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

He liked your image of the Lovecraft pastiche writer on twitter.

Lol ok, weird

Aickman's "The Trains" is really good, the fourth and best story I've read by him, it's very vivid. Never been sure if I wanted to go for his collections, I've mostly been content to find him in anthologies.

Elizabeth Gaskell's "Old Nurse's Story" is really good. Very cute and with clichés done quite satisfyingly.

Tanith Lee
-"Cain" twincest, with a ghost twin.
- "Where Does The Town Go At Night?" seemed to be getting quite treacly then goes into very bluntly portrayed shitty people.
- "Lady Of The Shallot House" hardly anything happens but it still feels quite full to me.

Those Lee stories sound good, where did you read them?

The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (series editor John Joseph Adams, guest ed. Joe Hill) seems more uneven than the volume guest edited by Karen Joy Fowler, and I already knew two of the
best, Karen Russell's "The Bad Graft"--which shows up early and proves a very tough act to follow, also to open for---and Kelly Link's "I Can See Right Through You" (from her most recent collection, Get In Trouble, which I carried on about upthread.
Also, Link's story added to the initial misgivings I had about several others here: they make the best, or at least end up justifying, the use of tired tropes, but---can't we just go on to something else? Nevertheless, some of them share a conscious theme of tropes getting older, like Link's iconic demon lover and his acolyte--who have proved to be cinematic one-hit wonders, living on and on in pop culture afterlife, especially tabloids, reality shows, b-movies. A little too much familiar snark and other nudge-nudge here, but it builds, it gets scary, and the demon lover's bleak, noxious POV, bleary and clear-eyed between compulsive brown-outs, proved to be a bit contagious here.
Cute humans get older and set aside for a while, in Alaya Dawn Johnson's "A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai'i" (incl. real vampires, still sufficiently cinematic of course) and Kelly Sandoval's "The Ones The Took Before" (aliens with a taste for girly singer-songwriters of Portland).
Kids are exploited by other humans, ones with cybervampiric (bandwidth-ravenous) needs, in "We Are The Cloud, by Sam J. Miller, whose artistry shows a bit more than his experience as a sharp-eyed community organizer disturbingly tells---misgivings returned at the very end, even before I read his notes: he thinks of this as a "supervillain origin story"---but what the hell, Bester's comic book influences served him well at his peak, and okay you got me Sam J. Especially since the ending is mainly presented as but one of several attractive options in a burgeoning mind, even though it's the one seized on in there for the moment (I'd rather think of it as a delusion, and I can if I don't think too much about hos Sam J. thinks about it).
Endings are more of a problem in several other stories, just the tacked-on happy endings, often completely non-seq, except sometimes it's understandable that the author and many readers, incl. me, want the protagonists to have happy endings--especially in trans author A. Merc Rustad's "How To Become A Robot in 12 Easy Steps"--no, the organic unit tagged as a girl named Tesla doesn't get to become out as a robot, but---still, that one makes for a fairly satisfying finale, via the precise, funny, sad, eerie, increasingly desperate voice of the narrator.
Also there are a few that come off more as promising pitches: here's a couple scenes, then yadda-yadda plot summary, then another scene---but maybe Netflix will make something of those.
Oh and speaking of descendants of Bester---she could be maybe a grandniece,with an indirectly related gift for imagery as fuel for drive---here's Russell's "The Bad Graft" (she's got several others on here too):
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/09/the-bad-graft

Oh yeah, and my big discovery here was Adam-Troy Castro (apparently a popular YA author), whose "The Thing About Shapes To Come" is about a generation, an epidemic to some, of shape-children, big warm cubes getting bigger, for instance, and those golf-ball types, in a variety of colors, who suddenly start bouncing around all over the place, all over the world---the cubes get called "squares, " then "s-words"--but there are some loyal, loving parents in here too. Very much like a Rudy Rucker story with more emotions, and I'll take it over s-word selections in this vol.

Those Tanith stories were from Tempting The Gods. It's the only collection I've read by her so far but Tanith By Choice is probably a better entry point. Her Arkham House collection Dreams Of Shadows And Light was quite celebrated but hard to find at a reasonable price (unless Gollancz have an ebook version). Tempting The Gods is subtitled Selected Stories but I think that's misleading, they were probably just stories that hadn't been collected yet (with a few exceptions).

The collection I have by her (pdf) is Nightshades

i just bought a gollancz ebook of dreams of dark and light for £2.99. also bought and started electric forest by her, so far reminds me of algis budrys - sf with a psychological focus.

Can’t remember if I ever posted this here: Covering Viroconium

Aargh. I caught some sort of misspelling bug in my fat fingers recently, of course it’s called “Covering Viriconium.”

Now I need to reread my viriconium omnibus

Very fine Bruce Pennington cover!

oho--this weekend's WSJ incl. Sam Sacks' favorable mention of Catastrophe and Other Storiesby Dino Buzzati, who made an incisive impression very, very early on in my science fiction-scarfing skull---here's a preview of the reprint: https://books.google.com/books/about/Catastrophe.html?id=w5MpDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button#v=onepage&q&f=false

Intriguing entry: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/buzzati_dino

"I go to bed angry and I get up angrier every morning," he boasted RIP Hell Up In Harlan:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/06/29/controversial-author-harlan-ellison-remade-sci-fi-while-battling-movie-studios-publishers-and-frank-sinatra/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.d2c2446f2740

Oh nice---dinged copies of Subterranean fancy editions for $20.00 ea., pretty sweet conceptually/not a chance in hell I'll buy, but feels good to be tempted:
https://subterraneanpress.com/djstories-the-best-of-david-j-schow-dinged

https://subterraneanpress.com/mandel-station-eleven

https://subterraneanpress.com/mckean-the-weight-of-words

Not specific to this thread but isn't Lulu a print on demand service? So I don't get why some orders are taking much longer than others. I thought they'd all be printed at the same time.

Not a regular scifi reader (see upthread) but I just finished Leviathan Wakes and dug it somewhat. Is there anything similar, but better written - or is the answer, Book 2 of The Expanse?

I feel like Leviathan might have prepped me for trying a little harder with M John Harrison's Light, which I found kind of chilly and incomprehensible and quit after about 50 pages.

Love me some LIGHT

Hoho at this Ian Sales review, unfortunately the link for the full review is dead.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/360254689

What is "New Space Opera"? If it means Alistair Reynolds, then, er, no thanks

I don't know, but I'd imagine it's earlier than Reynolds.

Isn’t there a Cramer/Hartwell anthology called The Space Opera Renaissance? I believe this topic is discussed in its introductory material.

reading dreams of dark & light by tanith lee, but i might give it up. her prose is fine, she creates detailed and colourful worlds, her characters are not unconvincing but i cannot feel any compassion for them and I'm not sure she could either. the one story where she manages to engineer a gay relationship between (physically) a man and a woman and (mentally) two straight men was noteworthy tho.

Was thinking the mid-70s Aldiss anthologies were a sign/stimulus of the revival, but this article points out more continuity than I'd remembered (as books, that is; it mostly vanished from most of the mags in 50s, at least for a while): http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/space_opera

Has anyone read this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maureen_Birnbaum,_Barbarian_Swordsperson
The excerpt here is hilarious

You might need to open the post by Alan C. Barclay to see.

Having seen various books in this series, I was never tempted to pick them up.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/12/Chicks_in_Chainmail.jpg

Some find Tanith a bit cold but I never did, yet at least.

Went to a bunch of second hand book stores and scored a bunch for super cheap (usually a pound each). Bunch of 70s horror anthologies, the first Van Vogt Null-A book, some Andre Norton, Sturgeon and 3 Joanna Russ books.

Recent reading:

Audrey Schulman - Theory of Bastards: really, really good near-future novel about bonobos and research and endometriosis and climate change, great stuff

Péter Zsoldos - The Mission: 1970s Hungarian novel about stranded researchers on an alien planet with a very cunning long-term survival plan; interesting but flawed, like a second-tier Lem crossed with a Bob Shaw novel

Elizabeth Bear - In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns: nearish-future, Indian cop investigates the murder of a man whose corpse has been impossibly inverted, at the same time as the first indisputable ET signal is received; thoroughly enjoyable, and I want to read more of her

AND

Roque Larraquy - Comemadre: interesting but ultimately too irritating and unfocused Argentinean SF about death and afterlife and bodies

got the elizabeth bear this morning, wasn't expecting to finish it the same day! It's more like a sketch of a novel. it started off straight out of the raymond chandler school of sf and i didn't really warm to it beyond that i'm afraid.

lol. Have you read the relevant Malzberg story, ledge?

It’s called “Playback.” And only know realized why.

D’Oh!
I mean I probably noticed before but I forgot.

ysi?

Just sent it via the Crap Nebula.

never heard of him before tbh. found a couple of career retrospective reviews which praise his talent and wonder at his lack of recognition, while making him sound easy to admire but hard to like.

I recommend Gather in the Hall of the Planets and others from the same period which I haven’t gotten around to reading properly but others here have.

He, like Silverberg, had a Fitzgerald-like Crack-Up and couldn’t write for a while. Silverberg rolled up his sleeves and went back to delivering fan service like Lord Valentine’s Castle, whilst Malzberg remained in bitterness.

theory of bastards sounds great, thanks for the rec

i bought that one too. at the moment i'll shell out for anything by a female author that sounds moderately appealing.

Yeah, I am thinking about taking the bait on that as well.

what up nerds, somehow I missed the most recent posts in this thread!

Malzberg is great, if repetitive and claustrophobic. But when he is good, he is *very* good, and as a constructor of marvelous sentences/prose stylist I think he's second only to Ballard in the genre.

Finally got around to Norman Spinrad's "Bug Jack Barron", which is weird given what a big deal/turning point it seems to have been in the New Wave. Only read short pieces of his before. Joanna Russ's critique (I would love to read her full review if it's online somewhere?) cited in the wiki entry seems at the very least accurate, if overly (and yet pretty understandably) hostile. The sexism in it is both very up-front as well as perfectly representative of the era and its politics, and the writing is not quite as sharp as Spinrad seems to think it is. His particular iteration of post-beatnik-stream-of-consciousness is way more repetitive and less inventive and memorable than, say, Aldiss' in "Barefoot in the Head". I am about 2/3rds of the way through it and wouldn't call it great, although there are some interesting ideas and imagery in it. It's explicit prediction of the cynicism and burnout of 60s activist politics is definitely prescient, if not particularly nuanced.

Curious about his Hitler-as-genre-author book.

Yeah, i bought The Iron Dream but am sort of pre-exhausted at the idea of actually reading it, given current state of the world.

Liked it when I read it in high school, don’t know how it holds up.

I agree with Shakey’s favorite, Mike Moorcock, that Spinrad’s best is The Void Captain’s Tale.

From his panoramic tour of Spinrad's work ( incl. favorable mention of The Void Captain's Tale),
here's shrewd John Clute on BJB in context:
...it was with his next book, Bug Jack Barron (December 1967-October 1968 New Worlds; exp 1969), that he made his greatest impact on the sheltered world of sf, whose risible parochialism, when confronted by this not particularly shocking novel, was demonstrated by Sam J Lundwall in his Science Fiction: What It's All About (1969; trans exp 1971), where Bug Jack Barron is dismissed as "practically a collection of obscenities". The violent texture and profanity of the magazine version of the text more ominously rattled the excitable dovecotes of the UK "moral establishment" as well, leading directly to the banning of New Worlds by W H Smith, a newsagent chain then so dominant in the market that its action was tantamount to censorship. The novel itself, whose language does not fully conceal a certain sentimentality, describes a Near-Future US through Television figure Jack Barron and his involvement in a politically corrupt system: the resulting picture of America as a hyped, Sex-obsessed, apocalyptic Theatre of the Absurd made the text seem less sf than Fabulation, where this sort of vision is common. The sledgehammer style matched, at points, the content; and the treatment of women (see Feminism) lost the book some of the positive interest its flaring cynicism about male-dominated power structures might have merited.

Oops that's from http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/spinrad_norman

I found Spinrad's book reviews in Asimov's to be refreshingly blunt and his observations focused my vague impressions and messy frustrations getting back into SF in the early 80s, trying to catch up, finding most reviewers to be too xpost parochial--but then he denounced Le Guin's Always Coming Home as soggy leftover 60s sentiment etc.--might've been right for all I know, but he stayed on his soapbox awhile and I stopped reading him. He's got a couple of nonfiction collections, which I haven't read, ditto any of his fiction. Nevertheless, he lead me to some good stuff by other writers, and good thoughts about what I was looking for, in several directions.

Here is some more about Spinrad, written by a guy I only know from his book of Silverberg interviews: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/iron-chromium-five-novels-norman-spinrad/

There are several things about The Void Captain’s Tale that make me think Spinrad is channeling Cordwainer Smith, so perhaps Shakey should steer clear.

Heh I’ll give it a shot