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

Read the first two of Max Gladstone's Craft sequence which were very enjoyable and reminded me somewhat of Mieville's New Crobuzon novels with their steampunk/urban fantasy setting.

ok, book i'm currently reading, which i won't name (again) because of spoilers.

end of the world, flu epidemic, 99.9% fatal. (which would still leave thousands of people in the london area, say...)

anyway, things start failing within a week, power, water, the internet, mobiles. i'd've thought it would take longer than that. electricity is the weak point, i guess. how autonomous is it?

Louise welsh?

no. i mentioned it about 5 posts ago if you're curious.

Oh, mandel, duh. I enjoyed that a lot.

The higsons i gave up on... They seemed to be becoming increasingly nasty in lieu of having any really good new ideas worth pursuing.

higson was on the radio the other day saying that he'd planned 3, but they kinda got away from him. i started getting confused when the books would start 'this took place during the same timeframe as (two books ago, during which time i'd read 50 other things)'. timeline was v confused by the end of it. i guess because of the lack of real planning.

new one, the 7th, is another 450 pages but it'll take me about 3 days to read.

it did seem to evolve in book 4 or 5, a chapter about falling from the stars, hinting at the cause of the (incredibly specific) virus, but the next book just seemed to ignore that.

good lord, charlie higson has written seven novels about zombies

someone just should be in charge of making sure this sort of thing didn't happen

Any opinions on Lin Carter? When I first read about him it was Moorcock giving him a beating in Wizardry And Wild Romance. But recently I've seen a lot of his supporters say that his contribution as editor/curator (with the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series and anthologies) is so enormous that you could say he had a large hand in creating fantasy as we know it now and saving lots of important books from obscurity. But even his biggest fans seem to agree that most of his own fiction was derivative pap.

Definitely major props as an editor. His own fiction - yeah I haven't. Looks like it might be better than sprague de camp's anyway.

you are better off with farmer and leiber. for sf AND fantasy.

i would totally read some de camp 50's SF. probably wouldn't read his fantasy stuff though.

farmer and leiber
Both these guys have their high points, but can be hit or miss, esp. farmer.

De Camp's reputation for fiction towers over Carter's. Enchanter series co-authored by Fletcher Pratt has canon status.

I think De Camp got a bad reputation because inevitably his Conan books were more widely read than anything else he done.

Machen's "Children Of The Pool" has a really impressively spooky part in the middle but like most of his others I've read recently, the really good parts are mostly overwhelmed by detective work, musings and the motions of genteel conversation.

This Elizabeth Hand book from earlier this year sounds interesting.

Wylding Hall

When the young members of a British acid-folk band are compelled by their manager to record their unique music, they hole up at Wylding Hall, an ancient country house with dark secrets. There they create the album that will make their reputation, but at a terrifying cost: Julian Blake, the group’s lead singer, disappears within the mansion and is never seen or heard from again.

Now, years later, the surviving musicians, along with their friends and lovers—including a psychic, a photographer, and the band’s manager—meet with a young documentary filmmaker to tell their own versions of what happened that summer. But whose story is true? And what really happened to Julian Blake?

interesting but also potentially really, really bad, i have to say

it's also apparently i. written as the transcript of the documentary ii. very short!!

interesting but also potentially really, really bad, i have to say

So kind of curious but also a little afraid to read this one in case it doesn't work.

Getting on with Octavia Butler's Lilith's Brood (#7 in my list of 10 or 11 SF must-reads this year, will I manage them all? Nope.) Haven't really managed to fully follow the alien life cycle/social mores she's invented but it's meant to be confusing and discomfiting so that's ok. Definitely a weird fiction vibe, what with all the tentacles.

Just started KS Robinson - The Wild Shore. Had read the first few chapters of a library copy many years ago and knew I would love it when I eventually got around to reading my own copy. And I do. Love it. So far.

Yeah, I really enjoyed that, think I commented upthread and/or on the old Rolling Science Fiction etc. Wish I'd read Gold Coast and Pacific Rim, the other two in that sequence (it's not exactly a trilogy, not in the usual sense, anyway).

Apparently I can only get all of Lilith's Brood as an ebook by buying each volume separately for £5.50. Am I contributing to the death of publishing by thinking that's a bit steep?

reading silverberg's masks of time which came out in 1968 and which is set in a 1999 that resembles the 50's. kinda reminds me of the movie Madigan i was watching the other day with henry fonda and richard widmark. late 60's but it might as well have been 1945.

First chapters of McKillip's Winter Rose incl. glinting earthy realness of isolated community bestirred into compulsive speculation/memory/fantasy and more coming up, as a beautiful hard-working, good-paying stranger(?) infiltrates.

Guess there might be a lot of that going around, plot-wise, but put it w author's vivid discipline of imagery x social (incl. village, family & couple) dynamics=so far, so good.

Mckillip a long deferred anticipated pleasure for me. I should finally read her this winter!

I read The Forgotten Beasts of Eld over the summer and it was almost perfect. I wish I had read it when I was 13 or something.

https://sites.google.com/site/jeffgilleland/catherine_lucille_moore

An audio reading by Catherine L Moore.

!

Actually was meaning to post that The Best of C. L. Moore and much of her other work recently became available as relatively cheap ebooks, I noticed over the weekend.

Getting on with Octavia Butler's Lilith's Brood (#7 in my list of 10 or 11 SF must-reads this year, will I manage them all? Nope.) Haven't really managed to fully follow the alien life cycle/social mores she's invented but it's meant to be confusing and discomfiting so that's ok. Definitely a weird fiction vibe, what with all the tentacles.

― ledge, Thursday, November 5, 2015 1:59 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's interesting in marketing terms re butler and re SF that for a good few years' lilith's brood' was known as iirc 'the xenogenesis trilogy'

http://wtfbadsciencefictioncovers.tumblr.com/post/126101606794/its-cats-in-space-week-a-tiger-with-the-face-of

Must check out CL Moore reading, thanks! Also Scott's thriller man John Sandford---didn't know he wrote SF too---saw this as was leaving library:
http://www.johnsandford.org/pic/SaturnRunLarge.jpg
more info on his site---can't tell that much from plot specs o course.

Disconcerted by how much the season of Winter Rose resembles my own moist, loitering autumn, reluctantly yet inexorably shapeshifting to winter, incl. bundled psychological-visceral tensions---'bout ready to chop a dragon for relief, but honey, it's not one of those. (No dragons, elves etc--- the rest may be all in the narrator's mind, but that's plenty).

ctein? is that a person?

A photographer, apparently

Read this: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51hB0AH%2BxML._SX362_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
(that's 'Zero Phase: Apollo 13 on the Moon' by Gerald Brennan)

which is definitely tring to do the Ian Sales/Apollo Quartet thing of alternative-history space program, this time about Apollo 13 actually making it's Moon landing and THEN the orbiter going haywire. it's well-researched and convincingly detailed (with much help from Jim lovell, from whose POV it's told), but it seems a bit artistically pointless: it doesn't do anything bigger than tell the slightly altered story, with no greater resonance or meaning, falling short of Sales's stuff. Well-written NASA fan-fic, I guess. There's a 'sequel' about Gagarin, which I may try too, to see if it attempts anything grander than this one--Brennan is a good enough writer to give a second shot to, I think.

actually making ITS Moon landing

Yeah, besides the ones that one way street and I mention, Triton is worth checking, and Driftglass--yep, more drifty, but also, he knew what a short story requires, and tried to follow suit, without being too dutiful about it (never a tendency of his).
I think Aimless's take on the drifting sands in thee hourglass of Dahlgren is fair, far as it goes, but past the 100-page point, some stuff happens, appears, reappears---clues, enigmatic opportunities, set pieces, incl. some of the porn, maybe (not a complaint). There is a quest, however entrophic (compare The Kid and Slothrop, for instance), and, as one way street says, it's also a loop---with meta implications along the way, if you want 'em. See also the very self-confident wikipedia article on this novel (no, really). And the ILX thread{s?) about it too.
I admit it's where I got off the bus, but I might go back (did dig Heavenly Breakfast, presented as a memoir--was that a real band, did they really make that record, is it somewhere? Hope so).

Oops, wrong thread! Technically.

Finished Machen's short novel The Terror. At times it was like trying to eat a brick but fortunately it has some of his finest moments scattered around it. The stuff about the farm in the valley was very good, the thing about the chimney was a great idea.

Orbit are doubling their output to 90 books a year.

Because their books have been so successful. There was a mention of diversity and it brings to my mind that the recent efforts towards diversity seem to have substantially expanded the audience for science fiction and fantasy. I wonder if this is really working that well.

i started reading heinlein's Beyond This Horizon. which couldn't really be MORE dated than it is, but it was written around 1942, so, what are you gonna do? everyone kinda SHOULD talk like james cagney in the future. now that i think of it.

Which one'a you mugs tested that serum on yourself? Knuckles? Jonesey?

pretty much.

"The local heroin rehabilitation center assured Phil that the break-in was undoubtedly the work of the Terra Linda Minutemen..." Paul Williams' epic coverage (prob his best journalism) of PKD for Rolling Stone, via time capsule mirror.pdf of the original issue---come along if you can: http://www.philipkdickfans.com/mirror/articles/1974_Rolling_Stone.pdf

http://io9.com/11-most-prolific-science-fiction-and-fantasy-authors-of-1443957263

Old-ish article but interesting, crazy.