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

Okay. Finished. Time to read that blog post to the end. Book holds up well, although ebook is riddled with horrible typos which grow worse towards the end, to the extend that the denouement actually appears inside one of the sidebars! Although one could attribute this to gravity shear, I guess. Have very little desire to read the rest of the Heechee Saga, as it were. Dimly remember not liking or not finishing Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, although eventually I did dig the song that title is based on.

Does anyone have any recommendations for great sci-fi that is either very feminist or phenomenologically-aware?

Also, here is Roberto Bolaño's (very) short and amazing contribution to speculative fiction: http://eyeshot.net/bolanobeach.html

Massively worth reading if you've a spare ten minutes this afternoon.

Joanna Russ (the Female Man in particular), LeGuin, Tiptree

Butler? (I've never read her)

Bolano is in that cosmos latinos anthology discussed awhile back. Definitely recommended.

I havent been able to get into butler myself but I imagine she might fit the bill

That Bolano piece linked is newly translated/not in the anthology. Thx for the heads up!

Thanks for recommendations! Will forward my impressions at some point in the future...

Came across that Bolaño piece in the 'Aliens' issue of Granta magazine a few years back, but that translation is subscription only online. Actually the whole anthology is well worth reading if you can get hold of it: http://www.granta.com/Archive/114

M.R James "Casting The Runes" and "Oh Whistle And I'll Come To You, My Lad".

Both often considered his best work but I thought the former was really underwhelming (I don't care much for Night Of The Demon film either) but the latter was brilliant and quite scary, some great visual descriptions.

I think there's a good sense of mounting tension towards the end in CtR, but yeah the lead up and denoument a bit thin, Count Magnus and A Warning to the Curious do the stalked by ghoulies thing better. The Treasure of Abbot Thomas and Mr Humphreys both have terrific - in both senses of course - visual descriptions towards the end, the latter is quite hallucinatory although it may try your patience on the way. There's a couple of shorter ones which have some of the nastiest imagery he came up with, A School Story and Wailing Well.

Oops, short changed Mr Humphreys out of His Inheritance.

I love "Count Magnus" but haven't read the others you mention, yet. I'm a fan of "The Ash Tree" too.

http://www.wildsidepress.com/Science-Fiction-Fantasy_c_3142.html
http://www.wildsidepress.com/Horror_c_3191.html

Can't believe how cheap and numerous these Wildside Megapacks are. 17 Oz books for the price of a bottle of juice!
Hope these are well formatted.

Hmm thanks! Might try one and report back. Leaning toward occult detective or weird fic. Or WH Hodgson.

Some of the Pulp Megapack stories have the most amazing titles but unfortunately like a lot of old movies and comics, an evocative title is no assurance of quality.

Silverbob really killin it in vol. 4, I must say. The Dybbuk of Mazel Tov IV and the Science Fiction Hall of Fame are him in top form.

Oh yeah reminds me I still need to read this:
Cool I'll just keep pasting in stuff from prev thread everytime somebody mentions something already discussed thoroughly, as I kept etc on prev thread its own self. Speaking of blurbs, here's a good 'un from a recent library shop score, Wandering Stars, An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Jack Dann, Introduction by Isaac Asimov:
I loved Wandering Stars, and why not? Two of the thirteen stories are from Orbit, and I would have bought seven of the rest if I had got my hands on them first. If the book had nothing else going for it, it would still be a triumph to get William Tenn to write the great story he was talking about in the fifties.--Damon Knight
(Also a blurb from Leo Rosten, who wrote The Education of Hyman Kaplan, about an immigrant who tends to take over English classes with his own versions and visions of language and lit.)

― dow, Friday, November 14, 2014 9:47 AM (2 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Contents (some of these titles are corny, but the few stories I kinda remember from mags etc were good):

Introduction:
"Why Me?" by Isaac Asimov

William Tenn: "On Venus, Have We Got A Rabbi"

Avram Davidson: "The Golem"

Isaac Asimov: "Unto the Fourth Generation"

Carol Carr: "Look, You Think You've Got Troubles"

Avram Davidson: "Goslin Day"

Robert Silverberg: "The Dybbuk of Mazel Tov IV"

Horace L. Gold: "Trouble With Water"

Pamela Sargent: "Gather Blue Roses"

Bernard Malamud: "The Jewbird"

Geo. Alec Effinger: "Paradise Lost"

Robert Sheckley: "Street of Dreams, Feet of Clay"

Isaac Bashevis Singer: Jachid and Jechidah"

Harlan Ellison: "I'm Looking For Kadah"

― dow, Friday, November 14, 2014 10:00 AM (2 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

started tau zero last night; the writing is pretty brutal

Dow I think all those stories were specifically written for that anthology

Well not the isaac singer one obviously. Silverbob's was tho

Also maybe not the Malamud, unless he was desperate for lunch money, and in the xpost blurb, Damon Knight sez: I loved Wandering Stars, and why not? Two of the thirteen stories are from Orbit...

Hm right. Ok well what do I know

finished the Forever War. was not expecting the happy ending tbh. Very good, deserving of its plaudits, a few lol 70s bits but on the whole a great mix of hard sci-fi, some socio-political commentary, and a romantic subplot that I found unexpectedly moving.

DO NOT READ THE SEQUEL, FOREVER FREE. It has the worst ending in literature, although it is kind of audacious in the sheer scale of the cop-out it uses.

Can't believe how cheap and numerous these Wildside Megapacks are. 17 Oz books for the price of a bottle of juice! Hope these are well formatted.

I believe these are just glommed-together stuff available at Project Gutenberg: have a look there (https://www.gutenberg.org/) under specific author names. The magazine stories there usually have the original artwork, too

Yup. Although I think now and then they mix it up and actually pay for a few stories though.

started tau zero last night; the writing is pretty brutal

― mookieproof, Wednesday, January 14, 2015 5:41 PM (3 hours ago)

Also still want to read The Three-Body Problem. and other Chinese SF.

http://io9.com/author-cixin-liu-is-answering-questions-about-the-three-1679328080

I believe these are just glommed-together stuff available at Project Gutenberg: have a look there (https://www.gutenberg.org/) under specific author names. The magazine stories there usually have the original artwork, too

― ornamental cabbage (James Morrison), Thursday, 15 January 2015

There's quite a few modern writers and even a few megapacks devoted to them, like Darrell Schweitzer.

I can't stop lol'ing at this illo for the Dybbuk of Mazel Tov IV

https://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/assets/001/117/588/c5fdf7f804544f69b0b7b550cb824020_large.jpg?1381638358

for one thing, it's central to the plot that the dybbuk is not a hasid, but I guess that's the only way the artist could think of to draw a Jew

Thomas Ligotti is getting a Penguin Classics collection. This is a pretty big deal, especially considering that for most of his career he has been published by small press (Virgin put out some of his more recent work) and that he is said to be pretty much a word of mouth success.
A lot of serious weird/horror fans consider him the most important author since Lovecraft (Robert Aickman and Ramsey Campbell are polarizing for too many, Clive Barker probably seen as too inconsistent).

Cool. The early story collections Devilock recommended seem hard to find.

Oh wow, great news. And it looks like I have a new thread to bookmark, ha. For some reason it never occurred to me to dip into the books subforum here.

I'd been avoiding ligotti.net, and Ligotti's work generally, because reading his stuff during the holidays can be, er, kind of trying, but I've sort of fallen back into Teatro Grottesco again over the last week or so.

jmm: unless you're patient enough to wait for the Penguin, you can get TG on Amazon. It's a really good blend of his newer and mid-period styles, and might actually be a better lure into the Ligotti world than his older work.

I would love it if this Penguin thing is comprehensive (there go my hopes, getting away from me already); my copy of The Nightmare Factory is at the point where I'm nervous when reading it -- and not for the usual Ligottian reasons. Still kicking myself for not buying a backup copy when I saw one at Borders sometime in the early 00s.

Double wow, I just got to the post in the thread about this at ligotti.net where JVM is quoted as saying that Songs of a Dead Dreamer is included.

On the prev. Rolling F etc thread, I posted news from Subterranean Press re Ligotti editions, but their stuff is pricey (ltd. ed., so may not can find affordable second-hand; interesting that the press release incl. seeming candor his career arc-of-sorts)

Great great news. My copy of nightmare factory is also precarious. That simply was not an edition/binding meant to passed down through the ages.

What is ligotti's state of being these days? Is he writing? Functional? I've really worried about that guy at times...

Not long ago he talked of a horrible ordeal at the hospital.

I think the situation is that on rare occasions feels good enough to write but never actually expects it. Every new work gets treated as possibly being his last.

Some of those guys at the previously mentioned ligotti.net forums have corresponded with him over the years. There may be some more personal stuff buried in there somewhere. That's the only link I know of between Ligotti and the world the rest of us inhabit.

Also I need to correct something I said in the metal thread when recommending TG. I forgot that the stories are not arranged chronologically so the "later stories in Teatro Grottesco" (quoting me) are not in fact representative of a style or era of Ligotti. They're all jumbled around in that collection. All in all they are, however, of his middle and late (at that time) period (though he'd not written any fiction since then, until The Spectral Link last year). The title of the book goes back to the final section of The Nightmare Factory, the first Ligotti compilation, but the stories that first appeared under that "TG" heading are for some reason shuffled throughout the Teatro comp. Whew.

Oh and it has "The Shadow, the Darkness," which is pretty much his masterpiece -- and his sprawling epic at just under 40 pages.

http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=8726

Most recent interview, pretty grim in places.

they were giving away free copies of Loaded(*) outside the tube last month. Ligotti was their "Philosopher of the year".

(*) British Lad's mag, historically tits– and booze-led

Man. i'm digesting that interview in pieces between other things. not to get all me-time about it but this shit is close to home (though I toil in the chronic depression dept, have never been truly manic and don't envy it)

xpost lol huh????

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that a good portion of Ligotti's fanbase exists because of a familiarity with some of his mental and physical health issues. Not far into the first story of his I ever read, I was like, am I imagining this or is this writer perfectly recreating that sense of cosmic unease that comes with panic disorder/depression?

Still not having read the copy of The Spectral Link perched raven-like atop my nightstand, I only checked out the parts of that interview not detailing its contents, and yeah -- the hospital anecdote gave me the ol' chest tightening, sick-n-dizzy feeling. I didn't realize how out of the Ligotti loop I'd been; this was all news to me.

me too

Ah – 'thinker', not 'philosopher'.

http://i.imgur.com/w6E1OE4.jpg

Wow he had two-stage intestinal resection surgery just like I had when I was 20. Never thought id be reading one of my favorite living authors reflecting on the unforgettable experience of spending a few months sporting a colostomy bag.

African science fiction "always existed...the use of futurism in teaching codes of conduct...I'm curious about that..."--brief, intriguing:
http://atlantablackstar.com/2015/01/15/this-kenyan-writer-might-blow-your-mind-about-the-origin-of-science-fiction-stories/

I asked Nalo Hopkinson, who tweeted that link, about the "Kenyan Writer." Her reply:
Wanuri Kahiu, director of Pumzi, 1st Kenyan science fiction film.

I still need to check that xpost Bolano story! Thanks for the link. Really liked the wild Russian SF writer in 2666, pushing his luck over the Stalin event horizon.

Doesn't Mike Resnick write about Africa, esp. Kenya?

Maybe, but he's not African, is he? This is re African artists etc