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

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?

well if you are reading sanderson you are towards one extreme of that spectrum. what is at the other end though, what is the unoriginal magic system? magic wands? vague vs specific magic is a creative choice (a favourite topic of sanderson's) and if you choose to explain how your magic works at all you are signing up to deliver "an original magic system"

I was really impressed by Sanderson's novella "Shadows For Silence In The Forests of Hell," despite the title--Silence is a woman, an innkeeper involved in shady moonlighting, who has to undertake a dangerous-as-fuck journey into the forests of her boondock land, the whole of which is called Hell because the shades of the dead float through the trees (they don't mind a little innocent bloodshed, like Silence getting her period, but violence and any use of fire brings them instantly to---). The the movements of the shades scared the shit out of me, which never happens in reading this kind of thing, or most others. And the overall tautness, despite the length, kept me involved---not like those boring-ass 50s movies where there's all this blah-blah among cops and scientists, while you're rooting for the monster to show up again and blast 'em all away.
I read it in the mostly good, sometimes amazing multi-genre/subgenre anthology of new stories, Dangerous Women; it's since become available as a singleton ebook/estory, whatever.

well if you are reading sanderson you are towards one extreme of that spectrum. what is at the other end though, what is the unoriginal magic system? magic wands? vague vs specific magic is a creative choice (a favourite topic of sanderson's) and if you choose to explain how your magic works at all you are signing up to deliver "an original magic system"

idk, i think there is implicitly a 'system' to magic in e.g. jack vance

but no appendices as far as i know

i've not read that much of this stuff at least of like the post-dragonlance and post george rrrr martin versions of this stuff; but steven erikson has a lot of 'system' going on. sanderson's rules are way more specific tho? or way more explicitly delimited?

i think its something to do with the rise of STEM fields

or possibly d&d

i should also point out that there is a robin hobb quote on this book i am reading which is something like 'a ripping yarn with a tremendously original magic system'

Did he ever write anything great?

the only books of his I've kept are the aforementioned Barefoot and Report on Probability A, both of which I would describe as successful formal exercises, the former being the-novel-as-acid-trip (altho tbf Silverberg's Son of Man is probably better) and the latter being narrative-as-surveillance. But I haven't found much to like beyond that. iirc Moorcock's take was that Aldiss required a good editor/someone to set goals for him.

There's also a contrast with Silence and the people around her xoutpost, who are no angels, and the smartypants cityfolk, exploitative, predatory, parasitical---bastards! Kind of an 18th Century setting, though Hell is on (or is?) another world. The kind of class relationship that never really goes away.

reading the 2nd book in the coyote trilogy by allen steele. i really enjoy it. he's a good old-fashioned storyteller. the first book in the coyote trilogy was made up entirely of short stories/novellas so you got that whole recap thing going on in each section which can be annoying. telling you stuff you already know. i know you guys were talking about fix-up novels upthread.

is it about coyotes

i am reading 'the well of ascension' and sanderson is actively bothering me now

"It’s rare for a fiction writer to have much understanding of how leadership works, how communities form, and how love really takes root in the human heart. Sanderson is astonishingly wise."