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

Had no idea Marion Zimmer Bradley was pro-war! Of course now this hardly rates amongst her worst crimes...

Only two of my favorites in the pro list and quite a few more in the anti list. But my favorite of all is in the pro list. Idk man.

And that favorite has gotta be ... Jack Vance.

Aye

That'd make a great quiz. You can maybe see some of Vance's leanings in portrayals like the risibly rapacious progressives in the Cadwal books.

I think I only like 3 people from the pro list, and lots from the anti list, fwiw

Has anyone read Adam Roberts' THE REAL TOWN MURDERS ?

Vance was nowhere near the proto-neocon some of his legacy-keepers want him to be, of course. But conservative, yeah

it's linked upthread but worth a reminder, as adam roberts has now completed his reading and blogging of hgwells's entire oeuvre: http://wellsattheworldsend.blogspot.co.uk

i haven't read it all by a long way, but some of the crit here is superb

The Real Town Murders is fun, especially if you like Hitchcock movies, but far from peak Roberts. He himself said somewhere he basically wrote it in despair after his much more ambitious books getting nowhere recognition/sales-wise.

Which other books of his do you recommend?

The Thing Itself is probably the best. Then the story collection Adam Robots. Yellow Blue Tibia is also excellent. The only one I'd avoid is The Snow.

Yes I know the Wells blog and admire it - I read the WAR OF THE WORLDS entry some time ago.

I like THE REAL TOWN MURDERS and find it inventive and interesting but I have not finished it. I like the use of Reading as setting but so far the book has not made so much of this.

Due to recent favorable mentions on here x a bag o] books I'd totally forgotten about (from the library shop of yore), I've just started my first xpost Bujold, Memory. Getting blown up does a body good, if it's Miles V.'s body, because he was born with very fragile bones, because his mother was almost assassinated in space opera--but every time he gets maimed or killed (kind of a Teddy Roosevelt, once-more-unto-the-breech overcompensation for childhood frailty, is my diagnosis, having known him for 10 pages), the doc rewards his pluck with bonus work, like replacing weak bones with synthetics.
However, at the beginning of this book, he wakes up in the ship's med bay unexpectedly; the last thing he recalls is liberating the hostage and leading him back through emptied corridors of the kidnapper's ship, with plenty of back-up---yadda yadda, his girlfriend shows up and tells him he had a seizure and blasted the freed hostage's legs off.(He then sees the hostage carried out of the bay, with the legs in their own box, or he can hope it's the legs.)
Girlfriend gets him to confess that he's had several (doesn't tell her quite the right number) seizures since his last medical resurrection---but he couldn't tell and still can't because it will endanger the identity he's assumed, of the mercenary "Admiral Naismith." Is it still assuming when you've been living it for a decade? Anyway it's important to him to live it and to think of it that way.
Girlfriend, who is also his second-in-command, is so pissed.
It's kind of Worlds of Wodehouse so far, but don't think she's going to turn into Jeeves or Uncle Fred, also there's more boom-boom and maybe even more cold sweat so far.

so if i were to read a jack vance, where should i begin?

I'm no expert, but I started with The Moon Mothhttp://www.unexploredworlds.com/RealPulp/htm/rpulp145.htm

Yeah. Any short story collection that includes moon moth and green magic.

Then, a stand-alone, perhaps languages of pao or big planet

And the dragon masters and last castle novellas.

Then, either the Dying Earth series or the Demon Princes series.

thanks!

Ps big planet has a sequel so it’s not really a stand-alone but w/e

Mostly what I've read by Vance, the ones that stuck in memory anyway, are some of the Cugel The Clever yarns: he's kind of anti-Conan, or a hipster in a 50s-early 60s sense, clever like a fox. Whatta guy.

A cruel cad.

I've heard that Adam Roberts' Bete is particularly good.

I'm trying to rotate my reading a bit more (mostly short stories) because when fatigue with one writer sets in I can change and get a bit more experience with writers I know less. I really wish my favorite old writers used more paragraph breaks because I'm finding so many massive paragraphs quite challenging.

Yes, Bete is good and somehow I forgot it!

I was blown away by the new maclaverty (endorsed by mantel!) one of the most humane and skilfully written books I've read in a long while

Is that MacLaverty the one with the incredible Boris Vallejo cover painting of the retired couple?

more details pleasr. the only maclaverty i can find on google doesn't belong in this thread.

I really like THE REAL TOWN MURDERS ! It seems distinctive and innovative in various ways.

Wow at that Wells blog of his.

Again, the video of him and Aliette De Bodard talking about Welles and Verne is quite fun. One of those times a panel benefits from most of the panelists not making it there.

Yeah, I was making a joke about MacLaverty (whom I do like but he is very un-fantastic) being in the wrong thread.

i get it! lol! not entirely implausible that mantel might endorse some sf/f though.

reading SPIN by robert charles wilson. if i dig it i'll read the sequels i guess. pretty entertaining so far. HUGO award winner. don't think i've ever read anything by RCW.

I believe James M has recommended him on multiple occasions

I was really impressed with/got involved in RCW's "This Peaceable Land; or, The Unbearable Vision of Harriet Beecher Stowe," when I read it in Hartwell & Cramer's Year's Best SF 15 (v. worthwhile anth; I didn't like every single story, but I never do). Involved in part because of the characters and their plight, in part because their plight is an alt-u where the Civil War as we "know" it never took place, but plenty ongoing bursts of boondock miseries dot the peace--extensions of our history's Bleeding Kansas and all that. I've always thought that's the way it might have gone, might still be going, even if there had been a new improved version of The Missouri Compromise or some such shit. maybe that would have been better in some ways, but not for everybody/

Also read a novel of his, blanking on the title, involving self-righteous, galloping boondocks assholes---thought at first it was more alt-history, but it's actually post-Apocalypse--at least the man-made kind, although there is of course some dispute/doctrine etc re that---most of the cultural continuity didn't survive, especially print got burnt and/or rained on, they def aint got the technology for digital archives, so they're making do with fragments of text, memory, etc.

Oh yeah, Bujold's xpostMemory has quickly moved beyond the comic dread, at least for now: starting to see a several women making niches in the Imperial Galactic patriarchy, could imagine some of it fitting Sargent's xpost Women of Wonder collections.

believe James M has recommended him on multiple occasions

and I will do so again. Mysterium, Bios, Spin, The Affinities, The Chronoliths are all good starting places.

Roberts also did a blog working through all of Anthony Burgess, which was very entertaining, and which now I cannot find.

this seems to be it, but it's invite only now

http://anthonyburgessblog.blogspot.com

no trolldroogs allowed

Been researching Chinese fantasy genres like Wuxia (real historical settings with unreal skills and sometimes supernatural elements), Xianxia (unbelievably huge scale fantasy with immortals in heavenly realms with powers that makes Dragonball look like Ken Loach), Xuanhuan (western influenced fantasy).

There's a few causes for concern.
There's incredibly few translation in print (especially considering these are some of the bestselling books in the world), most of this is read on regular webpages across hundreds of chapters. These books used to be serialized in newspapers but now it seems mostly online. Finding good books and translations will probably be tough. Doesn't help that a lot of the art and fan community has an unpleasantly slick videogame/anime look.

There was a few Oxford books of Jin Yong/Louis Cha but they're mostly too expensive now. Luckily this year just seen the release of Jin Yong's Legend Of Condor Heroes (which has caused controversy with the character name translations but I can deal) and Gu Long's Eleventh Son.

The Big Book of Science Fiction has two very different Chinese stories: Han Song's“Two Small Birds” 1988 in its first English translation by John Chu, is a brave, pained, 1988 allegory; Cixin Liu's “The Poetry Cloud” (translation by Chi-yin Ip and Cheuk Wong) is a majestic confection, from 1997. The only Chinese SF I've read (should check The Three Body Problem, come to think of it).

http://www.sfintranslation.com usefully and regularly posts links to translated SF from all over the web, and a lot of it is Chinese: some good stuff.

I was drunk and got the wrong thread : /

Those Gollancz-published Gateway Omnibus books of collected works are being remaindered everywhere now. got five of them, for $6 each

Curious which ones you got

Poul Anderson, Sheri Tepper , Bob Shaw, Damon Knight, John Sladek

just downloaded ancillary mercy, a year or more after reading the previous book. the first paragraph mentions the sound of someone making tea and i thought "oh no not the fucking tea again". probably be some gloves coming up very soon.

"seivarden turned from the counter, bowl of tea in one gloved hand." page 3.

I started Ancillary 2 a while after reading book 1, and it required me to remember more of the characters/plot from the first book than I was able to do, so I didn't last long.

I’m still stuck on the first one, which I just couldn’t get into.

Haven't read it. but the movie of the first one opens tomorrow, already rates 81, Universal Acclaim on metacritic. Directed by Alex Garland, who did Ex Machina, which I enjoyed and posted about upthread---seems like he's going for something deeper now, judging by a recent interview I can't find, and of course you have to be a good talker to make it in media, but his style seems attentive, resourceful, flexible, so maybe--a also like that he's working with Ex M lead Oscar Isaac again, and of course will see anything involving Jennifer Jason Leigh. The same place I saw the interview had another thing about I think it was Amazon backing an adaptation of Consider Phlebas, oh yeah here it is:
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/21/17035618/amazon-culture-series-iain-m-banks-television-show

And so here's the Garland thing! https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/21/17029500/annihilation-ex-machina-director-alex-garland-sci-fi
It’s super original. So many stories are retellings of other stories in a really self-conscious way, to the extent that I almost feel like it’s ritualistic. Like, you see the beats of that particular story starting, and you think, “Wow. We’re doing this again. It’s happening again.” What is the ritual? Where’s the comfort? What’s the need [this is addressing]? Particularly because so many of them are not comforting; they’re kind of disturbing. It’s just a weird thing. And Jeff’s book seems to just sit totally outside that, which I thought was really interesting. But that in itself is not a reason to adapt it, I think. It was really the atmosphere. It was just the feeling of reading it was so strange. It’s got a very strong dreamlike aspect. Reading it is like being in a dream, in a weird way. I thought, “That’s really interesting, and I’d like to have a try...There’s also a sort of metaphorical element to it, a sort of unknowable expanding existential thing. But the top-line narrative can satisfy the people who are not interested in the metaphorical side.

Haven't read it. but the movie of the first one opens tomorrow, already rates 81, Universal Acclaim on metacritic. Directed by Alex Garland

yer mixing yer ancillaries with yer annihalations.

A few more chapters in and I do like the general sense of finely graded social distinctions and scrupulously exacting proprieties, it's only the tea sets and gloves that seem rather obvious and somewhat less than exquisite.

definitely curious about the amazon banks adaptation. might work, might not. i've got enough of a distance from the books now that i won't be too bothered if it doesn't.