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

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

ledge, do you recall a long discourse from Fizzles at the July 2015 London ILB fap involving Machen, Churchill, the Siege of Sidney Street and horseflesh sandwiches (this last was the repetitive motif)?

If not, perhaps this blog post will refresh your memory.

Oh to be sitting on a roof eating horseflesh sandwiches.

Think I saw somebody doing that on the Chelsea Old Town Hall during the Pintar Rapido.

Pintar Rapido! This was the first year (of three) I didn't take part.

(Normal sf discussion will resume as soon as possible. We apologise for the inconvenience.)

Thanks for the tumblr article. I don't think it gives away much actually.

lois mcmaster bujold occasioned in me this feeling of "i wish i was reading something exactly like this ... only good," while i lost a bloody day to her. and, too, to some vague, passing fluish sickness, which i suppose i can't blame on 'barrayar', much as i'd like to.

there's something morally distasteful about space opera, the possibilities it allows one of writing about Society and Politics and Culture without having any knowledge about any of the three

Is there a Sturgeon's Law generalization to be gained by crossing out Space Opera and replacing it with something else?

yeah i should probably explain what i mean, like, w/ examples, but

i just finished Ancillary Justice. it's a pretty interesting space opera! lots of ideas about society and politics and culture. well, one culture in particular. i would recommend it. gonna start the second book today. don't know if the third book has come out yet.

ann leckie says two big influences on her ancillary books were cherryh and norton and not banks. so, i guess that makes her squarer than some. i still have never read a cj cherryh book. as with norton, there are a million of them. the norton SF i have read i have enjoyed. never read any of her sf/fantasy or fantasy.

A couple more from the library shop: Moorcock's Gloriana--is it good? And speaking of RR Martin-associated anthologies, also picked an expanded edition of the first Wild Cards, incl. Zelasny and several Martin-Dozois regulars, such as Howard Waldrop (why I bought it), Carrie Vaughn and Melinda M. Snodgrass.

*Zelazny*, sorry!

i've started lurking on the sffworld.com forums and they can be pretty handy. especially about new stuff. i feel like i'm the only person in the world who hasn't read the old man scalzi books. i might have to get those just to see what the hubbub is about.

Lois Bujold is big over there. so thomp might want to steer clear...

I could use some Andre Norton pointers

I'm skeptical about Scalzi but that's just my prejudice against military sci-fi in general talking. Heinlein's fascism can gtfo. Forever War is p good though.

i've just picked up straight SF norton paperbacks at random. i stay away from dragon covers. the store around the corner from me has literally 100+ of her paperbacks.

all I know about her are those 70s tv commercials that used to run on PBS

tv commercials ... ? for ... books?

I think Witch World is the signature Norton series.

Fascism or not, politics completely aside, military SF just seems really dull. But I was pretty surprised by the Edge Of Tomorrow film.

I kinda like the Starship Troopers too but it's not the kind of thing I'd seek out.

The film, I mean.

As a Frank Zappa fan, I have plenty of practice separating work I love from the asshole who created it. Which is my way of saying there's plenty of Heinlein worth reading.

i think you kinda have to read him if you are interested in the history of sf. he's so friggin' influential. for better and worse. i haven't read a ton of his books but at his best the stuff is just good storytelling and really entertaining. i've never read later stuff. just 50's and 60's.

i read maybe half a dozen of his books 20 years ago, so i guess they sufficiently drew me in. (although i do recall being mystified by 'stranger in a strange land's acclaim)

at this remove, however, i mainly remember the fascism and the approval of incest

Dont worry guys i've read heinlein.

Andre norton ads were like sponsor announcements for some museum w her name on it...? This is a dim memory tbh. Maybe some othe2r 70s LA kids around here might remember (ned?)

http://www.coverbrowser.com/search?q=andre+norton&searchmode=&name=ace-books
http://www.flickriver.com/photos/pulpcrush/sets/72157636264124864/

Two Norton galleries nowhere near comprehensive.

The Beastmaster films and tv shows were based on her work but apparently very loosely.

This is pretty through, for an overview (and carefully organized, ditto monster list at end) :
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/norton_andre
Sister site Encyclopedia of Fantasy, adds more about subsets and individual books:
http://sf-encyclopedia.uk/fe.php?nm=norton_andre