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

(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.

Okay, fair enough, there is some pretty crepey stuff in there, you are right.

BB's Big Book offering, "Sporting With The Chid", didn't make me think of Ballard or Borges, although they might or might not enjoy the gory details of the Chid's creative exobiology as advanced medical folk art, in contrast to the sweaty yet stiff upper lips and pith space helmets of the Earthmen.
Speaking of Moorcock, "The Frozeo Cardinal" seems like another mood tone pome, even a song---re xpost howling along w Ballard's "Voices of Time"---but this is much moreso, no hardsciencefictionsplainers need appy, which is maybe why "he was asked for a rewrite", apparently by Judith Merril, who commissioned it for Playboy in 1966. Wonder what her objection was?? She was a bold, wide-ranging, very particular editor, like Damon Knight---anyway Moorcock withdrew it, put it away 'til the late 80s.

huh, had not heard about that nz sf poetry anthology. some (relatively) well-known names in there. even has peter bland in it who made an appearance in this...

Interesting.

Wonder what I should dig into next vis-à-vis this thread, the Bob Shaw omnibus maybe.

I remain curious about shaw

Have you read his greatest hit yet, "Light of Other Days"?

Nope. Which anthos is it in?

Silverberg's Science Fiction 101 aka Worlds of Wonder is where I finally found it.

Which is an excellent collection across the board, pretty much all aces. Plus useful commentary by Silverbob.

Or look here: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?41206

Aha I have The Ascent of Wonder on my kindle somewhere.

lol at "somewhere."

Recently I have been training myself not to use the Search functionality too much but rather go through by author or title so I force myself to see what I have on there since at this point it is a ton of stuff.

Anyway, the usually reliable and interesting Matthew "Mumpsimus" Cheney is a fan of that anthology I mentioned: https://www.sfsite.com/06a/ww201.htm

Ascent of Wonder, which I went through way up this thread or on the previous Rolling Speculative etc., refuses to settle for any received definition of hard science fiction---got & deserved mixed reviews, but it's well worth cherrypicking.

Meanwhile in the Big Book (also a mixed blessing, but aren't they all), I'm still wrapping my brain around Kojo Laing's "Vacancy For The Post of Jesus Christ", which seems like a madcap panorama of social satire, with deft use of zoom lens and appropriately omniscient narration, reporting from the scene of "alien" (actually smartypants galactic prodigal) contact---scenes which I relate to those of Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Elias Canetti's Crowds And Power. But Laing's leading me around some previously unencountered turns---also want to check out some other African writers mentioned in the intro, Ben Okri and Mia Couto.

The modern crowd as part of the hivemind of humanity, the folkness. is a very smelly gateway for an alien god, a jaded collector-destroyer, in Cixin Liu's "The Poetry Cloud", which is pro-folk-classicism, pro-acceptable portion of tradition, generating avant-art-pop pleasures as healthy exercise, in a way acceptable to authorities, apparently---judging by the acclaim and un-fucked-with best sellerdom of his publications, as described in the intro. It can be taken as something of a safety valve for certain social tensions, antagonisms, subliminal satire---but hey, even healthier.

Says here Han Song is also respected, has a career, but his writing tends to disappear rather quickly, though some of it gets republished in Japan etc. "Two Small Birds" seems Kafkaesque, with some dizzying anime-associated imagery, effectively conveying a personal mythology of time-travelling quest, rebellion, duty, guilt, new sense of the elusive next: implosion and aftermath, mutation and meybe continuity, coded but crackable and somewhat cracked folkness of a life, told pretty short and bittersweet.

Misha Nogha's "Death Is Static Death Is Movement" (excerpt from Red Spider White Web) also seems anime-related, but her imagery would be hard or at least very expensive to convey in other media; here. it's just an amazing given, that she can do this just like this. Long-delayed revengefest, getting to be too much by the end, but turns out it's too much for the fest-quester too. Next on her list---?

One more quest, from Rachel Pollack's "Burning Sky":

Sometimes I think of my clitoris as a magnet, pulling me along to discover new deposits of ore in the fantasy mines. Or maybe a compass, the kind kids used to get in Woolworth's, with a blue-black needle in a plastic case, and flowery letters marking the direction.
Two years ago, more by accident than design, I left the City of Civilized Sex. I still remember its grand traditions: orgasms in the service of loving relationships, healthy recreation with knowledgeable partners, a pinch of perversion to bring out the flavor. I remember them with a curious nostalgia. I think of them as I march through the wilderness, with only my compass to guide me.

Partly putting this here to remind me to investigate it further later on: there's this new book which looks very interesting, 'Iraq +100', which is a collection of Iraqi science-fiction, each story set a century after the US invasion: http://www.sfintranslation.com/?p=1185

Also every now and then I hear about this allegedly amazing SF novel, 'Frankenstein in Baghdad', an Iraqi reinvisioning of Shelley's book, where the mad scientist stitches his monster together from bits of suicide bombers and their victims, and it's supposed to be being translated and coming out in English AT SOME POINT, who knows when.

Wow, just looked up Iraq + 100, looks good, thanks. Ditto The Madman of Freedom Square and The Iraqi Christ, collected short stories of this Iraqi writer---publisher says "allegorical", customer reviews: "magic realism", also "terse" and a variety of ideas and approaches:
https://www.amazon.com/Hassan-Blasim/e/B00ABMS8V0/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1

Yeah, both those Hassan Blasim books were published together in the US as 'The Corpse Exhibition': they're daaark and brutal, but fascinating