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

i was gonna start a thread once of just art/illustrations/portraits of sci-fi writers. but then i didn't.

i think it mostly had to do with finding this painting of heinlein online. but i just stared at it for a while and forgot to share it.

http://ljdopp.com/famous_authors/images/03Heinlein_jpg.jpg

Dynamic drapery on those lapels

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5F0wq2xtwk

I think there is a special issue of F&SF dedicated to Poul Anderson that someone should post the cover of.

This one, which may already been posted up thread:
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/70/cb/a7/70cba75cae2b968ffd4c94db97b10061.jpg

A couple of Delanys:

http://www.vol1brooklyn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/delany-cover.jpg

http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1414559383l/23398398.jpg

Harlan Ellison as a character in his own comic:

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/aa/f0/e8/aaf0e8d7cf1f84bb860cd29cdbd3f146.jpg

Fritz Leiber:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/fa/FSF_0769.jpg/220px-FSF_0769.jpg

pronounced LYE-buhr, fact fans

Also an act-or

https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/covers/cov0306lg-250.jpg

take your pick:

http://41.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_me3ms62w5e1qc8b0ao2_1280.jpg

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4113/5093655322_2a3796f7f5.jpg

kinda prefer rocket fingers myself...

The latter

Have to admit I can't figure out who a lot of people on that Malzberg cover are supposed to be.

Definitely Vonnegut there but maybe Asimov and Bloch at either side.

Up from the lower left is it:
Asimov, Silverberg, Heinlein, Dave Marsh, Michael Palin...

bearded dude in the hat is Emerson, no?

could be Moorcock I suppose, depending on the year that's from

I'm guessing the lower hatted figure is Whitman, but I'm not sure about the cloudborne near-Whitman above: Tolstoy?

Whitman! right that's who I meant, not Emerson duh

really curious about who the dude in the ranger outfit is supposed to be

Pretty sure that's supposed to be Hemingway.

Ah, yes. Then the guy in the lower right is Orwell.

And guy behind Papa is Faulkner.

p sure I've read that Malzberg piece (which is not specifically about sci-fi writers, but about his time at the Scott Meredith publishing agency)

Asimov, Silverberg, Heinlein, Dave Marsh, Michael Palin...

palin = aldous huxley (i'm pretty sure)

Sounds reasonable.

Resisting temptation to spam other ILB picture threads with that cover.

never forget

http://subterraneanpress.com/uploads/9781596067820.jpg

Those books are great, put a paper bag around the damn thing and read IMO

Oh I def wanna read it (Blaylock!), but hope to find something more affordable than Subterranean's initial price (also it's now marked SOLD OUT).

Speaking of Subterranean writers, I like this essay by Roz Kaveney on Caitlin Kiernan's short stories in the latest Strange Horizons:

Kiernan is far bleaker than most writers partly because she takes the long view—she knows that this is a universe dominated by entropy and extinction and that human stupidity is helping universal death along. One of the reasons—it sometimes seems—why she sets so much of her work in the present or the past is that there probably is not much in the way of a future; the universe is a fool-killer to those beings who wreck their own nest. Lovecraftian beings can do nothing to us that we are not doing to ourselves anyway. And that is without the contingent personal tragedies that might strike us at any time . . .

What consolations are there in this vividly evoked bleak world? Moments of sexual fulfilment; the celebration of art and ecstasy; a revelling in metamorphosis for its own sake, changing towards the rich and strange, and sloughing off what is mundane and second-rate. Kiernan's slow progress from conventional elements and standard tropes, however well done, to meditation on what story is and what it is for and why we seek it out is one of the most radical things that is going on in the fiction of the fantastic right now.

http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2016/07/two_worlds_and_.shtml

‏@SFEncyclopedia 14 hours ago
Born on this day in 1904, Clifford D Simak: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/simak_clifford_d

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Co7MHL4WYAAHOmR.jpg:large

read a really good story ("The Night Copernicus Died") by Kathryn Kulpa in one of these random issues of Asimov's from 1999 that I found on the street. Never heard of her, doesn't seem like she's published much beyond short pieces here and there. Even so, this is the kind of discovery that makes me appreciate these kinds of genre periodicals, always some diamonds among the dross.

Seems like she's mostly a young adult and children's author. But that story is in her collection Pleasant Drugs.

Caitlin Kiernan's short stories in the latest Strange Horizons
The first volume of the collected short stories is out of print and asking very high prices for used copies, so much so that it belongs on the $900 Grandmothers thread.

Ohhhhhhhh - I only just got the pun re $900 Grandmothers threat title

Just came across this quote from a young Kingsley Amis (1960) on litwriters doing SF: "Only the hyper-sensitive could greet without warm emotion [...] an imagined invasion of Earth by Vegan vegetables from the pen of Miss Ivy Compton-Burnett."

I just read a review of that horror issue of Granta from several years ago. The review said that Bolano's story is just the synopsis of Return Of The Living Dead 3 without actually revealing which film.

Interview with Nancy Kress, she has a Best Of collection now
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jCic1Feb4k

Would like to check that out, thanks. I've only read her bold 80s-90s shorts in Asimov's and the equally rash novel Brain Rose.
New York Review Books Summer Sale incl. one prev. discussed SF, others I hadn't heard of:
http://www.nyrb.com/collections/science-speculative-fiction-masterworks

Oh, and this group is on sale too---we talked about The Rim of Morning on here, or was it the old thread:

http://www.nyrb.com/collections/horror

All the books in both those sets are well worth reading

finished Gene Wolfe's "A Borrowed Man" - v good, up to his usual standards. Not sure if he's ever done a noir before? SF noirs are well-travelled ground obviously but Wolfe brings his own unique skills to it, and I was glad that it avoided a lot of the more "grim n gritty" bullshit of a lot of 3rd generation cyberpunk writers trying desperately to evoke Hammett and Chandler. While it is set in the future and gets some mileage out of disorienting the reader accordingly, the structure and characters all hew closely to classic noir tropes - a murder mystery, a femme fatale, a mysterious rich old guy, threatening but ultimately clueless cops, wisecracking sidekicks, a romantic/cynical protagonist drawn into a web of intrigue - it's all there. Good stuff.

also has Wolfe's characteristic meta-shadings - protagonist/(and occasionally unreliable) narrator is a clone of a mystery writer that "lives" in a library (hence the title)

Had not even heard of that, now see wolfe has been really prolific recently. I need to finish the last Sun trilogy.

Yeah i never got around to that, i should check it out. Never read a bad book by him tbh. But he can be taxing (those soldier of sidon books got a little exhausting trying to keep track of references and what was really going on)

A list of philosophically inclined SF, if that floats anyone's boat. A few more interesting choices amongst the obvious.
http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/forty-new-philosophical-sf.html

Wait, here's a whole load more:
http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/SF-MasterList-150813-byrecommender.htm