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

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

planet dwelling and war mongering don't seem v species-specific to me

My mistake, I was thinking of the dog things from "A Fire upon the Deep", I haven't read Deepness yet.

Xp no, but they're arguably a mark of a certain kind of intelligence or way of experiencing and reacting to the world, which is maybe what dog latin wants to get away from.

Nothing to see here (speaking of dogs):
http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/188296828X.02.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

stories where none of the characters are humanoid and/or the territory and setting is completely unlike Earth or habitable planets.

the more I think about it, yeah on some level any story operating under these conditions would be totally incomprehensible and uninteresting to the human reader. Without anything analogous to human experience, no identifiable frame of reference, it would just be gibberish. Even "Flatland" - which is probably closest to this - uses the prospect of human (3D space) interaction to drive the plot and uses a human conceptual framework (math) to convey its ideas.

Also the flatlanders as characters are quite recognisable, and awful, iirc.

Feel like there a few short stories with a similar gag where a non-humanoid, spacefaring race come upon a planet which upon examination, for the good of the galaxy and its diverse occupants, they decide to quarantine or destroy which turns out to be *SURPRISE* (SPOILER WITHHELD)

in The Companions book by Tepper there is a planet where most of the action takes place and all the plants and trees are the sentient life-forms there. they think and learn and end up communicating with the humans. they are cool things! i highly recommend that book if you like weird life. weird creatures. very cool. it's filled with politics and sexual stuff too in a radical eco-feminist kinda way too, but in a good way. one group of aliens puts all these humanoid sex slaves onto earth and earth falls in love with them and becomes addicted. and there are genetically modified dogs and humans that can turn into dogs and also nighmare dog-like creatures. and one lizard-like alien race that is war-like and kinda insane and they kill all their women and breed in an insane way. oh, it's loaded with weirdness.

my favorite sf books are the ones where every chapter could be someone else's epic novel or series of novels. just a million ideas. how she threads it all together is some sort of feat.

sounds good, xp

picked up a few cheap early 60s things:
Kornbluth/Pohl - Wolfbane (just started this, the premise is bizarre)
Damon Knight - Hell's Pavement
Damon Knight - Beyond the Barrier

Didn't know Damon Knight was also a translator. Been looking through Black Coat Press catalogue (talked about them in the previous thread, the Aloysius Bertrand and Villiers De L'Ilse-Adam books), they mostly translate French SF, fantasy, horror and mystery, with a big focus on pulp heroes in a large part of their books. Brian Stableford seems to do most of the translations.

Unfortunately the site is not very well designed and some of the author pages don't include all the books containing their work. It's not easy to tell which books are novels, collections or anthologies until you see the table of contents.

I read about Nathalie Henneberg recently, she's known for lush fantasy and Green Gods is a collection translated by Damon Knight and CJ Cherryh.
http://www.blackcoatpress.com/greengods.htm
The One really good thing about this site is that it shows you the original French cover art.

the handful of Knight's short stories that I've read have been great. Started Beyond the Barrier last night and loved it so far - sort of a bridge between Van Vogt and PKD (which is ironic given Knight's legendary pillorying of Van Vogt), with this paranoid "everyone's out to get me!/ohmigod what is REALITY!" underpinning.

Just saw that those Damon Knight translations of Henneberg are from his book Thirteen French Science Fiction Stories.

I raved about DK's Rule Golden and Other Stories on the old Rolling F thread; be sure you get the 1979 five-novella edition (with the suthor's intro, specifying that several were written with "FU, John W. Campbell Jr. and fascist pals" in mind). So, they're all from the early Cold War, I think, and a couple are a bit dated in spots, but ultimately pretty strong. And more intense, inventive, imagistic, speculative, than satirical or village (or Village, maybe) liberal.
Currently, Amazon prices start at $0.01 ( there's also a Kindle, James). No good cover art, apparently, so I chose the dumbest I could find (for this edition).
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51GsmOFKyzL.jpg

And of course scarf up any Orbit (his very picky anthology series) you can find; hit those yard sales, son!

lol @ that cover

yeah that's on my list to get

Just pasting something I said on another forum:

There's so much poor cover art on so many genre books that I despair.

I sometimes think of ripping the front cover off but that might leave the pages too vulnerable.
If I cover the front cover in India ink, it might rub off on other books even after it is dry.

But if I do either, I can't give the book away if I don't like it. Hmmm. Wonder if I could paper over it without damaging it?