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

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.

I was surprised that Unknown was another Campbell magazine, since it has a really great reputation for some of the best fantasy coming out at the time and seems to be similar to Weird Tales.

In Wizardry And Wild Romance, Moorcock mostly recommended RE Howard but taken issue with his imitators and the writers who written Conan books later on. Also that a lot of Howard's unfinished work got published and it spoiled his reputation to some extent. But I've heard some of his best work was posthumous stories that he might have polished up a bit more if he had lived.

I dont think Moorcock had anything against Howard per se, just that Elric is a pretty obvious inversion of Conan (similar to how Jerry Cornelius is an inversion of James Bond, altho in that case I imagine Moorcock really did have serious issues w Flwming and his ridiculous sexism, racism, imperialism etc.) I only brought up the Conan comparisob cuz Tolkien was not really referenced in the Elric books, I think its a mistake to categorize them as a reaction or response to LOTR.

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

They chose it themselves!

Browsing through the Borderlands stacks I was kinda bummed by how uninterested I am in so much of the modern sci-fi market - just tons of derivative looking steampunk and cyberpunk stuff, smart aleck-y dystopianism. I am judging by covers, blurbs, and bios here tbf. It bums me out that my favorite new guys just don't write that much, and the market appears to be otherwise dominated by interminable series' of recycled ideas. Of course if anyone's been totally blown away by some recently emerging writers I'm all ears...

Do you read the "Year's Best" type anthologies?

not habitually

Seems to me that is the last thing you want to read if you don't like current stuff.

as well documented here, my favorite recent/newish dudes are Jon Armstrong and Charles Yu, but both seem like outliers and neither are particularly prolific. Post-90s I seem to be drawn to the types of guys who write a couple books and then disappear (see also: Matthew Derby). Steve Aylett I like but can only take in limited doses. Jeff Noon appears to have given up on publishing novels in the US (and there was a bit of a decline in quality post-Automated Alice anyway).

this is supposed to be great!

http://www.amazon.com/Twenty-First-Century-Science-Fiction-Hartwell/dp/0765326000

Still working through the Twentieth Century one!