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

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?

I really hate those covers with CG models. I'm ruling out that technique completely but the way most of them look, they'd do a disservice to most writers.

I meant I'm NOT ruling out that technique completely. Fuck, of all the words to skip over.

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?

Greg Egan's most recent trilogy (The Clockwork Rocket, The Eternal Flame, The Arrows of Time) is set in another universe with different physics and very non-human characters. unfortunately it's also boring and quite heavy-going, a sort of thinly-fictionalised physics/maths thought experiment

Philip Jose Farmer's Love Song is on ebook, I've heard it was a rarity for a long time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Stableford

This guy has one of the most insanely huge outputs of any SF/fantasy writer I've heard of, including novels, short stories, editing, translation and non-fiction.

I've mostly been interested in his translations but the Dies Irae series is supposed to be a sort of classic.

Any Stableford experiences?

Read a few short stories and a novel, blanking on the title, which is typical of my experiences with him: no lasting (or even initial) impressions. Maybe it's just a matter of taste, but I look for writers to pull me from my usual limits.
Just finished Old Mars, George RR Martin & Gardner Dozois-edited anthology of new stories, "For Edgar Rice Burroughs, Leigh Brackett, Catherine Moore, Ray Bradbury, and Roger Zelazny, who inspired this book, and Robert Silverberg, who should have been in it." Guess he didn't file copy, but may be just as well at this point. Authors are popular, but most (incl. Martin/Dozois regulars) are best known and/or cared about by their mass niche fans----not meant in a snobbish way, just how it is on a well-populated planet.
Moorcock is the only Grand Master type, and his "The Lost Canal" combines classic action-suspense with our currrent trends: for instance, as individuals, anarcho-syndicalist Earthlings may present existentially justified privateer/pirate swagger and swag, but they also tend to swarm like insatiable eco-junkies, running through planets, moons and others like doubloons and ampules and candy bars. Tremendous build-up, then quick glib pulp resolution. Oh well, like several others, it does make for good promo, and i wanna check the new series he's working on now (having moved from London to a small Texas town, according to editors.
One (of the most) that def works all the way through is Ian McDonald's "The Queen of the Night's Aria," which takes the Martians beyond this anthology's usual Egyptiod/Native American nexus to a species and civilization inspired by HG Wells and HP Lovecraft, but also with McDonald's own rueful humor and lyricism.
A few stories don't sufficiently deal with the familiarity of red sands, exploited natives, canals, weathered remnants, secret depths, but then, you get something such as
"A Man Without Honor," by James S. A. Corey:
Imagine if you will, Your Grace, the vast Martian sky, as purple as a lilac, with the same sun that shines on Westminster and London here taking on a wholly foreign aspect, with wide tendrils of rainbow snaking from its centrally glowing orb. See, if you will. the vast ruins that had once been the pride of seven races with their crystal hearts laid bare by storms and war; the massive, dying river, slow as an old man's blood; the bleeding and desperate crew handing the hope of survival on a half-shattered cart that struggled and failed to rise from the ground like a wounded moth. The air was thin and held the scent of metal and spent gunpowder. The heat of the sun oppressed as powerfully as a tropical noontime.
Now hear the familiar cry of Quohog--awch loy---smoke ahoy. Picture a storm of dragonflies, each as large as a man's arm. They rose in the East, thick as the billows of a vast conflagration, and spread out across the sky. I heard Carina Meer's cry when she caught sight of them and saw the blood drain from her tawny face.
"We must hurry," she said. "The central hive has discovered us...." Must say," Master Darrow said, "I'm beginning to dislike these buggers."

in McDonald's story, the Martian species (and its cyborgs) seem more evocative of HP; the human species and both sides' war-based civilizations seem Wellsian, def incl. his POV in WWI--foreseeing "The Land Ironclads."

having moved from London to a small Texas town, according to editors

I thought he'd moved back and forth between Texas and London for decades now

Stableford has some good ideas but a sort of workmanlike style. I've read a book of his short stories about genetic meddling, 'Sexual Chemistry', and a novel about scientifically rationalised vampires that google is failing to call up.

I used to think Octavia Butler, Norman Spinrad, Janny Wurts and Owl Goingback were odd names but Gwendolyn Ranger Wormser takes the biscuit.

http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/arthur-machen-collection-at-risk.html
If you like Arthur Machen please read this short piece and there is a super easy super quick way to protest the closure of the collection to scholars and public.
It'll barely take a few minutes.

Will do, thanks for the word. Also signed up for newsletter (I see that one of the main contributors is Tolkien expert Douglas A. Anderson, whose anthology Tales Before Tolkien was extolled by me on the previous Rolling F)

Done. Oh yeah, think I didn't quite indicate the range of Old Mars. For instance, Allen M. Steele's "Martian Blood" is introduced in a way that makes it seem like it'll be Heinlein homage--but while the narrator does rail against the tasteless rabble, he's also alienated by the results (and even worse potential) of capitalist-colonial exploitation. And his isolation doesn't make him One Man Rising against tasteless rabble, like Campbell's crew and other problem-solving writers valorized, it makes him slow-thinking and otherwise ineffectual. So it's really more like one of those xpost Damon Knight critiques of 50s capitalist-colonialist-Campbellian crapola.
Also, Howard Waldrop has one about an ancient diary of an august Martian making a pilgrimage, and along the way he experiences meiosis, then trains his Bud to help him steer the sandcraft, and notes with satisfaction how new Bud is "flourishing in a twilight world" (diary ends soon after). I found it very relatable, as the kids say (spellcheck doesn't agree, but then it doesn't like its own name either).

Oh Robert, speaking of newsletters etc, do you know Subterranean Press? Lush special editions, some lush list prices too, but they have sales, also interviews and profiles of authors and illustrators, other good stuff. Mostly science fiction, fantasy, horror, some noir. Can check 'em out and sigh up here:
http://subterraneanpress.com/

Yeah, I've been checking them out recently. I've been interested in the Caitlin R Kiernan books in particular.

Was looking for ETA Hoffmann in the shops yesterday, both the Penguin and Oxford editions had a surprisingly small group of stories. I thought everything would be collected in big complete editions but there are 7 recent-ish collections with very different contents.
There are quite a lot of stories that don't seem to have been in English since Victorian Times.

did anyone see this baffling document: http://atseajournal.com/mjh-study/

Over the next ~25,000 words we will try and figure out how to get some of that rigor in our own work. No thanks. At least he got me to look up "zeugma."

finished Knight's "Beyond the Barrier" (moving on to "Hell's Pavement", which seems more promising). Some bizarre digressions in "Beyond the Barrier"; it is not really clear what is going on for maybe 90% of the novel, the protagonist just bounces from one incomprehensible scene to another with no knowledge of his motivations or context for what is happening to him. Which gets a little tiresome, but the big reveal at the end is quite clever and bring it's underlying themes into focus. I wouldn't say it's great by any stretch but it's not bad. "Hell's Pavement" seems to have a more concentrated dark satire of mind controlled consumerism at it's heart but I'm not v far into it.

also on deck - Haldeman's "Forever War"

Robert, I've found this article on Hoffman to be useful in turning the stories of most interest (to me, at least). Only thing is, unlike SF Encyclopedia, which gets updated often, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy is a dreaming jewel, mostly undisturbed since being uploaded in 1997, so nothing about collections published since:

http://sf-encyclopedia.uk/fe.php?nm=hoffmann_e_t_a

Also there was one I was marveling at on old Rolling F: blanking on title, but think it was in Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder, edited by Hartwell & Cramer, which has a lot of stories I think you might enjoy. Ditto Douglas A. Anderson's Tales Before Tolkien, though you're prob familiar with those two.

The ETA story in that anth turns out to be mentioned by me only in passing, but it's great---here's an earlier post, and the link still works:
re xpost the early stuff, I gotta re-read ETA Hoffman. Good All Things Considered on him this afternoon--audio: http://www.npr.org/2012/12/25/167732828/no-sugar-plums-here-the-dark-romantic-roots-of-the-nutcracker

― dow, Tuesday, December 25, 2012 4:47 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

xp Shakey, the only DK fiction I can recall is in the Rule Golden collection, so can't comment on the ones you're reading. Hope "Hell's Pavement" turned out OK.

The Rough Guide To Psychedelic India
Various

Rough Guide, RGNET1332DD, 26 January 2015

Indian music was hugely influential on Western psychedelia and the feeling was mutual. On this mind-expanding Rough Guide, hallucinatory sounds drift in and out of drones and ragas, ranging from the lysergic sitar of Ananda Shankar and trippy Bollywood vibes of the 1970s to more recent concoctions by Sunday Driver and The Bombay Royale.

Compiled by: DJ Ritu

he first musical whispers of India’s burgeoning influence on Western popular music were heard in 1965 when The Beatles’ George Harrison added the sounds of a sitar to the Rubber Soul album track ‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)’. Soon everybody from The Yardbirds and The Rolling Stones to Sergio Mendes and The Byrds was reflecting an Indian influence. During these years in India, drug culture wasn’t flooding its shores, but the country was undergoing its own transformation – the 1960s saw the advent of a DIY garage band scene.

When compiling this Rough Guide, DJ Ritu cast her psychedelic net wide into the diaspora and the modern day. This album pays homage to the swinging 1960s history whilst forging the journey onwards into psychedelia’s present-day incarnations.

Beginning the mix was easy; Ritu knew instinctively Ananda Shankar’s ‘Dancing Drums’ was first on her list, the LP was a rare find, hotly desired on the Asian Underground scene. Other vintage finds on this album include R.D Burman’s Bollywood hit ‘Dum Maro Dum’ from the film Hare Rama Hare Krishna. In the film the protagonist, sung here by the inimitable Asha Bhosle, takes deep drags on a large chillum before dancing floppy limbed amidst a throng of her beatnik friends. ‘Dance Music’ is another throwback Bollywood number by brother composer duo Kalyanji & Anandji.

Other tracks on the album root the listener firmly back in the present day and launches into the music of India’s vast diaspora. Sunday Driver set out their Indian shades of influence against a backdrop of Sgt. Pepper-ish Victoriana. The Bombay Royale are an eleven-piece Australian band inspired by old school Bollywood soundtracks.
More introspective expressions come from Ray Spiegel Ensemble with their low tempo track ‘Moksha’. Paban Das Baul performs music of the Bauls, the wandering spiritual musicians of Bengal and is heard on ‘Kaliya’.

Lose yourself in this collection of far out sounds – soaring sitars, tremulous tabla, distorted deep-set drones and unbound improvisations, all twisted through a rock and roll edge.
https://soundcloud.com/world-music-network

Track List

01 Kalyanji & Anandji: Dance Music (Instrumental)
02 Ananda Shankar: Dancing Drums
03 Sunday Driver: Satyam Shivam sund4ram
04 The Bombay Royale: Bombay Twist
05 Simon Thacker's Svara-Kanti: Rakshasa
06 Tiger Blossom: Brishtir Pani
07 Asha Bhosle: Dum Maro Dum
08 Paban Das Baul: Kaliya
09 Jazz Thali: Chamber Of Dreams
10 Jyotsna Srikanth: Thillana
11 Ray Spiegel Ensemble: Moksha
12 Debashish Bhattacharya Feat. John McLaughlin: A Mystical Morning

Total Playing Time: 67:45

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXBw2Y-K1lg

Damn! Wrong thread, wrong board even!

lol

Thank you Dow. I always wondered why the Michael Powell film Tales Of Hoffmann was so light, because previously I'd heard Hoffmann referenced as dark and even grotesque.

Hope "Hell's Pavement" turned out OK

I am liking it a lot so far. the premise involves this technology that basically permits mind control - you can place an "analogue" in someone's consciousness that directs their behavior towards specific ends (ie "don't murder people" etc.) Of course this technology totally warps society, gets into the hands of corporations who use it to create compliant populations of consumers dedicated solely to their products, and after a couple hundred years human society is pretty fucked up. BUT of course there are some mutant exceptions who are apparently immune to the technology...

Don't know where else to post this because it's fantastiscal/surreal/visionary art but if you like fantasy, you can hardly get a whole lot better than Albin Brunovsky. There was almost none of his paintings online before and I scanned a few.
http://eatenbyducks.blogspot.com/2014/12/albin-brunovsky-paintings.html

Looks like Malzberg's The Men Inside is about two ILX0rs.

The second volume of Silverberg's Collected Short Stories seems to be the one to get.

Holy Moly, those Brunovsky images are amazing. Think I like the ones in yr linked 2009 post even more. Did he ever illustrate fantasy, sf etc.?

He illustrated some classic literature and a lot of old fairy tales but I don't know if he ever did any contemporary fantasy.

Was Fritz Leiber's birthday Christmas Eve. Check out this guy's photostream of Leiber book covers- front, back and inside- along with some other stuff, including a few Robert Bloch: https://www.flickr.com/photos/cthulhuwho1/with/5054182811

I discovered recently that Leiber has a son who wrote science fiction a few decades ago.