Science Fiction : search and destroy

Probably because people who write mostly short fiction get overlooked.

You're probably right. He came along too early to be in McSweeny's/

You like the Them Bones that much? I have a copy around here and now I will definitely read it sooner.

Not a huge fan of David Brin but i dig his Uplift books to an extent just cos i really like the idea of talking chimps and dolphins.

The Waldrop anthology was "Night of the Cooters", which is a crap title, but a great collection. "Them Bones" is a novella, and it's also pretty damn good, but not as dazzling as the anthology.

Waldrop has always been known as a 'writer's writer' iirc. For some reason I have it in my head that he makes his bread and butter on TV writing and such.

Haven't really enjoyed the Brin I've read, but all the Greg Bear I've read, speaking of four-letter 'B' authors, has been worthwhile.

Waldrop's stories have a very loose, ragged style, and he has a sentimental streak a mile wide. They work best when you read one or two of them in an multi-writer anthology or a magazine.

Dunno why I thought it was 'Bryn' and not 'Brin'.

You thought he was Welsh?

picked up Shockwave Rider from Borderlands on Sunday and so far (ie, the first 25 pages) its fantastic

Sweet. Did I read you right above that only Brunner you've read before this was Stand On Zanzibar? Cuz you should definitely try to find Sheep Look Up and Squares of the City as well.

oh I forgot about Squares of the City, yeah I've read that - the chess one. Sheep Look Up was the other one the Borderlands guy recommended, but they didn't have that. I thought Stand on Zanzibar was okay, kinda lazy wrt characterization, but Shockwave Rider seems to sidestep that issue so far (helps to have a main character who's just a cipher - altho the guy-with-multiple-identities on the run in a wacky post-apocalyptic world totally reminds me of Jerry Cornelius, in a good way)

I really like Stand (just finished it recently as a matter of fact) but the two leads are probably the weakest part. He fell in love with that multi-character/sidebar saturated structure btw for a bunch of his other books (it appears in Sheep and Jagged Orbit--I've not read the latter, but I've heard its quite good as well, IIRC its his meditation on race.)

Search: Nymphomation by Jeff Noon, pretty much anything by Jeff Noon.

Destroy: Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein. Homophobic, misogynistic and pretty much all round shit.

I love Jeff Noon and am always surprised that he doesn't seem so well known in sci-fi circles. He's kinda diminishing returns tho - output has slowed considerably and he's been kinda recycling ideas for the last few books.

lolz my wife is re-reading Heinlen's Stranger at the moment and said the same thing (we both liked it as young'uns but as an oldster I can't get past Heinlein's politics)

The Scribner's Juveniles are fantastic though. (This used to be er a fairly common opinion in SF circles I guess.)

Noon's good stuff is all so 90s (maybe some of it is millenial, charitably) — the last one I bought new was that road trip one, I was like 19, I had actually completely forgotten about its existence until this moment

I have just read Altered Carbon, 'cause someone pressed a copy on me 'cause I professed a liking for The Steel Remains; though now I look this isn't the SF thread where ppl were talking about that — so nevermind, I guess

I have just read Christopher Priest's A Dream of Wessex which I thought was okay and then I saw something online that suggested it was meant to be read as metafictional and then I realised if anything that makes it slightly worse. I am now reading an anthology for Faber he edited about the same time, and jeez, it really does seem like all the SF writers in the UK just all decided to ... give up ... around 1975. Like, I've read good stuff by Robert Sheckley and Bob Shaw, stuff that would never suggest they're capable of anything as bad as Shaw's story in this, which starts with the rather terrible -

"The retro-thrusters were unpleasantly fierce in operation, setting up vibrations which Bernard Harben could feel in his chest cavity."

- and within a page Bernard Harben is putting moves on his female companion -

"'Let's claim this planet tonight,' he said, referring to a secret game in which love-making established their title to any place in which it occurred.

Her pale lips parted slightly, giving him the answer he wanted."

I couldn't get more than 10 pages into Altered Carbon. total crap.

recylced sci-fi as noir ideas - hard-boiled hero with a grim past, a mysterious heroine-in-distress, lots of babble about genetic engineering biotech blah blah blah. so lame

re: the UK - Moorcock and Ballard cranked out good shit well past '75. Noon's kinda the only recent UK writer I had any time for tho

lolz my wife is re-reading Heinlen's Stranger at the moment and said the same thing (we both liked it as young'uns but as an oldster I can't get past Heinlein's politics)

― Gimme That Christian Side-hug, that Christian Side-hug (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, December 1, 2009 1:22 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

haha im glad i never made it thru the first 20 pages

ps i just read inverted world by christopher priest in basically one sitting and it ROCKED.

a mysterious heroine-in-distress

fyi there is no such character in this book

what did moorcock do SF-wise that late? those oscar-wilde-at-the-end-of-time books? they were amusing, i guess.

I think you're faulting the noir book for ... trying to be noir, you know? I know the idea's getting a little old. But there's some interesting ideas to it; the main idea is 'how can you complicate murder mystery books if you make your cast immune to death?' it is pretty flabby, though, and his fantasy novel's way better.

xposts there's the woman who spends pretty much the whole novel dead/in storage? There's at least two "mysterious femme fatale" types, though; that would have been a more accurate slam.

like I said I stopped after 10 pages. there was a woman, I remember that much haha

that stopped u in your tracks huh

I am currently enjoying China Mieville's The Scar.

re: Moorcock - loads of Jerry Cornelius books, the last of the Oswald Bastable books, all of the Fabulous Harbours books (I haven't read those), a couple Von Beck books, I think a few more of those Wildean End of Times books, etc. plus my favorite, the Pyat novels (altho calling those sci-fi is sorta stretching it).

he's one of my favorites obviously. he's turned out a fair amount of junk, but his meta-historical sci-fi stuff is almost always great imho.

i think you read the prologue/flashback and not the actual novel...it's basically a very violent, grisly science fiction novel as opposed to a detective story in space.

that stopped u in your tracks huh

*rimshot*

china mieville is dope

best recent noir sci-fi mashup to-date has been Aylett hands down

china mieville is dope

― ankles (s1ocki), Tuesday, December 1, 2009 6:42 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

Yep, and The Scar is his best book. Those Moorcock books (Dancers at the End of Time) are also my kind of shit.

at the very least, they are really funny

Crackling with great throwaway concepts as well.

ps i just read inverted world by christopher priest in basically one sitting and it ROCKED.

please tell me there is no Shins connection

The album's title comes from a lyric in the second track, "One by One All Day", and alludes to a line from German philosopher and economist Karl Marx. In his 1843 Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Marx blames religion for creating an "inverted world consciousness" that excuses mankind from self-responsibility.

marx will change your life

The Shins were actually referencing the Priest novel. Actually though Hegel was referencing the Shins record in the first place so what goes around &c.

Inverted World was awesome

seconded in a BIG way

The sequels to Altered Carbon are significantly better, but also increasingly over the top with deliberately sadistic ultraviolence. I think I've given up on Morgan, but haven't read 'The Steel Remains'.

Can y'all post the opening sentences to whatever great SF books you have lying around? I figure it's as good a thing as any for seeing if you want to read more.

Here's the opening to Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress:
"They sat stiffly on his antique Eames chairs, two people who didin't want to be here, or one person who didn't want to and one who resented the other's reluctance. Dr. Ong had seen this before. Within two minutes he was sure: the woman was the silently furious resister. She would lose. The man would pay for it later, in little ways, for a long time."

I liked the short story version better, but it's not bad, and the only other SF book I have here is Star Trek: Strike Zone by Peter David

i started IW in an airport in italy and finished it over the atlantic somewhere. the dislocation of travelling really added to it.

The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner:

"A THOUGHT FOR TODAY
Take 'em an inch and they'll give you a hell."

Shadrach in the Furnace by Robert Silverberg

"It is nine minutes before sunrise in the great city of Ulan Bator, capital of the reconstituted world. FOr some time now Dr. Shadrach Mordecai has lain awake, restless and tense in his hammock, staring somberly at a glowing green circlet in the wall that is the shining face of his data screen. Red letters on the screen announce the new day:

MONDAY
14 May
2012"

I really need to read more Silverberg actually. I've read like a half-dozen of his books plus one short story collection, but I was just looking on wikipedia and there are at least half-a-dozen more that were Nebula/Hugo/blah blah nominees.

^^^yeah me too. The only stuff I've read of his were Majipoor Chronicles crap that I came across while in high school (totally unaware of his previous "pre-retirement" work)

M. John Harrison, The Course Of The Heart:

"When I was a tiny boy I often sat motionless in the garden, bathed in sunshine, hands flat on the rough brick of the garden path, waiting with a prolonged, almost painful expectation for whatever would happen, whatever event was contained by that moment, whatever revelation lay dormant in it."

Don't no where else to link this, but since he's been mentioned here by me and others:

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/12/11/dr-peter-watts-canad.html

My friend, the wonderful sf writer Peter Watts was beaten without provocation and arrested by US border guards on Tuesday. I heard about it early Wednesday morning in London and called Cindy Cohn, the legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She worked her contacts to get in touch with civil rights lawyers in Michigan, and we mobilized with Caitlin Sweet (Peter's partner) and David Nickle (Peter's friend) and Peter was arraigned and bailed out later that day.

But now Peter faces a felony rap for "assaulting a federal officer" (Peter and the witness in the car say he didn't do a thing, and I believe them). Defending this charge will cost a fortune, and an inadequate defense could cost Peter his home, his livelihood and his liberty.

Peter's friends are raising money for his legal defense. I just sent him CAD$1,000, because this is absolutely my biggest nightmare: imprisoned in a foreign country for a trumped-up offense against untouchable border cops. I would want my friends to help me out if it ever happened to me.

Sf writer David Nickle writes,

Hugo-award-nominated science fiction author Dr. Peter Watts is in serious legal trouble after he was beaten, pepper-sprayed and imprisoned by American border guards at a Canada U.S. border crossing December 8. This is a call to friends, fans and colleagues to help.

Peter, a Canadian citizen, was on his way back to Canada after helping a friend move house to Nebraska over the weekend. He was stopped at the border crossing at Port Huron, Michigan by U.S. border police for a search of his rental vehicle. When Peter got out of the car and questioned the nature of the search, the gang of border guards subjected him to a beating, restrained him and pepper sprayed him. At the end of it, local police laid a felony charge of assault against a federal officer against Peter. On Wednesday, he posted bond and walked across the border to Canada in shirtsleeves (he was released by Port Huron officials with his car and possessions locked in impound, into a winter storm that evening). He's home safe. For now. But he has to go back to Michigan to face the charge brought against him.

The charge is spurious. But it's also very serious. It could mean two years in prison in the United States, and a ban on travel in that country for the rest of Peter's life. Peter is mounting a vigorous defense, but it's going to be expensive - he's effectively going up against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and he needs the best legal help that he can get.

He's got that help, courtesy of one of the top criminal lawyers in the State of Michigan. We, Peter's friends and colleagues here in Canada, want to make sure he gets the help he needs financially to come out of this nightmare whole.

The need for that help is real. While Peter is a critically successful science fiction writer, he is by no means a best-selling author. Without help, the weight of his legal fees could literally put him on the street by spring.

We can't let that happen. So there's going to be fundraising.

We're going to think of something suitable in the New Year - but immediately, anyone who wants to help can do so easily. Peter's website, rifters.com, has a link to a PayPal account, whimsically named the Niblet Memorial Kibble Fund. He set it up years ago for fans of the Hugo-nominated novel Blindsight and his Rifters books, to cover veterinary bills for the cats he habitually rescues from the mean streets of Toronto. Peter has made it clear that he doesn't want to use the veterinary money to cover his lawsuit. But until we can figure out a more graceful conduit for the legal fund, that's the best place to send donations for now. Just let Peter know that the donation's for his legal defense, and that's where it will go.

Here's the link to the backlist page on Peter's website, rifters.com, or you can just send a PayPal donation to don✧✧✧@rift✧✧✧.c✧✧.

The link to the Niblet Memorial Kibble Fund is in the middle of the page. The page also links to Creative Commons editions of all his published work, which he's made available free. Peter would approve, we think, if you downloaded one or two or all of them. Whether you make a donation to the legal fund or not.

Holy shit!