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

Aside from the selfaggrandizing I think Lee and Ellison have very different flaws and virtues. They're opposites in many ways.

Been reading about Redgrove and Shuttle. They were a married couple of poets who written supernatural stories occasionally, solo and collaborating. Shuttle also wrote books about menstruation, feminism and a book about Redgrove after he died.

From Subterranean Press newsletter---sell thy firstborn:

We're thrilled to announce that we'll be stocking Swords and Deviltry by Fritz Leiber, the first in the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series being published by Centipede Press. (In fact, you'll be able to order copies of all the volumes through us.)

About the Book:

In the annals of heroic fantasy one epic tale stands head and shoulders above the rest, spanning sixty years in the telling, the saga of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser has captivated fans ever since Fritz Leiber's first tale of the duo appeared in the August, 1939 issue of Unknown. Just in time for the seventy-eighth anniversary of the characters debut, Centipede Press is releasing the first of what will be the definitive eight-volume set comprising not only all of the stories by Fritz Leiber (and his friend Harry Fischer), but also the brilliant epilogue to the series, Swords Against the Shadowland by Robin Wayne Bailey.

These are archival editions, lavishly illustrated and featuring guest introductions from some of the top writers in the field. We plan on releasing both Swords and Deviltry and Swords Against Death this year and customers are encouraged to contact us about reserving the entire set. There are 500 unsigned copies available.

The story of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser is among the most enduring in modern fantasy and we suggest reserving your set sooner rather than later.

Swords and Deviltry features five color interior illustrations, a full-color frontispiece, full color wraparound dustjacket, and custom illustrated endpapers. The introduction is by Michael Moorcock. The book includes all of the stories that make up Swords and Deviltry along with two archival essays by Harry O. Fischer, Fritz Leiber's 1973 introduction, two "Gray Mouser" poems from The Acolyte, and an interview with Fritz Leiber from 1979. Yes, we will be publishing the entire series of novels, each one with a load of extras. This is the ultimate edition of this legendary fantasy series.

Edition Information
Bound in full black cloth, blind stamping on front board.
Color illustrations hand-tipped into the book.
Introduction by Michael Moorcock.
Gorgeous dustjacket on Mohawk Superfine.
Head and tail bands, ribbon marker.
The limited edition (300 copies) is signed by the living contributors; the trade edition is unsigned

anyone read Borne yet? About halfway through. Much more accessible (and I'd even say...fun) than the Southern Reach trilogy. Reminds me of Mieville's New Crobuzon books a bit, although a lot lighter on its feet. Plus you know, it's got a gigantic flying bear monster

http://www.zagava.de

Zagava are reprinting dual language versions of Der Orchideengarten magazine, possibly the first speculative fiction magazine. Oddly they're doing them issue by issue rather than larger compilations (which I would prefer), so if they manage to do all 51 issues this will murder your wallet if you buy them all.

One of the best illustrated magazines I've seen.
http://50watts.com/filter/orchideengarten

"but his intros are rubbish"

he's written more introductions to his own fiction than most people will ever write fiction!

i was reading an sf short story collection recently - not by harlan - and the author wrote a long introduction that introduced ANOTHER introduction that he had written for the same story in a previous anthology and the second introduction was even longer than the first one. i was wiped out by the time i got to the actual story.

Who was the author, what the book? Obv. beyond embarrassment, so it's okay to say.

OK, would LOOOOVE those Orchideengarten reprints, but can't afford them at all :(

I'm a bit on edge as I've paid a lot of money for 26 old issues of Weirdbook and apparently they've been sitting in a French transit office for a few weeks.

reading The Mote In God's Eye and its funny how much it reminds me of the jack mcdevitt book i just read. it could have come out last year. it has that same vibe that a lot of recent bureaucratic/military/empire kinda SF books i've read have. now i know where all the newer writers got it from.

NK Jemisin won a Hugo for best novel second year in a row. Women won a huge majority and the Puppies didn't win a single thing.

more about dragon awards: here's what Asimov wrote about the Futurians in his memoir. fascinating how stable this phenomenon is pic.twitter.com/lKNZ6ribkJ

— Francis Bass (@FrancisRBass) August 10, 2017

nk jemisin is so bad. her prose is so dorky i feel embarrassed for her while reading it. it's like amanda palmer or something.

recent non dorky doorstop fantasies recommendations welcome

Good to hear criticism of newer stuff. I thought the premise of the Broken Earth trio sounded pretty cool but it's probably a good few years before I read it.

I'm not that familiar with Palmer's lyrics but it can't be worse than the Joss Whedon influence on modern fantasy.

For a second I thought was going to be about Robert Palmer and Jack Vance.

depending on how wide a net you cast i think jemisin could be called whedonesque.

i just want something outside of the tolkien/terry brooks tradition. somewhere in the middle of vance and lieber and wolfe and delany. i mean i could reread any of those but i want something shiny and new.

here is an awesome list of old stuff i will probably never read:

http://hilobrow.com/radium-age-100/

I'm impressed by this guy's lists, haven't heard of him or this site before. I own a bunch of these books but the only one I've read on the radium list is Hodgson's Night Land, great/awful. I suspect a lot of these are also not easy reads.

Was amused that recently on goodreads Jemisin did her first review for years and it's a one star review with no explanation. Possibly pissed at someone.

the tolkien/terry brooks tradition

ned to thread

I don't know what tradition(s?) they might be in, but I enjoyed McKillip'sWinter Rose and Novik's Uprooted, carried on about both upthread.
Thanks Scott! Will try to get to more of those, had found several in The Big Book of Science Fiction, incl. one of Dr. F.'s pataphysical excursions, for inst.

eight (probably massive) Peter F Hamilton books on sale on kindle daily deals today. thought i'd search here, see what people think...

> read peter f. hamilton's night's dawn trilogy over the course of several months
> what a ridiculous piece of crap
> ― mookieproof, Saturday, January 3, 2015 3:18 AM (two years ago)

oh...

one of his doorstops that i can't be bothered to google is probably the most ludicrous piece of work i have ever had the pleasure of not finishing. it's billed as hard sf but has al capone coming back from the dead.

Just looking at his books filling up a shelf or two all by themselves in the bookstore makes me want to hide in another dimension.

I have downloaded a leGuin be it on raggetts head

The Al Capone book is the same one mookieproof rubbished.

It's not like I don't have an enormous backlog anyway.

I have downloaded a leGuin be it on raggetts head

as a paid up le guin stan i must ask which one?

The Report on Probability A has been completed and filed.

heh

O. and a. watched J. file his report

i'm still pissed off about peter hamilton three years later tbh

What possessed you in the first place?

The first earthsea

btw I have meant to note that your displayname is extraordinarily good ledge

My dad loves Hamilton

Used to unironically rep for Battfield Earth too

Was he, as I was, limited to the SF that was stocked in the libraries of Donegal?

Ah no, he'd be down to Hodges Figgis regular. He'd already amassed a considerable library of his own by the time I started plundering it

Most of it was good in fairness, although our tastes differed quite a lot. He found my teenage Robert Jordan fandom baffling, I couldn't understand his inexhaustible appetite for the work of David & Leigh Eddings

Are Jordan and Eddings really so far apart? Jordan just more prone to bloating?

narcissism of small differences for sure

but it seemed like an important distinction at the time

lThe first earthsea

a ne plus ultra of YA fantasy, although it's not till 4 & 5 that the series becomes nonpareil in world literature.

btw I have meant to note that your displayname is extraordinarily good ledge

this isn't the thread for that now is it.

Shameless

NN, what's justifiably teenage muck to us must seem unjustifiably so to another, they having their own unjustifiables.

That first earthsea were right good I think I'll have another

What possessed you in the first place?

lol

i don't really have a good answer -- an acquaintance was reading them and said they were good trashy space opera, i'd heard vague insinuations of him being part of a 'new(er) wave' of SF . . . and while it was by no means *good*, i would have considered it simply time poorly spent had it not had the worst fucking ending of anything i've ever read. which is saying something in SF

on the other hand, people seem to love iain banks; i've only read one of his books (the business) and thought it was awful. so maybe it's me

The Business is not very good Banks. all his 'mainstream' stuff post Complicity is just going through the motions. He would write an SF book one year, a non-SF the next, like clockwork, and it has been clear for some time that he had nothing to say in the non-SF stuff.

B-but the Wasp Factory... The Bridge... The Crow Road... Walking on Glass even.

(I thought I'd kept up with the non-M stuff except for the last couple, turns out there are 7 I've not read, giving up after Song Of Stone)

Think I need to read all the SF stuff again, one more time.

Those were all pre-Complicity! Thus good.

(yeah, i misread this - "it has been clear for some time that he had nothing to say in the non-SF stuff" - to mean that it's recently become obvious that he never had anything to say in the non-M stuff)

I really liked The Bridge. I still haven't read the Culture books, but i'll get around to them all eventually as long as i don't die first. The Wasp Factory was such a cool 80s book. To read in the 80s. Along with all the other cool 80s stuff.

i went through the Radium Age list a couple of pages above and found all the gutenberg links if anyone's interested

G.K. Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904).
    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20058
H.G. Wells’s The Food of the Gods (1904).
    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11696
Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (1905).
    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29135
Edwin Lester Arnold’s Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation (1905).
    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/604
Gregory Casparian’s An Anglo-American Alliance (1906).
    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/52913
L. Frank Baum’s Ozma of Oz (1907).
    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33361
Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908).
    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1164
J.D. Beresford’s The Hampdenshire Wonder (1911).
    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/53028
William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land (1912).
    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10662
Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912).
    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/139
Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars (serialized 1912; in book form, 1917).
    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/62
Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague (1912).
    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21970
J.D. Beresford’s Goslings (1913).
    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/53611
Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt (1913).
    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/126
Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Gods of Mars (1913, as a book 1918).
    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29405 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/64
Edgar Rice Burroughs’s At the Earth’s Core (1914).
    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/123
H.G. Wells’s The World Set Free (1914).
    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1059
Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus (1914).
    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19149 (french)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915, serialized).
    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32
J.A. Mitchell’s Drowsy (1917).
    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/53802
Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Land That Time Forgot (1918).
    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/551
H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook (serialized 1918–1919).
    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1368
Owen Gregory’s Meccania: The Super-State (1918).
    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44074
A. Merritt’s The Moon Pool (1918–1919).
    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/765
David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus (1920).
    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1329
Karel Čapek’s R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots (1920–1921).
    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13083 (czech)
George Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch (1921).
    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13084
Homer Eon Flint’s The Devolutionist (1921).
    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5965

more of the pre-radium books are available but i only did the radium age ones. 1st jan 1923 is the cutoff for US (and UK) copyright so i stopped there (there could be some later books available i guess, depends when the author died) (and for other places, like australia and canada, where it's life + 50* rather than life + 70, then there'll be more available there too)

(* not strictly true, australia is life + 50 for deaths before 1955, +70 after.)

wow, great job.

that Chesterton has a classic first sentence:

"The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up."

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/53802/53802-h/images/i_194.jpg

"—AND GLIDE FOREVER, A HOMELESS VAGRANT THROUGH THE DUSKY VOID"—Page 171