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

rock SF should be like the scene in the masters of the universe movie when he uses the wormhole device as a keytar

i do love when MUSIC is mentioned in SF. the descriptions of future music usually pretty fun. one of my favorite things about the Ancillary books is main character being a collector of songs from forgotten/dead planets. he knows a million of them. and there are strange folk lyrics in every book.

tbf Moorcock writes credibly well about the actual music of Hawkwind and their performances in that book, it's all the other stuff that normally makes up a book (plot, characters, dialogue, etc.) that suck. from reading it you can def tell where Moorcock got bored and just left Butterworth to pick up the pieces.

The Memory of Whiteness by Kim Stanley Robinson is a CRAZY music of the future book

Space Opera by Jack Vance is one of my favorite standalone Vances, basically an opera troupe travelling from planet to planet performing Debussy and Puccini and stuff.

One of the few indicators of 'music vance likes' within his actual fiction

the original edition of Always Coming Home by Ursula LeGuin came with a cassette tape of Kesh folk music. i like it a lot. Lethem wishes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONrJIDGxHjk

(everyone knows he was a huuuuge dixieland dude)

I *love* the section in Silverberg's "The World Inside" about the musician

Didn't really mean rock music in the books, but rather fiction inspired by metal music's own imagery and lyrics. I don't think Swords Of Steel is anything to do with rock music other than who the writers are.
Like, I love those ultra dense poems in the Sunn 0))) sleeves.

Re: Andre Norton. Her Witchworld series is getting made into a film trilogy, so maybe more of her work will be reprinted and discussed.

Is Witchworld the place to start with her? And if so, Witchworld from the beginning?

i'm sure there are sf and fantasy writers who are metal fans. but i think the inspiration for the music usually comes from the books and not the other way around.

^^^

i like her early SF. but i'm not a big fantasy person. and even in her early stuff she is one of the better mixers of sf and fantasy.

I'm the opposite. A fantasy guy at heart, but like my fantasy in non fantasy trappings. Space Fantasy especially (have i mentioned my vance love in the last 5 seconds?).

I really wouldn't know where to start with Norton apart from recommendations I've noted. Witchworld may just be her moneymaker. David Pringle included it in 100 Best Fantasy not because he loved it but because he thought it was probably as good a representative book for the trend of long running fantasy series as you could get.
The books I've noted on my shopping list I've seen recommended by fans are Zero Stone(recommended by Ann Leckie), Last Planet, Saragasso Of Space and Time Traders.

Scott- different mediums develop their own fantasy imagery and tropes. One could write a science fiction book inspired by Tangerine Dream but unless you put in (probably annoying) clear references, you wouldn't know. A heavily black metal inspired fantasy book could be easy to identify, no references necessary. I'd imagine the Games Workshop franchise was heavily inspired by the heavy metal music version of epic fantasy.

Some horror writers became very influenced by horror films. Then there's horror inspired specifically by 50s horror comics (Ramsey Campbell did a bit of that). Speaking of Hawkwind, there was a Spanish science fiction/horror comic from the 70s that many have said has a definite Hawkwind influence.

Since power metal is based on cliched fantasy, I wonder if you could have a noticeable power metal style without reference to rock music?

one of the worst books i ever read was a horror novel about a heavy metal band.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41WhxsHqzkL._SX327_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

Meet The Scream. Just your average everyday mega-cult band. Their music is otherworldly. Their words are disturbing. Their message is unholy. Their fans are legion. And they're not kidding. They're killing. Themselves. Each other. Everyone. Their gospel screams from the lips of babes. Their backbeat has a body count. And their encore is just the warm-up act to madness beyond belief.

It emerged from a war-torn jungle, where insanity was just another word for survival. It arrived in America with an insatiable lust for power and the means to fulfill it. In the amplified roar of arena applause there beats the heart of absolute darkness.

No writer's name? Not that I want to read it.

Other example, there's a lot of stuff I thought of as "videogamey" but from reading a book by Hideyuki Kikuchi, seeing films by Tsui Hark and seeing the intro screens to Tetsuo films and Burst City, but now if people did those things again they'd be considered videogame influences.
Actually that isn't a similar situation but never mind.

john skipp and craig spector. they were a thing for a minute there in the new horror world.

Yeah, they were 'splatterpunk' lol (along w/ david j schow irrc).

oy vey

Some are strict on definition, but I think the splatterpunks are generally considered to be John Skipp, Craig Spector, David J Schow, Joe R Lansdale, Clive Barker, Roberta Lannes, Rex Miller, Richard Christian Matheson, Jack Ketchum, Wrath James White and John Shirley. Perhaps Kathe Koja and Poppy Z Brite.

Richard Laymon is in the Wikipedia entry but I assumed he was more like Graham Masterton who could be ultra violent and fucked up but never completely stuck to that mode. I don't know if Shaun Hutson is that gory but he's surely influenced by horror films more than older horror writers.

Forgotten Edward Lee.

Most of Wolf In White Van's characters come out of the (late 70s and)80s middle school-to high school culture, involved with fantasy, some SF, metal, Pink Floyd, gaming, nickel bags, cigarettes, little beer, french kissing groping, maybe a little more (if your parents have premium cable), some guns----can't really call 'em fans, it's more of a given, more organic than that---but rallyed in a crisis, staring at a hospital ceiling----none of this ever made all that much of my world, but it's---credible.

And amazing.

Just started Adam Roberts: The Thing Itself, about aliens? in the Antarctic, the Fermi Paradox and Immanuel Kant, among other things

i know this is an ILB thread but they are showing Who? on tv tonight in the UK, based on the Algis Budrys book. i've not seen it, it might be terrible. "Talking Pictures (ch 81) from 9:15pm to 11:05pm"

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072405/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

Musical SF: how about an alternate history where John Lennon left The Beatles before they got big?

http://www.thescreamonline.com/fiction/fiction4-2/snodgrass.html

Just started Adam Roberts: The Thing Itself, about aliens? in the Antarctic, the Fermi Paradox and Immanuel Kant, among other things

This could float my boat.

Musical SF: Disaster Area

Otm

https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fmedia-cache-ec0.pinimg.com%2F736x%2F01%2Fcb%2Fa9%2F01cba9e496b3000f07abcc95de12f226.jpg&f=1

http://www.hotblackdesiato.co.uk/

'a history of blackness in speculative fiction'

http://invisibleuniversedoc.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/IU_BSF_lit_2015_3000.jpg

awesome

lot of stuff I don't know on there (no surprise), a fair amount of stuff I hate (Delany), a few things that are among the greatest ever (Mumbo Jumbo). lol @ Delany pic being three times as large as everyone else

def my favorite title (about which I know nothing) is "The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad" by Minister Faust.

Why do you hate Delany?

http://io9.gizmodo.com/la-celebrates-science-fiction-legend-octavia-e-butler-1755565229

Why do you hate Delany?

I've gone into this in detail in various places, here's a representative sample:

▪▫■□▪▫■□▪▫■□▪▫■□▪ ILX ALL TIME SPECULATIVE FICTION VOTING THREAD & MARGINALIA ▫■□▪▫■□▪▫■□▪▫■□▪▫■□▪▫■

my great great grandfather and his brother served with Martin Delany during the Civil War and at the Freedman's Bureau after the war. and were friends with him. He was an amazing person. speaking of that black futurist thing. and Delanys.

Cool. Same family as the very long-iived Delany sisters, of Having Our Say? Backe when I used to read SD, I wondered if some of the more pretentious bits weren't defensive, because he felt he had a heavy family tradition---also, he was the prodigy who dropped out of Harvard or Yale very quickly. Nevertheless, I enjoyed a lot of his earlier stuff, and some of Dhalgren, but that's where I got off the bus.

Haruki Murakami, Kafka On The Shore: Writing about some of his books in the New York Times, Patti Smith referred to this one in passing as "musical, " and I can see what she might have meant. The overture might be: During WWII, a primary school class goes up into the hills to gather mushrooms---under careful supervision, and with the encouragement of the Japanese government, because everybody gets proper rations, of course, but everybody's always a bit hungry---the teacher sees a metallic flash, which she immediately thinks is bouncing off a B-29---but then nothing--until she looks around and sees that all of her pupils are lying on their backs, staring at the sky--maybe. They seem to be watching something, eyes going back and forth---normal respiration, etc---'til they wake up a couple of hours later in the same mellow, rustic setting, and wonder why all the fuss, the medics etc. No memory of being unconscious, they just wanna pick some more mushrooms (they didn't eat any before they passed out). No lasting effects, apparently, except on one little boy who doesn't wake up, and is eventually taken to a military hospital.
In 1969, a teenage girl, missing her boyfriend, who has gone off to college, has a huge hit with the first song she's recorded, her self-written "Kafka On The Shore." The bittersweet ballad has immediate, unpretentious melodic appeal, the lyrics are intriguing ( excerpts are pretty good too). Then the boyfriend is killed by other student activists, who mistake him for a government informer he greatly resembles. The girl vanishes, shows up in her hometown many years later.
Comes the Millenium, a runaway teenage boy rides the bus, sets up a new routine in another town. Back in his hometown, an old man, sort of a borderline or savant, maintains his own routine. Alternating storylines, in which shades of gray alternate with dark passages, which gradually become a cryptic progression, a shady spine, 'ware those keys---
which the same effect, writ large of the song "Kafka On The Shore," which, in the opinion of the teen boy, would be bland without a pair of weird, challenging chords in the chorus. coming around again and again.
And that's the advantage of pop songs, of 3:30" or so (I'm guessing, since it's a hit in 1969), over 435 big-ass pages, however meticulously landscaped. Think it might work better as a live-action movie, anime, or graphic novel, especially since the sex seems about what you might expect of a 15-year-old boy--who gets lectured sometimes, so we shouldn't take his POV for the author's--except for the behavior of the female characters---also, plotwise, some the more supernatural characters seem a bit too much like sockpuppets of the author's convenience, with some meta-winks.
But it's an okay read, sometimes with an unexpectedly deft turn of phrase, and speaking of music, there's discussion of a piece favored by classical pianists because it's a sturdy plodder, built to carry the weight of ornamentation/interpretation, which might be what the author has in mind too, with the lulling set-ups for scary stuff. (Also speaking of music, we get non-gratuitous bits of Prince, Trane, and Beethoven, among others).
Closing in on the finale or underture or whatever; I may read some more of his---any tips?

Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, Hard-Boiled Wonderland, Dance, Dance, Dance.

i recall really adoring the writing in the 'end of the world' chapters of hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world

Underground, his non-fiction account of the Sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway, is great. But I'm not much of a fan of his novels--liked Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, but everything else just hammers away at the same obsessions (cats! jazz! feeble sub-Kafka surreality! sexually aggressive manic pixie dream girls!) with rapidly diminishing returns.

yeah I find him offputting (I couldn't even finish Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, granted that was 15+ years ago)

he's no Kobo Abe

Eventually got tired of him too, but really liked the three I mentioned.

Dow what is the sturdy plodder piano piece they talk about? Something from irl repertoire?

Schubert's "Sonata in D Major."

Interesting non cliched Schubert sonata choice for a novelist to make

(cats! jazz! feeble sub-Kafka surreality! sexually aggressive manic pixie dream girls!)

u forgot 'woman goes missing'