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

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

I find these "controversies" about HPL a little baffling, insofar as I don't see what's so difficult about being open about both his faults and virtues. If the question is "can racists be great writers" the answer is undoubtedly yes, but it's useful to note that it isn't their racism that makes them great.

i'm guessing joshi is enraged bcz he feels like he's committed his life to pushing HPL up the respectability hill, aesthetically and culturally speaking, and was finally feeling he might actually have lastingly got him there -- only to have him knocked right back off the hill politically

obviously i think the problem here is believing respectability is a be-all-and-end-all gain for genre work -- but it's quite a widespread anxiety among those who've devoted a lot of time (and the qualifications their education brought them) to exploring pulp and pop forms; bcz of course you want your work respected beyond yr immediate peers, even if it's only ever seen you worrying away at militantly unrespectable forms

(i think you can also trace a version of it in mark fisher's work, for example: though respectability means something very different for him, since he wants HLP and others to have the respect of his fellow political radical and dissident philosophers -- and of course it's all over the upper levels of music-writing)

yeah I'm not much invested in the cult-of-respectability, I have a much more knee-jerk reaction against those that reject pulp and pop forms out of hand. When Calvin Trillin says there is no good science fiction my impulse isn't to figure out how to somehow convince him he's wrong and change his mind, it just makes me think Trillin is an idiot.

still, it's handy social capital for getting such nice things into the world as a collection or three of lovecraft short stories in well made (and well* annotated) penguin modern classic editions

*ish

true, I do like those kinds of things!

I find these "controversies" about HPL a little baffling, insofar as I don't see what's so difficult about being open about both his faults and virtues.

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, 4 October 2017 16:29

People disagree about how these things ought to be healthily acknowledged. There's a lot of defensiveness and ostracism and an anxiety about some younger readers and writers who refuse to read the problematic canon. This ties in with a younger and more diverse audience demanding better behaviour at conventions and online. A lot of the older club members are more willing to overlook shitty behaviour that alienates others. Some of the young liberals also behave in a vile and exclusionary way.

I'm inclined to think all canons are problematic, and reading and wrestling with them is part of being a young reader/writer. Like, that's the job.

Lovecraft is just one among a number of artists whose work I personally appreciate and am able to separate from the artist but that I'd have difficulty recommending to anyone else (particularly without explicitly calling attention to that which is problematic). It's difficult to know how to properly navigate through those waters, particularly since I increasingly assume that the majority of public figures are/were scumbags of one sort or another until it's revealed after their death that they've been secretly paying Rosa Parks's rent for decades.

the guy is so massively influential and his best stories are *so* good I don't have any reservations about recommending his stuff to anyone who's curious about spec fiction and horror writing. The racism in his stories is pretty overt, any competent reader should be able to spot it for what it is.

I'd sooner recommend him than other equally "problematic" canonical dudes like, say, Heinlein or Van Vogt.

Some insist it hurts too much to read stuff like that. I can't really argue with that because I don't know what it's like for them, but I hope they want to be able to read ultra-bigots eventually.
If you refuse to ever read misogyny, that's cutting out an enormous amount of great writers from all around the world.

I once seen this fantasy fan brag they didn't read anything before 2000, from the bad old days. As if all writing around the world holds the same social attitudes.

Also annoying: people who've been ball deep in Lovecraft for years suddenly saying they never really liked him that much. And fans who're walking on eggshells and assuring you they know how awful his views were.

I mean, if we get to the level of the individual reader sure read whatever the fuck you want, why should ppl force themselves to read Great Authors if their bigotry speaks more loudly to them than their skill? It's when it gets to criticism/canonisation that this conversation gets trickier imo.

I once seen this fantasy fan brag they didn't read anything before 2000, from the bad old days. As if all writing around the world holds the same social attitudes.

Yeah, there's a real feeling amongst some younger progressives that everything pre-2000 (in any medium, really) is just a swamp of bigotry, which is obviously unfair to scores of older artists but also carries with it this smugness that now it's all been figured out and there's no way current writing will seem ultra-problematic in decades to come.

obviously i think the problem here is believing respectability is a be-all-and-end-all gain for genre work -- but it's quite a widespread anxiety among those who've devoted a lot of time (and the qualifications their education brought them) to exploring pulp and pop forms; bcz of course you want your work respected beyond yr immediate peers, even if it's only ever seen you worrying away at militantly unrespectable forms

This feels like such a dwindling preoccupation to me - highbrow respectable institutions these days are either a) hugely invested in not being That Guy re: dismissing genre and pop or b) losing readers and "cultural relevancy" by the day. Obviously someone like Joshi is old enough to remember this being different, but at this point I always feel like the snooty genre-dismisser is more a strawman ppl bring up because it's romantic to rail against them than a real person.

A while ago my brother was talking to a nice young man who was taken aback by being told that a British tv channel in the 90s once had a "strong women" film season. As if that didn't seem possible in the 90s.

Unfortunately there's a popular impression of HPL today that his work is nothing but racism. So I can understand why some people would find that unapproachable.
Some HPL fans even believe that it's compelling because they think it's all sublimated racism. I don't buy this take at all.

Just watched a fantasy panel with Andrzej Sapkowski (The Witcher series, better known as a videogame) and he was the grumpiest panelist I've ever seen.

That pre-2000 avoidance is, uh, insane. WTF.

In keeping with the thread topic, I've shifted my reading to Halloween mode. I've been reading a Lord Dunsany collection (which is excellent and fits snugly among the mounds of ancient history/religion stuff I've been reading lately) and I just started House on the Borderland this morning. (William) Hope (Hodgson) it lives up to the hype.

I love that book so much I will make sure nobody ever makes a film of it. I did enjoy Corben's comic version though.

When that first came out, I was like, 'why did they choose to adapt some book I've never heard of that looks like a Lovecraft ripoff?' Naiveté, lol.

Some HPL fans even believe that it's compelling because they think it's all sublimated racism. I don't buy this take at all.

I was going to make a half-arsed argument along these lines - some of the stories that are most clearly about decadence due to miscegenation, "Shadow Over Innsmouth" and all that, do get some of their potency from Lovecraft's idiotic racial fears - but ultimately that's not what's at the heart of Lovecraft for me so much as the well-known cosmic horror, uncaring universe thing. If his mythos had included some Golden Age before the Old Ones the reactionary element would be harder to dismiss, but since there isn't, in the end the "savages" in "Call Of Cthulhu" know more than the civilized narrator - which is not to say their portrayal is ok, of course.

I love Lord Dunsany. Particularly the one about the club with the forgotten kings and the one about the dude buried alive for years and years.

i think there's a continuity: for HPL the borderland between unfeeling chaotic repulsive outer cosmos has always been right here on this planet, albeit for long periods hidden from the fragile civilised spaces and minds -- and the existence (and very being) of the uncivilised peoples on the world is a manifestation of it; they understand acknowledge and worship cthulhu bcz they are in essence coterminous with him in lovecraft's mind

I've never read Lovecraft, but I hated Alan Moore's two HPL comics, so maybe I should read the proper thing. I've got Vol 1 of the two collected editions at home...

Those more well-versed in Lovecraft can confirm or pooh-pooh, but it's long been my assessment that his depictions of an unfeeling chaotic repulsive outer cosmos are really just expressions of extreme xenophobia taken to their (il)logical conclusion. Fear of the other and that which lies outside of ourselves blown up to cosmic extremes.

I really don't know about that, Old Lunch: there is so much else that was around in Lovecraft's time/influenced him that you could attribute that sense of cosmic horror to, first and foremost the collapse of traditional religious values and ideological certainties, WWI, psychoanalysis, etc. You really don't have to be a racist to think the universe is empty and indifferent, and from there to actively hostile is a short leap.

i think there's a continuity: for HPL the borderland between unfeeling chaotic repulsive outer cosmos has always been right here on this planet, albeit for long periods hidden from the fragile civilised spaces and minds -- and the existence (and very being) of the uncivilised peoples on the world is a manifestation of it; they understand acknowledge and worship cthulhu bcz they are in essence coterminous with him in lovecraft's mind

This is well put, but I still think part of the horror for Lovecraft is that the "civilized" peoples aren't any different really, they just don't know/have managed to mentally supress their role. There are no "good" Gods in Lovecraft after all, no counterweight, we are all the Old Ones' playthings.

This sorta ties into Heart Of Darkness in a weird way: critique of Western whites believing they are civilized acheived through having the punchline be "actually you're a savage like the rest of them"; the problematic aspect of that being they take the idea of "savages" at face value in the first place.

he definitely thinks that civilisation -- nice as it perhaps is for some -- is a colossal delusion: ditto sanity

Some people exaggerate his nihilism (this is possibly because Ligotti taken that aspect and ran with it) but I think it's true that there's this HPL gradual realisation that it's not just the outer regions are wrong, but everything is tainted and hopeless.

Another reason for controversies: as fragile and defensive as some Lovecraftians are, some are just kind of exasperated by these arguments and that exasperation can be mistaken for reactionary suppression of discussion.

There have been a ton of thinkpieces, most of which don't do enough research, which Joshi will pounce on (he's one of the very few people to read all the remaining thousands of letters that let you into HPL's thought process). Add to this the current tendency for beginners to pretend they are experts (non-French speakers on every side of the argument who acted like they'd been reading Charlie Hebdo for years) and imagine the storm of thinkpieces Joshi will be riding if a popular screen adaptation happens.

These books are huge, expensive and there's many yet to come
https://www.hippocampuspress.com/h.p-lovecraft/collected-letters?zenid=3qivn2fp2pv7lsp195cd2uonn5

nameless ancient hideousness to the web design there