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

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

Thanks! I've read about half of those, hope to read the rest. The Iron Heel might be the framework for 1984, although Orwell said he got the basic idea from writing wartime propaganda for the BBC. (And JL'sPeople of the Abyss seems like a forerunner of Down and Out In Paris and London.)

We don't do many movies here, but since this was written by Jerome "It's A Good Life" Bixby, might be worth checking out---anybody seen it?

Jerome Bixby's THE MAN FROM EARTH celebrates its
10th anniversary with a brand new Blu-ray + DVD set
exclusively from MVD Entertainment Group
Special Edition Blu-ray + DVD Collector's Set of the cult classic science fiction drama
available On November 21st
Originally debuting in November 2007, this new anniversary release
hits retailers exactly ten years later.

https://mvdb2b.com/i/300dpi/MVD0512BR.jpg

Directed by Richard Schenkman (A Diva's Christmas Carol), The Man From Earth stars David Lee Smith (Fight Club, Zodiac), John Billingsley (2012, "True Blood"), William Katt (Carrie, "The Greatest American Hero"), Ellen Crawford ("ER", Soldier), Tony Todd (Candyman, The Rock), Annika Peterson (The Devil You Know), Alexis Thorpe (American Wedding) and Richard Riehle (Bridesmaids, Office Space) in this special edition release (with disc only exclusive features) of the worldwide cult smash movie that dazzled critics and audiences alike and currently resides among IMDb's top science fiction films of all time.

The Man From Earth is the provocative final screenplay by renowned science fiction author and screenwriter Jerome Bixby ("Star Trek", "The Twilight Zone", Fantastic Voyage, It! The Terror From Beyond Space) and tells the story of a mysterious professor named John Oldman (David Lee Smith). During a cold night in a remote cabin, an uneventful, impromptu goodbye party for Oldman becomes something extraordinary when he makes a prodigious announcement: He is an immortal who has migrated through 140 centuries of evolution and now must move on. Is Oldman truly Cro-Magnon or simply insane? Now one man will force five scholars to confront their own notions of history, religion, science and humanity, all reading to a final revelation that may shatter their world forever. Bixby's script explores themes first presented in the classic season three "Star Trek" episode "Requiem For Methuselah". He began work on the script in the early 1960's and completed it on his death bed in 1998.

A decade after its initial release The Man From Earth has become a world-wide cult classic and has become a favorite film among fans of the genre. The film currently ranks among the top 50 science fiction films of all time on the IMDb, was selected by AOL's "Sci-Fi Squad"as one of the Top 10 "Best Science Fiction Films of the Decade" (2000 - 2009) and was nominated for a Saturn Award by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films in 2008. The movie's success has spawned a sequel, The Man From Earth: Holocene, which is scheduled for release in theaters Fall 2017.

Regarding the film's popularity, Director Richard Schenkman muses "The idea that The Man From Earth would become someone's favorite movie of all time, and so many people's favorite movie of all time, is just amazing. It really is one of your fondest goals when you become a filmmaker, to have your movie seen. And God knows it's been seen, it's been seen millions and millions and millions of times. Given the phenomenon it has become over the last decade, I was compelled to go back and revisit why this film has touched so many people over the years and was the inspiration for the brand new, feature length documentary I directed called "The Man From Earth: Legacy", which will be included on the new Blu-ray and DVD as an exclusive feature".

Regarding the movie's special edition release, the producers have prepared an all new HD master which improves upon the previously released versions on Blu-ray and DVD. Jerome Bixby's The Man From Earth was originally shot on MiniDV (digital video) in January 2006 before the proliferation of high definition filmmaking. This new edition contains a high definition, newly remastered version of the film approved by the filmmakers which was completed using an up-conversion process from the original 172,800 pixels per frame MiniDV camera tapes to 2,073,600 pixels per frame of Full HD. The original DV 30 Mbps 29.97fps media was converted to a new ProRes 422 HQ 220 Mbps source at 24 fps for more cinematic motion and for more control and manipulation of the picture during an all new color correction process, with each shot meticulously noise reduced, sharpened, and detail enhanced.

In regards to special features, both the Blu-ray and DVD will include the following additional material:
Combo pack with will include both the High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) and Standard Definition DVD presentation (1.78:1) of the main feature
Original 2.0 Stereo Audio (Uncompressed PCM on the Blu-ray) and Dolby Digital 5.1 mix
BRAND NEW feature-length retrospective documentary "The Man From Earth: Legacy" (HD, 88 mins) chronicling the history and the phenomenon of the film with all-new interviews with the director, producers and the cast
Audio Commentary with Producer / Director Richard Schenkman and Actor John Billingsley
Audio Commentary with Executive Producer Emerson Bixby and Author / Sci-Fi Scholar Gary Westfahl
"From Script To Screen" (2007 featurette) [2:15, SD]
"Star Trek: Jerome Bixby's Sci-Fi Legacy" (2007 featurette) [3:28, SD]
"On The Set" (2007 featurette) [4:00, SD]
"The Story of the Story" (2007 featurette) [2:13, SD]
Original Theatrical Trailer [SD]
The Man From Earth: Holocene Teaser Trailer [HD]
The "mini-short" film "Contagion" (2016) [:30, HD] from the producers and director of The Man From Earth (Richard Schenkman and Eric D. Wilkinson) starring William Katt.
Before / After comparison of the brand new HD digital restoration of the feature film.
Photo Gallery
Jerome Bixby's The Man From Earth: Special Edition makes is home video debut on November 21 2017 on Blu-ray (UPC# 760137051282) MVD Entertainment Group in North America.

REVIEWS

"A considerable achievement... a picture which deserves wide exposure... The Man From Earth gradually and stimulatingly builds to a pitch of near hypnotic intensity." - Neil Young, The Hollywood Reporter

"Based on a really wonderful final work by Jerome Bixby... If you're a fan of Bixby's - it's a must own." - Harry Knowles, Ain't It Cool News

"One film has taken us back to the good old days of classic sci-fi; The Man From Earth... If you love science fiction, this is a must for you." - Doug MacLean, Home Theater Info

"The Man From Earth is very much a labor of love from all involved... it's well worth the effort. The final work from the writer responsible for some of the finest episodes of "The Twilight Zone" and the original "Star Trek" gets a thoughtful, low-budget treatment." - Ian Spelling, Sci Fi.com

FESTIVAL WINS

2007 - WINNER (GRAND PRIZE - BEST SCREENPLAY) Rhode Island International Film Festival

2007 - WINNER (1st PLACE - BEST FEATURE) Rhode Island International Film Festival

2008 - WINNER (BEST SCREENPLAY) Buenos Aires Rojo Sangre - Int'l Independent Horror, Fantasy & Bizarre, Argentina

2008 - WINNER (BEST SCI-FI SCREENPLAY) International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival, Phoenix, AZ

2008 - WINNER (Jury Award: BEST SCREENPLAY) Fixion-Sars Horror & Fantastic Film Festival of Santiago, Chile

2008 - WINNER (Audience Award: BEST FEATURE FILM) Fixion-Sars Horror & Fantastic Film Festival of Santiago, Chile

2008 - WINNER (2ND PLACE - BEST FEATURE) Rio de Janeiro International Fantastic Film Festival

2008 - WINNER (BEST DIRECTOR) Fantaspoa - International Fantastic Film Festival of Porto Alegre, Brazil

2008 - WINNER (AUDIENCE CHOICE AWARD) Montevideo Fantastic Film Festival of Uruguay

2008 - WINNER (BEST FILM) Montevideo Fantastic Film Festival of Uruguay

FESTIVALS - OFFICIAL SELECTION

2007 - Official Selection (U.S. PREMIERE) - San Diego ComicCon International Film Festival

2007 - Official Selection - Another Hole in the Head SF IndieFest

2008 - Official Selection - Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival

2008 - Official Selection - Atlantic City Cinefest

2008 - Official Selection - Otrocine Fantastic Film Festival of Bogota

2008 - Official Selection - FilmColumbia - Festival of Film in Chatham, NY

2008 - Official Selection - Festival de Cine Fantástico (FANCINE)

2008 - Official Selection - Festival Cinema de Salvador

2008 - Official Selection - Mostra Curta Fantástico of São Paulo, Brazil

2009 - Official Selection - Tel Aviv SPIRIT Film Festival

2009 - Official Selection - Festival of Science Fiction & Fantasy Film & Video in Mexico City

2010 - Official Selection - Festival de Cinema de Porto Alegre, Brazil
JEROME BIXBY'S THE MAN FROM EARTH
© 2007 Man From Earth, LLC
© 2007 Falling Sky Entertainment
© 2017 MVD Entertainment Group
Directed by: Richard Schenkman
Written By: Jerome Bixby
Produced by: Richard Schenkman and Eric D. Wilkinson
Executive Producer: Emerson Bixby and Mark Pellington
Stars: David Lee Smith, Tony Todd, John Billingsley, Ellen Crawford, Annika Peterson, William Katt, Alexis Thorpe, Richard Riehle
Running Time: 87 minutes
(I like the 87 minutes part)

never heard of it but "Now one man will force five scholars to confront their own notions of history, religion, science and humanity" as a premise for a film gives me pause

http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/1/15/DANGVEG1998.jpg

Anyone heard of Attanasio? Saw a bunch of people talking about him and his Radix series. Hadn't heard of him before but sounds awesome. Saw him on goodreads saying he can't find a publisher these days and writes straight to ebook. Apparently he used to be quite celebrated.

First Radix book just got reprinted in French this year.

We don't do many movies here, but since this was written by Jerome "It's A Good Life" Bixby, might be worth checking out---anybody seen it?

cannot for the life of me remember if i have seen it or just read the wikipedia page; returning to the latter though it sounds like it might be an interesting if not exciting 84 minutes (it is just people in a room talking) and a terrible & mawkish last 5.

Been a long time, but the Attanasio I read---blanking on the title---was enormously inventive, with jazzy, brainy, loreloving, chiaroscuro arcs---like Bester x Zelasny, dig, only moreso---too much so sometimes, like you ask him the time of day and he gives you a meta-space opera in five acts and three keys. One book seemed enough, but maybe it wasn't up to his usual, and I've meant to get back to him---this depicts his appeal pretty well---yes Captain!
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/attanasio_a_a

I know it wasn't yon giant trade pb of Radix; that's still over in the Collier Brothers corner of the room.

I seen some comparisons to Jodorowsky. Reading him talk about his work has a similarly ecstatic quality.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0950236X.2017.1358692

Excellent article about elitism and fetishization of obscurity in Weird fiction community and the fiction itself. Focuses on the cult of Arthur Machen and Count Stenbock in particular.

I think he should have noted that Tartarus eventually did paperbacks and ebooks.
Perhaps it wasn't known that the new Stenbock book Is a cheap paperback when the article was written.

Personally I haven't seen that many people express the desire for weird writers to remain obscure or anyone lose enthusiasm when they get more famous.

I like Stewart Lee but if he really wanted Machen to remain marginal, that is incredibly shitty.

this just reminds me that i need more poe in my life. so much poe i've never read. he was cool! and he's totally famous. and a weird fiction author. and one of the founding fathers of modern fiction. though they never mention him once in that article. they do mention david tibet more than once. i guess i should read some machen too though. i have some somewhere.

i say let the fetishists have their fetishes. and be as obscure as they want to be. i can't really remember a time when i didn't know about arthur machen. count stenbock i don't know.

If Stewart Lee had wanted Machen to remain obscure presumably he wouldn't have namedropped him in a BBC interview. Afaict this charge comes entirely from Lee's quibbling with the Penguin Classics cover of Machen - personally I had no problems w/ it (I own that edition), but it's a bit bad faith to ascribe this all to snobbery - it's worrying that ppl picking it up on the strenght of the cover won't get what they wanted from it, like if Investigations Of A Citizen Above Suspicion was sold on NoShame as a giallo flick.

The distinction between Weird Fiction and horror in the end goes back to a distinction horror fans have made for themselves for ages, and it's nowt to do with "genre fiction" - it's Val Lewton vs Universal Monsters. "Psychological horror" vs gorefests. You can see some snobbery there but frankly in 2017 it's all splitting hairs at this point imo, most enthusiasts appreciate both flavours. The VanDerMeers are notoriously omnivorous. And if there are battle lines being drawn it's completley outdated to view them in terms of a rejection of genre fiction - trashy paperbacks are the ultimate mark of a connoisseur now in many ways, the populist audience weird fiction advocates are supposedly sneering at mostly reading Robert Ludlum.

Collectors lamenting the death of rarity in the internet are a case of #checkyourpriviledge sure, but also it's natural for people to get a bit sentimental about the times when they had their private pleasures, 's only human.

The idea of Machen's supposed rarity being a fabrication is a much more interesting take, I feel - and the author advances some pretty good info on that front (well, in part - Borges and the bloke from Current 93 not being particularly good names to put forward if you want to make the case that an author is well known). "Unfairly neglected" is a stock narrative for lazy critics in all mediums, and especially powerful in genre fiction, where there is a lot of pathos invested in authors slaving away anonymously churning out pulp that neither the general public nor Those Fools At The Academy fully appreciate - that's the Lovecraft mythos, after all! And it's relative enough that people can go on applying it; my own (somewhat arbitrary) rule is that an author can no longer be called obscure if they're out in Penguin Classics, much as a film can no longer be a neglected gem if it's in the Criterion Collection. The question then becomes how famous is famous? For Weird Fiction stans Machen is 101 but he's not Stpehen King.

Of course definitions are going to be all over the place but there are different versions of Weird fiction. The descendants of Weird Tales and people like ST Joshi include Robert E Howard, Lord Dunsany and all sorts technicolor dark fantasy full of monsters.
For a lot of these people weird = supernatural horror/dark fantasy.

Some modern weird fiction authors made sure to keep Clive Barker in the family even though most splatterpunk is not. Note the fondness of aesthete decadence. Brian McNaughton was championed by Jeff Vandermeer and he's supposed to be like a gorier and more disgusting Clark Ashton Smith.

Personally I appreciate the emergence of Joshi and Vandermeer's idea of weird because I have very limited interest in slasher/serial killer stories and King wannabes and that stuff stopped appearing in the anthologies I buy. Horror genres are more neatly arranged these days.

i say let the fetishists have their fetishes. and be as obscure as they want to be.

― scott seward, Wednesday, 30 August 2017 05:06

As long as they're not preventing exposure. Or being like that awful species of music fan that complains about people who don't get/know their music but also want to ensure it stays that way. Bring dungeon synth to the masses!

But I should also say I hate cthulhu memes and humorous merchandise, junkified Tolkien and I fear the possibility of William Hope Hodgson movies.

Collectors lamenting the death of rarity in the internet are a case of #checkyourpriviledge sure, but also it's natural for people to get a bit sentimental about the times when they had their private pleasures, 's only human.

― Daniel_Rf, Wednesday, 30 August 2017 12:32

That was Ray Russell of Tartarus and I'm sure he understands this. As I say above, he puts out ebooks of most of the catalogue and makes paperbacks of the most popular titles.

Yeah I was gonna bring Barker up as another refutation of the "weird fiction fans hate horror" charge.

The Vandermeer compendium has both Barker and Stephen King! You can't really mount a "they hate genre fiction" charge around that I don't think.

On another forum someone responded to this article that those Machen paperbacks were really difficult to find before the internet, that he searched for this stuff for a long time without much luck. I doubt many people were able to find more than a quarter of his fiction and poetry before the late 90s.

I've still never seen an actual old pb or hc of Machen in person ever, only the recentish editions

they were more readily available in the u.k. lots of u.k. 60s and 70s paperback editions.

there were 70s machen paperbacks in the u.s. but lovecraft always easier to find.

RIP, bigtime R.A. Lafferty fan.

A superfan died?

Listening now to npr's Labor Day replay of excerpts from Studs Terkel's reel-to-reel interviews for the book Working (which became a musical, an unusual and good one, I'm told), I just remembered his and Calvin Trillin's "Nightcap" series, for the early 80s A&E Network: here they're talking with Asimov, Ellison, and Wolfe (some of whom appear elsewhere on this page)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZvcKB9vQO0

Working musical is good but really the book is where it's at.

no sci-fi for calvin trillin:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/20/books/review/calvin-trillin-by-the-book.html?_r=0

So James Atlas has a new book about being a biographer. Does this mean his excellent Delmore Schwartz bio will come back into print?

Ha, sorry, wrong ILB thread, was momentarily fooled by Calvin Trillin.

For some reason I need to tell someone this, and there is nowhere else appropriate: I have just (finally) remembered that my years-long-lost copy of Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, the pursuit of which has seen many a basement box ransacked and bookcase peeked behind, was in fact a library book, which I returned promptly and without fine after reading.

starting in on Lavar Tidhe's "Central Station" and Clifford Simak's "City":

second-tier Lem imo

xp