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

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?

Her 'Little Tours of Hell' story collection is not exactly SF, but I remember it fondly (it has been about 20 years since I read it, though)

Hope I didn't oversell. This can backfire on me.

And lo, it came to pass (re: barrington bayley). Don't worry I won't trash him, but I went back to your review of the fall of chronopolis and the word that stuck out, that i didn't heed at the time, was "pulpy". Also since I fondly remember a couple of his stories I enjoyed as a youth, it was always possible that "you can never go back" would rear its head.

Lol. I can't get past the second story in Knights of the Limits because of your negative review.

Although perhaps that is not the only reason.

Anyway, his writing seems to scratch a particular itch that you may not have. ILx0r James Morrison on the other hand....

Another one from The Big Book of Science Fiction, Elizabeth Vonarburg's "Readers of the Lost Art", a recounting of processes, watching the watchers of perfomance art, ends with an impression left as another quantitative quality, something to write home about---"Gosh folks, you shoulda heard just what I seen", but with no exclamation or any punctuation mark necessary or appropriate, except for this one way later: let it be.
Except I gotta write a little something about it, let the impressions re-surface here, something about the convergence of perspective and technology and technique and aesthetics and emotions in the ceremony, with risk for both the Operator and the Subject, with sympathies kept at a certain distance but generated, nurtured sustained while contained, via I guess the tone of the voice of the story via cold print, tone like the tone of muscles and whatever ultrasound rocks the Operator when his current instruments touch the Subject just so, right there---except, of course, it's not just like that for us, out here---or not for me.
(Trying not to spoil is one reason for writing like this, but will say that here Vonarburg, though the intro suggests comparisons of her overall work to Le Guin and I can kinda see that, now that they mention it, also reminds me here a bit of Cronenberg too, simultaneously even, wtf)

(Not a complaint!)

So I guess what I mean is that my response to reading "Readers of the Lost Art" seems like part of the performance of response of the audience and the performance process art they're watching, and the aftermath or last lap of it. Which might be changing as and maybe because I think about it again and try to put it and the reading experience into words. Which reminds me of ex-gallery-owner-sometime-short-story-writer-songwriter-ex-music-critic-maybe-ex-art critic Dave Hickey saying that he's a an evolutionist rather than a creationist, art-wise.

Read a few more stories in The Knights of the Limits. Liking it a lot more than the ledge did, if not as much as Michael Moorcock did.

How is "Mutation Planet"? They featured it on WeirdFictionReview.

Coming up next. Will let you know.

If we can accept that horror is a form of fantasy... Just finished Thomas Tryon's wonderful Harvest Home, contemporary with The Wicker Man and a US coeval of it in many ways, highly recc'd and I think in print from nyrb. Now starting The Dead Zone bc it's October + we have an actual madman on the loose

If I finish the SK before Halloween gonna take another few bites out of hartwell's The Dark Descent

NYRB has The Other, not Harvest Home.

The Other is a wonderful movie---the perfect example of what King in Danse Macabre called "sunlit horror", I take it---though I still need to read the book.
With the release of The Complete Orsinia, Le Guin joined Philip Roth as one of only two living novelists published by the Library of America. Also a volume of novellas---cool feature w new quotes:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/18/ursula-k-le-guin-interview-complete-orsinia?CMP=edit_2221

Yeah Jon, we've talked about horror on this thread and the previous one from time to time; it def fits----Lucy Clifford, Richard Matheson, think Lovecraft might have come up too, for instance.

I really want to read and see the other. Not so keen to watch the tv miniseries of harvest home. At least not while the agreeable flavor of the novel is still on my tongue.

Could anyone suggest some super chilly sci-fi that evokes the same space-is-big bleakness as the spoken word sections on Hawkwind's Space Ritual or should I just read Black Corridor?

lol was gonna say "just read Black Corridor" before I even got to the end of your post

also in that vein - Malzberg's "Galaxies" and "Beyond Apollo"

Wonder if this audio course by Gary K. Wolfe How Great Science Fiction Works is worth listening to. Seems to have a misleading title and is more of survey of the history of the genre, complete with plot summaries and spoilers, rather than a discussion about what makes it tick.

Eh, took a pass on that. Probably better to just plow through the Big Book like don.

Okay, finished the stories in The Knights of the Limits in the Barrington Bayley Omnibus and have to respectfully completely disagree with ledge. More later.

One might want to contrast Bayley with Ballard in the following manner: whilst one pointed into inner space, either using the trappings of conventional sf only to subvert them or, often enough, ignoring them all together, the other joyfully took on the entire junkyard of tropes, jumped into his nucleon rocket and happily headed off into the opposite direction- OR DID HE? Maybe at the far side of infinity outer space IS inner space.

In fact, Bayley was an early proponent of Ballard, and Moorcock says that three of them would meet to plan the New Worlds um, takeover? revolution? reboot? together. My take is that Barry Bayley was using the standard sf situations as grist for the mill of his own vision the same way writers like Sheckley were doing in those issues of Galaxy that Jim Ballard was reading to kill time whilst waiting to fly during his pilot training in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, which reading eventually inspired him to become an sf writer.

Although in his typical overboard bluster, Moorcock has to put out more red flags and say that Bayley is "sharper and more substantial than Borges."
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/aug/01/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.bestbooks

Yeah, moorcock always goes one step too far in his praise

Well I guess he feels he has to outdo Ursula K.

When I think of something as "Borgesian", I start with a foggy notion of a wispy academic exercise, an outline that takes on a life of its own and takes in other lives, at least provides a new grid for familiar and other elements, incl. the old curiosity shop and a taste for same---and just keeps rolling into the foreground, jolting me awake in a way I wasn't expected, or (if it's a story I've read before) in a way I didn't quite remember. That's my impression of the Borgesian effect of reading Borges, though it can take on new turns when somebody else seems Borgesian.
In the Big Book (long after Borges himself shows up), Connie Willis, of all people (always seemed smart, but at a distance), recently hit me with the seemingly Borgesian as hell "Schwarzschild Radius", in which the elements of ideation connect in a perpsective increasingly consisting of hairline fractures, that can never, ever fall out of the vibrating frame, but can only realign themselves, and be realigned, until----it all has to do with quantum physics and the experience of World War I. Something opening and closing and compressing and re-opening, to an extent.

perspective!

"awake in a way I wasn't expected"? Well--that too.

Geoffrey Maloney is Australian, and "Remmants of the Virago Crypto-System" seems to take place way out in the boondocks, as the narrator discovers that his (?) girlfriend's proposed weekend getaway is really a search for or scheduled reunion with her own girlfriend, an alien who didn't leave with the rest of her kind. The remnants incl. a venerable, alien-renovated church left with equipment for native use, at least as artifacts. But we can still type on the ancient typewriter, next to a cupboard full of yellowed sheets with faded script---some, maybe all of which the narrator finds to consist of "more statistics, more figures", of which seem to add up to the question, "why do they kill children?"
The narrator thinks the aliens have left because of this question---answered (by them) or not---left in the mess in the cupboard--but their legacy is also this little old church-station-watering-hole, where tourists can get drunk and party with othr strangers as long as they want, or drink as couples in limbo, or nurse drinks and grievances alone. But the question, once asked, once read anyway, can't be forgotten, not by the narrator and his or her girlfriend, or the alien girlfriend, probably.
The question and the other artifacts seem to fit with eroded Enlightenment methods and ideals, in this dusty (granular) playground of moments from earthly second childhood.

It is much of a mood tone pome, occasionally reminding me of off-key moments in a Nicholas Roeg film, but/and does pull me back in, like the films; I keep finding myself thinking about it, between blocs of other stories.

Reminded that Borges eventually makes an appearance on this thread

Oh yeah, almost forgot to mention one last thing, that there is an audiobook out there of The Knights of the Limits which is on spotify.

poo, sadly not in Australia, out here in the boondocks

On that note, the other day I came across something called Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand. Are you familiar with it?

My take is that Barry Bayley was using the standard sf situations as grist for the mill of his own vision

I just didn't get the impression that his vision was very far advanced from or orthogonal to any of his inspirations. Not that that would stop him from being fun, necessarily, but Ballard or Borges he ain't. And he has a very 1950s attitude to the opposite sex - not that Ballard is a standard bearer for gender-subverting post feminism either, but I don't recall him casually throwing in rapes just for a bit of local colour.