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

UBIK was a total blast, so I'm looking for further PDK recommendations. What sez anyone?

Things I loved:

- I was expecting something colder, like Pynchon or Twilight Zone, but was surprised/pleased by how moving and affecting Dick's writing is - the rapid-ageing set pieces and genuinely sad and nerve-wracking.
- The characters are kinda stock and silly but I enjoyed being in their company and rooted for them. (I'm not sure I "rooted" for, say, Oedipa Maas.) There is a LOT of plot but the characters don't act like clockwork pieces who solely for PDK to move the story forward - they have their own motivations and idiosyncrasies
- Was gradually won over by PDK's kooky overwriting, dad jokes, weird under-explaining, and silly poetry. I tried to imagine a more plotcentric version of Ubik, with terse Dashiell Hammett sentences and more straightforward plot momentum - and realised I wouldn't want to read that book.
- An ambiguous twist ending that actually works, thematically and structurally! Good job there PDK
- You know that "all-knowing" character in science fiction, like Ben in Lost, or Anthony Hopkins in Westworld, who could save everyone a lot of hassle and explain the whole mystery in the first episode, but doesn't because there's several seasons/episodes/chapters left to fill? I like that there *isn't* one of those characters in Ubik - everyone's as confused as each other.

Anyway, I probably don't need to PDKsplain to a sci-thread - but really enjoyed this.

Or PKD, even.

PDK, What Does It Mean?

Phillip Dick K.

Philip Dick mmKay

UBIK was a total blast, so I'm looking for further PDK recommendations. What sez anyone?

A Maze of Death is the closest in feel to Ubik.

I remember that one as A. Christie's Ten Little Indians In Space (incl.cameo appearance of Jesus in airlock)---not meant as a compliment---but been a long time, so might be wrong. OPPKD. Given what you liked about Ubik, maybe try A Scanner Darkly, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Flow My Tears The Policeman Said, Martian Time Slip, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and maybe try a couple of his non-SF novels, Mary And The Giant and The Broken Bubble.

Oh yeah, and VALIS!

Then you could see if you might wanta go for the rest of the VALIS Trilogy...

I remember The Broken Bubble seeming very proto-James P Blaylock

Cosign on Maze of Death + dow's recs, would also add Dr. Bloodmoney

Dr Bloodmoney is nuuuuuts

Word. Welp, I just now finally watched Arrival, and quite agree with Scott's comments upthread re the vibe and pace---incl. shuddery anticipation-apprehension; even her hair gets involved in that during one passage, as extension of nervous system----and by "her" I mean of course everlovin' Amy Adams, who is Louise Banks, narrator of Chiang's original "Story of Your Life" (without getting too Method-y or otherwise showy about it). For a major studio/stars release, some simplification is to be expected, but---aside from a brief jolt of aliensplaining, Tonto-style---it isn't too problematic---well, the mother-daughter bits are certainly smoothed out, but just when they're getting too gauzy, the movie's over. Also the description of the alien language, and the detective work involved, are developed more in the story, duh, but good to have this certainly-stronger-and-sufficiently-different-from-the-usual-SF-flick too.

Now if only somebody would find the Tower of Babel story.

https://www.cabbagesandkings.audio/podcast/48-book-club

Two critics talk about a favourite book and they both sound fascinating, never heard of either. The host talks about Watership Down afterwards so if you're not interested you can stop there.

What books do they discuss besides WD

Sarah Tolmie's The Stone Boatmen (and a bit about her book NoFood)
Sun Yung Shin's Unbearable Splendor

Now if only somebody would find the Tower of Babel story.

First read this as "ralaffertycon", like Comicscon for raheads---not quite, but still:
http://ralafferty.com/

B-b-but the link says they do have an annual convention!

sweet!

About halfway through the Kornbluth collection - not arranged chronologically so hard to plot any particular growth or development, especially over such a short career. Pohl could be sardonic on his own, but it's clear from these stories that the more smartass material in their collaborations came from Kornbluth. The guy loved a knowing leer and bitterly ironic plot twists. If anything he relied too much on the former; a fair amount of the stories get their juice from protagonists unwittingly contributing to their own downfall, delivered with a tone similar to Bester. To his credit, the stories range *all* over the place. Space opera, alternate history, post-apocalypse, modern fable, character study, you name it. If anything it's the latter that have really stood out to me. "With These Hands", for example, is a totally simple set-up about a sculptor who can't accept the progress of technology and it's impact on his livelihood and the wider culture, but nothing much really happens in the story - there's no "twist" - it's just a carefully-rendered mini-tragedy. "The Goodly Creatures" reads eerily like an episode of Mad Men: an unhappy/unfulfilled ad exec hires an awkward and not entirely qualified young weirdo, who proceeds to write his own ticket to becoming a spaceman, to the consternation and confusion of his former boss. There are a handful of socio-political elements that haven't aged all that well. 1958's "Two Dooms", for instance, is an apologia for the US's atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima/Nagasaki framed by a "what if the Axis powers won the war" scenario. But the alternate history timeline alternates between being grimly amusing (the Nazis build a Teutonic castle deathcamp in the middle of Chicago, staffed entirely by "Germanized" Americans) to the baldly racist (west coast is a series of squalid overpopulated subsistence-level peasant farms where the Asianized population is starved and stupefied), and then concludes with a definitive "... and that's why we had to drop the bomb!" sort of ending.

That goes with some of Kelly Link's collection Get In Trouble, where, for instance a male character can say to his twin sister, "Mom was an exhibtionist. That's why I'm gay and you're not." Which mainly tells you about his attitude and btw he's the slightly younger twin, grown from sis's second shadow, which she still has and was born with because their mother didn't know, nobody did back then, that you shouldn't visit a pocket universe while pregnant (second shadows are kept under wraps, but one night a pickup undresses big ol' sis and their four shadows fall across their bed, oowee; when he's gone she finds he's used her razor to cut his shadow off, leaving it in the sink with some beard hairs[ she ditches her stinky damp towels). So it goes, with lots of (subliminally exuberant) freewheeling inventiveness, kind of Lynda Barry's indie comics x the jazziness of Bester, but also his (and Cyril's) bitterness and YOU'RE ALL ALONE, but she keeps things so lively and deadly, with self-and-other challenge of risky ( esp.forshort stories) use of disparate elements, unified finally by tone and overall effect and omg implication----especially in "Two Houses", but every time I re-read it, the traces, the links, are still there, still disappearing. Occasionally Some do you see but not heavy enough for DO YOU SEE, well maybe once or twice (more like, "Get the picture?" cos she's a tough broad see.) No room for datedness so far, though historical etc. context, the Barry thing and also especially the grand finale, "Light", with the pocket universes and warehouses and bungalows and weather and whatnot, remind me that she's a child of 80s-90s south Florida, like her peer and colleague Karen Russell (who also blurbs this).

I gotta pick that up, hope he library has it. Never read Karen Russell, what's her deal...?

Kelly Link's stuff is all on the (otherwise mostly terrible) Kindle Prime Library Whatnot service - I can't recommend it, but it's free for the first 30 days.

I have Magic for Beginners and Stranger Things Happen and only read actual books but thx

I just started reading my first Joan Slonczewski and so far so good, I'm really digging it. Anyone have thoughts on her?

Is Joan S. kind of hard SF, but not in a reductive way? Think I've seen references to her in that vein/ I haven't read Russell's only novel, Swamplandia!, yet, although descriptions of it as inspired by the author's childhood home being near a decaying Florida theme park, certainly fit with some funky, refracted elements of Link's stories---jaded but intense, teeming even---though Russell doesn't seem to take shitty things as personally as Link does---still, many many bold strokes, finely executed, in the KR collection I have read, Vampires In The Lemon Grove.

Title story is the only one w. vampires, who aren't like any others, far as I know.

Joan Slonczewski: keep hearing good things about her, but have never seen a book by her in the wild

Never read Karen Russell, what's her deal...?

My impression is that she comes from more of a literary fiction background, even though most of her stories fit into some kind of genre fiction - loved Vampires In The Lemon Grove, really sharp and tough.

She also does non-fiction, like this piece on homelessness in Portland: http://lithub.com/looking-for-home-karen-russell-on-americas-housing-catastrophe/

just gonna leave this ongoing mixed-media masterpiece here https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football

just got to Kornbluth's "Marching Morons" and yow that is some dark, acidic stuff

what was the first sci-fi people can remember being exposed to? I was trying to re-trace my own fascination to the genre and weirdly I can't really think of anything prior to reading Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy sometime around 1985. And then from there it was straight to Gibson and Sterling. PKD I found out about a couple years later and that dominated my high school/college sf reading. I don't think I really got a broader sense of the genre until I was well into my 20s/30s. When I look back this seems like a strange trajectory but idk the 80s were a weird time for sf novels and a lot of contemporary stuff had zero appeal to me.

the Dragonfall 5 books when i was 8?

http://childrensbookshop.com/images/bookimages/80/80721.jpg

I definitely have an answer to that. When I was 8 or 9 years old I saw Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials on display in this bookstore/newsstand my parents would go to sometimes. Wayne Barlowe was a well known sf painter and in this book he had done idk 100 paintings of alien races from all eras of sf with a page of field guide like text on each facing page telling you what their deal was and what book they appeared in. In my memory it was an unbearable amount of time before I convinced them to buy it for me. I then mainlined that shit directly into my soul and when finished, proceeded to check out all of the cited novels in it I could find from the library. Shit like mission of gravity and star smashers of the galaxy rangers and childhoods end etc, a lot of which I did not appreciate but I had to read them to get at those fucking aliens man.

omg GIS makes that look like the most 80s sf thing ever

Did you know he did a companion fantasy version?

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?3616

He also written an acclaimed novel called God's Demon.

Pelosi etc call for kushner's sec clearance to be revoked

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/07/13/kushner-target-democrats-anger-240529

Oops

Barlowes Guide was '79 but yeah its spirit is more in the early 80s I suppose

Did not know he did a fantasy one!

Suspect my first SF "novels" were novelisations of movies like Star Wars and The Black Hole.

Thanks for that ongoing multimedia epic, will def try to keep up. Must check out both Barlowe's Guides, and his novel. My first were Stories From The Twilight Zone and More Stories From The Twilight Zone, Serling's reformatted, sometimes more fleshed-out/lengthier versions of his T-Zone scripts. Too bad he didn't include Bixby Bradbury Beaumont & Matheson, one of my favorite bands, but still I got a glimmer of something from seeing the eps and then reading them as fiction, real fiction for grown-ups, I thought (anybody from high school on was grown-up to me).

Having thought a bit more about this, I reckon my first "proper" SF novels were by Douglas Hill: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/hill_douglas
And I have remember reading the fairly feeble Anne McAffery 'Dinosaur Planet' novels at a young age.

Another nod to Douglas Hill here - no idea which came first but my main memories are of his Last Legionary series, something called Derai which I would have sworn was part of the same series but in fact is part of an entirely different (33 book long!) one by EC Tubb, and Aldiss' Penguin SF omnibi. Also Han Solo and the Lost Legacy.

Someone at school had a copy of Spacecraft 2000 to 2100 ad, Foss style book covers reprinted in large book format with ship schemata & accompanying fictional text totally unrelated to the original books. I lusted after it. Finally got a copy in my 30s, lol.

which I would have sworn was part of the same series

Possibly because both books involve the protagonist entering a galactic ultimate fighting contest.

Is that Spacecraft one a guide to like 5 different alien races' ships, plus a few mysterious hulks found drifting in space?

That's the one. One of the hulks later inspired (was flat out copied by) by Turner prize nominee Glenn Brown. Another of his copies, of a Chris Foss, went at auction for $5.7 million.

( http://glenn-brown.co.uk/artworks/55/#selected_mediums=13 )

oh, he's done a few

http://glenn-brown.co.uk/exhibitions/44/works/artworks51/