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

Yeah I read Over Sea last year and it's charming but didn't entice me to read the next one - maybe should have just skipped it

From Small Beer Press:

We are looking forward to publishing one of the most beautiful and unexpected books we've ever come across: The Chemical Wedding by Christian Rosencreutz: A Romance in Eight Days by Johann Valentin Andreae in a New Version by John Crowley, illustrated by Theo Fadel, and designed by Jacob McMurray.
More details, also links to Guardian etc., and the Small Beer site also has a podcast discussion w Crowley:
(Kickstarter goal done, son)
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2142694884/the-chemical-wedding-by-john-crowley?ref=card

have long wanted to read that, but their attempt to position it as a work of sf... i dunno? at least it will be more readily available, i guess.

Some Small Beer stuff looks great, but so expensive

Actually, I may be confusing them with Subterranean Press

I got that info from links in the latest Subterranean e-newsletter, cos ST is involved with the initial ltd. ed., but they just get licenses etc. for a lot of stuff, apparently, so a more affordable version may turn up eventually (as with some of the other titles ST has introduced).

It's mainly a way to get splashy publicity for a new or reissued title, as far as most readers are concerned, but also getssome collectors tingling, like sinfully expensive vinyl etc.

hmmm, checking amazon there's a translation by josceyln godwin from the nineties which suits my budget better... no pretty pictures though.

http://www.amazon.com/Chemical-Christian-Rosenkreutz-Hermetic-Sourceworks/dp/0933999356

I see there was some chat abt Ursula K LeGuin upthread - have just finished A Wizard of Earthsea for the first time. My initial reaction - this stuff is for kids??? The writing seems so slow and serious and sombre (LeGuin doesn't really do humour, does she?) But there's often a great, almost biblical beauty to the prose (the main character is in some ways a Christ-like figure), and always an incredibly powerful imagination at work - she creates a whole world and mythology in less than 200 pages, and throughout there are hints of a bigger narrative, a greater world still to be explored. She may not be the flashiest, the most pyrotechnic of SF/Fantasy authors, but there's something admirable about her high seriousness - if I'd read this as a child, I would've appreciated the way that doesn't ever talk down to the reader. And this isn't an especially didactic work, though it has humanist things to say about the corrosive desire for power and mastery.

http://greydogtales.com/blog/?p=1891

An enjoyable list of fantasy books from 70s-80s.

THIS LIST IS MY LIFE. The Susan Cooper cover art is amazing and at least 300% better than any other version I've ever seen.

Skip Cherryh skip Nargun skip skip...skip...

McKillip is the bomb, y'all. Skot, you should really hide out from the sun this summer with the Riddlemaster Trilogy. McKillip is subtle in a way that fantasy often isn't, kind of LeGuin-ish, now that I think of it. Beautifully haunting, so sensible, everything about them is just RIGHT. Her Forgotten Beasts of Eld is not to be missed, either. Although classed as YA (for a number of reasons, most of them not very good ones), it went waaaaay over my head until I was probably in my 30s. Also my given name was inspired by this book, so naturally I adore it.

Barbara Hambly--funny she's on here because I just re-read The Ladies of Mandrigyn, The Witches of Wenshar, and whatever the third one is. Very disappointing and misogynistic. The Ladies of Mandrigyn might be right there in the title, but they come second to the main hero character and are constantly described by their sexy or unsexy physical characteristics. Every old woman is also fat, pretty ones are thin (and only thin ones are pretty), women who aren't going to fall into bed with the hero are "disagreeable", and so on. And the poor witches of Wenshar are not only already dead and gone already at the time of the second book, they're EVIL, a sign of what women unchecked will become (naturally). It takes the hero figure AGAIN (who lacks any formal training in magic btw, he's just naturally more gifted than anyone else) to come along and expel them and put everything right again, saving the life of an attractive young woman from the spirits of her female ancestors who would have "twisted" and "corrupted" her if the man hadn't killed them all over again.

I got shit to do, I don't have time for misogyny in my recreational reading.

I definitely plan to read Cherryh someday, lots of people really rate her. She won some sort of lifetime achievement award at Nebulas recently.

When I was looking at old fantasy reader polls from the 80s and 90s, it seemed like McKillip was at God-tier with Tolkien, Peake, LeGuin and Wolfe.

as a teenager I was really into those Thieves' World books Cherryh had a hand in, but I've never gone back to them and sort of doubt they're actually good. I was very into the structure of interconnected stories written by different authors though (in retrospect something I would enjoy much later and in a different way with Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius stuff)

Oh yeah, George RR Martin used to organize interconnected stories by various authors the Wild Cards and so on, but I haven't read any of that kind (by Cherryh etc either). I do like the Martin/Dozois themey anthologies of new stories I've mentioned on this and the previous Rolling SF etc, so maybe I'll get around to the interconnected someday.

Five Earthsea novels so far (1968-'01), right? I need to catch up on the shorter stories, incl the one pub. 2014.
Wiki:
As of mid-2015, Le Guin has published eight short stories of Earthsea. Seven appear in two collections of her work (and some have been reissued elsewhere). Two early stories were originally published in 1964 and were collected in The Wind's Twelve Quarters (Harper & Row, 1975). These helped to define the setting of Earthsea. Five much later stories were collected in Tales from Earthsea (Harcourt, 2001), where three were original.[4] In October 2014 a new novella set in Earthsea was published as a stand-alone, "The Daughter of Odren".[5][6]

Tales from Earthsea also includes about thirty pages of fictional reference material titled "A Description of Earthsea" (2001) and cataloged as short fiction by ISFDB.[4]

Listened to an interview with Martin a while ago and he named a whole load of shared universe book series from the 80s and 90s. Personally I don't like the sound of it because I've never enjoyed that approach in comics.

i don't even really like duo collabs in sci-fi novels. they make me nervous for some reason. who wrote what????

wait, what's the famous one now with a bunch of writers writing stories about one place/world? uhhhhh, i'll think of it...

(individual stories existing in the same world don't bother me as much as the duo thing. they make me less nervous...)

the Thieves' World books are restricted to a single city. It was the first time I can remember reading a convincing urban setting in a fantasy book. Different writers (there were usually about a dozen) would each write distinct stories set in the city, so there wasn't collaboration per se, although events in one story could impact events in another etc.

oh right this. that didn't take me long to remember.

https://www.amazon.com/Metatropolis-John-Scalzi/dp/0765335107?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0

i remember the thieves world paperbacks VERY well.

that's how i knew the name robert asprin.

even though i never read any of them.

happy chap...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fd/Bob_asprin_laughing.jpg/800px-Bob_asprin_laughing.jpg

dude who's figured out how to live etc

and i remember the myth adventures comics based on his books that Warp put out in the 80's but i never bought those cuz the covers always looked really dumb but i would totally read them now.

I never read anything of his besides those Thieves' World books tbh, Myth Adventures always looked so dopy

dopey

the comic covers looked like low-rent role-playing game art from the 80's. but i read the HELL out of my Elfquests.

did you guys know that frank thorne of red sonja fame and wendy pini of elfquest fame used to do a red sonja and the wizard stage show in the 70's?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDj5wRbgf8A

WELL NOW YOU KNOW!

omg

that's gotta be the source material for Dave Sim's early Cerebus issues w Red Sofia and her dad

Wowww

Wendy also turns up in the Red Sonja costume right at the end of this interview with Phil Seuling, the guy who pretty much established the direct sales market for comics:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9wRii6aiUk

Haha, for some reason I figured the Wendy & Frank show was something every modern comics fan knew about.

From that list, didn't much enjoy the one Diana Wynne Jones fantasy I read, but her 'The Tough Guide to Fantasyland', a thorough encyclopedic demolition of fantasy cliches, is a lot of fun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tough_Guide_To_Fantasyland

Recent horror collections, but I want to start with an older one mentioned, the Peter Straub-edited Poe’s Children: The New Horror, w Kelly Link, M. John Harrison etc. (which reminds me, I still need to the VanderMeers’ monster anth, The New Weird).

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/05/books/review/horror-joyce-carol-oatess-the-doll-master-and-other-tales-of-terror-and-more.html?em_pos=large&emc=edit_bk_20160603&nl=bookreview&nlid=65074007&_r=0

Good tour, lots of descriptions and links
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/sympathetic-sci-fi

And (check link in here to Mieville’s essay also: utopia and rage need each other; hope he's taking it to the fiction)
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/salvaging-the-future/

Speaking of the xpost Vandermeers, didn't know they had this *other* monster anth. With several more books relevant to this thread, among others: http://io9.gizmodo.com/all-the-books-you-desperately-need-to-add-to-your-to-re-1780575415
Just started Naomi Novik's Uprooted: seems like no-nonsense fantasy, w plenty relevant funky detail x momentum, so far

Still digging xpost Uprooted. Maybe less enclosed than Winter Rose, but though they do go beyond the village and nearby, do spend a lot of time in the tower, and while it seems more "political," re dealing w encroachment of those in and from the Royal City, also using some people and phenomena as bait/distractions/otherness, still, lots of shifting moves and "identities" in WR too, just keeping it all in and too near thee family. So yeah, McKillip fans should check this out. Lots of sensual-to-sensuous imagery in both as well (though maybe layered in WR, riding dragon ov plot.

"though they": principal/most characters of Uprooted (so far).

Left out modifier and right paren, should be "in both as well (though maybe *more* layered in WR), riding dragon ov plot," cos both imagery of both tales riding it!

Left out right paren again, gotta give up and go back to virtual keyboard.

There's no way to re-set/sensitize a key once it goes consistently less and less responsive, right?

It's the whole key, the right paren and zero as well. Can use virtual for the former, but it's more distracting than number lock for the latter, and now that one's 0 is feeling squishy too.

Have you tried, um, turning the keyboard upside down and shaking it, to perhaps dislodge a crumb that may be causing the key to stick?

thx, but canned air might be safer? Would hate to dislodge anything that should be lodged

Perhaps some curved air and canned heat might do the trick.

Anyone read any REALLY GOOD horror fiction? Other than a few Victorian classics and some Stephen King, I've never really thought to read a horror novel. I get the impression a lot of it is pedestrian or a bit cheesy (like horror movies), but there must be some mitigating stuff too?

Thomas Ligotti - any of his short stories basically
Straub when he is on (Ghost Story, Koko, short stories)

Here's my favourites so far, I've got hundreds of horror books but I'm so far behind.

The first two are novels

William Hope Hodgson - House On The Borderland
William Hope Hodgson - The Night Land (Warning! This is an incredibly flawed book)
Edgar Allan Poe - The Black Cat
HP Lovecraft - Rats In The Walls
HP Lovecraft - Dreams In The Witch House
Ralph Adams Cram - The Dead Valley
MR James - Oh Whistle And I'll Come To You My Lad
MR James - Count Magnus
Arthur Machen - The White People
Arthur Machen - Great God Pan
Robert W Chambers - The Yellow Sign
Nathaniel Hawthorne - Rappaccini's Daughter
Algernon Blackwood - The Willows
Clive Barker - In The Hills, The Cities
Hugh B Cave - Murgunstrumm
Hugh B Cave - Stragella
R Chetwynd-Hayes - The Jumpity Jim
Ramsey Campbell - The Brood
J Sheridan Le Fanu - Schalken The Painter
Lucy Clifford - The New Mother