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

apparently this is a representative passage

http://i.imgur.com/XPWON5w.png

make your own mind up

Well obviously that is appalling. (Massive cringe at 'pirate ninja'.)

It must have something for not just richard and judy but the wall st journal and the ab club to be gushing over it tho.

Av club

Hack-a-day was raving about other other day. And I like what he did with the later revisions - fixing holes in his knowledge with user comments.

Also this:

https://xkcd.com/1536/

Comedy gold.

There was funny description of it on Spring ILB Rolling thread, I believe.

Ok you guilt tripped me enough to leave the comfort and safety of zing to do a search. Not enough to cut and paste the results tho, including one dismissive post from jordan right here just a month ago.

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

i dunno, i'm enjoying it. it's entertaining. seems like something a kid would love. i was probably reading encyclopedia brown books when i was ten. also about a nerd who solves mysteries.

Ok you guilt tripped me enough to leave the comfort and safety of zing to do a search.

Moorcock interview covering the standard bases but also about his new book and I thought this bit was worth highlighting (had seen it highlighted on John Coulthart's blog.

How does he feel about the triumph of Tolkienism and, subsequently, the political sword-and-sorcery epic Game of Thrones, in making fantasy arguably bigger than it has ever been?

“To me, it’s simple,” he says. “Fantasy became as bland as everything else in entertainment. To be a bestseller, you’ve got to rub the corners off. The more you can predict the emotional arc of a book, the more successful it will become.

“I do understand that Game of Thrones is different. It has its political dimensions; I’m very fond of the dwarf and I’m very pleased that George [R R Martin], who’s a good friend, has had such a huge success. But ultimately it’s a soap opera. In order to have success on that scale, you have to obey certain rules. I’ve had conversations with fantasy writers who are ambitious for bestseller status and I’ve had to ask them, ‘Yes, but do you want to have to write those sorts of books in order to get there?’”

Yeah good piece

Though Moorcock says he was mostly misquoted: From the most recent Ansible... http://news.ansible.uk/a337.html

Michael Moorcock's profile/interview (New Statesman, 24 July) had a subhead saying he 'revolutionised science fiction with symbolism, sex and psychoactive drugs. Now, at 75, he has invented another genre.' Also included was the mandatory MM quotation 'I think Tolkien was a crypto-fascist'. Mike has since issued a disclaimer: 'He was a nice bloke and it's a generous, well-meant, piece but I'm afraid I read it saying "no I didn't" and "I never said that" so many times that it was a relief to get to the last, more accurate, para. My fault, maybe, for talking too fast and modifying too frequently. I've never claimed the authority of being working class! I'm from the class most artists come from, the hated petite bourgeoisie, though I had a variety of relatives who didn't. I have spent half my life saying that Jerry Cornelius is not a "secret agent". Feel like I've just taken a turn on the same old roundabout. But I'll do a lot for four good pork pies. / Oh, and I absolutely LOVE hobbits. I'm just looking for the best recipe.' (www.multiverse.org, 24 July)

Sorry I'm going to be a bit basic here -- I've been a comic book reader all my life, but I've never really been into scifi/fantasy in *book book* form, save the odd Dragonlance novel I picked up as a teenager. I read the first Game of Thrones a few years ago but didn't love it enogh to read the rest (they are long!) and am happy to settle for the TV show. Tried China Mieville and find him an apalling sentence writer.

Anyway, I picked up a Star Trek novel, Imzadi, while on a lazy holiday last month and absolutely *loved* it. Obvs it's not very representative of sci-fi at large, in style or quality, but I *really* appreciated its trashy-ripping-yarn-ness after a decade plus of mostly just reading literary fiction - and was wondering where to go next. The classics, I guess -- what about Dune -- is Dune actually good? I worry it's just Casteneda with a narrative backbeat, but the sentences are better than I thought they'd be.

(Also I read The Magicians, which was pretty mediocre, but did whet my appetite to read something similar but better.)

Tried China Mieville and find him an apalling sentence writer

otm

dune is not really a ripping yarn

iain m banks is close to the intersection of decent writer/ripping yarn/star trek. consider phlebas

Just wondering whether it's worth a punt - enjoyed the opening two chapters and the authorial voice is much less hammy than I was expecting. But hoping it shifts up a gear soon.

Thanks! I have that one on my "to try" list. And I've got Kindle first-chapter samples of Gardens of the Moon, Lies of Locke, Anubis Gates, Black Company and (terrible title) Name of the Wind. I also bought an old John M Ford novel, Dragon Waiting, on the dim rememberance of enjoying one of his Paranoia RPG supplements.

i would def. recommend 'hyperion'

if you think GoT is too long don't start reading the malazan books.

Yeah, iain M Banks is a good recommendation based on what you've said. Also maybe Joe Haldeman's 'The Forever War', which combines action with nice big ideas stuff, and is quite well written.

Jack Vance - the Demon Princes and Planet of Adventure cycles. Old school space opera as skeleton for gorgeous inimitable prose, unforgettable supporting characters, dry irony and uproarious pomp.

Anubis Gates is pretty much the definition of a ripping yarn

Yeah I was gonna say. Love that book.

reading ancillary justice by ann leckie right now. HUGO and NEBULA winner and the first in her trilogy. i dig it. i don't think i love it, but i will definitely read the next two. just wanted to read something new that people have raved about. if you have never read a book about a lonely spaceship in human form out for REVENGE than this might be the one to start with.

i think people like mieville more for his imagination than his sentences, no?

for sure. but really, on the SF spectrum, mieville is not too bad a prose writer.

i have said the same about grrm: when you go to any kind of depth here you will swiftly find some truly bad writing, and it becomes hard to criticize basically competent writers who just have quirks or indulgences or w/ever

grrm?

fry tls

(george r r martin)

I've only read Mieville's nonfiction so far but I think he's really good at baroque pileups and that's fun to read. He's a great talker too.

there is definitely a part of me that likes the fact that someone wrote something in a night for a hundred bucks and its still being anthologized 60 years later. and that it's still worth reading even if its kinda sloppy. i like the riffing on well-worn themes that is a big part of SF. i think it helps that i'm a jazz fan. i do enjoy hearing what the 100th guy to tackle "my funny valentine" does with it. jazz also a genre filled with thousands of records where hungover guys go into a studio for an hour or two and make a record that people still listen to decades later. (you could say the same about R&B and punk and a lot of other stuff, but jazz works better for me as an kindred spirit...at its best it goes into uncharted territory and it uses the well-known as a launching pad.)

probably more total time that went into making a single comic book in the 50's and 60's than a lot of SF novels. minimal editing. minimal proof-reading (so many typos!). most publishers just churned them out as fast as possible to keep the drug store racks full.

certainly lots of bad stuff that is just boring bad. but there is some great immediacy in a lot of the bad/good old books i have read. so feverish! writing about robots as fast as you can can really be exciting. van Vogt might actually be my favorite bad writer. so demented! at times like something written in english and then translated into hindi and then translated into swahili and then back into english. but definitely not for everyone.

I always remember what Hugh B Cave said about having to make a typewriter smoke in those days to make a living from pulp magazines.
There's a Cave story that could have been much better if it didn't have the words "scowling" and "scowled" on every page. I strongly suspected this was editorial interference because Cave was never usually that clumsy. I can imagine an editor saying "our readers can't get enough of scowling detectives".
He was asked if he wanted to revise the stories but he felt they were so much a product of their time/situation that he left them as they are. I understand but I also think it's a shame because some of them could have been sharpened into something even better. I love "Murgunstrumm" and "Stragella".

sci-fi people really big on numbers too. how many words they wrote in a year. how many sales they made. love the emphasis on "sales" in general for some reason. "so and so made his first sale in 1963 and since then has sold 4 stories to so and so magazine and..."

i can't think of another genre or field that is like that?

kinda figured all the early pulps were like that...?

reading Knight's A for Anything now and it's pretty incredible. or at least the first 50 pages are so far.

also, you gotta figure if some publisher is paying someone 500 bucks or whatever to churn out a novel, how much are they gonna pay an editor to actually work on it? speed is of the essence!

or the emphasis on how many pages some omnibus collection is! page count very big with SF people too. haha, why do i love that?

(although i guess that is common with magazines in general. our fattest issue yet!)

obv pulp magazines and comic books are closely linked and entwined, but again in comic books there is an emphasis on productivity (jack kirby can pencil four pages in a day! joe gill writes a comic book a day!) and endless toil to turn a buck

Kirby talked a lot about "making sales" and page productivity was definitely fetishized in a way. Ellison talked about how he used to admire that type of pulp professionalism but ultimately it wasn't really good for the stories. He's right, as impressive as the productivity and often lovely detail of Alfredo Alcala and Joe Maneely was, that sort of factory mentality didn't advance the medium.

Finally read Arthur Machen's "The White People". Very good.
For all the endless recycling of the weird fiction forefathers, this feels very fresh and not overly "remade" (but the film Pan's Labyrinth has some similarity). Although there is a framing conversation which was fairly common, the main body of the story is structurally unlike most of the genre.
Basically a girl writing about her secret adventures in the countryside and the folklore her nurse passes to her from ancestors. I always like how real and different Machen's faery mythology feels.
Sometimes the gigantic paragraphs that take up most of the story given me trouble but it wasn't as difficult as I feared.

A few of us went on about the Dune books here and there upthread, and maybe the previous Rolling Science Fiction thread too: you might wanta check the particulars in our comments, but mainly I'd say def the original Dune is fun, and if you want more, the sequel, Dune Messiah, is equally strong in its own way. Children of Dune is not. God Emperor of Dune is mostly about the title character torturing the others with (tediously) manipulative philosophical bullshit. That's as far as I've gotten.
Also, I commented (mostly) favorably on several anthologies of new stories, fairly often ripping, assembled by Gardner Dozois and RR Martin: Dangerous Women (multiple-genre), Down These Strange Streets (urban fantasy, but also Cpl. Dashiell Hammett on the strange case in WWII Aleutians), Rogues, and Old Mars (with a ripping, if hastily concluded, recent yarn by Moorcock).
Oh yeah, Scalzi's Lock In, also commented on, was a fun read, and we were talking about Allan Steele, right?

i bought something by LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD. i also, oh dear, repurchased the first two books of the BOOK of the NEW SUN. all this to put off reading nell zink

Nell zink wallcreeper good
Nell zink mislaid not very good, but occasionally pretty funny

Basically a girl writing about her secret adventures in the countryside

I think you are somewhat downplaying one of the more convincingly hallucinatory episodes in english literature! And the framing conversation might be common in form, not so much in content. But what did you make of the ending, with it's strange allusion to the story of a mother's sympathetic injury? I had to rely on google to crack that one for me. "She had poisoned herself—in time" remains mysterious.

I prefer to downplay because although I wish more people read this stuff, it's great that you can experience so many classics knowing very little about them but I guess I'm still underselling it. I'm a bit wary of exaggerating and mischaracterizing too. Difficult to talk about when you don't want to spoil things too much.

I really don't know what to make of that injury or the poison thing. Or the idea of "processes" being embodied in the form of nymphs. Not an easy story to analyse.
I do wonder how different the story would read without the huge paragraphs.

here's the page that towards the end explains something of the heavily elided conclusion, the sympathetic injury and the statue hammered into dust and fragments. do not read if you would prefer it to remain a sublime mystery (in which case i am dearly sorry for putting temptation in your way):
http://asheraxonline.tumblr.com/post/25846179275/the-shock-of-the-numinous