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

The political is never more personal than with leguin.

http://siderealpressxtras.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/european-weird-hanns-heinz-ewers.html

Weird Fiction authors disapproving of each other. It should be noted that Lovecraft only ever got to read a few works by Le Fanu and not the best bunch.
http://wielhorski.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/a-matter-of-taste.html

With le Guin, if you can't get into 'The Lathe of Heaven', which is one of her most immediate, plot-powered books, then her other stuff probably won't work for you

But it's also a direct PKD rip-off pastiche inspired work and almost entirely unlike the rest of her books!

True, but it's not dry, which some people are finding a putoff

we went and saw that ted chiang movie tonight. i dug it. i dug how slow and moody and non-blockbuster-y it was. plus, non-humanoid aliens always a plus.

even cyrus liked it. and he's 11 and likes a lot of shiny things. was afraid he would get restless.

I've been listening to the original score for that, which totally blew me away

also, the trailer for the chris pratt movie about people who wake up too early in a spaceship TOTALLY reminded me of my favorite chapter in the first coyote book by allen steele. wonder if they ripped him off.

did you see it in the theatre, jon? that music is so intense with big speakers. kinda the most jarring thing about the movie which is pretty chill otherwise.

that guy is doing the music for the new blade runner.

and the Arrival guy is directing it. but you guys probably already knew that.

i will totally go see Passengers. the guy who directed that directed that awesome movie Headhunters.

Yeah, Passengers looks interesting. I read some of a draft of the script a while ago. It was funny.

i guess i should watch the imitation game by the headhunters guy since its on netflix. pretty cool that he only made 4 small movies over 10+ years and got to direct a hundred million dollar sci-fi movie. it better make money!

(Arrival music guy is Johann Johansson)

pretty sure Passengers is going to be the worst movie of the year. Looks unbearable

Based on the SIlverberg story?

no

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqEMn2idZys

Wow

Christ that looks awful

IN A WORLD... awesome/terrible trailers for SF films you will never watch

i would see it just based on headhunters which i loved.

i think i will watch that cumberbatch codebreaker movie. supposed to be good.

Scott, I haven't seen Arrival yet. I'm a film score junkie so I downloaded the film mix of Johansson's score from a nerd site. Might be my score of the year (as a standalone listen)

I read a bust of the cumberbatch codebreaker movie re supposedly totally playing down crucial contributions of other codebreakers, especially females, and misrepresenting his relationship with one of the women, also other aspects of the historical Turing's life---all of which can be easily referenced in bios---but that wouldn't suit the glory of slick screen overselling (according to this piece, like in London Review of Books I think---whatever it was, I crosschecked online and the movie-hatah's assertions about Turing and the other codebreakers seemed to be right, although I dunno about the movie itself, still haven't seen it)(just as a Cumberbatch movie, not taken too seriously, might be okay to watch though)

New York Review Of Books is reprinting David R Bunch's Moderan

The turing film also portrays him committing treason to avoid being outed as gay, which is a massive lie. He was gay, and suffered tremendously for it, but he was never a traitor.

ugh fuck that

~~spoilers for Imitation Game~~

dumbest bit in IG is when they CRACK THE CODE just in time to save a ship of UK civilians but Turingbatch decides the right thing to do is to let the ship sink because otherwise the Germans know they broke the code - like that's a call he would have been allowed to make

then the young wide-eyed junior scientist pipes up with "my BROTHER is on that ship!"

something like that happened, ie the bombing of coventry, but it was hardly turing's call--the british govt decided to let the civilians get bombed to avoid letting the secret loose

grew up in coventry and this is a major part of local lore but it is fairly conclusive that they didn't know it was specifically coventry that was being bombed.

yeah, I'm not saying that such a decision isn't credible - I'm saying it would be the military's call to make (probably decided before they even start the project, really). Turing making the decision on the spot is what's dumb about it. And the brother thing.

wow Silverberg's "Stochastic Man" is pretty incredible, Malzberg might've been right in calling it the "greatest of science fiction novels about politics". Sort of disconcerting to read in current political climate.

Ebook of that has some serious problems.

man, Lafferty. I really don't know what to make of this guy. He's clearly unique and has a very distinct style, but I literally do not understand maybe 50% of what he writes - the jarring shifts in tone, the seemingly never-ending stream of odd and obscure references, the idiosyncratic terminology, it's all kind of bewildering. I don't dislike it necessarily, but reading "Arrive at Earlywine" I feel like tons of stuff is just flying by me and I have no idea what's going on or what is being conveyed. I have a basic understanding of the characters and certain plot points, but everything is couched or enshrouded in this apparently ridiculous quasi-mystical/philosophical language and none of the characters talk or act like recognizable people, it's bizarre.

it's like all the characters operate with secret knowledge of (I presume) Christian metaphysics that is just never explained or spelled out, like there's some kind of analogy being made but I have no idea what to.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FeministFantasy

Found this quite interesting, the literature section in particular. Not sure a strong heroine should be enough to qualify these days.

gave up on the Lafferty, went back to the library and got Silverbob's "Thorns" and Gene Wolfe's "The Land Across". As far as the latter goes - is there any other author so totally infatuated with the unreliable narrator device? I mean, he's a master at it but it's sort of his default setting.

Lots of Lafferty takes upthread, where I luck up with my first by him, "Encased In Rind" and "The Narrow Valley", the latter seeming like it might have influenced young Rudy Rucker. Both with glints of other agendas, but nothing off-putting (although "TNV" incl. some 50s-early 60s SF stereotypical plastic suburbanites, but does the Author have some heady surprises for them, and for the Reader)

from a Rolling Stone interview w Phil Lesh (published last summer but I just now saw it):

What was your favorite book as a child?
I was a space nut. In elementary school, I checked out Destination Moon, by Robert A. Heinlein, about 3,000 times from the library. I've always loved sci-fi. More Than Human, by Theodore Sturgeon, is the one, in my mind, that helped define the Dead.

Still need to read MTH!

That's about it for the science fiction, though the rest of this is good too, short but sweet:
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/the-last-word-phil-lesh-on-jerry-garcia-memories-sci-fi-w434812

This is from "20 Things You Didn't Know About Jerry Garcia"(thanks, vh1.com):
10. Sci-fi fanatic Jerry especially loved the work of authors Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

11. Vonnegut sold Jerry the film rights to his classic novel, The Sirens of Titan. Between 1983 and ’85, Garcia worked on a screenplay adaptation with Saturday Night Live writer Tom Davis. Health complications and other matters delayed Jerry from seeing the movie through to fruition, and it remained one of his (few) unfulfilled dreams when he died in 1995.

12. One science fiction film that Jerry did get to participate in was Philip Kaufman’s acclaimed 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He plays the music that emanates from a banjo being plucked on screen by a homeless beggar. Fans have often erroneously believed that it’s Garcia himself who appears in the part.
Gee, why would they think that?

13. Another soundtrack to which Garcia contributed was Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 psychedelic cult freak-out, Zabriskie Point. He composed and performs the music during the film’s orgiastic outdoor love scene which was one succinctly summed up by Jerry thusly: “It’s a whole lot of people balling in Death Valley… A friend of mine, in fact, is in that scene somewhere. The guy that painted the album cover for our second album. Nice tie-in, you know!”
Also, for the first Twilight Zone revival ('85-'89), wiki sez, New theme music was composed by Jerry Garcia and performed by The Grateful Dead.[2]

Interesting.

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/features/changing-playing-field-hl-gold-galaxy-science-fict/

way up this thread or the previous, we discussed the downside of Gold (also discussed in the intro to a Galaxy comp, published past his tenure): he would change endings and other things, as writers might learn only when they read the published versions. One regular said in the intro that Gold called him up, figuring he was working away at something, as indeed he was, but the writer was so desperate to get free that he improvised a whole spiel about how he couldn't make his wife come anymore---and, though of course the writer could tell from the sounds Gold was making that he wasn't satisfied, maybe sensed he was being given the run-around, nevertheless he (Gold) couldn't resist, so of course they had an editorial conference, critiquing the writer's performance.

Not to say the stories couldn't turn out pretty well (still got some of the Galaxy Reader collections edited by Gold).

I just wish John Cage would have said more about the poker game. Or Martin Gardner, or anybody.

has anyone read ancillary mercy yet?? was a bit underwhelmed by the second one.

Sorry, Tracer, I was too underwhelmed to even finish the first one.

aw dude i LOVED the first one.