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

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.

"I recall somewhere here enjoying Steve Rasnic Tem"

I really liked Deadfall Hotel! that's the only one of his that i've read though. I was totally casting a hypothetical Netflix series while reading it. Someone with a great visual sense/design sense could really go to town with it. i liked the mix of dread/creepy/spooky/humor. hard to mix all that together unless you know what you're doing.

i finished Spin and now i'm on to Axis and will have to find a copy of Vortex to finish the Robert Charles Wilson trilogy. might have to buy a copy on the dreaded online.

there is no name for it but i always feel a sense of sadness when i go to another book in a series and the original protagonists from the first book are old or dead. space age grieving. its even worse when the 2nd book starts like a million years after the events of the first book and the original characters are just legend or dimly remembered.

"I also cannot believe, Dehydrating or not, any large species could survive what their planet has gone through" -- I very much got the impression that some revelation about the biological structure of the aliens was being held in abeyance until book two or three, maybe they are in fact clouds of sentient spores, whatever.

I quite enjoyed the first two paragraphs of that China Mieville thing, I am mostly posting this as a reminded to myself to finish it.

I hope you're right. Probably about to read book 2 because, despite my complaints in this thread, I did find book 1 fascinating and compelling.

same tbh

I'm deep into that Mieville essay linked above and it's all worth it to witness his proposed reconciliation of the hauntological and Weird traditions, a TENTACLED SKULL.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYPVyJwzerM

ksr, red mars:

Out on the flat sediment of the chasma floor there stood a classical Greek temple, six Dorian columns

dorian?

also describes one main character as 'dark' and 'swarthy' (twice). quit fucking around, is he black or white?

nitpicking though, enjoying it so far.

prepare to learn a lot about regolith.

gis suggests that nerds who've considered it think the character is white and/or alfred molina

but they could easily be wrong

Is there relogith on Mars?

Areolith?

Could not finish the Poe story "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall", agonizingly detailed hard scifi with not enough juice, ended up skimming and reading snatches to see where it went. Then I discover it was a hoax piece. Makes a lot of sense.

Then "Gold Bug", much better and very impressively crafted. It's pretty racist but there's a hilarious bit where a black helper (neither a slave or quite a servant) prepares to beat his master with a stick for deceiving him earlier.

Areolith?

The Pulp Magazine archive: https://archive.org/details/pulpmagazinearchive&tab=collection

https://ia601005.us.archive.org/25/items/Usborne_Book_of_the_Future_1979_pointlessmuseum/Usborne_Book_of_the_Future_1979_pointlessmuseum.pdf

Now I'm depressed.

It's like an illustrated hyper optimistic version of Red Mars, set not in the future but right now! Do the germans have a word for the feeling of sadness generated by outdated visions of the future which underscore what a depressing place the world of today is?

Thought Red Mars was great btw, despite being too long with too much geology, especially in the last chapter which was short but seemed an interminable repetition of skin-of-the-teeth escapes from geological peril. Characters were pretty broad stroke but still way ahead of e.g. Clarke or Reynolds (no idea what Frank's goals or motivation were though). The chapter halfway through with psychologist Michel really sealed it for me; it seemed at the time almost transcendent and I had to stop reading and just sit back and ponder. A personal reaction I'm sure, no claim that it was Great Literature, but it certainly did offer a break from all the geology, an insight into a character rather different from the rest, and a narrative boost just when it was needed.

the mars books just get better and better in my opinion. the first book is kind of a test. to see if you can get through all the rock talk. then things get really crazy!

will definitely re-read again at some point.

I love the madness as the big cables come down.

Characters were pretty broad stroke but still way ahead of e.g. Clarke or Reynolds (no idea what Frank's goals or motivation were though). The chapter halfway through with psychologist Michel really sealed it for me; it seemed at the time almost transcendent and I had to stop reading and just sit back and ponder.
Seems like you might enjoy Green Earth, the one-volume mixdown of his Science In The Capitol trilogy. You know he's uneven and odd, but yeah transcendent at times, like when Thoreau goes viral among the post-flood squatters in parks and buildings around DC (a post-flood funland, with plenty wireless; he's a green post-cyberpunk, and though climate disruption does suck and will suck worse for many/most, some survivors may have an awesome afterlife, at least for a while). He loves The Great Outdoors, DC, New England maritimes, California coast and mountains--anyway I carried on about it upthread a while back.
The only other KSR novel I've read is The Wild Shore, also post(?)-cataclysmic open air adventures (first of the Three California series), maybe more consistent than Green Earth (read that one in the 80s, but fairly sure it was; not as much risk-taking though).

Wild Shore is great, that’s the last KSR I read.

Yeah, it was exhilarating.
Wikip:
The Three Californias Trilogy (also known as the Wild Shore Triptych and the Orange County Trilogy) consists of three books by Kim Stanley Robinson, that depict three different possible futures of Orange County, California. The three books that make up the trilogy are The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast and Pacific Edge. Each of these books describes the life of young people in the three very different near-futures. All three novels begin with an excavation which tells the reader about the world they are entering.

Only other KSR I've read is Aurora, which was great, guess I'll add all these others to the long-term list. (I bought the collected Mars trilogy but I'm not going to get straight into it.)

Re: Chinese SF authors again. I was listening to some interviews with them recently and one guy referenced the film K-Pax in among all these SF classics!

Hope I'm getting past all Edgar Alan Poe's worst stuff. There was more hoax stories about the most boring stuff like cross atlantic balloon travel and criminals creating gold. There's a story about mesmerism which has interesting concepts but I could barely read most of these few, they were so technical and dry.
Currently getting back into the better stuff, a humorous story about Scheherazade and Sinbad. I'm starting to get why people think Poe is unfunny but I'll always like his description "Mr. Crab first opened his eyes, and then his mouth, to quite a remarkable extent; causing his personal appearance to resemble that of a highly-agitated elderly duck in the act of quacking".

Really liked a Tanith Lee piece about a world weary soldier regretting a lifetime of killing.

https://www.tor.com/2018/03/31/2018-hugo-award-finalists-announced/

novella, novelette, and short story nominations almost 100% women! actually, all women and one trans writer. wow. talk about the future of SF! that is so huge.

I sometimes think much more women write speculative fiction than men but the amount of nominated women could also be their increased participation after the gamergate style attacks on the Hugos. My more cynical side thinks the nominations have a lot to do with who is coolest on twitter.

I recently ordered a Martha Wells (she got two nominations) book in the Raksura series, I hope it's good. Sword and Sorcery with flying lizard people sounds cool.

Hard for writers or any arts/media pros to be outstandingly cool on twitter, when they mainly present themselves as pros---it's usually "here's a link" and/or promotional like millions of other tweets. Although what I see from Nalo Hopkinson is almost always uniquely enticing food porn I mean pix. She's not presenting herself as a great chef or gourmet or even foodie, just "Hey lookit this package of bread somebody gave me at the campground!"

While persistently reminding me, in effect, that I still mean to read her Brown Girl In The Ring, so promotional enough.

Good book eh?

I meant cool in a social justice/cultivator of the genre way.

shit

i read the dark forest and it's basically an entire novel about the logistics of preparing for an alien invasion. its narrative propulsion comprises, effectively, waiting. the content really seems to be modelling the situation and then seeing how it plays out and so extends where the 3BP tailed off. but about halfway through i started finding this compelling, though this may have been a literary form of stockholm syndrome. for those who've read it, I quite enjoyed all the wallfacer/wallbreaker stuff. And I'm a sucker for the idea of starting an entire epochal science fiction series and maintaining a clear link of provenance to the cultural revolution.

the obvious influence only occurred to me when it's explicitly mentioned in the text, which is Asimov's Foundation stuff. one of the characters gives a kindly-faced Osama bin-Laden proxy a copy in a cave :/

I guess i will read the third this weekend, as I've got a long flight.

While there's probably no influence on the DF trilogy, Zebrowski & Pellegrino forward the same resolution to the Fermi paradox in The Killing Star, just with plausible (to current knowledge) physics.

I tried The Killing Star recently, but found the mind-boggling physics far more believable than the characters, and gave up.

Ho-ho, but what if this is a Baaad sign?

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-space-blackholes/at-the-center-of-our-galaxy-theres-a-black-hole-party-idUSKCN1HC2JS?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=Social

My understanding is, not really. We can place an upper bound on how often black holes collide in the entire universe from results of the LIGO experiment, and when they do, only weak gravity waves escape. There's probably a similar number of white dwarfs circling the drain, and when they collide in a type Ia supernova, we probably won't even notice in visible light given the heavy dust/gas clouds in the galactic plane.

Apparently there is a bbc adaptation of china mieville's the city and the city showing on the bbc right now. I'm not too fussed especially given average reviews of the first ep but might be of interest to someone here.

Wonder if the narrator sounds like Triumph The Insult Comic Dog Puppet, as he came across at times in the book (accent based on that of Triumph creator Robert Smigel's elderly East Euro etc. immigrant relatives). A fairly uneven book, but the best parts were imaginative and carefully worked out, wouldn't mind seeing this (being vulnerable to offbeat procedurals of Dick, Chabon, Scalzi to a lesser extent, hell the library's got Asimov's Robots and Murder yesss)

I liked the first episode! One interesting stylistic choice is that all the street signs and such are in English, but with a bunch of random accents added to make it look Hungarian-esque.

Take away the setting though and you just have a bunch of noir clichés, in the book as in the series. I liked the sprawling stream of ideas of Perdido Street Station much better.

B-but you can't take away the setting, that's the main character! Buried city is strong contender. Haven't read the other one so can't compare, but if stream of ideas will check.

I spent a ridiculous amount of time making this for Twitter, so I'm going to inflict it all on you as well.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Daj0mN8VMAE0kpW.jpg

Lol

Ha! That just came up on my feed

That or Lovecraft interrogation pieces or mythos stories "improved" with all the shite from the KingSpielbergAbramsWhedonTarantinoSorkin age.

However, I do sympathize with writers who are just writing in the spirit of the big Weird Tales writers and some people coming to this stuff fresh will be expecting it to be purposefully weird all the time.

Currently reading Karin Tidbeck, who was championed by the Vandermeers, Le Guin, Mieville, Liz Hand and more. She was in the Ann Vandermeer version of Weird Tales and her stories are pretty weird and unreal in a non-classic way, very gross and uses Scandinavian folklore and I'm not sure when she's making up her own legends.