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

* John Scalzi does not understand satire as much as I, Theophilus Pratt, understand satire.

i love this

Burned and almost burned out by xpost God Emperor of Dune, finally took a peek at Heretics, and boy am I glad. Paul and his immediate family paid the cost to be the boss & co., now its their ultra-manipulators the Bene Gesserit's turn, also their mostly male janissaries/progeny (it's complicated) and their power-sharing clients/vendors/rival (also complicated). Discoverting that you have secret zensunni, even Sufi, principles->antidogmatic dogma in common doesn't ease the tension, just makes it more complicated. Character development x intrigue maybe not quite up to Le Carre, but even if the rest turns to crap, the first 167 pages will still have been worth reading (& McNulting).

the BG's mostly male etc, that is

it's the best/most exciting one imo

Got a copy of Ancillary Justice for $3--I'm going in!

You're a better man than I, as always.

curious to know what you think of it, james. i actually ended up liking the 2nd book more. it's definitely not your TYPICAL space opera.

more typical is the first book in the Coyote trilogy that i started. but it's entertaining in that trad dad way. can definitely see why it gets the HEINLEIN WOULD BE PROUD! blurbs.

i would say my one reservation/complaint about the Ancillary books is it was REALLY hard for me to picture what the hell people looked like. which i guess fit the gender-neutral scheme of things, and i got used to it, but everyone mostly just became a name to me. very little in the way of physical description. and i can definitely see hard SF people hating the lack of science. none of the tech is explained at all really. but i didn't really have a problem with that.

OK, I have to say I did enjoy it, without finding it the astounding book that all the awards would suggest. Funny that something marketed as a space opera, and with a cover like that, consists almost entirely of people have guarded conversations in small rooms. At the end it did have the disappointing falling-away feeling you get from being only at the end of volume 1, but if vol 2 is even better then I'll have to get hold of it. But yeah, that was pretty good.

none of the tech is explained at all really. but i didn't really have a problem with that.
Me either, as long as the writer keeps it consistent, which was the case here. (Not that I mind some rigorously thought-through brain-boggling physics, either)

yeah, i don't know if all the awards really does it any favors. sets it up to be some mindblowing thing, and it really is just...a decent SF novel! which is still a good thing. impressive that it's her first novel though.

a biologist friend of mine just texted me that he's attending a conference today on the SF estuary and (for some reason) KS Robinson is there giving a lecture

KSR kinda the go-to guy for all things futuristically dire. he will even play your party or bar mitzvah for a price.

some M R James chat on here. i've been reading ghost stories of an antiquary for the first time and it's been a real treat. spiders!

ditto bradbury's illustrated man.

both short, genuinely spooky tales. (and both recommendations / gifts from ledge iirc)

that said, lol, haunted bedsheets...

'a horrible, an intensely horrible, face of crumpled linen' < old sentences that haunt your thoughts

Reminds me: The Daedalus catalog, while pitching Masterpieces of The English Short Novel, asserts that "George Eliot profoundly influenced Henry James with her horror story The Lifted Veil": true? Didn't know she wrote horror; anybody read this or other such by her?

AThe Lifted Veil is very good, though Its the only such story by her that i know of. Can definitely see how it would have influenced henry james's creepier stuff. Edith wharton's, too.

i bought the mistborn trilogy to read while i quite smoking

i wasn't that into lifted veil, though i liked the potential eliot one could extrapolate from it: one who abandoned the writing of realistic fiction before adam bede. not that that would be a good thing. just an interesting hypothetical.

it shares an oxford world's classic volume with 'brother jacob', which iirc is also a little bit supernatural, though i read it less than a year ago and recall nothing

contrarywise i am halfway through rereading terry pratchett and remember every plot point of 'feet of clay', something i read when i was a teenager. what is wrong with me

Thanks, guys. What ghost etc. stories by Henry James should I read? I've read The Turn of The Screw.

(btw xpost Heretics of Dune ended up seeming a little too flimsy, plot-point-wise, toward the end, but scene by scene remained agreeable enough. Still think Dune and Dune Messiah are best, though this is sturdy and just referential enough to make God Emperor of Dune skippable as it is tedious.)

"The Jolly Corner" usually gets talked up among James's ghost stories; my favorites among the others are probably "The Beast in the Jungle" (Eve Sedgwick's reading of this is indelible, btw) "The Real Thing," "The Altar of the Dead" (the inspiration for Truffaut's The Green Room), and "The Author of Beltraffio."

The Lifted Veil is on Gutenberg, I read it last night ... telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and the reanimation of a recently-dead woman are quite a lot to pile into such a quiet, unsensational story. It's like a Poe story written by ... George Eliot. I wonder what she might have been reading that prompted her to write it?

xp The other big James ghost story is "The Jolly Corner" but The Ghost Stories of Henry James is all good.

(By "referential" I mean it gives you relevant, crisp bits of backstory from G E and all previous books.)

A whole collection of HJ's ghost stories? Shoulda known, thanks!

Oh, and anyone who likes disturbing 19th Century stories should check out Lucy Clifford, whom I've talked about before. She's ambushed me in several anthologies.

very little clifford on gutenberg (1 book of children's stories). more at archive.org - scans and terrible ocr copies. maybe someone should fix that...

any recommendations? it's hard to tell what's what there...

Anyhow Stories is her main book that has survived. People never really talk about anything else by her.

gutenberg doesn't even have that.

archive.org has some more things i think the 'disturbing' stories are mixed in with others.

https://www.facebook.com/MaraboutFantastique/photos_stream

Cover gallery for the French Marabout line.

Come to think of it, I've only read two Clifford stories, "The New Mother," and "Wooden Tony," but they had outsized impact. "Children's stories," but seem more like implicit commentaries on the mistreatment of children, written for adults, rather than moralistic Victorian stories for children, to scare them straight. "TNM" might even be a parody of the moralistic tale---her readers may well have been raised on such, and/or buying such books for their own children---here tis:
http://weirdfictionreview.com/2011/11/creepy-classic-lucy-cliffords-the-new-mother/

"Wooden Tony" is plenty eerie and unpleasant, but not a relentless push to the nightmare like "TNM." It delves into the commercial and other exploitation of children, of artists, als has to do with class, community, family snares.

I read it in Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder, edited by DG Hartwell.

https://www.blackgate.com/the-sorcery-of-storytelling-the-imaginary-worlds-of-darrell-schweitzer/

Good long feature/interview on Darrell Schweitzer from 2006. He was an editor on Weird Tales for a long time and his talk about that is interesting but it's mostly about his own fantasy/horror writing (which I very much want to read). Don't hear about him often but there's always praise.

Again, don't forget Edith Wharton's GHost Stories--there are several such or similar-named anthologies. She's very good at them indeed.

Don't know Lucy Clifford at all: will investigate!

http://www.wsj.com/articles/penguin-classics-to-publish-ligotti-stories-1442851513

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2015/09/21/thomas-ligotti-interview/

Reading Brian Aldiss' The Long Afternoon of Earth. It's not, so far, very good. But the ideas - the entire continent the story takes place on is filled with one giant banyan tree, the earth is tidally locked to the sun, vegetable creatures have replaced most animals, humans are about a foot and a half tall and green, there are giant (one mile long), vegetable-based spiders who travel through space and have spun webs around the earth and the moon are so crazy I kind of want to see where this goes.

Also read Galaxies Like Grains of Sand recently, which was a collection of loosely connected shorts from magazines; some ahead-of-his-time ideas (a kind of universal language that allows magic-like manipulation of reality, a massive cancerous blob that devours living organisms and becomes a kind of hive-mind, and, uh, a nuclear race war that drives whitey to the moon) but, again, flawed execution.

So Barefoot in the Head is next to check out by him.

Oh and "Out of Reach" in Galaxies has a proto-Matrix thing with people locked into dream-machines. 1957!

Is The Long Afternoon of Earth a different version to Hothouse? It's definitely the Aldiss I'd like to read first.

Apparently Long Afternoon is an abridged version of Hothouse. Which is a shame because I don't know if I'll be bothered to read it again, unabridged, in the next forty years.

is it more or less good than 'helliconia'

This thread has some cool Hothouse and Long Afternoon cover art, also some comments, posted last November.

Barefoot in the Head is fantastic, easily his best (and he is very hit or miss, i couldnt even finish Paleozoic)

Er i mean Cryptozoic

Barefoot is definitely next. Helliconia looks insane, but I haven't read it.

Don I somehow missed the cover art - I'm reading the same one you posted an image of; it's really easy to suck me in with some psychedelic bullshit cover art like that. The Hothouse cover's cool too, though.

SPOILERS GUYS

I've gotten to the bit where a symbiotic, morel-like fungus that grows on living things is part of the plot and it's kind of grossing me out a lot.

I should read that. I kinda thought barefoot was a bore, secretly v square, idk. Did he ever write anything great? who knows, anyway I'm reading Brendan Sanderson and enjoying him so I have no views on good writing anymore

Report in Probability A is unique and great if you like that kind of thing (do u see what I did there).

yeah i read that about the same time i read barefoot. probably fair to admit i do not like that kind of thing

q.: when did "an original magic system" become part of the accepted freight of epic fantasy?