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

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'

He's pretty good w solitary dread. Also, teenboy has just met a couple of military hold-outs----not on a South Pacific island, like the ones still turning up in the 60s (and later?), but deep in the Japanese woods, and they're not hiding from American invaders, they deserted from a 19th Century training exercise

"If you play Schubert's sonatas, especially this one straight through, it's not art. Like Schumann pointed out, it's too long and too pastoral, and technically too simplistic...he labelled this one 'Heavenly Tedious.' Play it through the way it is and it's flat and tasteless, some dusty antique. Which is why every pianist who attempts it adds something of his own, something extra. Like this---hear how he articulates it there? Adding rubato. Adjusting his pace, modulation, whatever. Otherwise they can't hold it all together. They have to be careful, though, or else all those extra devices destroy the dignity of the piece. Then it's not Schubert's music anymore. Every single pianist who's played this piece struggles with the same paradox."
He listens to the music, humming the melody, then continues.
"That's why I like to listening to Schubert while I'm driving. Like I said, it's because all the performances are imperfect. A dense, artistic kind of imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert. If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I'm driving, I might want to close my eyes die right then and there. But listening to the D major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of---that a certain kind of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect. And personally, I find that encouraging. Do you know what I'm getting at?"
"Sort of..."
"I'm sorry," Oshima says, "I tend to get carried away on the subject."
"But there's all kinds and degrees of imperfection, right?" I say.
"Sure, of course."

Some of that is true of all notated piano music and some of it does get at something specific about Schubert sonatas.

When I listen to Schubert sonatas I always think of the yes line "mountains come out of the sky and they stand there". There's that mysterious feeling of why are they just standing there? What do they want? Nothing?

i like the schubert sonata that has a 'game over' in it where it just suddenly pounds a bunch of low notes and then repeats all the way back to the beginning. i don't think that's the same one though

Re the discussion of Russian SF above, I just stumbled across this: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B016C3KATY?ref_=pd_ys_nr_all_8
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/B016C3KATY.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

It only came out 2 months ago

Hm. Sort of noticed that too, didn't really stop to look.

Octavia Butler's note to herself in the late eighties: http://huntingtonblogs.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/oeb-3.jpg

From this note on her archives: http://huntingtonblogs.org/2016/01/celebrating-octavia-butler/

Re: Tim Powers new book. There's a good interview on Geek's Guide To The Galaxy (on youtube). He talks about the book, his research methods, silent films, his friendship with PK Dick, a fictional poet he created with Blaylock and his dislike of fiction winking at the audience.

http://www.strangehorizons.com/2015/20150330/sperring-c.shtml

An article on Katherine Kurtz as a game changing fantasy author. Some of the comments are interesting.

Somebody I've overlooked, thanks for this appreciative overview of her pioneering work and its limits. Also in Encyclopedia of Fantasy--which hasn't been updated since 1999, but good as far as it goes:
http://sf-encyclopedia.uk/fe.php?nm=kurtz_katherine

http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2016/01/2015_in_review.shtml

It jumps back in time too.

Redfern Jon Barrett: I have to talk about Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). The latter half of the twentieth century may have seen utopian fiction take a backseat to its neon-fronted cyberpunk cousins, but Piercy's work stands out in providing a vision of a world free of prejudice, inequality, and environmental destruction. Tying in themes of racial oppression, abuse of women, poverty, and even ageism, Woman on the Edge of Time provides an intersectional feminist reading of society's ills decades before those words fell from the mouths of a million Millennials.

In fact, whilst reading it I continually had to remind myself that it was written a full eight years before I was born: Piercy even anticipates the genderqueer and polyamory movements. The plot is gripping, the language is beautifully detailed, and I still find myself pining for her utopian future. Plus, the novel's brief foray into dystopia directly influenced William Gibson's Neuromancer, kickstarting the whole cyberpunk genre.

100 odd pages into Michel Faber's The Book of Strange New Things. The story of a missionary out to convert the alien heathens, looks like things are going to go as well as you might imagine. Not the most original story or one that would seem to justify its >500 page length but we'll see. Bit worried that a major plot point has just been effected with the subtlety of a truck driver's gear change.

Yeah.. Would have read that if it was half the size, but , despite loving Under the Skin, other Faber books didn't give me the confidence he could pull off a convincing genre work of that size

iirc the reviews and a 3 for 2 deal talked me into it. I should get Scholz's Gypsy as a palate cleanser afterwards.

I read some of Crimson Petals etc and thought it was very good, but it was so long I never got around to finishing.

From Subterranean Press newsletter---their editions are expensive, but fairly often followed by more affordable ones via other sources:

Tim Powers' Medusa's Web, his latest novel-and also his most recent foray into a very esoteric sort of time travel-has just gone to the printer.

About the Book:

The last will of their suicide aunt requires that Scott and Madeline Madden return to Caveat, the vast old Hollywood Hills house they grew up in-and they soon learn that what they had thought was a shared childhood nightmare twenty years ago is in fact all too real.

Their strange, reclusive cousins, Claimayne and Ariel, are deeply involved in using a form of the Medusa-living two-dimensional psychoactive patterns known as "spiders"-to prolong their own lives and even hijack the lives of others...

Scott and Madeline are tumbled into the Medusa's web, and find themselves struggling in a tangle of lives and deaths extending back to the earliest days of Hollywood, fracturing timelines in the past and fleeing from predators in the present, inexorably bound for a showdown with the voracious ghost of their aunt and the entity which is the oldest and most powerful of the spiders.

The Subterranean Press edition of Medusa's Web will be oversize, with a dust jacket and number of illustrations by J.K. Potter, housed in a custom slipcase.

Limited: 474 signed numbered copies, housed in a custom slipcase: $125

From Publishers Weekly:
"A new Tim Powers novel is always cause for excitement. His latest is a twisted journey through time travel, possession, old Hollywood, addiction, and familial violence that promises much and, mostly, delivers... By the time the credits roll, the villain has crystallized into a dark portrait of selfishness and contorted love, the heroes have earned grace notes of surprising beauty, and you will never see Salomé quite the same way again."

From Booklist:
"Set over the course of one week, this novel is an atmospheric and complex supernatural thriller, with an old-time Hollywood frame, and it steadily builds to a frenetic climax."

Announcing THE BESTIARY edited by Ann VanderMeer
The Bestiary edited by Ann VanderMeer
Our friends at Centipede Press have a very interesting tome coming out soon, edited by Ann VanderMeer. We're only too happy to offer copies of The Bestiary to our customers.

About the Book:

Bestiaries have a long and vibrant history. The first spontaneous bestiary survives in historical documents from ancient Macedonia. A beehive, through a Fortean expression of the uncanny, was transformed overnight. As observed by the beekeeper, and then those that he summoned, all of his bees now had the heads of unusual monsters "and these heads were so heavy that most plummeted to the ground," there to be marveled at by the onlookers. By dusk, the bestiary no longer existed, having been plundered by perhaps the world's first souvenir seekers.

Here is a modern bestiary of made-up fantastical creatures organized from A to Z, along with an ampersand and an invisible letter, featuring some of the best and most respected fantasists from around the world, including Karen Lord, Dexter Palmer, Brian Evenson, China Miéville, Felix Gilman, Catherynne M. Valente, Rikki Ducornet, and Karin Lowachee. With over 20 full page illustrations by Ivica Stevanovic in fabulously designed book, gorgeously printed.

Trade hardcover edition, with ribbon marker: $30

Two ebooks by Philip Jose Farmer just released

Up from the Bottomless Pit by Philip Jose Farmer
We have a double-shot of new ebooks by Philip Jose Farmer:
Up from the Bottomless Pit is the ultimate collection for Philip Jose Farmer fans, including 140,000 words (roughly 400 pages) of very obscure, never-before-collected short stories, a novel beginning, non-fiction, and a complete novel as well.

Pearls from Peoria assembles over sixty previously uncollected pieces of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and autobiography that demonstrate the extraordinary range and vitality of Philip José Farmer's imagination.

New powers sounds great!

From @PulpLibrarian's ongoing celebration of #RedheadTuesday:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CbWB4l5WwAASUit.jpg:large

Enquiring minds need to know more.

so close to finishing Complete Ballard. Didn't know he'd turned to crime fiction towards the end.

Finished The Book of Strange New Things, it was erm subtle. Seemed explicitly designed to diffuse or confound any sense of tension. It was an easy and quick read only because I kept on expecting something to happen, but it pretty much never did. Ok Earth civilisation collapsed but that happened off screen and off-handedly, only as a set up for the main character's failure to react to it. Absolutely no critical engagement with what you would think would be his controversial role of missionary to the ignorant (and mostly passive, and of course inscrutable) aliens. It's plastered with critical plaudits, 'a masterpiece' according to david mitchell, 'bold', 'gripping', 'one of the best books i've ever read'! idgi.

don't remember any crime stories in the ballard!

The Book of Strange New Things probably seems great/mindblowing to people who don't read any SF, so don't encounter those concepts routinely. I would have thought David Mitchell would know better, though.

I think M John Harrison was a fan.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/23/the-book-of-strange-new-things-michel-faber-review

don't remember any crime stories in the ballard!

this was something my brother mentioned to me about Ballard's last decade of work (which I haven't read). I'm only up to the 80s in the short story collection, altho there are a couple of crime-y things, mostly of the "man goes crazy and murders woman" variety

His last few novels all were sort of crimey (and very similar to one another): people in rich, gated community start to go on violent crime sprees for kicks
And he did a novella in the 1990s about kids going on a killing spree

Just read two of Malzberg's favorite Kuttner stories: "Private Eye" and "The Children's Hour." Available online, replete with myriad typos.

More from Subterranean: one I've always (kind of) meant to check---having heard good things from usually reliable sources---and by now sure to find much cheaper copies than this 25th Anniversay Edition:

https://d3pdrxb6g9axe3.cloudfront.net/uploads/Boys_Life_by_Robert_McCammon_500_716.jpg

First published to universal acclaim in 1991, Robert McCammon's Boy's Life went on to win both the Bram Stoker and World Fantasy Awards for Best Novel. It's not hard to see why. Twenty-five years after its initial appearance, this elegiac account of small town life in the American South remains as absorbing and universally relevant as ever.

Boy's Life takes place in the lost world of Zephyr, Alabama in 1964. Its narrator/hero, Cory Mackenson, is an eleven-year-old boy about to encounter the mysteries lying beneath the surface of everyday life. At the heart of those mysteries is a brutal, inexplicable murder. An unidentified man-strangled, beaten, and handcuffed to the wheel of his car-plunges into Saxon Lake, as Cory and his horrified father look on. The murder will come to haunt them both in unimaginable ways.

Set against that violent act is a marvelously rendered account of a community, a family, and a way of life. Boy's Life is at once a closely observed portrait of day-to-day life in Zephyr-a town with more than its share of eccentric personalities-and a meditation on the power and persistence of magic. It is a book in which the quotidian realities-school, family, economic hardships-co-exist with an assortment of impossible but equally real elements: a ghost car driven by a ghostly driver, a monster that lives in the local river, a dog that returns, strangely altered, from the dead...

Beautifully written and astonishingly moving, Boy's Life is itself a piece of working magic that celebrates the magic in ordinary things, such as love, work, friendship, and play. Like this sumptuous new 25th anniversary edition, it is a work of permanent value that will continue to speak, with undiminished clarity, to future generations of readers.

The Subterranean Press edition of Boy's Life will be oversize, with a jaw-dropping wraparound dust jacket and eight interior color plates by David Ho.

Yeah I've been meaning to read a mccammon too

ha, I just started Boy's Life (but not the super deluxe edition) a week ago, and I'm enjoying it so far. I like how the murder in the opening chapter doesn't immediately spin off into a whodunit mystery — it's more like a lurking presence in the narrator's life that he's just barely able to engage/grapple with on an adult level. to make the obvious Bradbury comparison, it strikes a balance between the gothy over-the-topness of Something Wicked This Way Comes and the *childhood is magic* nostalgia of Dandelion Wine, with the episodic structure owing more to the latter. I get the impression that McCammon is toning down his usual horror elements here in favor of traditional autobiographical storytelling, but that's just an assumption since I haven't read any of his other books (I see that Wikipedia labels him as a splatterpunk!)

A collection of SF ebooks on sale here...
https://www.humblebundle.com/books/scificlassics_bookbundle

let us now praise this portrait of Ballard from SF Monthly, Oct 1975

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cb5_tdvW0AEVqaG.jpg

Ha. Just taught "Cage of Sand" in class today. Kids were understandably flummoxed but I think I turned them around.

read 'roadside picnic', to which the southern reach trilogy owes a certain debt

xpost"Cage of Sand": a Ballard story, right? Think I may have read it long ago---describe please. Also flummox-to-turnaround.

xxpost Yeah, think I remember reading that McCammon was displeased with Boy's Life being hyped as straight-up horror--creatively and commercially, he wanted to get past that era's bloody glut (which I guess he contributed to, with his splatterpunk?! Didn't know he went that far.)

I haven't really followed horror since the 80s/early 90s, but this seems like it might be okay:

H.P. LOVECRAFT: The Hound & The Music Of Erich Zann Spoken LP Out This Week; Theologian To Score Upcoming Titles In Series

Syracuse, New York-based Cadabra Records this week unveils the anticipated first title in the label's intense series in homage to legendary horror icon, H.P. LOVECRAFT, with the official release of The Hound & The Music Of Erich Zann this Friday, marking the first time the author's works have been read on vinyl in over thirty-five years.

Cadabra Records is a label constructed for the primary purpose of bringing classic horror literature in the spoken format to the public with captivating new techniques, with most of the works appearing on vinyl for the first time ever. In the outfit's first of H.P. LOVECRAFT's works to see release, The Hound contains the first allusion to The Necronomicon - the author's infamous book of madness-inducing magic and cosmic terror - and The Music Of Erich Zann is one of the author's most original and reprinted stories. Both tales are read by Andrew Leman, a partner of the H.P. LOVECRAFT historical society, a professional actor with years of stage, screen, and audio performances, his voice capturing the proper terror, dread, suspense, and madness of LOVECRAFT's stories. The liner notes were written by S.T. Joshi, a leading scholar on the writer responsible for a plethora of critical and biographical works. The pristine auditory delivery of the ominous tales includes sound and effects by Teratoma Sound Lab, with its ominous artwork handled by Alan Brown.

The Hound & The Music Of Erich Zann is out this Friday, February 26th, in a run of 500 copies on 150-gram vinyl and housed in a gatefold tip-on "old style" jacket, including an 8-page booklet with extensive liner notes and more.

Preview a sample of The Hound at Rue-Morgue HERE,
http://www.rue-morgue.com/#!HP-LOVECRAFT-spoken-word-comes-to-vinyl-for-the-first-time-in-35-years/cjds/5644de6d0cf21009be8426f3 and The Music Of Erich Zann at Shock Til You Drop HERE.
http://www.shocktillyoudrop.com/news/features/395539-sound-shock-exclusive-preview-cadabra-records-adaption-lovecrafts-music-erich-zann/

Cadabra Records also this week confirms that dark ambient/industrial outfit Theologian has been chosen as the label's "house band" for all upcoming titles in the H.P. LOVECRAFT series, of which several titles are already heavily under construction. Theologian has recently wrapped production on several titles for the label, including the Clark Ashton Smith, Inferno, read by S. T. Joshi 7", as well as the absolutely horrifying delivery of the H.P. LOVECRAFT classic The Lurking Fear, both of which will see release early Summer. The Theologian cult is already entrenched in the next several stories in the series including Pickman's Model and more to be announced.

H.P. LOVECRAFT remains a master of the weird tale, his influence has spanned through generations of film makers, musicians, artists, and authors alike. Whether you've already read his work or are new to it, you will gasp in wonder to the horrors within. Dim the lights, close your eyes, and listen to some of the greatest tales of horror ever told.

http://www.facebook.com/cadabrarecords
http://www.cadabrarecords.com
http://www.twitter.com/cadabra_records
http://www.instagram.com/cadabrarecords

Earsplit PR l Dave Brenner
earsplitcompound.com soundcloud.com/earsplit

Cage of Sand is relatively early (1962) - involves a small coterie of obsessives in an abandoned/irradiated landscape waiting around for remnants of the space program to fall back to earth

There's another recent Lovecraft audio/music thing, available on Spotify too. Haven't heard it yet, but it's The Duke St Workshop with Laurence R Harvey – Tales of H.P. Lovecraft : see http://thequietus.com/articles/19570-the-duke-st-workshop-tales-of-h-p-lovecraft-review