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

say no more

In the Pringle book, the entry for Tau Zero includes this quote from Barry Malzberg: "Tau Zero has long struck me as the only work published after 1955 or so that can elicit from me some of the same responses I had toward Science Fiction in my adolescence - a sense of timelessness, human eternity, and the order of the cosmos as reflected in the individual fate of every person who would try to measure himself against these qualities... The novel builds to an overpowering climax, yet has a decent sense of humility... Tau Zero suggested to me that it was not my own sense of wonder but that of the Science Fiction field itself that had flagged within the last twenty years." Makes me want to read it now!

Haha ok yeah i'm sold

You should keep in mind that it does indeed have all the aforementioned problems.

Really enjoyed The Dry Salvages, by Caitlín R. Kiernan, pessimistic hard sf along with some weird elements, which reminded me of Gateway and Carter Scholz's Gypsy.

Here is blog post she wrote about it: http://greygirlbeast.livejournal.com/739057.html

That sounds good. Never read her, somehow assumed she was a fantasy writer, think i am confusing her with cathrynn m valente.

..who i HAVE read, and liked on the sentence level, but whose stories overall did not come together fir me

Ok, i cannot type proper on ipad

I think she writes more dark fantasy than anything.

Enjoyed "Planet Lion", the Valente story in the anthology I recently mentioned upthread (The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016): hers is basically hard antiwar dystopian military SF, with poetic touches depending on/appropriate to POV, but all of her titles in my village library's online card catalog do look like they might be fantasy.

That sounds good. Never read her, somehow assumed she was a fantasy writer, think i am confusing her with cathrynn m valente.

That sounds good. Never read her, somehow assumed she was a fantasy writer, think i am confusing her with cathrynn m valente.

I want to read it! It looks hard to find, sadly--printed only in an OOP expensive Subterranean Press hardback. All her easily available stuff looks significantly less promising.

I think it is actually printed in two OOP expensive Subterranean Press hardbacks, one a standalone and one an anthology.

Is there any other genre than SF that has so much of its stuff published in really expensive/hard-to-get books from small presses? It's a bit self-defeating.

I mean, there are plenty of lit-fic small presses, but you can usually buy them easily and they don't try to gouge you. Sylph Editions possibly excepted.

Weird Fiction for sure. It's 85% on small presses and a lot of them are book as object fetishist publishers like Zagava/Ex Occidente, Egaeus Press, Centipede and Tartarus. Even most mainstream (by sensibility) horror and extreme horror is very expensive and in small print runs. But I could imagine collecting surrealist writing is even tougher.

MacMillan's got Kiernan and a bunch of others "starting at $2.99"---all ebooks in this ad, though prob have at lease some of 'em in other formats as well; seems to be the thing for a lot of F&SF publishers, judging by Amazon: http://view.mail.macmillan.com/?j=fe5c17767c650c797510&m=feee1c737d6c02&ls=fdc71576716401747712747567&l=fe5f15777d63047c7413&s=fe1d1674746c0d74721579&jb=ffcf14&ju=fe2711707267007a721370&r=0

I've downloaded a few cheapo ebooks via MyKindle to read on my laptop, but one reason for reading books is to get away from screens, so...

Ticked Madeleine l'engle's A Wrinkle in Time off the list. I'm not 12 any more but if I were I think I'd still be disappointed, it's very childish and pandering. Wasn't expecting the auld god fella to get dragged in either.

I see if I'd scrolled upthread I could have forewarned myself about the g man.

Now I'm debating whether to binge on the rest of John Crowley or savour it at a much slower pace.

Is L'Engle any worse than CS Lewis in that respect? I read A Wrinkle in Time in fifth grade and didn't feel beaten over the head by the Jesusisms, but maybe I'd feel differently if I revisited it today. I have this idea of L'Engle as a tolerant liberal Christian, mostly due to her association with the Trees Community (a '70s hippie cult / musical collective)

one of my favorite sff novels is The Book of the Dun Cow (and its follow-up, The Book of Sorrows) by the Lutheran pastor Walter Wangerin. he uses a standard 'talking farm animals band together to slay the cockatrice' narrative to work through his issues of crippling self-doubt as a minister. it's funny but kinda disturbing with all its metaphorical handwringing about cutting off your hand or poking out your eyes if they offend Christ. I can imagine being awed/traumatized by it if I read it as a kid. a religious sff thread might be interesting but I don't know if I should be the one to start it.

I like CS Lewis' space trilogy a lot (with some quibbles over theology here and there), never been able to make it through a L'Engle book. Maybe Lewis is just a better/weirder writer.

i loved both lewis and l'engle as a kid (although 'wrinkle in time' was maybe my least favorite of her books -- preferred the first two sequels/the austin series/others tangentially related)

while i *realized* aslan = jesus etc i don't recall it being overbearing. maybe it's more so as an adult, although i suspect modern readers are more put-off by things like the dismissal of susan than the religion. if anything, i'd say l'engle was less obviously christian.

read the space trilogy when i was older and yeah the allegories are there but i'm okay with that

the Lewis as sinister Christian indoctrinator thing is way overplayed these days

yeah that stuff is there, and The Last Battle is pretty loopy, but I didn't notice or GAF about that stuff as a kid

yeah I didn't get aslan=jesus as a kid - unsurprising perhaps as I wasn't brought up a believer. I was just a bit bewildered by the ending (of wardrobe). why did he let them kill them? how did he come back to life? wtf?

I read Book of the Dun Cow maybe 20 years ago. I don't think I had the toolkit to enjoy it at the time.

Contents for the new Swords Against Darkness anthology. There was five volumes in the 70s.
http://paulaguran.com/swords-against-darkness-toc-cover-reveal/

i remember going to see empire strikes back with my friend pat and his dad when it came out and on the ride home his dad started talking about christian holy trinity parallels and it kinda blew my mind. but i was 12.

reading Tower Of Glass by Robert Silverberg and enjoying it. great android theology.

That's a p good one. Doesn't end v satisfactorily iirc but whatever.

lol there's a used mass market paperback copy of Tau Zero going for $3k on amazon

Take it over to the $900 Grandmothers thread

like I'm gonna look that up when the search function is broken

It's right there on ILB New Answers, bro.

ok fine

/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=55&threadid=102012

(googling with "site:ilxor.com" usually works)

I was put off by Wrinkle's gushy Granny kisses incl. angels etc. upthread, but got how she was (as advertised) one of the pioneers of what was later called young adult, re some plausible tensions in and among family members, and somebody, maybe mookieproof, advised then that her later books could be much better, so maybe I'll check them out.
Once came across some ancient issues of think it was Amazing Stories, with a series of author profiles---by Sam L. Moskowitz?---prob: http://www.nytimes.com/1997/04/25/arts/sam-moskowitz-76-learned-devotee-of-science-fiction-dies.html---mostly mild-mannered, but slamming Lewis for heavy-handed proselytizing via clumsy use of symbolism. No idea if this was a widely shared opinion in the fantasy-and/or-science-fiction community, but considering how middle-of-the-road the other profiles and the magazine seemed, doubt that it was a very controversial view. Of course this was back in the early 60s (hey-hey-hey!), when most of the best (and maybe the rest) of fantasy and science fiction seemed to be written "by some smart-ass Noo Yawk Joo," as one of Randy Newman's good old boys put it (re many/most thangs). I haven't read the novels, but have come across a few anthologized stories sporting Earthman superiority incl. over women, reminding me of some of Gene Wolfe's earlier, pushier, smellier (shorter) efforts.

Some smirky, self-impressed sanctimony just under the floorboards in both (Lewis and Wolfe) cases.

But later for that smelly old stuff---in the previously mentioned Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (Karen Joy Fowler, editor/John Joseph Adams, series ed.), I was struck by what I mentioned somewhere else as the "initial snappy patter shifting to different tones and levels", very hard to do, and it's a cosmic-but-plausible story about cancer, by Adam Johnson---countered by S.L. Huang's cancer story, where there's no out-of-body-experience, no revelation, no transcendence, just adaptation, getting through it and going on with life. Huang says it's autobiographical---shifted into near-future treatments, and the character only has cancer once, so far, unlike the author (both are now "cured", or in remission). Also unlike this author, Johnson doesn't provide a comment on his story, but the female narrator has a seemingly Johnson-like husband---I hope his story is not based on his actual wife's experience; it does seem more imagined---in a way that seems almost foolish right after first reading Huang's story, but no, they're just---two ways of looking at it, writing about it. I think. Anyway, can't recall coming across such a juxtaposition in an anthology before.

Not that Johnson's story is Inspirational, it's about moving between past, present, future, commuting.

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/twenty-questions-ursula-le-guin/

Ha, good! I disagree re Ferrante, but from what I've read of Knausgaard, suspect she isn't missing that much. Wish there were more questions re science fiction, but good to know about the pickles (lodged in my mind now, so they did find a home after all).

http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/8/86/STRWTRSTRN2005.jpg

Just finished the audiobook, which I enjoyed, of the book recommended here: I Am Reading A Novel That Seems To Be Something That Elvis Telecom Would Like

Maybe I should say "mentioned" rather than "recommended." Not sf per se, but the protagonist is an sf writer and many real sf writers are mentioned or appear as characters, along with various figures mentioned on Eden Ahbez, Jack Parsons, and other LA kooks...

i started reading vernor vinge's a fire upon the deep. dig it so far. love those incomprehensible first chapters/prologues where you have no idea what's going on. which would be in about 50% or more of the SF i read. surreal and mock-poetic. i love the ones that start like that ("Colors...drifting...nexus floating...") and then half the book is mundanity about some scientist trying to have space sex with his secretary. it's tradition, i guess.

Both of the Deep Vinge books are great. He seems kind of hit and miss tho. (Also a Singularity believer iirc). Him and Bear and KSR make for a v odd San Diego sf triumvirate.