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

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.

Finished I, ROBOT.
Really good. Very intellectually based - problem-solving, a fiction founded on logic, etc.
But with one or two distinctive and engaging characters also.

(MR James radio adaptations currently being broadcast on radio4extra - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pfmfr/episodes/guide )

North and South by E Gaskell, which is decent enough. the very dickensian tone might be due to the fact it was published in Household Words.

(this copy is one i've reformatted from project gutenberg and added a cover from a google image search, one of two similar pictures (i used the other one for Mary Barton). was in a bookshop yesterday and saw the exact same picture on the cover of a book about charlotte bronte...)

(wrong thread for that second bit, sorry)

posting here cuz why not: http://sf-fantasy.suvudu.com/2015/11/dear-readers-a-letter-from-kim-stanley-robinson.html

Awesome, thanks! Will order Green Earth as soon as my Amazon account cools off a little bit (financial climate change continues)

I'm reading an earlier KSR right now, and have been contemplating reading the climate trilogy for awhile. Will totally get the new omnibus edition.

Will probably get as well, don't know when will have time to read tho.

Condensation, updating via ditching stuff that's now duh, not just cramming all three oldies into one vol.: v. appealing.

posted elsewhere first by mistake:
As brief takes go, promising (maybe esp. the Dibbell and Mieville, but prob pred by prior knowledge of, unlike w other authors here). I'll give 'em all the random read test asap:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/the-best-science-fiction-and-fantasy-books-of-2015/2015/11/18/4d65d9e8-7902-11e5-b9c1-f03c48c96ac2_story.html?postshare=3451447900927579&tid=ss_tw

KSR is on my list, the Claire North looks good and I am tempted by the Melville, I didn't love Perdido Street Station, the only thing I've read of his so far, but happy to give him another chance.

I did the most comprehensive count of Cthulhu Mythos and Lovecraft tribute anthologies I could and there was roughly 90 books, just under 10 different magazine titles and probably many more I'm missing.
That's astonishing, so much more than I anticipated. Some similar authors have 3 tribute anthologies at most.

ilxor nate is in a new one:

http://www.amazon.com/Cthulhu-Fhtagn-Laird-Barron-ebook/dp/B0127TCT8C

Didn't know he wrote fiction.

Here's the full lists I made, with some talk of tribute anthologies to other similar authors.
http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=10262

WSL columnist Tom Shippey on new series of collected Simak:

Nov. 25, 2015 3:55 p.m. ET

Clifford D. Simak is one of sci-fi’s 50-year men. Born in 1904, he sold his first story in 1931 and continued publishing till he died in 1988, all the way from the fiction era to “Star Wars.” Open Road Media is now marking his achievement by bringing out his collected short stories in 14 e-books, of which three are now available.

Their titles alone hint at Simak’s characteristic themes and strengths. The title story of “The Big Front Yard” ($7.99) is set in Simak’s homeland of rural Wisconsin. Its hero makes a living by “dickering”—trading in antiques. Then his home is turned into a portal by a team of alien robots. You go in the back door and you come out the front on an alien world, which has further portals. Their purpose is trade, and what’s traded is not goods but ideas. It’s fortunate for Earth that we have a dickerer as go-between. He works with Beasly, the village’s disregarded handyman, who happens to be telepathic. So it’s the meek, and the rural Midwest, who have the keys to the whole galaxy, made homely by being just “a big front yard.”

At the other extreme, “The Ghost of a Model T Ford” ($7.99) picks out Simak’s other recurrent theme, which is not outreach to the future, but memory of the past. His most famous novel, “City” (1952)—actually eight linked shorts—is held together by a robot who remembers humanity long after humanity has left earth for the stars.

“I Am Crying All Inside” ($14.99; also in paperback, $15.99) features another family-retainer robot, on the run because the human authorities mean to wipe his memories now that his human family has died. The title story has a robot organizing a funeral, and others have humans leading robot teams, as they try to cope with vegetable civilizations and alien tricksters.

Simak was never a “blaster and blast-offs” writer. His was a unique blend of humor and humanity, shown even by his robots, with the occasional and shocking flash of Gothic horror. His style is slow-paced, ruminative, reliant on emotional depth—all the things sci-fi isn’t supposed to have. But what he always had was ideas. Enough to last him 50 years. He has to be part of everyone’s sci-fi library.
(Dude in Comments stans for Way Station too)

WSJ, that is!