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

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

Will probably end up getting that Silverberg Vol 4. Meanwhile working through Volume 2, which seems to have the most acknowledged and anthologized stories, such as this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rj6gp8i_aQo

Hey check it out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfmp6DviZEI

Full list here: http://otrarchive.blogspot.com/2011/02/sci-fi-radio-npr.html

Also here: https://archive.org/details/Sci-fiRadio

Just listened to "Vintage Season." The character of the protagonist landlord is a little amped up, but basically faithful to the text and well done.

(Still annoyed at the author of that Moorcock article calling the author of "The Tunnel Under The World" and The Space Merchants a Campbell disciple)

I looked up the author of that article and he wrote a book about occult themes in music, looked interesting, especially that I didn't know there was much hiphop with occult themes.

I don't know a whole lot about that old school vs new wave thing other than what Moorcock has said. But it doesn't seem like a simple divide where everyone chosen sides, because so many of these authors liked each other (like Moorcock loves Poul Anderson, Ellison loved most of the big old school writers).
Reminds me a little bit of the way people oversimplify all rock music before punk and that whole relationship sometimes.

Wonder how Moorcock feels about still being called post-Tolkien or anti-Tolkien, sometimes even on his books. I wouldn't want to constantly be associated with an author I didn't care for even if the association was rejection/rebellion against them.

I wonder if the Pre-Raphaelites were happy with that name?

Elric is much more obviously an anti-Conan. I have little doubt that moorcock is still reviled byvtolkein's basic conservatism, politically speakinf.

Fucking phone

New year, new thread so will have another go at this: Basically, as editor of Astounding (later Analog) Campbell and his favorite writers Heinlein and Asimov cleaned up the and professionalized the genre, distancing it from its pulpy, Gernsbackian origins, creating well-constructed stories about problem solving engineers, written in a clear, efficient, logical if often inelegant or unadventurous style. The New Wave positioned themselves in opposition to this dominant form of sf. However this was somewhat of a simplification, since some of the suppressed elements of less straight-jawed, weird or more expressionistic or simpler better writing had already survived in the pulpier mags such as Planet Stories, or in the two main rival publications of Astounding, Horace Gold's (w/ help from Fred Pohl) Galaxy, which was way more welcoming of satirical material, a safe haven for such stuff in the Red Scare 50s, and Tony Boucher's Fantasy & Science Fiction, which placed a much higher premium on prose quality, or even through some of Campbell's other writers- "Vintage Season" first appeared in Astounding.