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

Newts is wonderful. Unfailingly polite genetically engineered newt servants to humanity politely revolt and politely set about destroying humanity.

I found it on Gutenberg, but found the style incredibly grating - e.g., sorry for huge chunk but that's sort of the point:

God it's beautiful here, so beautiful. It's a shame that Li can't see it. Mister Abe looked at her charming outline, and through some vague association began to thing about art. This was because his sweetheart, Li, was an artist. A film artist. True, she had never actually been in any films, but she was quite certain she would become the greatest film actress ever; and when Li was certain of something that was what happened. That was what Mamma Loeb couldn't understand; an artist is simply an artist, and she can't be like other girls. And anyway, other girls were no better than she was, Mister Abe decided; that Judy on the yacht, for instance, a rich girl like her--and Abe knew that Fred went into her cabin. Every night, in fact. Whereas Li and I...well Li just isn't like that. I want Baseball Fred to have the best, Abe thought generously, he's a friend from university, but every night...a rich girl like her oughtn't to do that. I think that a girl from a family like Judy's...and Judy isn't even an artist. (That's what these girls sometimes gossip about, Abe remembered; with their eyes shining, and giggling...I never talk about that sort of thing with Fred.) (Li oughtn't to drink so many cocktails, she never knows what she's talking about afterwards.) (This afternoon, for example, she didn't need to...) (I think she and Judy were arguing about who has nicer legs. Why, it clearly has to be Li. I know these things.) (And Fred didn't have to have that dumb idea about a beautiful legs contest. They might do that kind of thing on Palm Beach, but not in private company. And the girls didn't have to lift their skirts so high. That was more than just legs. At least, Li didn't have to. And right there in front of Fred! And a rich girl like Judy didn't have to do it either.) (Maybe I oughtn't to have called the captain over to be the judge. That was dumb of me. The captain went so red, and his mustache stuck out, and he excused himself and slammed the door. Awful. Just awful. The captain didn't have to be so coarse about it. And anyway, it's my yacht, isn't it?) (True, the captain doesn't have a sweetheart with him on board; so how's he going to look on that sort of thing, poor man? Seeing as he's got no choice but to be alone, I mean.) (And why did Li cry when Fred said Judy has nice legs? And then she said Fred was a brute, that he was spoiling the whole trip...Poor Li!) (And now the girls aren't talking to each other. And when I wanted to talk to Fred Judy called him over like a dog. Fred is my best friend after all. And if he's Judy's lover of course he's going to say she has nicer legs! True, he didn't have to be so emphatic about it. That wasn't very tactful towards poor Li; Li is right when she says Fred is a self centered brute. A heck of a brute.) (I really didn't think the trip was going to turn out like this. Devil take that Fred!)

Crappy old translation, do not judge by

Could use more parantheses

Xp I did think that, and would be interested to see an alternative, but if I'm reading a book called the War with the Newts then even if it's satire I want a goddamn war with some goddamn newts, not pages of colourful character development. I'm sure John Wyndham or HG Wells never made me work so hard.

Lol. New thread description or next thread throttle

Just got on goodreads and following lots of the most interesting reviewers I can find. Ian Sales is good and demanding, reviews loads of SF (though I sometimes suspect he's a robot more into hard science, politics and purely intellectual things), some from magazines he written for. I think someone was enjoying his work on here?

*raises hand*

What book was it again?

Four books, The Apollo Quartet. First one is called Adrift in the Sea of Rains or something like that.

Also a fan, it was mr redd who turned me onto him

This site claims its not mocking all the cover art because some of it's really good but just not ideal or it's charmingly oddball.

But I wanted to see more awful Baen covers, (if there's a good painting it will be ruined by the rest of the design).
http://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/?tag=baen-books

Baen are just dreadful. As you say, their typography alone is hideous, and then you add it to boobtastic or gun-cluttered art...

This might be the third or fourth time I've mentioned them but I'm still stunned by their covers. They look like something from a really crappy bygone era. I was looking at lots of romance novel covers recently and a lot of them are really similar to Baen but geared towards women, with really cheesy dated looking cover art that looks like it's from the 80s even when it's using current photoshop.
Shame Baen seems to have quite a number of good writers. I think they publish most of Bujold and her fans don't like the covers at all.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/books/review/the-latest-in-science-fiction-and-fantasy.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fbook-review

Also been enjoying NK Jemisin's reviews for NYT, see review of the new drowned world anthology.

yeah I wanna check out Jemisin's fiction too.
Locus pledge drive, w perks for various tiers: https://www.patreon.com/locus?utm_campaign=creatorshare2&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

http://ew.com/books/2017/01/10/marlon-james-dark-star-fantasy-trilogy/

I liked A Brief History... enough to check that out

Wanna read this Gleick book, and maybe the Amis, as discussed on What Are You Reading:

The Alteration - Kingsley Amis (delighted by the unexpected reference to The Man in the High Castle)
― Darcy Sarto (Ward Fowler),

This is a very underrated book, I reckon. It was referenced a lot in the book I just finished, James Gleick's 'Time Travel: A History', which was an enjoyable wander through the literary/cinematic history, philosophy and physics of time travelling.

― I hear from this arsehole again, he's going in the river (James Morrison)

Didn't realize Amis had done so much of science fiction-and-related-interest: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/amis_kingsley

Thought Amis hated sf. Although maybe it's just Chris Priest he hates. Oh wait you mean Kingsley.

The Alteration almost made it into Anthony Burgess's 99 Novels, but he went with Pavane, by Keith Roberts instead.

Moorcock and Amis hated each other iirc

'The Fortress at the End of Time' by Joe M. McDermott: normally I don''t like the sort of stuff branded as "military SF", but this is all about the soul-crushing bureaucracy of institutionalised life, and features no fighting or aliens--indeed, the war against aliens in the past which happened before almost all the characters were born may not even have taken place. Instead it's about a good but naive man slowly fucking everything up, couched as a confession about a final, grand, personal rebellion.

Moorcock and Amis hated each other iirc

Kingsley Amis called Terminator 2 a "deathless masterpiece"

the Gleick book is a lot of fun

The Alteration almost made it into Anthony Burgess's 99 Novels, but he went with Pavane, by Keith Roberts instead.

There is a cheeky reference to Pavane in The Alteration, too!

Moorcock and Amis hated each other iirc

Well, Amis' distate for experimental fiction was well known - see his Paris Review interview, conducted at the time he was actually writing The Alteration - and he fell out of love with the work of Aldiss and Ballard (and SF more generally) when they started to dabble in the avant-garde. So I guess he was hostile to the New Wave, and Moorcock's part in that. I don't think he ever critiqued PKD's 60s writing, but having been a fan of his 1950s short stories (as mentioned in New Maps of Hell), I don't imagine Amis had much time for something like The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch either (which is why I was pleasantly surprised by the mention of The Man in the High Castle in The Alteration.)

not usually into the belated sequel by another author thing but this sounds pretty fun

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/14/the-massacre-of-mankind-by-stephen-baxter-review

Tempted

http://www.snugglybooks.co.uk

Snuggly Books having pumping out some science fiction but quite a lot of translations of classic decadent writers.

There's some stuff there I have to get, like the Jean Lorrain, but that is possibly the worst publisher name ever, even more so than Cheeky Frawg.

I like it. Justin Isis probably named it, definitely sounds like him.

Affordable copies of Marcel Bealu's Experience Of The Night showed up on amazon recently.

Man, I tried Stephen Baxter's new War of the Worlds sequel, The Massacre of Mankind, but it combines a lack of Wells's wit and brevity with a surfeit of Baxter's clunky prose and dialogue, so gave up on THAT

I enjoyed Wool, although questions remain. (Where were they pumping the water to? What about the bends?) And the geometry of the place still alludes me, the distance between floors, the radius.

Not sure I want to bother with the other 2 though.

Hadn't seen this before: PKD's Lies Inc., “one of his last novels, expanded from the novella The Unteleported Man.” Anybody read either of these?

https://www.amazon.com/Lies-Inc-Philip-K-Dick-ebook/dp/B005LVR0AG/ref=pd_ys_c_rfy_25_27?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B005LVR0AG&pd_rd_r=JJTBVE5DG28YTQVN05M6&pd_rd_w=y3cig&pd_rd_wg=DTxM6&psc=1&refRID=F8XCYGDG2C44PND6X229

It's all right but it's maybe the fourth- or fifth-best novel he published in 1964 ... I read the Lies, Inc. version and it did not seem substantially weirder or more incoherent than some other Dick novels.

It's probably most interesting in the context of his 1963-64 outpouring -- all of those books feel tightly interrelated.

Yeah i agree w that assessment

Adam Roberts' The Thing Itself, disappointing. Was expecting something a bit cerebral, got something somewhere in between Robert Rankin and Dan Brown, and as ludicrous as either of them. Central idea itself was pretty clever, if flawed, & ok I have a degree in philosophy but I don't think it needed explaining four or five or six times.

KSR's Aurora much more my cup of tea. He manages to make a feature out of the usual bug of dry prose and info dumps by having it narrated by an AI, with a nascent interest in creative writing.

agreed re: Aurora. Although part of me thinks it's emblematic of KSR's shortcomings as a writer that his best-written character in the book is the AI. I do wish he'd break out of his hard-sciences straitjacket sometimes.

plugging the gaps in my Silverbob reading - so far I would say "Downward to the Earth" is top tier

KSR is like Marilynne bleedin' Robinson compared to Greg Egan.

from a discussion of KSR, esp. Green Earth, upthread aways:

"a more poetic or metaphysically inclined writer would have done something more interesting with the ship AI in the final stretch but eh whatever": It may be that his poetic or poetically-inclined side and his POV on science and technology don't mesh---Green Earth seemed wobbly sometimes, but the strongest passages (by far) are those where he goes for what he knows, as an outdoors guy, and in related love for Thoreau and Emerson (incl. the tension between them, which he surely feels as an outdoors/indoors guy, ingesting info and pounding out all those books), and some for Tibetan Buddhism too.

― dow, Monday, July 25, 2016 9:08 PM (six months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Also, he's observed the lives of scientists, in Southern Cali and DC, so that helps, even if he still doesn't pull it all together (at least in this one-volume mix-down of the original trilogy, which I still haven't read).

― dow, Monday, July 25, 2016 9:12 PM (six months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he is great at describing natural phenomenon and environments (although I do routinely have to look up some of his terminology, dude is so specific!), and I agree that's where his poetic side shines through. what I was getting at though is something that has to do with more basic plotting and conceptualizing in his work - he's very much bound by a commitment to scientifically-based realism, there's no real room for the fantastic or mystical or metaphysical, even in instances where it might improve the story. So where someone like, say, Arthur C. Clarke could thread the needle and employ both where appropriate, KSR doesn't let anything even remotely "unrealistic" creep in, everything is restricted by cold hard facts. I feel like the few instances where he breaks this rule are when he finds some way to artificially extend the lives of his characters, but maybe he just thinks that is more plausible than interdimensional hyper-aliens or whatever.

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, July 26, 2016 1:57 PM (six months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Reminds me, I should read some more Clarke, maybe incl. the late collabs w Baxter, can see how they might be compatible.

― dow, Tuesday, July 26, 2016
(Later that week, James Morrison says the collabs def seem mostly Baxter.)

Think the opening quote was maybe Οὖτις, re Aurora?

yes

Greatly enjoyed the sweep and careful tracking of The Wild Shore, though read it eons ago.

Yeah I read wild shore last year, it's really really special.

a more poetic or metaphysically inclined writer would have done something more interesting with the ship AI in the final stretch but eh whatever

It does wax somewhat poetic after it discovers the power of lo-ove. I thought its development was handled pretty well overall. Some metaphysics does creep in with the ghosts but I couldn't tell if it was an attempt to circumvent realism, or to add a bit of local but realistic colour (people do think they see ghosts after all), or a bit of misdirection. Also why was Freya so tall...

Anyway definitely minded to try more KSR, maybe the wild shore although I don't generally hanker after post-apocalyptic scenarios.

just go back to Red Mars

Yeah I was thinking of doing that, cos might have some good outdoors stuff along with the hard science in the dome or whatevs

the mythic arc of John Boone in the first one is really well done, one of my favorite things about it, but yeah there's tons of hard science/martian geography too