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

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 And if there are battle lines being drawn it's completley outdated to view them in terms of a rejection of genre fiction - trashy paperbacks are the ultimate mark of a connoisseur now in many ways, the populist audience weird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

hi nerds :) i just finished Name of The Wind, and started Wise Man's Fear today. I forgot that he's still working on Bk 3 though so i might try for a more leisurely pace with this one

I really love the writing but Kvothe as a character is v frustrating though. Like for someone that smart he is a goddamn meathead. Also I did get kind of tired of "hey let me tell you how great I am at this thing" but it's still a really engaging story all the same.

Also I dont even know the full deal w Deanna yet but omg srsly this is like Raymond Chandler 101 and he is a lummox

I got halfway through the first book and got a bit tired of the main character, then put it away. It gets a bit "Mansplaining: The Fantasy Role Playing Game."

If the third book gets good reviews, I'll try again though. The writing is good - it reminds me of the trashy mainstream fantasy I read as a teenager, except with sentences that adult me wouldn't cluck at.

On recommendation, I just read the kids' book Holes, which has some magical realism whatnot. It's so good.

Those books are so weirdly overrated and the main character is one of the most irritating creations in the genre's history. The endless "Kovthe is really really good at sex" section in the second book is completely laughable

and yet I probably will still read the third one lol

I liked NotW well enough but it did not put enough... er, wind at my back to drive me into the second book. Robin Hobb is still champ of currently active doorstop fantasy writers IMO. VG I think you would like her.

*googles* whoa she has like 9000 books! where should i start?

Farseer trilogy seems to be her classic. Starts with Assassin's Apprentice.

thx!

Yes and it feeds into subsequent trilogies. The first three are
Farseer trilogy (the ones with assassin in the title)
Liveship trilogy (the ones with ship in the title)
Fool trilogy (the ones with fool in the title)

And it goes on from there. Iirc the only books she's written that don't fit into that world are the soldier son trilogy (which djp is always quick to tell us are super gross).

She just published the final book in this setting this year. I'm quite a ways back from that, in the fool trilogy.

Farseer/Liveship/Tawny Man series are all great. Stay far far far FAR away from the Soldier Son trilogy, which actively angered me to the point where I have refused to pick up any of her other books.

xp: lol hi dere, I am predictable

You're Dan Perry?

seriously though, I don't know what she was thinking re: Soldier Son aside from "how can I come up with a unique magic system" without completing the thought with "that people will want to read about without hurling"

xp: last time I checked

Why was it that bad, I thought it was just gross in a gross-out way?

I haven't read it.

Maybe it wasn't as terrible for anyone else, but for me the whole concept of stuffing yourself with food past the point of fullness causes me psychosomatic pain.

Sounds kind of funny, is it used for comedy?

Not in the slightest.

my bad, it's called the tawny man trilogy not the fool trilogy, thx djp

I've never read a John Wyndham book and kinda want to. Should I? What's a good one?

The Day of the Triffids is his most famous work for a reason

Chocky isn't bad

They're all good imo but yeah I would with Triffids. Kraken Wakes is more of the same, Chocky is classic YA.

Seen some really passionate for The Chrysalids.

What about Robin Hobb's books under the name Megan Lindholm? Her real name is Margaret Astrid Lindholm Ogden.

omg she's megan lindholm?

i've had wizard of pigeons on my list to read forever but it's out of print

ok def reading robin hobb then

Yeah IIRC she hit some sort of wall wrt writing and decided fuck it, pen name time, and had a renaissance.

I haven't read any OG lindholm stuff.

On recommendation, I just read the kids' book Holes, which has some magical realism whatnot. It's so good. Haven't read the book, but really liked the movie.

IT'S SO FUN READ IT NOW

WYNDHAM: The Day of the Triffids and The Chrysalids are the pure good stuff.

Just read Dave hUTCHINSON'S SPACE OPERA NOVELLA aCADIE, WHICH WAS FUN AND CLEVER AND fuck I can't use caps lock properly

Been looking at hundreds of listings of small press magazines and buying a few here and there. It's just astonishing how many there were.
DF Lewis made a thread with cover scans of a lot of the magazines he appeared in. Cover art quality is all over the place.
http://vaultofevil.proboards.com/thread/672/small-press-cover-ark?page=1

Lavie Tidhar's "Central Station" is okay so far - a lot of description (some of which gets p repetitive) and not much in the way of a plot or central conflict 100 pages in, he seems more preoccupied with detailing this exotic tableau he's come up with. idk, I'll probably finish it but I'm getting the impression this isn't going to amount to much more than a bunch of wacky concepts and ethnographic mash-ups.