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

Well that Guardian reviewer is an SF writer so might not be that reliable. It's not unheard of for them to be totally honest but more often they are very complimentary.

You think?

Related subject
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXUKjn40l6Q

Tbh was afraid to click on that but I am now glad I did, it was kind of awesome.

Internet has actually made this situation far worse. With genre forums of mostly writers and some authors attacking negative reviewers. The horror forums I have frequented are always 90% writers/editors/illustrators and someday when I finally read a lot of these guys I'd be hesitant to write a negative or even lukewarm review, so probably wouldn't write a review at all.

Video left me wanting more info about Harlan Ellison's haircut decisions.

Went back over a couple more grauniad round ups, all the reviews were positive but not quite as unreservedly enthusiastic as this month.

Not sure what KSR short stories I've read but I haven't read any long ones. Aurora seems like a good place to start... I think I said this this upthread already.

Intriguing review of Neal Stephenson's Seveneves and Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora, with cogent, concise comments on their relationship to the present era:
http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/the-warm-equations

― dow, Sunday, June 28, 2015 2:31 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Only thing: the reviewer limits himself *so much* by abstention from all spoilers. But he says why.

― dow, Sunday, June 28, 2015 2:38 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Also check the links below the review, like Matthew Snyder on Hieroglyph:
http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/saving-spaceship-earth

― dow, Sunday, June 28, 2015 3:07 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Writers can now send that youtube link to each other when they don't want to blurb each others weaker books.

Don't be like Bill Pronzini or Stephen King!

Only thing: the reviewer limits himself *so much* by abstention from all spoilers. But he says why.

He emphasised it so much that I wanted to read Aurora just to see what he was going on about. But looking upthread I think James has blown that one already and might just have saved me 500 pages.

Er, sorry about that... It comes early on in the book, about 30p in

There are a couple of other big surprises i didnt describe

oh 30pp in doesn't count! Damn, back on the pile

> about 30p in

i read that as pence. total number of pages divided by cost of book ie 10 pages into a £3 book.

i finished Algernon and then had a confusing conversation with someone who didn't know that it was a novel-length thing (me not knowing it was originally a short story).

Some free KSR stories here: http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/1597801844/1597801844_toc.htm allegedly his 'best' but I don't how how representative they are - I was expecting a few more bangs and whistles than there are in these short character sketches of alternate histories or near futures. Serves me right for being a cheapskate, maybe.

I think I liked most of his early stories in Asimov's etc., later collected for Down and Out In The Year 2000. The only ones I half-way remember at the moment: a scientist who is depressed about the accumulating evidence of eco-decline, and its already problematic effects, like drought, he keeps slogging along, duty-bound, periodically treated for depression via massive doses of electric light: sits in a room facing a sun of many bulbs--that was a thing then (sad irony of the enviro dosed by artificial light---do you see--I was impressed by the lower-case way he presented it, though). The other was about a homeless guy in DC---no science fiction content at all, other than it was maybe the title story, thus set in the future, but seemed very much of its time; as in the depressed scientist's accumulating narrative. Seemed like he'd learned from Orwell about uncrowded density of imagery; he earned the O-ref of Down and Out...(or so I thought in days of yore).
Also enjoyed The Wild Shore,concerning the travels of a post-eco-collapse Huck Finn in the Great Northwest. But I never did read the rest of that trilogy (involving different characters), Gold Coast and Pacific Rim.

pretty excited by that r.a. lafferty omnibus linked upthread. anyone familiar enough with his work to name some can't-miss stories in there? i'm kind of just reading them at random, mostly the late 60s/early 70s ones, my favorite one i've encountered so far is "Ginny Wrapped in the Sun"

it took me a long time to finish KSR's Mars trilogy but i'm glad i did it. it felt like an accomplishment. i have a bunch of his other books at home that i still haven't gotten around to. kinda hard to top the Mars books.

Kinda like this Shirley Jackson story--starts out just sub-Kafka, and ends resonantly, evocatively---sub-Kafka still, you might say, but that's less relevant than the folkoid ballad quality, and what I infer as social commentary, on a personal note I almost heard
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/04/28/the-man-in-the-woods

reading the review of the new shirley jackson collection and apparently tons of the stories in it have never been published before? i might have to splurge on it.

"As we approach the centenary of her birth comes this astonishing compilation of fifty-six pieces—more than forty of which have never been published before. Two of Jackson’s children co-edited this volume, culling through the vast archives of their mother’s papers at the Library of Congress, selecting only the very best for inclusion."

40+ things!

yeah, i gotta get that.

like the space she leaves, and the breadcrumbs--in this one, but the other one on thenewyorker, "Paranoia," is not that hot. Yeah, I'd like to check the collection. Both stories were linked below this short non-fiction, also in the collection:
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/memory-and-delusion?mbid=rss

Just watched Under The Skin, rec. to fans of Ballard, Roeg, and Cronenberg,though the long unblinking solemn alien gazes at toddlin' Scottish streetlife and wide open spaces give me time to nurture my own niggling degrees of detachment and doubts. A "distillation" of a much more elaborately spelled-out script, director Jonathan Glazer explains, and that does seem right, if a little generous with the flow---there's def no sense of being force-fed gobs of exposition and bright twirling objects while accountants time the whole thing, as with so many bigger-budgeted items (Wonder how the Michael Faber novel is.) Certainly committed to show-not-tell---though could have used more bursts of hellish imagery, the overall arc is no prob---and,since the alien gazer is Scarlett Johansson....
Not as good as Her, but they could make a satisfying SJ SF double feature (how's Lucy?)

Re: puppies/awards conversation, I think those words "badthink" and "wrongfun" are hilarious.

Eyes Of The Overworld (2/4 in Dying Earth sequence) by Jack Vance.

This is a huge improvement over the previous book, a better adventure and so much more happens.
It's not a continuation although one character from Dying Earth is mentioned a few times. Eyes Of The Overworld has humour as a major component whereas Dying Earth only had several funny moments. Dying Earth was partially linked short stories about different characters but this is just one long story following one man.

Cugel The Clever seems to me a clear replacement for Liane The Wayfarer (easily the most fun character in the previous book); initially I thought Cugel was an anti-hero but he's every bit the horrible villain Liane was; I was genuinely shocked at how nasty Cugel could be, especially when he murders someone for a harmless prank, and shows he's probably not above sexual harassment.
The main pleasure of the book for me was the showy conversations (it's hard not to want to talk like this and start referring to food as "viands") and Cugel's hilariously pompous indignation and claims to innocence when he is accused of crimes he has actually committed. He wrongs so many people in a spectacular fashion.

A couple of problems though:
(1) The scene in which Voynod assumes Cugel killed one of the pilgrims made no sense, and then immediately after Cugel unconvincingly succeeds in lying to Voynod that the salve he is trading is magic. It's a weak setup for later scenes to happen.
(2) Vance is well known for his impressive visual descriptions (particularly good at countryside and skies) but just like in the previous book, I found a lot of the descriptions confusing, awkward or ill fitting.
When the disembodied legs that support Derwe Coreme's boat are first mentioned, there is no mention of their arms, but when the arms grab at people they are jarringly introduced as if we already knew about them.
Cugel's rope climb down from the huge pillar was seemingly impossible to visualise correctly from the text.
Many of the clothes, furnishings, creatures and various other things are described in a frustratingly plain or unsatisfying manner when compared to the often lovely settings, sights and generally extravagant manner of the story. This is my biggest complaint.

But I generally had a good time with this book and the strengths outweigh my disappointments.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/books/review/ursula-k-le-guin-by-the-book.html?hpw&rref=books&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

"I tend to avoid fiction about dysfunctional urban middle-class people written in the present tense. This makes it hard to find a new novel, sometimes."

this right here is why started reading so much SF 8 or 9 years ago. got so sick of the writing workshop white people angst. no offense to white people. i have some friends who are white.

Otm. A pretty half-assed stab at the "my favourite things" game though. Either play it for fun or do a drew daniel 12 page essay on why it sucks, or don't play it.

http://bookriot.com/2015/07/22/9-diverse-fantasy-books-will-challenge-idea-fantasy-fiction/

A list of fantasy with diversity and fresh viewpoints.

yeah, i like when people just name a ton of random writers they enjoy or are enjoying currently. doesn't have to be the BEST or GOAT or anything. would love a reading list from her. already pretty familiar with jane austen and the like...

x-post

although she does mention some people i've never read/heard of: harry roberts, kij johnson, helen phillips, colin thubron.

incidentally i finished 'the lathe of heaven' recently. a fairly decent potboiler that read more like a k dick than a le guin, with its fractured realities and coded messages. wouldn't rank it amongst her best.

did you know that UKL and PKD went to high school together and were in the same class and they didn't even know each other at all? you can't make that stuff up.

JP: Were you thinking about Philip K. Dick while writing Lathe of Heaven?

UL: Oh yeah. It’s sort of an homage to him.

JP: Was it something you shared with him and discussed with him?

UL: We wrote letters back and forth some. We never met. I was rather scared of Phil. He was very heavily into drugs, and drugs do scare me. I had three kids at home, and was not enthusiastic about having a real—not a pothead but a heavy drug user around. Phil went off the rails periodically, and so I was not really looking to meet him. But we did correspond, very friendly, for some while. We seemed to respect each other’s writing, were interested in what each other was trying to do.

JP: I read you had gone to high school together. That’s not true?

UL: That is so weird. Yes, we were complete contemporaries at Berkeley High School, but he’s not in the yearbook. His name is in the yearbook, but there is no photograph. I think Phil dropped out before graduation.
I don’t know many people anymore that were at Berkeley High with me. When there were more of us alive we tried to find out anything about him. Nobody remembers him. Not one person in this group remembered him physically. He worked at a store where I bought records when I had the money, so I might have met him there. But what he looked like then, as a teenager? [Shrugs.] He is absolutely the invisible man at Berkeley High.

that is so wild

wow!

Yes, terrific.

Speaking of weird Berkeley connections, PKD at 19 also lived in a warehouse loft with Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan for a while: http://www.strangehorizons.com/2009/20090323/cheney-c.shtml

I read somewhere that moving from the rainy world of his native Berkeley to the artificial paradise of Southern Cali was a revelation, maybe even before Disneyland opened, and there he became fascinated with, for instance, families' familial concern when the Abraham Lincoln simulacrum started seeing a little off, like it wasn't feeling well. (Also wrote some stories as by as A. Lincoln-Simulacrum.)
The Bay Area seems not to have turned him on so much, although the acerbic non-SF Mary And The Giant is v. readable, and unmistakably young PKD.

"turned him on in so many ways" might be a better way of putting it; he copped some inspiration there, anyway. (Speaking of the record store, he owned or managed his own for a while, and even had his own radio show---classical, I think.)

Great piece, one way street! I'll have to check out more Spicer. The affinities of SF and Beat (-era) poetry, h'mmm....

That record store or something like it, fictionalized, figures prominently in Radio Free Albemuth, iirc. You should definitely check out Spicer! Even with the Spicer revival of the last several years (i.e. since the bulk of his poetry came back into print in 2008), he deserves to be read much more widely.

I'm obliged to link to his 1965 lectures on poetics, since his notion of composition as dictation from the Outside gets fairly Dickian: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/238196?page=1

It’s impossible for the source of energy to come to you in Martian or North Korean or Tamil or any language you don’t know. It’s impossible for the source of energy to use images you don’t have, or at least don’t have something of. It’s as if a Martian comes into a room with children’s blocks with A, B, C, D, E which are in English and he tries to convey a message. This is the way the source of energy goes. But the blocks, on the other hand, are always resisting it.

Delany would be another writer worth thinking about w/r/t convergences between SF and postwar poetry: he spends some time in The Motion of Light in Water on his early relationship to Auden and his poetry, and iirc Nova has shoutouts to the Bay poet Helen Adam and Spicer's sometime boyfriend Russell Fitzgerald, who apparently discussed Delany's use of Tarot elements while he was composing that novel.

(And, obviously, Delany's queer marriage to Marilyn Hacker is treated really extensively in Motion, where long sections of Delany's memoir take passages from Hacker's autobiographical poetry from the later 70s as their starting points.)

I also need to check out more Delany and Hacker, duh!
Dylan was rumored to use tarot in writing his 60s lyrics; think I read that at least some of The Man In The High Castle came from casting I Ching. Reminded of that while reading The Grapes of Wrath this week, as weather patterns and events began to provide guidance to everything else, on and off the page. It also made me think of Kim Stanley Robinson's early Western eco-themes, in xpost The Wild Shore, for instance.

Yeah, I still really need to read those Kim Stanley Robinson California novels (I need to read Robinson, period, actually).

none of you need to read that norman spinrad greenhouse summer book i finally finished. not great.

i actually started reading ready player one because it is my ten year old kid's favorite book and he really wanted me to read it. he's halfway through the new one by that dude.

That KSR California trilogy is so, so, so good.

that ukl,pkd connection is amazing. i had no idea

something faintly heartbreaking about a ten yo whose favorite book is that book. sorry scott. condolences.

Lord knows what shite I liked when I was ten, but I was ten for god's sake.