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

I guess Tang Qi's To The Sky Kingdom looks like some of the webnovel stuff.

I've been hopping around my books, just taking bites in rotation.

Finally started on early Lord Dunsany. Seem like they were written for children but I'm not sure they were. Quite odd, all these gods sometimes darting around the planet, everything is weirdly unnatural and it's sometimes uncertain if certain gods and beings have any type of human form. Night, rain and mist all have humanoid forms. Mountains can talk and disguise themselves. The equator has a mouth but there is no other description.

A bit of William Hope Hodgson, a story much like Boats Of Glen Carrig. Kind of repetitive but still enjoyable.

I think there's still a few SF Gateway omnibuses I need.

i keep picking up the new ann leckie book at the local kinda-sad bookstore and putting it back. they only have the hardcover though and i'd rather pay less somewhere for the softcover.

i enjoyed the ancillary books.

did anyone read The Stars Are Legion? looks cool. by Kameron Hurley. who i don't know. came out last year.

She was quite a popular blogger, I've heard very mixed things.

if you like your ancillaries, you should read your baru cormorant

i looked it up. i would read it. or them. i guess there are two. they call baru cormorant HARD FANTASY. i guess i would call parts of the ancillary books HARD FANTASY. i am not a traditional fantasy reader. but i do enjoy sf/fantasy in the le guin mode.

i guess i would call parts of the ancillary books HARD FANTASY

Really? I guess the Presger gun is pretty much magic masquerading as tech but otherwise it's fairly straightforward spaceships, AIs & handwavy FTL.

Finished the final (? ...) one, they are pretty good as long as you in expecting less hi-tech derring-do and space battles and more diplomacy, politicking & social manoeuvring. Sounds pretty dull put like that - how about less Bourne and more Borgen. And you do have to read them close together (which I didn't), 2 and 3 especially.

so HARD FANTASY just means internally consistent? seems like a low bar

i think it was more the protocol and hierarchy that reminded me of fantasy in the ancillary books. rules and regulations that are like olde tyme kingdom rules. the lord of the radch and all that. and when they were on different planets it gave me a fantasy vibe. but they are mos def space opera.

hey are pretty good as long as you in expecting less hi-tech derring-do and space battles and more diplomacy, politicking & social manoeuvring. Sounds pretty dull put like that - how about less Bourne and more Borgen. And you do have to read them close together (which I didn't), 2 and 3 especially.
Same w Bujold's xpost Memory, except it's my first in the Vor series and works fine as a stand-alone: the characters' sense of history keeps the backstory evident and in check, they're determined to work its angles just right, although not all of the Vor Lords (incl. Miles V.'s father and grandfather, with status rewarded/duty required for being valiant and useful rebels in days of yore) and their capable minions would put it like that, except maybe among and/or to themselves.

Especially since Miles Vorkosigan has been busted back to his homeworld---his boss discovered that he'd tried to cover up the aforementioned seizure, of the kind he'd been having since the recent medical resurrection, and this one caused a spasm that resulted in the just-rescued hostages being sliced off by MV's plasma beam.

Forced to resign, leaving his daredevil mercenary undercover identity behind (or does he?), takes up the role of young Lord V., just turned 30 and retired, ho-hum, then discovers that his boss/mentor-since-childhood's eidetic memory chip is going haywire---real talk to the rescue:
"Our orders, my Lord, were to save the chip, or as much of the chip's data as could be retrieved."
"Why?"
"I would presume because the data is vital to ImpSec and the Imperium."
"Is it?" Miles leaned forward, staring into the brightly colored, biocybernetic nightmare chip-map hanging before his eyes above the table's central vid plate. "The chip was never installed to make Illyan into a superman. It was just a toy for Emperor Ezar, who fancied owning a vid recorder with legs. I admit, it's been handy for Illyan. Gives him a nice aura of infallibility that scares the hell out of people, but that's a corck and he knows it even if they don't. True?
"He was promoted because he was standing at my father's right hand the day Vordarian's forces murdered his predecessor, and my father liked and trusted him, and there was no time for a talent search in the midst of a raging civil war. Of all the qualities that make Illyan the best chief in ImpSec's history...the chip is surely the most trivial." His voice had fallen to a whisper. Avaldi and Ruibal were leaning forward to hear him. He cleared his throat and sat up.

Later, discussing Illyan in context with his possibly temporary replacement:
"The military, in an admirable effort to promote merit over blood, pretend that Vor is not real. The hig Vor, whose safety and good behavior are going to be your particular charge as long as you sit behind that desk, spend at least as much time pretending Vor is real."
"So which are right?"
"My mother would call it the clash of two competing fantasies. But whatever your personal opinion of the merits and defects of the Vor system---and I have a few thoughts of my own, which I wouldn't necessarily spout on the floor of the Council of Counts and Countesses---it's the system we are both oath-sworn to uphold. The Vor really are the sinews of the Imperium. If you don't like it you can emigrate, but if you stay, this is the only game in town."
"So how did Illyan get along so well with you all? He was no more Vor than I."
"Actually, I think he rather enjoyed the spectacle. I don't know what he thought when he was younger, but by the time I really came to know him...I think he'd come to feel that the Imperium was a creation that he helped to maintain. He seemed to have a vested interest in it...more of an artist to his medium than a servant to his master. Illyan played(Emperor)Gregor's servant with great panache, but I don't think I've ever met a less servile human being." "Panache" is not a word I would have thought to apply to the beige chipped one, but Miles knows him better/is also vested as hell.

just-rescued *hostage's legs*: being sliced off, I meant to say.

> i think it was more the protocol and hierarchy that reminded me of fantasy in the ancillary books.

and all the tea and gloves, obv.

Recently bought the new edition of Kavan's Ice and I've discovered that Penguin hates british people.

UK version
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41uXoTZhC6L.jpg

USA version
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/513UeD0X8hL.jpg

I was thinking that was going to be about replacing Christopher Priest with Jonathan Lethem, intro-wise.

I don't think mine has an intro. Honestly I don't know why people bother with intros most of the time. Why isn't a blurb or an afterward good enough? Are they scared you wont finish the book unless someone (particularly a more famous author) tells you how great it is?

the uk cover is better!

A bunch of people were saying that elsewhere too! I really didn't expect that. I think it's fine but I just found the American one far more striking.

i will await jm's verdict

the us one is really cool and the uk one is awful

#ItsMy2Cents

paul delvaux cover ftw

(also has a nice intro/appreciation by brian aldiss)

Penguin Classics US paperbacks due for a refresh, those black bottoms are tired

Wait, there is a completely different Ice cover that I am familiar with.

Black and white with snowflakes

bobby -- no

it's bullshit when a cover too clearly illustrates a character. let the text do that/let the reader form an image

apart from darrell k. sweet and boobs, of course

lol on review i realize i got them the wrong way round. i think i was put off by RAG's original post. wtf man.

There's a new Peter Owen hardback edition, with a die-cut cover, for the UK: https://www.peterowen.com/shop/ice-cased-classics

Penguin got the paperback rights to a whole bunch of Peter Owen books, so PO is doing fancy hardbacks with the rights they retain.

ooooh!!!
https://www.peterowen.com/shop/goose-of-hermogenes-special-edition

^^^would recommend to fans of kavan btw

Jeff VanderMeer
‏Verified account @jeffvandermeer
9h9 hours ago

Almost done co-editing The Big Book of Classic Fantasy w/ @AnnVanderMeer for @VintageAnchor. Roughly 85 stories, with 35 of those translations (several never before in English). Wild, phantasmagorical, surprising stuff. 500,000 words of fiction from 1800s to WWII.
Prob quite uneven, judging by The Big Book of Science Fiction, but by ditto, prob those last three adjectives too. Looking fwd.

And a second monster reason for finally getting an ereader (killin me, JV)

The Weird is the VanderMeer doorstop I own, and while obv not every story is a keeper it's amongst the best anthologies I've ever read for sure.

as posted on the the general books thread, have been reading the three body problem. been really enjoying it, so interesting to see the more equivocal or measured judgments here. did feel that the writing style was excellent, so it was interesting to read this interview with Ken Liu, who translated the first and third volumes into English, updated some of the technology in consultation with Liu Cixin and also re-ordered the chapters back to what apparently was their original intent.

It is a pretty segmented book, as ledge implies upthread, but i liked the way cultural revolution history is the starting point for the story, and persists throughout as a motive force. I also liked very much the management of the mystery, and the general structuring. However, I'm now at the end of that section, and just on the edges of what I take to be the info-dump section that ledge referred to, so i'll see how it goes.

Downloaded the second volume The Dark Forest for a long plane journey back to the UK this evening. Not translated by Ken Liu though. As I said on the other thread I very much liked the manner and imagery of this English translation, so it will be interesting to see how well it's maintained by another translator. The third volume is Ken Liu again.

first post here! no idea why it's taken me so long.

oh and yerman S- put me on to this article about the new Chinese extraterrestrial radio station to which Liu Cixin was invited.

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2017/11/WEL_Andersen_ChinaSETI_Web_Dish/edf0a0b96.jpg

RIP Peter Nicholls (1939-2018): https://t.co/utRmfbckBb

This is the entry Peter wrote with Cornel Robu on the importance of a SENSE OF WONDER to sf, which I consider to be excellent [MD]: https://t.co/cISt0XvcAQ pic.twitter.com/XykLuAiI5p

— SF Encyclopedia (@SFEncyclopedia) March 6, 2018

Glad to see a rehabilitation of the term, now to the entry for BIG DUMB OBJECTS for reading list ideas.

Thanks for the link to that article, Fizzles! Intriguing overall, fave bits so far:

This grim cosmic outlook is called “dark-forest theory,” because it conceives of every civilization in the universe as a hunter hiding in a moonless woodland, listening for the first rustlings of a rival.

Liu’s trilogy begins in the late 1960s, during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, when a young Chinese woman sends a message to a nearby star system. The civilization that receives it embarks on a centuries-long mission to invade Earth, but she doesn’t care; the Red Guard’s grisly excesses have convinced her that humans no longer deserve to survive.

A beam from a giant laser array, to be built in the Chilean high desert, will wallop dozens of wafer-thin probes more than four light-years to the Alpha Centauri system, to get a closer look at its planets. Milner told me the probes’ cameras might be able to make out individual continents. The Alpha Centauri team modeled the radiation that such a beam would send out into space, and noticed striking similarities to the mysterious “fast radio bursts” that Earth’s astronomers keep detecting, which suggests the possibility that they are caused by similar giant beams, powering similar probes elsewhere in the cosmos.

In 1442, after the Ming dynasty moved China’s capital to Beijing, the emperor broke ground on a new observatory near the Forbidden City. More than 40 feet high, the elegant, castlelike structure came to house China’s most precious astronomical instruments.

No civilization on Earth has a longer continuous tradition of astronomy than China, whose earliest emperors drew their political legitimacy from the sky, in the form of a “mandate of heaven.” More than 3,500 years ago, China’s court astronomers pressed pictograms of cosmic events into tortoiseshells and ox bones. One of these “oracle bones” bears the earliest known record of a solar eclipse...

Liu and I sat at a black-marble table in the old observatory’s stone courtyard. Centuries-old pines towered overhead, blocking the hazy sunlight that poured down through Beijing’s yellow, polluted sky. Through a round, red portal at the courtyard’s edge, a staircase led up to a turretlike observation platform, where a line of ancient astronomical devices stood, including a giant celestial globe supported by slithering bronze dragons. The starry globe was stolen in 1900, after an eight-country alliance stormed Beijing to put down the Boxer Rebellion. Troops from Germany and France flooded into the courtyard where Liu and I were sitting, and made off with 10 of the observatory’s prized instruments.

Head On

John Scalzi fans will rejoice at his latest near-future novel Head On, a companion to Lock In. In this world, some inhabitants suffer from Haden’s Syndrome, a disease that paralyzes the body but leaves the mind intact. Many people with Haden’s Syndrome use robots called threeps to play Hilketa, a violent sport where winning requires ripping off an opponent’s head and carrying it across the goal line. When one of the Haden’s Syndrome players dies during a match after his threep is injured, things look suspicious. FBI agents Chris Shane and Leslie Vann are called to investigate and they uncover shocking information about the players and the nature of the game itself.

On shelves: April 17
I admit to having enjoyed Lock In, despite its eventual tendency to TV quips--just in case you're taking the suspense too seriously---although in the agent's case they can seem more compulsive, like maybe a symptom of Haden's Syndrome? He's one of those with it, mostly curled up in the dark while making his way through mean streets and other DC spectacles via threep.
A sucker for SF and some other procedurals, certainly The Demolished Man and alt-universe The Yiddish Policemen's Union and of course Do Androids Dream...? (even liked voiceover in orig. release of Blade Runner, because sounded like Sterling Hayden). Library's got an Asimov collection, Robots and Murder, will prob get to that too.

Still confusing Greg Egan with Greg Bear---but think it was the former named by so many writers, not nec. SF etc. ones, several years ago, in a survey I may have posted upthread---think several of y'all endorsed him then---anyway, I'm intrigued by word of this new (three-part) novella:

https://subterraneanpress.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/p/h/phoresis_by_greg_egan_lo_rez.jpg

Dust jacket illustration by Gregory Manchess.

Welcome to Tvibura and Tviburi, the richly imagined twin planets that stand at the center of Greg Egan’s extraordinary new novella, Phoresis.

These two planets—one inhabited, one not—exist in extreme proximity to one another. As the narrative begins, Tvibura, the inhabited planet, faces a grave and imminent threat: the food supply is dwindling, and the conditions necessary for sustaining life are growing more and more erratic. Faced with the prospect of eventual catastrophe, the remarkable women of Tvibura launch a pair of ambitious, long-term initiatives. The first involves an attempt to reanimate the planet’s increasingly dormant ecosphere. The second concerns the building of a literal “bridge between worlds” that will connect Tvibura to its (hopefully) habitable sibling.

These initiatives form the core of the narrative, which is divided into three sections and takes place over many generations. The resulting triptych is at once an epic in miniature, a work of hard SF filled with humanist touches, and a compressed, meticulously detailed example of original world building. Most centrally, it is a portrait of people struggling—and sometimes risking everything—to preserve a future they will not live to see. Erudite and entertaining, Phoresis shows us Egan at his formidable best, offering the sort of intense, visionary pleasures only science fiction can provide.

Limited: 1000 numbered hardcover copies

From Publishers Weekly (Starred Review):

“Egan’s gripping and surprisingly accessible short novel centers on the weird but consistent and intriguing science that has become his hallmark. Though short, this science-driven tale has an epic feel…”

From Booklist (Starred Review):

“Phoresis is an elegant, spare, evocative jewel of a novella told in three parts.”

From Kirkus Reviews:

“Dazzling new novella from an author (Dichronauts, 2017, etc.) who specializes in inventing seriously weird worlds and making them real.”
$40.00---of course I'll wait for the ebook (or get the library to order a more affordable print ed.) Others of his I should check---?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Evigan

^ not helpful

Read earlier Egan, up to Teranesia, especially his short stories. His later novels have been clever weird physics thought experiments with aggressively minute elements of characterisation.

Being a short stories junkie, will def check the earlier, thanks.

The short story collection "Axiomatic" has some of the best sci-fi I've ever read. The only novel I've read is "Permutation City" which I didn't really like that much. He has some amazing ideas but his characters aren't really interesting enough to hold my interest for an entire novel.

Finally started one of my Tanith Lee books. Pretty decent so far, enjoyed a scene of a leopard humming in answer to a woman to show it understood her. Currently reading her story about chariot racers with their wives & prostitutes. Very goth at times but I haven't got to her full-on dark fantasy.

Algernon Blackwood is a very fine writer much of the time but he can bang on a bit. Like Machen, he's so much more than another writer of classic ghost stories, he has all these very personal ideas of spirituality, lived quite an interesting life, travelled a lot.

And also a Jessica Amanda Salmonson story that felt somewhere between Dunsany and Tanith Lee, about Death and Sleep trading places.

A horror anthology had FOUR stories by John Lennon, with wordplay that reminded me of his angry note to Todd Rundgren. Just silly little cruel stories.