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

woudl read sci-fi books written by Robin Gibb. Sad mopey space operas about ships crashing into each other

i finally went back to reading The Mote In God's Eye. i was kinda limping through it. when does it become the greatest sci-fi novel ever written (according to heinlein)? it's okay. i've read about five books in the meantime. but i'll finish it. don't know if i'll get to the sequel though.

(sometimes my brain can't handle the idea of collaborations. it's a thing i have. it makes me nervous not knowing who wrote what. i tend to avoid them. which is irrational, but it's a brain thing...)

what would be the prose analogue of the gibb banshee falsetto?

When an alien consciousness speaks in italics

One of the Tidhar Gorel books is called Black Gods Kiss so that has to be another Catherine L Moore reference. I think he calls Gorel "guns and sorcery".

good to know, thx deems!

(many many xposts, sorry)

I disagree that liveship is skippable. It's great!

well then i guess you'll both have to settle this in the parking lot

i cannot fight an irishes

ah they love it

I won't go to scrapping for it but when the sexual politics of a fantasy novel leave me thinking it was a bit much I have to consider how I would recommend it. Some of it was rough rough stuff iirc.

I'm not sorry I read the or anything tbf

Thought the reason Vance was mentioned was only because Central Station seemed like a fix-up, not for any stylistic reasons. I bought it the other day because the ebook was on sale and the blurbs were from some other interesting writers, but doesn't seem to be something I feel like reading right now

Also, just found this: https://www.io9.gizmodo.com/is-the-fix-up-the-best-kind-of-science-fiction-novel-1690623190/

Maybe better without the www (tried to remove the Google amp stuff) https://io9.gizmodo.com/is-the-fix-up-the-best-kind-of-science-fiction-novel-1690623190/

I've read first two earthseas in a sitting each and have really enjoyed the sparse simplicity of them tbh

keep going

There are undeniably a lot of great fix-up novels but I dunno if I would say they are inherently the "best"

I'm coming around on Central Station, the middle section (Shambleau, Robotnik, the Bookseller) really delivers

started in on "City" as well (another classic fix-up case) which is oddly fascinating both for its anachronisms and it's overall elegiac tone

been putting off City forever because I expect to love it a lot

Heh excellently expressed sentiment

i do that kind of thing almost pathologically

Adam- which Jemisin book did you read? Quite a few people who disliked her earlier stuff said the recent trilogy is a huge improvement.

heyo

http://bonsall-books.co.uk/interviewsconc/

the fifth season. i didn't make it more than 20 or 30 pages. i also tried the hundred thousand kingdoms a few years ago and had a similar experience.

I had the same experience with The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. Was really expecting to love it too. :(

Continuing the pile-on, I went to the library for The Fifth Season, but it was checked out, so I read a few opening pages of the new one-volume duology: BZZZ FAIL, clunky---if I do read fantasy, I demand a certain sense of cadence; also it seemed portentously mystical in a way I didn't particularly give a shit about, at the time. But may try again, with this, and/or The Fifth Season.

I tried too. DIdn't like the sentence writing. Her prose reads like over-wordy comic book panels - the kind you want to skip but still have grind through to figure out the plot.

Well that's a little hope for me because too much genre fiction these days is written flat and transparent.

It's a bit Gaiman, a bit Things Fall Apart, a bit Coen Bros pastiche of a modern science fiction writer

DNW

Is Chinua Achebe bad?

No

Def not. Wtf

Think keyword there is "pastiche."

Assuming he was brought in to hint at the nature of the plot, or of the world that was being built.

(I meant as pastiche. He's clearly not bad! But it's def possible to do a bad Achebe impression. Gaiman certainly has.)

Was the Gaiman comparison supposed to be negative?

Just an observation. I like some of his stuff, find other things tedious. It's more that he and Jemisin share that "adult story with a children's storybook narrator" style.

tbh if you'd pitch me Gaiman + Achebe + Coen Bros I'd be pretty stoked! Gaiman prob the least interesting out of those three tho.

Pre-Planet of the Apes SF Statue of Liberty imagery:

https://sciencefictionruminations.com/2012/10/01/adventures-in-science-fiction-cover-art-the-statue-of-liberty/

is that Evan Hunter on the Fantastic Universe cover Ed McBain?

yes! https://www.fantasticfiction.com/h/evan-hunter/

Thought so

From Stephen King thread

ST Joshi wrote a big King overview once (which missed out the Dark Tower series if I remember correctly) and was mostly negative. He can be needlessly cruel but I have to admit I got a lot of pleasure out of him completely trashing IT (which I think has several good things going on). But oddly he really liked Gerald's Game, Dark Half and a bunch of others that generally aren't favourites.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Tuesday, 3 October 2017 17:58 (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wait, do ppl take ST Joshi seriously? I haven't read very much -- mostly his intros to Lovecraft collections -- and based on them I've always taken him for an idiot.

― mark s, Tuesday, 3 October 2017 18:12 (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sometimes, there's certainly a backlash against him happening. I disagree with a lot of his opinions (some of which are very odd), but he deserves a ton of credit for the writers he's helped (living and dead), I think he helped build a scene and sometimes he's one of the only honest prominent voices in the scene. Sometimes he's very on the money.
What's he said idiotic in those intros?

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Tuesday, 3 October 2017 18:25 (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's ages since i read them, i remember my scornful response better than anything i was responding to

― mark s, Tuesday, 3 October 2017 18:31 (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I should also say he deserves a bit of the backlash, but I just hope people don't try to push him out.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Tuesday, 3 October 2017 18:36 (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Joshi's criticisms of King (at least the ones I've read) are incoherent, and seem mostly a reaction to his bestsellerdom

― Number None, Tuesday, 3 October 2017 23:36 (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

He put King's "Night Surf" in American Supernatural Tales.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Tuesday, 3 October 2017 23:40 (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

They only thing I've read by Joshi is his introduction to the Arthur Machen collection he edited for Penguin, which was fine as far as it went (he clearly knows a lot about gothic/supernatural literature), though the collection itself weirdly omits Machen's best-known story, The Great God Pan. However, Joshi's reaction to the HP Lovecraft awards controversy was definitely the height of idiocy:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/11/hp-lovecraft-biographer-rages-against-ditching-of-author-as-fantasy-prize-emblem

― Gunpowder Julius (Ward Fowler), Wednesday, 4 October 2017 09:41 (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes i just reread joshi's intro to the penguin "call of cthulhu" collection: ward's "fine as far as it goes" and "clearly knows a lot" are precisely fair, though his actual written style persistently irritates me -- with great knowledge comes great comic-book-guy is part of the problem, but he's also sometimes weirdly tin-eared as a critic. for example, he describes "the shunned house" as nostalgic -- i know what he's getting at, that the setting for HPL’s subject matter switched from where he used to live (Providence) to where he now lived, New York (“The Horror at Red Hook” etc), but he’d moved BACK to providence w/in literal months of writing “Red Hook", and, well, "nostalgic" is just so un-reread as a word to use of "The Shunned House" even if you can explain why he chose it.

he then goes on to make a pompous meal of HPL's "philosophy" (the universe is big and the gods are bad: none of them care a fig for humankind) in the context of the prior history of faiths. he is very much NOT qualified to be the comic-book-guy of comparative religion…

more to the point, somewhere else i'm p sure i read him dissing m.r.james -- he omits him from his pantheon in this intro -- and that is quite likely what first riled me tbh

― mark s, Wednesday, 4 October 2017 13:08 (fifty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Holy crap... I had never heard of HPL’s ‘on the creation of n___s’ poem before. Jesus fucking Christ, fuck him.

― harbinger of failure (Jon not Jon), Wednesday, 4 October 2017 13:21 (forty-three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ward- it gets so much worse than that, but let's take this over to the Speculative Fiction thread.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Wednesday, 4 October 2017 14:01 (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's hard to summarise but the speculative fiction community is more uncomfortable with Lovecraft than ever but he's also more popular than he's ever been.
Old school Lovecraftians like Joshi are really overprotective of HPL and they have not been handling the debates well. Joshi has been ranting on his blog more often. He keeps contradicting himself by saying Lovecraft is secure and unimpeachable yet also in danger from these pesky new critics.
Some file Caitlin R Kiernan in here because she was super pissed about the World Fantasy Award bust being changed.

Add to that revisionist Cthulhu mythos stories like Ballad Of Black Tom and Lovecraft Country (which Jordan Peele might be adapting for television) which address Lovecraft's bigotry.

I think some people railing against Lovecraft are being silly though. A moderator at the Necronomicon convention said he couldn't allow Lovecraft to stay in the canon and some writers have made really silly statements. Some idiots assume Joshi is white.

Here's Paul St John Mackintosh who gives a bigger overview...

http://greydogtales.com/blog/paul-stjohn-mackintosh-on-lovecrafts-legacy/

Joshi recently appeared in Alan Moore's Providence.

I think the worst thing is that Joshi has started unconvincingly targeting people (including Ellen Datlow) as Lovecraft haters and he insisted that one writer be excluded from the Necronomicon convention. He refused to work with a poet again because he called him "right wing".

I'd guess a great deal of his unease comes from his career being largely built on Lovecraft.
Funny thing is, the weird fiction community was also largely built on Lovecraft. A lot of the writers are either tired of HPL or never liked him, yet rely on HPL tribute anthologies and HPL fandom for their exposure.

The other personally repulsive artist whose work I have a lot of deep love for and who has given me a lot of inspiration is Wagner... in his case, I feel the operas are like the Monster which escaped and became more human than its creator.

HPL and his work are harder to square for me. At times I feel the enormous defects of his personality and his assholeism are deeply baked right into the work. And that his breakthrough theorem is somehow separable from him and can be more fruitfully explored by other practitioners who are not so fatally blinded

There's so many artists like this though. Apart from his bigotry I actually admire HPL a great deal, not just his work.

It's the currently living writers who did reprehensible shit that troubles me more about possibly liking their work.

Also, that Nick Mamatas story mentioned in the link sounds hilarious.

don't know if anyone else in the thread has read it, but mark (k-punk) fisher's final book, the weird and the eerie is basically a little essay on -- among other things -- the pertinence of HPL's cosmic worldview and of speculative fiction generally

It is frustrating that "Great God Pan" wasn't in Joshi's Machen collection but I'm guessing it was intended for a second Penguin collection that never happened.

Joshi recommended someone else to do the MR James Penguin collections but Penguin insisted that it had to be Joshi.

they should have asked me