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

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/

i saw the one from the spaceships 2000-2100 book in the Turner prize exhibition. What looked great on a paperback looked really lacking in detail & flat when scaled up to a giant canvas.

I've been trying to work out what that book was since the early 1990s! Thank you!

what was the first sci-fi people can remember being exposed to?

Probably an original-run episode of The Outer Limits. In book form, Have Space Suit, Will Travel or some other Heinlein juvenile from the school library. SF was very much in the air during the Apollo years. Around 1971 the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club lured me in with Frank Frazetta artwork; I remember staying up very late reading this twofer:

http://www.erbzine.com/mag4/gmwmffh4.jpg

After I'd signed my life away to the SFBC, a lot of reprints and anthologies of Golden Age SF turned up in the mail, as well as the big names of the 70s.

what was the first sci-fi people can remember being exposed to?

James Blish's Star Trek novelisations, sadly.

Actually fuck that, they were great

http://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1238706933i/6109067._UY475_SS475_.jpg

The first SF book I can remember really enjoying was Grinny by Nicholas Fisk:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/oct/25/nicholas-fisk-odourless-great-aunt-emma

I've been trying to work out what that book was since the early 1990s! Thank you!

are you going to get a copy? nothing wrong with doing that as an adult. nothing at all.

Oo, I had Peter Davison's Book of Alien Planets

And yes, i will be buying the spaceships book!

I guess this counts? It's a picture book about a cat that gets sucked into a video game and everything goes a bit Tron, except with dogs and cats. Apart from the pictures, it's just blank lined pages for you to write the story in.

https://d3525k1ryd2155.cloudfront.net/h/947/746/390746947.0.x.jpghttps://d3525k1ryd2155.cloudfront.net/h/947/746/390746947.1.x.jpg

Outside of that my first apart from the usual Adams/Pratchett were probably the equally usual fantasy-scifi-comedy books that were popular at the time: Craig Shaw Gardner, Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat, Red Dwarf novels, Robert Rankin, Paranoia ERPG manuals. Also think I read the (non-PKD) novelisation of Total Recall by Piers Anthony (!).

https://clutterreport.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/total-recall.jpg

Oops italicked instead of imgd

https://d3525k1ryd2155.cloudfront.net/h/947/746/390746947.0.x.jpg
https://clutterreport.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/total-recall.jpg

Actually quite recent. Read a bunch of stories straddling horror, fantasy and science fiction in the mid-00s by Hodgson and Lovecraft. Then I Am Legend by Matheson a bit after that, which is far more SF than horror in my view.
First proper science fiction I've read was probably Moorcock's Behold The Man in 2013.

Hmmmm https://www.scribd.com/doc/315390341/Terran-Trade-Authority-Handbook-SPACECRAFT-2000-to-2100AD#

"what was the first sci-fi people can remember being exposed to?"

http://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327271903l/1697749.jpg

https://c1.staticflickr.com/4/3171/2614343341_5f9f4f0db9.jpg

and then probably the lotus caves by JC after i read the two above.

those were my era-appropriate covers...

Ooh, yeah, came to those via the unfinished BBC series: they never got to book 3

I'm pretty sure my first intro to sf was the Tom Swift Jr. series of books by Victor Appleton II.

This is kind of an interesting question

someone find the good bits in this lot and let us know, thanks

https://archive.org/details/galaxymagazine

Wouldn't be surprised if that doesn't stay there long, other similar things have been removed before.

omg

lol so many Willy Ley lead stories, don't think I've ever read a word of his stuff

man I wish I wasn't at work I'd love to dig into some of those Damon Knight and William Tenn stories I've never gotten ahold of

reading Breaking Point by C.J. Box and it's even better than the C.J. Box book I just read. And that one was really good. Evil E.P.A. agents! Boooooooo!

also one of the grossest things i've read in a while was a scene - i'm gonna tell you the scene because you will never read this book - where this guy is stumbling through the forest with his hands tied and its night and he's dying of dehydration and he stumbles upon what he thinks is a small stream and starts drinking from it and it turns out its the inside of a huge mule deer carcass and he had been drinking rotten blood. EWWWWW!!! stephen king must have read that and smacked his forehead and said why didn't I think of that!?

oh shit meant that for general reading thread. ignore.

giant mule deer carcasses that can be mistaken for streams, you say? not for this thread, you say?

Am currently reading and enjoying (tho' not as much as I enjoyed The Alteration) Pavane by Keith Roberts. Knew almost nothing about Roberts before finding these gems published on David Langford's Ansible website shortly after Roberts' death:

Mike Moorcock: 'Never knew a bloke so determined to destroy himself. I expected this earlier, frankly. I think it's a mercy someone that miserable is dead. Put that in your newspaper, Mr Langford!' • Brian Aldiss: 'There was a time when Roberts' remarkable talent showed to best effect – in the days when he wrote Pavane and "Weihnachtsabend", a brilliant piece of work. Unfortunately, he became rather proud and quarrelsome. Literary agents and publishers (never mind his friends) did not care to deal with him. This is not the time to offer chapter and verse.... RIP.' • Malcolm Edwards has just reissued Pavane: 'With an irony somehow totally appropriate to Keith's life a finished copy arrived on my desk the morning I heard of his death. Speaking about Pavane to colleagues I said something to the effect that it was one of the finest sf novels ever written, by a man who at his best was a brilliant writer, but sadly also the most difficult human being I've ever had to work with.'