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

Summery Russian classic = Turgenev's First Love

also it's really short

Kuttner and Moore

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

Well this was absurdly good. Superbly written - one section with a character smashing the end of her thumb had me twisting away from the page in an effort to avoid the pain - well drawn characters, loads of non-fictional appeal for those into evolutionary/comparative/primate psychology. As far as the SF side of it goes, it was an effective cautionary tale but the ending was maybe a little overplayed for me; you could imagine it as a standard present day non-genre novel, dispensing with the SF elements and taking a less dramatic turn.

Summery Russian classic = Turgenev's First Love

also it's really short

Thank you! I found Fathers and Sons a bit of a struggle to get through, but if it’s short and summery then it might be just right. I’ll keep an eye out.

I just realised that this isn't the general reading thread, and I don't think Turgenev is hugely into speculative fiction.

No problem. I view your post as coming in through the slipstream.

also forgot which thread I was on lol

Some good-to=great Russian SF discussed here and there upthread.

also good-to-great.

bit on feminist sci-fi on Front Row last night:

"Women Invent the Future is a new anthology of science fiction short stories by and about women. One of the authors, Molly Flatt, discusses re-imagining the future from a feminist perspective with Christina Dalcher, whose new novel Vox is set in a dystopian world where women's voices are strictly limited."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bbn6z0

(it's the first section but there's more on the end of the podcast version if you download that)

(it wasn't great, when i got around to listening. book looks interesting though)

Don't know if anyone here has mentioned the new BL SF collections. Golden Age stories, nicely packaged:

https://www.bl.uk/shop/lost-mars-the-golden-age-of-the-red-planet/p-1938

So Bug Jack Barron is really bad, annoyed that I read it now

every plot point telegraphed and predictable, mind-numbingly repetitive prose, paper-thin characterizations (with plenty of sexist garbage strewn about), bad dialogue - clearly the only thing going for it *was* its transgressiveness, which doesn't really leave much to recommend it. Moorcock has often said (overly modestly, I think) he's a bad writer with good ideas, by contrast Spinrad seems more like a bad writer with mostly bad ideas.

read the chronoliths, by the aforementioned robert charles wilson

i'm not sure the ending/solution really makes sense, but that's fine. i liked it a lot.

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?19779

I read "Clara Militch" and wished he'd shut the fuck up about Platatuda Ivanova. Couldn't he just call her Platty?

As well as that Lost Mars anthology, Mike Ashley has Moonrise: The Golden Age of Lunar Adventures out this year and also one about scary sea stories if I remember correctly.

The British Library collections look lovely, but not much golden age stuff is actually good.

B-b-but what about Sturgeon's Law? Oh wait.

Agree about the Golden Age, i have to say.

50s are the real Golden Age imo

golden age > new wave

50s are the real Golden Age imo

Ledge who are yr top 5 golden age (30s - 40s) writers

Its funny how Golden Ages of various things (comics, sf etc.) are foundational texts that basically no one gives a shit about/are objectively crude and terrible

A lot of contents don't stick to what we think of as golden age, there's Ballard, Wyndham, Zimmer Bradley, Bradbury and Clarke but also a lot of obscure stuff buried in british magazines.

These days I definitely have more time for golden age comics.

I only recognized one or two authors in From The Depths And Other Strange Tales of the Sea.

Ledge who are yr top 5 golden age (30s - 40s) writers

oh no, finally outed as the worst diletantte with the haziest grasp of who wrote what when or if it was any good from stories i read 20 years ago :(

if the golden age was bad it was accidentally bad, new wave was deliberately bad.

some good things here: http://hilobrow.com/golden-age-sci-fi/ (which takes golden age to mean 1934–63)

I was more fishing for recommendations but ok
Xp

Thought you already read most of the standard stuff, Shakey.

Reading all the standards of science fiction is quite a feat but I think the required reading lists are probably going to change a lot.

i literally do not have a favourite author from the 30s-40s. and as they were all male and, we've agreed, largely garbage, i'm not sure it's worth trying to get one now. from the 50s, with caveats, it would be john wyndham.

I reread Jonathan Lethem's GIRL IN LANDSCAPE (1998). If anything I admired it this time. The drifting quality of the narrative, while still excessive, has some point in relation to the centrality of landscape. And the ending is more climactic and structured than I'd recalled.
― the pinefox, Tuesday, July 24, 2018 1:34 PM (four days ago)

Curious about Lethem - I really loved his comic book, Omega the Unknown, and have struggled with everything else. And She Climbed Across The Table is the only novel I've really regretted reading in the past ten years.

Simak, Sturgeon, Kuttner, C.L. Moore were all getting early stuff published in late 30s/early 40s (and of course Heinlein, Asimov, van Vogt, though I'm guess that's what yall are thinking of as Golden Age poop); Bradbury mid-to-late 40s I think.
Otherwise, "A Martian Odyssey" was pretty refreshing and could see how it was a whole ceiling fixture of good-idea lightbulbs in the Golden Dark Age (I posted about it while reading The Big Book of Science Fiction upthread). But Stanley Weinbaum died young, before writing a whole lot else.

Not quite "all male," def not incl C.L. Moore, Leigh Brackett for inst.

Just the other day I picked up a nice cheap hardcover of this anthology, which has to be a key text for the "50s were the real Golden Age/To hell with the New Wave" critical position:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Age_of_Science_Fiction_(anthology)

These days I definitely have more time for golden age comics.

I'll take a random Golden Age comic over a random Silver Age one these days - the Silver Age obviously attained greater heights but its rank and file stuff is repetitive and formulaic as fuck while with a golden age comic you never know what's gonna happen.

Chuck Tatum, why did you regret reading that novel? As it's only 192pp long, it's a curious one to regret.

Seems like Golden Age (or even Silver) is an uncertain term. I just read an article about Robert Sheckley, who I had thought was Golden Age, saying something like 'Sheckley was one of those writers of that undefined and under-researched period in SF, the 1950s ...'

I can't remember what Golden and Silver mean with comics either.

Ward Fowler, that wiki link does not work -- which book did you have in mind? I have read one edited by K. Amis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Age_of_Science_Fiction_(anthology)

Apologies, yes, it's the Amis anthology. Includes quite a long introduction where Amis is highly critical of Ballard and Aldiss' flirtations with the New Wave - but he still includes stories by them both! He also draws a comparison with modern jazz and the New Wave.

Grr I can't work out why that bloody link isn't working here

Yes that is a very readable book - I learned a lot from it, although the intro is so partisan.

Ballard reviewed it and dedicated the review to a riposte to Amis! That's in his book of essays:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_User%27s_Guide_to_the_Millennium

(ilx eats the last ) and breaks the link. happily, the wikipedia error page you end up on has a link to the correct page on it - "Did you mean: The Golden Age of Science Fiction (anthology)?")

Yep, this is the anthology in question:

https://pictures.abebooks.com/ORLAN_DO/3967325261.jpg

The version I read:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61AhjH6ZYfL.SX316.SY316.jpg

What about New Maps of Hell, what was in that?

New Maps of Hell is a series of lectures that Amis gave on SF at the end of the 1950s, gathered together in a book - no fiction.