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

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.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) announced the nominees for the 52nd Annual Nebula Awards, the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation, and the Andre Norton Award for Outstanding Young Adult Science Fiction or Fantasy Book. The awards will be presented in Pittsburgh during a ceremony on the evening of May 19, 2018.
All here:
https://www.amazonbookreview.com/post/27e0d9ab-3b1f-40d0-9c63-672038387e17/nebula-award-finalists

Picked up a cheap copy of a late Clifford D Simak novel, The Fellowship of the Talisman - the little capsule summary for it on Wikipedia sounds NUTS:

On a parallel Earth perpetually laid waste by the Harriers of the Horde, a young man must ferry what may be a true account of Jesus's teachings to distant London. He is helped by a lonely ghost, a goblin, a demon, and a warrior woman riding a griffin.

i read that as a kid! Simak's (kinda) genre fantasies are super weird. See also Where the Evil Dwells. I have been wanting to reread FotT tbh

xpost to general reading thread, regarding The Three-Body Problem:

I am also reading that, and enjoying it immensely, despite some reservations about weird dialogue, but there had best be some good explanations, even if they are handwavy, in the 100p I have left.

http://musicfeeds.com.au/news/the-flaming-lips-giant-laser-hands-stolen-from-southbound-reward-offered/

plus

https://www.dtelepathy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wacky_waving_inflatable_arm_flailing_tube_man.gif

should give you some idea.

also xposting to same, esp as it touches on ledge’s post upthread:

“thought its pacing and general appeal slipped quite badly towards the end unfortunately. still think the first half / two thirds was excellent.

reading the second in the trilogy, the dark forest, now. it’s a bit hard going and is more about the grind of preparing for an alien encounter 4.25 light years and multiple generations away, with modelled social implications. i quite like the way liu cixin (劉慈欣) is happy to let societal models play out almost as if they were characters an author allows to make their own decisions rather than forcing them down preconceived plotlines. but it’s not *really* a compelling basis for a novel.

also *lots* of characters who in strugglijg to distinguish.

on the advanced technology / fantasy point thomp, i think i agree. but the retention of scientistic language provides framework linking current day science and plausible future science to “fantasy science”. i’d also ask whether you’d include something that uses a scientific paradigm jump as its basic principle - like teleportation in The Stars My Destination - in that category.

there’s also a consideration, which is also too dull to consider, that much actual physics can feel fantastic, or requiring of a certain amount of faith, if you don’t properly understand the mechanics (as i don’t). tho as i say it’s a pub bore point.”

that last para is a bit lubberly - either make the point or don’t - so i’ll say that i think that point is irrelevant to the main point but perhaps pertinent to using the language of scientist - to which we are all accustomed - as a framework for hyper-advanced technologies. i think 3bp steers clear of magic for this reason tbh. i also have an inherent dislike for hard-science science fiction.

xp lol

try the first one again:

http://cdn3-www.musicfeeds.com.au/assets/uploads/6c8d61508321ac444175370124200350-640x360.jpg

it’s not that bad.

I think the fact that one of the central conceits, the video game, is so conceptually flawed (a massively multiplayer online game which somehow skips forwards hundreds of years only while the main character is logged off) that it does lead me to treat the rest of the science with scepticism, and while what is hard sf vis what is science fantasy can - must - be in the eye of the beholder, iirc there was very little explanatory framework for the more magical deus ex machinas at the end.

Jst finished it, and agree with both of you to a great degree. My main problem with the last 100p ended up being that the aliens turned out to be really DULL. But there was lots and lots of good stuff on the way there. Not sure whether to launch straight into vol 2, or do my usual trick of taking a break, forgetting who all the characters are, and then finding the second book mystifying because I let too much time pass.

i didn’t mind the conceptual flaws with the VR game, ledge.

two reasons: one is that the nonsense about mechanics of MMO that you rightly point out added to the mystery. the whole thing was so strange it didn’t matter to me.

second i thought the imagery and fun of chaotic / stable periods with humans superimposed on aliens was... fun! and resulted in some of the best imagery of the book. the pendulums, the animals flying out of the burning lands, the cauldron, walking through the sparse emptiness at the beginning.

i guess that v much links into thomp’s fantasy point, but i enjoyed it. like many things that fail to resolve satisfactorily it the crucial problem seems to be too many ideas. that’s definitely a side i’d rather an author fail on, than too lenten.

yeah it was definitely fun & had great imagery, e.g. the horserider on fire galloping into the palace shouting "dessicate! dessicate!"

Possibly mentioned this before but I think it's interesting that these current Chinese authors mostly get golden age SF, apparently the newer classics often aren't allowed by censors, apart from Neuromancer.

Sits interestingly in the discussion about new SF fans not reading golden age stuff or thinking it's bad.
http://youngpeoplereadoldsff.com/

Re: Clark Ashton Smith. He often talked about there being satiric elements in his work but it's not always obvious to me. He called a small spaceship "Space Annihilator" to be funny, but I thought it was just to be cool.

“dessicate! dessicate!” — it is interesting that in misremembering ledge has chosen a better word

i am at the bit where the cop says ‘if any of you try anything, I’ll shoot’ and then does not shoot during what sounds like an elaborate bit of business in which someone grabs a bomb

this is in the middle of a scene during which someone says ‘of course you already know the history of our organisation - but for our newcomer, i will repeat it’

these two flashback chapters had in them one relevant detail not extrapolatable from stuff the reader already knows

they did contain this bit of sub-ansible muddle-headedness though:

Ye’s hand hovered two centimetres above it.

(...)

Without hesitation, Ye pressed the button.

“Dr. Ding, would you please show Yang Dong’s note to Professor Wang?”

Hardest part for me was remembering who was who. Still, loved all three of them.

This just popped into my head from Jack Vance's Dying Earth

"Hold, hold, hold!" came a new voice. "Hold, hold, hold. My charms and tokens, an ill day for Thorsingol ... But then, avaunt, you ghost, back to the orifice, back and avaunt, avaunt, I say! Go, else I loose the actinics; trespass is not allowed, by supreme command from the Lycurgat; aye, the Lycurgat of Thorsingol. Avaunt, so then."

xp lol i thought dessicate was probably wrong but couldn't think of another word, what was it?

dehydrate

As she grew closer to Yang, he was able to get her many classics of foreign-language philosophy and history under the guise of gathering technical research materials. The bloody history of humanity shocked her, and the extraordinary insights of the philosophers also led her to understand the most fundamental and secret aspects of human nature.

The ETO concluded that the common people did not seem to have the comprehensive and deep understanding of the highly educated about the dark side of humanity. More importantly, because their thoughts were not as deeply influenced by modern science and philosophy, they still felt an overwhelming, instinctual identification with their own species.

on the advanced technology / fantasy point thomp, i think i agree. but the retention of scientistic language provides framework linking current day science and plausible future science to “fantasy science”. i’d also ask whether you’d include something that uses a scientific paradigm jump as its basic principle - like teleportation in The Stars My Destination - in that category.

bester -- it's a long time since i read him -- i recall as coherently doing one kind of thing. liu's book is, cough cough, like a particle extended into eleven dimensions, trying to occupy several different aesthetic positions at once: among others, those of stanislaw lem, blindsight, cryptonomicon, helliconia spring, the gods themselves, ender's game, the works of kilgore trout, and the fountainhead

the brief glimpse of trisolaria at the end kind of illustrates this -- their society is dunderheadedly tedious pop-eichmann, but then the shift into the fabulous when they're building the proton computer was one of the highlights of the book. HOWEVER as ledge correctly illustrates above 'it was protons all along!' is not a satisfying resolution to all the stuff set up in the first fifty pages of wang's story. -- while i can't imagine any reader not yelling at the chracters 'for god's sake, the game is a simulation of the alien civilisation ye made contact with forty years ago, catch up already'

(sidetrack: one of the standard readings of a detective fiction is that the real narrative is that he uncovers, which seems largely incorrect: the real narrative is the textural interest of how the detective interacts with his world. by the end of this novel, liu seems to have forgotten that he had provided his detective figure with a family and a past.)

more laziness:
-- the thunking chekhov's-gun landing when shi suggests using wang's nanofilament technology.
-- or that shen, who has been an Adventist for years, happens to be playing the game (why?) when wang comes by
-- the rather unlikely thread that leads wang to go visit ye for the first time, in order to provide the dramatic reveal that she's an Adventist leader

am i being too harsh, i don't know, my hand is hovering above the submit post button without hesitation

in retrospect, i realised i could have chosen a better term: by 'his detective figure' i mean the character who is the agent of the reader's encountering revelations about the past, that is, wang. not da shi, who is an actual detective.

I also cannot believe, Dehydrating or not, any large species could survive what their planet has gone through. Anthrax spores, maybe, but not a big animal. And surely a vast stable period, longer than human history, would be needed to develop to the point they could gather the resources to build a huge interstellar war fleet.

http://weirdfictionreview.com/2011/11/m-r-james-and-the-quantum-vampire-by-china-mieville/

i think you're being too harsh tbh xpost but making a fairly compelling argument doing so. the nanofilament thing is a bit bollocks obv but the whole reason for wang's involvement is that the trisolarians knew the technology would be dangerous. albeit not as a 'zither' but as a, errrrr, ladder into space iirc?

james that link looks like something i don't want to click on. i'm trusting you here.

I skimmed it a little bit and put it here for future reference. Not encouraging anyone else to click or not to click.

it's ok. i'm interested in the difference between horror and ghost stories, which roughly maps to his weird/hauntology categories. looking forward to reading it properly later. thanks for posting.

I was curious about that dichotomy too. Couldn’t quite follow the whole article.

I and/or also had trouble with it

Lol

I read it back when it came out but I don't remember much about it apart from his tattoo.

I recall somewhere here enjoying Steve Rasnic Tem, so you may be interested in this new best of collection
http://www.valancourtbooks.com/figures-unseen-2018.html

that china mieville piece is the epitome of using sesquipidalian and caliginous words not because they are useful and precise but because they are sesquipidalian and caliginous. pure cacography.

Okay, have to admit I came upon that article because it was linked in this article and was hoping somebody would either summarize it or confirm that it was kind of unreadable.