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

a couple of writers I'd never read before: James H. Schmitz's "Grandpa" is exobiology on the systematized, unexpectedly goin' wild side, mortal peril and quick, try, try again thinking,
First read this in best story in the penguin science fiction omnibus, 1973 and have been meaning to read more by him. "The Witches of Karres" seems to be his other best known story.

Sf writers for and against the Vietnam War (in Galaxy, June 1968; via maroonedoffvesta.tumblr.com)

http://68.media.tumblr.com/aa98335238b99adc2a3e28dd9a9ed35c/tumblr_oecisjWe431rge7zlo1_500.jpg

72 science fiction writers wrote, “We the undersigned believe the United States must remain in Vietnam to fulfill its responsibilities to the people of that country.” Among those whose names I recognise are Anderson, Leigh Brackett, Fredric Brown, John W. Campbell, Hal Clement, L. Sprague de Camp, Robert A. Heinlein, Larry Niven, Jerry E. Pournelle, R.A. Lafferty, Fred Saberhagen, Jack Vance, and Jack Williamson.

On the anti-war side, 82 signers wrote, “We oppose the participation of the United States in the war in Vietnam.” Names I know are Forrest J. Ackerman, Asimov, James Blish, Ray Bradbury, Samuel R. Delaney, Lester del Rey, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, Philip Jose Farmer, Daniel Keyes, Damon Knight, Ursula K. LeGuin, Fritz Leiber, Judith Merril, Gene Roddenberry, T.L. Sherred, Robert Silverberg, Kate Wilhelm, Donald A. Wollheim … and Harry Harrison.

https://alexcoxfilms.wordpress.com/2014/07/17/american-science-fiction-writers-and-the-vietnam-war/

No huge surprises there

Vance will always be my god but I know he was on the conservative side. Though nowhere near the 'secret hero' this cadre of loathsome neocons who have tried to dominate his legacy want him to be.

P4ul Rh0ads for example can eat a thousand dicks in hell

The Witches of Karres is also a well regarded big fat novel

http://www.mafarooqi.com/hoshruba/index.html

The world’s first and longest magical fantasy Hoshruba was compiled in the Urdu language by two of its greatest prose writers. Spread over eight thousand pages, it reached the summits of popularity and acclaim never attained by any other epic in the history of Urdu literature. But the richness of its language and its length deterred translations for more than one hundred and twenty-five years.

A few years later and there's still only one volume so I don't know if the translation will be continued. There's a much bigger Penguin volume 1 but this one might be the better translation?

The Witches of Karres is also a well regarded big fat novel

As hinted at on the Fall 2016 WAYRN thread, I got completely caught up in the world of Barrington Bayley's The Fall of Chronopolis this past weekend. It lived up to its recommendation by John Clute and others really delivered on stacking up the time travel tropes, creating an audacious century-spanning empire founded on time travel, with a theology to match, and mysterious enemies to fight both within and without. There's a lot of nice detail about all kinds of stuff without going overboard worldbuilding-wise, on the peculiarities of the Imperial royal family, on the "chronmen" that fly the time ships, and especially on the bizarre mechanics of traveling through the other level of spacetime known as "the strat," as opposed to regular "orthogonal" spacetime. He sets up lots of different weird plotlines and ideas and makes good on most of them. Perhaps it is a little too loopy at the very end, but for the most part it is in the sweet spot where pulpy and visionary SF meet.

Stylistically hard to describe exactly. There is an element of Ballardian deadpan. There is also a sense of really well-written imaginative stuff alternating with a bit of salacious, slightly crepey crowd-pleasing exploitation material, reminiscent of that other paperback original churner-outer Jim Thompson. Basing this on reading the two novels in the omnibus The Fall of Chronopolis and The Soul of the Robot. So far have read the first short story in the omnibus as well, "The Exploration of Space," in The Knights of the Limits and that was good too, in the cosmic vastness mathematical multiverse visionary vein, and am looking forward to reading the rest, but took a little break to read something else.

Or maybe stylistically sometimes a little like Christopher Priest, a kind of workmanlike prose that somehow opens up a trap door on a mind-bending idea.

bought the omnibus. might take me a while to get round to the novel though.

Hope I didn't oversell. This can backfire on me. For example, I couldn't read Cordwainer Smith for a couple of years after getting into it with Shakey about "Scanners Live In Vain."

Not to mention my recent discussion with a very smart Springsteen-hating neighbor.

your neighbor otm :)

You do peak my curiosity about the Bayley, he's one of the New Worlds guys I haven't really investigated. I read "The Four Colour Problem" in Moorcock's anthology and (after refreshing my memory last night) I remember being intrigued by it but also a little put-off by all the conceptual math mumbo-jumbo. It was like a cross between Burroughs and a really dry academic text about math theory. But what you describe sounds a little more pulpy and plot-driven, which sounds more my speed.

you'll never sell me on Cordwainer tho lol

Any opinion on Sheri S. Tepper? I just read "The Gate To Women's Country" and wow, a lot to dig into there.

have been curious abt her for awhile

Whatever you do, do not click on the Amazon reviews of the standalone version of The Fall of Chronopolis, because tons of spoilers
(xp)

"The Gate To Women's Country": post-apocalyptic gender segregated society. Things are pretty shady all around, but ultimately men are pretty much the bad guys - which didn't bother me, as a) the accusations made are mostly pretty right on and b) there is a kind of #notallmen concession in that the women's country actually includes many men who have rejected the warlike attitudes of their peers. What struck me most was how unsentimental the book is - women's country is certainly no utopia, and "how to survive in a barren hellscape" ends up a bigger issue than "what would a women-only society look like". There's also a strong Hellenic element to it all - protagonist is rehearsing for a role in a play about the aftermath of the war on Troy.

Early tepper >>> late tepper, which tend to be thinly veiled boring and simpleminded polemics

I'm- listening to Wang Wen's "Heart of Ocean" on headphones now nearing schools-veins-strata-trendlines of shiny flexing sounds, maybe attributable to rapture of the deep, and I'm thinking, "Why can't it be like this more often in The Big Book of Science Fiction?" Those times when you find yourself getting buzzed on the material and sorting through your impressions, your thoughts at the same time. Most of the time, we watch manly responsible men learn the limits of problem-solving, however ingenious, in alien environments, at home and abroad, and aliens, however intriguing---in appealing or repulsive ways---only become confusing when they turn out to be even more alien than expected---so far, they aren't really alluring, siren-like, for the most part---the shape-shifter in xpost Bradbury's September 2005: The Martian" does allure the grieving, greedy pioneers from Earth, but in creepy ways; it's pretty much a tale of child abuse.
But, sirens aside, there are stories where we're is left and led to fill in spaces, like I said upthread about St. Clair and Dick trusting their readers that way. (Oh, but speaking of "left and led", Sever Gansovsky's "Day of Wrath" leads a roving reporter into gradual awareness of his place in the scheme and happenstance of things: he's not a problem-solver, but a tool, like the dangerous posthumans he's covering----it's vivid and carefully paced and in your face too: one of those stories that amazed Judith Merril in her intro to the collection of Soviet SF I carried on about upthread, and/or maybe the previous Rolling thread; amazed her for its tough sophistication and that it was published at all, considering visceral vs. status quo, though there are also favorable implications re the need for civility and positive collective effort, mostly conspicuously absent)
Pohl's "Day Million" lets us decide whether our descendants of the far future are dead enders, sexually and otherwise, or better off than us mad busy fuckers of the Sixties, either way still not that far from the tree? Which also might be the options, if you care to think that way, of Delany's take-it-and/or-leave-it "Aye, And Gomorrah", which is terse, but a lot more evocative than Pohl's story, more to figure out (did he write more about the felks and spacers, or just walk away from 'em? Both seem equally likely).
Then there's John Baxter:
"His mind seemed limitless and the thoughts like pet fish suddenly emptied into an ocean. Ever since he had left Huxley, it had been like this. The collision of this thought with another might have sparked an explosion of fear, but the meeting never occurred. It joined the rest of the ideas that swam quietly about in his mind." Def rings an undersea bell, but doesn't get too meta: that's from "The Hands", a real good SF horror story.

Also day tripping on Silvina Ocampo's "The Waves", waving to Gerard Klein's "The Monster" and his new fan, while we're all metal detector-harmonizing with Ballard's "Voices of Time."

Thought the Klein story in View From Another Shore -do you know that collection?- was incredible and looked around for more of his stuff but just couldn't find anything so will be looking forward to reading that.

Yeah, the intro notes a Bradbury influence, but it's via urbane French 60s critique x humor.

Could be/might be condescending to sympathetic spacey female lead, but mainly sly-spooky-goofy-poignant, rooting for her by end (suddenly reminding me of the way I read a certain Flaubert story)

The one I read, The Valley of Echoes, totally read like a first tier Martian Chronicle that somehow inexplicably got cut from the main book.

From intro to "The Monster": Gerard Klein (1937- ) is a well-known French writer, anthologist, critic and editor. An economist by profession, Klein has used the pseudonyms Gilles d/Argyle (most frequently) and Mark Starr, also, with Patrice Rondard and Richard Chomet, as Francois Pagery (surname taken from first syllables of the co-authors' first names). His first stories, heavily influenced by Ray Bradbury,appeared in 1955 when he was only 18, beginning with "Une place au balcon" in Galaxie (the French edition of Galaxy). He soon made a major impact on the field in France, publishing more than 40 delicately crafted tales between 1956 and 1962 (a total that reached 60 by 1977), while also establishing himself as a forceful and literate critic of the genre with a series of 30 penetrating essays... dunno about the writing in these intros sometimes; they're cobbled by the editors of this volume and acknowledged contributors to Science Fiction Encyclopedia Online---two many cooks?)
(yadda yadda) ("The Monster") was first published in 1958 in French. It was translated into English by Damon Knight and published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Scienc Fiction in 1961 and reprinted in the Knight-edited 13 French Science-Fiction (sic) Stories (1965)...

Electronic versions of that damon knight french sf anthology at http://libgen.io/foreignfiction/index.php?s=Damon%20knight%20french&f_lang=All&f_columns=0&f_ext=All&f_group=1
Not fully legal, but the book is long out of print

There is also a Damon Knight translated novel available as an ebook.

I'm kind of a libgen junky truth be told

"Any opinion on Sheri S. Tepper?"

i LOVED The Companions and i told everyone here how weird and cool it was but it's a hard sell if you read a synopsis. it has soooooo many ideas crammed into it but that's kinda what i loved about it. there are just so many cool moments. it's definitely memorable. she could have written 20 good short stories out of what she managed to pack into the novel.

What the heck is Moderan], by David R. Bunch?

Oh, I see, there are Three from Moderan in the Big Book of SF and two in Dangerous Visions.

It got lots of mention on http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/61/unjustneglect61.htm

"THree From Moderan" is the first excerpt in here since Jarry's, and might be more---or less--- effective in context. Here we have a landscape of DO YOU SEE dystophia pushed deliberately toward comic book dimensions right off: starts with a couple of cyborgs basically cockblocking with their tools, as they compete over flattening the same bit of hollow earth, so it can be covered with plastic, and this gets mentioned in sexual terms by the other characters, just in case we don't get it. Then several conversations emphasizing the violent pathos and futility of Moderan (like, "Modern", dig?) life. Which conversations do induce some sympathy for the poor l'il grotesques, but seems like the whole thing (well the excerpted thing) might work better as something in a graphic novel, like several other selections (half way through, abiut 550 pages, and thinking it could be just as good-to-great if half as long).
So far, Bunch seems like Paolo B.'s Dad, and something of a Bester wannabee, Bester having assimilated actual comic book experience into jazzier, more involving and involved and sturdier variations on an existentialist x bluesy absurdist theme. But I'll prob read more, like if come across a cheapo copy of Moderan or the collection Bunch!

(Def wanna check The Companions; thanks for the reminder, Scott.)

I've seen a bunch of love for Bunch in recent times.

James Blecch otm on Bayley's "Sporting The Chid." Some of the other stories, even Lafferty's "Nine Hundred Grandmothers", aren't well-served (up) in context, in part because of pattern recognition, and some of the best authors aren't represented by their best or better stories but "Sporting The Chid" is strikingly distinctive---no prob w patterns here,just swinging those tropes around in tightly loose expertise, Chid-style---and it seems an ideal or at least enticing gateway.

His first two stories in the omnibus collection are promising, kind of genre exercises doing the intrepid 19th century explorer of the mind or cosmos, with the tongue nestled almost imperceptibly in the cheek. The next few start to become a chore though, reading in part or entirety like alternate universe academic journal articles - I don't really want to expend intellectual effort understanding counterfactual theories of cosmology or sociology or evolution in order to follow the story. I guess this is a particular subspecies of the WHAT IF school of SF noted elsewhere. Hey, what if there is an energy field that (it becomes apparent after ten pages of explanation) has been controlling humanity's social behaviour over the millennia? Hey, who cares? Am hoping the flippancy I know he is capable of will make an appearance soon.

Have only read the first two of those so far, so can't comment on the rest.

Seems like the title "Sporting with the Chid" is a play on the phrase "sporting with the child," which as far as I can tell appeared first in an old sermon: "when the courtiers of Pharaoh were sporting with the child Moses."

Testimony from his, um, peers:
Alastair Reynolds says he remained one of my favorite British writers
M. John Harrison says he was doubly saddened to hear that Barry Bayley died. He wrote pretty weird stuff & he was always good for a laugh.

Also lots of interesting stuff on this one particular fan site, including one page where it is said that He stands very much in the Wells-Stapledon-Aldiss lineage.

The highly intriguing-sounding Rhys Hughes overview, "Annihilation Factotum: The Work of Barrington J. Bayley," seems to have gone off the web because of Hulmu however.

But you can find him describing BB as a "pulp Borges" here

I like Tepper a lot even when she's being not very thinly veiled. Plenty of room for it in sf/f imo. Grass remains a high point in my memory for plot fun, and Gibbon's Decline and Fall is also a fave.

From Gibbon's cover copy: "A wave of fundamentalism is sweeping across the globe as the millennium approaches, and a power-hungry presidential candidate sees his ticket to success in making an example out of a teenage girl who abandoned her infant in a Dumpster. Taking the girl's case is Carolyn Crespin, a former attorney, who left her job for a quiet family life. Now she must call upon five friends from college, who took a vow to always stand together."

Oh yeah what a boring polemic, that could never happen in real life for instance.

James Redd- Did you get the SF Gateway Omnibus for Bayley?

Yes

doing the intrepid 19th century explorer of the mind or cosmos, with the tongue nestled almost imperceptibly in the cheek. O yes, and in this story taking the usual approach to exobiology One! Step! Beyonnd! The kind of "what if?" I dig, and am looking for, why would you read science fiction if not for some kind of "what if?"?. "Sporting with the child Moses" does seem like an appropriate point of departure, where you best be ready for that sporting, not trifling life, I be thinking.

Another first for me: "The Snake Who Had Read Chomsky", feat. the wicked wit of Josephine Saxton. Intro suggests comparisons w Angela Carter. What else of hers should I read?