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

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.

Son's main gig is that he is a philosophy professor who studies the nature of consciousness, which is kind of fitting given the premise of "You're All Alone."

xpost Wow, that Leiber-Bloch dude's blog: gateways within gateways http://cthulhuwho1.com/

i bought like a hundred of these today...

https://fbcdn-sphotos-d-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xpf1/v/t1.0-9/10698484_10153582953242137_8922190107959297129_n.jpg?oh=40595014060e61a7243d1bc56fcb969a&oe=552B3E18&__gda__=1428663143_6beecf1a6a3c90db4646feacaa906ad1

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https://fbcdn-sphotos-e-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xaf1/v/t1.0-9/1798822_10153582949617137_6184979953075229391_n.jpg?oh=ffdcd5ca5ce1173d30c8803358d2f708&oe=54FA7E02&__gda__=1428839093_e9eb154e8f387c1d970220c4154e1ec7

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Damn, good get. Gotta road trip to your store sometime.

Was there some special offer or something? Did you pay a big chunk for it?

Sweet gahan Wilson cover!!!

like all those covers. and speaking of that era of pulps, can anyone identify a story/author i remember reading in one years ago? sort of a last man scenario with a guy floating around in space deejaying into the void... definitely remember he was spinning the velvet underground and maybe the grateful dead, so would have been late sixties/early seventies...

lol at Poul Anderson cover.

Cats! A fat guy! Poul!

Read Absolution Gap, and then wrote too much about it:

I think I'm over Alistair Reynolds. I initially got swept along with AG's usual space opera stylings: the behemoth space ships, vast ditances, technology like magic; the switching between three or four different points of view, offering tantalising glimpses of what's to come. But I soon started to tire of the constant pov switching and drip feeding of info, and the planet bound plot which loses the interstellar excitement. But mostly I tired of his truly awful characters and societies. I think you could describe 80% of his characters - not just the ones in this book - as bitter. They hold lifelong, often murderous grudges. At one point in AG someone comes right out and says that forgiving and forgetting is bullshit, and that's one of the nicer characters. It's a philosophy so common in the books that I can't help but think it must be Reynolds' own.

Even though all the main characters are awful the poor plebs in their care suffer from collective Stockholm Syndrome. Happy to be under a dictatorship for 20 years they panic when the dictator looks like abdicating, casting about desperately for an alternative - "someone strong, someone prepared to think the unthinkable". For all his writing about collective consciousness and neural implants enabling direct democracy, Reynolds seems in thrall to the Great Man theory of history.

Then there's the religion at the centre of AG. Utterly, preposterously mediaeval. Ok it's all the work of a neurological virus and maybe this is Reynolds' gag at the expense of religion, but it doesn't matter, it's not plausible and it's not pleasant to read about. And that's the overall problem with this book, and his others. His worlds seem utterly devoid of the best human emotions and characteristics - joy, generosity, compassion, sympathy, forgiveness, thoughtfulness. And love. The only loving relationships he writes about, aside from a few enduring manly friendships born in the heat of battle, have long ago come to a tragic end (usually at the hands of another character, begetting one of those lifelong murderous grudges).

you're welcome! 8)

it struck me as a slight detour from the first two books and i liked the religion as a virus thing and the whole caravan thing. yes, grotesque, but that's ok. didn't think you'd like the suit of armour. mediaeval sci-fi religion is a trope though, isn't it? banks, stephenson spring to mind.

can't really remember much about the other thread, the women's part, other than the, yes, long grudgeful exile.

i also seem to remember him throwing 3 or 4 new races of aliens into the last chapter which made it all a bit messy. (or maybe that was the second book)

this, btw: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginnungagap

Century Rain, is, i think, probably different enough from the rest of his books to may be worth reading - more like a hard boiled 50s detective thing, at least to start with. bit grim though in places.

the rev space universe seems to have been left behind though and he's now 2 books into his 11 books eon spanning series. early days yet, i think (the first seemed to have a near contemporary setting iirc, the second ends up in generational ships)

i also seem to remember him throwing 3 or 4 new races of aliens into the last chapter which made it all a bit messy. (or maybe that was the second book)

Oh yes I forgot to whinge about the end, all pulled punches and a last minute bait and switch rendering the central macguffin entirely pointless. ok ok a macguffin is pointless by definition... well even more pointless than that.

i think i need to step away from whizz bang sf, for a while at least, and spend more time down the thoughtful end. still plenty of le guin to investigate.

Always wondered what you saw in that guy anyway, ledge.

Ginnungagap
This is a story by what's-his-name, Michael Swanwick, no?

xpost drool (scott's mags). Would very much like to know Samuel Delany and Ed Emshwiller's takes on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Have you read that, Scott??
Only read a couple A. Reynolds in annual anthologies; seemed okay, but ledge's delving reminds me of the TV Game of Thrones. It does have some sensitive interludes, but hard to see where these come from, other than the need for contrast. Don't see a source in the "culture" of Westeros, as depicted here. How are the books?

Oh, I shouldn't put culture in quotes: it's a culture of power plays, reveling (with whores, swords & grog, also in yer one-ups-manship), also--well, that's about it, unless you among the teeming troops or civilians, incl. a few fugitives: then you get to slog, run and die (maybe kill first).

xp Scott scores! Great covers.

Thought for a second dow was referring to Culture in the Iain Banks sense.

No thread roll for the new year, but a new screenname at least.

Not quite right

xpost speaking of Moorcock, profile in new New Yorker:
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/anti-tolkien

he has essentially written the other style guide for modern fantasy

Moorcock and his peers had become tired of the dominant science-fiction landscape: vast fields of time travel, machismo, and spaceships, as well as the beefcake heroes of the fantasy subgenre “Sword and Sorcery.” The Golden Age of Science Fiction, held aloft by authors like Frederik Phol, John W. Campbell, and Robert Heinlein had, by the nineteen-sixties, sputtered out into a recycling of the same ideas.

Was looking at Malzberg's bibliography and seen that he's written erotica under several different names (why so many names?), including a book called "My Stepmother, My Desire".

read peter f. hamilton's night's dawn trilogy over the course of several months

what a ridiculous piece of crap

So one really can judge a book by its cover?

mooks those books are buried somewhere deep within my to read list, why are they so bad and hated?

Hurray for that New Yorker profile

got Silverberg's collected stories vol. 4 yesterday. Havent started yet, beyond the introduction, which contains the first reference I know of to his temporary retirement being driven by bitterness over the commercial failure of his new wave-influenced stuff.

Fwiw I dont think its really fair to lump pohl in with reactionary rightwing nutjobs like heinlein and campbell. Pohl was old school, certainly from a formal and historical perspective, but he was not conservative.

Xps

That was exactly I was thinking. In addition to misspelling his name.

Did you read the earlier Silverberg collections?

I got 3 from the library awhile ago, altho I already had a bunch of the stories in that one. Might work my way backwards if the library has them all (these are not cheap at $40 a pop, but I sprang for 4 cuz I've wanted it for a long time and I love this period of his writing)

Please don't tell me you like "Sailing To Byzantium."

That's post-comeback so of course not. 4 only goes up to his "sabbatical"

I did read a bunch of those majipoor books in high school. Dont remember a thing about them, no desire to revisit

why are they so bad and hated?

at the end, one of the characters is (temporarily!) given god-like powers to magically fix all the problems that built up over 3000 pages

i am comfortable with a fair bit of ridiculousness in my sf, but come on

ah ok. even tho i feel like i am inured to bullshit resolutions to long ass books and series by this point, knowing ahead of time has got to be a dealbreaker.

How far did you guys get in Riverworld?

The first four. I've been thinking about going back and rereading those.

I never got to the end. Read the first two and part of the third. Plus the original story with Tom Mix.

David Langford ‏@ansiblemag
Mourning my mother Kit Langford and struggling (with brother Jon) with endless paperwork and funeral preparations. http://kit.ansible.uk/
So the Jan. issue of Ansible may take a while,
but Dec. issue is especially rich, esp.toward end hee:
http://news.ansible.uk/a329.html

Haven't read any of this yet but: http://www.infinitematrix.net/stories/swanwick/sleep_of_reason.html