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

Talkin' bout Laffertys, i just read Mur Lafferty's Six Wakes. A murder mystery on a spaceship full of clones. Perhaps some people are sick of "rules of cloning" stories, but I thought it was a lot of fun.

B-b-but wazzabout R.A. Lafferty's Six Fingers of Time?

I want someone to publish The Devil Is Dead with the missing chapters restored, More Than Melchisedech, the unpublished Coscuin novels if there are any... there's a huge job to be done.

Hey, what about this brand new bio of John W. Campbell?

Do not read if you hate Golden Age Mansplaining

Here: https://nevalalee.wordpress.com/about-astounding/

I got the Lafferty omnibus. Odd how the type size increases with each novel.

Also Mike Ashley's Glimpses Of The Unknown: Lost Ghost Stories, a collection of stories which have never been reprinted, including an EF Benson story that nobody knew about until now. This should be interesting.

Some of the amazon reviews for Broderick & Di Filippo's 101 Best SF Novels are totally wacko. Someone is positively outraged that these books are being considered science fiction, some reviewers expected an anthology (I guess the word Novel means nothing to them) and some people who seemed to expect 101 novels in one book, who must have ignored that there is a paperback version.

Anyone read 'Gnomon' by Nick Harkaway? It was recommended by a friend, but I'm not going to get into a nearly 700 pager lightly.

i enjoyed his first one (the gone-away world). but having read another one of his, which was fine, i began to suspect that they're all more or less the same.

he's john le carre's son, fwiw

i thought it was good. solid 8/10. recommended by former ilxor max iirc

Oh funny, I was thinking of switching from Little Drummer Girl to this (because Mark S said it was bad on the other thread).

came across a copy of Lafferty's "Annals of Klepsis" in the wild yesterday but idk didn't really appeal to me. opted instead for Malzberg's "The Day of the Burning" which is exactly what I expected it to be lol

found a cheap copy of jeff vandermeer's weird anthology and i'm excited to try a few stories at random. i've heard it's a mixed bag, but it's *huge*, so even if 1 in 10 stories is good, that's still a lot to read

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Weird

Hannu Rajaniemi, Summerland, anyone?

It's cheap on Amazon today and looks interesting. Like Century Rain by the sounds...

The new and excellent Dave Hutchinson, EUROPE AT DAWN

That Weird anthology is worth it for the stuff in translation that's impossible or near-impossible to get anywhere else, let alone all the other good stuff in it.

and some people who seemed to expect 101 novels in one book I wonder if they would complain that the stories in 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories are too short? I've got the 296 page mass market paperback edition (Avon), © 1978 by Isaac Asimov, Martin Harry Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander. Authors incl. Bester, Bierce, Boucher, Bretnor yadda yadda Knight,Kornbluth Lieber, Malzberg, Monteleone, yadda yadda Panshin, Pohl yadda Russ, Sheckley yadda yadda Westlake yadda Zelazny---never read it, but I like having it (story of my doom room)

I am actually reading one from the pile, though: omnibus The Books of the Black Current, by Ian Watson. The BC runs down the middle of a long river on a planet inhabited by people who know or believe themselves to be descendants of travelers on a ship, which, by definition, is something that sailed, past tense only, "the star void"---a boat is what the riverwomen use as linchpin of the riverside and inland settlements' economy, in fact it so far seems to be the only form of transportation, other than feet up and down the riverside and inland, which is the way men have to travel, because the Black Current only lets them ride the river once in their lives. Mostly they stay home or nearby while their wives work the river. Sometimes they have encounters with lonely wives, who are far (enough) from their homeports, also single sailors who are hunting husbands or just passing through.
They're cunning little creatures, these men, and some of them get the mostly innocent young riverwoman narrator, to look through their ultrageek tower telescopes at a Bizzaro World on the other side of the river: nobody ever comes near the water, seem to have no colorful riverside-type culture,make the women shround themselves in black and work in the fields, and one day Yaleen and the ultrageeks see a woman over there being burned to a smudge in their most powerful lens. She gets even more involved in the 'geeks plan than they'd hoped, but things don't go well, she blames herself, flees back to the river, tries to work herself beyond remembering.
Very concise density of plotting x worldbuilding, incl. Yaleen's POV, as she conveys in copious, somewhat tightjawed ( astro-Australian?) phrases and cadences, which can take a lyrical turn, but briefly as possible. I've got a long way to go in here, but don't mind.

Ian Watson's a very interesting writer. A lot of mystical stuff in his work, which usually gives me the shits, but he approaches it in original and fascinating ways. And his 'The Embedding' is very good linguistics SF.

I only know the famous time machine one he wrote, and have been meaning to read more but haven’t gotten around to it /pvmic

Actually the anthology it first appeared in is really good, Anticipations, edited by Christopher Priest.

Re: The Weird, I read that whole thing and it was worth it. Remember particularly enjoying the Robert Bloch story.

Great!

Was in Oxfam Books this afternoon and they had about twenty 1970s Philip K Dick paperbacks on a display. I had to restrain myself from buying the lot, but I got Martian Time-Slip and Three Stigmata. I've only read Ubik but loved it. And I've got copies Scanner Darkly, Flow My Tears and Electric Sheep somewhere round the house too...

Anticipations I've never heard off: will check it out.

It was a one-off

they had about twenty 1970s Philip K Dick paperbacks on a display. I had to restrain myself from buying the lot I went for the whole lot, 25-50 cents apiece, in a thrift store run by a church. The girl clerk looked terrified. It's cold enough for walking that far again, finally; think I'll go back.

I would get em just for the cover art

Not that I should ever ever ever buy another book, and rarely do, but

I would get em just for the cover art

Scifi books don't feel real to me if they don't have covers like:

https://i.imgur.com/Vyn6FkF.jpg

that palmer eldritch is all fuckin time imo
bob pepper?

Yup

This US edition of Palmer Eldritch cheekily reuses a Bruce Pennington cover from the UK paperback of Dune (where it makes a lot more sense!)

https://pictures.abebooks.com/THOTH/20035711458.jpg

https://i0.wp.com/www.danconnolly.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/dune.jpeg?resize=650%2C462

"Part One of the Dune trilogy"

lol

jeff vandermeer's weird anthology

― Chuck_Tatum, Wednesday, November 7, 2018 6:24 PM

Don't forget about Ann

yes! sorry

Jayaprakash Satyamurthy - A Volume Of Sleep

Satyamurthy has said his stories are essays, maybe sometimes but so far I see a number of these stories as him talking to us about anything that interests him while weaving in some plot and a speculative fiction concept. Discarded objects and outdated technology, a strange afterlife in which a woman let's go of some of her human sensibilities, some explanations of Satyamurthy's musical preferences and quite depressing depictions of musical failure (whether that's the lone guitarist being ineffective or the protagonist's band playing well yet being mostly ignored).

Like the previous collection it ends with a longer piece, this one about what might be twins, doppelgangers, multiple personalities or maybe something else. Contains many amusingly crazy theories about celebrities. Probably the best story but the tale of the afterlife is a contender for its outlandish distance.

Need to track down some of his anthology stories some day. Curious about what his contribution to Axes Of Evil will be like.

https://ttdlabyrinth.wordpress.com/2018/04/19/brian-w-aldiss/

Read this blurb
https://www.fantasticfiction.com/l/l-jagi-lamplighter/maga-2020-and-beyond.htm

Hey this David Bunch guy is p good

Moderan?

Yeah, got it from the library, just getting through the intro

Not sure why he was so hated initially, would think the humor would’ve gone farther in putting over such a bleak vision.

Remember I said these weird/ghostly/strange/surreal fiction presses were the most expensive of all the small presses? Some people I know have been speaking very highly of these but I cant ever imagine myself spending this kind of money.

https://www.ziesings.com/advSearchResults.php?action=search&orderBy=relevance&category_id=0&keywordsField=mount+abraxas

fuuuuuck

Most Jack Vance fans know about the Integral Editions that was a 44 book set for rich people containing Vance's preferred versions. What has completely flew under the radar and only just came to my attention is that most or all(?) of these books are in paperback from Spatterlight over the last 2 years.

I've had the Monsters In Orbit/World Between double on my wishlist for a while because somebody said it was their favorite book ever but I've just discovered that Monsters In Orbit is a fixup of stories included in Golden Girl and that most of the remaining stories are in Moon Moth.

I seem to recall that several years after the initial VIE, there was something like a ‘reader’s edition’ that was a kind of second chance? So the paperbacks would be kind of the third go. I’d love to see what they look like.

Around the original VIE launch was one of the last times in my life when I had disposable income :( and I was very very close to pulling the trigger. Major regret of my reading career.

I would have a heart attack worrying about the postage journey of 44 books.

Nice charity shop finds: Mary Gentle's Ash and Suzy McKee Charnas' Holdfast omnibus (first two books).

NYRB's edition of David Bunch's Moderan adds eleven stories, maybe the complete cycle, something like 60 (Amazon's got the trade pb for $12.00 or so) He's sometimes described as a "cyberpunk pioneer," but I don't recall cyberpunks dealing in oceans covered by sheets of plastic as a given, or at all. In the name of Progress of course, and yeah there was plenty utopian-dystopian satire in the 50s and 60s (Bunch placed two stories in the first Dangerous Visions[published 1967, right?]), and he's kind of Lafferty-like, but more cranked up with the deadpan tragicomic irony, for lack of a better term. Jeff VanderMeer says that Bunch is more in-your-face than PKD, Tiptree, anybody, and that may be--I've only read a few stories, like the one in The Big Book of Science Fiction. Here's JV's intro to the NYRB collection:
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/09/12/david-bunchs-prophetic-dystopia

I read the whole thing about a month ago. It's good (and funny!), albeit very repetitive. Essentially a paste-up, so the stories don't always cohere into a complete narrative arc that makes any sense. Some of the stuff is so apocalyptically bleak, particularly the stories that don't have to do with Stronghold 10 and instead focus on this fractured family (a plebian father and his progeny). Generally I found the Stronghold 10 stories fairly comical, closer to maybe Lem than PKD or Tiptree, whose writing styles are very different from the approach Bunch took. The intro (not VanderMeer's preface, but an intro piece that Bunch specifically wrote to preface the collection) is probably my favorite, a variation on the classic "I have unearthed this obscure manuscript from the past" framing device that is also really funny and sharp.