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

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

I'm reading The Anubis Gates. It is very silly.

The strongest memory I carry from that is the shivery sensation produced when the narrator, wandering Victorian London, hears someone whistling 'Yesterday'

That is a good bit, unfortunately I knew about it in advance.

I love the Anubis gates, hope I get time to reread it someday

Check it out: http://www.pseudopodium.org/repress/scholz-preface.html

I've started reading The Falcon, my first Emma Bull! Woolgathering second son, the Odd One in restive ruling family, reluctantly returns from solitary summer-long off-planet vacation, discovers that older brother Lord Beefbrane has rammed Native Materials Quota through Parliament, royally pissing off proles and suits, with violent consequences---royals control the news, and our boy has to read between the lines like everybody else, but it's clear enough---except their uncle, the Regent, seems even more of an abrasive hardass, and now he's openly threatening/threatened, semi-obliviously traumatized as well:control freak furtively fumbling the damage within and without. 21/3 chapters in, pretty good!
Seems like Emma Bull was mainly an anthologist when this was copyrighted, in 1990. Anybody read her War of the Oaks? Intriguing title.

In case you haven't read: http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/schwartz-between-the-galaxies/

by the title, i was expecting a spaceballs fanfic

One of his best (malzberg agrees)

About a hundred years ago, Gerald Warre Cornish, training with the 6th Battalion, Somerset Light Infantry, and afterwards serving in France, wrote a story called ‘Beneath the Surface’. The framework of the story is similar that of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912); an unorthodox explorer, regarded as vain and bombastic by his peers, is planning an expedition to remote parts. This maverick figure exercises a magnetic attraction, a strangely compelling force, on the narrator, who, despite general opinion, chooses to go with him. Ostensibly, Finn Lund, the shunned Danish explorer of Warre Cornish’s story, is commissioned to map certain unknown quarters of Mesopotamia. But in fact his quest is for the original Garden of Eden.

What impels Lund is a belief that the world we see, and all its natural processes, is simply what has been left behind by the passage of a much greater force. We are walking among the husks and shells of a vast creative energy, which he intends to pursue to its source. The narrator senses this force working within Lund too, and knows he must go with him to discover where it will lead. In the descriptions of this primeval power, often compared to a great river, and linked in this world to the meanderings of the Euphrates, there are passages of supernatural awe which rival those found in the fiction of Algernon Blackwood. More here: http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2016/03/beneath-surface-gerald-warre-cornish.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Wormwoodiana+%28Wormwoodiana%29

I've also just finished The Book Of Strange New Things. One of the only books I've read in a long time actually due to life getting in the way. I like the way Faber writes but god it was boring and I kept expecting things to happen and they didn't. I don't feel very enlightened having read it, just disorientated.

Phew, not just me then. Thoroughly baffled by the M John Harrison review upthread where he says "it has such a lot of religious, linguistic, philosophical and political freight to deliver".

I have a bad habit of looking for reviews the minute I finish a book and the couple I looked at were similar! I feel I know nothing about this alien race or planet. I liked the 'on earth' bits I guess, they managed to pack a punch in about 1/10 of the amount of text that the rest of it took up.

Folk Horror: Field Studies: new trade-size paperback, covering films, music, literature and oh yeah, folklore, in articles and interviews with Ligotti, Pullman, Kim Newman, etc.; Robin Hardy,director of The Wicker Man, is in here too:

http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2016/03/folk-horror-revival-field-studies.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Wormwoodiana+%28Wormwoodiana%29

i read Lightless by C.A. Higgins, which i thought was good if not quite "great." I never really like the trope of an enigmatic villain who's most dangerous when trapped, and without spoiling it I figured out the manner in which certain messages were being communicated as soon as i noticed how much attention was called to the particular action. but it has quite the ending and an excellent hero.

there's a sequel novel called Supernova coming out in July, i'll be reading it.

I've been interested in that Folk Horror book. The editor used to run a great art blog called Beautiful Grotesque and I discovered so many great artists there.

In the home stretch with previously mentioned Emma Bull's Falcon, which has generated enough momentum that, even if there's one of those last second, manifestly fake happy endings in the SF tradition, especially for paperback originals with this kind of space opera intrigue framework, the candy figleaf won't matter. There are just enough twists and leaps, but it's mostly the early digital tick-tock of the characters' lives, and even ones who just show up for a graf or two leave their mark, as marks get left in them. The author's absorbed her Dune, Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, her Bester, Tiptree, Cordwainer, cyberpunk, cyborgpunk for that matter, and prob the Heinlein story about a daring, patriotic young starpilot left a senile husk, as scheduled, also EE Smith's Skylark of Valerion or something like it, but this isn't any of those---isn't as distinctive either, or not in the same way, but doesn't need to be.
I told her on Ywitter that I was enjoying it, and she seemed surprised that anybody was reading it at this late date (published in 1990). Check your nearest yard sale or thrift store.

Not that you'd have to have read any of that other stuff to enjoy this.

I was friendly with Emma and her husband Will Shetterly in the twin cities right about when she was writing that book -- when I was a super pretentious sickly and poorly socialized 19 year old minicomics artist before I moved to Seattle and they moved to the desert SW. They were much nicer and more tolerant of me than they needed to be. Great people. Haven't touched base with them in ages as a reader or irl but I should. I remember war for the oaks and cats have no lord v fondly.

Thanks Jon! Thought she might be cool like that, considering some of her tweets. Enjoyed the rest of Falcon, tho ending was indeed a little h'mm, and in retrsopect the first part didn't quite go with latter developments, in terms of the hero's nascent powers, maybe should have been a little more foreshadowing---but I'd rather have too little than too much, like I usually get.
This prob needs updating, but will def look for books listed:
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/bull_emma

Another collector's edition from Subterranean newsletter; want this, but I'll wait for the mass-release or trade paperback:

Announcing THE BEST OF IAN McDONALD
The Best of Ian McDonald
Our good friends at PS Publishing have the huge (over 550 pages) The Best of Ian McDonald on their upcoming schedule, and we've been lucky enough to lock in copies.

About the Book:

Ian McDonald, the author of such landmark novels as Desolation Road, Chaga, River of Gods, and The Dervish House, has long been regarded as one of Britain's finest SF writers. Just like those full-length works, his shorter fiction has commanded much admiration, and now, in this massive retrospective volume, the best McDonald tales are assembled in glittering array.

Represented here are all the phases of McDonald's career: the poetic early retro-visions that in the late Eighties signalled the arrival of a marvellously fluent new stylistic voice; the virtuoso Nineties riffs on themes such as the Irish Troubles, nanotechnology, alternate history, and alien sexuality; the bold post-millennial ventures into the futuristic politics of Third World countries such as Kenya, India, and Brazil, as well as far afield to alien solar systems; and recent, dazzlingly conceived variations on the Arab Spring, the nature of superheroes, and Mars as pulp SF writers once fondly imagined it to be. The treasures are abundant, each presented in McDonald's addictive, immersive prose-language at once elegantly timeless and edgily contemporary.

Limited: 100 signed numbered hardcovers, with bonus chapbook, and illustrated slipcase: $75

Trade: Hardcover in dust jacket, unsigned: $40

never bothered with this guy, would this be a good starting point?

Chaga is a good start--strange alien _stuff_ infests Kenya (from meory), starts spreading out slowly across Africa; good character-driven SF, lots of nice ideas

memory, that should say

I keep having the impulse to post about books that sound cool but I don't because I might not like them or I might never read them (until last night I hadn't read any fiction in three months because of OCD and allergy problems, but my reading rate has been atrocious for years).

But I feel fairly confident that Chomu and Snuggly books probably are worthwhile. Quentin S Crisp (note the "S") and Justin Isis are two of my favourite people on forums, they and authors like Brendan Connell are common to both publishers and the three have even collaborated on a book.

There is weird fiction and what some of the writers call Irreal and New Decadence but I think they'll publish any type of book that interests them. They even do reprint/translations like Jean Lorrain.
A lot of the synopsises (synopsi?) and reviews sound really interesting. Like this review of Anna Tambour's Crandolin by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy..
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/590151832?book_show_action=true&from_review_page=1

http://chomupress.com/our-books/

http://www.snugglybooks.co.uk/

Also interested in Paul Hazel. He written a bunch of books in 80s and early 90s. Reviews make it sound as if Robert Aickman had written fantasy based on Celtic mythology.

Just got hold a of a cheap Faber collection of Aickman's, looking forward to that