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

The one Justina Robson novel I read was, while otherwise pretty good, nearly ruined by one character interminably quoting from the interminably boring 'American Pie', and done in such a way that it was plain Robson thinks that song is both excellent and deep, which made me pretty suss about her in general.

Holy Shit indeed:

Jeff VanderMeer ‏@jeffvandermeer

Holy sh*t "But by July, all rabbits are gone, real-life plot twist lifted from the Southern Reach trilogy" http://tinyurl.com/prjq579 @fsgbooks

Somewhere in Wolf In White Van: Catnip for Clute, hope he knows it, but I won't check the SFE site 'til I've finished it (finished the first time that is, suspect there will be replays). The narrator soaked up fantasy and science fiction from early childhood on, from when he started building on stray images especially, from covers of comic books, for his own purposes ( back of the park becomes the underworld throne room of Conan, recast as blood drinker: narrator tot pissed because family has to keep moving, father seeking new job and cheaper digs, I think--that's part of it). Cover of Leiber's Swords of Death becomes a point of intersection with another mysteriously purposeful loner in middle school; also its spine--the apparently purposeful and otherwise maybe accidental effects of design elements are big/handy influences on his invention of fantasy games.
The most important game is Trace Italian, title derived from the name of a medieval fortress, with rows layers f outer walls based around right angles, AKA "star fortress." This is also his life, or anyway his narrative, and certainly his livelihood, as subscribers (even or especially despite the Web) still send him their snail mail moves, and he responds with bits of scenario written decades, maybe a generation ago. The center of the fortress is just an empty, quiet place, very appealing, but they'll never get all the way in, or if they do---well, more relevant is that something has happened. A second thing, long after the disfiguring accident in high school. He approaches connection, while some incidents bleed through the old tapes he finds himself reviewing.

blah!

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/29/books/review/t-c-boyle-by-the-book.html?rref=collection/column/by-the-book&module=Ribbon&version=origin®ion=Header&action=click&contentCollection=By%20the%20Book&pgtype=article

"I have never been a fan of genre writing of any kind, because generally speaking it provides only one element I look for when I open a book of fiction: story. All right. Fine. Story is primary. But what I want — the richness of language, beauty that sweeps you away — is often missing in genre writing."

It's often missing in literary writing too! Also TC Boyle get one Vance!

God I can't wait to read that xp

Wolf notes cont. :"approaches connection," yeah, and always along the lines and at the angles he's established, but there were always connections to be made, and the second thing that's happened, the latest shake-up of his grid, leads to a wave-particle present-tense timeline, the accrual of old and even new faces, new social events either way. (the Mountain Goats thing for dimensions of geography, def. incl. crate digging.) Self-disfigured Sean ("it's like tire tread," decides a teen he meets [outside the liquor-video store, a favorite in Sean's own long-gone teen years], and Sean concurs) is charming-disarming and subtly manipulative, never overselling, unlike so many other first-person narrators. Always connections re-made, the web repaired, even/especially after the first great shake-out.

One way of coping, anyway, is to stare at the ceiling. A hospital room ceiling, white, like an egg in a carton that's been in the refrigerator for several weeks, away from the light, is dull, completely uniform, revealing variations only when you stare at the same spot for some time, and then, very slowly, venture out...You could let your attention rest there for a while, you could imagine the future of the ceiling, the battles playing out up there, camps pitched when the building was new, back in unremembered time...either in your mind's eye or out there on the actual field of play if your vision spreads that far, the plaster underneath is learning to follow the cracks, the mildew forming on residues left by cleaning solutions beginning to breed, and colonies of microscopic life-forms, hostile to dull matter, developing their ruthless, mindless strategy: consume, reproduce, survive. You can see the hospital when the building has been emptied of patients but a few workers remain: administrators, janitors, members of the demolition crew. You can see the ceiling in the next room, following the splits of the ceiling in its neighbor, and the one of beyond that in turn, and then the greater canvas, the sky at night gone flat and painted white, the constellations in the cracking paint, the dust the cracks bring into being as they form, finding free land where none had been before their coming

There are only two stories: either you go forward or you die. But it's very hard to die, because all the turns pointing that way open up into new ones, and you have to make the wrong choice enough times to really mean it. You have to stay focused. Very few players train their focus on death. The path forward stops here and there as you go, each frame filled out by outlines and figures from the rich depths of my hospital ceiling, shaded by colors I'd reconstituted from the foggy memory of the the visions that had proceeded the event for sixteen years: all those blurred plains, now deleted down into an ideally endless landscape, its peaks judiciously spread out so as not use them all up at once. Saving some for last when there was no last. When there was no point in saving, when no one would ever see the very last. Although at one point he does run into his old high school buddy Teague, the one who dug that Swords of Death cover, and Teague mentions in passing that he'd "played through" one of Sean's games, without bothering to say which one. (Some are or were less popular, maybe simpler than Trace Italian; Sean hasn't bothered much with them himself, so far.)

now *melted* down. that is.

TC Boyle giving reading at NYPL today. Perhaps he will reveal that quote as April Fool's joke.

http://subterraneanpress.com/uploads/Voice_of_the_Fire_by_Alan_Moore.jpg

from Subterranean Press:

Announcing VOICE OF THE FIRE by Alan Moore -- already at the printer!

Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore

We're six steps past delighted to announce a surprise signed limited edition of Alan Moore's challenging, maddening, spectacular novel, The Voice of the Fire, which just went to the printer.

Voice will be an oversize hardcover, with a dust jacket and endsheets by Dave McKean, and a brand new introduction by Joe Hill. We expect demand for this title to exceed supply, and likely won't have copies for our large online retail and wholesale accounts.
About the Book:

Alan Moore is one of the true grand masters of the graphic novel. His signature works, which include Watchmen, V for Vendetta and From Hell are cultural touchstones that have assumed the status of modern classics. But Moore's versatility extends to other forms as well, as his first (and thus far only published) novel, Voice of the Fire, amply demonstrates.

First published in 1996 as a paperback original, this extraordinary work ranges across 6,000 years of turbulent history and is set within the few square miles of rural England now known as Northampton. Its twelve largely independent narratives combine to form a cumulative portrait of the region's "secret soul," a soul that Moore illuminates with seemingly effortless mastery. The virtuoso opening section, "Hob's Hog," takes place in 4,000 BC and is related by a damaged and abandoned young man whose grasp of reality is as limited as his vocabulary. His story is one of loss, longing, and ultimate betrayal and that story, like others that will follow, finds its way into Northampton's gradually expanding pool of myth, legend, and dream. Subsequent narratives encompass a gallery of characters-saints and witches, murderers and mad men, artists and bureaucrats-whose personal histories reflect the larger history of one small corner of England.

Five years in the writing and told through an array of highly distinctive fictional voices, this visionary, unjustly neglected masterpiece remains one of Alan Moore's most astonishing creations. Mysterious, disturbing and always utterly original, Voice of the Fire is a work of permanent value, the rare sort of book that demands and rewards repeated readings. It is a brave, beautiful and adventurous achievement that no one but Alan Moore could have written.

Limited: 750 signed numbered oversize hardcovers: $60

Lettered: 26 signed leatherbound copies, housed in a custom traycase: $350

Wormwoodiana

THE GHOST STORY AWARDS

Posted: 30 Mar 2015 11:20 AM PDT
We are pleased to announce the winners of the inaugural Ghost Story Awards, sponsored by the literary society A Ghostly Company, and the journals Ghosts & Scholars and Supernatural Tales. The awards are for the best ghost story and the best ghost story book published in English in 2014.

The winners are:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4nnGNQ4oxio/VRlJSKkPt-I/AAAAAAAAAf4/RvF063uGL3Y/s320/Mr%2BPunch.jpg

Story – "Shallabalah" by D.P. Watt, The Ghosts & Scholars Newsletter no 26, Haunted Library

Book – Dreams of Shadow and Smoke: Stories for J.S. Le Fanu edited by Jim Rockhill and Brian J. Showers, Swan River Press

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zIA-g6qpayc/VRlJdYw2kBI/AAAAAAAAAgA/LJZZsdEbdKQ/s320/Dreams%2Bof%2BShadow%2Band%2BSmoke.gif

Our warmest congratulations to the winners, who will each receive a specially commissioned statuette, and a year’s complimentary subscription from each of the three sponsors.

Mark Valentine
Secretary

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/stunning-street-art-tribute-to-terry-pratchett-appears-in-east-london-10153232.html

http://www.standard.co.uk/incoming/article10153215.ece/alternates/w620/Pratchett1.jpg
(Picture: Ella Finch)

What book hasn’t been written that you’d like to read?

The one in which the author explains the mysteries of the universe (in detail, with diagrams and full-color photos of the creatures inhabiting all those other planets). This would, of course, include a photo shoot with God and lavish pics of the celestial pad itself.

huh kinda sounds like an sf novel

finished the Ted Chiang - pretty good, maybe a little cold/stiff when it comes to characters and people, but the ideas are engaging. Struck me as very much concept-driven, with other elements subjugated to the exploration (usually via exposition) of a given story's central concept. The story that seemed to work best on multiple levels - formal, conceptual, emotional - was the titular "Story of Your Life" with the alien-speech translator intercutting reminiscences of her (currently deceased) daughter with a "first contact" narrative that also loops around to explain her daughter's conception. That one was genuinely moving. Would read more but man dude is slow!

On to Robert Reed. First story "The Children's Crusade" is great.

"Story of Your Life" is getting a movie adapt with Amy Adams

Hm i don't really see a decent film in there

Was thinking something similar

lol at this whole "controversy" btw: http://io9.com/the-hugo-awards-were-always-political-now-theyre-only-1695721604

this thing that i got at that book store sale is a great resource, by the way:

https://scontent-lga.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xfp1/v/t1.0-9/11001890_10153794774872137_810032581196226929_n.jpg?oh=f1ed9c5bf02bd15144d663a842dfb48a&oe=557C87F1

1984 Pynchon essay on Luddism: http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html

nice to see some glowing enthusiasm for post-war sci-fi from the old master

I will check that, thanks.
Just finished Dune Messiah, though I may re-read/relive some parts of thee vision, appropriately enough, for "What is 'before,' little sister?" True space *opera*, with some lyrics even---also some soap opera, but never in the pot-boiler, placeholder sense; the momentum of plot x character development goes whipping though different points of view---but maybe with more of a sense of each moment than in Dune, which a previous poster found a little too fleet-footed--- as we're sometimes fed big sanctified visionary Scooby Snacks (and/or gamed-out evil plotters' points)of what will happen, but never how.
There's also a sense that busting out of the pattern can be part of the pattern working itself out, by means unforeseen, *maybe* even by the author. It does seem, in my def. sub-sub-etc.-Herbertian experierence, that sometimes you gotta let it go, to a certain extent. Which is a point he explicitly makes, re existence in the universe (not only his universe). Then again, the illusion of spontaneity is very much in the spirit of his creations, who do tend to be attracted to the long con and the deep game, as we say in the Golden Age of Television.

they must have some good weed where you live, don.

yeah, the sense of well-timed moments is there, incl. those in which the waiting is the hardest part (until the next "oh shit" penny drops, though actually it's always dropping through this story).

Kind of a Dune/Kim Stanley Robinson thing:
http://news.discovery.com/space/buried-mars-glaciers-are-brimming-with-water-150408.htm

Here is the Graphic Story that the sadpuppies members nominated for a Hugo: http://www.thezombienation.com/

Mr Martin not happy:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/09/george-rr-martin-right-wing-broken-hugo-awards

That comic strip might be worth a gold star in daycarey. There's a pretty good action story by Jim Butcher in the Martin/Dozois anthology Dangerous Women, and it seems favorably disposed re women (although the young female detective is maybe minding the store for the series hero, currently dead). Too bad if he's being misrepresented by these folks. Not a big Martin fan (incl. degree of GoT reliance on basic diet of boobs 'n' blood), but his comments here are pertinent.

Not a big Martin fan (incl. degree of GoT reliance on basic diet of boobs 'n' blood), but his comments here are pertinent.

cosign

(1-sine ^2)

= cosign^2

(should have spelled the first one "sign" I guess)

Just saw Interstellar last night and didn't really like it and couldn't help thinking that Gateway, which I recently reread, did a much better job with similar material. Probably won't like the movie of that either though. Is this a deformation from reading sf, that you end up not liking the film variety much, holding it to the wrong standard. Or maybe there are plenty who just eat it up all the same. Only saw the second half, I should add, perhaps first half is better.

they're not really making a Gateway movie are they

I thought so. Or maybe a miniseries even. I believe I read about it on The Way The Future Blogs.

http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/2014/03/good-news-gateway-tv-series-in-the-works/

Re discussion Ligotti discussion upthread, I see in the new Penguin Classics catalogue that Ligotti, Ray Russell and Charles Beaumont are all getting book. Covers are pleasingly mental, esp the Beaumont:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/B00TY3ZQZI.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0143107658.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0143107763.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Glad you saved me the bother posting these, yes they are very good and refreshingly unclassy for Penguin.

There's some talk of a follow-up Ligotti book. That should make his work far more findable than ever.

Ligotti cover is by Chris Mars.

Wow the long awaited ligotti-replacements link has been forged

Pretty interesting podcast about the Hugo nominees here: http://pexlives.libsyn.com/shabcast-3

(xpost) lol. But will it prove to be as strong as the Jack Vance - Robert Palmer link, or R.A. Lafferty - Steely Dan?

I know Beaumont wrote for Star Trek but lol at "afterword by William Shatner"

glad to see those Russell and Beaumont volumes as well as the Ligotti, all those guys should be in print

Didn't know Beaumont wrote for Star Trek, but it goes with his other activity, and he may have written some of the Twilight Zones Shatner was in; anyway I'm sure Shatner was aware of him back then, since CB (and Richard Matheson) wrote several if not most of the best TZ scripts. A re-post, incl. a re-re-post, of our prev. Beaumont discussion:

What do you know? Charles Beaumont is getting his own Penguin Classics book too.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Saturday, January 31, 2015 8:36 AM (2 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yay! From the old Rolling Science Fiction etc A book on my shelf twenty years before I read it: The Howling Man, short stories by Charles Beaumont. Title tale (later a Twilight Zone script, like several of these, most even better in the original) is the one about a traveler in bad weather, who stops at a monastery. Very hospitable to him, but why is that poor gentle man locked away? The traveler is increasingly troubled--he's also the first-person narrator, a nice, humble guy himself, which often means trouble up ahead, when a oh-so-non-literary, nice li'l narrator also has to convey the anxious spoon-feeding exposition and underscoring of the "literary"-as-fuck author. But *this* narrator, tortured by his conscience and his fear, his certainty, has obsessively drawn himself into hard-learned, self-taught eloquence, right from the beginning. How often does this happen?!
Beaumont was Hollywood king of the killer opening, though some of these come off too slick. And his sardonic-to-macabre humor , though often agreeable, even empathetic, could shade into something more repellent--misogyny, for instance: slick and shallow and sincere. Seems, according to William F Nolan's intro, that he came from some kind of boondocks gothic situation (orig name: Charles Nutt, a prodigy with sev. false starts before he made it, still youing, as a writer). A bit like Saki, H.H. Munro, whose sister confirmed that the aunts who raised them could be sadisict. Dunno about Nutt/Beaumont's alibi, but in any case, you could say the last laugh was on him: he died of Alzheimer's at age 38.
As Nolan tells it, he was a complex person, mercurial, but close and considerate to his wife, kids, and friends, with great enthusiasm beyond or along with the facility. I'd even like to read his damn car books! Also need to check out some of the b-movies he scripted, fairly well-known but not to me.

― dow, Thursday, August 23, 2012 10:29 AM (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nice

― the late great, Thursday, August 23, 2012 1:51 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Was just listening to a long Harlan Ellison interview and he namechecked Beaumont a couple times. Need to investigate...
---Elvis Telecom Sorry Elvis, my first time doing cutnpaste on Mac, but he prob posted that during the same week of Aug '12. Thanks Ward, I will check out Farmer.

― dow, Saturday, January 31, 2015 12:02 PM (2 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The aforementioned Valancourt Book published a Charles Beaumont collection a little while back, The Hunger and Other Stories, which I considered getting.

― Number Nine Meme (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, January 31, 2015 2:03 PM (2 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'd expect any Beaumont collection to be a bit uneven, but worth reading (at the very least).

― dow, Saturday, January 31, 2015 9:23 PM (2 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

There can be a driving, even exploratory quality to his writing, along with the sardonic tendencies, an unusual combination, I think (maybe more unusual in fantasy than science fiction, in that era, anyway).

is the ligotti using the original texts or his revisions?

I'm sure it's revisions.

was nightmare factory orig or revised?

my first ligotti was carroll & graf grimscribe c 1995, obv that was orig texts

I don't know about Nightmare Factory. I might be wrong but I think revisions started coming with Shadow At The Bottom Of The World.

what was I thinking, Beaumont didn't write any Star Trek episodes ... his Shatner connection is The Intruder