Dedalus catalogue. I read that they were going to go out of business then they got a big grant.

Going through loads of lists and catalogues I'm also attracted to lots of trashy looking books. Because so many great authors get godawful cliched fantasy covers. It probably does mean I'll end up reading lots of trash to find a few gems. You might say that's just like anything else but I think books are an even bigger gamble because trailers for films, glances across comic pages and clips of music is usually more reliable than reading the opening paragraphs of a book.
But even a lot of those trashy covers have an appeal (the ones that aren't completely ugly) that tantalizes me. Even though they're cliched they still suggest qualities I don't read often enough.

Cheesy photoshop covers have replaced cheesy airbrushed covers.

Dedalus publish some great books, but their covers are often hideous. Full of JPG artifacts and really insensitively chosen and placed type.

Haven't gave most of the covers a good look, but there is a few different covers for different editions of Grabinski's Dark Domain.
My copy of Nodier's Smarra & Trilby has a really nice Gustave Moreau painting.

I'm not really one to splash out on expensive editions of books but some publishers are really raising the standard.

Sourdough by Angela Slatter
http://sheneverslept.com/newsandreviews/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/sourdough-under.jpg
I think this sold out fast and no wonder, it's beautiful.

The Phantasmagorical Imperative & Other Fabrications by DP Watt
http://www.egaeuspress.com/Phantasmagorical_Imperative.html

Sometimes I think about posting the lists of Other Titles You Might Enjoy from the back pages of old SF paperbacks and see how many of them people have read, how many have become classics and how many have been forgotten. Either on a separate thread or even just on this thread. But then I think this kind of thing is really skot's domain and I should leave it to him.

Definitely keep it on this thread if you're going to do it.

Gary K. Wolfe on xpost The Three-Body Problem and The Blood of Angels, mainly:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/ct-prj-science-fiction-roundup-20141120-story.html

The paywall didn't dilate

Sometimes I think about posting the lists of Other Titles You Might Enjoy from the back pages of old SF paperbacks and see how many of them people have read, how many have become classics and how many have been forgotten.

haha I think about this all the time as well

hey guys can I get a lol about the wikipedia entry for "cyberpunk"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk

I mean:
Cyberpunk is often falsely credited as a subgenre of science fiction in a near-future setting. Cyberpunk is grounded in reality and not an imaginative far-future like science fiction.

I've been looking at loads of publisher catalogues, particularly forgotten classic style lines and it seems even these get forgotten very quickly and need to be reassessed.

Quite similar to Dedalus is Atlas Anti-Classics, but they focus more on surrealism and Dada-ism.

It's driving me crazy looking through all the small press horror stuff wondering what's worth reading. There's just so much constantly coming out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballantine_Adult_Fantasy_series
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcastle_Forgotten_Fantasy_Library

xp lol, i fixed that 4 u.

Could anyone a bit more knowledgeable than I am maybe point me to examples of fiction that is completely unrelated or disconnected to the physical human world? I'm thinking stories where none of the characters are humanoid and/or the territory and setting is completely unlike Earth or habitable planets. Possibly the universe could adhere to a different physical model or the characters could be rabbits and spongiforms living on a floating grid or some shit? The closest thing I can think of is Flatland, but there must be other examples?

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_the_Walls_of_the_World and http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_Themselves both have considerable sections devoted to just such things, although humans feature too.

Sorry for mobilised links.

brilliant, cheers ledge.

Looking at these, they still seem to take the science fiction format of being grounded in human reality, as in even though these entities inhabit alternative world's or universes, their consequences still relate to human life and interests in some way. I guess what I'm interested in is a former of extreme surealist fantasy. I thought maybe it would be cool to have a go at writing something like this - to see if it was indeed possible. And I had the idea of a green, rabbit-like creature, sitting on a Q-Bertish 3d grid floating in a soupy vacuum, waiting and contemplating its life and thoughts and surroundings before maybe some other equally surreal events took place. The challenge would hinge on keeping a human audience interested despite there being very little familiar to relate to. The other challenge would be to describe things in indirect, non-human terms. So this rabbit-like creature would never describe itself as 'a green rabbit' because in its world rabbits don't exist - that's simply how a human would describe it, and humans as far as we know do not exist in this universe either.

Sorry about the poor grammar in that post - I'm on my phone.

the fleeble vorted in the mallifrome

wait i got one: Lesabendio by Paul Scheerbart.

Lesabendio takes place on the asteroid Pallas—referred to as a “star” throughout the book—which is barrel-shaped, with an interior shaped like two funnels, oriented north and south, which face one another so the narrow ends join in the middle. This unlikely celestial object measures 40 miles across and is populated by an even more unlikely array of creatures, of whom the titular Lesabendio is one. Our introduction to him in the very first paragraphs of the novel make clear just how strikingly different this world, and its attendant species, is going to be: “Lesabendio made his suction-foot very wide and stuck it firmly against the jagged stone cliff… He then stretched his body, which consisted of nothing but a rubbery tube-leg with a suction-cup foot at one end, more than fifty meters high into the violet atmosphere.”
http://www.popmatters.com/review/167918-lesbendio-by-paul-scheerbart-trans.-by-christina-svendsen/

i couldn't finish it.

xpost hah, well it would have to be legible, of course. using this as a model though, would it be possible to get people to empathise with an entity that looks, acts, and inhabits a world completely different from human beings? many have trouble enough relating to people in different countries but sci-fi and fantasy still have their fair share of allegories all the same.

xpost - crikey, you could be close with that one.

it surprises me, though, that there aren't more examples. how much music is there out there that tries to describe auditory dream-like or even drug-like hallucinations? many of my stranger dreams - especially when i was very young - had very little to do with real life.

“Lesabendio’s head rose into the air and the rubbery skin of his head began to unfurl like an umbrella. Then it slowly shut itself up again, hiding his face, and his scalp began to turn into a pipe, open at the front. His face appeared on its back-surface, from which two long telescopic eyes protruded, eyes which Lesabendio could use to effortlessly gaze at the green stars, just as if he were near them.”

Jesus...

did you tell anyone about your weird dreams? were they interested?

well exactly. but this is where the challenge would have to come into it. it couldn't just be random crap, could it? that would be very self indulgent and really very boring. But y'know, something like the Little Prince would almost fall into this category. Some kids' cartoons might possibly fall into it too. Adult fiction, maybe not?

That said, I'm interested in these inhibitors that we grow as adults. These days my dreams are actually quite mundane and grounded in daily life. I haven't tried hallucinogens for a while, but last time I did, I found it was harder to let go and not be 'cynical' about the experience. Still, I think that in many ways everyone has dis-reality inside themselves and that many kinds of non-literal art (such as instrumental music - I'm especially thinking of things like Autechre or even more so, Rashad Becker) is an attempt to unlock that trans-humanist trans-global tradition in a way. Surrealism, to me, isn't just about melting stopwatches, but something ultimately indescribable - that feeling you sometimes get when you're about to nod off and you're not sure where your arm is in relation to the rest of your body, or even if you ever had an arm, or even WTF IS an arm in the first place?

Diaspora by Greg Egan springs to mind also, especially the later bits in the higher dimensions. (spoiler)

is there a cthulu story without a human protagonist?

I can think of near-examples in graphic novels - for example the psychic realms visited in things like Sandman and Prometheus (while both have scenes set in the real world) do well to convey the idea of universes outside the physical dimension - arguably something you might not be able to do so effectively with writing.

"Could anyone a bit more knowledgeable than I am maybe point me to examples of fiction that is completely unrelated or disconnected to the physical human world? I'm thinking stories where none of the characters are humanoid and/or the territory and setting is completely unlike Earth or habitable planets."

i started a thread like this a long time ago! but about movies...

When Is Someone Gonna Make A Sci-Fi Show Or Movie Without Any People In Them?

Somebody somewhere mentioned a Brunner story with an all-*alien*-alien cast---not seeing it on the old Rolling F etc., maybe another thread/site

one of my fave books that i have read in the last couple of years was The Companions by Sheri Tepper and that book had SO many awesome non-human life forms in it and i wanted the whole book to be about them. i think she could write a great non-human SF book.

i know i have definitely read sf short stories with no humans in them. but i can't think of titles.

I was going to say Mission Of Gravity by Hal Clement and someone said it on that thread just linked by Scott. Isn't that book fairly famous?

I think Lesabendio sounds pretty cool.

would totally read a book about microbes. in theory...

kinda can't believe nobody as written epic microbes hurtling through space on an asteroid and landing on uninhabited planet and creating life kinda thing. come to think of it.

kim stanley robinson should get on that...it's trilogy time...

"Common Time" by James Blish is a trippy short story about contact with a thoroughly non-human race, and the inability to communicate the experience.

I also think by the point you're writing about creatures detached from human concerns, many would not consider it SF, but just pure fantasy or surrealism.

Verner Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" and Pohl's "Jem" spring to mind - although both (eventually) bring humans into it. But the conception of a totally alien life told from the alien's perspective is a central narrative conceit of both, and they do it really well.

idk how interesting it would be to read something totally divorced from human experience though. I mean, to really achieve that would result in something that's total gibberish (nothing more human than language amirite)

I thought if Vinge and his creatures are pretty odd but they're still planet dwelling, warmongering, empire building, and basically mammalian with one albeit major quirk of physiology/psychology.

? spiders aren't mammals