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

(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."

(orson scott card.) let it be known that i don't think sanderson is astonishingly wise.

this and the lois bujold book i was reading upthread both try to do 'look at these people having a normal human relationship in the midst of all this chaos' in a way that makes everyone involved (characters, authors) seem like they are from mars.

http://static1.fjcdn.com/thumbnails/comments/4246199+_977e5845f8cdf1c94b97b25f60049017.jpg

one of the main characters has just invented the separation of the executive from the legislative branch. i wish this had been done with some sense of its own ridiculousness. i'd be all for it if that were the case.

another character just informed the lead that no-one, no matter what their superhero powers, can survive on 'three or four hours of sleep a night.' beg 2 fucken differ mate

no, no coyotes in coyote. man-eating flightless birds though.

Watching Ex Machina: Kid won a contest to run/experience Turing Tests for his employer, who wrote the code for Bluebook, which now handles 98% of all searches, when he was 13; the wetware ("structured gel") brain of Bluebook Dude's AI babe is informed by data hacked from all cellphones, re believable conversations, yadda-yadda, but mainly by Bluebook itself: "Those other search engine developers just wanted to monetize people's responses---what they didn't understand was that a search engine reveals more than what people think, it's how they think...patterns and chaos." The AI babe is exquisite cheese, Swiss gift shop here, rubberfuck plenitude there, and there's an anime-looking slave, "She doesn't speak English, it's a great firewall": all from "the mind of an asshole," as the break-in employees of Horrible Bosses once put it, and Oscar Isaac is immaculately obnoxious, in a low-key, confident way (but can tell this NewBoss is never fucking satisfied).

Yeah I liked it a bunch, I know a few posters were very underwhelmed. That line about Ghostbusters is funny.

"Name me one sentient lifeform that doesn't have a sex drive."

Not bad---even the ending seemed to fit, atmospherically, kind of a Vernor Vinge vibe(?)

https://www.blackgate.com/2015/09/30/john-w-campbell-jr-and-the-knack-for-being-wrong-about-everything/

Not very long but kind of funny.

Been reading a lot about people in the sff community that are basically lefties but have all the tactics and behaviour of death threat troll bigots. Pretty scary stuff.

What if *your* mind was based on a search engine (or what if it wasn't, is a better question at this point)?

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/915UUZNX5hL._SL1500_.jpg

Feel like some of you are downplaying Aldiss a little. He has a good ideas and can write well, although since he has written so much I imagine he had his share of misfires. Truth be told I haven't really read so much of his stuff yet, mainly some of the canonical short stories, as I probably posted upthread or in the other thread, such as "A Kind of Artistry," "Poor Little Warrior!," "Man in his Time," "Outside," his award-winning Wells tribute, "The Saliva Tree." Only novel I've read of his is the one mentioned in the original post of this thread, but loved the original short story version of "Hothouse" so interested to read the long version. Either that or Non-Stop.

Speaking of "Poor Little Warrior!", it is also one of several time travel stories to furnish a chapter title in John Varley's Millennium.

Aldiss: I enjoyed 'Non-Stop', and 'Frankenstein Unbound' and 'moreau's Other Island' had their moments. 'Dracula Unbound' had moments too, but they were all AWFUL.

Secretly have to admit my most enjoyed Aldiss is his 'The Brightfount Diaries', a non-SF book about being young and working in a bookshop, which I read when I was young and working in a bookshop

I recall a fun interview with him re: Kubrick and A.I., how he was so opposed to the Pinocchio direction the story was taking that he eventually wrote a version where the blue fairy gets annihilated in a nuclear explosion!

another fun example of sanderson's sense of scale: his heroine's magic-induced superpowers allowing her to cover, in a few hours of running, the distance one could walk in a day. well: yes.

is there a good collection of Aldiss' short fiction out there?

xp